untitled ‘paracelcus’ rediscovered: searching for the right dose of physical training christian schmied to cite: schmied c. ‘paracelcus’ rediscovered: searching for the right dose of physical training. open heart ; :e . doi: . /openhrt- - accepted february ▸ http://dx.doi.org/ . / openhrt- - clinic of cardiology, university heart center, zurich, switzerland correspondence to dr christian schmied; christian.schmied@usz.ch ‘all things are poison and nothing is without poison, only the dose makes a thing not a poison’. when phillipus aureolus theofrastus bombastus von hohenheim—better known as ‘paracelsus’—a swiss german renaissance physician, botanist, astrologer and philoso- pher coined this well-known quote about years ago, he might not have thought about dose-dependent ‘toxic’ effects of regular sport. nevertheless, these words per- fectly fit a highly debated hot topic in sports cardiology: where is the upper limit of ‘healthy’ physical exercise and up from which ‘dose’ it might be even harmful? although quite much is known about the minimal efforts of physical exercise that have to be provided to gain health benefits, so far no ‘upper limit’ has been defined. however, adverse longtime effects of regular strenuous endurance training (eg, in cross-country skiers and bicycle racers) could be defined: as such, a multitude of studies proved an increased rate of atrial fibrillation in endur- ance athletes at an older age compared with age-matched controls. the underlying morphological substrates are miscellaneous, consisting of inflammation, fibrosis and cavity dilation (figure ). another important ‘weak spot’, particularly in ambitious endurance athletes’ hearts, is the right ventricle. as such, postrace dilation and decreased function of the right ventricle have been demonstrated impressively in cyclists, recently. moreover, these changes are regressive but it might take a few weeks or months for the right ventricle to regain its primary function. thus, the border between acute and chronic adaptations caused by regular (endurance) training have become indistinct and should be interpreted as a ‘grey zone’. acute adaptations on physical efforts —does the dose really matter? marathon races, nowadays, have become mass events, where many of the competitors face a physical burden they are by far not suf- ficiently prepared for. the fact that the average finishing times of nearly all of the large city marathons increased continuously in the past years reflects this behaviour; recently, marathon running has become a ‘grassroots sport’ (figure ). this situation reflects an extreme discrep- ancy between the sedentarity of a better part of the population on one side and extreme physical efforts of a growing subgroup on the other side. as a relevant part of the popula- tion competes at marathon events, these ath- letes have been in the focus of various surveys conducted recently; although mara- thon runners show a relevant postrace increase of cardiac biomarkers (eg, troponin i, troponin t, b-type natriuretic peptide), sometimes associated with transient dilation of the right atrium and particularly of the right ventricle and reduction of right ven- tricular ejection fraction, cardiovascular mri suggests that this is not a result of serious ischaemic or inflammatory injury to any cardiac chamber. not only after the ‘racer’ study, a large survey in north-american marathon runners, that demonstrated a decreased risk for sudden cardiac arrest within the first half of a marathon run compared to the second half, the debate is going on whether half- marathon harbours a justifiable risk for sportive individuals. in this issue of the journal, dalla vecchia and colleagues high- light the effects of half-marathon running on amateur athletes to add data to that particu- lar subgroup performing at a relatively mod- erate level. therefore, they enrolled a relatively small number of amateur athletes (at the age of ± years). their findings could mostly be anticipated, however, the authors could demonstrate related (transi- ent) changes that have been observed in marathon runners. yet another unsolved issue is the question which individuals are particularly prone to acute structural, functional or biochemical response to high physical efforts: in a current schmied c. open heart ; :e . doi: . /openhrt- - editorial o n a p ril , b y g u e st. p ro te cte d b y co p yrig h t. h ttp ://o p e n h e a rt.b m j.co m / o p e n h e a rt: first p u b lish e d a s . /o p e n h rt- - o n f e b ru a ry . d o w n lo a d e d fro m http://crossmark.crossref.org/dialog/?doi= . /openhrt- - &domain=pdf&date_stamp= - - http://dx.doi.org/ . /openhrt- - http://dx.doi.org/ . /openhrt- - http://openheart.bmj.com/ meta-analysis including studies of marathon runners with elevated postrace troponin-t (ctn) levels, the pooled or for converting from a normal prerace to an elevated postrace ctn was . ( % ci to , i = %, p< . ). chronic adaptations on physical efforts— classical ‘cardiac fatigue’ versus ‘adverse remodelling’ multiple studies have pointed out increases in cardiac troponin and natriuretic peptides, as well as left and right ventricular dysfunctionality following an intense prolonged exercise. the term ‘cardiac ‘fatigue’ has often been used to express relatively prompt and, particularly, complete cardiac recovery. however, as aforementioned, the cut-off between acute and chronic cardiac adaptations lies within a grey-zone, particularly if focusing on right ventricular function that is more fre- quently and more profoundly affected. moderate right ventricular dysfunction has been demonstrated using various imaging techniques. however, the reason for this preponderance of right ventricular impairment is still unclear and it raises the hypothesis that repeated insults could explain a chronic right ventricular injury triggering potentially fatal arrhythmias. benito et al demonstrated another aspect of sustained intensive exercise in an animal model: ‘ultra marathon rats’ were conditioned to run vigorously for , and weeks. compared with their matched sedentary antipodes, the ‘marathon rats’ developed eccentric hypertrophy and diastolic dysfunction, together with atrial dilation. furthermore, they demonstrated collagen deposition in the right ventricle. messenger rna and protein expression of fibrosis markers in the atria and right ventricle were significantly greater than in seden- tary rats at weeks. in % of the ‘marathon rats,’ ven- tricular tachycardia could be induced (significantly more than in sedentary rats). moreover, the fibrotic changes provoked by weeks of intensive exercise appeared reverse after an -week exercise cessation. although these mechanisms need to be confirmed in humans—this study supports the hypothesis that long- term (repetitive) vigorous endurance training may lead to ‘adverse cardiac remodelling’ which leads to impair- ment and increased arrhythmic inducibility. are genetics the key? not only the results of the study with ‘marathon rats’ implicate that there is still an individual risk for acute and chronic adaptations to physical training that is most figure the ‘triangle of coumel’ illustrating the interplay between different factors that promote and preserve atrial fibrillation, particularly in an athlete (adapted from mont et al ). figure number of finishers and average finishing times at the chicago marathon from the year to (source: ‘marathon guide: chicago marathon’. marathonguide. . retrieved october ). schmied c. open heart ; :e . doi: . /openhrt- - open heart o n a p ril , b y g u e st. p ro te cte d b y co p yrig h t. h ttp ://o p e n h e a rt.b m j.co m / o p e n h e a rt: first p u b lish e d a s . /o p e n h rt- - o n f e b ru a ry . d o w n lo a d e d fro m http://openheart.bmj.com/ likely independent from the physical burden (within a certain range). in this context, it will be crucial to gain further data in the field of genetic susceptibility of an individual. a recent small study highlighted a possible role of micrornas. mooren et al could demonstrate that these crucial intracellular mediators, that also affect the cardiovascular system, significantly increase after a marathon race. moreover, none of the micrornas corre- lated with cardiac injury markers such as troponin t, troponin i and pro-bnp. probably, these muscle and heart-specific micrornas not only have a potential role as biomarkers of aerobic capacity but also as markers for cardiac adaptations and even for the individual cardiac risk in athletes. thus, at the bottom line, what would be of real impact is the question whether regular training (and competi- tion) of an individual who performs on a relatively mod- erate level (eg, as half-marathon racers) provokes less longtime adverse effects on the athlete’s heart. however, to answer this question, randomised studies in larger cohorts are needed that observe not only acute, but long-time, effects of regular physical training at different levels. finally, the crucial question that asks for the perfect dose of physical activity still remains unanswered, but it will be—with the help of an individually tailored and adapted recommendation based on well-established and further developed tools as cardiopulmonary exercise tests and imaging techniques combined with genetic analysis. however, as this aim is still far from clinical practice, it completes the circuit—bringing me back to another famous ‘paracelsus’ quote: ‘dreams must be heeded and accepted. for a great many of them come true. ’ competing interests none. provenance and peer review commissioned; internally peer reviewed. open access this is an open access article distributed in accordance with the creative commons attribution non commercial (cc by-nc . ) license, which permits others to distribute, remix, adapt, build upon this work non- commercially, and license their derivative works on different terms, provided the original work is properly cited and the use is non-commercial. see: http:// creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/ . / references . fletcher gf, balady g, blair sn, et al. statement on exercise: benefits and recommendations for physical activity programs for all americans. a statement for health professionals by the committee on exercise and cardiac rehabilitation of the council on clinical cardiology, american heart association. circulation ; : – . . elosua r, arquer a, mont l, et al. sport practice and the risk of lone atrial fibrillation: a case-control study. int j cardiol ; : – . . mont l, elosua r, brugada j. endurance sport practice as a risk factor for atrial fibrillation and atrial flutter. europace ; : – . . la gerche a, burns at, mooney dj, et al. exercise-induced right ventricular dysfunction and structural remodelling in endurance athletes. eur heart j ; : – . . trivax je, franklin ba, goldstein ja, et al. acute cardiac effects of marathon running. j appl physiol ; : – . . o’hanlon r, wilson m, wage r, et al. troponin release following endurance exercise: is inflammation the cause? a cardiovascular magnetic resonance study. j cardiovasc magn reson ; : . . kim jh, malhotra r, chiampas g, et al. cardiac arrest during long-distance running races. n engl j med ; : – . . regwan s, hulten ea, martinho s, et al. marathon running as a cause of troponin elevation: a systematic review and meta-analysis. j interv cardiol ; : – . . benito b, gay-jordi g, serrano-mollar a, et al. cardiac arrhythmogenic remodeling in a rat model of long-term intensive exercise training. circulation ; : – . . mooren fc, viereck j, krüger k, et al. circulating micrornas as potential biomarkers of aerobic exercise capacity. am j physiol heart circ physiol ; :h – . schmied c. open heart ; :e . doi: . /openhrt- - editorial o n a p ril , b y g u e st. p ro te cte d b y co p yrig h t. h ttp ://o p e n h e a rt.b m j.co m / o p e n h e a rt: first p u b lish e d a s . /o p e n h rt- - o n f e b ru a ry . d o w n lo a d e d fro m http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/ . / http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/ . / http://openheart.bmj.com/ pii: - ( ) - computers math. applic. vol. , no. - , pp. - , - / $ . + . printed in great britain. all rights reserved copyright © pergamon press pie s y m m e t r y a s p e c t s o f b o o k b i n d i n g s m. rozsondai department o f manuscripts and rare books, library o f the hungarian academy o f sciences, p.o. box , budapest, h- , hungary b. r o z s o m ) a i structural chemistry research group o f the hungarian academy o f sciences, e tv s university, p.o. box , budapest, h- , hungary abstract--geometric and other relations of decorated leather bookbindings are analysed. symmetry properties o f the ornamentation, the symmetries o f motifs and o f the layout, and some correlations o f symbols and ideas, furthermore the occurrence o f one- and two-dimensional space groups and interlace designs are demonstrated by romanesque and gothic bindings, hungarian, italian, french and german renaissance, as well as by baroque and rococo bindings, and finally, by some pieces o f modern bookbinding art. i n t r o d u c t i o n "numero pondere et mensura deus omnia condidit"--"god created everything by number, weight and measure." isaac newton dedicated these words (fig. ), his "tessera", to a hungarian student, ferenc pfiriz pfipai jr, the possessor o f the album held by the department o f manuscripts and rare books o f the library o f the hungarian academy o f sciences [ ]. the academy, now embracing all branches o f knowledge from arts and humanities through natural sciences to applied sciences, was filg. . isaac newton's autograph in the library o f the hungarian academy o f sciences. [shelf-number: t~rt. napl k, kis ° .] reproduced by permission. the authors are grateful for the kind permission to reproduce material from the holdings o f the library o f the hungarian academy o f sciences (abbreviated hereafter in figure captions as bibl. acad. budapest; no special mention of the permission will be made). ca~va /,~--x m. rozsondai and b. rozsondai f o u n d e d in as a " l e a r n e d society" to p r o m o t e a b o v e all h u n g a r i a n language an d literature. thus, in addition to scientific b o o k s and periodicals, the l i b r a r y contains literary m o n u m e n t s and bequests, manuscripts and rare books. m o s t o f o u r examples o f b o o k b i n d i n g decorations will be taken f r o m there. jan a m o s k o m e n s k ~ (comenius), the czech ed u cat o r, w h o f o u n d e d m o d e r n visual teaching by his most r e n o w n e d work, orbis sensualium pictus (the visible w o r m in pictures, n u r e m b e r g ; l o n d o n ) [ ], set up the ideal o f pansoph i a, a unified science reflecting the indivisibility o f nature. his b o o k , which he d r a f t e d during his stay ( - ) in sfirospatak, h u n g a r y , is also a realization o f these ideas in teaching latin and o t h e r foreign languages. it contains a passage on "bibiliopegus, the b o o k - b i n d e r " , as well as others o n "p ri n t i n g , the book-sellars shop, a book, an d a school". recalling n e w t o n ' s maxim, one o f the striking manifestations o f measure = r p ~ p o v is s y m m e t r y as it appears in nature a n d in m a n ' s work. it m a y also be a bridge, as the present an d a previous special issue o f this j o u r n a l exemplify, between different fields o f artistic an d scientific h u m a n activities. in the following discussion we try to investigate geometric a n d a n a l o g o u s relations t h r o u g h o u t the history o f b o o k b i n d i n g decoration. n o a t t e m p t has been m a d e to give a complete representation o f all periods and styles; the selection o f examples was influenced by o u r personal interest and the accessibility o f material. one o f the conspicuous geometrical relations is symmetry. point groups an d space g ro u p s will be used here to classify s y m m e t r y properties o f o r n a m e n t s b u t n o knowledge o f the t h e o r y is assumed. a point g r o u p (with the properties o f a m a t h e m a t i c a l g ro u p ) is a set o f s y m m e t r y operations, which leave at least one point o f the object fixed in space. f o r the p l an ar figures to be discussed, the s y m m e t r y o p e r a t i o n s include reflection t h r o u g h a plane (m i rro r plane, m ) a n d r o t a t i o n a b o u t an axis (two-, three-, f o u r - f o l d etc. axis, , , . . . . or, in o t h e r n o t a t i o n , c , c , c . . . . ). m i r r o r planes and r o t a t i o n axes are p e r p e n d i c u l a r to the plane o f the figure. c o n v e n t i o n a l n o t a t i o n s o f s y m m e t r y groups indicate the basic s y m m e t r y o p erat i o n s o f the group. in the case o f space groups, additional s y m m e t r y o p e r a t i o n s are translation an d glide reflection, i.e. a reflection c o m b i n e d with a translation. a space g r o u p applies to an infinite lattice o r periodic p at t ern , a n d when we speak o f the one- o r two-dimensional space-group s y m m e t r y o f a decorative p at t ern , we regard it as a section o f an infinite structure. f o r t h at matter, imposing geometrical relations such as congruence, s y m m e t r y or similarity on real objects is m o r e o r less an a p p r o x i m a t i o n . deviations f r o m exact relations are m o r e a p p a r e n t o n han d i craft p r o d u c t s - - h i s t o r i c a l b o o k b i n d i n g s typically belong to this c a t e g o r y - - a n d the extent o f deviations depends o n several factors such as technique, craftsmanship, tools and material used. sometimes a deviation can be intentional. stone, wood, clay tablets, p a r c h m e n t or p a p y r u s scrolls b o r e written records in ancient times before the b o o k in its present f o r m appeared. its p r e c u r s o r was the diptych, a pair o f ivory tablets or w o o d e n boards, possibly decorated, p r o t e c t i n g the inscription in wax inside. some folded p a r c h m e n t sheets were then placed, later also fastened, between the p a n e l s - - a n d thus the b o o k was born! all the essential elements t h a t constitute a b o o k t o d a y h ad been b r o u g h t together b y the d aw n o f the middle ages. a h a n d w r i t t e n a n d illuminated b o o k was itself a great asset; ivory o r precious metal covers a n d jewels a d d e d to its value and impressiveness [ ]. even in recent centuries jewelled or ivory bindings have been occasionally a p p l i e d to special o r ceremonial books. yet the b o o k b i n d e r ' s c r a f t s m a n s h i p finds its p r o p e r expression in the p r e p a r a t i o n an d embellish- ment o f leather bookbindings. l e a t h e r h a d been a favourite material fo r covering b o o k s f r o m the early coptic bindings until the age o f large-scale b o o k p r o d u c t i o n when the c h e a p e r binding materials o f cloth and p a p e r replaced it, at least partially. l e a t h e r bindings were most c o m m o n l y d e c o r a t e d by means o f finishing tools, each having an engraved design on its face and p r o d u c i n g a c o r r e s p o n d i n g blind or gold-tooled impression o n the leather. a pallet or fillet was used to impress a line o r parallel lines, a smaller stamp to have a unit motif. t h e roll, a tool with a brass wheel, with an engraved p a t t e r n o n its circumference, a n d the panel, a larger block o f metal, were in general use f r o m the fifteenth to the nineteenth century. t h e tool itself and its impression are d e n o t e d by the same words, viz. a stamp, a roll, a panel. a simple technique o f r e p r o d u c i n g an impressed m o t i f o r design o f a b o o k b i n d i n g is to p u t a piece o f p a p e r on it and r u b it with various soft lead pencils. symmetry aspects of bookbindings even after the invention o f printing in the s, when hundreds and hundreds o f identical copies o f an edition were produced, hand bookbinding transformed each copy into a unique entity. the purchaser and user had the b o o k bound in most cases. bookbinding research, which grew out of bibliophilic interests in the last century, goes into the details o f the "when, where, by whom, for w h o m " etc. o f a b o o k and its binding, and, relying on the exact identification o f tools used for decoration, on owners' notes in the book, on fragmental pages used as auxiliary material in binding, on archival sources etc., has become a complex field o f study. decorated bookbindings reveal a lot about the books and the culture o f a given age. b o o k b i n d i n g in the m i d d l e ages some coptic leather bindings from egypt have come down to us [ ] from the sixth to the eighth centuries but such bindings existed in earlier centuries. in europe the earliest leather bindings date from the carolingian age (ninth and tenth centuries). these are followed by the books bound in romanesque style (twelfth and thirteenth centuries). such bindings are recorded today [ ], and they represent a fully developed art o f book decoration. it must be remembered that at the time o f the romanesque bindings, gothic art was flourishing and dominating in the architecture o f europe [ ], and the same intellectual trend, scholasticism, influenced bookbindings and architecture alike. applied arts--including bookbinding--are in general characterized by a certain delay in relation to fine arts. romanesque bindings, i.e. their layout (fig. ), are related rather to coptic or islamic bindings than to those o f the carolingian and ottonian ages. the transition from romanesque to gothic bindings is, however, quite continuous. motifs are similar, and even the recutting o f some romanesque tools, especially palmetto and dragon stamps has been noted [ ]. the most frequent romanesque and gothic stamps (fig. ) represent lily (fleur-de-lis), palmetto, foliation, rosette (four, five and sixpetalous), birds, a pair o f birds, deer, dragon, eagle, double- headed eagle, griffin, the holy lamb, mermaid, monkey, pelican (the christ-symbol), unicorn, and the symbols o f the four evangelists (matthew, mark, luke and john: angel, lion, ox and eagle). on romanesque bindings usually there are many stamps, certainly more than on gothic bindings. only eight kinds o f stamps (fig. ) but altogether more than (!) impressions o f them figure on the upper and lower cover o f the early gothic leather binding o f a parchment codex from the fourteenth century (fig. ). the proper gothic binding shows a looser layout and a much smaller number o f repetitions o f the stamps. bilateral symmetry of motifs (fig. ) (point group m or cs) and rotations with mirror planes (point groups m, mm, mm and mm or c v, c v, csv and c ~, subscript v for vertical) are common, but pure rotational symmetry (point groups , , , . . . or c , (? , ca . . . . ) is rarely applied. a playful collection o f symmetries appears on a roll (fig. ), including point group c with fig. . layout of three romanesque bindings after [ ], nos , , . m. rozsondai and b. rozsondai fig. . stamps from some gothic bindings of the bibl. acad. budapest. symmetry aspects of bookbindings fig. . early gothic leather binding, upper cover. national sz ch nyi library, budapest: clmae . reproduced by permission. fig. . stamps on the binding in fig. : pair of birds, doubleheaded eagle, the holy lamb, pelican, deer, dog, monkey, bird. fig. . a roll from a gothic binding made in augsburg. the motifs have c v, c v, c , c v, c v, c v, c v, c v, c ~ and c v point-group symmetry, respectively. bibl. acad. budapest: rfith . this roll is identical with that in ref. [ , plate , ]. m. rozsond~ and b. rozsondai fig. . hatched motifs from gothic bindings. bibl. acad. budapest: inc. , inc. . a three-fold rotation axis. asymmetric motifs are often confined to a symmetric planar figure like a circle, a lozenge, or a square, and the encircling line is also shown. hatched motifs (fig. ) can be considered to possess colour symmetry, which means a combina- tion o f a geometrical synunetry operation (reflection, rotation, translation etc.) with a simultaneous permutation of colours. the use of hatching to indicate colours in heraldry explains the name "fer azur " (azured tool) o f the hatched stamps introduced in the sixteenth century on french renaissance bindings. i j a b c d e f g h i j i n fig. . some gothic headed outline stamps (a-k) and two blocks ( , m) derived from them. bibl. acad. budapest. the complemental space between stamps k gives the popular "cloud" pattern [ ]. symmetry aspects of bookbindings fig. . gothic binding from a workshop in herzogenburg (ref. [ , plate ]). bibl. acad. budapest: inc. , the headed outline or cusped edge stamps (kopfstempel in german) played an important role in the decoration of leather bindings (fig. ). the central field of the upper cover, within the borders, was decorated with curved branches, with a repeated vine-like tooling, especially in the southern parts of germany (fig. ). this pattern became popular in austria, bohemia and hungary, and it is a good example of technical progress as demanded by the increasing book production. in the s a whole curved diamond-shaped compartment (fig. ) was circumscribed in twelve steps by impressing eight double-headed cusped edge stamps [fig. (a)] and four stamps with two "heads" on the opposite sides [fig. (b)]. a large number of operations was needed to fill the central panel. to accelerate the working process, a half curved branch was engraved in the tool [fig. .( )], and the bookbinder obtained a whole curved lozenge in two actions. soon after the panel with all the details engraved was introduced [fig. (m)]. the half curved branches began a new life on some renaissance bindings in the early sixteenth century, and they appeared as ogee branches (fig. ). m. r o z s o ~ a a n d b. rozsol, n~^i fig. . early renaissance binding with ogee pattern, lower cover, from a secular workshop in buda [ ]. bibl. acad. budapest: inc. . the cuir cisel , i.e. the cut-leather bindings make up a special group o f gothic bindings [ ]. the outline o f the pattern is cut into the dampened leather and is emphasized by punching (stippling) the background by a pointed tool (fig. ). this embellishmen t required skilful masters. a similar appearance could be reached more simply by the ingenious use o f the cusped edge stamp. the master had to choose the most suitable stamps to get an indented outline o f an oak leaf (fig. ), or he had to think over carefully the proportions and the distances between the headed outline tools (fig. ). thus, he achieved a turnover of foreground and background, and a good appearance of the oak leaf or of a four-leaved fleuron. the impressed curved lines mark the nervure o f the leaf. the upper cover o f gothic bindings shows a more abundant ornamentation than the lower cover (fig. ). one or two borders, marked out by fillets, surround a central field, which is then symmetry aspects of bookbindings fig. i. cut-leather binding, germany, fifteenth century [ , item ]. national szrehrnyi library, budapest: clmae . reproduced by permission. subdivided by oblique straight lines to form a diamond pattern (fig. ), or by an arched vine-like network into curvilinear compartments (fig. ). while rectangular or rather square, semicircular and quadrant subfields were preferred on romanesque bindings (see fig. ), resembling structures o f romanesque architecture, perpendicular crossings o f lines were avoided in the central field o f gothic bindings. the central rectangle is subdivided only by its main diagonals (fig. ), or, more often, by additional lines parallel to them (fig. ). on the binding in fig. , the short sides o f the rectangle are divided into two sections, the long sides into three sections by intersecting lines, while the main diagonals do not appear in the pattern. using the latter and, consequently, an equal number o f divisions on the sides o f the rectangle, would have produced too slim diamonds. in all these cases, the original c v point-group symmetry o f the rectangle, with two mirror planes and a two-fold rotation axis perpendicular to the plane o f the figure, is retained if we disregard the pattern within the subfields. an interesting skewly oriented quasi-diamond tiling is shown in fig. . the minor discrepancy between the two sides o f the rhomboid is emphasized by the alignment o f one and two cusped edge stamps along them, respectively. the symmetries o f a field and o f the motifs which fill it often disagree. a pentamerous rosette can sit in the centre o f a diamond (fig. ). the half diamonds along the sides o f the central rectangle contain different motifs. the foliage on the binding in fig. (b) breaks through the rigid frames o f the rectangle and has four-fold rotational symmetry, point group c . figure shows a naturally simple arrangement o f alternating drop-shape figures, all pointing downwards in the central field with the antlers in this unnatural orientation, and outgrowing the corner boxes. adjoining single stamps in the inner border take the shape o f a tracery so characteristic o f gothic architecture and decorative art. david's six-pointed star (solomon's seal) in the outer corners encloses a pentapetalous flower. bearing in mind that a rosette is the virgin mary's symbol, is this a hint at her line o f descent? m. rozsondai and b. rozsosdai fig. . german gothic binding with leaf relief obtained by the headed outline tools in fig. (h-j). monastery bindery, aldersbach, bayern. bibl. acad. budapest: inc. . symmetry aspects of bookbindings fig. . gothic leaf-relief binding. probably ingolstadt. national sz ch nyi library, budapest: clmae . reproduced by permission. m. r o z s o ~ a i and b. rozsom>xl a~ ~ z t.. o symmetry aspects of bookbindings fig. . monastery binding from vienna [ ]. bibl. acad. budapest: inc. . m.r.ozsondai and b. roz.'.'.'.'.'.'.'.'.'k)ndai fig. . monastery binding from weddern near diilmen [ ]. pelbartus de themeswar: pomerium sermonum de sanctis. h. gran, hagenau ( ). bibl. aead. budapest: rm iii . a s y m m e t r y o f ideas a n d persons is represented on a simply decorated lower cover (fig. ) by the images o f christ's suffering in the shields (two hands, two feet, three nails, a heart a n d spear), the names o f jesus, his m o t h e r m a r y a n d her symbol the rosette beneath, a n d john, the disciple w h o m he loved and who stood with m a r y by his cross, a n d the symbols in the corners and h a l f d i a m o n d s o f the four evangelists who told the story o f the passion. a binding decorated with the same tools is kept in the british library [ ]. the edges o f a binding, and sometimes its central field too, are decorated by "frieze" patterns. the seven possible symmetries o f infinitely repeating patterns, the one-dimensional space groups have been nicely illustrated by h u n g a r i a n needlework [ ]. similarly, border patterns from book- bindings are shown in fig. , and classified according to symmetry groups. (see e.g. ref. [ ] for n o t a t i o n and explanation.) such patterns were produced either by repeated impressions o f single symmetry aspects of bookbindings fig. . gothic binding from ulm [ ]. bibl. acad. budapest: rfith f . stamps [as most o f the patterns in fig. and the " c l o u d " pattern in fig. (k)] or, especially later, on renaissance bindings, by a roll. the period o f the design, i.e. the shortest distance at which the m o t i f recurs, shows the dimensions, the perimeter o f the roll (fig. ), or, rather with geometric ornaments, the same m o t i f is repeatedly engraved in the' periphery, and it is difficult to find o u t the true dimensions o f the tool. the floral curls i n f i g . (b) fit roughly in space group lg, while there exist actually at least four variants o f flowers a n d birds, and translation remains the only symmetry operation. while searching for a n d selecting from examples o f space groups o f border designs occurring on bookbindings, one m a y reflect u p o n h o w and w h y symmetries o f o r n a m e n t s were chosen, preferred or neglected. the conventions o f the given style, its stock o f forms a n d motifs seem to be decisive. m. roz$ondai and b. rozsondai (o) lg (c) (d) ml fig. (a)-(d) symmetry aspects of bookbindings lm rng itim fig. . border patterns from gothic (( ) and renaissance (r) bindings [ ], and their one-dimensional space groups. ---, translation vector, - - reflection plane, ---- glide reflection plane, two-fold rotation axis. (a) monastery bindery buda (g)-dominican bindery vienna (g); (b) both from augsburg (g); (c) both from vienna (g); (d) vienna (g)-vienna (r); (e) buda (r)-venice (r); (f) florence (r)-minden, germany (g); (g) bamberg (g)--spanish (r). bibl. acad. budapest. g o t h i c figures o f animals, birds etc. or a hunting scene (fig. ), all viewed f r o m the side, present n o s y m m e t r y at all, a n d the simple repetition o f these motifs in a strip leads to space g r o u p [figs (a) and ]. o t h e r a r r a n g e m e n t s with f u r t h e r s y m m e t r y elements are n o t likely to occur, because it rarely ha ppe ns tha t an o r d i n a r y animal is represented upside down; a nice d r a g o n , however, m a y be an e xc e pti on (fig. )! b o o k b i n d e r s o f the renaissance, however, rejected such restrictions when they impressed a roll h o r i z o n t a l l y along the edges o f the c o v e r with p o r t r a i t s or m y t h o l o g i c a l a n d allegorical figures. w e have n o t met with a h e a d - t o - h e a d tail-to-tail alignment o f animals m a k i n g up s y m m e t r y g r o u p ml. a t a n y rate, a m i r r o r plane or a glide reflection plane in an a r r a n g e m e n t o f a symme t ri c motifs, when realized by single stamps, would require b o t h " e n a n t i o m e r s ' " ( m i r r o r image copies) o f the tool. flowers, foliage, vine o r geometrical f or ms offer a wider variety o f symmetries o f either the m o t i f itself or the p a t t e r n it comprises. camwa / - --y m. rozsondai and b. rozsonda fig. . rolls with hunting scenes on late gothic bindings from augsburg (the upper three) and memmingen (below) [ ]. bibl. acad. budapest. • a ' o t , • • : o i • . fig. . dragon stamps forming a border design, space group . drawing by eva kovfics-rozsondai after ref. [ ]. masters o f r o m a n e s q u e a n d g o t h i c b o o k b i n d i n g s obviously did n o t speculate a b o u t symmetry, they just applied it intuitively. t h e spirit o f their age, the object o f their artistic e n d e a v o u r , i.e. the b o o k cover, a n d the n a t u r e o f their materials and tools d e t e r m i n e d their work. t h e symmetries o f general layout, pa tt e rns covering fields a n d motifs m a k i n g up patter ns d o n o t necessarily har monize, and thus the resulting c omple t e d e c o r a t i o n m a y have a lower s y m m e t r y t h a n its c o m p o n e n t s , or even n o s y m m e t r y at all. r e n a i s s a n c e b o o k b i n d i n g s while the g o t h i c style is international a n d its general criteria are the same all o v e r e u r o p e , the renaissance has n a t i o n a l ma rks, a n d these are characteristic o f the c o u n t r y whose " m a k e " the given binding is. t h e b o o k b i n d i n g s to the s outh o f the alps differ considerably f r o m those o f the t r a n s a l p i n e area. e v e r y o n e w h o is f o n d o f beautiful b o o k s mus t have h e a r d o f the cor vinus bindings. t h e once f a m o u s library o f the h u n g a r i a n king m atthias cor vinus ( - ) held a b o u t codices [ ]. a p p r o x i m a t e l y o n e - t e n t h o f the stock has survived, scattered t h r o u g h o u t towns in countries. t h e r e are corvi nus ma nusc ri pt s a nd i n c u n a b u l a t t o d a y in h u n g a r y . s ome o f the b o o k s have their original silk, velvet o r c o l o u r e d gold-tooled leather bindings. t h e u p p e r a n d lower covers o f the d e c o r a t e d leather bindings are identical, a p a r t f r o m the title o r the a u t h o r ' s name, impressed at the t o p o f the lower cover. italian renaissance a n d oriental influences are mixed with local decorating t r a d i t i o n o n these typically h u n g a r i a n p r o d u c t s (fig. ). t h e floral motifs: rosette, calyx-flower, leaves, peltate, p a l m e t t o s a nd tulips are in general gilded, the cablework is blind, the tbooks printed in the fifteenth century. symmetry aspects of bookbindings ¢d j ¢ n oh m. rozsondai and b. rozsondai (cj) ) ) fig. . gold-tooled corvinus bindings. (a) osterreichische nationalbibliothek (onb): cod. lat. . (b) national sz ch nyi library, budapest: clmae . (c) onb: cod. lat. . reproduced by permission. (d) schemes of the central designs after ref. [ ]. punch dotting coloured. either the royal coat o f arms or matthias' raven (corvus in latin, hence his epithet) is placed in the centre. a m o n g the extant copies one c a n n o t find two identically decorated bindings. the overall symmetry is quite simple, c v, except for some details. an interesting feature o f the large n u m b e r o f emphasized central panels has been noted [ ], a leap o f a form into its negative, an interconversion o f figure and its background. all these forms can be imagined as enclosures shaped by surrounding copies o f one and the same m o t i f [fig. (d)], which by itself also appears as a central piece. the figure/background effect is even more p r o n o u n c e d in the repeated pattern o f fig. , which was obviously inspired by a certain type o f oriental carpet (fig. ). some tools o f the corvinus bindings, first o f all the flower-cup, were recut and used in other binderies in buda in the first three decades o f the sixteenth century. in addition, new stamps and rolls were produced (fig. ), and a m o n g them the different interlaced k n o t w o r k motifs and the rolls combining palmettos with leaves o f the acanthus became extremely popular. a n u m b e r o f their variants existed [fig. (a)] on h u n g a r i a n renaissance bindings. the acanthus leaves were a c o m m o n o r n a m e n t a t i o n in greek architecture in the fifth century b.c. and revived in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries all over europe [fig. (b), (c)]. the interlace or strapwork also occurs in architecture (fig. ). italian renaissance bindings are lightly decorated and pleasantly spaced out. a large scale o f k n o t w o r k stamps, arabesque centrepieces, linked arabesque circles as borders are their most prominent stylistic features (figs , ). coptic and islamic motifs as well as persian elements like the peas-trailer or clasper can be recognized on them (fig. ). different types o f renaissance bindings developed in france in the sixteenth century. a n u m b e r o f the books b o u n d for jean grolier, the bibliophile, were decorated by complicated interlace work (fig. ). a n o t h e r trend o f b o o k o r n a m e n t a t i o n , which was connected with the french royal court and h a d remained in practice well into the seventeenth century, created elegant masterpieces by simpler geometrical means. these sem bindings (semer = to sow) provide an o p p o r t u n i t y to demonstrate two-dimensional space groups. only some o f the possible two-dimensional space groups occur on bookbindings. the continuity o f the pattern is broken n o t only by field boundaries but also by variant or extrinsic elements o f decoration, a n d the n u m b e r o f repetitions o f the basic m o t i f or tile is too small to speak o f an "infinitely repeating" pattern. on a sem binding, the lattice points, in which the motifs are placed, fig. . gold-tooled corvinus binding with repeated pattern. osterreichische nationalbibliothek: cod. lat. . reproduced by permission. fig. . holbein-carpet. anatolia, sixteenth century. x cm. museum of applied arts, budapest: inv. . reproduced by permission. m. rozso~rdai and b. rozaondai fig. . hungarian renaissance binding [ ] of the so-called virginia codex, a hungarian linguistic record. franciscan monastery, buda, - . bibl. acad. budapest: k . symmetry aspects of bookbindings (a) fig. .(a) rolls of palmettos and acanthus leaves from hungarian renaissance bindings. (b) frieze from the erechtheion, acropolis, athens. (c) pilaster head from king matthias' palace, buda. m. rozsonoa~ and b. ro _..qondai (b) (a) ~ fig, .(a) knotwork border design composed of single stamps from the hungarian renaissance binding: bibl. acad. budapest: inc. . (b) a five-strand knotwork frieze in the town-hall yard of trogir, yugoslavia. (o) (b) fig. . italian renaissance bindings, sixteenth century, with different types ofknotwork (a), and arabesque circle border (b). bibl. acad. budapest: k , ant. . symmetry aspects of bookbindings fig. . arabesque centre and corner pieces. bibl. acad. budapest: ant. , rm iv f . fig. . gold-tooled renaissance binding. venice [ , ]. national sz ch nyi library, budapest: clmae . reproduced by permission. m. rozsondai and b. rozsondai fig. . french renaissance binding for jean grolier [ , plate ]. osterreichische nationalbibliothek: .e. (es ). reproduced by permission. form a rectangular (space group pmm, see ref. [ ] for notation) or a diamond tiling (cmm) (fig. ). the symmetry o f the pattern is then determined by the symmetry o f the underlying motif and the lattice. the fleur-de-lis motifs in a lozenge-type arrangement (fig. ) form a pattern with symmetry cm (fig. ). a system o f alternating motifs is a superposition o f two or more lattices (fig. ). although this array has a low geometrical symmetry, it possesses further symmetry elements that include permutations o f the motifs. this is then a case o f colour symmetry, with the motifs representing the different colours. the gothic diamond tiling (figs and ) and the analogous vine-like diaper (fig. ) also belong to space group cram (fig. ). the binding from the corvinian library (fig. ) has a higher tetragonal symmetry p m (fig. ) if the details and the layering o f the interlace work are disregarded. a much wider variety o f space groups and colour groups occurs on decorated papers used as b o o k covers or lining [ ] or as wallpaper. the symmetry o f an interlace pattern can be studied at different levels. first, we may regard the pattern as a composition o f lines and figures in the plane they decorate, exactly as it appears, disregarding its three-dimensional appearance. the two interlaced square frames in fig. thus possess only an eight-fold rotation axis but no mirror planes (point group cs). this figure can also v v p m m c m m c m fig. . two-dimensional space groups o f the rectangular (pmm) and the lozenge (cram) lattice, and a lozenge-type array (cm) o f motifs with c, point-group symmetry. o and v motifs, - - reflection plane, . . . . glide reflection plane, | two-fold rotation axis. symmetry aspects o f bookbindings fig. . sem binding, first half o f the seventeenth century, probably from the netherlands. museum o f applied arts, budapest: inv. . . reproduced by permission. be regarded as an eight-pointed star, with "hidden" parts o f the strips added. n o w it has eight reflection planes in addition to the eight-fold axis (point group csv). a third way o f looking at the figure is to consider its two or more layers and introduce symmetry operations such as a combination o f reflection with a permutation o f layers. geometric and such combined symmetry operations make up the layer groups. the double-square m o t i f (fig. ) can be regarded as lying in a two-sided plane, or it can simply be characterized as a three-dimensional object o f point-group fig. . pattern, space group p l , composed o f double letters m and y, tears and flames on a sem binding. sketch after ref. [ , plate ]. ~s' s sj % i f .s p m fig. . symmetry elements o f the two-dimensional space group p m. see fig. for notation, and • four-fold rotation axis. m. rozsondai and b. rozsondai fig. . interlace m o t i f from a renaissance binding. venice. bibl. acad. budapest: r m iv f . fig. . italian-type renaissance binding, middle of the sixteenth century. bibl. acad. budapest: ant. . symmetry aspects of bookbindings fig. . portraits of luther a n d m e l a n c h t h o n o n the central panels of upper and lower cover, respectively, of the binding by thomas kruger, wittenberg, [ ]. novum testamentum. interpreted by th. beza. h. stephanus, genevae ( ). bibl. acad. budapest: . . symmetry ds, with an eight-fold axis and eight two-fold axes perpendicular to it. further examples of layered motifs and patterns are shown in figs (c), (a), , and . on bookbindings, a braid of continuous strands or an interlace of loops and strands is often simulated by single stamps [fig. (a)], and imperfections at the linkages may make an exact evaluation of the structure difficult. the four-strand knotwork in fig. (c) (upper) is obtained by two single stamps: one straight, one curved. note the different slopes of the ascending and descending branches, giving serrated rather than symmetric wave lines. in the countries north of the alps panels and rolls dominate on renaissance bookbindings. both have mainly figural decorations, a portrait or a scene from the holy bible etc. the upper and lower covers are almost the same, except for the central panels, which, however, are related conceptually. thus, if leaders of the protestant reformation are shown, luther is accompanied by melanchthon (fig. ), calvin by b ze, and if a "reformer roll" is used we can nearly always see the following four portraits: martin luther, johann hus, erasmus rotterdamus and philipp melanchthon ( = m a r t i - i o h a n - e r a s r-phi me: fig. ). personified virtues such as justitia, fortuna (fig. ), fides (faith), spes (hope), caritas (christian love), patientia, prudentia (prudence and providence), fortitudo (strength of mind, courage) and temperantia (moderation) are also favourite figures of the panels and rolls (fig. ) on renaissance bindings of the german type. the counterpart of justitia is fortuna, sometimes lucretia or judith. the thematic symmetry of the panels on the upper and lower cover exists here, too. a classical element was revived with the janus-faced prudence on a leather binding (fig. ). the inscription of the panel: "seek advice from m e - - i who am called prudentia--if you wish for counsel in your affairs." janus, the roman god with two opposite faces looking forward and backward, gives good advice and is considerate and provident like prudentia on our panel. janus is the god of all beginnings, and it is advisable to begin everything with consideration and circumspection, i.e. prudence. the virtues as well as the muses (fig. ) and the seven liberal arts (fig. ) are as a rule represented in every field of renaissance art, hence also in book illustrations (fig. ) and on bookbindings. note the analogous depiction of arts and virtues in fig. . if we see the panel of the judgement of solomon ( kings : - ) on the upper cover then we see another scene from the old testament, viz. samson with the lion a n d - - i n the background--he m. rozsondai and b. rozsondai fig. . g e r m a n renaissance binding with a reformer roll and a prudentia panel. bound by m w (meaning melchior wagner, leipzig?) after [ ]. bibl. acad. budapest: rm iv . symmetry aspects of bookbindings fig. . justitia and fortuna on the upper and lower cover, respectively, of a german renaissance binding by h w (meaning hans welcker, nuremberg?) [ ]. daniel wintzenberger: warhafftige geschichte und gedenckwirdiger hiindel... dresden ( ). the inscription under justitia: "suum cuique juste tribuo" is a saying attributed to the roman jurist ulpianus; under the "ambiguous" fortuna: a variant from tristia . . by ovid. bibl. acad. budapest: rm iv . is taking away the gates o f the city o f g a z a (judges : ; : ) (fig. ). o r on a n o t h e r binding: t h e m o s t o u t s t a n d i n g he roine in the old t e s t a m e n t is judith (the b o o k n a m e d af ter her is one o f the a p o c r y p h a ) , w h o b e h e a d e d hol ofe rne s, the general o f the assyrian t r o o p s o f n e b u c h a d n e z z a r , and thus saved israel f r o m its enemies. judi th inspired m a n y artists to depict her and her feat in paintings, in sculptures a n d in metal engravings. in topical s y m m e t r y parallel to judith, we see either justitia holding a sword a n d a pa ir o f scales o r - - m o r e o f t e n - - j a e l , w h o inflicted something very similar o n a n o t h e r enemy, sisera (judges : ) (fig. ). t h e strongest t e s t i m o n y o f faith is a b r a h a m ' s readiness to offer his only son isaac (genesis ). " n o one is so great as a b r a h a m ! w h o is capable o f u n d e r s t a n d i n g h i m ? " - - a s k s s~ren k i e r k e g a a r d ( - ), whose influence is larger t o d a y t h a n it was in his own time, a n d f or w h o m the story o f a b r a h a m was the greatest p a r a d o x o f faith. a n d yet he included a " p a n e g y r i c u p o n a b r a h a m " , " t h e knight o f f a i th", in his b o o k [ ]. t h e example o f a b r a h a m ' s faith also fascinated customers w h o had their b o o k s b o u n d in the sixteenth century. on a panel decor ating the u p p e r c o v e r o f a b o o k (fig. ) we see a b r a h a m with a sword in one hand, the o t h e r h a n d lying o n the head o f his son, w h o is bending f o r w a r d , a nd below, to the right, is the sacrificial fire in a pot, while in the centre o f the picture, in the b a c k g r o u n d , a b r a h a m is climbing m o u n t m o r i a h with isaac and, finally, in the u p p e r right corner, is the angel o f the l o r d in the clouds, seizing a b r a h a m ' s sword. t h e inscription reads " a b r a h a m credidit d e o " - - a b r a h a m has believed in g o d . (present perfect, as it has already been d e m o n s t r a t e d ! ) t h e middle panel o f the lower cover is d e c o r a t e d with the arms o f the d u k e s o f w i i r t t e m b e r g with the initials o f their m o t t o (fig. ): v d m i e - - v e r b u m d o m i n i m a n e t in [a]eternum (a va ri a nt o f psalm = : ). t h e w o r d o f the l o r d remains f o r ever. we think that the panel o f a b r a h a m ' s sacrifice was chosen deliberately to emphasize the m o t t o and the arms, and this is again a case o f c o n c e p t u a l symmetry. let us r e t u r n to k i e r k e g a a r d ' s vision a nd interpretation. h e sketches f o u r variants o f w h a t had h a p p e n e d and h o w the last act o f this sacrifice was reached [ ]. each o f them is fearful and shocking but what is m o r e a ma z i ng is t h a t he draws a parallel between the deed o f a b r a h a m and the weaning o f a child f r o m its m o t h e r . k i e r k e g a a r d comes to optimistic conclusions only in the cases o f the m o t h e r and child. f a t h e r a nd son, m o t h e r a n d child are presented in analogous s i t u a t i o n s - - a s regards a kind o f s e p a r a t i o n - - a n d in f o u r aspects. intellectual s y m m e t r y is mostly indirect, hidden symmetry, w h a t is more , the symbolism itself is inherently symmetrical. t h e a u t h o r ' s life reveals a (o) (b) t } i i fig. . roils with representations o f the virtues (a), and the muses (b). bibl. acad. budapest: rm iv a, rm iii f b, . , rm iii . symmetry aspects of bookbindings fig. . the seven arts and the virtues on panels. inscriptions (above) grammatica-dialectica-redorica [!]-arithmetica -musica (two figures~-- (digit reversed!)--geometria-astronomia; (below) justicia [!]-prudencia [!]-fortitudo-temperanci [!]-fides-spes--charitas-paciencia [!] [ ]. bibl. acad. budapest: . , ant. . camwa / - ~z m. rozsondai and b. rozsondai fig. . the nine muses on the title page of strabon: en tibi strabonis geographicorum commentarios a c. heresbachio recognitos. valentenus curio, basileae ( ). fig. . the judgement o f solomon and samson with the lion on a binding by caspar kraft [ ]. bibl. acad. budapest: . . fig. . judith with holofernes and jael with sisera on a binding. inscription under judith from psalm = : ; under jael: judges : . bibl. acad. budapest: . . fig. . a b r a h a m ' s sacrifice and the coat o f arms o f the dukes of wiirttemberg on a'binding. kurtze auszlegung iiber... euangelia... in crobatischer sprach... (ed. primus truber). tiibingen ( ). bibl. acad. budapest: r/tth . m. rot_.~ondai and b. rozso~dai ) ! i i i ;} i t i t! : i ' ! i . . . . . . . . :ii fig. . biblical scenes on german renaissance rolls. metropolitan szab ervin library, budapest: bq / ; bibl. acad. budapest: rm iv f , r~th - . reproduced by permission. ( o ) symmetry aspects of bookbindings ( b ) . . . . . . . . fig. . (a) a justification panel. pietro martire vermigli, in epistolam s. pauli apostoli ad romanos commentarii. perna, basileae ( ). bibl. acad. budapest: . . (b) the justification represented on two panels. jean calvin: lnstitutio christianae religionis. rebulius, g-enevae ( ). bibl. acad. budapest: . . further dimension of the structure. the retold story of abraham and the parallel cases of mother and child are reflections of kierkegaard's emotional crisis after his engagement and tragic rupture with regina, subtle allusions to the waves in his soul of hope and despair, faith and final resignation. the scene of abraham's sacrifice is often engraved on rolls, too, together with other scenes from the bible. in general, such a roll consists of four little pictures. the crucifixion and the resurrection are represented on all three rolls shown (fig. ). these two scenes occur on panels in another connection [ ]. the four scenes on the panel in fig. (a) are divided by the tree of life: to the left the fall (adam and eve under the tree o f knowledge of good and evil), underneath damnation and moses with the tablets o f stone; this side o f the tree is dead. the fight-hand side of it is in leaf, since this half o f the panel comprises the crucifixion and the resurrection. the complex theme and the method o f representation come from the paintings of the allegory of the fall and the redemption or justification by lucas cranach sr and his workshop [ , ]. these paintings and other similar ones, e.g. that in the budapest museum of fine arts (fig. ) reflect the idea--the exegesis o f justification--of the great reformer martin luther and his circle. in the painting in budapest we can observe mount sinai, where the lord god gave moses the two tablets of stone, the fall, the serpent o f brass and death. in the middle adam or everyman is sitting between a prophet and john the baptist, both of them pointing to the crucifix. mary is kneeling on the top of a mount--opposite moses--accepting a small child gliding down on golden rays; on the two sides of the crucifix we see the holy lamb and the bethlehem scene with the angels, the shepherds, and the holy family in the stable; and at last christ triumphant over death. all this can hardly be accommodated on one panel [cf. fig. (a)]. the picture of justification, divided symmetrically into two parts along the tree, occurs commonly on two panels [fig. (b)] on the upper and lower cover of the given leather binding. sin and justification, law and redemption, death and resurrection; grave-stone, skeleton, objects, persons, gestures and ideas are positioned in a wonderful antisymmetry, in other words implying less geometrical rigour, in a counterpoint. even iffigural representations appear on a gothic or renaissance binding, no definite connection to the contents of the book can be recognized. (see the captions to the figures named here.) the book of sermons by pelbartus de tbemeswar is decorated by the insignia of the passion (fig. ). the covers of a new testament which was interpreted by b ze and printed in geneva were never- theless embellished by the portraits of luther and melanchthon (fig. ). it is of course thus, since the book was bound in wittenberg, the stronghold of the lutheran reformation. similarly, the lutheran dogma of justification is represented on calvin's work [fig. (b)]. justitia appears on a m. rozsondai and b. rot.~ndai fig. . fall and redemption (law and grace). painting, german master, middle of the sixteenth century [ ]. x . cm. deposited at the budapest museum of fine arts. reproduced by permission. book of historical events (fig. ), and abraham's sacrifice on a collection of gospel commentaries (fig. ). from baroque to modern b i n d i n g s baroque leather bindings catch the eye by their rich gold tooling (fig. ). their characteristic ornamental elements are the elongated leafy spiral, the curl, borrowed from late renaissance "fanfare" style bindings, voluted c- and s-shaped figures, sprays and floral motifs (fig. ). the asymmetrical spirals are skilfully combined to give heart-shaped and other symmetrical constructions, which in turn form the diamond or marquise-shaped central panel and the enchantingly harmonizing corner pieces. these masters must have had therefore a pair of stamps to impress both mirror image forms of the asymmetrical spiral motifs. two or three borders run along the edges. one of these rolls (fig. ) reminds us of an arabesque circle border pattern used years before [fig. (b)]. the brightest period o f hungarian baroque bindings in the eighteenth century is associated with the jesuits in nagyszombat (today trnava, czechoslovakia), who maintained their academy and symmetry aspects of bookbindings printing house there (predecessors o f e r t v r s university and the university press, budapest). these bindings bear jesus' monogram, ihs, the jesuits' sign in the middle o f the upper cover, and correspondingly the letters m a r i a on the lower cover (fig. ). there is no remarkable borderline between baroque and rococo bindings. the frequent occurrence o f shellwork gave the name to the style (rocaille = shell, shellwork in french). the central piece is often omitted, and only the borders o f the cover(s) are decorated (fig. ). books were the essential ornaments o f the splendid library halls o f the baroque and later periods, and, very often, only the spines o f these books were embellished. a distinct period o f hungarian binding began in the first half o f the eighteenth century and lasted for about a hundred years. the overwhelming majority o f these popular coloured parchment bindings was produced in the town o f wealthy urbanized peasants, debrecen (fig. ). their layout follows the interlace outlines o f french renaissance bindings, and the uncoloured strips surround brightly coloured fields with guilt or coloured fleurons and the curls known from baroque bindings. the master o f the binding in fig. (a) even turns the flower-pot upside down for the sake o f preserving the symmetry o f the rectangle (c v). colouring seems to have been applied instinctively to enhance brilliance but no conscious colour symmetry appears. a curiosity o f b o o k construction, and an example o f a three-dimensional point-group symmetry is the dos-fi-dos binding (fig. ). two, sometimes more books, related by their contents and usage, are bound together "back to back" with one common board and their spines on opposite sides. (a) fig. --continued overleaf m. rozsondai and b. rozsondai (b) fig. . hungarian baroque bindings, eighlcenth century. (a) bibl. acad. budapest: . . (b) metro- politan szab ervin library, budapest: bf / (ms). reproduced by permission. symmetry aspects of bookbindings fig. . ornamental elements of baroque bindings. the upper roll is from the binding in fig. (a); the second roll is from the binding in fig. (b). m. rozsondai and b. rozsondai . . t o e~ .=. o symmetry aspects of bookbindings ~ i i ~ i i ¸ ¸ ~ ! i i i i ! i i i i ! ! i ii~i!i~ !i~i ~i~i! i ~i!~ ~ ! ~ i ! ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ , ~ i i i i ~ ! i! ii~iii~iiiiiii~i~i~!ii!i~i~i~!ii!~ilziiiii~!~i ¸~¸ '̧̧ ¸~¸¸¸~ ~ ¸¸¸ ~ , ~ i ~ i i i ~ i i . . . . . . i ̧ ̧ ~ i i i i ~ i - i i o~ o o ° . .o . . l~ o~o t ~ m. roz,gondai and b. roz,sondai fig. . hungarian dos-~t-dos binding, eighteenth century. e tv s lorfind university library, budapest: rmk i a, rmk i i-ii. reproduced by permission. (another example and references can be found in ref. [ , item ].) this structure possesses a two-fold rotation axis parallel to the spines and a reflection plane perpendicular to it (point group c h). how practical this form proves to be for a two-way pocket travel dictionary! in some m o d e m pocket dictionaries the two integrated parts have rather one common spine and no board in the middle between the "running" and the "reversed" pages. the symmetry o f this b o o k is again trivial, point group c v, with the two-fold axis perpendicular to the spine. it is left to the reader to meditate on combinations o f symmetry operations with an inversion of, say, a hungarian-italian dictionary to its italian-hungarian counterpart. some m o d e m artists have created three-dimensional bookbindings [ ] that resemble rather a sculpture or space construction, and which have lost their practical purpose o f protecting and decorating a b o o k in use. though masters o f baroque and rococo bindings retained much o f the elements o f preceding late renaissance (curls, arabesque circles, interlace outlines, layout) or even late gothic bindings [bird- in-vine [ ], and of. fig. (b)], they succeeded in creating a new type o f bookbinding decoration, distinguished by its appearance and effect. the wells o f innovative power seem, however, to have been exhausted by the nineteenth century. at the same time when in architecture the different " n e o " styles follow, bookbinders cannot but historicize, and the period is marked by phrases like etruscan style, cathedral style, and flourishing species o f neo-renaissance. it is in such nostalgic works that the technical perfection o f hand bookbinding reaches a level unknown before (fig. ). para- symmetry aspects of bookbindings fig. . neo-renaissance binding by marius michel for gy rgy rfith, bibliophile, director of the museum of applied arts, budapest. end of the nineteenth century. bibl. acad. budapest: r .th . fig. . art nouveau binding by evelyn underhill, fec. op. , , england. museum of applied arts, budapest: inv. . reproduced by permission. m. ro _.sondai and b. rozsonda fig. . representation o f the labyrinth on the external wall of the cathedral in lucca, italy. photograph by and courtesy of istvfin orosz, budapest. fig. . binding by j. a. szirmai, - . terra-cotta goatskin (niger), on front cover blind impression by the use o f a linocut. x cm. cat. no. [ ]. andr gide: theseus. otilcina bodoni, verona ( ). photograph by j. a. szirmai. reproduced by permission. fig. . binding by j. a. szirmai, - . dark grey goatskin (oasis), on front cover onlays in black and light grey goatskin. x cm. cat. no. [ ]. julien green: adrienne mesurat. soci t les exemplaires, paris ( ). photograph by . a. szirmai. reproduced by permission. symmetry aspects of bookbindings fig. . binding by j. a. szirmai, . terra-cotta goatskin (oasis); onlays on front and back cover, partly crumpled, in yellow ochre, dark brown and green. . x . cm. cat. no. [ ]. hans erni: israel. ein skizzenbuch. scheidegger, zurich ( ). photograph by j. a. szirmai. reproduced by permission. doxically, at the same time, b o o k b i n d i n g as a handicraft loses ground and declines with the advent o f machine binding. the turn o f the century is a l a n d m a r k in the art o f bookbinding. the m o d e r n b o o k b i n d e r claims to be an artist who creates a work o f art and n o t simply a decorated product o f handicraft; he or she re-creates the contents o f the book, expresses his or her impression o f the work to be bound. principles a n d forms, artistic endeavour a n d materials o f m o d e r n fine art are reincarnated in m o d e r n bookbindings. a few examples have been selected here to show how apparently simple structures imply in the most intricate and sophisticated m a n n e r the arsenal o f " s y m m e t r o l o g y " [ ]. elements are consciously composed into a unit, and parts o f the book, upper and lower cover, are often treated as a whole (fig. ). the labyrinth, originally the m i n o a n palace in crete, has always provided an exciting adventure for the h u m a n mind, a source o f secret, a many-folded symbol, a m o n g others, o f the nether world and, at the same time, o f redemption from death [ ]. w h a t it m e a n t for comenius is concisely expressed in the title o f his work labyrinth o f the worm and the paradise o f the heart. it was represented in architecture (fig. ), arts and literature, as with, for example, the maze in the splendid book, three men in a boat, by j. k. jerome. professor szirmai's bookbinding (fig. ) is based on a circular symmetry, which is modified by a pseudo-symmetry o f four-fold rotation and reflection. similarity is expressed by the set o f concentric circles, and c a t a m o r p h y , the lowest category o f geometrical relationships [ ], by the decreasing number o f radial passages a n d dead ends along the inner circles. on a n o t h e r binding by szirmai (fig. ), the double figure is again a brilliant and ingenious superposition o f two-fold rotational symmetry and deviation from it, symmetry and a n t i s y m m e t r y (two-colour symmetry o f the figure on a " n e u t r a l " background), and, above all, the transfiguration o f a p h e n o m e n o n taken from the contents o f the book. we must apologize to the reader for disclosing the keyword: it is schizophrenia. figure represents symmetry in a broad sense, so to say, a "topological s y m m e t r y " . design and generalized symmetry extends over f r o n t a n d back cover. p. l. m a r t i n and m. jeagle use rotations and reflections on their bindings .(figs and ) combined with affine transformation, reflection with "blowing u p " (homothetic reflection [ ]), and colour transformation. c o n c l u s i o n s t h r o u g h o u t the history o f b o o k b i n d i n g decoration, the rectangular form o f the book cover has been decisive. the general layout o f decorated leather bindings most often conforms to the two m. rozsondai and b. rozsondai fig. . binding by pierre lucien martin, . black box-calf, onlays in various shades of gray calf, doublures red peau de su de. ren crevel: feuilles eparses. original illustrations by bellmer, arp, miro, ernst. paris ( ). fig. . binding -by~mart~i'n ' jaegl"e_ .' dark biue- asis goatskin, onlays in white, red and dark red, line tooling in white. voltaire: candide. m i r r o r p l a n e s o f t h e rectangle. o n e o r m o r e b o r d e r d e s i g n s a l o n g t h e sides leave a smaller, a g a i n r e c t a n g u l a r ( d e c o r a t e d ) a r e a in t h e m i d d l e . d e t a i l s o f r o m a n e s q u e a n d g o t h i c figures, a n i m a l s , floral m o t i f s , religious s y m b o l s , o r s u b d i v i s i o n o f fields d i s t u r b this s y m m e t r y . t h e o r i e n t a t i o n o f s u c h m o t i f s is i n f l u e n c e d b y the c o n v e n t i o n a l d i r e c t i o n o f view, i.e. the d i s t i n c t i o n b e t w e e n t o p a n d b o t t o m o f t h e b o o k c o v e r . t h e s y m m e t r i e s o f b o r d e r p a t t e r n s d o n o t i n d i c a t e a p r e f e r e n c e o f their o u t e r o r i n n e r edges. a unified g l o b a l c o m p o s i t i o n , the e m p h a s i s o n the c e n t r a l design, h a r m o n i z i n g b o r d e r d e c o r a t i o n a n d c e n t r e a n d c o r n e r pieces, a n d t h e s y m m e t r y o f details begin w i t h r e n a i s s a n c e b i n d i n g s , e i t h e r w i t h g e o m e t r i c o r floral p a t t e r n s o r w i t h p o r t r a i t s a n d scenes. i n t e r l a c e m o t i f s a n d p a t t e r n s b e c o m e a g a i n p o p u l a r . c o l o u r s y m m e t r y o c c u r s o n l y sparsely. b o o k b i n d i n g d e c o r a t i o n in e a c h age r e t a i n s s o m e e l e m e n t s f r o m its p r e v i o u s p e r i o d s a n d f o l l o w s w i t h a c e r t a i n d e l a y t h e m a i n styles o f t h e arts. d e c o r a t i o n r e q u i r e s i m a g i n a t i v e p o w e r a n d skill, a b o v e all in t h e case o f c u t l e a t h e r b i n d i n g s . s o m e nice parallels o f g e o m e t r y a n d s y m b o l s , d e p i c t e d scenes, p e r s o n s a n d ideas c a n be r e c o g n i z e d , nevertheless, t h e r e p r e s e n t a t i o n h a s h a r d l y a n y r e l a t i o n t o t h e c o n t e n t s o f the b o o k . t h e m o d e r n a r t o f b o o k b i n d i n g b r e a k s w i t h t r a d i t i o n . i t t r e a t s o n e o r b o t h b o o k c o v e r s a n d even the c o m p l e t e b o o k as a w h o l e . t h e n e c e s s i t y o f b o r d e r designs is e l i m i n a t e d . s y m m e t r y a n d the d i f f e r e n t k i n d s a n d levels o f g e o m e t r i c r e l a t i o n s a r e c o n s c i o u s l y a p p l i e d o r j u s t a b a n d o n e d . a n a l l u s i o n , a l b e i t indirect, t o t h e m e s s a g e in t h e b o o k is i n t e n d e d . acknowledgements---our thanks are due to professor and mrs aladar and l~va sarbu, ms l~va pr hle and mr bob dent, who read the manuscript and made valuable suggestions to amend its english. we gratefully acknowledge the permission and photographs for illustrations from institutions and persons named in the figure captions. r e f e r e n c e s . p. gergely, p@ai pgtriz-album a magyar tudomdnyos akadbmia k nyvtdrdban (the p~pai pfiriz album in the library of the hungarian academy of sciences). publicationes bibliothecae academiae scientiarum hungaricae , budapest ( ). . j. a. comenius, orbis sensualium pictus. facsimile of the third london edn ( ) (introduction j. bowen). sydney university press, sydney ( ). . f. steenbock, der kirchliche prachteinband im friihen mittelalter yon den anfdngen bis zum beginn der gotik. deutscher verlag fiir kunstwissenschaft, berlin ( ). . p. needham, twelve centuries o f bookbindings - . the pierpont morgan library--oup, oxford ( ). . f. a. schmidt-kfinsemfiller, die abendla'ndischen romanischen blindstempeleinbiinde. hiersemann, stuttgart ( ). . e. panofsky, gothic architecture and scholasticism. archabbey press, latrobe, pa. ( ). . g.d. hobson, further notes on romanesque bindings. library , - ( - ); some early bindings and binders' tools. library , - ( - ). . e. kyriss, verzierte gotische einbginde on alten deutschen sprachgebiet. textbandl tafelband - . max hettler, stuttgart ( - ). . o. mazal, gotische einb/inde mit kopfstempeldekoration aus der inkunabelsammlung der osterreichischen national- bibliothek. gutenberg jb - ( ). . ~. sz. koroknay, magyar reneszansz k nyvk tbsek (hungarian renaissance bookbindings). plate . cahiers d'histoire de l'art . akad miai kiad , budapest ( ). . f. a. schmidt-kiinsemfiller, corpus der gotischen lederschnitteinbiinde on deutschen sprachgebiet. hiersemann, stuttgart ( ). symmetry aspects of bookbindings . m. rozsondai, wiener dominikanereinb/inde in der bibliothek der ungarischen akademie der wissenschaften. gutenberg jb - ( ). . m. rozsondai, the popularity o f pelbartus de themeswar in europe as demonstrated by bookbindings (in hungarian). magy. ki~nyvszle , - ( ). . m. m. foot, the henry davis gift: a collection o f bookbindings. vol, , item . the british library, london ( ). . i. hargittai and gy. lengyel, the seven one-dimensional space-group symmetries illustrated by hungarian folk needlework. j. chem educ. , - ( ). . m. rozsondai, historical fine bindings in the library o f the hungarian academy of sciences and their connection to book history (in hungarian). thesis, budapest ( ). . d. schattschneider, in black and white: how to create perfectly colored symmetric patterns. comput. math. applic. b, - ( ). reprinted in symmetry: unifying human understanding (ed. i. hargittai). pergamon press, oxford ( ). . m. m. foot-romme, influences from the netherlands on bookbinding in england during the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries. act. xle congr. int. bibl. pp. - , bruxelles ( ). . cs. csapodi, the corvinian library: history and stock. akad miai kiad , budapest ( ). . ~. sz. koroknay, oriental influences in hungarian renaissance bookbinding (in hungarian). may. tb'rt. ertesitb'( - ), - ( ). . ~. sz. koroknay, eine ungarische renaissance-einbandgruppe vom anfang des . jahrhunderts. gutenberg jb - ( ). . . schunke, venezianische renaissanceeinb/inde: ihre entwicklung undihre werkst/itten. studidibibliographiaedistoria in onore di tammaro de marinis. vol. iv, pp. - , plate xxv, verona ( ). . o. mazal, europfiische einbandkunst aus mittelalter und neuzeit: einbiinde der osterreichischen nationalbibliothek. plate . akad. druck- u. verlagsanstalt, graz ( ). . m. m. foot, the olga hirsch collection of decorated papers. br. libr. j. ( ), - ( ). . m. rozsondai, signierte renaissance-einb/inde deutschen typs aus dem . jahrhundert. gutenberg jb -- ( ). . s. kierkegaard, fear and trembling... (translated, introduction and notes by w. lowrie). princeton univ. press, princeton, n.j. ( ). . k. von rabenau, reformation und humanismus im spiegel der wittenberger bucheinb/inde des . jahrhunderts. von der macht der bilder. beitrage des c.i.h.a.-kolloquiums "kunst und reformation" (ed. e. ullmann) pp. - . leipzig ( ). . luc~is cranach d.~., verdammnis und erl sung ( ). oltempera auf lindenholz. x cm. gotha, museen der stadt, schlossmuseum. inv. / . . lucas cranach d..~. (werkstatt), siindenfall und erldsung. (um ). nicht bez. oltempera auf holz. x cm. weimar, kunstsammlungen, galerie im schloss. . zs. urbach, the allegory of the fall and redemption (in hungarian). diak nia: evangdlikus szemle ( ), - ( ). . modern british bookbinding. bibliotheca wittockiana, bruxelles, koninklijke bibliotheek, 's gravenhage . exhibition catalogue. designer bookbinders, london ( ). . m. m. foot, the henry davis gift: a collection o f bookbindings. vol. i, nd impression, plate iv. .a. the british library, london ( ). . e. makovicky, symmetrology of art: coloured and generalized symmetries. comput. math. applic. b, - ( ). reprinted in symmetry: unifying human understanding (ed. i. hargittai). pergamon press, oxford ( ). . k. kerenyi, labyrinth-studien. labyrinthos als linienreflex einer mythologischen ldee. . erweiterte aufl. albae vigiliae . rhein, ziirich ( ). . j. a. szirmai, boekbandkunst. catalogus van boekbanden door j. a. s z i r m a i . . . i n de universiteitsbibliotheek. amsterdam ( ). camwa / -~-aa ridovics.indd – /$ . © akadémiai kiadó, budapest acta ethnographica hungarica, ( ), pp. – ( ) doi: . / . . . . examination of haban vessels with uranium-bearing blue glaze anna ridovics – zoltán may – bernadett bajnÓczi – mária tÓth hungarian national museum, múzeum krt. - , h- budapest, hungary e-mail: anna.ridovics@gmail.com institute of materials and environmental chemistry, research centre for natural sciences, hungarian academy of sciences, magyar tudósok körútja , h- budapest, hungary e-mail: may.zoltan@ttk.mta.hu , institute for geological and geochemical research, research centre for astronomy and earth sciences, hungarian academy of sciences, budaörsi út , h- budapest, hungary e-mails: bajnoczi.bernadett@csf k.mta.hu; toth.maria@csf k.mta.hu abstract: from the mid- th century “berettino”, or “turchino”, lighter and darker, deep blue, co- balt-bearing glazes were used on italian maiolica objects. at fi rst such vessels were made mainly in faenza, later they spread to northern italy and from the th century they became popular throughout eu- rope. according to written sources and archaeological fi nds, potters working in the anabaptist-hutterite settlements used blue glaze right from the start. from the second half of the th century there was an increase in the quantity of light and dark blue vessels that were made in many places. in the course of ar- chaeometric research using a handheld x-ray fl uorescence spectrometer (xrf), more than hutterite and haban objects were analysed; of these circa had a blue glaze. the measurements made on blue glazes and decorations found uranium in addition to cobalt in objects. some of the th century ves- sels and stove tiles were made in alvinc (vinţu de jos, romania), sárospatak, and probably in szobotist (sobotište, slovakia). the vessels with a blue or a white glaze, generally painted roughly with a brush, form a characteristic group provisionally attributed to a “mining town workshop”. their production be- gan at the end of the th century and was passed on by tradition until the s. the workshop probably operated in the vicinity of a mining town in the former zólyom county, along the upper reaches of the garam river, in the vicinity of besztercebánya (banská bystrica, slovakia). keywords: hutterite, haban ceramics, blue glaze, cobalt, uranium, jugs with miners’ symbols, sárospatak, besztercebánya, alvinc, szobotist introduction – the early, italian use of cobalt blue glaze light and dark, deep blue glazes (“berettino” or “turchino”) (ravanella guidotti : – ; ruffini et al. : ) were used on italian maiolica objects from the mid- th century. the use of cobalt as a colouring material in the decoration of ceramics had long been popular in chinese and islamic art (zucchiatti et al. : ). the raw material used for the so-called “mohammedan blue” was mined in the middle east and anna ridovics – zoltán may – bernadett bajnÓczi – mária tÓth asia, mainly in persian and arab territories, as well as in india. one of the fi rst examples of the use of cobalt in italy was on the glazed roof tiles of giotto’s campanile in florence around the s; later it gradually became better known (tite : ). around we fi nd it as a pigment in the motives decorating the “italo-moresque” and “zaffre” style vessels in north tuscany (blake ; fabri et al. ). from the second half of the th century the robbia family of florence played an important role in the development of brilliant, high quality tin maiolica glazes, especially for plastic works (zucchiatti et al. : – ). the fi rst blue-glazed vessels were produced mainly in faenza; later use of the blue glaze spread to the northern italian cities of venice, savona, albisola and genoa (ruffini et al. : ). from the th century it became popular throughout europe – wares of this type were made in southern italy (laterza), france (nevers), switzerland (winterthur), and in england, in the london pottery workshops. we know from “i tre libri dell’arte del vasajo” (the three books of the potter’s art), a manuscript written by picolpasso around the s, that the blue colour was made from (roasted) cobalt ore, zaf- fre obtained through venice (picolpasso : ). the development of glass-making had a deep infl uence on the trend in renaissance ceramics (gratuze ). the raw cobalt ore – which is accompanied by nickel, arsenic and a little iron – was heated and roasted to remove the impurities. the resulting cobalt oxide was the zaffera, zaffre – in german saf(f)er(blau), zafferblau, saffl or (jervis jones / : – ; kapf ). at fi rst, cobalt oxide resulted as a by-product from the processing of silver ore, then around a technological change occurred in the wake of an innovation introduced in the saxon- bohemian ore mountains (erzgebirge). from then on the ore was mined separately and roasted in a new type of furnace (zucchiatti et al. : – ). related to this tech- nological change, that is after around , a detectable amount of arsenic appears in the zaffre (zucchiatti et al. ). from the early th century smalte – in german: schmalte, schmalz, schmelz –, that is cobalt-oxide-silicate, fritted ground blue glass coloured with zaffre, served for the creation of quality blue pigment, that was used by potters to produce glazes, as well as by painters. cobalt pigment came to be produced on an industrial scale in saxony and the czech lands using raw material from the ore mountains (zucchiatti et al. : ). around blue cobalt glass was already being produced in the czech glass workshops (kapf ). blue glaze on hutterite ceramics in the th to th centuries the spread of tin-glazed ceramics in eastern-central europe can be linked largely to the activity of anabaptist-hutterite masters – generally referred to in the literature as habans , but in hungary they have often been called neo-christians. their faience production can be documented in the territory of moravia from the late s and s. the fi rst anabaptist communities representing the third branch of we use this expression for the masters after the disintegration of the hutterite settlements based on collective payment of taxes and common ownership of assets ( / ). examination of haban vessels with uranium-bearing blue glaze the reformation were formed in swiss territory in the s and soon appeared also in the neighbouring countries. they functioned as a free protestant church independ- ent of the secular authorities. their members were baptised as adults following their own personal decision (szebeni : ). right from the outset they were persecuted because of their religious tenets. their groups arrived in moravia in successive waves from switzerland, southern germany, tyrol, austria and italy. the potters work- ing in the communal anabaptist-hutterite settlements here were familiar with the ceramic traditions and latest achievements of italian and south german renaissance ceramics. according to data in written sources, such as the neumühl potters’ rules (hafner ordnung), they also knew about blue glaze (horvÁth – krisztinkovich : ). a blue stove was ordered from the anabaptists in for the bishop of olmütz, stanislav pavlovský (pajer : ; vida : ). the rules of mention the production of blue and white tankards (horvÁth – krisztinkovich : ). this is also confi rmed by the fi nds excavated by jiří pajer in the moravian set- tlements (pajer : , , ). however, with the increasingly strict principles of the community’s way of life, the rules issued on th december in szobotist or- dered that the members surrender all bone-white, blue, and other similar vessels with pewter fi ttings (katona : – ). for their own use the anabaptist brethrens were to make only black, yellow, green or plain unglazed earthenware vessels. blue- glazed products were popular in aristocratic courts. in western hungary the inventory of the batthyány family’s pharmacy in rohonc (rechnitz, austria) lists a blue horticultural vessel, vinegar jug, pots with handles, cups for jam (lictarium), and bowls and plates (katona : ). blue-tiled stoves used to heat the living spaces and at the same time as decoration are frequently mentioned in batthyány family in- ventories, generally in the lord’s room. there is a record of two in dobra (neuhaus am klausenbach, austria) ( ), in rohonc ( ) one blue stove, that is a tiled stove, stood in the lord’s room, there was a white stove in the lady’s room, and green stoves elsewhere (katona : ). but not in all cases. in németújvár (güssing, austria) ( ) the stove in the pharmacy was green, there was a white-glazed stove in the lady’s fi rst room, a blue one in her bedroom and also in the lord’s room (katona : ). the earliest known intact blue-glazed, light-coloured vessel is a round-bellied jug (prague, museum of applied arts, inv. . ) bearing the date ; it was prob- ably made in moravia (kybalova – novotna : ; pajer : ). decorative ceramics were also made in the principality of transylvania by the anabaptist mora- vian brethrens settled in alvinc by gábor bethlen in . his wife treasured these pieces. but so far we have not been able to identify any of them with full certainty. in the transylvanian material the earliest known piece is a blue jug from (bunta : ). it is well known that anna bornemisza, consort of the prince, recorded in her estate diaries that in the years – the anabaptists of alvinc made not only white-glazed dishes, cups, jugs with mouthpiece, water jug, large jugs, but also the same types of vessels in blue-glazed variant, bringing them to the prince’s court as a new year’s gift (bunta : , after szÁdeczky ).. according to the evidence of the surviving objects, a growing quantity of light and dark blue vessels was produced anna ridovics – zoltán may – bernadett bajnÓczi – mária tÓth from the second half of the th century. they were made in many places, but further thorough research is required to identify more precisely the places where individual products were made. vessels with uranium-bearing blue glaze and decoration research supported by the hungarian scientifi c research fund (otka) began in with the aim of bringing together, including in a database, and systematising the hutterite, haban ceramics stored in public and private collections in hungary (ridovics ). a separate question was to identify the technology used for blue-glazed ceramics and locate the place where they were made; stylistic analyses and also archaeometric methods are being used to answer this question. in the course of the archaeometric re- search we used a non-destructive handheld x-ray fl uorescence spectrometer (xrf) to analyse the chemical composition of the body, glaze and decorations (bajnÓczi et al. ). up to february we examined more than hutterite as well as haban, late haban and post-haban objects. of these, around pieces were glazed; a third, approx. pieces (dark and light), were blue-glazed: pieces were museum objects (vessels, stoves, separate tiles), the remainder were archaeological fragments of varying size. in cases the measurement showed the presence of uranium accompanying the cobalt in the blue glaze – in vessels, stove tiles and the stove from liptónádasd (trstené, slo- vakia) and archaeological fi nds. in addition to the vessels with a blue glaze, uranium was found in cases in the blue decorations applied on a white glaze – for the most part vessels, as well as the stove from gyulafehérvár (alba julia, romania), tiles unearthed in two excavations, three stove tiles in museums, and archaeological fragments from the historical museum in kolozsvár (cluj-napoca, romania). in total, the measurements showed uranium as well as cobalt in the blue glazes and decorations of objects ( ppm – . weight% uranium) (fig. ) . this is an entirely new result that had not been horvÁth – krisztinkovich : ; béla krisztinkovich (krisztinkovich : ) identifi es the place where blue-glazed vessels were made in the th century as alvinc; mária krisztinkovich considers that they were made in alvinc rather than in northern hungary. in general they cite magda bunta. cobalt was rare and costly in moravia and northern hungary, while in alvinc it was plentiful and tin was rare. bunta : – . measurements have been made on the objects of the following collections (see together with the identi- fying abbreviations before the inventary number): the museum of applied arts (imm, budapest), the hunga- rian national museum (mnm), the museum of ethnography (nm, budapest), the budapest history museum (btm), the rákóczi museum of the hungarian national museum (sárospatak), the scientifi c collections of the reformed college of sárospatak (srk), the transylvanian national historical museum (ktm) and the transylvanian museum of ethnography (enm) (cluj-napoca, romania), the collection of the roman catholic episcopacy of alba julia (romania) and the batthyaneum (alba julia, romania), the astra museum (sibiu, romania), the museum of folk life and folk art (Ömv, vienna, austria). findings of the excavations in moravia were studied with the help of the archaeologist jiří pajer in the czech republic. uranium was also detected in three vessels with sgrafi tto (museum of ethnography . . , vienna- Ömv . ; . ), two tiles from farkashida (im . ; . ) and a glass object (im ), but we will not discuss these here. examination of haban vessels with uranium-bearing blue glaze found by the previous research. among the components of the blue glaze a signifi cant ( p < . ) correlation can be observed between the uranium and the zinc (fig. ); this can pro- vide information on the place of origin of the cobalt pigment (the cobalt ore deposit) and so indirectly can help to determine where the objects were made. the provenance of haban objects preserved in museums is often uncertain, many pieces entered public collections fig. . uranium concentration (weight%) as a function of cobalt concentration (weight%) in the blue glazes measured by handheld xrf fig. . dendogram (tree diagram) for the elements measured by handheld xrf in the blue glazes anna ridovics – zoltán may – bernadett bajnÓczi – mária tÓth from private collections; they can be classifi ed on the basis of stylistic and chronological considerations. we fi rst take these considerations into account to analyse the collection pieces, and then the archaeological fi nds. we take the date appearing on vessels to be the year in which they were made; on this basis we separated the objects made in the th cen- tury from those made in the th century. the pieces not marked with a year were dated on the basis of stylistic considerations. th century faience with uranium-bearing blue glaze and decoration at present we classify ceramic vessels with blue glaze in the th century group ( dishes, tankards, jugs with strainer, angular bottles, pear-shaped jug, round-bellied jug, jug with fl anged handle). we also included here the damaged, burnt tankard (mnm . ) with a date that is diffi cult to decipher, (?) (plate ).. these have a tin-bearing blue lead glaze (bajnÓczi et al. ), a fl oral decoration of white lines generally colou- red with yellow and green, mostly with a brownish-black contour emphasising the outline. one dish ( , mnm . .) (plate ) and the small, pear-shaped jug ( , imm ) (plate ) are decorated with white only. ten vessels are marked with a year. the earliest (not counting the damaged tankard) is from ; it is an elegantly painted square bottle (imm ab) decorated on four sides with a rich fl oral ornamentation and an italian vase motive (plate ). an unusually deep dish (enm a ) with a broad rim has the year in the well with a fl owering plant (roŞca – klusch : ; radvÁnyi – rÉti , fig. ) (plate ). on the rim there are three wavy tendrils with three fl owers (rosette with radiating petals) and also unusually the tendrils are separated with braided vertical lines. the master who made the jug (ktm f ) dated used two kinds of decoration: there is a white wavy ten- dril in the central part of the decoration in three bands, above it between two upright white fl owering plants there are three fl owers drawn in contour with green stamens, the petals and leaves fi lled in with white (plate ). the date appears on the neck (bunta : , b; radvÁnyi – rÉti , fig. ). the other vessels were made in the s: two dishes ( (mnm . ), (mnm . . g:g:/a: ku: monogram) (plate , plate ), a small jug with pear-shaped body but wide neck and mouth ( , imm ) (plate ) and a nar- row-mouthed, round-bellied jug with fl anged handle ( , imm ) (plate ), tankard ( , imm . . ) (plate ), angular bottle ( , enm a ) (roŞca – klusch : ) (plate ). two jugs with strainers (imm , imm ) (plate ), a tankard (imm http://gyujtemeny.imm.hu/gyujtemeny/bokaly-onfedellel/ , with further literature, transylvania. http://gyujtemeny.imm.hu/gyujtemeny/fuszertarto-palack-csavaros-onfedellel/ , transylvania. http://gyujtemeny.imm.hu/gyujtemeny/korso/ , with further literature, transylvania. http://gyujtemeny.imm.hu/gyujtemeny/kupa/ imm ; bunta : . transylvanian work; katona : , ; balla : , item . nd half of th century; horvÁth – krisztinkovich : – ; http://gyujtemeny.imm.hu/gyujtemeny/ korso/ , upper hungary around ; imm . .; bunta : . transylvanian work; katona : , ; horvÁth – krisztinkovich : – . anna ridovics – zoltán may – bernadett bajnÓczi – mária tÓth examination of haban vessels with uranium-bearing blue glaze ) with a ceramic lid (plate ) and a fl uted bowl on stand (nm ) (the latter th or th century?) have no date, but on the basis of similar pieces we date them to the second half or end of the th century. the stove from liptónádasd (plate ) and the four stove tiles in the museum of applied arts are also traditionally placed in this period in descriptions. the representative stove (mnm . ) from the castle of the baán family in liptónádasd came into the possession of the hungarian national museum in (ridovics : ). the tiles around the body of the stove and decorating the corners have a plastic plant orna- mentation on a blue ground (winding tendrils with tiny fl owers in a line or facing each other in mirror symmetry, with large plant motifs with seeds and serrated hem) and the edges are emphasised with a white tin glaze. analogies exist in two other blue-glazed stoves, one (imm ) from the turcsányi house at besztercebánya in the museum of applied arts and the stove from the andrássy castle in krasznahorka (krásna hôrka, slovakia). single and mirror symmetrical tendril motives dominate among the tiles of the besztercebánya stove, but occasionally there is a mirror symmetric motif similar to those from kraszna- horka, composed in an arc. we were able to measure the fi rst two, but the results differed. we identifi ed uranium only in the stove from liptónádasd. however, uranium was present in the four separate blue stove tiles in the museum of applied arts: in the corner tile (imm . ) with a painted plant ornamentation on its raised edges (plate ), the thin, fl oral tile fragment (imm . ) and the leaf shape (imm . ) forming the top, and the profi led elements (imm . . .) of the pediment that are only painted. the decoration of fl oral tendrils and upright fl owering plants of hutterite, haban ceramics can also be observed on the th century vessels with a white glaze and painted with characteristic colours (copper green, antimony yellow, manganese brownish black), and blue decorations containing cobalt with uranium. they include four dishes ( , mnm . c; , mnm . ; , imm , ik monogram, , imm . ) (plate ), two jugs (a small, round-bellied jug (mnm . ) with the date and an elongated, oval-shaped, fl uted one with the date (mnm . ) (plate ), a big pear-shaped jug ( , srk f. . ), as well as two jugs with strainers ( , imm ; ? enm a ) (plate ). the fan-shaped stove crest tile decorated with an http://gyujtemeny.imm.hu/gyujtemeny/kupa-onfedellel/ , with further literature, transylvania, around – ; bunta : , – . http://public.neprajz.hu/neprajz. . .php?bm= &kv= &nks= , north-west hungary, th– th century, description by gabriella vida. imm . . . katona : without page numbering; imm . ; imm . ; imm . . http://gyujtemeny.imm.hu/gyujtemeny/kalyha-a-besztercebanyai-turcsanyi–bethlen--hazbol/ mid- th century; radvÁnyi : – . the most recent overview of the subject. we did not fi nd uranium in the blue glaze applied on the stove from besztercebánya. but diána rad- ványi raised the possibility that among the separate tiles with uranium-bearing blue glaze in the museum of applied arts, some pieces may have belonged to the besztrecebánya stove that could have been put together from several different stoves. so it will be necessary to repeat the measurement. http://gyujtemeny.imm.hu/gyujtemeny/tal/ , with further literature. pocsainÉ eperjesi : . it was a communion vessel of the calvinist church in Átány. http://gyujtemeny.imm.hu/gyujtemeny/korso/ , with further literature, transylvania, . the dating on the jug is very unusual, the fi gure is written on both sides of the handle. read together this gives the year . it is certain that vessels of this shape were not yet made at that time. perhaps the potter who painted the date was careless. presumably he meant to write the date but switched the order of the anna ridovics – zoltán may – bernadett bajnÓczi – mária tÓth italian vase motive and fl owers but without a date (ktm f ) from the transylva- nian historical museum is an exact pair of the piece found during the excavations at the rákóczi castle in sárospatak (vida : ; gyurica : ). there are three stove tiles in the museum of applied arts. two without frame are decorated with an endless pattern. the edge of the geometric motive determining the structure of the pattern is em- phasised with blue paint. the plant motives that fi ll the spaces are either left white or are coloured, generally painted blue. the third tile with a white glaze represents the mirror symmetric fl owering plant motive set in a framed panel (plate ). its dominant element is a multi-layered lance-shaped fl ower of oriental appearance with hems seen from the side (leaf fl ower, pomegranate?) arranged in facing pairs, emphasised with blue (imm ). the stove from gyulafehérvár reconstructed in the early s will be discussed in more detail in connection with the archaeological fi nds. six of the seven (blue and white) th century dishes show the manner of composition popular for the decoration of haban dishes. in the well of the dish there is a bunch of fl ow- ers, an upright fl owering plant, and around on the broad rim there are three fl oral tendrils and bunches with similar motive and colouring. one blue dish (mnm . ) (plate ) has only the date in a radiating frame, and in the centre a bunch of fl owers in white without a dark contour, with a double stripe around it. there is no dark contour either on the white, green and yellow pomegranate tendrils on the blue dish with the date (mnm . ). the reverse side of four dishes is entirely covered with glaze in a manner characteristic of the majority of th century hutterite, haban dishes – with an indented, turned centre or a low vertical foot edge. on three dishes, one blue-glazed and two white- glazed, all the three dated , we fi nd a solution that later came to characterise a certain type of th century dishes (mnm . ; imm . ) (plate , plate ). the bottom shaped at an angle is entirely unglazed, the middle is slightly turned forming an foot rim a good centimetre wide. the marriage dish of joannes berzewiczi and marisli ewa dated can also be linked to this group (imm . ) . the archaeological finds measurement of the archaeological fi nds showed that of pieces, ( with blue plus with white glaze) contained uranium. the distribution of the sites where they were found was: fragments (out of blue pieces) from the area of the former haban settle- ment in sárospatak, fragments (out of blue pieces) from the budapest history mu- seum’s excavation in buda castle, (out of blue pieces) from szobotist and fragments fi gures, or accidentally wrote the beginning of the date twice and was no longer able to correct it; bunta . published the object with the date ; roŞca – klusch : published the object with the date without any commentary. purchased from adolf resch in ; bunta : – . no. , ltsz. i . at one time it was in the collection of the former transylvanian museum. imm . . ; http://gyujtemeny.imm.hu/gyujtemeny/kalyhacsempe/ (thought to be) th cen- tury; imm http://gyujtemeny.imm.hu/gyujtemeny/kalyhacsempe/ lead-glazed? imm . . http//gyujtemeny.imm.hu/gyujtemeny/tal-berzeviczy-janos-es-mariass-uvanamara/ examination of haban vessels with uranium-bearing blue glaze from the alvinc material in the transylvanian historical museum (out of pieces), fragments (out of fi nds) from the excavation in gyulafehérvár around the former epis- copal palace, and the stove tiles found during the alterations. during the excavations led by istván ringer in and in the haban settlement in sárospatak, on the site in today’s kövi sándor utca pieces of varying size, most of them very small with vari- ous shades of blue glaze, were found; of these could be identifi ed as parts of vessels (ringer : ; ringer ). ringer assumed that they must have been kiln waste. we measured of these fragments and found uranium in the blue glaze of pieces. three tiny pieces were from the same object. the workshop fi nd representing the remains of the glaze dribbled onto the kiln supporting that they must have belonged to the as yet unexcavated potter’s kiln in sárospatak is especially important (ringer : , table ). it would provide fi rm proof that blue-glazed vessels containing cobalt with uranium were defi nitely made here. györgy rákóczi i settled anabaptists here in sárospatak in , in the héce area beside the river bodrog, where they lived until the mid- s. after that they moved away to avoid the forced conversion to catholicism, or integrated into the local population. the excavation fi nds from szobotist came into the possession of the museum of ethnography in as a gift from heřman landsfeld; the notes on the pieces were made by mária kresz on the basis of information given by landsfeld. of the fragments, one is from kosolna (košolná, slovakia), the remainder are from szobotist and holics (holíč, slovakia). there is no attached data on the date or circumstances of the excavation. of the two badly fi red blue-glazed fragments, presumably unearthed as workshop fi nds, piece no. (nm . . ) from szobotist contains uranium in the blue glaze. the blue glaze shrank and the vessel became smoky. according to the note attached to the fragment, it was probably made around . from the buda castle material in the budapest history museum we were able to examine tiny glazed fragments unearthed dur- ing the excavation led by anikó tóth. the excavation on the site at budapest st district, csónak utca – was in the stratum predating the construction of the gold bastion and the fi nds can be dated to before . it is possible to draw conclusions regarding the place and time of use from these fragments. uranium was found together with the cobalt in of the blue-glazed fragments. the bottom of the fragment (btm ta ) of a round- bellied jug has a lighter blue glaze on the inside and a darker blue on the outside. the latter contains uranium. the fragment of the jug (btm ta ) is light blue on the outside and has a white glaze on the inside. below the edge there is a decoration of double black lines. according to the inventory book, fi nds marked f . ... preserved in the transylva- nian historical museum in kolozsvár (f . – fragment of a stove tile, on the white lead-glazed base the raised leaf parts have been emphasised with blue painting. f . , f . , f . , f . fragments of vessels, f . fragment of the bottom of a small bowl, white glazed with a coloured decoration) came from the excavation in alvinc in september (s iii/b - , - , ). we do not know of any written material giving a more precise localisation or describing the circumstances of the excavation. magda bunta gabriella vida found the fragments when the stores were rearranged in . we thank her for drawing our attention to them. for more details on the fragments see her article in this volume, vida . http://public.neprajz.hu/neprajz. . .php?bm= &kv= &nks= , Ószombat, nyitra county. mid- th century, description by gabriella vida. anna ridovics – zoltán may – bernadett bajnÓczi – mária tÓth refers a number of times to the excavation in alvinc and in nearby borberek and to the fi nds made there. in her book she published stove tile fragments and vessel frag- ments (bunta : – ). of these we were able to measure practically every glazed piece; cobalt with uranium was found in pieces. two pieces, one fragment with a white glaze and one with a blue are also from this excavation but are not included in bunta’s publication. the dating of the tiny fragments is rather uncertain. considerations of style suggest that they could be placed in the second half of the th century, but there were also a large number of th century fragments in the assemblage. in there were still pot- ters, jug-makers and stove-makers active in alvinc (bunta : ). a reconstructed haban tin-glazed stove stands in the dining room of the former princely, today episcopal palace in gyulafehérvár (emŐdi : , ; emŐdi : – ) (plate ). the tiles are decorated in relief and the raised, stylised plant motives placed mirror symmetrically are picked out in cobalt blue paint. the corner tiles are decorated with a rosette between two bundles of leaves. the profi led foot tiles and the onion-shaped tiles along the top crest and the pendant elements are decorated with a variety of plant and geometric motives. the stove tiles were discovered in in the rubble fi ll behind the barrel-vaulted main entrance passage, together with pieces of another green lead-glazed stove, and fragments that have been identifi ed as wall tiles from the former tiled room. emődi puts the activity of the alvinc anabaptists living in the vicinity to after for the tiled audience cham- ber and considers that the stove was probably set up between and . uranium could also be identifi ed in two other fragments from the gyulafehérvár archaeological assemblage: in two stove tiles painted with blue on a white ground. on the basis of these archaeological fi nds it can thus be said with certainty that vessels and stove tiles with cobalt pigment containing uranium were made in the th century in two places: in alvinc and sárospatak, and probably also in szobotist. among the museum objects, fi ve can be found in collections in transylvania, in the transylvanian historical museum (the round-bellied jug (ktm f ) dated , the tile from the top of a stove (ktm f ) and in the collection of the transylvanian museum of ethnography the dish dated (enm a ), the square bottle dated (enm a ) and the jug with strainer from ? (enm a ). the remainder are preserved in museums in hungary: the national museum and the museum of applied arts that have purchased numerous objects from famous private collections in transylvania. although these may include objects from both the territory of the former royal hungary and from transylvania, the pieces, especially those with blue glazes that have entered from these collections, have in most cases been identifi ed traditionally in the literature as having been made in transylvania. the square blue bottle dated (imm ab), the undated blue tankard (imm ) with a pottery lid and the white jug with strainer (imm ) dated came to budapest in from the collection of count jenő lázár ( – ) of medgyesfalva (mureşeni, romania); the museum purchased one of the blue jugs (imm ) with strainer from emil sigerus of nagyszeben (sibiu, romania) in . the bunta : – , – , . she mentions them once as an excavation in , and elsewhere as . gyergy a-k- , gyergy a-k- ; marcu istrate : . item contains th century pieces unearthed near the episcopal palace in the excavations made between and . examination of haban vessels with uranium-bearing blue glaze four different-sized jugs with strainers are similar in form (although one is fl uted) and proportions. their decorations have different motives but follow the same compositional order. they are probably the products of the same workshop, presumably from the s or s. this type was unknown in the hutterite ceramics of the moravian settlements. the jug with strainer and a spout that widens like a funnel and is pinched together to form three lobes, with a fl attened globe-like body and narrow cylindrical neck section followed the pattern of ottoman-turkish metal vessels; it is known in the territories that were oc- cupied by the turks and was transmitted through black ceramics of balkan origin (hor- vÁth – krisztinkovich : – ; ridovics , with further literature). the shape also has parallels in transylvanian goldsmiths’ work from the last third of the th century (kiss : i. – ). in the light of the fi nds from the excavations in sárospatak, an- other possible localisation besides transylvania arises for this type of jug with fi lter. the excavation of the haban settlement led by ringer unearthed a number of unglazed kiln wastes that had been fi red only once (ringer : – , plates – ). the major- ity, but not all, were covered with a light engobe layer (ringer ). they included fl uted pieces, although in this case the fl uting was diagonal. the description “jug for sour water” that according to the sources (dÉtshy : ) the anabaptists of sárospatak were al- ready making in , probably applies to this shape. presumably, naturally carbonated mineral water was served in them. th century vessels with uranium-bearing blue glaze and decoration in the th century there is a substantial increase in the number of vessels with a ura- nium-bearing blue glaze – all in all, forming one group as regards their style, the com- position of their glaze and the production technique. although it is present in very small quantities, the blue glaze always contains tin indicating its intentional use (baj nÓczi et al. ). a number of th century vessels with a white glaze can be grouped into this stylisti- cal circle – pieces all in all. their shape, the manner of painting and the motives used for decoration link them to the same style and workshop. the characteristic shape and produc- tion technique can be fi rst observed in three dishes made at the end of the th century, in (mnm . ; imm . ; imm . . ). we know of two white dishes dated (imm ; mnm . ). taking into account both groups (blue- and white-glazed), pieces can be dated to between and . but there is also one jug (mnm . ) marked with the year and another bottle with (nm . . ), and there are even two very late vessels among them ( , mnm . . dish; , mnm . . jug). four dishes are without a date. among the vessels the greatest number are dishes with imm . – cm plaster-reconstruction at the mouth, imm . – cm, a – cm, imm – cm. http://public.neprajz.hu/neprajz. . .php?bm= &kv= &nks= , ge: am: , from the vicin- ity of pozsony/bratislava, description by istván csupor – gabriella vida mnm . , imm . . , mnm . does not contain tin?, mnm . . anna ridovics – zoltán may – bernadett bajnÓczi – mária tÓth wide rims ( blue and white), three larger and two smaller elongated, oval-shaped, so- called melon-bodied jugs with wide mouths; similar pieces are found among the th century haban products. the pear-shaped jugs ( , imm ), ( , mnm . ), ( , nm . . ), the round-bellied jugs with narrow necks and handles ( , Ömv . ), the rectangular bottle ( , nm . . ) and especially the ewers with pinched mouths ( , mnm . ), ( , mnm . ), ( , mnm . ) that fi rst appear at the end of the th century, are characteristic types by the th century. a few pieces with a white glaze decorated with the blue of cobalt pigment contain- ing uranium ( pieces) cannot be linked to the workshop mentioned above, as they differ in style. these were characterised by a stock of lightly sketched, often fi gural motives enriched with buildings on a white ground (fl oral linear patterns, dot-and-circle motive, cheerful fi gures, small horses and deer) that was increasingly popular from the early th century. they are a distinctive haban interpretation of “chinoiserie” (plate ). they include a round dish with a deep well and wide rim (mnm . ), three small pear- shaped joined jugs – known as the “three brethrens” or “dreibruder” (mnm . . ) similar pieces to the fl uted oval dish with blue decoration (mnm . ) are known from the turn of the th to the th centuries. the three albarellos form a separate unit with their curved frame motives painted in two shades of blue (camïeu blue), in which the name of the medicine could be placed later (mnm . ; mnm . . ; mnm . . ) a more detailed examination of these pieces is a task for future research. the “mining town workshop” in this study we attempt mainly to defi ne more precisely the characteristic group of objects, all having the same style, with a blue or a white glaze and generally rather roughly painted with a brush. this group of objects is not unknown in the literature. a number of authors have dealt with it, most recently pišutová, who has published new results. however, they have not yet been analysed more thoroughly or examined more precisely as a whole. at present more than vessels can be classifi ed to this workshop on the basis of considerations of style; of these were measured. the thrown shape of the dish is characterised by a broad rim and a deep well. they are generally – cm in diameter. the shaping of the reverse side differs characteristically from that of the traditional hutterite, haban dishes that are strongly articulated with the bottom of the well rounded. the difference can be clearly seen from a comparison of the two different types of dish (mnm . ; mnm . ) (plate ). the reverse side of the well is barely perceptibly separate, the rim does not curve out so sharply but rather rises steeply. in cross-section the vessel opens out rather like a funnel. the bottom mnm . . mar:sha; ; imm http://gyujtemeny.imm.hu/gyujtemeny/kanna- banyaszjelvennyel-georgius-bartha- -felirattal/ ; imm . . http://gyujtemeny.imm.hu/gyu- jtemeny/kanna-banyaszjelvennyel/ ; imm , mnm . . http://public.neprajz.hu/neprajz. . .php?bm= &kv= &nks= , zólyom, collected by elemér kund, place of use transylvania, mária kresz – gabriella vida. piŠutovÁ . unfortunately the article did not come to our attention until after the manuscript was completed, so we were not able to fully incorporate its results into our study. examination of haban vessels with uranium-bearing blue glaze of the dish is always unglazed. a variety of motives are used for the decorations on the dishes and on the basis of the compositional system they can be divided into several main groups. decorations in three parts. these include the plants and tendrils with bunches of fl owers around on the rim arranged according to the traditional hutterite, haban triple composition; there may also be a central motive in the middle of the well of the dish (mnm . ; mnm . . ; imm . . ; imm ; imm ; mnm . ; nm . . ). a date and monogram may also be placed on the rim (plate ). a variation of this has two identical motives at the bottom and above them only a date or monogram (mnm . , f:a: ). in another variation a date, monogram or craft symbol is painted between the curve of two leaves in the band around on the rim or the plant element proliferates to fi ll the whole width of the rim. decorations in four parts (plate ). four+four-part (mnm . ; imm ; imm ; imm ; nm . . ), four+three-part pattern distribution (imm ; imm ), with the same motive repeated in the centre. the plants facing each other are identical. they grow out of the centre towards the edge of the rim, starting from the infl ection point of the dish (imm ; imm ). in a variation of this arrangement the plants facing each other are identical and alternate with motives growing out from the centre and curving inwards from the outer edge of the rim (imm ; imm ). the four+four motive often emphasises a strong vertical articulation – e.g. lily of the valley, leafy branch (imm ). medallion arrangement. in a transitional type with a four+four medallion ar- rangement, where a curved frame is created around the elements of the four-part division with lines starting from the outside of the rim (imm ; imm ; imm ). medal- lion arrangement in the band around the rim (imm ; imm . ) with , medal- lions – a late type, found in two undated dishes and the one from (mnm . ). characteristic elements of the stock of patterns are fl owers seen from above and the side (tulips, pomegranates, fl owers in panicles, etc.), bunches of tendrils, upright fl owering plants – lily of the valley, branch of pine or rosemary. traditional haban motives in addition to the plant ornamentations include geometrical double outline, wavy line, lace (pyramid of arches) motive. the date is placed on the rim in a wreath (mnm . ), in an open wreath (imm ), between two leafy branches (imm ). dot-and-circle motive and buildings are characteristic of the blue-and-white type, but they sometimes also appear on these vessels (imm , imm . ; imm ). in the late stock of motives triangular hatching, petal lines radiating from the centre of a fl ower only half of which is shown, and stylised plant motives of a new type appear (imm ). unusually, a dish dated (imm ) has a single large motive, a stylised two-headed eagle fi lls the whole inside part of the vessel. so far we have found three dishes with craft symbols (nm . . , , miner?), (imm , , butcher), (imm . . i.p. weaver). numerous pieces are decorated with a monogram or double monogram. the latter were almost certainly ordered to mark weddings, imm , butcher; nm . . aw http://public.neprajz.hu/neprajz. . . php?bm= &kv= &nks= , . description by mária kresz – istván csupor, north-west hungary. http://gyujtemeny.imm.hu/gyujtemeny/tal-ketfeju-sas-alakjaval/ , the dish was a gift from györgy ráth in . the description on the card localises it to the territory of upper hungary. . http://public.neprajz.hu/neprajz. . .php?bm= &kv= &nks= , north-western hungary. de- scription by mária kresz – istván csupor. http://gyujtemeny.imm.hu/gyujtemeny/tal-meszaros-cehjelvenyekkel/ anna ridovics – zoltán may – bernadett bajnÓczi – mária tÓth as is the case of the white dish dated (mnm . ) and decorated with the names of (nemes és bötsületes (noble and honest) janos vigh and kata krisanovics. the decoration of the wheel-thrown bodies of rotation, jugs and tankards is characterised by very large fl oral motives drawn with dynamic brush strokes. in some cases a plant with fi ve fl owers (mnm . ) or a tendril with three fl owers (imm ) fi lls the whole side of the jug opposite the handle (plate ). the motive often extends beyond the double lines articulating the surface. in some cases the surface bordered by the traditional haban lace-like pyramids of arches is crowded full of small plant motives in an attempt to fi ll the entire space (mnm . . , iohannes termann). pieces decorated with craft symbols (plate ), mainly miners’ symbols, pieces with a name or monogram form a characteristic group within the elongated, oval-shaped, melon-bellied large jugs. so far we know of nine such blue vessels. large jugs with miners’ symbols: , (...s? ) luptak, cm, coll. lessner; , mar: sha: in a medallion, mnm . ; , georgius barla, imm ; , hanzo mezibrocki – in medallion, central slovakian museum, besztercebánya, no. ; , ger- rium balz. prague, národní muzeum . cm; , johanes woltar, gyulafehérvár, batthyány library no. ; , g. r. monogram on the neck, imm . . a blue jug made for mihael kohut with the symbols of the weavers’ guild is dated (imm . , cm, collection of vince wartha). a white, miner’s jug dated is published by kalesny (kalesny : . item no. . stredoslovenské múzeum v banskej bystrici inv. n. .), other miners’ vessels are published by pišutová (piŠutovÁ ). we measured fi ve of these (mnm . ; imm . ; imm , gyulafehérvár, batthyáneum no. ; imm ). in most cases the space between the double line painted around the lower third of the body and at the beginning of the neck is entirely covered with a decoration of miners’ sym- bols framed with a wreath: miner’s hammer, chisel, leather apron (horvÁth – krisztinkovich : – ; szemÁn : ). the miner entered the mine by sliding down the head slope on the leather, and if necessary sat on the apron to work. it also had a symbolic meaning as the symbol of the miners’ honour (szemÁn : ). in addition to the large fl oral motive, four of the pieces have at the bottom a row of arches arranged into pyramids , or levels high, but motives of another kind also appear, such as a chevron motive all round the body (mnm . ) or the use of three dots as decoration (prague nm . ). where were the pieces of the “mining town workshop” made? the identifi cations attached to vessels in various public and private collections and the data on description cards give various places as the place where the piece concerned was made. the literature mentions alvinc, the transylvanian territory, and the vicinity of zólyom (zvolen, slovakia) and besztercebánya. the transylvanian researchers published pieces belonging to this style and found in museums in romania and in czech and slo- http://gyujtemeny.imm.hu/gyujtemeny/kanna-banyaszjelvennyel-georgius-bartha- -felirattal/ , upper hungary, , with further literature. http://gyujtemeny.imm.hu/gyujtemeny/kanna-banyaszjelvennyel/ , , upper hungary. examination of haban vessels with uranium-bearing blue glaze vakian museums as being from alvinc (bunta : , no. b; roŞca – klusch : fig. ), kybalova places them in slovakia (kybalova – novotna : , ). béla krisztinkovich, and later the co-authors, krisztinkovich and horváth, group mainly only blue vessels into this style and in their publications give the place of production as northern hungary, the mining towns, possibly in the vicinity of selmecbánya (banská Štiavnica, slo- vakia), körmöcbánya (kremnica, slovakia), or perhaps besztercebánya (horvÁth – krisz- tinkovich : – , – ). they mention that jürgen fischer defi ned the large jug with miners’ symbols, the monogram m:p: and the date as being from alvinc, but by the haban settlement in alvinc was already very weak, its residents had moved away or assimilated into the transylvanian saxon population. the new wave of settlers arriving from austria and the settlement’s new fl ourishing can be observed only from . the au- thors consider it likely that the master was active in a haban settlement, by then converted to catholicism, in the territory of the former northern hungary, today slovakia. in the opinion of mária krisztinkovich sárospatak is another possible location. while it is true that the haban settlement there disintegrated around , numerous potters were active there in the th century, among others the wipf family. gabriella vida considers that the area of the former zólyom county is the most likely place of production of the blue- and perhaps also together with them the white-glazed ceramics belonging to a similar style (vida : , ). in her opinion the pieces in the museum of ethnography classifi ed here almost without exception entered the museum from this area, mainly from the vicin- ity of besztercebánya. she considers that these pieces were produced in besztercebánya, zólyom or the smaller mining towns along the upper reaches of the river garam. “they suggest masters with a good sense of style but more limited manual skills, their products are slightly more robust than the classical haban vessels. they were made between and .” (vida : , ) a number of authors consider them to be the fi rst folk-style variants of haban ceramics. jános szendrei mentions that a haban potter called messer- schmidt also worked in libetbánya (l’ubietova, slovakia) (szendrei : ). gabriella vida cites this information in her article in the present volume and examines this style and its connections in more detail, as well as the question of libetbánya. she recently found in the papers of mária kresz the notebook in which she recorded the conversations she had with heřman landsfeld in late and early . according to these notes landsfeld did not regard the dark blue vessels as haban pieces, in his opinion they are the work of a slovak master, haban copies, perhaps made in the area of besztercebánya. this opinion is also represented today by the archaeologist jiří pajer. pišutová, partly following the work of drugová, places the area in which the workshop operated in besztercebánya, or libetbánya and/or tájó (tajov, slovakia) (piŠutovÁ : , ). it can be seen that there are still many question marks and much uncertainty. what do we know? it would appear that the production of vessels belonging to this workshop circle began at the end of the th century and the tradition was passed on right up to the s. this means that the krisztinkovich : . group of dishes with a blue ground glaze, all of which were produced in a period of a few years prior to , and evidently the work of a single craftsman. he operated near the mining centre of besztercebánya. a néprajzi múzeum ethnológiai archívuma / . personal communication with jiří pajer. anna ridovics – zoltán may – bernadett bajnÓczi – mária tÓth beginning of the workshop’s activity must be put some years earlier, changing the date generally accepted in the literature. the blue glaze on every piece measured so far that can be classifi ed in this group on the basis of stylistic considerations has been found to contain uranium. it is possible that for around years they obtained the cobalt needed for the blue colour from the same source(?). in the case of the blue glazes containing uranium, the stove from liptónádasd can probably be localised with greatest certainty, it was probably made in the area of the mining towns of lower hungary. based on the statistical analysis of the xrf data the stove from liptónádasd was classifi ed among the vessels containing uranium made in the s. (xrf data were evaluated by the statistica software (version and ) using cluster, factor, and principal component analysis.) the workshops making stove tiles are typically conservative, the motives and tile moulds were used and passed on for decades. consideration could be given to changing the date of the liptónádasd stove to the early th century. (however, the glaze on the tiles of the stove from besztercebánya that were probably made earlier, probably also locally, does not (?) contain uranium, which suggests the need for caution.) the vessels that can be considered as belonging to this workshop are known from various places, many have been preserved in private collections. there is very little information on the places where these vessels were used. the dish dated (nm ) was collected from gyetva (detva, slovakia) in zólyom county. the dish (mnm . ) dated was used as a communion plate in the calvinist church of szentkirályszabadja, veszprém county. the jug preserved in the batthyaneum in gyu- lafehérvár may have been used in transylvania. according to our present knowledge, the greatest number of these objects are preserved in public museum collections in hungary. a number of conclusions can be drawn from the shape of the vessels, their decoration, and the decoration on the large jugs with miners’ symbols. the circle of buyers changed in social composition and grew wider. as a consequence there was a demand for more ceramics. both the technology and the style changed. the decoration became more roughly drawn and often crowded. on the basis of their material, shape and manner of painting the min- ers’ jugs that have survived in various places (in hungarian, slovakian, czech, austrian and romanian collections) can be linked to a single workshop; so far we know pieces that can be dated between and . the workshop must probably have been close to the clients, in the vicinity of a mining town; perhaps in a place where cobalt was also mined nearby making it easier to obtain the cobalt pigment. a very small quantity of cobalt pig- ment is suffi cient to give a strong blue colour. it was available commercially, and so it also reached places at a considerable distance from the cobalt mines and the places where the pigment was made. cobalt mining in hungary according to th century sources cobalt suitable for the production of pigment need- ed for blue paint was mined in hungary. a decree issued in – dated st november – at the instruction of the chief director of mines ordered that no permits were to http://public.neprajz.hu/neprajz. . .php?bm= &kv= &nks= , by gabriella vida. examination of haban vessels with uranium-bearing blue glaze be issued for the extraction of cobalt, as her majesty reserved the right to process cobalt into pigment (pÉch – : iii./ ; izsÓ : ). this probably applied to szo- molnok (now smolník, slovakia). the question arises whether earlier others also had the right to process cobalt. cobalt mining probably started earlier, as well as the production of the raw material for pigment (zaffre, smalte). but we have not yet found any reference to this. the ore mountains on the border between bohemia and saxony were the most important sources of cobalt in europe; cobalt pigment used to colour ceramic glazes and glass was exported throughout the world from here as early as the th century (gratuze et al. : ; zucchiati et al. : – ). the mining of cobalt was closely linked to silver mining; the so-called fi ve-element veins (ni-co-as-ag-bi-u) were mined in the saxon-bohemian ore mountains (kissin ). friedrich kapf ( – ), a ger- man mineralogist in breslau (wrocław, poland), wrote about the deposits in hungary and elsewhere in europe, as well as on the mining of cobalt and the various ways of making the pigment (kapf ). cobalt deposits were found in hungary in the following places: puganz – also known as bakabánya, pukanec, in hont county (pukanec, slovakia) – was one of the major mining towns in lower hungary in the vicinity of besztercebánya and selmecbánya. in the szepesség region of upper hungary, schmöllnitz (szomolnok, kassa district, slovakia) and dobschau (dobsina, gömör county, slovakia) were recorded as places where cobalt was mined. the hungarian cobalt from schmöllnitz/szomolnok was made into pigment in klodnitz, austria (kapf : ) in the th century. klodnitz (kłodnica) is now in poland, between kraków and wrocław. in the banat region cobalt was found in oraviza (or oravicabánya, orawitz, krassó-szörény county, now oravita, romania). with the exception of oravica, the other places had been mined for silver from the middle ages (kapf : ). where could the cobalt ore containing uranium have been mined? there are many such sources in the bohemian ore mountains, among them joachimstal. dobsina is a fi ve-element vein type ore deposit (kissin ), but it was known as a source of cobalt from the s, we have data on the mining of cobalt for use as pigment from that time (rozlozsnik ). the transylvanian researchers (bunta ; roŞca – klusch ) regard the transylvanian mountains closer to alvinc, the hátszeg, zalatna, rézbánya areas, as the source of the cobalt used there. conclusion right from the start the products of the hutterite and later the haban workshops included blue-glazed vessels and from the second half of the th century there was an in- crease in the number of pieces with a lighter and darker blue glaze. the vessels examined show that in making the blue glaze with cobalt pigment various amounts of tin were al- most always used in the glaze in the th and th centuries (bajnÓczi et al. ). in some of the pieces the xrf measurements also found uranium together with cobalt in the blue glaze and in the blue decoration on the white glaze. on the basis of considerations of style, periodisation and place of production, the vessels with uranium-bearing blue glaze can be classifi ed into a number of groups. we can conclude with a high degree of certainty from the archaeological fi nds that blue vessels covered with a cobalt glaze containing uranium anna ridovics – zoltán may – bernadett bajnÓczi – mária tÓth were made in the second half of the th century in sárospatak and alvinc, as well as in szobotist. after the disintegration of the hutterite settlements based on collective pay- ment of taxes and common ownership of assets ( / ), a workshop of haban origin and cultivating haban traditions operated from the end of the th century in north-western hungary (now western slovakia) further away from the haban settlements, probably in the vicinity of the mining towns in lower hungary, near besztecebánya, on the upper reach of the river garam. on the basis of production technique, stylistic considerations and material examinations, the vessels produced here form a clearly distinct group. the workshop’s most productive period was in the s to s, but its style lived on for decades after that. the haban system of composition, the transformation of motives and the shift of the style towards a folk-like style can be clearly observed in this group of objects. acknowledgements we thank gabriella balla, katalin csontos, kornélia hajtó and diána radványi (mu- seum of applied arts, budapest), gabriella vida (museum of ethnography, budapest), eszter kovács, anikó tóth (budapest history museum), edit tamás and istván rin- ger (rákóczi museum of the hungarian national museum, sárospatak), eszter eperjesi pocsainé (scientifi c collections of the reformed college of sárospatak), melinda mitu (transylvanian national historical museum, kolozsvár), tekla tötszegi (transylvanian museum of ethnography, kolozsvár), gábor teleky and enikő hegedűs (collection of the roman catholic episcopacy of gyulafehérvár), doina biró hendre (batthyaneum, gyu- lafehérvár), botond gudor (nagyenyed county of reformed church), karla roşca (as- tra museum, sibiu, romania), claudia peschel-wacha (museum of folk life and folk art, vienna), jiří pajer (czech republic) for their great help. this study was supported by the hungarian scientifi c research fund (otka k , k and k ) and the jános bolyai research scholarship of the hungarian academy of sciences (granted to b. bajnóczi). literature bajnÓczi bernadett – may zoltán – ridovics anna – szabÓ máté – nagy géza – tÓth mária : the tin content of the blue-glazed hutterite and haban ceramics – implications for the produc- tion technology based on the results of the handheld xrf and empa analyses. acta ethnographica hungarica / . – . balla gabriella : habán kerámiák tárgyleírásai [descriptions of haban ceramics]. in: reneszánsz és manierizmus. az európai iparművészet korszakai [renaissance and mannerism. periods in european applied arts]. ed.: pÉter márta: iparművészeti múzeum, budapest. – . blake, hugo : pottery exported from northwest italy between and : savona, albisola, genoa, pisa, and montelupo. in: archaeology and italian society. prehistoric, roman and medieval studies. eds: barker, graeme – hodges, richard. papers in italian archaeology ii. bar international series . – . examination of haban vessels with uranium-bearing blue glaze bunta magda : az erdélyi habán kerámia [haban ceramics in transylvania]. bucharest, kriterion. dÉtshy mihály : adalékok a sárospataki újkeresztények (habánok) történetéhez [new data on the history of the anabaptists (habans) of 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geoarchaeological and bioarchaeological studies , inst. for geo- and bioarchaeology, vrije universiteit, amsterdam. – . szÁdeczky béla : i. apafi mihály fejedelem udvartartása [the court of prince mihály apafi ]. vol. i. bornemisza anna gazdasági naplói ( – ) [economic diaries of anna bornemisza ( – )]. magyar tu- dományos akadémia, budapest. szebeni olivér : anabaptisták [anabaptists]. magyarországi baptista egyház, budapest. szemÁn attila : a farbőr mint bányásszimbólum [the miners’ apron as a miners’ symbol]. bányászattörténeti köz- lemények. – . szendrei jános : a habánok története magyarországon és a habán majolika [history of the habans in hungary and haban maiolica]. művészi ipar . . tite, m. s. : the production technology of italian maiolica: a reassessment. journal of archaeological science , – . zucchiatti, a. – bouquillon, a. – katona, i. – d’alessandro, a. : the della robbia blue: a case study for the use of cobalt pigments in ceramics during the italian renaissance. archaeometry , – . vida gabriella a: kályhacsempék [stove tiles]; habán fajanszok [haban faience]. in: legendás lények, varázslatos virágok – a közkedvelt reneszánsz [legendary beings, enchanting flowers – the renaissance we all know and love]. ed.: fejŐs zoltán, budapest, néprajzi múzeum. – , – . : the budapest museum of ethnography’s haban ceramics. acta ethnographica hungarica / , – . anna ridovics – zoltán may – bernadett bajnÓczi – mária tÓth plate bottle, . inv. n. knm a dish, . inv. n. knm a bottle, . inv. n. imm small pear-shaped jug, . inv. n. imm round-bellied jug, . inv. n. ketm f jug, . inv. n. imm tankard, around – . inv. n. imm tankard, (?). inv. n. mnm . tankard, . inv. n. imm . . examination of haban vessels with uranium-bearing blue glaze plate jug with strainer. inv. n. imm . jug with strainer. inv. n. imm . jug with strainer, . inv. n. imm jug with strainer, with faulty date, . inv. n. knm a anna ridovics – zoltán may – bernadett bajnÓczi – mária tÓth plate round-bellied, fl uted jug, . inv. n. mnm . oval-shaped, fl uted jug, . inv. n. mnm . dish, . inv. n. mnm . dish, . inv. n. imm examination of haban vessels with uranium-bearing blue glaze plate dish, . inv. n. mnm . dish, . inv. n. mnm . anna ridovics – zoltán may – bernadett bajnÓczi – mária tÓth plate stove from liptónádasd, late th-early th c. inv. n. mnm . stove from gyulafehérvár, – stove tile. inv. n. imm . . stove tile. inv. n. imm examination of haban vessels with uranium-bearing blue glaze plate dish, . inv. n. mnm . dish, . inv. n. imm dish, . inv. n. imm . dish, . inv. n. imm dish, . inv. n. imm dish, . inv. n. mnm dish, . inv. n. nm . . dish, . inv. n. nm . . dish, . inv. n. nm . . anna ridovics – zoltán may – bernadett bajnÓczi – mária tÓth plate dish, . inv. n. mnm dish, . inv. n. imm dish, . inv. n. imm dish, . inv. n. imm dish, . inv. n. imm dish, . inv. n. imm . dish, s.d. inv. n. imm . dish, . inv. n. imm dish, s.d. inv. n. imm . examination of haban vessels with uranium-bearing blue glaze plate jug, . inv. n. mnm . pear-shaped jug, . inv. n. mnm . pear-shaped jug, . inv. n. imm pear-shaped jug, . inv. n. nm . . jug, . inv. n. imm jug. . inv. v. mnm . anna ridovics – zoltán may – bernadett bajnÓczi – mária tÓth plate jug with miners’ symbols, . inv. n. mnm . jug with miners’ symbols, . inv. n. mbm . jug with miners’ symbols, . inv. n. imm jug with miners’ symbols, . inv. n. imm jug with miners’ symbols, . inv. n. gybk jug with weavers’ symbols, . inv. n. imm examination of haban vessels with uranium-bearing blue glaze plate albarello. inv. n. mnm . albarello. inv. n. mnm . albarello. inv. n. mnm . dish, . inv. n. mnm . triple jug. inv. n. mnm . fluted dish. inv. n. mnm . wp-p m- .ebi.ac.uk params is empty sys_ exception wp-p m- .ebi.ac.uk no params is empty exception params is empty / / - : : if (typeof jquery === "undefined") document.write('[script type="text/javascript" src="/corehtml/pmc/jig/ . . /js/jig.min.js"][/script]'.replace(/\[/g,string.fromcharcode( )).replace(/\]/g,string.fromcharcode( ))); // // // window.name="mainwindow"; .pmc-wm {background:transparent repeat-y top left;background-image:url(/corehtml/pmc/pmcgifs/wm-nobrand.png);background-size: auto, contain} .print-view{display:block} page not available reason: the web page address (url) that you used may be incorrect. message id: (wp-p m- .ebi.ac.uk) time: / / : : if you need further help, please send an email to pmc. include the information from the box above in your message. otherwise, click on one of the following links to continue using pmc: search the complete pmc archive. browse the contents of a specific journal in pmc. find a specific article by its citation (journal, date, volume, first page, author or article title). http://europepmc.org/abstract/med/ the political project of wölfflin's early formalism<xref ref-type="fn" rid="fn " ptype="focto_a_ " citart="citart "><sup>*</sup></xref> the political project of wölfflin’s early formalism* evonne levy october , winter , pp. – . © october magazine, ltd. and massachusetts institute of technology. what would it mean to art history if its foundational formalist, heinrich wölfflin, also turned out to be a political thinker? in the literature on wölfflin’s early publications, only sporadic attempts have been made to reverse the overwhelming critique of wölfflin’s formalism as narrowly visual and apolitical. only one text has addressed wölfflin’s politics directly: in an essay from , martin warnke demon- strated how wölfflin’s distress over world war i and the slavish service by the profes- soriat to its nationalistic themes elicited the icy ahistorical formalism of the principles of art history published in . in warnke’s reading, wölfflin’s apoliticism was, para- * earlier versions of this essay were presented at various conferences, and my thanks go to my many hosts and interlocutors: maurizio ghelardi, sabine frommel, maarten delbeke, caroline van eck, ursula frohne, stefan grohé, norbert nussbaum, christian fuhrmeister, and tristan weddigen. special thanks also go to those who took the time to offer comments on the manuscript: james ackerman, paul jaskot, albert narath, peter parshall, robert levit, and hal foster. anna stainton checked my translations but all errors and infelicities are my responsibility. research for this article, which is part of a book nearing com- pletion entitled barock: art history and politics from burckhardt to sedlmayr ( – ), was supported by the social sciences and humanities research council of canada. . joseph gantner (wölfflin’s pupil and preeminent biographer), joan hart, meinhold lurz, daniel adler, and harry francis mallgrave, among others, have discussed wölfflin’s philosophical neo- kantianism in terms of organicism and aesthetic theory, as well as his interest in empathy theory and psy- chology, and his relations to gottfried semper’s theory of style, to archaeologist heinrich brunn’s incipi- ent formalism, and to jacob burckhardt’s art and cultural histories. the intellectual biographies of lurz and hart in particular were written with full knowledge of wölfflin’s papers; and they have been correct to read his work through these and other intertexts and influences. hart, for one, has argued forcibly against reading wölfflin as a hegelian, but rather for a reading in the context of neo-kantianism, an important argument that daniel adler has elaborated. joan goldhammer hart, “reinterpreting wölfflin: neo- kantianism and hermeneutics,” art journal ( ), pp. – , and hart, “heinrich wölfflin: an intellectual biography” (unpublished ph.d. dissertation, university of california, berkeley, ); daniel adler, “leaps of faith: formalist notions of the painterly” (unpublished ph.d. dissertation, city university of new york, ); adler, “painterly politics: wölfflin, formalism and german academic culture, – ,” art history ( ), pp. – , – ; meinhold lurz, heinrich wölfflin: biographie einer kunsttheorie (worms: werner, ); harry francis mallgrave and eleftherios ikonomou, trans. and ed., empathy, form, space: problems in german aesthetics – (los angeles: getty center for the history of art and the humanities, ), pp. – . . martin warnke, “on heinrich wölfflin,” representations ( ), pp. – . wölfflin’s classic art ( ) has been read as a politically inflected text in margaret iversen, “politics and the historiography of art: wölfflin’s classic art,” oxford art journal , no. ( ), pp. – . wölfflin’s formalism in classic art and principles is reconsidered as morphological rather than taxonomic, as “tools for interpreting the meaning of the artistic act and never a merely formal or analytic apparatus,” in marshall brown, “the classic is the baroque: on the principle of wölfflin’s art history,” critical inquiry (december ), pp. – . october doxically, a political act of resistance. but as wölfflin wrote in his diary in , after his departure from the university of munich and return to his native switzerland: “i am taken as a formalist. as cool. i am not that.” is wölfflin’s resistance the only discernible form of political thought in his work? besides warnke’s exceptional article on this topic, discus- sions of the historian’s politics have been mainly relegated to ill-founded conclusions about wölfflin’s purported sympathy towards national socialism. for art historians, wölfflin is thus either apolitical or involved in the most heinous politics. while a full response needs to be carefully con- structed on the basis of thorough archival research, it is true that wölfflin’s work was readily taken up by national socialists, and his comparative formal- ism seems to have possessed a potentially racist ker- nel that made it open to appropriation by fascism. but neither wölfflin’s largely uninvestigated biography nor his texts—which include thousands of unpublished letters and dozens of notebooks in his nachlass in basel— have been scrutinized for their political implications. wölfflin’s role as the straw . joseph gantner, ed., heinrich wölfflin – : autobiographie, tagebücher und briefe, nd ed. (basel: schwabe, ), p. . . at first sight the most damning evidence was the appearance in the nazi newspaper völkische beobachter (january , ) of wölfflin’s name on a list of founding members of the reichskammer für kultur, a group of cultural figures supportive of national socialism organized by elsa bruckmann. wölfflin’s friend since the s, bruckmann, together with her husband hugo, were early supporters of hitler, and the f. bruckmann verlag was the publisher of most of wölfflin’s work and of mein kampf. the article has been used as evidence of wölfflin’s political sympathies in jonathan petropoulos, faustian bargain: the art world in nazi germany (oxford: oxford university press, ), p. , and suggested as such in eric michaud, the cult of art in nazi germany, trans. janet lloyd (stanford: stanford university press, ), p. . however, in a recently discovered letter from wölfflin to elsa bruckmann dating to , wölfflin expresses anger that bruckmann published his name in the aforementioned list without his permission. wölfflin’s anger over this abuse of their friendship is the strongest signal to date that he was not in sympathy with national socialism. see anne bechstedt, anja deutsch, and daniela stöppel, “der verlag f. bruckmann im nationalsozialismus,” kunstgeschichte im “dritten reich”: theorien, methoden, praktiken, ed. ruth heftrig, olaf peters, barbara schellewald (berlin: akademie verlag, ), pp. – . . art historians relied overwhelmingly on racial (and sometimes racist) categories during wölfflin’s lifetime. for the category of race in wölfflin and principles of art history as mapping conflict between north and south in the context of world war i, see eric michaud, “nord-sud,” in histoire de l’art: une discipline à ses frontiers (paris: hazan, ), pp. – . the usefulness of wölfflin’s comparative method in support of national socialist ideology is to be discussed in the introduction to paul jaskot, the nazi perpetrator and postwar german art (forthcoming), which the author allowed me to read in manuscript. . fragments have been published in gantner, heinrich wölfflin, and the nachlass is used extensive- ly in hart, “heinrich wölfflin: an intellectual biography.” i rely on the typed transcriptions of a broad selection of the notebooks deposited with wölfflin’s papers (heinrich wölfflin nachlass , nachtrag, ib, no. – ). unless otherwise noted, all references to wölfflin’s notebooks are from the heinrich wölfflin nachlass, universitätsbibliothek, basel. heinrich wölfflin. courtesy of the universitätsbibliothek, basel. http://www.mitpressjournals.org/action/showimage?doi= . /octo_a_ &iname=master.img- .jpg&w= &h= man for the anglo-american “new art history” has seemingly prevented scholars from looking at wölfflin from a political perspective—although formalism itself can hardly be regarded as outside of politics. admittedly, wölfflin himself made the politi- cal a less than obvious focal point. judging from his notebooks, which only rarely divulge a life out- side that of the mind, world war i (during which he lived in munich) barely distracted him from his intellectual preoccupations, and world war ii passed virtually without mention by the retired professor in zurich. although his letters show he was not oblivious to his times, he was less likely to describe an actual event than to make oblique, suggestive, and slippery references. it may thus come as a surprise to discover the extent to which wölfflin’s renaissance and baroque ( ), his first art-historical work and the first work of formalism, is a highly politicized text. in what follows i map out the imbrication of politics and formalism in that work and begin to assess whether wölfflin may have been both a political thinker and an apolitical man. i base my argument on a close reading of the language of renaissance and baroque and on heretofore unconsidered aspects of wölfflin’s university education in political history and political philosophy and his preoccupation with the contem- porary emergence of the german state. these studies and circumstances con- tributed to his own worldview as a swiss national who studied and later taught in the political project of wölfflin’s early formalism . that wölfflin was a sacrificial victim, whose work was subject to certain reductive readings against which new positions were laid out, is viewed by warnke as an inevitable and productive kind of distortion in the history of the discipline, necessary to move the field in new directions. warnke, “on heinrich wölfflin,” p. . for a contentious debate from within art history over formalism and its pol- itics, see johanna drucker, “formalism’s other history,” art bulletin ( ), pp. – and yve- alain bois, “whose formalism?,” art bulletin ( ), pp. – . . there are several published collections of wölfflin’s letters to individuals in addition to the broad range of letters quoted in gantner, heinrich wölfflin. see especially joseph gantner, burckhardt- wölfflin: briefwechsel und andere dokumente ihrer begegnung – , nd ed. (basel: schwabe, ); heidy margrit müller, ed., “etwas für die phantasie”: heinrich wölfflins briefwechsel mit “züs colonna” mit erinnerungen und erzählprosa von lotte warburg, with an essay by peter g. meyer-viol (munich: iudicium, ); golo maurer, august grisebach ( – ): kunsthistoriker in deutschland; mit einer edition der briefe heinrich wölfflins an grisebach (ruhpolding: verlag franz philipp rutzen, ); and ricarda huch, ed., mosaikbild einer freundschaft: ricarda huchs briefwechsel mit elisabeth und heinrich wölfflin (munich: iudicium, ). . heinrich wölfflin, renaissance und barock: eine untersuchung über wesen und entstehung des barockstils in italien (munich: theodor ackermann, ). all translations are mine, though reference will be made to the english translation by kathrin simon, published as wölfflin, renaissance and baroque (ithaca: cornell university press, ). in-text citations are first for the german text, followed by the simon translation. title page of renaissance und barock, . http://www.mitpressjournals.org/action/showimage?doi= . /octo_a_ &iname=master.img- .jpg&w= &h= germany as well as in basel and zurich. the question is whether young wölfflin practiced a “political formalism”—in which the point of formalism was to under- stand the political—or whether the text under examination speaks to a political unconscious of formalism. of course there is a certain irony in the effort to recapture the political charac- ter of wölfflin’s text now, for to a late-nineteenth-century reader architectural histo- ry—and specifically the question of style—was self-evidently a political issue. from the highly politicized, prussian-supported rebuilding of cologne’s cathedral in the catholic rhineland in the gothic style in the s to the discussions in berlin in the s about the appropriate style for the imperial capital, style was de facto politi- cal. by the s, the gothic and renaissance revivals were burning out in germany, and the hellenistic baroque, exemplified by the spectacular pergamon reliefs, had become the ancient imperial architectural model for the new unified german empire. the newly excavated hellenistic works, until then considered the decadent works of a decadent empire, were celebrated by the akademie der künste in berlin in june with a reconstruction of the pergamon altar and a massive cos- tumed parade in which , artists and actors participated. wölfflin, who was study- ing in berlin during this period, was in italy at the time but surely knew about the event. even before berliners danced around the altar, the wildly expressive pergamon reliefs had caught the attention of two of wölfflin’s most important teach- ers. jacob burckhardt was bowled over by the sculptures when he saw them in berlin in ; they reminded him of rubens, whose work he increasingly admired as he came around to the baroque, and he took some mischievous pleasure in watching the archaeologists dismiss them as decadent. heinrich brunn, the munich archae- ologist to whom wölfflin dedicated renaissance and baroque, published an important article on pergamon reliefs in in which he retained a traditionalist’s reserve about them, comparing the hellenistic works to the proto-baroque creations of giulio romano (they reminded him of the artist’s mantuan fresco cycle in the sala dei giganti). the fact that wölfflin originally planned to include a parallel analysis of the changes in style in antiquity suggests that pergamon and its attendant political october . the bibliography on this subject is vast. for two paths, see michael j. lewis, the politics of the german gothic revival: august reichensperger (cambridge, mass.: mit press, ); hans belting, the germans and their art: a troublesome relationship, trans. scott kleager (new haven: yale university press, ). . the parallel architectural and political modeling was made explicit with the issuing in of a medal with then-emperor friedrich iii on one side and eumenes ii, who commissioned the pergamon frieze to commemorate his victory over the gauls, on the verso. on the discovery of the pergamon sculptures and their political significance for unified germany, see the rich article by lionel gossman “imperial icon: the pergamon altar in wilhelmine germany,” journal of modern history ( ), esp. pp. – ; and suzanne l. marchand, down from olympus: archaeology and philhellenism in germany, – (princeton: princeton university press, ). marchand’s book was brought to my atten- tion by alina payne, who makes a compelling argument for the significance of the pergamon reliefs for wölfflin’s renaissance and baroque in “portable ruins: the pergamon altar, heinrich wölfflin, and german art history at the fin de siècle,” res / ( ), pp. – . . gossman, “imperial icon,” pp. – . . heinrich brunn, “Über die kunstgeschichtliche stellung der pergamenischen gigantomachie,” jahrbuch der preußischen kunstsammlungen ( ), pp. – . see gossman, “imperial icon,” pp. , – . wölfflin’s notes on brunn’s article are preserved in notebook ( ), pp. – . parallel to the german empire had indeed been important in the genesis of his inau- gural work on the baroque. wölfflin’s renaissance und barock: individual and state renaissance and baroque was wölfflin’s habilitation, and it followed closely after his dissertation, prolegomena to a psychology of architecture. a trip to rome in the intervening years led wölfflin in this book to stage an encounter between the empathy-theory-based relations described in the dissertation and a then-contro- versial historical period of art (the baroque), which forced him to face cultural history as well. the book is organized in three parts, the first of which most closely related to principles of art history, defines the chief formal characteristics of baroque style: the painterly, grand style, massiveness, and movement. part two is concerned with the undergirding of the baroque in cultural history, posing the question why does style change? the final part, which draws on the organization of burckhardt’s largely typological history of italian renaissance architecture, ana- lyzes the change in style in churches, palaces, villas, and garden design. political themes emerge within wölfflin’s formal categories, most significant- ly the relation of part to whole, of individual to totality. wölfflin translates one of the central concerns of political philosophy (the project of securing the relation of the individual to the power structure or state) into a formal category. freedom, a central preoccupation of kant’s political philosophy and of german political philosophy of the nineteenth century in general, is omnipresent in wölfflin’s conception of the individual architectural form. related to both of these themes is his conception of unity, which in the nineteenth century is a gen- eralizable political category, linked closely to nationalism and to liberalism. two of wölfflin’s categories, “grand style” (grosse stil) and “massiveness” (massigkeit), return again and again to ways in which the individual form (the com- ponents of a classically based architecture like columns, pedestals, cornices, and so on) is overwhelmed by the totality in baroque architecture. renaissance architec- ture, by contrast, offers a secure place for the individual form: “more and more what was admired [by the sixteenth century] in antiquity was the colossal scale of its undertakings, not the pleasure in individual forms” (p. /p. ). the increase the political project of wölfflin’s early formalism . wölfflin, renaissance und barock, p. vi. in a letter to paul wolters dated may , , wölfflin explained the dedication to brunn as referring especially to what he learned from him about the painterly. but the dedication did not signal anything more, since he did not deal with the ancient baroque, much of which is “pure hideousness” and the various ancient baroques must be differentiat- ed. gantner, heinrich wölfflin, p. . . heinrich wölfflin, “prolegomena to a psychology of architecture” ( ), in empathy, form, space, pp. – . . jacob burckhardt, the architecture of the italian renaissance, trans. james palmes, ed. peter murray (chicago: university of chicago press, ). originally published in as die geschichte der renaissance in italien. . i rely here on the classic work by leonard krieger, the german idea of freedom (chicago: university of chicago press, ). in scale to monumentality is, he says, a common symptom of decline, when there is a loss of sympathy for the individual: “there is no longer an understanding of the individual (das einzelne), and a refined sense of form is lost; one strives only for the imposing and overpowering” (p. /p. ). one way in which the individual is absorbed into the form-mass is through the painterly effect of baroque architecture. in baroque architecture, he says, one sees: “not individual forms, individual figures, individual motifs, but rather an effect of the mass, not something finite, but rather infinite!” (p. /p. ). not content to employ the rhetorical device of repetition to underscore his point about the loss of the singu- lar, he escalates his language: “as its final consequence the painterly style must com- pletely destroy the plastic form” (p. /p. ). drawing on contemporary writings on mass psychology, wölfflin imagines individual forms and figures not just absorbed but destroyed by their absorption in a “masseneffect.” indeed, historians and political theo- rists of the late nineteenth century trying to explain the french revolution reasoned that the formation of the mass deprived man of reason and individuality. wölfflin also uses the word “subordination” to describe the baroque relation of parts to whole. the best example is his analysis of the dome of st. peter’s as an instance of the passage from renaissance to baroque style: bramante’s st. peter’s is not baroque. one may find here a cupola of the largest dimensions, but around it bramante arranged four neigh- boring domes which do not cramp it but provide a counterbalance. they maintain their own independence against the large cupola and curb the impression of the overpowering. michelangelo by contrast october . for the significance for wölfflin’s terms, see evonne levy, propaganda and the jesuit baroque (berkeley: university of california press, ), pp. – . st. peter’s dome, from renaissance und barock, rd ed. . http://www.mitpressjournals.org/action/showimage?doi= . /octo_a_ &iname=master.img- .jpg&w= &h= counted precisely on this impression; he pushed the neighboring spaces so far down in size that they can no longer maintain themselves against the principal volume and in this way produced an absolutely dominating center, which makes everything else appear unfree and lacking in a will of its own (p. /p. ). in this passage we see an anthropomorphic characterization of renaissance forms as “independent” and not “subordinate” to the larger form. the renaissance relation of part s engender s “calm” (beruhigung), and gives to the minor form “secur it y” (sicherheit); it allows it to “be sovereign” (beherrschen) and to have it s “feeling for life” (lebensgefühl) fulfilled. in con- trast, michel angelo’s colossal cupola is so dominated by the “center” that the part s are “unfree” and “without will of their own”; they are “convolut- ed” and “swallowed up,” “repressed” and “inhibited” by the dominating form. the vio- lent effect s of powerful baroque forms that engulf the individual parts by force are dramatized in another anthropomorphic image when wölfflin says that a form under the “force” of this “load” actually “suffers” (p. /p. ). the pressure on forms and the “suffering” that results is developed in a detailed analysis of the arch: “the cheerful round arch becomes a pressed elliptical form,” as on the second floor of the farnese palace (p. /p. ). there “the pedestals, which before were slender and high, helping to give the impression of lightness,” are now pressed down by michelangelo “into such a low and uncomfort- able form that one must feel the heaving force of their load” (p. /p. ). individual forms are pressed, or oppressed, and lose their freedom and self-determination at the scale of the column. here his example is the arcade of michelangelo’s conservator’s palace: the upper story presses down so heavily on the (underscaled) subordi- nate (untergestellten) columns that they seem to be pushed against the giant piers. we feel convinced that the columns are only maintained the political project of wölfflin’s early formalism . according to hart, influenced by his studies in aesthetics with johannes volkelt; see hart, “reinterpreting wölfflin,” p. . . see brown, “the classic is baroque” and adler, “painterly politics,” for wölfflin’s reversal on this in later works, where baroque would become synonymous with all life, and the classic with death. capitoline palace, from renaissance und barock. . http://www.mitpressjournals.org/action/showimage?doi= . /octo_a_ &iname=master.img- .jpg&w= &h= there by force. this impression results in part from the most highly irra- tional and infelicitously close spacing of the column intervals, from which no self-contented and no self-determining form can result (p. /p. ). the subordination of individual to the whole encompasses the entire build- ing facade. whereas on a renaissance church façade wölfflin sees a “coordina- tion” of elements between bays (such as at s. spirito), on a baroque façade there is an “an emphatic subordination”: s. spirito has a façade of five bays, symmetri- cally disposed, with the only exception that the middle bay is somewhat wider. this coordina- tion is replaced in the baroque by an ener- getic subordination. and this was understood in a different way than the way subordination was understood in the renaissance. the latter also had its façades structured into indepen- dent and dependent parts—usually a dominat- ing middle bay flanked by narrower corner bays which were bound to the main body by receding sections. the subordinate parts, how- ever, and this is the most decisive point, always possess the character of an independent indi- viduality (selbständiger individualität); they are subordinate (untergeordnet), but enjoy a fully free development, without any feeling in any line that their nature must be denied on account of another more powerful will. the baroque, by contrast, recognizes no free indi- vidual existence. everything remains closed in a general mass. its horizontal courses operate in such a fashion that a middle bay projects while the side bays recede in steps and remain in a formless and unarticulated state (pp. – /pp. – ). wölfflin demonstrates this loss of independence not only in elevations but also in plan, as for example in the palace courtyard, which is not allowed to con- vey the effect of an independent closed area: “the court is not an independent entity (ganzes) that has rights of its own (recht für sich)” (emphasis mine; p. /p. ). here again wölfflin anthropomorphizes the courtyard, which loses its independence, its “recht für sich”—as if a courtyard had “rights” that could be taken away. wölfflin sees the loss of independence, individuality, rights, and selfhood at october s. spirito, from renaissance und barock. . http://www.mitpressjournals.org/action/showimage?doi= . /octo_a_ &iname=master.img- .jpg&w= &h= all levels of baroque architectural form. walls become undifferentiated, unified masses with individual bricks hidden under a layer of unifying stucco (p. /p. ), and the independent renaissance column becomes an entrapped pier: the solemnity of the pier lies in its material diffidence. while columns are free and round and clearly set out from a mass, are quite self-assured (ganz selbst bestimmt) in their form, full of will and of life, the pier always remains, so to speak, with a foot stuck in the wall. it lacks the independent form (the roundness), the impression of mas- sive heaviness overwhelms (p. /p. ). as an example wölfflin describes the columns in the arcades of michelangelo’s conservator’s palace, which strive for freedom: the columns cannot be freed from the wall. these are not half-columns, but free and whole ones, but they have not yet gained their freedom. half has become detached but the rest is embedded. the impression on one’s imagination is that of an end- less, restless striving for freedom (pp. – /p. ). wölfflin sees the columns in politicized terms: the renaissance column is “free” and “self-determining,” all “will and life”; the baroque column is “imprisoned,” and the striving of the suppressed individual that has lost its independence for freedom becomes the drama of the baroque, which has no sense of the value and individual meaning of individual forms, only for the more muted effect of the whole. the individual (einzelne) and finite (begrentzte), the plastic form, cease to be important; one compos- es for the effects of masses (masseneffecten). the most indefinite of all elements, light and shadow, have become the real means of expression (p. /p. ). because of the loss of the sense of the value of the individual, wölfflin’s own method of empathy for architectural forms experienced through the body, which he laid out in his prolegomena, breaks down: there can be no empathy for a person who has disappeared. the political project of wölfflin’s early formalism . “in fact an important characteristic of the baroque style is that it cannot be seen in terms of the human body.” wölfflin, renaissance und barock, p. ; renaissance and baroque, p. . embedded column, from renaissance und barock. . http://www.mitpressjournals.org/action/showimage?doi= . /octo_a_ &iname=master.img- .jpg&w= &h= symptomatic reactions to renaissance and baroque although wölfflin voiced his skepticism of cultural explanations in his text, he does offer explicit historical and ultimately political motivations for these changes in form. in his second chapter, on the causes of the changes in style, he points to the jesuits as having a “system that forced the individual”; he notes that it was the renaissance papacy that compelled the push towards monumentality; and that it was the imitation of a manner of somber exteriority by the spanish ruling classes that compelled the unification of the roman palace exterior with the suppression of vari- ous divisions and parts (glieder). the baroque was, in sum, a product of the counter- reformation, a conclusion that was so understated that two of wölfflin’s students were moved to make it explicit in their publications on the baroque in the s. in the new edition of renaissance and baroque published by his student and assistant hans rose in , with several chapters of his own added to the text, rose wrote that the foundation for the baroque in the history of ideas or spirit of the times was now the “heart of the baroque problem.” in spite of any misgivings about the lack of cultural explanations, wölfflin’s anthropomorphic analyses of these forms, politically inflected and dramatic as they were as an art-historical poetics of force and submission, were often influen- tial for several generations of architectural historians, and are still admired by architectural historians today. one of the reasons that the political has been overlooked is that wölfflin’s formal analyses make good sense on their own. nonetheless, subsequent scholars reimagined the relation between part and october . heinrich wölfflin, renaissance und barock, th ed.; expanded and with a commentary by hans rose (munich: f. bruckmann, ), pp. and . one wonders if rose felt compelled to insert this after several reviewers of wölfflin’s principles of art history lamented the absence of a cultural historical perspec- tive in that work. warnke, “on heinrich wölfflin,” pp. – . werner weisbach is even more explicit about the need for sociological analysis in barock als kunst der gegenreformation ( ), a book written in the wee hours of the morning during his military service and the first to explicitly link the baroque with pro- paganda. werner weisbach, geist und gewalt (vienna: anton schroll, ), p. . vestibule of the laurentian library, from renaissance und barock, rd ed. . http://www.mitpressjournals.org/action/showimage?doi= . /octo_a_ &iname=master.img- .jpg&w= &h= whole, individual and state in the same terms but based on their own politics, which suggests their grasp, conscious or not, of the political inflection of wölfflin’s terms to begin with. for example, in nikolaus pevsner’s an outline of european architecture, first pub- lished in , we find the following response to wölfflin’s view of michelangelo in a passage on the vestibule of the laurentian library: “it has often been said that the motifs of the walls show michelangelo as the father of the baroque, because they express the superhuman struggle of active forces against overpowering matter.” but pevsner, detecting the subjectivity of this view, goes on to say: “i do not think that anybody who examines without prejudice his sensations in the room itself would sub- scribe to this statement. there seems to me no expression of struggle anywhere.” yet pevsner only slightly shifts wölfflin’s emphasis on struggle when he acknowledges the “conscious discordance all the way through,” and his alternative to wölfflin resides more in a new periodization that expands the concept of mannerism than in a change of terms to describe the works: what michelangelo’s laurenziana reveals is indeed mannerism in its most sublime architectural form and not baroque—a world of frustration much more tragic than the baroque world of struggles between mind and matter. in michelangelo’s architecture every force seems paralysed. the load does not weigh, the support does not carry, natural reactions play no part—a highly artificial system upheld by the severest discipline. pevsner’s language has been connected to the psychological nervousness that charac- terized the spiritual crisis of weimar intellectuals. but this text, written during world war ii, might also reflect the particular situation of an emigrated german scholar in england with a very complex relation to his own jewishness (which he denied) and to national socialism (which he supported even after his dismissal from the university, although to what extent is not clear). that such an interpretation should focus on the scholar’s haunt, a library, makes its overdeterminations poignant. a second revealing example is james ackerman’s analysis of the façade of the conservator’s palace on rome’s campidoglio in his monograph on michelangelo’s architecture, a work deeply indebted to renaissance and baroque but at the same time a profound revision of it. where wölfflin saw subordination in the political project of wölfflin’s early formalism . nikolaus pevsner, an outline of european architecture, nd ed. (middlesex: penguin, ), p. . . pevsner was frustrated that, notwithstanding his conversion to protestantism as a young man, his promising university career in germany had been halted by the regime that he very much support- ed (also in print). see stephen games, pevsner: the early life: germany and art (london: continuum, ), esp. pp. – . . it is striking the extent to which this book applies to michelangelo’s architecture alone (and identi- fies michelangelo as the leader in the character of the baroque) the characteristics that wölfflin attributed to the baroque as exemplified by michelangelo. this is especially evident in the chapter on michelangelo’s theory, where ackerman finds a justification for wölfflin’s general method of seeking empathy for archi- tectural forms in the body. ackerman says this is historical and evidenced by michelangelo’s sculptural sen- sibility, which is especially evident in his drawings. in this way, ackerman’s book seems like a larger exem- plification of my point: by identifying the impersonal historical style in the work of the individual artist, the bottom story and the imprisonment of the columns, ackerman sees some- thing else entirely: michelangelo intended to keep the potentially overwhelming horizontal accents in check by applying verticals of equal power: the colossal pilasters which, in embracing two stories, interrupt the continuity of the lower entablature and, together with the columns, window colonnettes, and balustrade figures, establish a tense equilibrium of forces. but a structural analysis reverses the process, proving that ingenious devices were necessary to prevent verticals from dominating the façade. through a “structural analysis” ackerman can show that michelangelo (and bramante) did not affirm monumen- tality, but actively worked against it. distancing himself from a view that emphasizes the overwhelming of indi- vidual parts by the whole, ackerman sees “ingenuity” as solving the problem of unchecked power by providing “checks”—verticals are kept in check by horizontals and by smaller forms to create a “tense equilibrium of forces.” this formal analysis of the seat of rome’s civic government (as opposed to the autocratic vatican across the tiber), by an american scholar in the postwar era, expresses an ethos of indi- vidual participation in its accounting for the participation of the columns and colonnettes. with the whole façade embodying a political system that “struc- turally” ensures a balance of powers, ackerman’s description of the conservator’s palace could stand in as a textbook visualization of the system of “checks and bal- ances” of the united states government. all of these formal analyses appear to be shaped, even driven, consciously or unconsciously, by beliefs about the relation of the individual to the state. wölfflin against the “great state” how to characterize the politics that emerge from wölfflin’s pages? his stylistic antinomies are matched by political ones: the renaissance is a moment october ackerman accomplishes en masse what he attempts to do on a case by case basis with his analysis of the components of various buildings, restoring to the individual powers and intentions what wölfflin had described as belonging to an epoch. . james ackerman, the architecture of michelangelo (london: zwemmer, ), pp. – . illustrations from the architecture of michelangelo by james ackerman. . http://www.mitpressjournals.org/action/showimage?doi= . /octo_a_ &iname=master.img- .jpg&w= &h= of equilibrium, where individuals are relatively free and autonomous relative to the whole; the baroque, by contrast, is almost entirely negative in its oppressive treatment of the individual. wölfflin echoes an even more entrenched view than the one found in the classics of ranke and burckhardt, that the baroque was the product of an oppressive counter-reformation led by popes and jesuits, with part icularly bad result s for the individual. here wölfflin is reliant on burckhardt’s view of the emergence of the individual in the renaissance as a product of a relaxation in the church’s authority. but whereas burckhardt’s political views (known to us through his political journalism, his extensive corre- spondence, and his politically oriented historical writing) have been brought to bear on a political reading of his works in history, wölfflin’s have yet to be. we have by contrast only hints from the published biographical material on wölfflin of the late s that he may have shared burckhardt’s anti-nationalism, anti- clericalism, swiss particularism, and conservative critique of modernity. the political view that emerges from renaissance and baroque points at the very least to a robust anti-clericalism; if one reads between the lines of wölfflin’s work, it becomes clear that he shared burckhardt’s lifelong distrust of power as “an oppo- nent of human individuality and creativity.” one of the inheritances of burckhardt’s renaissance was the notion—which burckhardt did not invent but did shape distinctively—of the state as a “work of art.” as numerous scholars have pointed out, what burckhardt means is that the state was man’s fabrication, an idea that can be traced to the enlightenment. but burckhardt’s use of the word “art” lends the idea a specific nuance, even though in his writing, this work of art does not find its way into specific forms. wölfflin took up the idea of the state as an artwork more literally, and his own scholarly trajectory—from a burckhardtian cultural history to a more autonomous history of art—suggests a path by which the political philosopher’s preoccupation with the form of the ideal state entered art history. given wölfflin’s imagery of a powerful and oppressive superstructure, we must wonder about his attitude toward the emergent german reich. in my read- ing of various passages from renaissance and baroque the architectural organism that absorbs and represses the individual is, at the very least, a figure of power, a state-like figure (although wölfflin does not use the word “state”). one hint that the younger man shared burckhardt’s suspicion of the monolithic state appears in wölfflin’s diary after a meeting with his teacher in september , just after renaissance and baroque appeared. his notes refer to two subjects of their discus- sion: his book and politics, specifically about italy before and after unification. the political project of wölfflin’s early formalism . see esp. richard sigurdson, jacob burckhardt’s social and political thought (toronto: university of toronto press, ); and john r. hinde, jacob burckhardt and the crisis of modernity (montreal and kingston: mcgill-queens university press, ). . sigurdson, p. . . see in particular eric slauter, the state as a work of art: the cultural origins of the constitution (chicago: university of chicago press, ). my thanks to tom mitchell for this reference. “size does not make greatness in politics,” he wrote in parentheses. to pass from a discussion of wölfflin’s book to pre-unification italy, apparently to praise the small city-state, suggests a link between the two. in any case, wölfflin’s note is not inconsistent with the negative view of monolithic power in renaissance and baroque. passages from wölfflin’s unpublished notebooks also show that he was preoc- cupied with the question of the state in the mid- s and through the comple- tion of his habilitation. such a preoccupation would have been stimulated by hearing the lectures of the charismatic political theorist and historian heinrich von treitschke, the so-called “herald of the reich.” wölfflin enrolled in treitschke’s extremely popular lecture course on politics (widely diffused in print as die politik) given at berlin’s frederick william university. in a notebook entry dated november, , wölfflin wrote: “berlin is a metropolis. . . . in the catedra one hears treitschke daily, before an audience of . . . . the idea of the state, of the great state (grossen staates) is finally a living one for me, thank god!” treitschke viewed political institutions as the exterior form of the inner life of its people, and his lectures were infused with the language of part and whole, individ- ual and state. wölfflin did not take many notes during the lectures, but he com- mented on them enthusiastically in letters to his family: one has the feeling of sitting before an important man. he rouses his listeners to enthusiasm. the other day treitschke held the attention of his public on the european state system. the pride in the capital of the first people of the world [berlin] before the blossoming of its youth, to praise the beauty of the german nation—that is the basic tone of the lecture. about the unity of the reich one speaks in an entirely different way here [in berlin] than in bavaria. we know that at this time he visited the reichstag and saw it through treitschke’s eyes: “it made a big impression on me, as prepared by treitschke.” wölfflin quoted treitschke at least twice in his notebooks from to , and october . entry dated september , , in notebook , pp. – , cited in gantner, heinrich wölfflin, p. . . heinrich von treitschke, politics, trans. arthur james balfour, vols. (new york: macmillan, ); originally published as politik: vorlesungen, vols. (berlin/leipzig: s. hirzel, – ). . “berlin ist doch eine weltstadt. muss noch tiefer hinabkommen und schauen! vom katheder hört man tägl. treitschke, publikum vor leuten. wo sind die nationen, die unsere festgegründe- ten staaten erschüttern könnten. —-die idee des staates, des grossen staates wird lebendig in mir gottlob, endlich!” notebook ( ), p. . . wölfflin’s notebook for treitschke’s course is preserved in the heinrich wölfflin nachlass, ii. a : winter – treitschke, h.v. politik. universitätsbibliothek, basel. . heinrich wölfflin, letter to his parents, may , , quoted in gantner, heinrich wölfflin, p. . . heinrich wölfflin, letter to his parents, november , , quoted in ibid., p. . . heinrich wölfflin, letter to his parents, february , quoted in ibid., p. . there are some resonances between wölfflin’s language and treitschke’s. but these comments seem like the observations of an outsider. overall, wölfflin seems to be writing, like burckhardt, against a hegelian conception of the state as a kind of leviathan that “could swallow up everything.” a more important result of treitschke’s course was that it encouraged wölfflin to make a place for political history and for the question of the form of the state in his thinking. in the years – he was constantly mapping the various humanistic disciplines, including political history, in his notebooks as he tried to figure out what kind of historian he should be. in several entries he is specifically preoccupied with the form of the state. in one, appearing under the heading “political history,” he writes: “the idea of the state, how it is established and realized by those who have power.” about a year later, in an unspecified reference to wilhelm von humboldt, founder of the german education system and theorist of the state, wölfflin writes: “truth and goodness. humboldt. the life of man, history, takes certain forms, the idea of the state is a form which tries to work its way into material.” there are nota- tions of “staatsform” (form of the state) in his working plan for his habilitation, and “staatengeschichte” (history of the state) is noted as an area to be investigated. in , however, wölfflin differentiates political history from the type of psychological history to which he is attracted: politics lies in acts; writing about political history must convey the feeling of participation, of having lived through something (treitschke). this his- tory, which is bound to people and chance happenings, is the opposite of a history as psychic development, which functions according to laws, not only in the area of the state, but also in that of art, of philosophy and so on. this is history in the highest sense, it is philosophy. although this passage seems to point away from political history, wölfflin continued to pursue the question of the state. for instance, in october , several months after he completed the habilitation, he met in munich with a professor mayer (who must have been a legal theorist or political philosopher) and discussed national char- acteristics in law with him. wölfflin quoted mayer as saying, “legal thinking must cleanse itself of weak and ill-defined imagery of the state as an organism, as a person. the state is something thoroughly indeterminate: relational.” the form of the state: baroque is modern does wölfflin’s preoccupation with the form of the state, as evoked in renaissance and baroque, refer to a historical state, a state in the present? here the political project of wölfflin’s early formalism . treitschke, politics, p. (citing the hegelians). . notebook ( ), p. . . notebook ( – ), p. . . ibid., p. . . notebook ( – ), p. . . notebook ( – ), p. . the notebooks again show that wölfflin was also preoccupied with understand- ing the present as a precondition for understanding the past. in the first half of he wrote: it seems laughable to me how someone can take as the object of their studies knowledge of the renaissance or descartes or aristotle and have no concept of the natural sciences of our day. overall, historical training only makes sense if one has examined it in relation to the pre- sent. one will be ungrounded and without guiding principles to jump into any historical period and to look around; to close ones’ eyes to today’s sun makes no sense. on january , , he noted: “put in the foreground the concept of the present as historian.” and in the same month he wrote: “occupation: to be able to appre- hend the present. living connections must be sought in earnest. the historian of men must be a psychologist. he shows the forms of humanity, the life of the soul. astonishing richness: modern man can model his feelings on the antique, on mysti- cism, classicism, and romanticism.” clearly, although not made explicit in renaissance and baroque, wölfflin believed it the historian’s task to view the past through the eyes of the present, and vice versa. in renaissance and baroque wölfflin was, it seems, drawing a line between the form of the german state in his day and the emerging grosser staat in the baroque: the baroque revealed to him the form of pre- sent-day germany, and the new imperial germany made clear the origins of its form in the dominating, centralizing, and repressively monumental forms of the baroque. in the late s wölfflin was not alone in projecting a contemporary political order onto the formal description of baroque architecture. although wölfflin was dismissive of the three-volume survey of european baroque architecture by his con- temporary cornelius gurlitt, their texts did travel on parallel tracks. compared to wölfflin’s, however, gurlitt’s politics—he was an ardent nationalist—are manifest. his volume on the german baroque reads as a post-unification and post-kulturkampf saga that, for the first time, places positive value on the baroque period not as a moment of weakness and susceptibility to international catholicism but as an era of october . notebook ( – ), p. . . notebook ( – ), p. . . ibid. . cornelius gurlitt, geschichte des barockstiles in italien (stuttgart: ebner & seubert, ); gurlitt, geschichte des barockstiles des rococo und des klassicismus in belgien, holland, frankreich, england (stuttgart: ebner & seubert, ); and gurlitt, geschichte des barockstiles und des rococo in deutschland (stuttgart: ebner & seubert, ). . see juergen paul, cornelius gurlitt: ein leben für architektur, kunstgeschichte, denkmalpflege und städtebau (dresden: hellerau verlag, ). paul’s monograph draws upon a collection of , letters from gurlitt’s family circle, which was recently published online as the “nachlass gurlitt,” gurlitt.tu-dres- den.de. a selection of these letters accompanied by scholarly essays is in matthias lienert, ed. cornelius gurlitt–sechs jahrzehnte zeit- und familiengeschichte in briefen (dresden, institut für sächsische geschichte und volkskunde, ). in english, see fritz stern, the politics of cultural despair: a study in the rise of the germanic ideology (berkeley: university of california, ), pp. – , . there is a chapter on gurlitt in levy, barock: art history and politics. rich cosmopolitanism out of which an authentic german architecture emerged. gurlitt’s books could almost be read as the architectural companion to the famous history of nineteenth-century germany by heinrich von treitschke. what was cru- cial for gurlitt in treitschke’s history of germany was his location of the foundation of modern germany not in the reformation and the break from rome, but in when germany lay in ruins. because in this revisionist history modern germany saw its birth in the confessionally heterogeneous period of the counter- reformation, the world of the german baroque held a pressing interest. wölfflin’s concepts of the individual, superstructure, freedom, and unity in baroque architecture were used simultaneously by gurlitt in his distinctive version of what in his case can aptly be termed “politi- cal formalism.” gurlitt published his histor- ical survey of european baroque architecture—the first systematic treatment of the subject—at the end of the s. the italian, french, dutch, and flemish his- tories were written in order to explicate and ultimately to exalt the cosmopolit an german baroque. gurlitt’s first volume, on italy, appeared in , and wölfflin read it at least twice before finishing renaissance and baroque. he was harshly critical of it. wölfflin was likely to have been especially dis- mayed by gurlitt’s radical recuperation of the german baroque. for young wölfflin, a passage to the baroque in the north could not have occurred, since a pure and rule-bound renaissance had never taken root there. the development to the baroque was an italian, and specifically a roman, phenomenon, although he would later come to view the german feeling for form as essentially a baroque one. the political project of wölfflin’s early formalism . heinrich von treitschke, history of germany in the nineteenth century, trans. eden and cedar paul (new york: mcbride, nast, ), originally published as deutsche geschichte im neunzehnten jahrhundert, vol. (leipzig: s. hirzel, ). . for example, he emphatically rejects gurlitt’s view of vignola as the bearer of the palladian rule book. wölfflin, renaissance und barock, p. ; renaissance and baroque, p. . on wölfflin’s critique of gurlitt’s book, see lurz, heinrich wölfflin, pp. – . . on the roman focus of his study, see wölfflin, renaissance und barock, p. ; renaissance and baroque, p. . in wölfflin’s last monograph, die kunst der renaissance: italien und das deutsche formgefühl (munich: f. bruckmann, ), which focuses on northern and southern renaissance art, his terms for a german sense of form (movement, unclearness) recall those of the baroque. for the shift in his thinking; see levy, barock: art history and politics. title pages of geschichte des barockstiles und des rococo in deutschland by cornelius gurlitt. . http://www.mitpressjournals.org/action/showimage?doi= . /octo_a_ &iname=master.img- .jpg&w= &h= gurlitt’s grand explanation of the baroque can be outlined briefly as follows. michelangelo and palladio were the late-renaissance architects whose works set the stage for the baroque. palladio’s architecture was interpreted by vignola in the spirit of the counter-reformation as a “dry” (nüchtern) rule-bound architecture that sup- pressed architectural detail (understood by gurlitt as the unity of the individual). this is gurlitt’s “bad” baroque. michelangelo’s individualistic, “unique” (eigenartige) architecture of “interiority” (innerliche)—read protestant—resolved itself into the “good” baroque, not in italy (as wölfflin saw it), but in germany in general and in the architecture of protestant germany above all. unlike wölfflin, gurlitt explicitly links proclivities in architectural form to political form, as in the following passage: where in the life of the state and society there is a proclivity for logical clarification and for fixed forms, where the lawful regulation [gesetzlich- er regelung] of relationships prevails, where reason predominates, there will one find palladio’s disposition to be dominant. . . . but where emo- tional life was conducted prevalently as a religious relationship, where a fervent piety reigned, where the bold “i” displaced and overcame the social order, and broke through men’s rules and laws . . . there would michelangelo’s spirit be powerful. for gurlitt, german architecture came to maturity when it broke free from the cabinetmaker’s kleinkunst mentality—the focus on details that dominated the german renaissance—to the real project of architecture, which was the considera- tion of the whole: “the feeling for the unity of the work of art, for the orderly arrangement of the parts by the whole, into a unified mass.” the similarities between wölfflin’s and gurlitt’s thinking are particularly apparent in their analyses of princely palaces. gurlitt differs from wölfflin in see- ing unity as a key to the expression of princely power, but like wölfflin he argues that in italian palaces unity is achieved at the expense of the individual forms, which are all suppressed. for both men, italian baroque palaces embody autoc- racy achieved by force. but gurlitt sees a solution to this italian formulation take shape in the baroque palaces of prague, when the german spirit revived and where unity was redefined “in the german way” as the “harmony of many parts put together, the whole as the product of many individual forms.” that such a october . evonne levy, “the jesuit style and bohemian architecture in cornelius gurlitt’s ‘geschichte der des barockstiles und des rococo in deutschland’ ( ),” in bohemia jesuitica – , ed. petronilla cemus with richard cemus (prague: univerzita karlova v praze, ), vol. , pp. – ; and levy, “cornelius gurlitt als ‘barockmann,’” in lienert, cornelius gurlitt, pp. – . . gurlitt, geschichte des barockstiles in italien, p. . . “die empfindung für die einheit des kunstwerkes, für die geregelte unterordnung der theile unter das ganze, für geschlossenes massen.” gurlitt, geschichte des barockstiles und des rococo in deutschland, p. . . gurlitt, geschichte des barockstiles in italien, esp. p. . . “zusammenklang vieler theile aufgefasst, das ganze als das erzeugnis vieler formen- individualitaten.” gurlitt, geschichte des barockstiles und des rococo in deutschland, p. . development in german art should take place in bohemia was no accident, he says, for it was here that the national question was the most animated. it is in his assessment of the berlin schloss (to which he erroneously believed both borromini and andreas schlüter contr ibuted) that gurlitt most direct ly expressed his understanding of how a building can convey an ideal relation of individual to state. there the german architect, he says, moderated the harsh severity of the it alian part s of this uniquely monument al building, and “into the building he carried that spirit of the prussian kingship, which does not see its greatness in being cut off from the peo- ple but in its inner ties to them. from a defiant palazzo he made a prussian royal palace.” in gurlitt’s view schlüter modified italian monu- mentality—the precondition for the baroque in germany—with an assertion of individual parts that was about power binding itself to the people rather than absorbing them and thereby cutting itself off from them. the deeper explanation of gurlitt’s for- mal language for german baroque architecture is to be found in the longue durée of german political theory. leonhard krieger argues for a distinctive german notion of freedom, which differed fundament ally from that of other european nations because of the historical rela- tionship of regional princes to the holy roman empire. because the german princes, who were sovereign over their territories, asserted their own freedom from the holy roman emperor, princely authority was always linked to freedom rather than the opponent of it. thus treitschke is in keeping with the german idea of freedom as meinecke outlines it when he argues that “freedom should be sought within the state not from it,” for the “power of the state and the liberty of the people are inseparably connected.” treitschke’s vision of the relation of part to whole is subsumed by gurlitt’s political formalism: this is gurlitt’s ideal baroque palace. the views of gurlitt and wölfflin of the baroque are no doubt similar, yet while for gurlitt the italian baroque is subordinate to the ideal organization of parts to whole that could only be born in germany, for wölfflin the golden age of rational coordination in the renaissance degenerated into the subordina- the political project of wölfflin’s early formalism . ibid., p. . . krieger, the german idea of freedom, p. . . treitschke, politics, vol. , p. . berlin schloss, from geschichte des barockstiles und des rococo in deutschland. . http://www.mitpressjournals.org/action/showimage?doi= . /octo_a_ &iname=master.img- .jpg&w= &h= tion of parts to whole in the baroque, marking the complete annihilation of the individual. the comparison of wölfflin’s and gurlitt’s texts suggests that we should take more seriously the centrality of the figure of the state in both books as a preoccupat ion of the t imes. for if the st ate was, as lionel gossman has shown, at the center of the german historical project in the nineteenth cen- tury, we should consider art history as moving on a parallel track to its closely linked discipline. wölfflin’s text can be seen as hegelian in its validation of the spirit of the age. everyone was a hegelian to some extent at this time. on the other hand, how he defines that spirit seems closer to contemporary german historiography’s view that the “form” of political organization is equally an expression of that spirit, and that the form of the state is the proper subject of history. if wölfflin, as he would later put it in principles of art history, believed in writing the history of civilization from the point of view of a lost sensibility, reconstructing it on the basis of the material traces of (mere) art, we must rethink wölfflin’s renaissance and baroque, as the history not of the traces in architecture of early modern culture or society, but of the form of the state. the most important question, though, is this: should we think of the politi- cal in wölfflin’s work as political formalism? that is, is the description of the form of the state one of the purposes of formalism? or is the political system the uncon- scious of formalism—always already present, but in a repressed form? the evi- dence of wölfflin’s notebooks suggests strongly that the former is the case. october . lionel gossman, basel in the age of burckhardt (chicago: university of chicago press, ), esp. chapter . . see frederic j. schwartz, blind spots: critical theory and the history of art in twentieth-century germany (new haven: yale university press, ), pp. – . ryff’s acanthus. on field research in renaissance architecture ryff’s acanthus on field research in renaissance architecture elizabeth j. petcu : inquiries into art, history, and the visual # - , pp. – https://doi.org/ . /xxi. . . https://doi.org/ . /xxi. . . elizabeth j. petcu abstract this article proposes a new framework for examining the empir- ical research of early modern architects. it explores the rise of nature study in sixteenth-century architectural theory and practice through the works of medical pracitioner and architecture expert walther hermann ryff (c. – ). the article argues that ryff’s vitruvius teutsch, the first german translation of vitruvius’s de architectura, gave architects pathbreaking advice about perform- ing design research in nature. ryff’s book supported the botanical investigations of architects by aping empirically derived botanical imagery from the de historia stirpium of leonhart fuchs ( – ) and by comparing architectural nature study to the period craze for examining ancient ruins first-hand. in proposing a new mode of architectural empiricism, vitruvius teutsch reconciled tensions between abstract theory and hands-on practice in the formation of architectural knowledge. keywords renaissance architecture; nature study; empiricism; botany; archaeology. ryff’s acanthus in , the age-old dialogue between nature and architecture took an unexpected turn. until this year, the holy roman empire remained one of the last regions of western europe without a trans- lation of the continent’s paradigmatic guide to architectural natural- ism and its sole architecture book to survive antiquity, vitruvius’s de architectura. medical practitioner and editor walther hermann ryff (c. – ) seized the opportunity, baiting anticipation for his german edition of vitruvius’s text. in , ryff contributed to a version of the first latin de architectura published in the german- speaking lands, and in produced a scholion or companion text to vitruvius in german, the so-called architectur. but when ryff finally did release his german de architectura translation and com- mentary, the vitruvius teutsch, some months later, it contained an image unmentioned by vitruvius and unlike any theretofore printed in architectural literature [fig. ]. alongside his remarks on vitru- vius’s account of the acanthus-laden capitals of the corinthian order, ryff set a woodcut acanthus with tangled roots, a slim stalk of nascent buds, and leaves that curl into parabolic surfaces with delicate hatching. an open bloom floats beside the plant, figuring the flower’s mature state. this detailed portrayal of the life stages of the acanthus deploys the pictorial rhetoric of what is now known as the “nature study”, an image of life rendered with apparent fidelity to observed nature, and a result of what ryff’s mid sixteenth-century contemporaries would term autopsia, that is, direct observation. as in the detailed yet legi- ble presentation of specimens in albrecht dürer’s canonical, early contribution to the genre, the large piece of turf of [fig. ], this article arose from papers delivered at the university of cambridge in november and the th annual meeting of the renaissance society of america in march . the research was generously supported by a bayerische gleichstellungsförderung-stipendium from the frauenbeauftragte der ludwig-maximilians-universität münchen and a robert lehman fellowship at villa i tatti, the harvard university center for italian renaissance studies. the author warmly thanks christopher p. heuer, alexander marr, colin murray, alina a. payne, ulrich pfisterer, pablo schneider, pamela h. smith, and tianna uchacz for fostering those opportunities, as well as susanna berger and the anonymous reviewers for their insightful comments on earlier drafts. unless otherwise noted, all translations are my own. on ryff’s medical publications, see, for instance, katalin rákóczi, die widerspiege- lung der humanistisch-reformatorischen tendenzen der medizin im populärwissenschaft- lichen werk von walter hermann ryff, in: orvostörténeti közlemények. communicationes de historia artis medicinae , , – . ryff’s architectural publications are considered in julian jachmann, die architekturbücher des walter hermann ryff. vitruvrezeption im kontext mathematischer wissenschaften, stutt- gart . on the work, see werner oechslin, marcus vitruvius pollio, in: werner oechslin, tobias büchi, and martin pozsgai (eds.), architekturtheorie im deutschsprachigen kulturraum - , basel , – . on the parallel function of ryff’s architectural books as accompaniments to virgil, see michael gnehm, ryffs scholien zu vergil, in: scholion , , – , esp. . the book’s publication history is detailed in michael gnehm, druckgeschichte und bibliog- raphie. w.h. ryffs “vitruuius teutsch”, in: scholion , , – . on autopsia in nature studies and natural history, see sachiko kusukawa, picturing the book of nature. image, text, and argument in sixteenth-century human anatomy and medical botany, chicago/london , . elizabeth j. petcu [fig. ] unknown artist after heinrich füllmaurer, albrecht meyer, and veit rudolf specklin, counterfeit image of the true acanthus, woodcut illustration to vitru- vius/walther hermann ryff, vitruvius teutsch […] (nuremberg: johann petreius, ). heidelberg, universitätsbibliothek heidelberg, t res, fol. cxxxvv. ryff’s acanthus [fig. ] albrecht dürer, the large piece of turf, , watercolour and body colour with white heightening, . × . cm. graphische sammlung, albertina, vienna, inv. , www.albertina.at © the albertina museum, vienna. http://www.albertina.at elizabeth j. petcu the nature study balances pictorial specificity with representational clarity to pose as a trustworthy conduit of knowledge about the natural world. the nature study purports to derive either from spe- cific observations of life or to collate and generalize such investiga- tions (a synthesis lorraine daston dubbed an “epistemic image”), cultivating through its economy of detail a more or less mediated record of some experience. having germinated in manuscripts and painting in the decades around , when writers came to esteem the study of life as well as art as foundations of artistic mastery, the nature study took root in new terrain during ryff’s lifetime. it flourished in drawing and print as those media gained prestige and autonomy from painting, and as natural history’s descriptive ambitions grew more enmeshed with artists’ mimetic enterprise. above all, the nature study consolidated interest in the epistemic authority of depicted experience. vitruvius had supplied the renaissance with a foundational argument for the emulation of nature in architecture. de architectura praised greek architects because “[…] in the proper completion of their works, they expressed everything as it certainly was, drawn from the true customs of nature, and they approved those things of which the explanations, when examined, can be shown to possess the ground of truth”. because vitruvius held that the effective emulation of nature results in decorous, or correct and appropriate structures, he advised architects to design works that register the ratios of anthropomorphic anatomy, and extolled the resonance between temple columns and the proportions of various human see lorraine daston, epistemic images, in: alina payne (ed.), vision and its instruments. art, science, and technology in early modern europe, university park, pa , – , here – . on the period’s evolving notions of the image taken from life, see claudia swan, ad vivum, naer het leven, from the life. defining a mode of representation, in: word & image. a journal of verbal/visual enquiry , , – . as cennino cennini wrote some time around , “[…] sopra i maestri tudei ritrarre senpre del naturale con chontinuo”, / “[…] on top of the masters, you should always copy from life, practicing continuously”, cennino cennini, cennino cennini’s il libro dell’arte. a new english translation and commentary with italian transcription, ed. and trans. lara broecke, london , here . on the origins of the renaissance nature study, see, for instance, albrecht dürer und die tier- und pflanzenstudien der renaissance (exh. cat. vienna, albertina), ed. by fritz koreny, munich , esp. – . on the descriptive enterprise of early modern natural history, see brian w. ogilvie, the science of describing. natural history in renaissance europe, chicago/london . the intersections of renaissance art and natural history are deftly addressed in pamela h. smith, the body of the artisan. art and experience in the scientific revolution, chicago/lon- don . “omnia enim certa proprietate et a veris naturae deducta moribus transduxerunt in operum perfectiones, et ea probaverunt, quourum explicationes in disputationibus rationem pos- sunt habere vertitatis.” vitruvius, de architectura, . . ; this and all subsequent passages as transcribed in vitruvius, vitruvii de architectura libri decem, ed. fritz krohn, leipzig . translation from vitruvius, ten books on architecture, trans. ingrid d. rowland, commen- tary and illustrations by thomas noble howe, with additional commentary by ingrid d. rowland and michael j. dewar, cambridge , . ryff’s acanthus physiques. vitruvius also encouraged architects to study medicine and the environment so they might identify salubrious sites for con- struction. with the circulation of de architectura and vitruvian publications from the later fifteenth century on, europe revived a long-dormant mode of classicizing architectural naturalism and developed a coherent discourse on architectural naturalism as such. the conversation ranged across buildings and books, from donato bramante’s tree columns at the canonica of the basilica of s. ambrogio of c. – [fig. ] to the dendriform order pictured in philibert de l’orme’s premier tome de l'architecture [fig. ]. yet art historians have seldom scrutinized the nature study as a tool of renaissance architectural design; and architectural historians, while thorough in considering early modern architects’ first-hand research of buildings and ruins, have rarely probed the circumstances of renaissance architectural nature study in depth. the acanthus woodcut in ryff’s vitruvius teutsch thus would have raised, and still raises, many questions. how does the acanthus function within the body of architectural knowledge presented in ryff’s vitruvian text? what can it tell us about the evolving scope and methods of early modern architectural fieldwork? and if art theorists deemed knowledge of the natural world a prerequisite for artistic mastery, what role did nature study play in renaissance notions of architectural expertise? these questions matter not only to the history of architectural theory and practice, but to the history of observation as such. ryff’s acanthus marks a watershed moment when renaissance architectural literature began to engage queries about the observa- tion of nature that once existed primarily in artistic discourse. the present article advances three claims about ryff’s pivotal but little-noted intervention. first, i contend that ryff’s acanthus sig- see vitruvius, de architectura, . . – , . . – . on decorum in ryff’s milieu, see hans joachim dethlefs, wohlstand and decorum in sixteenth-century german art theory, in: journal of the warburg and courtauld institutes , , – . “disciplinam vero medicinae novisse oportet propter inclinationem caeli, quae graeci κλίματα dicunt, et aeris et locorum, qui sunt salubres aut pestilentes, aquarumque usus; sine his enim rationibus nulla salubris habitatio fieri potest.” / “he should know the science of medicine, as this depends on those inclinations of the heavens which the greeks call climates, and know about airs, and about which places are healthful and which disease ridden, and about the different applications of water, for without these studies no dwelling can possibly be healthful.” vitruvius, de architectura, . . ; translation from vitruvius, ten books on architecture, . on the arboreal theme in renaissance building and architectural theory, see hubertus günther, das astwerk und die theorie der renaissance von der entstehung der architek- tur, in: michèle-caroline heck, frédérique lemerle, and yves pauwels (eds.), théorie des arts et création artistique dans l’europe du nord du xvie au début du xviiie siècle, lille , – . here i understand observation as a function of historically specific visual practices and strategies, as proposed in jonathan crary, techniques of the observer. on vision and modern- ity in the nineteenth century, cambridge, ma/london . elizabeth j. petcu [fig. ] donato bramante, pilasters and tree column, c. - . cano- nica, basilica di s. ambrogio, milan. photo © elizabeth j. petcu. ryff’s acanthus [fig. ] arboreal order, woodcut illustration to philibert de l’orme, le premier tome de l’architectvre […] (paris: frederic morel, ). bern, universitätsbiblio- thek bern, mue bong iv , fol. r, http://dx.doi.org/ . /e-rara- . http://dx.doi.org/ . /e-rara- elizabeth j. petcu nals a new investment in the direct observation of nature as a form of architectural research, by which i mean the principled gathering of knowledge for insight on the processes, products, and perform- ance of architectural design. second, i establish that ryff orien- ted architecture’s novel affinity for botanical study within the era’s growing fascination with surveying ancient architecture, and the new forms of first-hand architectural investigation that antiquarian- ism entailed. finally, i argue that ryff’s seemingly paradoxical min- gling of the rhetoric of observation with plagiarized images speaks to his keen grasp of what was at stake here: the question of how architects know what they know. ryff had good reason to weigh the relative authority of direct experience, images, and written reports in the formation of archi- tectural knowledge. sixteenth-century architecture faced multiply- ing and often contradictory models of expertise, a predicament exa- cerbated by the era’s dizzying proliferation of architectural styles and treatises, and the contested professionalization of the architec- tural discipline. ryff’s case for architectural nature study confron- ted renaissance architecture’s crisis of expertise with an empiri- cism that reconciled tensions between abstract theory and hands-on practice in the formation of architectural knowledge. i. counterfeit architecture despite its sway in early modern architectural culture, vitruvius’s charge to emulate nature remained an obscure edict for architec- tural theorists until the middle of the sixteenth century. authors had urged architects to research nature but seldom specified how, and rarely stipulated the degree to which building should cleave to natural models. even leon battista alberti, a key renaissance ambassador of vitruvianism, broached the topic in general terms, promoting a naturalism of harmonious ratios, correct syntax, and unity of structure and ornament. alberti did not cite detailed tac- tics for imitating specific natural specimens as such. architectural anti-naturalism inspired more colourful commentary. dismissing i draw this definition from the influential essay by jeremy till, architectural research. three myths and one model, collected writings, , url: https://jeremytill.s .amazonaws.com/uploads/post/attachment/ / _three_myths_and_one_model.pdf ( . . ). a recent assessment of architecture’s emergence as a profession is elizabeth merrill, the professione di architetto in renaissance italy, in: journal of the society of architectural historians , , – . see alina a. payne, the architectural treatise in the italian renaissance. architectural inven- tion, ornament, and literary culture, cambridge , . on naturalism in alberti’s architectural theory, see caroline van eck, goethe and alberti. organic unity in nature and architecture, in: the structurist, , issue , – . https://jeremytill.s .amazonaws.com/uploads/post/attachment/ / _three_myths_and_one_model.pdf https://jeremytill.s .amazonaws.com/uploads/post/attachment/ / _three_myths_and_one_model.pdf ryff’s acanthus the unusual tectonics of building in the north, a letter to pope leo x drafted between and c. / and now attributed to raphael concluded that “the germans, whose maniera still survives in some places, often include as ornament a figurino ranicchiato and badly made and even worse conceived as a bracket (mensola) to support a beam, and other strange animals and figures and leaves lacking any kind of reason.” here the alleged qualities of german architectural anti-naturalism – poor figuration, unconvincing tec- tonics, and odd ornament – are clear. theorists wrote with greater candour when detailing the conditions under which architecture was allowed to appear unnatural. paraphrasing serlio’s remarks on raphael’s vatican loggia grotesques and ancient roman wall paint- ing, a german translation of pieter coecke van aelst the eld- er’s adaptation of the quarto libro admitted that “[…] in vaults it is acceptable to apply such things with free will, […] according to what one wants, be it foliage, nests, flowers, animals, birds, and figures of all sorts, combined”. already taciturn on strategies for naturalistic design, architecture experts remained virtually mute when it came to methods for researching nature first-hand. ryff could blame this silence on the incommensurability of words and experience. as both ernst kris and pamela smith have observed, ryff aborted an attempt to explain life casting in his architectur by declaring the near-ineffability of the technique, which he regarded as “[…] much easier […] to understand from instruction on the spot than from written report”. text, ryff held, could not convey insight about architecture as experience could. “e li tedeschi (la maniera de’ quali in molti luoghi ancor dura) per ornamento spesso ponevano solamente un qualche figurino rannicchiato e mal fatto per mensola, a sostenere un trave, e animali strani, e figure e fogliami goffi e fuori d’ogni ragione naturale.” tran- scription of version c of the letter, in the archivio castiglioni di casatico in mantua, from raphael, gli scritti. lettere, firme, sonetti, saggi tecnici e teorici, ed. ettore camesasca with giovanni m. piazza, milan , . translation from payne, architectural treatise, . “[…] welche ding in den gewelbē vast wol komen vmb der freyigkayt willen, so man darein machē mag, zůwissen was man will, als bletter, näst, blůmen, thier, vogel, figuren mit allerlay sorten vermengt.” sebastiano serlio, die gemaynen reglen von der architectvr vber die fvnf manieren der gebev, zv vvissen, thoscana, dorcia, ionica, corinthia, vnd composita, mit den exemplen der anti- qvitaten so dvrch den merern tayl sich mit der leer vitrvvii ver- gleychen, dutch trans. pieter coecke van aelst; german trans. jacob rechlin- ger (antwerp: pieter coecke van aelst, ), wolfenbüttel, herzog august bibliothek a: . geom. ° ( ), fol. r. “[…] vor gegenwertiger berichtug vil leichtlicher zuvernemen, dann aus der schrifftlichen anzeigung.” walther hermann ryff, der furnembsten, notwendigsten, der gantzen architec- tur angehörigen mathematischen und mechanischen künst, eygentlicher bericht und vast klare, verstendliche unterrichtung, zu rechtem verstandt der lehr vitruuij in drey furneme bücher abge- theilet. als der newen perspectiua das i. buch vom rechten gewissen geometrischen grund, alle regulierte und unregulierte cörperliche ding, deßgleichen ein yeden baw, und desselbigen angehörige glider, und was uns im gesicht furkomen mag, künstlichen durch mancherley vortheil und gerechtigkeit zirckels und richtscheidts, auff zureissen, in grund zu legen, und nach perspec- tiuischer art auff zu ziehen, mit weiterem bericht des grundts der abkurtzung, oder vermerung aller ding nach verendrung der distantz, mit erklerung der furnembsten puncten künstlichs unnd perspectiuischen reissens und malens, verstandt der farben, mit getrewer unterweisung der gantzen sculptur oder künstlicher bildung, ein yedes ding aus gewissem grund in rechter propor- tion und simmetria, artlichen uñ gerecht zu formieren und bilden, durch schnitzen, hawen, graben, etzen, stechen, abformen, possieren, abgiessen uñ abtrucken, in aller handt zeug, als elizabeth j. petcu renaissance reticence about architectural nature study also had epistemological roots – that is, it hinged on beliefs about how knowledge was attained. until ryff’s time, authors conceived archi- tectural naturalism in terms of general principles or ideals rather than specific conditions revealed through observation. cesare cesariano’s pioneering printed, illustrated italian translation of de architectura from contends, for instance, that its vitruvian man woodcut [fig. ], a model for building ratios, features “the measure of the human body and [the way] to find from it all eurythmic and proportionate measurements by means of geometric forms, as this picture shows”. whereas cesariano tends to extrapolate the forms of nature from a priori knowledge of geometry, ryff stresses the a posteriori wisdom of experience and description. ryff’s rhetoric of fidelity to observation persists even when he peddles a copy of another cesariano vitruvian man [fig. ] as an accurate image of nature rather than a clone of another’s print; “a clear and manifest representation of the foundation of the human body parts according to correct symmetry”. artists could, of course, allow a priori expectations about “natural” architectural proportions to inform holtz, stein, marbel, metal, helffenbein, gyps, wax, gießandt, uñ dergleichen. mit sonderlicher abtheilung, der rechten proportion unnd simmetria menschlichs cörpers, und was weiter zu der kunst der perspectiva erfordert werden mag, alles mit schönen figuren fur augen gestellet. weiteren inhalt des ii. und iii. buchs der geometrischen büxenmeisterey und geometrischen messung, sampt den kurtzen summarien, des gantzen begriffs der selbigen vnterschidnen theil fin- destu hernach nechst der vorred verzeichnet. allen künstlichen handtwerckern, werckmeistern, steinmetzen, bawmeistern, zeug oder büxenmeisteren, maleren, bildhaweren, goltschmiden, schreineren, und was sich des zirckels und richtscheidts künstlichen gebraucht, zu sonderlichem nutz und vilfeltigem vortheil in truck verordnet (nuremberg: johann petreius, ), munich, bayerische staatsbibliothek münchen rar. , under “unterrichtung der sculptur”, fol. xliv. translated in smith, body of the artisan, – . see also ernst kris, der stil “rus- tique”. die verwendung des naturabgusses bei wenzel jamnitzer und bernard palissy, in: jahrbuch der kunsthistorischen sammlungen in wien nf , , – , here . “hvmani corporis mensvra. et ab eo omnes symmetrias evrythmia- tas & proportionatas geometrico schemate invenire. vt adest fig- vra.” vitruvius and cesare cesariano, di lucio vitruuio pollione de architectura libri dece traducti de latino in vulgare affigurati: cōmentati: & con mirando ordine insigniti: per il quale facilmente potrai trouare la multitudine de li abstrusi & reconditi vocabuli a li soi loci & in epsa tabula con summo studio expositi & enucleati ad immensa utilitate de ciascuno studioso & beniuolo di epsa opera, trans. cesare cesariano (como: gottardo da ponte, ), edinburgh, university of edinburgh main library special collections jy , fol. xlixr. translation from carol herselle krinsky, cesare cesariano and the como vitruvius edition of , ph.d. dissertation, new york university , . “augenscheinliche anzeigung wie in die grundlegung menschlicher glidmassung nach rechter symmetri […].” vitruvius and walther hermann ryff, vitruuius teutsch. nemlichen des aller namhafftigisten vñ hocherfarnesten, römischen architecti, vnd kunstreichen werck oder bawmeisters, marci vitruuij pollionis, zehen bücher von der architectur vnd künstlichem bawen. ein schlüssel und einleytung aller mathematischē uñ mechanischen künst, scharpffsin- niger fleissiger nachtrachtung oder speculation künstlicher werck, aus solchem hohen verstand, rechtem grund, sattem und gewissem fundament aller löblichen künst, der massen fleissig uñ ordentlich in schrifften verfasset, das hierin ein yeder kunstbegiriger leser der architectur und kunstlichen bawwercks unterwisen wirt, vnd der architectur angehörigen mathematischen und mechanischen künsten ein rechten verstandt, leichtlichen erlernen und fassen mag. alles mit schönen künstlichen figuren und antiquiteten, und sonderlichen commentarien zu mererem bericht und besserem verstand gezieret und erkleret. allen künstlichen handtwerckern, werck- meistern, steinmetzen, bawmeistern, zeug uñ bůxenmeisteren, brunnen leyteren, berckwerck- ern, malern, bildhawern, goltschmiden, schreineren, und allen denen, welche sich des zirckels und richtscheidts kůnstlichen gebrauchen, zu sonderlichem nutz und vilfeltigem vortheil erstmals verteutscht, und in truck verordnet, trans. walther hermann ryff (nuremberg: johann pet- reius, ), munich, bayerische staatsbibliothek münchen res/ a.lat.b. , fol. civ. the woodcut is identified as a copy of vitruvius/cesariano, de architectura libri dece, fol. lr, in: jachmann, architekturbücher, . ryff’s acanthus [fig. ] cesare cesariano (designer) and unknown woodblock cutter, vitruvian man, woodcut illustration to vitruvius/cesare cesariano, di lucio vitruuio pollione de architectura libri dece […] (como: gottardo de ponte, ). einsiedeln, stiftung bibliothek werner oechslin, a c ; app. , fol. xlixr © stiftung bibliothek werner oechslin, einsiedeln. elizabeth j. petcu [fig. ] unknown artist after cesare cesariano, vitruvian man, woodcut illustra- tion to vitruvius/walther hermann ryff, vitruvius teutsch […] (nurem- berg: johann petreius, ). einsiedeln, stiftung bibliothek werner oechs- lin, a d ; d , fol. civ © stiftung bibliothek werner oechslin, einsiedeln. ryff’s acanthus their observations of life. albrecht dürer began experimenting with the anatomical ratios that de architectura had attributed to beautiful orders by imposing vitruvian proportions on drawings evidently made from live models. later, dürer reversed this a priori approach, instead tabulating measurements of individually observed human bodies to create a typological system of anatomical proportions potentially useful for architectural design. it seems likely that ryff was thinking of dürer’s empirical anatomical sys- tem, published in in the artist’s vier bücher von menschlicher proportion (four books on human proportion), when the editor called on architects to draw on encounters with nature. ryff’s innovation was to shift the emphasis from generalizing, theoretical formula- tions of natural bodies to the direct observation and apt architec- tural translation of those forms. ryff’s interest in architectural design as a product of specific, first-hand encounters with nature aligned with his era’s maturing apparatus for discussing the concept of autopsia, or direct observa- tion. prior to the middle of the sixteenth century, neither artists nor natural scientists in europe possessed precise terminology for acts of attentive visual observation. the word autopsia, a latin neologism derived from the greek term for “eyewitness”, autoptēs, came into use along with observatio (direct or indirect observation) and phainomena (phenomena, or how things appear) as astronomers, anatomists, and botanists traded aristotelian confidence in a pri- ori principles for ancient empiric and sceptical philosophy, which had instead promoted direct observation. the concept of autopsia gained currency in renaissance architecture through travel litera- ture and archaeology. ciriaco d’ancona, among the first authors to champion direct investigation as a tool of archaeology and his- tory writing, made first-hand observations of greek and roman antiquities in athens that became sources for giuliano da sangal- lo’s sketchbook, now known as codex vaticanus barberinus latinus . in the codex drawings, the athenian monuments ciriaco had described, which giuliano himself had never seen, assumed on dürer’s early encounters with vitruvius and the ensuing anatomical studies, see albrecht dürer and hans rupprich, dürer. schriftlicher nachlass. zweiter band. die anfänge der theoretischen studien / das lehrbuch der malerei; von der maß der menschen, der pferde, der gebäude; von der perspektive; von farben; ein unterricht alle maß zu ändern, ed. hans rupprich, berlin , – . the canonical discussion of the genesis of dürer’s theoretical writings on anatomy occurs in erwin panofsky, the life and art of albrecht dürer, princeton, nj , vol. , – . a critical edition of dürer’s treatise with commentary is albrecht dürer and berthold hinz, albrecht dürer. vier bücher von menschlicher proportion ( ). mit einem katalog der holzschnitte, trans. berthold hinz, berlin . on the emergence of autopsia and the related terms discussed here, see gianna pomata, observation rising. birth of an epistemic genre, – , in: lorraine daston and elizabeth lunbeck (eds.), histories of scientific observation, chicago/london , – , here – . elizabeth j. petcu the forms of structures giuliano studied during his own travels in roman italy and france. with the proliferation of print, archae- ologists refined their procedures for translating descriptions of ancient architecture and other antiquities into visual images consis- tent with their observed models. this empiricism colours ryff’s claim that the vitruvius teutsch figures an “extremely accurate, lifelike counterfeit [contrafactur] image of the true acanthus, with its growth and the structure of the wreathed perforations or basket [of the corinthian capital]”. clas- sing the acanthus woodcut as a contrafactur, ryff aligns the print with a mode of representation also known as the imago contrafacta. the term imago contrafacta and vernacular derivatives like contra- factur connoted an image either based on first-hand observation or a figure that reproduces such an image; visual proof of experience. the category of the imago contrafacta came to prominence in the decades before vitruvius teutsch appeared, as novel technologies of reproduction – print, medal striking, stamping, and even waxwork – saturated the german-speaking lands, complicating notions of archaeological authenticity and artifice as well as the procedures of artistic research. peter parshall has argued that the epithet imago contrafacta leveraged the perceived trustworthiness of the eyewit- ness account to lend epistemic weight to print and other new media of copying, allowing certain images to claim fidelity to nature even without actually having been made from life. ryff’s architectural culture had unprecedented use for the category of the imago contra- facta because the era’s multiplying accounts of antiquity and the natural world had also raised questions about what counted as valid beverly louise brown and diana e. e. kleiner, giuliano da sangallo’s drawings after ciriaco d’ancona. transformations of greek and roman antiquities in athens, in: journal of the society of architectural historians , , – . christopher s. wood, notation of visual information in the earliest archaeological scholar- ship, in: word & image. a journal of verbal/visual enquiry , , – . “gantz eygentliche lebliche contrafactur des waren acanthi, sambt seiner wachsung und gestalt der geflochten zänen oder körblein.” vitruvius/ryff, vitruvius teutsch, fol. cxxxvv . on the imago contrafacta in ryff’s world, see peter parshall, imago contrafacta. images and facts in the northern renaissance, in: art history , , – ; and kusukawa, book of nature, – . the impact of technologies of reproduction on artistic research in the german renaissance is treated in christopher s. wood, forgery, replica, fiction. temporalities of german ren- aissance art, chicago/london . for their effects on architectural culture, see mario carpo, architecture in the age of printing. orality, writing, typography, and printed images in the history of architectural theory, trans. sarah benson, cambridge, ma/london . parshall, imago contrafacta, here esp. – . ryff’s acanthus [fig. ] veit rudolf specklin (woodblock cutter) after heinrich fülllmaurer and albrecht meyer (draftsmen), acanthvs vera. welsch bernklaw., woodcut illustration to leonhart fuchs, de historia stirpivm commentarii insignes […] (basel: michael isingrin, ). basel, universitätsbibliothek basel lo i , p. . elizabeth j. petcu architectural evidence. when ryff classifies the vitruvius teutsch acanthus as an imago contrafacta, he is asserting the image’s origins in nature study and its status as a legitimate source for design, not its status as a life study itself. the acanthus woodcut is not, as we might first believe, an immediate record of architectural nature study. rather, it is an argument for such hands-on research. but if ryff invoked the language of imago contrafacta to cast the vitruvius teutsch print as a purveyor of fact, the facts of the acanthus print prove difficult to establish. we do not know if ryff made any of the woodcuts for vitruvius teutsch or the dozens of other books that bear his name or his pseudonym “q. apollinaris”. it appears that multiple artists devised and cut the vitruvius teutsch blocks; the prints have been variously and diversely attributed to hans brosamer (c. –after ), peter flötner (between and – ), georg pencz (c. – ), and virgil solis the elder ( – ). this is not the place to identify the artist of the still-unattributed acanthus, not least because the notion that this particular design arose from a specific author cannot hold water. like the woodcuts in most ryff productions, the acanthus and many other vitruvius teutsch woodcuts derive from other printed sources and multiple phases of copying. ryff’s use of the plagiarized acanthus as an emblem of architec- tural fieldwork may seem counterintuitive – until we consider its source. savvy readers could trace the vitruvius teutsch acanthus design to a pivotal work of sixteenth-century botany: leonhart fuchs’s de historia stirpium (on the history of plants) [fig. ] (or its german adaptation, the new kreüterbuch, the new herbal, of ) – a fact first observed in a modern publication by heinrich röttinger. a design devised by albrecht meyer, transposed to the an influential theory of architectural evidence and imitation before this juncture is alexander nagel and christopher s. wood, anachronic renaissance, new york . on the slippery question of originality in ryff’s works, see alexander marr, walther ryff, plagiarism and imitation in sixteenth-century germany, in: print quarterly , , – . ryff’s bibliography is catalogued in josef benzing, walther h. ryff und sein literarisches werk. eine bibliographie, hamburg . the foundational contribution to the attribution issue is heinrich röttinger, die holzsch- nitte zur architektur und zum vitruvius teutsch des walther rivius, strasbourg . on the current state of the question in relation to the architectur woodcuts, from which numerous vitruvius teutsch prints derive, see marr, walther ryff, , n. . ryff also recycled images from his previous treatises in new books, though not in the case of the acanthus. the original image is in leonhart fuchs, de historia stirpivm commentarii insignes, maximis impensis et vigiliis elaborati, adiectis earvndem vivis plvsqvam quingentis imaginibus, nunquam antea ad naturæ imitationem, artificio- sius effictis & expressis (basel: michael isingrin, ), munich, bayerische staatsbibliothek münchen rar. , p. . it also appeared in leonhart fuchs, new kreüterbůch, in welchem ryff’s acanthus woodblock by heinrich füllmaurer, and carved by veit rudolf specklin, this and other de historia stirpium woodcuts consolidated the authority of images in natural history. de historia stirpium aug- mented ancient botanical expertise by picturing the normative char- acteristics of over species in printed images all purportedly deriving from first-hand investigations. fuchs championed autop- sia in describing the genesis of these woodcuts, bragging, “[…] we had decided to include in our commentaries no history of a plant without its pictures from life […]”. prior botanical tracts, such as otto brunfels’s – herbarum vivae eicones (lively images of plants), also contained woodcuts allegedly taken from life. the de historia stirpium prints differed, though, in eschewing descriptions of individual specimens for canonical images of each species in dif- ferent developmental stages, synthesized from multiple observa- tions. fuchs acknowledged the prints’ integral role in his argument, allowing the book’s artists to immortalize themselves in the act of drawing botanical specimens [fig. ]. he also extolled how the lucid appearance of the unmodelled prints promoted the accurate por- trayal of botanical form. promising that “over and over again, we have purposely and deliberately avoided the obliteration of the nat- ural form of the plants lest they be obscured by shading and other artifices that painters sometimes employ to win artistic glory”, he made an innovative case for the epistemic import of graphic style. fuchs recognized that to avoid cross-hatching was to set visual legi- bility and the reporting of pictorial fact above the pleasing artistic bravado of deceptive volumetric effects. ryff the apothecary may have consulted fuchs’s books for information on medical botany, nit allein die gantz histori, das ist, namen, gestalt, statt und zeit der wachsung, natur, krafft und würkung, des meysten theyls der kreüter so in teütschen unnd andern landen wachsen, mit dem besten vleiß beschriben, sonder auch aller derselben wurtzel, stengel, bletter, blůmen, samen, frücht, und in summa die gantze gestalt, allso artlich vnd kunstlich abgebildet vnd con- trafayt ist, das deßgleichen vormals nie gesehen, noch an tag komen (basel: michael isingrin, ), munich, bayerische staatsbibliothek münchen rar. , pl. xxix. see röttinger, holzschnitte, . agnes arber, herbals, their origin and evolution. a chapter in the history of botany, – , darien ct , here – . sachiko kusukawa, the uses of pictures in the formation of learned knowledge. the cases of leonhard fuchs and andreas vesalius, in: sachiko kusukawa and ian maclean (eds.), transmitting knowledge. words, images, and instruments in early modern europe, oxford , – , here – . “siquidem cum nullius stirpis historiam sine uiua eiusdem imagineijs nostris cōmentarijs inserere constituissemus […].” fuchs, de historia stirpium, sig. α v. translation from fred- erick g. meyer, emily emmart trueblood, and john l. heller, the great herbal of leonhart fuchs. de historia stirpium commentarii insignes, (notable commentaries on the history of plants), stanford , vol. , . on fuchs’s priorities for the qualities of the images, see sachiko kusukawa, leonhart fuchs on the importance of pictures, in: journal of the history of ideas , , – . “de industria uerò & data opera cauimus ne umbris, alijsq. minus necessarijs, quibus inter- dum artis gloriam affectant pictores, natiua herbarum forma obliteraretur […].” fuchs, de historia stirpium, sig. α v. translation from meyer et al., great herbal, vol. , . elizabeth j. petcu [fig. ] unkown colourist and veit rudolf specklin (woodblock cutter) after heinrich füllmaurer and albrecht meyer (draftsmen), pictores operis; scvlptor, woodcut illustration to leonhart fuchs, de historia stirpivm commentarii insignes […] (basel: michael isingrin, ). glasgow, university of glasgow library, sp coll hunterian l. . , p. , by permission of university of glasgow library, archives & special collections. ryff’s acanthus but ryff the art director took note of de historia stirpium’s pictorial strategy. if de historia stirpium mounted a pioneering argument for images as tools of botanical study, vitruvius teutsch developed a cutting-edge case for botanical images as implements of architec- tural research. what ryff borrowed from fuchs was not only an acanthus design, but confidence in representations of first-hand experience as valid sources of knowledge. yet the vitruvius teutsch woodcut is no exact replica of the de historia stirpium acanthus, nor even the first copy after the print that ryff sponsored. fuchs pilloried ryff and ryff’s frankfurt publisher christian egenolff for printing de historia stirpium designs in ryff’s edition of pedanius dioscorides’s de materia medica, releasing an “apologia, by which [fuchs] refutes the malicious criticism of the sly fox, walther ryff”, in . it appears that ryff’s edition of dioscorides contained the earliest copy of the fuchs acanthus pro- duced under ryff’s direction, evidently made from an intermediary drawing in a process that reversed the original scheme [fig. ]. the copyist who devised the dioscorides acanthus rendered the figure at about one-third the size of the de historia stirpium version, placing the bloom on a wider but shorter stalk of buds, making the tangle of roots more chaotic, and eliminating the outermost leaves visible in the original print [see fig. ]. the vitruvius teutsch acanthus [see fig. ], reversed again when evidently copied from this de materia medica model or one of its analogues, reincorporates the missing flowers and returns the mature bloom to its hovering position while on ryff’s confidence in the authority of images when used in concert with text, see michael gnehm, “cum auctoritate et ratione decoris”. bildinterpretation in den vitruv-kommenta- ren w.h. ryffs, in: frank büttner and gabriele wimböck (eds.), das bild als autorität. die normierende kraft des bildes, münster , – . leonhart fuchs, apologia leonharti fvchsii medici, qua refellit malitiosas gualtheri ryffi ueteratoris pessimi reprehensiones, quas ille dioscoridi nuper ex egenolphi officina pro- deunti attexuit: obitérque quàm multas, imò propémodum omnes, herbarū imagines è suis de stirpium historia inscriptis cōmentarijs idem suffuratus sit, ostendit (basel: michael isingrin, ), london, british library general reference collection .a. .( .). translation from kusukawa, book of nature, . on the ensuing fracas, see ibid., – ; – . the offending acanthus image is pedanius dioscorides, pedanii dioscoridis anazarbei de medicinali materia libri sex […], trans. jean ruel with commentary by walther hermann ryff (frankfurt am main: christian egenolff, ), london, the british library general reference collection .l. ., liber tertivs, page marked as p. . a similar image occurs in the egenolff-published herbarvm, arborvm, frvticvm, frvmen- torvm ac legvminum. animalium præterea terrestrium, uolatiliū & aquatilium, aliorium- que quorum in medicinis usus est, simplicium, imagines, ad uiuum depictæ, vnà cum nomen- claturis eorundem usitatis […] (frankfurt am main: christian egenolff, ), london, the british library general reference collection .h. ., p. . a truncated version of the de historia stirpium acanthus with a different arrangement of leaves meanwhile appears in leonhart fuchs, leonharti fuchsij, medici, primi de stirpivm historia commen- tariorvm tomi uiuæ imagines, in exiguam angustioremq. formam contractæ, ac quàm fieri potest artificiosissimè expressæ, ut quicunq. rei herbariæ radicitus cognoscendæ desiderio tenen- tur, eas uel deambulantes uel peregrinantes in sinu cōmodius gestare, adq. natiuas herbas conferre queant (basel: j. bebel, ), london, the british library general reference collection .g. , p. . a reversed version of the egenolff acanthus with revised roots surfaced after the publication of vitruvius teutsch in hieronymus bock, hieronymi tragi, de stirpivm, maxime earvm, qvae in germania nostra nascvntvr, usitatis nomenclaturis, proprijsq. differentijs, necnon temperaturis ac facultatibus, commentario- rum libri tres (strasbourg: s.n., ), edinburgh, university of edinburgh main library special collections ja - , sig. kkk viiv. my gratitude goes to sachiko kusukawa for these references. elizabeth j. petcu [fig. ] unknown artist after heinrich füllmaurer, albrecht meyer, and veit rudolf specklin, acanthus., woodcut illustration to pedanius dioscorides, pedanii dioscoridis anazarbei de medicinali materia libri sex […], with commentary by walther hermann ryff (frankfurt am main: chris- tian egenolff, ). munich, bayerische staatsbibliothek münchen res/ a.gr.b. , p. , http://daten.digitale-sammlungen.de/~db/ /bsb /images/. https://daten.digitale-sammlungen.de/~db/ /bsb /images/ ryff’s acanthus reviving the proportions, if not the large scale, of the de historia stirpium design. yet hatching occurs in both copies, an obfuscating device fuchs had charged his artists to avoid. the spare, linear acanthus in fuchs’s book eliminates the vagaries of texture, which could differ from specimen to specimen, in order to serve readers intent on identifying acanthus in the wild. the volumetric, haptic effects of ryff’s acanthi court audiences seeking vivid images. according to alexander marr, we can discern a certain “dis- ingenuous ingenuity” in ryff’s plagiarism. outfitting his trea- tise with a “counterfeit” botanical image descended from fuchs’s famous work of nature study, ryff implies that architecture, like the contrafactur acanthus, can arise either from first-hand research of the kind that produced the original image, or from the imitation of designs x degrees removed from nature, like the vitruvius teutsch acanthus print. ryff’s vitruvius teutsch acanthus concludes a chain of replication in which each pictorial link has been formulated to serve the priorities of the bibliographic genre in which it occurs. the acanthus in de historia stirpium’s modern botanical corpus [see fig. ] resurfaces in translated form within ryff’s dioscorides [see fig. ], a latin translation of an ancient greek text on botany. a more poetic adaptation reappears in ryff’s vernacular vitruvius teutsch [see fig. ], destined for art enthusiasts, completing a trajec- tory of mimetic modes that runs from art emulating nature to art imitating art. alois riegl, in his stilfragen of , would later contend that the ancient acanthus motif first arose not from the observation and imitation of botanical specimens, but from even older palmette ornaments. it serves to recall riegl’s scepticism about the myths of naturalism when we interrogate ryff’s copying practices. that the vitruvius teutsch acanthus was not made from life would seem to cheapen ryff’s case for botanical fieldwork in architectural design. and yet print, in ryff’s day, was beginning to outstrip drawing as a preferred means to reliably copy an architectural image: the draft- ing hand could err, but the printing matrix promised consistency in execution. in illustrating a counterfeit acanthus derived from a paradigmatic treatise on nature study, vitruvius teutsch accom- modates a culture of architectural research with terms of pictorial marr, walther ryff, here . here i refer to the processes of serial imitation theorized in george kubler, the shape of time. remarks on the history of things, new haven . alois riegl, stilfragen. grundlegungen zu einer geschichte der ornamentik, berlin , – . mario carpo, how do you imitate a building that you have never seen? printed images, ancient models, and handmade drawings in renaissance architectural theory, in: zeits- chrift für kunstgeschichte , , – , here – . elizabeth j. petcu authenticity newly forged by the copious copies of the german re- naissance. ii. callimachus in the field at the time vitruvius teutsch appeared, northern europe enter- tained two paradigms of architectural naturalism. ryff came of age in a milieu dominated by what has been called the north’s “renais- sance gothic” architecture, a style integrating complex tracery and ornate botanical forms, often seemingly derived from life, with the sober proportions of more classicizing design. from the second decade of the sixteenth century, a more rigorously vitruvian mode of architectural naturalism had begun to inflect this style in the ger- man-speaking lands, promoting the abstract manifestation of natu- ral harmonies over the vivid description of natural forms. by , the completed fugger chapel at st. anna in augsburg could align a blind all’antica arcade with gothicizing rosettes and prismatic rib- bing, alternative means to the common end of naturalistic design [fig. ]. northern vitruvianism benefitted from the adaptation of de architectura into french, flemish, and german, as well as the north’s increasingly intimate tryst with images of antique architec- ture, at first a long-distance affair conducted for the most part by graphic means, as prints and drawings of classical forms filtered over the alps and began to breed locally. northern encounters with vitruvian architecture invigorated interest in architectural fieldwork as well. design research had once been a matter of turning to jealously guarded pattern-books or conversations with a seas- oned building master. the northern renaissance’s multiplying modes of architectural naturalism and the waxing prominence of print as a driver of that stylistic change spurred authors like ryff to reprioritize how architects should research design, whether through first-hand study of the world or through secondary sources such as text and images. on this style, see the essays in: monique chatenet, krista de jonge, ethan matt kavaler, and norbert nußbaum (eds.), le gothique de la renaissance. actes des quatrième rencontres d’architecture européenne, paris, – juin , paris ; and ethan matt kavaler, renais- sance gothic. architecture and the arts in northern europe, – , new haven/london . henry-russell hitchcock, german renaissance architecture, princeton , . on the rise of vitruvianism in germany, see werner oechslin, “vitruvianismus” in deutschland, in: architekt und ingenieur. baumeister in krieg und frieden (exh. cat. wolfenbüttel, herzog august bibliothek), ed. by ulrich schütte with hartwig neumann, wolfenbüttel , – . christopher p. heuer, northern imaginative antiquarianism. the dismembered column as relic and tool, in: alina a. payne (ed.), renaissance and baroque architecture. the com- panion to the history of architecture, vol. , hoboken, nj , – . on the reorganization of architectural knowledge vis-à-vis printed, illustrated books in northern europe, see carpo, age of printing, – . ryff’s acanthus [fig. ] unknown architect, fugger chapel, – , st. anna, augsburg. photo © elizabeth j. petcu by permission of the fürstlich und gräflich fuggersche stiftungen and the evangelisch-lutherisches pfarramt st. anna. elizabeth j. petcu it is against the backdrop of the north’s growing commitment to the vitruvian naturalism of all’antica architecture and the new forms of architectural research that print entailed that we can read the text accompanying the acanthus woodcut. this is de architectura’s origin myth for the corinthian order, and ryff’s commentary on that narra- tive. as in his account of doric and ionic columns, vitruvius related the corinthian shaft to a human physique, specifically, the body of a young maiden. he veered from the formula used for the other orders, however, by explaining the genesis of the acanthus-laden corinthian capital as a product of nature study as well. vitruvius divulged how the sculptor callimachus encountered the grave of a corinthian girl adorned by a small bushel containing an acanthus root and covered with a tile. the artist, vitruvius wrote, […] noticed the basket and the fresh delicacy of the leaves enveloping it. delighted by the nature and form of this nov- elty, he began to fashion columns for the corinthians on this model, and he set up symmetries, and thus he drew up the principles for completing works of the corinthian type. this tale was recycled ad nauseam through the early modern period, for it explained the corinthian capital as well as the jump from nature research to architectural invention. roland fréart de chambray’s dichotomy of antique and contemporary orders, the parallèle de l’architecture antique et de la moderne (or parallel of ancient and modern architecture), even showed callimachus in the act of drawing the acanthus capital [fig. ], mobilizing the classical sculptor-cum- researcher as a cipher for fréart de chambray’s empirical argument for the superiority of the ancients over the moderns. ryff’s modern architect emulates callimachus in the field, seeking inspiration in experience. equipping readers to follow callimachus’s example, ryff augments vitruvius’s narrative with advice on identifying the acan- thus in the wild: “[…] just so that you know how to recognize the same acanthus that grew around the basket, precisely because this herb is foreign and unknown in german lands, for it does not grow [here] without careful cultivation, which the experienced physicians spare see vitruvius, de architectura, . . . “[…] animadvertit eum calathum et circa foliorum nascentem teneritatem, delectatusque genere et formae novitate ad id exemplar columnas apud corinthios fecit symmetriasque constituit [et] ex eo in operis perfectionibus corinthii generis distribuit rationes.” vitru- vius, de architectura, . . . translation from vitruvius, ten books on architecture, . on the callimachus narrative, see payne, architectural treatise, – . on the visualization of this episode in early modern architectural treatises, see joseph ryk- wert, the dancing column. on order in architecture, cambridge, ma/london , here , and n. . ryff’s acanthus [fig. ] attributed to charles errard, callimachus invents the corinthian capital, engraved illustration to roland frèart de chambray, parallele de l’architect- vre antiqve et de la moderne […] (paris: edme martin, ). zürich, eth-bibliothek zürich rar , p. , https://doi.org/ . /e-rara- . https://doi.org/ . /e-rara- elizabeth j. petcu no little effort in attempting.” ryff also specifies how to distinguish between the acanthus or so-called “foreign bear claw” (welschen bern kloe) and the “bear claw” (bern kloe) native to the german-speaking realm, a passable substitute for the rare, foreign acanthus. it is tempting to read these musings on nature’s ersatz-acanthus as justifi- cation for ryff’s own copying practices. ryff proceeds by instructing architects on how to adapt botanical studies to architectural design. on the one hand, he assures us that the acanthus specimen provides architects with a basis to devise “this artful capital […] following nature”, making few alterations to the observed plant’s form. yet he also permits architects to stylize the specimen’s appearance in a manner illustrated in a previous chapter [fig. ], citing ancient precedent: “for the purpose of superior adap- tation, the ancient architects split this [acanthus] stem stalk into two parts, one of which extends up to the abacus of the capital, the other of which, by contrast, extends itself with a smaller vortex no further than to the middle of the capital.” sebastiano serlio’s extraordi- nario libro has been credited with paradigmatically posing the judi- cious amendment of architectural models as a key basis for architec- tural invention. arriving three years before, vitruvius teutsch’s approach to the expeditious amendment of botanical models in archi- tectural design anticipates serlio’s innovation. ryff developed vitruvius teutsch’s sophisticated methodology of architectural nature study amidst a revolution in architectural fieldwork: the rise of rigorous efforts to survey ancient buildings. evidence of such first-hand antiquarian research abounds in north- ern artists’ sketchbooks and albums of drawings made on site, as “[…] allein das du wissest das selbig kraut acanthum zu erkennen, mit welchen das körblein umbwachsen war, und ist zwar solchs kraut in teutschen landen frembt und unbekaut, dan es nit wachsen mag on fleissige pflantzung, welches den erfarnen medicis nit wenig hat zu schaffen geben.” vitruvius/ryff, vitruvius teutsch, fol. cxxxvr. vitruvius/ryff, vitruvius teutsch, fol. cxxxvr–v. ryff likely gleaned these insights from fuchs, who illustrated and explained the difference between the true acanthus and the german “bear claw” in fuchs, de historia stirpium, pp. – . “[…] dise künstliche capiteel in solchē der natur zu volgen.” vitruvius/ryff, vitruvius teutsch, fol. cxxxvv. “[…] aber umb merer bequemheit wegen, ist diser stengel von den alten bawmeistern in zwey theil getheilet worden, der ein windet sich bis zu oberst unter die platten des capiteels, der ander aber erstrecket sich mit den kleinern wyrblein nit weiter dan in mitte des capitals.” ibid. the passage adapts the advice to render the capital in three parts in vitruvius, de architectura, . . . on serlio and the “reform” of architectural models, see mario carpo, la maschera e il modello. teoria architettonica ed evangelismo nell’extraordinario libro di sebastiano serlio ( ), milan . the literature on this topic is too vast to encapsulate here. for a recent summary with extensive bibliography, see carolyn yerkes, drawing after architecture. renaissance archi- tectural drawings and their reception, venice . ryff’s acanthus [fig. ] unknown artist after agostino dei musi, foliate ornament, woodcut illus- tration to vitruvius/walther hermann ryff, vitruvius teutsch […] (nurem- berg: johann petreius, ). einsiedeln, stiftung bibliothek werner oechs- lin a d ; d , fol. cxiiiir © stiftung bibliothek werner oechslin, einsiedeln. elizabeth j. petcu well as in paintings that allegorize such investigations. one thinks here of the ruinscape that herman posthumus (c. – after ) made at rome in before migrating to landshut, in ryff’s south german stomping grounds, around [fig. ]. posthumus pla- ces his main protagonist, a minute, turbaned figure measuring a col- umn base, amongst a fantastic assemblage of theatres, baths, grot- toes, temples, and archaeological bric-a-brac ostensibly drawn from the painter’s own encounters with antiquity. these ruins are set within the sweeping, craggy terrain and bluish atmosphere of a netherlandish world landscape. tellingly, the architecture teems with botanical specimens; posthumus’s crumbling reinterpretation of the dome of santa costanza practically heaves under the weeds. obscuring the architectural forms, the plants vie with the ruins for prominence as the architect’s source material. ryff promoted the fashion for scrutinizing classical ruins first- hand with his der fünff maniren der colonen (the five manners of columns), published within a year of his vitruvius teutsch and archi- tectur by the same nuremburg press. comprising a mere five woodcuts and a single page of text, der fünff maniren arranges a bat- tery of architectural fragments (some lifted from serlio’s vol- ume on antiquities, the terzo libro) into a streamlined selection of bases, capitals, friezes, cornices, architraves, and columns. the accompanying key nevertheless denies the images’ pirated origins, instead marshalling the rhetoric of eyewitness to describe the archi- tectural sources. in a reference to the half-elevation of a capital from the pantheon in the centre of one print, labelled “ ” [fig. ], ryff explains that, “[…] these capitals are seen (werden gesehen) in rome in the estimable work of s. maria rotunda, and tread far out- side the rules and teachings of vitruvius […] but are nevertheless for instance, on the precocious case of jan gossart in rome, see ethan matt kavaler, gossart as architect, in: maryan w. ainsworth (ed.), man, myth, and sensual pleasures. jan gossart’s renaissance. the complete works (exh. cat. new york, metropolitan museum of art), new york/new haven/london , – , here – . on northern ruins and landscapes in period sketchbooks, see christopher p. heuer, on the peripatetics of the sixteenth-century sketchbook, in: piet lombaerde (ed.), the notion of the painter-architect in italy and the southern low countries, turnhout , – . see nicole dacos, hermannus posthumus. rome, mantua, landshut, in: the burlington magazine , , and – . walther hermann ryff, der fünff maniren der colonen, sampt aller derselbigen zierung von possament, basen, capiteelen, cornizen oder architraben: mit allen jren vnter scheidnen glydern mancherley gesimps augenscheinliche exempel, von den aller ältesten berümbtestē antiquischen wercken, so aus rechtem grundt vnd verstandt, der lehr vitruuij, zu rom vnd durch gantz ita- liam, im werck gesehen werden, ersucht, und fleissig in gerechter maß vnnd proportion verjüngt (nuremberg: johann petreius, ), berlin, staatsbibliothek zu berlin – preußischer kul- turbesitz, abteilung historische drucke ” ny / : r, http://resolver.staatsbibliothek -berlin.de/sbb f ( . . ). michael j. waters, a renaissance without order. ornament, single-sheet engravings, and the mutability of architectural prints, in: journal of the society of architectural historians , special issue on architectural representations , , – , here . http://resolver.staatsbibliothek-berlin.de/sbb f http://resolver.staatsbibliothek-berlin.de/sbb f ryff’s acanthus [fig. ] herman posthumus ( – ), landscape with roman ruins, . liechtenstein, the princely collections – vaduz-vienna, oil on canvas, . × . cm, inv.: ge © . liechtenstein. the princely collections, vaduz-vienna / © photo scala, florence. elizabeth j. petcu [fig. ] unknown artist after sebastiano serlio, various manners of capitals, woodcut illustration to walther hermann ryff, der fünff manieren der colonen […] (nur- emberg: johann petreius, ). berlin, staatsbibliothek zu berlin – pk, abtei- lung historische drucke, signatur: ” ny / : r, fol. r, http://resolver. staatsbibliothek-berlin.de/sbb f © bpk / staatsbibliothek zu berlin. http://resolver.staatsbibliothek-berlin.de/sbb f http://resolver.staatsbibliothek-berlin.de/sbb f ryff’s acanthus regarded to be the loveliest and best capitals in all of rome”. flag- ging the discrepancy between the text of de architectura and actual observations of antiquity, ryff frames the first-hand study of archi- tecture as a vital addendum to vitruvius, a tactic perhaps aimed at pushing copies of der fünff maniren to supplement his vitruvian treatises. but while der fünff maniren poses as antiquarian reportage, it also offers itself as a tool of such investigations. printed in quarto format, the book fit under the crooked arm of the architect roving from the workshop to an archaeological or building site and back, ready for him to consult its images in the acts of architectural research, design, and construction. in , fuchs had likewise released primi de stirpium historia commentariorum (foremost com- mentaries on the history of plants), an epitome of his de historia stirpium, in a more portable octavo format, creating a handbook ver- sion of his great herbal that botanists could consult in the field. as a slim companion to his vitruvian tomes, ryff’s der fünff maniren supplied a similar field guide to ancient architecture. it has been said that the early modern era regarded antiquities, unearthed as if in an archaeological harvest and often displayed alongside naturalia, as products of nature. vitruvius teutsch projects the adjacent idea that the study of antique ruins and the study of plant life constitute complementary facets of architectural fieldwork. ryff’s remarks on the observation of plants take cues from the evolving culture of first-hand research on ancient building. paraphrasing vitruvius’s account of cretan sites in a passage like- wise joined by a print [fig. ] derived from an image in fuchs’s de historia stirpium, ryff notes: […] on this island about one hundred cities were built and maintained, including the noble and wondrous labyrinth […], which is still in this time to be found broken and ruined. on this island the ancient physicians noticed through many observations a healthy disposition, for in certain places the livestock [graze upon] woad, which completely discharges the spleen, and therefore, as vitruvius reports, is found and used as spleenwort[,] asplenum […] of such a spleenwort “dise capiteel werden gesehen zu rom am trefflichen werck s. maria rotunda, tretten weidt aus der regel und lehr vitruuij […] werden aber doch nit desto weniger fur die aller schönesten uñ besten capiteel in gantz rom geachtet.” ryff, der fünff maniren der colonen, fol. r. fuchs, primi de stirpium historia commentariorum. see kusukawa, book of nature, . horst bredekamp, the lure of antiquity and the cult of the machine. the kunstkammer and the evolution of nature, art and technology, trans. allison brown, princeton , . fuchs, de historia stirpium, p. ; also fuchs, new kreüterbuch, pl. clxv. see röttinger, holzschnitte, . elizabeth j. petcu [fig. ] unknown artist after heinrich füllmaurer, albrecht meyer, and veit rudolf specklin, welsch miltzkraut, woodcut illustration to vitruvius/walther hermann ryff, vitruvius teutsch […] (nuremberg: johann petreius, ). einsiedeln, stiftung bibliothek werner oechslin, a d ; d , fol. xxxviir © stiftung bibliothek werner oechslin, einsiedeln. ryff’s acanthus you have here a contrafactur, as it grows among us ger- mans. moving fluidly from the labyrinth to the spleenwort, ryff aligns antiquity and botany as subjects of a single research outing. because ryff and other northern architecture experts operated at a remove from a contiguous landscape of classical ruins, they had keen incen- tives to invent an alternative to the mode of architectural field- work embodied in the first-hand investigation of antiquity. vitruvius teutsch’s concept of architectural nature study met that need. crucially, ryff’s account of architectural nature study also pro- motes the vitruvian idea that architecture entails medical knowl- edge. speaking of the counterfeit acanthus print, ryff explains he illustrated the plant “[…] not only so that the artful architect might recognize and draw it [in the field], but also for its varied, useful applications in medicine”. as a medical practitioner and author of both medical texts and architectural literature, ryff embodied the vitruvian ideal of dual architectural and medicinal expertise, but he also innovated on that ideal. while vitruvius had suggested that medical knowledge allowed the architect to determine healthy sites and orientations for buildings, ryff discerned parallels between architecture and medicine in their common use of botany, and their shared observational practices. ryff concludes the spleenwort passage by insisting that archi- tectural mastery demands first-hand study of the world. he asserts: in order for the architectus to be sufficiently experienced [in such things], it is not only necessary for him to hold these rules firmly in [his] memory, and likewise to know well the old histories and such that vitruvius [tells] of this place, and how they truly transpired [.] rather, it will also be necessary that [the architect] have seen the old buildings and diverse, artful works that the ancient building-masters [bawmeistern] erected with great understanding and care, [and] that he does not merely stay behind the hearth, as they say, but instead in various countries and foreign nations, learns and brings to realization the full scope of this art, so that he can “dann in diser insel stet etwan erbawt und bewaret gewesen, sambt den trefflichen wunder gebew des labirinthen oder yrrgarthē, so noch diser zeit zerbrochen und zerfallen gespürt wird, in diser insel haben die alten artzt auß oberzelter auffmerckūg gesunder stat wargenomen, das an etlichen ortē das vihe von der waid, des miltzes gentzlichen entledigt worden ist, daher wie vitruuius meldet das miltzkraut asplenum erfunden und auffbracht […] hastu hie bey ein contrafactur, wie es bey uns teutschen wechst.” vitruvius/ryff, vitruvius teutsch, fols. xxxviv–xxxviir. “[…] nit allein dem kunstreichem architecto zu eygentlicher erkandnuß auffreissen wöllen, sonder auch zu mancherley nutzlichem gebrauch in der artzney.” ibid., fol. cxxxvv. on the intersections of architectural and anatomical expertise in renaissance strasbourg, see elizabeth j. petcu, amorphous ornament. wendel dietterlin and the dissection of architecture, in: journal of the society of architectural historians , , – ; on ryff’s acanthus in this context, see ibid. . elizabeth j. petcu verify his rhetoric not only on the basis of writings, but also on the examples of eyewitness. in charging architects not only to read, but to probe modern monu- ments and ancient ruins in person – no modest task for many north- erners – ryff frames architectural expertise as a result of integrat- ing book learning with first-hand investigations. in so combining theoretical and empirical knowledge, the architect, like the botanist, garners insight capable of sustaining the rhetoric of learned argu- ment. iii. index and autopsia in the wake of vitruvius teutsch, architecture books across europe pictured plants and animals as observed specimens, framing nature study as a normative facet of architectural design. giovanni antonio rusconi filled his della architettura, a de architectura commentary composed around mid-century but published posthumously in , with botanical prints to illustrate vitruvius’s remarks on woods for construction, the origins of the corinthian capital, and plants used for pigment. however, like the vitruvius teutsch acanthus, most such images in fact arose through copying. for instance, juan de arfe y villafañe illustrated his de varia commensvra- cion para la escvlptvra, y architectura (on various propor- tions for sculpture and architecture) with a copy of the rhinoc- eros and other creatures from dürer’s graphic oeuvre [fig. ]. like ryff, these authors admitted to the mediated status of the nature studies that filled their tracts. de l’orme’s premier tome de l’architecture (first book on architecture) pictures a stalk the author claims to have personally copied from an ancient frieze at the roman garden of cardinal de gady [fig. ], asserting: “damit aber in solchen sachen der architectus gnugsam erfaren sey, ist im nit allein von nötē dise reglen wol in gedechtnuß zufassen, desgleichen alter hystorien wie sich solchs und anders so vitruuius dises orts erzelet zutragen und warhafftig verloffen hat gut wissen zuhaben, sonder im wirt auch von nöten sein, das er die alten gebew uñ mancherley kůns- tliche werck von alten bawmeistern mit grossem verstand und fürsichtigkeit auffgericht, gesehen hab, darumb er nit wie man spricht hinder dem ofen sonder in mancherley land und frembder nationen die volkomenheit diser knnst erlernen und zuwegen bringen muß, damit er nit allein auß den schrifften sonder augenscheinlichen exempeln sein red bestetti- gen mög […].” vitruvius/ryff, vitruvius teutsch, fol. xxxviiv. giovanni antonio rusconi, della architettvra di gio. antonio rvsconi, con centosessanta figure dissegnate dal medesimo. secondo i precetti di vitruuio, e con chiarezza, e breuità dichiarate libri dieci. al serenißimo sig. duca d’vrbino (venice: i giolitti, ), edinburgh, national library of scotland nha.m , pp. – , , – . on rusconi’s book, see gàbor hajnoczi, un traité vitruvien. le della architettura de giovan antonio rusconi, in: jean guillaume (ed.), les traités d’architecture de la renaissance. actes du colloque tenu à tours, du er au juillet , paris , – . on de arfe y villafañe’s appropriations from dürer, see maria portmann, l’image du corps dans l’art espagnol aux xvie et xviie siècles. autor du “libro segundo” de juan de arfe y villafañe ( ), bern , – . ryff’s acanthus [fig. ] juan de arfe y villafañe, rhinoceros, woodcut illustration to de varia commensvracion para la escvlptvra, y architectura. […] (seville: andrea pescioni, y juan de leon, ). london, the well- come library, wellcome collection, /d, libro tercero fol. r. elizabeth j. petcu [fig. ] stalk from an ancient frieze at the garden of cardinal de gady, woodcut illustration to philibert de l’orme’s le premier tome de l’architectvre […] (paris: frederic morel, ), bern, universitätsbiblio- thek bern, mue bong iv , fol. v, http://dx.doi.org/ . /e-rara- . https://www.e-rara.ch/bes_ /doi/ . /e-rara- ryff’s acanthus therefore, this sprig of leaves will serve to teach and give a start to those who will want to know the splits of leaves and foliage, where it is necessary to have the judgement to know the nature of the curvature and shade, to bring them out in representation; and also to know how to represent and carve [the plant] in stone, imitating the natural as best as possible. offering a print of a carving of a plant as a model for architectural foliage some degrees removed from life, de l’orme explicitly cel- ebrates a form of nature study by proxy that is merely evoked in ryff’s counterfeit acanthus. such acknowledgement of the gulf between nature and building, however, begged the question: could architecture ever mediate a first-hand experience of nature? up to this point, we have been concerned with the processes ryff and his contemporaries developed for pursuing architectural nature research. however, the products of these pursuits – architectural naturalism – also mattered. the problem of architectural (non)verisimilitude to nature dogs a canonical example of the epistemic image, the british museum sheet with a flemish copy of dürer’s rhinoceros and a french inscription on one side [fig. ], and an etching of a mausoleum from jacques androuet du cerceau the elder’s temples à la manière antique from circa on the other [fig. ]. originating from an album in the collection of sir hans sloane, the sheet was likely assembled in the second half of the sixteenth century. more strik- ing than the seemingly strange conjunction of rhino and temple, though, are the diverse nature prints – that is, impressions made from unaltered naturalia – covering recto and verso, indexes of a “doncques ce bouillon de feuilles seruira pour apprendre & donner commençement à ceux qui voudront sçauoir les refentes de feuilles & feuillages : ou il faut auoir le iugement de cognoistre la nature du destour et vmbre, pour la releuer en protraicture: & aussi pour sçauoir cognoistre comme il la faut representer & tailler en pierre, imitant le naturel au mieux que faire se peult.” philibert de l’orme, le premier tome de l’architect- vre (paris: frederic morel, ), munich, bayerische staatsbibliothek münchen res/ a.civ. k, fol. r. this impression of the rhinoceros is treated in aaron wile, unknown artist after albrecht dürer, german, – , and hans liefrinck the elder, netherlandish, c. – , rhinoceros, c. ; in: prints and the pursuit of knowledge in early modern europe (exh. cat. cambridge, ma, harvard art museums), ed. by susan dackerman, new haven/london , . du cerceau’s series is dated in peter fuhring, catalogue sommaire des estampes, in: jean guillaume with peter fuhring (eds.), jacques androuet du cerceau. “un des plus grands architectes qui se soient jamais trouvés en france” (exh. cat. paris, musée des monu- ments français), paris , – , here . on the album’s provenance and assembly, see giulia bartrum, anonymous, flemish, after dürer, rhinoceros, mid– th century; in: albrecht dürer and his legacy. the graphic work of a renaissance artist (exh. cat. london, the british museum), ed. by giulia bar- trum, london/princeton , . for sachiko kusukawa and michael waters’s identifi- cation of the du cerceau print, see rhinocerus (rhinoceros), the british museum collec- tion online: http://www.britishmuseum.org/research/collection_online/collection_object_ details.aspx?objectid= &partid= &searchtext= , . +&page= ( . . ). http://www.britishmuseum.org/research/collection_online/collection_object_details.aspx?objectid= &partid= &searchtext= , . +&page= http://www.britishmuseum.org/research/collection_online/collection_object_details.aspx?objectid= &partid= &searchtext= , . +&page= elizabeth j. petcu [fig. ] anonymous printmaker after albrecht dürer, hans liefrinck the elder (publisher), and unknown nature printmaker and colourist, rhinocerus (rhinoceros), hand-co- loured woodcut and letterpress c. , assembly of sheets and inked impres- sions of plants after c. , . × . cm. london, the british museum , . recto © the trustees of the british museum. all rights reserved. ryff’s acanthus [fig. ] jacques androuet du cerceau the elder and unknown nature printmaker, elevation of a mausoleum, surrounded by impressions of inked leaves, etching c. , assembly of sheets and inked impressions of plants after c. , . × . cm. london, the british museum , . verso © the trustees of the british museum. all rights reserved. elizabeth j. petcu direct experience of plant life. ryff’s contemporaries discerned something architectural about nature prints; gerolamo cardano even compared the compartmentalized, cellular impressions left by nature prints to “[…] vestiges similar to an ichnographia […]”, an architectural ground plan. whether architecture could match the nature print’s status as an index of life was another story. consorting with a rhinoceros and an ancient mausoleum, the sloane sheet’s nature prints eschew the genre’s conventional ambi- tions as a substitute for botanical drawings or preserved specimens. in a compelling analysis of the recto side, susan dackerman pro- posed that the leaf prints identify the rhinoceros, with its wood- block-like armour, as an “indexical fantasy”, a dream of xylography as a direct, unmediated impression of nature as well as the artistic imagination. the du cerceau etching and its botanical addenda, omitted from most interpretations of the sheet, complicate this reading. if the printed leaves accompanying the rhinoceros position the woodcut as an index of nature, the inky foliage adorning du cer- ceau’s mausoleum proposes that architecture, too, descends from brushes with living forms. yet the etched edifice differs from the rhinoceros in its refusal to echo the structures and textures of the nature prints. du cerceau’s pristine, geometrical house of death stands aloof from the wild impressions that adorn it. as a result, the sloane sheet imagines a direct, indexed form of architectural naturalism untenable for building but accessible to graphic archi- tecture. ryff’s counterfeit acanthus, many times removed from its living, botanical subject, indulges a similar vision. using print to fake architectural fieldwork even as he urges architects to probe nature first-hand, ryff invents a rhetoric of architectural eyewit- ness, autopsia, that might overcome the medium’s failure to record a direct experience of nature as the indexed nature print could. more than the crisis of architectural naturalism challenged ryff and his colleagues to augment the scope of architectural research so that it would encompass nature study. the advent of print as well as nature printing in fifteenth to seventeenth-century continental europe is treated in roder- ick cave, impressions of nature. a history of nature printing, new york/london , – . “herba virens imprimitur chartæ, vt vestigium quasi ichnographia remaneat […].” gero- lamo cardano, hieronymi cardani mediolanensis medici, de svbtilitate libri xxi. nvnc demvm ab ipso autore recogniti atque perfecti (lyon: g. rouillé, ), glasgow, university of glasgow library sp coll ferguson ag-d. , p. . see kusukawa, book of nature, – . susan dackerman, dürer’s indexical fantasy. the rhinoceros and printmaking, in dacker- man et al., prints and the pursuit of knowledge, – . on the imperfect, shifting links between art and empirical observation in the era after ryff, see svetlana alpers, the studio, the laboratory, and the vexations of art, in: caroline a. jones and peter galison (eds.), picturing science, producing art, new york/london , – . ryff’s acanthus architectural treatises, academies, and other institutions of architec- tural knowledge raised questions about the relative value of direct and indirect experience – of nature or any other model for building – in the formation of architectural expertise. ryff knew this well. we have no evidence that the author ever practised as an architect, but he was nonetheless far from alone amongst the non-practition- ers who became dominant voices of renaissance architectural dis- course. the wave of de architectura translations and commentaries produced in the author’s lifetime made such figures as ryff and jean martin, scholar-translators lacking experience in building practice, among the most influential players in the architectural culture of the period. yet in an era when artisans were coming to play an ever more crucial part in advancing learned knowledge, non-archi- tect authors like ryff experienced pressure to match the empirical insights that tradesmen brought to architectural debates. with the vitruvius teutsch acanthus and its philosophy of architectural nature study, the architectural knowledge of non-practitioners like ryff found a place alongside the savoir faire of architects and build- ers. elizabeth j. petcu (elizabeth.petcu@ed.ac.uk) is lecturer in archi- tectural history at the university of edinburgh. her research exam- ines the intersections of visual and scientific inquiry in the archi- tectural culture of the early modern world. her expertise lies in the architecture and architectural theory of northern europe and colonial latin america and their entanglements with the methods and investigative practices of the natural sciences from the fifteenth to the eighteenth centuries. petcu additionally publishes on the his- toriography of art and architecture in the german-speaking world. she has articles in the journal of the society of architectural histori- ans and the journal of the warburg and courtauld institutes, and is completing a book titled the edifice undone: art, architecture, and scientific practices in wendel dietterlin’s renaissance. for the thesis that artisans played a key role in the rise of empiricism, see edgar zilsel, the sociological roots of science, in: american journal of sociology , , – , here – . a recent response is pamela o. long, artisan/practitioners and the rise of the new sciences, – , corvallis, or . allegor y and inter pretation in heinrich aldegrever's series virtues and vices a thesis submitted to the temple university graduate board in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree master of art history __________________________________________________________________ by jennifer marie murphy diploma date august thesis approvals: dr. ashley west, advisor, department of art history dr. jonathan k line, department of art history ii © copyright by reserved rights all murphy mariejennifer iii abstract heinrich aldegrever ( - ) was a highly skilled and innovative printmaker working around the area of westphalia during the sixteenth century. he used complex systems of allegory and adapted established visual codes, such as those of traditional heraldry, to engage his audience to unpack the meaning of his work and set himself apart from his contemporaries. however, due to aldegrever’s stylistic similarities to both albrecht dürer and the so-called german ‘little masters’ working in n uremberg, his prints are often given the short shrift by modern historians, who have considered his images unoriginal or derivative. through a close study of aldegrever's series of engravings depicting the c hristian virtues and vices, this paper rectifies this scholarly oversight and attempts to restore aldegrever's place among the great masters of the printed image in the generation immediately following dürer. as this subject matter of virtues and vices was popular among printmakers and their targeted audiences, i compare aldegrever’s series with similar works from his immediate predecessors and contemporaries to show that his virtues and vices are, in fact, more innovative than previously thought in their invocation of ancient texts and complex iconographic twists, and worthy of scholarly discussion on their own terms for values of effective marketability and artistic imitation. iv for my grandparents, donald and antoinette v acknowledgments i am indebted to my primary advisor dr. ashley d. west, for cultivating my love of printed images and the northern renaissance. i would particularly like to thank dr. west for her unending encouragement as well as her much needed constructive criticism throughout this project, particularly in my final section. i would also like to thank my second reader, dr. jonathan k line for his insightful comments and patience, without which this thesis could not have been completed. lastly, i would like to thank my friends and fellow temple students, shannon stearns and genevieve arnone. i can never thank you two enough for your humor and emotional support. you never let me quit. vi table of contents page abstrac t....................................................................................................................... iii dedication ....................................................................................................................iv acknowledgments ...................................................................................................v list of figures/illustrations .......................................................................... vii introduction ..............................................................................................................xi chapter . text an d image: expanding on a story ................................................... . allego ry and in terpretation: cracking aldegrever’s code...................................................................... . the business of art: aldegrever and the german print market ....................................... . conclusion : .......................................................................................................... bibliography .............................................................................................................. illustrations............................................................................................................. vii list of figures/illustrations figure page . heinrich aldegrever, chastity from virtues, , engraving, . x . cm. metropolitan museum of art, new york . heinrich aldegrever, lust from vices, , engraving, . x . cm. philadelphia museum of art . heinrich aldegrever, wrath from vices, , engraving, . x . cm. philadelphia museum of art . heinrich aldegrever, patience from virtues, , engraving, . x . cm. de young, san francisco . heinrich aldegrever, pride from vices, , engraving, . x . cm. philadelphia museum of art . heinrich aldegrever, modesty from virtues, , engraving, . x . cm. philadelphia museum of art . heinrich aldegrever, temperance from virtues, , engraving, . x . cm. art institute of c hicago . heinrich aldegrever, gluttony from vices, , engraving, . x . cm. philadelphia museum of art . heinrich aldegrever, charity from virtues, , engraving, . x . cm. art institute of c hicago . heinrich aldegrever, avarice from vices, , engraving, . x . cm. philadelphia museum of art . heinrich aldegrever, compassion from virtues, , engraving, . x . cm. philadelphia museum of art . heinrich aldegrever, envy from vices, , engraving, . x . cm. philadelphia museum of art . heinrich aldegrever, diligence from virtues, , engraving, . x . cm. philadelphia museum of art . heinrich aldegrever, idleness from virtues, , engraving, . x . cm. philadelphia museum of art viii . anger commits suicide, choir of notre-dame-du-port, c lermont-ferrand, early t h century . hans burgmair, justice from seven virtues, ca. , woodcut, . x . cm. british museum . hans burgmair, hope from seven virtues, ca. , woodcut, . x . cm. british museum . hans burgmair, temperance from seven virtues, ca. , woodcut, . x . cm. british museum . hans burgmair, love (charity) from seven virtues, ca. , woodcut, . x . cm. british museum . hans burgmair, faith from seven virtues, ca. , woodcut, . x . cm. british museum . hans burgmair, fortitude from seven virtues, ca , woodcut, . x . cm. british museum . hans burgmair, prudence from seven virtues, ca. , woodcut, . x . cm. british museum . hans burgmair, lust from vices ca. , woodcut, . x . cm. british museum . hans burgmair, pride from vices ca. , woodcut, . x . cm. british museum . hans burgmair, wrath from vices ca. , woodcut, . x . cm. british museum . hans burgmair, gluttony from vices ca. , woodcut, . x . cm. british museum . hans burgmair, avarice from vices ca. , woodcut, . x . cm. british museum . hans burgmair, sloth from vices ca. , woodcut, . x cm. metropolitan museum of art, new york . hans sebald beham, knowledge of god, from the knowledge of god and the seven cardinal virtues, , engraving, c leveland museum of art ix . hans sebald beham, prudence, from the knowledge of god and the seven cardinal virtues, , engraving, c leveland museum of art . hans sebald beham, charity, from the knowledge of god and the seven cardinal virtues, , engraving, c leveland museum of art . hans sebald beham, justice, from the knowledge of god and the seven cardinal virtues, , engraving, c leveland museum of art . hans sebald beham, faith, from the knowledge of god and the seven cardinal virtues, , engraving, c leveland museum of art . hans sebald beham, hope, from the knowledge of god and the seven cardinal virtues, , engraving, c leveland museum of art . hans sebald beham, fortitude, from the knowledge of god and the seven cardinal virtues, , engraving, c leveland museum of art . hans sebald beham, temperance, from the knowledge of god and the seven cardinal virtues, , engraving, c leveland museum of art . silver medallion with name and title of johanns ii of c leve, after design by heinrich aldegrever . heinrich aldegrever, william, duke of julich, cleve and berg, , engraving, . x . cm. harvard art museums . heinrich aldegrever, lust from vices, , engraving, . x . cm. philadelphia museum of art (detail) . albrecht dürer, the men’s bath, , detail, woodcut, . x . cm. royal collection trust, london . master ds, basilisk supporting the arms of the city of basel, , woodcut, . x . cm. metropolitan museum of art, new york . bonifacio bembo, the queen of swords, visconti-sforza tarocchi, ca. - , . x . cm, morgan library & museum, new york . bonifacio bembo, temperance, visconti-sforza tarocchi, ca. - , . x . cm, morgan library & museum, new york . master of the e-series, prudentia (prudence), the mantegna tarocchi, ca. - , engraving, . x . cm, british museum x . luther bible owned by hans plock, volume , featuring a portrait of martin luther by heinrich aldegrever, staatliche museen zu berlin . martin schongauer, death of the virgin, c. - , engraving, . x . cm. from the plock bible, staatliche museen zu berlin . heinrich aldegrever, self-portrait at age twenty-eight, , engraving, . x . cm, metropolitan museum of art, new york . israhel van meckenem, self-portrait of the artist with his wife, ida, c. , engraving, . x . cm. philadelphia museum of art . albrecht dürer, self-portrait, , oil on wood panel, . x cm. alte pinakothek, munich xi introduction during the mid-sixteenth century, following the success of albrecht dürer ( - ) and his contemporaries, a small group of n uremberg engravers began to turn their attention from the monumental to the miniscule. the most widely celebrated of these artists, hans sebald beham ( - ), barthel beham ( - ), and georg pencz (ca. - ), became known to later scholars as the k leinmeister or “little masters,” a name that speaks not only to the miniature size of many of their prints, typically ranging between that of a modern postage stamp and a playing card, but also to the skill with which these images were meticulously rendered. while the nuremberg kleinmeister remain the most well-known printmakers to take on the artistic challenge of working in small scale, they were by no means the only ones to do so. heinrich aldegrever ( - ), who lived and worked predominantly in westphalia, is perhaps the most widely misunderstood and misrepresented contemporary of the little masters. despite being active as a printmaker in a center other than dürer’s nuremberg, modern scholars have nonetheless classified aldegrever as a member himself of the kleinmeister, albeit a minor one, often relegating him to footnotes and off- handed comments in the scholarship surrounding them. in doing so, many of aldegrever’s innovations and contributions to the history of printmaking and the german renaissance have been glossed over, conflated or confused with other little masters, as see linda c. hults, the p rint in the western world: an introductory history (madison: university of wisconsin press, ), ; antony griffiths, prints and printmak ing: an introduction to the history and techniques (berkeley : university of ca lifornia press, ), ; and david landau and peter pa rshall, the renaissance print, - (new haven: ya le university press. ), , , , and . while landau and parshall appear to mention aldegrever rather frequently, each page devotes only one or two sentences to him, and then only in re lation to other artists. xii just one of a group. in many cases aldegrever has been completely forgotten, in favor of an established, modern narrative of the german renaissance and of the history of printmaking that continues to favor notions of originality above other values. i argue that aldegrever was, in fact, a successful and ambitious printmaker—even going so far as to design and publish two printed self-portraits, an unusually bold act in his day—who excelled in his own lifetime at producing highly marketable, if not completely novel, images with appealing layers of visual signs and a style invoking the familiar line and erudition of albrecht dürer. aldegrever’s work is often considered to be derivative of more famous artists, notably albrecht dürer. print scholar peter parshall has described aldegrever as “dürer’s more brittle imitator,” referring to aldegrever’s meticulous and laborious imitation of dürer’s linear style, suggesting that aldegrever should be considered a more rigid copyist than loose draughtsman or original maker. while aldegrever often chose to imitate dürer’s manner and even adapted the master’s iconic monogram for his own, he did not take his mimicry so far as to copy the compositions or subject matter of dürer’s prints exactly. additionally, while aldegrever worked on a similar small scale to the kleinmeister, his handling of allegorical themes was more complex than that of his contemporaries, packing his images’ small size with a density of meaning that compensated for his less delicate handling of line. aldegrever’s distinctive ways of representing humanist subject matter in an updated and memorable manner have been a prime e xa mp le of this scholarly bias can be found in a catalog of mannerist prints by hans - martin kau lbach and reinhart sch leie r in wh ich the authors praise the artist jacob matham’s ( - ) use of heraldic shields within his images of the christian virtues and vices. as we will see, this trope was adapted by aldegrever decades before and to greater effect. see kaulbach and schleie r, " der welt lauf": allegorische graphik serien des manierismus (ostfildern ruit : hatje, ), - . landau and parshall, . xiii over- looked and underappreciated by modern art historians, and shall be reconsidered here, using his series of virtues and vices from as a primary focus. scholars have given several conflicting accounts and anecdotes of aldegrever’s life and work. for example, the great biographer of northern art, karel van mander ( - ), relates in het schilderboek ( ) an incident in which aldegrever was entrusted with the task of painting violets onto an incomplete altarpiece by dürer for a nuremburg church, suggesting perhaps involvement in a more monumental project directly related to dürer and suitably involving a miniaturist’s exactitude in skills of decoration. however, alan shestack insists that this story is apocryphal and unsubstantiated, stating that: “there is no documentary evidence, however, that aldegrever ever journeyed to n uremberg or came into personal contact with dürer or his circle.” it is likely that this story arose as a way to explain aldegrever’s stylistic similarity to dürer and would later be referenced as a way to strengthen the argument for his status as a viable kleinmeister. it is unknown whether aldegrever had any direct affiliation with dürer or the kleinmeister, or if he was instead familiar with them only through the study of their work. aldegrever’s rendering of line and particular monogram strongly suggest that, as with the kleinmeister, aldegrever was a close imitator of dürer; however, unlike painting and sculpture, printed artwork, by its very nature, allowed artists the opportunity to study another’s particular aesthetic without ever having to kare l van mander, het schilderboeck (amsterdam, i i ed.) , as cited in a lan shestack, "some pre liminary drawings for engravings by heinrich a ldegrever," master drawings , no. . ( ): - . shestack, . xiv journey outside their own locality or region. so direct contact, training in dürer’s workshop, or collaboration with any of these nuremberg artists would not have been necessary to account for aldegrever’s own manner of imitation. it is clear from these accounts that scholars have been primarily interested in discussing aldegrever’s work in terms of his similarity to more famous masters, rather than addressing the areas of his own inventiveness and mastery. indeed, the nineteenth- century scholar adolf rosenberg seems to have set the tone for scholarship to follow when he described both aldegrever and lucas van leyden as “neither […] a genuine born artist, but only a well-balanced and gifted mind, who replaced want of natural genius by unwearied industry and a large capacity for assimilation.” while the nature of lucas van leyden’s skillfulness has been revisited and restored by scholars in the past three decades, aldegrever has not yet received his fair due. rosenberg’s characterization of artistic genius as narrowly linked to novelty and contrasted with laboriousness and the assimilation of visual sources is an ahistorical generalization guided by the biases of nineteenth-century notions of modernity. his derogatory relegation of aldegrever as a diligent imitator can be updated and historically contextualized to take on positive in this respect, prints complicate the usual models of centers and perip heries raised by enrico castelnuovo and carlo gin zburg, “centre and pe riphery,” in history of italian art, eds. ellen bianchin i and cla ire dorey (ca mbridge, ma: blackwell publishers, ), ii, - . stephen h. goddard, the world in miniature: engravings by the german little masters, - (lawrence, ks: spencer museum of art, ), . goddard is one of the few scholars who does not fall into the pattern of discussing aldegrever as simply working in the style of other artists. adolf rosenberg, “the ge rman little masters of dürer’s school,” in the early teutonic, italian and french masters (london: chatto and windus, ), . on lucas van leyden, see peter parshall, “ lucas van leyden's narrat ive style,” nederlands kunsthistorisch jaarboek ( ): - ; and hu lts, - . xv connotations with respect to aldegrever, a task that i shall undertake in order to explain his success, as well as to reassert alde grever’s artistic distinctiveness. rather than dismissing his images as unoriginal—or over-argue for their complete novelty— it is worth taking a moment to place his work within the common artistic practices of the period. in our modern era of copyrights and intellectual property laws, to follow another artist’s style so closely in one’s own work is seen as akin to theft. however, in the sixteenth century, aldegrever’s mode of imitation instead would have been seen as standard, even savvy, artistic practice. by replicating the grand subject matter and the detail associated with dürer’s style, but on a small scale, aldegrever was making the claim that his skills were equal to, or perhaps even surpassing, those of the great master. furthermore, aldegrever’s imitation of dürer’s engraving manner and style in serial format was also part of an effective visual and commercial strategy, fitting well within the desire of collectors for dürer prints and for other forms of precious collectibles. in his essay on the origin and use of miniature engravings in german- speaking lands, stephen h. goddard observed that: …after the format [small scale engraving] was adopted from the italians, the small print assumed a life of its own in renaissance [sic] germany in response to specific habits and tastes in collecting (mounting prints in books, and the rise of the aesthetic of the miniature object). with the advent of kunstkammers (collectors’ cabinets) in the mid-sixteenth century, the aesthetic appreciation of the small and curious object became well established. for mo re on the change in attitudes towards copying and artistic originality fro m the early modern to modern eras, see lisa pon, dürer and marcantonio raimondi: copying and the italian renaissance print (new haven: ya le university press, ). goddard, - . xvi as goddard suggests, aldegrever’s technique would have served him well as a way to market his prints to the prevailing tastes of collectors, as well as fit a particular niche within emerging methods of print collecting, particularly in the wake of dürer’s death. perhaps the finest example of this dual strategy of both celebrating and challenging dürer on a miniature scale can be seen in aldegrever’s series created in showing the seven virtues and seven vices, each measuring roughly centimeters by centimeters in size. though rendered in small scale, these images are by no means simplistic in nature. rather than bowing to convention, aldegrever chose to depict his allegorical figures dynamically as warriors, rather than immobile and statuesque. indeed, the particular theme of spiritual struggle embodied by these images suggests a link between aldegrever’s series and a fifth-century text entitled the psychomachia, which would have been recognizable to discerning scholars. however, these prints should not be considered purely illustrative. instead i suggest that aldegrever’s images served as pedagogical and memory-related devices, which assisted the viewer to better recall specific scenes and moral lessons within the text yet were able to stand independently of the source material. aldegrever’s images are densely packed with symbols, particularly in the form of animals, which relate to contemporary teachings on virtue and vice as well as to bestiaries and the heraldic tradition, which would have been famil iar to aldegrever’s intended audience. each of aldegrever’s allegorical figures is accompanied by a banner emblazoned with a unique identifying image and by a heraldic coat-of-arms, which when on the art of me mo ry and the role of rhetoric in refo rmation era human ist studies see: frances yates, the art of memory (chicago: university of ch icago press, ); mary ca rruthers, the craft o f thought: meditation, rhetoric, and the making of images, - (new york: ca mbridge up, ); and mary carruthers, the book of memory: a study of me mory in medieval culture (new york: ca mbridge up, ). xvii decoded would further explain the nature of each virtue or vice. additionally, aldegrever’s vices are shown astride the animal most often associated with each sin. in order to better understand the complex set of attributes accompanying each personificatio n, i will examine how these particular animals were treated by medieval bestiaries, possible visual sources and iconographic standards for aldegrever and for his presumed audience. by exploring the ways in which scholars viewed these animals, both symbolically and even in the realm of natural philosophy, i will be able to highlight aldegrever’s particular innovations within a pre-established allegorical tradition. aldegrever’s series may show a particular form and handling of line that carries with it the ‘feel’ of a dürer, but his use of complex symbols and unusual treatment of allegorical figures and their attributes reveals an artistry that is distinctly his own. the sixteenth century in german-speaking lands is often seen as an early highpoint for the printed image. with works by so many famous artists flooding the market, one can easily see how an artist such as aldegrever, known for his stylistic imitation of dürer’s engraved line, has fallen through the proverbial cracks in the scholarship. rather than dismissing aldegrever and similar artists as mere copyists or as dismayingly derivative, historians need to delve deeper in order to paint a more complete picture of the print culture of the early modern era. aldegrever did more than simply mimic dürer’s distinctive style; he built upon the artistic and marketing foundations that the great master left behind. aldegrever’s mastery of small-scale printed images and his ability to engage earlier visual models while asserting his own complex compositions and see janetta rebold benton, the medieval menagerie: animals in the art of the middle ages (ne w yo rk: abbeville press , ); and thorsten fögen, “anima l co mmunicat ion,” the oxford handbook of animals in classical thought and life (oxford university press, ), - . xviii modes of conveying meaning make him as worthy of study as any of the kleinmeister. a study of aldegrever’s virtues and vices series also provides key examples of how printed images, especially miniature ones, played an oversized role in the history of ima ges for their primacy with respect to texts, and in the history of collecting, both for their materiality and flexibility as a tool for structuring knowledge. chapter text and image: expanding on a stor y in the year , heinrich aldegrever created two distinct yet interconnected series of engravings depicting allegorical representations of the cardinal virtues and capital vices, also called deadly sins (fig. . - ), each print about . cm. x . cm. unique among his contemporaries, aldegrever chose to depict female personifications, not as statuesque individuals or angelic ideals, but rather as dynamically posed warriors. while this method of depicting the virtues and vices as characters in a spiritual struggle did not originate with aldegrever, he is one of the first artists to fully realize its aesthetic, educational, and commercial possibilities. to better understand aldegrever’s contribution to allegorical and serial printed images, it is important to explore some of the textual sources that undergird his imagery and that likely would have been evoked for sixteenth-century beholders. i shall explore the relationship between aldegrever’s virtues and vices and earlier texts in which virtues and vices are presented together, namely in plato’s republic and the antique psychomachia, or the battle for man’s soul, by the fifth-century poet prudentius. additionally, i shall examine the ways in which early christian authors have dealt with the concept of cardinal virtues and capital vices prior to the publication of aldegrever’s series and then delve further into specific parallels, as well as divergences, between aldegrever’s representations of virtues and vices and the psychomachia, where the virtues and vices are reconceived as battling personifications within the soul of a prudentius, prudentius volume , “the fight for mansoul” (loeb classical libra ry, volu me ), ed. and trans. h.j. thomson (ha rvard un iversity press: ), - . a ll further refe rences to, and translations of, the psychomachia will be ta ken fro m this edition. christian everyman. i shall then discuss the possible theological and socio-historical implications behind aldegrever’s militant theme and how virtues and vices likely would have been received by collectors on either side of the sixteenth-century conflict between catholics and protestants in northern europe. finally, i shall discuss other artists’ portrayals of the virtues and vices in order to show the ways in which aldegrever’s interpretation differs from those of his contemporaries. what we shall find is that aldegrever’s choice in presenting oppositional virtues and vices and their general association with the psychomachia allowed his series to break free of convention in order to revive and celebrate these ancient texts, as well as to introduce original visual commentaries on the nature of virtue and vice and their relationship to post-reformation christian life. virtues and their corresponding vices have long been a popular subject among christian artists and writers alike. similar to the commandments, they serve as a way to educate and guide the faithful in proper c hristian behavior. however, the concept behind the creation of a list of desirable and undesirable spiritual (or indeed social) qualities pre- dates c hristianity by several centuries. one of the earliest discussions of virtue and vice can be found in the fourth book of plato’s republic where the character of socrates states: ’now, then,’ i [socrates] said, ‘i hope i’ll find it in this way. i suppose our city—if, that is, it has been correctly founded—is perfectly good.’ ‘necessarily,’ he [adeimantus] said. ‘plainly, then, it’s wise, courageous, moderate and just.’ during this exchange, plato introduces what will later be known as the four cardinal or pagan virtues: justice, wisdom, moderation and courage. he goes on to explain that plato, the republic of plato, trans. allan bloo m (ne w yo rk: basic books, ), v. e. while each virtue is vital to the success of this hypothetical society, what is paramount is to maintain the proper attitude between each virtue and its antithesis. he continues: ‘to produce health is to establish the parts of the body in a relation of mastering, and being mastered by, one another that is according to nature, while to produce sickness is to establish a relation of ruling, and being ruled by, one another that is contrary to nature.’ ‘it is.’ ‘then, in its turn,’ i said, ‘isn’t to produce justice to establish the parts of the soul in a relation of mastering, and being mastered by, one another that is according to nature, while to produce injustice is to establish a relation of ruling, and being ruled by, one another that is contrary to nature?’ ‘entirely so,’ he said. ‘virtue, then, as it seems, would be a certain health, beauty and good condition of a soul and vice a sickness, ugliness and weakness.’ according to plato’s logic, in order for one to achieve a “healthy” soul, one must exist in such a way that virtue is always in mastery over vice. this concept would later be adapted to suit c hristian teachings by st. ambrose and st. augustine, both writing in the fourth century and transposing some of these concepts of good citizenship to good christian believers. st. ambrose ( s- a.d.) is perhaps the earliest theologian to coin the phrase ‘cardinal virtues’ in his commentary on the gospel of luke, in which he writes, “and we know that there are four cardinal virtues : temperance, justice, prudence, fortitude.” st. augustine would go a step further in his discussion of virtue by defining each as follows: […] that temperance is love giving itself entirely to that which is loved; fortitude is love readily bearing all things for the sake of the loved object; justice is love serving only the loved object, and therefore ruling rightly; plato, the republic, v. e. st. a mbrose, commentary on luk e, v. , as cited in sa int thomas aquinas, magnus albertus saint, and philip the chancellor, the cardinal virtues: aquinas, albert and philip the chancellor, ed. r. e. houser, vo l. , (toronto: pontifica l institute of mediaeval studies, ), . prudence is love distinguishing with sagacity between what hinders it and what helps it. this list would be expanded by prudentius and others to include the virtues of faith, hope and charity, also known as the heavenly, or theological, virtues. likewise, the specific nature and number of capital vices (also called deadly sins) tended to fluctuate from author to author. in addition to a host of comparatively minor sins, prudentius lists eight main combatants on the side of vice : worship-of-old- gods, lust, wrath, pride, indulgence, greed, avarice, and discord. evagrius ponticus (c. - a.d.), a c hristian monk writing in egypt, listed gluttony, lust, avarice, sadness, anger, sloth, vainglory and pride as the primary challenges to the righteous soul. in the sixth century, pope gregory the great ( - a.d.) simplified this list by cutting it down from eight to seven by replacing sadness with envy, and placing pride as the root of all other sins. the traditional list of seven found in aldegrever’s series, and indeed most sixteenth-century depictions of capital vices, is derived from thomas aquinas’ summa theologiae (iaiiae . - ) and are as follows: lust, gluttony, avarice, sloth, wrath, envy and pride. while the specific list of virtues or vices would be changed and adapted several times over the centuries, the basic principle behind plato’s discourse remained the same. that principle was to assert that there existed certain traits one must acquire and nurture st. augustine, de moribus ecclesiae catholicae. xv. co lu mba stewa rt, “ evagrius ponticus and the ‘eight generic logismoi’” in in the garden of evil: the vices and culture in the middle ages (toronto: pontifical institute of mediaeval studies, ), . kevin t impe and cra ig a. boyd, virtues and their vices (oxford : oxfo rd un iversity press, ), . as referenced in t impe and boyd, . that are most beneficial to the health and well-being of the human soul, and these traits exist alongside other undesirable qualities, which must be mastered. for the most part, writers have treated this as a theoretical struggle; however, one poet, prudentius, chose instead to depict this internal struggle as a war waged actively by personified forms of virtues and vices for the fate of each man’s soul. prudentius’ psychomachia is among the most vivid and frequently cited literary works devoted to the battle between virtue and vice. writing in the t h century c.e., prudentius’ text reflects a period of transition between c lassical literature such as plato’s republic, and texts by the early church fathers. though not a c lassical author himself, prudentius drew heavily from the roman literary tradition by adapting the form of epic poetry exemplified by vergil in order to depict a uniquely c hristian struggle, thus acting as a literary bridge between the c lassical, late antique, and early medieval periods. unlike the writing of sts. ambrose and augustine, prudentius chose to connect with his audience on a more emotional level, rather than a purely intellectual one, by depicting each virtue and vice as a character in an allegorical narrative. o ften considered by scholars to be the earliest example of fully- fledged personification allegory, the psychomachia paved the way for a new genre of religious literature and theatrical performances popular in the middle ages. the theme of spiritual conflict shown as personification allegory was also taken up with enthusiasm and invention by artists macklin smith, prudentius' "psychomachia” (princeton: princeton university press, ), . s. georgia nugent, “virtus or virago? the fe ma le pe rsonifications of prudentius’ psychomachia,” in virtue & vice: the personifications in the index of christian art. vol. , ed. co lu m hourihane (princeton: princeton university press, ), - . during the romanesque period, with several examples surviving in sculptural form, especially ornamenting church portals and historiated capitals (fig. . ). unlike c lassical texts such as plato’s republic or virgil’s aeneid, the psychomachia’s popularity during the medieval period meant that it did not require ‘rediscovery’ by humanist scholars. however, examples of the psychomachia as a direct source for depictions of virtue and vice began to decline following the end of the romanesque period. scholars have proposed that o ne possible reason for this was the shift in theological writing from an interest in depicting a literal triumph of virtue over vice to analyzing the theoretical and spiritual nature of these qualities. whatever the reason, by the sixteenth century few artists chose to adorn the virtues or vices with trappings of war in reference to their perpetual battle as staged by prudentius. one notable exception to this was the westphalian print-maker heinrich aldegrever. in aldegrever created two series of engraved images, one of virtues and one of vices, which, though not directly illustrative, bear several striking similarities to the psychomachia as a recognizable literary source for knowing viewers. the growing interest of humanist scholars in the relationship between c lassical literature and early christian texts, exemplified the psychomachia, was not the only possible reason behind aldegrever’s design. the theme of militant and spiritual struggle within prudentius’ text would have struck a particular chord for aldegrever as an artist “the popularity of the psychomachia in particula r is evident in its direct influence on medieva l writers ranging fro m the ca rolingian poet theodulf of orleans to the c th [sic] theologian alanus de insulis, and in its more general, often med iated inspiration for many others such as alcuin, isidore of seville, the author of the treatise de conflictu vitiorum et virtutum, hugh of st. victor and even, in the later middle ages, vernacular writers like the author of the c th assembly of the gods.” jennife r o’re illy, studies in the iconography of the virtues and vices in the middle ages (new yo rk: ga rland publishing, ), . o’re illy, . living and working in germany largely during the second quarter of the sixteenth- century. beginning in with martin luther’s ( - ) ninety- five theses, his critique of doctrinal principles and denouncement of certain policies of the latin c hurch, the reformation launched a period of political and religious conflict in europe. in german-speaking lands, this turmoil gave rise to the schmalkaldic league, an alliance between the protestant territories of the holy roman empire in order to protect their right to practice the new faith and to stand against the catholic armies of emperor c harles v, until their defeat in . aldegrever published his images in , just three years before the peace of augsburg brought a political resolution to the question of religious practices and sectarian alignments within the empire. within this historical context, aldegrever’s series adapts the metaphor of internal struggle at the heart of the psychomachia and manifests it outwardly and visually in order to transform his series of virtues and vices into an allegory of the struggle between catholics and protestants during the reformation and resulting schmalkaldic war ( - ). indeed, as peter parshall suggests, “the appeal to conflict seems to have become essential to the appreciation of images in this tense and dynamic intellectual climate.” although aldegrever left the bulk of his images open to interpretation, the sin of pride, in particular, contains several symbolic elements that could be read as openly anti-clerical as well as anti- imperial. this does not suggest that his series was intended to be overtly in favor of protestantism; however, it is possible that aldegrever’s image could be peter pa rshall, “hans holbe in’s pictures of death,” in hans holbein: paintings, prints and reception, ed. mark roskill and john oliver hand (ne w haven: yale unive rsity press, ), . aldegrever depicts the sin of pride (superbia ) wearing the papal tia ra and inc lude s several nods to the nobility in his design of both the banner and coat -of-arms within the image. the full details and implications of this will be d iscussed in chapter . viewed by collectors as an admonition of both the catholic c hurch and the ruling classes for allowing their pride and cultural rigidity to divide the empire, and at great cost to civility and community. as its title suggests, the psychomachia (translated as the fight for mansoul) is an epic poem in which female warriors representing each of the cardinal virtues and capital vices meet in a series of symbolic battles within the soul of a c hristian everyman. this war consists of a series of seven distinct battles taking place along a rocky and scarred landscape, where each vice is met and eventually defeated by its respective virtue. after the last skirmish is won, the characters of concord and faith order the building of a magnificent temple in which wisdom is finally enthroned. each of aldegrever’s images shows a female figure either seated astride an animal relating to their inner nature, in the case of the vices, or in relaxed contrapposto, as with the virtues. each is set within a barren and war torn landscape and depicted carrying a banner and an intricate coat-of-arms proclaiming either holiness or depravity by way of an intricate series of symbolic elements set within a frame of contemporary heraldic items. below each image, aldegrever includes a latin inscription, which briefly declaims the nature of each figure as either a virtue or vice. although these lines are not direct quotations from the psychomachia, they function in a similar way to the text by describing each virtue or vice in terms of its primary traits as an allegorical individual, rather than as an abstract moral concept. for example, the inscription accompanying pride (superbia in latin) emphasizes her vicious nature as the mother of all things bad. prudentius, , v. - . “prima nefandarum vitiosa superbia rerum mater et o mnigeni fons scaturigo mali.” one may argue that a single image within a series does not, on its own, suggest the psychomachia as his primary source material. however, upon closer inspection of this poem in relation to aldegrever’s prints, several key elements can be found which will more directly link text and image, beyond simple thematic adaptation, in the minds of thoughtful viewers. the first of aldegrever’s combatants to take the field in the psychomachia are chastity and lust. c hastity is described as a maiden, shining in beauteous armor, while her opponent, lust the sodomite, is clad in the fire-brands of her country. in her hand, lust wields a pine wood torch, which she uses in an attempt to blind her foe. c hastity, unperturbed by her attack, disarms her opponent with a stone before striking at her throat with a sword, beheading her as judith dispatched holofernes. she then washes the foul blood from her sword in the river jordan. in aldegrever’s image, c hastity is shown in relaxed contrapposto, adorned only in a swath of fabric (fig. . ). in her left hand she holds a banner depicting a maiden and a unicorn, symbolizing her purity. behind her, a ship travels along a river, possibly alluding to the jordan, for close readers. the figure’s right hand gestures downwards to several rocks, one of which may have been used by the virtue to defeat lust. lust, on the other hand, is shown in a more active position, at the point of either mounting or dismounting her steed, a camel (fig. . ). she also carries no prudentius, - , v. - . prudentius, - , v. - . obvious weapon but instead holds aloft a banner emblazoned with a fox, declaring her identity as a deceiver of man. following the defeat of her sister vice, prudentius’ figure of wrath dons her shaggy crested helm and charges into battle against the mild mannered patience. though wrath hurls barbed insults and various projectiles at her foe, patience is unmoved until, at last, wrath takes her own life in a fit of rage and frustration. aldegrever’s figure of wrath wears no armor, although her hairstyle, consisting of loose curls that frame her face and are bound with tight netting, may suggest the shaggy helm mentioned by prudentius (fig. . ). she sits astride a powerful bear and holds in her hand a bow, which is partially drawn and nocked with three different arrows at once, suggesting both the caustic words thrown at her opponent, as well as her inherent impatience. as with chastity before her, patience is depicted in a relaxed contrapposto which suggests to the viewer both an inner serenity as well as a readiness of movement (fig. . ). the closest parallel between aldegrever’s series and the text of the psychomachia can be found in the battle between modesty and pride. of this clash prudentius writes: it chanced that pride was galloping about, all puffed up through the widespread squadrons, on a mettled steed which she had covered with a lion’s skin, laying the weight of shaggy hair over its strong shoulders, so that being seated on the wild beast’s mane, she might make a more imposing figure as she looked down on the columns with swelling distain. high on her head she had piled a tower of braided hair […]. a cambric for similar depictions of the fo x as deceiver in early modern art, see george ferguson, signs & symbols in christian art (oxford university press, ), ; and fran ziska schnoor, “octopuses, foxes and hares” in early modern zoology: the construction of animals in science, literature and the visual arts, v. , ed. ka rel a. e. enenke l and paulus johannes smith (boston: brill, ) , - . prudentius, - , v. - . mantle hanging from her shoulders was gathered high on her breast and made a rounded knot on her bosom… while not an exact recreation of this scene, aldegrever’s image includes several key elements described in this text. pride is placed on a galloping charger, her braided hair transformed visually (and cleverly) into a heavy coiled chain around her neck and towering papal crown atop her head (fig. . ). her mantle is draped across her shoulders. aldegrever here takes a direct anticlerical jab at the perceived pride and luxury of the church and its hierarchy, at this critical moment shortly after the conclusion of the schmalkadic war when catholics and protestants clashed mightily. although not used to cover her horse’s back, as suggested in the psychomachia, a lion accompanies pride, prowling alongside her rearing mount. in stark contrast to this image of bravado is the figure of modesty (fig. . ). she is unique among aldegrever’s virtues in that she is accompanied by an animal other than those depicted in either banner or arms—in this case, a lamb. according to the psychomachia, in order to succeed modesty had to “make hope her fellow” and is the only virtue to require such direct assistance. although pride ultimately defeats herself by falling into a pit, it is only with hope’s help that gentle modesty is able to behead her enemy. in c hristian iconography, the lamb represents c hrist as the perfect sacrifice. this lamb of god included in aldegrever’s tableau likely would have been understood as a reference to the presence of hope and abiding assistance cloaked in the c hristian prudentius, - , v. - : “forte per effusa inflata superbia turmas/ effren i volitabat equo, quem pelle leonis/ texe rat et validos villis oneraverat armos,/ quo se fulta iubis iactantius illa fe rin is/ inferret tumido despectans agina fastu ./ turritum tort is caput adeumularat in a ltu m/ crinibus, e xtructos augeret ut addita cirros/ congeries celsumque apice m frons ardua ferret./ ca rasea ex u meris summon collecta coibat/ palla sinu teretem nectens a pectore nodum.” prudentius, - , v. . symbolism of salvation. this interpretation is reinforced by the images of the man of sorrows on modesty’s banner, as well as the figure of the archangel michael defeating satan on her coat of arms, which will be discussed in further detail in the next chapter. due to the decline in popularity of the psychomachia following the romanesque period, audiences began to develop a new language of symbols and attributes surrounding the virtues and vices. aldegrever absorbed these current trends and signifiers into his images by choosing to follow the, by then, standard list of virtues which included compassion and diligence in opposition to envy and idleness, respectively (fig. . - ). by creating images that alluded thematically to the psychomachia, rather than limiting himself to merely illustrating this text, aldegrever opened up the interpretive range of the works in order to appeal to a larger audience, while at the same time allowing his work to celebrate this once widely published didactic text. it is this ability to balance aspects of the most current market appeal with his own desire for originality that allowed aldegrever to thrive as an artist. considering the primary criticism surrounding aldegrever—that his work was derivative of other more famous artists—one could expect to find dramatic similarities between his series and depictions of virtues and vices created by his near and immediate contemporaries. upon further examination, however, this is simply not the case. visceral though the psychomachia may have been, it appears to have been under- used by other artists of the early and mid- sixteenth century, who tended instead to depict the subject as a purely intellectual exploration of the nature of virtue and vice, rather than as a physical struggle. it is worth examining these other serial print approaches to the virtues and vices in comparison to aldegrever’s series in order to better understand the distinctiveness and appeal of his images on the open market. the german printmaker hans burgkmair ( - ) published two series of woodcuts around , which depicted the seven virtues and seven vices (fig. . - ) each about . cm. x . cm. burgkmair’s personifications are set in their finished state within elaborately ornamented framing devices and niches, rather than in intricately designed landscapes, as with aldegrever’s images. burgkmair’s series are also not presented in an adversarial relationship countering one another. when creating his series, aldegrever chose examples of virtue and vice that were in direct opposition to one another: lust is opposed by c hastity, wrath by patience, and so forth. burgkmair’s series, on the other hand, are self-contained, with each set unified by a repeated matching woodblock frame, and with yet a third related series of seven planets staged similarly with its own heavily adorned frame. while his choice of vices is identical to aldegrever’s, burgkmair’s virtues instead reflect the cardinal virtues and heavenly virtues as established by plato and later authors, namely justice, temperance, prudence, fortitude, faith, hope and love (charity). burgkmair also does not limit his personifications to a single gender, as is consistent with classical allegory, as aldegrever does, choosing to depict wrath as male and including a second male figure in his depiction of amorous lust. rather than activating his figures within an overarching narrative, burgkmair encourages his collectors to examine each image individually and as part of its respective series in order to meditate on the nature of virtue and vice as self- contained ways to organize categories of knowledge. nuremberg artist and fellow little master, hans sebald beham, engraved a related series, the knowledge of god and the seven cardinal virtues, in (fig. . - ). it shows an even smaller scale (at around cm. x . cm.) and more detailed level of craftsmanship than aldegrever’s. however, small scale and fine engraving is where such similarities end. following burgkmair’s example, beham’s images do not suggest any specific text or narrative, nor do they line up with an oppositional figure in a corresponding series. each of beham’s images shows a winged allegorical figure, and like burgkmair’s figures, each is accompanied by items and animals typically associated with each virtue. justice holds a set of scales and prudence a mirror, and so forth. however, in beham’s series we can see a more fully labored sense of detail and line in comparison to burgkmair’s woodcuts, and also a desire in artists and collectors for more dynamic tableaus, instead of images featuring personifications and their attributes tucked into restrictive ornamented niches. thirteen years after beham’s series was first printed, aldegrever would take t hese elements yet a step further. not content to simply recreate the language of allegory surrounding virtue and vice, aldegrever innovated by adapting some of the more conventional iconographic attributes into banners or heraldic items, which each figure could take into battle, or in the case of his vices, onto mounted steeds of various sorts. in this way, aldegrever was able to break with the representations of virtue and vice as shown by burgkmair and beham to assert his own original twist on the presentation and format of the figures. he did so by activating existing conventions to redirect them back to a closer referentiality to virtue and vice as oppositional figures in the psychomachia text and to militarize his personifications with the familiar language of battle and heraldry that invoked both the text and current events in the holy roman empire. as we have seen, the study and representation of virtues and vices in both christian literature and art have followed two distinct paths. the first, followed by artists such as burgkmair and beham show the cardinal virtues and vices as separate entities, and although it is made clear which of the represented traits are more desirable for a good christian, they are not shown in direct opposition to one another. aldegrever, apparently working more closely from prudentius’ example and during an immediate context of open warfare between catholics and protestants, represents instead the capital vices, and their corrective virtues, surrounded by contemporary militant accoutrements. in this way, aldegrever was able to harness the theme of internal personal struggle found in the psychomachia and also invoke current open religious conflicts in order to differentiate his series from those of his contemporaries and appeal to a broad audience on both sides of the religious divide. and even more so than burgmair and beham’s treatments, aldegrever’s presentation of figures might engage his viewers on multiple levels to put to memory the inscribed couplets below eac h image, match the appropriate virtues with their respective vices, and unpack their symbols and attributes encoded on banners and other devices. chapter allegor y and inter pretaion: cr acking aldegrever’s code although aldegrever’s militant theme appears to have been derived at least in part from the psychomachia, his images and their compositions should not be seen as simple illustration. indeed, few works of art rely on any single text in order to relate meaning. virtues and vices utilizes but modifies a language of visual codes common to sixteenth-century classical allegorical depictions of virtue and vice, as well as visual codes rooted in the traditions of he raldry, thus creating additional layers of interpretation and intervisual dialogue beyond the textual sources. aldegrever paid tribute to the established tradition of aristocratic heraldry, whose emblems and syntax would have been recognizable to sixteenth-century viewers of the prints, in order to better incorporate his complex symbolic elements. in this chapter i shall further explore aldegrever’s artistic innovations in virtues and vices by breaking down the individual images into their component elements and examine aldegrever’s innovations with mixing established iconographies. his integration of heraldic codes and emblems both embraced and, in some cases rejected, contemporary allegorical conventions for his figures. the use of personalized insignias on the battlefield is a practice thought to predate language, when simple emblems served the dual purpose of identifying one’s own troops during the heat of battle while working to intimidate the opposition. however, the complex system of heraldry as it exists today arose during the first crusade in the rudolf wittkowe r, “ interpretation of visual sy mbols” in allegory and the migration of symbols (london: thames and hudson ltd, ), . hubert -allcock, heraldic design: its origins, ancient forms and modern usage (new york: tudor publishing co mpany, ), . eleventh century when men from across europe found themselves forced to join in the common cause of their neighbors while at the same time needing to remain close to their own countrymen. in later centuries, the prevalence of impresa as heraldic devices began to extend beyond the theatre of war and into the world of courtly society, serving as visual and cultural symbols representative of the noble ancestry and status of their possessor. as hubert allcock has discussed, the adoption of such embellishments was not limited to members of the noble class or even to individuals : at the same time, the shield was being adopted as a background for the emblems of many who had never borne arms in battle—clergymen and scholars, artists and craftsmen, merchants and notaries, burghers and even peasants. it became the custom for churches, universities, guilds, and cities, as well as for families, to display armorial bearings. thus, although the ancient battle shield had disappeared, its images lived on, deeply ingrained in the imagination, tradition and culture of european society. allcock observes that, as the purpose behind heraldic devices evolved beyond the battle field, the granting of arms became a highly sought after status symbol for both a growing class of merchants and affluent artists looking to emulate the nobility, as well as for organizations looking to engender a sense of legitimacy and a connection to the ruling elite. humanists, too, found not only cultural capital in the display of their own devices, neubecker, a guide to heraldry (ne w yo rk: mc gra w-hill, ), . fo r additional reading on the origin and evolution of herald ic devices see alfred rubens, "heraldry" in encyclopaedia judaica, nd ed., ed. michae l berenbaum and fred sko lnik, vo l. (detroit : mac millan re ference, ), ; and jesús d. rodríguez-ve lasco and eunice rodríguez ferguson, "poetics of the chivalric emb le m," in order and chivalry: knighthood and citizenship in late medieval castile (university of pennsylvania press, ), - . allcoc k, . both sebald beha m and hans burgkma ir we re a warded coats of arms by emperor ma ximilian as a sign of their esteemed status. see karl emich le iningen -westerburg, and george ravenscroft denis german book -plates: an illustrated handbook of german & austrian exlibris (london: george bell & sons ), . and jennifer spin ks, monstrous births and visual culture in sixteenth -century germany, vol. (london: pic kering & chatto ), . but also saw in them possibilities for exercising their visual wit and erudition in the development of new impresa that invoked not genealogical ties, but rather clever emblemata, other noble virtues, and visual jokes. aldegrever, as many other artists of the sixteenth century, was well- versed in the production of coats-of-arms and other heraldic imagery. he is credited as the designer for a heraldic medal bearing the name and title of john ii of c leve (fig. . ) and for the engraved portrait of william duke of julich in (fig. . ), which included in its background the duke’s coat of arms, as was conventional for such portraits. aldegrever’s familiarity with members of the nobility, as well as their taste for certain visual codes may have acted as the inspiration behind his adaptation of heraldic themes within his series of virtues and vices. further, as allcock reminds us, the use of such arms were not necessarily limited to the aristocracy, so these visual codes structuring aldegrever’s engravings would have been legible and appreciated, too, by merchants, scholars, and others equally well- versed in principles of nobility based on the display of virtues and erudition, rather than purely in bloodline. heraldic devices, in other words, were prevalent aspects of visual culture quite broadly during aldegrever’s career. in virtues and vices each of aldegrever’s figures is accompanied by both a banner and coat of arms relating to her nature as the personification of a virtue or a vice. sixteenth-century viewers of these prints would have understood that each of these two the device adopted by albrecht dürer fa mously shows a pair of open doors upon the crest and is considered by scholars to be a play on the name dü rer which is similar to the german ‘tür’ or door. designing and producing heraldic devices for ho mes, bookplates, p ortraits, banners, and other such works was a regular part of almost any painter’s workshop practice. among other artists whose work entailed such production are albrecht dürer, lucas cranach, and hans bu rgkma ir. georg habich, "he inrich aldegrever als siegelstecher" jahrbuch der preuszischen kunstsammlungen ( ): . note that the date of on this medal is not the date of production but instead marks the year of the me rger of cleve with the county of mark. elements was created to serve a specific purpose, namely to identify the specific name, in the case of the device, and spiritual nature, shown by the banner emblem, of each allegorical figure. commenting on the complex visual mechanisms of impresa and heraldic signs and symbols, the sixteenth-century author julius capaccio ( - ) wrote that: the emblem has only to feed the eyes, the device the mind. the former aims only at a moral; the latter has for its purpose the concept of things. the one is the more delightful the more it is adorned with objects, and, although such things do not pertain to the essence of the emblem, it needs other images, great or small, or grotesques and arabesques, to adorn it. the other sometimes has more loveliness to the eye when it is simple and bare, with no other ornament but a scroll. as capaccio suggests, the elaborate coats-of-arms in aldegrever’s images were meant primarily as an identifying element “to feed the eyes” and as a result, while more heavily adorned, the symbols contained on either shield or crest tend towards the more straightforward interpretations inherent in images of virtue and vice. conversely, the device found upon the banner of each figure, though far simpler in design, served a much more intellectual purpose, as a way to elevate and educate the mind. in the case of virtues and vices, the iconography upon each of the banners describes the hidden nature of each virtue or vice and would theoretically inspire deeper scholarly discussion, while the more complex arrangement of symbols within and surrounding the arms act to identify the central figure. each coat of arms in aldegrever’s images consists of three essential elements: the crest, the helm and the shield. in heraldic terms, the crest is a symbol (often an animal), which rests on top of the helmet and is typically derived from the arms. the helm must be an authentic military helmet, scaled to the size of the shield, typically delle imprese, pp. vo- , as cited in ma rio pra z, studies in seventeenth-century imagery, nd edition (ro me: edizioni d i storia e letteratura, ), . accompanied with a ceremonial cloth mantle or feather embellishment. finally, the shield bears the attribute or emblem of each allegorical figure (fig. . ). aldegrever’s choice to create heraldic arms and banner emblems for his figures would have solved the problem of visual overcrowding by compartmentalizing information within his images, while at the same time allowing the artist to integrate both classical and contemporary elements into each scene in a format that collectors of his era would have been poised to recognize, read, and interpret. the appropriation of animals for allegorical purposes in c hristian art can be traced to medieval bestiaries. these texts served as a storehouse of information for a variety of functions and people, at once acting as artist pattern books, treatises of natural history and philosophy, and as spiritual microcosms. bestiaries existed as an extended collection of images accompanying parables, in which c hristian moralizing lessons were often applied to, or indeed derived from, the observed or behavior of animals. for example, an entry found in one of the earliest such works, the physiologus from the second century a.d., describes the complex familial relationship of a particular bird called the hoopoe. the entry in question suggests that this animal had been observed in the act of grooming and providing food for its elderly relatives, thus raising the question “if these irrational birds behave to each other like this, why do men, who are ratio nal, fail for a more in-depth description of the proper arrangement and purpose of these and other common e le ments of armorial devices, see allcock, - , and gera ld w. wollaston, “heraldry,” journal of the royal society of arts ( ): - . ron ba xter “ learn ing fro m nature: lessons in virtue and vice in the physiologus and bestiaries,” in virtue & vice: the personifications in the index o f christian art, vol. , ed. colu m hourihane (princeton, n.j: princeton university press, ), - . ba xter, . to repay their parents for bringing them up?” conversely, the ibis, declared unclean due to its diet of carrion (leviticus : ), serves as an example of un-acceptable behavior. this creature’s behavior was considered representative of a man choosing to “ignore the teachings of christ, to stay on the shores of the waters of understanding and eat the fetid corpses washed up on the shore.” the point here, of course, is not that these birds, or indeed any animal, is any more or less virtuous than humankind. rather, in the eyes of the readers of bestiaries, a close study of the behavior of various creatures could provide lessons by which an attentive christian may be guided in their religious and social duties. in short, animals served in similar fashion as historical exempla and counter- exempla to shape and demonstrate proper human behavior for contemporary contexts. alongside his skill as an engraver, aldegrever’s particular artistic genius lies in his ability to harness these moralizing stories s urrounding each of his symbolic creatures within the tradition of heraldry in order to better relate to his viewer the complex nature of each virtue and vice in a way both memorable and thought provoking. for the sake of brevity, i shall contain my argume nts to the prints in both virtues and vices in which aldegrever most clearly diverges from the established allegorical conventions, beginning with c hastity and lust (fig. . - ). this is perhaps the most controversial pair of the traditional capital vices and their corrective virtues. if, after all, god commanded adam to “go forth and multiply” would it not stand to reason that as quoted in ba xter, . for the full entry, see physiologus latinus: Éditions preliminaries, versio b, ed. f. j. carmody (paris: libra irie e. dro z, ). ba xter, . see also simona cohen, animals as disguised symbols in renaissance art , st ed. (boston: brill, ), for a mo re detailed look at the ways in which medieval bestiaries dictated the use of animals as symbolic e le ments in renaissance art. the publication of nume rous editions of the ancient text of aesop’s fables served a simila r function in ea rly mode rn ch ristian society. chastity should be considered a greater disobedience than lust? colleen mcc luskey has explained that this classification of chastity as virtuous and lust as sinful originated with the tradition of the desert fathers. these early christian hermits considered sexual desire to be a temptation that “distracts one from the ultimate goal of the desert life, which is contemplation, whose purpose is closeness to god.” by this definition, someone guilty of the capital sin of lust is not simply anyone who indulges in carnal activities, but rather one who is ruled by these desires and is consequently blinded from proper contemplation of spiritual matters. prudentius manifests this quality in the psychomachia by arming his personification of lust with a pine wood torch with which to blind her foes. while aldegrever was not quite as literal in his depiction o f lust’s tendency to blind man from his spiritual duties (fig. . ), careful reading of the heraldic elements within his scene reveals a similar warning about the nature of this particular vice. aldegrever’s figure of lust carries the banner of the fox, an animal traditionally appearing in christian art as a symbol of cunning, trickery, and in some cases even as the devil himself. the crest above the figure’s coat of arms, a position usually reserved for falcons or other such birds of prey, is taken up by a common rooster. in c hristian iconography, the rooster or cock is often used as a symbol of the denial of st. peter and of the passion. however, this animal can also be found in more secular printed works as a co lleen mc cluskey, “lust and chastity,” in virtues and their vices, eds. kevin timpe and cra ig a. boyd (oxford: oxford university press, ), . prudentius, - , v. - . george fe rguson, signs & symbols in christian art (oxford university press, ), . e.s. whittlesey, symbols and legends in western art: a museu m guide (new yo rk: charles scribner & sons, ), . jocular reference to male sexuality, as shown in albrecht dürer’s the men’s bath, c. (fig. . ). the inclusion of this barnyard fowl within aldegrever’s scene was most likely a nod to such popular visual humor. the toad, on the other hand, which appears on lust’s crest, is used to represent “rep ulsive sin, sometimes of worldly pleasures, sometimes of heretics,” or to symbolize those who snatch at life’s fleeting pleasures. when read as a whole, these images suggest that the central figure represents one who is deceitful, licentious, and indulging in fleeting worldly pleasures. the shield within the figure of c hastity’s coat of arms (fig. . ), conversely, features a robed angel kneeling with its hands crossed in front of its chest. within the context of the psychomachia, the angelic figure could be read as a symbol of sophia, the figural representation of holy wisdom (traditionally depicted as a winged female figure), which would be enthroned in her temple following the triumph of the virtues. prudentius writes: “here mighty wisdom sits enthroned and from her high court sets in order all the government of her realm, meditating in her heart laws to safeguard mankind.” this figure is also reminiscent of depictions of the angel gabriel in scenes of the annunciation (luke : - ), and would act as a mimetic device calling to mind the figure of the virgin mary who stands herself as the ultimate exempla of chastity. continuing this theme of spiritual and physical purity, the banner held in the virtue’s left hand features a tableau showing a seated young woman, dressed in the classical style, doting upon a unicorn. one well-known myth surrounding the unicorn is that the only way to capture whittlesey, . ferguson, . prudentius, - , v. - . “hoc residet solio pollens sapientia et omne/ consilium regni celsa disponit ab aula,/ tutandique hominis leges sub corde retractat.” this elusive equine was with a young virgin. sensing her, the animal would approach and lay its head upon her lap before falling asleep. together, these symbols in aldegrever’s engraving would identify the central figure as one who is both chaste and full of heavenly virtue. as with lust, the sin of wrath does not encompass every possible expression of anger, but rather the act of allowing an excess of rage to distract one’s thoughts away from spiritual matters. thus, figures representing wrath are often dressed in armor or brandishing swords, as if about to partake in unnecessary violence (fig. . ). here, aldegrever rejects the traditional symbols associated with this vice by depicting wrath without either armor or sword (fig. . ). instead, wrath wields a bow and arrow to represent the harsh words hurled towards patience in the psychomachia. “irked by her [patience] hanging back, she hurls a pike at her and assails her with abuse.” aldegrever’s figure of wrath also exchanges the typical bird of prey, a common sign of nobility when used as the crest, for loathsome cockatrice. this chimerical creature was thought to be “of that nature, that its look or breath is said to be deadly poison,” reinforcing the danger of words hurled while in a fit of rage. thought to be the result of placing the egg of an elderly hen or male chicken beneath a dunghill and allowing it to be hatched by a toad, this european form of the mythical basilisk is generally accepted to be a symbol of evil and the devil and therefore rarely seen in heraldry by the sixteenth century, except as a fierce supporter, the way the wild man functioned with heraldic john vinyco mb, fictitious & symbolic creatures in art with special reference to their use in british heraldry (london: chapman and hall ltd., ), . prudentius, - , v. - . “ …ut belli e xsorte m teloque et voce lacessit,/ inpatiensque morae conto petit, increpate ore” vinycomb, . devices, as well (fig. . ). below the cockatrice in aldegrever’s engraving, the heart of wrath’s coat of arms is a bristling wild boar. this creature features several times in greek mythology, often as a symbol of uncontrolled fury. one popular story suggests that the goddess artemis sent the calydonian boar to terrorize the land of oeneus for failing to honor her and was eventually destroyed by hercules in one of his labors, those symbolic acts of a civilizing force ; in another myth, ares, the god of war, murders adonis while disguised as a boar. in both cases, this creature was chosen for its tendency towards irrational ferocity, charging and reaping destruction when provoked. combined with the cockatrice in this way, the resulting coat of arms acts as a fitting, albeit non-traditional, visual description of the nature of wrath. the banner carried in the crook of this figure’s arm displays the images of a woodpecker and continues aldegrever’s association between the greek god of war and t he christian sin of wrath, as this bird was considered sacred to ares. wrath’s counterpoint figure of patience carries the banner of a white dove, one of the most recognizable symbols of the christian faith (fig. . ). in the o ld testament, it was the dove who brought back an olive branch to noah as proof that the flood waters had receded (genesis ), and under the law of moses, the purity of this bird allowed it to be used as an offering of purification following the b irth of a child. in c hristian art, the see jan bondeson, the feejee me rmaid and other essays in natural and unnatural history (ithaca, ny: corne ll un iversity press, ), ; and laurence a. bre iner, “the basilisk,” in mythical and fabulous creatures: a source book and research guide (new yo rk: green wood press, ), - ; a lso whittlesey, . in hera ldic terms, a supporter refers to an ele ment of decoration, often an anima l, which appears beside the shield (litera lly supporting it) in cere monia l coats of arms. whittlesey, . whittlesey, . ferguson, . dove is traditionally used as the symbol for the holy ghost. the presence of a white dove upon the banner of patience does more than simply announce the purity of this particular virtue. indeed, for knowing viewers it may also have been understood as a reference to her victory over wrath in the psychomachia, where prudentius states that, “job had clung close to the side of his invincible mistress throughout the hard battle.” patience’s coat of arms features a parrot, the bird commonly associated with both eve, due to its presence in the garden of eden, and mary as it was the only creature known to be able to recite the phrase ‘ave [maria]’ , and is dominated by the figure of a small dog. lapdogs such as these were often featured in wedding portraits, as in jan van eyck’s arnolfini portrait, and were regarded in these contexts as symbols of fidelity and faithfulness. in the c hristian tradition, the sin of pride is considered to be both chief and originator of all others. the self-aggrandizing attitude inherent in this particular vice was considered to be a direct challenge to god as well as to others, as the prideful individual seeks to achieve greatness even at the cost or neglect of all others, including the divine. in c hapter one, i discussed the similarities between aldegrever’s depiction of the sin of pride and the character of pride within the psychomachia (fig. . ). these similarities are not the only elements that set aldegrever’s image of pride apart. the prudentius, - , v. - . “…nam proximus iob/ haeserat invictae dura inter bella magistrate.” farrin chwa lko wski, symbols in arts, religion and culture: the soul of nature (ca mbridge scholars publishing, ), . ferguson, . timpe and boyd, . craig a. boyd, “pride and hu mility: te mpering the desire fo r excellence,” in t impe and boyd, . blasphemy was understood, in fact, to be re lated directly to the sin of pride, as e xe mp lified by the story of luc ifer and the fall of the rebel angels. inclusion of a peacock, for instance, while common to nearly all allegorical figures as a primary symbol of the sin of pride, is here displayed as the heraldic crest in pride’s coat of arms, thus taking on an assisting role, rather than acting as a primary symbol. below this figure, the shield contains a rather unusual creature for this circumstance, a lion. this animal was prized as a positive personal emblem across western europe and stands as a symbol of strength, agility and nobility. its inclusion on the device of a capital sin at first appears out of place. however, when examined alongside other heraldic elements within this image, a possible interpretation becomes clear. aldegrever utilizes the image of a lion in several different ways throughout these two print series, distinguishing types of lions by using different visual modes, heraldic and more naturalistic. in each print in virtues and vices, aldegrever depicts the symbolic elements on both arms and banner in a relatively naturalistic way, as he does with the actual striding lion positioned behind pride’s rearing hor se. in the case of pride’s coat-of- arms, however, aldegrever depicts the heraldic symbols within this print in the traditional style. the lion featured in pride’s coat of arms is in t he rampant position, one hind paw on the ground with other limbs raised and tail erect, which is the most common attitude for lions in heraldry. when combined with the peacock crest, pride’s coat of arms could be interpreted as a veiled warning against the sin of pride, and to some viewers also as an outright admonition aimed at the noble classes as the most able practitioners of this sin. the lion is the most frequently used heraldic beast, as suggested in the french whittlesey, . charles c. boutell, wilfrid scott-giles, and j. p. brooke-little , boutell's heraldry, revised edition (london: f. warne, ), . saying: qui n’a pas d’armes porte un lion (he who has no arms bears a lion). by adapting this most common heraldic creature, aldegrever was free to make this visual commentary on the sins of nobility without the risk of accusation that his images targeted any specific individual or family. this theme is reinforced by the addition of a soaring eagle on the figure’s banner. this bird is another well- known heraldic animal most closely associated with the imperial eagle of the holy roman empire and can be found in the arms and devices of princes and lesser nobility in western europe as far back as the emperor c harlemagne. aldegrever’s association of the upper classes with this particular vice was not uncommon. hans burgkmair (fig. . ) depicts the sin of pride as an upper-class woman admiring he r own reflection in a hand mirror (also accompanied by a peacock). combined with the attribute of the papal crown, the sign of the heraldic lion and imperial eagle in aldegrever’s engraving forcefully indicate that the sin of pride was most grievously committed in history by the rulers of the world and those bearing power. the arms and insignia of aldegrever’s image of modesty (fig. . ) are as complex as those of her counterpart pride, but still legible by the engraving’s knowledgeable viewers. in her hand, modesty carries a banner emblazoned with the man of sorrows, an iconic distillation of one of the most important narrative cycles in sixteenth-century religious art. here the figure of c hrist is shown wearing the crown of thorns and holding the instruments of the passion. images of christ as the man of sorrows were used as objects of meditation, meant to remind the viewer of the events neubecker, . neubecker, . hults, - . surrounding c hrist’s sacrifice and, as in the case here, the humility shown by him by allowing this sacrifice to take place for the sake of humanity. modesty’s coat of arms depicts yet another vital event in the c hristian tradition, the casting down of satan by the archangel michael. this rather violent scene depicts the angelic figure quite literally defeating pride, which was considered to be lucifer’s primary fault causing him to rebel against god. these two images, archangel michael and the man of sorrows, together can be read as a lesson on the nature of humility and of sacrifice. that is to say that while actions done for one’s own sake or glory constitute the sin of pride—that is, lucifer’s grave sin for which he was cast out of heaven by st. michael—sacrifice for the sake of god or of others is a holy virtue. in each of aldegrever’s images, the creatures adorning the heraldic items act as mnemonic devices. they aid the viewer in calling to mind representative virtues or counter-exemplary vices raised in popular mythology, as in the case of c hastity’s unicorn banner or the cockatrice above the arms of wrath, or specific passages or narratives of scripture, such as in the case of modesty. the inclusion of such complex symbolic elements suggests that aldegrever designed the virtues and vices for an anonymous but likely intellectual audience. however, the collection of serialized allegorical prints was not limited to the intelligentsia, nor was their use limited to objects of meditative study. indeed, it is likely that aldegrever’s unique designs would have appealed to a variety of collectors. by studying the structure of aldegrever’s images as well as the visual modes whittlesey, . see yates, the a rt of memory; and ca rruthers, the book of memory. they invoke, we can begin to discern both the function of these prints and their presumed audiences. chapter the business of art: aldegrever and the german print market aldegrever’s contribution to the medium of prints relied heavily on his ability to market his images effectively to multiple audiences. virtues and vices, in particular, can be said to appeal to two particular kinds of print collectors, those who curated their collections based on subject matter in order to fulfill an intellectual purpose and those who sought out works by specific artists, such as albrecht dürer, whose style aldegrever follows rather close in his images. the symbolically dense images of aldegrever’s virtues and vices served as savvy marketing strategy for the artist and publisher and bear clues to their likely function as a pedagogical tool for a presumed targeted audience of learned collectors with humanist interests in antique and modern texts, images, and systems of knowledge. in addition, aldegrever’s imitative style of dürer—much maligned by scholars of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries as compensating for a lack of natural genius --would hardly have been a disadvantage. collectors during the mid- sixteenth century were beginning to organize their collections by artist name, not just subject, suggesting that aldegrever’s close imitation of dürer’s engraved line would have been a highly desirable selling point. rather than casting alde grever in negative terms for his perceived unoriginality, his ability to assimilate and refresh dürer’s style for new subjects in serial format was a marketable asset. w ithin the context of sixteenth-century ilja m . veld man, “seasons, planets and tempera ments in the work of maarten van hee mskerc k: cosmo-astrological a llegory in sixteenth-century netherlandish prints,” in simiolus / - ( ): - esp. : “ … descriptions of tempera ments and children of the planets cou ld have an educational and mora listic significance …” on the appeal of the miniature to collectors, see john mack, the art of small things (ca mbridge, m.a.: harvard university press, ), . adolf rosenberg, “the ge rman little masters of dürer’s school,” in the early teutonic, italian and french masters (london: chatto and windus, ), . print collecting, aldegrever’s ability to render small-scale images with a distinctly dürer- like sense of monumentality was a testament to his skills as an engraver and a shrewd marketing ploy cultivating the prevailing aesthetic tastes of collectors, allowing his images to thrive within the competitive print market of sixteenth-century germany. for those collectors primarily interested in subject matter, the serial nature of the virtues and vices and their moralizing themes would have found an audience on either side of the religious divide. humanist scholars, those with an interest in the study of classical greek and roman literature and the rhetorical arts and their relation to early christian literature, in particular would have appreciated aldegrever’s ability to wed classical elements, such as his roman style allegorical figures, with contemporary elements in his prints, as well as their potential use as a tool for meditation on the nature of virtue and vice. in their compact density of meanings and visual codes, virtues and vices invoked exercises in the art of rhetoric and memory by providing a system of ancient and timeless knowledge in condensed forms. such images that helped to codify systems of knowledge while encouraging mental and physical interaction with them through handling, shuffling, and reordering them find precedent in italian tarocchi from the late fifteenth century. unlike the modern tarot cards, popular with fortune-tellers and occultists, the italian tarocchi of the early modern period were used in an elaborate card game, enjoyed by members of the ruling elite. while the original nature of this game has been lost to see yates, the a rt of memory; and ca rruthers, the book of memory. on this popular misinterpretation of these playing cards see michael du mmett, the visconti- sforza tarot cards (ne w york: g. bra zille r, ). m ichael du mmett e xp la ins: “the first esoteric interpretation of tarot cards recorded in print appears in the eighth volume of a vast unfinished work of misconceived scholarship, antione court de gébelin’s le monde primitive of ,” . according to history, the theme of each suit and the hierarchical arrangement of the cards would suggest that this pastime acted as an amusing method of learning and studying various subjects, including the states of man and the planets. in considering tarocchi as a possible model for the manner of viewer engagement and function of aldegrever’s series of virtues and vices, it is noteworthy that what had originally been crafted as hand- painted and gilded luxury tarocchi for a courtly context would soon take the form of engraved images by the late fifteenth century—similar in size to aldegrever’s and overlapping in subject. it is clear from the existence and design of the visconti-sforza illuminated tarocchi (fig. . - ) and similar sets of engraved images in the manner of andrea mantegna that such a game was widely enjoyed, especially in northern italy in the second half of the fifteenth century and early sixteenth century. perhaps the best known example of engraved tarocchi was created by followers of mantegna around the year (fig. . ). these so-called mantegna tarocchi consist of fifty engravings identified by inscriptions at the bottom of each bearing the name of du mmett, gébelin cla imed that the tarot was a product of ancient egyptian priests; however this is entirely unsubstantiated. the visconti-sforza set of tarocchi contains fifty-six suit cards, which fall into one of four suits; swords, batons, cups and coins, and twenty -two separate picture cards. each suit contains the familiar numerical range of ace to ten and four court cards: king, queen knight and jack. the re ma ining cards, which were generically re ferred to as trionfi, or tru mps in italian, form several h ierarch ical sequences which depict a series of standardized subjects including: the states of man, the celestia l spheres and the platonic virtues. each of the visconti-sforza cards were hand painted and illu minated on heavy cardboard measuring . x . centimeters, only slightly larger than aldegrever’s prints. see du mmett, . on the visconti-sforza tarocchi, see gertrude moakley and von ifac io be mbo, the tarot cards painted by bonifacio bembo for the visconti-sforza family: an iconographic and historical study (new york: new york public library, ). this date refers to the e-series of these tarocchi rather than its reproduction, often called the s- series which was printed around and is a reversed copy of the original. see kristen lippincott, “mantegna’s tarocchi,” print quarterly. . ( ): - . although there is wide consensus that mantegna did not create these tarocchi cycles, scholars continue to use the misnomer ‘mantegna tarocchi’ to refer to what is now presumed to be by an unknown artist or artists fro m the area of ferrara . the card, as well as a letter and a numerical value identifying each figure’s suit and hierarchical position within the deck. the mantegna tarocchi can be separated into five distinct suits that ultimately relate to systems of knowledge: the states of man, apollo and the muses, the liberal arts, the virtues—the subject taken up by aldegrever—and the celestial spheres. each suit, in turn, is arranged hierarchically by number. these markings suggest that the set would be of little use as typical playing cards and instead hint at a different type of game based on an implied knowledge of complicated cosmological subjects. kristen lippincott writes: “there is also the game described by the franciscan friar, thomas murner, in which the fifty- two cards of the pack are arranged in sixteen suits according to the steps of logic.” the act of physically arranging the cards would not only allow a player to better learn and remember these steps but would also aid in the visualization of interrelated spheres of knowledge. considering the subject matter and design of these cards, scholars now think it likely that the so-called mantegna tarocchi were utilized in this fashion as an educational game or rhetorical exercise. jean seznec also suggests a possible educational purpose behind these cards based on the theological order of the universe : their proper order, indicated by the letters a, b, c, d, e for the groups, and the numbers to for the separate figures, reproduces the order assigned by theology to the universe. placed edge to edge, they form, as it were, a symbolic ladder leading from heaven to earth. from the summit of this ladder god, the prima causa, governs the world—not directly but stepwise, ex gradibus, by means of a succession of intermediaries. the divine power is thus transmitted down to the lowest level of humanity, to the humble beggar. lippincott, . jean se znec, the survival of the pagan gods: the mythological tradition and its place in renaissance humanism and art (princeton: princeton university press, ), . seznec notes that this ladder could be read in the opposite direction, teaching man that he may gradually raise himself within the spiritual order. the hierarchical structure of the mantegna tarocchi is consistent with the model of the universe devised by st. thomas aquinas, and it may be assumed that the original collectors of these prints, as educated and literate individuals, would have recognized this. therefore, there is little doubt that this was a game to be played seriously, as though each piece were “from the divine chessboard.” aldegrever’s virtues and vices share certain similarities with the italian tarocchi, which may help us better understand their possible function and desirability as flexible images for contemporary collectors. firstly, working in a similar scale to tarocchi decks, aldegrever’s series could easily be held in the collector’s hand or pasted side by side within an album for private examination. secondly, while not arranged hierarchically, the two series by aldegrever encourage viewer contemplation and interactive engagement with higher ideas pertaining to the spheres of moralizing knowledge inherent in virtues and vices, reflecting subjects in the visconti-sforza trionfi cards and those featured in the engraved mantegna tarocchi. aldegrever’s images also promote reading across series in both a directed and open way for the viewer to consider the nature and relationship of virtue with vice, and the modern applications of them. thus, as with the tarocchi, aldegrever’s images were able to act as tools for private study and memory. indeed, judging by his use of complex allegorical themes and references to classical literature, it is likely that aldegrever’s presumed audience for virtues and vices would have been eva skopalová, "the mantegna tarocchi and the view of the world in northern italy in the th century," umeni art , no. ( ): . se znec, . similar to the printed tarocchi in targeting humanists, theologians, and learned collectors interested in the relationship between early christian texts and contemporary theological debates. it is clear from the overall design of virtues and vices that aldegrever was interested in cultivating a sophisticated clientele for his images. he was not alone in this endeavor, as stephen h. goddard writes: “the little masters’ engravings were intended for an educated and literate audience upon whom complex allegories and recondite references to roman history and mythology, and latin quotations would not be lost.” indeed, it is likely that aldegrever designed his series to serve as a useful visual aid for humanist study, rhetorical exercises, and meditation on these larger truths and orders of knowledge that included the virtues and vices. this nature of aldegrever’s images follows a particular trend in humanist print collection in northern europe, which was systematically cultivated among the book-orientated intelligentsia by increasingly larger publishing houses beginning around the s and accelerating in the mid-sixteenth century. according to the preeminent print scholar, peter parshall, “a major innovation of these houses was the conversion of the print into an important arena for humanist literary invention, such that putting together a print collection could be a useful exercise in moral rhetoric.” in this way, artists and publishers were able to nurture an environment in which buyers would desire purchasing sophisticated print series, such as the fourteen image virtues and vices at least as eagerly as individual images, for their receptivity to being open-ended and pliable in their uses. goddard, . peter pa rshall, “art and the theater of knowledge: the orig ins of print co llecting in northern europe,” harvard university art museums bulletin , no. ( ): . the desire among collectors for a series of printed images relating to a single subject like the virtues and vices may have grown out of this practice of humanist study. however, as parshall suggests, the emergence of large scale print collecting also reflects the relationship between early print collectors and the development of private libraries during the same period. the growth of private libraries in northern europe appears to coincide with the rise of protestantism during the reformation. parshall explains that, “religious reformers encouraged the increase of private libraries, the very locations where print collections would eventually be housed and quietly consulted.” these private compilations often contained personally curated selections of printed images complete with inscriptions, and it is thought that the tradition of collecting prints in the form of an album was related to this specific practice. o ne frequently practiced method of print collection in northern europe evolved alongside the deve lopment of printed books and the desire for abundant, inexpensive, and flexible illustrations for them. the early habit of gluing small prints into books, both devotional and secular, seems to have led to the practice of collecting prints in separate albums or folders, which collectors often stored in private libraries as parts of larger kunstkammern (collectors cabinets). this particular practice has in turn become a great boon to art historians, as the surviving albums and collection inventories show us not only which prints were considered worthy of collecting, but also the possible illustrative, meditative, or peter pa rshall, “prints as objects of cons umption in ea rly modern europe.” journal of medieval and early modern studies , no ( ), - , esp. . landau and parshall, . according to landau and parshall, it was around this time in the universities of germany began to encourage the creation of alba amicorum, or a lbums of friendship. these albums contained collections of signatures, comme morative e mb le ms and coats of arms of a person’s friends and encountered acquaintances, tracking a kind of network of social re lationships, and perhaps sharing a similar fondness for notions of compiling, cutting, and pasting seen in early print collections. contemplative purposes behind each collector’s desire for them. o ne of the prime examples of prints being used in this way during the artist’s lifetime can be found in a copy of luther’s edition of the bible belonging to the embroiderer, hans plock, in which plock pasted numerous prints throughout the book, sometimes relating to the text, other times not at all. for the title page of this personalized book, plock cut out and composed engraved portraits of leaders of the protestant reformation, including images of martin luther and philip melanchthon by aldegrever, situated below albrecht dürer’s own printed image of luther’s protector, elector frederick the wise (fig. . ). it is notable that while these images were clearly selected based on their subject matter—to introduce the main protestant reformers— plock chose to include an engraving by aldegrever, rather than one of lucas cra nach’s numerous printed portraits of luther. this suggests not only that aldegrever was considered an important artist in his own time, but also that his skills and style were seen, at least by plock, to be of a similar caliber to dürer’s. indeed, aldegrever’s portrait style and compositions featuring each figure’s bust in three-quarter view above a simulated inscribed stone tablet mimic dürer’s so closely that, upon initial inspection, these three portraits appear to have been created by the same hand. plock filled his two-volume edition of luther’s translation with a variety of prints, including some by aldegrever and others that had little or nothing to do with the corresponding scripture. this peculiarity suggests that plock chose his prints and the locations in which to paste them in the book out of a range of motivations, not simply out of a clear devotional or illustrative function arranged by subject matter. indeed, plock said as much when he added the following inscription beneath an impression of martin goddard, - . schongauer’s engraving of the death of the virgin, c. - (fig. . ), a subject that had nothing to do with the text of the adjacent pages: this image [by schongauer] was judged in my youth to be the finest work of art (‘das beste kunststuck’) to have come out of germany, therefore i pasted it into my bible, not because of the story, which may or may not be true [properly portrayed]. however, since the unsurpassed engraver dürer of n uremberg began to make his art, this [estimation of quality] no longer holds. the engraver was called "handsome martin" on account of his skill (‘kunst’). plock makes it clear that the image was collected and valued not for its subject matter or as an illustration of the text, but rather for its artistic merits as a work of art by martin schongauer. plock also singles out dürer as the preeminent engraver who was considered to have surpassed all others in this developing canon of artists. in this respect, then, once again, it is notable that aldegrever’s engraved portraits imitate those of dürer so closely. while modern scholars may not consider aldegrever’s work to be on a similar level to schongauer’s, his prints were valued and put to good use by collectors in his own lifetime, both for their subject matter and at times also for their ability to mimic dürer’s linear style. a little later, this shift from collecting and organizing by subject matter to artist is further developed. indeed, the great b iographer of northern artists, karel van mander ( - ) once stated outright that the prints of aldegrever were excellent and worthy of collecting. additionally, an inventory of the n uremburg collector paul von as quoted and translated by parshall in “art and the theater of knowledge,” . original te xt is as follows : “dise figur ist meiner jugent vor das beste kunststuck geacht worden das im theutschen land is aus gangen, deshalben ich es auch in meine b ibel han gele imt n it von wegen der hystorien, sie kan wa r vnd auch nit sein. aber do der durer von nurnburck seine ku nst liess auss geen, do galt dise nit mer we lche auch alle kunststhdecker vberthrift. diser kunststhdecher hat der hubsch martin geheissen von wegen seiner kunst.” goddard, . praun ( - ) contained several portfolios of printed images, one of which featured engravings by aldegrever. aldegrever’s style may have been purposefully similar to dürer’s, however it is unlikely that aldegrever saw himself solely as another nameless copyist of the master. in , at the age of twenty-eight, aldegrever created and distributed an engraved self- portrait (fig. . ). in this image, the artist presents himself in three-quarter view, wearing traditional dress including a rather large brimmed hat. above his left shoulder, aldegrever displays a rather prominent example of his ag monogram, derived from dürer’s iconic ad, placed on a decorative element, which appears to be halfway between a scroll and a heraldic device. the design of aldegrever’s self-portrait appears very similar to the convention for printed portraits of members of the nobility, as well as for the financial and intellectual elite. in doing so, aldegrever was making a statement in regards to his own artistic nobility. to create a self-portrait at all, let alone one with such strong visual connotations, was an unusually bold move, especially for a sixteenth- century printmaker. such a statement was attempted by very few of this profession prior to rembrandt ( - ), whose printed self-portraits are well-known and still considered novel in the following century. indeed, prior to , only israhel van meckenem ( - ), famously appearing ca. in an engraving with his wife ida, attempted to make such a statement in printed multiples (fig. . ); even dürer, ambitious as he was and also known for his self-portraits, preferred to depict himself only in paint goddard, . these images can be found in “portfolio f” of the praun collec tion wh ich contained engravings, among which the prints of aldegrever figured prominently. (fig. . ). in this way, aldegrever was not only elevating the value of his own artistry, but also that of the craft of printmaking, in general. in order to find success in the increasingly flooded print market of mid-sixteenth century germany, aldegrever cultivated the needs and expectations of a variety of collectors without sacrificing his own distinctiveness. this fine balance was achieved in several different ways. like the tarocchi, aldegrever’s complex allegorical themes would have enticed humanist collectors, looking to utilize these images for their subject matter as tools for study and contemplation of categories of moral and cosmological knowledge. the themes of virtue and vice also could find favor among both sides of the religious divide and avoided promoting any particular theological ideology, promoting open-ended discussion instead of hardened doctrine. additionally, aldegrever’s use of dürer’s signature stylistic elements would have appealed to collectors such plock and later collectors like praun, when collections mid-century were increasingly built around specific artists rather than subject matter. in this way, aldegrever was able to capitalize on dürer’s popularity in order to market his images in suitable serial format to the widest possible learned audience. seven years after the publication of this self-portra it, a ldegrever would publish a second printed portrait in which he depicts himself as a grown man with a beard. conclusion heinrich aldegrever was an artist who possessed a great technical and intellectual talent. however, despite working in a center other than n uremburg and with questionable anecdotal evidence to suggest any personal contact with dürer or his circle, aldegrever has been unfairly dismissed by modern historians as an unimaginative copyist, or at best just another member of the k leinmeister whose work is least deserving of academic attention. aldegrever’s images may contain a similar linear style to that of dürer and a similar miniature scale to members of the kleinmeister, yet it is here that these similarities end. aldegrever’s complex symbols and unusual treatment of allegorical figures was not something stolen from the images of more popular masters, b ut was instead derived from a kind of genius all his own, one based on knowing how to create desirable, marketable, flexible, and effective images to sustain viewing attention. in this context, attempts to bury aldegrever within the scholarship surrounding the n uremburg kleinmeister appear wholly misguided. rather, it is far more likely that aldegrever adapted these elements into his own work in an attempt to market his prints to a similar audience as his little master contemporaries, taking positive advantage of reinterpreting and renewing the legacy of dürer among that next generation of printmakers. aldegrever, like the creators of the italian tarocchi before him, sought to tailor his images to the interests of the intellectual classes who would have collected them for reasons other than mere aesthetic appreciation. aldegrever’s primary audience, made up of scholars and others sharing humanist interests, would have had a particular desire for collecting series such as virtues and vices, which, with their small scale, serial nature, and moralistic subject matter, could act as tools to aid in the study and contemplation of spiritual and cosmological subjects. aldegrever’s adaptation of recognizable elements and emblems from aristocratic heraldry and familiar iconographic traditions allowed him to effectively incorporate his complex symbolic elements into each tableau in a way that was visually engaging for the viewer. such as system of dense attributes and signs would also act as a set of codes that could be deciphered to reveal the intrinsic nature of each virtue or vice by invoking a related web of ancient philosophical, mythological, or scriptural textual sources. additionally, the discerning collector would have noted aldegrever’s break with the traditional method of statuesque and solitary depictions of the virtues and vices and would perhaps have appreciated the visual link between aldegrever’s figures and the characters of the psychomachia. without revealing his personal theological or political beliefs, aldegrever was able to harness the theme of spiritual struggle found in the psychomachia, particularly in the description of pride, as a metaphor for the open religious conflicts between catholics and protestants. such moralizing subjects would appear both ancient and timely, and appeal to audiences on both sides of the divide, while at the same time promoting an open-ended discussion of shared humanity over divisive doctrine. aldegrever may not be as famous or as widely celebrated by modern scholars as albrecht dürer, few printmakers are ; however that does not mean that his images were not appreciated and used during his own lifetime. both karel van mander and paul von praun notably considered aldegrever’s images to be skillfully rendered and worthy of collection. indeed, the fact that a n artist—collector such as hans plock would display aldegrever’s work alongside that of dürer suggests that his skills and style were seen, at least by the discriminating eyes of plock, to be nearly equal to, or at least consistent with, the great master’s. as art historians, we cannot continue to ignore such fascinating and indeed successful artists as heinrich aldegrever, simply because they do not fit the constructed narrative of the wholly original artist, or the modern canon of the first generation of german o ld masters who lived during the first decades of the s. rather, by taking the time to study and understand aldegrever’s contributions to mid-sixteenth-century print production, we are able to perceive a richer and more complex view of printed art and its role within sixteenth-century society as a medium that could initiate contemplation and discussion—about humanist education, warfare and conflict, religion, and moral virtues—in an open and flexible, even irresolvable manner. by taking aldegrever and his ambitions seriously—seen clearly by his early imitation of dürer, his application of a monogram, and his printed self-portrait—we gain a more full view of early modern success rooted in values other than ‘pure originality,’ such as in an astute ability to market oneself and imitate a range of visual and textual sources that are both familiar and new at once. bibliogr aphy allcock, hubert. heraldic design: its origins, ancient forms and modern usage. new york: tudor publishing company, . aquinas, thomas, saint, magnus albertus, saint, and philip the c hancellor. the cardinal virtues: aquinas, albert and philip the chancellor. edited and translated by r. e. houser. vol. . toronto: pontifical institute of mediaeval studies, . battistini, matilde. symbols and allegories in art. los angeles: j. paul getty museum, . benton, janetta rebold. the medieval menagerie: animals in the art of the middle ages. new york: abbeville press. . bondeson, jan. the feejee mermaid and other essays in natural and unnatural history. ithaca, ny: cornell university press, . breiner, laurence a. “the basilisk. ” in mythical and fabulous creatures: a source book and research guide, edited by malcolm south. new york: greenwood press, . boutell, c harles c., wilfrid scott-giles, and j. p. brooke-little. boutell's heraldry. rev. ed. london: frederick warne and company, . cohen, simona. animals as disguised symbols in renaissance art. boston; leiden: brill. . carruthers, mary. the book of memory: a study of memory in medieval culture. new york: cambridge university press, . ---. the craft of thought: meditation, rhetoric, and the making of images, - . new york: cambridge university press, . castelnuovo, enrico, and carlo ginzburg. “centre and periphery.” in history of italian art, edited by ellen bianchini and c laire dorey, - . cambridge, ma: blackwell publishers, . chwalkowski, farrin. symbols in arts, religion and culture: the soul of nature. cambridge scholars publishing, . dummett, michael. the visconti-sforza tarot cards. new york: g. braziller, . ferguson, george. signs & symbols in christian art. new york: o xford university press, . fögen, thorsten. “animal communication.” the oxford handbook of animals in classical thought and life, oxford university press, . griffiths, anthony. prints and printmaking: an introduction to the history and techniques. berkeley: university of california press, . goddard, stephen h. the world in miniature: engravings by the german little masters, - . lawrence, ks: spencer museum of art, . habich, georg. "heinrich aldegrever als siegelstecher." jahrbuch der preuszischen kunstsammlungen ( ): - . h. r. s. "the "little masters" in the exhibition of early german prints. museum of fine arts bulletin , no. ( ): - . hourihane, colum. virtue & vice: the personifications in the index of christian art . vol. . princeton: index of christian art, in association with princeton university press, . hults, linda c. the print in the western world: an introductory history. madison: university of wisconsin press, . isolde, hausberger, rolf biedermann, et al. hans burgkmair, - : das graphische werk, stuttgart: staatsgalerie, . kaulbach, hans-martin, and reinhart schleier. " der welt lauf" : allegorische graphikserien des manierismus. ostfildern ruit: hatje, . koerner, joseph leo. “albrecht dürer: a sixteenth-century influenza.” in albrecht dürer and his legacy, edited by giulia bartrum, - . london: british museum press, . landau, david, and peter parshall. the renaissance print, - . new haven: yale university press, . leiningen-westerburg, karl emich, and george ravenscroft denis. german book- plates: an illustrated handbook of german & austrian exlibris. london: george bell & sons, . lippincott, kristen. “mantegna’s tarocchi.” print quarterly ( ) - . mack, john. the art of small things. cambridge, ma: harvard university press, . moakley, gertrude, and vonifacio bembo. the tarot cards painted by bonifacio bembo for the visconti-sforza family: an iconographic and historical study. new york: new york public library, . neubecker, ottfried. a guide to heraldry. new york: mcgraw-hill, . newhauser, richard. in the garden of evil: the vices and culture in the middle ages. toronto: pontifical institute of mediaeval studies, . o’reilly, jennifer. studies in the iconography of the virtues and vices in the middle ages. new york: garland publishing, . parshall, peter. “art and the theater of knowledge: the origins of print collecting in northern europe.” harvard university art museums bulletin , no. ( ): - . ---. “hans holbein’s pictures of death.” in hans holbein: paintings, prints and reception, edited by mark roskill and john o liver hand, - . new haven: yale university press, . ---. “lucas van leyden's narrative style.” nederlands kunsthistorisch jaarboek ( ) - . ---. “prints as objects of consumption in early modern europe.” journal of medieval and early modern studies , no. ( ) - . plato. the republic of plato. translated by allan bloom. new york: basic books, . pon, lisa. raphael, dürer and marcantonio raimondi: copying and the italian renaissance print. new haven: yale university press, . praz, mario. studies in seventeenth-century imagery, nd edition. rome: edizioni di storia e letteratura, . prudentius. prudentius volume . edited and translated by h.j. thomson. cambridge, ma: harvard university press. . rodríguez-velasco, jesús d. "poetics of the chivalric emblem" in order and chivalry: knighthood and citizenship in late medieval castile, edited and translated by eunice rodríguez ferguson. - . philadelphia, pa: university of pennsylvania press, . rosenberg, adolf. “the german little masters of dürer’s school.” in the early teutonic, italian and french masters. edited by augustus henry keane, - . london: c hatto and windus, . rubens, alfred. "heraldry" in encyclopaedia judaica, nd ed., edited by michael berenbaum and fred skolnik, vol. . detroit: macmillan reference, . seznec, jean. the survival of the pagan gods: the mythological tradition and its place in renaissance humanism and art. princeton: princeton university press, . schnoor, franziska. early modern zoology: the construction of animals in science, literature and the visual arts, vol. . edited by karel a. e. enenkel and paulus johannes smith, - . boston: brill, . shestack, alan. "some preliminary drawings for engravings by heinrich aldegrever." master drawings , no. . ( ): - . skopalová, eva. "the mantegna tarocchi and the view of the world in northern italy in the th century." umeni art , no. ( ): - . smith, macklin. prudentius’ psychomachia: a reexamination. princeton: princeton university press, . spinks, jennifer. monstrous births and visual culture in sixteenth-century germany. vol. . london: pickering & c hatto, . stewart, columba. “evagrius ponticus and the ‘eight generic logismoi.’” in in the garden of evil: the vices and culture in the middle ages, edited by richard newhauser, - . toronto: pontifical institute of mediaeval studies, . timpe, kevin, and craig a. boyd. virtues and their vices. o xford: oxford university press, . veldman, ilja m. “seasons, planets and temperaments in the work of maarten van heemskerck: cosmo-astrological allegory in sixteenth-century netherlandish prints.” simiolus , nos. - ( ): - . vinycomb, john. fictitious & symbolic creatures in art with special reference to their use in british heraldry. london: c hapman and hall ltd., . whitman, jon. interpretation and allegory: antiquity to the modern period. boston; leiden: brill, . whittlesey, e.s. symbols and legends in western art: a museum guide. new york: charles scribner & sons, . wittkower, rudolf. allegory and the migration of symbols. london: thames and hudson, . wollaston, gerald w. “heraldry. ” journal of the royal society of arts ( ): - . yates, frances a. the art of memory. chicago: university of chicago press, . illustrations fig. . heinrich aldegrever, lust from vices, , engraving, . x . cm. philadelphia museum of art fig. . heinrich aldegrever, chastity from virtues, , engraving, . x . cm. metropolitan museum of art fig. . heinrich aldegrever, patience from virtues, , engraving, . x . cm. de young, san francisco fig. . heinrich aldegrever, wrath from vices, , engraving, . x . cm. philadelphia museum of art fig. . heinrich aldegrever, pride from vices, , engraving, . x . cm. philadelphia museum of art fig. . heinrich aldegrever, modesty from virtues, , engraving, . x . cm. philadelphia museum of art fig. . heinrich aldegrever, temperance from virtues, , engraving, . x . cm. art institute of chicago fig. . heinrich aldegrever, gluttony from vices, , engraving, . x . cm. philadelphia museum of art fig. . heinrich aldegrever, charity from virtues, , engraving, . x . cm. art institute of chicago fig. . heinrich aldegrever, avarice from vices, , engraving, . x . cm. philadelphia museum of art fig. . heinrich aldegrever, compassion from virtues, , engraving, . x . cm. philadelphia museum of art fig. . heinrich aldegrever, envy from vices, , engraving, . x . cm. philadelphia museum of art fig. . heinrich aldegrever, diligence from virtues, , engraving, . x . cm. philadelphia museum of art fig. . heinrich aldegrever, idleness from virtues, , engraving, . x . cm. philadelphia museum of art fig. . anger commits suicide, choir of notre-dame- du-port,clermont-ferrand, early th century (inscription reads: ira se occidit [anger k ills herself]) fig. . - hans burgk mair, seven virtues, ca. , woodcuts, british museum from top left: justice, hope, temperance, love (charity), faith, fortitude, and prudence. fig. . - hans burgk mair, vices, ca. , woodcuts, british museum ( - ) and metropolitan museum of art ( ) from left: lust, pride, wrath, gluttony, avarice and sloth fig. . - hans sebald beham, the knowledge of god and the seven cardinal virtues, , engraving, cleveland museum of art from top left: knowledge of god, prudence, charity, justice, and faith fig. . - hans sebald beham, the knowledge of god and the seven cardinal virtues, , engraving, cleveland museum of art from left: hope, fortitude and temperance fig. . silver medallion with name and title of johanns ii of cleve, after design by heinrich aldegrever fig. . heinrich aldegrever, william, duke of julich, cleve and berg, , engraving, . x . cm. harvard art museums fig. . heinrich aldegrever, lust from vices, , detail fig. . albrecht dürer, the men’s bath, , detail, woodcut, . x . cm. royal collection trust fig. . master ds, basilisk supporting the arms of the city of basel, , woodcut, . x . cm. metropolitan museum of art . bonifacio bembo, the queen of swords, visconti-sforza tarocchi, ca. - , . x . cm, morgan library & museum . bonifacio bembo, temperance, visconti-sforza tarocchi, ca. - , . x . cm, morgan library & museum . master of the e-series, prudentia (prudence), the mantegna tarocchi, ca. - , engraving, . x . cm, british museum . luther bible owned by hans plock, volume , featuring a portrait of martin luther by heinrich aldegrever (bottom right), staatliche museen zu berlin, kupferstichkabinett . martin schongauer, death of the virgin, c. - , engraving, . x . cm, from the plock bible, staatliche museen zu berlin, kupferstichkabinett . heinrich aldegrever, self-portrait at age twenty-eight, , engraving, . x . cm, metropolitan museum of art . israhel van meckenem, self-portrait of the artist with his wife, ida , c. , engraving, . x . cm, philadelphia museum of art . albrecht dürer, self-portrait, , oil on wood panel, . x cm, alte pinakothek, munich journal of art historiography number june josef frank and the history of architecture: gothic and the renaissance, leon battista alberti and albrecht dürer in architectural discourse on neues bauen at the beginning of the s caterina cardamone ‘history exists not to be correctly recognised, but to deliver raw material for scientific and artistic work from which we might gather what we need.’ introduction the reflection on history constitutes one of the central issues in the theoretical work of josef frank ( - ), one of the most influential figures of viennese architecture in the interwar period. ‘dissenting voice’ in the german discussion on architecture between the end of the s and his emigration in , frank belonged however to the core institutions of modernism. founding member of the ciam, leading figure of the austrian werkbund, frank proposed an alternative vision of modernity based on a profound reflection on classical tradition. frank’s engagement with history starts with his education at the technische hochschule in carl könig’s milieu and the writing of his doctoral dissertation on leon battista alberti in – not included in any of the following of alberti’s bibliographies. josef frank, architektur als symbol. elemente deutschen neuen bauens, wien: schroll , now in tano bojankin, christopher long, iris meder (eds.), josef frank. schriften / writings, wien: metroverlag, , vol. , . unless otherwise specified, i will refer to the existing english translation of frank’s writings (published in the two volumes of the bilingual edition by bojankin, long and meder). christopher long, josef frank. life and work, chicago and london: the university of chicago press, . ‘a dissenting voice’ is the title of a chapter ( - ) that christopher long devotes to frank’s role in the founding institutions of architectural modernism. for a biographical excursus, see also maria welzig, josef frank - . das architektonische werk, wien: böhlau, . more recently, iris meder (ed.), josef frank. eine moderne der unordnung, wien: verlag anton pustet, and marlene ott-wodni, josef frank - . raumgestaltung und möbeldesign, wien/ köln/ weimar: böhlau, . for a broader discussion of these arguments, see author, ‘varietas, mediocritas and annehmlichkeit. the reception of classical tradition in the work of josef frank and its viennese context’, architectural histories, forthcoming. on cark könig’s school at the technische hochschule, see christopher long, ‘an alternative path to modernism. carl könig and architectural education at the vienna technische hochschule, - ’, journal of architectural education, : , , - . caterina cardamone josef frank and the history of architecture... in frank’s theoretical work, a paradigmatic case study for the use of historiographical categories in the discussion of modernity is architektur als symbol. elemente deutschen neuen bauens ( ). reviewed as ‘less than systematic’ by contemporaries, as ‘unpleasant’ and ‘acid’ by interpreters, architektur als symbol provides one of the most complex analyses of modern architecture ever written. to argue his position, frank devotes approximately two thirds of the book-length essay – an uninterrupted discourse on modernity artificially organised into chapters – to a re-writing of architectural and cultural history. frank’s narration strongly and explicitly moulds the entire historical course in order to assign modern architecture a determined place in it and to argue his critique of neues bauen. my contribution focuses essentially on one aspect of frank’s historiographical construction: the opposition of classical tradition and gothic sketched at this point, which proves itself determining for his critique of german functionalism and for the foundation of modern architecture in the context of frank’s entire theoretical production. the first and most salient aspect in frank’s approach to history is a declared operational use of it, an attitude that is rather common in the theoretical works of architectural modernity. in a more circumscribed viennese context, precedents are also to be found in the closest milieu around frank. it is in the written work of oskar strnad and oskar wlach – in particular in the doctoral thesis defended by oskar wlach in about polychrome cladding of florentine proto-renaissance – that historical knowledge emerges as an instrument to intervene in contemporary discourse. in his ‘flowing and clear writing, carried by intelligence and artistic sensitivity’, wlach uses principles that he derives from his analysis of florentine long, josef frank, . long argues that ‘it was precisely (…) carefully constructed ideological systems that frank in fact was rejecting’. karin lindegren, ‘architectur als symbol: theory and polemic’, in nina stritzler-levine (ed.), josef frank. architect and designer, new haven and london: yale university press, , . frank, architektur als symbol, (in the annotation of john sands). frank, architektur als symbol, . maria luisa scalvini, maria grazia sandri, l’immagine storiografica dell’architettura contemporanea da platz a gedion, roma: officina edizioni . oskar strnad, das prinzip der dekoration der fruechristlichen kunst. eine kritische studie ihrer toreutischen stereotomie mit besonderer ruecksichtnahme der bezueglichen werke roms und ravenna, unpublished doctoral dissertation, : archiv tu wien / – / ; oskar wlach, die farbige inkrustation in der florentiner protorenaissance. eine studie über die verwendung der farbe in architektur, unpublished doctoral dissertation, : archiv tu, / – - , in particular - . on frank’s closest collegues, ursula prokop, ‘josef frank and “the small circle around oskar strnad and viktor lurje”’, in christoph thun- hohenstein, hermann czech, sebastian hackenschmidt (eds.), josef frank. against design. the architect’s anti-formalist oeuvre, basel: birkhäuser , - . archiv tu, / – / , rigorosen journal n° : june , karl mayreder, erstattung des referates, folio . my thanks to dr. juliane mikoletzky, director of the universitätsarchiv der tu wien for her insightful suggestions on the transcription of this handwritten passage. ‘die arbeit untersucht in einer leicht fliessenden, klaren, von intelligenz und künstlerischem empfinden getragenen schrift, die ästhetischen prinzipien caterina cardamone josef frank and the history of architecture... medieval and renaissance incrustation to deliver a sharp critique of the work of the influential baurath otto wagner. frank’s position is however decidedly more radical in the entanglement of history and present situation and has probably no parallel in contemporary contributions. ‘we no longer want to take the view of the historian who can recognize what is good and bad or what is authentic and what is fraudulent, who understands and forgive all. it is no longer enough [if] we want to give expression to our clear will.’ it is probably this engagement that leads to an extraordinary superposition of historical past and present. ‘our time is all of history, as it is known to us. this notion alone can be the basis of modern architecture.’ moreover, it is historical knowledge – and not scientific, as commonly assumed in the theory of modern movement – that constitutes the distinctive core of modernity. throughout the entire essay, historical discourse is not separable from comments on the contemporary situation. continuous temporal shifts are a distinctive mark in the writing. an example for this inextricable link between history and present can be seen in an excerpt from a passage describing the literary soul of the nineteenth century and its search for national styles: ‘[the will to stagnate] was also expressed in the fact that a style was standardised for use in certain kinds of buildings with particular functions, which in essence is still done today, despite attempts to disguise it – for the literary age lives on as the journalistic age.’ the impossibility of excluding history from the analysis of present has its counterpart in the impossibility of discarding the present in the analysis of history, to abandon the ‘(wrong) meter of our time’ in every piece of historical writing. in architektur als symbol, the historical dynamic appears to follow conventional schemes. in frank’s narration, the historical development of architectural forms goes through periods of enrichment and ‘decline’, concluding einer geschlossenen gruppe architektonischer schöpfungen in einer eingehenden und theilweise auch eigenartigen weise, daß sie eine volle wissenschaftlich vertiefung in das aufgestellte thema beweist.’ on wlach’s doctoral thesis, on the use of history for a criticism of otto wagner’s majolikahaus ( - ), and on the role of max fabiani – otto wagner’s assistant teaching however at the technische hochschule – see now berthold hub, oskar wlachs reise zur "farbigen incrustation in der florentiner protorenaissance" und die wiener moderne, paper presented at the conference sehnsuchtslos und postkanonisch? architektenreisen nach italien im . jahrhundert, rome, bibliotheca hertziana - december . paper kindly provided by the author. frank, architektur als symbol, . frank, architektur als symbol, and for the stronger german original: ‘unsere zeit ist die ganze uns bekannte historische zeit. dieser gedanke allein kann die grundlage moderner baukunst sein.’ on this point see also lindegren, ‘theory and polemic’, . frank, architektur als symbol, . at the bigger scale of the literary structure of the essay, a further example could be the inclusion of the chapter the u-boat, the mud brick, and the flat roof in the discussion of late antiquity (frank, architektur als symbol, ). frank, architektur als symbol, (the author’s translation): ‘wir sind heute ebensowenig wie die griechen imstande, über den kunstwert eines ägyptischen oder auch eines andern vorklassischen bauwerks ein urteil abzugeben, außer indem wir es mit dem (aber falschen) maßstab unserer zeit messen.’ caterina cardamone josef frank and the history of architecture... with abrupt changes of direction. although contextualised and relativized, the notion of style is still in use. the forms of every age begin simply and end in ever-greater opulence. the cause of this phenomenon is pleasure in variety, the horror vacui, but also the increasing wealth of that people or caste whose appearance and seizure of power established the new age and who, having grown rich in peace, is now defending the existing order against the new. some passages from frank’s history of antiquity and the shift from late antiquity to middle age provide a significant example of the application of this historical schema. the temple sprang from the collective will [wollen] of the greek people as athena from the head of zeus; or the beneficence of the gods destroyed all evidence of any preliminary and developmental stages that preceded the perfect form. but these – if they ever even existed – were certainly nothing other than a determined pursuit of the only (yes, the only) perfection that has ever been achieved. the temple emerged without regard to material and function. in the transplantation of greek forms in italy, their ‘organic evolution’ continued until the definition of the tuscan order, probably ‘the highest form that could still be vital as an abstract means of expression’. the following passage, in frank’s narration, sheds light on what is likely to come after reaching this ‘highest form’. however, the arguments are not assertive: yet, can we speak of a ‘decline’ of architecture? that is really only possible in such times in which attempts are made to try to feign something through forms that have already become untrue and in which the means cannot be found to express something vital. thus the eclectics are always wrong. ‘revolutions lead to antiquity’. the circularity of history we could follow frank’s arguments in the description of late empire as a ‘degradation of art to an intellectual, material luxury for the few’ and the origin of german medieval art from late antique volkskunst. for our point, it is noteworthy frank, architektur als symbol, . frank, architektur als symbol, . frank, architektur als symbol, . frank, architektur als symbol, . frank, architektur als symbol, . frank, architektur als symbol, . frank, architektur als symbol, . caterina cardamone josef frank and the history of architecture... that this process of evolution, decline and rebirth is not lineal but follows rather a circular schema: the clear parallel between late empire and baroque is in fact a first example of an insisted and consistently developed idea in frank’s narration: history follows a circular course and the end of the - war should mark the beginning of a further cycle. this circularity does not, however, exclude ‘foreign influences’ and both baroques are characterised by the intervention of forces majeures – the influence of middle eastern art in the case of late antiquity and china, in the case of th-century baroque. gothic architecture is then introduced as a period of decadence, as the necessary ‘catastrophe’, succeeding late antique opulence. in his description, frank uses powerful metaphors. gothic buildings are ‘embalmed corpses’, ‘blood- drained shadows of former strength’. as a reaction, a revolution of great abruptness, force and energy’ starts a further cycle with the conscious invention of a style: ‘[it] is the first example for which there is real historical evidence of the invention of a style that abandoned an ostensible tradition.’ with the renaissance, the cycle of european architecture was actually complete; we were once again back where we began; the old tradition had been recovered. what then followed was essentially nothing other than that which followed antiquity, in particular the formal expansion of architecture’s expressive means and their liberation from doctrinaire prescriptions. there are two principal results of frank’s historiographical construction, two main consequences in the circularity of history that he discusses: the historical relativity of modernity – and its values – because of its insertion in a cyclical course, and above all the absence in this continuity of any nineteenth-century caesura that could justify a reflection on a new machine era and its forms. neither the industrial revolution nor the - war, as mentioned above, could be interpreted as an interruption. the latter is rather considered as the departure point of a further cycle, the sole solution after the rapid – circular – flow of unsatisfactory formal experiments at the turn of the century. the direction to be taken after this new start is obvious: antiquity. that [formal research at the beginning of the century] does not sufficiently satisfy is demonstrated by the fact that our building types and systems frank, architektur als symbol, . frank, architektur als symbol, . frank, architektur als symbol, . frank, architektur als symbol, . frank, architektur als symbol, . frank, architektur als symbol, . frank, architektur als symbol, . frank, architektur als symbol, . frank, architektur als symbol, . caterina cardamone josef frank and the history of architecture... supplanted each other with remarkable speed, until the years of the revolution following the war led once again back to antiquity. the time has come to consciously acknowledge this. frank’s reading of the immediate past after the - war points out german ‘false assumptions’ which create a new formal language and abandon the multiple formal possibilities of a classical anthropocentrism; as i will further argue, these ‘false assumptions’ impose a formal uniformity upon a classical varietas. in frank’s historiographical reading, the invention of machine does not imply a new direction in the course of history and aligns itself perfectly with the intellectual trajectory of antiquity. with this statement, frank is healing the nineteenth-century scar which is one of the principal historiographical points of modernity: ‘machines are products and essential outcomes of the intellectual trajectory of the ancients, who made men the focus of all thought and the measure of all things.’ the idea is reiterated in various passages, persistently and explicitly linked to contemporary architectural discourse: it is entirely mistaken to believe that the machine age has created a new spirit, because this goal has always been sought, and to anyone who understands the full context, everything that has been created in europe since the earliest days, comes together wonderfully into a total image, without his sense for harmony compelling him to sit in a tubular chair because he has a bathtub. frank goes even further: classical tradition is the only appropriate expression of every revolutionary age because ‘revolutions lead to antiquity’ in their circular revival. in frank’s dialectic, the same raison d’être of modernism is called into question. the formal solutions of modernism, in fact, are not the only appropriate expression of a revolutionary and mechanical oriented age. frank, architektur als symbol, . frank, architektur als symbol, . ‘do we want to start over again from the beginning? and again with false assumptions? for the european, as i have shown here, only a single system of forms can become his own, one with which he is inextricably bound ( … ) furthermore, we have seen that antiquity and its system stands in opposition to all others, be they related or not; in any case, they are laden with tendencies that are not our own. all of these forms are therefore also not suitable to serve as springboards that propel us headlong into the unknown. these forms, granted us by fate, are as distinct and at the same time as diverse as the human form [eindeutig und dabei so vielfältig wie die menschliche gestalt] and could express every character and every feeling; a quest for new ones is hopeless.’ frank, architektur als symbol, , but also : ‘the machine age is not new, but rather was always been cultivated in europe, because we have always thought along the same lines, and that is what distinguishes the europeans from other races.’ frank, architektur als symbol, - . frank, architektur als symbol, , also , , . caterina cardamone josef frank and the history of architecture... ‘there is no such thing as traditionlessness.’ no interruption is possible in history; this statement is an even more radical assertion than the continuity of thought – the cultural belonging to an antique cultural tradition – espoused by adolf loos at the beginning of the century. this historiographical continuity without caesurae, and the impossibility to abandon any tradition, constitute a main point in the viennese response to the search for a modern formal expression. gothic and classical tradition as metaphors to intervene in the architectural debate in this general historiographical context, the opposition of the gothic and classical tradition appears as a successful metaphor of the contemporary situation that traverses the entire book. the attention to classical tradition is one of the most apparent issues of the book, reiterated with an unusual clarity and consistency that we can define as almost didactic. the beginning of modern architectural history will be dated to around the eighth century b.c., from the time when the first doric column was noted, which constituted the anthropomorphic form of [material]. ( … ) we will most likely never be able to separate ourselves from the wavelike, surging intensity of the ancient tradition. violent and hopeless attempts have been made to this end, and they have increased recently, but i do not believe that they will amount to anything more than trendy fads. what i mean here by ancient tradition is not the use of column and cornices and all other dated forms – which incidentally will never completely disappear – but rather the pursuit of the organic design of inanimate material; this tradition will dominate our culture as long as man is the measure of all things. the category of gothic emerges already in the very first pages of architektur als symbol, as a negation of the organic architectural growth of a greek temple. in frank’s construction, the ‘intuition’ of the greek temple openly counters intellect and intellectual ornamentation of the gothic cathedral. frank, architektur als symbol, and for the german original: ‘traditionslosigkeit gibt es nicht.’ adolf loos, ‘die alte und die neue richtung in der baukunst’, der architekt, iv, , - in adolf loos, ‘on architecture’, riverside: ariadne press, , - for the english translation; adolf loos, ‘architektur‘ ( ), in adolf loos, trotzdem, innsbruck: brenner verlag, , - , in loos, architecture, - for the english translation; adolf loos, ‘meine bauschule’, in loos, trotzdem, - and loos, architecture, - for the english translation. in many passages the two concepts are switched or superposed, see for instance frank, architektur als symbol, : ‘the iron bridge and the gothic are the poles of our new architecture that presumes to bring together both in thousands variations.’ frank, architektur als symbol, . frank, architektur als symbol, . see below, footnote . caterina cardamone josef frank and the history of architecture... standing in complete opposition to such a free creation is the line of thought of the gothic mode of construction, in which structure and effect complete, excuse, comment and spiral into the air while calling upon a peculiar, scholastic logic in considering themselves to be mutual necessary. this is an overture to the very restrictive mode of thought and work of new architects who direct the designer in all that he does according to the question of ‘to what end?’ compelling him to have justification for everything. from the above passage a first character of gothic emerges, in which frank individuates a profound similarity with neues bauen: the decorative use of structure – and function, in the case of neues bauen – as an effect in itself. the switch of function and mean is typical for both gothic and german contemporary architecture. in various excerpts, frank insists upon the structural / decorative aspects of gothic, on its – even harmonious – system centred on ‘symbols of static’. frank recognises in the pointed arch, ‘the primeval form of the arch’ the symbol of gothic par excellence, a symbol of the weakness of a system that has no function save its own realisation. the parallel to contemporary german architecture and the superposition of gothic past and german present is latent in the entire discussion: ‘when used superfluously, structure or function appears ornamental even to us today.’ furthermore, gothic and german functionalism share a more obvious aspect: their common germanic roots. in both cases, a local limited character, a nationalistic attitude is present, which stands in contrast to the internationalism and openness of classical tradition, and the latter’s possibilities for formal enrichment. if the repertoire of classical architecture - because it is commonly understandable, frank, architektur als symbol, . frank, architektur als symbol, for the ambiguity of ‘mittel’ and ‘zweck’ in german contemporary architecture. about harmony in gothic architecture, frank, architektur als symbol, . the notion of ‘symbols of static’ is consistently developed at the beginning of the s in josef frank, ‘modern architecture and the symbols of statics’, synthese: an international journal devoted to present-day cultural and scientific life, / - ( - ): - now in bojankin, josef frank. schriften/writings, vol. , - . frank, architektur als symbol, and : ‘the pointed arch thus seems to me to be such a characteristic symbol of the gothic, for contained in it is the entire helplessness and weakness of this architecture that, despite all structural boldness, it cannot divest itself of. this pursuit – attempting to prevail over material, which in greece succeeded through intuition – here continually invents new and elaborate structures that have no function save their own realisation. ( … ) all those overly ambitious structures ( … ) were a sort of intellectual ornamentation, and still are today wherever structure is supposed to replace ornament. when used superfluously, structure or function appears ornamental even to us today.’ frank, architektur als symbol, : ‘it is certain that that which is characteristic of medieval art is in large part an achievement of germanic peoples; but it is wrong to try to deduce from this a germanic style that is now supposed to be unique to these peoples, even beyond renaissance. ultimately, the germanic tribes also made classical culture their own without their own independent development.’ also frank, architektur als symbol, . caterina cardamone josef frank and the history of architecture... international and therefore modern – admits renaissances, this is not possible for gothic, because this ‘style’ is ‘too dependent on fleeting trifles’. the latent geographical aspect of the duality is better highlighted in a passage of an unpublished essay dated to the mid-to-late s. the point here is the drawing of a border between two different architectural cultures, mediterranean antique and germanic, an enduring dichotomy that has a profound impact on the contemporary situation. it is significant that, at this precise historical moment, after the - war, austria is explicitly considered to belong in the south: the border between old and new cultures roughly follows the border of the roman empire, along the rhine and the danube; nations west of the rhine and south of the danube belong to the old culture and have traditions derived from antiquity. one of these traditions consists of the unconscious understanding of the essence of form ( … ) lands of new culture started using the forms of antique only after their century long evolution without contributing to its progress and the short time after their adoption was not enough to create a tradition. for this reason, it is difficult for them to create forms that could appear obvious. frank, architektur als symbol, and : ‘the reawakening of gothic forms is limited at the most to peripheral frivolities, to curiosities isolated from life and art that a small scale seem like fun for a while but then get old.’ see also - : ‘a renaissance of gothic can never be possible, even if we are impelled up into the unknown once again by a similar feeling of longing and distress, gloominess and disconsolation. ( … ) i want to explain this difference in very simple terms. when a house is built today in the roman style (style in its most popular understanding) along with its trappings like columns and cornices, etc., it will not attract attention and does not seem the least bit unmodern. on the other hand, any “gothic” building with pointed arches, etc., will give an onlooker the immediate impression: “this is a gothic house”.’ also frank, architektur als symbol, for renaissance of gothic as a ‘delusional’ belief. josef frank, . kunstgewerbe und aberglauben, manuscript, hermann czech archive: post , folio . ‘quer durch europa verläuft die grenze zwischen alter und neuer kultur ungefähr längs des rheins und der donau; das waren die grenzen des römischen reichs; die länder westlich des rheins und südlich der donau gehören der alten kultur an und haben traditionen aus der antike; eine dieser traditionen besteht im unbewussten verständnis für das wesen der form, ohne das es keine kunst geben kann ( … ). die länder der neuen kultur haben die formen der antike nach derer jahrtausende langen entwicklung übernommen ohne selbst an ihnen mitgearbeitet zu haben; die kurze zeit nach deren Übernahme war nicht ausreichend eine tradition zu bilden; es ist deshalb dort schwer für irgend etwas eine selbstverständlich scheinende form zu erfinden.’ this passage recurs, almost literally, in walter sobotka, principles of design, typescript, walter sobotka architectural records and papers, subseries d, box , avery library columbia university: ‘finally typed in ’, . caterina cardamone josef frank and the history of architecture... the two systems are not mutually permeable to each other. german culture arrived late to the classical tradition, and assimilated it as a closed system, without contributing to its growth and development. in parallel with gothic, german contemporary architecture emerges through architektur als symbol as a national and merely economic phenomenon, pretentiously international, trying to impose in europe a german narrow-minded and bourgeois weltanschauung. to conclude, there is a further aspect in the dichotomy of gothic-classical tradition: the countering of gothic mysticism – the same mysticism that also informs the machine age – and renaissance scientific thinking. in his arguments, frank does not deny the powerful consequences of mechanical production in western society and culture. his criticism focuses on the mysticism related to the use of machines and on the supposed necessity to adapt the formal repertoire for the new instruments of production: ‘steel is not a material; it is a worldview.’ reference to the mysticism of gothic recurs in many passages, along with reference to the mysticism of the machine age. architecture of feudalism and scholasticism, gothic ‘gave power to those who knew the answer to the riddle’, in contrast to scientific openness of renaissances. leon battista alberti, in late writings, appears as the most influential representative of this scientific worldview, which does not persist in contemporary architecture. an unpublished passage on alberti’s letter to matteo de’ pasti better explains frank’s vision. in alberti wrote to his master builder who had proposed to open a circular window [in the façade of san francesco in rimini]. i do wish the man in the trade knew his job. i ask him, why do they open up the wall and weaken the structure to make windows? for the sake of the light. well, if you can let me have more light with less weakening the fabric, aren’t you making a mistake giving me an inconvenience of this kind? from right to left of the round window the wall is broken into, and the arch the size of the frank, architektur als symbol, - : . ‘german renaissance was more an acceptance in good faith of hitherto unencountered forms which needed not to be developed for a second time.’ frank, architektur als symbol, , on gothic as national style during the nineteenth century. frank, architektur als symbol, on the cosmopolitanism still lacking in the so-called ‘international style’; frank, architektur als symbol, on economic goals of new german architecture and functionalism as a decorative element. frank, architektur als symbol, : ‘at first, the tuscan renaissance (…) had ideals that seemed to be oriented toward the past; this appears all the more notable, since in each instance scientific progress, traditionlessness, and modern technology are stressed as its exemplary characteristics.’ frank, architektur als symbol, for renaissance as a ‘scientific, anti-metaphysical mode of thought’. for the dictatorship and the religion of the machine, architektur als symbol, , for its mysticism, frank, architektur als symbol, , for its romanticism frank, architektur als symbol, . frank, architektur als symbol, . frank, architektur als symbol, , also for the ‘dictatorship of the machine’. frank, architektur als symbol, , also for the mystical foundation of construction rules in mason guilds. caterina cardamone josef frank and the history of architecture... semicircle has to hold the entire weight above, while below, the fabric is none the stronger for having a round window, and the opening that should give you light is blocked up.’ he demands a functional form of the window, that here becomes a symbol of rational thinking, as the practical value of the form of a window in a religious building is not significant. leon battista alberti and albrecht dürer an uncontested internationalism and a profound scientific attitude constitute two of the principal aspects of classical tradition – in line, we could add, with a rather current and unanimous vision of modernity. frank’s most original contribution to the twentieth-century reception of classical tradition emerges, however, through his particular anthropocentrism. a true lebendigkeit is the strongest issue of classical tradition that frank highlights in opposition to the literary dryness of gothic / neues bauen and its detachment from life. ‘“i should choose” said the shadow of achilles to odysseus when he visited the underworld, “to serve as the hireling of another, of some portionless man whose livelihood was but small, rather than to be the lord over all the dead that have perished”. ( … ) enough with “timeless” art and its eternal values! – for [only] living man epitomizes eternal value.’ attachment to life constitutes the core of frank’s classical based anthropocentrism and the vivid principle of modern architecture. in frank’s vision, man has nothing of immutable ratios that are crucial in frank’s contemporaries’ josef frank, . kunst und wissenshaft, manuscript: hermann czech archive, post , folio - : ‘im jahre schrieb alberti an seinen baumeister als dieser ihm vorgeschlagen hatte, ein rundes fenster zu machen: “ich wünschte dass einer / der vom handwerk ist, seine sache besser verstünde. ich verstehe wohl, dass man eine mauer durchbrechen muss um licht hereinzulassen, auch wenn dadurch ihre festigkeit vermindert wird; der obere bogen des rundfensters trägt die darauf ruhende last. aber die beide zwickel rechts und links des unterem bogens erhöhen nicht die festigkeit und vermauern dazu den teil, der licht hereinlassen soll”. er verlangt eine funktionelle form des fensters, die hier ein symbol des rationalistischen denkens ist, denn der praktische wert der form eines kirchenfensters ist allzu unbedeutend.’ alberti‘s letter to matteo de‘ pasti ( november ) is kept at the pierpont morgan library in new york. see cecil grayson, ‘alberti and the tempio malatestiano: an autograph letter from leon battista alberti to matteo de’ pasti, november [ ], albertiana, , , - : : - for the english translation of the passage. frank, architektur als symbol, , . frank, architektur als symbol, . it is interesting to note that in this passage classicism is proposed also as a cold literary construction, opposed to the true tradition of antiquity. ‘but how cold and constructed do they appear, these products of a literature that has become space, when compared with the last offshoots of the baroque period, of this organically developed renaissance.’ following the historiographical approach of the nineteenth century, baroque is still interpreted as the last part of the renaissance. frank, architektur als symbol, - . it is interesting, in this case, to quote a part of the german original: ‘weg mit der “zeitlosen” kunst und deren ewigkeitswerten! da nur der lebendige mensch der ewigen wert darstellt.’ caterina cardamone josef frank and the history of architecture... proportional systems sketched at that time. in architektur als symbol, man is principally an ‘imperfect intention of nature’; ‘we see in all people – this is instinct or tradition – an imperfect intention of nature, an imperfect striving toward one or more forms that are not universal, an average of all people.’ in his mannigfaltigkeit, his varying and mutable needs, and his sentimentalität, his average values, man is the centre from which the search for modern architecture’s true principles should emanate. but indifference towards the incidental, awareness of the diversity of the world, and the recognition that our emotions have value are among the cornerstones of modern life and its symbols, modern architecture. ( … ) modern is the house that can assimilate all the vitality of our time and still be an organically developed entity. modern german architecture may be objective, practical, correct in principle and sometimes even appealing, but it remains lifeless. lebendigkeit has therefore two aspects: varietas – the core of classical tradition and essence of classical anthropocentrism – and mediocritas – to be understood as moderation and the search for the vital compromises of a via media, as an alternative to pathos and striving towards singles extremes of german modern architecture. both are the inspiring principles of true modern architecture. the reading of de re aedificatoria proves to be determining for the definition of this particular anthropocentrism; varietas and mediocritas are central categories in leon battista alberti’s writing. their reception at the beginning of the s contributes substantially to the definition of the ends of modern architecture. frank’s interest in alberti depends on his academic education at the technische hochschule. in , as mentioned above, frank wrote a dissertation, ueber die urspruengliche gestalt der kirchlichen bauten des leone battista alberti, in which the original projects for alberti’s religious buildings are reconstructed in watercolour plates and sensibly discussed. the originality of frank’s reading of alberti’s work emerges through a comparison with max theuer’s doctoral on this aspect, see jean-louis cohen, ‘le corbusier’s modulor and the debate on proportion in france’, architectural histories, vol. : , . . , http://doi.org/ . /ah.by. in the same collection objects of belief: proportional systems in the history of architecture, see also francesco benelli, ‘rudolf wittkower versus le corbusier: a matter of proportion’, architectural histories, vol. : , . . , http://doi.org/ . /ah.ck. frank, architektur als symbol, . frank, architektur als symbol, and also for a similar passage. for the distance of german architecture from life, also frank, architektur als symbol, . see author, ‘varietas’, passim. for varietas, see martin gosebruch, ‘“varietà” bei leon battista alberti und der wissenschaftliche renaissancebegriff’, zeitschrift für kunstgeschichte, : , , - . alberti discusses the notion of mediocritas in de re aedificatoria, ix, . some of them published and commented in author, cat. n° , , , , , , in cristina acidini, gabriele morolli (eds.), l’uomo del rinascimento. leon battista alberti e le arti a firenze tra ragione e bellezza, firenze: mandragora, . caterina cardamone josef frank and the history of architecture... dissertation, presented in at technische hochschule – it is a work that will constitute the basis for the first german translation of de re aedificatoria published by hugo heller in . the presence of leon battista alberti in architektur als symbol is mostly implicit. the trattatista is explicitly quoted just once in the text – an excerpt from the prologue of the italian version of de pictura ( ), which constitutes, together with de re aedificatoria, a fundamental reference for frank. alberti’s concinnitas is mentioned in two passages as ‘the most important secret of any architecture’. in the concluding lines of the essay, a crucial reference to both varietas and concinnitas reveals the profundity of frank’s reflection on the renaissance and antique principles and their integration in the discourse about modernity. men are alike and yet all different from one another. the leaves of a tree are like each other, but we can never find two that are perfectly identical. all men write the same letters, but their writings are so dissimilar that their entire character can be deduced from them, and copying someone else’s writing is prohibited. ( … ) whence the whole habit of inventing a new writing all the time when the old one still [has] so many possibilities? we will recognize once more that the ancient teachings of the proportions – the eternal harmony of individual parts among themselves and with the whole – mean the most; that nothing was able to destroy this tradition that was and always will be the essence of every architecture; these proportions whose laws are as steadfast as those of man, who in our age has never changed. students will not to have to learn any other rules besides those of the ancient tradition, because irregularity, imperfection, and coincidence [zufälliges] cannot be taught. on the contrary, german classicism – and german neues bauen – are excluded from this vitality of classical tradition, for germany does not belong to the antique tradition. significant for this point is a passage consecrated to the german renaissance and to albrecht dürer. with a historiographical argument, by stigmatising the work of the most influential german artist of the renaissance, frank denies any possibility, for german contemporary architecture, to participate in defining a vision for modern architecture. in architektur als symbol, frank discusses a page-long excerpt from dürer’s underweysung der messung, mit dem zirckel ( ), with the explicit intention of max theuer, leon battista alberti zehn bücher über die baukunst ins deutsche übertragen eingeleitet und mit anmerkungen und zeichnungen versehen durch max theuer, wien und leipzig: heller, . author, ‘frank and leon battista alberti. the reception of de re aedificatoria in josef frank’s writings’, in thun-hohenstein, czech, hackenschmidt (eds.), josef frank. against design, - . frank, architektur als symbol, . frank, architektur als symbol, . frank, architektur als symbol, - . this passage has already been commented by lindegren, theory and polemic, . caterina cardamone josef frank and the history of architecture... comparing ‘[dürer’s teachings] with those of italian theorists’. the chosen passage is about the construction of a ‘victory monument after vanquishing rebellious peasants’. it begins with some remarks about german taste and comments on the introduction of a ‘new style or fashion’ in germany. frank’s review leaves no doubt as to his judgement on german renaissance architecture. dürer was already afflicted by the schism, causing him to waver between unbridled fantasy and rigid rules, the value of which he had learned in italy. this is the typical fate of the german artist who as a result mostly falls when it comes to harmonious creation. his triumphal procession of emperor maximilian exhibits ideas similar to his rules; they are considered literary, just like any modern approach to architecture. it does not matter whether this sort of approach stresses content or structure or function or economy; in any case it is not formal and thus not architecture; in any case it is unilateral and thus not modern. the entire german renaissance built in this way; at its core, it was nothing but a disguised gothic style whose forms were embellished according to new fashions because they were no longer convincing. german classicism has nothing to do with the true tradition of classical culture, a living tradition based on varietas. this notion would become a leitmotif in frank’s late writings. his repeated statements on this issue – targeting in some passages the architecture of mies van der rohe – should suggest a search for a different category; a different adjective to describe frank’s reflection on classical tradition, for a classicist frank is not. the context of contemporary architectural critique: a reactionary- progressive gothic josef frank’s ‘humane architektur’ is based on classical tradition. his particular reception of antique and renaissance principles of varietas and mediocritas are utterly frank, architektur als symbol, . for an outline of dürer’s fortuna in the second half of the s, starting point could be julius schlosser, die kunstliteratur: ein handbuch zur quellenkunde der neueren kunstgeschichte, wien: anton schroll & co., , - . schosser refers to erwin panofsky’s doctoral thesis (dürers kunsttheorie, vornehmlich in ihrer verhältnis zur kunsttheorie des italiener, berlin ). frank’s intents are explicitly similar – to compare dürer’s theory with that of italian writers. frank, architektur als symbol, . frank, architektur als symbol, . frank, architektur als symbol, - . josef frank to walter sobotka, stockholm october , in sobotka, principles of design, : ‘the meaning of the theory of mies v. d. rohe of having to expose the construction is in fact only a variety of ancient classicism of showing the symbols of construction.’ hermann czech, sebastian hackenschmidt, ‘die einrichtung der wohnung von karl und hedwig tedesko’, in thun-hohenstein, czech, hackenschmidt (eds.), josef frank. against design, . see also josef frank to walter sobotka, france (sic), september , in sobotka, caterina cardamone josef frank and the history of architecture... original in the context of contemporary architectural discourse, whose interest in classical repertoire is mostly limited to the discussion of proportional issues. if in a viennese milieu we could easily find a precedent for frank’s attention to the continuity of classical thought in adolf loos’ writings, it is more delicate to provide circumstantiated references for frank’s anthropocentrism based on the classical principle of variety. frank’s ‘humanistic’ standpoint, could partially find a viennese parallel in oskar strnad’s conferences held in the years around the - war, with their open references to renaissance models and the concreteness of masaccio’s representation of man. to some extent, adolf behne’s critique of deutscher werkbund and its ideals is also the expression of a humane vision of architecture. only during the - war, however, in a completely different cultural context, with belgium under german occupation, did victor bourgeois explicitly refer to a renaissance tradition – the humanism of erasmus of rotterdam – as a worldview countering contemporary barbarism. even rarer are contemporary references to varietas, apparently limited to the viennese context. in an article published in , it is frank’s younger colleague walter sobotka who traces an explicit link between the longing for variety in contemporary furnishings and antiquity as a model. more generally, what frank’s contemporaries appreciate in the classical south is rather a mediterranean stimmung, the purity and abstraction of perennial principles of design, : ‘there are now, it seems to me, two types of architecture, “human” and “inhuman”, the latter consists in fulfilling an abstract principle persistently; a rather evil example are mies and his followers.’ this argument is discussed by frank especially in his late correspondence with walter sobotka, published as appendix to sobotka’s principles of design. on this issue see robert trevisiol, ‘gli ultimi giorni dell’antichità’, in giovanni denti (ed.), adolf loos. la cultura del progetto, roma: officina, , typescript kindly provided by the author. for the reception of classical tradition in strnad’s conferences, author, ‘la tradizione classica negli scritti di architettura di josef frank’, ph.d thesis, università degli studi di firenze: , - . the reference is to oskar strnad, kultur und form. vortrag des hernn professor strnad am . janner , typescript, archiv der universität für angewandte kunst, , folios - and - . on this point lindegren, theory and polemic, . it is interesting to note that also adolf behne was an art historian: he studied at the university in berlin with heinrich wöllflin and wrote a doctoral dissertation about ‘das inkrustationsstil in toskana’ ( ). haila ochs, ‘vorwort’, in haila ochs (ed.), adolf behne. architekturkritik in der zeit und über die zeit hinaus. texte - , basel – berlin – boston: birkhäuser, , . victor bourgeois, de l’architecture au temps d’erasme à l’humanisme social de notre époque, bruxelles et paris: a l'enseigne du chat qui pêche, (based on a conference of april ). i am grateful to maarten delbeke for attiring my attention on victor bourgeois’ work. walter sobotka, ‘das möbel als gerät’, innendekoration, xxxii, juni , . see also oskar wlach, ‘zu den arbeiten josef franks’, das interieur, xiii: , , - . wlach describes frank’s interiors – by first reviewing and publishing them – as open to any further enrichment, any further accidental elements that the life of their inhabitants could bring to them. the parallel is to the polychrome variety of italian cinquecento paintings (wlach, ‘arbeiten josef franks’, ). caterina cardamone josef frank and the history of architecture... rules in ‘vernacular’ architecture that constitute one of the major issues of orthodox modernism. the central point to be discussed here, however, is the dichotomy of classical tradition and gothic architecture, proposed by frank, the opposition of two architectural cultures, as a means of interpreting the contemporary architectural situation. as christopher long has pointed out, the dynamics of deutscher and Österreichischer werkbund at the beginning of the s could partially explain the genesis of architektur als symbol and frank’s intentions in his virulent attack to german neues bauen. architektur als symbol is in fact a pamphlet resulting from the polemic arisen by his intervention was ist modern?. frank’s speech, at the occasion of the werkund’s meeting in vienna on june , was published in the official organ of the werkbund (die form) provoking strong reactions of its other members. the delicate political situation at that point should also ultimately be taken into account as one of the possible reasons for frank’s prise de distance from the german ‘mentality’. it is evident in his late writings that the classical category of varietas could also have political implications. the category is charged with values of pluralism and democracy lacking in the architecture of every totalitarianism – german functionalism included. i do not wish to infer that people who do not have a weltanschauung do not necessarily have aesthetical preferences, but principles are different and, under certain circumstances, they can also lead to abstract ideas. they reject closed systems because they have more pleasure in diversity and variety [mannigfaltigkeit und abwechslung] rather than in absolute beauty. their political form of state is what we now currently define as democracy. frank’s dichotomy is inevitably bound to be read in the context of a reactionary approach to architecture at that time. gothic is obviously the german style par excellence in a conservative milieu and mediterranean architecture is jean-françois lejeune and michelangelo sabatino, ‘north versus south. introduction’, in jean-françois lejeune and michelangelo sabatino (eds.), modern architecture and the mediterranean, london and new york: routledge, , , . long, josef frank, - . long, josef frank, - . among reactions, we find the contributions of wilhelm lotz, roger ginzburger, walter riezler. for the reception of middle age in germany during the s and the s, see maike steinkamp, (ed.), mittelalterbilder im nationalsozialismus, berlin: akademie verlag, . josef frank, ‘ . aesthetische weltanschauung’, manuscript, hermann czech archive: post , folio : ‘damit ist aber nicht gesagt, dass diejenigen, die solche [eine weltanschauung] prinzipiell ablehnen, nicht auch nach ästhetischen wünschen handeln, nur sind es andere prinzipien, die unter umständen auch zu einer abstrakten ideen hinleiten. der grund, weshalb sie geschlossene systeme zurückweisen ist der, dass sie mehr gefallen an mannigfaltigkeit und abwechslung finden, als an absoluter schönheit. ihre staatform ist das, was heute im allgemeinen sprachgebrauch demokratie genannt wird.’ caterina cardamone josef frank and the history of architecture... discarded as non-autochthonous, ‘un-german’ in its physiognomy, and foreign. the target of frank’s criticism is, however, not german heimatkunst but left wing german architecture – as well as the agonising german bauhaus, although it is never openly cited. in describing the researches of german functionalism as gothic ‘trifles’, frank assigns neues bauen to the politically ambiguous background that german modern architecture is countering. no difference exists between the two fronts. what is worth noting is that frank’s dialectic, despite inverting the polarity of gothic and classical tradition, never questions the cultural and geographical opposition of the two entities. ambiguous cultural considerations about the ‘physiognomy’ of architecture, therefore, heavily influence the entire architectural discourse of the beginning of the s, their contrasting aims notwithstanding. in his parallel gothic / neues bauen, frank is referring to a well-known aspect of german contemporary architecture. the fascination with gothic architecture is an evident aspect of what we could call expressionist tendencies in german architecture. however, frank associates gothic to german functionalism, proposing a historiographical reading that seems to be confirmed by recent studies. gothic informs architectural researches from bruno taut glass haus for the werkbund exhibition in cologne ( ) up to walter gropius’ weimar haus am horn in , presented like a cathedral in the hands of medieval donor figures. the attention to gothic architecture is not uncommon in contemporary ‘progressive’ architectural writings, where gothic is ‘sublimated into the concept of pure abstract’. frank’s critique calls into question some of the main issues of gothic’s twentieth-century reception. gothic has nothing of the organic growth, the bauwachsen, or of the ‘crystal plant’ – it is perceived as a dry and literary phenomenon. nor is it revolutionary, as assumed by apologists. on the contrary: organic and revolutionary are appropriate adjectives in describing the classical tradition. historiographical context there are different reasons for our interest in architektur als symbol’s historiographical context. josef frank highlights a link between architectural on paul schultze-naumburg use of the adjective, kai k. gutschow, ‘the anti- mediterranean in the literature of modern architecture’, in lejeune and sabatino (eds.), mediterranean, and for schultze-naumburg’s arguments about a ‘germanised’ classicism. on bauhaus as the implicit target of frank’s critique, lindegren, ‘theory and polemic’, . gabriele bryant, ‘gothic of the murdered god: from the crystal creed to the spirit of abstraction in modern german architecture’, in henriette steiner, maximilian sternberg (eds.), phenomenologies of the cities, burlington: ashgate, , for the reference to the bauhaus exhibition postcards designed by gerhard marcks in . bryant’s thesis is that gothic instances sublimated into the concept of pure abstract in modernist architectural theories during the s. bryant, ‘gothic of the murdered god’, . see for instance frank, architektur als symbol, . bryant, ‘gothic of the murdered god’, . the reference is to karl scheffler, der geist der gotik, leipzig: insel verlag, . caterina cardamone josef frank and the history of architecture... historiography and architectural discourse and this link constitutes a central part of his critique of the contemporary situation. the entanglement of historiography and contemporary architectural debate, already put into evidence in some case studies such as rudolf wittkower or le corbusier, has thus a broader context and constitutes a main issue of viennese architecture in the interwar period. this entanglement has different aspects. the first point is the deliberate influence of art historians in the architectural debate, an intervention toward which frank has a critical attitude. ‘art historians (…) – especially since they have also become journalists – will not stop trying to influence and guide processes that cannot be explained to them’, with ‘ruinous effect[s]’ indeed. who the ‘journalists’ are that frank has in mind is difficult to ascertain. in the editorial board of die form, some of the collaborators were educated art historians, such as the editor in chief, walter riezler, author of one of the most staunch reactions to was ist modern?. in vienna, after the - war, dagobert frey held the position of redakteur of der architekt. the second aspect is frank’s own historiographical background. frank’s own historiographical references are significant in acquiring a broader perspective on the cultural context of modernity theory in vienna. an exhaustive analysis of these references in architektur als symbol is, however, still to be written. diverging views are in fact evident in the work of this austrian architect. not surprisingly, jacob burckhardt is the only art historian explicitly cited when defining the notion of the renaissance. from burckhardt derives obviously the idea of continuity of modern history, also present in adolf loos’ writings between and . references directly emerging from the reading of architektur als symbol could be integrated by the rich bibliography of a late typescript by walter sobotka, principles of design ( ). walter sobotka ( - ) was one of frank’s closest colleagues in vienna – a founding member of haus & garten in , with josef frank and oskar wlach. frank and sobotka had an intensive and partially accessible correspondence ( - ) about classical tradition and proportional alina payne, ‘rudolf wittkower and architectural principles in the age of modernism’, journal of the society of architectural historians, , september , - ; benelli, ‘rudolf wittkower’, passim. frank, architektur als symbol, and on popular art history at the beginning of the century and its relationship with contemporary architectural experiments. walter riezler, classical archaeologist and art historian, was editor in chief of die form in and between and . eva chrambach, ‘riezler, walter’, in neue deutsche biographie, ( ), - . see walter riezler, ‘werkbundkrisis?’, die form, : , , - . frey is redakteur from until . for a first approach lindegren, ‘theory and polemic’. lindegren refers to works that were successfull during the s, such as egon friedell, kulturgeschichte der neuzeit, münchen: beck, - and oswald spengler, der untergang des abenlandes, i, wien: verlag braumüller, and ii, münchen: beck, . frank, architektur als symbol, , . on the notion of continuity, depending directly from jakob burckhardt, geschichte der renaissance in italien, stuttgart: ebner & seubert, , see also author, tradizione classica, . caterina cardamone josef frank and the history of architecture... rules. in principles of design, the intention is, once again, to connect historical knowledge to intervention in contemporary discourse. sobotka enlarges the historiographical perspective, extensively quoting the work of julius von schlosser, adolf riegl, heinrich wölfflin, benedetto croce, erwin panofsky, antony blunt and rudolf wittkover. the typescript constitutes a fundamental document for the erudite historiographical references of the wiener moderne. wölfflin draws sobotka’s attention because of his ‘distinction between a northern and a southern art – german and italian expressions in art particularly’. this remark could suggest that we could search in wölfflin a reference also for frank’s opposition of a northern and a southern architectural culture. in principles of design, panofsky is appreciated for an excerpt from the first page of giorgio vasari’s libro ( ), in which he ‘illustrates the distinction between type and style symbols, although using other terms’, a central issue in sobotka’s arguments. panofsky, together with wittkower, plays a crucial role in sobotka’s discussion of proportional systems. we cannot exclude that panofsky was also a reference for frank at the beginning of the s. this circumstance could nuance the question about the cultural matrix of frank’s symbole – whether depending on iconographic studies or on epistemological cues mediated by frank’s brother philip, an active member of the wiener kreis. in this case, the immediate association is with ernst cassirer’s philosophy of symbolic forms, published in three volumes between and – produced in hamburg, with the work undertaken in the cultural sciences library founded by aby warburg. recent studies documented a friendship connection between oskar wlach and the couple ernst and toni cassirer and possibly also the furnishing by haus & garten of an apartment for the couple in breslau ( or ante). on sobotka, author, tradizione classica, - . on sobotka’s initial participation to haus & garten, marlene ott, josef frank ( - ) – möbel und raumgestaltung, doctoral dissertation: universität wien, , - . author, tradizione classica, for more details. sobotka, principles of design, and footnote referring to heinrich wölfflin, the sense of form in art. a comparative psychological study, new york: chelsea publishing comp., . the original italien und das deutsche formgefühl is however contemporary to architektur als symbol and dated . sobotka, principles of design, and footnote . on this aspect author, tradizione classica, . sobotka quotes extensively rudolf wittkower, architectural principles in the age of humanism, london: the warburg institute, and also erwin panofsky, ‘the history of the theory of human proportions as a reflection of the history of styles’, in erwin panofsky, meaning in the visual arts, garden city, new york: doubleday, . on frank’s relationship with the vienna circle, see christopher long, ‘the wayward heir: josef frank’s vienna years, - ’, in stritzler-levine, josef frank, - and author, tradizione classica, - . marlene ott lists an apartment cassirer in breslau (ott, josef frank, - ) furnished by haus & garten in or ante. clients could be ernst cassirer and his viennese wife toni; the correspondence of oskar wlach with his brother armin documents the ties of friendship that existed between the couple and oskar wlach (ott, josef frank, ). caterina cardamone josef frank and the history of architecture... at first sight, probably the most unexpected aspect of frank’s historiographical references is his attention to the work of adolf riegl. riegl’s name is more often linked to the theories of viennese sezession and to the theoretical works of writers such as hermann bahr – to a cultural context apparently extraneous to that of modernism. according to a reading that stresses the opposition between both approaches, the generation of wiener moderne, on the other hand, is supposed to adhere unconditionally to gottfried semper’s vision. there is evidence of a strong reflection on semper’s theoretical legacy in the viennese context at the beginning of the century. oskar strnad’s and oskar wlach’s dissertations demonstrate the depth of interest displayed within the milieu of the technische hochschule where archival research shows that the teachings of der stil were expressly adapted to the necessities of ex cathedra lessons. josef frank’s reconstructions of leon battista alberti’s religious buildings ( ) also bear a heavy cladding, perfectly compatible with viennese research at the beginning of the century. in architektur als symbol, it is a passage about the origin of greek temple that attracts attention, as it emphasises a ‘will’ and highlights the victory on material as the most profound essence of classical tradition. in one passage, moreover, josef frank explicitly criticises the materialism of the semper-school: ‘of course, it could easily be argued in the sense of the structural materialists of the semper-school that these are structural necessities. but who can determine whether it is not the formal tradition that drives our entire structure within these rules’. these remarks should suggest that semper’s and riegl’s reception in vienna was not reduced to a neat countering of the two figures or to their association with two clearly opposed cultural contexts. to conclude, an attempt is made to insert architektur als symbol in the context of the historiographical reception of gothic during the s. probably together with wilhelm worringer’s formprobleme der gotik, it is dagobert frey’s gotik und renaissance als grundlagen der modernen weltanschauung ( ) that marked frank’s historiographical vision. the idea of a cultural continuity – already clearly christopher s. wood, ‘introduction’, in christopher s. wood, the vienna school reader. politics and art historical method in the s, new york: zone books, , . on the general context for gottfried semper’s reception in vienna akos moravánszky, die architektur der donaumonarchie - , budapest: corvina, , - , werner oechslin, stilhülse und kern. otto wagner, adolf loos und der evolutionäre weg zur modernen architektur, zürich: gta / ernst und sohn, . (english translation: werner oechslin, otto wagner, adolf loos and the road to modern architecture, cambridge: cambridge university press, ). for semper’s reception at the technische hochschule and karl mayreder adaptation of der styl to the necessities of ex cathedra courses, caterina cardemone, ‘varietas’. cardemone, frank and alberti, . frank, architektur als symbol, . formprobleme der gotik, first published in munich in (piper), had three editions during the s, in , and . for worringer’s reception, magdalena bushart, der geist der gotik und die expressionistische kunst. kunstgeschichte und kunstthethorie - , münchen: schreiber, . wölfflin’s italien und das deutsche formgefühl, however interesting for the countering of a northern and a southern art, is published in the same and could have no influence on architektur als symbol. caterina cardamone josef frank and the history of architecture... enucleated by jakob burckhardt – is reiterated here, in a context which for different reasons is even closer to frank. ‘our aesthetic sense, our scientific image of the world, our astronomical model of the universe, our sense for justice, our ethics, the laws of the state, our diplomacy: everything has its roots and its profoundest foundation in the renaissance.’ dagobert frey ( - ) constitutes in fact one of the principal connections between the vienna school of history of art at the university and the milieu of architects. he registers at the technische hochschule in and is listed among karl könig’s students – two years older than josef frank, it is not to be excluded that they could have personally met. after a doctoral dissertation on architecture in dalmatia presented in at the technische hochschule, and a thesis on bramante’s drawings for san pietro in rome at the university ( ) under the supervision of max dvořák, he is redakteur of der architekt immediately after the - war. in frey’s approach to art history as geistesgeschichte, it is above all his remarks on the relationships between art and science that could have attracted frank’s attention. in , frey gives two conferences at the Österreichisches museum für kunst und industrie: one about the birth of the renaissance and its relationship with natural sciences and the second about copernicus’ vision in baroque’s raumgestaltung. as mentioned above, there are recurring remarks in frank’s writings about the scientific worldview of the renaissance. the conviction that a new astronomical model could determine the design of new spaces is also a recurring subject in frank’s late writings and it appears, with a clear reference to frank’s example, in sobotka’s principles of design also. in frank’s late writings are the laws of kepler that are linked to the elliptic form of the dome in baroque architecture. dagobert frey, gotik und renaissance als grundlagen der modernen weltanschauung, augsburg: filser, , : ‘unser ästhetisches empfinden, unser naturwissenschaftliches weltbild, unsere kosmisch-astronomischen vorstellungen, unser rechtgefühl und unsere ethik, unser staatsrecht und unsere diplomatie haben in gleicher weise in der renaissance ihre wurzeln, sind in ihren wesentlichen grundlagen bis zum heutigen tage von ihr bestimmt.’ on dagobert frey, ursula gensbaur-bendler, ‘dagobert frey – lebensphilosophische grundlagen seiner kunsttheorie’, wiener jahrbuch für kunstgeschichte, xlii, , - . for dagobert frey as könig’s student, markus kristan, carl könig - . ein neubarocker großstadtarchitekt in wien, wien: holzhausen, , . payne, ‘rudolf wittkower’, footnote remarks that also sigfried giedion’s space, time and architecture could depend on similar arguments derived by dagobert frey and that the austrian historian could also be responsible for the representation of modern architecture as a part of an historical flux. cardemone, tradizione classica, and frey, gotik und renaissance, xiii. frank on elliptical domes in baroque architecture in josef frank, kunst und wissenshaft, manuscript, hermann czech archive, post , folio : ‘die form der kuppel als symbol des universum veränderte sich gemäss neuer wissenschaftlichen entdeckungen, die sich wohl nicht unmittelbar durch anschauung, wohl aber durch vorstellung erfassbar waren. als die keplerischen gesetze lehrten dass sich die planeten in ellipsen um die sonne drehten, so folgte die symbolische form des weltalls getreulich diese lehre, es wurde aus caterina cardamone josef frank and the history of architecture... conclusions josef frank’s strong training in architectural history at the technische hochschule and his doctoral writing on alberti are crucial circumstances for his entire theoretical work and, in particular, for the choice of historiographical arguments in his criticism of neues bauen. gothic, as a category to stigmatise german contemporary architecture, provides a powerful metaphor for his direct criticism not only of the conservative heimat tendencies but also of the left-wing researches of an orthodox modernism. it is not to be excluded that, at this precise historical moment, frank’s remarks could already target a political and ideological context. apparently, moreover, in his dichotomy of gothic and classical tradition, frank simply inverts a successful schema widely discussed during the s. in more general terms, history is an influential instrument in framing the architectural discourse for entire wiener moderne generation. contemporary historiographical works constitute the basis of walter sobotka’s theory of proportioning in principles of design. his references provide a fundamental document for the circulation, use and adjustment of historiographical works in the architectural discourse. on the other hand, first-hand research in florentine proto- renaissance gives the norms to be applied in contemporary praxis, as in the case of oskar wlach. together with the already documented reception of gottfries semper’s theoretical legacy it is now the impact and relevance of other possible sources, such as the work of jakob burckhardt, alois riegl, erwin panofsky, heinrich wölfflin, that has to be taken into account in the viennese architectural context. caterina cardamone wrote her phd at the università di firenze on classical tradition in josef frank’s writings ( ), continued her research on quattrocento architecture, reception of the renaissance in the twentieth century and technical passages in italian renaissance architectural writings; she has been working as a lecturer at the uclouvain-la-neuve since . recent contribution in the exhibition catalogue josef frank. against design (basel: birkhäuser, , - ), conference paper on epistemological aspects of filarete’s libro architettonico (april ), forthcoming essay on varietas in frank’s writings (architectural histories). caterina.cardamone@uclouvain.be this work is licensed under a creative commons attribution- noncommercial . international license. der kugel zu einem ellipsoid.’ also sobotka, principles of design, , with an explicit reference to josef frank for the link between kepler’s laws and elliptic form of the dome. http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/ . / http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/ . / http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/ . / style debates in early th-century german architectural discourse barnstone, da. . style debates in early th-century german architectural discourse. architectural histories, ( ): , pp.  – . doi: https://doi.org/ . /ah. research article style debates in early th-century german architectural discourse deborah ascher barnstone in spite of the negative connotations ‘style’ has in contemporary architectural discourse, in early th- century germany there was no consensus on the meaning or value of the concept amongst architects and critics. although style was a dirty word for some like hermann muthesius, it represented the pinnacle of achievement for others like walter curt behrendt. against the backdrop of behrendt’s famous victory of the new building style, of , were very diverse understandings of the term. this plurality was partly due to conceptual confusion between ‘the styles’ and ‘style’, but it was also a legacy of gottfried semper’s and alois riegl’s respective efforts to resituate style as a practical and historiographical tool. although style was endlessly debated between and by german architects, critics, and intel- lectuals of all stripes, later scholars have either largely overlooked its significance or used the term as a way of describing a particular group of works with a narrow set of formal tropes. the debates, the conceptual confusion, and the incredible variety of opinion over style in early th-century discourse have not been addressed, especially in relation to practicing architects. this essay examines some of the intersecting positions of several important german practitioners to show how the notion of style served as a conceptual framework for divergent modern practices. introduction although written in the late s, sigfried giedion’s observations about style were based on his experiences in the decade before: there is a word we should refrain from using to describe contemporary architecture. this is the word ‘style’. the moment we fence architecture within a notion of ‘style’, we open the door to a formalistic approach. the contemporary movement is not a ‘style’ … it is an approach to life that slumbers unconsciously within all of us. ( giedion : xxxiii) his warning captures the negative attitude toward ‘style’ that many architects had in germany at the time, one that is still common today. for giedion, ‘style’ described architecture of the past, not the present, something outmoded, old-fashioned, and rooted in historicism. the word style was doubly problematic because it referred to outward appearance rather than essence, the invisible and ineffable aspects of an architect’s intentions embed- ded in the form. in spite of these negative connotations of style, there was no consensus on the meaning or value of the concept amongst architects and critics in early th- century germany, and the subject was hotly contested. if style was a dirty word for some, like hermann muthesius, for the influential architecture critic walter curt behrendt it represented the pinnacle of achievement. behrendt returned to the question of style repeatedly between and , adjusting his position but never abandoning his belief that a new style was imminent and necessary (behrendt ; behrendt ). for others, like peter behrens, style was not a particular concern but rather the natural result of the design process, difficult, if not impossible, for contemporaries to discern (behrens ). there were even calls to abandon style in order to discover a new style, a way of using negation to affirm the actual importance of style (hausmann et al. ). these differences in the german attitude toward style were partly due to a conceptual distinction between ‘the styles’ and ‘style’, famously articulated by viollet-le-duc, but they were also, as other essays in this collection of architectural histories show, a legacy of gottfried semper’s and alois riegl’s respective efforts to resituate style as a practical and historiographical tool (mallgrave : – ). the position assumed by architects and critics when they considered style depended on what aspect of style they privileged: building form, aesthetic ordering system, the architect’s intention, or the architecture’s symbolic meaning. this differentiation was further complicated by the fact that these aspects of style were rarely treated completely separately from each other. here, the focus will be less on the intellectual background to the debates and more on the actual debates themselves, looking at some of the key exchanges and statements on style in early th-century germany. university of technology sydney, faculty of design architecture and building, au deborahascher.barnstone@uts.edu.au https://doi.org/ . /ah. mailto:deborahascher.barnstone@uts.edu.au barnstone: style debates in early th-century german architectural discourseart.  , page  of how to understand style style can mean different things. paraphrasing the philosopher nelson goodman, style can be analyzed as the how, the why, or the what, which is precisely what makes it so complex to understand or discuss (goodman : – ). when style describes how a building is designed, it refers to strategies like symmetry, proportion, and repetition, as well as spatial and compositional techniques. when style refers to why a building has come into being, it alludes to the motivations behind design, such as satisfying functional imperatives, site conditions, a spiritual movement or a philosophical con- cept, or responding to societal circumstances. and when style refers to the ways in which architecture is manifest, it indicates the specific ornamental motives, material palette, color, pattern, construction and technical sys- tems. all three of these understandings were present in early th-century discourse, often in overlapping and unclear formulations. the styles, in the german debate, referred to th- century historicism, which relied on the application of historical ornament to a building. hans poelzig typi- fied contemporary attitudes toward the styles when he wrote, ‘we the elders, were hungry for a field that was not plowed, where no written, historicizing stylistic idea governed … it had become customary to see gothic churches, oriental synagogues, and to produce post office buildings in german renaissance. for court buildings one even used cloister baroque’ (poelzig : ). the styles were seen both as a system of design and one of classification. if the styles described goodman’s how and what in a work of architecture, depending on how it was used, style in the singular indicated its why. as richard riemerschmid asserted, ‘style — overall and so also in the fine arts — is an expression of life’ (riemerschmid : ). that is, style is the outward manifestation of every aspect of modernity — politics, society, economics, and culture. if the concept itself was confusing, debates over style in germany between and were further muddied by the expectations that germans had for the aftermath of the first world war. most artists and leading cultural figures on the political left and right initially believed that war would act as catharsis to cleanse german art and culture of what was seen as their stale and bankrupt elements. they believed the result would be a completely new art and culture, a desperately needed break from the aesthetic straitjacket of the long th century. people such as the art critics karl scheffler and richard braungart, the writer thomas mann, the artist franz marc, and the architect peter behrens believed that the war experience would either render artists more sensitive and therefore more expressive or else tear them apart so completely that they would be forced to discover new forms, which would ultimately lead to something totally original and fully german. from the very start of the first world war, a series of articles and artist declarations appeared that proclaimed the end of the old, ineffective art and culture and the beginning of the new. one of the most eloquent, and typ- ical in its sentiments, was karl scheffler’s essay, ‘der krieg’ [the war] in the january issue of kunst und künstler [art and artists]. scheffler begins with this claim: [w]ar is only the means with which to secure the peace and a new spiritual and moral deepening. this deepening power of war … can even be wel- comed as a blessing in the name of art and artists, despite worries, hardships, and the material losses that he will have in the aftermath. it is from this that we hope for a powerful regeneration of ideal- ism; yes, this regeneration has already begun in a gorgeous fashion … in this war with all its sorrows and its curative distress brings us the awaited new culture. (scheffler : ) scheffler concludes by asserting that the war must be a ‘school for talent’, after which national cultural regeneration would be possible. in an article published several weeks later, scheffler explicitly connects the expected new culture and a national style (scheffler : ). scheffler delineates what he saw as the terms of rejuvenated post-war german art; it would consist of a totally new formal language, motivated by sensitivity to contemporary life and idealism. how artists and architects would actually develop this language and deploy it, how- ever, is not clear. the style debate the pervasiveness of the question of style in the period is apparent in the range of publications that treated the subject, from professional journals like die form, deutsche kunstblatt, and kunst und künstler to popular satirical magazines like simplicissimus, wahre jakob and lachen links. behrendt’s book of , der kampf um den stil im kunstgewerbe und in der architektur [the battle for style in applied arts and architecture] may have been one of the very few publications to deploy style in its title, but a raft of books by critics and architects explored the issue. examples include adolf behne’s der wiederkehr der kunst [the return of art] and der moderne zweckbau [the modern functional building], bruno taut’s die neue wohnung: die frau als schöpferin [the new apart- ment: the woman as creator], and ludwig hilbersheimer’s internationale neue baukunst [new international architecture]. many of the articles and books dealt with problems related to new building form, but not exclu- sively; writers were also concerned with the essence of the new architecture, its relationship to contemporary societal challenges, and its ability to positively affect users and the environment. in , the deutsche werkbund released the first issue of its short-lived new publication, die form: monatsschrift für gestaltende arbeit [form: monthly journal for design work]. the decision to feature six articles by well-known practicing architects addressing the question of style in the inaugural issue signaled how critical the question of style was at the time. the contributors were walter riezler ( – ), peter behrens ( – ), richard riemerschmid ( – ), wilhelm kreis ( – ), otto bartning ( – ), and hans poelzig ( – ). barnstone: style debates in early th-century german architectural discourse art.  , page  of behrens and poelzig were transitional figures widely cred- ited with bridging the gap between historicist design and modernism, whereas only bartning represented the s generation (to which the more radical architects walter gropius and bruno taut belonged) that assumed leader- ship roles after the war. although the more extreme view- points to the left and right were not represented in die form, the inaugural issue did address many of the contem- porary perspectives on style, with riezler, riemerschmid, kreis, and bartning supporting the development of a new style, while behrens and poelzig were far more skeptical. in his introduction to the issue, riezler did more than equate form with style; he declared: the goal … is the new style. we are still far from that, and any attempt to use force to create the style would be disastrous. yes, it is better not to think of [style] at all, to be devoted to every task, to seek the proper form, and not control but serve the powers of the mind and fantasy: of course they do not serve any human power but the the divine power of nature. (riezler : ) if architects could solve contemporary design challenges with novel formal approaches, then the new style would emerge (riezler : ). form was not ‘the content of a for- malistic aesthetic’, ‘the exterior of art’, and ‘not even an aes- thetic concept’ (riezler : ). instead, he argued, form was the essence of architecture and the quality that gives ‘new meaning’ to the world. in this, and in line with the german idealist tradition, riezler saw form and style as a truthful artistic mirror of the essential qualities of a period. he made clear that the question of style in the s could not be separated from the first world war and the cultural crisis that was part and parcel of it, a view shared by riemerschmid, kreis, bartning, and poelzig. riezler also wrote that it was crucial to consider the ways in which indus- trialization and machines had changed the world. industrial processes were at the heart of the new type of destructive warfare whose consequences needed to be understood, and were central to the social and technological changes that were affecting all aspects of interwar life. the critical questions for these writers were the follow- ing: is style a relevant consideration, why and how does a style emerge, and what constitutes a style? if style was not necessarily a desirable thing, it was certainly a ger- mane topic that merited discussion. despite their subtly nuanced opinions, they agreed that true style was more than the outward aesthetics, it was a reflection of the essence of the times. riemerschmid made the clearest argument in this regard: since any good design must by definition relate to the conditions of contemporary life, he wrote, style was manifested in the things that humans make, such as architecture, furniture, clothing, household utensils, as the ‘mirror picture’ of the world. by extension, the genesis of a new style lay in the formal challenges of new building types that constituted the essence of modern life, like railroad stations, factories, and cinemas. poelzig extended riemerschmid’s argument by surveying the development of style over time and explaining the connection between architectural expression, style, new materials like steel and concrete, and construction systems like steel-frame (poelzig : – ). all six writers described the manifestation of style using visible aesthetic attributes of building, including its form, layout, material palette, and construction systems. yet herein lay a paradox, since they all believed that true style reflected essential and invisible aspects of contemporary soci- ety. poelzig attacked the ‘logical error’ made by some architects in the s who looked to the machine and technology as the basis of new formal solutions because machines and technology were seen as expressions of modernity. according to poelzig, this was the result of two false beliefs: that style is made by the application of surface ornament to a building and that because style is a visible attribute of architecture, it is something that can be consciously created. in other words, style is the result of artistic creation, not the goal. of the contributors, only poelzig and behrens rejected the notion that an architect could intentionally create a style. behrens anchored his ideas in arguments first promoted by muthesius in his influential essay, stilarchitektur und der baukunst [style architecture and the building art]. according to muthesius, any new architectural form had to respond to the new industrial processes and mate- rials, and the spatial needs of new building types that had appeared because of industrialization, like train stations, factories, and exhibition halls (muthesius ; maciuicka : – ). he wrote that ‘the real values in architec- ture are entirely independent of the stylistic question’, and indeed, ‘a real way of looking at a work of architecture will not speak of style at all’. buildings will embody the lessons found in the new engineering marvels, like train sheds, bridges, and steamships, muthesius believed, without suc- cumbing to a narrow set of aesthetic parameters, to style (muthesius ). in , behrens affirmed muthesius’ position, writing that ‘every period has its unique style, including ours’, although ‘a style is not recognizable in one’s own time but rather can only be perceived at a later time’ (behrens : ). disputes over form even though much of the stylistic debate focused on issues deeper than appearances, periodically formal arguments inevitably bubbled to the fore. after all, the visual quali- ties of architecture were easy to identify and argue about. as the architectural historian richard pommer points out, one of the recurrent flashpoints was the flat roof, which for some became a potent symbol for modern architectural aesthetics (pommer : – ). while modernists were usually pitted against traditionalists, within the progressive groups there was also disagreement about what aesthetic qualities constituted the new architecture and whether aesthetics should be codified at all (gropius ; may ; schultze-naumburg ). the flat roof controversy reached a fever pitch at the werkbund exhibi- tions in stuttgart ( ) and breslau ( ), as well as in the housing projects for the gehag building society that were designed by bruno taut and martin wagner in berlin-zehlendorf. barnstone: style debates in early th-century german architectural discourseart.  , page  of in spite of being profoundly suspicious of formalism, mies van der rohe recognized the necessity of projecting some kind of aesthetic unity at the werkbund exhibition in stuttgart to demonstrate the arrival of the new build- ing style. he therefore insisted on selecting a group of ‘leftist’ architects and developed a set of formal rules for architects designing the project that included using flat roofs, simple volumes, roof gardens, and off-white exteri- ors (pommer and otto : , , ). in breslau, the organizers instituted far looser guidelines because they recognized how aesthetically varied the new architecture actually was. most of the buildings still featured a flat roof, but gustav wolf’s house had a pitched one and others used vivid exterior colors and more complex forms (barnstone : – ). the gehag development was divided into two parts, taut’s uncle tom’s hut colony and wagner’s am fischtal colony. the two are famously pictured across the street from one another, so that the flat roofs and boxy volumes with large, blank walls at uncle tom’s hut stand in stark contrast to the pitched roofs over symmetrical facades peppered with punched windows at am fischtal. the projects seem to be in conversation with one another, engaged in a visual dialectic about the new architecture. the image captures the tension between modernity and tradition endemic to weimar-era culture, usually referred to as the kultur/zivilisation dichotomy, and evident in every aspect of german cultural production (see, for exam- ple, rohrkrämer and bollenbeck ). style as a new formal language walter gropius was one of the first architects who looked to the realms of industry, commerce, and transportation, that is, the new building types that muthesius and behrens had pointed to, not only as the locus in which a new style might be developed but for the elements of that style. by the beginning of the th century, progressive german architects recognized the aesthetic opportunities inherent in designing buildings for the new industrial age; here were building types for which there was no historic precedent and therefore no aesthetic expectations. industrial, commer- cial, and transport buildings were therefore seen as sites for experimentation and the development of a new style — the work of pioneers like poelzig and behrens constituted this approach. gropius realized, however, that such architecture had even more to offer — the simple functional forms and practical hardware used in industrial buildings could be adapted to other architectural programs. that is, not only could industrial buildings be designed as works of architec- ture but the constructive elements of industrial architec- ture could also contribute significantly to the development of a modern style. in , gropius wrote ‘der stilbildende wert industri- eller bau-formen’ [the style-forming value of industrial building forms], one of several essays he wrote between and in which he laid out the ways a new style could emerge (gropius [ ]: ). in the essay, he referred to the ‘wille zur kultur’, [will to culture] and the ‘wille zur form’ [will to form] as two ingredi- ents necessary for the development of a contemporary style (gropius [ ]: ). his formulation con- nected the drive to create a meaningful culture in the broadest possible sense — to encompass all the arts includ- ing architecture — with the determination to give specific form to that culture, to the appearance of a new style. he wrote, ‘the beginnings of a strong and unified will to culture are unmistakable today … [as] art’s longing for a uniform form, for the new awakening of a style; people again realize that the will to form is always the only deter- mining factor in the work of art’ (gropius [ ]: ). gropius also made clear that such form must necessarily derive from the social, political, and spiritual conditions of the time: when these conditions are in flux, as in the th century, it is impossible to develop a clear style: ‘as long as the spiritual concepts of the time fluctuate uncertainly, without a definite clear goal, art also lacks the possibility of developing a style, and hence of gathering the creative will of the many into one concept’ (gropius [ ]: ). gropius even went so far as to suggest that the ‘first meaningful signs’ of a new style manifested themselves in architecture because architecture bridges the practical and the purely aesthetic arts. gropius first attempted to find a method of transform- ing industrial architecture into an art form by making it ‘monumental’, that is, by trying to develop an aesthetic language that would make industrial buildings timeless in the same way that classical temples, renaissance palaces, baroque churches, or other great masterpieces of the past were (gropius [ ]: – ). in much the same way that cathedrals embodied the essence of the gothic period, because of their monumental scale and exemplification of social and cultural values of their time, he believed that industrial buildings were the embodiment of modernity and therefore critical for contemporary architects to design. he wrote, ‘by virtue of their entirely new formal character, [industrial buildings] comprise the harbingers of a coming monumental style’ ( [ ]: – ). again gropius asserted, ‘the longing for a uniform form begins to awaken to a style, [when] the people realize again that the will to form is always the single value-determining aspect in the work of art’ ( [ ]: ). in other words, it was not the form itself that determined value or style but the impe- tus behind the form, the intention. gropius foresaw a fruitful collaboration between architect, industrialist, and technologist to probe the possibilities in the factory building form. ‘precisely shaped form’, he wrote, ‘no randomness, clear contrast, the arrangement of the same parts and the unity of form and color will become, according to the energy and economy of our public life, the aesthetic armor of the modern architect’ ( [ ]: – ). even more significant, gropius explained that to develop a modern style, it was necessary to develop appropriate ‘formtypen’, form types, by which he meant fundamental forms that constituted an aesthetic system. form types in greek classicism, for example, include the doric column, pediment, metope, triglyph, and architrave: a new development of form must take its starting point from these works of industry and technology … [t]he expression of our common lifestyles must also gain in unity. this would then lead to a style that ultimately reaches into the last branches of barnstone: style debates in early th-century german architectural discourse art.  , page  of human art. but it is only when the great happiness of a new faith is to be restored to human beings that art will again fulfill its highest goal, and will be able to reinvent the serene form of ornament to the bitter forms of the beginning as a sign of inner refinement. (gropius : ) this new system has to be deeply rooted in modern society and culture, which in gropius’ mind meant that it had to respond to new technologies and the condi- tions of modern industrial society in a meaningful way. gropius revisited these themes again and again both before and after the first world war, making only small adjustments to his positions after . although gropius used the word style in his prewar essay, he did not return to it after the war. likely, he came to view style as too easily misconstrued and too closely tied to qualities he disliked in art, such as ‘dogma’ and ‘uncrea- tive academicism.’ he vociferously refuted what he saw as the conceptual inaccuracies and limitations in the concept of functionalism, or neues bauen, equally rejecting the notion of a ‘bauhaus style’ and hitchcock and johnson’s ‘international style’ (gropius [ ]; ). he did continue to use other concepts from the prewar essays, however, and treated many of the same concepts that he believed were inextricably tied to style, such as the question of form and where it comes from, the demands of industrial society on architectural invention, the rela- tionship between technology and architecture, and the development of a new architecture reflective of the times (gropius [ / ]: – ; gropius [ ]: – ). gropius also repeatedly advocated freedom from historic styles and preconceived notions of form, was convinced that form is symbolic and not just functional ( [ / ]: ). this last belief is critical for several reasons; it constituted the basis of his arguments against pure function as the driver of aesthetics, but also extended muthesius’ arguments to suggest that meaning is the penultimate determinant of value in architecture. poelzig was one of the pioneers gropius deeply admired for breaking through to a new approach to architecture in exactly the way muthesius had predicted. in his designs for new building types like the chemical factory in luban ( ) and the department store in breslau ( ), poelzig had, gropius thought, developed an architectural language of simple forms and functional spaces without applied ornament or recourse to historicist motifs. yet paradoxi- cally poelzig did not see his work as the beginnings of a style but as individual responses to specific design problems. he was deeply suspicious of any stylistic label. in a lecture to the bund deutscher architekten from , he railed against neue sachlichkeit [new objectivity], which he saw as a codified style, with prescribed aesthetic treatments like white stucco facades, flat roofs, large surfaces of glass, and not a true response to functional imperatives (poelzig gnm, ic ): [i]s new objectivity so absolutely objective? …this kind of new objectivity has in it just as much false romanticism [as other styles] and in the end, inauthenticity is hidden like in any period that gets drunk on a buzzword. it is totally unobjective if i use expensive trusses over long spans without having to, if i omit columns that only make the construction cheaper and easier, and the delusion of the vast expanse of window space is in itself no less erroneous than the earlier architect’s attitude, who believed that proper architecture had to have heavy, damp and thick walls. (poelzig : ) poelzig called these design attributes ‘fashion’, a pejorative term. to him, fashion connoted low art, versus high art, and a passing mode or craze that had no lasting value. fashion was to be avoided because it was fleeting, superficial, and therefore irrelevant (even though being fleeting was also considered a positive attribute of modernism). in , in a letter to bruno taut, poelzig reminded taut that biedermeyer was once considered kitsch fashion and jugendstil was seen as art. by the time of the letter, the reverse was true. in other words, it takes historical distance to be able to differentiate between fashion and style. poelzig was worried that many works that appeared to be good in would not stand the test of time, while others that were overlooked might be greatly appreciated in the future. he pointedly asked, ‘who can guarantee that in another fifteen years a large part of today’s mod- ern production will not again fall prey to the concept of kitsch?’ (poelzig : ). poelzig famously took issue with the direction that the arbeitsrat für kunst was tak- ing under taut’s leadership because he felt the group’s manifestos over-emphasized the role technology should play in architectural expression. he warned that not every- thing related to the machine should be sacred to contem- porary architects, lest they fall into the same rut of their hated th-century predecessors who worshipped historic styles. that is, technology- and machine-inspired forms can easily become superficial stylistic elements that are no different than doric columns, baroque ovals, or gothic tracery. ‘one forgets that all technical forms, in contrast to the absolute meaning of art, only have a relative mean- ing’, he admonished. technical form changes over time, so it cannot be the basis for art or style; architecture is about symbolic form and higher meaning. ‘the logic of art’, he wrote to taut, ‘is not computable but goes against com- putation, [and is] mathematical in the higher meaning of the word’ (poelzig gnm ic ). poelzig was not only at odds with taut but with many others, including gropius, riezler, riemerschmid, and behrendt, who believed that any new style had to relate to modern materials and industrial technology. architecture beyond style bruno taut’s polemical embrace of technology was short- lived. by he had been forced from the arbeitsrat leadership and turned his attention to other concerns. he became convinced that it was necessary to move beyond style, and he used his many publications, including the journal frühlicht [early light] to promote his beliefs. in taut’s mind, the word ‘style’ connoted a historicist approach to design that considers the surface of architecture and its appearance, instead of the space and its essence. nine- teenth-century understandings of style were inadequate, barnstone: style debates in early th-century german architectural discourseart.  , page  of in taut’s view, since they ultimately were concerned with the physical appearance of architecture. to illustrate his point, taut quoted paul scheerbart: ‘in the style, the game is the goal — in the game, the goal is the style — at the goal, the style is the game’ (taut [ ]: ). taut used this kind of circular reasoning, from which it is impossible to extract a definition of any term, to illustrate what he saw as the futility of debates over style. his disparaging atti- tude toward style was directed at all the elements of fash- ionable contemporary architecture; rhythm, for instance, is ‘military, organization, imperialism, mass murder’ (taut [ ]: ). rather than worry about style, it was important to design and construct. taut particularly despised jugendstil, literally the ‘youthful style’, which he derided as ‘swamp chaos’ and part of the dreaded ‘style brew’ because it worked on the surface of buildings, often with complicated applied ornament (taut [ ]: – ). while many of his contemporaries saw jugendstil as one of the first advances toward a non-historically based approach to design, for taut, jugendstil repeated the mistakes of clas- sical, renaissance, baroque, and other historic styles, by relying on an applied ornamental system to create their visual and aesthetic effects. while spurning historical styles, taut did not reject his- tory as a source of insipiration. in several articles penned between and , taut argued that it was in nature and the gothic that architects could discover the princi- ples of modern design. in nature existed ‘the space that we can never emulate, but which drives us to shape a picture of its glory in our buildings’. in the gothic, was the mysti- cal space architecture should aspire to, the marriage of all the arts in the service of architecture in a manner reflective of its time, and the perfect integration of ornament and architecture in a seamless construct (taut [ a]: ; taut [ b]: – ). gothic architecture too incorporated the ineffable magic of light and color that, together, created an otherworldly interior experience. it was this quality that taut sought for in his visionary projects like alpine architektur [alpine architecture] of and auflösung der städte [dissolution of the cities] of , with their unbuildable yet fantastic and enchant- ing glass structures. he called for architects to design using ‘the experience of the soul’, to respond to all the lessons of history and nature. taut loathed style and function in equal measure, seeing both as enemies of good architecture. in ‘eine notwendigkeit’, [a necessity] from he called for the design of buildings that were beyond function, and, in fact, this was how taut described the glass pavilion of ; it ‘had no other purpose than to be beautiful’ (taut [ a]: – ; taut [ b]: ). he wrote, ‘greatest wisdom: build the space!’ (taut [ ]: ). in , in ‘architektur neuer gemeinschaft’ [architecture of the new community], taut explicitly declared that style was not the goal of architectural design (taut [ ]: ). taut hoped for a form of expression that was beyond style — that was both mystical and spiritual. for erich mendelsohn, like taut, style was a mystical concept embodying the very essence of the zeitgeist, ‘the strong spirit that means style for us’, and therefore was exceedingly difficult to achieve but still the ultimate goal for architectural aesthetics (letter of march, in mendelsohn – ). like gropius, mendelsohn defined his position on style before the first world war, then continued to reassert his beliefs in the s. in a letter from march , about hugo von hofmannsthal’s rosenkavalier to his future wife, luise maas, mendelsohn praised ‘the victory of poetic con- tent and wordy delicacy over geometrical style laws and form’ (mendelsohn – ). while he is describ- ing an opera, not architecture, the sentiment is one he applied to all the arts. poetry is the ultimate defining aspect of art and it cannot be reduced to codified laws or mathematical formulas. mendelsohn believed that style was a particular kind of expression of the zeitgeist (mendelsohn ). in his opinion, in a letter dated march , by responding to the inherent qualities of new materials like concrete and steel, a ‘new form’ and ‘new style’ world emerge: the way that building material demands a form, that will fully exploit its technical potential, in order to bring the latent formal possibilities to light … the egyptian pyramids (stone); the greek temples (marble); the pantheon as roman dome construction (form stone); the cathedral (brick); suspension bridges (iron) … the great technical revolution in iron…gave the possibility to be more creative, the means to design something new, to give shape to new building form. … reinforced con- crete is the building material of our new form-will, the new style. (mendelsohn – ) he would later describe the process of discovering the form-will by saying, ‘but we search for the elemental, [and] form is the logical consequence’ (mendelsohn ). mendelsohn’s ‘form-will’ is similar to gropius’s ‘will to form’, but unlike gropius who believed in a compre- hensive cultural source for style, mendelsohn privileged architecture-specific culture: new construction systems, materials, functions, and spatial tropes. simply imitating engineering form would not result in a new architecture, he wrote; architects had to reveal the essence of modern inventions and technology (mendelsohn : ; : ). while he sought new forms that responded to modern building materials and systems, mendelsohn was certain that architecture had to be more than mere form. ‘if he [the architect] feels his work is only a general endeavor to find new forms, he will not be able to recognize false solu- tions’ (mendelsohn : ). architecture had to embody eternal values, he wrote in his march letter (mendelsohn – ). in this view, mendelsohn aligned himself with poelzig, but he differed from many other members of the avant-garde for whom ‘eternal and immutable’ val- ues belonged to the classical arts, not to the modern ones. mendelsohn never explained precisely how the discovery of new forms and style would occur, although he contended that to advance their art architects must use statics, the logic of form, harmony, balance, and the expression of loads, in their composition. rather than attempt a clear description of barnstone: style debates in early th-century german architectural discourse art.  , page  of how style emerges, or how it can be recognized, he resorted to asserting ‘that everyone must feel, that it is right, as it is’. in other words, style is ineffable, impossible to define, tied to the spirit, but nonetheless recognizable in the flesh. unlike mendelsohn, mies van der rohe found the con- cept of style problematic because it suggested conform- ity rather than originality, and appearance rather than essence. his beliefs were similar to those of taut in that he believed style described the outward and superficial aspects of architecture rather than the conceptual and spatial, but he criticized taut’s mysticism and romanti- cism and emphatically pointed to ‘reason, realism and functionalism’ as the driving forces for the new age and its architecture (mies van der rohe [ ]: ). also like taut and behrens, mies asserted, ‘architecture is the will of the epoch translated into space’ ( [ ]: ). the danger, mies believed, lay in a ‘new formalism’, that is, in the superficial application of aesthetic tropes to a design (mies van der rohe : ). according to mies, formalism was concerned with outward appearance and surface, with what was made rather than how or why it was made, with the exterior rather than the interior, the space, or the meaning. formalism meant the mindless repetition of design tropes of every kind for façade composition, plan organization, massing, material choice, construc- tion systems, and details — what he decried as the use of ‘doctrine’ rather than a true response to the program at hand. in mies’s words, ‘we reject all aesthetic speculation, all doctrine, and all formalism … create form out of the nature of the task with the means of our time’ (mies van der rohe [ ]: ). in this critique, mies repeated karl scheffler’s notion of a dualism between formalists and functionalists in german architecture during the s. as detlef mertins pointed out, inherent in mies’s position was an antipathy toward predetermined forms and solutions: in mies’s view, style was just such a form of predetermination (mertins : ). victory of the new building style the dispute over the meaning of style did not eradicate the hope that the changed world ushered in by the end of the first world war would lead to something new in german art and culture. as behrendt’s declaration in der sieg des neuen baustils [victory of the new building style] attested, by the end of the decade some believed that this had come to pass. at the beginning of the book he proclaimed: influenced by the powerful spiritual forces in which the creative work of our time is embodied, the mighty drama of a sweeping transforma- tion is taking place before our eyes. it is the birth of the form of our time. in the course of this dramatic play — amid the conflict and convulsion of old, now meaningless traditions breaking down and new conventions of thinking and feeling arising — new, previously unknown forms are emerging. given their congruous features, they can be discussed as the elements of a new style of building. (behrendt : ) for behrendt, more than most practicing architects, style represented the apotheosis of design: it was no accident that he paired ‘victory’ with ‘style’ in the title of his book. behrendt viewed style as the positive outcome of successful responses to, and architectural expression of, the competing pressures from societal changes and technological inven- tions in an historic period. behrendt repeatedly stressed that style is the spiritual embodiment of contemporary val- ues, the reduction of those values to the most fundamental principles and basic aesthetic elements, in a system that was similar to classicism (behrendt : ). if this new architectural style was characterized by cer- tain visual elements, such as ‘simple, austere form and a clear organization, with smooth, planar walls, and always with a fat roof and straight profiles’, these were second- ary to the forces driving the design (behrendt : ). importantly, behrendt explained the distinction between the functionally derived forms of new technology, such as automobiles, airplanes, and appliances, and aesthet- ics extrapolated from common characteristics of these inventions, like streamlined shapes, clear proportions, and shiny surfaces. simply using the forms from modern engineering without a deeper intention would be pure formalism of very the kind mies was worried about. but this is not what behrendt believed was occurring. the new style did not imitate technological elements, he wrote, but rooted itself in the same design method that had brought them forth; that is, style strove to express the qualities and phenomena of contemporary life in the simplest, most logical and direct manner. key to behrendt’s understanding, therefore, was the notion of style as a process rather than an aesthetic sys- tem (mertins : ). in this way, behrendt addressed the concerns of mies, mendelsohn, taut, poelzig, and muthesius all at once, by imagining an approach to design that was beyond superficial expression, and therefore not fashion, not formalism, and not functionalism. if giedion would come to define style in superficial aesthetic, visual terms only, behrendt was certain that it was more. ‘the new forms will be understood as the result of a new formu- lation of the problem’, he wrote. style was the result of ongoing efforts of architects to ‘shape these new realities [of modern life] spiritually and to master them creatively through design’ (behrendt : & ). the process behrendt described was one of trial, error, and discovery, realized through dialectical exchange — a response to the new norms, inventions, and speed of modern life. notes although style was debated endlessly in s germany by architects, critics, and intellectuals of all stripes, later scholars have either largely overlooked its significance or used the term as a way of describ- ing a particular group of works with a narrow set of formal tropes; see goldhagen ( : – ) and mertins ( ). the origins of the term ‘style’ are dealt with in other essays in this volume. some of the noteworthy essays were those by richard braungart, thomas mann ( ), and karl scheffler, barnstone: style debates in early th-century german architectural discourseart.  , page  of and an essay, ‘die deutsche kunst und der krieg’, by the editors of deutsche kunst und dekoration: monatshefte fuer modern malerei, plastik, architektur, wohnungskunst u. kunsterlisches frauen-arbeiten, ( ): n.p. (https://digi.ub.uni-heidelberg.de/diglit/ dkd / /image). this version of the journal folded after one year and was replaced with die form ohne ornament [form without ornament] in with a new editor, walter curt behrendt. in addition to the architects, the politi- cian theodor heuss authored a short contribution. today the so-called zehlendorf war of the roofs is memorialized with a plaque. see https://www.geden- ktafeln-in-berlin.de/nc/gedenktafeln/gedenktafel- anzeige/tid/zehlendorfer-daecher/. competing interests the author has no competing interests to declare. references unpublished sources mendelsohn, e. – . correspondence of erich and luise mendelsohn, mendelsohn archive, kunstbibliothek berlin. available at: http://ema.smb. museum/de/briefe. mendelsohn, e. . das problem einer neuen baukunst. lecture to the arbeitsrat für kunst berlin. mendelsohn archive, kustbibliothek berlin. mendelsohn, e. . die internationale Übereinstimmung des neuen baugedankens oder dynamik und funktion. lecture at architectura et amicitia, amsterdam. mendelsohn archive, kunstbibliothek berlin. mendelsohn, e. . frank lloyd wright. mendelsohn archive, kunstbibliothek berlin. poelzig, h. . second letter to taut, dated jan. , germanisches nationalmuseum/abk, i.c. poelzig, h. . lecture to the bda, june , germanisches nationalmuseum, poelzig archive, i.c. published sources barnstone, da. . beyond the bauhaus: cultural modernity in breslau, – . ann arbor: university of michigan press. behrendt, wc. . der kampf um den stil im kunstgewerbe und in der architektur. berlin: deutsche verlag. doi: https://doi.org/ . / sil. . behrendt, wc. . der sieg des neuen baustils. stuttgart: fritz wedekind. behrens, p. . stil? die form: zeitschrift für gestaltende arbeit, : – . available at: https://digi.ub.uni-heidel- berg.de/diglit/form / . bollenbeck, g. . bildung und kultur: glanz und elend eines deutschen deutungsmusters. frankfurt am main: suhrkamp. braungart, r. . krieg und kunst. die kunst für alle, : . giedion, s. [ ]. space, time, architecture. cambridge, ma: cambridge university press. goldhagen, sw. . something to talk about: modernism, discourse, style. journal of the society of architectural historians, ( ): . doi: https://doi. org/ . / goodman, n. . the status of style. critical inquiry, ( ): – . doi: https://doi.org/ . / gropius, w. . das flache dach: international umfrage über die technische durchführbarkeit horizontal abgedeckteer dächer und balkone. bauwelt, : – . gropius, w. [ ]. meine konzeption des bauhauses-gedankens. in: gropius, w (ed.), architektur: wege zu einer optischen kultur, – . fischer: frankfurt. gropius, w. [ / ]. grundlagen für neues bauen. in: probst, h (ed.), walter gropius: der architekt und theoretiker, – . ernst: berlin. gropius, w. [ ]. geistige und technische voraussetzungen der neuen baukunst. in: probst, h (ed.), walter gropius: der architekt und theoretiker, – . ernst: berlin. gropius, w. [ ]. monumentale kunst und indus- triebau. printed manuscript for a lecture in hagen , walter gropius archive, bha berlin, / . in: probst, h and schädlich, c (eds.), walter gropius, ausgewählte schriften, : – . berlin: ernst & sohn. gropius, w. [ ]. der stilbildende wert industrieller bauformen. in: probst, h and schädlich, c (eds.), walter gropius, ausgewählte schriften, . berlin: ernst & sohn. hausmann, r, et al. . aufruf zum elementaren kunst. de stijl, ( ): n.p. maciuicka, jv. . hermann muthesius and the reform of german architecture, arts and crafts, – . phd dissertation, university of california, berkeley. mallgrave, h. . gottfried semper: architect of the nineteenth century. new haven: yale university press. mann, t. . krieg! es war reinigung, befreiung, was wir empfanden, und eine ugeheure hoffnung! in: politische schriften und reden, . frankfurt: fischer. may, e. . das flache dach. das neue frankfurt, ( ): . mertins, d. . introduction. in: behrendt, wc (ed.), the victory of the new building style. trans. h mallgrave. los angeles: getty. mertins, d. . architecture of becoming: mies van der rohe and the avant-garde. in: riley, t and bergdoll, b (eds.), mies in berlin. new york: museum of modern art. mies van der rohe, l. . a letter to walter riezler. die form ohne ornament, : . mies van der rohe, l. [ ]. architecture and the times. in: johnson, p (ed.), ludwig mies van der rohe, . new york: museum of modern art. mies van der rohe, l. [ ]. working theses. in: conrads, u (ed.), programmes and manifestoes on th- century architecture. cambridge, mass.: the mit press. available at: https://archive.org/details/ thcarchite ctureprogramsmanifestoes. muthesius, h. . stilarchitektur und die baukunst. mülheim-ruhr: k. schimmelpfeng. available at: https://archive.org/details/stilarchitekturu muth/ page/n . https://digi.ub.uni-heidelberg.de/diglit/dkd / /image https://digi.ub.uni-heidelberg.de/diglit/dkd / /image https://www.gedenktafeln-in-berlin.de/nc/gedenktafeln/gedenktafel-anzeige/tid/zehlendorfer-daecher/ https://www.gedenktafeln-in-berlin.de/nc/gedenktafeln/gedenktafel-anzeige/tid/zehlendorfer-daecher/ https://www.gedenktafeln-in-berlin.de/nc/gedenktafeln/gedenktafel-anzeige/tid/zehlendorfer-daecher/ http://ema.smb.museum/de/briefe http://ema.smb.museum/de/briefe https://doi.org/ . /sil. . https://doi.org/ . /sil. . https://digi.ub.uni-heidelberg.de/diglit/form / https://digi.ub.uni-heidelberg.de/diglit/form / https://doi.org/ . / https://doi.org/ . / https://doi.org/ . / https://archive.org/details/ thcarchitectureprogramsmanifestoes https://archive.org/details/ thcarchitectureprogramsmanifestoes https://archive.org/details/stilarchitekturu muth/page/n https://archive.org/details/stilarchitekturu muth/page/n barnstone: style debates in early th-century german architectural discourse art.  , page  of poelzig, h. . vom bauen unserer zeit. die form: zeitschrift für gestaltende arbeit, : – . https:// digi.ub.uni-heidelberg.de/diglit/form / / image. pommer, r. . the flat roof: a modernist controversy in germany. art journal, ( ): – . doi: https:// doi.org/ . / . . pommer, r and otto, cf. . weissenhof and the modern movement in architecture. chicago: university of chicago press. riezler, w. . zum geleit. die form: zeitschrift für gestaltende arbeit, : – . available at: https://digi. ub.uni-heidelberg.de/diglit/form / /image. rohrkrämer, t. . eine andere moderne? zivilisation- skritik, natur und technik in deutschland, – . paderborn: schöningh. scheffler, k. . der krieg. kunst und künstler, : – . available at: https://digi.ub.uni-heidelberg.de/diglit/ kk / /image. scheffler, k. . kunstgespräche im kriege. kunst und künstler, : – . available at: https://digi.ub.uni- heidelberg.de/diglit/kk / /image. schultze-naumburg, p. . zur frage des schragen und des flachen daches bei unserem wohnhausbau. deutsche bauzeitung, : – , – . taut, b. [ ]. aufruf an die architekten. in: volkmann, b (ed.), bruno taut: – , – . berlin: akademie der künste. taut, b. [ a]. natur und kunst. in: ex oriente lux, – . berlin: gebr. mann. taut, b. [ b]. natur und die baukunst. in: ex oriente lux, – . berlin: gebr. mann. taut, b. [ a]. eine notwendigkeit. in: ex oriente lux, – . berlin: gebr. mann. taut, b. [ b]. glashaus. in: ex oriente lux, – . berlin: gebr. mann. taut, b. [ ]. architektur neuer gemeinschaft. in: ex oriente lux, – . berlin: gebr. mann. how to cite this article: barnstone, da. . style debates in early th-century german architectural discourse. architectural histories, ( ):  , pp.  – . doi: https://doi.org/ . /ah. published: december copyright: © the author(s). this is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution . international license (cc-by . ), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. see http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/ . /. open access architectural histories is a peer-reviewed open access journal published by ubiquity press. https://digi.ub.uni-heidelberg.de/diglit/form / /image https://digi.ub.uni-heidelberg.de/diglit/form / /image https://digi.ub.uni-heidelberg.de/diglit/form / /image https://doi.org/ . / . . https://doi.org/ . / . . https://digi.ub.uni-heidelberg.de/diglit/form / /image https://digi.ub.uni-heidelberg.de/diglit/form / /image https://digi.ub.uni-heidelberg.de/diglit/kk / /image https://digi.ub.uni-heidelberg.de/diglit/kk / /image https://digi.ub.uni-heidelberg.de/diglit/kk / /image https://digi.ub.uni-heidelberg.de/diglit/kk / /image https://doi.org/ . /ah. http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/ . / 	introduction 	how to understand style 	the style debate 	disputes over form 	style as a new formal language 	architecture beyond style 	victory of the new building style 	notes 	competing interests 	references 	unpublished sources 	published sources antagonist images of the turk in early modern european games middle east – topics & arguments # – anti/thesis “the turk” is a multifaceted concept that emerged in the late middle ages in europe, and has gained new faces over the course of time until today. being pri- marily a muslim, the turk usually con- noted the antichrist, infidel, and the ulti- mate enemy. with such attributed qualities, the concept influenced european art and literature by providing a subject with negative visual and textual representations. current scholarly corpus about representations of the turk suffi- ciently investigates the subject, yet, with- out offering different reading and conclu- sion. this paper aims at introducing a new perspective to the image of the turk by shedding light on its representations in early modern european board games and playing cards; thus, contributing to a nou- velle scholarly interest on the image of the turk. it argues that, belonging to a familiar but relatively obscure world of games, board games and playing cards have the potential to reinforce an antith- esis to the negative image of the turk. keywords: image of the turk, board games, playing cards, early modern period, the ottomans the earliest representation of the turk in art appeared in venetian quattrocento paintings as a result of the increasing com- mercial activities of venice, which played a role as the main connection between europe and the levant (raby ). the per- ception of the image of the turk varied depending on the conflicts between venice and the ottomans, usually pro- voked by religious and political propa- ganda. gentile bellini’s circa portrait of mehmed the conqueror, who con- quered constantinople, is one of such rare early examples that reflected an apprecia- tion of an incognito enemy before the early modern period, which had faded over the course of time as tensions increased. bellini, who started a short- lived early renaissance orientalism, was commissioned by mehmed ii, whose pri- vate patronage was “eclectic with a strong interest in both historical and contempo- rary western culture” (raby ). the forma- tion of the holy league of against the ottomans was celebrated in venice with a procession in which “the gran turco [was represented] as a huge dragon with a crescent on its head” (gombrich ). similarly, the battle of vienna, which marked a decisive victory for european forces over the ottomans, was glorified by commissioned artists who symbolized the turk in like manner. such celebrations antagonist images of the turk in early modern european games anti-thesis Ömer fatih parlak middle east – topics & arguments # – inspired not only artistic but also ludic expressions. the turk, with all these qualities, became a part of cultural productions in art and literature. their terrible image was re-pro- duced by artists and writers who needed an antagonist in their works. winning a war against the turk was glorified in paint- ings depicting enslaved turkish soldiers, broken scimitars and ottoman flags on the ground. titian’s - “allegory of the battle of lepanto” represents an exam- ple of such a depiction commemorating victory against the turk. robert daborne’s play “a christian turn’d turk” expressed a deep anxiety of christians’ conversion to islam. religious conversion was regarded as the most gruesome vic- tory that turks could gain at a personal level. the image of the turk from the point of view of the europeans has been broadly investigated by researchers from different fields whose views have been revolving around unfavorable connotations attri- buted to the turks from the time they became a topic in europe in the th cen- tury. these connotations are so strong that it seems impossible to propose a different reading that claims otherwise, due to the fact that the repetitive negative image in historical sources is highly ubiquitous. delicate yet significant new approaches have yielded a more multifaceted image that argues for a revision to the simplistic dichotomy of a positive europe vs. a neg- ative turk. as a researcher on this topic, i find the image of the turk in early modern european board games and playing cards particularly promising, bearing the poten- tial to provide a counterargument to the mainstream image of the turk in other media as well. considering the long history of wars between the ottomans and the europeans, the image of the turk may have emerged out of a perception of fear, threat and aggressive military conditions. thus, according to many scholarly publications, the turk was seen as the enemy, antichrist, infidel, barbarian, and terror of the world. despite the growing interest, early mod- ern writers’ insufficient knowledge about the ottomans consolidated an imagined turk that was widely circulated in many early modern publications. james hankins states that he collected more than four hundred texts on the necessity of a cru- sade against the turk, written by more than fifty humanists and printed between - , and this number is by no means complete (hankins ). in parallel, ottoman advances in balkans, especially in the th century, attracted not only pub- lications, but also translations of docu- ments regarding the turks. in spite of this, early modern humanists situated the turk into a different context by classicizing them in accordance with classical anti- quity, as a result of which the turk was identified with scythians (the epitome of barbarism). the humanists’ insufficient knowledge on one hand, and their grow- ing interest about the turk on the other, resulted with an imagined turk. this approach of the humanists towards “the turk” resonates with what stephen greenblatt calls “engaged representa- tions”: representations override the objec- tive knowledge, as a result of which the points of departure (in our case, of the humanists) are the very imagination (of the turk). studies on how wide the image of the turk spread to the world with european colonialism and missionaries and how fragmented it could get in relation to the geographical and cultural distance show that the image of the turk travelled faster than the turks themselves. however, there are examples in represen- tations of the turk in the early modern period suggesting differing views which should not be disregarded. while tradi- tional historiography claims that muslim communities became inexistent in europe after the spanish reconquista, this notion of a homogenous europe has been criti- anti/thesis middle east – topics & arguments # – cized by tijana krstic. krstic collected the ever-present muslim strata in europe under four groups: slaves and captives, merchants, diplomats and travelers, and scholars (krstic - ). although slavery and captivity are closely related to wars, these groups had constant interaction with the two parties beyond militaristic practices. the intensity of diplomatic “net- works of contacts” and the ottoman “go- betweens” in the mediterranean polities highlighted by emrah safa gürkan are novel scholarly contributions to this end (gürkan - ). anders ingram’s thor- ough inspection of the frequently refer- enced works of richard knolles on the ottomans, on the other hand, reveals that while addressing the ottomans as “the terror of the world”, this early modern english historian had a different mindset that the current scholarship has neglected in its interpretation. (ingram, p. ) this recent research on the familiarity with turks and muslims necessitates a reevaluation of the earlier consensus of a purely negative image of the turk, which will be conducted in an exemplary fashion on the level of card and board games in this article. the turk as a biblical enemy early modern board games and playing cards form a part of cultural production ludic way (jessen - ). thanks to the developments in printing technology pio- neered by johannes gutenberg, early modern european societies could access printed playing cards and board games, with playing cards in particular enjoying an unprecedented popularity. since the production of pictures on the playing cards required skillful woodcut and etch- ing artists, unique pieces of art were pro- duced in this medium by leading german renaissance artists, some of whom also were engaged in the production of other genres such as biblical illustrations. the exotic and uncanny appearance on most of the cards. in this regard, albrecht dürer’s contribution to the early depic- tions of the turk is both paradigmatic and controversial. as raby noted in his “venice, dürer and the oriental mode” ( ), during , all orientals in his works (mostly biblical characters) were ottomans, wear- ing distinctive ottoman headwear such as the turban, taj and börk. however, he also drew turks in compliance with exoticism and by no means derogative. his and card makers alike in establishing a “german” image of the turk. anti/thesis figure : meister pw’s playing cards; turkish king and the over knave. the british museum, inv. num: , . , , . . middle east – topics & arguments # – one of the earliest german woodcut art- ists was meister pw, whose initials appear on a number of works. although little is known about him, he lived and produced his woodcuts in cologne in the last half of the th century. besides illustrations for the bible, he produced playing cards, among which a round deck is the most notable. produced around , this round turk on a playing card: a turkish king, over knave (ober) and under knave (unter) (figure ). the almost identical appearance between meister pw’s turks and dürer’s demonstrates that the former was familiar with the orientals depicted by the latter. peter flötner ( - ), another german card-maker, introduced the turk in his deck to german card players as the king of hearts. the turkish king and his deputy were depicted murdering three children (figure ). as rainer schoch argues in “das flötner’sche kartenspiel”, it is remi- niscent of the biblical story “the massacre army camp can be seen with tents and sol- diers, who are in celebration. the rest of the cards in the deck portray a carni- valesque world with imaginary situations, absurdity, and ordinary people, as well as royalties from around the world: the king of denmark, king of native americans, and the emperor of the holy roman empire (maximilian i or charles v). the presentation of the turkish king card in this fashion shows a contradiction with the other images in the deck, in terms of com- position and religious references. nonetheless, the turkish king represents power, fear and threat. in conclusion, the german depictions of turks on early modern playing cards draw - ent in dürer’s work and connect the turk biblical salvation history. the static turk giuseppe maria mitelli ( – ), a bolognese artist, produced his board games and caricatures during a period when the ottomans and the europeans (mainly the habsburgs and the venetians) were engaged in a number of military con- enemy, generally representing bad luck and the least possible advantage. turks are static and cannot be chosen to play, in some instances even positing the turk as the opponent against which all the players play to win the game. with these qualities, mitelli’s turks constitute fundamental dif- ferences from that of the above-men- tioned german playing cards. mitelli’s “the game of the eagle (il gioco del aquila)”, for instance, was published some time after the battle of vienna (figure ). according to the game’s instructions, the players put coins into the circle in the center of the page. depending anti/thesis figure : peter flötner’s - playing cards; turkish king of hearts on the bottom right. the british museum, inv. num: , . . - . middle east – topics & arguments # – on the number of eyes on the dice thrown by the players, they either pay coins to the pot or take coins from the pot. the possi- ble combinations of eyes on the dice are represented as contestants in a european- turkish struggle. the ottoman comman- ders, who are the result of a throw of dice containing at least one dice with one eye, bear the letter p. , which means paying out one coin. the sole exception in this is the pasha of vidin, who has the minimum dice combination ( - ): when throwing his dice combination, the player pays coins. on the other hand, the imperial eagle pro- tects all european commanders under its wings. all of them bear the letter t. , mean- ing the player should take coin from the pot. a double six dice combination will take all the coins as they correspond to the combination of the imperial eagle. the depiction of the turks in the game is strikingly grotesque, with grades of grief and astonishment visible on their faces. the turk in the center, presumably the sultan, is chained up like all the other turks. the imperial eagle holds the chains of the enslaved pashas. in marked opposi- tion, the chivalric european commanders are protected by the eagle. the knightly turk? although fewer in number, some board games and playing cards represent a markedly different image of the turk. the turk in these games bears neither nega- tive aspects, as in the german tradition, nor are they static, as in the games of mitelli discussed above. on the contrary, they are part of the game and placed on an equal level with europeans. this con- tradiction derives in part from the com- plexity of the gaming world that may sometimes manifest its own reality: ene- mies in reality can become friends in games. interestingly, some of the best examples of such games belonged to the elites of habsburg empire, which had to relationship with the ottomans through- out the early modern period. a prime example of this tradition is a chess set produced in southern germany around the mid- th century (figure ). the chess board has an unconventional × squares and chess pieces, which raises doubts as to whether it was ever played. the pieces include winged stal- anti/thesis figure : giuseppe maria mitelli’s game of the eagle; after . the british museum inv. num: , . . figure : chess set with turkish, spanish and kunsthistorisches museum wien, inv. num: pa and pa middle east – topics & arguments # – anti/thesis lions with black, yellow and red colors on king and queen. this unique set implies that the turk is part of a combined army against a common enemy together with his european friends. in other words, the perception of the turk in this set mani- fests an antithesis to the image of the turk in some sort of opposition that has been discussed so far. a similar perspective can be seen in a set of a board game called langenpuff, which was played with counters and dice. the counters in this game resemble medal- lions and were perhaps produced by medallion artists of the time. the example in viennese kunsthistorisches museum is comprised of counters, who all are ren- dered in the shape of royal persons of the th century, among whom sultan süleyman ( - ) is also present (figure ). produced around - in augsburg, the counter illustrates the ottoman sultan in a realistic way, refrain- ing from any negative depiction. in paral- lel with the above chess set, the counter is a part of the game on equal terms with the other pieces/peoples. a curious deck of english fortune-telling cards is also worth mentioning in this con- text (figure ). dateable to the early s, the deck was produced and sold by a london-based stationer called john lenthall and comprises the typical cards in suits (hearts, diamonds, clubs and spades). the king cards represent four biblical rulers (holofernes, pharaoh, nimrod and herod), and the queens rep- resent four famous women from ancient times (proserpina, semiramis, dido and clytemnestra). the knaves include, as inscribed on the tops of the cards, cupid, wat tyler, john hewson and a certain mahomett in an oriental costume. other cards include a number of implications for fortune-telling and astrological signs, like zodiac diagrams (wayland - ). from the instructions written by lenthall on the “use” cards, the knaves, who hold three books in their hands, lead the player mahomett is, accordingly, a guide that takes the player from one stage to another figure : a game piece representing sultan süleyman, th century augsburg. kunsthistori- sches museum wien, inv. num: figure : some of the cards from lenthall’s fortune- telling cards. mahomett in bottom-left, early th century. the british museum inv. num: , . middle east – topics & arguments # – anti/thesis in search of his/her fortune. from this per- spective, in terms of composition and functionality within the game, mahomett does not bear a negative connotation. in conclusion, the image of the “positive turk” in the examples presented in this article forms an antithesis to the well- known and widespread negative image of the turk. although the image is multifac- eted and cannot be generalized by a sim- plistic dichotomy, the overall conflictive nature of the relationship between the ottomans and europe caused both posi- tive and negative imaginations in the minds of early modern europeans. in this context, it should be noted that the image of the european in early modern ottoman literature was predominantly negative. europe, seen as the land of the infidels (dār-ı küffār) was the ultimate enemy opposing islam. the fact that the positive examples dis- cussed above come mainly from more expensively wrought games played (or exhibited) by the european aristocracy allows the question of whether this posi- tive image was restricted to aristocratic circles, which also showed great interest in oriental fashion. in this context, the pre- dominance of a negative image of the turk in games presumably played by com- mon people suggests a more negative perception of the turk in these social con- texts. as in other instances, the arbitrari- ness and complexity of the gaming world seem to have accommodated different opposed traditions in the representation of the turk, as presented in this paper. Ömer fatih parlak is a ph.d candidate in the autonomous university of barcelona and a member of a research team supervised by professor maría josé vega (uab). he is investigating the image of the turk and the function of the turkish character in games played in early modern europe. he is an active member of the international board game studies association and the society of turkic, ottoman and turkish studies (gtot) in university of hamburg. his research interests lie in the area of early modern europe with special emphasis on reflections of the image of the turk in european arts and literature. email: ofatihparlak@gmail.com notes the ottoman defeat against a european coalition resulted in large celebrations that helped change the ottomans’ invincible image and increased the sense of a united europe. the battle of lepanto, for example, temporarily united the catholic powers of europe; habsburgs, venetians and the papal states. although the battle did not stop the ottoman advance and power, the spectacle of its celebration went beyond the battle so as to cause a downfall of the invincible image of the turk (jordan; gombrich - ). the great siege of vienna comprised even more diverse european forces than that of lepanto, and the victory was celebrated as in post-lepanto celebrations. there are two known decks of cards thematizing the siege of vienna, published in vienna in the beginning of the th century (witzmann “das spiel der mächtigen”, british museum inv. no: , . ). robert schwoebel states that, due to the curiosity emerged in europe about the turk, the ottoman siege of the island of rhodes, for example, covered three history books, one of which was printed ten times between the years - and translated from latin to italian, english and german languages. see, schwoebel, “the shadow of the crescent: the renaissance image of the turk”, b. de graaf, nieuwkoop, . nancy bisaha employs a closer analysis on the question of the turk in early modern humanist writing, rooting the issue from the medieval tradition of crusade literature as a genre, which was re-devised by humanists at the expense of their humanist views. see, bisaha, “creating east and west: renaissance humanists and the ottoman turks”, university of pennsylvania press, philadelphia, . ––› middle east – topics & arguments # – anti/thesis dürer’s orientals included some irrelevancies to their original appearance, which were also copied by german artists. similarities between his orientals’ footwear, for instance, can be followed in figures and , made by different artists. see dürer’s “the whore of babylon” for a better comparison. see caillois “man, play and games”; and huizinga “homo ludens”. this can be better explained by the fact that england followed a different, rather neutral, pathway in its relationship with the ottomans than other continental countries. in search of access to mediterranean waters, england formed an alliance with the ottoman vassal state of morocco. nabil matar states that during the early th century, there were so many british workers in north africa that they established their own lobby. as paulino toledo claims, there had already been an image of the turk in th century chile carried by the spanish conquistadors long before the turks travelled to chile. see: toledo, “türkler ve hıristiyanlar arasında” adlı komedide türk İmgesinin biçimlenmesi” in kumrular (ed.) dünyada türk İmgesi, kitap press, istanbul, ; “İslam korkusu: kökenleri ve türklerin rolü”, doğan kitap press, istanbul, . as paulino toledo claims, there had already been an image of the turk in th century chile carried by the spanish conquistadors long before the turks travelled to chile. see: toledo, ““türkler ve hıristiyanlar arasında” adlı komedide türk İmgesinin biçimlenmesi” in kumrular (ed.) dünyada türk İmgesi, kitap press, istanbul, ; “İslam korkusu: kökenleri ve türklerin rolü”, doğan kitap press, istanbul, . a comparison of dürer’s martyrdom of ten thousand and portrait of süleyman the magnificent clearly shows different approaches to the subject: while the former thematizes the turk in a religious enemy context, the latter implies curiosity. a reflection of the turk in art shaped by a shared trading interest in early modern netherlands was discussed in michael wintle “islam as europe’s ‘other’ in the long term: some discontinuities” in history. the journal of the historical association, , pp. - . for the european interest in oriental dress and motives, see charlotte jirousek “more than oriental splendor: european and ottoman headgear, - ”, in dress ( ) pp: - ; onur inal “women’s fashions in transition: ottoman borderlands and the anglo- ottoman exchange of costumes” in journal of world history, vol. , no. , pp: - ; “turquerie”. the metropolitan museum of art bulletin, new series, vol. , no. , , pp. - . works cited bisaha, nancy. creating east and west: renaissance humanists and the ottoman turks. pennsylvania up, . gombrich, e. h. “celebrations in venice of the holy league and of the victory of lepanto.” studies in renaissance and baroque art presented to anthony blunt, , pp. - . greenblatt, stephen. marvelous possessions: the wonder of the new world. chicago up, . gürkan, “mediating boundaries: mediterranean go-betweens and cross- confessional diplomacy in constantinople, - ” journal of early modern history , , pp: - . hankins, james. “renaissance crusaders: humanist crusade literature in the age of mehmed ii.” dumbarton oaks papers, vol. , , p. . hoffmann, detlef. kartenspiel des meisters pw. heimeran verlag, . holländer, hans; holländer, barbara. spielwelten der kunst - kunstkammerspiele: eine ausstellung des kunsthistorischen museums wien ; kunsthistorisches museum wien, may - august . edited by wilfried seipel, skira, . ingram, “writing the ottomans: turkish history in early modern england”, palgrave macmillian, . jessen, lee kelly “renaissance futures: chance, prediction, and play in northern european visual culture, c. - ”, pp. - . jordan, jenny. „imagined lepanto: turks, mapbooks, intrigue, and spectacular in the sixteenth century construction of .“, ucla, . kumrular, özlem. dünyada türk imgesi. kitap yayınevi, . ---. İslâm korkusu: kökenleri ve türklerin rolü. doğan kitap, . ––› ––› middle east – topics & arguments # – anti/thesis the journal of the playing- card society, vol. , no. , , pp. - . accessed nov. . krstic, “islam and muslims in early modern europe”. early modern european history - , oxford up, pp: - . raby, julian. venice, dürer, and the oriental mode. islamic art publications, . ---. “a sultan of paradox: mehmed the conqueror as a patron of the arts”. oxford art journal, vol. , no. , , pp. - . schoch, rainar. das flötner’sche kartenspiel. piatnik, . schwoebel, robert. the shadow of the crescent: the renaissance image of the turk „( - ) „. b. de graaf, . smoller, laura a. „playing cards and popular culture in sixteenth-century nuremberg.“ sixteenth century journal, vol. , no. , , p. . vitkus, daniel j, and n i. matar. piracy, slavery, and redemption: barbary captivity narratives from early modern england. columbia up, . wayland, virginia, and harold wayland. “lenthall pack no. xviii [fortune-telling cards].” ––› issn: - x http://dx.doi.org/ . / meta. . . escholarship@mcgill.ca - redirect redirecting to: http://escholarship.mcgill.ca microsoft word - (sackeroff) testimonial gesture (formatted draft-final).docx 	
   the testimonial gesture: temporality and mediation in representations of john the baptist by samuel sackeroff b.a., the university of british columbia, a thesis submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of master of arts in the faculty of graduate studies (art history) the university of british columbia (vancouver) august, © samuel sackeroff, ii	
   abstract 	
   in leonardo da vinci’s john the baptist ( - ), the figure of the baptist is shown from the waist up, his form lit evenly against an opaque black background. gazing expectantly at the viewer, the baptist raises his right hand to point toward a referent located just beyond the painting’s frame, absent from the compositional space. unavailable for direct inspection, this referent is accessible only by way of the baptist’s mediating presence. following his ostensive cue, we move toward the absent referent, investing in his presence as a credible ground for such movement, returning to his figure and finger to assure ourselves that our viewing is not in vain. in this thesis i will argue that the willingness to invest in the mediating presence of leonardo’s baptist is paradigmatic of what i will call the “testimonial mode of viewing,” a practice which became condensed in the baptist’s extended index finger, a durable structural feature which i call the “testimonial gesture.” providing a three-stage typology of representations of the baptist, tracing the migration of his figure from the margins of mid to late th-century icons into the center of early th-century panel paintings, i will suggest that the testimonial mode of viewing emerged as a means of preserving the presence of the iconic referent in the face of what hans belting has called the “crisis of the image,” a rupture which threatened to displace the referent by relocating it either in the minds of artists or in context-bound periods. challenging the model of rupture, i will argue that the testimonial mode of viewing constituted a nascent resource to which viewers appealed when confronted by the prospect of rupture in both devotional and secular circumstances in order to preserve the presence of the referent. 	
   	
   	
   	
   	
   	
   	
   iii	
   table of contents 	
   abstract .....................................................................................................................................ii	
   table of contents ............................................................................................................... iii	
   list of figures .........................................................................................................................iv	
   acknowledgments ................................................................................................................ v	
   dedication.................................................................................................................................vi 	
   introduction: the hermeneutic leap .................................................................................................................... 	
   chapter one: referential presence and its discontents ................................ 	
   - : the presence of the iconic referent............................................................................................................. 	
   - : the modern strain........................................................................................................................................... 	
   - : the anti-modern strain................................................................................................................................. 	
   - : the non-modern strain................................................................................................................................. 	
   chapter two: a typology of the baptist ................................................................ 	
   - : from margin to mediator (stage )........................................................................................................... 	
   - : from margin to mediator (stage )........................................................................................................... 	
   - : from margin to mediator (stage )........................................................................................................... 	
   - : the testimonial gesture ............................................................................................................................... 	
   - : the testimonial mode of viewing ............................................................................................................ 	
   chapter three: on rupture and reference ........................................................... 	
   : humanism, history, historia ........................................................................................................................ 	
   : alberti’s aesthetics and the ammonitore .................................................................................................. 	
   	
   epilogue: the nachleben of the testimonial gesture.................................................................................. 	
   	
   figures........................................................................................................................................ 	
   bibliography .......................................................................................................................... 	
   	
   	
   	
   	
   	
   	
   	
   	
   	
   	
   	
   	
   iv	
   list of figures 	
   fig. . gherardo starnina, madonna and child between st. john the baptist and st. nicholas of bari, c. - , tempera on panel, x cm, accademia, florence..................................... 	
   fig. . giovanni antonio boltraffio, madonna with saints john the baptist and sebastian and two donors, c. , oil on wood, x cm, musée du louvre, paris .......................................... 	
   fig. . leonardo da vinci, saint john the baptist, c. - , oil on wood, x cm., musée du louvre, paris.............................................................................................................................. 	
  	
   	
   	
   	
   	
   	
   	
   	
   	
   	
   	
   	
   	
   	
   	
   	
   	
   	
   	
   	
   	
   	
   	
   	
   	
   	
   	
   	
   	
   	
   	
   	
   	
   	
   	
   v	
   acknowledgments for their compassion, dedication and support, i thank my family. in addition to the many words of encouragement spoken, cups of coffee made and knowing jokes told, they have contributed to my growth as a scholar, brother and son in ways that can be neither numbered nor summarized. at the risk of leaving everything else out, i will say that jenny taught me how to see, jim taught me how to work, and caity taught me how to care. this thesis is the result of my tenure as a student of dr. bronwen wilson. as my thesis supervisor, dr. wilson has provided continued support, valuable insight, and a wealth of expertise, enriching all aspects of this project. as a mentor, she has demonstrated diligence, patience, and a healthy amount of restraint without which the maneuvers attempted in the following pages would not have been possible. a series of undergraduate and graduate seminars conducted by dr. wilson introduced me to the rich and varied terrain of early modern art historical scholarship, and her breathless engagement with the many facets of the discipline continues to astound and inspire. i am also grateful to my second readers, dr. marvin s. cohodas and dr. maureen p. ryan, both of whom generously lent their attention to early drafts, offering substantive feedback with which i have been able to refine many of the claims made. i also would like to aknowledge the faculty of the department of art history, visual art and theory at the university of british columbia more broadly. i have benefitted greatly from the unique blend of intellectual rigor, social awareness, and academic collegiality that they have fostered. in particular, i would like to thank dr. charlotte townsend-gault, dr. serge guilbaut, dr. carol knicely, dr. john o’brian and dr. william wood. i would also like to thank deana holmes, michael mao and audrey van slyck for their inestimable contributions to the department. i was fortunate enough to belong to a talented and lively cohort of graduate students, including lisa anderson, michal coughlin, karl fousek, heather muckart, vytas narusevicius, mohommad salemy, kelsey wilson, ivana vranic, erica zacharias, and danijela zutic, among others. i would like to thank each of them for their perceptive conversation and good humor. finally, i am indebted to the social sciences and humanities research council of canada for a joseph-armand bombardier canada graduate scholarship received in , as well as to the university of british columbia for a pacific century graduate scholarship received in . vi	
   dedication for my father, present and absent 	
   introduction: the hermeneutic leap 	
   that is he of whom i said, after me cometh a man which is preferred before me: for he was before me. -john, : - : it is before someone that the witness testifies to the reality of some scene of which he was part of the audience, perhaps as actor or victim, yet, in the moment of testifying, he is in the position of third-person observer with regard to the protagonists of the action. this dialogical structure immediately makes clear the dimension of trust involved. he does not limit himself to saying “i was there,” he adds, “believe me.” -paul ricoeur, memory history, forgetting above all, leonardo da vinci’s saint john the baptist ( - ) [fig. ] asks to be believed. standing alone against a black background, adorned modestly with an animal-skin cloak and a reed-fashioned cross, the baptist turns his gaze expectantly toward the viewer and points with his right hand beyond the painting’s frame toward its referent, the prophesied christ. absent from the composition and unavailable for direct inspection, the painting’s referent can be accessed only by way of the mediating presence of the baptist himself. as we follow his raised arm and outstretched index finger toward the referent, we prepare ourselves for what can only be described as a leap of faith. however, this is not a leap out of the painting but rather a leap into it. for as we move toward the referent beyond the frame, we necessarily confirm our belief in the painting’s own credibility as a ground for such movement, validating what one commentator has called the “that-ness” of its status as a referring object. indeed, the baptist’s left hand, which serves as an ironic double of the right, pointing not beyond the frame but rather toward the baptist himself, anticipates precisely this validation, acknowledging the painting itself as the ultimate site of referential appeal. this leap is familiar to historians. as paul ricoeur notes in memory, history, forgetting, it characterizes one of the central aporias of the historiographical operation as such: the ability to render present an absent past through the mediation of testimony. whether a letter found in a tattered trunk, an artifact recovered in an archaeological dig, or an eyewitness report delivered in 	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
   authorized king james version bible with apocrypha, (oxford: oxford university press, ). paul ricoeur, memory, history, forgetting, trans. kathleen blamey and david pellauer (chicago: university of chicago press, ), p. . robert zwijnenberg, “presence and absence: on leonardo da vinci’s saint john the baptist” in compelling visuality: the work of art in and out of history, ed. claire farago and robert zwijnenberg (minneapolis: university of minnesota press, ), p. . 	
   person, testimonies encountered in the here and now are the sole means by which the anterior referents of the past are made available for interpretation by historians. even when skeptical of their details—their accuracy, their authorship, their dating—historians are nevertheless bound by the peculiarities of their discipline to approach these testimonies on a scale of belief as offering more or less “faithful” accounts of the pasts to which they refer—pasts which would otherwise remain lost. this leap is most familiar, however, to historians of art. as michael anne holly has argued, the play between presence and absence so characteristic of history as a discipline is nowhere more evident than in the sculptures, sketches, paintings and prints that form the basis of art historical practice. “the very materiality of the objects with which we deal presents historians of art with an interpretive paradox absent in other historical inquiries,” holly writes, “for works of art are at the same time lost and found, past and present.” unlike other areas of historical inquiry in which testimonies serve to re-construct pasts from which the testimonies are distinguishable—of nations, trade routes, industries, etc.—the pasts which art historical inquiry re-construct are expected to reside in the testimonies themselves as formal qualities to be encountered by art historians during the interpretive process. it can be said that, at this minimal level, all art historical interpretation implicitly affirms alois riegl’s claim that “no obsolete worldview, once overcome, vanishes immediately from the face of the earth” but rather “continues to reverberate for centuries in outer form.” like leonardo’s baptist, the objects of study with which historians of art deal point ultimately to themselves as the loci of their historical referents. with this in mind, i might revise my initial description of leonardo’s baptist, which now seems to be less concerned with the dogmatic leaps of disciples than with the hermeneutic leaps of (art) historians. in the following pages i will suggest that the precision with which leonardo’s baptist addresses the play between presence and absence so characteristic of the aporetics of testimony is due to the painting’s position at the end of a sequence of representations of the baptist in which a distinctly testimonial mode of viewing emerged and was refined. providing a typology of these representations, following the baptist’s figure as it migrates from the margins of th-century devotional icons to the center of th-century panel paintings, i will argue that this testimonial mode of viewing emerged as a means of mitigating the transition from what hans belting has called the “era of the icon” to the “era of the artwork.” 	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
   ricoeur, memory, history, forgetting, p. michael ann holly, “mourning and method,” in the art bulletin, vol. , no. (dec. ), p . alois riegl, historical grammar of the visual arts, trans. jacqueline e. jung (new york: zone books, ), p. . 	
   for belting, the era of the icon was defined by the inherence of the referent in the icon itself. visited by pilgrims and petitioned by supplicants, the icon was seen as the very locus of the pictured divinity. however, during the th century religious, social and technological events brought about the rupture described by belting as the “crisis of the image.” the era of the artwork followed, and with it the proliferation of objects from which the referent was displaced. belting explains, “the new presence of the work succeeds the former presence of the sacred in the work. but what could this presence mean? it is the presence of an idea that is made visible in the work: the idea of art, as the artist had it in mind.” the crisis of the image heralds for belting the end of the pre-modern practice of icon viewing, with its insistence on god’s divinity manifested as a presence in the work, and the beginning of the modern practice of art viewing, with its insistence on the artist’s idea recognized in the presence of the work. whereas the iconic referent was an element intrinsic to the icon, materially located in chapels and churches, the artistic referent is an element extrinsic to the artwork, conceptually located in the minds of artists. challenging the rupture model on which belting’s analysis is based—a model that has long dominated italian renaissance scholarship —i will argue that the testimonial mode of viewing exemplified by leonardo’s baptist intervened to mitigate precisely this rupture. just as the divide between the era of the icon and the era of the artwork began to open during the th century threatening to displace the referent, representations of the baptist began to proliferate as a genre distinct from the icons on the margins of which they had previously been confined. i will suggest that, as this proliferation continued and the genre became more distinct, the testimonial mode of viewing emerged using the very resources of this threatened displacement to preserve crucial aspects of the practice of icon viewing, ensuring above all the preservation of the referent’s intrinsic presence. in the first chapter i will offer a survey of recent studies of the icon, treating these not only as analyses of the practice of icon viewing but also as indications of broader investments in rupture as a methodological principle in contemporary art history. having established the conditions in which icon viewing took place and the conventions which icon viewing obeyed, i will identify two opposed but complementary strains in icon scholarship, both of which locate icon viewing on the far side of a rupture similar to belting’s “crisis.” the first, which i will call the “modern” strain, celebrates this rupture as the marker of our triumph over superstition. the 	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
   hans belting, likeness and presence: a history of the image before the era of art, trans. edmund jephcott (chicago: university of chicago press, ), p. . for a survey of the role rupture has played in discussions of both chronology and genre in recent icon scholarship, see fredrika jacobs, “rethinking the divide: cult images and the cult of images” in renaissance theory, ed. james elkins and robert williams (new york: routledge, ). 	
   second, which i will call the “anti-modern” strain, laments this rupture as the marker of our lost immersion in the world. in contradistinction to these i will situate my own argument within a third “non-modern” strain which rejects the legitimacy of rupture as a methodological principle altogether. in the second chapter i will turn to representations of the baptist, which i will consider sequentially as belonging to a three-stage typology. the first stage will include representations from the mid to late th century in which the baptist plays a relatively minor role, confined to the margins of conventional icons. the second stage will include representations from the th century in which the baptist plays a moderate role, moving toward the center of less conventional altarpieces. the third stage will include representations from the early th century in which the baptist plays a major role, occupying the center of panel paintings. with each successive stage, the testimonial mode of viewing becomes more refined as the baptist’s figure proceeds in its migration, condensing its properties into its most durable structural feature, the extended index finger pointed beyond the frame, which i will call the “testimonial gesture.” in the third chapter i will describe certain contemporaneous developments in italian humanism which i will claim inherited the testimonial mode of viewing, putting it to work as part of more general efforts to negotiate a host of newly complex relationships with an antique past the potency of which relied on its being simultaneously present and absent. i will devote particular attention to leon battista alberti’s theorization of the “historia” genre in his treatise on painting ( ), specifically his discussion of the genre’s central figure, the ammonitore or “commentator,” the purpose of which, alberti explains, is to mediate the viewing of the genre’s antique scenes by “telling the spectators what is going on” and “beckoning them with his hand to look.” i will offer alberti’s ammonitore as evidence of not only the successful migration of the baptist’s testimonial gesture from the devotional realm of the icon to the secular realm of the historia, but also, as i will argue in a brief epilogue, of the persistence of testimonial viewing as the practice most important to the humanities today. before beginning, two caveats are in order. first: due to the pervasiveness of the rupture model as both an implicit and explicit foundation for historical thinking in the academy, the following pages may cause concern for some readers who might judge the argument as lacking elements of conventional scholarship, foregoing particular considerations of contexts in favor of general considerations of structures. while these concerns are certainly valid, i will suggest that 	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
   i borrow the terms “modern,” “anti-modern,” and “non-modern” from bruno latour, we have never been modern, trans. catherine porter (cambridge: harvard university press, ). leon battista alberti, on painting, trans. cecil grayson (london: penguin books, ), p. . 	
   their validity is attributable to the temporal and political assumptions of the rupture model itself. as such, i ask the reader’s patience and urge him or her to regard these omissions as intentional, motivated by the interventionist nature of the argument. as the following pages will demonstrate, the testimonial mode of viewing requires that we adopt a posture of receptive credulity in order for the structures of works of art to transcend the strictures of fractured time, enabling them to serve as material witnesses encountered in the present of historical events lost to the past, a posture which i too will ask that readers occasionally adopt. second: in an effort to reflect this posture of receptive credulity, i have left the relationships between chapters and subsections somewhat loose. while these conform to a single argument, the reader will at times notice a degree of disjuncture, being asked to move briskly from contemporary theory to formal analysis to biblical exegesis. since works of art often occasion this pace when they are encountered, i trust the reader will consider it appropriate that this pace should be maintained when they are discussed. 	
   chapter one: referential presence and its discontents - : the presence of the iconic referent more than any other class of devotional image in the west, the icon insisted on the inseparability of the divinity to which it referred and its own status as a material object. perceived as “matter imbued with charis, or divine grace” icons functioned within what bissera v. pentcheva has described as complex synaesthetic networks, their gold and silver adornments reflecting the light of candles and their lacquered surfaces reverberating the sounds of worship, rendering their divine referent sensibly present to the viewers whose spaces they shared. these synaesthetic networks in turn belonged within larger, liturgical networks, which in turn reinforced the icon’s claim to referential presence. the more powerfully icons were able to make their divine referents present to viewers, the more valuable they became within medieval and early modern economies of salvation. monasteries, churches and chapels depended on the ability of icons to draw pilgrims from surrounding areas both in order to further doctrinal initiatives, providing a larger and more mobile audience to whom they could preach, and to bring in revenue, providing an annual influx of new and often affluent customers to whom they could sell mementos, accessories and indulgences. all of this required that the icon and its referent remain physically present as material objects available to both supplicants and proprietors. the devout explained the presence of the iconic referent by deferring to a number of origin-myths, all of which strove to establish a direct relationship between the icon as object and 	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
   bissera v. pentcheva, “the performative icon” in the art bulletin, vol. , no. (dec., ), p. . although pentcheva’s discussion concerns byzantine icons specifically, the synaesthetic aspect of icon viewing on which iconic presence depended was associated with icons more broadly. as alexander nagel and christopher s. wood have argued, the synaesthetic emphasis on both the physical fragility of byzantine icons and the precious materials out of which they were fashioned were, along with other aspects of byzantine icon viewing, imported into the west during the late th century as a part of broader attempts to compensate for emergent event-based models of image production and reception. see alexander nagel and christopher s. wood, anachronic renaissance (new york: zone books, ), p. - . richard c. trexler notes the proportional growth of the “miraculous” power of icons and their value as objects of ownership to local churches in “being and non-being: parameters of the miraculous in the traditional religious image” in the miraculous image in the late middle ages and renaissance, ed. erik thunø and gerhard wolf (rome: the biblioca hertziana and the accademia di danimarca, ), p. . on the role of icons in the medieval and early modern economies of salvation, see david freedberg, the power of images: studies in the history and theory of response (chicago: the university of chicago press, ), p. - . as joseph leo koerner argues in the reformation of the image (chicago: the university of chicago press, ) and “the icon and iconoclash” in iconoclash: beyond the image wars in science, religion and art, ed. bruno latour and peter weibel (cambridge: mit press, ), reformation reactions to the icon’s implication in these economies also fortified the physical presence of the iconic referent by visiting their retaliations on the icons themselves. on the influence of eucharistic doctrines of “real presence” on devotional image viewing, see michael camille, the gothic idol: ideology and image-making in medieval art (new york: cambridge university press, ), particularly chapter five, section two, “latria or idolatria: christian theories of sacred figuration,” p. - . 	
   the pictured divinity. the most potent of these involved moments of indexical transfer, exemplified by th-century byzantine accounts of the mandylion of syria and th-century european accounts of the veronica or vera icona of rome. a cloth image from the syrian town of edessa, the mandylion was one of the earliest “true images” of christ. petitioned by the missionary thaddaeus on behalf of the syrian king agbar, who had fallen ill and sought divine aid, christ is said to have consented to have his portrait painted by the missionary since he was unable to travel to syria himself. after unsuccessful attempts to portray his image, christ picked up a nearby piece of fabric to wash his face, impressing his features directly on the cloth. the cloth, accompanied by a letter written by christ authenticating the portrait and expressing his regret at not being able to attend to the king personally, were then taken by thaddaeus to the syrian king. as the portrait entered the city it shattered heathen idols in its wake, toppling them from their columns and leaving its own impression on the tiles below, and when it was presented to agbar, the king was miraculously healed. many elements of the early accounts of the mandylion were absorbed by later accounts of the veronica. also a cloth image, it was said to have been the headdress of a woman from jerusalem which christ used to wipe his sweat-soaked and bloodied face while processing toward the cavalry, leaving the imprint of his features behind as stains on the fabric. like the mandylion, the veronica was sought by an ill-stricken monarch, in this case the roman emperor tiberius, who, when presented with the icon, was, like the syrian king, miraculously healed. both the mandylion and veronica myths rely on moments of indexical transfer in which the icon comes into direct material contact with christ to secure the icon’s status as a “true image” endowed with miraculous properties. as louis marin notes, these portraits did not operate as mimetic approximations of christ, but rather as legitimate instances of his presence: [w]hat the story of the icon of edessa and that of the veronica announce…is the end of the mimetic image in two senses of the term: imitation is here perfectly accomplished in an absolute representation since it presents its object miraculously and without mediation. but the sending of the portrait, instead of jesus himself, puts an end to all mimesis and the desire which it involves of 	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
   for a survey of the theological and philosophical development and application of the concept of the “true image,” see mosche barasch, icon: studies in the history of an idea (new york: new york university press, ), p. - . as barasch explains, early theological discussion of the possibility the “true portrait” begins with the abstract theory of allegorical resemblance put forward by philo of alexandria and concludes with proclus’ concrete theory of material likeness, precursor of the principle of indexical transfer found in the mandylion and veronica myths. belting, p. - . freedberg, . belting, p. . 	
   recognizing the image by the name, of identifying by homonymy the visual with the verbal. as marin explains, the mandylion and the veronica admit no distance between their own object status and christ, the index of whose features they bear. it is in this sense that they served not as mimetic representations, signifying the likeness of christ who would per force remain semiotically absent, but as absolute re-presentations, manifesting the being of christ who, through indexical transfer, they rendered materially present. another, albeit less potent group of origin-myths to which the devout deferred when explaining the presence of the iconic referent featured the apostle luke. unlike the myths of the mandylion and veronica, these relied not the moment of indexical transfer but on the assurance of divine authorship. also emerging during the th-century in the byzantine east, this group recounted scenes in which the virgin, often holding the christ child in her left hand and pointing to him with her right, appeared to the apostle whom she exhorted to paint her portrait, which he composed in the now conventional half-length form of the hodegetria (latin for “indicator of the way”). the half-length form in fact developed from earlier en buste imperial portraits associated with ruler cults, which so effectively captured their sitters that tributes were routinely paid to the portraits themselves rather than to the emperors they depicted. like these earlier imperial portraits, the half-length devotional icons were able to render their referent materially present. however, in their case this ability was attributed to the divine authorship of the apostle, whose brush was often described as being angelically guided, allowing to him to produce a miraculous image of his sitters fit for veneration. in addition to affirming the referent’s material presence, these myths also affirmed the referent’s temporal presence. the icons resulting from the moment of indexical transfer recounted in the myths of the mandylion and veronica and the divine authorship recounted in the myth of the hodegetria were described in greek as a-cheiro-poiēton, or “not made by hands” and in latin as non manufactum, or “not hand-made.” both terms served what must ultimately be considered a temporal function, providing a means of suppressing the problematic instant of willed 	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
   louis marin, “the figurability of the visual: the veronica or the question of the portrait at port- royal,“ trans. marie maclean in new literary history, vol. , no. , probings: art, criticism, genre (spring, ), p. . for discussion of st. luke and the hodegetria half-length mode, see rona goffen, “icon and vision: giovanni bellini’s half-length madonnas” in the art bulletin, vol. , no. (december, ), p. - . david and tamara talbot rice, icons and their history (woodstock: the overlook press, ), p. . for a discussion of the relationship between the half-length icon and imperial portraits, see belting, p. - , and sixten ringbom, icon to narrative: the rise of the dramatic close-up in fifteenth-century devotional painting (doornspijk, the netherlands: davaco, ), p. - . belting, p. . 	
   manufacture. for icons to fulfill their devotional obligation, they had to foster an unbroken temporal continuity between the divinity to which the referred and the devout by which they were viewed—a continuity that would be shattered were they seen as the subjective or arbitrary products of autonomous individuals occupying one instant among many. indeed, each myth- group suppressed particular aspects of willed manufacture. in the mandylion and veronica myths, its instant-oriented aspects were suppressed through the self-effacing character of the moment of indexical transfer, the instantaneous properties of which were nullified by the subsequent equivalence of christ and cloth. in the hodegetria myths, its subject-oriented aspects were suppressed through the self-effacing character of the apostle’s authorship, the autonomy of which was nullified by the divine appearance of the virgin and child, their exhortation to be painted, and the accounts of angelic assistance. the ability of these myths to suppress particular aspects of willed manufacture, specifically the discontinuity of instants to which these aspects threatened to give rise, allowed the iconic referent to be not only materially present in the viewer’s space, but also temporally present in the viewer’s time. by being affiliated with either myth-group, whether claiming to actually be the mandylion, veronica, or hodegetria themselves, or more modestly posing as an accurate replication of one of these prototypes, icons were able to suspend questions of manufacture and with them the threat of time’s fracturing, allowing the fabric of history to fold onto itself with the icons threading together the centuries, bringing their divine referents with them into both the material and temporal presence of the viewer. although regularly qualified and occasionally refined, there has been little essential variation among accounts of the referential conventions icons obeyed. the presence of the iconic referent has long been accepted in art historical scholarship, with both its historical and theoretical currency remaining remarkably consistent. considerable variation can, however, be found in the roles icons have played in this literature. this variation derives for the most part from the different ways in which icons and the referential presence they facilitate(d) have been located chronologically vis-à-vis the historians engaged in their analysis, and is comprised of three strains: the modern, the anti-modern, and the non-modern. as i will demonstrate in the remaining sections of this chapter, the chronological location of the icon by each strain serves a broader purpose, allowing art historians belonging to those strains a means of articulating their 	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
   victor ieronim stoichita notes the paradoxical status of authorship in myths of the hodegetria, which became increasingly apparent as notions of individual authorship preoccupied artists and viewers to ever- greater degrees during the th and th centuries in his a short history of the shadow, trans. anne-marie glasheen (london: reaktion books, ), p. - . i discuss the nuances of the temporal presence of the iconic referent and the temporal complexities of the relationship between prototype and replication more thoroughly in section of this chapter. 	
   commitment to the temporal frameworks that define the methodologies they employ. these strains and the temporal frameworks to which they are committed can be best described by addressing the degree to which each invests in rupture as a methodological principle. - : the modern strain the earliest and most influential strain in icon scholarship is the modern strain. before turning to case studies paradigmatic of this strain, i must first describe its basic properties. the most important among these is a commitment to the saeculum (latin for “aeon” or “age”), the two constituents of which are the secular temporal order and the secular political order. as charles taylor explains, the secular temporal order is made up of a succession of discrete temporal units, whether they be seconds, minutes, eras or epochs, which follow one another horizontally, extending infinitely in a linear fashion. to exist exclusively in secular time is to admit no violation of this linearity. although the units can be distinguished quantitatively they cannot be distinguished qualitatively, since all fall within a span that is itself infinite, lacking both a beginning (origin) and end (telos) capable of grounding qualitative relationships between any of the particular units, which walter benjamin called “empty homogenous time.” as taylor explains, if taken to its limit, all discussions of historical events taking place within the secular temporal order will be restricted to quantitative statements regarding the transitive positions those events occupy along the order’s horizontal line, observing that “if a is before b and b before c, then a is before c,” or “if a is long before b, and b is long before c, then a is very long before c.” most often, however, the secular temporal order is manifested more mildly in the succession of hours that make up what taylor calls the “ordinary” or “clock” time in which much of our day- to-day lives take place. the secular temporal order supports and is supported by the secular political order. indeed, it is on the succession of discrete temporal units that the model of revolutionary action peculiar to the secular political order relies. this model of action requires an autonomous subject or group of subjects who regard their temporal position as utterly dissimilar to both that by which they are immediately preceded, from the influence of which they hope to extricate themselves, and that by which they will be immediately followed, the arrival of which they hope to bring about. furthermore, it is on behalf of the interests that preoccupy us in the “ordinary” or “clock” time of our day-to-day lives that this revolutionary action is pursued. as hannah arendt has 	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
   water benjamin, illuminations (london: fontana, ), p. ; cited by charles taylor in a secular age (cambridge: the belknap press of harvard university, ), p. . charles taylor, a secular age, p. . 	
   argued in her discussions of karl marx, whose writing on icons will serve as my second case study, the majority of revolutionary action is in fact concerned not with securing access to the material resources necessary for our liberation from the metabolic cycles of production and consumption so characteristic of day-to-day labor, but rather with using these resources to assure the most uninhibited conditions in which these cycles can be perpetuated, a contradiction which arendt registers by describing marx’s revolutionary subject as “animal laborans.” however, as arendt notes, this contradiction is not attributable to any particular failing in marx’s thinking, but rather to the temporal framework on which his thinking relies. it is to these two constituents of the saeculum—that is, the secular temporal order and the secular political order—that scholarship belonging to the modern strain remains ultimately committed. indeed, the very designation “modern” presupposes these constituents. in addition to presuming a discrete “pre-modern” temporal position in contradistinction to which it defines itself, it also describes the breaks between these temporal positions in revolutionary terms, with the moderns standing victorious over their conquered predecessors. as bruno latour observes: when the word ‘modern,’ ‘modernization,’ or ‘modernity’ appears, we are defining, by contrast, an archaic and stable past. furthermore, the word is always being thrown into the middle of a fight, in a quarrel where there are winners and losers, ancients and moderns. ‘modern’ is thus doubly asymmetrical: it designates a break in the regular passage of time, and it designates a combat in which there are victors and vanquished. given the icon’s ability to suspend time’s fracturing and relevance of autonomous individuals by suppressing the instant- and subject-oriented aspects of willed manufacture, it is unsurprising that scholars belonging to the modern strain should seek to distance themselves from icons and icon veneration. in each of the three case studies i offer as paradigmatic of this strain—jacob burckhardt’s the civilization of the renaissance in italy ( ), karl marx’s capital, vol. ( ) and jean baudrillard’s simulacra and simulation ( )—this distance is achieved by resorting to one of the strain’s primary conceits—that of rupture. rupture is asserted most forcefully in burckhardt’s text, dividing the pre-modern middle ages from the modern renaissance. on far side of this rupture lies pre-modern subjectivity: 	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
   hannah arendt, the human condition (chicago: the university of chicago press, ), p. - . arendt continues, “marx’s attitude toward labor, and that is toward the very center of his thought, has never ceased to be equivocal. while it was an ‘eternal necessity imposed by nature’ and the most human and productive of man’s activities, the revolution, according to marx, has not the task of emancipating the laboring classes but of emancipating man from labor; only when labor is abolished can the ‘realm of freedom’ supplant the ‘realm of necessity.’ for ‘the realm of freedom begins only where labor determined through want and external utility ceases,’ where ‘the rule of immediate physical needs’ ends. such a fundamental and flagrant contradiction rarely occurs in second-rate writers; in the work of the great authors they lead into the very center of their work.” latour, we have never been modern, p. . 	
   immature, un-individuated, and absorbed in the superstitious religious practice of icon viewing. on its near side lies modern subjectivity; mature, individuated, and concerned with the rational secular practice of art viewing. it is this rupture, to which burckhardt refers as “the discovery of the world and of man,” that marks both the arrival and triumph of modernity as such: in the middle ages both sides of human consciousness—that which was turned within as that which was turned without—lay dreaming or half awake beneath a common veil. the veil was woven of faith, illusion and childish presuppositions, through which the world and history were seen clad in strange hues. man was conscious of himself only as a member of a race, people, party, family or corporation—only through some general category. in italy this veil first melted into air: an objective treatment and consideration of the state and of all things of this world became possible. the subjective side at the same time asserted itself with corresponding emphasis; man became a spiritual individual and recognized himself as such [burckhardt’s emphasis]. remarkable in this passage is the clarity with which burckhardt demonstrates the role rupture itself plays as the guarantor of modernity. it is by epistemologically breaking with the pre-modern era and tearing off the “common veil woven of faith, illusion and childish presuppositions” that modern man establishes himself as an individual subject capable of objective scrutiny. one of the primary purposes of historical scholarship in the modern strain is the reassertion of this rupture and of the modern subjectivity it bestows on themselves and their readers. this is evident in burckhardt’s description of the modern world as “this” world—that is, that to which he and his readers also belong. a more resounding example is found in burckhardt’s introduction to his chapter on renaissance morality and religion, in which he insists on maintaining distance between himself as a historian and his objects of study. “what follows,” burckhardt writes, “is no judgment, but rather a string of marginal notes, suggested by a study of the italian renaissance extending over some years.” it is this insistence on distance and deferral of judgment that causes hayden white to regard burckhardt’s scholastic position as essentially 	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
   jacob burckhardt, the civilization of the renaissance, trans. s. g. c. middlemore (london: penguin classics, ), p. - . ibid, p. . the continued centrality of burckhardt’s text as a paradigmatic example of the rupture model in art history generally and in italian renaissance art history particularly was recently noted by ethan matt kavaler during a seminar which included as participants stephen campbell, michael cole, james elkins, claire farago, fredrika jacobs and robert williams, the proceedings of which have been published in renaissance theory, ed. james elkins and robert williams (new york: routledge, ). kavaler observes: “although there is a strain in northern renaissance studies that emphasizes ties with the middle ages, another one of those problematic periods, most of us who study the renaissance have an idea of italy as central…italian culture is usually considered to have initiated many of the traditions of the modern world, and that is one of the reasons why the substitution of ‘early modern’ for ‘renaissance’ doesn’t really revise the situation; ‘early modern’ denotes even more forcefully the earliest stages of modernity. this alternate expression continues the tradition of burckhardt, with renaissance italy as the birthplace of the modern world. that’s really a heritage that we have not successfully come to terms with” ( ). ibid, p. . 	
   ironic. “he apprehended the world of historical objects as a literal ‘satura,’ stew or medley, fragments of objects detached from their original contexts or whose contexts are unknowable,” white writes, “capable of being put together in a number of ways, of figuring a host of different possible and equally valid meanings.” white continues: the story he told was ironic, with its aphoristic style, anecdotes, witticisms, and throwaway… the plot structure of this story was ironic; that is to say, ‘the point of it all’ was that there is no ‘point’ toward which things in general tend, no epiphanies of law, no ultimate reconciliations, no transcendence. by maintaining an ironic distance between himself and the historical fragments he arbitrarily configures and re-configures, burckhardt epitomizes the modern strain’s resort to rupture— between the pre-modern and the modern, the subject and object, the historian and his objects of study—as a conceit capable of achieving the more particular distance between scholars belonging to the modern strain and those aspects of icon viewing most threatening to the temporal and political constituents of the saeculum to which they are committed. while burckhardt includes icon viewing within his more general account of pre-modern practices, marx accords icons more dedicated attention. like burckhardt, he describes a rupture between pre-modernity and modernity. however, unlike burckhardt, he is concerned less with establishing this rupture than with critiquing those elements of modernity that jeopardize the secular temporal order to which the methodological principle of rupture belongs. most glaring among these is modernity’s own species of icon—or, to adopt marx’s own vocabulary, of idol— the commodity fetish. the commodity fetish is objectionable not simply because it provokes false consciousness, but because it does so by reversing the transitive relationship between labor-value and exchange-value, frustrating the linearity of the secular temporal order. although labor-value precedes exchange-value in time, a product of the effort expended in the manufacture of objects themselves, the commodity fetish privileges exchange-value, a product of the social circumstances of markets in which those objects are traded. by privileging exchange value, the commodity fetish frustrates the linearity of the secular temporal order, imperiling the modern subjectivity that it bestows. it is the ability of the commodity fetish to frustrate the secular temporal order and imperil modern subjectivity that causes marx to liken it to a pre-modern icon- idol: the form of wood for instance is altered if a table is made out of it. nevertheless it continues to be wood, an ordinary, sensuous thing. but as soon as it emerges as a commodity, it changes into a thing which transcends sensuousness. it not only stands with its feet on the ground, but, in relation to all other commodities, it 	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
   hayden white, metahistory: the historical imagination in nineteenth-century europe (baltimore: johns hopkins university press, ), p. - . 	
   stands on its head, and evolves out of its wooden brain grotesque ideas, far more wonderful than if it were to begin dancing of its own free will. most significant in this passage is marx’s attitude toward the agency of the commodity fetish. at the moment when the manufactured object (table) becomes a commodity (icon-idol), it is endowed with the ability to “evolve out of its wooden brain grotesque ideas,” assuming for itself the role of active agent in the world. from a marxist perspective this is objectionable precisely because it allows the commodity fetish to usurp its producer temporally, claiming its traffic in markets as the source not only of economic worth, but of action as such. it is in this sense that the marxist historian can be deemed an iconoclast. by critiquing processes of commodity exchange, he or she seeks to restrict the agency of the idolized commodity-fetish by re-establishing the temporal precedence of labor-value. as w. j. t. mitchell explains, from the marxist perspective “the idolater has ‘forgotten’ something—his own act of projection—and thus he must be cured by memory and historical consciousness.” mitchell continues, “the iconoclast sees himself at a historical distance from the idolater, working from a more ‘advanced’ or ‘developed’ stage in human evolution, therefore in a position to provide a euhemeristic, historicizing interpretation of myths taken literally by the idolater.” as this description implies, in the final analysis it is the linear succession of discrete temporal units and the modern subjectivity this linear succession allows that marxist iconoclastic critiques strive to uphold. by reminding the idolater of the precedence of labor-value the marxist iconoclast-critic, like burckhardt and all other scholars belonging to the modern strain, reasserts the ruptures on which the secular temporal order that grounds his or her modern subjectivity relies. a more recent example of the modern strain is found in the work of jean baudrillard. like marx, baudrillard is more concerned with the upholding rather than establishing the secular temporal order that the icon frustrates. indeed, the first chapter of baudrillard’s simulacra and simulation can be read as a post-revolutionary reprisal of marx’s discussion of the commodity fetish. for baudrillard, the icon upsets the linearity of the secular temporal order by occasioning what he describes as the “precession of the simulacra.” the precession of the simulacra occurs when there ceases to be any qualitative difference between prototype and replication, sign and signified, reality and its simulation. by insisting on the inseparability of the divinity to which it refers and its own status as a material object, the icon threatens these relationships, confusing the latter with the former in each pair, begging the question: 	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
   karl marx, capital, vol. , trans. ben fowkes (london: penguin classics, ), p. - . w. j. t. mitchell, “the rhetoric of iconoclasm: marxism, ideology, and fetishism” in iconology: image, text, ideology (chicago: the university of chicago press, ), p. . jean baudrillard, simulacra and simulation, trans. sheila faria glaser (ann arbor: university of michigan press, ), p. . 	
   [w]hat becomes of the divinity when it reveals itself in icons, when it is multiplied in simulacra? does it remain the supreme power that is simply incarnated in images as a visible theology? or does it volatize itself in the simulacra that, alone, deploy their power and pomp of fascination—the visible machinery of icons substituted for the pure and intelligible idea of god? as in marx’s description of the commodity fetish, it is the icon’s ability to frustrate the linearity of the secular temporal order—that is, its ability to occasion the phenomenon of “precession” as such—to which baudrillard takes objection. however, unlike marx, baudrillard suggests that, even if it were upheld, the secular temporal order would no longer pay the political dividends it once had. although the “order of history, science, and museums, our order” still persists, “it no longer masters anything.” once the transitive relationships between prototype and replication, sign and signified, reality and its simulation have been confused they cannot be re-instated. indeed, it is one of the more stubborn cruelties of the saeculum that there can be no going back. although the secular temporal order remains binding in baudrillard’s work, its frustration still registered as an affront, it has lost the ability to assure the benefits of modern subjectivity that it had once bestowed. stripped of his or her capacity for autonomous action and consigned to the end of history, baudrillard’s iconoclast-critic is without political will, a passive witness to the onset of an apocalyptic “hell of simulation.” for these reasons, baudrillard marks the post- revolutionary limit of the modern strain. - : the anti-modern strain the anti-modern strain acknowledges the limits of the modern strain and struggles to provide a rejoinder. aware that the secular temporal order no longer pays the political dividends it once had, unable as it is to underwrite the autonomous action of modern subjects, scholars belonging to the anti-modern strain look to icons and the referential presence they facilitate(d) for an alternative. as the two case studies i will offer as paradigmatic of this strain—david freedberg’s the power of images: studies in the history and theory of response ( ) and hans belting’s likeness and presence: a history of the image before the era of art ( )— demonstrate, the anti-modern accounts of the icon are nostalgic in character. stricken by a sense of lost immersion in the world, their authors look to the pre-modern practice of icon viewing for 	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
   ibid, p. . ibid, p. . ibid, p. . while baudrillard marks the post-revolutionary limit of the modern strain, by no means does he mark its end. additional examples include michael camille, the gothic idol: ideology and image-making in medieval art (new york: cambridge university press, ), and w. j. t. mitchell, what do pictures want?: the lives and loves of images (chicago: university of chicago press, ). 	
   an immediacy of experience from which they have become alienated and to which they hope to return. however, while it may claim to be opposed to the modern strain, the anti-modern strain in fact serves as the modern strain’s complement. as bruno latour has observed, although anti- modernism objects to many aspects of the modern strain, it nevertheless retrains the secular temporal order on which the whole of that strain relies. this is evident in both the revolutionary oppositionalism of the prefix “anti” and the stringent historicism of its fashionable euphemism, “post.” in his description of anti-modernism, latour describes the degree to which the secular temporal order is (paradoxically) retained: disappointed rationalists, its adepts indeed sense that modernism is done for, but they continue to accept its way of dividing up time; thus they can divide up eras only in terms of successive revolutions. they feel that they come ‘after’ the moderns, but with the disagreeable sentiment that there is no more ‘after’. ‘no future’: this is the slogan added to the moderns’ motto ‘no past.’ what remains? disconnected instants and groundless denunciations, since the post-moderns no longer believe in the reasons that would allow them to denounce and to become indignant. it is in the anti-modern strain’s nostalgia for the pre-modern practice of icon viewing that the secular temporal order so crucial to the modern strain is clung to most strongly. by looking back to pre-modernity as an alternative to modern alienation, scholars belonging to the anti-modern strain reassert the very ruptures at the heart of the modern strain which they had hoped to refute. as latour explains, for all their attempts to counter the modern strain, “the anti-moderns even accept the chief oddity of the moderns, the idea of a time that passes irreversibly and annuls the entire past in its wake.” in his study, freedberg offers a profound and elegant defense of the referential presence that pre-modern icons facilitate(d), which he accesses through the interpretive framework of “response.” for freedberg, response is a heuristic resource routinely overlooked by modern art historians given its tendency to accept referential presence. concentrated in our pre-critical behavior, response is credulous toward images, willing to submit to their referential claims. introducing his study, freedberg notifies us that “we shall spend some time on responses predicated on the perception that what is represented on an image is actually present, or present in it,” before continuing: but perhaps with such responses, it is not that the bodies are present; it is as though they were present. when we think, as photinus did, that the virgin is in 	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
   bruno latour, we have never been modern, p. . ibid, p. . latour later emphasizes the modernity of the anti-modern’s nostalgia, declaring, “the idea of an identical repetition of the past and that of a radical rupture with any past are two symmetrical results of a single conception of time” ( ). 	
   the image…are we only thinking metaphorically? or metonymically? if that were the case, then the kinds of responses outlined in this book provide proof of the constructive power of metaphorical and metonymic thought, and of the way in which all perception elides representation with reality… telling in this passage is freedberg’s movement from the actual presence of the referent (the perception that what is represented on an image is actually present, or present in it) to the ostensible presence of the referent (as though what is represented is present on or in the image) and finally to a self-conscious post-critical willingness to invest in the ostensible presence of the referent (the elision of representation with reality). it is this post-critical willingness to elide representation with reality, to accept the ostensible presence of the referent in the image itself, which freedberg offers as a rejoinder to the hell of simulation that marks the limit of the modern strain. as compelling as freedberg’s rejoinder may be, its nascent affinity with the secular temporal order of the modern strain is belied by the nostalgia with which he regards referential presence. while the majority of his discussion of response suggests a continuity that would defy rupture, his conclusion locates the referential presence icons facilitate(d) on the far side of the now familiar epochal schism. art history’s neglect of the heuristic value of response is registered as a product of its modernity, to be remedied by renouncing the discipline as such and reverting to pre-modernity: much of our sophisticated talk about art is simply an evasion. we take refuge in such talk when, say, we discourse about formal qualities, or when we rigorously historicize the work, because we are afraid to come to terms with our responses—or, at the very least, with a significant part of them. we have lost touch with them, so we repress them and do not study the kinds of material i have presented—or, if we do, we fail to draw out their full implications. if any doubt remains that the “sophistication” of which freedberg speaks is that of a distinctly “modern” art history, this is dispelled by the prescriptive declaration that “we have, in a sense, to try to lose our education (at the same time acknowledging that we never can) and become ‘primitive’.” by hoping to refute the modern strain with an attempted return to a credulous pre- modernity, freedberg reasserts the ruptures of the secular temporal order on which the modern strain relies. instead of a theory of response premised on pan-epochal continuity, we are given a nostalgic account of prelapsarian viewing. perhaps it is to be expected that nostalgia for the pre-modern practice of icon viewing should be felt most acutely in the work of the anti-modern strain’s most diligent historian of the 	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
   freedberg, p. . ibid, p. - . ibid, p. . 	
   icon’s referential presence. in his study, belting contrasts the sacred presence of the iconic image with the semiotic absence of reformation theology. whereas the iconic images of the middle ages manifested the divine in their very materiality, ensuring their referent’s presence, the sermons of the reformation maintained a separation between the word being preached and the divinity being venerated, ensuring their referent’s absence. for belting, the absence of the referent ushered in by the reformation’s endorsement of word over image (and, for belting, perpetuated by contemporary art history) marks not only the rupture between the era of the icon and the era of the artwork described above, but also the modern subject’s lost immersion in the world: the eye no longer discovers evidence for the presence of god in images or in the physical world; god reveals himself only through his word…the word does not depict or show anything but is a sign of the covenant. god’s distance prohibits his presence in a painted representation, sensually comprehended. the modern subject, estranged from the world, sees the world as severed into the purely factual and the hidden signification of metaphor but the old image rejected reduction into metaphor; rather, it laid claim to being evidence of god’s presence revealed to the eyes and the senses. it is the modern subject’s lost immersion in the world—his or her “estrangement” from pre- modern referential presence—that causes the rupture between the era of the icon and the era of the artwork to be registered by belting as a “crisis,” and it is this crisis that motivates belting’s scholastic interest in the “old image” of the era “before” art. while freedberg lapses into the nostalgia of the anti-modern strain, belting premises the whole of his account on its backward gaze. his history of the icon is commemorative, delivered as a eulogy to a group of readers who, it is expected, will share sympathetically in the mourning of a bygone age. the eulogistic sentiment is most palpable in the study’s conclusion, in which belting writes: it is here that the history described in this book comes to an end… as we look back, the image, with which this book has dealt, stands out more distinctly. with the new distance, our perception of the old situation has sharpened. the sources that inform us of the theory and practice of images are themselves witnesses to a new state of things. the meaning of art now had to be explained, since there were (apart from the texts of antiquity) no justifications, nor could there be… it now is no longer enough to tell the stories of images, as was done in this book as well. images find their place in the temple of art and their true time in the history of art. a picture is no longer to be understood in terms of its theme, but as a contribution to the development of art. 	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
   belting, p. . ibid, . 	
   in the articulate and forlorn rhetoric of nostalgia, the study is described as a temporary reprieve from the oppressions of the day to which the reader is forced to return having arrived at its last pages. we “look back” on the era before art from this side of the rupture-crisis, our modernity confirmed less by our ideas of art than by the temporal frameworks to which art belongs, the “true time” of the secular temporal order onto which art’s development is transitively mapped. like freedberg, belting begins his study by struggling to provide a rejoinder to the modern strain’s apocalyptic endgame and succeeds only in affirming a “new distance,” inadvertently reasserting the methodological principle of rupture on which the modern strain relies. instead of baudrillard’s hell of simulation we have a purgatory of nostalgia. - : the non-modern strain a successful rejoinder to the modern strain has come only recently, put forward by scholars who reject the methodological legitimacy of rupture altogether. before turning to case studies paradigmatic of this strain, i must first describe its basic properties. the most important among these is a commitment to the kairos (greek for “now”), the two constituents of which are the kairotic temporal order and the kairotic political order. as charles taylor explains, unlike the secular temporal order which is made up of a succession of discrete temporal units which follow each other horizontally, extending infinitely in a linear fashion, the kairotic temporal order is made up of a “lower” secular time over which stand multiple “higher” kairotic times, whether they be anniversaries, commemorations, festivals or prophecies, which encroach on the lower time vertically causing it to contract in a non-linear fashion. although lower and higher times can be distinguished quantitatively, their transitive positions mapped like any other, their significance lies in their being distinguished qualitatively, with higher times intervening in the flow of lower time from above, breaching secular ruptures through what benjamin called “divine 	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
   it is important to note that belting challenges the methodological principle of rupture in his earlier work, the end of the history of art?, trans. christopher s. wood (chicago: university of chicago press, ), where he states “we must abandon the notion of a single, unidirectional process” ( ), only to reaffirm its legitimacy in his later works, likeness and presence and the invisible masterpiece, trans. helen atkins (london: reaktion books, ). however, this seeming inconsistency is itself indicative of the contradictory relationship between the anti-modern and modern strains. taylor, p. . giorgio agamben, the time that remains: a commentary on the letter to the romans, trans. patricia dailey (stanford: stanford university press, ). agamben describes the pauline distinction between chronos, the secular time that spans from the creation to the messianic event, and kairos, the contracted “time of the now” of the messianic event itself, which he associates explicitly with benjamin’s notion of “jetztzeit” or “now time” (p. - ). 	
   violence,” allowing particular pasts and futures to bear immanently on our present. as taylor explains, discussions of historical events taking place in kairotic time will extend to qualitative statements regarding the bearing those events have on the present of the historian, “de- homogenizing” time by “gathering” around the historian those pasts and futures which meaningfully organize his or her experience. the kairotic temporal order supports and is supported by the kairotic political order. it is on the encroachment of higher times on lower time that the messianic model of action peculiar to the kairotic political order relies. this model of action requires a non-autonomous subject or group of subjects who regard their temporal position as fundamentally encroached upon by those by which they are preceded, whose practices remain nascent sources of meaning in their world(s), and those by which they will be followed, whose immanent coming they resolutely anticipate. an inversion of revolutionary action, messianic action involves a radical receptivity toward these higher times during the kairotic moments of their encroachment. as benjamin explains, one of the richest sites of this receptivity to kairotic encroachment is the image. “the past can be seized only as an image which flashes up at the instant when it can be recognized and is never seen again” writes benjamin, “…for every image of the past that is not recognized by the present as one of its own concerns threatens to disappear irretrievably.” most significant in this passage is the kairotic relationship between past and present. the past that “flashes up” and is “seized” belongs not to the secular temporal order, located on the far side of rupture, but rather to the kairotic temporal order, encroaching on what benjamin elsewhere calls the “now-time” [jetztzeit] of the receptive present which “recognizes” it as “one of its own concerns.” indeed, it is the secular temporal order itself that is interrupted by this seizure, without which the image of the past would succumb to its succession of temporal units, “disappearing irretrievably.” for benjamin, it is the ability of the image of the past to interrupt the secular temporal order that gives it its radical potential. the image of the past provides a higher kairotic time that can intervene in lower secular 	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
   walter benjamin, “critique of violence,” trans. edmund jephcott in selected writings, vol. ( - ), ed. marcus bullock and michael e. jennings (cambridge: the belknap press of harvard university press, ). in benjamin’s essay, divine violence is contrasted with mythic violence, which eric l. santner in creaturely life: rilke; benjamin; sebald (chicago: university of chicago press, ) describes as “the repetition compulsions of political power, of the rise and fall of empires, states, rules and ideologies, the homogeneous time of an endless chain of succession in which one sovereign power- structure finds its momentary place in the sun of world history” (p. ). taylor, p. . walter benjamin, “on the concept of history,” trans. edmund jephcott in selected writings vol. ( - ) (ed. marcus bullock and michael e. jennings (cambridge: the belknap press of harvard university press, ), p. - . walter benjamin, “allegory and trauerspiel,” the origin of german tragic drama, trans. john osborne, (london: verso, ), p. . 	
   time, providing those who remain receptive to its encroachment on their present a means of “wrest[ing] tradition away from conformism” and an alternative array of models and practices with which they might organize their experience. it is to these two constituents of the kairos—that is, the kairotic temporal order and the kairotic political order—that scholarship belonging to the non-modern strain remains ultimately committed. like scholars belonging to the anti-modern strain, scholars belonging to the non- modern strain seek to oppose the modern strain. however, unlike the anti-moderns, the non- moderns do so successfully, not by claiming to come “after” or returning to an era “before” modernity, but by rejecting the methodological principle of rupture on which such periodizing depends. since the non-moderns can come neither after nor before the moderns, lest they reassert modernity’s ruptures, they must claim a continuity that binds us to our pasts and futures which has endured unbroken through modernity. for latour, this is the continuity of “mediation” residing in the chains of mediating agents (objects, people, texts) which hold together the fabric of our world(s), admitting transmission and translation across space and time. it is by attending to these chains of mediating agents and remaining receptive to the kairotic breaches of secular time which they provide that we can transcend the apocalyptic endgame of the modern strain and begin to grasp the not-quite-forgotten truth that we have never been modern. “if we simply restore this mediating role to all agents,” latour writes, “exactly the same world composed of exactly the same entities cease being modern and become what it has never ceased to be—that is, non- modern.” in each of the case studies i offer as paradigmatic of the non-modern strain—georges didi-huberman’s “before the image, before time: the sovereignty of anachronism” ( ), latour’s own “what is iconoclash? or is there a world beyond the image wars” ( ) and alexander nagel and christopher s. wood’s anachronic renaissance ( )—the mediating role of agents is restored by approaching images as messianic sites of kairotic encroachment. of the three case studies paradigmatic of the non-modern strain, didi-huberman describes the kairotic encroachment occasioned by images most forcefully. discussing a small fresco by fra angelico in the florentine convent of san marco, didi-huberman berates the art historians of the modern and anti-modern strains for confining the image to its th-century context. given its anomalous form, a collection of abstract speckles and drips, the fresco had been 	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
   ibid, p. . latour addresses the possible problem rupture poses to non-moderns, asking “but how can we retrace our steps? isn’t the modern world marked by the arrow of time? doesn’t it consume the past? doesn’t it break definitively with the past? doesn’t the very cause of the current prostration come precisely from a “post” modern era that would inevitably succeed the preceding one, which, in a series of catastrophic upheavals, itself succeeded the pre-modern eras? hasn’t history already ended?” (we have never been modern, p. ). ibid, p. . 	
   overlooked by those scholars due to its failure to readily conform to their historicist methods, offering neither precedents nor contemporary accounts with which it might be fixed in time, leaving it vulnerable to any manner of “anachronisms.” as didi-huberman explains, it is this un- fixedness that allows the fresco to serve as an analog for the kairotic potential of all images. once historicist methodologies have been abandoned, images become messianic gateways through which sundry pasts and futures might anachronistically rush, benefits we reap by undergoing the “dispossession of the gaze” characteristic of the radical state of receptivity that defines the kairotic “now” of the encounter. it is this radical state of receptivity that didi-huberman describes when he states that “we are before the image as before the law,” alluding obliquely to the pauline notion of the messianic ho nyn kairos or “time of the now” which both precedes and establishes all lawmaking. rebutting the modern strain’s call for autonomous subjectivity, didi-huberman suggests that it is only once we have been dispossessed of our gaze and (at least partially) submitted to the image as sovereign lawgiver that we can receive its kairotic encroachment and participate in its anachronistic potential. acknowledging the interruption of the secular order caused by this dispossession and submission, didi-huberman describes the moment of our encounter with the image as a more-than-present. “to gain access to the stratified multiple times, to the survivals, to the longues durées of the more-than-past of memory” he writes, “we need a more-than-present of an act of reminiscence: a shock, a tearing of the” veil, an irruption or appearance of time.” this more-than-present is nothing less than the messianic moment described by benjamin during which we recognize and seize the image of past as one of our own concerns, receiving its higher times as they encroach during the kairotic “now.” as latour explains in his own work on icons, it is also the moment at which we restore to the image its role as mediator. whereas the modern and anti-modern strains limited the agency of the icon, whether through iconoclast-critique or forlorn nostalgia, latour’s brand of non-modernism invests the icon with a surplus of agency by regarding it as representative not of a pre-critical worldview but of the mediation that always has and always will bind us to our world(s). this is achieved in part 	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
   georges didi-huberman, “before the image, before time: the sovereignty of anachronism,” trans. peter mason in compelling visuality: the work of art in and out of history, ed. claire farago and robert zwijnenberg (minneapolis: university of minnesota press, ), p. . ibid, p. . agamben describes the distinction made in paul’s letters between chronos, the secular time that spans from the creation to the messianic event, and ho nyn kairos, the contracted “time of the now” of the messianic event itself, which he associates with benjamin’s notion of the “jetztzeit” or “now time” (p. and - ). didi-huberman, p. . 	
   by re-interpreting the notion of the acheiropoiete or image not made by hands discussed briefly above. instead of suspending the instant- and subject-oriented aspects of willed manufacture, latour foregrounds these aspects not as threats to the divine status of the image, but as contributors to its mediating power: but what if hands were actually indispensible to reaching truth, to producing objectivity, to fabricating divinities? what would happen if, when saying that some image is human-made, you were increasing instead of decreasing its claim to truth? that would be the closure of the critical mood, the end of anti-fetishism. we could say, contrary to critical urge, that the more human-work is shown, the better is their grasp of reality, of sanctity, of worship. that the more images, mediations, intermediaries, icons are multiplied and overtly fabricated, explicitly and publicly constructed, the more respect we have for their capacities to welcome, to gather, to recollect truth and sanctity (“religere” is one of the several etymologies for religion). for latour, it is the very fabricated-ness of the icon that allows it to reach beyond itself in both space and time to the public, social world(s) in which it exists. indeed, we might say it is by emphasizing the fabricated-ness of the icon to such a degree, locating it so firmly in the public and the social, that the icon is able to exceed the instant- and the subject-oriented aspects of willed manufacture, rendering it inextricable from the network of mediators to which it belongs and which it welcomes, gathers and collects for reception by the viewer. latour refines his discussion of fabrication in his retelling of the biblical parable of the iconoclast abraham’s confrontation with his father, the idol-worshiper terah. upon returning to his idol-workshop, which he had briefly entrusted to his son, and finding it destroyed, terah turns to abraham and asks, “why does your ear not listen to what your mouth says?” latour expands this ambiguous question posed by the idolater to the iconoclast into a defense of not only the icon, but of the mediator as such. adopting the voice of the idolater, latour asks abraham, father of the western faiths: if you start to break the idols, my son, with what mediations will you welcome, collect, assemble, and gather your divinities? are you sure you understand the dictates of your god? what sort of folly are you going to enter if you begin to believe that i, your father, naively believe in those idols i have made with my own hands, cooked in my own oven, sculpted with my own tools? do you really believe i ignore their origin? do you really believe that this lowly origin weakens their claims to reality? is your critical mind so very naïve? this passage can be read as latour’s rejoinder to both the modern and anti-modern strains alike. by posing his question to abraham as to a modern critic, he opens a kairotic “now” in which the 	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
   bruno latour, “what is iconoclash? or is there a world beyond the image wars?” in beyond the image wars in science, religion and art, ed. bruno latour and peter weibel (cambridge: mit press, ), p. . ibid, p. . 	
   practice of icon viewing can encroach upon the present, intervening in the secular temporal order. moreover, he does so not by casting icon viewing as a pre-modern practice to which we are returning—the naivety is not terah’s—but as a nascent argument against the critical mind that has endured continuously from the question’s first articulation to latour’s own retelling. in this passage latour pulls on the chains of mediation in order to gather the times of icon viewing, old- testament iconoclasm, and th-century deconstructionist theory into his own present, marshaling each of these as well as the phenomenon of mediation itself in his refutation of the modern and anti-modern strains. in their recent collaborations, alexander nagel and christopher s. wood have expanded latour’s discussion of mediation into a comprehensive art historical approach. foregrounding the fabricated-ness of images, they describe mediation as a stretching across time and space achieved through referential replication. for nagel and wood, images derive their meaning from their ability to claim a referential bond with a more esteemed prototype that they replicate. this referential bond is claimed by a particular image’s insistence on its own mediality, that is, on those formal features of its composition that associate it with its prototype. a privileged example of the prototype-replication bond constituted by mediation can be found in the icon’s relationship with its prototype, which i have alluded to briefly above in my discussion of the mandylion, veronica, and hodegetria. icons served as replications which referred back to their prototypes not as naïve copies but as fabricated mediations. as nagel and wood argue, this is most evident in the practices of icon maintenance, which sought not to preserve the object itself but, through over-painting repair and stylistic updating, to maintain its medial similarity to other replications of its prototype, not to say the prototype itself. the desire was not to convince viewers of the icon’s status as a copy of the prototype, but to convince them of the icon’s claim to be a suitable mediator, achieving the “functional presentness” of the prototype. however, like latour, nagel and wood avoid the anti-modern’s nostalgia by stressing the fact that the phenomenon of mediation is not a pre-modern practice, but a condition of the image’s very claim to meaning. “the simple and straightforward image that delivered the real never actually existed,” they write. “it was only ever visible from a vantage point inside a later image, which worried about its own crafted and mediated nature.” like latour, nagel and wood describe mediation as a network of chains. each image is bound to its prototype and all images sharing that prototype by “chains of substitution” which extend backward and forward diachronically from prototype to replications affirming the validity 	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
   nagel and wood, p. . ibid, p. . 	
   of each link. in an earlier theorization of these chains influenced by whitney davis’s prior discussion of the durability of “chains of replication”, wood writes “the substitutional paradigm is basically the belief that a chain is as good as its strongest link.” for nagel and wood, it is this belief in the validity of the image as a link in the chain of substitution that allows the image to breach the ruptures of the secular temporal order and occupy multiple temporal positions: the image or building took up its multiple residencies in time presenting itself as a token of a type, a type associated with an origin, perhaps mythical or only dimly perceived, an origin enforcing a general categorical continuity across a sequence of tokens. under such a model of the temporal life of artifacts, one token or replica effectively substituted for another; classes of artifacts were grasped as chains of substitutable replicas stretching out across time and space. by assuming their positions within these substitutional chains, images were able to reach backward and forward typologically, an ability to which we will return shortly, breaching the secular ruptures of the modern strain, carrying the temporalities of their prototypes and fellow replications of those prototypes with them into the kairotic “now” of the viewer. although nagel and wood’s substitutional articulation of mediation may seem to represent a less radical iteration of the non-modern insights of didi-huberman and latour, appearing to surrender the breadth and immanence of those earlier insights to the institutionalization required by a comprehensive art historical approach, it can on the contrary be seen as representing a more radical iteration of those insights. for nagel and wood, the contraction of time described by didi-huberman as “anachronism” is not a unique or unusual result arrived at only once historicist methodologies have been abandoned, but rather the necessary foundation of the image’s claim to meaning as such. “within the substitutional mode, anachronism was neither an aberration nor a mere rhetorical device, but a structural condition of artifacts.” it is within the non-modern strain that i will situate my own argument regarding representations of the baptist. however, instead offering yet another rejoinder to the modern strain, seeking to breach the ruptures lining the saeculum by positing an additional kairotic model of interpretation, i will suggest that, as the figure of the baptist migrated from the margins of th- century icons to the center of th-century panel paintings, the phenomenon of rupture was itself 	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
   christopher s. wood, forgery, replica, fiction: temporalities of german renaissance art (chicago: university of chicago press, ), p. . nagel and wood’s discussions of replication and substitution owe much to the work of whitney davis in his replications: archaeology, art history, psychoanalysis, ed. richard w. quinn (university park: pennsylvania state university press, ). while davis introduces much of the rhetoric employed by nagel and wood, i have chosen the latter as examples of the non-modern strain because of their application of this rhetoric to the renaissance and the methodological principle of rupture with which the renaissance is associated. nagel and wood, p. . ibid, p. . 	
   incorporated into a testimonial mode of viewing which wavered productively between kairos and saeculum. as the practice of icon viewing gave way, threatening to displace the referent on the far side of belting’s crisis, this testimonial mode of viewing emerged requiring viewers to resolve in very the act of viewing the problematic of rupture and reference—presence and absence— which that crisis posed. in the remaining chapters i will argue that, when encountering representations of the baptist in which the icon’s referential claims waned as the baptist’s increased, viewers were encouraged to extend skills they had acquired in the devotional realm of the icon to the secular realm of the historia, effectively mitigating the transition from icon to artwork by preserving the intrinsic presence of the referent as a feature of testimony. 	
   chapter two: a typology of the baptist 	
   - : from margin to mediator (stage ) representations of the baptist underwent profound compositional developments during the decades leading to and following from belting’s rupture-crisis, which i described in the introduction as a figural migration comprised of three typological stages, beginning from the margins of conventional icons, moving toward the center of less conventional altarpieces, arriving finally at the center panel paintings. heeding henri focillon’s recommendation that questions of mobility in images be considered questions of form, i will discuss this migration in formal terms arguing that, with each successive move toward what david rosand has called the “iconic field” of the increasingly vacant compositional center, the figure of the baptist assumed a larger share of the referential responsibilities formerly met by the icon itself, satisfying these not by approximating the icon’s presence, but rather by pointing to its absence. the first typological stage includes such conventional late th and early th-century devotional images as gherardo starnina’s madonna and child between st. john the baptist and st. nicholas of bari, ( - ) [fig. ], sandro di pietro’s madonna and child with saints ( - ) and sassetta’s madonna of the snow altarpiece ( - ), each of which evince an undiminished ability to facilitate the referential presence expected of the icon. in these works, the figure of the baptist occupies a marginal position, confined to the lower left corner of the compositional space. this marginality is pictured most emphatically in starnina’s icon, the earliest of the three examples. here the baptist is portrayed in diminutive scale on the lower left of the composition’s immediate foreground, which he shares with an unidentified contemporary cleric stationed on the opposite side. draped in his animal-skin cloak, he clutches his cross in his left hand while pointing prophetically with his right over his shoulder toward the madonna and 	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
   henri focillon, the life of forms in art, trans. charles b. hogan and george kubler (new york: zone books, ). describing the formal quality of spatial and temporal mobility in images, focillon writes, “whether constructed of masonry, carved in marble, cast in bronze, fixed beneath varnish, engraved on copper or on wood, a work of art is motionless only in appearance. it seems to be set fast-arrested, as are the moments of time gone by. but in reality it is born of change, and it leads to other changes… this mobility of form, however, this ability to engender so great a diversity of shapes, is even more remarkable when examined in the light of certain narrower limits. the most rigorous rules, apparently intended to impoverish and to standardize formal material, are precisely those which, with an almost fantastic wealth of variations and of metamorphoses, best illuminate its superb vitality.” ( ) david rosand, ’divinitá di cosa dipinta’: pictorial structure and the legibility of the altarpiece” in the altarpiece in the renaissance, ed. peter humphrey and martin kemp (cambridge: cambridge university press, ), p. . for a discussion of the provenance and iconographical conventions of starnina’s icon, see ann t. lurie, “in search of a valencian madonna by starnina” in the bulletin of the cleveland museum of art, vol. , no. , dec., , p. - . 	
   child enthroned behind. occupying the composition’s center, approximately three times the size of the baptist and shown in the conventional hodegetria form, these figures dominate the composition, successfully commanding devotional attention. flanking the madonna and child are two pairs of saints bearing gifts, lining either side of the composition’s middle-ground. arrayed in an arch above the madonna and child in the composition’s background are seven angels with wings splayed outward, their attentions turned toward the iconic center. although the scene is densely populated, the baptist is distinguished from the surrounding figures by his failure to direct attention toward the madonna and child. instead, his gaze is averted, cast to the left beyond the frame. this averting of the gaze, which also occurs in sassetta’s altarpiece to which we will return shortly, secures the baptist’s marginal status by aligning his figure with the material border of the image, situating him at both a physical and conceptual remove from the composition’s devotional focus. however, this marginality is not without its ambiguities. the baptist’s location in the immediate foreground assumes greater weight given the way in which that space is situated within the temporal architecture of the composition as a whole. on the same plane as the cleric, the baptist participates in his contemporaneity, being compositionally introduced into his historical moment and, we can assume, into that of the viewers by whom that moment was shared. these figures are separated from a second temporal plane shared by the madonna and child the four saints, to one of whom the christ child extends an arm to receive the proffered gift, signaling their contemporaneousness. the angels suspended in the arch above these figures constitute yet a third temporal plane, observing the scene as if from a time beyond time. by being located in the most “present” of these temporal planes, co-substantial with the material frame of the image and contemporaneous with the historical moment of the cleric, the baptist can be said to contest his own marginality. the more his gaze is averted and his figure pressed against the frame, the more ambiguous his marginal status becomes as he draws greater attention to himself as a second a potential site of devotional focus. the ambiguity of the baptist’s marginality is inherent to his function as a mediator of the act of viewing. the baptist derives this function from the gospels in which he bore witness to the coming of christ. in di pietro’s icon, the baptist holds a scroll bearing the words “ecce a” or “behold,” a fragment of the phrase from john : “ecce agnus dei” or “behold the lamb of god” 	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
   kathleen corrigan, “the witness of john the baptist on an early byzantine icon in kiev” in dumbarton oaks papers, vol. ( ), p. - . corrigan notes that, although the figure of the baptist was routinely represented prior to the th century, early representations portrayed him not as the mediating witness of christ but as the administrator of the baptismal rite ( ). 	
   seen in sassetta’s altarpiece. this often repeated phrase establishes the mediatory function the baptist will perform in the image, declaring his status as both biblical herald and compositional intermediary. indeed, we might say that the baptist performs in the visual register a mediatory function similar to that which the madonna performs in the supplicatory register, acting as an intercessor appealed to not in the act of prayer, but in the act of viewing. the baptist-madonna symmetry is further implied by the manner in which each figure gestures toward a referent other than themselves: the madonna toward the christ child and the baptist toward the pair. just as the madonna’s intercessional capacity renders her a site of devotional focus during the act of prayer, so too does the baptist’s intercessional capacity render him a site of devotional focus during the act of viewing. however, insofar as the baptist shares in the madonna’s intercessional capacity, so too does he risk jeopardizing her integrity as one of the icon’s two central figures, becoming himself an object of veneration. to this end the inclusion of the scroll can also be read as means of repressing the baptist-madonna symmetry, for in the same instant that it declares the baptist’s function as mediator, so too does it declare his function as merely a mediator. by associating the baptist with text, the scroll reduces him to a semiotic level at which he is forced to play signifier to the madonna and child’s signified. indeed, in the two examples featuring the scroll—di pietro’s icon and sassetta’s altarpiece—the baptist appears relatively docile. in the former, he assumes his customary position in the lower left of the compositional space with the ranks of his fellow saints, pointing toward the madonna and child enthroned in the center. any excessive attention paid to him is checked by the ribbon of text bisecting his body, which is turned toward the viewer and angled in such a way as to lead readers from the left of the composition toward the right—that is, from the baptist on the margin toward the madonna and child at the center. in the latter, the scroll serves a similar purpose. also bisecting the body of the baptist, who is seen kneeling with his gaze averted to the altarpiece’s left, the scroll comes to an end as it meets the gilded frame superimposed on the panel dividing it into its triptych format. it is in sassetta’s altarpiece that the ambiguities arising from the baptist’s marginality are most successfully repressed. here the baptist’s scroll, averted gaze and alignment with the border of the image 	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
   belting, . as pentcheva has argued, it was not uncommon in the byzantine tradition for viewers to see the madonna coupled with saints and apostles by whom her intercessional function was shared, at times appearing on the reverse sides of icons as a pair complementing the figure of christ. although pentcheva notes that the madonna most often shared compositional space with john the theologian, it is important for our purposes that she privileges the apostle’s “gesturing hand” as the most immediate and resilient indicator of his shared status as intercessor. see bissera v. pentcheva, “imagined images: visions of salvation and intercession in a double-sided icon from poganovo” in dumbarton oaks papers, vol. ( ), p. - . 	
   ensure that devotional attention is directed unambiguously toward the composition’s center. as long as this centrality is sustained, the baptist remains a marginal mediator. it is unsurprising that the baptist’s ambiguous marginality should be so fraught with tension, given the strict compositional dictates devotional images often obeyed. the vast majority of devotional images invested the compositional center itself with the properties of the icon. a product of long-standing compositional protocols which insisted on fixing the icon equidistant from either edge of the surface on which it was painted, this space became invested with a residual divinity the violation of which constituted a transgression in viewing. in his discussion of these protocols, rosand describes the compositional center of the image as its “iconic field”: what we might call the iconic imperative of the altarpiece enforces the centrality of focus; the lateral forces of the field operate centripetally, with reference to the center. such visual dynamics determine the relationship of worshipper to image. in viewing such a field, lateral scansion is rendered irrelevant, except as a way toward the center. the iconic field insists upon direct confrontation—with a divine center. all eyes are, literally, on the deity (or his surrogate), the functional core of the image.) as rosand explains, the entire compositional program of the devotional image was obliged to reinforce this iconic field, directing attention toward the compositional center. the margins on either side of the image were to play only a supporting role, “operating centripetally with reference to the center.” should these margins distract from the center, they would risk the ability of the image to fulfill its “iconic imperative,” jeopardizing the viewer’s experience of salvation that only a “direct confrontation” with its “divine center” could bestow. as i suggested above, if the baptist in di pietro’s icon and sassetta’s altarpiece remains a merely marginal mediator, directing devotional attention toward the deities residing in the iconic field of the compositional center, he does so only by way of a certain repression. the relegation to the border, the averted gaze, the semiotic scroll—these elements limit the likelihood that the baptist will upset the confrontation with the image by intruding as second potential site of devotional focus. although di pietro and sassetta’s images may accomplish this more successfully than starnina’s, the baptist’s marginality continues to be a source of ambiguity in the image. we can account for this continued ambiguity by attributing to the baptist a role as necessary as it is compromising to the efficient operation of the iconic field. given the baptist’s relationship to the frame, it is reasonable to expect that his figure somehow supports the iconic field, serving as what jacques derrida has famously called its parergon. parsed, the term means “beside” (para) “work” (ergon), and as we know is borrowed from immanuel kant’s religion within the limits of reason alone, in which it is used to describe the four “general remarks” 	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
   rosand, p. - . 	
   appended to the text, which dealt with peripheral aspects of religion considered to exceed the limits of the work itself, including the effects and means of grace, miracles and mysteries. derrida extends its application to all varieties of marginalia or framing which are “cut” from a more central site of attention but which cannot be reduced to mere excess: a parergon comes against, beside, and in addition to the ergon, the work done [fait], the fact [le fait], the work, but it does not fall to one side, it touches and cooperates within the operation, from a certain outside. neither simply outside nor simply inside. like an accessory, that one is obliged to welcome on the border, on board [au bord, á bord]. it is first of all the on (the) bo(a)rd(er) [il est d’abord l’á-bord]. as derrida explains, the parergon is that element of the margin or frame that encroaches upon the work. “on the border,” it is appended to the work as a supplement or addition, while also being “on board,” a participant in the work’s operation. this ambiguous status as both appendix and participant is a product of the parergon’s supporting role. a component of the work’s infrastructure, it reveals an unacknowledged “lack” or “sans” (without) in the work for which it compensates, making its inclusion both equivocal and obligatory. the parergonal status of the baptist is suggested by his capacity to both intrude upon the center, threatening to become a second potential site of devotional focus, and to repress such intrusion by acting as a marginal mediator, directing the viewer’s attention toward the center. unlike the other figures portrayed, the baptist alone engages in this consideration of the act of devotional viewing. if the principal concern of the other figures is what the viewer sees, the principal concern of the baptist is the how the viewer sees. with this in mind, we might say that the baptist retains a parergonal claim to a practical aspect of iconic presence ancillary to that claimed by the iconic field. while the madonna and child in the composition’s center claim the metaphysical aspect of iconic presence associated with the icon as a manifestation of the divine, the baptist on the composition’s margin claims the practical aspect of iconic presence associated with the icon as a functional object. borrowing from harry berger jr., i that the first of these corresponds to the “symbolic” order of icon viewing, whereby the icon is “linked” to the “other- worldly (supernatural, transcendent) figure it represents,” and the second to the “observational” 	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
   jacques derrida, the truth in painting, trans. geoff bennington and ian mcleod (chicago: the university of chicago press, ), p. . derrida’s use of this term refers to kant’s aesthetic theory of the “pure cut” which removes objects of aesthetic contemplation from worldly interest, making them available to judgments of taste rather than judgments of reason. ibid, p. . ibid, p. . harry berger jr., “the system of early modern painting” in representations, no. (spring, ), p. . 	
   order of icon viewing, whereby the icon is the center of a system of “rules, codes, regulations” with which viewers comply. with this in mind, the baptist can be regarded as not only a mediating figure, directing attention toward the iconic field at the composition’s center, but also as a figure for mediation, acting as a cipher for what pierre bourdieu has called the “universalizing mediation” of the habitus, the complex of practices that invest meaning in or “frame” all actions, including devotional viewing. however, since the three examples considered in this section predate belting’s crisis, each belonging to an era in which the conventions of icon viewing were not yet in jeopardy, the figure of the baptist and the practical aspect of icon viewing with which his figure is associated retain the mark of the parergon. not yet a subject of explicit concern, they continue to participate tacitly in the work of the icon, mediating viewing from its margins. although the baptist remains a marginal mediator in the first typological stage, affixed to the physical and conceptual frame of the image, his parergonal status will persist even in later stages as he moves increasingly toward the compositional center. indeed, one property of the parergon which will be of particular importance in my discussion of later baptist imagery is its ability not only to retain an association with various aspects of the ergon from which it is cut, but to do so even when removed from the ergon in time and space. as derrida explains, this ability is a result of the double-nature of the cut that shears the parergon not only from the work, but also from the contexts to which the work would be otherwise bound: parerga have a thickness, a surface which separates them not only (as kant would have it) from the integral inside, from the body proper of the ergon, but also from the outside, from the wall on which the painting is hung, from the space in which the statue or column is erected, then, step by step, from the whole field of historical, economic, political inscription in which drive to signature is produced… like the frame of a painting that stands at a certain remove from both the canvas which it encloses and the wall on which it hangs, the parergon stands at a certain remove from both the work and its contexts. as we will see in works belonging to the second and third typological stages, by being subjected to this double-cut, the figure of the baptist as parergon is afforded a degree of mobility allowing it to move independently across all manner of boundaries (temporal, spatial, compositional, generic), while retaining its association with the ergon. in the remaining 	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
   ibid, p. . berger cites the distinction made by jonathan crary in his techniques of the observer: on vision and modernity in the nineteenth century (cambridge: mit press, ) between spectare (“to look at”) and observare (“to conform one’s action, to comply with”). pierre bourdieu, outline of a theory of practice, trans. richard nice (cambridge: cambridge university press, ), p. . ibid, p. . 	
   sections of this chapter, this parergonal mobility will carry his figure and the practices with which it is associated toward the compositional center of less conventional th-century altarpieces and finally into the compositional center of a new genre of th-century panel paintings. - : from margin to mediator (stage ) the second typological stage includes such less conventional late th and early th- century altarpieces as francesco pesellino’s madonna and child with saints zenobius, john the baptist, anthony abbott and francis of assisi ( ), giovani antonio boltraffio’s casio madonna altarpiece ( ) [fig. ] and parmigianino’s vision of st. jerome ( - ), each of which evince a diminished ability to facilitate the iconic presence expected of the icon. in these works, the figure of the baptist abdicates the marginal position it had occupied decades earlier and moves toward the center of the compositional space. in both pesellino and boltraffio’s altarpieces, he remains to the left of the image, but is no longer fastened to its border. instead, he has moved in, and is now flanked on his right by additional figures who effectively free him from his former marginality. although it cannot be said that the baptist himself occupies the iconic field in either composition, he does in each image encroach visibly upon it, albeit with some hesitation. in pesellino’s altarpiece, he stands to the immediate left of the madonna and child, his index extended finger portrayed in such a way as to suggest his touching the christ child, causing the boundary between reference and presence to become less distinct. similarly, in boltraffio’s altarpiece, while the baptist himself remains stationed on the left, his scroll-bound cross breaks into the center, its apex marking the composition’s median. this movement toward the center is most dramatic, however, in parmigianino’s later altarpiece. here the baptist abandons all marginal pretense, thrusting boldly from the left into the iconic field. half-kneeling in his animal- skin cloak, he extends his muscular right arm across the center of the image, pointing toward the madonna and child enthroned above with his now intemperately embellished finger. if the baptist encroached upon the center with a degree of hesitation in boltraffio and parmigianino’s earlier altarpieces, brushing up against it with the tip of a finger or the edge of a cross, in parmigianino’s he has migrated bodily into it, assuming an unabashed corporeal residence. in addition to abdicating the marginal position he had occupied earlier, the baptist has, in each of these second-stage images, ceased averting his gaze. in pesellino’s altarpiece it is only the baptist and christ child who peer out from the picture surface to lock eyes with the viewer, sharing between them the claim to ocular privilege with the gazes of the surrounding figures fracturing idiosyncratically in other directions. similarly, in boltraffio’s altarpiece the baptist 	
   joins the madonna and child in visually appealing to the viewer causing his scroll’s semiotic glancing blow to ricochet back toward himself. as before it is parmigianino’s altarpiece that provides the most dramatic example of this shift. here, as in pesellino’s altarpiece, it is the baptist and christ child who look out at us. however, while in that earlier altarpiece these gazes complemented one another, dividing the viewer’s attention between them, here the baptist’s gaze appears to eclipse that of the child. with his brow lowered and his body arched, he looks at us with an intensity that the child’s coquettish posture noticeably lacks. although he continues to point toward the divine pair, turning his shoulders deferentially toward their devotional scene, these features seem residual—traces of an earlier marginality that has been internalized as accessories of his own charismatic figure. if in pesellino and boltraffio’s altarpieces the baptist acts as a zealous co-participant assisting in the iconic work of the image, in parmigianino’s altarpiece he seems to be its sole proponent. this impression is amplified by the rendering of the sleeping figure of saint jerome, whose metaphysical vision the image nominally portrays. reclining in the lower right-hand corner, he is shown reduced excessively in scale with his forearm draped across his eyes, traits which serve both to forego any contribution he might have made to the image and to throw into relief the figure of the baptist, confirming him as the uncontested mediator of viewing, gazing intently at us from the composition’s center. like his figural migration toward the compositional center, the baptist’s outturned gaze affiliates him with the iconic imperative of the image. indeed, one of the principal means by which icons secured their claims to presence was through a choreographed exchange of gazes. in his treatise de visione dei sive de icon liber (“on the vision of god”), nicholas of cusa describes this exchange as one taking place between the omnivoyant or all-seeing gaze of the icon and the subjected-and-subjecting gaze of the viewer. writing to a group of monks at a benedictine monastery in tegernsee, to whom he had sent a vera icona which he instructed to be hung on the monastery’s north wall, cusanus takes as his point of departure the familiar sensation that the gaze of the icon appears to regard each viewer individually, following their unique movements as they circulate around the room. to this sensation cusanus adds the reflection that, because each individual will claim to have experienced the undivided attention of this gaze, the icon must simultaneously regard the collection of individuals as a group, a paradox which for cusanus defines divinity as such: and because the icon’s gaze regards you equally everywhere and does not leave you wherever you may go, a contemplation will arise in you, and you will be stirred saying “lord, in this image of you i now behold your providence by a certain sensible experience. for if you do not abandon me, the vilest of all, you will never abandon anyone. indeed, you are present to all and to each, just as being, without which they cannot exist, is present to all and to each. for thus you, 	
   who are the absolute being of all, are present to all as if you had concern for no other… this exchange of gazes was one of the hallmarks of icon viewing, responsible for what myer schapiro elsewhere describes as the latent or potential “intentness” which icons possessed as devotional images, capable of visually addressing their offers of salvation to viewers personally, in a manner comparable to that of the first and second person singular pronouns “i” and “you.” the baptist’s partaking in this exchange, in some cases becoming, as we have seen, its primary instigator, suggests the degree to which he is increasingly affiliated with the iconic imperative in these second-stage images, his mediating function both literally and figuratively taking center stage. perhaps it is unsurprising that the baptist should share in this exchange of gazes, given cusanus’ emphasis on the mediatory role of the icon. discussing the th-century treatise, joseph leo koerner notes that cusanus stresses the necessity of using a material object (the icon) as a means of rendering divinity accessible to thought, giving particular emphasis to cusanus’ declaration that, “in the effort to transport you to divine things by human means” he “must use some kind of similitude.” this ascension from the human to the divine by way of the mediatory step of iconic similitude is, for koerner, cusanus’ most unique and valuable contribution: what is new about the argument of the vision of god, and what makes cusan such a pivotal figure in the rise of modern self-consciousness is the way the self begins to color the object of devotion, acquiring the attributes of the god it claims to worship. it is after all human viewers who, believing they are being seen by the icon, invest it with a fictive gaze that can trope for the vision of god. cusanus reverses the relation between human and divine, endowing the viewer with that sight-giving power formerly invested in the god pictured in the image. as koerner explains, the cusan exchange of gazes is not reducible to the earlier polarizing models with which icon viewing was formerly understood, with viewer and icon existing as discrete entities passing glances back and forth. instead, the cusan exchange re-imagines the icon 	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
   nicholas of, “on the vision of god” (de visione dei) in nicholas of cusa: selected spiritual writings, trans. h. lawrence bond (new york: paulist press, ), p. . myer schapiro, words, script, and pictures: semiotics of visual language (new york: george braziller, ). schapiro contrasts the forward-facing gaze of the icon to the profile gaze of the narrative painting, writing, “the profile face is detached from the viewer and belongs with the body in action (or in an intransitive state) in a space shared with other profiles on the surface of the image. it is, broadly speaking, like the grammatical form of the third person, the impersonal “he” or “she” with its concordantly inflected verb; while the face turned outward is credited with intentness, a latent or potential glance directed to the observer, and corresponds to the role of the “i” in speech, with its complementary “you” ( ). nicholas of cusa, p. . ibid, p. . 	
   as an “object of mediation” around which viewer and deity revolve, each investing the other reciprocally with the “sight-giving power” constitutive of devotional viewing, co-participants in a practice at once finite and infinite, human and divine. we might extend koerner’s interpretation of the cusan exchange to my discussion of second-stage baptist imagery, with which the treatise is roughly contemporaneous. like the cusan text, these images establish icon viewing as an undertaking neither exclusively mortal nor exclusively divine. in them, the association of the baptist with the practical aspect of icon viewing familiar from first-stage images is expanded beyond the mere directing of attention toward the iconic field. eclipsing the metaphysical aspect of iconic presence associated with the madonna and child, he emerges as an explicitly practical means by which the divine referent of iconic viewing is made available for encounter. gazing at us from his increasingly centralized position in the compositional space, the baptist has become by the end of the second typological stage a figure of mediation, his own charismatic figure invested with the ability to facilitate iconic presence. as i suggested above, the baptist’s increasing assumption of referential responsibility during the second typological stage can be seen as reactionary, occurring in proportion to the icon’s decreasing ability to meet its own referential obligations. it is at this point that i would like to begin reintroducing belting’s crisis, the most dramatic effects of which occur during the decades comprising the second stage. although much of belting’s account presents the reformation as the prime instigator of the rupture between the era of the icon and the era of art, belting finally regards this episode as belonging to a broader and more nebulous shift in early modern comportment toward images, the driving forces of which were the twin discoveries of objective experimentation and subjective invention first articulated, as we have seen, by burckhardt. belting describes these discoveries as introducing into the image two new poles of reference—the imitative and the imaginative: the image formerly had been assigned a special reality and taken literally as a visible manifestation of the sacred person. now the image was, in the first place, made subject to the general laws of nature, including optics, and so was assigned wholly to the realm of sense perception. now the same laws were to apply to the image as to the natural perception of the outside world. it became a simulated window in which either a saint or a family member would appeal in a portrait. in addition, the new image was handed over to artists, who were expected to create it from their “fantasy.” seen in this light, a work was an artist’s idea or invention, which also provided the standard for evaluation. with this double reference to 	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
   joseph leo koerner, the moment of self-portraiture in german renaissance art (chicago: university of chicago press, ), p. . 	
   imitation (of nature) and imagination (of the artist), the new image required an understanding of art. both the imitative and the imaginative poles of reference can be readily identified in my three second-stage examples. illustrations might include the use of recessional perspective in pesellino, of atmospheric depth in boltraffio, and of figural foreshortening in parmigianino as instances of an experimental interest in imitative optics. similarly, we might mention each image’s manipulation of the enthronement motif as instances of an inventive interest in imaginative form. for belting, the introduction of the imitative and imaginative poles of reference precipitated the waning of the icon’s ability to facilitate referential presence. whereas the iconic referent was regarded as present to the viewer, co-substantial with the materiality of the icon, the imitative and imaginative referents are located elsewhere, either in the natural world or in the mind of the artist. by looking to either of these referential poles, viewers risked evacuating the image of any intrinsic worth, displacing the referent from the object itself. it is this displacement of the referent that belting’s crisis describes. however, while belting understands this referential displacement by appealing to the methodological principle of rupture, viewing it as evidence of an insurmountable schism between the pre-modern era of the icon and the modern era of the artwork, my discussion of the first and second typological stages of baptist imagery suggests an alternative explanatory approach. instead of accepting the principle of rupture, foreclosing the possibility of referential presence and consigning ourselves to either baudrillard’s hell of simulation or belting’s purgatory of nostalgia, we can observe in the baptist’s figural migration toward the center a new constellation of practices emerging from the very locus of rupture itself, appropriating its premises as a means of preserving that presence. inheriting the referential obligations of the increasingly compromised icon as properties of his own mediating presence, the baptist can be seen as anticipating the problem of rupture plaguing the modern and anti- modern strains, offering to those capable of receiving the good news a nascent solution to the problem of fractured time. the very functionality of the baptist as a solution to both the historical and methodological facets of the problem, that is, the problem as it was posed to viewers 	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
   belting, . discussing the renaissance altarpiece, burckhardt succinctly articulates the rupture between the icon and the artwork, giving special emphasis to boltraffio’s casio madonna altarpiece. remarking on the transmission of the compositional conventions of sacra conversazione scenes into the fifteenth century, burckhardt describes the altarpiece’s uniformity as an ideal showcase in which the innovations of individual artists could be displayed. for burckhardt, these scenes became centers in which new kinds of individual “expressivity” could be investigated, including not only the expressive postures and faces of individual deities and saints, but also the expressive authorial choices made individual artists, both of which he argues provide evidence of “a completely secular idealism.” see jacob burckhardt, the altarpiece in renaissance italy, trans. peter humphrey (cambridge: cambridge university press, ), p. . 	
   engaging devotionally and as it is posed those engaging interpretively, suggests the degree to which it had, by the second stage, emerged as a mediating presence. - : from margin to mediator (stage ) the third typological stage includes such th-century panel paintings as raphael’s saint john the baptist in the desert ( ) and leonardo’s two portraits, the seated saint john the baptist ( - ) and the half-length saint john the baptist ( - ), each of which feature the baptist as a solitary figure residing in the center of the compositional space, the sole vestige of the referential presence facilitated by images belonging to earlier stages. in these works, the figure of the baptist has completed his migration into the iconic field, now vacated by the icon and pictured as either an uninhabited desert-scape or a pathos-laden void. as in images belonging to earlier stages, the baptist serves a mediating function, retaining his parergonal status, appearing to point toward the familiar iconic referent located somewhere to his right. however, unlike earlier images there is no iconic referent to be found. instead, there is a compositional clearing registering the icon’s absence. in raphael’s painting, we notice a break in the wall of vegetation and stone before which the baptist sits. located at the extreme right of the image, it is toward this break that the baptist points, leading our attention expectantly toward an expanse of empty space receding into the distance. not only does the compositional location of this break recall the absent icon, the break’s dimensions suggest the removal of an icon-sized object from the pictorial space, suggesting a degree of self-awareness regarding the painting’s position in the late stages of the typological sequence we have been tracing. in leonardo’s seated portrait, this break is replaced by a blackened passage, also located at the extreme right of the image and also retaining the dimensions of an icon-sized cavity. the absence of the icon felt most forcefully in leonardo’s half-length portrait, with which this essay began. here the baptist is featured against an unremittingly opaque background painted entirely in black. pointing over his right shoulder toward a gap in the composition analogous to that seen in the seated portraits, his figure is illuminated by an unspecified light emanating from the left. in each painting, the baptist retains aspects of his earlier parergonal status. in the seated portraits, his location to the left of the compositional breaks recalls his earlier location to the left of the iconic field, an impression made all the more acute by the ersatz quality of the backgrounds before which his figure sits, insufficient settings for the narrativizing necessary to make him a 	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
   victor ieronim stoichita, the self-aware image: an insight into early modern meta-painting, trans. anne-marie glasheen (cambridge: cambridge university press, ). 	
   independently cohesive and satisfying subject of the work. in leonardo’s half-length portrait, this parergonal status is also conveyed by the manner in which the baptist is lit. the right side of his figure—that which is nearest to the vacancy left by the absent icon—is draped in shadows which seem to pull him into the receding deep space while the left side of his figure—that which is nearest to both the frames of the first and second-stage images as well as, given the angle of the baptist’s shoulders and torso, to the frame of the painting itself—is bathed in a light which seems to pour into the compositional space from a source just beyond the left foreground of the image, a virtually synonymous with the left and bottom struts of the frame itself. however, in the absence of the icon to which it had been affixed, the parergonal figure of the baptist becomes the sole focus of the composition as margin becomes center, frame becomes work and “para” becomes “ergon.” as one might expect, the emphasis placed on the persistence of the baptist’s parergonal status in spite of his location in the center of the composition fundamentally alters not only the conditions of viewing but also the very manner in which the image is offered as a source of meaning, an alteration addressed explicitly through the motif of the cross. in raphael’s painting, the cross enters the picture from the right. positioned some distance from foreground, it seems to occupy not the space of the baptist but rather that of the compositional break left by the absent icon, matching its scale and accented by its palette. similarly, in leonardo’s seated portrait the baptist holds the cross loosely by its base, allowing it to slope to the right, entering the blackened passage over the baptist’s shoulder. this affinity between the cross and the compositional break left by the absent icon is most clearly demonstrated in leonardo’s half-length portrait. here, not only does the cross occupy the void left by the compositional break, the intersection of its two pieces marks that void’s center. indeed, so consistently is this affinity between the cross and the compositional break asserted that the one would be forgiven for regarding the cross as that referent to which the baptist bereft of the icon now points. however, the cross cannot carry the referential weight of the icon. as belting himself notes, in christian iconography the cross served a semiotic function inverse to that of the icon. whereas the icon manifested referential presence, the cross signified referential absence. “unlike the image [icon or portrait],” writes belting, “the cross is a sign and thus not to be identified with what it symbolizes.” like the baptist himself, the cross can be said to be a parergon, “divert[ing] attention from itself as an object to the intended meaning.” given the semiotic function of the cross, the consequence of its inclusion in place of the icon are twofold: first, its inclusion insists that the removal of the icon be confronted not only as a compositional absence, a vacancy in the formal organization of the image, but also as a 	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
   belting, p. . 	
   heuristic absence, a vacancy in the interpretive infrastructure productive of meaning in the image; second, its inclusion causes the baptist himself to assume a new interpretive status relative to the cross, which serves as a second-order parergon paradoxically investing the baptist’s first-order parergon with a referential weight distinct from yet comparable to that of the icon, the absence of which the cross marks. it is with this investment that the figure of the baptist realizes most fully what i have been describing as his mediating presence. unable to approximate the iconic presence familiar from first and second stage images, which the rupture-crisis caused by the introduction of the imitative and imaginative poles of reference have compromised beyond recoverability, and unwilling to forsake the referential obligations of the icon in which it had formerly participated, the figure of the baptist in these third-stage images facilitates a mode of viewing which preserves aspects of that presence by pointing explicitly to the icon’s absence, calling viewers to invest in his own figure as a site of a referential presence predicated solely on mediation. given the degree to which these images draw on the obligations and failings of their predecessors, it seems that it is not until the third typological stage that this mediating presence is fully articulated, offered to viewers as part of a distinct and explicitly self-aware practice. following george kubler, i regard these third-stage images generally and the baptist’s mediating in particular as “solutions” offered to the “problem” of rupture-crisis posed by the introduction of the imitative and imaginative poles of reference. such an approach would reconfigure the three typological stages as a “chain of linked solutions” and extend the role of mediation beyond the baptist’s mediation of our access to the absent iconic referent to the third-stage image’s mediation of our access to first and second stage images, reaching all the way back to the pre-crisis icons, traversing the rupture-crisis and mitigating the transition between belting’s two eras. what would otherwise remain a series of discrete chronological periods separated by rupture becomes a continuum of typological stages joined to one another by referential mediation. the radical potential of such a reconfiguration should not be underestimated. by affording third-stage images the status of solutions to problems posed throughout earlier typological stages, we can glimpse an alternative to the methodological principle of rupture as such—an alternative, moreover, which we as viewers seem to receive kairotically from the images themselves. kubler provides a lexicon for articulating this reception, arguing that linked solutions extend indefinitely, comprising “sequences” that are “still open to further elaboration.” that being said, we as non-modern viewers contending with the shortcomings of the modern and 	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
   george kubler, the shape of time: remarks on the history of things (new haven: yale university press, ), p. . 	
   anti-modern strains might look to the mediating presence realized by the figure of the baptist in third-stage images as offering a solution not only to the th-century problem of rupture-crisis, but also to our own problem of fractured time—a solution which would be yet a “further elaboration” in an open sequence. indeed, as kubler suggests, insofar as our encounters with these images affect us as rich interpretive experiences, they do so precisely because they occupy other positions within a shared sequence, “the present interpretation of any past event” being “only another stage in the perpetuation of the original impulse.” if moderns and anti-moderns locate the emergence of modern subjectivity in the th- century rupture-crisis, the effects of which continue to reverberate in the western tradition, non- moderns might locate a rejoinder to modern subjectivity in the mediating presence realized in third-stage images of the baptist, the effects of which we must assume also continue to reverberate in our tradition. in the remaining sections of this chapter, i will expand my discussion of the baptist’s mediating presence and begin delineating some channels of its continued reverberation. in order to emphasize its availability for our reception, i will describe it as both a structural feature refined in the images, which i will call the testimonial gesture, and as a practice emerging from the images, which i will call the testimonial mode of viewing. as we shall see, both the testimonial gesture and the testimonial mode of viewing will prove remarkably durable solutions, capable of preserving referential presence not only in the realm of the th-century image, but also in the adjacent realms of early modern italian humanism and the contemporary humanities. - : the testimonial gesture the mediating presence realized in images belonging to the third typological stage relies on the baptist remaining charged with the referential obligations established in earlier stages of his figural migration despite the compositional and heuristic absence of the iconic referent as such. the most conspicuous repository of this charge is undoubtedly the baptist’s extended index finger. in each of the third-stage examples, it is the extended index finger that binds the figure 	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
   ibid, p. . the baptist’s right arm and hand was an important relic during the late th century. according to an account provided by guillaume caoursin, vice-chancellor of the order of st. john of jerusalem, in his de translatione sacrae dextrae ( ), the arm was removed from the saint’s grave near sebaste and transported to antioch by st. luke, where it stayed for over three centuries until it was presented to emperor constantine vii, a proponent of the cult of the baptist who had it enshrined in the church of st. john in petra, where it stayed until falling into turkish hands in . the relic was recovered by the order in , and soon became a topic of contention, with different sources attesting to its being located in the hospitaller’s church in barcelona, the church of st. martin in groningen, the grand master’s chapel in 	
   of the baptist most strongly to its earlier position on the margins of conventional icons and its attendant task of directing devotional attention toward the iconic field, pointing over his left shoulder to the mother and child residing in the compositional center. indeed, there is no better example of how closely the extended index finger binds the figure of the baptist to these referential obligations than parmigianino’s altarpiece which, as we have seen, marks not only the limit of the second typological stage but also the height of the index finger’s embellishment. like the baptist’s outturned gaze, the index finger can be said to be reactionary, its embellishment occurring in proportion to the compromising of the icon, the referential claims of the former increasing as those of the latter waned. however, unlike the outturned gaze, i will argue that the index finger serves an explicitly testimonial function, becoming integral to viewing only in the absence of the icon, a gesture bearing witness structurally to the referential obligations of its past. the mobility that allowed gestures to cross the boundaries dividing genres, media and epochs while retaining residual charges from earlier typological stages has been most eloquently described by aby warburg. discussing the re-appearance of nymph-like figures from antiquity in the paintings and frescoes of the florentine renaissance, warburg introduced and refined his theory of the pathosformel or “pathos formula.” for warburg, the windblown hair and flowing garments of these figures preserved vestiges of a pathetic intensity common in antiquity but extinguished in the middle ages, their re-appearance in works by botticelli, ghirlandaio and pisanello constituting not simply a borrowing of form but a tapping of the pathetic charge these flourishes retained. however, these charges did not persist unchanged. rather, as e. h. gombrich has noted, antique gestures possessed for warburg a “latent energy” which made them available for “dynamic inversion” by their renaissance successors who would re- 	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
   rhodes to name only the most prominent examples. for an account of the history and significance of the relic, see timothy b. smith, “up in arms: the knights of rhodes, the cult of relics, and the chapel of st. john the baptist in siena cathedral” in images, relics, and devotional practices in medieval and renaissance italy, ed. sally j. cornelison and scott b. montgomery (tempe: arizona center for medieval and renaissance studies, ), p. - . in an uncommonly concise discussion of the excavation of the laocoön group, warburg emphasizes the affective charge that antique gestures retained for their renaissance inheritors: “and in when a small replica of the laocoön group was found during nocturnal excavation work in rome, the discoverers, even before they recognized the mythological subject, were fired with spontaneous artistic enthusiasm by the striking expressiveness of the suffering figures and by ‘certi gesti mirabili’ (certain wonderful gestures). this was the vulgar latin of emotive gesture: an international, indeed a universal that went straight to the hearts of all those who chafed at medieval expressive constraints.” aby warburg, “dürer and italian antiquity,” trans. david britt in aby warburg: the renewal of pagan antiquity: contributions to the cultural history of the european renaissance, ed. kurt w. forster (los angeles: getty research institute for the history of art and the humanities, ), p. . e. h. gombrich, aby warburg: an intellectual biography (chicago: university of chicago press, ), p. . ibid, p. . 	
   appropriate the “unconscious inherited dispositions” lying dormant in the formal arrangement of a lock or fold, activating this latent energy and channeling it according to their own interpretive needs. georges didi-huberman argues that it is precisely the pathetic dimension of the pathosformel that allows the gesture’s mobility through space and time. benefitting from the rhetorical flexibility of “movement” as such, alluding to both its physical (to move through) and emotional (to be moved by) connotations, didi-huberman argues that warburg introduced to the lexicon of art historical scholarship an approach sensitive to the “symptomatic” quality of the image encounter, a heuristic resource capable of freeing both artist and historian from the strictures of fractured time. “[t]he pathosformel,” didi-huberman writes, “gave art history access to a fundamental anthropological dimension—that of the symptom. here the symptom is understood as movement in bodies, a movement that fascinated warburg not only because he considered it ‘passionate agitation’ but because he judged it an ‘external prompting.’” although didi-huberman stresses that the warburgian symptom should in no way be considered pathological, he does go to some length to ensure that it not lose the quality of an “external prompting,” encroaching on and interrupting the normal course of things with an unexpected and often violent eruption of symptomatic pathos. the referential obligations of the baptist’s index finger are registered pathetically, as a symptom in the warburgian sense. indeed, the rupture-crisis precipitating its embellishment during the second typological stage insists that its claims to reference be experienced as an “external prompting,” encroaching on viewers from the crisis-rupture’s reverse side. in this sense, the obligatory aspect of the index finger is dual, encompassing not only the index finger’s relationship to its parergonal past, but also extending to the viewer’s relationship to the image. in each of my third-stage examples, the viewer is confronted by an image replete with referential intent but shorn of the referent as such, encouraging him or her to respond to its pathetic or symptomatic aspects alone. we might say that the extended index finger serves as a heuristic semiconductor or point of energetic transfer, transmitting the charge of referential obligation embedded typologically in its form to the viewer as an obligation to accept its referential claims 	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
   ibid, p. . georges didi-huberman, “knowledge: movement (the man who spoke to butterflies)” in philippe- alain michaud, aby warburg and the image in motion trans. sophie hawkes (new york: zone books, ), p. . 	
   as what erwin panofsky would call the image’s “primary” or “natural” subject matter, received exclusively on formal grounds. however, insofar as the baptist’s index finger transmits the charge of referential obligation from image to viewer, it does only to the degree that its form has ceased being mere form, its mediating capacity further affirmed by its undergoing what hans-georg gadamer describes as a “transformation into structure.” for gadamer, the transformation into structure occurs when the practical aspects or “play” characterizing our engagement with texts, paintings or sculptures becomes durable, achieving a degree of permanence as inheritable properties of those texts, paintings or sculptures which, in the process, are changed from idiosyncratic works of artifice to world-bestowing works of art: i call this change, in which human play comes to its true consummation in being art, transformation into structure. only through this change does play achieve ideality, so that it can be intended and understood as play. only now does it emerge as detached from the representing activity of the players and consist in the pure appearance (erscheinung) of what they are playing. as such, the play— even the unforeseen elements of improvisation—is in principle repeatable and hence permanent. it has the character of a work, of an ergon and not only of energia. in this sense, i call it a structure (gebilde). as gadamer explains, once transformed into structure, the practical aspect or play characteristic of our engagement with artworks is freed from any representative function, appearing to its audience as a meaningful whole in terms of which the surrounding array of other practices constituting our world can be understood. significantly for my discussion, gadamer argues that the world-bestowing capacity of artworks is attributable to what he calls the structure’s “total 	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
   panofsky includes gestures within the formal, pre-iconographic category of “primary” or “natural” subject matter, which is followed by the category of “secondary” or “conventional” subject matter and finally by the category of “intrinsic meaning” or “content.” as panofsky explains, primary or natural subject matter is “apprehended by identifying pure forms, that is, certain configurations of line and colour, or certain peculiarly shaped lumps of bonze or stone, as representations of natural objects such as human beings, animals, plants, houses, tools and so forth; by identifying their mutual relations as events; and by perceiving such expressional qualities as the mournful character of a pose or gesture, or the homelike and peaceful atmosphere of an interior. the world of pure forms thus recognized as carriers of primary or natural meanings may be called artistic motifs. an enumeration of these motifs would be a pre- iconographical description of the work of art.” erwin panofsky, studies in iconology: humanistic themes in the art of the renaissance (oxford: icon editions, ), p. . hans-georg gadamer, truth and method, trans. joel weinsheimer and donald g. marshall (london: continuum publishing group, ), p. . ibid, p. . ibid, p. . a useful discussion of the transformation into structure can also be found in william schweiker, “beyond imitation: mimetic praxis in gadamer, ricoeur, and derrida” in the journal of religion, vol. , no. (jan., ), p. - . 	
   mediation” through which thematic comprehensions of a given medium are “superseded” (aufhebt), freeing the structure of the medium to present itself as a mediating agent. sympathetic with warburg, gadamer privileges the gesture as one of the most potent instances of the total mediation resulting from the transformation into structure. for gadamer, the gesture poses a unique hermeneutic challenge to interpreters. the product of an arrested signifying motion, the gesture vacillates between the presence and absence of intentional meaning, throwing interpreters into a unique hermeneutic situation in which the total mediation of the structure stands as the exclusive site of interpretive appeal. gadamer explains: what a gesture expresses is “there” in the gesture itself. a gesture is something wholly corporeal and wholly spiritual at one and the same time. the gesture reveals no inner meaning behind itself. the whole being of the gesture lies in what it says. at the same time every gesture is opaque in an enigmatic fashion. it is a mystery that holds back as much as it reveals. for what the gesture reveals is the being of meaning rather than the knowledge of meaning. it is the gesture’s vacillation between presence and absence that allows the total mediation of structure to become apparent. like warburg, gadamer describes the gesture as operating on a pathetic rather than conceptual basis, revealing the “being” of meaning rather than the “knowing” of meaning. just as the arresting of the signifying motion causes the gesture to be both present and absent, “there” as a source of intentional meaning which nevertheless remains “opaque” to its interpreters, so too does the durability of hermeneutic play transformed into structure cause the source of the meaning to gradually become gradually obscured through the course of time, resulting in that meaning’s being wholly condensed into the mediating structure itself. however, belying his position as a non-modern scholar, gadamer argues that instead of being an obstacle to interpretation, the vacillation between presence and absence characteristic of structures and conspicuous in gestures accords interpretation its profundity, freeing it from mere subjectivity. he continues: every gesture is human, but not every gesture is exclusively the gesture of a human being. indeed, no gesture is merely the expression of an individual person. like language, the gesture always reflects a world of meaning to which it belongs. and the gestures that the artist is able to bring out in his work, the gestures that allow us to interpret the world, are never simply human gestures alone. we can elucidate gadamer’s cryptic statement that human gestures are “never simply human gestures alone” by reintroducing my earlier distinction between the horizontal saeculum and the vertical kairos. although gestures are the product of the saeculum’s horizontal succession of 	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
   ibid, p. . hans-georg gadamer, image and gesture,” trans. nicholas walker in the relevance of the beautiful and other essays, ed. robert bernasconi (cambridge: cambridge university press, ), p. . ibid, p. . 	
   temporal units, a succession which allows the arresting of the signifying motion, they also reflect the kairos’ vertical interruption of that succession by serving as mediating agents capable of making absent meaning present. gadamer himself employs the horizontal-vertical distinction in a later essay, in which he describes mediating structures as “e-minent” (“standing-above”). contrasting the eminent poetic text that has undergone the transformation into structure to non- eminent ordinary speech that hasn’t, gadamer writes, “a poetic text is not like a sentence in the ongoing flux of speech, but rather it is like something whole which lifts itself up out of the stream of speech that is flowing past.” he continues, “the most homely, realistic verbal gesture which one encounters in a literary work is, in this sense, “elevated” language.” the ability of eminent structures—gestures among them—to elevate themselves vertically above the horizontal flow lifts them from the subjective realm of the simply human saeculum into the intersubjective realm of the more-than-human kairos. it is precisely the combination of warburgian pathos and gadamerian eminence that allowed the baptist’s mediating presence to be condensed into the durable structural feature of his extended index finger. indeed, the increased investment of referential weight in the baptist produced by his unique typographical lineage suggests that his extended index finger be regarded as one of more dramatic instances of the pathos and eminence of the gesture as such. this is further encouraged when we consider what i will call the testimonial function of the baptist’s index finger. while during the first and second typological stages the baptist pointed toward the madonna and child enthroned in the iconic field, his status as mediator confirmed proximally by these figures, during the third typological stage he points toward their absence, his status as mediator confirmed by his typological lineage alone. it is at this point that the baptist’s mediating presence becomes testimonial. as i will demonstrate in the following section, the phenomenon of testimony also relies on the combination of pathos and eminence characteristic of the gesture in order to render present an absent past. insofar as the baptist’s extended index finger points to the absent icon while preserving the referent through the baptist’s own mediating presence, it constitutes a testimonial gesture, bearing witness structurally to the referential obligations of its past. the degree to which the testimonial gesture draws on its own typological past to realize the baptist’s mediating presence is nowhere more apparent than in leonardo’s two portraits, undoubtedly the most mature examples of the third stage. as i have noted, in the seated portrait, 	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
   hans-georg gadamer, “the eminent text and its truth” in the bulletin of the midwest modern language association, vol. , no. (spring, ), p. . ibid, p. . 	
   the baptist’s right hand displays its extended index finger, which points toward the void left by the absent icon. outlined against the baptist’s chest and marking the absolute center of the canvas, it dominates the composition and commands the viewer’s attention. however, for all its emphatic centrality, the extended index finger of the baptist’s right hand is made to share its gestural primacy. following its cues, viewers are led to right toward the void, encountering in this lateral passage the baptist’s sloping cross which then directs our eye down toward the baptist’s left hand. here we find the extended index finger of the right hand doubled by that of the left. accented amidst a patch of shadow, the index finger of his left hand points downward, opening an ostensive circuit which leads from the baptist to the right toward the void of the absent icon before cycling back once more, rendering the prior move inconclusive and causing the viewer to return to the baptist once more, appealing to the mediating presence fostered by his typological past and condensed in his testimonial gesture for referential reassurance. in leonardo’s half- length portrait this circuit is completed and made an explicit compositional theme. here viewing is choreographed so as to lead our eye via the baptist’s right hand from the his figure toward the void over his shoulder before cycling back via his left hand to the baptist’s chest. this circuitous choreography becomes the subject of several visual puns, including the baptist’s mass of curling hair, falling on either side of his ovoid face, and his serpentine cloak, winding around his neck, torso and forearm, all of which articulate the interpretive course taken by the viewer from baptist to void and back. insofar as the circuit formed by the extended index fingers of the baptist’s left and right hands encourages the viewer to acknowledge his or her appeal to the structure of the painting as the ultimate site of referential appeal, so too does it encourage viewers to adopt a viewing practice capable of receiving from the image an account of its previous typological stages which, although absent from the scene of viewing as such, are made present through the mediating presence of the baptist. in this sense, the circuit constitutes a hermeneutic circle. martin heidegger famously described the hermeneutic circle as that ontological horizon into which we are thrown and within which we perform the interpretive movements constitutive of understanding. just as, when interpreting a given text, we must move in a circular manner from part to whole to part, or, from its details to an overall reading and then back to the details as the source of that reading, when we interpret a given practice we too must move in a circular manner from that practice to a thematic account of it and then back to the practice as the ground on which our understanding of that 	
   account stands, prompting heidegger to describe the circle as “non-vicious,” being a source of knowledge rather than its obstacle. it is on the basis of this circularity that heidegger will argue that interpretation cannot lay bare practices that would require interpreters to break from the circle and regard its contents objectively from the outside, but is limited to “pointing-out” [aufzeigen] the tendency of practices to withdraw from our interpretive grasp. as he explains in his later writings, by pointing to this withdrawal, interpreters allow practices to appear while preserving their validity as grounds of understanding. drawn toward this withdrawal, caught in what heidegger calls the “draft” generated by the hermeneutic circle’s centripetal movement, interpreters can only gesture toward the ontological source of meaning, pointing first to its elusive ground, then to their own pointing as evidence of that ground: to the extent that man is in this draft, he points toward what withdraws. as he is pointing that way, man is the pointer. man here is not first of all man, and then also occasionally someone who points. no. drawn into what withdraws, drawn toward it and thus pointing into the withdrawal, man first is man. his essential being lies in being such a pointer. as this passage suggests, not only does the circuit formed by the index fingers of the baptist’s left and right hands epitomize the hermeneutic circle, the testimonial gesture itself epitomizes the pointing toward withdrawal constitutive of the limit and ground of the interpretive act. following the baptist’s ostensive circuit, we cycle from presence (the baptist) to absence (the void left by the iconic referent as well as the typological past of baptist imagery) then back to presence (the mediation figured by the baptist and condensed in the testimonial gesture). 	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
   martin heidegger, being and time, trans. john macquarie & edward robinson (new york: harper & row, ), p. . hubert dreyfus provides the following synopsis of heidegger’s account of the hermeneutic circle, noting several of its most important methodological implications: “in general, the so- called hermeneutic circle refers to the fact that in interpreting a text one must move back and forth between an overall interpretation and the details that a given reading lets stand out as significant. since the new details can modify the overall interpretation, which can in turn reveal new details as significant, the circle is supposed to lead to a richer and richer understanding of the text. as introduced by heidegger even in division i [of being and time], however, the phenomenological-hermeneutic circle involves a stronger methodological claim: ( ) since we must begin our analysis from within the practices we seek to interpret, our choice of phenomena to interpret is already guided by our traditional understanding of being. ( ) since it deals with what is difficult to notice, this traditional understanding may well have passed over what is crucial, so we cannot take the traditional understanding at face value. ( ) thus we must be prepared to revise radically the traditional account of objects, subjects, language, space, truth, reality, time, and so on, on the basis of the phenomena revealed by our interpretation.” see hubert dreyfus, being-in-the-world: a commentary on heidegger’s being and time, division i (cambridge: mit press, ), p. . additional explication of heidegger’s account of the hermeneutic circle can be found in william blattner, heidegger’s being and time: a reader’s guide (new york: continuum, ), p. , and mark a. wrathall, heidegger and unconcealment: truth, language, and history (new york: cambridge university press, ), p. - . martin heidegger, “what calls for thinking?” trans. max niemeyer verlag in basic writings, ed. david foster krell (san francisco: harper collins, ), p. - . 	
   in the following section, i will describe the willingness of viewers to follow the baptist’s ostensive circuit, cycling from presence to absence to presence, as belonging to a testimonial mode of viewing, a practice born of the need to preserve the presence of the referent in the face of the rupture-crisis and made inheritable in the durable structural feature of the testimonial gesture. - : the testimonial mode of viewing as i have noted in the introduction, testimony is characterized by a central aporia: the ability to render present an absent past. among the most eloquent and penetrating descriptions of the aporetics of testimony is that provided by ricoeur in his memory, history, forgetting. borrowing from aristotle’s discussion of memory in de memoria et reminiscentia (on memory and reminiscence), ricoeur begins his discussion by asserting the paradoxical status of remembered entities, posing aristotle’s question, “how it is possible that though the affection [the presentation] alone is present, and the [related] fact absent, the latter—that which is not present— is remembered.” like aristotle, ricoeur distinguishes two ways in which remembered entities become present. the first of these, which ricoeur calls “simple evocation,” concerns those remembered entities which become present spontaneously as subjective affects, products of the phenomenon of mneme (memory). for aristotle, the affective presence of mneme consists of two parts: the phantasma (the affect as sense perception), and the eikon (the affect as likeness or copy). the second of these, which ricoeur calls “effort to recall,” concerns those remembered entities that become present only through the external prompting of mnemonic tokens which begin willed movements back to subjective affects, products of the phenomenon of anamnesis (recollection). although ricoeur acknowledges aristotle’s distinction between mneme and anamnesis as essential, he suggests that, due to the common root of each in the affects of subjects, any discussion of memory equipped with these terms alone will be incomplete, unable to accommodate the vast majority of remembered entities for which no original affects can be found. the most important reserve of these is the intersubjective field of history, and it is here that aristotle’s initial question becomes most complex. 	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
   aristotle, de memoria et reminiscentia (on memory and reminiscence) trans. j. i. beare in the basic works of aristotle, ed. richard mckeon (new york: the modern library, ), p. . aristotle insists on the affective root of anamnesis, writing, “that the affection is corporeal, i.e. that recollection is a searching for an ‘image’ in a corporeal substrate, is proved by the fact that in some persons, when, despite the most strenuous application of thought, they have been unable to recollect, it [viz. the effort at recollection] excites a feeling of discomfort, which even though they abandon the effort at recollection, persists in them none the less ” ( ). in an earlier essay to which i will refer again, ricoeur opposes to the corporeal affects grounding mneme and anamnesis in aristotle’s discussion of memory a hermeneutic pathos more akin to aristotle’s discussion of tragedy. for ricoeur, the best example of this 	
   for ricoeur, history constitutes an exaggerated form of anamnesis. not only does history begin with an external prompting like all forms of recollection, it does so in the face of two obstacles which preclude any arrival at the subjective affects which for aristotle had grounded traditional anamnesis: the spans of time across which histories extend and the intersubjective spaces in which histories are shared. as ricoeur explains, each of these foreclose the possibility of moving backward from mnemonic token to subjective affect by imposing a radical absence, concealing the object of recollection behind either the impenetrable fog of time or the opaque psyche of the other. history is able to pursue its recollective course in spite of these obstacles only by way of what ricoeur describes as the mediating function of testimony. as ricoeur explains, testimony is characterized by its ability to mediate between the recollected entities or events that are themselves absent from the annunciative scene, and the audiences in the presence of which accounts of those entities or events are delivered, either by a witness or text. it is this mediating role unique to testimonial accounts that causes ricoeur to declare that, “testimony takes us with one bound to the formal conditions of ‘things of the past’ (praeterita), the conditions of possibility of the actual process of the historiographical operation.” this process, ricoeur argues, rests on a foundation not of affect, which for reasons i have noted cannot ground historical recollection, but of faith, which extends both to the recollected entity or event of which we expect “a faithful account,” and to the claims of the witnesses or texts which asks us to “believe” their claims to have “really been there.” for ricoeur, it this foundation of faith, sedimented in the institutions of history, that enables testimony to render recollected entities and events present. 	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
   pathos is to be found in the book of job: “what did job ‘see’? behemoth and leviathan? the orders of creation? no. his questions about justice are undoubtedly left without an answer. but by repenting, though not of sin, for he is righteous, but by repenting for his supposition that existence does not make sense, job presupposes an unsuspected meaning which cannot be transcribed by speech or logos a human being may have at his disposal. this meaning has no other expression than the new quality which penitence confers on suffering. hence it is not unrelated to what aristotle speaks of as the tragic pathos that purifies the spectator of fear and pity.” here, pathos is distinguished from affect in that it constitutes a source of meaning without, however, rising to the level of proof, a qualification consistent with warburg’s theorization of the pathosformel. see paul ricoeur, “toward a hermeneutic of the idea of revelation” in the harvard theological review, vol. , no. / (jan.-apr., ), p. - . ricoeur, memory, history, forgetting, p. . ibid, p. - . as ricoeur explains, the critical endeavor to expose false testimonies also relies on a foundation of faith when proceeding from accounts of historical entities or events regarded as less reliable to accounts of historical entities or events regarded as more reliable: “to memory is tied an ambition, a claim—that of being faithful to the past…to put it bluntly, we have nothing better than memory to signify that something has taken place, has occurred, has happened before we declare that we remember it. false testimonies…can be unmasked only by a critical agency that can do nothing better than to oppose those accounts reputed to be more reliable to the testimony under suspicion” ( ). 	
   ricoeur enriches his discussion of testimony’s reliance on the foundation of faith by comparing historical testimony to prophetic revelation, both of which, he argues, are the products of an inspired double authorship. the fundamental instance of this double authorship in the western tradition is the prophetic revelation delivered by moses to the tribes of israel. as ricoeur explains, when narrating the pentateuch, moses “presents himself not as speaking in his own name, but in the name of another, in the name of yahweh. so here the idea of revelation appears as identified with the idea of a double author of speech and writing. revelation is the speech of another behind the speech of the prophet.” although the fundamental instance of this double authorship is located in the scriptures, ricoeur expands this instance analogically into a mode of discourse more primordial than that of theology, offering historical testimony as a further example of discourse in which statements are subtended by double authorship. like prophets delivering revelations, witnesses and texts delivering testimonies do not speak in their own name but rather in the names of the past entities and events to which they refer which, like yahweh, serve as anterior second authors speaking behind and lending legitimacy to the testimonies themselves. for ricoeur, both prophetic revelations and historical testimonies become matters of faith insofar as their anterior second authors remain unavailable for direct inspection, requiring audiences to accept their apparently unreasonable claims without objectively verifiable evidence, focusing the burden of proof on the mediating witness alone. as the most dramatic example of this, ricoeur offers the figure of the martyr: when this proof becomes the price of life itself, the witness changes names. he becomes a martyr. in greek, though, µαρτνs means witness, i am well aware that any argument from martyrdom is suspect. a cause that has martyrs is not necessarily a just cause. but martyrdom precisely is not an argument and still less a proof. it is a test, a limit situation. a person becomes a martyr because first of all he is a witness. 	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
   ricoeur, “toward a hermeneutic of the idea of revelation,” p. . interestingly, ricoeur describes the unavailability of these anterior second authors and the resulting mediation as results of a “scission” ( ), a term which alludes to the kantian notion of the “pure cut” discussed briefly above. the allusion is intentional, and ricoeur goes on to articulate the intimate relationship between kantian aesthetics and historical testimony: “at the moment of accounting for the aesthetic production of genius, [kant] invokes that power of imagination ‘to present’ (darstellung) those ideas of reason for which we have no concept. by means of such representation, the imagination ‘occasions much thought’ (viel zu denken) without however any definite thought, i.e., any concept, being capable of being adequate to it; it consequently cannot be completely encompassed and made intelligible in language.’ …historical testimony has the same structure and the same function. it, too, is a ‘presentation’ of what for reflection remains only an idea: namely, the idea of letting go wherein we affirm an order exempt from that servitude from which finite existence cannot deliver itself” ( - ). ibid, p. . 	
   as ricoeur explains, it is precisely because martyrdom does not constitute an argument but rather a test that it serves as the most concise example of the unique evidentiary burden born by the mediating witness. unable to provide objectively verifiable evidence, he or she ceases “testifying that…” and begins “testifying to….” ricoeur recommends the latter phrase as a means of better understanding the way in which testimonies, shorn from their anterior second authors, focus the burden of proof on the actions and, in the most dramatic cases, lives of the mediating witness- martyrs by whom they are delivered. while ricoeur alludes only briefly to examples, mentioning socrates and jesus as possible test cases, i offer john the baptist as among the most representative instance of the evidentiary burden born by the witness-martyr as mediator. according to the chronology provided in the gospel of luke, john the baptist appeared during the fifteenth year of the reign of the emperor tiberius ( ce) in the valleys and desert of judea, southeast of jerusalem along banks of the jordan river and the dead sea. born to sacerdotal parents zacharias and elisabeth, the baptist is generally considered to have refined his brand of apocalyptic asceticism among the essenes of qumran before retreating to the surrounding wilderness where he delivered the majority of his sermons and baptisms, including that which he is said to have performed on christ in the waters of bethany, beyond the jordan. before turning to the complex relationship between the baptist and christ, we can already notice in the performance of the baptismal rite and the penitent diet of locusts and honey what ricoeur described as the focusing of the burden of evidentiary proof born on the actions of the witness. indeed, st-century jewish historian flavius josephus suggests that the imprisonment and eventual martyrdom of the baptist at the hands of herod antipas ( - ce) was the result of the tetrarch’s objection to precisely the way in which these actions claimed to consolidate the source of divine judgment. offended by the baptist’s objecting to his affair with herodias, wife of his half- brother (also named herod), and alarmed by the popular support the baptist received in the surrounding territories, herod had the baptist imprisoned and later executed. while the 	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
   ibid, p. . for discussions of the baptist’s relationship to the essenes of qumran, see howard m. teeple, “quamran and the origin of the fourth gospel” in novum testamentum, vol. , fasc. (oct., ), p. - and john a. t. robinson, “the baptism of john and the qumran community: testing a hypothesis” in the harvard theological review, vol. , no. (jul., ), p. - . unlike accounts of the baptist recorded in the gospels, josephus notes that the baptismal rite was considered to be redemptive of the body and not the soul. according to josephus, the baptist preached that the redemption of the soul was secured only by “proper behavior.” see josephus flavius, josephus: the essential writings, trans. and ed. paul l. maier (grand rapids: kregel publications, ), p. . accounts differ regarding the circumstances of the baptist’s execution. josephus’s account states that herod summarily ordered the baptist’s death amidst fears of a rebellion. the gospel of mark ( : - : ) describes herod as hesitant. according to the gospel, herod made an oath to salome, daughter of herodias, having been impressed by her ability to entertain the courts as a dancer. the oath guaranteed salome one 	
   emphasis on the baptist’s performance of the baptismal rite and penitent diet are typical of ricoeur’s description of the focusing of the burden of evidentiary proof on the actions and life of the witness-martyr, it is in the baptist’s relationship to christ that his exemplarity in this regard is made most explicit. the baptist’s role as witness is most accurately reflected by his epithets “forerunner ” and “precursor,” both of which refer to his preparatory function preceding and testifying to the coming of christ. although several passages in each of the four of the gospels describe the baptist’s role as witness, two passages from the gospel of john articulate the structural conditions of this role particularly well. the first, spoken by christ, indicates both the unique status of the baptist as witness and the double authorship underwriting his prophetic revelation: “if i bear witness myself, my witness is not true. there is another that beareth witness of me; and i know that the witness which he witnesseth of me is true. ye sent unto john, and he bare witness to the truth.” while these lines are dense with parabolic meaning, one of their more striking aspects is christ’s insistence on his own insufficiency as witness. one reason for this may be christ’s status as god-man, which nullifies the anteriority of the second author yahweh which, as we have seen, is such a crucial component of the witness-martyr’s discourse. this view is supported by the passage’s final line, in which christ specifies the distance between the baptist and yahweh as elemental to his ability to serve successfully as witness. the second, spoken by the baptist and adopted as one of this paper’s epigraphs, indicates the way in which the burden of evidentiary proof becomes focused on the witness-martyr: “that is he of whom i said, after me cometh a man which is preferred before me: for he was before me.” remarkable in these lines is the paradoxical status of the baptist’s testimony, which is described as both preceding christ (“that is he of whom i said, after me cometh a man”) and following christ (“which is preferred before me: for he was before me.”) another instance of the hermeneutic circularity described above, we as readers cycle from the presence of the baptist’s testimony (“after me”) to the absence of the messianic figure of christ (“a man which is preferred before me”) before returning once more to the presence of the baptist’s testimony (“for he was before me”). as was the case when viewing third-stage representations of the baptist, the cycle ends with the baptist assuming a mediating presence, his figure baring the burden of evidentiary proof. it is this cycling from presence to absence to presence encouraged both by the third-stage images of the baptist and by the gospels’ descriptions of his role as witness-martyr that 	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
   wish or half the kingdom. when salome demanded the head of the baptist be delivered to her in a charger, herod obliged her only reluctantly. john : - : . john : - : . 	
   characterizes what i call the testimonial mode of viewing. as in all forms of testimony, the baptist as mediator is in both cases charged with the task of rendering the absent present. in my third-stage examples, it is not only the absent iconic referent that the baptist renders present, but also, as we have seen, the referential obligations of those earlier typological stages from which his mediating presence emerged. in this regard, third-stage images of the baptist can be said to epitomize one of the most complex facets of the baptist’s unique testimonial function. in addition to bearing witness narratively, proclaiming his appearance, the baptist also bares witness structurally, serving as what in biblical exegesis is often described as a typos of christ, prefiguring his appearance. this suggests that the association of the baptist’s testimonial function with the typological thinking i have been describing was itself a nascent resource, received and refined by the testimonial gesture, preserved and perpetuated by testimonial mode viewing. in the next chapter i will argue that, while exemplified by third-stage images of the baptist, the testimonial mode of viewing extended beyond the devotional realm, becoming one of the most crucial components of the secular genre of the historia. i will argue that it was in the historia that the problems of fractured time posed by the rupture-crisis were most successfully addressed. focusing on the theorization of genre provided by leon battista alberti, i will claim that viewers not only extended the willingness to cycle between presence and absence that they had developed in their confrontations which images of the baptist, but that this extension occurred by way of the durable structural feature of the testimonial gesture, a variation of which alberti describes as the defining attribute of the genre’s ammonitore figure. locating both the 	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
   northrop frye describes the organization of the old and new testaments as corresponding to a type- antitype pairs, with old testament parables and figures serving as the counterparts of their new testament equivalents, which are often interpreted as complementing or fulfilling their predecessors. as frye explains, biblical typology relied on a complex rhetoric of pre-figuration, with “typos,” “forma,” and “figura“ often being considered synonymous: “everything that happens in the old testament is a ‘type’ or adumbration of something that happens in the new testament, and the whole subject is therefore called typology, though it is typology in a special sense. paul speaks in romans : of adam as a typos of christ; the vulgate renders typos here as ‘forma,’ but the av’s ‘figure’ reflects the fact that ‘figura’ had come to be the standard latin equivalent of typos. what happens in the new testament constitutes an ‘antitype,’ a realized form something foreshadowed in the old testament. see northrop frye, the great code: the bible and literature (toronto: penguin group, ), p. . christopher s. wood alludes briefly to the baptist’s implication in typological thinking, citing saul a. kripke’s discussion of the unique status of the baptismal event ( ). kripke suggests that, although temporally fixed, the baptismal event is typologically preserved through time, being replicated anew with each utterance of a subject’s name: “an initial ‘baptism’ takes place. here the objet may be names by ostension, or the reference of the name may be fixed by description. when the name is ‘passed from link to link,’ the receiver of the name must, i think, intend when he learn how to use it the sane reference as the man from whom he heard it.” see saul a. kripke, naming and necessity (cambridge: harvard university press, ), p. . 	
   historia and the ammonitore within the broader textures of italian humanism, i will offer an alternative to burckhardt’s influential account of the renaissance as a period in which the veil of faith was dropped, arguing instead that the humanists’ relationship to the artifacts, grammar and rhetoric of antiquity relied on the testimonial mode of viewing, preserving rather than dispelling the referential conventions of icon viewing in a series of cultural institutions which, i will claim, persist as among the most important foundations of the contemporary humanities. 	
   chapter three: on rupture and reference 	
   : humanism, history, historia while the rupture-crisis emerged in the devotional realm of the icon, it was in the secular realm of the historia that the problem of fractured time which it posed was most successfully addressed. this is due in large part to the way in which the genre served as a figurative space where italian humanists could articulate the terms of their complex relationship with the antique past. as has been often noted, this relationship differed dramatically from our own, exhibiting a receptivity which, by the comparatively atrophic standards of current scholarship, appears in many ways strange. arguably, this receptivity was nowhere more effectively demonstrated than in the attitude that the humanists adopted toward the artifacts of antiquity. as charles mitchell argued in an influential essay, humanists were often willing to forego distinctions between the categories “original” and “forgery” on which modern and anti- modern scholars rely when fixing objects in time. although early modern antiquarians like the th-centuy bishop antonio agustin, to whom the illustrious title arca universae antiquitatis (“repository of all antiquarian knowledge”) was given, took pride in their critical knowledge of antiquity, preferring to “see the original rather than the copy,” this pride was balanced by an appreciation of the knowledge and sensitivity demonstrated by convincing fakes. as mitchell notes, agustin took particular pleasure in the fraudulent coins of the paduan cavino, counterfeited to near perfection, and the spurious inscriptions of the veronese panvinio, which had fooled countless compilers. agustin’s delight in these forgeries was not idiosyncratic, but reflected a broader sentiment among antiquarian humanists that mitchell describes as creative, not to say romantic: the sixteenth-century antiquary was a humanist in a new medium. his first task was to correct, elucidate and supplement the classical texts where they were deficient. he could restore something like the spelling of the words cicero or caesar had in mind when they dictated their works…. [h]e could also systematically illustrate the various departments, the antiquitatis, of ancient greek and roman life…. but at the same time the antiquary, like the literary humanist, was an original composer. he invented inscriptions to show his taste, and he could fake them too to exhibit his skill and his ability to rival the ancients. 	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
   charles mitchell, “archaeology and romance in renaissance italy” in italian renaissance studies, ed. e. f. jacob (london: faber and faber, ). important contributions to the discussion of these categories in the early modern period have also been made by anthony grafton in his forgers and critics: creativity and duplicity in western scholarship (princeton: princeton university press, ). ibid, p. . 	
   the more like the genuine article his products were, the greater credit they were to his scholarship. in mitchell’s description, the antiquarian humanist assumes the role of participant, adding freely to artifacts recovered and embellishing artifacts invented. however, this participatory stance was the product not of undue arrogance but rather of presumed contemporaneity. for, although made absent by the centuries that had passed since cicero and caesar, antiquarian humanists considered the antique worlds to which their objects of study belonged to be nevertheless available for dynamic kairotic reception in their present. many shared the ambition of renowned antiquarian cyriac of ancona to overcome historical distance by resurrecting these worlds, “bring[ing] them from the dark tomb to light, to live once more among living men.” products of this ambition, the forged originals so admired by agustin and cyriac were not seen as violations of scholastic decency, but as examples of scholastic receptivity. indeed, humanists often continued to regard forgeries as originals even when they had been exposed, perceiving their own imitations of antique precedents as legitimate instances of the models they copied. among the most renowned examples of this is the reception of michelangelo’s sculpture of a sleeping cupid, famously recounted by giorgio vasari: [the cupid], when finished, was shown by means of baldassarre del milanese to lorenzo di pier francesco as a beautiful thing, and he, having pronounced the same judgment, said to michelangelo, “if you were to bury it under ground and then sent it to rome treated in such a manner as to look old, i am certain it would pass for an antique, and you would thus obtain much more for it than by selling it here.” it is said that michelangelo handled [the cupid] in such a manner as to make it appear an antique; nor is there any reason to marvel at that, seeing that he had genius to do it and even more. others maintain that milanese took it to rome and buried it in a vineyard that he had there, and then sold it as an antique to cardinal san giorgio for two hundred ducats. david quint has described vasari’s anecdote of michelangelo’s cupid as revealing a propensity among humanists to think of all artifacts regardless of provenance as “forged,” that is, as painstakingly made by hands. however, this forged status did not temporally relativize these artifacts as one might expect. instead, quint argues, it allowed both forgeries and originals to be 	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
   ibid, p. . ibid, p. . giorgio vasari, the lives of the most excellent painters, sculptors and architects, trans. gaston du c. de vere, ed. phillip jacks (new york: random house, ), p. . david quint, origin and originality in renaissance literature (new haven: yale university press, ), p. . 	
   seen in relation to “typological” sources of meaning which were considered to be beyond time, and which fostered a degree of exchangeability between the two categories. it was to the continued availability of these typological sources of meaning that humanists attested when imitating the styles and forms of their antique predecessors, often regarding the convincing replication of these as warrant enough for the attribution of the descriptor “antique” to their counterfeit works. one of the most convincing replicators of these styles and forms was none other than the young alberti, whose precocious play philodoxeos fabula imitated the latin of imperial rome and the conventions of antique comedy so convincingly that, when an unauthorized version was circulated anonymously, it was taken to be a legitimately classical work, giving off what alberti later called “a powerful scent of the ancient comic genre and a sort of deep antiquity.” alberti seemed comfortable with his text retaining its claim to antique status, attaching a forward to a revised edition which attributed the work to confected antique author lepidus, then letting it circulate freely among readers, fooling some who were thrilled at the recovery of yet another antique source, delighting others who were encouraged to join in the imitative enterprise. the readiness with which early modern humanists admitted forgeries into the ranks of originals reflected the developments occurring in the humanists’ conception of historical time. spurred by an ever expanding range of travel, and an unprecedented awareness of the geographic and ethnological complexity exhibited by the landscapes and societies of africa, asia and the americas, peripatetic scholars fashioned chronological systems capable of coping with the discrepancies this complexity posed for what seemed to many a restrictive and rigid temporal model derived from the old testament. as anthony grafton has noted, while these chronologies shared an unflinching demand for precision dating, each embossed folio, wall chart and pocket almanac construed these dates differently, causing the swath of history itself to seem fluid, subject to continuous revision, modification and amendment. as grafton explains, this fluidity caused informed readers by the middle of the th century to see chronology “not as a fixed textbook discipline but as a challenging interdisciplinary study, one that swarmed with unsolved 	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
   quint offers erasmus’ the praise of folly as another example of early modern humanism’s submission of the time-bound categories of forgery and original to the timeless category of conventional and typological sources of meaning. erasmus poses an alternative, quint argues, between a historicist conception of time that separates the forgery from the original, and an allegorical conception of time that allows these categories to merge: “as long as folly remains the original fiction of her human author, her oration and his text are limited to a corrosive satire that empties human life of significance. the positive, allegorical movement of the text toward the recovery of true meaning is accompanied by a gradual relinquishing of folly’s distinctive voice for a conventional language of piety and by the identification of folly herself with a preexistent scriptural typology” ( ). cited by anthony grafton in leon battista alberti: master builder of the italian renaissance (cambridge: harvard university press, ), p. . 	
   problems.” each of these unsolved problems presented chronologists with an opportunity to reshape the historical continuum to which they belonged, locating events, artifacts and themselves at various positions within a contested temporal matrix which, with each rearrangement, was thrown again into flux. the developments occurring in the field of chronology were mirrored by those occurring in the field of etymology. expanding quint’s discussion of typological sources of meaning, marian rothstein’s describes the th-century vogue for etymological studies (from etumos, meaning “true” or “real”) as evincing a fluid conception of historical time similar to that reflected in the unabashedly forged originals of the antiquarians and the continuously amended almanacs of the chronologists. this fluidity was expressed both explicitly, in etymological treatises such as isidore of seville’s th-century work, etymologiarum sive originum, which was wildly popular amongst th-century grammarians and derived the truth or “etumon” of entities from their names alone, and implicitly, in a variety of translatio imperii and translatio studii, which described the transmission and preservation of secular power and learning from greek and roman sources to their contemporary manifestations. whether explicitly theorized or implicitly assumed, these contributions to the etymological field also presented a conception of historical time that was fluid, allowing relatively free exchange between the humanists and their antique forbears. even extended historical lapses could be quite easily overcome as long as a text, sentence or even a single word remained through which etymologists could derive the formal principles of the sources that the trace obeyed. for, as rothstein argues, these sources were regarded by humanists as “perpetually present,” available for dynamic kairotic reception at any point in the historical continuum. the humanists’ receptivity to typological sources of meaning exhibits many of the hermeneutic traits that i have identified as belonging to the testimonial mode of viewing. in each of the examples given, whether drawn from the fields of antiquarianism, chronology, or etymology, artifacts served a mediating function analogous to that served by the figure of the baptist, allowing absent antique sources of meaning to be rendered present to scholars pouring over their forms. this initial resemblance becomes more compelling when we entertain the 	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
   anthony grafton, “dating history: the renaissance & the reformation of chronology” in daedalus, vol. , no. , on time (spring, ), p. . marian rothstein, “etymology, genealogy, and the immutability of origins” in renaissance quarterly, vol. , no. (summer, ), p. . ibid, p. - . rothstein also offers the following description of renaissance invention which, like quint’s description of the forged status of artifacts, subsumes the time-bound production of objects beneath their timeless conventional and typological sources: “generally speaking, for the renaissance, an invention is the making known of something that already exists, the tapping of a previously untapped potential where the act of tapping is not more important than the independent pre-existence of the potential” ( ). 	
   possibility that, when turning to these artifacts and preparing to receive from their formal features a glimpse of the antique models according to which they were produced, the humanists were exercising the very practices acquired from second and third-stage baptist imagery. indeed, the lucian aphorism leonem ex unguibus aestimare (“to reckon the lion from the claw”), so often cited by vasari, erasmus and others, may have served as an antique proxy for the testimonial gesture itself. the testimonial gesture would, however, become the subject of dedicated attention when theorized by alberti as one of the most crucial features of that genre charged with the explicit task of addressing what role the act of viewing would play in humanism’s broader antiquarian project: the historia. as jack m. greenstein has explained, the theorization of the historia provided by alberti in his treatise was the product of a combination of elements from the greco-roman rhetorical tradition and the medieval christian theological tradition. from the greek ἵστωρ or latin histor, meaning “skilled witness or judge,” historia referred during early antiquity to the activity of one who investigated and testified to events which he himself had observed. in later antiquity, historia referred to the results of these investigations and testimonies, imbuing the word with a degree of ambiguity by refusing to distinguish between the events themselves and the witness’s testimony, both of which being equally regarded as historia. as the production of historia became more ambitious, claiming both a wider temporal scope and a greater degree of veracity, the limits of the witness became more pronounced, causing historians like thucydides to organize and collate many individual accounts according to inherited cultural models of emplotment and mythic types, giving the historia the distinctly narrative aspect to which aristotle would attest in his poetics, placing it alongside epic and drama as a distinctly literary form. when used by the latin writers of pagan antiquity, the earlier emphasis on the witness as investigator was all but forgotten. adopting neither its root word histor nor its active verb historien (“to inquire” or “to relate the results of inquiry”), these writers adopted an almost exclusively typological understanding of historia. included as part of the grammar and rhetoric curricula that sought to train students in the effective reading and composing of texts, historia assumed what greenstein calls an “informational” significance, perceived as referring to the 	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
   this aphorism and its citation by vasari and erasmus is discussed by robert williams, art, theory, and culture in sixteenth-century italy: from techne to metatechne (cambridge: cambridge university press, ), p. - . jack m. greenstein, mantegna and painting as historical narrative (chicago: university of chicago press, ), p. - . much of greenstein’s gloss of the antique understanding of the historia is culled from gerald a. press, “the development of the idea of history in antiquity,” ph.d. diss., university of california, san diego, . press published a summary of his dissertation titled “history and the development of the idea of history in antiquity” in history and theory, vol. ( ), p. - . 	
   actuality of the events that had occurred. this informational significance was reflected by historians who, when amending earlier historia, would seek not to correct implausibilities in the sources themselves, but rather to “recount” these in “a more pleasing and memorable fashion” when composing their own historia, demonstrating a more inventive use of the typological conventions to which the sources belonged. it was through the manipulation of these typological conventions rather than the uncovering, correcting or exposing of sources that the latin historian’s contribution to historical accuracy of was made. the understanding of historia born of the greco-roman rhetorical tradition was succeeded by that born of the medieval christian tradition. here, historia were no longer concerned exclusively with retrospective accounts of events that had occurred in the past, but began to locate these events within a divine temporal framework that also included prospective accounts of events that would occur in the future. as greenstein explains, the location of historia within this divine temporal framework allowed events far removed from one another to be considered relationally, interpretively joined through biblical hermeneutics and figurative analysis. in biblical hermeneutics, historia corresponded to the sensus litteralis, the primary or literal meaning of scripture, and served as the basis for sensus spiritualis, its allegorical or spiritual significance. figurative analysis, from the latin figura or “type,” would interpret the events of historia typologically as prefigurations of later events with which they shared some relation within the divine temporal framework. as greenstein explains, figurative analysis negotiated between the events of the historia and the figurative types to which they were interpretively joined without sacrificing either particularity or abstraction. indeed, the theological obligation of the figure was to facilitate a reciprocal relationship between typological abstractions and the particular events by which they were embodied. it was this figurative dimension that allowed the term historia to be applied not only to texts but also to other media, including painting. an etymology coined by nd-century grammarian aulus gellius and repeated by isidore of seville linked historia to a distinctly visual form of knowledge on the basis of the witness’s having had to have seen those events to the 	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
   ibid, p. - . greenstein notes the distinction made by latin historians between historia, which exhibited a strong narrative emphasis grounded in the inventive manipulation of typological convention, and annals, which purported to be merely annual recordings of facts stripped of all narrative and typological trappings. greenstein cites latin grammarian sempronius asellio’s charge that annals were akin to fables in that they lacked the verisimilitude of historia, being able to list events but unable to locate these within a narrative arc that would relate what had caused these events to occur and what significance these events might have. ibid, p. - . 	
   existence of which he testified. it is this claim that alberti would pursue on behalf of painting in his treatise, arguing that painting in general and the historia in particular be included among the ranks of the “liberal arts,” capable not only of delighting the senses of viewers, but also of contributing to their intellectual understanding of and moral comportment in the world. as we will see in the following section, both contributions relied on the cultivation of a kairotic receptivity that found its most explicit articulation in the ammonitore figure, whose most distinguishing feature was a variation of the testimonial gesture. : alberti’s aesthetics and the ammonitore alberti’s treatise, written in latin in , translated into italian in , and then reissued as a definitive latin edition in , drew from both the greco-roman rhetorical tradition and the medieval christian theological tradition when theorizing historia as a genre of painting. the principle concern of the second of the treatise’s three books, the first being devoted to a mathematical explication of linear perspective and the third to the preferred conduct of the painter, the historia was for alberti “the great work of the painter,” unequalled both in ambition and import. considered to be a participant in humanism’s antiquarian project, alberti insisted that historia portray notable scenes from classical myths or biblical verse. these were to be represented convincingly by figures arranged in groups of no more than ten, portrayed with correct anatomical proportions and in a geometrically rendered space capable of relating their relationships both to each other and to the setting in which they appear. the emphasis placed by alberti on the convincing representation of classical and biblical scenes constitutes an extension of that placed by the greco-roman tradition of the historia as the testimonial recounting of an event by a witness. like the witness’s testimony, alberti intended historia to render the absent events or entities they portrayed present to the audiences by which they were viewed. indeed, in the introduction to the second book of his treatise dedicated to the historia, alberti describes this ability to render the absent present as one of painting’s most potent traits: painting possesses a truly divine power in that not only does it make the absent present (as they say of friendship), but it also represents the dead to the living many centuries later, so that they are recognized by spectators with pleasure and deep admiration for the artist. 	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
   ibid, p. . leon battista alberti, on painting, trans. cecil grayson (new york: penguin books, ), p. . ibid, p. . 	
   alberti here describes painting as not only able to render the absent present, but to do so across considerable temporal intervals, a specification which placed painting in the tradition of the greco-roman histor as a witness to events or entities which audiences would not otherwise encounter, requiring the scenes portrayed be rendered with plausible figures occupying plausible spaces. while the convincing portrayal of figures and spaces was crucial to alberti’s understanding of historia, the genre was by no means confined to the merely illustrative. in addition to techniques for the simulation of perspective space and anatomical features, alberti also offers an extensive treatment of pictorial composition and its participation to the historia’s testimonial function. as michael baxandall has shown, much of alberti’s compositional theory was derived from humanist guides to the grammatical structures of classical latin. alberti’s description of composition as the correct assembly of parts in relation to a whole in particular reflected similar models commonly found in these guides. as alberti explains, “composition is the procedure in painting whereby the parts are composed together in the picture…parts of the ‘historia’ are the bodies, part of the body is the member, and part of the member is the surface.” baxandall notes the resemblance between the four-stage hierarchy comprised of the historia, the body, the member and the surface described in this passage and that comprised of the period, clause, phrase, and word described in the humanists’ grammatical guides. while baxandall limits himself to noting this resemblance, acknowledging the importance of alberti’s theory of composition as a uniquely humanist achievement but resisting granting it much significance beyond matters of style, recent work by robert williams suggests that the part-whole correspondence on which alberti’s theory of composition relied was more robust, and served as one the most distinctive features of humanist aesthetics. for williams, early modern art theory and production was premised on the co- determination of individual images (parts) and the complex of other images to which they 	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
   ibid, p. . michael baxandall, giotto and the orators: humanist observers of painting in italy and the discovery of pictorial composition - (oxford: oxford university press, ), p. - . baxandall concludes his study by delineating two schools of humanistic art theory, each of which corresponded to a school of grammatical theory. the first was alberti’s school of compositus painting, which corresponded to the school of compositus writing, the main proponent of which was italianized cretan and greek scholar george of trebizond who articulated its principles in his de rhetorica libri v. the compositus school stressed compositional harmony between formal elements, and concerned itself with providing ruled for managing their arrangement. the second was the dissolutus school, which george of trebizond felt was typified by guarino da verona, who was also responsible for a comparable school of grammar. unlike the compositus school, the dissolutus school stressed compositional variety or varietas, paying little attention to compositional harmony ( - , - ). greenstein criticizes baxandall’s limiting his conversation to stylistic matters in his essay “on alberti’s ‘sign’: vision and composition in quattrocento painting” in the art bulletin, vol. , no. (dec., ), p. . 	
   belonged (wholes). it was this co-determination, theorized by williams as the “systematicity of representation,” that allowed early modern humanists to negotiate relationships between subject and object, internal and external, self and society by conceiving of these as reciprocal components in a more fundamental representational order. williams describes this order as neither conceptual nor static, but rather as a sort of consistent pressure exerted by the system of representation itself in relation to which the significance of individual representations is intuitively determined. as new representations are introduced into this system, the ebb and flow of this pressure changes, allowing new significances to emerge. while the system itself remains absent and unavailable for articulation, it encountered in those individual representations experienced as meaningful, appropriate or in some sense important. williams suggests that the rise of early modern aesthetic theory be considered the product of an increasing awareness of this systematicity, offering the theorists’ attempts to provide general principles as attempts to reckon with the system itself. as one of the most potent examples of the systematicity of representation, williams offers the historia. for williams, the part-whole relationship constitutive of historia composition serves as among the most explicit expressions of the systematicity of early modern aesthetics, since it was in the historia that a variety of represented objects were arranged in service of a single unified theme. williams cites vasari’s description of historia, translated here into italian as istoria, as exemplary of the genre’s role in early modern attempts to reckon with the systematicity of representation in general and part-whole relationships in particular: the istoria should be full of things differentiated one from another but always relevant to the matter at hand, which the artist is in the process of giving shape to. he must distinguish the gestures, attitudes, making the women with sweet and lovely airs, and also youths, but the old always grave aspect, and especially priests and persons of authority. but above all he must always take care that everything correspond to the work as a whole, so that when the picture is seen, one recognizes there a harmonious unity, in which the fierce emotions arouse terror and the pleasant effects a sweetness, and that immediately conveys the intention of the painter, and not the things of which he was not thinking. 	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
   williams provides the following gloss of his theory of systematicity: “the order or structure or inner logic to which the idea of systematicity refers may reveal itself in many ways; it may be present in different superimposed ways even in within the same work of art. it is something we respond to intuitively when we experience particular works of art, manifest in our sense of ‘rightness,’ our feeling that a consistent principle of some kind governs the treatment of details, that the appearance of all the parts have been shaped, as it were, by a consistent sort of pressure. such a feeling depends upon an awareness, however unconscious, of something having been withheld or suppressed: much as a self-evident visual abundance may seem to be what most affects us, what is not represented is also essential to our experience. what is absent is present, and the meaning of the whole resides as much on what we cannot see as what we can.” see robert williams, “italian renaissance art and systematicity” in renaissance theory, ed. james elkins and robert williams (new york: routledge, ), p. cited by robert williams in art, theory, and culture in sixteenth-century italy: from techne to metatechne, p. . it is significant that vasari emphasizes authorial intentionality rather forcefully at the 	
   as in alberti’s description, this passage establishes the convincing representation of the antique and biblical scenes portrayed in historia not only as an illustrative goal met by the illusionistic rendering of figures and spaces, but also as a compositional goal met by the co-determination of part and whole. for williams, it was this co-determination, this systematicity, which served as both arbiter and guarantor of the plausibility of the represented scene. returning to alberti’s discussion of the historia, we can see how the systematic co-determination of part and whole participated in the genre’s testimonial function, and established in what sense the historia serves as a space uniquely given to the practice of the testimonial mode of viewing. the co-determination of the part and the whole characteristic of the historia’s composition is also characteristic of the histor’s testimony. just as the systematicity of representation underwrites any individual historia, becoming available for encounter only through the mediating presence of its composition, so too does the anteriority of the past underwrite the discourse of any individual histor, becoming available for encounter only through the mediating presence of his or her testimony. in both cases, the mediating presence of the part determines and is determined by the absence of the whole. alberti seems to have been particularly sensitive to this, for in addition to providing an extensive treatment of composition derived from greco- roman grammar he also provides an important treatment of figuration derived from medieval christian theology. as we have seen, in that tradition figuration was understood as a means by which several events separated in time could be interpretively joined in a single figure dense with typological significance. this understanding of figuration was complemented by the understanding of historia as a visual form of knowledge in which viewing a historia and knowing its referent were not to be distinguished. these two strains of medieval christian theology meet in a third which, i will suggest, was not only one of the most important aspects of alberti’s 	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
   end of the passage. for williams, the author in vasari’s writing was characterized not only by an ability to freely invent subjective form, but also by his or her capacity for and sensitivity to disegno, which for williams was that faculty through which the systematicity of representation and the co-determination of part and whole were recognized. williams begins by citing vasari’s discussion disegno in architecture, which “contains nothing of [the building’s] material, but is such that we can see the same design in many different buildings; we perceive the same for and the parts of which it is composed, the site, the orders [and so forth, of different buildings] all similar as regards the lines and angles.” from this passage, williams concludes, “we are forced to imagine disegno as a single, vastly synthetic intuition the underlying unity of creation, presumably the product of a unique moment of insight in an artist’s life—even if prepared for by long study and enhanced by subsequent reflection—which then informs and governs all his work. disegno is a vision of the whole in nature in which the relation of all its parts is manifest, which fives us the capacity to recognize the unity of the whole in the part, the universal in the particular, the one in the many. it is not explicitly an understanding of causal relationships but of formal analogies: we might call it a formal or aesthetic conception of nature” ( - ). with this notion of disegno in mind, vasari’s emphasis on authorial intentionality becomes somewhat paradoxical, affirming the inventiveness of the author and the priority of the system of representation to equal degrees. indeed, the relationship between the two would itself constitute an example of the co-determination of part and whole characteristic of the system. 	
   discussion of historia as a pictorial genre capable of participating in humanism’s antiquarian project, but also a direct variation of the testimonial gesture that emerged in second and third- stage images of the baptist with which his treatise was roughly contemporaneous. this third strain is that of the res gestae. commonly translated from the classical latin simply as “events,” res gestae took on an array of more complex meanings during the th and th centuries. consistent with the period’s understanding of both figura and historia, res gestae became associated with the historia’s ability to make the absent present through viewing. as greenstein notes, several etymologies associated the res gestae of historia with the gestures of figures, referring to these as that aspect of an event that was visible to observers. one such etymology claimed, “it [historia] derived from isterion, which is gesticulation [gesticulatio]; for in it deeds [gesta] are recorded. another, coined by the th-century cardinal stephen langton, stated that isterion meant “to see or to gesticulate; for it [historia] narrates only what is done and seen [quae gesta sunt et visa].” in these etymologies, the res gestae or events narrated in historia are equated with the gestures of the figures whose actions historia depict. indeed, it is implied that the events are themselves constituted by these gestures, since it is the gestures alone that are “done and seen.” in his treatise, alberti emphasizes this equivalence by theorizing the ammonitore, a distinct figure whose ostensive gesture served an explicitly mediating function, showing viewers both what the represented event was and how it ought to be received. often reduced to a choric figure, the ammonitore or commentator would be better described as the pictorial surrogate of the histor or witness as such. indeed, it was precisely the ammonitore’s capacity to serve as witness that made the figure so crucial to alberti, who concludes his discussion of the historia with a description of its function in the genre. having described the importance of the plausible portrayal of figures and spaces and the principles of composition, alberti writes: then, i like there to be someone in the ‘historia’ who tells the spectators what is going on, and either beckons them with his hand to look, or with ferocious expression and forbidding glance challenges them not to come near, as if he wished their business to be secret, or points to some danger or remarkable thing in the picture, or by his gestures invites you to laugh or weep with them. in the context of the treatise, this passage is significant in that the preceding theorization in its entirety is here localized in one figure whose explicit task it is to mediate the act of viewing. initially, it implies that all the prescribing of thematic content, all the instruction in convincing 	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
   greenstein, p. . alberti, p. - . 	
   representation, and all the emphasis on systematic composition would be imperiled lest this figure intercede to instruct viewers how and what to see. in this sense, the ammonitore figure serves as the histor or witness in two capacities. first, and most simply, he witnesses the classical and biblical scenes portrayed, relating that which is “going on” to the viewer. second, and more complexly, he witnesses both the greco-roman tradition of the histor by establishing himself as its pictorial surrogate, and the medieval christian tradition of the figura by doing so through figural gesticulation. in both cases, the ammonitore condenses these traditions into its own figure, serving as a visibly present part facilitating mediated access to their necessarily absent wholes. this is confirmed by alberti’s remarkable and routinely overlooked insistence that the viewing of historia required no knowledge of either the scenes represented, or the traditions conveyed. historia were, for alberti, manifestly public works that drew on resources more fundamental than those articulated in his own treatise, making them available to all viewers regardless of social class, political persuasion, or cultural education. “a ‘historia’ you can justifiably praise and admire,” writes alberti, “will be one that reveals itself to be so charming and attractive as to hold the eye of the learned and unlearned spectator for a long while with a certain sense of pleasure and emotion.” given the genre’s density in terms of both textural content and hermeneutic traditions, this passage may strike readers as anomalous, not to say contradictory, which perhaps accounts for the relative lack of scholarly attention it has received. it can, however, be made clearer in light of my earlier discussion of the testimonial mode of viewing and of the testimonial gesture. alberti describes the ammonitore figure as one who “beckons with his hand to look.” beyond an initial evocation of the testimonial gesture familiar from second and third-stage images, specifying an ostensive motion made by the hand as the principle feature of the ammonitore and reading as a near transcription of the injunction inscribed across the baptist’s scroll, this passage also demonstrates the condensation of the ammonitore’s mediating presence into that ostensive gesture itself, the very hallmark of the testimonial gesture as a structural feature. it is by beckoning “with his hand” that he introduces the viewer to the historia; it is by “pointing to some danger or remarkable thing” that he indicates what is deserving of the viewer’s attention; and it is by “his gestures” that he infuses the represented events with pathos, facilitating their kairotic reception. indeed, alberti’s description suggests that the ammonitore’s gesture is testimonial in the strongest sense, for not only is it is through this gesture that his testimony passes, rendering the historia’s absent referents present to viewers, but even more importantly it is through this gesture that the traditions on which the historia as a genre depends are brought to 	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
   ibid, p. . 	
   bear, establishing the testimonial mode of viewing itself as a valid means of communing with the past. having emerged in the devotional realm of the icon as a means of preserving the presence of the iconic referent, the testimonial gesture now appears in the secular realm of the historia as a means of preserving the antique referent. the relationship between the two should not be understood in terms of direct causation, however, but rather of indirect variation. developed as a solution to the problem of fractured time in a particular circumstance, the testimonial mode of viewing as hermeneutic practice and the testimonial gesture as durable structure persisted as nascent resources which could be harnessed when facing the challenges posed by rupture in a variety of circumstances, preserving the presence of the referent through the kairotic receptivity of mediation. 	
   epilogue: the nachleben of the testimonial gesture in the preceding pages, i have provided an account the testimonial mode of viewing; a practice which i argued was condensed into a durable structural feature which i called the testimonial gesture. following the figural migration of john the baptist as it moved through three distinct typological stages, from the margins of icons to the center of panel paintings, i claimed that the testimonial gesture itself became typologically dense, distilling a long-developing willingness on the part of viewers to accept the mediating presence of the gesture as a sufficient means of engaging with the increasingly absent iconic referent. i then claimed that this testimonial gesture served a similar function in the historia genre, participating in the early modern humanist’s endeavor to render present absent antique referents. this claim was premised on the conviction that the testimonial gesture was, as a durable structural feature, itself mobile, able to migrate through time and space as a medium for the testimonial mode of viewing. by way of this brief epilogue, i would like to offer an anecdote which was originally recounted by koerner, but which will no doubt strike many as familiar, as confirmation of this mobility. in the midst of a lecture on th-century german artist lucas cranach, koerner recounts striding from his podium toward the projected image of one of cranach’s altarpieces featuring the figure of martin luther. preparing to comment on the work and convey to his students its position in the tradition of reformation image-making and viewing, koerner casually extends his index finger toward the hanging screen, casting his shadow across the projected image, only to find himself doubling the posture of the represented luther: my students noted it first and pointed to the spot. as i gestured toward the cross, my hand cast a shadow on the projection precisely where luther, also speaking from the right, stretches his fingers toward christ. suddenly everything appeared alike. preacher and teacher, pulpit and podium, sermon and lecture, parishioners and undergraduates, windowless choir and darkened auditorium: all seemed part of the same mechanism…. true, the image’s reference had changed. for luther it stood for faith and religion, while for me it represented information and art. yet the image itself, together with the apparatus of its use, remained eerily the same. it was to this likeness that my finger unwittingly pointed. while koerner confines his discussion of the anecdote to the context of reformation image- making and viewing, i would like to suggest that it is deserving of much broader consideration, for it describes what might be called, following warburg, the nachleben or “afterlife” of the 	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
   joseph leo koerner, the reformation of the image, p. . 	
   testimonial gesture, that is to say, its continued potency as a practice surviving in form. confronted with the problem of fractured time uniquely posed to the historian when faced with the task of conveying subject matter removed from both himself and his audience by many centuries, it is to the nascent resource of the testimonial gesture itself appearing in the spectral light of the projected image that koerner appeals. indeed, more than that of a priest, koerner assumes the posture of the histor, standing before his students as witness, testifying to the traditions being conveyed to his audience. most striking, however, is that this mediation is not confined to koerner alone. his students also adopt this posture, “pointing to” the site of the doubling, serving as so many witnesses testifying to the occurrence of the event. i submit koerner’s anecdote as confirmation of the mobility of the testimonial gesture. not only has it migrated from past to present, manifesting itself in the contemporary moment in which the lecture was given, it has also migrated from the individual to group, manifesting itself in the actions of the students occupying the auditorium. in short, it has entered what taylor calls the “intersubjective reference world” as a “common meaning.” for taylor, it is on the foundation of common meanings that all aspects of our common life depend: common meanings are the basis of community. inter-subjective meanings give people a common language to talk about social reality and a common understanding of certain norms, but only with common meanings does this common reference world contain significant common actions, celebrations, and feelings. these are objects in the world that everybody shares. this is what makes community. as the means by which the intersubjective referents of our social realities are made available for consideration, these common meanings serve what can be described as a testimonial function, tasked with rendering present through mediation the array of traditions, conventions, and norms on which our common action depends. both the testimonial mode of viewing and the testimonial gesture would, it seems, be among the most crucial of these common meanings for, as we have seen, their explicit task is not only to render present that which is absent through mediation, but to do so in the company of an audience willing participate in such mediation. 	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
   for accounts of warburg’s notion of nachleben, see kurt w. foster, “introduction” in aby warburg: the renewal of pagan antiquity: contributions to the cultural history of the european renaissance, p. - ; kurt w. foster, “aby warburg’s history of art: collective memory and the social mediation of images” in daedalus, vol. , no. , in praise of books (winter, ), p. - ; matthew rampley, “from symbol to allegory: aby warburg’s theory of art” in the art bulletin, vol. , no. (mar., ), p. - ; georges didi-huberman, “the surviving image: aby warburg and tylorian anthropology” in oxford art journal, vol. , no. ( ), p. - . charles taylor, “interpretation and the sciences of man” in philosophy and the human sciences: philosophical papers, volume (cambridge: cambridge university press, ), p. .	
   	
   perhaps it is to be expected, then, that the specter of the testimonial gesture should be made manifest in an auditorium, its shadowy form projected reciprocally onto schoolteacher, student and screen, for it is in such settings that the absent is most consistently evoked and mediation most consistently sought. indeed, the humanities can be said to be that domain in which the problems of fractured time are most often posed, for when endeavoring to make available those traditions, conventions and norms on which our common action depends, as the objects of either affirmation or critique, practitioners of the humanities strive above all to render present that which would otherwise remain absent. their articles, essays and books are per force viewed in the testimonial mode, mediating access to these referents. like leonardo’s baptist with which this discussion began, it is finally to themselves that these texts and their authors point when reckoning with the past, every historian a histor, every student a witness. 	
   figures fig. . figure has been removed due to copyright restrictions. gherardo starnina, madonna and child between st. john the baptist and st. nicholas of bari, c. - , tempera on panel, x cm, accademia, florence. fig. . figure has been removed due to copyright restrictions. giovanni antonio boltraffio, casio madonna altarpiece, c. , oil on wood, x cm, musée du louvre, paris. fig. . figure has been removed due to copyright restrictions. leonardo da vinci, saint john the baptist, c. - , oil on wood, x cm, musée du louvre, paris. 	
   	
   	
   	
   	
   	
   	
   	
   	
   	
   	
   	
   	
   	
   	
   	
   	
   	
   	
   	
   	
   	
   	
   	
   	
   	
   	
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   rice, david and tamara talbot rice. icons and their history (woodstock: the overlook press, ). ricoeur, paul. memory, history, forgetting, trans. kathleen blamey and david pellauer (chicago: university of chicago press, ). . “toward a hermeneutic of the idea of revelation” in the harvard theological review, vol. , no. / (jan.-apr., ), p. - . riegl, alois. historical grammar of the visual arts, trans. jacqueline e. jung (new york: zone books, ). ringbom, sixten. icon to narrative: the rise of the dramatic close-up in fifteenth-century devotional painting (doornspijk, the netherlands: davaco, ). robinson, a. t. “the baptism of john and the quamran community: testing a hypothesis” in the harvard theological review, vol. , no. (jul., ), p. - . rosand, david. “‘divinitá di cosa dipinta’: pictorial structure and the legibility of the altarpiece” in the altarpiece in the renaissance, ed. peter humphrey and martin kemp (cambridge: cambridge university press, ), p. - . rothstein, marian. “etymology, genealogy and the immutability of origins” in renaissance quarterly, vol. , no. (summer, ), p. - . santner, eric l. creaturely life: rilke; benjamin; sebald (chicago: university of chicago press, ). schapiro, myer. words, script and pictures: semiotics of visual language (new york: george braziller, ). schweiker, william. “beyond imitation: mimetic praxis in gadamer, ricoeur and derrida” in the journal of religion, vol. , no. (jan., ), p. - . stoichita, victor ieronim. a short history of the shadow, trans. anne marie glasheen (london: reaktion books, ). . the self-aware image: an insight into early modern meta-painting, trans. anne-marie glasheen (cambridge: cambridge university press). smith, timothy, b. “up in arms: the knights of rhodes, the cult of relics and the chapel of st. john the baptist in siena cathedral” in image, relics and devotional practices in medieval and renaissance italy, ed. sally j. cornelison and scott b. montgomery (tempe: arizona center for medieval and renaissance studies, ), p. - . taylor, charles. a secular age (cambridge: the belknap press of harvard university, ). 	
   . “interpretation and the sciences of man” in philosophy and the human sciences: philosophical papers, volume (cambridge: cambridge university press, ), p. - . teeple, howard m. “quamran and the origin of the fourth gospel” in novium testamentum, vol. , fasc. (oct., ), p. - . trexler, richard c. “being and non-being: parameters of the miraculous in the traditional religious image” in the miraculous image in the late middle ages and renaissance, ed. erik thuna and gerhard wolf (rome: the biblica hertziana and the academia di danimarca, ), p. - . vasari, giorgio. the lives of the most excellent painters, sculpturs and architects, trans. gaston du c. de vere, ed. phillip jacks (new york: random house, ). warburg, aby. “dürer and italian antiquity” in aby warburg: the renewal of pagan antiquity: contributions to the cultural history of the european renaissance, ed. kurt. w. foster (los angeles: getty research institute for the history of art and the humanities, ), p. - . white, hayden. metahistory: the historical imagination in nineteenth-century europe (baltimore: johns hopkins university press, ). williams, robert. art, theory, and culture in sixteenth-century italy: from techne to metatechne (cambridge: cambridge university press, ). . “italian renaissance art and systematicity” in renaissance theory, ed. james elkins and robert williams (new york: routledge, ), p. - . wood, christopher s. forgery, replica, fiction: temporalities of german renaissance art (chicago: university of chicago press, ). wrathall, mark a. heidegger and unconcealment: truth, language and history (new york: cambridge university press, ). zwijnenberg, robert. “presence and absence: on leonardo da vinci’s saint john the baptist” in compelling visuality: the work of art in and out of history, ed. claire farago and robert zwijnenberg (minneapolis: university of minnesota press, ), p. - . journal of art historiography number december bagley among the germans review of: robert bagley, gombrich among the egyptians and other essays in the history of art, seattle: marquand books, , pages, isbn- : isbn- : - , ills, $ . andrei pop the most memorable thing i have ever heard in a faculty meeting was an elderly colleague recalling that ‘according to oleg grabar, we should all be able to teach all of the history of art.’ i wondered in what spirit the celebrated islamicist had made his remark: ought we to know everything published, a vain hope even in the early exploratory days of art history, or are we to adopt a sublime enough perspective that we can meaningfully approach objects and artists that are strange to us? the silence that greeted grabar’s remark must have been as much embarrassed as reverent: we art historians suffer both the specialist’s lack of specific knowledge outside our competence, and the specialist’s discomfort with bold theorizing. fortunately, robert bagley is immune to both ailments, and his gombrich among the egyptians is delightful for the very unpretentious, down to earth way the expert of ancient chinese art tackles big questions, from how to teach art history to beginners to what to do with the vexed and perennial problem of style, from where to attribute agency in the creative process (‘to agents!’ is bagley’s sane cry) to how to think about medium and technique in all arts and crafts we may wish to think about. he even engages in art historiography: taking to task meyer schapiro and ernst kitzinger and erwin panofsky on style, erwin panofsky again on iconography and, as the title suggests, ernst gombrich on knowing and seeing and the challenge of a world history of art. in this connection, the book’s refreshing directness all too often is a missed opportunity, resulting in a speedy trial, with bagley as judge and jury. thus, in the introduction, before we’ve even had a chance to review gombrich’s sins, they are gathered up in a single sentence that might have pleased bellarmine: ‘he believed that there is one optically correct way to represent the world, and he believed that optically correct representation is or ought to be the sole end of art.’ (p. ) curiously, a note accompanies this, presumably as evidence, citing a passage from the story of art ( , p. ) where gombrich compared constable with turner and friedrich: ‘however great and deserved was the popular success which some of these romantic painters achieved in their days, we believe today that those who followed constable’s path and tried to explore the visible world rather than to conjure up poetic moods achieved something of more lasting importance.’ that suffices to convict someone of thinking there is one correct way to andrei pop bagley among the germans see the world? even the sympathetic reader, may wonder whether bagley is a reliable guide. in another sense, however, though bagley’s forthrightness consistently overlooks gombrich’s central european ironies, the book is well-titled: what interests bagley is the confrontation of the expert with alien traditions and what may be learned therefrom, even for those who claim to know those traditions well. bagley himself is, as the very first words of the book tell us, ‘a western scholar applying a western discipline to the study of very unwestern material’, a state of affairs that gives him ‘an interest in the intellectual foundations of art history along with something resembling a cultural outsider’s view of it.’ (p. ) not that the book is an exercise in postmodern ethnography, or the grammar of form: its essence is circumspection. after the introduction, which sums up the papers ( previously published) and then embarks on an important discussion of the artist’s skills and materials, a discussion that sets the tone for the whole book, we are treated to general reflections on style (grounded however in attempts to define and fix the boundaries of the gothic), the ‘first writing assignment’, that awkward student paper where instructors sternly order ‘no research!’ (we might as well ask for ‘no thinking!’), and ‘meaning and explanation’, which opposes the logocentrism of iconography by considering chinese bronzes for whose decoration we have no written sources. four more papers on those bronzes follow, concerned both with the development of their nearly abstract animal decoration and with their casting and design; finally comes the polemic against gombrich, which is however at the same time a fascinating disquisition on the mixing of pictures and writing in a middle kingdom lintel that makes ‘the literate viewer’s encounter with the work cognitively complex to a degree for which i can think of no parallel’ (p. ). bagley’s enthusiasm matches his boundless energy—he applies himself to the secondary literature on egyptian art in a way that should inspire all of us to reach beyond the familiar. what is his purpose in doing so? bagley insists that all the individual papers, including those that look like specialist contributions to the archives of asian art, were written for art historians in general, and the whole book reads as a brief for how to understand art, artists, and humans better on the basis of a bounded but deep store of knowledge and common sense. of course, there is always the risk that arthur schopenhauer complained of: ‘each pursues his bread and butter research, but afterwards wants to have a say about everything.’ bagley ably dodges this risk in the exemplary chapter on style. after asking, strikingly, of the louvre, ‘what is the style of this building?’, he shows that the question has no answer, because it has multiple answers: baroque, classical, french, perrault, early perrault, etc. then he savages schapiro’s unabashedly hegelian coupling of historical periods and visual styles. schapiro, being cautious too, allows arthur schopenhauer, Über das sehn und die farben, nd. ed., leipzig: hartknoch, , vi, my translation. andrei pop bagley among the germans that a period, if not stylistically uniform, will produce ‘one style or a limited range of styles’. bagley pounces: suppose he were to say ‘nineteenth century french painting had only a limited range of styles’: how much wiggle room would we have to allow to make that a plausible statement? and how much wiggle room could we allow and go on believing that the statement says anything? (p. ) comparable chestnuts from panofsky, kitzinger, and janson are sharply rebuked, not without humour: ‘st.-denis is not perfection, not by a long shot, but it is the first step toward perfection. abbot sugar was trying to build amiens, he just did not quite know how.’ (p. ) we may reply: ‘perhaps panofsky’s generation took those questions seriously, but that is not the kind of problem i work on.’ (p. ) bagley is at his best in unsettling such complacency. it may be true that no contemporary medievalist uses the term gothic with any explanatory intent, but just the fact of there being medievalists, of working within certain disciplinary and factual preserves, attests to our unflagging belief in periods and their coherence. (i wonder if bagley feels this strongly in his own case; perhaps not, as ancient china is not a ‘classic’ art historical style, but it is a consequence of his argument that his domain of expertise is equally artificial). throughout the book bagley picks on survey writers, principally horst janson and hugh honour and john fleming. he does not do so because he considers them particularly stupid, but because survey authors confront questions that other art historians ignore, except when we are teaching introductory courses. thus honour and fleming say that claus sluter ‘produced some of the last great medieval works.’ would they have bothered to say he produced ‘some of the last great fourteenth century works’? and what of people who call the renaissance the early modern period? ‘they have embraced the nineteenth century notion that the renaissance is us and the middle ages are not, which is very bad history.’ (p. ) bagley is more even radical than this. style being ‘a roundabout way of talking about an object’s relationships with the other objects’ (p. ), ‘we must banish from our thoughts the spirit of the age, and with it, the age. instead, we should think about the training of the artist and the status quo he starts from.’ (p. ) brave words, and spoken like a true specialist. indeed, in our monographs, the spirit of the age has retreated into artist’s contracts, letters to and fro, competitors and clients, the entire panoply of sources favoured by michael baxandall, perhaps the only major art historian to escape gombrich among the egyptians unscathed. but how will that mass of detail help the harried survey lecturer? if style is shorthand, sure we may use gothic to stand for the peculiar syndrome of church and royal patronage, courtly poetry, school philosophy, pointy shoes and arches? bagley’s emphatic embargo on such talk is curiously like an atheist’s complaint that god is unreliable and one should avoid asking his help. andrei pop bagley among the germans there is another sense of style that bagley seems unaware of, probably due to his (traditional) art historical concern with periodization. i deliberately choose an example which i know less well than bagley does gothic: in japan before the twentieth century, two schools of painting, kano and tosa, dominated elite patronage. artists educated in one school not only took on its name, but strove to paint in its recognizable canon, which resembled the other less than it did some ancient or foreign styles (chinese painting in the case of kano). would bagley tell these painters that they are deluded in their adherence to a ‘style’? ‘the actors in the history of art are people. styles do not influence people because styles do not exist.’ (p. ) yet people act on ideas, even if ideas alone are not efficacious without people acting on them. there is a history of communism, and not only of communists. bagley, in insisting on attention to the artist’s training and status quo, is knocking on an open door. this is standard contextualist art history, denuded of its zeitgeist by clear thinking. however, i should not discount the power of clear thinking to reform a field as hidebound as art history. this virtue shines in the second chapter, on the ‘first paper assignment.’ here, bagley demolishes joshua taylor’s learning to look ( ) and the whole market niche of specialized introductions to art history writing, ‘as if writing about art [is] such an arcane business that the normal rules of good exposition do not suffice.’ (p. ) through examination of various objects and texts, including kitzinger on the arch of constantine, for bagley one of the finest pieces of art historical description, we are shown how good art writing requires prior knowledge and comparison: to deny either is to believe ‘in the self-sufficiency of the work of art.’ (p. ) very true, and yet some artists may harbour the false belief that their works are self-sufficient, and demand that we approach them only through voluminous description of our visual experience, without taking any context into account. surely nothing bagley has said excludes the possibility. in general, bagley is sound in his demands, but too categorical in his conclusions. the third chapter, the purposely general-sounding ‘meaning and explanation’, suggests that rather than hunting for meaning in intricately decorative works like a lindisfarne gospels page or a shang bronze, we might acknowledge ‘visual power’ as precisely what the artist and his patron ‘felt and valued and sought’ (p. ). bagley is of course right to say that the growth of archaeological evidence has not been kind to most speculative symbol interpretation, but again, why the exclusive tone? visual power is just jargon for beauty. and not the hardiest formalist has denied that beautiful things might have meaning as well. surely, as form might cause subjective delight in a subject, it might bagley is unfair to sylvan barnett, in claiming that his short guide to writing about art ‘is pages long!’ as the bibliography indicates, the obese book is the tenth, edition— early versions were shorter, and better for it. andrei pop bagley among the germans set off private thoughts that are articulate? we may fail to get at the right interpretation, but as a matter of theory, the bare possibility suffices. chapter , on ‘interpreting prehistoric designs’, where no written records may be used to check the historian’s speculation, is every bit as corrosive. gombrich appears as the proponent, in his sense of order, of natural symbolism, like eyes meant to endow objects with ‘protective animation’. bagley tears down this and many other houses of cards, with a great variety of comparative materials, including some s buicks. a quotation captures well the dismissive tone: i have to confess a cynical suspicion that iconography without texts flourishes because it is safe: prehistoric symbols can be interpreted without fear of contradiction. would an interpreter who confidently explains eyes on prehistoric objects be equally ready to tell us the meaning of eyes on an egyptian coffin? i doubt it. there is too much danger that a literate egyptologist might actually know what the eyes mean. i doubt that anyone would claim the ability to penetrate egyptian iconography without help from texts. (p. ) fair enough, texts are needed for iconography. but one can’t help feeling that bagley’s targets are too easy, his refutations too cynical. after all, some charity goes a long way: there are surely prehistoric iconographers who are anxious to get it right and dissatisfied by their lack of corroborating evidence. and an attempt to explain, say, the eyes on the exterior of an archaic greek drinking cup may prove as intractable, despite the wordiness of greek vases. bagley in fact mentions these vase-eyes (n. , p. ), but is sanguine that, ‘even if some iconographic interpretation should be correct’, it is still visual power that explains their presence. here his complacency matches that of the prehistoric iconographers. the following three papers, on shang ritual bronzes (starting with design, going deeper into technique, and concluding with ornament) are the beating heart of the book, concise contributions to specialist debates and at the same time, as bagley claimed, of wide interest. they are even a handy introduction to chinese bronze sculpture in this period, though bagley dislikes periods. i have not the background to offer much in the way of criticism of bagley’s minute scrutiny of vases and their details. these details, having mainly to do with the question of where part moulds were inserted to produce a given finished surface, reveal, for instance, that a foundry could make bronzes ‘to any required technical standard and i argue this for the fresco decoration of the ‘anselm chapel’ in canterbury cathedral in ‘iconology and the logic of belief’, ikon (iconology old and new), ed. marina vicelja- matijašić, , - . yet at times he forgets himself and writes things like ‘from about to bc the bronze casters experimented with flowing patterns of various kinds and with dragon designs sometimes so reduced in scale as to read only as surface texturing.’ (p. ) is this an empirical generalization or one of the dreaded statements of period style? andrei pop bagley among the germans that it was prepared to take shortcuts whenever an opportunity presented itself’ (p. )—the latter being a transhistorical truth about manufacturers if there ever was one. it is to be hoped that historians of chinese art, many of whom have encountered these essays already in periodicals, will brave this book despite its title and tell the rest of the art historical community how convincing individual arguments, such as that about the emergence of animal ornament or the self- conscious use of flanges, are to them; to me they looked well-argued and free of the uncompromising quality found in bagley’s historiography. of course, these essays are earlier, and had to undergo peer review—perhaps, were bagley to have written the whole book from scratch, the essays in chinese prehistory would be as bold as his demolition of style, iconography, and gombrich. that said, the composite nature of the book, with the earlier, more positive contributions in the middle-rear, works to ground bagley’s efforts, though it takes some stamina on the reader’s part to get there. luckily the author provides at the end of the introduction a theoretical distillation of his decades of empirical study of bronzes. taking issue with honour and fleming’s characterization of ‘a tension between ends and means’, the artist’s skills and materials serving as obstacles to the realization of the artwork, bagley argues that technique and the concreteness of materials should be understood as occasions of design and invention, without which the artist’s hypostasized conception would not materialize at all. the point is driven home by a wealth of empirical examples. the same effects were achieved with the section-mould as with lost wax, though more laboriously: indeed, one of the reasons it took scholars so long to accept the obvious fact that section-moulds were used is that the technique does not dictate any content or form to the artist, it merely opens the door for certain inventions and refinements. as bagley puts the matter in the fifth chapter, ‘a shang caster would probably be puzzled to hear that its technique had limitations…we will understand the bronzes better if we think in positive rather than negative terms.’ (p. ) this is certainly true, as is the conclusion that, if technique matters, so do the people who execute the works: ‘technique, design, and factory organization interact at [the foundry of] houma; they cannot be understood apart from each other…’ (p. ) again, this holism is almost a platitude in contemporary art history: but bagley’s holism is more lucid than usual, since it admits only human agents. technique, like style, is never a deus ex machina imposing periodization. this runs against much recent art history, which is still impressed by the technological determinism of walter benjamin’s ‘artwork’ essay, and has as often taken instances of technical interrelation between objects as evidence against humanism, especially against the bagley oddly accuses honour and fleming of subscribing to michelangelo’s dream of freeing his idea from marble (pp. - ). that materials are conditions of possibility of art, and that dürer or monet did not ‘feel at odds with his medium’ (p. ) did not stop leonardo, degas, or kafka from being frustrated with their work! bagley’s rosy view of artists delighting perpetually in their craft seems to originate in the art historian’s perpetual delight in looking. andrei pop bagley among the germans priority given to the artist in explanation. bagley is immune to the romantic- renaissance fixation on the genius, but he is too clear-headed to dispense with artists, offering the motto ‘we should not be satisfied, in this or any other case, with a formulation that treats a process as an agent.’ (p. ) technique, unlike style, exists, but it no more casts bronzes or paints pictures than do philosophical ideas. people do, using the one, the other, or both. this is a logical insight, one that allows bagley to tackle with confidence (and with vast and careful reading) the techniques and materials of various lands and times and show how humans made things, at times suggesting some probable reasons or at least points of comparison. that is fine world art history, or rather cosmopolitan art history. there remains the titular essay, placed like a monument at the end of the book. in a way it sums up bagley’s preoccupations, and can be read alone. it is the cathartic slaying of a villain, gombrich, who also on the basis of specialist confidence (in renaissance art) went forth to speak of all art, and in bagley’s opinion, made a mess of it, ‘dismiss[ing] not particular works but whole civilizations’ (p. ). the scene of the combat is egyptian art, often used by gombrich to contrast an art that shows ‘what we know’ with an art that shows ‘what we see’. bagley’s procedure is not what one would expect. gombrich is not brought forth to make his case, but merely paraphrased, his words consigned to page-long endnotes. this frees up the main text for an introduction to hieroglyphs, by way of the limestone lintel of senwosret iii ( th dynasty, mid- th century bc), which adorns the cover and is reproduced four times in the book. the image is a sophisticated combination of writing and image, with the double, reversed portrait of the seated ruler and his accompanying deities serving both as pictures and as writing, obviating the need for signs disambiguating names as names of men, for instance. bagley so admires this elegantly symmetrical panel with its interplay between looking and reading that he declares art historians’ troubles with its allegedly rigid, stereotyped quality a mere consequence of illiteracy. ‘the failure is ours: we have failed in the art historian’s basic task of explaining why the panel looks the way it does.’ (p. ) the failure is not peculiarly gombrich’s, since he didn’t discuss this panel; so the topic shifts to the wooden relief of hezyre, which he did discuss, to mayan and assyrian examples, and most extensively, to the egyptian relief of ti hunting hippopotamus at saqqara ( bc). this work is remarkable for the closely observed bodies of animals, plants, and servants who vie to hunt for their lord: he chris wood’s forgery, replica, fiction: temporalities of german renaissance art, chicago: university of chicago press, , is the most prominent such work. bagley rejects the michelangelesque model of genius as an ‘irrelevant importation from renaissance art theory’ (p. ), but like baxandall insists on the role of (many) agents. again, a qualification is needed: certainly a material, technique, ‘process’ or even ‘style’ (in the second sense discussed above) might explain some particular effect, and thus be legitimately considered its cause. (why does this look a certain way? because x painted it) it is agential causes, that is persons, that bagley is concerned with. andrei pop bagley among the germans stands there rigidly, feet set apart, in the way gombrich finds schematic. there follows an imaginary dialogue between bagley and gombrich about this relief, modelled perhaps on that between nietzsche and buddha in russell’s history of western philosophy, only less charming, with gombrich saying heartless things like: ‘the patron demanded a baby hippo, so the artist invented a schema for a playful baby hippo.’ (p. ) it is hard to take this seriously as a refutation, though bagley footnotes voluminous quantities of obiter dicta from gombrich that are supposed to convict him of just such dogmatic refusal to look. what results, entertainingly enough, is a ding-dong battle: exactly how gombrich described his opposition of egyptian and greek in a press release accompanying the reissue of the story of art. bagley, with his no-nonsense prose, has no ear for this, but of course a ding-dong battle is a kind of punch and judy marionette farce, ‘more slapstick than real.’ for gombrich, the ‘egyptian in us’ was a heuristic device for understanding what in art served a cognitive, what a sensual purpose. that it led him into any number of chauvinistic, ignorant remarks about egyptian and other arts cannot be denied. but one must deny stoutly what bagley asserts in the impassioned conclusion: that one ought not to write about any art one does not love dearly, for in that case one will not have tried hard enough to understand it. one has only to think of ruskin’s writings on turner to see the limitations of this dictum; how many persons have the skill and the honesty to write truly about what they love? and in any case, gombrich certainly did not write at length about art he despised, egyptian or otherwise. the three charges bagley levels against him, then, are that he is a teleologist (art had to become greek, and sensually illusionistic), that the distinction between knowing and seeing is a fuzzy one (‘the egyptian in us is perception!’ bagley glories in an endnote; gombrich might have replied: ‘precisely!’), and thirdly, that gombrich is as wrong to say that narrative art demands illusion as he is to say it requires reading homer! gombrich may be guilty but does bagley do better? recall that his explanation of canonical style is that the important personages in egyptian art ought to look like letters. to explain why this should matter to the egyptians, he makes the familiar point about the afterlife: people of high status are drawn like ti and hezyre. why? perhaps because the mutable individual is thereby turned into something like a word. he is removed from the accidents of the here and now, and made into something outside time. (p. ) the ‘mutable individual’ freed from ‘accidents of the here and now’—is this anything else but gombrich’s ‘conceptual art’, brought up to date by egyptology? bagley allows his faux-gombrich to needle him about the disparity between this definition of ‘ding-dong battle’ is from frank herbert, dune, new york: ace, , . andrei pop bagley among the germans canonical principals and naturalistic side figures: according to ‘gombrich’, by painting lunging workmen and playful hippos, the artist overshot his client’s expectations, which explains why these wonderful inventions did not enter the tradition. bagley counters dogmatically, in the manner of the contemporary art historian who sees the power, status, and influence of the client everywhere at work, that nothing in the artwork could have been outside the purview of ti. it is as if the art historian has assumed the mantle of egyptian royalty. gombrich was less reverent. he might have reminded bagley that egyptian art did swerve away from its canon, and preserved those innovations in a short-lived canon of its own, the so- called amarna style, during the reign of akhenaten and his heir. bagley, who is allergic to style, may want to attribute this interlude to the status quo of its workmen, but there is no denying that his gombrich has seized on a sore spot in the holism of current art history: artists and clients are not always in harmonious lockstep. bagley forgets this, and as a consequence his talk of egyptian art is just as monolithic as that of the art historians he is attacking. gombrich is a flawed author. but he is a visionary and ambivalent one as well. bagley, who is neither, though better informed and sober, can only see what is flawed and trivial in his adversary. this makes his final essay fall short of going beyond gombrich in bringing all the art humans have made into conversation. that is too bad, because bagley’s view of technique is truly remarkable. it can only be hoped that readers are motivated to think the same issues through more dispassionately, rather than just shrug and say ‘to hell with those old germans.’ the book is published with marquand, a firm specializing in museum catalogues. the large format is congenial to the many, well-printed images; its diminutive print, coupled with endnotes and bibliographies after each chapter (and no index) make for harder going. still, bagley is to be congratulated for making both a thoughtful and a physically pleasant book. art historians who have published in today’s spartan university press conditions will envy this workmanship. andrei pop is associate professor in the committee on social thought and the department of art history, university of chicago. his monograph on antiquity, theatre, and the painting of henry fuseli, and his english edition of karl rosenkranz's aesthetics of ugliness appeared in . apop@uchicago.edu he has less excuse. emmanuel loewy’s classic book on naturalism in greek art appeared in ! final (apparatus) university of cambridge faculty of english the poetics of mid-victorian scientific materialism in the writings of john tyndall, w. k. clifford and others jeffrey robert mackowiak trinity college a dissertation submitted for the degree of doctor of philosophy, june i, jeffrey robert mackowiak, certify that this dissertation has been written by me, that it is the record of work carried out by me, and that it has not been submitted in any previous application for any degree. furthermore, this dissertation does not exceed the regulation length, including footnotes, references and appendices but excluding the bibliography. in submitting this dissertation to the university of cambridge i understand that i am giving permission for it to be made available for use in accordance with the regulations of the university library for the time being in force, subject to any copyright vested in the work not being affected thereby. i also understand that a copy of the work may be made and supplied to any bona fide library or research worker. jeffrey robert mackowiak trinity college, cambridge june dedicated to my mother, dr elaine mackowiak, my sister, dr lisa filippone, and to the memories of my father, dr robert mackowiak, and grandfather, stanley decusatis. ––––––––––––––––––––– table of contents ––––––––––––––––––––– acknowledgements iv abbreviations and textual conventions vii abstract viii introduction chapter - the presentations (and representations) of scientific naturalism in mid-victorian literary culture chapter - tyndall’s crepuscular materialism: orations at belfast, august, and manchester, october chapter - materialism’s afterlife in the poetry and thought of w. k. clifford and james clerk maxwell chapter - heated exchanges: john tyndall, thomas carlyle, and the rhetorics of thermodynamic conservation chapter - tyndall among the glaciers: the mid-victorian scientific materialist as romantic survivor conclusion works cited - iv - ––––––––––––––––––––– acknowledgements ––––––––––––––––––––– i would, as ever, like to thank the master, fellows and scholars of trinity college, cam- bridge, especially rev. dr martin, rev. adams and my tutors dr morley and prof. worster, for their support of my research over the (many!) years; the principal and members of wesley house, cambridge, especially iain merton and jim stirmey, for excellent accommodation and highly welcome hospitality; and my friends among the fellowship (notably, dr robert macfarlane and dr corrina russell) and the english undergraduates of emmanuel college, cambridge, for advice, encouragement, and, above all else, collegiality in its most authentic sense. in prof. dame gillian beer, dr j. c. a. rathmell and dr david clifford i have not only had the benefit of three of the most knowledgeable supervisors anyone could ever have wished for, but also – and as critically – three of the most patient. dr clifford, in particular, warrants my eternal gratitude for helping me extrude from two hundred thousand or so interesting words the right batch required for a cambridge degree. financial backing for this dissertation has been provided by an internal graduate studentship from trinity college, an overseas research students (ors) awards scheme bursary from the uk committee of vice-chancellors and principals, and supplemental grants from the trinity college ashton fund, the cambridge overseas trust (cot), and the university of cambridge board of graduate studies. i would in particular like to acknowledge my debt to the cot for the awarding of an honorary scholarship and my subsequent election as a fellow of the cam- bridge overseas society. i would also like to thank the master and fellows of hughes hall, cambridge, for their generous offer of a junior research fellowship. a preliminary year of postgraduate coursework in literature and analytic philosophy at the university of virginia was funded by that university’s president’s fellowship in english language and literature. dr laura otis, of hofstra university on long island, ny, and, previously, the max- planck-institut für wissenschaftsgeschichte in berlin, who first contacted me while researching her anthology literature and science in the nineteenth century, has become a good friend and advocate, her expertise especially appreciated arising as it does from the biological, rather than physical, sciences side of things. thanks as well to dr bernard lightman, of canada’s - v - york university, for sending me some years ago an essay – since published in science serialized: representations of the sciences in nineteenth-century periodicals – on the popular reception of tyndall’s belfast address. the staffs of the various libraries that have supported me during the course of this re- search have, without fail, been both endlessly accommodating and distressingly knowledge- able, though i perhaps owe a particular debt of gratitude, for help with manuscript sources and permission to quote material from the institution’s archives, to yvonne martins, lenore symons and dr frank james of the royal institution of great britain. i also wish to thank the staffs of the manuscripts and munby rare books reading rooms in the university library, cambridge; the whipple library of the history and philosophy of science, cambridge; the library of westminster college, cambridge; the wren library of trinity college, cam- bridge; and that as well of the special collections department of the st andrews university library, scotland, for likewise granting me permission to quote from one-of-a-kind manu- scripts and rare publications in their keeping. such collections – and such libraries, generally – truly represent an extraordinary resource for the scholar (and for me, too, i might add), featuring many unexpected delights, not the least of which was my stunned realisation late one evening, having finally deciphered a bookplate inscription, that most of the volumes authored by james clerk maxwell on open shelving at trinity were actually donated by the great man himself. and finally, there are, as inevitable with projects of this sort, any number of profound personal debts which it would be remiss if i did not at the least attempt, if inadequately, to acknowledge. dr matt mccullagh, dr emma woolerton, lauren sallinger, oliver darwin (yep, great-great-grandson), chris cox, pete o’connell, geoff chepiga, ken hannah, capt. matt baker, lt. john jackson, the hon. adela bottomley, sarah cochrane, charles crowson, dr christine luscombe, roger hensman, prof. james secord of the department of history and philosophy of science, selected friends of bentley (james, lauren, edmund and julian), and (fellow st andrean and finest ball date imaginable) dr bella d’abrera, to name only a few, are remarkable – and remarkably friendly – individuals all of whom served to make this place as socially and personally rewarding as it is, in my estimation, aesthetically unparalleled. harriet slogoff, among others, in the david rittenhouse laboratories of the department of physics and astronomy of the university of pennsylvania endeavoured to keep me in balance by reminding me, over holidays, of what an equation looked like, if not how it could be solved. i would also like to recognise in passing the more ‘institutional’ or ‘collective’ kinds of support - vi - provided by the members of the st and rd trinity boat club, by my cambridge university golf club team-mates (in particular, those gorse-scarred veterans of the mighty stymies and blues sides of - ), by the gentlemen of the hawks’ club of the university of cam- bridge (gdbo!), and those as well of the kate kennedy club of st andrews university (floreat kathrena). and, of course, i would like to close with brief mention of my greatest indebtedness of all, for without the love, encouragement and good humour of my mother, dr elaine mack- owiak, and my sister, dr lisa filippone, i would never be where i am today, and it is difficult to overstate what their unwavering support has meant to me throughout the course of my education – and, indeed, my life as a whole. thanks so very, very much, both of you. - vii - –––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––– abbreviations and textual conventions –––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––– the following abbreviations and short forms are used in footnotes and parenthetical docu- mentation; for full bibliographic details of these and other works see the listing of works cited. ‘ba’ ‘british association’, the times, august . ba tyndall, address, . ba [ ] tyndall, address, ‘ th thousand’ ed., . ‘dp’ tyndall, ‘descriptive poem’, july [final fair copy]. ‘dp’ [ ] tyndall, ‘descriptive poem’, [ ] july [complete first draft]. fos tyndall, fragments of science, rd [british] ed., . fos [ ] tyndall, fragments of science, th [british] ed., . fos [ ] tyndall, fragments of science, th [british] ed., vols., . ljcm campbell and garnett, the life of james clerk maxwell, . lwjt eve and creasey, the life and works of john tyndall, . nf tyndall, new fragments, st [american] ed., . of g. beer, open fields: science in cultural encounter, . ssc chisholm, such silver currents: the story of william and lucy clifford, . in the dissertation that follows, substantive insertions and deletions from manuscript sources are indicated, respectively, by angle-brackets and strike-outs; ‘baas’ stands for the british association for the advancement of science; ‘ri’, for the royal institution of great britain. the first british edition is used as the baseline for all discussion of the belfast address as it was, in a sense, ‘officially sanctioned’ – that is to say, a corrected text, rather than tran- scription or abridgement, specifically prepared by its author for widespread publication. documentation follows the mla handbook, th edition. the authorised king james version is the source for quotations from holy scripture. and translations, unless otherwise indicated, are my own. the poetics of mid-victorian scientific materialism in the writings of john tyndall, w. k. clifford and others my dissertation examines the representations of materialism – a philosophy stereotypically associated with a reductive, anti-theological and mechanistic world-picture – in the published prose and (typically) unpublished poetry of several figures central to scientific discourse in the latter half of the nineteenth century, most notably w. k. clifford, a mathematician, and john tyndall, a physicist and media-savvy ‘champion of science’. these engagements, and repre- sentations, were not merely on the level of ‘direct’ argumentation, however. a self-consciously allusive, even polyphonous tone was far from uncommon in the many literatures arising from mid-victorian scientific encounter, and this openness of form permitted both popularisers and critics of materialism to choose the vocabularies in which to relate their observations – the texts with which they would engage – towards specific ends. as i argue, such was a task they performed with great care and an often astonishing felicity: an essay on cosmology, after all, acquires quite a different colouration when interleaved with the cadences of milton, another again if illustrated with quotations from whitman or an epigram from ‘tintern abbey’. my st chapter provides a broader context for those that follow, analysing both changing nine- teenth-century ideas of materialism and also a range of potential reactions to – and inter alia a variety of the contrasting vernaculars used in illustration of – contemporary metaphysical or ‘methodological’ materialism. my nd chapter offers a reading of tyndall’s august belfast address, the locus classicus for practically all later elaborations of materialistic belief. my rd chapter contrasts the theologically orthodox position of james clerk maxwell (buttressed by allusions to the theologically doctrinaire george herbert) with the radically atheistic and materialistic philosophy of clifford (underpinned by the similarly atheistic algernon charles swinburne). my th and th chapters are paired studies in the ‘private’ nuances of tyndall’s ideology, elaborating on my nd chapter’s scrutiny of its more public attributes. the former discusses his notions of cosmic connectedness, ironically derived from the non-materialistic works of carlyle. the latter examines both the exultancy and the despair explicit in tyndall’s poetry and implicit in his prose. as i note in conclusion, such contrary emotions, phrased with striking clarity in tyndall, are common in mid-victorian writings concerning material- ism, directly or indirectly. they are rooted in the hopes afforded by materialism’s explanatory prowess, on the one hand, and the ‘atrophy of spirit’ born of its austere, even dehumanising, epistemology, on the other; that is to say, in a salutary awareness of both power and pitfalls. ‘understanding by the theology of the age or country the theory of the universe generally accepted then and there, and by its morality the rules of life then and there commonly regarded as binding, it seems to me extravagant to say that the one does not influence the other’. - sir james stephen, april , the nineteenth century modern cartoon by sidney harris suggesting something of the dilemma nineteenth- century scientific materialists faced when trying to account for human sentience. - - introduction science and philosophy are just now in that irritable state which betrays secret doubt; and an attack on opinions may be more disturbing than one would imagine, because those who are committed to theories feel themselves on very thin ice […]. - robert a. watson, gospels of yesterday, in his preface to contesting cultural authority ( ), frank turner traces his abiding fascination with the perplexities of labelling to his days as a postgraduate in the late s, ‘suspicious that many of the categories used to understand the victorians were inadequate and misleading’. such concerns, he explains, have since led him to a wariness about uncritical acceptance of preordained or pre-existing terminologies, and a concomitant realisation that ‘the experience of the victorians and their intellectual activity can no longer be regarded as unproblematic, inevitable, or quaint’ (p. xi). even some victorians had a like sense that categorisation could be, at least potentially, invidious, however. in ‘forgotten bibles’, an article of , max müller lamented: ‘nothing is so misleading as names – i mean, even such names as materialism, idealism, realism, and all the rest – which, after all, admit of some kind of definition’ (p. ). one definition of materialism, for instance, from a dictionary of the english language, overseen by american lexicographer joseph worcester and published in , provided its key term with an appar- ently resilient explanation; equally, though, it saddled the term’s philosophical antithesis with an appellation that, as the century drew nearer its close (and the drawing rooms of genteel new england filled with the sounds of table-rattling and mediumistic divination), might have appeared to warrant either replacing or, at minimum, phenomenological clarification: the theory that the material universe is self-existent and self-directed, and that the functions of life, sensation, and thought, arise out of modifications of matter; or the metaphysical theory that is founded on the hypothesis that all existence may be resolved into a modification of matter; – opposed to spiritualism, or the doctrine that above the universe there is a spirit sustaining and directing it. indeed, among materialism’s mid-victorian advocates and adherents, issues arising out of the epigraph from watson, gospels, p. v; epigraph page quotation from stephen, p. . - - dictionary’s suggestively split sense (practical ‘theory’ describing how things are accomplished in the experiential world; metaphysical ‘hypothesis’ that such an explanatory presumption encompasses all that there is to know or believe about the experiential world) were destined to remain – and persist to this day as – points of tremendous epistemological stress. this dissertation is an examination of materialism’s literary representations, and philosophical or aesthetic elaborations, in the second half of the nineteenth century, and it offers a reading of some of those discourses in which such epistemological stresses were made most glaringly manifest. it proceeds via analysis in the writings of a number of important scientific (or tangentially scientific) figures of a concept which might seem, upon prejudiced or cursory inspection, to possess the stability of worcester’s second encapsulation but which, upon any closer scrutiny of the particularities of, or problems posed by, individual implementation, reveals an astonishing multifacetedness, far beyond even that suggested by worcester’s first. this study in ideological and terminological jostle is counterparted by, and interlinked with, my investigation into the techniques by which these individuals interacted with england’s literary heritage, into their engagement in practices of renegotiation and renewal with prefab- ricated lexicons and traditions, crafting in the process a variety of rough, though identifiable, personal literary styles. these styles were then ‘made available’ for other, sometimes non- specialist, usage, for appropriation by politicians and poets, moralists and philosophers. stripped of mathematical underpinnings, many of the more general conclusions and implications of the era’s physical sciences could be grasped, if not always accepted, by most among the educated. meanwhile, one cultural transformation in particular expedited enor- mously the popular diffusion of technical ideas, while concurrently facilitating argument and interdisciplinary exchange: the fact that an ever-increasing ‘reading public now had access to a vast array of printed materials’ – specialist and generalist, highbrow and lowbrow, periodi- cals; cheaply priced and heirloom editions of important scientific texts – ‘in which conflicting views of science were expounded’ (dawson, noakes and topham, p. ). it was, however, not merely controversialists, nor disgruntled clergymen, nor outraged humanists, who cavilled at, or rejected outright, ideologically troublesome portions of mid-nineteenth-century scientific belief; sometimes even those figures behind its most revolutionary physical syntheses did so as well, seeming startled or unnerved by what their colleagues’ (or their own) insights said about the universe surrounding them, often remaining unable, or unwilling, to embrace the seeming ramifications of deciphered equations and conjectured entities. their anxieties, like their - - enthusiasms, sought – and found – expression in books and articles delimiting the meaning and interrogating the effective scope and application of theoretical assertions. many such works, moreover, provide excellent documentation of their authors’ attempts at mediation between an array of competing discourses and antagonistic constituencies, at developing fit, and privately satisfying, vernaculars in which to summarise, debate, popularise and codify both scientific ideas and extra-scientific beliefs. at the same time, some of these texts tried also to reassure, even fortify, a population increasingly aware that a wide assortment of ongoing investigations into the disposition of the phenomenal world hinted at one (potentially destabilising?) prospect: that physical being, animate or inanimate, in the heavens or on the earth, might be of irrefragable materiality. such reductive cosmologies had a long history, of course, but somewhere in this period a tipping point was reached, a preliminary consensus established, infusing an old philosophy, that of the ancient greek and roman atomists, with a resurgent vitalism. somewhere materi- alism, in worcester’s first usage, began to seem – to such prominent individuals as john tyndall, william kingdon clifford, and t. h. huxley, among others – less an appurtenance to theory, more the basis of sound theory itself (a metamorphosis elaborated upon in my opening chapter). bertrand russell, for instance, reminiscing in the early twentieth century about the changes in the intellectual climate of the middle years of the nineteenth, spoke of a ‘period often described as “the materialistic ’ ’s”’ (introduction, p. vi), while the scottish geologist james croll, in an article of , observed: ‘physical inquiry in every direction is converging towards molecular physics, is resolving itself into questions regarding the dynami- cal action of the ultimate particles of matter’ (p. ). such an idea of a ‘convergent century’ is one that both animated nineteenth-century discussions and provided the historian of science harold sharlin with the title for his influential study, subtitled the unification of science in the nineteenth century. this was an explanatory convergence that suggested to many victorians, somewhat misleadingly, a philosophical one as well, and as scientific authors ‘illustrated the uniformity of nature by allusions to the atomic theory’, turner explains, ‘their own mode of scientific publicism permitted their readers and listeners to consider them materialists’ (‘an- cient’, p. ). james clerk maxwell, not a ‘believer’ himself despite analytical inquiries into nominally materialistic topics and themes, quipped, in october , that, ‘[i]n the present day, men of science are […] supposed to be in league with the material spirit of the age, and to form a kind of advance radical party among men of learning’ (‘introductory’, p. ). this widespread popular deduction was at once correct and obfuscatory: for it was - - with wholesale adoption of worcester’s second usage – materialism as metaphysic, rather than practical programme – that most practicing scientists expressed the clearest quibble, leading to their diversity of opinions about the nature, and significance, of the matter with which material- ism ostensibly concerned itself, and also about the possible existence, beyond molecular perturbations, of a higher power. such interpretive multiplicity was, however, the inevitable outcome of the range of personalities involved in debate, and of the cultural and professional climate of the time. indeed, excepting darwinism, from the early s to the s, there was, within the british scientific community, no more prevalent, or volatile, topic of ‘non- technical’ discussion and disagreement than materialism’s remit. this preoccupation – one at once cantankerous and metaphysically provocative – would, moreover, have reverberations among figures seemingly peripheral to that community, even wholly unrelated or antipathetic to it, provoking strong reactions and engendering passionate dispute, a discourse and process of negotiation and reinterpretation which has left a multitude of literary traces: in published sermons, reviews and quarterlies, philosophical tracts, poems, fictions, extant specimens of correspondence. one such figure was f. w. h. myers: though not a scientist himself, he was ac- quainted with a good number of important scientific personages, a confidant of george eliot, and an intellectual who also, in any number of ways, served as an embodiment of some of the feuding personal allegiances associated with the middle and later decades of that transitional (if, pace wallace, wonderful) century. his biography reveals an astonishing malleability, and an endearing sincerity. he began, as an undergraduate at cambridge, as a fervent hellenist, transitioning, under the influence of friends, into a vigorous, sometimes evangelical, christian apologist, before succumbing, in the late s, to a sort of existential crisis brought on by his increasing acquaintance with the dictates associated with contemporary scientific naturalism. he finally chrysalized as a spiritualist, that oddly agglomerated intellectual stance com- pounded equally of (misunderstood) science, (displaced) religiosity, and a pagan exultation in a sense of human spirituality at once unfettered by the doctrines of orthodox theology and suggestive of ‘god-like’ transcendent potential. in ‘modern poets and the meaning of life’ ( ), a product of that final phase, he wrote of two of several conclusions apparently forced upon him by the tenets of late-victorian science (as he understood it), the physical origin of human ‘exceptionality’ and the concomitant extinguishing of god, both distressing deductions from the materialist hypothesis, while nonetheless also managing simultaneously to embrace questions – intimately related, he thought – of morality and behaviour: - - we are bound to face the possibility that the human race came into existence from the operation of purely physical causes, and that there may therefore be in all the universe no beings higher than ourselves; not even the remote and indifferent gods of the lucretian heaven. by many modern minds, in whom the sense of pity for unmerited suffering and the desire for ideal justice have become passion- ately strong, this conception, which absolutely negatives [sic] the possibility of any pity or justice more efficacious than our own, is felt as an abiding nightmare, which seems from time to time to deepen into a terrible reality. this is the mood of mind illustrated in its extreme form in tennyson’s “despair”. (p. ) ‘have i crazed myself over their horrible infidel writings? o yes, / for these are the new dark ages, you see, of the popular press’ (p. ; ll. - ), tennyson’s nameless protagonist laments in that poem, composed in . he represents a soul driven to attempted suicide by the workaday contents of widely circulated journals and newspapers, periodicals carrying the writings of much-celebrated and much-feared, putatively anti-religious ‘infidels’ – england’s ‘scientific publicists’ (turner’s term, and others’). nonetheless, as has become the consensus view among modern scholars, such figures were themselves far from secure in any advocacy of unmitigated or un-prettified materialism, that cosmological and ethical nightmare precipitating the unfortunate soul’s disillusionment in tennyson’s lyric. contemporary scientists, it seems, were prone to identify themselves, though not always explicitly, among myers’s ‘many minds’ troubled – or left, on some level, unsatisfied – by the mandates of any too uncompromised naturalistic faith. for instance, though maurice mandelbaum, in his monumental history, man, & reason ( ), pigeonholed tyndall as not only the most intransigent, but practically the lone, materialist in victorian society (‘if materialism is construed […] as a position which is an alternative to idealism and to other forms of metaphysics on one hand and to positivism on the other, then there were relatively few materialists in the nineteenth century […]. [i]n england tyndall stands out as an almost unique example’ [p. ]), ruth barton, writing sixteen years subsequently, casts even such a swingeing classificatory proviso into doubt, redefining tyndall as nouveau panthe- ist or closet idealist and suggesting, not without cause, that ‘[p]erhaps dogmatic materialism, like social darwinism, was an ogre created by its opponents’ (p. ). similarly, steven kim, in john tyndall’s transcendental materialism and the conflict between religion and science in victorian england ( ), follows barton in diligently resituating tyndall’s ‘materialism’ amid active continental traditions of romanticism and philosophical idealism. so, too, paul sawyer’s outstanding ‘ruskin and tyndall: the poetry of matter and the poetry of spirit’, an essay in paradis and postlewait’s anthology victorian science and victorian values: literary perspectives. in it, sawyer insists that deep-seated resemblances between two such (famously antagonistic) individuals ‘illuminate a crucial intersection in victorian culture: - - the intersection of romantic tradition with the triumph of scientific naturalism’ (p. ). likewise, james bartlett, in a dissertation stressing tyndall’s mountaineering narratives, ‘preaching science: john tyndall and the rhetoric of victorian scientific naturalism’ ( ), contends that, within the freedom provided by that generic form, ‘tyndall creates the scientist as both nature conqueror’ – literally (through pioneering exploration), figuratively (though the pacification of physical law) – ‘and nature lover, as both british imperialist and wordswor- thian poet’ (p. ). surveying the intellectual landscape more broadly, bernard lightman’s the origins of agnosticism: victorian unbelief and the limits of knowledge ( ) arrives at similar conclusions, insisting that, during the period covered by his argument, ‘[…] european materi- alism was limited almost exclusively to germany […]’ (p. ), while peter allan dale, in in pursuit of a scientific culture: science, art, and society in the victorian age ( ), reclassifies many superficially materialistic writings of that century’s latter half within the anti-essentialist discourse of philosophical positivism. my own work, though on one level complementary to such studies, diverges from them in its central focus on the languages of representation, not just the substance, or heritage, of ideologies. in particular, i pay attention to the role played in the s and beyond by poetry, by poetic citation, and by the notion of ‘poeticised’ science, in qualifying or enriching concep- tions and descriptions which might otherwise seem uncharitably reductive or brutishly materi- alistic. now, this is, in part, an old story: the idea that allusion, literary like philosophical, is infrequently, if indeed ever, either innocent or adequately constrained, that meaning almost invariably overflows metaphor, blurring and distorting surrounding sentences like a drop of water falling unexpectedly on a page of fresh ink. ‘the language’, gillian beer notes in one of her essays, ‘translation or transformation? the relations of literature and science’, available alike to nineteenth-century creative writers and scientists had been forged out of past litera- ture, the bible, philosophy, natural theology, the demotic of the streets or the clubs. scientists as various as james clerk maxwell and charles lyell habitually seamed their sentences with literary allusion and incorporated literature into the argumentative structure of their work [...]. (of, p. ) but, following on from beer’s insights concerning evolutionary narrative in darwin’s plots ( ), what is particularly striking about many of these grammars of allusion and citation is their surprising reciprocity; that is to say, the manner in which their deployment does not merely serve to adorn ‘uncouth’ science with some tasteful, literary embellishment, but also, at the same time, to suggest a real complementarity – and to establish a (sometimes halting) dialogue – between two ancient and empowering traditions. commonly, for instance, poetic - - references in nineteenth-century scientific prose serve not so much to constrain as to liberate meaning – to expose both the limitations and the lacunae in certain interpretations (then thought to be in the ascendancy) of contemporary materialistic paradigms even as they argue, more often than not, forcibly in favour of an unyielding form of obdurate materialism – at the level of analysis, if not elucidation. and, at other times, they tend to roll in, almost surrepti- tiously (allusion’s ‘benign haunting’, in harold bloom’s evocative phrase [p. ]), the assump- tions of entire regimes of metaphysical speculation, beliefs and conjectures seemingly at odds with, and having no place in any account of, a dawning era of scientific rationalism – and preening cultural predominance in both the academy and victorian society at large. occa- sionally, they are there simply to remind us of the truism that the poet and the scientist are, in their own ways, of an imagination compact. thus, a poetic (or other) quotation might, in any number of these circumstances, serve as a commonplace (worn-out citation decoupled from original artistic context), a critical aside, an epigram (pithy, fulsome substitute for several lines of prose), a metaphysical rumination: sometimes it might even function as all four of these things concurrently. figures like john tyndall and w. k. clifford (a mathematician more famous during his lifetime for the atheism he espoused than the algebras he devised) could, therefore, human- ise their ‘materialistic’ writings via deliberate interlinkages with, or allusions to, or invocations of, a linguistic register associated with a poetic or literary tradition that was decidedly non- materialist (carlyle’s sartor resartus, wordsworth’s ‘tintern abbey’, the king james bible). they could also relate sideways with up-to-date vocabularies dealing with problems posed by materialism (the poems of tennyson, for instance), or which suggest a meliorist side to a non- theological cosmos (those, say, of whitman or swinburne). as mcsweeney and sabor insist in a recent introduction to carlyle’s most celebrated work: ‘[…] sartor resartus is essentially a work of imaginative fiction that demands a more sensitive and complex response than that in which its formal and stylistic husks are stripped away to reveal the doctrinal kernels’ (p. viii). though hardly fictitious, there is certainly an imaginative component to the reality described by nineteenth-century scientific materialism – courtship among molecules, unrest among atoms, a singing ether – and a similar sensitivity to the form, context and style of recorded beliefs reveals a comparable diversity and richness of signification beyond the argumentatively explicit, providing further confirmation that turner, like max müller, was right to be appre- hensive about any too rigid taxonomisation of victorian philosophical attitudes. ‘the differ- ence between darwin and many who call themselves darwinians, is as great at least as the - - difference between the horse and the mule’, wrote müller (‘forgotten’, p. ); so, too, that between the many materialisms of the nineteenth century, not even favoured with such a progenitor from which their separate discourses could be said to descend. the discursivity of mid-victorian physical science in october , less than a year before he was to bestir the victorian cultural imagination with his stern materialistic pronouncements at belfast, the westminster review ran a rather disapproving review of john tyndall’s six lectures on light, a publication in one volume of a series of his american addresses. the precise circumstances of that disapproval might seem somewhat perplexing to modern ears, however, especially when considered in light of para- digms inferred from present-day precedent, of those ‘manners’ now expected of, or popularly associated with, legitimate scientific discourse. tyndall’s factual content, the westminster review(er) suggested, was adequate enough: not cutting-edge, perhaps, but just the sort of thing – a broad-based survey, replete with suggested experiments and a discussion of historical development – that one might have expected from such an individual: a natural philosopher and eminent public intellectual of multifarious interests and abilities, with no small measure of pedagogic and rhetorical skill. dissatisfaction stemmed rather from its form, from the work’s comparative plain- spokenness, from the lack within its pages of philosophical or meta-thematic conjectures (unsanctioned by empiricism, beyond the reach of then-present theory). particularly missed, it seems, were those interpolated extrapolations, so prominent and memorable in a number of tyndall’s previous writings and orations, in terms of scale and reference from the microscopic to the macroscopic and, from thence, to what would have been deemed by many (though not, perhaps, by the scientist himself) the ineluctably metaphysical: we expected, indeed, that these lectures would afterwards prove quite an original addition to scientific literature, if not in the promulgation of novel facts, yet in the striking mode of treating old facts, in the manner of illustrating them by experiments, striking or instructive, or both, as each case would require; and, above all, we looked forward to the glowing introductions to each subject, the magnificent thoughts on the road, by which the professor concatenates apparently wildly distant facts, and fills the minds of his hearers with elevated thoughts often of the highest poetry; and finally, we counted on the magnificent perorations, for which qualities, as well as for the other characteristics we have mentioned, professor tyndall’s lectures have become justly famous. (‘science’ [ ], p. ) the reviewer, respectful of the volume’s informational content, recoiled nonetheless from the atypicality of presentation, its dull recapitulation of ‘mere’ truth. he felt plainly the absence of - - what might be called the characteristic vernacular of tyndallic exposition: poetically exuber- ant, philosophically suggestive, synthesising and readily quotable, a medium, it would seem, for far more than the communication of broad theoretical consensus or simple empirical fact. his frame of reference, in other words, was not that of science writing considered expansively, but rather science writing as perpetrated by tyndall, with that author’s fixations and propensi- ties, even if (as the case here) in puzzling non-attendance, very much at the fore. neither rhetorical nor apparent ideological largesse was unusual in the scientific prose of the age, however. on the contrary, from a modern perspective, the discourse’s polymor- phousness is perhaps as striking as its perceptible oddness; its refusal to be clumped indiscrimi- nately together as remarkable as its jarring remove from what would seem to be more norma- tive ‘grammars’ of technical communication. ‘the humane, intellectual, and moral elements of the writing of the great naturalist-publicists are there in the freshness, clarity, cockiness, and energy of their prose’, yet that writing was not unitary, at times evidencing neither ‘consis- tency’ nor ‘philosophic depths’, as george levine has observed (p. ). still, for all that, darwin’s and huxley’s works remain models of eloquent exposition (yet unique in their own ways, despite similarities of mood); clifford’s and maxwell’s, of terse rhetorical grandeur (if likewise differentiable); tyndall’s, of pantheistic effusion atop ever-engaging popularisation. though (to twenty-first-century ears, at least) some of these heterogeneous modes can sound elliptic – at times, overwritten; at others, under-evidenced – a bewildering copiousness was in fact a more general characteristic of the era’s writing; as alastair fowler has noted: ‘personal styles abound in nineteenth-century literature: the profusion of letters, journals and memoirs, many of them highly influential, never ceases to astonish’ (history, p. ). scientific authors, then, like all authors, were of their time. beyond such tonal factors, the range of venues available for publication, particularly in the periodical press – which was characterised by extraordinary editorial diversity, with thousands of regional and national serials pitched at a wide array of political and religious dispositions, not to mention levels of literacy – allowed the nineteenth century’s theoreticians and experimentalists, like its essayists and theologians, ample freedom to establish, as gowan dawson has phrased it, ‘distinct authorial personas with consistent individual opinions ex- pressed throughout several different articles’ (p. ). the issues of opinion and persona are pivotal. greg myers has elaborated a pair of suggestive terms for the classification of modern biological writing: the ‘narrative of nature’, unlike the ‘narrative of science’, focuses more on the phenomena under description than the - - mechanisms of discovery and analysis (writing, pp. - ). it can seem a difficult, if not hopeless, task differentiating any such contrasting modes in victorian scientific prose, how- ever, where authors, trying to appeal to (and edify) varied readerships characterised by diver- gent needs and expectations, took ‘care to make their work as accessible as possible. works like darwin’s origin of species was [sic] not simply a piece of research written by one scientific practitioner for his peers; it was meant to be read by a general educated audience’; simultane- ously, many of these authors also incorporated what might be considered a ‘narrative of meaning’ alongside (or intermingled with) those of ‘nature’ and ‘science’, as many, if not most, of their texts sought, beyond instruction, ‘to promote a particular interpretation of scientific knowledge’, as frank james has commented (‘books’, pp. , ). yet not all was surface and ornament, nor opinion and hearsay. obfuscation was as dreaded a failing as oversimplification; clarity, an absolute virtue; rigour, essential and cele- brated. ‘everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler’, einstein once insisted – this is true, needless to say, for explanation as much as entheorisation, an imperative guiding orations and equations alike (qtd. in cohen and cohen, p. ). in the nineteenth century, paradoxically, the same urge could lead to difficulty, confusion, even the appearance of muddle. ‘[t]he selections presented here’, a. s. weber wrote in his introduction to an anthology nineteenth century science: a selection of original texts ( ), ‘have not lost their value as models of rhetorical persuasion, precise observation, and clear exposition of the perennial problems of natural philosophy’ (p. xii). two years later, laura otis was to remark in the preface to a rival volume: ‘it is thus no surprise that nineteenth-century scientists found they could be more persuasive by using the story-telling techniques of fiction writers’ (p. xxiv). to ‘fiction writers’ she might profitably have added ‘poets, philosophers and preachers’, perhaps other cultural groupings. to ‘story-telling techniques’: ‘vocabularies’, ‘assumptions’ and ‘strategies of argument’. any discrepancy between weber’s and otis’s observations is, how- ever, easily accounted for, a topic discussed at length in following chapters, when considering the interrelationships between the ‘two worlds’ shaping mid-victorian discourse. first, the cultural milieu which scientists of the age inhabited (one of ‘vigorous, non-specialized, poly- mathic freedom of thinking […]’ [davis, p. ]). second, the actual world each was trying to explain. that was a place which maxwell, in a variant text for one of his poems, was play- fully, if aptly, to describe as ‘atom-haunted’ (‘hermann’, p. n ). his label, meant to characterise a cosmos, could equally be said to designate the zeitgeist: ‘the open challenge [of darwinism] was grave enough’, the author and bbc broadcaster l. l. whyte once wrote, - - ‘but [materialism’s] unconscious shock went deeper’ (p. ). the former brought into disrepute some niceties of parentage. the latter called into question the nature of being itself. it seemed a primal wounding, not glancing blow – a new(ish) philosophy casting all in doubt. from the point of view of materialism, the second half of the nineteenth century has as its twin spiritual foci the november publication of the origin of species and tyndall’s august delivery of the belfast address. the latter proclamation, though hardly of the pyroclastic invective that some critics claimed for it, was nonetheless one of scientific self- sufficiency and supreme self-confidence, unqualified in its announcement of the necessity for a ‘materialistic’ path for future physical inquiry. turner has called the stance brazenly advo- cated within it ‘scientific naturalism’: ‘these ideas were naturalistic because they referred to no causes not present in empirically observed nature and were scientific because they inter- preted nature through three major mid-century scientific theories’ (‘tyndall’, p. ). these were the atomic theory of matter (a series of principles explaining chemical reactions and the behaviour of gasses); the conservation of energy (that is, the first law of thermodynamics, a precept restricting the outcome of any dynamic process); and darwinian evolution. , moreover, was also an important, if now less remembered, date in the field of spectroscopy. robert wilhelm bunsen’s discovery of the identity between ‘lines’ observed in solar (and extra-solar) absorption spectra and those found in mid-victorian physical laborato- ries for ‘earth-bound’ elements shattered a long-standing cultural myth (the exceptionality of the heavens), even as it rendered yet another phenomenon ineradicably ‘material’. some scientists were astonished as they came to realise that the most distant visible stars could be examined for composition, temperature and structure as readily as if they were ground mineralogical samples stored in erlenmeyer flasks. others were unnerved about what such a revelation – another copernican decentring: just as darwin was perceived as linking man with the animals ‘below’ in the biological realm (though he himself shunned such hierarchy), so did bunsen with the stars above in the astrophysical – said about the nature of the cosmos. if the s, as william mcgucken has observed (p. ), were the heyday for unification of chemical with atomic views of stellar (and other) spectra, alexandre-edmond becquerel, a judeo-christianity had always featured some form of ‘supervised’ development myth; gladstone, for in- stance, eagerly authored articles claiming evolution and genesis compatible ‘in the broad sense’ (gould, p. ). ‘but now [in ]’, as matthew arnold warily reported, ‘[…] [materialistic] conceptions of the universe fatal to the notions held by our forefathers have been forced upon us by physical science’ (‘literature’, p. ). many of the texts i quote, both victorian and modern, use the labels ‘scientific naturalism’ and ‘scientific materialism’ more or less interchangeably, though strictly speaking, in turner’s scheme, the latter would add to the suppositions of the former the idea, to be addressed in my next chapter, of psychophysical parallelism. - - french physicist, spoke for many when he remarked, in : ‘to study the physical constitu- tion of the sun and stars, astronomy employs in general telescopes and the spectroscope; this last instrument shows us that the heavenly bodies are composed of the same elements that are found in the earth; whence it may be concluded that the forces governing matter are of universal existence’ (p. ). i am not suggesting that there was any total change in this period, nor that its scientific writings differed utterly in either substance or tone from the productions of previous genera- tions and established disciplines – or subsequent generations and emergent disciplines, for that matter. on the contrary, modifications in form or idiom happened along a continuum, even as evolution had its precursors, even as materialism had an ideological genealogy (as was acknowledged by many at the time, conspicuously tyndall) stretching back into antiquity. i would nonetheless suggest that during this period, and in these writers, something in- triguing, if not unprecedented, was taking place. they charted a strange transition, or change of phase, describing a time in which physical sciences were grappling with universals of a new ‘global’ sort, a transformation examined in some detail in my first chapter. some of these revelations seemed so profound and distressing that they could only be mentioned in a kind of awed – or stuttering – fashion. furthermore, audiences, whether in print or person, were experiencing this ‘as it happened’, in a sense, like watching live television coverage of a disaster in progress, and the uncertainty and ambivalence of scientists can be clearly gleaned from those texts documenting transmission. ‘[t]he history of thought’, as early twentieth- century physicist alfred north whitehead phrased it in his important study science and the modern world ( ), ‘in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries is governed by the fact that the world had got hold of a general idea’ – that physical behaviour, studied empirically, was best explained without reference to the preternatural – ‘that it could neither live with nor live without’ (p. ). this observation, characteristically trenchant, is nevertheless insufficiently precise. there were multiple ways of ‘liv[ing] with’, even as there were any number of meth- ods for ‘liv[ing] without’, for denial. prior to the origin, prior to the formalisation of the second and first laws of thermo- dynamics (the ordering is deliberate, and follows historical progression), prior to bunsen’s that is not to say there were no quantifiable transformations in, say, language or disciplinarity, however: for example, as david roos has pointed out: ‘by the end of the nineteenth century’ – unlike nearer its middle, before specialisation and increased professionalisation had fragmented what is often stereotypically conceived as the unitary character of its intellectual culture – ‘the chances of a major scientific achievement being influenced by an article in the edinburgh review, or any other generalist, nonprofessional journal, were almost nil’ (p. ). - - remarkable discoveries in solar spectroscopy, it seemed that one could find room in science for a wide range of ancillary beliefs, suppositions and metaphysical hypotheses. this became far more challenging afterwards. the change in mindset augured by these transfigurations in awareness can hardly be overstated. before them, materialism could be viewed as an interpre- tation of theoretical constructs; subsequently, it seemed to men like tyndall and clifford a presupposition, something that could not be avoided, only refused. (in an article of , tyndall scorns one antagonist for failing to accept a fait accompli: ‘the modern scientific interpretation of nature […]’ [‘materialism’, p. ].) though the constitution of man ( ) – a phrenological study by combe, a work tending towards materialism – had at its publication invited a flurry of denunciations, by the late s ‘reflective treatises by herschel, lyell, nicholl, and others had shown how natural laws might be discussed without outraging public sensibilities. outside the shadowy world of freethought, the slightest opportunities for accusa- tions of materialism had to be blocked […]’ (secord, p. ). tyndall and clifford, by contrast, writing little more than a generation later, actively courted such a judgement. to them, materialism was no longer a prejudice or corollary, a ‘taste’, it had begun to seem the irresistible condition for advance, the only legitimate way forwards, as necessary for a profitable science – and an expansionist empire – as belief in a round earth. to assert that the art of shakespeare was potential in the sun (as the former did), or that the universe would inevitably be rendered unfit for life: not just human life, but life of any sort (as the latter, among others, did), is to argue for a qualitatively different role for scientific explanation, far more radical than the recalibrations of belief advocated by, say, lyell or chambers. these are speculations about process, about teleology, about first origins and final endpoints, seeming neither to require, nor admit, ‘the extraneous’. few scientists were undisturbed by this – not even figures who would actually seem to be arguing in favour – and, from within their texts, literary remnants of various and irresolvable discontents can be readily exhumed. it is this that unites such a polymorphous discourse, such a diversity of styles and assumptions among mid-victorian writings in the physical sciences, making them, despite divergences, seem like species of one genus: all had to deal with a likely positioning of materi- alistic philosophy, no longer alongside, but behind – or beneath – unprecedented revelations. though some ‘non-specialists’ found this possibility a wonder, others were unnerved: to f. w. h. myers it served to suggest a sort of panoptic diminishment, that ‘the cosmos has no true place for man […]’. for, he elaborated, such ‘inhumane’ belief seemed not only to - - reveal, but to revel in, the ‘underlying aspect of nature which, once seized, is no less than appalling; when the familiar garden seems alien and terrible as a gulf in the milky way; and, nakedly confronted with the everlasting universe, man that must die feels more than the bitterness of death’ (‘modern’, p. ). myers, if uniquely eloquent in expressing it, was not alone in this inference. many audiences were equally discomforted, finding themselves frightened and adrift. not acciden- tally does tyndall’s reviewer long for guidance as much as edification; not for nothing does he mourn the lack of oratorical uplift, ‘the magnificent thoughts on the road’, a figure stressing the scientist’s role as guide, or fellow traveller. whether a virgil among the shades (a parallel suggested by t. s. eliot for tennyson and his in memoriam [p. ]) or a moses in judea (one implicit in some of w. k. clifford’s comments on the interrelationships between scientists, scientism and progress), traversing a hell or wandering in search of some – hitherto unfathom- able – promised land, was for many in those audiences worryingly unclear. and yet on the answer to that question so much depended. ‘methodological’ materialism as spiritual refuge turner’s important study, between science and religion: the reaction to scientific naturalism in late victorian england ( ), provides sympathetic analysis of the careers and beliefs of gentlemen like myers, alfred russel wallace, and herbert spencer, among others, all of whom ‘generally accepted the concepts and theories of science. at one time or another each had contributed to the naturalistic synthesis or had been trained in scientific procedures and philosophy or had been profoundly affected by its ideas’ (p. ); yet, ultimately, each had also ‘embraced the belief that [...] they could not meaningfully guide their lives with reference solely to the visible world’ (p. ). in so doing, they were able to back away from what they perceived as the nineteenth century’s deadening, intermittently nihilistic, materialism. tyndall, too, had a route of egress, one likewise achieved via faith in an invisible world. but it was a world of intrinsically natural, not supernatural, specification, an unseen reality of molecules and atoms and all their marvelous and varied interactions, not spiritual- ism, nor other modish elaboration of antiquated belief. moreover, as barton has noted, he, ‘like huxley, hermann von helmholtz, and [frederick] lange, advocated materialism as a methodology, a program, or a method of scientific research, but not as a general philosophy’ (p. ). turner had some years before reached an identical conclusion: ‘often within the - - same lecture or essay the scientific publicists dealt with a matter in two ways – in terms of scientific theory and as a philosophical stance’ – the very tension so conspicuous in joseph worcester’s dictionary’s definition for the concept. ‘in the latter regard, they usually backed away from materialism. huxley always said that if forced to answer the unanswerable question, he would chose idealism over materialism’. tyndall, indeed, despite lecturing ‘for several years on a materialistic theory of psychology […]’ (‘carlyle’, p. ), represented perhaps the apotheosis of this class, the individual in whose writings such a bifurcation of approach was most unmistakably – and expressively – instantiated. he wrote, to give one example of this, of a transcendental tingle apprehended in the audience of nature in a letter of april to juliet pollock, wife of william pollock: the part of human nature which came into play under such circumstances is that which puzzles me most. that solemn unison which the soul experiences with nature, and which is a thing essentially different from the intellectual appreciation of her operations. but i will not carry you into a cloudland where i have often wandered myself without finding rest for the sole of my foot; and where probably man’s spirit may wander till the end of time without being sensibly more instructed. (p. ) of course, reluctance to burden his correspondent with such speculations does not imply that tyndall did not juggle them himself, and his frequent wanderings left textual traces through- out his career: in his atmospheric perorations, in the poetry he composed (‘i do not know that he has ever written poetry’, wrote w. t. jeans in , ‘but he is certainly a poet in the fire of his imagination and in his love for all the forms of natural beauty’ [p. ]), in the splitting he continually emphasised between the pragmatic need to approach science materialistically, but never to think that such rational inquiry could – or should – unreservedly gratify private desire. this bifurcation was never more accentuated than in his belfast address. my second chapter is an analysis of that address, along with another, ‘crystals and molecular force’, delivered in manchester around six weeks later, though clearly aligned with the earlier oration in topic as well as tone; in both, as we shall see, the adamancy of tyndall’s insistence on the prerogative of materialism in discussions and explanations of the physical world’s witnessed behaviour contrasts somewhat awkwardly with his avowal of a nebulous inspecificity regarding the intrinsic significance of that physical world, or the manner in which its phenomena were to be spiritually understood and appreciated. he, queen’s remembrancer, noted barrister, translator of la divina comédia, ‘a man of liberal culture and rare social charm’; she, a bonne-vivant and intellectual, favoured, like her husband, with ‘numerous […] friendships in the world of letters, science, and art’ (rigg). it was mrs pollock who brokered the preliminary meeting between tyndall and tennyson, for instance (lwjt, p. ). - - my third chapter is a study in contrasts and similarities between two nineteenth- century analytical luminaries, whose most celebrated writings stressed a tough-minded or algebraic description of nature over the kind of enraptured depiction favoured by tyndall, though that was a rhetorical mode never fully abandoned: the first, w. k. clifford; the second, another cantabrigian, james clerk maxwell, a scientific visionary whose theories concerning electromagnetism and statistical mechanics were to leave the landscape forever altered, heralding the arrival of a revolutionary new paradigm, a ‘change in the conception of reality […]’, according to einstein, that was ‘the most profound and the most fruitful that physics has experienced since the time of newton’ (p. ). at this chapter’s heart is a discus- sion of two contrasting apprehensions of the fundamental nature of material substance, as embodied in two divergent conceptualisations of (to mid-victorian minds) its most elementary constituents: atoms and molecules; related to this are the two men’s speculations on the destiny of human consciousness after death. f. w. h. myers, in his posthumously published textbook, human personality and its survival of bodily death ( ), had his own views on this subject (unambiguous in such a choice of title), arising from his ‘third way’ spiritualistic convictions. clifford and maxwell, by contrast, exemplified the two other primary possibili- ties. the former, like many victorian positivists, advanced a belief in death’s physical domin- ion but metaphoric impotence if life has been lived well and nobly, dedicated to the better- ment of both self and species. the latter, among peers almost uniquely secure in his christian adherence, was – and this perhaps due to the orthodoxy of that faithfulness – far more muted publicly on the subject of the afterlife than either clifford or myers, but trumpeted, when the opinions of colleagues seemed unworthy of the ‘science’ on which they were allegedly based, his disagreement with a comparable vehemence. my final two chapters are paired examinations of tyndall’s ‘cloudland’ wanderings, discussions of their impingements on those narratives and texts which, on first appraisal, might seem more involved in the first part of his essential dualism: ‘the intellectual appreciation of her [nature’s] operations’. the fourth is a study of how tyndall’s materialism was under- pinned, challenged and revitalised via the writings of thomas carlyle. particular focus is placed on the manner in which, through those writings, tyndall was able to struggle with the conception of being put forth in carlyle’s prophetic texts, where, contra utilitarian and eighteenth-century mechanistic philosophies, readers are impelled towards ‘a more unworldly conception of human life’, as the irish social historian w. h. lecky explained things, in (p. ). tyndall’s phrase in the letter – the one discussing ‘[t]hat solemn unison which the - - soul experiences with nature’, seemingly almost a verbatim recapitulation of wordsworthian sentiment – suggests the subject of my fifth, in which i discuss how romanticism (particularly english romanticism), broadly construed, provided a specific framework in which tyndall could articulate his own vision of carlyle’s ‘natural supernaturalism’. this, however, was an endeavour seemingly founded on irresolvable paradox: if, following lecky, carlyle’s task was the estrangement of humanity from the corrosively material, the lauding of otherness, the scientist’s own was precisely contrary, in that tyndall sought to demonstrate humankind’s intimate ‘worldliness’, the utter interlinkage of homo sapiens with the measurable and mun- dane, while concurrently distancing such beliefs from what he referred to, and derided, as the ‘practical materialism’ of both contemporary thinkers (like harriet martineau and thomas young), and those enlightenment mechanists whose pronouncements earlier in the century had so affrighted a young carlyle. these were nuances frequently irrelevant to adversaries, however: the unnamed author of one extended critique spoke for many in claiming that, while ‘[i]t may appear the difference is great between miss martineau’s and professor tyndall’s views on the question of materialism […]’, and ‘though as regards actual substance or matter, this is in some degree true; yet when the main and most important principles are concerned, the same line of thought is plainly manifested […]’ (materialistic, p. ). tyndall, like other publicists, recognised this propensity, and expended considerable energy – often for nought – in contesting such unflattering, if schematically accurate, interpretations of his belief. these chapters are therefore studies in ‘redacted materialism’. my first, by contrast, provides more abstract analysis, overviewing the historical context of materialism, the ‘literary’ status of popularising language, the possibility of a ‘poeticised’ science, while sketching also some nineteenth-century readings and reinterpretations of the unadorned hypothesis. all of these discussions, moreover, are set against more general theological issues presented by the ongoing conflict between science and religion. while turner is certainly correct in interpret- ing this as, on one level, a contest for authority between rival professional clans (‘conflict’, p. ), it must never be overlooked that there were real feelings at stake, too; as the rev. john quarry explained in a sermon published within two weeks of belfast: ‘the supposition that lifeless matter is the origin of all being, and contains in itself the source of all life and thought, cannot fail to give a rude shock to our better feelings, and to deaden all the higher aspirations of the human mind’ (p. ). his were worries, as we shall see, not entirely foreign to a number of mid-victorian ‘scientific materialism’s’ most ardent and prolific propagandists as well. - - chapter the presentations (and representations) of scientific naturalism in mid-victorian literary culture i have shown that all the realms of the universe are mortal, and that the substance of the heavens had birth; and i have explained most of those things that in the heavens occur and must occur. please listen now to what remains to tell. - lucretius, on the nature of the universe the nineteenth century saw the rise of a sense, and a definition, of ‘literature’ as applying to, and demarcating, a body of writings as distinct owing to origin or nominal subject. perhaps fittingly, it is two science writers who are in the oed credited with innovation (or, at mini- mum, priority of citation), thus becoming, from a lexicographical point of view, the figures associated with these broadenings out of denotated meaning: humphry davy in the first instance ( : literature as ‘the body of writings produced in a particular country or period’ [def. a]), and, splendidly, john tyndall – whose own productions teeter so precariously between those three styles of ‘narration’ discussed in my introduction – for the second ( : literature as ‘[t]he body of books and writings that treat of a particular subject’ [def. b]). brande and cox’s definition of literature in the edition of their dictionary of science, literature, & art managed to capture something of that term in the very throes of semantic mitosis: the word denotes, generally, the entire results of knowledge and fancy preserved in writing; but, in the narrower use to which ordinary custom restricts it, we draw a distinction between literature and positive science, thus exempting from the province of the former one extensive branch of our studies. and, in a still more restricted sense, the word literature is sometimes used as synonymous with polite literature, or the french belle-lettres. (p. ) the victorian fin de siècle, despite the persistence in some quarters of such reservations and provisos, saw classificatory amnesty made complete – in we encounter for the first time application of the signifier ‘literature’ to ‘[p]rinted matter of any kind’ (oed, def. c) – with the admittance of all comers, if only informally, to that hitherto exclusionary realm. yet the epigraph from lucretius, p. ; . - . - - other meanings were never far behind, and a whiff of elitism continued to linger about both the word and the concept. ‘[a] general term which, in default of precise definition, may stand for the best expression of the best thought reduced to writing’ – so the entry for ‘literature’ in the encyclopædia britannica begins (f.-k., p. ). this is a designation at once open- ended (‘best thought’ allows much manoeuvre) and limiting (the banal, witless or poorly phrased need not, it seems, apply, as the mere status of ‘information written down’ becomes a necessary, though hardly sufficient, criterion for class membership). a recent academic definition keeps such qualifications intact, robert scholes saying of literary criticism (and thus the object of its inquiry): ‘it is an art, not a science, […] which means we learn it by studying the texts in which the arts of language are most powerfully on display. we call these texts “literature” […]’ (p. c ). over the past thirty-odd years, scholars have come to grant ‘literary’ status to some, even most, of the linguistic artefacts of nineteenth-century scientific culture, if perhaps warily. william bartlett, for instance, described his dissertation on tyndall as ‘a contribution to the recent (and rapidly growing) field of science studies’ because of ‘its emphasis on the rhetorical analysis of texts that are often placed on the margins of a canon of victorian literature’ (p. ). conversely, critics like gillian beer, george levine, sally shuttleworth and jonathan smith have illuminated the fashion in which works central to that canon were influenced by those ‘technical’ discourses purportedly nearer its outskirts. what did the scientific writers of that century say about the ‘status’ of their own writings, however? how did they view them? in relation to the literary tradition? in relation to the philosophical? what did such authors, not ourselves, mean by a ‘poetic’ sensibility or ‘universal’ applicability? and what did they accentuate as most novel about the kinds of discoveries they were seeking to elucidate? these issues are paramount in any examination of the coupling of scientific naturalism with its literary representations. this chapter is thus in large part a study of definitions, of changing nineteenth-century ideas of materialism, ‘poetic’ science, ‘teleological’ or ‘global’ natural philosophy. it also provides, in its concluding section, analysis – oriented around a reading of a twentieth-century poem outlining a trio of possible responses to materialism – of a series of re-definitions, a survey of mid- to late-victorian attempts to humanise that belief- system by remaking it into something less ethically dismaying or spiritually austere. these queries frame my terms of debate, providing a broader context for those specific responses to materialism discussed later in this dissertation. to start with, the idea of the ‘poetical-ness’ of science was one that exercised a variety of thinkers, particularly scientific popularisers. i will - - examine two texts which directly addressed themselves to this question. an anthology by the astronomer richard proctor argued forcibly in favour of parity between scientific investigation and a rousing ‘poetic sense’. the contrary case, that for disproportion, was made in ‘prose and verse’, a poem of by fellow astronomer john herschel, a piece which also suggests something of the ‘new course’ for – and, implicitly, the emergent sense of import associated with – scientific theorising in the second half of the nineteenth century, a recalibration of belief for which i argue in this chapter’s middle section. on the likeness and unlikeness of science and poetry in , richard proctor published an anthology suggestively entitled the poetry of astronomy. that’s one designation which would seem to lay bare authorial intention. yet just as impor- tant is proctor’s subtitle, which clarifies the nature of this proposed ‘poetic’ exploration, a task he conceived not so much aesthetically, or linguistically, as ideologically: a series of familiar essays on the heavenly bodies, regarded less in their strictly scientific aspect than as suggesting thoughts respecting infinities of time and space, of variety, of vitality, and of development. this is astronomy, then, as (in part) romantic spectacle, productive of deep thoughts, a correlative to wonder. this is astronomy as aid to reflection, a belittling splendour willingly sought; astronomy as teaching tool abetting personal reflection and the necessary reconceptualisation of the role and relation of self to universe (or, in terminology less solipsistic, species to same). f. scott fitz- gerald was to write in the s of the panorama of long island sound that greeted european pioneers, of the ‘fresh, green breast of the new world’, describing it as inadvertent encounter, unplanned revelation: it suggested the bewilderment of early modern man ‘compelled into an æsthetic contemplation he neither understood nor desired, face to face for the last time in history with something commensurate to his capacity for wonder’ (p. ). on earth, perhaps, was this, if debatably, the case, though other vistas remained, other new worlds presenting like possibilities of discovery, self- and otherwise. views directed outwards towards space or backwards in time (geological, evolutionary), examinations oriented inwards towards the sub- molecular, or downwards towards the psyche (psychological meditations on the effluvium of consciousness itself), these were similarly to transfix the victorian observer, perhaps an indi- vidual sufficiently secure in material terms or adequately ensconced in worldview that he or she deliberately courted destabilisation and conceptual rebooting, craving the narcotic rush of novel perspective. proctor celebrated this dual movement. - - figure - ‘the transit of venus, – december , ’, punch’s almanack for . - - he defended a conception of science allowing its impact on our ‘poetic’ sense, even as our ‘poetic’ sense told us better where to look, why to look, and, indeed, what to bother looking for: many think that science cannot truly be called science if clothed in poetic garb, and, on the other hand, others seem to fear that a glory must depart from the face of nature if science scrutinise her mysteries too closely. i believe both these fears to be unfounded – that science need not be less exact though poetry underlie its teachings; while, beautiful and glorious though the ordinary aspect of nature may be, a deeper poetry, a more solemn significance, a greater beauty, and a nobler glory can be recognised in the aspect of nature when science lifts the veil which hides it from the unaided vision. (p. v) proctor’s slightly confused, and confusedly sexed, scheme of anthropomorphisation is telling, indicating something of the complexity of his metaphor. nature is feminised, something to be uncovered, or stripped bare, blushing if necessary. yet a ‘poetic’ sense is likewise figured as a sort of ‘garb’, a concealing garment draped atop nature, like a throw shrouding a classical sculpture. such dressing, then, is done not so much to preserve modesty as to facilitate admittance to, and passage through, polite society. it is science (and scientists), in other words, that unclothe nature, before sending nature out of the house wearing something more suitable. and it is science (and scientists) that can be trusted to behold, unblanchingly if with some delight, things in their unadorned state; it (and its practitioners) that can persist comparatively unfazed by prospects, precipitously discovered, of ‘unearthly’ beauty. ( december witnessed a transit of the planet venus, an event epitomised in a punch cartoon as a procession of beauties, a venus each, from across the globe, from all historical epochs. they move in orderly fashion, as if themselves governed by ‘beautiful’ inexorable law, passing above the leering lenses of enraptured scientists – though an obvious pun, this joke, like proctor’s expla- nation, suggests something of the gendered nature of victorian scientific conceits [fig. ].) beyond the figurative, proctor’s language evokes other associations as well: ‘lifts the veil’, for instance, looks backwards towards in memoriam and ‘the lifted veil’ ( ), george eliot’s famed short story, towards canonical variations on that fragment fixed in discourse. the poetry of astronomy, however, though citing passages from several ancient and ren- aissance poets (particularly revealing is one mid-chapter excursus integrating discussion of the iliad, the recent naming of the two moons of mars, phobos and deimos, and astronomically based speculation on the date of the trojan war [pp. - ]), makes scarce direct mention of mid-victorian verse reflecting scientific engagement: that of tennyson, that of myers, that of swinburne or browning. it focuses still less on potentially poetic (‘poetic’ here meaning ‘conventionally literary’, a ‘surface’ phenomenon: ‘poetic’ as stereotypically conceived) aspects - - of, or flourishes within, the technical and popular writings of mid-nineteenth-century scientists and science writers themselves. the distinction, to him, seems a prepositional one, a valuation of the poetry in science above the poetry of science. proctor, in effect, fixated on ‘first-order’ experience, the shiver of poetic feeling precipi- tated by direct (or nearly direct, as it is mediated via the astronomer’s own aesthetic proclivi- ties) contact with nature. but sometimes a ‘second-order’ production can replicate something of that immediacy, sometimes poetry can communicate the hackneyed ‘wonder of science’ – unimpeded by equations or latin nomenclature – with the force, if not always the knowledge- content, of science as purportedly ‘felt’ by the initiated. there are, of course, certain topics more obviously prone to such literary appropriation-hence-appreciation. as maurice riordan and jon turney observe in their introduction to a quark for mister mark ( ), an anthology (prejudiced towards the twentieth century) collecting verses and verse-fragments influenced by the methods, results and opinions of science: we did find, though, that poets’ curiosity has its blind spots. or perhaps only certain kinds of news from science can get through clearly. the scale and age of the universe impress plenty of poets, and one could make a sizable, but repetitive, collection just featuring awe-struck or morose meditations on star-gazing. the struggle to understand evolution is another, nineteenth-century, theme which continues to thrive, perhaps because it builds on a traditional poetic concern with natural history. (p. xiii) this was the case, not infrequently, in victorian intellectual life as well. then, as now, certain frontiers – in scale (the very large, the very small) as much as subject – perennially intrigue, appearing more seductive to the curious. not coincidentally do the themes which riordan and turney identify find semi-mythic origin in the period covered by this study. the giddy wheel of cosmic perspective (brought to popular awareness by mid-victorian explorations and quantifications of the vastness of the heavens and related speculations regarding the plurality of worlds); the plummet of recognition felt in acknowledgement of simian ancestry, of deep geological time: these were, and remain, invitations to thought and self-questioning, like the tableaux of the stations of the cross. yet, as often as not, they are productive of sometimes contrary emotions, feelings of terror and unease alongside awed humility or wonder. proctor’s definition of poetry as applied to science, then, has little to do with manner of expression, still less with caesuras and end-rhyme. it is more an index of common humanity, of shared affections, a register harkening back to burkean concepts of the sublime (as burke wrote: ‘infinity has a tendency to fill the mind with that sort of delightful horror, which is the most genuine effect and truest test of the sublime’ [p. ]); accordingly, the ‘poetry’ he - - identifies in astronomy venerates the intangible, the power of glorious spectacle, even as it recalls more current notions of romantic beauty, that recognition of – and those meditations upon – the overlooked or picturesque. like proctor, many victorian scientific publicists were capable of discerning within, and publicly investing, the routine – even the prosaic or ‘house- hold’ – with a semblance of inspirational grandeur: huxley lectured on a piece of chalk; tyndall, on the colour of the sky; faraday, on the chemical history of a candle, to name only three of the most renowned of many such discourses. in these talks, each scientist sought, after a fashion, to poeticise the commonplace, yoking rational comprehension with imagination and fancy, and joining to that an unmistak- able sense of immanent or transcendent meaning, like keats with his urn, or wordsworth, his daffodils. such works upon publication, like proctor’s own text, typically attained at least the minimum standards set forth in a definition of literature given, nearly contemporaneously, by craik in his pioneering a compendious history of english literature, and of the english language, from the norman conquest ( ). this was a work which, by its very nature, busied itself distinguish- ing between ‘what was in’ and ‘what was out’, delimiting categories: as for literature, it is not the synonyme [sic] even of written language. it is not coextensive with that, or limited to that. for want of a better term, we call artistic composition in words, or thought artistically so expressed, literature; but, on the one hand, there is abundance of writing, and of printing too, which is not literature in this proper sense, and, on the other, it is not a necessity of artistic composition that it should be in a written form. ( : ) huxley, for instance, in an unpublished manuscript (available electronically), once opined: but there is a portion of scientific work which seems to me to have an indisputable claim to the title of literature – i mean the work of the popular expositor – of the man who being a well qualified interpreter of nature translates that interpretation out of the hieratic language of the experts into the demotic vulgar tongue of all the world. i call this literature – for it seems to me to be the essence of literature – that it embodies great emo- tions and great thoughts in such form that they touch the hearts and reach the apprehensions not merely of the select few but of all mankind. (‘literary’) the latter paragraph effectively restates definitions of poetry given earlier in the century, particularly in the specific issues raised: that of ‘translation’ from a lofty to a ‘demotic tongue’; the romantic conceit revivified to extend to science, conveying, like verse, ‘great thoughts’ and ‘great emotions’. (‘hieratic’ is even a shelleyan word, bringing to mind his noble defence of poetry’s art and function.) huxley here made claims for the literary worth of science writing (though mainly that huxley, ‘chalk’; fos, pp. - ; faraday, chemical. - - of the ‘popular expositor’); proctor, in the poetry of astronomy, for the subject’s spiritual profun- dity, or ‘poetry-like’ appeal. not all scientists, of course, were interested in these issues. nor, among those that were, was confidence absolute in comparable equivalencies. for instance, the following, written in , seems a manifesto impelling the era’s science away from dry or workmanlike inquiry, towards poetry, a request that science commence itself to addressing the grandest sorts of philosophical conundrums. this is not to suggest that there isn’t a feeling of palpable affection for the subject intermixed with an overtone of broader humanistic dissatis- faction pervading ‘prose and verse’, a poem by sir john herschel, professional astronomer, enthusiastic amateur musician, son of sir william herschel (himself an astronomer of re- nown). in it, science and poetry are addressed, not so much as wife and lover, but rather as two muses, or infidelities: one, science, now regarded affectionately though with perhaps diminishing ardour (he writes to her in apology: ‘and if from thy clear path my foot have strayed, / truant awhile, – ’twas but to turn / with warm and cheerful haste; while thou didst not upbraid, / nor change thy guise, nor veil thy beauteous form […]’ [p. ]); the other, poetic art, praised passionately, if chastely, exuberantly, if clandestinely, like a teenager’s crush. thus herschel’s poem reads as a double ode, to cloying and coy mistresses, respec- tively. science feels to him clear-headed, but a bit dull, enlightening but distant, a presence at once unapproachable and drearily unreproachable. poetry to him seems, by contrast, a ‘breathy’ seductress holding him wholly in thrall, a feminine principle similarly unattainable, yet for whom his desire is never slaked; she is epitomised as a dark lady leading him away from science’s day-lit paths, into the night, towards private pleasures, ‘cell[s]’ and ‘haunted grove[s]’. his second stanza enacts this turning away from public obeisance, beginning in a tone of (faint) praise for science, segueing into an encomium for his other joy: high truths, and prospect clear, and ample store of lofty thoughts are thine! yet love i well that loftier far, but more mysterious lore, more dark of import, and yet not less real, which poetry reveals; what time with spell high-wrought, the muse, soft-plumed, and whisperingly nightly descends, and beckoning leads to cell or haunted grove; where all inspiringly she breathes her dirge of woe, or swells my heart with glee. (p. ) this seems a bit unfair, as astronomy was often perceived in a similar light, felt as a subject conveying grand or mystifying emotions, at times ‘whisperingly’. the aspirations underlying, - - and communicated by, the essays in the poetry of astronomy; the scope and vision endemic to tennyson’s late verse; the solemn sense of personal transcendence, of ‘loftier far, but more mysterious lore’, implicit in those hyperbolic blazons to celestial beauty spouted by swithun st cleeve in hardy’s two on a tower ( ): these were all markers of a contrary estimation. perhaps herschel – raised in observatory house in slough, in the shadow of its forty-foot reflector – had just grown too inured to astronomy’s charms (his phrasing would certainly seem to indicate just that) from long acquaintance. however, for such a soul – apotheosis of walt whitman’s ‘learn’d astronomer’: do- mesticating the heavens, divesting the darkness of its wonder – in poetry, not parallax, might be found escape and cosmic perspective. the third stanza of the poem makes explicit this aesthetic transference, telling how verse-forms create within herschel an alternative space, how they manage to occasion analogous ‘cosmological’ or ego-rattling shocks. in it, he describes the capacity of poetry to construct for him a linguistic continuum truly self-contained yet possessed of kindred witchery, and, in so doing, to facilitate a kind of psychological mo- ment commensurate with that afforded to others by confrontation with belittling astrophysical spectacle, by jarring encounter – zippy teleportation from surrey to sagittarius, or from herefordshire to eternity – with what must have seemed to almost everyone else the incom- prehensibly vast and timelessly existent: oh! rosy fetters of sweet-linked rhyme, which charm while ye detain, and hold me drowned in rich o’er-powering rapture! space and time forgot, i linger in the mazy round of loveliest combination. […] (p. ) there is one sense, though, in which herschel’s criticisms might be justified. the title of the piece – and as g. k. chesterton once noted with characteristic sagacity: ‘titles are sometimes neglected even when books are studied’ (p. ) – is at once surprising and easy to overlook. it is not, as might be expected, ‘science and verse’, but rather ‘prose and verse’. nonethe- less, the work begins with a dedication (‘to thee, fair science, long and early loved’), and ends with a vision of reconciliation between two rival temptresses. could, however, this invocation of ‘prose’ say something about the variety of science be- ing critiqued? if not for herschel, then for others who might have felt some sympathy with such a stance, with its inchoate ‘anti’-reductionism, its aura of vague aesthetic and moral dissatisfaction? does he, in other words, indict or censure prosy-science because prosaic- - - science? in the july westminster review, herbert spencer, towards the conclusion of an essay offering spirited defence of the nation’s need for a universalised scientific curriculum, formalised a revealing distinction. he in so doing made explicit what many among his peers had for long years presumed. speaking with fervour of the superior wisdom and discernment of ‘the sincere man of science’, he immediately qualified that term with a parenthetical: ‘(and by this title we do not mean the mere calculator of distances, or analyser of compounds, or labeller of species; but him who through lower truths seeks higher, and eventually the highest) […]’ (‘what’, p. ). mere classificatory knowledge, in other words, the stereotypical, drudg- ing labour of vicar naturalists and amateur geologists, the unexamined production by scientific professionals of cross-checked tabulations of latent heat, or taxonomies and chemical charts, does not qualify. nor, indeed, does abstract analysis, airy mathematical fantasias at an unimaginable remove from lived reality. a different sort of endeavour is here affirmed, an endeavour more akin to that poetic affliction lamented by herschel. this variety of science, it seems, could whisper. it could breathe a ‘dirge of woe’, or utter such words as would ‘swell the heart with glee’. though whether the former or the latter – that is, whether mournful dirge or gleeful proclamation – would more often than not be determined, not by some quality inherent in theories or facts themselves, but rather by who was listening and what he or she expected to hear, by senses (and sensibilities) conditioned by temperament or through theological predisposition. coleridge, writing in , gave aphoristic expression to one enduring antagonism, perceived or actual: ‘poetry is not the proper antithesis to prose, but to science […]. the proper and immediate object of science is the acquirement, or communication, of truth; the proper and immediate object of poetry is the communication of immediate pleasure’ (‘defini- tion’, p. ). (this judgment was at the time considered to be so authoritative that it was often cited in lieu of – or given as supplement to – both definition and argument in a surprising number of mid-victorian reference texts: for instance, the definition of poetry in latham’s dictionary [ ].) a half-century later, henry drummond, in his polemical study natural law in the spiritual world ( ), offered an appraisal diametrically opposed: ‘true poetry is only science in another form’, he wrote (p. ). these are extreme positions, of course, and heavily qualified. drummond was a noted christian evangelist, a ‘hybridised’ explorer- scientist of some distinction (he authored works on anthropology as well as on the flora and fauna of tropical africa), not to mention a lifelong campaigner for a rapprochement between science and religion. for him, therefore, ‘[t]rue poetry’ was, unsurprisingly, the source text of - - revealed faith, the christian bible, above all else. equally, coleridge’s position, perhaps semi-flippant at bottom, appears similarly suspect. it hardly seems a quibble to inquire: cannot poetry serve as a conduit for truth (of some sort)? or, conversely, cannot science be the source of ‘immediate pleasure’? now it would be disingenuous to argue that the period between coleridge’s assessment and drummond’s own witnessed a wholesale conversion, from everyone siding with the former to everyone assenting to the latter. most people in or – that is, at either endpoint – if they had opinions on the subject at all, probably held opinions that were admixture. it would likewise be absurd to insist that a change in the character of science was the sole reason for its increased ‘poetic’ acceptability over the years. the rise of technology, science’s sibling – the telegraph, the railroad, later the telephone – abetted the process, as did the increase in cultural audiences for science (itself the consequence of the rise of mechanic’s institutes, among other ever-ongoing processes of social and educa- tional transformation). i would nonetheless suggest that more people agreed with coleridge earlier in the cen- tury; more with drummond towards its close. in addition, as i will argue (and drummond himself made this connection, as did most of the major figures addressed in this dissertation, if sometimes more hesitantly), a transformation in the aspirations of science, a shift in the quality of the claims it made, over the period separating the two had an inevitably profound effect on popular perception. herschel’s poem, composed in , provides documentation of that transformation’s early stages, and also its general tendency. what, however, was the nature of this change? what was it about this ‘new science’, beyond darwinism, that could prove so enthralling to some, but menacing, even existentially paralysing, to others? and what exactly did the ‘sincere man of science’, in his questing after those higher – and highest – truths ostentatiously valorised by spencer, discover (and, as crucially, communicate) about the nature of the physical world? and, not always implicitly – and at times with grim or forebod- ing insistence – about the metaphysical one as well? teleological claims in nineteenth-century natural philosophy in his study james clerk maxwell and the electromagnetic field, john hendry concocts, in part, a narrative of synthesis, an heroic tale of stubborn contraries reunited through the agency of a the term ‘science’ itself shifted and narrowed its sense over this period, coleridge’s usage encompassing ‘all systematic knowledge’, not merely results of laboratory empiricism (engell, p. ). - - ‘great man’. he identifies two trains of thought – the mechanistic and the dynamistic – in the epistemology of early nineteenth-century physics. these he characterises, on one level, as effective binaries, antithetical tendencies, if not diametrically opposed then, prior to the diplomatic labours of maxwell and various ‘maxwellian’ successors, only imperfectly or inadvertently reconciled. on another, he suggests that each of these concepts presupposes the other, requires the other; that each was less the embodiment of a clear-cut cultural or intellec- tual movement, a reaction to specific and local circumstance, and more the manifestation of inherent psychological and philosophical bias, predispositions culturally influenced and affirmed, certainly, but really transcending any individual moment or context. a few histori- ans of science have since faulted hendry for having taken what they believe an inappropri- ately reductive approach, despite the nuances implicit in such an interpretive bifurcation; they have found fault, or improper oversimplification, in his orienting of discussion between two such idealised contraries, whether conceived as unities or mixture. yet as robert purrington has written: ‘if we resist the temptation to label each individual a dynamist or a mechanist but recognize those terms as two poles on a continuum and acknowledge that there are other dimensions to this graphical representation of philosophical inclination, then more good than harm may result from it’ (p. ). the same can, of course, be said usefully not just of nineteenth-century scientists but a range of nineteenth-century scientific theories as well. of these, perhaps the most founda- tional, wide-ranging and (in time) revolutionary was the so-called ‘analytical theory of heat’. it was derived from joseph fourier’s totemic théorie analytique de la chaleur, first published in , finally making its way into full english translation in . in the meantime, however, it was to exert a profound influence on a generation of natural philosophers, in britain and else- where. william thomson, the man later to be known as lord kelvin, and in whose honour the modern metric unit of absolute temperature is named, was one; james clerk maxwell, another. the former, indeed, according to purrington, built ‘his entire career […] upon fourier’s work and its implications’ (p. ). it is often taken to be a paradigmatic example of a dynamical theory, unwilling to be too specific about the basic nature of the concepts involved, content with numerical description, with establishment of algebraic relations capturing known behaviour. in this, it was uniquely successful: maxwell praised the text as ‘one of the very few scientific works which can never be rendered antiquated by the progress of science’ (‘extract’). this was in large part owing to its reticence about ultimate natures, true causes. its author made such a focus clear from the onset: in a philosophically oriented ‘preliminary discourse’, - - he began with clear assertion of a dynamicist’s – or, if more loosely, a positivist’s – apparently unanswerable scepticism: ‘primary causes are unknown to us; but are subject to simple and constant laws, which may be discovered by observation, the study of them being the object of natural philosophy’. he then elaborated on this, going on to make plain his deep-seated aversion to unjustifiable inference or ontological speculation, his desire to craft a theory mathematically accurate, one in accord with known facts, adequately epitomising and sys- tematising those facts, but never attempting, in effect, to derive phenomena from ‘the bottom up’, nor speculating on (potentially fallacious) intrinsic realities: ‘the object of our work is to set forth the mathematical laws which this element [heat] obeys’ (p. ) – ‘element’ here means ‘aspect of experience’, not ‘real thing’, not heat as chemical or material substance, but rather as it is known via thermometry, through the tabulated register of instrument-readings and sense-impressions. such philosophical caginess was understandable, perhaps even prudent. the nature of heat was, after all, one of the most radically (and frequently) redefined concepts in the whole of physical science, one destined forever to remain to some minds a bit mysterious or misunderstood. michael guillen, in a modern popularising work, has charted no fewer than five competing theories of heat – starting with that of the ancient world; progressing via the caloric theory (dominant in the latter eighteenth century, pioneered by joseph black); ending with the molecular, with heat (in the famous phrase) as a ‘mode of motion’, a theory which was in the ascendant by the middle of the nineteenth – each new conception seeming less like a refinement of the previous than a wholesale re-imagining (pp. - ). yet few doubted heat’s ubiquity, nor its significance. fourier himself likened it to the force of gravitation, omnipresent and inescapable. he wrote: ‘heat, like gravity, penetrates every substance of the universe, its rays’ – like those enmeshing vectors interlinking body with body implicit through- out classical mechanics – ‘occupy all parts of space’ (p. ). but with a difference: newton’s gravity is time-independent, eternal, unsullied, the planets processing unimpeded through an ethereal emptiness. newton’s law, as paradigmatically understood, describes a clockwork cosmos, a perfect, perpetual engine. that abstraction tackled by fourier, by contrast, imposes a definite arrow to time, a clear – and inarguable – directionality. it tells tales not of effective stasis, nor celestial perfec- tion, but rather decay, irreparable rupture, the corruption of the world, the bleeding of heat. auguste comte, for instance, found much to admire in the arguments of joseph fourier (hendry, p. n ). - - the world, it insists, of the past differed from that of today; the world of today will differ from that of tomorrow, perhaps unrecognisably. as noted by stephen brush in his important study the kind of motion we call heat ( ), many nineteenth-century debates on the irreversibility of physical transformation turned on recognition of theoretic incompatibility, pointing ‘out that in newton’s second law, ! f = ma , the substitution of -t for t leaves the right-hand side invariant, whereas this is certainly not the case with fourier’s heat conduction equation […]’ (p. ). in fourier’s model, in other words, could be discerned the spectre of entropy (a notion formally quantified nearly three decades later by clausius and others). its rules describing the flow and ablation of sensible heat in solid objects function only in a ‘forward’ direction une- quivocally; to try to use them to extrapolate indefinitely backward, an application so congenial to newton’s time-symmetric law, produces in the case of heat-exchange gibberish, not discrete solution nor plainly intelligible response. the oracle, it seems, works one way only. tellingly, clifford wrote of this analytical asymmetry in a fashion bringing to mind, among other things, story and storytelling: ‘suppose you try to go backwards, in time […]’, soon enough, fourier’s equation, which previously had seemed so straightforward in its prophesising, ‘[begins] to talk nonsense’, as he commented in his article ‘the first and last catastrophe’ (pp. - ). maxwell, in his textbook theory of heat ( ), likewise made explicit this failing – or maybe collapse – of theory, pointing to it as yet another harbinger of entropic decay, yet another signpost differentiating future from past, a glimpse in algebra of thermodynamic convulsion: the negative value of t [for time], for which the series becomes divergent, indicates a certain date in past time such that the present state of things cannot be deduced from any distribution of temperature occurring previously to that date […]. this is only one of the cases in which a consideration of the dissipation of energy leads to the de- termination of a superior limit to the antiquity of the observed order of things. (pp. - ) so, here we encounter a key implication derived from thermodynamic theory: the failure of prediction, nineteenth-century science’s discovery, or unearthing, of a limit to prognostication. many victorian physicists, grasping only too well the likely cosmological implication of such domestic behaviour – ‘your coffee grows cold on the kitchen table, / therefore the universe is dying’, in the words of twentieth-century poet neil rollinson – came also to believe that the universe had a long-term teleology, that it was progressing (or, less prejudicially, implacably transforming) from its unknowable beginnings towards termination in ‘heat death’, the ther- modynamic equilibration of all physical things. convinced of the predictive power of entropy, - - a few of the more outspoken among them started publicly to contend that the universe of distant futurity – uncountable eons hence, to be sure – would be a corpse sans potential, becoming a place finally (though fatally) at rest: physically static, biologically sterile, chemi- cally inert. such a process might begin with local morbidity. ‘prophets’, greg myers observes snappily in an outstanding article, ‘through the ages [had] predicted the end of the earth’, but it was to be thomson who, in the s, was to become the first among them to offer mathe- matically precise formulae for dispassionate computation of ‘its final temperature’ (‘nine- teenth’, p. ). ultimately, however, entropy – ‘heat death’ – would insure a more compre- hensive extinction. as put in geschichte des materialismus (history of materialism; ), a work of philosophical genealogy – by frederick lange, the prolific neo-kantian – which was to prove revelatory in certain mid-victorian quarters: ‘finally, there seems to result also, as a simple consequence of the mechanical theory of heat, the destruction of all life in the whole universe’ ( : ). lange’s seems a phrase at once coolly understated and curiously disbeliev- ing, the deadpan utterance of a gentleman absolutely certain that he was fated to perish from unstanchable blood-loss subsequent to the most trifling of cuts. nor was he alone among victorians in knowing how the bouncing would stop, the unchanging fate of the dropped and unmolested ball of children at play. thomas pynchon suggested this analogy in the crying of lot , a twentieth-century novel itself entropy-obsessed (and, as gillian beer has explained, the text responsible for introducing her, along with so many ‘others of her literary generation […]’, to the ideas and particulars of nineteenth-century thermodynamic dispute [of, p. ]); of a deceased ex-lover oedipa maas, pynchon’s harried protagonist, at one point reminisces: ‘“keep it bouncing,” he’d told her once, “that’s all the secret, keep it bouncing.” he must have known, writing the will, facing the spectre, how the bouncing would stop’ (p. ). the second law of thermodynamics, that edict stipulating a global entropy increase over any given time, foredooming oedipa’s bouncing ball, was, famously, derived from (at minimum) three directions, finding theoretical justification within the bounds of putatively contrary tendencies in thought. firstly, it can be inferred from measured inefficiencies in industrial machinery, becoming a guiding principle of engineering. this was hinted at in sadi perhaps the most famous declaration of this belief was made by the prussian rudolf clausius; its phrasing, moreover, in a translation from the german well known to british and american physical science, was far from euphemistic: ‘supposing this condition’ – that is, the final maximisation of cosmological entropy – ‘to be at last completely attained, no further change could evermore take place, and the universe would be in a state of unchanging death’ (p. ). - - carnot’s slim volume of – unnoticed for decades – réflexions sur la puissance motrice du feu (reflections on the motive power of fire). secondly, it can be viewed as a consequence of the equations of fourier, elegant dynamical descriptions capturing and quantifying the amount and direction of heat transference from hot to cold regions. (an approach that, in early days, led to confusion; as the hungarian physicist c. szily observed, in , one rationale for the slow professional acceptance of the second law lay in the fact that it ‘did not find in [post- newtonian analytic] mechanics any correlative principle so generally known as the [f]irst [law] did […]’ [p. ].) thirdly, it can be derived from theories proposing a specific character to the ‘element’ (heat) being shuffled about (this was established by ludwig boltzmann in ), from an actual material philosophy predicated on the definition of heat as ‘mode of motion’, one presupposing jiggling atoms and vibrating molecules as unobservable, though basic, entities. these, then, would be neither proxies for reality, nor models of reality, but the really there stuff constituting reality. in other words, as with a variety of physical precepts of the mid- nineteenth century, in retrospect the ‘entropy law’ would seem irredeemably materialistic, but many philosophers and scientists at the time could conceive otherwise, insisting that as an in part dynamical rule (or, perhaps, merely pragmatic statement of victorian technological limitation), it could be surreptitiously reintegrated into a less reductive – and pessimistic? – world-picture. for the publicists, however, for men like huxley, tyndall and clifford, the laws of thermodynamics were essential parts of an explanatory synthesis. the conservation of energy, the first law, in particular, which tyndall referred to as one of science’s ‘great generaliza- tions’, ‘has been called the most important discovery of the nineteenth century’, as sharlin has noted (p. ); it underpinned countless declarations by the century’s ‘materialistic’ propagan- dists in favour of the nebular hypothesis, against the interposition of the miraculous in terres- trial affairs, against the ideas of spontaneous generation or vitalism in biology, as it bound ‘nature fast in fate […] to an extent not hitherto recognized, exacting from every antecedent its equivalent consequent, from every consequent its equivalent antecedent’, thereby rendering universal history, like sentience and organic growth, material phenomena, as tyndall ex- plained at belfast (ba, p. ). huxley wrote similarly of energy conservation in ‘the progress of science’ ( ), re- flecting on the theoretical accomplishments of five glorious decades with self-evident pride (though never quite the awe-struck dizziness of a tyndall or clifford): - - i have said that our epoch can produce achievements in physical science of greater moment than any other has to show, advisedly; and i think that there are three great products of our time which justify the assertion. one of these is that doctrine concerning the constitution of matter which, for want of a better name, i will call “molecular;” the second is the doctrine of the conservation of energy; the third is the doctrine of evolution. each of these was foreshadowed, more or less distinctly, in former periods of the history of science; and, so far is either from being the outcome of purely inductive reasoning, that it would be hard to overrate the influence of metaphysical, and even of theological, considerations upon the development of all three. the peculiar merit of our epoch is that it has shown how these hypotheses connect a vast number of seemingly independent partial generalisations; that it has given them that precision of expression which is necessary for their exact verification; and that it has practically proved their value as guides to the discovery of new truth. all three doctrines are intimately connected, and each is applicable to the whole physical cosmos. (p. ) these three represent the very pillars of scientific naturalism as outlined by turner, the ‘doctrinal’ trinity of that intellectual denomination. yet, as mentioned in my introduction, few (including huxley himself) subscribed to outright philosophical materialism without some dilutions or reservations, for all the evidence – that motion from ‘foreshadowed’ belief to likely hypothesis – suggesting veracity, much of which had been unavailable prior to mid-century. in that, however, such figures were merely continuing a practice of reflexive denial which had for centuries characterised the genealogy of materialism, a stance many deem coeval with that of ‘philosophy’ as an identifiable discipline in the west. bertrand russell, in an introduction to lange (itself, fittingly, penned even as quantum mechanics and special relativity posited their own novel twentieth-century challenges to materialistic allegiance), once remarked that ‘[m]aterialism as a theory of the universe has had a curious history. arising almost at the beginning of greek philosophy, it has persisted down to our own time, in spite of the fact that very few eminent philosophers have advocated it’. likewise, many scientists – even those active during periods when materialism as a pol- icy or presupposition might have appeared virtually ‘synonymous with the scientific outlook’ (p. v) – have been similarly dismissive (or half-hearted). perhaps mid-victorian materialism’s most fraught contention, however, one prone to rattling even the most fixed of adherences, was that of psychophysical parallelism, the connecting of mind with matter. lange, always wary of mental reductionism, ridiculed eighteenth-century expostulations – he spoke of a time when ‘the childishly naïve conception could still be put forward with the pretension of a scientific hypothesis, that every idea has its particular fibre in the brain, and that the vibration of these fibres constitutes consciousness’ ( : ) – but then hinted that even its more subtle or sophisticated nineteenth-century variants might be of equal indefensibility. similarly, herbert spencer, so bullish about evolutionary insight, nevertheless classified among the unknowable knowledge of the sort increasingly claimed by fellow publicists, asserting that, in matters of - - physiological psychology, as elsewhere, ‘the materialist and spiritualist controversy is a mere war of words; the disputants being equally absurd – each believing he understands that which it is impossible […] to understand’ (‘progress’, p. ). spencer’s comments are from an article of , two years pre-origin; lange’s, from a text of six years post-. both men were often accused of, or slandered for, ‘materialistic’ leanings – and justi- fiably, too. but in neither case – as with so many such sympathisers, throughout the centuries – was conviction absolute. victorian ‘materialism(s)’: questions of cladistics and nomenclature croll, writing in , had identified as a primary goal of the scientific theorist: ‘we try to induce a unity amongst the multifarious facts of the senses by bringing as many of them under a certain conception as will be rationally connected by it’ (p. ). such a statement, while epistemologically accurate, should not, however, be misconstrued as equivalent to signifying that all nineteenth-century scientific unifications took place within a robustly materialistic paradigm. some principles of heat exchange, as discussed, could be accepted without com- mitment to ontological hypotheses, as could many aspects of contemporary chemical theory (purrington, p. ). interpretive double-ness could even be suggested by the period’s nomen- clature: the nineteenth century’s paradigmatic theory of heat, for example, was often labelled the ‘dynamical theory’ as it had vanquished the idea of a caloric fluid: ‘till the latter part of the last century’, hamblin smith summarised in a popular undergraduate textbook, ‘heat was generally regarded as a material substance, an invisible weightless fluid […]’. now, however, ‘[i]t has been conclusively proved that heat is not matter, but that the application of heat to a body causes a vibration to the minute particles composing that body; that this vibration increases in intensity as the body receives more heat; and that what in our sensation is heat is in the body nothing but motion’ (p. ). as a descriptive term, then, ‘materialism’ might seem inadequate, even useless, en- compassing more than two millennia of philosophical speculation, only a fraction of which can be made conveniently to seem, or interpreted as, ‘genuinely’ or rigorously ‘materialistic’ – by our own contemporary standards, at least. by the appearance of the encyclopædia britan- nica the seeming unity of subject implicit in its definition (‘materialism is the name given to that speculative theory which resolves all existence into a modification of matter’) had been superseded by an awareness of diversity, a recognition of the different ends and origins of - - materialistic philosophising. totalising ‘cosmological materialism’, it is argued, had as its impetus the aesthetic desire for a pleasing, all-encompassing system; ‘medical materialism’, by contrast, found pragmatic, ‘local’ and limited justification in an awareness that certain forms of treat- ment and disease prevention had better outcomes than certain others forms of treatment and disease prevention. ‘[a]nti-religious materialism’ was entrenched in a reactionary resistance to received dogma and existential belief, a stance having far less to do with physics than social politics; ‘naïve materialism’, on the other hand, is somewhat condescendingly attributed not to any coherent intellectual commitment, but rather a sort of unexamined credulity, and the author of the article found it both in, say, ancient greek animistic hylozoism and such pre- socratics as thales (who famously believed that in the different manifestations of water could be discovered all the forms and variety of the experiential world), and also in the considerably more contemporary writings of t. h. huxley and the german embryologist ernst haeckel (both of whom should have known better, as argued implicitly by this scheme of classification and critique). above all these in the hierarchy, indicating, perhaps, where our encyclopae- dist’s sympathies lie (it is, we are told, materialism’s ‘highest form’), is the methodology of ‘scientific materialism’, that ‘doctrine so commonly adopted by the physicist, zoologist and biologist’. such a fin de siècle fracturing in terms of ideology and implementation should hardly surprise, however – nor was it solely the consequence of victorian scientific and philosophical dispute. materialism’s genesis as articulated system, a fact acknowledged since mid-century by commentators, could be traced amid the conjectures of leucippus, democritus, epicurus; indeed, the roman atomist lucretius, essentially overlooked for more than a millennium, was in the s ‘thrust […] into the mainstream of contemporary polemics over science, religion, and philosophy […]’ by tyndall’s address at belfast. though some found ancient concep- tions of ‘falling atoms’ – of collocations of matter wrought by oddly domestic forces (love, hate, and so forth) – quaint, others recognised in them legitimate precursors to certain aspects of scientific naturalism’s rapacious worldview. lucretius, more than the rest, came to seem prophetic, having argued ‘that nothing can come from nothing, that the universe is orderly, and that atoms alone are the constituent elements of nature’ (turner, ‘ancient’, p. ). philosophical materialism, after centuries in desuetude, had first made an impression in britain, becoming a serious – and, more often than not, antagonistic – alternative to con- ventional systems of metaphysical belief, in near lockstep with the inception and progress of the enlightenment, with the publications of newton on gravitation and laplace and lagrange - - on mechanics and de la mettrie on physiological function. the arrival of the nineteenth century, however, saw empiricism catch up with conjecture: atoms, formerly mental abstrac- tions, became (to some) actual, weighable entities; physiological correlations between thought and electric currents became manifest, if scarcely uncontroversial. materialism, put another way, by mid-century came at last to seem something potentially falsifiable, a scientific belief in the popperian sense. (either the world had, or had not, the properties of ‘atoms’; either ‘energy’ was, or was not, the sole currency of its phenomenal interchange.) at the same time, it became cognizant of its own past. practitioners and advocates laboured to find proof, and found solace in the continuity of belief. much of this activity took place on the continent, ludwig büchner’s kraft und stoff (force and matter; ) becoming, like lange’s geschichte, a reference document on the functioning and significance of materialism even as laplace’s mécanique céleste (celestial mechanics; - ) began to seem one of the proudest monu- ments to its thorough implementation. a complex of factors – the length and richness of its history, the polyglot nature of dis- semination – contributed enormously to the profusion of ‘materialisms’ in mid- to late- victorian intellectual life, causing the term itself to become semantically pliant, a linguistic marker having endless gradations of meaning and, in many instances, tremendous cultural and individual specificity. roger smith has argued this point as well, noting that, throughout the latter decades of the nineteenth century (and in a formidable range of discursive contexts), the noun ‘materialism’, like the noun ‘materialist’, seemed a designation – and a disparage- ment – at once ‘notably common and notably undefined’ (p. ). this is not, however, to insist that such terminologies and labellings are wholly point- less or misleading. rather, they have modal functions, significations that are malleable, though not indefinitely so. take ‘modernity’: as an abstract concept or ontological mode it has a certain understood genealogy, consensually accepted, a conventional tang of significance in talks about architecture, a different one in talks about social welfare or literature or art history. so, too, with classicism, rationalism, romanticism – and scientific materialism or naturalism. contemporary ‘evolution’, for instance, is multifaceted, accommodating not only the strict neo-darwinian synthesis as found in the works of richard dawkins, but also the ‘methodological evolution’ of steven j. gould, even (some would argue) the decidedly more benign ‘[t]heistic evolution […] borne most forcefully in moderate to liberal protestantism and this paragraph draws heavily on george stack’s entry on ‘materialism’ in the routledge encyclopedia of phi- losophy. - - in mainstream catholic thought’ (witham, p. ). diachronic mutability further enriches such synchronic pluralism: the term ‘scientist’ meant one thing in , something again in , nothing at all in . burdens of meaning change with context, with locale, within social groups. in the nineteenth century, publicists like tyndall and clifford used a range of classificatory or philosophical terms generically (not unfailingly, but often enough), as did critics and commentators. to reduce wordsworth to sentiments expressed (or understood to have been expressed) in ‘tintern abbey’, or pope to those adduced from an essay on man, is grossly unfair; it also seems not altogether removed from how many at the time – particularly those outwith the literary tradition – genuinely perceived things. to reduce darwin(ism) to ‘survival of the fittest’ is equally unjust, yet was itself a commonplace. victorians returned to the same texts, cited the same lines, distilled the same ‘essences’ of meaning and implication, from both literary works and scientific theorems. generalisation, like periodisation, is therefore, i believe, nearly unavoidable, though hardly excuse for critical sloppiness. such a point follows on from purrington’s observations concerning hendry’s perhaps too schematised deployment of ideological categories like ‘mechanist’ and ‘dynamist’ in his study of maxwell’s electromagnetism. many thinkers of the nineteenth century likewise broke the world – and history – into pieces, writing as if the severance between rationalism and romanticism was as absolute as a line of longitude (once defined, then accepted). to give one example: william james, in an essay of posthumous appreciation, said of myers’s work (his output consisted primarily of studies of border states of consciousness, mesmeric and schizoid trances, liminal personality profiles) that it was rather as if myers had gothicised the rationalistic garden of thought, adding picturesque architectural follies and patches of untended growth (‘nature’, james concluded, ‘is everywhere gothic, not classic. she forms a real jungle […]’ [‘frederic’, p. ]), in the process making an interdisci- plinary analogy that calls to mind also the changes in the background of stoppard’s arcadia. scientists themselves, particularly those under the sway of positive doctrine, were often wholly conscious of the sunderings implied, or invidiously imposed, by such deep-seated tendencies towards intellectual compartmentalisation. comte identified three stages in moral evolution, charting – or projecting – in society a path from the theistic to the metaphysical to the positiv- istic; these were progressive and clearly differentiable, like the evolving forms of a butterfly. was, for many victorian thinkers even uninfluenced by positivism, the occasion of a like disjuncture, rendering an irretrievable ‘before’, an uncertain ‘after’. frequently, there was a trajectory foreseen – or hoped for. was this, however, one for the better? - - alternatively, one could conceptualise terms like ‘romanticism’ and ‘rationalism’ not as incompatible allegiances but rather as an axis (or axes) in (or atop) a coordinate system, just as one can rethink evolution, or scientific materialism, not as the product of one moment, but as a historical tendency, a conceptual space, not geometric point. doing so might suggest intriguing interconnections. hendry himself links the dynamicist tendency in natural philoso- phy with the romanticism of wordsworth and constable (p. ), even as gillian beer suggests a punning, if suggestive, interplay between theories of deconstruction in the human sciences and that of plate tectonics (‘with its emphasis on un-grounding’ [of, p. ]) in the geological ones. such junctures constantly vitalise nineteenth-century scientific writing, especially that of the publicists, figures poised ‘between the secular implications of scientific naturalism and the theological underpinnings of the culture. in a culture hostile to materialism’, as barbara gates comments in an essay on the pedagogic role of scientific popularisation, ‘they helped initiate the acceptance of science by reconfiguring its message’ (p. ). the remainder of this chapter provides an outline of several of the reconfigurations proffered, siting them within the context of three primal reactions (acceptance, rejection, compromise) to those various – and, to some, profoundly ‘antagonising’ – orthodoxies of mid- to late-victorian naturalistic belief. the varieties of material experience; or, thirteen ways of looking at a blackboard in an essay entitled ‘cosmic emotion’, w. k. clifford observed that knowledge, here referring specifically to scientific knowledge, knowledge about the world ‘as it is’, must have been in men’s possession for a long time before it has acquired the certainty, the precision, the familiarity, the wide diffusion and comprehension which make it fit to rouse feelings strong enough and general enough for true poetic expression. for the true poetry is that which expresses our feelings, and not my feelings only – that which appeals to the universal in the heart of each one of us. so it has come about that the world of the poet, the world in its emotional aspect, always lags a little behind the world of science […]. (p. ) if this, then, be the case then that is perhaps one among several reasons why a poem like ‘meaning’, written late in the twentieth century by the octogenarian polish nobel laureate czeslaw milosz, feels nonetheless startlingly ‘late victorian’, calling to mind, thematically, among other pieces, thomas hardy’s ‘new year’s eve’ ( ). its imagery likewise suggests that poet’s ‘the darkling thrush’ ( ), where, over a desolate, meaningless, ‘material’ landscape, an ‘aged thrush, frail, gaunt and small / in blast be-ruffled plume, / had chosen to - - fling his soul / upon the growing gloom’. in fact, a number of figures addressed in this dissertation found such an emblem – bird on branch, flittering from matthew : , but also hamlet (v.ii. - ) – of a heartrending poignancy, if never (quite) hardy’s desolation. it seemed so iconic at once of mortality and aspiration. ‘[w]e will second every word’, frederic harrison said pointedly of positivists in , ‘of those who cry out that civilisation is in danger if the workings of the human spirit are to become questions of physiology, and if death is the end of a man, as it is the end of a sparrow’, his dread of materialism shading into reflex antagonism (‘soul’, p. ). a phrase equally epigrammatic, of comparable cinematography, yet markedly different in both implications and mood, was scribbled a decade or so later by richard jefferies, the nature writer and social activist. eschewing both the melancholy and vituperation of hardy, and harrison’s negative polemic, it sublimates instead into something near transcendence, a private reverie likewise occasioned by a series of musings on the existen- tial ramifications of materialistic psychology: ‘bird on tree – expressing an idea i do not understand. they are beyond’ (‘notebook’, p. ). nonetheless, for all the indisputable diversity in their rhetorics, metaphysically minded thinkers of the nineteenth century, like their twentieth- and twenty-first-century counterparts, in confronting the implications of a potentially ‘meaningless’ universe, ultimately had to align themselves with one of three interpretive frameworks. each is adumbrated with admirable acuity and forthrightness in a stanza from milosz’s postmodern codification: meaning – when i die, i will see the lining of the world. the other side, beyond bird, mountain, sunset. the true meaning, ready to be decoded. what never added up will add up, what was incomprehensible will be comprehended. – and if there is no lining to the world? if a thrush on a branch is not a sign, but just a thrush on the branch? if night and day make no sense following each other? and on this earth there is nothing except this earth? – even if that is so, there will remain a word wakened by lips that perish, a tireless messenger who runs and runs through interstellar fields, through the revolving galaxies, and calls out, screams, protests. either an order beyond the visible, inaccessible to experiment, or nothing ‘on this earth […] - - except this earth’. either a bright and numinous realm ‘beyond bird, mountain, sunset’ in which a deductive explanation is ready to hand for that which we must presently take on faith (a world in which, in short, ‘what was never added up will add up’), or – to the detriment of religion and metaphysics – one in which the arbitrary is doomed to remain ever as such, even after death, in which ‘a thrush on a branch is not a sign, / but just a thrush on the branch’. such a poem, like many of the disturbances occasioning it, would have made perfect sense to any of mid-victorian england’s scientific publicists. even milosz’s language seems backward-looking and curiously nineteenth-century (his conceit of the universe as book- keeper’s ledger, for instance, or natural philosophy as a generalised form of accountancy), as are his examples meant to show the unsettling and irreducible contingency of most observed natural phenomena. questioning the causal necessity of sunrise and sunset was, indeed, not merely a victorian commonplace, but a humean – if not biblical – one. the second option sketched by milosz’s ‘meaning’, of course, encapsulates the perspective of materialism (the perspective, as jefferies put it in a manuscript of the mid- s, that ‘[t]here neither is, nor has been, nor will be any chair, or table, or picture, or quern in the cosmos’, that interpolated suggestions of design in nature are chimerical [old, p. ]); the first, that of most traditional approaches to metaphysics, whether neo-platonic, theistic or otherwise. needless to say, viewpoints of this latter sort perforce require an essential splitting of focus, an ontological doubling, one nicely captured in a remark by t. h. huxley: adherents to such forms of belief, he explains, insist that ‘beyond the natura naturata, mirrored or made by the natural operations of the human mind, there is a natura naturans, sufficient knowledge of which is attainable only through the channel of revelation’ (‘modern’, p. ). for this reason, a suggestive and readily transportable phrase (excerpted from the cele- brated fifty-sixth canto of in memoriam) like tennyson’s gnomic ‘[b]ehind the veil, behind the veil’, the gist of which seems to argue in favour of just this sort of cosmological dualism, came to have an almost iconic importance to those who sought solace in the idea of a natura naturans, and it was repeated and re-echoed in their writings time and time again – and, as ever, in a striking variety of (frequently clashing) philosophical and scientific contexts. for many deprived of god, deprived of faith (tennyson’s enigmatic ‘o for thy voice to soothe and bless!’, of course, refers as much to his dead friend hallam as it does to the word of god as ‘spoken’ in holy scripture), the poet wonders despairingly: ‘o life as futile, then, as frail! / o for thy voice to soothe and bless! / what hope of answer, or redress? / behind the veil, behind the veil’ (p. ; lvi. - ). whether such a declamatory closing couplet suggests that a spiritual accommodation has been reached or merely the persistence in tennyson’s conflicted heart of some species of hope (or lingering faithfulness) remains at this juncture tantalisingly unre- solved. - - opponents of materialism it served in effect as a rallying cry. it appears, for instance, as a motto near the conclusion of balfour stewart and p. g. tait’s the unseen universe; or, physical speculations on a future state ( ; p. ), where its presence would seem to suggest that ‘the veil is the material world, and behind it we find angels in the form of energy’ (g. myers, ‘nineteenth’, p. ). other victorian malcontents found for it different interpretations and wildly divergent significations. some merely used it as an ideal way of silencing or foreshort- ening debate and analysis, a rhetorical gambit to which (they thought) there could be neither answer nor apt rebuke. as harrison, perhaps the foremost positivist in england at the time, observed in his article ‘the soul and future life’, many such individuals ‘assume the question [of materialism’s insufficiency] closed, when they have murmured triumphantly, “behind the veil, behind the veil”’ (p. ). clifford, among others, took note of this, writing: ‘to some minds there is hope and renewing of youth in the sense that the last word is not yet spoken, that greater mysteries yet lie behind the veil’ (‘cosmic’, p. ). nonetheless, the number and specification of potential denizens in such blessedly (or, in the arguments of stewart and tait, ‘scientifically’) revealed or unveiled ‘other worlds’, such natura naturans, as clifford rightly points out – the varieties and specifics of these much sought-after special revelations – cannot be limited to those mentioned in christian scripture. accommodation, he explains (in a fine reductio ad absurdum of dualist logic), need not only be found for the holy trinity, nor even, perhaps, the ‘ethereal angels’ described in the unseen universe, but also the ‘goddess kali, with her obscene rites and human sacrifices, or for any intermediate between these. here is the clay; make your images to your heart’s desire’ (‘unseen’, p. ). yet materialism by itself represents an arduous path to follow. belief in some further, more perfect ordering to things, as suggested by ‘meaning’, provides inbuilt justification for the endless tribulations of quotidian experience. indeed, milosz’s first stanza hints at just the kind of soothingly satisfying frisson of coherence and tidy completeness – one enabled in large part by thoroughgoing acceptance of a janus-faced metaphysic – with which death will then imbue a life lived and lost on earth. the second, that stanza setting forth unornamented materialism, requires additional resolution, however; it is phrased as a series of conditionals, anxious enquiries about the state of things, each apparently more apprehensive than the last. reductive philosophy presents not an answer, it seems, but rather a series of disquieting secondary questions. the third, hence, manages to evince a grimace of stoicism or defiance in the face of such truths, harsh realities about our cosmos revealed or implicated by the tenets of - - modern (or nineteenth-century) science. ‘even if that is so’, even if, as his argument goes, there is no world beyond this world, ‘there will remain / a word wakened by lips that perish’. that word, of course, is, in a sense, the poem itself, a plea which ‘calls out, screams, protests’, carrying the staccato syntax of its concluding lines (whose halting rhythms seem jarringly removed from the bardic confidence of milosz’s opening) forward to future generations via the printed page, or disseminating out- ward at the speed of light, through the ether, across the void. again, such sentiments find countless analogues amid the ideological tumult of the latter nineteenth century. (quite literally, too: stewart and tait, in the unseen universe, as discussed in more detail in my third chapter, used conservation principles suggested by thermodynamics to argue that the human soul after death would be preserved eternally within a sort of ‘second ether’, like a standing wave bounding and rebounding forever between distant stars.) in other words, remarkably few – then, as now – could accept the facts of an unmitigated materialism, one bereft of supplement or balm to assuage us in our grief, though yet we realise, howsoever reluctantly, that customary western perspectives on nature, ‘taken as the production of the creator’s will, can never be made to harmonize with the blind force of cellular tissues sprouting by accident into all the phenomena of life’ (darwinian, p. ). (so one cantabrigian observed with sober clear-headedness in an anonymous study of .) there were also, of course, temporal and earthly consequences to such naturalistic belief, not just eternal and heavenly ones. these, too, have long been acknowledged – and lamented. w. h. mallock, the mid-victorian satirist and cultural critic, published an essay, ‘is life worth living?’, late in the s, in the nineteenth century. he prefaced it with an obser- vation bridging the recondite and the day-to-day, in the process irrevocably associating sociological, even moral, inquiry with the sort commonly deemed scientific and, as such, ‘dispassionate’: my aim is a far humbler one. it is simply to awake others, and enable them to pass judgment for themselves. it is my aim to make them see what in these days we are really debating […] and to show them that it is not only first causes, and natural selection, and the condition of the universe millions of years ago [presently under discussion]; but the tone and character of our human existence now – our hopes, our fears, our affections, even our amusements […]. ( : - ) yet such revelations were hardly so singular as mallock pretends, particularly among the intelligentsia, though they also had a currency amid any number of constituencies far distant from that serial’s well-educated (and -heeled) readership. many were moved to response and action, fearful of the projected spiritual and cul- - - tural impact which material science’s dismissal of those great truths – about human exception- ality, or centrality to creation – would have upon the contemporary psyche, repelled by that adrift-at-sea emptiness associated with suspicion that their lives were suddenly less ‘meaning- ful’ or profound than they had previously been. as dale has explained: ‘by the late s there began to emerge a distinctly negative reading of the meaning of science for the future of man. […] advances in biology, genetics, heat theory, and astronomy all worked relentlessly towards the dehumanization of the world picture’ (pp. - ). though, as dale contends, spiritual pessimism among practicing scientists was never the majority view, revolutionary scientific developments still managed to convey to many non-professional audiences in victo- rian britain a range of discomforting or troublesome possibilities. punch, in a poem of december , ‘the fine old atom-molecule’ – featuring such kowtowing couplets as ‘then bow down, mind, to matter; from brain-fibre, will, withdraw; / fall man’s heart to cell ascidian, sink man’s hand to monkey’s paw’ – gave six stanzas of despondent interpreta- tion, all the while effectively dismissing any induced gloominess though the easiness and whimsy of its touch. few were quite as adept as mr punch at maintaining such a demeanour of unflappable geniality. in a well-remembered account of george eliot, frederic myers recalled her once declaiming the interpersonal obligations of humankind, the need for each member of society to strive for the betterment of others; they had been on a walk one rainy evening through the fellows’ garden of trinity college, cambridge (j. beer, p. ). ‘never, perhaps’, he wrote in of these pronouncements, ‘have sterner accents affirmed the sovereignty of impersonal and unrecompensing law’ (‘eliot’, p. ). grimmer still, however, were those disembodied injunctions – heard as an ‘inward voice’ – made by science, edicts, as he wrote in ‘an autobiographical fragment’, which had led him in the late s to ‘an agnosticism or virtual materialism which was sometimes a dull pain borne with joyless doggedness, sometimes […] a horror of reality that made the world spin before one’s eyes’ (pp. - ). though written after the passing of that malaise, his poem of , ‘a cosmic history’, encodes perhaps the most ‘dehumanising’ version of the contemporary naturalistic hypothesis, unspooling a tale of nebular condensation and arbitrary vertebrate evolution, culminating in the loveless equilibration of thermodynamic ‘heat death’: come then, poor worm at war with fate, – (what inward voice spake so stern and low?) come, paltry life importunate, - - enough of truth thou too shalt know; since man’s self-stirred out-reaching thought hath seen in visions sights of awe; hath from a darker sinai brought damnations of a vaster law. from dust, they told thee, man was born? – the cosmos’ self from dust began, […] [………………………………………] no mind creating watched alone, nor bade the emergent minds begin; to weltering waters, senseless stone, the seeds of life had entered in. [………………………………………] then all in silence; all in one the exhausted orbs have crashed and sped; cold to the core is every sun, and every heart that loved is dead. (pp. - ) this is darkly miltonic, in a way. a new exodus, in which the oppressed are liberated at the cost of hope. a new genesis, in which the saturnalian disordering of things, of primordial chaos – ‘the womb of nature, and perhaps her grave, / of neither sea, nor shore, nor air, nor fire, / but all these in their pregnant causes mixed / confusedly […]’ (milton, p. ; . - ) – is shown in the universal scheme to have had effective hegemony all along, despite our momentary respite on a sunlit world, in a civil society. ‘chaos, cosmos! cosmos, chaos! who can tell how all will end?’, the venerable poet laureate had asked in , the balance between opposites so delicately poised (‘locksley’, p. ). myers, however, had by then known his generation’s answer to tennyson’s riddle – and with dreadful certainty – for decades. those ten commandments of mosaic law are accordingly supplanted, if not reduced to triviality or a sort of self-deluding archaism, in myers’s ‘a cosmic history’ by the revelations of a ‘vaster law’: a material rule encompassing energy conservation, entropic decay; a principle suggesting the futility of life, the absurdity of sentience. tennyson, too, struggled in ‘vastness’ ( ) with a comparable sense of kaleido- scopic disorientation, of a race – a species – ‘swallowed in vastness, lost in silence, drown’d / in the deeps of a meaningless past […]’ (p. ), before ending that poem in a brief coda suggestive of existential accord. ‘a cosmic history’, by contrast, allows no harmonious resolution. its implications seemed especially resonant in an age like that of the victorians, one in which science seemed to proclaim (to audiences of theists, agnostics, positivists, atheists of varying stripes), that the sum of all society’s, of all science’s, painstakingly acquired knowl- - - edge about the cosmos and its generalised laws, when looked at on any grand enough scale, amounted, in effect, to little more than an epitaph, or, at least, the initial drafting of one – a prescription of death, if not final notification. ‘[a]ll we know’, clifford explains with brave and stark simplicity towards the end of ‘the first and last catastrophe’, ‘is that the sun is going out’ (p. ). and with it, ‘not only the earth itself, and all the beautiful face of nature we see, but also the living things upon it, and all the consciousness of men, and the ideas of society, which have grown up upon the surface, must come to an end’ (p. ). two decades later, h. g. wells, formerly a pupil of huxley’s at kensington’s normal school of science, was to recapitulate these very cadences in the famous concluding chapters of the time machine ( ), his most influential single work (perhaps inadvertently confirming in the process clifford’s observations about the time-lag between the scientific expression of an idea and its literary elucidation). the time traveller, going millennia beyond the etiolated earth of , with its population of effete eloi and savage morlocks, comes at last to a world in ruins, its dying sun hanging vast and incarnadine in a cheerless sky: ‘it would’, he tells us, ‘be hard to convey the stillness of it [that world]. all the sounds of man, the bleating of sheep, the cries of birds, the hum of insects, the stir that makes the background of our lives – all that was over’ (p. ). wells here, however, was merely giving fictive form to a haunting prophecy of univer- sal thermodynamic doom known by then to most among the literate (if not always accepted, either blithely or unconditionally), a fate decrypted initially from fussy equations describing the internal working of heat-engines, from fourier’s dynamic models, from the mechanistic understanding of heat as ‘mode of motion’, then extrapolated to govern a cosmos, before ultimately being given popular expression in the writings of clifford, proctor, william thom- son and others. indeed, the modern physicist paul davies, in a popular guide to scientific apocalypse, the last three minutes: conjectures about the ultimate fate of the universe ( ), has described the nineteenth century’s discovery of the truth that the universe as a whole was condemned, like a clock running down, to an inevitable (and ignoble) ‘heat death’ as ‘probably the most depressing prediction in the history of science’, one which was to have ‘a profoundly depressing effect on generations of scientists and philosophers’ (pp. , ); and it was an all but irrefutable one, too, ‘an inexorable consequence of the laws of thermodynamics […]’ (p. ) – the precise laws that allowed steam engines to chug and milling machines to press, that enabled britannia to rule the waves along with much of the wider world: militarily, politically, economically. - - gillian beer summarised the effect that this funereal state of affairs was to have on the victorian mindset – abetted, of course, by darwin’s, huxley’s (and, almost subliminally, tennyson’s) speculations on species extinction – in her ‘“the death of the sun”: victorian solar physics and solar myth’: ‘the expanding of individual death into the idea of the death of a whole species […] as well as the idea of the ebbing of the sun’s energy, make for an undertow of sadness in victorian thought’ (of, p. ). ‘god is light’, milton had declared in paradise lost (p. ; . ). for many intellectuals, however, by the latter years of the nineteenth century that god-function had been usurped by the sun, both literally (‘the sun is the great sustainer of our life’, as the irishman w. goff remarked in an scientific paper [p. ]), and, for a smaller group, metaphorically as well (‘the sun is our lord and god, sublime, serene’, in the opening words of one late swin- burne lyric [‘lake’, p. ]). at the same time, the era’s science recognised that the sun, like the earth itself, was mortal, having birth, facing death. there is, for instance, a certain alarm- ist tone pervading thomson’s pronouncements on the implications for human life of the twin laws of thermodynamic theory: ‘within a finite period of time past, the earth must have been, and within a finite period of time to come the earth must again be, unfit for the habitation of man as at present constituted […]’ (p. ). this seemed deeply unsatisfying to many of the period’s atheistic and agnostic commentators. even a few christians were unnerved: ed- mund beckett gave his opinion of materialistic presumptions of solar obsolescence in astronomy without mathematics, first published , a volume of both overarching, if prominently ac- knowledged, theistic suppositions and (more often than not) unimpeachable astrophysical scholarship (the high-minded society for promoting christian knowledge was its english sponsor); such beliefs, he explained, ‘must be perfectly satisfactory and convincing to those who will believe anything except a creator’ (p. ). but in that ‘anything believed’ there was enormous diversity. the sun’s senescence was only one among several problematic issues raised by naturalistic belief. psychophysical parallelism and the apparent banishment of the supernatural or divine from both natural phenomena and mental life seemed likewise to diminish, or render pointless, humanity’s existence. each of the figures addressed in this dissertation had his own scheme of rejoinder to these challenges, however. each had, as it were, an idiosyncratic vocabulary, in milosz’s vernacular, for ‘call[ing] out, scream[ing], protest[ing]’ – for responding to (or raging against) the cruelty perceived or assumed to lurk within a cosmos rendered ominously inhospitable to both humanity itself and humanity’s freight of moral and theological concerns. a few even - - questioned the entire validity of such interpretive assumptions: ‘when we hear it said […]’, ernst haeckel countered in the evolution of man: a popular exposition of the principal points of human ontogeny and phylogeny ( ), that materialism would ‘cause a retrogression in the intellectual and moral development of man […], i cannot withhold my conviction, that the very opposite will be the true, that by it the progressive development of the human spirit will be advanced in an unusual degree’ ( : ). his unyielding defence of pure rationalism, not unlike clifford’s (discussed in my third chapter), directly contradicts mallock’s contention in ‘is life worth living?’. meanwhile, a further grouping – among those i have mentioned thus far: jefferies and myers, tyndall after a fashion – looked to science to redefine the religious sense, moving it beyond strict naturalism, beyond pedantic piety, hoping to navigate odys- seus-like those tempestuous ideological seas lurking between nineteenth-century science and nineteenth-century religion. and thus, while clifford may have felt that poetry was an expression of the universal – he was, after all, reasonably emphatic in his insistence that ‘true poetry is that which expresses our feelings, and not my feelings only’ (‘cosmic’, p. ) – clearly it was the issues he and colleagues were addressing, not the conflicted solutions proffered, that were truly communal. their predicament was self-evident. rev. robert watson, author of scholarly glosses for the books of ruth, numbers, job and judges, phrased things succinctly in gospels of yesterday ( ), saying of the intellectual scramble by his generation’s agnostics and materialists: attempt after attempt has been made of late to extract from the ordinary course of things a rule for the guidance of mankind, a religion not altogether wanting in fervour, and having at least an air of wisdom and impressiveness. it is plain that the world cannot go on without something of the sort, for, however much we have outstripped our forefathers in mechanism and sanitation, we remain much like them in our need of comfort, stimulus, and hope. (p. ) many nineteenth-century scientific publicists partook of these attempts, notably tyndall. the author of extra physics, and the mystery of creation ( ), a book-length critique of materialist and reductionist physical paradigms, reiterated one popular perception of that scientist in his own analysis, the governing metaphor evangelical: more than any of his contemporaries, [tyndall] stands for physical truth. other men may be greater in their special departments, but as the high priest of physical truth, interpreting, as with a wave of light, its deepest dynamics, and dispensing with radiant beneficence its subtlest gifts, – as the inspired seer of molecular activities, summoned by an expectant universe to strike, with the tuning-fork of science, the keynote of all practical wisdom, and proclaim with authority the possibilities and limits of the human intellect, he stands alone. (p. ) nonetheless, even tyndall, as we shall see, science’s celebrated ‘high priest’, was in various - - and subtle ways a malcontent, hesitant to accept the burden of his own radical conclusions, unsure about the nature of the world he wished to ‘materialistically’ encapsulate. thus, while theoretical entities (vortex atoms, gear-like current flows) bounding about, unseen though not unremarked upon, in the laboratories and lecture theatres of the nine- teenth century rarely survived to trouble the researchers of the next, milosz’s ‘meaning’ – a modern restatement of one contemporary puzzle (its like universality confirmed by the en- compassing reach of its title) – serves as a strangely affecting reminder that some victorian concerns linger in the air of the physical laboratory even to this day, long after many other items of ‘scientific’ import, for all intents and purposes, have been utterly forsaken. or, perhaps more properly, they linger in the study of the kind of ersatz ‘natural philosopher’ (or interested amateur) still busy pondering such problems, for what practicing, results-oriented empiricist has the time to spare! - - chapter tyndall’s crepuscular materialism: orations at belfast, august, and manchester, october it is probably part of the great change in the manners of this country that such an address as that of the president of the british association will now give but little offence, and encounter little contradiction, even in most religious circles. - ‘professor tyndall’s address’, the times, august at the time of its publication, the notice appended to the august edition of nature, an announcement of a much anticipated annual scientific conference, must have seemed unre- markable enough: ‘as usual this season […] congresses are coming thick upon us. the british association commences its sittings next wednesday at belfast, when prof. tyndall will give his presidential address’ (‘notes’, p. ). that address, however – like the fracas that greeted its delivery – was to prove any- thing but unremarkable. lange, in the second volume of a revised edition of his geschichte des materialismus, said of its religious and scientific significance: tyndall’s address is, as it were, the official announcement of a new era for england, which plays so important a part in the history of materialism. the old hollow truce between natural science and theology, which huxley, and recently darwin, had seriously shaken, is now broken, and men of science demand their right to follow out in all directions, undisturbed by any subsisting traditions, the conse- quences of their theory of the world. ( : ) such a message was as unpopular as it was uncompromising. even tyndall’s close friends, in its wake, ‘thought he had gone too far in straying into the murky swamps of metaphysics in defence of scientific materialism. for weeks he was denounced […] and pamphlets attacking the “belfast address” continued to appear for years afterward’ (burchfield, p. ). indeed, as frank turner notes, this exhortation of little more than an hour and three-quarters in length (according to a contemporary account of it in the times [‘ba’, p. ]), ‘succeeded in sparking perhaps the most intensive debate of the victorian conflict of science and religion. it aroused far more controversy than the huxley-wilberforce encounter […]’ – perhaps surprising given the amount that that dispute has figured in popular imagination of the cultural foment of the - - time – as the belfast address ‘more clearly illustrated the social and intellectual issues at stake’ (‘tyndall’, p. ). subsequent to it, the scientist found himself assailed for, quite literally, a multitude of sins. lightman, in ‘scientists as materialists in the periodical press’, a study of the address’s aftermath as reflected in contemporary journalism, observes that tyndall was accused of plagiarism (in blackwood’s edinburgh magazine), paganism (in the edinburgh review, irish review, dublin review, and elsewhere), atheism (in fraser’s magazine); he was likewise slated for his overriding dependence on darwinism (in the month and catholic review), his slippery use of rhetoric (in the contemporary review), and, more or less universally, inexcusable lapses in logic and general professional, not to forget philosophical, presumptuousness. he was frequently tarred as well with the charge of being an unrepentant or unscrupulous materialist, an accusa- tion which, in the s, ‘was a serious one. it grouped tyndall together with lower-class atheists, casting aspersions on his status as a member of the intellectual elite’. lightman even goes so far as to suggest that belfast signalled a volte-face in the intelligentsia’s entire disposition towards the man; before it, he explains, ‘[…] tyndall was usually cast in a positive light in the periodical press, albeit with some reservations, and he was not labeled as a materialist. but after the belfast address he was portrayed as an aggressive, dishonest, devious and distinctly un-british materialist’ (p. ). this chapter is an examination of the rhetoric, and philosophy, of that address. en- gaging also with a number of issues relating to the oration’s instant notoriety (for good or ill) in mid-victorian society, it provides analysis of a few of those themes elaborated within it des- tined to cause such a shifting in the popular perception of both the scientist and the nature of the ‘materialism’ he so earnestly advanced. its first section incorporates, alongside commen- tary on the belfast address itself, a reading of ‘crystals and molecular force’, an address given in manchester two months after the inaugural, one which both responded to some of the criticisms levied at its more famous predecessor while effectively reiterating the same overall argument, in miniature but with equal forcefulness. the steadfastness of such conviction, despite all controversy, as evidenced in this follow-up lecture is mirrored, as we shall see, in the obstinacy tyndall demonstrated in revision of the text of the belfast address proper – particu- larly one divisive assertion on the ‘promise’ and ‘potency’ of matter – through a range of editions over the several years following its delivery. later sections focus on the seeming ‘asymmetry’ of tyndall’s belfast worldview (a bias in exposition central to my final two chapters), and the nature of scientific analogy in the structure of his argument, before an epilogue discussing the cultural fate of both tyndall and his ‘truce-breaking’ pronouncement. - - the major scientific publicists and agnostics, lightman argues, ‘never formed an orga- nized school or net, but they regarded each other as friends and shared a common circle of acquaintances, quoted one another with approval in their writings, and lent support, both moral and financial, in times of need’ (origins, p. ). for that group, the belfast address served as the locus classicus for discussions and reassessments of the centrality of materialism to physical investigation, as it provided the clearest, most thorough and memorable, exposition of a naturalistic ideology. maxwell summarised its central message – and that of mid-victorian materialism as a whole – in a single couplet, where it is phrased as a modernisation of de- mocritean atomism: ‘from nothing comes nothing, they told us, nothing happens by chance, but by fate; / there is nothing but atoms and void, all else is mere whims out of date!’ (‘brit- ish’, p. ). subsequent chapters will observe how maxwell (and several others) reacted against the metaphysical contentions of such belief, how clifford reaffirmed them with marked zeal, and how tyndall (so often thought of as materialism’s ‘high priest’) attempted to mitigate any potentially ‘debasing’ or ‘demoralising’ aspects of that mid-victorian interpretive methodology through deliberate invocation of literary or ‘non-materialistic’ language. ‘atom, the architect’ ‘crystals and molecular force’ commenced, so far as one can judge from a ‘corrected edition’ of the lecture’s text, with something of a parable. several years before, tyndall explains, he had been asked by the headmaster of a local school to address a group of students; he had agreed on the condition that he be permitted to instruct a class of ‘the youngest boys’, a group, on the whole, unfettered by notions of how the world was to be divvied up and parcelled, who would never refuse to see beauty inhering in the humblest of substances. these children, tyndall remarks, ‘had no notion that the thing they had been crunching and sucking all their lives [crystallised sugar-candy] embraced so many hidden points of beauty […]. [a]nd when they found that in certain directions it could be split into thin laminæ with shining surfaces of cleavage, their joy was at its height’. it seems in matters of learning, as in matters of devotion, children – particularly young children – are by far the most amenable to proceeding solely on ‘faith’: these ‘young philosophers’, the scientist tells us, spent the whole hour ‘listen[ing] to me with the most eager interest’ (p. ). tyndall followed such a personable introduction with a fine specimen of mythologised - - historiography, a synoptic literary mode with which he had become increasingly linked. this provided, as elsewhere in his addresses and writings, a cultural narrative fixating not on battles nor parliaments, but rather the process – through trial and error, induction and experiment, over the course of millennia – which had ‘rendered physical science almost as stable as the system of nature it professes to describe’ (p. ). beginning in prehistory, related in telegraphic jumps, tyndall’s account skipped from revelation to revelation, from the rudiments of experi- ence to the fullness of a formalised and mathematicised theory of universal gravitation: ‘in the drawing of a bow, the darting of a javelin, the throwing of a stone, in the lifting of burdens, and in personal combats, even savage man became acquainted with the operation of force’ (p. ). as man, according to tyndall, became ever more adept at such rudimentary tasks, he found he had at his disposal additional ‘time to look about him, and become an observer and inquirer’, discovering through experience first the phenomena of magnetic attraction (and repulsion), then quantifying that experience – rendering it expressible in language, in terms of pushes and pulls – through ‘a kind of poetic transfer’, a process of analogy in which human activities (pushing and pulling) were seen to have clear analogues in inorganic behaviour (pp. , ). from there, in the tyndallic worldview, it is but the tiniest of intellectual leaps to newton’s g and kepler’s three famed laws: ‘having started with the savage and his sensa- tions of molecular force, we pass on to the observation of force exerted between a magnet and rubbed amber, and the bodies which they attract, and rise by an unbroken growth of ideas to a conception of the force by which sun and planets are held together’ (p. ). syntax recapitu- lates scientific history: each comma elides centuries of ‘inactivity’ (from the speaker’s perspec- tive), each phrase enacting conceptual revolution. the accumulation of physical knowledge is figured as organic, ‘unbroken’: worldly ‘[e]xperience […] furnishes the soil for plants of higher growth’, that is, abstract theories themselves, which, suitably nurtured, ‘grow out of the fruitful soil of observation’ (pp. , ). but not through induction alone. imagination is also vital: ‘you imagine where you cannot experiment’, the scientist implores (p. ). discussion of the actual geometric intricacies of crystallisation – the ‘hard science’ of such a scientific lecture – occupies a comparatively small proportion of it textually. even this ‘hard science’ is couched in spiritual imagery and language, however. the dialectical rigour of baconian method – hypothesis, experiment, revised hypothesis, subsequent experiment – is re-figured as quasi-religious rite or catechism, a call-and-response between the scientist and the irresistible ‘voice’ of externality: ‘looking at these beautiful edifices and their internal structure, the pondering mind has forced upon it the question, how have these crystals been - - built up? what is the origin of this crystalline architecture?’ (p. ). again, the suitably prepared ‘pondering mind’ is obligated to look beyond the superficially diverse phenomena of crystalline structure (readily apparent even to those inquisitive schoolchildren), and to search assiduously for some ordering principle beyond the visible, inaccessible to experiment, one perhaps arising from magnetism, a known microscopic cause with macroscopic consequences. he elaborated, saying that the mid-victorian physical theoretician was compelled by bias towards unity of principle to transcend experience, and endow the atoms and molecules of which these crystals are made with definite poles, whence issue attractions and repulsions for other poles. in virtue of these attractions and repulsions some poles are drawn together, some retreat from each other; atom is thus added to atom, and molecule to molecule, not boisterously or fortuitously, but silently and symmetrically, and in accordance with laws more rigid than those which guide a human builder when he places his bricks and stones together. (p. ) he here has recourse to an explanatory trick widespread in popularised descriptions of mo- lecular phenomena, then as now. ‘in the specimens hitherto placed before you’, tyndall told his audience in manchester’s free trade hall, ‘the work of the atomic architect has been completed; but’, he promised, soon enough – in a sequence of demonstrations he was prepar- ing to begin – ‘you shall see him at work’ (pp. - ). this fastidious ‘atomic architect’ thus took its place alongside maxwell’s demon, an- other wee beastie first ‘discovered’ in , becoming one in a growing family of minuscule anthropoid creatures animating a deterministic, even homely, atomic or molecular world (in much the same way that schrödinger’s cat became a garden-variety macroscopic creature illuminating something unfamiliar – or alarmingly inhuman – about the non-deterministic, sub-atomic world of twentieth-century quantum mechanics). tyndall, in a critique of james mozley’s eight lectures on miracles ( ), had once reflected that the ‘concerns’ of pre- copernican cosmology – like its scale and temporal scope – were ‘vastly more commensurate with man […] than those of the universe science now reveals to us’ (fos, p. ). equally, though, such ‘disproportioning’ awareness, in a curiously palpable way, even while it aug- mented in a literal sense, also contracted in a more symbolic one the gap between nature and individual. two examples: ‘[t]he lightning flash’, as tyndall observed in a journal entry for may , ‘is but an enlargement of the electric spark and the cracking of [?this] machine a microscopic thunderpeal’ (p. ). he was to replicate many such scale-bridging phenom- maxwell’s demon ‘behaves like a pianoforte player, endowed with extreme molecular smallness and an enviable dexterity, but, despite all this, he is to be considered in no way supernatural’, as described in nature in a brief article of ‘the sorting demon of maxwell’. - - ena in his popular lectures, particularly at the ri. from the s to the early s, in dozens of darkened auditoria (on albemarle street as across the british isles), he spectacularly produced ‘artificial skies’ and lights ‘almost as brilliant as […] the sun’, to quote his own self- publicity (fos, pp. , ). he was always to insist, moreover, that the truly inquisitive need never content themselves with simulacra, with mere reproductions of such ‘tangible’ things. the earth, as noted in another of his addresses (given before graduands at university college, london), ‘is illuminated by a sun which, though nearly a hundred millions of miles distant, can be brought virtually into our closets and there subjected to examination’ (p. ). the grandest spectacles in nature, in other words – the sky’s tint, noontime’s blinding glare – could be not merely recreated, but constrained, held captive, in the comfortable confines of a victorian domestic space, there to be analysed at will. ‘this bed thy centre is, these walls, thy sphere’, donne had said of the sun in , describing the ‘contracted’ world of enraptured lovers (p. ). bunsen’s spectroscopic science had, however, made this metaphysical conceit physically descriptive, even as ‘modern’ atomic theory, as elaborated by tyndall, transformed the exigencies of inorganic crystallisation into the doings of a gentlemanly professional: the former, shrinking the cosmos; the latter, expanding it, making it (analogically) as big as life. tyndall’s notion of an ‘atomic architect’ became something of a sensation. punch, in particular, had for some time delighted in satirising the scientist, not so much for his irishness (though that was a target, too), as for his earnestness, a naïve – if infectious – enthusiasm for the natural world which sought continuously, as paradis puts it (in a phrase at once figurative and literally true, given the scientist’s atmospheric investigations and vibrant lecture perform- ances), ‘to coin deeply mystical significance out of thin air’ (p. ). but, on november , a poem entitled ‘atom, the architect’ featured in the pages of the serial. it did not, however, lampoon the manchester oration’s sometimes syrupy lyricism. on the contrary, mr punch’s intended target was far more specific: tyndall’s seemingly outrageous claim that the structure of the universe was not ordained on high but rather, as it were, on ‘low’, in that microscopic realm of atoms and molecules – in that realm, in short, of ‘atomic architects’. the first of four quatrains went as follows: it can sometimes seem a gendered space as well: the smoking room, rarely the kitchen. tyndall’s lan- guage hinted as much in an aside (innocent perhaps) in ‘on the scientific use of the imagination’. there, in a digression on the infinitesimal amount of ‘sky-matter’ present in the atmosphere – matter which, by reflection and absorption, brings into being the full splendour of a ‘deep blue firmament’ – tyndall wondered: ‘what is its probable amount? i have sometimes thought that a lady’s portmanteau would contain it all. i have thought that even a gentleman’s portmanteau – possibly his snuff-box – might take it in’ (fos, p. ). - - these ‘architectural atoms!’ o ’tis fine to see humanity so sadly dwindle! let michael angelo and wren resign; atoms can build cathedrals – so says tyndall. typical punch, it would seem: take a debatable assertion; follow it through to some (logically questionable) conclusion. but there is beneath any frivolity a pummelling sanctimoniousness which refuses to allow the popular magazine’s satire to be as light-hearted as it hopes. note that the artist-architects who have, so to speak, been ‘made redundant’ are both best known for ecclesiastical commissions. moreover, the first three quatrains – all of them, on the whole, fair jest – end with the refrain ‘so says tyndall’. not so the fourth, where punch’s undis- guised polemic seems particularly mean-spirited: shallow professor! the eternal fates sit silently and turn the fearful spindle; and that great wheel of doom the moment waits to crush the sceptic silliness of tyndall. tyndall was not slow to react to this further assault. he was quick as well to recognise that such ‘satire’ arose, not from careful consideration of the complete text of his lecture, but rather glib perusal of a few of its juiciest assertions. ‘punch’, he commented, ‘has been my friend for more than thirty years. here, i grieve to say, he has followed the multitude who commit the evil of condemning what they have never read’ (ba [ ], p. ). such a sin is one of which he often accused the more immoderate among detractors of his writings on scientific materialism in general (and the belfast address in particular) of having perpetrated as well. as he once said of the arguments put forward in ‘“materialism” and its opponents’ (an essay intended – somewhat tellingly – as ‘an introduction to a forthcoming edition of the “fragments of sci- ence” […]’, but which made its first appearance in the pages of the fortnightly review): ‘to the judgement of thoughtful men i now commit them: the unthoughtful and the unfair will not read them, though they will continue to abuse them’ (p. ). tyndall’s penchant for elliptical or unsophisticated philosophising was a forensic habit much criticised by colleagues: oliver lodge, for instance, in , quipped that the scientist ‘never failed to elaborate the simple’ (‘tyndall’, p. ), while another contemporary, henry wace, in a survey article of , ‘scientific lectures – their use and abuse’, reprimanded him for intruding his ‘speculations into regions which are far beyond those which are properly [his] province […]’ (p. ); it was a tendency at manchester perhaps most pronounced in some discursive asides on crystallisation. after almost wistfully lamenting the possibility that - - there might not be a higher power in the universe – that is to say, that the ‘atomic architect’ might be the sole architect of consequence – john tyndall, vehement materialist, nonetheless still found comfort in a surprisingly dualistic account of the scheme of things. this encom- passed not just physical substance but also ‘stereotypically’ omniscient god-figure (rather weakly described as some ‘power, being, or thing’). the impetus of theistic (or, at minimum, deistic) concern so evident in these concluding paragraphs was, of course, conveniently overlooked by the parodists at punch. ‘the mechanism’, he explained, of crystallisation is rendered intelligible by the picture of atomic poles; but is there nothing but mechanism here? there is something, in my opinion, which the mind of man has never yet seized; but which, so far as research has penetrated, is found indissolubly joined with matter. i have seen these things hundreds of times, but i never look at them without wonder. and […] i would say that when standing at spring-time and looking upon the sprouting foliage, the lilies of the field, and sharing the general joy of opening life; i have often asked myself whether there is no power, being, or thing in the universe whose knowledge of that which i am so ignorant is greater than mine. i have said to myself, can it be possible that man’s knowledge is the greatest knowledge – that man’s life is the highest life? (pp. - ) there is much to enjoy in this passage, but grounds for mistrust as well: the displaced sexual- ity of tyndall’s evocation of ‘sprouting […] opening life’; his legalistic wording (perhaps designed to insure that no conception of the divine was prematurely debarred); the whitman- esque solipsism implicit in the scientist’s lonely dialogue with nature. most crucially, however, tyndall used his manchester platform to correct, or admon- ish, critics and clarify – but hardly qualify or enfeeble – the bold assertions he had made not long before at belfast. many in the audience were awaiting such a rapprochement – or, at least, brief acknowledgement of ideological wrongdoing. tyndall, pointedly, made no such apology. such resolve (or pigheadedness, to the minds of some) also characterised the various revisions he made to the text of the belfast address over the years. its editorial constancy through a half-decade period of republication and hullabaloo is perhaps best illustrated by examining, in five distinct variants, a few of the (very minor) modifications tyndall made in the phrasing of one of its most divisive assertions. each text is a snapshot in time. the first under consideration is the transcript of the address taken from the london times of august , the day after its delivery (it had been diligently telegraphed overnight); the second, the initial longmans, green, and co. printing of (which incorporated some additions and elaborations; as tyndall explained: ‘it was [originally] written under some disadvantages this year in the alps […]. when read subsequently, it proved too long for its purpose, and several of its passages were accordingly struck out. some of them are here restored’ [ba, p. v]); the third, that publisher’s ‘seventh thousand’ edition, likewise of . the lattermost edition also - - featured, alongside a revised peroration, a thoughtful (and lengthy) preamble – ‘i take advan- tage’, he explained at its start, ‘of a pause in the issue of this address to add a few prefatory words to those already printed’ (ba [ ], p. v) – discussing, among other things, a range of the most damaging and unfair slanders levelled either at the substance of tyndall’s argument or the person of its author. one gains a sense of the rapidity of all this – surely, the address must have been among the literary sensations of its day – when one notes that the two longmans volumes were published in the space of a few months. in copies held by the university library, cambridge, for instance, stamped imprints give acquisition dates of october and january , respectively. for comparison, i have selected variants that appeared in and . both were included in that ‘authorised’ compendium of tyndallic thought, fragments of science for unscientific people, an anthology – which was so fantastically popular that it required a second edition within a fortnight of its initial publication – written, in its author’s own words, out of a ‘desire […] to extend sympathy for science beyond the limits of the scientific public’ (fos, p. ix). the address’s most inflammatory contention by far – one that ‘trace[d] back all exist- ing things, both mental and physical, to the interaction of the forces, affinities and motions of the ultimate particles of matter’, as ably summarised by john quarry, rector of donough- more and canon of cloyne cathedral (p. ) – provided a materialistic genealogy of con- sciousness, one overlooking animating agency or divine being in favour of the cooling and coalescing of insensate atoms in the pre-planetary nebula. this is how it appeared in the times: ‘abandoning all disguise, the confession that i feel bound to make before you is that i prolong the vision backward across the boundary of the experimental evidence, and discern in that matter, which we in our ignorance, and notwithstanding our professed reverence for its creator, have hitherto covered with opprobrium, the promise and potency of every form and quality of life’ (‘ba’, p. ). of its reception tyndall commented: ‘to call it a “chorus of dissent,” […] is a mild way of describing the storm of opprobrium with which this statement has been assailed’ (fos [ ], p. ). bernard lightman notes that clear references to – even verbatim citations of – such a (perhaps too readily) quotable manifesto were made in an astonishing number of contemporary periodicals: the dublin review, the irish monthly, the i should also mention that there were, in the same period, a number of additional reproductions of (or excepts from) the address in nature, local and regional papers, popular serials, and so forth, not to overlook its appearance as centrepiece to the cumbersome (if encompassing) volume, report of the forty-fourth meeting of the british association for the advancement of science; held at belfast in august , overseen by the baas itself. - - spectator, the graphic, fraser’s magazine, even the athenaeum, among others (‘scientists’, p. ). the textual evolution of the sentence through those four subsequent editions, though, demonstrates how little public censure caused the scientist to either downplay his message or weaken its phrasing. ‘by an intellectual necessity i cross the boundary of the experimental evidence, and discern in that matter which we, in our ignorance of its latent powers, and notwithstanding our professed reverence for its creator, have hitherto covered with oppro- brium, the promise and potency of all terrestrial life’ (ba, p. ): the most evident alterations between the times transcription and this, the first supervised revision, include removal of a prefatory transitional phrase (less necessary in a printed, rather than spoken, context), and clarification of ‘our ignorance’ in terms of our ‘ignorance of its [matter’s] latent powers’. the ideas of ‘latency’ and ‘power’ are, of course, volatile ones in the rhetoric of tyndall, someone well aware of the fantastically broad reach of the thermodynamic principle of energy conser- vation. moreover, the new wording – which perhaps also preserves a modicum of uniqueness for man via the added modifier ‘terrestrial’ – strengthens tyndall’s reasons for ‘cross[ing] the boundary’: in the original, this inductive leap is something he feels compelled to ‘confess’; not so in the revision, where he justifies it in terms of a mandate, an ‘intellectual necessity’. a few reviewers remarked on this subtle shifting in emphasis. john tulloch, for one, writing in blackwood’s edinburgh magazine, observed that, ‘[i]n his address, as revised and published by himself, dr. tyndall has slightly modified the expressions of this significant passage […]’, in so doing managing to impute its phrases with far ‘more the semblance of reasoning, and less the air of a devotee eager to proclaim his gospel […]’ (p. ). the ‘seventh thousand’ republication left this autocratic claim in wording identical to that of the first longmans edition, as did the variant. the latter text, however, incorpo- rated a footnote making the extremely pertinent point that ‘cross[ing] the boundary of the experimental evidence’, though marginally non-baconian, was by no means an interpretive or investigative technique only recently ‘invented in belfast’ (fos [ ], p. n ). such an observa- tion, of course, ties in with another of the scientist’s constant themes: the need for imagination in both entheorisation and experiment (also inescapable in ‘crystals and molecular force’). or, as phrased elsewhere in the address: ‘physical theories’ – he cites as representative two of the most profound: darwinian evolution and newtonian gravitation – ‘which lie beyond experience are derived by a process of abstraction from experience’ (ba, p. ). the text further emphasises this point, replacing that initial phrase (‘[b]y an intellectual necessity’) with the considerably more defensive and temperate ‘[b]y a necessity engendered and justified by - - science’ (fos [ ], : ); such an emendation implies communal sanction, while also situating its exponent – a maverick no longer – within a vital and productive analytic tradition. that was not the only statement from belfast destined for popular disrepute. one nearly as infamous (and referenced) – and which likewise maintained a threatening semantic constancy throughout the course of several published variants – set out the militancy and imperialism of mid-victorian scientific naturalism’s emergent disciplinary orthodoxy. here is the statement as reprinted in the times, and it seems (particularly out of context, as so often encountered in contemporary journal articles and sermons) to be one leaving little room for either barter or arbitration: ‘the impregnable position of science may be described in a few words. all religious theories, schemes, and systems, which embrace notions of cosmogony, or which otherwise reach into its domain, must in so far as they do this submit to the control of science, and relinquish all thought of controlling it’ (‘ba’, p. ). that this sentence – like the materialistic proclamation it allegedly epitomised – did nonetheless still leave considerable room for both will be the subject of my next two sections. is the worldly not enough?: tyndall’s belfast address satirists certainly thought they knew what tyndall’s address was about. in william mallock’s the new paul and virginia, a work of , pugnacious prof. darnley spouts an amalgamation of the received ‘wisdom’ of his day to a pliant shipboard audience. ‘men of science’, he lectures, ‘can only see theology in a ridiculous light, therefore theology has no side which is not ridiculous. he [darnley] then told them [the passengers] a few of the names that enlightened thinkers had applied to the christian deity – how professor tyndall had called him an “atom-manufacturer,” and professor huxley, “a pedantic drill- sergeant”’ (p. ). (darnley himself seems more archaeological dig than discrete individual: excavate a bit and you encounter layer upon layer of scientific propaganda and pseudo- scholarly detritus, the flotsam and jetsam of agnostic, positivistic and materialistic debate from countless issues of the period’s magazines and newspapers. of such a figure i can think of no more barbed description than mallock’s own: ‘his mind was like the sea, into which the other great minds of the age discharged themselves […]’ [p. ].) the author’s earlier the new republic ( ), a serialised satire which likewise caricatured many contemporary thinkers (albeit in the form of a far more blatant roman à clef), explored similar subject matter; in it, one woman, a miss merton, responds to one of mr stockton’s (tyndall’s) scientific diatribes by - - declaiming: ‘but […] there is nothing religious in a gas. i don’t see how anything religious can come out of it’ ( : ) – stockton, moments earlier, had been holding forth on the essential sublimity, even religiosity, of the nebular hypothesis. a more reductionist and fearsome interpretation still of stockton’s views is offered by mr saunders (a clear stand-in for w. k. clifford): ‘“yes, yes, yes,” cried mr saunders, recovering himself, his voice tremulous with excitement, “i know all that. i know that in their last analysis a pig and a martyr, a prayer and a beef-steak, are just the same – atoms and atomic movement”’ (p. ). saunders has little patience, or enthusiasm, for stockton’s rhapsodies on the interpenetration (and indivisi- bility) of physics and poetry and philosophy, fixating instead only on the subtext, on the bit of stockton’s argument insisting that the world, that external nature, is to be interpreted and explained only in terms of paradigms irreducibly materialistic. saunders’s take on the tyndallic (or stocktonian) worldview seems to be what many victorians got out of the belfast address. and punch, perhaps unsurprisingly, frequently chose to parody the sort of uncompromising scientific-cum-spiritual belief apparently advocated therein. to give two contrasting examples: a poem of december (cited in my previous chapter), ‘the fine old atom-molecule’ (to be sung to the tune of ‘the fine old english gentleman’), ends with the ironic, if suitably jocular, injunction: ‘and our lord be the atom-molecule, / of the young world’s proto-prime!’. ‘democritus at belfast’, however, published august of that same year – in other words, little more than a week after the address’s delivery – encodes in its final quatrain a far grimmer sense of both moral and theological dethronement: if tyndall’s last word be indeed the last – of hope and faith hence with each rag and tatter! a black cloud crowds out future as our past; matter, the wise man’s god: the crowd’s – no matter! needless to say, tyndall’s position – as seen already in ‘crystals and molecular force’ – was rarely so schematised as such charges suggest. in truth, the belfast address, like its mancunian successor, displays nearly to perfection each and every one of tyndall’s oratorical hallmarks. there are a cornucopia of allusions to the writings and doctrines of carlyle, wordsworth and goethe; the requisite number of rhetorical questions. there are not one, but several, interpolated ‘histories’: of evolutionary thought, of atomism, of philosophical and scientific materialism. and each of these historical narratives carries with it its own associated saints and sinners as well; tyndall enumerates - - them with an admirable multiculturalism: ‘during the [scientific] drought of the middle ages’, he explains, ‘the arabian intellect, as forcibly shown by draper, was active’. thus, tyndall’s history of atomism includes not only greek and roman metaphysicians but also alhazen, an arab who was ‘the first to correct the platonic notion that rays of light are emitted by the eye’ (ba, p. ). moreover, just as the scientist’s ‘crystals and molecular force’ con- cluded with something of a headfirst dive (hardly unanticipated) into the turgid waters of metaphysical and theological conjecture, so, too, did his belfast address. arthur eddington, musing on the perspective afforded the s by his own generation’s novel theoretical conceptualisations, once wrote: ‘the recent tendencies of science do, i believe, take us to an eminence from which we can look down into the deep waters of philosophy; and if i rashly plunge into them, it is not because i have confidence in my powers of swimming, but to try to show that the water is really deep’ (p. ). tyndall’s justification would have been similar, though his stance never so secular. in- deed, he actively courted engagement with a variety of sacred concerns. during the s and ’ s, an anxious tyndall, like many, had been ‘looking for a replacement for traditional christianity […]’; but by the s, he was talking ‘confidently of the survival of religion’ – albeit redacted, made relevant (lightman, ‘robert’, pp. , ). in that, tyndall thought he and fellow publicists had a prophetic role. as a reviewer of the th edition of fragments observed, many of its chapters set out, without reservation or apology, ‘to investigate the higher questions connected with phenomena of life in which the border lands of science and religion are thought by some people to overlap, if not to come into antagonism’ (‘science’ [ ], p. ). such an investigative predilection – never more accentuated than at belfast, where it attracted the fiercest condemnation – was, however, one to which preachers and pundits reflexively attributed a degree of immorality or scandalousness. what many of them failed to recognise – or, perhaps, simply refused to see – was that the address, in the words of modern critic ruth barton, was merely ‘the culmination of a series of essays and addresses that argued for a qualified materialism’ (p. ). this materialism, in the words of tyndall himself (from the initial preface), insisted that, for homo sapiens – a creature as much of heart as head – ‘[t]he facts of religious feeling are […] as certain as the facts of physics’ (ba, p. vi). as such (this remarkable clarification comes from the ‘seventh thousand’ edition revision of the peroration, in which tyndall amplified on the non-deductive compunctions of human aware- tyndall, throughout his address, makes quite explicit his indebtedness to such intellectual historians as hume, draper and, especially, lange (whom he pointedly describes as ‘a non-materialist’ [ba, p. ]). - - ness, even while leaving the general methodological implications of his address unaltered), there are such things woven into the texture of man as the feeling of awe, reverence, wonder – and not alone the sexual love just referred to, but the love of the beautiful, physical, and moral, in nature, poetry, and art. there is also that deep-set feeling which, since the earliest dawn of history, and probably for ages prior to all history, incorporated itself in the religions of the world. you who have escaped from these religions into the high-and-dry light of the intellect may deride them; but, in so doing you deride accidents of form only, and fail to touch the immovable basis of the religious senti- ment in the nature of man. to yield this sentiment reasonable satisfaction is the problem of problems of the present hour. (ba [ ], p. ) in pleasing parallel, just as primeval man was forced by innate biology into the systematisation of the things and processes of the external world, so, too, was he drawn into the creation, interpretation and admiration of things having little (practical) to do with that world as such: literature and philosophy, painting, theology, sculpture, music. tyndall put it eloquently towards the close of the updated peroration: ‘the world embraces not only a newton, but a shakespeare – not only a boyle, but a raphael – not only a kant, but a beethoven – not only a darwin, but a carlyle. not in each of these, but in all, is human nature whole’ (p. ). exiling the ‘immovable basis of the religious sentiment in […] man’ is therefore, for tyndall, as quixotic – or, even, inconceivable – a task as somehow banishing that of the intellectual. he eschews ‘high-and-dry light’ – a flattening, glaring illumination redolent of out- moded, dehumanising or overly ‘rational’ schemes of philosophising: the severity of mill’s utilitarianism, say, or laplace’s mechanistic determinism – in favour of a crepuscular materi- alism. his science embraces the incorrigible plurality of lived experience, the world in its fecundity and fullness, the entrancing spectacles of the sun’s rising and setting, not merely the well-lit vistas of the geologist’s microscope or anatomist’s bench. such a cosmos requires more, and messier, description than the eternally pristine mathematics of a keplerian ellipse; it is one trembling with irreducible interconnections, resounding with melodies less metro- nomic, and more cacophonous, than the ticking of celestial clockwork. it demands spiritual appreciation as well as algebraic synthesis. tyndall’s metaphors in this passage point towards two of the traditions through which he was best able to encapsulate, or articulate, this ‘qualified materialism’, and which will serve as subjects for my fourth and fifth chapters. his description of the ‘woven-ness’ of man’s nature suggests sartor resartus’s symbology of transcendental conviction, in which carlyle, ‘via his clothes philosopher teufelsdröck, uses the weaving of cloth, or the sewing of a suit of clothes, to represent the process of authoring beliefs and institutions. his [carlyle’s] emphasis on clothing as woven textile plays on the root of the word text – texere, to weave’ (vanden - - bossche, p. ). similarly, tyndall’s recognition of a necessary diachronic mutability within those satisfactions for the ‘religious sentiment’ deemed allowable, and pertinent, for the latter nineteenth century brings to mind the literary and philosophical labours of some of its earliest writers, particularly the visionary behind ‘tintern abbey’. tyndall had concluded the first british edition of the belfast address with approving citation of a dozen or so lines from that poem (in second and subsequent editions, these lines were moved to the start, where they serve as an epigraph). myers, in his study wordsworth ( ), captured the significance of the author’s achievement for many victorian thinkers wobbling in their faith. disillusioned with christianity – if retaining his undergraduate hellenism – he explained that wordsworth was the first to endow a spiritually impoverished century with its own native sense of surrogate divinity. citing the four causes (prophecy, prayer, artistry and human love) enumerated by plato as tending to make man ‘percipient of an intelligence other and larger than his own’, myers contended that wordsworth, to this list, ‘has made an important addition. he has shown by his example and writings that the contemplation of nature may become a stimulus as inspiring as these; may enable us “to see into the life of things” – as far, perhaps, as beatific vision or prophetic rapture can attain’ (p. ). unmistakable traces of carlylean transcendentalism, of wordsworthian natural piety, these certainly seem, as tyndall phrased things in his second introduction, attributes of a ‘“materialism” vastly different from what you suppose […]’ (ba [ ], p. ). why, then, were they so easy to overlook? why was it predominately the materialistic sentiments in his phi- losophy which drew public attention, and ridicule, in the s and beyond? even barton, who dedicates most of ‘john tyndall, pantheist’ to advocating that the scientist’s materialism was really little more than a disguised crypto-pantheism, concedes that ‘in the context of the belfast address, tyndall’s conclusion about the limitations of materialism as a philosophy of life occupied a comparatively small place’ (p. ). this is, of course, entirely correct. (oliver lodge was not being disingenuous in proclaiming, in a volume of reminiscences, tyndall’s inaugural ‘the chief pronouncement of the materialism of the nineteenth century’ [advancing, p. ].) the fittest explanation for this partiality – an asymmetry in the ‘philosophy of life’ limned by tyndall – is simply that, in his address, he was concerned primarily with victorian science, and materialism, for him, was the proper framework in which to discuss the subject, a philosophy sufficient for interpreting all the myriad phenomena and processes of the physical world. theology, so often an impediment to scientific advance, was to have no input. but, on a deeper level, behind any ‘antireligious dogmatism’ (in theodore porter’s phrase [p. ]), - - was that manchester dualism: a cleavage, ever-present in tyndall’s thought, between cultures of intellect and emotion. he, in the address, before ‘embattled’ peers, was attempting to stress the disjunction, even as he hinted – blue-sky thinking? – at a future settlement: ‘they are not opposed, but supplementary – not mutually exclusive, but reconcilable’ (ba [ ], p. ). unfortunately, however, just as the new republic’s mr saunders was able to hear in william mallock’s ersatz tyndall (mr stockton) only the claims of atheism, and miss merton only the counterclaims of theology (matter as antithesis of spirit), so also was the wider victorian public predisposed to hear in the belfast address only what it wanted – or expected – to hear. the irony is that mallock, amid such a rollicking satire as the new republic, was therefore being far more sensitive to the richness of tyndall’s position than any number of that scientist’s ‘genu- ine’ contemporary critics were ever disposed to be, many of whom were outraged by the hubris of an address, given under the imprimatur of one of britain’s most influential organisa- tions, ‘which reviewed a wide selection of recent scientific developments and then concluded that these developments represented the highest level of human knowledge’ (basalla, coleman and kargon, p. ). it is perhaps, then, not altogether surprising that in august , john hawkshaw, in- coming president of the baas, with the trauma of the previous twelve months clearly in mind, commented in his own inaugural: ‘past presidents have already discoursed on many subjects, on things organic and inorganic, on the mind and on things perhaps beyond the reach of the mind; and i have arrived at the conclusion that humbler themes will not be out of place on this occasion’ (p. lxviii). so he prefaced a well-footnoted history of civil engineering through the ages, moving ‘science’ – at least publicly – back to territory less ideologically contentious, though hardly silencing the furore of debate. in an intriguing instance, however, at least one specifically ‘tyndallic’ dispute has had a peculiar afterlife, maintaining a vestigial presence into modernity. a recent opinion column in the daily telegraph penned by alexander – fortunate son of auberon, fortunate grandson of evelyn – waugh in praise of nepotism trumpeted those advantages which he (and his grand- sires) have enjoyed: ‘[…] i am sure that my genealogy of nepotism stretches way beyond [immediate history], even unto the first protoplasmal primordial atomic globule among my ancestors […]’; his allusion is, of course, to a hammy recitative in gilbert and sullivan’s the mikado ( ) in which haughty pooh-bah sneers: ‘i can trace my ancestry back to a proto- plasmal primordial atomic globule. consequently, my family pride is something inconceiv- able’ (sullivan, p. ). hubert yockey has asserted that the librettist’s ungainly phrase found - - figure - ‘matter!’, punch, or the london charivari. figure - ‘odium theologicum’, punch, or the london charivari. - - origination in ernst haeckel’s discussions in the s of life’s beginnings amid ‘primordial albuminous combinations […]’, but i think a more likely site – the word ‘atomic’ seems decisive – a marvelous cartoon (fig. ) published in punch around a fortnight after belfast ( october ). entitled ‘matter!’, it shows a ‘portly old swell’ (with torso nearly globular in scope), dressed in an overstuffed waistcoat and standing in a formal drawing room of some description; he is shown, a look of utter shock and disbelief plainly evident on his face, ex- claiming to no one in particular: ‘dear me! is it poss’ble! most ’xtr’ord’nary! – (throws down the review) – that i should have been originally a “primordial atomic globule”!!’. scientific progress and the politics of metaphor tyndall, not alone among his colleagues, was always one to choose his words carefully, selecting metaphors, not merely for explanatory efficacy, but for persuasive or cumulative force. at belfast, he described primitive organic lifeforms in terms unabashedly inorganic: ‘we come at length to those organisms which i have compared to drops of oil suspended in a mixture of alcohol and water’ (ba, p. ). he spoke of man’s artistic instincts in terms of neural pathways and electrochemical interactions. he joked – not without ulterior motive – of his friend, herbert spencer, saying of the noted psychologist’s elegant prose-style: ‘it is to be inferred’, based on such evidence, ‘that the ganglia of this apostle of understanding are sometimes the seat of a nascent poetic thrill’ (p. ). he also provided examples of an impos- ing diversity of evolutionary processes: the gradual development of differentiated tissues from the lowest to the highest of organisms (‘so of the other senses; they are special differentiations of a tissue that was originally sensitive all over’ [p. ]); the slow augmentation of intellectual capacity (‘thus it happens’ – tyndall is here quoting spencer directly – ‘that out of savages unable to count to the number of their fingers, and speaking a language containing only nouns and verbs, arise at length our newtons and shakespeares’ [qtd., p. ]). he emphasised as well the historical pedigree of evolutionary thought: ‘thus more than , years ago the doctrine of the “survival of the fittest,” which in our day, not on the basis of vague conjecture, but of positive knowledge, has been raised to such extraordinary significance, had received at all events partial enunciation’ (p. ). this move from ‘vague conjecture’ to ‘positive knowledge’ is a maturative one in tyn- dallic science, and a number of the interpolated narratives in his address are structured along those lines, each showing an analogy’s progress from the realm of the academic to that of the - - scientific, two of three dissimilar types of persuasive comparison analysed by alan gross in his valuable study the rhetoric of science ( ). both academic and scientific analogies are not only demonstrative – that is to say, they do not just illustrate or objectify abstract concepts – they, if cannily chosen, become simpler, more malleable substitutes for those concepts. unlike academic analogy, however, scientific analogy finds additional support in the more or less agreed-upon apparatus of a time-tested scientific method, that ‘complex of quantitative methodologies shared by scientists and central to their verification procedures’ (p. ). early believers in the atomic theory of matter, for instance – democritus, epicurus, empedocles, lucretius – were engaged, tyndall suggests, in an academic dispute; modern believers like loschmidt, stoney and thomson, a scientific one. ancient materialists, perhaps reasoning from the wear and tear of everyday objects (rings becoming thinner, clothes drying in the sun, and so forth), hypothesised that ‘[n]ature acts through invisible particles’ (ba, p. ). by contrast, victorian physical scientists, convinced of the reality of such particles, sought, using the newest techniques and mechanisms of experi- mental investigation, ‘to determine the sizes of the atoms, or rather to fix the limits between which their sizes lie […]’ (p. ). in these comparisons, tyndall traced the fortunes of the ‘atomic analogy’ from the vagaries of pre-christian philosophical dispute to the near- certainties (within well-understood limits) of the nineteenth-century physical laboratory. and he saw in that development a clear progression from the academic to the scientific, from the postulated to the inferred – and from the inferred, in time, to the known. his enthusiasm for historical parallelism was such that a number of contemporary critics believed he had merely rehabilitated a series of discredited or ramshackle hypotheses. this became so commonplace a contention that clifford, in an article of , felt compelled to intervene on tyndall’s behalf to protect him – and inter alia the basis of materialistic science – from further attack: ‘the difference between the two [atomic theories] is mainly this: the atomic theory of de- mocritus was a guess, and no more than a guess’, while that ‘held by scientific men in the present day is not a guess at all’ (‘first’, p. ). tyndall’s rhetorical strategies, moreover, instructed as they historicised. analogies equating creativity with cerebral ganglia – or single-celled creatures with droplets of oil – conditioned the listener (or reader) to accept his eventual declarations about the inseparability of mind and brain. likewise, analogies demonstrating the ubiquity of evolutionary transfor- mations prepared the listener (or reader) for that startling induction to come, an imaginative leap enabling the scientist to discern life’s – and intelligence’s – origins in lifeless matter. or, - - as he phrased it elsewhere in his address: the ‘strength of the doctrine of evolution’ – upon which he based that induction – ‘consists, not in any experimental demonstration (for the subject is hardly accessible to this mode of proof), but in its general harmony with scientific thought’ (p. ). nonetheless, tyndall was willing to concede that in his philosophy there were any number of difficulties which remained to be surmounted – perhaps which were never to be surmounted: most notably, that of the transition between neurochemistry and personal consciousness. in his commentary on such present, or potential, unknowability, however, he never (quite) shaded into the assertion of a metaphysically unknowable à la herbert spencer. spencer, according to lightman, thought the unknowable akin to a spiritual reservoir, a kind of transmogrified providence, guaranteeing that ‘beneath the seeming waste of the evolutionary process’ – which he believed in wholeheartedly – ‘lay an economy, order, pur- pose and harmony’ (origins, p. ). tyndall, by contrast, felt the likely unknowability of certain mental or physical processes an epistemological problem, not a metaphysical escape route: something that might not be comprehended by materialistic scientists must still, he argued, be governed by materialistic principles, as complex or unimaginable as they may be. note in his remarks on the predicament posed by psychophysical parallelism the iterated fantasias on incompleteness and radical unattainability; note as well the vague but ineradica- ble frisson implicit in them of both a professional and endearingly personal species of explana- tory anxiety (this passage is from the revised peroration to his belfast address): we can trace the development of a nervous system, and correlate with it the parallel phenomena of sensation and thought. but we try to soar in a vacuum the moment we seek to comprehend the connexion between them. an archimedean fulcrum is here required which the human mind cannot command; and the effort to solve the problem, to borrow a comparison from an illustrious friend of mine, is like the effort of a man trying to lift himself by his own waistband. (ba [ ], p. ) and here, too, from the preface to that updated text: ‘while fearlessly accepting the facts of materialism dwelt upon in these pages, i bow my head in the dust before that mystery of mind, which has hitherto defied its own penetrative power, and which may ultimately resolve itself into a demonstrable impossibility of self-penetration’ (p. xxx). there were, of course, quite a few nineteenth-century observers who remarked on tyndall’s uncharacteristically pessimistic stance – tantamount to an admission of science’s probable failure – on a subject of such pivotal importance to any proselytising materialist. a commentator at the times found in the classical past an apt precedent for tyndall in this regard: ‘the aspiring professor lifts his voice, elevates his tone, searches the sky, and strides as did the sibyl when she led the hero to the realm of prophecy, but he cannot go beyond this’ (‘professor’, august ). - - gross discusses a third type of analogy as well – the political, a variety that invites ‘an emotional reaction to a crisis’ (p. ) – and uses as his prime example roosevelt’s inaugural address of march , a speech animated by the president’s memorably inflammatory comparison between the depression and the actions of an invading army. post-origin, scien- tists (perhaps sensing the weakness of an exhausted and increasingly desperate opponent) frequently resorted to argumentative tactics of this sort. andrew dickson white, for one, president of cornell university, published in a series of lectures under the revealing title the warfare of science; tyndall provided white’s volume with an enthusiastic introduction. indeed, tyndall himself – despite the comparative ‘pacifism’ (considering its fiery reputation) of his belfast oration – was not averse to resorting from time to time to the use of language nearly as belligerent; in ‘on the scientific use of the imagination’, he said of creationism: ‘you may, however, rest secure in the belief that the hypothesis just sketched [the creationist] can never be stormed, and that it is sure, if it yield at all, to yield to a prolonged siege. to gain new territory modern argument requires more time than modern arms, though both of them move with greater rapidity than of yore’ (fos, p. ). all the same, roosevelt’s inaugural was governed by two distinct analogies: the depression was an occupying force; the president, commander of an insurgency. tyndall’s own scheme of blatant ‘political’ analogy had, by contrast, a sharply changed architecture. certainly, the armies of science were on one side; those of obstreperous or unenlightened religion, the other; but tyndall hardly positioned himself as in any way a general, ready and eager to take command. on the contrary, he went to tremendous lengths to allow nature herself to assume that role. her call, as suggested so stirringly at manchester, is irresistible; her seductions, innumerable; her rewards, at once religiously fulfilling and aesthetically compensatory. the belfast address, accordingly, began by emphasising the historical or anthropological continuity of investigative enterprise: ‘an impulse inherent in primeval man turned his thoughts and questionings betimes towards the sources of natural phenomena. the same impulse, inherited and intensified, is the spur of scientific action to-day’ (ba, p. ). in a sense, then, tyndall was engaged in his own ritual self-annihilation. even as the narratives within his address emphasised the odd stability of physical thought (nineteenth- century atomists as heirs to lucretius, and so forth); the address itself biologised – made ‘inherent’ – the particular attitude towards scientific inquest tyndall himself was trying to espouse. science needs no general, he says: nature provides leadership enough. thus, at its conclusion, he could justly, in front of an audience of fellow combatants in an ongoing strug- - - gle, rhapsodise about the day when ‘you and i, like streaks of morning cloud, shall have melted into the infinite azure of the past’ (‘ba’, p. ). tyndall’s language here alludes to prospero’s dissolution of the nuptial masque in shakespeare’s the tempest. even more sugges- tively, it parallels that describing teufelsdröck’s attainment in sartor resartus, after arduous, occasionally debilitating struggle, of the ‘[…] everlasting yea, wherein all contradiction is solved, wherein whoso walks and works, it is well with him’. carlyle’s description of such a euphoric, bodiless state nonetheless presaged tyndall’s own rhetoric at belfast forty years later: ‘on the roaring billows of time, thou are not engulphed, but borne aloft into the azure of eternity’ (p. ). such redemptive anonymity was, however, something that, subsequent to belfast, both britain’s mainstream press and established churches were in the short term loath to grant. so a reluctant tyndall was, for a brief while, forced into stewardship of an ‘army’ he believed favoured already with an unimpeachable source of both strategic and moral guid- ance. epilogue: the tyndallic afterlife – cambridge these our actors, as i foretold you, were all spirits and are melted into air, into thin air […] - the tempest, iv.i. - it is extraordinary how closely linked tyndall’s and huxley’s names were in the victorian satiric press. there were those passages in the new republic, of course. a poem (printed early in ) in punch like ‘address to an atom’, attributed to ‘an uncomfortably conscious auto- maton’, conspicuously linked memorable lines from tyndall’s address (‘dry light’, ‘nascent thrills’, ‘promise and potency’) with t. h. huxley’s own notorious belfast catchphrase (his paper there was ‘on the hypothesis that animals are automata, and its history’). huxley, in his obituary for tyndall, even quipped that there were those among their contemporaries who looked upon the famously chummy pair as a ‘a sort of firm’ (‘professor’, p. ). there was one on wednesday, august, tyndall reiterated this concluding theme – described in blackwood’s edinburgh magazine as an especially galling example of forced ‘rhetorical pathos’ ([tulloch], p. ) – in the remarks with which he brought the belfast meeting to a formal close: ‘[i]n the struggle for existence between truth and error there is the law of order in the universe always to check and control. i will say no more. i have no doubt that this process of selection will go on, and i shall be justified in the future, in so far as i shall be, to use the closing words of the address – “a mere vapour that vanisheth away.” (cheers). i thank you from the bottom of my heart for the exceedingly cordial manner in which you have received me’ (qtd. in ‘british’, august ). - - cartoon, entitled ‘odium theologicum’ (fig. ), which appeared in punch’s june number; it implied that the real threats to god-fearing english society were not to be found in the doctrines of evolution or atomism or thermodynamics per se, nor even in the teachings of those eminent figures closest linked with these discoveries. on the contrary, they were to be discerned in such materialistic propagandists as huxley and tyndall themselves. it depicts a pair of gravely dressed ministers returning from a stroll on a cold and (one presumes) blustery afternoon: first street preacher. “on the ’eath was yer? how did you get on?” second ditto. “o, i warmed up old tyndall an’ ’uxley to-rights, i can tell yer!” what a difference a century makes. today, huxley is popularly remembered, if at all, as ‘darwin’s bulldog’, while poor tyndall seems, if anything, even more neglected. (in purring- ton’s physics in the nineteenth century [ ], he merits one full sentence; that sentence? – ‘in the words of englishman john tyndall, who succeeded faraday at the royal institution, “in this single week he [faraday] developed the laws of what are called electrodynamics”’ [p. ].) the names of maxwell and faraday and darwin, by contrast, seem more or less untarnished; their importance, unforgotten. gross, in the rhetoric of science, comments perceptively: ‘for scientists […] science has no past – or, rather, no past that does not wholly suit its present purposes. it is this absence, then, that nurtures the useful illusion: for scientists, the results of science depend not on science but on nature herself’ (p. ). this very self-image, however, the inescapability of this ‘useful illusion’ in twentieth- and twenty-first-century discourse, testifies in large part to the profound success of efforts by men like huxley and tyndall to stake out in the nineteenth some practically inviolable intellectual ground for future professional inquiry – beyond dis- pute, above politics, subservient to no other discipline or institution. contemporary science, in other words, believing this episode from its own heritage ef- fectively superfluous, nowadays simply has no use for a tyndall anymore. and so, truly, he has at last faded (as he himself foretold), like a streak ‘of morning cloud’, into that ‘infinite azure of the past’ of which he at belfast spoke so rapturously – and so prophetically as well. such wholesale historical effacement is not merely a modern phenomenon, however. even as early as the mid- s, it was acknowledged – in certain circles, at least – that tyndall’s star was already incontestably on the wane. ‘it seems curious that the death of professor tyndall should have made so little stir in the world of science. how different’, one obituarist conjectured in early , ‘it would have been twenty years ago! captivated, perhaps, by the boldness of his thought and the confidence of his style, his admirers allowed their zeal to outrun their discretion. the inevitable swing of the pendulum has [now] carried the reaction too far’ (d., p. ). - - chapter materialism’s afterlife in the poetry and thought of w. k. clifford and james clerk maxwell pale despair and cold tranquillity, nature’s vast frame, the web of human things, birth and the grave, that are not as they were. - shelley, ‘alastor; or, the spirit of solitude’, f. w. h. myers began his human personality and its survival of bodily death with a forthright challenge to his generation’s science: in the long story of man’s endeavours to understand his own environment and to govern his own fates, there is one gap or omission so singular that, however we may afterwards contrive to explain the fact, its simple statement has the air of a paradox. yet it is strictly true to say that man has never yet applied to the [problem] which most profoundly concern[s] him those methods of inquiry which in attacking all other problems he has found the most efficacious […] – whether or no his personality involves any element which can survive bodily death. ( : ) he was right, on one level, and the spiritualised psychology he advocated (along with others like arthur sedgwick and edmund gurney) represented an attempt to interrogate seriously such a seeming lack. but, on another, his question sidesteps the ‘paradox-producing’ fact that late victorian inductive science’s mandate was primarily with analysis of the objective, the measured, the seen (howsoever: microscopically, telescopically, spectroscopically), not what remained, despite partisan claims for the lab-bench verifiability of paranormal phenomena, the subjective, unseen and immeasurable. for all that, however, a fascinating array of con- temporary thinkers were still far from mute on the topic. it was just that they, more often than not, put forth solutions which neither myers nor his ‘spiritualistic’ colleagues preferred to hear. this chapter is devoted to a pair of such responses, giving, firstly, an analysis of the ways in which two theoreticians, popularly known scientific visionaries differently committed to dissemination of what might outwardly appear an outlook of ‘materialism’, dealt with such theistic perplexities as personal immortality and the nature of a spiritual afterlife. secondly, and closely integrated with this discussion, is more wide-ranging commentary on the specific epigraph from shelley, ‘alastor’, p. ; ll. - . - - utility of poetry – and, more generally, a ‘poet’s’ sensibility – for a scientist engaged in the workaday business of mid-nineteenth-century physical investigation, particularly in attempts at elucidation or wider popularisation of research. one of the most charismatic individuals involved in that business – by the late s he was, so dawson tells us, ‘the nation’s best-known scientific firebrand’ (p. ) – and the central figure here addressed, is w. k. clifford. a mathematician, he was, as noted in my introduction, notorious both for a trenchantly unmollified espousal of the trinity of doctrines associated with materialistic thinking (atomism, energy conservation, evolutionism), and the persistent, public advocacy as well of a type of petulantly ‘noisy atheism’ (qtd. in reid, p. ). my account focuses both on the manner in which a ‘poetic apprehension of the world’ provided clifford with a variety of novel metaphors and models for communicating his ideas to audiences of specialists and non-specialists alike, and also on the fashion in which allusion to, and citation from, the literary tradition enabled him to buttress his more contentious philosophical and anthropological assertions by associating them with a storied heritage of past – and, if more controversially, present – verbal brilliance. the second main scientist engaged with is maxwell, a figure always prone to reference assumptions derived from natural theology and creationism, stances seemingly at odds with his continued analytical emphasis on mechanical modelling and the probabilistic underpinnings of thermodynamic behaviour. indeed, as evidenced with particular clarity in privately circu- lated manuscripts and re-printings of his popular lectures, he founded his scientific and personal philosophy on belief in a benevolent god and the notion of a parallel imprinting: upon the soul of humanity, ‘the divine image’ (like the stamping on a coin of a sovereign’s silhouette); upon natural phenomena, intelligible and immutable law. together, these paired paleyan conceits became, for the scientist, a providential guarantee, vouchsafing all at once ‘the comprehensibility, unity, and relative autonomy of the world’ (kaiser, p. ). his dislike of a reflex attribution of the label ‘materialistic’ to emergent theories, particularly his own, was acute, and, as schaffer has noted, much of the scientist’s ‘public work of the late s and early s’ – those years in which he was so busy promulgating his statistical theory of gasses and unifying the forces of electricity and magnetism – ‘was designed to counter the materialist implications of tyndall’s molecular physics and huxley’s evolutionism’ (p. ). he composed a rambunctious ballad – submitted by a friend (with maxwell’s approval) for publication in blackwood’s edinburgh magazine – in response to tyndall’s address at belfast, in which that (self-consciously) portentous retelling of civilisation’s development from material- - - ism’s ‘perspective’ is condensed, and artfully caricatured, in a series of galloping, rhymed octameter couplets. the legalese of the source, for instance – ‘they also fell back on experi- ence, but with this difference – that the particular experiences which furnished the weft and woof of their theories were drawn, not from the study of nature, but from what lay much closer to them, the observation of men’ (ba, p. ) – is, in the maxwellian burlesque, trans- formed into the most anticlimactic of asides: ‘in the very beginnings of science, the parsons, who managed things then, / being handy with hammer and chisel, made gods in the likeness of men’. the parody’s treatment of tyndall’s enshrinement of molecular self-organisation, with its interpolated commentary on the scientist’s penchant for sometimes risible magniloquence, takes on a comparable pitch, seeming at once flippant and affectionate: so treading a path all untrod, the poet-philosopher sings of the seeds of the mighty world – the first-beginnings of things; how freely he scatters his atoms before the beginning of years; how he clothes them with force as a garment, those small incompressible spheres! (p. ) outside such works, however, maxwell was rarely as boisterous as clifford in setting out beliefs. this was in large part a consequence of temperament; as basil mahon has observed in a recent biography the man who changed everything: the life of james clerk maxwell ( ), though the scientist’s faith was simply ‘too deeply rooted to be shaken […]’, ‘his probing mind would not allow any possible fissures between god and science to remain unexplored; they had to be surveyed and bridged. this was an intensely personal process, to be re-examined in the light of each new scientific discovery, whether his own or someone else’s’ (p. ). this was the impetus, and character, too – though the ‘faith’ which craved integration was wholly antithetical to maxwell’s, and the endeavour far less hushed – of clifford’s own poetic and rhetorical explorations of the troubled intersections of materialistic science with personal creed. accordingly, half this chapter is devoted to focused analysis of a number of ‘private’ or occasional texts written by clifford and maxwell in which scrutiny is directed as much at the assumptions of ‘their’ science as at the foundations, or ideological nuances, of their ‘supple- mental’ systems of guiding doctrine: a journal entry and a pair of verse fragments by the former; several extended poems by the latter, notably ‘to hermann stoffkraft, ph.d., the hero of a recent work called “paradoxical philosophy”’. more often than not, as i shall - - argue, works such as these were composed in attempts to ‘flesh out’, humanise or otherwise elaborate and make more palatable the idiosyncratic worldviews each was trying to articulate. as such, they form, not accidentally, a sort of ‘parallel text’ for – or, more aptly, an authorised commentary upon – the more technical and precise, less sentimental or frivolous, sorts of writings with which the two men were throughout their lives more stereotypically associated. however, despite an overriding assuredness (maxwell in his scottish protestantism, clifford in his agnostic humanism, both in the explanatory acumen of nineteenth-century science), these texts, more often than not, seem to have been composed more for personal comfort, or spiritual satisfaction and reassurance, than for that of any audience, real or foreseen. such ameliorative labours seemed to many at the time a necessary exercise, how- ever, though for some – souls perhaps not blessed with either scientist’s convictions, working inside or outside or alongside the professional scientific community – the need was even more importunate. the science of the era, as discussed in my first chapter, seemed to be groping towards a conclusion – which many then resisted, through a sometimes dazzling variety of strategies and metaphysical evasions – memorably encapsulated by myers in his ‘autobio- graphical fragment’, where he characterised the later s and early s ‘as the very flood-tide of materialism, agnosticism – the mechanical theory of the universe, the reduction of spiritual facts to physiological phenomena’ (p. ). but there were collateral moral consequences to such physical – and, consequently, religious – belief, and these, to some, could seem particularly galling. ‘to believe’, as rev. martineau pointed out in , ‘in an ever-living and perfect mind, supreme over the uni- verse, is to invest moral distinctions with immensity and eternity, and lift them from the provincial stage of human society to the imperishable theatre of all being’ (p. ). victorian materialism thus precipitated an act of banishment, an existential relegation. taking place in an age when ‘the question of man’s soul-less descent from the apes was the center of intellectual controversy’ (s. smith, p. xxii), such a further workaday affront could simply prove too hideous for some to endure. this monologue is from tennyson’s ‘despair’: oh we poor orphans of nothing – alone on that lonely shore – born of the brainless nature who knew not that which she bore! trusting no longer that earthly flower would be heavenly fruit – come from the brute, poor souls – no souls – and to die with the brute – (p. ; ll. - ) so a saved man cries out to the minister who had pulled him from the sea, where he and his - - wife had attempted to drown themselves (ironically, he does so in the same metre as maxwell’s tyndallic satire, another, more optimistic take on the period’s ‘materialism’, a work firmly anchored in the scientist’s unshaken trust in heavenly dominion). here is myers – despite periodic bouts of melancholy, he was never one to cow like tennyson’s histrionic survivor – commenting of the debris left behind by materialism’s ‘flood- tide’: it was a time when not the intellect only, but the moral ideals of men seemed to have passed into the camp of negation. we were all in the first flush of triumphant darwinism, when terrene evolution had explained so much that men hardly cared to look beyond. among my own group, w. k. clifford was putting forth his series of triumphant proclamations of the nothingness of god, the divinity of man. swinburne, too, […] had given passionate voice to the same conception. (‘autobiographical’, pp. - ) then, as now, such ‘negating’ sentiments aroused passionate counter-feelings, and the finding of something else at the bottom of things, a light in those dark places, was more than a par- lour-game to those, like myers and tyndall, either closest to, or most threatened by, such unforgiving physical and evolutionary insights: spiritually pallid, epistemologically unyielding. clifford – one of materialism’s most voluble, impassioned and ‘triumphant’ advocates – felt this concern no less keenly. his response, though, as hinted at in myers’s ‘fragment’, could scarcely have been more dissimilar, as he overpraised neither the spirit (like the former), nor nature (like the latter), but joined rather the poet swinburne in exulting, to the trepidation of many, a heretic’s te deum: ‘glory to man in the highest! for man is the master of things’ (‘hymn’, p. ). poetry as aid to explanation: w. k. clifford’s ‘stream of consciousness’ ‘it was early in his school career’, wrote j. j. thomson in a centenary appreciation of the life and works of james clerk maxwell, ‘that he began to write verses, a practice which he kept up all his life, to the great delight of his friends’ (p. ). he was, of course, not alone among victorian scientists in so doing: herschel (as noted in my first chapter) tried his hand at it, as did tyndall – earlier in his life tyndall had even submitted a few verses (preserved in the ri) to local papers and magazines under odd pseudonyms like wat ripton, wat ripton snooks, or simply ‘w. s.’ – as did clifford, too. though the existence of these works, mainly unpublished, a few circulated privately, would perhaps have been greeted by some controversialists among the london literati with a - - snort of surprise, shading into perfunctory dismissal, such an uncharitable response would hardly have been global. frederick pollock, in a (borderline hagiographic) biographical assessment prefacing the first volume of clifford’s collected lectures and essays ( ), was not alone among contemporaries in realising – despite his half-joking assertion at the start – that it is an open secret to the few who know it, but a mystery and a stumbling-block to the many, that science and poetry are own sisters; insomuch that in those branches of scientific inquiry which are most remote from the grasp of the ordinary sensible imagination, a higher power of imagination akin to the creative insight of the poet is most needed and most fruitful of lasting work. (p. ) (incidentally, frederick pollock, a legal scholar, was the son of juliet pollock, tyndall’s friend and frequent correspondent.) it is, of course, the remoteness of much abstract physical knowledge that concerns pollock the most here, its removal from the commonsensical world of medium-sized dry goods (in twentieth-century philosopher of science j. l. austin’s memorable turn of phrase). the ‘higher power’ of scientific comprehension – a mental process figured as at once difficult and a murky ‘mystery’, certainly not something for the ordinary man on the street – peers into the world of the microscopically small or the cosmologically great and, through the agency of a strongly poetic ‘creative insight’, grasps truths that had been hereto- fore occluded. this was hardly original. the image of scientist as priest or seer privy to wisdom unknown, or grasping connections invisible, to us duller, more blinkered folk (a trope encoded in the connotations of one telling professional designation even by then – the late s – still not wholly superseded: ‘natural philosopher’) was – and remains to this day – at once potent and familiar. maxwell, for instance, was renowned for his modelling of electromagnetic dynamics, in which he raided the depots of the railway engineer, blithely borrowing saw-tooth gears and idle wheels, in his quest for an enlightening, if grimy, correspondence (‘how ingenious, both electrically and mechanically!’, sharlin says of this particular scheme of analogy [p. ]), while clifford, whose toils were largely confined to the incorruptible realms of pure analysis, was similarly praised for his trademark habit of initiating even the most multi-dimensional of mathematical excursions from within the home ground of a commonsense or ‘geometrical view of numbers’ (ssc, p. ). what is more interesting is the manner in which pollock next begins to concentrate not merely on the inspirational or analogic function of such an underlying poetic sensibility, but also on its vital explanatory role. when it ‘is joined’, he explains, ‘with quick perception and delicate sympathies, it can work the miracle of piercing the barrier that separates one mind - - from another, and becomes a personal charm’ (p. ). the ‘miracle’, then, is not merely in the discovery, but in the communication (to scientific peers and, vitally, other cultural groupings as well) of formalised natural law, or particular interpretations of that law. sometimes this could be achieved by linking the strange with the comforting, ordinary, or, perhaps, reassur- ingly banal. clifford once explained the relative proportion of hydrogen to oxygen in a molecule of water subsequent to electrolytic disassociation by recourse to one of the homeliest metaphors imaginable (given his audience): ‘[i]t is clear that each of those molecules of hydrogen must have been divided into two [in the hundred molecules of water], because you cannot put horses into stables, so that there shall be exactly the same amount of horse in each stable; but you can divide pairs of horses among stables’ (‘atoms’, p. ). here, in a telling conjunction, electrochemistry meets country life. later, in the same talk, a popular lecture first delivered january before an approving (and predominately genteel) crowd as part of a sunday afternoon series, clifford referenced a similarly bucolic simile suggested by william thomson: ‘he expresses the result in this way – that if you were to magnify a drop of water to the size of the earth, then the coarseness of the graining [be- tween molecules] […] would be that of something between cricket-balls and small shot’ (p. ). the scales remain staggering, but a point of purchase is found. a hint of scandal or romance could be intimated as well. in an essay on ‘the first and last catastrophe’, clifford escorts the states of matter into the salons of polite society, describ- ing molecules in a gas dancing the ‘sir roger de coverly’; those in liquid, ‘the grand chain in lancers’; while those in a solid, where each particle has ‘a place which it keeps […]’ (p. ), are nonetheless still found to be fidgeting with the incessant twitter of thermodynamic agita- tion. are the lattermost, one must wonder, eager to rejoin more ‘energetic’ comrades on the microcosmic dancefloor? such a gift for poetic metaphor and model was not the only one that was useful to the scientist anxious to make his ideas better understood, whether to a duly attentive audience at a well-publicised ri lecture series or, perhaps, some interested, though necessarily anonymous, reader poring over one of the era’s great generalist journals, venues in which the ‘verbal and conceptual interconnectedness of the sciences, politics, theology, and literature were both sustained and revealed by their juxtaposition in periodical articles’ (dawson, noakes and topham, p. ). it was equally true that an often quite literal poetic sensibility had a wide- ranging and highly pedagogic utility in the performance of this task as well, particularly if coupled with a suitably synthesising awareness of the nineteenth-century literary tradition. - - dozens of works situated within that tradition, after all, were routinely mined by the scientists of the era in search of seemly quotations and tropes, even as the great poets themselves, figures like milton and shakespeare and tennyson, were – often quite unwittingly, to be sure (though a man like tennyson well knew his function in this regard) – conscripted into the grand and noble endeavour of relentless scientific advance, foot-soldiers alongside their platoon mates in the lab. as pollock says of clifford: ‘he had a fair general knowledge of english literature (by which i mean considerably more than is yet supposed necessary for an englishman’s educa- tion), with a preference for modern’ – a mid-victorian codeword for ‘radical’ – ‘poetry […]’. clifford was, moreover, one always to reserve – again, rather pragmatically – particular admiration for individual works and authors such ‘as gave expression to his own ideas’ (p. ). (the same could, of course, be said of a range of clifford’s colleagues as well, themselves alive to potentialities and registers of meaning secreted in verse beyond those deemed merely illustrative – though each, needless to say, had his own personal pantheon of poetic favourites from which to draw both inspiration and support.) it is, for instance, entirely possible that no substantive allusion was meant to king lear in the following phrase, one lifted from a lengthy critical essay of (partly a scathing appraisal of stewart and tait’s the unseen universe; or, physical speculations on a future state) authored by clifford for the fortnightly review. speaking of the manner in which the sane mind, housed in a body infused with the full vigour of youth and health, ‘rebels once [and] for all against its own final and complete destruction’, clifford goes on to add: ‘and forasmuch as so many and so mighty generations have in time past ended in death their noble and brave battle with the elements, that we also and our brethren can in nowise hope to escape their fate, therefore we are solely driven to find some way in which at least the image of that ending shall be avoided and set aside’ (‘unseen’, pp. - ). clifford’s concluding clause echoes, faintly if unmistakably, an image in act v of shakespeare’s apocalyptic tragedy. lear is near mad- ness, despairing at the sight of cordelia’s corpse, yet clinging simultaneously to the hope that some life still remained in her; he asks therefore of an attendant, possibly kent or edgar: lend me a looking-glass; if that her breath will mist or stain the stone, why then she lives. kent is this the promis’d end? edgar or image of that horror? (v.iii. - ) perhaps such a fleeting congruence was wholly accidental, so pervasively was shakespearean - - language and imagery by then interwoven with contemporary metaphor, idiom and cliché. however the earlier text coheres too well with clifford’s argument for this to be fully convincing: we flee, not merely death itself, but also its apparitions and reminders, ‘image[s] of that ending’. we seek, like grieving lear over his daughter’s lifeless body, a measure of solace instead, so clifford explains it, in our identification with something greater than our- selves while still alive (a faith, an army, a creed) or, perhaps, in a fervent, though unfounded, belief in some sort of life subsequent to this one (a prospect dismissed by clifford as ‘not orderly, not natural, not healthy, but monstrous or supernatural […]’ [‘unseen’, p. ]). edgar’s eschatological visions elide with clifford’s of our own necessary extinction. the allusion, though sly, is metaphysically apt. and, atop it, cadences, diction – and an undis- guised chivalric subtext – indebted to, if not worthy of, le morte d’arthur provide a further, likewise antiquarian, flourish. redolent of a hazily recalled golden age, such an implicit parallelism summons to mind a double triumph: that of ‘traditional’ english character (does not the death of that king represent one of the most rousing archetypes in western literature of ‘noble and brave’, if foredoomed, ‘battle with the elements’?), and that of ‘traditional’ anglo- saxon prosody (manifested at its most plainspoken and ‘muscular’ in mallory’s late medieval romance). in another – less clandestine – illustration, from later in the same appraisal, of clif- ford’s use of literary intertextuality in the service of his politicised philosophical ends, we note the scientist this time making profound poetic indebtednesses at once more explicit and more precise. excerpted lines are indented, italicised, set off from the main body of a mid-victorian text in a manner consonant with the fashion in which a significant equation might be high- lighted in a modern one. he, in the course of an argument, deploys a couplet (unattributed) from swinburne, always one of his favourites. (is it any wonder that the irrepressible clifford found so much to admire in the verse of that intriguing figure, perceived by all as something of an artistic libertine, one well known for his interest in ideas and subjects on the very border- lines of social propriety? by contrast, most of clifford’s fellow publicists, nervous about the potential professional repercussions of such immoderate literary affiliations, or by nature more conservative politically and aesthetically, ‘tended to ally themselves with older more respect- able poets’ [dawson, p. ]. ) clifford is here writing of the intractable, and indissoluble, another of those ‘modern’ poets prominent in clifford’s writings is walt whitman (in ‘cosmic emotion’, he editorialises on a passage from song of myself: ‘so sings one whom great poets revere as a poet, but to whom writers of excellent prose, and even of leading articles, refuse the name […]’ [p. ]). in that preference, too, - - bond between mind and matter, relating the idea of the ‘stream’ of personal consciousness – a metaphor nowadays often reflexively associated with the appearance of william james’s epochal text, the principles of psychology – with the flow of water molecules constituting a river: ‘consciousness is not a simple thing’, the scientist explains, ‘but a complex; it is the combina- tion of feelings into a stream. it exists at the same time as the combination of nerve-messages into a stream’ (‘unseen’, p. ). clifford’s split emphasis – on the stream-like nature of the recognisable contents of consciousness (i.e., thought) as well as on the uninterrupted nature of the manifold sensory and other stimuli goading such awareness – anticipates the psychologist’s later definition. in it, emphasis is likewise placed on the continuity and intermingling of those different currents – ‘a teeming multiplicity of objects and relations […]’ ( : ) – which, upon merger, collectively contribute to a unitary and interpretable mental state, that singularly enabling illusion. these diverse inputs, as james writes in a famous chapter, can be unnoticed or acknowledged, circumstantial or willed. asserting first that consciousness, though integrating effortlessly such a manifold of competing input-sources, ‘is nothing joined; it flows’, he emphatically concludes: ‘a “river” or a “stream” are the metaphors by which it [consciousness] is most naturally described. in talking of it hereafter, let us call it the stream of thought, of consciousness, or of subjective life’ ( : ). though clifford’s usage of such an ‘aquatic’ metaphor is here basically phenomenol- ogical, behind it is the same sense, as owen flannigan has phrased it, present in james’s fin de siècle conception of the ‘stream’ of personal or subjective consciousness, a thing ‘continuous, forward-moving and in constant change’: consider a mountain rill. it runs down in the sunshine, and its water evaporates; yet it is fed by thousands of tiny tributaries, and the stream flows on. the water may be changed again and again, yet still there is the same stream. it widens over plains, or is prisoned and fouled by towns; always the same stream; but at last ‘even the weariest river winds somewhere safe to sea.’ when that happens no drop of the water is lost, but the stream is dead. (‘unseen’, pp. - ) such a concept of the ‘flowing stream’ provides clifford with an extensible and pliant model to expound his own ideas of consciousness, a process, he insists, shaped both by incident (‘it widens over plains, or is prisoned and fouled by towns […]’) and the inexorable ‘downward’ was clifford remarkably progressive for his time and place, an individual, it seems, as forward-thinking in aesthetic sensibilities as he was in his own – practically unmatchable – mathematical, evolutionary and sociologi- cal ones. - - passage of remorseless time (in the ‘forgetting’ of evaporation, or the ‘acquisition’ of both shaping experiences and new competencies through the trickling contribution of effectively innumerable ‘tiny tributaries’). the heraclitean truism – ‘[…] all things are in motion and nothing at rest; he [heraclitus] compares them to the stream of a river, and says that you cannot step into the same river twice’, in jowett’s translation of plato’s cratylus (p. ) – is also implicit, recoded as ‘never the same person twice’, an acknowledgment of the irrefraga- ble flux of temporal being, that perpetual evolution and metamorphosis of character amid the hurly-burly of personal circumstance. the citation from swinburne’s ‘the garden of proserpine’ thus, on one level, merely completes the scientist’s figurative identification between watercourse and mind. in a materi- alistic philosophy of consciousness, the stream lost in the sea – and yet not lost, for the consti- tutive, albeit ‘lifeless’, water molecules persist – is equivalent in a metaphysical sense to a human personality extinguished by death. the process is irrevocable; the personality (like the totality of the stream itself), irretrievable. the principle, it seems, of matter conservation (so integral to mid-victorian physical science) restricts significantly the sorts of afterlives material bodies may experience – for clifford, at least. but the use of swinburne’s ‘proserpine’ couplet provides a further context, too. it is, in other words, not merely illustrative, or argumentative, or a way of phrasing parsimoniously – while, at the same time, memorably – a concept or critique which would otherwise sprawl over several uneconomical or, perhaps, graceless lines of prose. nor is it merely a way of capping a metaphoric arc with a canonically poetic keystone. rather, it serves also to cohere nicely with the scientist’s own thoughts (elaborated more fully elsewhere, in such writings as ‘cosmic emotion’ and ‘the influence upon morality of a decline in religious belief’) on the role of mankind in a world in which theology is discredited, in which the prospect of an eternity to be spent in either heaven or hell offers up to us neither promise nor fear. as he the philosopher of mind barry dainton remarks in his study the stream of consciousness: unity and continuity in conscious experience ( ) that ‘in some respects streams of consciousness are more like their liquid counterparts than some enthusiasts for such comparisons have recognized’ (p. ). if this is so, it raises the question: for a materialist, what happens to the ‘water’ (memories, learned skills, and the like) after death? clifford’s theory of ‘mind-stuff’, discussed later in this chapter, provides one possible answer: consciousness, having arisen from an ocean of itself, merely disperses back into that ocean, the dissipa- tion of like into like, as a river into the sea. stewart and tait, extrapolating from their own understandings of the same precept, found for it a radically divergent signification (examined in more detail in the next section). explicated cogently in the unseen universe – and, as noted, hatcheted mercilessly, by clifford, in the fortnightly – it held that ‘we are supposed to follow universal physical laws [like mass conservation] to a belief in the immortality of the soul’ (g. myers, ‘nineteenth’, p. ). - - explains in ‘the first and the last catastrophe’, those who hold such beliefs, who deny the continuity of spiritual essences or the rewards and privations of an afterlife, must just face the fact [of mortality] and make the best of it; and i think we are helped in this by the words of that jew philosopher, who was himself a worthy crown to the splendid achievements of his race in the cause of progress in the middle ages, benedict spinoza. he said: “the freeman thinks of nothing so little as of death, and his contemplation is not of death but of life.” our interest, it seems to me, lies with so much of the past as may serve to guide our actions in the present, and to intensify our pious allegiance to the fathers who have gone before us, and the brethren who are with us; and our interest lies with so much of the future as we may hope will be reasonably effected by our good actions now. (p. ) clifford’s vocabulary is decidedly ecclesiastical (our ‘fathers’, our ‘brethren’, ‘our pious alle- giance’), though his message seems anything but. ‘do i seem to say’, he adds a little further on, ‘“let us eat and drink, for to-morrow we die?” far from it; on the contrary, i say, “let us take hands and help, for this day we are alive together”’ (p. ). so he ends a popular science article on the nebular hypothesis and the end decreed by thermodynamics for all life upon this earth. like such positivistic thinkers as his contemporary frederic harrison (a good friend [ssc, p. ]) and, more notoriously, the parisian social theoretician auguste comte, clifford believed that the end of each and every life of achievement and sacrifice served to auger the establishment of a true ‘kingdom of man’ upon this earth, and that, consequently, every man’s death was a martyr’s death if his life had been lived conscientiously, devoted equally to the service of others and the betterment of self. unlike some of those thinkers, however – harrison, in an essay of , decried the ‘corrupting doctrine’ telling ‘us that devotion is a molecular change in this and that convolu- tion of grey pulp […]’ (‘soul’, p. ) – the scientist expressed little remorse about the funda- mental nature of the world as he had come to understand it. for clifford, then, our mortality, even our materiality, becomes a blessing, a fortunate fate, not something to be feared by the right-thinking man; it compels us towards action, towards cooperation (‘band-work’, he termed it, viscerally anglicising a word which still then seemed something of an obtruding latinism [‘cosmic’, p. ; see of, p. ]), towards achievement, away from sloth and idleness. the swinburne he chose for citation in his review comes from a stanza which also makes clear this point: passages presaging the arrival of a benevolent ‘republic’ or ‘kingdom of man’ are common throughout clifford’s non-mathematical work – for instance, this line, from the essay ‘cosmic emotion’, provides as corollary the scientist’s unambiguous renunciation of the christian covenant (cf. mark : ): ‘much patient practice of comradeship is necessary before society will be qualified to organise itself in accordance with reason. but those who can read the signs of the times read in them that the kingdom of man is at hand’ (p. ). - - from too much love of living, from hope and fear set free, we thank with brief thanksgiving whatever gods may be that no life lives for ever; that dead men rise up never; that even the weariest river winds somewhere safe to sea. (‘garden’, p. ) clifford’s neurophysiology finds its counterpart in swinburne’s metaphor of the ‘weariest river’ slouching homewards, even as his ‘positivism’ finds support in the poet’s celebration of mortality, or, perhaps more to the point, his shrinking from an etiolated immortality. swin- burne was one who habitually used the sea as a metaphor for death and dissolution. so did clifford, and elsewhere in the article he found in another maritime phenome- non a singularly apt memento mori, an emblem of, and an analogue for, human finitude. no man, donne tells us in meditation xvii, may be an island, but could he perhaps be a wave? ‘but for you’, clifford proclaims, ‘noble and great ones, who have loved and laboured yourselves not for yourselves but for the universal folk, in your time not for your time only but for the coming generations, for you there shall be life as broad and far-reaching as your love, for you life-giving action to the utmost reach of the great wave whose crest you sometime were’ (‘unseen’, p. ). such an outlook, of course, represents in part a philosophy of negation (‘in your time not for your time’, ‘yourselves not for yourselves’); it encodes a refusal, renunciation of despair, a denial of thanatos. it provides an alternative to heaven (the smugness associated with knowing that we live on in our progeny), even as it offers a different take on the difficult concept of immortality (not an infinite vista of deathless-ness, but rather the prospect, mildly comforting, of an ever-more-advanced and ever-more-humane human future). elsewhere, he wrote of the sea’s height: ‘it increases and decreases, and increases and decreases again at definite intervals’; if you mark a point by putting ‘a cork upon [the sea’s] surface, you will find that the cork will rise up and down; that is to say, there will be a change or displacement of the cork’s position, which is periodic in time […]’ (‘first’, p. ). so, clifford suggests, like a cork upon the sea we are borne up briefly from stillness, teeter upon the crest (maturity), and then fall gently again to rest – the wave coursing resolutely on, oblivious to our, to any, absence. the imagery, like the language and the seductive sonority of the prose, feels familiarly swinburnian, having parallels in ‘the garden of proserpine’ and elsewhere (perhaps most evocatively in one late work, ‘the lake of gaube’); the message, though, suffused with its odd blend of resignation alongside a defiant sociological optimism, - - seems singularly indebted to positivism. its publicists, not coincidentally, likewise had a penchant for watery metaphor; as harrison demonstrates: ‘[i]n some infinitesimal degree, the humblest life that ever turned a sod sends a wave – no, more than a wave, a life – through the ever-growing harmony of human society’ (‘soul’, p. ). the novelty in clifford’s employment of such symbology arises from the fluency of his comparisons, that concourse within his writings of a range of discourses, coupled with the fact that, in terms of ‘his’ materialism’s psychology (with its idea of consciousness itself as flowing, as having a ‘stream-like’ quality), these comparisons become more than merely poetic or descrip- tive, but phenomenologically precise. the chance or glancing allusion, the direct citation, the echo of mood or metaphor, these techniques provided clifford with further methods of propagandising his own ‘scientific’ agenda. such a poetic awareness or affinity, as pollock remarked in his introduction to clifford’s lectures and essays, such an openness to the literary resources of analogy and refer- ence, allowed that scientist simultaneously to describe the world in what would have seemed to him an accurate enough manner even as it granted him license to, in a sense, remake it wholesale, refashioning it, at once subtly and idiosyncratically, into a shape and hue of his own devising. pollock put it thusly: ‘this living and constructive energy’ – one defining character- istic of the naturally gifted science-writer, he insists – ‘projects itself out into the world at the same time that it assimilates the world to itself’ (p. ). hence, many such author-figures as clifford were, in a sense, cosmogonists as well, fabricating whole universes, self-made worlds malleable and internally consistent in which their contentions (whether scientific or not) made sense. each of these private ‘universes’ was, in the main, peculiar and distinct, if not in every instance altogether unique: clifford’s borrowed more than a little from tyndall’s, even as huxley’s elaborated – ambivalently, here; uncompromisingly, there – on darwin’s beatific vision, limned (limbed?) in the origin, of the ‘great tree of life, which fills with its dead and broken branches the crust of the earth, and covers the surface with its ever branching and beautiful ramifications’ (p. ). moreover, clifford, like many colleagues and competitors, availed himself fully of the common currency provided by household works of poetry, fiction and theology. by and large, even as members of the victorian public were better acquainted with the science of their era than seems the case in postmodernity, so, too, were they more that is, when they were not advancing tuneful substitutes – bringing to mind george eliot’s ‘choir invisi- ble’, whose ‘music is the gladness of the world’ (‘choir’, p. ) – in its stead, as harrison does towards the end of this quotation. - - conversant with many aspects of both its then-present and its more ancient humanistic heri- tage. clifford’s readership likely knew, if only by reputation, the licentiousness of a swin- burne, the romanticism of a wordsworth or shelley; they recognised, for the most part, the cadences of the king james bible or the metre of an in memoriam stanza. for some this competence was gained through close, full reading of the source text; for others, recollection of fragments from school or sermon, or perusal of, say, a popular anthology of cherished verse extracts (palgrave’s golden treasury was first published in ), unregulated manners of acquisition rendering the ‘poetic’ lines at once context-free and more amenable to recapitula- tion and cunning redeployment. and, to be sure, some scientific propagandists even today make use of like techniques, if perhaps more subtly. richard dawkins, in his recent neo-darwinian synthesis river out of eden ( ), after cheerfully dismissing the entire prospect of either a teleology behind, or a purpose hidden somewhere within, the cosmos’s multitudinous affairs – ‘the universe’, he tells us, matter-of-factly and without hope of appeal or reprieve, ‘we observe has precisely the properties we should expect if there is, at bottom, no design, no purpose, no evil and no good, nothing but blind pitiless indifference’ – then concludes a chapter entitled ‘god’s utility function’ by quoting a fragment of verse, co-opting its lines in a fashion which can only be described as cliffordian: as that unhappy poet a. e. housman put it: for nature, heartless, witless, nature will neither care nor know dna neither cares nor knows. dna just is. and we dance to its music. (p. ) ‘serious’ scientists do occasionally use the same as well. a article in the journal of high energy physics, discussing spacetime topological deformations wrought by closed string tachyons, ends with full citation of yeats’s ‘the second coming’, a poem put forth as ‘anticipating’ the authors’ thesis; they even gloss its opening with their own strophic updating. ‘turning and turning in the widening gyre / the falcon cannot hear the falconer; / things fall apart; the centre cannot hold […]’ (yeats, pp. - ) becomes, for instance, ‘vortex-induced / causal disconnection / follows tachyon condensation […]’ (adams et al., p. ). their tone, though, remains aloof and wry, acknowledging the absurdity of such yeatsian precognition, and the primacy (or, at best, separateness) of science. the appendix in which it occurs, ‘towards a transformative hermeneutics of off-shell string theory’, even evokes that egg-on-face pillorying of ill-judged interdisciplinarity, alan sokal’s ‘toward a transformative hermeneutics of quantum gravity’. dawkins, though, subtly misrepresents – the kind of mistake committed (or, less charitably, the sort of wil- ful deception perpetrated) at best infrequently by clifford – the overriding theme of that ‘unhappy poet’ in his chosen usage of the housman. the lines selected are taken from a piece which, if anything, attacks the pathetic fallacy alone, the belief that there is an ineradicable correspondence (ubiquitous in romanticism, of course) between human feelings and the ‘emotional states’ of an inappropriately anthropomorphised external world. here is the excerpted stanza in full: ‘for nature, heartless, witless nature, / will neither care nor know / what stranger’s feet may find the meadow / and trespass there and go, / nor ask the dews of morning / if they are mine or no’. hence, it is human arrogance, not natural cruelty or indifference per se, that seems to have been the poet’s – and poem’s – intended target. - - as it had for so many predecessors of more than a century previous, the epigrammatic yet oddly encompassing scope of the aptly chosen poetic quotation provides dawkins with a temporary, if superficial, respite from the nihilism encroaching stealthily beneath the surface of his own evolutionary narrative, a fleeting glimpse of beauty and coherence in a world denuded of meaning. and thus in the very ambivalence and inscrutability of biology is dawkins able to find a new music, a new meaning, even as clifford was able to discover a compelling sublimity and a tantalising exuberance in the vastness and comprehensibility of his own era’s vision of a nature rendered ‘heartless, witless’. ‘we are all to be swept away’, clifford wrote, ‘in the final ruin of the earth. the thought of that ending is a sad thought; there is no use in trying to deny this. but it has nothing to do with right or wrong; it belongs to another subject. like all-father odin, we must ride out gaily to do battle with the wolf of doom even if there be no balder to come back and continue our work’ (‘modern’, p. ). such a course of action, he insists, is neither suicidal nor pointless. not for clifford the paralysis of myers’s ‘would god it were evening’, a morose sonnet in which, in the era’s newly ‘material’ cosmos, even the promises of keatsian romanticism are quashed: ‘alas! a melancholy peace to win / with all their notes the night- ingales complain, / and i such music as is mine begin, / awake for nothing, and alive in vain’. there is, for him, too much yet to live for. humanity’s future, hence, elides with norse mythology, not christian theology; with ragnarök, not john’s apocalypse. clifford’s eschato- logical visions, his ‘image[s] of that horror’, evince, accordingly, a grand and triumphal burst of glory before the ultimate conflagration, even though he, of all people, knew only too well the manner in which all cosmologically scaled thermodynamic processes must inevitably play out – and in that conflagration, truly, he’d say, we would meet the absolute and inescapable ending of all ponderable things. in the meantime, what joy could be found, beyond duty, in clifford’s philosophy was provided by ‘cosmic emotion’ (henry sidgwick’s coinage), ‘an emotion which is felt in regard to the universe or sum of things, viewed as a cosmos or order. there are two kinds of cosmic emotion – one having reference to the macrocosm or universe surrounding and containing us, the other relating to the microcosm or universe of our own souls’ (‘cosmic’, p. ). clifford, clifford was not alone among victorians in his deliberate evocation of this mythology. carlyle, as gillian beer points out, gave in ‘a synopsis of the balder legend in heroes and hero-worship […]’; moreover, matthew arnold, in ‘balder dead’, an epic-length poem of , provided his readers with a characteristic ‘[…] christian- izing of the myth in which balder is identified with christ’ (of, p. n ). - - in an essay on this queer concept, suggests a ‘star-full’ sky as one spectacle ideally suited to produce ‘cosmic emotion of the first kind’; exultant contemplation of man’s ‘moral faculty’, perfect to incite the second (pp. , ). these were, however, compensatory comforts which seemed paltry to many. mallock, in the new paul and virginia, tartly punctured the narcissistic solemnity of such a doubly focused ‘sensitive’ atheism (darnley’s ‘bosom swelled violently, and he cried aloud, his eyes still fixed on the firmament, “oh, important all! oh, important me!”’ [p. ]), while in ‘is life worth living?’, a meditative essay of , he went even further, mocking the absurd presumptuousness of all naturalistic guides to conduct, saying of their advocates: ‘but the knowledge which has qualified them to destroy religion, has no bearing whatsoever on the knowledge that will qualify them to replace it’ ( : ). more pessimistic still was the appraisal put forth in rev. watson’s gospels of yesterday. peering into the depths of clifford’s oceanic metaphor, having skimmed off pretty rhetoric and all the humanistic froth, he discerned beneath those ‘waves’ an unquenchable emptiness, the abysmal unendurability of any cosmological system denying the agency of christ: and there is no remedy. for men, for societies, for the whole human race, one law holds in the vast dominion of force. the mightiest nation is but a wave in the weltering ocean which beats from cosmic shore to cosmic shore, unceasingly active, eternally impotent. what is it to a man that the wave of which he forms a part will have its flashing crest for a moment as it rolls in on some resounding beach? he is nothing; the ceaseless movement is all. (p. ) was a conciliation to be found? one scientist who could seemingly manage to reconcile a viable accounting of the natu- ral world with the revelation denied by clifford was maxwell. he, like many among the polemicists’ fraternity, appealed frequently to the tenets of molecular physics, though derived from them antithetical conclusions, ‘that neither the kinetic theory of gasses nor the laws of thermodynamics implied materialism’ (harman, p. ). the manner in which he was able to do so will be the focus of my next section. thermodynamics as allegory: maxwell’s critique of the unseen universe john herschel said of the infallibility and instantaneity of atoms, in : ‘their movements, their interchanges, their “hates and loves,” their “attractions and repulsions,” their “correla- tions,” their what not, are all determined on the very instant. there is no hesitation, no these issues (anti-materialism, anti-positivism) truly energised mallock. he later expanded ‘is life worth living?’, already formidable, to book-length. verdict? – tentatively affirmative, after pages. - - blundering, no trial and error’ (‘atoms’, p. ). maxwell, echoing herschel, and stirred simultaneously by christian faith and the grandeur of nineteenth-century scientific concep- tions of the phenomenal world, famously believed that at least one among several conceptual entities – specifically, molecules – deployed in the paradigms of contemporary theoretical physics provided evidence, as it were, of the ‘flawless’-hence-‘manufactured’ beginnings of physical substance. molecules, he wrote (in a celebrated article of that name), ‘continue this day as the day they were created – perfect in number and measure and weight […]’; their perfection, in a sense, mirrors the perfection of god, as ‘they are essential constituents of the image of him who in the beginning created, not only the heaven and the earth, but the materials of which heaven and earth consist’. one wonders, having heard this, what of the second law? what of its decree, wholly unanswerable, that all order – including molecular order – must in the end dissolve? maxwell, predictably, had thoughts on this as well. ‘natural causes’, he enthused, as we know, are at work, which tend to modify, if they do not at length destroy, all the arrangements and dimensions of the earth and the whole solar system. but though in the course of ages catastrophes have occurred and may yet occur in the heavens, though ancient systems may be dissolved and new systems evolved out of their ruins, the molecules out of which these systems are built – the foundation stones of the material universe – remain unbroken and unworn. (p. ) immutable, eternal, ‘steadfast’, exempt from the ravages of entropy, molecules must have seemed to provide maxwell with palpable confirmation of his faith, proof positive of his long- held contention that the elements of structuring, in sublime ensemble with all the voices of our experiential world (indeed, with a perhaps unique expressiveness), ‘tell the same unending story – / “we are truth in form arrayed”’. so he had rejoiced in his undergraduate compo- sition ‘a student’s evening hymn’ (p. ). in other words, for maxwell, the study of molecules opened wide a window on the numinous. but that should not be confused with the belief that they – that worldly things themselves – constitute the numinous. in a speculative essay submitted to the cambridge apostles, maxwell had two decades prior to ‘molecules’ cautioned against this line of argu- ment, against slippage from recognition of potential signs of cosmic design to assertion of metaphysical certainties (about, for instance, corporeal, or spiritual, or ethereal, afterlife) based on those signs. such a prejudicing ‘hope’ – a debilitating urge to find scientific evidence for that which necessarily lies, or so he insisted, beyond the reach of scientific evidence – ‘has tyndall, in his address, found room to comment on the ‘ethic glow’ and ‘very noble strain of eloquence’ so unmistakable in these lines, while nonetheless critiquing their theistic implications (ba, p. ). - - prompted many speculations of natural historians, who would be ashamed to put it into words’ (‘what’, p. ). peter guthrie tait, maxwell’s untiring correspondent, apparently felt few such scru- ples. though j. d. north’s entry for tait in the dictionary of scientific biography makes no mention of it – yet another instance of the selective amnesia of the scientific community – he and his friend, balfour stewart, were perhaps best known in the s for two popular works. they were the unseen universe (that so tempting target for clifford’s invective), and its sequel, paradoxical philosophy ( ). both deployed concepts from physics – energy conservation, the permeability of the ether – in defence of some, to modern sensibilities, curious speculations concerning the perfect and eternal ‘durability’ of the human soul. the scope of such inquiries, as explained in paradoxical philosophy, was justified on the grounds that ‘the only result of drawing a hard and fast line between the natural and the revealed has been to divide us into two separate and seemingly hostile camps, the one under the banner of science and the other under that of religion’ (p. ). the unseen universe, in particular, despite its potentially impervious subject matter, was to prove a sensation, going through numerous re-printings (fourteen editions in thirteen years [g. myers, ‘nineteenth’, p. ]), as nervous victorians found solace in its vision of harmony between personal immortality and the transience decreed by atomistic and thermodynamic science. the authors aspired for more, however, beyond comfort-giving; as p. m. heimann has observed: ‘though the unseen universe can be regarded as a popularization of science for an ideological purpose, it was intended as a contribution to the philosophy of nature’ (p. ). in fact, an assortment of contemporary thinkers attempted an array of comparable projects, at once psychologically resuscitative and theoretically aware. like the unseen uni- verse’s authors – searching amid entropic ruin, amid the waste of lives and worlds, for spiritual redemption – each typically discovered at least redemption’s vague promise, a hope cheering if equivocal. a few even undertook multiple such ‘quests’, returning diverse travelogues: not least, tait himself. he, fifteen years prior, had co-authored, with william thomson, an article on thermodynamics for good words. a text far more explicitly christian than the unseen universe, it was unambiguous in making apparent to a theologically and culturally conservative readership the ‘synergism’ between cosmological narrative and biblical apocalypse, directly relating guttering ‘heat death’ to the cleansing of genesis’s primordial flood. the dead cosmos of distant futurity, as the authors dutifully explain, is doomed to endless mouldering in ‘chaos and darkness as “in the beginning.” but before this consummation can be attained, in - - the matter of our solar system, there must be tremendous throes and convulsions, destroying every now existing form’ (p. ). transcendental geometer c. h. hinton, in his extraordinary allegory ‘the persian king’ ( ), likewise found in the thermodynamic arrow of time an unwavering pointer to celestial providence. the tale provides a convoluted parable in which an invisible, magnani- mous and (effectively) omnipotent monarch is able to goad his unwitting subjects from inactiv- ity by making certain actions ‘feel’ more pleasurable than certain other actions. to it is appended hinton’s moral – and inductive – justification: ‘they [the subjects] might have reasoned. […] [the] universal condition of anything happening must be the cause. energy goes from a higher to a lower level. that which causes the difference of level is the cause, and the cause of the difference of level must be that which accompanies such a transference of energy from a higher to a lower level’ (p. ). thus is god, mover of aquinian scholasticism, discovered. he is found in the day-to-day, peeking out from – and furiously pulling levers behind – the now-translucent ‘curtain’ of thermodynamic directionality. he seems a material- ist’s wizard of oz. if anything, though, the unseen universe’s synthesis, the era’s most valiant and persua- sive attempt at salvaging a fiction of meaning from otherwise implacable physical precepts, went further than either tait and thomson’s article or hinton’s entropic fable, dragooning poetry along with religious prophecy in support. (few peers had unmitigated sympathy with this approach, but it seemed ‘correct enough’ to many.) in the course of just the epigraphs for seven chapters, stewart and tait quote the tempest (prospero’s ubiquitous soliloquy on ‘[…] this insubstantial pageant, faded, / leav[ing] not a rack behind’ [iv.i. - ]), thomas campbell’s ‘the last man’, virgil, milton’s paradise lost, pascal, plato’s phaedo, tennyson (in memoriam, more than once), pope’s essay on man, st paul’s epistle to the romans, macbeth, and – for purposes, one imagines, of a kind of spiritual compendiousness – that codification of ancient judaic oral tradition known as the mishna, pirke abot. this is in addition to all the inset quotations and allusions evident in the text proper, which – alongside scores of explicit scrip- tural references and metaphoric parallelisms – include citation of further works by such major, and heterodox, figures as byron, lucretius, matthew arnold, john stuart mill, pope again (‘the dying christian to his soul’), plato again (the gorgias). and, bestrewn among all these, a variety of more ephemeral – or, perhaps, more ‘irremediably victorian’ – personages: henry baker and james montgomery, james martineau and the rev. charles parsons reichel, b.d. pilgrim’s progress makes an appearance on the verso of the title page, right beneath a few lines - - from hadrian. as ‘science’, the text – subtitled physical speculations on a future state – feels at once accu- rate and wilfully misleading, an appraisal not exclusively modern. inside, official-sounding phrases, communal terminologies, and a hotchpotch of both overtly and subliminally ‘christian’ sayings and literary extracts are intermixed. this is done in a manner which would, among other things, have appealed to prejudices, post-belfast address – scots algebraist alex macfarlane deadpanned, in a lecture: ‘[i]t is certainly remarkable to find in the same book a discussion of carnot’s heat-engine and extensive quotations from the apostles and prophets’ (p. ). the authors piggyback on the writings of such ‘precursors’, borrowing cachet, assimilating presumptions. they reject ‘any attempt to separate the natural from the miraculous’ (heimann, p. ), and assign to the ‘unseen’ a role not incongruous with that of the holy spirit (the existence of such an underhanded corre- spondence was one of clifford’s chief complaints). the materialists’ presupposition of conti- nuity of energy and law becomes rather a statement, for them, of the continuity of intelligence, of human personality liberated from the corpse-coffin of matter, made undulatory, and set adrift amid waves of ether. so is that individual rendered, for practical purposes, undying. the unseen universe, accordingly, ends with an accounting of jovial congruence, the overlapping of thermodynamic with new testament revelation: if then we regard the universe from this point of view we are led to a scientific conception of it which is […] strikingly analogous to that system with which we are presented in the christian religion. for not only are the nebulous beginning and fiery termination of the present visible universe indicated in the christian records, but a constitution and power are assigned to the unseen universe strikingly analogous to those at which we may arrive by a legitimate scientific process. (p. ) entropy, in such a reckoning, becomes a means to both an end, and an ending, a gateway rather than gallows; thermodynamics, a way of at once ordering the visible universe and stocking stewart and tait’s purported invisible one. ‘in other words’, they explain, ‘the tendency of heat is towards equalisation; heat is par excellence the communist of our universe, and it will no doubt ultimately bring the system to an end’ (pp. - ). as greg myers has observed, the ‘reference to a communist, four years after the fall of the paris commune, would have carried a specific meaning for stewart’s and tait’s readers. the social order and the cosmic, the end of the universe and the end of capitalism, are conflated’ (‘nineteenth’, p. ). yet this collapsing of merged economic and physical organisations ushers in the emergence not of nothingness, nor of chaos, but instead a better organisation, one reified in the ether, made incontrovertibly eternal yet somehow preserving the priceless ‘currency’ of ontological - - distinctiveness. though the guardian, for one, had described the unseen universe as ‘a perfectly sober inquiry, on scientific grounds, into the possibilities of a future existence’ (qtd. in ‘macmillan’, p. ), maxwell himself remained rather less convinced. he frequently chastened his col- league, in both epistolary and an assortment of discursive contexts, for holding such unsup- portable – and, to his mind, irresponsible – beliefs. he ended the otherwise laudatory verse ode ‘report on tait’s lecture’ with a joke playing on tait’s assertions about the destiny of matter: ‘while you, brave tait! who know so well the way / forces to scatter, / calmly await the slow but sure decay, / even of matter’ (p. ). of course, maxwell, convinced of its absolute permanence, believed atomic matter altogether incapable of any sort of decay. on september , upon hearing news of the planned publication of paradoxical philosophy, a collection of further ‘hymns’ to a posthumous ethereal existence, maxwell wrote a letter to tait. in it, he commented (riffing on the unseen universe’s concept of ‘spiritual evolution’) that it ‘is said in nature that uu is germinating into some higher form. if you think of extending the collection of hymns given in the original work, do not forget to insert “how happy could i be with ether”’. (‘how happy could i be with either’ – melody: ‘have you heard of a frolicsome ditty’ – is a philander’s lament sung by macheath in gay’s beggar’s opera [p. ; ii.xiii], perhaps maxwell’s comment on tait attempting to ‘have it both ways’ with a ‘scientised’ christianity.) in a subsequent review of the book for nature, he observed, in tones imbued with the full weight of the serial’s editorial voice: ‘on opening this book, the general appearance of the pages, and some of the phrases on which we happened to light made us somewhat doubtful whether it lay within our jurisdiction, as it is not the practice of nature to review either novels or theological works’ (‘paradoxical’, p. ). he was to dedicate the remainder of the article, unsurprisingly, to analysis of the scientific non sequiturs and lapses in logic present in many, perhaps most, of paradoxical philosophy’s conceptually misguided, if unquestionably earnest, crypto-pagan imprecations. maxwell, however, could hardly resist using the platform of a formal review in nature (especially given its topic) to elaborate on his own beliefs about what ‘science has to say about the soul’: ‘the progress of science […]’, he concluded, ‘has added nothing of importance to what has always been known about the physical consequences of death, but has tended rather to deepen the distinction between the visible part, which perishes before our eyes, and that which we are […]’ (p. ). in effect, maxwell suggests looking inward, towards revelation and the boggling perplexities of self-consciousness, rather than outward, at the relative mundanity (in all its senses) of entropic convulsion and energy - - conservation; for, in so doing, we might find authentic guarantees – avatars, even – of post- mortem continuance. as theodore porter has noted, in maxwell’s view, ‘[b]oth science and religion […] needed to be protected from mistaken claims of their incompatibility’ (p. ); evidently, though, they required also vigilant defending from hyper-unificationism, epitomised in tait and stewart. hermann stoffkraft (such a surname conjoining the two halves of büchner’s – and nineteenth-century scientific naturalism’s – cosmology: stoff, ‘matter’; kraft, ‘energy’) is the pivotal character in paradoxical philosophy, a teutonic rationalist embodying the doctrines of materialism, and who, appropriately, voices a litany of objections to the metaphysical argu- ments offered therein. yet, as maxwell chides in his review, he ‘makes it his chief care to brandish his materialistic weapons as not to hurt the feelings of his friends […]’ (‘paradoxical’, p. ). indeed, stoffkraft’s defence of materialism is so attenuated that, by book’s end, he has fully embraced the peculiar beliefs about immortality held by the several members of the so- called paradoxical society. to him maxwell dedicated his poem ‘to hermann stoffkraft, ph.d., the hero of a recent work called “paradoxical philosophy”’. maxwell’s decision to, as it were, ‘redistribute’ responsibility for the work’s content – a move suggested by the poem’s title – from its two authors to stoffkraft himself can perhaps be explained by a letter, ostensibly written by the fictitious character, which appeared in nature not long after the volume’s publication. ‘there are […] strong scientific analogies’, the missive’s ‘hermann stoffcraft’ insists, ‘which lead us [the members of the paradoxical?] to believe that the thinkable antecedent of the present [cosmological] system was a spiritual unseen, which not only developed but which now sustains the present order’. maxwell’s ‘to hermann stoffkraft’ opens with an evocation of a human soul envi- sioned in terms of entangled atomic vortices, maxwell’s preferred model for atomic structure, derived from helmholtz and thomson, a model in which mysterious forces need not be introduced to account for emission and absorption spectra, the apparent profusion of chemical elements, the interlinking of atoms into molecules and compounds, and so forth. the ‘vortex atom’, he explained elsewhere, is ‘qualitatively permanent, as regards its volume and its strength, – two independent quantities. it is also qualitatively permanent as regards its degree incidentally, though ‘stoffkraft’s’ communiqué could have been penned by tait or stewart, it seems so deliriously narcissistic – sample argument: ‘is it therefore necessary that i should in like manner help to sustain some inferior universe?’ – that i am fairly sure it was submitted by some satirist, perhaps maxwell himself. - - of implication, whether “knottedness” on itself or “linkedness” with other vortex rings’ (‘atom’, p. ). (clifford liked the concept too, praising such atoms as, ‘if […] not the foundation of the final theory of matter, […] at least imperishable stones in the tower of dynamical science’ [‘unseen’, p. ].) ‘my soul is an entangled knot, / upon a liquid vortex wrought / by intellect, in the unseen residing’, ‘to hermann stoffkraft’ begins (pp. - ), rehearsing, in vortex vernacular, just the sort of description ubiquitous throughout paradoxical philosophy and, earlier, the unseen universe. such lines hint at the element in the speculations of stewart and tait to which their author took the gravest exception. maxwell, a rational empiricist, presumed the ether to be an entity comprehensible to science, potentially a quantifiable substance obeying discoverable rules, knowable if not yet fully known. ‘if aether is molecules’, he reasoned in manuscript notes, ‘be the molecules ! or ! [in size] of those of hydrogen, the aether is a gas tending to equality of temperature with other bodies […]’ (‘notes’). for maxwell, the ether was a thing, and, as a thing, the ether was of this world. and, as something of this world, it seemed a dreadfully unsuitable destination for the human soul, something maxwell believed profoundly immaterial, intrinsically unworldly. we are thus meant to interpret the following lines of his ode with suspicion: till in the twilight of the gods, when sun and earth are frozen clods, when, all its energy degraded, matter to æther shall have faded; we, that is, all the work we’ve done, as waves in æther shall forever run in ever-widening spheres through heavens beyond the sun. (p. ) now, it is evident that maxwell did not really mean any of this – such a rhapsody, in effect, merely describes the götterdämmerung of stewart and tait’s post-conversion stoffkraft. max- well, with his well-documented ardour for the principle of molecular incorruptibility, thought the idea of matter degrading to ether – of matter, in truth, degrading to anything, given his generation’s unfamiliarity with radioactive decay – ludicrous, borderline nonsensical. his unshakeable insistence that the physical world was incapable of ‘assembling’ the human soul – ‘atoms’, he once quipped, ‘are a very tough lot, and can stand a great deal of knocking about, and it is strange to find a number of them combining to form a man of feeling’ (qtd. in ljcm, p. ) – has as its logical corollary the contrary supposition: that the same physical world (irrespective of ‘paradoxical’ properties) is equally incompetent to effect the soul’s disassembly, - - facilitating individual personality’s energetic preservation. many years after its drafting, maxwell affixed an alternative title, ‘does the existence of causal chains prove an astral entity or a cosmothetic idealism?’, to his undergraduate piece ‘what is the nature of evidence of design?’ (ljcm, p. n ). this alteration points once more to maxwell’s continued concern with unjustified inference from tokens of continu- ity in the universe – the conservation of force, and so on – to a belief that, consequently, human spirit itself is regulated by analytical laws, demonstrating corresponding complexities. the final stanza of ‘to hermann stoffkraft’ – understood as dramatic monologue, rather than maxwellian volte-face – is written from the perspective of an individual altogether secure in such a fallacious hypothesis. it is, however, a hypothesis which would be called immediately into doubt by any evidence suggesting that causality isn’t inviolate, that energy isn’t conserved. and, thus, maxwell (or, more accurately, his poetic alter-ego, a stand-in for stoffkraft or, perhaps, some ordinary member of the paradoxical) implores: ‘oh never may direct creation / break in upon my contemplation; / still may thy causal chain, ascending, / appear unbro- ken and unending’ (p. ). there is a bit of truth in these lines for anyone, of course: sceptic or spiritualist, hermann helmholtz or hermann stoffkraft. a scientist like maxwell depended – perhaps even more so than those characters in paradoxical philosophy – upon causality, upon regularities in natural law, upon inviolable conservation principles. but, for him, such considerations provided not evidence for posthumous continuation (in any sort of strange or ethereal form, like resonances in stewart and tait’s ‘unseen’), but rather further confirmation of his long- held belief that, as he wrote in a buoyant little ditty, the ‘end that we live for is single /’ – the glorification of god – ‘but we labour not therefore alone, / for together we feel how by wheel within wheel, / we are helped by a force not our own’ (‘tune’, p. ). the entirety of ‘to hermann stoffkraft’, in other words, is parodic, written in mock celebration of another theoretician’s personal beliefs, beliefs with which maxwell passionately disagreed. it was perhaps the fact that the ‘other theoretician’ in question was his treasured friend p. g. tait that caused the scientist to soften, even mask, the exuberance of the work’s satire, though, it must be said, maxwell’s humour was frequently at once both subtle and self- effacing, and many of his poems (not merely this one) disguise beneath their superficial placid- ity a kicking wit. tait himself would later note as much. in an overview of maxwell’s publica- tions and research interests (published in nature not long after the scientist’s death), he found room to comment, if hyperbolically, both on the felicity of maxwell’s poetic skills and the - - ferocity of his satiric ones. ‘no living man’, he explained, ‘has shown a greater power of condensing the whole marrow of a question into a few clear and compact sentences than maxwell shows in these verses. always having a definite object, they often veiled the keenest satire under an air of charming innocence and naïve admiration’ (‘clerk-maxwell’s’, p. ). in defence of ‘scientific’ poetry in his preface to the oxford book of victorian verse ( ), the ubiquitous ‘q’, arthur quiller- couch, ever mindful of his formidable responsibilities as a selector and arbiter of popular taste, remarked that there were some among his contemporaries who believed that ‘the anthologist does his best service in recapturing fugitive, half-forgotten poems – frail things that by one chance or another cheated of their day have passed down to limbo’ (p. vii). he, however, never found such an occupation profitable. instead, quiller-couch insisted that intrinsic worth (as he judged it!) should be the sole criterion for a given work’s inclusion. few indeed of the ‘scientific’ or occasional poems addressed in this dissertation would have survived – or even risked – passage through such an uncompromising sieve. yet many of them provide intriguing documentation of a wide range of cultural anxieties, both in the scientific sphere and in that of mid-victorian society at large. this being granted, it would, of course, be disingenuous to argue that these verses, considered as a group, constitute a signifi- cant artistic achievement in the same sense that, say, those of tennyson constitute a significant artistic achievement; at the same time, it would also be to do them a tremendous disservice not to concede that several of their number, if not indisputably high art, must nonetheless be considered of high merit. it is, however, merit of a peculiar sort, as it often seems to arise less from conventional literariness and more from each individual poem’s curious cultural location somewhere between lecture and literature, scientific explanation and (perhaps dubious) moral, aesthetic or philosophical expostulation. james najarian, querying the idea of ‘minorness’ in victorian verse, wonders: ‘[w]hy [minor] poets access the modes they do – what were these poets reading, and how were they reading in order to form their subjectivities and express them in that most literary of forms, poetry, in ways that were (deliberately?) outwardly lacking originality?’ (p. ). these issues are central, whether analysing william mcgonagall’s verse or james clerk maxwell’s. but ‘scientific’ poems pose scientific questions too, and must be interrogated as both informing and, concurrently, being informed by non-literary arenas. certainly, they must be - - read with the milieu of the mid-century in mind, a space of lectures and laboratories, profes- sional alliances and scandalously public disputes. but they must also be read in the context of normal paradigms, and a scientist’s own theories and suppositions about the nature, govern- ance and description of the physical world. (sometimes in the context, too, of the unfamiliar or challenging minutiae of those theories and suppositions.) maxwell’s ‘to the committee of the cayley portrait fund’, for instance, addressed to certain fellows of trinity college, cambridge, presupposes a range of specialist literacies. an encomium in form and flavour, its author animates conceptual entities associated with arthur cayley, a pure mathematician who during the course of his career both formalised matrix algebra and elaborated the theory of quarternions (though always one to remain sceptical about their practical benefit, he eventu- ally contributed an analytical chapter to the rd [ ] edition of tait’s elementary treatise on quarternions). accordingly, phalanxes of noughts and ones, and some stranger numbers, are marshalled by maxwell in homage, arrayed into the ranks and files of rectilinear algebraic matrices: ‘first, ye determinants! in ordered row / and massive column ranged, before him go’. next, the poet commands, ‘ye powers of the nth roots of - ! / around his head in cease- less cycles run, / as unembodied spirits of direction’. the final reference is at once punning and arcane: the (imaginary) roots of negative one not only form the basis of complex analysis, but also its mid-century generalisation, quarternion algebra; in that ‘hypercomplex’ system, the non-real components of each quaternion -tuple – as suggested by the curious phrase ‘unembodied spirits of direction’ (‘unembodied’ since imaginary) – are deemed to represent three-dimensional extension. moreover, delightfully, iterated powers of the square root of negative one do in fact ‘in ceaseless cycles run’ – the scientist’s playful literalisation of a tricky mathematical concept – as every fourth power of i is taken to equal itself: ! in = i ( n+ ). the vitality of such connectedness, such tight enmeshing of poetic word with personal world, in textual artefacts of this sort must be kept constantly in mind if one is to avoid the sort of honest misreading proffered for ‘to hermann stoffkraft’ – admittedly one of maxwell’s more cryptic efforts – by twentieth-century physicist j. j. thomson. of that poem’s conclud- ing stanza thomson wrote: ‘it has some lines which are a remarkable anticipation of the speculations which are now [circa ] so common about the destiny of matter and energy’ (p. ). these rhapsodic ‘speculations’ of maxwell, however, are only to be taken seriously, as i have argued, in so much as they predict the condition of the universe in the far downstream: without potential, paralysed by entropy. they say nothing, except by indirection, of max- - - well’s own beliefs about the ‘fate’ of molecules condemned eternally to wander such a sepul- chral domain. as with in memoriam’s prescient ‘evolutionism’, then, the seemingly ‘forward- thinking’ aspects singled out by thomson in ‘to hermann stoffkraft’ are actually responses to – even critiques of – pre-existing theory, not prophecy at all. of such ‘poetic’ works by mid-victorian scientific thinkers some are, of course, ephemeral. others, even in view of the most blindly charitable of critical appraisals, of an at best debatable degree of either literary or socio-historical merit. a very small number indeed are both these things. take this ‘inverted doxology’ proposed by clifford; it is preserved in edward carpenter’s my days and dreams ( ), a curmudgeonly memoir. in a description of his days at cambridge, carpenter, later a fully ordained minister but then an idealistic young curate nonetheless far from averse to mixing with a crowd of freethinkers often less than sympathetic towards his chosen vocation, recalls that clifford would preside over gatherings of an informal colloquium devoted to discussion of literature, theology (or, as was more likely, its immediate, wholesale abolition), sexual and domestic politics, and other topics of pressing intellectual interest. clifford, he tells us, ‘was a kind of socratic presiding genius at these meetings – with his satyr-like face, tender heart, wonderfully suggestive, paradoxical manner of conversation, and blasphemous treatment of the existing gods’ (p. ), a man who appar- ently delighted in his own self-consciously scandalous declarations of radical religious unbelief: o father, son and holy ghost – we wonder which we hate the most. be hell, which they prepared before, their dwelling now and evermore! (qtd. in carpenter, p. ) this is crude, of course – indeed its generic baseness was part of its design, composed as it was to shock and startle a cambridge which only in relaxed its statues concerning religious affiliation and the taking of holy orders by senior members, mocking the seeming simplicity of officially mandated spiritual declarations by the making of an equally facile counterclaim. however, aside from a brief glimpse into the author’s iconoclastic personality proffered by the daring novelty of its form, the piece adds little to our knowledge of either clifford the man or the sort of scientific rationality he represented. he was, after all, in no one’s estimation a closet atheist. in that extended review, for instance, of the unseen universe, he addresses the work’s authors as deluded, if not yet quite beyond redemption, comrades in science, even while denigrating their juvenile and, he hints, unwholesomely atavistic hankering after an effectively repugnant system of christian belief: - - ‘that which you keep in your hearts, my brothers’, he explains, ‘is the slender remnant of a system which has made its red mark on history, and which still lives to threaten mankind’. (this was a radical tactic: contrast the extremity of clifford’s stance with tyndall’s respectful re-channelling and reworking, rather than comprehensive renunciation, of those same drives in the bulk of his own philosophy.) a few sentences earlier clifford had gone so far as to characterise the theological predisposition seemingly inherent in humankind as little more than the ‘sickly dreams of hysterical women and half-starved men […]’ (‘unseen’, p. ). adrian desmond points out, in his biography of t. h. huxley, that even john morley, liberal editor of the fortnightly and redoubtable advocate for many authors of unconventional or unpopular stripe, had more than once had ‘his fingers burnt’ over his – and his serial’s – continued advocacy of w. k. clifford (p. ). not all victorians, it seems, were eager to tolerate the scientist’s habitually wild-eyed diatribes against both organised religion in general and protestant christianity in particular. (that’s not to say that some didn’t find such anti- theological diatribes endearing – or energising, for that matter. ‘[m]y great social success of the period [the mid- s], not now to be sniffed at, was gained by outdoing poor clifford in a contest of schoolboy blasphemy’, so robert louis stevenson once reminisced of his years of literary apprenticeship among the radicals and positivists of london [qtd. in reid, p. ].) by contrast, a poem clifford addressed to lucy – his wife, and a woman who was, af- ter his early death, to become a prominent author in her own right, though one sometimes prone to decidedly ‘un-cliffordian’ bursts of sentiment – seems at once to provide humanising biographical insight while simultaneously deepening our appreciation for the thoroughness of the scientist’s materialism. it begins with a familiar motif, a likening of death to the end of summer: ‘the summer dies out, sun by sun; / the lily droops to the ground and dies; / dies, but the root in the ground lives on. / that shall one day rise’ (qtd. in ssc, pp. - ). the manoeuvre is whitman-esque, even as it describes with admirable rectitude the processes of organic degen- eration and biological rejuvenation. his prophecy of resurrection, however, is wholly natural, not theological, and, as extended in the following lines, becomes a metaphor associating his own mortality with his ‘deified’ wife, perceived as transcendent, but in an earthly way: is it thus with me, o sun of my days? shall death lay hold on me, after you, till you shine again, and the fresh warm rays revive me too? the old tales tell of a soul of things, - - how earth and sky are made of his breath, how in one man’s flesh he folded his wings and died the death. (qtd. in ssc, p. ) the christian narrative (one of those ‘old tales’) is referenced (the incarnation figured as a stilling of divine motility, a ‘fold[ing] of wings’), and then dismissed. clifford, in its place, substitutes a seventeenth-century conceit, with his whole mental world (and its phenomenal manifestations of externality) attributed to a personal and loving monism: ‘all my world is of one love made; / earth and sky are the limbs thereof; / life and death are its life and shade, / and the soul is love’. this seems a far more considered and ‘positive’ paganism than that encountered in the quatrain preserved by carpenter, though, of course, it remains equally dismissive of theological conviction. similarly, we gain a far more substantive insight into the social ideology of the scientist through an entry in one of his later cambridge notebooks. though not in verse, it apes the form’s density, seeming a quasi-swinburnian paean to scientific – and, implicitly, political – revolution, a song to a rationalistic sunrise. (pollock, with evident disdain, dubbed the affair ‘half-poetical’ [p. ]). within, we encounter clifford grappling with issues raised by the spectre of materialism; we note as well the atheistic bluster of his public pronouncements (and persona) muted, even as we observe both an explanation of, and a justification for, his vision of a post-theological, empirically based humanism, one seemingly at once far more rigorous and far more reasoned than most of the kindred lines of argument lurking elsewhere among his published essays and reviews. all by way of a lengthy prose meditation on that celebrated – and widely circulated, in a dizzying variety of victorian literary and cultural contexts – injunction prefacing william blake’s ‘auguries of innocence’: ‘to see a world in a grain of sand / and a heaven in a wild flower, / hold infinity in the palm of your hand / and eternity in an hour’ (p. ; ll. - ). clifford’s opening sentence seems a masterpiece of pragmatic understatement (language or bicycle), just the kind of thing we might expect to hear from such a practically minded individual; thereafter, though, we are exposed to something new: whosoever has learnt either a language or the bicycle can testify to the wonderful sudden step from troublesome acquirement to the mastery of new powers, whose mere exercise is delightful, while it multiples at once the intensity and objects of our pleasures. this, i say, is especially and exceptionally true of the pleasures of perception. every time that analysis strips from nature the gilding that we it is fascinating to compare clifford’s effort with an (equally touching) poem maxwell dedicated to his own wife; his work, however, makes embodied love entirely subservient, and approximate, to divine blessing: ‘strengthen our love, o lord, that we / may in thine own great love believe / and, opening all our soul to thee, / may thy free gift receive’ ([‘wife’], p. ). - - prized, she is forging thereout a new picture more glorious than before, to be suddenly revealed by the advent of a new sense whereby we see it – a new creation, at sight of which the sons of god shall have cause to shout for joy. what now shall i say of this new-grown perception of law, which finds the infinite in a speck of dust, and the acts of eternity in every second of time? why, that it kills our sense of the beautiful, and takes all the romance out of nature. and moreover that it is nothing more than a combining and re- organizing of our old experiences, never can give us anything really new, must progress in the same monotonous way for ever. but wait a moment. what if this combining and organizing is first to become habitual, then organic and unconscious, so that the sense of law becomes a direct perception? shall we not then be really seeing something new? shall there not be a new revelation of a great and more perfect cosmos, a universe fresh-born, a new heaven and a new earth? mors janua vitæ; by death to this world we enter upon a new life in the next. a new elysium opens to our eager feet, through whose wide fields we shall run with glee, stopping only to stare with delight and cry, “see there, how beautiful!” […]. (qtd. in pollock, pp. - ) mors janua vitæ: ‘death is the door to life’. but not bodily death, of course – death rather to preconceived notions of natural or- der, the abandonment of worthless, though bedazzling, gilding formerly prized or deemed in some fashion precious to us. as in ‘the unseen universe’, clifford’s language is again grounded in that of the king james version, as he proposes a secular sacredness to both painstaking experimentation and subsequent entheorisation, processes, in his worldview, often profoundly, irreversibly transformative of souls and civilisations alike. compare, for example, the celestial city, the new jerusalem, so vividly prophesised in the final chapter of the book of revelation: ‘and he [the angel] showed me a pure river of water of life, clear as crystal, proceeding out of the throne of god and of the lamb. in the midst of the street of it, and on either side of the river, was there the tree of life, which bare twelve manner of fruits, and yielded her fruit every month: and the leaves of the tree were for the healing of nations’ ( : - ). it is science, however, clifford intimates, not theology, that promises to make real, in a manner of speaking, st john’s extraordinary vision, that will provide us with entry into a ‘great[er] and more perfect cosmos, a universe fresh-born, a new heaven and a new earth’, even as it will be the texts of that science (darwin’s origin, spencer’s first principles, maxwell’s treatise, along with countless other germinal works as yet unwritten, though dimly foreseen) that will be as sacred documents heralding liberation, the books – written by several authors and on sundry topics – of a scientific, secularised and defiantly humanised ‘newer testament’. it will be they that will provide duly faithful and open-minded readers with tantalising glimpses of better worlds still to come, of ‘new revelation[s]’ as yet unimagined (and as yet unimaginable, as we are not yet endowed with cognitive faculties adequate to their perception); it will be they that will serve to unlock for us – or the victorians – the gates to paradises renewed and revivified. but while the christian heaven is a markedly static place, a tennysonian lotus-land, - - free of struggle and strife and (reciprocally, it must be remembered) either mental attainment or any teleology of ethical or personal progression, where the blessed for all eternity content themselves in the glorification and sight of the lord, william kingdon clifford’s is most assuredly not. st john in revelation figuratively brings the bible full-circle, back once more to genesis, to verdant, luxurious eden with its blossoming ‘tree of life’. clifford’s revelation, by contrast, his own characteristic depiction of a utopian future for ennobled and enlightened man, is pro-, not retrogressive, and from it further revelations can – and must – be achieved. moreover, it is entirely of this life, not the next; entirely of this earth, not some further realm, at once unattainable and logically incomprehensible. carlyle, too, had earlier in the century secularised this forceful conceit; of a sudden spiritual resurgence teufelsdröckh, repurposing revelation : , declaims: ‘[t]he heavy dreams rolled gradually away, and i awoke to a new heaven and a new earth’ (sartor, p. ). likewise is clifford’s paradise a local one, at least potentially, not situated somewhere paradoxically beyond space or the grasping reach of time. presaging kuhnian epistemology’s notorious notion of a ‘paradigm shift’ – in conse- quence of which it ‘is rather as if the professional [scientific] community had been suddenly transported to another planet where familiar objects are seen in a different light and are joined by unfamiliar ones as well’ (kuhn, p. ) – clifford’s ecstatic vision of novel worlds without end would seem also to suggest that each would appear effectively incommensurable to those that dwelt in the previous, like ‘a new picture more glorious than before, to be suddenly revealed by the advent of a new sense whereby we see it’. and as the bible’s new jerusalem brings about ‘the healing of nations’, so, also, will science’s, clifford explains, if coupled with a braveness and a stoicism in the face of mortality, echoing the ethical stance advocated by positivism. self-sacrifice will be necessary too, to maintain such a paradise, another point of agreement: ‘he [clifford] would not gauge the worth of human life […] by its degree of happiness, but with a touch of the ascetic bade men forego happiness as their goal in favour of tribal efficiency’, as james sully wrote in ‘scientific optimism’, an article of (p. ). (harrison, in , proclaimed a positive ‘religion, of which the creed shall be science; of which the faith, hope, charity, shall be real, not transcendental, earthly, not heavenly – a religion, in a word, which is entirely human, in its evidences, in its purposes, in its sanctions and appeals’ [‘modern’, p. ].) christianity is quietist, even selfish – ‘failings’ noted as much by clifford as by harrison (or, near contemporaneously, friedrich nietzsche). as such, the scientist would have - - humanity bound by terms set forth in one of the most atypical of all wordsworthian odes, that to ‘duty’, an allusive and at times despondent work in which the compunctions of that un- compromising virtue are heard to resound in the poet’s consciousness as if echoing the very voice of god: stern daughter of the voice of god! o duty! if that name thou love who art a light to guide, a rod to check the erring, and reprove; thou, who art victory and law when empty terrors overawe; from vain temptations dost set free; and calm’st the weary strife of frail humanity! (p. ; ll. - ) clifford quoted these lines in the early portions of his own elaborate ode to moral and human- istic duty, the essay ‘cosmic emotion’ (p. ). and they suggest the dark side to his vision of distant, green lands revealed under the light of fresh-risen suns, of brave, new worlds ‘at sight of which the sons of god shall have cause to shout for joy’ (qtd. in pollock, p. ). nature (as much human as external), the poet observes in the opening stanza of his emphatic ‘ode’, reveals to us – ‘weary’ representatives of a suddenly ‘frail humanity’ – ‘empty terrors’ which ‘overawe’. later, in the same work, a troubled and doubting wordsworth implores, asking humbly of ‘duty’ herself, that stern, though often mastering (for the mindful, it is ‘a rod / to check the erring’), personification of positivistic virtue: ‘give unto me, made lowly wise, / the spirit of self-sacrifice; / the confidence of reason give; / and in the light of truth thy bond- man let me live!’ (p. ; ll. - ). such terrors, apprehensions and hopes are implicit in clifford as well, and his meta- physics vacillate, in mood and effect, between darkness and illumination, between a world ‘progress[ing] in the same monotonous way for ever’, in which science ‘kills our sense of the beautiful, and takes all the romance out of nature’ (suggested as one possibility in the passage discussed above), and one in which an epiphanic, liberatory, ‘moralised’ science provides an ever-hopeful human race with a succession of cheering and alluring ‘new creation[s]’ of its various till-then benighted world-pictures, each one, he intimates, ‘more glorious than before’ (suggested as another – and, for the moment, favoured [qtd. in pollock, pp. , ]). but, surely, it would seem to be darkness, in the end, that predominates, as implicit in clifford’s account of successive revelations is a belief as well in successive trying, even brutal, skirmishes to achieve them. and his ragnarök, the final thermodynamic doom prophesied in ‘the first and last catastrophe’, remains unimaginably far ahead, with, as he would reso- - - lutely insist, no consummating assumption into valhalla of the bold, the weary – or even the worthy – in its wake. (clifford, in bald précis, had ‘one very simple message – […] no god, no soul, no future life’, as w. h. mallock put it [‘late’, p. ].) there will be, in other words, no real, tangible reward for anyone, regardless of stature or the part for good or ill he or she may have played, in its terrible aftermath, as, by definition, ‘heat death’ – clifford’s ‘last catastrophe’ – can have no aftermath. in the meantime, then, the ‘final battle’ rages on, with momentary respites, perhaps, but those the exception, not the norm. such an eschatological scheme could hardly be more out of step with those posited by most western faith-traditions. for his, at base, is a nominally darwinian view of things, in which struggle and ad- vance represent the natural state of affairs – intellectually, socially, ethically, scientifically – and such a presumption, he insists, is one hardly to be contested. cliffordian society, it seems, cannot afford to rest upon its laurels, though at least it, unlike the apparently aleatoric affairs of lower species, has a teleology – provided by science and tending, for now, towards the better. nevertheless, as is made equally clear, even this general progressive tendency could, he fears, be countermanded by the stultifying demands of unreasoning piety. ‘take heed’, he wrote in his lengthy review of the unseen universe, warning his readers – by way of a confused horticultural analogy – against allowing in their own time any resurgence of sacerdo- tal christianity (‘that awful plague’) or, for that matter, some other equally debased form of ‘non-scientific’ worship, ‘lest you give soil and shelter to the seed of that awful plague which has destroyed two civilisations, and but barely failed to slay such promise of good as is now struggling to live among men’ (p. ). what, however, was the nature of the materialism – and the ‘darwinism’ – he ranged against faith? and was it in fact as ‘un-coddled’ as he liked to think? clifford’s ‘mind-stuff’: the ideal materialism? clifford’s materialism was at once hard-headed and tender-hearted. he was, as many have noted, an impassioned advocate of darwinism – indeed, his initial departure from high as a sympathetic columnist at the times observed, the fierceness of such conviction, coupled with sincere pedagogic aspirations, forbid clifford from ‘rest[ing] content until he had made us taste with him the philosophy, the polity, the morality, and even the poetry of the new era [post-origin of species, post-belfast address, post-songs before sunrise, post-first principles, etc.]’ (‘professor’, october ). ‘[s]cientific thought’, clifford (towing the positivistic line) told the assembled membership of the baas at brighton late in the summer of , ‘is not an accompaniment or condition of human progress, but human progress itself’ (‘aims’, p. ). - - church orthodoxy had come under the influence of the origin and those writings of its earliest hermeneuticists. always a passionate evangelist for the causes of science, before his death from tuberculosis at thirty three he had plotted to recast his writings for the periodical press into a volume to be entitled the creed of science (pollock, p. ). the appearance to him of evolutionary doctrine, in particular, had, as he described it, the radiance of an emergent revolutionary paradigm, a transfixing, even solar, providentiality about it; it represented, or so he argued, a disciplinary moment so singular as to justify what might have seemed to some of his contemporaries professional over-infatuation with the idea: ‘when the sun is rising, we pay special attention to him and admire his glories […]’ (‘cosmic’, p. ). furthermore, ‘[h]e belonged’, lightman explains in the origins of agnosticism, ‘to a circle of young men […] who looked to evolution for a new system of ethics which would combine the precision of the utilitarian with the poetical ideals of the transcendentalist’ (p. ). clifford’s natural philosophy had its quirks, too, evincing an analogous double focus, seeming at once unyielding and agnostic. he, for instance, with an empiricist’s skepticism overruling a mathematician’s innate inclination towards abstraction and idealisation, always remained decidedly dubious about the validity of assertions concerning actions taking place ‘forever’, ‘though all space’, ‘unchangeably’, ‘with exact precision’. similarly, he was never one to trust that lines in, say, absorption spectra were absolutely coincident from atom to atom; that each molecule of a given substance was, following on from maxwell, not only experimentally, but actually, indistinguishable; that the laws of physics and chemistry were universally or eternally applicable. these had been foundational precepts of the species of naturalism expounded by tyndall, huxley and others, where they had the status of dogma, almost beyond proof. (f. w. h. myers remarked in ‘modern poetry and the meaning of life’ – a spiritualistic shimmy becoming drolly apparent in his concluding prepositional phrase – that such overriding theoretical assumptions, ‘even if as yet but dimly and narrowly understood, may conceivably be valid for the whole universe, on all possible planes of being’ [p. ].) clifford, by contrast, while granting local and limited validity to such concepts (atoms seem identical, or near enough; matched spectral lines can be reasonably assumed to possess equivalent frequencies; generalised physical laws can be used with broad certainty of correctness) – after all, clifford knew, how else could science prosper and progress? – he found for them a pragmatic utility. in his periodical contributions, in defence of such a tendency towards epistemological conser- vatism, he deployed arguments – and phrasings – of a jurisprudential circumspection. witness - - this tiptoeing disclaimer, from ‘the unseen universe’: ‘[t]he laws of motion and the conser- vation of energy are very general propositions which are as nearly true as we can make out for gross bodies, and which, being tentatively applied to certain motions of molecules and the ether, are found to fit’ (p. ). ‘the figure of speech or of thought’, maxwell pronounced in one presidential address, ‘by which we transfer the language and ideas of a familiar science to one with which we are less acquainted may be called scientific metaphor’ (‘section’, p. ). clifford’s justification of psychophysical parallelism – in which he cites as evidence the linguistic theorisations of müller and the physiological researches of helmholtz – is based on a sense of equivalent complexity, suggesting (by way of one such metaphor) that a spoken sentence and the same sentence written are two utterly unlike things, but each of them consists of elements […]. now the relation between the spoken sentence and its elements is very nearly the same as the relation between the written sentence and its elements. there is a correspondence of element to element; although an elementary sound is quite a different thing from a letter of the alphabet […]. (‘nature’, p. ) so, too, he suggests, is there a mapping from consciousness ‘ejective’ to neural perturbation, linking cognitive functioning not only with the higher processes of language, but with verbal ghostings of self-awareness, utterances like ‘i am’. responding to those who, daunted by such prospects of material imbrication, fall back onto theological orthodoxy, denying any credibility to scientific theories enveloping thought in convolutions of neurobiology, he seems more exasperated than anything else: ‘to say: “up to this point science can explain; here the soul steps in,” is not to say what is untrue, but to talk nonsense’, he insists (p. ). moreover, he follows tyndall in refusing subjectively, even invidiously, to demarcate vitality, or to stipulate absolute criteria for sentience; he writes of the precepts implicit in ‘his’ theory of mental evolution: ‘for if that doctrine be true, we shall have along the line of the human pedigree a series of imperceptible steps connecting inorganic matter with ourselves. to the later members of that series we must undoubtedly ascribe consciousness, although it must, of course, have been simpler than our own. but where are we to stop?’ (p. ). his question is rhetorical. so he continues his investigation, discerning in base matter not only tyndall’s ‘promise’ of terrestrial life, but, with greater force, its potency – even its kinship – too, discerning a glimmering, or the germ, of sentience, of higher mind itself, all the way down. in his article ‘on the nature of things-in-themselves’, he heads the final section ‘mind-stuff is the reality which we perceive as matter’, asserting in its second sentence that a ‘moving molecule of inorganic matter does not possess mind, or consciousness; but it possesses a small - - figure - george romanes, mental evolution: a lecture, p. . - - piece of mind-stuff’ (p. ). turner has noted that ‘clifford’s mind-stuff was essentially an idealistic monism’ (‘victorian’, p. ); it provided an explanatory mechanism sidestepping all at once the mind-body problem, the question of the origin of awareness and vitality, and the paradox presented by the fact that matter (in the brain) can fabricate some conception of itself. as william james commented in principles, clifford’s insight had the deep virtue of allowing him to insist that, in his universe, ‘no new natures, no factors not present at the beginning, are introduced at any later stage’ ( : ). a more modern thinker like arthur eddington, in the nature of the physical world ( ), used the label ‘mind-stuff’ to assert a perceptive necessity: ‘by “mind” i do not here exactly mean mind, and by “stuff” i do not at all mean stuff’, as he qualified his declaration ‘the stuff of the world is mind-stuff’ (p. ). for clifford, however, who believed exactly that, such a statement suggested something true and precise about ontology, something genuinely mind-like about cosmological matter. tess cosslett has charted how, developing in parallel with, but separate from, theories of organic evolution – a discontinuity which became in time the source of marked discomfiture – were theories dealing with the progression of intelligence (pp. - ). in a popular lecture of , george romanes, eminent darwinian and close academic colleague of clifford in london, suggested that the ‘problem’ of intellectual development was a ‘subject […] second to none that has ever occupied the attention of our race’ (p. ). his talk focused on a ‘somewhat formidable-looking diagram’ (fig. ) presenting ‘the whole course of mental evolution […]’ (p. ). with a taxonomist’s zeal, he identified thirty-seven levels of physical development (embryo to adult englishman), psychological sophistication (reflex ‘pugnacity’ to sidgwick’s ‘cosmic emotion’), and mental refinement (from none, via fetishism and monotheism, to scientific awareness). he also represented cultural attainment diagrammatically – the ‘low savage’, for instance, having, at best, the intellect of an english toddler (p. ). but clifford, through advocacy of ‘mind-stuff’, blurs such gradations, refusing absolut- ism while recognising difference – and shirking in the process that victorian propensity for category and easy ranking. this was in him so ingrained a tendency that it coloured his judgment on non-biological matters as well. in his physics, even his nothings become a something, prospectively – indeed, as he hints in pleasingly parmenidean fashion, maybe even the same something. his most audacious speculation in ‘the unseen universe’ concerns the most extreme of all possible monisms, a viewpoint linking not only the inorganic with the organic, not only the insentient with the sentient, but his generation’s proxy for nothing or - - emptiness (ether) with its something-surrogate (matter): ‘until, therefore, it is absolutely disproved it must remain the simplest and most probable assumption that they are finally made of the same stuff, – that the material molecule is some kind of knot or coagulation of ether’ (p. ). space, matter, life, thought: all become congruent, even coincident, in an insight so radical, so ahead-of-its-time, that it might, as clifford biographer monty chisholm dreamily speculates (in a chapter co-written with her husband, a mathematician working on clifford algebras), ‘provide a future clue to a “grand unified theory”’ (p. ). and there are, the scientist avows, moral consolations, and consequences, of such materialistic beliefs as well. evolution, for one, though it may seem to unmoor some of the old certainties – ‘the loss of the immutable and eternal verities […]’ of both traditional and even paleyan theology – provides, or so he conjectures in ‘cosmic emotion’, as unforeseen benefit a scientifically calibrated ‘conception of a good action, in a wider sense than the ethical one’ (p. ). for him, a ‘good action’ is one which augments our organicity, his chosen barometer of race advancement, elevating us ‘up’ the ladder – the geometric conceit at once biologically conventional and an analogue for theistic damnation or salvation – away from insensate in- organicity. becoming, for clifford, trumps being: ‘in this way the human race embodies in itself all the ages of organic action that have gone to its evolution. the nature of organic action […] is to personify itself, and it has personified itself most in the human race’ (p. ). ‘we more and more need a religion that can deal with this world’, frederic harrison wrote in the present and the future: a positivist address ( ), ‘which has something to say to the intellectual and social problems of our age, which can show us how to live on earth, not how to prepare for heaven’ (p. ). he here makes explicit the role of positivism as bespoke faith, as culturally contingent a belief-network as fin de siècle spiritualism, oriented towards victorian problems, satisfying (albeit, for some, only temporarily or inadequately) victorian aspirations and wants. ‘positivism’, as the modern political theorist john gray has delineated it, ‘is a doctrine of redemption in the guise of a theory of history’ (p. ), a displacement of the christian hope for individual salvation onto that of the species as a whole. clifford’s concep- tion of evolutionism becomes the biological co-conspirator of positivism’s moral imperative; his ‘natural selection’, a surrogate god, or all-mother. he quotes a ‘splendid hymn’ of ‘mr. swinburne’s’ as if in evidentiary support of this hypothesis: mother of man’s time-travelling generations, breath of his nostrils, heartblood of his heart, - - god above all gods worshipped in all nations, light above light, law beyond law, thou art. (‘triumphalis’, p. ) these lines are from ‘mater triumphalis’, a panegyric to democratic upheaval, to the dreams of those french revolutionaries, with the ‘mother triumphant’ a personification of liberty, justice, fraternity: a secular idol – and ideal. clifford, in ‘cosmic emotion’, deploys them in support of his judgments about evolution, that womanly apotheosis of swinburne’s republican ode becoming, by insinuation, a biogenetic as well as a socio-political marianne (pp. - ). as this essay was first published in the tolerant nineteenth century, he felt boldly able to cite the name of his preferred muse – in ‘the unseen universe’ he had, by contrast, left the couplet from ‘the garden of proserpine’ to reverberate anonymously – at a time when swinburne was usually referred to in the periodical press, if at all, by indeterminate epithet (‘a singer’, ‘a living english poet’); this decision, gowan dawson tells us, ‘seems to have provoked little attention at the time, but it would soon become a central issue in the [typically negative] portrayal of clifford immediately after death’ (p. ). the implicit coupling would have been unmistakable to educated readers, however: the social forces of political rebellion and cultural progression are inextricably yoked to the processes of biological evolution and morphological transformation, processes which, in clifford’s worldview, are predominately directed ‘up- wards’. (‘if i have evolved myself out of something like an amphioxus [a primitive fish], […] i have become better by the change; […] i have become more organic’, he explains in ‘cosmic emotion’, arguing for just the sort of undisguised progressivism certain to quail the present- day evolutionist [p. ].) this, though an alliance foreign, even wrongheaded, in most twentieth- and twenty-first-century construals of ‘true’ darwinian insight, was nonetheless a supposition not out of character with its period; as dale confirms: ‘[george] lewes, spencer, [leslie] stephen, clifford, tyndall, darwin himself, and many others all tried to turn evolu- tionism to good account’ (p. ). clifford, in ‘on the scientific basis of morals’, a study in evolutionary ethics, even found the justification for social altruism in an individual’s sense of duty to tribe, ‘one of the primary units on which natural selection works in homo sapiens […]’, from his perspective (dale, p. ). for clifford, then, an imperative towards novelty and incessant improvement impels both nature and human nature; that swinburnian mother, enemy of the ancien regime, friend to insurrectionists, wrecks all old orders, nurturing or giving birth to new and better ones. such a line of metaphor returns us to clifford’s notebook entry, which likewise celebrates the stripping away of those gilded monuments associated with religious (and crypto-religious) - - iconography: ‘the temples and the towers of time though breakest, / his thoughts and words and works, to make them new’, swinburne says of his exultant mother (‘triumphalis’, p. ). so, too, clifford suggests, does evolution refine and perfect physiology. though this might suggest the meliorism of someone like henry drummond – who proclaims of nature in the ascent of man ( ): ‘evolution, development, progress are not only on her programme, these are her programme’ (p. ) – clifford never forgot, or ceased to fear, the possibilities of degeneration: spiritual, cultural, intellectual, social, even biological. he was hardly alone among victorians in doing so, however. his muse swinburne had already in own writings documented comparable worries of recidivism, particularly in moral and political spheres. ‘mater triumphalis’, accordingly, finds its glum counterpart in another, less optimistic piece in the collection songs before sunrise – ‘mater dolorosa’: ‘mother of sorrows’, an appellation applied since the middle ages to the bereaved mary, mother of jesus – a title, and a conjunc- tion, making the poet’s (and, by association, the scientist’s) usurpation of the theological by the secular and humane utterly unmistakable. ‘this is she for whose sake being fallen, for whose abject sake, / earth groans in the blackness of darkness, and men’s hearts break’ (p. ): this couplet describes the pitiful state of swinburne’s sorrowful mother before the firebrand of populist revolution is lit – or wherever, and whenever, it has been prematurely extinguished. but, for clifford, the linguistic parallelism, and punning, between mater and ‘matter’ serves further to insist that this revolt is as much against a retrogressive ‘in-organicity’ – those tableaux of bestial, primitive anthropoid history (which haunt also tennyson’s ‘the dawn’: ‘red of the dawn! / is it turning a fainter red? so be it, but when shall we lay / the ghost of the brute that is walking and haunting us yet, and be free?’ [p. ; ll. - ]) – as it is against the oppressive features of the modern patriarchal state, and those equally suffocating strictures imposed by the tenets of revealed religion. repentance, redemption and human fallibility: the case of james clerk maxwell’s george herbert clifford championed swinburne, that up-to-the-moment bard of godlessness. is it not apt, comte’s symbolic flag of positivism was to depict a ‘young mother, carrying her infant son […]’, thus rendering positivism the heir of catholicism – the ‘virgin coming to be regarded as the personification of humanity’ (willey, p. ). tyndall also accentuated such a phonetic parallelism: giordano bruno, he reminds us, always insisted that ‘[m]atter is not the mere naked, empty capacity which philosophers have pictured her to be, but the universal mother who brings forth all things as the fruit of her own womb’ (ba, p. ). - - therefore, that the poetry of maxwell seems to find its model in the more devout metaphysi- cals: donne, to an extent, but especially herbert? on his deathbed, in fact, a witness testified, beyond the conventional pieties, to the scientist reciting ‘the morning after an unusually bad night, the five stanzas of [herbert’s] “aaron” without a mistake’ (qtd. in ljcm, p. ). in the poetry of herbert, a spiritual cycle – sin, suffering, death and heavenly resurrec- tion – is brought to completion through the agency of christ. that same cycle is in ‘aaron’ given a modulated, even mildly dissonant, tonality, however: though a conversion poem, it seems one having at its nucleus, as helen vendler has phrased it, ‘a fever of self-obliteration’ (p. ), not merely the rational, ‘reasoned through’ obviation of a niggling spiritual doubt. aaron himself was moses’s brother, yet another instance of the sort of typology which confers upon the poet a theological as well as a metaphoric richness. he serves as an archetype for the figure of the priest, more specifically, the vaguely mystical priest, the old testament cleric- conjurer, a wrathful emissary of the divine more than capable of duelling with pharaoh’s court magicians. he seems a preternatural figure (one, needless to say, at a great remove from any dottering village vicar), a sort of moses for the recently deceased, ‘raising the dead / to lead them unto life and rest’ (ll. - ). herbert contrasts such an idealised priest with his own spiritual self-perception, figuring himself a poor aaron indeed, predestined by his own inade- quacies to spend eternity in that place where there ‘is no rest’ (line ). but then he remembers christ, ‘(who is not dead, / but lives in me while i do rest)’, a spiritual intercessor unknown to ancient aaron (ll. - ). in christ, he imagines, he could have rest, rest of the peace that passeth understanding sort; in him, he could be reborn, ‘that to the old man’ – himself, an imperfect servant of god – ‘i may rest, / and be in him [christ] new drest’ (ll. - ). similar play between these multiple senses of ‘rest’ – rest, repose; rest, death; rest, res- pite; rest, relaxation – first strikes the reader of maxwell’s poem ‘on st. david’s day’. in its final stanza, the lord, we’re told, will grant sinners ‘rest of life and not of death, / rest in love and hope and faith, / till the god who gives their breath, / calls them to rest from living’ (p. ). this feels nearly as packed as the herbert, while seeming similar in its archi- tecture: maxwell’s ‘rest of life’ recalling herbert’s realm of ‘life and rest’; maxwell’s gratitude for divinely bestowed ‘rest from living’ echoing herbert’s praise for a christ, ‘without whom i could have no rest’ (line ). maxwell’s is a devotional poem, of course, not a ‘scientific’ one, but it suggests also a more general hierarchy of allusion and symbol, while indicating something of the depth of his religiosity. however, if perceived first and foremost as a recasting of ‘aaron’, it must, at least - - in part, be considered a failure – and yet a failure remarkably consonant with the cultural sensibilities of its time. vendler has written of the nineteenth-century spiritual climate that would have compelled one contemporary adapter of ‘aaron’ for choral singing to excise many of the work’s grimmer undercurrents, its harbingers of damnation and requiem. this represents no superficial change, however, altering, to vendler’s mind, the very essence of the poem, producing something certainly not like herbert, who is far more primitive, saying there is a hell, there are the dead, sins threaten an eternity of no rest, the priest has the supernatural power to raise the dead, and the priest should take care not to be himself one of the dead. these thoughts, rather archaic for the nineteenth- century “enlightened” mind, are silently passed over […]. [t]he priest emerges not as a sacred intermediary possessing supernatural power, but rather as a helpful minister – sound, harmonious, pure, engaged in finding rest for the sinful. (pp. - ) how, though, was a figure like maxwell able to maintain a kindred complacency? it might seem uncanny that a scientist whose name remains so associated with theories suggesting a godless materialism – thermodynamics, electromagnetism, statistical mechanics – managed nonetheless to maintain throughout his life such an unstrained, even cheerful, relationship with theological orthodoxy. but that is precisely what maxwell did, and he espouses – in his versification, in particular – a piety that seems to embrace both the christian trinity and aspects of that materialistic one identified by t. h. huxley, except, of course, where aspects of the latter conflicted with the former: in any insistence on the banishment of the soul, the indifference of a creator, or the silence of a world with no word to sustain it. for instance, his poem, ‘a vision. of a wrangler, of a university, of pedantry, and of philosophy’, composed while a student at trinity college, cambridge, gives details of one particularly vivid hallucination, telling of a crisis of faith expeditiously averted (one finding origin, ultimately, in the precepts of a ‘too mechanistic’ epistemology). it tells how maxwell, wearied by long hours of revision, sat half-asleep in a chair. his mind, however – endlessly active and as yet uneasy – contrived to insure that any dozing would be at best sporadic, conjuring up for him a gallery of grotesques, nightmare-figures embodying the university itself: ‘fathers there, of every college / led the glorious ranks of knowledge’ (p. ). these, in turn, fade into the shadows, supplanted by a hideous, nomi- nally feminine, apparition – a frankenstein monster for the obdurate materialist, bereft of spirit, animated by malice and machinery: ‘angular in form and feature’, ‘hair of pens and skin of paper; / breath, not breath, but chemic vapour’, ‘eyes of glass, with optic axes / twisting rays of light as flax is’. through such eyes, he imagines, ‘all nature / seems reduced - - to meaner stature. / if you had them you would hate your / symbolising sense of sight’ (p. ). though maxwell here concedes the body’s role in perception (‘symbolising […] sight’), he clearly considers this by itself insufficient. for him, any existence would be unendurable in which spirit did not supplement the meagre data provided by such brusquely ‘analytic’ organs. the creature then addresses maxwell directly, admonishing him for his lack of focus, advancing the ‘cause’ of pedantry and ignorance: “of the [natural] philosophic spirit richly may my son inherit; as for poetry, inter it with the myths of other days. “cut the thing entirely, lest yon college don should put the question, why not stick to what you’re best on? mathematics always pays.” (p. ) soon, a second figure enters the dream (this time, a decidedly beatific one), eclipsing that first monstrosity – for surely it is maxwell’s demon: his truest nemesis, the corporealisation of all those loathed tenets of psychological materialism – and banishing it to the shadows. this new vision’s appearance serves to remind maxwell (who, again, never really seemed to doubt such an assertion) ‘that creation / bears the test of calculation, / but that man forgets his station / if he stops when that is done’. men of science, he insists, must, in consort with the vast and unscientific majority, ‘learn’ – or, if necessary, be reminded how – ‘to worship as we ought’ (p. ). george herbert, in ‘vanity [i]’, had two centuries prior expressed a not dissimilar conviction. the ‘fleet astronomer’ of that era, he had suggested, too easily ‘thread[s] the spheres with his quick-piercing mind’ (ll. - ). maxwell’s modern spectre is likewise capable of ‘seeing planets in their courses / thick beset with arrowy “forces”’ (p. ). (note as well the incidental critique of newtonian ‘action at a distance’.) herbert’s ‘subtle chemic can devest / and strip the creature naked […]’ – in other words, he can reduce man to the thing itself, the very condition of soulless mechanism – ‘till he find / the callow principles within their nest’ (ll. - ). maxwell, in ‘a vision’, confronts just such an abomination (obvious archaisms emphasising his literary indebtedness: that first visitation had ‘breath, not breath, but chemic vapour’). in a sense, the scientist, with herbert, asks in chorus of the uncontemplative investiga- tor: ‘what hath not man sought out and found / but his dear god? […]’ (‘vanity’, ll. - ). his natural philosophy, in other words, often seems an extension into the ‘materialistic’ mid-century of a paradigm associated with the natural theology of its earlier half, even of - - herbert’s christian humanism. it would seem, then, that what differentiates the scientifically inspired verse of tennyson (and other such thinkers distressed about the horrors or implica- tions of materialism) from the scientifically inspired verse of maxwell (a professional investiga- tor labouring methodologically within an apparently materialistic paradigm) is, at its heart, a matter of trust: in maxwell – a believer never wavering in his conviction concerning the essential truth of, say, psalm : : ‘the heavens declare the glory of god; and the firmament sheweth his handywork’ – there is no authentic doubt about the relationship between science and the precepts of faith; that doubt is reserved instead for the relationship between scientists and the precepts of faith. he, through his writings, affirms a kind of partitioned worldview: the universe, sometimes to be understood as if it were material, is never perceived as solely that, rarely described as solely that. as kaiser has observed, for maxwell ‘the laws of [human] mind and the laws of nature were both aspects of reality created by god, but only partial aspects. one could, therefore, arrive at a view of reality entailing either freedom or determinism depending on how one focused the instruments of observation and analysis on the events involved’ (p. ). for these same reasons, some of maxwell’s theories can seem ‘materialistic’; others, dynamistic; still others, not comfortably reducible to either overarching paradigm. despite this necessary partiality, however, the world remained for him a blessed spec- tacle, with scientific inquiry ‘a divine vocation’, as schaffer has characterised it (p. ). in ‘a student’s evening hymn’, maxwell refers to god as ‘thou that fill’st our waiting eyes / with the food of contemplation’ (p. ). and it is through such enlightened contemplation that victorians, scientists or not, can know him, themselves and their world – and in such a way deemed harmonious with the particular talents (gifts themselves of god, surely) of their own era. thus, the poetry, and thought, of james clerk maxwell provides an intriguing counter- part to that of w. k. clifford, indicating how two totally irreconcilable worldviews – and two radically contrasting matrices of allusion and reference – can coexist, and can, at the same time, both perform, and contribute to, the discovery, and promulgation, of excellent science. - - chapter heated exchanges: john tyndall, thomas carlyle, and the rhetorics of thermodynamic conservation we were told lately that a great scientific man, in his best hours, when he looked at the boundless universe as far as it was revealed to his power of observation, could not but have forced upon his mind the be- lief that there was some mind far greater, and power more powerful than any human mind, before which all these truths which he was fee- bly groping after were clear and plain. - the archbishop of canterbury, november many victorian intellectuals were excited by tyndall’s invitation at belfast, stirred to action, reaction, delineation or redefinition. c. h. hinton, author of ‘the persian king’, was one. ‘we are bidden […]’, he wrote in ‘professor tyndall and the religious emotions’, published four months subsequent to tyndall’s address in the contemporary review, his phrasing seeming that of the apprentice – or acolyte: ‘we are bidden to seek some thought respecting the universe and our relationship to it that shall do two things: in the first place, shall satisfy the religious emotions, and, in the second, shall not contradict the results of the exploration of the universe by our senses and our intellect’ (p. ). he proposes a solution, a reconciliation, a synthesis of matter and heart. it seems, in retrospect, a hollow one, wholly unsatisfactory, at once un-filling and unfulfilling, a rhetori- cian’s gambit leaving urgent spiritual hungers unsated, while doing few favours, if little out- right damage, to the causes and crusades of science (or scientism) itself. all the same, it is striking that hinton, like so many others in the century’s latter half (secularists and atheists as much as spiritualists and divines), felt challenged enough to make it. his own technique involves confrontation with the facts of materialism head-on, the wholesale redefinition of concepts: the dumb processes of physical causation, of one thing (‘a’) leading inexorably to another (‘b’), for instance, are by him re-inscribed in a variety of judeo-christian sacrificial meta-lingo, becoming ‘the visible image of the giving up of one’s life for another’s being’ (p. ), of a rock falling so that the thump might be heard, that the ground might be shaken and epigraph from [a. tait], p. . - - warmed. as huxley once remarked in a well-known letter of september to charles kingsley, novelist and chaplain to queen victoria: ‘whoso clearly appreciates all that is implied in the falling of a stone can have no difficulty about any doctrine simply on account of its marvellousness’ (p. ). huxley boggles at the perfection and comprehensibility of physi- cal transformation, apprehending it as a wonder far surpassing any of the unsubstantiated claims of protestant theology. hinton goes one better, finding in thermodynamic metamorphosis itself a proxy for such refuted and ‘inadequate’ belief-systems. for him, the conservation of matter, of force, becomes a kind of metempsychosis of energy, a passing on of ‘volition’, a higher-level phe- nomenon not unworthy of his vision of a redacted and improved materialism nonetheless denying simple mechanism: a ‘heartless’ supposition he believed both metaphysically naïve and scientifically simplistic. hinton’s chosen language is that of exhortation, of the preacher (or the mountebank). his sentences – in the main, short, declarative, straightforward in their diction; each pressing the message clearly onwards, scarcely pausing, or allowing room, for ‘extraneous’ clauses of evidence or counterargument – are suffused with the vehemence of a proselytising missionary, and their contents, likewise, seem intended to soothe, cajole – and, ultimately, one supposes, convert. in the belfast address, there seems, by contrast, an asymmetricality, a sort of sketchy, self-conscious minimalism, to tyndall’s worldview (as there presented), an incompleteness in his own attempts at promulgating a fortifying ‘materialism plus’ for the considered use, or edification, of the latter victorian age. this, in part, was the subject of a preceding chapter, where a number of rationales for such lopsidedness – the predicament of a personal philoso- phy celebrating the complementary nature, the necessarily complementary nature, of scientific reasoning and ‘the religious emotions’, which nonetheless appears frustratingly reticent about fully one-half of that psychological equation – were put forward: tyndall’s conviction that contemporary science, unlike contemporary religion, was a public matter, a magisterium in which broad consensus was both attainable and, within limits, to be desired, coupled with the predominance in popular discussion, in prior cultural history, of a view antagonistic to this, diametrically so; his own (shaky) adherence to the remit of a president’s address before the baas; the uncertain politics of response, those ex post facto interactions between the expecta- tions of figures in attendance, outside commentators (religious or not), and that vastly greater audience, less policeable and infinitely heterogeneous: the broadly literate population of great britain, circa august . and yet, as also discussed, there were even in the belfast - - address vantages provided, glimpses of tyndall’s spiritual topographies, of private accommo- dations achieved between those conflicted, conflicting domains of scientific agnosticism and theistic belief. some individuals, blessed with restraint or liberal tolerance, were prepared to listen without undue prejudice. so, too, were certain organisations – the times, for instance: ‘professor tyndall’s address’, an editorial which appeared august (that is, within twenty-four hours of the address’s delivery), insisted, with an enlightened equanimity: ‘[t]here is no theological reason for recoiling from the conclusion to which professor tyndall would conduct us […]. his analysis of the world’s history leaves out one half of man, and he finds it impossible to deny to this other side of man’s nature a reality as absolute as that which he claims for his physical faculties and for his understanding’. even archibald tait, then archbishop of canterbury, in acknowledging such a noteworthy lack (in the quota- tion used as this chapter’s epigraph), believed it admirable, rather than blasphemous, while his own incisive allusion to the consternation shown by a ‘great scientific man’ demonstrates as well both the imaginative penetration of the address’s argument and the social notoriety of its deliverer. both tyndall and hinton used rhetoric and the manifold resources of language to their own ends, of course. how could they not? tyndall’s counter-engagements, his rebuttals and re-brandings of ‘sterile’ naturalism, are, throughout his address, secreted in plain sight, by meshes of literary referral and poetic invocation. hinton’s in that article – objections arising out of his own affinities for ‘higher-dimensional’ analysis, his familiarity with the sorts of transcendental conundrums posed by the ‘scientised’ spiritualisms then becoming popular (if geometry can be conceptualised in spaces beyond the euclidean, why not matter in planes beyond the reductively material?) – seem, conversely, more stated than implicit, more surface than depth, confident and conspicuous rather than camouflaged or qualified. both, moreover, in confronting, or counterbalancing, the implications of contempo- rary scientific naturalism, found their own sources of spiritual comfort and moral affirmation, although in wildly different arenas. (each conjured, in effect, a patchwork and provisional ‘faith’.) hinton (as exuberantly expressed in ‘professor tyndall and the religious emotions’) immersed himself in the conjectures of ‘frontier’ mathematics, in the untapped possibilities of spirit and mind. tyndall, by contrast (sounding far more muted in his belfast address), looked, not to extreme scientific speculation, but rather the softer consolations of literature. he discovered there – in the vernaculars of poets and the tropes of the past, in its writers and - - writings, its triumphs and traditions – a compensatory solace equal to, yet aesthetically dissimi- lar from, that achieved by his ‘admirer’. this chapter, like the next, is an examination of how, and why, he went about doing so. it is also a study of the effects tyndall achieved, how they interacted with, commented upon, or strained against those great under-mentioned over-themes outlined in my first chapter: the conservation of energy, and the cosmic teleology implicit in those laws and suppositions associated with the ‘new’ physical science. as gillian beer has written: ‘deepest habits of mind often leave only slight traces on the surfaces of writing’ (of, p. ). this is a tracing of those traces – an archaeology in one individual of ‘deepest habits’ of thermodynamic reason- ing and materialistic rationalisation – examining the fashion (following on from my discussion in chapter two) in which tyndall’s choices of language and metaphor tend to channel, imply, distort or amplify manifest meaning, shaping perception, colouring interpretation and final response. the central theme here examined – for such linguistic practices are only interesting in terms of concrete instances – is the metaphoric persistence, clearly underpinned by those mental habits, throughout tyndall’s thought of a kind of ‘solar’ deification of human achievement, with primeval man imagined as fire-worker, as tool-shaper, first and foremost. and thomas carlyle and, though to a lesser extent, tennyson – living contemporaries and, later in life, cherished friends of the scientist – are the dominant figures here engaged with. ‘[t]he image of fire runs like a bright thread through everything he wrote’, so john holloway observed of the former, in his unreprovable the victorian sage ( ; p. ). i would argue that a like stitching binds tyndall’s own arguments together as well, at once knitting divergent genres and literary traditions into a cohesive whole, and patching them to, or with, both the textured vernaculars of carlylean rhetoric and the vestures of carlyle’s ‘outmoded’ transcendental beliefs. for tyndall, like his mentor, seized upon the suggestive, even arche- typal, power of a certain complex of incandescent images – fire-worshippers, labouring blacksmiths, the polymorphic manifestations on this earth of solar warmth – in his varied characterisations, not merely of brute physical processes (like the conservation of energy), but also intellectual fecundity and prowess. the sun provides radiant heat; the sage, spiritual illumination. and so, similarly, tyndall argues, do their strange energies circulate. moreover, such parallels – given the intellectual climate of mid-victorian england – with fire, light and heat necessarily had for many at the time, not just tyndall, resonances beyond the literal. this chapter looks at a few of these as well, particularly with reference to their function in defining their author’s relationship with, on the one hand, the material, that stuff making up - - our day-to-day world, and, on the other, the intellectual, poetic and literary, those unique products, seemingly without broader purpose, of the conscious, self-aware mind. the questions at this chapter’s core, in other words, are those very ones posed, with an unmistakable yearning, in a suggestive passage from tyndall’s popular study of , the forms of water in clouds & rivers, ice & glaciers: ‘but what is the sun? we know its size and its weight. we also know that it is a globe of fire far hotter than any fire on the earth. but we have to learn definitely what is the meaning of solar light and solar heat […]’ (p. ; my italics). john tyndall, sun-worshipper john tyndall, towards the end of a series of lectures at the ri on the public life and scientific achievements of michael faraday (later collected and published in book-form under the title of faraday as a discoverer [ ]), provided a strange, even startling, analogue for the intellec- tual character of his departed friend: ‘thus his fire was that of a solid combustible, not that of a gas, which blazes suddenly, and dies as suddenly away’ (p. ). elsewhere, he wrote in similarly incandescent terms of faraday’s affection for his wife, sarah barnard, over the course of their nearly half-century of marriage: ‘never, i believe, existed a manlier, purer, steadier love. like a burning diamond it continued to shed, for six-and-forty years, its white and smokeless glow’ (fos, p. ). tyndall, of course, was well known – and sometimes gently chided – for his popular laboratory demonstrations involving ‘singing’ flames and fluorescing gasses. he, however, enlivened both his prose, whether alpine or scientific, and his public lectures with not dissimi- lar pyrotechnics as well, the analogic as much as the rhetorical. both comparisons above, for instance, represent a kind of anti-anthropomorphisation or de-personification; they remake the sentient into the elemental, phenomenal and inert; they encode, seemingly, the total materialising of the spirit, the deepest loss of will. at the same time, however, they revivify the maxwell, for one, seemed to view some of tyndall’s achievements as unnecessarily showy, even unseemly, in particular his laboratory demonstrations on the composition and colour of the sky. these performances are restaged in one poem, dryly subtitled ‘a tyndallic ode’, as quasi-vaudevillian, as scientific snake-charming: ‘the atoms clash, the spectra flash, / projected on the screen, / the double d, magnesium b, / and thallium’s living green’; or, later: ‘i shout, i whistle, clap my hands, / and stamp upon the platform, / the flame responds to my commands, / in this form and in that form’ (‘chief’, p. ). indeed, in the highly idiosyncratic correspondence between p. g. tait and maxwell – a correspondence characterised by both a cryptographic compactness and a constantly punning linguistic allusiveness (here, for example, the technical nomenclature of the tensor calculus is gleefully plundered) – tyndall figured as ‘ ! " " t because ! " " t represents a tensor of the second rank’ (goldman, p. ). - - commonplace. we pass over without undue reflection cant attributions of idealised or ever- lasting love, but linger for a moment on such amatory phrasings as these, similes oddly involv- ing immolated allotropes and incandescing gasses. they, by comparison, seem innovatory, conceptually jarring, though their intents and effects remain largely cliché. beyond this, when examined in the overall context of the scientist’s thoughts and writings, the presence of such allusions to fire, and warmth, and flame enact more than literary novelty; they highlight concerns and preoccupations, underscoring tyndall’s obsessions with the manifold signifying properties afforded by the concepts of thermodynamics. for, like planets orbiting a central star (or, more glumly, disconsolate mourners encircling a pyre), clustered around the emblems and ideas of heat, of heat’s circulation, renewal and final dissipation, lurk in tyndall’s rhetoric a range of looming matters: the inviolability of causality, the potentialities of life, the strictures of energy conservation, the pre-eminence of the material in the physical world and, within that world, the capacity of mind, of unyoked thought, to transcend ‘materialistic’ limitations, allowing the scientist to re-envision matter, not as dull clod, but rather something rich, poetic and re-invigoratingly strange. it was through heat and its metaphors that tyndall was able to explore and interrogate the seeming paradox central to his thought, what william irvine described as the scientist’s admission that ‘there was as yet no bridge between consciousness on the one hand and mo- lecular activity on the other’, while nonetheless still insisting that insensate matter, ‘properly understood’, remained the ‘magic substance by which all mysteries would be penetrated and all contradictions resolved – the very principle and symbol of progress, uniting invisible atomicity with invisible intelligence and both with infinite possibility beyond’ (p. ). a claim symptomatic of this difficulty, tyndall closed his response essay of , ‘“ma- terialism” and its opponents’, with a line that seems prima facie absurd, one foretelling, with due solemnity, a paradisiacal future in which ‘purer and mightier’ minds than ours strive to attain a ‘deeper knowledge of matter […]’, while evincing a ‘more faithful conformity to its laws’ (p. ). mallock lampooned these desiderata via the new paul and virginia’s overbearing prof. darnley. here, the professor, a celebrity aboard the good steamship australasian, expounds the unpalatable truths of nineteenth-century materialistic science to fellow passengers – an audi- ence, minute by minute, increasingly demoralised. (it is, by any standards, a bravura diatribe.) ‘however,’ he [darnley] proceeded, ‘of one thing we can be quite certain: all that is, is matter; the laws of matter are eternal, and we cannot act or think without conforming to them; and if,’ he said, ‘we - - would be solemn and high, and happy and heroic, and saintly, we have but to strive and struggle to do what we cannot for an instant avoid doing. yes’, he exclaimed, ‘as the sublime tyndall tells us, let us struggle to attain a deeper knowledge of matter, and a more faithful conformity to its laws!’. (p. ) as implicit in mallock’s account, this could seem a lunatic’s imprecation. earlier in the article tyndall had declared, with analogous evangelical sweep: ‘matter i define as that mysterious thing by which all this is accomplished’ (‘materialism’, p. ) – the magisterial relative clause (with its encompassing subject, ‘all this’) subsuming every facet of reality, both experienced and conjectured. nevertheless, while, on one level, this represents a fully adequate declaration of materialism’s central belief, on another, it appears frustratingly incomplete, as it apparently leaves out agency, slighting thereby one player in a vital partner- ship: for it is, after all, the interaction of matter, not matter itself, that ‘makes’ structural accom- plishing. to the mid-victorian scientific naturalist, force and matter, in all their protean manifestations, were closed systems, subject to conservation laws, neither created nor de- stroyed (einstein, however, with his iconic mass-energy relation, ! e = mc , would in link them in a more elementary monism), but, equally, the first without the second would have been inefficacious (having nothing on which to act), and the second without the first, without form and void. even faraday, never one to classify himself as one of those ‘high and piercing intellects’ transgressing beyond science’s ‘exalted’ theoretical frontiers (he classified himself, rather self-deprecatingly, as one of its ‘persevering labourers’ instead), was moved by the formalisation, and increasing importance within all research, of the first law to a series of more grandiose pronouncements: ‘for we know matter only by its forces […]’, he asserted on february in ‘on the conservation of force’, an ri friday evening discourse (p. ). four years previously, in another such evening discourse, tyndall had made an equivalent assertion, exemplifying that aspect of the naturalistic hypothesis about which those two proclamations from ‘“materialism” and its opponents’ (both eminently quotable, but effectively doomed to caricature and misprision when excised from any argumentative con- text) had seemingly been silent: ‘there are no two words with which we are more familiar than matter and force. the system of the universe embraces two things, – an object acted upon, and an agent by which it is acted upon; – the object we call matter, and the agent we call force’ (‘influence’, p. ). needless to say, it is force that effects the biblical transformation, that sketched in genesis, through its (to naïvely, if tyndallically, anthropomorphise) ‘beckonings’ and com- mands, decrees made in accordance with nano-lilliputian taskmasters. (these were the ‘atomic architects’: unseen, infallible and autocratic.) maxwell, in a more jolly metaphor, - - here turning elemental cohesions into panting courtship, wrote of those ‘microscopic spaces / where molecules with fierce desires / shiver in warm embraces’ (‘chief’, p. ); his final line represents a fine scientific pun, encompassing, in the two senses of ‘shiver’ (‘to vibrate’ and ‘to break apart’), both the oscillation of matter due to intrinsic heat and the sundering of chemical bonds in the formation of new compounds. ‘architecturally’ arrayed? or ‘romantically’ compelled? either way, over billions of years, the ultimate consequences of such molecular behaviour – or, perhaps, molecular misbehaviour – for the cosmos as a whole are unquestionably miltonian: order from disorder sprung. swift to their several quarters hasted then the cumbrous elements, earth, flood, air, fire; and this ethereal quintessence of heaven flew upward, spirited with various forms, that roll’d orbicular, and turned to stars (milton, p. ; . - ) beyond their science, maxwell had his faith; tyndall, despite the challenges of agnosticism, his belief in the ‘mysteriousness’ and vibrancy of all substance. both described a scientific cos- mology, but in neither formulation does it appear automatically a hateful or nihilistic one. myers, by contrast, writing in the tradition of unmediated materialism (that is, materi- alism as it was often stereotypically perceived), supplanted milton’s divine fiat with a new ‘one law’ – a prescription not heavenly, but horrifically, degradingly material – in ‘a cosmic history’, that poem introduced in my first chapter. in its account of celestial ordering, one at once paralleling, and mocking the anthropic presumptuousness of, say, paradise lost’s sublime and humanistic vision, we encounter a dour and rationalistic updating of this ancient trope, one likewise relating how the stars were ‘roll’d orbicular’ (and – now aimlessly – patterned into reassuring constellations), but enacted this time in a thoroughly ‘modern’, de-theologised universe of energy conservation and impersonal molecular impingements: then lone in space the comet hung; then waxed the whorls of cloudy glow; then each on other swept and swung enormous eddies, formless flow; one law, one force, and manifold, bestrewed high heaven with sparkling fire, burned in orion’s belt of gold, and lit the dragon and the lyre. (p. ) gravitation leads to nebular compaction; compaction to heating; heating to stellar ignition and subsequent fluorescence: this is all true; but it would be hubris itself, the poet insists, to - - consider such a firmamental spectacle one forged for man’s contentment and delight. tyndall’s cosmology is, on the whole, congruent with that of ‘a cosmic history’, but rarely interpreted, or described, so gloomily. his treatment of solar hegemony is typical. like many victorians, tyndall, goaded by the tenets of his science, had a veneration for, and a fascination with, the sun. and, alongside clifford (and many other thinkers, both scientific and otherwise), he followed john herschel – he quoted these lines from herschel’s outlines of astronomy ( ) towards the close of his own textbook on heat ( ) – in observing that ‘[t]he sun’s rays are the ultimate source of almost every motion that takes place on the surface of the earth’ (p. ; qtd., p. ). life, ultimately, for tyndall, was one of those motions; its growth and maintenance, like geology, like climatology, a consequence of heat-driven metamorphosis. ‘in this sense’, he explains in his address on ‘matter and force’, ‘we are all “souls of fire and children of the sun”’ (fos, p. ). the allusion, slightly obscure, is likely to the first line of a couplet cited in the ameri- can john prescott’s history of the conquest of peru ( ), then a work of considerable renown. prescott had used it in a description of incan tribal retributivism (p. ). such feral contexts are excised in tyndall’s materialistic re-inscription, though one perhaps persists. prescott had remarked of incan belief: ‘the deity whose worship they especially inculcated, and which they never failed to establish wherever their banners were known to penetrate, was the sun. it was he who, in a particular manner, presided over the destinies of man; gave light and warmth to the nations, and life to the vegetable world’ (p. ). similarly, in a postscript tyndall affixed to a discursive account he had written of his ascent of the jungfrau – one interlaced with speculations on the sun’s omnipotence, on the earthly authority of solar radiation – he quipped: ‘eight years ago i was evidently a sun-worshipper; nor have i yet lost the conviction of his ability to do all here ascribed to him. – j. t., ’ (hours, p. n). such language is liturgical, an ascription of the potency of christian divinity to a mate- rial object: he is thus, or so it is implied, putting forth a creed at once recidivistic and up-to- the-moment. accordingly, the first half-dozen or so pages of his the forms of water (published as the premier volume in the international scientific series, a selection of texts ‘embodying the results of the latest investigations in the various departments of science at present most prominently before the world’ [‘catalogue’, p. ], such an honorific or endorsement hinting at the importance popularly ascribed to tyndall’s inquiries), trace a droplet of moisture from the ocean to its nominal source, a discussion comparable to that referenced by clifford in swinburne’s ‘garden of persephone’. but this progress ends neither in morose thanatophilia, - - nor aquatic dissolution of individual identity, but rather triumphant reconfirmation of the sun’s dominion and a concurrent affirmation of the interpretive power of nineteenth-century science: ‘thus, by tracing backward, without any break in the chain of occurrences, our river from its end to its real beginnings [in rain, in glaciers], we come at length to the sun’ (forms, p. ). if there is a subtext in tyndall’s prose, it is an awed solarism akin to this, a leitmotif re- sounding throughout an astonishing range of compositional contexts and circumstances. nevertheless, even this most purportedly unassailable of doctrines remains a conjecture about which he does – from time to time – articulate a fugitive unease, though without ever truly shading either scientifically into doubt, or morally into the nihilism of myers’s cosmic halluci- nation. so is it more generally with the scientist and his naturalistic preoccupations. in their excellent analyses, both steven kim and ruth barton try to fix a label to tyn- dall’s philosophical stance circa belfast: he suggests ‘transcendental materialism’; she, ‘panthe- ism’. both likewise note the admixture within it (with components deemed less ‘idealistic’ dominating as drew close) of antithetical trends: german romanticism, lucretian atomism, and so forth. this is correct, but practically to miss the point. i suggest that far more significant than any interpolated trajectory is the back-and-forthness – the play – of tyndall’s argumentation. for in many of his writings we encounter precisely that: internal dialogue and debate, an attempt at the working out of contraries, a struggle enacted both rhetorically (in the substance and structure of arguments) and linguistically (in the author’s – or, sometimes, orator’s – selection and manipulation of allusive contexts and explanatory vernaculars). hence, i argue that one of the most striking things about most any work by tyndall is its curiously fractal nature, the fashion in which it enacts, in miniature or elabora- tion, via the embellishment of a peroration or in the studied sobriety of an explanation of laboratory procedure, concerns which inform the whole of his oeuvre – as we saw in those ‘twinned’ addresses at belfast and manchester. each seems self-similar, in its own peculiar way, with the collective, evincing a kind of ‘interchangeability’, encapsulating within its paragraphs a lifetime of arguments, concerns, personal prejudices. thus, also, the remarkable ideological and metaphoric coherence and continuity evident in so much of his writing. as pronounced in the biographical review of prominent men and women of the day (an american production of , published in chicago, indicating something of the esteem in which tyndall was held on both sides of the atlantic): ‘in a life of the duration of nearly three score years and ten, this able man has wielded his pen in the cause of science with a steadiness - - of purpose and a persistency of will that is worthy of praise and emulation’ (herringshaw, p. ). over that same period this ‘steadiness of purpose’ was coupled, too, with a consistency and striking unity of idiosyncratic worldview; and beneath this consistency, we can discern always the same roil of discontents, thus discovering another kind of continuity, a topic to be addressed at some length in this dissertation’s concluding chapter. on the beach: tyndall as mid-victorian poet-scientist on june , tyndall was on the south coast, preparing for an excursion the next day to the isle of wight, site of geological and ecological interest, home to tennyson, a retreat from the bustle of london life, and, especially after the queen selected it in the s as the site for the construction of her vacation home, a favoured holiday spot for well-to-do and middle-class victorians, men and women who thronged to ports such as lymington, bournemouth and portsmouth (themselves already congested with merchants and fishermen) to book passage on the many steamers and sailboats which regularly made their brief crossings over the solent, a narrow, salt-water strait separating the island from the mainland. he had been feeling poorly for nearly a week. it was, moreover, a malaise which seemed, despite all best efforts, unshake- able – his journal entry for june reports one of several futile attempts at self-repair: ‘[v]ery unwell all day, spent some hours in kensington gardens, thence took an omnibus to wimble- don, walked round through wandsworth and home by train[.] still felt ill’. he resolved, accordingly, to make a pilgrimage to wight, what one mid-victorian guidebook euphorically dubbed the ‘madeira of england, – a sanatorium of the highest repute, and of daily growing acceptance to the valetudinarian’ ([nelson et al.], p. ). tyndall – like many of his compatri- ots, well aware of the salutary effects of a brief stay on the island, far from the tumult and pollution of urban life, and at a remove from the drudgery of professional and personal routine – sought also ‘spiritual’ benedictions, the medicine of enlarging landscape, a curative beyond those ‘materialistically’ derived from physical exertion or the benefits of wight’s ‘climate softer and drier than any in england […]’ (p. ). lounging adjacent to the solent he wrote that afternoon a brief note to his friend, mrs pollock. in it, we encounter a line of reasoning so compressed, wide-ranging and tele- graphic – it seems a history of the world in ! clauses – that it verges on self-parody: the ‘scene setting’ at its onset, a phrase or two of dolorous natural description, a sudden shifting of - - register from the particular to the great, as his missive swerves, or blunders, unapologetically into issues of design, mechanism, the role claimed by science (and, if in unstated opposition, philosophy and literature) in the training of an individual’s imagination. there’s a citation of his beloved mentor, a digression into the biological ramifications of physical ordering, a glance at the evolution (future and past) of sentience, even an otherworldly peroration – suitably ‘elevated’, likewise fashioned in perfect miniature – which, as with that at belfast, evaporates into mellifluous literary quotation. from country pleasantries to cosmic destinies, with a dollop of edification in the middle. (he must have been a maddening correspondent.) and over it all presides the ‘original grand engineer’, that source, ultimately, of terrestrial life and light – the sun, whereof all this is accomplished: mudeford near christ church th. june . my dear mrs pollock, miss herries’s note, but not her book, has reached me this morning. i shall be in london on wednesday next, and my first act after i return will be to attend to her request. i am trying to be idle here for a week, and thus to permit my brain and muscles to regain their normal toughness. at my feet is the sea, splashing and booming and causing the pebbles to rattle up and down along the beach. right opposite are the white cliffs of alum bay [on wight], it seems that i could swim to them with ease, and yet i am told they are eight miles off. what glorious weather this is, the central day is hot, but the morning and evening are delicious; the deep quiet, and the perfume of the honeysuckle and beanflowers are a slight improvement upon the growls and gully holes of london. i wonder does science really injure a man’s imagination? sometimes when looking at the sprouting flowers i endeav- our to follow the mechanical action of the sunbeams upon the atoms of matter whereby they are caused to arrange themselves into these beautiful structures, and to die their petals in these splendid colours. you remember mr. faraday’s experiment with the iron filings which you liked so much. these iron filings when acted on by a magnet, moved towards each other and clung together in a peculiar manner. the sunbeams appear to act in a somewhat similar manner: they shake up the particles of matter and cause them to arrange according to certain laws, and the result being the formation of grass, gooseberries, and flowers. we eat the gooseberries; but the grass is too much for us and so we cunningly submit it first to the digestive apparatus of the ox and sheep; but the sun is still the original grand engineer to whom we owe the architecture of our bodies. behind these of course are the questions which beset us now, but which are perhaps to be answered by a race of beings bearing the same relation to us that we do to the tadpole and [?]. the vision which is rudimentary in us may in them be developed into perfect day: and thus “the something in this world amiss may be unravelled by and by” i will not afflict you longer – goodbye[.] yours ever sincerely, john tyndall those ‘questions which beset us now’ are, of course, the very ones set forth in the finale at belfast, and to which hinton made his own fervent reply. - - the ‘particles of matter’ shaken by sunlight, set to molecular jiggling by the imparting of heat (a mode of motion inducing motion); the rhetorical evasion of ‘somewhat similar’ (magnetic flux dispersing and reorienting ‘iron filings’ along lines of force: a coldly ‘mechani- cal’ affair, as most would consent. but can the same be said, without quibble, of the actions of radiant light, of solar energy, on those germ-stuffs yielding ‘grass, gooseberries, and flowers’?); the inspecificity of ‘certain laws’ (they exist, he insists, but remain pragmatically unsketched); the evocation of a jovian over-presence for the sun, god-like in ‘his’ ability to draft and animate mammalian ‘architecture’, to shape organic existence: these are recurrent themes and phrasings, the rhetorical-cum-argumentative atoms comprising tyndall’s own structures of explanation. and they are, as ever, set in an overall narrative of change, of death and life and death again, of long darkness followed by rapturous dawning: of literal light, of metaphoric enlight- enment. tyndall’s letter becomes an evolutionary progress, morphing amoebas into humans, exalting humans into bafflingly unknown – or, ominously, superseding them by wholly alien – species or races of superior intelligence. these, too, were among his (and materialism’s) emblematic themes; as said by mallock of one of darnley’s speeches: ‘he showed them how viewed by modern science, all existence is a chain, with a gas at one end and no one knows what at the other; and how humanity is a link somewhere; but – holy and awful thought! – we can none of us tell where’ (paul, pp. - ). similarly, tyndall’s slight, and partial, misquota- tion of tennyson’s ‘the miller’s daughter’ – the original reads: ‘there’s somewhat in this world amiss / shall be unriddled by and by. / there’s somewhat flows to us in life, / but more is taken quite away’ (p. ), lines which associate human existence with irretrievable loss, with the transience of earthly adoration – emphasises, by contrast, the speculating scientist’s underlying hopefulness (he looks forward to a time when a problem is solved, not a truth painfully learnt), even as his accidental emendation (‘unravelled’ for ‘unriddled’) subtly entangles this discourse amidst the warp and woof of carlylean ‘weaving’ metaphors. three days later, tyndall, returned from wight with health fully restored, added a brief (and atypically buoyant) entry to his daily journal; it read, in part: ‘walked to bourne- mouth: spreading plaid on the pebbles and lay there for nearly two hours watching the roaring waves, and writing the above […]. felt unusually strong’ (journal, july ). he was referring to a chronicle he had written of his trip, an account in the form of several hundred lines of (reasonably) accomplished blank verse, much of which had evidently been subjected to extensive revision. interesting for a number of reasons, most compelling is - - the focus it places on the role, if any, to be played by abstract literary imagination in the framing, and popular elaboration, of his evolving system of ‘scientifically derived’ aesthetics, an approach to perceiving and understanding the phenomena of the physical world which tyndall thought non-theological, though hardly non-spiritual, in terms of its essential pre- sumptions. such an antithesis merely restates huxley’s perspicacious verdict on sartor resartus: a work which had abetted his own realisation that ‘a deep sense of religion was compatible with the entire absence of theology’ (letter, p. ). ‘my friend’, he later noted of tyndall’s relationship with the author of that volume, ‘was disposed to regard carlyle as a great teacher; i was rather disposed to take him as a great tonic; as a source of intellectual invigoration and moral stimulus and refreshment, rather than of theoretical or practical guidance’ (‘professor’, p. ) – as we shall see, however, tyndall was in fact prone to regard carlyle as a bit of both simultaneously, prophetic instructor as well as instructing prophet. there have been, since the mid- s, a wide range of studies and appreciations of tyndall, a figure who was, after all, a ‘personality’ of so many interests, a media-darling before there even was such a concept, profligate in both publications and the friendships he culti- vated. mid-victorian pamphleteers and journalists attacked him as an unrepentant material- ist; jeans approached him as a propagandist for science and electrical engineer; huxley, as a confidante and comrade-in-arms. he merited two obituaries in the alpine journal: one on his function as scientist (by ‘h. d.’); another, on his achievements as a mountaineer (by c. e. mathews). eve and creasey – co-authors of the biography the life and works of john tyndall ( ), a project of several decades’ gestation partly overseen by the scientist’s widow – described him with the respectful caution, and nostalgia, of the eulogiser. modern academics have tended to study the man as cultural phenomenon first and foremost, perhaps inadver- tently perpetuating the unkind appraisal put forth by oliver lodge in the th edition of the encyclopædia britannica. (this, though, was considerably softened – by the editors – in time for the mighty th.) tyndall’s ‘scientific achievements were none of them of the very first magnitude’, he averred, ‘it was not so much what he did as who he was that is of permanent interest […]’ (p. ). inevitably, a subtly ‘different’ tyndall to such synoptic summations becomes apparent in the ‘journal entry’, the final drafting of which, posted to mrs pollock, was dated july . for above all else, this account composed, revised, and diligently recopied, of a journey to wight on june accentuates ordinariness, depicting a ‘nice enough’ fellow trying to - - pursue his interests amid a bustle of others all trying to pursue theirs. (paul sawyer’s pleasing contention is thus provided with fascinating – and generous – support: ‘in so many ways [was] tyndall […] a victorian, often to a platitudinous degree’, he wrote in ‘ruskin and tyndall’ [p. ].) though hardly a dense poem, it seems a deep one, a superficial placidity of surface texture – and a degree of critical translucency – allowing clear apprehension of elaborate, submerged matrices of social and literary convention. we note, for instance, behind its pages, and often only barely overwritten (or suppressed?), ancillary texts, literary and otherwise, documenting diverse mid-nineteenth-century traditions and norms: geological primers and thomas cook’s illustrated travel brochures; sartor resartus and paddle-steamer timetables; well-thumbed accounts of helmholtz’s scientific lectures and leather-bound editions of keats’s collected verse. it is similarly, and with like inevitability, a palimpsest of its author’s considerable erudition, particularly in literature. always one ‘keenly alive to the influence of poetry […]’, as eve and creasey tell us, he ‘loved to learn long pieces which he used to recite to himself when walking and of which he used to speak “as a stimulant much better than wine”’ (p. ). a telling précis of a few of his favourite authors was provided by louisa charlotte hamilton tyndall, the scientist’s widow, in notes prepared for jonathan hutchinson not long after her husband’s tragic death: ‘shelley, byron, keats, wordsworth, cowper, campbell, burns, were all laid under contribution – to say nothing of the german poets [particularly goethe], in whom he took great delight. but perhaps the bits most frequently quoted [by him], and serving as a perpetual source of inspiration, were passages from tennyson and the american poet emerson’ (qtd. in lwjt, p. ). several of these influences are recognisable in this lively, magpieing account. a sense of its vibrancy as cultural document – and a demonstration of tyndall’s uneasy ‘fitted-ness’ in proletarian society – can be gleaned from its telling of the frenzied first few minutes of his stay. full of anarchic or improbable incident, overloaded with a wealth of evocative and clearly seen descriptive detail, this section of narrative seems also to provide ample evidence of sociological disjunction (is tyndall’s tone one of bemusement or, as i suspect, palpable distress?), showing a man unmoored from mundanity, caterwauling at the intransigency or indifference to ‘lofty’ naturalism of ordinary folk. having disembarked, he tells us, the scientist busied himself inspecting the geological curiosities presented by the rock formations ringing alum bay: ‘the courses of the flint, / running contorted through the massive chalk, / which too had suffered through the mighty jerk / that set the neighbouring - - sandstone cliffs on edge’. intrigued next by the prospect of a sea-hollowed cave, he rushed within, trustingly abandoning his scarf near its entryway – and unwisely so: it is quickly pilfered by ‘two yellow boys / yellow with dirt and tan […]’ (‘dp’, p. [ ]). having retrieved his scarf – the youths, variously described by tyndall (equivocating diplomatically about the innateness of criminality) as ‘varlets’ and ‘urchins’, on whose faces ‘the natural law or evil use / had written foul expression […]’ (p. [ ]), were surprised by the scientist’s ranging gait – he and his companions entered the grotto, only to be roused from duly sedulous contemplation of its semi-aquatic flora by the sound of ‘lower-class’ mockery (these are lines excised from the manuscript sent to mrs pollock): ‘two stranger maids were near us at the time; / one stooped and raised a leaf and holding high / the dripping shred, exclaimed in accents coarse / “what can she [mrs wright] want with rubbish such as this”?’ (‘dp’ [ ], p. [ ]). by turns flirtatious, naïve, prejudiced, ingenious, arrogant, quixotic, enraptured and awesomely stub- born, keenly aware of both the nuances of his own personality and his own at times exceed- ingly specialised desires, often wilfully oblivious to those of the dozens (and, on several in- stances, hundreds) of others around him, fellow travellers – or tourists, a differentiation then becoming semantically charged (buzard, p. ) – and local residents alike, this lengthy work reveals the man in delightful complexity, showing tyndall away from the podium, outwith the comforting chumminess of his london circle. for the isle was decidedly no annex to the ri’s cloistered laboratories, though rather too frequently it seems as if tyndall tried to treat it as such, and it is this disparity, this jarring incongruity between actions and surround, which gives rise to a good deal of the comedy present in the poem. of these episodes the majority seem frivolous and warm-hearted. in a description of one young beauty, tyndall quips, his rhyming couplet ranging in its diction from sub-pyramus and thisbee to strict newtonian proportionality: ‘oh light! oh sound! oh beauty rich and rare, / diminishing inversely as the square’ (‘dp’, p. [ ]). but some feel of more dissonant pitch, tinged with desperation, veering towards pathos or mono- mania. after an account of souring banter with an attractive barmaid – he repeatedly fixates on her ‘creamy’ or ‘milky’ complexion – tyndall falls to whimsical lamentations on the weighty lot of the harried scientific professional, envying the ‘simpler state’ of a local porter sitting nearby. yet, even in so doing, his phrasing remains that of the materialist on holiday. he dissects a public house into euclidean planes and foci, figures the glow of a woman’s face in terms of optic wavelengths: - - athwart the tavern bar i see a bagman puffing a cigar. oh! jolly day – like you to linger here i’d give up chemistry and take to beer, banish la lampe electrique from my sight. to make experiments on other light; and hold the red end of the spectrum low, if placed in competition with the glow of cream and coral, now concentered where the plane of the first lobby cuts the stair. (‘dp’, p. [ ]) all things considered, it would seem that if the victorian naturalist was – to some minds – the apotheosis of his society, he was also, at times, its antithesis, too, lonely and misunderstood. beyond such instances of sociological suggestiveness, far more telling (for the purposes of this study) is the additional light which tyndall’s verse-narrative sheds on the sometimes contradictory impulses defining the intellectual range of his own personal ideology. for in it, we are offered glimpses – though hardly a cipher, unwilling or incapable of voicing his own discontents and influences, these seem even by his standards particularly unimpeded – of his abiding affection for romanticism; of the epistemological bases underlying a number of his most earnest rationalisations for the love-hate nature of his relationship with stringent scien- tific materialism; of the close, albeit volatile, affiliations (at times alternating almost willy-nilly in tone between the contentious and the cordial) he cultivated with – and laboured assiduously to maintain, through regular meetings and a voluminous correspondence – several pre- eminent figures in nineteenth-century letters, and so forth. he was to count among his confidantes ralph waldo emerson and, of course, tennyson himself. (at their first meeting, tyndall recalls, the poet was pleased to discover that the scientist did not number among ‘those who disdain to quote maud’ [qtd. in lwjt, p. ].) it is, however, to tyndall’s relationship with thomas carlyle, sage-like theorist of historical and social energies and triumphant recipient (at least by proxy, in the person of his prof. diogenes teufelsdröckh) of a ‘spiritual new-birth’ – a sacrament of mystical renewal and ethical reconfirmation he called (in a famous, if slightly impenetrable, phrase) a ‘bathometric fire baptism’ (sartor, p. ) – that we now turn. twin prophets of the cosmos as steam-engine? ‘the mistake, not infrequently made’, tyndall explains near the conclusion of ‘personal recollections of thomas carlyle’, - - of supposing carlyle’s mind to be unscientific, may be further glanced at here. the scientific reader of his works must have noticed the surprising accuracy of the metaphors he derived from science. without sound knowledge such uniform exactitude would not have been possible. he laid the whole body of the sciences under contribution – astronomy, from the nebular theory onwards; mathematics, physics, chemistry, geology, natural history – drawing illustrations from all of them, grinding the appropriate parts of each of them into paint for his marvellous pictures. (nf, p. ) frank turner, in ‘victorian scientific naturalism and thomas carlyle’, concurs with tyn- dall’s (perhaps biased, one suspects, by friendship and long familiarity) opinions in this regard: ‘he [carlyle]’, turner explains, ‘was anything but ignorant of physical science […]. he had translated encyclopaedia articles on scientific topics and had reviewed scientific books. his use of scientific metaphors was frequent and exact’ (p. ). tyndall, though anxious to reclaim an often wayward soul for the noble cause of his profession, nonetheless still recognised that the fit between materialistic natural philosophy and the worldview espoused by carlyle was far from perfect. turner has described carlyle’s attitude to such beliefs as, at the best of times, ‘ambiguous’ (p. ), while one nineteenth- century commentator went so far as to say that ‘[e]verything like [scientific] analysis was repugnant to him’ ([call], p. ). tyndall’s writings, however, demonstrate the lengths to which the scientist would go to smooth over such problematic joins. ‘yes, friends’, carlyle’s teufelsdröckh announces in sartor resartus, ‘not our logical, mensurative faculty, but our imaginative one is king over us […]’ (pp. - ). these are lines which tyndall passes over with the observation that it was not the methods and (duly qualified) assertions of mid-victorian natural history and natural philoso- phy in and of themselves to which their author objected (one common interpretation); rather, ‘[i]t was the illegitimate science which, in its claims, overstepped its warrant – professing to explain everything, and to sweep the universe clear of mystery – that was really repugnant to carlyle’ (nf, p. ). moreover, how could carlyle be deemed unscientific, reasoned tyndall, if he, in a sense, could be given the ‘credit of poetically, but accurately, foreshadowing the doctrine of the conservation of energy’ (nf, p. )? that justly famed, globally synthesising physical ‘doctrine’, an abstract statement of universal principle, encompasses, as discussed in my first chapter, in the cold equations of its formalism a range of cosmological (and spiritual) conse- quences both fundamental and profound; it is a precept which, in any survey of tyndall’s scientific philosophy, must be granted – even over the theory of darwinian competitive evolution – absolute pride of place. as a notably conscientious man of science well acquainted with the both long and by - - no means uncomplicated history of the slow progress and often only reluctant assimilation of such novel discoveries into the folds of paradigmatically ‘normal’ thought, tyndall recognised that the philosophical heritage of the first law could, of course, be traced back quite easily to an era predating, not only that of carlyle, but even that of francis bacon himself, who, in the advancement of learning, had postulated: ‘is not the observation, omnia mutantur, nil interit [every- thing changes, nothing dies], a contemplation in philosophy thus, that the quantum of energy is eternal? […]’ (pp. - ). such an eerily prescient sentiment – particularly in its use of the word ‘quantum’, a linguistic talisman almost fetishistically associated by many modern intel- lectual historians with the sub-atomic theorems of the early and mid-twentieth century – still does not, however, ‘make francis bacon’, as greg myers has joked, ‘the discoverer of conser- vation of energy, as some of the more eager anglophiles in nineteenth-century priority debates claimed’ (‘nineteenth’, p. ). (nor of quantum mechanics, he might have added.) indeed, in heat: a mode of motion, tyndall found the genesis of that basic thermody- namic precept in ancient hebraic lore: ‘this law [of energy conservation] generalises the aphorism of solomon, that there is nothing new under the sun, by teaching us to detect everywhere, under its infinite variety of appearances, the same primeval forces’ (p. ). what, however, inspired the scientist to trace its genealogy not merely in rehabilitated biblical commonplaces, nor even the collected papers of joule and mayer, but also the ramblings of carlyle’s clothes-addled teufelsdröckh? ‘harking back to ’ – a year, tyndall elaborates a bit further on, in which, for all intents and purposes, that pair of pioneering thermodynamic theorists must be considered as yet ‘scientifically unborn’ – ‘we find him [carlyle] at craigenputtock, drawing this picture […]’ (nf, p. ): as i rode through the schwarzwald, i said to myself; that little fire which glows star-like across the dark-growing […] moor, where the sooty smith bends over his anvil, and thou hopest to replace thy lost horse-shoe, – is it a detached, separated speck, cut off from the whole universe; or indissolubly joined to the whole? thou fool, that smithy-fire was (primarily) kindled at the sun; is fed by air that circulates from before noah’s deluge, from beyond the dogstar [sirius]; therein, with iron force, and moreover, it was science – as tyndall slyly suggests in heat: a mode of motion – that has been the human enterprise that has come closest (in – a quarter-century, in other words, before carlyle ever put pen to paper) to providing the world with a bone fide teufelsdröckh, ‘the indefatigable [count benjamin] rumford […]’. rumford, however, predicated his studies, not on wildly discursive literary and anthropological specula- tion, but rather ‘an elaborate series of experiments on the conductivity of the substances used in clothing’ (p. ). although i cannot be entirely certain that tyndall was solely responsible for the preparation of the excellent index for this volume, i can only imagine that it was to him a source of great amusement to have this particular sub-section referenced under the heading: ‘clothes, their philosophy […]’ (p. ). - - coal force, and far stronger force of man, are cunning affinities and battles and victories of force brought about: it is a little ganglion, or nervous centre, in the great vital system of immensity. (sartor, pp. - ) ‘with its parts in “æterne alternation”, tyndall goes on to say, the whole of ‘the universe presented itself to the mind of carlyle’ (nf, p. ); he perceived an interconnected world inconceivable in its vastness, one of flux, recapitulation and transformation, of ceaselessly circulating processes, but never spontaneous caprice or creation. the cosmic gavotte carlyle envisaged encompassed all scales, from homely (‘that smithy-fire’) to celestial (‘kindled at the sun’), even as it ranged fully over both axes of abstract mensuration, temporal (‘from before noah’s deluge’) as well as spatial (‘from beyond the dogstar’). tyndall, in his essay, quotes this passage, though only up to the phrase ‘kindled at the sun’, just past the interrogative, excising in the process carlyle’s allusions to air ‘beyond the dogstar’ and ‘noah’s deluge’ (see nf, p. ). i suspect the reason for his not citing these latter two qualifiers – despite the fact that they metaphorically cohere with his own grand conceptions of the explanatory scope throughout all space and time of thermodynamic calculus – can be in part attributed to the fact that they, from a strictly materialistic perspec- tive, have only a poetic truth about them. tyndall, of course, was no fan of the bridgewater treatises, those curious attempts, in the s and ’ s, at establishing ‘that natural theology was itself a science, and that it had a place within christian theology’ (robson, p. ); let alone did he abide more heavy-handed efforts at proving begrudging accommodation be- tween revealed historiography and dug-up palaeontology: thus, no deluge for him, noachic or otherwise. nor would he ever have allowed air (the ether, perhaps, but not breathable air) to circulate freely through sidereal space – an attenuated vacuum, according to science. nevertheless, while they may have disagreed about specifics, he, like carlyle, believed wholeheartedly in the interconnectedness of phenomena. carlyle’s achievement, tyndall suggests, was providing a contemporary literary and philosophical context for a scientific understanding of such a ‘primeval’ force’s mutable nature, and, even more significantly, for suggesting something of the wholly self-enclosed ‘anatomy’ of our world’s (and, by materialis- tic extension, our universe’s) network of thermodynamic exchange, of the fact that everything, by definition, is inextricably enmeshed, a ‘ganglion’ within ‘the great vital system of immen- sity’. indeed, such an overarching belief in continuity, tyndall speculates, is what allowed a man like carlyle, despite his preternatural, even knee-jerk, ‘dislike of anything savouring of materialism […]’ (nf, p. ), to nonetheless concede the rightness of his observations about the illogic behind the concept of spontaneous generation; hence, ‘the conclusion to which […] - - [tyndall’s] experiments [on spontaneous generation] pointed’, he explains, ‘that life was derived from antecedent life, and was not generated from dead matter, fell in with his [carlyle’s] notions of the fitness of things. instead therefore of repelling him, the experiments gave him pleasure’ (p. ). in parallel with this process of scientific rehabilitation, tyndall engages in a spot of moral redaction as well. ‘and now i come to the charge so frequently made against him [carlyle], that he was the apostle of might’, tyndall, persisting in the role of impromptu apologist, writes in ‘on unveiling the statue of thomas carlyle’ (nf, p. ). certainly, he concedes, martial virtues were prominent in the man’s philosophy – darwin, for one, could fixate on little else; in his autobiography he recalled that carlyle’s ‘views on slavery were revolt- ing. in his mind might was right’ (p. ) – but such prominence, tyndall insists, was the result primarily of a sense of cultural pragmatism combined with a keen awareness of history, not inherent bellicosity. more than that, in carlyle there remained an overriding assumption that, on a meta-historical level, strength – military or otherwise – is only efficacious if coupled with moral steadfastness and good virtue. the scientist dedicated the dozen or so lines concluding his poem ‘a morning on alp lusgen’ to making this point, if somewhat oddly (through decidedly martial analogies and a sideways glance at napoleon): you [carlyle] spoke of might and right; and many a shaft barbed with the sneer, ‘he preaches force – brute force,’ has rattled on your shield. but well you knew, might, to be might, must base itself on right, or vanish evanescent as the deeds of france’s emperor. reflect on this, ye temporary darlings of the crowd. to-day ye may have peans [sic] in your ears; to-morrow ye lie rotten, if your work lack that true core which gives to might and right one meaning in the end. (nf, p. ) tyndall justifies such a cheering interpretative slant by allusion to an assertion in carlyle’s chartism ( ), made in the text by another in the author’s pantheon of fictitious interlocutors, a ‘herr professor sauerteig’: ‘might and right do differ frightfully from hour to hour; but give them centuries to try it in, they are found to be identical’ (pp. - ; qtd. in nf, p. ). but, ultimately, for tyndall, it is the precepts of evolutionary theory, not those of economic, social or political philosophy, which confirm the propriety of sauerteig’s/carlyle’s ‘melioristic’ historiography: ‘[a]dvocacy of might is not, in the abstract, offensive’, he writes, - - ‘for it meant at bottom the assertion that, in the end, that only is mighty which has the “law of the universe” on its side. with carlyle, as with empedocles, lucretius, and darwin, the fit survive’ (nf, p. ). his historical evolution, however, despite tyndall’s best efforts to reinterpret it other- wise, seems, if anything, proto-lamarckian, guided by will and consensus, not aleatoric sequences of mutation, accidents of fertility or auspicious circumstance. similarly, carlyle’s ‘energy’ was not materialism’s. nor was his ‘force’, at least not fundamentally. rather the presence of such terms in, say, sartor resartus’s sartorial-aesthetic vocabulary – as holloway observes in the victorian sage: ‘time and again carlyle’s images are of some power or force or energy, disorderly perhaps, but passionate, violent, irrepressible’ (p. ) – served to articulate carlyle’s belief in, beyond matter and the measurable, things – essential things – non-material and stupendous. through constant iteration, like homeric epithets, words and images such as these accumulate significance, becoming refrains and responses, the recruiting slogans for a cosmological sect repudiating, on one level, mechanistic interpretations of lived reality, while conceding, on another, a local, pragmatic utility for such interpretations; always they function to pose the insistent question: ‘are we not spirits, shaped into a body, into an appearance; and that fade away’ – teufelsdröckh’s language here melting into that of the tempest’s solilo- quy, itself quoted at the end of ‘natural supernaturalism’ (the keystone chapter in sartor resartus) – ‘again into air, and indivisibility?’ (p. ). tyndall’s readings, and handlings, of carlylean argumentation, in other words, can seem selective and incomplete, even dishonest. sawyer makes this point as well, asking the apposite, if rhetorical, question: ‘in his readiness to exchange carlyle’s metaphors for scien- tific terms – energy for force, or the philosophy of might for the survival of the fittest, or the unity of all for the conservation of energy – does tyndall sacrifice the emotional power of the original vision and reduce both science and religion in the process?’ (p. ). carlyle was inconsolably terrified by the prospect of an ateleological universe (a possi- bility precipitating ‘the everlasting “no”’ which had reduced prof. teufelsdröckh to dejec- tion, and near suicide). he judged such a purposeless world, one beyond the reach of human agency and, apparently, malignly oblivious to all common concerns, ‘unendurable’, a ‘perma- nent injustice’ visited by ‘an infinite power’, and counselled: if men had lost belief in a god, their only resource against a blind no-god, of necessity and mecha- nism, that held them like a hideous world-steamengine, like a hideous phalaris’ bull [a fabled method of torture and execution], imprisoned in its own iron belly, would be, with or without hope, – revolt. they could, as novalis says, by a ‘simultaneous universal act of suicide,’ depart out of the world- - - steamengine; and end, if not in victory, yet in invincibility, and unsubduable protest that such world- steamengine was a failure and a stupidity. (chartism, p. ) loss of faith in god is here – a characteristic equation in the writings of carlyle – a proxy for the failure of divine providence, for modern science’s enervating revelation of a world incommensurable with older or more humanistic concerns. it is, in effect, a shorthand for the universe of philosophical materialism, a cosmos of the specification popularly, if in large measure misleadingly, associated with the names of john tyndall and charles darwin, herbert spencer and t. h. huxley. carlyle, obviously, was never able to respond to tyndall’s acts – in poetry, and such articles as ‘personal recollections’ – of posthumous reinterpretation. if he had, no doubt he would have reprimanded tyndall, perhaps reiterating the reproachful words of teufelsdröckh: ‘we speak of the volume of nature: and truly a volume it is, – whose author and writer is god. to read it! dost thou, does man, so much as well know the alphabet thereof?’ (sartor, p. ). tyndall, earlier in life, had answered carlyle’s challenge with a trace of triumphalism. in a journal entry from , he reiterated an explanation he had given his students at queenwood college when asked about his decision to pursue a doctorate at the university of marburg: ‘[w]hat are sun, stars, science, chemistry, geology, mathematics, but pages of a book whose author is god! i want to know the meaning of this book, to penetrate the spirit of this author and if i fail then are my scientific attainments apple rinds without a core’ (qtd. in barton, p. ). long before the time of his address at belfast, however, such hubris had been chas- tened into something approaching humility, his deistic certainty into winsome nostalgia for lost theological consensus; his stance had begun to evince both guardedness about the possibil- ity of unimpeachable physical knowledge and ceaseless acknowledgement of the human need for something more than unimpeachable physical knowledge. a letter written april , seven months prior to the first edition of the origin, that hinge of nineteenth-century thought, gives particularly unambiguous voice to these ‘carlylean’ reservations about materialism’s adequacy as guiding doctrine. telling of tyndall’s peregrina- tions on another restorative holiday, this time in the lake district, where topographies can seem ghosted through with an ineffable aura of transcendentalism, it finishes in a diminutive peroration evoking obliquely the ‘spinning’ symbology of thomas carlyle. in his writings, the loom, a (too obvious) totem of incipient modernity and material improvement, becomes also, and relatedly, an icon, on a corporeal level, of dehumanising industrial machineries. on a - - non-corporeal one, cloth, the loom’s output, becomes an agnate – equally loaded – symbol: simultaneously, a metaphor for the integrity and deep connectedness of the cosmological ‘fabric’, and a metonym for the inseparable (if, potentially, hoodwinking) interweaves consti- tuting the ‘smooth’ manifold of newtonian -d ‘spacetime’. ‘[y]our two grand fundamental world-enveloping appearances, space and time […]’, teufelsdröckh says of these homolo- gies, ‘spun and woven for us from before birth itself, to clothe our celestial me for dwelling here, and yet to blind it, – [which] lie all-embracing, as the universal canvass, or warp and woof, whereby all minor illusions, in this phantom existence, weave and paint’ (sartor, p. ). ‘[t]here was something in the nature of the light which gave the mountain [helvellyn] a light and unsubstantial appearance’, tyndall’s lakeland missive concludes (his phrasing once again deliberately evoking both sartor resartus and prospero’s peerless speech), ‘as if it indeed consisted of ether in a slightly more condensed form […]. there is something in this universe different from the spinning of cotton, different also from the investigation of mere physical law. but i wont [sic] moralize’ (letter, april , pp. - ). teufelsdröckh had similarly rebelled, denouncing those who insist, following (among others) the reductive materialism of de la mettrie’s l’homme machine ( ), that human life – more pointedly, that human sentience – was the production of a physiological clockwork; he raged against the conjecture that ‘i am a mere work-machine, for whom the divine gift of thought were no other than the terrestrial gift of steam is to the steam-engine; a power whereby cotton might be spun […]’ (sartor, p. ). the scientist’s chastened, even flustered ‘apology’ for inadvertently donning mid-letter a garment entirely inappropriate for the preening naturalist, those worn vestments – flaunted by c. h. hinton, among countless other contemporary intellectuals – of ‘humanistic’ or ‘spiritual’ distress, shows that, on occasion, both he and carlyle/teufelsdröckh were wont to frequent the same tailor. first man as type of smith despite the persistence – and ineradicability – of difference, the scientist was always one to idolise carlyle. his influence – and that of his writings – is inescapable in tyndall’s thought. as gillian beer has noted: ‘metaphor, translation, chiasmus, heterogeneity of reference: such are the modes by whose means carlyle translates the reader from the fixed grid of here and now’ (of, p. ). these are techniques, particularly evident in less rote or ‘procedural’ - - specimens of his prose, which tyndall seems to have internalised as well, presumably in part through literary encounters with the sage of chelsea. the belfast address, for instance, a survey of materialism beginning in pre-history and culminating in that sacred moment of the scientist’s oration, invites comparison with sartor resartus’s overview of ‘clothes philosophy’, incorporating such carlylean rhetorical devices as an interpolated dialogue between a disciple of lucretius and bishop butler, demonstrating a comparable polyglot multiculturalism in its resources. in addition, it derives its spiritual and ethical underpinnings, admittedly to subtly divergent effect, from the same ‘german renaissance’ philosophers and thinkers – fichte, schiller, goethe – that had been so vital, earlier in the century, in restoring ‘faith’ to a quest- ing carlyle. that faith, theretofore compromised, was ‘in a transcendent spiritual order which underlay the apparent world and gave it whatever reality it might possess’ (le quesne, p. ) – and it was existentially vital to tyndall, too, and often equally under threat, even after decades of ‘materialistic’ progress. herr prof. teufelsdröckh’s lonely walk across a benighted schwarzwald likewise made a tremendous impression on the scientist, as did his apprehension, in the gloaming, of that forlorn ‘fire which glows star-like across the dark-growing […] moor, where the sooty smith bends over his anvil’ (p. ). for, like heat-energy itself (mutable in manifestation, thrown off from the smithy and subsumed by the night-time air), kindred thermal allegories circulate and re-circulate throughout much of tyndall’s prose, both expository and descriptive, recuperat- ing and making literal carlyle’s own penchant for fiery metaphor. far more than sparks fly from a blacksmith’s anvil, it seems, and blacksmithery – the tempering and shaping of malle- able metals, achieved through a carefully mediated commingling of natural agency and strenuous effort (at once abstract and intellectual as well as back-breaking and menial) – becomes an unmistakably meticulous motif recurring prominently throughout the scientist’s symbolic vocabulary. and aptly so, in a world verifiably remade through the joint agency of steel and steam: witness its paddle-boats and railways and sewage pumping stations. (we observe, for instance, in tyndall’s poetic description of his trip to wight, a document once again casting splendid illumination on aspects of common social experience, the rapid onset around mid-century of adolescence in the ‘new economy’ founded on mass-tourism, a wide-ranging cultural trans- formation predicated, in part, on the technological harnessing of heat: ‘we reached the steamer [in lymington] where with heart of fire / beside the quay she lay. a human swarm / - - already filled her decks, and we to swell / the throng stepped forward […]’ [‘dp’, p. [ ]].) strikingly, faraday, tyndall’s immediate predecessor as professor at the ri, was himself the son of a smith, a fact the two men both made much of from time to time. it is interesting to note how he – and this was a passage particularly dear to tyndall’s own heart; he cited it in full in a review of bence jones’s the life and letters of faraday ( ) – moved all but effortlessly from almost banal celebration of the quaintly picturesque charms of rural life, through a meditation on blacksmithery, to an aside which, as his protégé would later suggest, seems to embrace nothing less than the universe entire, thereby elevating the modest details of journal- istic autobiography into something approaching a grand statement on the human condition: they dry fruits here [interlaken, in switzerland, a village in the shadow of the jungfrau] in the sun, as cherries, apples, pears, &c.: for this purpose they spread them out on boards surrounded by little raised ledges. these boards are blackened, that they may absorb the rays of the sun and become hot. clout-nail making goes on here rather considerably, and is a very neat and pretty operation to ob- serve. i love a smith’s shop and anything related to smithery. my father was a smith. (qtd. in jones, : ) john tyndall, years later, remarked rather dizzily on what seems an ineffable expansion of grammatical and, perhaps, anthropological reference: ‘this [entry]’, he observes in his review, ‘is from his [faraday’s] journal; but he is unconsciously speaking to someone – per- haps to the world’ (fos, p. ). that faraday should from time to time have referenced blacksmithing was inevitable; after all, as observed in a recent biography, ‘[w]e do not know how much time faraday had spent with his father in the smithy, but the family had lived over the shop for years, and the sounds, sights, smells and conversations were close at hand’ (ham- ilton, p. ). by contrast, tyndall’s own preoccupation, ungrounded in any form of biographical detail, was pointedly not so much reflective as ideological and ostentatiously applicable to his own understanding of naturalism. it had its roots in that dualism discussed earlier, that necessary wedding, or welding, of action with agent, of kraft (‘puissance’) with stoff (‘substance’ or ‘material’). (stoff, moreover – in a fine, and carlylean, pun – can be translated as ‘cloth’ or ‘textile’ as well.) like a blacksmith, then, thermodynamic or ‘structural’ force acts with ‘deliberation’ on the raw molecular resources of the cosmos, shaping things into themselves. there was an element of nostalgia, too: even in the mid-nineteenth century, the solitary blacksmith was increasingly a figure of folklore, cultural memory, not daily experience; as john light observes: ‘when one considers […] that a smith from the late th century had many tools and machines not available to earlier craftsmen […] then it is not at all fanciful to - - observe that the general blacksmith of probably had more in common with his ancestor of , years than he did with his direct descendant of years’ (p. ). sartor resartus’s schwarzwald artificer thus became, for tyndall, a fulcrum of continuity, uniting past with present, energy with matter, in a hammer-blow. ‘the art of the smith is the most ancient of human handicrafts […]’, so it was charac- terised in the smithy and forge, a technical treatise of (crane, p. v). it is transformed into something far more noble than even that, however – becoming an endeavour both interpreted and described in a broadly mythological, if not archetypal, fashion – in one memorable illustration central to tyndall’s well-wrought essay on the curious biological principle (thor- oughly discredited, from his own point of view) of ‘vitality’, or living-force: to most minds, however, the energy of light and heat presents itself as a thing totally distinct from ordinary mechanical energy. but either of them can be derived from the other. by the friction of wood a savage can raise it to the temperature of ignition; by properly striking a piece of iron a skilful blacksmith can cause it to glow, and thus, by the rude agency of his hammer, he generates light and heat. this action, if carried far enough, would produce the light and heat of the sun. (fos, p. ) his final sentence is revelatory, taking carlyle’s abstract fable of continuity and showing the manner of its literal truth. teufelsdröckh’s allegories of perpetual transmutation – ‘with iron force, and coal force, and far stronger force of man, are cunning affinities and battles and victories of force brought about’ (sartor, pp. - ) – become, in the precise terminology of tyndall’s scientific re-inscription, wholly quantifiable processes of exchange and substitution, the sort of dry subject-matter fit for accountants and city clerks, not merely metaphysicians and oxbridge theologians. tyndall was not the first scientist to avail himself of such imagery. tait and thomson, in an article in good words, wrote in language probably plagiarised by tyndall (‘vitality’ first appeared anonymously in the reader, on october [barton, p. n ]): ‘thus the savage who lights his fire by rubbing together pieces of dry wood, expends his muscular energy in producing heat. by mere hammering, a skilful smith can heat a piece of iron to redness’ (pp. - ). what tyndall adds is the further step, and it’s a doozy: to the flames of the sun. (this extrapolation was also, perhaps, influential: c. william siemens, in , promulgated a theory of ‘fan-like’ solar maintenance based on the ‘action of the heat recu- perator in the regenerating gas furnace’ [p. ], a concept culturally appealing, but entropi- cally verboten.) and implicit in tyndall’s passage we apprehend as well another recurrent theme: a hint that man (on some primal level) is, by his very nature, a type of smith, a maker and - - manipulator of fire. f. w. h. myers, in a stanza from an unpublished poem, captured this sentiment adroitly: i [?learnt] the inheritance of fire from wise prometheus falls again; – a single and a last desire unites me with primaeval men. ([‘sometimes’]) conversely, the transition from ape (or australopithecus) to skilled artisan is, in a manner of speaking, both correlated with, and occasioned by, blacksmithery, not to forget its many associated competencies. carlyle put it thusly, his half-rhetorical ponderings closely in line with tyndall’s: ‘or was the smith idle, hammering only wartools? he had learned metal- lurgy, stithy-work in general; and made ploughshares withal, and adzes and mason-hammers’ (chartism, p. ). some nineteenth-century anthropologists (max müller memorably charac- terised two of their theories as the ‘pooh-pooh’ and ‘bow-wow’ [lectures, : ]), following on from lord monboddo’s insights in the eighteenth, attributed the ascent of man to, say, the onomatopoeic origination of speech, or an urge towards animal mimicry, or some insuppres- sible human need for music-making. tyndall, however, would give to fire-starting and steel-tempering and iron-forging that role of vital evolutionary boost. and the fact that, in miniature, faraday’s personal progress (from working-class son of a london smith, to journeyman bookbinder, to pre-eminent natural philosopher of his age) paralleled homo sapiens’ own slow cultural and social advance since the time of the last glaciation would, for tyndall, have added poignancy, and grace, to the comparison. even tyndall’s lowly savage, we note, holds, potential, in the palm of his hand, the transformative flames of the sun – a vast store of heat-energy which is itself re-imagined, in any sufficiently rigorous tabulation (such as that mandated by contemporary thermodynamic science), as little more than a further line-entry in that cosmic ledger, from which subtractions, and to which additions, could be (and are) unfailingly made. from such a perspective, tyn- dall explains, ‘the energy of nature is a constant quantity, and the utmost man can do in the ‘everyone now knows’, tyndall wrote at the start of his review (appealing to the necessary and culturally affirming myth in skewed or hierarchical societies of the ‘poor boy made good’), ‘the story of the philosopher’s [faraday’s] birth; that his father was a smith; that he was born at newington butts in ; that he slid along the london pavements, a bright-eyed errand boy, with a load of brown curls and a packet of newspapers under his arm […]’. tyndall’s narrative, indeed, seems almost dickensian in its sweep, right down to the detail of the ‘lad’s’ (his term) stern yet understanding taskmaster, ‘a kindly man, who became attached to the little fellow and in due time made him an apprentice [bookbinder] without a fee […]’ (fos, p. ). - - pursuit of physical knowledge, is to shift the constituents of the never-varying total, sacrificing one if he would produce another’ (heat, p. ) – and anyone who thought otherwise might as well, as he phrased it in his (frequently ribald) exposé ‘science and the spirits’, ‘maintain the story of “jack and the beanstalk” in the face of all the science in the world’ (fos, p. ). carlyle likewise chafed at those who thought the universe little more than an uncon- nected assemblage of random occurrences spread haphazardly throughout space and time, filled with detritus past use, the tattered end-products of exhausted chemical, biological and physical processes. instead, such remnants, he insisted, were not worthless debris, destined to be no longer considered part of any useful ordering, but rather, when ‘[r]ightly viewed’, humble tokens of being itself: the drop which thou shakest from thy wet hand, rests not where it falls, but to-morrow thou findest it swept away; already, on the wings of the northwind, it is nearing the tropic of cancer. how came it to evaporate, and not lie motionless? thinkest thou there is aught motionless; without force, and utterly dead? […]. detached, separated! i say there is no such separation; nothing hitherto was ever stranded, cast aside; but all, were it only a withered leaf, works together with all; is borne forward on the bottomless, shoreless flood of action, and lives through perpetual metamorphoses. the withered leaf is not dead and lost, there are forces in it and around it […]. despise not the rag from which man makes paper, or the litter from which the earth makes corn. rightly viewed no meanest object is insignificant; all objects are as windows, through which the philosophic eye looks into infinitude itself! (sartor, pp. - ) although tyndall, in an analogous passage, replaces carlyle’s inchoate ‘force’ with the more thermodynamically specific concept of heat, he, too, like his predecessor, requests that we permit our inner ‘philosophic’ (or, in his terminology, ‘mental’) eye to track its gradual pro- gress. we are then shown a carefully delimited sequence of such ‘perpetual metamorphoses’: the mental eye can, indeed, follow the emission [of heat] from its source, through the ether as vibra- tory motion, to the ocean, where it ceases to be vibration, and takes the potential form among the molecules of aqueous vapour; to the mountain-top, where the heat absorbed in vaporization is given out in condensation, while that expended by the sun in lifting the water to its present elevation is still unrestored. this we find paid back to the last unit by the friction along the river’s bed; at the bottom of the cascades where the plunge of the torrent is suddenly arrested; in the warmth of the machinery turned by the river; in the spark from the millstone; beneath the crusher of the miner; in the alpine saw-mill; in the milk-churn of the châlet; in the supports of the cradle in which the mountaineer, by water power, rocks his baby to sleep. all the forms of mechanical motion here indicated are simply the parcelling out of an amount of calorific motion derived originally from the sun; and at each point at which the mechanical motion is destroyed, or diminished, it is the sun’s heat which is restored. (heat, p. ) in short, we have an interplay of literary tropes with armchair gedankenexperiment, of a nine- teenth-century scientist’s personal prejudices with nineteenth-century scientism’s impersonal - - ‘truth’. observe, for instance, how tyndall moves, in the course of explanation, from a pair of examples drawn from (quintessentially victorian) heavy industry (‘the warmth of the machin- ery’, ‘the crusher of the miner’), to another associated mainly with a conventional domestic space (‘the milk-churn of the châlet’), and, finally, to one firmly anchored in that most sacro- sanct and homely domain of them all, the bedroom of a newborn child (‘the supports of the cradle in which the mountaineer […] rocks his baby to sleep’) – all by way of telling references to millstones grinding iconically away. note also the financial vocabulary, the way heat becomes a finite, parsimoniously conserved commodity, one that is at first ‘parcell[ed] out’ and then, in due time, ‘paid back to the last unit’. even so, as he had done with carlyle’s teachings on historical change, tyndall, in at- tempting to parallel (or buttress) his own convictions regarding the conservation of energy with those implicit in ‘teufelsdröckh’s’ transcendentalism, perpetuates a subtle, perhaps totally subconscious, act of misconstrual and faulty transmission. his conception of cosmic whole- ness, as noted earlier, was never precisely equivalent to that of the first law. (carlyle had written, for instance, in on heroes and hero-worship [ ] of our estrangement as conscious beings from the reductively or mechanistically material, not tyndall’s unity with such things, giving as his definition of the universe: ‘that it is a force, and thousandfold complexity of forces; a force which is not we. that is all; it is not we, it is altogether different from us’ [p. ].) however, though such a wilful misrepresentation on the scientist’s behalf might seem uncharitable, it was far from unprecedented. even the aggrieved carlyle had himself been prone, throughout his career, to commit- ting a comparable indiscretion. he, too, from time to time, mangled teachings, vernaculars and metaphors derived – or inherited – from his own illustrious spiritual and stylistic ‘progeni- tors’. a. l. le quesne remarks: he [carlyle] repeatedly distorted and coarsened their distinctions and definitions, usually in the interest of deriving a simpler moral message from them […]. carlyle’s habitual method was to seize on isolated ideas and phrases from their work – entsagen (renunciation), selbsttodtung (self-annihilation), ernst ist das leben (“life is earnest”), and so on – lift them out of context, and reinterpret them in ways that suited him […]. (p. ) nonetheless, for all their divergences, these were both writers convinced of the beauty of a principle that either coheres with – or could be construed as precursor to – the doctrine of energy conservation, even if tyndall conceptualised energy, and energy conservation, far more expansively, tracing all present motions, animate and inanimate, back to solar potency. yet the sun itself, as he would have insisted, represents a far from infinite – though, in - - all fairness, still unimaginably bountiful – reservoir of obtainable warmth. tyndall asked, his science as yet unable to answer (the radiative emission from, and disaggregation of, uranium salts not being discovered till ), a question of staggering contemporary import towards the close of his textbook heat. (‘as soon as it was realised [by scientists] […] that the sun was running down, it became important to them to discover the source of its energy’, as frank james has summarised, with little understatement [‘thermodynamics’, p. ].) [h]ow is its [the sun’s] […] [fire] maintained? how is the perennial loss [of mass through ‘combus- tion’] made good? we are apt to overlook the wonderful in the common. possibly to many of us – and even to some of the most enlightened among us – the sun appears as a fire, differing from our terres- trial fires only in the magnitude and intensity of its combustion. but what is the burning matter which can thus sustain itself? (heat, p. ) so, while tyndall’s science could calculate to the erg the expenditure of energy required to raise a climber from the base to the summit of mont blanc (equal to that ‘derived from the combustion of about two ounces of carbon’ [p. ]), it could not even begin adequately to explain the origin of ‘solar light and heat’, two phenomena, of course, which in consort constitute ‘the very mainspring of […] life’ (p. ). these, presumably, were questions with answers. other riddles, however – and this, as discussed in chapter two, would be a paramount theme at belfast as well (though one often overlooked by commentators) – require more for ‘resolution’ than mere empiricism or mo- lecular theory. ‘as regards knowledge’, tyndall explains in ‘vitality’, ‘physical science is polar. in one sense it knows, or is destined to know, everything. in another sense it knows nothing. science knows much of this intermediate phase of things that we call nature, of which it is the product; but science knows nothing of the origin or destiny of nature’ (fos, p. ). hence, science, as he conceived it, is at once omniscient (‘it knows’) and ignorant (it ‘knows nothing’), though this dualism for tyndall did not present any intractable paradox, nor did it invalidate (or belittle) the unsurpassed progress already made under a materialistic banner. he announces boldly, for instance, in the concluding sub-section of heat: a mode of motion, that, ‘presented rightly to the mind, the discoveries and generalisations of modern science constitute a poem more sublime than has ever yet addressed the human imagination. the natural philosopher of to-day may dwell amid conceptions which beggar those of milton’ (p. ) – the key phrase, of course, being tyndall’s first: ‘presented rightly to the mind’. he once computed that he could ascend a particular peak in the alps on the energy derived from eating nothing more than a single sandwich. he then did precisely that, just to prove his point. (this famous anecdote, incidentally, is the sole reference to tyndall in adam hart-davis’s what the victorians did for us [ ; p. ].) - - who, then, given the evident insufficiency of milton, certainly in an ontological sense (with reference to things that are: a domain now triumphantly annexed by science), could give warmth and quasi-religious fullness to what must have seemed to many victorian minds the essential poverty of such a ‘beggaring’ combination of beliefs? this was that brew of unre- lieved baconianism, ‘lucretian’ materialism, and the ‘new’ biology and cosmology of mid- century, so central to tyndall’s thought – and, increasingly, or so it seemed, to the thought of science more generally. ‘[a] celestial coal for ever bright’: the victorian seer as type of sun carlyle, for one, seemed to tyndall, seemed to many, an ideal seer to reveal these emergent connections between religion and science. (‘professor tyndall calls him our greatest spiritual teacher’, as w. m. w. call observed in an article of [p. ].) he, on several occasions, imagined him a prophet. carlyle, for instance, was once the featured speaker at a graduation ceremony at the university of edinburgh, a ceremony at which both tyndall and t. h. huxley were to receive honorary degrees. nonetheless, on the day, tyndall, though undenia- bly thrilled by the prospect of personal academic recognition, found himself for a few mo- ments far more intrigued by the audience’s reactions to carlyle. sitting before ranks of graduands, ‘looking […] at the sea of faces below me – young, eager, expectant, waiting to be lifted up by the words of the prophet they had chosen – i [tyndall]’, as he explains in his essay ‘recollections’, ‘forgot all about the degrees [to be conferred]’ (nf, p. ). ‘let the world say what it will regarding carlyle’, he wrote in a letter of may to juliet pollock, ‘i am not acquainted with his equal. among my acquaintance in the literary world which of course is but a small acquaintance he has nothing like an equal – an intellect of the very strongest fibre horsed on an imagination of the most fiery quality […]’ (pp. - ). such equine imagery is arresting: reason as stalwart knight astride animal imagination, bridled yet impetuous. he, elsewhere, utilises precisely the same conceit in a portrait of able scientific rationality as well, a process in which imagination is understood by him to be investi- gative endeavour’s absolutely necessary accompaniment. (this is a theme exemplified in his discourse ‘on the scientific use of the imagination’, with, as phrased in the third [ ] in a lecture of at london university, tyndall strongly cautioned his audience (invoking milton’s manifesto in paradise lost . ) against those ubiquitous, if scientifically and theologically retrogressive, ‘expound- ers of the ways of god to men, who offer us intellectual peace at the modest cost of intellectual life’ (fos, p. ). - - edition, its intriguing definition – subtly steeplechasing – of science as ‘a leap of the prepared imagination’ [p. ].) in a notebook entry of october , tyndall explains: the term imagination has been discredited by the misuse of the faculty. pranks have been played with it in all ages of the world, and pranks will continue to be played with it to the end of time. but side by side with those who make this illegitimate use of imaginative power, others have existed, and will exist, who have taught us, and will continue to teach us, how to use it aright. instead of suffering themselves to be carried away by it, such men direct and rule <these stronger ones, when they use it govern> the force of imagination as a mighty rider controls and guides his charger with bit and rein. to such spirits, adventurous and strong <firm>, we are indebted for our deeper knowledge of the methods by which the physical universe is ordered and ruled. (‘sky’) here, again, tyndall affirms that the scientist and the poet bring similar aptitudes to bear on explicating and categorising phenomena; both use their peculiar talents to frame new ap- proaches, new languages – literary or mathematical, abstract or representational – which gradually enter the wider vernacular. but a perhaps more apt analogue for a social prophet like carlyle – and one which likewise appears commonly in tyndall’s prose – can be found in solar phenomenology, in images of the sun. the sun, after all, he reminds us, a ball of ‘living fire’ seeming far more than the site of mere burning, is not simply an example of terrestrial combustion writ large. rather, it is an (in every practical sense) inexhaustible source of vital energy, the source and fount of everything. a popular astronomical work by richard proctor, the sun: ruler, fire, light, and life of the planetary system ( ), encapsulates much in its title of the central orb’s prominence in the cultural, scientific, literary and, indeed, mythic imaginations of the period (and, correspondingly, their multiform discourses as well), providing further confirmation of the cultural heliotropism addressed in this dissertation’s opening chapter. moreover, tyndall was, if anything, perhaps the most influential (and, surely, the most eloquent) among that broad-based fascination’s instigators and exponents in mid- to late-victorian intellectual life. a self-conscious solarism, for instance, informs this description of his initial sighting, on the trip to wight, of tennyson’s house. told that evening by his travelling companion, mr wright, of its proximity, and with vision constrained by the superstructure of the carriage in which he was riding, i tried my best to see the house, but beech and cedar flung their sheltering arms between the road and house. i saw a corner gleaming through the trees, it went – a second for a moment came, - - and that was all, still it was something worth to glance upon the corner of a house which holds a poet. one in whose clear mind burns a celestial coal for ever bright! no smoke, no glare, but smoke and glare condensed to living fire which warms the souls of men. (‘dp’, p. [ ]) we note in his description the equivalence between the qualities of the sun as (mis)understood by nineteenth-century science (‘a celestial coal for ever bright’) and those of tennyson’s ‘clear mind’. its illumination, like that provided by the sun itself, demonstrates neither ‘glare’ nor ‘smoke’, appurtenances (trochaically emphasised) of terrestrial fires – and, by extension, common, muddled apprehensions. it continues on, rather, serenely undiminished: a ‘living fire which warms the souls of men’. indeed, in his dedicatory essay ‘on unveiling the statue of thomas carlyle’, though a much later work, he likewise deployed conspicuously solar iconography in posthumous tribute: ‘a friend and i agreed some time ago to describe him [carlyle] as “dynamic,” not “didactic” – a spiritual force, which warmed, moved and invigo- rated, but which refused to be clipped into precepts’ (nf, p. ). light and energy from the sun, of course – similarly irreducible, equally ‘dynamic’ – share these same animating attrib- utes. if man is by nature a type of smith (an image, some decades later, to inform stephen dedalus’s conception of transcendentally impersonal artistry in joyce’s portrait of the artist as a young man), then the true seer, it would seem, is a type of sun. tennyson’s residence, situated along a road from freshwater to alum bay, was destined to become (much to its owner’s displeasure) one of the isle of wight’s premier tourist attractions, though it was still not quite that when tyndall made this visit in early summer . ‘the poet laureate […]’, marianne lane explains in piers of the isle of wight ( ), ‘and his family came to live at farringford, freshwater in , where they entertained many important guests, including h. r. h. prince albert, charles darwin, charles kingsley, edward lear and celebrated artists such as holman hunt, g. f. watts and millais […]’ (p. ). tyndall was himself invited, in , to join such an elite – and deliciously eclectic – group. he describes a discussion that evening in an undated letter to mrs pollock, presumably of may : after mrs. tennyson went away we continued to talk, and after that again i ascended to the upper story, into the poet’s own holy place; here he filled a pipe for me, lighted it himself and transferred it to my lips, and we smoked and talked for another hour. we talked of maud and its critics[,] of peotry [sic], of mr. buckle’s lecture, which he and [?jowett] had glanced at and thought empty, of christian- ity and the influence of the imagination. tennyson does not dazzle, but there is that about him which pulled me like the force of gravity – a thorough candour and brotherliness, if i may use the expression, an absence of all artificial fences, so that there is no hindrance to the play of natural affinities. - - tyndall’s prose again evokes the celestial, if somewhat less exuberantly (a slight change in register perhaps a consequence, not merely of the more restrained rhetorical standards of an epistolary context, but also the demythologising impulse associated with personal familiarity). tennyson, he suggests, like the all-pervading central force of solar gravitation – that which caused the sun and planets to condense out of the primordial nebula in the first place, and which has ever since governed them magisterially in their orbits – is naturalised, made an irresistible, even universal, phenomenon. and the transference of the lit pipe, replicating (perhaps unintentionally, certainly with a degree of whimsy) the promethean myth, also recapitulates in miniature the actions of our solar furnace day in and day out. prometheus unsought ‘no one can stop us now / !’cause we are all made of stars’. - richard melville hall [pop star ‘moby’], nonetheless, tyndall’s cultural historiography, conditioned in large part by his intractably materialistic interpretations of mid-century cosmology and evolutionary theory, mandated a ‘promethean’ myth with, at its heart, no prometheus-figure. put another way, in his beginning, his book of genesis, there was the nebula, and only the nebula. everything, literally everything, proceeded from that. (modern astrophysicist- poet rebecca elson described creation’s simplicity, and isolation, thus: ‘begin with particles which could be dust / or stars, it makes no difference / and put them in a box from which they can’t escape’.) as a natural philosopher, tyndall conceptualised cosmogenesis from the top down, imagining the birth of the world in a ‘fiery cloud’, a cloud governed by the laws of gas dynamics, in which basic physical principles such as the conservation of energy held ineluctable dominion. for him, the starting point for extrapolation was not fossils in the ground, nor evidence of geological uniformitarianism (both ready-to-hand terrestrial indica- tions of the earth’s extraordinary antiquity), but rather a set of equations on a blackboard, themselves doctrines derived from repeated experiment. an analysis based on such principles, not only did tyndall envisage tennyson in oddly stellar terms, the circumstances of their first meeting, to hear him tell it, even had a touch of the newtonian – if not, maybe, the astrologically preordained – about them as well. thinking back years later on the event, he observed: ‘i had often wished to meet the poet, but had never made a move towards securing this pleasure. “it is wonderful,” i remark in my journal, “how things gravitate in this world. here is a great pleasure and a great privilege come to me without my seeking”’ (‘glimpse’, p. ). - - he wrote, would lead inevitably to the realisation that the planets were once ‘parts of the same undislocated mass; that matter in a nebulous form preceded matter in a dense form; that as the ages rolled away, heat was wasted, condensation followed, planets were detached, and that finally the chief portion of the fiery cloud reached, by self-compression, the magnitude and density of the sun’ (fos, p. ). speaking of these conjectures on solar and planetary evolution, he once famously posed the question: ‘for what are the core and essence of this hypothesis?’: strip it naked and you stand face to face with the notion that not alone the more ignoble forms of animacular or animal life, not alone the nobler forms of the horse or the lion, not alone the exquisite and wonderful mechanism of the human body, but that the human mind itself – emotion, intellect, will, and all their phenomena – were once latent in a fiery cloud […]. many who hold it [the nebular hypothesis] would probably assent to the position that all our philosophy, all our poetry, all our science, and all our art – plato, shakespeare, newton, and raphael – are potential in the fires of the sun. (pp. - ) tyndall’s smith, in other words, his primordial man, had only nature from which to learn. there was no divine ‘tap on the shoulders’ telling him to do this and not that with the sputter- ing flame he had harnessed. and, similarly, tyndall’s seers – his tennysons and carlyles, his newtons and darwins – had only collocations of matter from which their genius was derived. yet such figures also represent the process coming full-circle, as they themselves (and their works) become sites of origin, of potential and boundless intellectual encouragement. generations untold, tyndall insinuates, will be warmed by – and perceive things more clearly because of – their light (an alfred, lord tennyson that ‘does not dazzle’; a michael faraday whose ‘fire was that of a solid combustible, not that of a gas […]’ [faraday, p. ]), shining bonfire-like through centuries, across cultures and continents, illuminating diverse interdisci- plinary cubby-holes. in a journal entry of may , tyndall, referring to carlyle, made such an analogy explicit in words at once tritely conventional and wholly his own: ‘his position is sometimes startling – to many he will appear impious […]. i however thank the gods for having flung him as a beacon to guide me amid life’s entanglements’ (qtd. in barton, p. ). but this sentiment is itself (at least, in part) neo-carlylean, like so many other such ‘tyndallic’ tropes. in the first lecture of on heroes and hero-worship, that author had com- mented on the role of the courageous ‘great man’, even in a dilapidated age like the victorian: but i liken common languid times, with their unbelief, distress, perplexity, with their languid doubting characters and embarrassed circumstances, impotently crumbling-down into ever worse distress - - towards final ruin; – all this i liken to dry dead fuel, waiting for the lightning out of heaven that shall kindle it. the great man, with his free force direct out of god’s own hand, is the lightning. his word is the wise healing word which all can believe in. (p. ) fittingly, tyndall (as w. t. jeans observed in ) was himself destined to become a local luminary, one lesser light or flaring nova of brief though piercing radiance: ‘[b]y his [tyn- dall’s] writings he has probably done more than any other man in england to kindle a love of science among the masses […]’ (p. ). such figures brighten beyond their state; they make evident and ennoble; they inspire creativity and precipitate endeavour – and, in so doing, they take the place of those supernatu- ral forces rendered irrelevant, though hardly superfluous, by the dictates of materialism, but so often invoked in such inspirational capacities. ‘in regard to metaphors drawn from science, your father [tennyson], like carlyle, made sure of their truth’, so tyndall explains in another posthumous tribute-essay ‘a glimpse of farringford, ; and “the ancient sage,” ’, a piece commissioned by hallam, the poet’s son, for a volume of memoirs: to secure accuracy, he [tennyson] spared no pains. i found charts in his room of isothermals and isobars intended to ensure the exactitude of certain allusions of his to physical science. in illustration of this, the late lord houghton, […] once told me that, having composed an exquisite poem upon a flower, tennyson discarded it because of some botanical flaw. in comparing him with carlyle, i notice that the latter drew his imagery, for the most part, from what we call inorganic nature. physics and chemistry were well advanced when carlyle wrote, but modern researches in biology had scarcely begun. these later fell into your father’s hands, and he has made noble use of them from “in memor- iam” onwards. (p. ) here, as he had done for carlyle, tyndall is attempting to rehabilitate tennyson – though, to be fair, that poet’s credentials (fellow of the royal society, and so forth) never looked for a moment even half as suspect – as ‘friend to science’, or, at worst, regrettably, or intermittently, estranged confederate. even he, however, has to concede that tennyson was never entirely comfortable with the doctrines of scientific materialism, with those theologically destabilising ramifications derived from the nebular hypothesis, natural selection, organic evolution, the conservation of energy. ‘your father’s interest in science was profound’, he observes in the article, ‘but not, i believe, unmingled with a fear of its “materialistic” tendencies. this, however, is to me a point of secondary importance’ (pp. - ). why should this have been? why, in other words, should the poet’s ‘fear’ have re- mained relatively untroubling to such a committed and outspoken exponent of scientific naturalism, particularly one so notoriously prone to proselytising and prejudgement? in the preface to the second edition of fragments (reprinted in most later editions as - - well), tyndall gave definition to the shape of his ‘ideal scientist’. he did the same for that of his ‘ideal artist’. they are identical, hardly surprising given his predilections for poetry and the complementary nature of his own intellectual upbringing, with two ersatz fathers, faraday and carlyle (the first, a quintessentially ‘masculine’ scientist; the second, an equally ‘mascu- line’ artist-prophet), splitting his affections, each vying, perhaps, for the dominant role. (tyndall’s attitude towards faraday seemed, as noted by eve and creasey, ‘filial rather than brotherly’ – arising out of a ‘deep and sincere affection’ [p. ], despite troubling religious differences – while his behaviour towards carlyle was, by many, identically characterised, t. h. huxley describing it, in an obituary, as evidencing ‘almost filial devotion’ [‘professor’, p. ].) the problem which presses for solution is, how, amid the wreck of [religious] forms now immi- nent, to preserve the reverence and loftiness of thought and feeling which in times past found in those forms organic expression. this is not to be done by science only, still less by routine utterances about god and the human soul. from ‘society,’ or from aggregates of men in societies, whether ‘christian’ or otherwise, no voice of guidance as regards this question can possibly come. but if nature have in store a man of the requisite completeness – equivalent, let us say, to milton and helmholtz rolled into one – such a man, freed by his own volition from ‘society,’ and fed for a time upon the wild honey of the wilderness, might be able to detach religious feeling from its accidents, and restore it to us in a form not out of keeping with the knowledge of the time. (fos, pp. vi - vii) as in his essay ‘vitality’, we observe the same know/not-know duality, here extended, how- ever, to encompass the non-scientific and synthesising alongside the scientific and reductionist. (we note also that this preface, dated may , effectively epitomises the argument of his belfast peroration, delivered late august .) tyndall, it seems, heard something rather cheerier on the shingles near the solent in june , from matthew arnold’s ‘melancholy, long, withdrawing road […]’, (‘dover’, p. ; line ) – words published in but, likely, composed in june (allott, p. ). his ‘man of the requisite completeness’, though, even he concedes, has an almost zarathustrian aura of realistic unattainability, a prospect of realisation, if ever, only at some point in utopic futurity. in the meantime, then, tyndall would insist, and irrespective of the success or failure of such rehabilitative efforts as those he so often attempts, such ‘solar’ figures as carlyle and tennyson (or, on the other side of the aisle, hermann von helmholtz and michael faraday), are the nearest approximations which we, or the victorians, could ever hope to find. - - chapter tyndall among the glaciers: the mid-victorian scientific materialist as romantic survivor she wraps man in darkness, and makes him for ever long for light. she creates him dependent upon the earth, dull and heavy; and yet is always shaking him until he attempts to soar above it.a - goethe, ‘nature: aphorisms’; huxley’s translation, an undated, unfinished draft letter found (misplaced?) between the pages of a bound volume of notebooks in the tyndall archives at the ri (and written in the hasty scrawl of that scientist) seems at first an isolated curiosity. it is tagged with the address of his alpine holiday home: alp lusgen, brieg, switzerland. it lacks an addressee or salutation. its text amounts to two full sentences, neither auspicious: ‘there is gloom upon the mountains, gloom upon the glaciers, while clouds hang dusky fringes downwards from a heaven of gloom. our hills are left [?with] us desolate, bald and bare, shorn of their herbage, forsaken by their flocks, with no sound save the dull hum of the distant torrent which sulkily shakes the air’ (‘loose’). this is surely too precious (did he realise this? is that perhaps why it was left incomplete?): the alliteration in every clause; the grammatical and metrical identity between those two object- phrases taken by the initiating verb; the paired sibilances, both in ‘s’, hissing menacingly, sandwiching that dental consonance made by ‘dull hum’ and ‘distant torrent’; and, above everything else, the droning, liturgical cadence of it all, iambic and unrelieved. it seems a knowing parody of romanticism, at once linguistically overwritten and symbolically over- wrought: too many gothic portents, too much adolescent ‘literariness’. perhaps, one muses darkly, it was deliberately misplaced, if misplaced it was. nevertheless, more charitably, this brief fragment once again highlights tyndall’s care in composition, while hinting also at a number of the scientist’s own (hardly suppressed) literary and philosophical influences. by contrast, a romanticism of a different sort – ideological this time, not just meta- epigraph from goethe, ‘nature’, p. . - - phoric, existing beyond the superficial plane of language and figuration – pervades this phrase from his landmark textbook, six lectures on light ( ); it seems one expressing a fact at once tautologically true (modern science must, by definition, adhere to some first-hand conception of the external) and epistemologically suggestive: ‘indeed, it may be doubted whether the real life of science can be fully felt and communicated by the man who has not himself been taught by direct communion with nature’ (p. ). william wordsworth would have concurred, if perhaps substituting for ‘science’, ‘poetry’. tyndall’s choice of ‘communion’ to characterise such behaviour is both apt and familiar; it looks simultaneously backwards towards the ideologies associated with poets earlier in the century and sideways towards prominent rhe- torical and lexical proclivities explicit in his own writing. after all, as discussed in chapter two, those manichean categorisations of good and bad personages in the history of science, of a black and white distinctiveness between correct and false physical knowledge, invariably evanesce into chiaroscuros of colour and shade – the ‘azure’ of the belfast peroration, for instance – when subjects under discussion transcend empiricism, when they venture beyond the terrain (admittedly expansive) claimed as the sole provenance of materialistic investigation. gillian beer, among others, has remarked on this, delighting in the scientist’s literary resourcefulness, his playful erudition and sense of semantic expansiveness, tendencies mar- shalled, from time to time, in the service of evasiveness and chary equivocation. such culti- vated ambiguity, she notes, is to be discovered not merely at the level of denotated meaning but also within the wording of argumentation itself – in the impressionistic vibrancy of his linguistic palette, for example. indeed, when caught wandering beyond the scientifically certain, monochromatic ‘high-and-dry light’ – beer’s phrasing here fittingly references that of the peroration at belfast – ‘is not tyndall’s medium; he prefers the liberal oscillation within sentences, the vigour of metaphor, and the ardent recomposition of ideas. to that degree his views temptingly ran alongside the religious, even while they repudiated religious authority’ (of, pp. - ). surrogate religiosity was a feature as well of the nineteenth-century romantic tradi- tion, as many of the more perspicacious thinkers of the age intuitively understood, and it is with this tradition that tyndall’s ‘scientific’ sentiments seem sometimes most pleasingly to harmonise. this chapter, then, is an exploration of borderlands in his thought, focusing more generally on the latent – or, as i argue, reconstituted – romanticism inhering in tyndall’s interpretations and elucidations of nineteenth-century naturalism. the power of place, embodied in sites of enlightening or pedagogic ‘communion’, so emphasised in the artistic - - pronouncements of romantic poets and prophets is likewise strikingly underscored in tyn- dall’s own literary productions, not just in prose but in verse as well. yet considered attention to the verbal representations of this concern, my subject in the middle sections of this chapter, provides ample evidence of both the continuities linking, and the disjunctions distinguishing between, two separate attempts at engagement with (distinct, even irreconcilable) de- theologised interpretations – that early in the century, made most iconically by wordsworth; that midway through, put forward by one ardent exponent of scientific materialism (and poetic amateur) – of the phenomena of natural and mental worlds, their quandaries and confusions. it will, accordingly, be instructive to start by looking at the ‘high altar’ at which tyndall most frequently ‘worshipped’, and from which he derived the most fervent and long- lasting inducement: those peaks, glaciers and foothills encountered amongst the alpine range. salvage or synthesis?: tyndall and the ‘wordsworthian project’ in , sheldon amos, writing in a section of the westminster review devoted to coverage of recent publications in the fields of politics, sociology and travel, made (perhaps inadvertently) his own minor, though characteristically irksome, contribution to ongoing, cross-cultural debates concerning the respective intellectual domains of the sciences and the arts in mid- to late-victorian britain. these were debates, of course, which by the s were to lead to c. p. snow’s celebrated pronouncements in the two cultures, though at the time there was still widespread hope for some sort of future metaphysical rapprochement. contrasting hours of exercise in the alps, a work on mountaineering, with the same author’s fragments of science for unscientific people (both first published that year), the reviewer noted that, from his own per- spective – and no doubt, he supposed, from that as well of many among his readership – ‘“hours of exercise in the alps” is the title which professor tyndall gives to a volume of short papers supplementary to that of his “fragments.” the previous volume contained sketches of his working life, as the second does that of his holiday-making’ (p. ). tyndall himself, though he fully recognised that the two ‘halves’ of his own personality (professor at the ri, pioneering alpinist) were not perfectly contiguous, would never have endorsed such a bifurcation. nor would he have countenanced one work being considered supplemental, or somehow ancillary, to the other. (‘a short time ago’, he explains in prefatory notes to hours of exercise, ‘i published a book of “fragments,” which might have been called “hours of exercise in the laboratory” […]’ [p. v].) he would, moreover, have insisted that - - disjunctions pale when viewed in comparison with strange or unexpected affinities, that distinctions of value are both subjective and invidious, pointing out that mountains provided him with a respite from work even as they informed the course of his research, while cramped london laboratories enabled him both to study and, from time to time, to replicate phenom- ena he in many instances had first encountered while traversing the altitudinous spaces of switzerland and france. it was inarguably the case, even there, amid grandiose geographies of summits and ice, that it was the methodologies of mid-victorian inductive science that guided his footfalls and directed his vision, all the while conditioning his more general spiritual and aesthetic sensibilities as well. in recollections of an old mountaineer, a volume of memoirs first published in , wal- ter larden recounts a meeting with tyndall amid just such monumental topographies; the year was or : once a lean, strong-faced man (the image is dim to me now) came across to lunch; i saw it was tyndall. i wish i had had the assurance to introduce myself to him as (in a small way) a scientific man! it would have been a memory worth possessing. those old climbers did more than conquer moun- tains, with alpenstocks in place of the modern ice axe, and inefficiently-nailed boots, for they con- quered the fears of men and the superstitions that clung about the unknown. and tyndall took the mountains in a large spirit; he had imagination and perception. i wish i had once talked to him! (p. ) this is retrospective canonisation, in part, but it testifies to the complexity of tyndall’s cultural ‘function’ while trekking and climbing. it suggests something as well of an essential paradox, as bartlett has noted in ‘preaching science’: the irony that, in interpreting and writing about his experiences among mountains, ‘being a scientist made tyndall more “romantic,” more willing or able to draw upon tropes of the sublime, than were non-scientist fellow-members of the alpine club’ (pp. - ). nor should it be forgotten, as larden intimates, that the alps were always, for tyndall, supreme experimental venues, essential locations for study and empirical investigation, every bit as significant as the basement laboratories of the ri. this intercourse was not merely intellectual, however, taking place between disciplines alone. it was textual as well, and because of it many of tyndall’s works slip ready or uncomplicated generic classification. extended passages, for instance, from his travel writings reappear in more ‘scientific’ contexts indeed, early on, his climbing even received, as it were, an apt ‘scientific benediction’: tyndall was pre- sented with his alpenstock (a steel-tipped ‘climbing stick’ then absolutely essential for serious mountaineering) by the botanist and noted himalayan explorer j. d. hooker; hooker, however, to mark its ownership, scored tyndall’s initials, not with a knife, but rather by singeing its wooden surface with ordinary sunlight focused through a pocket magnifying lens (clark, p. ). - - (several chapters of hours of exercise, to take but one obvious example, appeared eventually in new fragments, the ‘sequel’ to fragments of science), even as the intractability of physical reference within his ‘straightforward’ tales of mountaineering and high adventure render them curiously resistant to labelling. they, in other words, only infrequently seem ‘travel literature’ first and foremost, while, conversely, his various and wide-ranging works on ‘natural philoso- phy’ rarely confine themselves exclusively to the bald elucidation of facts and equations, graphs and physical tendencies. what sort of text, for instance, is the following, an evocative extract from tyndall’s glaciers of the alps ( )? the anticipated storm at length gave notice of its coming. the sea-waves, as observed by aristotle, sometimes reach the shore before the wind which produces them is felt; and here the tempest sent out its precursors, which broke in detached shocks upon the cabin before the real storm arrived. billows of air, in ever quicker succession, rolled over us with a long surging sound, rising and falling as crest succeeded trough and trough succeeded crest. and as the pulses of a vibrating body, when their succession is quick enough, blend to a continuous note, so these fitful gusts linked themselves finally to a storm which made its own wild music among the crags. grandly it swelled, carrying the imagination out of doors, to the clouds and darkness, to the loosened avalanches and whirling snow upon the mountain heads. moored to the rock on two sides, the cabin stood firm, and its manifest security allowed the mind the undisturbed enjoyment of the atmospheric war. we were powerfully shaken, but had no fear of being uprooted; and a certain grandeur of the heart rose responsive to the grandeur of the storm. mounting higher and higher, it at length reached its maximum strength, from which it lowered fitfully, until at length, with a melancholy wail, it bade our rock farewell. (pp. - ) a reader, too, one suspects, might be ‘powerfully shaken’; tyndall’s prose, like the storm it describes, is here breathless, sensual, tempestuous. nature is personified as warring, chival- rously giving advance ‘notice of its coming’; it emits at times a ‘wild music’, a melancholic ‘wail’; it bids ‘our rock farewell’. his argument glances at aristotle, meteorology, wave- mechanics, the theory of sound and harmony. their mountain cabin becomes a ship ‘moored to the rock’, battered by undulating troughs and crests of wind. most notably, a romantic correspondence is established, the orgiastic fury of the storm inciting in the heart a certain sympathetic ‘grandeur’. comparable passages appear throughout a range of tyndall’s more technical works as well, many of which devolve from time to time into personal or subjective narrative, into, in vital particulars, travellers’ tales. indeed, this multivalency, and these crossings-over, between forms of scientific and peripatetic description, between forms of realist and imaginative representation, are often in and of themselves sources of charm and glancing profundity. pace that reviewer, in both fragments and hours of exercise, as in all his popular works (and not a few of his ‘specialist’ ones as well), science is refigured as quest narrative, with a plot and real excitement, at the same time that the new-fangled sport of mountaineering – dubbed pejora- - - tively, and not altogether unfairly, ‘pinnacle chasing’ by charles dickens (qtd. in bartlett, p. ) – is remade into something far less simpleminded and chest-thumpingly ‘masculine’. the remainder of this chapter interrogates some of these overlappings through examination of, among other things, the role of place in tyndall’s prose and occasional verse, before turning at its conclusion towards broader discussion of the significance for such a thinker of materialistic conceptions of an ‘organic’ or ‘symphonic’ cosmology, metaphors which were, as we shall see, closely enmeshed. it also incorporates an analysis, growing out of these consid- erations, of the role canonical, late-eighteenth- and early-nineteenth-century english roman- ticism – an aesthetic stance heavily indebted to notions put forth by those ‘idealistic’ philoso- phers cited in my previous chapter – played in the framing of the scientist’s worldview. wordsworth, in particular, is a powerful presence, as, after a fashion, tyndall took it upon himself to refine (and, if possible, bring towards fruition) what might loosely be termed the ‘wordsworthian project’ – a lofty goal, to be sure, but one not wholly out of keeping with either the man or his times. this ‘redacted’ project – to borrow, and upend, a phrase from m. h. abrams (itself borrowed, of course, from sartor resartus) – was the evincing of a form of ‘supernatural naturalism’, a way of looking at the world wholly scientific and yet imbued with the strength and wonder of earlier philosophies. abrams explains: ‘the title natural supernatu- ralism indicates that my recurrent […] concern will be with the secularization of inherited theological ideas and ways of thinking’ (p. ). this was accomplished by writers in the first half of the nineteenth century with varying degrees of flamboyance, individuals often starting from a variety of divergent presumptions. such particularities resulted in a compelling diversity of early and mid-victorian ‘ro- manticisms’, distinguishable if interrelated. carlyle, writing in the s and afterwards, inspired by german alongside english precedents, became so insistent in his annexation of biblical concepts and phrasings as to suggest, not merely analogy, but ‘a deliberate attempt to blur the differences between traditional christian beliefs and the subjectivity of romantic regeneration’ (mcsweeney and sabor, p. xxvii). tyndall’s own ‘supernatural naturalism’, a production of the s and ’ s, represented, nonetheless, a far more radical break, moving from the secularisation of faith to its actual materialisation, the promulgation of a form of naturalised religion, a ‘worship’ of the real and evidenced. it was a small but vociferous denomination. of its adherents rev. watson observed, in : ‘now a notable thing in regard to the preachers of nature-religion is the way they press gospel phrases and ideas into - - their service […]’ (gospels, p. ). yet, in this behaviour, ‘the preachers’, tyndall among them, were merely partaking in, and augmenting, a productive and varied discursive tendency; it was one extending back at least (here further to mythologise the event) to the publication in of wordsworth’s ‘preface to lyrical ballads’. as such, tyndall’s relationship with the ‘romantic tradition’ – a movement at once homogenised and simplified in his writings – provides a fine case-study in mid-victorian scientific intertextuality at the same time that it counterpoints tyndall’s own subtly different engagements, likewise often intertextual (though not exclusively so), with thomas carlyle. there was, as i argued previously, a compendiousness in tyndall’s re- sponses to carlyle, and the scientist’s reactions (whether right or wrong) were, more often than not, informed by the whole of his oeuvre, not just sartor resartus but also chartism, not just past and present but also the french revolution and on heroes, hero-worship and the heroic in history. they were friends, of course, reading each other’s works, frequently discussing them at length. tyndall’s familiarity with wordsworth and his contemporaries, by contrast, while thorough, was never so personal. thus he felt less inhibited by context. for him, wordsworth and keats, like pope or milton, like marlowe or shakespeare, were part of the literary heri- tage, something past, to be responded to, re-appropriated and imaginatively recast, not necessarily engaged in reciprocating dialogue or addressed on equal terms. yet wordsworth and keats, far more than any of those other figures, chimed with tyndall’s sensibilities, and hence his ‘supernatural naturalism’ represents a double inversion: romanticism as ethos first restrained and then rehabilitated by the selfsame thing, the doctrines of mid-century material- ism. this was, however, not a process of inversion yielding identity (as in mathematics or formal logic), but rather telling difference (as in english rhetoric, where the phrase ‘he is not un-handsome’ is only exceptionally a way of attributing a wholly unqualified attractiveness). tyndall’s ‘litotic’ romanticism, then, while superficially congruent with that of, say, word- sworth, encodes a world of difference, in part, of course, by quite literally encoding a different world: the world as known to, and as described by, mid-victorian molecular, evolutionary and thermodynamic theory. it was precisely through such a cobbled neo-romanticism that tyndall attempted to synthesise, or perhaps salvage, an aesthetic stance simultaneously adequate to the challenges posed by materialistic science and responsive to the questions raised by his own literary ‘forbearers’: those sainted translators of the authorised version; milton; and, above all others, carlyle and the romantics. positing a sensibility he hoped would revivify the perceived - - sterility of a thuggish materialism, he re-forged thereby – or reclaimed – an aesthetic-cum- philosophical standpoint in which observation and elucidation could be understood as provid- ing the ‘unheard music’ which, half-a-century prior, had so haunted the young keats, endow- ing the experiential world with a shimmering, quasi-mystical counterpart to sensible aware- ness. this would be a verifiable analogue to, at once alike and unlike, the prelude’s (and m. h. abrams’s) ‘correspondent breeze’. sometimes this ‘unheard music’ was sensed at the microscopic level: in the melodies of molecular crystallisation, for example; at others, a macroscopic one: in the singing of stars in distant space, or the sough of ethereal waves. in mountaineering in , these two levels of natural song are epitomised in two quotations, both from emerson: the first, from ‘monad- noc’ (‘for the world was made in order, / and the atoms march in tune’ [p. ; qtd., p. ]); the second, from ‘the house’ (‘she lays her beams in music, / in music every one, / to the cadence of the whirling world / which dances round the sun’ [pp. - ; qtd., p. ]). sometimes, too, an ‘unheard music’ was felt on a further, truer level as well: as tuneful- ness internal, interacting in fugal fashion with such ‘external’, sustaining voices. these were those sympathetic melodies stirred within the brain – a harp caressed by the breeze, in col- eridgean terms – of the well-tempered scientific analyst upon hushed and reverent attention to a ‘silently symphonious’ cosmology. (put succinctly, tyndall’s ‘“materialism” vastly different from what you suppose […]’, that motto from his much-revised belfast peroration [ba [ ], p. ], merely amplified – or un-muted – sequestered orchestrations.) at other times such a subliminal world was figured visually instead, as a secret beauty, or hidden pattern. jacob korg, in an essay on the influence of romanticism on pedagogy at cambridge between and , wrote: ‘the difference that romanticism (as a specific historical movement) stood for – one that bound men together in generational bonds whatever their “discipline” – was a perception that superficial appearance, wherever studied, concealed quite a different kind of order than had previously been suspected’ (p. ). this is what tyndall recollected of his initial crossing to the isle of wight on a private charter: and i to give rub the rust from chest and arms seized a relinquished oar; and long i tugged, and then i steered again, and saw our craft proudly o’ertake and pass with conquering sweep her canvassed sisters of the solent sea. we tacked and tacked, for so the wind decreed; while i with hand upon the helm took in the boatman’s hints, and but linked his facts to laws. - - he knew the how, and i resolved the why, and through the light of principles discerned a beauty in his acts he did not see. (‘dp’, p. [ ]) similar private wonders were discerned in the stars above, in atoms beneath boot-soles. such modes of responsiveness to phenomenological input are everywhere evident in tyndall’s published output; they provide the philosophical foundations for his scientific sense, one not absolutely secure, though remarkably resilient, its fracturings and aporias becoming most conspicuous in his outpourings of verse, despite such uneasinesses as articulated in discursive prose works like the belfast address, ‘on the scientific use of the imagination’, and others. this seems logical, that tyndall’s poetry should at once best express his philosophy while making most plainly manifest its faults and contradictions. the form has a habit of doing precisely that. it is a platitude at once tritely ignorable and timelessly correct that the era makes the poet as much as the poet the era; as one commentator observed in the encyclopædia brittanica – casually dismissing the obviousness, on one level, of such an assertion, while continuing to insist, upon another, on its radical, even dictatorial, authoritativeness – that poetry which seeks to please through our sympathies must shift and vary, both in its themes and in the manner of treating them, with the changes of society, is a truism on which it is needless to enlarge. if the opinions of men change, if their habits and the objects and associations which interest them alter, poetry must adopt itself to this altered state of things. it does so indeed unconsciously; it cannot avoid doing so; for the poet’s own nature has partaken of the change. (‘poetry’, p. ) tyndall’s science, the ‘opinions of [those] men’ on whom he had most relied, had, no doubt, undergone a materialistic, teleological turn, effectively irreversible, in the years after mid- century, post darwin and helmholtz and thomson. his poetic and metaphysical sensibilities struggled to match that turn fitly, to adapt their underlying architectures to what was, quite profoundly, an ‘altered state of things’, an observation-based, not merely ad hoc ‘metaphysical’, materialism. that the rest of the world, that ordinary victorians, were less aware of such a transition was the task tyndall set himself remedying in public. he could seem cocky, immoderate, even blasphemous in doing so. in private, however – as memorialised in verses, in letters, in journal entries – his tone was to remain far more circumspect; such was particularly the case later in the century, as the scientist’s own material ending inescapably approached. on the description of nature / on the nature of description tyndall, of course, was well aware of the ameliorative effects which a subtle change in situa- - - tion could sometimes work on an individual’s mindset, not least through personal experience. once, for instance, while wrestling with conceptual difficulties underlying a fundamental problem in electromagnetism (‘the experiments’, he later remarked, ‘which everybody seems to understand are the ones that trouble me most […]’ [qtd. in lwjt, p. ]), he took some time out to draft a letter. it was to thomas archer hirst. a friend and constant correspon- dent, he was also a figure who had himself ‘emerged’ – alongside such righteous publicists as huxley, spencer, wallace, and, of course, the author – around mid-century ‘from a spiritual crisis to become one of the leaders in a new faith in science’. (as james secord has quipped, the familiar, retrospective narrative [p. ].) in it, tyndall told his protégé of how it was often the case that slight glimmerings of theoretical or mathematical insight could swiftly rekindle even the most rapidly flagging of enthusiasms. on such occasions, he explained, ‘i have found myself […] converted from a miserable, complaining, rebellious wretch, into a loyal and happy worker, in less time than it has taken to write this sentence. a thought has rifted and scattered the cloud of discontent, as the wind disperses the mist upon the hills’ (qtd. in lwjt, p. ). his meteorological metaphor was far from accidental. in fact, he likewise believed that it was not merely minor alterations in awareness, changes in internal mental state, which could enact upon the psyche such profoundly disproportionate effects. external transformations could work equivalent wonders. he noted habitually the transformative physical and psycho- logical powers – all at once instantaneous, revivifying and inspirational – wrought by alpine vistas or, perhaps, as on that daytrip to wight, the merest glimpsing of a comely barmaid’s charms. in one untitled poem, for example, preserved in manuscript at the ri, he observed: the thickset trees which crowd the undercliff – the scented woodbine on the neighbouring knoll – the foxglove shaking all its purple bells – and roses blushing mid the tender green – all blend into a bouquet for the sight; but not for sight alone, for beauty sends its finer essence down into the heart […] as one epigraph to hours of exercise tyndall selected a passage from the (largely forgotten) american poet james russell lowell arguing this precise point: ‘the brain / that forages all climes to line its cells / ranging both worlds on lightest wings of wish, / will not distil the juices it has sucked / to the sweet substance of pellucid thought / except for him who hath the secret learned / to mix his blood with sunshine, and to take / the wind into his pulses […]’ (p. ; qtd., p. xii). tyndall, however, in typical fashion, left out (one must presume: deliberately) lowell’s line referring to ‘both worlds’; in all likelihood, he did so because such a line argued for a dualism of metaphysics anathema to mid- victorian scientific naturalism’s strict monism/anti-platonism. - - while a much later essay of his, in a specimen of prose remarkable as much for its dynamism and calculated lyricism as for its unimpeachable scientific precision, reiterated with still greater vehemence such ‘quasi-romantic’ presumptions. he, within, was reporting details of an excursion he had made between stops while on a whirlwind lecture-tour of a number of cities along the north-eastern seaboard of the united states, an excursion on which he first had the opportunity to see (and listen to) the cacopho- nous splendour of famed niagara falls: here my guide [to the river beneath the falls] sheltered me again, and desired me to look up; i did so, and could see, as before, the green gleam of the mighty curve sweeping over the upper ledge, and the fitful plunge of the water, as the spray between us and it alternately gathered and disappeared. an eminent friend of mine often speaks to me of the mistake of those physicians who regard man’s ailments as purely chemical, to be met by chemical remedies only. he contends for the psychological element of cure. by agreeable emotions, he says, nervous currents are liberated which stimulate blood, brain, and viscera. the influence rained from ladies’ eyes enables my friend to thrive on dishes which would kill him if eaten alone. a sanative effect of the same order i experienced amid the spray and thunder of niagara. quickened by the emotions there aroused, the blood sped healthily through the arteries, abolishing introspection, […] and enabling one to think with tolerance, if not with tenderness, of the most relentless and unassailable foe. (‘niagara’, p. ) this description may seem off-kilter – perverse in some particulars, grotesque or clinical in others – as if it were cast in ‘incorrect’ language for evocation of what, to many, even today, would surely have seemed a manifestly transcendent, or spiritual, experience. (that is, of course, assuming that the present-day visitor could somehow manage to overlook the honey- mooning kitsch of the place!) it was, though, entirely apposite for a thinker like tyndall. for here, as ever, his prose remains that of the trenchant scientific materialist, the ever-stubborn natural philosopher who never once conceived of a psychological effect without a physiological cause. but it also contains echoes – somewhat muted, perhaps, though for all that unmistak- able – of the displaced lake-land poet as well, of the vernacular of men and women ripped from turn-of-the-century inns or taverns and dropped, rather unceremoniously, into the dissecting rooms or public lecture theatres of fifty years subsequent. there, suddenly finding themselves inhabiting a world of steam engines and electromagnetic telegraphy, rather than ruined cottages or rustic carriage-ways, they nevertheless still felt compelled, by force of habit, to inscribe in verse using the language they thought best suited to their purposes, not, this time around, a cumbrian tarn or the village of grasmere, but rather the grander spectacles of niagara or alp. thus we have those eminently logical segues – from tyndall’s perspective – from the sort of (self-conscious, fussily ‘poetic’) rhetoric associated with countless derivative - - mid-nineteenth-century intimations, and imitations, of the wordsworthian sublime to that drawn more from a victorian anatomical guidebook. he does not, as might be expected from someone more prototypical, veer in such instances towards either the diction or the metaphors associated with a theological or even a (conventionally) philosophical treatise or lecture. ‘[a]mid the spray and thunder of niagara’, tyndall’s ‘soul’, accordingly, never once swoons, nor does his heart – considered metaphorically, of course, most certainly not cardiovascularly – even for a moment ‘leap up’; rather, freshly oxygenated blood speeds exultingly through ‘arteries’, thereby perfusing his body’s multifarious ‘viscera’. it would seem that, at its core, even tyndall’s romanticism, his metaphysical sensibil- ity, was fully grounded in what remains by its definition the stuff of the obstinately, even ostentatiously, physical. the first drafting of his poem about wight, for instance, commences with just such a jarring flourish of materialistic imagery. in its opening lines, he celebrates his morning repast in terms poetically unfortunate but gastro-intestinally precise: ‘for breakfast – we attacked it – […] / they to their tea, i to my cocoa mild / which mrs. leary mixes every morn / with milk, thus forming a nutritious mud!’ (‘dp’ [ ], p. [ ]). (in the fair copy of the poem sent to mrs pollock this section was excised, perhaps for reasons of decorum.) his later (infinitely more felicitous) excursus on the motive potential of a domesticated horse, by contrast, seems somehow less reductively radical, or ‘morally’ caustic: ‘we put our pony in the hostler’s hands, / and bade him to be bountiful with corn, / and charge each fibre of the beast with force / to bear us homeward cheerily at eve’ (‘dp’, p. [ ]). yet horse and human alike are both fuelled through analogous processes of ingestion, a piquant challenge to exceptionalism. tyndall’s lifelong affinity for wordsworth was, in fact, particularly acute, never suffer- ing a falling off, let alone (as infamously related by darwin, in the autobiography [p. ]) extinc- tion. it is, moreover, evident, and evidenced – if often inconspicuously, in linguistic echo, or small gesture – throughout the range of his writings, for both scholarly and popular audiences. when, in a review of bence jones’s extensive biography of faraday, he remarks that ‘[t]he first volume [of jones’s work] […] reveals to us the youth who was to be father to the man’ (fos, p. ), it must have seemed to many among his readership that the scientist was invoking nothing more than what must have seemed by then a rhetorical commonplace, not making any sort of direct or spiritually significant allusion to ‘my heart leaps up’. perhaps, they reckoned, tyndall, aware of the intended audience for his critique (it was to be published in the academy, a recently established highbrow and highly literate monthly), half expected - - some of his readers to re-contextualise such a reference as one evocative of the species of ‘natural’ – contrasting with scriptural – piety so central to that lyric. but this explanation does not fully convince, and the quotation, in my opinion, was neither accidental nor off-hand. tyndall knew precisely what he was doing with such a shop- worn phrase, at once suggesting, explicitly, the continuity of his mentor’s temperament through the long course of his lifetime, and also, implicitly, the closeness of faraday’s own scientific struggles to those of the nature poet, a soul similarly endeavouring to transform ‘a discrete, dead, and alien milieu into a human, integral and companionable milieu in which man finds himself thoroughly at home’ (abrams, p. ). like ‘double-minded’ rationales, i suggest, underpin many of tyndall’s ‘romantic’ invocations elsewhere, too: in his poetry, his prose and, not infrequently, in his professional and personal correspondence. a letter to mrs pollock of april , mentioned in my previous chapter, told of some perambulations in the lake district, and of that region’s (famously tempestuous) climate. note the effulgence of the scientist’s description of speedily unfurling weather fronts, not to mention the sideways glances plainly evident in his language, not merely at the romantics, but also thomas gray’s elegy. this latter aspect becomes perhaps most conspicuous in tyndall’s concluding remarks on the picturesque attributes of the poet’s final resting place, where a lone ‘black cypress gives character to the scene’. consider also the telling conjunc- tion in this text of the monumental figures of william wordsworth with humphry davy (simplistically: ‘co-founder’ of romanticism, pioneering post-lavoisian physical chemist), two names deliberately isolated out of a ‘hundred’ others, both of whom came to national promi- nence in the opening decades of the nineteenth century. as such, they form a de facto grandfa- therly counterpart to that ‘patriarchal’ pairing of michael faraday with thomas carlyle: i reached windermere at o’clock and before dinner walked to orrest head and saw wordsworth’s “beautiful romance of nature”. next morning at o’clock we rowed from windermere to ambleside – the lake was smooth and sunny when we departed, but it became black and rough, and to shelter ourselves from one storm we pushed ashore and landed on a wooded knoll. near the spot stood a granite cross marking the spot where two young men had been drowned the year before within feet of the shore. remember walter must be taught to swim. the storm howled over us spitting heavy snow flakes against us. the little lake looked quite grand, black as ink under the black scowl of heaven with the crests of its little sputtering waves rendered doubly white by contrast. the slate rocks all over the knoll were carved and sculptured by some local madman, who had a passion for chiseling [sic]. there were wordsworth, davy, and a hundred other names, some deeply cut, others in relief, the rock around the letters being chiseled [sic] away. we landed at ambleside, walked thence to rydal mount, compare these lines in gray’s elegy written in a country church-yard: ‘beneath those rugged elms, that yew tree’s shade, / where heaves the turf in many a mould’ring heap, / each in his narrow cell for ever laid, / the rude forefathers of the hamlet sleep’ (p. ). - - and looked round wordsworth’s nest. thence to grasmere, and stood for some minutes beside his grave. a clear stream rushes near it, a few trees are at hand; one black cypress gives character to the scene, and there the poet sleeps, while the plainest slab of black slate which contains only his name, marks his resting place. if i can manage it i will be buried in a country churchyard. i hate town burials. (pp. - ) this davy/wordsworth conjunction points the way towards the most significant of tyndall’s double-codings, the published belfast address, where, in the first longmans edition, he chose emblematically to conclude, and qualify, the body of his argument – in which a ‘parallel message’ had always been latent – with extended quotation from ‘tintern abbey’ (ba, p. ). he was not the first science writer to attempt such retroactive defusing. gideon man- tell, notes stephen gill in wordsworth and the victorians ( ), added to the edition of his wonders of geology ( ), a similar coda, quoting the same poem, thus (hopefully) ‘reassur[ing] any nervous reader that this scientific work was in no way irreligious […]’; that ‘these facts and diagrams could be summed up in a poet’s “prayer”’ (p. ). tyndall’s aspirations were comparable, if more pantheistic. the presence, one imagines, of such a refrain in such a venue could hardly have been overlooked. nevertheless, its significance was still often dis- missed (a topic broached in chapter two) – by audiences hostile, unimaginative, or inattentive – as ornamental, rather than essential, to the heritage and meaning of the scientist’s overall ‘materialistic’ epistemology. (whether mantell had any more success remains obscure.) wordsworth’s critical vitality, though perhaps not popular reputation, reached some- thing of a nadir in the first decades after mid-century – thereafter it revived, somewhat. ‘throughout the s and s’, gill observes, ‘received ideas about wordsworth were promulgated, a particular slant being given by the writers’ opinions, but there was little probing or questioning. only in a few articles was there any sign of either a considered review of the grounds for asserting wordsworth’s continuing importance, or dissent from the consen- sus judgement which would provoke debate’ (pp. - ). yet the scientist’s writings through this period, and after, surely could be classified – albeit at second-hand – among the former. at a time when, as arnold sighed, it was ‘quite permissible to speak of wordsworth’s poetry, not only with ignorance, but with impertinence’ (‘wordsworth’, p. ); at a time when ruskin openly lamented the tempering of an adolescent delight in the ‘pure childish love of nature which wordsworth so idly takes for an intimation of immortality’ (præterita, : ), tyndall’s fondness, it seems, remained irony-free, not so much qualified as refined, made substantial. one poem in particular exemplifies this. anyone befuddled by the ‘wordsworthian- ism’ of the belfast address, confronted by ‘a morning on alp lusgen’, would have been hard- - - pressed to reach the same impasse. anthologised in new fragments, this late work – drafted c. – makes unambiguous the scientist’s various, deeply resonant spiritual and artistic debts to the writings of that para- digmatic figure, praised – in a study of , by charles herford – as a poet who ‘loved “common” things, because they were common […]’, and who ‘loved those rare and strange aspects […]’ of common things ‘that called forth or “caught” imagination’ (p. ). tyndall, within, typified the panorama from alp lusgen, an isolated retreat, with suitably ‘wordswor- thian’ style and strength, moving swiftly, as had many devotees before him, from the prosaic business of topographic description to the rather more interesting task of spiritual and cosmic speculation. the poem, in short, embodies (if in an updated, continental mise-en-scène) affec- tions singled out by herford. (it does so in blank verse of considerable vigour and conviviality; c. e. mathews was not being disingenuous when he – writing a portion of tyndall’s obituary notice for the alpine journal – described ‘a morning on alp lusgen’ as a ‘poem of considerable power […]’ [p. ]. ) it integrates also, over a few score lines, tyndall’s thoughts on moun- taineering, on morality, and, as noted, personal perspectives on both the late thomas carlyle’s achievement and popular observations on its incompleteness. it encompasses as well tyndall’s materialism, percolating contemporary critiques of that materialism, and his own lingering doubts about the fairness and final sufficiency of such a reductionist philosophy. but above these specifically ‘tyndallic’ tropes, born of the late-nineteenth-century natural philosopher, lurks the spectre of the man who had undertaken, in midsummer , a nostalgic tour of the countryside; one of his poems, written in documentation, announces: again i hear these waters, rolling from their mountain-springs with a soft inland murmur. – once again do i behold these steep and lofty cliffs, that on a wild secluded scene impress thoughts of deep seclusion; and connect the landscape with the quiet of the sky. (p. ; ll. - ) by contrast, tyndall’s own recasting of wordsworth’s opening to ‘tintern abbey’ in ‘a morning’ reminds us of the ‘parochialism’ (meant, however, by its author in no pejorative sense) of his predecessor’s limited perspective, of the fact that tyndall’s world of skyscraper not all critics were quite as impressed as mr mathews: eve and creasey, for instance, pronounced at best ‘ephemeral’ tyndall’s ‘from the alps: a fragment’, a precursor to ‘a morning on alp lusgen’ first published in the pall mall gazette (lwjt, p. ). (incidentally, that early title nicely ‘scientises’ the poem, incorporating it, by implication, in the great body of his work, fragments of science.) - - peaks and tumbled moraines, quite literally, ‘overtops’ all the features of those british land- scapes which so frequently moved wordsworth to rapture and artistry. as tyndall notes, writing from an aerie midway up the mountainside, the plummet from this height must sink afar to reach yon rounded mounds which seem so small. they shrink in the embrace of vaster forms, though, placed amid the pomp of cumbrian fells, these hillock crests would overtop them all. steep fall the meadows to the vale in slopes of freshest green, scarred by the humming streams, and flecked by spaces of primeval pine. (nf, p. ) while the scientist’s language clearly parallels that of his prototype, he adumbrates a world quantitatively, not just qualitatively, removed from the one wordsworth captured so many years prior, his pentameter encoding not simply a change in geography, but a shifting in worldview. it was, for instance, a place made far older (‘primeval pine’) and rendered less domestic and hospitable in its scope by developments in geology. tyndall’s rugged lowlands ‘shrink’ in the shadow of the ‘vaster forms’ of the local terrain, one ‘flecked’ indiscriminately by copses of ancient pine, and ‘scarred’ by the ceaseless processes of erosion and sedimenta- tion wrought by myriad fast-flowing alpine streams (these, needless to say, almost certainly emit no restful ‘soft inland murmur’ like wordsworth’s gentle ‘waters […] rolling from […] mountain-springs’). nevertheless, despite such belittling magnifications in scale, despite nearly a century of convulsions in theoretical paradigm, tyndall would still have concurred wholeheartedly with the famously brash assertion, made by wordsworth in the ‘prospectus to the recluse’, that it was ‘the mind of man […]’ which was to be his ‘haunt, and the main region of [his] song’ (p. ; ll. - ). , he would likewise, no doubt, have seconded the poet’s (equally audacious) celebration, twenty-one lines later, of a splendid, sympathetic ‘fitted-ness’; it is between, on the one hand, in , writing in defence of his belfast position, tyndall characterised one of his adversaries, the bishop of manchester, as a frustrated and bitter anachronism, a soul fated to occupy most of his time ‘running to and fro upon the earth […] wringing his hands over the threatened loss of his ideals […]’, utterly incapable – or unwill- ing – to believe ‘undoubtingly that in the mind of man we have the substratum of all ideals’ (‘crystals’, p. ), that it was the precepts of his own christianity, not those of ‘materialism’s’ enlightened humanism, which might come to seem superfluous. edward manier, in ’s the young darwin and his cultural circle, argued that the excursion, to which these lines were prelude (and which expresses similar sentiments), ‘provided powerful poetic expression for some of darwin’s deepest philosophical concerns and convictions’, though conceded that evidence for such formative influence was ‘only circumstantial’ (p. ). - - the sensory and analytic powers of the ‘romantic’ mind, and, on the other, the examined phenomena of nature: my voice proclaims how exquisitely the individual mind (and the progressive powers perhaps no less of the whole species) to the external world is fitted: – and how exquisitely, too – theme this but little heard of among men – the external world is fitted to the mind; and the creation (by no lower name can it be called) which they with blended might accomplish: – this is our high argument. (p. ; ll. - ) gillian beer says of this: ‘mind and world have a hoped-for appropriateness to each other – a “fitness”. the notions of just proportions, exact craftsmanship, sexual harmony, healthful mutuality, are all poised within the repeated “fitted”’ (darwin’s, p. ). emergent synergisms, captured here, at once inspired – and guided – tyndall. his letter of april to mrs pollock includes a lengthy, topically discursive ac- count of how he and edward frankland, his walking companion, had managed in horrid weather to traverse the high fells between ambleside and grasmere. in it, he elaborates on the fashion in which the play of light and shadow on the rumpled topography could at times seem evocative of specific mental states, at one point even a brooding psychological condition suggestive of dark ‘supernatural horror’. ‘but the blackness’ of the clouds overhead, he wrote, was above all description grand, and the contrasts wonderful. the boundary of the storm was marked with perfect definition: outside of it rocks and fells, and lakes lay bathed in sunlight; in front of the gloom the hills were of a grimness that suggested a kind of supernatural horror. frankland said that if a little nitrate of [?] were ignited on scawfell pike, so as to redden the clouds, we should have a fair representation of a certain locality. (p. ) hellish premonitions – shared with frankland – were not the only ones troubling the rambler. he later comments on the ‘calm delight’ with which a break in the weather filled him, making explicit one crucial presumption of canonical romanticism, derived from the ‘prospectus’ (pathetic fallacy linking mindscape with mountain): ‘i cannot describe them’, he said of some luminous cloudbanks abruptly visible, ‘and the calm delight they imparted suggested a rela- tionship between them and the human soul’ (p. ). even as a child, tyndall had been aware of, and believed in, this identification. the outdoors, needless to say, had long been a powerful presence in the scientist’s life, from the time of his boyhood in ireland to that of his death, at age seventy three, in hindhead, - - a growing – too rapidly, he thought – village on the outskirts of london. in an (undated, though obviously late) draft manuscript, he wrote of his never-ending quest for romantic solitude and his lifelong love of nature, quoting from his lehrjahren – roughly, ‘apprentice journal’, a diary of intellectual maturation and personal discovery. (the ‘screen’, by the way, was a lofty contrivance of larch-poles and heather matting erected to interrupt sightlines between tyndall’s house in hindhead and some unattractive outbuildings on a neighbouring property [lwjt, pp. - ].) my story of “the screen” at hindhead large has my love for nature been, i loved her from a child. i loved her in her summer sheen and when the winter wild wrapped storms around her awful brow, and ocean formed a throne, to bear her, queen and conqueror, my love was her’s [sic] alone. thus i wrote in my lehrjahren. the lines were are worthless, but they mark a tendency. when as an imaginative little boy youngster i often crept into the hollow of a tree in windy weather, and listened with elation to the sound of the swaying branches overhead. in my youth i have walked miles upon a stormy night to reach a cliffy coast from which i might <see and> hear and observe <view> the raging of the sea. this stamp of natural tendency has never been effaced. for six and thirty years it took me to the alps, where sixteen years ago, i built <causing me finally to build there> a nest amid <above> the heather and bilberries <of alp lusgen> at a height of over feet above the sea. a retreat in england [tear in manuscript] […] to the “sunset of life” was less easy to find. this entry, even as it echoes the portentously apocalyptic squall detailed in glaciers of the alps, perhaps also brings to mind william irvine’s brusque dismissal of tyndall’s prose: ‘diluted wordsworthian nature rhapsody’, is how he described his tendency to deliquesce, in ‘height- ened’ passages (p. ). (maybe tyndall, aware of his limitations, would not have considered this remark so cutting?) beyond ‘tintern abbey’, that paragon of the british romantic tradition, one incon- testable further influence on ‘a morning on alp lusgen’ was an extended verse ode written in praise of an american peak by ralph waldo emerson, foremost among the school of new england transcendental thinkers who, ‘beginning in the s, seized upon and expanded the assertions by coleridge, wordsworth, carlyle, and their german contemporaries concerning bertrand russell, in his autobiography, recalls his childhood awe at tyndall’s monumental presence in this village: ‘in the year my uncle rollo bought a house on the slopes of hindhead, where, for a long time, we all visited him for three months in every year. […] i was frequently taken to see tyndall, and he gave me one of his books, the forms of water. i admired him as an eminent man of science, and strongly desired to make some impression upon him. twice i had some success […]’ (p. ). - - the power of renewal in the eye of a man who sees as a child sees’ (abrams, p. ). ‘i can almost hear his [tyndall’s] melodious voice ringing out with emerson’s apostro- phe to the mountain “monadnoc”, so often repeated among rocky solitudes in switzerland […]’, recalled louisa tyndall to a mutual friend not long after her husband’s passing (qtd. in lwjt, p. ); here is an excerpt: ages are thy days, thou grand affirmer of the present tense, and type of permanence! firm ensign of the fatal being, amid these coward shapes of joy and grief, that will not bide the seeing! hither we bring our insect miseries to the rocks; and the whole flight, with pestering wing, vanish […] (pp. - ) so declaims a pilgrim in the audience of that new hampshire immensity, one of those ‘cow- ard shapes’ at once cowed and cured by the mountain’s enormity in space, persistence in time. here landscape overwhelms, eternities threaten; menaced by the infinite, the ‘insect’ soul bewildered by monadnoc seems a fitter analogue for tyndall upon alp lusgen than reposing wordsworth, overlooking that homely welsh vista of ‘hedge-rows, hardly hedge- rows, little lines / of sportive wood run wild: these pastoral farms, / green to the very door […]’ (p. ; ll. - ). indeed, richard proctor, in an essay of , even explicitly likened his generation’s dawning conception of infinite space and endless time to his generation’s increasing acquaintance, via travel and exploration, with the cyclopean geological forms presented by the alps. spiculated outcroppings and vertiginous emptinesses, crushing weights and straight-faced pinnacles, these could challenge mens sana, not just corpore sano. ‘who can wonder’, he writes, ‘if from these awful depths [of an ‘expanded’ cosmos] men have turned in weariness of soul, nay almost in affright, as when the alpine traveller, peering over some fog-enshrouded precipice, sees down […] to deeper and deeper abysses […]’ (‘newton’, p. ). the focus of my next section will be tyndall’s wary encounter with just such a prospect, and the fashion in which it both tested, and affirmed, beliefs. the romance of the real: materialism’s transcendentalism for all the perfect similarities in terms of aesthetic sensibility between materialistic and ro- - - mantic (or transcendentalist) ideology, there were always, for tyndall, differences in elemen- tary philosophy. for him, wordsworth’s – and, by crude extension, high romanticism’s – cohering symmetry between internal and external worlds was no miraculous boon, nor blessed acci- dent. on the contrary, it testified, directly, to the fact that the intellect seems fitted to the world because it is of the world, that nature seems comprehensible to the mind because the mind is of a piece with it. this, needless to say, was tyndall’s ‘high argument’, his ‘[t]heme […] but little heard’; in truth, if there could be said to be one principle unifying (and summa- rising) all his multifarious writings – essays and books and reviews covering the disciplines of biology and physics, mountaineering and epistemology, sociology and practical epidemiology – it would be that of the very completeness of this absolute and ineluctable identity between mind and matter, where he, following his mentor fichte, unfailingly insisted that ‘the brain and the moral and intellectual processes were, insofar as experiences could tell […], known to be indissolubly associated with the physical laws found paramount in nature’ (kim, p. ). consequently, tyndall was open to criticisms of the sort levied by william blake in marginal comments (found in his personal copy of wordsworth’s ‘prospectus’): ‘you shall not bring me down to believe such fitting & fitted. i know better […]. does not this fit, & is not this fitting most exquisitely too, but to what? – not to mind, but to the vile body only & to its laws of good & evil & its enmities against mind’ (‘marginalia’, pp. - ). in rebuttal, tyndall repeatedly emphasised that neither is the body vile, nor the mind exalted. rather, both, in essentials, are interchangeable, at once eternally and inextricably aligned – if low, equal in lowliness; if sublime, identical in sublimity. in one famous essay, he illustrated such exegetical proclivities via a matrimonial twist, linking mind and matter, like husband and wife, in allegorical sacrament: ‘they degrade neither member of the mysterious duality referred to’, he said of himself and his materialistic brethren; ‘but they exalt one of them from its abasement, and repeal the divorce hitherto existing between both. in substance, if not in words, their position […] is: “what god hath joined together let not man put asunder”’ (fos, p. ). mallock, like many among his contemporaries (and like blake himself, decades prior), baulked at such levelling, at materialism’s propensity for knocking everything down to a common ground-state: the matter of the stars above, the soil below – or ontological equiva- lence with the most grubby proto-hominid. one such animal, having a fugitive presence throughout the new paul and virginia (it is glimpsed fleetingly in dense jungle by prof. darnley - - and quickly becomes for him the grail itself), is meant as a comical stand-in for anthropology’s fabled ‘missing link’, though it is at the tale’s conclusion revealed to be nothing more than a trained and servile monkey ‘wearing’ a piece of women’s jewellery. darnley, who frequently quotes tyndall (often verbatim) in his diatribes, opines at one point of such a debased entity: ‘the missing link is the token of the solemn fact of our origin from inorganic matter. i did but catch one blessed glimpse of him. he had a silver band about his neck. he was about three feet high. it is through him that we are related to the stars – the holy, the glorious stars, about which we know so little’ (p. ). such overblown rhetoric is meant to invite ridicule and censure; such pomposity to incite laughter at the sorry spectacle of circus animal ‘worshipped’ by haughty intellectual, a thinly disguised composite of mid-victorian england’s scientific propagandists. mallock’s entire scenario is, in effect, carefully gauged to reveal materialism’s (like evolutionism’s) ethical poverty. tyndall, again, throughout his career, put forth an (unvarying) counterproposal, point- ing out that gradations of worth are meaningless – and egotism no refuge – when confronted by the majesty of a unified and wholly material creation, even if it is a creation that does, by definition, include both the sacred and profane, the self-aware mind and that jibbering mon- key. he, of course, made many score, if not thousands, of declarations, spread throughout an entire lifetime of lecturing and active publication, of this, his foundational belief. the following passage, however – meditative, suggestive and precise – represents, to my mind, their apotheosis. indeed, it is written in the form of a prose-poem, an estimation apparently confirmed by its reappearance as a full-page ‘epigraph’ in fragments of science for, tellingly, tyndall’s celebrated discourse ‘on the scientific use of the imagination’ (fos, p. ). ‘old alpine jottings’ – excerpted from hours of exercise in the alps, republished initially in macmillan’s magazine, and later reprinted in the catch-all volume new fragments (again, evidence of cross- generic, intertextual pollination) – concludes with several observations on the matterhorn, pointedly focusing not on the peak’s aggressively ‘masculine’ power or seeming indomitability, but rather on the way its physical appearance, as with that of niagara falls, testifies to ‘the irresistible and remorseless character of those forces whose summation through the ages pulls down even the matterhorn’. ‘hitherto’, he explains, ‘the impression it [the mountain] had made was that of savage strength, but here we had inexorable decay’ (nf, p. ). in modern painters iv ( ), john ruskin, commenting on the rochers des fys (his phrasing, incidentally, bringing to mind the - - valiance of maxwell on behalf of ‘steadfast’ or incorruptible molecules, as discussed in my third chapter), had described that alpine precipice as particularly ‘frightful’, exemplary of the geological type ‘nourishing no root in their crevices, touched by no hue of life on buttress or ledge, but, to the utmost, desolate; knowing no shaking of leaves in the wind, nor of grass beside the stream, – no motion but their own mortal shivering, the dreadful crumbling of atom from atom in their corrupting stones […]’ (pp. - ). such oppressive spectacle encodes, for ruskin, one ‘of those terrible and sad truths which the universe is full of’ (p. ). ‘at their most troubled moments’, paul sawyer observes of ruskin’s later scientific mediations, they come close to nightmares – raging struggles of sanctity against blasphemy, purity against the devil, life against death; mythopoeia draws close to hallucination, and one senses the darkness of the morning in when ruskin awoke to find the evil one in his room. by contrast, the lucretian universe of tyndall, purged of troublesome projections, seems blandly salutary; for tyndall feared neither analy- sis, nor mother earth, nor life, nor death. (p. ) (ruskin, though nearing such despondency in his commentary on the rochers des fys, evades it via painterly description – an aesthetician’s stratagem, his acculturation of the sublime.) in comparison with that of ruskin, sawyer is certainly right to describe the tyndallic cosmos as ‘salutary’, but it is neither ‘bland’ nor without projections, often troublesome. they, however, tend to be irksome in the interpretive rather than ethical sense, appearing less baleful than confounding, like invitations to deep rethinking rather than outrageous assaults on the idea of humanity itself. for instance, having extrapolated forwards towards its over- throw, tyndall’s peripatetic ‘thought’ is then drawn backwards, by the inexorable necessities of causal reasoning and the twinned laws which govern the conservation of mass and energy, to a period when the matterhorn was in the full strength of mountainhood [….] [and] to its possible growth and origin. nor did it halt there, but wandered on through molten worlds to that nebulous haze which philosophers have regarded, and with good reason, as the proximate source of all material things. could the blue sky above be the residue of that haze? would the azure which deepens on the heights sink into utter darkness beyond the atmosphere? i tried to look at this universal cloud, contain- ing within itself the prediction of all that has since occurred; i tried to imagine it as the seat of those forces whose action was to issue in solar and stellar systems, and all that they involve. did that formless fog contain potentially the sadness with which i regarded the matterhorn. did the thought which thus ran back through the ages simply return to its primeval home? if so, had we not better recast our definitions of life and force? for if life and thought be the very flower of both, any definition which omits life and thought must be inadequate, if not untrue. (nf, pp. - ) his chosen language – tyndall’s evocation of his own peculiar paths of ‘[t]hought […] [that] wandered on through molten worlds to that nebulous haze’ – even as it answers ruskin’s slanderings of geological degradation, subtly parallels diction deployed in the prelude: specifi- - - cally, wordsworth’s description of roubiliac’s statue of newton in the antechapel of trinity college, cambridge. so, too, does the manner in which he characterises his own idiosyncratic interpretive habits serve to betoken an understated affinity between that celebrated ‘precursor’ and his latter-day self. they were a pair of thinkers, nonetheless, separated by far more than the mere matter of a hundred and fifty years. newton’s achievement, in tyndall’s opinion, was that he recognised that ‘what is true of the earth as she swings to and fro in her yearly journey round the sun, is also true of her minutest atom […]’; thus he busied himself studying, like a curious watchmaker analysing the workmanship of an unfamiliar, yet comparable, master-craftsman, all the measurable world’s ‘wheels within wheels […] [its] rhythm within rhythm’ (fos, p. ). (incidentally, it would seem that even by the mid-nineteenth century such a parable of watch and watchmaker was already considered among the literati overly threadbare. ) tyndall, by contrast, aspired to learn of much vaster and more occulted things. he tried to apprehend nothing less than the presumed ‘utter darkness beyond the atmosphere’; he hoped to peer into the ‘universal cloud’ which, through condensation and gravitational collapse, was over untold millennia ‘to issue in solar and stellar systems, and all that they involve’. and he recognised that in this looking backwards there was also an element of looking inward, an apprehension, not just of the self, but also that part of the self capable of feeling awe, of gazing silently into the darkness, filled with amazement and asking (often unanswerable) questions. ‘did the thought’ – tyndall directs this urgent query apparently as much at himself as at any hypothe- sised reader – ‘which thus ran back through the ages simply return to its primeval home?’ for it seems, like newton before him, tyndall, too, possessed ‘a mind for ever / voyaging through strange seas of thought, alone’ (prelude, p. ; . - ). as t. w. heyck has noted: ‘for the early victorians, newton stood as the heroic fig- ure in human progress, for they saw him, as had their predecessors in the eighteenth century, as having demonstrated the perfection of the divine plan’ (p. ). for somewhat more secular reasons he remained so, later in the era. but while that natural philosopher, perhaps while overlooking the courts of trinity, surveyed a universe of like regularity, of clockwork planetary motion, set to spinning by the hand of god, a universe of ponderous order through and ‘to prove design […] caro has recourse to the old analogy of “the watch”’, remarks the author of ‘science and positivism’, a philosophical appraisal from the saturday review of april ; he continues: ‘an argument is no worse for being old, but all the better, if it has often been used but never refuted. but this is not the case with “the watch” as implying a watchmaker – an argument which was not true even when it was new’ (p. ). - - through, tyndall beheld from his own craggy, mountainside perch those many years later – hours of exercise appeared in – one both far less human in its scale and far less reducible in a mathematical sense. tyndall’s world, unlike newton’s, was not predictable in any total way, its large-scale behaviour remaining defiantly inexpressible in terms of any conceivable, finite sequence of algebraic relations. newton’s cosmos – as noted in my opening chapter – by a simple act of scalar substitution (or negation) for the time-variable t (in his own elegant formulations of kepler’s three laws for planetary motion), could be run backwards in time, with infinite accuracy, as reliably as forwards. tyndall’s, however, governed by what are (so satisfactorily) called the irreversible processes of thermodynamic transformation, admits of no such simple divination. simply put, one can’t un-stir coffee, howsoever one might try. nor can one, beholding the world as it is, fully reconstruct or even begin adequately to comprehend, in any ‘quasi-omniscient’ sense, that fulminating primordial cloud, the nebula which did, or did not, contain the seeds of the ‘sadness’ with which tyndall ‘regarded the matterhorn’. it is difficult to determine how much of this he knew, or merely suspected – such ideas were at once in the air, and confused. edward daub has demonstrated how, in mid-victorian entropic science, priority disputes, fuzzy analysis and lexical inconsistency led to widespread mystification. moreover, as stephen brush has noted, even in the s, after boltzmann had proved via his h-theorem that randomness, irreversibility and disorder were deeply linked, ‘it was difficult for scientists to abandon the view of laplace that one assumes phenomena to be random because of lack of knowledge rather than because of any inherent indeterminism’ (p. ). tyndall’s passage embraces – perhaps embodies – such ambivalence. there may be, it suggests, complete and universal determinism (‘the prediction of all that has since occurred’), or, then again, there may not. but, either way, the answer to such a riddle, due to limitations (theoretical? informational?), remains forever beyond the reach of absolute computability. the ‘hope’ encapsulated in a jovial couplet penned at the turn of the twentieth century by cambridge mathematical physicist a. a. robb – ‘no tolerance will be shown to any sort of this was the precise analogy drawn by william james to describe f. w. h. myers’s services to victorian psychology, cited in my opening chapter. such an epitome, though prevalent post-enlightenment, actually refers more to the neo-newtonian com- putational determinism of laplace than to the beliefs of the natural philosopher himself, who was rarely absolut- ist. he famously believed, for instance, that instabilities in orbital motion required continual divine correction. moreover, ‘he [newton] never insisted that universal gravitation was essential to matter – largely because he was always concerned with how his laws of motion would correspond with the presence of god in the world […]’; thus, christopher lukasik argues, ‘his system could not be strictly classified as a mechanistic theory […]’ (p. ). - - mystery, / as soon as we can calculate all past and future history’ (p. ) – was thus understood, even then, at the macroscopic level, to be hokum. tyndall also knew well that he was by no means exempt from the equations he wielded with such alacrity, an impartial observer watching nature unfold, as if in a terrarium, from outside, at a distance. this was a fact acknowledged in an entry defining materialism in the edition of brande and cauvin’s a dictionary of science, literature, & art: ‘that metaphysi- cal theory which is founded on the hypothesis that all existence may be resolved into a modifi- cation of matter, including, of course, the conscious subject’ (p. ). but (this seems a subtle proviso), ‘conscious subject’ includes not only others perceived, it includes the self perceiving, the eye – ultimately, the brain – of the conscientious scientist interacting with matter and its spectral emanations. this tyndall recognised, discerning an aspect in his own era, and in his own science, of the one great truth of quantum mechanics: that the observer’s role was as much that of the watched as the watcher, and that neither could be un-implicated in the affairs of the other. yet, like so much of his thought, this ‘axiom’, too – far from novel – had romantic ori- gins, or precedents: ‘do not forget, then, what thou hast now clearly understood’, an inquisi- tioning spirit announces, in fichte’s die bestimmung des menschen (the vocation of man; ); ‘in all perception thou perceivest only thine own condition’ (p. ). mid-victorian developments in science, coupled with his own convictions about the intractably material nature of conscious- ness – mediated, one suspects, by both a latent idealism, and a recollection of wordsworthian self-questioning (à la ‘tintern abbey’) – forced tyndall to admit that a search for origins was also a search for self. thus, any mental voyage into ‘formless fog’ was inevitably circular, landing the traveller once again on the slopes of some lesser peak, in matterhorn’s shadow, peering upwards – in ruskinian horror? or tyndallic delight? – at its time-ravaged silhouette. from self to cosmos and from cosmos to self, from matter to mind and back again, the jour- neys are indistinguishable when looked at from any remote enough vantage point – such as that afforded tyndall by the terrain of the alps. one unidentified wag at punch was, in fact, being far more perceptive than he probably realised when, in the number for december , he observed, in a throwaway quip, tucked in the bottom corner of a page: ‘the horn of the dilemma for tyndall. – the matter-horn’ – the joke’s genius, of course, a visual one, residing in that hardly incidental mark of hyphenation ([‘horn’]). where else, though, beyond the monumentally sublime, was ‘poetry’ to be found in tyndall’s accounting? an echo of ethereal keats, not rustic wordsworth, offers one indica- - - tion (though the earlier romantic expressed not dissimilar sentiments in his own verse from time to time). keats, in his justly famed ‘ode on a grecian urn’, explained that heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard are sweeter; therefore, ye soft pipes, play on; not to the sensual ear, but, more endear’d, pipe to the spirit ditties of no tone […] (p. ; ll. - ) a conviction with which tyndall would seem to agree. in , the scientist, responding in the fortnightly to a critique of his unshakeable – when was it not? – belief in the capacity of a flower to direct its own growth and development (made by the rev. james martineau, an eminent unitarian theologian as well as one of the scientist’s most able and persistent antago- nists), included in the text of his argument what amounts to a brazen declaration of aesthetic principle, every bit as radical in its own way as that made by keats those many years before: i went some time ago through the greenhouse of a friend. he had ferns from ceylon, the branches of which were in some cases not much thicker than an ordinary pin – hard, smooth, and cylindrical – often leafless for a foot or more. but at the end of every one of them the unsightly twig unlocked the exuberant beauty hidden within it, and broke forth into a mass of fronds, almost large enough to fill the arms. we stand here upon a higher level of the wonderful: we are conscious of a music subtler than that of the piano, passing unheard through these tiny boughs, and issuing in what mr. martineau would opulently call the “clustered magnificence” of the leaves. does it lessen my amazement to know that every cluster, and every leaf – their form and texture – lie, like the music in the rod, in the molecu- lar structure of these apparently insignificant stems? (‘materialism’, p. ) here is the romanticism, then: in that element of self-evidencing pattern seen inhering in worldly things themselves, suggesting the ‘subtle’ and ‘unheard’ music of molecular interac- tion. it is this recognition of design without insistence on a designer – this belief in the banishment of all divisions between matter and rarefied mind – that would, for tyndall, have served to augment, rather than extinguish, any sympathetic artist’s perception of the truly miraculous amid a superfluity of the mundane. ‘i see what he [martineau] sees with a wonder superadded’, he writes further on; ‘to me as to him – nay, to me more than to him – not even solomon in all his glory was arrayed like one of these [fern-branches]’ (p. ). biblical allusion – the phrase cited is borrowed from luke : , a verse simultane- ‘it is worth pausing’, he remarks in forms of water, ‘to think what wonderful work is going on in the at- mosphere during the formation and descent of every snow-shower: what building power is brought into play! and how imperfect seem the productions of human minds and hands when compared with those formed by the blind forces of nature!’, before castigating himself (and others) for such ungenerous choice of adjective: ‘but who ventures to call the forces of nature blind? in reality, when we speak thus we are describing our own condition. the blindness is ours […]’ (pp. - ). - - ously luxuriating in the prodigy of material creation and praising the boundless munificence of its creator: ‘consider the lilies how they grow: they toil not, they spin not; and yet i say unto you, that solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these’ – serves to further buttress his point. nature is religious, he insists, though not in the unexamined, or ‘retrograde’, fashion associated with martineau’s theology, which would, of course, never have endowed even a molecule with animating power or capacity, while persistently denigrating matter as unworthy of mind. by contrast, as the whole of the ‘animal world […]’, from tyndall’s perspective, is simply ‘a distillation through the vegetable […] from inorganic nature’, faith and reason themselves are enthralled to the atomic and, thus, drastically, even paradigm- shiftingly, akin to rocks and trees, liquids and gasses (‘materialism’, p. ). few ‘literary’ writers earlier in the century would have dared to suggest as much – save, perhaps, for emer- son. the ‘unheard music’ is therefore not merely keats’s poetic imagination in and of itself, but also that startling moment of perception by a suitably prepared observer of emergent signs of continuity between mind and matter, of ordering born of chaos. hence, a loss of distinction between subject and object, artist and landscape, percipient soul and that which it both espies and delights in, is not to be mourned by the poet or philosopher. on the contrary, in it is to be found a new portal to the numinous, that ‘higher level of the wonderful’ which tyndall celebrates with such enthusiasm in his ruminations on the ceylonese ferns of a friend. wordsworth, in ‘tintern abbey’, describes about midway through a volte-face in his attitude towards nature, one which had taken place a number of years previously (after that period of ‘thoughtless youth’). he does so in the course of those very lines tyndall had chosen to cite subsequent to the concluding paragraphs of the first authorised edition of his belfast address; they read, in part: for i have learned to look on nature, not as in the hour of thoughtless youth; but hearing oftentimes the still, sad music of humanity […] (p. ; ll. - ) this is a subtle transformation. ian ousby says of it: ‘no longer merely a stimulus to be exploited or a spectacle to be judged, nature has become for wordsworth […] a living force embracing the individual soul and communicating with it, to console, uplift and ennoble’ (pp. - ). perhaps tyndall’s obvious affinity with these sentiments can be explained by the fact that he, too, in adulthood had come to recognise both the beneficence of this ‘living force’ and - - its interpenetration with human affairs, though, needless to say, in a fashion far more neces- sary, if not far more profound, than even wordsworth could ever have dreamed. the materialist and the mustard seed ‘tintern abbey’, fixed at a moment of introspection, expresses a serenity, as well as a raptur- ous certainty, of conviction. tyndall, in his work, let alone throughout his life, was not always so cheerful, nor dogmatic. indeed, his ‘materialism’, if strong, was ever a precarious balance, unresting and active. often self-doubting, pragmatically self-aware, it seemed, at times, in need of vigilance, tiny recalibrations or tweakings of assumption and epistemological belief. misgivings about design (or design), fears of nihilism and extinction, concern about the roles claimed for anthropomorphism and reductionism, constantly tussle in his prose with more optimistic passages, paeans to scientific progress or all-conquering rationality. as with clifford, these instabilities – materialistic ‘heresies’ always threatening – become most glaringly evident in works of verse, where the discipline required by poetic composition, in consort with the putatively private or confessional nature of the form, conspire to insure compactness and memorability of phrasing. as yeats once remarked, with typical acuity: ‘[w]e make out of the quarrel with others rhetoric, out of the quarrel with ourselves, poetry’ (qtd. in henn, p. ). far more so than in rhetoric, though, poetry’s inward ‘quarrellings’, beyond ideology, encompass a variety of idiomatic contretemps as well, internal altercations and unsteady alliances between divergent vernaculars and modes of description. as such, those revelatory collisions – or acts of collusion – so prevalent in tyndall’s prose, between ‘plainspoken’ language (and striking instances of unadorned physical explanation), with biblical reference (and invocations of romantic terminology and conceit), surprise with still greater force, and emerge with much greater regularity, within the more intimate venues afforded him by the conventions of versification. he therefore dedicated much to its careful crafting and consid- ered revision. an overlapping of scales is, of course, evident in much of tyndall’s expository writing, where emphasis is continually being placed on the extensibility of materialistic explanation, on strict causal law’s draconian implementation across all orders of magnitude in space as well as time. this became an abiding poetic theme, and concern, of his as well. ‘to the moon’, an unpublished piece dated valentine’s day , addresses one of his lifelong loves, what keats - - in ‘ode to a nightingale’ referred to as the ‘queen-moon […] on her throne, / cluster’d around by all her starry fays’ (p. ; ll. - ). (tyndall, for comparison, invokes ‘that heaven / where thou dost reign, the queen of all the stars’.) the scientist’s is a promiscuous affection, however, and his verse, in its first stanzas, ranges over creation, offering a classic libertine’s rationale for romantic inconstancy (that vice, of course, archetypically associated with luna as heavenly body), attempting thereby to justify the wantonness of his own aesthetic ardours by appeal to (our charmingly personified) satellite’s sense of ‘perspective’ and cosmic proportionality: say does the crimson of the drooping rose when soft it falls upon delighted eyes close up those eyes against the glorious sun which gives all flowers their odours & their bloom? or does the song of lark and nightingale mingling at dawn along the devon shore make the full heart less fitted to enjoy the grander music of the gleaming sea? is it not rather so, that where a love so large as fills my soul for thee unlocks the doors, the smaller loves of earth troop in without disturbance to the great? dismiss thy fear; retract thy strong reproach, and bend thy beauty o’er me as of yore. – tyndall’s ode ‘to the moon’ serves thus as a sort of tonic to keats’s own for a nightingale, obliquely invoking the earlier poet’s meditations on the burdens of consciousness and mortal- ity, dreads occasioned by the warblings of that ‘light-winged dryad of the trees’ (p. ; line ), only to dismiss them. he finds, instead, in the several ‘musics’ of nature, a restorative, rather than premonition or dirge. his final lines, for instance, recast keats’s melancholic ‘adieu! adieu! […]’ (p. ; line ) into a cheerful, even cheeky, leave-taking: ‘thou’rt bright once more, – come nearer then my love, – / still nearer – stoop – a little lower – there! / i kiss thy silver cheek and say <goodnight!> goodnight!’. (the scientist’s scribbled emenda- tion is telling, further accentuating the poem’s literary parallelisms and allusive genealogy.) they were different, of course, keats’s project and tyndall’s. moreover, their poetic gifts could hardly have been more unequal. yet both wrote night pieces. keats sought his escape on ‘viewless wings of poesy’ to a kind of timeless, quasi-narcotic rapture; he abjures the world in which ‘but to think is to be full of sorrow’ (p. ; ll. , ). tyndall’s own trans- port, by contrast, comes by virtue of thought, through his recognition of the interconnectedness - - of things, of the animating role of sun and tide-governing moon, those celestial bodies (as he phrased it in an earlier poem) ‘command[ing] the plastic sea / which rolls around the world its silvered brine’ (‘queenly’). yet thought’s temptations, those enticements of laboratory bench and spectroscope, do not supplant his direct experiences of external nature, but, instead, serve to augment them, adding to the romantic’s litany of conventional wonders a few undreamt of in earlier philosophies. such bonuses somewhat, though not fully, compen- sate for the lack that many judicious victorians were later to surmise in, say, the belfast address. in ‘to the moon’, a justification of the poetic allure of his generation’s science, tyndall lists two chemical elements – the first isolated in ; the second, ; both ironically toxic to man – as well as the moisture cycle of evaporation and condensation (itself, of course, the embodiment on a homely level of the principles of matter and energy conservation), as poten- tial distractions for a nineteenth-century materialist. but he then slides immediately from proactive confession into protestations of a higher, more constant and fundamental fealty: ‘nor bromine richly brown, nor chlorine green – / nor aqueous vapour which the praying earth / swings from her censors underneath thy beams, / has ever caused my love to swerve from thee’. tyndall’s metaphors of adoration are applied not just to exalted homo sapiens, but to those other patternings of matter and force (a ‘praying earth’ which, priest-like, ‘swings […] her censors’ beneath evening’s cathedral vault, for example); these ‘worshipped’ objects – inert and insensate, perhaps – are, he hints, likewise ‘enlivened’, set dancing by thermal and gravi- tational energies derived, ultimately, from heavenly bodies: from sun and moon. the peroration of tyndall’s poem on his visit to wight similarly hinges on such conundrums of scale, on the telescoping magnitudes of his own aesthetic entrancements (though this time he plays no favourites). he is here describing the coach ride back to wright’s house in mudeford. perhaps most notable is the sense of equilibrium conveyed, of the poet’s contentedness with his place, and precedence, in the chain of being – and that other chain, less abstract, of biological beings as well. he becomes at once the focus of attention and an attribute of the scene, at once the adamic orderer of phenomena and something ordered among those phenomena. an editorial in the times of august identified as the oration’s argumentative gist: ‘the strain of reason and the emotions of his physical nature will not rest unrecognized; and when the end of the professor’s address is reached we echo his own thoughts if we say, – “there are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in his philosophy”’ (‘professor’). - - he has seemingly achieved a sense of locale and proportionate significance; his inner mental state – an attribute uniquely of sentience, magnified and contextualised in the psyche of the pontificating materialist (a soul, he suggests, inclined to canny regard for the ‘actual’ disposi- tion of physical things) – in soothing accord with the serenity and sanctity ‘evidenced’ by that external world surrounding him. he here puts forth, in all essentials, a scientific pastoral: and soft and calm the saintly evening drooped in silence o’er the earth, – the world within as warm and tranquil as the world without. cradled in foliage lay the smiling fields; the soft green of the pastures gleaming through their umbrous frames of hazel and of elm. the bean fields came to meet us with their scent, and the pink woodbine netted through the hedge poured out in sweetness all its floral soul. and when the twilight darkened into night the knolls on either hand were like the sky studded with twinkling stars – the grass was gemmed with glow-worms, one of which i knelt beside and saw it like a little sun illume in emerald light the leaves and grasses near […] (‘dp’, p. [ ]) tyndall seemingly shrinks to nothing in these lines, becoming a perceiving presence only, a whitman-esque observer. the synthesising, ‘labouring’ theorist reasserts himself – encoding a generic modula- tion from scientific pastoral into scientific georgic? – in a passage absent from the copying out of the poem as sent to mrs pollock. (removed for reasons – fairly self-evident! – of social appropriateness, i suspect.) having noted the microcosm of glow-worm and grass blade, a planetary system writ domestically small, tyndall returned to the waiting carriage, where he sought to make the nature of this wondrous thing called light, as far as science has explored its essence, manifest to mrs. wright. poor wright was silent – afterwards i learned that while we talked of ether and of waves his stomach, shaken sadly of [sic] the sea began to totter, and when he resigned his charge at mudeford, he quite gave way. (‘dp’ [ ], p. [ ]) this (embarrassing) impingement of the physical on the mental provides another arresting instance of tyndall’s curious otherworldliness, his obliviousness to the concerns of others. but the implicit paralleling of ether waves with physical waves, of shaken atoms with scrambled - - passenger, has a certain niceness. tyndall’s cosmos, here as elsewhere, is a decidedly orches- tral one. a sense of melody, of an undulatory or ‘singing’ external world, of that ever-present, if unheard, keatsian music, is for him a common conceit, at once poetically pleasing (convey- ing a sense of real ‘aliveness’ and anticipation in nature) and scientifically accurate (with omnipresent heat as ‘mode of motion’, its energies oscillating atoms and molecules). the overture to his poem ‘a morning on alp lusgen’, for instance, glances in its first lines at the opening couplet of the first quatrain of the rubáiyát of omar khayyám, before moving from poetic convention to theoretical insight made poetic through extension of the ‘rippling’ imagery perfusing fitzgerald’s persian paraphrase (‘awake! for morning in the bowl of night / has flung the stone that puts the stars to flight’, in the text of the first edition [p. ]): the sun has cleared the peaks and quenched the flush of orient crimson with excess of light. the tall grass quivers in the rhythmic air without a sound; yet each particular blade trembles in song, had we but ears to hear. (nf, p. ) associations vibrate without bound in such a cosmology: between objects, between events, connecting the great with the little, the here with the there. ‘we on the earth’s surface live in the midst of ætherial commotion’, as tyndall informs us in a manifesto on ‘the constitution of nature’. it is the hum and throb, the restless, rustling energy, of electromagnetic vibration that he overhears, as if it were the purring of some titanic engine – one aural landscape increasingly familiar to victorian senses – appre- hended in the background of all. ‘to the conception of space being filled’, tyndall immedi- ately elaborates, ‘we must therefore add the conception of its being in a state of perpetual vibration. the sources of vibration are the ponderable masses of the universe’ (fos, p. ). each of these – whether star, fluorescing nebula, solar planet (illuminated by reflected radia- tion) – throws its light out. the waves propagate through the hypothesised ether (‘this all- pervading substance’) like concentred ripples rushing outwards from a pebble carelessly tossed into a pool of still water. tyndall’s language is carlylean here, with its breathless intimations of a quivering under-fabric to the structure of reality itself, of a universe never stilled save in death (or thermodynamic equilibration, which is precisely the same thing): ‘this all-pervading sub- tyndall’s statement has a literal truth about it as well when one recalls the accidental, though fortuitous, discovery in the mid- s (by the radio astronomers penzias and wilson) of the primordial echo of the big bang itself, that low-level buzz omnipresent in the °k cosmic microwave background radiation. - - stance takes up their [stars’, nebulae’s, planets’] molecular tremors, and conveys them with inconceivable rapidity to our organs of vision. it is the transported shiver of bodies countless millions of miles distant, which translates itself in human consciousness into the splendour of the firmament at night’ (fos, p. ). carlyle, beer has noted, deploys ‘prodigious linguistic energy […] into recuperating the past and reviving the marvel of the everyday’ (darwin’s, p. ). tyndall couples a composi- tional virtuosity indebted to carlyle’s transcendentalism with, as here, a scientific philosophy having at its base the urge to make manifest ‘the bridge between the sensible and the insensi- ble – the manifestations in sound, light, and motion of the forces acting on molecules’ (sawyer, pp. - ). as such, the world tyndall describes comes to seem at once verbally alive and materially vital. his was to prove a compelling and seductive vision, contributing to an enduring mode of literary expression and aesthetic appreciation. the (much later) hallucinatory pantheism plainly evident in any number of dylan thomas’s most celebrated lyrics (‘the force that drives the water through the rocks / drives my red blood; that dries the mouthing streams / turns mine to wax’, so he writes in the second stanza of ‘the force that through the green fuse drives the flower’ [ ]), seems to bear its imprint, as does, more certainly, the nature prose of richard jefferies, particularly that composed during the s and s. in a notebook entry from (reproduced in the recent compilation at home on the earth [ ]), that author, so reverential towards living things, so sympathetic towards the wonders of landscape, comes to seem equally energised by the undelimited possibilities of tyndall’s – or, more generically, mid-nineteenth-century scientific naturalism’s – enlightened admiration for the most ‘base’ of imagined substances: ‘life a property of matter. intelligence a property of matter, and infinite capacities unrecognised. no fear therefore in becoming matter (being matter now) as that is only becoming that which is life and intelligence’ (p. ). the ordinary or unremarkable, throughout jefferies’s prose, as throughout tyndall’s thought, is transfigured into the extraordinary; the everyday, imbued with a kind of jolting alterity; matter, too, estranged and made familiar, if not familial, all at once. many among their contemporaries found such conceptual rejiggings unsettling, even sinister (a recurrent theme, of course, throughout this dissertation). rev. watson, so harsh on clifford’s idea of ‘man as wave’, put things with characteristic starkness in gospels of yesterday, taking tyndall’s soothing and melodious cosmic hum and replacing it with the din of a maelstrom – and that deafening silence of materialism’s banished god: ‘and ever there is - - darkness upon the rhythmic deep, darkness within it, a roar of energy, an awful heat of motion, but no eternal truth, no love that endures, no life that is not a movement towards death’ (p. ). ruskin, equally horrified by materialism, was less extreme in the ethics of dust: ten lectures to little housewives on the elements of crystallization ( ), where he targeted one of tyndall’s explanatory proclivities in dialogic form: l[ecturer]. i do not see why it should be provoking to be asked what it is to be alive. do you think you don’t know whether you are alive or not? (isabel skips to the end of the room and back). l. yes, isabel, that’s all very fine; and you and i may call that being alive: but a modern philosopher calls it being in a ‘mode of motion.’ it requires a certain quantity of heat to take you to the sideboard; and exactly the same quantity to bring you back again. that’s all. isabel. no, it isn’t. and besides, i’m not hot. l. i am, sometimes, at the way they talk. (p. ) such a stance, such an openness to connection and theoretical unification, was also something that could be taken, by some, to debilitating extremes. one of tyndall’s acquaintances, thomas james cobden-sanderson, confessed to an almost paralysing sense of interrelated- ness. some years later, virginia woolf, in a review, described the woozy sensation while reading cobden-sanderson’s memoirs of encountering a world washed through with meaning, its occupants, like its objects and occurrences, inundated by interpretability, each, as it were, a rorschach blot. ‘everything seems to suffer a curious magnification’, she writes; ‘nothing exists in itself but only as a means to something else. the solid objects of daily life become rimmed with high purposes, significant, symbolical. the people that drift through these diaries – even swinburne and morris – have become curiously thin; we see the stars shining through their backbone’ (p. ). tyndall never went so far. all the same, for him, the world-as-understood remained somehow other to the world-as-experienced, suffused with a palpable quivering. sometimes such a prospect appeared a blessed revelation granted via science and rationality, sometimes (though more rarely) an enervating curse. the allusion, therefore, to mark : in ‘a morning on alp lusgen’ (jesus’s admonition to his disciplines: ‘and he said unto them, he that hath ears to hear, let him hear’) hopefully figures the materialist as secularised apostle, as chosen possessor – and, in time, charged proselytiser – of higher truth, comprehending the world’s allegory, glimpsing beneath its masks and superficialities authentic, pulsatory meaning. (coleridge, in reflecting on wordsworth, likewise invoked this verse, towards similar ends. in biographia literaria, he noted of ‘the wonders of the world before us’, that they are ‘an inex- - - haustible treasure, but for which, in consequence of the film of familiarity and selfish solicitude we have eyes, yet see not, ears that hear not, and hearts that neither feel nor understand’ [ : ].) the start of mark is given over to the parable of the mustard seed. encountering incomprehension, or obtuseness, among one of his followers, jesus addressed the group with an exasperated aside: and he said unto them, unto you it is given to know the mystery of the kingdom of god: but unto them that are without, all these things are done in parables: that seeing they may see, and not per- ceive; and hearing they may hear, and not understand; lest at any time they should be converted, and their sins should be forgiven them. and he said unto them, know ye not this parable? and how then will ye know all parables? ( : - ) the elementary parable of sower and sowed, then, an allegory underpinning all other allego- ries in christian theology, finds a scientific counterpart in the mystery posed by a different kind of planting. that trembling world underlying daily experience apprehended by tyndall beneath worldly appearance has, of course, its own buddings and fruits, unignorable mustard trees arising serendipitously from minuscule, sometimes unnoticed, often unremarkable, beginnings: those hothouse fronds, the petals of a water-lily, green pines growing in an alpine declivity. this is the conviction which characterises much of tyndall’s published work. even if does seem to flicker from righteous orthodoxy here and there, it still manages, more often than not, to resolve into apology, or the acquiescence of a humble – or, more precisely, humbled – servant, departing with a deferential bow. but not always. indeed, at times tyndall’s unfaith – and it is manifested most plainly in his poems, or in those letters quoted already – seems to go far beyond that of jesus’s quizzi- cal discipline. not simple doubt, beyond mere contrarian quibble, it toys with apostasy. later in ‘a morning’, for instance, tyndall’s scientific sense seems, for a moment, overwhelmed by his visual one. befuddled by the seeming design evident in (what intellect tells him to be) a uniform grove of conifers made to appear uniform solely by chance and those haphazard inducements of natural selection, he exclaims: unplanted groves! whose pristine seeds, they say were sown amid the flames of nascent stars – how came ye thence and hither? whence the craft that shook these gentian atoms into form, and died the flower with azure deeper far than that of heaven itself on days serene? what built these marigolds? what clothed these knolls with fiery whortle leaves? what gave the heath - - its purple bloom – the alpine rose its glow? shew us the power that fills each tuft of grass with sentient swarms – the art transcending thought, which paints against the canvas of the eye these crests sublime and pure, and then transmutes the picture into worship? […] (nf, pp. - ) the buzzing motif continues: the ‘sentient swarms’ capering in individual tufts of grass suggest both a penumbra of insects and the internal jostling of sun-warmed molecules, the atoms deterministically ‘shaken’ into final form: whether mountain, pine, observing naturalist, flowering shrub. there is a reiterated concern with colour, partly poetically conventional, of course, partly occasioned by his own meteorological and atmospheric obsessions. he marvels at the belfast address’s ‘azure’ of heaven surpassed in that of the alpine flower, the purple of the heather, the redness of the whortleberry plant. but there is an unease with the project of materialism as well, not seen so clearly before, nor expressed as pithily. the plangent ‘whats’ prefixing these lines convey a poignancy and pathos through insistent repetition: what might seem at first a mood of childlike inquisitiveness descends soon enough into something nigh petulance. job’s litany of accomplished wonders, some rendered counterfactual by victorian science – a god ‘which commandeth the sun, and it riseth not; and sealeth up the stars; which alone spreadeth out the heavens, and treadeth upon the waves of the sea; which maketh arcturus, orion, pleiades […]’ (job : - ) – is here referenced not just semantically, but syntactically as well. but tyndall’s queries, unlike job’s, do not have the surety of cate- chism, while those frustrated ‘whats’ leave teasingly unspecified the nature, even the possibil- ity, of demiurge. (forceful, transitive verbs reinforce this notion, communicating a nature ‘built’ or ‘clothed’, a spectacle rendered wondrous by – uncrafted? – ‘craft’.) moreover, statements in a draft of a lecture given at queenwood college, preserved as his journal entry for may , demonstrate that such discomposing existential anxieties had, in fact, long preoccupied tyndall. ‘can man by searching find out god exclaimed job in his day and the syllables echo on’, he had announced to his students, ‘a question without an answer through the ages of prospective eternity’ (p. ). if not quite riposting job, tyndall, in hours of exercise in the alps, a study of , nonetheless provided the unwavering response of contemporary naturalism to the specific puzzlement articulated so clearly in ‘a morning on alp lusgen’. (it was an answer to be adroitly lampooned in the anonymous tract materialistic views of professor tyndall and harriet bartlett also provides a useful discussion of a section of this passage (pp. - ). - - martineau criticized [ ]: ‘and here we may fancy tyndall to exclaim: o wise sun, and as sagacious ocean; o virtuous and all-powerful pair, how can we enough honour thee?’ [p. ].) and as i looked over this wondrous scene towards mont blanc, the grand combin, the dent blanche, the weisshorn, the dom, and the thousand lesser peaks which seemed to join in celebration of the risen day, i asked myself, as on previous occasions: how was this colossal work performed? who chiselled these mighty and picturesque masses out of a mere protuberance of earth? and the answer was at hand. ever young, ever mighty – with the vigour of a thousand worlds still within him – the real sculptor was even then climbing up the eastern sky. it was he who raised aloft the waters which cut out these ravines; it was he who planted the glaciers on the mountain-slopes, […] and it was he who, acting through the ages, will finally lay low these mighty monuments, rolling them gradually seaward […]. (hours, pp. - ) tyndall’s veneration for the sun encompasses the prophecy of luke : (‘every valley shall be filled, and every mountain and hill shall be brought low; and the crooked shall be made straight, and the rough ways shall be made smooth’), supplanting divine with thermodynamic equilibration, turning the narrative of salvation into a horror of geological dilapidation and entropic ruin. but, as so often, this leaves him spiritually undernourished, for the question he poses in ‘a morning’ seems more akin to that posited by carlyle in heroes and hero-worship, one refusing to allow ‘the sun’ to serve as its pat resolution – an ‘answer’ which answers nothing: we call that fire of the black thunder-cloud ‘electricity,’ and lecture learnedly about it, and grind the like of it out of glass and silk: but what is it? what made it? whence comes it? whither goes it? science has done much for us; but it is a poor science that would hide from us the great deep sacred infinitude of nescience, whither we can never penetrate, on which all science swims as a mere superfi- cial film. this world, after all our science and sciences, is still a miracle; wonderful, inscrutable, magical and more, to whosoever will think of it. (pp. - ) carlyle, among the nineteenth century’s earlier thinkers, had not been alone in raising such awkward ‘ontological’ questions. they were a particular preoccupation of the american transcendentalists. a work quoted by tyndall in his lecture ‘matter and force’ (fos, p. ), emerson’s ‘the rhodora’ told of the poet’s encounter with a flower growing in a remote and inhospita- ble swamp, far from potential human observers – a flower, it would seem, languishing pointlessly: rhodora! if the sages ask thee why this charm is wasted on the earth and sky, tell them, dear, if eyes were made for seeing, then beauty is its own excuse for being: why thou wert there, o rival of the rose! - - i never thought to ask, i never knew: but in my simple ignorance suppose the self-same power that brought me there brought you. this precise perplexity confronted tyndall, and he could not, in ‘a morning on alp lusgen’, despite the lapsed decades, for all the relentless progress of cosmological theory, give an answer any less rooted in ‘simple ignorance’, nor more sophisticated than further noddings towards that ‘self-same power’. furthermore, the security of scale, so central to tyndall’s earlier ‘to the moon’, is, here, unmistakably absent, almost extravagantly so – that sense of nature conceived as unity, of parts fitted to whole, of a kind of synergistic rightness. (it also, of course, features climacti- cally in the account of june .) common sense, he argues in ‘a morning’, asserts the absurdity of any genealogy linking starburst with marigold, evanescent flower with cataclysmic astrophysical event unimaginably distant in both time and space. this seems the obverse of francis thompson’s epigrammatic observation later that century (beloved nowadays by some chaos and quantum theorists) set forth in his poem ‘the mistress of vision’: ‘hiddenly / to each other linkèd are, / that thou canst not stir a flower / without troubling of a star’ (p. ). conversely, the materialist, as here described, can’t seem to trouble a star without stirring a flower, somehow, somewhere. this could seem almost too implausible, or hubristic, to be regarded as sane belief. put another way, the very panorama tyndall glimpses, the evidence of his own eyes, seems to suggest, even confirm, the illogic of the nebular hypothesis, and inter alia the correctness of rev. martineau’s persistent objections. an alpine rose, it seems, can challenge all materialisms, threatening to debunk any reductive or ateleological system of metaphysical conjecture. and yet more ludicrous still, tyndall proposes, is that correlated internal mental state – a variety of romantic ‘worship’ – triggered within him alongside these rather more esoteric reflections, allegedly by mere rearrangement of molecules! incredulity is his initial response to the concept that somehow ethereal waves of light, of quantifiable wave- length, are interpreted as vista and then endowed with something beyond themselves: a sense of the burkean sublime. all this enacted, effortlessly and with near instantaneity, amid the chemistry-store ordinariness of brain-stuff and perceptive-networks. consequently, tyndall distances himself, momentarily disillusioned, from the whole interpretive charade espoused by ‘rationalist’ colleagues, their extreme fetishisations of the material – this excerpt begins with a bitter: ‘pristine seeds, they say / were sown amid the flames of nascent stars’ – before, finally, achieving a sort of peace, though not content. the stanza ends with a sigh of weary supplica- - - tion: ‘science dumb / we yearn, and grope, and guess, but cannot know’ (nf, p. ). his ‘they’ has become ‘we’, but not blindly, nor without fevered introspection. mate- rialism’s disciple, in other words – as with the querulous soul encountered in mark – had his doubts, too, it seems, moments in which the world’s parable seemed to poise unsteadily on the epistemological axis lying between absurdism and maddening incomprehensibility, like an alpinist precariously traversing some knife-like ridge. in forms of water, tyndall – amidst a (somewhat boastful) discussion of materialistic science’s expertise in their remorseless, even surgical, disentangling – spoke of ‘the way in which the various threads of what we call nature are woven together’ (p. ). in an essay on ‘prayer and natural law’, however, he conceded that mountains in particular can provide a noteworthy challenge to reductive and syncretic interpretive methodologies, where the impos- sible cornucopia of physical form – ‘world is crazier and more of it than we think’, as louis macneice phrased the predicament in ‘snow’ ( ) – seems to shirk off any single or simple explanation. up high, he suggests, the ‘threads’ of nature can seem unkempt or knotty; their ‘woven’ aggregations, matted and makeshift. ‘accounts of mountain-goers from the s’, as robert macfarlane has explained, ‘tend to be exuberant with detail, written by travellers whose eyes have become newly sensitive to the particular beauties of the mountains. […] again and again in travel journals, attention is drawn to curious geological outcrops: arches, caves, stalactites and pinnacles […]’ (p. ). ruskin’s modern painters iv, for instance, pro- vided its readers with formidable catalogues of topographic exotica, while whymper’s scram- bles among the alps ( ) – featuring such listings as ‘[t]here are precipices, apparent, but not actual; there are precipices absolutely perpendicular; there are precipices overhanging: there are glaciers, and there are hanging glaciers; there are glaciers which tumble great séracs over greater cliffs […]’ (p. ) – threatens at times to collapse under the burden of precise descrip- tion. the very snowy variousness, and causal suddenness, of mountain landscape was, how- ever, for tyndall, one key to its uncompromising aesthetic appeal. ‘in this entanglement of [alpine] phenomena it seems hopeless to seek for law or orderly connection’, he asserted in that essay – before, with considerable élan, adducing law and orderly connection (fos, p. ). but such an explanatory aptitude still leaves, for all its impressiveness and transferabil- ity, some cardinal questions unaddressed. this he admitted with unusual forthrightness in ‘a morning on alp lusgen’, a poem which received its widest circulation as an epilogue (the ‘last word’) to new fragments (itself – as it turned out – the scientist’s final major publication). - - the personified mountain in emerson’s ‘monadnoc’ had expressed anticipation, even impatience: ‘i await the bard and sage, / who, in large thoughts, like a fair pearl-seed, / shall string monadnoc like a bead’ (p. ). tyndall, while asserting his own science’s fitness for the peak’s physical encapsulation, finally has to concede – in ‘a morning’, most poignantly – that he, like his science, remains dismayingly ill-equipped for any attempt at such a mightier task. strange matters: tyndall’s strung cosmos unheard or not, the concept of a celestial music is – beyond its inherent playfulness – one that has been, since the beginning of recorded physical speculation and across a range of world cultures, endlessly revitalised. from the pythagorean music of the spheres, to the plucked strings quivering in a -dimensional manifold in superstring theory, whose ‘vibrational patterns orchestrate the evolution of the cosmos’, many have argued that ‘the winds of change […] gust through an aeolian universe’ – so physicist brian greene has phrased things, in the elegant universe ( ; p. ). such analogies, if properly chosen, can have pleasingly heuris- tic functions as well, revealing, or suggesting, rules and properties which might not otherwise be so evident: such was certainly the case with the symphonic cosmology set forth by tyndall. ‘rhythm’, he wrote in mountaineering in , ‘is the rule with nature […]. the passage of a resined bow across a string is typical of her operations’ (p. ). she has a pulse, too: ‘thus beats the heart of the universe […]’ – this a comparison from a discussion of the conser- vation, and endless interconvertibility, of potential energy and vis viva (or ‘kinetic energy’, in the modern nomenclature [fos, p. ]). event follows event, he explained, in accord with implacable causality, thumping ‘ever onward in the uninterrupted rhythm of cause and effect […]’ (p. ): from the frantic moto perpetuo of oscillating atoms on an Ångström scale to the lugubrious, lento tempos of planets orbiting suns. tyndall enacted some of these metaphors in his demonstrations at the ri, in his ‘singing’ (and dancing!) ‘jets of gas’, behaving like a conductor at the podium. he urged his listeners to attempt similar exploits at home. in the rede lecture, given may in the senate house of the university of cambridge, he spoke midway through of the fashion in which the ‘air of a room accommodates itself to the requirements of an orchestra, transmitting each vibration of every pipe and string’; he contin- ued (testing the pliancy of such an undulatory or ‘wave’ model, and moving thereby from concert hall to cosmic void), ‘so does the inter-stellar æther accommodate itself to the re- quirements of light and heat’, two phenomena re-conceptualised by nineteenth-century - - science as transverse wave oscillations, as (in materialism’s iconic phrase) ‘modes of motion’. he concluded this memorable address with an exponential zooming in, a ‘return’ from the illimitability of space to the confines of a drawing room, and, from thence (penetrating further, and more intimately, inwards), to precepts derived from materialistic physiology, explaining to his audience: ‘if you open a piano and sing into it, a certain string will respond. change the pitch of your voice; the first string ceases to vibrate, but another replies. […] [t]hus is sentient man acted on by nature, the optic, the auditory, and other nerves of the human body being so many strings differently tuned, and responsive to different forms of the universal power’ (p. ). that invocation of a ‘universal power’ seems, again, decidedly carlylean, but then so is the musical model precipitating it, and those analogies used in illustration. as turner has noted: ‘transmitted through carlyle the romantic heritage of seeking the meaning of life through a particularistic or empirical apprehension and examination of nature allowed the scientific publicists to confront the naturalistic universe without regret for past supernatural- ism’ (‘victorian’, p. ). often, for instance, tyndall invoked the language of clothing in a conventional way – he wrote, for example, in ‘atoms, molecules, and ether waves’ of the ‘cloak’ provided by our earthly atmosphere: ‘were that garment removed, terrestrial life would probably perish through the consequent refrigeration’ (nf, p. ) – but at other times the speculations of teufelsdröckh seem not far beneath, plainly visible through the diaphanous weavings of the scientist’s own allusive vocabulary. he began his ‘lecture on magnetism’, to take one instance, with a suitable disclaimer, declaring himself an ‘exponent’ of the view of nature finding it ‘an organic whole, as a body each of whose members sympathises with the rest, changing, it is true, but without one real break of continuity, or a single interruption in the fixed relations of cause and effect’ (fos, p. ). such a concept, and such language, clearly evidences the heritage of carlylean metaphysics. ‘to him’, the scientist said of carlyle, ‘the universe was not a mechanism, but an organism – each part of it thrilling and respond- ing sympathetically with all other parts’ (nf, p. ); so, too, that ‘supply’ accommodating universe of materialistic cosmology, as the scientist explained in his rede lecture. in it, he defined the ‘temperature of space’ as a function correlated with the visible and invisible radiations emitted by the panoply of stars: a measure derived, he explained, from ‘the cease- less thrill of those distant orbs collectively in the æther […]’; moreover, like the separate instruments constituting any orchestra, the light from each remains individual and distinct – a point glimpsed clearly ‘across the entanglement of wave-motions produced by all other stars’ - - (fos, p. ; my italics). this sense of organism was abetted by a renewed appreciation among his scientific peers for the mortality of all material things, stars as much as starfish. ‘we had only solar and stellar chemistry’ – lord kelvin announced of the early days of spectroscopic analysis (in his baas inaugural) – ‘we now have solar and stellar physiology’ (thomson, p. xcviii), a theory of the life processes and internal workings of stars, not just awareness of ascensions and declinations. the earth-spirit in goethe’s faust, part one had declaimed to the terrified doctor: in the tides of life, in action’s storm, a fluctuant wave, a shuttle free, birth and the grave, an infinite sea, a weaving, flowing, life, all-glowing, thus at time’s humming loom ’tis my hand prepares the garment of life which the deity wears! ( : - ) sartor resartus’s harried ‘editor’ – noting the indebtedness to goethe of teufelsdröckh’s ‘clothes philosophy’, in particular such outpourings as the professor’s ecstatic: ‘o nature! – or what is nature? ha! why do i not name thee god? art not thou the “living garment of god”?’ (p. ) – wonders whether or not the ‘clothes philosophy’ being set forth within the book was ever likely to have a transformative effect on an english readership, a population beaten down by mill’s utilitarianism and mechanistic philosophy. he needn’t have worried, however. (tyndall, by the way, quoted carlyle’s/goethe’s ‘living garment’ line explicitly in his essay ‘on the scientific use of the imagination’ [fos, p. ].) in america, too, the book made an impact. do the following lines from emerson’s ‘monadnoc’, however, allude to goethe? carlyle? both? neither? is this the voice of the mountain (a ‘constant giver’) as surrogate – transcendental, after a fashion, though hardly divine – for faustus’s earth-spirit?: ‘in his own loom’s garment dressed / by his proper bounty blessed / fast abides this constant giver, / pouring many a cheerful river’ (p. ). tyndall’s own usage, on first appraisal, of such goethian ‘weaving’ metaphors seems more materialistic still. in ‘“materialism” and its opponents’ – that defence of the preroga- tives of naturalism (and the rightness of his pontifications at belfast), perhaps excusing an arch tone which seems calculated to shock – he speaks of human gestation: ‘i figure it [the baby] growing in the womb, woven by something not itself, without the conscious participation of - - either the father or mother, and appearing in due time, a living miracle […]’ (p. ). simi- larly, in an essay nearly as prickly, tyndall seems blithely – perhaps freakishly – disinterested, not only in making any distinction between raw organic elements and biological life, but between different orders of biological life: ‘so also as regards the reunion of the carbon and the oxygen, the molecular machinery through which the combining energy acts may, in one case, weave the texture of a frog, while in another it may weave the texture of a man’ (fos, p. ). this seems, on one level, the sort of assertion – a corrosive debasement of humanity augured by the devices of industrialism – which drove teufelsdröckh to contemplate suicide prior to ‘the everlasting “yea”’: ‘to our less philosophical readers […]’, sartor resartus’s ‘editor’ explains, ‘it is now clear that the so passionate teufelsdröckh precipitated through “a shivered universe” in this extraordinary way, has only one of three things which he can next do: establish himself in bedlam; begin writing satanic poetry [that is, atheistic, after shelley]; or blow out his brains’ (p. ). but, on another level, as we have seen, the cosmology of tyndall was not so much ‘shivered’ (broken apart) as ‘shivering’, trembling with a sensuous feeling for matter-in-life and life-in-matter (the same double sense animating a stanza in maxwell’s ‘tyndallic ode’). ‘reac- tion against mechanistic science led to nature’s being perceived as living and growing’, barton explains, ‘nature was appreciated in its fecundity, its grandeur, and its immensity’ (p. ). as such, tyndall’s ‘weaving’ metaphors can be seen as encoding a view of the world, and as suggestive of a philosophy about being in that world, as distinct in its own way from eight- eenth-century mechanical theories (which, as practiced by harriet martineau and others, persisted in the ‘practical materialism of the present’) as it is from ‘the torn swaddling bands of the past’, those fetters – or outgrown, moth-eaten clothes – of unreconstructed theological orthodoxy (‘materialism’, p. ). - - conclusion the world does not speak. only we do. the world can, once we have programmed ourselves with a language, cause us to hold be- liefs. but it cannot propose a language for us to speak. only other human beings can do that. - richard rorty, contingency, irony, and solidarity, bertrand russell – a man tremendously influenced by w. k. clifford’s the common sense of the exact sciences ( ), which he read before he was sixteen (monk, pp. - ) – set forth his decidedly cliffordian worldview in ‘a free man’s worship’, an article of . after enu- merating first a catalogue of cultural failure and entropic decay (descriptive of a universe inextricably sunk into the final thermodynamic equilibration of ‘heat death’), he concluded by noting that such eschatological predictions, though undeniably gloomy, ‘if not quite beyond dispute, are yet so nearly certain that no philosophy which rejects them can hope to stand. only within the scaffolding of these truths, only on the firm foundation of unyielding despair, can the soul’s habitation henceforth be safely built’ (p. ). the words ‘scaffold’ and ‘scaffold- ing’, of course, have a dark double meaning: at once support and essential apparatus of construction (and, by extension, clear sign of civilisation ascendant, of a society rebuilding), they name also the platform from which the condemned go to meet their doom by hanging. in a later essay, ‘what i believe’, reprinted in the volume why i am not a christian ( ), this double-ness of signification was made explicit: ‘many a man has borne himself proudly on the scaffold; surely, the same pride should teach us to think truly about man’s place in the world. even if the open windows of science make us shiver after the cosy indoor warmth of tradi- tional humanizing myths, in the end the fresh air brings vigour, and the great spaces have a splendour of their own’ (p. ). these are sentiments with which clifford himself would surely have concurred, and their phrasing brings to mind not only that scientist’s defence of scientism (discussed in chapter three) but also the coda to the origin of species, in which darwin insisted that, despite the apparent nihilism inherent in his doctrine of speciation and evolution by the ruthless mechanisms of predation and natural selection, there was nonetheless still ‘a grandeur epigraph from rorty, p. ; following epigraph page quotation from van wylen, sonntag and borgnakke, p. . - - in this view of life’ (p. ) – though scant comfort it must have seemed to many among his generation, if not to darwin himself. such sanguine consolations were indeed commonplace (if not commonplaces) in mid- to late-victorian scientific perorations, suffusing many of them with a fatalistic melancholy. however, they, like their authors, only rarely shaded into the outright ‘unyielding despair’ anticipated by russell. this was in large part due, as argued throughout this dissertation, to the persistence of, if not always the substances, then at least the languages of those ‘traditional humanizing myths’ which russell, himself a scientific propagandist in the turnerian mould, would later reference – and dismiss – with such an evocative admixture of arrogance and nostalgia. tyndall had his romanticism, his residue of carlylean or emersonian transcendentalism; clifford, the boisterous humanism of swinburne or whitman, the steely stoicism of spinoza and epicurus, the examples set by nineteenth-century positivists (for instance, harrison and comte), and by his own ‘materialistic’ predecessors (for instance, tyndall). both tyndall and clifford had also, like the romantic poets and carlyle before them, the cadences of the king james bible from which to borrow, if not earn, a linguistic gravitas and moral authority. this final resource was invaluable, as it was commonly – and, in the case of, say, clifford’s implementation, correctly – perceived by many in the mid-victorian reading public that atheism was a necessary appurtenance to contemporary ‘materialism’. as phrased by one particularly vehement opponent, such an approach to cosmology was ‘imper- fect in a scientific sense, destructive in a religious, and degrading to humanity in every point of view […]’; moreover, its various explanatory elaborations, despite ‘superficial’ literary and philosophical idiosyncrasies, were to be uniformly condemned as fruits ‘from one and the same tree – “the boundless upas, the all-blasting tree,” the tree of atheism’ (materialistic, p. v). clifford was well aware of this widespread perception, observing that ‘it cannot be doubted that theistic belief is a comfort and a solace to those who hold it, and that the loss of it is a very painful loss. it cannot be doubted, at least, by many of us in this generation, who either profess it now, or received it in our childhood and have parted from it since with such search- ing trouble as only cradle-faiths can cause’ (‘influence’, p. ). he, personally, was resolute in his atheism, his abandonment of those ‘cradle-faiths’. in that, he was the polar opposite of maxwell, who, as he wrote in a letter march , believed that ‘[y]ou may fly to the ends of the world and find no god but the author of salvation. you may search the scriptures and find not a text to stop you in your explorations’ (qtd. in ljcm, p. ). this he asserted to the - - end of his days, for all the rumblings made by colleagues. tyndall, however, unlike both clifford and maxwell, was always one to remain guarded in public proclamations on the existence – or non-existence – of divinity. this was a fact lost on many observers, but some acknowledged at least an agnostic trend to his thought. a few even saw tyndall’s ‘supernatural naturalism’ as a prolegomena to some future faithfulness, one sympathetic commentator at the westminster review, for example, writing in : to emancipate the minds of men from any form of slavery by substituting intelligent comprehension for unreasoning formulae or wonder, has ever been the first step in the liberation of human energies, so that they may produce greater happiness for the individual and advance the progress of the whole community; and we cannot doubt that these utterances of professor tyndall will go far towards creating a new element of religious belief in this country […]. (‘science’ [ ], p. ) nevertheless (as argued in chapters four and five), tyndall’s emergent faith, for all its appeal, was not without its own novel challenges, nor were its rewards entirely commensurate with those stereotypically associated with more normative systems of theological belief. others, including many not considered among turner’s ‘publicists’, could still accept, even proselytise, the facts of nineteenth-century materialistic science – its reduction of every- thing to stoff and kraft, matter and force – but only as temporary approximations to some superseding truth. among those discussed, hinton insisted that the ‘meaning’ of matter must eventually be appreciated from the standpoint of transcendent geometric dimensions. myers hypothesised that the supraliminal – he was to label it the ‘methereal’ (human, : ) – reality in which departed souls reside was founded not on impersonal quantity, but rather private human affection (‘shall they not recognize that no terrene matter or energy, but love itself is the imperishable of that higher world […]’? [‘modern’, p. ]). jefferies, searching for an egress from the perceived bleakness of contemporary reductionism, speculated that there might be an infinite hierarchy of cosmological ‘conditions’ (‘all natural things known to us as yet may be referred to those two conditions: one, force; two, matter. a third, a fourth, a fifth – no one can say how many conditions […] may exist […]’ [‘dawn’, p. ]). for such thinkers, materialism, a stripping away of some (now outgrown or irrelevant?) ‘humanizing myths’, was a starting point, the ideological foundation for humane and revivifying conjecture. russell, in a preface to an edition of the common sense of the exact sciences, composed during dreary days towards the end of world war ii, had hoped that readers of clifford’s text (full of its enthusiasm for human progress and rationalism) might ‘imbibe something of its author’s belief in the possibility of excellent things, and that this [might] help them to acquire - - some of the strength that is needed to fight against the evils of the age in which we are com- pelled to live’ (p. x). yet many of the agnostic thinkers discussed in this dissertation, not just clifford, looked towards humanity’s future with hope, even ebullience, foreseeing comparable possibilities in the advancement of science. tyndall, for instance, predicted a cultural climate more amenable to the claims of his belfast address, even as he anticipated a science more fit to answer some of his most riddling concerns. this perhaps surprising undercurrent of optimism – evident despite fears of religious revival or secular strife; evident despite the seeming darkness of their several anthropological, biological and thermodynamic visions, and perhaps made most conspicuous by the continued emphasis in their writings on the joy of discovery rather than the drudgery of duty and routine – was, however, not merely a conse- quence of personal psychology, but also a by-product of the ‘sort’ of science they were at- tempting to describe, as analysed in my opening chapter. one final example illustrates this perfectly. whitehead made an apposite point when he noted midway through science and the mod- ern world: the nineteenth century has been a perplexed century, in a sense which is not true of any of its prede- cessors of the modern period. in the earlier times there were opposing camps, bitterly at variance on questions which they deemed fundamental. but, except for a few stragglers, either camp was whole- hearted. the importance of tennyson’s poem [in memoriam a. h. h.] lies in the fact that it exactly expressed the character of its period. each individual was divided against himself. in the earlier times, the deep thinkers were the clear thinkers, – descartes, spinoza, locke, leibniz. they knew exactly what they meant and said it. in the nineteenth century, some of the deeper thinkers among theologi- ans and philosophers were muddled thinkers. (pp. - ) i would suggest that, to whitehead’s list, one might add ‘scientists’, too, for is there not some- thing ‘muddled’, ‘perplexed’, if not tremulous and over-awed, about, say, tyndall’s mediations on the governing principles of thermodynamics? i have called the philosophy of heat a new philosophy, without, however, restricting the term to the subject of heat. the fact is, it cannot be so restricted: for the connection of this agent with the general energies of the universe is such, that if we master it perfectly, we master all. even now we can discern, though but darkly, the greatness of the issues which connect themselves with the progress we have made – issues which were probably beyond the contemplation of those, by whose industry and genius the foundations of our present knowledge were laid. (heat, p. xv) tyndall strives for a language overmatching previous technical vernaculars, cobbling here, as elsewhere, his response to specific forms of contemporary scientific belief from whatever vocabularies were thought suitable. his sly wheeling in of the extraordinarily familiar biblical phrase (from corinthians : ) ‘though but darkly’ (and, alongside it, all the intimations of - - a steady and required progression from childish ignorance to the comprehension of responsi- ble adulthood that such a reference would automatically entail) allows him, for instance, to convey a clear sense of undelimited disciplinarity; such a reference also implicitly suggests something of the increased spiritual significance attributed by tyndall to ‘materialistic’ theo- rising in mid-victorian intellectual life. at the same time, tyndall’s ‘heat philosophy’ recalls herr prof. teufelsdröck’s transcendental fulminations – occasioned by the chance sighting of a blacksmith’s convective hearth – on cosmological and ‘thermodynamic’ interconnectedness. whitehead continued, speaking again of nineteenth-century philosophers, theologians and poets: ‘their assent was claimed by incompatible doctrines; and their efforts at recon- ciliation [between doctrines] produced inevitable confusion’ (p. ). so was it commonly for the era’s scientists as well, with their several allegiances and often conflicting aspirations. maxwell’s unflappable commitment to the church of scotland; tyndall’s, to a sort of roman- tic pantheism; and clifford’s, to a meliorist and reassuring quasi-positivism, did not sit alto- gether easily alongside their equal fealties to the methods of rationalism and empiricism as espoused by nineteenth-century inductive science; nor did the vernaculars associated with such diverse interpretive traditions meld without disjointedness. at the same time, a degree of disjointedness was sometimes actively courted. clifford’s extraordinary (to modern ears) essay ‘cosmic emotion’ had its genesis in a talk given may before the sunday lecture society, ‘the relations between science and some modern poetry’ (pollock, p. ). such a title was neither accidental nor a non sequitur. note how he made use of the plural, ‘rela- tions’. scientists needed poetry – needed literature more generally – even as poets (to be relevant to the rapidly changing culture in which they – and their readers – lived) needed science. science, in effect, enabled poets and philosophers to suggest at one stroke something about their world, a certain unsettling confluence of epistemologies and beliefs, which needed making sense of (serving immediately to justify their own disparate efforts to somehow try and do so, through ‘explanatory’ productions in prose and verse), while poetry, conversely, en- abled scientists to insinuate what they might never have dared to argue so openly otherwise – or, in other words, it allowed them to more readily give voice in their writings to the not-said, though frequently implicit. for some, therefore – such publicists, for instance, as p. g. tait and john tyndall – a redolently poetic or allusive language became the characteristic tenor of expository prose throughout this period, the ideal dialect in which they could address their own particular concerns, wage their own private battles, and, to borrow russell’s phrase, fight resolutely - - ‘against the evils of the age in which [they were] compelled to live’. that each of them was able to do so so effectively acts as a testimony to both the multivalency of the discourses available at the time and also their often considerable prowess in shaping these extant, subtly incompatible vocabularies towards their own peculiar ends. others – for instance, w. k. clifford and james clerk maxwell – in pursuit of the same goals, chose different tactics, plainer idioms, marshalling alternative registers of metaphor and citation. this, too, they went about with both zeal and success – again, further evidence of the discursive diversity in play. for all these reasons, then, ‘materialistic’ language in the latter decades of the nine- teenth century was predestined to be anything but monotonic. - - ‘if the second law is valid for the universe (we of course do not know if the universe can be considered an isolated system), how did it get in the state of low entropy? on the other end of the scale, if all processes known to us have an entropy increase associated with them, what is the future of the natural world as we know it? quite obviously it is impossible to give conclusive answers to these questions on the basis of the second law of thermodynamics alone. however, we see the second law of thermodynamics as the description of the prior and continuing work of a creator, who also holds the answer to our future destiny and that of the universe’. - fundamentals of classical thermodynamics, ‘the ancient writers who celebrated the heavens’ declaration of the glory of the lord saw only through a glass darkly. unbeknown to them and countless others who followed them, the universe has revealed itself by the instruments that modern science has made possible to be far bigger, more spectacular, and more humbling than we ever imagined it to be’. - john d. barrow, march , templeton prize news conference - - ––––––––––––––– works cited ––––––––––––––– this bibliographical listing is divided into five main sections: works by john tyndall, works by w. k. clifford, works by james clerk maxwell, works by others published prior to , and works by others published since . works by john tyndall the tyndall papers are housed in the archives of the royal institution of great britain. tyndall’s published works: address delivered before the british association assembled at belfast, with additions. london: long- mans, green, . address delivered before the british association assembled at belfast, with additions. ‘ th thousand’ ed. london: longmans, green, . ‘address of john tyndall, f.r.s., d.c.l. oxon., ll.d. cantab., f.c.p.s., professor of natural philosophy in the royal institution, president’. report of the forty-fourth meeting of the british association for the advancement of science; held at belfast in august . london: john murray, . lxvi - xcvii. ‘crystals and molecular force’. tyndall, address, ‘ th thousand’ ed. - . faraday as a discoverer. introd. keith gordon irwin. new york: thomas y. crowell, . rpt. of faraday as a discoverer. . th ed. [ ]. the forms of water in clouds & rivers, ice & glaciers. international science series . london: henry s. king, . fragments of science for unscientific people: a series of detached essays, lectures, and reviews. rd ed. london: longmans, green, . fragments of science: a series of detached essays, addresses, and reviews. th ed. london: long- - - mans, green, . fragments of science: a series of detached essays, addresses, and reviews. th ed. vols. london: longmans, green, . the glaciers of the alps. . [abr. ed.]. the glaciers of the alps & mountaineering in . introd. right hon. lord avebury. london: everyman’s library - j. m. dent & sons, . - . ‘a glimpse of farringford, ; and “the ancient sage,” ’. alfred lord tennyson: a memoir. by hallam tennyson. vols. london: macmillan, . : - . heat: a mode of motion. . rd ed. london: longmans, green, . hours of exercise in the alps. . new ed. london: longmans, green, . ‘inaugural address of prof. john tyndall, d.c.l., ll.d., f.r.s., president’. nature (may - october ): - . ‘“materialism” and its opponents’. the fortnightly review new series (july - december ): - . mountaineering in . . the glaciers of the alps & mountaineering in . introd. right hon. lord avebury. london: everyman’s library - j. m. dent & sons, . - . new fragments. new york: d. appleton, . ‘niagara’. macmillan’s magazine (may - october ): - . ‘on the influence of material aggregations upon the manifestations of force’. 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[ /c ]. tyndall papers. . letter to mrs juliet pollock. june . typescript facsim. correspondence of john tyndall – vol. vi. from & to sir w. f. pollock, bart., & lady pollock. tyndall papers. . letter to mrs juliet pollock. april . typescript facsim. correspondence of john tyndall – vol. vi. from & to sir w. f. pollock, bart., & lady pollock. tyndall papers. - . letter to mrs juliet pollock. april . typescript facsim. correspondence of john tyndall – vol. vi. from & to sir w. f. pollock, bart., & lady pollock. tyndall papers. - . letter to mrs juliet pollock. may . typescript facsim. correspondence of john tyndall – vol. vi. from & to sir w. f. pollock, bart., & lady pollock. tyndall papers. - . letter to mrs juliet pollock. [may ?]. typescript facsim. correspondence of john tyndall – vol. vi. from & to sir w. f. pollock, bart., & lady pollock. tyndall papers. . loose ms. letter [circa may ] in bound volume of notebooks [ e / ]. tyndall papers. ‘my story of “the screen” at hindhead’. loose ms. [circa may ] in bound volume of notebooks [ e/ ]. tyndall papers. not paginated. ‘the queenly moon commands the plastic sea’. march [ - ?]. bound volume of sundry manuscripts. ms. [ /e ]. tyndall papers. not paginated. ‘the sky’. [october ]. notebook . bound volume of notebooks. ms. [ e/ ]. tyndall papers. not paginated. ‘to the moon’. february . bound volume of sundry manuscripts. ms. [ /e ]. tyndall papers. not paginated. untitled poem [‘the sea holds jubilee this sunny morn’]. typescript facsim. correspondence of john tyndall – vol. vi. from & to sir w. f. pollock, bart., & lady pollock. tyndall papers. . works by w. k. clifford where possible, all citations from the works of w. k. clifford are based on the texts as they first appeared in victorian-era periodicals; this has been necessary as many of the versions incorporated within stephen and pollock’s lectures and essays were either revised (sometimes subtly) or, in a few instances, merely condensed (often indiscriminately) by his two posthumous - - editors, occasionally through excision of entire sections. such modifications were made, or so they claim, in part to avoid duplication between articles but also because, from time to time, they believed that such a process of selective expurgation would have been in accordance with the author’s wishes. ‘[c]ertain passages’, they explain, somewhat disingenuously, ‘have been omitted which we believe that clifford himself would have willingly cancelled, if he had known the impression they would make on many sincere and liberal-minded persons whose feelings he had no thought of offending’ (p. ). ‘atoms’. stephen and pollock : - . the common sense of the exact sciences. 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[add. ib/ ]. james clerk maxwell papers. cambridge university library. ‘molecules’. garber, brush and everitt [ ] - . ‘notes “concerning demons” and “concerning a molecular aether”’. ms. [add. vi/ a]. james clerk maxwell papers. cambridge university library. ‘on st. david’s day. to mrs. e. c. morrieson’. campbell and garnett - . ‘paradoxical philosophy’. rev. of paradoxical philosophy, by p. g. tait and balfour stewart. nature (november - april ): - . ‘report on tait’s lecture on force: – b.a., ’. campbell and garnett - . ‘section a. – mathematical and physical science…’. nature (may - november ): - . ‘a student’s evening hymn’. campbell and garnett - . theory of heat. london: longmans, green, . ‘to hermann stoffkraft, ph.d., the hero of a recent work called “paradoxical philosophy”’. campbell and garnett - . [‘to his wife’]. campbell and garnett - . ‘to the chief musician upon nabla. a tyndallic ode’. campbell and garnett - . ‘to the committee of the cayley portrait fund’. campbell and garnett - . a treatise on electricity and magnetism. vols. oxford: clarendon press, . ‘tune, il segreto por esser felice’. campbell and garnett - . ‘a vision. of a wrangler, of a university, of pedantry, and of philosophy’. campbell and garnett - . ‘what is the nature of evidence of design?’. campbell and garnett - . other works cited published prior to ‘address to an atom’. punch, or the london charivari (january - june ): . 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___________________________________________________________________ in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree doctor of philosophy ___________________________________________________________________ by scott gratson diploma date may examining committee members: ashley west, advisory chair, art history tracey cooper, art history philip glahn, painting laura weigert, external member, rutgers university ii © copyright by scott gratson _____________ all rights reserved iii abstract this analysis is on the function of cadaver or transi tombs in the south of england and germany from the fifteenth to early sixteenth centuries, at particular moments when theological and cultural shifts related to church reforms and the reformation were tethered to new considerations about death, memorial, and changing concepts of the soul and matter. the study begins with a focus on the tombs of henry chichele ( – ) in canterbury cathedral in canterbury, england, and alice de la pole ( – ) of saint mary’s church in ewelme, oxfordshire, england. additionally, the memorial relief of ulrich fugger ( – ) in saint anna's church in augsburg, germany, acts as a bridge to hans holbein’s painted dead christ in the tomb ( ) in the kuntsmuseum basel, in which christ is simultaneously portrayed as an effigy, transi, and resurrected body. this was also an extended period when notions of visuality changed, along with preferences for different media and pressures on images and objects. as the demands of verisimilitude and discourses about presence and matter changed, media progressed from three-dimensional sculpture and carved relief to oil paint on wood. transi tombs embodied this trajectory, altering uses and impressions of materials as they progressed from metal to stone to relief carving and paint. transi tombs, in particular, structured time as a malleable construct, through the incorporation of varying images and their configuration in different visual strata and degrees of vividness and decay. by merging motifs of the dead with the resurrected christ, the transi tomb phenomenon situated death in relation to the viewer’s experience of mortality, memorial, and remembrance. through these changing images and media, public perception of death was inextricably transformed, coinciding with the advent of the reformation. iv dedication for jodi. for devon. for aria. forever. “memory is the seamstress, and a capricious one at that. memory runs her needle in and out, up and down, hither and thither. we know not what comes next, or what follows after.” virginia woolf, orlando (new york: harcourt brace & company, ), v acknowledgments i have been a student in the tyler school of art for almost a decade. i could not have asked for a more superb group of faculty members to instruct, mentor, and guide me in my new and fascinating field. i have had the chance to complete my education with some of the best art historians in the world, a gift given to me through temple university. for that opportunity, i am deeply thankful. there are no words to adequately express my regard for the members of my dissertation committee: dr. ashley west, dr. tracy cooper, and dr. philip glahn from the tyler school of art, as well as dr. laura weigert from rutgers university. they willingly read hundreds of pages of research, considered innumerable theories and citations, and perpetually provided me with the guidance necessary to complete a degree in this incredible discipline. i am humbled by their dedication and acumen. in particular, i wish to recognize the mentorship and assistance of dr. west, who guided my research and writing since we first considered the topic of this dissertation while strolling through sebalduskirche in nuremberg several years ago. her knowledge of all things pertinent to the reformation and northern renaissance art is as boundless and inspirational as her dedication to scholarship, research, and academe. i can only hope to be as erudite and learned as her. i am a professor of instruction in the lew klein college of media of communication. i am deeply appreciative for my colleagues’ continuing willingness to support me in my art history endeavors, especially the members of the deans’ suite and the faculty throughout my college. vi some time ago, my students in the communication studies program remarked that they had deepened their knowledge of art history through my affiliation with the tyler school of art. i am humbled that a student who may have known me through my work with lgbtq issues or student athletic advising or philanthropic endeavors would come to see art as an important part of their lives through my tutelage. i hope that my explanations have been as illuminating as their interest in my work has been inspiring. i joke with my students that i almost became the topic of my own dissertation when i was struck by a car while bicycling in march, . my students consistently reminded me that my time in a wheelchair would end, and that i would be back to walking through the cathedrals, chapels, galleries, and museums that i admire so much. my process of recuperation has been a fortuitous one, accomplished in no small means through my students’ support as they pushed and moved me onward toward recovery— in the case of temple’s football team, quite literally. i am deeply grateful. i must note a day trip in the late s that led me to saint george’s chapel, windsor castle. the day was rainy, dreary, and unseasonably cold, but the view of that immense collection of art could not have been more uplifting and memorable. it was there that the cleaveley family of sussex, england first introduced me to the depths and wonder of british art. it became a lesson well-learned and never forgotten, an inspiration for my work that continues to this day. finally, thank you to dr. deborah dezure, who introduced me decades ago to the tailless lion at the metropolitan museum of art, shepherding my ongoing interest and fascination with the artistic progression of humankind, and to the new york public library, where i started and finished my writing. vii table of contents page abstract……………………………………………………………………………...iii dedication……………………………………………………………………………iv acknowledgments…………………………………………………………….…..v list of figures………………………………………………………..….……….....ix chapter . a reconsideration of transi tombs and their impact throughout the reformation project justification and theoretical overview………………....………………. summary and exploration………………………………...…………………..… . structures and images in the transi tomb of archbishop henry chichele: a reaction to a growing reformist movement description of the tomb of archbishop chichele…………………..……..…… the rise of archbishop henry chichele and reformist fissures of the church in england…………………………………..……………………………………… transi tombs and late medieval piety in relation to death…..…….........…… : a gendered response to transi tombs through a consideration of alice de la pole an overview of the tomb of alice de la pole………………………………….. visions and interactions: materiality and womanhood in alice’s tomb…...….. viewership of alice’s tomb in the practice of death: a consideration of gender…….………………………………………………………………...…… viii : the fugger chapel as a new [conceptualization of] transi tombs examination of memorial stones: the fugger epitaphs………………..……… the growing position of augsburg and the fuggers within the reformation... a reconceptualization of death and the implications of the fugger chapel within the reformation………………………..………………………………. : reconsidering hans holbein’s the dead christ in the tomb as transi, effigy, and resurrection explication and analysis of the dead christ and its impact…………...……... holbein and navigating death through the reformation……………………… the ontological turn of the dead christ and its legacy……………...……… a novel memento mori: re-reading the dead christ as a transi figure….… conclusions and implications……………………….………………...…... references cited…………….………………………………………………...… appendix figures………………..…………………………………………...………… ix list of figures figure page . tomb of archbishop henry chichele of canterbury cathedral (d. ), canterbury cathedral, canterbury, kent, england…………………………….. . tomb of archbishop henry chichele of canterbury cathedral, marble, effigy detail, canterbury cathedral, canterbury, kent, england ………………….…. . tomb of archbishop henry chichele of canterbury cathedral, marble, transi detail, canterbury cathedral, canterbury, kent, england................................... . church of saint mary the virgin church (c. – ), ewelme, oxfordshire, england….……………………………………………………………..…..…… . tomb of alice de la pole, duchess of suffolk (d. ), alabaster, effigy detail, ewelme parish church, oxfordshire, england……..………………………….. . tomb of alice de la pole, duchess of suffolk (d. ), alabaster, transi detail, ewelme parish church, oxfordshire, england …………………………..…..... . fuggerkapelle memorial plaque of ulrich fugger, d. ( - ), marble, saint anna’s church, augsburg, germany…….................…………………… . hans holbein the younger. the body of the dead christ in the tomb (c. ), oil on wood, x in., kunstmuseum, basel, switzerland………………….. . chichele gate, outside tomb of archbishop henry chichele (c. ), canterbury cathedral, canterbury, england……...………………………………...………. . modern chair of the archbishop of canterbury, view from the tomb of archbishop henry chichele (c. ), canterbury cathedral, canterbury, england………………………………………………………………….……... . tomb of archbishop henry chichele (c. ), side view, canterbury cathedral, canterbury, england…………………………………………………………... . tomb of archbishop henry chichele (c. ), marble, upper tier canopy detail, canterbury cathedral, canterbury, england ………………………………..…. . tomb of archbishop henry chichele (c. ), marble, bosom of abraham detail, canterbury cathedral, canterbury, england …………………………………... . tomb of archbishop henry chichele (c. ), marble, virgin mary detail, canterbury cathedral, canterbury, england ……………….……………….…. . tomb of archbishop henry chichele (c. ), marble and gilt, effigy with angels detail, canterbury cathedral, canterbury, england……………………….…… . tomb of archbishop henry chichele (c. ), marble, transi body detail, canterbury cathedral, canterbury, england………………………………..….. x . tomb of archbishop henry chichele (c. ), marble, transi face detail, canterbury cathedral, canterbury, england …………………….…………….. . saint mary’s church and complex (c. – ), ewelme, oxfordshire, england………………………………………………………………………… . tomb of alice de la pole (c. ) alabaster, saint john’s chapel, saint mary’s church, ewelme, oxfordshire, england.…….……………….…….………….. . monogram of saint john’s chapel (c. – ), polychrome and gilt, saint mary’s church ewelme, oxfordshire, england ………………………………. . tomb of alice de la pole (c. ), alabaster, saint mary’s church, ewelme, oxfordshire, england ……………...……………………………………….….. . memorial plaques of thomas chaucer and matilda chaucer (née burghersh) (c. ), brass, saint mary’s church, ewelme, oxfordshire, england..……….… . tomb of thomas chaucer and matilda chaucer (c. ) saint mary’s church, marble, ewelme, oxfordshire, england, ewelme, oxfordshire, england....…... . effigy of alice de la pole (c. ), alabaster, saint mary’s church, ewelme, oxfordshire, england.……...……………………………………………..……. . tomb of alice de la pole (c. ), wood, angels at top of canopy detail, saint mary’s church, ewelme, oxfordshire, england..……….…………………….. . effigy of alice de la pole (c. ) alabaster and gilt, angels and pillow detail, saint mary’s church, ewelme, oxfordshire, england...…………………...….. . master e. s., ars moriendi (c. ) engraving, . x . in., ashmolean museum of art and archaeology, oxford, england………………….………... . effigy and transi of alice de la pole (c. ), alabaster, saint mary’s church, ewelme, oxfordshire, england…………………………………………….…... . tomb of alice de la pole, the annunciation, transi tomb painting (c. ) saint mary’s church, ewelme, oxfordshire, england………………......................... . tomb of alice de la pole, john the baptist and mary magdalene, (c. ), polychrome, saint mary’s church, ewelme, oxfordshire, england…………... . tomb of alice de la pole, the annunciation, polychrome, transi tomb detail (c. ) saint mary’s church, ewelme, oxfordshire, england………………...... . sebastian loscher, fugger chapel with epitaphs, marble, saint anna’s church (c. ), augsburg, germany…….…………………………………….……….... . albrecht dürer, design for the fugger chapel in augsburg, christ resurrected, ulrich fugger epitaph sketch, , pen, charcoal, and chalk on paper, . x . in., albertina, vienna, austria…………………………..………………... xi . albrecht dürer, samson slaying the philistines, sketch for the georg fugger epitaph, , pen, charcoal, and chalk on paper, . x . in., kupferstichkabinett, staatliche museen zu berlin……………………………... . attrib. to sebastian loscher, epitaph for georg fugger (c. ), marble, saint anna’s church, augsburg, germany………...……..………………………….. . attrib. to sebastian loscher, epitaph for ulrich fugger, (c. ), marble, saint anna’s church, augsburg, germany…..……………………………...……….. . attrib. to sebastian loscher, epitaph for jakob fugger (c. ), marble, saint anna’s church, augsburg, germany …………………………………...…....... . attrib. to sebastian loscher, epitaph for the fugger famil (c. ), marble, saint anna’s church, augsburg, germany…...……………………………...... . hans daucher, lamentation of christ and altar, (c. ) marble, saint anna’s church, augsburg, germany ….……………………………………………..... . memorial plaque of ulrich fugger, d. ( - ), marble, chapel of saint mark, the fuggerei, augsburg, germany……………………………….. . saint anna’s church (c. ), augsburg, germany….…..………………..…. . figure . : crypt entryway and marker ( ) marble, x in. saint anna’s church, augsburg, germany ………………………………………….. . hans holbein the younger, the body of the dead christ in the tomb (c. ) oil on wood, x in., kunstmuseum. basel, switzerland…………………. . matthias grünewald, the crucifixion (c. – ) oil on wood, predella detail, x in., colmar, france, unterlinden museum……….………….….…… . unidentified artist, after hans holbein the younger (c. – ), the dead christ in the tomb, c. silverpoint, chalk on paper, blue ground, x . in., winnipeg, canada, winnipeg art gallery…………….…………………….…. . hans holbein the younger ( ), the body of the dead christ in the tomb, oil on wood, face and head detail, kunstmuseum. basel, switzerland ……...……. . hans holbein the younger ( ), the body of the dead christ in the tomb, oil on wood, hand wound detail kunstmuseum. basel, switzerland....…...…….… . hans holbein the younger ( ), the body of the dead christ in the tomb, oil on wood, feet and legs detail, kunstmuseum. basel, switzerland…….......…... . hans holbein the younger, pictures of death, the emperor (c. ), woodcut, . x . in., new york, the metropolitan museum of art …….…………. . hans holbein the younger. pictures of death, the plowman (c. ), woodcut, . x . in., new york, the metropolitan museum of art………………… chapter : a reconsideration of transi tombs and their impact throughout the reformation project justification and theoretical overview tombs lie at the juncture of interpretations of death, theological doctrine, and individual and communal identity. this study is a new consideration of visual conceptions and depictions of death from the mid-fifteenth through early sixteenth centuries in western europe, specifically england and germany, a period when notions of death were changing due to altering theological and socio-historical ideas about the relationships between individuality, physical matter, and the soul. changes in this period resulted from a novel means of seeing how the divine was manifested and illustrated through physical works, echoing what caroline walker bynum would link to shifting christian theological ideas about matter and materiality. in particular, the phenomenon of cadaver or transi tombs in england and germany forms the basis of this study. attention is paid to the rendering of different forms of matter, representations of the body, its coverings and attire, and other forms of ornamentation. i argue that these tombs and their imagery participate in developments of reformation theology and that ann marie yasin, “funerary monuments and collective identity: from roman family to christian community,” art bulletin , no. ( ): – , esp. . see caroline walker bynum, christian materiality: an essay on religion in late medieval europe (cambridge, ma: zone books, , esp. — . for an overview of the differences developing concerning reformist ideology developing in germany and england versus france, see r. j. knecht, “the early reformation in england and france: a comparison,” history , no. ( ), – , esp. - . the term transi likely derives from the latin verb transire, an etymological development of the phrase trans, “across”, and eō, “go.” the aspects of presence, verisimilitude, and materiality so central to transi tombs will find full expression in other increasingly prominent mediums, such as oil paint. their engagement with the viewers and their environments is central to the development of notions of subjectivity and the role of art within the northern renaissance. transi, or cadaver tombs are structured and operate as a series of horizontal strata in identifying and recognizing the dead. first, the deceased person is memorialized in effigy on the top level or tier of the memorial. the sculpted effigy depicts the deceased person in full period attire, either in his or her youthful prime or near the end of adult life. the bottom tier of the tomb located closest to the ground typically includes a sculpture of a decomposing corpse, or a transi. the transi is often not an outright skeleton, but rather a corpse in the process of desiccation, putrefaction, and decay. while tombs with stone effigies may include two effigies side by side, such as a husband and wife, the transi is often singular. the transis are typically at or near life size and are usually depicted as gisant, being recumbent or reclining. in most cases, the physical remains of the deceased person are interred below the lower tier in accordance in local and church regulations. cadaver tombs were described by erwin panofsky as “double decker memorials” with the deceased being represented in two states of being. his “tomb sculpture: four lectures on its changing aspects from ancient egypt to bernini” marked the reconsideration of tombs as artistic and memorial objects. panofsky noted that tombs each of these stages are fully defined and described in mary roach, stiff: the curious lives of human cadavers (new york: w. w. norton & company, ), esp. — ; and kenneth v. iserson, death to dust: what happens to dead bodies (tucson, az: galen press, , esp. — . erwin panofsky and h. w. janson, tomb sculpture: four lectures on its changing aspects from ancient egypt to bernini (new york: harry n abrams, , originally published in ), . should be considered not only as artistic works, but also as emblematic of prevailing and changing attitudes toward the dead. he contended that tombs were indicative of and generated novel sources of style, form, and function. further, panofsky explained that tombs were representative of how deceased people were viewed within a broader cultural lens, serving as images of shifting, and at times conflicting, mentalities toward death. panofsky theorized that tombs should be viewed as veritable and important iconological signifiers, and that memorials were emblematic of wide-spread cultural and philosophical concepts. tombs were representative of a larger nexus of belief that included visuality, viewership, and representations of identity. building on panofsky’s view of tombs as cultural emblems, i argue that these works can also be viewed as extensions of temporality, in that they posit alternate reconstructions of time. more importantly, transi tombs suggest an interpretation of death and responses to it in a novel light. by investigating the intersection between public memorial, theology, and an unfolding reconceptualization of time in select but representative transi from southern england and germany, i posit that portrayals of death shifted during the northern renaissance in ways that help us better understand altering beliefs about matter, self-representation, and memorial. in prior research, transi tombs were often associated with the study of medieval art, complete with references to pervasive ideologies of the period about death. throughout the medieval period, transi tombs established for viewers a universally shared and ibid., . inevitable pathway of mortality, while also suggesting elements central to christian faith and ideas about resurrection. these stone memorials served distinct theological purposes: what the transi tomb did, of course, was contrast or replace altogether the idealized effigy with its opposite: a decomposing or desiccated cadaver (the representacion de la mort, or representation of death). the macabre was an important element of these tombs, but their main purpose was as preparation for the apocalypse, not as a moralizing message or appeal for prayers… a perfectly balanced union of two sensibilities, mortification and glorification, fear and hope that made up the process of death and resurrection. medieval transi tombs thus suggest popularized ontological and theological views about death and daily life, as well as the fate of the body and soul after death. what has been less well studied, however, has been the intersection between the continued development of this tomb type and emerging mentalities and debates of the northern renaissance, a period when the creation of transi tombs continued unabated. coupled with the theological shifts of the reformation, these tombs are both a durable phenomenon and reinvention of period concepts related to death and matter. transi tombs became a desirable form of memorial for those of the noble classes. kathleen cohen catalogued almost two hundred transi tombs from the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries with the majority located in england, france, germany, and the netherlands. primarily, these were situated inside chapels, churches, and occasionally cathedrals, with their exact locations varying from placement in the nave to the less accessible choir. john aberth, from the brink of the apocalypse: confronting famine, war, plague, and death in the later middle ages (new york: routledge, ), . for additional descriptions of the transi tombs, see kathleen cohen, metamorphosis of a death symbol: the transi tomb in the late middle ages and the renaissance (berkeley: university of california press, ), a publication based upon her dissertation from , see kathleen rogers cohen. "the changing meaning of the transi tomb in fifteenth and sixteenth century europe" faculty publications ( ). transi tombs reflect and promote religious developments and contemporary ideological debates. as a further display and construction of identity, they incorporated funeral achievements, regalia which are replications of, or actual, physical accessories commonly used by the deceased person, such as armor, clothing, and military standards. transi tombs enriched christian conceptualizations of death and incorporated aspects of classical, as well as medieval, motifs in their construction. incongruent with bynum’s findings about late medieval images, blood is noticeably absent from transi imagery. this variation, however, suggests a potential application of corporeal depictions to the role of the sacred. with images of christ and the saints typically entailing images of blood to emphasize their humanity and suffering, the lack of it may illustrate death’s unique link to human mortality as an abstract state rather than individual contingency. as bynum states, by the s bloody depictions are ubiquitous as the motif within christian art changes narrative form. images of christ became constantly awash in blood, actions that are assumed to link humankind to the divine in a pouring of oneself through blood back to god. transi tombs, however, illustrate a passage beyond the physicality of blood. coupled with the emerging theological turbulence that erupted in both england and germany over church doctrine, transi tombs altered local ideological landscapes and frameworks about individual and communal memory, through the conglomeration and genesis of myriad artistic motifs. additionally, they both reified and suggested new the role of death and its implication within the public sphere was inherently tethered to perceptions of the self and others. see john helgeland, “the symbolism of death in the later middle ages,” omega--journal of death and dying , no. ( ): – , esp. ; and raymond l. m. lee, “modernity, death, and the self: disenchantment of death and symbols of bereavement,” illness, crisis, & loss , no. ( ): – , esp. . see caroline walker bynum, wonderful blood: theology and practice in late medieval northern germany and beyond (philadelphia: university of pennsylvania press, ), esp. — . methods of understanding prevalent mentalities toward death and remembrance, posing a range of art historical meanings and conclusions. the preponderance of transi tombs are located in england and the german- speaking lands of the holy roman empire and are worth further consideration in their respective local contexts. to better understand how these works functioned for their presumed viewers and as fabricated objects in space, we can learn much from michael baxandall’s approach to german renaissance sculpture, advocating as malcolm baker does, that scholars should “bring production and reception into conjunction, bring more into play the spectators’ responses to materials and making.” as baxandall demonstrated in his foundational study of german limewood sculpture, even the choice of a piece’s support is a cultural decision replete with meaning, what allan langdale summarized as “an anthropological analysis of a society’s visual culture.” baxandall’s notion of a period eye suggests the vital role that ideology, a shared visual language, and materiality play in understanding art. while baxandall applied his theory to the limewood sculptures of germany to elucidate the cultural and artistic importance of multi-winged altarpieces, in particular, he did not consider other prominent forms and functions of the role of death and its implication within the public sphere in this period was inherently tethered to perceptions of the self and others. see helgeland, symbolism of death, , and lee, modernity, . malcolm baker, “some object histories and the materiality of the sculptural object,” in the lure of the object, ed. stephen melville (dudley, ma: studley press, ), – , at . see allan langdale, “aspects of the critical reception and intellectual history of baxandall’s concept of the period eye,” in about michael baxandall, ed. adrian rifkin (new york: wiley-blackwell, ), – , at ; and michael baxandall, the limewood sculptors of renaissance germany, – (new haven: yale university press, ). german sculpture, such as stone or metal tombs, funerary achievements, or memorials as will be rectified in this study. my analysis of cadaver tombs further amplifies other earlier studies of the topic, as well. i return attention to the important cataloguing efforts of kathleen cohen, to add consideration of the impact of reformist theologies on the presentation and meaning of transi and situate the examples in broader reformation-related debates about the phenomenology of death and the materiality of the body. an examination of the relationship between monument, matter, artistic medium, and the viewer have not been investigated in the context of such debates in both england and germany as comparative and linked examples. in addition, this is the first sizable study to consider how transi tombs function structurally and visually in multidirectional ways that have broader implications for perceptions of time. my study expands upon these earlier inquiries, furthering the geographic scope and range of artifacts and materials that were part of the cadaver tomb phenomenon, to offer a better understanding of their active function as agents of performative, theological, and artistic change. summary and exploration coupled with other aspects of theological thought, conclusions about materiality, and the impact of temporal multidimensionality, this analysis will augment studies of tombs by investigating shifting notions of their ontology. beyond these findings, tombs are more than mere representations of religious or cultural shifts. christopher wood and alexander nagel have theorized that a work of art exists in temporal instability, negating the expectation for a successive ordering of time and instead referencing earlier ‘original’ authoritative types or forms. by presenting the dead not only as enduring effigy, but also as a figure linked to his or her material demise in both sculpture and actual physical remains, the artist manipulated time and presented a unique interpretation of death. transi tombs depict life, death, and resurrection as states that are very much part of the material, physical world—as sculpted figures that can be seen, touched, and experienced—while also falling decidedly outside of earthly chronology. in the following chapters, changing meanings of how religious thought was altered by, and is replicated in, tombs are considered. the phenomenon of transi tombs in chapter two is introduced by analyzing memorial discourse and its intersection with differing ideologies between the church and early reformists, such as in the tomb of archbishop henry chichele (d. ) of canterbury, a stalwart supporter of the papacy (figure . ). beyond being covered with meaningful latin inscriptions and surrounded by myriad strata of saints, chichele’s tomb is of interest due to its good state of preservation and polychromy. the sculpture showcases the naturalism that underscored the artist’s work to create a vivid and memorable encounter between the viewers of the tomb with theological doctrines of resurrection. productive comparisons between chichele’s effigy and its transi abound. sculptural details such as pink pigments to suggest flesh tones overlay pronounced facial and hand muscles (figure . ). the luxurious fibers of the archbishop’s cloak and miter are replaced with the transi’s desiccated face, neck, and chest (figure . ). i shall also explore the importance of such verisimilitude in effigies, a feature that will have cross-application later in chapter five christopher wood and alexander nagel, “interventions: toward a new model of renaissance anachronism,” art bulletin , no. ( ): – ; and alexander nagel and christopher s. wood, anachronic renaissance (cambridge, ma: zone books, ), esp. – . the study of hans holbein the younger’s dead christ in the tomb, as well as its visual impact on the public perception of death. chapter three focuses on an investigation of the relationship between transi tombs and the fashioning of individual and civic identity by considering the representation of gender in the tomb of alice de la pole (d. ) in saint mary’s church, ewelme, oxfordshire (figure . ). while most effigies in transi tombs are either male or a male- and-female couple, singular female transi tombs such as that of alice de la pole were rare but did exist. her tomb is one notable highpoint, her effigy detailed in its full finery, complete with allusions to architectural elements, fabrics, and religious themes (figure . ). her transi, however, is stripped of individuality; although clearly female, none of her personal or social accouterments are featured (figure . ). this chapter will include an analysis of personal effects as indicators of identity, noting aspects of gender, status and position, and how these variations underwent novel interpretations throughout this time period. the focus on political achievements that is pronounced in tombs of men is slight in alice’s tomb, allowing for conclusions about the public formation of identity through tombs. this analysis will shift in chapter four to germany to explore what happens to the monumental sculpted transi tomb there, notably in the stone relief memorials of the fugger family in saint anna's church in augsburg ( – ), which play with this tradition in new form and significance. concepts of death and memory changed and became sites of renewed inquiry as the reformation took hold unsteadily and to differing extents in various parts of the holy roman empire. cadaver or transi tombs investigate how images of the body interconnect with changing concepts of theology, viewership, and temporality during the reformation period, particularly in the south of england and german-speaking lands. the localized history and receptivity of the reformation is a textured one, as johannes schilling and martin luther ( – ) delivered or inspired sermons in augsburg in the first decades of the sixteenth century, though the city’s official turn to reformation theology was officially enacted relatively late in . the city’s larger complicated relationship with the reformation was echoed in the lives of the fuggers, one of the city’s, and indeed europe’s, most economically powerful families. the beliefs and patronage of the fugger family reached across the protestant and catholic divide. the memorial plaque of ulrich fugger ( – ), one of the most revered and influential of the fuggers, is a relief sculpture possibly designed by or after albrecht dürer depicting a profile of a transi entombed below an image of the resurrection and forms a logical extension of my analysis (figure . ). my investigation in this chapter will conclude with a reconsideration and reframing of the contributions of hans holbein the younger ( – ) to these theological, material, and artistic debates, namely by reconsidering his dead christ in the tomb ( ). made in basel within the context and conventions of the transi tomb phenomenon for the humanist scholar and professor of law bonifacius amerbach ( – ), the transi tomb was transformed into a two-dimensional representation in little is known about schilling’s life and background, despite being considered “the preacher who had the most dramatic effect in augsburg in the ’s. …we do not know even the dates of birth and death.” from lee palmer wandel, the eucharist in the reformation (madison: university of wisconsin, ), . for information related to the changing environment of augsburg during both his and luther’s time, see b. ann tlusty, ed. and trans., augsburg during the reformation era: an anthology of sources (indianapolis: hackett publishing co., ). the medium of oil paint (figure . ). holbein’s career spans from his native augsburg to his work in basel, and his eventual relocation in london, bringing together geographical and art historical traditions of this study while extending to the new medium and demands of oil paint. for example, joseph koerner links his own conclusions about holbein’s work to those of georges didi-huberman, who noted that the artist’s representation of the sarcophagus is mimicry of a tomb: “the dissemblance of false marbles, he argued, displays the painted mark as such, de-familiarizing its process with a sacred charge. representing the unpresentable, painted stone lays the icon bare.” the implications of this finding, particularly in relation to visuality, materiality, and naturalism within the context of the reformation, will be more fully explored in this final chapter. the experience of viewing and walking around transi tombs affected the concept of the body, death, and resurrection during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries in northern europe. cadaver tombs created a new means to approach and understand temporal dimensionality. this analysis is tethered to leading theological discourses of the period, while also accentuating my study with modern semiotic, phenomenological, and ontological theories about shifting cultural reactions toward death and memory. modern ideas about the vital role of media and personal identity can be cross applied to earlier historical periods to draw unique conclusions. additionally, cadaver tombs represented and facilitated innovative ways of crafting social and personal identity, both for the deceased person depicted and for the viewers of the monuments. these elements, when joseph leo koerner, the reformation of the image (chicago: university of chicago press, ), . combined with considerations of the theological shifts of this period, will provide for new insights and conclusions. these debates about artistic geographies, the term ‘northern,’ and the problem of modern nationalism divides up these studies too narrowly and not comparatively. instead, the prominence of shared or blurry mentalities that are rooted in various forms of reformist thoughts and in the challenges of artistic production in both england and german speaking lands are pertinent. artistic movements and philosophical exigencies concerning reformist ideologies in england were reconstituted and reaffirmed in myriad locations across europe. mark trowbridge draws upon northern artists’ work to substantiate this claim in his support of sherry c. m. lindquist’s position, “the profound originality of claus sluter or melchior broederlam has often been presented as a statement of artistic individuality, a reflection of a new renaissance mentality. lindquist instead resituates those works within late-medieval thought.” lindquist is not alone in her findings. as jacques le goff succinctly summarizes: “the reality is that in the course of the middle ages there were a number of renaissances, more or less extensive, more or less triumphant.” panofsky had proposed a similar contention, focusing primarily on italy and germany while noting the difficulty of the periodization of art within a milieu of locations and historical developments. see mark trowbridge, agency, visuality, and society at the chartreuse de champmol (burlington, vt: ashgate publishing. ), xviii, . jacques le goff, must we divide history into periods? european perspectives: a series in social thought and cultural criticism, trans. malcolm debevoise (new york: columbia university press, ), . see erwin panofsky, renaissance and renascences in western art (new york: harper & row, ), – . little art historical research has focused on exploring philosophical currents across broad regional and modern national lines, particularly between territories in central europe and england, with few writers suggesting that both locations underwent similar artistic experiences or progressions in visual culture, particularly in relation to concepts of death. that lacuna will be explored throughout this study, noting that works in england often remain removed from the purview of many northern renaissance art historical researchers. as larry silver explains, the art history world has, perhaps based upon panofsky’s pronounced lead, consistently forgotten much of england, the iberian peninsula, and eastern europe. even fewer authors have attempted to synthesize artistic developments between england and germany. the periodization that commonly earmarks the emergence of a distinct northern renaissance within only a small cadre of geographical locations can be deemed problematic. this study aims to correct that pattern by looking at english tombs and seeing cross applications with emergent designs elsewhere in europe. this analysis will constitute a novel way of viewing the form and function of tombs, and their larger art historical impact. i argue further that the reformist thought that was affected by and surrounded the creation and perception of cadaver tombs is emblematic of a larger epistemological quandary, one that focuses on the unique character and art historical experience of the northern renaissance and that poses intriguing conclusions. my analysis will present new conclusions and conceptualizations see larry silver, “the state of research in northern european art of the renaissance era,” art bulletin , no. ( ): – . a notable substitution is the work of thomas dacosta kaufman, court, cloister, and city: the art and culture of central europe, – (chicago: university of chicago press, ). about how transi tombs create powerful messages about the experience of viewers and how changing theological beliefs underscore their impact. i will illustrate how these tombs transformed the trajectory of the northern renaissance and altered the ideological, visual, and material landscape of the reformation. this development will posit for new conclusions about shifting religious and cultural ideologies and varying artistic techniques, shifting to heightened visual impacts in the apotheosis of holbein’s the dead christ. chapter : structures and images in the transi tomb of archbishop henry chichele: a reaction to a growing reformist movement description of the tomb of archbishop chichele the painted marble transi tomb of archbishop henry chichele is located in canterbury cathedral between the upper choir and the choir ambulatory, adjacent to the north-east transept. it is situated near the gateway leading from the transept into the choir, an entrance popularly known as the chichele gate (figure . ). it was created between and when chichele was still living, and is viewable from the location of the original archbishop’s chair of the cathedral, situated at the front of the nearby altar (figure . ). chichele would have encountered his completed tomb each time he processed toward the altar at the onset of mass. the positioning of the tomb is a purposeful one, as chichele selected a location that would function as a very public memento mori, and as an important element for his officiation of the mass. considering the position of chichele’s tomb the visible reminder for his own earthly demise and the hopeful fate of his soul would have been in his direct view as he celebrated the resurrection of jesus christ. the transi tomb of henry chichele offers us a view of some fundamental shared qualities of this tomb type—such as their memorializing functions and their depictions of death—that are parcel to a transi made at the intersection of key reformist debates in fifteenth-century england about the function of death and redemption. chichele’s tomb exemplifies the positions of church orthodoxy and yet incorporates popularized ideologies about the nature of matter, thereby contributing to ongoing tensions surrounding transubstantiation, corporeality, and the resurrection. the tomb is a triple-tiered stone sculpture approximately twelve feet tall and including an elaborate carved canopy (figure . ). references to church orthodoxy are replete throughout its iconography. the tomb’s canopy is decorated with heraldic shields from other bishoprics, particularly those of archbishop john pecham ( – ), chichele’s earlier predecessor, as well as niches bearing biblical and local figures of note. these shields line the base of the canopy, which is multi-tiered and includes a polished exterior. the underside of the upper canopy is painted a dark ebony with inlaid gilded lattice work, which together function like a reflective surface, positioned above the effigy of chichele (figure . ). the sequence of sculpted figures in niches establish a kind of genealogy that asserts an unbroken chain of local and biblical history. one figure shows chichele himself, portrayed as holding a model of all souls college of oxford university. other niche figures include abraham, who holds a small figure representing the souls that had departed prior to the birth of jesus christ, and the virgin mary (figure . and . ). other religious and political figures are depicted throughout the tomb structure: examples of statues also include saint anslem, positioned with a holy book, saint alphege carrying the stones of his martyrdom, and saint dunstan, who carries a self-illustrated manuscript, commonly known as the glastonbury class book. additional niche statues include thomas becket and edmund rich, and images of england’s prominent kings, including figures that may be king henry iv, v, or vi, as each had reigned during chichele’s lifetime. king henry vi ( - ) is likely as he played a particularly important role in chichele’s rise to prominence, and the inclusion of a statue though completed by , the elaborate tomb and canopy were restored twice, first in and then , when additional figures were added to the side columns of the tomb. see charles grant robertson, all souls college (london: f. e. robinson, ), esp. – . of thomas becket is notable for its proximity to the site of his murder and shrine is located only a few feet away. the statues and heralds of former monarchs and church leaders established an ongoing dynastic heritage, one that would not be conquered by death but that carries on through national policy and liturgical orthodoxy. this position was reflected in the writings of ernst kantorowicz and his notion of the king’s two bodies in that the natural body has physical attributes, suffers, and dies but the non-material body, the enduring, public political body, transcends the earthly realm and serves as a symbol of an office. the same sentiment underscores the continuation of papal and monarchial hierarchies. the concept of the king’s two bodies allowed for this continuity of a monarchy even after a regent had died, a contention well summarized by the dictum “the king is dead. long live the king.” this continuation of the head of state revolved around three aims: the continuation of a dynasty into perpetuity, the corporate character of the crown, and the immortality of the royal post. chichele’s tomb is comprised of elements of each of these facets, lending authority to the monarchs that he served and the church that he helped lead. chichele would have aspired to mirror the lives of the saints without resorting to the sin of pride, as a means of general theology and as a matter of orthodoxy discussed in carlo giuseppe quadrupani, light and peace, instructions for devout souls to dispel their doubts and allay their fears, th ed. (st. louis: b. herder, ), esp. . see ernst kantorowicz, the king’s two bodies: a study in medieval political theology (princeton: princeton university press, ). this same concept is applied to a variety of offices held by magistrates and leaders throughout europe. for example, see tracey cooper, “on the death of great men: a note on doge andrea gritti,” in venice and the veneto during the renaissance: the legacy of benjamin kohl, m. knapton, eds. j. law, a. smith (florence: firenze university press, ), – . chichele’s life-size recumbent effigy is sculpted in full liturgical garb, including the archbishop’s miter and crosier. differing from other designs, his staff is topped with a simple teutonic cross, and his miter is surrounded by two angels placed on either side of his head. (figure . ). two small mourning angels kneel at his feet, complete with prayer books and flowing robes. the columns that flank chichele’s tomb are separated into four horizontal sections, two levels of which are covered with niches for the statues that cover two thirds of each column. the top and bottom layers include small, brightly colored but empty niches, while the canopy itself is held aloft by five shield-bearing angels on either side. chichele’s marble effigy is covered with an elaborately carved and heavily polychromed burgundy and gold archbishop’s cloak, complete with representations of myriad jewels and fine fabrics. the sculpture and coloring accentuate both his lifelike features and the details of his effigy. his robust face is presented with his eyes fixed on a small statue of the virgin mary located overhead in a central niche. surrounding the platform of the effigy lies an epitaph, supposedly written by chichele himself. as arthur duck summarizes, chichele’s involvement in the construction of his own tomb was well known: “[h]is body was laid in the tomb which he had built himself … in the upper part of which is his statue very handsomely cut in white marble.” the tomb’s design suggests ongoing inclinations toward more individualized methods of memorial and remembrance. chichele’s epitaph suggests a position of prominence within arthur duck, the life of henry chichele, archbishop of canterbury, who lived in the times of henry the v. and vi. kings of england: written in latin by arth. duck, now made english and a table of contents annexed (london: r.l. chiswell, ), . the church history and hierarchy, also making mention of and visually including in the sculptural assemblage the numerous kings under whom he had served: here lies henry chichele doctor of laws and sometime chancellor of salisbury, who in the seventh year of king henry the fourth, was sent ambassador to pope gregory the xiith. and was consecrated bishop of s. david's by the hands of the pope in the city of siena. the said henry in the second year of king henry the fifth, was demanded for archbishop in this holy church, and translated to it by pope john the twenty third. he died in the year of our lord on the th of april. there is no mention of chichele’s creation of a jubilee year in at canterbury, despite the impact that this declaration had on the wider church as it raised the ire of the pope. the inscription does, however, emphasize chichele’s important role as an ambassador to the papacy and his affiliation with the field of law. despite chichele’s involvement in campaigns against early reformists as we shall see, his epitaph focuses primarily on his initial clergy positions and his associations with various popes and political leaders. the finding that a work of art cannot be wrested from the political, theological, or ideological framework in which it was created and viewed bolsters the claims posited by baxandall, who also substantiates the importance of art as a social exchange. by focusing on an artist’s local experiences, the creation of their craft, and the importance of local guilds, baxandall suggests that art history is a foray into “alien sensibilities,” asserting that seeing the world of the artist through an anthropological lens invites a “historical hic jacet hen∣ricus chichele legum doctor, quondam cancel∣larius sarum, qui anno septimo hen∣rici iv. regis ad gregorium papam xii. in ambasciata transmissus, in ci∣vitate senensi per manus ejusdem pa∣pae in menevensem episcopum conse∣cratus est: hic e∣tiam henricus an∣no secundo hen∣rici quinti regis in hac sancta ecclesia in archiepiscopum postulatus, & à jo∣anne papa xxiii. ad eandem transla∣tus est, qui obiit anno domini mil∣lesimo quadringen∣tesimo quadragesi∣mo tertio, mensis aprilis die xii. explanation” moving beyond an individual artist toward an audience-focused interpretation. the result is a distinct departure from panofsky’s iconology-based analyses and any ensuing connection to an artist’s personal psychology. panofsky’s approach typically points to a larger focus on the role of the individual artist as opposed to an investigation into the shifting ideological principles that underscored an art historical period. ultimately, ongoing narratives emblematized by works of art were grounded in dramatic performance, one that coupled theology with artistic creations that effectively enhanced the viewer’s experiences and deepened a sense of visual awareness and engagement. with the case of death and transi tombs in particular, viewers were able to perceive the process while still remaining separate from it. sensing the inevitability of death exemplified by a tomb is certainly a powerful memento mori. however, the interpolation of effigy, transi, and burial enacted the experience of dying when viewed downward toward the earth and the possibility of immortality when the gaze moved upward in the other direction. memorials such as chichele’s not only construct a kind of shared public memory of an archbishop, but also provide an immediate visualization on the intersection between death and redemption that prompts emotions and contemplation. in extending the foundation of effigy tombs, transi tombs emblematized a particularly effective means of considering not only the see baxandall, limewood sculptors, esp. – , and michael baxandall, patterns of intention: on the historical explanation of pictures (new haven: yale university press, ), esp. - . for more on the development of iconology and the association with personal effects of the artist, see erwin panofsky, early netherlandish painting (london: harper collins, ). for an overview of this period and some of the contentions about the role of the individual, see craig harbison, the mirror of the artist: northern renaissance art in its historical context (new york: harry n. abrams incorporated publishers, ). materiality and matter of the body, but also an anachronic exploration of memory and resurrection that existed perhaps unsteadily with official church doctrine. although viewership and experience were indeed linked, an optical and experiential distance between the viewer and object is notable. vision connected the viewer with the object, but also suggested that there was inaccessible distance that could only be imagined and not experienced. in the case of death, it is fundamentally impossible for the viewer to ascertain the full extent of the experience. visual cues in the form of increasing levels of detail or suggested narrative, such as the plethora of biblical figures that surround chichele’s tomb, however, stimulate the viewer’s imagination to contemplate the experience of the deceased person’s soul. sculpture united both of these aspects, combining a life-size figural likeness of the deceased individual with the viewer’s ontological assumptions. as diane wolfthal has noted about how narrative functioned in carved multi-wing altarpieces: over time narrative elements multiplied; more episodes, anecdotal details, and figures were added to form complex, multilayered compositions. as [lynn] jacobs observes [in early netherlandish carved altarpieces, - : medieval tastes and mass marketing] the narrative form was preferred for public worship, not private devotion, and was deemed particularly appropriate to the space of the altar, since mass was traditionally interpreted as a dramatic narrative. the visual narrative of both the effigy and the surrounding statues of chichele’s tomb is clear, with each level having distinctly different details to catch the viewer’s eye and propel it in multiple directions. in that regard, the rendering of chichele’s outfit, face, and hands warrants attention. while the polychrome of chichele’s robes may be a recent diane wolfthal, review of early netherlandish carved altarpieces, – : medieval tastes and mass marketing, by lynn jacobs, speculum , no. ( ): – , at . addition, the original effects of his effigy are distinctive for their sculptural details, such as the fleshy knuckles of his praying hands or the intricacies of his ear lobes. each of the four angels that surround chichele’s effigy—the two at his shoulders that flank his miter and the two kneeling at his feet—hold prayer books, including suggestions of individual pages. the angels at his shoulders appear to be gesturing to his face, while the angels at his feet extend one hand upward with another hand gesturing to the interior of a prayer book. the smooth tones of the angel’s cheeks and individual feathers on their wings are illustrative of the level of detail on the remainder of the statues that surround the tomb. this level of detail accentuates the viewer’s imagination, while also strengthening a visual connection with objects that serve as important cues into chichele’s life, public legacy, and orthodox beliefs. the extreme amount of detail in transi tombs such as chichele’s operated in several visual directions across a variety of strata and tiers. just as the deceased proceeded through the stages of earthly life, decay, and eventual decomposition, so too these stages are represented descending vertically through each of the tomb’s tiers in a physical and direct manner. caroline walker bynum has asserted that there is a medieval fascination with the progressive putrefaction of the body in transi tombs, an intrigue grounded more in the process of decay than of death itself: “they were perhaps ‘rotten,’ not ‘dead,’ precisely because it was so extraordinarily difficult for people in the later middle ages to see any matter as truly dead, the sense of inert, rather than rotting or fertile.” as bynum notes, the images of transi tombs referenced the constant vitality of bynum, christian materiality, . a human corpus. if transi tombs did not represent an interest solely in death, but instead constituted a unique reconsideration of the transformative processes of death, of time and its effects on matter, the function of death images and decay take on new possibilities, theologically and artistically. viewed this way, transi tombs to fifteenth- and sixteenth- century viewers are not only suggestions of memorial, but also statements about the non- ending status of life throughout stages of corporeal decay. this progressive direction of death and mortification was reversed, however, during resurrection at the time of last judgment. the reconsideration of time as a flexible or dual-directional kind of temporality has been noted by scholars in other applications to apocalyptic images as marcia hall explains in her study of michelangelo’s last judgment ( – ), counter-reformation notions of death encapsulated new outlooks and beliefs on the decayed body and how it was believed to rise again from the grave, returning to a corporeal self before the soul’s ascension. tombs also sealed the memory of the deceased in a particular moment of their lives and suggest that the inclusion of the body in full costuming, such as a prince’s armor and sword or a bishop’s robe, crosier, ring and chalice, rendered the tomb a time capsule awaiting opening at the last judgment. by examining transi tombs in relation to ongoing debates in the north during the later fifteenth century about the state of the soul and resurrection of the body, we might understand how these tombs blended the passage of time and the natural marcia b. hall, “michelangelo’s last judgment: resurrection of the body and predestination,” the art bulletin , no. ( ): – , esp. . elizabeth a. new, “episcopal embodiment: the tombs and seals of bishops in medieval england and wales,” in the prelate in england and europe, – , ed. heale martin (martlesham, uk: boydell and brewer, ), – , esp. . process of dying with eventual redemption and immortality—beliefs that deserve further attention within the northern context where these tombs feature so prominently. this conceptual movement echoes what georges didi-huberman would suggest is an inherently mobile process, one that incorporates both substitution and contradiction, as the viewer imaginatively replaces the effigy with decomposition and resurrection simultaneously, with visions of the past and the future at once. one of the many reasons for the visual appeal of chichele’s tomb is the level of detail in both the effigy and the surrounding canopy. it also renders lifeless and decomposing matter into an approximation of vitality. in terms of the transi, verisimilitude is similarly stressed, accentuating the stark contrast with the vividness of his rosy-cheeked effigy (figure . ). each of the bones on the withered rib cage of chichele’s transi is pronounced, as are the hollows of his check and jaw. though denuded of all worldly costume befitting an archbishop, his hair, still cut in the style of a tonsure, includes indentations of individual strands of dark chestnut hair. the carving of the taught skin over chichele’s features accentuates not only the desiccation of the corpse, but also the prominence of his facial bones. his eyes are closed while his mouth is set with slight tension suggested at the corners of his jawbone (figure . ). the sinews in his shoulders, arms, and torso are clearly presented, with his ribs being prominently displayed. unlike the effigy, which features a brilliant array of dazzling colors, the transi is in an almost singular hue, with some slight variation in the coloration of the georges didi-huberman, la ressemblance par contact: archéologie, anachronisme, et modernité de l’empreinte (paris: editions du minuit, ), – . differing with other writers, i am opting to continue to refer to transi with personal pronouns, instead of a popularized decision to refer to a corpse or its representations by the neutral term of “it.” accompanying shroud on which the transi lies. more than a mere cloth, the transi’s shroud appears as a half opened large sack, the topmost portion tied with the transi lying atop it. chichele’s transi is noticeably smaller and thinner than the vividly presented effigy. while the face of the effigy suggests a great deal of liveliness, complete with a pronounced set of fleshy jowls and full cheeks and open eyes, the visage of the transi is that of a withering corpse suggesting that the death process and decay had already taken hold. the shared phenomenological process of death is encapsulated by the popularized epitaph often accompanying many tomb structures in some variation: si quis eris qui transieris hoc respice plora/ sum quod eris quod es ipse fui pro me precor, that is, “whoever you may be that passes by, stop, read carefully, lament, i am what thou wilt be, and i was that thou art, for now i beseech you, pray.” the present subjunctive tense and pronoun usage of the epitaph is intriguing, as the opening line assumes a commonality that suggests not only a viable memento mori, but also a continuation of dialogue from the grave, a breaking of physical time and space through prosopopoeia. the use of prosopopoeia—of an object given voice to speak to the viewer—is an established rhetorical device that was deployed frequently in tomb monuments during the late medieval tradition, a mode that also asserts in its immediacy a powerful pictorial agency. this conflation ruptures chronological linearity and is an extension of what translated in s. andrews, “notice of sepulchral slabs at mount sherborne,” in papers and proceedings, by hampshire field club and archaeological society, vol. , ed. g. w. minns (southampton, uk: hampshire field club & archaeological society, ), – , at . this epitaph is assumed to be the origin of the heavily popularized versions of the same phrase that appeared throughout the medieval eras throughout europe, including in the italian renaissance, and appeared even through the th century in america. wood and nagel posit as the folding of time in a chain of artifacts leading back to a presumed and absent prototype—which, in these cases, are the actual cadavers themselves hidden from view within the tomb or beneath the floor. this collapsing of temporal distancing is particularly important in the construction of tombs by extending a theological, if not metaphysical, interpretation to these material substitutions. the opulent nature of chichele’s ornamentation is in strong contrast not only to the comparatively skeletal transi, but also to the epitaph message that wraps around the top layer of his tomb. it follows an established trope of humility about the unity and eventual disintegration of all matter: as cited by paul binski in medieval death: ritual and representation, the epitaph reads “i was a pauper born, then to primate here raised, now i am cut down and served up for worms—behold my grave. whoever you may be who will pass by, i ask for your remembrance, you who will be like me after you die; horrible in all things, dust, worms, vile flesh.” together, the full inscriptions around the tomb read as a summary of his life and also as a way of interpreting the ethos of the tomb itself. chichele’s rise within the church and his eventual death are both suggested in his epitaph, which may be viewed as a “corpse poem,” a literary device that diana fuss notes can serve additional functions beyond being an accentuation to a memorial. in particular, “the corpse poem betrays a desire to wed itself eternally to voice, a voice capable of surviving death, a voice that conveys not a distant trace but a proximate presence.” chichele’s epitaph, which combines a mention of his positions within the clergy while see wood and nagel, new model of renaissance anachronism, – . paul binski, medieval death: ritual and representation (ithaca, n.y: cornell university press, ), . diana fuss, “corpse poem,” critical inquiry , no. ( ): – , at . also suggesting through an active voice an association with the living, serves this function. it also repositions viewers’ concepts of time. a conflation of voice across temporal planes accentuates a flattening of time and space, creating a tethering between life and death, and fashioning a conduit between the viewer and the deceased person. moreover, the command to “behold my grave” as a central component of the epitaph is a reminder for the casual observer, and for the occupant of the archbishop’s chair, whose line of vision would have included the tomb upon the procession and at the onset of mass. similarly, visitors to chichele’s tomb would encounter suggestions of both the process of dying and of resurrection, dramatic themes that were reenacted in the drama of the nearby liturgical service. attention to chichele’s liturgical garb warrants further interest, as the sculpted details are some of the most pronounced elements and brightest colors of the tomb. within the miter, overlapping strands of thread lie with an accumulation of jewels and gems, whose facets are visible and unique to each stone. the embroidery of the miter is crafted with sculpted woven crosses bordered by golden medallions. at the center of the headpiece is a teutonic cross, which is replicated on the top of his nearby crosier. chichele’s cloak is best described as luxurious, with layers of vestments lying along and across his effigy. tassels adorn both ends of the two tiers of pillows that surround his head and embellish the end of his cloak and vestment. the shoes show excessive detail, with sculpted effects including ridges and platforms along with allusions to embroidery, complete with polychrome netting. such a polychromed sculpted tomb would have functioned within the liturgy, as lynn jacobs suggests, as an appeal to everyday viewers, combining an appreciation for liturgical drama with monumentality. this fondness for visual drama and spectacle, evident in altarpieces throughout northern europe, provided viewers an opportunity to view and engage bodily, tactilely with the dominant medium of sculpture, a staple in tomb and memorial creation, and the strong impact of polychrome added to the work’s verisimilitude. michael baxandall advances a connection between the viewing of altarpieces and engagement with sculpture, tethering both three-dimensional mediums to viewers’ tactile experiences. the same reaction is present in regard to tombs, which like other monumental sculpted objects occupy real space and bring certain possibilities of bodily engagement for the viewer. the impact of sculpture is fundamentally rooted in issues of scale, verisimilitude, material presence and demands on viewership, especially in relation to the creation of visual drama, a mainstay of both liturgical and memorial art, and a link to a larger and potentially codified visual narrative of dying, death, and decay. the rise of archbishop henry chichele and reformist fissures of the church in england variations between the desiccated transi and the lifelike effigy parallel late medieval discussions on the changing function of inert matter and the vivacity of the soul. transi tombs acted as change agents to address and affect ongoing discussions about the function of memorials as theological artifacts of death and as works of art. as paul binski concludes, death was at the very center of christian ideology in the medieval period. indeed, death was both a central ideological artifact of the middle ages and lynn f. jacobs, early netherlandish carved altarpieces – (cambridge, uk: cambridge university press, ). baxandall, limewood sculptors, – . presented robust implications for religious practices. prayer was assumed to be a viable means through which the faithful were able to connect with any form of an “otherworld,” a place summarized by peter de wilde as connected to the living only through religious practice. tombs augmented and solidified this entrée for the viewer and believer, serving as a kind of visual portal challenging current and shifting conceptions of death, resurrection, and the changing state of matter itself. well before the reformation period in the third decade of the sixteenth century the design of english tombs had become categorized into distinct themes. of vital difference between cadaver tombs and scores of already extant effigy memorials was the pronounced use of the transi and accompanying figures, such as the statues surrounding chichele’s effigy. these variations became organizational and systematic principles throughout the ensuing reformist period in england. specifically, memorials can be subdivided into two aspects: the tomb itself and the surrounding structure. the latter became an important element of the memorial and also acted as a proscenium for an ensuing drama of remembrance and viewer participation. each portrayal included distinct binski, medieval death, – . peter de wilde, “between life and death: the journey in the otherworld,” in death and dying in the middle ages, eds. edelgard e. dubruck and barbara i. gusick (bern: peter lang publishing, ), – . the impact of henry vii’s description of memorials is strong in that it serves as a conflation of the numerous trends in memorial design during the late fifteenth century. beyond serving as a compendium of common tomb making practices, it was used as a practical guide to the means of viewing and understanding memorials of this era. see barbara hochstetler meyer, “the first tomb of henry vii of england,” the art bulletin , no. (sep., ): – . see thomas astle, ed., the will of king henry vii, by henry vii, king of england (london: ), – , esp. – . conclusions about the deceased person and public sentiments about death and remembrance. by the fourteenth century, the prototypical depiction of a tomb’s effigy was as a gisant, such as with chichele, a fully clothed and costumed figure laying atop a flat slab. the facial features were consistently relaxed and peaceful, with the gisant’s eyes either closed, as if in slumber, or fully opened, often staring outward with a blank expression, devoid of pupils or irises. the latter position often made the figure look awestruck, perhaps alluding to the viewing of final judgment, with the deceased person seemingly having been resurrected or perhaps viewing the face of god. this interpretation gains credence in light of prayers and depictions that gained in prominence in the late fourteenth century. as robert scribner describes, the emergence of the “devout gaze” stirred the viewer’s emotions while also suggesting that this was an act of “sacramental seeing, a kind of ‘seeing through’ the image or object in a way that made present the sacred person behind it, so constituting the ‘sacramental gaze’ as a major form of religious experience.” such tombs present the viewer with a depiction of the dead as a person—often rendered naturalistically and with details of costume and physiognomy— while also suggesting allusions to the resurrection of the soul and an encounter with the face of god. tombs acted as dual harbingers of an eternal life and physical reminders of the former, but now extinguished, vitality of the dead. the importance of chichele’s memorial and its presentation of orthodox principles about encountering the face of god are underscored by his association with the robert w. scribner, “ways of seeing in the age of dürer,” in dürer and his culture, eds. dagmar eichberger and charles zika (cambridge uk: cambridge university press, ), – , at . church and the early days of reformist thought in england. henry chichele was linked to church teachings for much of his life, and he was raised in an era of restructuring the political position of the crown and the clergy. he rose to prominence to become a powerful archbishop at a time when the papacy attempted to exert heavy control over early english reformists, in the wake of john wycliffe ( – ) and the lollards. throughout england, political and religious debates had been increasing from the onset of the fourteenth century, ultimately becoming seeds for the formation of the church of england about a century later under king henry viii in . henry chichele’s familial background epitomized this convergence between national politics and ongoing religious shifts, movements that permeated chichele’s career and forged his legacy. as the son of thomas chicheley ( – ), a political candidate for the mayor’s court and a former mayor of higham ferres, northamptonshire, henry chichele was exposed to politics for much of his upbringing, a background that segued into his rise in both secular and religious prominence. he studied law at new college, oxford, around , before becoming involved with the church soon thereafter. he was ordained by the early ’s, with administrative posts beginning as early as , when he was made an archdeacon by the bishop of salisbury. he also became involved in the court of arches in london, effectively cementing his study of theology with law, creating forays into growing theological and political movements throughout england. much of the information about henry chichelle’s life is based upon joseph barnes, vita henria' chichele, arclziepiscopi cantuariensis, sub regibus henvic: /' et vr; descripta ab arthuro duck, oxford, , published as an english translation (london: richard chiswell, ). both henry and his father thomas chicheley’s last name are spelled as chichele and chicheley regularly. i have opted to use only chichele for the spelling of henry’s name while retaining thomas spelling as chicheley. historically, the period of the early fifteenth century marked a vital point in church history. religious institutions continued to divide as the papal schism between rome and avignon reached an apogee in , the year that chichele became a special envoy to the roman pope gregory xii. as the schism persisted, chichele found himself at the core of political intervention, hoping to arrange in for a lasting peace between england and france. by he had been named to the bishopric of saint david's in wales, giving him the right to hold all its benefices within his office. in that same year, he and sir john cheyne were received by pope gregory xii as english envoys along with bishop repingdon of lincoln, one of many instances of a direct contact between chichele and the papacy. five years later, he was involved with diplomatic missions under the new roman pope innocent vii. upon the recommendation of king henry v, he was ultimately promoted to the archbishopric in march , a position that was formalized by the papacy on july of that same year. as an ardent supporter of the established church, chichele’s opposition to the ideas of the reformist john wycliffe and his followers was pronounced. central to wycliffe’s contentions was the reinstitution of a life of austerity for church members and a reconsideration of the church’s pronounced overseeing of charitable efforts. theologically, the intricacies of this belief about good works were being reconsidered throughout chichele’s lifetime. beyond growing concerns over the treatment of the poor, chichele also preached that the wycliffe movement and the resultant attacks against the clergy, which continued unabated well into the mid-fifteenth century, were antithetical to an abundance of the spelling of john wycliffe’s name exists. i use a popular spelling, but do not alter any of the quotations or citations that spell his name in a different manner. the teachings of the church and inherently against the ideals of the papacy. a growing popularization of reformist beliefs had coincided with the emergence of the black death in , which heightened public views of mortality, the body, and identity throughout the following century to chichele’s own day. wycliffe’s advocacy about the church’s appeal to laypeople also drove at least a part of his decision to translate the vulgate into english. this decision was popularly considered as an ecclesiastical means to increase human potential and interest in the benefits of a personal theology, ideas that martin luther would later take up anew. additionally, wycliffe’s writings suggest a burgeoning alliance of reformist thought building on the critiques of the bohemian reformer jan hus ( – ), particularly in relation to other neophyte movements that incorporated the vernacular into church teachings. wycliffe’s localized focus was underscored by his perception of the monarchy as a corrupt conduit for personal success, especially within england, while he noted the importance of publishing the bible in the vernacular to increase the understanding of and adherence by the laity to scripture. wycliffe expounded upon this contention as a matter of theology, specifically noting in his letters that the link between the vernacular and preaching was routed in the original example of jesus christ: “christ and his apostles taught the people in the language best known to them. it is certain that the truth of the see john stacey, john wyclif and reform (london: westminster press, ). john wycliffe, latin works: polemic work , no. (london: publishers for the wyclif society by trübner book, ). for more on wycliffe’s contentions, see lawrence s. cunningham and john j. reich, culture and values: a survey of the humanities, comprehensive edition, th edition (boston: cengage learning, ). christian faith becomes more evident the more faith itself is known.” the response from the church to these publications was immediate and scathing. archbishop arundel condemned wycliffe and his followers outright, referring to wycliffe as “that wretched and pestilent fellow of demandable memory... the very herald and child of the anti- christ, who crowned his wickedness by translating the scriptures into the mother tongue.” the resultant political and theological impasse formed the background of archbishop chichele’s defense of the papacy within the growing reformist movement. the lollard response of the late fourteenth century, positioned as contrary to the ideals of the papacy in both liturgy and operations, accentuated the principles of wycliffe. overall, the lollards felt that the ideals of the church were too ensconced with temporal matters, a finding that was only intensified by the focus on the rigid hierarchies within church bureaucracy. this sentiment was particularly acute in regard to prayers by the clergy for the dead. instead, lollards believed that prayer should be viewed as manifestation of equality rather than privileged status, with a stratification of power or grace being antithetical to their religious ideals. in addition, the lollards’ condemned the centrality of devotional images as contrary to the church’s primary mission of salvation and grace. each of these contentions were antithetical to the orthodoxy that chichele wycliffe’s reaction is grounded is furthering the importance of the vernacular while suggesting the problems with the latin liturgy, specifically: [t]he doctrine should not only be in latin but in the vulgar tongue and as the faith of the church is contained in the scriptures, the more these are known in a true sense the better. the laity ought to understand the faith and, as doctrines of our faith are in the scriptures, believers should have the scriptures in a language which they fully understand.” see christopher lensch, “the morningstar of the reformation: john wycliffe,” wrs journal , no. (august ): – , at . aaron caldwell, the contemporary agnostic believer (charleston, sc: createspace independent publishing platform, ), . upheld and to the exigencies that underscore the design and function of his tomb, which highlights the pronounced importance and vital role of biblical and political hierarchies. simultaneously, chichele was working to promote novel alliances amidst growing schisms within the church. shannon gayk summarizes this period as advancing reform within the church while simultaneously forcing a reconsideration of the role of images within the liturgy. rejecting the contention that lollardism was completely against the concepts of images within liturgical thought, gayk instead posits that the movement originally acknowledged the important pedagogical and liturgical role of images. even more, the early lollards were apt to educate the public about effective means to question supposedly false images, while simultaneously expounding upon a process of how to measure the acceptability of other motifs. this process of accommodation, which gayk notes as an early separation of reformist reactions prior to full-blown iconoclasm, was grounded in a removal of the presence of images within the public life of the church and suggested a novel role for art within the liturgy. as gayk asserts, “lollard writers proposed ‘alternative’ iconographies that were nonetheless ‘surprisingly incarnational.’” the beliefs of the later generations of lollards grew increasingly separate from wycliffe’s beliefs, whose opinions were closer to the early founders of the lollard movement. as w. r. jones explains, wycliffe was not inclined to address the topic of iconoclasm at great length, and when he did, he see shannon gayk, image, text, and religious reform in fifteenth-century england: cambridge studies in medieval literature (cambridge, uk: cambridge university press, ), . gayk argues for the importance of sacred images, particularly those associated with liturgical texts, shared by the church and the reformist movements of pre-sixteenth century england. see karen a. winstead, review of image, text, and religious reform in fifteenth-century england, by shannon gayk, speculum , no. ( ): – , at . based his views on images in the worshiping practices of the ancient hebrews and early christianity. he noted that images of christian practice had been gradually introduced toward the end of the apostolic period, when they were justified as books for the unlearned and as sources of christian inspiration. the ultimate result of wycliffe’s endeavors, however, was also a rise in english proto-nationalism and the beginning of a hardening strain against the papacy. indeed, pope gregory xi wrote that wycliffe was attempting “to overthrow the status of the whole church.” as the umbra of wycliffe’s followers’ teachings grew throughout england and the northwest of scotland, their contentions became associated with the beginning of the peasants’ revolt in , a political reformist movement prior to the rise of luther’s prominence and the ensuing peasant war of . ultimately, these socio-theological movements resulted in a dramatic reconsideration of the form and function of art, particularly related to discussions about redemption and eventual salvation. these ideologies also resulted in debates about the execution of the mass itself. for example, some reformers noted that the sacrament of the eucharist was not clearly operationalized in the bible, and transubstantiation remained undefined. chichele’s wycliff’s followers saw a link between the practice of hebrews and the worship of early images as a precursor for christianity, with images of the holy trinity being antithetical to official church doctrine. notably, “wyclif’s most extensive discussion of images was presented in his treatise on the ten commandments-the de mandatis divinis. commenting on the first and second commandments, he observed that the ancient hebrews had been forbidden to worship gods other than their own and to make graven images. this prohibition derived from the fact that the jews were prone to idolatry, that the incarnation had not yet sanctified human form, and that christ's birth and life had not created the holy family and his disciples. …[h]e was especially offended, as were the lollards of a later time, by the representation of the trinity in the form of an old man, a youth, and a dove; by the tendency to endow images with magical virtues; and by the crass materialism that sometimes surrounded pilgrimage sites.” see w. r. jones, “lollards and images: the defense of religious art in later medieval england, journal of the history of ideas , no. (jan.–mar., ): – , at . from john foxe, the church historians of england: reformation period, vol. , part (london: forgotten books, ), . position was in keeping with the church orthodoxy that the altar itself became the stage for transubstantiation of matter and the veneration of relics as having real presence and magical qualities, two principles that were antithetical to the burgeoning lollard movement and to the ideals of wycliffe who preceded them. as jones concludes, “lollardy after wyclif was not a systematic body of belief, but, rather, a loose assortment of opinions and attitudes concerning christianity and its institutions.” chichele’s position was one in which the church dictated principles of the reverence for artistic images of the life of christ. these ideologies ran counter to the findings of the lollards, who instead believed that images of death and torture were contrary to the teachings of christ and to the promise of bodily resurrection. this disparity between images promoted through church teachings and liturgical practices was also promulgated through memorials and tombs. chichele’s ongoing responses to early reformists were steadfast in his public role as a defender of orthodoxy and as a patron of the arts with images that reference the church and its theological structures, including his tomb where this same ideology is given visual form. his church orthodoxy regularly blended into his exercise of jurisprudence. for example, he presided at the trial of john claydon (d. ), a currier and citizen of london, who was held on charges of heresy for claims against the church, particularly defamation of the papacy and the promotion of lollardism. claydon’s case is emblematic of larger ecclesiastical conflicts, as his crimes suggest a growing belief in a malevolent clergy, several claims of which were printed in the lanterne of light ( ), jones, lollards and images, – . a popular publication that asserted that priests were direct conduits and contacts of the anti-christ. claydon’s trial segued into an investigation and ongoing inquisition of heresy throughout england, with chichele himself directing an inquisition by archdeacons to hunt out church malfeasance. by , he attempted to rout out suspected heretics en masse, an important example of which was the trail and summary execution of william taylor (d. ). taylor preached that prayers should only be directed at god, completely foregoing and negating the role of saints and of priests, and one must assume, of mediating images in accessing the divine. considering chichele’s lifelong and pronounced belief in the role of saints within the church’s liturgy and even in the design of his tomb, and his defense of the church hierarchy as mediators, taylor’s lessons were tantamount to blasphemy. his efforts became waged against early reformers who focused not only on the conduct of priests, but also on the function of prayer, and the nature of divinity itself. by , however, chichele himself also had become increasingly involved in critiques against the new roman papacy even as his orthodoxy became entrenched. in particular, he expressed local opposition with the roman papacy when he had announced a jubilee to be held at canterbury in , an event that would divert profits from rome to england. the church’s reaction to chichele’s declaration was firm and forthright, see presbyterian board of publication, writings and examinations of brute, thorpe, cobham, hilton, pecock, bilney, and others: with the lantern of light (philadelphia: presbyterian board of publication, ). little is known of taylor’s life. he appears twice before henry chichele, once as an excommunicant who had subsequently and absolved and then released. he was ultimately executed by burning in smithfield under henry’s sentencing. only one of his sermons survives. see anne hudson, two wycliffite texts: the sermon of william taylor , the testimony of william thorpe , issue (oxford: early english text society, ). including a terse response from the pope, who in noted that his teachings could “ensnare simple souls and extort … and to pivot themselves against the apostolic see and the roman pontiff.” despite such provocations, chichele’s influence within canterbury through papal orthodoxy only grew. the tomb of henry chichele suggests several implications of these developments and for the viewing of death vis à vis altering contentions of theology—reformist and orthodox—in england. it also offers a potential baseline for consideration of additional tombs. the character of death is fundamentally culturally bound, while personal reactions to death may be linked to greater theological beliefs, but the experience of representing a corpse and what it suggested permits distinctly different conclusions among christian viewers, nonetheless. the medieval period was underscored by a combined fear and fascination with death that was exemplified and compounded in changes in theology. questions concerning the condition of death were raised about the representation and constitution of the body and the subsequent transmigration of the soul. transi tombs and late medieval piety in relation to death chichele’s tomb affords us multiple ways to interpret the ongoing transi phenomenon and late medieval theologies surrounding images, death, and the dead. transi appear to exist between two realms simultaneously, the plane of the living, catholic church, calendar of entries in the papal registers relating to great britain and ireland: – (neuilly sur seine, france: ulan press, ), . for some considerations of the ongoing cultural and theological shifts concerning the representation of death, see nigel llewellyn, art of death: visual culture in the english death ritual c. –c. (london: reaktion books, ). llewellyn places images of death and the character of death itself into a long historical trajectory, with cultures adopting and disposing images of death at numerous historical intervals. executed with attention to period attire, and the expectation of corporeal reanimation during final judgment. through this viewing, observers encountered the deceased person as both a reposing and animated effigy, an allusion of resurrection that simultaneously also recognized the physical demise of the body. this conflation of time, of synthesized past and future, is accentuated through a consideration of the unique role of the transi, notably in the decaying portion of the tomb group as the wholly dead counterpart to the effigy in full flesh. specific prototypes of the transi emerged throughout the medieval era. the transi represents a relation to the viewer as part of a universal state of mortality, stripped of the ornamentation of the effigy and removed from the worldly grandeur of decorative accouterments. eyes of the corpse figures were consistently closed, with facial features gaunt and desiccated. the transi had already started to show the inevitable mortal effects on the body. hair, if present at all, laid flaccid around the face. gestures had often moved from a position of prayer to hanging limply alongside the corpse. with few exceptions, transi are sculpted as partially clothed, with attire usually being only a scant and plainly decorated cloth. visually, the impacts of death are clearly suggested by the transi, as details include shriveled or shredded skin, or further examples of decomposition like pronounced bones and amplified sinews. additional figures suggest visual substitutions and references to societal roles and theological beliefs. for example, in comparison with funerary effigies and transi that are typically portrayed in a prone position, seated or assis figures were representative of civic and liturgical positions. assis figures allowed the deceased to be memorialized in light of their social station, usually in conjunction with an image of worldly power or position. these figures were suggested by carvings on roman sarcophagi and occasionally incorporated into medieval tomb designs. the interpretive comparison with the transi is stark, as assis figures are emblematic of status, while transi are stripped of any suggestion of public rank or even individual identity. transi tombs activated the viewers’ experience of death by erasing a sense of temporal and spatial differences. dual directionality of meaning and motion generates novel interpretations for memorials, tombs, and images of religious practice. by suggesting that along with temporality being conflated or collapsed—with time as complex and non-linear in nature—assumptions concerning the process of living and dying are put into question. transi tombs did not merely reflect contemporary notions about dying and resurrection, but instead actively shaped conversations about death and memorial within christian ideology. conclusions about these issues are not resolved through transi tombs. instead, they initiate contemplation about these matters, acting as agents for viewers’ individualized reactions. even more, tombs acted as agents to address and affect ongoing discussions about the function of memorials as theological artifacts and as works of art. during the earlier medieval era transi can be seen to have distinct stylistic differences partially based upon geographical preferences. corpses were portrayed as hosts for worms, along with frogs or serpents in numerous germanic depictions. kathleen cohen investigated this association, noting that within germanic literature serpents were often used in lieu of death, and that some folktales even assumed that the deceased would transform into reptilian form following corporal decay. further, frogs were considered to be both death’s byproduct and favored pet. this trend extended to other animal and reptilian artistic motifs. for example, some depictions of the dead included salamanders and newts, associated with an ability to withstand fire as see cohen, metamorphosis of a death symbol, . representations of death and martyrdom and resurrection. these accompanying details act as veritable symbols in and maintaining the viewer’s attention, while also conveying messages about the state of death itself as mere matter devolving in a continuous natural process of decay, as part of the natural world. despite these variations in presentation in details, transi were ultimately studies in putrefaction. unlike the effigies, which lay in repose above the transi, the figure on the lower tier had lost all sense of vitality. similarly, costuming changed course; instead of period attire, transi were wrapped in a mere shroud, or were portrayed practically nude, stripped of worldly and individualized identity. the decay of fabrics and skin is linked visually and conceptually in the transi, an image of a symbiotic relationship in which the fibers parallel that of human flesh and viscera. as part of the process of desiccation, transi were shown with accentuated lifelessness, as the vigor of perpetual youth that was evident in the effigy above it had been replaced by the jarring effects of bodily demise. while the effigy suggested not only corporeality, but also the possibility of resurrection and ascension toward eternity, the utter mortality of the transi was a demonstration of the disintegration of matter. the transi further intersected with dominant ideologies, art historical meanings, and social inferences through signs and semiotics. the position of the body and the relation the use of several reptiles and amphibians as emblems for death pre-dates the medieval period by centuries. as only one popular and historical example, toads have been utilized to symbolize and suggest death since at least the time of the ancient greeks. for more information, see nora c. flores, ed., animals in the middle ages (new york, routledge, ). as symbols pertaining to alchemy and the generative possibilities of manipulating the elements and transforming matter, see pamela h. smith, “art, science, and visual culture in early modern europe,” isis , no. ( ): - . as suggested by umberto eco, a sign can be defined as any object that refers to something else, with semiotic implications suggesting how this result conjoins with previously established social to the signs that surround it manifests the paradigms that underscored and were affected by the tomb’s creation. tombs are not only an idea of death but also guide the viewer to visualize and contemplate the intricacies and processes of dying, as memorials created a complex system that illustrated dominant themes of ontology. these images are unique in tombs in that the work is indicative of the larger complex nature of death, an abstract notion or state of being that can never be fully understood by the viewer. by focusing on the figures within a tomb, the viewer is able to consider how an image is both representative of a specific moment—that is, the moment a person dies and the moment of the work’s creation as a work of art—and also transverses that moment—with death as a perpetual state until the last judgment and decay-and-renewal as an ongoing process. in the case of transi tomb, however, the presentation of the body takes on deeper meaning through the incorporation of a cadaver sculpture. in this case, the artist effectively seals a moment of the human body’s natural decomposition into unchanging physical material while alluding to that process of decay and changeability as a stage en route to dust. decaying flesh is presented as unalterable stone, symbolically unable to metamorphose into a new being until the last judgment. moreover, in association with the mass and in particular with the concept of the resurrection, tombs suggest a coda to the termination of life. the decay following death is overcome through christ. the tomb convention. see umberto eco, a theory of semiotics (bloomington, in: indiana university press, ), . the resultant creation of art is unique in its function as both a sign and semiotic cue. this shared relationship underscores what semiotics theorist charles peirce suggested as he noted that “a sign, or representamen, is something which stands to somebody for something in some respect or capacity. it addresses somebody, that is, it creates in the mind of that person an equivalent sign. that sign which it creates i call the interpretant of the first sign. the sign stands for something, its object not in all respects, but in reference to a sort of idea.” see charles peirce, philosophical writings of pierce, ed. j. bachler (new york: dover publications, ), . and its relationship with prevalent religious beliefs at the time of its creation suggests theological conflicts that underscored and were affected by its viewing, resulting in a host of ontological conclusions, as the viewer incorporates the representation of the dead within their own life. through skillful carving, the artist can convey a sense of verisimilitude of flesh— the softness and suppleness of a face, for example—as well as its decay, staged in the transi. the materiality of stone simultaneously evokes permanence in a notoriously difficult medium. historian of science pamela h. smith underscores the importance of materiality by proposing an “artisanal epistemology,” positing that artisans experienced and understood nature through the manipulation of natural materials and processes of transformation, transmutation, and decay. primary knowledge could only occur with a “bodily encounter” with material. the natural matter not only of artisanal materials, but also of the human body itself—both the memorialized deceased body and that of the viewer—are simultaneously evoked in transi tombs and represent a form of knowledge conveyed in the making and viewing of a stone corpse. images of a corpse initiate thoughts not only about the process of death, but also about the lineage of mortality. noting that the first recorded death within the judeo- christian tradition is that of abel, saint john chrysostom, (c. – ), archbishop of constantinople, asserted that any depiction of death harkens back to the events and impacts of that first murder. abel’s death appeared in illustrated manuscripts for centuries, including byzantine works that introduce abel’s soul as a resuscitated corpse smith, “art, science, and visual culture,” – . that speaks directly to god. the extensive importance of abel’s murder suggests an ongoing struggle to confront and understand the profundity of death. as joseph koerner summarizes: for chrysostom, the vision of abel's cadaver makes of death a spectacle that occupies all the senses. everything about the corpse is significant or emblematic: god showed what death is, how heavy, bitter, and hostile. adam learned this not only through the first sight of death, but also through all that happened after: through the foul smell of the corpse, through the pus which oozed from it, through the ashes into which it was transformed, and through all the circumstances which followed the burial. the importance of involving the senses in depictions of death is underscored through tomb sculpture, which appeals to tactile, visual, and in recognition of the density of stone, weight or pressure sense, as well as scale. in addition, eve’s reaction to the viewing of abel’s corpse became associated typologically with the response of the mary to the presentation of christ’s crucified body. beyond the shared grief of both mothers, the commonalities between christ and abel as victims of murderous plots shared an additional motif of both men as innocent sufferers and shepherds. reactions to abel’s corpse as a representation of the collective death of humankind was echoed by the sentiments of modern-day theorists. forms of linguistic or verbal associations act as bridges to bygone eras, complete with a realization of ongoing emotions, fears, and beliefs. this process, which mikhail bakhtin referred to a cross-link among “speech acts,” links verbal language and visual cues, the result of which positions for more information on early images of abel’s corpse and cain’s murderous act, see maria evangelatou, “word and image in the ‘sacra parallela’: codex parisinus graecus ” (washington, dc: dumbarton oaks papers , ), – . see joseph leo koerner, “the mortification of the image: death as a hermeneutic in hans baldung grien,” representations, no. (spring, ): – , esp. . the artist as a creator or sender of an ongoing communicative act, one that transverses time. niklas luhmann advanced this claim by noting the experience of life itself is a shared autopoietic system of social cognition, in which human beings’ responses are grounded in former communicative messages. additionally, bakhtin asserted that individual images do not exist on their own visual merits, but are instead imbued with meaning only through their association with earlier creations and dialogues. similarly, it can be surmised that a viewer is engaged in both outright and inner dialogue with a particular utterance, be that of a work of art or speech: dialogism in contrast recognises the multiplicity of perspectives and voices. it is also referred to as ‘double-voiced’ or ‘multi-voiced’. it is a ‘principle’ which can become the main referent of a particular aesthetic field. … discourse does not logically unfold (as in analytical philosophy), but rather, interacts. a dialogical work constantly engages with and is informed by other works and voices, and seeks to alter or inform it. the dialogical word is always in an intense relationship with another’s word, being addressed to a listener and anticipating a response. this relationship, originally applied to texts and literary analysis, can be cross-applied to art historical research, particularly to the application of images with robust typologies and recognition, such as the death of abel and the theological implications of his corpse and its burial. through abel’s murder and burial, humankind was tethered to the experiences of adam and to the inherent nature of death as an ontological mainstay, which bakhtin see mikhail m. bakhtin, speech genres and other late essays, nd ed., eds. caryl emerson and michael holquist, trans. vern w. mcgee (austin, tx,: university of texas press, ). see david seidl, “luhmann’s theory of autopoietic social systems,” munich business research - (munich: ludwig-maximilians-universität münchen, ), – , esp. . linda m. park-fuller, “voices: bakhtin’s heteroglossia and polyphony, and the performance of narrative literature,” literature in performance ( ): – . see andrew robinson, “in theory: bakhtin: dialogism, polyphony and heteroglossia,” accessed september , , http://ceasefiremagazine.co.uk/in-theory-bakhtin- /. identified as being an example of a shared societal consciousness. the same commonality with images and actions is present in the positioning of transi as the inevitable and mutual destiny of humankind. bakhtin observed similarly that “consciousness is in fact that commentary which every adult human being brings to bear on every instance of his behavior, and achieves its final realization in a work of art.” this image of the artist as a contributor to an ongoing formation of consciousness and as an arbiter for human behavior was captured in bakhtin’s essay art and answerability, in which he posits that “[a]rt and life are not one but they must become united in myself—in the unit of my answerability.” this act of answerability is for bakhtin a nexus of thought between art and the viewer, in which a viewer does not see art as an extension of the self, but instead as an invitation to grapple with larger meanings, ongoing dialogues, and a lineage of interpretations. this process ultimately holds the viewer as responsible with the ongoing guilt or associations that are exemplified by a piece of art’s larger claims. those claims, particularly in reference to death, connect the viewer to earlier experiences of dying. as joseph koerner summarizes: “everything about the corpse is significant or emblematic… in the gruesome corruption of the body, the living can read their fate. the corpse is there to mirror the living and to mediate a message applicable to all: ‘hodie mihi cras tibi’ kurt eisen, “novelization and the drama of consciousness in ‘strange interlude,’” the eugene o'neill review , no. ( ): – . mikhail m. bakhtin, art and answerability: early philosophical essays, eds. michael holquist and vadim liapunov, trans. vadim liapunov and kenneth brostrom (austin, tx: university of texas press, ), . for additional explanations of the vital role of the viewer and how consciousness emerges as both a byproduct of and inspiration for art, see the bahktin, art and answerability, , particularly “author and hero in aesthetic activity (ca. – ),” - , especially pages - . (today me, tomorrow you),” a message similarly summarized in the chichele’s epitaph. in this way, the presence of a corpse was a memento mori as well as an inspiration for a change of earthly behavior, ultimately serving as a reminder of mortality and immortality simultaneously. this finding was only intensified in relation to transi sculptures, in which a corpse is presented through sculpture in lurid detail and often to scale in three dimensions, occupying the same space as the viewer. this association allows the viewer to see abel’s death as the origin for humankind’s mortality and cain’s consternation about a corpse as the prelude to the emergent quagmire of how viewers can envision their own eventual death. even more, images of death may force a consideration of the position of the body and soul at the end of time, what koerner refers to as the “second death” in again invoking saint john chyrsostom: “in order for the distinction between illusion and reality to be erased, human history (which began with the fall) must end, so that all souls and all works can be judged as a self-contained and readable whole, divorced from the shifting disguises of the temporal world.” this shift in the temporal world substantiates a suggestion that images of death and body are layered with historical meaning, including a flattening of time and erasure of hardened temporal boundaries. the very nature and meaning of death and resurrection were under constant debate and scrutiny throughout the late medieval era, in which a corpse was assumed to be neither fully living nor fully dead. as eamon duffy summarizes, the emphasis on the see joseph leo koerner, moment of self-portraiture in german renaissance art (chicago: university of chicago press, ), at . koerner, mortification of the image, . corruption of the flesh was not perceived as being in any sense “opposed to the salvation of the soul. … its function was spiritual, to bring home to the spectator the reality of his own mortality, and thereby to bring him to a sense of the urgency of his need for conversion.” the image of christ as a fully resurrected person not only suggested a repudiation of sin, but also a complete reversal of death as opposed to a soul being in a state of perpetual limbo. to this point, nancy caciola posits an intriguing view of death, one that focuses on the constant transitory and fluid nature of death and a corpse: “medieval conceptions of death were fluid. … in doctrinal terms, the body awaited resurrection even as it decayed, while the soul entered one realm tripartite afterlife.” a corpse was therefore in ambiguous liminal territory, placed on a spectrum that was somewhere between a world of an afterlife and an earthly plane. even more, a corpse represented a conduit between life and a non-terrestrial dimension, a world that was connected to both the land of the living and the dead. the representation of a corpse, particularly one that was in such an advanced state of decomposition as a transi figure, was easily interpreted as straddling different worlds, uncertain as to its eventual destination. the transi harkened back to the collective death of humankind, an ongoing re-appropriation of abel’s corpse. conversely, images of eamon duffy, the stripping of the altars: traditional religion in england, – , nd ed. (new haven, ct: yale university press, ), . caciola continues by noting that “a person could die a ‘good’ or a ‘bad’ death; one could undergo a temporary or a more permanent death; and one could die a partial that is, a death of the personality without a death of the or vice versa patrick geary has defined the dead in the [medieval] ages as an ‘age class’ this neatly encapsulates the social procity between the living and the dead, and the continued influence that the latter exerted over the former throughout society. intimacy between the living and the dead was because death was not envisaged as a full extinguishing of body or spirit.” see nancy caciola, “wraiths, revenants and ritual in medieval culture,” past & present , no. ( ): – , at . effigies like chichele’s portrayed the dead as still caught in the exuberance of life, often as youthful and full of earthly vitality, usually donning the recognizable costume indicative of social status and comfort. the link between the corpse and the image of an apparently living person, peculiar to transi tombs, suggests a tethering of the two entities that remain supposedly distinct and differentiated. chichele’s defense of orthodoxy in a moment when certain aspects of it matter and its meaning are under siege are repositioned in his transi, a visual reminder of the shifting consubstantiation of decaying and living flesh, a motif reaffirmed in the celebration of the transubstantiated host. it would only be through the resurrection of the body that these bodies could hope to be fully and completely integrated into a greater whole, while simultaneously becoming part of the larger body of a collective resurrected christ. koerner provides some concluding points for this discussion by noting how the presentation of a corpse itself—or in the case of transi and effigy tombs, a representation of the dead body—suggests unique and psychological reactions to dying: when we turn now to the representation of the corpse in art, death transforms the body into a sign that is directed toward the gaze of the living; and this spectacle, the cadaver, mediates certain fundamental knowledge about the nature of our postlapsarian existence that would otherwise be inaccessible. it is the sight of the corpse that enables us to regard life in its proper relation to death. in the case of some transi tombs, designs were completed, and tombs were constructed prior to a person’s death, as was the case with chichele’s tomb. in this way, the memorialized were forced to consider their own mortality, and in the case of transi tombs, would have to contemplate an image of their own rotting corpse. it can be contended, however, that it is through an encounter with a corpse that the living begin to koerner, mortification of the image, . understand the complexities of the dying process, along with hopes for eventual christian immortality. in the case of henry chichele, this resurrection would hopefully entail a personal conflation with the hierarchal strata of saints and angelic orders—carefully rendered in stone around his tomb—that he might eventually encounter. chapter : a gendered response to transi tombs through a consideration of alice de la pole an overview of the tomb of alice de la pole alice de la pole (née, chaucer) was buried in in ewelme where she had been born in , the site of a small village in the rolling hills of south oxfordshire. this location would scarcely be considered as a site for visiting pilgrims, verifiably different than canterbury cathedral where her grandfather, the famed poet and author of the canterbury tales, geoffrey chaucer ( – ), was buried in the same nave occupied by the tomb of henry chichele. although geoffrey chaucer had died four years before alice was born, his literary legacy was well established by the time of her birth. as the only child of thomas chaucer ( – ) and matilda burghersh ( – ) alice was raised within a period of everchanging political conflicts, events which only intensified as her father became speaker of the house of commons on three different occasions from to . this position placed alice under immediate public scrutiny, a situation that intensified throughout her subsequent marriages. her position within england was not only tied to her family’s political prowess, but also to her family’s emerging role within the church before the emergence of reformists such as john wycliffe. despite the possible political opportunities afforded by later developments, including her son john becoming brother-in-law of two kings, edward iv ( – ) and richard iii ( – ). alice would not remarry after her third see rowena e. archer, “alice chaucer, duchess of suffolk (c. – ),” oxford dictionary of national biography (oxford: oxford university press, ). marjorie anderson, “alice chaucer and her husbands,” pmla , no. ( ): – , esp. – . husband’s murder, possibly taking a vow of chastity until her death. aged about seventy- one, she died in may or june of , opting to be buried at saint mary’s away from her last husband and declaring her own self-fashioning, where she asserted her achievements and faith, reversing the trajectory of paternal familial allegiance, reposition herself and her marital relations outside of the standard role of the male figures in her life aside from her father buried nearby. alice’s transi tomb is an opportunity to consider the formation of a gendered approach to death and memorial within the reformist period of the late fifteenth century. much of alice’s initial formal identity was defined by the status of the male figures in her family—a series of conventions that she would make efforts to disrupt with her tomb as a culminating statement about her own agency as a formidable female political figure. realizing that the figure of death has consistently been gendered as male, the implications of alice’s relation to mortality are fundamentally different from what we presume in the tomb of a man, and therefore pose unique implications for interpreting art from the medieval era, including popularized responses to corporeality and emerging beliefs about the postmortem experience of the soul. alice’s life was a succession of situations that were made more unique as a woman ever-poised to navigate the changing socio-political structures in england. ibid., – . with a lack of facial or anatomical references, the gendered nature of death is difficult to determine, despite the consistent references, particularly in english and german art of this period, to a male identity. see karl siegfried guthke, the gender of death: a cultural history in art and literature (cambridge: cambridge university press, ), – . outside of gendered attire, there appears to be little reason to assume a male identity for the character of death. also, although the dark cloak often associated with death is not a gendered piece of clothing, the hefty scythe that death carries was often associated with male field workers. eventually titled as the countess of suffolk and later the duchess of suffolk, she was married in to sir john phelip ( – ), who died after they had been married for only one month; alice had just reached the age of maturity of eleven years at the onset of their marriage. political arrangements would continue with her marriage in to her second husband, thomas montague ( – ). montague was already a widower by the time that he married alice and had been entitled as the fourth earl of salisbury. he had become known as an experienced military commander in france, but on october , , he was struck with flying debris from a cannonball following an attack at orléans. suffering a mortal wound to the face, he died a week later. upon his death, alice became a nobleman's widow and the countess of salisbury. she was subsequently made the supervisor of her husband’s will, being the executrix of half of his material goods, including gold, jewelry, metal plate, and the net-revenues of his properties in normandy, leaving alice in a uniquely powerful societal and economic position. along with her inheritance, she was becoming increasingly involved with england’s military efforts in france. in fact, it was through military connections of her former husband that alice would meet her third and final husband, william de la pole, for more information on the political campaigns and life of thomas montague, particularly in relation to his military campaigns, see john a. wagner, encyclopedia of the hundred years war (westport, ct: greenwood publishing group, ). understanding the societal position of women and the uniqueness of alice’s case in the medieval period is a complex undertaking but references can be better understood by consulting carol m. meale, “reading women’s culture in fifteenth-century england: the case of alice chaucer,” in mediaevalitas: reading the middle ages, eds. piero boitani and anna torti (woodridge, uk: d. s. brewer, ), – . the first duke of suffolk ( – ), who became the commander of montague’s troops in france at the point of his death. ultimately, william would have the greatest impact on alice’s presence in english political circles, rivaled only by the paternal influence that had accompanied her rise to prominence. the couple’s only child john was born on september , , but by this time alice had achieved social standing outside of her familial relations due to her own growing political and social accomplishments. she remained active in governmental affairs throughout her life, becoming involved in events with both the houses of york and lancaster during the war of the roses, ultimately establishing her position with the winning side of lancaster. she was granted garter robes in and then again in the years – and – , one of the earliest women ever to be so honored. she had also been made a marchioness of suffolk as her husband was made a marquis on september , . later when sailing across the english channel in , the ship of william de la pole was overtaken by rebellious english troops aboard the vessel nicholas of the tower, and after a mock trial he was executed by beheading; his remains were rowed to the cliffs of dover and left on the shore. for more information on william de la pole and his family, see edgar trevor williams and christine stephanie nicholls, eds., the dictionary of national biography (oxford: oxford university press, ), – . both william and alice de la pole served significant roles during the war of the roses, an overview of their allegiances and positions is recorded and set into historical context in mathew lewis, the wars of the roses: the key players in the struggle for supremacy (strand, uk: amberly publishing, ). it is worthwhile to note that lewis refers to william de la pole in the chapter about him as “the most despised man in england.” see simon harrison, alice chaucer: a survivor in hard times (windsor, uk: archives of the college of saint george of windsor castle, ). see roger virgoe, “the death of william de la pole, duke of suffolk,” bulletin of the john rylands library ( ): – . subsequent funerary efforts were overseen by alice, who moved his body from wingfield, its original burial spot, to the charterhouse at hull, as had been requested in his will. alice de la pole’s tomb presents very different characteristics than the tomb of henry chichele—if not the tombs of most men— before it. saint mary’s church, a small building where alice would have her tomb erected, was founded in ewelme alongside other educational and philanthropic institutions (figure . ). the original medieval plan of the grounds included three principle components: the church and chantry chapel, the almshouse quadrangle and surrounding gardens, and a series of academic buildings, including the grammar school. saint mary’s church is comprised of one central nave, as well as a north and south aisle. the church’s cloister is surrounded by thirteen cottages that were built as residences for poor men, with additional residences surrounding the hospital as well as an open court. the most dominant part of the compound, however, is the church with its chantry chapel, situated at the highest point overlooking the remainder of grounds. alice’s tomb is often noted as the central highlight of saint mary’s church, if not of the village of ewelme itself. it is constructed of alabaster, a rarity for large-scale construction in england during this period that was used primarily for small devotional objects. the visual impact of the alabaster is also qualitatively different than marble, see karen karen stöber “the burial preferences of monastic patrons in the later middle ages.” in late medieval monasteries and their patrons: england and wales, c. - (martlesham, uk: boydell and brewer, ), – esp. ; n. ibid., . m. prister-crutwell, “ewelme: a romantic village, its past and present, its people and its history,” accessed december , , http://www.fordsfarm.co.uk/history-of-ewelme.html. paul williamson, object of devotion: medieval english alabaster sculpture from the victoria and albert museum (alexandria, va: art services international, ). with “the translucence of the alabaster conveying a smoother, more delicate and, consequently, less tortuously macabre spirit.” alice’s tomb is located in the chapel of saint john, an addition to the main nave of the church that was built sometime after . the tomb is accessible from both the back and side of the chapel and is situated at the corner of the chapel’s main altar (figure . ). it had been built in conjunction with the creation of the nearby hospital, likely related to the medical needs of patients residing at the almshouse. the chapel is located under an open timber ceiling, a substantially molded construction of wooden beams with a series of shield-bearing angels carved into each intersection. the nearby walls are lavishly covered in over one hundred repetitions of ihs, a greek variation of the holy name of jesus, an oft-used gothic monogram. the pattern is repeated consistently throughout the entirety of the chapel in gold, red, and black letters against a white background (figure . ). on the tomb canopy, small carved angels bear shields with each corner section inter-spliced with the same monogram, which appears along the walls and the overhead beams and as part of each ceiling panel. more than mere decoration, the intoning and repeated referencing of christ’s name was assumed to serve a mystical function, with immediate and eschatological implications. pamela margaret king, “contexts of the cadaver tomb in fifteenth century england,” (phd diss., university of york, ), . for additional information on the uses of alabaster, see kim woods, cut in alabaster: a material of sculpture and its european traditions - (london: harvey miller publishers, ). see john a. a. goodall, god’s house at ewelme: life, devotion, and architecture in a fifteenth-century almshouse (farnham, uk: ashgate, ), . for more on the monogram of christ, see alva william steffler, symbols of the christian faith (grand rapids, mi: wm. b. eerdmans publishing co., ). the monogram reflects perceptions of the theological meaning and role of christ’s name. its origin may be based on biblical verses, primarily philippians : , “a name which is above all names: that in the name of jesus every knee should bow, of those that are in heaven, on earth and under earth,” and acts : , “for there is no other name under heaven given to men whereby we may be saved, everyone that shall call upon the name of the lord shall be saved.” the monograms were seen in the medieval period as visual extensions of the mass and the eucharist in particular, and act as visual backdrops of both the liturgy and alice’s tomb. the importance of accessibility and the relationship between the viewer and these objects forms a central part of this investigation. as david areford explains, accessibility to images and the viewers’ reactions to them change not only the perception of a work, but also its very function. granted, areford was originally noting these facets in the context of print culture in both northern and southern europe. however, that same questions of accessibility, and of a simultaneously private and shared public experience, are of vital importance in consideration of transi tombs, as the overwhelming majority of tombs assume viewership as an inherently important aspect of their design as objects occupying space to be engaged with and experienced. alina payne summarizes this state biblical references from king james bible (cambridge: chadwyck-healey, ). see john o'brien, a history of the mass and its ceremonies in the eastern and western church (new york: catholic publication society, ), ; laurent adamowicz, “religious symbols: ‘ihs’ son of ‘ios’ the carpenter,” the chronicle of the early american industries association, inc. , ( ): – , esp. . david areford, the viewer and the printed image in late medieval europe (new york: ashgate, ). for additional explanation as to how images and their place within the public sphere changed course throughout the late medieval period, see david s. areford, nina rowe, and sandra hindman. eds., excavating the medieval image: manuscripts, artists, audiences, essays in honor of sandra hindman (farnham, uk: ashgate pub. limited, ). as a half-way point between the experience of objects with architecture, what is called kleinarchitektur (small architecture). the public accessibility of a memorial precipitate inevitable applications to mortality as a central theme. christine m. boeckl notes this conclusion by illustrating a difference between twenty-first century versus early modern depictions of death. primarily, variations between the eras emerge, she argues, based on the public nature of the earlier artistic works. boeckl’s work, originally focusing on images of the black death, can be expanded to other examples of the public nature of images of mass death and the important social role of memorials. accordingly, these tomb memorials, like that of alice de la pole (figure . ) and henry chichele—both focal points in their respective churches—were not meant to be viewed in private for personal reflection alone, but as the public performance of mortality and the liturgy. epitaphs seemingly being uttered by the dead are spoken directly to the living in this public and liturgical setting. similar to the case with other images, this discourse establishes “a unique longstanding devotional impulse to interact with the image.” this association among viewership, dialogue, and meaning underscores what areford referred to as a work’s unique quality, in this case, one that is singularly situated to the public function of memorials. with this finding in mind, it is worth considering how alice’s tomb problematizes these images of death and remembrance. images in alice de la pole’s tomb, particularly the paintings of the annunciation and mary alina payne, “materiality, crafting, and scale in renaissance architecture,” oxford art journal , no. ( ): – . christine m. boeckl, images of plague and pestilence: iconography and iconology (kirksville, mo: truman state university press, ). areford, the viewer and the printed image, . magdalen above her transi, appear to her as if in a vision, reenacting and reaffirming the tradition of mysticism among holy laywomen, a hallmark of the late medieval period that reified the importance of vision as vital to religious experiences. the setting of alice’s tomb further enhances this experience by alluding to a longitudinal experience of death, one grounded in a familial legacy linked to numerous local and national events and developments. the coffins of alice’s parents are located in the same chapel in a shallower relief sarcophagus, complete with two brass memorial plaques featuring their likenesses (figure . ). thomas’ family’s crest of a unicorn is at his feet, with his wife’s family represented by the stylized burghersh lion. while the representation of thomas is wearing a full suit of armor, including a helmet, sword and scabbard, his wife’s image is adorned in a simple mantle, veil, and wimple. the slab and tomb are made of marble, and includes a coat of arms in each of the four corners. the sides of the tomb are covered with a series of eleven gothic arches, two engraved shields placed below the apogee of each arch, with the exception of a blank arch at the head of the sarcophagus (figure . ). the heraldic symbols trace the lineage of the see teresa brennan and martin jay, vision in context: historical and contemporary perspectives on sight (new york: routledge, ), – ; also, caroline walker bynum, holy feast and holy fast: the religious significance of food to medieval women (berkeley: university of california press: ). the chaucer family tomb and heraldic shields are discussed in e. a. greening lamborn, “the arms on the chaucer tomb at ewelme with a note on the early manorial history of the parish,” oxoniensia ( ): – . an original description of the tomb from the accompanying church record reads: “thomas chaucer, the last heire male of the chaucers, and owner of ewhelme and donnington castle, the inheritance of the chaucers, lieth buried in a black marble tombe in a faire chappell in the parish church of ewhelme, in the south side of the quier,” with a small epitaph bearing the names of both thomas and matilda chaucer, as well as their respective death dates. see william thynne, the workes of geffray chaucer newly printed, with dyuers workes which were neuer in print before, and etc., ed. brian tukem (london: thomas godfray, ), ff. xiii–ccclxxxiii. chaucer family across multiple centuries, including relations among four generations. the chaucer tomb and engravings were likely completed as part of the chapel in , coinciding with the licensing of the church’s hospital wing. as with henry chichele’s tomb, this inclusion of a political dynasty extends the reach and impact of the memorial across the space it occupies. alice’s heritage was linked to the political aspirations and position of her father. beyond serving as the speaker of the house, thomas chaucer represented the county as a member of parliament for years and was privy to royal circles of influence. in particular, he was a relation of john of gaunt ( – ), a leading church reformist and figure within the house of plantagenet, a position which facilitated chaucer’s rise to prominence, but which also created a political and public persona for alice. ultimately, chaucer positioned his daughter as a likely recipient of his political status, securing her place within civic and religious circles, eventually resulting in the purchase of donnington castle in berkshire for her and her progeny. alice soon became an important figure throughout the south of england, clearly associated with her family’s ever-growing the authenticity of the familial distinctions has been debated, with greening lamborn noting that the tomb is “representing one of the largest and most interesting collections of mediaeval coats to be found on any tomb in england, the arms on the chaucer tomb at ewelme have never been competently examined, so that the persons represented by them have been only partially, and sometimes incorrectly, identified. the most recent account of them, in the otherwise admirable notes on the church compiled by a late rector, is of little genealogical or heraldic value; and the account in the first volume of the oxford journal of monumental brasses is of no value at all: ‘others to some faint meaning make pretence but shadwell never deviates into sense.’” lamborn, arms on the chaucer tomb, . goodall, god’s house at ewelme, . see william hunt, “thomas chaucer,” in dictionary of national biography, vol. , ed. stephen leslie (london: smith, elder & co., ), – . the lineage and accession of donnington castle during and after alice’s lifetime is fully described in henry godwin, “on donnington castle, berkshire,” archaeologia , no. ( ): – . network and emergent wealth. this status resulted in her becoming well-sought after by suitors, eventually leading to three marriages and four betrothals. completed around , soon after her death, it is likely that alice’s alabaster tomb was repositioned within the chantry chapel, evidenced by the shortening of the tomb’s sides closest to the base of the lower canopy. the canopy of the tomb is constructed of a series of sculpted layers, which is then trifurcated into additional overlapping sections. similar to henry chichele’s tomb, alice’s tomb is comprised of three distinct sculpted strata: an elaborate sculpted canopy, effigy, and the transi, with a series of frescoes placed above the transi’s body at the feet and closed eyes. the paintings are difficult to ascertain by the standing viewer, being placed behind a complex latticework of columns, as they are designed instead as if to represent a simulated vision for the corpse or alice’s ascending soul as its primary viewer. the tomb’s canopy includes a top stratum of geometric shapes of interlocking acanthus leaves above a series of quatrefoils. finally, a trio of crown-wearing angels comprise each of the sections of the final, bottom layer. the top layers of the sculpted canopy include various heraldic and religious symbols, including gothic quatrefoils below a top layer of tudor roses. this final image is particularly relevant to the lifetime of the duchess, as she was involved with the ongoing events of the war of the roses, and her son had become a part of the tudor dynasty. anderson, alice chaucer and her husbands, – . goodall, god’s house at ewelme, . elizabeth fowler posits that the placement of the columns is central for the viewer’s experience of the transi, requiring a position of kneeling, approaching the tomb as if in prayer. see elizabeth fowler, “the duchess and the cadaver: doubling and microarchitecture in late medieval art, with alice chaucer and john lydgate,” in personification: embodying meaning and emotion, eds. walter melion and bart ramakers (leiden: brill, ), – . alice’s political ascendency and philanthropic dedication is underscored by ongoing changes in religious beliefs as reformists’ teachings took hold in england. her tomb and achievements within saint mary’s church and ewelme are testament to these tenuous shifts. the duchess’ attire is complex and textured. the detail in her tomb invites contemplation of her social status and explicates the experience of women in the late medieval era by suggesting differences in self-fashioning and presentation compared to prominent men. she is wearing a coronet and robes commonly associated with women who had taken vows with the church. her adorned head rests on a pillow, carved with attention to the gaping of fabric at her neck and even to the tassels at the pillow’s edge. above her head is elaborate tracery featuring ogee arches and lines of flowering plants and leaves, vines, and trefoil arches. she wears a wimple and veil under her headpiece, and a rosary is twisted around her belt, partly concealed by her robes at the right hand, hip pocket. her feet lie atop a crouching lion, a possible heraldic reference to her matrilineal crest or to england itself, whose head rests on the right side of the effigy with the tail slightly wrapped around the left side. despite her involvement in political and potentially military operations, no references are made to her associations and accomplishments during the war of the roses or within the house of york. conversely, a rose, decorated with red polychrome to resemble the emblem of the house of lancaster, is placed at the opposing side of the effigy. surrounding the tomb is a brass inscription, a nineteenth-century recreation of the original text, which had read: “pray for the soul of the most serene princess alice, for information on the heraldic connection of lions with england, see andrew stewart jamieson, coats of arms (stroud, uk: pitkin, ), esp. – . duchess of suffolk, patron of this church and first founder of this almshouse, who died on th day of may in the year of our lord , [dominical letter a.]” her husband is not mentioned here as a co-founder of the almshouse, and the meaning of the dominical letter and its significance are unclear. the inscription does not include typical references to popularized late medieval epitaphs, such as that of henry chichele’s corpse poem, for example. like that of her parents, the duchess’ tomb incorporates an extensive presentation of familial heraldic heritage. these include references to the de la pole, chaucer, burghersh, and montague families, effectively representing all of alice’s familial and spousal relations, with the exception of her first, short-lived marriage. as is a typical practice with most effigies of females, in comparison with popularized images of men, alice’s tomb does not include allusions to soldiery, weaponry, or armor. in seeking to understand how alice’s tomb exceeds its function of memorializing her singular life, it is helpful to consider its various components as material performances, and as an object enmeshed in social relations and activating a socio- “orate pro anima serenissimae principessae aliciae ducissae suffolchiae, huius ecclesiae patronae, & prmae fundatricis huijus elemosynariae quae obtiit die mensis maij; anno di. , litera dominicali a.” see eleanor prescott hammon, chaucer; a bibliographical manual (new york: the macmillan co, ), . in addition, eight heraldic symbols are presented on the side of the tomb, and include, at the south, four references to the de la pole family. the heraldry of the roet family, alice’s uncle and aunt, are included. the shields are subdivided into one for the montague, monthermer, and burghersh families, two for the chaucers, and one referencing france and england. the north side features four references to the de la pole family, two combinations of the roet and chaucer families, one for the burghersh family, and one recognizing the montague, monthermer and mohun families. see rachel dressler, “gender as spectacle and construct: the gyvernay effigies at st. mary’s church, limington,” different visions: a journal of new perspectives on medieval art ( ): – , esp. – . communicative function. this importance of seeing works as extensions of their initial purpose is asserted by arjun appadurai, who noted that: even if our own approach to things is conditioned necessarily by the view that things have no meanings apart from those human transactions, attributions, and motivations endow them with, the anthropological problem is that this formal truth does not illuminate the concrete, historical circulation of things. for that, we have to follow the things themselves, for their meanings are inscribed in their forms, their uses, their trajectories. it is only through the analysis of these trajectories that we can interpret the human transactions and calculations that enliven things. by investigating the meaning of the social life of the object, viewers become active participants in both viewing and establishing ongoing and evolving meanings, as artifacts establish what appadurai refers to as “the flow of social relations.” malcolm baker claims that an investigation into materiality itself is an inquiry into how materials substantiated and promoted ways of knowing, augmenting what chris gosden and yvonne marshall refer to as “the cultural biography of objects.” social theorist niklas luhmann has explained how viewers become emmeshed in a social artistic experience— like walking around a vivid transi tomb or reading a corpse poem by “exist[ing] within its environment, whether as artists who make artworks, or as recipients who observe them and perhaps produce communications about them.” this interaction of the image of the arjun appadurai, the social life of things: commodities in cultural perspective, cambridge studies in social and cultural anthropology (cambridge, uk: cambridge university press, ), . ibid., . see chris gosden and marshall yvonne, “the cultural biography of objects,” world archaeology , no. ( ): – . hans van maanen, “niklas luhmann’s system of artistic communications,” in how to study art worlds: on the societal functioning of aesthetic values (amsterdam: amsterdam university press, ), – ; esp. . the foundation of communication and the explanation of art as being dialogic is specifically noted in niklas luhmann, art as a social system (stanford, ca: stanford university press, ), – . effigy with the viewer is a further exemplification of what rachel dressler posits as the sharing of vision and participation. in particular, she suggests that the viewer forms an inherently important link with the effigy through the memorial of the dead: for beholders, tomb effigies provided the occasion for the good work of prayers on another's behalf and for the contemplation of one's own death and the need for preparation. all who participated in devotional practices surrounding the medieval tomb forged a link between heaven and earth, and between the past, the lifetime of the deceased and her or his ancestors, and the future through the viewer's contemplation and prayer. the effigy of alice as the duchess of suffolk at the middle layer of the tomb, situated below approximately five feet of open air beneath the canopy (figure . ), invites such contemplation about how materiality and the durable presence of stone illustrates the permanent nature of the soul and the solidity of alice’s ongoing public memorial. similar to the connection between materiality and its socio-communicative force, it is difficult to remove the emotional and psychological element of mourning and commemorating from the performative nature of memorials. that same process of reflection is part of what baker referred to in his conclusions on the phenomenon of viewership, when he explained that the viewer considers the transformation of matter into art, contemplating how natural elements were fashioned into an image. visions are tethered to the experiences of the senses throughout the medieval era. for more information on the sensory connection of images, see jacqueline jung, “the tactile and the visionary: notes on the place of sculpture in the medieval religious imagination,” in looking beyond: visions, dreams, and insights in medieval art and history, ed. colum hourihane (princeton: index of christian art, ), – . dressler, gender as spectacle and construct, . for a consideration of the permanence of stone as emblematic of the nature of the soul and the function of effigies as public memorial see catherine maxwell, “michael field, death, and the effigy,” word & image , no. ( ): – , esp. . for more information on the shared linked between materiality and viewership, see malcolm baker, “epilogue: making and knowing, then and now,” in ways of making and knowing: the material beyond theological or political aims and assertions of self-fashioning, tombs function within distinct confines of funerary objectives, charged with the possibility of creating reactions in the viewer. this process of viewing and engaging with tombs like alice de la pole’s and henry chichele’s is tethered to what sigmund freud alluded to as the connection between memory and grief, or melancholie, the important function of mourning as parcel to understanding mortality. ultimately, however, the past emerges like walter benjamin’s “angel of history,” whose gaze is affixed on historical ruin. memorials are a reconstitution of this path and of the notion of ruins, with tombs providing a sense of potential closure to destruction. david eng and david kazanjian summarize this process as “figuring the past as an object of melancholic longing which, unlike the object of mourning, will not assume a kind of fixity that enables its dis- attachment from the ego. … [m]elancholia becomes a mechanism for maintaining a productive engagement with the past that weds the personal with the cultural.” beyond this connection to grief rites and rituals of memorializing, tombs also facilitate a connection across time with the expectation of renewed life. in this way alice de la culture of empirical knowledge, eds. pamela h. smith, amy r. w. meyers, and harold j. cook (ann arbor: university of michigan press, ), – . although baker’s work is primarily situated in the later eighteenth century, his explanation of the connection between materials and experiences is applicable to this analysis, as well as to the other aspects of the late medieval period. sigmund freud, “mourning and melancholia,” the standard edition of the complete psychological works of sigmund freud. vol. ( – ): on the history of the psycho-analytic movement, papers on metapsychology, and other works, eds. james strachey and anna freud (london: the hogarth press, ), – . see andrew benjamin, walter benjamin and history: walter benjamin studies (london: continuum international publishing, ). for a summary of the role of history in understanding the role of art, see georges didi-huberman, confronting images: questioning the ends of a certain history of art (university park, pa: pennsylvania state university press, ). david l. eng and david kazanjian, eds. loss: the politics of mourning (berkeley: university of california press, ), . pole’s tomb is both a memorial to her accomplished life and corporeal decay, as well as a reminder of her soul’s—and the viewer’s—aspirations for renewal and immortality. visions and interactions: materiality and womanhood in alice’s tomb alice and william de la pole had together founded “god’s house,” saint mary’s almshouse in , adjacent to the church. it was originally given its license under henry vi, but did not start operation until twenty years after its licensure. the public role of almshouses was under revision during alice’s lifetime, a situation affected by john wycliffe’s writings about the mission of the church in its instruction of belief toward the poor and the role of charitable giving. almshouses had served the needs of the poor in england since at least . the function of late medieval english almshouses had been tethered to a spirit of labor and devotion, in that they specifically were “to provide accommodations for poor men who had outlived their working life and were willing to submit to a cloistered, rigorous, devotional life.” the number of almshouses in england was slowly increasing during the period of its founding, as a rising amount of private donations and investments reflected a shift in public sentiment and philanthropic interest. the ewelme church, nearby hospital, and almshouse were initially built to house and care for the clergy and the poor. primarily, the original intent of almshouses was to goodall, god’s house at ewelme, – . eric midwinter, the development of social welfare in britain (buckingham, uk: open university press, ). thomas barrie, review of god’s house at ewelme: life, devotion and architecture in a fifteenth-century almshouse, by john goodall, ed. ian hayward, apt bulletin , no. ( ): . john goodall’s analysis of god’s house at ewelme is one of the strongest studies of the site, including a rich amount of description on the physical details of the church. see john a. a. goodall, god’s house at ewelme: life, devotion, and architecture in a fifteenth-century almshouse (farnham, uk: ashgate, ). now after nearly six hundred years of operation, both almsmen and almswomen continue to administer the almshouse, with five people permanently residing in the almshouse cloister. for current provide for the poor while decreasing the patron-devotee’s time in purgatory through the performance of good works and prayer. god’s house was founded by alice as a part of church teachings concerning spiritual salvation and, fulfilling the chantry mission of almshouse, residents performed daily devotions as part of the requirements for their residency. this mission and function were “typical of hundreds of perpetual chantry foundations established in fifteenth-century england,” an operation that continued throughout subsequent decades. despite her pronounced philanthropic and political presence, the differences between alice de la pole’s memorial and that of renowned men in england are vast and significant as markers of political representations and self-fashionings. an examination of alice’s tomb presents unique ways to understand the body as a confluence of gendered discourse, a suggestion of “body history,” well presented by kathleen canning who noted: [a]ll of those processes that mark the body through specific rituals and practices – punishment, torture, medicalised observations, sexuality and pleasure – denote bodies that represent ‘an uncontrollable, unpredictable threat to a regular, systematic mode of social organisation’. positing a place for agency in the discursively constituted subject, … the body is not only marked by coercive forces, but is ‘internally lived, experienced and acted upon by the subject and the social collectivity.’ information on the status of the church, almshouse and school, see “history of st. mary’s church, ewelme: a brief introduction,” friends of ewelme church, accessed on october , , http://www.friendsofewelmechurch.co.uk/history/caring-for-the-village-people-from-the-cradle-to-the- grave/. barrie, review of god’s house, . goodall, god’s house, . kathleen canning, “the body as method? reflections on the place of the body in gender history,” gender & history , no. ( ): – . alice de la pole’s tomb represents a novel construction of gender that is atypical of the social organizational tropes and the representations of a gendered body that were popularized prior to its creation. despite her extensive experience in political and civic matters, the duchess’ tomb is atypical of the glorification of a nationalistic and militaristic state that were common with representations of men, particularly with governmental or religious leaders such as archbishop henry chichele. this combination of religious object and architecture emblematizes kleinarchitektur, in which the sculpted facets of alice’s tomb advance principles of memorialization, while underscoring a distinctly gendered approach to tomb construction. her tomb can instead be tethered to the physicality of death and the association of womanhood with the sensual experiences of the divine. beyond the shared focus on a detailed effigy and a complex canopy in both alice’s and henry’s tombs, as well as their reliance on stratifications and layers, insights can be gleaned by discussing differences between these two tombs, particularly in relation to gender. in order to better understand the social constructions of gender and gender difference, or at least the performance thereof, these constructs must be dismantled and examined through a larger consideration of dominant cultural, theological, and political ideologies. feminist art historians norma broude and mary garrard suggest that current theorists should consider the impact of the exclusion of men in depictions of women. in most effigies of women, a reference to a spouse or the inclusion of a spousal effigy is common practice as a key norma broude and mary garrard, eds., the expanding discourse: feminism and art history (boulder, co: westview press, ); geraldine a. johnson, “pictures fit for a queen: peter paul reubens and the marie de’ medici cycle,” in reclaiming female agency: feminist art history after postmodernism, eds. norma broude and mary d. garrard (berkeley: university of california press, ), – , esp. – . aspect of identity construction. notably, alice’s tomb does not feature any references to her husbands’ military or wartime successes, nor are there allusions to her growing civic accomplishments. her political achievements are posited as an extension of her religiosity, which is combined with occasional references to militaristic motifs. her alabaster multi-tiered coronet and outfit, complete with emblems of christianity and armor, denote a position of social, theological, and soldierly capital. instead of the assortment of political leaders and heavenly strata of saints and archangels featured in henry chichele’s tomb, alice’s tomb features myriad angels on a variety of plateaus and serving myriad functions, extending above her canopy and then unto the ceiling of the chancery chapel. near the top of the tomb, angels are presented in a position of prayer with their robes alternating in design across the lintel. four wooden figures stand atop pinnacles that rise above the canopy on each side of the tomb, positioned in a conventional stance of praise or prayer (figure . ). each figure is uniquely attired, with outfits ranging from feathers to cloth vestments to combinations of the two. their hands are held in gestures that may indicate the holding of actual devotional objects. the position of their faces suggests that they are placed so that the remainder of the chapel would be within their line of vision. atop the tomb, a series of wooden angels with shields line the interior of the chapel. these angels have fully enlarged wings, distinct facial features, flowing hair, robes covered with feathers, and gauntlets across their arms. along the lintels, the angels are shown from the waist upward, with the lower half of the torso covered by a pronounced shield. overhead, the angels are crowned and some are adorned with additional wings below their torsos, a slight suggestion that the angels may be grouped into orders such as denominations, seraphim, or cherubim. at the base of the plinths of the wooden angelic figures are a number of angels whose gestures appear to be undulating, as the position of each angel includes hand and arm gestures that are non-symmetrical or patterned. the costuming of each angel varies, including some angels wearing armor and others clerical vestments such as a monk’s robe, although the specific order is difficult to determine. these nine angels form the border of the canopy, with eyes looking downward toward the viewer and alice de la pole’s effigy. a complex series of angels are placed on the bottom tier of the tomb that surround her transi. a total of eight angels are positioned on either side of the tomb, their eyes looking forward, while holding heraldic shields and wearing liturgical gowns or armor, with some angels being crowned with simple tiaras. their wings are some of the most detailed on the tomb, with individual feathers and mesh armor carved in relief. beyond the costuming of the angels, bellicose overtones are not included in the remainder of the tomb, effectively synthesizing religious and militaristic depictions as a fundamental aspect of alice’s memorial. the final set of angels are on the pillow of the effigy and surround the transi of the tomb. unlike the angels on other strata, these angels are positioned with their limbs and torsos placed in active positions, even intersecting the pillow tassels and fabric. they wear full body amour, complete with individually gilded scales. their wings, fully each of these varying ranks of angels, their physical descriptions, and the relegations of orders are described in steven chase, angelic spirituality: medieval perspectives on the ways of angels (costa mesa, ca: paulist press, ). for additional aspects the differing orders of angels, see amy gillette, “the music of angels in byzantine and post-byzantine art,” peregrinations: journal of medieval art and architecture , no. ( ): – , esp. – . outstretched and surrounding their bodies, are positioned at the edges of the pillows, with their eyes turned toward alice’s face, positioned to be holding alice’s pillow aloft and seemingly communicating with her (figure . ). unlike the angels that surround alice’s tomb, these figures appear to be accompanying and interacting with her at the point of death and beyond. they lean toward her face, support her pillow, and gesture upward. this same visual device is included in henry’s chichele’s tomb, which also features a grouping of angels at his feet who gesture toward a prayerbook as other angels kneel nearby. the iconography and distinctions of angelic orders had been well-advanced by the fifth century through the writings of pseudo-dionysius the areopagite in de coelesti hierarchia and continued to be a point of interest in the widespread writings of saint thomas aquinas, whose public awareness became pronounced in the early modern period. beyond a ranking of angels, this repeated grouping of angels suggests a re- enactment of the ars moriendi. written and popularized by , artists and viewers throughout europe would have been familiar with its details disseminated in illustrated pamphlets, especially during the social and religious upheavals of the late fifteenth century (figure . ). contrary to the depictions of the ars moriendi, with demons grappling with angels over the ensuing journey of the deceased person’s soul, the angels of alice’s tomb have already started on the spiritual journey as they chaperone her soul to the role of angels and the variety of strata of angelic orders are well summarized in chase, angelic spirituality, – . for information on aquinas, see ralph m. mcinerny, selected writings of thomas aquinas (new york: penguin books, ), . for more information on the role of the ars moriendi in the medieval period, see john raymond shinners, medieval popular religion, – : a reader (peterborough, canada: broadview press, ), esp. – . the afterlife. the host of demons has been replaced by a phalanx of angels who guide the spirit that has been released from the decaying flesh of the transi to the realm of a celestial and heavenly plane. accompanying angels, themselves small in stature and slight in build, effortlessly lift the soul and the reconstituted corpus of the deceased, a reimagination of the physicality of the matter and weight of the newly unified soul and body. the suggestion of mobility, well-presented through the sculpted fluttering wings of angels and garments of angels, depicts the upward and heavenly trajectory of the soul through a kinetic revitalization of the effigy. the inclusion of angels throughout the chapel and on alice’s tomb is notable. ranging from the relatively minute angels near her effigy to the sentinel angels at the top of her tomb to the sizable angels that hover overhead holding the monogram of jesus christ, there is a pervasive presence of angelic orders. each figure seems to be associated with a specific tier or layer, as the design of angels on one level is not replicated in any other. beyond the strata that are associated with transi tombs, the angels occupy disparate and unique echelons, resembling an ascendance that alice’s soul might encounter at the last judgment. the use of angels as carriers for the soul is an ancient motif, but a variation in this depiction departs from earlier representations. in referencing popularized woodcuts from ars moriendi, moshe barash explains, “the saved soul's ascension, is usually portrayed as an angel holding a soul in the shape of a new born babe in his hand and carrying it to heaven.” in this case, alice’s adult effigy is conflated with a newborn soul, being ushered to heaven through ranks of attending angels, reminding the viewer of moshe barasch, “the departing soul: the long life of a medieval creation,” artibus et historiae , no. ( ): – , at . a good death as afforded by the ars moriendi, while also suggesting the eventuality of salvation. unlike the revitalization suggested by alice’s effigy, her transi on the lowest level of the tomb is stripped of individualized references. the transi is almost completely nude, with one hand placed at her side and at the base of her waist (figure . ). no personal indicators of gender are included, with the exception of the noticeable presence of her breasts. her corpse is partly encased in a shroud that is tied at the head and feet. alice's shriveled and desiccated transi is shown with slightly opened eyes staring upward at the ceiling of her sepulcher on which two murals appear. above her half open eyes is a mural showing an image of the annunciation (figure . ) and over her feet, john the baptist and mary magdalene hover (figure . ). the hues of the murals are primarily gold, green, and red, with pronounced black outlines. suitably for alice’s tomb as an assertion of her importance and piety, both images feature prominent women in the holy story. they are singled out visually for the viewer and for the corpse itself in the repeated gesture of the finger-point: gabriel interrupts the virgin mary from her prayerbook at the inception of christ, and saint john the baptist points to the sacrificial lamb and in mary magdalen’s direction, signaling her privileged role in christ’s sacrifice and then resurrection. the transi’s eyes are positioned directly below the image of the virgin mary (figure . ), as if the first image made visible to alice upon her soul’s ascension. the combination of both images of women suggests a trajectory that unites alice and her christian foremothers as agents in the foundation of the church and the collective body of christ, a gendered presentation of women awaiting the point of resurrection. this association between women across time periods extends beyond a typological interpretation to form a visual counter-action against dominant male focused discourse, presenting a shared gendered experience of marginalization alongside images of empowerment and societal recognition. alice’s tomb itself acts as a visual counter- action to dominant male paradigms, while also suggesting the unique path toward agency and power that was part of alice’s social biography. for the viewer, alice’s tomb is both a statement to the changing concepts of the soul and to the emergent possibilities of powerful women in the early modern period. viewership of alice’s tomb in the practice of death: a consideration of gender during the late medieval era, the corpse was conceived as being only partially gendered, a state of ontological imbalance that was to be rectified during resurrection. this fragmentation is noted by peter diehl, who advocates conceiving of resurrection through the analogy of “beasts regurgitating their prey so that they can be made whole again at last judgment.” transi tombs function in this same manner, with the decaying body associating with the vitality of the deceased through their memorial effigy. bynum asserts that this belief was underscored by societal fears of biological processes, particularly in consideration of corporeal decomposition. the shifting ideologies concerning the presence of the body and function of the soul take on novel meanings in for a discussion of images being used as references to longitudinal struggles for female empowerment, see sonja. k. foss, “judy chicago’s ‘the dinner party’: empowering of women’s voice in visual art,” in women communicating: studies of women's talk, eds. barbara bate and anita taylor (norwood, n.j.: ablex pub. corp., ), – , esp. – . see peter d. diehl, review of fragmentation and redemption: essays on gender and the human body in medieval religion, by carolyne walker bynum. comitatus: a journal of renaissance studies , no. ( ): – . for more information on the gendered concept of the soul and the importance of corporal return, see caroline walker bynum, the resurrection of the body in western christianity, – (new york: columbia university press, ). this era, especially in relation to gender distinctions made visible in art. the experience of death during this period was assumed to be potentially colored by gender difference, with religious experiences among women characterized in terms of bodily and metaphysical encounters and visions. these tensions are apparent in the construction of both effigies and transi tomb, with variations between men and women showcasing disparate meanings for the representation of death and remembrance. bynum has noted that the position of women’s experiences in the late medieval period was one of heightened sensuality associated with corporeality. her observations were linked to the experience of food and bodily fluids, particularly in relation to the eucharist and to mary’s milk, as well as to the shared sacrifice of blood, but the sensuality of the female body—as being both a source of and susceptible to temptation— is also parcel to the same explanation. she argues that women had been associated with food and holy images, and assumed to understand “the opportunity of physicality” and union with god. the function of female genitalia, assumed to link only to reproduction or temptation, are offset by the presentation of alice’s breasts. in the case of alice’s transi, her breasts are viewable and pronounced, but her genitals are completely obscured by both hands and a shroud. contrary to the transi of men, where similar poses of concealing the genitals—only partially covered with one hand, in the case of henry chichele— were typical throughout the medieval period, women’s breasts were see additional information about the role of the body and senses in the medieval period in bynum, holy feast and holy fast, – . ibid., . illustrative of a nurturing and nonsexual female. this depiction is reified in the case of the virgin mary with her milk being offered as a counterpart to christ’s redeeming blood. both genders were depicted in tomb sculpture as reenacting the great shame of original sin, but only women featured pronounced withering breasts, and women’s genitals were associated with eve and temptation. cultural historian gail hawkes has posited that the medieval view of female genitalia was to see it as an outward sign of anatomical and social incompleteness among females, substantiating claims that women were morally suspect, passive, and needy of spiritual guidance. this demonstrative gesture of female shame was based on the christian guilt associated with the fall, as women were cast as temptresses who possessed a sexuality that was perceived as “a direct threat to the inherent moral supremacy of men.” death itself was assumed to quell these inadequacies by removing the sexualized nature of females that were inherited from the legacy of eve, and also by showing, as in alice’s transi, female ‘wetness’ becoming dried out and asexualized with age. death—that is, mortality—is also a consequence of the legacy of eve in the first place, too. further, as bynum concludes, though flesh could be seen as male or female, there is medieval see elizabeth bolman, “the enigmatic coptic galaktotrophousa and the cult of the virgin mary in egypt,” in images of the mother of god: perceptions of the theotokos in byzantium, ed. maria vassilaki (london: ashgate publishing, ), – . willy jansen and grietje dresen, “fluid matters: gendering holy blood and holy milk,” in things: religion and the question of materiality, eds. dick houtman and meyer birgit (new york: fordham university press, ), – . see gail hawkes, a sociology of sex and sexuality (buckingham, uk: open university press, ), . ibid., ; . sander l. gilman, sexuality: an illustrated history (new york: wiley, ). variation as to the nature of the soul, at times in line with ancient greek thought, in which higher spirit is assumed to be male, while earthly body is female, while some conceptualization of the soul as a distinctly feminine entity can be found in both liturgy and literature by the middle of the twelfth century. alice’s transi furthers these tensions, while also suggesting that the experience of death and resurrection might continue to be gendered, with variations of a shadow memory of the time of the fall lying dormant, if not for alice in resurrection then for viewers of the tomb from the time of the fall continuing to affect women even after death until the last judgment. in alice de la pole’s sculpted tomb, as opposed to the painted murals above her corpse, there is also a sense of the visionary as leading the deceased in a transmigration of the soul—and the viewer to imagine that—in movement across the strata of the tomb suggested by the multiple tiers of angelic orders that adorn the canopy. upon the resuscitation of the soul and its movement vertically up through the strata of transi, a resurrected alice would first encounter images of the annunciation. a painting of gabriel and mary hovering above her transi’s eyes, partially obscured from the viewer and acting as a vision awaiting her acknowledgment, would only be fully seen by alice as her soul reversed the trajectory of her body’s entombment. the layers of her transi tomb suggest a literal progression, moving from the early confines of a grave upward toward levels of attentive angelic hosts. the four sentinel angels placed atop alice’s tomb would serve two functions: both as guides for her soul’s aspirant resurrection and as see caroline walker bynum, “the body of christ in the later middle ages: a reply to leo steinberg,” renaissance quarterly , no. ( ): – . bynum also suggests that the conceptualization of the female nature of the soul may simply be due to the linguistic classification of the feminized latin term anima as an indicator for a human soul, regardless of the gender of the deceased person. guardians for the soul itself, waiting in slumber until that final day. the addition of the monogram of jesus christ completes the trajectory of the soul progressing through layers toward immortality, returning from the grave with its decaying corporeality before being revived with human flesh to ultimately proceed toward the divine. as also explored in the tomb of archbishop henry chichele, the layers appear to suggest transitory movement, with upward mobility across strata of heavenly presences. in both instances, the visual experience of the viewer and his or her ability to engage bodily with, and imagine entering into, the complex states and spheres presented in the tomb structures is intensified through the features of sculpture. the dimensionality and materiality of the unpainted alabaster—increasing in abstraction that way if without color—intensifies this effect of moving to the divine sphere where neither time nor color hold sway. the inability for a living person to fully experience or portray the act of dying or migration of the soul deepens the visual and visceral impact of encountering transi tombs in their full staging as kleinarchitektur. emergent beliefs about the presence of the anti- christ, an upcoming apocalypse preceding final judgment, and the near constant presence of plague and sporadic natural events paved the way for universal conclusions about the meaning of bodily death and its omnipresence folded into life, and vice versa, regardless of gender. signs and symbols of the imminence of decay proliferated in the late medieval period, with artists attempting to showcase through tombs a suggestion of life through an effigy and its inevitable negation through the transi. in the case of transi tombs, binski suggests that “the effigy functioned as ‘a simulacrum,’ a substitute, but one see caroline walker bynum and paul freedman, last things: death and the apocalypse in the middle ages (philadelphia: university of pennsylvania press, ). which not only replaced but powerfully erased the thing, the natural body, whose form it suggests in perpetuity, even as the natural body engaged in a process of decay below.” viewing an effigy would have prompted an imaginative association with the corpse. the tomb was only a temporary and illusory container. complicating this contention, the visual presence of a transi with the effigy allowed for a suggestion of decay and resurrection to occur simultaneously. we might say, then, that tomb is both simulacrum and temporal fulcrum in that respect. ultimately, the question must be posed whether death-as-corpse functions with any gender associated with it at all. indeed, as joseph koerner has summarized: the dead body comes to haunt the living not only as an inert object of contemplation… but also as an animated being who installs himself in the midst of earthly society and mingles in [daily] affairs. the message of the dance of death, mors monia aequat (death makes everything equal), expresses itself in the featureless corpse. although koerner was writing about the art of hans baldung grien ( – ) during the reformation in germany, which feature a personified specter of death, similar conclusions can be reached about memorial sculptures throughout much of europe. death became not only present in the unidentifiable visage of the transi, stripped of worldly accouterments and individualized achievements, but in the final sojourn across corporeal binski, medieval death, . jessica barker, “stone and bone: the corpse, the effigy, and the viewer in late-medieval tomb sculpture,” in revisiting the monument: fifty years since panofsky’s ‘tomb sculpture,’ eds. ann adams and jessica barker (london: the courtauld institute of art, ), – . koerner, moment of self-portraiture, . effigies, a journey that ends in the celestial visions suggested and incorporated in the memorial canopies of henry chichele and alice de la pole. beyond allusions to presumed dialogue with viewers, the materiality of alice’s tomb presents distinct impressions and the possibility of multiple conclusions. transi were primarily constructed of stone, with accompanying elements such as funeral achievements made of wood, metal, leather, or fibers. variations with effigies were also common, including differences in metal, stone, and occasionally jewels. viewership was also affected by the presentation of innovative materials, particularly in regard to sculpture. as christopher wood explains, in the case of sculpture and winged altarpieces the viewer responds in a more experiential, tactile manner than when confronted by two- dimensional painting. unlike painting or a variety of other mediums, sculpture is materially and experientially exclusive in its demands, with the viewer able to engage a work visually but also in a tactile and kinetic manner. the phenomenological reaction to sculpture is unusual in that it is fulfilling multiple functions, especially when linked to the presentation of verisimilitude, grounded in forms that link to dimensionality, physicality, and sensuality.. see christopher wood, “germany's blind renaissance,” in infinite boundaries: order, disorder, and reorder in early modern german culture, sixteenth century essays and studies, vol. , ed. max reinhart (kirksville, mo: truman state university press, ), – . both authors suggest that the experience of sculpture is grounded not only in its multidimensional qualities but in the iconography and cultural milieu that underscore the materials of its creation. see baxandall, limewood sculptors, – , and koerner, moment of self-portraiture, – . this point is extended by baker, “some object histories,” – , esp. – . see also peter dent, ed., sculpture and touch (farnham, uk: ashgate publishing, ). moreover, temporality and visuality combine in sculpture. as wood and nagel note about artists working in the fifteenth century: an artist was now conceived for the first time as an author, an actor or founder, a legitimate point of origin for a painting or sculpture, or even a building. these artifacts were understood in the pre-modern period to have a double historicity: one might know that they were fabricated in the present or in the recent past but at the same time value them and use them as if they were very old things. these findings from wood and nagel suggest that if we extrapolate to the case of transi tombs, the artists who made henry or alice’s tomb created a work of art whose point of origin was rooted in the date of its making with ancient and potentially non-extant prototypes, evoking the ancient past as ‘origin’ as well as present. these stone tombs might therefore reference the tomb of abel, the sepulcher of jesus itself, or both. this development suggests that history progressed not as a singular temporal construction, but instead as a fluid conceptual stream, one in which temporality was a constantly shifting entity that could be manipulated by the artist and invoked variously by viewers. this process also resulted in a reconsideration of the sharp division of time and instead included an interpretation of time as a much more malleable, if not potentially fabricated, thing. the past was reconstituted into a new character, incorporating elements of bygone instances into current day applications, while also suggesting possible applications for the future. this bridge across and through time extends in implications to the depictions of death, particularly with conflation of the dying with the living. this wood and nagel, “interventions,” – ; jacques le goff, time, work, & culture in the middle ages, trans. arthur goldhammer (chicago: university of chicago press, ), esp. – , . wood and nagel reference warburg in this discussion, ultimately suggesting that time is not only a social construct that varies in the response of the viewer, but also that time can be perceived in a non-linear manner without clear methods of regulation or operation. conclusion echoes what bynum would suggest is a reconsideration of the material body and spiritual resurrection, reflecting her contention that “dead is not only incorruptible but also alive.” bynum asserts that the late medieval period was rife with alterations of dominant thoughts about the role of the resurrected body and revulsion over corporeal decay. transi tombs emblematize this juxtaposition and duality, which is only intensified through the lens of societal responses to gender. the tombs of alice de la pole and henry chichele established the longevity and linearity of memory. unlike later images and works about entombment, such as the fuggers’ relief epitaphs in augsburg and holbein’s painted dead christ in basel, both to be discussed in the following chapters, transi tombs like that of henry chichele and alice de la pole were more literal, constructing images-as-simulacra of stages of the deceased person in distinct and clear reenactment of corporeal decay. transi tombs disassembled and reconfigured these temporal distances not only in terms of life and death, but also regarding notions of resurrection and bodily, or material, reconstitution. the connection of transi tombs with the viewer suggested a rendering of death, while simultaneously ushering in a hopeful expectation for new life. this folding of time is apparent in both the tomb itself and through the act of seeing, allowing the viewer to bridge a chasm with the deceased person and to share a collective hope for resurrection. the shared experience of death provokes a sense of universality among multiple viewers. yet in the same way that the tomb’s design lessened the temporal distance between life, death, and resurrection, bynum, christian materiality, . the viewer was placed in a position to ponder the memory of the deceased, as well as her or his own eventual corporal demise. chapter : the fugger chapel as a new conceptualization of transi tombs examination of memorial stones: the fugger epitaphs the transi tombs discussed in the previous chapters were composed of three- dimensional, multi-tier forms carved fully in the round. in this chapter, we will consider instead tombs of transi carved only in relief on upright stone slabs, a pictorial means of depiction that required additional imagination to complete the visual message. in saint anna’s church in augsburg, germany, four memorial stones or epitaphs commemorate one of the city’s (and indeed, europe’s) most prominent banking families of the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, the fuggers: namely, jakob ( – ), ulrich ( – ), and georg ( – ). carved with reliefs showing transi corpses and biblical narratives we can understand these memorials as innovative variations developed from the transi tomb conventions, replacing the usual vertical structure of fully carved effigies, transi, and heavenly apparatus. the four identically shaped marble stones are set upright and curved at the top, situated around a niche in the apse behind the main altar of the church (figure . ). the two stone relief memorials to ulrich and georg are in the center of the wall and depict scenes of tombs in their lower halves—carved transi figures atop images of sarcophagi—with ulrich’s featuring the resurrection of christ above the tomb and georg’s showing samson striding forcefully across the upper half in a battle against the philistines. these are flanked on the left by the stone epitaph for jakob, which depicts a collection of italianate armor and soldiers, heraldic symbols, and putti, and on the right by a stone with the family coats of arms. this area of the church, known as the fugger chapel, was constructed between to and is one of the earliest renaissance- style spaces north of the alps, a style that would be important both as a marker of cultural prestige and wealth, and one appropriate for the growing ideologies of the reformation. the fugger epitaphs and their placement in saint anna’s extend the analysis of earlier examples of monumental transi tombs into a different artistic geography, one that was equally a key focal point of shifting religious debates and concerns, a number of them in common. the rationale of studying tombs in england in conjunction with developments in germany and the swiss republic in these ensuing chapters is thereby based on shared theological and philosophical landscapes, if differing in political structures. these regions also share a long cultural and intellectual heritage, with links among europe’s leading humanists, and a deep connection through trade. although ultimately culminating in a widespread socio-theological change, the growing reformist movement across continental europe was at first heavily substantiated by the work of earlier proponents who had reached prominence in england. the reformists whose work had taken hold in england and scotland during the fifteenth-century later had their theological critiques resurface to be echoed by like-minded critics in bohemia and german-speaking lands, with figures such as jan hus and martin luther during the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, and with even more radical voices such as those of see bruno bushart, die fuggerkapelle bei st. anna in augsburg (munich: kunstver, ) and andrew morrall, “the deutsch and the welsch. jörg breu the elder’s sketch for the story of lucretia and the uses of classicism in sixteenth century germany,” in drawing – : invention and innovation, ed. stuart currie (farnham, uk: ashgate publishing, ), – . the links between england the germany stem to at least the period of saxon migration, roughly from the sixth to the twelfth centuries. for an overview of the cultural and social impacts of this migration, see john hines, ed., the anglo-saxons from the migration period to the eighth century: an ethnographic perspective (london: woodbridge boydell press, ). additional arguments have been raised as to when and how england became uniquely separated from this anglo-saxon heritage. see bryan ward-perkins, “why did the anglo-saxons not become more british?” the english historical review , no. ( ): – . the ulrich zwingli ( – ) from switzerland. additionally, growing responses to the lollards’ popularized reformist beliefs in england and germany were mirrored in both countries, suggesting additional commonalities and outlooks on issues of the transformation of matter, death, salvation, and the role of images and impacted conceptions of tombs. by looking at later reformists’ writings and sermons in germany and switzerland, elements of these earlier english foundations become evident. by the early sixteenth century in german-speaking lands, changes in the concept of the soul and discourses surrounding the existence of purgatory segued into a reconsideration of the function of prayers, incantations, and masses for the dead. these developments were in part an extension of efforts at reform in england dating from the centuries prior. both locations also saw artistic changes that were tethered to larger theological shifts about the status of the soul after death, debates that were only amplified by the reformation. although augsburg declared itself as a protestant city in , when all catholic rituals were forbidden, saint anna’s recognized itself as lutheran only in . conflicting beliefs remained part of life in augsburg even after the death and entombment of multiple fugger family members, as several had remained catholic during these tumultuous times when catholicism and multiple protestant sects vied for see heiko augustinus oberman and eileen walliser-schwarzbart, luther: man between god and the devil (new haven, ct: yale university press, ), – . the authors assert that the precursors both to marin luther’s rise to prominence and to the consolidation of religious movements in germany can be linked to earlier debates in england. craig koslofsky, the reformation of the dead: death and ritual in early modern germany (basingstoke, uk: macmillan, ), – . see bridget heal, the cult of the virgin mary in early modern germany: protestant and catholic piety, - (cambridge, uk: cambridge university press, ), – . visibility and control in augsburg. we can view the memorials of the fuggers as participants in these ongoing theological debates. the execution of the fugger epitaph stones, attributed to sebastian loscher ( / – ), are based upon designs by albrecht dürer, who created charcoal chiaroscuro drawings in (figures . and . ) as works done specifically for the fugger chapel. these were not study drawings for a larger painting, nor were they the basis for an engraving or etching, and have not gained as much scholarly prominence as many of dürer’s other drawings. jeffrey chipps smith has commented that although the carvings are based upon dürer’s work, the “shallow reliefs lack the sketches’ emotional intensity of the grieving figures or the raw power of samson, the old testament hero, who strides across the memorial to georg fugger” (figure . ). the same lack of emotional volatility and force could be noted in the depiction of the resurrection, in which the characters seem more restrained than in the prepatory drawing, and the undulation of forms, particularly around christ’s grave, is less apparent (figure . ). however, even while emotional verve and dürer’s calligraphic flourishes are diminished or even absent in the translation from chalk to carved stone, what is gained is a necessary hard-edged clarity that is better for viewing stone reliefs from a distance behind the altar for more on the association of the reliefs with sebastian loscher and emergent associations with dürer, see bushart, die fuggerkapelle bei st. anna, – . dürer’s christ resurrected, design for the epitath for ulrich fugger is now lost. samson battling the philistines, design for the epitaph of georg fugger is located at the berlin kupferstichkabinet, prints and drawings collection. for suggestions on additional extant designs related to these renderings, see kayo hirakawa, the pictorialization of dürer's drawings in northern europe in the sixteenth century (bern: peter lang ag, internationaler verlag der wissenschaften, ), . larry silver and jeffrey chips smith, eds., the essential dürer (philadelphia: university of pennsylvania press, ), . and for keeping the memorializing function central over the individual artistic performance of the maker. the visual clarity of the relief carvings, as opposed to dürer’s evocative drawings, also accentuates the linear thrusts of samson’s spear and christ’s staff, reminding the viewer perhaps of typological links between the old testament figure of samson and christ the redeemer. these narrative actions as backdrop for the marble altar are reified with the foregrounding of the liturgical setting, both for the performative gestures of the priest, arms outstretched while elevating the consecrated host, and for the altar’s tawny colors shared also by the reliefs. the result is a visual and conceptual tethering of the two locations—epitaph stones and altar—bridging the celebration of the material changes of the transubstantiated eucharist with images of the resurrected and altered corporeal matter portrayed behind it. the memorial epitaphs in their content and spatial logic, situated behind the altar of saint anna’s as a kind of backdrop screen, visually reaffirmed a connection between material changes of the eucharist and the resurrection. the marble altar in the fugger chapel, by hans daucher ( – ), is itself a substantial monument, dated , with materials originating from over miles away in the ore mountains of bohemia. it works well with the fugger epitaph reliefs to activate the overall visual experience around themes of death, redemption, and the transformation of matter in ways related to imagery that were achieved in the vertical structure of henry chichele and alice de la pole’s transi tombs. the altar includes three inset geometric carved panels of scenes from christ’s passion and a fully in-the-round sculptural group of the lamentation of christ also by daucher on top of the altar itself. the altar ensemble should be considered as integral to the viewing and understanding of the epitaphs, as they collectively form the foreground lens for viewing the memorial stones. the epitaphs of ulrich and georg are unique as variations in relief of transi conventions, for they lack the portrait-likeness of a full effigy of their patrons—usually the part of a tomb most closely related to the worldly construction of identity—and are instead comprised of the biblical narratives overlooking images of ulrich and georg’s transi corpses. the transi figures, then, are all there is to fulfill that function as personal qualifiers for the fugger brothers, seemingly establishing a commonality in the shared anonymity of death. however, what is notable in the fugger memorials is the trace of a profile in the corpses, as the faces seem to suggest an outline of each deceased person, a subtle but recognizable individual likeness. some clear variations are notable across each epitaph, particularly as jakob’s memorial stone is heraldic and italianate in design (figure . ). instead of biblical scenes from the old and new testaments, details include portions of the fugger family coat of arms and heraldic standards, including two attendants in jakob’s epitaph and in the memorial stone for the collective fugger family (figure . ). similar to the artistic suggestions of familial, political, or religious hierarchies and dynasties that we saw in previously discussed tombs in-the-round, the fugger family legacy is presented as an ongoing history that obfuscates the finitude of death. unlike these earlier motifs, however, popularized references to death are displayed, including an assortment of skulls and snakes. these motifs cobble together a series of visual traditions, including emerging on the ‘data’ of the facial features signaled in the linearity of profile, see maria h. loh, “renaissance faciality,” oxford art journal , no. ( ): – . italianate details that were being incorporated into artistic developments north of the alps. the epitaph of ulrich fugger is a novel variation of a transi tomb, complete with a focus on the importance of base-relief for portraiture in sixteenth century tombs. visible from near the fuggers’ crypt at the front of the altar and at the edge of the church pews, some important observations about ulrich fugger’s memorial are worth considering, especially how it incorporates a transi into a larger narrative scene. often, as with the monumental transi tombs of henry chichele and alice de la pole, the resurrection of the deceased is assumed through the vertical structure of the memorials, which permits a kind of visual ascension or reanimation and restorative wholeness of the body, as much as it dramatizes death and decay viewed in the other direction. instead of the usual effigy being ‘stacked’ on top of the transi and scaled to life, as is a common format elsewhere, however, the ulrich fugger relief attributed to loscher directly showcases a scene of the resurrection of christ hovering above the figure of the transi. additionally, the transi figure is shrouded with few facial or physical identifiers, potentially representing the entombed body of christ himself, or of ulrich fugger’s decayed body, stripped to a kind of abstract or universal abjection. the visual linking of the transi with the resurrected christ also alludes to the last judgment (rev. : – ), see daniel gallo, “small portraits for great men: the miniature portrait bust in the sixteenth century,” the rijksmuseum bulletin , no. ( ): – . gallo focuses on the rise of gargantuan sculptures in italy but also cross references important bust sculptures, including a pear wood miniature of jacob fugger by conrat meit (c. – ). and i saw a great white throne, and him that sat on it, from whose face the earth and the heaven fled away; and there was found no place for them. and i saw the dead, small and great, stand before god; and the books were opened: and another book was opened, which is the book of life: and the dead were judged out of those things which were written in the books, according to their works. and the sea gave up the dead which were in it; and death and hell delivered up the dead which were in them: and they were judged every man according to their works. and death and hell were cast into the lake of fire. with christ presiding over the dead, who will rise from their graves and become whole again and united in ultimate salvation (matthew : – ). the conflation of christ’s corpse with that of ulrich fugger has theological implications affirming the concept that all dead christians sleep in christ. the epitaphs and their relation to the altar also intersect with additional theological and liturgical debates about how one should honor the dead—debates that were heated and unresolved in the city of augsburg at this time. as both martin luther and augsburg’s own fiery and more radical preacher, johannes schilling, had argued, masses for the dead were anathema to the growing concepts of the reformation, because of the intercession of priests for masses of the dead and a belief in salvation by faith, not in good works or in prayers for the soul by others. despite the theological and liturgical catholic underpinnings that are suggested in ulrich fugger’s epitaph, his memorial appears to serve an additional artistic and devotional function, primarily to force the viewer into experiencing the image in a more conceptual sense in which the dead are part this is the second death. and whosoever was not found written in the book of life was cast into the lake of fire. when the son of man shall come in his glory, and all the holy angels with him, then shall he sit upon the throne of his glory: and before him shall be gathered all nations: and he shall separate them one from another, as a shepherd divideth his sheep from the goats: and he shall set the sheep on his right hand, but the goats on the left. then shall the king say unto them on his right hand, come, ye blessed of my father, inherit the kingdom prepared for you from the foundation of the world: for i was an hungred, and ye gave me meat: i was thirsty, and ye gave me drink: i was a stranger, and ye took me in: naked, and ye clothed me: i was sick, and ye visited me: i was in prison, and ye came unto me. the contention that all christian dead are part of the larger motif of christ’s death and eventual resurrection was posited in thessalonians : , “for since we believe that jesus died and rose again, even so, through jesus, god will bring with him those who have fallen asleep.” although the concept of a sleeping soul was not part of the catholic lexicon, luther directly addressed the principle of a shared respite for christians awaiting resurrection, a concept that was paralleled within the lutheran church teaching. hanson zelinsky, religious identity in an early reformation community: augsburg, to (leiden: brill, ), – . of visions of immersive sacred experiences. christopher wood explains how german masters of this period, such as albrecht altdorfer (c. – ), heightened the experiential sense of immediacy for the viewer with certain structural and formal conceits, some of which we see in the loscher reliefs after dürer, as well: … dramatic foreshortenings, rotations, zooms, reverse angles, low horizons, and rückenfiguren, … refractions and revisions of compositional convention, were all designed to intensify the religious experience of the beholder. altdorfer placed his beholders in direct, almost visionary confrontation with the sacred stories.…[t]he unexpected framings and croppings, the overlapping of figure and frame, call attention to the frontier between fiction and reality. wood concludes by noting experiences with altdorfer’s widely-distributed prints that experimented with these kinds of structures, which in unexpected ways resonate closely with the pictorial effects and embodied experiences stimulated by the fugger relief memorial in its sharp linearity, tactility and dimensionality, as niches extending the wall: “they re-create the beholder as a contemporary of christ …and at the same time stage persuasive fictions of possible worlds as if glimpsed through windows.” these portals allow objects to appear in fuller dimensions through relief carving, while systematically acting as virtual windows into the past, facilitating images that become fully experienced through the viewer’s imagination. see christopher s. wood, review of albrecht altdorfer in seiner zeit: religiöse und profane themen in der kunst um , by thomas noll; sehen und erkennen: albrecht altdorfers religiöse bilder, by magdalena bushart; der wald in der malerei und der graphik des donaustils, by margit stadlober, the art bulletin , no. ( ): – . christopher wood primarily contends that the works that noll visits are part of a larger art historical lineage, dating at least to albrecht altdorfer if not to earlier artists, including rogier van der weden. for more information on altdorfer’s use of the image and the conflation that wood summarizes, see thomas nol, albrecht altdorfer in seiner zeit: religiöse und profane themen in der kunst um (berlin: deutscher kunstverlag, ). wood, “review of albrecht altdorfer,” . the foreshortening of figures in these panels, complete with the framing of the visual narratives into a multipart progression, provides vignettes for the viewer to behold the image of christ and the passion. the viewer is also drawn into the frame as the foreground is shortened. in the fugger epitaphs, we see loscher and dürer similarly incorporating visual strategies that create in the viewer a means to achieve a self- awareness about the enfolding liturgical narrative. the images of the passion present the end of christ’s life, ultimately demonstrating a motif of tragedy in combination with images of memorial for the fuggers, displaying the trajectory of the end of life and the greater collective whole of the church and christian redemption. this function places the viewer as an engaged participant with the persuasive messages of artwork, while simultaneously suggesting participation in the unfolding dramatic narrative and shared function of death and redemption. these visual strategies and blatantly artistic novelties suggest a growing importance during the reformation period of the image as an agent intensifying a personal religious as well as aesthetic experience. the creation of an image as a continuation of a larger visual narrative was suggested by david freedberg as one strategy an artist might use during this period to convey a new visual concept, one that challenged the boundaries between historical narrative and contemporary experience. in particular, freedberg harkens to plato’s explanation of oratory, with artistic images serving in much the same function, as creating “dreams for those who are awake.” this see carl c. christensen, art and the reformation in germany, vol. (columbus, oh: ohio university press, ). david freedberg, the power of images: studies in the history and theory of response (chicago: university of chicago press, ). ibid., – ; . recreation of a religious vision in the mind of the viewer straddles the line between icon and conceptualization. while this pivot toward conceptual visuality seems antithetical to the experiences of catholic orthodoxy that would have been celebrated by the fugger family, augsburg itself was a longstanding contested territory between catholic and protestant theologies, as the different confessions coexisted uneasily, more than with many cities of the holy roman empire. a resultant shift during the reformation from the literality suggested in the verisimilitude and corporeal presence of sculpture to a conceptualization of religious images is suggested in the fugger epitaphs, which as relief carvings hover between the sculptural and pictorial. such a shift was part of a development that would continue throughout the early sixteenth century and culminate in another transition of the concept to a new medium, as we shall see in the ensuing chapter in hans holbein’s rendering of the dead christ in oil paint, representing changes in public perceptions of memorials. such shifts in the concept of memory were driven by a reconsideration of how the dead are recalled and how to best characterize, define, or perform memory, a growing conundrum across both the european continent and in england. in addition, the reformation took on these debates about death-related practices in liturgy. depictions of a deceased person as a visual prompt for the prayers of the living surfaced in the fugger memorials, as “the dead were not praying to or for anything, a change from earlier tombs robert kress, “the roman catholic reception of the augsburg confession,” the sixteenth century journal , no. ( ); – , esp. – . ibid., – . where they made supplication to god, the saints, and the visitors.” among those faithful to the papacy, the growing reformist concept that masses and prayers were ineffective in securing a promise of a heavenly afterlife was against the core principles of church orthodoxy, beliefs ardently upheld by the fuggers and incorporated into their collective memorials. as jonathan finch effectively summarized, within the late medieval period “the living were not encouraged to remember the dead, but to remember to pray for the dead.” within reformist thought, however, the rituals and injunctions that were offered for the dead by the gracious prayers of the living were under as much attack in luther’s sermons as indulgences were. this shift in the public performance of memory was not unique to reformation and counter-reformation movements. peter sherlock concludes that: every society reconstructs the past in the present. in early modern europe, these reconstructions were directed toward the future and the afterlife as much as toward the past. the reformation of memory was most pronounced in the changing relationship of the living and the dead. …this late medieval vision of the afterlife was very much a memory-theater, arranged to aid the penitent christian in his or her devotions on behalf of the dead and in the preparation for death itself. … early modern europe was replete with deliberately created memories and invented commemorations, designed as responses to the reformation with its attendant loss of an established narrative for the past and to the beginnings of the disenchantment of the world. peter marshall, beliefs and the dead in reformation england (oxford: oxford university press, ). jonathan finch, “a reformation of meaning: commemoration and remembering the dead in the parish church, – ” in the archaeology of reformation – , eds. david gaimster and roberta gilchrist (leeds: maney, ), – , at . koslofsky, reformation of the dead, – . peter sherlock, “the reformation of memory in early modern europe,” in memory: histories, theories, debates, eds. susannah radstone and bill schwarz (new york: fordham university press, ), – . the memorials at the fugger chapel operated as mechanisms within this trajectory. they posited both the devout and orthodox theological beliefs of the fugger family, particularly in relation to the changing physicality of the soul and the vital importance of the eucharist, and sealed their public and ideological legacy in an increasingly reformist location. the fugger chapel represents these ongoing theological and liturgical debates in a unique fashion, combining the ongoing religious debates with the visual drama of the memorials and prominently displayed altar in the foreground. the near life-size statues on the altar in the forefront of the chapel feature the lamentation of christ with the body of christ held aloft by an angel and flanked by his mother and saint john the baptist (figure . ). along with the impressive rendering of christ and hi s attendants, hans daucher also sculpted a series of playful putti, possibly designed by hans burgkmair ( – ), that decorate the nearby altar bannisters. christ’s arms lie in a relaxed position, his head, slack jaw, and body seeming to be lithe with sleep or newly dead, still in the process of being deposed from the cross, instead of an outright depiction of a rigid corpse. he remains crowned with his head aloft. christ’s foot advances beyond the edge of the altar, seemingly breaking the fourth wall while also slightly hovering above the space where the eucharist—and within catholic doctrine, transubstantiation— will occur. christ’s blood would conceptually appear to be flowing from his open wounds directly into the priest’s upraised chalice. a cross is not included in the sculptural group, but christ’s pose, with his upright but slacked body and limp arms stretched across his three attendants, echoes the form of the cross as a reminder for the viewer. similar to the completion of negative space that is possible in base-relief, the lack of a cross prompts the viewer to complete the image in his or her own imagination. the panels on the front of the altar include three base-relief designs (figure . ), depicting three episodes from the passion. in the first relief panel, christ carries the cross, and looks outward toward the veil-donning veronica as four soldiers beat and taunt him. nearby, crowds have gathered, with mary standing in the background, held up under her arms as if she is about to swoon, suffering pain at jesus christ’s crucifixion instead of at his birth, itself a miraculous and mystical occurrence, similar to the transubstantiation of the eucharist enacted upon the accompanying altar. the second relief depicts christ’s descent from the cross. here, christ is shown as crucified, complete with a crowd of onlookers and the two thieves writhing still in pain on their crosses. the foreground includes the now dead christ, being taken from the cross by joseph of arimathea and nicodemus. mary is placed in the bottom right side of the relief, overcome with grief. the third panel shows the harrowing of hell, a concept that was of considerable debate during the reformation, especially considering its notable absence in the bible. in this panel, christ appears in hell as the personified souls of the soon-to- be-redeemed dead stand near him. christ stands alongside his cross-topped staff, his leg bent at the knee as he approaches a river of entangled human bodies to elevate a newly redeemed soul. overhead, outlines of arches and buildings are suggested in carved relief, the panels were renovated in to . see bushart, die fuggerkapelle, . see mary e. fissell, “the politics of reproduction in the english reformation,” representations no. (summer, ): – , esp. ; . tarald rasmussen, “hell disarmed? the function of hell in reformation spirituality,” numen , no. ( ): – . their façades covered with a commingling of half-nude human forms and occasional demons with ragged wings and tortured faces. the three panels are part of a tripartite narrative, a continuous loop or circle that is formed visually with the liturgical function of the altar, creating a performative act that synthesized the life, passion, and resurrection of jesus christ with the fugger family and the larger church community. memorials in base-relief like the fugger epitaphs and the altar panels that incorporate aspects of negative space extend a trajectory that began with sculpted effigies. through base-relief, the sculptors loscher and daucher created works that facilitated a visual arc in the mind of viewer, synthesizing images with active interpretation and conceptual participation. relief sculpture invites the viewer to envision a predominantly flat object as a fully developed, three-dimensional image. functioning on the border between sculpture and painting, base-relief incorporates aspects of both mediums, while also recasting the role of the viewer and the image into a new perspective. different than the tombs of henry chichele and alice de la pole, the epitaphs are conceptualizations forcing the viewer to imagine the unfolding scenes and any reality-enhancing features like paint or gilding. shades and hues are accentuated by the variations in the natural material and lighting. michael baxandall referenced this phenomenon in describing a limewood altarpiece by tilman riemenschneider (c. – ), explaining that variations in light and perception of the different depths of carving changed the function of the work and the viewer’s involvement with it, moving from brightness to shadows. this same process is displayed on the fugger memorial and daucher’s altar panel carvings. we gain a better understanding of how the fugger epitaphs functioned as tomb memorials and dynamic revisioning of transi tombs if we take into consideration the spatial logic of the memorial stones within the chapel, as well as the context of saint anna’s church within sixteenth-century augsburg. the bavarian city of augsburg owed its rising prominence to its status as the holy roman emperor’s favored city, as well as to its mercantilism, with the fugger family at the center of those civic identities as one of its most eminent patrician families. theological debates revolving around various reformist beliefs divided augsburg and were particularly complex as they played out in the city during the first decades of the sixteenth century. these debates and tensions were persistent as religious spaces in augsburg were contested for longer than in many other cities, such as nuremberg and basel. the function of religious art was similarly disputed. luther’s theses had been posted in the year prior to his arrival in augsburg in and his initial stance toward religious images was relatively benign, with him and his followers viewing religious images as secondary to the word but as still having a useful place within christian teaching, if circumscribed. luther’s later response to images emerged in a pronounced way, as “first and foremost came indulgences, then the cult of relics, and only later the see michael ann holly, “patterns in the shadows,” in the melancholy art (princeton: princeton university press, ), – , esp. . see wandel, eucharist in the reformation, – . misuse of works of art.” however, he recognized that the problem was not in the existence of images themselves, but rather in the viewer who misunderstood or misperceived real presence in matter—in the paint or wood or carved stone. as jeffrey chipps smith explains “reform rhetoric begat iconoclasm” as sculptures and religious images were destroyed starting in , with both horrific and psychologically complicated results: “religious images were so engrained in the lives and rituals of pre- reformation society, so linked with one's relationship with the catholic church, that for many iconoclasm meant liberation.” despite luther’s more moderate preaching against the practice, andreas karlstadt (c. – ), gabriel zwilling (c. – ), and ulrich zwingli led the charge of iconoclasm with growing factions adopting their beliefs. subsequently, locations such as zurich were emptied and destroyed of religious art, and basel, the eventual residence of hans holbein the younger, incurred occasional attacks. the economic prowess and influence of the fuggers exemplified these ongoing disputes, through their efforts to curtail reformist ideology and safeguard catholic orthodoxy. to that avail, three independent foundations were established in augsburg through the beneficence of the fugger family in a deed: the memorial chapel in sergiusz michalski, christianity and society in the modern world: reformation and the visual arts, the protestant image question in western and eastern europe (london: routledge, ), . jeffrey chipps smith, german sculpture of the later renaissance c. –i (princeton: princeton university press, ), – . see michael p. carroll, madonnas that maim: popular catholicism in italy since the fifteenth century (baltimore: johns hopkins university press, ). carlos m. n. eire, war against the idols: the reformation of worship from erasmus to calvin (cambridge, uk: cambridge university press, ). saint anna’s church, the fuggerei housing complex, and a sermon endowment at saint moritz. three particular chapels are often associated with the fugger family patronage. the first is a small chapel dedicated to saint mark located inside the entrance to the fuggerei, founded in as a place of worship within one of the oldest faith-based (i.e., catholic) residential communities in europe still in existence. this small chapel was likely used only by the residents of the fuggerei and includes a vertical stone slab featuring an enshrouded transi of ulrich fugger (figure . ). additionally, an epitaph was installed for georg fugger near saint george’s chapel on the south aisle of the basilica of saints afra and ulrich, with the final chapel being in the most pronounced location the fugger chapel in saint anna’s church, where they dedicated their memorial stones. saint anna’s church (figure . ) occupies a much smaller urban space than the other more prominent buildings that dominate the city skyline, such as the perlach tower and the spires of the augsburg cathedral. it is not only smaller, but also relatively removed from the major thoroughfares of augsburg. artistically, it emblematized the impact of the fuggers through emerging renaissance styles north of the alps, particularly as it became credited as the first architectural construction of the german renaissance. mixing local design with the ‘new’ italianate, or ‘welsch,’ style, it was see fürstlich und gräflich fuggersche stiftungs-administration, “the fugger chapel at st. anna: representation to honor the deceased,” accessed september , , http://www.fugger.de/en/singleview/article/representation-to-honour-the-deceased/ .html a historical overview of the fuggerei and its function is provided in marien tietz-strödel, die fuggerei in augsburg: studien zur entwicklung des sozialen stiftungsbaus im . und . jahrhundert (tübingen, germany: mohr siebeck, ). for a review of the increasing role of the fuggers and the chapels that were created as part of their growing societal impact, see wolfram koeppe, “an early meissen discovery: a ‘shield bearer’ designed by hans daucher for the ducal chapel in the cathedral of meissen,” metropolitan museum journal ( ): – . originally created as an extension of a nearby monastery, whose carmelite friars in had played an active role in housing luther following the diet of augsburg, but whose ideals as a monastic order mirrored the beliefs of the steadfastly catholic jakob fugger. as art historian andrew morrall explains, the italian renaissance style become increasingly identified with the societal rise of the fugger family, associating welsch style with economic and social distinction, compared to the localized deutsch or germanic artistic traditions. baxandall suggests that some of the difficulty in ascertaining the identity of the artists responsible for the creation and decoration of the fugger chapel is rooted in the confluence of myriad cultural styles, ranging from an extension of a german and italian motifs into a particular composite of ulm’ish and venetian traditions. this complex integration and unsteady synthesis of styles continued in the artwork within the chapel and in its overall architectural design, particularly in relation to the tension between the building’s late gothic vaulting and overall italianate forms. the renaissance style also has implications for the reformation, too, as an artistic element that further distinguishes saint anna’s church from other church spaces that signals allegory or artifice. different from the city’s eleventh-century cathedral built near byzantine-era remnants, saint anna’s church associated at various for information on the role of the fuggers and these emergent styles, see andrew morrall, jörg breu the elder: art, culture, and belief in reformation augsburg, histories of vision (burlington, vt: ashgate, ). both styles are further explained in morrall, “the deutsch and the welsch,” – . baxandall, limewood sculptors, . in particular, baxandall suggests that figures suggest an ulmish tradition in the crafting of their heads, to an overall german tradition in the positioning of christ, and a distinctly lombardi inspiration in the drapery of saint john and with the angel situated directly behind christ. he also suggests that venetian experience in the crafting of drapery and in the cutting of the limestone altar reliefs. morrall, jörg breu the elder, – . for additional information, see ashley west, review of “jorg breu the elder: art, culture, and belief in reformation augsburg,” caa reviews (december , ): – . times with different sides of this religious divide, resulting in variations in artistic style and in a decorative scheme that would come to sustain different audiences and expectations for images. the entrance to the church is near the doorway into the south chapel, with visitors first encountering a series of monastic cloisters and various memorial plaques. the interior of the church is primarily white, having been plastered during the rise of the lutheran movement, with the notable exception of the goldsmith’s chapel, founded in . the south chapel—later to become the fugger chapel— is the oldest part of the church. it dates to the early fourteenth century and was originally attached to the carmelite monastery itself. the pronounced nave is flanked by two aisles, with a side corridor that runs along the western side of the church. the fugger chapel occupies a substantial open space in what is often considered to be the central focus point of the church. the chapel “was originally intended as a funeral chapel to commemorate through daily masses members of the fugger family buried in the crypt beneath the altar.” jakob fugger’s name is the most pronounced on the memorial stone above the crypt at the base of the altar (figure . ), which also houses the remains of his brothers georg and ulrich, as well as his nephews raymund ( – ) and hieronymus ( – ). the original design of the chapel was contested, and the construction of the altar itself was hotly debated: “the chapel’s carmelite setting has, however, not been sufficiently acknowledged because the intense negotiations between the friars and the powerful sankt anna augsburg (augsburg: wiβner-verlag: ), . norbert jopek, “die fuggerkapelle bei st. anna in augsburg,” the burlington magazine , no. ( ): – , at . merchants have been consistently underestimated.” complicating the scenario even more are the original plans for the altar, whose designs have been lost. the church is a locus of innovative designs in northern renaissance art, and featured works after dürer and augsburg’s own leading artists, painters hans burgkmair and jörg breu the elder and the sculptors hans daucher and sebastian loscher. later additions by lucas cranach and his workshop may have been included, likely as a part of the fugger’s massive collection of northern art. the visual impact and sense of novelty around the fugger chapel was substantial, as “original opulence shaped posterity's image of its patron, jakob fugger, the international banker and the holy roman empire's wealthiest patrician [with] the first truly renaissance-style funerary chapel in germany.” michael baxandall summarized that: in ulrich and jakob fugger had made an agreement with the prior of the carmelite house of st. anne in augsburg to build in his church a large sepulchral chapel for themselves and their dead brother georg, quite exceptionally it is not a side chapel but a grandiose extension of the whole west end of the church… in retrospect it is clear that fugger chapel marks the moment when the augsburg sculptor was directed into a new line of development, carving usually in stone and usually in a positive relation to what was known of italian renaissance art. but something had happened also which went beyond simple importation of a few italian patterns, tastes, and pretensions. christa gardner von teuffel, “the carmelite altarpiece (circa – ): the self- identification of an order,” mitteilungen des kunsthistorischen institutes in florenz no. ( ): – . bruno bushart, die fuggerkapelle, – ; note . ibid., . michael north and david ormrod, markets for art, – (new york: routledge, ), . smith, german sculpture, . baxandall, limewood sculptors, ; – . the fugger chapel ostensibly represents an amalgamation of international renaissance and local styles, combining motifs associated with northern artists with a reconceptualization of popularized italian works as an expression of artistic collaboration across media. the growing position of augsburg and the fuggers within the reformation by the time of the chapel’s creation, the fuggers had established themselves as one of the most powerful economic forces in europe. they were prominent financiers for far-ranging economic initiatives, bankrolled emperor maximilian i with their copper mines in central europe, and used their wealth, too, for commissioning art, architecture, growing a collection, and building even a menagerie. pierre cositl provides an appropriate historical overview of their wide influence throughout europe: “they had known unprecedented prosperity, the luxury of a merchant who benefited artists, for more on how the fugger chapel straddles the line between italian renaissance and german gothic, see norbert nussbaum, german gothic church architecture (new haven, ct: yale university press, ), – . they have been credited as the inspiration for modern day capitalism; see edmund laskine, revue d'histoire Économique et sociale , no. ( ): – . also, for example, see conrad peutinger’s own contemporary defense of their methods in his sermones convivales. the fuggers’ economic prowess was so immense that jakob fugger has been described as “the richest man who ever lived,” a title only barely beyond hyperbole. see greg steinmetz, the richest man who ever lived: the life and times of jacob fugger (new york: simon & schuster, ). for a consideration of the appropriateness of steinmetz’ nomenclature for jacob fugger, see jonathan knee. . “jacob fugger and the renaissance superrich,” the new york times, july , . the pronounced position of the fuggers in creating economic changes throughout europe has been noted extensively. beyond suggestions that the fuggers spearheaded modern capitalism, other authors assert that their efforts came to emblematize the protest work ethic for centuries. see sam whimster, “max weber and the spirit of modern capitalism - years on,” max weber studies . , no. . (july /january ): – . see mark häberlein, the fuggers of augsburg, pursuing wealth and honor in renaissance germany (charlottesville, va: the university of virginia press, ). häberlein’s work traces the rise of the fuggers to a growing presence of networks and advancements in social systems. in terms of artistic impacts, he effectively asserts that although the fuggers may not have been as prominent art patrons as the medici family with whom they are regularly compared, their cultural and artistic influence was still quite vast. scientists, and humanists, and access to privileges of nobility, including titles, lands, and alliances.” their memorials reflected both their economic success and substantial presence throughout the holy roman empire. but the fuggers and their wealth cannot be divested from the changing religious and cultural maelstrom that was happening throughout europe in the early sixteenth century. rightly assumed to have played a major role in the investment and banking infrastructure of europe’s top markets, the fuggers were also active in both the reformation and counter reformation in augsburg. for example, it was on the fuggers’ estate that luther had initially refused in october to recant his theses, and was ordered to submit to the pope after his stay with the carmelite friars who administered saint anna’s church. the fugger family itself was comprised of both protestant and catholic followers, and funding for both movements was part of their banking industry, one that only grew as augsburg continued to flourish and prosper. despite augsburg passing a decree against iconoclasm in , social and religious tensions were high, and the city had its own occasional iconoclastic outbursts and rioting . augsburg emerged, however, as a theological nexus for scores of preachers of reformist confessions who frequented the city to sermonize. the ensuing sermons, combined with a series of attacks against the papacy, took as their subjects a number of ongoing and even contradictory reformist proposals, including those of ulrich zwingli, who made particularly radical critiques of marian veneration and avidly preached against see pierre cositl, “le mecenat humanistes des fugger,” humanisme et renaissance , no. ( ): – . see tlusty, augsburg during the reformation, . the use of religious images. in addition, lesser-known preachers such as johannes schilling rose to prominence in augsburg, especially during the early s. schilling was a follower of zwingli in his radical denial of the place of images in religious practice and played a complex and fierce role in augsburg, having been banished by augsburg magistrates, an act resulting in an uprising of over , residents, many of them lower or working class, the collective social and economic antithesis of the fugger family. the eucharist and its ecumenical functions were contested as part of schilling’s legacy. the eventual severing of the eucharist with memorial masses fortified a growing wall within reformist ideology between the living and the dead through the denouncement of commemoration practices. as these attacks continued to increase throughout the reformation, “the requiem mass, so long a hinge between the earthly world and beyond, became an autocracy in the eyes of the new theology.” assumed to be a connective and communicative tool between christians and the divine, and a mainstay of the fugger family, the requiem mass became identified as a misguided belief, according to schilling and his followers. owing to the pronounced focus that luther had on the eucharist as a central tenet retained in the reformation (albeit understood as a symbolic enactment), sacraments for the dead became understood as bridget heal, the cult of the virgin mary in early modern germany: protestant and catholic piety, – , past and present publications (cambridge, uk: cambridge university press, ). see also james m. stayer, anabaptists and the sword (new york: wipf and stock publishers, ). thomas a. brady, german histories in the age of reformations, – (cambridge, uk: cambridge university press, ), . volker leppin, “preparing for death: the late medieval ars moriendi to the lutheran funeral sermon,” in preparing for death, remembering the dead, eds. jon oygarden flaeten and tarald rasmussen (gottingen, germany: vandenhoeck & ruprecht, ), – , esp. . against the mission of the reformist movement. peter marshall addressed this shift and noted the profound impacts that the reformation posed to the laity and clergy alike: “wherever it took hold, the reformation changed the meaning and experience of death.” as the reformation moved throughout the communicative social fabric of augsburg, theologians advocated for varying positions about the eucharist, death, and ostentatious public displays of images from a number of locations throughout the city. shifting mentalities about public life, heavy ornamentation and display, and personal aggrandizement became parcel to theological debate. as ulinka rublack writes: renaissance cultural arguments explored and sometimes challenged ways in which appearances articulated boundaries between an inner and outer self, appearance and reality, nature and artifice, the sacred and profane, the rich and the ragged. what emerges is a world of colours and laws that sought to curtail too many extravagances, but also of changes of perception and values, for example in the course of the reformation when ‘old luxury’ came to symbolize the excesses of the catholic church. against this tense backdrop, saint anna’s church, with its expressive italianate style, became a showplace for changes within the reformation and the enduring role of the fugger family. similarly, the growing presence of schilling and his sermons left an undeniable impact on his audiences at saint anna’s. a favored reference for much of his sermons came from the gospel of luke, especially the first three chapters, which focus on the robert c. croken, luther’s first front: the eucharist as sacrifice (ottawa: university of ottawa press, ). peter marshall, “after purgatory: death and remembrance in the reformation world,” in preparing for death, remembering the dead, eds. jon oygarden flaeten and tarald rasmussen (gottingen, germany: vandenhoeck & ruprecht, ), – , esp. . ulinka rublack, dressing up: cultural identity in renaissance europe (oxford: oxford university press, ), . humanity of jesus christ. beyond actively arguing with the augsburg city council, schilling also preached sermons up to three times a week and during all holy days. he emphasized not only the comity that christ had established with the poor (luke : – ), but also noted his poverty-laden background and humility (luke : – ). each of these points were cornerstones of the emerging reformation and positioned schilling in direct contrast with the life and ideology of prosperity that had been promoted by the fuggers for their public identities, as displayed not only in expensive patronage of spaces like the fugger chapel, but also in its use of an ornamented italianate, or ‘foreign,’ style. moreover, schilling based his retorts against the city council heavily on luke’s depiction of john the baptist’s reaction to charlatans seeking refuge in religion without altering their self-serving behaviors. assistance for the poor was one of the vital components of this expectation, a point stressed through john the baptist’s castigations that became a basis for schilling’s sermons—charity not as good works but for their own sake of service. ultimately, however, schilling’s preaching was thwarted as he was accused of creating social unrest, leading to his expulsion from augsburg in . the fugger family and other patricians of augsburg were likely to have been pleased to see him go. schilling’s liturgical impact was pronounced, especially in relation to the eucharist. beyond being known for maligning the sacrament in his sermons as a kind of idolatry, he was also apt to enrage clergy members by engaging in behavior that they for more information on schlling’s impact on augsburg and his emergent role within the reformation, see joel van amberg, a real presence: studies in the history of christian traditions (leiden: brill, ), – . häberlein, the fuggers of augsburg, . believed blasphemous. in particular, schilling held a ceremony upon a balcony as a makeshift altar in which he held a cut radish aloft and suggested that it could well be believed to be a consecrated host. for all of his blistering pronouncements, schilling’s message became most associated with a reconsideration of the importance of the poor within an ecumenical ministry, a message that was compounded by the establishment of institutions, such as almshouses and, in the case of the fuggers, the fuggerei, an early example of faith-based public housing and service facility. although his questioning of the nature of the eucharist was the foundation of his vision, and a fundamental aspect of the reformation, his denouncement of the wealthy and their habits of paying for charitable good works for their salvation and personal glorification may have underlain his acrimony with the fugger family. subsequently, events surrounding the uprising of over the expulsion of schilling affected the fuggers and their involvements with ecclesiastical affairs. seeing how the revolt had affected daily life in augsburg, jakob fugger briefly left the city soon after the start of the uprising for his mayoral estate in biberbach in the northern part of the district of augsburg. the emerging rift between jakob fugger and reformist movements in augsburg continued, however, and enveloped the fugger family for decades and across family lines. fearing for his family’s and his own safety, jakob fugger asserted that luther himself had been responsible for social unrest, writing that luther was “the initiator and primary cause of this uprising, rebellion, and bloodshed in wilhelm vogt, “johann schilling der barfusser-monch und der aufstand in augsburg im jahre ,” zeitschrift des historischen vereins fur schwaben und neuburs ( ): – , esp. – . see tietz-strödel, die fuggerei in augsburg, . the german nation.” ultimately, the fuggers realized that their family would be embroiled within the controversies of the reformation, and jakob fugger saw to it that the family chapel that he helped create in saint anna’s would not become associated with the reformist movement during his lifetime. although a great amount of the fugger family’s network remained faithful to the catholic church, a significant portion of augsburg became supporters of the growing reformation. the position of saint anna’s church and the fugger memorial chapel became entangled in public discussion and, ultimately, the design of the chapel itself was not fully realized, as the city of augsburg became entrenched in the blossoming reformist movement. the acrimonious relationship between the emerging evangelical movement and allegiances to the papacy surrounded not only the publishing of the augsburg confession in , but also the public position and reach of augsburg’s religious institutions, catholic and reformist alike, before when the city council made an official decision on the matter by banning all catholic rites and practices. it was not until with the adoption of the peace of augsburg that a more cogent and controlled solution would be found for the designation of both faith traditions across the holy steinmetz, richest man, . sean f. dunwoody, “civic and confessional memory in conflict: augsburg in the sixteenth century,” in memory before modernity: practices of memory in early modern europe, eds. kuijpers erika, pollmann judith, müller johannes, and van der steen jasper (leiden: brill, ), – , esp. – . charles p. arand, james a. nestingen, and robert kolb, “the augsburg confession,” in the lutheran confessions: history and theology of the book of concord, – (minneapolis: augsburg fortress, publishers, ), . häberlein, the fuggers of augsburg, – . roman empire, according the faith of each territory’s local ruler. in some ways the liturgical and ecclesiastical role of saint anna’s church embodied the oscillation of steady or shifting coexistence between catholic and protestant beliefs. although the church would vacillate between catholic and reformist control to ultimately fall under the auspices of the burgeoning protestant movement, it became a complex site for the reformation as well as the public memory and social history of the catholic fugger family. a reconceptualization of death and the implications of the fugger chapel within the reformation changes in memorial design present innovative ways of picturing death and remembrance, an opportunity aptly presented in the memorial to the fugger family. by seeing the contributions of the fuggers through their relief epitaphs, we explore the intersection between liturgical functions in shifting late medieval to reformist mentalities and the resultant art associated with the commemoration of the dead. koerner argues that much of the art that emerged during the reformation showcases negative, or at least intangible, space as important features of changing theologies. art that includes negative space forces the viewer to consider images that are not readily viewable but only conceivable, what koerner notes succinctly as “ideas about the thing, not the thing steven ozment, “society and politics in the german reformation,” the age of reform, - : an intellectual and religious history of late medieval and reformation europe, - (new haven, ct: yale university press, ) – . a short overview of the longitudinal impact of the fuggers and the political and cultural landscape of europe is provided in richard olivier, review of memoria an der zeitenwende: die stiftungen jakob fuggers des reichen vor und während der reformation (ca. – ) by benjamin scheller, annales. histoire, sciences sociales , no. ( ): – . koerner, reformation of the image, – . itself.” tombs function as visceral images of negative space. negative space invites visions of completion, as space is crafted as being neither concrete nor finite. instead, connections with the viewer across negative space exist in a conceptual manner, an experience paralleled with religious visual encounters and with demands on the viewer’s imagination to fill in that void. this filling of space is exacerbated in the carved reliefs of the fugger memorials, in which the viewer must mentally complete the paucity of forms that are only partially suggested in the panels. theological discussions about the illusory nature of death and the fate of the soul reach a poignant and powerful interconnection in these memorials, especially when considering images of the dead and resurrected christ. prominent sermons of the time, particularly those of schilling, luther, and johannes oecolampadius ( – ), shaped pervasive mentalities on death and memorial, as well as on the relative value of physical and holy matter. luther and his contemporaries mentioned death and the process of resurrection directly. for example, justus jonas ( – ) eulogized luther in terms that parallel the performative nature of transi tombs: “but after this, at the last day, flesh and blood, notwithstanding, they that had been eaten by worms had rotten and decayed in the ground shall again come forth and rise in great glory.” this eulogy ibid., . for information on the function of negative space and its association with the collective memory of the dead, see james e. young, the texture of memory: holocaust memorials and meaning (new haven: yale university press, ), – . ibid., – . as quoted in justus jonas and michael caelius, two funeral sermons on the death of dr. martin luther: delivered at eisleben, february th and th, , by justus jonas and michael celius (lancaster, pa.: junior missionary society of the church of the holy trinity, ), . see martin luther, “des d. justus jonas leichenpredigt luthers zu eisleben. . febr. ,” in dr. martin luther suggests that a connection to the corporeal world was only predicated on a realization of the impending inevitability of the reconstituted self in the moment of salvation at last judgment. reactions toward corpses are grounded in similar theological principles of mortality and with notions of materiality and a viewer’s association with it. as susan zimmerman adroitly summarizes, “[t]he reformation’s attack on the anthropomorphism of idolatry was symptomatic of its preoccupation with the dangers implicit in materiality and its properties: the materiality of the image or idol, the materiality of the body, and – at the most profound and ordinary level – the materiality of the corpse.” part of this contention is connected to changing concepts of matter, complete with altering perceptions of the eucharist and corporeality. theological shifts concerning the changing nature of matter were promulgated in the ongoing debates about transubstantiation, exacerbated by depictions of matter undergoing dramatic transformations, as in images in the fugger epitaphs of decaying corpses and resurrected souls. these conclusions were popularized alongside luther’s considerations of the eucharist—itself a fundamentally integral aspect of the experience of the fugger epitaphs— seeing differences between a spiritual, or symbolic, instead of a corporeal presence of christ in the holy host. luther posited that the soul does not alter in matter, or progress to purgatory or to an immediate afterlife, one filled with the sämmtliche schriften. neue rev. stereotypausg, zweite thiel, ed. johan georg walch (st. louis: concordia publishing house, ), – . susan zimmerman, “body imaging and religious reform: the corpse as idol,” in the early modern corpse and shakespeare's theatre (edinburgh: edinburgh university press, ), – , esp. . amy nelson burnett, karlstadt and the origins of the eucharistic controversy: a study in the circulation of ideas, oxford studies in historical theology (oxford: oxford university press, ), – . potential hierarchies of saints or angelic orders of church beliefs, as we saw pictured in the tomb canopies of henry chichele and alice de la pole. instead he perceived the soul as relegated to a series of post-mortal visions awaiting final judgment. as luther summarized, “a man tired with his daily labour...sleeps. but his soul does not sleep but is awake. it experiences visions and the discourses of the angels and of god.” he further suggested this variation from orthodox church teachings by noting that “salomon judgeth that the dead are asleep, and feel nothing at all. for the dead lie there accepting neither days nor years, but when are awaked, they shall seem to have slept scarce one minute.” similarly, thoughts concerning the thinness of temporal boundaries were suggested by other prominent theologians, including jan hus whose example as a forerunner of reformist ecclesiastical thought had an impact on leading theologians throughout europe a century later, including martin luther. this concept of a “sleeping soul” that operates outside of chronological order and did not proceed through an as quoted in dave armstrong, martin luther: catholic critical analysis and praise (raleigh, nc: lulu.com books/barnes and noble, ), . see martin luther, “lectures on genesis, chapters - ” in luther's works, vol. , eds. jaroslav jan pelikan, and walter a. hansen, trans. george victor schick (saint-louis: concordia publishing house, ), . see martin luther, an exposition of salomon’s booke, called ecclesiastes or the preacher, , folio v. hus’ death was noted extensively in luther’s funerary sermon by johann bugenhagen ( – ), including references to chronological anachronisms: “but in this sorrow we should also rightly recognize god’s grace and mercy to us and thank god that he has awakened for us through his spirit this dear dr. martin luther … only one hundred years after the death of the holy john hus (who was killed for the sake of the truth in the year ), just as john hus himself prophesied before his death about a future swan. hus means "goose" in the bohemian language. ‘you are now roasting a goose,’ (says john hus), ‘but god will awaken a swan whom you will not burn or roast.’ and as they shouted much against him, which he could not answer, he supposedly said: ‘after one hundred years i will answer you. he has done that uprightly through our dear father, dr. luther, and has begun it precisely in the one-hundred-and-first year. bugenhagen’s sermon is entitled “a christian sermon over the body and at the funeral of the venerable dr. martin luther, preached by mr. johann bugenhagen pomeranus, doctor and pastor of the churches in wittenberg.” see kurt k. hendel, johannes bugenhagen: selected writings, vols. and (augsburg: augsburg fortress publishers, ), . see also hans-martin barth, the theology of martin luther: a critical assessment (minneapolis: fortress press, ), esp. – . immediate realm of an afterlife was anathema to widespread church beliefs, resulting in condemnation of luther’s teachings. relating to images and other aspects of death, it was not until decades after posting his theses at wittenberg that luther would broach the topic in his sermons and letters, only then detailing his thoughts on the process of dying and immortality. this exploration became heavily pronounced in the later years of his ministry, including after the death of his second daughter magdalena ( – ), followed soon by the death of his close friend george spalatin ( – ). these events dovetailed with luther’s changing attitudes toward death as he reconsidered the casting off of the material body, the propriety of masses for the dead, and the ethos of the soul on its eternal journey. a pronounced amount of luther’s contentions about mortality, the soul, and an afterlife were written as he was grieving his daughter’s death: then, [luther] address[ed] her: “my little magdalena, my little girl, soon you will not be with me, will you be happy without your father?” the tired child tenderly and softly answered: “yes, dear father, as god wants.” soon, we put her in the coffin. … “ah! sweet lenchen,” he says, “you will rise again and you will shine like a star, yes, like the sun! i am happy in the spirit, but my earthly form is very sad.” …[h]e wrote to justus jonas: “i believe the report has reached you that my dearest daughter magdalena has been reborn into christ's eternal kingdom. …. the armstrong, martin luther, . magdalena was pre-deceased by her sister elizabeth ( – ), who did not survive infancy. georg(e) spalatin was the pseudo name of georg burkhardt. he emerged as a leading leader of the reformation and was heavily involved with associations and conversations with churches and educational institutions throughout saxony. his pseudo name is a latinized variation of spalt-spalatimer, his birthplace near nuremberg. see henry eyster jacobs, “spalatin, george,” in lutheran cyclopedia (new york: scribner, ), . see david v. n. bagchi, luther’s earliest opponents: catholic controversialists, – (minneapolis: fortress press, ). force of our natural love is so great that we are unable to do this without crying and grieving in our hearts, or even without experiencing death ourselves.” the effect of magdalena’s death overwhelmed both parents, with luther mournfully writing the epitaph for his child, whom he refers to as a “daughter of death”: “i, magdalena, luther’s dear child/sleep softly with all the saints,/and lie in my quiet and rest./now i am our god’s guest./i was a child of death,/borne by my mother of mortal seed./now i live and am rich in god,/thanks to christ’s blood and death.” the use of an epitaph in which the deceased person speaks directly to the living, a trope also incorporated in the tomb of henry chichele, was a well-established literary device by the sixteenth century. luther also referenced reactions to death in starkly visual terms, suggesting the conflicting responses to images that arose throughout the reformation. in his sermons, he specifically notes the importance of considering images (bilder) of dying, sin, and hell as in his sermon on preparing to die ( ): death looms so large and is terrifying because our foolish and fainthearted nature has etched its image too vividly within itself and constantly fixes its gaze on it. moreover, the devil presses man to look closely at the gruesome mien and image of death to add to his worry, timidity, and despair. indeed, he conjures up before man’s eyes all the kinds of sudden and terrible death ever seen, heard, or read by man. you must look at death while you are alive and see sin in the light of grace and hell in the light of heaven, permitting nothing to divert you from that view. see scott h. hendrix, martin luther: a very short introduction (oxford: oxford university press, ), . dormio cum sanctis hic magdalena, lutheri/filia et hoc strato tecta quiesco meo./filia mortis eram, peccati semine nata,/ sanguine sed vivo, christe, redempta tuo. see carl p. e. springer, “death and life after death in martin luther’s latin elegies,” in acta conventus neo-latini upsaliensis, proceedings of the fourteenth international congress of neo-latin studies, vols. and (uppsala ), ed. astrid steiner-weber (leiden: brill, ), – , at . bradley depew, “wordsworth on epitaph: language, genre, mortality,” elh , no. ( ): – , esp. ; vogler, bernard, “attitudes devant la mort et cérémonies funèbres dans les Églises protestantes rhénanes vers ,” archives de sciences sociales des religions , no. ( ): – , esp. – . see martin luther, “‘ein sermon von der bereitung zum sterben’ und ‘die spatmittelalterliche ars moriendi,’” lutherjahrbuch ( ): – , at . the confluence between mortality and resurrection suggests that luther posited that death was ultimately containable. his later sermons appeared to introduce a confrontation with death, a point that christine helmer suggests “possibly intended to mock the finitude of death itself.” through the resurrection, the nature and function of death and the soul changed, a point recast and debated throughout luther’s teachings. these debates were both conceptualized and visually presented in churches such as saint anna’s, with memorial epitaphs being a visual reminder and blurring of ongoing theological divides and growing rifts about death. by comparing the foundations of lutheran thought with dominant church beliefs, we find differing theological concepts about images of death and the afterlife, and their resonance for the fuggers and viewers of their relief epitaphs in saint anna’s church over the decades. these ongoing debates about memorial and remembrance were pervasive in the early modern period, as were public reactions to and considerations of death and dying. indeed, “the most common use of the word memory revolved around the relationship of the living and the dead.” this association—and the examples of full transi tombs or epitaphs that use the corpse motif, as with the fuggers in saint anna’s church—forced the viewer to consider his or her own imminent demise and reflected a larger connection with the experiences of all of the dead. christ’s death, particularly in relation to the possibility of earthly decay beyond the see christine helmer, “god from eternity to eternity: luther’s trinitarian understanding,” the harvard theological review , no. (apr., ): – . ibid., . sherlock, reformation of memory, . promise of the resurrection, links humans and god in the same shared experience. the resurrection, especially in relation to the last judgment, was considered a promise of immortality of the soul post mortem. the shared and finite confine of mortality was believed to be one, however, that must be experienced first. images of the earthly demise of humankind’s collective mortal coil synthesized the living with the experiences of the dead. the implications of this finding and its application to the concept of the divine will be explored in the subsequent chapter. chapter : reconsidering hans holbein’s the dead christ in the tomb as transi, effigy, and resurrection explication and analysis of the dead christ and its impact hans holbein the younger painted the dead christ in the tomb in oil on limewood between and . the current frame is a later addition to the work, most likely added in the nineteenth century. at roughly eighty inches long and only twelve inches wide, the narrow panel dimensions compare well with the cramped dimensions of an actual tomb, into which we see a privileged view, as if through a cutaway of one side panel (figure . ). the painting itself remains a non-narrative, unflinching look at christ’s suffering conveyed through a forthright image of his corpse. jonathan jones summarizes contemporary visitors’ responses today to this shocking view of mortality, one that, in confronting death so directly, has been seemingly shared for centuries since the work’s creation: it is difficult…to think of the object before you as a painting. it is a dead body that lies at eye level in a recess in the museum wall. and yet even as you admire holbein's skill in painting it, you respond to the corpse not as a painted figure at all – but as a dead body. the painting is wide and low, the height and length of a coffin, and this is crucial to its disturbing effect. the painted tomb serves purely to hold the body and display its shocking details: dark blood caked on a wound made by a spear; the ridged hollowness of the ribcage; those small, unseeing eyes. there is nothing christlike about this body, nothing to set it apart. it is anyone's corpse. holbein presents it as naturally and clinically as a pathologist showing the basel kunstmuseum utilizes these completion dates in its description and catalog. the variation is notable only in that the painting itself includes the year . earlier research did indicate a completion date of based upon x-ray findings. see hans reinhardt, “das entstehungsjahr des toten christus von hans holbein d. j.,” zeitschrift für schweizerische archäologie und kunstgeschichte , no. ( ): . you an accident victim on a hospital mortuary slab. few artists have ever exposed our fate more ruthlessly. this fate is all the more shocking if the modern viewer believes that resurrection is not possible. a consideration of the dead christ in relation to the longer transi tomb phenomenon with which the presumed viewers would have been familiar, however, leads to a novel interpretation of holbein’s painting that places christ in both a position of true death and simultaneously as in the process of resurrection. the image of christ as a corpse suggests interpretations of the divine that, echoing the words of erwin panofsky, are “transforming the ousia (reality) into the phainomenon (appearance), seem[ing] to reduce the divine to a mere subject matter for human consciousness.” by calling on this tomb tradition, holbein’s painting conflates christ’s corpse as an effigy, transi, and resurrected body into one centralized image, expanding upon the depiction of the divine while also suggesting unique reconstructions of appearances and physical matter, reflecting contemporary reformist attitudes about death and the body. this problem is further compounded by the shift from its original location, as this loss of context and its placement in a museum further isolates it from considerations of mortuary tradition. the dead christ is believed to have been commissioned by the basel printer, bonifacius amerbach ( – ), and came into the collection of his son basilius amerbach ( – ), a humanist and professor of jurisprudence at the university of jonathan jones, “holbein’s dead christ delivers a shock,” the guardian, june , . jeff j. a. gatrall, “between iconoclasm and silence: representing the divine in holbein and dostoevskii,” comparative literature , no. ( ): – , at . basel. both men were avid collectors of engravings, coins, and various antiquities. the painting’s owners do not appear to have publicly displayed it in a family chapel, for example, due to the increasingly hostile sentiments about religious images in basel and fears of iconoclasm. rather, holbein’s painting entered directly into the kunstkabinett of basilius. it was first inventoried in as “an image of a dead man [by] hholbein on wood with oil colors.” a small marginal comment reads “cum titulo iesus nazarenus rex j[udaeorum],” referring to holbein’s painted inscription above, which itself refers to the titulus crucis, the piece of wood nailed at the top of the cross mocking the name of christ as king of the jews and inscribed in hebrew, greek, and latin. for its narrow form, the dead christ has been interpreted as having been intended originally as part of an altarpiece—namely, as the predella, or sarg—similar to the same section of matthias grünewald’s ( – ) isenheim altarpiece ( ), where he instead features a joint lamentation and entombment scene (figure . ). while the ibid., . meilan solly, “researchers unlock secrets of basel papyrus,” accessed april , . https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/researchers-unlock-secrets-basel-papyrus-now-identified- late-antiquity-medical-document- / giulia bartrum review of hans holbein der jüngere: die jahre in basel – (basel, kunstmuseum, april– july, ) by christian müller, renaissance studies , no. ( ): – . the entry from basilius amerbach’s inventory reads “ein todten bild h. holbein vf holtz mit olfarben cum titilo iesus nazarenus rex.” see arthur bensley chamberlain, hans holbein the younger, vol. (new york: dodd, mead and company, ), at . translated as “with the titulus jesus of nazareth, king of the jews.” for a discussion on the evolution of the titulus, see mitchell merback, “recognitions: theme and metatheme in hans burgkmair the elder's ‘santa croce in gerusalemme’ of ,” the art bulletin , no. ( ): – ; david areford, “multiplying the sacred: the fifteenth-century woodcut as reproduction, surrogate, simulation,” studies in the history of art ( ): – , esp. – . see oskar bätschmann and pascal griener, hans holbein (cologne: dumo, ), . subject of the entombment was common for predellas, it is likely that holbein’s father also had taken him to view grünewald’s work, particularly as the elder holbein was commissioned to complete a series of paintings for hospitals in isenheim by , when holbein the younger was still part of his workshop. the ragged depiction of christ’s wounds, especially those of his feet and hands, suggests additional commonalities between the dead christ and grünewald’s work. the positioning of christ’s body, especially his legs and feet, further shows distinct similarities between the two paintings. scholars have proposed a series of other possible explanations concerning the odd narrow format of the piece and its original purpose. suggestions have ranged from it being a replacement for a stone figure within an easter sepulcher, or as a work for display within the town hall of basel, functioning as both an altarpiece and as a municipal showcase work of art. additional suggestions include the possibility of it being a cover for a tomb, a conclusion likely tethered to the strong similarity in dimensions between the painting and the lid of a coffin. many of these findings suggest that researchers interpreted the work to be part of a more expansive design, a conclusion that was barbara butts, lee hendrix, and scott c. wolf, with the john paul getty museum and st. louis art museum, painting on light: drawings and stained glass in the age of dürer and holbein (st. louis, mo: st. louis art museum, ), . these suggestions are adroitly summarized in bernd w. lindemann, “‘the dead christ in the tomb,’ hans holbein the younger: the basel years, – , eds. christian müller, stephan kemperdick and maryan w. ainsworth (munich: prestel, ), – . in relation to the possiblity of an easter reference, see walter Überwasser, “hans holbein d. j. christus in der gräbnische,“ zeitschrift für schweizerische archäologie und kunstgeschichte ( ): – . the liturgical and municipal intepretations are explored in heinz klotz, “holbeins ‘leichnam christi im grabe,’” offentliche kunstsammlung basel (basel: jahresberichte – ), – . see tat'iana kasatkina, “after seeing the original: hans holbein the younger’s ‘body of the dead christ in the tomb’ in the structure of dostoevsky’s ‘idiot,’” russian studies in literature: a journal of translations , no. ( ): – , esp. . countered by later research such as that of herbert von einem, who advanced the finding that the panel was done solely as an independent work, complete in itself. christian müller, curator at the basel kunstmuseum, has argued that the painting was first commissioned by amerbach but originally designed for private use within the basel charterhouse of the carthusian monastery. variations between the painting’s date of origin and its eventual installation add to this conundrum. it does seem possible that the painting was expected to be displayed in the carthusian monastery, but was pre-empted by the rise of the reformation in basel and the emergence of iconoclastic outbursts. so instead, it became part of the private kunstkabinett of basilius with numerous other works by holbein, which would form a significant portion of the basel kunstmuseum when the city purchased the collection in . as previously mentioned, the physical elements of the painting are stark. the body is positioned within a closely cropped border and up close to the picture plane, such that little space exists between the edges of the frame and the corpse, and between the viewer and the corpse. the close quarters of the cramped painted space are seemingly broken in two ways, as christ’s hand and some of his hair appears to break the so-called “fourth wall” and approach the viewer directly. the crypt into which christ has been placed is a flat surface, completely covered in a flowing white veil, the same material of herbert von einem, “holbeins ‘christus im grabe,’” kunstchronik , no. ( ), . christian müller, holbeins gemälde “der leichnam christi im grabe” und die grabkapelle der familie amerbach in der basler kartause (zurich: karl schwegler ag, ). see bernhard mendes bürgi and bodo brinkmann, holbein. cranach. grünewald: masterpieces from the kunstmuseum (basel: kuntsmusem basel, ), . david j. roxburgh, the persian album, - : from dispersal to collection (new haven: yale university press, ), . which surrounds christ’s midsection—perhaps referencing the linen shroud belonging to joseph of arimathea. the shroud slightly bunches at his elbow, with more distinct folds emerging near his hands and feet. unlike the results of the wounds on his hands, feet, and side, the wounds around christ’s head are not apparent save for a few bloody blemishes. radiography suggests a slightly different original work visible in the underdrawing, one replicated in a silverpoint sketch most likely completed by an apprentice in holbein’s studio at the time of the painting’s creation (figure . ). although the claw of christ’s hand and his half-opened eyes and mouth do appear in the silverpoint sketch, the representation of the corpse does not rise to the same level of verisimilitude afforded by the coloration with oil paint. in the painting holbein adds to his underdrawing conception by building out through paint the composition of color, light, and anatomical details. tension across a furrowed brow becomes more salient through the use of oils. holbein slackens christ’s jaw, while adding pronounced teeth and gums to an elongated mouth. by slightly altering the poise to foreshorten the limbs and direction of christ’s flowing hair, holbein more effectively breaks the fourth wall, connecting the unfolding drama with the viewer in a more substantial manner. similarly, the movement of light that accompanies the rejuvenation of christ’s body in holbein’s final work is not indicated in the underdrawing. the depth and complexity of the human body, wonderfully mastered in paint by holbein who highlights the persuasive dimensionality and modeling of the body even in the details of the tautness of the body’s sinews and desiccated muscles and flesh, are lacking in the silverpoint sketch. for more information on the silverpoint drawing and its origin, see winnipeg art gallery, “hans holbein, ‘the dead christ in the tomb,’ c. ,” accessed november , , http://wag.ca/art/collections/works-on-paper/display,collection/ . the anatomically suggestive rendering of death in christ’s face, hands, and feet are startling and disconcerting focal points for the painting’s profound visual impact on the viewer (figure . ). christ’s eyes are partially open, with barely half of the iris and pupil being visible, as if the eyes have rolled backwards into his head. the cheeks are sunken and clearly desiccated, which in combination with the slack jawline pulls the mouth open, showing the ridges of the teeth and gums. the combination of the half-open eyes and mouth creates an image of christ being in mid-breath or in pronounced rigor mortis, as almost in a state of perpetual asphyxiation. christ’s hands are similarly rendered, with the fingers either splayed in a post-mortem claw or as grasping at the cloth between it. parts of the tomb’s interior and the body are covered in a slightly viridis tone, signaling in painted color the end of the circulation of blood. unlike the remainder of the body, christ’s feet and hands appear to be bathed in a green and gangrenous hue near his wounds. comparatively, the seemingly washed side wound is far less pronounced and is surrounded by a light bruising with a slight stream of blood near it. the blood on christ’s hands is coagulated, with the oil forming a deep ridge along the boundaries of the wound (figure . ). the coagulation of blood is intensified by the condensed flakes of paint. the darkened redness of the blood stands in stark contrast to the green back and fingers of the hand, and the blanched pink of the interior of christ’s mouth. his cheeks and nose are similarly covered in the same green shade, with his neck muscles being noticeably more relaxed than his taught cheeks and jaw. christ’s abdomen shows little signs of the same decay. his upper torso is lean, and the muscles of his chest, thighs, and upper calves are full and textured, with his calves and triceps being particularly well-defined. the muscles near his collarbone and ribs are noticeably distinct, as is his navel, although it is positioned slightly lower than what would be anatomically correct, emphasizing the stretched-out position of the corpse. the outstretched finger of christ is foreshortened and extends out of the picture plane. this same technique is suggested in christ’s right foot, which also breaks the picture plane slightly at the heel. the feet are flush with the bottom of the tomb, where holbein has inscribed the completion date of the painting and his initials. the interior of a closed coffin would obviously be completely darkened, but holbein cleverly has included distinct references to light. for example, the interior side of christ’s feet and lower extremities are illuminated (figure . ). the same centralized beam of light progresses up christ’s mid-section, splaying a natural light across his abdomen. the light maintains roughly a thirty-five to forty-degree angle from the base of the tomb at christ’s feet to his chin, with more light appearing at the base of the coffin. the suggestion of movement of the light leading from the base toward the top of christ’s neck adds to the unfolding drama. the division between the light at christ’s jawline is evident and creates a particularly jarring effect. as lorne campbell notes, the demarcation of light at christ’s jaw creates a sense of horror, seeming to separate the body even more by bifurcating the treatment of the head from the remainder of the body. holbein has included no outward signs of decay that parallel that of christ’s hands, face, or feet wherever the light touches. it may be interpreted that holbein’s painting draws focus to the parts of christ’s body that were primarily affected by the lorne campbell, review of holbein: the paintings of hans holbein the younger, complete edition, by john rowlands, burlington magazine , no. ( ): – . passion, with the less notable treatment of the wound at his side and only slight suggestion of abrasions from a crown of thorns. viewers’ reactions to dead christ crystallize along specific spectra. first, the sheer mortality and blunt depiction of death are tied to this larger test of faith by creating doubt in the likelihood or possibility of christ’s resurrection. olga meerson summarizes this ongoing view as both an oft-noted crisis of faith and as a direct exploration of christ’s humanity, noting “human emotions as anguish, compassion...the emotions and temptations of which christ himself partook.” more than a reflection on the mortal decay of christ’s body, an emotional connection is established between the viewer and subject, positioning christ as not only memento mori, but also as empathic prototype. holbein and navigating death through the reformation holbein’s dead christ thematizes novel interpretations of death that illustrate the triumph of painting and emergent theologies within the northern renaissance and reformation. his career spans across the first half of the sixteenth century, employed the use of disparate media and took place in significant reform locations in western europe and may have served as a bridge across artistic traditions to accompany shifts in viewing audiences. holbein’s career usually is described as following four distinct stages of development, each situated along specific geographical locations: his artistic formation in augsburg ( or – ), training and working under his father and brother, also formidable painters; his activities in basel when he painted the dead christ ( – ); olga meerson, “ivolgin and holbein: non-christ risen vs. christ non-risen,” the slavic and east european journal , no. ( ): – . his first english period and subsequent return to basel ( – ); and his second english period ( – ), when he left basel in iconoclastic throes for a more stable and promising career back in england, where he finally earned a position at the english court. historiographically, holbein’s works have been seen as an extension of earlier netherlandish and germanic artistic traditions, on one hand, and as rudimentary digestions of italian ones, on the other. pierre coulanjon has argued that holbein the younger’s work emblematizes not only a strong break from his father and brother’s earlier creations, but also provides a synthesis of earlier religious and secular traditions, all culminating in a novel humanist approach to painting characteristic of the northern renaissance. holbein’s work is underscored by a focus on mimesis and naturalism, prompting his contemporaries to remark: “[y]ou wish to see pictures that perfectly resemble life? behold this work by holbein’s noble hand.” this tradition of humanism, naturalism, and portraiture— holbein’s specialty in artistic genres—earmarks holbein as a catalyst for the changing ideological and socio-artistic patterns that were sweeping across europe in the early campbell, paintings of hans holbein, – . the trajectory of holbein’s work as an extension of these traditions is explored in wilhelm pinder, “holbein der jungere and das ende der altdeutschen kunst, vom wesen und werden deustcher formen,” geschichtliche betrachtungern (cologne: e. a. seeman, ), – . holbein’s historic artistic connection to italy is described in jean rousseau, hans holbein (paris: librarie d’art, jules rouam, ), . see pierre coulanjon, “holbein,” les cahiers de la peinture , no. ( – ): – . “cernere vis, hospes, simulacra simillima vivis? hoc opus holbinae nobile cerne manus.” from nicolas bourbon ( – / ) french poet and member of king henry viii, quoted in alfred woltmann, “historiarum veteris testamenti icones ad vivum expressae,” in holbein und seine zeit (leipzig: e. a. seemann, ), . the phrase is translated with its history in stephanie buck, “hans holbein: portraitist of the renaissance,” in hans holbein the younger / – , eds. stephanie buck and jochen sander (zwolle, netherlands: royal cabinet of paintings, mauritshuis/waanders publishers, ), – , at . sixteenth century. as larry silver summarizes, holbein’s international affiliations and experiences distinguish him from his german contemporaries and positioned him in a uniquely entrepreneurial position. overall, holbein’s prolific oeuvre crossed media, styles, and scale, with highly regarded paintings, prints, drawings, and miniatures all being part of his eclectic artistic trajectory. by leaving basel largely to escape the limits on his career posed by radical reformers and iconoclasts, and by practicing as a successful artist in england and germany, two locations also deeply affected by reformist thought, holbein provides a unique opportunity to analyze and reconsider how he created works that could sustain interpretations from viewers on both sides of the religious divide, including the dead christ. holbein’s relationship with the reformation was a textured one and his life was situated along a shared axis of growing theological debates surrounding the reformation. additionally, his career was underscored by changing socio-cultural and theological contemplations about the role of the artist in religious contexts. beyond a conceptual consideration, holbein’s work also stakes its claim as part of a pivotal shift from sculpture and relief to painting as the medium best suited for the creation of convincingly absorptive and mental images, especially of topics that are illusory like depictions of the afterlife or interior of a buried coffin. this development is particularly significant, as the medium of paint not only became dominant throughout europe during this period that holbein was particularly affected by shifts toward renaissance humanism from earlier portrait traditions in europe, which did not prioritize visual likeness as its aim. see david r. smith, “portrait and counter-portrait in holbein's ‘the family of sir thomas more,’” the art bulletin , no. ( ): – . larry silver, review of albrecht altdorfer in seiner zeit: religiöse und profane themen in der kunst um by thomas nol, the sixteenth century journal , no. ( ): – . also witnessed the conceptual dissolution or dismantling of the altarpiece, but also represented new implications in the growing image debates, including the more radical activities of iconoclasm of the sorts that took place in basel in and likely necessitated holbein’s departure to find more steady patronage elsewhere, and to seek additional work in the realm of printmaking. this transition is specifically relevant to holbein’s work principally in reference to representation, readily explored by jeanne nuechterlein. she posits that holbein opted to represent images in a self-fashioned manner, positioning himself as the inventor of the image, as opposed to his religious imagery or portraiture in which he created a simulacrum. this dichotomy between authorial style versus passive description or replication is suggested by nuechterlain as a hallmark of the categorical divisions between the artistic invention of images compared to the reconstitution of a particular vision, that is, of things seen in the world. moreover, this praxis suggests a means to understanding how holbein wrestled with the details of affective verisimilitude, while also considering the implications of the artist’s vision. these two matters were parcel to the ongoing debate about the function of the artist in the reformation and “ultimately suggests that holbein consciously employed them [inventions versus reconstruction of images] either in isolation or combination, to comment on the nature of the visible world christopher s. wood, “michael pacher and the fate of the altarpiece in renaissance germany,” res (spring ): – ; amy powell, depositions: scenes from the late medieval church and the modern museum (cambridge. ma: zone books, ); and maria h. loh, “the death of the medium and technologies of the new in early modern italy,’ in novità—das ‘neue’ in der kunst um , theorien, mythen, pratiken, eds. ulrich pfisterer and gabriele wimböck (munich: diaphanes, ), – . jeanne nuechterlein, translating nature into art: holbein, the reformation, and renaissance rhetoric (university park, pa: pennsylvania state university press, ), – . and the artist’s role in communicating this nature.” holbein’s life was practically at the epicenter of these theological and artistic quagmires. similarly, holbein’s response to the “image problem” that would become iconoclasm may have been inflected by his contacts with the humanist erasmus of rotterdam, of whom he painted multiple portraits, works that were completed in the throes of debate about the function of images within civic and religious life. the very function of painting caused erasmus distress as he found it to be problematically aligned with the principles of christianity, namely that images may distract viewers from the meanings of scripture. in that regard, jürgen müller summarized: “again and again [erasmus] spoke of the dangers that painting holds for the trusting believer: it is the worship of saints and religious relics that leads to confusing a representation with an archetype and causes christians to adhere to a silly, yet pleasant superstition.” erasmus’ position suggests the particularly problematic dangers of verisimilitude in paint, and also susanne meurer, review of translating nature into art: holbein, the reformation, and renaissance rhetoric, by jeanne nuechterlein, renaissance quarterly , no. (summer, ): – . this relationship between holbein and erasmus is explored in hans reinhardt, “Érasme er son portraitist hans holbein le jeune,” in l’humanisme allemande ( – ), ed. xviiieme colloque internationale de tours (paris: vrin, ): – . holbein’s association with erasmus bridged much of his life, with his illustrations from erasmus’ praise and folly completed when holbein was seventeen or eighteen years old. see erika michael, “the legacy of holbein's ‘gedankenreichtum,’” in hans holbein: paintings, prints and reception—studies in the history of art: center for advanced study in the visual arts symposium papers xxxvii, eds. mark roskil and john oliver hand (washington d. c.: national gallery of art, ): – . erwin panofsky, “erasmus and the visual arts,” journal of the warburg and courtauld institutes ( ): – . jürgen müller, “the eye of the artist: hans holbein's theory of art,” in hans holbein: paintings, prints and reception—studies in the history of art: center for advanced study in the visual arts symposium papers xxxvii, eds. mark roskil and john oliver hand (washington d. c.: national gallery of art, ), – . is a statement concerning the function and visuality of appearance of kunst from bild and ontology, a concept further explored by hans belting and thomas dunlap who noted differences between the appearance and reception of the image versus the elements of its actual content. prints—a medium wholly unconducive to verisimilitude—gave holbein a relatively safe outlet to explore these issues about the problem of representation and the role of images, if not religious ones, in public and civic life, key artistic issues at stake during the reformation. namely, his woodcut cycle of pictures of death, designed by , but not published until , played with the totentanz, or death’s dance, tradition. as kathi meyer-baer explains, “the skeleton is the leader and is intended to represent death.... the figure is usually leading his partner quietly very seldom is he in lively action, almost never is he dancing or fighting with his partner.” images of a peaceful death and reactions to it underscored the ideologies of the reformation, with a host of basel-based artists exploring the connection. for example, the ship of fools by sebastian brant, published in basel in , had already been exploring pervasive characteristics in the depiction of death that emblematized the skeletal presence and see hans belting and thomas dunlap, eds., an anthropology of images: picture, medium, body (princeton: princeton university press, ), esp. – . holbein’s pictures of death is cataloged as les simulachres ez historiees faces de la mor, aurantv elegammen! pourtraictes, que arztficiellemen imaginees, a lyon: soubz l'escu de coloigne. excudebant lugduni melchior et gaspar trechsel fratres, , b ivv c ir, c iv, c iiv (pierpont morgan library.) kathi meyer-baer, music of the spheres and the dance of death: studies in musical iconology (princeton: princeton university press, ), . for an exploration of exploration between public perceptions of death and the reformation and how the two are explored through basel based artists, see alfred berchtold, bâle et l’europe: une histoire culturelle (lausanne, switzerland: payot, ). costuming. in fact, one could argue that the foundation for holbein’s own artistic elaborations on death and his characterization of its role within the reformation was likely established well before the publishing of his oft-noted depictions of death in pictures of death. in working through his designs for the pictures of death in the early s, holbein’s characterization of death was explored in multiple facets to sustain a broad and anonymous audience, around the time of the dead christ’s creation. as peter parshall summarizes: [holbein] matured in a political and religious climate that by , when the designs for the pictures of death were probably completed, lay on the threshold of what the historian donald kelley has termed ‘the beginning of ideology.’ by this kelley means a europe driven by polarized beliefs and rapidly moving beyond a point of conciliation or the reasonable exchange of opinion. basel's liberal humanist community centered around its active, internationally connected printing industry, which had already begun to serve lutheran interests by . this conclusion positions holbein not only as being fundamentally affected by reformation debates and divisions, but also as working in the very nexus of disparate theological and political thoughts in basel, a situation that was mirrored during his earlier time in augsburg prior to . for more information on the proliferation of images of death during holbein’s era and its ongoing legacy, see christiane hertel, “dis/continuities in dresden’s dances of death,” the art bulletin , no. ( ): – . peter parshall, “hans holbein’s ‘pictures of death,” in hans holbein: paintings, prints, and reception—studies in the history of art: center for advanced study in the visual arts symposium papers xxxvii, ed. mark roskil and john oliver hand (washington d. c.: national gallery of art, ), – , at . katharine baetjer, “a portrait by holbein the younger,” bulletin of the detroit institute of arts , no. ( ); – , esp. . holbein’s pictures of death garnered attention throughout europe beyond the public response toward the dead christ. death is portrayed as culling souls regardless of social station, effortlessly thwarting powerful regimes (figure . ) or assisting mortals with their final labors (figure . ). though in a completely different way from the dead christ, holbein’s pictures of death woodcuts make room for the viewer’s interpretation to complete the meaning of the work. by positioning death as perpetually extant and omnipresent while moving across a wide swath of people, holbein invited the viewer to see death as a constant presence in life, a potential extension of basel’s liberal humanist ideology that tethered the resurrection to that certainty. although holbein incorporated several of these same themes of representation into his earlier works, the dead christ exemplifies a complex shift in execution and more demands on the viewer to contemplate mortality. holbein’s work resonates anew if we consider it within this context as itself a painted extension of the transi phenomenon. a consideration of holbein’s work as a verifiable new form of transi has not yet been considered, nor has its links to basel as a center for iconoclastic concerns about matter and medium. for information regarding the public reaction to holbein’s pictures of death, see natalie zemon davis, “holbein's pictures of death and the reformation at lyons,” studies in the renaissance ( ): – , esp. – . ibid, – . for a summary of the extensive literature on the series, see stephanie buck, “international exchange: holbein at the crossroads of art and craftsmanship,” in hans holbein: paintings, prints, and reception—studies in the history of art: center for advanced study in the visual arts symposium papers xxxvii, eds. mark roskil and john oliver hand (washington d. c.: national gallery of art, ), – , esp. . k. j. wilson, “more and holbein: the imagination of death,” the sixteenth century journal , no. ( ): – . the ontological turn of the dead christ and its legacy one might well envision holbein’s work within a larger interpretation as a rendering not only of christ and an anonymous corpse, but also as the personification of death within a larger theological trajectory. seeing holbein’s work within the conventions of renaissance portraiture at this time, in a desire for visual likeness and descriptive detail, introduces new perspectives, ones that as nancy struever has suggested, “do…‘social work,’ and that in the contemporary lutheran artists’ practice, the portrait ‘gives order and establishes order, positioning bodies in social space.’” as the reformation continued to take hold throughout europe, a reconsideration of memorials and tombs also occurred. the alterations in graves and their purpose within the larger sphere of sacred spaces was noted by paul binski, who differentiated between the construction of tombs and their larger theological function as elements of sacred space. binski’s work suggests that tomb construction in the medieval period was underscored by a belief in an ongoing dialogue of mutual and transactional obligation between the living and the dead. a series of religious and socio-cultural elements events were heralds for this growing art historical movement. holbein has been typically regarded as one of the leading portraitists of the northern renaissance by both his contemporaries and current day scholars, a master in the handling of oil paint to achieve naturalistic effects. the naturalism of his dead nancy s. struever, review of translating nature into art; holbein, the reformation, and renaissance rhetoric by jeanne nuechterlein, rhetorica: a journal of the history of rhetoric , no. ( ): – , esp. . binski, medieval death, – ; – . buck, hans holbein, , . christ has been characterized in deeply personal terms. details of bodily internal hemorrhaging and decay are immediately evident upon viewing it, and the effect is jarring. a link to earlier styles of artistic representation has been suggested in other works by holbein, particularly in situating himself in direct artistic lineage with early netherlandish painting, namely in van eyck’s manner of illusionistic naturalism enabled by a mastery of oil paint and erasure of traces of the hand in the form of brushstrokes. in particular, the dead christ has been referred to as an audacious transformation of the theme of entombment. the painting’s impact lingers as it suggests the interior of a claustrophobic coffin with the jarring and all too evident effects of death. with christ’s half-opened mouth, askew eyes, and facial expressions, holbein creates a complex visage of individual and universal experience. as jeanette kohl and dominic olariu propose,“[t]he belief in images and image-making all overlap in the face. the face as a high-density system of physically operating sensory signals and their finely tuned choreography represents the person more than anything else. often enough we think of a face as identity.” this facial meaning, however, is beyond mere recognition but is instead, as maria a. loh concludes, “about bodies being transformed into data through significance and subjectification. these faces reterritorialise the bodies for an exploration of other works that parallel the incorporation of a van eyckian tradition, particularly in consideration of holbein’s ‘solothum madonna’, see mark evans, “holbein. basel. london,” burlington magazine , no. ( ): – . on aspects of portraying the entombment, see jochen sander, “the darmstadt madonna: on the genesis of holbein’s panel for jakob meye zum hasen,” in hans holbein the younger / – , eds. stephanie buck and jochen sander (zwolle, netherlands: royal cabinet of paintings mauritshuis/waanders publishers, ), – . for reactions to holbein’s work and to the body of the dead christ in the tomb ( ) in particular, consult the seminal work of julia kristeva, “on the melancholic imaginary,” new formations (winter, ): – , esp. and – . jeanette kohl and dominic olariu, en face: seven essays on the human face, special issue of kritische berichte (marburg, germany: jonas, ), . attached to them … which in turn naturalises the construction of these ‘individuals’ along similar terms.” the ecumenical and liturgical function of holbein’s painting can be considered by positioning the body of christ not as a simultaneous effigy and a transi, a cadaver not of stone but of paint, caught in limbo between death and resurrection, between individual identity and universal experience. christ’s mortality is stressed through the depiction of his tortured body and seems impossible to overcome. the promise of the life-affirming blood of jesus christ, so readily provided to humankind as a saving balm in myriad artistic depictions, is here coagulated and festered, an apparently all too lifeless thing. the decaying body that had been suggested through transi sculptures instead bore a verisimilitude that mirrored the rot of septic and decomposing flesh. the contradictions of representations of corpses with earlier depictions of the dead are pronounced. contrary to the vibrant images painted above the transi of alice de la pole, holbein opted to depict god’s incarnate body with the hues of gangrenous rigor mortis. the waxy smoothness of henry chichele’s transi and the curves of pristine alabaster in alice de la pole’s shroud facilitated a tactile response from the viewer, mollifying the shock of death. polychromy and gilding act in henry chichele’s tomb as a means of augmenting a three-dimensional representation of the human body and its costuming. the durability of the carved relief of the fuggers’ epitaphs can also be contrasted with the cerebral and illusory images afforded by oil paint, a medium which itself is built up slowly in translucent layers. the dead christ is jarring in its removal of these discreet suggestions of visual euphemisms, a viewing made loh, “renaissance faciality,” . only more powerful by its subject matter. the intense reception that is afforded by oil paint is not apparent in these earlier examples, and the odious experience of sensing rottenness is not as fully envisioned in the other examples of death. the visual experience is also kinetically different when a viewer’s body encircles memorial stones or a tomb, all the while noting unique images at each turn. in both henry chichele and alice de la pole’s tombs, the viewer’s eye may glance to the realms of familial or clerical power, attended by realms of saints and angels sculpted alongside the effigy. similarly, the viewer experiences the base-reliefs of the fugger memorial stones from different angles, facilitating a conceptual completion of the carved images as part of the nearby celebration of the life-affirming eucharist. in the case of the dead christ, holbein forces the viewer to mentally complete the horrific image of the emaciated body of the divine in a roughly hewn coffin, solitary in its demonstration. through the two- dimensional surface of holbein’s work, the viewer is apt to imagine contours of the depth of christ’s wounds while also imagining the havoc wreaked upon his body. even more, the presentation by holbein of christ still within a narrow sarcophagus bears additional implications about the moment we are witnessing of an utterly dead corpse encased by stone. and yet, as we shall see, that moment is extended in the viewer’s mental imagination, freeing and cleansing christ’s body in perfection and resurrection. as joseph koerner explains in the reformation of the image, etymologically linked to the germanic term sarg, or coffin, the sarcophagus of a tomb can be interpreted as an extension of the altar, a work made of stone since at least the time of charlemagne. chichele’s tomb relates to the representation of a sarcophagus, along with the stratification of heavenly figures and allusions to death, and the combination of sculpture and polychrome entice the viewer through a suggestion of kinetic and tactile sensations. like dürer’s self-portrait of holbein’s painting and the responses it solicits may be seen as entombment portraits, having implications for theology, representation, the status of a work of art, and larger questions of ontology. the underlying and historical premise of art and its creation carries with it distinct ramifications and conclusions about a state of being, including suppositions related to the experience of the hermeneutic aesthetic. as philosopher hans george gadamer explains, art invites a unique language as a form of communication and conversation, one based on a historical dialogue that is only reified through painting: [t]he work of art is handed on in the same sense as our literary sources are. at any rate, it speaks not only as remnants of the past speak to the historical investigator or as do historical documents that render something permanent. what we are calling the language of the work of art, for the sake of which the work is preserved and handed on, is the language the work of art itself speaks, whether it is linguistic in nature or not. the work of art says something to the historian: it says something to each person as if it were said especially to him, as something present and contemporaneous. thus, our task is to understand the meaning of what it says and to make it clear to ourselves and others. the conversation that art initiates suggests a manifestation of language, with communication being able to be manipulated through linguistic means. this dialogue see koerner, reformation of the image, . see hans-georg gadamer, “aesthetics and hermaneutics,” in the continental aesthetics reader, nd ed., ed. clive cazeaux (new york: routledge, ), – , at . a critique of gadamer’s work is that he focuses primarily on western languages and images, with very little regard to the association between the two in any non-european cultural tradition. the tenuous relationship between language and meaning, as well as between image and representation, is not confined solely to western art, despite several of gadamer’s examples and conclusions. for an effective explanation of the link between language and meaning in contemporary eastern art, see bing xu, joseph thompson, jesse robert coffino, delissa handoko, paulette wein, xuan sheng, and massachusetts becomes complex and potentially problematic within the confines of religious orthodoxy, permitting variations of responses or ideas to contemplate that may be antithetical to the established lexicon of pervasive theological doctrine. holbein’s dead christ participates in that debate. holbein’s simultaneous invocation of the divine and human aspects of christ in this painting—its dual function as an appeal to humankind’s interpretation of the divine while simultaneously suggesting corporeal decay—collapses the dichotomy between the destruction and redemption of the collective human body. in this way, holbein showcases the destruction of corporeality alongside and through an interpretation of christ’s entombment and its function within the milieu of christian ideology, representing one of the more complicated works in all of holbein’s substantial oeuvre, facilitated during tenuous and shifting ideological and ontological landscapes. ingo herklotz summarized events leading into the fifteenth century as emblematic of this re-categorization of the association between the living and the dead, conclusions part of the larger discussion about the role of the liturgy and clergy. extending binski’s claim, the movement of graves into churches, the rise in monastic provisions for the dead, the privatization of funerary liturgy, and the prolific amount of effigies and portraits of the dead during the early sixteenth century all suggest a reconceptualization of death and the resurrection in the late medieval period. museum of contemporary art. xu bing: phoenix (north adams, ma: massachusetts museum of contemporary art, ). ingo herklotz, review of medieval death: ritual and representation, by paul binski. speculum , no. ( ): – . binski, medieval death, . by representing a deceased person as occupying multiple conceptual and theological spaces, artists represented the soul as possessing uniquely active properties that actively and effectively crossed temporal boundaries and dimensions. fred paxton reiterates this point about death and remembrance by suggesting that corporeality, in particular the presentation of a corpse, is an illusory representation of the soul. seeing the representation of the corpse as a sign or invitation for dialogue, paxton and binski suggest that medieval tombs invited discussions about selfhood while simultaneously positioning the soul as ambivalently related to both the living and the dead in an intricate balance. this point is furthered by visual theorist griselda pollock, who notes that by creating a corpse, “holbein has managed to hold in tension form – namely the possibility of meaning – and death – the erasure or end of meaning, non-being – by means of the dismal palette he has deployed.” within holbein’s painting, the corpse of christ can therefore be interpreted as suspended between representing the decay of the human body and its revitalization, a similar fate that was believed to befall the soul itself. brian repsher encapsulates this movement by summarizing binski’s findings as a re-ordering of the “sensitive boundaries between the living and the dead.” the tomb was instrumental in representing and evoking a dialogue with a deceased person. the liturgy and prayers played a vital role in the potential collective agency of the fred paxton, review of medieval death: ritual and representation by paul binski, the catholic historical review , no. ( ): – . griselda pollock, “the missing wit(h)ness: monroe, fascinance, and the unguarded intimacy of being dead,” journal of visual art practice , no. ( ): – ; emphasis in original. binski, medieval death, . commemoration of the dead, a point advanced by janet burton in reflection of binski’s findings. in particular, she contends that binski’s observation on discourse between the living and the dead substantiates the importance of seeing tombs as serving a vital communicative and instrumental role, one that should be considered at a similar, if not greater, level to that of the aesthetic value of memorials. particularly, binski’s conclusion about the role of beneficent saints serving to intercede for both the living and dead is suggested through the presentation of vivacity in the effigy and the desiccating features of decay through the transi. similarly, tombs underscore a fundamental shift in the perception of individuality versus collective responses to death and memory. what happens if we understand holbein’s dead christ within the visual world of sixteenth-century viewers trained in viewing transi tombs and understanding the blurred demarcations between individual and collective responses to dying, between spheres of life and death? any resultant separation between the seemingly contradictory spheres of life and death is contested, a conclusion that is intensified through holbein’s painting. temporal boundaries are dissolved as the affirmation of an immortal soul outside the earthly decay of the corpse is presented as being malleable. simply, the line between mortal corporeality and immortality is tenuous, as christ’s body shows little sign of an impending resurrection. the grossly discolored skin tones of the hands and feet embody lifelessness, a finding augmented through the powerful verisimilitude of painting. simultaneously, however, holbein’s incorporation of the movement and intensification of light across the body suggests the possibility of a revitalization of life within the dead see janet burton, review of medieval death: ritual and representation by paul binski, the english historical review , no. ( ): – . materiality of the corpse. the soul’s presence within the decay of entombment and the temporality of death is being reconsidered, contested, and potentially suspended. the fleshy hues on portions of the body suggest that it is not definitely and fully a mere corpse, but the lifelessness of the image creates a vision of finality. contrary to many earlier depictions of the dead christ, holbein does not include any references to the instruments of christ’s torture as an indicator for the pain associated with his death. for example, there are no physical indications of a crown of thorns, nails, or spear. instead, holbein has removed any indicator of metaphysical mysticism and physical torture, as well as narrative. sociologist john lechte summarizes this depiction as one based on agony, with the torture and corporeal destruction associated with the passion. lechte notes that holbein’s rendering is so disconcerting because the promise of the resurrection has been nullified. this interpretation reiterates the claim that the dead christ is incontrovertibly an image of a corpse, the promise of immortality seeming so distant and unlikely. the viewer of the painting is forced to consider death as a fundamentally nihilistic, if not omnipresent, force. as oskar bätschmann and pascal griener observed in holbein’s pictures of death, ‘[t]he dialogue between man and death as it is staged in the traditional totentanz has been modified. the image is instead intended for the reader and the beholder, who must reckon with the unexpected lechte’s position is on the use of graphic violence in art and how images indicate our conceptualization of being. he also posits that art is tethered to theological experiences, stemming at least to the byzantine era. these intersections are explained in john lechte, “beyond the ontology of the image?” either/and ( ), accessed on january , . http://hdl.handle.net/ . / . john lechte, “kristeva and holbein, artist of melancholy,” british journal of aesthetics , no. ( ): – , esp. . interruption of death into their everyday life.” while death in pictures of death primarily overtakes his forthcoming victims with a personal touch, he is instead made all the more powerful in the dead christ by being present without being visible, forcing a dialogue in novel directions and directly confronting the viewer. similarly, the presentation of the body suggests a study in a monochromatic rendering of death. walter Überwasser found that the coloration of the body, particularly when compared with other similar works by grünewald and even by holbein’s father, lacks coloration and expressiveness, surmising that the palate of hues and bodily expression was more limited. Überwasser also concluded that the distortions of the head, feet, and hands further a late medieval approach, perhaps a deliberate stylistic anachronism to heighten the emotive effects and impact of viewing. while other images of the dead christ suggest the inevitability of christ’s immortality, holbein’s depiction leaves the viewer without a hopeful resolution, inviting “a banal and non-transcendent mortal experience.” the implication of christ’s apparent utter and unchanging mortality not only suggests an alternative interpretation or orientation to the promise of the resurrection, but also to the foundation of christ’s very nature. bätschmann and griener, holbein, revised and expanded, . see this idea echoed by parshall, “hans holbein’s ‘pictures of death,’” – . it is also possible to interpret death as a guide or even an amicable assistant in pictures of death as noted in death and the plowman, which features a farmer tilling his fields alongside death’s helpful hand. walter Überwasser, “holbeins ‘christus in der grabnische,’” studien zur kunst des oberrheins: festschrift für werner noack (constance and freiburg: rombach, ), – . lechte, kristeva and holbein, . a novel memento mori: re-reading the dead christ as a transi figure a potential interpretation of holbein’s dead christ as simultaneously effigy and transi raises philosophical and theological questions about the relationship of the body to the soul. thomas aquinas ( – ), had tried to resolve that question by arguing that the body and the soul were inherently dichotomous, distinct entities, with the body understood to encase the soul. his view represents an alternative to aristotle’s principle of hylomorphism, which predated christianity but nonetheless had enduring implications for christian ideas about the body as a physical extension of the soul. in essence, hylomorphism is “in terms of its matter, understood as parts or components, and its form, understood as a principle of unity.” aristotle developed his contention of hylomorphism not in relation to human beings specifically, but rather to the form and function of materiality in total, seeing a common experience within all living organisms. aristotle’s and aquinas’ views were not resolved, as questions about hylomorphism were reopened because of reformist’s interests, extends aristotle’s explanation and defining it as a form that predates a particular material construction and that exists outside of, but also through, a materialized nature. some sixteenth-century viewers—including one of the for more on aquinas’ explanation of materiality and refutation of aristotle’s explanation of hylomorphism in his book de anima, see jeffrey e. brower, aquinas's ontology of the material world: change, hylomorphism, and material objects (oxford: oxford university press, ). mark johnston, “hylomorphism,” the journal of philosophy , no. ( ): – , at . aristotle presented his contentions on hylomorphism in a series of writings, but a helpful synthesis is presented in william jaworski, structure and the metaphysics of mind: how hylomorphism solves the mind-body problem (oxford: oxford university press, ). siyi chen, “the priority argument and aristotle’s political hylomorphism,” ergo , no. ( ): – , esp. . presumed primary viewers, the humanist basilius amerbach—may have understood the dead christ as participating in ongoing debates about how the constitution of matter intersected with the ephemeral, particularly in relationship to the soul. holbein’s work presents some of these concerns and unresolved debates by positioning the body of christ as emblematic of humanity’s mortality with the inevitability of humankind’s collective death. through hylomorphism, the physicality of the body is seen as an extension of the soul, with the form of the soul being synonymous with the body’s matter in the same way that wax and its form are congruent. the split between the body and the soul, an oft- noted consideration of transi tombs, is visually re-oriented in the case of holbein’s dead christ. holbein’s work suggests a novel interpretation of images of the soul not as a small homunculus, nor as the pristine and undefiled bodies of saints elevated to heavenly realms, both of which stand in stark contrast to the degeneration emblematized by transi tombs. instead, holbein’s work combines the image of the soul and body into one form, with the promise of the resurrection and the grisly pall of death occurring simultaneously. by assuming that the corpse presented in holbein’s painting could indeed have been understood by some viewers as a hylomorphic presentation of the soul, the dialogue between the dead and the living, or even between the soul in purgatory and the wax and its form analogy has been partial to the explanation of hylomorphism since its creation, with allusion occurring both in aristotle and aquinas’ writings on the topic. see kendall a. fisher, “thomas aquinas on hylomorphism and the in-act principle,” british journal for the history of philosophy , no. ( ): – , esp. – . for a consideration of the transi tomb as a display of decay and the immutability of matter, see binski, medieval death, . eternity, emerges in a new light. states of being are conflated and subsequently open questions about the death of the body as an extension of the soul. ideas about the foundation and constitution of matter, including attributes of the body, underwent dramatic shifts during holbein’s time in basel, coinciding with the lectures of swiss medical doctor and professor theophrastus von hohenheim, commonly known as paracelsus ( or – ). paracelsus posited both anatomical and theological conclusions about the constitution of the body and nature of the soul—mainly that physical mass is separated into the planes of material versus spiritual existence, with humans being a combination of both elements, effectively augmenting aristotelian matter theory. paracelsus theorized that the body and the remainder of the natural world were comprised of four basic ontological components including the elemental, sidereal, immortal bodies, and the soul. these constructs, often recast as corporeal body, spirit, and divine soul, equated with the nature of the triune god, a preternatural life-force present throughout the world. this presence was perpetual as “all matter contains some degree of this trinitarian life force… from rocks to trees to animals to humans to walter pagel, “the prime matter of paracelsus,” ambix ( ): – ; and massimo luigi bianchi, “the visible and the invisible: from alchemy to paracelsus,” in alchemy and chemistry in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, eds. piyo rattansi and antonio clericuzio (dordrecht, netherlands: kluwer, ), – . see daniel dane thor, “paracelsus on baptism and the acquiring of the eternal body,” in paracelsian moments: science, medicine, and astrology in early modern europe, eds. gerhild scholz williams and charles d. gunnoe, jr. (kirksville, mo: sixteenth century journal publishers, inc., ), – . see h. c. erik midelfort. “the anthropological roots of paracelsus’ psychiatry,” in kreatur und kosmos: internationale beiträge zur paracelsusforschung, ed. rosemarie dilg-frank (new york: gustav fischer verlag, ), – . angels.” he posited that all matter was a combination of these disparate elements that merely shifted in ratio across time, but that were always imbued with the manifested presence of the divine, extending debates about the corporeality of the body and the composition of the soul. these conclusions posited that the body was imbued with formed by multiple and comingling attributes, existing in an interpolated manner. while aquinas, aristotle, and paracelsus were apt to suggest that the body and soul were conjoined and mutually bounded through shared space, holbein extends that premise by synthesizing a living soul with inert corporeal matter, while also suggesting that the resurrection is a vital component of this amalgamation. holbein’s work represents an interpolation of vivacity, a rotting corpse, and an eternal soul into one singular entity, as with the stratification of a transi tomb. the progression of christ’s reconstitution is an inherent element of this depiction. as the light painted at the base of christ’s feet progresses from his tortuous wounds to his gangrenous hands and lifeless visage, reanimation and resurrection awaits in the balance. this life-bearing light emanates from outside the tomb but is supernatural light, because its presence is a physical impossibility in a light-defying crypt or in the complete darkness of encased soil. holbein effectively eliminates these strictures as light appears to emanate from both above and through christ’s body, suggesting that the wounds may be in the process of becoming healed and the body reanimated through both external and internal means. the decay and fallibility of flesh, previously artistically signified by a decomposing transi and katherine eggert, disknowledge: literature, alchemy, and the end of humanism in renaissance england (philadelphia: university of pennsylvania press, ), . dane thor daniel, “invisible wombs: rethinking paracelsus’s concept of body and matter,” ambix , no. ( ): – . lifelike effigy, would reanimate not through a progression of stratified tiers but simultaneously as a unified phenomenon, conjoining soul, body, and resurrection together. holbein represented the salvation of redemption and the mortality of flesh concurrently in one body and image, as if a kind of conflation or compression of the separate strata previously designated to a transi tomb. holbein can be seen extending the ethos of transi tombs and translating it into another medium, with the living body of the portrait effigy, the rotting corpse of the transi, and the unviewable bodily remains becoming synthesized into one image. what had been a depiction of the dead through a three-dimensional sculpture was now a matter of an optic and conceptual image of the interior of a sealed tomb—really an impossible view—a view only achieved through the illusory qualities of paint. expanding beyond the physicality of sculpture, be that of a life-size effigy, as with henry chichele and alice de la pole, or through the narrow depths of a base-relief, as with the loscher epitaphs for the fuggers, it is worth considering the experiential role of painting within the reformation. echoing the points of joseph koerner, the communicative function of art shifted during this period, as the preferred medium changed from stone to paint: “painting as a silent medium simply makes visible what in preaching is audible.... taken at another level, the medial shift from saying to showing, ... [the shift from] word to image articulates the difference between any medium of transmission and the information it transmits.” this trajectory is even more apparent in relation to portrayals of death. moreover, the representation of christ’s corpse evokes a sign of suffering by evoking the ephemeral, presenting evocations of the frailty of life by offsetting feelings of melancholia and increasing its beauty, even though the image is of a human corpse. the portrayal of a corpse and sixteenth-century reactions to it would have been grounded in viewer responses to the executed body, a point that suggests a different phenomenological reaction to the corpse of a criminal or the damned. intriguingly, however, holbein’s painting may create a moralizing response, particularly in making the viewer consider christ’s human experiences and imploring him or her to a life of imitatio christi. similarly, olga meerson suggests that the painting is not a visual manifesto against divinity, but rather is instead a guide for expected human behavior, “to morally implicate the reader [i.e., viewer] in the tempting experience of such purely human emotions as anguish, compassion, and passionate doubts about the possibility of christ's resurrection—the emotions and temptations of which christ himself partook.” the dead christ serves a dualistic purpose in that “[i]t is both a desperate appeal to what is best in us and in the world against violence, and, at the same time, an attempt to koerner, reformation of the image, . also, see bradley james cavallo, “matter(s) of immortality: oil paintings on stone and metal in the th and th centuries,” phd diss. (temple university, ). the perception of the body of christ as being an extension of the depiction of corpses of an executed person is noted in alexander burry, “execution, trauma, and recovery in dostoevsky’s ‘the idiot,’” the slavic and east european journal , ( ): – . similarly, dostoevsky’s compatriot and contemporary leo tolstoy ( – ) explored a shared conclusion about societal reactions to a criminal’s corpse. see thomas seifrid, “gazing on life’s page: perspectival vision in tolstoy,” pmla , no. ( ): – . the implication of the body of the executed and the treatment of the criminal is also discussed effectively in michel foucault, discipline and punish: the birth of the prison, trans. alan sheridan (new york: pantheon books, ), – . see also mitchell b. merback, the thief, the cross, and the wheel: pain and the spectacle of punishment in medieval and renaissance europe (chicago: university of chicago press, ), – . meerson, ivolgin and holbein, . authenticate the primacy of the self-vis-à-vis and against others.” holbein’s depiction acts as a recollection of loss and suffering, while simultaneously evoking a brief moment of suspended time toward the portal of death. holbein depicts christ as an amalgamation of different ontological spheres, being both living and dead, as well as being simultaneously in the process of resurrection and decay. this confluence forces the viewer to consider how death and the resurrection are not separate moments, existing instead in a state of chronological limbo, or outside time. by synthesizing images of melancholia and exaltation, as well as humanity and divinity, holbein posits the death and resurrection of jesus christ as variables that defy the silos of easy temporal categorizations and definitions. the progression across art forms provoked changing conclusions about the role of death in quantifying the experience of existence. holbein gives death a characterization that is devoid of the usual artistic motifs, an object of veneration and reflection, presented in sorrow and hope simultaneously. it is, in essence, a modern work of art that also marks the death of sculpture. maria loh notes that the medium of sculpture began to give way to an innovative means of sustaining modern imaginations. succinctly, she purports that “tradition and academic theory could have sculpture; but contemporary practice claimed painting.” coupled with a shift away from the dimensionality and space-occupying status afforded by sculpture alexander spektor, “from violence to silence: vicissitudes of reading in ‘the idiot,’” slavic review , no. ( ): – . martin bidney, “flame-engulfing storms and seas of darkness: byron’s love-death epiphanies in kristevan context,” interdisciplinary literary studies , no. ( ): – . loh, “death of the medium,” . loh builds on the contentions of marshal mcluhan, the forerunner of mediated determinism. see marshall mcluhan, the gutenberg galaxy: the making of typographic man (toronto: university of toronto press; reissued by routledge & kegan paul, ). ibid., . into the illusory qualities imbued through painting, holbein’s work created a novel image in the mind of the viewer while also suggesting a division between late medieval and early modern thought. concurrently, holbein’s work can be interpreted as grounded squarely in each era, with the final determination of its meaning resting upon the theological and philosophical leanings of the viewer. this conclusion supports the suggestion that holbein—as also his patron basilius amerbach—was caught in the throes of reformist thought. he represented the body of christ as both a corpse composed of merely inanimate matter, thus cordoning himself from attacks of iconoclasm, while he simultaneously suggested that christ’s corpus was becoming supernaturally reanimated, paralleling a belief in transubstantiation. considering the shifting exigencies of the s in basel, both approaches would be sustained by holbein’s dead christ, and ultimately illustrate an innovative means of encapsulating and representing the tenuous positions of a finite death, eternal life, and the precarious position of the viewer. chapter : conclusions and implications throughout the late medieval and early modern eras, transi figures and effigies thematized death by situating vivacity alongside eminent decay, and forged a dynamic depiction of time through images of death. these depictions captured and explored the state of death and the dead body, encapsulated by stone and three-dimensional figures. relief sculpture was an outlet as another medium for translating the transi figure, suggesting dimensionality through degrees of depth, but without offering fully in-the- round experience or life-size elements of sculpture. these artistic facets of verisimilitude were more developed and became more nuanced through painting of the dead body, even while repurposing the kind of bodily engagement the viewer had with a tomb monument. where the images that the artist had previously considered were life-size and life-like sculptures that occupied physical space, painting allowed the viewer to formulate individualized meanings and conceptualization, with the viewer’s imagination completing dimensionality and details. throughout each development of artistic techniques or medium a novel consideration of death, the body, and matter emerged, interacting, and participating with ongoing theological debates in various moments of reformist periods in england in the fifteenth century and german-speaking lands in the early reformation years of the sixteenth century. both of these locations underwent cultural and ideological shifts resultant from the emergence of reformist beliefs. holbein’s dead christ extended these debates while also framing a reconceptualization of the public tomb and private contemplation of death. my study investigates how images of the body interconnect with changing concepts of time, memory, theology, and viewership during the reformation and northern renaissance through consideration of how transi tombs activated the viewers’ experience of death by eliding a sense of temporal and spatial differences. such monuments raise questions about assumptions concerning the process of living and dying by recategorizing time and exposing its complex and non-linear nature. transi tombs did not merely reflect contemporary notions about dying and resurrection, but actively shaped perceptions about death, matter, and memorial. conclusions about these issues are not resolved through transi tombs. instead, they initiate contemplation about these matters, acting as agents for viewers’ individualized reactions and experiences. transi tombs may represent a flattening of time, one in which the viewer may enter into the artistic narrative or staged drama at any reference or visual point. the viewer may contemplate the interred remains, the decomposing representation, or the vitality of an effigy singly or simultaneously. the glory of the divine and immortality is presented alongside messages about the repugnant demise and putrefaction of human flesh. the reorganization of time that is suggested by transi tombs conflates the promise of an afterlife with that of earthly existence. the viewer may reorient the ensuing artistic conversation in myriad fashions. a visual entry may follow the literal steps suggested by the varying strata—downward from effigy to transi to interred remains—or the viewer may visualize the tomb in reverse, moving upward through the vertical layers, as the soul proceeds through its journey in a less linear fashion. the options for potential directions or the progression of the pathway of the deceased person’s soul fluctuate depending upon the experiences and beliefs of the viewer. as diane wolfthal explains, the mass can be interpreted as a dramatic narrative, complete with liturgical roles and themes. tombs would have augmented the ensuing storyline, while also serving as a visual rejoinder for participating audiences. a similar deduction about varying entry points and malleable narratives for a visual work was suggested also by marshall mcluhan, who noted that any medium could be understood by accessing it at different entrees. he positions information not as a linear construct, but instead as a series of clusters best understood as an evolving and ever-changing set of mosaics. mcluhan’s ideas, originally applied to modern technologies such as film or broadcasting, can also be seen to share deeper commonalities with other media, including forms of sculpture, relief carving, and painting in oil. through transi tombs, the viewer is able to fold time and history, as suggested by the tomb and canopy of archbishop henry chichele. beyond the similarly suggested strata of progression in the tomb of alice de la pole, chichele’s tomb is a pronouncement of historical and contemporary figures. statues that were placed around the columns of chichele’s tomb are primarily a representation of the political and theological hierarchies and genealogies of england and the church. their positioning, however, also suggests the layers of saints that would be encountered upon the transmigration of the deceased’s soul. more than the tomb of alice de la pole, chichele’s tomb references an eclectic wolfthal, early netherlandish carved altarpieces, . see sergio roncallo-dow and carlos a. scolari, “marshall mcluhan: the possibility of re- reading his notion of medium,” philosophies , no. ( ): – . these ideas on the non-linearity of communication and human experiences as a whole are addressed in mcluhan, guttenberg galaxy, – . mcluhan posited that human expression was not typically confined to mere linear progression, especially in an electronic age as part of a post-gutenberg digitally mediated era. assortment of characters. they are arranged not in a chronological trajectory with a singular point of temporal origin, but instead as figures scattered throughout different periods of history. england’s kings and military leaders are presented in tandem with ancient biblical heroes, the viewing of which echoes the disparate points of entrée suggested by mcluhan’s contentions. simultaneously, each of these tombs suggest nationalistic, familial, and self- fashioning themes that illustrate how the deceased person’s lineage is not only memorialized, but also displayed in space. references to immutability of the crown and the nation state are most apparent in henry chichele’s tomb. conversely, by linking alice de la pole’s legacy to the almshouse of ewelme and to the lineage of the chaucer families, the viewer is able to ascertain a daily life that is both memorable and inherently linked to the foundations of the church in which she is memorialized. through stone life- size carvings, the viewer is able to clearly envision the deceased as still extant and even occupying shared space, with the promise of their immortality and earthly legacy intact and firmly constructed. similarly, the relief sculptures of the fugger chapel serve much of the same function. the central panels of the fuggers’ memorial stones focus on the degradation and resurrection of the body, while the outside panels showing heraldic devices represent both the fugger family and the ongoing presence of their financial empire. in a different fashioning from the promise of immortality in transi tombs, the epitaphs associate the resurrected christ with a practically anonymous transi, which could be a fugger family member or christ. the depiction of death changed as the reformation took hold, with artistic responses consisting of capturing images and familial legacies in a more illusory or conceptual manner. the fugger lineage is suggested by the incorporation of a family coat of arms in a similar fashion as the inclusion of the heraldic shields and denotations of historical and familial heritage in transi tombs. rather than being depicted practically nude, the fugger transi reliefs are portrayed as almost entirely wrapped in shrouds, a presentation of the body partially used by holbein that obfuscates the material aspects of the body and yet emphasizes its corporeal nature simultaneously by directly referencing burial rituals. unlike earlier depictions, flesh and cloth equally bind the body to the materiality of fibers and earth. the verisimilitude of stone cadavers is tethered to a suggestion of the finite materiality of flesh and cloth, with hopeful resurrection eclipsing the confines of death. the fugger epitaphs extended the developments made in earlier fully sculptural depictions of death, advancements that would further be explored through painting. at the front of the fugger chapel and serving as backdrop for the altar, the relief showing christ resurrected, designed after dürer, is one of the three levels of ulrich fugger’s epitaph. the largest field is dominated by the body of the resurrected christ, surrounded by angels and putti in an umbra of light. christ hovers above his broken tomb. immediately below this depiction is a long-pronounced line separating the scenes into clear divisions, effectively fashioning a center section for a sarcophagus. the incorporation of the transi here on ulrich’s epitaph and again on georg’s epitaph beside it are, however, distinctive features of the reliefs that do not appear in dürer’s drawing studies. these shifting images capture the meaning of memorialization and present an understanding of the social construction of death in the space of st. anna’s church as augsburg itself was negotiating its own reformist positions about masses for the dead, resurrection, and the nature of matter—be it the corpse or the holy host. holbein’s painting extends these ontological inquiries beyond variations of the life and death binary. instead, holbein combines earlier traditions of transi and effigy tombs into a work supporting new interpretations. by condensing time and space, holbein presented a painting that is at its crux a non-temporal work, suggesting that death is not tethered to a specific chronological continuum, more or less confined to a simple linear binary. the dead christ is a work that reconfigures the physical confines of time as it combines different states of being, effectively blending depictions of death, decomposition, and immortality into one image. this conflation establishes the movement of time in an innovative direction, one in which chronology is assumed not only to move in a linear fashion but also pivots across a variety of temporal planes, all suspended within a single depicted moment. in taking a recent cue from gerhard wolf, works such as transi tombs allow the viewer a chance to “free the concept from the connotation of an ‘error’ in an order of time.” this observation suggests a reading of death not as the end of a chronological trajectory, but instead as a mixture of temporal possibilities, and it does so visually in a way prompted through the horizontal strata of depictions. as noted by jacques derrida, at its core death poses an ontological difficulty. rather than seeing death as a horizon that must be crossed, what heidegger refers to as the concept of social construction of realities, particularly through language, can be found in john shotter, conversational realities: constructing life through language (london: sage, ). gerhard wolf, review of anachronic renaissance, by alexander nagel and christopher s. wood,” the art bulletin , no. ( ): – . “the possibility of the absolute impossibility of da-sein [there being],” derrida asserts that “dying would be the aporia, the impossibility of being dead, the impossibility of living or rather ‘existing’ one’s death.” for derrida, death presents a performative contradiction: “if death turns out to entail the cessation of experience, and i cannot experience the cessation of experience, then, strictly speaking, my death does not happen to me.” holbein’s painted dead christ goes beyond heidegger’s notion of da-sein and allows the viewer to contemplate, if not experience, the state of the impossibility of death. holbein’s incorporation of the tiers of tombs within a singular work, as i have argued, represents the experience of death without the cessation of being. the implications of derrida’s finding suggest that tombs are able to fill a vital role for the viewer. they effectively and visually bridge the gap between the incomplete contemplation of death and the manifestation and experience afforded to the dying of the other. realizing the inherently difficult means of contemplating and creating images that depict non-existence is a challenging task, one fraught with ontological quagmires. the reception that is suggested by the work is also commonly noted throughout the modern while derrida focuses on death as an ontological quagmire, he also refutes the distinct delineations and demarcations of the experience of dying. in particular: “derrida is also undermining the various problematic closures or borders that heidegger sets up in his attempt to distinguish the “properly dying” (eigentlich sterben) from perishing (verenden), demising (ableben), and dying (sterben). for derrida, there is only perishing, demising, and what he calls the death of the other. thus, rather than viewing death as a problem, one that depicts death as a border, derrida proposes thinking of death as aporia, whose apposite image would therefore not be of a border “not to be bypassed,” but rather as a nonpassable border, that is, death as a nonpassage.“ quoted in paul nadal, “be late: death as impossible possibility: notes on derrida’s critique of heidegger’s existential analysis of death,” accessed on march , , https://belate.wordpress.com/ / / /derrida-aporia-death/. derrida, aporias, . iain thomson, “can i die? derrida on heidegger on death,” philosophy today , no. ( ): – , at . era and in myriad field. for example, swiss poet and theologian johann kaspar lavater wrote in that it is “impossible to behold and is revolting in the face… the whole work lacking in taste, love, and sentiment,” a position shared by both dostoevsky and goethe. an assumption is also made that the painting is parcel to a much more gothic, that is to say medieval, tradition than that of a later more modern art tradition. even more, the contemplation of death itself may, to echo the words of carl jung, be a showing of “nothing but the dark pit.” conversely, jung contended that myth and religion celebrated the possibility of a novel direction for living and ultimately dying, seeing death not as an end, but as a goal. this reflection was part of what jung considered to be a novel application of the ars moriendi, particularly in relation to the imitation of christ . jung posited that a death that paralleled the uniqueness of the demise of jesus christ illustrates what is “capable of evolving out of ourselves with or see friedrich karl mathys, “holbeins toter christus, und was berühmte betrachter über das bild sagten,” sonntagspost: wöchentliche beilage zum “landbotn und tagblatt der stadt winterthur” , no. ( ): . the placement of holbein as a bridge between various art historical periods has been considered throughout research, particularly in relation to what julia kristeva would refer to as the “gothic eroticism of paroxistic pain.” see julia kristeva, black sun: depression and melancholia (new york: columbia university press, ), esp. – . for more information on the associations between these periods as explicated through holbein’s oeuvre, see karma lochrie, “embodying the text: boisterous tears and privileged readings,” in margery kempe and translations of the flesh (philadelphia: university of pennsylvania press, ), – . carl g. jung and aniela jaffe, memories, dreams, reflections, trans. clara winston and richard winston (new york: vintage, ), . c. g. jung, alchemical studies, collected works of c.g. jung, vol. . trans. gerhard adler and r. f. c. hull (princeton: princeton university press, ), . jung was forthright in his conviction that beliefs in immortality and myths that suggested elements of it are inherently important aspects of the life cycle, particularly in later life. he argued that a discussion of the possibility of immortality was, through the lens of religion or myth, a fundamentally important aspect of understanding an impending death. for a general overview of the ars boni moriendi, see david william atkinson, the english ars moriendi (new york: peter lang, ). without divine grace.” this finding suggests a tethering between the experience of death among all mortals and their connection with the humanity of jesus christ. in furthering julia kristeva’s contention, pollock summarizes: then, there is the violence of compositionally enclosing the anguished dead body in the chilling confinement of the narrow, horizontal tomb closed by the painted slab so close to the body. this insistent horizontality incites in viewers both the terror of imagining ourselves locked in the interior of the airless tomb while at the same time that chill condition so physically evoked serves as a displaced sign for psychic pain: the living deathliness of profound depression as a modern condition as well as a psychic affliction. this interpretation echoes the perception of dostoevsky, who found the painting to be simultaneously posing the hopelessness and denial of the foundation of christianity itself. it also proposes the likelihood that the viewer sees the painting as the representation of a lifeless corpse, potentially their inevitable own. this conclusion is shared by others. olga meerson extends dostoevsky’s noteworthy perspective, that “this is only the corpse of a man who endured infinite suffering even before the cross… indeed, the corpse of any man after such torments would look like this, no matter who he is.” contemporary writers have even postulated that the dead christ presents a deeply disturbing theological conundrum concerning christ’s own mortality and decomposing body. the interpretation of the painting as a corpse instead of as a ‘resurrectable’ body and divine image was underscored by robert carl g. jung, psychology and religion: west and east, collected works, vol. , eds. herbert read and gerhard adler, trans. r. f.c. hull (princeton: princeton university press, ), . pollock, the missing wit(h)ness, . ibid., . the impact of this quagmire was also noted in regard to personal and public reactions to suicide, a point nicely articulated in irina paperno, suicide as a cultural institution in dostoevsky’s russia (ithaca, ny: cornell university press, ), – . bush, who forthrightly noted that the painting “symbolizes the absolute power and finality of death.” that the image appears to be the unflinching rendering of a corpse is attested by unsubstantiated anecdotes from the seventeenth century positing that holbein based his painting on a body that had been recovered from the rhine river. recalling derrida’s contention that the experience of death is impossible to envision, the cessation of the viewer’s life is similarly elusive, except for artistic attempts to visualize or represent that experience in a work of art. indeed, dostoyevsky was rumored to have questioned the very basis of christian faith while observing the dead christ, noting “it is strange to look on this dreadful picture of the mangled corpse of the saviour, and to put this question to oneself... how could they have gazed upon the dreadful sight and yet have believed that he would rise again?” similar to the robert l. busch, “dostoevski’s major novels and the european gothic tradition,” russian language journal / Русский язык , no. / ( ): – . the discussion about the accuracy of the account of holbein’s retrieving a corpse from the rhine as a model for his study has been contested. as holbein was increasingly drawn to painting in a naturalistic and realistic tradition, the account clearly has a place in an interpretation of this work. having noted, i am not advocating that holbein intended or ultimately created an anatomical study, despite the depiction of great detail and verisimilitude that is parcel to his painting. for more information on this anecdote that holbein procured a corpse from the rhine, see pál Ács, “holbein’s ‘dead christ’ in basel and the radical reformation,” the hungarian historical review: new series of acta historica academiae scientiarum hungaricae ( ): – . additionally, research has focused on the potential for the corpse to specifically that of a jewish person, resulting in considerations both of holbein’s motivations and potential interpretations of cultural identity. see gatrall, between iconoclasm and silence, – ; and jefferson j. a. gatrall, the real and the sacred: picturing jesus in nineteenth-century fiction (ann arbor, mi: university of michigan press, ), esp. . derrida specifically questioned the ability of a person to conceive of his or her own death by positing: “is my death possible? can we understand this question? can i, myself, pose it? am i allowed to talk about my death? what does the syntagm ‘my death’ mean? … ‘my death’ in quotation marks is not necessarily mine; it is an expression that anybody can appropriate; it can circulate from one example to another.” from jacques derrida, aporias, trans. thomas dutoi (stanford, ca: stanford university press, ), – . fyodor dostoyevsky, the idiot (new york: brentanos, ), at . for more explanations of the impact of holbein’s painting on dostoyevsky, see oskar bätschmann and pascal griener, hans holbein, revised and expanded, nd ed. (london: reaktion books, ), . construction of effigies and transi tomb figures like the ones examined in henry chichele and alice de la pole’s tombs, the dead christ suggests a life-sized subject, but one that forces the viewer to consider death in a new manner—responses articulated also by dostoevsky and julia kristeva. sensing the role of the unobtainable experience of death, kristeva asserted that the viewer contemplates and negotiates a personal response to their own experience of melancholy. she also concludes that art may assuage these concerns: “artistic creation combines and consumes them; works of art thus enable us to establish less destructive, more pleasurable relations with ourselves and with others.” holbein’s work forces the viewer to consider how the collective death of the other is related to the death of the self. holbein’s dead christ can therefore be interpreted as claiming ground at the intersection of derrida’s observation of death as not representable and melancholy as a response to mortality. while earlier fully sculpted transi tombs stage an easily decipherable visual ‘diagram’ or drama about the distinct phases of death, decay, and resurrection of the body, holbein’s work through oil paint suggests a more conceptual experience. kristeva’s additional findings on the rhetorical interpretation of the dead christ similarly incorporates an aristotelian approach but departs from his concept of hylomorphism as described previously. instead, kristeva takes a linguistic turn to her interpretation, focusing primarily on the representation of the melancholic. she incorporates nietzsche’s contention on the death of god, while furthering the argument kristeva, on the melancholic imaginary, . ibid., . kristeva, black sun, – . that holbein positions depictions of grief and despair in his painting so that it they resonate within that interpretation. as sara beardsworth summarizes, “[kristeva’s] analysis of the dead christ turns on the ways in which this image of severance— ‘god is dead’—renders the severance of representation (the challenge to the aesthetic) in artistic form.” kristeva adroitly summarizes this impact as “god is dying, i am dying.” this severance, complete with allusions of grieving and loss, invites a larger discussion of melancholy, loss, and remembrance. coming from a psychoanalytic background, kristeva positions the dead christ as a rupture from the traditional depiction of christ’s suffering and death. specifically, she focuses on “the martyrizing side of christian tradition associated with representing an eroticized image of pain and suffering. counter- posed to the cathartic power of the resurrection, the dead christ in holbein's work offers an imaginary re-enactment of the void that is depression and death.” this reenactment is an amalgamation of christ’s and the viewer’s ultimate demise and is also a personification of total despair, a concept further explicated through kristeva’s investigation of melancholy. through the dead christ, melancholy may be interpreted as a part of a contentious debate about christ’s descent into hell. this removal from any state of grace prompted richard bloch and michael du plessis to augment kristeva’s analysis by sara beardsworth, julia kristeva: psychoanalysis and modernity (albany, ny: state university of new york press, ), – . quoted in stephen j. fountain, “ashes to ashes: kristeva’s ‘jouissance,’ altizer’s apocalypse, byatt’s possession and the ‘dream of the rood,’” literature and theology , no. ( ): – . lawrence d. kritzman, “melancholia becomes the subject: kristeva's invisible ‘thing’ and the making of culture,” paragraph , no. ( ): – . suggesting that holbein’s painting is not a cessation of the soul’s link to heaven as much as a presentation of damnation. by referencing calvin, they note that kristeva “insists on the ‘formidabilis abysis into which christ has been thrust at the hour of his death, descending to the depths of sin and hell.’ in other words, the jesus of the reformation, or at least of holbein, is not certain of his salvation.” this interpretation suggests dread and apprehension about the promise of salvation, testing the viewer’s faith. it also blends the temporality and space of christ’s presentation: he is confined to hell while being viewed as a potentially resurrectable corpse that is entombed in earth. as john lechte summarizes: “kristeva's analysis [of the dead christ] evokes the idea that life as such is a temporary overcoming of death: this can be its meaning, the source of its beauty is its potential for overcoming melancholy.” the sense of how the corpse functions as a reminder of the brief ability to overcome death presumes that images of the living are evoking a period between two larger states of non-existence. that is, life is book-ended by two states of non-being. the negative space of the pre- object and the ultimate demise and decay of life remind the viewer of the brief interlude in which a lost and unknown thing takes form. the resultant foreboding sense of melancholy that emerges while viewing the dead christ is linked to what jacques lacan and kristeva would refer to as a pre-object that can never be fully recovered and whose origin lies beyond a point of human richard block and michael du plessis, “a treacherous subject: an introduction,” cr: the new centennial review , no. ( ): – , esp. . john lechte, “kristeva's ‘soleil noir’ and postmodernity,” cultural critique ( ): – . understanding. kristeva suggests that holbein is thus giving a substantiated form to negative space, depicting a viable existence to a physiological state that cannot be overtly defined. if viewed as a visual exploration and representation of the nothingness of death, “the painting gives form and color to the un-representable, understood not as erotic profusion but conceived as the eclipse of the means of representation on the brink of their extinction in death.” by representing the dead as being both extant and viable, as well as devoid of positive space in its claustrophobic rendering, holbein straddles the fields of viewership and loss, a hallmark of what kristeva notes is a primary function of the painting. images of death, as seen in the examples from this analysis, present an intersection of ontology, theology, and art. tombs and depictions of the dead created meaning through participating in changing theological and philosophical contentions that were under pressure during this extended period in england and german-speaking lands. throughout the reformation, the presence of tombs forced viewers to confront and consider altering definitions of immortality, the link between the living and the dead, the material body and the soul. these tombs also posed pronounced questions about the changing nature of the self and selfhood, and the role of art to represent the unknowable ethos of death. in the same way that the dead progressed through variable stages of the identity and definition of the pre-object are summarized in perry meiseal. . “sadness starts early: review of black sun, depression and melancholia by julia kristeva, translated by leon s. roudiez,” the new york times, february , . timothy murray, “‘et in arcadia video’: poussin the image of culture with marin and kuntzel,” mln , no. ( ): – . helen weston, “jacques-louis david’s ‘la mort de joseph bara’: a tale of revolutionary myths and modern fantasies,” paragraph , no. ( ): – . corporeality, decay, and reconstitution, transi tombs reimagined and reformed death and redemption. through the promotion of painting, the allusive image and meaning of death took atypical forms. holbein’s dead christ reified contentions about mortality and affirmed beliefs about the collective state of humankind. transi tombs further reconstituted public memorial and personal recollections of the dead, a trajectory that ultimately resulted in a reconsideration of the collective body of christianity and the corporeality of jesus christ. by exploring these tenuous definitions and operations of time, these tombs created an altogether innovative method of experiencing the mutable strata of life, death, and resurrection. references cited aberth, john. from the brink of the apocalypse: confronting famine, war, plague, and death in the later middle ages. new york and london: routledge, . 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( - ), marble, saint anna’s church, augsburg, germany. figure . : hans holbein the younger. the body of the dead christ in the tomb (c. ), oil on wood, x in., kunstmuseum, basel, switzerland. figure . : chichele gate, outside tomb of archbishop henry chichele (c. ), canterbury cathedral, canterbury, england. figure . : modern chair of the archbishop of canterbury, view from the tomb of archbishop henry chichele (c. ), canterbury cathedral, canterbury, england. figure . : tomb of archbishop henry chichele (c. ), side view, canterbury cathedral, canterbury, england. figure . : tomb of archbishop henry chichele (c. ), marble, upper tier canopy detail, canterbury cathedral, canterbury, england. figure . : tomb of archbishop henry chichele (c. ), marble, bosom of abraham detail, canterbury cathedral, canterbury, england. figure . : tomb of archbishop henry chichele (c. ), marble, virgin mary detail, canterbury cathedral, canterbury, england. figure . : tomb of archbishop henry chichele (c. ), marble and gilt, effigy with angels detail, canterbury cathedral, canterbury, england. figure . : tomb of archbishop henry chichele (c. ), marble, transi body detail, canterbury cathedral, canterbury, england. figure . : tomb of archbishop henry chichele (c. ), marble, transi face detail, canterbury cathedral, canterbury, england. figure . : saint mary’s church and complex (c. – ), ewelme, oxfordshire, england. figure . : tomb of alice de la pole (c. ) alabaster, saint john’s chapel, saint mary’s church, ewelme, oxfordshire, england. figure . : monogram of saint john’s chapel (c. – ), polychrome and gilt, saint mary’s church ewelme, oxfordshire, england figure . : tomb of alice de la pole (c. ), alabaster, saint mary’s church, ewelme, oxfordshire, england. figure . : memorial plaques of thomas chaucer and matilda chaucer (née burghersh) (c. ), brass, saint mary’s church, ewelme, oxfordshire, england. figure . : tomb of thomas chaucer and matilda chaucer (c. ) saint mary’s church, marble, ewelme, oxfordshire, england, ewelme, oxfordshire, england. figure . : effigy of alice de la pole (c. ), alabaster, saint mary’s church, ewelme, oxfordshire, england. figure . : tomb of alice de la pole (c. ), wood, angels at top of canopy detail, saint mary’s church, ewelme, oxfordshire, england figure . : effigy of alice de la pole (c. ) alabaster and gilt, angels and pillow detail, saint mary’s church, ewelme, oxfordshire, england. . : master e. s., ars moriendi (c. ) engraving, . x . in., ashmolean museum of art and archaeology, oxford, england. figure . : effigy and transi of alice de la pole (c. ), alabaster, saint mary’s church, ewelme, oxfordshire, england. figure . : tomb of alice de la pole, the annunciation, transi tomb painting (c. ) saint mary’s church, ewelme, oxfordshire, england. figure . : tomb of alice de la pole, john the baptist and mary magdalene, (c. ), polychrome, saint mary’s church, ewelme, oxfordshire, england. figure . : tomb of alice de la pole, the annunciation, polychrome, transi tomb detail (c. ) saint mary’s church, ewelme, oxfordshire, england. figure . : sebastian loscher, fugger chapel with epitaphs, marble, saint anna’s church (c. ), augsburg, germany. figure . : albrecht dürer, design for the fugger chapel in augsburg, christ resurrected, ulrich fugger epitaph sketch, , pen, charcoal, and chalk on paper, . x . in., albertina, vienna, austria. figure . : albrecht dürer, samson slaying the philistines, sketch for the georg fugger epitaph, , pen, charcoal, and chalk on paper, . x . in., kupferstichkabinett, staatliche museen zu berlin. figure . : attrib. to sebastian loscher, epitaph for georg fugger (c. ), marble, saint anna’s church, augsburg, germany. figure . : attrib. to sebastian loscher, epitaph for ulrich fugger, (c. ), marble, saint anna’s church, augsburg, germany. figure . : attrib. to sebastian loscher, epitaph for jakob fugger (c. ), marble, saint anna’s church, augsburg, germany. figure . : attrib. to sebastian loscher, epitaph for the fugger famil (c. ), marble, saint anna’s church, augsburg, germany. figure . : hans daucher, lamentation of christ and altar, (c. ) marble, saint anna’s church, augsburg, germany. figure . : memorial plaque of ulrich fugger, d. ( - ), marble, chapel of saint mark, the fuggerei, augsburg, germany. figure . : saint anna’s church (c. ), augsburg, germany. figure . : figure . : crypt entryway and marker ( ) marble, x in. saint anna’s church, augsburg, germany. figure . : hans holbein the younger, the body of the dead christ in the tomb (c. ) oil on wood, x in., kunstmuseum. basel, switzerland. figure . : matthias grünewald, the crucifixion (c. – ) oil on wood, predella detail, x in., colmar, france, unterlinden museum. figure . : unidentified artist, after hans holbein the younger (c. – ), the dead christ in the tomb, c. silverpoint, chalk on paper, blue ground, x . in., winnipeg, canada, winnipeg art gallery. figure . : hans holbein the younger ( ), the body of the dead christ in the tomb, oil on wood, face and head detail, kunstmuseum. basel, switzerland. figure . : hans holbein the younger ( ), the body of the dead christ in the tomb, oil on wood, hand wound detail kunstmuseum. basel, switzerland. figure . : hans holbein the younger ( ), the body of the dead christ in the tomb, oil on wood, feet and legs detail, kunstmuseum. basel, switzerland. figure . : hans holbein the younger, pictures of death, the emperor (c. ), woodcut, . x . in., new york, the metropolitan museum of art. figure . : hans holbein the younger. pictures of death, the plowman (c. ), woodcut, . x . in., new york, the metropolitan museum of art. http://genomemedicine.com/content/ / / faik et al.: genome medicine , : abstract in humans, infections contribute highly to mortality and morbidity rates worldwide. malaria tropica is one of the major infectious diseases globally and is caused by the protozoan parasite plasmodium falciparum. plasmodia have accompanied human beings since the emergence of humankind. due to its patho- genicity, malaria is a powerful selective force on the human genome. genetic epidemiology approaches such as family and twin studies, candidate gene studies, and disease-association studies have identified a number of genes that mediate relative protection against the severest forms of the disease. new molecular approaches, including genome-wide association studies, have recently been performed to expand our knowledge on the functional effect of human variation in malaria. for the future, a systematic determination of gene-dosage effects and expression profiles of protective genes might unveil the func- tional impact of structural alterations in these genes on either side of the host-parasite interaction. introduction malaria is a disease caused by apicomplexa parasites of the genus plasmodium, and is transmitted by the bite of an infected female anopheles mosquito. malaria has affected humans since their evolutionary emergence as a separate species. the divergence of man and chimpanzee is paralleled by the divergence of the two specific parasites plasmodium reichenowi and plasmodium falciparum [ ]. the earliest references to malaria are descriptions of spleno- megaly with fever from china in the nei ching canon of medicine in bc, and from ancient egypt in the ebers papyrus in bc. the parasite was identified by alphonse laveran in ; giovanni b grassi and sir roland ross demonstrated that malaria parasites could be trans mitted to infected vertebrate hosts (birds and humans) by mosquitoes. malaria is one of the main global causes of death from infectious diseases, which are one of the major public health issues, especially in developing countries. in the year , about . million deaths were attributed to the effects of infectious diseases. about % of the world population is at risk for malaria, causing around million deaths each year, predominantly in infants [ ]. malaria is a devastating disease that not only has an effect on the health system, but also slows the rate of long-term economic growth and development. global climate change and a possible further migration of parasites will put even more people at risk in the future. malaria has a broad distribution in both subtropical and tropical regions, with many areas of the tropics being endemic for the disease. the countries of sub-saharan africa carry the highest burden of all malaria cases. in many temperate and richer areas, such as europe and the usa, public health measures, economic development and environmental changes have successfully eliminated the disease, apart from a minor number of cases imported by travelers. the life cycle of all plasmodia species is very similar and follows basically the same process (figure ). development involves a host change from an arthropod vector to a vertebrate host (the female anopheles mosquito and the human host for plasmodia), with a mostly intracellular life style. infection is initiated with the bite of an infected female anopheles mosquito and the injection of sporozoites from the salivary glands into the host’s blood- stream (figure a). within minutes, the sporozoites invade hepatocytes (figure b) and undergo an asexual replication that results in the production of schizonts. the hepatocytes burst (figure c) after five days at the earliest, and release merozoites into the bloodstream (figure d). the released merozoites then invade red blood cells (rbcs) and initiate another asexual replication phase in the erythrocyte. review parasite-host interaction in malaria: genetic clues and copy number variation imad faik, elisandra grangeiro de carvalho and jürgen fj kun address: institute for tropical medicine, university tübingen, wilhelmstr. , tübingen, germany. correspondence: jürgen fj kun. email: juergen.kun@uni-tuebingen.de adr, adrenoceptor; cnv, copy number variation; cq, chloroquine; cr , complement receptor ; cyp a , cytochrome pigment ; dhfr, dihydrofolate reductase; fcγr, receptor for the constant fragment of immunoglobulin g; fcgr, gene for the constant fragment of immu- noglobulin g; fcgr a/ b, receptor for the constant fragment of immunoglobulin g, low affinity iia/iiib; gch , gtp-cyclohydrolase ; gwas, genome-wide association studies; gpc, glycophorin c; hla, human leukocyte antigen; icam- , intercellular adhesion molecule ; il, inter- leukin; mbl , mannose/mannan-binding lectin ; pfcrt, plasmodium falciparum chloroquine resistance transporter; pfmdr, plasmodium falci- parum multi-drug resistance; rbc, red blood cell; snp, single nucleotide polymorphism. . http://genomemedicine.com/content/ / / faik et al.: genome medicine , : invaded merozoites develop from the trophozoite to the schizont containing to new merozoites. these are released and re-invade new rbcs. the duration of the cycle is species dependent and can vary between hours (p. knowlesi) and hours (p. malariae). alternatively, some parasites differentiate within the rbc into the sexual forms, the male and female gametocytes, which are taken up by a female mosquito (figure e). within the mosquito mid-gut, the male gametocyte undergoes a nuclear division, producing eight flagellated microgametes that will fertilize the female macrogamete (figure f). at the end of the zygote development, hundreds of sporozoites are formed, which migrate to the mosquito salivary gland awaiting injection into the human host (figure g). the clinical spectrum of malaria is wide, spanning from asymptomatic infections, fever and mild anemia, to severe anemia and cerebral malaria and, subsequently, death [ ]. until recently, four distinct species were recognized as human pathogens: p. falciparum, p. vivax, p. malariae, and p. ovale, with p. falciparum the most lethal, causing the majority of deaths. very few fatalities are caused by p. vivax, and no deaths have been reported by the latter two so far. a fifth parasite, p. knowlesi, known as a simian parasite, is now also considered to be pathogenic for humans [ ]. the influence of host and parasite genetics in malaria malaria and single nucleotide polymorphisms in humans, a genetic contribution to resistance against malaria has long been suspected, and epidemiological evidence exists for the protective sickle cell trait in malaria [ ]. it is estimated that genetic factors account for approxi- mately one-quarter of the total variability in malaria incidence of a study population, with the hemoglobin s gene explaining % [ ]. this finding indicates the influence of many other unexplored protective genes, each indivi- dually resulting in small population effects. genetic markers such as single nucleotide polymorphisms (snps) are a valuable tool to study risk assessment and progression of infectious diseases. snps are highly frequent and are abundant in the human genome [ ]. snps that lead to amino acid changes are of particular impor tance, provid- ing an indication of how the protection is mediated. it is obvious that parasitic and human receptor-ligand interaction is involved in the parasite’s various invasion processes into erythrocytes or liver cells. this interplay of two organisms has to be balanced carefully to ensure the survival of both. this balance is reflected in genetic alterations in both the host and the parasites. genetic variation in response to malaria epidemiological studies of malaria in humans have demonstrated that malaria phenotypes, including severity, disease incidence and parasitemia, can significantly vary amongst individuals [ ]. in , a longitudinal study of malaria in sibling pairs was designed to investigate the extent of the genetic determinants of predisposition to clinical malaria in rural gambia [ ]. in this study, a strong association of human leukocyte antigen (hla) genes was found to contribute to the risk of contracting uncom pli- cated malaria. in , a quantifying analysis of the implication of genetic and non-genetic factors in malarial infection was conducted in a rural sri lankan population [ ]; the heritability was estimated to be around % for the intensity of the clinical signs and about % for the incidence of asymptomatic and symptomatic p. falciparum infections. a strong association of age with potential genetic determinants was also detected, whereas the extent of the genetic effect was higher in infants in comparison with adults [ ]. genetic epidemiological studies using segre gation analyses in a sib-pair linkage analysis identified genetic factors that were linked to the level of malarial infection in burkina faso [ ]. this analysis figure life cycle of plasmodium falciparum (a-g) projected onto a sketch drawn by the german renaissance painter albrecht dürer ( - ). this sketch was drawn by dürer for his doctor pointing to the site of nagging pain, presumably due to splenomegaly. dürer supposedly contracted malaria on a trip to the netherlands, never recovered completely and died of it years later. (a) (b) (d) (f) (g) (c) (e) . http://genomemedicine.com/content/ / / faik et al.: genome medicine , : focused on the chromosomal region q - and suggested that the genes coding for β -adrenergic receptor (adr) and the interleukin genes (il)- and - are involved in the control of the infection. many immunological studies have investigated the genetic regulation of the variation of human immune responses to malaria. in the early s, one of the leading studies was conducted in twin pairs from liberia and madagascar, measuring antibody levels to malaria antigens [ ]. a high analogy in antibody levels was detected in monozygotic twins compared with dizygotic twins or sex- and age-matched siblings, and unrelated individuals under similar exposure to malaria transmission. in the following sections, we will describe some of the most important genetic alterations that have an impact on malaria. single nucleotide polymorphisms and malaria countless association studies have been performed with numerous snps in cohorts of different geographic origin looking at differing disease presentations. many of these studies have reported conflicting associations or genetic alterations that cannot be explained by malaria exposure alone. for example, a snp termed icam- kilifi located in the gene for the intercellular adhesion molecule (icam- ) was found to result in an amino acid change at position (lys to met). this highly frequent alteration has been associated with a predisposition to cerebral malaria in kenya [ ]. on the contrary, in a case-control study of gabonese infants, icam- kilifi was associated with protec- tion against severe malaria [ ]. the largest study con duc- ted to analyze icam- kilifi investigated more than , individuals, and no association with any malaria phenotype was observed [ ]. an interesting phenotype that has been associated with severity of plasmodial infections is so-called rosetting, by which a parasitized erythrocyte surrounds itself with un infected red blood cells with the involvement of comple- ment receptor (cr ) [ - ]. other studies have, however, failed to support the association of disease severity with rosetting [ , ]; on the other hand, results from a study in a papua new guinean population have shown that polymorphisms leading to cr deficiency mediate protection against severe malaria [ ]. interestingly, reduced rosetting may also play a role in the weakly protective role of blood group . in african regions with a strong overlap of malaria endemicity and high prevalence of blood group , it has been reported that this blood group forms rosettes very inefficiently compared to other blood groups [ ]. evidently, in indigenous south american populations with % of the people being positive, other mechanisms must be in action. in papua new guinea, the erythrocytes of a high propor- tion of the population do not carry glycophorin c (gpc), the component that forms the gerbich blood type [ ]. malaria parasites use gpc to invade erythrocytes [ ]; whether this deficiency has positive effects on malaria outcomes remains to be elucidated . mannose-binding lectin (mbl) is a collagen-like serum protein that acts as an unspecific antibody binding to the carbohydrate moieties of pathogens in order to enable macrophages to opsonize them [ ]. common genetic variants located in the human mbl gene locus impact the stability and the serum level of the resulting protein, which influences the predisposition and clinical outcome of various infectious diseases of bacterial and parasitic origin [ , ]. a comparison of mbl plasma levels in young gabonese patients suffering severe and mild malaria suggested a protective effect for mbl [ ]. genetic variants causing lower concentrations of the protein were associa- ted with different malaria phenotypes [ , ]. the effect of mbl on malaria may be explained by a direct binding of mbl to glycoproteins of the merozoites or the infected erythrocyte, as shown by enrichment of parasite proteins on mbl affinity columns [ , ]. other studies, however, have not shown any association with malaria [ ]. moving from candidate gene studies to genome-wide association studies the sequencing of the human genome has generated large- scale genomic data, and the hapmap project has identified millions of snps, allowing the performance of genome- wide association studies (gwass) [ ]. the first investiga- tions of multifactorial infectious diseases utilizing a genome- wide technology were conducted in african tuberculosis patients [ ] and in brazilian patients suffering from schisto somiasis [ ]. in , a gwas approach was used to identify the major determinants for host control of hiv [ ]. in malaria research, two studies have been performed so far: the first on mild malaria in ghanaian children [ ] and a second on a gambian cohort with severe malaria [ ]. both studies failed to detect known protective traits, probably due to technical reasons. on the other hand, it is likely that there is not just one protective trait; malaria- affected humans may have many ways of coping with infec- tion. the mechanisms by which one population battles disease may not necessarily be the same as those in a different population. it is probably a feature of complex diseases that they provoke complex weaponry. copy number variations in malaria one approach that has not been tried so far in malaria research is the determination of copy number variation (cnv) and its possible association with the disease. these structural variations are defined as two-fold or more multiplications of dna segments larger than kb [ ]. it has become widely accepted that genomic structural alterations, rather than dna single nucleotide substi tu- tions, account for a significant amount of human genetic . http://genomemedicine.com/content/ / / faik et al.: genome medicine , : variation [ ]. cnvs between unrelated people can reach . % of the genome [ ]. in an initial cnv study in the human genome, a large number of cnvs was found in immunorelevant genes, some of which are also candidate genes for malaria protection, such as the genes for the receptor for the constant fragment of immunoglobulin g (fcgr) - important regulators of the immune response - and the human leukocyte antigens (hla) [ ]. the association of genetic polymorphisms in the low-affinity receptors iia and iiib (fcgr a, fcgr b), which encode the fcγr molecules, with susceptibility to cerebral malaria is well known [ ]. various studies link the human genetic variations of the hla genes, whose protein products are responsible for antigen presentation to the immune system, to disease progression and outcome. the first evidence for an asso- ciation between hla genetic variants and predispo sition to malaria was identified in sardinians about years ago, when the frequency of hla alleles was observed to be variable in villages located at different altitudes of the island, indicating an influence of malaria transmission intensity as selective pressure [ ]. independent protective effects against severe malaria in the hla locus were found in a west african population [ ]. protective genetic variants of hla were highly prevalent in africans but rare in other populations, which points to malaria as a creating force. as a result, the functionality of the hla immune compo nent has been the focus of various studies aiming to develop an hla subunit vaccine. copy number variation in malaria treatment interestingly, treatment of malaria may also be influenced by cnv [ , ]. the cytochrome pigment (cyp) a of the p family is involved in the metabolism of the newly recommended drug artesunate and present in the genome as multiple copies. increase in cyp a copy number is also associated with a higher plasma level of the nicotine detoxification product cotinine. whether individuals with multiple copies also metabolize artesunate more quickly will be the subject of future investigation. gene duplications also help the parasite to cope with the unfriendly environment of a chemotherapy-treated patient. studies in the mechanisms of artemisinin resistance show that drug resistance is conferred by an increased number of gene copies of the multi-drug resistance (pfmdr) gene [ - ]. a decrease of copy numbers results in suscep- tibility to drugs like mefloquine, lumefantrine, halofan- trine, quinine and artemisinin [ ]. a systematic analysis of the parasite’s genome revealed a number of genes in multiple copies [ ]. one of them, gtp-cyclohydrolase i (gch ), is situated in a pathway targeted by drugs, but had not previously been identified as mediating resistance to antifolate drugs. amplification of gch was also detected in a separate study looking at geographically distinct parasites with known drug resis- tance profiles [ ]. the genomic amplification in gch resulted in an increased expression level of the corres- ponding mrna. it was also shown that the presence of multiple copies of the gene was associated with mutations in the gene for dihydrofolate reductase (dhfr), which had been identified as the only cause of antifolate resistance. amplification of gch may be vital to compensate for the putatively fitness-reducing mutations in dhfr. the long-suspected role of pfmdr amplification in chloro- quine (cq) resistance may also be a result of compensation [ ]. later on, it became obvious that pfmdr could not be held accountable for all the phenomena of cq resistance. finally, the p. falciparum chloroquine resistance trans- porter gene (pfcrt) was identified, and mutations media ting resistance were characterized and confirmed clinically [ , ]. several years later, it was shown that parasites with point mutations in pfcrt also multiply the pfmdr gene in vitro, in comparison to their isogenic ‘sister’ parasites [ ]. duplications exist in other genes responsible for cell division, cell-cycle regulation and sexual differentiation; others remain un-annotated [ ]. a very interesting duplication affects the surfins, molecules possibly involved in invasion [ ]. the surfins represent a family of ten members; the relevant gene product of the duplicated surfin is localized on the surface of merozoites [ , ]. multiplication of this gene may lead to the birth of new family members awaiting selectable mutations to evade immune responses or to explore novel invasion pathways. cnv could be the starting point of a new round in the arms race between parasites and the human immune system. conclusions cnvs are a feature of the parasite-host interaction in malaria. whereas the parasite perspective of malaria has been under intense investigation, especially regarding drug response and resistance, the host side has so far received less attention. the study of cnvs in relation to malaria could explain some of the discrepancies between genetic association studies, since some of the candidate genes identified do occur as multiple copies. knowledge of the role of cnv in malaria could have three major impacts: the most important feature is to monitor changes in cnv in the parasite population to recognize emerging drug resistance quickly and early. drug resis- tance is one of the biggest problems in battling malaria, and even the newest therapies with artemisinin derivatives are under threat by resistant parasites [ , ]. investiga- ting cnvs of drug-metabolizing p may lead to persona- lized adjustment of drug dosage to compensate for increased degradation of drugs if a surplus of copies is present. . http://genomemedicine.com/content/ / / faik et al.: genome medicine , : on the other hand, if a reduced copy number or a snp with a strong influence on malaria suppresses expres sion of a protective gene product, one could consider replace ment therapy. as has been done for hemophilia patients with factor viii replacement for decades, infec tious diseases like malaria may in the future be treated using protective serum factors such as mbl [ ] or components of cytokine pathways that are not sufficiently expressed [ ]. a joint analysis of cnvs, snps and transcriptomics may shed light on the genetics of host-parasite interaction during malaria pathogenesis. combined with the indivi- dual genome sequences [ ], ‘personalized’ genetic analysis (personomics) will give a clear answer to the question of which snp or cnv influences gene expression in a particular person and how this particular person deals with malaria. competing interests the authors declare that they have no competing interests. authors’ contributions if wrote the sections on snps and malaria and the gwas studies and human cnv studies; egc wrote the historic remarks and the description of the parasite cycle, and jk contributed the parasite-host relationship and parasite cnv studies, conclusions and final editing. acknowledgements we are grateful to all researchers who provided the excellent data we used to write this review. we also would like to thank the staff of the institute for tropical medicine for 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ml, hill s, butman ja, schneider r, babyn p, el shanti hi, pope e, barron k, bing x, laurence a, lee cc, chapelle d, clarke gi, ohson k, nicholson m, et al.: an autoinflammatory disease with deficiency of the interleukin- -receptor antagonist. n engl j med , : - . . fullwood mj, wei cl, liu et, ruan y: next-generation dna sequencing of paired-end tags (pet) for transcriptome and genome analyses. genome res , : - . published: september doi: . /gm © biomed central ltd 	introduction 	the influence of host and parasite genetics in malaria malaria and single nucleotide polymorphisms 	malaria and single nucleotide polymorphisms 	genetic variation in response to malaria 	single nucleotide polymorphisms and malaria 	moving from candidate gene studies to genome-wide association studies 	copy number variations in malaria 	copy number variation in malaria treatment 	conclusions 	competing interests 	authors’ contributions 	acknowledgements 	references by now it should sound like music by now it should sound like music by nicole taylor sheets a dissertation submitted to the faculty of the university of utah in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of doctor of philosophy department of english the university of utah august copyright © nicole taylor sheets all rights reserved the university of utah graduate school statement of dissertation approval the dissertation of nicole taylor sheets has been approved by the following supervisory committee members: melanie rae thon karen brennan scott black muriel schmid barry weller , chair , member , member , member , member april , bate approved april , bate approved april , date approved april , date approved april , bate approved and by __________ v_l"'· c--'e"' ne.- t-=p--'e--' c-=- or"'a"----_________ ' chair of the department of english and by charles a. wight, dean of the graduate school. abstract in my dissertation, by now it should sound like music, i explore connections between inheritance and writing, and how we experience different kinds of inheritance in our bodies, families, and spiritual lives. although my primary genre for this project is the essay, many of these pieces have a story to tell. my look at inheritance is as personal as my immediate family, especially my father’s adoption, and the turbulence following my grandmother’s spiral into alzheimer’s. but i also follow stories and figures far outside of my own experience, such as composer olivier messiaen and mother teresa. the self is unpredictable, exciting quarry to track. and the self, by itself, is rarely enough. i investigate my evangelical upbringing, especially the stories, songs, and cultural products like the sinner’s prayer and the altar call that were part of my early spiritual formation and embedded in family relationships. in part two of the manuscript, i reach beyond the evangelical culture of my youth to catholic and orthodox expressions of christianity. in search of wisdom, transcendence, or healing, i look to spiritual places like the rocks of southern utah, the painted monasteries of romania, and the dehydrated carnival of burning man. by now it should sound like music includes many different types of writing, from the protein scripts of our dna to the lakes and canyons inscribed by glaciers. in these essays, the material shape and heft of words as objects, and not just meanings, are items for study in their own right. music is one of the most important kinds of “writing” iv in the collection. musical notation aims at precision but, like writing, allows room for interpretation in the birdseye of a fermata, or the suggestiveness of a metaphor. music’s other side, silence, is the backdrop of this project. many of the essays are a reaction to silence: a silence imposed because of illness, death, physical distance, or a severed relationship. a priest i like once explained that the bible is not the revelation but is a record of the revelation. this manuscript is no bible, but these essays record. they function like afterimages of things seen and unseen. they function like echoes. for my parents, tom and susan, and my brother, isaac the self is a cloister full of remembered sounds. —wallace stevens the echo is, to some extent, an original sound, and therein is the magic and charm of it. it is not merely a repetition of what was worth repeating in the bell, but partly the voice of the wood… —henry david thoreau, walden contents abstract………………………………………………………………………….iii acknowledgements………………………………………………………….viii voice mail from the seeing place………………………………………. one shall be taken…………………………………………………………… provenance……………………………………………………………………… hand and name…………………………………………………………………. what’s there to fear except the darkness…………………………. in the twinkling of an eye…………………………………………………. would you like to meet my best friend?............................................... this is my story, this is my song………………………………………….. make your partition………………………………………………………….. why burning man won’t fix your shattered self-esteem…….. by now it should sound like music…………………………………….. portraits: looking at moldova over my shoulder……………... more colors, more wings…………………………………………………... they say it is so………………………………………………………………… acknowledgments many thanks to my committee, melanie rae thon, scott black, karen brennan, muriel schmid, and barry weller, for their guidance in this project. i am grateful to the steffensen cannon family for their financial support, as well as to the university of utah for a vice presidential fellowship. “by now it should sound like music” was previously published in western humanities review (spring ). voice mail from the seeing place for marjorie ( - ) the broccoli was cooked into its afterlife. i fumbled in nana sheets’ kitchen for two cans of corn. when i visited nana, she was usually in a bathrobe, knocked over like a bowling pin on the couch, watching on golden pond for the th time. hanks of her short brassy hair poked out in all directions from the crown of her head. her hair spiked straight up in front; she was always in a state of hearing shocking news. the steroids for her asthma plumped her face into a prednisone mask. are you still in there? my dad would ask when nana glassed over. she’d laugh and say, i’m still here. christmas, though, nana was up and dressed, in a beige blouse with a thick elastic waistband and creased polyester pants. when i opened two cans of green beans, nana panicked. don’t you have bacon? no bacon, i said. nana had insisted on ordering a standing rib roast from tower foodfair. my dad knew his sister, jeanne, wouldn’t help cook it even though by then she was living with nana. my parents had driven over early christmas morning to help nana slide the roast in the oven. what about the meat? nana asked while i stirred the corn. it’s cooking. relax, mom, my dad said. the poinsettia cloth napkins waited like folded hands on the table. the roast emerged charcoal on top and sunset shades of raw in the middle. dad wasn’t quite sure what had happened to it, but he carved it up anyway. an eighty dollar piece of meat, he said. who made this cranberry salad? nana asked for the third time. she was much better with the deep past. we did, nan. christmas eve, nana and i had clamped the medieval meat grinder on the edge of the kitchen table to crush the fresh berries. that afternoon was a flash of the good ol’ nan, who watched over my shoulder to make sure i chopped the pecans finely enough, that the diced celery was uniform. anything connected to food was more likely to velcro itself to her short-term memory. she would miss her pills, but not her sweet rolls. she would not forget the cup of shoney’s potato soup on the kitchen table, even if it hid in a paper bag. as we sat down to eat, jeanne emerged from the basement with a basket of sorry- ass, sad little dinner rolls. she didn’t even spring for the bakery kind. i dropped the basket on the table and a couple of rolls tumbled out. i chucked them back into the basket like a clown. nick, dad said. he shot me a look like have some dignity, will you? it’s christmas. i cupped three rolls in my hands and pretended to gnaw at them like a hungry typewriter. pasty flecks of roll shaved onto the table. jeanne exploded; my mom laughed too. nick! dad repeated. nana giggled and asked: honey, are you hungry? here’s a memory i hold out in front of me: when i was younger, dad’s patience stretched like a circus tent. on the two-day drives to sarasota, i played in the backseat of the car with the woodsies, a family of three squirrels who lived in a plush log complete with plastic wood-looking furniture. the woodsies feasted on dad’s ear wax. they wanted to drive the car. they patted the back of dad’s head with their plastic hands the size of my fingernails. get those rats out of my ears! dad shouted, but he was smiling. they’re not rats! that summer when dad was out of work, we went to the beach every day. we lived in my mom’s parents’ winter home, the one with the icy, screened-in swimming pool. nana sheets sent me a package, four dolls she’d sewn, dolls a little taller than coffee mugs: one boy and girl with brown yarn hair, one girl with yellow yarn, and my favorite, a boy with a striped shirt and silky copper hair of embroidery thread. those dolls made me miss nana so bad i cried in mom’s lap under the orange trees. all summer i fed the seagulls with stale bird bread from the publix supermarket. my parents and i picked fruit off the backyard trees. we could hear the lung rattle and hack of our next door neighbor, dale, shouting for his wife, juanita, to bring him a beer. we cracked each other up, eating our late lunch on the card table by the pool, juanita! i growled at my mom. can i have a coke? in greek tragedy, the chorus says what the actors cannot say. it is the running ticker of the real register of things. the chorus punctuates episodes. when a new character needs to be checked out, or a wayward one needs it told to them, cue the chorus. it was once the kernel of drama, to the point that “asking for a chorus” was the same as asking for a play. tragedy evolved as an actor talked with the chorus leader. later two or even three actors would be set in motion like a juggler’s hankies. eventually actors took over and dismantled the scaffolding of the chorus, folded it up like flimsy tent poles and stashed it away in the basement of culture in case someone else came along and wanted to use it as an antique, a period piece, a festival of anachronism. euripedes closed the distance between actor and chorus, collapsed the whole thing like a telescope folding in on itself. the chorus outlived its usefulness. my mother and brother dance first to the left, then to the right. i can’t see them dancing because i am on a cell phone, hundreds of miles from the theater. mine is a thin phone, too small for a camera. but my mother and brother sound a little out of breath when they talk, so i know they are dancing. they are the chorus, not the principal players. it is easy for them, for me, to tell dad that nana has to get out of that house, or get jeanne out of that house, or she’ll die. but we’re not the ones who’d have to pick nana up like a sack of corn and buckle her into the truck. of all the characters, i find my father most sympathetic, though jeanne also commands a measure of pity. by her antics it is easy to forget she’s fifty years old. it seems more fitting to cast her as a lost teenager, a gangly pitiful rudderless girl. nana was thirty when she and granddaddy collected my dad at the hospital. jeanne was a surprise, eight years later. my father claims he has no interest in finding his birth mother. i am fascinated by the idea of this phantom family. when i was little, dad joked that he was from krypton, and he would refer to his secret powers and to my grandfather jar-el. tell me about jar-el! i’d shout and clap my hands in our booth at pizza hut. my dad would shush me in a mock scold. don’t let anyone overhear! my dad’s adoption makes me think about what we carry in our blood. i thought about this too when i watched rivers and tides, perking up when andy goldsworthy discussed the iron in small, brown, unassuming river stones. in the documentary, he pulverizes the stones into red powder and forms a pigment ball he plunks into the current, watching the bright rivulets batik the stream. the iron in rock, goldsworthy says, is the same as in our own blood. i wonder, too, what pulses through the heart’s byways, what is written on the scrolls of our dna, those double helixes in the fiesta of the body, spiraled like the crepe paper streamers on my pink huffy bicycle when i entered the fourth of july bike parade at ritter park. i decorated my huffy with tinfoil stars on its white plastic basket and playing cards clothespinned to the spokes. miranda’s mom freaked that i wrapped the bike body in a rainbow of streamers instead of sticking to red, white and blue. one summer afternoon i left huffster on the driveway and my mom ran over its front tire with the minivan. we called the bike clown bike because the front tire warped, the wheel folded over as though waving howdy. tipsy huffy wobbled as i rode. i pictured myself part of a circus act. the christmas i first met the huffy was balmy for west virginia, maybe degrees. i wore my cowgirl boots, a denim skirt, and green knit toboggan hat. i was, as usual, recovering from an earache. my mother would not negotiate about the knit hat. i wore it down over my ears as i drove huffy in manic hourglasses on nana and granddaddy’s etch-a-sketch of a patio. my thinking bleeds like goldsworthy’s iron in the water. i cannot look at nana’s present without seeing the past. the ancient greek way makes sense, superimposing history on the future, two different hues creating the color of the present. around th century bce, pythagoras described history as one great year, magnus annus, which would eventually repeat: another iteration of the planets’ positions, all the same damn people and their kooky events. consider the body language of the aymara, indigenous to bolivia, peru, and chile, who gesture behind them to refer to the future, who hold their arms in front of them, close to the body to express recent events, way out for ancient times. all i can do is sit here and listen for the phone, with a mickey mouse viewmaster in front of my face like a mask, tug the lever and advance the cardboard disk to the next frame. the past out in front, see? next frame [nana carries pots from the stove to warm the garden hose water in our plastic sesame street swimming pool.] next frame [nana spreads margarine on roman meal bread before adding peanut butter and jelly so the sandwiches won’t stick to the roofs of our mouths.] next frame: [nana sits beside me in the tv room on the plaid yellow couch across from the picture window and the patio. the first book she teaches me to read is a slim stapled paperback called ted. each page has a primitive line drawing of a hapless cub in a square panel, and a line or two of text heavy on short vowels. ted is a cub. etc. basically ted plays, gets capped by a bad man, and soaks in a tub while his mom brings bread and jam. nana’s precisely filed fingernails hard as flint, perfect for back scratches, make her long patient schoolteacher fingers even longer, as she points word by word.] next frame: [nana and granddaddy feed me minty life savers in our blue pew at highlawn baptist church. i chomp the candy and kick my feet against the seat in front of me. i doodle on the church bulletin. i am fond of the handbell choir, young people dressed in matching white robes. the bells wait on low tables. then the robed young people stand at the ready, an upside-down bell in each hand, the bells’ round mouths open to show their clappers like silent tongues. the robed young people extend their arms to ring the bells with a wrist flick, then retract their arms in an arc. the robed young people jingle out hymns like a big white polyester-blend acne-prone calliope of love.] next frame [nana and i hunch at the turquoise sewing machine. for a brief season in high school, i want to sew, and nana helps me make a pair of jams, upping the ante with pockets and an elastic waistband. i choose a colorful fabric, a print with piles of vegetables. nana does not abide shortcuts. it takes me forever just to cut the pattern out of the thin shushy beige paper. i iron seams flat. i pin and hand-stitch the hems before touching the turquoise machine with its racy pedal. we work on the jams well after midnight, and then i sleep in the pink bedroom, jeanne’s old room. we work by the bright light of a lamp rather than the sallow overhead fixture.] next frame [nana and grandaddy stand and clap next to my parents in the center of the huntington mall where the fountains are. brown indoor/outdoor carpet vomits over a hexagonal makeshift stage near the organ and piano store and the frontier fruit & nut co kiosk with its bins i frequent for their gummi bears, shoveling them into a plastic sack to be priced by the pound. in first grade i score the lead in my class’s production of the little red hen and volunteer nana sheets to make my costume. she transforms my red dress with white dots into a body of felt feathers, like tongues of fire in red, orange, yellow. but the gold medal goes to the yellow pair of totes socks with grippy plastic dots on the bottom that she stitches to look like three-toed poofy chicken feet, foghorn leghorn style. mary beth foss, the duck and one of the hen’s naysayer friends, wears a pair of orange swimming flippers.] next frame: [nana slides her long scissor fingers into her voluminous purse, snatching fun-size snickers for me and my cousin melissa at the movies. the hiss and spume as she opens pepsi cans for us from the same voluminous purse. after the movie, the three of us in her brown buick, waiting to get out of the mall parking lot, me turning the radio to wkee . fm, hoping an r.e.m. song would come on.] i emphasize the master in viewmaster. the image isn’t going anywhere until i pull that lever. i could play this game for a long time. after lunch at bob evans, dad helped nana out of the jeep and up the stairs to her house. watching her totter up the stairs with dad at her elbow, i thought of that children’s book, love you forever, especially the last part when the adult son cradles his elderly mother. children’s books crack my face sometimes, the plaster flakes around my eyes and mushes under my tears. the velveteen rabbit, for example, i had a coloring book version of it when i was little and i filled in its delicate sepia lines with colored pencils. i cry even now at that story, though one might argue that the ending is happy, as the rabbit transforms from a condemned germbag stuffed toy into a real rabbit. last year my friend erin and i went to barnes & noble because i needed a couple of gifts: the guide to getting it on for a gentle friend about to be married, and runaway bunny for my neighbor’s new baby. i found the guide first, th edition, the one with the stylized spiky-haired couple making out in a four-panel design on the cover. i held the book under my arm and wondered if i would set off some kind of weirdo alert system as i moved to the children’s section. there i reread goodnight moon, that’s a pretty safe one. then little gorilla, who grows till he’s so big he can’t fit in the frame of the page. but when i opened runaway bunny there was the mom rabbit with her waders and creel, her line baited with a carrot. something burst open inside me at that love that won’t let go, that octopus tentacular go-go-gadget arm love. someone in barnes & noble was holding a thick black book in her armpit and crying over small square cardboard pages of bunny drawings. someone in barnes & noble fumbled for the restroom so she could blow her nose. when i was little, i wept openly at a broad category of what i then called sad music—anything sweepy and orchestral, bette midler wind-beneath-my-wings kind of stuff. theme music for the miss america pageant. strains of muzak at the kroger supermarket. at the kroger i sat in the basket of the shopping cart, death grip on the handle, facing my mom, pursing my lips, trying so hard not to cry. sad music? mom asked. maybe i had an undiagnosed andrew lloyd webber allergy? last summer i cried when my dad limped back to work after meeting me for lunch downtown. i imagined my dad’s death, pictured him buckling in his cubicle, crushed by the weight of his disintegrating mother, flattened by the dark anvil of his sister and her crack-dealing boyfriend. my dad would drop like a puppet with the strings cut. his cubicle, the cube, i could joke it’s already a tomb, a box waiting for a body. my dad has a corner cube, pinned with price charts for hooks, cranes, hammers, and chainsaws. also in the cube: a photo of george w. and laura bush, a large stuffed buzzard, and a boondoggle keychain shaped like a puppy that my brother made in one of his crafty phases. i haven’t seen dad cry about his mother’s slow implosion. she can’t die fast enough, he said one afternoon, and i know it’s his own black humor, that this slow letting go of his mother shreds his heart into a pile of heart shavings, that as her body softens, his love for her grows exponentially. he has time to think about what life will be like without her, this woman who brought him home from the hospital at three days old, who chose him when his own mother didn’t want him, this crazy lady in blue satin pajamas who for a million dollars could not remember if she ate breakfast or not, she has poured her love into him for nearly sixty years, and when she dies he’ll have to live on the reserves of that love for the rest of his life. nana is an orphan, only her sister myrtle is left. my dad will be an orphan again. nana told me once, a few years ago, that no matter how old you are, it is always a fear and emptiness to know your parents are gone. this is the natural order of things, i guess, but we all know nature can sure be a bitch. actors in greek tragedy always wore their masks on stage. even if an actor were to appear naked, he would strip down to a costume under his costume to suggest “naked.” masks in greek tragedy can be traced to aeschylus in th century bce. it pleases me to learn that the earlier masks were meant to be lifelike, whereas by the late th century bce, masks were larger than life, mouths fixed in anger or laughter. so, too, with memory: at first memories align more closely with the contours of fact, and with distance they bend, elongate, blimp out as caricature, lose the fine-grain detail. they are changed, and fixed as with epoxy. in later greek and roman theater, masks also anchored in front a highly stylized poof of hair, hair i read described as so stylized that it has very little similarity to human hair. nana left post-it notes for jeanne on the table in the foyer, in her shaky long- legged schoolteacher script, the letters knee-knocking into each other and bracing themselves against the frame of the pale yellow paper, please be home by midnight. whenever jeanne disappeared for a couple of days, nana wondered if she’d been arrested. even in a panic attack, nana knows to call my dad, whether or not jeanne is in the house. sometimes dad can drive the five minutes to her house, give her more prednisone and a breathing treatment, and talk her out of her panic. sometimes nana insists on going to the emergency room, despite dad’s reminders that she hates the hospital, and they’ll sit in the emergency room for a few hours until a doctor sends her home with more prednisone and a breathing treatment. where’s jeanne? my mom demanded as dad took nana’s call at am. jeanne spent most of her hours asleep in the back bedroom, her white and pink childhood room, or in what my mom called the hole, nana’s basement gallery of glass jif jars, the highchair passed through four grandchildren and one great grandchild, a cradle, grandaddy’s golf clubs, a dead refrigerator, the washer and dryer, rakes and brooms, currier and ives canisters, ashtrays, sue-sue’s litter box. jeanne didn’t always emerge from the hole long enough to see that nana got dressed, or showered every couple of days, or caught the pick-up van for physical therapy, or took her breathing treatments and pills. she put nana up to calling my dad or harriet when she was out of pepsi, even though jeanne could walk or drive to the nearby superamerica and buy some. jeanne had lost a marriage, her job as a public schoolteacher, and close contact with her one living daughter. she’s got a lot of nerve, mom said. that’s about all she’s got left. it was never so simple as dad being angry with jeanne. he fumed at her, then gave her a ride to the tobacco hut when her boyfriend totaled her car and she was out of cigarettes. once i visited nana with him and i asked her for some sheets for my apartment, knowing she had piles of linens squirreled away. i was trying to make a joke out of it, you know, sheets from nana sheets, but no one was listening. while nana rifled through the hall closet, jeanne emerged from her bedroom in a white terry cloth robe. she was perky and disjointed. i hadn’t seen her in months. she was very thin, and i thought she wanted to hug me. somebody cut my hair! she said. i backed away. i’m no good at cutting hair. i’ve never done it, i said. this was true. oh come on, it’s a straight line, you can do it, she said. no, really, i’ll just mess it up. it’s a straight line. nana slid old folded sheets out of a tower stacked like smooth cotton flapjacks. jeanne touched the brittle elastic around the edges. mom, don’t give her these, she said. i told her it didn’t matter. jeanne and dad disappeared, while nana took a couple more sheet pancakes from the hall closet and handed them to me. when jeanne came back, her thin black hair was cut in a sawtooth line, ragged like some unraveled thing, draped across her robe. things were partly ok, until jeanne chained the front door so dad couldn’t get in with his keys. dad clawed at the chain to unhook it. my brother held up his phone and i heard dad howl. he could never be sure whether jeanne chained the door out of spite, or absent-mindedness, or an impulse to hide various deeds of darkness, or what. the next time dad visited, he brought wire cutters. distance is important for proper perspective on the situation. i live nearly miles away from nana’s house, so i hear more than i see. i can turn off the show like a radio. if i back up a little, i find it interesting to study the jeanne character. an example of jeanne-logic: before she and my uncle keith divorced, jeanne drove by nana’s late one night and wanted to check on her. rather than wake nana by ringing the doorbell, she dragged a picnic bench across the patio, the patio where my cousins and i used to play restaurant, filling plastic bowls with torn-up newspaper and square vocabulary cards like laminated saltines. the cards had words in black type on one side ([skate] [pan] [clown]), and a picture illustrating the word on the other. we jockeyed to be waitress, the plum role. that night jeanne scratched the picnic bench legs across the concentric wavy grooves of the patio, a rough sound file overlaid with the bark of a distant dog. jeanne gazed at her mom through the window screen as though looking on relics in a catacomb. nana found jeanne’s bench outside her window the next day and panicked that someone had tried to break in. another example: jeanne called an ambulance and let nana ride to the hospital alone. all the way in utah i heard my dad ream jeanne when she finally showed up in st. mary’s e.r. nana, a woman with dementia, pushing , in her silk pajamas and saggy knee-highs, rode alone because my aunt couldn’t be bothered to hop in the back of the ambulance, or maybe she was too high to care. the chorus dances left to right. they leave me voice mail: did you see nana lock eyes with the emt as he placed the oxygen mask over her face like a lid on a cookie jar? did you see her clutch her handbag to her chest with those bony hands? when the home health nurses started visiting nana for physical therapy, my mom or harriet was there to greet them in case jeanne was down in the hole. one day, though, the nurses came unannounced and saw the dirty dishes piled on the counter and the sink, the trash slumped and smelling in the corner, nana disoriented, wheezing, in her bathrobe, unwashed for three days. the nurses alerted adult protection services, who scheduled a meeting with my dad and harriet. worst case they’d throw nana in a state- run nursing home. don’t upset mom, my dad said to jeanne when he found out. my brother held up the phone and boy did nana sound pissed once jeanne blurted out that the aps people were coming. i can bathe myself! nana shouted. i can feed myself! mom took the phone and said she just didn’t understand it. when dad asked jeanne to get out of nan’s house for a few days, he was a monster. he was no longer just the overworked guy with bad knees who counted out nan’s pills each week and snapped the lids on the mtwrfssu morn noon eve night grid of compartments so he could have some slim assurance that his sister wasn’t bogarting all the pharmaceuticals. he was not the one who talked nana down when she raged in the rehabilitation hospital or st. mary’s. nana pulled out ivs, scooted down the hallway with her purse big enough for a bowling ball on her arm, my mild-mannered nana whose strongest swear word was golly neds!, who wrote checks to the billy graham crusade for decades. nana shouted that dammitgoddammit she wanted out of that hospital, and the nurses knew to call my dad. though nana had made a deposit on a room at chateau grove assisted living, she wouldn’t leave jeanne. despite all the boxes being moved out of her head, nana had some sense that jeanne needed her protection, that she could get in trouble with the police. tom says it’s not safe for me to be here with you, jeanne said to nana before the aps people came. hold me, mom. jeanne knelt by nana’s mauve recliner near the picture window. my mom took the phone and said nana shot my dad a glare she’d never seen before, one cold, cold look from that old and smooth face. it was as though nana willed herself not to hear the arguments between her children. jeanne, on the floor, played the lowest card she had. i heard the words crackle on impact. you are not my brother, she said to my dad. and you’re not her son. from a seat in the theatron, literally the seeing place, those greek merrymakers could hear everything. masks amplified the voices, pitching them to the back row. you can hear the latin persona, and our person, in the mask’s vocal projection. as though we are born of our own sounds. second only to my parents, jeanne called me more often than anyone else during my two years in the peace corps. these days she leaves me weepy messages railing on my dad or asking for forgiveness. jeanne calls me at a.m. to tell me it’s nana’s birthday, which i remember without her. she calls twice more and i turn off the phone. when i turn it back on later that day, she’s left three more voice messages. what would you do if it were your mom? jeanne asks me once about nana. would you lock her away? she calls me to tell me about this guy who likes her and made belgian waffles for her and nana. she calls me at : in the morning to ask where anne frank was from; firstly i am annoyed that she calls so early and then i’m embarrassed that after all these years of school i have to look up the answer. second only to my parents, jeanne mailed more and heavier packages to me in the peace corps than anyone else. she sent silverware after i’d emailed that i’d moved on my own and had two forks. and also small rectangular box, the kind for a five-by-seven picture frame, sheathed in bubble wrap. i held it for a moment. shit. i already knew what it was. opened it: a framed five-by-seven of my dead cousin’s last prom picture. the glass had cracked, clear chips rattled in the box. allison wore a yellow strapless dress, a sunshine dress, and her hair in ringlets. in jeanne-logic i’m sure it made perfect sense to send this. i propped it up on my book table for a few days and then took it down because it was creeping me out. jeanne sent me two empty photo albums, with post-its on them written in her thin, eager schoolteacher print: one for you, and one for a friend. as though i were a child. something about the simple earnestness of her instructions pierced me. i wept in my large dusty living room with my new knives and forks, the balcony windows craned open, and tried to figure out which friend would get the book. when i was home for a little while in the summer, nana and i sat in the waiting room of the huntington internal medicine group clinic while my dad’s cousin harriet talked with the receptionist. nana slumped in a wheelchair, her head in her hands. i made a mental note: if you bring your own white plastic trash can/puke bucket, you jump to the front of the line! nana was sick to her stomach, but harriet suspected a urinary tract infection. i wanted to say something like nan, you should really stop sleeping around! but my internal save-as-draft function caught me. himg, a new clinic, had an air of sterile disorganization. in the examining room, nana’s bed was four feet off the ground with no side rails on it. it was not a bed for sick people. a nurse bustled in and said harriet and i had to get nana up and into the bathroom for a urine sample. my job in the awkward choreography was to keep lots of slack between the iv pole and nana’s arm. i cringed at the thought of the kaleidoscope of germs dancing on a health care facility toilet seat, but nana dropped right down on it. i knew nana had been hitting the donuts pretty hard, but i was not prepared for the soft elephant sag of her body. her arms, legs, feet, fingers still stretched long and skinny, as though all the years and sweet rolls had gathered in her torso. nana held her head in her right hand. just as we wondered if she was falling asleep, she lifted and offered the urine sample cup to the nurse. back on the high bed, nana complained she was cold, and she couldn’t keep her eyes open. she muttered that she was thirsty, so the nurse brought a cup of ice chips. i fed her a few ice pellets on a plastic spoon; she opened her eyes just a crack to see when i brought the spoon to her mouth. she ate like a little bird, softening the hard corners of her mouth into a round o like a coin purse. she didn’t move under the scratchy flannel blankets. my dad drove straight from work to the clinic and sat with us until the ambulance was ready to take nana to st. mary’s for more tests. are you still in there? he asked his mother. yeah, i’m still here, she said without opening her eyes. she didn’t even remember she was breaking our hearts. one shall be taken it is snowing in west virginia, dumping the white flakes down, clouds emptying bottoms-up like boxes of instant mashed potatoes. we don’t get much snow here, and it’s not going to last, but christy and two-year-old brooklyn dance under the white trees in their front yard and jay tapes it. christy and jay, a youth pastor at a church in our hometown, are planning to move to india: jay will teach at a bible college, and christy, a nurse, will work at the college and an orphanage. we’re all from a small town a river away from kentucky and ohio. christy takes the camera. jay throws a snowball that lands by her feet. if she’s healthy enough, christy will go in february to chennai with a medical relief team to help people displaced by the tsunami from the recent indian ocean earthquake. she will also travel to kota, where she and jay have been several times, to visit the orphans there, the orphans she calls her kids. this video is for them: she wants to show them snow. she wants to show them brooklyn, her baby. when she’s in india, she tapes the orphans to show us. after two years of teaching as a peace corps volunteer, i am marginally employed and living with my parents. i plot my next move. christy urges me to go on the three-week medical trip. they need non-medical staff, she says. i can fill out papers, i can color with kids while they wait to see a doctor, i can hug people whose work and villages were wiped away. i can shampoo kids’ heads. i can touch untouchables. i remind her i’m not good in a crisis. the medical work, christy admits, is often only surface. the team won’t have many resources for follow-up care. but at least it’s the surface. they treat lice, and scabies, and simple infections. they give what comfort they can. this is a difference between christy and me: christy goes, i don’t go. christy and jay live a mile from my parents, and i’ve come in the snow bearing cauliflower and potatoes and a bag of frozen peas. we’ll do a curry, our suburban anglo girls version of curry, a gesture at least to the country jay and christy have adopted. it is not new to call a cauliflower a brain, the florets branching into lobes. it is a meek vegetable, absorbing whatever you put with it. it provides a texture puzzle for the tongue, rounded ridges, nubs, soft but not slimy invertebrate soft. the recipe uses a whole head of cauliflower. by the time we add the diced potatoes, the mound of seasoned vegetables spills over the side of the skillet, so we enlist a second pan. i know i could halve the recipe, but what good is half a head of cauliflower/half a brain? christy is on naan duty. she kneads a cup of yogurt into flour, she rolls the dough into flat patties and browns them on a hot skillet, then brushes them with butter. we make piles and piles of food for three adults and one child. i’ve known jay since junior high. christy and i could never remember when we met, but our paths intersected at church camps and all-county choir. christy has always been too pretty to have many female friends. in college she entered a city-wide beauty pageant on a dare and won a scholarship. guys wanted to best her at sports and then ask her out, and it was unclear which part was more of a challenge. at christy and jay’s wedding, the other bridesmaids and i clutched daisies and danced down the aisle of the - h camp hall, per christy’s instructions. in the kitchen we listen to simon and garfunkel. christy and jay are people with bible verses and prayers taped to kitchen cabinets, and clusters of photographs of indian friends, bible college students and orphans, on the dining room walls. they were two church people with whom i could really be friends. they didn’t judge my feelings of estrangement from evangelical christianity, though jay told me more than once that christy felt “burdened” for me, which signaled that i’d fallen away somehow, and also made me feel like crap for adding one more thing for christy—weak, sick, exhausted in her ownership of all kinds of loneliness—to worry about. i knew church was not uncomplicated for them, either; they were baptist because of the local church where they worked, but they weren’t diehard about the denomination. the faces from india taped to their walls and cabinets had straight, white, beautiful teeth. christy had told me that many people in india would be fortunate ever to see a doctor in their lives, much less a dentist. my associations with poverty, eastern european style, involved missing and gold teeth. mama nina, my moldovan host mom, once complimented my teeth and asked if they were real. oh yes, i said, they’re mine. brooklyn runs in and out of the room, escaping the curry cloud from the stove. jay drives to the supermarket, and when he returns says that he could smell dinner from the driveway. christy received a curry cookbook for christmas, and we drool over the pages, we plot out the next months of our lives in curries. i plan to move away at the end of the summer, and christy and jay will be gone in the fall, so we know the time is fleeting. the cooking can’t wait. i stay the night in their guest room, and in the morning i leave them a bucket of leftovers and take a bucket with me. in the kitchen christy moves slowly, as though she might shatter. heavy doses of steroids calmed her intestines enough to get christy out of the hospital for christmas and the snow. she takes enormous pills every day. this morning she suspects she has a bladder infection, so she pops an antibiotic too. it’s never clear whether her medical training is a blessing or a liability. “there goes your olympic career,” i’d offered when christy was in st. mary’s a few weeks earlier. she had crohn’s disease, and intestines were out of control. sometimes she passed out in the bathroom from the pain; she kept a bottle of smelling salts near the toilet. her father, dave, had a colostomy years ago, the only cure for the disease. “i don’t want them to cut my guts out,” she said. she feared that trying to keep a clean colostomy bag in india would be a disaster. also, she was and wished for more children and wanted to have sex with her husband without a pouch of feces flapped on her stomach. christy was sick of ensure, tired of sad pudding and lifeless soup. she said she was starved for nutrients and would i please bring some hummus. i filled the barrel of my food processor with two cans of chickpeas, a peeled knob of ginger, a few cloves of garlic, and a couple of spoonfuls of tahini. easy money. she asked me to puree some cooked whole wheat pasta with a can of tomatoes. it looked as gross as it sounded, but christy ate it with her eyes closed in pleasure, as though it were a feast in a fist-sized tupperware container. thanks to my facility with the “on” button of a food processor, christy glowed a bit, like an illuminated lawn ornament, as though life and happiness were intensified for a moment in her hungry cells by some kind of metaphysical dimmer switch somewhere inside her. out of the hospital in time for the holidays, christy invited me to a christmas eve service at their church, fellowship baptist, a wide, white sanctuary with sophisticated light and sound system. i sat with rhonda, christy’s mom, and ken and lou, students from china who were studying at the nearby university, whose real names were not ken and lou but whose chinese names were stumbingblocks for enough people that they gave us other options. they brought their infant son, baby ken. after the service, christy wanted to eat at the super chinese buffet near the mall, one of few restaurants still open. jay borrowed one of the church’s vans and we piled in. the super chinese buffet is an awkward remodeled circuit city store, ill-fitting like the banner furniture store in an old baptist church on pea ridge road. you can cover up the brick cross built into the front with a big sale banner, but you can’t erase the church from the building. it was so good to watch christy eat, even if it was the super chinese buffet, the red jell-o squares, pale beige pudding, sad fantail of butterfly shrimp slumping under a heat lamp. i am two weeks away from my first marathon. i eat five times a day, and am never satisfied. by the end of the church service i am howling, i would gnaw the hymnals if i knew people weren’t looking. earlier that week i’d run through housing developments near heritage farm village and was struck by the new fashion, circa christmas , of six-foot upright canvas holiday figures inflated by air pumps. i passed tall bobbing penguins, polar bears, santas, snow globes on yards with no snow. living in moldova for two years had created an enjoyable sort of rip van winkle effect. i had missed the proliferation of wifi and sleep number beds, for example, and those motion- sensitive soap and paper towel dispensers in public bathrooms. from the super china buffet, we drove through the nearby town of milton to give out the candy cane award, a kind of clark grizwold honor for the gaudiest home holiday display. ken, lou, baby ken, rhonda and i voted from the van’s back seats. christy strolled onto the winning porch with a foot-tall plastic candy cane and presented the award to the surprised guy in flannel who answered the door. i took a photo. the winner smiled, and christy glittered like milton’s own vanna white. christy may have felt desperately sick, but she was radiant all evening. at the christmas eve service, christy, out of the hospital for less than a week, had sung at the front of the church. i get restless in church, especially in a baptist church, but i wanted to be near christy. she wore a jeweled sari, a red bodice wrapped in yards of olive shimmering fabric. it’s a wedding sari, she told me. of course we didn’t know that in less than a year she’d be buried in it. just after new year’s, i ran my marathon in phoenix. i stayed with a college friend, damon, who reminded me that the guy who ran the first marathon, to athens from marathon, died after blurting out that the persians had lost the battle of marathon. damon hadn’t started dating his wife yet, so it was cool if i commandeered the guest room. i brought a french press, because i knew he didn’t own a coffee pot. when i discovered that he also doesn’t own any coffee mugs, just a couple of crappy plastic ones from - , i bought some mugs at target and left them in his cabinet. the evening before my race, i was his date for a wedding with eight bridesmaids, and a reception that included a mariachi band, a mechanical bull, and a barbecue feed which was not the easy carbs i should have been filling up on, but i couldn’t help myself. this was one cool wedding, not least because i didn’t know anyone but damon. in the dark early morning, damon dropped me near the race start. i didn’t know the course, or anyone cheering. running has a way of making me feel not lonely even when running by myself. i learned from this race that if you want people to call your name, you have to write it on your race bib or shirt; sometimes nice people watching from the sidewalks of phoenix, scottsdale and tempe yelled “bandana!” or “go blue shirt!” when i passed. i eyed the solidarity of team in training folks, many of whom had matching outfits and were raising money for cancer research. one thing i love about runners is that they don’t shy away from accessories. there were people with photos in baggies pinned to shirts covered with puffy paint graffiti, people who wore race belts with multiple water bottles, like grenades of glycogen goodness. i didn’t raise money for charity. i guess this race was for me. at the start, with thousands of people packed close, i realized my right shoe was untied. it was all asses and elbows packed in the start corral, so i barely had room to bend down and redo the knot. “are you running toward or running away from?” adam, my then-boyfriend, asked me once. as my nana sheets would say, especially as her short-term memory started to flicker, “well, now you’ve asked me something.” despite damon’s words of warning, i found that a marathon wasn’t about death. it wasn’t even about suffering. behold the runner’s high: o holy dopamine! i’m not saying that i’m fast or that i have strategy or game. running just feels like something my body was built to do. runner’s high brain tells you that if you had enough gatorade and a place to pee now and then, you could go forever (though if you’ve put in your miles, and you pass a pizza or barbecue place, or a donut shop, runner’s high brain might be ok with you stopping.) “i’ve never given myself an enema in front of anyone,” christy says. we have arrived at a new stage in our friendship. and technically she’s not giving herself an enema “in front” of me. she readies what looks like a baster for a small turkey, and then i sit in the anteroom, next to the sink and linen closet and a large bathroom with a pull cord for help and a shower with a plastic seat, and try not to listen. i wait with my back turned, reading her copy allende’s eva luna and keeping one ear open in case she needs something. or i’m on the phone with the mother of a prospective peace corps volunteer; what are the conditions like, she wants to know. is it realistic for his girlfriend to find a job with an ngo in moldova while her son completes his peace corps service? christy moans in the background. “get the nurse,” she says. i explain to the woman on the phone that i’m at the hospital with a critically ill friend and i have to go find a nurse but i will call her back. sometimes christy only needs me to go away. once she asks me to move the potty chair closer to her bed and to help her up. what else can i do? i ask. “take a walk,” she says. i take the stairs to the first floor, passing a statue of mary and a wall of photographs of this hospital through the ages, to a windowless café area. the coffee shop part is closed but four vending machines look on. i get a cup of robocoffee with extra “whitener,” which is not terrible. i study the crumbs on the tabletop until the coffee is finished and i assume i’ve been gone long enough. i don’t know which is worse, her pain or the loneliness of her pain. one afternoon as soon as i arrive at the hospital christy tells me she doesn’t feel right. i’ve brought a couple of movies, which we never watch. “i don’t feel right,” she repeats. she looks flushed. we have to go from the third floor to the basement for chest x-rays. christy sits in a wheelchair and holds a heavy bound book, like an accountant’s ledger, on her lap. a nurse pushes the wheelchair and i follow behind with the oxygen tank, wheeling it like a vacuum cleaner. it is hard not to tangle the thin tube that stretches, like part of an aquarium, from christy’s nose to the tank. i cut the corners too narrow. the nurse deftly backs christy’s wheelchair into the elevator. in the basement, christy is gone for half an hour. there’s a bulletin board in the x-ray waiting area covered with a construction paper pirate and a lumpy ship. a guy in grungy white parachute pants, ragged high-tops, and a neck brace sits in a wheelchair near the television. the man doesn’t so much as nod at me. he ensures that our lines of sight never ever cross. maybe he’s in too much pain to make small talk. an episode of powerpuff girls is on tv. buttercup, the green one, is beating the crap out of a squirrel. the man’s pale chest hair is patchy around a four-inch scar down his sternum. neither of us bothers to change the channel. the times i stay overnight with christy, i leave st. mary’s when jay arrives in the morning. christy keeps the air conditioning on full blast, maybe degrees in the room. christy wears a short sleeved t-shirt and pajama pants, her face flushed. i know to wear layers. on the way home, i stop at this lunch place i like for a “hillbilly flu shot,” a hot dog topped with chili and jalapenos. these days i take my food as hot as i can stand it, as though i could sweat out death, as though i could outwit the curse of flesh. i sink into a guilty glee, the sheer euphoria that i am not sick. i am not dying. at home i lace up my shoes and run the loop: over the bridge to nowhere, past the wyngate assisted living community and the defunct brickyard, by my old high school, and the new post office where i like to talk to the moderately hot postal worker with that thick luscious drawl. i know it’s cliché, but when i hear that guy talk i think “molasses.” i think “honey.” “let me ask you something. you got a car?” moderately hot postal worker asks me. “yes.” “so why do i see you runnin’ all the time?” i stopped by st. mary’s on my way to a yoga class at the nearby nursing school gym. christy was to be transferred by ambulance to cleveland for more tests, to check the possibility of doing the colostomy surgery. i found christy alone in her room in the early evening. jay had gone home for the day to take care of brooklyn and some church business; the best he could do was to drive the six hours to cleveland first thing in the morning to join her. christy’s mom was too sick to make it to the hospital often. her dad wasn’t really in the picture. there was a lull in church lady visits. i realized there was no way i was getting out of here in time to make yoga. christy didn’t ask me outright, but i knew she wanted someone to go with her to cleveland, to help her sort through information and make decisions and in general just be a less-medicated, auxiliary brain. i had no job or child or duties. i had just returned from the peace corps. i had managed to navigate bus stations in countries where i didn’t speak the language. and yet getting home from cleveland by myself was somehow a challenge i didn’t feel like undertaking. i had no spirit of adventure when the adventure wasn’t fun. as i dithered, christy swabbed her backside with mylanta to soothe the burning. christy was embarrassed about wearing depends because her insides wouldn’t stay inside. i don’t know why i didn’t go. christy was full of grace. it’s ok, she said. the nurses would take care of her, she said. she was even able to joke with the ambulance drivers, one of whom called himself fetus because he looked so young. i watched the ambulance pull away into a bitter january night. in that moment i felt guilty but not that guilty. actually i felt hungry. i felt alive and wanted to peel out of that hospital. i bought a sandwich in the cafeteria and dodged the parking lot ice and drove home to my parents’ house. they were sitting by the fireplace watching the news, my parents who are happy together, who can sit there and watch tv because their only daughter isn’t dying. more and more i find that my emotions have a kind of unhelpful and misleading time-release, that in a provisional way i’m alright with a situation, or with a choice i’ve made, and then later or much later the real weight of it knocks me over. choose wrong in haste, repent at leisure. leave your dying friend in a dark moment and have the rest of your own life to think about it. christy called me in february from kota, on the medical relief trip. she’d recovered enough to be able to go after all. i didn’t know what time it was in india, but it was afternoon for me, and when my mom called me to the phone all i could do was listen to christy’s hysterics about how christians in india were persecuted. the orphans cared for by hopegivers, a christian ministry her church had partnered with, were attacked, molotov cocktails lobbed over the orphanage walls. “my babies,” she said. the children were terrified, with good reason. i behaved as though the persecution of christianity had ended with the new testament, as though once saul became the apostle paul, it was all good. i knew this wasn’t the case; i heard from missionaries and human rights groups that freedom of religion is hardly a global standard, that in many places around the world, outward faith carries a high price. but listening to christy was like watching a short clip of a movie somewhere in the middle without any setup, you don’t have a synopsis, you are scrambling to figure out what’s going on. christy could have judged me: this is the real world, dammit! aren’t you listening? just because you don’t want to get involved doesn’t mean violence isn’t happening. but that wasn’t her voice. it was mine. her voice just wanted to tell me about her sadness, to ask me to pray for her and for the medical team and most of all for the scared children who weren’t safe on the streets or, apparently, within the walls of charity. her hair is scarecrow-wild, her face bloated. black socks slouch around her ankles. a wide hourglass of her backside shows through the gaps in the hospital robe she tries to hold shut with one hand. her skin crinkles like a fleshy plastic sack, an old lady suit that’s too big for her. i pass her in the hall at st. mary’s on my way to christy’s room. weeks after the indian trip, christy has gained almost pounds, most of it fluid. she’s outgrowing her body and her pajamas. four women from church visit her, and one pulls out a pair of blue underwear the size of a front porch flag. “granny panties,” christy says. “how sexy is that.” her taut body is now a balloon body, the skin of her swollen legs stretched to ripping, the pores pulled out of shape. as though her body is not skin but plastic. if skin can scream it is screaming. christy is on lasix to lose the fluids. she is catheterized and refers to the plastic liter-sized box into which her urine drains as her “purse,” as though we’re going shopping. christy is still fighting the double pneumonia that set it after she started immuno-suppresant drugs, after the steroids stopped working. she is restless. she gets up to arrange the sheets and blanket on the foldout chair where i’ll sleep tonight. she insists i let her arrange the bed. i’ve brought her a couple of recent new yorkers and a plastic inflatable flamingo. “fauna!” i announce. when christy feels strong enough to write, she keeps a journal: “if i don’t make it, she says, i want brooklyn to know i tried.” we don’t linger on this kind of talk. christy has heard rumors, church gossip, that some people disapproved of her traveling to india for medical work. why was she jeopardizing her health when she had a child at home? but to christy, it was a useless question. the orphans are her kids. months ago jay submitted his resignation to the church for the end of the summer, in preparation for their move to india. there are rumors that christy is faking her illness so that jay can keep his job. “who would fake this?” she asks. she is more amused than angry. “tell me.” christy wants to walk to the cafeteria on the first floor. it’s a big trip, but the nurse says she can go. though her lungs are damaged, her intestines for now are calm, so she eats whatever she wants. the cafeteria is open till a.m. she chooses a corndog and a piece of sclerotic boston cream pie, her second slice of the day. she takes my arm as we promenade the food court, past legions of juices in coolers, the empty salad bar, the buffet of mashed potatoes and a thick-skinned gravy tarn under a heat lamp. wkkw, the dawg, plays on the radio. i choose a chocolate chip cookie bigger than my fist, one dry, crusty cookie. it is better as an idea than a cookie. in the far right corner of the dining room a statue of mary, two feet high, stands on a table. she is shaped like an arch, like a keyhole, as though she is the portal to something good. mary with a virgin blue napkin draped on her head, her hands outstretched to us. please do not sit at this table, requests the sign beside her. mary dines alone. we sit one table over. near mary hang fake windows with drooping shutters and window boxes of plastic flowers. the white wall shows through the quadrants of the window frames. “it’s worse than a blank wall,” christy says, of this half-hearted attempt at cheer, the earnest bad taste trying to drive out the sterile grief of the place. christy assembles a mound of ketchup and mustard packets and squirts them into the rectangular carton for the corn dog. she closes her eyes after she tears open a packet, she smiles and hovers there as if telling herself a really good joke. it might be the dilaudid, or the oxycodone, the ativan, or the temazepam. she is a running ticker of non sequiters. she is talking out her head. “i’ve got it all taken care of,” she says, holding the mustard packed above the table. “what’s that?” i ask, slipping the packet from her hands. “thanks,” she says. “brooklyn’s not here, is she? i was talking to her. the pizza delivery.” “do you want to stay here? should we go up?” “no, give me a minute.” she leans slightly to one side and then the other. her eyes are closed. “do you need help?” i don’t want to stay down here too long. i don’t want her to tire out. i’m of no use when things unhinge. “i’ll submit to your authority, just give me a minute,” she says. now it’s the new testament garbling out. “you don’t have to submit to anything. i just want to make sure you’re ok.” she opens her eyes. she opens another packet of mustard and dunks the corn dog in the psychedelic mix. she points in the air with the corn dog. her eyes close again. “christy?” “i’m sorry, i’m talking to everybody,” she says. “tell me something funny.” “remember the time i ran over your suitcase with my dad’s truck?” christy giggles, that famous laugh percolating out of her as she sets down her corn dog. i had dropped her off after a week of church camp in flat gap, kentucky. it was dark, and i couldn’t see her suitcase in the rearview mirror as i backed over it. christy and her dad called after me, but i had rolled the windows up against the dust from the gravel road. once i turned onto pavement i heard the scraping: the muffler? there was no where well lit to pull over and check until the kwik stop on route . indeed, the suitcase handle was wrapped around the underside of the truck so tight i couldn’t budge it. i was already halfway home, so i kept driving, a car behind me flashing its lights in a warning, sparks trailing my dad’s blue truck on the highway. the friction burned holes in christy’s clothes. it burned one eye and both ears off of mr. bear. it burned the leather cover of her white king james bible but not the pages. do you remember? i ask her. back then we took the protection of the word as a sign. christy’s desire for more children of her own collapsed into a speck infinitely receding before her. early in her marriage, christy suffered several miscarriages, but she was hugely and gloriously pregnant with brooklyn when i left for moldova. by now, her insides were rags, her meds hardcore. christy knew her one daughter was already adapting to life without her mother, already asking less and less often to see her mother, caught up as she was in the care of grandparents and aunts. jay brought brooklyn down to the hospital so she could have a movie night with her mom. “he chose dumbo,” christy told me later. oh the thought of dumbo’s mom taken on the train, her serpentine trunk caressing her little elephant through the bars of her captivity. “i know he means well,” christy said of jay, “but dumbo?” sometimes i forget that orphans still exist; i assume that, like polio or smallpox, the condition of “orphan” has been eradicated, consigned to the stuff of musicals like annie, my childhood favorite, and everyone has a happy home, their own daddy warbucks to sing with them and buy them stuff. my first real encounter with orphans was in moldova, at the orphanage where my friend vica volunteered. at the halloween party, dozens of kids mobbed me for the bucket of candy i was passing out. help! i strongly wished to hide under the table. sarah, another volunteer, took the bin and tongs from me, and lo, the waves of children parted before her. a new york fairy godmother, sarah doled out the gummi mouths with fangs, sweet little vampire mouths, reaching for each one individually with the tongs, and the children neither crowded nor mobbed. “you don’t work with kids, do you?” she said, but not in a snarky way. i can think of orphans in a more typographical way, widows the lone last line of a paragraph at the top of the page, and an orphan the first line of a paragraph at the bottom of a page (though dictionaries claim these are sometimes used interchangeably). widow and orphan control are options on microsoft word. the word “orphan” makes me think of james, one of those practical books of the bible, one that scandalized martin luther because of its attention to works over grace. concludes chapter one: “pure religion and undefiled before god and the father is this,/ to visit the fatherless and widows in their affliction, and to keep oneself unspotted from the world.” widows (it’s hard for me not to type “windows”) i know. both of my grandmothers and my great-aunt myrtle had been widows for many years. they kept photos of their late husbands (“late for what?”) on top of the tv or the coffee table or near a wicker elephant, depending. they got moody on their late husbands’ birthdays, on wedding anniversaries. they talked more about the good times than the bad times. they liked it when i asked how they met (nana sheets: at a church service, hazel: roller skating with friends, myrtle: arranging a shop window). my own father was an orphan for three days. he was named thomas michael wise, born to ruth wise, before ernest and marjorie sheets showed up at the hospital and named him thomas michael sheets. so says the adoption certificate he found when cleaning out his dying mother’s safety deposit box. somehow his having a name makes him seem less like an orphan, less at the mercy of the hardships of the universe, and more like kal-el/superman. once the respirator was removed, christy told me she’d seen angels on the back roads of kentucky. in july, christy thought she was healthy enough for a week of church camp, the same camp in flatgap, kentucky we’d attended in high school. the camp site was remote, so when christy stopped breathing one afternoon, coy had to pack her in his truck and race to meet the ambulance in paintsville, twelve miles away. christy spent several days in intensive care, on a respirator for a lung infection she may have picked up in her travels and medical work. after a few days in icu, christy didn’t want to be left alone overnight at the hospital. she was heavily medicated and knew she wasn’t thinking straight. jay stood by her most of the day, but then he needed to take care of brooklyn and couldn’t rest if he stayed in the hospital around the clock. christy’s dad had made efforts to reconnect with her in her illness. he stayed one night with her in the hospital and they took turns massaging each other’s feet. in her childhood and into her teens, christy’s father kept the thermostat set on low-grade terror. she would have to sneak around the house to do normal, mundane things like get a cup of hot chocolate. i remembered dave as an ok guy, who went with us to a modern dance performance at the university, who didn’t have much to say but also in small doses seemed pretty laidback. then again, i didn’t live in christy’s house. in the same year, christy had a miscarriage and her parents divorced. dave had grown a mullet, moved across the state line to ohio, and taken up with a red-head nurse silver-tongued christy could only call a “bitch”–a woman to step on dave and put him in his place, the opposite of her mother. christy had visited their trailer recently. dave had taken up painting, she said. he had filled the trailer with paintings of cosmic phalluses erupting stars on cool lunar blue and purple backgrounds. “i’ve never seen him happier,” she said. one evening christy insisted on massaging my feet. i resisted. she had passed out less than an hour before, after arranging her bed and my fold-out chair-bed. she was not made for sitting still. christy had complained she felt light headed. she slumped into my folded-out chair. i pressed the nurse call button. three of them came in. they did not look accusingly at me, exactly, but they seemed annoyed, as though christy pushed their buttons all the time. a woman in a white cardigan lifted one of christy’s eyelids and shined a flashlight in her eye to check for an overdose. another nurse took her vitals. i’m sure the nurses were tired and overworked. it was work too, on our end, to get christy’s medications brought on time. sweat beaded her upper lip when the meds were late. her breath shortened. i didn’t insist with the nurses that they bring the medicines as soon as possible. i know christy would have politely charged the nurses’ station to get something done if i were too sick to do it myself. loss can make us bitter or cheesy. even in moments of sharpest pain--her body in revolt and her heart broken for the family she knew she was already leaving behind as she rode on into illness alone--christy looked at my meager deeds, which on no count could be called sacrifices, with gratitude instead of judgment. she wasn’t oblivious or naïve; she just accepted with love whatever i could give, even if later i would realize how much i was holding back. i need the comfort of the motions. christy died at her mother’s house last night. jay called and said they’d returned from cleveland earlier that day and were visiting her mother, who lives next door. christy was too sick for surgery; they’d sent her home with more drugs to kill the blood infection first. i wept at my desk. i took my heavy body to bed. i must have slept with my eyes open. in the morning i go to church. i need the familiar moves, the kneeling and standing, the rustling and fumbling of hymn book and prayer book, the belting out all six verses of a hymn that resolves itself into a minor chord. i need raggs the priest to stand at the altar, where she gives me a wafer of christ like a vellum poker chip, the bread of heaven. the chalice bearer bends with the silver cup. at home i peel and seed a plump butternut squash and cook it into a stew with onions, cinnamon, and cumin. i don’t have a pastry cutter or a food processor so i mash the flour, butter and salt together with a fork, with a touch of water, for the pie crust. it is not an artful crust. my grandmothers would turn angry dervishes in the kitchen if they saw it. it is forlorn, a lumpy, snaggletooth crust. but today i don’t have the heart to finesse it. my mother calls while i’m sautéing the fresh tomato slices in olive oil and basil. “are you busy?” she asks. “i’m in the kitchen, where i belong,” i answer. “i love you,” she says. later today i’ll call christy’s mom, who has to brush her teeth in the bathroom where her daughter collapsed, then died. i escape to my bathroom window and ride out the crest of a sob. i blow my nose and wash my hands. the oven is hot. i layer the cheese, then the tomatoes, then the egg-milk custard in the troubled crust, and gently set the quiche in the oven. the clock is set. i taste the stew—too much heat, too many jalapenos. i always make it too hot, as though it’s a test, as though i could purge the curse of flesh. i visited jay and christy’s house the summer after christy’s death. jay was showing the house and preparing to move with brooklyn to nashville, where he had a teaching job with a church. jay had a few of the college students over who’d once been part of his youth group. brooklyn was holding court in her playroom. one of the kids stuck a tiara in brooklyn’s hair. she danced to her karaoke machine and stereo that looked like an old-fashioned juke box; the stereo played a cd of christy singing, though it took me a couple of songs to catch on. brooklyn shook a miniature magic -ball. say your wish, she said. i wished for health for my family. positive outcome. and for peace in the world. yes. after i fetched her some ice cream, brooklyn crawled into my lap. say your wish, she repeated. i wished for a cat. forget it. sitting with christy’s latter-day image in my lap made me think of that creepy passage in matthew about “the coming of the son of man”: then shall two be in the field; the one shall be taken, and the other left. two women shall be grinding at the mill; the one shall be taken, and the other left. facebook has polluted the way i think about the world, as though we have walls, invisible walls we can write on. i’m writing on christy’s celestial wall: christy, spirited away, i’m still at the mill, where are you? i visit christy the night before i move to utah. she has a staph infection from the pick line in her arm, a plastic tube like something from an aquarium through which she received her injections. “no wonder i feel so bad,” she said, once she found out about the staph. it’s her blood that’s bad. her whole body is bad. she is on expensive, high-octane drugs. at her request i stop at the dairy queen for a mint oreo blizzard, so sweet it makes my teeth hurt to think about it. i buy a medium, but she eats it with such rapture, i wish i’d bought the large. two larges. once the weeping starts, she holds my hand and asks me to leave. you have a long trip, she says. i kiss her warm forehead, i tell her i love her, which she already knows. christy calls me every few days, when she has the energy to talk. she phones one night, after i’ve lived in utah for a month or so, while i’m hosting a little dinner party. three of the four guests are poets, which is the right proportion for a dinner party. although much cooking lore advises the home cook to master a dish before serving it to guests, my impulses run contrary. i sit with my cookbook and plot out future menus–oh, the soups i will make! the bowls i will fill! the knobbly ginger i will peel and grate, the garlic cloves i will smash and dice, the scent lingering on my fingers till the next day. i like to read the recipes over and over, to imagine myself carrying out the steps. sometimes i freestyle with recipes, but i like a recipe as a guide. the recipe is like sheet music–i can riff if i want but at least there’s a melody to start with. tonight, the pilaf platter, three different kinds, it requires some labor but the cookbook promises a payoff: make this for a special occasion–it serves a lot of people– and your guests will talk about it for weeks. i am that vain. i want them to talk about this tri-colored pilaf platter for weeks. the pilaf is a palette of warm color: the golden rice tinted with turmeric and flavored with onion, garlic and scallions; the orange of carrots mixed with raisins, the red of beets flavored with vinegar, honey and dill. it is a mound of color, a layering of tastes when the pilaf is topped with the stew. i make a stew of sweet potatoes, spinach, prunes and orange juice, inspired by persian koresh. the recipe calls for a heady blend of spices: coriander, cardamom, cumin, cinnamon, turmeric, ginger, cloves, and black pepper. the effect is something not unlike carpet deodorizer. the stew is pungent–not something i could eat every day. it’s a loud and celebratory dish. my hands are bloody. i peel the boiled beets, the skin comes off easily, you can slough it off with your fingers once the beets are cooked. the scarlet dyes the whites of my fingernails. the unpeeled naked scarlet roots are almost too hot to touch. i cut three beets into cubes. they tinge the whole rice bowl pink. nicole, the guests say, you must have worked like a mule. yes, i am your mule! a mule for you! christy calls after we’ve grazed awhile. i slip into the kitchen to talk. she’s traveled from st. mary’s to a bigger hospital in cleveland; she and jay are there to talk with specialists about the colostomy. she has resigned herself to this. she is still weak, and her intestines are flaring up again. i can’t go on like this, she says. i need my life back. the poets have finished all the wine and are digging out the cheap beer in the back of my fridge. christy asks what i’m doing and i tell her about the party. what did you make? she asks. tell me. so i narrate the tart roasted eggplant salad, the pilafs touched with dill fronds, the funky and aromatic stew. she’s on easy carbs these days: a can of ensure. toast. pudding. it sounds so wonderful, she says. i promise to make it for her when i’m home at christmas. when i call christy back the next evening, answers, breathless, that she can’t talk, i’m so sick, she says. i’ll call you. i try to call again in a couple of days but can’t get through. of course if i had known that our last conversation would be our last conversation, i would have disbanded the dinner party early and sent the poets home with kisses or beer or whatever they wanted from me. i would have put on a sweater and sat on the front stoop in the september desert night, a light scattering of stars above my visible breath, as christy spoke to me from that hospital bed in cleveland. we would have unrolled the future like bolts of luminous indian silk. maybe christy and i never would have stopped talking. maybe the conversation would have kept her alive, as though her body could not give out until we’d covered everything, until every book was read, every dish eaten, every mangled prayer healed and kissed, every orphan home. provenance the summer after my first year of college, i wondered if museum work was for me, so i accepted an internship in collections at the west virginia state museum. it was my first real job, after a stint of volunteering at another museum’s gift shop. early on i rightly suspected it would be a summer full of paperwork drudge, that kalina and lucia had cool names and cooler internships like designing new exhibits, while i jotted down the provenance of somebody’s grandma’s shawl from tucker county and filed it away. part of my job was to bring order to the museum’s clothing collection. i tried to learn the differences between an s and s bustle, to sort the cloche and toque hats. it was maddening, or it would have been maddening if i hadn’t known i’d be done minimum-waging in august and heading two hours north to morgantown for the fall semester. college is for self-discovery, and so is work. lesson: trying to bring order to anything is not part of my skill set. charles, my boss, had jheri curl hair and a parade of hooters waitress girlfriends, but he never struck me as sleazy. he was not a dumb guy, but also not a particularly self- aware person or a deep thinker. he was from pinch, west virginia, which he pronounced “peench,” but he was not a hick. he had an endless supply of sport coats. he didn’t eye me the way he did the rotation of hooters girlfriends, but he never made me feel like he wasn’t eyeing me because i wasn’t worth eyeing. rather, there was this tacit understanding that he was hunting something different. charles declared that when he turned , he’d marry whomever he was dating at the time. he laughed at my jokes and he let me play the radio and he praised my “worth ethic,” and a couple of fridays he took me and kalina out for two-hour lunches. at the end of the summer he bought me a small glass deer. it reminds me of you, he said. charles kept the museum collection under lock and key. he called it the cage. charles liked complaining to me in low tones about jim, who also worked with us in the cage. jim was a guy flirting with retirement who’d once had charles’ job but had been demoted for reasons i didn’t understand. jim knew everything about west virginia glass—fenton, blenko, pilgrim. he was on friendly terms with every piece of glass in the museum’s collection. he was a plump balding mole with broad fingernails and unreliable teeth. the bomb-shelter fluorescent lighting of the cage and its dusty labyrinth of artifacts was his natural habitat. jim would corner me and unload a story, his whole frame shaking, the laughter reverberating inside the rafters of his body covered with a white buttondown and pocket protector. he was a friendly whale, and i imagined some lonely jonah inside him, jostled to nausea whenever jim laughed, waiting for the day jim might cough him free. i thought a lot of weird things that summer. i wasn’t scared to rummage alone in the far corner of the cage, among turn-of-the-century tricycles. it was not a dispiriting work environment, though as july dragged into august i started counting down my cage hours. too much alone time with all that old stuff made your head get moldy. our museum was part of the division of history and culture. culture, “the tilling of land,” is rooted in place and springs up in the mid- s, related to latin “colere”: “tend, guard, cultivate, till.” the word and its kin took on figurative edges not long after, as education was referred to as “cultivation” as early as the s. much later, in the th century, culture would take on the sense of “the intellectual side of civilization.” sorting the dusty hats, i wondered if this is what culture distills into: moth-eaten boots, glass ashtrays and splintered spinning wheels? jesus. the summer of my first job coincided with my first boyfriend, abe (“father of a multitude”) who lived minutes from the museum. abe’s father was a baptist minister. abe and i were both virgins. we never even kissed. he always had an air of one- upmanship, proud he’d been published in a role-playing game magazine while i had yet to publish anything. our university is not prestigious but it’s the biggest school in the state. i was on a full ride, one of five scholarships given each year. abe was always looking for confirmation of the gross clerical error that labeled me a winner. we both lived in the honors freshmen dorm. abe would walk down from his sixth floor room, which he called the penthouse, to find me reading. i had a british lit survey with dr. blaydes, and in fact her lectures did make me want to cut myself. her class met in a bleak annex in the basement of stansbury hall, where the english, philosophy, and religious studies departments shared a live-and-let-live attitude with army and air force rotc and their inspirational hallway posters like a jet flying poised for flight beneath the command to aim high! i often looked at the jet on my way to class, past the vending machines and the rotc guys playing basketball. week after week, dr. blaydes failed to recognize my genius. eventually i stopped reading for the class, but i pulled a b. aim high! annie, my freshman year roommate, worked at domino’s pizza and would sometimes bring back a pizza with fresh tomatoes and mushrooms for me. she made pizzas until she got a job at the cancer research center, a job almost unheard of for a freshman to get. annie had sandy blond hair, and blue eyes with long floppy lashes. she was unaware of her beauty, which made the roommate situation livable, in fact really quite good. she also dated guys who were several rungs beneath her, including marty the lacrosse player, a holdover from high school. annie was a horse girl. as far as horse girls go, she was pretty normal. she was also a townie, so she would often stay with her mom on weekends, in her room lined with shelves of model horses and a last of the mohicans poster. in the dorm we bunked our beds for more space in our shoebox-sized room. she hooked a bridle for her horse, tex, over one corner of the bed, which was a conversation piece with my friends, particularly guy friends who came by my room while i was working on spanish grammar exercises. i wrote compositions on my smith-corona word processor, the one with a small black screen and orange characters. after you told it to print, you had to feed it individual sheets of paper and endure the typing out, pretending that an astute ghost was typing your paper for you at the last minute. i had to time my homework so that i wouldn’t finish my papers after annie had gone to bed, a canopy of sheets hanging from underneath my bunk, surrounding her bed, so my desk light wouldn’t bother her. i filled in the accent marks by hand on my spanish compositions about my dream home or my family history because i couldn’t figure out how to do it on the machine. once abe brought me a rose before we went out to dinner. i put it in a plastic mountain dew bottle and set it on my little desk by the window. you’re glowing, annie said. i am not. you are, definitely. she wanted me to trust her because she was a bio/chem double major. shut up, i said. abe had this weird vaguely horsey boy smell. he wore shorts all year round. his favorite colors were orange and purple, and he filled the shelves in his room with painted miniature dungeons & dragons figurines. i’m pretty sure he resented being attracted to me at all. at , abe would claim he was already having a midlife crisis. our friends and i would dismiss this as morbid talk. his mother, waverly (“from the tree-lined meadow”), died of huntington’s disease in her s, and it was fifty-fifty that abe had it. abe said he would never have children because he wouldn’t take the chance of passing it on: he would be a dead-end. abe could be reclusive but also relentlessly social. he took pleasure in denying us his company when he knew for sure we wanted it. we had no choice but to indulge him. sometimes he shuffled through the tv lounge in his house slippers as though he carried the weight of early death like a sickly, heavy lamb or a splintery cross on his narrow shoulders. if i were to draw the abe of that time, i’d shade heavily under his eyes, lots of smudging or cross-hatching, not only because abe procrastinated but because he must have seen more than the rest of us, the specter of his mother’s suffering just visible in the periphery at every turn. you don’t even know you have it, i said. maybe you’re fine. huntington’s is named for george huntington, who in wrote the first in- depth description of the disease. a dna test for huntington’s became available in , while abe and i were still in high school. a few years after college, i heard from our friend james that abe tested positive for huntington’s. james sat with abe through the post-test counseling. james also reported that abe is losing his hair, perhaps something else he inherited from his mom’s side. abe downplayed the test when i first talked to him, but what else could he say. i said: abe, shit. abe, i can’t believe it. huntington’s disease lacks star power. its most famous case is woody guthrie, who died from complications of the disease in . families affected by huntington’s don’t always want to self-identify for fear of discrimination at work or by insurance companies. huntington’s does not skip generations, so you don’t have to look far to figure out where it came from. if you’re in the percent that doesn’t inherit the disease from a parent with huntington’s, then you can’t pass it on. the huntingtin (htt) gene sits on our fourth chromosome. part of the gene includes a section in which genetic “letters,” or dna bases, repeat their c-a-g sequence, called a trinucleotide repeat. everyone has the htt gene, including the repeats. after a certain number of repeats, somewhere around , a mutant form of the huntingtin protein (mhtt) is created instead of the normal version. it’s this mutant form that causes cell death, and no one has been able to explain why. the more occurrences of this genetic hiccup or stutter, the earlier and more drastic the onset of huntington’s is likely to be. the disease is also called huntington’s chorea, from greek for “dance,” to describe the jerky (but sometimes unexpectedly graceful) movements of huntington’s patients as they lose muscle control. people with huntington’s are often accused of being drunk because of their affected walk and speech. huntington’s is not the only kind of chorea. sydenham’s chorea, known as juvenile chorea, chorea minor, or saint vitus’s dance, affects children, usually girls, who have rheumatic fever. saint vitus is a patron saint of people with chorea. he is the patron saint of dogs and domestic animals, young people, dancers, prague, coppersmiths, actors, and comedians. people seek his protection against epilepsy, storms and lightning, snakebite, and sleeplessness. saint vitus is also an american doom metal band, and saint vitus’ dance the name of the sailboat sonny crockett lived on in the s tv series miami vice. saint vitus is one of the catholic church’s fourteen holy helpers. unlike the more recent hamburger or tuna helper, the holy helpers are saints whose intercession is thought to be particularly effective against diseases, a belief dating back to the th century and the peak of the black death. vitus’s remains were supposedly moved to saxony in the ninth century, so his “cultus” is particularly potent there. medieval people, especially medieval german people, liked to dance around a statue of saint vitus on his feast day, june . the dance was thought to bring a year of good health. vitus’s power sounds like it could go either way, though, and that calling up vitus’s fury could lead to dancing mania, or choreomania, a craze in th to th century europe. sometimes up to hundreds of people would dance uncontrollably, and explanations range from religious visions and ecstasy to a coping mechanism for famine and other hardship, or a case of eating rye infected with psychoactive fungus. th century physician and alchemist paracelsus was the first to label the frenzied dancing “chorea,” wishing to scoot the nomenclature away from all this saint business. vitus’s story splinters. even the catholic encyclopedia shies away from a definitive version. but it may go something like this: vitus’ tutor, modestus, and his nurse, crescentia, who was modestus’s wife, were christian. vitus converted at a young age, and the three traveled through second-century sicily. valerian, a local official, tried to test vitus’s faith, so the three headed out to rome, where vitus exorcised a demon from emperor diocletian’s son. when vitus refused to sacrifice to the gods, he was accused of sorcery and tortured in spectacular ways, including a dunk into a cauldron of lead (from which—miracle!—our vitus escaped unscathed). sometimes vitus is depicted with modestus and crescentia. according to saintvitus.com, “saint vitus is depicted as a boy with a rooster and a cauldron. at times he may be shown ( ) with his modestus and crescentia as they refuse to worship idols; ( ) being put into an oven; ( ) with a palm and cauldron; ( ) with a palm and dog; ( ) with a chalice and dog; ( ) with sword and dog; ( ) with a sword and rooster; ( ) with a book and rooster; ( ) with a wolf or lion; or ( ) as a young prince with a palm and scepter.” i like this mix-and-match iconography, the many props for vitus as though he’s a barbie with scooter, helmet, horse, tack, big hair, tiny purse, tiny shoes. the anthem of abe’s death will be neurological degeneration, as the working parts of his body shut off like carnival lights. huntington’s disease will erode abe’s ability to walk, speak, eat, and remember. it may push him into dementia, and quite likely into depression. the disease won’t directly cause his death, but rather its complications: maybe a fall, a heart attack, choking, pneumonia brought on by aspirated food, suicide. i’ve lost two close friends, one in her mid-thirties, one in her late twenties. both of them suffered unspeakably, both languished in hospitals. both of them were gone within months of their diagnosis. it is a mercy that the healthy stretches of their lives were not crippled by such specific foreknowledge of their death, that they didn’t watch their mothers die as a template of their own losses. abe might be my saddest friend. abe hasn’t escaped the cauldron. if i draw abe’s future, the lion and abe face off. it’s unclear whether the lion will lick abe’s hawkish nose or maul him senseless. abe, abe, there’s still time for a miracle. abe, abe, abe if i see you again, i will definitely kiss you. hand and name i. peaceful mountain adam (“red clay”) wept over a newspaper article about the birthday of tai shan (“peaceful mountain”), the new panda cub at the national zoo. i told adam he was kind of like a woman. i’ll take that in the spirit in which i believe it was meant, he said. i meant he was sensitive and liked to talk, and he was even more google-eyed around kids than i was, and i was getting bad about it. for example, it was hard for me to keep reading once the young couple brought that baby into the coffee shop, that baby in a petal pink jumpsuit. ii. my buddy even the loud grabby kids at the coffee shop, the whiny ones at the supermarket, i couldn’t help watching them, watching the mom or dad’s frazzled invisible love tangles follow their kids, love their kids even while wanting to stuff them in one of the tall coolers of chicken nuggets and frozen pies. at the supermarket i saw a middle-aged man in glasses, a fishing hat, and knee socks, with a doll dressed just like him, my buddy- style, in a pack on his chest. standing at the checkout, i knew that i was part of this man, and he was part of me. i wanted to follow him and his doll; instead i fumbled for my credit card. the man in glasses hunched to examine the halloween candy display. he held the doll’s face close to the boxes. the doll was also nearsighted. children screamed through the supermarket. i pictured myself a plodding earth mother, round and expectant, rosy and fecund and strewing petals down the cereal aisle to prepare the way for my firstborn. strange thoughts were taking over, they were camping out and getting comfortable, they were squatting in the furrows of my brain, building little thought-tarp villages, they were setting up for a little thought-music festival and the jam bands were doing sound checks and the industrious ones were weaving thought- hemp jewelry to sell for gas money home, and of course i love music too and i believe in freedom and i didn’t have the heart to chase them out. the thoughts suggested i carry around a doll for practice. i could latch her on my back with a big batik wrap. one thing for sure: i’d get a wide berth at the supermarket. iii. our flayed lord if i say museums were a locus amoenus for adam and me, i don’t mean sweaty experimental trysts on priceless carpets but rather the electric pleasures of catching his hand, a quick kiss on the neck when no one was looking. one saturday we spooled down the guggenheim and blushed among aztec artifacts. a clay and pigment xipe totec (“our lord the flayed one”), ruler of the west, disease, spring, goldsmiths and the seasons, watched our ignition. xipe totec is flayed and covered with his own skin. without skin, xipe totec is gold. iv. hand and name i don’t know all the available phenotypes for jewishness, but i have learned that i am not any of them. in israel, i dodged the light of the white stone, the gold glare from the dome of the rock. adam smoothed the lumpy blue kipa on his head. he said everyone could read him: american jew, not observant. i added: holding hands with a gentile. at the museum yad vashem (“hand/memorial and name”), the last, lofty rooms inhale after the cramped exhibits of ghettoes and railcars. adam wandered through the hall of names, the crescendo before the museum’s zionist climax: a balcony and a panorama of jerusalem. i stood in a room full of light and photographs of survivors’ young families. i looked at those women, the tensile strength of their flesh. bend the body as close as you can to death, and sometimes it still bends back. v. beautiful song adam flashed slides from the excavated projector: a shot of alligators framed by a glass-bottom boat, a cabin at the beach, adam’s mother, carolyn (“beautiful song”), in a green headscarf after chemotherapy. those were dark times, he said, looking at the light of his dead mother painted across the wall. adam wept, and i slipped my hand onto his heart. he carried grief that i felt like a grief-suit on my skin. he said, i haven’t looked at pictures of my mother in a long time. what’s there to fear except the darkness maybe the fear of becoming one’s mother is a “thirties thing,” as glamour might put it, like a propensity to multiple orgasms or knowing more clearly what you will and will not put up with in your professional life. sometimes i do set up my coffee pot the night before, just the way mom does. my mom is a hot mom, my past boyfriends have told me. mom has blue eyes, blond hair, big knockers, little tolerance for clutter, and a great capacity for friendly chit- chat. i didn’t inherit any of those things, so i’m not afraid of stepping right into her mold. she met my dad in seventh grade, their romance started in eighth grade, and they’re still holding hands into their fortieth year of marriage. i have inherited her worry gene, the one that compiles lists and lists of what can go wrong. sometimes i salute the gene as if it’s a person, named gene, like “hey, gene, lighten up” or “why the long face, gene?” our therapy friends tell us that it can be helpful to articulate our fears, to call them into a lineup instead of letting their murky fuzz-blots shadow the rooms of the psyche. it’s another take on one of my favorite hymns, “count your blessings, name them one by one.” let’s treat our fears the way oily televangelists instruct regarding the blessings we want in our lives: name them and claim them. afraid of being alone i was talking to a therapist once and i told him that i’d like to “change the tapes in my head,” picturing my head like a boxy answering machine with tapes a little smaller than matchbooks. my parents still have an answering machine with such a tape, and it’s my mother’s voice that explains that you should leave your name, number and a brief message and they will get back to you as soon as they can. i guess i should say a “playlist” rather than tapes, right? i need to update my metaphors. my therapist and i were about the same age, and he laughed when i mentioned the outdated technology. even my friends look at me funny when i say i don’t need to download a song because i’ve got it on a mix tape somewhere. i get the look that asks “didn’t anyone tell you the s are over?” my mom’s west virginia answering machine voice is one of grace. after my third bridesmaid gig in a year, mom was the one who bought me a new set of cookware as if to say “see, you don’t have to get married to get nice stuff.” she says “it’s better to be alone than to be with the wrong person.” she says, “it’s not a sin to be five minutes early.” she says, “the secret to a successful marriage is having separate bathrooms.” one night a few summers ago i sat with my mom on the back porch. i wasn’t handling a breakup so well. i would miss adam. i would miss having someone to talk to about the detritus and small triumphs of the day, someone to take a look at my stove when it sparked, someone to open stubborn jars. i had made big plans for us. i imagined singleness like an airport, as though i were waiting in the layover lounge for my connecting flight. i had questions like: “how long will i be here?” and: “are there any snacks?” that summer, on my flight back to salt lake city, i expected a three-hour wait in phoenix. instead i walked two gates over to a flight at final boarding. the gate agent let me right onto that plane, without even time for a coffee. i was crying down the aisle to my seat beside a friendly dentist. i didn’t mind talking to him, but i was empty and tired, and eventually he saw that i was more interested in my issue of harper’s than telling him about my studies. “do you hear that, she’s going to be a doctor!” he crowed to his friend across the aisle. “not a real doctor,” i said. the dentist had his own practice and three young children. he seemed so accomplished, so grounded, so loud, i figured surely he must be older than i was. he said he was . i was too, and what did i have to show for it? it was a mixture of embarrassment and pride. i didn’t feel like i’d wasted my s, and i reveled that i didn’t have a mortgage or a diaper genie. i could up and move to japan and teach english at any given moment, i could change my name to moon dancer express and apprentice with location-independent glassblowers and fall off the grid of existence like that center dot of light that persists then fades when you turn off an old tv. afraid of being orphaned abandonment by parents can happen for a variety of reasons. take oedipus, whose parents didn’t off him outright, but passed him to a servant who was supposed to leave defenseless infant oed on a mountaintop. to make things even more emphatic, oed’s feet were pinned together, as though the doomed babe might be able to wobble away like those dogs you see in inspirational specials on tv. in these specials the family can’t keep their beloved dog, so they give him away, but scruffy runs for two days straight, following the scent of home, and shows up hungry and triumphant on their new porch. the situation of oedipus calls to mind one of my mother’s favorite snippets from the book of numbers: “your sin will find you out.” that is to say: it’s not god or cops or the youth pastor who will unveil your deeds of darkness, but rather the deeds themselves will betray you with their unmistakable odor, their undeniable fruit, tainting you like the ink that spurts from theft-prevention bubbles clamped onto clothes at the mall. the deeds, like the rocks of the psalms, cry out if you are silent. as a side note, mom also favors a paraphrase of first thessalonians: “if you don’t work, you don’t eat.” for a different sort of abandonment entirely, consider moses, put to float on the nile in a pitch-daubed basket like a bathtub toy, in a desperate ploy for salvation. i know my mom wouldn’t leave me on purpose, but the motive doesn’t matter so much once you have to reckon with the gone-ness of the person, a new tear in the retractable movie screen that pulls down over your heart, the screen that shows all those sentimental films the brain likes to play, and the brain knows the heart just eats that stuff up, the heart would keep watching movies about the old times all day long if you’d let it, like those tv marathons that splice together one episode after another of america’s next top model, so you can’t get a real thought in edgewise and there you are already suckered out of another hour of your life that you don’t get back. i think of my mother’s life shuttling through her heart, that organ with its mixed inheritance: her father’s quadruple bypass at , her mother’s mild heart attack and swift recovery at . hazel, my grandmother, had to sit out a few weekends of dancing at the senior center, but these days she’s back in action. i took her to her cardiologist a few months after the attack. nana was doing very well, the good doctor said. he was more worried about her weight loss than her heart. “go have a hamburger,” he said. so we stopped at mcdonald’s on the way home and shared a happy meal. i got the toy. nana dusted some of the salt off the fries. she can’t find unsalted pringles, so at home she brushes the chips with a tiny clean plastic paintbrush. afraid of killing my mother i’m not afraid of matricide for electra reasons, nor is it a manifestation of self- loathing because on some level i believe mom and i are the same person. truth is my mom has chronic pain, and i’m clumsy, and sometimes she asks me to give her a shot of pain medication. “a shot of tequila, coming right up!” i say. “not a real doctor!” i protest. for years she has suffered from debilitating headaches, with acute nerve pain above her left eye. no one is quite sure what’s wrong with her. some pain killers don’t work, or shred her stomach, or wear off after she’s used them for a few months. she has some morphine patches in reserve, but they make her nauseated. occasionally i ask if i can have a couple. “kidding, mom!” her doctor prescribes vials of toridol, medicine the color of ginger ale. mom says she should learn to give herself injections and continues not to do it. if she’s desperate, i will. i’m afraid of injecting my mom with beads of air that would destroy her brain or her heart. once while visiting my friend christy in the hospital, i asked her nurse to show me how to give an injection, to make sure i was doing it right. the nurse assured me that i’d have to inject so much air to do any damage. to demonstrate he held a length of christy’s oxygen tube, like the tube in an aquarium air pump, between his outstretched hands: you’d need a lot of air, he explained. to shoot my mom: scrub hands, express air out of syringe and insert into upended vial. pull plunger and fill barrel of syringe with medicine. tap the barrel and shoot a little arc of medicine into the air. watch as mom holds her waistband away from her lower back, exposing her flank. wherever there’s already a gray-yellow bruise, like the outside of a boiled egg yolk, stick the needle. press the plunger with conviction. if you press too hard because you’re nervous, mom will say your technique is fine; the stabbing above her eye is sharper than a needle stick. remove needle from her backside and replace its plastic cover, dropping the used syringe in an empty water bottle for collecting sharps to throw away. swab the stick site with rubbing alcohol, and apply a bandage if it bleeds. when the tissue near her hip abscesses, give injections in her leg until the skin repairs itself. afraid of going blind hazel has her wits. she has a small waistline and the moxie to wear glittery holiday clothes most seasons of the year but the modesty not to try to “dress too young,” as she puts it. she has a couple of wigs and three closets. one bad case of arthritis. one baby grand piano. and macular degeneration. sometimes her mascara or her pink lipstick veers, and the tectonic plates of her face don’t quite line up. she doesn’t drive after dark, and even in the daytime she limits herself to a small loop on rt. , as far west as her doctor’s office and the kmart, and as far east as the supermarket. macular degeneration comes from macula, stain, and is hereditary. nana sees serious floaters. at she conceded that she should phase out her driving, declaring she won’t renew her license when it expires in three years. nana doesn’t read much because she has a hard time focusing on the letters. my mom is farsighted, so she can drive and watch tv. she can’t read, though, because wearing her glasses triggers the eye pain and massive headaches. my livelihood depends on reading, so i can’t think much about her condition. while i’m home, she asks if i’ll help her shop for bras because she can’t find her size and she can’t read the price tag and she’s too embarrassed to shop for them with my dad or my brother, and it would be a day-long process with hazel. no one understands my mother’s byzantine filing system. she makes oversized abbreviations on her calendar and then can’t remember what they all mean. she uses a one-subject spiral-bound notebook as an attempt at a phone directory, but it takes less time for one of us to look in the real phone book or for her to call than to find the number again in those sheets full of her three-inch tall letters which lean sharply to the left, unlike her politics. afraid of being hard-hearted and sort of an all-star b-word i have been reading about mother teresa and taking notes. in my notes i abbreviate mother teresa as mt, which i hear as “empty.” mt prays for her own heart and thinks about its shape. mt thinks about containers and emptiness. she says: “pray that [he may] empty my emptiness.” she says: “be kind in words….would that we could keep all our words in [mary’s] heart.” in a letter to father neuner, she begs “that our hearts may be the crib our lady chooses for her baby.” in sunday school my little brother made a manger from a section of a cardboard tube. he cut the tube in half and glued the halves together back to back, forming a kind of nativity parabola. in one of the parabola cups he glued a peanut with a smiley face drawn on it. we called him peanut jesus. mom parked him in the crèche, that small open stable with beige plastic figurines and a rough floor dusted with mossy flakes. if i’m not careful, i end up thinking too much about cribs and strollers. i say snotty things sotto voce when i’m running and have to cut a wide path around hot moms pushing a baby jogger with one hand and holding a dog’s leash in the other. at peak times and weather, hot moms stroll two or three abreast, a cadre, a veritable brigade of hot moms. they take up the whole sidewalk, i grumble, though sometimes a voice inside says: “only if you’re very lucky will that be you some day.” my neighbor tells her dogs, gus and washington, to “be sweet” instead of “don’t jump” or “stop that” or “no, dammit.” maybe it helps that she’s a very good psychiatrist. she corrects with a kind word, reinforcing the sweet, not the no. there’s a tacit acknowledgement that gus and wash know how to be sweet; they just have to be reminded. i’m trying to train myself: “be sweet,” the voice says. i like to believe that inside me lies a vein of sweet and i just need to tap it, like a spile in a sugar maple. afraid of some darkness a few years ago my mother visited my first apartment in salt lake city, and she mentioned my laundry situation several times thereafter. the coin-op washer and dryer squatted in the basement, where storage units waited like anchorite cells full of skis, space heaters, and unmarked boxes. my neighbors’ failed paintings propped up against the cinderblock wall. in one corner two rows of storage units intersected, leaving a blind spot in this room that was never locked. my mother imagined scenarios of kidnapping, enslavement, butchery, who knows what. when i was in west virginia for christmas in , a student from the nearby university disappeared. the student, leah hickman, worked at the dress barn in the merritts creek shopping center, five minutes from my parents’ house. on tv reporters showed leah’s myspace photo and wondered for days where she could be without her purse, cell phone, and keys, which were found in the apartment. a week after the disappearance, detectives discovered leah hickman’s body stuffed in a crawlspace in the basement of her building. i sat on the couch by my mother, who watched the news and imagined me as that girl stuffed behind the hot water heater. i do not usually shop at the dress barn because the name of the store makes me feel like livestock. but when the barn closed for two days upon news of leah’s death, this during the busiest retail season of the year, i considered unstrapping my feedbag and buying something. i felt safe in my building in salt lake. i assumed a neighbor would hear me and come running if trouble found me. i did manage to get my laundry done during the daylight hours. why court the darkness? in a letter to her confessor, mt writes that “darkness surrounds me on all sides—i can’t lift my soul to god—no light or inspiration enters my soul.—i speak of love for souls, of tender love for god—words pass through my words [sic, lips]—and i long with a deep longing to believe in them.” although an editor of mt’s correspondence offers his own correction, i much prefer mt’s idea of words passing through words, as though one word is the wall and the other the ghost that slips to the other side. i’m thinking of a paragraph as a dollhouse, and there are wall words and there are ghost, geist, spirit words that travel like the smoke of incense, the vapor of prayer. a dollhouse that opens down the middle, cracked open like a walnut. tiny beds and lamps are there, perhaps the word chair or lamp. table is a wall word, whereas love is a spirit word. leper, sari, sister = walls. darkness, god, soul, pain, absence, blasphemy, holy are spirits. or instead of a dollhouse, words pass through a crèche, like my mother’s barn of sticks. in the twinkling of an eye once when i was eight, i snuck under the lip of the bar that separated our kitchen from the tv room, and my dad hid in the garage. i can’t remember why we hid, but i could hear my mom walking through every room. i could hear her open every closet, every door. she called for my dad, in her voice a thin skein of panic. it couldn’t have been more than a couple of minutes before my dad came back inside. the joke was up. i uncrouched from behind the barstool. my mom laughed a tight laugh, she laughed at herself, she knew we were there somewhere, but she’d been scared, for a second, that the rapture had come. my mother feared she’d been left behind in the tv room with snuggles our cat to wait for the great tribulation. christ’s second coming was much-discussed at church. before the plagues on earth and the day of judgment, the lord, according to i thessalonians, “shall descend from heaven with a shout, with the voice of the archangel, and with the trump of god: and the dead in christ shall rise first: then we which are alive and remain shall be caught up together with them in the clouds, to meet the lord in the air: and so shall we ever be with the lord.” (i thess : - ). the moment is described more poetically in i corinthians : - : “we shall not all sleep, but we shall all be changed, [i]n a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, at the last trump: for the trumpet shall sound, and the dead shall be raised incorruptible, and we shall be changed.” a t-shirt in my evangelical wardrobe showed the outline of two high-top sneakers worn out as though they’d been playing in a youth group basketball tournament all day. rays shone from the shoes, suggesting the wearer both recently and vertically vacated them, caught up, as the shirt specified in a funky font: in the twinkling of an eye in their s my parents started attending elmwood missionary baptist church. mom had grown up methodist, but she felt that in all those years she’d never really heard god’s plan of salvation. she didn’t respond publicly to an altar call at elmwood, but one evening she asked my dad to help her pray and invite jesus into her heart to be her personal lord and savior. she also asked to be re-baptized, by immersion this time, in a big green tub in the church’s cinderblock fellowship hall. her mom, my grandmother hazel, was pissed, and considered a second baptism an affront and unnecessary. i guess the fact that she and my grandfather had bought the baptismal font for their methodist church didn’t help much either. part of what attracted my mom to the baptist church was a desire for clarity, for what she referred to as a “know-so” rather than a “think-so” salvation. the sinner’s prayer is designed for this. one example of a sinner’s prayer, from the four spiritual laws booklet produced by campus crusade for christ: lord jesus, i need you. thank you for dying on the cross for my sins. i open the door of my life and receive you as my savior and lord. thank you for forgiving my sins and giving me eternal life. take control of the throne of my life. make me the kind of person you want me to be. the idea is that you pray this, or words to this effect, to seal your decision to follow christ. i like the idea of closing decisions with seals, the wax blot on the back of a fancy envelope, or the exchange of rings at a wedding. the sinner’s prayer can give you a precise moment of conversion. you can write the date and time and place in your bible if you want to, as though it were a guest register at a small hotel or a log book at a trailhead. you can mark that you were there. you could write down your decision as a mirror of your name being written in the lamb’s book of life. mom reminds me of my “spiritual birthday,” august , when i knelt at my bed and asked jesus to come into my heart. (alas, she does not send me spiritual birthday presents.) i remember telling my mom that i wanted to be saved and go to heaven, and with my dad we prayed the sinner’s prayer at my beside one night. i knew i felt the stirring of the spirit, a sense of unease until i made things right with god. looking back at my six-year-old self, i don’t doubt the sincerity of my words and the purity of my belief. i was baptized a few months later, though it was emphasized to me that baptism was just an outward profession of what had already happened inside. the church of my youth counted it heresy to rely on baptism for salvation. if you get baptized and you haven’t accepted christ in your heart, the thinking goes, then you’re just a wet sinner. the water has no effect on your soul. it’s sort of like the wisdom we heard in drivers’ ed: pouring coffee into someone who’s been drinking doesn’t yield a sober person but a caffeinated drunk. critics of the sinner’s prayer point out that for much of christian history, the seal of belief was baptism. look, they say, christ himself opted to be baptized by john the baptist. the sinner’s prayer credits the believer with too much agency, they say. belief is necessary, but if jesus comes into a person’s heart, it’s not because of magic words but because he chooses to move in. when jesus is asked in the new testament, “what must i do to inherit eternal life?” the answers involve loving god and neighbor (neighbor defined broadly, as in the good samaritan) and being willing to leave everything behind to follow him. there’s no mention of a special prayer. steven francis staten has excoriation, and unfortunate clip art, on his web site about the evils of the sinner’s prayer: “if you prayed the ‘sinners prayer’ for your salvation, you are still lost in your sins, because it is not what god said to do,” he claims. staten borrows a phrase from c.s. lewis, describing the sinner’s prayer as “a great cataract of nonsense,” a blind spot to the text of the bible and to church tradition, a “modern apostasy.” jesus gave out fishes and loaves, but he didn’t give an altar call, at least one documented in the gospels. presbyterian minister charles grandison finney ( - ) is considered the father of the altar call, paving the way for billy graham and other evangelists. finney popularized the “anxious bench” technique, designating an area where anxious sinners would sit and be preached to, though the bench appeared as early as the mid- th century with minister eleazar wheelock’s “mourner’s seat.” altar calls were already a hit in methodist revival meetings during the second great awakening, in the th century. the altar call was both a kind of crowd control, with interested sinners often cordoned off to one area in the church for additional counseling. it was also a kind of focus group, inviting sinners to self-identify and position themselves to receive extra attention. in college i read langston hughes’ essay “salvation” about an altar call moment in his childhood when the minister drones on, stretching those elastic hymns into verse after verse, while the minister assures the congregation that there was still a lost lamb out there, and wouldn’t that lamb come to jesus before it’s too late? in the essay, hughes realizes that in fact the minister means him, that this repeating loop of invitation, the hymns, the tears, the swaying, it’s all being held out for him, and he figures if they’re ever going to leave that church, he has to get off that pew and appease them. part of the pathos of the essay is that in the very moment when hughes the narrator expects to see jesus, jesus doesn’t come. hughes weeps, which his aunt takes as a response to the holy ghost, but hughes confesses he deceived all the people in that church. i hadn’t been to a service quite that extreme. but as a child i assumed all churches everywhere had an altar call, some kind of coda at the end of the sermon inviting people to come forward and accept christ as personal savior, or to repent of backsliding, or to renew a commitment to christ, or to pray for a lost loved one. sometimes you came to the altar to lay your burdens down. god, the baptist church liked its object lessons. one wednesday night, my dad helped the teacher of the adult fellowship class make a point. my dad put bricks in a shoebox and slung the bag across his back. this is how we approach the altar, the teacher said. we bring our burdens to god, we set them on the ledge of holiness, and then we take our burdens right back instead of leaving them with god almighty. he cued my dad to walk away from the altar shouldering the same box of bricks with which he’d approached the altar in the first place. to an evangelical, any service without an “invitation” or altar call is suspect. when else do people hear the message of salvation and have a chance to act on it? the hymns for invitation tend to be short. the songs emphasize the urgency of the decision, that this might be the last chance one has to accept christ: “just as i am, and waiting not/ to rid my soul of one dark blot/ to thee whose blood can cleanse each spot/ oh lamb of god, i come, i come.” or the popular “have you any room for jesus?”: “room for pleasure, room for business/ but for christ the crucified?” which asks you not only to reflect on questions like this but to “swing your heart’s door widely open/ bid him enter while you may.” have you any room for jesus? the song asks. i shift my weight from foot to foot, thinking: does jesus have a reservation? is it under his name? and will that be one king or two double beds? is non-smoking ok? would jesus like extra towels for the fitness center? an altar call stretches like a quavering net of song to rescue or seize, depending on your perspective. it’s a net with several verses, so you can let out its extra folds. the minister speaks over the organist slowly spilling chords: if you died tonight, do you know for sure you would go to heaven? what if you had to face jesus before that nascar race ever gets started on tv this afternoon? have your sins been washed in the blood of the lamb? when god looks down on you, does he see your sins, or does he see “paid in full” written in red with the blood of jesus? and you, christian, if you’re sure you’re going to heaven, are there people in your family or at work who are headed for an eternity in the fires of hell? why not come up and pray for them? christian, you may be saved, but are you living like each day is your last? are you giving your all for jesus? the pastor and some of the deacons would be standing by to pray with anyone who came forward. some of the ladies of the church were on standby, too, as the pastor would prefer not to kneel beside a weeping woman at the front of the church (though better before the eyes of the congregation, where their conduct could be monitored, instead of one-on-one in a pastor’s office). after a week of revival services with a guest preacher, or after church camp, the altar would bustle with people going forward to renew their commitments. and it did feel powerful to pray in front of the church. you could be disburdening yourself, laying before god not a slain unblemished goat or the firstfruits of your garden but your heavy heart about someone you love. you could be casting your cares on jesus, for he careth for you. i have been “under conviction” and the feeling lifted when i went forward to pray. yes i could have taken care of the matter privately, but the willingness to pray at the altar made my prayer feel more definitive, as though my prayer was now italicized or in boldface type. an altar call is noisy and potentially manipulative of the emotions, and maybe it also does some good. my mom believes there’s something about publicly praying, even though you may be praying silently to yourself, that furthers your commitment. everyone knows it takes some effort to overcome the inertia of the pew, that you’re opening yourself up to the looks of others. in a snarkier moment, i try to imagine what different people might be praying for. in a more judgmental mood, i might consider that they’re repenting of some dark deed. i admit that on occasion, when someone comes forward to pray and do business with god, on what feels like the fifteenth verse of “just as i am,” the thought has flashed through my mind could you please hurry, or the methodists will get all the tables at applebee’s. the sinner’s prayer offers a crystallized moment of decision. like the text of jacob ciccolella’s note to me in third grade: will you go with me, circle yes or no. are you lost or not? are you blind or can you see? the million verses of a hymn of invitation nudge the sinner to get off the anxious bench and decide right now. it’s not unlike the time clock on the home shopping network that tells you how much time you have left before the featured cubic zirconium pendant is no longer available. i was reacquainted with that moment of compression when i adopted a kitten. half a dozen people are lined up to check out at the yuppie puppy, a pet rescue, vet and boutique that’s now a thai restaurant. a woman brings in her cat, barack, who has some respiratory issues. the guy who’s helping to clean out the cat colony does so in an incredibly distracted way, and then he starts bitching about obama, and eventually the cats are pooping on the floor and scooting toys on top of it in their best attempt to cover their waste, bless their hearts. the pet adoption form asks: will you be responsible for your pet for the rest of its life? maybe i should sleep on this decision and come back tomorrow morning. but the kitten i want reaches his orange paw through the chicken wire of the cat colony as i leave. and another woman starts looking at him. oh no, sorry, he’s already adopted, i say, and scoop him up. i think i might pass out as i fill in all the paperwork. will you be responsible for your pet for the rest of its life? my vision starts to gray out a little bit at the edges. the yuppie puppie doesn’t have any to-go boxes, so i hold the kitten close to me, under my left arm, as though i’m going for a kitty touchdown. he purrs, ready for adventure as we climb into my friend’s getaway car. will you be responsible for your pet for the rest of its life? and yet when i sign the form, yes i will take care of this orphaned cat, i will love and cherish him in sickness and in health, i feel peace and joy. bluebirds of love explode from my heart. i can’t take my eyes off the tiny orange fluffball with gigantic ears and paws, who immediately disappears under the living room couch and emerges with cobwebs strung across his face like a furry haunted house. yes, spooky cat. there is room in my heart for thee. as a child, i would worry that i was telling lies when i didn’t mean to. after swimming one afternoon, i felt a weird shape on my leg and i tried to explain to my mom what it was. it was a diamond, it was a circle, it was a square, no it was a diamond. i kept bothering my mom to update her on which shape it was. i was so afraid of lying, even accidentally. i was so afraid of saying it wrong. my mom had great patience to listen to me, but that afternoon when i kept interrupting guiding light, even i could tell i was overdoing it. my grandmother hazel thought i went to church too much and that it kept me from having fun. i spent a lot of time with nana. i raided her stash of costume jewelry which i didn’t recognize was “costume” and wore without irony. “it spends the same,” i said at the mall, a perfect echo of hazel, when i bought a madonna cassette at musicland with pocket change and the cashier balked at accepting so many coins. “it spends the same” hazel would say when i asked for bills after she’d offer me a handful of change or a prescription bottle full quarters and dimes. nana took me to my weekly piano lesson and then we ate dinner at morrison’s cafeteria at the mall or somewhere in the food court. i’d usually sleep at her house, just up the hill from my parents. i often spent the night with her the year after papa died, to keep her company. we both slept in her big lavender bedroom, on twin beds. but she didn’t sleep much, and when her grief would overtake her in the middle of the night, we’d get up in the wee hours and work a jigsaw puzzle on the kitchen table. i would eat ice cream and watch the cosby show and then begin the task of flossing my braces while family ties was on. nana gave me purple wicker mirror that swiveled up and down. the base of the mirror was a compartment where i stored my small pouch of plastic threaders for the dental floss. i strung the floss through the big loopy eye of the threader, then drew the threader under the wire of my braces. it was a cross between a handicraft and oral hygiene. these were the days when i’d set the kitchen timer each day to make sure i practiced my piano lesson long enough. i was very disciplined about flossing, very guarded about the fault line of my mouth. sometimes i’d sit in the pink bathroom at hazel’s house and look at the giant mirror bolted to the wall, the mirror with the scalloped edges like some ancient map or treaty, and stare at myself. i would tell god that i wanted to revoke the sinner’s prayer, that i didn’t actually want to be saved. i thought i’d test the bible verse i’d read about nothing separating us from the love of god. could god undo salvation? i wondered. but then i would get scared. i meant it after all, god, i’d say. i would pray a version of the prayer, and then another time or two in case it wasn’t clear the first time. i would pray the prayer again and again, fearing that it didn’t take, worrying that maybe i didn’t really believe the words when i prayed them all the other times, worrying the prayer like a latch on a tricky door, like the hasp on a chest full of treasure. any bench can be an anxious one to the right mind. would you like to meet my best friend? my dad or my brother helps mom with the jumble of bills. my mom can’t see the figures, can’t read the ledger, only signs the checks and stuffs the envelopes while someone else figures the slender balance. she includes a gospel tract in every envelope, a folded paper about the size of a cassette tape, maybe a flimsy full-color slick with a gaudy butterfly on the front, its joyful wings caught in mid-beat, how to be born again! printed above its head. my mom can’t read the words in the tract, but she knows by heart the verses used to explain the plan of salvation or the romans road. sometimes she orders tracts from catalogs and sometimes she gets them from a rack in back of the church. for a while she was using these tracts with a woman’s cyan face and mary tyler moore swingy hair on the front. she looked kind of like a flight attendant, or clip art from the s. my brother and i crack up. would you like to meet my best friend? is printed on the front of the tract. “would you like to meet my best friend?” i ask my brother, and hold out my hand, palm upturned like my voice at the end of the question. “ok, so they’re kind of old-fashioned,” mom says. in college i passed out a yellow booklet, the four spiritual laws, skinny and long like a matchbox car, and its green, square, updated cousin, would you like to know god personally? in high school i wedged tracts in library books before i returned them. i read chick tracts, the fundamentalist comic book ones like “this was your life” about the suddenness of death and the need to repent today, or “why is mary crying?” or “the death cookie” about the blasphemy of the roman catholic church. my piano teacher left chick tracts on his bookshelves near the boring magazines; though he was methodist, he didn’t shy away from waiting room evangelism. i have since parted ways with the gospel tract. if i have any role in spreading the good news, then i assume it involves love, including loving my neighbor as myself. this likely involves learning the neighbors’ names, which i’ve been slow to do, though i know eric, the guy in the adjacent apartment, who has a cat named shoshanna, and jeremy the golf pro in the apartment below, who likes to play video games, especially the same one over and over, and the stripper who lived there before him who frequently exuded very strong feelings for someone who, much evidence suggests, is named david. at worst, tracts are inaccurate and hateful and they make you want to cut yourself with the edges of the paper. at best, they are cheesy. but i also know people who read a tract and believed and experienced a new openness to love. who am i to judge? i admire my mom’s loyalty to tracts as a vehicle of god’s message. in addition to including tracts in her bill payments, my mom sends them sometimes in notes, such as a thank-you note to my jewish then-boyfriend written in her leaning-tower script. the tract had a perky menorah on the cover. do you know the messiah? she leaves them with a tip at restaurants. a few days before christmas last year, we went to mings, my parents’ favorite chinese restaurant. the waitress already knew my parents’ order (they get the same thing every time, but this has been the case at their favorite restaurants long before my mom couldn’t read a menu). at the end of the meal the waitress brought out small cinnamon buns, which i didn’t understand. my mom fished for a tract. i looked at it— nemo, the clown fish from that awful animated movie. we had watched the movie one night when i was home, and i was so traumatized by the first three minutes of it, in which nemo’s mother is whisked away forever, that the lightheartedness later in the film could not appease me. yet another one of those stories for kids in which mothers don’t fare so well, if they’re present at all. my brother bought a box of finding nemo fruit snacks after we saw the movie and i called him a monster. “you cannot use nemo tracts!” i said. mom usually keeps tracts in her purse in a small plastic sleeve, but this one got crinkled, so she decided not to leave it on the table. “besides,” she said, “i’ve left her several already.” i was raised to believe that everything can be a sign of god’s love. and everything can be a tool of evangelism, of spreading the good news as commanded in the great commission in the gospel of matthew: “go therefore and make disciples of all the nations, baptizing them in the name of the father and of the son and of the holy spirit, teaching them to observe all things that i have commanded you…” assorted commercial ventures spring forth to equip the faithful for engaging the lost in spiritual conversations. consider testamints, which help you “pass the word” with mints wrapped in bible verses. or the evangecube classic, a -centimeter puzzle that can be folded in different ways to reveal pictures of the gospel, ranging from the more suggestive pictures of a celestial light with a human figure surrounded by darkness (our need for a savior and the separation from god caused by our sin) and more representational ones, like a cross, a tomb with a big stone in its mouth. there’s even a panel about christian growth, four pictures surrounding a picture of a heart, which is where jesus lives now if you’ve prayed sincerely to invite him in and be the lord of your life. the picture in the upper left corner is a human figure, kind of like the ones on street signs, kneeling, to emphasize the importance of prayer, and a picture of a white and dark-skinned hand clasping as a sign of growing together in fellowship with other believers. the evangecube comes in pink, blue and black models, too, and the sample pack comes complete with an evangepen. you can share your faith, for example, with stickers on car windows and bumpers: praying calvin—a version of bill watterson’s cartoon boy known for his hyperactive imagination and tiger companion—kneeling at the foot of the cross. a virtuous echo of pissing calvin, whose urine pours forth, usually onto a ford or chevy logo. you have two choices for eternity: smoking or non-smoking. without the bread of life, you’re toast. in case of rapture, this car will be unmanned. in case of rapture, this car will be driverless. after the rapture, give this car to my mother-in-law. no jesus, no peace. know jesus, know peace. fear him. got jesus? got faith? got peace? patty mallow was already out of the youth group when i was old enough to join, but i thought of her as my friend. patty was more godly and less pretty than other girls in youth group. i looked up to her. many years after youth group, patty mallow married a man named wendell wilkie and bore him many sons. one sunday night after church, patty stood around with some of the other church members to show them her new t-shirt she removed from its plastic bag. patty was vexed about the t-shirt. the slogan this blood’s for you scrolled across the top and budwiseup at the bottom, a play on a budweiser ad. being in the world but not of it is a fine line, and patty feared her shirt looked too worldly, that someone might have to study it to see that it was a gospel- inspired spoof and not celebrating beer. the elmwood missionary baptist church covenant expressly states that members won’t consume alcohol. plus one had to consider i thessalonians : , “abstain from all appearance of evil,” or as rendered in the darby translation “hold aloof from every form of wickedness.” in high school i held aloof from alcohol and drugs, and boys held aloof from me, which made the path of virtue a smooth road. my sense of style was a mix of fashion bug and kmart, where i shopped with hazel, the occasional fancy trip to benetton, and the zondervan christian bookstore. like patty mallow, i wanted to spread the good news with my t-shirts. i wore an “abortion stops a beating heart” t-shirt, stamped with what looked like an inked imprint of a newborn’s tiny feet, and the serrated line across the front like an ekg. the cashier at little caesar’s pizza asked if i was with, and i was like with what, and then i figured out she thought i was pregnant. my favorite t-shirt from this period was kind of sgt. pepper album cover but black and white. who will save your soul? the shirt asked in big block letters across the front. it was a front-and-back collage of famous people’s photos, cut-and-paste like an old school yearbook spread. on the back of the shirt, jesus stood near rod stewart and goofy. accept christ as savior or burn in hell: drape your brimstone banner across an interstate overpass the morning of the l.a. marathon, and you’ve got , souls running by on their way to santa monica. others will give you work to do, but only christ will save your soul: hold your admonishing posterboard, taller than a man, by the side of the road as runners try not to elbow each other in the hustle to the next water stop. one noticed, between little cups of powerade, an ideological shift in the course, as the fundamentalists clustered like doomsday morning glories in the dewy hours, but the campaign for peace, the end this war folk showed up miles later. i was running with john, who also goes by johnny, and johnny was printed on his race bib above his number, and women all over the city shouted “keep it up, johnny!” in the start corral at dodger stadium, we weren’t able to find our friend barbara. we could barely move. pacers and fundraising teams held signs. one woman held up a white cross about the size of an unfolded pizza box. john : was written on the cross bar. jesus ran down the vertical axis. “what’s john : ?” john(ny) asked. i recited the verse without hesitation: “for god so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish but have everlasting life.” “woah,” he said. we joked that he, john(ny), should train to run a : marathon. “i don’t know why,” he said. i said, “maybe the lord has chosen you.” as it turns out, i beat john(ny) the ultra-marathoner by more than minutes because he had leg cramps and was more accustomed to running on trails than roads. runners first, friends/lovers second, so i pressed on when he slowed down. john(ny) took photos and chatted with people. john(ny) (a real doctor!) helped a runner who collapsed in a tunnel get to nearby paramedics. not long after we met, john(ny) picked me up on his scooter for an outdoor concert. i buckled my arms around him so i wouldn’t fall off. we talked about how much taller i am than his kids, and also we talked about church. he attended the church of alta ski resort. he was a card carrying member of the compassionate agnostics. “i know a lot of people who go to your church,” i said. i had recently joined the choir at st. mark’s, and soon i noticed john(ny) attended more services than he missed. “why are you here?” i asked him on the way to coffee hour. he said “i like the choir.” you can buy colorful soul-winning bracelets from iana.com, a branch of the evangecube empire. iana is an acronym for the first part of romans : : “for i am not ashamed of the gospel of christ: for it is the power of god unto salvation to every one that believeth…” the iana web site proclaims: “the gospel: wear it. share it. it’s that easy!” iana bracelets are plastic bands; in high school i wore a bracelet with a similar concept, but made of beads on a leather cord. these witnessing beads were different colors: white for the purity of god, black for the sinfulness of man and the pain of separation from god, red for the blood of christ that washes sins away, green for the growth of our new spiritual life, yellow, a craft store’s gold, for the brilliance of heaven and an eternal life with god. i sat behind my friend shannon in science and she asked me what the different colors meant. perfect! she’s fallen right into the flow of the flow chart of how to share your faith: soul-winnee expresses interest or confusion at your t-shirt, piece of jewelry, keychain, hat, bible cover, etc., while soul-winner gets an entry point into the conversation and dispels the confusion and gets to proclaim the gospel message of salvation, to boot! “what are the different colors?” i parroted back to shannon. what do they mean to me? the door was open; would i walk through? jesus is knocking on your heart; will you answer? i had several classes with shannon, and she played on the volleyball team, and i just couldn’t really picture myself busting out the plan of salvation. i thought of the preachers inviting both the lost and the saved to the altar at the end of every service. is it well with your soul today, friend? today, today is the day of the salvation. christian, if you don’t share your faith now, when? if not here, where? if not you, who? “oh, they’re just beads,” i said. “you know, some colors i like.” i jangled my wrist for emphasis. this is my story, this is my song at sea with my family on the emerald ii, my careers as vocalist and bingo hustler peaked. i played bingo in the afternoons, working four cards at a time. i charged cokes to my parents’ room. the crew of the emerald ii posted a sign-up sheet for the talent show, and i felt that i should sing my song for all of these people because it was my talent. from sunday school i remembered the parable of the three stewards given talents as in amounts of money, not abilities, though the sunday school teacher extrapolated that we could interpret it to mean abilities, too. in the parable, the master praises the servants who circulate and increase their talents, and berates the servant who buries his in the ground for fear of losing it. i wasn’t quite sure why the servants got unequal talents. the ones who multiplied theirs had more to start with, which didn’t seem fair, but then again fairness wasn’t really what underpinned most of the parables. the moral, it seemed, was that the master could pay whatever wage he wanted. that wasn’t our business. it was our job to be grateful and to use wisely whatever we had. my family was at sea on the emerald ii because hazel, my grandmother, didn’t want to sit at home at christmas and think about my dead grandfather. i had a song to sing because in my elementary school’s christmas program i had just played a character named mrs. merriweather. the script called for mrs. merriweather to be played by the choir teacher, but miss scites thought i was already tall enough and bossy enough to play an adult. i wore a green v-neck sweater, a white blouse, a navy skirt, and a black scarf looped like a clover around my neck. my solo explained that “the greatest gift to come our way/ was sent by god on christmas day.” when i saw that talent sign-up sheet, i felt a stirring in my heart, i felt a sense of conviction that i should sing this song on board as i had already sung it as “special music” at my church. much of the church’s “special music” involved soundtracks, like karaoke, with the backup music of contemporary christian songs. in her essay “an expedition to the pole,” annie dillard claims “i have overcome a fiercely anti-catholic upbringing in order to attend mass simply and solely to escape protestant guitars.” a folky acoustic group called “wildflowers” has invaded the mass. “who gave these nice catholics guitars?” dillard asks. i have wondered: who turned baptists loose with tapes (now cds and mp s) and thought this was a good idea? i would stop in the zondervan bible bookstore on trips to the mall with hazel after my piano lesson. at zondervan, there were many shelves of accompaniment cassettes that weren’t shrink-wrapped, so you could try them out in a tape player and listen with headphones. well-meaning protestants sang off-key at the small white table with the tape player, groping for which arrangement best suited their vocal range. i didn’t have the tape for my mrs. merriweather solo, so i just sang a cappella, standing at the pulpit in the elmwood missionary baptist church sanctuary on a sunday night. i was nervous to sing my solo, but not afraid. i had sung in front of many more people in the school cafeteria. i wasn’t worried about being off-key or forgetting the words. i would jump off the high-dive of obedience, and the spirit would catch me. at sea, i thought i could bury my talent or i could use it. so i sang in the afternoon talent show, at sea on the emerald ii, alone with a mic on the parquet dance floor. that evening when my mom and i were walking toward the dining room, a woman and her daughter stopped me on the stairs. the woman said she liked my song. “do you know what you’re singing about? do you know what it means?” she asked. i said yes, that i had asked jesus into my heart, that i knew what the song was about. say what you will, but there’s a balls-to-the-wall quality about evangelism, a requisite amount of courage needed to take ordinary small talk into the realm of conversations about eternal decisions. again dillard is instructive here. in her essay “on a hill far away,” a lonely boy feels compelled to ask dillard “do you know the lord as your personal savior?” “not only that,” dillard replies, “i know your mother.” my mother was impressed that this woman on a cruise ship had the boldness to ask me about my salvation, even though it’s a perfectly common evangelical question: have you? if not, why not? today is the day of salvation. growing up in an evangelical church, i learned a lot of cool songs, and also some things about language. my family regularly attended services at elmwood on sunday morning and sunday night and wednesday night. one of the most notable features of the sunday night service was its more relaxed feel: less pressure to finish up by a particular time, and more freedom of the spirit. this wasn’t holy rolling. but sunday night allowed for more singing, so you might have seen people raising their hands, maybe (but not likely) some clapping or swaying. and though there was a little testimony time on sunday morning, it was on sunday night that people could let rip about what god was doing in their lives. many of these testimonies were vignettes of an answered prayer or some unexpected blessing. some people referred to or retold the story of their moment of accepting christ as their personal savior. hearing others’ testimonies made me think about my own, and about how to package a life into salient bundles: lo, observer, behold the glass-paneled curio cabinet of my formative experiences. there’s a testimonial impulse embedded in many expressions of an evangelical church. some hymns follow the “just as i am” trajectory of “i once was lost, but now i’m found.” hymns may unfold into a triptych of experience: first panel: i was lost/on sinking sand/ a boat tossed by waves and about to be dashed on rocks. middle panel: then jesus called/ found/delivered/ rescued/ ransomed me. third panel: someday i’ll walk with him on streets of gold/ beside the crystal sea/ to the mansion he’s prepared for me. in church we sang “blessed assurance”: “this is my story, this is my song:/ praising my savior all the day long.” we sang: “he brought me out of the miry clay,/ he set my feet on the rock to stay;/ he puts a song in my soul today…” this suggests we don’t just get salvation by the skin of our teeth. it’s a joyful act, with a pinholed outline around it to let light and music through. we get saved, and a song. a couple of summers ago, i was visiting my parents and joined them for a service at elmwood. the youth group had just returned from a week at church camp, and they were hot to testify. there would be time for singing camp songs, especially ones with hand motions. i thought about my own experience in church camp, and the joy of commandeering the sunday morning service when we returned tired, sunburned, and spirit-filled. a lot of fire imagery is used. campers sing a song asking god to light the fire in our weary souls. the congregation is admonished to fan the flame and encourage the youth in their fervor to witness for christ, to help them keep their resolutions to give up rock music or cussing or whatever else they’d vowed by the campfire. as a camper, i’d always liked the symbolism of the final night’s fire. even though i knew it was made from branches the youth pastor and some boys gathered during activity time, the fire seemed indwelt with the holy spirit. it was much more than a flaming nest of twigs. it burned from somewhere deep in the earth. from it, we carried little flames in our hearts, tiny lanterns of faith back to the grownups stuck in their desk jobs, or the stay at home moms sentenced like sisyphus to clean glittery finger paint mashed into the wall-to-wall carpeting, or the kids who were too cool for camp or who didn’t want to be away from home so long or who were not interested in using showers where you really needed shower shoes. during the testimony time that sunday after camp, dad and i kept score. he scratched a line on the back of the bulletin for each occurrence of the word “awesome” (as in “jesus is awesome. camp was awesome. you had to be there.”) later we compared tallies. my dad and my brother have been known to time testimonies at church, especially mrs. dunkle’s. she’s a grandmotherly lady whose husband fell ill, whose daughter’s life veered from the path of god, whose granddaughter’s husband needed brain surgery. sometimes she starts out with a prayer request but the request unfolds like a stealthy paper lantern into a full-blown testimony. “twelve minutes!” my brother would shout when we got in the car. “a record!” my dad is bible-toting, concordance-checking, tithing, praying, sunday-school teaching christian soldier. but the joy of parody is not lost on him. he and i would sing when he took me to school on his way to work. we composed a song called “we got across the road” to be performed when we crossed rt. ’s four lanes of traffic after a left hand turn. a few hymns got doctored in the car. “i’ve got a mansion, just over the hilltop” became our hit “we’ve got a mcdonald’s.” “it’s under the blood” was no longer a song about redemption through christ once it was reworked as “she’s under the bed,” a tune about the best place to search for snuggles our cat. “plenty of room in the family,/ room for the young and the old,” about being welcomed into the church became “plenty of room in the chevy,/ room for the dog and the cat./ three in the front and three in the back,/ unless, of course, you’re real fat.” in those days, on summer sunday mornings, i’d sit in the back of the minivan after church, sweltering until the ac got going. i’d whine that it was hot in the back seat. “you know where else-uh is hot-uh?” my dad asked, channeling his best fundamentalist preacher voice. “in the fiery pit of hay-ell, that’s where,” he said. dad would pull into the - on the way home for a snack to tide us over until sunday dinner at nana sheets’ house. like the honey given to children as they begin their study of the torah, high-fructose corn syrup played a part in my openness to religious instruction. my dad got a big gulp of diet pepsi and split a mars bar with my mom. he bought cinnamon certs, and i think if he’d had his way, he would have bought a pack of cigarettes, but he’d started running and had given up smoking for good. it was all part of reclaiming his status as someone born again. it was about living life with philippians : gusto: i can do all things through christ who strengtheneth me. at the - , on my way to the candy aisle, i wanted a moment to browse the pine- tree shaped air fresheners, the rectitude of the stacks of tissue boxes, the single-dose packets of aspirin and antacid, the tins of vienna sausages and cartons of hamburger helper, the tall coolers of bologna and lunchables and pints of milk. i had a reputation as a piddler, one who took forever to get going in the morning, one who couldn’t make up her mind, one for whom efficiency was not on the list of personal goals. in the candy aisle i was torn between the tiers of fruit-inspired delights—starburst, skittles, charms blow pops, pop rocks, nerds, spree, gummi bears, gummi worms, jolly ranchers, sweettarts, twizzlers—and then there was all the chocolate. my choice, and the time my father afforded me to make that choice, felt like a sacrament. i still think - s are borderline holy places. on our long runs, barbara and i may stop at one or more - s to use their public services and to buy water if they don’t have a fountain ( - s are hit or miss on this count). barbara pays for her water and maybe she is surprising me with a small pouch of cheese combos. i realize i don’t have enough change on me for a domokun straw and also i don’t want to carry it with me for eight more miles. i am mesmerized by the hot dogs, taquitos, and kielbasa rolling back and forth under the heat lamps. i like to observe their various states of shrivel. there should be an award for the last dog rolling, the one that’s lost all its greasy shine, that looks like it’s made out of vinyl. the ceaseless back-and-forth motion of the hot dog warmer is not a picture of purgatory or boredom to me. it seems like a fine way to spend an afternoon, kind of like being on the beach with a constant massage. a guy eats a doughnut outside the - by a display of firewood bundles. his shirt says “got me? i’ll do your body good.” barbara asks, as we resume our run, “how could you let him get away?” in a testimony, there’s a desire for clarity i can appreciate, a hope of a tidy story about a messy life that’s been washed clean by the blood of christ. some people have survived remarkable things: near-death experiences, privation, hardships or abuse they’ve managed to overcome. my parents read devotional pamphlets and inspirational christian books full of stories like this. my dad was inspired by dave dravecky, a pitcher in major league baseball in the s who briefly returned to the major leagues after an operation to remove a cancerous tumor in his pitching arm. my mom was moved by the story of joni eareckson tada, who became quadriplegic after a diving accident and then learned to paint landscapes with a brush between her teeth. then there’s a testimony model for those of us who’ve more or less grown up in church, who accepted christ at an early age but still had struggles great or small with eating disorders, porn, drugs, not living like a spirit-filled christian, or keeping one’s faith to oneself instead of witnessing to the lost. my own testimony is of this latter sort. what can i say? i’ve never been much of a plot person. in college, i helped lead a bible study with campus crusade for christ, a nondenominational christian group. in crusade we were encouraged to hone our testimonies, to write them out and commit them to memory so we could share our faith at any moment, so we’d be ready “in season, and out of season,” as the book of ii timothy expresses it. the web site clicks.com reminds me of my crusade training. the idea is that you answer a series of questions, clicking from one to the next, and these become the building blocks of your testimony narrative. the story has three basic parts: before you became a christian (describe where you looked for peace and happiness, and why that wasn’t enough); how you heard about jesus and what happened when you received him; and how your life changed. clicks.com compiles your responses to its prompts, and then you’re asked to comb over the composite testimony with these questions in mind: - does this read like a story? - is it disjointed? does it make sense? - can i read this out loud in to minutes? - have i exaggerated? - did i give the lord enough credit for the change in my life? i attended several campus crusade conferences, including spring break at panama city beach. instead of drinking and fornicating on my st birthday, i was passing out booklets called the four spiritual laws and would you like to know god personally? sometimes i asked people if i could get their thoughts on the booklet. i had some questions to ask about each page if people were interested in talking. i asked students in bikinis or jams if they would mind filling out a survey. it was sort of like market research for jesus. the survey asked questions about one’s satisfaction with life, or the strength of one’s desire to know god more. near a volleyball net, a few girls made a dotted fortress of green tracts wedged around their beach towels. clearly our work there was done. the other day, while i was walking from the library to the student union, a woman in a pink and purple scarf stopped me. “do you have a minute?” she asked. i’m an easy mark, and i was preoccupied with thoughts of lunch, and i assumed she was going to ask me for the time or for directions. but of course “do you have a minute?” is the opening gambit of a survey, like from those people in the mall concourses with their clipboards, or from the sales associates at those wagon-shaped kiosks in the middle of the mall selling skincare products or cell phone covers. with the woman in the scarf, i didn’t slow down. we did the walk and talk. i guess my body knew what my mind hadn’t picked up on, that i didn’t actually have a minute, that this woman with her invitation to a bible study stood between me and a garden burger. i told her i had class, which was true, and also that i already had plans for easter. “good luck with your bible study,” i said, rather than “leave me alone.” i hate feeling tricked, even though i know the intentions can be good: people need to hear the good news, one might say. people will thank me for the chance to try this exfoliating face wash. but if you’ve got a good product, you don’t need a trick. maybe just some slick posters, or a catchy song. if i were to meet my college self now, the one with bad hair and all those tracts, i wouldn’t give her the time of day. i would not fill out her survey about my satisfaction with life. i would crumple and throw it in the nearest waste receptacle. be sweet, college me implores. but i’d get drunk and call her names: prude, hypocrite, fatso, lesbo, clog dog, ramen-breath, warrior princess of acne, even the dungeons & dragons guys won’t kiss you. in my senior year of college, i started hanging out with chris. i had briefly dated someone my freshman year, but had not yet really received my entry pass into the club for people who date other people. i was still wearing my favorite overalls. they were from the gap and made of a thin, soft denim. my attachment to the garment may have involved subconsciously ascribing to it some kind of spiritual significance, like “jesus’s love covers (over)all.” chris came with me to campus crusade weekly meetings. i teased him that it was really campus crusade for chris, which he thought was funny. this was a good sign. chris and i had met our freshman year because we were both spanish majors and had a class together. freshman chris was lanky, and he’d gained so much weight by our senior year that it took me a moment to recognize him. he was smart and funny, and had blue eyes and a job with an internet company in town. chris had initially asked me out on a date, and though i demoted the event to just hanging out, he was still not in the bin of other guy friends who i would really never ever consider dating. sometimes chris and i went to coopers rock, a state forest where we’d bring lunch and sit on the overlook above the brambly sheer hillside and the cheat river far below. chris and i watched a lot of movies together, and he sent me an email once, after we’d been to a movie in friendsville, maryland, wondering if he would be the world’s oldest virgin. chris said he went days sometimes without anyone ever touching him. i realized that i never touched him: i never gave him a hug at the end of an evening, i never kissed him on the cheek if i hadn’t seen him for a long time. chris told me early in our hanging out period that he was hiv-positive, from a blood transfusion for hemophilia. he explained that his dramatic weight gain was from medication. i told myself that i didn’t keep my distance from chris because he had hiv. i reminded myself that i was not usually an initiator of hugs with any of my friends. i promised myself that i wasn’t not-dating chris just because he had hiv. his email wasn’t an accusation, but it was a loneliness i had never thought about. for a while, chris attended my bible study. at the crusade friday night meetings, called prime time, one or two people would share their testimony each week. i asked chris if he wanted to work on his, but he was shy about it. continued faith in god despite intense physical suffering could be the backbone of a very powerful story, i thought. another student in our crusade group almost died after her ruptured appendix was misdiagnosed for nearly two weeks. she returned to an altered version of health, and presented her testimony of survival and strengthened faith to us and to churches all over the area. incurable illness hung like a millstone around chris’s neck, an affliction pinned to an innocent. and yet he didn’t hate the world or god. he wanted to finish his degree. he wanted a girlfriend. wow, i thought, when i looked at chris, what a testimony. make your partition i was searching for mount messiaen, nine miles from parowan, utah. in , a mountain known as white cliffs was renamed for french composer and organist olivier messian, whose symphony des canyons aux etoiles… (from the canyons to the stars…) was inspired by his visit to utah’s bryce canyon. i can’t read topographical maps, and i couldn’t find clear directions on the internet to the mountain and its marker. it occurred to me the day before i left salt lake that i might want to call parowan’s chamber of commerce. i assumed i’d get voice mail but in fact every number i dialed had a real person at the other end, as though the good people of parowan had been sitting at their desks all morning just waiting for my call. the chamber of commerce referred me to the visitors center. a woman at the visitors center asked me to hang on for a minute. hey, do you know about that composer? she said to someone nearby. hey, you need frankie lou bentley she told me, and gave me frankie’s work and home phone numbers. i’m from a small town in west virginia, so i’m no stranger to this kind of open-hearted, unsuspicious help. my impulse was to explain myself, but no one seemed particularly concerned about what i was up to. i’d first heard of messiaen earlier that year, at a performance of his quartet for the end of time, one event in a week-long messiaen festival. why, i wondered, was utah dedicating a week to this french guy? in messiaen was commissioned by alice tully—new york mezzo-soprano, heiress, and patron of the arts—to write a symphony for the american bicentennial. i can picture messiaen leafing through his les merveilles du monde, his wonders of the world book series and lighting on bryce canyon as the most beautiful place in america. (for the record, hawaii scored a close second). messiaen’s from the canyons to the stars… features such instruments as a thunder sheet, a eulophone or wind machine, and a geophone, messiaen’s own invention, basically a drum full of rattling pellets attempting to replicate the sound of dry crumbling earth. the symphony is an hour and a half long, and almost a third of it is piano solo. from the canyons to the stars… isn’t widely performed because it requires musicians, somewhere between a chamber group and an orchestra. in messiaen’s defense, the number of musicians was determined by the space available in alice tully hall, part of the lincoln center for the performing arts in new york city, where the symphony premiered in . messiaen wasn’t trying to be difficult. as a singer/songwriter i, like jimmy buffett, wasted some time with country music. jimmy buffett discusses the early frustrations in his career and the roots of his beach bum persona in his autobiography a pirate looks at (published by random house in , the same year as buffett’s don’t stop the carnival tour). a fun fact about jimmy buffett is that he is one of only seven writers to have had books top the new york times bestseller lists in both fiction and nonfiction. (the other six: ernest hemingway, john steinbeck, william styron, irving wallace, dr. seuss, and mitch albom). years ago i too tried to make it in that world of country music, banging my forehead against it. i struggled until—like buffett—i realized “hey, i’m no two-bit country singer meant to troll the bars of mobile and nashville. i’m a star.” one of the best songs i wrote in my country music period is called “what’s the motive for my votive?” i wrote it as a way to explore my feelings about buying big-c catholic candles at the supermarket. i am not tough enough to be catholic. but i buy catholic candles in part because of their pleasing and assorted colors, and they burn a long time. also i have been on the jesus team for many years, but i don’t really know his mother at all. so far the candle score is - , with the blessed virgin mary in a slight lead over her son. my newest candle showcases the immaculate heart of mary. on the front of the candle, mary is dressed simply, in a blue robe with a soft beige cloth draped around her face. her left hand holds open the robe to reveal her heart, square in the middle of her chest. the heart looks like a red hot-water bottle with a fat orange pompom flaming from its top. it could be an ad for pepcid ac. mary’s right hand gestures toward her heart, and red cartoony rays fantail around it, just to let you know, in case you missed it, that this is a super heart. on the back of the candle is a prayer to the sacred heart of mary, first in spanish and then underneath in english. instead of inviting the devout to “make your petition” the clumsy directions cue, in my favorite typo of all, to make your partition. the blessed virgin mary is mysterious to me. for example, i don’t understand how she stays a blessed virgin if she had more children after her most famous son. at least for a time she might have been both virgin and mother. i, who am neither/nor, admire this idea of both/and. if i could be any typographical mark, i would choose to be a slash. the slash allows more than one option to co-exist, floating there like fruit in the tree of possibility. a slash creates a lean-to for a weary clause, a bivouac for an item that is not nested in another idea but paratactically stands shoulder to shoulder with the other items on the list. a slash mark creates a partition like the wall of a dollhouse. the sentence swings opens like a dollhouse so we can see all the rooms at once, all the characters and actions and tiny furniture simultaneously. more and more i see the blessed virgin mary’s face. one summer, at the church of st. francis in santa fe, i stood before a puppet-like statue, the oldest marian image in north america. here she is la conquistadora and the informational literature indicates that people pray to her for peace. there’s a note too about how the prayers to la conquistadora have been kind of effective, as the spanish reconquest of santa fe was not as bloody as it could have been. this sounds a bit like settling, to me. the episode did inspire my song, which you might remember from its heavy radio rotation, called “at least we weren’t massacred real real bad.” near the front of the church i heard a pulsing, puffing sound like an ipod turned up loud. i thought: what sacrilege! walking through a church with an ipod! when i turned around i discovered the sound was from a little girl in orange shorts with an oxygen tank in her backpack. and not downs, but something. i chanted to myself: shit shit shit oh shit shit shit shit. at that moment, i wished intensely that the noise were her ipod playing the hannah montana movie soundtrack or the jonas brothers or whatever she wanted to listen to. i thought of a song i’d written a couple of years before, called “who’s the asshole now?” i realized afresh that my work was more autobiographical than i’d readily admit. in general, i was really singing about/to myself. sometimes i wonder if my spiritual goals have less to do with seeking holiness than trying to avoid assholiness, a lame sort of via negativa. i do believe that some assholiness is unintentional. for example, in santa fe, outside the church of st. francis, two women in sensible footwear walked the gray and white stone labyrinth, quiet and intent. a younger blond woman popped gentle wheelies with a stroller, spun donuts on the labyrinth, not catching on that this was a tool of religious or meditative devotion rather than a folky playground mosaic. when i reached parowan, utah, population , in my search for messiaen’s mountain, i followed frankie lou bentley’s instructions and parked in her driveway. she’d pegged the purple canvas banner in her front yard—parowan high, class of —just as she’d told me on the phone. i couldn’t miss it as i rounded the turn on center street. frankie lou bentley was on the committee in parowan that renamed white cliffs for messiaen, and she met him once at a reception. frankie had short wavy silver hair, brown penciled-in eyebrows, and a sheen of sweat on her forehead as we stood squinting in her driveway. inside frankie lou bentley was a sherpa; even though her classmates were arriving in just a couple of hours, she offered to lead me to mt. messiaen in her silver chrysler. i followed her to highway , to the gravel turnoff after mile . the marker for mt. messiaen is a bronze plaque pressed into rough loaves of sandstone. it is not unlike a cemetery marker. the plaque doesn’t face the gravel road, though it is in the foreground of the diorama of mt messiaen. i would never have found it without frankie lou bentley. i’m not so great with monuments. for example, on the way to kodachrome basin, i stopped at a ranger station and considered a route back to salt lake that might take me by the grand staircase-escalante national monument. steve, the ranger on duty, did not mock my epiphanic moment at the giant map display. so, steve, i said, you’re telling me the whole thing is the monument? yes, steve confirmed, the whole thing, all . million acres, is the monument. it’s not like the washington monument, he said. from the angle of the marker, it’s clear that mt. messiaen is actually three mountains, sort of a trinitarian mountain, which must have appealed to messiaen’s catholic sensibilities. frankie said it was a shame i wasn’t seeing the mountain at sundown. there must be silica in the stone, she said, because when the light hits just right it shines. after frankie left for her class reunion, i stood there in pine and juniper, and while trying to commune somehow with the spirit of messiaen, i found that i could not switch off the dented simile machine in my head. the area around the bronze marker was junked up with the charred remains of a campfire. a faded beige couch cushion sprouted like a mushroom from the shaded earth. and as if from a fairy tale: a green door lay face- down over a dry ditch. the cheap wood peeled apart like a head of lettuce, each layer shearing off like a limp leaf. it was swollen like the copy of the odyssey that falls in the bathtub and then you have to leave it open on your kitchen table to dry out, but it’s never the same even when you press it with heavy books. that green door was like a portal you could open into an underground world with a staircase and a cobweb cellar with jars of cooked cabbage and beets and berries. the door curved like ribbon, it flopped there like a strip of undercooked bacon. the wood was not real wood but composite wood, like a long flaking sheet-cake of guinea pig cage filler. all around, insects flittered that looked like moths and rattled like castanets. before i left i apologized to messiaen that i was flesh as well as spirit, and i snuck off into some tree cover to pee. i knew it was a lonely road over the pass to panguitch and on to bryce. i turned away from his mountain and toward the open, decorated heavens, cloud doilies draped over the blue couch of the sky. messiaen is known for a love of “non-retrogradable rhythms.” in his essay “music and color,” messiaen explains: “just as it is impossible to go back in time and change past events, the non-retrogradable rhythm does not change when played backward, it merely repeats itself.” messiaen found non-retrogradable rhythms in the symmetries of palindromes, butterflies, the human form. non-retrogradable rhythms mirrored back on themselves, a matryoshka doll unnesting then nesting again. messiaen is known for a love of puzzles and obstacles, claiming that “certain mathematical impossibilities, certain closed circuits, possess a strength of bewitchment, a magical strength, a charm.” like messiaen, i enjoy challenges, the diamond-hot heat when pressed by formal limitations, the fear of shame were i to fail a double-dog-dare to self (does one have to honor one’s bets to self? walk self naked through temple square? buy oneself a round at the tap room?). the catalyst for my latest experiment is my matryoshka set depicting russian leaders. the biggest one is putin with the faint comma of a comb-over. the baby one is stalin, stalin who glares like a mustached, fiercely varnished peanut. the excitement of matryoshka is not in the shape, which is a pretty basic cylinder with a rounded head and tapered bottom, but in the painted designs. typical matryoshka sets include at least five nesting dolls, and traditionally a woman is the outer doll, a woman carrying a rooster and wearing a sarafan, a peasant garment that’s a cross between an apron and a muu muu. before they were tourist must-haves, matryoshki were gifts for infants and were considered symbols of fertility and timelessness. the inner dolls may be of different genders, with the innermost doll, as one source puts it, “a baby that does not open.” although matryoshki stand as bottom-heavy emblems of russian arts and crafts, the dolls first appeared in russia only in the late th century, inspired by japanese nesting dolls. russia was no stranger to nesting and surprises; recall that these are the fine folks who brought us the faberge egg. tsar nicholas alexander iii commissioned an easter egg from the house of faberge for his wife, empress maria fedorovna, in . the gold egg opens up to a gold yolk, then a gold chicken, then a crown dangling an egg- shaped teardrop of a ruby. the faberge egg is such a success, that eventually the tsar gives faberge full creative control. one egg per easter. the tsar is so happy that in subsequent years he just says to the house of faberge, surprise me. as a songwriter, i was trying to push myself. i had written a song about this matryoshka set of russian leaders: “i’m not a doll, i’m an action figure.” i was planning an entire album, shells of songs, around stalin. i came across some honorary and spurious titles he’d accepted in his lifetime, which i thought might make nice songs too: "coryphaeus of science," "father of nations," "brilliant genius of humanity," "great architect of communism," “staff of life,” "gardener of human happiness." i also co-opted stalin’s editorials and essays "dizzy with success," "reply to collective farm comrades,” and “marxism and linguistic questions." stalin wanted to recast soviet history in his own image. once trotsky was snuffed out, stalin could condense the soviet story into a tale of two men, a kind of buddy comedy, the lenin & stalin show. once he offed people, he also had to vanish them out of his photographs. stalin showed tremendous creativity and forward-thinking, stalin the proto-photoshopper. i had worked up a few songs to fill out the album. the most promising were more or less a throwback to my country/western period: “you don’t know lonely till your regime kills at least million people,” “the only combine i want to drive is you,” “let me buy you a drink, let me tell you ‘bout my five-year plan.” well, there was that love ballad, “the only aral sea you need is deep inside your heart,” and an electronica piece “look into my eyes (let’s collectivize).” i connect most with stalin at his points of insecurity. born ioseb besarionis dze jughashvili, stalin was renamed “uncle joe” and “kremlin highlander” because he was from the caucasus mountains (stalin a hillbilly, like moi?). stalin renamed himself with many war names including “stalin” from the russian word for steel. at five feet five, stalin was not, shall we say, a tower. if the highlander were from my hometown, he’d tool around in a jacked-up ford f- super duty with extended cab. that truck would be loud, with a deep-throated vroom. it would be the anti-prius, which needs an artificial vroom to let you know it’s approaching, like digital cameras with an added-on shutter sound just to give you that satisfying click that says cheers, you took a picture, o brilliant maker-of-memories, you. stalin stands there in his uniform, hands on soviet hips: this vroom is real! some thoughts about partitions: a partition is sexy, like that scene in bright star where john keats and his beloved fanny brawne caress the wall, scoot their respective beds to that wall dividing their rooms in the rented house. “partition” means both a division/separation as well as that which divides or separates. both cause and effect. partition grows from partir “to divide,” which also gives us “party.” though we may think of party as an event that brings people together for some shared purpose (a tea/search/tupperware/hunting party), the word had about a -year head start as a “side in a contest or dispute.” a “gathering for social pleasure” doesn’t circulate until the early th century. a “party line” is orthopedic politics that line up for nearly years before it’s a shared telephone line ( ). you couldn’t have been a party pooper until , or at least you couldn’t have been called by your rightful name, says the online etymological dictionary. “party” definitions abound, and some of them sound like a multiple-choice test, such as definition from the american heritage dictionary: a. a subscriber to a telephone party line b. a person using a telephone. c. an act of sexual intercourse. d. an orgy. perhaps this could also be found in a rhetoric textbook (see slippery slope). the way was paved, long ago, maybe even before pavement, for the love vessel par excellence, the booty text. talk about turning nature into notation! a partition is sacred—like the grille obscuring the faces of priest and penitent, for the anonymity of confession. post-vatican ii, the screen is optional. some confessionals have a traffic light system outside the booths: green means go ahead and unload, the priest is inside. red means the confessional is occupied, wait your turn, and better yet out of earshot. some confessional lights are activated by pressure on the kneeler inside, not unlike the door lock on airplane lavatories that illuminate the red x to tell you no use unfastening your seatbelt just yet. one custom for dealing with this problem of overhearing is covering your ears when passing by the confessional, whether or not anyone is in there. i like the cultivation of the habit of shielding your ears, red light or no, just to cover all the bases, just to make sure that even the latent echo of a confidential word won’t be misplaced. confession, then, runs on the honor system. no wonder the plots of so many plays function on eavesdropping. a partition is sexy—the negotiation of the arm rest at the movie theater on an early date. whose territory is this anyway? you want to seem assertive, that promised land touted by our therapy friends between passive and aggressive. sometimes it’s more fun to make people read your mind, and then get huffy when they read it all wrong!! in which case, one becomes passive-aggressive. the slash would not work here because in this case it’s not one or the other but rather the two fused into one concept, much like the crayola shades of red-violet or violet-red. the hyphen joins like a belt, cinching the waist of the phrase, keeping its semantic figure. it’s like the clasp of the necklace, the kiss that seals the lips but also the flick of tongue against teeth to aspirate those consonants, punch them out of the mouth of speech. the hyphen is a cleaver: it separates, it joins. a hyphen is like a big-c cleaver, like the peerless s family, obedient, well-groomed, knows the rules. i must confess that the more i read about messiaen, the more i’m developing a crush on the guy. it’s not just the early photos of him in his small round eyeglasses and butterfly collar shirts. certainly i’m drawn to messiaen’s potent and mystical catholicism. messiaen said “je suis ne croyant,” i was born a believer. i feel this too. faith is like a fanny pack, no a backpack, and when i try to peel it off of my shoulders, it doesn’t go anywhere. leaving it behind is like trying to leave behind my foot. i don’t feel burdened by the backpack, i realize it’s a golden backpack, a great and inexplicable treasure. now you know that inside my more ecumenical self is a tiny fundamentalist mini- me. behind the old church that taught me songs, many of them complete with hand motions, grazed a small herd of tires half-buried in the ground. the herd loitered across from the field where the church made applebutter every fall. that youth-group fundraiser seemed like something from the deep past, with the fires and kettles and all, something you’d do at a heritage festival or gettysburg. there was a dance and rhythm to sweeping the wooden paddles back and forth, scraping the bottom of each big kettle so the sweet molten applebutter wouldn’t stick and burn. baptist arms churned like a giant meditative mixer. the kettles didn’t move, so you did, in gyres around them, walking a path in a sort of baptist labyrinth (though careful, don’t sound too new age-y). even with my dental floss arms i could move the paddle by myself in one of the smaller kettles, although it was nice when someone else would jump on and help me. (see photos from the old church directory in which applebutter-making is tagged as an “appealing project” and a “stirring event.” do not trust baptists with puns.) now if there’s any applebutter in my parents’ fridge, it’s from the supermarket. the “old church” was razed for a school playground. the field of the fires and kettles now spreads like a blanket beneath the “new church” and the “multipurpose family center.” the tires died off. those tires’ arced bodies were primary colors. one tire was five feet from the ground at its highest point. as a child i was scared to climb them; i was scared not about the going up but the coming down. i preferred to hide inside the tires, a knee tucked into the rim of each lip. a tire was a great hiding place, secure but not closed, small but not stuffy. i waited for someone to find me. messiaen sounds like a guy who couldn’t resist a good detail, who couldn’t keep his own myth-making under control. the very existence of his quartet for the end of time, composed while he was imprisoned during wwii, is the stuff of story. messiaen had been judged unfit for active duty in the french army; he was a furniture mover and then a medic, until he was captured by german forces and imprisoned in the stalag viii- a camp in silesia. messiaen was not jewish, so for all the darkness and privation of prison, he wasn’t under the specter of deportation. different versions of the messiaen story compete for sunlight. did the germans give him a barrack in which to compose in quiet? or was he, as his second wife yvonne loriod maintained, writing music in a latrine used by prisoners? when you’re listening to the quartet, with a haunting cello solo so slow you might fear it will be the very vehicle that ushers you into eternity, does it matter? messiaen wrote his quartet for piano, violin, cello and clarinet, the instruments available in the camp, and the work premiered for both guards and prisoners on january , . he claimed there were people in the audience, though other sources argue the hall could not possibly have held such a crowd. in messiaen’s version, the quartet went on with a bum clarinet, one of its keys melted by a german officer’s paraffin stove. clarinetist rebecca rischin, in her book for the end of time: the story of the messiaen quartet, argues this is impossible, that the instrument would have combusted from such heat, not just lost one key. also in messiaen’s version of the premier, the cello had only three strings. rischin interviewed the cellist, etienne pasquier, who joked that he would correct messiaen— “i kept telling him: ‘i had four strings, and you know it,’” pasquier said—but messiaen wouldn’t let go of that story. messiaen’s version is compelling. once that track is laid down, you can’t extricate it but only layer over it. it’s scary how long our utterances hang there. a friend once told me a story about painting the walls of her new apartment. she used coat after coat of glossy off-white but a permanent-markered message from a previous tenant bled through, no matter how much paint she applied. i can’t remember the message exactly, “i love you, beth” or “fuck you forever” or something like that. it was weird, not the words of the message but its tenacious, unstoppable nature. the story struck me as part poe, part home depot. sometimes a story becomes a read-only file, you can’t overwrite it at all, even if your version is better or more accurate. it’s hard to quarrel with a good story, one that has a smooth shape, smooth as an ikea table, though remember if you’ve asked me to put the ikea table together, probably the top’s not flush with the floor. i always wind up with extra pieces which i think the swedes don’t really factor into their assembly kits. people like me also lose pieces, and usually it’s the important pieces. recently i began work on my first big-budget production: ikea: the musical, including the heartwarming hit “how do you solve a problem like ikea?” my tribute to the unparalleled musical achievement of the sound of music. i picture ikea at some kind of crossroads, like rodgers and hammerstein’s maria, the young woman who wavers between of a life of celibate devotion to god or marriage to captain von trapp, a man covered with harsh, battered man-crust but who is—underneath—full of loving man- magma. in the wake of his losses, captain von trapp has no vocabulary around which to shape his emotional experience. captain von trapp blows a bosun’s whistle and his seven children line up like unnested matryoshka dolls. i can’t get that image out of my mind. and that whistle. was it some phallic intrusion of power? the shrill sound of his hollow masculinity? with the whistle, captain von trapp plays commands for the children to follow as a group. in addition, it’s both touching and perverse that he creates a distinct tune to summon each one. there will be no whistles in my musical. messiaen has a control-freaky side i can relate to. his efforts to score nature as sheet music could be read as an overlay of control, an attempt to tame the variables. though he himself was not converted but was born right into the manger of catholicism, his work is about conversion: birdsong into notation, suffering into escape, time into eternity. on some plane of soul-love, rainbows and freedom, messiaen and i are doubles, two speckled wings on a non-retrogradable cosmic butterfly. when messiaen digs into non-retrogradables, i wonder: how much variation does symmetry withstand? in the messiaen companion, steinitz faults messiaen’s from the canyons to the stars… for its zealous symmetry, an order imposed too, shall we say, religiously on utah’s rocks and stars. messiaen is also faulted for avoiding conflict in his music; in him there is no darkness at all. “this great hymn to heaven and earth has no darker side,” steinitz laments. in from the canyons…there’s not even a gray stripe of doubt, a chiaroscuro birthmark/rorschach to set apart the glow of faith, to make it pop. and not only is there no shading, there are no people. messiaen might have at least thrown in some mormon pioneers, steinitz suggests, but a “narrative of human drama would have interfered distractingly in this theocentric song of praise.” a central part of faith, as i understand it, involves being a neighbor-lover, a brother-keeper. this is a very tricky part. but i’m kind of with messiaen on this one. birds are ok; people just foul things up. i’ve opened up the dollhouse, the dollhouse of damaged men. unlike my childhood stash of barbies with the lone beleaguered ken, this dollhouse is man-heavy. stalin, for one, could not fight in wwi because of an accident with a cart that damaged his left arm. messiaen’s poor eyesight exempted him from wwii active combat. jimmy buffett was turned away from vietnam because of a peptic ulcer. captain von trapp, well, clearly he’s a military star shining so bright that he got a title out of it. in the parlor, stalin the gardener of happiness tries to sell some faberge eggs to make bank for the revolution. in the dining room, captain von trapp (for a time trapped—oh, it’s too easy!—in a sonic web of sorrow, a cocoon of sound that instead of nourishing life and giving space for the fragile strength of wings that could one day bear his spirit aloft rather mummies him, isolates him from the love beams of his seven children and julie andrews and the salutary austrian snowcap glint) blows his whistle. he whistles in loneliness, trying to summon his octave’s worth of children caught in their forbidden playclothes made from curtains. messiaen creeps around with his daypack complete with mesh pouches for his keys and pencils and also a water bottle (hydration, messiaen, hydration!). he ticks the cadences of von trapp’s whistle. padding on the mezzanine that wraps around the house like a scarf on a neck, messiaen tracks a flock of jimmy buffett’s parrotheads. messiaen’s pencil scratches the face of the notebook even after he’s struck on the head with a stray beach ball. you can imagine how excited i was, how carnal desire quicksilvered through my veins when messiaen called me all the way from . he was pumped about the tully commission, and he’d just bought a ticket to utah. would i pick him up at the airport? yes yes, of course, i said. his wife was joining him. would i also, he asked, pick up his wife? yes, i said, yes i’ll pick yvonne up too. as soon as they arrived, yvonne wanted to take a nap at the hotel, but messiaen was eager to buy supplies for their trip to bryce canyon. would i take him shopping? as we strolled through rei, messiaen was in rare form. he insisted that we get sleeping bags that zipped up together. “oh you,” i said. messiaen shrugged as if to say “married, not buried.” this was the sexiest thing that had happened to me for some time. i knew that when messiaen camped, number one it would not be camping in a tent but in a cozy cabin maybe even with one of those cushy beds with the numbers you dial to achieve perfect firmness, and number two the trip would be with his current wife and former student, yvonne. messiaen liked lying there on the sales floor, trying out down and synthetic mummy bags at various price points as some kind of sarcophagus rehearsal or cocoon costume. i thought about a project i’d been working on. a minister had asked me to write a musical for children; the idea was to help kids affirm their faith and their love of god’s creation while also galvanizing their interest in what the minister called “the urgency of ecology.” my working title for the musical was the natural world is almost as cool as a text message, maybe even a bit cooler. butterflies would feature prominently in the production, and the songs i’d drafted so far included “all the larva sing god’s praises” “smile, god has a purpose for every pupa under heaven,” “don’t mess with metamorphosis” and “i can’t wait till i get wings.” messiaen could star as a chrysalis with the patience of the ages. a craggy sales associate did not make me or messiaen feel weird for trying out sleeping bags on the floor. “are you an rei member?” he asked, and when it became clear that i was lost in messiaen’s eyes and messiaen was lost in his cocoon, the sales associate disappeared among the freestanding display of chacos. how alike does something have to be to be a double? i’m not trying to be coy or airheaded here. i’ve really been asking: what is a double? how to recognize one? this question hit home at in-n-out burger, where i the in-n-out novice was instructed that if i were “really hungry” i should order a double double with cheese. as i annihilated the two patties, i thought, shouldn’t a double double actually be a double of a double? as in four patties with cheese instead of only two? (listen to me, only two!) maybe i carry around the simile machine in my head as a way to crank out the doubles. then i always have company (though, as our therapy friends remind us, we know company doesn’t negate loneliness). the simile, some say, is a kind of imperfect doubling, a goofy fraternal twin. you hook things together and insist hey look, there’s a hook, that means they’re similar. maybe all this doubling creates a crushing, maddening, beautiful, useless wealth. a songwriter sets notes side by side, trying to figure how they fit, how to show their angles to advantage, how to echo and complement their contours. is there really a kind of parataxis (etymologically “an arranging in order for battle”), a level field where ideas join hands like a fluttery streamer of paper dolls? or am i leaning more, of late, to hypotaxis, that nesting matryoshka of syntax, a subordination one into another till we get to that pit, the pith of mystery, that glowing impenetrable core, fiery wick, the baby that does not open. inside me is a singing star that feeds me lyrics and melodies. as i walk down the street i sing my newest song, trying to transcribe it as i hear it. the title is something like “what is at the core of my self-loathing?” all i’ve got so far is a line mumble mumble something clothing and later in i think an attempt at a slant rhyme garble garble …nothing. to trace messiaen’s path from the canyons to the stars, i needed some stars. at first i feared there would be no stargazing in bryce canyon, but then i got wind of the star guys who set up at the red canyon campground. steve, the lead astronomer, gathered a dozen gazers around a telescope. he touched stars with a red laser pointer, as though the night sky were an overhead transparency. except for elementary school hits like the big dipper, i was lost in the illegible expanse. i thought maybe i could understand a little better if i could touch the sky like the pimpled metal spool of a music box. also i wondered, would i go blind if i looked at the red laser pointer? my neck hurt from a day of looking up, first at mt. messiaen and then at constellations. in the telescope, jupiter winked. i counted four of its many moons, gray but legible dots. we also looked at m- , the ring nebula, which steve called “a smoky cheerio” and a nasa web site labeled “a barrel-shaped cloud of gas shrugged off by a dying central star.” the m in m- , i learned that night, is for another french guy, this one from the th century, charles messier. of messier’s biography one source reports: “while playing turbulently, he was falling out of a window of the messiers' house and breaking a leg on the level of the thigh, but he was found and taken care by a farmer of his hometown, who looked after him and assured complete recovery.” i wrote a song about the life of messier, called “defenestration blues.” after his injury, charles was taught by his brother, hyacinthe, in “administrative and methodic work.” messier made a career of cataloging objects that could easily fool comet hunters; he tracked decoys, those false doubles. more stargazers crowded near astronomer steve as he explained that double stars are quite common. the north star, for example, is actually a pair. steve found one in two different colors. a woman in sweatpants bent to the scope and named the colors right away: gold and blue. clearly she and steve were speaking the same language. i don’t think i would have picked out the differences in color had they not been pointed out to me ahead of time. in fact, the whole star adventure brought back my anxiety of the eyepiece. i remembered hunching over microscopes in intro biology. we were supposed to count cells on a slide and i just saw an illuminated blur, highlighted fuzz. there was nothing to count. my eye throbbed. my lab group made jeff count everything and then we used his data. i couldn’t look at all that light. my eyes have to be trained to see. like messiaen’s music, ok i’ll admit it, i like it but i don’t always know what i’m listening for. i’m not alone here. noted le boulaire, messiaen’s violinist in the quartet premier: “at moments, it’s unlistenable. it’s severe, jolting. there’s no harmony, no song, no melody, just this harshness…so, we were a little dumbfounded by his music, because, amid all this severity, suddenly, a song would arise.” as astronomer steve readjusted the scope, he said it was surprising that our own sun is a single star, burning alone. i wonder: am i a single star or a double star? sometimes double stars look like single stars, which i think is a neat feature. i pondered this one evening on my way to meet my friend luke. luke is an attorney and part-owner of a comic book store. six months after his divorce, his ex had moved in with her new boyfriend, a manager at captain d’s seafood kitchen. “i can’t compete with free hush puppies,” luke said. over dinner, i told him that if i ever have a daughter, i want to name her starlene. “does that name come with its own trailer?” he asked. if i have son, i continued, his name will be tote bag, but i will call him tote. “because,” i said, “i really love tote bags.” i needed a coffee so we walked to empire books in the new uppity outdoor mall in our hometown. luke motioned me toward a corner of the store. “you have to see this,” he said. in a section of the bookstore usually labeled “adult” or “mature reading” the shelf was marked, simply, “individuals.” this next song is called “i’m not lonely, i’m an individual.” why burning man won’t fix your shattered self-esteem a giant white chicken on wheels can’t help you if you won’t be helped. we were soldiers deploying weapons of mass abstraction. we were virgins, first-time burners. we debated our playa names on the way to black rock city, the city that effloresces in nevada’s black rock desert for the week of burning man. e chose aphasia because, she claimed, no one ever remembered her name anyway. i considered princess fallopia (too pynchon?) and decided on candy (who doesn’t like a little candy?). it wasn’t until we drove past elko, nevada, and a stand of hills with tawny patches like threadbare armrests that i thought about how, at burning man, i’d be sealing myself off from the rituals that preserve me in unsteady times. once we set up camp, i wouldn’t be able to call my mom and ask her to remind me i’m ok. i couldn’t cruise lol cats. in a temporary city of more than , burners, entry and exit would take hours: i couldn’t just jump in my car and leave. we weren’t even in my car. we took aphasia’s car. aphasia pitched this isolation/claustrophobia feeling as a chance to detach from habits and get in touch with the deeper self. yeah, it could be a pathway to healing, but it could also be a big shitstorm disaster. the experiment ensued!! burning man is all kinds of noun. burning man is a person, place, thing, and idea. burning man gives good noun. a few months before burning man, i’d found myself with a love who had turned into a judge, a judge in whose lakeblue, judicial eyes i was found wanting. i found myself first in bargaining (“what if i mute my self-doubt like one of those decorating shows on tv that you don’t really need the sound for?”). then in denial. much later, finally, some anger. i found myself apprised that despite the judge’s high talk of wanting space, his new woman moved in with him, a woman who is tall and dark-haired like me, a smoker and a keeper of rabbits, which i am not. i saw facebook photos of her jade plants and white adirondack chair on the judge’s porch, where i used to drink coffee and throw rubber toys to the puppies and stare at the parking lot of the -hour mexican restaurant across the highway. i found myself divided into equal parts omg and wtf. i found myself heartsick, able to get through a day and call it good thanks to the dream that the judge would expropriate the woman and ignite her adirondack chair. we would bore the rabbits to death. we would roast them over the pyre. after wiping rabbit grease from his chin, the judge would kiss me and gesture to the flaming chair: “case dismissed!” i found myself waiting for this. waiting. waiting. then at the end of august i found myself in a vintage boy scout tent tall enough to stand up in. each time i entered the tent i shook playa dust from my feet like a missionary leaving a town of hard hearts. in the tent i fought encroaching dust as though bailing water from a doomed canoe. i found myself, when the wind rested, lifting my eyes to the sere hills guarding our gaudy city. when the wind rallied, i wore ski goggles and a flimsy painter’s mask. dust blotted out the tall flags of center camp, the hub of black rock city. its longitude is based on the clock; the latitude rings out alphabetically with words related to the year’s theme. like the y of our alphabet that’s sometimes consonant, sometimes vowel, time can also be a place in black rock city; you could easily find yourself at : & biology at : . and funny thing about clocks: i wore a watch at burning man, just like i do in the default world, and naked or bedazzled or neon people would stop me to ask the time. for all the dusty exuberant freedom of burning man, there was also a printed schedule like a conference, events and talks that wouldn’t wait. i found myself, in the tumult of winds, knocking on doors of new friends in rvs. their air was stale because they couldn’t spare fuel to run the generators, not with the hours-long exodus waiting at the end of the week. so i’d sit in their stuffy peace like a grateful musty hat in an attic box, while into our tent, small dunes blew. the dust whispered it would bury me if i’d just hold still. when i was little, my parents and i would sit around the breakfast table and have family devotions. the source text was our daily bread, a monthly publication of rbc ministries (formerly radio bible class). for years odb was distributed by my parents’ church until it fell out of favor for its use of the new international version bible instead of the king james. each day, the odb suggested a scripture reading and included a short inspirational story, an italicized verse of a hymn or poem, and then a pithy statement in boldfaced type that my mom called the snapper (origin unknown). the snapper was a smooth capsule, a tidy mnemonic device, a sleek vehicle for wisdom. my adolescence was snapper-rich (“stand for nothing, and you’ll fall for anything”), including the ten commandments for teens: “ii. don’t let your parents down; they brought you up,” or “vi. choose a date who would make a good mate.” snappers gave adults, especially youth group workers and parents, a sense of victory, some scripted stuff that could feel like a zinging talk-to-the-hand rejoinder in an argument with a teen at a crossroads. a snapper is a proverb’s shabbier cousin, the one who gets all the clothes the proverb’s outgrown. i think of snappers as only a small side-step toward perverbs, one of my favorite oulipo tricks (e.g., “a stitch in time is worth two in the bush”; “red sky at night gathers no moss”). perverbs crack open then splice together, releasing fresh revelation. the snapper was part of the real-life application of scripture, an emphasis in my upbringing intended, i suppose, as a hedge against empty ritual. you couldn’t just repeat a creed or already scripted prayer (that was for idolators and catholics). the idea was to let the spirit use the word to guide you into deeper truth. jesus is a personal savior, so why shouldn’t his word be a personal word? our youth group, the gospel four, was divided into teams, one each for the four canonical gospels. we earned points for our teams by bringing visitors, memorizing scripture and taking notes on sermons. note-taking encouraged attendance as well as thoughts about the bible. you can imagine why i did so well at church in the ways it was like school. my spiritual formation was hyper-protestant, with its stress on salvation by grace not by works, but as a matter of temperament i do like keeping track of points. there’s a part of me that would like the life of the spirit to be based on points, something like the tickets i earned at billy bob’s wonderland for skee ball, one sport i actually enjoyed. i liked redeeming the tickets. (what is the soul’s equivalent of a spider ring?) i envision the lamb’s book of life—in which are written the names of those saved for all eternity—as the lamb’s gradebook of life. the lamb of god, that takest away the sins of the world, also moves his red pen over the celestial graph paper, awarding and penalizing us for participation, taking initiative, attitude, preparedness, on- time completion of tasks. the lamb keeps orderly rows and columns in this vast vast book, but this after all god’s lamb, and god can crunch a lot of numbers, since he invented numbers, and there’s even a whole book of the bible called numbers. in my thinking about burning man, i’m struggling to get the genre just right. an inspirational & devotional story: ~the bread of busyness~ some days, when i have a lot of work to do, i like to bake bread. i think of this as “virtuous procrastination.” surely there’s nothing immoral about baking bread! you say. you’re right! in fact, baking reminds me to give thanks that jesus, like bread, rose again. as i pummel the warm, yeasty dough, i think about how god is shaping me, molding me into the image of his love. so what’s the problem with baking? well, even though my bread is good (just ask the ladies at bible study!), i’ve given baking my attention instead of accomplishing the other work god laid on my heart that day. instead of trusting in his will, i’ve taking matters (literally!) into my own (floured!) hands; i’ve swapped something good in place of god’s best. that, my friends, leaves a bad taste in my mouth. real-life application questions: . what are your “virtuous procrastination” habits? how do you recognize them as such? ________________________________________________________________ . how do you distinguish between the good and the best that god has in store for your life?________________________________________________________________ burning man could easily discern the mixed motives of my devotion: i wanted to see this man. but also my heart was broken, and i felt like shit. i wanted to outrun the shit feeling. i wanted to feel better about myself. i wanted to be the kind of person who goes to burning man, so i went to burning man. in spite of my upbringing i’m still a snapper apprentice (i can hear your voice already: you’re fired!). i readily admit that some of these aren’t snappy enough to be real snapper, grade-a snapper. not rancid but also not fresh, mine are the manager’s special of snapper, meeting the minimum standards because they have indeed been memorable as they drive across the desert floor of my waking and sleeping mind like a chicken-shaped car but less visually interesting. a self-helpy snapper: you can’t get everything from one person. a break-up snapper: i wish you felt better about yourself. another: i need to be alone to learn how to be a man. a core tenet of burning man is “radical self-reliance,” by which the event “encourages the individual to discover, exercise and rely on his or her inner resources.” i heard echoes of berryman (“i conclude now i have no / inner resources”); i (mis)heard this burning man principle as “radical co-dependence” (“burning man, i hate you! burning man, don’t leave me!”). one practical manifestation of radical self-reliance is that you have to carry in all your own water, and dispose of your gray water by either constructing a shallow evaporation pool or trucking it out when you leave. here we abut the burning man principle of leave no trace. the survival guide didn’t say, but i should have surmised, that you also carry your own weight with you. one of our provisions was a big plastic barbie head we found at a thrift store. the head offered hair styling practice on barbie’s snarly mane perched atop her long tan neck. we named her self-esteem barbie. she became our own kind of burning man, our effigy, the catch-all for our pent-up pain. as in: “maybe if barbie didn’t eat so much, we wouldn’t have so much trouble closing the hatchback/ the car wouldn’t ride so low to the ground/ we’d have more space for important camping equipment.” “maybe if barbie weren’t so stupid, we wouldn’t have missed the exit.” “maybe if barbie felt better about herself, the car wouldn’t smell like feet and burger king.” we were embarrassed for barbie, and we left her visible but enclosed in the back of the car for the first three days. she had to earn her way out. finally we needed her to weigh down the rigged dust flap in front of the tent. imagine: she couldn’t even do that right. she was fat enough to be in the way, but not fat enough to be useful. my brain is a horn of plenty, one of those wicker cornucopia things people use as thanksgiving centerpieces. substitute for the gourds and indian corn the snapper substance that swells on the vines of my recollected experience. o vibrant harvest, embarrassment of fecundity! some of these are not quite snapper-worthy, but they are part of my textual record, and whoever wrote them there pressed down really hard, like a child learning to write with death-grip fist around the pencil: god doesn’t close a door without opening a window. let go, and let god. at a.m., pandora’s fix-it shop was cleared out. aphasia and i had driven all day, provisioned up in reno, wound our way on the two-lane road to black rock city. i was in full road mode, in my stained band t-shirt and black shorts dusty with crumbs. i wore no body paint, no pasties, not even a glow stick. a camp had set up a bar across the street from pandora’s, so we waited until we saw someone who could tell us where to put our tent. a woman moved through the bar with a silver tray of quesadillas. “put on your friendly face,” aphasia said, and though normally i don’t like to be told what to do, by then she and i were so in sync that it didn’t feel like criticism. she meant: “it’s not enough just to listen to that weird pink floyd mix anymore, now you have to say something back, darling.” and it worked, the command released me. i did, to some guy who’d driven to burning man from ohio, i did begin to say things back. hi i’m candy. melts in your mouth, and in your hand. hi i’m candy, sweeter by far than honey, than honey in the comb. i woke panicked and hot in my sleeping bag. short of breath, thinking about all the things i had left undone. i read a psalm. at a.m. there was plenty of light, so i didn’t need my headlamp. i brought a few books to burning man, including the king james bible i’ve had since i was five. many verses are highlighted and underlined, the edges of pages trimmed with wobbly script, a trace of myself, the young annotator. sections of the new testament and maps of jerusalem and saint paul’s journeys fall out every time i open the thing. playa dust filled in its cracked leather cover. i began with psalm : the heavens declare the glory of god; and the firmament sheweth his handywork. i wondered that morning: was anyone else around the playa reading the kjv to calm down? anyone? is this thing on? i have a soft spot for the new american standard bible, but i brought my kjv. and though i’m not a kjv-or-the-highway kind of girl, i stand with those who cheer that pound for pound, the kjv beats up on many other translations. let us consider job : : niv and assign your nuggets to the dust, your gold of ophir to the rocks in the ravines kjv then shalt thou lay up gold as dust, and the gold of ophir as the stones of the brooks your nuggets to the dust? really? tell me the kjv hasn’t wrapped up the niv here like a hot pocket, heated it in the toaster oven, chewed it up, swallowed, digested and excreted it before the niv even realized what happened!! face, niv! the kjv feeleth familiareth. at burning man, wisdom visited me in many guises. snappers popped into -d. i walked toward the line of port-a-potties at : & genome, and i cut in front of a guy on a bike even though i saw him coming in plenty of time to have stopped and let him pass, which would have been the polite thing to do. “sorry,” i muttered, even as i walked. i didn’t want to wait. “don’t say sorry unless you’re sorry,” he said, swerving around me. this reminded me of my new honesty across the board campaign. i picture a united way-style thermometer to gauge my progress (i am % honest! let’s work together to meet our goal!). or a mudflap on my honda with an number for people to call in and register their opinions. how’s my truth-telling? i wish you felt better about yourself. in th grade i attended a just say no rally with my school, and someone played whitney houston’s hit “the greatest love of all.” i stood there and thought about the ways i would say “no”: “i love my body too much to harm it with drugs.” “i believe in my future and drugs are a dead end.” i swayed to whitney houston in my white t-shirt with red neckline and cuffs, and my orange fraying fire patrol belt. please know: i had been approached by the safety patrol, a more elite force at our school. safety patrols stood outside with the adult crossing guards to help arriving and departing students. they wore white belts with silver badges, and in the rain and snow they wore old long yellow raincoats with hoods. i nursed a cold through most of the winter, so my mother vetoed the safety patrol. for fire patrol, when the alarm rang you had to carefully but quickly assume your station, propping open doors as classes filed out in orderly lines, maintaining an expression and demeanor of calm, of hey we’ll get through this, no cause for alarm, of hey aren’t you glad your reading test was interrupted so now you can ask your friend for the answers. after the just say no rally, while waiting in the parking lot to board the school bus, brad wolfe said to me: “i’m going to tell you a joke that’s so funny, you’ll laugh your titties off.” [beat] “oh, i see you’ve already heard it.” i wonder what brad wolfe is doing now. i guess i would have a better idea of what brad wolfe is doing if i’d planned our class reunions like i was supposed to. sorry, cmhs class of ‘ . don’t say sorry unless. burning man is lent via mardi gras. a fasting through superabundance, indulgence turned inside out, a backdoor way to asceticism. flesh bends subtly, like a mobius strip, into spirit. as they say: a riddle wrapped in an enigma wrapped in bacon wrapped in hot pink duct tape coated with fine alkaline dust. for dust thou art… i was hoping that burning man was like church camp but different. the first two or three days suck and then things click, you get tight with your friends, the hardness of your heart gives way, and by the campfire on the last night you are ready to make promises to change your life, to carry a bit of the fire back home with you, like a prometheus, or someone in need of pepcid ac. the golden tribe planned a parade for the light, to begin at the children of chaos camp. i had a gold purse and a pair of gold shoes that i also used in the default world. i borrowed aphasia’s gold minidress. roam, our neighbor, gave me some gold craft ribbon that i tied around my head in a plumose fashion. the tribe were mostly the aarp set, and they were ready to rock. they admired my gold ensemble. one guy asked if he could take a photo, and i said yes; he asked if i would remove my hot pink sunglasses, but i didn’t want to so i said no. later, walking alongside the photo guy, i said that i understood this to be the parade to the light, and my eyes were full of darkness. if therefore the light that is in thee be darkness, how great is that darkness! we handed out strands of gold beads. there was no agenda except to salute the light. this was early in the burn, and i resisted the golden tribe and their cocktail hour. i was still clinging to my rituals of the default world rather than giving in to the chaos. i could recognize my behavior, but as our therapy friends remind us, recognizing and changing are two different things. burning man is the place, i encouraged myself, where people leave their jobs in engineering, data entry, customer service, and teaching to slip into lives as willow, magnolia, beaker, cedar, fishbait, bella, la sauce. i wondered: was i a member of the golden tribe? was i so uptight precisely because i was loath, like many foundlings, to take possession of my true identity? were these people my destiny? was i running from corinth only to end up at thebes? and more to the point: why couldn’t i relax? at the head of our parade was the gold bar, an art car painted gold with a working bar in the back, stools sprouting like mushrooms around it. a dancing naked man painted bright garanimals green from head to toe danced on top of the truck. oh that we could all be as free as the green man, shaking his round green belly, shaking his tiny green dong. from the top of the top of the truck, green man shouted “i’m oxidized!” a lot of back pain comes from clenching your glutes. a lot of heart pain comes from clenching your soul. self-helpy snapper: there are many different ways to be. variation: there are many different ways to be fun. it’s ok if burning man isn’t my thing, i thought. with the minor complication that i still had four days left of burning man. shall the dust praise thee? shall it declare thy truth? instead of turning around at the man with the golden tribe, i kept on walking to the temple. looking out from center camp you might not even see the temple; it’s nearly hidden by the skeletal illuminated man perched high above a ring of pylons like a troop of handholding starfish, a crown of dancing thorns. the temple’s filigreed wooden base held up a lotus. its petals bulged around the temple’s second and third stories and reached toward the heavens, swaying in the wind and dust. the temple would burn on sunday, the night after the man, and i’d heard from experienced burners that this event was less frat-party, more spirit. i kept thinking of snappers that sounded more like koans but also parodies of koans, faux-koans: the temple burns but it does not break. but i was not just a snapper- maker but also a symbol-reader. i wondered: what is burning man about? what does it mean? was the man an empty center around which rituals crystallized in order to justify an extended hippie party in the desert? was the man a mirror, reflecting us back to ourselves? i climbed to the temple’s third story, reading the notes written on beams, looking at the photos, posters, stuffed animals. the place was not just a memorial. it was crowded with people climbing ladders to gaze at the playa from inside the spare lotus. on sunday the messages and artifacts would be reduced to ash and the ash carried away and the imprint of the ash smoothed out like a spot on a goblet by the water that would collect in the playa bowl in winter. the hardpan face would melt into a mirror. let there be a firmament black rock city etches like chicken feet on the alkaline bed of lake lahontan, a lake that was born in the pleistocene ice age and peaked about , years ago. now it’s desert most of the year, a desert, the black rock rangers tell us, used mostly by “rock hounds, land sailors, history buffs, wd enthusiasts, amateur rocketeers, and the community of burning man.” lahontan, like the great salt lake, was endorheic. lahontan, like me, was what we in the business like to call a closed hydrologic system. we don’t flow into other bodies. though sometimes they flow into us. let it divide the waters from the waters. northrop frye: “[r]itual is a conscious waking act, but there is always something sleepwalking about it: something consciously being done, and something else unconsciously meant by what is being done.” “lighten up” some guy yelled at me from his bike as i walked to center camp. a sign on a booth on the esplanade: got guilt? need more? i knew i had to bend. the temple burns but it does not break. i didn’t know how. i didn’t know which way. i never felt at ease with roam, even though he sat at our picnic table a lot and washed his feet there in his cherry-picking bucket. he said i should go out and meet people. look at all those empty couches, he said, waiting for the people. later that day i sat at the couchsurfers camp, even though i didn’t know anyone there. i needed a couch, and i was proud of myself for finding one. a girl was chatting to two guys nearby, correcting one guy’s english. “score one for the native speaker!” i said, and they laughed. a moment later, one of the couch guys, the one who’d been corrected, introduced himself as menelaus. menelaus asked me if i knew where the billion bunny march started. i got a little melty looking into those blue eyes, bluer than the water i faintly remembered from the default world. no, i told menelaus. do you want to come? he said. no, i said, but i should have said yes. also missed: the wilson phillips pancake breakfast, the librarian cocktail party, soul retrieval, the weird underwear brigade, the critical tits bike ride. real-life application questions: . recall a time when you felt free. describe it. _________________________________ . how can you reclaim and keep that feeling? __________________________________ dancing with luna at the opulent temple i realized that life is too short to feel so bad, and i should just shake my booty in my white pants that made me feel like captain stubing of the love boat, but even sexier. the pants endowed me with swagger. they shivered my timbers. they snugged then flared to accentuate my moves, pant legs flapping like tall white flags of surrender to beats, to dance, to dust, nature’s most perfect body glitter. i could extend this feeling by wearing white pants more frequently. i wanted to pack up the sky, fold it up and take it home with me. i wanted the wide blue day sky and the pinholed starry night sky. day unto day uttereth speech, the sky above black rock city was kind of like day to night barbie. she wore a pink shimmery leotard underneath her pink velvety pencil skirt and blazer trimmed in white. she was a real career girl. she carried a plastic purse with tiny paper credit cards smaller than chiclets gum. i long for an outfit like that. when it’s time to clock out, you just stow your blazer and turn your skirt inside out to reveal a hot pink crinoline, especially useful if you’re going to prom or happy hour with the guys. and night unto night sheweth knowledge. a blond guy from tahoe showed up at our picnic table, introduced himself as black rock. “i guess you had to think real hard about your playa name,” i said. i told him i ran the burning man k, and showed him my race number still pinned to my tank top. he said he’d walked all over camp, way more than k, just that morning. he also informed me that he speaks spanish, french, german, chinese, and polynesian. “that’s a lot of languages,” i said. “why do you know all those languages?” said black rock, “i’m a cunning linguist.” goethe: “symbolism transforms the phenomenon into an idea, the idea into an image, and in such a way that the idea remains always infinitely active and unapproachable in the image, and even if expressed in all languages, still would remain inexpressible.” recovery snapper: give your grief the space it needs. but i can’t find a bowl big enough. from the burning man mission statement: “the touchstone of value in our culture will always be immediacy: experience before theory, moral relationships before politics, survival before services, roles before jobs, embodied ritual before symbolism…” maybe that’s right. rituals we move through, self-aware or robotic, improvisational or dogmatic, awake or asleep. but we can’t slip our arms into the sleeves of a symbol. symbols don’t let us in like that. they burn but they don’t break. symbols we can heave ourselves up against, we can walk around, pose in front of and take pictures, try different angles. sources say we give out before our symbols do. now i’m just giddy and sleep deprived, and someone is filling my playa cup with popcorn. i’m kicking up dust, alone on the esplanade, coming back from a yoga class, that old ritual. i feel pulled apart and reassembled by my rituals. i feel nearly capsized by loneliness. i see the white chicken! wait, now i’m singing i’m dreaming…of a white chicken…just like the ones i used to know. now i’m addressing the white chicken: “white chicken, somebody took a big fat dump in my heart, and i’m still scrubbing the skid marks. white chicken, i want my heart to be as white and stainless as you.” “white chicken, o kentucky fried paraclete.” hide me under the shadow of thy wings susan brind morrow: “if the city was um a dunya [mother of the world], what was the desert? the city’s negative: a blank page on which things magically appeared.” this may be true for egypt and sudan, morrow’s terrain. but what about a desert that is a city? she’s got the “magically appeared” right, anyway. a dust storm chokes everything, effaces the man, the mountains. gloms on anything lucky enough to be a surface. i can’t overemphasize the dust. frosted burning man, he’s magically appearing. dust breaded me like shake-n-bake on chicken breast, but i slipped on a pair of silver pants i borrowed from aphasia and a sequined top. who coverest thyself with light as with a garment; who stretchest out the heavens like a curtain… zombie loaned me her bike, the one with the plastic doll hands reaching out from the handlebars. i already had my friendly face on, without effort. for a few hours, my friendly face was my real face! at glitterbox i glimpsed my soulmate, a guy hustling toward late middle age, wearing silver pants and a bandana, like me. i have to dance with that guy, i told my friends, and soon i drew him to me, a dry boat across the dry lake bed, i tugged him with my invisible girl-cables. when i said i was from utah, he crowed “you mormon girls! you’re spying on the enemy!” i’m not mormon, but i liked the idea of being a mormon spy. we danced back to back, we ground out sparks from our silver butt cheeks, we ignited the supple mirrors of our asses. “you’re a very good spy!” he said as i left him on the dance floor. i felt electric. whence such light? i was a reflective surface but also giving off light from the inside. i was, for a few hours, like a solar panel, as though my anxiety had stored up all this energy that now at last i could spend. i was a glow stick, a wand of color in the dark. i was light inside and outside. just before sunrise, my friends and i parked our bikes near the trash fence at the perimeter of black rock city, deeper in the playa than the astroturf slide. we were pulled between the rising sun and the full moon, the greater light to rule the day, and the lesser light to rule the night. we watched the rising sun till our eyes seared and we had to look away, and then poof! we saw that big mugging moon. so white and full, the bright imprint of its plump cheek pressed against the sky. that morning i rode from the deep playa back to camp, steering around the temple. i split off from the group, trying to find a bathroom, and thinking i’d found a bathroom, instead i’d found an art installation comprised of a series of port-a-potty doors. cursed. held it. there is no speech nor language, where their voice is not heard. walking down : i met a guy in a red speedo who was from barbie death camp. he seemed very excited when i mentioned self-esteem barbie. he said their camp had ss guards, a barbie gestapo, ovens. even in a place of such creative excess, in a place where one is exempt from asking “is this weird?” these guys were going too far. self-esteem barbie was stupid and fat and not much fun, but that was no crime. surely she hath borne our griefs, and carried our sorrows. an inspirational & devotional story: ~sometimes you have to stop to get ahead~ one day, a friend and i wanted to ride bikes across the playa. we waited for the wind to die down, but the longer we sat at our tent, the more dust we collected in our hair and pores. finally, approaching twilight, we decided to take a bike ride anyway. we pushed through oncoming dust that threatened us like a dirty inescapable unhygienic mean- spirited car wash from h-e-double hockey sticks! my friend and i quickly lost sight of each other in the needling clouds, but fortunately, god provided a way for us to stay together through the raucous call-and-response of our squeaky bikes! you may ask, was sticking to our plan worth the wear on our bikes and bodies? well, when we dared open our eyes, we saw god’s heavenly handiwork, the pink celestial dryer lint clouds clinging to the sunset sky. eventually we stopped noticing our coughs. and in those grainy photos we’re smiling! how wonderful when we can view our obstacles as opportunities to grow! when we can’t control the circumstances, let’s control our attitude (and our tongue!) real-life application questions: . describe a situation in your life in which you had to exercise great patience. what were the circumstances? what did you learn from the experience? ______________ . how do you practice patience in your day-to-day life? ______________________ i can’t do the one thing i’ve been assigned to do, which is to pack flat the crates of kitchen stuff. it’s like math field day, and i’m trying not to have a panic attack. the temple burns but it does not break. i’m ready to start the exodus from black rock city, but our picnic table goes in the car first, and roam and zeek are still cooking pancakes on it and offering them to rosy women who show up at our camp on bicycles. i don’t know how to dismantle the tent and untie the knots. i’m antsy as hell. also: tired and hungry and not pretty enough to score a second pancake. at last the kitchen crates are passable. i’ve done all the preliminary stuff i can do and now i’m waiting for aphasia’s cues about what happens next. she writes in her journal for an hour, eats a couple of pancakes. “it’s sunday. i need some church music,” she says. bleuroses, a neighbor and self-identified theater geek, busts out a full-size keyboard with an extension cord, props it on a table near his camper, sings. i continue writing my own burning man scripture: when the dust buffeteth thine eyes, thou mustest stoppeth. i’m smoldering: let’s move! then i get it. a little golden pride-nugget glimmers in my heart when i finally get it. i crack open the last beer from the cooler and sit for a moment. sometimes all you can do is the best thing to do. listen to the peter, paul and mary sing-a-long. finish your beer. salute the light. am i living every moment to its full potential? do my joys outweigh my regrets? a couple of days before the exodus, aphasia invited me to a seminar on how to take home the lessons of burning man, how to re-enter the default world. i opted to stay in the tent and read elle. inwardly i scoffed at the need for such a seminar, even though i myself was given to self-reflection all the time. am i doing burning man right? am i wringing every bit of meaning? i scoffed at the applicators. i, the experienced applicator. he knoweth our frame; he remembereth that we are dust. cars and rvs stir the playa, snake along the exodus from black rock city. you can’t speed up the stop-start. you wait hours to turn onto the two-lane road to gerlach and i- . you can’t use the mirrors because the car is stuffed, but through the front windows your eyes lick the last sugary lines of the city lights. as for man, his days are as grass: as a flower of the field, so he flourisheth you wave to your fellow burners in their stopped cars and rvs. you carefully time the inching stop-start so you can slip into your iridescent wings and have one last j.c. penney photo shoot on the playa before you lose the light. you can make fun of the people ahead of you in the adjacent lane, the people from california who are not moving ahead when the stop-start allows them to move ahead. they are busy filling a travel mug with playa dirt. for a souvenir? because they forgot to get some ashes from the burn? for a hair-styling product? a snack? like they haven’t absorbed enough? c’mon, california, you shout. get it together! for the wind passeth over it, and it is gone; and the place thereof shall know it no more. by now it should sound like music xerox, in russian, takes the masculine pronoun. we have to cajole him, flatter his ego, so he’ll spit out copies with dark lines down the page, or the text half faded out, or the white paper crinkled into dainty fans. we have to open him up, leave his side panel ajar like a dislocated wing when he overheats. do you understand the rudiments of his functioning? ludmila asks, pointing to the xerox. if i hang out with ludmila too much, i start to talk like her. yes, ludmila, i understand the rudiments of his functioning. the cracks in her fingers are green from the ointments she rubs twice a day on her dying mother’s legs. she calls her mother “mummy.” ludmila is in her early forties, and she has a regal air. she is also a hugger, and on occasion she will pat my american behind. ludmila often shares her open-face sandwiches with me, margarine and cheese on slices of white bread the size of my palm. things are going well with her man friend, a retired military officer, she tells me as she breezes into the room like spring. she wears a turquoise pillbox hat over her blond curls. her thin eyebrows are penciled in brown. love is the great beautician, the cliché lobe of my brain throws this up, i don’t say it aloud, but it’s true. all of the teachers in the modern languages department share a common room, one giant office. ecaterina, “the chief of the chair,” as she once introduced herself to me, has a large desk in the back power corner. we have four computers, a full-length mirror, two coat closets, the unsteady xerox, and ten tables with shallow shelf space. the tall windows overlook decebal street, a major thoroughfare, and one of the three mcdonald’s in the country squats right across from us. two teachers share each table except for me. i get my own. imperialist! i jam papers in every chink between my books. although romanian is moldova’s official language, in the teachers’ room most everyone chatters in russian unless they’re speaking to me. ludmila and dima, though, they often speak in english to each other when they’re around me, even if i’m not involved in the conversation. in romanian, a free period between classes is a fereastra, a “window.” ludmila, dima and i have a window at the same time. i should be grading papers or writing a lesson plan but usually i make tea and check my email. dima reads about boxing matches online. he is in his early thirties and he, like ludmila, teaches twice as many hours per week as i do. when we walk across the hall to the bufet for a pastry, he pats his slight paunch with pride. he doesn’t drink alcohol at all, he explains, but he cannot resist a cake. dima shows a particular weakness for the vinnie puh, a blob of cream as tall as a thumb covered with chocolate crumbs, plump and sweet like its namesake. in the s georgi lozanov, a bulgarian psychologist, turned his work with mentally disabled schoolchildren into a foreign language teaching program for adults. he called his method suggestopedia, based on suggestology, a field focused on the responses of the human subconscious. with adult students, lozanov favored a desuggestive- suggestive approach, removing students’ psychological barriers and anxieties to make the mind more “suggestible” to new material. femei sa fie ca shi o paine calde, women should be like warm bread, the director of our institute says in romanian as he pours small glass of cognac in his office. it is the first day of the new academic year, and between the morning and afternoon classes, we circle up in domnu director’s office to celebrate. ludmila urges me to take a glass, and to eat something. i have a class to teach but how can i refuse? femei sa fie ca shi o paine calde, the director repeats. i blush, for the first time in a long time. if i have cognac, i will be on the floor, ha ha! i say. the director hands me a glass. he is not unfoxy with his silver hair and moustache. he is a silver fox. toasts are made, mostly in russian, all prosperity in the new school year etc. dima whispers translations in my ear as we stand close together on the bright blue carpet. i am already ten minutes late for class, but some of the older teachers chide me for rushing off. if i ever complain about my job, i email a friend later that day, please remind me of this moment. our institute, a branch of moldova state university, occupies a renovated factory building. upstairs, it’s one endless corridor opening onto rooms painted buttermint hues. moldovan students take all of their classes together in groups. my afternoon group has sixteen women. they are sitting at their tables and yelling in russian, it always seems as if russian speakers are yelling. i enter with my clunky sling bag and flushed face. oh students! i sing out. take a deep breath! i am putting the students in a relaxed state. i pass out rectangles of white paper traced from an audio cassette case. let’s make a quilt of our expectations for the year. they draw a globe and talk about peace, a diamond ring and say they’re getting married, an airplane to take them out of moldova, a diploma for the end of their struggle. i sober up and am moved by their speeches. as the students walk to the front of the room and tape their quilt squares on a big poster, i can’t help but admire. they all do the european butt swish, a sexy walk they must be taught in the womb. it is a slight sway from side to side. wearing high heels, as most of them do, must help. you wear those cute clothes and you walk like a boy, nataly, a friend and former student, told me once. it is not flattering. she tries to show me how to do the walk in the dim hallway of the school, but i am made of metal, i am not fluid, i plod, she collapses in hysterics, she cannot breathe. even young moldovan girls, you can watch them saunter down stefan cel mare, the main street downtown. they glide, they sashay, they are not in a hurry because the world will wait for someone so full of grace. at lozanov’s suggestology research institute, beginning students attend classes for a month, two hours a day. for most of the lesson, the teacher reviews the previous day’s material and explains some new information. the suggestopedic session comes last. lozanov explained in his suggestology and outlines of suggestopedy that music, particularly baroque music with its close imitation of the heartbeat, is key to unlocking the subconscious. the teacher plays a musical recording of “an emotional nature,” enters the mood of the music, and then reads aloud the new words and translations in the mother tongue. this is not a sleep or hypnotic state: students follow along in their textbooks. after a few moments of solemn silence, the teacher repeats the material in a more relaxed, conversational tone and with music of a more “philosophical nature.” this time the students are not allowed to look in their textbooks but should listen, relax, and allow their minds to wander in fruitful distraction. at the end of the lesson, students leave in silence. though she is not a slim woman, nataly favors miniskirts and the deep v-neck. she carries a handbag with the word “flirt” sewn on one side. one of her eyes does not stay centered, so i focus on the one that does. she opens her throat wide to laugh when she hears something funny. obviously, i am very funny. when you come into the classroom, i get butterflies, nataly wrote once in a card she made for me. obviously, i am the most beautiful english teacher she has ever had, and she says she wants me to feel in my body what she feels in hers. nataly and her husband, vlad, find partners for three-ways on the internet. vlad is smaller than nataly, blond, a computer programmer. they speak russian. vlad understands english but asks nataly to translate sometimes. they both know their way around a kitchen. i have visited their flat in ciocana, on the outskirts of town, several times, and i never remember how to get there. each time nataly meets me in front of the fidesco supermarket. it is our ritual. i must like it, because every time i say i’m going to memorize her cat’s-cradle path around the gray apartment buildings, but i never do. i sit on a concrete step outside the market waiting for nataly. don’t sit there! she scolds when she finds me. you’ll freeze your ovaries! their apartment, on the fourth floor, is covered with nataly’s collages of half-dressed women. long sheets of white drawing paper with women’s faces sketched from cosmetics advertisements, their clothing a mosaic of ripped paper, ragged edges, gaps of white space between the folds of a skirt, a misshapen top hat. vlad supports nataly’s ambitions with me. it is a game we play. would you prefer foreplay or just sex? she asks. i prefer soup i say and dip the ladle in a white tureen. she laughs up to the ceiling. vlad cuts more bread. the big joke is now that i’m no longer her teacher, i have no excuse for delaying our torrid affair! nataly is a photographer and shows me lingerie pictures she’s taken of malasha, their most recent young playmate. she is striking: jeweled eyes, slender waist, breasts like ripe pears. maybe malasha has been photoshopped, or maybe she is in fact flawless. there are more words for beauty like this, but i can’t remember them. it will be years before bach. for now it’s the c major scale in two octaves, up and up, back and back, until my fingers memorize it. vasilii vasilivich, my guitar teacher, is a compact, middle-aged ukrainian man, not russian but ukrainian, he reminds me. i can’t keep up with his russian, and his romanian is as shaky as mine, but it’s what we’ve got. that, and the sheet music in my beginner’s book, and the guitar tablature like beads on an abacus. we break a sweat trying to figure out when to meet for our next lesson. usually i find him at the casa armata, the army building downtown. vasilii vasilivich winks at the woman who guards the keys. there is a large auditorium and long bleak hallways with cracking parquet floor and narrow red carpets. we have our lesson in a small closet of a room. the guitar feels clumsy, my hands like paws. i practice chord progressions, and vasilii vasilivich tells me my hand should jump on each chord, clean, see?, not wrap around it finger by finger, as though i can’t make up my mind. the hand jumps, he says. he takes the guitar. his stubby fingers flash in and out, chord to chord, like a convulsing spider. one two three four, c f g c. practice it times this week at home, he says. this does not calm my heart rate. i plunk twice through a short prelude in my textbook. ok, nice, he says, but now it should sound like music. following a suggestopedic session, students do little if any homework, no more than a cursory rereading of the day’s material before bed. with this method, some beginner students learn an average of new words a day. in other cases, some students learn more than words after a day-long lesson. in his book, lozanov claimed this was just a beginning, and projected that students could learn even words or more. an added benefit: at the completion of the day course, many students suffering from “neurotic complaints” experienced relief of their symptoms. in our introductory russian class, we get new names. call me nina. the teacher drills us on the alphabet. there are two letters for [sh] and i can’t tell the difference between them. they both look like bars of a gate, one has a barbed tail. the [zh] looks like a stylized spider with six legs. it is a lovely letter. the teacher holds up big flashcards to help us remember the letters. [yo] is a yoyo to mimic the sound, [ee] is a woman on a chair screaming because there’s a mouse! the flashcard for one of the [sh]s is a librarian, her bun knotted on top of her head, her index finger covering her mouth. the bun is attached to a string, and if you pulled it off her head the finger would jab the air, she would do the hustle to the strains of beethoven piped into the room. she would lighten up! how do you memorize the letters? our teacher asks. i tell her i light a candle, and sit in my quiet place, and visualize the letters on the back of my eyelids. it is a running ticker of letters. nina, you really have your shit together, says a student next to me. says the teacher: here’s a map of russia, in case you care. as in many moldovan apartments, at nataly and vlad’s the bathtub and sink sit in a separate room from the toilet. on the back of the toilet room door is a picture nataly cut from a magazine. it is a woman’s stiletto heel in the middle of a rounded, orange background. it is a black thong between two stately plump butt cheeks. it is a rorschach experience. while i dispatch my business, i see: a stiletto, a thong, a stiletto. before the beginning of the course each student is given a name that is used in the language he is going to study, wrote lozanov. he is also given a new biography. in this way, the students become actors and actresses. they are forbidden to talk about their real names and professions and, further, are not to ask each other questions about themselves. there is pleasure in scales, in the walk of my fingers up the neck of the guitar, the soothing repetition of their dance. i practice alone in my living room on the disabled pink brocade couch that slumps to one side, next to my table covered with a burgundy cloth and a stash of books, two uncomfortable floral chairs, a glassed-in balcony and clothesline, and beyond that the mangy white building opposite mine and a patch of sky. the guitar sleeps in a corner of the room. i don’t have a tv, so it’s the bugeye stereo or my own music on the guitar. i find chord progressions for easy songs and practice them in hopes of impressing my students. i play “el condor pasa,” i sing i’d rather be a hammer than a nail. i’d rather be a sparrow than a snail. in one of my morning conversation classes we’re working on stating preferences. would you rather learn a romance language or a slavic one? would you prefer to study or sleep? the song fits. i try to tune the guitar’s strings with the help of an orange plastic pitchpipe. i am the piper leading all of moldova’s students past the crumbling zoo at the edge of town, and out through the gates of the city. lozanov listed guidelines for teachers at the suggestology research institute. all the staff of the institute with whom the students come in contact should show or suggest: *confidence in the teachers and the method. *fastidiousness in teachers’ manners, dress and reactions. *maintenance of a high cultural level in the etudes and little plays which the students perform. alcoholic drinks are banned in the institute as is improper behavior and sexualization or misunderstood modernization of the etudes. *a solemn attitude toward the session. *a tactful attitude toward poor test papers, if there are any *maintenance of an enthusiastic emotional tone, without overplaying it. i write the cyrillic alphabet over and over. if you don’t write in cursive, russian people will think you’re retarded, our teacher says. i imagine the letters each with a different taste. the cursive m is my favorite. it tastes like honey. the cursive lowercase t also looks like an m, but you can tell a real m by the pronounced knob at the beginning of the penstroke. nataly and vlad invite me for dinner. oh, you don’t have to cook, i say. i mean it just as politeness. by the time i meet her at the supermarket, i’m running on fumes. what’s for dinner? i ask. she cackles. silly, you said i didn’t have to cook, so i didn’t cook. she winks. in the living room waits a cold bottle of champagne, and a box of chocolates. i eat enough chocolates to push me to the edge of pancreatic shock. nataly doesn’t drink, and she teases me that getting me drunk is all a part of her plan to seduce me! we nibble chocolates and watch music videos on tv. the sun goes down and the apartment turns green. moldovans are always trying to sex me up, people are always putting me in high-heeled shoes and scribbling on my face with eyeliner. nataly wants to give me a makeover, so i rest my head on a pillow in her lap while she smears my face with foundation, glitters my eyelids, lines my lips. i cannot say i find her unattractive. i still have too much sunday school in my head for adultery, though i wonder if i sleep with vlad too perhaps it would cancel out? in gold eyeshadow i look so hot we have to open a window. i wink a hyperextended eyelash at vlad, a lash so long it might reach out and molest him. vlad studies his glass of champagne. he has removed his gray sweater and sits in his white t-shirt. i feel that i know vlad quite well because i have seen photos of their vacations at mamaia, on romania’s black sea coast. in the photo, vlad wears a speedo, shimmery turquoise with thin beige stripes, an opulent second skin. lozanov: anticipation of the next phase, the session phase, arouses pleasant emotions in the students. as the teacher explains and deciphers new material, the teacher must suggest through his behavior that the assimilation of the new material has already begun and all is pleasant and easy. in one of the morning groups at the institute, there are two male students. viktor wears sweaters, some spread across him like garish landscapes. his spoken english is a little choppy, but he is diligent and makes progress. i ask the students to write in their journals about their first few days of class. the teachers are patient and good looking. my hopeness is that all will be fine in the near future, viktor writes. as part of his job, he produces the weather report for a local radio station. in his journal, a notebook with puppies on the front, he writes about his dysfunctional aquarium and the dire wild mushroom situation this year. the journal is a conversation between us, and in my comments i ask if there’s any hope for the forest mushrooms. next time he hands in his notebook, he assures me yes, mushroom situation has improved. one day after class viktor says i learn english all the life and still it is not so good. i rip off his synthetic sweater, the colors bleed like an apocalyptic sunset, and i throw his black boxy manpurse out the window. my unstoppable powers and the green afternoon light blind viktor into submission. with the light and tchaikovsky and the pulsing of our bodies, you’ll remember a thousand words for love, i whisper. it is the green light of desire, it is the green-eyed dragon of jealousy that will rip your sorry ass apart should you ever so much as lay an eye-mote on the toned yet ample backside of some secretary who works downtown in short skirts and heels and baroque, peekaboo tights. you watch her meaty hindquarters propel her frame onto the marshrutka, the white minibus that will carry her to a molting building where she will exchange her heels for slippers. she will tie back her hair and make chicken zeama and a cabbage salad for dinner for herself and her mother, with whom she shares the flat. you will want the secretary, viktor, as she warms whole cabbage leaves in a skillet, dips them in honey and flattens them on her mother’s naked back, covering the leaves with a plastic bag, wrapping her mother in a thick blanket, kissing the top of her unwashed head. but you can’t have her. i will hunt you, viktor, i will light candles to your sterility, may your bread always be stale, may you always miss the bus on rainy days. you will make no woman happy if not me. zhana, my stylist, does not understand my romanian very well, but she does understand my hair. your forehead is too big. you need bangs, she says. i know the word for “bangs,” as i know the word for “highlights,” because i looked them up before my appointment. i am crestfallen, my ungainly forehead hanging down. don’t worry, i have a big forehead too, she says, sweeping her bangs up with her free hand. a fine mist of hairspray pulsates in the large open room, young girls mingle with their hair curled or swept up or braided with flowers. a girl is in a hurry, zhana asks if i’d mind terribly if she styles her first. the girl is thin, her thin legs hold her up like an elegant giraffe. i leaf through russian women’s magazines, looking at the pictures. giraffe girl hands zhana an artificial rose. any time of day or night is suitable for suggestopedic lessons. in russian class, we dance on the tables, we wave our hands like monkeys. the letters appear before me, my own sort of protestant kabala, the letters get up and move around and they don’t spell “women’s shoes” or “hat” or tell me how to get through customs like the textbook does. we chant dialogs over and over. we learn the script. good afternoon! let’s get acquainted! my name is olga simonovna! what is your name? my name is jane! i am canadian! we waltz and whisper in each others’ ears what’s in our suitcases (magazines, computer games, dresses). in the dialog there are dresses in the suitcase. it’s funny when the boys say “dresses.” it hasn’t stopped being funny. i bring kolea, a guy i fancy, to dinner at nataly and vlad’s. i invite him on the spot, while we’re having a beer downtown, and i don’t call nataly in advance to tell her. what a surprise, that’s all she says. we sit in their small kitchen, where long thin windows overlook a courtyard and another grimy building. a padded bench at the table lines the wall and then cuts at an angle toward the window. vlad stirs a packet of spices into a pot of potatoes. pale yellow cabinets hulk over the sink. the soviet-era stove has knobs like a spaceship. kolea sits in the crook of the padded bench near the window, and i sit between him and nataly. vlad takes a chair opposite me. kolea is not left-handed, no one in this country is left-handed because it’s beaten out of them by the first grade. but he gestures with his fork in his left hand, and his right hand grabs my thigh under the table. i don’t know how nataly sees but she sees, and she giggles. for a while we all speak in english, but even at the risk of hurting my feelings, nataly interrogates kolea in russian and no one translates. they laugh. later that night, when i’m home alone, nataly calls me. her tone suggests breaking bad news or letting down gently. ok, what? i finally ask. nataly says, he just wants you for sex! irina petrovna, the vice-director of the institute where i teach, hosts a seminar at the state university about rhythmopedia, a technique she developed based on suggestopedia. irina petrovna is a blond tank in her s, and though i know she is happy to have a native english speaker on board, because she told me, i fear that one day she’ll run over me. my dear girl, she says, in polished english and a sing-song voice, discussing my students. you have to correct them more. at the seminar, irina petrovna shows a video of herself teaching a class. on the screen she is much younger, standing at the front of a long lecture hall. dima leans in to translate for me. we move to a nearby classroom and sit at individual carrels each with headphones and a small lamp with a green plastic shade and a lightbulb the size of a toe. the bulb has melted a bubble in my shade. some shades have been patched with tape, some just allowed to burn through. i sit between dima and ludmila. irina petrovna gives us each a photocopied paper with russian words in one column and english translations in the other. the papers are wrinkled, dog-eared. she will collect them at the end of our session to use them again. on the audio tape there’s a layer of vivaldi, and the faint pulse of a metronome to match our heartbeats. a woman’s voice reads english phrases and their russian translations three times. workers! the woman reads. vlad and ecaterina are scientific workers! this table belongs to ecaterina! the green lamp burns brighter and fades out in cycles. i already know the russian word for “work” because there’s often a sign on our xerox indicating it doesn’t. at a nearby café, over plates of salads, some of the younger teachers ask me what i remember from the presentation. workers! i shout. i stand up and salute. nicole, they say, you proud little soviet! kolea invites me to miracol, a summertime disco in the ciocana district. he hosts a popular morning radio show, vremea dingea, time is money, on hit fm. we pass a long blue swimming pool and a tent with video games. bartenders pour a streak of vodka along the edge of the bar and light it on fire to amuse themselves. kolea’s friend d.j. mars is on stage, the good times, they are rolling, the disco ball spins, red and yellow lights flash, a guy walks around with a video camera, a herd of giraffe girls, in high heels and swimsuits shrouded with flirty translucent sarongs, bust their moves. we’re people dancing. the guy with the camera throws us up on a huge screen. i would prefer not to see myself dancing, so i burrow into the crowd. if ever i saw myself dancing, i would never shake my american butt again. kolea removes his shirt, ties it around his waist. he is something of a celebrity. a girl asks if she can take a picture with him; her friend unfolds her phone. it’s the capital city, but it’s a small town, and kolea’s histrionics are hard to miss. already he envisions me ten pounds lighter, already he fashions a workout routine for me with the weights, which i ignore. those girls, he says with a glance to the giraffes, have even worse bodies than you do. in the institute, the heat is meager in winter. the students sit in their puffy down coats, or leather and fur. don’t you want your coat? they ask. i am worked up when i teach, i can’t sit still, i pace the aisle between their tables, i talk from one corner of the room and then the other. i’m writing on the board, i’m jumping up and down. over the hum of the fluorescent light the students chatter in groups, finishing up a list of questions. i tell them i have a surprise, and unveil the guitar from its white plastic “case,” the same bag in which vasilii vasilivich delivered it to me as though it were kilos of corn. i strum the strings, checking to see if we’re in tune. i pass out lyrics for “el condor pasa” and explain a little about my american lovers simon and garfunkel. we read the lyrics aloud, like a poem. the vocabulary is straightfoward, and once we clear up what exactly a sparrow is, i sing. my playing is abysmal. i’m nervous, my brain can see the chord patterns but my fingers don’t follow fast enough. the song sounded so much better in my apartment. my voice tries to hold us together. i look up for a second from my fingers on the strings. none of the students is staring at me. they are reading the lyrics. each one of them sings. portraits: looking over my shoulder at moldova rita she stretched my name to three syllables, nee-cole-ay, and when she took my hand to touch her face, i instinctively pulled away. she talked about her toothache in a confetti of russian, romanian and english, and she wanted to prove to me the swelling was gone. rita was my student for a week at the institute for continuing education before she dropped to a beginner class. other teachers warned me: one show of kindness and she'd push you to your limit. her blue eyes slightly sunken in their dark circles, the creases of her face showed she was on close terms with hard times. she was cagey, and she had nerve. she stopped me one day in the hall after class: could i find some money for her heating bill? her husband was sick, and her relatives were no help. i had no idea if her story was true, but it was hard for me to say no. though i worked less than my moldovan colleagues, i made more money. the dollar stretched in unimaginable ways. it did pirouettes at the currency exchange offices on every corner. later that week i gave rita an envelope, resigned that i might never see the cash again. one evening as i was leaving work she caught me again, near the stairwell, and asked me for help her with an assignment. her daughter, in primary school, watched us as though we were playing table tennis, her blue eyes tracing every move of the conversation. i wondered how much she understood. i helped rita with a couple of exercises, “come by” versus “come around,” but when it became clear that she wanted me to do the entire worksheet, i refused as graciously as i could, assuring her she was up to the task by herself. rita insisted she would pay me back, but she just needed more time: “you. three weeks. permit me.” yes, of course, and finally in july, just before i left, she met me on the busy corner in front of the gemini department store to hand me the cash, every bit of it. i could have made it a gift. surely she just borrowed the sum from someone else. but i was leaving, traveling west, and so surprised by the money that i took it. king lars lars is coming to dinner, with two moldovan friends. lars is the swedish language department for the whole country. he lives on stefan cel mare boulevard, the main street downtown, in an apartment right above the palmer lingerie shop. the shop’s logo, an illuminated green p with a crown, hangs just below lars’ kitchen window. i call him king lars. once i drank some water in that kitchen and looked at the tiny flashcards he’d scattered across his table: romanian infinitives and swedish kings. lars sat with a cup of nescafe, listened to the traffic of stefan cel mare, reviewed his lineages and translations. before dinner, one of the moldovan guests helps me in my kitchen. she insists that i give her a task. “i am a moldovan woman!” she says. “give me work!” usually i work alone but i like her and i’m moving slowly, so i let her peel the carrots. lars says “too many cooks spoil the soup,” by way of excusing himself from kitchen duty. the kitchen is cramped, the floor warps, there’s no kitchen sink, only a plugged up pipe where a sink should be. it is impossible not to have a crush on lars, his wire-rimmed glasses and his lilting voice. he’s on the skinny side, but i could fix that because i like to bake. we talk sometimes about the prolonged adolescence afforded us freewheeling westerners in moldova. lars is in his early s and his students are floored that he isn’t married. my students, the dean, the director of the institute where i teach all hint that i need to get busy in terms of my personal life: maybe you? will meet a moldovan man? and get married? and stay with us? in my living room, lars plays the cheap guitar i rent from my guitar teacher, vasili vasilivich. i announce that dinner is almost ready. i imitate as best i can the fumbling swedish chef from the muppet show. in response lars sings a swedish folk song, a tune full of oos and ohs. he says, “it must have been written by a phonetics teacher.” at the end of the night, the moldovan friends leave to catch their rutierra, a van better suited to hauling furniture than people. lines of rutierras circulate through the districts of the city. i kiss them goodbye. lars can afford a taxi, but after another drink decides to take the little bus, too. i walk outside with him, help him navigate the junky courtyard, the mangy gazebo with peeling shingles. stars peek out. the night is cool but not cold. lars has not yet met sylvia, his great moldovan love, so he is free to embrace me among the stray dogs and small plastic bags blowing like confused jellyfish around the ruts in the mud. i could swoon by the post office, locked up for the night, or by the drivers who smoke and wait under a tree. lars thanks me for dinner and gets on the bus. i wave goodbye and stand there, a big american weirdo, a little too long. mental illness corner there was blood on the steps of the rutierra, as the driver opened the door and pushed a drunk onto the pavement. there was blood down the faces of men who threatened each other with jagged broken bottles near the bus stop. i lived on the outskirts of chisinau, moldova's capital, and near the intersection of my street, independentei, and cuza voda was a bus stop where people talked to themselves, or slept on the bench. a guy cocked his head to his shoulder as though talking on an invisible cell phone. a woman in dusty, mismatched clothes looked me over only to huff and turn away when i smiled at her. musicians around the corner from my bus stop sprawled the piatsa, the open-air bazaar where vendors sold piles of tomatoes and apples, pyramids of canned corn and peas on tables underneath sagging sheets of plastic. one sunday morning as i passed through the garlic and parsley, i heard a boy singing folk songs over an accordion melody. the black- haired boy and the stooped old man with the accordion were dark-skinned roma, gypsies, tsigani. the boy warbled loudly to the wheezing accompaniment. as i paid for my small sack of garlic bulbs, the singing boy collected gifts in his bucket. into his bucket one vendor placed a beet, one an onion. dima i went to a movie with my colleague dmitrii at the country's only english- language cinema. he invited me for a coffee at his family's apartment, a couple of blocks away. i gave him a stainless steel thermos, which had been a gift to me months earlier from another american casting off her worldly goods. dmitrii, known as dima, behaved as though i were doing him a great favor, as though such a fine thermos would have been forever beyond his reach. his mother, wide as though another two women hid under her housecoat, served us nectarines, nescafe with chocolate liquor, and ice cream. dima's sister took photographs of us. the giant hulking cabinets in the living room occupied an entire wall. the cabinets held dishes, shot glasses, a bust of lenin, goofy stuffed animals, the kind won at fairs and arcades, and photos of family and french film stars. in one photo dima's sister wore a fox costume. in a poster-sized black and white print, dima as a chipper schoolchild stood at the blackboard. “hello, school!” was written in russian, with lenin's picture looking down. the blackboard shows the date as october , commemorating the russian revolution, though dima said it was really the th or th of october by the time the pictures were taken. as dima proudly showed me his books, i wished again that i could will myself to fall in love with him. our dima: smoothing his blond cowlick before class, running off to a badminton match, brushing crumbs of pastry or vinni puh dessert from his sweater, asking me questions about boxing, which i didn't care about, and american movies, which i did. his mother never sat down but beamed at us, moved from room to room with trays. she gave me a pair of crocheted slippers to keep as a souvenir of moldova. i marveled at their colors, bright red and blue. i couldn’t stop the little sing-song party in my head: slippers are red, slippers are blue... i wore them like a harlequin, delighted in their style, like doilies gone wild. james joyce i wanted to make cookies, so i navigated the maze of piatsa stalls covered with draped tarps, the lightbulbs on strings like at a county fair. it was early fall, it was a moment from “araby,” the stalls shutting down, most of them empty, the desperate search as the lights extinguished themselves and left cavernous halls in the dark. oh, for a packet of cocoa for my mocha cookies. i found vendors who had not yet closed up shop. “please, you have cacao?” i’d asked. the vendors stared at me, shook their heads no. that evening, when i recounted my quest for romanian-speaking friends, i learned that my pronunciation was off and i had wandered from vendor to vendor, seeking a small packet of shit. “for cookies!” i’d said, in romanian, to vendor after vendor. “a small packet of the shit! i need the shit for to bake!” alex and the interchangeable boys moldovan boys are all copies of the same boy, scrawny, wiry, years old, close- cropped hair. i can’t remember their names, or even distinguish the faces. except for alex. he’s in junior high, with light brown hair, and by the time i leave moldova he’s got a faint moustache. he addresses me in english whenever he sees me cross the junky courtyard shared by two molting apartment buildings. some of the interchangeable boys say hello. once in the entry way of my stairwell a boy spat out, as though the words were acid: jingle. bells. jingle. bells. “hello,” alex says. “where are you going?” it’s getting dark. he addresses me in front of a small pack of interchangeable boys sitting on the flaking green benches built at right angles. surely they must tease him for talking to me. i have come from the piatsa with a kilo each of potatoes and carrots. and from the supermarket: a block of tofu, “soy cheese” in the vernacular, and a bag of sour cream. “home. to make dinner. i live up there,” i say, pointing to the fourth floor with my index finger freed from the bag. “i know,” he says. lena it’s one thing to choose not to take communion, but it’s another thing to be denied it. it is like being locked out of your own house. lena, one of my moldovan students, invites me once to her church, a baptist church planted by british missionaries. aha, i think, if anyone will let me take communion, it’s the baptists. i was baptized when i was six years old. this was no wussy sprinkling but a full-on hold-your-nose dunk-you- backwards-and-raise-you-to-new-life baptism in the church’s cinderblock fellowship hall. i meet lena in the city’s ciocana district and we walk to a small, white building. most of the men sit on one side, separate from the women. the service is in russian. i speak dysfunctional romanian and have not studied russian at all. lena whispers translations in my ear. “you can’t take communion here,” she says to me. she shrugs. it’s a rule that adults must be baptized in their church in order to receive the bread and wine. my first thought: bunch of legalistic poopypants! i am being uncharitable. “lena, lenutchka,” i say, “it’s alright.” after the service, lena wants me to take photographs in the forest with some members of her church. one tall guy wears an anaphylactic zebra-print sweater. i’m in my caramel wool coat. i’ve lived in moldova for five months and already i’ve gained ten pounds, and there’s still the winter to come. lena has green eyes and a sweet round face. for a while she had an english- speaking boyfriend. she reads a lot of tolkien. her family is ukrainian and she wants to be a translator when she finishes her courses at our institute. her dad, a round happy man with a brown mustache, is the conductor of the band at the moldovan national circus. i think this must be the coolest job for any friend’s dad to have. lena promises some day they’ll take me to a show. at their flat, lena apologizes for the cold water and drafty rooms. her tiny bedroom is stuffed with pillows and bears. her mom serves me borscht and coltsunash, thumbnail-sized dumplings stuffed with potatoes, slathered with sour cream. mostly lena and i speak in english and she translates for her parents. her mom stares at me whenever i open my mouth. i am as fun as the circus. pasha pasha wears the pants his mother makes him. they fit his slim hips snug, the waist low, a slight flare at the bottom. i try on a pair and pose in front of his full-length mirror. pasha and i are the same height, but the back pockets of his pants flatten my ass into a baking tray for a toaster oven. i take the pants off and fold them on a chair. pasha was born in archangel. he is a radio d.j. on hit fm, which everyone pronounces “heat fm,” a russian language station in moldova. he has a shock of blond hair that artfully hangs over his eyes. he tosses his head back, flips the golden wing for emphasis. he smells like baking bread. i tell him this when i kiss behind his ear. “my grandfather, he’s still available, he smells like bread and honey,” pasha says. i like that by “available,” pasha means alive. pasha is fun and strange, and after he kisses me i want to squeegee my face. i’m leaving moldova in less than a month, after teaching for two years at a university across town. pasha works out every day. pasha says “don’t go back to america and get fat.” i say, “i’ll miss you, too.” i hang out at his apartment. a band called leningrad is on tv, with a video involving pale bumpy chicken carcasses lined up on beach towels, their legs moving in a can-can. the song repeats the word muzhik. “what is muzhik?” i ask. i learn new words: muzh, husband, muzhin, man, muzhik, manly man, moy muzhik, my manly man. i try to cook. “how do you know which faucet to use?” i ask from the kitchen. the taps are labeled, in english, “hot” and “hot.” pasha laughs and says, “you are the first person to notice.” pasha’s english is good. his father was a trade ambassador in the s for the soviet union and was stationed in the u.k. for part of pasha’s childhood. “english won’t be your bread,” pasha says, channeling his father, “but it will be your butter.” pasha tells me about the separate soviet school for expat kids, where their uniform included the red pioneer neckerchief. the school grounds butted up against an english school, the soviet kids separated from the british kids by a fence. “we’d wave,” pasha says, and i imagined a chain link fence, pasha in a gray shirt and red soviet kerchief, a pale blond little bird with a noble nose so outsize to his face the other kids called him “concorde,” his pudgy arm lifted in a wave to the english boys on the other side, with whom he could not go to school. lily, vlad and catyusha in a moldovan classroom, i once spied a poster divided in half: in one half, a tree stands strong and tall, and a boy sits at his desk, a red line drawn down his straight, straight spine. in the other half, a tree bows to the ground and a boy hunches over his books, his spine a red curve. i tried to stand straight, not to wilt in the heat, under a big leafy tree outside the cvin supermarket with a kilogram of peaches, waiting for lily. we peeled peaches and baked a crisp despite the heat, despite my kitchen that could not will itself to be clean. she stayed for three hours, and we ate and listened to music. lily had been my student, but now we were friends. lily had just defended her thesis, a comparison of russian translations of winnie the pooh, so it was a visit of celebration, too. “it's a pity you don't know russian,” she would say, not out of judgment but as though i had not yet visited a land she knew i would adore. not long before i left moldova, i visited lily at her apartment. vlad took charge of the cooking: fish. their daughter catherine, catya, catyusha, still young enough to run around the apartment without a shirt, leaned her belly on the window sill, calling out to her playmates in the alley between the apartment blocks. her feet dangled above the floor. lily reminded her not to fall on her head. after we ate together in the tiny kitchen, catherine slipped on a dress to play outside. we drank the very last of some uniquely bad wine. our apartment buildings, both in the city’s botanica district, were half an hour apart on foot. it was summer, people strolled down the sidewalks, flower vendors watched their wares in well-lit booths all night. i felt safe walking alone. i usually walked alone, but lily asked to join me halfway, to traian boulevard, a main thoroughfare. when i got up to leave, i realized i’d bled a big red strawberry on the white seat cover. i apologized and excused myself to the toilet. it was a flashback of my junior high fear—part health education, part horror movie, part sitcom—that one day i’d get up from my desk to work out a math problem on the board and realize too late that i’d bled some serious slapstick blood all over my seat and my backpack. in some twisted way it would be like my water had broken, but even more gross. that was always happening to pregnant women on tv, their water was breaking in some inconvenient place like an elevator. of course my entry through the gates of womanhood involved much less fanfare, but i didn’t know that before it happened, so i was free to worry about it for ages. i apologized again to lily and vlad. the rational particles of my brain said, sister, get yourself to the health center and figure out what’s the deal with this atomic period. the cheesy-metaphor lobes of my brain said, behold, your animal body marks its territory. look, your heart is breaking, and you just can’t hold it all. bessarabia besarabia noastra, our bessarabia, the moldovan man with three silver teeth tells me, tapping the window glass of the dingy rutierra carrying us from gura bicului back to the capital. he gestured to the green floodplain of the bic river, the grass pulled taut like the felt of a pool table on either side of the river. on a map, bessarabia spreads itself over current-day moldova like a gauzy paper dress pattern. both are marked by the dniester river to the east and the prut in the west, but bessarabia stretched down into the danube and the black sea, land now part of ukraine. bessarabia changed hands like a dull nicked coin. as part of the treaty of bucharest, ending the russo-turkish war in , the ottoman empire ceded the fertile swatch to the russians. it was then given back to romania, an “outpost of latinity,” after wwi, then taken again by russia and turned into an ssr. when the moldavian soviet socialist republic declared independence in , there was talk of reunification, plugging bessarabia back into “greater romania.” but the reunification didn’t happen, and in romania joined the european union, and that’s that. one of bessarabia’s biggest problems has been how to write its name. the orthography of bessarabia danced back and forth to the tunes belted out by ruling powers. bessarabia was a supple clay tablet, blank and ready for inscription. script after script pressed into the tablet, there was no way to erase the previous letters, you just had to push down harder with your own alphabet. you had to push down into the fertile dirt with your hand, a rock, a ploughshare, a spoon, a staff. the letters stacked on top of each other, the latin over the cyrillic over greek. someone was feeding the alphabets. caroline caroline took an hour to get ready. she scrunched her blond hair into elaborate waves and wore backless heels, a long, slinky skirt, and a chunky fake diamond ring. she smoked thin karelia cigarettes when her mom wasn’t around. when i first moved into her family’s house in chisinau, she walked me to the passport office, a few blocks away, where i had to register with the local police and get an anexa for my passport. it occurred to me that caroline wasn’t used to walking really anywhere. she called taxis, or her friends picked her up. after i moved out, her dad bought her a little greenbean peugeot. it was unfortunate that i turned out to be not as cool as caroline had hoped. doamna luda, her mother, made it clear to me that it was caroline’s whim to host an american. i lived with them for six months, before finding an apartment across town that was much closer to my university. caroline could be generous, a little bit, in her way. she invited me downtown to panipit, which was not a strip club but what my american friends called “the french place,” with a courtyard full of expats in summer. you could order quail. you could fondue. we drank beer while caroline smoked and waited for her friend veronica, the chatty one in the red gaucho pants. one night caroline wanted to call a taxi to go downtown and buy a new mobile phone because she had lost her old one. my parents had called from the states and the connection was pretty good. caroline asked if she could use the phone. she asked me to go with her. i said i was in for the night. i talked to my parents maybe once a month, and it was tricky to negotiate the seven-hour time difference. i told her to give me five minutes and explained to my parents that my caroline needed the phone. doamna luda scolded her for hurrying me off the phone when my parents had called from so far away, but it didn’t mean anything. “caroline should be more like you,” doamna luda would say, after caroline had taken an hour to smooth and perfume herself before going out. luda meant my pragmatism, my sensible gray unwrinkleable pants, my boy-short hair, my hiking boots, the frumpy messenger bag i carried to the university. luda repeated, flashing her wide smile at her shined, coiffed daughter, “caroline should be more like you.” more colors, more wings elaine's face smiles, like the moon. her bargain: all the romanian monasteries i want for one castle. to romania we travel from moldova, its neighbor. elaine teaches health education in sculeni, a border village, and i work in chisinau, the capital. many hands have drawn the boundaries in this part of the world. romania once included most of present-day moldova, and the country still has a moldavia region, a place of confluence, where the russian, habsburg, and ottoman empires waxed and waned. today romania's shape suggests a fish as the map swims on the television screen for the weather report. romania is not a real place but a beat-up cardboard diorama full of vampires, gypsies, goats and orphans, superstitions like cobwebs in all corners, a scrim of communism throwing shadows. it is a nation molting off the dead skin of past misrule, a nation in transition. of course, so is our moldova. compared with moldova, though, romania glitters. and this is more than metaphor. from a night black without street lamps in giurgiulesti, moldova's southernmost village, romania glows from across the danube delta like an oasis of light. in late june, elaine and i leave moldova from the bus station in chisinau. the autogara is a storm without an eye, no calm place in that swirl of exhaust fumes and people, plastic bags and boxes heading back to the village. in questionable urban planning, the autogara nudges against the piatsa centrala, the largest outdoor market in the country. vendors display housecoats like loud velour flags with zippers down the front. they stack plastic clocks, boxes of baby chicks and flats of eggs. men in fake leather jackets lug dollies piled with bags of vegetables or laundry soap. on the side of the market near the hotel meridian, acrylic blankets flutter in bright colors and animal prints. the first time i navigated the gara on my own, the directions i’d been given didn't make much sense. i called my boss for help. you will see many carpets, she said, as though this were the crucial clarification. the huge market throbs like a clogged, cacophonous heart. the alley between the piatsa and the gara clots all day. on the gara side of the street, men, women in headscarves, young girls in tight jeans and high heels wait for their rides. they stand at tables, drinking soda or beer, eating ice cream. techno music blares from a kiosk selling audio cassettes. nearby a woman with a crown of dark hair, wearing something like a sports bra and a breezy skirt, sways her hips to music from a stereo. a small crowd forms around her, glued to her moves. elaine stays in my apartment sometimes when she travels to the capital. she brings me tiny packets of miso soup mix her mom sends her from california. elaine is and has never been on a date. she has no agenda for our trip except a castle. that i have made plans with a person even more passive than i am leaves me in the awkward position of being in charge. i want: churches, nuns, angels. to be moved. to wake up from a monastery bunk and watch beatific orthodox nuns do calisthenics in a courtyard, to hike from the painted walls of the monasteries' churches into cathedrals of trees in the forest, buttressed with pine and light. i want to explore on my own, but i’m also afraid i’ll miss something; i want a guide to tell me what i’m seeing, to make sure i catch every drop of meaning. on this trip i want everything planned; i want everything spontaneous. this is my piscean way. at the end of the zodiac, pisces bears all the wisdom and failures of the entire cycle. it’s a lot to sift through. i am two fish, panic and serendipity, swimming in opposing directions, facing each other, opening and closing their mouths. what are you saying? i ask the fish. o, they say. it is their refrain. o o o o. i try to count the os like the chimes handed down from a clock. the fish turn in their circle like a compass, a globe, the ever constant, all embracing, giving away nothing o. zero, the stopwatch before the race, before time gets invented, before the universe has nudged its odometer. the o that divides anything back into itself. with the o racket echoing in my head, i forget that elaine and i speak some romanian. elaine speaks so well she can teach sixth graders, in romanian, to brush their teeth and stay away from cigarettes. i panic that we won’t see everything, forgetting that of course we won’t see everything, and rather than wait into our old age for public transportation, we hire a car and driver in suceava to take us to some of the bukovina monasteries. this is a bad idea. the pace is too fast. the colors blur together. every church is an overwhelming feast. i can’t hope to taste it all. ciprian, a young skinny guy with a dark buzz cut and fake leather jacket, hangs out at the tourism office. ciprian is also a bad idea. i want to enjoy the churches for myself; we can ask nuns or latch on to a tour group if we suffer desperate questions. and yet. i like someone whispering facts, even disjointed, jagged, questionable facts in my ear. we need a guide, of course we need a guide, and i inquire, shyly, might he be available to go with us? in the car, ciprian plays manele, turbo-folk with a strong bass line and relentless repetition. it is a polarizing force: either you want to bellydance like a snake or lunge for aspirin. manele unfurls its tremolos. ciprian chatters. we pass farmed fields, tracts with alice in wonderland stripes, haystacks like giant pastries with poles sticking out at odd angles, like something on an appetizer tray. a pig pokes its snout from the back of a horse-drawn carutsa. it is when the edge of the carpathian mountains rise into view that my heart pounds faster than the manele. music switches on in my head, a celestial aaaah, as a halo of light pours through the sieve of the sky. another curve in the road and the mountains drop out of sight for a moment. go back! but i'm sure the driver can’t hear me over the quivering riffs and stairstepping bass. the carpathian mountains cover almost a third of romania's land area, and they pull me into their orbit as we skirt transylvania. i gaze at these thickly forested hills so different from anything in moldova, even its prized codru, the national forest. although i regret my decision to hire this car, i can’t berate myself with my whole brain. ah, say the mountains, an angel choir's ah, alpha and omega, the first and last syllables of alleluia. the pointed a of the forest's ah mimes the peaked tree tops, those stately, unfathomable trees. ciprian dotes on elaine, who is petite and more sociable. i scribble in my notebook. all day long i ask clarifying questions of ciprian, noting dates and names i will probably never need again but who knows? my whole existence is a collection of things i might or might not use again, a gamble: what’s a bargain, and what’s dead weight, ready to be cast overboard? professor, you are writing a book? he asks. winks. although its forests gather pine, birch, fir, and poplar, bukovina takes its name from its beech wood trees. stefan cel mare, stefan the great, a national hero and religious saint, defended this land against the ottoman empire from to . he and his son, petru rares, built monasteries in bukovina both as fortresses, their walls and towers still standing, and as monuments for their victories. frescoes of biblical scenes with a military flourish gave illiterate soldiers and worshippers something instructive to look at. the land fell anyway, under rares’ watch, to ottoman rule. these monasteries and their painted churches have survived shifts in boundaries and rulers, and centuries of weather. they are praised not least for their paint. no one has successfully copied the formula. robert kaplan, in his book balkan ghosts, credits the paints' staying power to pure dyes: madder for red, cobalt and lapis lazuli for blue, sulfur for yellow. some say the paint contains cheese, and its butterfat keeps the color. these churches also attract the eye with their shape. as the moldavia region has witnessed overlapping cultures, so the churches themselves blend east and west, and gothic and byzantine architectural styles. for kaplan, the fan-shaped roof, extending far out over the walls to cover the paintings from the rain, suggested the protective intimacy of a peasant's home. the peaked roofs look like dark party hats. at voronet monastery, touted in one guide as the “sixtine chapel of the east” and known for its distinct blue, a school group shuffles on the grounds. the rickrack of scaffolding wraps a slice of building under renovation. ciprian leads us through the church's pronaos, the first of its three rooms, this one painted according to the church calendar, a block for each day. scenes of christ's passion line the altar room, the innermost space, including peter's denial of christ. christ's prophecy in ciprian's words: you will drop me three times until the chicken will sing. i cannot dislike him. outside, near the top of the last judgment scene, angels fold the ends of the zodiac, rolling up time like a picnic blanket. a zodiac on a church seems incongruous, something occult grafted onto something christian, but ciprian explains it as a symbol of eternity over which god presides: jesus is the center of all time. the last judgment includes a wasteland scene of souls bundled like babies. fire rains. angels blow horns. fish, bears, lions, tigers, a melancholy elephant bring bones of the dead for the final reckoning, a host of animals coughing up their snacks. a kitten sharpens her claws near our feet while all the fire of judgment pours into an elephant's mouth. the deer has nothing to return because in the romanian folklore it stands for innocence, notes one travel guide. this last judgment is processed in a characteristic moldova way: the souls carried to heaven are wrapped in moldova's towels, while the souls doomed to the fire of gehenna wear the turbans of the turks, the moldova's enemies. judgment is not announced by a trumpet but a bucium, a moldovan folk wind instrument. the frescoes show the bible, but a bible as seen through th century moldovan eyes. god, or his word, minted in one's own image. the churches i know exalt words not pictures. orthodox churches blindside me with their gold, their paintings and colors. red rules the moldovitsa monastery. we enter the grounds and pass a nun with aviator glasses. in the altar room, lined with scenes of christ, i am knocked down by the faces. these are old, open faces. men cast lots for christ's robe, a man in red waves scissors, threatening the integrity of the garment, to cut it to bits. other men with long faces stare, dice resting by a man wearing what looks like a dwarf hat. there is no avoiding the crucifixion: the lifting of christ's limp body off the cross, his halo intact, blood leaking down his feet. a lanky man with tools ready to pluck the nails from his flesh. two women and an old man hover above christ's swaddled form at the burial. a woman in red kisses his cheek. the other woman stands with hands upraised in a gesture of what will we do? i hear mmmmm like a buzz of flies in the altar room, but only in retrospect do i think of emily dickinson. god the whitehaired father, the son, and the dove preside over the middle of the iconostasis, the border beyond which only male servants of the orthodox church may tread. outside the church, two wings of an altar hold candles for the morti, those who have died, and a big middle section for the vii, the living. one small candle burns. next to the altar a sign admonishes us to pastrati curatenie, keep it clean. ciprian fawns on us and struggles with irregular verbs. romanian offers many more words for devils than angels. my moldovan friend rodica, a teacher, easily rattles off levels of devils: diavol, demon, satana, beelzebub, drac, naiba, necuratul, bata-l crucea (“let the cross beat him”), bata-l toaca (“let the stick that announces ceremonies in church beat him”), duca-se pe pustii (“let him go to some uninhabited places or desert”). angel words can't compete. superstition enriches the infernal vocabulary; it's less risky to speak of the devil indirectly, rodica says, and even in the same breath as the cross (like bata-l crucea). uttering the word dracul, devil, can bring his power on you; after saying the word or even hearing it, cross yourself three times, to be safe. with angels it’s easy, rodica explains. you can say 'angel' all day long and nothing will happen to you. on the walls of sucevitsa monastery, deep in the carpathians, mary and jesus wear crowns. not normal, ciprian says, pointing to the crowns. russian orthodoxy, not romanian, stresses royalty. the ladder of saint john from sinai cuts a decrescendo across one side of the church. it is a ladder of thirty rungs, and a crown waits at the highest step. some mortals fall headlong off the ladder, arms and legs askew. demons dance with open arms. things lose form, plunging into the void. on this wall, the angel space and demon space may be equal, but the arrangement of angels is striking. despite their semantic disadvantage, they rule. angels are a more orderly force, their yellow halos like astronaut helmets bubbled on their heads, the arpeggios of their cream-tipped wings dyed deep red, light green, dark blue. some angels carry what look like prosoape, long white traditional cloths often embroidered with flowers. in moldovan and romanian homes these cloths garland rooms, draped around icons in corners. they appear at weddings, around the necks of the nanasi, the godparents of the bride and groom, or around wreaths of bread big as truck tires. i can't stop looking at the ladder. monastery walls surround us, as the carpathians surround the walls. i want to stay here, but i don’t ask the nuns if it’s possible; the fear fish in my nature says we'd be stranded, though there are buses and taxis and someone's got to be heading to town eventually. the colors mesmerize, but i break my own trance. ciprian is in a hurry, our time clicking fast. a woman circles sucevitsa monastery beating a wooden plank the size of a cutting board with a toaca. she calls to prayer those with ears to hear. another nun climbs into a red opel and drives away. near the town of raudati, a man sleeps in a flowerbed by the sidewalk. we stop at a pottery factory. in the studio a lonely boy throws black clay, spins it into ashtrays, while three blank women look on. elaine and i browse the shelves of vases and knickknacks, but i don't want to weigh myself down. i know i need my feet on the ground. i need to move at the speed of nuns in a courtyard: walking. augustine’s words give off the o of an echo, solvitur ambulando: it is solved by walking. in the carpathians, i feel girded with sound like the vibrations of a singing bowl, a glorious tinnitus that i can’t and don’t want to shake. as we leave the mountains behind, a heaviness descends. i can’t breathe. in those mountains i felt what i came here for, and i’m not ready to let go. this delayed reaction isn’t new for me. i often feel my compass spinning when i travel. not only am i disoriented in time and place and language, but i feel aimless until i trip over a touchstone—an image, a view, a plate of food, a joke—that cries out ah, clumsy pilgrim! this is why you’re here! i decide we should sleep surrounded by these mountains, not in a hostel back in suceava. in true pisces fashion, we’ll face the way we came. i ask the driver and ciprian to take us back to voronet. once we change direction, the right pitch sings inside me. i feel so fed by bukovina’s colors that i can even spare some generosity, a little light, for myself. in fact, i’m on a self-affirmation roll, something i never bargain for. there are many ways to see these monasteries, besides zipping past in a hired car or hitchhiking and camping for weeks in the forest, i tell myself. each path can be beautiful, i say, giving myself a high five. at the gate of voronet, a whitehaired woman takes my arm and leads me to her two-room house around the corner where elaine and i can stay for , lei, less than four dollars. doamna elena’s place is small and old-lady musty with a wooden outhouse in the yard. elaine and i drop our bags and head down the hill to find some dinner. the dark green night is brisk, even in june. i wear my one sweater and my sandals, the only shoes i brought. i guess i was feeling optimistic when we left chisinau, or not thinking of mountain weather while sitting all summer like a little cake in moldova’s easy-bake oven. at : , when we return to doamna elena's, she is already in her bed in the front room, the room with the stove, pots, pans, and dirty dishes. she is laid out as though waiting for the great o of death, but she rouses at our entrance, pours water into a large bowl for us to wash our faces and hands. elena’s walls sprout icons in their corners. a fanta poster smiles down on us from the ceiling. prosoape butterfly along the walls. identical prints of the last supper watch us like two eyes in a strange head. elaine and i whisper, trying not to disturb elena, whose room is not separated from ours by a door. this place makes me think about doubles: the two opposing yet identical fish in my nature, and their isometric pull. elaine and elena, one whitehaired and bent with time, one dark-haired and fresh-faced, ready to race her students across the courtyard after class. those two last suppers, that table spread before two sets of disciples. the dual familiar and estranged feelings i have about the landscape: i was shaped by mountains, but not these mountains, and by churches, though not these churches. the next day elaine and i wear the same clothes as the day before. we have seen the humor monastery briefly with ciprian, of course, but we haven’t seen it from voronet, through the small town of gura humorului, and up the hill. though humor and its monastery are pronounced oo-mor, humor would be a fitting name for our destination if i were of a more allegorical turn of mind. where’s your sense of oo-mor? i ask myself. lighten up, sister, i say. you can’t take yourself too seriously, kiddo, not in sandals like that. elaine and i are quiet on the five-kilometer walk. we dodge some hail and fail to hitch a ride the rest of the way. we console ourselves with tiny jam-filled croissants from an alimentara. a muddy white dog decides to join our pack. the weather conforms to a made-for-tv-movie version of our day: the clouds part at the monastery as we finish our climb. on rocks we look at roses and the streaked church walls. we sun ourselves like snakes. walking jogs my thinking about accepting the backlash of beauty. i remember that everything has a price, and the surrender to something so marvelous, so powerful to bring me out of mind—a meaning and effect of “ecstatic”—also bears the shadow side of reckoning with my limits. who told me i’d see everything? who would expect that? accept the limits. enjoy the gifts. that’s what this place tells me. give thanks you have eyes to see. after elaine and i dry out, we head to the train station at gura humorului. three boys on bikes pass us, ride faster then lag behind, keep us in sight. they address us as young people, not formally. elaine is accustomed to dealing with kids. why do you come here? the boys ask. it's beautiful, we answer. you should come to america, i say, for no reason. will you give us your address? asks one. a boy not much younger than my own brother makes a special effort to keep up with me and introduces himself as nicushor. i give him and his friends each a piece of gum. do you have any money? nicushor asks. not much. he wants to know what an operation in america would cost for his blind sister. do i know anyone who can help? i tell him i’ll try to find something, but he should keep asking around. i take his address. and please could we give him some money for ice cream? i say no. i don’t know why i say no. even if it’s a scam, even if he isn't a kind boy looking out for his blind sister, so what? ice cream is a gamble a traveler can take. even a day of walking can’t solve everything for me. walking has two sides, too: it can generate greater awareness and compassion, or at least point to a place like a dry riverbed where compassion might flow one day. but walking also calls up the crabby parts of me and makes me look at them, walk with them like embarassing companions who pick their noses and complain loudly about everything. maybe the idea is that in looking at those shady parts, i also have to give them a hug, hug them like the kid who acts out not because she is super evil but because she feels she isn’t being heard. i hear you, kid, i’m supposed to say. i love you, kid. but in fact, i just want to be magically transported to sinaia without waiting for the train or losing a night's sleep in the jaundiced light of the transfer station. i say no to the ice cream, and nicushor disappears. i must already feel guilty for telling him i'll try to find information for his sister, knowing i probably won't. weeks later i do make a couple of half-hearted efforts and then choose to forget about it. ashamed of my two faces, i don't want to look at his young one. i want him to go away. i don’t know what, in those moments, turned my heart to stone. sinaia, a ski resort town in the prahova valley named for mount sinai, has a monastery dating from the th century and a castle used as a royal palace and later a retreat for ceausescu's communists. i see my breath as i climb, still in sandals, up the station steps. in the morning chill, vendors line the margins on the paved walk to the castle. peles castle emerges with its german renaissance hulk like a movie set. we buy a roof-shingle-size piece of susan, sticky homemade granola of sesame seeds, honey and the thick, tongue-numbing aftertaste of sunflower oil. i buy a small plastic cup of raspberries. a man sells boomerang toys, flicking them in the air and catching them, while a black and white rabbit on a leash sniffs around his table, attracting customers. vendors offer hunks of quartz, rugs, handmade doilies, pokemon purses, and snow globes, including one with a scene of the last supper filled with colored beads that give the icon a jimmy buffett flavor. i consider buying this snow globe, the one with its jesus with a face like an unbaked pie, blurred past the normal edges of a face. i want to trim his excess crust. i take elaine’s picture with peles castle in the background, so we have proof we’ve seen something. our afternoon train from sinaia to bucharest runs hot and slow. there is no question of leaving windows open on both sides of our compartment because of the curent, the perilous crossbreeze that gets blamed for earaches, colds, stiff necks, and muscle deformation. most babies and small children wear hats and bonnets, even into the warm days of late spring or summer. moldovans are aggressive bundlers, their babies like bright, stiff marshmallows. rodica explained to me once in ominous tones: if the air that circulates is capable of shutting violently doors and windows, imagine what it can do to your internal ears and throat. people swelter. the window across from our compartment slides down about four inches but requires someone to hold it in place. i prop it open with my body, desperate for air. standing, breathing, i am attacked by sunflowers. at times their yellow blurs unbroken for miles, dizzying, the motion nauseating like a carnival ride. elaine and i have one more day of walking in bucharest before our train back to moldova. elaine has no preference so i set out to find the church of bucur, the namesake shepherd of the city as well as a word for joy. with our map we walk among the fountains of bulevardul unirii, then the crooked elbows of side streets, looking for this church. we stop at a restaurant and ask a cook but cannot get our bearings as to how we, two people, relate to the uncaring lines and squares on a white piece of paper. in its alleys the city is more under construction, dusty, cracked into pieces than the bulevardul unirii suggests with its cavalcade of billboards and grand buildings modeled on the champs elysees. a truck with several workers lounging in its bed passes us, two girls with question marks where our faces used to be. i do not grieve that we don’t find the church, though we had no trouble finding the multiplex cinema or the pizza hut. i don’t hear the angelic ah or ringing o, just the beat of a sledgehammer busting up the sidewalk, eating it out from under us. i am a lousy mystic. my flesh is still here; it hasn’t burned off. but there’s a pull to the holy, like the pull to the strange. it bends me to monastery’s simple clock of prayers, to its colors. there is nothing quite like these colors where i come from. they are obligate. they do not translate. they make me believe i can be baptized by color, made pure by color, not only by water or fire. they say it is so mama nina’s racitura congealed in the fridge, waiting for easter. the dish’s name is related to the romanian rece, cold, and the first syllable sounds like “retch,” which more or less described my response. for racitura, nina boiled a cleaned chicken, which was then disassembled and arranged on three or four small platters. then the broth was poured around black-red knobs of kidney, the brittle spread of toes, the neck sheathed in tender flesh. racitura was always a hit at parties. the organs and appendages vanished. guests spooned up cold blobs of broth like molten light. racitura was the second most disturbing thing i ever saw in nina’s kitchen. the most disturbing thing was back in the days of the old freezer, which i opened once to find an intact pig’s head. the pig’s head wasn’t wrapped in plastic or posing in a tupperware box. it was just there, looking blankly from its icy lair towards the white wall behind me. wisps of frost formed an aura or halo helmet around the pig’s head. the dead pig was not distressed. he looked good. he seemed peaceful. the pig currently living in nina’s backyard was named shashlik, a russian word for barbecue. i wondered what this pig’s name had been. i wondered what the head was for. perhaps it had talismanic powers to ward off evil freezer spirits. possibly it featured in some moldovan proverb i hadn’t learned yet: pig’s head in freezer, food all winter, or a frozen pig’s head always speaks truth. perhaps it was a party trick (nina asks dinner guest nearest the freezer to hand her the ice cream. guest opens freezer. guest: aaaah! family explodes, nina weeps with laughter). maybe this pig’s head was remarkable only to me because everyone in the village had their own pig’s head propped next to the frozen corn. this was my third easter with my host family in mitoc, a small village in moldova. before i moved to chisinau, the capital, for my peace corps assignment, i’d lived in mitoc for a few weeks of language training, and i returned there on holidays. by now i knew the routine. i slept a little after dinner, then at : my host brother mihai opened the door and called to me from the hallway : are you going? i brushed my teeth and dug out my scarf. nina and natasha, my host sister, had cooked all day. natasha was already asleep, but nina arranged the food in the basket to be blessed: small patties of fried pork, smoked duck, baked and herbed cuts of lamb, miel, a word i always confused with miere, honey. she stacked wedges of cozonac, a sweetbread with golden raisins and a sugary glaze, and pasca, a bread braided around pockets of egg and sheep cheese. nina polished the eggs, all dyed red, with animal fat so they would shine in the candlelight. i often saw red in the village: the bobochi, baby ducks daubed with thumbprints of red paint, or a cow with a red tassel in its forelock, or babies with red strings around their wrists or ankles. why red? i asked. nina explained that it was a color of protection. later i learned that in russian, which is spoken along with romanian in moldova, a word for “red” is also an archaic word for “beauty”; moscow’s red square is named for its splendor, not the color of its bricks. iasha, my host dad, carried nina’s basket. by the time he, mihai, and i reached the church, the faithful had already marched around it three times and gathered inside. the choir, mostly women in white frilly headscarves, sang the liturgy like a run-down cassette player, stretching out the sounds. the melody line of hristos a inviat, christ is risen, reached its highest note at the “at” of “inviat,” then stairstepped down into something about christ conquering moarta, death. i stood near the back of the church in my leopard-print headscarf. i kept an eye on nina’s basket parked in the foyer, checking on it as though there were a baby inside. a heavy older woman leaned forward from her wooden stool and poked my wrist. nu se poate–you can’t do that, she said. my hands wanted my pockets. i folded my hands in front of me, lest they fall to other mischief. mihai shuffled in and out of the church. he had lots of people to talk to; he was a ninth grader at the village school and a dj at the nearby discotec, marked by its unequivocal “disco bar” sign. nina worked three nights a week at the disco’s adjacent store in addition to a part-time bookkeeping job at the mayor’s office. she sold vodka and cognac by the shot or bottle, and beer, soda, juice, boxes of wrapped candies, blocks of butter, and whole fish shining silver and gold from a white plate in the case. the orthodox service was a radical shift for a good protestant girl like me. everyone stood except the old and infirm, who took the small stools along the periphery. the church had no linear pews or orderly aisles. it did have a convection current of worshippers kissing icons, passing candles and money back and forth to the little stand in the corner. as in the markets or on the bus, in church there’s a high tolerance for pushing. moldova is a culture of shared space, of common rooms that become bedrooms, full of transformer furniture (sofa and armchair by day, beds for three people by night. more than meets the eye!). i loved my pockets and i loved my space. isn’t it too much space? my university students asked when they visited my apartment for a class party. it was a big place: three rooms, one of which my landlady claimed for storage, a kitchen and two large balconies. but too much space? hadn’t i taught them any better than this? the question was absurd. hello, are you joking? i’m american, i reminded them. there’s no such thing as too much space. toward the end of the easter vigil the priest repeated three times hristos a inviat. each time we answered him adverat ca-a inviat, indeed he is risen. for forty days after easter, this exchange replaced the usual buna zuia greeting in the village. the assurance of adverat ca-a inviat also called to mind amen, which simply affirms “so be it” or “it is so.” it also made me think of the absence of alleluia in the episcopalian liturgy during lent, and its magnificent reappearing at easter. throughout the easter season it’s magnified into a double alleluia: alleluia, alleluia, and those alleluias explode with the force of pent-up blooms. every easter i find my mouth has missed the shape of the word, the workout of all those vowels. alleluia is a word that asks to be sung, like the nasal “n” at the end of amen, a consonant behaving like a vowel that can stretch as far as you have breath to sing it. iasha, mihai and i moved outside for the end of the service, lining up along the path from the front gate to the driveway behind the church. many more people stood with their baskets and candles, waiting for a blessing, than could have possibly fit in the sanctuary. we lit up the yard like an airport runway. the whole village was in on this. at a.m., there was a hushed busyness, not a somber wait. the mourning was over. christ was already back. people chatted. christ is risen, said one. true, he is risen, answered another. i recognized candlelit faces in the crowd, a gallery of faces from my first summer in moldova, including nina’s friend with the mentally disabled daughter. this woman with frizzled brown hair and a gold front tooth, who was probably in her late thirties but looked older, led her teenage daughter by the arm like a suitor, gently guiding her through the press of bodies as though they were headed for a cotillion instead of waiting for the priest. the girl wore a thin dress and house slippers. her eyes crossed. she had freckles and was quiet. i had seen the mother and daughter once in nina’s kitchen that first summer, when i came home from my romanian language class. in peace corps speak, i was to begin “self-directed time,” practicing my verb conjugations; in romanian, i fell into a pui de somn, literally a “chick of sleep,” the etymology of which i never really got a handle on. i greeted the mother and daughter and sat at the table, while nina made me a snack of fried potatoes and some compot, the boiled fruit and sugar drink she kept in big jars in the cellar and called moldovan pepsi. small piles of women’s and children’s clothing lay on a nearby rug. it wasn’t clear to me whether the clothes were being sold or given, or whether they belonged to nina or this woman. the freckled girl stared at my glasses, which were a rare sight. outside the mitoc church, candles gave up their pixels of light. the night was not warm even at the end of april, and my dingy camel-colored coat got wet in the light rain. iasha, trained as an engineer, flopped a piece of plastic over the open basket so the food would stay dry and the candles wouldn’t set the whole thing on fire. i felt awkwardly proud to be with them: this dad who was not my dad, the brother not my brother, the church not my church. the priest in his white brocade vestments made the rounds with an older man who carried a bucket of water. into the bucket the priest dipped a broom of the dried flowers of busuioc, sweet basil; every flick spattered us with sweet-smelling water. mihai and i joked that we were not very faithful. we were like characters in a parable who were not big-time evil but just kind of dopey and inattentive, because our candles blew out at the easiest breeze. we kept lighting them from iasha’s steady flame. we cupped our flickering candles in our palms, we made little hand-caves, but the wind snuffed mine out again just as we passed through the church gate and headed home. after that i had to imagine its light. arabic inscriptions and pseudo-inscriptions in italian art otto-friedrich-universität bamberg arabic inscriptions and pseudo- inscriptions in italian art _____________ ennio g. napolitano acknowledgements i would like to give a heartfelt special thanks to professor lorenz korn for guiding and supporting me over the years. he patiently allowed me to explore and learn from my mistakes. i also thank the gerda henkel stiftung for the initial funding of the project. i will forever be thankful to vincenza grassi for being persistent and encouraging, for her priceless help, and for sharing with me her kindness and knowledge. my gratitude is also extended to rosamond mack for her scientific advice and many insightful discussions and suggestions. i thank all the curators and staff of the museums who allowed me to examine the collections and collected data for my ph.d. thesis. i also thank my friend francesco amato for providing support and friendship that i needed. of course, no acknowledgments would be complete without giving thanks to my family: maria, pasquale, giuseppe, riccardo, gianfranco and saverio for the support, and constant encouragement they gave me over the years. abbreviations dai= the journal of dar al-athar al-islamiyyah mhj= the medieval history journal dop= dumbarton oaks papers raa= revue des arts asiatiques zdmg = zeitschrift der deutschen morgenländischen gesellschaft ei= encyclopaedia of islam bika= beiträge zur islamischen kunst und archäologie rei= revue des études islamiques res= anthropology and aesthetics note on transcription all transliteration in this study follows the encyclopaedia islamica system for arabic letters. contents ______________________________________________ abbreviations note on transcription introduction chapter : annotated bibliography and state of art. open questions chapter : historical outline . islamicate artefacts in the late middle ages and renaissance: trade, gifts and pillage . artistic patronage in italian seigniorial courts chapter : repertoire of inscriptions . early period . . introduction . . the twelfth and thirteenth centuries . . summary . the fourteenth century . . introduction . . early-trecento artists . . . segna di buonaventura . . . giotto . . giotto’s school . . . florence . . . lombardy . . . naples . . the sienese school . . . the followers of duccio . . . simone martini . . . the lorenzettis . . pisa . . venice . . summary . the fifteenth century . . introduction . . international gothic . . . gentile da fabriano . . . pisanello urn: urn:nbn:de:bvb: -opus - doi: https://doi.org/ . /irbo- . . . sienese artists . . early renaissance . . . fra angelico . . . others florentine painters . . . venetian school . . . cima da conegliano . . pseudo-latin and encrypted latin inscriptions . . inscriptions on carpets . . summary . last period . . introduction . . last evidence of arabic script . . pseudo-latin and encrypted latin inscriptions . . carpet inscriptions . . summary conclusions bibliography abbreviations dai= the journal of dar al-athar al-islamiyyah mhj= the medieval history journal dop= dumbarton oaks papers raa= revue des arts asiatiques zdmg = zeitschrift der deutschen morgenländischen gesellschaft ei= encyclopaedia of islam bika= beiträge zur islamischen kunst und archäologie rei= revue des études islamiques res= anthropology and aesthetics note on transcription all transliteration in this study follows the encyclopaedia islamica system for arabic letters. introduction art historians and archaeologists dealing with the interaction between the islamic world and latin west during the middle ages face problems that are related to the meaning and role played by islamic artefacts in cross-cultural exchange, beyond the mere transfer of goods. the gist of the present study is the transmission of islamic epigraphic patterns used for decorative purpose to western christendom. in particular, a specific type of epigraphic patterns that george c. miles defined as kufesque has been taken into consideration. we intend to debate the idea of a mere invention of ornaments made up of strokes resembling arabic letters, and introduce a sharper distinction between what concerns epigraphy or not. it is worth recalling here the role played by epigraphy in the islamic culture. even though the use of inscriptions has been widely developed since remote antiquity, it had an absolutely unmatched role in islam. in fact, arabic epigraphy took on a priority role in the islamic culture that cannot be found in any other society. arabic writing was the sacred medium chosen for the koranic revelation, and therefore the very emblem of islamic faith. the islamic world has not only continued the tradition of the antiquity, which used funerary and building inscriptions as a mean to promote the ideology of the ruling classes, but has expanded it in terms of space and time as well as in the variety of writing materials and utensils, the so-called media scriptoria. the use of arabic epigraphy is extended throughout islamic territories and crossed over the borders of the arabic-speaking communities. in fact, from the late seventh/early eight century onwards, arabic script was the glue that kept united a world made up of countries both linguistically and ethnically different, as it was the liturgical language, the language of the qurʾān whose g. c. miles, “byzantium and the arabs: relations in crete and the aegean area”, dop, vol. , washington , p. . cf. r. hillenbrand, “islamic monumental inscriptions contextualised: location, content, legibility and aesthetics”, bika , wiesbaden , pp. - ; see also: j. sourdel- thomine, “aspects de l'écriture arabe et de son développement”, rei , , paris , pp. - . archetype, i.e. the umm al-kitāb, was preserved in heaven. the refined taste of the educated classes for increasing intricacies in writing styles led to the shifting from the communicative value of the inscription towards a mere aesthetic function of the letters with a consequent development of superimposed ornamentation. the spread of more and more refined styles of writing in islamic countries became significant during abbasid period also because of the influences of non-arab artistic traditions operating in the new conquered territories. due to such a practice, only the most cultivated class of arab origin could read the texts hidden under the appearance of artworks. thanks to its great aesthetic value, arabic epigraphy succeeded in penetrating even into western crafts. indeed, with the intensification of trade in the middle ages, precious objects and fabrics began to arrive through the mediterranean basin from eastern islamic countries, and soon circulated over most of the italian peninsula. this fact favoured the development of the taste for the elegant arabic lettering more or less clearly identifiable as arabic script, among the decorative elements of many italian artists. such epigraphic patterns have been labelled with the general term of “pseudo-inscriptions”, that is inscriptions deemed unreadable. as it will be demonstrated later, an extensive literature has approached the problem of their identification in western arts, and some attempts of advancing a reading of these corrupted arabic words have been carried out. most of them agreed on the identification of the word allāh or the profession of muslim faith, the so-called shahāda. the artists’ awareness about the meaning of the inscriptions they more or less carefully copied has been questioned. the problem remained unsolved mainly for two reasons: first see e. geoffroy, f. daftary, “umm al-kitāb”, ei, second edition. consulted online on september , <http://dx.doi.org/ . / - _islam_com_ >. as regards the shia context see y. friedman, the nuṣayrī-ʿalawīs. an introduction to the religion, history and identity of the leading minority in syria, boston , pp. , . w. ivanow, “notes sur l’’umm al-kitâb des ismaéliens de l’asie centrale”, rei , paris , pp. - . r. ettinghausen, "arabic epigraphy: communication or symbolic affirmation", in near eastern numismatics, iconography, epigraphy and history: studies in honor of george c. miles, beirut , pp. - ; see also l. korn, “religious inscriptions in islamic architecture”, in the aura of alif: the art of writing in islam, munich , pp. - . see a. grohman, “the origin and early development of floriated kufic”, ars orientalis, ( ), pp. - ; l. volov, “plaited kufic on samanid epigraphic pottery”, ars orientalis, ( ), pp. - . because art historians did not usually own the linguistic tools allowing them to read arabic inscriptions; and secondly because arabists are usually not concerned with western arts or, if so, they have interpreted inscriptions so far on the basis of the ductus that arabic letters should have had. the study of arabic inscriptions on portable objects shows that very often, for technical reasons such as the hardness of materials and the system of production, the craftsmen’s copy of arabic script can be debased to such an extent that words can be hardly read, unless people had knowledge of the customary formulas. because of this, we have considered the opportunity of studying the formulas, taking into consideration the overall outline of each word irrespectively of the rules governing arabic script. this method has proved to be fruitful, as it allowed the identification of arabic expressions in corrupted signs previously deemed mere ornamentations or mocking arabic letters. the study begins with an annotated bibliography, in which the possible application of the term pseudo-inscription in both the cultural contexts are investigated. as the list of literary sources suggests, this phenomenon has arisen the attention of many scholars, but at the same time each study has outlined single aspects of the problem without supplying an overall exhaustive treatment of the subject. an unrelated and discontinuous approach to the phenomenon and weak interpretative methods are frequently used and, as matter of fact, almost all the questions raised by scholars in the mid-nineteenth century remain unsolved. a thoroughly and extensive study centred on the phenomenon of arabic inscriptions should aim at providing cogent answers based on the lessons learned so far and, even more, on the data offered by new inter- disciplinary research. the present study focuses on italian romanesque, gothic and renaissance paintings. it both assesses how the borrowing of presumed islamic models took place, either directly from an artefact or through the mediation of a workshop sketch, and it identifies when and why such a phenomenon triggered the creation of imitative symbolic patterns aimed at satisfying the weltanschauung of western culture. although the focus of the study is on the most relevant italian paintings, it has been deemed useful to broaden the area and the span of time in order to determine where and when western arts were affected by the use of islamic epigraphic patterns. starting from the assumption that in most cases western artists did not invent meaningless marks resembling arabic script but copied real arabic texts making a transfer of islamic models to part of the western artistic idiom, the study has produced relevant results supporting our position. in fact, the use of an innovative comparative method allowed us to read islamic inscriptions and sultanic titles within decorations on some italian paintings from the twelfth to the sixteenth century, whereas most of the previous studies have considered them as mock inscriptions. the use of so-called arabic "pseudo-inscriptions" has been treated up to now as one of the ornamental motifs that affected western art, particularly from the thirteenth to the fifteenth century. it has been so far considered as a forgery because it used arabic lettering without any respect for arabic language system and therefore, can be considered devoid of any meaning. on the contrary, we want to underscore that, at least in its early period, epigraphic decorations were a simple copy of original products created in islamic regions circulating in the west. the proportion of the phenomenon urges a more complex approach considering the different roles it played in the centuries that saw its occurrence. as for the presence of arabic inscriptions in gothic and renaissance art, it is obvious that one of the issues that has attracted the greatest interest of art historians and palaeographers over the past two centuries can be summed up into a few questions: how was it possible that the holy personages portrayed in italian paintings were adorned with a script that was so tightly linked to islam and its revealed book? what was the impact they had on the society of this concept has been developed by v. grassi in the article “nondum matuta est, nolo acerbam sumere. per una critica del concetto di pseudo-iscrizione araba”, bullettino storico pistoiese, cxviii, , pp. - . that time? was it a form of cultural appropriation? or an acculturated copy implying variations or interpretations? the growing interest in oriental art by western scholars had led to the development of many simplifications, which inevitably had to be made. regardless of the correct spelling, readability, and legibility of the ductus of the single letters, an attitude gained ground according to which the terms "inscription" and "pseudo-inscription", "kufic" and "pseudo-kufic" have been deprived of their original meaning and given a generic and conventional one falling under the common category of ornamental patterns inspired by arabic characters. given this fact, these terms often became interchangeable in use. one of the most crucial obstacles that has slowed down the development of efficient scientific investigation tools heretofore is by no doubt the far- reaching territorial extension and wide span of time in which islamic artefacts bearing inscriptions occurred. the paucity of the scrutinised material in comparison to its overall consistency and the rough set of criteria used for classifying inscriptions on objects prevented a step forward in the debate around the presence and meaning of the above mentioned ornamental epigraphic patterns. this is the overall aporia in which our research will move. with reference to palaeography, for each pattern we will analyse in detail the ductus of the arabic script trying to identify the single characters, the systemic study of the decorations and changes in shapes. furthermore, the presence of such inscriptions will be placed in their historical and cultural context, that is the relationships established since the middle ages between the coastal region of the mediterranean. finally, a careful examination of the related literature will suggest a new multi-disciplinary interpretation for the presence of inscriptions and pseudo inscriptions in italian gothic and renaissance art. apart from some occasional attempts to interpret them as misshaped shahādas, i.e. the islamic profession of faith, the epigraphic decorations were never considered true arabic inscriptions, because they lacked readability. this is see chapter i: annotated bibliography and state of art. open questions. cfr : f. déroche, manuel de codicologie des manuscrits en écriture arabe, paris . the first assumption that we are going to rebut, showing that the readability of an inscription is not so much related to a careful and accurate copy made on arabic-speaking craftsmen’s works, as the likeness to real arabic script depends on the artist's ability to replicate carefully the models he has at his disposal as well as on the degree of alteration of the letters that might already be present on the copies available. when considering the decorations depicted along the rims of the thrones, in the haloes and garments of madonnas and saints, we can realize that often they are not repeated patterns, but they are very different one from the other. this led me to make some points about the use of the term pseudo-inscription. in order to show that the altered forms of arabic well-wishing expressions or sovereign protocols were attested on islamic artefacts, we will parallel the ductus of the word present on paintings and those occurring on different islamic objects, proving that our readings are based on a firm ground. the classes of objects that occur more frequently are: islamic pottery from spain dated to the th - th centuries, mamluk metalworks in vogue in europe between th to th century and islamic embroideries from th to th century. such commodities were sought after in italy, mainly in central and northern regions, to dignify the houses of the italian lords. arabic words found in paintings will be compared with those found on objects. as a consequence, it can be easily inferred how a given model was transferred from an artist to another, or shared among them, even through several centuries. generally, in the gothic period these patterns were copied from authentic inscriptions found on islamic fabrics and precious objects, and such heritage was continued and developed in the renaissance period. anyway, according to some western scholarship the borrowing of this kind of decoration was a deliberate reference to christianity and its history, as it will be shown later in this work. the term “gothic” applied first to a type of medieval script by humanists in the th century and later its use was extended to arts produced between the second half of th c. and the beginning of the th c. in europe and between the th century and the first decades of th century in italy. lately art historians have felt the need for a critical review of historiography, as suggested by the seminal studies of hans belting, such as "das ende der kunstgeschichte?" published in munich in , which he took back in in his "das ende der kunstgeschichte. eine revision nach zehn jahren". a fairly widespread phenomenon that can be noted in the use of encrypted latin inscriptions concerns the ones whose appearance looks like arabic or hebrew, but that in reality hide encrypted and disguised latin words. this characteristic feature has hitherto been overlooked by most of art historians and linguistics experts apart from rare cases such as the saint magdalen altarpiece in tiefenbronn. these artists were most probably unaware of the meaning of the inscriptions they were copying. this type of epigraphic decoration requires, in fact, an imaginative development of alphabetic signs when copying. this assumption is the starting point for our search for a prototype. however, the process of transferring the decorative pattern from one medium to another one cannot be considered sheer copying, as its passage from a cultural context to another one changes its own function. in other words, when we find arabic inscriptions in western arts, they are used for a purpose that is internal to the cultural context that produced it and does not correspond to the role it played in islamic culture, so such inscriptions should be understood from a christian- occidental viewpoint. since the appearance of the phenomenon, the inscriptions gradually lose their imitative intent and evolved towards a reinterpretation of the epigraphic decorations. the imitative phase can be understood as a response to the western perception of the east as a source of exoticism and magnificence. the splendour attributed to holy personages mirrors the devotion for these exempla of christian faith. this act of homage might suggest a continuity in the medieval world view but, at a closer look, the choice of the semitic languages as well as the writing style could be representative of the refined cultural framework of humanism. in this cultural climate, the search for new script typefaces led to the study of ancient writings, and basically semitic writings. this field was previously m. köhler, st. maria magdalena tiefenbronn, lindenberg ; see also w. boeck, lucas moser, der magdalenenaltar in tiefenbronn (werkmonographien zur bildenden kunst; nr. ), stuttgart . r. a. jairazbhoy, “the decorative use of arabic lettering in the west”, in oriental influences in western art, london . m. barasch, “some oriental pseudo-inscriptions in renaissance art”, visible language , , pp. – . confined to the clergy, but soon became the interest of scholars, artists and savants of the renaissance period. as for the arabic writing styles, even when they are actually mock inscriptions, they are of divergent types and differ from the basic definition of kufic “pseudo-inscriptions”. if it is true that generally speaking the use of inscriptions for ornamental purposes favoured their iconic value against their communicative function, a fortiori in their transfer from one medium to another or simply from an object to a subsequent copy, the inscriptions which were often copied, carved, woven or painted by non-arabic speakers, gradually lost their readability. while in some cases we are able to decode the ductus of the letters, as well as the writing styles, in many other cases the letters are so degraded that they will only be readable when the whole process of degradation can be established. in this research, the use of arabic characters in italian art has been investigated and analysed by studying several paintings from the period between the late twelfth and the mid-sixteenth centuries. those epigraphic patterns were then compared with objects which had come to europe as imports from the islamic world and, since then, located in churches and other collections. the main part of the work, which deals with the reading of the inscriptions in several italian paintings, is illustrated with images from plates. it is arranged in chronological order: the material is presented in four sections, one for each century . in each section, after a few introductory remarks on the painting of the related period, the substantial core of the analysis, namely the deciphering, follows; the readings are often justified by comparing inscriptions found on other objects. some results of this work will sharply contrast with what was exposed in earlier studies. the choice of analysing the phenomenon diachronically lay on the presumption that a possible detection of transfer of a given pattern from an artist/an artistic school to the following one might be better understood. chapter annotated bibliography and state of art. open questions in european works of art, the presence of strokes resembling arabic letters that cannot be read since they are supposed to be merely ornamental has been reported since the nineteenth century; most scholars labelled anything they were not able to interpret as “pseudo-inscription”, without making a difference within the different patterns they met. in this section, we will present a brief but thorough history of the field studies connected to the question of inscription readability. the first scholar to deal with pseudo-inscriptions, or rather the use of arabic characters for ornamentation, especially in a western context, was adrien de longpérier in , who spoke of "mode des bordures orientales" . first of all, he analysed arabic inscriptions in france, and then expanded his study to those located in the rest of europe. ten years later, in , owen jones published the grammar of ornament , one hundred and ten tables prefaced by a text dealing mainly with ornamental styles, with a clear focus on the islamic lands, among which we can detect alif and lām graphemes in different shapes. they were considered by the author to be the model from which many of the decorations found in islamic and western territories are derived. in a henri lavoix’s article titled de l'ornementation arabe dans les oeuvres des maîtres italiens concerned the painting adorazione dei magi by gentile da fabriano; there he observes odd- looking letters on the gold halo on the head of the virgin mary, which bring to mind arabic letters, especially the alif-lām sequence. in , archibald h. christie stated that what appears on medieval fabrics of arabic manufacturing origin is already a transformation of the original text a. de longpérier, "de l'emploi des caractères arabes. l'ornamentation chez peuples chrétiens de l'occident", revue archeologique ii ( ), pp. - . o. jones, the grammar of ornament, london . h. lavoix, "de l'ornementation arabe dans les oeuvres des maîtres italiens", gazette des beaux-arts / , e période, paris , pp. – . a. h. christie, traditional methods of pattern designing: an introduction to the study of decorative art, oxford . due to the technical requirements of weaving processes, as well as the need for harmony and balance in the design. in his book les influences orientales dans la peinture toscane , soulier communicates the need to clarify the use of the term "kufic", which the french scholar warns to be improperly used as a blanket expression to identify a composition made up of arabic letters. one of the first scholars to raise the possibility of giving a meaning to the sequence of arabic letters that are not clearly recognizable, without however demonstrating the ground on which he laid his thesis, was eustache de lorey in . in his opinion, all the patterns could be explained as the abbreviations of the words allāh and baraka (blessing), in a deformed shape due to the illiteracy of the craftsman, who was however aware that he was gaining the blessing of god simply by copying the script. in marquet de vassellot proposed the theory that the alif-lām ligature was reworked into an ornamental form in europe. a few years later, in , ernst kühnel wrote a treatise titled die arabeske in which, in addition to dealing with the issue of islamic decoration in general, he states, refuting de vassellot’s argument, that the ornament made up of the arabic letters was created in the middle east. in kurt erdmann compiled a catalogue of decorations with arabic lettering present in western art of the middle ages, proposing and comparing specimens from france, germany, england and italy, including some which had earlier been reported by other scholars such as de vassellot and longpérier. in another important contribution to the subject was given by george carpenter miles and concerned the relations between byzantium and the arabs at a very early age. g. soulier, les influences orientales dans la peinture toscane, paris . e. de lorey, "peinture musulmane ou peinture iranienne", raa, xii : , paris , pp. - . j. j. marquet de vasselot, les crosses limousines du xiiie siècle, paris . e. kühnel, die arabeske: sinn und wandlung eines ornaments, wiesbaden . k. erdmann, arabische schriftzeichen als ornamente in der abendländischen kunst des mittelalters. mainz/wiesbaden , pp. – . g. carpenter miles, “byzantium and the arabs: relations in crete and the aegean area”, dop ( ), pp - . if such epigraphic patterns had been considered hitherto the whimsical inventions made by western artists and craftsmen, it was thanks to don aanavi that such inscriptions that were previously deemed meaningless were now considered “text” that would be possibly interpreted by “experts” as well-wishing expressions. he was indeed the first to open the door to the possibility that western artists had copied real arabic texts. in rudolf sellheim published an article titled die madonna mit der schahāda , in which he, based on kurt erdmann’s collection of medieval ornamentation inspired by islam, established a "ganzheitsmethode" that allowed an interpretation of the shahāda that was applied to the halo of the madonna of the triptych of san giovenale by masaccio ( ) . in martin forstner , following the method developed by sellheim, identified the shahāda in the works of gentile da fabriano from before . in particular, although he admitted that the quality of the depicted script often made the letters difficult to identify, forstner acknowledged the profession of islamic faith in the haloes of gentile’s madonnas. on a closer inspection, the presumed profession of islamic faith seems to consist in a series of oblong- shaped signs similar to the repetition of the ligatures alif-lām. the repetition in sequence of these two arabic letters was defined in by richard ettinghausen as a "high-short-high syndrome" . thanks to the study material left by george c. miles, the german-american art historian concluded that occurrences in latin and byzantine contexts could be traced to the same source, in other words the muslim east. the scholar fully supported erdmann’s thesis, as de lorey and don aanavi already did, which holds that the letters alif-lām are an abbreviation of the word allāh. this hypothesis, which has up to now remained unchallenged, was rebutted by ettinghausen. he compared these accounts with the table developed by erdmann, including d. aanavi, “devotional writing: “pseudoinscriptions” in islamic art”, the metropolitan museum of art bulletin, xxvi, may , pp. - . r. sellheim, die madonna mit der schahada, leiden . c. caneva, masaccio: il trittico di san giovenale e il primo ' fiorentino, milano , p. . m. forstner, "zur madonna mit der Šahāda", zdmg ( ) pp. - . r. ettinghausen, "the decorative arts and painting: their character and scope", and "the impact of muslim decorative arts and painting on the arts of europe”, in the legacy of islam, oxford , pp. - , pp. - . the various developments that this word underwent on portable objects manufactured in europe, and reached the conclusion that its basic features can be found both in islamic and european territories, and in particular, in byzantine greece. apart from ettinghausen and other few exceptions , most of the research works were limited to asserting the presence of arabic inscriptions on medieval and renaissance european artworks, without venturing any attempt to read these inscriptions. this attitude towards the phenomenon of “pseudo-inscriptions” is still present in many contemporary works, where the mainstream prefers to linger in a sort of comfort zone offered by the well-established stand of considering the ornamental writing as an arabesque without allowing further investigations. a seminal study was published by sylvia auld under the title kuficising inscriptions in the work of gentile da fabriano, where the scholar carried out a detailed study of the historical and economical background of th century-florence and gentile da fabriano’s paintings dated from to , a period in which latin inscriptions are dropped in favour of “kuficising” script. auld realized that such a script was a copy of a real inscription as she says: “none of the inscriptions is legible but all are close enough to kufic to show that gentile’s intention was to show “real” arabic writing . in , maria vittoria fontana published un itinerario italiano sulle tracce dello pseudo-cufico , a collection of ornamental patterns based on arabic letters found in central and southern italy, sicily included, drawn from previous publications. the author provides an easy tool to compare the patterns available in italy. this was at the basis of a further work, published in where fontana developed the idea of byzantine mediation put forth by miles and ettinghausen as a probable answer to the presence of arabic lettering in see m, belghagi, die rezeption islamischer kufimotive in der abendländischen kunst vom . bis zum . jahrhundert, tehran . s. auld, “kuficising inscriptions in the work of gentile da fabriano”, oriental art , no. ( ), p. . m.v. fontana, “un itinerario italiano sulle tracce dello pseudo-cufico”, grafica / , , pp. - . southern italy. furthermore in , dealing with the madonna’s and st john’s halos in the croce in the church of santa maria novella in florence , fontana confirmed that the script was made by a meaningless sequence of arabic letters. following to a lecture held in at the municipal library of fabriano, vincenza grassi published le iscrizioni arabe nell’opera di gentile da fabriano , a study on the use of ornaments with arabic lettering in gentile’s paintings. in contrast with the mainstream opinion hitherto current, alleging that italian painters created meaningless squiggles resembling arabic letters, whose sequence might sometimes be referred to the islamic profession of faith, grassi pointed out at the existence of a true arabic inscription in gentile’s madonna dell’umiltà preserved in pisa. in her reading of the arabic inscription running along the embroidered textile, on which the infant jesus lies, as part of a mamluk protocol, she discusses what kind of object might possibly be used as model, especially in the light of the existing similarities found in pisanello’s drawing portraying the arrival of the byzantine emperor john paleologus in ferrara in , and the problems raised by the dating of the two works. finally, the use of latin prayers under the guises of arabic lettering in the virgin’s halo was deemed to be a learned trick, whose ambiguity of meaning was a typical trait of humanistic culture. the following year , grassi amended and updated part of her work, reviewing the field studies. she corroborated her identification of a mamluk model in gentile’s work, establishing a comparison between a sign present on the virgin’s mantle in gentile’s incoronazione della vergine, preserved in the getty museum of los angeles and a th century-mamluk silk fabric preserved in the lacma. both proved to be the abbreviation of the word: al- m.v. fontana, “byzantine mediation of epigraphic characters of islamic derivation in the wall paintings of some churches in southern italy”, in islam and the italian renaissance, london . m. v. fontana, “i caratteri pseudo epigrafici dall'alfabeto arabo”, in giotto. la croce di santa maria novella, firenze , pp. – . v. grassi, le iscrizioni arabe nell’opera di gentile da fabriano, napoli . v. grassi, “le iscrizioni arabo-islamiche nell’opera di gentile da fabriano”, in intorno a gentile da fabriano. nuovi studi sulla pittura tardogotica, atti del convegno, livorno , pp. - . sulṭān. the graphic renderings of the study of the inscriptions in the virgin’s halos, processed by the present writer, are presented alongside the text. grassi underlined that using islamic inscriptions in christian context, the artists not only intended to honor the madonnas and saints dressing them with the precious oriental fabrics circulating in italian courts, but using semitic scripts they meant the very roots of christianity in the holy land. in a further study grassi challenged the idea that illiterate and/or non-arab craftsmen are the makers of inscriptions that are deemed to be illegible today and, therefore, labelled as pseudo-inscriptions, raising the problem of the significance of images in a given cultural context. she distinguished between the function of islamic inscriptions in their own context, where although they appear in a degraded form, their meaning is unchanged, and the appearance of islamic inscriptions in western context where they subscribe to renaissance cultural values. she argued that part of these signs that scholars judge illegible are abbreviations of well-known expressions that could be easily read by arab speakers accustomed to them. a useful list of well-wishing expressions and prayers in their modified shortened forms is supplied. in rosamond e. mack and mohammed zakariya published a two hand- study that took into consideration two aspects in the analysis of the ornamental bands placed on the tunic and boot tops of verrocchio’s david: on the one hand zakariya focused on the relation between such ornamental bands and legible arabic, on the other hand mack investigated the genesis and significance of pseudo-arabic in italian art. although zakariya noticed that the epigraphic patters were not random, and they appeared also mirrored in reverse, he attributed the latter feature to verrocchio’s choice to employ the lettering pattern, considered by the author a meaningless succession of arabic letters, mostly made up of alifs and lāms, which resembles the expression “li- llāh”. it is surprising that having acknowledged the occurrence of this kind of calligraphic composition in muslim artistic tradition, only later he supposed that these signs could have been taken from real islamic objects, perhaps v. grassi, “abbreviations and mock inscriptions in arabic epigraphy”, orientalia lovanensia analecta, , leuven , pp. - . r. mack, m. zakariya, “the pseudo-arabic on andrea del verrocchio’s david”, artibus et historiae , no. , , pp. - . mamluk ceramics intended for export or fourteenth- and fifteenth century- italian silk textiles “featuring exotic eastern motifs” . as for mack, she outlined the developments of pseudo-inscriptions in italian art pointing out their occurrence in the renaissance period; a topic investigated in depth in her learned bazaar to piazza , where she analyzed the influence produced by luxury goods from the east on the development of italian taste over three centuries. she considered how the borrowing of ornamental bands suggesting arabic script negotiates cultural differences and showed how islamic motifs were absorbed into christian contexts. nevertheless, mack partly relays on the italian studies by bernardini, curatola and fontana, and dismisses the attempt of reading the so-called pseudo inscriptions. as a matter of fact, at p. of her book she states: “the fairest term for italian imitations that are mostly fantastic are often blended with each other elements is “pseudo-arabic”. in julia bailey dealing with the kufesque carpet border design that can be termed an example of the tall-short-tall syndrome described by ettinghausen, dismissed bartels’ hypothesis on the origin of kufesque from earlier sasanian vegetal forms. in confirmation of this, some paintings of shah ardashir in manuscripts show that the inscription in the carpet borders can be read as a repeated succession of al-mulk without the ending li-llāh (dominion belongs to god). this connection appears again on an illustrated copy of kalila and dimna produced in tabriz in - . bailey suggested that this inscription was used for propaganda purposes by the rulers, and the iranian carpets from the th to the th century encode such message. as for th and th century anatolian carpets, known as holbein and lotto carpets, they depart from the earlier kufesque versions and exhibit a loss of semantic and symbolic meaning that was no longer applicable in the new cultural context. later caucasian carpets do not have kufesque borders, although the rigid symmetry of design has resemblance to the script. the following year a debatable article by alexander nagel listed twenty- four individual comments on the topic of pseudo-scripts in relation to italian ivi, p. . r. mack, bazaar to piazza: islamic trade and italian art, - , berkeley . j. bailey, “carpets and “kufesque””, dai , , pp. - . a. nagel, “twenty-five notes on pseudoscript in italian art”, res, / , , pp. - . beaux arts. first of all, he underlined the fact that these “illegible marks” are not messages able to be decoded as their aim is to be an icon of a “sacred past/script”. it is not clearly stated if the expressions refer to the birth of christendom in the east or to the sacralization of arabic as language of god’s revelation or else to both. once that the equation “pseudo-script = ornament” is established, the fact that in its merely decorative value it escapes the patrons’ control is rather obvious. an interesting observation, which the author unfortunately did not prove at all, hints at identifying the foreign lettering as the author’s signature. this fact has proven true in more than an italian painting that we are going to analyze. although nagel identifies mamluk writing style in the works of gentile in note , no reference is made to any precise reading and he limited himself to provide mack’s hint at the pseudo-scripts as activator of memories about the holy land. most of what follows is of no help in the present debate. in , vera beyer and isabelle dolezalek analyzed the presence of islamic motifs in different european contexts in order to investigate the cultural and social reasons behind the adaptation of these elements in medieval european art. the study focuses on the perception of ornamental forms in the tuscan cultural context and then investigates the “formal language shared by mediterranean elites”. the authors show that the actual presence of decorative forms belonging to a cultural and religious context that is alien to the european patterns cannot be confined to a generalisation that is determined by the juxtaposition of categories. indeed, the contextualisation of these elements in a cross-cultural context suggests a “revision of the internalist assumption of autonomous cultural entities”. the term “islamicate” expresses, in fact, a meaning related to reception, and not to the provenance of an object. the work presents a variety of objects, textiles, ivories and crystals that illustrate the various functions for which islamic ornamental motifs were reused in european arts. in conclusion, the spread of these epigraphic styles outside the arab-islamic boundaries, or their direct ancestry, are to be considered in the authors’ opinion as a direct consequence of the choice that v. beyer, i. dolezalek, “contextualising choices: islamicate elements in european arts”, mhj / , , pp. - . artists exercised in employing this kind of ornamentation, rather than a phenomenon induced by cultural influence. some pages further, on the same number of mhj , dolezalek pores over the epigraphic decorations woven on the mantle of roger ii and william ii’s alb, the norman kings of sicily. the author takes into account the methodological approaches related to the concept of “transfer”, “shared court cultures” and “comparison”, providing information relating to the dynamics and to cultural relations current in the mediterranean. as a result, the role played by arabic inscriptions on textiles in the norman area in comparison to that of other mediterranean contexts seems to show the adaptation of these ornaments in twelfth century sicily. according to dolezalek, the methodological approach that solely expresses the notion of “transfer” risks limiting the study of epigraphic ornamentation to formal considerations, while the comparative approach also provides an opportunity to examine the role of inscriptions in a given social context. in this regard, the alternate use of latin and arabic on the hem of the embroidered gown of william ii would reflect the multicultural and multilingual character of norman sicilian society. starting off with the case of the ornamentation of the mantle of roger ii and, more generally, the production of norman textile items, dolezalek examined the implications of the “visual display of continuity in royal representation” and the expression of merely political intentions. in contrast to what occurs in sicilian private production, where continuity with the north african context may be demonstrated, the author excludes that the political function of the ṭirāz at the ifrīqiyan court could have had continuity in the norman courts. however, it seems likely that sicilian private production could have influenced the norman courts, also for technical reasons, which might have been the availability of skilled artisans. according to the author, the mantle of roger ii was produced by arab craftsmen in palermo, although the ornamentation was not necessarily imported from the contemporary arab i. dolezalek, “fashionable form and tailor-made message: transcultural approaches to arabic script on the royal norman mantle and alb”, mhj / , , pp. - . i. dolezalek, “textile connections? two ifrīqiyan church treasuries in norman sicily and the problem of continuity across political change”, al-masāq / , , p. . context. the type of kufic, with its very simple forms, is different from contemporary fatimid textile examples of egypt, and is closer to sicilian monumental epigraphy. the case of the re-importation of arabic elements to the norman visual idiom remains open, and there is the hope that there will be “more medium-specific studies of continuity in artistic practices”. over the past two years, vera-simone schulz has been disseminating articles themed on arab epigraphic decorations in medieval italian painting. a new approach was proposed in , aiming at analysing the pseudo-inscriptions in a global context, rather than in an isolated manner that exclusively takes into account the function of the text. leaving aside the issue of the readability of the texts, here the author assumes that the arabic lettering “arranged in a nonsensical order” might derive from a composite variety of decorative inscriptions or could merely be the invention of those very artists. it is rather evident that the author underplays the value of the identification of the text and its sources, which on the contrary give plenty of information about the cultural, social and economic context where the phenomenon appeared. due perhaps to the fact that the work of reconstruction requires specific linguistic knowledge, vera-simone schulz like most art historians prefers to investigate the artistic practices, and their reuse in the italian artistic sphere. in stating that “no matter how intriguing the cases in which ‘orientalising’ lettering can indeed be deciphered are”, the intent of her paper is clearly set on reconsidering the notion that pseudo-inscriptions are merely artistic manifestations, by highlighting the impact of islamic artefacts, mainly metalworks and textiles, on italian art, as well as investigating the interactions between image and object, placing the phenomenon in broader contexts, which are related to the concepts of materiality, transmedial and transmaterial dynamics. v. s. schulz, “from letter to line: artistic experiments with pseudo-script in late medieval italian painting, preliminary remarks”, in the power of line, chicago , pp. - . her recent article, dated , deals with pseudo-inscriptions in the decoration of haloes in the madonna of san giorgio alla costa by giotto and the san giovenale triptych by masaccio. the study provides some interesting elements for the identification of the continuity, similarities, and differences of epigraphic patterns in haloes depicted in florentine painting from to the beginning of the fifteenth century. schulz offers extremely detailed analysis of graphic styles, how they fit into the artworks, suggesting comparisons with other tuscan works and effective arguments concerning the reception of islamic art objects in italian painting. unfortunately, the limits of her approach—which has been broadly used for years in the studies on such a topic—lies in the belief that everything that cannot be read falls automatically in the category of nonsensical lettering, and consequently should be considered mere decoration. such a claim seems not to be consistent with the bibliography listed in the article, where interesting references to real arabic texts derived from objects and workshop prototypes are reported. in the same year, hannah baader and ittai weinryb describe the various issues encountered in articulating notions about the historical effectiveness of an object. although this interesting and stimulating essay does not contain any reference to arabic inscriptions and/or pseudo-inscriptions, its critical investigation on the relationship between object and text proves to be illuminating and helpful for the understanding of the role played by the object plays, also in the case it bears an inscription. the idea that comes up is that images containing within themselves all kinds of graphic or epigraphic representations, or artefacts carry an “act” function. the function of the images and the specific qualities of the objects in a broader sense are fully investigated. the article provides a series of examples according to which the meaning of an object goes beyond its iconographic function, where its value exceeds the v. s. schulz, “intricate letters and the reification of light: prolegomena on the pseudo-inscribed haloes in giotto's madonna di san giorgio alla costa and masaccio's san giovenale triptych”, mitteilungen des kunsthistorischen institutes in florenz, lviii , pp. - . h. baader, i. weinryb, “images at work: on efficacy and historical interpretation”, representations / , march , pp. - . object itself, but its value relies on its “materiality”, as well as its “mediality”, that is the ways in which a text inscribes in its own language the effects produced by other media. in the case of objects and transmitted texts in a cross-cultural context, the work of art not only responds to its cultural or religious function, but to its own “materiality”, as well as to the ability and will of its creator. new contributions focusing on each individual aspect of the topic are being spread after at an increasingly fast rate on different media from the web to academic journals, but the heavy task of advancing new readings has been hitherto faced only sparingly. chapter historical outline . islamicate artefacts in the late middle ages and renaissance: trade, gifts and pillage the relation between christians and muslims cannot be studied through a one-sided approach as within each side coexisted diversified attitudes toward the adversary, which changed according to the situation. the social and political events as well as religious polemics were the scenes where christians and muslims developed the views they had of each other. on the one side, christian west adopted the demonization of the enemy as a weapon to exorcise its fears, also because most of the people were completely unaware of what islam was. on the other side, muslims deemed byzantines as their true counterpart, peer in authority and culture , while the people of latin west were judged to be no more than barbarians unworthy of any attention. with the fall of the empire most of the books of classical antiquity got lost, but as early as the th century learned europeans, mostly clergy, knew that the classics, especially the scientific works, had been translated into arabic. hence the need to access classical heritage through the translation from arabic into latin. this brought a deeper interest in and more precise knowledge of islamic faith and culture, and it held particularly true during the reconquista, by which the control over the territories that had previously fallen under muslim authority was regained. the first latin translation of the qurʾān, called corpus cluniacense , included the translations of historiographical, cf. j.j. saunders, a history of medieval islam, london . cf. h.c. evans, “byzantium and islam: age of transition ( th- th century)”, in byzantium and islam: age of transition, th- th century, ney york , pp. - . j. f. o'callaghan, reconquest and crusade in medieval spain, philadelphia . m. di cesare, the pseudo-historical image of the prophet muhammad in medieval latin literature: a repertory, berlin , pp. - . religious and theological arabic texts, with a preface by peter the venerable, and was aimed at the refutation of islam. if islam resulted to be a negative entity either as a religion or for its social and political significance, a far more important link was established between the latin west and the muslim world on the cultural level: strong was, in fact, the impact of islamic culture on european learning during the renaissance. as christendom was not a unified front, muslim-christian relations did not develop in the same way in the byzantine orient and in europe. moreover, from the muslim point of view, byzantium was known and considered as a sort of "equal partner", while on the contrary the knowledge of western latin was almost completely absent. italy was home to the renaissance, which spread from the republic of florence, under the patronage of the medici family, and flourished in rome, under the patronage of the popes. from these italian centers its cultural influence soon reached all over italy, france, germany, holland and england. between the second and third decade of the fourteenth century, the italian poet petrarca opened a period of search, discovery and collection of manuscripts and works of art, contributing to the creation of the modern philological method based on the collatio , establishing “a foundation for the revival of oratory that would characterize the humanist movement in cities and courts across central and northern italy” . his passion for collection proliferated in intellectual circles, and rapidly scholars and sovereigns were mesmerized by the discovery of ancient literary materials. the humanists' work was supported by the munificence of patrons, who promoted by gifts of money and the purchase of manuscripts the new learning. cosimo de' medici ( - ) founded the medicean library (now biblioteca medicea laurenziana), which was later developed by his worthy grandson, j. waardenburg, muslim and others: relations in context, berlin-new york , pp. - . f. somaini, “the political geography of renaissance italy”, in courts and courtly arts in renaissance italy: art, culture and politics, - , milano , pp. - . g. mestica, le rime di francesco petrarca, restituite nell' ordine e nella lezione del testo originario sugli autografi col sussidio di altri codici e di stampe e corredate di varianti e note da giovanni mestica, firenze . d. looney, “the beginnings of humanistic oratory”, in petrarch: a critical guide to the complete works, chicago , p. . lorenzo the magnificient. other famous patrons were alfonso, king of aragon and naples ( - ), federigo da montefeltro, duke of urbino (d. ) and popes from nicolas v ( - ), who founded the present vatican library. the process of search and collection went alongside an enthusiasm for the ancestors, a taste for ancient civilizations, and the idea of a literature that humanizes. the study of latin and greek manuscripts revealed the long- forgotten cultures of the near east. when the collection of the latin classics was well advanced around the middle of the th century, the search for greek manuscripts led chiefly italians to the east. also inscriptions, coins, medals and other curiosities were imported with the books. the humanistic yearning after the original sources of the bible and ancient treatises drew the interest of european scholars upon semitic languages: arabic, hebrew, chaldean (sic for aramaic) and syriac, which was believed to be the language spoken by jesus. the study of semitic languages, which had been already fostered by frederick ii hohenstaufen in the th century, was the requisite for biblical criticism. following to the council of vienne in , pope clement v ( - ) ordered to establish chairs in hebrew, arabic and chaldean languages at the universities of paris, bologna, oxford and salamanca. it is worth noting that the same pope exchanged embassies with the mongol ilkhan ruler oljaitu to create a franco-mongol alliance against muslims. an earlier evidence of the teaching of hebrew and arabic can be found in the dominican convents and in the higher schools conducted by dominicans under the direction of the spanish prior raymond of penyafort o.p. ( - ). another paramount factor was performed by trade. the appreciation of middle-eastern objects by the western markets started as early as the c. o’hagan, “greek manuscripts in the th century”, british library, consulted online september , . https://www.bl.uk/greek-manuscripts/articles/greek-manuscripts-in- the- th-century. i. baghdiantz mccabe, orientalism in early modern france: eurasian trade, exoticism, and the ancien regime, oxford , p. . medieval period and is documented by the abundant collection of gifts preserved in the religious treasuries. after an initial break of relations , the diplomatic exchange between charlemagne and the abbasid caliph hārūn al- rashīd opened a new era of mutual perception. byzantium and especially italy, france and spain resumed and intensified commercial relations with the muslim world. in particular, italian city-states rose thanks to these commercial links from the th century. the maritime republics were the result of the new culture based on the commerce and exchange of knowledge with other countries outside europe. their commercial routes allowed the transmission of islamic art beyond the boundaries of the western lands conquered by the muslims. not only sicily and the southern italy, but also genoa, lucca, pisa, siena, florence and venice became the outposts for the import of precious textiles and objects of vertu thanks to the establishment of depots or warehouses for merchant in the levant. the cultural achievement of islamic lavish artefacts was widely accepted and admired by the west and the public displays of islamic treasures- lustrous ceramics, illuminated manuscripts, embroidered silks, carved ivories, fine carpets and intricate scientific instruments - have long been used as a powerful tool to show the rulers' power and secure their dynastic legitimacy. the exchange of gifts was of paramount importance in negotiations and alliances and its persuasive power allowed the meeting of the east and the west. its use dates back as early as , when hārūn al-rashīd sent envoys accompanied by a series of gifts to the newly crowned holy roman emperor charlemagne. amalfi and venice were the main suppliers of textiles to italy and western europe. embassies regarded papacy as well, as is the case of the Īlkhāns, just to name one. this pattern was maintained and developed up to . the flow of luxury items brought from the islamic world to europe not only caused the outset of a dedicated market, but even islamicized local s.n. fliegel, resplendent faith: liturgical treasuries of the middle ages, kent . see a.d. beihammer, nachrichten zum byzantinischen urkundenwesen in arabischen quellen ( - ), bonn . antique objects of art collected for their beauty or artistic quality. a. shalem, islam christianized: islamic portable objects in the medieval church treasuries of the latin west, frankfurt am main . d. behrens-abouseif, practising diplomacy in the mamluk sultanate: gifts and material culture in the medieval islamic world, london . craftsmen. however, the influence of the islamic art on the west was also mediated by the byzantine world. a special attraction had textiles, which were among the items the most portable ones. a growing demand for silk textiles brought to the import of tatar and turkish cloths, which in italian literature are called “panni tartarici” . tuscany, and in particular florence and siena, established tight links with the mongol-controlled persia from the th up to the early th century. carpets became a status symbol in the th century, therefore they became so invasive in european paintings. they were extensively used as tapestry covering the throne of the virgin mary in the so-called “maestà” and the anatolian carpets gained the favour of italian renaissance to such an extent that the expression “lotto carpet” was coined. the name of some precious textiles bear witness instead to the trade of venice and genoa with the major cities of egypt and syria ruled by the mamluks. the great trade routes through damascus and across the red sea to south and south-est asia passed through mamluk lands where a permanent diplomatic staff from venice was base to protect venetians' interests. venice held a near- monopoly in the trade of glass and ceramics as well as metalworks. the production of metalworks was subject to a double flow of export and import, as venetian merchants exported brass and copper in large quantities to metal workers in the middle east and then imported the finished products. this fact gave rise to the debate on the so-called “veneto-saracenic metalwork” . at first scholarship presumed that these items were created by muslim craftsmen who had established in venice. on the contrary, recently art historians have rejected this thesis arguing that such inlaid metalwork, that is ewers, incense burners, candlesticks and basins have been imported from the islamic world into europe, as the crafts guilds in venice had a self-defence system so tightly managed that would not have allowed any foreign workers to establish themselves in the city. the presence of a european coat of arms on many of m.v. fontana, "l’influence islamique sur la production de céramique à venise et padoue", in venise et l’orient, – , paris , pp. - . see a. e. wardwell, “panni tartarici: eastern islamic silks woven with gold and silver ( th and th centuries)”, islamic art ( – ), pp. – . p. spufford, power and profit: the merchant in medieval europe, london , pp. - . j. w. allan, “venetian-saracenic metalwork: the problems of provenance,” in arte veneziana e arte islamica: atti del primo simposio internazionale sull'arte veneziana e l’arte islamica, venezia , pp. - . these items could be explained by the use of a space left blank to be filled into by the owners. during the renaissance period, islamic art objects were often depicted in portraits of patrons and their families, shown standing in domestic context. in addition to being a status symbol and a proof of international connections, they satisfied a new-born taste for exotic and expensive items. the more and more growing demand for these luxury commodities led to the production of local imitations in europe. this is the case of glass, for instance, as in the th century venice moulded its production of decorated glass on the gilding and enamelling techniques, which had been developed in the near east. this was made possible not only by venetian maritime trade with the islamic world, but also because exiled byzantine craftsmen settled in venice. besides using forms and decorative styles developed in the islamic middle east, craftsmen in venice also turned for inspiration to narratives and motifs taken from italy’s classical past. as for ceramics, glazed lustre pottery from al-andalus was also imported to europe. in italy, tin-glazed wares, named “maiolica” after the island of mallorca, - a key staging post on the maritime route for pottery from al- andalus- were produced in venice, florence and elsewhere. artisans made their own maiolica wares from the late onward. from middle eastern potters, italian craftsmen learned a technique known as “sgraffiato”; it consists in scraping out the outer glaze to uncover the darker surface beneath. a. contadini, “middle-eastern objects”, in at home in renaissance italy, london , pp. - . see m. verità, "l’influence…", in venise et…, paris , pp. - . . artistic patronage in italian seigniorial courts during the middle ages italy was broken up into political entities different in size and form of government. the cities of the northern and central italy had emancipated themselves from central authorities, i.e. the emperor or the pope, and adopted forms of organization as city-states, based on a certain autonomous municipal government. they were under the rule of an individual or a dynasty. the manifestation of communal identity, as shown by recent researches, was represented by civic architecture, whose frescoes bore witness to the communal value and achievements. the landmarks of the town were the space for the display of political power, be it religious or secular. the proliferation of the system of the commune in the th and th centuries was undermined by the factional strife of local oligarchies, fighting for the supremacy over italian territories. this prolonged unrest brought about the end of the old city-states and their replacement with princely states. the republics of venice, pisa and genoa were able to conquer their naval empires in the mediterranean sea. in lombardy, veneto and tuscany stable states were created at expenses of the neighbouring lordships. in the south of italy, the kingdom of naples was first under the angevin crown and after under the aragonese one. it extended on a very large territory, although it was split into a mosaic of feudal enclaves, which were so autonomous to maintain fortifications and build state residences. the turning point in italian politics occurred in , when, following to a series of conquest in the po plain and tuscany, gian galeazzo visconti purchased the title of duke of milan. it was the first time that a lord of urban origin could get a sovereign title without any imperial investiture. such a title gave full right to galeazzo to exercise power not only over his communal territory, but he could act as a peer with other european sovereigns. soon his behaviour was imitated by other italian lordly dynasties: the rulers of savoy o. banti, “‘“civitas” e “commune” nelle fonti italiane dei secoli xi e xii”, critica storica, ix, , pp. - . v. mele, f. senatore, “baronial courts”, in courts and courtly arts…, milano , p. . d. m. bueno de mesquita, giangaleazzo visconti, duke of milan ( - ): a study in the political career of an italian despot, cambridge . ( ), the montefeltro ( ), the gonzaga (marquesal title in ; ducal title in ), the este ( - ), the da varano ( ), and the medici ( ). the political stability, which followed in the third and fourth decades of the th century, was at the base of the flourishing of economy, art and literature. a further reinforcement of this balanced political situation was pursued through the peace of lodi (april ), as none of the conflicts that followed compromised the territorial arrangement established since then. henceforth, the political entities that were formally recognized exceeded the number of one hundred and twenty, but only five major states consisted of many cities and territories. they were the kingdom of naples, the duchy of milan, the republics of venice and florence, and the papal states. intermediate powers were the republics of genoa and siena, and the lands of the marquises of este. in piedmont and emile were based smaller lordships, followed by city-states of different size and importance. and down the scale rural seigniories often limited to single citadels or very restricted areas. this system of territorial states took place during the th and early th centuries at expenses of weaker petty states which were absorbed within the boundaries of major powers such as milan, florence and venice. as for the south of italy, the kingdom of naples stretched over the whole continental southern area reaching the abruzzi. in the central area, the papal states included a number of states formally recognized by other italian and european powers. notwithstanding its political weakness, the papacy, back in italy from avignon since , claimed its monarchic authority and spiritual primacy, leading in its role of moral and political guide of the christian world the anti- turkish movement. as the rule of italian lords was built on unsteady foundations and they themselves represented a new model of sovereignty, new forms of legitimation of the power were needed. the power of such despots should be displayed not only in term of war and diplomacy, but also by celebrating the prince and his monarchic qualities. the ostentation of rich clothing, the pomp m. folin, “courts …”, in courts…, milano , p. . f. c. lane, venice: a maritime republic, baltimore and london f. somaini, “the political geography of renaissance italy”, in courts and courtly arts…, milano , p. . of the court, the magnificence of dynastic palaces and the artistic patronage were all weapons of propaganda to legitimate the lords' power. the allure emanating from the courts succeeded in bewitching even cities that had always been attached to their republican tradition such as florence, siena and partially venice. the result of this feverish life of italian courts competing each other was the boom of architecture and arts. different from other european countries, italian courts did not produce a unified artistic language; as each patron required a different representation of his own authority, artistic products were deeply influenced by the cultural trends and the artistic tastes of each court. as a consequence, the political scenario gave birth to municipal artistic paradigms. even when rome and naples hosted the most important courts in italy and in the second half of the th century florentine-roman classicism prevailed over the italian peninsula, various local “idioms” can be detected in the works of art of each court. despite the process of political and administrative centralisation, which was developing during the th century, the revival of local literary and artistic traditions prevailed on a single unified italian tradition, which was represented by the universal latin. the reason for that was a new concept of knowledge, where cultural outputs were mainly intended for legitimising each local political entity, whose role was not often justified from a strict legal point of view. given that, it appears evident that patronage was a means of self-promotion and, therefore, it was largely practised by the most prominent italian lords . arts used to accomplish such a service by representing the courtly world as an ideal space. an exception for this was the republic of venice, where the division of power and the assignment of offices for a short time did not allow that power could be grasped by single personalities. consequently, it is more appropriate to d.y. kim, the traveling artist in the italian renaissance: geography, mobility and style, new haven . g. lytle, s. orgel, patronage in the renaissance, princeton . r. rinaldi, “writing at court”., in courts and courtly arts …, milano , p. . speak about “state art” than “court art”. the cultural and artistic flourishing of venice was at its heights after the doge francesco foscari ( - ) signed the peace of lodi on april , with francesco sforza, who at the death of the last visconti male had took over the duchy of milan. the aragonese kingdom of naples, the duchy of savoy and the marquisate of monferrat, a branch of the byzantine imperial family of the palaeologues, supported venice, while florence, under the control of cosimo de' medici, and the city- states of mantua and genoa were allied with milan. both parts were willing to stop war, as venice was menaced by the ottomans and francesco sforza was impatient to establish firmly his power over milan. the terms of the agreement, which were worked out by cosimo de' medici, established that venice and its allies recognized sforza as the rightful duke of milan and, in exchange for this, some northern territories, including bergamo and brescia, were granted to venice. unlike the neighbouring padua, venice had not been influenced by the florentine renaissance art around the mid-fifteenth century. its art, heavily dependent on byzantine prototypes, whose style was resistant to change, had been sided with the new international gothic style. however, two painters, who were in turn commissioned by the republic of venice, contributed to the erosion of the venetian gothic style: jacopo bellini and antonio vivarini. an example of the state art of the most serene republic is given by the doge's palace, a portion of which was rebuilt so that could host the gatherings of the great council. this last was the most important of the political body of the republic, which included all the venetian patricians aged over twenty-five; these members were charged to control over the state authorities, so that the latter could not exceed in the use of their powers. the hall of the great council was decorated by pisanello and gentile da fabriano with an important cycle of late gothic frescoes. under doge niccolò marcello ( - ) jacopo and giovanni bellini were appointed to redecorate the hall, but again the withering of the frescoes made the painters lean to paint on canvas. this see g. mattingly, renaissance diplomacy, new york , pp. - . r. longhi, viatico per cinque secoli di pittura veneziana, firenze . a. galansino, “the venetian republic: the doges - ”, in courts and courtly arts …, milano , p. . happened during the temporary peace agreement reached between venice and the ottoman empire, when gentile bellini was sent as an envoy of the venetian state to sultan mehmet ii's ( - ) court at constantinople to work for him. afterwards, both vivarini and carpaccio were appointed to work on this venetian cycle. if giovanni bellini had been considered the official painter of the venetian republic (pictor nostri domini) , the painter and medallist antonio pisano, best known as pisanello, was the artist that worked for the gonzaga’s court in mantua, where late gothic culture outlived up to the first years of s. mantua was a centre of the humanist culture, which was linked with the neoplatonic symbolism between the late th century and the early th century. many were the artists who worked at the court, from leonardo da vinci to giovanni bellini, but it was thanks to artists such as costa, dosso dossi and correggio that the modern manner was introduced. this happened in , when giulio romano established in mantua. another important italian family was the house of este. alberto was appointed papal vicar in ferrara, which was a papal fief, by pope boniface ix. this family put into practice what italian literati theorized about the concept of grandeur or magnificentia. the pomp and the munificence were once again a means of propaganda and of preservation of the family's power. with the reign of niccolò iii ( - ), the este family gained by means of diplomacy an influential role in italian politics. as a matter of fact, the duke established his role of maintaining the balance in the political and military contests in the italian peninsula and in the meanwhile extended his domains. his reputation gave reason for the designation of ferrara to host in an ecumenical council that represented an attempt to bring together the eastern and western churches in view of a new crusade against the turks. the byzantine emperor john vii palaeologus, pope eugenius iv, the patriarch of ivi, p. . o. bätschmann, giovanni bellini, london , p. . v. posio, pisanello e l'arte delle armature nel rinascimento, mantova . b. berenson, the study and criticism of italian art, london , pp. - . g.pasetti, giulio romano. genio e invenzione, mantova m. toffanello, “ferrara: the este family ( - )”, in courts and courtly arts…, milano , p. . j. gill, il concilio di firenze, firenze . constantinople joseph ii were accompanied by artists such as leon battista alberti and pisanello. having proved a failure, the council was moved to florence. niccolò's chosen successor, his illegitimate son leonello, made ferrara a lively centre of culture and art and his court was attended by the major painters and architects, and humanist scholars gravitating around the humanist guarino veronese. pisanello worked at leonello's medals searching his models in roman antiquity. leonello owned a rich library and a reliquary as for a renaissance prince the possession and displaying of relics, objects and arms was not only an exhibition of religious devotion, but it assumed the same symbolic value of that played by the pignora imperii (the pledges of rule) in the ancient rome, that is the relics were supposed to guarantee the continuity of rule. the interest and the search for models in antiquity were distinct features of the humanistic culture of that time. in rimini, sigismondo malatesta’s court was among the most important for artistic patronage. named after him was the tempio malatestiano, a mausoleum where highly regarded artists like piero della francesca and filippo lippi worked. patronising the art was an activity practised widely by the medici lords in florence and we can state that italian renaissance art would not have been what it is if such a family had not existed. lots of artists worked at their court. among the most famous artists are gentile da fabriano, who was called by cosimo de' medici, brunelleschi, donatello, filippo lippi, and michelozzo. cosimo made a valuable contribution to the expansion of the library through the purchase of greek and latin manuscripts. it was at the base of the laurentian library built by michelangelo, a public library emphasizing that the medici lords were no longer bankers or mere merchants, but members of the refined elite of the day. the same concept was conveyed by the presence g. alberigo, christian unity: the council of ferrara-florence / - , leuven . r. b. waddington, “pisanello's paragoni” in perspectives on the renaissance medal: portrait medals of the renaissance, abingdon , pp. - . cf. c. mosca, g. scandone, s. gambacurta, m. valentini, i servizi di informazione e il segreto di stato, milano , p. . m. campigli, “emilia-romagna”, in courts and courtly arts …, milano , pp. - of marsilio ficino, one of the most influential humanist philosophers of italian renaissance, at cosimo's court. under the rule of lorenzo the magnificent, the collection of manuscripts was enlarged as well as that of gems and precious objects. lorenzo also founded an academy, the so-called school of san marco, named after the piazza by which stood the building where young artists and patricians met to admire lorenzo's collection. renaissance artists were eager to draw inspiration from both classical and medieval sources, be they literary or archaeological ones. the history of the medici family crosses more than once that of papacy, as it gave birth to four popes: pope leo x, pope clement vii, pope pius iv and pope leo xi. a tuscan town hostile to florence was lucca, where paolo guinigi, vicar of the holy roman emperor sigismund of luxemburg, ruled from to . some inventories deal with paolo's treasure consisting in jewels, goldwork, lavish fabrics and other luxury items. he also owned an extensive library with latin classics and medieval manuscripts around which many scholars gathered. the presence of transalpine artists at the guinigi court favoured the engraftment of the international gothic style. it was lorenzo trenta, guinigi's councillor, who was fond of franco-flemish art and, having appreciated the developments of gothic art during his frequent travels to paris and bruges. he commissioned the illumination of a missal still extant in lucca. two important masters worked in the town: gherardo starnina, who introduced the new international gothic style in tuscany , and jacopo della quercia. the city of siena, which had been a self-governing commune in the th century, was in permanent conflict with the neighbouring florence. having peaked up as a banking centre in the th century, the city went through two centuries of political instability and warfare, which included the surrender of siena to the hands of giangaleazzo visconti up to . a new system of government was adopted, that is the balia, a sort of executive that developed f.w. kent, lorenzo de' medici and the art of magnificence, baltimore , p. . c. altavista, lucca e paolo guinigi ( – ), la costruzione di una corte rinascimentale. città, architettura, arte, pisa . g. fattorini, “tuscany”, in courts and courtly arts …, milano , p. . j.m. najemy, a history of florence - , oxford . in a permanent magistracy. this marked the end of the republican system of the “monti” or “ordini”. during the pontificate of pius ii ( - ), siena was a papal dependency. in , pandolfo petrucci, an exiled aristocrat seized the power and, although he established a seigniory, he never assumed the title of lord, but ruled as a member of the balia and acted as a chairman of the coalitions governing siena. the “signoria of the petrucci” was a tyrannical regime and was torn by french and spanish invasions. in spite of this political uncertainty, the city enjoyed a period of cultural prosperity and it was the home of many humanist intellectuals and artists. the leading families competed in building lavish homes and collecting antiquities. an example of this is given by the camera bella in the petrucci palace in siena's via dei pellegrini, the most decorated room in the palace, which contained greek and latin inscriptions. the purpose for the decoration was to celebrate the petrucci dynastic legacy; it also accounts for the refined antiquarian taste of the owner and his entourage. the style of the room has been deeply influenced by nero's domus aurea in rome. furthermore, a new ordering of the tile decoration of the floor has disclosed that it echoes islamic geometric designs based on the star and cross patterns. a decorative pattern that is to be found on islamic objects and buildings from the eleventh to the sixteenth centuries and that, in the petrucci floor, seems to be associated with the elite culture in siena. the montefeltro family played a key role in bringing the papacy back from avignone to rome and in strengthening the pope's temporal power. all the same, federico da montefeltro, a valiant, cultivated prince who patronized arts, was excommunicated by pope eugenius iv for his purchase of the town of fossombrone without the pope's consent. but, when the next pope nicholas v pardoned him, federico acknowledged the ruling power of church. being often absent from court, he could not compete in magnificence with other italian lords. even so, thanks to his good relationships with florence, many florentine artists went to urbino to work. at the urbino court c. shaw, l'ascesa al potere di pandolfo petrucci il magnifico, signore di siena ( - ), siena . e. miller, a. graves, “rethinking the petrucci pavement”, in re-thinking renaissance objects: design, function and meaning, oxford , pp. - . b. roeck, a. tönnesmann, federico da montefeltro. arte, stato e mestiere delle armi, torino . an unparalleled fusion of humanist culture, art and mathematics took place and the library, containing about nine hundred codices among latin, vernacular, greek, arabic, and hebrew ones, was a key factor in the meetings of intellectuals and scholars. the source of such codices were the florentine bookseller vespasiano da bisticci and lorenzo de' medici. the small courts in the apennines had close relationships with the papal power and enjoyed less independence than the courts we have dealt with so far. one of their peculiar features was that the noble families were closely connected with the urban merchant class. this fact explains why their emissaries often played both political and commercial roles. the town of camerino, in the heart of marche, became a significant centre of culture and art thanks to the da varano family, who in the late th century formed a three-century fiefdom. in , giulio cesare da varano built a ducal palace, which was one of the most outstanding renaissance buildings of the time. the court painter was giovanni angelo d'antonio da bolognola, a frequent traveller to medici's florence, who was active in camerino. the da varano court attracted artists and scholars from across italy and lately italian art critics have re-evaluated the role of the camerino school of painting, as it had original traits reflecting his patrons. in imitation of the malatesta and montefeltro families, the policy followed by the de varano family was based on the promotion of local artists who were sent to master the arts to the italian most prominent centres such as florence and padua, and later rome, where they tightened political and commercial ties. as a matter of fact, the family had invested in manufacturing activities. lots of great merchants rose in f. p. fiore, “urbino: the montefeltro and della rovere families ( - ) in courts and courtly arts…, milano , p. . s. corradini, il palazzo di giulio cesare varano e l'architetto baccio pontelli, macerata . k. christiansen, from filippo lippi to piero della francesca: fra camevde and the making of a renaissance master, new york , p. . camerino, such paoluccio di maestro paolo, who was the agent for francesco datini from prato, an owner of warehouses in venice and ancona. one of the de varanos' allies was the trinci family from foligno, whose residence includes paintings by gentile da fabriano . this latter worked from to for pandolfo iii malatesta , lord of brescia, but did not tie to any court in particular for he worked in milan as well as for the venetian republic. it was the lord of fabriano, chiavello chiavelli, who sent gentile to train in the north, perhaps in pavia. although the popes became the main patrons of the arts in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, some contributions were given even in the earlier century. nicholas v founded the vatican library, employing scholars and copyists to provide the basis for the great collection of manuscripts. a group of artists was summoned by the pope sixtus iv to paint the sistine chapel. pope julius ii was the greatest patron of arts, who commissioned work from michelangelo and raphael. it was under his rule that bramante laid the foundation of the new st peter's basilica. while humanist scholars raised doubts about the temporal power of the church, the intellectuals flocking at the popes' court considered it as a heritage which deserved to be preserved and legitimated. there scholars and artists competed for glory producing masterpieces of painting, sculpture and architecture and thus showing to the world the glory of new-born rome and its papacy. e. di stefano, “un profilo economico: i mercanti e le arti”, in il quattrocento a camerino. luce e prospettiva nel cuore della marca, catalogo della mostra (camerino ), milano , pp. - . f. marcelli, gentile da fabriano, milano , p. . a. galli, “presenze veneziane a brescia nel quattrocento”, in la pittura e la miniatura del quattrocento a brescia, milano , p. . a. de marchi, gentile da fabriano, milano , p. . j. e. sandys, “the printing of the classics in italy”, in reader in the history of books and printing, englewood , pp. - . chapter repertoire of inscriptions . early period . . introduction the art historian gustave soulier wrote about the spread of pseudo-kufic writing in italian art : "on sait comment l’exemple des caractères coufiques devait aisément et rapidement se répandre en europe, car il s’introduit avec des objets de petite dimension ou aisément transportables […] qui, dans le commerce de luxe si actif déjà au moyen âge, composaient tout le déballage des marchands orientaux". according to soulier, whether its introduction in the markets and in western cultural gatherings appears to be an obvious consequence of particularly active trade throughout the middle ages between the north and southeast basins of the mediterranean, the affirmation of such evidence in european taste and, especially, in italy, would be attributed to the peculiar characteristics of islamic epigraphic ornamentation, expressing a "flexible and inexhaustible ” decorative style, lush creative richness and easy adaptation to different media and with different artistic techniques. alessandra bagnera claims that intense trade relations between pisa and egypt have been recorded since the first half of the twelfth century , while the presence of sassanid and persian fabrics has been documented in italy since the tenth century. throughout the middle ages, large parts of the production of textiles, ceramics and metals decorated with epigraphic ornaments were imported and therefore it was realized that they originated g. soulier, les influences orientales dans la peinture toscane, paris , p. . g. soulier, les influences orientales…, paris , p. . trade relationship between pisa and north african countries dated back earlier than xi century. an evidence of this is provided by the presence of th century ceramic basins from egypt. see g. berti, l. tongiorgi, i bacini ceramici medievali delle chiese di pisa, roma , pp. - - - . a. bagnera, “tessuti islamici nella pittura medievale toscana”, islam, storia e civiltà, xxv, , pp. - . – cf. also k.-h. allmendinger, die beziehungen zwischen der kommune pisa und Ägypten im hohen mittelalter. eine rechts- und wirtschaftstheoretische untersuchung, vierteljahresschrift für wirtschafts- und sozialgeschichte. beihefte , wiesbaden . from muslim workers. nevertheless, artefacts from local production centres that were manufactured since the early twelfth century testify the gradual integration of arab elements in the local handicraft. the insertion of decorative elements inspired by the arabic alphabet appears to be particularly an art feature in italian paintings the use of which is reflected since the twelfth century in several frescoes in the churches of the peninsula. according to soulier , the first example of copy of pseudo-arabic writings in italian paintings can be credited to deodato orlandi. in , the tuscan painter created a cycle of paintings devoted to the life of saints peter and paul in the church of san piero in grado. in the fresco of st. peter and st. paul’s burial the saints’ bodies are wrapped in shrouds woven with oriental fabrics and decorated with cursive arabic pseudo-inscriptions; in the ‘vision of constantine’ the epigraphic bands stand out on the curtains and along the edges of the fabrics that cover the bed. as stated by tanaka, a scholar who identifies the use of mongols phags-pha characters in giotto’s ornamental inscriptions, the orlandi's frescoes date around the first decade of the fourteenth century . on the basis of such dating the japanese art historian identifies the first example of pseudo-inscription in arabic characters documented in italian paintings in the crucifix kept at the museum of san matteo in pisa, by an unknown artist that he ascribes to the thirteenth century. alessandra bagnera argues, instead, that the crucifix of san domenico in arezzo, painted between and by cimabue, is the first florentine work in which depicted fabrics have an ornamentation of epigraphic bands in pseudo- arab characters. undoubtedly it is difficult to identify the first evidence of pseudo-arabic inscription in italian paintings, since the dating of medieval works, especially m.v. fontana, “l'influsso dell'arte islamica in italia”, in eredità dell'islam – arte islamica in italia, venezia , pp. - . g. soulier, les influences… p. : “il semble bien que les exemples les plus anciens que nous possédions soient, vers ou peu après, les fresques attribuées à deodato orlandi dans la vieille église de s. pietro a grado, près de pise […] c’est ainsi que dans le diverses scènes qui relatent la sépulture de saint pierre et de saint paul, nous pouvons voir les corps des saints enveloppés de linceuls faits d’étoffes orientales, à rayures, ornées d’inscriptions cursives. il en est de même, dans la vision de constantin, de la tenture suspendue derrière le lit de l’empereur, et la bordure de la draperie qui recouvre le lit semble aussi composée de caractères arabes déformés”. h. tanaka, “oriental scripts in the paintings of giotto’s period”, gazette des beaux arts, , , pp. - . those made by unknown artists, is often inaccurate. the very presence of inscriptions or pseudo-inscriptions in a painting may not be commonly agreed upon. in several cases, either the conservation status or the type of decoration used may not allow a proper distinction between a simple composition inspired by abstract, geometric or vegetal motifs and an epigraphic decoration. the madonna with child, by an anonymous artist of pisa coming from the chiesa di santa chiara, preserved at the museum of san matteo in pisa and dated between the th and th centuries , is an example. on the frame, an ornamentation that may resemble modular pseudo-inscriptions appears consisting of “a sequence of peacocks facing a stylized palm, according to a motif widespread in islamic and byzantine textile art” ; we could go back to the original drawing showing that the hooks enclosing the shaft in sequence were winged figures (fig. ). the crucifix, made by an unknown artist and preserved in the national museum of pisa, proposed by tanaka as the first example of arabic epigraphic decoration, is among the most convincing. however, the frescoes of the rock churches of apulia and basilicata that contain epigraphic ornamentation in arabic characters belong to the same period. in contrast with the dating of the crucifix to the early thirteenth century suggested by the japanese scholar, we would attribute it to the late twelfth century, as reported in recent literature. in this regard, some convincing observations on the influence of fatimid fabrics in the epigraphic m. bacci, "pisa bizantina: alle origini del culto delle icone in toscana”, in intorno al sacro volto. genova, bisanzio e il mediterraneo (secoli xi-xiv), venezia , p. . ibid. h. tanaka, “oriental …”, gazette…, , p . “i would like to remark also that the first representation of arabic-like letters had already appeared in the crucifix in the museo nazionale di pisa, which could be dated to the first half of the xiiith century. these apparently kufic characters but cannot be read. i do not know why these were written on the edge of the footing board […]”. see s. pedone-v. cantone, “the pseudo-kufic ornament and the problem of cross- cultural relationship between byzantium and islam”, opuscola historiae artium, , supplementum ( ), pp. - ; see also m.v. fontana, “un itinerario italiano …”, grafica, p. ; m.v. fontana, “kufic ornamental motifs in the wall paintings of six churches in southern italy”, iosr journal of humanities and social science , is. / ( ), pp. - . m.bacci, a. caleca,“cruz pintada de la iglesia del santo sepolcro de pisa”, in el romanico y el mediterráneo: cataluña, toulouse y pisa, – , barcelona , pp. – . ornamentation of the crucifix have been recently advanced by vera-simone schulz. a relevant detail is that the oldest works decorated with epigraphic ornaments inspired by the arabic alphabet in tuscany are mainly of pisan origin. the growth of pisa’s economic and political power, in fact, took place mainly through the acquisition of possessions and commercial rights in the eastern mediterranean during the period of the crusades, and through this process, material gains like gold vestments for the cathedral of pisa were also achieved. in the seventeenth century, the historian giuseppe setaioli, in the historie dell'antichissima città di pisa, already denotes a similar observation. the presence of pisa and the other republics was not limited, of course, to supporting the crusaders, but it also aimed to establish commercial colonies in syria, lebanon, and palestine. the historical period we refer to is that between the end of the umayyad caliphate of cordoba and the beginning of mamluk rule in cairo. decorative art items such as ceramics, ṭirāz, glass objects and carved crystal became widely spread through the trade with the west. this period was characterized by the flourishing of the islamic arts, whose reflections are also found in the frescoes of the palatine chapel in palermo. from a strictly epigraphic point of view, the decorations that we find in works preceding those of cimabue, already provide us with extremely valuable information . v.s. schulz, “from letter…”, the power…, munich , pp. - . g. setaioli dal portico, historie dell'antichissima città di pisa, consulted online on september , . http://dante.di.unipi.it/ricerca/html/set.html: "patriarca pisano qual fece ritorno per allhora alla patria stette in quel tempo l'armata pisana quattro anni continui in quelle parti e volendo far ritorno a i patrij lidi ricordevoli di alcune ingiurie ricevute da colajanni imperatore di constantinopoli risolvettero (benché da longhe fatiche indeboliti) volere andare a i danni di detto imperatore e luoghi e scorrere fino a costantinopoli del che intimorito mandò sei ambasciatori a chieder paci alli pisani dalli quali benignamente fulli concessa con alcuni pochi di tributi quali dovesse detto imperatore pagare fra i quali furono cinquanta capi di paramenti per la lor chiesa del duomo de i quali ven'era alcuni che per la quantità dell'oro si reggevano ritti" . j. johns, “iscrizioni arabe nella cappella palatina”, in la cappella palatina di palermo, modena , pp. - . kurt erdmann’s catalogue on arabic lettering provides several examples among which we remember for the th century the decoration of the manuscript of the apocalypse of saint sever sur l’adour (n. ) and for the th century the wall paintings at the cathedral of lavaudieu (n. ), the cathedral of chartres (n. ), the cloister in niedernburg, passau (n. ). erdmann k., arabische schriftzeichen…, pp. - . http://dante.di.unipi.it/ricerca/html/set.html the cross painted in the mid-twelfth century by the roman/tuscan artist, as we will see, contains a decoration consisting in the rendering of the word al- mulk probably copied from a ṭirāz that we will try to decipher. it might be the first evidence in tuscan painting of an epigraphic ornamentation in arabic inscriptions in which the signs are readable. around the mid-thirteenth century, giunta pisano added new arab signs recognizable in its decorations: the word baraka and a decorative form of al- yumn. the ductus of al-yumn is also visible in a table by guido da siena, of which we will propose a comparison with a fragment of an islamic ceramic from the site of calatrava la vieja. cimabue, the great innovator of thirteenth-century painting, also took part in the elaboration and copying of epigraphic ornamentation in arabic characters, using the encrypted form of the name “maria”. as will be demonstrated, duccio di buoninsegna proposed, at the beginning of his career, the same epigraphic decorations as can be found in cimabue’s works. in one case, the madonna gualino, the encrypted decorations of the virgin’s name and a modular composition of the high letters are so similar to those painted by cimabue in the maestà at the louvre to suggest a possible copy. duccio contributed to the diffusion of arabic script using the already known signs of al-mulk, but added, perhaps for the first time, a degenerated composition of the word al-sulṭān, that was to appear in different works. here we find isolated letters, but we can identify the ligature between the letters tā' and alif and the initial sīn in a pattern very close to the one that we will find again in some works of fourteenth-century artists and which will be made readable only during the renaissance. . . the twelfth and thirteenth centuries the above-mentioned crucifix, coming from the church of santo sepolcro in pisa and now preserved at the museum of san matteo, shows the christus triumphans surrounded by small scenes of death and resurrection, neatly arranged from the arms of the cross to the lateral boards and the suppedaneum, while in the cymatium the heavenly vision of mary among the angels and apostles has been depicted. the sharply contoured figures show a reiteration of faces and architectural backgrounds found in contemporary miniatures of umbria and latium. the epigraphic decoration is located along the edges of the octagon at christ’s feet (fig. ). it is a gold decoration in an unusual arrangement. the epigraphic elements inscribed in the frame usually follow a single line. in this case, however, an interruption on the text can be observed. the first part of the inscription starts from the top right, extends along the right side and horizontally up to the end on the left. the second part of the inscription starts from the top left and goes down along the sides, stopping on the bottom left at the same point. the inscription in kufic characters presents high shafts bearing wedge-shaped apexes and squared letters without ornamentation, as it is the case with the arabic alphabet. the central part of the inscription running along the base line of the octagon is deteriorated, but the rest of the composition is perfectly legible. the high letters occupy the entire length of the line; there are decorative elements on the mīm (fig. ). the inscription is quite interesting because of its variety of a complex ductus. the composition is very similar to epigraphic decorations present on contemporary fabrics (xii-xiii century) from islamic spain. the ductus present in the inscription can be sorted into three groups (fig. ): a. (in yellow) mīm between two high letters decorated with a three-lobed palmette in the middle. see m. burresi, l. carletti, c. giacometti, i pittori dell'oro. alla scoperta della pittura a pisa nel medioevo, pisa , p. . b. (black) mīm between two high letters with two branches departing from the middle c. (in purple) a repetition of the signs lām-kāf the ornaments belonging to group a are easily distinguishable and always reproduced in the same way. it is a very frequent type of decoration between the textiles, as documented by a ṭirāz coming from bamberg cathedral (fig. ). the branched forms coming out from the mīm belong to group b. this decoration topping the letter mīm undergoes alterations in its different occurrences. we find it in a v-shaped form of the arabic letter tā', which is also detached from the mīm. this kind of decoration is particularly significant because it will spread in italian paintings of the following centuries. but what is the origin of this decoration? it is very likely that we are dealing with inscriptions copied from ṭirāz with writing bands. the most common problem in the copy of the inscriptions from fabrics, for a non-arabic-speaking craftsman, is related to the identification of the shape of the letters. often, the non-arabic-speaking observer cannot distinguish the line of writing from its background and can interpret as an alphabetic letter the space left blank by the writing. it follows that in our case the copy did not follow the actual course of the letters, but that of the empty spaces, making a sort of negative of the inscription. this phenomenon is well illustrated by rosselló bordoy in cases involving the word al-mulk in the epigraphic ornaments of hispanic ceramics from the tenth- eleventh century. if we observe the image of an eleventh-century fatimid tissue (kevorkian collection, paris) with the word al-mulk and if we isolate the empty spaces of the arabic text, we get a drawing similar to that of group b (fig. ). the more recognizable element becomes just the central branches also present among the islamic objects dating between the eleventh and thirteenth centuries, as the fatimid egyptian ring (metropolitan museum in new york) and the m. petzet, textile grabfunde aus der sepultur des bamberger domkapitels. internationales kolloquium, schloss seehof, / april , (arbeitshefte des bayerischen landesamtes für denkmalpflege, bd. ), münchen , pp. - . g. rosselló bordoy, escrito en el barro. notas sobre epigrafía en cerámicas de Época islámica, palma de mallorca , p. . fragment of fabric coming from the bamberg cathedral (fig. ). in both cases, we can assume, through the analysis of the drawing, that it is an alteration of the word al-mulk. returning to the decoration of the crucifix, the ornamentation of group b would be nothing more than the negative forms of the group a. proceeding with the comparison of the drawings, from the negative of b decoration we get, indeed, the same decoration of a (fig. ). this form copied in various epigraphic band will undergo changes, but its matrix will always be identifiable. the signs of kāf and lām (in two cases are only reported the kāf) belong to the group c. in , , , , , segments there is a perfect alternation between the lām and kāf letters (in purple) and the ductus lām-mīm -lām (yellow and black). in segments and and in the left-hand part of only the signs in yellow and black are repeated. the presence of high letters alternated to a lām-mīm-lām ductus, is very frequent in western islamicate artefacts such as the arca santa reliquary preserved in oviedo, dated to the late th century or early th century (fig. ). the crucifix inscription seems to follow the same patterns as those present in the arca santa and in an enamel ciborium from limoges known as ‘master alpais' ciborium’ , preserved at the louvre (fig. ). from the comparison of the epigraphic patterns, we can note the similarities with those that decorate both the ciborium (fig. ), and the arca santa (fig. ). these are recurrent signs in arabic epigraphy, which are, however, adapted and re-inserted in western artefacts decorations between the th and th century and later transferred to the ornamentations in the paintings. in the specimen of the crucifix, we face, therefore, an epigraphic decoration whose signs are still visible and from which we can derive the original arabic g. helmecke, byzantinische und orientalische seidenstoffe, grabfunde aus der sepultur der bamberger domherren, bamberg , p. - ; see also textile grabfunde aus der sepultur des bamberger domkapitels. internationales kolloquium, schloss seehof, ./ . april , (arbeitshefte des bayerischen landesamtes für denkmalpflege ), münchen , pp. - ; a. stauffer: die mittelalterlichen textilien von st. servatius in maastricht (schriften der abegg-stiftung bern ), riggisberg , p. . j. d. dodds, the art of medieval spain, a.d. - , new york , pp. - . b. drake boem, l'oeuvre de limoges. Émaux limousins du moyen age, paris . inscription al-mulk. in my opinion, this could be one of the most ancient examples of arabic inscription, documented in tuscan painting, that still keeps readability. the analysis of these signs will allow us to better understand their evolution in the various artists and works of different periods. several frescoes in southern italy byzantine rock churches are decorated by arabic epigraphic patterns . the inscriptions painted on the frescoes dating around the thirteenth century and depicting the saints james the greatand the apostle peter, in the church of san giovanni in monterrone in matera, have been already reported by gabrieli and more recently by fontana . along the frame of the niche of st. peter, the sequence of kāfs is visible between two high elements joined by a vertical u-shaped ligament at the bottom. this kind of epigraphic ornamentation is very often used in byzantine painting as evidenced by the frescoes of the monastery of hosios loukas in boeotia (fig. ). in the frame of st. james, however, appears a more complex decoration consisting of a sign and its mirror image repeated in sequence. also, this form shows among the epigraphic decorations from the greek monastery (fig. a). in both cases, it is a kind of composition occurring on jars dating from th and th centuries, such as those kept at the palazzo della zisa in palermo (fig. b). i believe we are dealing with a degeneration of the word al-mulk that we can reconstruct thanks to the comparison with jars from palermo where the arabic simplified version is still recognizable. these cases may shed light on the role of byzantine art in transferring the epigraphic decorations in arabic characters through a gradual transition to the west (greece, sicily, spain, france). m. falla castelfranchi, pittura monumentale bizantina in puglia, milano , pp. - . g. gabrieli, inventario topografico e bibliografico delle cripte eremitiche basiliane di puglia, roma , p. . m.v. fontana, “kufic ornamental motifs …”, pp. - . f. ardizzone, “le anfore recuperate sopra le volte del palazzo della zisa e la produzione di ceramica comune a palermo tra la fine dell'xi e il xii secolo”, mélanges de l'ecole française de rome. moyen-age, n. , pp. - , . among the oldest known italian artists in whose works the presence of epigraphic ornamentations in arabic script is testified, giunta pisano has to be mentioned. born between the end of the twelfth and the beginning of the thirteenth century, he is one of the few painters prior to cimabue to use this kind of arabic epigraphic decoration. the arabic signs occur on different crosses and reredos painted by the tuscan artist. in the double-faced cross attributed to giunta and dated to the mid- th century, from the museum of san matteo in pisa, the epigraphic decorations are visible on the christus patiens’ white cloth (fig. a). it is a processional crucifix shaped and painted on both sides in tempera and gold on wood, coming from the opera del duomo in pisa. the epigraphic ornaments are in gold in the middle of the cloth band. in the first part of the epigraphic ornamentation it is possible to recognize the strokes of the letters bā' and rā’ lying on the line and followed by an angular letter that would correspond to a kāf and the tā' marbūṭa which takes the shape of the alif (fig. b.). considering this sequence, it might be read as the word baraka. in the reredos of st. francis and six miracles, epigraphic decorations are painted in a completely different way. it is a painting in tempera and gold on wood attributed to giunta dating around , preserved in the museum of san matteo in pisa. it was painted for the church of san francesco in pisa, a few decades after the canonization of st. francis ( ). two symmetrical angels fill the triangular spaces of the cusp. below them, on both sides of the saint, the six scenes related to the miraculous healings stand out. the epigraphic ornamentation is present in three scenes on the upper part of the tower and in the scene of the miraculous healing of women afflicted with a fistula breast, over the entire length of the wall of the building (fig. ). the pattern in black follows a modular composition, two high letters with terminations bending towards the centre are linked by a ligament surrounded m. burresi, cimabue a pisa: la pittura pisana del duecento da giunta a giotto, pisa , pp. - . very frequent phenomenon seen in the inscriptions of the word baraka present on iranian ceramics. e. b. garrison, italian romanesque panel painting: an illustrated index, firenze , pp. , . m. boskovits, “g. pisano: una svolta nella pittura italiana del duecento”, arte illustrata, , nn. - , p. . l. bellosi, cimabue, milano , pp. , - , , . by an oval leaf-shaped sign. the foliated style bears leafy endings. between the beginning and the end of each modular element, we find a high letter topped with a decorative dot. the pattern is similar to that found on the fatimid amphora of the th century in the victoria and albert museum in london. the decoration can be paralleled with a type of ornamentation present on a fragment of egyptian ikat from the eleventh century preserved at the new york metropolitan museum. however, in the last case, the terminations are simpler (fig. ). the round ductus with an up-raising tail is a recurring element on the th- th century artefacts circulating in europe bearing the word al-yumn. the decorations of the door of the bohemond of hauteville mausoleum in canosa and a fragment of tissue from the tomb of bishop otto ii in bamberg provide examples (fig. ). a different shape of al-yumn is present in the coronation of the virgin preserved at the courtauld gallery in london (fig. ). the table, by guido da siena , was part of the dossale di badia ardenga, whose panels are now preserved in five different european museums . in the painting, which represents the cusp of the dossale, two angels are placed next to two shields. in the middle of a long throne, jesus crowns the virgin mary, while keeping open the book of the holy scriptures the epigraphic element appears on the cuff of christ: it is a decoration in gold carved in relief, which seems to recall a type of writing style used on fabrics coming from egypt. in particular, by looking at the epigraphic ornamentation on an eleventh century cloth fragment in the metropolitan museum in new york, many similarities can be found (fig. ). the epigraphic pattern is characterized by the presence of curved endings on each letter. the initial yā’ is formed by a horizontal line followed by a medial mīm and the nūn with an inv. . . . e. g. napolitano, “le iscrizioni arabe della porta del mausoleo di boemondo a canosa”, in spolia. journal of medieval studies, , pp. - . bellosi l., “i vivi parean vivi: scritti di storia dell'arte italiana del duecento e del trecento”, prospettiva: rivista di storia dell'arte antica e moderna, n. - , , p. . a. bagnoli, r. bartalini, l. bellosi, m. laclotte, duccio: alle origini della pittura senese, milano , p. . up-raising tail bent inwards. a similar type of ornamentation is also found in a ceramic fragment from the archaeological site of calatrava la vieja (fig. ). from the pisa area is also the maestà with two angels (fig. ) by an unknown artist of pisa, which was stolen in from the national gallery in london. the pictorial style is still deeply influenced by byzantine art. on the golden background stands out in red the greek inscription mp oy which stands for 'mhthp Ѳeoy "mother of god. the pseudo-kufic element is instead on the fabric that surrounds the shoulder of the virgin, in gold on a red background. ascribable to simple kufic are a series of high letters topped with split arrow-heads arranged in mirroring position that can or cannot be connected. a key step in the transition from idealized figures, coming from the byzantine tradition, into true subjects displaying humanity and emotions is due to cimabue. this achievement would form one of the bases of western and italian painting; without a brisk deviation from strictly byzantine ways, he brought them on the verge of a renewal which was then fully developed by giotto. the use of arabic script in cimabue's paintings takes on a different role and shape. the epigraphic decorations that had hitherto been located in marginal parts of the works are brought into prominence on the thrones and along the frames in cimabue’s works. the florentine painter used ornamental inscriptions in arabic characters to decorate thrones and glories in almost all his works. the style of arabic writing used is exclusively cursive. here, three illustrative examples taken from the maestà of the louvre, the santa maria dei servi and the later maestà of holy trinity are provided. in the maestà at the louvre, dated around , cimabue established a new rule for the traditional iconography of the madonna and child, with which subsequent painters had to deal: the maestà is the most direct model for the rucellai madonna by duccio di buoninsegna, formerly in santa maria novella m. retuerce, m. Ángel hervás, a. de juan, la cerámica islámica de calatrava la vieja y alarcos. nuevos hallazgos. viii congreso internacional de cerámica medieval en el mediterráneo. ciudad real-almagro , p. pl. . see https://www.nationalgallery.org.uk/paintings/italian-pisan-the-virgin-and- child-with-two-angels. e. carli, la pittura a pisa dalle origini alla bella maniera, pisa , p. ; l. bellosi, cimabue, milano , p. . and today at the uffizi (with a similar throne, and with a frame with very similar saints heads), whose execution is documented a few years later, in . the painting preserved in the louvre museum was previously in the church of san francesco in pisa and was then transported to paris in , during the napoleonic occupation. the wooden throne is intentionally painted in a three-dimensional rendering, according to the canons of the inverse perspective, where the lines diverge instead of converging towards infinity. the work is adorned with different bands of writing decorations, placed on the fabric that covers the throne both in the upper part and in a central band and within the halo of the virgin. the one on the top is particularly rich, consisting of four epigraphic bands, divided into frames that run along the entire length of the fabric. the central frame is wider and is bordered by a red hem, the other two frames on an orange background, are bounded by a black hem the lower frame also contains an epigraphic band. the writing ductus is cursive but there are some differences in the drawing of the letters. in the central part, the cursive style is elaborated, there are wedge-shaped, and sometimes bi-lobed and three-lobed apexes. in the two narrower bands, however, we find a simple cursive writing, devoid of any decorative elements (fig. ). in the third band, the repetition of the epigraphic pattern composed of a lām-mīm in ligament followed by kāf can be seen: a shape of al-mulk that resembles those present on the jars in palermo (fig. ). the decorations in the halo of the virgin are similar to those of the wider central part of the upper band over the throne, but here they are decorated inside with dots. the writings are not always readable, and this holds true in particular for those that are found in small black bands belonging to the top decoration. it is a composition consisting of high letters interspersed with circular characters (fig. ). e. sindona, cimabue e il momento figurativo pregiottesco, milano . g.magi, il grand louvre e il museo d'orsay, firenze , p. . a second epigraphic decoration is in the central part of the fabric up to the elbow of the virgin. the pattern is enclosed by two black parallel hems which draw a rectangle containing a floral decoration (fig. ). the two bands on an orange background present a swan’s neck shape crossing two high letters, a sort of stylisation of the ductus previously seen. this kind of ornamentation may contain an abbreviated word, a phenomenon particularly popular in arabic epigraphy on ceramics, as shown on a twelfth- century bowl of iranian origin, at the metropolitan museum in new york . on the evidence provided by iranian ceramics, we can draw some observations on the ductus of the letters. the central element, in this case, is not separated from the high shafts that precedes it, it is a unique sign that corresponds to the isolated form of the kāf, a letter which, usually, is the generatrix of the word baraka . in this case, however, the layout resembles a simplification of the signs repeated in other parts of the painting, where the similarity with the ductus al-mulk present on sicilian jars is evident (fig. ). returning to cimabue’s painting, the wide band is composed of letters with wedge-shaped apices, in which some arabic letters in isolated position are identifiable. in the small band, a completely different type of ornamentation is present. the pseudo-arabic characters appearing here are similar to the other bands, but in the final part we could distinguish the letters a-r-i-a, preceded by a more complex shape of the gothic m (fig. ). it is a very important ornamental device that will be reused in subsequent centuries by different artists and that has never been thoroughly studied up to now. this attention paid to the execution of "encrypted" latin decorations testifies to the importance of writing in the decorative assets of works. this is not about random signs dictated by the artist's imagination, but a scheduled and reasoned ornamental pattern. by the late thirteenth century, then, we already find the will to impart a christian message to the decorative writing programme, without sacrificing the representation of arabic lettering that was inv. . . a see v. grassi, abbreviations …”, orientalia…, leuven , pp. - . perceived, most likely, as a reminder of the holy scriptures. it should be noted that in this first phase, several pseudo-inscriptions on thrones and clothes are very similar to those that we find in the holy texts depicted in the paintings. the arabic signs that artists observed on ceramics and fabrics of islamic origin were used as a starting point for the composition of a complex decorative system to be included in their works. in the maestà of santa maria dei servi (fig. ) preserved in the homonymous church of bologna, the inscriptions in nashki style decorate the drapery on the throne behind the virgin. the work is dated between and . like other majesties from the thirteen century, it was rounded at the top due to the fact that the cusped form was no longer in vogue, in order to give a more modern appearance. the epigraphic ornamentation is divided into four areas. two epigraphic bands are located behind the virgin mary and the other two at her feet. many are the real words recognizable alternating with pseudo- arabic signs. the lām-alif ligature is repeated several times in the text, often in isolation and also in mirror reflexion. in the composition, high letters appear at intervals with short letters with sublinear terminations like the rā’ or wāw. the same lām-alif ligature appears in the epigraphic decorations of frescoes in the upper basilica of st. francis of assisi, where there is a thick sequence of lām-alif ligament and hā’ compositions in the cartouches between the prophet’s hands. the maestà of saint trinity is a work dating between and , preserved in the uffizi gallery in florence (fig. ). it depicts the madonna with the child, surrounded by eight angels that present at the bottom, four prophets’ half-busts. the table shows the mature style of cimabue, in which the artist showed the most extreme overcoming of the byzantine rigidity toward freer and humanized formulas. compared to the other two majesties, the epigraphic decorations still in cursive style are slightly different. the whole composition is less dense, and more linear. of all the shapes of the letters used in previous works, only the l. bellosi, cimabue, milano , pp. - . ivi, p. . a. tomei, cimabue, firenze , p. . lām-alif ligature, a tail isolated letter and the kāf have been preserved. the type of cursive is much simpler than those used in other works, devoid of ornamentations and apices. it follows an interrupted, but fluid stroke. a sign that we will find in a large part of the epigraphic production in the paintings of the fourteenth century, starting from duccio, namely, the shaft with a central arc, appears here for the first time. duccio, together with cimabue, is considered the greatest figure of thirteenth- fourteenth-century italian painting before the rise of giotto. the art of duccio was originally strongly influenced by the byzantine style, to which he added a personal gothic taste that can be circumscribed as refined chromatic range and transalpine linearity elegance. compared with epigraphic decorations by cimabue (probably his teacher in the early years) that are stylistically similar to each other, duccio used varied forms of the pseudo-arab characters. the earliest work attributed to duccio and therefore heavily studied to understand the beginnings of the founder of the fourteenth-century painting is the madonna gualino, dating to around - and housed in the galleria sabauda in turin. the work recalls the maestà by cimabue at the louvre . there are many aspects of this painting which are reminiscent of the florentine painter: from the drapery of the child to the physical features, from the reversed perspective of the throne to the use of light and shade. even the inscriptions that stand on the epigraphic band on the throne cloth both along the golden edge and in the central part are inspired by those present in the painting of cimabue. in particular, we find along the hems of the epigraphic decorations in white characters a "copy" of the forms found on the wider epigraphic band present in the maestà of the louvre (fig. ), although with some differences in style. moreover, the same pattern made up of an s-shaped letter between two high letters is reused on the edge of the throne to write the name of mary - another example of a latin text encrypted in arabic characters. figure shows the comparison between duccio’s and cimabue’s inscriptions. l. bellosi, g. ragionieri, duccio di buoninsegna, firenze , p. . a. bagnoli, r. bartalini, l. bellosi, m. laclotte, duccio…, milano , pp. , . ivi, pp. , . the presence of a copy of the epigraphic decoration by duccio fits into the raging debate over duccio’s ties with cimabue. this has recently been rehearsed by ferdinando bologna in a very careful analysis considering some comparisons between the two artists’ epigraphic ornamentations. decorations that, in the writer’s opinion, could reopen the debate on the attribution of the painting, and which, indeed, witness the influence of cimabue in duccio’s training already before and not, as it has long been debated, later than the madonna rucellai. the largest painting of the thirteenth century is the so-called madonna rucellai, a maestà with six angels from the church of santa maria novella in florence preserved at the uffizi gallery. the work dates and was inspired by cimabue’s maestà of the louvre . the theme, however, is represented here with a new more "gothic" sensitivity, loaded with greater expressiveness in the faces and with chromatic elegance. the epigraphic decorations compared to the rich ones of the louvre maestà, take an absolutely leading role in the decorative organization of the work. the pseudo-inscriptions are not only present on the throne fabric but also on all the edges of the angels’ and virgin’s clothes (fig. ). the more angular style of golden characters differs from the cursive ones used by cimabue: in this case, we could talk of pseudo-kufic inscription. in the epigraphic band, which lies behind the throne and on the pillow, the letters have more sharply defined outlines than those on the hems of the clothes, and, in some cases, the signs seem to be inspired by the capital letters of the latin alphabet. the high letters delimit the height of the written field; the style of the composition is very fragmented since the letters are rarely linked. the most common sign is the high shaft with an arch present in the latest works by cimabue, where it is the most frequent element in the lettering pattern. the inscription that adorns the edge of the pillow is presented in a more cursive form compared to that of the throne cloth (fig. ). the letters are loose and show a hooked termination. there are diacritical dots f. bologna, “duccio e assisi, duccio ad assisi. gli esordi di duccio di buoninsegna, a proposito della mostra di siena”, in confronto. studi e ricerche di storia dell'arte europea, napoli , pp. - . h. maginnis, duccio's rucellai madonna, philadelphia , pp. - . l. bellosi, g. ragionieri, duccio…, firenze , p. . used as fillers of the composition. the type of pseudo-inscriptions seems to be very imaginative and therefore has few readable elements. in the madonna and child with saints (also known as polyptych n. ), a work of unknown provenance preserved at the national gallery in siena , the pseudo-inscriptions have loose letters. the shafts are always interrupted by a central arch, both in epigraphic decoration placed on the book and in those on the saint’s collar (fig. ). however, some stylistic differences can be pinpointed in the two decorative patters: on the collar, the letters show a hooked ending, while those on the book terminate with a horizontal stroke. the former is also more cursive compared to the latter that have a more geometric shape. once again, we find the artist's wish to show, even in the same work, different epigraphic decorations. this kind of decorations composed of loose letters with the central arc is also found in the epigraphic ornamentation of the stained-glass window of siena cathedral made by duccio in - , in particular in the scrolls and in the books depicting the holy scriptures (fig. ). different, however, is the epigraphic decoration that runs along the throne of the coronation (fig. ). in this case, we find the standard lām- mīm -lām ductus of al-mulk as it appears on the spanish ceramics and on various islamic textiles (fig. ). in the case of the ceramic bowl coming from madīnat al-zahrā', we find in the centre the inscription of al-mulk with the final kāf, while on the edges there is the simplification with the lām- mīm -lām shape. the same pattern is visible, for example, in a textile fragment published by cornu in . as can be seen from the comparison of the patterns, this kind of ornamentation very recurrent is easily recognizable as it consists of the same scheme with small variations in the adventitious elements and in ligatures between the letters (fig. ). altarpiece is one of two works attributed with certainty to duccio after the maestà del duomo. the work dated between the first and second decade of was originally intended for the church of the hospital of santa maria della a. bagnoli, r. bartalini, l. bellosi, m. laclotte, duccio…, milano , p. . l. bellosi, cimabue, milano , p. . g. cornu, tissus d’egypte. témoins du monde arabe viiie–xve siècles, paris , pp. – n. . scala (destroyed) and is now on display at the pinacoteca nazionale di siena (fig. ) . the epigraphic decorations are present on the virgin's veil and on the ciborium in the saint’s hands (fig. ). once again, the style of ornamentation is not the same. in the first case, it is a very simple composition of inclined shafts with hook-shaped termination, while in the second the letters with the characteristic central arch, juxtaposed with other signs, form a more complex composition. in particular, a portion of the pattern could be inspired by the word al-sulṭān, subsequently reported by many artists, in a more or less readable way, coming from the mamluk protocols (fig. ). the identification of these writing patterns in pre-fourteenth century paintings provides the elements necessary to study the spread of recurring models in the artworks of the fourteenth and the fifteenth century. a. bagnoli, r. bartalini, l. bellosi, m. laclotte, duccio…, milano , p. . e.g. napolitano, “the transfer of arabic inscriptions in italian gothic and renaissance painting. a new approach. the words al-mulk, baraka and al-yumn in the th and th centuries- italian paintings”, in proceedings of the nd ueai congress (palermo - september ) forthcoming. . . summary the use of arabic pseudo-inscriptions has been tightly linked to the import of oriental objects in europe and its subsequent imitative production, which was aimed at satisfying the increased demand for luxury items from the east. this phenomenon dates back as early as the twelfth century and it is coincident with the intense commercial exchanges existing between european countries and the islamic world since the middle ages. this link is proved by the fact that some of the earliest evidences of arabic letters appearing in tuscan paintings are already readable. the crucifix by an unknown roman is an example; christ is depicted in the maniera greca style according to a symbolic image known as christ triumphant over death, as he is shown alive on the cross. the arabic lettering runs along the edge of the footstool, where the word al-mulk (abridged form of “dominion belongs to god”) in floriated kufic script can be detected in the space left empty among the signs. this feature suggests that the inscription might be copied from a textile, as a non-arab speaking observer can easily mix up the weft and the warp. islamic ṭirāzes, costly fabrics woven with inscriptions, were used for robes of honour granted by muslim rulers in return for services and are most frequent among the gifts found in european secular and religious treasures. consequently, they were within easy reach of european traders and monarchs and were practically under the eyes of medieval and renaissance artists. al-mulk is not the only arabic well-wishing expression that gained popularity among italian painters. in fact, two other words are attested in the first half of the th century, namely, baraka (blessing) and al-yumn (prosperity). in giunta pisano’s and guido da siena’s paintings they appear for the first time. at first sight, the repetitive sequence of the word al-yumn seems to be a festoon made up of stylized leaves, but the comparison with spanish glazed pottery dating th century, mainly from calatrava la vieja, offers the reading of such signs. in both cases, the reference model is no more a fabric, but pottery; a medium that was available to everyday people and not restricted to the court environment. the change of medium also affects the style of writing that is cursive and misleading. it appears clear that, since the very beginning, both kufic script and cursive writing are attested in italian medieval painting and there was not a process of degradation from the well-outlined forms of kufic letters to the distorted ligatures of cursive writing or highly stylized forms. in cimabue’s paintings we find, for the first time, a type of decorations that will be widely repeated and elaborated in later centuries: the "encrypted” epigraphic decorations in latin characters. these signs, based on the appearance of arabic writing, are altered to such an extent that they assume the forms of latin letters. in the case of cimabue, these decorations, which are sometimes inserted between still legible arabic words, hide the name “maria”. in the decorative patterns, the ductus shape of the alif appears with a central arch and the signs of the lām- alif ligature in sequence. in some cases, in the frescoes of the upper basilica of st. francis of assisi, for example, the copy of the ligature lām-alif and, in particular, a very well-preserved composition of the letter lām and hā, could lead to the erroneous reading of the word allāh. at the turn of the century, the degraded form of the word al-sulṭān (authority, title of muslim sovereign) is found in most of duccio da buoninsegna’s paintings. this is the beginning of a large display of forms with whom the inscription will appear on the works by the most fashionable artists of the early renaissance period. the patterns occurring on duccio’s panel paintings are hardly discernible and the intricacy of the letters becomes clearer only in light of the forms that will appear in the following years. a characteristic that is noticeable since the earliest degraded form is the position of the letter nūn at °. moreover, the letter sīn, which later assumes the recognizable shape of a horizontal stroke, is drawn like a w. the models of these inscriptions are mamluk silk fabrics and metalworks. the reference to mamluk luxury goods will be emphasized in the next centuries by the titles enclosed in the sultanic protocol present on objects for usage in courts. . the fourteenth century . . introduction until the second half of the thirteenth century the epigraphic ornamentations were restricted to marginal roles in the essential backdrop of medieval painting. they were conceived by the artists as lavish ornaments, part of a decorative set-up that, imitating the byzantine splendour, contributed to enrich and to give glory to the sacred images of christianity. there is sporadic evidence of the presence of fragments of inscriptions, most likely copied from precious eastern artefacts. in a period that was crucial for the birth of a new italian painting, when byzantine influence was gradually abandoned in favour of a representation that introduced a sense of space, volume and colour, works by cimabue and duccio represent a turning point also for the spread of arab writing in italian art. the epigraphic decorations, far from being simple isolated signs, become themselves elements of the painting. these artists re-interpreted the use of arabic script, bending the design of the letters to fit their will and placing them in almost all the works in the same positions: on the throne behind the majesties and on the precious fabrics of the sacred personages. the work of their followers was also seminal; they would continue to use and develop this trend, remaining essentially faithful to the styles of the epigraphic ornamentations, but adding new elements from objects circulating on italian markets and courts (textiles, ceramics and metals). . . early-trecento artists among cimabue’s and duccio ‘s followers who, from the thirteenth to the fourteenth century, developed the use of arabic decorations, are segna di buonaventura, the master of varlungo, the master of albertini, the master of san torpè, deodato orlandi and the master of città di castello. in the maestà at the metropolitan museum in new york, dated to - and painted by the master of varlungo , the epigraphic elements are inserted in the manner of cimabue along the sides of the fabric of the throne. the decoration is very simple, made up of only rough graphic signs and in the shape of broken lines recalling the epigraphic ornamentation on the crucifix by guida da siena (fig. ). more elaborate ornaments that are very similar to duccio’s epigraphic decorations are those present in two polyptychs painted by the master of città di castello kept at the pinacoteca nazionale in siena, both dating around the beginning of the fourteenth century . in the virgin and child with saint francis, john the evangelist, stephen and clare, st. john the evangelist’s kirtle is decorated with an epigraphic band in kufic style, braided with a bilobate palmette termination and the typical central arch of the high letters (fig. ). in the other polyptych named virgin and child with saints augustine, paul, peter and anthony abbot, the characters decorating saint augustine’s dress are very similar, but even more elaborate and accurate (fig. ). the ductus of the letters is very angular. in addition to the high shafts with the central arch, there are also some signs that recall the lām-mīm ligature and the letter kāf. the terminations are bilobate and trilobate palmettes. in the final part, there is an interesting connection consisting of a high letter, a lām- mīm ligature followed by another high letter and an isolated kāf: a sequence that may be interpreted as a corrupted form of the word al-mulk (fig. ). a. tartuferi, m. scalini, l’arte a firenze nell’età di dante: ( - ), firenze , p. . a. bagnoli, r. bartalini, l. bellosi, m. laclotte, duccio…, milano , pp. - . for a more in-depth analysis of these inscriptions see e.g. napolitano, “le decorazioni epigrafiche negli affreschi dell’antico palazzo dei vescovi a pistoia. l’uso dei caratteri arabi nelle arti pistoiesi tra xiv e xv secolo”, bullettino storico pistoiese, cxviii, , (terza serie li), pistoia , pp. - . a very impressive form of shaft bearing a central arch is found in the table virgin and child enthroned with angels and saints nicholas and john the evangelist, painted by the master of san torpé and dated to the first half of the fourteenth century, found in the museum of san matteo in pisa (fig. ). at the bottom of st. nicholas’ tunic, there is an inscription in yellow on black background. also in this case, the epigraphic pattern may have been inspired by the stylized form of the word al-mulk. the arrangement is mirror-like, as it happens in the inscriptions on the fabrics. . . . segna di buonaventura segna’s role in the use and understanding of the arab pseudo-inscriptions has been crucial. he is the joining link between cimabue’s and duccio’s epigraphic decorations and the subsequent ornamentations. he was duccio’s pupil and a faithful follower, who popularised his style . in his works, the mirror-like composition of the word al-mulk filling the whole epigraphic band appears plainly for the first time. this kind of decorative set-up denotes the typical horror vacui of islamic influence. already in , in the altar-frontal signed and dated by deodato orlandi, housed in the museum of san matteo in pisa, we find a very complex arrangement of al-mulk on the book and along the hems of the fabrics of the saints, where alphabetical signs are altered by rotating parts of the script (figg. , ). but it is thanks to the comparison with the segna’s crucifix, from the church of san giusto in siena and kept at the pinacoteca in siena, that we can understand the process of this alteration of the ductus. in the crucifix , there are two epigraphic bands in white on the veil that surrounds christ’s waist (fig. ). we can identify the word al-mulk copied several times throughout the extension of the epigraphic band. the text is framed in all the spaces, taking advantage of ° rotations. just as orlandi did, but remaining more faithful to the original ductus, segna stretches, shrinks and tilts the high letters, especially the first lām, to better insert the word in the blanks, using from time to time some broken elements as fillers of g. vigni, pittura del due e trencento nel museo di pisa, palermo , pp. - . j. h. stubblebine, duccio di buoninsegna and his school, princeton , p. . ivi, p. . the ornamentation (fig. ). this decorative device will be found not only in his works, but it will spread in the tuscan painting throughout the first half of the fourteenth century, where the word al-mulk will often be found with a tilted and lowered shaft, in fact, more similar to a hā than a lām. in the crucifix kept at the national gallery of london, dating - , we have the same kind of decorations on christ’s veil (fig. ). the madonna with st. paul, st. john the evangelist and st. romuald signed by segna, dated around , depicts the same inscription on the book, this time adorned with a bilobate floral termination (fig. ), whereas in the virgin and child with nine angels at the metropolitan museum in new york, there is a pseudo-epigraphic decoration on the fabric behind the throne. among these signs, impossible to read, a recognizable ductus of al-mulk is inserted, almost as a hint that helps to identify the starting point of the epigraphic decoration (fig. ). different decorations are found in the saint magdalene, a work dating - kept at the alte pinakothek in munich. here, along the hem of the virgin’s veil, there are swastikas joined to another type of square decoration, similar to square kufic inscriptions (fig. ). this kind of epigraphic pattern occurs mainly in monumental epigraphy of iran and central asia (fig. a). however, there are also examples from mamluk egypt, and a group of textiles from egypt dated to the th- th centuries provide ornamental bands with swastikas that look like a chahār ʻalī (as shown in the fig. b). in the crucifixion of the metropolitan museum in new york dated around , the decorative band is made up of a series of s-shaped palmettes, which might allude to the letters bā’- rā’ (fig. a) that can be read as the abridged version of the word baraka, as evidenced by a comparison with a textile in the ashmolean museum (fig. b). the same pattern had already appeared on the crucifix of giunta pisano (cf. fig. ). a. bagnoli, r. bartalini, l. bellosi, m. laclotte, duccio…, milano , p. . j. h. stubblebine, duccio …, princeton , p. . c. brandi, duccio, firenze , p. . a. bagnoli, r. bartalini, l. bellosi, m. laclotte, duccio…, milano , p. . a more detailed definition of the style can be found in v. grassi, “the never-ending story of the chinese influence on the origin of square kufic script” in islam and globalisation: historical and contemporary perspectives: proceedings of the th congress of l'union européenne des arabisants et islamisants, paris , pp. - . j. h. stubblebine, duccio…, princeton , p. . . . . giotto according to common art historical periodization, giotto was the forerunner of the renaissance. as a matter of fact, he was the first to give body mass and a ‘realistic’ physiognomic characterization to human figures, surpassing the flattened figures of byzantine art. giotto introduced, or better re-introduced space into painting, through the use of an empirical perspective after the greek-roman mode. architectural elements in his paintings tend to establish a more realistic and consistent relationship with the human characters and are no longer just symbolic representations, as it was still the case with cimabue. on the contrary, giotto gave a psychological characterization to his figures and started the process of secularization of painting. even within the field of epigraphic ornamentations, giotto has a very innovative approach, as he broadens the range of eastern scripts for decorative purposes, not limiting himself to arabic script. in the above-mentioned article , tanaka distinguishes different types of “eastern” pseudo- inscriptions in giotto's painting that are identified on the basis of the dating of his works and the analysis of the lettering. the works that he investigates come from the cycle of frescoes on the life of st. francis of the homonymous basilica in assisi, from the maestà of all saints in the uffizi, from the frescoes in the scrovegni chapel in padua and those of the bardi chapel in the basilica of santa croce in florence. therefore, a time span ranging from to is under consideration. from the analysis of the pseudo-inscriptions, the japanese scholar identifies two distinct scripts: the arabic cursive and the phags-pa characters that were in use in the mongolian empire. indeed, in the ognissanti madonna, dated around the first decade of , the ornamental lettering on the personages’ clothes, the cushion and the casket offered to the virgin are very different from those found so far (fig. ). a. crowe, g. b. cavalcaselle, a. jameson, early italian painting, london , p. . h. tanaka, “oriental...”, in gazette…, , pp. - . ivi, p. . e. carli, g. a. dell’acqua, storia dell’arte…, vol. , bergamo , p. . the pattern probably imitated in a mirror-like manner the phags-pa seals of the mongol empire as reproduced in matsui's drawings of the "qutluy seals" (fig ). this type of pseudo-inscriptions continues to be a unique feature of giotto’s decorative set-up, which was used again later, albeit rarely, by some of his followers. in the dormitio virginis, dated - , kept at the gemäldegalerie in berlin, the decoration is quite different. the inscriptions are much more stylized and detached (fig. ). in some parts of the hems of the fabrics, the epigraphic pattern reproduces the shape of a swastika, while in others a v-shaped composition appears. such a v-shaped decoration is also present in the virgin and child, dating around , kept at the national gallery in washington (fig. ). these v-shaped signs look like the ones in the dormitio virginis, but this time the drawing is more accurate and has been clearly marked on the child’s robe. we also find long shafts with a central arch hinting at the ductus of al-mulk (fig. ) accomplished in mirror-like shape, as in the work of the master of san torpé (fig. ). the last supper, the crucifixion and the descent into limbo are three works dating - , kept at the alte pinakothek in munich, which provide the lettering patterns imitating the phags-pa seals (fig. , , , ). in later works, giotto does not give any more the pseudo-inscriptions that prominent position he used to grant them before. they occupy a marginal place, until they become sketchy and highly stylized signs, losing any reference to alphabetical letter to transform into geometric decorations. an example is given by the crucifixion, dating around and , kept at the louvre museum (fig. ). here, the most interesting inscription element is the one that adorns the personages' belts. it is a stylized form consisting in two shafts with a central circle (fig. ). this geometric pattern, resembling that on the egyptian fabric from th century preserved in the metropolitan museum d. matsui, “uigur administrative orders bearing 'qutluγ-seals'”, studies on the inner asian languages , , p. – . e. baccheschi, l'opera completa di giotto, milano , p. . s. bandera bistoletti, giotto: catalogo completo, firenze , p. . ivi, p. . ivi, p. . of new york (fig. ), can also be identified as stylized forms of the word al- mulk. the legacy that giotto left regarding the use of pseudo-inscriptions was twofold. compared with the rich arabic decorations of the thirteenth-century masters, giotto established a new cultural link, transcending the semitic context and moving toward the far east, thereby giving even more exoticism and ‘glitz’ to his ornamentations. on the other hand, when compared to cimabue and duccio, he did not standardize the use of scripts by restricting them to defined places or functions, which makes their identification difficult. in support of this, it is worth noting that his followers, otherwise strongly influenced by the decisive innovations of his painting technique, did apparently not model their lettering on giotto’s decorations, as they were blurred and difficult to copy. consequently, they preferred to seek their prototypes of arabic script from other sources, which they might have seen in drawing albums or on imported portable objects especially the mamluk ones. . . giotto’s school with the intense painting activity of giotto and his pupils and followers, florence determined the fortune of painting during the fourteenth century in several regions of italy. the creation of a new school of painting produced a new language, aimed at the "naturalistic" in the sculptural representation of figure and space. a large number of artists from all over the peninsula took part in giotto’s school because his travels to different italian towns gave him the role of a unifier of italian art, and his works were admired and copied by masters from naples to padua and from rome to milan. . . . florence from the vibrant school established by giotto in florence, artists such as taddeo gaddi, bernardo daddi, maso di banco, the master of san martino alla palma and jacopo del casentino helped to spread the oriental script in the fourteenth-century florentine painting. a beautiful example of al-mulk-type decoration is found in the four scenes from the passion of christ, painted by the master of san martino alla palma or his workshop. the work dates back to the middle of the th century and is currently kept at the gemäldegalerie in berlin. the characters’ garments are decorated with a simple geometric pseudo-script (fig. ), similar to the v- shaped elements present in giotto's dormitio virginis. however, in christ’s halo an entirely different ornamentation is present (fig. a). the word al-mulk repeated several times and engraved in gold, can be noticed, once again with different rotations (fig. b), as in the case of pre-giotto painters. the letters are so debased that the motif could even be taken for a distortion of the word "muḥammad" in a square arrangement. we find a similar treatment of decorations in the annunciation painted by jacopo del casentino , kept at the poldi pezzoli museum in milan. the robes r. offner, bernardo daddi and his circle, firenze , pp. - . r. offner, “jacopo del casentino. integrazione della sua opera”, bollettino d’arte, n.s., , - , p. . are decorated with the above-mentioned v-shaped motif, in alternate sequence like those accomplished by giotto and the master of san martino alla palma (fig. ). quite different are, instead, the signs in the archangel’s golden halo: a cursive writing formed with three disconnected signs that might recall the repetition of the word baraka (fig. ). similar ornamental motifs are found in the contemporary work of his master, taddeo gaddi, who worked in giotto’s workshop from to , the year of his death . in gaddi’s triptych of the virgin and child enthroned with saints of , kept at the gemäldegalerie in berlin, there are inscribed decorations in gold on the throne and along the hem of the virgin's kirtle (fig. ). the angular mirror-like script can be paralleled with some mamluk textiles shown in figure . in the virgin and child painted around - by maso di banco and kept at the gemäldegalerie, we find on the transparent veil (fig. ) a pattern recalling those seen in segna’s works. this form of al-mulk with the slanting shafts appears anew in contemporary egyptian fabrics, kept in the ashmolean museum (fig. ). along the virgin’s collar, there is a decoration that might be inspired by letters of the latin alphabet. in bernardo daddi’s largely documented work, we find the same elements that appear in the paintings of the artists of his school, as well as signs previously used by the thirteenth-century masters. in the processional cross at the poldi pezzoli museum, there is a decoration along the hems of the fabrics (fig. ) similar to those seen in fig. and . also, in the annunciation in the louvre museum we find epigraphic decoration clearly in mamluk style in the archangel’s golden halo (fig. ). the decoration copies the ductus of al-mulk with bilobate terminations in a mirror-like manner, similar to those seen in the works first of the master of san torpé and later in those by giotto. p.p.donati, taddeo gaddi, firenze , p. . ivi, p. . m.a. bianchini, maso di banco, milano , p . b. berenson, pitture italiane del rinascimento, milano , p. . ibid. in daddi’s works, we often find inserted pseudo-latin characters having the function of decorative elements. these elements are present in the crucifixion at the courtauld gallery in london , in the virgin with saints thomas and paul at the paul getty museum and in the assumption at the metropolitan museum in new york (fig. ). here we find the repetition of the same stylized patterns. in this case, we witness an involuntary latinization of a sign unknown to the artist, as it takes the form of the letter r rendered next to each other that recalls the signs of the word maria, as already shown above. the capital letter r is represented as the letter a, because the two arms are sometimes not connected, so that it can be identified with the letter i. in the rendering of the virgin’s name, only the letter m would be missing, which is always depicted with two adjacent rs. the result is, in fact, a single letter that, slightly modified and repeated for the entire decoration, stands for the virgin’s name. the reference to the oriental signs remains unchanged, but a well-known christian reference is added. this ornamental device, born from the artist’s observation, would develop through the following centuries and, as we will are going to see, will subsequently be brought to its extreme in the sixteenth century by painters such as bernardino bergognone. although no longer directly influenced by giotto's painting, a new generation of artists from the mid-fourteenth century onwards inaugurated a new period of florentine art that, in the context of epigraphic decorations, proposed again the different genres experienced by previous artists; among these we find the brothers nardo and andrea di cione, the master of san lucchese, puccio di simone and later giovanni of tano fei. in the works of the cione brothers, small angular signs can be distinguished that cannot be attributed to any ductus of the arabic alphabet. only in a few works by nardo di cione, such as the saints giuliano, benedict, peter, nicholas of bari and stephan (ca. ) from the alte pinakothek, more elaborate and r. longhi, giudizio sul duecento e ricerche sul trecento nell'italia centrale: - , firenze , p. . r. offner, bernardo daddi…, firenze , pp. - . b. berenson, pitture italiane…, milano , p. . r. offner, a critical and historical corpus of florentine painting, iv, , new york , pp. - . unreadable decorations appear, consisting of shafts and arches similar to maso di banco’s decorations. in the virgin and child with eight angels dated about , attributed to the master of san lucchese kept at the gemäldegalerie, we find a mirror-like composition of al-mulk (fig. ). different forms of al-mulk are recognizable in the decorations of the enthroned madonna with saints, painted by puccio di simone and allegretto nuzi, currently at the national gallery in washington, dating . the work is rich in mirror-like epigraphic ornamentations (fig. ), but the most interesting is the one that decorates the collar of the virgin. it may be a reproduction of the word al-ʿizz (al-dā’im) that we can parallel with some egyptian fabrics . in the drawing (fig. a), the letters lām-ʿayn-zāy in ligature (coloured in dark grey) show the same shapes occurring on the mamluk specimens, followed by less readable letters that might stand for the rest of the formula (al-dā’im) (fig. b). a new decorative item that arrives in florence after being consolidated by the sienese school, and in particular by simone martini, as we shall see, is the “seal-like” decoration of the word al-mulk. we find it, for example, towards the end of the fourteenth century in the coronation of the virgin and saints kept at the metropolitan museum in new york and painted by giovanni di tano fei . the seal-like decoration with leafy terminations that start from the mīm is repeated along the hems of the characters' clothes. u. thieme, f. becker, allgemeines lexikon der bildenden künstler von der antike bis zur gegenwart, vol. , leipzig . a. tartuferi, l’eredità di giotto: arte a firenze - , firenze , pp. , . perpetual glory the words are recurrent on portable objects. see e. atil, islamic metalwork in the freer gallery of art, washington, , p. , n° ; r. ettinghausen, "the wade cup in the cleveland museum of art, its origin and decorations", ars orientalis, ii, , pl. figs. - ; j. david-weill, catalogue général du musée arabe du caire : bois à épigraphes, cairo, , p. . e. merciai. "il probabile giovanni di tano fei: un'interprete bizzarro del gotico internazionale a firenze," arte cristiana , milano , pp. – , , – . . . . lombardy giotto lived in milan between and , painting a cycle of frescoes in azzone visconti’s palace, today lost . the frescoes of the cupola in the abbey of chiaravalle are the result of the introduction of tuscan art on lombard soil. giotto’s art also influenced other northern schools, where it was often further developed, as demonstrated by the works of giusto de’ menabuoi, an artist of florentine origins who worked in padua at the court the da carrara’s court . the most famous of giotto’s follower in the north of italy was giovanni da milano, active in the third quarter of the fourteenth century. also in his virgin and child with donors at the metropolitan museum in new york, dating around , the lettering patterns are placed along the hems of the fabrics. long letters in gold cover the entire height of the frame in which they appear. these shafts are sometimes slanting and at times straight with the recurrent little arch in the middle (fig. ). the epigraphic decoration adorning the coronation of the virgin painted by giusto de’ menabuoi, at the national gallery in london, is more similar to that in giotto’s works. the painting is decorated with angular and clumsy characters, however, on the hem of the tunic we find the same decoration we have already seen on the mamluk fabric at figure (fig. ). . . . naples in naples, too, giotto’s presence left a lasting mark on the previous french and sienese influences, as evidenced by the works of artists such as the master of franciscan tempera, active in naples between and and roberto d’oderisio (active from the half of the fourteenth century and mentioned up to ) . in general, the epigraphic decorations of giotto's neapolitan followers are more elaborate. the inscriptions are often readable and copied faithfully in the j. a. crowe, g. b. cavalcaselle, a. jameson, early…, p. . j.b. delaney, giusto de' menabuoi: iconography and style, ann arbor . d. parenti, giovanni da milano: capolavori del gotico fra lombardia e toscana, exh. cat., galleria dell'accademia. firenze , pp. – . f. bologna, i pittori alla corte angioina di napoli - , roma , pp. - . backdrops, in the borders of the fabrics. the presence of objects of islamic origin at the court of anjou, in particular, precious textiles and metals mainly required in naples, is made highly probable by the intense trade that went on across the mediterranean . in the madonna of humility with saint dominic and donor, attributed to the master of franciscan tempera, dating around - , at the museum of capodimonte in naples, we find a gold decoration consisting of two rectangular-shaped seal-like inscriptions that are repeated throughout the virgin’s mantle (fig. ). they are reproduced with extreme accuracy and are always clearly distinguishable. this type of inscription is widely documented in works by simone martini, whom the neapolitan artists were able to observe at work, as in he was called to the angevin court in naples for the realization of the saint ludovic of toulouse crowning his brother robert of anjou. in the first part, we find a decoration resembling the arabic letters bā’ and rā' with the latter bearing a termination that falls inward towards the center of the rectangle. in the second, there is a broken square in which the two ends are joined to form a kind of x. in the madonna of humility by roberto d’oderisio in the museum of capodimonte, dating around - , the epigraphic decoration running along the hem of the virgin's mantle is engraved in gold in relief (fig. ). the inscription shows the ductus of the word al-mulk with a roof-like cover on the letter mīm almost lengthwise. in some points, however, the upper part shows a sign that might be identified as a final kāf. the u-shaped element lying over the mīm is, in reality, the detached form of the x-shaped ligature present on the roman-tuscan master’s crucifix, resulting from the plaiting of two shafts. an earlier step of such a ligature can be observed in the form of a volute on master alpais' ciborium of limoges (fig. ). g. vitolo, medioevo i caratteri originali di un’età di transizione, milano , p. . f. basile, storia dell'arte in sicilia, v. , cagliari , p. . m. pierini, “martini simone”, in enciclopedia dell'arte medievale, roma , vol. viii, pp. - . p. leone de castris, arte di corte nella napoli angioina, firenze , pp. - . the most interesting inscriptions are those found in the diptych depicting the death of christ with the virgin and saints john the evangelist and mary magdalene. the work is currently divided, the part depicting the saints is in the robert lehman collection at the metropolitan museum in new york, while the panel with the dead christ and the virgin is in the national gallery in london. the diptych, dating around - , was painted by a member of giotto’s workshop in naples, who was active on the frescoes in the church of santa chiara . according to the information on the metropolitan museum website, “the diptych may have been commissioned by queen sancia of naples ( - ), the wife of king rene of anjou, who was particularly devoted to mary magdalene and was the founder of santa chiara”. we are facing the first cases since the appearance of arab script in italian art, in which a composite inscription was faithfully copied from an object bearing a text of mamluk tradition. the inscription may have been copied from a casket or a metal dish of egyptian or syrian origin, like those kept at the fitzwilliam museum in cambridge, at courtauld gallery in london and from the private collection of comte de toulouse-lautrec (fig. , , ). in the illustration, i have separated the writing from the ornamentation (fig. , ), to ease the reading of the arabic text (fig. ). the inscription runs along the side hems of the frame of the diptych. it is a work on gold foil, in relief, and this, too, would make it similar to the original, probably a precious metal adorned by an inscription along the hem. the inscription seems copied carefully, and all the high letters are of the same height. in addition, floral ornaments are used as fillers that do not interfere with the ductus of the letters, which are fairly recognizable. only in the new york panel, in the part where st. john the evangelist’s halo and mantle intrude upon the writing field, the signs are simplified. probably, those parts of the text that had been accurately copied were supplemented with schematized particles, to fill the available space. d. gordon, the italian paintings before , london , pp. - . http://metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/ consulted online on september , . http://metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/ on the new york panel, on the right side (fig. a), we find the inscription: al-ʿā(lī), al-birr, (a)l-ʿā(lī), (a)l-ʿā(lī), (…) al-maqarr, al-birr, al-maqarr. on the left side (fig. b), we can read: al-birr, al-birr, (…) al-maqarr, al-birr, al-ʿālī, (…) (a)l-mā(likī), al-maqarr, al-birr, al-ʿālī, (a)l-karīm, al-mālikī, al-birr. two details must be noted that are found in the text and that would confirm the hypothesis of the copy of a mamluk original, as in the cambridge casket. the first concerns the word al-karīm that, in the original text, has the yā’-mīm placed above the baseline, in order to fill in the spaces left between the high letters. the same arrangement is also used in the painting. the ductus of al- maqarr is another interesting element of comparison. in the elegant thuluth writing, the letters qāf, rā’ and the first alif of the subsequent word are depicted in such a way that a non-arabic reader could confuse them with a single sign, similar to a ṭā’ or a round letter followed by an alif. in the text of the painting, it appears in a similar shape. decorative tendrils sometimes affect the strokes of the letters. some words are incomplete as some forms of al-ʿālī and al-mālikī. in figure , the decorations of the painting are compared with inscriptions on mamluk metalwork to show the likeliness of the signs. the state of conservation of the engraved inscription on the panel of the dead christ and the virgin is worse than the other panel. unfortunately, the photographs at my disposal do not allow a comprehensive investigation. the text, however, can be interpreted in some parts and appears to be the same as the excellent the generous. although the group “al-br” or simply “br” has usually been used on ceramics as an abbreviation of the work al-baraka, this reading is not congruent with the sequence of mamluk titles. the authority. the words al-maqarr and al-ʿālī usually followed each other on mamluk metalworks, as in l. a. mayer, saracenic heraldry. a survey, oxford, , p. , n° . the royal the generous in the other frame of the diptych. in particular, the words al-ʿālimī, al-maqarr (also in this case reported with the same shape), the first three letters of al-ʿālī (fig. a and b) and a probable form of al-mulk (fig. c) can be identified. the inscriptions are not only found on the frames but also along the hems of the characters’ tunics. the style, although similar, is richer in floral decorations and tendrils, where the shape of the letters is thinner (fig. ). this type of inscription that brings references to words used in the mamluk protocol is an important document that will turn up again after more than a century in the works by cima da conegliano. . . the sienese school the sienese school of painting flourished in italy between the thirteenth and fifteenth centuries and was comparable to florence, with regard to prestige, even though it was more conservative and focused more on the decorative beauty and elegance of the last gothic period. duccio di buoninsegna can be considered one of the principal founders of the school, and even simone martini, who will be regarded as one of its major representatives, was his apprentice. the school brought together painters with different artistic sensibilities. although the artists of the sienese school developed a technique which was distinct from that of giotto and closer to the transalpine linearity, some of them were influenced by spatial and volumetric innovations of the florentine master. in particular, the lorenzetti brothers, who spent their formative stage in florence, painted works with majestic and compact figures, enhancing the sculptural plasticity of the bodies. even the creation of illusory spaces of ever- increasing complexity could not be totally separated from an awareness of the achievements of giotto. the wise other artists remained influenced by the teachings of duccio, but most of them worked out an artistic language that took its cue from a more thoroughly assimilation of the figurative "vulgar", of its formal solutions and its close relationship with reality, and had a widespread and lasting diffusion within the national boundaries. . . . the followers of duccio ugolino di nerio was, together with segna di bonaventura, among the most loyal followers of duccio. he contributed to the success of sienese painting in florence with prestigious commissions for the altars of the two major basilicas, santa maria novella and santa croce, contemporarily to giotto’s return to the city. his only signed work is an altarpiece dated around - for the high altar of the basilica of santa croce in florence , which is now dismantled and scattered in various foreign museums. the spandrel angels kept at the national gallery in london are part of this altarpiece. the robes of the angels have golden borders decorated with epigraphic decorations (fig. ). the cursive writing accomplished with long strokes shows a possible variety of the word al-sulṭān, similar to that seen in the duccio madonna. in particular, on the hem of the angel's robe, thanks to the comparison with the duccio inscription, several letters can be recognized: the article al, the sīn with high teeth, the lām and the ṭā’-alif ligature reproduced in a similar manner to the lām -alif ligature, and a final nūn (fig. ). also, the epigraphic decoration in the works of ugolino di nerio is similar to that of his master duccio. in the virgin and child now in the new york metropolitan museum (dated around ) attributed to his workshop , the white veil of the virgin is decorated with an epigraphic pattern containing hooked letters which are very similar to those present in duccio’s paintings. on the collar decorated with gold, we find an entirely different d. gordon, a. reeve, “three newly-acquired panels from the altarpiece for santa croce by ugolino di nerio”, national gallery technical bulletin vol , london , pp – . a. bagnoli, duccio: siena fra tradizione bizantina e mondo gotico, milano , p. . ornamentation. two long shafts surround a central circular decoration, which leads back to the word al-mulk (fig. ). the same hooked and disjointed letters can be found in the virgin and child in the louvre, dating around - . the white veil of the virgin is adorned with the same illegible pseudo-inscriptions that might be originated from a copy of the word al-sulṭān which lost its original shape in the passages from a copy to the following one (fig. ). in the altarpiece of the madonna with child and saints of the pinacoteca nazionale di siena dated ca. - , epigraphic decoration can be found in the book and on the vase. the former is of particular interest as it shows the same decorative pattern meaning al-sulṭān. in this case, the letters lām, ṭā’ and nūn are detectable (fig. ). in the other contemporary follower of duccio, niccolò di segna, son of segna di buonaventura, we find quite an innovative style. in st. benedict and st. michael the archangel and st. bartholomew and st. nicholas, dating back to the end of the third decade of the fourteenth century , the panels of which are kept at the pinacoteca nazionale di siena, the decorations are always located along the golden hems of the characters' robes, but instead of the word al- sulṭān formed with hooked and disjointed letters, we find the word al-mulk arranged alternately upside down in floriated kufic (fig. ). the term “seal- like” is in order here, referring to this kind of decoration inscribed in rectangles lined with high letters, which we otherwise find frequently in simone martini's works. the master of the albertini was a follower of duccio active between and . the virgin and child dated around , preserved in the pinacoteca di siena, is probably his first piece known to us. it is still very much influenced by the byzantine style, which is evident even from the golden background and e. foucart-walter, catalogue des peintures italiennes du musée du louvre. catalogue sommaire, paris , p. . g. coor-achenbach, “contributions to the study of ugolino di nerio's art”, the art bulletin vol. , no. , new york , pp. , . b. franci, “niccolò di segna”, dizionario biografico degli italiani - volume , roma . a. tartuferi, g. tormen, la fortuna dei primitivi. tesori d'arte dalle collezioni italiane fra sette e ottocento, firenze , p. . the streaks in the drapery of the gown. along the hem of the cloak, there are epigraphic ornaments inserted into small diamond-shaped frames. the ductus of the letters is angular and very similar to those already seen in the master of varlungo and guido da siena works, from which a new design of the word baraka might be derived (fig. ). the style of decoration recalls that of the mamluk fabrics in the ashmolean museum (fig. ), in which each unit consists of a pair of bā’ and rā’ joined by a ligature that could represent a kāf. a comparison between the signs is illustrated in figure . . . . simone martini simone martini’s artistic education was influenced by his knowledge of french gothic art, gained during his short stay at the papal court. inspirations from the transalpine cultures are manifested in the representation of a new aristocratic ideal, permeated with the spirit of chivalry, which is also reflected in the representations of sacred subjects. his largest and most complex work is the altarpiece of st. catherine of alexandria , dated and preserved in the national museum of san matteo in pisa. it comes from the main altar of the dominican church of st. catherine of alexandria in pisa. the rich epigraphic decoration is found on the hems of the robes of the virgin and saint mary magdalene. there are two completely different styles of ornamentation. in the decorations on the virgin’s veil the ductus seems to be inspired by a re-elaboration of the model of the word al-mulk as can be seen in the works of segna di buonaventura, but in an altered and reinvented form. on the red veil of mary magdalene, however, we find a golden border with a decoration displaying a modular organization. while on the veil of the madonna (fig. a) the signs are random, dissimilar and do not follow a sequential structure, in the ornamentation of the veil of mary magdalene (fig. b), the drawing is different. for the whole length of the border, we can see f. s. kleiner, gardner's art through the ages: the western perspective, boston , p. m. pierini, simone martini, milano , pp. – . a repetition of a golden decoration arranged alternately in an upside-down manner. in this case, the standard ductus of al-mulk (shaft-circle-shaft type) has been enhanced with two hooks before and after the mīm, which should be read as the letters yā’ and nūn (fig. a), which allows us to identify the word al- yumn. figure b shows a similar pattern painted by giunta pisano in the xiii century. in the famous annunciation altarpiece , painted in for the cathedral of siena, now kept at the uffizi, the epigraphic decorations that adorn the veil of the madonna are similar to those in the virgin's veil in the altarpiece of saint catherine and in many other subsequent works such as the madonna announced in the hermitage in st petersburg, which is among his latest works dating to - . there are two different epigraphic decorations. the “seal” decoration is situated on the mantle, while the other epigraphic decoration, more compact in design, is inserted along the hems of the dress (on a red background) (fig. a). in this case, however, the seal-like inscription is not in an alternate position, but each single seal contains its upturned form on the top. also in this case, the inscription is identifiable as al-yumn patterns (fig. b). around , the sienese artist paints an altarpiece , now dispersed in various museums, depicting the virgin and child with the saints ansano, peter, andrew and luke the evangelist. the five panels are now at the thyssen- bornemisza collection in madrid (st. peter), the paul getty museum in los angeles (st. luke) and the metropolitan museum in new york (st. ansano, madonna with child and st. andrew). in saint luke, we can see the double shape decorative band (fig. ). on the mantle of the saint in the epigraphic band (in brown), as seen in the polyptych of st. catherine, we can find some similarities with the elaborations of the word al-mulk found in the works of segna di buonaventura. on the saint’s collar (in red background), there is the double "seal" decoration (both in standard shape and upside down) lacking, in this case, the distinctive elements of al-yumn. it a. crowe, g.b. cavalcaselle, a. jameson, early italian painting, london , p. . t. kustodieva, museo statale ermitage, la pittura italiana dal xiii al xvi secolo, milano , p. . m. pierini, simone…, milano , pp. , , – . is, in fact, the word al-mulk which is also present in niccolò di segna’s inscription (fig. ). arabic characters are present in almost all the works of simone martini, and they refer to the same prototypes. this indicates the will of the artist to use a particular type of decoration and not just a generic imaginative composition. also in the case of the seal-like decoration, it is possible to find a comparison with portable islamic objects. a significant example is a dish from the los angeles county museum of art (fig. ). to support the assumption that the type of "seal" decoration spread from a prototype circulating in the workshop of simone martini, we examine the epigraphic decorations of his most important followers: lippo memmi and the master of palazzo venezia. the latter is considered one of his most attentive followers. his artistic personality was highlighted for the first time by weigelt in , with a virgin and child found in the museum of palazzo venezia in rome, dated around . the st. peter and mary magdalene in the national gallery in london and st. paul, in a private collection, have been associated with the roman madonna as possible components of a dismantled altarpiece . along the hems of the clothes of the saints, we find the kind of al-mulk decoration very similar to those painted by simone martini (fig. ). a more angular version, inspired by the seal-like decoration of the altarpiece of st. catherine by simone martini, is found in the virgin and child by lippo memmi and now kept at the gemäldegalerie in berlin. it is an altarpiece, painted between and made for the church of san francesco in san gimignano with the seven main panels: saint louis of toulouse and francis (pinacoteca of siena) paul (metropolitan museum new york), saint john the baptist, madonna and child (gemäldegalerie), saint john the evangelist (new c. weigelt, “minor simonesque masters”, apollo, , london , pp. - . e. sandberg vavalà, “some partial reconstructions”, - ii, the burlington magazine, , , pp. - , - . m. boskovits, italian paintings of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries: the collections of the national gallery of art, systematic catalogue, washington , pp. - . haven art gallery) and saint peter (louvre museum). two types of decorations occur, a cursive pseudo-inscription on the hem of the virgin’s mantle, while a geometric ‘seal’ appears on the collar in the same style of the martini altarpiece (fig. a), an arrangement very close to that of a fragment of egyptian textile from the ashmolean museum (fig. b). lippo memmi was simone martini’s brother-in-law and collaborator. in fact, the triptych of the annunciation with the saints ansano and margarita, created for the chapel of sant'ansano in siena's cathedral (florence, uffizi), bears the inscription "symon martini et lippus memmi de senis me pinxerunt anno domini mcccxxxiii" on its frame . in general, in all of lippo memmi’s works, the epigraphic decoration appears to be very similar to that of his brother-in-law. copies of the seal-like decoration showing a stylized rendering of al-yumn can be found in the altarpiece of casciana alta preserved in the museum of san matteo in pisa (fig. ) and the st. peter (belonging to the altarpiece of san francesco in san gimignano) in the louvre museum (fig. ). besides, in the virgin and child of the national gallery in washington dated around , there is a seal that refers to al-mulk models (fig. ). in these three cases, we find an epigraphic pattern made in different styles: geometric, foliated and floriated. the epigraphic decoration of the drapery in the virgin's hands of the virgin and child in the gemäldegalerie (fig. ), attributed to memmi’s shop and dated around - by joseph poltzer, develops in a different way. as already seen in the works of simone martini, here we find models inspired by segna's decorations, consisting of a condensed and distorted ductus of the word al-mulk. the same kind of pattern is depicted on the book of st. louis of toulouse belonging to the altarpiece of san gimignano preserved in siena (fig. ). the strong similarity between the decorations in question supports the attribution to memmi’s workshop proposed by poltzer. furthermore, this a. crowe, g.b. cavalcaselle, a. jameson, early italian…, london , p. . l. bellosi, “polittico di casciana alta”, in simone martini e “chompagni”, firenze , pp. - . e. w. rowlands, the collections of the nelson-atkins museum of art: italian paintings, – , kansas city , p. . j. poltzer, “a sienese painting in the gemäldegalerie, berlin.” jahrbuch der berliner museen , berlin , pp. – . suggests that some recurring patterns circulated among artists that, in turn, had been transferred from inscriptions on portable objects, as demonstrated by a comparison with an egyptian fabric in the ashmolean museum (fig. ). even among "minor" painters, a massive presence of epigraphic decorations inspired by oriental scripts can be noted. a case in question is meo da siena, a painter from siena whose center of activity was nonetheless perugia. in the double-faced panel in the städelsches kunstinstitut in frankfurt, dated - , rich epigraphic ornamentations are visible along the hems of the clothes, on the scrolls held in their hands by the saints and in the halos. there are three different types of decorations. the ones on the clothes are extremely simple and reminiscent of those that adorn the fabrics painted by martini and his followers. the decorations on the scrolls are more complicated, but they seem to be inspired by the hebrew alphabet. lastly, the inscriptions engraved in the golden background of the halos are more interesting. they reproduce, in elegant mamluk script, tall shafts with bilobate and trilobate palmette endings; in some cases, it is possible to recognize a simplified version of al-mulk (figg. , , , ). . . . the lorenzetti the splendid flourishing of the sienese school continued with the two lorenzetti brothers. they proposed a language which was realistic and devoid of excessive grandeur in opposition to the aristocratic, cultural cosmopolitanism of simone martini. the epigraphic decoration seems to move away from the traditional “seal” ornamentation. motifs from fabrics and carpets were introduced. in the backdrops painted by both brothers, there are carpets and fabrics decorated with decorations in square kufic, as it is the case of the small maestà, painted by ambrogio lorenzetti around the and kept at the pinacoteca nazionale in siena (fig. a). the carpet at the foot of the throne bears such rich j. gardner, “the altarpiece by m. da s. for s. pietro at perugia. tradition versus innovation”, städel-jahrbuch, , frankfurt , pp. - . c. de benedictis, “ambrogio lorenzetti”, enciclopedia dell'arte medievale, roma , vol. , pp. - . epigraphic motifs in square kufic style. among them, the classical hooked cross and a diamond decoration with angular letters stand out. the same decorative patterns can be admired on some egyptian fabrics, as shown in figure b. in the pala coming from the chiesa del carmine in siena painted by pietro lorenzetti in (fig. a), kept the in the pinacoteca nazionale di siena, the same type of square kufic is used (fig. b). the crosses stuck in geometric decorations are a clear evidence for a proclivity to islamic inscriptions, in particular to the panel containing the word muḥammad, with reference to the prophet’s name. an example of this is found on the süleyman mosque wall in hasankeyf (turkey, th century), where the word muḥammad is formed by four units. the word al-mulk is quite often detectable in the decorations of the lorenzetti brothers as well. one of the few examples of “seal” ornamentation is the one we find in the crucifixion attributable to pietro lorenzetti and preserved in the städel museum in frankfurt. the decoration, inspired by the word al-mulk, is depicted roughly, while a pseudo-inscription in cursive can be seen on the scrolls in the hands of the saints (fig. ). in the virgin and child and the saints magdalene and martha painted around by ambrogio lorenzetti, preserved at the pinacoteca nazionale of siena, the mirror-like copies of the word al-mulk with bilobate palmette endings are inserted along the mantle of the virgin (fig. a). this type of arrangement of the letters, which we have already met in the works of previous painters, is very frequent in inscriptions on textiles. a comparison with a mamluk textile can be established as the inscription shares the same style and lay-out (fig. b). f. zeri, “pietro lorenzetti: quattro pannelli della pala del al carmine”, arte illustrata , milano , pp. - . b. berenson, italian pictures of the renaissance - central italian and north italian schools, london, , p. . c. de benedictis, “ambrogio…”, enciclopedia dell'arte medievale, roma , vol. , pp. - . a similar type of al-mulk with a double arc appearing in the virgin and child by ambrogio lorenzetti in the louvre (fig. a) can be compared with a piece of fabric from the ashmolean museum (fig. b). in the saints bartholomew, cecilia and john the baptist, painted by pietro and dated , kept at the pinacoteca di siena, a decorative pattern of al-mulk is arranged along the hems of the fabrics with a regular position and in reverse, in its plain form without any abbreviations (fig. ). this is another example of a likely direct copy from an arabic inscription. the lorenzettis and simone martini deeply influenced the painters of the next generation, born around and belonging to the sienese school: cecco di pietro, paolo di giovanni fei, andrea vanni and bartolo di fredi. bartolo di fredi uses the seal-like decoration of al-mulk type, in his presentation in the temple kept at the louvre. the position of the inscription is unusual. in fact, it is on the wall decorations of the building (fig. ). the same decorations can be seen even in the adoration of the magi, kept at the pinacoteca nazionale di siena. in this case, inscribed ornamentations are placed, as it is customary, on the hems of the garments. two ornamental floral branches depart from the medial mīm (fig. ). a large golden inscription in interlaced kufic bearing the word al-mulk shows along the hem of the veil in the reredos depicting cristo in pietà by cecco di pietro dated , which is kept at the museum of san matteo in pisa. here the branches of the mīm assume the form of an a, and in some cases of a v- shaped element (fig. ). it is interesting to note that the collocation of the word, as observed in the works of segna, is varied. we find it in parallel, perpendicular and oblique positions with respect to the hem of the frame. the decoration in the nursing madonna and child with angels, also preserved at the museum of san matteo in pisa is much simpler. the cuff and collar of the e. s. skaug, “two new paintings by ambrogio lorenzetti: technical criteria and the complexity of chronology”, arte cristiana, , , pp. - c. volpe, pietro lorenzetti, milano , pp. - . m. meiss, painting in florence and siena after the black death, princeton , p. . m. ascheri, siena nella storia, cinisello balsamo, , p. . burresi m., carletti l. and giacometti c., i pittori dell'oro…, pisa , p. . e. carli, pittura pisana del trecento, la seconda metà del secolo, milano , p. . musician angel are adorned with alternate al-mulk decorations in mirror-like reverse (fig. ). the same inscription is present in the haloes of the annunciation by bernardo daddi (fig. ). the decoration of a virgin and child painted by an unknown sienese artist, dated around and kept at the gemäldegalerie in berlin is quite alike, but it is more complex as it shows a connecting line between the two mīm (fig. ). the circulation of this kind of decoration among the sienese artists is also evident in the apostle james the great painted by antonio veneziano, dated - and kept at the gemäldegalerie where we find the same epigraphic pattern (fig. ). a possible evolution towards a more stylized rendering of the word can be seen in the work of paolo di giovanni fei, the nativity of mary . on the panel in the pinacoteca di siena, dated around - , a book closed by two straps decorated with pseudo-inscriptions is depicted. the arrangement of reflected shafts with central arch remind, in a very simplified shape, the model of the mirror-like decoration of the word al-mulk (fig. ). h. bock, r. grosshans, gemäldegalerie berlin: gesamtverzeichnis, berlin , abb. . m. boskovits, frühe italienische malerei, berlin , pp. - . p. torriti, la pinacoteca nazionale di siena. i dipinti dal xii al xv secolo, genova , pp. - . . . pisa in pisa artists of such a calibre as francesco traini and giovanni di nicola were trained in workshops that were culturally linked to contemporary sienese painting. such was the authority of lippo memmi and simone martini, and the significant role that their works played in pisa, too. in the virgin and child with saints, five panels of a dismantled polyptych, all kept at the national museum of san matteo in pisa, painted by francesco traini and dating back to the first half of the fourteenth century , the border of the virgin's cloak is densely decorated with close-packed epigraphic decorations. also, in this case, we find the repetition of the overlaid and interlaced word al-mulk, disposed randomly throughout the epigraphic band (fig. ). it is very similar to the decoration painted in the dossale of cecco di pietro (fig. ). the decorations that enrich the altarpiece of st. martha painted by giovanni di nicola in the mid-fourteenth century for the church of st. martha and now in the museum of san matteo in pisa, belong to a different category. on a closer inspection, we can recognize a correspondence with giotto’s phags-pa characters, in addition to the stylistic trend of horror vacui with condensed pseudo-inscriptions. in particular, there is a serpentine sign that previously appeared only in the decorations of the ognissanti madonna (cf. fig. ) stuck in a similar epigraphic pattern (fig. ). at the same time, however, the seal-shaped decoration with al-mulk does not lose its popularity. in his works, barnaba da modena used some very simple pseudo-inscriptions repeated in a pattern consisting of horizontal and vertical strokes. however, in the virgin and child, dated and signed by the artist , now preserved in the städel museum of frankfurt, an interesting kind of seal occurs. s. petrocchi, “traini, francesco”, enciclopedia dell'arte medievale, , roma , pp. - . burresi m., carletti l. and giacometti c., i pittori dell'oro…, pisa , p. . m. davies, the early italian schools before , london , pp. - . as discussed previously, the branches growing from the central arch of the mīm have taken different forms ranging from floral or geometric decorations to the ones having some similarities with latin letters. in this case, a sort of blending between the al-mulk seal and the letter m, repeated on the hems of textiles and in the halo of the child takes place (fig. ). the homage to the virgin mary begins to be established. . . venice among the most outstanding exponents of venetian painting, developing since the fourteenth century, stands paolo veneziano, a precursor of this school of painting, in which a balance between the byzantine themes and the influence of giotto is attained. his epigraphic decorations are easily recognizable because the type of ornamentation he makes up is recurrent in all his works. while using, basically, the same letters, he depicts them using several epigraphic styles. the study of such inscriptions find a match in the decorations of two iranian bowls preserved respectively in the louvre museum and the metropolitan museum in new york, dated between the tenth and the eleventh century. observing the two artefacts, we can notice the tight ligature between the letters mīm and nūn and the raising tail of the nūn that springs directly from the body of the mīm (fig. and ). both bowls show on the brim two mirroring decorations that are the stylized version of the central inscription (fig. , and ). likewise, paolo veneziano’s paintings present an abridged form of al-yumn consisting in a mirroring s- shaped element. the whole inscription present in the decorations of the enthroned madonna with child, dated - , from the church of sant’alvise and kept at the galleria dell'accademia in venice, can be reconstructed as well as other simplifies forms found in other paintings. in particular, we can distinguish the two parallel shafts connected by a sign, readable as the letter yā’, overspreading the medial mīm from which an ascending termination is generated (fig. ). the strokes that link high letters to the medial mīm are the main elements that allow a distinction between the simplified form of al-mulk and al-yumn. while in the case of al-mulk the medial mīm is linked to the shafts through elongation strokes, in the case of al-yumn the teeth of the initial and final letters can be seen. e. napolitano, “the transfer of arabic inscriptions...”, in proceedings of…, palermo , forthcoming. s. moschini marconi, gallerie dell'accademia di venezia. opere d'arte dei secoli xiv e xv, roma , pp. - . the ornaments of the altarpiece of the church of santa chiara in venice now in the galleria dell'accademia provide strong support for the reading of the decorations of paolo veneziano proposed. the painting, depicting the magnificence of the courteous and worldly splendours, contains various kinds of decorative lettering. here we find not only the ubiquitous s-shaped element, but two new patterns useful to understand its original model. on the chest of christ’s robe (fig. a) there is a decoration different from those seen previously, but very similar to that of the dossale painted by giunta pisano made more than a century earlier (fig. b). the similarities lie both in the shape and location of additional signs in the word al-yumn, which also occur in the inscriptions coming from the islamic artefacts (fig. ). on the fabric behind the throne runs the inscription al-yumn in sequence with a three- lobed fleuron in the middle, where the presence of the letter yā’ and the tail of the final nūn are clearly rendered (fig. ). as already seen, the most recurrent epigraphic decoration in the artist's works is the simplified version of the s-shaped element. it is a widespread sign in the works of other artists of his entourage. in fact, it can be seen both in the birth of st. nicholas, ca., by paolo veneziano , kept at the contini bonacossi collection at the uffizi gallery in florence (fig. ) and in the coronation of the virgin at the washington national gallery (fig. ); the latter was first attributed to paolo veneziano and recently to the "master of the washington coronation" (probably paolo’s father, martino da venezia). figures , , and show the comparison between these signs in the paintings and the inscriptions on the islamic ceramics of the th- th centuries coming from syria and iran, where the word al-yumn is highly stylized. some of these models would be resumed by his follower, lorenzo veneziano. two different versions of al-yumn with an interlaced lozenge-shaped decoration in the middle appear in the lion polyptych dated - in the galleria f. flores d’arcais, “paolo veneziano”, enciclopedia dell’arte medievale, vol. , rome, , pp. - . ivi, pp. - . f. rusk shapley, “master of the washington coronation of the virgin”, catalogue of the italian paintings, the national gallery of washington, washington , pp. - . f. flores d'arcais, “lorenzo veneziano”, enciclopedia dell'arte medievale, vol. , roma , pp. - . dell’accademia, on the rectangular decorations of the robes of the saints in the first compartment to the right of the virgin (fig. ). the same treatment occurs on the paolo veneziano’s polyptych (fig. ). the decorations of the coat appear to be very similar to those of his master, and can be assumed to come from the same prototype (fig. ). the same applies to the madonna of the humility with the saints mark and john the baptist kept at the national gallery in london (fig. ) and with greater clarity in the mantle of the virgin in the altarpiece depicting the annunciation and with the saints signed and dated in by the artist (fig. and ). the transmission of this model among venetian painters is evident in the coronation of the virgin by catarino, dated to , now in the galleria dell’accademia. probably inspired by the decorations of the most important venetian masters, both the ornamentation on christ’s robe and that running along the hems, where the word al-yumn has been copied in a very stylized form, have been identified only thanks to the comparison with the readings made on the paintings by paolo and lorenzo veneziano (fig. ). different epigraphic decorations show in the works of the guariento di arpo, a paduan follower of giotto, who more than giovanni di nicola was inspired by giotto’s decorative script. in fact, the very motifs inspired by the mongolian phags-pa characters in giotto’s ognissanti madonna are copied in the virgin and child kept at the metropolitan museum of new york (fig. ) and in enthroned virgin and child, dated - , kept at the gemäldegalerie (fig. ). figure shows a comparison between the epigraphic decorations painted by guariento di arpo ( a) and giotto ( b). the correspondence of the models both in style and arrangement demonstrate the propagation of the prototypes, especially within the respective pictorial schools. b. berenson, italian pictures of the renaissance. venetian school, vol. , london , p. . f. d'arcais, “per il catalogo di caterino”, arte veneta , venezia , pp. - . d. banzato, “guariento”, giotto e il suo tempo (exh. cat., ed. v. sgarbi; padua, mus. civ), venezia , pp. – . f. flores d'arcais, “guariento di arpo”, in enciclopedia dell'arte medievale, vol. , roma , pp. - . . . summary much of the epigraphic decoration found in fourteenth-century paintings was copied and elaborated in the subsequent centuries. al-mulk is the most frequent word in fourteenth-century ornamentations. reproduced in varied styles, with very significant differences and elaborations and also with different degrees of readability. among the most important ones, we can distinguish the following forms: - mirror-like - seal-like - with a rotating movement for a clearer understanding of the developments of the phenomenon, a table with the various debased forms of the inscriptions has been conceived (fig. ). the mirror-like form of al-mulk (type a in the drawing) is very frequent. the inscription is copied backward, as it often happens on islamic ṭirāzs. this model is already found in the early fourteenth century and subsequent decades and it can be easily identified, as the letters did not undergo considerable alterations, even in its specular copy, with the sole exception of the shafts, whose shape is sometimes approximately drawn. the second widely diffused model of al-mulk is a form where the letters are bent and/or adapted to the filling of a compartment through a ° rotation movement impressed to the word, with the result of creating a thick weft (type b in the drawing). the readability of this form is more complex than the previous one, because the modifications do not refer only to the bending of the letters but affects the proportion of the letters themselves. the right or left shafts are often lowered and/or bent according to the available space. in the early fourteenth century, segna di buonaventura was the first artist who proposed such type of ornamentation on the epigraphic bands on christ’s clothes in the crucifixes. in subsequent decades, this decoration had a wide diffusion and was also used in combination with other models. also in this case, correspondences have been found in islamic textiles from egypt. the third form is represented by the “seal-like” ductus, a type of ornamentation introduced by simone martini around the second decade of the fourteenth century. it is a decoration surrounded by a quadrangular frame looking like a seal (type c in the drawing). al-mulk is rendered with various, mostly floral, decorations. the result is a modular composition that usually decorates the hems of the personages’ clothes. it is found in many works of senese painters, and we can consider it a real distinctive mark of martini’s decoration. thanks to its modular shape, it is not difficult to recognize this type of decoration among the epigraphic ornamentations. the significant difficulties come from the ornamentation of the script, which often takes on extremely rich scrolls and tendrils. a reference can be found in the inscriptions present on several th-century islamic ceramics. the “seal-like” decoration will prove particularly versatile from the epigraphic point of view, as it could be based not only on the ductus of al-mulk but also of other arabic words such as al-yumn and baraka. the presence of the debasements of al-mulk and al-yumn makes a useful reasonable comparison with islamic artefacts for the identification of the differences, even if minimal, in the execution of the two words. in figure , a drawing shows the debasement of the word al-yumn. the condensed mīm-nūn ductus is coloured in yellow and the yā’ in grey. epigraphic decoration from oriental textile imitating squared inscriptions was also common in the th century - a practice probably derived from islamic fabrics. giotto’s works provide a very varied range of ornamentations taken from different oriental scripts. they range from the imitation of the mongol characters phags-pa to some forms of arabic characters and further to the introduction of latin elements. the latter can be considered an innovation, although it already flashed up in the works of cimabue and duccio and it would consolidate as a long-lasting ornamental trend because of the function of latin as liturgical language the mongol characters, too, were imitated by some of giotto’s followers, such as giovanni di nicola and guariento di arpo, but, above all, the latin characters turned out to be a source of inspiration to italian artists, not only in the fourteenth century. around , we find an encrypted latin pseudo-inscription inspired by the virgin’s name, and we will find this type of “marian” decoration with other artists, especially in the fifteenth century. the coding and decoding of the name “maria” will give the start to a whole series of ornamentations and enigmatic games responding to the educated character of renaissance humanism. contrary to what might be expected, the passing of time did not always coincide with the process of alteration and loss of readability of the arabic characters. what proves fundamental is the original support on which the inscription was based, together with the artist’s will and/or capability to copy a text from an artefact or a prototype. it is not by chance that the most faithful copies of arabic texts are found in the works of famous artists of the fifteenth century, who show the ability and will to copy that specific genre of ornamentation among their decorative parties. the word al-sulṭān is a clear example of an extremely flawed inscription in fourteenth-century works, that will, instead, become more identifiable in the fifteenth century. it is thanks to the analysis of renaissance inscriptions that we can recognize the forms of al-sulṭān in earlier medieval paintings. during the entire middle ages, starting from the inscriptions of duccio, the word al- sulṭān is represented by high, apicated and disconnected letters. still, on the issue of the readability of the arabic text, i would like to point out a crucial case, namely that of giotto’s neapolitan follower who, around - , copied a long arabic inscription on the frame of a diptych. the text in gold, reproducing a part of the mamluk protocol, although slightly deteriorated, is still legible. this kind of epithets was to be replicated in the inscriptions by gentile da fabriano and cima da conegliano, copied from oriental artefacts, in particular precious metalworks, the existence of which in italy attested by several sources. . the fifteenth century . . introduction at the beginning of the fifteenth century, according to the traditional interpretation, the arts, after the saeculum obscurum of the middle ages, would be revived to new beauty. at a closer look, in the quattrocento, the admiration of the classical world and the desire for antiquity was one of many manifestations of that intellectual vitality. it did not translate into a clear separation moved by the wish to implement an imitative practice but constituted an impulse to renew the means of expression. as stated by the art historians enzo carli and gian alberto dell’acqua, between the new artists of the renaissance and the previous gothic maestros, “there was a very rich medieval figurative tradition […] that could not be abruptly cancelled by the emergence of new formal aspirations and new ideals”. unlike what happens in tuscany, especially in florence, in many parts of italy particularly in the north, until the mid-fifteenth century, the florentine renaissance idealism was still opposed by a medieval naturalism which spoke with a late-gothic language, in the refined and precious representations of costumes, buildings, and nature. there is no doubt that in this century a new model of humanity and beauty gains popularity through the perspective of space, proportions and a heroic conception of the man already present in the work of some precursors commonly known as the "fathers of the renaissance." among the significant achievements of renaissance art, the primary place is occupied by the invention of linear perspective, to be considered not so much as a set of rules designed to render depth illusively, but as a new filter of the outside world. the art historian carlo argan writes that thanks to the new perspective rules of the renaissance "we no longer see things in themselves, e. carli, g. a. dell’acqua, storia dell’arte…, bergamo , p. . we see everything in proportional relationships; reality no longer presents itself as an inventory of things but as a system of metric relations.” the flourishing of painting, architecture, sculpture paved the way also to the so-called minor arts, active in the production of medals, jewellery, small bronzes, ceramics, fabrics, and weapons that bear witness to refined and lavish lifestyles, when compared to those of the previous periods. this happens in conjunction with the emergence of seigniories and principalities: from lombardy, where the sforzas replaced the rule of the visconti, to ferrara, where the estes rule, to mantua, home of the gonzaga, to naples and the south, where the aragonese dynasty continued the splendour of the angevins, to florence, where the rule of the medicis polarized every intellectual initiative and, finally, to the state of the church that, regarding patronage, was to become the most beautiful of all the italian courts . a new concept of art will be associated to new social conditions, alien to the medieval mentality, aimed at improving the individual existence and everyday life, which resulted in an enhancement of the artist’s personality and his creative activity. for these reasons, the quattrocento is the century that has greatly enhanced and enriched the use of arabic epigraphic patterns in painting, which appeared under various shapes and styles. g.c. argan, storia dell’arte italiana, vol. , firenze , pp. . e. carli, g. a. dell’acqua, storia..., p. . . . international gothic in late fourteenth and early fifteenth century, a figurative current spread in europe which, owing to its cosmopolitanism, became known as "international gothic." it had a wide diffusion also in italy, where it contrasted with the novelties of the tuscan renaissance. it was characterized by a fairy-tale and princely tone, hence the term “courteous" that reflects the sumptuous life of the court. the premise to this new taste can be attributed to the activity of simone martini and, subsequently, to fourteenth-century lombard painting. a prominent place was given to the calligraphic ornamentations influenced by arabic letters, whose ubiquity intensified the splendour and elegance of the works. in florence, the international gothic affirmed itself with particular characteristics, traditionally strongly linked to classicism. of great importance was gherardo starnina’s journey to valencia in . when he returned to florence, he modernized on the international taste and novelties, exerting a powerful influence on the new generation of painters such as masolino da panicale and lorenzo monaco. among the epigraphic signs that starnina largely uses, consisting of x-shaped elements, it is possible to detect a recurring element: a form made up of lām-mīm letters in ligature, followed by a high letter, possibly readable as al-mulk, occur in saint hugh of lincoln who exorcises a possessed man, held in the poldi-pezzoli museum (fig. ), and in st. mary magdalene, st. lawrence and donor at the gemäldegalerie berlin (fig. ), whereas masolino’s decorations are an enriched version of the x-shaped decorations from which some tendrils spring, as in the case of virgin and child at the alte pinakothek in munich (fig. ). p. de vecchi, e. cerchiari, i tempi dell’arte, vol. , milano . j. van waadenoijen, starnina e il gotico internazionale a firenze, firenze , p. . j. van waadenoijen, “a proposal for starnina: exit the maestro del bambino vispo?”, the burlington magazine, cxvi ( ), pp. - . l. bortolotti, “masolino da panicale”, dizionario biografico degli italiani, vol. , roma , pp. – . differently in lorenzo monaco’s works, all the forms already devised by the previous florentine painters appear at the same time. in the coronation of the virgin (courtauld gallery, london), we find an al-mulk model alternated with a mirror images (fig. ). in the adoring saints belonging to the first decade of the fifteenth century (national gallery, london), the hems of the clothes are adorned with some stylized signs (fig. ), also in a reflected duplication, painted with angular strokes that look like maso di banco’s decorations (fig. ) and were probably copied from textile inscriptions containing a debased form of al-mulk (fig. ). a regular presence of al-mulk decorations and their reflected images appears in the works of sienese artists active at the beginning of the fifteenth century. in the baptism of jesus dating about the end of fourteenth century , at the museum of san matteo in pisa, turino vanni draws a beautiful composition of al-mulk (fig. ) on the cloth that surrounds christ’s waist. an example of recurring epigraphic patterns, probably drawn from artefacts that were copied on the paintings during the years, is found in the works by martino di bartolomeo and giovanni di pietro da napoli. here the decorations inspired by the word al-mulk are placed on the hems of the textile present in the mystic marriage of saint catherine of alexandria dated , in the polyptychs coming from the spedale di santa chiara dated and from the monastery of san domenico dated , all kept at the pinacoteca nazionale in pisa . in the mystic marriage of saint catherine of alexandria (fig. ) the mirror-shaped al- mulk occurs in the same way of early fourteen-century italian art (see fig. ). we find the form of al-mulk, similar to that seen in the southern italian churches and sicilian amphorae (see fig. ), in the polyptych dated (fig. ). in addition, the al-mulk slanted mark used by segna di buonaventura is visible in the polyptych of (fig. ), where we also find the angular sign present in the thirteenth-century works (fig. ) that was taken from mamluk textiles (see figures and ). another evidence for the use of mamluk m. eisenberg, lorenzo monaco, princeton , p. . ivi,pp. - . g. neri, “turino vanni”, enciclopedia dell'arte medievale, . http://www.treccani.it/enciclopedia/turino-vanni_% enciclopedia-dell% -arte- medievale% / consulted online on december . m. becchis, "martino di bartolomeo" dizionario biografico degli italiani, vol. , roma , pp. - . http://www.treccani.it/enciclopedia/turino-vanni_% enciclopedia-dell% -arte-medievale% / http://www.treccani.it/enciclopedia/turino-vanni_% enciclopedia-dell% -arte-medievale% / cursive writing is given by the polyptych dated coming from the spedale dei trovatelli , only signed by martino of bartolomeo, where the word al- mālikī has been depicted in mamluk cursive (fig. ). from lombardy, illuminated manuscripts, depicting the aspects of the costumes, the objects of everyday life and many species of plants and animals faithfully spread to europe. michelino da besozzo was a renowned interpreter, painter, and miniaturist active in pavia and milan. michelino painted the mystical marriage of saint catherine now at the pinacoteca nazionale in siena. on the hem of saint anthony abbot’s black cape, there is an elegant cursive writing decoration (fig. ). even in this case we do not meet any new models, but one that already appeared in the previous centuries, which is probably related to the degenerated form of baraka (see figures , , , ). in the poldi-pezzoli museum in milan we can see the only work signed by cristoforo moretti, an artist who worked at the sforza court: the triptych enthroned virgin and child, st. genesius and st. lorenz . the epigraphic decorations that are embossed in the golden haloes and painted on the hems of the textiles (fig. ) can be identified with the word al-mulk already present in the thirteenth century (see figures and ). . . . gentile da fabriano gentile da fabriano is among the most prominent exponents of the international gothic. thanks to his taste for decorative elements, he started a dialogue between the emerging art and humanism, which was part of a conscious transition from the late gothic to the renaissance. he exerted a very significant influence “in tuscany, and in fact in the stronghold of intellectual art, florence itself.” the particular attention to the decorative elements e. carli, la pittura a pisa…, pisa , p. . the royal. p. torriti, la pinacoteca…, genova , pp. - . m. natale, museo poldi pezzoli. dipinti, milano , pp. - . k. clark, “international gothic and italian painting, journal of the royal society of arts , no. , london , p. . would allow the artist from the region of marche to supply an excellent production of epigraphic decoration. the role that arabic script played in the works of the fabriano painter is of paramount importance for the understanding of such a phenomenon in the early fifteenth century and its development in the following centuries. in his work, we find two distinctive features: the copy of mamluk titles contained in the sultanic protocol on the one hand, and, on the other hand, the compositions of devices in which "encrypted" latin characters containing the word “maria” were disguised under signs mimicking arabic script. both features had already emerged from time to time previously, but in gentile’s work, they are exploited more carefully paying attention to the context. in the madonna of humility (ca. ) kept at the pinacoteca nazionale in pisa, there is one of the most interesting inscriptions of the early fifteenth century (fig. ). vincenza grassi provides a convincing reading of the inscriptions running along the child's bedsheet, which confirms the use of mamluk inscriptions in italian painting. as is the case of the neapolitan follower of giotto inscriptions, the text contains a series of mamluk epithets in use in islamic movable epigraphy. in the famous adoration of the magi (uffizi, florence), signed and dated , there are several inscriptions in thuluth style embellishing the scarf (of the woman) and sash of the personages, which contribute to give an oriental connotation to the setting (fig. a). on the knight’s sash there is an inscription (fig. b) with the words al-mālikī (in dark grey) and al-ʿādilī (light grey). on the mantle of the king standing, at the height of his arm, the word al-ʿādilī is visible (fig. ). the ornamentations that are seen on the haloes in these two works present some important particularities. the signs on both the halo of the madonna of burresi m., carletti l. and giacometti c., i pittori dell'oro…, pisa , p. . v. grassi, “rethinking arabic pseudo-inscriptions in context”, th ueai conference, palermo , forthcoming. k. christiansen, gentile da fabriano, ithaca , p. . the sovereign the just humility and that of the virgin in the adoration of the magi are similar to those present on the sheet or on the belt, but not identical. the haloes of st. joseph (fig. ) is adorned with thuluth characters. in the central part, we seem to recognize some epithets of the protocol, albeit with some misspellings. from right to left: al-karīm, al-mawlawī, al-ʿāmilī, al-birr (fig. ). the decoration in the haloes of the virgin, in both works, is harmonic, divided into modules separated by rosettes. in the ductus, it is possible to identify some signs already used by gentile. however, if we look at the upside-down image, we find encrypted characters containing the name “maria”. this brain teaser should be interpreted as a tribute to the madonna. in the halo of the madonna of humility (fig. ) it is possible to identify the extended greeting "ave maria" (fig. ) as well as in the virgin’s halo in adoration of the magi (fig. ) we can recognize the name “maria” repeated twice (fig. ). the study of the decoration that in the adoration is present along the hem of the virgin's mantle support our hypothesis. here the ornamentation, consisting in the al-mulk type arranged in the seal-like form, bears the overlapping letters m and a in the central part (fig. ). this specimen underscores that the novelty in gentile's inscriptions lies in such an alternation between arabic and latin encrypted texts. in the light of what discussed above, it is possible to dismiss the reading of the shahāda in the haloes of other virgins painted by gentile, as it was previously maintained. this is the case of the virgin and child at the frick collection in new york, the virgin enthroned with child at the national gallery of washington and many others (fig. ). the artist's desire to present two different types of epigraphic ornamentations on the halo and on the fabrics, thus also giving a different meaning to the decorations, is clearly evidenced in quaratesi polyptych. the lord the diligent m. boskovits, and d. a. brown, et al., italian paintings of the fifteenth century. the systematic catalogue of the national gallery of art. washington, d.c. , pp. - . painted in for the chapel of the quaratesi family in the church of san niccolò oltrarno, it has then appeared in several museums . the virgin and child at the national gallery in london has a latin decoration in the halo that reads "ave maria gratia plena" (fig. ), but on the hem of the mantle there is a long inscription in thuluth. unfortunately, the picture at disposal does not allow a definite reading of the inscription. however, it is possible to recognize some words such as al-karīm, al-malik (fig. ), and al-kāmil (fig. ). . . . pisanello an evidence that in those years the mamluk protocol was known to italian artists is given by the copy of an inscription on a drawing by pisanello (with whom gentile collaborated for a long time) dating , kept at the louvre in paris, which portrays john viii palaeologus on horseback (fig. ). the text reads: ʿizz li- mawlānā al-ṣultān al-malik al-mu'ayyad abū al-naṣr shaykḫ [ 'azza] naṣruhu . the historian michael vickers believes that the inscription was taken from an object owned by john palaeologus. on the grounds of a letter in greek sent to the emperor by the mamluk sovereign abū al-naṣr barsbāy ( - ) that was allegedly accompanied by a kaniskion , vickers supposes that such gift might consist in a robe on which there was the inscription reproduced by pisanello and that the event may have occurred in the years leading to the council of florence. anyway, this could not be the only mamluk inscription circulating in the workshops of the italian artists, given that many of the epithets present in the epigraphic compositions by giotto’s neapolitan follower first and gentile’s later frequently appear on the objects, and in particular metalworks of syrian- a. de marchi, gentile da fabriano, firenze , p. . the perfect k. christiansen, s. weppelmann, p. lee rubin, the renaissance portrait: from donatello to bellini, new york , p. . this is the common protocol used for the rulers of the mamluk empire, in this case the sultan abū al-naṣr shaykh (r. - ). m. vickers, “some preparatory drawings for pisanello’s medallion of john viii paleologus”, the art bulletin, vol. , , , pp. - . it is the technical term for a provisioning of a tax-collector. see a. harvey, economic expansion in the byzantine empire, - , cambridge , p. . egyptian origin. another evidence that pisanello copied arabic inscriptions from islamic artefacts is shown in his annunciation now in verona. in , the pisan painter painted the frescoes in the basilica of san fermo maggiore . a precious oriental carpet at the virgin’s feet displays ornamentations in square kufic. in the lower part of the edge of the carpet the pattern consists of four quadrangular elements (fig. ), while in the upper part a mark looking like the lām-alif in ligature seems to take the form of the word allāh (fig. ). a comparison between this pattern and a fragment of an egyptian fabric preserved in the newberry collection in the ashmolean museum provides clear proof that nothing has been invented as the textile presents both the quadrangular module and the lām-alif ligature (fig. ). . . . sienese artists three other epigraphic elements, already used by fourteenth-century tuscan painters, are present in the decorations of the fifteenth-century sienese painters giovanni di paolo, master of the osservanza and sano di pietro. the decorative patterns that they employ in their works make large use of epigraphic elements, which duplicate some of the trends previously under examination, contributing to their large circulation in the art world of that time. for example, the well-known seal-like arrangement of al-mulk enriched with floral terminations (fig. ) shows in giovanni di paolo’s coronation of the virgin kept at the metropolitan museum in new york. in the birth of the virgin, painted around by master of the osservanza and kept at the national gallery in london, the inscription, placed on a white r. brenzoni, “nicolò de rangonis de brenzono e il suo mausoleo in s. fermo di verona”, archivio veneto, xii ( ), pp. - . a. ladis. "sources and resources: the lost sketchbooks of giovanni di paolo", in the craft of art: originality and industry in the italian renaissance and baroque workshop, athens , pp. - . c. brandi, tra medioevo e rinascimento: scritti sull'arte da giotto a jacopo della quercia, milano , p. . the painter has been recently identified with the early phase of sano di pietro. see m. falcone, "la giovinezza dorata di sano di pietro: un nuovo documento per la 'natività della vergine' di asciano", prospettiva, n. , , pp. - . sheet (fig. ), is painted in black characters on a white background with a double black line as a frame (fig. ). it is very similar to the decoration on the white casket in the virgin and child painted by the master of , also framed with a double black line. in particular, the sequence of the epigraphic elements - a round shaped letter placed between two high letters and preceded by a sort of final kāf - as well as the overall design are alike. in sano di pietro’s works, there is a recurrent element recalling the triangular shapes of al-mulk type, which had appeared for the first time in segna di buonaventura’s decorations. the epigraphic bands are inserted on the hems of the cloths, but also on the open pages of the bible, used as a model to represent the holy scriptures. the scripts in the virgin enthroned with child (fig. ) from the church of san giovanni battista dell’abbadia nuova di siena and in the coronation of the virgin with angels (fig. ) kept at the pinacoteca nazionale in siena may be compared . those on the plate which come from the abbadia nuova are more accurate and reproduce the inscription al-mulk under the effect of different rotations, as already seen from segna onwards. the symbolic use of these signs, aimed at evoking the language of the holy scriptures, explains their perception in the fifteenth century milieu; a reference to the holy land and to christ, as well as an example of elegance in ornamentation. sano displays this kind of ornamentation also on the textiles, as witnessed by the decorations on the virgin’s mantle in the virgin with child and saints (fig. ) at the metropolitan museum in new york and in the one on the pinnacles depicting jesus’ life in the virgin and child at the pinacoteca in siena (fig. ). see p.p. donati, “per la pittura pistoiese del trecento i: il maestro del ”, paragone, firenze , pp. - . see e. napolitano, “le decorazioni epigrafiche…”, pistoia . ivi, p. . p. torriti, la pinacoteca…, genova , p. t. j. newbery, the robert lehman collection: frames, vol. , new york , pp. - . p. torriti, la pinacoteca nazionale di siena: i dipinti, volume , genova , p. . the virgin and child at the metropolitan museum in new york attributed to his workshop is a patent demonstration that artists, within the limits of their skill, intentionally chose to make detailed copies of arabic letters. the hem of the garments (fig. ) testifies to the painter’s willingness to imitate arabic writing, even though his workshop disciples made rather rough attempts and this aspect could be a useful cue for the attribution of the work. g. freuler. "sano di pietro, la sua fortuna critica e il "problema" del maestro dell’osservanza" in sano di pietro: qualità, devozione e pratica nella pittura senese del quattrocento, milano , p. . . . early renaissance in the first decades of the fifteenth-century, while the imitation of giotto’s ways became increasingly repetitive and sterile, the modern taste was formed by the influence of international gothic and its “new confidence in nature” that is “one of the great discoveries” of the tardogotico. meanwhile, the so-called "minor arts" were beginning to have a greater spread among the renaissance courts. objects of italian manufacture inspired to eastern handicrafts (textiles and metals) will represent the means for transmission of arabic scripts. the new pictorial civilization of the renaissance had as its initiator a young florentine who died when he was not yet twenty-seven years old. masaccio arrived in florence in , when the city was in the midst of a period of economic, social and cultural prosperity. along with filippo brunelleschi in architecture and donatello in sculpture, he can be considered the founder of humanism in the art of painting, as man, represented in his reality and his daily feelings, is the protagonist of his art . as for epigraphic decoration, we find in masaccio works a tendency to use mixed scripts: the word al-mulk appears together with several latin letters, e, v and above all x. in the sant'anna metterza (dated c. ) kept at the uffizi in florence , a decorative pattern made up of cursive letters, which might be read as al-mulk with rotated characters, high shafts and v-shaped letters (fig. ), appears in the angel's halo at the right-hand top. in the child’s halo and on the hem of the virgin’s robe the ornamentation consists almost exclusively in x-shaped signs (fig. ). the ornamentations of the dress of the madonna casini, dated about , are a different issue. the small panel, kept at the uffizi, bears some scripts engraved on the golden hem of the virgin's dress. inserted into the collar, it is possible to identify an arabic word, already presented above, belonging to k. clark, “international gothic...”, london , p. . see c. g. nauert, humanism and the culture of renaissance europe, cambridge . g. fossi, galleria degli uffizi: arte, storia, collezioni, firenze , p. . ivi, p. . the mamluk protocol that we will often find in this form: al-sulṭān. the part of the word that can be better identified is the final one, with the nūn rotated ° to the right, the alif, the ṭā’-alif ligature and the first part consisting in a particular sīn elongated upwards (fig. ). this form of al-sulṭān is also found in the decorations in fra angelico’s paintings, a florentine painter who knew and appreciated both gentile da fabriano’s and masaccio’s novelties, showing a movement towards masaccio and then towards the formal language of the renaissance. . . . fra angelico fra angelico was one of the most important figures of the renaissance. his pictorial language shows “a gradual move towards the rectangular form, and therefore to the release of the art from the strictures of the traditional form.” he was entrusted with painting the frescoes of one of the great works that, during the council of florence in , were commissioned by the medici and which became one of the milestones of the renaissance: the reconstruction of the convent of san mark. it is in the fresco of the madonna of shadows, dating ca. that we find on the robe worn by san lorenzo a cursive writing pattern inserted in a rectangular frame. it is an inscription which is fundamental in understanding the many epigraphic patterns not only decorative ones that angelico painted but those of his contemporaries as well. just like on the collar of the madonna casini by masaccio, we find the word al- sulṭān, which here is followed by al-malik (fig. a). the final nūn is rotated and takes the form of an e like in the inscription by masaccio, the ṭā’ and alif are properly designed, and the teeth of the sīn are elongated. as we can easily infer from the comparison of the drawings of the two inscriptions by masaccio and fra angelico, they are very similar (fig. b). in madonna of the shadows, even the strokes of the word al-malik are well traced. the shaft of the alif is interrupted by a half-circle arch as it will appear in other ornamentations g. bartz, masters of italian art: fra angelico, köln , p. . ivi, p. . made by fra angelico. the word is perfectly legible, although the final kāf has been covered in the drawing. the inscription occurring in the madonna of the shadows, although distorted in design, may be read as the word al-sulṭān. this specimen gives a key of interpretation for other decorations present in other works by fra angelico that would otherwise be illegible. in the chart (fig. ), some examples are provided, taken from the lamentation of christ, the deposition of christ, the san pietro martire triptych, the coronation of the virgin and the virgin and child enthroned, works which come from the museo di san marco in florence. as mentioned before, at the beginning of the fifteenth century there was a massive production of precious islamicate objects made in italy, from which painters drew their lettering. likewise in painting, craftsmen were inspired by the islamic inscriptions embellishing fabrics and oriental metals which had been circulating for some centuries in italy. this is the case of two contemporary artefacts dating back to the early fifteenth century: a fabric and a partially gilded silver reliquary. the former is preserved in the textile museum of prato and the latter in the museum of san zeno cathedral in pistoia. two signs part of the decorative program of these artefacts were favoured by several artists in their paintings. the golden arabic letters, encircled by the polylobate rosettes, show the sequence lām-mīm-alif that can be led back to the word al-mālikī (fig. ). as it is often the case, the inscription is followed by a copy in reverse both in the upper and lower parts of the rosette. the epigraphic bands on the reliquary of st. albert are also quite interesting (fig. a), as one out of many words is reproduced in the correct direction, all the rest being in reverse. this fact hints at a possible copy from textiles, or that the preparatory drawing was transferred to the object without knowledge of the right direction of the script. as a matter of fact, the letters "al-mā" are identical to those of the prato’s textile but, in this case, we also find the words al-ʿālī and al-ʿālimī, which are recurrent on mamluk metals (see the quarter and ). in side there is the complete form of al-mālikī and, in side , there is the debased form of al-maqarr. angelico’s vast collection of arabic inscriptions, which we have dealt with before, contains almost all the words met so far, but the most frequent are the al-maqarr (that usually precedes al-mālīkī in mamluk titulature) and the abridged form al-mā, both present in the reliquary. a comparison among the above-mentioned inscriptions on the textile and those on the reliquary is displayed in fig. b. some examples of al-mā, reproduced in different works, are shown in figure ; while the comparison with the word al-maqarr is visible in figure . fra angelico is the author of an extraordinary number of epigraphic decorations that call for a careful study of the use of this kind of ornamentation. the dominican monk does not limit himself to the copy of what had been seen in the works of previous painters, but experiments and re-elaborates these signs and concepts. if in the decorations of gentile, we can sense an apparent desire of the artist to include the name of mary in his decorations, with angelico the use of encrypted inscriptions takes on an entirely new outlook, a more elaborate vision, with the addition of new latin words. on the right-hand part of the hem of the madonna di pontassieve , kept at the uffizi in florence, the latin signs n-a-z-a-r-e ascribable to the word “nazarene”, occur in the same style of other inscriptions, but here latin is followed by arabic letters. despite the use of two different scripts, the style of the decoration is unvaried. in the middle of the arabic epigraphic band, we can detect a form of al-mulk and al-muʾayyad . in the final part on the left, we find the sign with two shafts which could be a possible variation of al- maqarr (fig. ). several epigraphic decorations appear along the hems of the fabrics in the virgin and child with four angels in the museo di san marco, attributed to angelico’s assistant zanobi strozzi around . the word “maria” is hidden among the arabic letters on the collar of the child, followed by the see v.porter, m. rosser-owen, metalwork and material culture in the islamic world: art, craft and text, london , p. . b. berenson, italian pictures of the renaissance, london , p. this word can also be read as al-malik, matching the following al-mu'ayyad. the one supported by god l. b. kanter, p. palladino, fra angelico, new york , p. . word al-mulk (fig. ). in the deposition, dated , a dense decoration with tendrils in which we can distinguish the word “magister” (fig. ) is depicted on the hem of the cloak of st. joseph of arimathea, while on the hem of the virgin’s robe, the name “maria” (fig. ) has been placed between the arabic letters. an arabic inscription in thuluth (fig. ) runs on christ’s shoulder in the coronation of the virgin, painted before , preserved in the museo di san marco, while three high letters and a final hāʾ in mirror-like position are painted on the collar (fig. ). this pattern, recurrent in arabic epigraphy, has often been interpreted as the word allāh. as we have already shown, religious formulae do not usually belong to the repertory of arabic inscription found on italian paintings. a rare exception, which seems to be convincing, is a resembling form of the shahāda on the coronation of the virgin of the uffizi (fig. ). angelico’s epigraphic decorations represent a crucial point for the circulation of arabic script among the painters of the early renaissance. even though his activities witness his willingness to alternate the real arabic letters and/or inscriptions with latin characters and pseudo-arabic signs, from this moment onward the two scripts will no longer appear at the same time. a group of artists will continue to propose epigraphic ornamentation inspired by the signs of the arabic alphabet with various levels of legibility, and another will tend to replace those characters with latin alphabet signs with varying degrees of distortion. . . . others florentine painters regarding the use of decorative arabic characters, the fifteenth-century artists, even those considered "minor" ones, could not dissociate themselves from the results achieved by the maestros of early renaissance, like masaccio and fra angelico and forerunners such as gentile da fabriano. they g. bartz, masters…, köln , p. . ivi, p. . ivi, p. . continued to be influenced by the decorations present either on the cloths of personages or on precious objects part of the background scene. this is the case of painters like francesco d'antonio di bartolomeo and antonio da firenze, who do not move away from the decorative style used on tuscan artefacts and copied by angelico as well. on the collar of the singing angels by francesco d'antonio di bartolomeo (academy of drawing arts, florence), dating to around , elegant inscriptions in gold copy several words belonging to the mamluk protocol, which have already been mentioned above. figure shows a debased inscription where can be read the words: al-ʿizz (in blue), al-ʿā[lī] (in white), al-nāṣrī (in red), al-mā[likī] (in yellow), al-maqarr (in gray). these signs are also repeated on the collars of other personages. a golden decoration consisting of a sequence of mīm-alīf is shown in the paintings of antonio da firenze: the crucifixion with virgin and saint john and the madonna and child with a bishop, saints and angel, both kept at the hermitage museum in st. petersburg and dating to the mid-fifteenth century (fig. ) . among other signs, we find the word al-mālikī inserted in the hems, here highlighted in white (figs. and ). the transmission of the patterns of al-maqarr and al-mā[likī] is also apparent in the works of andrea del castagno. in the annunciation of the virgin from the gemäldegalerie we find these words on the virgin's cuff (figs. and ), while a version of al-mālikī, also upside-down, is set on the hem of the dress (fig. ). a compound ornamentation made up of three interconnected round letters found in the virgin and child of the contini collection in florence can be interpreted as a copy in the light of an iranian bowl dated th- th c. kept at the metropolitan museum in new york, bearing a similar inscription (see fig. ). l. bellosi, i maestri del colore. la pittura tardogotica in toscana, milano , p. . glory the victorious t. kustodieva, museo statale…, milano , p. . a. zanaoli, i maestri del colore. andrea del castagno, milano , p. . ivi, p. . in the article by rosamond mack and mohamed zakariya on the arabic pseudo-inscriptions on the david by andrea del verrocchio , the authors establish a reasonable and fruitful comparison with mamluk inscriptions in thuluth style on precious metals of islamic origin. the drawing of the epigraphic bands engraved on the sculpture offer useful data for the study of the decorations painted by the artist. through the comparison, we can highlight the presence of the words al-mālikī, al-maqarr and al-ʿālī in most of verrocchio’s paintings. in particular, both the words al-ʿālī and al-mālikī can be identified (fig. ) on the hem of the cloak in the virgin and child in the gemäldegalerie. here, the shape of the lām-kāf in the word al-mālikī is similar to that of the mamluk writing found on metals, as well as to the inscriptions painted by the gentile and the neapolitan follower of giotto. the same model has been copied in the virgin and child in the metropolitan museum in new york, assigned to the workshop of verrocchio and dated . an abridged version of the word al-mālikī runs along the hem of the dress (figs. and ). rosamond mack's reference to mamluk inscriptions is convincing, especially in the light of the present reading of words that are also present on the mamluks metals. a further support is offered by the fact that andrea del verrocchio was also a goldsmith, so he surely had the opportunity to come across such vessels. in my opinion, we should not look for a model in a complicated re-interpretation of allāh signs (as proposed by m. zakaria) but, rather, in the recurring patterns transmitted by movable epigraphy. domenico ghirlandaio, another master of the florentine renaissance, received his training in verrocchio’s workshop; his epigraphic decorations look like those of his maestro. arabic letters in thuluth style appear on the trims of the clothes, and a wide range of ornamentations are placed on carpets that we will deal with later. the same model of the word al-mālikī used by r. e. mack, m. zakariya, “the pseudo-arabic…”, artibus…, vol. , no. , , pp. - . l. fornasari, c. starnazzi, m. pagliai, verrocchio e l'atelier del rinascimento, arezzo , p. . l. venturini, francesco botticini, firenze , p. l. fornasari, c. starnazzi, m. pagliai, verrocchio …, pp. , . r. e. mack, m. zakariya, “the pseudo-arabic…”, artibus…, , p. . verrocchio is also found in his virgin and child in the national gallery in washington, dated around (fig. ). a reference to verrocchio's david is evidenced by the sequence of lām-mīm-alif in ligature as well as other common decorations which adorn the hem of the virgin’s robe in the vallombrosa altarpiece dated - and preserved in the homonymous abbey (fig. ). in the virgin and child in the louvre museum , the epigraphic decorations stand out, in handsome thuluth style, along the hems of the virgin’s robe. they are interspersed with floral rosettes like the ones found in the compound decoration of mamluk metals. all epigraphic patterns decorating the paintings of the previous masters occur also in ghirlandaio’s works and those of verrocchio, included the word al-sulṭān depicted in the veil covering the head of the virgin, according to its established codification (fig. ). . . . venetian school in the first half of the fifteenth century, venetian painters like jacobello del fiore, nicolò di pietro, and michele giambono remained in the stream of gothic painting, re-interpreting the byzantine style of paolo and lorenzo veneziano by means of typical gothic hyper-decorativism. in the epigraphic decorations used by these artists, the influence of gentile da fabriano, who was in venice in to work in the ducal palace, can still be noticed. in the triptych by jacobello del fiore kept at the galleria dell’accademia in venice, dated , ornamental inscriptions in cursive style are embossed on gold leaf (fig. a). a high degree of distortion characterizes the writing, but it is, however, possible to identify some known forms that can be m. boskovits, and d. a. brown, et al., italian paintings…, washington , pp. - . c. caneva, il ghirlandaio di vallombrosa. un restauro difficile, un ritorno trionfale, firenze . f. ames-lewis, “il paesaggio dell’arte nel ghirlandaio”, in domenico ghirlandaio, - atti del convegno internazionale, firenze , p. . s. moschini marconi, gallerie dell'accademia di venezia. opere d'arte dei secoli xiv e xv, venezia , pp. - . associated with al-mulk and baraka, where the bā΄ and rā΄ in ligature, sometimes followed by a final kāf, are the only intelligible strokes (fig. b, c). the particular shape of al-mulk could belong to a model circulating in venice, but already present in florence at the beginning of the fourteenth century. a support for this is given by a detail of the ornament used by florentine niccolò di pietro gerini in the crucifixion with the virgin and st. john in the hermitage (fig. ), whose likeness to that painted by jacobello del fiore is easily ascertained. another prototype of tuscan origin circulating in venice is al-mā, the initial part of the arabic word al-mālikī, here copied according to different styles and shapes. in the coronation of the virgin (fig. ) by nicolò di pietro , kept at the pinacoteca di brera in milan, it is repeated on the hems of the fabric and consists of two shafts, in which the mīm is always distinguishable, sometimes even reproduced with two round letters. following the period of the international gothic, the first hints of pictorial renewal in venice appeared around with the bellini (jacopo, giovanni, and gentile) and the vivarini (antonio, bartolomeo and alvise) families, which gradually mitigated the sumptuous and over-ornamented aspects of the floral-gothic tradition from which their careers started. in the decorations with arabic lettering, the style is characterized by a dense weft made up of high shafts bent by a central arch with a round letter in between. initially, as shown by the decorations of jacopo bellini and antonio vivarini, the copy of the first part of the word, that is "al-mā", is still readable, but over the time it underwent so many substantial distortions that it became almost unrecognizable. in the adoration of the magi by antonio vivarini dated - and kept at the gemäldegalerie in berlin, epigraphic ornamentations recalling mamluk inscriptions in thuluth are present on the textiles, gold foils and flag. they are t. kustodieva, museo statale…, milano , p. . o. ferrari, “un’opera di niccolò di pietro”, commentari, iv ( ), pp. - . r. pallucchini, i vivarini (antonio, bartolomeo, alvise), venezia , p. . repetitions of the same varieties that we find in a stylized version on the hems of the tissue, but well visible on a heraldic flag (fig. ). it is the whole word al-mālikī, which appears in the drawing split into three parts in order to distinguish the strokes representing the letters alif, then lām, mīm, alif and, finally, lām-kāf-yāʾ (fig. ). in the works of jacopo bellini, the word is split into two parts: "al-mā" and “likī” on the robe of the virgin (ca. ) in the virgin and child in the new york metropolitan museum (fig. ), on the robe and the halo of the madonna and child with cherubs (ca. ) in the galleria dell’accademia in venice (fig. ), and on the halo of the virgin and child (ca. ) in the uffizi gallery (fig. ). in the dense and intricate design of the graphic signs of his son giovanni, the words al-mālikī is hardly recognizable. in its place, we find a sequence of mīm and alif interconnected. while in some cases, as the madonna enthroned cherishing the sleeping child in the galleria dell’accademia , signs are still distinct (fig. ), in others works, like the christ blessing in the louvre museum, we find an intricate network of shafts with rounded elements (fig. ). in padua, andrea mantegna adequately represented the humanistic spirit of the renaissance. his epigraphic decorations are reminiscent of the style of filippo lippi (which we will see below), whose presence in padua in is proven by the fact that he painted the tabernacle of the relics in the basilica del santo in padua . nonetheless, compared with lippi, mantegna’s ornamentation retains a recognition of the arabic ductus. in judith with the head of holofernes in the national gallery in washington, on the edge of the tent, the mīm-alīf letters, followed by a shaft that could represent the lām-kāf of al- mālikī is recognizable (fig. ). in the virgin and child painted around - m. boskovits. "per jacopo bellini pittore (postilla ad un colloquio)." paragone , firenze , p. . c. eisler, il genio di jacopo bellini. l'opera completa, milano , pp. - . ivi, pp. . r. ghiotto, t. pignatti, l'opera completa di giovanni bellini, milano , p. m. olivari, giovanni bellini, firenze , p. . j. ruda, fra filippo lippi, londra , p. . b. b. fredericksen, f. zeri, census of pre-nineteenth-century italian paintings in north american public collections, cambridge , p. . , kept at the metropolitan museum in new york, on the hem of the cloak there is a sequence of letters that calls to mind the shahāda (fig. ). it must be said that his decorations are made up of a long repetition of tall letters imitating the elegant mamluk style. in the decoration of the holy family with the saint mary magdalen (ca. - ) in the metropolitan museum, the epigraphic band on st. joseph’s mantle is extremely dense as many signs are repeated several times (fig. ). once again, the painter used an already known model as it is shown by the comparison with the inscribed frieze painted more than a century and a half before by the master of the città di castello (fig. ). a simple repetition of shafts also occurs in the st. luke in the pinacoteca di brera (fig. ). . . . cima da conegliano undoubtedly, the most significant, comprehensive and faithful case of transfer of arabic inscriptions to italian art is represented by the works of giovanni battista cima da conegliano. the cultural context in which cima da conegliano operated was rich in new ideas that highlighted his work. once he reached artistic maturity, cima moved from conegliano to venice, where he came into contact with a cosmopolitan world and with famous painters working in the city. he met giovanni bellini, alvise vivarini and, probably, albrecht dürer, who was in venice during those years . meeting them gave him the opportunity to confront and improve his talent by concentrating particularly on details, in both figures and ornaments. it is just this attention given to the remarkably faithful reproduction of the decorative elements, together with the need to represent refinement and elegance, which make the work of cima the most notable example of faithful reproduction of arabic texts in italian paintings. s. fumian, mantegna e padova, - , milano , pp. , – , . g. finaldi, “mantegna”, the dictionary of art, vol. , new york , p. . s. bandera bistoletti, il polittico di san luca di andrea mantegna ( - ): in occasione del suo restauro, milano , p. . b. carpenè, “la biodiversità vegetale nei dipinti di cima”, in il paesaggio di cima: da conegliano ai monti di endimione, cornuda , p. at the end of the fifteenth century, venice was a main trading power, whose wealth was based on and organized around the trade routes with the east, particularly egypt and mamluks syria. fabrics and metals were among the most appreciated gifts, and these goods were the most widely in demand. thanks to recent research it is possible to document the gifts sent by the mamluk sultanate and by the ottoman diplomatic missions to the venetian seignory , among which textiles and precious metals represented the biggest component. it is easy to see why the epigraphic decorations that we find in the works by cima are copied from arabic inscriptions in thuluth style which are part of the mamluk protocol. the works that we consider here were painted in a period that goes from to and represents only a part of cima’s massive artistic production. one of the complete inscriptions is painted on the hem of st. peter's tunic in the virgin and child with saints peter, romuald, benedict and paul , preserved in the gemäldegalerie in berlin, where there is a long golden inscription in arabic (fig. ). the text is separated by two rosettes designed in clear mamluk style. the ductus of the letters is extremely faithful to the original thuluth writing. the inscription (fig. ) begins with the end of an undeciphered word and follows with al-malik (interrupted by the tissue fold), al-mā[likī] , al-ʿālī, al-nāṣir (?), [a]l-mālikī, al-malik, al-ʿālī, al-mawlawī, al-mālikī, al-ʿāmilī, al-mālikī, al-ʿālī, (…), al-nā[ṣir]. ( الملك العالي المولوي المالكي العاملي المالكي العالي الملك ال ( العالي النارص)؟( )ا(لما)لكي ما)لكي )...( النا)رص(؟ g. curatola, “marin sanudo, venezia, i doni diplomatici e le merci orientali islamiche”, in islamic artefacts in the mediterranean world, venezia , pp. - . r. mack, bazaar to piazza…, berkeley , pp. , . g.c.f. villa, cima da conegliano, poeta del paesaggio, venezia , p. . the following adjectives are the so-called alqāb al-tawābi‘, which are nisbas modelled on the original titles owned by the sovereing. see g. gabrieli, il nome proprio arabo-musulmano, roma , pp. - . the royal majesty, the excellent, the victorious (?), the royal majesty, the excellent, the lord, the royal, the diligent, the royal, the excellent, the victorious (?). when we parallel the arabic inscriptions by cima and the inscriptions on islamic metalworks, the similarity is appalling. in particular, the mamluk tray of the victoria and albert museum (fig. a) gives evidence for the word al- malik (fig. b). besides, in figure b, the word al-ʿālī occurs in the same way of the mamluk bowl of the courtauld museum (fig. a): there is an exact correspondence of the writing because of the position of the lām-yā’ in ligature where the tail of the yā’ bends backwards on the right. the word al- nāṣir is not easy to identify (fig. b). in the mamluk metalworks, the group of letters ṣād-rā’ are placed in the upper register of the epigraphic band and always intertwined between the shafts of the lām and alif in al-nā, as can be seen in figure a, depicting a mamluk bowl of the courtauld museum. even in cima's inscription, albeit in a slightly stylized manner, it is possible to identify two shafts with a medial nūn and a superimposed serpentine element. figure shows the comparison of the word al-mawlawī as represented in the inscription on the painting (b) and on the box preserved at the v&a museum (a). a very interesting comparison is that of the word al-ʿāmilī occuring in the same way as the mamluk plate in the smithsonian museum (fig. a). given that, we can affirm that cima copied the stylistic feature with extreme accuracy. also the presence of central rosette (fig. b), typical of the mamluk decorative tradition, supports the idea that the reference materials were mamluk objects, even if some details indicate that copies were not always made directly from artefacts (fig. a). lastly, in figure b, we can notice that the word al-mālikī in the painting corresponds precisely to the inscription of the mamluk box (fig. a). although cima proved to be accurate in his copy of arabic inscriptions, twice in his decorative programme the word al-mālikī is abbreviated to its first part, that is "al-mā", as we have seen previously. it is one of the most common elements in pictorial epigraphic ornamentation during the entire fifteenth note that the ending -ī on most of the epithets points to an inscription in the name of an amīr, with reference to the royal titles of his former lord from the early stage in his career. century. such abridgments as well as lacunae in the script seem to confirm that the painter was not aware of the meaningful segments of the script. this also accounts for the absence of many alifs in the inscription. in conclusion, although the painter tried to duplicate the original as faithfully as possible, it is reasonable that he did not copy the inscription directly from an object (probably metalworks), but from a sketch. in this case, from the dense texture of mamluk cursive shafts, some may have escaped the artist’s attention. since he probably had the possibility to see inscriptions on circular objects such as plates, lamps, candlesticks, the easiest way to bring those decorations in the two-dimensionality of the canvas was, in fact, to separate the epigraphic elements. this explains the presence of "al-mā" followed by other mamluk epithets in other epigraphic ornamentation, where the available space is reduced, for example in the cuffs. this is the case of the inscription on the collar of the madonna dell'arancio (ca. - ) kept at the galleria dell'accademia in venice and on the cuff of the virgin and child, dated around - ), of the national gallery in london. in the first case a particular phenomenon occurs: the group "al-mā" occurs first in reverse as in textiles and is followed by the word al-ʿālī and the abbreviation al-mā, this time correctly oriented (fig. ). in the second painting, the inscription is wholly in reverse and begins with some high letters followed by al-mā al-ʿālī and the beginning of a word that is so blurred that does not allow any reading (figs. , ). the inscriptions often start with single meaningless letters, which can probably refer to the end of circular inscriptions and precede the copy of legible words. this fact hints at the inability of the artist to identify the beginning of the text when displayed on a circular surface. a similar ornamentation, also in mirror-like position, is found in the virgin and child with saints jerome and john the baptist ( - ) in the national gallery in washington (fig. ). the inscriptions are present on both of the virgin's cuffs. on the right hand, we read "al-mā" separated from the rosette (identical to the one included in the inscription of the saints in the g. c. f. villa, il paesaggio di cima: da conegliano ai monti di endimione, cornuda , p. . p. humfrey, cima da conegliano, cambridge , p. . g.c.f. villa, cima…, venezia , p. . gemäldegalerie) then al-maqarr (fig. ) drawn in the same way we saw in the personage of the neapolitan follower of giotto (fig. ). the text that appears more frequently in the works of cima consists of the words al-mālikī and al-ʿālī. in addition to what has been seen, the concomitance of these words appears: - in the archangel raphael with tobias between saints nicholas and james the major , in the galleria dell'accademia in venice, al-mā is followed by a series of shafts (probably indicating lām-kāf in ligature), then al-ʿālī and again al-mā (fig. ). - on the cuffs of the virgin and child with saints john the baptist and paul in the galleria dell’accademia in venice , on the right one (fig. ) (al-mawlawī al- mālikī al-ʿālī al-mālikī), on the left one (fig. ) (high letters, al-ʿālī (a)l-mā al- mā). - on the collar of the virgin and child dating around - in the national gallery in london. it is not sure to whom the work should be assigned. however, the epigraphic decoration provides a vital clue in attributing it to cima. on the collar of the virgin, a tentative reading of the first word is al- mālikī, followed by al-ʿālī (fig. ). these inscriptions appear under such a shape in this period only in the works of cima. on this account, the attribution of the work to the venetian painter seems to be confirmed. the inscriptions that we find in the virgin and child in the los angeles county museum are more complex: al-nāṣir al-ʿālī mā (?) al-māl(ikī)? can be read on the collar (fig. ). the word al-nāṣir has been painted likewise in the st. peter in berlin modelled on metalworks, such as the bowl preserved at the courtauld gallery in london dated to the mid-fourteenth century. on the virgin’s cuff, the inscription begins with a word that could be read as al-maqarr and continues with al-mālikī al-ʿāmilī al-mālikī (fig. ). p. humfrey, cima…, cambridge , p. . ibid. see the note of the national gallery website. https://www.nationalgallery.org.uk/paintings/probably-by-giovanni-battista-cima-da- conegliano-the-virgin-and-child-with-saints consulted on line on december . g.c.f. villa, cima…, venezia , p. . https://www.nationalgallery.org.uk/paintings/probably-by-giovanni-battista-cima-da-conegliano-the-virgin-and-child-with-saints https://www.nationalgallery.org.uk/paintings/probably-by-giovanni-battista-cima-da-conegliano-the-virgin-and-child-with-saints in the epigraphic decoration of the three saints (dated around - ) in the new york metropolitan museum we find, on the saint lucia mantle, a series of unconnected shafts followed by al-ʿādil (?), although not rendered in elegant mamluk style as in the cases presented above, and by a word that, shifted into the right position, might be interpreted as al-maqarr (fig . ). al-ʿāmilī al-mālikī (fig. ) occurs on the collar of the virgin and child dated around - in the national gallery in london. on the collar and on the cuff, among many signs, we can distinguish the words on al-ʿāmilī and al- ʿālī (fig. ). the inscriptions of the virgin and child (ca. ) in the pinacoteca nazionale di bologna and the virgin and child with saints jerome and mary magdalene housed in the alte pinakothek in munich are different. in both cases the inscription is clumsy. the epigraphic decoration found on the collar (fig. ) and cuff of the virgin (fig. ) in bologna can only be properly interpreted if compared with the inscription in munich. here on mary magdalene‘s left cuff (fig. ) we can distinguish al-mā followed by undeciphered signs; after the rosette, it seems possible to read the word baraka with the letters bā’ and rā’ separated and the tā’ marbūṭa substituted by the alif , as it is customary on islamic ceramics. on the right cuff (fig. ), there are simplifications of baraka (as found on the decorations the bologna’s painting). similarly, on the left cuff of the virgin, we find the repetition of the letter kāf (fig. ). a very long inscription is present in the incredulity of saint thomas (ca. ) in the national gallery in london. an inscription is depicted on the hem of the tunic of the first saint on the right-hand side, which is very similar to that of the st. peter in the gemäldegalerie; a second epigraphic band is located on st. thomas’ tunic. unfortunately, the quality of the image at our disposal does not allow an accurate study of the text, but some words like al-ʿālī and al-ʿāmil can be identified (fig. ). p. humfrey, cima…, cambridge , p. . p. humfrey, cima…, cambridge , p. . g. c. f. villa, il paesaggio…, cornuda , p. . p. humfrey, cima…, cambridge , p. - . ivi, p. - . the analysis of the inscriptions present in the work of cima allows us to make some reflections on the transmission of inscriptions from the artefacts. as already mentioned, precious metalworks probably have a fundamental role in the copy of mamluk inscriptions. most likely, cases where these inscriptions are less accurate can be explained with the copy from the textiles. in fact, because of weaving techniques or the origin of craftsmen many ṭirāz bear debased inscription, as already mentioned. in addition, when these ṭirāz are worn by personalities it was very difficult for the artists to make an exact copy of the inscription. the script on the pala preserved in the duomo of conegliano veneto can be a useful example for that. the inscribed cartouches on the collars of st. apollonia and the virgin contain inscriptions (fig. ) very similar in shape and style to those on a fragment of egyptian textile kept at the ashmolean museum (fig. .). exactly as on the textile, we find two cartouches having respectively a series of high letters with a final kāf, and the letters alīf-ʿayn- alif in ligature with a superimposed central sign. again, we are faced with a possible copy of an artefact of eastern origin containing degenerate inscriptions. as already mentioned, this collection of cima’s inscriptions is not meant to be complete. it is a small part of the artistic production of the venetian painter, but enough to understand the importance of the role of epigraphic decoration in his art. the omnipresence and the high quality of the arabic script in his work contrast with a blatantly obvious observation: these inscriptions have never been subject to thorough study because they were regarded, in the same way as the other decorations, as fanciful ornamentation inspired by arabic characters. this fact is symptomatic of how the phenomenon has been underestimated and what arbitrary terminology has been used to describe the inscriptions. the paintings by cima da conegliano represent the culmination of a process that began in the twelfth century, which evolved and matured through the centuries and which finds its highest expression in the work of this venetian g. c. f. villa, il paesaggio…, cornuda , p. . artist. there will be no other artist after him that will recreate arabic inscriptions in such a faithful manner. on the contrary, we will see a gradual movement away from the arabic script in favour of latin and pseudo-latin compositions. latin prayers concealed under the appearance of islamic motifs manifested the artist's refusal to copy a text he couldn't understand. cima’s inscriptions give evidence for the legibility of the signs. this was due to two essential conditions: the accuracy of the original text and the ability or the desire of the artist to copy it faithfully. . . pseudo-latin and encrypted latin inscriptions as we have explained, the use of pseudo-script ornamentations is based on the creation and re-elaboration of merged alphabetical signs. in this case the overused term "pseudo-inscription" appears appropriate for once. in florence, artists active throughout the fifteenth century such as filippo lippi, filippino lippi (his son), zanobi strozzi, francesco di stefano (also known as the pesellino), jacopo antonio, paolo di stefano, jacopo del sellaio, francesco botticini, benvenuto di giovanni, the perugino and sandro botticelli are interpreters of this new florentine use of epigraphic decorations. sometimes, the original arabic inscription is detectable, but in most cases, the ornamentation is related to alphabetic compositions in latin characters and to latin encrypted inscriptions. filippo lippi joined the process of pseudo-inscriptions creating a personal style of epigraphic decoration inspired by the latin alphabet but with elements borrowed from the arabic script containing the letters lām-mīm, the shafts and some forms of kāf. we can easily detect these arabic elements in the virgin and child with saints, known as the pala barbadori (dated - ) , preserved in the louvre museum in paris (fig. ). lippi’s decorations are firmly oriented towards a reproduction of the latin alphabet through the alteration of the signs he knew, using encrypted latin forms as it appears in gentile’s and angelico’s works. we can notice it in the decoration on the collar of the virgin and child at the national gallery of washington dated ca. (fig. ) and in the adoration of the child with st. bernard and st. john (ca. ) (fig. ), kept at the gemäldegalerie. in these cases, the signs seem to be almost exclusively inspired by gothic characters. s. miller, the word made visible in the painted image: perspective, proportion, witness and threshold in italian renaissance painting, cambridge , p. . m. boskovits, and d. a. brown, et al., italian paintings…, washington , pp. - . r. grosshans, gemaldegalerie berlin: gesamtverzeichnis, berlin , p. . the inscriptions that we find in pesellino’s works are very similar. the decoration in the virgin and child with saints by pesellino , kept at the louvre, can be considered as an example of this similarity (figs. , ). the blend of arabic and latin pseudo-inscriptions becomes apparent in many works. the ornamentations gradually abandon the link with the arabic characters in place of new enigmatic games such as the introduction of the author's signature. that is the case of the annunciation in the national gallery of london, painted by angelico's disciple, zanobi strozzi . within the epigraphic decorations hidden among tendrils, we can detach his signature “za-nobi” (fig. ) followed by a lām-alīf ductus (fig. ). this is a trend that will be found in subsequent periods as in the case of the virgin and child dated towards the end of the fifteenth century and kept at the national gallery of london. it was painted by paolo di san leocadio, an artist from the emilia-romagna . on the hem of the textile, we can recognize his signature “paulus” between the pseudo-inscriptions (fig. ). decorations by sandro botticelli and perugino paved the way for a new kind of ornamentation that would spread during the entire sixteenth century. those painted by botticelli reproduce the ductus of the latin stylized characters overlapping in a dense and intricate composition. we can notice it in the haloes of the virgin and child with saint john, at the louvre, dated around (fig. ). however, the decorations by perugino are composed of capital latin letters adorned by fantasy inventions in an ornamental calligraphic style. we find this kind of decoration in many works of art: in the virgin and child with angels and saints from the louvre museum (fig. ); in the crucifixion at the national gallery of washington, in the virgin and child with two angels at the poldi pezzoli museum in milan, and in the virgin and child with saint catherine and saint john the baptist at the louvre . in some of b. berenson, pitture…, milano , p. . a. leader, the badia of florence: art and observance in a renaissance monastery, bloomington , pp. - . x. company, il rinascimento di paolo da san leocadio, palermo . s. malaguzzi, botticelli. l'artista e le opere, firenze , p. . j. a. becherer, pietro perugino, master of the italian renaissance, new york , p. . for the works mentioned above see: v. garibaldi, perugino: catalogo completo, firenze . these works, the drawings of al-mulk in a mirror-like shape are still recognizable. pseudo-latin inscriptions are documented even among the artists of the sienese school in the fifteenth century. the virgin and child with angels by pietro di domenico da montepulciano, exhibited in the metropolitan museum of new york, dating to , shows that epigraphic decorations are inserted on the hem of the robe of the virgin in gold. these are signs inspired by latin letters where, in some cases, it is possible to recognize the greeting to the virgin in the word “ave” followed by very degenerate signs that might hide the name “maria” (fig. ). in the second half of the fifteenth century in siena, there was a tendency towards x-shaped decorations. the work by neroccio di bartolomeo de' landi could give a plausible explanation about the origin of this ornamental pattern. a dense epigraphic band with very angular characters decorates the hems of the tissues in the virgin and child with saints in the national gallery in washington. the pattern consists of intricate x-shaped signs, among which it is possible to detect some arabic letters like wāw, lām-alīf, ʿayn (fig. ). in other works, the arabic letters disappear almost completely in favour of the x-shaped decorations, such as in the virgin with child and saints kept at the pinacoteca nazionale di siena, dating to the late fifteenth century (fig. ). this type of pseudo-inscription will be found both in the works by matteo di giovanni: virgin and child with angels and cherubim at the national gallery in washington (fig. ) and the virgin and child with saints at the pinacoteca nazionale in siena. in central italy, the gradual introduction of pseudo-latin is already evident between the late fourteenth and early fifteenth century. ornamentations that were originally composed of angular and separate forms underwent, during a. de marchi, “pittori a camerino nel quattrocento: le ombre di gentile e la luce di piero”, in pittori a camerino nel quattrocento, milano , p. . m. boskovits, and d. a. brown, et al., italian paintings…, washington , pp. - . f. zeri, italian paintings: a catalogue of the collection of the metropolitan museum of art: sienese and central italian schools, vicenza , p. . m. boskovits, and d. a. brown, et al., italian paintings…, washington , pp. - . p. torriti, la pinacoteca…, genova , p. . the century, gradual transformation into a latticework or cursive forms. since the end of the fourteenth century, a kind of epigraphic ornamentation inspired by separate latin alphabetic signs adorned the madonna of the humility (national gallery of london) painted by the bolognese lippo di dalmasio around - (fig. ). this change of alphabet suggests a gradual loss of interest in the islamic world. we found similar pseudo-inscriptions in the altarpiece of st. helena kept at the galleria dell ‘accademia in venice painted by michele di matteo from bologna around . here, the name of virgin can be detected (fig. ). latin characters are present also in the mystical marriage of st. catherine painted by lorenzo d'alessandro, from the italian region of the marche, in the late fifteenth century and kept at the national gallery of london. in the painting, the presence of arabic elements has almost disappeared except for a few round letters (fig. ). vincenzo foppa was a witness to this trend in the lombard renaissance. in both of his works depicting the virgin and child in the poldi pezzoli museum in milan and in the metropolitan museum of new york, dated about – , there are some latin letters combined with fantastic signs and shafts placed side by side (fig. ). contrary to what happened in central italy, the artists of the venetian school used pseudo-inscriptions involving arabic letters. this demonstrates the diffusion and importance of the inscriptions painted by famous artists as bellini, mantegna, and cima da conegliano that left an indelible mark and a notable example for the venetian renaissance painters. in this regard, we can observe the decorations present in the carlo crivelli’s painting, on the robes of the virgin and child with angels in the pinacoteca di brera in milan (fig. ). in the epigraphic decorations by marco zoppo and michele da verona, even though they are characterized by pseudo-latin characters, it is possible to trace motifs back to the model of a recurrent inscription: the ductus al-sulṭān a. tartuferi, g. tormen, la fortuna…, firenze , p. . g. agosti, m. natale, r. romano, vincenzo foppa. un protagonista del rinascimento, milano , pp. - . m. natale, vincenzo foppa: un protagonista del rinascimento, milano , pp. - . p. zampetti, giovanni boccati, milano , p. . as it appears in the madonna casini by masaccio . in the ornamentation of marco zoppo’s work, the enthroned madonna and child with saints, dated and kept at the gemäldegalerie in berlin, there is an epigraphic decoration on the hem of the saints’ tunic, interspersed with six rosettes. in the first segment from right, we find an interesting composition of letters. proceeding with the lecture from the right, there is a portion of a shaft, then two s, then a sign similar to the arabic ṭā’ followed by a shaft (fig. ). we find the same inscription on the madonna’s cuff in the virgin with the infant saint john the baptistin the metropolitan museum of new york, dated around and painted by michele da verona . reading from the right we find the classical w shape followed by the letter that should correspond to arabic ṭā’ (in this case with the raised eyelet), a shaft and a kind of reversed b (that corresponds to the e found in the madonna casini), which represents a rotated nūn (fig. ). cf. fig. . c. schmidt arcangeli, giovanni bellini e la pittura veneta a berlino. le collezioni di james simon e edward solly alla gemäldegalerie, verona , pp. - m. vinco, “gli inizi di michele da verona”, proporzioni, ix-x, firenze - , p. . . . inscriptions on carpets in fifteenth-century painting, there is an ever-increasing presence of oriental carpets decorated with arabic inscriptions. the large number of rugs represented in the italian and european art, particularly in venetian paintings, is due to the role that venice had in importing oriental carpets between the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. those known as "lotto" or “holbein” are a kind of anatolian carpets that were most appreciated in europe (at least, their presence is most attested) . they owe their name to the sixteenth-century painters who, more than others, documented their presence. however, already in the fifteenth century, many artists reproduced the oriental carpets with patterns of arabic writing. vittore carpaccio painted carpets with epigraphic ornamentations in kufic inscriptions of the word al-mulk in stories of st. orsula (the departure of the pilgrims) dated ca. - , in the galleria dell‘accademia in venice (fig. ). we can compare these kinds of inscriptions to those present on oriental textiles, such as the fragment from the ashmolean museum (fig. ). a further support of this hypothesis is the article carpets and "kufesque" by julia bailey offering a detailed investigation of this type of decoration and a convincing hypothesis of its interpretation as al-mulk. a fascinating carpet is painted on the edge of the balcony in the annunciation with saint emidius by carlo crivelli dated , in the national gallery in london. the decoration is composed of a repetition of a modular element, rotated in various positions and made up of two shafts with round endings and a central element like a letter mīm depicted in an open shape (fig. ). we suggest a comparison of this ductus in a fragment of textile, probably from turkey, dated to the thirteenth-fourteenth century and kept at the metropolitan museum of new york (fig. ). see d. y. kim, “lotto's carpets: materiality, textiles, and composition in renaissance painting”, the art bulletin . , , pp. – . m. cancogni, g. perocco, l'opera completa di carpaccio, milano , pp. - . j. bailey, “carpets…"”, dai, kuwait . c. harrison, an introduction to art, new haven , p. . the decorations on the carpet in the virgin and child (hermitage museum) by an anonymous venetian painter towards the end of the fifteenth century are painted in geometric style, probably of iranian taste. we can observe angular eyelet letters like the ductus of the arabic fā’ (fig. ). the presence of oriental carpet inscriptions, albeit with smaller spread, is attested also in tuscany. a clear example is detectable in the marriage of the virgin painted by gregorio di cecco di luca , now at the national gallery of london (fig. ). a beautiful epigraphic ornamentation in kufic style runs all along the edge of the carpet, repeating a shape of al-mulk as appears on a fragment of an eastern tissue (fig. ). as already mentioned, a large representation of carpet inscriptions is present in the works of domenico ghirlandaio . a very interesting example is the interlaced kufic pattern that embellishes the fresco of the resurrection of the boy in the basilica of santa trinità in florence (fig. ). we find a comparable decoration on a western anatolian carpet, published by p. r. j. ford in oriental carpet design (fig. ). more carpet inscriptions are attested in the fresco of st. jerome in his study in the church of ognissanti in florence (fig. ) and in the painting ingesuati sacred conversation preserved at the uffizi (fig. ). in both of these works, the composition consists of the repetition of two interlaced shafts. unlike what happens in the decorations of halo and clothing, the inscriptions on the carpets underwent fewer changes in the transmission process because they were copied directly from the original artefacts without any readaptation in the drawing. it is, therefore, a parallel phenomenon that will be more popular in the sixteenth century and which, as we shall see in the next chapter, will represent the latest evidence of arabic script in italian art. l. bellosi, come un prato fiorito: studi sull'arte tardogotica, milano , pp. - . for the works mentioned above see: j. k. cadogan, domenico ghirlandaio: artist and artisan, new haven , p.r.j. ford, oriental carpet design: a guide to traditional motifs patterns and symbols, london , pp. . the author writes that "this carpet has stylistic affinities with the geometric mamluk carpets woven in cairo in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries”. . . summary in this summary, we introduce a rapid overview on the trends of arabic and pseudo-arabic decorations developed during the fifteenth century. we attempt to highlight the most recurrent texts copied from the arabic inscriptions and the degeneration of forms already met in previous centuries, transmitted to the works of quattrocento. consequently, we will trace a comprehensive framework of the phenomenon already explained in this chapter. although the presence of arabic scripts in italian art can be considered being in a start-up phase at the beginning of the fourteenth century, the tendency to use sketches and prototypes of the original inscriptions, allowing for a greater flexibility in the arrangement of epigraphic decoration in the paintings, began to develop already in the mid-fourteenth century. soon, this trend generated an expansion of different types and styles of arabic decorations in the works of the quattrocento. likewise, the transfer from the objects continues to testify the presence of legible arabic inscriptions in the paintings as well. this latter phenomenon occurs mostly in the fifteenth century. at the beginning of the s, when the precept of renaissance humanism had not yet totally involved the visual arts, a well-established trend was represented by the international gothic and its accuracy in the reproduction of the decorative elements. the attention to ornamental detail encouraged the development of new forms of epigraphic ornamentation, although, in many of these paintings, reproductions of the epigraphic pattern already introduced in the previous period can frequently be found. in tuscany, from the early years of the fifteenth century onwards, a still very common ornament is the inscription of al-mulk in a mirror-like position, as it appears in the works of lorenzo monaco, turino vanni, and martino di bartolomeo. the words al-maqarr, al-mālikī and its abridged form "al-mā" are mostly re- proposed in the painting decorations. these ductus already mentioned for the previous centuries became a very common element in the following years. the presence of the abridged form “al-mā” is also attested on contemporary italian artefacts as we can see on a silver reliquary kept at the cathedral museum of pistoia and on a fabric preserved at the textile museum of prato. it seems plausible that the re-elaboration of the arabic inscriptions during the quattrocento was a stylistic trend that extended over all artistic areas. therefore, it is easy to realize why gentile da fabriano, one of the main representatives of the international gothic in italy, used these signs and imbued them with new splendour. the presence of the sultanic protocol and the use of thuluth writing in the in italian paintings is evidenced by gentile’s arabic inscriptions, in an even clearer way than with giotto’s neapolitan followers. in his paintings, we find the words al-mālikī, al-karīm, al-ʿālī, al-maqarr, al-sulṭān, and al-mawlawī. another element of innovation is represented by the introduction of encrypted latin inscriptions, especially on the haloes of the virgins. these decorations are composed of pseudo-arabic characters containing overturned latin inscriptions. while we have already presented the virgin’s name intertwined with arabic characters in previous paintings, these inscriptions are organized in a more reasoned manner in gentile’s works. for example, in the adoration of the magi, the epigraphic decorations on the haloes of the virgin and st. joseph may seem similar, but those of st. joseph contain arabic words, while the inscription in the virgin’s halo are made up with encrypted latin letters bearing her name. the reference to mary is clearly expressed, leaving no room for misunderstandings. towards the end of the century, cima da conegliano gives a relevance to epigraphic ornamentation that it had never experienced before, thanks to his very accurate copies of mamluk inscriptions. a comparison with th- th century islamic portable objects from syria and egypt has provided evidence for their possible prototypes. as a matter of fact, the circulation of objects of minor arts from these islamic countries in venice was not new, as it dated back to the ninth-tenth century. however, trans-mediterranean trade, particularly through the port of venice, had now reached much larger dimensions. in cima’s epigraphic decorations, we find long compositions of mamluk epithets, usually interspersed with floral rosettes as they appear on metalworks. the writing style is very faithful to thuluth, even the most emblematic distinctive trait such as the kāf-yā’ in ligature where the tail of the yā’ bends backwards on the right. furthermore, the abridgments as well as omissions in the script seem to confirm that cima did not copy the inscription directly from an object, but from a sketch. his works represent the ultimate expression of accuracy in the copy of arabic inscriptions. in the subsequent period, a progressive abandon from the arabic characters in favour of better- known decorative patterns, whether composed by alphabetic (latin), abstract or floral elements, can be noticed in renaissance art. gradually, many artists use almost exclusively latin characters to embellish their works; nevertheless, venetian painters continued to represent encrypted-latin decorations mixed to arabic letters. that explains the important role played by the pictorial schools in the choice of the epigraphic patterns. obviously, venetian artists were largely influenced by the great tradition of arabic decorations attested by their masters. a further proof of the circulation of sketches with arabic inscriptions can be found in the patterns painted by marco zoppo and michele da verona, where a debased form of the word al-sulṭān is still noticeable, even if they used encrypted-latin characters. in giovanni and gentile bellini’s decorations, the letters tend to progressively take a separate shape, they lose the connecting elements, become unrecognizable and leave space for the representation of latin alphabet signs. in florence, filippo lippi’s decorations were strongly oriented towards the re- elaboration of the latin letters. in his works, only few arabic letters are detectable, such as the lām-mīm in ligature and some forms of kāf. the decorations by sandro botticelli and perugino represent a new kind of ornamentation that would spread during the entire sixteenth century. botticelli’s ornamentations are composed by the overlapping of latin letters, while perugino used capital latin letters in a very calligraphic and ornamental style. towards the end of the fifteenth century, these artists depicted almost exclusively latin characters, interspersed with long shafts like alīf and lām; these would be the last identifiable arabic signs in the hem of the personages’ cloths. over the years, x-shaped decorations in an increasingly schematic appearance are attested in the sienese school. however, words such as “ave” and “maria” remain often noticeable among the decorations. finally, further attention is given to the carpet decorations represented in italian and, especially, in venetian painting. in fact, their circulation in venice is largely attested by artists such as vittore carpaccio, cecco di pietro and carlo crivelli. the recurrent inscription is composed by different variations of the al-mulk pattern as it happens in the ornamentation of oriental carpets. these types of decoration, half the time, did not undergo alterations because they were copied directly from the original. in the sixteenth century, thanks to an increasing import of carpets, a great representation of these patterns is attested also in northern renaissance paintings. this phenomenon represents the last evidence of arabic inscriptions in european visual art before the colonial period. the artistic movement occurred in europe from the late fifteenth century influenced by italian renaissance. . last period . . introduction as we have previously stated, the gradual abandonment of arabic inscriptions in favour of more stylised decorations began in the very places where the phenomenon had developed, namely, florence and tuscany. in veneto, instead, we find the last evidences of arabic inscriptions used in the paintings, however imprecisely or incomplete, before their definitive disappearance. furthermore, the development of highly stylised signs is attested in the decorations of venetian and tuscan painters already at the beginning of the cinquecento. this started a gradual and unavoidable process towards the complete disappearance of the phenomenon of epigraphic decorations in italian art. we found a stylised pattern on the hem of the cloak in the virgin adoring the child by lorenzo di credi kept at the national gallery of london. the decoration is made up of a circle combined with a trilobate shaft (fig. ). the same composition occurs in the st. agnes with st. mary magdalene and another saint (museum of san matteo, pisa) by an unknown pisan. the band is composed by two lines, one of which is set in the mirror position (fig. ). two patterns of stylized shafts decorate the collar of the madonna in the virgin and child with two angels by liberale da verona, and in the holy conversation with saints by the florentine ridolfo del ghirlandaio from the museo civico in pistoia. in the work of liberale da verona, we find a set of parallel shafts with some oblique elements that recall the shape of lām-alīf in ligature (fig. ). moreover, an even more stylized composition is observable in the ghirlandaio’s painting (fig. ). in this case the shafts are neatly r. van marle, the development of the italian schools of painting, vol. , new york , p. . b. berenson, italian…, london , p. . ivi, p. . parallel and more similar to the weft threads of a fabric than to the letters of arabic script. . . last evidence of arabic script at the beginning of the sixteenth century, some sketches of arabic inscriptions referring to the words al-maqarr and al-mulk were still in circulation. the same shape of al-maqarr as attested in the st. alberto reliquary and in fra angelico’s paintingscan be found between the latin letters on a cuff in the holy family (gemäldegalerie, berlin) painted at the beginning of the by gianfrancesco de maineri (fig. ). likewise, al-mulk is depicted in the hem of the madonna and child by bernardino fungai in the hermitage museum (fig. ), in the same shape as handed down by the trecentescos segna di buonaventura and maso di banco (fig. ). the writing band on the hem of the dress in the half-length figure of a saint (fig. ), painted by francesco bonsignori between and and preserved in the poldi-pezzoli museum of milan, appears corrupted. however, a comparison with an islamic textile suggests that his could be a debased copy of the letter ʿayn between two shafts, which might belong to the word alʿālī or al-ʿizz (see figure for a comparison). some vertical bands on the drape painted in the supper at emmaus by marco marziale , signed and dated and kept at the galleria dell’accademia in venice, show an interesting pattern (fig. ). the decoration is made up of a series of s-shaped diamonds, very recurrent among islamic textiles (see fig. ) and a more complex form of interlaced letters that could represent the word naṣr (victory), rotated in various positions and connected by a line joined in a single interlaced element (as drawn in fig. ). for the various versions or copies of this painting cfr: s. zamboni, pittori di ercole i d'este, milano . t. kustodieva, museo statale…, milano , p. . the fourteenth-century painters. m. natale, museo poldi …, milano , pp. - . e. merkel, la cena in emmaus di san salvador, milan , p. . a very particular specimen of thuluth writing so recurrent in venetian painting occurs in the reception of a venetian delegation in damascus by an unknown artist, preserved in the louvre museum. in this work, dated around - , two circular cartouches are depicted under a central rectangular slab containing arabic inscriptions (fig. ). the central writing band has been carefully studied by malika bouabdellah-dorbani in her article venise entre orient et occident au début du xvie siècle, la réception d'une délégation vénitienne à damas, au musée du louvre. we are facing a representation of building inscription embedded in a gate of damascus. while admitting the difficulties of the interpretation caused by the deterioration of the inscription, bouabdellah-dorbani identifies a part of a text related to the construction of the monument. in my opinion, some words do not seem to correspond to the arabic text but rather to those text fragments present in italian paintings. this would suggest, probably, a copy by a sketch that was reinterpreted according to the painter's knowledge. for this reason, we find signs similar to a latin m or oblique shafts, combined with arabic words. probably the most interesting prototype circulating in the sixteenth century is the one identified in the works of bartolomeo veneto and francesco bissolo. the inscription appears in the rectangular strip of the wise-man’s cowl in the circumcision in the louvre museum by the bartolomeo veneto signed and dated (fig. ) and on the christ’s collar in the salvator mundi in the alte pinakothek in munich painted by francesco bissolo few years later (fig. ). the similarity between the two inscriptions appears clear especially in the central part, where the sequence of the letters lām-shīn-kāf-rā’ is comprehensible. instead, from the comparison of the first part, we can assume that the ductus reproduces a word consisting of three shafts. we found a very similar inscription decorating a bronze oriental censer of th century exhibited at the overseas chinese museum in xiamen (fig. ) where we can c. campell, a. chong, bellini and the east, london-boston , p. . m. bouabdellah-dorbani, "venise entre orient et occident au début du xvie siècle, la réception d'une délégation vénitienne à damas, au musée du louvre", la revue des musées de france. revue du louvre, – , pp. - . l. pagnotta, bartolomeo veneto, l'opera completa, firenze , p. . h. f. schweers, gemälde in deutschen museen. katalog der ausgestellten und depotgelagerten werke, münchen , p. . see c. da-sheng, l. kalus, corpus d'inscriptions arabes et persanes en chine, province de fu-jian, paris , p. , n° . read الشكر ّ� (al-shukr lillāh), that means “all thanks is to god”. figure shows a comparison with the word lillāh rendered in light colour and the word al-shukr in dark. here, we probably meet the last readable evidence of an arabic inscription drawn by a sketch in italian paintings. . . pseudo-latin and encrypted latin inscriptions like arabic inscriptions, also latin ones gradually lost their function in the decorative programme of italian art. at a closer look, it appears clear that the use of altered latin characters did not result from the final stage of debasement of arabic script in decorations, but that it was rather a parallel phenomenon, which underwent an analogous development. in the paintings by ambrogio bergognone, the hems of the personages’ garments are decorated with latin scripts. these patterns are both composed of pseudo-latin characters and latin inscriptions. in the virgin and child with two angels in the poldi pezzoli museum of milan, only a few latin letters are legible among the degraded signs (fig. ). on the contrary, in the virgin and child with saints in the national gallery of london, bergognone uses a clear latin inscription in the hem of the madonna’s dress. figure shows a detail of the inscription with the text “maria mater gratiae”. his brother, bernardino bergognone, experienced a very impressive technique for decorating the hems (fig. ). he depicted, in the virgin and child with two angels displayed at the national gallery of london (dated around - ), a long epigraphic band composed of overlapping latin letters creating a true text. if we isolate the letters we can read the words of the ave maria prayer. a part of the inscription is evidenced in the figure , m. g. balzarini, foppa, milano , p. . a. ottino della chiesa, “ambrogio da fossano”, dizionario biografico degli italiani, vol. , roma , p. . there is no relevant literature on this work. some scholars attribute it to his brother ambrogio, cfr: c. bertelli, restituzioni : capolavori restaurati, vicenza , p. ; but, the information sheet of the national gallery attributes it to bernardino: https://www.nationalgallery.org.uk/paintings/bernardino-bergognone-the-virgin-and- child-with-two-angels consulted online on december , . https://www.nationalgallery.org.uk/paintings/bernardino-bergognone-the-virgin-and-child-with-two-angels https://www.nationalgallery.org.uk/paintings/bernardino-bergognone-the-virgin-and-child-with-two-angels we read “maria gratia plena ora pro nobis”. in the lower part of the dress a signature of the painter "bernardino" (which confirms the attribution of the work) is inserted with the same method (fig. ). bernardino's inscription is probably the principal example of encrypted latin composition. sixteenth- century painters would reproduce decorations separating the latin words from the pseudo-latin characters on the same epigraphic band. this produces an inscription that is legible only in some parts, as it appears in st. catherine of alexandria (national gallery, london) painted by antonio de solario in . st. catherine’s sleeve is decorated all along the hem with degraded latin letters but, in the final part, the salutatio angelica “ave maria” is detectable (fig. , in grey). the signs decorating the hem of st. ursula’s dress are inspired by an imaginary latin alphabet (fig. ). a probable degraded form of “maria” may be identified in the virgin and child with st. sebastian by giovanni cariani at the louvre museum (fig. ). a multifarious production of pseudo-latin ornamentations adorns several works by central-italian artists during the first and the second decades of the th century. it is possible to notice some examples in the works of raffaello, boccaccio boccacini, domenico panetti, lodovico mazzolino and gerino gerini. in the portrait of elisabetta gonzaga by raffaello at the uffizi gallery, two l- shaped inscriptional bands are arranged in a mirror-like position. in the hem of the collar, a repetition of shafts runs all along the band, and among the shafts a sign similar to lām-mīm is visible (fig. ). furthermore, the decorations in the niccolini-cowper madonna from the national gallery in washington, in the terranuova madonna kept at the gemäldegalerie in berlin and in the holy family preserved in the alte pinakothek in munich are made with latin characters. we find in these works, dated to the first decade of th century, latin letters that are combined b. berenson, italian pictures…, london , vol. , p. . g. fossi, galleria degli uffizi…, firenze , p. . j. meyer zur capellen, raphael in florence, london , p. . p. de vecchi, raffaello: la pittura, firenze , p. . g. sgarzini, raffaello, roma , p. . without an apparent sense, as shown in the niccolini-cowper madonna (fig. ) and in the holy family (fig. ). the epigraphic band on the collar of terranuova madonna is more elaborate. on the sides, we find the type of motifs that we have just described above, instead, in the central part, a seal-like decoration with m, representing the name of the virgin, is present. on the sides of the ring containing the m, two elements are depicted in mirrored position, in a shape that seems to reproduce the debased form of al-mulk that we found in the previous centuries (fig. ). in my opinion, these attempts to imitate signs used by the trecento and the quattrocento masters may suggest an awareness of this phenomenon and careful attention to previous decoration details. in the work by boccaccio boccaccino, the marriage of st. catherine with saints kept at the galleria dell’accademia in venice, we find capital latin letters along the collar of the saint (fig. ). the signs adorning the hem in lamentation of christ with a donor by domenico panetti ( ) kept at gemäldegalerie in berlin are formed by angular latin letters and geometric motifs (fig. ). towards the second decade of the th century, latin characters became gradually stylized, as in the case of pseudo-arabic, losing their relation with the original alphabetical forms. some examples can be found in the holy conversation with saints signed and dated by gerino gerini in , kept at museo civico of pistoia (fig. ) and in finding in the temple by lodovico mazzolino from the gemäldegalerie in berlin (fig. ), the signs are inspired by imaginary forms whose relations with latin characters seem to be lost. a. puerari, boccaccino, milano , p. . o. pujmanová, italian painting c. - , praha , p. . f. falletti, chiostri seicenteschi a pistoia. le storie di s.francesco a giaccherino e gli altri cicli contemporanei, pistoia , p. . r. skwirblies, altitalienische malerei als preußisches kulturgut. gemäldesammlungen, kunsthandel und museumspolitik - , berlin , p. . . . carpet inscriptions from the second decade of the th century onwards, after the ottoman conquest of syria and egypt that annihilated the mamluk empire, western perception of the islamic east underwent a change that resulted in a cultural representation of the orient not through the arab sultanates, but through the turkish empire. already a few decades earlier, the fall of the byzantine empire to the turks with the conquest of constantinople in had led to a particular integration of the eastern and western world. western art was gradually assimilated by ottoman sultans who commissioned their portraits from european painters while maintaining the islamic tradition of book painting. the representation of the turkish “other” in renaissance art occurred between and also because of ottoman expansionism in europe. the imagery of the turk was conveyed through the knowledge of artists who spent time at or near the sultan’s court, as diplomats, captives and pilgrims. the exoticism present in european painting featuring oriental scenes and personages deeply influenced european courtly culture and life . starting from these years, the arabic inscriptions were replaced by patterns depicted on the anatolian rugs. however, the most recurrent motif is still the al-mulk repetition as it appears in the resurrection of the boy in domenico ghirlandaio (see fig. ). in fact, a similar decoration is visible on the carpet painted in the cardinal bandiello sauli, his secretary and two geographers (fig. ), by sebastiano del piombo in the national gallery of washington dated . this epigraphic pattern is copied from an anatolian carpet type as already shown above (see a detail fig. ) and it was also represented in lotto’s paintings. nevertheless, not all carpets represented in paintings contain such decorations. around , girolamo del santo reproduced a pseudo-inscription consisting of shafts, teeth, circles and floral elements (fig. ) in a virgin and child enthroned with angels and st. benedict , from the poldi-pezzoli museum. a squared pattern is found in rosso fiorentino’s and giuli campi’s carpets. in the portrait of a young man by rosso fiorentino (ca. see r. born, m. dziewulski, g. messling, the sultan's world. the ottoman orient in renaissance art, ostfildern, . m. natale, museo poldi…, milano , p. . - ) , preserved in the museum of capodimonte in naples, a medallion with three-square knots is depicted in the middle of the carpet (fig. ). in the allegory of vanity by giulo campi, dated around - and kept at the poldi- pezzoli museum, we can see the reproduction of an uşak carpets (fig. ). the recurring pattern already presented in del piombo's work has been identified over the centuries as the lotto’s carpet. this kind of al-mulk repetition is found, for example, in the portrait of giovanni della volta with his wife and children, dated around , in the national gallery of london (fig. ) and in the alms of st. anthony, ca. , from the basilica di san giovanni e paolo in venice (fig. ). the pattern is made in both shapes with an isolate shaft separating the words (as in portrait of giovanni della volta), and without i (as in the alms of st. anthony). a similar arabic lettering, with the only difference that the second shaft is interlaced with the first one of the following word, is detectable in the virgin and child with saints jacopo da ponte bassano, dating around - , in the alte pinakothek (fig. ). between the end of the th and the beginning of the th century, thanks to the contributions of masters such as hans memling and hans holbein the younger, a large representation of oriental rugs is witnessed in german renaissance paintings. the carpet painted by memling are characterized by the presence of hook decorations as it appears in the donne triptych , ca. and preserved in the national gallery of london (fig. ). this kind of decoration is probably related to the quchan rugs as mentioned by p. r. j. ford . in holbein’s works, we find a correspondence with the patterns depicted in lotto’s carpets as in the merchant georg gisze in the gemäldegalerie (fig. a. natali, c. falciani, rosso fiorentino, firenze , p. . l. e. brancati, i tappeti dei pittori: testimonianze pittoriche per la storia del tappeto nei dipinti della pinacoteca di brera e del museo poldi pezzoli a milano, milano , pp. , . a. braham, italian paintings of the sixteenth century, london , p. . g.c. argan, storia dell'arte italiana, vol. , firenze , p. . b.l. brown, p. marini, jacopo bassano ( ca.- ), bologna , p. w. b. denny, how to read islamic carpets, new york , pp. - . p.r.j. ford, oriental…, pp. . w. b. denny, how to read…, new york , pp. - . ) but also s-shaped diamonds and hooked elements as visible in the ambassadors kept at the national gallery of london (fig. ). these paintings can count as examples just to outline the kind of arabic lettering on rugs that continued to be depicted in european renaissance art. d. carrier, a world art history and its objects, university park (pa) , pp. - . . . summary the th century witnesses the last stage of the decorations using arabic letters, before their definitive disappearance. they can be divided in three groups as follows: - arabic and pseudo-arabic inscriptions; - encrypted latin inscriptions and pseudo-latin inscriptions; - arabic lettering on islamic carpets. in the first two groups, a gradual stylization of the letters ended up with the loss of the proper features of arabic letters that went along with the consequent homogenization of the signs and final transformation into geometrical or floral ornaments. the highest occurrence of debased arabic inscriptions is found in venetian painters, and the most readable ones belong to the beginning of the th century. the works by bartolomeo veneto and francesco bissolo provide, perhaps, the last evidence for copies from a workshop album. if we compare their decorations with those present on middle eastern islamic artefacts, it can be inferred that they refer to the arabic invocation al-shukr li-llāh (all thanks is for god). in several works the arabic words al-mulk and al-maqarr sporadically occur until they disappear in favour of stylized signs. the writing bands bear the usual sequence: stroke-circle-shaft or a simple juxtaposition of horizontal strokes. the use of encrypted latin inscriptions culminated at the beginning of the sixteenth century with the elaborate writing patterns invented by the bergognone brothers. the youngest brother, bernardino, proved his mastery in hiding his signature in the wording of the ave maria prayer. as a contrast, other venetian painters limited themselves to the creation of latin pseudo- inscriptions. the depiction of oriental carpets was popular in the th century not only among italian painters. lorenzo lotto and hans holbein contributed so much to this fashion that their name was closely linked to the type of carpets present in their paintings. in this case, the painter did not choose to transfer the inscription from an object to the painting, thereby giving it a different function, but simply represented the artefact in his painting as it was. the epigraphic patterns are exactly those occurring on the carpets, arranged in the very same position. consequently, they cannot have worked as a source of inspiration for the artist who adapted the drawing to serve his own purpose in the decorative programme. his work now aimed at representing home interiors in detail, in order to immortalize the luxury lifestyle of the class to which their patrons belonged (or aspired). two kinds of decorations are found on these paintings: the most popular one among different painters refers to al- mulk in plaited kufic, while the other one in a geometric arrangement of the letter mīm repeated. in the sixteenth century, we witness a gradual decline in arabic writing decorative patterns among italian painters. when mannerism held sway in the second half of the century - a period characterized by a crisis of artistic ideals that had triumphed in the previous stages - epigraphic decorations were definitively abandoned. the interest in the arab world, which few years earlier had characterized the ornamentation in italian painting, changed parallel to the expansion of the ottoman empire and the fall of the mamluk sultanate. thanks to the production of precious ceramics, fabrics, and metalwork highly appreciated in european courts of the previous centuries, the art of the almohad, the fatimid, and the mamluk periods had left a clear mark in the aesthetic taste of italian artists - a taste that was expressed above all by decorations consisting in arabic inscriptions. later, the advent of the ottoman empire fostered a new taste in european painting which took its inspiration from oriental carpets and costumes. conclusions the detailed collection of epigraphic ornamentations presented in this study has shed light on a conspicuous amount of arabic inscriptions made in varied styles and having different origins as well as a number of ornamental pseudo- inscriptions inspired by some arabic calligraphic styles. having in mind the key points discussed in the introduction, we will sum up some considerations on the re-definition and perception of the phenomenon in both its historical and epigraphic contexts, clarifying some fields of application of the results. we have broadly addressed the terminology used in the related literature to frame the phenomenon, highlighting the frequent improper use of terms. we have shown that the first step towards the knowledge of the use of arabic scripts in western arts has to achieve, firstly, a correct distinction between arabic lettering and ornamental patterns inspired from arabic script. the collection of data and their organization in homogeneous groups has highlighted a much clearer distinction between the terms "inscription" and "pseudo-inscription". a crucial step in the processing of data has required the assessment of the styles of the inscriptions, i.e. "kufic" and "nashki", as the term “kufic”, commonly used to cover a set of monumental writing styles sharing common features, has been used without any discrimination in most of the literature. the same can be said for naskhi, a type of cursive writing, which is applied to whatever script shows ligatures. since this term, refers to a writing style that was well defined in abbasid chancery treatises on penmanship and that can be discerned in our specimens, we should rather refer to mamluk naskhi or thuluth. the study and reading of texts allowed the separation of arabic inscriptions from those written in other languages, that is latin, mongolian, hebrew, which fell in the same category of arabic/oriental script. it is to be noted that prior to this study, latin inscriptions in disguise passed unnoticed. as a matter of fact, such a difference of scripts had never been clarified, as the so-called "pseudo-kufic inscriptions" are difficult to read and, a large literature is devoted to the seven pens or styles. a critical synopsis can be read in chpts and , pp. - , spec. § “the standardization of round scripts under ibn al- bawwab” in s. blair, islamic calligraphy, edinburg , pp. – . over time, have acquired an all-encompassing significance that led to a proliferation of generalizations and misunderstandings. the collection of over a thousand works featuring epigraphic and pseudo- epigraphic decorations related to a period ranging from the middle of the th century to the middle of the th century has been organized in chronological order for discussion and each of them has been labelled under its proper writing style. the paintings examined come from different international museums and churches, but the collection is far from being exhaustive, as it could be enriched with additional works, making the knowledge of the phenomenon more comprehensive and detailed. also, the field of enquiry, here limited to italy, could be expanded to neighbouring countries. in the absence of any clear reference in the analysis of the epigraphic models, i considered it appropriate to refer to the method followed by other codicologists, such as françois déroche , to identify the writing groups in periods where there was no exhaustive literature that would help to identify the existing samples. i used a comparative method that allowed the creation of groups of inscriptions and pseudo-inscriptions, according to stylistic and/or semantic analogies. the subdivision into "families" has led the study towards the research and identification of prototypes used to copy epigraphic decorative patterns into paintings. once it was ascertained that these decorative patterns were real arabic inscriptions, the further step was to browse islamic collections of art objects to look for the original arabic inscriptions. not to proceed randomly, we started with the assumption that epigraphy is based on the presence of formulas that are proper to each class of objects. it was also evident that it was necessary to cross the classes of objects having the given formulas with the historical data referring to the flows of trade between italy and islamic countries in order to establish what kind of objects entered italian market and which ones enjoyed the favour of italian lords and courts. although there is evidence that textiles were the most required commodity at the time, metal vessels and ceramics showed to be the most fruitful fields of inquiry. an unexpected result came see f. déroche- v. sagaria rossi, i manoscritti in caratteri arabi, roma , pp. - , . from the search for prototypes, which highlighted that the most recurrent formula al-mulk (li-llah), already in use in the th century (painting), and, to a lesser extent, al-yumn, were modelled on inscriptions found on everyday objects such as amphorae, plates, and pottery. profitable material of comparison has been found in sicily and muslim spain, dating from the th century onwards, where it has been possible to follow the debasement of the decorative inscriptions over the centuries, so that the lettering occurring on italian paintings could be interpreted in the light of the data coming from material culture. besides, other texts are more specifically related to mamluk applied arts, mostly widespread between the mid- th and late th centuries, when precious mamluk artefacts represented utmost splendour in the taste of the european elite. contrary to the first set of texts, which were present on objects created for both rich and common people alike, objects of art displaying sultanic protocols were meant for ruling classes. the third chapter has been completely devoted to the comparison of the copied versions of arabic inscriptions in italian painting and their prototypes on the objects circulating in the countries of the mediterranean basin up to the th century. it was at that time that a stylized abbreviation of the word al-mulk, present along the edges of the ottoman rugs, anticipated the gradual abandonment of the use of the arabic decorations and announced the arrival of the new eastern economic and cultural power: the ottoman empire. if on the one side our study has challenged the idea that arabic lettering was the result of artists’ creativity, on the other side we cannot exclude the attempt of inventing imaginary alphabets by mixing up features of different script. this happens already in the th century, when the cryptography of the word "maria" in the form of pseudo-arabic signs, and then to the composition of complex texts such as prayers and signatures of the authors in the high renaissance spread. although the iconographic sign of the nimbus or halo, symbol of the light coming from god, has a voluminous literature showing that its representation in early christian art from the th century a.d and in byzantine art later was rooted in the pagan cults of helios in greece and of the sol invictus in the later roman empire, the textuality of the halo has not been extensively dealt with. if the latin prayers or the name of the holy personages give verbal evidence for the divine status or the blissful state of madonnas and saints, we do not know if humanist thought has pushed further into speculations on the evocative power of arabic writing, in addition to providing an iconographic sign of the cradle of christendom. given that no other study hitherto provided such a detailed scrutiny of arabic texts in italian art, we should now explain what the substantial utility of the work undertaken is and how the data obtained can be used. is it important to know that italian artists copied real inscriptions? what changes for the research to know their content (when it is possible to read them) in consideration of the fact that artists were most likely unaware of their meaning? it is obvious that if we want to interpret a sign we have to get knowledge about the system and the rules that produced it. consequently, the difference between inscription and pseudo-inscription responds to the pertinence to a code: that of the language or that of aesthetics. the reading of the text, therefore, is not a demonstration of linguistic dexterity, but the proof that the artist put himself in a dialectical process with a sign taken from the code of the written language, i.e. arabic script, and did not resort to his creativity. according to the preceding considerations about the artist’s reasons, it holds true that the sign is treated by the interpreter/artist in terms of iconicity rather than symbolic value, as he is unaware of the conventional character the sign owns in the cultural context of reference. nevertheless, the value of the interpretation of the inscriptions is undeniable. the identification of inscriptions from islamic portable epigraphy transferred to italian paintings provides precious details for the reconstruction of a historical phase of european economy and commerce in the mediterranean and their perception in the taste of western societies. furthermore, the identification of textual elements and their borrowing by the italian schools of painting contributes to establish the trade routes and the circulation of islamic manufacturing objects. a massive presence of inscriptions from precious metals is encountered in venetian paintings, as we have seen, for example, in see w. leeds-hurwitz, semiotics and communication: signs, codes, cultures, new jersey , pp. , . cima da conegliano, while several representations of fabrics (see fra angelico) are found in tuscany. differently, a general tendency to paint portable objects of spanish origin is largely witnessed in southern italy, where, however, also the copy of inscriptions present on luxury items is attested. through the recognition of arabic epigraphic decorations, it has been possible to infer the diversification of parallel markets destined for elites or middle classes. the perception of these artefacts in italian cities has been the subject of recent studies. in this regard, rebecca müller suggests that the relocation and re-use of islamic objects in christian context played a pivotal role in the perception of these materials whose religious meaning would not have been a fundamental element. likewise, in the present study, the transfer of inscriptions from the object to the painting determines the change of function that transformed arabic characters from islamic liturgical language into a christian message about the land of christ and the people who took part in his life. this is demonstrated by the many islamic artefacts coming from oriental trade that are represented in italian paintings by artists such as mantegna, jacopo and giovanni bellini to evoke "the exoticism of the holy land". the development of segregated fields of research has prevented, in my opinion, a deeper understanding either of the textual elements or of the spirit of the time. a tendency to hold on to positions that had proved comfortable has led art historians to ignore or to undervalue the extraordinary amount of information that the exact knowledge of arabic inscriptions and pseudo- inscriptions could bring for different approaches. we have seen how the study of the transmission of techniques, copies and productions of prototypes varies from an atelier to another. although the same texts were covered by different authors, the styles used and the application of the prototypes in the paintings were often exclusive. sometimes a single element or just a detail is sufficient enough to distinguish a painter from another, or the master from his workshop apprentices. these details can work as a trademark or "signature”, r. müller, “riflessioni sulla percezione di artefatti islamici nella genova medievale”, in genova, una capitale del mediterraneo tra bisanzio e il mondo islamico. storia, arte e cultura, milano , pp. , . c. schmidt arcangeli, "la peinture “orientaliste” à venise du xve au xviie siècle”, in venice et l’orient", paris , p. . and this aspect can be exploited in cases where the attribution of works of art with regards to authorship, period and geographical location are in doubt. this is the case of the fresco in the chapel of san niccolò in pistoia, where i have advanced a hypothesis of assignment and dating of the work based on palaeographic analysis and comparisons between similar inscriptions in different works . obviously, the bulk of the material scrutinized is rather broad in view of the purpose of the research, but in reality, it is small when compared to the actual proportions of the phenomenon. new specimens could be analysed and a comprehensive database could be developed. unfortunately, in several cases, the poor quality of the photographs did not allow a careful study of the texts and many textual elements still await an analytic look. also, the parallel production of degenerated arabic inscriptions on western manufacturing items such as fabrics, ceramics, and metals, requires the attention of a multi- disciplinary team able to provide significant contributions on the identification and the spread of prototypes, adding new details about the use of arabic lettering in the western arts. see e. g. napolitano, “le decorazioni epigrafiche…”, pistoia , pp. - . bibliography aanavi d., “devotional writing: “pseudoinscriptions” in islamic art”, the 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debasement of the word al-mulk during the centuries unknown pisan, virgin and child, museum of san matteo, pisa pl. unknown roman-pisan, museum of san matteo, pisa crucifix, fig. fig. pl. fig. fig. لما لما لما لما a b c a detail of the inscription chart of letter shapes used in the inscription on the crucifix pl. fig. fig. fig. fig. comparison between a detail of the painting and the textile from the bamberg cathedral fragment of fatimid textile, egypt, kevorkian collection, paris ring, egypt, metropolitan museum, new york fragment of textile, spain, bamberg cathedral positive and negative shapes limoges enamel ciborium with champlevé, france, arca santa of oviedo, reliquary casket, spain, limoges inscription oviedo inscription crucifix inscription crucifix inscription pl. fig. fig. fig. fig. comparison of the inscriptions comparison of the inscriptions the monastery of hosios loukas, greece the church of san giovanni in monterrone. matera jar. zisa museum, palermo the monastery of hosios loukas. greece jar. zisa museum, palermo the church of san giovanni in monterrone. matera pl. fig. fig. u-shaped form of al-mulk a. mirror image form of al-mulk b. inscriptions on jars a. giunta pisano, museum of san matteo, pisa processional cross, giunta pisano, museum of san matteo, pisa dossale of st. francis and six miracles, fatimid jar, victoria and albert museum, london ikat, egytp, metropolitan museum, new york pl. fig. fig. fig. b. reproduction of the inscription guido da siena, the courtauld gallery, london coronation of the vergin, fragment of textile, egypt, metropolitan museum, new york fragment of ceramic, spain, calatrava la vieja pl. fig. fig. fig. mausoleum of bohemond, canosa fragment of textile, tomb of bishop otto ii, bamberg fig. unknown pisan, national gallery, london virgin and child with two angels, cimabue, louvre museum, paris maestà, fig. fig. jar, detail of inscription. zisa museum, palermo detail of the maestà pl. fig. comparison between a detail of the painting and the jar fig. fig. fig. bowl, iran, metropolitan museum, new york detail of the halo inscription detail of the inscription on the throne pl. detail of the enchripted latin inscription cimabue, maestà of santa maria dei servi, church of santa maria dei servi, bologna cimabue, uffizi gallery, florence madonna di santa trinità, pl. fig. fig. fig. duccio di buoninsegna, galleria sabaudia, turin madonna gualino, duccio’s pseudo-arabic (madonna gualino) cimabue’s «maria» inscription duccio’s «maria» inscription cimabue’s pseudo-arabic (maestà) pl. fig. fig. comparison between duccio's and cimabue's inscriptions. duccio di buoninsegna, uffizi gallery, florence madonna rucellai, duccio di buoninsegna, pinacoteca nazionale, siena virgin and child with saints, pl. fig. fig. fig. detail of decorations on the pillow pl. duccio di buonsinsegna, stained glass window of siena cathedral, fragment of pottery, madinat al-zahra’, spain textile, (cornu ) inscription on duccio’s painting inscription on pottery inscription on textile fig. fig. fig. - fig. detail of the coronation duccio di buoninsegna, virgin and child and saints, pinacoteca nazionale, siena reproduction of the word al-sulṭān pl. fig. fig. fig. detail of the inscription on the ciborium pl. fig. master of varlungo, virgin and and child enthroned with angels, metropolitan museum, new york master of città di castello, virgin and child with saints francis, john the baptist,stephen and clare, pinacoteca nazionale, siena master of città di castello, virgin and child with st augustine, st. paul, st. peter, and anthony abbot, pinacoteca nazionale, siena fig. fig. fig. drawing of the corrupted form of al-mulk pl. master of san torpé, virgin and child with angels and saints, museum of san matteo, pisa fig. deodato orlandi, dossale d’altare, museum of san matteo, pisa fig. fig. detail of the book segna di buonaventura, crucifix, pinacoteca nazionale, siena pl. segna’s inscriptions orlandi’s inscriptions segna’s condensed al-mulk type orlandi’s condensed al-mulk type fig. fig. segna di buonaventura, crucifix, national gallery, london fig. pl. fig. segna di buonaventura, madonna and child with nine angels, metropolitan museum, new york fig. segna di buonaventura, madonna with st. paula, and st. romuald, pinacoteca nazionale, siena st. john the evangelist fig. pl. fig. segna di buonaventura, st. madeleine, alte pinakothek, munich a. daštī mosque fig. a. segna di buonaventura, the crucifixion, metropolitan museum, new york b. textile fragment with swastikas, egypt, ashmolean museum, oxford b. textile, egypt, ashmolean museum, oxford. (from v. grassi, ) fig. fig. giotto, dormitio verginis, gemäldegalerie, berlin drawings of six types of seals on uyghur documents (matsui fig. ) fig. giotto, ognissanti madonna, uffizi gallery, florence pl. giotto, virgin and child, national gallery, washington fig. fig. giotto, last supper, alte pinakothek, munich fig. pl. detail of long shafts with a central arch giotto, descending into limbo, , alte pinakothek, munich fig. giotto, crucifixion, , alte pinakothek, munich pl. fig. fig. detail of the hem pl. giotto, crucifixion, louvre museum, paris fragment of textile, egypt, metropolitan museum, new york fig. fig. fig. master of san martino alla palma, scenes from the passion of christ, gemäldegalerie, berlin fig. detail of the belts pl. fig. jacopo del casentino, the annunciation, poldi pezzoli museum, milan fig. a. master of san martino alla palma, scenes from the passion of christ b. detail of the inscription fig. pl. taddeo gaddi, tryptic, gemäldegalerie, berlin mamluk textile fragment, ashmolean museum, oxford figg. , jacopo del casentino, the annunciation maso di banco, virgin and child, gemäldegalerie, berlin pl. fig. egyptian t fragments, ashmolean museum, extile oxford fig. bernardo daddi, processional cross, poldi pezzoli museum, milan fig. pl. fig. bernando daddi, annunciation, louvre museum, paris pseudo-latin in the daddi’s paintings crucifixion with saints, courtauld gallery, london virgin, st thomas aquinas and st paul, paul getty museum, los angeles the assuntion of the virgin, metrpolitan museum, new york fig. master of san lucchese, virgin and child with angels, gemäldegalerie, berlin pl. puccio di simone and allegretto nuzi, virgin enthroned with saints, national gallery, washington fig. b. egyptian t fragments, ashmolean museum, extile oxford fig. fig. a. detail of the inscription pl. giovanni di tano fei, coronation of the virgin, metropolitan museum, new york fig. giovanni da milano, madonna and child with donors, metropolitan museum, new york giovanni da milano, coronation of the virgin, national gallery, london fig. fig. pl. fig. fig. fig. limoges reliquary crucifix xii c. madonna of the humility roberto d’oderisio, madonna of the humility, museum of capodimonte, naples master of the franciscan tempera, madonna of the humility, museum of capodimonte, naples neapolitan follower of giotto, ork saints john the evangelist and mary magdalene, metropolitan museum, new y right side left side pl. fig. fig. pl. mamluk casket, egypt, fitzwilliam museum, cambridge المقرالبرالمقرلعالعاالبرالبر العا (...) (...)العاليالبرالمقر(...)البرالبر المالكيالعاليالمقر لما البرالبر ا()لكریما b. left side a. right side mamluk basin, egypt, private collection comte de toulouse-lautrec fig. fig. fig. text of the inscription pl. mamluk bowl, egypt, courtauld gallery, london mamluk inscriptions painting inscrptions fig. fig. neapolitan follower of giotto, the dead christ and the virgin, national gallery, london fig. fig. comparison the the painting and mamluk metalworks between inscriptions on a b c detail of the hem pl. ugolino di nerio, spandrel angels, national gallery, london fig. duccio, virgin and child and saints ugolino, sprandel angels fig. workshop of ugolino di nerio,virgin and child, metropolitan museum, new york fig. ugolino di nerio, virgin and child, louvre museum, paris ugolino di nerio, virgin and child with saints, pinacoteca nazionale, siena fig. fig. pl. niccolò di segna, saint benedict and saint nicolas, pinacoteca nazionale, siena fig. pl. master of the albertini, virgin and child with six angels, pinacoteca nazionale, siena fig. fig. fig. detail of textiles, egypt, ashmolean museum, oxford textiles, ashmolean museum master of the albertini, virgin and child with six angels comparison between the inscriptions on the painting and islamic textiles simone martini, altarpiece of saint catherine, museum of , pisasan matteo a. simone martini’s inscription b. giunta pisano’s inscription pl. fig. fig. a. simone martini, the annunciation, uffizi gallery, florence fig. a b b. reproduction of the inscription pl. simone martini, saint luke, paul getty museum, los angeles fig. simone martini’s inscription niccolò di segna’s inscription fig. fig. dish, egypt or turkey, los angeles county museum, los angeles master of the palazzo venezia, st. peter and st. mary magdalene, national gallery, london fig. a. lippo memmi, virgin and child, alte pinakothek, munich lippo memmi, polyptych, museum of , pisasan matteo lippo memmi, st. peter, louvre museum, paris lippo memmi, madonna and child with donor, national gallery, washington pl. fig. fig. fig. fig. b. detail of textile, egypt, ashmolean museum, oxford workshop of lippo memmi, madonna and child, gemäldegalerie, berlin lippo memmi, saint louis of toulouse, pinacoteca nazionale, siena segna’s condensed al-mulk type memmi’s condensed al-mulk type fig. fig. fig. pl. meo da siena, retable from s. pietro in perugia, städel museum, frankfurt fig. detail of textile, egypt, ashmolean museum fig. fig. fig. pl. retable from s. pietro in perugia retable from s. pietro in perugia retable from s. pietro in perugia a. amborgio lorenzetti, small maestà, pinacoteca nazionale, siena b. ashmolean museum textiles fig. a. pietro lorenzetti, pala del carmine, pinacoteca nazionale, siena fig. pl. b. detail of the süleyman mosque, hasankeyf wall, pietro lorenzetti, crucifixion, städel museum, frankfurt fig. a. ambrogio lorenzetti, virgin and child with st. mary magdalene and st. marta, pinacoteca nazionale, siena b. mamluk textile, egypt, ashmolean museum, oxford fig. pl. pl. a. ambrogio lorenzetti, virgin and child, louvre museum, paris fig. b. textile, egypt, ashmolean museum, oxford pietro lorenzetti, st bartholomew, st cecilia and st john the baptist, pinacoteca nazionale, siena fig. bartolo di fredi, presentation in the temple, louvre museum, paris bartolo di fredi, adoration of the magi, pinacoteca nazionale, siena fig. pl. fig. fig. cecco di pietro, cristo in pietà, museum of san matteo, pisa pl. cecco di pietro, nursing madonna and child with angels, museum of , pisasan matteo fig. fig. unknown sienese, virgin and child, gemäldegalerie, berlin paolo di giovanni fei, nativity of mary, pinacoteca nazionale, siena fig. antonio veneziano, the apostle james the great, gemäldegalerie, berlin fig. pl. francesco di traino, virgin and child, museum of , pisasan matteo fig. fig. giovanni di nicola, polittico di santa marta, museum of , pisasan matteo barnaba da modena, virgin and child, städel museum, frankfurt fig. pl. bowls, iran, louvre museum, paris bowls, iran, metropolitan museum, new york fig. fig. fig. fig. fig. paolo veneziano, enthroned madonna and child, galleria dell’accademia, venice a. paolo veneziano, polyptych, galleria dell’accademia, venice b. giunta pisano, dossale master of the washington coronation, coronation of the virgin, national gallery, washington paolo veneziano, the birth of st. nicholas, national gallery, washington fig. pl. fig. fig. fig. fig. detail of fabric behind the throne pl. paolo veneziano, coronation of the virgin paolo veneziano, polyptych paolo veneziano, polyptych bowls, iran, metropolitan museum, new york fragment of a bowl, syria, metropolitan museum, new york bowl, iran, metropolitan museum, new york fig. fig. fig. comparison between paolo veneziano’s decorations and inscriptions on pottery pl. lorenzo veneziano, lion polyptyc, galleria dell’accademia, venice fig. fig. fig. lorenzo veneziano, lion polyptych paolo veneziano, polyptych lorenzo veneziano, madonna of humility with saints mark and john, national gallery, london fig. paolo veneziano, polyptych, galleria dell’accademia, venice pl. fig. fig. lorenzo veneziano, the annunciation with saints, galleria dell’accademia, venice fig. catarino, coronation of the virgin with angels, galleria dell’accademia, venice detail of the hem guariento di arpo, virgin and child, metropolitan museum, new york fig. pl. guariento di arpo, enthroned virgin and child, gemäldegalerie, berlin fig. fig. b. giotto, ognissanti madonna a. guariento di arpo, virgin and child type paint a b c meo da siena, main retable from s. pietro in perugia master of san martino alla palma, four scenes from the passion of christ master of the albertini, virgin and child and six angels cecco di pietro, madonna nursing the child with angels segna di buonaventura, crucifix barnaba da modena, virgin and child niccolò di segna, st. bartholomew and st. nicholas simone martini, saint luke antonio veneziano, the apostle james the great fig. debasement of the word al-mulk in the th c. italian paintings pl. type paint a b c ا paolo veneziano, coronation of the virgin paolo veneziano, virgin and child enthroned (sant’alvise) paolo veneziano, polittico di s. chiara, simone martini, virgin and child with saints simone martini, annunciation lorenzo veneziano, madonna of the humility paolo veneziano, altarpiece of santa chiara lorenzo veneziano, lion polyptych debasement of the word al-yumn in the th c. italian paintings fig. paolo veneziano, polyptych fig. gherardo starnina, saint hugh of lincoln who exorcises a possessed man, poldi pezzoli museum, milan pl. fig. gherardo starnina, st. mary magdalene, st. lawrence and donor, gemäldegalerie, berlin fig. masolino da panicale, virgin and child, alte pinakothek, munich pl. fig. lorenzo monaco, coronation of the virgin, courtould gallery, london fig. lorenzo monaco, adoring saints, national gallery, london turino vanni, baptism of jesus, museum of san matteo, pisa fig. martino di bartolomeo and giovanni di pietro da napoli, mystic marriage of st. catherine of alexandria, museum of san matteo, pisa martino di bartolomeo a , polyptich, museum of san matteo, pisa nd giovanni di pietro da napoli martino di bartolomeo , polyptich, museum of san matteo, pisa and giovanni di pietro da napoli fig. fig. fig. fig. pl. martino di bartolomeo , polyptich, detail of al-mulk and giovanni di pietro da napoli pl. martino di bartolomeo , polyptich, museum of san matteo, pisa fig. michelino da besozzo, the pinacoteca nazionale, siena mystic marriage of st. catherine, fig. cristoforo moretti, triptych, poldi pezzoli museum, milan fig. pl. gentile da fabriano, madonna of the humility, museum of san matteo, pisa fig. a. gentile da fabriano, the adoration of the magi, uffizi gallery, florence fig. fig. b. reproduction of the inscription detail of the mantle’s king pl. gentile da fabriano, the adoration of the magi. st. joseph’s halo fig. ab c d ab cd fig. fig. gentile da fabriano, madonna of the humility. madonna’s halo reproduction of the inscription fig. reproduction of the words «ave maria» fig. reproduction of the word maria fig. pl. gentile da fabriano, adoration of the magi, virgin's halo gentile da fabriano, the adoration of the magi, detail of the mantle hem fig. fig. gentile da fabriano, enthroned virgin and child, frick collection, new york gentile da fabriano, madonna and child national gallery, washington entrhoned, pl. pl. fig. fig. fig. gentile, enthroned virgin and child, frick collection, new york inscriptions on the hems: a. al-malik b. al-karīm a. b. inscriptions on the hems: al-kāmil pl. pisanello, sketches of john viii palaeologus during his visit at the council of florence, louvre museum, paris fig. pisanello, the annunciation, basilica di san fermo maggiore, verona. detail of the lower part of the carpet fig. fig. fig. detail of textile, egytp, ashmolean museum, oxford pisanello, the annunciation. detail of the upper part of the carpet pl. giovanni di paolo, coronation of the virgin, metropolitan museum, new york master of the osservanza, the birth of the virgin, national gallery, london fig. fig. fig. master of the , virgin and child with saints, museo civico, pistoia pl. sano di pietro, enthroned madonna with child, pinacoteca nazionale, siena sano di pietro, coronation of the virgin, pinacoteca nazionale, siena fig. fig. pl. sano di pietro, madonna and child with saints, metropolitan museum, new york sano di pietro, virgin and child, pinacoteca nazionale, siena workshop of sano di pietro, virgin and child, metropolitan museum, new york fig. fig. fig. pl. masaccio and masolino, sant’anna metterza, uffizi gallery, florence. angel’s halo fig. fig. masaccio and masolino, sant’anna metterza, uffizi gallery, florence. child’s halo masaccio, madonna casini, uffizi gallery, florence pl. fig. a. fra angelico, madonna of the shadows, museo san marco, florence fig. masaccio’s inscription fra angelico’s inscription b. comparison between masaccio’s and angelico’s inscriptions madonna of the shadows lamentation of christ deposition of christ coronation of the virgin virgin and child enthroned with trinity san pietro martire triptych debasement of the word al-sulṭān in fra angelico paintings fig. detail of textile, italy, museo del tessuto, prato fig. pl. a. reliquary of sant'alberto, museo della cattedrale, pistoia fig. pl. virgin and child enthroned with trinity the adoration of the magimadonna strozzi coronation of the virgin (museo di san marco) b. comparison between prato and pistoia artefacts textile, prato reliquiary, pistoia fig. examples of al-mā in fra angelico’s paintings al-maqarr ductus the madonna of pontassieve coronation of the virgin (uffizi gallery) tabernacle of the linaioli fra angelico, the madonna of pontassieve, uffizi gallery, florence fig. zanobi strozzi, virgin and child with four angels, museo di san marco, florence fig. reliquary of sant'alberto fig. pl. pl. fra angelico, museo di san marco, florence. detail of «magister» deposition of christ, fig. fig. fra angelico, coronation of the virgin, museo di san marco, florence. detail of the christ's shoulder fig. fig. fra angelico, museo di san marco, florence. detail of «maria» deposition of christ, fra angelico, coronation of the virgin. detail of the christ's collar pl. fra angelico, uffizi gallery, florence coronation of the virgin, francesco d’antonio di bartolomeo, singing angels, accademia delle arti del disegno, florence fig. fig. antonio da firenze, crucifixion with virgin and st john, hermitage museum, st. petersburg fig. pl. andrea del castagno, assumption of the virgin, gemäldegalerie, berlin. al-mā[likī] al-maqarr al-mālikī fig. andrea del castagno, virgin and child, collezione contini bonacossi, florence bowl, iran, metropolitan museum, new york fig. antonio da firenze, madonna and child with a bishop, saints and angel, hermitage museum, st. petersburg fig. fig. fig. fig. comparison between ornamentations made up of interconnected letters pl. andrea del verrocchio, virgin and child, gemäldegalerie, berlin fig. andrea del verrocchio, virgin and child, metropolitan museum, new york fig. fig. andrea del verrocchio, virgin and child pl. domenico ghirlandaio, virgin and child, national gallery, washington fig. domenico ghirlandaio, pala di vallombrosa, abbazia di vallombrosa, reggello (florence) fig. domenico ghirlandaio, virgin and child, louvre museum, paris fig. pl. a. jacobello del fiore, triptych, galleria dell’accademia, venice fig. niccolò di pietro, coronation of the virgin, pinacoteca di brera, milan fig. niccolò di pietro gerini, crucifixion with the virgin and st. john, hermitage museum, st.petersburg fig. baraka al-mulkb c pl. antonio vivarini, the adoration of the magi, gemäldegalerie, berlin fig. jacopo bellini, virgin and child, metropolitan museum, new york fig. fig. reproduction of the inscription pl. jacopo bellini, virgin and child, uffizi gallery, florence jacopo belini, madonna and child with cherubs, galleria dell’accademia, venice fig. fig. giovanni bellini, madonna enthroned cherishing the sleeping child, galleria dell’accademia, venice giovanni bellini, christ blessing, louvre museum, paris fig. fig. pl. andrea mantegna, judith with the head of holofernes, national gallery, washington fig. andrea mantegna, madonna and child with seraphim and cherubim, national gallery, washington fig. andrea mantegna, the holy family with the saint mary magdalen, metropolitan museum, new york fig. fig. master of città di castello andrea mantegna andrea mantegna, st. luke, pinacoteca di brera, milan fig. comparison between inscriptions pl. cima da conegliano, madonna and child with saints peter, romualdo, paul and benedict, gemäldegalerie, berlin fig. a. mamluk tray, egypt or syria victoria and albert museum, london b. cima’s inscription detail of the word al-malik fig. fig. a. mamluk bowl, egypt, courtauld gallery, london detail of the word al-‘ālī b. cima’s inscription fig. ؟ (؟) العام pl. fig. detail of the word al-nāṣir (?) a. box, egypt, victoria and albert museum, london b.cima’s inscription a. box, egypt, victoria and albert museum, london b.cima’s inscription detail of the word al-mawlawī fig. a.basin, egypt, museum of islamic art, cairo detail of the word al-ʿāmilī b.cima’s inscription fig. a. box, egypt, v&a museum, london b. cima’s inscription detail of the word al-mālīkī fig. pl. a. mamluk plate, egypt, smithsonian museum, washington b. cima’s decoration fig. detail of the flowers decoration cima da conegliano, madonna dell'arancio, galleria dell’accademia, venice fig. pl. cima da conegliano, virgin and child, national gallery london fig. mirror image reproduction fig. pl. cima da conegliano, madonna and child with st. jerome and st. john the baptist, national gallery, washington mirror image reproduction fig. fig. neapolitan follower of giotto’s detail of al-maqarr fig. pl. cima da conegliano, tobias and the angel and two saints, galleria dell’accademia, venice fig. cima da conegliano, madonna and child with st. john the baptist and st. paul, galleria dell’accademia, venice fig. fig. left side inscription probably by cima da conegliano, the virgin and child with saints, national gallery, london fig. fig. cima da conegliano, madonna and child in a landscape, county museum, los angeles fig. pl. iscription on the cuff pl. cima da conegliano, three saints, metropolitan museum, new york fig. cima da conegliano, virgin and child, national gallery, london fig. fig. iscription on the cuff pl. cima da conegliano, virgin and child, pinacoteca nazionale, bologna cima da conegliano, madonna and child with sts jerome and mary magdalen, alte pinakothek, munich fig. fig. fig. iscription on the cuff pl. fig. fig. cima da conegliano, the incredulity of saint thomas, national gallery, london fig. cima da conegliano, pala di conegliano, conegliano cathedral, conegliano veneto fig. fig. textile fragment, egypt, ashmolean museum, oxford inscription on the right cuff inscription on the collar pl. filippo lippi, pala barbadori, louvre museum, paris fig. filippi lippi, virgin and child, national gallery, washington filippo lippi, the adoration of the child, gemäldegalerie, berlin fig. fig. pesellino, virgin and child with saints, louvre museum, paris pl. fig. zanobi strozzi, annunciation, national gallery, london fig. fig. fig. decoration of the collar detail of «nobi» pl. paolo di san leocadio, virgin and child, national gallery, london fig. sandro botticelli, virgin and child with the young st john the baptist, louvre museum, paris fig. pietro perugino, virgin and child with angels and saints, louvre museum, paris fig. pl. pietro di domenico da montepulciano, virgin and child with angels, metropolitan museum, new york fig. neroccio di bartolomeo de’ landi, virgin and child with saints, national gallery, washington fig. neroccio di bartolomeo de’ landi, virgin and child with saints, pinacoteca nazionale, siena fig. fig. matteo di giovanni, madonna and child with angels and cherubim, national gallery, washington pl. lippo di dalmasio, the madonna of the humility, national gallery,london fig. fig. michele di matteo, polyptych, galleria dell’accademia, venice lorenzo d’alessandro, the mystical marriage of saint catherine, national gallery, london fig. pl. vincenzo foppa, madonna and child, metropolitan museum, new york fig. carlo crivelli, virgin and child with saints, pinacoteca di brera, milan fig. marco zoppo, enthroned madonna and child with saints, gemäldegalerie, berlin fig. michele da verona, metropolitan museum, new york madonna and child with the infant st john the baptist, fig. pl. vittore carpaccio, the stories of st. orsola, galleria dell'accademia, venice textile fragment, ashmolean museum, oxford fig. fig. carlo crivelli, annunciation with saint emidius, national gallery, london fig. textile fragment, turkey, metropolitan museum. new york fig. pl. unknown venetian, virgin and child, hermitage museum, st. petersburg fig. gregorio cecco di luca, the marriage of the virgin, national gallery, london fig. fig. textile fragment, ashmolean museum, oxford domenico ghirlandaio, resurrection of the boy, basilica di santa trinità, florence fig. western anatolian carpet, from oriental carpet design fig. fig. pl. domenico ghirlandaio, ingesuati sacred conversation, uffizi gallery, florence domenico ghirlandaio, st jerome in his study, chiesa di ognissanti, florence fig. fig. pl. liberale da verona, virgin and child with two angels, national gallery, london lorenzo di credi, virgin adoring the child, national gallery, london unknown pisan, st. agnes with st. mary magdalene and another saint, museum of san matteo, pisa ridolfo del ghirlandaio, holy conversation with saints, museo civico, pistoia fig. fig. fig. fig. fra angelico’s inscriptiongianfresco de maineri, the holy family, gemäldegalerie, berlin bernardino fungai, madonna and child, hermitage museum, st. petersburg maso di banco’s inscription, - pl. fig. fig. fig. francesco bonsignori, half-length figure of a saint, poldi pezzoli museum, milan fig. marco marziale, supper at emmaus, galleria dell’accademia, venice detail of textiles, egypt, ahsmolean museum, oxford pl. fig. fig. fig. fragment of textiles, egypt, ahsmolean museum, oxford fig. unknown, reception of a venetian delegation in damascus, louvre museum, paris fig. reproduction of the inscription bartolomeo veneto, circumcision, louvre museum, paris francesco bissolo, salvator mundi, alte pinakothek, munich censer, bronze, overseas chinese museum, xiamen veneto’s inscription bissolo’s inscription censer’s inscrption pl. fig. fig. fig. fig. ambrogio bergognone, virgin and child with two angels, poldi pezzoli museum, milan ambrogio bergognone, the virgin and child with saints, national gallery, london bernardino bergognone, the virgin and child with two angels, national gallery, london pl. fig. fig. fig. fig. fig. white highlighted inscription on the hem encrypted signature giovanni cariani, virgin and child with st. sebastian, louvre museum, paris antonio de solario, st. ursula, national gallery, london antonio de solario, st.catherine of alexandria, national gallery, london pl. fig. fig. fig. raffaello, portrait of elisabetta gonzaga, uffizi gallery , florence raffaello, the niccolini-cowper madonna, national gallery, washington raffaello, terranuova madonna, gemäldegalerie, berlin raffaello, the holy family, alte pinakothek, munich pl. fig. fig. fig. fig. boccaccio boccaccino, marriage of st. catherine with saints, galleria dell’accademia, venice domenico panetti, lamentation of christ with a donor, gemäldegalerie, berlin lodovico mazzolino, finding in the temple, gemäldegalerie, berlin gerino gerini, holy conversation with saints, museo civico, pistoia pl. fig. fig. fig. fig. sebastiano del piombo, cardinal bandiello sauli, his secretary and two geographers, national gallery, washington pl. girolamo del santo, virgin and childs enthroned with angels and st. benedict, poldi pezzoli museum, milan rosso fiorentino, portrait of a young man, museo of capodimonte, naples detail of western anatolian carpet, from oriental carpet design, fig. fig. fig. fig. fig. giulio campi, allegory of vanity, poldi pezzoli museum, milan pl. lorenzo lotto, portrait of giovanni della volta with his wife and children, national gallery, london lorenzo lotto, the alms of st. anthony, basilica di san giovanni e paolo, venice fig. fig. fig. hans holbein the younger, the ambassadors, national gallery, london hans holbein the younger, the merchant georg gisze, gemäldegalerie, berlin pl. jacopo da ponte bassano, virgin and child with saints, alte pinakothek, munich fig. hans memling, donne triptych, national gallery, london. fig. fig. fig. بركة الیمن الملك بركة الیمن السلطان العالي العز المالكي االمقر الملك السلطان العالي االمقر البر th c. th c. th c. th c. th c. الملك المالكي الملك الكریم appendices: formulas and epigraphical patterns: السلطان � الشكر العز نصر العز بركة العادلي الكمل العامل العافیة الكریم المولوى الناصري . . . . more than specimens - specimens - specimens less then specimens الملك pl. the spread of the arabic formulas during the centuries in the examined paintings th c. th c. th c. th c. th c. kufic and cursive writings during the centuries mamluk cursive ........square kufic interlaced kufic ornamental kufic floriated kufic foliated kufic cursive kufic with elaborate apices pl. formulas and epigraphical patterns: th c. th c. th c. th c. th c. formulas and epigraphical patterns: debasement of the word al-mulk during the centuries pl. 	pagina 	pagina 	pagina 	pagina 	pagina 	pagina 	pagina 	pagina 	pagina 	pagina 	pagina 	pagina 	pagina 	pagina 	pagina 	pagina 	pagina 	pagina 	pagina 	pagina 	pagina 	pagina 	pagina 	pagina 	pagina 	pagina 	pagina 	pagina 	pagina 	pagina 	pagina 	pagina 	pagina 	pagina 	pagina 	pagina 	pagina 	pagina 	pagina 	pagina 	pagina 	pagina 	pagina 	pagina 	pagina 	pagina 	pagina 	pagina 	pagina 	pagina 	pagina 	pagina 	pagina 	pagina 	pagina 	pagina 	pagina 	pagina 	pagina 	pagina 	pagina 	pagina 	pagina 	pagina 	pagina 	pagina 	pagina 	pagina 	pagina 	pagina 	pagina 	pagina 	pagina 	pagina 	pagina 	pagina 	pagina 	pagina 	pagina 	pagina 	pagina 	pagina 	pagina 	pagina 	pagina 	pagina 	pagina 	pagina 	pagina 	pagina 	pagina 	pagina 	pagina 	pagina 	pagina 	pagina 	pagina 	pagina 	pagina 	pagina 	pagina 	pagina 	pagina 	pagina 	pagina 	pagina 	pagina 	pagina 	pagina 	pagina 	pagina 	pagina 	pagina 	pagina 	pagina 	pagina creating procedural window building blocks using the generative fact labeling method w. thallera, r. zmugga, u. krispela, m. poscha, s. havemanna, d.w. fellner a,b a institute of computergraphics & knowledgevisualization (cgv), tu graz, austria b tu darmstadt & fraunhofer igd, germany key words: procedural modeling, neo-classical architecture, d-reconstruction, shape grammars, fact labeling method abstract: the generative surface reconstruction problem can be stated like this: given a finite collection of d shapes, create a small set of functions that can be combined to generate the given shapes procedurally. we propose generative fact labeling (gfl) as an attempt to organize the iterative process of shape analysis and shape synthesis in a systematic way. we present our results for the reconstruction of complex windows of neo-classical buildings in graz, followed by a critical discussion of the limitations of the approach. figure : reasons for the complexity of window modeling. intri- cacies of facade composition (left), vertical coherence (middle), and horizontal coherence (right) between ajacent windows. introduction most digital urban reconstructions today suffer from bad win- dows. there are two main sources of inaccuracy: either the win- dow is well modeled but does not match the original (because it is selected from a set of pre-modeled assets), or the window matches but is badly modeled (window texture). how can this situation be improved? we opt for geometric reasoning. windows are among the most salient features of façades. in most classical styles of architecture a window is not just a rectangular hole in a wall, but rather a combination of different inter-related design elements. they may derive from a long-standing architec- tural tradition. thus, when creating a d model of a façade, a substantial part of the effort will be spent on modeling the win- dows and the decorative elements that go with them. a library of common pre-modeled windows can be used only for superfi- cial reconstructions. when more accuracy is required, windows from an asset library can at most be used as a starting point for further manual modeling, or they must be camouflaged by photo-texturing. windows in different buildings are often simi- lar but hardly ever identical. we must better understand this phe- nomenon (figures , ) to produce more accurate reconstructions. in this paper we propose a methodological approach to deal with situations where a large number of highly structured, similar but not identical shapes must be captured. our generative fact label- ing (gfl) method has three phases: • analysis phase: we have gathered a collection of pho- tographs of complex windows. we have structured them into elements by assigning fact labels (see section ). • synthesis phase: we have produced a library of combine- able procedural assets corresponding to the elements iden- tified in the analysis phase (see section ). • verification phase: we have d-reconstructed several well- chosen windows from this collection in order to assess the usefulness of our procedural library (see section ). we discuss strengths, weaknesses and limitations in section . . contribution we introduce the mentioned concepts (fact label, attribute, ele- ment, procedural asset, exemplar) as part of our generative fact labeling (gfl) method, a simple conceptual framework to deal with families of complex structured shapes. the goal of this method is generative shape reconstruction, i.e., to produce a li- brary of functions that allow not only reproducing the limited number of given exemplars, but also the design space that is spanned by them. whenever factoring shapes into procedural ele- ments or components, one must be aware that this factorization is only an interpretation (speculation); there is no such thing as the “best” procedural description. elegance is related to simplicity, but one can never be sure, e.g., to have found the shortest proce- dural description . our method is a guideline how to find at least a reasonable procedural explanation of a complex shape class. . benefit procedural models have striking advantages over other types of d models (compact, editable, re-usable, scalable, meaningful semantics), especially over d scans (sampling approach). gen- erating d models by varying a few high-level parameters is nice, but it can be difficult to determine the parameters of a given real- world shape (procedural shape fitting). even more challenging, and far from solved, is the aforementioned problem to determine a suitable set of procedures for a given set of shape examplars (also called inverse procedural modeling). the use case in this paper shows how to approach such a complex problem. the second benefit is that we invite all knowledgeable specialists in the field of architecture to refine and specialialize our imper- fect taxonomy (discussion in section ). in contrast to other tax- onomies with mainly academic value, the purpose of ours is to actually reproduce the shapes, i.e., it is a generative taxonomy. the kolmogorov complexity kc(b) of a bit sequence b, the length of the shortest computer program that (re-)produces b, is not computable. figure : window exemplars. the full set contains images of windows from neo-classical buildings erected in graz, austria, in - (gründerzeit). the complexity and visual dominance of the windows pose challenges to any digital urban reconstruction. related work digital reconstruction of buildings and monuments was a promi- nent topic throughout the years, and generative approaches on architecture are a hype today. already the first shape grammars (stiny and gips, , stiny, ) were very useful for under- standing the patterns of classical architecture. hierarchical struc- tures, such as façade layouts, are an ideal use case for shape gram- mars; but it turns out that their value for windows is only limited. one of the first applications of shape grammars not just to un- derstand, but also to generate complex architecture was (wonka et al., ). recent approaches on shape grammars for proce- dural modeling of architecture (müller et al., , hohmann et al., , krecklau et al., ) usually focus on scripting as the main method to achieve their stunning results. as an alternative we have presented in (zmugg et al., ) an approach where scripted procedural assets and shape functions can be applied and assembled interactively in order to reconstruct complicated archi- tecture (e.g. the façade of the louvre in paris). the system pre- sented in this paper follows the same approach. the result of the modeling process can be described procedurally, but not as a box grammar since we can perform more general shape operations. for the analysis phase in our method (see section ) it is useful to study the appropriate literature in the field of architecture; we chose (chitham, , mitchell, , schulze, , davies and jokiniemi, ). these books provide comprehensive informa- tion about possible window element configurations, naming of the individual parts, and how they were composed. a very im- portant reference, in particular for windows in graz (austria), is the work of august ortwein (ortwein and scheffers, ). his work on the german renaissance, consisting of nine volumes, is still used as seminal compendium in building restoration due to the high accuracy in the description of details. ortwein had much influence in graz during the th century; he designed buildings in the famous ”sporgasse” as well as several churches. our interactive d modeling approach for the synthesis phase (section ) is based on (thaller et al., ). all d-models shown in this paper are internally represented as a collection of convex polyhedra. they support modeling operations that are very useful for architecture, in particular cut operations and csg. these are the low level shape operations that were used to realize the procedural window elements presented in section . window analysis in the beginning we are confronted with an unordered set of about exemplars of complex windows, a selection of which is de- picted in figure . the question now is, how do we synthesize a function library that reproduces these windows? as outlined before, the first step is the analysis described in the following. . the generative fact labeling method the process of generative shape reconstruction starts generally with a finite collection of exemplars, which are undisputable facts. each exemplar is then associated with a number (set) of observa- tions, which are (human) interpretations of the facts. observa- tions from different exemplars are then grouped together, thereby exploiting the structure of the observations. a first observation could be that every window consists of a hole in a wall, and that this hole can have different shapes. hole shapes are mutually ex- clusive, a hole is either round or rectangular, but not both. a set of mutually exclusive observations leads to a set of alternatives which are grouped together in a label group. a label group is assigned a group label, for simplicity we use a, b, c, etc. every alternative is enumerated, leading to labels a , a , a etc. for the label group a. we call the ensemble of observations, labels, and label groups a classification of the exemplars. unfortunately, we cannot assume that the set of labels in each group, nor the set of groups, will ever be exhaustive. we follow the open world assumption that our set of exemplars may always grow. therefore we add two special labels for each group, namely not applicable (a-), and other (a*) indicating that “something a- ish is there” but none of the available alternatives apply. the fact labeling process typically proceeds in a coarse-to-fine manner. we first determine rough structural units (window lay- out) and then look at the parts in order to differentiate alternatives more locally. this produces new label groups, which we still keep in a flat list. note that although we seek to decouple the labels we do not assume any hierarchy in the labels; the relation between the label groups (and the labels) can be quite complex, in fact. the fact labeling approach as described so far is very generic and applies to any effort to create a classification scheme. the distinguishing property of generative fact labeling is the proce- dural view: we seek to group our observations in such a way figure : various fact labels applied to five example windows. refer to table and to section . for explanations of the labels. that they can be mapped to procedures that (re-)produce the ob- served shapes (sections , ). this allows introducing a metric on the produced classification: the better the procedures (software engineering) and the better the results, the better is the classifica- tion. this distinguishes our classifications from those produced for academic reasons, e.g., in art history or history of architecture. . generative fact labeling applied to windows consulting the relevant architectural literature was helpful in the communication with experts who helped us making more relevant observations. broad prior knowledge is not mandatory, however, and may even be distracting since the gfl method focuses ex- clusively on the geometric aspects of architecture. we started with more or less obvious observations such as “this window has a sill” or “next to the window are pilasters”. after some iterative refinement we arrived at the fact labels and label groups shown in table ; labels not applicable (-) and other (*) are omitted. figure shows some fact labels on example win- dows. note that each label group, i.e. each line in the table, can be interpreted as a question that can be asked about a window: a. count how many windows are there? b. side is the window framed at the side by columns or pilasters? alternatively, the decoration above the windows can be sym- bolically supported by brackets at the side of the window. c. sill is there a sill below the window, or is there a sill with additional decorations below it? d. above is there a cornice above the window, or a pediment, or a combination of the two? e. frieze is there additional space, a frieze, or an architrave be- low that cornice or pediment (figure (a))? f. layout the interaction between pillars at the side and the frieze or architrave between the cornice and the opening. g. shape the shape of the window opening itself. h. frame is there is an added frame around the opening? does that frame have a visible keystone at the top? i. pediment the basic shape of the pediment. j. pediment a systematic variation of pediment shape. k. pediment is there a open pediment, or a keystone? l. cornice is the cornice broken in the center? m. below-cornice are there brackets that symbolically support the cornice? this does not include the ”side” brackets (b ). n. below-sill are there brackets that symbolically support the window sill? (a) (b) (c) (d) figure : pilasters, brackets, friezes and architraves, and their possible arrangements. a window with no side decoration but with a frieze (yellow) is shown in (a). pilasters (red) bypass the frieze in (b). pilasters can be reduced to smaller brackets that support the cornice (c). finally, pilasters end at the top of the window opening and support an architrave (d). some of these questions depend directly on the answers to other questions; if a window has been labeled as not having a cornice or pediment (d-), all questions about the shape of the pediment and cornice will have to be answered with not applicable as well. note that this hierarchical relation is not imposed from the out- side; such dependencies emerge from the observations. depen- dencies between label provide only a hint for a possible hierarchi- cal structure to be used in the generative reconstruction later on; however, there need not be a simple one-to-one correspondence since the fact labels do not form a strict hierarchy naturally. window elements the window analysis from section must eventually lead to the synthesis of three-dimensional window shapes described in sec- tion . the bridge in between is actually a software engineering task, namely to factor the shapes to be produced into re-usable procedures. we have identified, for example, in many parts the necessity to apply mouldings; technically, this is a profile sweep along certain edges of a shape. other examples of re-usable pat- terns that can be mapped to functions are circular partitions, circle segments, and linear repetitions. these are the functions that are then used to quickly obtain scripted building blocks for interac- tive procedural modeling, in this case window elements. a selection of the realized procedural window elements is illus- trated in figure , and some of the elements are described in some detail in the following; an index like (a ) refers to an image in the table of images in this figure. cornice and pediments we offer two basic shapes of pedi- ments - triangular and round - with the possibility of adding some customizations, including extended end parts (a ), open top sec- tions (h ), the addition of a keystone (g ), or stepped designs (e ). to realize open pediments an additional csg-difference operation is used. keystones are inserted by extruding a part of the pediment to the front as well as up and down. stepped de- signs for pediments, cornices and keystones can be achieved by a separate extrusion step. broken cornices (a , c ) are supported besides the regular ones. mouldings can be applied to further enhance the appearance of pediment and cornice (see below). window shapes and crossbars the most common window shapes are supported in our system. these include the com- mon rectangular shape (d ), round shape (c ), as well as several arches; among these are the round arch (e ), segmental arch (a ) and lancet arch (b ). crossbar assets (f -h ) are realized independently of the shape of the window itself. the crossbar rules adapt automatically to the (convex) space that is provided for them. l. label group x x x a count single window double window triple window b side pilaster f big bracket c sill simple sill a sill and decoration below d above cornice e pediment a cornice and pediment b e frieze frieze/architrave f layout pilasters/brackets beside frieze pilasters end below architrave crossing g shape rectangular opening d round arch e segmental arch a h frame frame frame with keystone i pediment triangle pediment b round arch pediment segmental arch pediment j pediment horizontal cornice at the sides a k pediment open h keystone g stepped l cornice broken c stepped e m below-cornice brackets at side a many brackets c centered brackets b n below-sill brackets at side c balustrade table : this labeling table is the result of the analysis phase (section ). every label, e.g. a , is associated with a set of observations on the given facts (exemplars). entries in the x-columns refer to the table of images of procedural assets in figure . figure : samples of procedural assets from the window part library: cornices and pediments (first row, a -h ), window shapes with borders and crossbars (second row, a -h ), friezes, panels and pilaster (third row, a -h ), and window sill and decorations (bottom row, a -h ). all these assets adapt their size to the space they are inserted to. figure : different mouldings on assets created by the frame operation. pediment and cornice are generated in a generic way (upper left), the moulding is then applied using a specific profile (lower left). the differnt mouldings (right) are defined indepen- dently from the assets that they are applied to. frames and mouldings our system provides a frame oper- ation that generates a frame for arbitrary convex shapes. this operation is used for frames of the window pane (a -e ) and to generate the shape of the pediment (a -d , f -h ). additionally we can create geometry along a poly-line to achieve certain ped- iment shapes (a ). the output of this operations can be refined further by applying mouldings (see figure ). moudlings apply an extrusion pro- file along the course of the frame. this extrusion profile for the moulding is generated independently from the asset it is applied to. the cornice (e ), the architrave or the window sill (a ) can also be refined by adding mouldings to them. pilaster and brackets we have a round (f -g ) and a rectangu- lar pilaster (h ), equipped only with a basic capital and pedestal. however, their usage can be very versatile - from being the es- sential part of the balustrade, to various uses in friezes and other decorative elements. in most cases, pilasters can be exchanged with brackets. since their appearance can be quite diverse, we only provide a crude approximation to give the basic idea of the real shape. especially friezes are often decorated with a multitude of brackets (a -c ). two fundamental types can be identified, pillar-shaped brackets (c -e ) for which we use our pilaster assets, and brackets with a slanted bottom part (a -c , f -h ). frieze and architrave several decorative elements are placed symmetrically in the frieze (a -e ). we provide supporting ele- ments like brackets and decorative panels (d -e ). these panel operations use the window shape and frame operations together with extrude and bevel operations to obtain their look. brackets and panels are placed with a repeat operation that subdivides the available space to place repetitive elements (a -c ). architraves are often just decorated with a moulding that runs across the width of the window. all the supported profiles for the mouldings can be used to decorate the architrave. window sill and decoration beneath a window sill is an ex- truded part that has often a moulding applied to it (a ). the space beneath the window sill can be decorated like a frieze (c -h ). brackets then support the sill instead of the cornice. this space can also feature a balustrade. the same pillars as described be- fore, just smaller, appear equally spaced below the sill. the re- peat operation ensures that the number of pillars is adjusted ac- cording to the available space. window synthesis to assess the usefulness of our approach we have reconstructed a selection of window exemplars by combing the procedural assets described in the previous section. . interactive step-by-step example a step-by-step illustration of a window reconstruction is shown in figure . the modeling process mostly follows the labeling process. it can be understood to some extent as a shape grammar since one part is selected and then replaced by one or more new parts. however, with a shape grammar it is not possible to realize crossings of vertical and horizontal structures and to snap to other parts in different branches of the hierarchy, as we sometimes do. modeling a window proceeds by combining discrete assets; even when this is done in a graphical user interface, it can still be seen as interactive scripting. a script is generated in background that will reproduce the model when executed. the main difference to conventional interactive free-form modeling is that the mouse is in fact only used as a selection tool in our system. therefore, the recorded script does not have to contain any tracked mouse coordinates, only references to high-level assets. the first step in the window creation process is to decide what kind of window is to be created. then different layouts are cho- sen for the window elements, for example the window part is par- titioned into a center and two pilaster parts to support the frieze. all measurements and sizes of specific parts can be modified by parameters, i.e., the vertical alignment of pilaster and brackets can be adjusted manually. asset insertion steps can be executed in any order since each asset operates on a single selected part. although the number of different procedural assets appears to be fairly limited, quite a variety of shapes can be achieved since el- ements can be combined, nested and repeated sometimes in sur- prising ways. the versatility of the procedural modeling tools encourages us to believe that it will indeed be possible to achieve eventually a good coverage of the architectural variety of the given examplars by further extending the toolset. . example reconstructions figure shows reconstructions of five different windows from exemplars, all with different layouts. some of the decorations where only approximated by manually placing variations of other assets at certain positions. by manually adjusting certain dimen- sions and exchanging a few assets several other (similar) win- dows can be realized quickly. the benefit of our procedural ap- proach is that the parts can adapt flexibly to a wide variety of surroundings. it is therefore in most cases much more efficient to adapt an existing window than to create a window from scratch; so the re-use of models is encouraged by the system. figure shows some variations of the two windows in red and blue frames from figure . assets can be nested and combined to realize also more complicated configurations (third variation of the blue window). in terms of operations these windows are ’close’, which suggests that procedural distance could be a useful shape similarity measure. discussion we discuss the limitations of our method on three levels. we first present some challenging window exemplars that are hard to syn- thesize with our current procedural library, then some shortcom- ings of the classification, and then elaborate on whether or not this invalidates the fact labeling approach. finally, we discuss the relation of our approach to shape grammars. figure : interactive window modeling using procedural assets. first, the layouts for the individual sections are chosen (row , images (a), (b)), in this case a single window with decoration above and below the hole. the order in the asset insertion steps (row (c) to row (a)) is not important since assets can be inserted independently from each other. the last step is to apply detail mouldings to the window elements and to add the keystone ( (b)). . challenging window exemplars we have grouped the problematic windows (fig. ) into difficult but feasible (left) and more fundamental problems (right). win- dows in the left group exhibit a feature that is not yet supported but has a well-defined place in the classification of table . they can be synthesized when specific assets are added (missing fea- ture issue), e.g., new opening shapes for windows (c), (d) and (j) and new frame decoration styles for window (b). the intricate decorations around windows (a) and (i) are out of scope since we have limited ourselves to convex partitions; general ornamentary requires a different shape modeling approach. the work-around is to allow importing decorations as non-procedural pre-modeled d assets like in box grammar systems (müller et al., ). the windows to the right in figure reveal problems of a slightly more fundamental nature. window (e) exhibits delicate tracery in the top, leading to bar and hole shapes that require specific geo- metric constructions which are not found elsewhere; the same ap- plies to window (k) (general construction issue). window (e) also features a ledge that runs along the façade and crosses the window on a horizontal bar, interacting with various structures of the win- dow along the way (cross feature issue). even more drastic is the cross hierarchy issue; the seemingly innocent example is the top figure : synthesis of example windows. the first exercise was to reconstruct five window exemplars with sufficiently different layouts and decorations. the second task was the variation of the two windows in the red and blue frames (see figure ). figure : variations of the two windows in red and blue frames from figure . the variations are derived only by replacing assets and manually adjusting proportions. assets can be combined to realize also more challenging configurations (right group, third variation). figure : windows that cannot be handled properly by our current system. the left group of windows could be handled by special- purpose assets, the right group reveals more fundamental issues and problems. see section . for an explanation. figure : examples of a window with overlapping structures. the pilaster (red) overlaps the architrave (yellow). in the over- lapping area, the moulding of the architrave runs across a contin- uation of the capital of the pilaster. in the window at the bottom, a ledge that runs across the whole façade also serves the purpose of a window sill. of window (m) where the keystone not just protrudes downwards and upwards, but actually bridges and breaks the circular profile, then the horizontal frame, and finally becomes part of the frieze in the top. window (g) violates one of our implicit assumptions, namely that window decorations are applied to planar façades. the pediment and the structures at the sides of this circular win- dow – which are vaguely reminiscent of ionic columns – are part of the three-dimensional structure of this particular building (pla- narity issue). the holes of the multi-windows (h) and (n) are so tightly coupled that the window classification is ambiguous. apparently a larger hole was partitioned by bars, so it makes no sense to treat the sub-windows separately; but the bars are also so prominent the windows are clearly separated. we have found so many exam- ples of this ambiguity issue that we suspect that ambiguities are introduced intentionally by architects. the issue is similar to the repurpose issue of window (l), where the pediment is not on top of the window, but the window is inside a triangle pediment. . classification problems the fact labeling approach allows making interdependencies ex- plicit by assigning additional labels. we can, for instance, easily state that in a given window, there are (i) pilasters that support the cornice and pediment, and (ii) there is an architrave below this cornice. we have then introduced an extra label group f that describes how these two structures interact. the window in fig- ure is labeled d , as it has a cornice and pediment, and e because it has an architrave and frieze. additionally, it receives the label f because both structures overlap. to generate geometry for this fact label f , the assets must be able to deal with the interaction of the architrave and the pilaster. however, this interaction depends on the specific assets that are used for the pilaster and the architrave; in the worst case, one asset has to be defined for every possible combination of a pilaster asset and an architrave/frieze asset. this is clearly not scalable. another example of problematic overlaps are ledges running hor- izontally over the whole façade. sometimes they do not interfere with the windows, for example between storeys; in other cases they are interrupted by a window. sometimes, such a ledge is re-used as a window sill. the most difficult case arises when the ledge is modified slightly to accommodate the role of a win- dow sill. the corresponding procedural asset for the window sill would have to describe a window sill created by modifying an ex- isting ledge in a certain way. by limiting our focus to individual windows and their immediate surroundings, we have side-stepped this feature in disguise problem for now. . feasibility of the gfl approach we have mentioned now so many issues and problems that we need to examine the feasibility of the overall approach. the ques- tion is, will the gfl method ever converge, and is there a realistic chance to obtain in the end a reasonably small procedural func- tion library that can synthesize for all examplars a d-model with satisfactory detail resolution? gfl produces a flat list of labels without any hierarchy or other additional structure because the expectation is that such a struc- ture shall in fact emerge during the exercise. however, since the method makes no a priori assumptions whatsoever about any po- tential structure or relation between the labels, the resulting la- bels may be arbitrarily unorganized. a great danger of the gfl method is over-specialization when more detailed analysis of the exemplars produces an ever-growing number of observations, la- bels and label groups. the only effective counter-measure is con- tinuous re-iteration in order to identify similarities between labels that can be merged and mapped to the same generative procedure. we call this inductive reasoning process label reduction. to illustrate the label reduction process, consider for example the labels m (below-cornice) and n (below-sill) from table . they reveal striking similarities when comparing images (a )-(c ) and (c )-(h ) in figure . consequently, both labels can certainly share most of their procedures, and maybe even merge. the main difficulty in label reduction is to ’factor out’ structural ambiguities in a correct way. we have realized that it is in fact a common situation that some architectural rule a allows or re- quires an element x, and another architectural rule b allows or requires a different element y in approximately the same place. one way for an architect to merge a and b is to make x resem- ble y in an creative way; and this is very difficult to schematize and to map to common procedures. we suspect that this is an important reason for the abundant variety of windows shapes. . relation to shape grammars it is interesting to note that “overdoing” the label reduction re- sults in a procedural library that is indeed very simple, but cap- tures shape interdependencies only insufficiently. the discussion in the previous section has shown that although the list of label groups a,b,c,... produced by the gfl method remains flat, the relation between the individual labels can in fact become very in- tricate and complicated. in order to reduce this complexity we have intuitively taken the approach to decouple as much as possi- ble the different labels. label dependency is minimal when every label depends only on a single other label. this leads to a linear label refinement process and thus, eventually to a (context-free) parametric shape grammar. we had to realize that the result of our experiment is a procedu- ral function library that is effectively such a shape grammar. the implications are revealed by revisiting the step-by-step example from figure : the vertical separation (image (a)) nicely de- couples the three window parts (top, mid, bottom) that can then be independently refined into sub- and sub-sub-parts without any side effects; but note that the window sill and the column bases are contained in the bottom part, separated from the column tops. although the resulting columns look like coherent vertical struc- tures (image (c)), they are composed of three independent parts; and the middle part, the window sill, is in fact even a separating horizontal structure cutting through both columns. this model captures interdependencies insufficently because the vertical integrity of the column cannot be preserved when the three parts forming each column are varied horizontally. con- sequently, the apparent coherence is only a coincidence. conclusion and future work we have presented a fully manual method to obtain a library of functions that is capable of re-generating procedurally a given collection of non-trivial input shapes, as well as many variations of these shapes. we propose an iterative process of grouping, labeling and re-grouping of shape observations, followed by re- flection and inductive reasoning to discover structures and sim- ilarities that can then be exploited in the software development process to produce a concise but powerful set of shape generat- ing functions. we have integrated these functions as d modeling tools in a simple graphical user interface, so that the actual shape composition, which requires no programming but only straight- forward function composition, can be carried out interactively. as confirmed by our experiment with windows of neo-classi- cal buildings, several passes of this potentially very tedious pro- cess are necessary in order to obtain satisfactory results. we ac- knowledge the fact that procedural d modeling ultimately im- plies shape programming, and our generative fact labeling method is a first attempt to guide the development process in a systematic way. since the method is extremely generic, it can be applied in any domain of man-made shape, from castles over buildings and furniture to engineering and automotive design. our conjecture is that in fact any attempt to produce a library of shape generating functions for a certain domain must apply this method, or at least a variant of it. we admit, though, that this generality is also a weakness since although the method is effective, much sophisiti- cation is required for it to be also efficient. we see mainly three avenues for further research. first, it is in- teresting to note that the labeling method gives rise to a very straightforward string encoding of the exemplars. mentioning only relevant labels, the windows from figure can be encoded as follows using our very simple labeling from table : a _c _d _e _g _h _n a _b _c _d _e _f _g _h _n a _b _c _d _e _f _g _i a _c _d _e _g _h _i _k _m _n* a _b _c _d _e _f _g _h _i _j _n the great value of such a shape formalization is that it provides an interface to bridge the gap between shape analysis and shape syn- thesis. although this is only a very rough encoding, it could al- ready be useful, e.g., as feature vectors for training shape analysis and machine learning algorithms. and even without any dimen- sions, more faithful window geometry can be produced already from this encoding. an obvious area for further research is how to extend this encoding when more structure has been found. the second research question is whether the tedious label pro- duction and reduction process can be supported with algorithms, e.g., to check an observation for consistency with the exemplars (“how many windows have a triangle pediment?”). such checks are obviously required very often; but manual checking is very tedious, which limits both label production and reduction. there are many interesting quantifiable measures to assess observation and label quality, such as relevance, coverage, conflicts, etc. the third research challenge is whether this method might even- tually lead, after experiments in various different shape domains, to a more general understanding of shape ontologies. our conjec- ture is that the observations on how shapes interact in one shape domain will not be fundamentally different from the observations in other domains. if this is true, then it should be possible to iden- tify a few central concepts of a “conceptual reference model” for shape, that can then be mapped to specific shape domains via subclassing (specialization). the proof that such an endeavour can eventually lead to success was given by cidoc-crm for the equally complex problem of creating a small vocabulary for encoding facts in cultural heritage (crofts et al., ). references chitham, r., . the classical orders of architecture. second edn, architectural press. crofts, n., doerr, m., gill, t., stead, s. and stiff, m., . def- inition of the cidoc conceptual reference model. version . edn, cidoc documentation standards working group. (iso ). davies, n. and jokiniemi, e., . dictionary of architecture and building construction. architectural press. hohmann, b., havemann, s., krispel, u. and fellner, d., . a gml shape grammar for semantically enriched d building mod- els. computers & graphics ( ), pp. – . krecklau, l., pavic, d. and kobbelt, l., . generalized use of non-terminal symbols for procedural modeling. computer graphics forum ( ), pp. – . mitchell, w.-j., . the logic of architecture. the mit press. müller, p., wonka, p., haegler, s., ulmer, a. and van gool, l., . procedural modeling of buildings. acm trans. graph. ( ), pp. – . ortwein, a. and scheffers, a., . deutsche renaissance band ,. nd edn, seemann verlag. schulze, j., . wie man um fenster baute. in: fenster im baudenkmal, lukas verlag. stiny, g., . introduction to shape and shape grammars. en- vironment and planning b ( ), pp. – . stiny, g. and gips, j., . shape grammars and the generative specification of painting and sculpture. in: c. v. friedman (ed.), information processing ’ , amsterdam, pp. – . thaller, w., krispel, u., havemann, s., redi, i., redi, a. and fellner, d., . developing parametric building models - the gandis use case. in: f. remondino and s. el-hakim (eds), proc. isprs workshop d-arch , isprs. wonka, p., wimmer, m., sillion, f. and ribarsky, w., . in- stant architecture. acm trans. graph. ( ), pp. – . zmugg, r., krispel, u., thaller, w., havemann, s., pszeida, m. and fellner, d. w., . a new approach for interactive proce- dural modelling in cultural heritage. in: proc. computer appli- cations & quantitative methods in archaeology (caa ). humanities — to be or not to be, that is the question humanities , , - ; doi: . /h humanities issn - www.mdpi.com/journal/humanities editorial humanities — to be or not to be, that is the question albrecht classen department of german studies, university of arizona, tucson, az , usa; e-mail: aclassen@u.arizona.edu received: september / accepted: september / published: september . introduction let us carry some proverbial owls to athens or coals to newcastle, that is, revisit issues that have been discussed and examined by so many different voices in the past and the present. however, those issues by themselves are so powerful and important, so urgent and difficult that we must never tire of examining them always anew because they pertain centrally to our own human existence and prove to be the defining factors for our survival as a species. why do we need the humanities as an academic discipline in the university, or in our educational system at large? what role do the humanities play both inside and outside the academy? most universities in this world somehow acknowledge the importance of languages, literatures, music, art history, philosophy, religion, and education. but when it comes to basic financial issues, the humanities tend to be the first victims of budget cuts, if we disregard specifically liberal arts colleges that focus on the humanities above all or exclusively. lamentably, it is always an easy method by politicians and bureaucrats to pay lip service to the humanities, yet when they face tough choices, they regularly opt to favor the hard sciences, economics, business, mathematics, medicine, and athletics. i include athletics because i teach at an us-american institution, where athletics departments commonly prove to be the biggest money makers, irrespective of their low or non-existing academic relevance. there is nothing negative about athletics, or any kind of sport activities, especially in an intellectual context insofar as the romans already knew of the significance of a healthy body as the critical foundation for a healthy mind. juvenal (first to second century c.e.) emphasized in his satires (x) the need to have a mens sana in coropore sano (a healthy mind in a healthy body) [ ]. but that is very much beside our point here. more important now proves to be how to create this healthy mind, once the body has been made healthy. at stake proves to be the correlation between both dimensions, since they are interdependent. by the same token, that applies to the relationship between the humanities and the sciences, for example. open access humanities , . humanities and university it would be difficult to argue against those who point out the needs for all universities to secure the basic finances, that is, a solid budget, either from public or private funds. moreover, there is the common assumption, rightly or wrongly, that studying the sciences or business will easily lead to professional employment after the completion of ones‘s academic training. it seems highly unlikely that those who turn toward the study of medicine might easily face unemployment after their graduation. altogether, our society is in desperate need of medical doctors, of engineers, scientists, and business leaders. the technological changes require ever more engineers and computer experts, and since food and water are some of the most burning issues in this world, no one would question the overarching importance of agriculturists, hydrologists, or chemists. yet, what does someone do with an education in the humanities? to begin with our discussion, a true university in the humboldtian sense does not narrowly define itself as a professional training school [ ]. by contrast, the university educates, offers bildung, and serves as a place where teaching and research go hand in hand in the free spirit of the intellect, aiming for the improvement of the individual, the community, and the nation, if not the world [ ]. the humanities play a central role in that context, as most universities, at least in north america and europe, include the liberal arts as one of the essential corner stones. i venture to claim that a central ideal at a modern university would be to help the young people enrolled as students to gain a well- rounded education, which includes both scientific-mathematical and humanistic aspects. as individuals, we need the abilities to speak and to write, to count and to calculate, to analyze and to think, to appreciate and to understand, to emphasize and to sympathize, to share and to ask, to collaborate and to teach. the middle high german poet wolfram von eschenbach expressed this perhaps the best in his classic grail romance, parzival (ca. ), where the suffering in the world, represented by the grail king anfortas‘s wound in the testicle, is finally overcome by the protagonist, anfortas‘s nephew parzival, who simply has to formulate the one basic question: ―uncle, what troubles you?‖ [ ]. parzival has learned true commiseration, has understood that all people belong to one community, and that pity, empathy, and sympathy are the glue that holds us all together. most significantly, the young protagonist has broken into tears while asking for the direction to reach the grail, and god then grants anfortas the immediate recovery from near death. subsequently, the grail stone has a writing appear on its surface which announces parzival as the legitimate heir and successor to the throne, who is soon joined by his wife condwiramurs and their two sons, whom he had not seen for years. love thus reenters the human heart, and global healing sets in. there is no doubt that humanity is plagued by sorrow and suffering, but love and joy can always compensate the worst experiences, there is hope, as poets and artists have told us for ages. it is the task of the humanities scholars to bring out that message and to carry it forth to the world. . a homesick astronaut now, let us turn to the example of an astronaut who spends a long time in space, visiting the space station, the moon, or a nearby planet, such as mars. the astronaut can only accomplish his or her task because a huge team of researchers and technicians at ground control support everything s/he does out humanities , there, far away from mother earth. considering the complexity of the entire space program and the space ship, the individual astronaut almost seems to be nothing but a cog in the wheel, whether s/he steers the space ship himself or not. at any rate, even though the astronaut can accomplish all his tasks, reach the distant stellar body, and traverse unimaginable distances, ultimately, however, he remains, we hope, a human being. while s/he is floating through space, working, eating, sleeping, occasionally exercising, something is happening for sure which the official reports normally never mention. the astronaut has also a mind, a heart, fantasy, dreams, hopes, and fears. no one at ground control will ever assist him/her in coming to terms with his/her own individual existence while s/he floats quietly through dark space, having the glowing body of the moon, of mars, or of earth in front of his/her eyes. and once s/he has returned and gotten out of the space suit, the astronaut retransforms into the being that s/he had been before, man or woman. what might go through his/her mind while s/he is traveling in space? the astronaut is a human being, and all human beings have feelings of all sorts, and cannot be separated from those easily, if ever at all. here the humanities suddenly come into play, and they prove to be essential. without artistic expressions (music, literature, visual arts, etc.), the human creature would not be what it is in essential terms. simply put, we need all those hard sciences, business, economics, medicine, etc., but by the same token we also need songs, poems, romances, paintings, sculptures, films, and all kinds of other art works and media, including dance, theater, etc. why would the astronaut want to return to earth if s/he would not know that human society would wait for him/her down there, whatever that might mean in specific terms. space flight might encapsulate perfectly why the humanities are one of the central subjects in our lives. astronautical efforts might achieve great things, and they have actually done so many times, to the awe of mankind. but beyond that, what has space travel achieved for the improvement of the human soul? the question is unfair, of course, because astronautical endeavors have very specific scientific goals, and they should not aim for humanistic goals when it is all technical in the entire set-up. however, if we focus only on one side in our lives, we will be blinded, for sure. this also means that those who only consider poetry or music as the mantra of everything, ignoring the essential aspects of the sciences and medicine that have done miracles to the improvement of human life, blatantly commit the same mistake as those who want to get rid of the humanities. recently i had the wonderful opportunity to attend an art opening displaying the paintings and metal art work by the east german artist andreas nottebohm [ ]. he has been one of the artists whom nasa had commissioned to reflect upon the space program by means of art works. indeed, many of his contributions can rightly be called masterpieces, offering innovative perspectives toward space exploration, and providing visual lenses for the stunning beauty of the universe. nottebohm achieved the most remarkable accomplishment of working on the aesthetic and the scientific side, thus addressing both the scientists and the ordinary people interested in art. more importantly, he created images of the extraterrestrial world making it thus accessible through visual means. what does art, what does music bring about, and why would they be important for all people? of course, there might not be any need to raise such questions, but let us repeat them anyway because each person, every generation, and all people have to deal with them over and over again in order to come to terms with their own idiosyncratic culture and their value system, that is, with their essential being. we must also expand the questions and include literature/poetry, philosophy, and religion, to humanities , mention the most important domains. the universe in its microcosmic and macrocosmic dimensions is, ultimately ineffable and inconceivable in specific human terms, and we often stand in front of a natural phenomenon, deeply filled with admiration, love, and delight, sometimes also with fear and horror, and yet we cannot vocalize specifically what happens with us or what it all matters to us as creatures in the universal context. the same might happen with man-made objects, machines, bridges, buildings, or clothing. the inner beauty, brought to light by human ingenuity, is suddenly laid bare to us, and we feel an inner stirring, sometimes translating into poetry, sometimes rendered as a musical composition or an art piece. the apophatic character of the absolute beautiful challenges us in many respects, since we cannot tolerate, as human beings, the lack of words for what we experience in physical and metaphysical terms. no wonder that the world of medieval mystical literature proves to be so amazing even for us today because these religious authors had already gained incredible insights into the godhead and had formulated their visions and revelations in most extraordinary fashion. . beauty let me illustrate some of those fundamental features with a brief discussion of the old alpine pass tremola, leading over the st. gotthard, switzerland [ ]. road engineers created sone of the most stunning switchbacks and serpentine roads crossing the massive mountain, providing a means of transportation in some of the most rugged swiss terrain. human skills and abilities made it possible to defy the mountain‘s challenge and to allow people to drive over the pass, and this already for a long time, though the first major modern road construction was not completed until [ ]. all that belongs in the field of history and road engineering. but one look at that mountain side alone easily leaves anyone simply breathless. the beauty of the rocky landscape in lofty heights is incomparable and requires more than a technician‘s mind to grasp its full meaning. a poet might be helpful, then a photographer, and a composer would certainly be a good companion here as well. a painter could do wonders, just as the engineer did when he created those hairpin curves. however, as a religious person would point out, the creator of all that beauty also deserves credit, probably the greatest of them all. however we might see that, and irrespective of what beautiful part of this world we might consider in this context, whether glaciers in alaska or a black-sand beach on the big island of hawai‘i, natural beauty strikes us as profound and all encompassing, perhaps in the sense ralph waldo emerson ( – ) had already described it so powerfully, especially in his essay ―the over-soul‖ ( ): ―we live in succession, in division, in parts, in particles. meantime within man is the soul of the whole; the wise silence; the universal beauty, to which every part and particle is equally related, the eternal one. and this deep power in which we exist and whose beatitude is all accessible to us, is not only self-sufficing and perfect in every hour, but the act of seeing and the thing seen, the seer and the spectacle, the subject and the object, are one. we see the world piece by piece, as the sun, the moon, the animal, the tree; but the whole, of which these are shining parts, is the soul.‖ [ ] we need this realization so desperately since life without beauty is very hard to take and probably not possible. even the foulest and most destroyed area in inner cities or in industrial regions are not devoid of beauty, whether we think of manchester, uk, essen, germany, or pittsburgh, pa (with apologies to those cities, if my assessment is completely incorrect). but who perceives that beauty, and humanities , who can help the individuals living there to recognize those hidden treasures? let us move more closely to human life itself by extending the same line of thoughts. beauty is not limited to the young female beauty queen. the old grandmother, beloved by her children and grand-children, can exude more spiritual beauty than the most stunning star model in her physical appearance but coupled with limited emotional maturity. one of the best examples illustrating the inner beauty of an old person was proved by the famous german renaissance artist albrecht dürer when he created a woodcut of his old mother in [ ]. we all know that we will grow old and die, and this sometimes at the very moment when the entire world seems to be at our disposal and we enjoy beauty to the utmost, as we learn so well in goethe‘s famous play faust (with the second part finally completed in ) [ ]. his contract with mephistopheles, or the devil, stipulates, upon his own insistence, that the latter could take his soul when the one unlikely moment would have arrived: ―‗ah, stay a while! you are so lovely!‘‖ (scene iv, verse ) [ ]. the only thing we do not know is the time when we will die. until then, however, we have every chance to prepare ourselves, to work toward that moment, and try hard to make the best out of the short span of time granted to us here on earth. this labor should be a labor of love. we ought to find love, to make friends, to help society, and leave this world behind as a better place, whatever there might be in our power as an individual. the value, for instance, of an unexpected smile or hug cannot even be defined in concrete terms. poets, however, would know how to say what such a smile really means. . science and technology and human nature while the sciences and medicine are most important factors in this huge enterprise which every individual has to go through from birth to death, we cannot only rely on material strategies that contribute to the basic maintenance of human life. after all, we are both physical and emotional/spiritual beings. we love and hope, we laugh and cry; we have hopes and we can despair; we are filled with anger and with joy; we respond to the external world with enthusiasm and melancholy; we might live in a deeply satisfying partnership with a beloved person, or we might face loneliness and boredom all by ourselves. the possibilities of how our lives develop are infinite, and each person here on earth has to cope with the external and internal conditions which are given us. some become fighters, others are passive figures. some people are warriors, others pursue peace at almost any cost. in other words, the options are endless, and the changes that can occur in our lives are most promising and threatening at the same time. nothing what i have said will really come as a surprise. we can read about all those aspects in self- help books, in meditation guides, we can hear about them in sermons, but then also in poems, in theater plays, in movies, in radio talk shows, in confessionals, in discussions with friends and lovers, in debates with counselors and advisors, etc. in this context a number of factors immediately emerge that are essential in comprehending the issues at stake. we as human beings rely most critically on the ability to communicate with each other, either by means of words, gestures, images, music, or by way of written texts, images, and sound. we are, after all, citizens of one world in all its kaleidoscopic features and must rely on each other, trust each other, if possible at all, to make sure that the ideas and insights from the past carry over to the future and so guarantee the survival of our planet earth—there humanities , is no other (see martha nussbaum‘s brilliant appeals and reflections on the essential function of the humanities) [ ]. moreover, human life is determined by the experiences of love, happiness, joy, and death. sorrow is always paired with hope. we can dream and hope for a better life and imagine a utopian society. dr. martin luther king, jr. was so right about that when he pronounced that he had a dream [ ]. in fact, in order to live we all must dream and aspire for a better world in which we can realize all our potentials and abilities. some might achieve that goal, others might be only partially successful, and others again might fail. nevertheless, the central issue proves to be the strife itself, which seems to be tantamount to life. however, is there any way to define what these fundamental aspects in our lives might be? can we define love, or death, joy or god? is there any possibility to specify what the basic emotional experiences truly are, perhaps by means of a mathematical or chemical formula? both medieval and modern poets have struggled in vain to achieve that goal, and scientists have never even claimed that they might be able to answer those questions in the affirmative. in general, i would assume that the arts and literature, whether composed and created in east or in west, in antiquity or in the present, are best qualified to help the individual to come to terms with some of those issues that are so important for us if we want to enjoy a ‗good life,‘ whatever that might mean in specific terms. who would deny the soothing, uplifting, enthralling, empowering, saddening, and illuminating power of music? as much as we always fight over what might constitute good or bad literature, paintings, sculptures, etc., we would probably all agree on the one common experience that the ineffable features in human existence find the most appropriate formulation in poetic, visual, or musical form. this is the domain of the humanities, and whoever tries to cut down that academic field is also announcing open warfare against human culture and human life. . our common humanities studying the humanities means many different things, such as developing linguistic skills to reach out to other people and other cultures. by way of literary works we can understand differences in religious orientation and political viewpoints. music and paintings have always spoken a universal language, building bridges where gulfs and abysses seem to separate everyone in hostility and enmity. of course, the same applies to mathematical numbers and chemical formulas, which also prove to be of extreme importance. all languages, including those used to develop computers and internet connections, reach out to other people. the humanities, however, are primarily qualified to establish those links between individuals and communities, and to create the essential means to overcome conflicts and wars. by the same token, the study of literary works or art works has never prevented the outbreak of hostilities, but neither have physical or economic research. even when humanists do not succeed in reaching out to the other creatures here in this world, and cannot convince the other side to put down the weapons, they are the ones who carry the torch of love and peace across all barriers, through all cultures, and beyond all linguistic hurdles. ironically, the economic impact of those humanistic efforts is so great that no one can even fathom the full extent. we might ultimately say that the humanities have defended themselves rather weakly, although they represent some of the most central and most important issues in this world. it would be absurd to set up an artificial polarity with the sciences because those are like brothers and sisters to the humanities, humanities , as perhaps best illustrated by the differences and yet also strong familial bonds between alexander ( – ) and wilhelm humboldt ( – ), the first having been one of the greatest scientists of his time, while the other one established the modern university and laid the foundation of the humanities as we know them today. irrespective of all the military conflicts between muslim fundamentalists and the western world today, and irrespective of the many crusades by the christian knights against the muslims holding the holy land during the middle ages, the west owes much of its present scientific, philosophical, and artistic traditions to arabic sources which were translated and transferred to europe during the twelfth century [ ]. these processes had been possible because of countless efforts on the part of translators, poets, religious persons (francis of assisi, / – ), artists, politicians, and authors (ramon llull, – ). the number of other examples illustrating the deep and fundamental impact of humanistic strategies on the well-being of our lives is legion. the imaginary astronaut mentioned above would also confirm that s/he could survive in the void of his/her space travel only because the image of the blue earth was constantly in his/her mind. without that goal, without hope for life, love, and god, people could not exist. that‘s the stuff the humanities are all about, both today and in the future. of course, we all must first think of how to survive, how to get food, water, and shelter, as bertolt brecht emphasized so powerfully in his threepenny opera ( ), ―first comes food, then moral.‖ subsequently, however, once the creature‘s needs have been met, the heart, the mind, and the soul demand principal attention. we are people not simply because of our human body, but because of our human spirit above all. and we know that this is true, considering that asian philosophers and poets have more or less reached the same conclusions in this regard as western, african, australian, or american thinkers or writers. references and notes . the relevant research literature on this topic is immense; see, for instance, sarah curtis, space, place and mental health. geographies of health (farnham, surrey, england; burlington, vt: ashgate, ); walter m bortz, next medicine: the science and civics of health (new york: oxford university press, ); available online: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ mens_sana_in_corpore_sano (accessed on september ). . wilhelm von humboldt ( – ). prospects: the quarterly review of comparative education; xxiii, no. / , – ; available online: http://www.ibe.unesco.org/fileadmin/ user_upload/archive/publications/thinkerspdf/humbolde.pdf (accessed on september ). . for international perspectives, see albert rolls, international perspectives on education. reference shelf, , ([bronx, ny]: h.w. wilson co., ). as to liberal arts, see bruce a. kimball, orators & philosophers: a history of the idea of liberal education (new york: teachers college, columbia university, ); gregory s.prince, teach them to challenge authority: educating for healthy societies (new york: continuum, ). . wolfram von eschenbach: parzival and titurel. trans. with notes by cyril edwards. with an introduction by richard barber. oxford world‘s classics. oxford university press: oxford, uk, ; book xvi, section , p. . humanities , . available online: http://artmuseum.arizona.edu/exhibitions/nottebohm_andreas.shtml (accessed on september ). . available online: http://www. cities.net/image/gotthard-tremola-switzerland# . , . , . (accessed on september ). . available online: http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/gotthardpass (accessed on september ). . available online: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ralph_waldo_emerson (accessed on september ). . available online: http://www.albrecht-durer.org/durer% s-mother-large.html (accessed on september ). . wellbery, d.e. faust and the dialectic of modernity. in a new history of german literature; ryan, j., ed.; the belknap pres of harvard university press: cambridge, ma, usa, london, uk, ; pp. - . . available online: http://www.poetryintranslation.com/pitbr/german/faustiscenesivtovi.htm (accessed on september ). . nussbaum, m. cultivating humanity: a classical defense of reform in liberal education; harvard university press: cambridge, ma, usa, . . i have a dream. available online: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/i_have_a_dream; http://ia .us.archive.org/ /items/mlkdream/mlkdream_ kb.mp (accessed on september ). . une conquête des savoirs: les traductions dans l’europe latine (fin du xie siècle milieu du xiiie siècle). colloque organisé à la fondation singer-polignac le jeudi novembre . actes édités par max lejbowicz. rencontres médiévales européennes, (turnhout: brepols, ). © by the authors; licensee mdpi, basel, switzerland. this article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the creative commons attribution license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/ . /). izlek citation: nd international congress on new horizons in education and social sciences (ices - ) proceedings, june - , , istanbul-turkey nd international congress on new horizons in education and social sciences (ices- ) proceedings june - , istanbul-turkey albrecht dürer’in gravür eserlerine estetik açıdan bir bakış albrecht durer's a look from the point of view of aesthetics Öğr. gör. dr. yıldırım onur erdİren * pages: - doi: . /ibad. tekirdağ namık kemal university, turkey, yoerdiren@nku.edu.tr * corresponding author abstract albrecht dürer, the most important figure of the german renaissance, plays an important role in the historical events of his time. his diaries, the notes he holds, and the sources of his time let us know a lot about dürer. albrecht dürer ( ın ) is one of the greatest masters of the art of print. he used the techniques of wood printing, copper and dry digging, and acid-picking. when he went to italy, he was influenced by mantegna. dürer's emphasis on engravings is the art of engraving and printing techniques dating back to the th century. among the most well-known and well-known works are the allegory meaning, cavalry-death-devil, melancholia, in the study room. jeramie is. the art of engraving is examined aesthetically from the past to the present. therefore, it is necessary to grasp the aesthetics of the art of engraving. the word aesthetics comes from the greek word aisthesis or ist aisthanesthai est. gelir aisthesis u means sensation, sensible perception, and the word gel aisthanesthai means being perceived by the senses. dürer's engraving works can be examined as elements of design (color, light and shadow, form, direction, line, texture) and aesthetic analysis (aesthetic subject, aesthetic object, aesthetic value and aesthetic judgment). dürer; he made evaluations and pressures about rate, anatomy and perspective problems. anatomy studies and studies have been found in many studies that have identified the ideal human type. in this study, albrecht dürer's examples of engravings will be examined. key words: albercht dürer, gravure, aesthetic. mailto:yoerdiren@nku.edu.tr nd international congress on new horizons in education and social sciences (ices- ) proceedings gİrİŞ gravür sanat dallarından biri olmakta ve geçmişi çok uzun yıllara dayanmaktadır. metal, taş, tahta üzerine oyma tekniğini kullanarak yapılan ve kağıt üzerine aktarılan sanat, yaygın bir biçimde yapılmaktadır. İnce detaylar kullanarak ve özen isteyen gravür sanatı, matbaacılık alanında da kullanılmaktadır. günümüzde muşamba gibi çeşitli materyaller üzerine de uygulanmaktadır. gravür sanatını başarılı bir şekilde uygulayan albrecht dürer alman rönesans ressamı ve ünlü gravür sanatçısıdır. sanatçının birden fazla tarzda ve üslupta icra ettiği farklı eserleri vardır. dürer’in gravür eserlerinin yanı sıra tuval üzerine çalıştığı eserleri de mevcuttur. dürer’in eserleri günümüz genç kuşak sanatçılarına ilham kaynağı olmuştur. günümüz sanatçıları fikir açısından sanatçının eserlerinden esinlenmektedir. bunun yanı sıra, dürer’in eserlerini kavramak ve anlamak için o eserleri estetik açıdan incelemek önemlidir çünkü eserler estetik açıdan incelendiğinde o eserin nasıl bir estetik yapıya sahip olduğu anlaşılacaktır. estetik bakımdan bir eseri incelemek için estetik çözümleme; estetik obje, estetik süje, estetik yargı ve estetik değer olarak incelemek gerekmektedir. bununla birlikte bir eseri estetik incelemek için eserin tasarım unsurları bakımından nasıl olduğuna da bakılması gerekmektedir. bunlar; renk, şekil, çizgi, ton, ışık ve gölge, denge, vurgulama, görsel devamlılık, oran-orantı ve bütünlük olarak incelenmektedir. bu çalışmada, dürer’in gravür eserlerinin bu nitelikler ile birlikte nasıl incelendiğini görmüş olacağız. . albrecht durer kİmdİr alman rönesans ressamı ve gravürcüsü albrecht dürer ’de nürnberg’de doğdu. bir macar ailesinden veya macaristan’a yerleşen alman mültecisi bir aileden gelmedir. bir kuyumcunun on çocuğundan biriydi. ’da babası tarafından ressam ve gravürcü wolgemut’un yanına çırak olarak verildi. genç dürer ’dan ’e kadar sanatın ilk öğrenim devresini tamamladı. bu arada bir süre colmar şehrinde kaldı. o sırada ölen devrin en değerli gravürcüsü büyük schongauer’in kardeşlerinin yanında çalıştı. daha sonra tahta üzerine oyma resimler (bu eserlerin kesin olmamakla beraber dürer’in olduğu sanılır) yaptığı basel şehrinde yaşadı. nürnberg’e dönünce hemen evlendi. bir yıl sonra İtalyaya gitti. yola çıkmadan önce yaptığı eserler arasında Öğretmeni wolgemut’un portresi ( - uffizi galerisi) ile kendisinin nişanlık portresi ( - louvre) vardır. daha İtalya’ya gitmeden mantegna’nın bakır üzerine yaptığı gravürleri görmüş, İtalyan sanatının etkisinde kalmıştı. İlk suluboya peyzajlarını yolculuk sırasında çizdi. yıllarında bakır üzerinde gravür ustalığını elde etmişti. apokalipse konusundaki resimlerini büyük levha halinde tahta üzerine büyük bir canlılık ve hareketlilikle işledi, böylece daha o yıllarda kişiliğini ortaya koydu. kıvrımlı, düğümlü, lav gibi akıcı deseni henüz ortaçağ karakterini taşıyordu. o sıralarda yapmağa başladığı İsa’nın çilesi tahta gravürlerini çok daha sonra tamamladı. zevkçe daha incelmiş topluluk için yaptığı bakır gravürlerinde İtalyan ustaları gibi çıplak vücutları canlandırmak istedi. kendi yağlıboya portreleri arasında en ışıklı en canlı ve parlak renklisi ’de yaptığı siyah-beyaz yelekli olanıdır (prado müzesi). . albercht dÜrer’İn gravÜr eserlerİ dürer’in eserlerine baktığımızda oran, anatomi ve perspektif sorunlarıyla ilgili incelemeler ve baskılar yapmıştır. anatomi araştırmaları ve etütleri, ideal insan tipini tespit etmiş olduğu birçok çalışmalarında görülmüştür. çizgi, nokta ve çapraz taramanın bütün imkânlarını kullanan dürer, ayrıntıları büyük bir titizlik ve incelikle oymuş, doku ile renk etkisi verecek kadar ileri gitmiştir. nd international congress on new horizons in education and social sciences (ices- ) proceedings resim . “gergedan”, gergedan, albrecht dürer tarafından yılında yapılan bir gravür çalışmasıdır. resmin üzerinde bir tasvir bulunmaktadır ve bilinmeyen bir hint sanatçı tarafından güldürü yazısı da yazılmıştır. resmin türü olarak figüratif bir unsur görülmektedir. çizgi ve ton bakımından başarılı bir şekilde yansıtılmıştır. işık ve gölge eserde görülmektedir. denge, yön ve biçim olarak bütünlük sağlanmaktadır. estetik obje-süje ilişkisi ve estetik değer-yargı ilişkisi kurulmaktadır. sanatçı ortaya bir sanat eseri ortaya koyarak, bu esere değer atfedebilir ve yargıda bulunabiliriz dolayısıyla sanatseverin estetik çözümlemede nasıl bir ilişki kuracağı kişiden kişiye göre değişkenlik gösterir. resim . “Ölüm ve Şeytan”, Şövalye, Ölüm ve Şeytan, meisterstiche'den biri olan alman ressam albrecht dürer'in gravür üzerine yoğunlaşmak için boya veya gravür işlerinde neredeyse hiç durmadığı bir dönemde tamamladığı gravürüdür. görüntü, yüzyıllardır kesin olarak tartışılan karmaşık ikonografi ve sembolizm ile aşılanmıştır. eserde resmin türü olarak yine figüratifler kullanılmıştır. gölge ve ışık başarılı bir şekilde yansıtılmıştır. figüratif unsurlar arasındaki denge, biçim, oran-orantı, perspektif uyumlu bir şekilde yansıtılmıştır. nd international congress on new horizons in education and social sciences (ices- ) proceedings resim . “gravür”, çalışmalarında saint jerome, alman sanatçı albrecht dürer'in gravürüdür. saint jerome masasının arkasında oturan, işe dalmış olarak gösterildi. köşesinde haç olan masa rönesans'ın tipik bir örneğidir. eserde resmin türü olarak iç mekan ve figüratiftir. perspektif başarılı bir şekilde yansıtılmıştır. bu eserde ışık ve ton etkilidir. resim . “kıyamet”, kıyamet, doğru şekilde kıyamet resimleri ile apocalypse, albrecht dürer'in 'de yayınlanan ve avrupa’da hızla ün saldığı “vahiy kitabı” ndaki sahnelerin ünlü on beş gravür serisidir. eser resmin türü olarak yine figüratiftir. episteme olarak eserin kıyamet temalı olduğu anlatılmaktadır. işık ve gölge başarılı bir şekilde yansıtılmıştır. nd international congress on new horizons in education and social sciences (ices- ) proceedings sonuÇ dürer’in eserlerine baktığımızda oran, anatomi ve perspektif sorunlarıyla ilgili incelemeler ve baskılar yapmıştır. anatomi araştırmaları ve etütleri, ideal insan tipini tespit etmiş olduğu birçok çalışmalarında görülmüştür. çizgi, nokta ve çapraz taramanın bütün imkânlarını kullanan dürer, ayrıntıları büyük bir titizlik ve incelikle oymuş, doku ile renk etkisi verecek kadar ileri gitmiştir. gravür eserlerinde figüratif çalışmıştır. dürer, her gravür eserlerinde sıra dışı temalarıyla ışık ve gölge başarılı bir şekilde yansıtmıştır. kaynakÇa tunalı, İsmail ( ). estetik, İstanbul: remzi kitabevi ccc volume issue cover and back matter dionysian art and populist politics in austria william j. mcgrath vienna at the turn of the century felt the impact of an extraordinary student movement whose leaders dreamed of welding art and politics into a vital national culture that would replace what they regarded as a sterile and fragmented society. this unusual interdisciplinary study traces the relationships between the political and artistic manifestations of this important cultural movement. $ . yale university press new haven and london new german critique an interdisciplinary journal of german studies. i new german critique is an independent socialist journal of modern german society, culture, politics, and theory. the purpose of its interdisciplinary approach is to help develop a critical school in america and to eliminate the often artificial distinctions between disciplines. tncmes will include: the political economy of east and west germany, labor history and working class culture, theories of fascism, alienation under capitalism and socialism, the brecht-lukacs debate, marxist aesthetics in literature and art. the first issue, published in december , contained articles on max weber, heinrich heine, wilhelm reich, the german new left, the political economy of reparations, questions of organization, theories of popular literature, and child education in west germany. forthcoming: special issue on east germany with articles on the convergence theory, mass-cultur», historiography, political economy, bertolt brecht, johannes r. becher and heiner muller, plus — a classic by composer hsnns eisler, plus reports, reviews, and an extensive bibliography. mew german critique gcman department box the university of wisconsin— milwauke milwaukee, wisconsin issues per year individual foreign institution year years years $ . s . $ . $ . $ . $ . $ $ . $ . cambridge core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/ . /s downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. carnegie mellon university, on apr at : : , subject to the https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /s https://www.cambridge.org/core the word in stone the role of architecture in the national socialist ideology robert r. taylor what kind of architecture was considered appropriate for the german renaissance that allegedly was occurring under na- tional socialism? what was the ideal or typical "german" style? what concepts and values should genuinely "german" architecture express? historians have suggested that german leaders were generally indifferent to architecture; taylor ar- gues, however, that it was intended as government propaganda for national unity. in support of his thesis he reviews the speeches, conversations, and diaries of nazi leaders, as well as relevant published works of the time. lc: - pages illustrations s . island refuge britain and refugees from the third reich, - a. j. sherman the acrimonious debate over british policy toward refugees from nazi germany has scarcely died down even now. it has, however, become possible to investigate the truth of these charges and to analyze the british reaction to these refugees. the first authoritative account is based on government and private papers only recently released for public scrutiny. lc: - pages $ . the technical intelligentsia and the east german elite legitimacy and social change in mature communism thomas a. baylis this book explores the political profile of the technical, eco- nomic, and managerial specialists in east germany. it relates their emergence to the troubled process of authority-building in industrially advanced societies, and assesses their present and potential influence in brinqing about fundamental change. lc: - pages $ . univcrsitv op cauporma press derkeiev o cambridge core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/ . /s downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. carnegie mellon university, on apr at : : , subject to the https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /s https://www.cambridge.org/core journal of art historiography number december towards an ‘exakte kunstwissenschaft’(?) part ii: the new german art history in the nineteenth century: a summary of some problems the rhetoric of scientificness ‘dem kunsthistoriker kann niemand vorarbeiten’. anton springer was not only an eminent academic art historian but also the master of a concise german prose. ‘the art historian does not need anybody else to prepare the ground for him’ would be an english equivalent. springer’s statement of marks the principal desire of the scholars of his time, from the s to the s, namely to establish art history as a distinct field, as a new subject in its own right, equal to all the other major academic disciplines. at the very beginning of this report it was stated that the principal aim of all the very recent research appeared to be to provide a detailed account of how art history’s independence had emerged. yet it turned out that all three major books discussed here predominantly emphasise art history’s togetherness with the adjacent disciplines and its involvement with the philosophies and the major cultural issues of the time. what has undoubtedly been demonstrated in this way is the new subject’s overall intellectual rank. the second part of this report tries to summarise these issues and to shed a little more light on them by putting renewed stress on the initial purpose, to characterise the subject’s distinctiveness. hence the argument is somewhat reversed: intellectual rank and academic probity follow from the aspirations of methodological self-definition. two strong voices have been added to the discussions – which have already briefly been mentioned in the section on locher’s book - the tracts by the principal actors of the s and s, anton springer and his colleague in vienna, moritz thausing. connoisseurship apart from the as yet very small number of those who considered themselves ‘proper’ art historians, there were many other groups who also claimed the right and the distinction to speak authoritatively about art. thausing begins with those preoccupied with aesthetics. ‘in its methods and problems it is totally different ...aesthetics is a ‘philosophic discipline’. in thausing’s understanding aesthetics appears to have amounted principally to the propensity of making ‘aesthetic anton springer, ‘kunstkenner und kunsthistoriker’, im neuen reich, vol. , no. , , - , also in anton springer, bilder aus der neueren kunstgeschichte, nd ed. bonn: a.marcus , - , henceforth abbreviated as ‘springer’. ‘in methode und problem völlig verschieden’, moritz thausing, ‘die stellung der kunstgeschichte als wissenschaft’. …antrittsvorlesung (inaugural lecture) …’ , also in mortiz thausing, wiener kunstbriefe, leipzig: seemann , - (article newly published in wiener jahrbuch für kunstgeschichte, xxxvi, , - , henceforth abbreviated as ‘thausing’, here p. . stefan muthesius towards an ‘exakte kunstwissenschaft’(?) part ii judgements (aesthetische urteile)’, and he follows his argument about the unsuitability of this procedure with the already quoted remark about not needing the word beauty in art history. to operate with absolute judgements in art history would be equivalent ‘to conducting political history with the help of moral philosophy’. hence acts of veneration, as in the case of the italian renaissance, have no place in art history. springer, in particular, rejected facile judgements, such as ‘elegant’, ‘forceful’, and ’tender’, which to him are detrimental to historical research. for springer the issues can also be more complex. he goes into some detail in his assessment of major writers of his era, such as the berlin architectural theoretician karl boetticher on greek architecture, viollet le duc on gothic and semper on the principles of the applied arts and renaissance architecture. however insightful these works are for the art historian, a notion of ‘general laws in the world of art’ cannot be considered within art history proper. not that art history would want to dispute the laws in themselves, but historical consideration always reflects on contingencies: what is needed is the ‘verification of the various external and internal conditions for the development’ of an art form. by far the most important groups, however, from whom springer and thausing strove to distance themselves, were the ‘kunstkenner’. ‘kunstkenner und kunsthistoriker’ is the actual title of springer’s tract. he comprehensively refers to all groups of collectors, antiquarians, critics, as well as all dealers and collectors. to him, and this is springer’s opening argument, the principal motive of many groups of the connoisseurs of his day appeared to ascertain monetary value and he records his disgust for the ‘kunstmakler’, the art-realtor. both thausing and springer also forcefully distanced themselves from any contemporary artist who attempted a judgement of a work of art of the past. yet the attempted juxtaposition of connoisseurs and art historians was far from clear. the basic problem, springer claimed, was that ‘the connoisseur and the art historian are one and the same person in the eyes of most’. in fact, it had to be admitted that ‘for the art historian the activities of the connoisseur form an undoubted pre-condition.’ the question arises, what is, or, what was kennerschaft? clearly it was not enough to simply disdain it, as hegel did early on, who held that it was concerned merely with external appearance. prange’s brief outline in her section on the eighteenth century characterises the connoisseur as somebody who has a strong interest in art but is not normally an artist. he or she no longer concentrates on preaching the elevated values of art in general but takes each see note in part i. ‘politische geschichte ...moraphilosophuie’, thausing . thausing, . ‘historische urteile … elegant, energisch, zart’, springer, . ‘allgemeine gesetze in der künstlerischen welt’, springer ; der nachweis der mannigfachen bedingtheiten äusserer und innerer art bei der entwicklung’, springer, . springer, . springer, . ‘der kunstkenner und der kunsthistoriker decken sich in den augen der meisten leute’; springer, . ‘die tätigkeit des kunstkenners bildet für den kunsthistoriker eine unabweisbare vorraussetzung’, springer, . cf. prange, . stefan muthesius towards an ‘exakte kunstwissenschaft’(?) part ii work ‘as it is’, ascertaining authenticity, assessing dates and names of authorship. in fact, all art history before the new german art history of the nineteenth century could come under the kunstkenner heading. one must turn here to gabriele bickendorf’s comprehensive book of on italian (and some french) writers on art, entitled die historisierung der italienischen kunstbetrachtung im . und . jahrhundert (the historisation of italian [and some french] writings on art in the th and th centuries). concepts of the historicising of art were gaining strength all the time. this entailed the combination of ‘direct visual observation’, such as the meticulous examination of ‘lineaments and brushstrokes’, with an ever greater precision and sophistication of the examination and use of documentary sources (‘quellenkritik’). the ‘material’ was ordered into periods and schools, using the guiding terms of ‘style’ and ‘character’. studies extended back into the middle ages, often in order to serve local historical pride. it all meant a decisive departure from the vasarian mode of the vita as a ‘historia magistra’, as well as supplementing his central historical narrative in many directions. the term ‘storia dell’arte’ came into firm use by the later eighteenth century, albeit after winckelmann. the high point and end point of this development, published belatedly in , was the work of seroux d’agincourt, his monumental, copiously illustrated volumes on medieval art, l'histoire de l'art par les monuments, depuis sa décadence au quatrième siècle jusqu'à son renouvellement au seizième. claudia schrapel has detailed the role and writings of another major contemporary author in the very early nineteenth century, johann dominicus fiorillo. he was central europe’s first university teacher of art history (in göttingen), who, being an artist himself, was also one of the last serious writers who held that such proficiency was necessary in all pursuits of art history. both the deepening of ‘source-criticism’ and the desire for ‘the perfection of sight’ continued to be dominating issues. to the art historians it appeared that connoisseurs, like archaeologists, were frequently engaged in arguments about authenticity. however, art historians also took part in major controversies. a celebrated case, already mentioned, was the holbein streit in the s. the winners were held to be the art historians in this case, whose eyes acted free from aesthetic prejudices. as regards morelli, did his new nomenclature of marking smallish details in paintings as significant, belong to connoisseurship or modern art history? thausing was completely in favour of morelli, while springer’s answer was that prange, - . berliner schriften zur kunst, vol. xi., edited. by kunsthistorisches institut der freien universität berlin, berlin, publ. worms: wernersche, . ‘historisierungsschub / push for historical treatment’ bickendorf, ; ‘den eigenen augenshcin’, ; ‘linienführung und pinselstrichen’, . bickendorf, . bickendorf, . vols. folio with plates, paris: treuttel et würtz, . see daniela mondini, mittelalter im bild. seroux d’agincourt und die kusnthistoriographie um , zurich: interpublisher, . johanna schrapel, johann dominicus fiorillo, grundlagen zur wissenschaftsgeschichlichen beurteilung der geschichte der zeichnenden künste in deutschland und den niederlanden, hildesheim: olms, . ‘die vervollkomnnung des menschlichen gesichtssinnes’, thausing, - . karge in epergne, kugler, , . stefan muthesius towards an ‘exakte kunstwissenschaft’(?) part ii while morelli’s method has aided the study of works of art, it is not at all sufficient when trying to comprehend a work of art in its totality. so what exactly was added to connoisseurship by the new german art history from the s? firstly, as bickendorf states in the afterword of her italian book, it was the new professionalisation, meaning the new institutionalisation which gradually replaced individual, independent and ‘private’ scholarship. secondly, it was the new ‘german discussions of the philosophical-aesthetic and the theory-of-history concepts of idealism and romanticism’. hence in this way bickendorf neatly prepared the ground for prange’s comprehensive philosophical analysis, while prange implicitly agrees with bickendorf in discussing art- connoisseurial empiricism in her section on the eighteenth century. there is only the small proviso, namely that among art historians in museums there were always those who stressed the importance of what they saw as the more connoisseurial kind of procedures, as distinct from the more academic kind of work. arguments between the two groups continued in germany well into the twentieth century. empiricism judging from some of the writings, the s and s marked a high point in the drive to instil the general values of science. one may begin with the exhortations to observe ‘precision’ and the ‘utmost completeness’. in a tribute to springer, his colleague hubert janitschek moralises by using the strongest words: springer’s work stood ‘under a strict methodological discipline / under the rod’, he excelled with the ‘cleanliness of his technique of working’ and more specifically with the way he ‘conducted the processes of verification’. thausing demanded ‘inductive research’; observation must then ‘lead to continuous comparisons, similar to those which the most real of our sciences, the natural sciences are used to practice’. for subsequent pronouncements of this kind of empirical art history one may continue with kathryn brush’s book on some members of the next generation of art historians, such as wilhelm vöge and adolph goldscmidt, both of them springer’s pupils. springer, - . ‘die philosophisch-ästhetischen und geschichtstheoretischen vorraussetzungen des idealismus and der romantik ...‘, gabriele bickendorf, die historisierung der italienischen kunstbetrachtung im . und . jahrhundert, worms: wernersche, , . ‘genauigkeit’,thausing, . ‘die allergrösste vollständigkeit’, alwin schultz, kunst und kunstgeschchte. eine einführung ..., ii. abteilung (series: das wissen der gegenwart. deutsche universal-bibliothek für gebildete), leipzig g.freytag / prag f.tempsky , ff. hubert janitschek, ‘anton springer als kunsthistoriker’, in anton springer, aus meinem leben, berlin: grote , - . ‘unter strenger methodischer zucht’, ; ‘sauberkeit der arbeitstechnik’, ; ‘führung des wahrheitbeweises', . ‘induktive forschung’, thausing, ; ‘ein weg ... fortwährender vergleichung, ähnlich demjenigen, den die realsten unserer wissenschaften, die naturwissenschaften einzuschlagen pflegen’, thausing, . kathryn brush. the shaping of art history. wilhellm wilhelm vöge and adolph goldscmidt and the study of medieval art, cambridge university press, ; for similar discusions in the new cracow school of art history see stefan muthesius, ‘the cracow school of modern art history: the creation of a method and an institution - ’, journal of art histotiography, , . stefan muthesius towards an ‘exakte kunstwissenschaft’(?) part ii all those weighty words are easily voiced by art historians and historians of art history alike. yet, for the philosopher, ‘induction’ or ‘truth’ are the subjects of complex debates of a kind that art historians are hardly capable of understanding. hence there is a gap here which nobody seems able to fill. in any case, problems with empiricism were voiced among the art historians, too. perhaps somewhat surprisingly even the tracts by springer and thausing contain statements of doubt. springer’s words, ‘raw empiricism’ have already been cited. thausing at some point appears to belittle the work on the ground: ‘to arrive at an exact observation of monuments no special divination is needed.’ as regards the comparisons with the natural sciences, karge has pointed to the way in which kugler’s procedure is reminiscent of a more mechanical kind of eighteenth century taxonomy rather than the newer kinds of systematic thinking in biology. all this fits in with a debate that was being conducted widely, regarding the relative positions of the natural and the human sciences, to use today’s most frequent wording; earlier terms used were geisteswissenschaften or kulturwissenschaften. where should the borderlines between the two groups be drawn? to what extent should the methods or the ethos of the natural - the ‘exact’ - sciences be used for the human sciences as well? evaluations in the natural sciences seemed to be ruled by the sense of progress; would one apply this to the human sciences as well? the more reflective recent histories of art history take care to avoid any kind of valorisation. heinrich dilly warns of applying a simple linear development from dilettante art history to professional, scientific art history. rößler cautions regarding a ‘normative understanding of scientific procedure, whereby history of idea components might be lost, in other words, an optimal history of ideas (with stress on the plural) cannot proceed when judgements or norms taken from one of the fields are applied throughout. this also includes philosophy. a more radical philosophical line is taken by prange. for her, the question of scientific progress hardly arises. at several points in her book, her philosophical scepticism takes her quite far. already quoted was her remark on the foundations of burckhardt’s insistence on looking in schelling’s philosophy of art. categorically, for prange ‘the object which is described by the art historian is merely being produced by the art historian himself’. in an extremely laudatory review of prange’s book by a philosopher we read that 'the methods of analysing objects and the critique of sources which are aimed at given facts constitute mostly only a moment within the double-track pursuit of a scientific praxis.’ to characterise in quoted in rößler, . ‘genaue anschauung der denkmäler ...um zu dieser kenntnis zu gelangen, bedarf es jedoch keiner besonderen eingebung oder divination’, thausing . karge in klein / boerner, stilfragen, , . see e.g. gudrun kühne-bertram and others, eds., kultur verstehen. zur geschichte und theorie der geisteswissenschaften, würzburg: königshausen und neumann, , chapter . heinrich dilly, kunstgeschichte als institution. studien zur geschichte einer disziplin, frankfurt: suhrkamp, , . ‘normativen wissenschaftsbegriff ... ideengeschichtlichen komponenten verloren gehen könnten’, rößler, review of hellwig, biographie, in sehepunkte [electronic resouce], ausgabe , no. . ‘der gegenstand, den der kunsthistoriker beschreibt, wird durch ihn erst produziert’, prange . ‘die auf gegebene fakten gerichteten methoden der werknanalyse und der quellenkritik bleiben vielfach nur ein moment einer zweigleisig verfahrenden wissenschaftspraxis’, review of prange by stefan muthesius towards an ‘exakte kunstwissenschaft’(?) part ii this way the immense effort in empirical work, undertaken by generations of art historians, seems to mark an extreme position, one which, one might say, goes rather beyond the limits of the usefulness that a philosophical viewpoint can provide. reference needs to be made again to andrea schütte’s book on jacob burckhardt and its philosophical approach. in an overall sense it comes close prange’s, but without the metaphysics. schutte cannot find any essentialisms at all in burckhardt’s generally ‘jerky’ approach. schutte firstly refers to the older epistemological scepticisms, namely that no writer on history can bypass his or her own subjectivity. burckhardt, schütte claims, had ‘no problems’ with the issue of objectivity, and for him the ‘subjective approach’ was, in fact, ‘an objective one’. using elements of a post-modern textkriitk she defines history writing further as a mixture of ‘claims for truth, productions of representations, and considerations of texts [thoughts about how to write]’, which continually oscillate between noesis and poiesis. as burckhardt himself wrote, ‘history is, and will be for me to a large extent poetry’. with this postulate of a historiographic-fictional continuum, schütte, as already indicated, prefigured rößler’s approach. as a result they both feel to be in a position to sideline the problems of empirical observation and objectivity. however, schütte’s book remains very largely within the theoretical sphere, in the sphere of epistemology and literary theory. if one expects from the history of art history a certain comprehensiveness, revealing not only the more abstract kinds of theories and the literary parameters, but also a sense of the the lifeworld of the protagonists, as well as an insight into how the actual works of art were dealt with, then rosler’s inclusive approach is to be preferred, even if the result is lengthy and intricate. history writing once again the basic question: what is the wissenschaft component in the new art history? it is precisely: ‘history’. and: ‘the knowledge of the past remains exclusively the task of wissenschhaft’, wrote thausing. springer stresses many times that the kunstkenner, the dilettante is simply not capable to understand things historically. all areas of history have to be examined by the art historian, especially ‘the cultural background’. ‘indispensable’ is also the ‘the most thorough knowledge of the history of literature’. springer advocates a special kind of kunstsoziologe hans zitko in zeitschrift für Ästhetik und allgemeine kunstwissenscchaft, / , , - . schütte, . schütte, . ‘gerade der subjective [zugang] ist der objektive, weil er ein authentischer ist’, schütte, - . ‘die ständig zwischen noesis and poesis oszilleirt: wahrheitsanspruch, repräsentationsproduktionen und textüberlegungen’, schütte, . ‘geschichte ist mir und bliebt mir poesie im grössten masse’, letter to willibald beyschlag, . , in j.burckhardt, briefe (ed. max burckhardt) vol. ii, basle: schwabe, , schütte . ‘ die erkenntnis [der vergangenheit] bleibt ausschliesslich sache der wissenschaft’, thausing . ‘culturgeschichtliche hintergrund’, springer, , cf. thausing . ‘die genaueste kenntnis der literaurgeschichte ist für den kunshistoriker unentbehrlich’, springer, . stefan muthesius towards an ‘exakte kunstwissenschaft’(?) part ii empathy with the past: ‘one needs to place it all into the real world in which the artist stands and moves around.’ this included the culture of the middle and lower classes, the ‘popular’, the ‘volkstümliche’ world. does all this not lead one back to the issue of the separateness of the fields? springer goes into further detail about the use of the historical frame or background for the art historian, or rather he tells us how not to proceed. when trying to characterise the art of a period, the art historian should be cautious in using sweeping judgements, such as the characterisation of the renaissance as a period of rough and egoistic manners. springer was no doubt having a dig at schnaase when he warned of broad concepts, ‘contained in abstract introductions’. as already cited: ‘one must not generalise, but individualise’. much is made of the term historismus, or historicism, of the nineteenth century. it first of all refers to a new and unshakable belief in the relevance of history writing. it was felt that it was the researching and writing of the history of a subject, of a sphere of life or knowledge which provided an excellent – if not the best – understanding of that subject. before or alongside the new art history, new ‘historical schools’ of law, of economics and of language emerged, predominantly of course conducted in academe. and with those, the epistemological problems outlined above did not seem to apply. a completely dispassionate, objective view of the past is possible because, as thausing explains, nobody would ask a diplomat to try and explain old documents, or a contemporary painter to enlighten us about an older painting, because ‘the present and the past have been completely separated’, once again the insight into the latter remains exclusively the province of wissenschaft. most importantly, proceeding dispassionately means that all periods of human history were judged similarly, according to the principle of –‘historical neutrality’ (prange), and of the ‘equal evaluation of all cultures’ (karge) – with the possible exception of one’s own period, referring once again to locher’s contention regarding the new art historians’ widespread reluctance to judge the art of their contemporaries. finally, the historicism of the nineteenth century has also come to mean something else, which entailed rather the opposite to ‘value-neutrality’. during the course of the century we witness changing preferences for historical periods, and in that sense the term historismus is often used to characterise the nineteenth century propensity to imitate many historical styles in its art. in springer’s time a love for everything that belonged to the italian high renaissance surfaced again and again, ‘the magnificence and the pure ideal verve of italian art’ as he wrote, devoting the ‘es gilt doch die einfügung in die reale welt in welcher die künstler stehen und sich bewegen’, springer, . springer, . ‘in abstracten einleitungen’, springer, . ‘nicht generaliseren, sondern […] individualsieren muss man’, springer, . ‘hier wie dort fallen gegenwart und vergangenheit völlig auseinander und die erknntis der letzteren bleibt ausschliesslich sache der wissenschaft’, thausing, ; cf. otto gerhard oexle, ed., krise des historismus. krise der wirklichkeit. wissenschaft, kunst und literatur - , gottingen: vandenhoek und rupprecht and kathrin maurer, visualising the past. the power of the image in german historicism, berlin: degruyter . ‘historisch neutralitätsgrundsatz’, prange, ; ‘gleichbehandlung aller kulturen’, karge, kunsthistorische arbeitsblätter, , . stefan muthesius towards an ‘exakte kunstwissenschaft’(?) part ii majority of his academic studies to it. raphael still ruled supreme. however, from germany witnessed a sudden love of a style that was now defined as ‘german renaissance’, especially in architecture as well as a new appreciation of the art and life of the german fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. it was associated with the prevailing new national-liberal outlook in the politics of the new prussian german empire, to which springer also subscribed. even though, by the s the issue of a ‘german’ art was, on the whole, not a strong one, when one disregards the occasional attempts to declare early netherlandish painting as ‘german’. there was no real parallel, in art history, to the germanicity preached by the brothers grimm as linguists and literary historians. the early nineteenth romantic century idea of the german origin of gothic had been expunged by architectural historians by the s and substantial work on old german painting did not really get going before the s or s. the beginnings of a stronger and partly racially orientated cultural nationalism only came in the s. earlier on in this piece, reference was made to gabriele bickendorf’s argument that much of what germans prided themselves to be ‘their’ new art history had in fact been prepared by italian writers in the preceding centuries, and as the germans took over those approaches from the italian writers, they also continued to cherish italy as the land of art, and thus, bickendorf concludes, they failed to produce ‘a systematic history of german art’. a rather unusual recent study must be noted in this context, marcus müller’s geschichte, kunst , nation … which pieces together a comprehensive semantic field of a ‘“deutsche” kunstgeschichte’ by lifting the word ‘german’ from a vast number of publications, mostly dating from the early twentieth century. as regards hegel, there is of course a continuing general agreement that without him there would hardly have been a historicism or the notion of the historical framing of all cultural manifestations. his kind of thinking can be traced into the details of some specific interpretations. for instance, according to rößler, springer closely follows hegel in his analysis of the patronage of julius ii: bringing into the discussion the mixed reputation of this pope, rößler writes about quoting springer: as patron julius thinks “devotedly of art” [springer], because it freely pays homage “to the powers of the world, to the ideal concepts of life”. springer hereby sets the history of art in analogy to the healing power of realpolitik. he places himself completely into the hegelian tradition and he interprets art as the visualised expression of “the really and truthfully rational state” [hegel] and the ideal reconciliation of opposites … die herrlichkeit und den reinen idealen schwung’, springer, . cf. ralf mennekes, die renaissance der renaissance, petersberg: imhof . ‘konsistente geschichte der deutschen kunst’, gabriele bickendorf, ‚deutsche kunst und deutsche kunstgeschichte‘, in thomas schilp and barbara welzel, eds., dortmund und conrad von soest im spätmittelalterlichen europa, bielefeld: verlag für regionalgeschichte, , - . marcus müller, die sprachliche konstituierung einer,deutschen kunstgeschichte‘ aus diskursanalytischer sicht, berlin: walter de gruyter, . ‘als mäzen denkt julius “ehrerbietig von der kunst, weil sie den weltmächten, den idealen ordnungen des lebens frei huldigt. damit schaltet springer die kunstgeschichte analog zur versöhnenden kraft der realpolitik. ganz in hegelscher tradition stehend, wird die kunst als stefan muthesius towards an ‘exakte kunstwissenschaft’(?) part ii hegel’s follower as an art historian in berlin was heinrich gustav hotho to whom we largely owe the recording of hegel’s aesthetics, and who then attempted in his lectures to fill the philosopher’s abstract systems with historical detail. however, on the whole, the picture of hegel’s influence is extremely diffuse. as far as the very beginnings of the new art history in the s were concerned, with waagen and rumohr, hegel’s ideas had not yet been spread. berlin’s most prominent historian, leopold von ranke proffered his belief in the equal validity of all epochs. the new art historians would then hardly accept the well-known complex hierarchical periodisation of hegel’s system. hegel had positioned the phase of history in which the visual arts provided the superior cultural expression quite early on within the overall development of history and culture, and the period of art was followed by phases in which other cultural manifestations, such as philosophy, constituted the highest achievement. art historians would tend to replace all this with a simpler vision of a zeitgeist for each epoch within which the fine arts kept their relative rank. neither could another thesis of hegel’s, dubbed as ‘the end of art’, find much favour. for prange it was overruled by ‘schelling’s “construction of the universe of art”, which, in the spirit of romanticism, resisted hegel’s verdict.’ the producers of the vast handbooks, especially kugler, would find some inspiration in the apparent historical and geographical completeness of hegel’s aesthetics and history, but they could hardly be adherents of the hegel’s central constructions of the history of art. the position of schnaase vis-a-vis the philosopher was somewhat more complex. prange holds that he followed the idea that art history as a whole was going through ‘a predetermined development’, but karge concludes that in spite of his strong philosophical interests schnaase purposely left the sphere ruled by ‘hegel’s system-dominated way of thinking’. most basically, as the century went on, art historians and many other academics could no longer share the general german idealist belief of the conflict between ‘geistige natur’ and the ‘prosa der welt’. a major anti-hegelian notion was that of the accidental happening (‘der zufall’), within ‘a realm of changefulness and real accidentality … not deduced from concepts’, words from alexander von humboldt’s kosmos ( ff.), cited as a motto by kugler. visualisierter ausdruck des „wahrhaft vernünftig gegliederten staat[es]” und ideale vermittlung der gegensätze gedeutet’, rößler, . see elisabeth ziemer, heinrich gustav hotho, - . berliner kunsthistoriker, kunstkritiker und philosoph, berlin: reimer . ‘dennoch wird eher schellings “ konstruktion des universums in der kunst” für das selbstbewusstsein in der kunstgeschichte wirksam, die sich im geist der romantik gegen das hegelsche verdikt vom ende der kunst stemmte’, prange, . ‘notwendigen entwicklungsverlauf’, prange ; ‘bannkreis des hegelschen systemdenkens’, karge in niederländische briefe, xvi, xxvii. hegel, quoted in rößler, . ‘dem felde der veränderlichkeit und realer zufälligkeit ... nicht aus begriffen abgeleitet’, franz kugler, handbuch der geschichte der malerei, nd ed., berlin: duncker und humblot, , quoted by karge in klein and boerner, stilfragen, , . stefan muthesius towards an ‘exakte kunstwissenschaft’(?) part ii style after all these abstractions, it is time to reflect on art history’s actual instruments with which its artefacts could be investigated. dan karlholm in his earlier account of the first comprehensive german handbooks proposed the following: ‘genre, style, period or culture’. by far the most important instrument was ‘style’. it must be rated as one of nineteenth century’s success stories. provided one did not hit the wrong term, a single adjective could provide a sense of knowing something important about a small detail, such as a part of the decoration of a building, and something about the general character of a period spanning several centuries in all western countries. the practice is closely related to general period labelling. for karge, style-labelling comes under empirical and historicist procedures. empiricist – historicist was the belief of the equal value of all styles. one needs to be aware, though, that some art forms lend themselves better than others to stylistic labelling; here clearly, at least in the nineteenth century, architecture comes first. according to karge, much of kugler’s ordering practice was derived from arcisse de caumont’s nomenclature for medieval buildings. during the later twentieth century these kinds of labels have been eclipsed, one major reason being that scholars became ever more conscious that most designations, such as ‘romanesque’ or ‘baroque’, would not have meant anything to those in the past who produced the works. as a result, the books reported here devoted very little to the issues of style. locher purposely avoided what he calls ‘stilgeschichte’. moreover, from the s ‘style’ merged partly with ‘form’. the term ‘stilkritik’ gained coinage. a certain division took place. plain period style labels were now mainly the province of the more popular kind of literature, while stilkritik usually went into detailed formal description, whereby the basic style and period labels need no longer play a decisive role. a probing recent analysis of ‘style’, largely philosophical, forms the most substantial chapter in schütte’s book. a new understanding of style was a key element in winckelmann’s new art history. while, for him, the term retained its old normative power, it is now systematised, it can be applied as a geographical and a historical categorisation. in goethe’s essay of , concerning painting and sculpture, and entitled ‘einfache nachahmung der natur, manier, stil’ (simple imitation, mannerism, style), the normative element is rendered more prominently again, as it signifies a state that comes above mimesis and the individual artist’s subjective input (‘manner’), but the essay also helped with the general spread of the term. more radical changes came with rumohr. for him ‘style’ signified less a generalised state of perfection than a plurality of individual modes, meaning in each case ‘an accommodation to the inner demands of the material which has developed dan karlholm, handböckernas konsthistoria. om skapandet av "allmän konsthistoria" i tyskland under -talet, diss., (symposion, stockholm/stehag, ), ff. see ‘periodisation et histoire d’art’, perspective. la revue de l’inha, paris, , - . karge in espagne, kugler, , . locher , , . cf. caecilie weissert, ed., stil in der kunstgeschichte. neue wege der forschung, darmstadt: wgb, . hubert janitschek, ‘anton springer als kunsthistoriker’, in anton springer, aus meinem leben, berlin: grote , - ( ). stefan muthesius towards an ‘exakte kunstwissenschaft’(?) part ii into a habit’. rumohr was in turn attacked by hegel, who chided him for his un- idealistic outlook and for his concentration of the artefact itself, on its formal and material conditions. hegel changed the goethean hierarchy again, for him it was now ‘manier, stil, originalität’. style was a mediator through which the artist could reach real originality. further theorisations diversified greatly. a hegel adherent and writer on aesthetics and art theory, friedrich theodor fischer, restored ‘style’ again to the top of the hierarchy: ‘talent, manier and stil’. he opened the door of appreciation to a wider range of expressions by postulating stylistic subcategories, such as ‘the simple beautiful’, ‘the exciting and touching’, ‘the high and sublime’. with gottfried semper’s magnum opus, his two volume der stil in den technischen und tektonischen künsten … of , the title indicates that the word’s popularity must have reached its peak. but semper’s book has nothing at all to do with the handbook-type of list of styles, nor with the emerging formalist stilkritik for paintings. his principal interest was to analyse the origins, the ‘natural laws’, that is, the technical and environmental principles of various techniques in the textile, ceramic and building crafts. what semper did push forward was the quest for the ‘origins’ of a style, which was something very different from the more static practice of just coining and sub-dividing labels. schütte then goes on to two less well-known mid-century philosophers, christian hermann weisse and rudolph hermann lotze. the former came back to buffon’s old psychological adage ‘le style c’est l’homme même’, the latter stressed diversity, ‘the exciting, attractive and always innovative formations’ of style. riegl’s concept, to put it at its briefest, related ‘style’ firmly to abstract forms and thus a ‘theory of style’, of signification, no longer appeared necessary. finally, slightly back in time, schütte finds – as to be expected – little overt systematicity in the writings of her hero, burckhardt. principally style signifies here a self-contained ‘total expression’, demanding order and the elimination of ‘willkür’, of everything arbitrary, said here about greek art which brings one back to the concepts of winckelmann. iconography / ‘form’ formalist or iconographic / iconological was the dominant methodological alternative for art history during much of the twentieth century. before the last decades of the nineteenth century this alternative did not exist, or was hardly formulated in this way. iconography itself could hardly be called a new subject. a definition of reads as follows: ‘iconography serves the orientation for the imagery that occurs in works of art, especially of the pictures of saints which occur so frequently (for ‘ein zur gewohnheit gediehenes sich fügen an die inneren forderungen des stoffes’, quoted in schütte, . schütte, . ‘einfach schöner’, ‘reizender und rührender stil’, ‘hoher und erhabener’, paraphrased by schütte, . ‘interessante, reizvolle und immer neues erschliessende anordnung’, quoted in schütte, . schütte ff. ‘geschlossene gesamtausdrucksweise’, quoted by schütte, . schütte, . stefan muthesius towards an ‘exakte kunstwissenschaft’(?) part ii ancient art one uses the art mythology instead)’, a definition of . iconography was here grouped with palaeography, numismatics and heraldry as a ‘hiflswissenschaft’ for the ‘kunstwissenschaft’, as an auxiliary science. springer, as rößler records, showed some fatigue with the diligent identification of such crowds of saints, or with the philosophers in raphael’s disputà. at the same time springer attacked what he saw as facile approaches in the coining of meaning and argues against attempts to ‘erect bridge[s] between great world events and the small world of art.’ instead one should try and investigate the less documented, ‘the popular sphere, the lasting elements in the formation of an epoch’. for example, we cannot see direct relationships between the work of dante and giotto, but both of them took up the ‘perceptions which quietly chimed with popular consciousness’ and gave them ‘the poetic form and the artistic shape’. it was with these definitions springer took the step from iconography to iconology, something duly emphasised by rößler and prange. in contrast to iconography, the term ‘form’ and its origins are characterised by an utter vagueness, at least before fiedler and wöfflin supplied their rigidly formalist definitions. ‘form’ can be used synonymously with ‘style’ and in most cases where one refers to the form of an ornament that form serves as the carrier of the stylistic designation. in rößler’s book the issue of form is omnipresent. locher and prange trace its rise in the nineteenth century principally through the development of the theories of decorative art. one could undertake a parallel study for the writings on the history of architecture. most detailed architectural descriptions could be characterised as ‘formal’. when we read springer in : ‘… the types and characters [the artist] chooses for the principal actors … the lines and forms [the artist chooses]’ we get a sense of the iconographic and the stylistic-formal methods emerging side by side as reasonably distinct. but as springer also declares, the choice of forms happens ‘almost unconsciously’, we realise that there is still a morellian purpose of just identifying names and we are still some way away from a notion of formalism which assumes a conscious and aesthetically evaluated intent on the part of the artist. once more one may reflect on rößler’s construction of a three-tier concept of meaning in springer’s work on raphael’s disputà, foreshadowing panofsky: ) recognising the object for what it is in everyday terms, ) the specific iconographic signification and ) the iconology of the broadest cultural context. rößler here lays particular stress on the way in which springer defines no. ) as the plainest description of what one sees, for instance the colours of a dress. at times it appears that springer’s reduction to the ‘registering of the seen’ also means that it is ‘de- die ikonnographie [dient] zur orientierung über die auf kusntwerken vorkomemenden bildnisse, besonders auch die der heiligen wegen der häufigkeit ihrer darstelung (fur die alte kunst anstelle der letzteren die kunstmythologie)’ meyers konversationslexikon in ( rd ed. vol. ), . ‘... grossen weltereignisse und dem kleinen künstlerreich …’, springer . ‘das volkstümliche, wahrhaft herrschende und dauernde in der bildung eines menschenalters’, springer, . ‘…anschauungen, welche bereits leise im volskbewusstsein anklangen ... gaben ihnen die poetische form und die künstlerische gestalt’, springer, . ‘…welche typen and charaktere [der künstler] für die hauptpersonen wählt ... welche linien und formen ...[er] gebraucht benahe unbewusst ...’, springer, . stefan muthesius towards an ‘exakte kunstwissenschaft’(?) part ii semanticised’, although rößler (and his arguments have been somewhat simplified here) does not want to go as far as claiming that springer hereby undertakes ‘a formanalytische präzisierung’. concluding rößler on springer’s analysis of the disuputà, one may however be tempted to speculate on a curious coincidence, a combined origin of wölfflin’s concept of a ‘de-semanticised’ form and panofsky’s new systematisation of meaning. practices i after accounting for some of the theoretical propositions which never ceased to be challenged, one may take a different angle and study more directly what was actually being produced. what types of writings were now being published? what was new about them? there were indeed two fundamentally new types of work, the all-comprehensive history and the monograph of a single work of art. naturally, most broadly speaking, these genres were not without precursors, but their systematisation took place during the course of the nineteenth century. this systematisation happened in accordance with the two general methodological beliefs outlined above. there was, firstly, the massing of individually examined detail, based on a notion of the individuality of each object, its non-repeatability and, secondly, the belief in the need for explanations though delving into the broadest backgrounds, going well beyond the actual object. both the handbook and the monograph operated with these principles. most of the works discussed here, and locher in particular, with karlholm having drawn attention to it before, pointed to the importance of the genre of the handbooks, and the very high importance of the first ones by kugler and schnaase in particular. a little more emphasis might have been put on the handbook’s opposite, the monograph, ‘the source-critically-founded analysis of the individual artefact’ (rößler). in the already cited article ‘kunstwissenschaft’ in meyers konversationslexikon’s, the edition of , presenting what we might assume the then ‘official’ definitions, we read; ‘the available material must be gathered and every individual piece must be investigated according to its characteristics and then it has to be brought into a systematic overview according to various points of view’. springer explicitly made ‘spezialforschung / specialised research’ his major task from - onwards. conducive to the shorter kind of monograph was, from the s, the new medium of the art history periodical which was exclusively devoted to historical topics, not mixing them with issues of contemporary art, as all earlier art journals had done. a vitally important sub-category of the monograph is the biography. karin hellwig has recently revealed the surprising complexity of this genre. she traces its ‘auf die registrierung des gesehenen, rößler’, ; ‘entsemantisiert, roesler, ; ‘formanalytisch …’, rößler, . ‘quellenkritisch gestützte einzelanalyse’, rößler , cf. . ‘das vorliegend material muss gesammelt und jedes einzelne stück nach seinen eigenschaften untersucht und nach verschiedenen gesichtspunkten in eine systematische Übersicht gebracht werden’. meyers konversationslexikon ( rd ed. vol. , ), . hubert janitschek, ‘anton springer als kunsthistoriker’, in anton springer, aus meinem leben, berlin: grote , - , . stefan muthesius towards an ‘exakte kunstwissenschaft’(?) part ii development from the renaissance custom of the vita, principally written by artists with celebratory and didactic aims in mind, to the new eighteenth century types of biography with their new systematic treatment of life and work, their desire to provide ‘truth’ and ‘completeness’ as well as broad historical backgrounds. hellwig here largely confirms bickendorf’s account of the same period with regard to the scientificness of the eighteenth century contributions to art history. the first half of the nineteenth century diversified approaches, introducing more psychological slants and the notion of genius. germany’s major art periodical, ‘schorns’ kunstblatt conducted long methodological deliberations on the issues of the life-work relationship and the use of the concept of the ‘künstlerischer character / artistic character’, aimed to lend a sense of unity to each biographical work. some of the most important new works of the new art history were biographies, such as waagen’s on the van eycks and johann david passavant’s on raphael in . the new emphasis on an all-comprehensive art history in the s and s brought a slight eclipse of the genre; it was argued that the concentration on individuals cannot provide comprehensive historical explanations. but from the s and s the genre returned with great prominence and the new works by grimm and justi excelled through their length, their psychological concentration and the breadth of their contextual explorations. moreover, a striking new kind of heroisation was introduced here which suited the long–established grandeur of a michelangelo or a raphael. finally through their sheer literary quality these major works formed a group of their own – and this literary success, the very popularity of these books, led to a new reduction in the genre’s estimation, at least as far as the great names were concerned, and within the strictly academic environment. practices ii what nineteenth century general debates on the natural sciences underlined was the way those sciences showed a continuous and rapid progress, or at the very least one could speak of a continuous, tangible, material advancement. in art history, too, one may speak of advancement. with dilly, one may stress the instalment of so many institutions, especially of art museums and university chairs; with prange one can pay respects to the art historians’ familiarity with major philosophical currents, with rößler one can foreground their close involvement with the broader cultural and literary scene. one may also chose the simpler level of purely quantitative factors and point to them as practical tasks. it now appeared that ‘the stock of monuments is overwhelming’. part of the new desire for completeness led springer to stress that lesser works can have explanatory power as well. all narrow aesthetic preferences should be pushed aside. with regard to architecture, there was the added urgency to help with assuring its conservation. the decades from saw a new dynamic, a massive ‘empirieschub’, meaning a sudden push to supply empirical detail, or even an ‘empirisierungsdruck’, a veritable pressure to produce empirical work, or, just ‘der denkmälervorrat is überwältigend’,thausing, . ‘minder bedeutende werke’, springer, . stefan muthesius towards an ‘exakte kunstwissenschaft’(?) part ii work. a few decades later most of the important old buildings had received at least some kind of monographic treatment in a journal or in the new genre of the ‘inventory’. its volumes, later to be entitled ‘bau-und kunstdenkmäler’ (monuments of building and art), provided area-wide information for the use of everybody (though, admittedly few of the series were ever completed). finally, attention must briefly be drawn to the fundamental matter of providing pictures of the works of art discussed. principally the nineteenth century is the crucial period for the full development of the published reproduction. it started with the last examples of copper plate engravings and ended with the kind of reproductions of photographs of a quality that has been taken for granted until today. only colour was still largely missing. one may trace the linear progression as regards both the verisimilitude of reproduction as well that of the cost factor. very simply, many early nineteenth century publications had to make do without illustrations while by the end of the century that could not happen any more. a new important work on the subject of the illustrated art book, edited by kataarina kraus and klaus nier, kunstwerk, abbild, buch. das illustrierte kunstbuch von bis , provides a number of very diverse aspects of the topic. nier’s incisive introduction points to a number of more complex issues, such as the changing relationships between the illustrations and the text. he also states that illustrations cannot simply be understood merely as passive reproductions, but that they also have their own agendas. a world lies between the serial spread of illustrations, each of them simplified in order to arrange them in large groups for didactic purposes, as, most notably early on in seroux d‘agincourt’s early monumental work of , already mentioned, and those publications which make the greatest effort to reproduce high-ranking works in major museums, such as dresden or the louvre, often entitled ‘masterpieces of …’ for a recent excellent investigation into the late nineteenth century advances in late nineteenth century techniques of reproduction one may turn to a volume published by iris lauterbach, entitled die kunst für alle … . all in all, the rapidly increasing use of photographic reproductions from the s onwards was, according to rößler, fundamental for the disciplinary independence of the subject. should one, at the very end, allow the new art historians to voice some of their new pride, their convictions about the superiority of their whole enterprise? one may start with schelling: ‘the realm of art is thus the place where ideality is realised in perfect, crystalline forms ….’ schnaase, following hegel in spirit, but not in detail, held art to be, as prange puts it, the permanent highest authority of the expression of the human spirit.’ if one does not go for the philosophers’ universalism one might turn to justi’s excitement about the paradox of the lousy political situation in spain producing an artist of the eminence of velazquez. ‘empirieschub’, rößler ; karge in espagne, kugler, , . ‘empirisierungsdruck’, rößler, . cf. also articles by locher and kilian heck in espagne, kugler, . die kunst für alle ( - ) zur kunstpublizistik vom kaiserreich bis zum nationalsozialismus, munich: zentralinstitut für kunstgeschichte, (veröffentlichungen des zentralinstituts für kunstgeschichte, ), cf. also dorothea peters in the volume labuda, etablierung. rößler, . as phrased in oxford encyclopedia of aesthetics, michael kelly, ed, oxford university press, , vol. , . stefan muthesius towards an ‘exakte kunstwissenschaft’(?) part ii however, from what has been told in this second part of the review one could also conclude that intellectually, the new art history did not have all that much to offer. the tracts by springer and thausing seemed to be concerned predominantly with how not to proceed. but, such a conclusion would miss out on the essential infrastructural value of the concerns outlined here: springer’s and thausing’s articles were, in fact, addressed not so much to their colleagues but to a wider audience. it was vital to draw the line between the pursuits in academe and the more mundane world of the connoisseurs whose activities might have appeared similar. hence springer and thausing would tie in academic probity with art history’s moral probity. the reiteration of the basic laws of empirical procedure was crucial, norms that sound simple on paper, but were often perceived to be difficult to achieve in practice. but how much does all this pertain to the actual, to the particular scientific contents of the new wissenschaft? a very recent volume, its title beginning with german art history and scientific thought deals with a selection of ideas and methods from about onwards, that is, with the work of riegl, wolfflin and schmarsow and others. the book does this chiefly by tracing their general affiliations to, and even co-operation with new directions in the sciences of psychology, physiology, phenomenology and other academic fields of their time. a somewhat hasty conclusion might well state that art history’s striving for independence during the nineteenth century had been of limited importance, after all, and that the real kunstwissenschaft was about to begin only now. stefan muthesius taught at the university of east anglia and published on th and th century architecture and design in england, germany and poland. his latest book is the poetic home. designing the th century domestic interior, thames and hudson . s.muthesius@uea.ac.uk mitchell b. frank and daniel adler, eds., german art history and scientific thought. beyond formalism, farnham: ashgate . wp-p m- .ebi.ac.uk params is empty sys_ exception wp-p m- .ebi.ac.uk no params is empty exception params is empty / / - : : if (typeof jquery === "undefined") document.write('[script type="text/javascript" src="/corehtml/pmc/jig/ . . /js/jig.min.js"][/script]'.replace(/\[/g,string.fromcharcode( )).replace(/\]/g,string.fromcharcode( ))); // // // window.name="mainwindow"; .pmc-wm {background:transparent repeat-y top 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(online) journal homepage: https://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rvcb ‘bold liberals who fought for the cause of freedom’: the german reception of the graphic satires of james gillray and thomas rowlandson at the fin de siècle ( – ) matthew c. potter to cite this article: matthew c. potter ( ) ‘bold liberals who fought for the cause of freedom’: the german reception of the graphic satires of james gillray and thomas rowlandson at the fin�de�siècle ( – ), visual culture in britain, : , - , doi: . / . . to link to this article: https://doi.org/ . / . . © the author(s). published by informa uk limited, trading as taylor & francis group. published online: jul . submit your article to this journal article views: view crossmark data https://www.tandfonline.com/action/journalinformation?journalcode=rvcb https://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rvcb https://www.tandfonline.com/action/showcitformats?doi= . / . . https://doi.org/ . / . . https://www.tandfonline.com/action/authorsubmission?journalcode=rvcb &show=instructions https://www.tandfonline.com/action/authorsubmission?journalcode=rvcb &show=instructions http://crossmark.crossref.org/dialog/?doi= . / . . &domain=pdf&date_stamp= - - http://crossmark.crossref.org/dialog/?doi= . / . . &domain=pdf&date_stamp= - - matthew c. potter ‘bold liberals who fought for the cause of freedom’: the german reception of the graphic satires of james gillray and thomas rowlandson at the fin de siècle ( – ) this article explores the reception of the work of james gillray and thomas rowlandson in germany in the long nineteenth century, within the contexts of evolving art historical studies and nationalist cultural policies during the period. the german-language art historical writings of fin-de-siècle critics (two from germany – richard muther and hans wolfgang singer – and two from the low countries – charles polydore de mont and jan veth) demonstrate how these authors used historical examples of british graphic satire to promote modern liberal agendas of protest and internationalism in opposition to the narrow nationalism of the prussian-led kaiserreich (the german empire, – ). keywords: gillray, rowlandson, muther, reception, graphic, satire, international- ism, nationalism, wilhelmine investigating the reception of visual culture can reveal rich international exchanges. the complexities of interpretation and multiplicities of after- lives become legion when more than one language and culture is involved. fixing exactly what qualities attracted commentators to foreign objects and what domestic contexts gave these items value for interna- tional audiences necessitates close examination. these exchanges took place within an intricate framework of rhetorical, art historical and socio- political discourses. the position of graphic satire within the hierarchy of the genres further complicates matters. its marginal canonical status does not reduce its potential for contributing to complex cultural debates fuelled by international cross-pollination. this article focuses on one such phenomenon. it examines the previously unstudied relevance of the satirical cartoons of james gillray ( – ) and thomas rowlandson ( – ) to the aesthetic, political and cultural debates of fin-de-siècle germany. between and two critics from germany, richard muther ( – ) and hans wolfgang singer ( – ), and two critics from the low countries, charles polydore de mont ( – ) and jan veth ( – ), undertook a series of interventions into the critical reputations of gillray and rowlandson and engaged with developing narratives on the nature of modern art and internationalism. these were all written specifically for a german- speaking audience and therefore signify self-conscious responses to the cultural environment of the kaiserzeit (the age of imperial germany, visual culture in britain, https://doi.org/ . / . . © the author(s). published by informa uk limited, trading as taylor & francis group. this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/ . /), which permits unrest- ricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. http://orcid.org/ - - - http://crossmark.crossref.org/dialog/?doi= . / . . &domain=pdf – ). exploring what these critics wrote about british graphic satire from the napoleonic era provides an important insight into the continuing currency of gillray and rowlandson over time and geogra- phical borders. the first age of reception, – this fin-de-siècle german reception did not occur without precedent, and the previous chapters in this history need to be borne in mind in order to fully understand the later developments that form the primary focus of this article. british cartoons from the napoleonic era were subjected to widespread continental scrutiny immediately they were published. in the s; for example, british prints were sold at william remnant’s english bookshop in hamburg and bremer and sons in braunschweig. the trade in british prints to european nations was disrupted by the french prohibitions and conflicts of the revolutionary and napoleonic wars ( – ), but such commodities nevertheless found their way through these barriers. napoleon bonaparte went to great lengths to quash foreign and domestic satirical prints that targeted him, and french intolerance for the medium endured into the restoration regimes. napoleon’s retreat following the battle of leipzig (october ) ended the censorship of the french occupation and increased the supply of domestic (largely from nuremberg and berlin) and foreign (predomi- nantly british, french and russian) political cartoons in the german states. during that era, gillray’s prints provided models for german cartoonists, who readily plagiarized them. there were considerable difficulties in the early reception of the british cartoons in germany. even when prints possessed integrated explana- tory captions, their german audiences seldom had sufficient english language skills to understand them. nonetheless, between and the berlin-based journal, london und paris, reproduced pirated copies of key prints by gillray, swiftly following the london publication of the originals. they also published commentaries on these images, reaching wider audiences via the membership of reading clubs and libraries. whilst in london, johann christian hüttner tutored the son of george leonard staunton (a british diplomat and east india company employee), wrote for london und paris, and knew gillray personally. hüttner was one of c. , germans in london at that time who were crucial conduits in transmitting information about british graphic satire to a continental audience. critically, hüttner announced the four key characteristics that contributed to gillray’s pre-eminence: the artist’s ability to make literary references; his allegorical knowledge; his facility in creating accurate and recognizable portraits; and his ‘constant regard for the true essence of caricature’ which together contributed to his works attaining ‘high art’ qualities. at this initial stage of the german reception, reverend frederick wendeborn, a london-based pastor to a german congregation, felt that british graphic satire appealed to early- nineteenth-century germans, owing to the generic humour they matthew c. potter contained rather than because of their specific lampooning of british celebrities and politicians. as he wrote, the germans ‘laugh at them, and become merry, though they are entirely unacquainted with the persons, the manners, and the customs which are ridiculed. the wit and satire of such prints, being generally both local, are entirely lost upon them’. the london und paris commentaries sought to educate the german public in the latter, but the casual interest in humour remained the primary motive for germans looking at the georgian caricatures. furthermore, the german reception of these satirical works effectively defied the foundational victorian categorizations. henry george bohn ( – ), for example, adopted a division of the prints of gillray into a ‘political series’ and a ‘humorous’ or ‘miscellaneous series’ with ‘satires on persons and manners’ for his two volumes of reproduction prints, which wright and evans took as the structure for their digest. meanwhile, f.g. stephens adopted a chronological order by subject for his record of the ‘political and personal satires’ in the british museum collection. the subsequent analysis pays little critical attention to the categories used by the victorians and subsequent british scholars on this topic as these were irrelevant to the germans, who were interested in compositional conceits and the practical methods of the cartoonists. graphic satire in germany – more generally, the german reception of british graphic satire was a product of the social, art historical, constitutional and nationalistic developments of the nineteenth century. new opportunities for graphic satire were forthcoming with innovations in publishing. the ground- breaking british publication, punch ( – ), had equivalents in german magazines such as the fliegende blätter ( – ) and simplicissimus ( – and – ). edgar feuchtwanger describes the latter publication as ‘the german punch’, and both attracted polite, liberal and middle-class audiences similar to those enjoyed by their british model. such influences are not directly part of the history of the reception of the napoleonic caricatures under survey in this article, however, for the stinging and raucous fare of the long eighteenth century quickly gave way to the lighter comedy featured in these illustrated comedic journals, which effectively produced a ‘satirical hiatus’ in both countries, as evident in the gentler content of such magazines. meanwhile, within german art historical practices, nineteenth-century nation-building activities fuelled historic inquiries into the graphic art legacy of albrecht dürer, who enjoyed a heroic status owing to his subversion of academic rules and the hierarchy of the genres. elsewhere, the graphic satire produced by other countries slowly crept into historical surveys undertaken in germany. the handbuch der geschichte der malerei by franz kugler ( – ), for example, briefly noted how william hogarth pioneered the ‘element of the caricature’, subsequently visible in the work of gillray and others, but no in- bold liberals who fought for the cause of freedom depth analysis was forthcoming from german-speaking scholars at that time. with german unification ( ) pressure was increasingly placed on the middle class to conform to conservative and nationalistic tastes, and this also left its mark on the graphic arts. during the first decades of the kaiserzeit, graphic art publications tended to hedge their bets. whilst the fliegende blätter, for example, rounded on avant-garde artists such as max liebermann and arnold böcklin, who had been influenced by foreign styles, the ‘philistine’ public was also frequently ridiculed in the same papers. a german renaissance of interest in british napoleonic cartoons ( – ) political and art-critical developments combined at the end of the nine- teenth century to create an ideal context for reigniting german interest in gillray and rowlandson. germany’s national culture was the subject of great debate between conservative and avant-garde art critics who adhered to opposing nationalist and internationalist principles respec- tively. whilst a philistine alliance of the prussian junkers (aristocrats) and german mittelstand (middle class) united behind nationalism, the learned bildungsbürgertum (educated elite) rallied in support of internationalism. complicating matters further, kaiserzeit xenophobia also infiltrated some intellectual circles. while heinrich wölfflin ( –- ), for example, rejected charges of excessive italian influence on germany’s pre-eminent artist in die kunst albrecht dürers ( ), he ultimately conceded that the talismanic artist had wasted energy on attempting the impossible in trying to reconcile northern and southern spirits. as a foreign (swiss) art historian, wölfflin may have been pandering to the nationalism of the prussian establishment and popular to his appointment in berlin. the essay, ’deutsche kunst und deutsche geschichte’ ( ) by george dehio ( – ) went even further in its nationalism by codifying quintessential german artistic traits. there are various reasons to assume that german conservatives should have been enthusiasts for many napoleonic british satirical cartoons: the anti- catholicism and francophobia of otto von bismarck’s kulturkampf policy and the kaiserzeit more generally matched up with the anti-french sub- ject matter of many of gillray’s cartoons, for example. in fact, this did not occur. the xenophobia of the german mittelstand was all- encompassing and british culture was just as problematic in their eyes as french. the internationalism of the bildungsbürgertum was also compromised in regard to the reception of these works. the greatest enthusiasm for internationalism occurred amongst advocates of french art, but such influential writers as hugo von tschudi ( – : director of the national gallery, berlin, – ) and julius meier- graefe ( – ) did not discuss gillray or rowlandson. ironically the anti-gallicism that provided the unfulfilled potential for attracting the conservatives also repelled the francophiles. nevertheless, a smaller matthew c. potter niche still existed, within the progressive camp, who were interested in these graphic satirists, and the remainder of this article focuses on the content and causes of their investigations. one of the reasons progressive german art writers began to look abroad for inspiration was a perception of the declining international status of german art centres. munich especially suffered from the virtual parisian monopoly that existed at the time. the secession movements that emerged were part of this response. the berlin secession ( – ) formed the major rallying point against academic art and allied institutions of the wilhelmine era: impressionism was dominant but more modern styles were also represented through associated exhibitions. the munich secession ( – ) was founded not only earlier but also in a far less oppressive environment. it emerged out of the egalitarian spirit of the münchner künstlergenossenschaft (munich artists association: established ), which was dedicated to liberal ideas of representative government, the free market and the elevation of the public via bildung (education). munich had nevertheless faced its own specific challenges with declining arts patronage from the bavarian royal family, the wittelsbachs, after , despite prince luitpold’s cul- turally interested regency ( – ). berlin and munich offered fertile ground for a revived interest in satirical culture more generally. while the german kabarette reached their apex under the weimar republic ( – ), the theatrical founda- tions of that golden age were established in the counter-cultural sections of the cosmopolitan cities of the wilhelmine era. from a group of progressives, including frank wedekind ( – ), otto julius bierbaum ( – ), and oskar panizza ( – ), author of the essay on ‘der klassizismus und das eindringen des variété’ (‘classicism and the inroads of variety theatre’: ), combated conser- vative taste and censorship via the establishment of parisian-style variety cabarets in berlin and munich. the exchange between theatrical and artistic circles was unsurprisingly great: not only did wedekind contri- bute to simplicissimus but wassily kandinsky ( – ) was a great enthusiast of the cabaret. crucially, german kabarett culture shared much with the world of the georgian cartoons, with their melange of ephemerality, criticism, cynicism, intimacy and satire. richard muther and the geschichte der malerei im xix. jahrhundert ( – ) muther very much personified the secessionist zeitgeist. the munich- based art critic and art historian was heavily influenced by his studies under anton springer ( – ). springer ‘integrated his intensive study of art and of social life’ in opposition to g.w.f. hegel’s idealist view of culture and history, substituted relativist and historicist values for hegel’s universalist ones, and subscribed to a schillerian belief in the importance of human relations, social life, and the artist’s personality as artistic catalysts. muther also wished to swim against the wilhelmine bold liberals who fought for the cause of freedom tide and place german art within a firmly international context. unlike his contemporaries, such as cornelius gurlitt ( – ) and adolf rosenberg ( – ), muther believed that internationalism was cen- tral to innovation in art. the munich international exhibition of provided a useful forum for developing such theories, exhibiting , contemporary artworks from fifteen countries. while this allowed téodor de wyzewa ( – ) in the gazette des beaux-artes to assess modern german painting, german critics such as friedrich pecht ( – ) took it as an opportunity to evaluate the works displayed by artists from foreign schools, including those of america, britain and france. muther, for example, felt that the exhibition helped highlight how ‘in general, little is known about english art on the continent. while every major newspaper provides correspondence upon the paris salon every year, english exhibitions are almost never reported; english works but rarely come to us’. muther’s magnum opus, the geschichte der malerei im xix. jahrhundert ( – : translated as the history of modern painting), was written in a synthetic style, offering a grand modernist survey of nineteenth- century art related to cultural and social values, loyal to springer’s ideals. while it was rejected by wölfflin and the vienna school for its unscientific and biographical qualities, and has been criticized by udo kultermann as ‘unflatteringly confessional’ and obsessed with the erotic qualities of fin-de-siècle art, such values spoke to the aestheticist, symbolist and secessionist appetites of the time. indeed muther’s friendship with munich secessionist poets encouraged his attempt at popularizing art history by introducing his intellectual content in a beguiling literary style praised by the art historian and museum direc- tor max schmid-burgk ( – ). muther’s geschichte der malerei im xix. jahrhundert was a seminal text that provided the rhetorical and logical frameworks for many modernist arguments in germany and beyond based on anti-academicism, autonomy, internationalism and naturalism. graphic satire played a minor but important part in the narrative of the geschichte der malerei im xix. jahrhundert. muther’s time as the con- servator of the königliche graphische sammlung (the king’s prints and drawings collection) from established him as an authority on this medium. as with the other artists featured in the text, gillray and rowlandson were seen by muther as having contributed to the develop- ment of internationalist modern art owing to their foregrounding of personal expression, another concept owed to springer. for muther, after the unfortunate retreat to classicism triggered by the tumult of the french revolution, the romantic caricaturists were distinctive in bravely seizing upon their modern subject matter for ‘the great draughts- men of the nineteenth century were the first who set themselves with their whole strength to bring modern life and all that it contained earn- estly and sincerely within the range of art’. muther’s bibliographies provide clear evidence of his research into the extant international art critical literature. nonetheless, the coverage of gillray and rowlandson matthew c. potter was uneven: of the monographic works muther listed on the napoleonic british caricaturists, rowlandson was the focus of only two, while gillray was represented by none, with thomas wright’s the works of james gillray ( ) a prominent omission. muther’s investigation of british political cartoons was admittedly brief, but in the english edition he added references to more marginal satirists, such as henry william bunbury ( – ) and also drew connections between rowlandson’s work and the ‘savage indignation of [jonathan] swift’. like wedeborn before him, muther found the universal comedic register important but felt there was a greater role for graphic satire to play in addressing the visual crisis of modernity. he introduced this in a section where he championed dürer’s ability to represent his times, for ‘the whole age is reflected in the engravings of this one artist with a truth and distinctness which put to shame those of the most laborious historian’ and noted how this had been lost in modern times, for ‘it was not until the beginning of the nineteenth century that this connection with the life of the present and the soil at home was lost to the art of painting’. muther believed that this erstwhile equilibrium could be restored via the nineteenth-century aesthetic movement with its rejection of the historicisms of the early- to mid-nineteenth century. eighteenth-century graphic satire also provided succour. not only did caricaturists such as gillray and rowlandson constitute ‘a power of political warfare of their time’ but muther wanted to retrieve them from aesthetic obscurity. muther believed that the original utility of these works was short-lived, for ‘the worst of it is that the interest excited by political caricature is always of a very ephemeral nature. the antagonism of [william] pitt [the younger] against [charles james] fox and [the earl of] shelburne against [edmund] burke, the avarice and stupidity of george iii, the [ act of] union, the conjugal troubles of the prince of wales, and the war with france seem very unimportant matters in these days’. muther passed over specific political meanings to emphasize their generic radical power. these cartoonists were ‘bold liberals who fought for the cause of freedom with a divine rage and a slashing irony, while, at the same time, they were masterly draughtsmen in a vehement and forceful style’. muther saw these artworks as influential levers in the struggle against oppression and assertion of true liberal ideals during the napoleonic period, and presumably also a timely inspiration for oppo- nents of the repressive and philistine cultural policies of the kaiserzeit. gillray did not receive the greatest attention in muther’s account, for ‘rowlandson, since he was not a pure politician, appeals to us in an intelligible language even after a hundred years have gone by. like hogarth, he was the antithesis of a humourist. something bitter and gloomily pessimistic runs through all he touches’. while the london und paris commentaries assessed the aesthetic merits of prints as well as their political meanings, muther gave greater emphasis to the for- mer task. additional distance in time presumably meant he felt justi- fied in leaving analysis of historical contexts to historians. muther’s bold liberals who fought for the cause of freedom reference to ‘humourists’ relates to victorian suppliers of more ano- dyne entertainment – john leech ( – ), charles keene ( – ), and george du maurier ( – ) – whom he treated later in the geschichte der malerei im xix. jahrhundert. indeed, when muther sur- veyed the nineteenth-century graphic art of germany he explicitly cited their lack of an equivalent to rowlandson, seeing johann adam klein ( – ) and johann christian erhard ( – ) as merely capable of nascent naturalism, and ludwig richter ( – ) as only achieving a ‘gemüth’ (hearty-feeling) comparable to leech. by con- trast, he found a darkness specifically in the humour of rowlandson which perhaps resonated with fin-de-siècle fashions for degeneracy nurtured by max nordau’s degeneration ( ). the unseemliness of late eighteenth-century satirists was in harmony with the atmos- phere at the close of the nineteenth century. the topsy-turvy nature of rowlandson’s vision was the key to his continued modern appeal, for while ‘he is brutal, with an inborn power and an indecorous coarseness. his laughter is loud and his cursing barbarous’ he made fun through ‘the simplest means’. rowlandson balanced ‘fat and thin, big and little, young wife and old husband, young husband and old wife, shying horse and helpless rider on a sunday out. or else he brings the physical and moral qualities of his figures into an absurd contrast’ with deaf musicians, bandy-legged dancing masters, preten- tious servants, absurdly coquettish old maids, drunken parsons, all receiving a fall from grace in the punchlines as in hogarth’s work, although rowlandson also provided insight into social history with other images that ‘represent the life of the people’. despite muther’s hagiographic treatment of rowlandson, gillray returned to the spotlight in the german author’s general assessment of british graphic satire. while rowlandson shared key characteristics with the latter-day victorian cartoonists, gillray represented a more consis- tently scathing oppositional spirit. muther noted how in georgian britain: people loved juicy delusions, exuberant power and stark rudeness. a broad, aristophanic laugh shook people to the core such that they appeared like epileptics. in the time when empire fashion came to england, gillray dared to portray some of london’s most famous beauties getting dressed in a manner in which even the beautiful and uninhibited madame tallien would not have indulged. muther was making complex allusions here to social satire and gillray’s oeuvre. it probably referred to the artist’s lampooning of female fashions for classical attire and extreme décolletage, visible in ladies dress, as it soon will be (january ) which in turn aped thérésa tallien’s personal style. it also invoked gillray’s notorious print showing tallien and joséphine de beauharnais (the future empress) dancing in a state of undress before paul barras (the leader of the directory), with napoleon stealing a glance from behind a curtain. muther did not illustrate either of these works in his text. he did, however, give a sense that he regretted the loss of something valuable as mores matthew c. potter changed, for ‘such things were no longer possible since england had grown out of its adolescence’, although the contemporary english trans- lation arguably better captured the implied meaning when it replaced ‘adolescence’ with ‘saucy youth’. as muther continued: since the time of gillray a complete change came over the spirit of english caricature. everything brutal or bitterly personal was abandoned. the clown put on his dress-clothes, and john bull became a gentleman … his disciples were indeed not caricaturists at all, and addressed themselves solely to a delicately poetic representation of subjects. they know neither rowlandson’s innate force and bitter laughter, nor the gallows humour and the savagery of hogarth; they are amiable and tenderly grave observers, and their drawings are not caricatures, but charming pictures of manners. muther’s account of the decline in british graphic satire chimes with the conclusions of later historians. the shift from savage rebukes and raucous outbursts to humorous observations and polite middle-class laughter is now universally recognized. the precise reason for muther’s attribution of more column width to rowlandson than gillray is, however, hard to ascertain. it may have been due to the greater simplicity of rowlandson’s visceral humour, but, more likely it was triggered by the less overtly political nature of his work, as previously noted. rowlandson’s cartoons would be more easily com- prehended by germans without the need for extensive explanations, and this played to muther’s generalist approach to imagery. nevertheless, gillray’s inspirational status amongst german copyists no doubt persuaded muther to maintain him, ultimately, as the lode- star in his narrative. muther’s geschichte der malerei was distinctive for its rich illustra- tions, an advantage not afforded to his predecessors. given the broad chronological parameters of his book, it is perhaps unsurprising that muther chose to illustrate only one work by a british cartoonist from the napoleonic age in the original german edition: rowlandson’s fight in an ale house (figure ). he did not include any provenance for the image so the collection from which he sourced the work is unknown. he also failed to discuss the image, deploying it as an undissected generic illustration. without the clues provided by textual analysis, the particular reasons for reproducing this image are elusive. it was possibly taken from his or another private collection for there is no record of the königliche graphische sammlung holding etch- ings by rowlandson or gillray at that time. muther may have selected it as representative of rowlandson’s oeuvre owing to its chao- tic combination of drink, gambling and threatened violence. the scene (which grego speculated was one of rowlandson’s best productions of the year, and a subject with which the cartoonist was ‘perfectly at home’) depicts a soldier losing at hazard (a dice game) to his oppo- nent (identified by dorothy george as a frenchman owing to his ponytail) – they are drawing pistols on each other whilst those around them wield various improvised weapons in order to participate in the dispute. given his admiration for the british contribution to modern art and his internationalist values, muther’s intention in including this bold liberals who fought for the cause of freedom image was surely not xenophobic. even so, it may perhaps partly have been his fear that english-language readers would accidentally impute a slight (that all britons were alcoholic gambling thugs) that led muther to supplement the illustrations for the translation. rowlandson’s a fight in an ale house was thus joined by gillray’s affability (figure ) and rowlandson’s harmony ( ), inserted as whole-page illustrations between the extant text on pages and respectively. again neither work was referred to in the letterpress. (royal) affability was illustrated by thomas wright and graham everitt, whose book featured in muther’s bibliography and may well have been where he saw the image first. wright explained how the image depicted george iii interviewing a rural inhabitant (an occupant of one of the smallholdings the king – ‘farmer george’ – established at windsor), but wright discussed neither gillray, rowlandson nor this work for they did ‘not fall within our definition of a “nineteenth century” satirist’ owing to the hatred and injustice in them. muther’s detached approach was therefore not without precedent. harmony was a partial reproduction of the duchess of devonshire and the countess of bessborough watercolour (with the musician removed from the composition), but it is unknown from where muther sourced the derivative print. muther’s decision to include examples of rowlandson’s water colour drawings (albeit engraved reproductions of these) is intri- guing as it hints at the growing trade in this aspect of the artist’s work. muther’s aversion to political content is further demonstrated figure . thomas rowlandson, der streit im wirtshaus (fight in an ale house a.k.a. a kick-up at a hazard table) (march ) illustrated in richard muther, geschichte der malerei im xix. jahrhundert ( ), : : private collection. matthew c. potter by his failure to refer to the duchess of devonshire, a prominent whig leader at the time. idealism, internationalism, national schools and naturalism: singer, de mont, and veth scholarly analysis of gillray and rowlandson continued beyond muther amongst art-writing circles in germany. hans wolfgang singer was born figure . james gillray, [royal] affability (february ), illustrated in richard muther, history of modern painting ( ), . : private collection. bold liberals who fought for the cause of freedom in new york but was educated and worked in germany. he studied in munich, leipzig and berlin, before settling in dresden, first, in , as directorial assistant then curator at the museum of prints and drawings, before becoming professor at the royal saxon polytechnical school in . it was from there that he made numerous observations about british art from a progressive perspective, especially in the künstlerlexicon ( – ), developed his expertise on black and white artworks with max lehrs at the dresden gallery’s kupferstich-kabinett (cabinet of prints, drawings and photographs), and also wrote for british journals about german art topics. in an article on international poster art for the berlin art magazine pan, singer indulged in an art historical digression which compared the british and continental artistic schools and their aesthetic motivations. singer felt that ‘english artists’ were prone to ‘simplification’ and ‘stylization’ in their works, and that ‘the principle of “nature is the only teacher” has never been so highly esteemed as on the continent’ while ‘“truth”’ or ‘the conscientious faith in nature’ had never been promoted by british artists. singer believed that british art was characterized by artifice and arabesque patterns, for ‘the “pre-raphaelites”, decorative artists of the type of walter crane, and the most subjective masters of caricature such as leech, gillray and others, valued the rhythmic play of lines over natural forms, and self-consciously arbitrary harmonies of colours over every-day sunlight’. britain’s graphic satire tradition was seen by singer as conforming to the aesthetic principles of its national school, with subjectivity and idealism dominating its practice, in contrast to the objectivity and naturalism of the german school. interestingly, this ran counter to british narratives for the formation of their national visual cultural identity. idyllic landscape naturalism was adopted as a conceptual framework of political economy not only by john ruskin in modern painters ii ( ) and lectures on art ( ) but also by richard and samuel redgrave in a century of painters of the english school ( ). german-language interventions on gillray and rowlandson were not only produced by german critics. art writers from the low countries also played a significant role as internationalist go-betweens in the fin-de-siècle german reception. theirhistorical connections with britain and germany placed them in a perfect position to bridge the critical gap between the two nations. charles polydore de mont was one such figure. he was a flemish poet and curator who was appointed as the director of the museum of fine arts in antwerp in . de mont’s liberalism manifested in several ways that had national and international impact. his long-standing activism on behalf of the flemish movement at home caused trouble with the church and the establishment, whilst his fund-raising in for the boers in south africa was problematic for anglo-dutch relations: thedifficulties thesecaused him as a public servant led to his resignation in from the museum. in his article on james ensor for the viennese journal, die graphischen künste, de mont described how the belgian artist shared affinities with foreign artists, including the colourism of franz hals, the fantasy of hieronymous bosch, and the dream- ing poetry of goya and turner, and how he was ‘a ruthless caricaturist like gillray or rowlandson’. the graphic satire of the napoleonic cartoonists matthew c. potter was particu-larly useful to de mont in promoting his internationalist and oppositional agendas. he attributed ensor’s syntheticism to his dual national origins, enjoying the ‘exuberance of a southern dutchman and the phlegm of a british man’ through his english father and flemish mother. his paternal line gave him ‘his cold-blooded mockery, his talent to see and imagine every- thing as an injustice, his talent as a caricaturist’, and formed a direct line of visual cultural genealogical descent. de mont went on to exclaim that ‘here you can see the great-grandson of gillray and rowlandson again’, and ‘how successfully he parodies the parades, triumphal entries and other so-called patriotic events in an inimitable and funny way!’ such allusions were rhetorical, and a more literal connection was neither proved nor necessary. the international currency and significance of the british cartoon-ists of the georgian era was demonstrable by such effortless gambits, and de mont felt no reticence in abandoning the safer ground of canonical art history in order to conjure with the names of gillray and rowlandson as apt predecessors of a modern misanthropic artist such as ensor. several years later a dutch writer, jan veth, treated british graphic satire even more directly in two articles for the progressive berlin maga- zine kunst und künstler ( – ). veth was a painter, poet, art critic and later professor extraordinary in history of art and aesthetics at the rijksakademie voor beeldende kunsten in amsterdam. as with muther before him, veth sharply contrasted the british satirical cartoo- nists of the brash napoleonic and staid victorian eras. in april , for example, he noted how ‘keene did not possess the brutal grasp of a rowlandson, gillray or [george] cruikshank’ but relied more upon observational comedy. veth used similar dualism to singer – natural- ism versus idealism – although in his case he did so in order to set georgian fancy against keene’s prosaic decorum, for the latter’s self- proclaimed methodical ‘formula’ was to ‘draw things the way you see them’. given the prominence that rowlandson enjoyed in muther’s narrative, interestingly, he was the only napoleonic cartoonist to receive a monographic article in germany during the fin de siècle. in that piece, veth argued for a paradoxical art historical significance for that ‘mocker of the great napoleon’, for: even if the many caricatures by his hand are only of moderate interest in the long run owing to the monotony of their rugged tendencies, it certainly remains characteristic that bonaparte’s furious challenger, especially by the very nature of his art beyond caricature, is the strangest antagonist of that empire style, which prescribed regulations for a whole epoch. for rowlandson was born the opponent of everything which can be called law or rule or demonstrable principle. veth believed that rowlandson and his art were the acme of the romantic genius of the time, opposing the neo-classicism of jacques louis david and his followers, echoing muther’s earlier judgement. the issue of the ephemerality of rowlandson’s art was germane for veth. he may have judged that its ‘moderate interest’ to modern eyes owed as much to its outdated political references as to its repetitive formal morphology, but he believed that there was nevertheless bold liberals who fought for the cause of freedom a transcendent value in rowlandson’s cartoons, ‘the sight of which is still invigorating, amusing and liberating for us’, owing to their ability to stage a scene simply and amusingly. the satirist was a ‘funny buccan- eer classic in his way’ who was ‘gruff, sometimes a little mannered, and not infrequently almost too burlesque; but free of any tameness’. the language that veth employed to describe the artist emphasized repeat- edly his nervous energy. he referred to ‘rowlandson’s restless drawing art’, his ‘volcanic’ nature, the apparent ‘constant liveliness through all his drawing’, and how ‘turmoil and restlessness are his favourite spheres, and sometimes it is as if he regarded life as an eternal carnival’. the visceral and tantalizing characteristics of rowlandson’s art had a special charm for veth, suggesting to him a peculiarly evoca- tive, fanciful, and creative genius: with rowlandson you can feel that this road beyond the turn goes even further, that there is new life behind every corner, that through this picturesque gate you will reach a city with spacious squares and all sorts of surprises, that men dwell behind the windows in the streets which he draws, that behind this hill a valley extends, that behind every tree the heavens spread out. his tree trunks appear to be rooted in the soil, the branches are eagerly reaching out into the open, and the tufts of leaves, loosely planted in a tree, seem to breathe fertility and to sway in the gentle breeze. it is quite possible that veth, while not referencing them, was doffing his cap to the redgraves and their observations on the romantic genius of british landscape painting – drawing a line of continuity between thomas gainsborough’s landscapes and portraits, and those of rowlandson, with the dual intention of elevating the latter’s art historical status. rowlandson’s ‘physicality in his outlook on life’ was tempered by a ‘mental grasp’ of the literature of henry fielding ( – ) and oliver goldsmith ( – ), demonstrable in his idyllic drawing of the church, promenade (presumably the vicar’s family on their road to church, , illustrating goldsmith’s the vicar of wakefield, ). his ‘electrified’ sketch of the cockpit, from the collection of the berlin art dealers and print sellers amsler and ruthardt (active – ), was thought by veth to be ‘sump- tuously daring’ and equal to ‘a daumier or goya’ (figure ). the cockpit was another case of german-language commentators choosing to illustrate exam- ples of rowlandson’s social observation rather than his political satire. meanwhile, veth extended his art-historical comparisons to link rowlandson to golden age artists from the low countries owing to their mastery and invention in the two fields of landscape and genre painting, including the dutch artists pieter brueghel the elder ( – ), adriaen brouwer ( – ), adriaen van ostade ( – ), aelbert cuyp ( – ), jan steen ( – ), and willem van de velde ( – ), and the flemish artists peter paul rubens ( – ) and jacob jordaens ( – ). despite the potential validity of these parallels, such a heavy-handed deploy- ment of these masters spoke no doubt of his pride in the art-historical legacy of his own nation, and furthermore was part of a counter move against the contemporaneous german attempts at cultural colonization evident in julius langbehn’s rembrandt als erzieher (rembrandt as educator) ( ) and moves to ‘germanize’ vincent van gogh. however, internationalist and nationalist matthew c. potter agendas were not always diametrically opposed. veth possessed further intellectual connections to germany. his theory of gemeenschapskunst (com- munity art) drew upon richard wagner’s development of k.f.e. trahndorf’s concept of the gesamtkunstwerk (total art work: ), yet, veth subverted the transformative political effect of individual artists upon the (the volk) people in order to give greater emphasis to how artworks reflected the communal values of the societies that produced them. conclusion this article has demonstrated how british graphic satire from the napoleonic period received renewed attention in fin-de-siècle germany. as art-historical research grew, so british graphic satire came under increasing scrutiny. an awareness formed of the distinc- tions that existed between the later victorian polite social satirists and their earlier more savage georgian counterparts, who indulged in more political fare. even so, greater formal analysis of individual works tended to focus on images that were generically funny rather than reliant upon specific knowledge of their political subjects. deeper political values were nevertheless identified in these artworks by lib- eral critics. muther lamented the passing of an age of vibrant and at times ‘saucy’ censoriousness, and while he did not wish to use the artists as kindling for revolt or revolution, he did wish to encourage by their example the capacity for intelligent criticism in his own age of cultural conservatism and anti-modernism. individual aesthetic figure . thomas rowlandson, the cockpit (no date), illustrated in jan veth, ‘thomas rowlandson’, kunst und künstler, : (october ), : heidelberg university library, c - folio. bold liberals who fought for the cause of freedom principles often generated divergent readings on particular points amongst the liberal german-language writers on the topic of gillray and rowlandson. these were usually in alignment with personal political agendas. while singer constructed a narrative for british art that placed graphic satirists alongside their romantic artistic country- men as idealists (consistent with muther’s arguments but at odds with the perspective of the british redgraves), veth found that the natural- ism of rowlandson’s romantic landscapes constituted an essential connection with his own homeland and its art history. there was, however, a consensus amongst all the critics surveyed here from germany and the low countries regarding the internationalist agen- das they promoted in their treatment of this material. the ability of the works of gillray and rowlandson to speak to critics across national borders and over expanses of time provides ample evidence of the powerful liberal messages that could be read in their work by later audiences. even if the specific political situations that had first spawned these cartoons had since passed and modern anglo- german diplomatic antagonisms were on the rise at the dawn of the twentieth century, the capacity of british napoleonic graphic satire to produce humorous effects, promote positive values of international- ism, and encourage public accountability remained obvious to german-language critics between and . muther, singer, de mont and veth were thus ‘bold liberals who fought for the cause of freedom’ in a similar manner to the british graphic artists whom they celebrated in their writings. disclosure statement no potential conflict of interest was reported by the author. notes . clayton, ‘the london printsellers’, , . . baker, the business of satirical prints, ; clayton, ‘the london printsellers’, – , , . . goldstein, censorship of political caricature, , – ; mainardi, another world, , , . . clark, zeitgeist and zerrbild, . . ibid., – . . ibid., – . . donald, the age of caricature, . . clayton, ‘the london printsellers’, . . banerji and donald, gillray observed, , – , , , , , – , , , . . ibid., – : quoting frederick a. wendeborn, a view of england towards the close of the eighteenth century (london: g.g.j. and j. robinson, : vols.), : – ; clark, english society – , ; clark, zeitgeist and zerrbild : gillray frequently labelled his figures to ease identification. gillray’s german copyists did not always transcribe such marginalia, however, for the names were mostly meaningless to their audience. . wright and evans, caricatures of james gillray, xic, i, . . turner, ‘collections of british satirical prints’, . . feuchtwanger, imperial germany – , ; schulz-hoffmann, ‘zur geschichte der illustrierten satirischen zeitschrift’, – and sailer, ‘glanz und elend des simplicissimus’, – . . kunzle, the history of the comic strip, ; maidment, comedy, caricature and the social order, . . lenman, artists and society in germany – , ; kuhlemann, ‘the celebration of dürer’, see also – . matthew c. potter . lenman, artists and society in germany, – ; paret, art as history, – ; kugler, handbuch der geschichte der malerei, . . lewis, art for all?, , , – ; schulz-hoffmann, et al., simplicissimus, – , – . . potter, the inspirational genius of germany, . . belting, the germans and their art, ; schiff, ‘introduction’, german essays on art history, xxxviii. . dalle vacche, ‘introduction’, the visual turn, . . belting, the germans and their art, – . . lenman, artists and society in germany, . . blackbourn, ‘the discrete charm of the bourgeoisie’, . . geppert and gerwarth, ‘introduction’, and blackbourn, ‘“as dependent on each other as man and wife”’, in geppert and gerwarth, wilhelmine germany and edwardian britain, – , – , . . paret, ‘the tschudi affair,’ – ; paul, hugo von tschudi; hohenzollern and schuster, manet bis van gogh. . lenman, artists and society in germany, . . matelowski, die berliner secession – ; west, the visual arts in germany, , . . makela, the munich secession, – , . . ibid., xvii, . . segel, turn-of-the-century cabaret, – , ; jelavich, berlin cabaret, vii, . . segel, turn-of-the-century cabaret, , – . . ibid., – , : see rowe, representing berlin on the prominence of sexual over political contents. . schleinitz, richard muther, – . . podro, the critical historians of art, xxiv, , – . . jensen, marketing modernism, – ; schleinitz, richard muther, , – , n . . holt, the expanding world of art, - ; lenman, artists and society in germany, , n ; anon., ‘die münchener ausstellungen’, – ; see also pecht, ‘die münchener ausstellungen von ´, : where pecht compared jules bastien-lepage with fritz von uhde as painters of shepherdesses. pecht believed uhde was superior as a ‘born painter, not merely drilled’ nor misled by theory. presumably nationalistic prejudices motivated his perception of the superiority of german naturalism over similar french artistic practice. . muther quoted in schleinitz, richard muther, . . lenman, artists and society in germany, . . johnson, the memory factory, – ; kultermann, the history of art history, . . schleinitz, richard muther, – , , , , see also – . . jensen, marketing modernism, . . schleinitz, richard muther, . . muther, geschichte der malerei im xix. jahrhundert, : ; muther, the history of modern painting, : . . schleinitz, richard muther, . . muther, geschichte der malerei im xix. jahrhundert, : : the works cited were grego, rowlandson, , and stephens ‘thomas rowlandson the humourist’, . . muther, the history of modern painting, : . . ibid., : - : translating muther, geschichte der malerei im xix. jahrhundert, : – . . muther, the history of modern painting, : ; muther, geschichte der malerei im xix. jahrhundert, : : refers incorrectly to the ‘madness of george ii’ [‘die dummheit georgs ii.‘]. . ibid. . muther, the history of modern painting, : : translating muther, geschichte der malereiim xix. jahrhundert, : . . muther, geschichte der malerei im xix. jahrhundert, : – ; muther, the history of modern painting, : – . . ledger and luckhurst, the fin de siècle, , . . muther, the history of modern painting, : : accurately translating muther, geschichte der malerei im xix. jahrhundert, : – . . muther, the history of modern painting, : : translating muther, geschichte der malerei im xix. jahrhundert, : . . muther, geschichte der malerei im xix. jahrhundert, : : author’s translation: the original german is: ‘man liebte saftige zoten, überschäumende kraft und unverhüllte derbheit. ein breites, aristopha- nisches lachen durchschüttelt die menschen, so dass sie wie epileptiker aussehen. in der zeit, als die empiremode nach england kam, konnte gillray wagen, einige der bekanntesten londoner schönheiten unter voller porträtähnlichkeit in einer toilette darzustellen, wie sie ungeni[e]rter die schöngewachsene bold liberals who fought for the cause of freedom madame tallien nicht hätte tragen dürfen.’ muther, the history of modern painting, : : translated this passage as ‘there was a delight in a juicy ribaldry, effervescing power, and a coarseness that was unveiled. men were shaken by a broad aristophanic laughter till they seemed like epileptics. at the time when the empire style came into england, gillray could dare to represent by speaking likenesses some of the best-known london beauties, in a toilette which the well-grown madame tallien could not have worn with greater coolness. such things were no longer possible when england grew out of her saucy youth.’ . https://www.britishmuseum.org/research/collection_online/collection_object_details.aspx? objectid= , , &partid= &searchtext=tallien&page= . . http://www.britishmuseum.org/research/collection_online/collection_object_details.aspx? objectid= &partid= &searchtext=gillray+occupations&page= . . muther, geschichte der malerei im xix. jahrhundert, : : ‘solche dinge waren, seitdem england aus den flegeljahren herausgetreten, nicht mehr möglich’; muther, the history of modern painting, : . . ibid. . schleinitz, richard muther, . . the author is grateful to michael grassl and sabine wölfel at the staatliche graphische sammlung münchen, which now incorporates the königliche graphische sammlung, for this infor- mation. the first graphic work by either artist to appear in the collection was a feather drawing by rowlandson of a drawing room scene which was acquired seventeen years after muther’s volume was published (inv.no. : ). . grego, thomas rowlandson, the caricaturist, : , ; george, catalogue of prints and drawings in the british museum, : – . . wright, the works of james gillray, ; everitt, english caricaturists and graphic humourists of the nineteenth century, – . . hargraves, ‘georgiana, duchess of devonshire’, , pl. . . betthausen, ‘singer, hans wolfgang’, – . . ibid., ; potter, the inspirational genius of germany, ; lenman, artists and society in germany, . . singer, ‘plakatkunst’, : author’s translation. . ibid. . helsinger, ‘ruskin and the politics of viewing,’ ; ruskin, ‘lectures on art ( )’, ; cheetham, artwriting, nation, and cosmopolitanism in britain, ; codell, ‘righting the victorian artist: the redgraves’, – . . galle, ‘pol de mont of het noodlot van de factotum’, ; beyen, held voor alle werk, , , ; schoeman, brothers in arms, . . de mont, ‘die graphische künste im heutigen belgien und ihre meister’, – : author’s translation. . ibid. . ibid., , . . feist and feist, eds., kunst und künstler, – ; paret, ‘review’, – . . http://www.dwc.knaw.nl/biografie/pmknaw/?pagetype=authordetail&aid=pe . . veth, ‘charles keene, – ´, : author’s translation. . ibid. . veth, ‘thomas rowlandson’, a: author’s translation. . ibid., a, a. . ibid., a-b. . ibid., b, b. . ibid., a. . redgrave, a century of painters of the english school, : , . . veth, ‘thomas rowlandson’, b. . ibid.: possibly a preparatory sketch for the royal cockpit or a pastiche of hogarth’s etching of the same subject, see: http://www.britishmuseum.org/research/search_the_collection_database/ term_details.aspx?bioid= ; thomas rowlandson, microcosm of london ( ), plate : https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/ ; william hogarth, the cockpit ( ), royal academy of arts, london: https://www.royalacademy.org.uk/art-artists/work-of-art/the- cockpit. . veth, ‘thomas rowlandson’, b– a. . stern, the politics of cultural despair, , , , – ; potter, the inspirational genius of germany, , , . . maas, ‘a pragmatic intellectual: dutch fabians, boekman and cultural policy in the netherlands, – , ; lajosi, ‘wagner and the (re)mediation of art’, – , – ; see also brown, the quest for the gesamtkunstwerk and richard wagner. matthew c. potter https://www.britishmuseum.org/research/collection_online/collection_object_details.aspx?objectid= , , % partid= % searchtext=tallien% page= https://www.britishmuseum.org/research/collection_online/collection_object_details.aspx?objectid= , , % partid= % searchtext=tallien% page= http://www.britishmuseum.org/research/collection_online/collection_object_details.aspx?objectid= % partid= % searchtext=gillray+occupations% page= http://www.britishmuseum.org/research/collection_online/collection_object_details.aspx?objectid= % partid= % searchtext=gillray+occupations% page= http://www.dwc.knaw.nl/biografie/pmknaw/?pagetype=authordetail% aid=pe http://www.britishmuseum.org/research/search_the_collection_database/term_details.aspx?bioid= ; http://www.britishmuseum.org/research/search_the_collection_database/term_details.aspx?bioid= ; https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/ ; https://www.royalacademy.org.uk/art-artists/work-of-art/the-cockpit https://www.royalacademy.org.uk/art-artists/work-of-art/the-cockpit orcid matthew c. potter http://orcid.org/ - - - bibliography anon. “die münchener ausstellungen.” kunstchronik , no. 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( ): – . hohenzollern, j. g., and p.-k. schuster. manet bis van gogh: hugo von tschudi und der kampf um die moderne. munich: prestel, . holt, e. g. the expanding world of art, – . new haven and london: yale university press, . jelavich, p. berlin cabaret. cambridge, ma: harvard university press, . jensen, r. marketing modernism in fin-de-siècle europe. princeton: princeton university press, . johnson, j. m. the memory factory: the forgotten women artists of vienna . west lafayette, in: purdue university press, . kugler, f., and j. burckhardt, ed.. handbuch der geschichte der malerei seit constantin dem grossen. berlin: duncker and humblot, . kuhlemann, u. “the celebration of dürer in germany during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.” in albrecht dürer and his legacy: the graphic work of a renaissance artist, edited by giulia bartrum et al., – . princeton, nj: princeton university press and british museum press, . kultermann, u. the history of art history. new york: abaris, . kunzle, d. the history of the comic strip – the nineteenth century. berkeley: university of california press, . lajosi, k. “wagner and the (re)mediation of art: gesamtkunstwerk and nineteenth-century theories of media.” frame , no. 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(february – march, ): – . stephens, f. g. “thomas rowlandson the humourist.” portfolio (july, ): – . stern, f. the politics of cultural despair: a study in the rise of the german ideology. berkeley: university of california press, . banerji, c., and d. donald, tr. and eds.. gillray observed: the earliest account of his caricatures in london und paris. cambridge: cambridge university press, . turner, s. “collections of british satirical prints in england and america.” journal of the history of collections , no. ( ): – . veth, j. “charles keene, – .” kunst und künstler: illustrierte monatsschrift für bildende kunst und kunstgewerbe , no. (april, ): – . veth, j. “thomas rowlandson.” kunst und künstler: illustrierte monatsschrift für bildende kunst und kunstgewerbe , no. (october, ): – . west, s. the visual arts in germany – . utopia and despair. manchester: manchester university press, . wright, t. the works of james gillray, the caricaturist; with the history of his life and times. london: chatto and windus, . bold liberals who fought for the cause of freedom wright, t., and r. h. evans. historical and descriptive account of the caricatures of james gillray. london: henry g. bohn, . matthew c. potter is an associate professor and reader in art and design history at northumbria university, uk. his research focuses on national identities in visual culture, especially in the period to , in connection with themes of international cultural exchange, art and empire, art and history, and histories of art education. his publications include the inspirational genius of germany: british art and germanism, – (manchester university press, ); british art for australia: the acquisition of artworks from the united kingdom by australian national galleries, – (routledge, ); and he edited the concept of the ‘master’ in art education in britain and ireland, to the present (ashgate, ). matthew c. potter 	abstract 	the first age of reception, – 	graphic satire in germany – 	agerman renaissance of interest in british napoleonic cartoons ( – ) 	richard muther and the geschichte der malerei im xix. jahrhundert ( – ) 	idealism, internationalism, national schools and naturalism: singer, de mont, and veth 	conclusion 	disclosure statement 	notes 	bibliography 	notes on contributor [pdf] classification of lead white pigments using synchrotron radiation micro x-ray diffraction | semantic scholar skip to search formskip to main content> semantic scholar's logo search sign increate free account you are currently offline. some features of the site may not work correctly. 	doi: . /s - - - corpus id: classification of lead white pigments using synchrotron radiation micro x-ray diffraction @article{welcomme classificationol, title={classification of lead white pigments using synchrotron radiation micro x-ray diffraction}, author={e. welcomme and p. walter and p. bleuet and j. hodeau and e. dooryh{\'e}e and p. martinetto and m. menu}, journal={applied physics a}, year={ }, volume={ }, pages={ - } } 	e. welcomme, p. walter, + authors m. menu 	published 	art 	applied physics a lead white pigment was used and synthesised for cosmetic and artistic purposes since the antiquity. ancient texts describe the various recipes, and preparation processes as well as locations of production. in this study, we describe the results achieved on several paint samples taken from matthias grünewald’s works. grünewald, who was active between and , was a major painter at the beginning of the german renaissance. thanks to x-ray diffraction analysis using synchrotron radiation, it… expand view on springer moodle.epfl.ch save to library create alert cite launch research feed share this paper citationsbackground citations results citations view all figures from this paper 	 figure citations citation type citation type 	all types 	cites results 	cites methods 	cites background has pdf publication type author more filters more filters filters sort by relevance sort by most influenced papers sort by citation count sort by recency composition and microstructure of the lead white pigment in masters paintings using hr synchrotron xrd 	v. gonzalez, t. calligaro, g. wallez, m. eveno, k. toussaint, m. menu 	materials science 	 	 save alert research feed plumbonacrite identified by x-ray powder diffraction tomography as a missing link during degradation of red lead in a van gogh painting. 	f. vanmeert, g. van der snickt, k. janssens 	chemistry, medicine 	angewandte chemie 	 	 	pdf save alert research feed macroscopic x-ray powder diffraction imaging reveals vermeer’s discriminating use of lead white pigments in girl with a pearl earring 	s. de meyer, f. vanmeert, + authors k. janssens 	materials science, medicine 	science advances 	 	 	pdf 	view excerpt save alert research feed leonardo da vinci’s drapery studies: characterization of lead white pigments by µ-xrd and d scanning xrf 	v. gonzalez, t. calligaro, l. pichon, g. wallez, b. mottin 	materials science 	 	 save alert research feed revealing the origin and history of lead-white pigments by their photoluminescence properties. 	v. gonzalez, d. gourier, t. calligaro, k. toussaint, g. wallez, m. menu 	chemistry, medicine 	analytical chemistry 	 	 save alert research feed compositional study of prehistoric pigments "carriqueo rock shelter, argentina… by synchrotron radiation x-ray diffraction 	c. vazquez, o. palacios, l. darchuk, lué-merú marcó parra 	geology 	 	 save alert research feed xrf, μ-xrd and μ-spectroscopic techniques for revealing the composition and structure of paint layers on polychrome sculptures after multiple restorations. 	m. l. franquelo, a. durán, j. castaing, d. arquillo, j. pérez-rodríguez 	chemistry, medicine 	talanta 	 	 save alert research feed applications of synchrotron-based micro-imaging techniques to the chemical analysis of ancient paintings 	m. cotte, j. susini, + authors p. walter 	engineering 	 	 	pdf save alert research feed investigation on the process of lead white blackening by raman spectroscopy, xrd and other methods: study of cimabue's paintings in assisi 	m. vagnini, r. vivani, + authors c. miliani 	materials science 	 	 save alert research feed synchrotron methods: color in paints and minerals 	i. reiche, e. chalmin 	art 	 	 save alert research feed ... ... references showing - of references sort byrelevance most influenced papers recency investigation of white pigments used as make-up during the greco-roman period 	e. welcomme, p. walter, e. van elslande, g. tsoucaris 	chemistry 	 	 save alert research feed identification of copper-based green pigments in jaume huguet's gothic altarpieces by fourier transform infrared microspectroscopy and synchrotron radiation x-ray diffraction. 	n. salvadó, t. pradell, + authors m. vendrell-saz 	chemistry, medicine 	journal of synchrotron radiation 	 	 save alert research feed the presence of antimony in some grey colours of three paintings by correggio 	m. ferretti, g. guidi, p. moioli, r. scafè, c. seccaroni 	art 	 	 save alert research feed synthetic hydro­cerussite, pbco ·pb(oh) , by x‐ray powder diffraction 	p. martinetto, m. anne, e. dooryhée, p. walter, g. tsoucaris 	chemistry 	 	 save alert research feed id : a multitechnique hard x-ray microprobe beamline at the european synchrotron radiation facility. 	a. somogyi, r. tucoulou, + authors a. simionovici 	medicine 	journal of synchrotron radiation 	 	 	pdf save alert research feed id f: a new micro-x-ray fluorescence end-station at the european synchrotron radiation facility (esrf): preliminary results 	a. somogyi, m. drakopoulos, + authors f. adams 	chemistry 	 	 save alert research feed e.s.d.'s and estimated probable error obtained in rietveld refinements with local correlations 	j.-f. bérar, p. lelann 	chemistry 	 	 save alert research feed mfit: multiple spectra fitting program 	a. hammersley, c. riekel 	materials science 	 	 save alert research feed catalog of “bayerische landesausstellung, aschaffenburg / 	augsburg 	 artemis-software for generating elemental maps using x-ray fluorescence spectra, european synchrotron radiation facility 	 ... ... related papers 	abstract 	figures 	 citations 	 references 	related papers stay connected with semantic scholar sign up about semantic scholar semantic scholar is a free, ai-powered research tool for scientific literature, based at the allen institute for ai. learn more → resources datasetssupp.aiapiopen corpus organization about usresearchpublishing partnersdata partners   faqcontact proudly built by ai with the help of our collaborators terms of service•privacy policy the allen institute for ai by clicking accept or continuing to use the site, you agree to the terms outlined in our privacy policy, terms of service, and dataset license accept & continue gary tomlinson. music in renaissance magic: toward a historiography of others. chicago and london: university of chicago press, . xvi,  pp. isbn - - - (hardcover) all rights reserved © canadian university music society / société de musique des universités canadiennes, ce document est protégé par la loi sur le droit d’auteur. l’utilisation des services d’Érudit (y compris la reproduction) est assujettie à sa politique d’utilisation que vous pouvez consulter en ligne. https://apropos.erudit.org/fr/usagers/politique-dutilisation/ cet article est diffusé et préservé par Érudit. Érudit est un consortium interuniversitaire sans but lucratif composé de l’université de montréal, l’université laval et l’université du québec à montréal. il a pour mission la promotion et la valorisation de la recherche. https://www.erudit.org/fr/ document généré le avr. : canadian university music review revue de musique des universités canadiennes gary tomlinson. music in renaissance magic: toward a historiography of others. chicago and london: university of chicago press, . xvi, pp. isbn - - - (hardcover) gordon e. smith numéro , uri : https://id.erudit.org/iderudit/ ar doi : https://doi.org/ . / ar aller au sommaire du numéro Éditeur(s) canadian university music society / société de musique des universités canadiennes issn - (imprimé) - (numérique) découvrir la revue citer ce compte rendu smith, g. e. ( ). compte rendu de [gary tomlinson. music in renaissance magic: toward a historiography of others. chicago and london: university of chicago press, . xvi, pp. isbn - - - (hardcover)]. canadian university music review / revue de musique des universités canadiennes,( ), – . https://doi.org/ . / ar https://apropos.erudit.org/fr/usagers/politique-dutilisation/ https://www.erudit.org/fr/ https://www.erudit.org/fr/ https://www.erudit.org/fr/revues/cumr/ https://id.erudit.org/iderudit/ ar https://doi.org/ . / ar https://www.erudit.org/fr/revues/cumr/ -n -cumr / https://www.erudit.org/fr/revues/cumr/ ( ) authorized by augustine and jerome, what greater advantage could an instru- ment have in providing a festive sound on occasion. this book is the first in a series, cambridge studies in medieval and renaissance music, and with its mastery of detail and its thorough treatment of various aspects of instrument building and music theory, will interest a wider range of readers than students of organs and organ music. william wright gary tomlinson. music in renaissance magic: toward a historiography of others. chicago and london: university of chicago press, . xvi, pp. isbn - - - (hardcover). in a recent article by bruno nettl entitled "the dual nature of ethnomusicology in north america: the contributions of charles seeger and george herzog," the author comments that american ethnomusicologists tend to think of their work in dualisms - sound and context, anthropology and musicology, theory and application. in the last several decades, which have seen the institution- alization of ethnomusicology in the north american academy, ethnomusic- ology has exerted varying kinds of influence on historical musicology; a heightened awareness and need on the part of scholars to consider seriously social and cultural factors is an example. notwithstanding some historic tensions between the two disciplines, there is an emerging corpus of research in which attitudes and critical methods from both historical musicology and ethnomusicology are combined in innovative ways. some of these resonate with and extend nettl's dualisms: one of the most striking is relationships between the interpreter and the interpreted, and questions of "otherness" and "difference." gary tomlinson's recent book is a case in point. in tomlinson's text, the discussion is constructed elegantly and with scholarly thoroughness around the dualism of hermeneutic and archaeological levels of interpretation. a historical musicologist at the university of pennsylvania, tomlinson is known for his doctoral dissertation (ucla ) on the humanist heritage of early opera, several related articles, monteverdi and the end of the renaissance ( ), and, of course, music in renaissance magic. these writings have earned for tomlinson a deserved reputation as a distinguished renaissance specialist. a close reading of music in renaissance magic shows tomlinson bruno nettl, "the dual nature of ethnomusicology in north america: the contributions of charles seeger and george herzog," comparative musicology and anthropology of music, ed. bruno nettl and philip v. bohlman (chicago: university of chicago press, ), . cumr/rmuc to be thoroughly coherent in other large and difficult domains as well, notably that of critical theory (anthropology, linguistics, and philosophy), and related concepts of historiography. as much as music in renaissance magic is about a historical topic, namely music and its relationships to magic (and vice versa) in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, its subject is much broader and inclusive of issues and ideas tomlinson feels have been left aside in renaissance studies, largely because of the traditional eurocentricity of historical musicology. in the opening paragraph of the book's preface, tomlinson expresses the hope that "the book will appeal both to students of renaissance and early-modern culture and to those writers in various disciplines who are fostering new, postobject- ivist historical approaches" (ix). music in renaissance magic is divided into eight chapters, a preface, and an appendix in which tomlinson provides longer originals of primary source quotations cited in the text. the book is framed by two chapters entitled "approaching others (thoughts before writing)" (chapter ) and "believing others (thoughts upon writing") (chapter ). in chapters to tomlinson explores in detail ideas and concepts in theoretical, largely philosophical sources on musical magic. chapter is a discussion of two monteverdi pieces in which the author applies some of the notions explored in the earlier sections of the book in these two specific musical contexts. in an overall structural sense, the book can be read as a series of essays as well as a continuous narrative; indeed, tomlinson suggests this several times in the text with references to the book's "essays" (e.g. p. ). the chapter that stands apart most - at least in the view of this reader - is the opening one in which tomlinson discusses the critical apparatus upon which the book is based. as he points out in the preface, his discussion throughout the book moves on two separate, but connected levels: the archaeological and the hermeneutic: "... in this dual motion the book constructs two distinct (if ultimately inseparable) varieties of meaning in the cultural traces it treats" (ix). for tomlinson, "hermeneutic" is concerned with interpretations of texts that form hypotheses of their authors' conscious or unconscious meanings, as well as the construction of hypotheses about relationships between texts and traditions of writing. the term hermeneutic "signals an engagement in the conventional activities of cultural history and the history of ideas" (x), an engagement tomlinson maintains has dominated writing in historical musicol- ogy. in chapter , with effective and succinct references to appropriate critical literature (heidegger, gadamer, ricoeur, and bahktin), tomlinson advocates extending hermeneutics beyond content of ideas and subject interpreting object, to include intersubjective, dialogical interpretation. "archaeology," the other part of tomlinson's methodological dualism, ( ) derives from foucault (the order of things: an archaeology of the human sciences, ; the archaeology of knowledge and the discourse on lan- guage, ) and involves seeking hidden structures of ideas. tomlinson observes that "archaeological history differs from hermeneutic history in that it takes us beneath questions of authorial intent and intertextuality to the grid of meaningfulness that constrains and conditions a discourse or social practice" (x). conversely, and a crucial point in tomlinson's equation, is that archaeol- ogy also includes, and indeed, "welcomes" the dialogical impulse. in chapter tomlinson discusses implications of the hermeneutic/archaeological dual- ism first with a review of recent trends in anthropology ("anthropology and its discontents"), emphasizing (with reference to the work of james clifford and bernard mcgrane) the theme of critical self-consciousness that has come to dominate ethnographic research. tomlinson then proceeds to examine magic in sources on renaissance history and philosophy, and anthropology (i.e. todorov, tambiah, dodds, lloyd, walker, allen, said). in this discussion, and indeed, throughout the book, tomlinson highlights the idea of "lopsided cultural hegemony" that dominates much writing on renaissance culture. his position is that intersections between music and magic are of fundamental significance in gaining understanding of human history in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries - certainly much more than many writers have led us to believe. in tomlinson's view, no where has this hegemonic lopsidedness been more prevalent than in musicology. tomlinson notes that, despite charles seeger's admonition in which seeger warned scholars not to view one's own brand of music or musicology as the only one, "the fallacy of synecdoche pervades musicoiogical constructions of renaissance culture ... music historians have made the renaissance their own, appropriating it with an aggressiveness that seems at times to obscure all but its most easily recognisable aspects" ( ). this hegemonic stance was apparent in the early years of the discipline (e.g. guido adler's proclamation that music developed from simple to complex, inferior to superior, bad to good), the discovery of bach (and other composers such as handel, schutz, palestrina, lassus, victoria) in the nineteenth century, the subsequent progeny of editions of such composers' music, and perhaps, most significant, the so-called "great" composer notion that has dominated decades of scholarly writing on music in our century. tomlinson comments that, although much of the dominant bad-to-good evaluation in nineteenth- century historicism has eased, we have not entirely worn out the teleogy of this thinking: "we may convince ourselves ... that the evolution we now scrutinize is from good to good, but evolution toward known and prevalidated goals still tends to determine what we study" (p. ). the fact we (or at least some) still cumr/rmuc teach that josquin was the "beethoven" of the renaissance, and monteverdi was the "creator of modern music" is disturbing because it limits our vision of music-making and thinking in the renaissance, and leads us to believe that this narrow vision sees most of what there is to see, or worse still, all that it is important to see ( ). thus tomlinson leads us to the idea that hegemonic inequality, or the emphasis of the same familiar strains of renaissance musical culture, has made it difficult to introduce and discuss magical dimensions in any kind of serious way, the subject, of course, of his book. in chapter , "the scope of renaissance magic," tomlinson examines the significance of "the new magic" in the sixteenth century, which coincided with a reorganization of the divisions of knowledge around . much of this discussion is based on tomlinson's reading of de occulta philosophia très, a treatise on magical knowledge by the german renaissance magician (tomlinson's designation), henry cornelius agrippa, in which he synthesizes earlier sources on magical thinking (le. platonic) thereby laying the foundation for the new magic. what follows is an engaging comparison between agrippa's conception of magic and that of foucault, as expressed in the order of things and the archaeology of knowledge. this discussion is a good illustration of tomlinson's identification of intriguing resonances between renaissance occult thought and postmodern thinking as a means to uncovering "other" voices. tomlinson appears to be cognizant of the difficulty or "thickness" (geertz's term) of such resonances, and, as is his style throughout the book, summarizes a conceptual framework for locating magical musics; he tells us, for example, that musical magic in the renaissance tended to fall into three classes: ( ) the magic of music's effects on sublunar objects such as the human body and soul, ( ) the music of the spheres, and ( ) the power of music to bring about trances and exalted states ( ). as much as such objectifying serves to aid the reader, tomlinson advocates a flexible and open interpretation of classification. this is the case in the following chapter in which connections between the modes and ethics and cosmology are discussed. as tomlinson observes, two of the most venerable, fascinating, and difficult to grasp ideas that have been handed down from the ancient mediterranean world are "the ideas of music's ethical power to affect man's soul and.. .the presence of harmony in the cosmos" ( ). here tomlinson takes us back to writings by plato, aristotle, and boethius among others, and then leads the discussion forward to an examination of related concepts in treatises by the renaissance theorists, ramos, gafori, and ficino. much of the book's centre is an examination of the work of the third of these, marsilio ficino ( - ), the florentine doctor, philosopher, translator, musician of some note, and, of course, magician, ( ) described at the beginning as being the book's "protagonist," tomlinson discusses ficino's "magical songs" (chapter ), and, above all, assigns ficino great general importance in the new magic of the renaissance. based on careful exegesis of ficino's writings, especially de vita ( ), tomlinson advocates his thesis that there are "corollorary questions about renaissance epistemol- ogy, psychology, and theories of sense perception that have not been grappled with in musicological studies of the period" ( ). he suggests, for example, that d. p. walker's functional distinction between words and music in his important study of ficino's magical songs {spiritual and demonic magic from ficino to campanella), which was followed by others, is not substantiated in ficino's writings. as tomlinson comments, "we sense in it [walker's position] the shutting of windows on renaissance mentalities, the a priori imposition on sixteenth-century perceptions of more modern ways of thought" ( ). tomlinson builds an effective argument based on ficino's platonian premise that musical sounds and words emanate from divine ideas and represent images in the human world. the conflation of word and image must be seen in broader perspective, as the assimilation to image of word, sound and music alike. further, he notes that ficino's ranking of words and sounds over images runs counter to the traditional hierarchy of the five senses in western thought, which places sight over hearing. within the context of the development of the polyphonic madrigal in the sixteenth century, the possibility of reversing this order and placing hearing as the noblest sense, can lead to an enrichment of our usual tracing of madrigalists' concern for text expression to humanist rhetorical philosophies. here tomlinson moves beyond questions of the content of ideas and authorial intent to hidden structures of ideas - doing archaeological history to invoke part of his dualistic paradigm. tomlinson's protracted discussion of ficino's work is continued in the two following chapters ( and ), both of which contain the same level of scholarly depth in their respective examinations of primary sources on the topics of musical possession and soul loss, and the archaeology of poetic furor, - . in the book's penultimate chapter, "archaeology and music: apropos of monteverdi's musical magic," tomlinson maintains that musicology has not yet found an archaeological approach, largely because archeology looks for other less familiar meanings thereby "cutting against the grain of too many long-standing goals" ( ). musicology's emphasis on composers' expressive aims, stylistic evolution, and relationships between musical works and styles with extramusical forces such as patronage systems and political events are examples of these goals. tomlinson notes that musicology has resisted archaeology because of its "dispersing, decentering, and ultimately defamiharizing aspect...that flies in the face of familiarizing tendencies of cumr/rmuc musicological thought" ( ). with their emphasis on the hermeneutic level of historical explanation, tomlinson cites iain fenlon's music and patronage in th-century mantua, anthony newcomb's the madrigal at ferrara, and his own music and the end of the renaissance as examples. particularly significant in tomlinson's position is his criticism of the eurocentricity of musical analysis, a methodology that has been, and continues to be, part of the musicologist's strategy. the discussion of monteverdi's "sfogava con le stelle" ( th madrigal book, ) and the "lament of the nymph (eight madrigal book, ), is a fascinating, if at times, abstruse application of the ideas expressed throughout the book. a more extended coverage (in terms of repertory) could serve to illuminate and further confirm tomlinson's position. music in renaissance magic is not an easy book. indeed, its thorough and effective manipulation of primary and secondary literature, coupled with the application of postmodern critical writing, requires careful, thoughtful reading. in its forward (and backward) looking critical exegeses, it represents an exciting, important example of new musicological scholarship. it challenges all of us who aspire to write meaningfully about all musics to reconsider our long held assumptions, and to break down barriers through dialogues with "other" distant - past and current - neglected voices. gordon e. smith jean-jacques nattiez. wagner androgyne: a study in interpretation. trans- lated by stewart spencer. princeton studies in opera. princeton: princeton university press, . xx, pp. isbn - - - (hardcover). in early , wagner opined to august rôckel that "the true human being is both man and woman," and concluded that "it is the union of man and woman, in other words, love, that creates (physically and metaphorically) the human being." jean-jacques nattiez contends that the figure of the androgyne - essentially the fusion of opposites - was central to the interpretation of both wagner's prose writings and musical works. nattiez's book is devoted to the exploration of the significance (both literal and metaphorical) of the figure of androgyny "in wagner's works and theoretical writings when seen within the context of the texts, the composer's life, and the age in which he lived" (xiii- xiv). but it is more than that: it is the embodiment of androgyny itself. letter to august rôekel, / january . translation from selected letters of richard wagner, ed. and trans. stewart spencer and barry millington (new york: norton, ), . izabela amalia mihalca romanian review of regional studies, volume x, number , the influence of decision makers in the evolution of the built heritage in the land of dorna izabela amalia mihalca abstract - the present paper aims to describe the role that decision makers and inhabitants have in the evolution of the built heritage from the regional system of the land of dorna. in order to achieve this goal i analyzed and systematized all data and information relevant for this study. data from different sources provided by literature and from the field research led to the identification of the local characteristics of the regional system. the analysis has revealed a number of inconsistencies between an optimal situation of a territorial system and the current state of the land of dorna system in which a number of monuments lie in an advanced state of decay. the improper management of the built heritage of the land of dorna by the local actors has led to a series of territorial dysfunctions. the conclusions of this paper have highlighted the urgent need to implement a series of measures aimed to revitalize the built heritage in the land of dorna. keywords: heritage, decision makers, responsibilities introduction the built heritage is the result of the activities of several generations. these have added specific elements from every historical period, elements that are a part of the history and spirituality of that community. all historical monuments offer to a territory an idyllic image of the past and a clear image of the present and future. regardless the area of provenance, the physical state of a historical monument can provide useful information about the community where it is located and about the involvement of local and national decision makers in the decision making process, highlighting the social reality of the territory. the measures taken over time by the decision makers regarding the built heritage in romania (including that of the land of dorna) have led to the deterioration or disappearance of some historical monuments from the cultural circuit. this state of decay is characteristic to the entire national territory (e.g. herculane spa, bánffy castle in bonţida, the casino of constanţa, the fortress of rupea, etc.). the changes in the last decades (the property restitution, the change of the property status regarding construction or lands, the lack of education concerning material and immaterial cultural values, the lack of local interest, the "hunger" for money, etc.) have marked the built and the natural heritage from the land of dorna. in this study, i focus only on the built heritage seen through the eyes of both inhabitants and decision makers. why is the built heritage important for the land of dorna? because it preserves and presents the history of a place and of a community. the destruction of the material values leads to the loss of the local identity within a territory. the conservation and protection of a monument is essential for maintaining the values of a certain period and place in the cultural circuit. the purpose of this study is to perceive how the local community and decision makers are involved in keeping alive the cultural and spiritual values of the land of dorna and to assess the role they played in the degradation of the casino of vatra dornei [cazinoul băilor]. to capture all the conceptual meanings, the built heritage has to be related with the entire community’s perceptions and with the quality assigned. the relation is both with the historical past of the monument or group of monuments as well as with the present and future. the perception of an individual or a community ph.d. candidate, babeş-bolyai university, faculty of geography, - clinicilor street, cluj-napoca, romania. e-mail: izabela.mihalca@geografie.ubbcluj.ro izabela amalia mihalca upon an important cultural monument is influenced by a number of aspects: education, economic state of the respective territory, the principal influences and interests, etc., aspects that lead to the construction of the local identity with respect to the built heritage. the casino of vatra dornei presents a piece of the local history. in order to provide a clear picture of the existence and evolution of the casino, a brief introduction into the history of the monument is required. the construction of the monument began in and ended in . it was built in “an eclectic style, with a vague air of german renaissance” by the architect paul p. brang (Ţăranu, , vol. iii, p. ). the casino has architectural elements similar to the casino of baden, opened in (figure and ). figure . the casino of baden source: http://postcardscollection.wordpress.com/ / / /vatra-dornei-casino/, retrieved on . . , at . figure . the casino of vatra dornei source: http://postcardscollection.wordpress.com/ / / /vatra-dornei-casino/, retrieved on . . , at . during the austro-hungarian period, the casino of vatra dornei was used by the foreign elite for social purposes (gambling, cultural events, shows, parties, etc.). thus, in a short time, it became the main attraction of the resort. beginning with world war i until , the building of the casino underwent major modifications compared to the original design (from rearrangement of the interiors, to the construction of the terrace oriented towards the park, of the statues and the fountain in the courtyard, etc.). along with these changes, the monument also received other functionalities: refuge for the foreign armies, hospital for the sick and the wounded during the war, etc. by the end of world war ii, the building was seriously damaged and the resistance structure required some improvements (Ţăranu, , vol. iii, pp. - ). with the nationalization of buildings in , once again the functionality of the monument changed. it was transformed into a cafeteria and used to serve the hospitalized patients. after , the restoration work was approved, but the activities were interrupted by the revolution of (Ţăranu, , vol. iii, p. ). the change of the political regime led to successive changes of the monument owners. these actions led to the devaluation and destruction of the building. during - , the casino passed from the property of the state to the property of a private firm. later, according to the decision no. of august , the ownership was transferred to the vatra dornei local council. during these years, the restoration works were interrupted. this generated serious damage to the structure of the building. in , by government decision no. of october , the building was returned to the archbishopric of suceava and rădăuţi (the legal administrator of the romanian fund of the orthodox church in bucovina). today the monument is in an advanced state of degradation, thus affecting the image of the city. the influence of decision makers in the evolution of the built heritage in the land of dorna figure . the casino of vatra dornei in the past source: http://www.google.ro, retrieved on . . , at figure . the casino of vatra dornei at present source: http://www.google.ro, retrieved on . . , at . methodology for a better understanding of the territorial reality concerning the built heritage of the land of dorna, a qualitative approach was employed (grix, , p. ). semi-structured interviews were used for data collection and the casino of vatra dornei was chosen as a case study. this is due to the fact that this historical monument is a symbol of bucovina region, being ranked in the a group of the list of the historical monuments, but currently is in an advanced state of degradation. table . the historical monuments in the land of dorna no. code lmi denomination locality, address dating sv-ii-m-b- gavril candrea house (casa gavril candrea) dorna cândrenilor village; dorna cândrenilor commune end of the th century sv-ii-m-b- school (Şcoala) dorna cândrenilor village; dorna cândrenilor commune sv-ii-m-b- wood mill (moară de lemn) gura haitii village; Şaru dornei commune on bânca dornei creek sv-ii-m-b- ioan nichituş household complex (complexul gospodăresc ioan nichituş) iacobeni village; iacobeni commune end of the th century sv-ii-m-b- "sf. dumitru" wooden church (biserica de lemn "sf. dumitru") poiana stampei village; poiana stampei commune th century sv-ii-s-b- ion ivan household (gospodăria ion ivan) poiana stampei village; poiana stampei commune end of the th century sv-ii-m-a- "santinela" mineral spring building (clădirea izvorului "santinela") vatra dornei, in the municipal park sv-ii-m-b- vatra dornei resort railway station (gara băi) vatra dornei, dornelor street sv-ii-m-b- vladimir house (casa vladimir), today the mining company vatra dornei, mihai eminescu street end of the th century izabela amalia mihalca sv-ii-m-b- hotel vatra dornei, mihai eminescu street sv-ii-m-b- city hall (primăria) vatra dornei, mihai eminescu street sv-ii-m-b- the post office (poşta) vatra dornei , mihai eminescu street sv-ii-s-b- the old commercial part of the town vatra dornei, - , - mihai eminescu street th century sv-ii-m-b- library vatra dornei, mihai eminescu street sv-ii-s-b- the old commercial part of the town vatra dornei, - , - luceafărului street th century sv-ii-m-b- aurora negrea wooden house (casa de lemn aurora negrea) vatra dornei, parcului street first half of the th century sv-ii-m-b- vatra dornei railway station (gară oraș) vatra dornei, podu verde street sv-ii-m-b- the baths building (clădirea băilor) vatra dornei, republicii street sv-ii-m-b- "unirea" mineral spring building (clădirea izvorului "unirea") vatra dornei, republicii street sv-ii-m-a- casino (cazinoul băilor) vatra dornei, republicii street sv-ii-m-b- hotel carol (former vila ) vatra dornei, a republicii street sv-iv-m-b- statuary group: eminescu, caragiale, sadoveanu, enescu, porumbescu, kogălniceanu, negri , russo vatra dornei, in the municipal park - source: extract from the list of historical monuments, the interview guide was generated in order to cover the following points: - the attitude of the community towards the protection and conservation of the monument; - the attitude of the local decision makers towards the protection and conservation of the monument; - the attitude of the regional decision makers towards the protection and conservation of the monument; - the attitude of the owners towards the protection and conservation of the monument. the method of the individual semi-structured interview was chosen based on its advantages: creating a familiar environment between the participant and the interviewer. this gives the interviewee the opportunity to express freely according to the topic, without being compelled to strictly answer predetermined questions. another advantage is that the interviewer can choose a limited range of participants with extremely varied component parts (rotariu, iluț, , pp. - ). participants in order to collect reliable information on the protection and conservation of the casino building, i included within the sample, representatives from different social groups: residents of vatra dornei, local decision makers, and tourists. moreover, seven subjects aged between and , and three subjects aged above were interviewed. out of the ten participants, four were female and six male. all had their residence in urban area. out of the ten participants, seven were university graduates the influence of decision makers in the evolution of the built heritage in the land of dorna and three were high school graduates. the data in table were listed according to the order of interviews. table . sample characteristics of the subjects subject gender age residency education data type m urban university interview m urban university interview f urban university interview m urban grades interview f urban grades interview f urban university interview f urban grades interview m urban university interview m urban university interview m urban university interview procedure the interviews were carried out individually at the participants’ homes, offices and on the street. each subject gave an oral agreement and an additional consent for the audio recording. in order to preserve the participants’ anonymity, they will be subsequently mentioned as subject , … , according to the order of the carried interviews. the participants had the opportunity to withdraw from the interview anytime they wanted, without the obligation to justify their decision. each participant was interviewed once and each interview lasted approximately . hours. the interview guide was elaborated in order to cover all four guidelines: - the attitudes of the community towards the protection and conservation of the monument (e.g. to what extent were the residents of the city and of the region involved in the process of protecting and preserving the building? can you give any examples of ways in which the public opinion fought back to protect the building? etc.); - the attitudes of the local decision makers towards the protection and conservation of the monument (e.g. what actions have the local decision makers taken in order to protect the building? what were the most important measures they took regarding the future of the building? etc.); - the attitudes of the regional and national decision makers towards the protection and conservation of the monument (e.g. to what extent do you think that the regional and national decision makers were involved in the protection of the building? were there times when representatives of these institutions came to see the state of the building and take some measures to remedy the situation? etc.); - the attitudes of the owners towards the protection and conservation of the monument (e.g. who are currently the owners of the building? to what extent were they involved in the protection and conservation of the monument? etc.). for interpreting the qualitative data, qsr nvivo software was chosen. the program helps the researcher, through the agency of the tools it disposes of, to systematize the information, to code it under various forms, and in the end, to quickly obtain a series of accurate data (richards, , p. ). all interviews were transcribed in doc. format and then loaded as source documents. these documents were grouped into cases and each one received a series of attributes. by encryption, free nodes (which were not organized) were created and, afterwards, these were transformed into tree nodes. based on these codes, matrices were generated. in the end of this process a final model was generated (richards, , p. ). this reveals the role of all four dimensions played in the process of protection and conservation of the casino in the last years. izabela amalia mihalca results in order to identify which factors had the greatest influence on the protection and conservation of the casino, the questions and the participants' answers were grouped on each of the four dimensions. the subjects’ answers have revealed the level of involvement that the local community had over time concerning the protection and conservation of the building: locally we collected signatures that we sent to the archdiocese so that we could prove that we don’t agree with the actions undertaken by them regarding the state of the casino (subject no. ), any time televisions were making some cover stories about our region, some of us gathered there and said what we thought about the existing problem (regarding the casino) (subject no. ), some of us tried to fight for the building, not all inhabitants, of course, because they don’t have civic spirit. however, we did our best, we can’t do more because “theyˮ have more power than us” (subject no. ). responses revealed also their attachment to the building and the desire to save it: if you look closely you will see the architectural elements specific for the end of the th century. you will not find another architectural jewel like this in suceava. too bad that it is not properly maintained (subject no. ), each of the old buildings of the town keeps a piece of the community history, at least i see it that way… when i look at it, my heart breaks because nobody does anything to save it (subject no. ), the building still keeps the image of the past. the region is beautiful and every element counts in its development (subject no. ), we must do something to save this symbol of the town and of the region too, until it is not too late. they have to understand that the casino is part of the local history and not an asset they can use to negotiate something. if they want, they can change the functionality of the building (subject no. ). according to the subjects, the actions taken by the local authorities related to the protection and conservation of the casino were weak and insignificant: everyone should know their responsibilities regarding the protection of a monument or object. but they stood with arms folded and were looking how the building was collapsing. not only the casino is in this situation (subject no. ), did they do something? no! they blamed each other and no one took any measures, so the time passed and the building is in this deteriorated stage (subject no. ), in the ’ s, i remember that they repaired the roof, but since that moment nothing else has happened. authorities blame the owners and the state, the owners blame the state and the authorities and so on… (subject no. ), it is not possible that after such a long time (over years) no one takes any action. no official has gone further to plead the casino’s cause, they expect the inevitable: to collapse… (subject no. ). while the actions of the local authorities were insignificant, the answers given by the subjects showed that regional and national authorities were not involved in the process of protection and conservation of the casino, except for a particular interest: when x (author’s note: name of a politician) was in suceava, he talked about the building only to appear on tv. he never did something specific to save the casino (subject no. ), when the discussion regarding the restitution of the building appeared, a commission from bucharest came to the town. they rated the building and decided that the archdiocese is the new owner (subject no. ), they came and followed all their interests and left satisfied because everyone was a winner (subject no. ), why don’t they come here to impose some sanctions for breaking the law? neither they nor the local authorities and the archdiocese obey the law. why are there any laws if they are not applied? the guilty parts need to be held accountable for their actions (subject no. ). the responses regarding the measures taken by the current owners were full of indignation: the archdiocese of suceava and rădăuţi is the current owner of the casino and of other buildings and lands in bucovina. how good does it sound: the priest and the casino, right? (subject no. ), they got the ownership in and since then they haven’t put a finger on it. nevertheless, they say they act only in the interest of the monument (subject no. ), all of them are just fakers who pursue their own interests and destroy anything that stands in their way. the current owners demanded . ha of forest from the state in exchange of the building. maybe under these circumstances they will allow somebody to restore the building. we live in a democratic society... (subject no. ), no one saw a situation like this in which the law is being infringed and the authorities are not taking any measures. each owner of a historical building has certain duties mentioned in the law. it doesn’t matter if the the influence of decision makers in the evolution of the built heritage in the land of dorna owner is the state or a private person, the law it is very accurate (subject no. ), after the revolution ( ) none of the so-called owners did anything to save the casino building and give it a chance (subject no. ). based on the interviews it emerged that the current state of the building (the advanced stage of degradation), in conjunction with its central position in the locality, influences the perception of tourists regarding the resort and puts vatra dornei into a bad light: the building is located on the main street of the town and it is covered with that blackened canvas. everyone passing by the resort notices the ramshackle building and probably has a low opinion of us (subject no. ), it was a symbol of thetown, being located in the centre of vatra dornei. because of its current image it is a disgrace for the entire community (subject no. ), the building still retains the idyllic image from the past, when everything was much simpler and nicer. i think that its position fits perfectly into the resort landscape, the only inconvenient being the state of degradation (subject no. ), the first thing that caught my eye when i came into the resort was the casino building, maybe because of its size and position. i honestly believe that it jeopardizes the image of the town and that someone should take some measures to improve this (subject no. ). discussion the interview results reveal that all ten subjects consider that the biggest responsibility for the protection and conservation of the casino goes to the current owners and that they need to comply with the laws. eight out of ten subjects stated that the owners’ actions and obligations are the most important. the state also plays an important role. after , the building had four owners: the state, a private firm, the vatra dornei local council, and the archbishop of suceava and rădăuţi. none of them were sufficiently involved in protecting and conservation the building, which has been treated with indifference for years. the current owners break all the moral and legal norms. why moral norms? according to the interviewees’ answers, corroborated with the information gathered from several documents, the legal representatives of the casino are using it to achieve certain proprieties and lands from the romanian state. they repeatedly stated that they would not give up the building or restore it unless they repossessed those goods (see also: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zn_r r_rxxm&feature=relmfu, accessed / / , at . ). why legal norms? because of the obligations for the owners of a historical monument stipulated in law no. ⁄ , article (official gazette, part i, no. of november ). none of these obligations have been enacted since . seven out of ten subjects claimed that the local decision makers did not fulfil their duties regarding the well being of the casino building and they did not take into consideration the preservation of the monument in the local and national cultural circuit. on the one hand, the current state of the building is due to the local decision makers. during - , the monument was the property of vatra dornei local council. this period is characterized by little rehabilitation work to the building mainly of the masonry and roof ( ). since , the measures taken by the local authorities have included meetings, negotiations with the legal representatives of the archdiocese, and actions to get funds and restore the building. all these actions remained without any real results. regarding their legal duties stipulated in law no. ⁄ , article (official gazette, part i, no. ⁄ november ), these were not fully applied. five of the respondents stated that the representatives of the regional and national decision makers were not enough involved in the problem arisen between the archbishop-state-community and for that matter in any actions that led to the protection and conservation of the historical monument. since they have not transferred any funds for the rehabilitation and restoration of the monument. in the same time, they have not taken any measures to sanction the responsible person or institution for the destruction of the building. therefore, they did not comply with the legal obligations stipulated in law no. of on the protection and conservation of a historical monument. as for the attitude of the community regarding the protection and conservation of the casino, six respondents considered that the actions of the protest group were commendable and appreciated. izabela amalia mihalca four subjects stated that the actions taken by the community are useless because they do not have any power and that they are not taken into consideration by the authorities. the decision makers and the archdiocese are the only ones who can solve the problem. the unanimous opinion of all those interviewed was that is necessary to find viable and suitable measures to restore and protect the casino monument which is unique by its history and architecture. it is an urgent need to enforce the law regardless of any personal interests. in conclusion, results show that the actions of the current owners, followed by the local decision makers, the regional and national decision makers and the community has had the greatest influence in the evolution of the casino in the last years. based on the developed model, we can observe the influence of the four dimensions in the evolution of the building and the relationship established between them (figure ). figure . the influence of the four dimensions and the interrelation between them in the development of the casino building source: nvivo export this model might represent a starting point for similar future studies. to generalize the generated model, the number of participants coming from the regional and national decision makers and representatives of the archdiocese might be increased for a further study. also a mixed design will increase the validity of the results. references grix, j. ( ), demystifying postgraduate research. from ma to phd, university of birmingham press, united kingdom. richards, l. ( ), using nvivo in qualitative research, sage publication, london. rotariu, t., iluȚ, p. ( ), ancheta sociologică și sondajul de opinie. teorie și practică [sociological investigation and the opinion poll. theory and practice], polirom press, iași. ȚĂranu, p. ( ), memoria dornelor. stațiunea balneoclimaterică [the memory of dorna. the spa resort], vol. iii, biblioteca bucovinei, suceava. *** ( ), legea privind protejarea monumentelor istorice nr. / , monitorul oficial al româniei, partea i, nr. / noiembrie [law on the protection of historical monuments no. ⁄ , official gazette, part i, no. / november ]. *** ( ), lista monumentelor istorice , monitorul oficial al româniei, partea i, nr. bis/ octombrie [the list of historical monuments, official gazette, part i, no. bis⁄ october ]. *** http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zn_r r_rxxm&feature=relmfu. *** http://postcardscollection.wordpress.com/ / / /vatra-dornei-casino/ sleep softly: schubert, ethics and the value of dying well wilkinson d. j med ethics ; : – . doi: . /medethics- - sleep softly: schubert, ethics and the value of dying well dominic wilkinson , , feature article to cite: wilkinson d. j med ethics epub ahead of print: [please include day month year]. doi: . / medethics- - oxford uehiro centre for practical ethics, university of oxford, oxford, uk newborn care, john radcliffe hospital, oxford, uk murdoch children’s research institute, melbourne, vic, australia correspondence to professor dominic wilkinson, oxford uehiro centre for practical ethics, university of oxford, oxford ox jd, uk; dominic. wilkinson@ philosophy. ox. ac. uk received september revised october accepted october © author(s) (or their employer(s)) . re- use permitted under cc by. published by bmj. abstract ethical discussions about medical treatment for seriously ill babies or children often focus on the ’value of life’ or on ’quality of life’ and what that might mean. in this paper, i look at the other side of the coin—on the value of death, and on the quality of dying. in particular, i examine whether there is such a thing as a good way to die, for an infant or an adult, and what that means for medical care. to do that, i call on philosophy and on personal experience. however, i will also make reference to art, poetry and music. that is partly because the topic of mortality has long been reflected on by artists as well as philosophers and ethicists. it is also because, as we will see, there may be some useful parallels to draw. death and the maiden ‘pass by! oh, pass by dread skeleton i am still young! go… please…i matthias claudius, ‘tod und das mädchen’ the first stanza of claudius’ poem, ‘death and the maiden’, is a plea to be spared. it evokes the desperation of someone who is not ready to die. claudius’ poem is often associated with the nineteenth century image of an adolescent or young adult succumbing to tuberculosis. but the underlying sentiment has not lost its relevance. a version of the same prayer is whispered each night in neonatal intensive care units across the world. parents, who have been told that their infant may die, sit in vigil at the cot side, quietly pleading for the shadow to move on, for their child to be spared. newborn intensive care is a strange, disquieting, discomforting environment. it is a place where the clichéd ‘miracle’ of new life is witnessed each day. but it is also a place where life and hope are regularly, cruelly, extinguished. in a world where medicine and medical technology seem to know no bounds, the death of a newborn infant appears to defy rational explanation or expectation. it, too, is a kind of miracle. paintings of dying maidens resisting, and being seduced or molested by the spectral figure of death, appear regularly in german renaissance art in the sixteenth century (figure ). the motif often had a dark and apparently erotic subtext. however, in i trans.: d wilkinson the nineteenth century, the image gained a more tragic air and renewed popularity among romantic writers, painters and composers (figure ). the poet and journalist matthias claudius wrote a short poem ‘tod und das mädchen’ (death and the maiden) in . in the first stanza, (above) the maiden begs for death to spare her. in the second verse, the figure of death tries to console offer, offering solace. the poem was incorporated by the young austrian composer franz schubert into a song (lied) with the same name in . schubert, in his late teens, had worked as a school teacher for several years, though he hated it. from late , aged , schubert obtained leave of absence from his school duties and spent months living with a friend, with free board and lodgings and composing full time. it was a period of intense creativity for schubert. he wrote many of his most loved songs including death and the maiden, a set of piano sonatas, several overtures, and his sixth symphony. when schubert returned to the theme of this song, years later, his circumstances were dramat- ically different. in , schubert had been unwell and impoverished, able to write little music, and with very few performances of his music. in february, he noted elliptically that ‘the circum- stances of my health still do not permit me to go out side the house’, and many biographers have concluded in retrospect that he was quarantined with the first manifestations of syphilis. at the period, the symptoms and the prognosis of such an infection would have been well known. in may, he penned a poem ‘mein gebet’ (‘my prayer’), which includes the suicidal lines i in torture go my way, nearing doom’s destructive day. take my life, my flesh and blood plunge it all in lethe’s flood at the end of the year, he was apparently some- what improved, but in early , aged , with a recurrence of his symptoms, his mood was extremely low. at the end of march, he wrote this (quoting goethe) in a letter: my peace is gone, my heart is sore; i shall never find peace again, never again. he was still able to compose. in that same month, schubert wrote his th string quartet. the main theme of the earlier song—death’s theme, appears in the second movement (https://www. youtube. com/ watch? v= os z akbvy ). o n a p ril , b y g u e st. p ro te cte d b y co p yrig h t. h ttp ://jm e .b m j.co m / j m e d e th ics: first p u b lish e d a s . /m e d e th ics- - o n n o ve m b e r . d o w n lo a d e d fro m http://jme.bmj.com http://www.instituteofmedicalethics.org http://orcid.org/ - - - http://crossmark.crossref.org/dialog/?doi= . /medethics- - &domain=pdf&date_stamp= - - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=os z akbvy https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=os z akbvy http://jme.bmj.com/ wilkinson d. j med ethics ; : – . doi: . /medethics- - feature article musicologists sometimes refer to a biographical fallacy—an erroneous attempt to see the artist’s life reflected in their creative works. but it hardly seems coincidental that schubert, ill and contem- plating his own mortality, should choose to incorporate into his quartet the song of death from his own earlier lied. perhaps it is fanciful, but when i listen to this music, i cannot help but hear the struggle of an individual facing news that death is coming. the quiet, spare plangent notes of the g minor theme, seem awfully reminiscent of the silence that follows the breaking of terrible news. we then hear a series of variations that convey an increasingly frenzied and frenetic struggle against inevitable mortality. when schubert played the first performance of his quartet, in , he would have only two more years to live. desperation and despair many newborn intensive care units have a room set aside for private discussions with parents. it is, euphemistically, called ‘the quiet room’—but among experienced parents, those who have been in the neonatal intensive care unit for some time, it is sometimes known instead by its nickname ‘the room of doom’. a few years ago, i sat in the quiet room with a couple, who i will call bianca and tom, whose baby, hal, had a severe cardio- myopathy and was several days old.ii in adults, cardiomyopathy can be caused by vascular disease, damage from medication, sometimes from infections. in babies, cardiomyopathy is often due to a genetic or metabolic problem. in the most severe cases, there is no cure—the heart swells to fill the baby’s chest, it weakens until it fails, and then stops. hal had been diagnosed before birth with this condition. we weren’t sure exactly what the cause was—however, tests had ruled out the very few treatable causes. after birth, hal had initially been stable, better than expected. however, in the last day or so, hal’s breathing had become more laboured. he was receiving oxygen, but this was not enough. blood tests showed that that the acid levels in his blood stream were building to dangerous levels. if things continued as they were, he would start to have pauses in his breathing. these would become longer and more prolonged. at some point, his breathing would stop and not start again. bianca and tom struggled, as any would, to accept the news that i was trying to convey—that their son’s condition was wors- ening, that he was dying. they had been researching on the internet about cardiomyop- athy in infants. much of the information they had found was worrying and bleak. but they had found several things that they felt could help. hal could go on to the ventilator, the breathing machine, which would relieve some of the strain on his heart. if that was not ii this is a fictionalised composite case. figure hans baldung grien, death and the maiden. . kunstmuseum, basel, switzerland. erich lessing/ art resource, new york. wikimedia commons. https:// en.wikipedia.org/wiki/hans_baldung/media/file:hans_ baldung_ .jpg figure la jeune fille et la mort, marianne stokes, , musee d’orsay, paris. https://commons.wikimedia.org/ wiki/file:la_jeune_fille_et_la_mort-marianne_stokes- img_ .jpg o n a p ril , b y g u e st. p ro te cte d b y co p yrig h t. h ttp ://jm e .b m j.co m / j m e d e th ics: first p u b lish e d a s . /m e d e th ics- - o n n o ve m b e r . d o w n lo a d e d fro m https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/hans_baldung/media/file:hans_baldung_ .jpg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/hans_baldung/media/file:hans_baldung_ .jpg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/hans_baldung/media/file:hans_baldung_ .jpg https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/file:la_jeune_fille_et_la_mort-marianne_stokes-img_ .jpg https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/file:la_jeune_fille_et_la_mort-marianne_stokes-img_ .jpg https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/file:la_jeune_fille_et_la_mort-marianne_stokes-img_ .jpg http://jme.bmj.com/ wilkinson d. j med ethics ; : – . doi: . /medethics- - feature article enough, hal could go onto a heart- lung bypass machine (extra- corporeal membrane oxygenation, ecmo). neither were a fix for hal’s heart problem, but he could be listed for a heart trans- plant. that would surely solve the problem of the weak heart muscle? tom had even found some information about experi- mental treatments being tested in mice for the genetic causes of cardiomyopathy. i listened quietly to tom. he was a successful executive and accustomed to identifying problems, finding solutions, and implementing them. he was talking quickly, firmly, brooking no disagreement. bianca was saying little. she was looking at the floor, holding, scrunched in her hand, a tissue that i had given her at the start of our conversation. i was listening, and nodding. but what i was hearing was not the details of the newspaper reports, websites and scientific journals that tom was referring to. what i was hearing was a desperate need to find some way out of a dark place, a need to find some way of avoiding, or at least putting off, the loss of a much- loved child. i was hearing the maiden’s cry. tom’s research into possible treatments for hal is not unusual, or even uncommon. for example, in a swiss survey in , % of parents used digital media to seek information relating to their child’s health. an earlier canadian study found that % of canadian neonatal intensive care parents used their smartphone to seek health information. the use of such sources is potentially even more likely in situations where a child’s doctors are unable to offer any curative treatment. in recent high profile cases, parents’ desperate need to find treatment have sometimes led them to doctors overseas who were offering treatments for their child contrary to the advice of local specialists. the media attention to these cases might further encourage information seeking in other parents. so, i listened to tom’s suggestions, and i understood where they came from. but the problem was that none of them were likely to help. we had already considered the option of ecmo and transplantation. the transplant team at a specialist centre had felt that there was not a realistic chance of hal being able to be transplanted and so they would not consider him for ecmo. gene therapies might one day be able to help children like tom, but they would be far too late to help him. i could put hal on a breathing machine, but it would not stop him from dying—it would merely delay it for a matter of hours or days. in cases like hal’s, one of the things that drives parents’ desperate search for treatments, for cures, is that the alterna- tive is unthinkable—awful, abject, loss. the words ‘despair’ and ‘desperation’ come from the same source—‘esperer’ or ‘espoir’—french for hope, and ‘de’—‘from’, or ‘without’. if desperation is the intense desire to cling on to the threads of hope, despair is what is left once those strands have slipped through your fingers and you are left empty handed. hope give me your hand, sweet and lovely maiden! i am a friend, and do not come to harm you. do not cry! i am not cruel, you will sleep softly in my arms! matthias claudius, ‘tod und das madchen’, in the second stanza of claudius’ poem, the figure of death tries to offer reassurance to the dying maiden. ‘i am not cruel’ he insists, ‘i am a friend’. in schubert’s lied, death’s voice whis- pers, in a soothing pianissimo, a repeated low, insistent note, ‘gib deine hand, du schon und zart gebild’. this image of the consolation of death might be familiar when it comes to those at the other end of the lifespan. we still talk of pneumonia in the elderly as the ‘the old man’s friend’. but does it make any sense to view death as a friend when it comes to a baby who is dying? many might find it jarring, off key. they might imagine, not a friend, but a malign evil spirit. in the renaissance images, death has the image of a molester (figure ). this is no friend at all. for myself, i find the image unhelpful, not because i see death as malevolent—more because i just do not find the embodiment of death at all plausible. there is no hooded spirit lurking in the shadowy corners of the intensive care unit. no spectral figure swooping through the corridors of the nursery plucking the souls from slumbering infants. but there is something in claudius’ verse and in schubert’s musical imagining of death’s serenade that is worth exploring. one of the most difficult questions that i ever have to answer in the quiet room is this: ‘so, are you saying ‘there is no hope’?’ how can you answer that question? to answer ‘no’ seems heartless, even cruel. the temptation, faced with such an enquiry, is to hedge. it is easier in some ways to offer parents a life- line—perhaps expressing some of the inevitable uncertainty that accompanies prognostication. after all, can we ever be % sure what will happen? talking about uncertainty, and the vanishingly small chance of unexpected improvement avoids extinguishing parents’ hope. but it also comes with its own risk—that it will impair parents’ ability to prepare for what seems (virtually) inevitable and prevent them from making important decisions for their child’s care at the end of life. some time ago, i was trying to understand how to talk to families about death and dying, how to answer some of the incredibly difficult questions that parents ask. i found helpful the advice of a group of us oncologists and palliative care physicians. faced with the ‘is there any hope?’ question, they did not recommend answering either ‘yes’, or ‘no’—instead they suggested a different response: ‘well, there are all sorts of things that people hope for. tell me what goes through your mind when you talk about hope?’ it is easy, in conversations like the one i had with bianca and tom, to get caught up in discussion about blood gases and ventilators, about the medical indications for ecmo or trans- plantation, the state of current scientific knowledge about gene therapies. sometimes those things are important to talk about, and cannot be avoided. but often they leave no space or energy or opportunity to talk about other things. asking parents about their hopes and priorities, sometimes helps to shift discussions away from medicine and medical treat- ments to more important topics. when i asked bianca and tom about their hopes, tom replied immediately: he hoped that hal would continue to defy doctors’ expectations, that he would improve, that he would recover. he stopped there. there was nothing else to be discussed. bianca seemed to be saying very little, so i asked her separately what she was hoping for. she muttered that, yes she was hoping, of course, for hal to survive. but i pressed her, gently. what else? are there other things? o n a p ril , b y g u e st. p ro te cte d b y co p yrig h t. h ttp ://jm e .b m j.co m / j m e d e th ics: first p u b lish e d a s . /m e d e th ics- - o n n o ve m b e r . d o w n lo a d e d fro m http://jme.bmj.com/ wilkinson d. j med ethics ; : – . doi: . /medethics- - feature article she mentioned that she hoped to be able to hold hal. she wanted to be able to take him home. she hoped that he was not suffering. the starting point for these conversations is whether the infant will live. but sometimes that is not an option available, much as we might regret it. it is not something that either the parents or the health professionals have any control over. sometimes, the only options remaining are about how the baby lives in the time remaining to them. how they live. and how they die. a good death can death be good? what would it mean for a death to be good? for those who have not experienced death, this can seem like a strange, even incoherent question. how can death possibly be good? but death can certainly be bad. schubert again. he wrote his death and the maiden quartet in , age . he then had several years of musical creativity and prosperity. however, within years, his health had deterio- rated, and schubert confided in his friends that he feared he was nearing his death. in late , schubert moved to his brother ferdinand’s house in the suburbs of vienna—in the hope that the fresh air would help however, on october, his brother described the start of a decline—during a meal, schubert pushed his food away after the first mouthful—complaining that it tasted like poison. he ate and slept little in the days thereafter. fatigued, and weak, schubert took to his bed. he wrote this in his last letter on november i am ill, i have eaten nothing for eleven days and have drunk nothing. i totter feebly and shakily from my chair to bed and back again. rinna is treating me; if i ever take anything i bring it up at once lachner, schubert’s friend (himself a composer) visited him on november. when i came into his room he was lying with his face turned to the wall in the deepest, feverish delirium. added to this was scanty nursing and a badly heated room on the walls of which the damp was running down! on the day before he died, schubert had the delusion that he had already been buried. he begged his brother i implore you to take me to my room, not to leave me in this corner under the earth. do i, then, deserve no place above the earth?! he died the following afternoon. here is another death. alfie evans was a liverpool infant whose parents lost a long legal battle over his medical treatment in . alfie had a severe neurodegenerative disorder—a condition causing progres- sive, inexorable loss of brain function (it was undiagnosed at the time, but after his death it was found to be a form of gaba transaminase deficiency). this was a form of dementia. we are all sadly familiar with that illness in our elderly family members. however, rarely, this cruel illness can affect young people, even infants. in alfie’s case, he had declined to the point that he could no longer breathe without help in december . he was then put on life support. as in hal’s case, the ventilator could delay alfie’s death, but it could not prevent it. there was then a long period—more than months, while alfie’s parents and doctors were unable to reach agreement about how to care for him. one of the potential reasons for disagreement was deep concern for the nature and circumstances of alfie’s death. although it was not always expressed in these terms, it appeared that the health professionals were worried that keeping alfie alive on life support was imposing on him, or at least risked, a bad death. they were likely to have felt that it would be bad for alfie to die attached to life support machines, away from his family, perhaps receiving futile attempted resuscitation. after a long and bitter court battle, alfie had intensive care withdrawn in april . he died days later. some of the media reports of alfie’s final days described his father performing mouth to mouth resuscitation in a desperate attempt to forestall his dying. why are these deaths bad? in what way? there are a number of different elements. the greek philosopher epicurus famously denied that death was bad. he claimed that, by its nature, death represents the end of existence of a person. but that means that when death occurs, there is no longer any person for whom death could be bad. ‘when we are, death is not come, and, when death is come, we are not’. one response to epicurus points to what is lost in death. death is bad in one important way because it deprives the person of a valuable future life. the better and longer that future, the worse it is for a person to die and thereby to be unable to experience it. on this account, premature deaths—of the young musical genius schubert, or of an infant like hal or alfie are particularly bad. however, there must be more to say about the value of death than that. even if someone dies at an advanced age, it seems entirely conceivable that they could die badly, could have a bad death. this would also apply to an infant or child or adult who has a terminal illness. dying now might not deprive them of much future good life.iii nevertheless, it still seems important to think about and care about how they die. this points to another way of responding to epicurus—to talk about the period prior to death, and the value (or disvalue) of ‘dying’. dying can obviously be bad if it involves suffering, pain, distress. one of the reasons for thinking that schubert’s death was bad are the distressing reports by his friends of his agita- tion, angst and confusion in the days before he died. conversely, death can be less bad, and maybe even (relatively) good, where someone experiences feelings of comfort, reassurance, calm and awareness of the presence of friends in their dying phase. concern about the subjective experiences of dying patients is clearly a central part of modern palliative care. there is good reason to think that access to analgesia, sedation, antiemetics and good nursing care would have made schubert’s dying expe- rience much less unpleasant.iv iii one of the challenges of the deprivation account is working out the relevant ‘counterfactual’—that is with which future life are we comparing? to evaluate alfie’s death, should we compare with a possible life where he lived longer but in the same health state, or with a possible life where he would live in full health for a normal lifespan. for alfie, death at age was not bad compared to the first, but terrible compared to the second. iv obviously, in the current era, it is likely that he would not have died of his illness… o n a p ril , b y g u e st. p ro te cte d b y co p yrig h t. h ttp ://jm e .b m j.co m / j m e d e th ics: first p u b lish e d a s . /m e d e th ics- - o n n o ve m b e r . d o w n lo a d e d fro m http://jme.bmj.com/ wilkinson d. j med ethics ; : – . doi: . /medethics- - feature article but sometimes these elements of subjective experience may not apply. for example, consider the very famous uk legal case of tony bland. tony was a teenager who was crushed in the hill- sborough stadium football disaster in . he suffered severe brain damage from lack of oxygen and was left in a persistent vegetative state. four years later, when his doctors applied to the court for permission to stop life- prolonging medical treatment, the court heard evidence that tony had no awareness, no ability to sense either pleasure or pain. if that is right, it appears that there could be no way that (experientially) death could be either good or bad for him. similarly, in the case of alfie evans, the court heard evidence that alfie showed no response to external stimuli. it was thought to be unlikely that he experienced pain or discomfort (though this could also not be ruled out). death can be bad in a different way if it occurs in a way that is against the wishes of a person. many people, if asked, would prefer to die at home. however, most end up dying away from their homes—often in hospitals. imagine an older person, mary, who has long said that she would not wish to be resuscitated and would not wish to end up dying in hospital on life support. one day she collapses suddenly on the street and the ambulance offi- cers, without being aware of her wishes, do resuscitate her. she is transported to hospital and admitted to intensive care, where she dies days later without recovering consciousness. in this case, it seems that mary’s death is bad, not necessarily because it is associated with suffering (she may have been aware of nothing after her collapse)—but rather because it is contrary to her long- held wishes and plans. this element of the value of death is obviously important for adults. it is one reason why advance care planning is crucial, and why identifying and respecting patient wishes is a central part of palliative care. yet this consideration is not always relevant. for example, it cannot apply to young children or to any of my patients in the neonatal intensive care unit. they have never had a chance to develop views or wishes about the manner of their death. death can be good or bad because of its effect on those around the dying person. that includes family members and friends. but it might also include carers or health professionals who are in attendance. this consideration is clearly extremely relevant to children or newborns. one of the fundamental concerns of paediatric palli- ative care is to support the child’s family. this includes helping them to make the most of the time that they have remaining with the child, to help them create, if possible, some positive memo- ries of the last part of their child’s life. for example, for some families it might be important to take the child home. taking into account the family’s wishes might be relevant to a wide view of the value of death even if the patient is too young to have expressed wishes of their own. in some cases, the views or preferences of those around the patient might conflict. family members may disagree. alterna- tively, what would meet the needs of the family might cause stress or difficulties for caregivers, or vice versa. to summarise: i have suggested that death can be bad when it deprives us of a future that we would value, when it is painful or associated with suffering for the patient, when it occurs in a way that is contrary to the patient’s wishes or values, and where it is distressing and traumatic for the patient’s family. indeed, it is perhaps because it involved all of those elements that schubert’s seemed a particularly bad death. to put this in the opposite, more positive way, death can be good if it doesn’t rob us of future valuable live, if it is associ- ated with comfort and consolation, if it is consistent with the patient’s values and preferences, and is not distressing for the individual’s family and those caring for them. the final chapter that might be all there is to say about the value of death or dying. however, i am going to suggest that there might be one more element. reflecting on cases like tony bland might suggest a temporal dimension for evaluating dying. one of the reasons not to provide certain forms of medical treatment for tony was the sense that these were not prolonging his life, rather they were prolonging his dying. similarly, when the court heard the case of alfie evans, he had already been sustained in intensive care without any apparent possibility of improvement, for more than a year. alfie had been dying, slowly, for all that time. if alfie was experiencing pain over that period, there is good reason to think that he should have been allowed to die months earlier—he was harmed by being kept alive. however, even if he was completely unaware, and experienced no pain at all over that time, it could still be bad to prolong his dying phase without benefit. how can we make sense of this temporal value of dying? it is different from the notion (referred to above) that it would be better to die later in life rather than sooner because premature death deprives our life of something that we would value. the idea is almost the opposite: sometimes, it would be better to die sooner rather than later, because longer existence would not in any meaningful way add value to our life, and may in fact detract from its value. we could draw an analogy with literature. deaths can be good or bad for us in a way that is similar to the effect of the final chapter of a work. the final chapter of a novel could be bad in a number of different ways. it could be badly or unpleasantly written. it could disrupt our hopes and expectations for the story or the charac- ters. it might be premature, and fail to resolve or address narra- tive threads. but a final chapter can also be bad in its dimensions. it can be too long and drawn out, unbalancing the earlier writing through the writer’s inability to conclude. a bad final chapter casts a pall over a whole book. to extend the analogy, the narrative or story of someone’s life is also crucially affected by how it ends. tony bland’s story was tragically cut short by the hillsborough stadium disaster. but there is also a sense that his long period in a vegetative state, his long final chapter, significantly affected the value of his life as a whole. another analogy is with music. just as with literature, a poor conclusion to a piece of music diminishes what has gone before. in classical music, a ‘cadence’ is a sequence of chords that signal to the listener the end of the piece. one of the most familiar cadences in western classical music is the so- called ‘perfect’ cadence. this is a transition from the tonic chord to the domi- nant, and resolving to the tonic. the end of the second move- ment of schubert’s death and the maiden quartet ends with a series of those cadences—chords moving from g major to d major and back to g major. it leaves the listener feeling satisfied that the music has reached its conclusion. however, there can be much less satisfactory ways of ending a piece of music. an ‘interrupted’ cadence is one where the transi- tion of chords leaves the listener expecting resolution—but there is none, the dominant chord does not move to the expected tonic—rather to the sixth chord of the scale. o n a p ril , b y g u e st. p ro te cte d b y co p yrig h t. h ttp ://jm e .b m j.co m / j m e d e th ics: first p u b lish e d a s . /m e d e th ics- - o n n o ve m b e r . d o w n lo a d e d fro m http://jme.bmj.com/ wilkinson d. j med ethics ; : – . doi: . /medethics- - feature article music can also end badly in another way. some pieces of music seem to drag on and on—beyond the point when they should have stopped. the composer has run out of musical ideas and repeats material or stretches material unnecessarily. the over- long, extended ending distorts the shape of a piece of music. like the bad final chapter of a book, or a prolonged dying phase it can affect the value of the whole. lives, like pieces of music—can be long and symphonic— with complex structures, many moving parts, multiple themes and transitions. or they can be brief, concise, fleeting melodies comprising only a few notes or chords. it might seem that the value of a good conclusion is most important with a life or a musical work that is long and complicated and rich in experience and texture. on the contrary, the ending of a short song or a short life is disproportionately important. the lives (outside the womb) of some newborns are measured in minutes—it is all the more crucial, if we can, to take care about how those minutes are spent and how they conclude. they are, to draw another analogy—more like a haiku, than a ballad or an epic. no moment to waste concentrated existence - each syllable counts. the analogy with literature and art might suggest that the temporal dimension of dying is something like an aesthetic value of the end of life. normally, we can understand aesthetic value subjectively in terms of the value of a piece of art to others—the extent to which it is valued by observers or has properties that would typically lead to it being so valued. viewed in that way, the temporal value of dying might be reducible to the wishes and preferences of the individual, or those around them (perhaps even of wider society). tony bland’s family did not believe that he would have wanted to have his dying prolonged, and they did not wish him to be kept alive in a vegetative state. is there any additional sense in which bland’s prolonged dying was bad? if there is a relevant temporal dimension to dying, it is argu- ably not simply or purely an aesthetic value. it could represent an objective element of well- being that applies in the last phase of life. by an ‘objective’ element, i am referring to features of a person’s life that make that life go well or better, in a non- instrumental way, and regardless of whether or not they are desired or appreciated by the person. for example, some philosophers have argued that pleasure, friendship, significant achievement, important knowledge and autonomy are objective goods. is it objectively good to die at a particular time, or (more rele- vantly) is it objectively bad to have one’s dying phase prolonged? philosopher, brad hooker, has suggested a ‘sympathy’ test for objective well- being. he asks us to reflect on whether we feel sympathy for someone whose life lacks a particular property. imagine two people whose whole lives are similar in every other respect (eg, similar in pleasure, achievement, satisfaction), but one of whose lives lacked friendship. would we feel sympathy for such a person? according to hooker, if we do, that supports the idea that a life containing friendship is a better life: friend- ship is an objective element of well- being. we could apply to the same test in reverse to the value of a prolonged dying phase. imagine two people whose whole lives are similar in every other respect (eg, similar in pleasure, achievement, satisfaction), but one of whom has a prolonged phase of unconsciousness at the end of their life. would we feel sympathy for such a person? if we do, that is potentially because a prolonged dying phase is objectively bad.v why does all of this matter? reflecting on the different ways in which deaths can have value is important for those who care for dying patients. we may not always be able to prevent premature death. but good quality palliative care can improve the subjective experience of those who are dying, respect where possible their wishes and preferences, support their family, and avoid prolonging their dying phase. it is also ethically important, since the different ways in which deaths can be good may come into conflict. i have argued that there may be a temporal aspect to dying. if it makes sense that it is better to die at a particular time, and that dying should not be prolonged (even if not associated with pain) this is not the only or the most important thing to consider. this value needs to be weighed against other considerations—like the wishes of the patient and those of family members. sometimes it might need to be forsaken or compromised. some ways of dying might be better in one way but worse in others. however, clarifying that this is a value to be weighed may be helpful—particularly in some of the cases i have mentioned relating to profoundly compromised newborns or infants, whose subjective experience may be minimal, and who do not have any wishes of their own to consider. it was concern for the value of hal’s death that led me to spend a long time talking with bianca and tom. it was clear to me from our conversation that they were in different places, that they had different ideas about what might be most important, about what could actually be done. i was afraid that i might be compelled to intubate hal, to put him on a ventilator, though that seemed to me to be the wrong thing to do. but a short while later, when i spoke to them again, the conversation took a different turn. now it was tom’s turn to be quiet, while bianca spoke up. she told me that they did not want hal to die, but they did not want him to suffer either. they had talked more about the ventilator and come to a shared feeling that if it was merely going to prolong hal’s dying that they did not want to put him through that. we spoke some more then about what things we could do to help ensure that hal was comfortable, about the things that would be important for them to do with him while they could. that afternoon, both parents spent time at hal’s bedside holding him to their chest, reading to him. tom brought in a guitar and sang a song to his son that he had written for him. they arranged for several family members to visit and though the family weren’t religious, the hospital chaplain came and said a blessing for hal. hal’s breathing seemed easier with a low dose of morphine. that night, bianca and tom were able to sleep in one of our parent accommodation rooms with him in a cot beside them. it was the only time that they had had anything like a normal experience of being with their newborn son. v our intuitions here might be unreliable. it could be that we judge this to be bad because most people prefer not to have their dying prolonged. or we might fear that the patient could be in pain even though they appear not to be. or we might be implic- itly taking into account concern for the use of limited resources. it could be clearly harmful to others to consume limited health- care resources (for example, using a scarce intensive care bed) in prolonging the life of a patient who is permanently uncon- scious. however, we could control for those factors. consider a young child who has never been able to express preferences, who is certainly unconscious, and whose life is prolonged at his parents’ expense in a private hospital with ample capacity. in such a case, some at least may still feel sympathy for the child, and think that it would have been better for them to die earlier. o n a p ril , b y g u e st. p ro te cte d b y co p yrig h t. h ttp ://jm e .b m j.co m / j m e d e th ics: first p u b lish e d a s . /m e d e th ics- - o n n o ve m b e r . d o w n lo a d e d fro m http://jme.bmj.com/ wilkinson d. j med ethics ; : – . doi: . /medethics- - feature article we had hoped that hal might be able to go to our local chil- dren’s hospice the next day, but by mid- morning it was clear that he was deteriorating rapidly and that was not going to be possible. he died around lunchtime, in his parents’ arms. hal had a good death, a good final chapter to the short tale that was his life. he was comfortable, and as far as i could tell, not in pain. his parents were grateful for the time that they could spend with him and the memories that they had of his last hours. we did not prolong his life, but neither did we prolong his dying. twitter dominic wilkinson @neonatalethics acknowledgements this paper was first presented as a lecture given as part of a miegunyah distinguished visiting fellowship at the university of melbourne. the fellowship was generously supported by the russell and mab grimwade miegunyah fund. contributors dw wrote and conceived of this paper. funding dw was supported for this work by a grant from the wellcome trust /z/ /z. disclaimer the funder had no role in the preparation of this manuscript or the decision to submit for publication. competing interests none declared. patient consent for publication not required. provenance and peer review not commissioned; externally peer reviewed. data availability statement there is no data for this paper. open access this is an open access article distributed in accordance with the creative commons attribution . unported (cc by . ) license, which permits others to copy, redistribute, remix, transform and build upon this work for any purpose, provided the original work is properly cited, a link to the licence is given, and indication of whether changes were made. see: https:// creativecommons. org/ licenses/ by/ . /. orcid id dominic wilkinson http:// orcid. org/ - - - references claudius m. asmus omnia sua secum portans, oder, sämmtliche werke des wandsbecker bothen. wandsbeck: beym verfasser, . eichberger d. close encounters with death: changing representations of women in renaissance art and literature. in: muir bj, ed. reading texts and images : essays on medieval and renaissance art and patronage ; in honour of margaret m. manion. exeter, : – . mckay en. franz 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[ ] ewhc (fam), . gomes b, calanzani n, gysels m, et al. heterogeneity and changes in preferences for dying at home: a systematic review. bmc palliat care ; : . fletcher g. objective list theories. in: fletcher g, ed. the routledge handbook of philosophy of wellbeing. abingdon: routledge, : – . hooker b. the elements of well- being. journal of practical ethics ; . o n a p ril , b y g u e st. p ro te cte d b y co p yrig h t. h ttp ://jm e .b m j.co m / j m e d e th ics: first p u b lish e d a s . /m e d e th ics- - o n n o ve m b e r . d o w n lo a d e d fro m https://twitter.com/neonatalethics https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/ . / https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/ . / http://orcid.org/ - - - http://dx.doi.org/ . / http://dx.doi.org/ . /s http://dx.doi.org/ . /s - - - http://dx.doi.org/ . /anc. http://dx.doi.org/ . / http://dx.doi.org/ . / http://classics.mit.edu/epicurus/menoec.html http://classics.mit.edu/epicurus/menoec.html http://dx.doi.org/ . / - x- - http://jme.bmj.com/ 	sleep softly: schubert, ethics and the value of dying well 	abstract 	death and the maiden 	desperation and despair 	hope 	a good death 	the final chapter 	references taking a stand for reformation: martin luther and caritas pirckheimer taking a stand for reformation: martin luther and caritas pirckheimer kenneth g. appold lutheran quarterly, volume , number , spring , pp. - (article) published by johns hopkins university press doi: for additional information about this article [ access provided at apr : gmt from carnegie mellon university ] https://doi.org/ . /lut. . https://muse.jhu.edu/article/ https://doi.org/ . /lut. . https://muse.jhu.edu/article/ lutheran quarterly volume ( ): – © johns hopkins university press and lutheran quarterly, inc. text, for the record taking a stand for reformation: martin luther and caritas pirckheimer by kenneth g. appold [on october , , the quincentennial reformation observance at princeton theo- logical seminary featured kenneth g. appold’s inaugural lecture as james hastings nichols professor of reformation history] i two hours ago, students of this seminary posted several pages of theses to the door of miller chapel. (as a concession to our administrators and to their own professional futures, they used tape rather than nails.) in doing this, the students reenacted one of the most iconic scenes of the reformation: martin luther’s post- ing of his disputation on the power of indulgences, commonly known as the “ theses,” to the door of his own university chapel, the castle church of wittenberg, on october , —exactly years ago. despite the fact that no eyewitnesses took note of the event and luther himself never mentioned it, which has prompted some historians to question whether it happened at all, the moment has acquired enormous symbolic significance for protestants. the nails and hammer, wielded by the clear-headed and courageous reformer, have come to represent a turning point in christian history: the birth moment of the protestant reformation. the fact that october should have become so important to protestants is not at all obvious. the date had no special significance during the reformation itself. that is not surprising. for luther, the l u t h e r a n d c a r i ta s p i rc k h e i m e r “ theses” were an academic exercise. the chapel door served as the university’s bulletin board, and posting theses prior to a planned disputation was standard practice. it would have been no more sig- nificant than posting a course syllabus on blackboard today. our celebrations of that event would have puzzled luther as much as i would be surprised to find students, years from now, cere- moniously pressing a giant “enter” button on a replica keyboard to commemorate the scheduling of ch in . luther did not think posting disputation theses was remarkable. in this particular case, he probably had little intention of following through with the disputation itself; in fact, it never took place. far more momen- tous for luther—and for history—was something else he did with those theses on that day: he mailed them to three individuals, one of whom was the most powerful church leader in germany, arch- bishop albrecht of mainz. luther wanted to open a public debate that reached beyond the walls of the academy. he wanted to engage the church. in that sense, sending the theses to albrecht was a bad move. the archbishop profited enormously from the indulgence trade—far more than luther realized at the time—and the last thing he wanted was a public debate on the virtues of those indulgences. albrecht wanted luther to go away. and the most appropriate des- tination for luther, in albrecht’s mind, was a bonfire in rome. so albrecht forwarded his luther folder to the pope. that in turn set off a chain of events that quickly catapulted an entirely unknown professor from a backwater university onto center stage of european politics. heresy proceedings were opened against luther, refutations of luther’s theses were published, and demands were issued to have luther brought to rome to stand trial in person. since luther himself had absolutely no intention of going to rome, those demands were sent to his ruler, frederick the wise of saxony, requesting immediate extradition of the heretic. to rome’s irri- tated surprise, frederick, too, showed no intention of complying. he argued that luther was not only his subject, but also a professor at his state university and therefore should stand trial at home. negotiations dragged on, interrupted by various distractions, until an exasperated pope leo x finally excommunicated luther in january of . l u t h e r a n q ua rt e r ly that should have sealed luther’s fate, but it did not. frederick ignored the bull of excommunication, along with the repeated demand to send luther to rome, and instead insisted on a secular hearing by imperial authorities on german soil. frederick got his way and the hearing landed on the agenda of the next imperial diet, scheduled to take place in april in the german city of worms. that event turned out to be far more dramatic than the initial publication of luther’s “ theses” three-and-a-half years earlier. it is not hard to see why: luther’s life was at stake. he would have to answer for his views in the presence of germany’s most important rulers and even of the holy roman emperor. as the well-known cases of jan hus and florence’s savonarola reminded everyone, the life expectancy of heretics in such circumstances was not long. and attached to luther’s personal fate was the outcome of the ref- ormation itself. would rome, with the empire’s help, manage to crush the renegade reforming spirit, or would the german princes commit themselves and support the reformer? history hung in the balance. the resulting showdown—luther at worms—has turned into the second great “iconic moment” of the reformation. in many ways, this image outshines the first. the stakes were quite obviously higher, there were plenty of eyewitnesses, and the conse- quences were dramatic. the picture of luther at worms inspires the imagination, as the nineteenth-century representation printed in your bulletins makes clear. here we have a simple monk and scholar, facing the most powerful men in europe, armed with nothing more than the truth of scripture and his conscience. here we have a heroic reformer, clad in minimalist black amidst the opulence of his accusers, eyes lifted heavenward, “speaking truth to power” in a way that could hardly be more immediate. if any image symbolizes our traditional understanding of “reformation,” this is arguably it. in the following forty-five minutes, i would like to take a closer look at luther’s confrontation with the authorities in worms. as we will see, things were more complicated than they appear in paintings and iconography. it makes good sense, on this historic occasion, to take a look behind the screens of our confessional legend-making and ask ourselves anew what that celebrated moment has to teach us. and in order to facilitate that learning process, i will do something l u t h e r a n d c a r i ta s p i rc k h e i m e r that to my knowledge has never been done before: i would like to juxtapose luther’s great stand with that of another reformer, some- one far less known today, a catholic woman who was a nun and who took her own courageous stand, armed with little more than scripture and her conscience, also roughly years ago. she had to take her stand in part because luther had taken his. unlike luther, she stayed catholic and remained in her convent. her name was caritas pirckheimer, and if you don’t know much about her now, you will get to know her better in a few minutes. on march , , a herald arrived in wittenberg, wearing an impe- rial eagle on his sleeve and carrying a summons for martin luther. he would escort luther to the imperial diet in worms, roughly miles away. luther had expected him. the fact that he was an official of the empire and not of the roman church already represented a kind of victory for the reformer. rome had desperately sought to avoid such a scenario for it undermined the authority of its own supposedly definitive actions against luther and ceded authority to a secular process whose outcome it would be at pains to control. the man charged with imposing that control was a papal nuncio named girolamo aleandro [ jerome aleander], an accomplished humanist scholar and papal confidant, who was sent to observe the proceedings and to make sure that rome’s interests would be served by them. aleandro’s correspondence and subsequent report are important sources for reconstructing rome’s view of the event. the lutheran perspective appeared in print shortly after the diet; it was likely the work of several authors with luther playing an important role. as always in these early years of the reformation, luther and his allies had the edge in public relations; they published their account in both latin and in german, thereby making it available to the widest possi- ble audience. the catholic version was in latin only and saw a much lower circulation, thereby yielding valuable ground in the battle over the narrative. such concerns about messaging dominated luther’s preparations for the trip, as well. inexperienced and a bit naïve back in , luther was by now a veteran of high-profile clashes with prominent authorities and demonstrated an astonishing knack for controlling his public message. when the imperial herald arrived on march , the reformer was ready. l u t h e r a n q ua rt e r ly still, luther waited until april to depart. if rome wished that he would go to worms as inconspicuously as possible, luther and his allies had other plans; they sought to turn the trip into a political campaign. stylizing himself as a “simple monk,” luther borrowed a rickety old cart and, accompanied by several close colleagues, spent the next two weeks making his way towards worms. some have likened his entourage to the image of jesus entering jerusalem on palm sunday. others to a triumphal procession. all along the way, throngs of people lined the road to see him. clearly, luther’s case had struck a nerve. though some found him offensive, many more had come to view him as a kind of national hero—the first in hundreds of years to have the courage to stand up to the corrupt powers that be. resentment against the pope and roman curia was particularly strong, undergirded by long-standing cultural rivalries between the supposedly simple germans and overly sophisticated italians. luther knew how to play to those emotions, taking every opportunity to point out italian condescension and emphasize his own teutonic sincerity. behind this calculated façade, however, luther was genuinely anxious. he may have known how to orchestrate opinion, but he also realized that something far greater was at stake. at its heart, this was not about politics; it was not even about his own survival. this was about faith, and it was about salvation. it was about an insight that luther had come to call “the gospel.” on sunday, april , while taking a stop in the city of erfurt, luther preached a sermon to an overcrowded church. at times prophetic, at times almost apoca- lyptic, but always with an eye on the central message of salvation by trust in god and not by works of the law, the sermon climaxes in the following lines: the world may be full of evil, but “i want to speak the truth, and i must. that is why i stand here, without taking money for it. one must not trust in human laws or works, but rather have a right faith, which is a destroyer of sin, and in this way we find ourselves growing in him.” and in another passage, he draws attention to the stakes of this message: “i know that many don’t want to hear this. but i want to speak the truth, and need to do so, even if it costs me twenty necks.” though he never mentions worms l u t h e r a n d c a r i ta s p i rc k h e i m e r or his personal fate, the sermon strikes the themes that would later surface in the hearing: the gospel message is disruptive. it comes to destroy—to destroy sin, but nonetheless to destroy. despite that cost, however, luther feels compelled to proclaim the message. he must take a stand, with no regard to self-interest or self-preservation, and no concern for the powers that seek to stop him. the emo- tional burden, though, was considerable. shortly after, on his way to eisenach, he nearly collapsed and had to be bled. the city’s mayor gave him a more effective remedy: a stiff drink and a good night’s sleep. luther recovered. meanwhile, aleandro was seething. nothing was going to plan. far from remaining quiet, the heretic was spreading his toxic mes- sage everywhere he went. the nuncio’s nightmare was about to get worse. hoping that luther would enter worms through inconspic- uous backstreets with minimal commotion, he now had to watch on april as luther arrived at the main gate with an entourage of saxon nobles, welcomed by trumpets blasting fanfares from the cathedral tower, and met by a rush of more than two thousand locals frantic to meet the excommunicated reformer. if rome’s strategy had been to silence luther, it was failing. in order to understand the conflict that was now brewing, one needs to appreciate aleandro’s agenda. while luther tended to speak of the “tyranny of the papacy,” and had by now even begun to refer to the pope as an “antichrist” bent on obstructing the gospel, rome was concerned with something else. for the pope and his advisors, luther was clearly a heretic. heresy was dangerous not only because it preached falsehood and imperiled people’s salvation, but also because falsehoods were destructive to society. a heretic was by nature someone who struck out on his or her own, someone whose one-sidedness of perspective put him or her at odds with tradition and consensus, and who therefore posed a serious threat to the social equilibrium both church and state worked so hard to maintain. heresy was disruptive. and if heresy went unchecked, it spread like a corrosive cancer though the delicate sinews of society. this is why aleandro and others wanted so much to keep luther contained. germany was restless and vulnerable to insurrection. a l u t h e r a n q ua rt e r ly man like luther, intolerant, reckless and delusional, could do enor- mous social damage if left to speak freely. the hearing began on april . pointing to a stack of books, an official asked luther two questions: did you write these books? and do you stand by what you wrote? luther was expected to answer simply “yes” or “no.” everyone expected him to say “yes” to both, thereby ending the trial and sealing his fate. aleandro was already rubbing his hands at the thought when luther came up with a surprise that astonished everyone present. the first ques- tion he could answer easily. yes, he had written those books. but the second, luther, continued, was more difficult. “because this is a question of faith and the salvation of souls, and because it concerns the divine word, which we are all bound to reverence, for there is nothing greater in heaven or on earth, it would be rash and at the same time dangerous for me to put forth anything without proper consideration.” and then luther asked for time to reflect. this was completely unexpected, but after consulting with the emperor and princes, the secretary, visibly annoyed, informed luther that he would have until the next day to prepare his answer. the next day luther did indeed return, escorted by the herald, arriving punctually at : pm. the princes made him wait. finally, at six, the secretary told luther his time of reflection had come to an end; he must now give his answer. facing the emperor and princes, luther made his reply. it was not short. transcribed and in book form, it covers four full pages. it was not even a clear “yes” or “no.” luther’s response resembled a sermon or lecture more than a legal statement. it is hard to imagine the imperial bureaucrats sitting still for all of it. but luther was undeterred. rather than retracting or affirming his books in their entirety, he divided them into three groups. the first were simply devotional, and even his opponents conceded their value—therefore it made no sense to retract those. the second included his attacks on the papacy. to retract these would fan the flames of papal tyranny, and leave rome’s machinations— which he went on to describe in some detail—uncriticized. this he could not do. that same reasoning applies to the third group, in which he attacks private individuals who wrote against him in order l u t h e r a n d c a r i ta s p i rc k h e i m e r to defend the papacy. though he admits he may have overstepped the mark and given genuine offense, he nonetheless cannot step back from those statements lest his opponents, who surely deserved his criticisms, continue their efforts and open the door to godless- ness among god’s people. at this point, luther digresses slightly. what he says now tends to get overlooked because it does not add to the argument materially, but it may well be more significant than the more famous words he said later. luther knew very well that he had been accused of causing dissent and division, and that, interlocked with the charge of heresy was the assumption that his efforts could spark insurrection and a collapse of the social order. he lets the emperor and princes know that he has considered this potential effect of his teachings. and now he says something remarkable: “to see excitement and dissension arise because of the word of god is to me clearly the most joyful aspect of all in these matters.” one can imagine ale- andro sitting up at this point; one can imagine the young emperor, charles v, raising his eyebrows. they would have expected luther to deny these consequences of his teachings, saying he could not take responsibility for what others did when they misunderstood him. instead, the reformer actually welcomed—and even took joy—in this ominous outcome. “for this is the way,” luther continued, “the opportunity, and the result of the word of god, just as christ said, ‘i have not come to bring peace, but a sword.’ ” this was a direct challenge to all the worldly powers assembled before him. like a prophet, luther reminds the kings that they, too, answer to the word of god—and that that word will be their judg- ment. that he would say such a thing while himself on trial seems either extremely foolish or even delusional. some would argue that luther had by this time given up on his own safety and took this chance to speak his mind—for the record. others, including his famous inner-protestant rival thomas müntzer, viewed this episode as proof that the entire event was rigged and that luther was in no real danger at all. but those explanations place too much value on external factors. luther’s closing statements make clear that he is motivated by a much more interior dynamic, something deeply l u t h e r a n q ua rt e r ly personal that makes him forget, at least momentarily, his personal temporal fate. when the court’s speaker reproached him for not answering the question, luther agreed to give a “simple” answer: unless i am convinced by the testimony of the scriptures or by clear reason (for i do not trust either in the pope or in the councils alone, since it is well known that they have often erred and contradicted themselves), i am bound by the scriptures i have quoted and my conscience is captive to the word of god. i cannot and i will not retract anything, since it is neither safe nor right to go against conscience. having said this in latin, he now added in german, according to some sources, the famous words: “i cannot do otherwise, here i stand, may god help me, amen.” of course, this answer is not quite as simple as luther suggested. importantly, it is not a straightforward appeal to his conscience— which is how it is often understood. luther does not say that his conscience prevents him from recanting, but that his conscience is “captive to the word of god.” that is an important difference because it does not locate the authority for his actions within him- self; he is not listening to an inner voice, trying to be authentic, or true to himself. he is trying to be true to the word of god. and this is also different from saying that god prevents him directly from recanting. luther is not saying that god has spoken to him—as god spoke to the prophets, for example. he is not claiming immediate revelation—not even by using formulas like “after ‘prayerful reflec- tion’ this is the path that was revealed to me,” the way our contem- poraries frame their statements when they want to escape scrutiny. luther does something else entirely. he points to the authority of the word of god. it is the word that holds his conscience captive. and even that statement is qualified in a significant way: if some- one convinces him that scripture says something else, or that he has misunderstood or even misapplied scripture, he will be open to changing his position. in that sense, luther behaves less like a prophet and more like a scholar. he seems to be interested in a kind of free academic inquiry, where the truth emerges through open discourse. after all, he was a professor. let us remember, though, that this is a special kind of scholarship: a scholarship where the stakes l u t h e r a n d c a r i ta s p i rc k h e i m e r are ultimate, and where one’s conscience is stressed to the full. it is a scholarship that matters—in the deepest sense. ii luther lived to see another day. his remarkable stand in worms swayed ambivalent princes and inspired masses to line up behind him in a hope for change. while the imperial diet condemned him, threatened his allies and ordered the burning of his books, the empire had reached the limits of its might. prince frederick of saxony, aptly named “the wise,” refused to implement the diet’s edict and instead protected luther. other rulers ignored the measure, too. following martin luther, an entire society was beginning to take a stand as the reformation entered an entirely new dimension. but not everyone was happy with these changes, and not everyone who resisted did so out of spite, or fear of change, or out of a desire for more papal tyranny. there were people who found their own consciences burdened by the now predominant call for upheaval, and whose consciences called on them to fight for a different way. caritas pirckheimer was abbess of a convent in the imperial city of nuremberg, germany. she belonged to the order of the poor clares, a group of female mendicants closely allied with the male franciscans, and founded by francis and his associate clare of assisi three hundred years before the reformation. they, too, were born of a protest movement, rising against the waves of a new mercantile economy and its ethos of wealth-acquisition. they rejected the new obsession with owning things and thought that private property strangled one’s soul. they dedicated themselves to a more purely spiritual life, a life unencumbered by money and objects, and com- mitted to following jesus christ in serving the world. caritas was born as the eldest child into a wealthy and highly intellectual patrician family in —making her sixteen years older than martin luther. her given name was barbara. the girl’s upbringing was unusual for her time because her father made sure that she received the best possible education a girl—or boy—of that age could get. that meant private tutoring, learning latin, and having access to the family’s remarkable humanist library, much of l u t h e r a n q ua rt e r ly it acquired in italy. that was not at all a normal way to treat girls’ education, even among the wealthy of the day. barbara’s father made little distinction between boys and girls in that respect and extended the same principles of classical education to her eight younger sib- lings, as well. among them, willibald would grow up to become one of the most distinguished humanist scholars of germany. inter- estingly, when their father died in , he left his library not to willibald, but to barbara. barbara entered the convent at age twelve. had she been a boy, she could have enrolled in one of nuremberg’s latin schools, but since that path was barred to girls, the convent offered the main opportunity for a life of learning. of the four pirckheimer daugh- ters, three would enter convents. four years later, in , which also happened to be the year luther was born, barbara professed her vows and joined the order, taking the name caritas—or “love.” it guided her for the rest of her life. caritas pirckheimer’s impact on humanist intellectual circles of her day is astonishing, especially when one considers that she rarely left her convent and could speak to outsiders only through a screen at the visitors’ window. she did, however, write letters. and she wrote many. her correspondence, at times deeply insightful, erudite and revealing, reached luminaries across europe, and even included the pope. most of these partners were men, and quite a few were profoundly inspired. they included the painter albrecht dürer, the poet conrad celtis, and other intellectuals, several of whom dedicated poems and other writings to caritas. to many, she came to represent a kind of idealized image of a german renaissance woman; in their eyes, she stood for humanist progress and became a reminder that gender distinctions, at least in those rarified airs, could be blurried. an erudite woman could become like a man, entering friendships with men and even taking the roles of men. erasmus of rotterdam, arguably the most famous humanist in all of europe, knew of her through her brother and likely based a character in his piece, “the abbot and the learned lady” at least partly on caritas. in this satire, a dim-witted abbot finds himself mismatched in conversation with an educated woman. he tells her that women should not read or seek education, for “books ruin l u t h e r a n d c a r i ta s p i rc k h e i m e r women’s wits—which are none too plentiful anyway,” and “learning doesn’t fit a woman.” his conversation partner calmly disagrees, pointing out that, while unlettered abbots are all around, there are growing numbers of literate women who “can rival any man.” “if you’re not careful, the net result will be that we’ll preside in the theological schools, preach in the churches, and wear your miters.” “god forbid,” cries the abbot. caritas pirckheimer did not say those words, of course, but she could easily have inspired the role. few women of her time were better qualified to preside over seminaries, preach in churches, or wear an abbot’s miter. indeed, caritas did preside over a convent school, taught the sisters from scripture, and was herself an abbess— thereby already fulfilling these very functions, albeit in a space reserved for women. judging from her correspondence, more than a few men would have been delighted to learn far more from her. although she inspired many men to write to her and about her, we know her through her own words, as well—above all through her many letters. caritas also left another remarkable document: a journal chronicling the convent’s experience during the tumultuous years of – . this eye-witness account provides a unique perspective on the reformation from someone who showed some sympathy for its theology but found herself completely at odds with its methods. many of nuremberg’s leading minds sympathized with luther, who visited the city in . willibald pirckheimer even wrote to the pope to defend the reformer. caritas and her sisters read and discussed luther in the convent, and the biggest churches had lutheran-minded pastors by . bit by bit, evangelical reforms found implementation. churches began celebrating communion in both kinds; services, scripture readings and sermons shifted to german; priests started to marry; and voices rose in calls to close the monasteries and convents. both luther and melanchthon had written very negatively about monastic life and in particular about monastic vows, arguing that, as currently understood and practiced, such vows encouraged works righteousness. while monastic vows could be useful if properly understood, they were human constructs and not binding before god. those who taught that keeping one’s monastic vows was l u t h e r a n q ua rt e r ly necessary for salvation committed a serious error. though luther’s writings were aimed at comforting monks and nuns who had left their orders and were struggling with their consciences as a result, their impact on those still in monastic life was enormous. all around germany, monastery walls opened like bursting dams, spilling their contents into the streets. and where that did not happen, civic lead- ers sought to pry them open by force—both out of conviction and because they could take possession of the houses once empty. in nuremburg, pressure on the monasteries and convents had been building for several years. caritas makes this point in her very first journal entry for : in the year noted above it happened that many things were changed by the new teachings of the lutherans and much dissension befell the christian faith. the ceremonies of the church have been done away with in many instances and the clerical class has been almost completely destroyed in many areas. at that time christian freedom was being preached as well as the idea that the laws of the church and even the oaths of the religious orders were invalid and no one was obligated to keep them. and so it happened that many nuns and monks made use of such freedom and ran away from their cloisters and threw off their robes and habits; some married and did whatever they wanted. from this we suffered much distress and affliction. during the day many of the pow- erful and of the simple people came to their relatives who resided in our clois- ter. they preached and spoke of the new teachings and disputed incessantly, arguing that the cloistered were damned and subject to temptations and that it was not possible for them to attain salvation there. we were all of the devil. when the city council adopted the reformation formally in march of , the oppression increased dramatically. the protestant reformers pressured the sisters to put on worldly clothing, to open their visitors’ windows so that outsiders could see the sisters, and finally to open the convent itself. evangelical pastors were sent in to preach sermons, and attendance was taken to make sure the sisters heard them: thus for the whole passion week we had to hear all the preachers so that we might be converted by force since there was no escape. truly we had a diffi- cult passion week, with a great deal of commotion, shouting and unrest in the chapel. the entire convent was compelled to hear the sermon and no sister could miss it. . . . they threatened us that . . . they would let people enter who l u t h e r a n d c a r i ta s p i rc k h e i m e r would sit with us during the sermon and keep watch to see if we were all there, how we behaved and whether or not we stuffed wool in our ears. . . . in good faith [the evangelical preachers] exhorted [the people] to wipe out our godless community entirely, tear down the cloisters and drag us out of them by force. we were, you see, in a state of damnation, heretics, idolaters, blasphemers and would belong to the devil forever. perhaps more seriously, the city council prohibited the franciscan friars from hearing confession in the convent, as they traditionally had done. this meant the sisters had no way of making confession, thereby disrupting their religious life in a central way. things came to a head when citizens came and dragged their daughters out of the convents, at times with the help of police. as implausible as it may have seemed to those concerned citizens, these sisters very much wanted to stay in their cloistered life; and they wanted to remain true to their vows. caritas refused to back down or to give in to the pressure from the city fathers—and, to be fair, local mothers, too, since it was often the mothers who came to pry their daughters out of the convent. caritas defended the sisters and the convent tirelessly, writing letter after letter to the city council, asking for relief—and for respect. for the next nine months, she stood up to an overwhelming tide of public opinion in the city, as wave after wave of would-be intruders arrived to “liberate” the sisters from behind their walls. her position was unfashionable and thought to be unmodern. well-established reformers, such as andreas osiander and wenceslaus linck, key movers in nuremberg’s protestant refor- mation, wrote fiery treatises attacking the convent and did their best to wear down the abbess. but she stood firm. her brother, too, interceded on her behalf—finally writing his friend, philipp melanchthon. in reply, melanchthon came to the city in november of . caritas expressed concern that the wittenberg reformer would make things worse. nonetheless, she agreed to meet with him, and they spoke—through the screen. no one knows how long they spoke, but caritas wrote about it in her journal. melanchthon tried to enlighten her about lutheran theo- logy, which caritas seems to have understood much better than he anticipated. she assured him that she and the sisters placed their faith in the grace of god, and not in works. deeply moved by her l u t h e r a n q ua rt e r ly arguments, her eloquence and her resolve, the reformer conceded that the sisters could indeed find salvation within the convent’s walls—as long as they did not believe their vows were meritorious. afterwards melanchthon persuaded the city council to change its policies and to respect the nuns. the convent remained. no new novices were allowed to enter, but the sisters who were there stayed until they died. caritas lived until , two years longer than her younger brother willibald, whose enthusiasm for the reformation had dimmed long before. iii caritas pirckheimer had taken a stand. but what was it for? ulti- mately, it was for love. this was the name she chose for herself in her new life when she was sixteen and committed herself to a life in the convent. it was a profound love. for many on the outside, and even for many today, it was also a confusing love. not a few scholars have struggled to define it, typically using terms such as “idealized,” “pla- tonic,” “pure,” a “love of the spirit and not of the body,” and so forth, taking great care to cleanse it of any trace of the erotic. this may say more about those scholars than it does about caritas, however. she was far less prudish. one of the most revealing of her epistolary exchanges took place with the renaissance poet conrad celtis. celtis was best known for a collection of love poems, divided into four books, each dedi- cated to a different one of his mistresses. their relationship began in , when celtis sent her a copy of his most recent work, a drama based on a highly learned tenth-century nun. this piece celtis dedi- cated to caritas pirckheimer, whom he had never met but of whom he knew through his friendship with her brother. the two begin to exchange deeply revealing, personal letters. finally, celtis sent caritas a copy of his four books of love poems, to which he had added a new poem—to caritas. it was passionate and eloquent at once, but also a bit risqué. his professions of eternal love were hardly chaste. caritas took three weeks to respond. she thanked him for his poem, which she said had touched her deeply. but she would have been even more delighted if he had devoted himself to visions of l u t h e r a n d c a r i ta s p i rc k h e i m e r the heavenly jerusalem than to earthly things. she was concerned that celtis would interpret this as a rejection—and indeed he did; he never wrote to her again. but that was not at all her intent. instead she wished to redirect his passion to a love of higher things, specifically into the mystical theology that she herself so much enjoyed. this, she suggests to him, is where true love—and true caritas—may be found. it is some- thing she would like to share with him. the play on words—offering him a path to the “true caritas”— is intriguing, and it may be worth noting that no part of the christian repertoire is more overtly erotic than mystical theology! by appearing to reject more conventional expressions of love, she gives her partner a map to where a deeper love—and her truer self—reside. unfortunately, celtis, presumably embarrassed, bolted, and we will never know how their relationship might have unfolded. as this exchange makes clear, the convent walls were more than protection from the outside, or a place of refuge for educated women such as caritas. they gave them, to use a term from virginia woolf, a “room of their own”: a space to write. and, as caritas’ letters show, that writing was itself an expression of christian love—perhaps the highest expression to which men or women of that humanistic per- suasion could aspire. this was what the humanists called “erudi- tion.” it formed and cultivated the spirit and lifted it closer to god. the art of humanistic letter writing was not an obvious component of a monastic life that traditionally emphasized askesis and unworld- liness. in that sense, caritas was reshaping the ideals of the convent and opening up new possibilities for those within it. if previously, convents were mainly places to pray, chant, and meditate, they were now, in her hands, also a place to write. and letter-writing was a potent medium. it transcended walls and crossed boundaries, bring- ing women like caritas pirckheimer into christian friendship with men of every class and every station—and on equal terms. it was liberating. and it was this freedom that she fought so hard to protect. it was a different freedom than being able to leave one’s convent, the kind of freedom she described earlier in her journal entry as a kind of “protestant freedom.” but it was closer to the kind of free- dom luther showed in worms: it was the freedom of someone who l u t h e r a n q ua rt e r ly has found something. more importantly, it was the freedom that comes from god—and frees us from ourselves. on one level, this is a theologically understood freedom, connected to the grace of god. but it also has a social dimension. both caritas pirckheimer and martin luther find within that grace a freedom from societal discourse and conventions that have previously defined them—in luther’s case an achievement-based doctrine of salvation, and for caritas, the traditional constraints of gender. both find themselves liberated from such exterior realities and led to the discovery of something more true. unfortunately, the nuremberg reformers do not acquit them- selves well in this story. they who found themselves inspired by the image of luther in worms to take a stand against tyranny turned around and imposed their own brand of tyranny on the convent. they wanted to remove the nuns and turn it into a school—which is perhaps the greatest irony of all, and says a lot about their incapac- ity to understand the life behind those walls. it also reminds us today, as we look back on years of reformation, that no “side” ever gets it completely right. more importantly, taking sides is not the same as taking a stand. it doesn’t take nearly as much courage—and it is certainly not as liberating. a poet i admire has used the term “holy disorder.” it is what happens when the world of one’s certainties comes crashing down around one. that can be profoundly disorienting; but it can also be holy. it can open a window onto something new and as yet unrecognized, a world not yet seen, a promise not yet claimed. and within all that mess is a god who speaks and reveals a new and unanticipated way to call. the term is particularly apt for describ- ing the reformation. because the reformation itself was a kind of holy disorder. more than a specific agenda or program, more than any particular reforms or new confessions or a taking of sides, more than a recipe for the perfect polity or the ideal congregation or even the right way to read scripture, it was a time of disorder. the old certainties were cast into doubt and the course of events pulled the rug out from under a good many feet. vows were broken, vows were upheld; no one knew what was next and nothing in the past gave a reliable map for the present—much less the future. at times like l u t h e r a n d c a r i ta s p i rc k h e i m e r that most people run for the sidelines; and there they line up and they take sides—which is what many in the reformation did. a few, however, did something else. they heard the voice of god, whether in scripture, their conscience, or somewhere in the clutter and chaos around them. they saw the holiness. and they took a stand. that’s a lonely place to be, and not everyone has what it takes. but this evening i wanted to introduce you to two remarkable people who did. and the stands they took—each different but also profoundly similar—changed the course of the world. notes . accounts of luther’s appearance at the diet of worms, and of the complicated negotiations that preceded it have generated much literature, beginning shortly after the event itself with a report by luther and his allies, as well as a counter-report by the papal nuncio, girolamo aleandro. these and others of the period are collected and edited in wa : – . luther’s letters shed additional valuable light on these events; see wabr . of more recent studies, i am particularly indebted to the following: volker reinhardt, luther der ketzer. rom und die reformation. . aufl. (münchen: verlag beck, ); lyndal roper, martin luther: renegade and prophet (new york: random house, ); martin brecht, martin luther. sein weg zur reformation (stuttgart: calwer verlag, ); scott hendrix, martin luther: visionary reformer (new haven and london: yale, ); and armin kohnle, reich- stag und reformation. kaiserliche und ständische religionspolitik von den anfängen der causa lutheri bis zum nürnberger religionsfrieden (heidelberg: gütersloher verlagshaus, ). among the historic accounts closer to luther’s own time, that of friedrich myconius (historia reformationis, written around , but published posthumously in , as well as in more recent editions) remains influential, especially for roper. . see reinhardt, – , – . . see wa : – . . particularly insightful on this dimension of luther’s trip is reinhardt, – . . reinhardt, – ; roper, – ; brecht, – . . reinhardt, ; hendrix, . the palm sunday motif was also applied to luther’s trial in worms; see roper, . . roper, . . see brecht, ; roper, . . wa : – . for additional background, see hendrix, . . wa : , ll. – . . ibid., ll. – . . friedrich myconius, geschichte der reformation, ed. by otto clemen (leipzig: voigt länders verlag, [s.d.]), . . brecht, ; roper, ; reinhardt, . aleandro’s reaction is documented in his correspondence; reinhardt, . . lw : . see wa : . l u t h e r a n q ua rt e r ly . ibid. . lw : – . wa : – . . lw : . wa : – . . ibid. . lw : . wa : . . lw : . wa : . the sources are inconsistent on this point. some omit the statement entirely, others include some variation of the statement, such as “may god help me.” (see lw : , n. ). . see anne bezzel, caritas pirckheimer. Äbtissin und humanistin (regensburg: verlag friedrich pustet, ), – . also, josef pfanner, “caritas pirckheimer—biographie der Äbtissin,” in: caritas pirckheimer. ordensfrau und humanistin—vorbild für die Ökumene. fest- schrift zum . todestag, ed. by georg deichstetter (köln: wienand verlag, , – ; and françois terzer, caritas pirckheimer: une femme voilée de liberté (paris: les Éditions du cerf, ). . ibid., . . pfanner, . . the date of her vows remains undocumented, but this seems most likely since it was the earliest age at which she would have been eligible, and it is around this time that her new name begins to appear. see bezzel, . . some humanists drew on older medieval traditions, particularly inspired by st. jerome and his friendship with st. paula, that allowed women to “become men” under certain highly spiritualized conditions, chief among them sexual abstinence but also, of course, learnedness. see ursula hess, “oratrix humilis. die frau als briefpartnerin von human- isten, am beispiel der caritas pirckheimer,” in: der brief im zeitalter der renaissance, ed. by franz josef worstbrock, deutsche forschungsgemeinschaft (weinheim: acta humaniora, ), – ; here – . see also bezzel, ; and berndt hamm, “hieronymus- begeisterung und augustinismus vor der reformation. beobachtungen zur beziehung zwischen humanismus und frömmigkeitstheologie (am beispiel nürnbergs),” in: augus- tine, the harvest, and theology ( – ). essays dedicated to heiko augustinus oberman in honor of his sixtieth birthday, ed. by kenneth hagen (leiden, et al: brill, ), – . it is worth pointing out that erasmus does not make virginity a requirement for wom- en’s erudition; indeed his “learned woman” in the famous colloquy, “the abbot and the learned lady,” mentioned below, is married. . see willibald pirckheimer’s letter to erasmus, dated may , , in which he extends greetings from caritas and their sister, both of whom had read erasmus closely, especially his edition of the new testament. printed in: briefe von, an und über caritas pirckheimer (aus den jahren – ), ed. by josef pfanner (landshut: caritas pirckheimer forschung, ), p. ; and desiderius erasmus: opus epistolarum, vol. (oxford: claren- don, ), p. . see also martin h. jung, nonnen, prophetinnen, kirchenmütter. kirchen- und frömmigkeitsgeschichtliche studien zu frauen der reformationszeit (leipzig: evangelische verlagsanstalt, ), p. and n. . . the character of the learned lady is named “magdalia” and therefore impossible to identify with certainty. some scholars see her as based on caritas, others on thomas more’s daughter margaret roper. she may well be a composite. see bezzel, – , who takes the former view; and collected works of erasmus, vol. : colloquies, transl. and ed. by craig r. thompson, ; thompson favors margaret roper. “the abbot and the learned lady” (abbatis et eruditae) appears here annotated and in translation, colloquies, pp. – . l u t h e r a n d c a r i ta s p i rc k h e i m e r erasmus himself mentions “the more daughters, . . . the pirckheimer and blarer ladies” in the piece by name (colloquies, ). . colloquies, (l. ) and (l. ). . colloquies, – . . die “denkwürdigkeiten” der caritas pirckheimer, ed. by josef pfanner (landshut: caritas pirckheimer forschung, ); in english translation, caritas pirckheimer: a journal of the reformation years, – , transl. by paul a. mackenzie (cambridge: d. s. brewer, ). . luther expounds on these topics in a series of writings from and , cul- minating in the major treatise, de votis monasticis martini lutheri iudicium (the judgment of martin luther on monastic vows), wa , – (lw , – ). melanchthon was actually more critical of the monastic vocation than luther, and included such statements in his loci communes of and other writings (see jung, – ). . journal, – (with several changes of my own to the translation). see denkwür- digkeiten, . . journal, f; denkwürdigkeiten, f. . see jung, – ; denkwürdigkeiten, f; journal, f. . hess points to a conflict between divergent trajectories in caritas’ activity: that between her ascetic monasticism on the one hand and her humanist passion for learning on the other. see hess, . . briefe, pp. – . . briefe, . . see bezzel’s account of the exchange; bezzel, – . . briefe, . . for more on the status of letter writing in the renaissance, and on the implica- tions of caritas’ own writing, see hess, passim. particularly helpful are hess’s observations on the ideals of erudite friendship in erasmus’ above-mentioned colloquy, and as evidenced by caritas’ exchange with celtis ( – ). also instructive is hess’ analysis of caritas’ epis- tolary friendship with sixtus tucher, which has some parallels to that with celtis ( – ). . sera chung, “holy disorder,” holy disorder [cd], firemouth culture, . journal of art historiography number june alois riegl and his lecture notes. a reconsideration of his concept of ‘baroque’ eleonora gaudieri . die entstehung der barockkunst in rom ( ) as part of riegl’s lecture notes the work of alois riegl ( ‒ ), one of the major thinkers of the so-called ‘wiener schule’ and of modern art historiography in general, has already been this article is an elaboration of my talk at the conference ‘the influence of the vienna school of art history before and after ,’ which took place ‒ april at the czech academy of sciences in prague. for the latest contribution to riegl’s work, see, for example: ute engel, ‘der barock und das kunstwollen: alois riegl,’ in ute engel, stil und nation: barockforschung und deutsche kunstgeschichte (ca. ‒ ), paderborn: wilhelm fink, , - ; diana reynolds cordileone, alois riegl in vienna ‒ : an institutional biography, farnham: ashgate, ; peter noever, artur rosenauer and georg vasold, eds., alois riegl revisited: beiträge zu werk und rezeption. contributions to the opus and its reception, vienna: Österreichische akademie der wissenschaften, ; and the review of this by matthew rampley, ‘re- reading riegl,’ journal of art historiography, , december ; alois riegl, the origins of baroque art in rome, ed. and trans. by andrew hopkins and arnold witte, with essays by andrew hopkins, alina payne and arnold witte, los angeles: getty research center, ; alois riegl, grammatica storica delle arti figurative, trans. by carmela armentano and ed. by andrea pinotti, macerata: quodlibet, ; matthew rampley, ‘alois riegl ( ‒ ),’ in ulrich pfisterer, ed., klassiker der kunstgeschichte, , von winckelmann bis warburg, munich: beck, , - ; alois riegl, historical grammar of the visual arts, trans. by jacqueline e. jung and ed. by benjamin binstock, new york: zone books, ; georg vasold, alois riegl und die kunstgeschichte als kulturgeschichte: Überlegungen zum frühwerk des wiener gelehrten, freiburg im breisgau: rombach verlag, ; richard woodfield, ed., framing formalism: riegl’s work, amsterdam: g+b arts international, . see julius von schlosser, ‘die wiener schule der kunstgeschichte: rückblick auf ein säkulum deutscher gelehrtenarbeit in Österreich,’ mitteilungen des Österreichischen instituts für geschichtsforschung, xiii: , . for the latest contribution to the vienna school, see, for example: matthew rampley, the vienna school of art history: empire and the politics of scholarship, ‒ , university park, pennsylvania: the pennsylvania state university press, ; ján bakoš, discourses and strategies: the role of the vienna school in shaping central european approaches to art history & related discourses, frankfurt am main: peter lang edition, ; and the review of this by branko mitrović, ‘the vienna school and central eleonora gaudieri alois riegl and his lecture notes. a reconsideration of his concept of ‘baroque’ extensively examined, however some aspects of his literary production still remain unexplored. this concerns especially the partial publication of his manuscripts on baroque art and consequently a compromised reception of his idea of ‘baroque,’ which remain important issues in current historiography. the project was inspired by the getty publication the origins of baroque art in rome ( ), edited by andrew hopkins and arnold witte. this book stands out from the historiography on riegl’s work not only because it offers the first english translation of the posthumous publication die entstehung der barockkunst in rom ( ) , but also because of the complexity of approaches by the authors of the introductory essays ‒ alina payne, arnold witte and andrew hopkins ‒ to riegl’s work, analyzed from different points of view. furthermore, their contribution paves the way for a more thorough investigation of riegl’s manuscripts on baroque art, since it discusses the problematic reception of his concept of ‘baroque’ by modern and contemporary historiography. in , three years after riegl’s death, the book die entstehung der barockkunst in rom was published. its editors were arthur burda, librarian of the hofmuseum as well as riegl’s former student and friend, and max dvořák, riegl’s successor to the chair of art history at the university of vienna. die entstehung offers an almost european art history,’ journal of art historiography, , december ; edwin lachnit, die wiener schule der kunstgeschichte und die kunst ihrer zeit: zum verhältnis von methode und forschungsgegenstand am beginn der moderne, vienna, cologne and weimar: böhlau verlag, ; maria theisen, ed., wiener schule: erinnerung und perspektiven, vienna: böhlau, . alois riegl, the origins of baroque art in rome, ed. and trans. by andrew hopkins and arnold witte, with essays by andrew hopkins, alina payne and arnold witte, los angeles: getty research center, ; and the review of this by ute engel, ‘riegl on the baroque,’ journal of art historiography, , december , - . alois riegl, die entstehung der barockkunst in rom, ed. by arthur burda and max dvořák, vienna: schroll, . published in a second edition with additional illustrations. vienna: schroll, . reprint, munich: mäander, . reprint, munich: mäander, . translated by sibylle muller as alois riegl, l’origine de l’art baroque à rome, paris: klincksieck, . reprint, paris: klincksieck, . for the historical contextualisation of riegl’s work in the field of the contemporary german-language historiography on baroque art, see alina payne, ‘beyond kunstwollen: alois riegl and the baroque,’ in riegl, the origins, - . for the reconstruction of riegl’s work on baroque art in its development phases and an introduction to the problematic reception of riegl’s idea of ‘baroque’ in consideration of the unpublished manuscripts, see arnold witte, ‘reconstructing riegl’s entstehung der barockkunst in rom,’ in riegl, the origins, - . for the reception of riegl’s work in the field of the german art historiography of the s and s with its effects on the following decades until a second ‘riegl renaissance,’ concentrated in the field of british and american art historiography of the s and s, see andrew hopkins, ‘riegl renaissances,’ in riegl, the origins, - . for the latest contribution to riegl’s work on baroque art, see ute engel, stil und nation: barockforschung und deutsche kunstgeschichte (ca. ‒ ), paderborn: wilhelm fink, , - . eleonora gaudieri alois riegl and his lecture notes. a reconsideration of his concept of ‘baroque’ literal transcription of selected parts of riegl’s lecture notes on baroque art, which, as indicated by its publishers in the editors’ preface, he prepared for his teaching at the university of vienna between and . in respect to this, at least one question would be appropriate, namely, whether the selection criteria applied by burda and dvořák can in fact guarantee a complete understanding of riegl’s idea of ‘baroque.’ as explained by the authors of the origins of baroque art in rome, the collation of the posthumous book of with riegl’s manuscript notes gets to the heart of the matter. it sheds light on the fact that burda and dvořák decided to publish only a small part of riegl’s lecture notes under the title die entstehung. the book deals with the period of italian art from michelangelo buonarroti’s mature works starting from to the final years of annibale carracci and michelangelo merisi da caravaggio in , that is to say, with the ‘origin’ (‘entstehung’ in german) of baroque art. furthermore, it is useful here to point out that in order to provide a clear structure to the book, burda and dvořák divided the text into chapters and consequently modified the structure of the lecture notes, which exhibit rather generical captions. even the emphasis on the ‘origin’ of baroque, as suggested in the title, seems to be based primarily on an editorial decision, since there is no reference to this title in the corpus of riegl’s manuscripts. . riegl’s lecture notes on baroque for his teaching at the university of vienna riegl’s manuscripts on baroque are preserved in the archives of the art history department at the university of vienna and kept in a box labeled ‘alois riegl vorlesungen barock / , / bernini.’ the reconstruction of the genesis and developmental stages that involved the writing process and the organisation of the lecture notes together with an overview of their structure, as proposed by arnold witte in his essay ‘reconstructing riegl’s entstehung der barockkunst in rom,’ was a fundamental task in preliminary approaches to riegl’s documents. the manuscripts are divided into three different groups, or rather ‘chronological sections,’ according to riegl’s lectures. there is a close connection between each of these folders due to riegl’s constant reuse of his preceding lecture notes for the following sessions. riegl gave his first course on baroque, dedicated to ‘art history of the baroque age,’ in the winter semester – . the main theme was the origin and cf. arthur burda and max dvořák, ‘preface,’ in riegl, die entstehung, v-vi. see arnold witte, ‘reconstructing riegl’s entstehung der barockkunst in rom,’ . riegl (box iv): umschlag ‘kunstgeschichte des barockzeitalters,’ vorlesungsmanuskript ws ‒ ; umschlag ‘italienische kunstgeschichte von ‒ ,’ vorlesungsmanuskript ws ‒ ; umschlag ‘lorenzo bernini,’ Übungsmanuskript ss . archives of the art history department at the university of vienna. witte, ‘reconstructing riegl’s entstehung,’ - . eleonora gaudieri alois riegl and his lecture notes. a reconsideration of his concept of ‘baroque’ development of the roman baroque style throughout italy and beyond the alps. from the lecture notes which he wrote and used in preparation for this course, he took out those sections that did not deal with italian art. in fact, four years later, riegl then focused his attention on italian art and dedicated a second cycle of lecture to ‘italian art history from to .’ for his third course, ‘italian art history from to ’ in the winter semester – , he used earlier teaching materials, especially the lecture notes of his second course, ‘italian art history from to .’ from the material prepared for his third cycle of lectures, he extracted the section on giovan lorenzo bernini and used it for his monographic seminar of the summer semester , dedicated to the baroque artist. on this occasion, he offered his students translations and commentaries of passages from filippo baldinucci’s vita del cavaliere gio: lorenzo bernino, scultore, architetto, e pittore ( ). based on the different paper colour of riegl’s manuscripts – grey, faded blue and white sheets – it can be argued, as observed by witte, that the notes are the result of a ‘constant reordering and adjustment of the texts he composed for his lectures.’ grey paper was used for his course on ‘art history of the baroque age’ ( – ), faded blue for the lecture on ‘italian art history from to ’ ( – ), and, finally, the white paper goes back both to the third course on ‘italian art history from to ’ ( – ) and the monographic seminar on bernini of the summer semester . the first folder, entitled ‘art history of the baroque age, w[inter] s[emester] / ,’ contains lecture notes of the first cycle of lectures on grey paper, and, in addition, sections on white paper dealing with architecture in ‘saxony’ and ‘prussia (and north germany),’ which riegl presumably jotted down later as supplements to his discourse on architecture in germany. this first folder includes the most substantial number of papers, namely loose sheets, and it constitutes a relevant thematic group since its unpublished material allows access to a european baroque art. following an introduction to his course, riegl began his investigation with a section dedicated to ‘the first period of baroque architecture from michelangelo to the arrival of bernini.’ it follows the subsequent captions ‘the development of for information on riegl’s series of lecture on baroque art and on the related lecture notes, see also burda and dvořák, ‘preface,’ in riegl, die entstehung, v-vi. for the dating of riegl’s manuscripts on the basis of the different kind of paper, see the follow of the main text and note . filippo baldinucci, vita del cavaliere gio: lorenzo bernino, scultore, architetto, e pittore, firenze: stamperia di vincenzio vangelisti, . witte, ‘reconstructing riegl’s entstehung,’ . for information on the dating of riegl’s lecture notes on the basis of his different use of paper, see: karl m. swoboda, ‘foreword,’ in alois riegl, historische grammatik der bildenden künste, ed. by karl m. swoboda and otto pächt, graz and cologne: hermann böhlaus nachf., , - and . ‘sachsen’ and ‘preussen (und norddeutschland).’ ‘kunstgeschichte des barockzeitalters,’ in riegl (box iv). archives of the art history department at the university of vienna, - . eleonora gaudieri alois riegl and his lecture notes. a reconsideration of his concept of ‘baroque’ roman baroque architecture until the arrival of bernini’ and ‘baroque architecture before bernini outside rome.’ on page is found a section dedicated to ‘the middle period of baroque style (high baroque),’ subdivided in turn by the captions ‘roman baroque architecture of the th century starting from bernini’ and ‘baroque architecture of the second period outside rome.’ from page onward, the title is ‘third period of italian baroque architecture: th century.’ pages to include a section dedicated to ‘italian sculpture of the th and th centuries,’ which ends with a more extended examination of ‘painting of the italian baroque era,’ for which the numbering starts anew with page . the final section deals with ‘german art of the baroque’ and again features a new numbering. the second folder, ‘italian art history from – , w[inter] s[emester] / ,’ contains the corpus of die entstehung ( ), which groups together the materials from riegl’s two other and thematically closely related lectures, respectively those on faded blue paper for his second cycle of lectures, ‘italian art history from to ’ ( ‒ ), as well as the lecture notes on white paper that he prepared for his third and last course on the baroque, ‘italian art history from to ’ ( ‒ ). this material is clearly an elaborated version of those sections of lecture notes of the first folder on the origins of baroque style, the main theme of die entstehung. the dominance of faded blue paper here might suggest that the text basically consists of the notes already prepared for his second lecture, ‘italian art history from to ’ ( – ), and that riegl probably prepared his third and final lecture ‘italian art history from to ’ ( – ) on the basis of his previously written text for his preceding course. furthermore, as part of this material, one can find a small group of notes written on grey paper and, consequently, taken from the lectures of the first folder. a vivid example of riegl’s reuse of previous material for his successive lectures is the section on michelangelo merisi da caravaggio and the naturalists, written on grey paper and inserted later at the end of the second folder. while die entstehung ends with the sentence ‘[...] and he died of fever at porto ercole on the pontinian coast in , before he was able to reach rome ‒ in the same year annibale carracci died in rome,’ the lecture notes at the end of this second folder continue with the reception of caravaggio by the naturalists and a critical analysis of their art work. it concerns the paintings of bartolomeo manfredi, carlo saraceni, michelangelo cerquozzi and domenico fetti, see also witte, ‘reconstructing riegl’s entstehung,’ - . it will be helpful here to correct some information derived from witte’s preliminary investigation on the manuscripts: the first folder contains only the lecture notes on gray paper (with some integrated part on white paper) for the first course of ‒ ; the second folder includes the corpus of die entstehung on blue, white and some gray paper. this means that this second folder contains both the lecture notes of the second course of ‒ , on blue paper, and those of the third course of ‒ , on white paper. cf. witte, ‘reconstructing riegl’s entstehung,’ . ‘[…] und [caravaggio] stirbt fieberkrank zu porto ercole an der pontinischen küste, bevor er rom erreichen kann, im selben jahre, da annibale carracci zu rom geendet hat.’ riegl, die entstehung, . eleonora gaudieri alois riegl and his lecture notes. a reconsideration of his concept of ‘baroque’ with particular attention to the art of fetti. this is continued in the first folder by riegl’s examination of italian schools of painting from north to south up to the th century, a time in which the figure of giovanni battista tiepolo stands out, whom riegl regarded as the last important italian painter. the simultaneous presence of grey, mainly faded blue but also white paper in this second folder suggests that its label dating the material to – is not entirely correct. the last folder, entitled ‘lorenzo bernini,’ contains riegl’s monographic research on giovan lorenzo bernini, to whom he dedicated the seminar of the summer semester . the text, written exclusively on white paper, consists of riegl’s comments on filippo baldinucci’s vita del cavaliere gio: lorenzo bernino, scultore, architetto, e pittore ( ), together with translations of selected sections. later, in , the material was published by arthur burda and oskar pollak under the title filippo baldinucci’s vita des gio: lorenzo bernini. as burda and dvořák have indicated in the editors’ preface of die entstehung, riegl took out from the corpus of his third lecture notes, ‘italian art history from to ’ ( – ), the sections on bernini to reuse and maybe to revise them in view of his monographic seminar of . according to the editors, the publication of stanislao fraschetti’s monography on bernini in prompted riegl to examine bernini’s works more closely and to carry out his research in line with the latest literature. burda and dvořák indicated riegl’s text of as his most recent contribution to bernini. this state of things was confirmed by a collation between this section with another one dedicated to the artist, which, written on grey paper, can be found from page to of the first folder’s content, as a part of the lecture notes for the winter semester – . . barockkunst in rom ( ) and projects for a publication of riegl’s ‘art history of the baroque age’ fifteen years after the publication of die entstehung ( ), a new edition entitled barockkunst in rom ( ) was published by karl m. swoboda and johannes wilde. the differences from riegl’s manuscript are even more substantial than the first edition by burda and dvořák. swoboda and wilde included thirty-two illustrations in their book, which are neither part of the edition nor of riegl’s lecture notes, they rearranged the order of chapters as compared to die entstehung, and finally they changed the book’s title to barockkunst in rom. it is conceivable that these further changes were due to swoboda’s and wilde’s efforts to facilitate the see witte, ‘reconstructing riegl’s entstehung,’ - . alois riegl, filippo baldinuccis vita des gio: lorenzo bernini, Übersetzung und kommentar von alois riegl, ed. by arthur burda and oskar pollak, vienna: schroll, . see burda and dvořák, ‘preface,’ in riegl, die entstehung, v. alois riegl, barockkunst in rom, ed. by karl m. swoboda and johannes wilde, wien: anton schroll & co, . see witte, ‘reconstructing riegl’s entstehung,’ - . eleonora gaudieri alois riegl and his lecture notes. a reconsideration of his concept of ‘baroque’ figure karl m. swoboda’s scheme of riegl’s lecture notes on baroque art (first page), ca. . reception of the text. moreover, it cannot be ruled out that the editors originally intended to publish a larger part of riegl’s manuscripts under the new title barockkunst in rom. these additional alterations to the original structure of the lecture notes led authors to deal with the first edition of , as in the case of the recent english translation the origins ( ). in the second folder of riegl’s lecture notes, before and separate from the corpus of die entstehung, are found five handwritten notes on white paper in a hand that conforms to the one of swoboda. the first four pages of swoboda’s notes show a scheme of riegl’s lectures notes on baroque art, organized into three groups (fig. ). the illustrated subdivision of the material corresponds to the chronological sequence of riegl’s lecture notes and also provides information on the different uses of paper. thus, as stated by witte, it reflects the current sorting of riegl’s manuscripts into the first two folders, which group together the three lectures on baroque art and presumably goes back to swoboda. the first grouping on swoboda’s scheme, that is, the lecture notes of the first course, ‘art history of the baroque age,’ corresponds to the first archival folder. the remaining two groupings, with reference to the lecture notes on ‘italian art history from to ’ ( – ) and the materials for the following third course, ‘italian art history from to ’ ( – ), are part of the same second folder, which contains the corpus of die entstehung. the scheme shows no reference to riegl’s lecture notes in the third folder, which consists of riegl’s translations and comments on baldinucci’s biography of giovan lorenzo bernini, later published by arthur burda and oskar pollak in . the fifth paper of swoboda’s scheme, as while the book cover’s title is barockkunst in rom, one can read on the frontispiece of the same volume the title die entstehung der barockkunst in rom. therefore, a planned publication of additional volumes of riegl’s unpublished lecture notes cannot be ruled out. cf. witte, ‘reconstructing riegl’s entstehung,’ - . see witte, ‘reconstructing riegl’s entstehung,’ and note . see witte, ‘reconstructing riegl’s entstehung,’ - . eleonora gaudieri alois riegl and his lecture notes. a reconsideration of his concept of ‘baroque’ figure karl m. swoboda’s scheme for a planned new edition (fifth page), ca. . suggested by the caption ‘for a reconstruction for a new edition,’ contains references to a possible new edition of riegl’s lecture notes (fig. ). on the basis of the indicated page numbers together with the corresponding subjects, it seems that swoboda’s intent was to include in the planned new edition both published and unpublished sections of riegl’s lecture notes. the publication should have focused on art history from to , hence, in riegl’s periodisation, from high baroque to neoclassicism. however, this new edition would have changed the structure of riegl’s notes, since it would have joined together, without distinction, published and unpublished passages taken from the three folders (the roman numbers refer to the lecture series and the arabic numbers to the page numbers of the selected sections), with the aim of providing space for an organic discourse on baroque art. it follows that the latter would have reflect swoboda’s own ideas more than riegl’s intentions. in any case, swoboda’s plan for a more comprehensive edition of riegl’s writings on baroque was never realized. . a european baroque art from the mid- th century to : riegl’s introduction to his course ‘art history of the baroque age’ only when turning the pages of the manuscripts do we realize that riegl’s investigation of baroque establishes more extended geographical and chronological boundaries. from the analysis of the unpublished material comes to light, indeed, a far more complex idea of ‘baroque’ as an artistic phenomenon that goes beyond the limits of rome and includes a more extensive chronological period: a european baroque art from the mid- th century to . the lecture notes of the first folder, see witte, ‘reconstructing riegl’s entstehung,’ . eleonora gaudieri alois riegl and his lecture notes. a reconsideration of his concept of ‘baroque’ ‘art history of the baroque age’ ( – ), offer such a wide-ranging perspective since riegl discusses the topic of the concept of european ‘baroque’ in the field of german art literature at that time. . . riegl’s periodisation of baroque art in introducing students to his course, riegl should have asked the following question: ‘is it justified to treat italian art history from to as an independent section?’ already the first sentence of his lecture notes speaks of an intention to tackle a methodological question, suggesting the necessity of treating italian art in a broader context. riegl’s following observations make particularly evident the periodisation of his investigation of baroque art, the time frame of which extends from – according to him the end of the high renaissance and the beginning of baroque – to the nineteenth century, when finally, in his words, begins ‘‘modern art’ in the strict sense.’ concerning italian art history of the baroque age, to which riegl dedicated more than the first half of his lectures notes on ‘art history of the baroque age,’ he established its chronological boundary with the last phase of antonio canova’s career around , whose artistic contribution he defined as ‘reaction against everything that italian art had striven for since .’ in the context of his periodisation, riegl proposed a further subdivision of the same time frame: on the one hand the baroque style, which developed from to , and on the other hand neoclassicism, which continued the last phase of the baroque from to . on this basis, riegl further restricted the boundary of his ‘scientific systematics’ in the first section of the time frame, which covers the period from to . in this time frame, one could assume with him ‘a generally uniform artistic direction.’ nevertheless, he stressed that it would be useful to consider the time frame of – as an ‘appendix’ to the whole periodisation. the motivation would lie in the importance of the last phase of baroque for the development of neoclassicism. see witte, ‘reconstructing riegl’s entstehung,’ . ‘ist es gerechtfertigt die geschichte der italienischen kunst von – als selbständigen abschnitt zu behandeln?’ ‘kunstgeschichte des barockzeitalters,’ . the lecture notes show two series of numbers: after page , the following sheets were marked with a new numbering. ‘‘moderne kunst’ im engeren sinne.’ ‘kunstgeschichte des barockzeitalters,’ . ‘reaction gegen alles, was die italienische kunst seit angestrebt hatte.’ ‘kunstgeschichte des barockzeitalters,’ . ‘wissenschaftliche systematik.’ ‘kunstgeschichte des barockzeitalters,’ . ‘ein[e] im allgemeinen einheitlich[e] kunstrichtung.’ ‘kunstgeschichte des barockzeitalters,’ . ‘anhang.’ ‘kunstgeschichte des barockzeitalters,’ . eleonora gaudieri alois riegl and his lecture notes. a reconsideration of his concept of ‘baroque’ . . the role of roman baroque within a ‘universal history’ after riegl’s explanation of his periodisation of baroque art, he drew his students’ attention to a further question concerning the role of italian baroque within ‘a universal history of the visual arts of humanity.’ the examination of the corpus of this first folder indeed shows a discussion of the developments of baroque style and its propagation beyond the alps within a extensive history of culture. this history goes back to ancient egyptian, greek, roman and byzantine art but also includes the ‘modern era.’ within this universalistic historical perspective, the artistic phenomenon is significant either as a ‘local’ or a ‘universal’ cultural expression. this depends on whether the art works of a certain period are to be understood as parts of a localized cultural episode, or whether they acted as a dominant factor of culture, such as the italian renaissance art or baroque art. riegl assumed that in the course of history the supremacy of one cultural center would be replaced by other centers, whereby the interplay between the ‘artistic talent’ of a ‘nation’ (‘volkes’) and cultural, sociological and political factors would be decisive. within riegl’s ‘universalgeschichte,’ the visual arts play a fundamental role in this historical development, both as a cultural phenomenon and at the same time as an ‘eine weitere vorfrage werden wir uns auch mit nutzen sofort zu beantworten trachten. sie werden sich fragen: welche bedeutung innerhalb der großen universalgeschichte der bildenden kunst der menschheit haben sie der italienischen kunst, die auf die hochrenaissance gefolgt ist, beizumessen?’ ‘kunstgeschichte des barockzeitalters,’ . riegl briefly introduced the kind of role of italian and european baroque in the artistic development in the introduction to his subsequent cycle of lectures focused on italian art. see riegl, die entstehung, - . within the framework of riegl’s work, the analyses of the artistic phenomenon develop within a universal historical perspective, or rather ‘universal history.’ riegl was introduced to this historical view by the teaching methods of robert zimmermann and max büdinger. burckhardt’s work also agreed with this philosophy, which showed human history to be a unified development. see for example: swoboda, ‘foreword,’ historische grammatik, . for riegl’s universal-historical analysis or morphological comparative method, see andrea pinotti, ‘foreword to the italian edition,’ in alois riegl, grammatica storica delle arti figurative, trans. by carmela armentano and ed. by andrea pinotti, macerata: quodlibet, , . see also gianni carlo sciolla, la critica d’arte del novecento, novara: de agostini, , . ‘kunstgeschichte des barockzeitalters,’ . describing those artistic phenomena that would have played a marginal role in the development of art history, riegl employed the following expressions: ‘lokale bedeutung’ or ‘untergeordnete bedeutung.’ ‘kunstgeschichte des barockzeitalters,’ . concerning those artistic phenomena that would have played a crucial role in the development of art history, riegl used the following expressions: ‘weltbeherrschende rolle,’ ‘fundamentale weltgeschichtliche bedeutung,’ ‘universalen werth’ or ‘führende rolle.’ for riegl as ‘kulturhistoriker,’ see georg vasold, alois riegl und die kunstgeschichte als kulturgeschichte, - . ‘künstlerischen begabung.’ ‘kunstgeschichte des barockzeitalters,’ . ‘volkes.’ ‘kunstgeschichte des barockzeitalters,’ . eleonora gaudieri alois riegl and his lecture notes. a reconsideration of his concept of ‘baroque’ independent means of expression with its own laws. the universal history of fine arts, in riegl’s sense, consists of the periodic alternation of the leading role of a ‘volk,’ which for a certain time dominates the progress of artistic development. the artistic dominance of a ‘volk’ is determined by the successful development of its own ‘artistic talent’ on the basis of which it creates a ‘universal’ model for the other nations. the dominant artistic direction is either accepted or rejected by the other ‘völker,’ which leads to different results: in the first case – in riegl’s opinion the ‘standard principle’ – the leading role of the ‘volk’ is recognized and its artistic language assimilated; in the second case, the other ‘völker’ take their own artistic direction and express it in their own artistic language, but without playing an important role in the international scene. seen through the lens of this far-reaching historical perspective, for riegl it was undeniable that the role of, for example, ancient egyptian, greek, roman and byzantine art at their respective times could be described as ‘universal.’ the same kind of phenomenon is reiterated in the art of the italian renaissance, which acted as an ‘authoritative model’ for the local artistic developments in the other european countries. due to the dominance of this italian artistic language inspired by ancient times, it was impossible for another, equally powerful artistic phenomenon in the rest of europe to develop its own rules. in this context, german, english, french or spanish renaissance arts, in comparison to the universality of italian culture, represent a local expression of this artistic phenomenon, the development of which was dependent on italian art. starting from the end of the th century, according to riegl, italian art gradually lost its hegemonic role in all disciplines of art history, the first symptoms of which could be observed in the field of painting, now dominated by holland and spain, up to the second half of the th century, when france took over the leading role in the european art scene. nevertheless, the investigation of european art of the baroque age, with a focus on the relationship between the italian baroque art stemming from the roman tradition and the baroque of those territories beyond the alps, would confirm a more or less constant influence of italian art on the ‘local’ development of baroque in european countries, and consequently its ‘universal’ role in european art history. riegl used the example of viennese architecture, which between the end of the th and the beginning of the th centuries under fischer von erlach and his school developed its distinguishing features. however, at the same time, in his opinion viennese baroque architecture betrayed the influence of roman baroque, without the assimilation of which its own original development would have been inconceivable. riegl noted that a similar situation of a local artistic expression based on the roman example could also be observed in the other territories of austria as well as in the southern territories of germany, and he drew the following conclusion: ‘whoever wants to get to know the development of art after in its ‘maßgebende regel.’ ‘kunstgeschichte des barockzeitalters,’ . the example of the viennese baroque architecture as a ‘local’ and at the same time original development of roman baroque is present also in the introduction of die entstehung ( ). see riegl, die entstehung, - . eleonora gaudieri alois riegl and his lecture notes. a reconsideration of his concept of ‘baroque’ most important features, must first study the development of the roman baroque style.’ . focusing on selected passages of riegl’s lecture notes: a european late ‘baroque’ after surveying the corpus of riegl’s lecture notes with a total of pages, i focused my attention on those sections that supplement die entstehung ( ). applying a further selection, i first chose those passages that contribute to broadening riegl’s idea of ‘baroque,’ that is to say, those sections that bring to light the european character of the late baroque. to better understand riegl’s difficult handwriting (fig. ), it was necessary to transcribe a part of the unpublished corpus amounting to a total of pages. this basically represents the transcription of a conspicuous part of the first folder’s contents, most of which consists of the lecture notes on grey paper from the first teaching cycle, ‘art history of the baroque age.’ in addition to this material, i also transcribed the final pages of the second folder that contain the corpus of die entstehung. these last sheets are the continuation of the section with which burda and dvořák decided to end riegl’s discussion on baroque painting with caravaggio’s death; these letters, also on grey paper, were kept apart from the material of the first folder. concerning the criteria for transcription, my aim was to leave the selected section unchanged, maintaining both its original structure and, wherever possible, the orthography in use at that time in the german speaking countries. the obtained text thus offers a whole section of ‘wer die kunstentwicklung nach in ihren maßgebenden zügen kennen lernen will, muss in . linie die entwicklung des römischen barockstils studieren.’ ‘kunstgeschichte des barockzeitalters,’ . figure example of riegl’s handwriting, page of the section ‘painting of the italian baroque era.’ riegl’s notes for the ‒ series of lectures. eleonora gaudieri alois riegl and his lecture notes. a reconsideration of his concept of ‘baroque’ the lecture notes, with the exception of the passages on bernini, the carracci’s school, guido reni and francesco albani. as explained, the pages on bernini in this first folder show no substantial differences, neither in structure nor in the analysis of artworks, from the lecture notes on bernini written by riegl for his summer seminar of and published later in by burda and pollak. a similar argument also applies to the passages on carracci’s school, guido reni and francesco albani, which do not fundamentally differ from the sections on the same topic in to the second folder that constitute part of the corpus of die entstehung. the selected and transcribed material can be divided into two major thematic sections: the first one deals with italian art from ‘high baroque,’ the beginning of which riegl established in bernini’s early work, to neoclassicism; and the second section is dedicated to ‘german art of the baroque age,’ that is to say, the development of baroque style beyond the alps from the first half of the th century, when according to riegl the assimilation of the roman baroque style by northern people would have taken place, to neoclassicism. these two sections, however, are connected not only by their time frame and the treatise’s structure or the grouping of art works into the three major categories of art history, architecture and sculpture and painting. their common ground also lies in the contemplation of the artistic phenomenon in its stylistic development. riegl traces, in his words, an ‘historical thread of development’ of art history of the baroque age which not only encompasses italy from north to south but also permeates the whole of austria. riegl pays particular attention to the viennese baroque and includes in his discourse both germany and bohemia, with particular attention to prague. riegl’s investigation in each field of artistic discipline basically follows geographical and cultural criteria, which makes it possible to define the baroque not only as a ‘universal’ phenomenon, as in the case of the international style based on the roman example, but also as a ‘local’ phenomenon, as for example in the case of the viennese baroque. if the examination of roman baroque style, which riegl identifies as the ‘origin’ of european baroque art, can make it possible to understand the stylistic development in its various phases throughout europe, the analysis of art beyond the alps also reveals a plurality of artistic ‘languages’ which, apart from a common ground, namely, the roman baroque style, have their own identity. riegl’s examination of baroque art proceeds by means of a detailed analysis of individual art works of these personalities, who have more or less significantly contributed to the development of baroque. except for more wide- ranging reflections concerning the development of art history in a universal historical perspective, the structure of riegl’s discussion, the rhythm of which is the full title of the first section of the transcribed corpus is ‘ii die mittlere periode des barockstils (hochbarock).’ see ‘kunstgeschichte des barockzeitalters,’ . ‘kunstgeschichte des barockzeitalters,’ . ‘historischen entwicklungsfaden.’ ‘kunstgeschichte des barockzeitalters,’ . riegl used this expression with reference to his aim to investigate, through geographic-cultural criteria, the specificity and complexity of northern baroque. eleonora gaudieri alois riegl and his lecture notes. a reconsideration of his concept of ‘baroque’ articulated by careful investigation of art works, is quite similar to his lecture notes for the following courses, which constitute the corpus of die entstehung. this way of proceeding in a case-by-case manner, which can only confirm the relevant role of an empirical approach in riegl’s methodology, seems to have its raison d’être in the intrinsically didactic value of this kind of writing, that is to say, the lecture notes. the section on italian art concludes riegl’s examination of italian baroque, thus integrating the published lecture notes on the origin and early development of the roman baroque style. as in the book die entstehung, the largest part is dedicated to architecture, which constitutes the first topic. the section on the ‘high baroque’ introduces the art of giovan lorenzo bernini and his crucial role in the development of italian art, which is then followed by an analysis of the work of francesco borromini, pietro da cortona and andrea pozzo. the important role of francesco borromini for the artistic development is evident not only from this part of the manuscripts dedicated to italian art but also from the examination of baroque beyond the alps. his influence on the art of guarino guarini and domenico gregorini are also discussed. the lecture notes on ‘german art of the baroque’ include a discussion of the development and assimilation of borromini’s language by the architects on the other side of the alps, as in the case of dientzenhofer’s in bayern, franconia and bohemia. concerning architecture in italy, riegl distinguishes it into three areas: north, centre and south. he includes an analysis of the architecture of cosimo fanzago, baldassarre longhena, ferdinando fuga, alessandro galilei, filippo juvarra, luigi vanvitelli and others. the section dedicated to italian sculpture then deals with the work of alessandro algardi, françois duquesnoy, francesco mochi and the influence of bernini on their artistic production. it follows a larger part dedicated to ‘italian painting of baroque age,’ which thematically consists of two parts. the first introduces an extensive discussion of the development of art history from antiquity to the th century under the lenses of a mutable relationship between man and nature with its consequences on artistic production. from this point of view, baroque painting is considered as the most appropriate artistic language for a ‘realistic’ interpretation of the natural phenomenon in the modern age. in the second part, riegl discusses the heterogeneity of italian baroque painting and therefore the necessity to proceed along schools, groups of painters or single personalities. after the naturalists follows the examination of the roman school (andrea sacchi, carlo maratta and sassoferrato), the works of neapolitan and foreign painters, who made important contributions to neapolitan art (from giuseppe ribera and salvator rosa to luca giordano and francesco solimena), florentine painting and tuscan painters (as in the case of cristofano allori, cigoli, francesco furini, carlo dolci and pietro da cortona) as well as northern painting (from bernardo strozzi to giovanni battista, daniele and giuseppe maria crespi). the analysis of italian art concludes with the painters of the th century, such as pompeo batoni, antonio canale, bernardo bellotto, giovanni battista tiepolo, rosalba carriera and francesco zuccarelli. the second section, dedicated to ‘german art of the baroque age,’ begins with a discussion of the development of ‘german art’ from the middle ages to the eleonora gaudieri alois riegl and his lecture notes. a reconsideration of his concept of ‘baroque’ baroque era, discussing in particular the role of roman baroque in this process and at the same time the distinguishing features of ‘german art.’ as for the examination of italian art, riegl deals extensively with the study of architecture. he reaffirms the necessity to proceed by ‘territories,’ which often correspond to not only geographical but also political boundaries. only in this way it would have been possible to understand the artistic development of each territory and its more or less consistent assimilation of baroque art, taking into account the specificity of its artistic traditions. concerning architecture in austria, riegl focuses his attention on the development of baroque in vienna and closely examines the work of johann bernhard and joseph emanuel fischer von erlach and lucas von hildebrandt. starting with a propagation of the roman baroque style due to the immigration of italian artists, which according to riegl found its full expression in bernini’s art, this is continued with an elaboration of the roman baroque by the next generations of austrian artists towards the creation of a ‘national’ style. the next passages are then dedicated to the baroque in prague, from the important role of italian families of architects in its propagation, such as the lurago family, to the maturation of a local artistic language due to the activity of christoph and kilian ignaz dientzenhofer. since bohemian architecture would have essentially maintained its roots in the ‘german’ renaissance, despite the diffusion of roman art, the baroque style of borromini, which in riegl’s opinion had profound affinities with ‘german art,’ would have had found fertile ground for its assimilation. the investigation of the baroque in germany, which riegl defines as a ‘territorial complex,’ takes into account the following areas: ‘alpine territories south of the danube,’ ‘south germany,’ ‘franconia,’ ‘swabia,’ ‘rhineland,’ ‘saxony,’ and ‘prussia and north germany.’ concerning the history of baroque art in these areas, riegl always distinguishes between a first phase, characterized by the initial spread of italian baroque, and a second phase, in which, due to its reinterpretation by local artists, it evolves into a national style. with regard to the baroque sculpture of the territories beyond the alps, riegl discusses its development starting from the diffusion of bernini’s art, most of all thanks the intermediation of italian artists, up to the creation of a local artistic language. this section thus deals with the art works of lorenzo mattielli, giovanni giuliani, raphael donner, franz messerschmidt, andreas schlüter and johann friedrich böttger. riegl’s lecture notes for the winter semester – end with the examination of german painting. particular attention is dedicated to the work of adam elsheimer, which in riegl’s opinion had the capability to blend the italian means of expression with german naturalism into a unique artistic language. ‘kunstgeschichte des barockzeitalters,’ . ‘ländercomplex.’ ‘kunstgeschichte des barockzeitalters,’ . eleonora gaudieri alois riegl and his lecture notes. a reconsideration of his concept of ‘baroque’ . a synthesis of approaches: a philological-historical method and a universal historical analysis in his introduction of riegl’s posthumous book historische grammatik der bildenden künste ( ), swoboda states that because of his designation as a full professor of art history at the university of vienna in , riegl felt able to include in his teaching also italian art history, which until this point was considered the domain of the at that time full professor franz wickhoff. according to swoboda, at this point it became possible for riegl to specify his target, that is to say, to engage in the research and teaching of art history, without restrictions, as a ‘universal history of art.’ from the so far addressed issue, one can deduce that at the time of his course on baroque of the winter semester – riegl was engaging with an extensive investigation of italian art and its relevant role in european art history. furthermore, from these lecture notes, one can assume that aim of his discourse on baroque was to show his students the importance of a kind of approach to art history that was able to combine the empirical analysis of art works with the investigation of the artistic phenomenon from a more wide-ranging point of view. both his reflection on a ‘universal art history’ through which he introduced this first cycle of lecture as well as his detailed analysis of individual art works, which articulates the rhythm of his investigation of the baroque, can be regarded as exemplifications of the ideal methodological approach that he will later theoretically susbstantiate in his essay ‘kunstgeschichte und universalgeschichte’ ( ). riegl’s discussion on the baroque arises from a synthesis of two methodological approaches which, as he will explain in the essay of , should not be applied one aside from the other in scientific research: the ‘philological-historical method’ and the ‘universal-historical analysis,’ which nowadays corresponds to what is known as the ‘comparative method.’ the first should be used as a methodological instrument in the service of ‘im jahre war riegls ernennung zum ordentlichen professor der kunstgeschichte an der wiener universität erfolgt. an der universität nun gleichrangig mit wickhoff, fühlte riegl sich nicht weiter verpflichtet, die geschichte der kunst italiens als eine sonderdomäne wickhoffs zu respektieren. anderseits fühlte er sich nun bestimmt, die gesamte kunstgeschichte als universalgeschichte der kunst zu erforschen und zu lehren. es erscheint in diesem jahr sein aufsatz ‘kunstgeschichte als universalgeschichte.’’ swoboda, ‘foreword,’ historische grammatik, - . alois riegl, ‘kunstgeschichte und universalgeschichte,’ in riegl, gesammelte aufsätze, - . ‘philologisch-historische methode.’ riegl, ‘kunstgeschichte und universalgeschichte,’ . ‘universalgeschichtliche art der betrachtung.’ riegl, ‘kunstgeschichte und universalgeschichte,’ . ‘es wäre also völlig müßig die frage aufzuwerfen, welcher von beiden methoden der verzug zu geben ist. sie sind beide notwendig und bedürfen einander wechselseitig. es stünde daher zu wünschen, daß sie stets hand in hand miteinander gingen. das wäre das ideale verhältnis, das aber als solches wohl kaum je zu erreichen sein wird.’ riegl, ‘kunstgeschichte und universalgeschichte,’ - . see pinotti, ‘foreword,’ riegl, grammatica storica, : ‘[…] quel che il metodo storico- filologico non vede, perché esclusivamente circoscritto a quest’opera, lo può invece cogliere eleonora gaudieri alois riegl and his lecture notes. a reconsideration of his concept of ‘baroque’ historiographic research to examine the visual arts as a unified cultural development of a history of humanity. the individual work should provide information about the overall development and vice versa. in the context of this extensive perspective, it would have been possible to identify deep connections between works of art, which could be very far apart from each other chronologically, through the principle of ‘comparison,’ and this modus operandi would allow the art historian to solve the major issues of art history. conclusions in light of what has been discussed so far, it is possible to draw the following conclusions. from the investigation of riegl’s lecture notes on ‘art history of the baroque age’ stands out, in comparison to the posthumous publication die entstehung, a far more complex idea of ‘baroque’ as a stylistic phenomenon, which, arising from rome around , develops throughout italy and european countries until the beginning of the th century. riegl’s examination of baroque art avails of geographic-cultural criteria with the aim to consider the plurality of responses of the rest of italy and other european countries to the assimilation of the roman baroque. the detailed analysis of the most representative art works of each territory allows to grasp the specificity of their cultural identity in their different elaborations of baroque. furthermore, some sections of the lecture notes, in particular the introduction to the first course and the discussion of the role of baroque painting in the universal history of human perception of nature, shed light on riegl’s wide- ranging approach to art history. in comparison to the sections of the lecture notes published by burda and dvořák under the title die entstehung, the manuscript of this first folder is not marked only by a pronounced empirical approach to individual works and documentary sources. from this first group of lecture notes also clearly stands out a conception of the development of the baroque style as part of, in riegl’s own words, ‘a universal history of the visual arts of humanity.’ as discussed, riegl’s methodological approach to baroque art synthesizes a detailed analysis of single art works and documentary sources with a universal-historical consideration of art history. if earlier works, such as altorientalische teppiche ( ) and stilfragen ( ) , show such a combination of an empirical approach with a ‘universal historical analysis,’ riegl’s reflections on the principles that inform such cultural history of mankind reveal in nuce a further broadening of his theory of art quella che riegl chiama (con terminologia büdingeriana) un’‘analisi storico-universale’, e che potremmo oggi definire metodo morfologico comparativo.’ ‘vergleichung.’ riegl, ‘kunstgeschichte und universalgeschichte,’ . ‘universalgeschichte der bildenden kunst der menschheit.’ ‘kunstgeschichte des barockzeitalters,’ . alois riegl, altorientalische teppiche, leipzig: weigel, . alois riegl, stilfragen: grundlegungen zu einer geschichte der ornamentik, berlin: siemens, . eleonora gaudieri alois riegl and his lecture notes. a reconsideration of his concept of ‘baroque’ toward a theory of culture and of worldviews, which will find full expression in his later writings, historische grammatik der bildenden künste ( ‒ , ) and die spätrömische kunst-industrie ( ) . eleonora gaudieri is phd candidate in art history at the university of vienna and fellow of the ‘vienna doctoral academy.’ from october to october she was employed as a pre-doctoral research assistant (uni:docs fellowship) at the department of art history at the university of vienna. she is currently concluding her phd project, which reconsiders alois riegl’s contribution to baroque studies on the basis of his unpublished manuscripts. eleonora received the ‘getty library research grant’ ( ) and was a fellow of the austrian academy of sciences at the historical institute at the austrian cultural forum in rome ( ‒ ). eleonora.gaudieri@univie.ac.at this work is licensed under a creative commons attribution- noncommercial . international license alois riegl, die spätrömische kunst-industrie nach den funden in Österreich-ungarn, vienna: kaiserlich-königliche hof- und staatsdruckerei, . http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/ . / http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/ . / http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/ . / hypercell a bio-inspired design framework for real-time interactive architectures jia-rey chang hypercell a bio-inspired design framework for real-time interactive architectures jia-rey chang delft university of technology, faculty of architecture and the built environment, department of architectural engineering and technology toc 	 abe.tudelft.nl design: sirene ontwerpers, rotterdam isbn - - - - issn - © jia-rey chang all right reserved. no part of the material protected by this copyright notice may be  reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including  photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system without  written permission of the author. toc to my mother, ling-rong, my father, jin-fu, and my wife, shu-huang (becky), who cares, loves, and always be there for me. toc toc acknowledgements it is a great honor to acknowledge my deepest thanks to my promoter, prof. kas  oosterhuis. under his supervision, he gives me the visionary and the freedom to  explore my experimental research in interactive architecture. i am also grateful to my  co-promoter/daily supervisor, dr. nimish biloria, who keeps constantly challenging my  mindset with loads of critical inspirations/discussions to assist me in accomplishing  my dissertation under his guidance. many thanks to all my hyperbody colleagues i’ve been working with, especially to vera  laszlo, marco galli, tian-tian, and yu-chou, for all the laughter, cares, and supports  during my ph.d. life (especially in the lunchtime). and thanks to the ph.d. fellows,  achilleas psyllidis and sina mostafavi, for sharing their critical thinking and knowledge.  many thanks to dr. paul mass for keeping feeding me all kinds of up-to-date and  useful knowledge via emails. a very special gratitude go out to all the students i’ve  been tutored who help me gain immense and priceless educational experiences and  allow me to learn/get inspired from their talents. i would also like to express my true  appreciation to my mentor and friends in taiwan, who continuously reach out to me  just to be supportive and giving me warm concern, like prof. cheng-chen chen, min- chieh chen, mark cheng, david hsu…etc. words cannot express how grateful i am to my beloved and incredible parents, without  their endless financial and mental supports, i will never manage to finish my ph.d.  degree. it is so thankful to have them as my parents with their tremendous love. last but not least, i would like to sincerely thank my lovely wife, shu-huang (becky)  chiu, of always being my biggest fan and the strongest and most supportive backing,  who gives me enormous courage, confidence, and inspirations to fearlessly move  forward to the end of my ph.d. journey. toc hypercell toc contents contents list of figures      summary      samenvatting      introduction        .   structural introduction   .   background and problem statement        .   research questions        .   research objective        .   research methodology and proof of concept        .   research outline      from interactive to intra-active body:  towards a new organic digital architecture        .   background: the origin of interactive architecture        .   de-skinning of interactive architecture        .   materialization of interactive architecture        .   immediate demands and bodily connection/communication  of interactive bio-architecture        .   bio-inspiration of interactive architecture      toc hypercell   .   organic bodies for interactive architecture (from cell to body)        .   from interactive to intra-active architecture (from  inter-activeness to intra-activeness)        .   conclusion      information processor - digital form with computational means        .   introduction        .   form sculptor        .   form generator        .   form animator        .   form interactor        . .   internal interaction        . .   external interaction        .   conclusion      body conjunction = wavering between actual and virtual spaces        .   from body measurement to body extension to body without organ        .   you are in a virtual reality more frequently than you know        .   from interface to interact: merging layers of (sur)faces      toc contents   .   body and brain vs. machine and computer under the  discourse of interactive architecture        . .   materialize the body: “to motorize or to naturalize”, that is the question        . .   build up the brain: from decentralization to collective intelligence        .   conclusion        defining a novel meaning of the new organic architecture        .   current developments and trends of bio-inspired/organic architecture.        .   morphological        . .   morphological development          . .   morphological development i        . .   morphological development ii        .   material        . .   materialization with algorithms        . .   materialization with real organs        . .   materialization, biomimicry, and digital fabrication technologies        .   behavioral   . .   more than form finding        . .   a swarm of smart autonomous entities        . . .   autonomous as transportation and assembly        . . .   autonomous as mobile/transformable components in architectural design        . . .   a vision of autonomous emergent systems        .   from static to dynamic optimization      toc hypercell   .   evo-devo (evolutionary development biology), the  inspiration of new organic bio-architecture        . .   simple to complex        . .   geometric information distribution        . .   on/off switch & trigger        .   conclusion      hypercell: a bio-inspired design framework for  real-time interactive architectures        .   architecture as body        .   the integration of digital architecture = living interactive  architecture = new organic bio-architecture        .   translating principles from evolutionary development  biology to organic bio-architecture designs.        . .   from “simple to complex” to “componential system”        . .   from “geometric information distribution” to “collective intelligence”        . .   from “on/off switch and trigger” to “assembly regulation”        . .   living creature-like architecture = componential system +  collective intelligence + assembly regulation        .   the crucial and immediate demands of developing real- time re-configuring space as a living creature        .   a series of experiments with the hypercell system:        . .   hypercell geometric principles and technical interpretation:        . .   the applications of a hypercell furniture system and future evolution        . .   a series of developments with hypercell      toc contents   .   brief conclusion        .   living creature-like space with its own intelligence and behavior        . .   ambiguous topology        . .   hyperloop, an intra-active pavilion        .   conclusion      conclusion and future recommendation        .   conclusion        . .   information        . .   improvisation        . .   integration   . .   intelligence = information + improvisation + integration        .   future recommendation:        . .   software        . .   hardware        . .   design thinking      appendix      curriculum vitae      publications      toc hypercell toc     list of figures list of figures .    overview of the research framework  map.     .   archigram has published several pamphlets  about its design ideas and ideals. their  concepts are often expressed through very  stylish collages. this picture here is titled  tuned suburban, showing the urban design  concept for the triennale di milano in  .  in this image, the spatial units of architecture  are designed by pre-cast mass production  which can be purchased in advance and  attached to the existing building to perfectly  complete users’ requirements (source: http:// balticplus.uk/tuned-suburb-c /).     .   left: walking city ( ) (source: https:// www.archdaily.com/tag/archigram) and  right: cushicle ( ) (source: http:// archigram.westminster.ac.uk/project. php?id= ).     .   the perspective drawing of fun palace  ( ), proposed by cedric price in    (source: http://www.cca.qc.ca/en/ collection/ -cedric-price-fun-palace).     .   the bordeaux house plan by rem koolhaas  with an elevator in the center for the owner  who was unable to move freely to go to any  floor at will which completed the functions  of each floor as it reached that floor (source:  http://www.oma.eu/projects/ / maison-%c %a -bordeaux/).     .   a scene from blade runner (source: blade  runner, a   movie directed by ridley  scott).     .   from left to right: al bahr towers in abu dhabi  by aedas (source: http://www.thenational. ae/business/property/in-pictures-interna- tional-property-awards-success-for-uae-de- velopments), arab world institute in paris by  jean nouvel (source: http://www.archdata. org/buildings/ /arab-world-institute),  and tower of winds in yokohama by toyo  ito (source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ toyo_ito).     .   hyposurface designed in   by decoi, let by  mark goulthrope (source: https://www.cca. qc.ca/en/events/ /archaeology-of-the- digital-media-and-machines).     .   transport, designed in   by the onl led  by kas oosterhuis (source: http://www.onl. eu/?q=projects/trans-ports).     .   the hygroscope in the centre  georges-pompidou designed by the icd team  led by achim menges (source: http://www. achimmenges.net/?p= ).     .   inform/transform developed by the  tangible media group under the mit media  lab. the graph on the left shows the surface  effect, and the one on the right shows the  structure of the mechanical device (source:  http://tangible.media.mit.edu/project/ inform/).     .   turnon designed by the alleswirdgut team,  an experimental work of a residence. the  rotating wheel-shaped space can meet users’  demands according to time (source: http:// www.alleswirdgut.cc/en/project/trn-e/).     .   image of the conceptual idea of cityhome by  mit media lab (source: http://cp.media.mit. edu/places-of-living-and-work/)     .   strandbeest designed by theo jansen (source:  http://roskofrenija.blogspot.nl/ / / theo-jansen-strandbeest-kineticke.html)     .   the hylozoic series designed by philip  beesley, an organic space like nature (source:  http://www.philipbeesleyarchitect.com/ sculptures/ _city_gallery_wellington/ index.php).     .   an illustration of how the growing process of  organisms can be applied to architecture in  the hypercell research study.     list of figures toc hypercell .   possible variable furniture created by  adjusting numbers and parameters like dnas  based on the transformation make-up of  hypercells.     .   a space created by the interactive projection  platform designed by the hyperbody research  group (jia-rey chang and nimish biloria) and  dieter vandoren where visitors had to try to  twist their body to complete different effective  movements to interact with the swarm of  units displayed by the beams.     .   hyperloop, a transformable pavilion  space the hyperbody research group  aims to implement, with all nodes being  transformable and the sensors on the nodes  being able to communicate for the purpose  of spatial feedback. please refer to the video:  https://vimeo.com/ .     .   a scaled mechanical prototype model of  hyperloop.     .   left: course in airplane lofting, burgard high  school, buffalo, ny, usa, january i,  .  right: picture of people working on airplain  lofting(source: http://cornelljournalofar- chitecture.cornell.edu/read.html?id= ,  https://i.pinimg.com/ x/ e/ / bb/ e bbaa c fd afb cfe . jpg).     .   introducing and demoing the sketchpad  to the general public on a tv program.  (source: https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=usyot_ha_ba).     .   a drawing showing the usage of the  perspective drawing instrument invented by  albrecht dürer in the  th century (source:  https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/ file:duerer_underweysung_der_messung_ fig_ _page_ .jpg )     .   analyzing the various morphology of animals  using deformable grids by d’arcy thompson  (source: on growth and form, the complete  revised edition, new york: dover publications,  inc.,  ).     .   images exhibiting the swarm idea either  in nature or in the film. a swarm is a group  of animals that aggregate and travel in the  same direction(https://en.wikipedia.org/ wiki/swarm_(disambiguation)). from  left to right: a swarm of insects, a school  of fish, a group of agent smiths in the  matrix (source from left to right: http:// www.ayni.institute/swarm, http://www. dailymail.co.uk/news/article- / divers-caught-middle-huge-school-fish- snap-selfies-them.html, and http://movies. stackexchange.com/questions/ / is-there-a-trope-for-a-pile-on-fight).     .   diagram outlining the process of relationship  changing between the desired machines and  the body without organs from left to right  and to the bottom. dm = desire machine,  bwo = body without organs. body without  organs initiates with the action of repelling  the desire machines but ends up morphing as  a slippery smooth surface attaching with them  as a boundless network.     .   a diagram illustrating the conceptual idea of  “brain in a vat”.     .   diagram exhibiting the idea of space that in  current condition has blended the virtual and  the reality as a whole. in other words, there  is no sharp boundary between vr and reality  within the omnipresent internet.     .   pokémon go is an augmented reality game  where the player as a pokémon go trainer has  to catch the wild pokémon monsters in order  to battle with other players. the innovation of  pokémon go is that it combines augmented  reality technology and the gps system to  makes players sense the virtual monsters  vividly as they actually live in reality (source:  niantic/nintendo, http://blogs-images. forbes.com/insertcoin/files/ / / pokemon-go-list - x .jpg ).     .   image captured from keiichi matsuda’s  animation project “hyper-reality” showing  an augmented reality scenario in a  supermarket.     toc   list of figures .   a simulation image showing the navigating  process by free-hand gestures with the sensor  of “soli” developed by google atap (source:  google atap soli project, https:// po- baduekzw jt a-zippykid.netdna-ssl. com/wp-content/uploads/ / / google-project-soli.png )     .   images of “hypersurface” project by decoi  exhibiting the scale on the left, the details  from the backside on the right top, and  the component of each actuating element  on the right bottom (source from left to  right: http://fluxwurx.com/installation/ wp-content/uploads/ / / pr_ _hyposurface_ _p.jpeg, http:// www.mediaarchitecture.org/wp-content/ uploads/sites/ / / /pr_ _ hyposurface_ _p.jpg, and http://www. mediaarchitecture.org/wp-content/uploads/ sites/ / / /digi gn.jpg).     .   the images of the “hygroskin” on the left and  the “shapeshift” on the right (source from  left to right: icd: http://icd.uni-stuttgart. de/?p= , and see the materiability  research network: http://materiability.com/ shapeshift/).     .   turing pavilion by biothing (alisa andrasek  + jose sanche) cooperating with dshape  italy based on the reaction-diffusion  algorithms (source: biothing, https://vimeo. com/ ).     .   bone chair by joris laarman (source: joris  laarman lab, http://www.jorislaarman.com/ work/bone-chair/, the optimization process  can be observed in the same webpage.).     .   image on top is the design project “syncretic  transplants” of tobias klein under the  guidance of marcos cruz. the bottom image  is the “gaming console” derived from the  film, the “existenz” (source from top to  bottom: ucl bartlett, https://www.bartlett. ucl.ac.uk/architecture/research/projects/ neoplasmatic-design, and http://acidemic. blogspot.nl/ / /death-to-realism-ex- istenz-oculus-rift.html.     .   neri oxman’s gemini (source: neri oxman,  http://www.materialecology.com/projects/ details/gemini#prettyphoto).     .   flight assembled architecture by gramazio  & kohler (source: ethz, gramazio & kohler  research and institute for dynamic systems  and control, http://www.idsc.ethz.ch/ research-dandrea/research-projects/archive/ flying-machine-enabled-construction.html  )     .   diagrams illustrating the fundamental  principles extracted from evo-devo by this  research. “simple to complex” referring to the  modular elements idea of constructing animal  bodies; “geometric information distribution”  indicating the internal communication  globally as a fate map system, or locally as  neighboring distribution protocols; “on/ off switch & trigger” implying the essential  logic of building complex animal bodies by  following relatively simple rules as an on/ off (  and  ) logic to produce proteins as  demanded.     .   diagram illustrating the analog comparison  as a conceptual design idea of having an  “evolving architecture” akin to natural  growing processes. the mature architecture  body would be as a human figure ultimately  interacting with the surrounding environment  and additionally fulfilling the user’s demands  as functional requirements.     .   diagram detailing the generic idea of  hypercell: a bio-inspired design framework  for real-time interactive architectures.     .   process of collective decision making through  local level adaptive components to the  emergent optimized body for the information  distribution idea within the logic of  self-organization and swarm intelligence.     .   diagram portraying possible dna logic  implemented in architectural design as a set  of relationships instead of parameters merely  for form generation.     .   diagram illustrating how the computer  sees us from the left derived from the  publication of “physical computing: sensing  and controlling the physical world with  computers”, and on the right-hand side  exhibiting how this research would like the  hypercell components to possess essential  intelligence.     toc hypercell .   a) degrees of freedom in terms of dimensions.  b) true mirror function. c) false mirror  function. d) an example of true & false  regulation between cells.     .   diagram illustrating the bottom-up  communication protocols and how it  influences the real-time morphology of the  architectural element (wall in this case)  owing to users’ demands using the swarm  intelligence logic.     .   diagram showing types of table variations  also as an example for forming the furniture  in accordance with the logic of logic-dna  and dimension-dna as this research  developed.     .   diagram illustrating the conceptual idea  of having different reconfiguration and  combinations of the furniture system as  various spatial usages metaphorically  representing different species. (i.e. from left  to right: private working space to office space;  human being to panther).     .   the first generation of hypercell component  on top, and a duchamp wall project following  the same logic with more diversity of the  morphing patterns.     .   hypercell  .  furniture applications such  as hypercell walls that can reconfigure  (transform into) seats, counters, ramps,  waiting partitions, and encountering meeting  spots as multi-functional partitions owing to  diverse time slots and users’ demands.     .   a  d diagram exhibiting the collections of  the transformable furniture system made of  “hypercell” components as a catalog. these  are variations but can include more diversity  in terms of form and usage. the catalog with  l-dan and d-dna is found in appendix i.     .   top image shows the concept of virtual slider  and button in accord with hand gestures.  bottom image records the utilization of  the hypercell interface in real physical  space (see the video here: https://vimeo. com/ ).     .   images exhibiting the virtual reality  space built up by transformable hypercell  components which is able to interact with  the users in real-time as an immersive  spatial experience by utilizing the  processing real-time simulation and motion  tracking technology cooperating with  microsoft kinect (please check the video  for more understanding: https://vimeo. com/  ).     .   image of “ambiguous topology”.     .   diagrams showing basic principles and setup  for  -dimensional geometry realization based  on the volumetric projection system.     .   diagrams of craig reynold’s swarm behavior  principles for the flocking simulation;  separation, alignment, and cohesion. (http:// www.red d.com/cwr/boids/).     .   diagram showing the interactive loop of data  streams.     .   images showing different modes of the  ambiguous topology experience with scenes  of “follow”, “spike”, “disturb”, “attract”,  and “nurbs” mode from top to bottom with  photos taken on the left and simulations on  the right side.     .   hyperloop pavilion simulation by v-rep.     .   the real-time morphology simulation of  hyperloop acting by embracing and repelling  movement among the people surrounding it  by v-rep.     .   diagram explaining the mechanical loop  structure concerning the capability of the  joint against gravity: no.  joint staying on  the ground can possibly hold no.  and no.   joints in the air but no.  joint would have  to stay on the ground in order to support the  structural stability.     .   diagrams illustrating the flexibilities and the  rotation axis of the joint design at the initial  experiment stage. the bottom is the photo of  the  d printing prototype embedded with    servo motors as the rotating actuators.     toc   list of figures .   images exhibiting the simulations and the  photos of the  d printing joint as scale  models for examining the flexibility of the  pavilions. the sphere shape of the joint  reduces one directional rotation to make it  functionally more impactful and efficient and  also relatively more protectable for the device  when embedded into the joint against the  friction while making the morphology of the  whole structure.     .   images exhibiting the simulations, the  prototype scale model of the hyperloop  pavilion, and a closer look at the joint design  and prototype.     toc hypercell toc   summary summary “…the body says what words cannot...” martha graham this pioneering research focuses on biomimetic interactive architecture using  “computation”, “embodiment”, and “biology” to generate an intimate embodied  convergence to propose a novel rule-based design framework for creating organic  architectures composed of swarm-based intelligent components. furthermore, the  research boldly claims that interactive architecture should emerge as the next truly  organic architecture. as the world and society are dynamically changing, especially in  this digital era, the research dares to challenge the utilitas, firmitas, and venustas of  the traditional architectural weltanschauung, and rejects them by adopting the novel  notion that architecture should be dynamic, fluid, and interactive. this project reflects  a trajectory from the  ’s with the advent of the avant-garde architectural design  group, archigram, and its numerous intriguing and pioneering visionary projects.  archigram’s non-standard, mobile, and interactive projects profoundly influenced  a new generation of architects to explore the connection between technology and  their architectural projects. this research continues this trend of exploring novel  design thinking and the framework of interactive architecture by discovering the  interrelationship amongst three major topics: “computation”, “embodiment”, and  “biology”. the project aims to elucidate pioneering research combining these three  topics in one discourse: “bio-inspired digital architectural design”. these three major  topics will be introduced in this summary. “computation”, is any type of calculation that includes both arithmetical and non- arithmetical steps and follows a well-defined model understood and described as,  for example, an algorithm . but, in this research, refers to the use of data storage,  parametric design application, and physical computing for developing informed  please refer to the website: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/computation for further understanding of “compu- tation.” toc hypercell architectural designs. “form” has always been the most critical focus in architectural  design, and this focus has also been a major driver behind the application  computational design in architecture. nonetheless, this research will interpret the term  “form” in architecture as a continual “information processor” rather than the result  of information processing. in other words, “form” should not be perceived only as an  expressive appearance based computational outcome but rather as a real-time process  of information processing, akin to organic “formation”. architecture embodying kinetic  ability for adjusting or changing its shape with the ability to process the surroundings  and feedback in accordance with its free will with an inherent interactive intelligent  movement of a living body. additionally, it is also crucial to address the question of  whether computational technologies are being properly harnessed, if they are only  used for form-generating purposes in architecture design, or should this be replaced  with real-time information communication and control systems to produce interactive  architectures, with embodied computation abilities? “embodiment” in the context of this research is embedded in umberto eco’s vision on  semiotics, theories underlying media studies in marshall mcluhan’s “body extension”  (mcluhan,  ), the contemporary philosophical thought of “body without organs”  (gilles deleuze and félix guattari,  ), the computational logic of ‘swarm behavior’  and the philosophical notion of “monadology” proposed by gottfried leibniz (leibniz,  ). embodied computation and design are predominant today within the wearable  computing and smart living domains, which combine virtual and real worlds.  technical progress and prowess in vr development also contribute to advancing  d  smart architectural design and display solutions. the proposed ‘organic body-like  architectural spaces’ emphasize upon the realization of a body-like interactive space.  developing interactive architecture will imply eliciting the collective intelligence  prevalent in nature and the virtual world of big data. interactive architecture shall thus  embody integrated information exchange protocols and decision-making systems in  order to possess organic body-like qualities. “biology”, in this research explores biomimetic principles intended to create purpose- driven kinetic and organic architecture. this involves a detailed study/critique of  organic architecture, generating organic shapes, performance optimization based  digital fabrication techniques and kinetic systems. a holistic bio-inspired architecture  embodies multiple performance criteria akin to natural systems, which integrate  structural, infrastructure performances throughout the growth of an organic body.  such a natural morphogenesis process of architectural design explores what janine  toc   summary m. benyus described as “learning the natural process” . profoundly influenced by  the processes behind morphogenesis, the research further explores evolutionary  development biology (evo-devo) explaining how embryological regulation strongly  affect the resulting formations. evo-devo in interactive architecture implies the  development of architecture based on three fundamental principles: “simple to complex”, “geometric information distribution”, and “on/off switch and trigger.” the research seeks to create a relatively intelligent architectural body, and the tactile  interactive spatial environment by applying the extracted knowledge from the study of  the aforementioned principles of evo-devo in the following fashion: a extract a self-similar componential system based approach from the “simple to  complex” principle of evo-devo b extract the idea of “collective intelligence” from “geometric information distribution”  principle of evo-devo c extract the principle of “assembly regulation” from “on/off switch and trigger”  principle of evo-devo the “hypercell” research, through an elaborate investigation on the three  aforementioned topics, develops a design framework for developing real-time adaptive  spatial systems. hypercell does this, by developing a system of transformable cubic  elements which can self-organize, adapt and interact in real-time. these hypercells  shall comprise an organic space which can adjust itself in relation to our human bodies.  the furniture system is literally reified and embodied to develop an intra-active space  that proactively provokes human movement. the space thus acquires an emotive  dimension and can become your pet, partner, or even friend, and might also involve  multiple usabilities of the same space. the research and its progression were also had  actively connected with a  -year collaborative european culture project: “metabody”. the research thus involves exploration of interactive architecture from the following  perspectives: architectural design, digital architectural history trajectory, computational  technology, philosophical discourse related to the embodiment, media and digital culture,  current vr and body-related technology, and evolutionary developmental biology.  janine benyus, a biologist, who coined the term, “biomimicry”, has stated there are three different levels of  learning from nature: one is to mimic the natural form of organisms; second is to study and apply the natural  process of organisms; the last is to fuse into the eco-system of the nature. see: https://www.ted.com/talks/ janine_benyus_biomimicry_in_action toc hypercell “hypercell” will encourage young architects to pursue interdisciplinary design  initiatives via the fusion of computational design, embodiment, and biology for  developing bio-inspired organic architectures. references gilles deleuze and félix guattari. ( ). anti-oedipus. minneapolis: university of minnesota press . leibniz, g. w. ( ). monadology. (j. bennett, trans.) retrieved from http://www.earlymoderntexts.com/ assets/pdfs/leibniz b.pdf mcluhan, m. ( ). understanding media: the extensions of man. new york: mcgraw-hill. toc     samenvatting samenvatting “ …the body says what words cannot...” martha graham dit pionierende onderzoek is gericht op biomimetische interactieve architectuur  waarbij “computatie”, “belichaming” en “biologie” worden gebruikt om een intieme  belichaamde toenadering te creëren voor het introduceren van een ontwerpkader dat  is gebaseerd op nieuwe regels. hiermee kunnen organische architecturen worden  gecreëerd die bestaan uit zwermintelligentie-componenten. verder beweert het  onderzoek vastberaden dat interactieve architectuur de volgende daadwerkelijk  organische architectuur dient te zijn. terwijl de wereld en de maatschappij, zeker in  deze digitale tijd, dynamisch veranderen, daagt het onderzoek de utilitas, firmitas  en venustas van de traditionele architecturale weltanschauung uit, en verwerpt  het deze door de nieuwe notie dat architectuur dynamisch, fluïde en interactief  dient te zijn aan te nemen. dit project reflecteert een traject van de jaren   met  de komst van de architecturale avant-garde ontwerpgroep archigram en de vele  intrigerende en baanbrekende visionaire projecten. de uitzonderlijke, mobiele en  interactieve projecten van archigram hebben een nieuwe generatie architecten grondig  aangespoord om de connectie tussen technologie en hun architecturale projecten te  verkennen. dit onderzoek bouwt voort op deze trend van de verkenning van de nieuwe  ontwerpdenkwijze en het kader van interactieve architectuur door de onderlinge  samenhang tussen drie belangrijke onderwerpen te onderzoeken: “computatie”,  “belichaming” en “biologie”. het is het doel van het project om baanbrekend  onderzoek te verhelderen door deze drie onderwerpen in één discours te behandelen:  “bio-geïnspireerd architecturaal ontwerp”. deze drie belangrijke onderwerpen worden  in deze samenvatting geïntroduceerd. toc hypercell “computatie” slaat op iedere berekening waarin zowel rekenkundige als niet- rekenkundige stappen worden genomen en volgt een goed gedefinieerd model dat  bijvoorbeeld begrepen en beschreven kan zijn als een algoritme . in dit onderzoek  verwijst het naar het gebruik van dataopslag, parametrische ontwerptoepassingen  en fysiek computerwerk voor het ontwikkelen van geïnformeerde architecturale  ontwerpen. “vorm” heeft altijd de meest kritieke focus gehad in het architecturale  ontwerp en deze focus is ook een grote drijfveer geweest voor het toegepast  computationeel ontwerp in architectuur. desalniettemin zal dit onderzoek de term  “vorm” in de architectuur interpreteren als een continue “informatieverwerker”, in  plaats van als het resultaat van informatieverwerking. in andere woorden dient “vorm”  niet alleen als een uitdrukkelijk op verschijning gebaseerde rekenkundige uitkomst  te worden gezien, maar meer als een real-time proces van informatieverwerking,  verwant aan organische “formatie”. het betreft architectuur met kinetisch vermogen  voor het aanpassen of veranderen van de vorm met de mogelijkheid om de omgeving  en feedback te verwerken in overeenstemming met de vrije wil gecombineerd  met een ingebouwde interactieve intelligente beweging van een levend lichaam.  daarnaast is het ook van cruciaal belang om de vraag te behandelen of computationele  technologieën goed worden benut, of ze alleen worden gebruikt voor vorm- genererende doelen in het architecturaal ontwerp, of vervangen dienen te worden voor  real-time informatie communicatie- en controlesystemen om interactieve architectuur  te produceren met belichaamde berekeningsmogelijkheden. “belichaming” ligt in de context van dit onderzoek verankerd in umberto eco’s visie op  semiotiek, theorieën die ten grondslag liggen aan mediastudies in “body extension” (mcluhan,  ) van marshall mcluhan, de eigentijdse filosofische gedachte van  “body without organs” (gilles deleuze en félix guattary,  ), de computationele  logica van ‘zwermgedrag’ en de filosofische notie van “monadologie”, voorgesteld door  gottfried leibniz (leibniz,  ). belichaamde berekening en ontwerp overheersen  tegenwoordig binnen de draagbare computationele en smart-living domeinen, welke  virtuele en werkelijke werelden combineren. technische vooruitgang en bekwaamheid  in de vr-ontwikkeling dragen ook bij aan geavanceerd  d smart-architecturaal  ontwerp en display solutions. de voorgestelde ‘organische lichaamsachtige  architecturale ruimten’ benadrukken de realisatie van een lichaamsachtige  interactieve ruimte. interactieve architectuur ontwikkelen omvat het opwekken van de  collectieve intelligentie die voorkomt in de natuur en de virtuele wereld van big data.  interactieve architectuur zal dus geïntegreerde informatie-uitwisselingsprotocollen en  keuzesystemen belichamen om zo organische lichaamsachtige kwaliteiten te bezitten. zie de website: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/computation voor verder uitleg over “computatie.” toc   samenvatting “biologie” verkent in dit onderzoek biomimetische principes bedoeld om doelgerichte  kinetische en organische architectuur te creëren. dit omvat een gedetailleerde  studie/evaluatie van organische architectuur. hierin worden organische vormen,  op prestatie-optimalisatie gerichte digitale fabricatietechnieken en kinetische  systemen gegenereerd. holistische bio-geïnspireerde architectuur belichaamt  meerdere prestatiecriteria verwant aan natuurlijke systemen, welke structurele  infrastructuurprestaties in de groei van een organisch lichaam integreren. zo’n  natuurlijk morfogeneseproces van architecturaal ontwerp verkent wat janine m benyus  omschreef als “het natuurlijke proces leren” . diepgaand beïnvloed door de processen  achter morfogenese verkent het onderzoek de evolutionaire ontwikkelingsbiologie  (evo-devo) verder, waarbij het uitlegt hoe embryologische regulatie de uiteindelijke  formaties sterk beïnvloedt. evo-devo in interactieve architectuur impliceert de  ontwikkeling van architectuur gebaseerd op drie fundamentele principes: “simpel tot complex”, “geometrische informatie verdeling” en “aan/uit schakelaar en trigger.” het onderzoek wil een relatief intelligent architecturaal lichaam en een tactiele  interactieve ruimtelijke omgeving creëren door de gewonnen kennis uit de studie op de  bovengenoemde principes toe te passen op de volgende manier: a een benadering verkrijgen die is gebaseerd op een zelfgelijkend componentieel systeem uit het “simpel tot complex” principe van evo-devo b het idee van “collectieve intelligentie” verkrijgen uit het “geometrische  informatiedistributie” principe van evo-devo c het principe van “montageregulatie” verkrijgen uit het “aan/uit schakelaar en trigger”  principe van evo-devo het “hypercell” onderzoek ontwikkelt een ontwerpkader voor het ontwikkelen van  real-time adaptieve ruimtelijke systemen door middel van een uitgebreid onderzoek  naar de drie bovengenoemde onderwerpen. hypercell doet dit door een systeem van  transformeerbare kubische elementen te ontwikkelen die zichzelf kunnen organiseren,  zich kunnen aanpassen en kunnen interacteren in real-time. deze hypercells zullen  een organische ruimte omvatten die zich kan aanpassen aan onze menselijke  lichamen. het systeem is letterlijk geverifieerd en belichaamd om een intra-actieve  ruimte te ontwikkelen die menselijke beweging proactief opwekt. deze ruimte krijgt  dus een emotionele dimensie en kan uw huisdier, partner, of zelfs vriend worden en  janine benyus, een biologe die de term “biomimicry” heeft bedacht, stelt dat er drie verschillende leerniveaus uit  de natuur zijn: de eerste is het imiteren van de natuurlijke vorm van organismen; de tweede is het bestuderen en  toepassen van het natuurlijke proces van organismen; de laatste is samensmelten met het ecosysteem van de  natuur. zie: https://www.ted.com/talks/janine_benyus_biomimicry_in_action toc hypercell dezelfde ruimte kan zelfs op meerdere manieren worden gebruikt. het onderzoek en  de voortgang ervan zijn ook actief verbonden aan een  -jarig collaboratief europees  cultuurproject: “metabody”. het onderzoek omvat dus de verkenning van interactieve architectuur vanuit de  volgende perspectieven: architecturaal ontwerp, digitaal architecturaal historisch  traject, computatie-technologie, filosofisch discours gerelateerd aan belichaming,  media en digitale cultuur, huidige vr en lichaam-gerelateerde technologie en  evolutionaire ontwikkelingsbiologie. “hypercell” zal jonge architecten aanmoedigen  om interdisciplinaire ontwerpinitiatieven via de fusie van berekeningsontwerpen,  belichaming en biologie voor het ontwikkelen van bio-geïnspireerde organische  architecturen na te streven. referenties gilles deleuze and félix guattari. ( ). anti-oedipus. minneapolis: university of minnesota press . leibniz, g. w. ( ). monadology. (j. bennett, trans.) retrieved from http://www.earlymoderntexts.com/ assets/pdfs/leibniz b.pdf mcluhan, m. ( ). understanding media: the extensions of man. new york: mcgraw-hill. toc   introduction introduction “like medicine, it (architectures) must move from the curative to the preventive.” cedric price § . structural introduction this research examines three fundamental topics: computation, embodiment,  and biology to develop a design framework for developing organic, interactive  architectures. the design framework is termed “hypercell”, which involves, developing  real-time interactive designs leading to novel organic architectural proposals.  furthermore, such a biotic space advances the next level of artistic and philosophical  discourse via broadening the range of innovative interactive architectural design  thinking. the ultimate goal of the research is to evoke and enrich more innovative  interactive architectural design to take place in the near future. § . background and problem statement digital, organic, and interactive architecture. the semantic and semiotic sense of “digital”, “organic”, and “interactive” architecture  is explored. “digital” refers to designs using digital design and fabrication technologies  including parametric design, generative computation, digital form finding etc. “organic architecture”, apart from the original definition coined by frank lloyd wright, now  toc hypercell incorporates overtly complex appearances of architectural space produced using  contemporary computational techniques. “interactive architecture”, is usually  perceived as a building covered with either a delicate mechanical façade which adapts  to its surrounding environment or a media skin in the form of an information vehicle. digital architecture is undoubtedly associated with “computation”. by perceiving  the evolutionary process of caad (computer aided architecture design), it is quite  impressive to note how architecture took advantage of computational technologies in  various aspects: from data storage, spatial modeling, rendering based representation,  and animation, to the current design trends of parametric design and digital  fabrication. computation is omnipresent in contemporary architectural design practice  from the initial conceptual design phase to the end production process. nevertheless,  computer usage is largely dedicated to redraw and store technical drawings. this  makes one wonder whether computational technology has been properly implemented  in current architecture design. is it possible to shift the mind-set of designers  from developing “computer aided architecture designs” to a mindset promoting  “computation embedded within architecture”? this will imply empowering the  entire space with computational intelligence, thus allowing it to interact not only with  the surrounding environment but also with the users inside the space and with the  building components formulating the architecture itself. as a second evolution in this  change of mindset, is it possible to create a biological cell-like intelligent architectural  building block with embedded computation, which can sense, react, communicate,  and even interact, in order to compose a holistic intelligent architectural body? the same issue applies to organic architecture, especially in today’s context, when  young architects are mostly fascinated with computational assistance for form  generation. as mentioned before, organic architecture at present is mostly a term used  for describing formal architectural qualities akin to organic curvilinear shapes by taking  advantage of computational techniques of parametric and algorithmic design. multiple  algorithms for generating such so-called organic shapes are freely available and easily  assessable to young architects to apply to their architectural designs. unfortunately,  this approach of focusing on mimicking organic shapes without understanding their  biological significance seems to be an inevitable wave rapidly spreading out in today’s  digital architectural context. computational technology is thus disembodied and  reduced to a mere generative tool for churning out strange organic shapes, while it  could be deployed to embody an intelligent environment. the other critical issue is that  even when such forms of architecture are ingenuously generated by the application  of complex algorithms, almost all of such so-called organic architectures end up  with a static optimized character which is totally contrary to how the organic world  factually operates: in a dynamic fashion. every living/organic entity is constantly  changing/evolving (at variable scales: atomic, cellular) whether rapidly or gradually  toc   introduction at its own pace and is naturally condition to follow the flux of the environment within  which it is embedded. this primary quality of the organic world should be echoed  in any architectural, entity which claims to be organic. this implies not crystallizing  architecture into static expressions of flowy forms, but rather the embodying the ability  to process contextual information flow like a natural organic body. apart from developing such organic-appearance-oriented design, some architects  have dedicated themselves to seriously investigating bio-inspired principles in their  architectural designs via material studies, understanding structural/energy flow  logics or via advanced bio-digital fabrication (e.g., neri oxman in arts and sciences at  the mit media lab, and achim menges of institute for computational design at the  university of stuttgart). however, still, a crucial character in nature, which is constantly  forgotten, is “integration”. nature is mostly multi-performative, unlike artificial  mono-performative architectural systems. in nature, to build up organic bodies, the  material is applied as supporting structures as well as the transporting paths for water  and nutrition through a self-assembly approach. it thus integrates multiple functions  for enhancing efficiency and intelligence of the organic body. this is why the organic  body is so mysterious, admirable and worth studying and learning from. but to be  aware of this is not the ultimate goal of the research. rather, creating a novel living,  constantly data processing architectural species, embedded in the principles of natural  morphogenesis, as a refined interactive architecture becomes the ultimate goal of the  research. examining the current development of interactive architecture, it becomes apparent  that most projects remain at the level of façade design adapting to the external  environment instead of having tangible impacts on the users inside the space  (e.g., arab world institute in paris designed by jean nouvel, and al bahr towers in  abu dhabi designed by aedas). the research suggests a change in this prevailing  scenario and provides a direction involving real-time user-space interactions from  a user-centric perspective. in this case, both the human body and the architectural  space become crucial communication mediums. the ultimate goal of the research is thus to create buildings as embodied organic bodies which can interact with the external environment, the users inside as well as amongst their constituting building components. when it comes to the discussion of the architectural “body”, it certainly  implies the embedding of computational technologies concerning real-time sensing,  actuation, communication & control protocols. to achieve true “integration”, one  must strive to achieve synergy between digital/computational architecture, organic architecture, and interactive architecture. the questions of how to conceive and design  such an integrated, intelligent, and interactive architecture shall be answered in the  explorative journey of this research which will cover the domains of computation, embodiment, and biology (organic). toc hypercell § . research questions the main research question addressed in this research involves issues pertaining  to a synergistic combination of the three major domains of: “computation”,  “embodiment”, and “biology”. several sub-questions subsequently emerge from this  main research question and these are elaborated in accordance to these individual  associated domains: is it possible to develop a rule-based design framework for creating interactive architecture for the generation of novel authentic organic architecture which aptly utilizes computation capabilities to generate an intelligent, body-like, and tactile interactive environment following the principles of morphogenesis derived from natural organisms? in order to answer this main question, several related sub-questions are explicitly  outlined: computation (chapter ): how have computational technologies and their applications in architectural design evolved? it is crucial to have an overall picture of the evolution of computational technologies  and their application in architectural design to predict future trends and propose  novel directions to ensure the apt usage of computational technologies. computation  techniques have been harnessed in architecture in various capacities, ranging from  data storage, renderings as representation purposes,  -dimensional modeling, to  develop parametric models with relational logics etc. to name a few. but most of  the time these technologies are used for form-generation purposes, which limits its  potential applications in architectural design. the research would like to propose a  novel approach for utilizing computational technologies for developing embedded  intelligence within architectural components (smart building blocks) which populate  a built form. communication protocols between such components to enable  collective intelligence based decision making can thus become a vital feature of such  architectural bodies in a bottom up fashion. toc   introduction with the assistance of computational techniques, what will be the new role/definition of “form” in the context of this research? computers essentially were meant to be invented as calculating machines dealing with  numbers and data sets. after the emergence of computation as a plausible assistant to  architects, it became possible to sculpt various non-standard forms could be by using  d modeling software. in this context, “form” has been treated as a generative outcome  of a computation process in the form of an architectural object with a certain expressive  appearance. however, this research proposes to interpret “form” in a different manner, as  an information processor in accordance with the preferable computational methodologies  the designers choose. along with the evolution of the computational technology and their  implementation in architecture design, this research also defines form as a form sculptor, form generator, form animator, and form interactor in accordance with the means  with which the designer generates and defines their architectural forms. ultimately, it  intentionally implies that the development of computational technology in architectural  design should shift more towards providing for interactivity in architectural form via  dynamic engagement with the natural and artificial environment. embodiment (chapter ): what is the connection between architectural space and embodiment from a theoretical or conceptual point of view? expanding upon marshall mcluhan’s “body extension” notion (mcluhan, understanding  media: the extensions of man,  ), architecture or rather the built environment can  be seen as a second skin of the human body especially in today’s hyper-connected era. by  connecting one’s body to the internet through various gadgets, for example, by using a  mouse and keyboard in the early years and vr helmet and google glasses in today’s times,  technology gives people a chance to de-construct their body and re-assemble it as an  avatar throughout the internet in a parallel digital universe. the manner in which each  digital embodiment (ip address) attaches itself to the network of internet/cyberspace, can  be equated with individual beings as machines with embedded desires adhering to the  smooth surface of a “disembodied body without organs”. this idea of individual entities  relates to the notion of “monadology”  proposed by gottfried leibniz (leibniz,  ).   the monadology is one of gottfried leibniz’s best-known works representing his later philosophy by sketching  in some   paragraphs a metaphysics of simple substances, or monads. as far as leibniz allows just one type  of element in the building of the universe, and this unique element has been ‘given the general name monad  or entelechy’ and described as ‘a simple substance’ (the text was cited from: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ monadology#text). toc hypercell a sophisticated network constructed by the monad can be equated with a complex  system composed of small intelligent entities in a system. in other words, either a  single cell of a body, a bird in a swarm, a tiny dust particle in the air, or a planet in the  universe, all follow certain dynamic principles to maintain their interrelationships and  thus maintain the homeostasis of the overall network. from this perspective, both  notions of understating “architecture as a body” or “the body as architecture”, implies  space being a refined object composed of multitudes of intelligent entities. this  research also considers this notion as an inspiration to generate the proposed organic  body-like architecture. is now the time to take both reality and virtual reality into account while conceiving spatial/architecture designs? it is no longer considered a magical moment if a person is omnipresent in different spaces  at the same time using the internet. once you are “on-line”, you can be present in any  virtual environment playing the role of as many different characters as you like in the  so called “parallel digital universe”. the internet or cyberspace has become common in  people’s daily lives for several decades now. nonetheless, virtual reality, although a part  of cyberspace, now refers more to an immersive and relatively tangible experience by  utilizing wearable technology. in other words, virtual reality is not completely a different  concept than cyberspace, but with internet connectivity, the being virtually omnipresent  idea, can now be achieved in a relatively more tactile and sensory environment with  feelings enhanced with the use of wearable gadgets. within the internet environment in a  conventional on-line game, you might see yourself as an avatar inside the world through  the interface of the “screen” in front of you, but with electronic gadgets like google  glasses, you are able to envision the whole surroundings as a simulated environment  through another interface of the “lenses” which makes you feel more authentically  engulfed inside this virtual reality environment. this relates to marcos novak’s idea that  “the cyberspace itself is architecture, but it also contains architecture”. regardless of  whether physical space contains cyberspace or the other way around, it has become “an  architecture nested within architecture” (novak,  ). it is now considered inadequate  to ignore the true sense that people gain from the world of virtual reality and to claim that  virtual reality is totally fake. it is now the time to confront the integration of virtual and  real to seek an equal/dynamic balance between the two since both conditions occupy  almost the same time and space in people’s lives. how to materialized an organic body-like space as an interactive architecture? “how to materialize” a body-like interactive architecture has always been a difficult  issue for both interactive and “organic body-like” architectures. but this is one of the  main challenges this research would like to explore. a common analog for comparing  toc     introduction technological devices to an organic body is to envision the body being composed of  sensor and actuator parts and the brain being the seat of computation, which acts  as a commander/orchestrator. by observing the current development of body parts  in interactive architecture, which mainly comprises of actuating systems, one can  delineate the features in two different categories, “naturalized” and “motorized”. the  “naturalized” features refer to actuation utilized by the natural material properties  to achieve kinetic movement; the “motorized” functions indicate those requiring  electricity to perform relatively strong and powerful kinetic mechanical actuations.  the “naturalized” systems tend to be more sensitive and energy efficient but such  engineered materials are normally structurally weaker to support architectural  scale built work and thus tend to be deployed as non-structural building skins;  the “motorized” ones are sufficient enough for holding the bigger construction  and but suffer from disadvantages of being relatively less sustainable as regards  energy consumption and take up larger proportions of space for performing their  tasks. therefore, the research questions if it would be favorable to develop a hybrid  condition wherein the advantages of each system can be considered for developing  interactive architecture. as for the notion of the brain operating as the centralized  commander to control the sensing and actuations of a body, it is quintessential to  state that the natural brain works in the manner of a highly distributed system. the  main components of the intelligence of the brain that makes you think, sense, and  react are the brain cells or so-called the neurons. they are constructed nearby and  form the cerebrum for the reason to get the extreme protection of the skull by nature  but it doesn’t make the cerebrum a centralized controlling machine because of their  close location. in fact, they are assigned to different specific tasks through networking  communications and to eventually have the ultimate emerging decision which makes  it actually akin to a more de-centralized system in terms of its operational logic . for  the proposed embedded intelligence based organic space, the computation would thus  acquire a distributed systemic quality as regards its control systems, akin to a swarm of  agents. this property will also insure the performance of the entire system to be intact  even while any one of the constituting entities of this space is out of operation. please refer to the website for further understanding of brain and neuron: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/neu- ron toc hypercell biology (chapter ): what are the current developments in biomimetic design developments in the context of “organic” or “bio-inspired” architectures? investigations into the current biomimetic design developments of “organic” or “bio- inspired” architectures, lead to their categorization into “morphological”, “material”,  and “behavioral”. as for the “morphological”, various digital approaches of either  using  d modeling software to create the organic-looking shapes or applying generic  algorithms from “chaos theory” for organic form-finding is covered in this chapter. the  “materials” part under the tag of organic and bio-inspired designs focus on material  properties, which include the development of smart materials, transplanting bio- organs into physical architecture or utilizing biomimetics in conjunction with advanced  digital fabrication techniques. in the section of “behavioral” aspects, swarm logic is  applied as a generic form-finding solution to crystallize real spatial objects. the section  also elaborates upon some experimental architectural projects, which translate swarm  simulation based outputs into advanced applications such as generating intelligent  building blocks as basic elements composing the entire architectural body. a wide  range of studies and research have been covered in this section to give a clear picture  of what is the current status quo of “organic” and “bio-inspired” architecture as a biomimetic or bio-arch resource. what novel application of natural/biological systems based knowledge can be applied within architectural design instead of merely focusing on the prevalent form based mimicry approach? janine benyus, a biologist who coined the term “biomimicry” once stated in a public  ted talk  that there are three levels of learning from nature. the first one is to learn  from the appearance/form of natural organisms; the second is to learn the processes  of natural growth and evolution; and the last is not only to learn from nature but to  actually integrate with natural eco-systems. after spending years into mimicking  animal organic forms with the help of digital sculpting or algorithm generation, it  can be sufficiently claimed that much progress has been achieved in mimicking such  outward appearance. a shift to the next level of learning from nature: understanding  “process” is thus our challenge now. john frazer in his influential publication, “an evolutionary architecture” (frazer,  ), simply but explicitly stated: “what we are please find the link of the janine benyus’ ted lecture here: https://www.ted.com/talks/janine_benyus_bio- mimicry_in_action toc   introduction evolving are the rules for generating forms, rather than the forms themselves”. keeping  in line with frazer’s proposition, to understand processes of growth, evolution, and  development in nature it is thus deemed essential to conceive a rule-based design  framework as a new way of architectural design thinking of organic architecture. we  should thus look fundamentally into the principles of morphogenesis to understand  how natural organisms end up having differentiations even though they share the same  gene toolkits as an essence of the proposed organic architectural design framework.  the research hence makes serious investigations into evolutionary development  biology (evo-devo) which offers an interesting insight into evolutionary principles.  intriguingly, the research is able to extract three fundamental principles from evo-devo  intended to be translated and applied systematically to the proposed organic body like  architecture: “simple to complex”, “geometric information distribution”, and “on/off	 switch and trigger”. § . research objective the research apart from addressing the main and sub-questions mentioned above  points towards future directions for interactive architecture (as active organic bio- architecture) and strongly provokes researchers and architects to dedicate themselves  to this realm. by extracting the three biological morphogenesis principles of “simple to complex”, “geometric information distribution”, and “on/off switch and trigger”, and translating them into three design rules of “componential system”, “collective intelligence”, and “assembly regulation”, the primary objective of the research is the following: to develop a rule-based design framework for interactive bio-architecture, which can interact and improvise its performance in response to its context in real-time. this will encompass active reconfiguration of space in accordance with user demands akin to a living organism. extending the discussion of the research questions, the study sets up a rule-based  design framework by translating the three crucial morphogenesis principles from evo- devo (carroll,  ) into design rules for interactive bio-architecture. the “simple to complex” idea was translated to deploy the notion of a modularity idea in the form  of a “componential system”. this relates to the fact that complex shapes within the  animal kingdom are composed out of the repetition of simple, self-similar modules.  following this componential idea, the “geometric information distribution” principle  was abstracted as a rule set fostering “collective intelligence”. this relates to the  toc hypercell context of cellular development and the manner in which a distributed information  system regulates the morphological evolution of successive cells in order to create  diverse organs. a collective intelligence protocol which aids in the real-time growth and  evolution of building components from a morphological and behavioral perspective  is thus set up. the “on/off	switch	and	trigger” principle, which regulates the process  of morphogenesis in living organisms, is utilized as a strategy for conceiving protocols  for the development of an informed architecture comprising of numerous smart  autonomous entities: “assembly regulation”. these principles are exemplified upon  in greater detail in the first half of chapter  . the research is thus primarily concerned  with the intricacies of processing, generating, transforming, and communicating  principles rather than having an outwardly focus on the generation of organic form. organic + embodiment + bio-architecture = componential system + collective intelligence + assembly regulation apart from the aforementioned bio-inspired rule based principles, what is the practical  end goal/output that this biomimetic interactive bio-architecture can provide? this  design framework is essentially aiming to produce a user-centric reconfigurable space,  which responds to the users’ varying ergonomic and activity patterns through a   hrs.  cycle. unlike former developments in interactive architecture that mostly focused on  environmental response, which gave the users inside the space a relatively indirect  influence, this research concentrates on the user-centered design to deal with the  real-time responsive space, which will have a strong and direct impact on the people  occupying it. it is the core idea of this study to use a minimum footprint of space to  fulfill the maximum activity based spatial requirements of the users, thus encouraging  a sustainable space usage strategy. by creating such a user-centric reconfigurable  space, it not only ensures that the users can experience optimal spatial usage but could  also lower the price of real estate for residential space, thus providing a new perspective  to solving critical problems of urban. sub-objective: considering that architecture can have its own intelligence and own behavior implies establishing new relationships between it and human bodies. this hypothesis already marks a reversal of conventional design thinking in conceiving architecture while challenging our perception of architectural space. taking inspiration from marcos novak’s liquid architecture (novak,  ) and kas  oosterhuis’ hyperbodies (oosterhuis, hyperbodies: towards an e-motive architecture,  ), this research would like to address the future of cognitive architecture  with embodied intelligence how it could forge a new relationship between its own  toc   introduction living creature-like attributes and its human occupants. such spatial evolution can  certainly become a probable future scenario considering the fast pace of technological  development coupled with advanced research in the domain of smart living solutions  using artificial intelligence and machine learning. it would thus not be surprising to  witness a time in the near future when space embodies its own intelligence. § . research methodology and proof of concept to achieve the research objective, a wide range of inter-disciplinary studies were  conducted. these included explorations within the domains of architecture,  contemporary technological innovations, interactive art, media culture and social  contents, associated with the topics of interaction, computation, and biology. this  wide body of knowledge apart from operating as literature review helps in providing  abundant resources for subsequent research for the younger generation of architects  who wish to dedicate themselves in investigating the domains of interactive,  computational, and or bio-inspired design in architecture. by extracting, organizing,  translating, and mastering the above knowledge, a comprehensive design framework:  “hypercell” is derived for developing organic body-like architectures. subsequently, experimental design projects based on the “hypercell” design  framework were conducted as proof of concept. these, are divided into two major  parts, the “user-for” and the “user-less”. the first series of the experimental design  projects, “user-for”, was aimed at conceiving a user-oriented re-configurable space  idea in the form of a furniture system, termed as “hypercell”. hypercell builds upon  the concept of a transformable building component similar to the traditional asian  tangram concept. a series of “hypercell” furniture applications are illustrated in this  part of the study. “user-less” is the second part of the experimental design projects  addressing the topic of a non-utilitarian with a central hypothesis, which considers  space akin to a living creature with embedded intelligence and behavior which  challenges the human body towards adopting novel movement and instigates a shift  in perception. two major projects under “user-less” were conceived and executed;  “ambiguous topology”, which leans towards an immersive new-media driven spatial  experience and the “hyperloop”, a scaled prototype of an interactive pavilion design.  both projects were a part of “metabody”, a european culture project which, focused on  the inter-disciplinary development of an intra-active architectural space (elaborated  upon in chapter  ). toc hypercell two kinds of experiments, one engulfing a real-time utilitarian response and the other  covering a self-evolving behavioral interaction are conducted as proof of concepts  of the research objective. these experiments (hypercell , ambiguous topology , hypercell pavilion) are elaborated upon extensively in chapter  . § . research outline the research is structured explicitly, providing each chapter within its own particular  focus. after an overview of the trajectory of the project, which extends into chapter  , the three major topics of “computation”, “embodiment”, and “biology” are  sequentially elaborated separately, yet in an intimate interconnected fashion through  chapters  - . in conclusion, a design framework for interactive architecture for  developing novel organic architecture is proposed in chapter  . an application of this  design framework via the projects hypercell furniture system, ambiguous topology  and the prototype of hyperloop pavilion serves as proof of concepts in chapter  .  chapter  . the research subsequently points towards several ideas and directions for  future research development not only as a reference to other researchers interested in  this interdisciplinary exploration but also as a reminder towards the vital contributions  made by this research to the three intriguing topics. chapter - chapter   elaborates upon the contributions of the avant-garde architecture group,  “archigram”, from the  ’s and challenges the long-term fundamental attributes  associated with architecture; utilitas, firmitas, and venustas. an alternative focus  on developing dynamic, fluid, and interactive attributes of architecture, which focus  on today’s transient societal, the environment, and user based issues. post this, an  introduction to the evolution of interactive architecture mainly focusing on shifting  biloria, nimish & chang, jia-rey. ( ). hyper-morphology: experimentations with bio-inspired design  processes for adaptive spatial re-use. proceedings of the ecaade conference volume no. ,   (tu delft) (pp.  - ). delft: ecaade and faculty of architecture, delft university of technology. chang, jia-rey, biloria, nimish, & vandoren, dieter. ( ). ambiguous topology from interactive to pro-active  spatial environments. proceedings of the ieee visap’ conference: data improvisation (pp.  - ). chicago:  ieee visap. toc   introduction the emphasis of interactive architecture as associated with environmental conditions  as a façade/skin system to a more user-oriented usage is presented. moreover, the  research categorizes the current interactive architecture developments in accordance  with their actuating system; “naturalized” and “motorized” in order to assess the  pros and cons of both. apart from the designer’s viewpoint concerning spatial usage,  the practical utilization of space from the users’ point of view is also elaborated upon  via case studies and design projects. a series of developments within the domain of  bio-inspired design were included in this chapter. a connection to the latest research  developments in evolutionary development biology is thus put into context for  illustrating the potential usage of this organic body like architecture. also, a series  of design projects; hypercell furniture relating to the hypercell design framework  is elaborated upon sequentially. chapter   concludes with the design projects,  “ambiguous topology” and “hyperloop”, outlining the next level of artistic discussions  on cognitive architecture with its own intelligence and behavior as a proactive space  and how to set up a new relationship with this kind of living creature like space. chapter - chapter   exhibits the evolution of computational applications in architecture. the  chapter categorizes the different approaches of harnessing computational technologies  by designers as “form sculptor”, “form generator”, “form animator”, and “form interactor”. “form sculptor” indicates the category wherein architects use  d modeling  software as a tool for form modeling in a top-down aesthetics driven decision- making capacity; the “form generator” category refers to the usage of computational  technology deploying generative algorithms to assist architects within the form-finding  process (current prevalence of parametric or algorithmic design); the “form animator”  category refers to computational experiments which tend to identify how organic  bodies were formed and how they evolve while they are within specific environmental  conditions to generate their resulting forms, while “form interactor” refers to a  category wherein computational applications are used for dynamic interaction with the  surroundings to evoke an active, cognitive approach. the form interactor category is  what the direction which the research exploits further. chapter - chapter   emphasizes on the topic of “embodiment” with a deep focus on the concept  of “body extension” as suggested by marshall mcluhan (mcluhan, understanding  media: the extensions of man,  ), “body without organs” from gilles deleuze  and félix guattari (deleuze, g., & guattari, f.,  ). “body extension” and its  toc hypercell philosophical linkage to a virtual space, as well as the “body without organ’s” and its  philosophical linkage with the world composed of monads as proposed by gottfried  leibniz’s monadology (leibniz, monadology,  ), refer to the same principle of a  network-like structure with the smallest entities constituting the surface possessing  exerting highly synergistic, fullerene-like influential forces on each other. apart from  the theoretical discussion on the body relating to reified, embodied and wearable  technology, the focus subsequently shifts to the discussion between virtual and real  and the current developments of hi-technology gadgets such as virtual reality and  augmented reality devices. speaking about cyberspace and virtual reality, these  can be seen as evincing the first intentions of generating interactive architecture  through software and games like sim city. after years of developments in the physical  computing world, with devices such as arduino, artists and architects now have the  opportunity to bring the virtual kinetic/interactive idea into the real world. since then,  rapidly increasing numbers of interactive spatial installations/architectural designs  relating to physical computing were created. these have been categorized in this  chapter in two major divisions of “naturalized” utilizing natural material properties,  and those that are “motorized” relying heavily on electronically driven mechanical  systems. a novel thinking driven by the idea of collective intelligence involving the  merger of naturalized and motorized systems into an efficient hybrid system for  conceiving interactive architecture might become the next step for a technological  breakthrough. chapter - chapter   elaborates upon the topic of biology or bio-inspired/biomimetic design.  numerous current developments are featured under three major divisions in this  chapter: “morphological”, “material”, and “behavioral”. the “morphological” aspect  looks into the relationship between organic form and artificial architectural forms  comprising methods of  d modeling and generative algorithms in the form-finding  process. the “material” category involves explorations involving the usage of bio- materials (for instance transplanting natural flesh as architectural components), and  the biomimicry approach including materialization aspects involving digital fabrication  techniques and contemporary scientific principles from physics or chemistry. the  “behavioral” factor is akin to the logic of swarm behavior wherein every building block  becomes an intelligent entity constituting the whole architectural body. instead of  researching optimization based solution for generating a static form, the research  involves evolving real-time adaptive kinetic architectural bodies that can respond  to different conditions through dynamic optimization. unlike the most common  approach of mimicking organic form, this research paid attention to the principles of  morphogenesis, specifically evolutionary development biology (carroll,  ). the  toc   introduction research explicitly involves extracting growth and adaptation rules from such studies  and applying it to interactive architectural design. three biological morphogenesis  principles of “simple to complex”, “geometric information distribution”, and “on/off  switch and trigger”, are translated into three design rules of “componential system”,  “collective intelligence”, and “assembly regulation”. these are explicitly identified  upon in this chapter and elaborated upon in chapter  . chapter - chapter   is a summary of the aforementioned domains of computation, embodiment, and biology, and merging the findings via principles derived from evo-devo to  develop a design framework, “hypercell”, for developing interactive architecture as an  authentic form of organic bio-architecture. the rules comprising this design system:  “simple to complex”, “geometric information distribution”, and “on/off	switch	 and trigger” are all transformed and applied towards developing “componential system”, “collective intelligence” and “assembly regulation” logics. to prove that  the architecture design can follow this design framework to create novel and useful  usage of space, a series of hypercell experiments were conducted in the form of  experimental design projects elaborating upon the potential flexibility and efficiency  of this real-time adaptive furniture system. extending the discussion of creating an  organic body-like interactive architectural space to a techno-artistic level of making a  cognitive, smart space having its own intelligence and behaviors, the research involved  further developing an immersive interaction based project: “ambiguous topology”, and  a scaled prototype of an interactive pavilion, “hyperloop”. these projects further open  up a novel direction of design development challenging the norm where architecture  relates to solid, concrete and static built form. chapter - in chapter  , the research categorizes the entire narrative into three vital features:  “information”, “improvisation”, and “integration”, and concludes with the idea of  “intelligence” as a merger of these features. future recommendations are proposed in  the form of software, hardware, and design thinking methods. in conclusion, while  addressing software, the research proposes a game-like structure in the form of a design  tool embodying the proposed rule-based design framework which can even combine  vr and motion tracking technology. it is the vision of the author to realize the hypercell furniture component as physical hardware extension of the research, go beyond developing  such components for interior purposes but develop them as real physical building blocks  constituting architecture. intelligence driven self-assembly could become an active feature  toc hypercell whereby both construction and disassembly of the space is automated. in this case, a  hybrid material merging the advantages of naturalized and motorized systems would  naturally be needed to work in synergy. concerning design thinking methods, the hypercell design framework is used to inspire people to further the componential idea based  proposed bio-inspired architecture development. it is not necessary to follow the exact  principles provided in this research, but it is crucial to stimulate this kind of interdisciplinary  and robust design thinking in architectural design. the research ultimately envisions a near  future comprising various spatial and product based options customized to user choices  akin to the “hypercell” based outputs proposed in this research. toc     introduction a rule-based design framework ? componential system simple to complex collective intelligence geo-info distribution assembly regulation on/off switch&trigger organic body architecture user oriented user oriented space with free will o ve rvie w free wills behavors computer current development current development learning the mophogenesis process = evo- devo space v.s. body vr v.s. reality materialize form = info processor >>> form interactor digital interactive organic background + problems research question hypercell furniture system vr = ambiguous topology prototype = hyperloop pavilion for body-like interactive = organic architecture (body) embodiment biology software hardware design = game chapter?= hypercells = platform ? research objective figure  .    overview of the research framework map. toc hypercell references carroll, s. b. ( ). endless forms most beautiful: the new science of evo devo. new york: w. w. norton &  company, inc. deleuze, g., & guattari, f. ( ). anti-oedipus: capitalism and schizophrenia. london: continuum. frazer, j. ( ). a natural model for architecture/ the nature of the evolutionary mode. in j. frazer, an evolu- tionary architecture. london: architectural association. leibniz, g. w. ( ). monadology. (j. bennett, trans.) retrieved from http://www.earlymoderntexts.com/ assets/pdfs/leibniz b.pdf mcluhan, m. ( ). understanding media: the extensions of man. new york: mcgraw-hill. novak, m. ( ). liquid architectures in cyberspace. in m. benedikt, cyberspace: first step (pp.  - ).  cambridge: the mit press. oosterhuis, k. ( ). hyperbodies: towards an e-motive architecture. basel: birkhäuser. toc   from interactive to intra-active body: towards a new organic digital architecture from interactive to intra-active body:  towards a new organic digital  architecture “true hyperbodies are proactive bodies, true hyperbodies actively propose actions. they act before they are triggered to do so. hyperbodies display something like a will of their own. they sense, they actuate, but essentially not as a response to a single request.” kas oosterhuis § . background: the origin of interactive architecture the  s was the age of freedom and boldness. according to john lennon, the legendary  singer-songwriter, who said in his last interview for rko, “the thing the sixties did was to show us the possibilities and the responsibility that we all had. it wasn’t the answer. it just gave us a glimpse of the possibility”.  various technologies and cultures were  developing boundlessly at an unprecedented speed during this time. movements  for civil rights due to racial discrimination, movements for women’s rights due to  feminism, liberation movements for bodily autonomy, and student movements  this interview was done with the interviewer, dave sholin of rko radio, which is the last one john lennon did to  promote his new album “double fantasy” before he got murdered on the same day. please refer to  http://www. thenation.com/article/lennons-last-interview-sixties-showed-us-possibility/ toc hypercell (mai  ) in france due to the education system, influenced and challenged the  conservative thought and systems in the society which people were used to. with the  flourishing development of high-end technology, during the cold war period, the us  and russia were still competing to be the world leaders in technological development.  the battlefields of the well-known space race included not only the terrain of the  earth but also the surface of the moon. for the general public, the impact of rapid  technological development, plus the discovery of chaos theory in science and the  gradual advancement of computer technology, opened the door towards all kinds of  imagination about how the future world will look. the influential pop art movement,  gave new birth to art which was no longer bigwigs’ assets hung on the walls of a royal  palace and high-end art galleries, but relatively closer to people’s daily lives by using  common substances and materials for creating art pieces. in addition, with the growth  of the underground hippy culture and rock ‘n roll music, it was the golden age when  people gradually had the courage to explore, to experiment, to express personal  opinions, and dare to imagine and expect a future life of their own. and this was also  the time when archigram was born. figure  .   archigram has published several pamphlets about its design ideas and ideals. their concepts are  often expressed through very stylish collages. this picture here is titled tuned suburban, showing the urban  design concept for the triennale di milano in  . in this image, the spatial units of architecture are designed  by pre-cast mass production which can be purchased in advance and attached to the existing building to  perfectly complete users’ requirements (source: http://balticplus.uk/tuned-suburb-c /). toc   from interactive to intra-active body: towards a new organic digital architecture archigram was founded by peter cook ( - ), david greene, ( - ), mike webb  ( - ), and dennis crompton ( - ) in london, uk. it had swept across the  architecture field like a rock ‘n roll band, leading a new direction of architectural design  through a series of pamphlets published regarding their visionary architectural design  ideas (crompton, d., & archigram (group).,  )(figure  . ). besides unrestrained  imagination and the corresponding inspiration with the combination of architectural  design and technology, the main values that archigram brought to architects was  to challenge the virtues of architecture, “utilitas, firmitas, and venustas”, written  by vitruvius in “de architectura”, which had been strictly followed by professional  architects since the  st century bc. in a sense, archigram seemed to find possible ways  to release architecture from these constraints by relating architectural design to the  rapid development of aerospace and other hi-end technology to create avant-garde  architectural fantasies, which perfectly fit into the vigorous wave of liberal society at  that time. for instances, their large city-scale design concepts such as walking city  which can find its optimized environments through mobile migration like animals  (ron herron,  ) (figure  . , left); or plug-in city (peter cook,  ) where they  proposed an idea of capsule-like dwelling units which can be plugged/replaced into  a mega infrastructure to form an economical efficient recycling process for a circular  economy; to body-scale ideas such as suitaloon (mike webb,  ), which intended  to be a wearable and portable space to explore the intimate relationship between body  and space; and another experimental project, cushicle (mike webb,  ) (figure  . , right), within the spirit of nomad living which can be compressed and inflated  to fit in different environmental indoor/outdoor conditions. all the aforementioned  cases are a part of achigram’s visionary projects, but they strongly impacted people’s  typical impressions regarding the fundamental definition of what architecture  should be. overall, archigram’s design philosophy can be shortly interpreted here  in its three major emphases of “non-permanence, non-immobility, and non- standardization”. being non-permanent means being temporary or instantaneous,  which means architecture no longer has to exist externally. instead, architecture can  perform temporarily on demand and then be removed, and be mobile to respond  to requests elsewhere. non-immobility refers to the idea that architecture can be  portable and perform as a nomad living space. non-standardization expands/blurs  the standard definitions of architecture as it can be defined as including wearable  devices, be transformed as transportation, and even be performed as spaces.  toc hypercell these definitions are no longer constrained by conventional concepts of architecture  but rather motivated and inspired the development of an embryonic stage of interactive  architecture, namely kinetic architecture  back in the  s. figure  .   left: walking city ( ) (source: https://www.archdaily.com/tag/archigram) and right: cushicle  ( ) (source: http://archigram.westminster.ac.uk/project.php?id= ). besides the uk, other european countries had, under this innovative wave, developed  various architectural design experiments to challenge the conventional/essential  notion of architecture as well. for example, villa rosa, designed by an austrian  architecture team, coop himmel(b)lau in  , is an inflatable installation space  which can be adjusted in accordance with different interior/exterior spatial conditions.  another austrian architecture team haus-rucker-co designed oase no.   in  ,  attempting to challenge classic architectural facades by attaching inflatable spherical  spaces out of them to express their weariness. in addition, just to name a few,  projects like new babylon ( - ) by a dutch architect, constant nieuwenhuys,  continuous monument ( ) by the italian architecture team suprastudio, and  ville spatiale ( ) by czech architect yona friedman, are all inspiring experimental  designs revealing a new-generation of architectural conceptual ideas in the urban  domain with characteristics of high convenience, promptness and immediacy (van  schalk & macel,  ). one of the most innovative and interesting visionary projects  is this paradigm, fun palace (figure  . ) designed by cedric price in  , is an initial  architectural experiment endeavoring to create an adjustable/adaptive space which  can be re-configured through time and functional requirements by employing the  as for interactive bio-architecture, there are more detailed distinctions and definitions. the kinetic architecture  mentioned in this research is purely based on space transformation. adaptive architecture is space with trans- formable façades that make-up or undergo re-configuration which can adjust according to time or environment.  besides the above elements, spatiotemporal interactive architecture also stresses the links and perceptive  associations between space and space and between space and body. toc     from interactive to intra-active body: towards a new organic digital architecture combined technologies of computational programming and architectural design. this  idea basically revealed the now prevalent definition of an adaptive architecture, which  made fun palace one of the primary and iconic interactive/adaptive architectural  experiments in the early years. during this time, cedric price sought to cooperate  with john frazer, one of the pioneers of digital architecture in the uk, facilitating the  opportunity of merging information science, digital technologies, and interactive  architecture. figure  .   the perspective drawing of fun palace ( ), proposed by cedric price in   (source: http:// www.cca.qc.ca/en/collection/ -cedric-price-fun-palace). although none of these avant-garde architects and teams were able to carry out their  wild visionary designs in reality, their experiments still have had a great influence on later  generations, extended the scope and horizon of contemporary architectural design, and  even opened the gate towards the uncharted territory of interactive bio-architecture.  the design of centre georges-pompidou, paris project was developed by peter cook’s  students: richard rogers and renzo piano, at the architectural association (aa), with  an initial intention to introduce archigram’s concept of dynamic floors within the centre  pompidou. unfortunately, the idea of the movable floors based on time and functional  requirements was not realized due to that era’s technology constraints. a few years later,  rem koolhaas, another dutch architect, who graduated from the aa, implemented the  idea of dynamic floors while designing a residential project of maison À boraudeaux  for a client whose lower body was paralyzed after a serious car accident (figure  . ). to  complete each floor’s function as a dynamic floor plate, the center zone of the house is a  massive platform which can be elevated and descended, like an open elevator, to connect  to different floors. rem koolhaas, on one hand, fulfilled the requirements requested from  the clients to create the spatial complexity of this residential project; on the other hand,  the architect cleverly resolved the issue of accessibility for his disabled client. in rem  toc hypercell koolhaas’ project, we witnessed an evolving progress from a pure kinetic architecture  to an adaptive architecture for functional purposes. and at the same time, the project  showed the pragmatic potential of interactive architecture to solve complex and multiple  functional spatial requirements.  figure  .   the bordeaux house plan by rem koolhaas with an elevator in the center for the owner who was  unable to move freely to go to any floor at will which completed the functions of each floor as it reached that floor  (source: http://www.oma.eu/projects/ /maison-%c %a -bordeaux/). in addition, from the other side of the globe, in japan, the metabolism movement  in architecture led by kisho kurokawa brought forth another modern innovative  design idea in an attempt to conceive an organisms’ metabolism into both urban  and architectural design concepts. one of the representative projects, the nakagin  capsule tower built in  , was coincidentally almost the thorough realization of  the ideas hinted upon by archigram’s plug-in city. regardless of being damaged or  in case a tenant moved out, the former residential unit of the nakagin capsule tower  can be taken out and be replaced immediately by inserting a new pre-fabricated unit  to the main infrastructure of the tower. the concept of metabolism in architecture  based on organisms happened to be consistent with the ideas of visionary architecture  toc     from interactive to intra-active body: towards a new organic digital architecture by archigram and other european avant-grade architects who were looking for  inspirations from innovative technology. this coincidence seemed to be a clue to  predict a corresponding possibility of bridging kinetic architecture and organic  architecture together for developing a new kind of interactive organic bio-architecture  in the near future. § . de-skinning of interactive architecture figure  .   a scene from blade runner (source: blade runner, a   movie directed by ridley scott). with the popularization of computers and applications of computer-aided design,  architects have become interested in the appearance of the form of architecture and are  mainly focused on the external skin of their designs. no longer limited by simplifying  designs under the global trend of modernism, they started to use computer-assisted  modeling software to create higher fluidity and for sculpting free-form appearances.  with the rapid growth of new media technology, and not being satisfied with only the  fancy forms created with the computer, some architects eventually started focusing  on new media and eventually started to apply information technology onto physical  architectural skins. all along, the purpose of the architecture façade is to express  architects’ subjective aesthetics, decoration, and unique architectural language. the  fluidity of multimedia screens with real-time information enhanced the potential  of architecture as a vehicle not merely to deliver visual information but also to send  toc hypercell messages. these kinds of programmable walls with dynamic information for highly  interactive social exchanges made it possible for architecture to communicate with  its spectators. moreover, the influence from sci-fi movies on architecture can be  traced back to ridley scott’s well-known film, “blade runner” (figure  . ), in which  the main character flew his flying vehicle amidst high-rise buildings with multimedia  screens. this tremendous scene was a shock to many people’s imaginations, including  architects, as regards potential cities of the future, and in terms of further enhancing  their desire and craving for implementation of interactive architectural skins in the  form of digital building façades. in terms of theoretical aspects, architects also witnessed a shift in their philosophical  interests; from the concept of heterogeneity and deconstruction based on the theory  proposed by french semiotician, jacques derrida to the “smoothness” of surface  theory from “a thousand plateaus” (deluze, g., & guattari, f.,  ) by gille  deleuze and felix guattari. this philosophy shift indeed resulted in a deep impact  on architecture, not only in terms of liberating form, with respect to its geometry but  in terms of enhancing it by implementing an additional interactive layer between  building skins and the users. furthermore, deleuze and guattari’s notions of the fold  inspired topological innovation wherein a flat skin surface could be converted into a  -dimensional space. to this space, the addition of the dimension of time, in the form  of real-time immediate information, converts it to a so-called  d space (imperiale,  ). when seeing the multimedia screens on time square in new york, what people  perceive is not just plain colorful skins of the buildings, but rather a vivid space with  variable depths caused by the commercial or animation running behind static skins.  that unprecedented scene in blade runner with multimedia building façades has now  come to fruition in mega cities around the world and has now become quite common  as information propagators. in the meanwhile, marcos novak proposed the concept  of “hypersurface” expressing his idea that a computer screen could be considered  as an intelligent surface, and can even be extended via the internet to visualize fluid  space (palumbo,  ). thus, in practice, architects have indeed been exploring  more exciting possibilities for architectural skins and are not only constrained within  the boundaries of media façades. for example, jean nouvel designed the arab world  institute with delicate camera-lens-like mechanical devices on the surface of the  building to adjust the light penetration patterns in real-time. in this case, the skin  of the architecture acts similar to a living creature, which can adapt as a response  to its surrounding environment. furthermore, not only being a carrier to perceive  information (intensity of light), this skin of the architecture is also a feedback actuator  responding to those input information (hole size adjustment). although these kinetic  facade devices jean nouvel created fall completely under the mechanical paradigm, he  managed to embody the architectural skin with an organic sensing/actuating capacity.  another interesting case is the tower of winds in yokohama, japan by toyo ito. the  toc     from interactive to intra-active body: towards a new organic digital architecture project is near a subway station, with its external skin having the ability to change its  color in accordance with the amount of surrounding air pollution. the amount of air  pollution is thus delivered indirectly and an invisible dialogue is initiated between the  building and the passersby, thus converting an otherwise inert building entity into  a dynamic information vehicle. some design projects, such as the al bahar towers  in abu dhabi by aedas and one ocean thematic pavilion expo   designed by  soma carry on such innovative trends. these innovations have not only been treated as  information carriers through the idea of media façades but have managed to convert  architectural skins into smart surfaces with real-time adaptation possibilities (figure  . ). figure  .   from left to right: al bahr towers in abu dhabi by aedas (source: http://www.thenational.ae/ business/property/in-pictures-international-property-awards-success-for-uae-developments), arab world  institute in paris by jean nouvel (source: http://www.archdata.org/buildings/ /arab-world-institute), and  tower of winds in yokohama by toyo ito (source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/toyo_ito). however, as regards interactivity of architectural space, the aforementioned projects  hardly provide the users with actual physical/tangible interaction abilities with their  immediate spatial surroundings. reasons such as the economies of scale may possibly  be the reason why the current development of interactivity in buildings is at a relatively  smaller scale or is mainly limited to certain parts of a building, such as façades. the  purpose of interaction in such cases is mostly limited to environmental response, such  as light and air flow, and thus do not touch upon issues of spatial re-configuration. it  was only in  , that decoi led by mark goulthrope collaborated with the mit media  lab to develop the hyposurface (figure  . ) project, giving people direct and tangible  impact from an architectural space interactively.  toc hypercell figure  .   hyposurface designed in   by decoi, let by mark goulthrope (source: https://www.cca.qc.ca/ en/events/ /archaeology-of-the-digital-media-and-machines). the original concept of hyposurface was inspired by aegis in greek mythology which  means being under the protection of a powerful all-knowledgeable source. each  unit comprising the hyposurface is made of triangulated metal panels combined  with a linear actuator behind them. the operation of the linear actuator can trigger  a  d morphological change of the corresponding triangulated surface. when people  touch this morphable wall installation, they can literally feel the actual thrust of the  actuation on their body. this programmable skin system strongly achieves tangible  interactions and delivers a non-verbal sense of communicative expression to users.  however, even after a decade of hyposurface being built, it is disappointing to see that  although a lot of architects have tried, there have been a very few or even no interactive  installations which can compete with the impressive performance of this project. the  megafon pavilion of the winter olympics, held in sochi, russia,  , was designed  based on the recently popular “selfie” idea and realized by using image processing  technology and dedicated mechanisms to translate a  d image into a  d landscape  like surface. visitors could see their photographed faces on the wall  -dimensionally.  the sophisticated mechanism used behind this kinetic installation is not much  different than the hyposurface, which was developed a decade ago. the only major  difference between the two is that instead of constructing the surface with triangulated  panels, numerous color-changing led light bulbs were used as the main expressive  elements in this project. although in this case too, the interactions between the façade  and passerby reduce the architectural skin an information carrier, only possessing one  directional communication, as compared to the hyposurface’s ability to influence  people’s behavior via a continual morphing space. toc     from interactive to intra-active body: towards a new organic digital architecture figure  .   transport, designed in   by the onl led by kas oosterhuis (source: http://www.onl. eu/?q=projects/trans-ports). during the same time, kas oosterhuis, a visionary dutch architect, had a different  perspective regarding architectural skins, researched and realized through several  challenging projects accomplished by his own architectural firm, onl [oosterhuis  lénárd], and the hyperbody research group, founded by him in  , at delft  university of technology, the netherlands. for kas, an architectural skin is a  continuous surface, as seamless as a human/any organisms’ skin. an architectural  skin contains, at least, double layers, the external skin and the internal skin, which can  achieve a dynamically balanced homeostasis status corresponding to multiple forces  working upon it from the inside out and from the outside inward, simultaneously.  therefore, an architectural skin should not merely be considered as a single external  layer of a building, but a continuous surface to form a volumetric vectorial body which  could simultaneously adapt accordingly to the forces both externally and internally,  as a hyperbody (oosterhuis, hyperbodies: towards an e-motive architecture,  ).  like any living creature’s physical body, it can sustain external forces from outside  environments and maintain operations of internal organs/components and then  make passive corresponding adjustments or even take unexpected actions. under  such a seamless surface logic, architectural components need to be looked at in a  very different perspective. for instance, components such as windows and doors  could be designed in the form of dynamic pores on the building skin. kas’ constantly  morphing skin/spatial concept brought architectural thinking to another level wherein  architecture transforms into a living creature with embedded sensing and actuating  abilities and a will of its own. oosterhuis has pushed this idea into practice through  the design projects by his firm onl and at times in co-operation with the hyperbody  research group, tu delft. various projects such as the transports (figure  . ), emotive  house, muscle reconfigured, and interactive wall projects illustrate such novelty.  oosterhuis’s innovative ideas to treat or create architecture as an organic body shall be  further discussed in chapter  . toc hypercell § . materialization of interactive architecture current research experiments concerning interactive architecture can be categorized into  two basic groups: naturalized (material-related) and motorized (mechanics-related).  “naturalized” studies look for deformation parameters of materials based on their  physical characteristics (these materials are sometimes also called “smart materials”).  “motorized” studies attempt to achieve transformation through electronic devices based  on mechanical principles. the ultimate goal for both types of studies is to provide practical  assistance to enable kinetic and interactive architecture. this section illustrates the  advantages and disadvantages of each category through multiple case studies. one example of “naturalized” studies is the experiment: shapeshift, designed by  the materiability research network team led by manuel kretzer in the swiss institute  ethz caad, which, uses electro-active polymer(eap) thin films which have the ability  to physically bend as soon as they are induced by electric current. through different  combinations of components made out of these eap units and an elaborate set of  electricity controls, a large overall area of a morphing surface could be created. on  one hand, the resultant spatial effects were quite strong and dramatic. but on the  other hand, the eap films were as thin as paper and could be easily ripped apart in  case of large physical transformations either during the process of production or  experimentation. because of the nature of this material, it could barely be used for  developing façade apertures or as interactive building skins. it was thus impossible  to use the eap material despite its great potential as regards physical morphing to  conceive them as potential material systems for larger transformable architecture  components or to bear any amount of weight . another example of a “naturalized” experiment can be seen at the centre georges- pompidou in france called: hygroscope. the installation was developed at the icd  (institute for computational design), stuttgart university under the guidance of achim  menges. in this case, the team studied how thin wood film bends according to humidity  variations in a natural environment (menges, a., reichert, s., & krieg o. d.,  ). each  unit of the hygroscope is composed of a hexagonal frame with   thin triangular wood films  of the same size. these wooden films tend to open and close based on the humidity levels  in the air, resulting in variable opening patterns. the hygroscope prototype was placed  inside a glass box, whose humidity could be controlled to correspond with the humidity  please refer to the website http://materiability.com/ for how eap or other smart materials are made. manuel  has collected a lot of information regarding how to self-make deformable materials and the information is  available on the website of his lab as an open source. toc     from interactive to intra-active body: towards a new organic digital architecture data in paris. dramatic and beautiful morphing effects could be observed instantly. later,  in  , the results of the hygroscope study were further improved and again designed to  be implemented for the openings of the “hygroskin pavilion” (figure  . ) project. in this  case, the same material is supposed to react with actual environmental humidity rather  than being within a controlled setup such as the aforementioned glass box. unfortunately,  in this scenario, the same instant dynamic results could not be achieved in an outdoor  setting with natural humidity fluctuations. both experiments again operate at a skin  level and thus lack the ability to be used as a transformable structural frame to eventually  change the overall shape of the architecture. figure  .   the hygroscope in the centre georges-pompidou designed by the icd team led by achim menges  (source: http://www.achimmenges.net/?p= ). another “naturalized” project example falling within the domain of programmable  materials was developed at the mit media lab led by skylar tibbits. they attempted to  fabricate programmable materials using  d printing technologies, consisting of material  properties that are engineered to become multi-performative. this implied that  d flat  materials could be folded into pre-defined  d forms by exerting simple external forces  such as water pressure, swinging force, and slight thrust, in a relatively short time. this  process was named as  d-printing by skylar. this implied that the initial product could  be manufactured relatively cost-efficiently through  d printing techniques, and because  the pre-programed products are flat, they could be easily carried and cost-effectively  transported to customers. currently, the lab has already developed several material  systems which operate on this idea, including carbon fiber, printed wood grain, custom  textile composites, and rubbers/plastics. the next goal for them is to print composite  materials and to further develop variable materials with better adaptability and variability  without using any mechanical device as a support for adaptability applications in  architectural and industrial design. they claim that they want to build true material  toc hypercell robotics or robots without robots  (figure  . , right). the experimentation with smart  material fabrication and development is currently still in its initial stages. figure  .   inform/transform developed by the tangible media group under the mit media lab. the  graph on the left shows the surface effect, and the one on the right shows the structure of the mechanical device  (source: http://tangible.media.mit.edu/project/inform/). as for “motorized” experiments, one example can refer to the aforementioned project,  hyposurface by decoi. a huge dynamic surface composed of numerous triangular  metal panels morphing its overall shape by triggering the linear actuators behind,  giving audiences immediate, direct and tangible impressions. another example is  the kinetic wall, which was exhibited at the la biennale di venezia   designed by  barkow leibinger. the basic mechanical make-up and motions are almost the same  as hyposurface. the only difference is that the triangular metal panels were replaced  by elastic fabrics to make different expressions. this kind of a project normally delivers  high intensity of interaction and significant performance to the audiences, yet at the  same time, it relies on a lot more robust mechanism. besides, the space for mechanical  equipment is much larger than one can imagine. in other words, for example, almost  nine-tenths of the overall space of the project is occupied by mechanical and electrical  devices in order to actuate a thin layer of material which takes up hardly one tenth of  the. this viewpoint is proven by the inform/transform project developed by the  please refer to http://www.selfassemblylab.net/index.php for skylar tibbits’ research with the self-assembly lab. toc   from interactive to intra-active body: towards a new organic digital architecture tangible media group of the mit media lab. inform/transform is a pixelated  transformable table-like platform composed of modular movable units of square  masses. the upward and downward motion of the square masses can be controlled  through hand gestures or based on an input digital graph to create three-dimensional  spatiotemporal morphing effects in real time (figure  . , left). their current research  direction is to implement the same design idea and mechanism to develop larger-scale  and transformable furniture system fulfilling multiple functions in space. yet, as one  can observe from the mechanical structure below the installation, most space is taken  by linear actuators and related devices below used for driving the motion of the square  masses’  (figure  . , right) the challenge ahead is thus how to create maximum  physical impact in real time/space with the least possible actuating devices which will  consume the minimum size. the same quest is prominent in the field of interactive  architecture design, as regards finding ways to develop mechanical devices which are  simple but efficient, solid but changeable and are able to consume lesser physical  space. to conclude in brief, as for “naturalized” (material-related) experiments, we saw  applications based on physical material properties, while simultaneously realizing  that there are limitations to the nature of applications if we consider the relatively  limited properties of such engineered materials. on the other hand, in the “motorized”  (mechanics-related) experiments, we witnessed tangible impacts of such projects  on the users based on their physical transformation abilities, while becoming aware  of the amount of space which needs to be reserved for mechanical equipment. the  intention of pointing out the pros and cons from both “naturalized” and “motorized”  research studies is not to oppose the outstanding contributions and achievements  of these aforementioned experiments, but to question ourselves as interactive space  researchers to look for a better materialization solution. perhaps the idea of combining  the application both from material properties and delicate mechanics can lead to the  next leap for materialization of interactive bio-architecture in larger scales. please refer to http://tangible.media.mit.edu/project/transform/ for the video regarding inform/trans- form. toc hypercell § . immediate demands and bodily connection/ communication of interactive bio-architecture figure  .   turnon designed by the alleswirdgut team, an experimental work of a residence. the rotating  wheel-shaped space can meet users’ demands according to time (source: http://www.alleswirdgut.cc/en/ project/trn-e/). there can be no doubt that we are living in a vibrant and dynamic world. the ‘you’ at  this moment and the ‘you’ in the previous one is completely different from both, the  state of action and state of emotion perspectives. especially in this age of information  explosion, every single entity, object, substance, element, datum existing in the world  can never hold still but changes constantly by adapting with the physical environment or  information flow. most of the time, data just simply pass through rapidly in front of you  without being grabbed, used or even noticed. why stubbornly persist in adhering to the  old regulations and conservative design principles for architecture which remains stuck  with static, non-responsive ways of interacting with the rapidly changing world around  us? why not think outside the box and design a new kind of architecture which can adapt  to this dynamic world? with these questions, many architects have shifted their focus  toc   from interactive to intra-active body: towards a new organic digital architecture towards creating a real-time adaptive architectural body. however, for the general public,  a space/place is nothing more than a container of activities or life, and they often ask why  does space have to literally transform and adjust almost all the time to the environment?  this question can be somehow metaphorically answered from the viewpoint of a natural  biological/physical body. with the blood circulation inside a body, the cells can filter and  exchange nutrition and energy through their membranes in order to achieve the optimal  state of an individual’s body. imagine, if, in a similar fashion, an architectural body acts  as a living entity and can adapt its constituting components to optimize sun shading and  air flow rate in accordance with fluctuating environmental conditions in real-time, and  avoids unnecessary energy consumption. however, this explanation is still a bit vague and  a little distant and indirect for convincing people who lack knowledge pertaining to the  architectural and biological domains. to increase the substantive desire for the existence of interactive bio-architecture, it  should relate more to people’s daily lives. in other words, if interactive architecture  can be designed to somehow link with tasks of assisting us and improving our daily  lives, it will strongly appeal to people’s imagination and desires to invest in smart  spaces. in  , the alleswirdgut team designed “turnon”, an experimental project  of a minimal residential space. all the functions required for a person’s daily life were  included in a compact wheel-shaped space. the space was manually rotated by the  users to obtain the desired spatial usage (figure  . ). in  , los angeles-based  architect, greg lynn, further developed this aforementioned wheel rotation idea to  create the rv (room vehicle) house project by replacing the manual labor based  control with an electronic driven mechanical system. the egg-form shape has been  designed to have each part of the interior space used as a specific function all over the  room. so, by automatically rotating itself by a motorized mechanism, the egg-shaped  space based on pre-set timelines would perfectly meet users’ demands precisely on  time. however, this residential space seems to be a fantasy solution because it does  require a relatively bigger area to install not just only for its irregular egg shape but  also its motorized mechanism which is hosted underneath. in such a case, most  people cannot afford such a large space for installation and also purchase a robust  mechanism to rotate the space. this design can thus be seen as not an efficient and  economical solution for people who live in an urban area where the price of the real  estate is extremely high. therefore, architects born and raised in a relatively high- density urban area seem to have a more realistic proposal for a highly economic design  which is small in size but rich in function. take gary chan, for example, a practicing  architect from hong kong, which is a city well-known for its extremely high population  and density. gary designed transformable walls embedded with furniture which can  be pulled out or reconfigured to achieve maximum space utilization under different  requirements in a small apartment space. this kind of transformable furniture idea has  been taken further and adopted by the mit media lab to develop another interesting  toc hypercell project, cityhome  (figure  . ), a digital interactive furniture/space which can  be manipulated through free-hand gestures. the idea is similar to gary’s design to  have transformable furniture. this way a user can have multiple functions such as a  bedroom, a study, a living room, and a dining room available in a single footprint of  space with intuitive control over the configurations through his/her own body gestures  and movement. briefly speaking, with this kind of transformable design, the spatial  requirements for different functions becomes extremely compact and minimized,  allowing young consumers living in high-density urban areas, to save money by not  purchasing redundant space and to reduce their living load. figure  .   image of the conceptual idea of cityhome by mit media lab (source: http://cp.media.mit.edu/ places-of-living-and-work/) recently, one can see a rise in people’s desire to use gesture based non-verbal  communication. this can be seen as a result of various technological developments in  tracking technology, such as multi-touch touch screen and motion tracking cameras.  with the launch of smartphones and tablets, people have already been trained and  accustomed to attribute control to more intuitive gestures instead of a remote control,  or a set of mouse and keyboard.   years ago, we wouldn’t have believed that one of  the most commonly performed gestures in our daily life would be sliding our finger  please refer to https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f gie i cae for the video regarding cityhome. toc     from interactive to intra-active body: towards a new organic digital architecture on a screen. actually, years ago, lots of hollywood sci-fi movies have imperceptibly  influenced our imagination for such intuitive control and have pushed certain prevalent  technological developments. for example, in “minority report”, a sci-fi movie released  in  , there is a scene with the main character, tom cruise, sophisticatedly moving  his fingers controlling the transparent screen-like interface of a future computer is  still very attractive and an inspiring moment to see it even   years later. practically  speaking, in order to reach the level of intuitive hand gesture based controls for spatial  re-configuration, besides the immediate affect at an actuation/output end, analytical  data systems to read/analyze environmental information or identify precise human  body movements at the input end, are very crucial and challenging. in  , marshall mcluhan introduced the concept: “medium (technology) is an extension of any human body” in his masterpiece “understanding media: the extensions of man” (mcluhan, understanding media: the extensions of man,  ). in  the book, he defined the multiple meanings of ‘medium’ (technology) which covered a  broad range; from the light bulb, text, typography, mobile vehicle, architecture, movie,  a weapon to automation, basically indicating human inventions and technology. one  of the most vital messages he delivers is that human inventions and technology can be  considered as extensions of the body itself, or as an embodiment. for example, cars  replace our feet for walking, arms/weapon replace our hands to attack, tvs replace our  eyes to view, telephones replace our ears and mouth to communicate. architecture  is undoubtedly also one of the medium/body-extensions under his definition, and  this architectural space seems to be more and more closely associated with our  existing physical/human bodies, especially in the era of digital technology, and can  be interpreted as a second skin of our physical bodies. through current technology,  such as the internet connectivity and innovative electronic gadgets, interactive bio- architecture seems to be able to fully embody and match this notion of body extension.  moreover, this realization could be a start to move away from the classic modernist  notion of “a house is a machine for living” towards incorporating organic ideas of  real-time information processing associated with the human body. imagine such an  organic space, which humans can easily manipulate via intuitive hand gestures or  body movement to suit their immediate requirements. not only can redundant space  be saved, but also customizing spatial re-configuration can be immediately met in  such an interactive space. besides architects, artists have fantasized regarding the  concept of interaction. for instance, keiichi matsuda’s computer simulation film titled  “hyperreality” showed a future kitchen concept using augmented reality. similar to  the google glass idea, the film shows a device that can be worn by humans, to envision  a kitchen as an information carrier showing real-time commercial advertisements of  the all brands stored in it. not only that, through the virtual interface of the glasses,  users can simply manipulate all physical devices in this future kitchen by hand  gestures, such as fine tuning the power of a microwave, or turn on and off the switch  toc hypercell of the electric kettle . “living kitchen”, another animated simulation created by  michael harboun, showed the emergence of a kitchen from a blank space composed  of a smooth flat surface to a fully functional interactive kitchen by actuating the flat  surface to convert it to a sink, tap, etc. all devices appear via gestural . in addition  to such imagined developments, in recent years, google’s research in technology  has brought such a reality closer to the imagination. for instance, the google atap  (advanced technology and projects) team is currently working on the “soli” project to  detect/capture the very delicate micro motion of hands such as twisting and clicking,  etc., through the radio-frequency spectrum, which is a radar signal. a tuning knob,  slider or button normally attached to a physical object, such as a watch, a radio, etc.,  can be replaced virtually by implementing such radar detecting technology without  physically touching any controlling device . with more and more research dedicated  to the development of motion tracking and free-form gesture detecting technology,  it is believed sooner or later that interactive bio-architecture using body movement  to control a space for a more convenient usage can surely become a reality. at that  moment, space will not only be seen as an extension of the body but will literally  become a second skin of the human body. § . bio-inspiration of interactive architecture about   years ago, the first arduino micro-controller chip was invented. since  then, architects and artists have been able to design and experiment with interactive  prototypes on their own. the ease of learning programming language plus the simple  circuit connections made it possible for architects to build physical interactive  prototypes. through arduino, architects can now easily retrieve data received by any  sensor worn by users or embedded within the environment, and then by applying  conditional statements of scripting based on their design principles, this input data  can be converted into output data in the form of an actuator’s action. for example,  a dynamic surface that can be opened and closed, a programmable lighting system  that can be turned on and off rhythmically, a movable floor that can be lifted up and  please refer to https://vimeo.com/  for the video regarding hyperreality please refer to https://vimeo.com/  for the video regarding living kitchen. please refer to https://atap.google.com/soli/ for the video regarding project soli. toc   from interactive to intra-active body: towards a new organic digital architecture down vertically as a tangible mockup rather than virtual simulation. some architects  even boldly attempted to create mechanized organisms through with these interactive  tools. minimaforms, a team led by the brothers theodore & stephen spyropoulos,  completed a project named petting zoo with arduino, microsoft kinect camera, and  a couple of servo motors. several elephant trunk-like objects suspended from the  ceiling could move up towards the visitors as if they were alive based on the tracking  data of participants’ approaching routes and velocities. these were accompanied with  lighting effects of different colors, unconsciously pulling visitors and inducing within  them the desire to interact via touching the life like trunks, or approaching them using  diverse routes and speeds. in this space with plenty of life-like objects, visitors were  no longer spectators watching a distant performance but rather became parts of the  project within which they were engaged themselves. in such interactive spatial designs,  success can often be measured via the degree of engagement that the users of such a  space exhibit. figure  .   strandbeest designed by theo jansen (source: http://roskofrenija.blogspot.nl/ / /theo- jansen-strandbeest-kineticke.html) in the area of bio-inspired objects, theo jansen, a physicist from the netherlands is  considered as the modern da vinci. his strandbeest (sand beast) project was a giant  walking machine composed of plastic tubes which are common on construction sites  to protect electricity cables. it is even more surprising considering that the strandbeest,  with its mighty size of   meters tall and   meters wide, could walk easily on the beach  simply with the aid of wind force (figure  . ). theo, at the age of  , is still working  on improving his strandbeest to become smarter. he has designed successfully a  toc hypercell non-electric inflating device to give the strandbeest simple intelligence and a nervous  system, in order to avoid it stepping into the sea which could damage it. theo once  made fun of his project by saying that with this new intelligence and nervous system  embedded, even when he is gone, his beast can still stay alive and walk on the sand.  humans are always fascinated and attracted by these living mechanical objects. people  have been trying to build robots which are like humans. with this kind of desire and  advancement of technology, a world cohabited with humans and robots is just around  the corner. this fact has made steven hawkins, noam chomsky, steve wozniak, bill  gates, elon musk and hundreds of others, through an open letter express their concern regarding the threats of ai (artificial intelligent) which can potentially be more  dangerous than nuclear weapons to humans. besides bio-inspired projects, the hylozoic series installations by philip beesley are  also very inspiring. hundreds and thousands of acrylic tentacles were suspended from  the ceiling creating an environment of an upside-down jungle (figure  . ). when  visitors went under these devices, the interactive journey was initiated. these tentacles  could be triggered to move and touch the visitors. assisted by embedded sensors and  control systems, the tentacles assumed their own will and were intent upon teasing  visitors. the intelligence, in this case, is no longer referring to one-to-one responsive  behavior but becomes a rather sophisticated operation, generated via specifically  designed artificial intelligence algorithms. a centralized intelligent system with  distributed intelligent controls is deployed. this enhances the visitors’ curiosity as they  are unable to figure out in a short time how this so-called living entity worked. philip  even added a metabolic system so that the hylozoic series could generate energy on  its own without an external power supply. the visitors’ experience in such a space was  like being in a natural environment they had never been in before. they had to spend  time experiencing it in order to get to know this dynamic environment. philip’s hylozoic  series was not a bio-inspired project but was rather an attempt to create a living  ecosystem (beesley,  ). what happened inside with the installation were not only  interactions between objects and humans, but also internal interactions evoked among  the tentacles as well. with this embedded intra-active system, the installation thus  seems to have its own will and behavior to react pro-actively with the surroundings and  visitors as a collective intelligent ecosystem. based on philip’s project, the tendency of  interactive architecture to shift from typical two-way responsive visible interactions to  multi-dimensional intra-actions and relationships becomes apparent. the full content of the open letter titled “research priorities for robust and beneficial artificial intelligence” can  be found from the following link: http://futureoflife.org/ai-open-letter/#signatories toc   from interactive to intra-active body: towards a new organic digital architecture figure  .   the hylozoic series designed by philip beesley, an organic space like nature (source: http://www. philipbeesleyarchitect.com/sculptures/ _city_gallery_wellington/index.php). § . organic bodies for interactive architecture (from cell to body) back to kas oosterhuis’ idea of “hyperbodies”, which is a volumetric body composed of  a continuous seamless skin surface. when forces are applied individually to the internal  and the external layers, the body is driven to seek homeostasis or balance, and can  thus morph. and how is this skin composed? the concept kas introduced here is the  “swarm”. like a flock of birds flying in the sky, a school of fish swimming in the sea, a  cluster of ants moving on the ground, or a group of bees looking for honey, every single  entity has its own simple intelligence to communicate and exchange information.  when they are clustering together, their collective intelligence helps them to make  a decision pertaining to its immediate environment and produce a corresponding  response/reaction accordingly. therefore, the idea of creating a morphing intelligent  skin/body is to form a composite body using basic intelligent single somatic cells. this  is one of the crucial ideas this research deployed. toc hypercell from a broader perspective on digital architecture nowadays, the definition of organic  architecture seems to be limited to building organic forms. through sophisticated  d  modeling software, easily accessible visual programming software (which has become  more and more common nowadays), and infinite open source codes available online,  building intricate organic shapes is no longer challenging. if we keep on addressing  building organic shapes, we will lose opportunities to truly explore and discover new  definitions closer to the true inner spirit of organic architecture. we indeed have  some architects, who, try to build upon biomimicry based research, via extracting  certain traits from organisms in nature and translating them into procedures for  operating human technology such as robotic arms. however, digital form in the field  of computer-aided design, digital fabrication and its association with structure, and  biomimicry from the perspective of function are all independently developed systems  without comprehensive integration and thus are contrary to the holistic nature of  growth in organisms. hence, the authentic and original meaning of “being organic”  is totally lost in the current digital/organic architecture field. take any organism  for example: its form, structure, and functions should be designed and developed  simultaneously instead of being three independent systems added to one another in  a linear manner. integrating (digital) form, (digital) manufacturing, and biomimicry  can help in achieving a form of interactive architecture, which is closer to the genuine  idea of “being organic”. janine benyus, who coined the term “biomimicry” (benyus,  ), once said in a speech that there are three phases of “learning from nature”.  the first phase is to imitate natural forms; the second phase is to look into all-natural  growth processes; the third phase is to deeply get involved into understanding natural  ecosystems. after having mastered the art of producing organic looking form using  complex  d software, it’s time now to move to the next phase of learning about  growth processes in nature. john frazer, one of the pioneers of digital/computational  architecture, has written an influential quote in his book “an evolutionary architecture” stating that “…what we are evolving are the rules for generating the form, rather than the forms themselves” (frazer,  ). his words strongly support the idea that digital  architectural design should be developing logical design systems for generating forms  instead of merely modeling/sculpting forms, which coincidentally aligns with the  thought behind janine benyus’ second phase of learning about the process of growth in  nature. along with the aforementioned ideas, a new kind of digital organic architecture  can thus be proposed: imagine if architecture could grow like living organisms, having  basic growth information at the embryonic stage, being influenced by the surrounding  environment while growing, and going through all the sophisticated processes of cell  differentiation, self-organization, and self-assembly, to eventually grow into a mature  living architectural body. this mature architectural body which is able to communicate,  adapt, and interact with the surrounding environment as a living organism will  become a genuine organic bio-architecture, a new kind of digital organic architecture  (figure  . ). toc   from interactive to intra-active body: towards a new organic digital architecture dna embryo cell division infancy mature body info mrna gravity switch regulation trigger switches proteins function realtime / reaction/ reflection subjective essentials **design intestion **geometry **color **number objective factors **exterior **interior repeated **self-organization **programmable **bottom-up **muti-functions **self-assembly **adaption **re-configuration **environment sensitive ** user oriented figure  .   an illustration of how the growing process of organisms can be applied to architecture in the  hypercell research study. according to this new-found design mindset, this hypercell research attempts to offer  a new methodology of building an architectural body composed of intelligent cell-like  entities, which are based on several principles derived from biology (biloria, nimish &  chang, jia-rey,  ), with a focus on evolutionary development biology (evo-devo).  one of the main notions extracted from evo-devo which can be potentially applied  as a core idea in this research is to see how organisms develop and differentiate into  a variety of animals although they come from similar embryos. with the current  developments in biology, we already know that all living organisms share the same  genetic toolkit. in other words, this is similar to the now popular idea of parametric  design, as humans and all the other creatures have similar parameter sets to design/ grow their organic bodies. they are different animals only because their gene  sequencing and combinations (natural parameters) are different. this interesting  process is worth being further discovered and translated into the parametric  architectural design by learning from principles behind it in order to encourage digital  architecture to step into the bio-inspired domain. several interesting and useful logics  that can be applied to architectural design systems can be extracted from the principles  behind evo-devo, such as: the biological logic to create a complex body based on  the repetition of simple, self-similar elements; the logic of distributed information  communication pertaining to how cells are informed about their vital functions after  cell differentiation through specific communication protocols; the switching (on/off)  toc hypercell logic via which dnas inform rnas to produce protein to build different body parts, etc.  (carroll,  ). in simple words, such a bottom-up understanding of the natural world  can serve towards extracting a fundamental logic for a new organic architectural design  process. such a process would imply developing intelligent architectural cells at the  smallest element level, to build an interactive architectural body which can stay alive to  adapt and communicate with the environment bench no. chair no. chair no. chair no. chair no. chair no. chair no. [ , , , ] c m c m c m c m { , , , , } [ , , , ] [ , , , ] { , , , , } [ , ,- , ] [ , , , ] [ , , , ] [ , , , ] { , , , , } { , , , , } [ , ,- , ] { , , , , } { , , , , } [ , , , ] [ , ,- , ] [ , ,- , ] { , , , , } [ , , , ][ , ,- , ] c m c m c m c m c m c m c m chairs// {logic dna} [dimension dna] table no. table no. bed no. bed no. table no. c m { , , , , } { , , , , } [ , , , ] [ , ,- , ] [ , ,- , ] { , , , , } { , , , , } [ , , , ] { , , , , } [ , ,- , ] bed no. { , , , , } [ , , , ] bed no. { , , , , } [ , , , ] c m . c m c m c m c m c m c m table no. ( tatami ) [ , ,- , ] { , , , , } tables// beds// figure  .   possible variable furniture created by adjusting numbers and parameters like dnas based on the  transformation make-up of hypercells. in order to make this research more comprehensible and convincing, several design  case studies have been developed to support it. take the series of hypercell furniture  system design projects for instance: the basic geometric shape of a cell was a square  in  d and cubic shape in  d. although the lengths of the sides can extend or shorten,  the changing degrees of the length is still constrained according to physical limitations,  such as gravity and mechanical forces. under these limitations, based on different  arrangements and combinations with the adjustment of input parameter’ values,  the overall body can acquire complex forms even though it is composed of simple  geometric shapes as basic elements. all input parameters of the basic geometric  element (quadrangle in this case) can be changed in real-time to make transformation  possible at any time in order to meet the users’ requirements. in this project, instead of  regular environmental factors such as lighting, wind flow, humidity, and temperature,  toc   from interactive to intra-active body: towards a new organic digital architecture etc., users gain paramount importance to trigger the transformation of the hypercell  furniture. a catalog of furniture designs which are possible via the aforementioned  transformation logic was created to show a wide range of potential performance  possibilities (fig.  ). all adjustable parameters, in this case, can be considered as  the dna of the furniture. and based on different dna information sets and the total  number of hypercell components, different types of furniture could be formed/ generated. in simple terms, you can imagine yourself going to a furniture wholesale  store like ikea to buy several hypercell components and take them home. you can then  follow the instruction to adjust the dna by intuitive hand gestures to create a default  table and a chair with them and when taking a break in the next hour you can simply  and conveniently change the setting and transform the table and the chair into a deck  chair  (figure  . ). similar to the aforementioned example of cityhome, the users’  demand for occupied space can thus be reduced to the minimum and the functional  efficiency of a unit area can be optimized to the maximum extent. the difference is that  the hypercell furniture can be moved around instead of being fixed in a certain. another interesting aspect pertains to “evolution”, which can be witnessed in nature.  in the case of hypercell furniture, the evolution is initiated by the users. when users  become familiar with the operations and adjustments of the hypercell dna, they  can modify these dna parameters at will to create novel furniture pieces based  on their needs. for example, a table can be combined with a chair to create new  compound furniture. in the process of research development and design, certain  dynamic simulation tools and kinect cameras were also used to experiment with the  possibilities of controlling the transformation of furniture by intuitive hand gestures  or body movements so that the hypercell furniture can be used more intuitively . by  designing the hypercell furniture system, it was proven that this bio-inspired design  please refer to the blog of p&a lab (http://pandalabccc.blogspot.tw/search/label/hypercell) for the research  progress and the video regarding to “hypercell” and the following papers of the authors for more detail informa- tion: biloria, nimish & chang, jia-rey. ( ). hypercell: a bio-inspired information design framework for real-time adaptive  spatial components. proceedings of the  th ecaade conference (pp.  - ). prague: ecaade and czech  technical university in prague, faculty of architecture. (http://papers.cumincad.org/cgi-bin/works/show?e- caade _ ) biloria, nimish & chang, jia-rey. ( ). hyper-morphology: experimentations with bio-inspired design processes for adaptive  spatial re-use. proceedings of the ecaade conference volume no. ,   (tu delft) (pp.  - ). delft:  ecaade and faculty of architecture, delft university of technology. (http://papers.cumincad.org/cgi-bin/ works/show?ecaade _ ). hypercell interface is designed with the microsoft kinect cameras. so, the mouse movements are  replaced by free-hand gestures to adjust hypercell parameters and change the shape of the hypercell furniture here. to learn more  about it, please refer to the video (http://pandalabccc.blogspot.tw/search/label/hypercell) toc hypercell method is feasible, and can be put into practice when all the digital architecture  techniques (e.g., parametric design, digital simulation, digital fabrication, physical  computing…etc.) are applied comprehensively. a more important question, however,  is how to apply this logic to bigger architecture structures so that architectural bodies  may be able to interact with the environment and communicate with users in a more  intuitive way. furthermore, it is also desired to increase the efficient usage of space  and to achieve the goal of producing a genuinely organic architecture. (please refer to  chapter   for more details about the development of the hypercell design project). § . from interactive to intra-active architecture (from inter-activeness to intra-activeness) attaining responsive interaction in architecture is not the ultimate goal of this  research. instead, a multi-modal, multi-dimensional interaction between space and  the human body, which challenges the physical and psychological perception of space  becomes of vital value. the head of the hyperbody research group, kas oosterhuis,  defined “hyperbody” more than   years ago , as a pro-active body with proactive  actions before being driven, as if it has a will of its own. adhering to this philosophy,  the hyperbody constructed via this research using hypercells can possess the  collective intelligence to facilitate real-time information collation, producing informed  action. both, information from the outside obtained through sensors and internal  communication between the swarm of hypercells are key to give this hyperbody its  own free will. obviously, the primary goal of an architectural body is no longer limited  to responding to the environment and users as usual. users will interact with this  “space” through negotiations which can help with comprehension. if the hylozoic  series projects by philip wants to claim that “space must return to nature”, then here  the statement would be “space is nature”. to achieve this goal, intra-activeness of  space definitely needs to be created and constructed. the original quote from the book, “hyperbodies: towards an e-motive architecture” by kas oosterhuis is: “true  hyperbodies are proactive bodies, true hyperbodies actively propose actions. they act before they are triggered  to do so. hyperbodies display something like a will of their own. they sense, they actuate, but essentially not as a  response to a single request.”     toc     from interactive to intra-active body: towards a new organic digital architecture in summer,  , the researcher was invited to be involved in metabody , an eu  culture research project. the team members included choreographers, digital media  artists, sound artists, and music composers from   different european countries. the  purpose of the project was to re-interpret bodies both of humans and space through  the means of new media. the project considered how to empower architectural space  in order to induce/evoke people to explore unknown/untapped potentials of their own  body, as regards both, physiological and psychological aspects. the primary goal of the  body of space here has no need to meet users’ demands as typical architectural design  thinking strives to do. also, space is no longer seen as an extension of an individual  body as mcluhan stated, but as an independent individual with its own emotions,  actions, and behaviors like kas oosterhuis’ hyperbody idea. users would have to get  along with the space by looking for possibilities to communicate with it through body  movements instead of verbal language. figure  .   a space created by the interactive projection platform designed by the hyperbody research group  (jia-rey chang and nimish biloria) and dieter vandoren where visitors had to try to twist their body to complete  different effective movements to interact with the swarm of units displayed by the beams. in summer,  , the researcher with the supervisor, nimish biloria, cooperated  with dieter vandoren, a rotterdam-based multimedia artist to exhibit in the form  of an experimental installation in the form of an immersive digital interactive space  to know more about metabody, please refer to the link: http://metabody.eu/ or http://www.hyperbody.nl/ research/projects/metabody/. toc hypercell called “ambiguous topology” (chang, jia-rey, biloria, nimish, & vandoren, dieter,  ) in medialab-prado, madrid. the projection system platform developed by  dieter was different from the general approach of projecting images onto a  d screen  to represent/realize a  d space. in the exhibition space, four projectors were set up  at the four corners of the exhibition area. the geometry (points, lines, and planes) in  the projection space was re-interpreted through the light beams in a specific manner.  for example, a point in the space was precisely located at the intersection crossing  of the beams from the four projectors. in ambiguous topology, we also built nearly   agents to construct the entire space based on the swarm logic. seven different  experiential scenes were displayed in chronological order so that visitors would feel like  being in an immersive living space with projection inducing them to interact with the  space using novel body movements (figure  . ). for example, in one of the scenes,  the momentum of the agent/light beams was activated/disturbed when visitors  touched them (projected light beams) by waving or pushing them. the colors of the  agents/light beam also changed according to the velocity of the light beam. aggressive  colors, such as red and yellow indicated the high transmission value of locomotion  compared to blue and green, which express relatively passive and stable light beam  movement. when each agent has accumulated sufficient momentum by progressively  storing the energy generated from the visitors’ movements, the agents instead of  acting in a responsive fashion, acquire a role wherein they are intimately attracted to a  user’s body. this implied, the agents/light beams to acquire aggressive colors (red and  yellow) and to quite literally attach themselves to the visitors’ limbs (attraction points),  thus directly transforming their response. visitors were not given any instructions  about interaction scenarios before entering “ambiguous topology”. furthermore,  the designers/programmers only set the rules/logic for each scene of the swarm’s  behavior as a set of gaming rules. so even the designers and programmers found it  was impossible to predict the exact changes of the space and visitors’ reactions to this  dynamic and unpredictable space . in other words, “ambiguous topology” became  a space having its own life. visitors in this installation had to use full body movement  based non-verbal communication means to communicate with this dynamic space.  this also opened up a new dimension for interacting with space for the disabled (please  refer to chapter   for more details about the “ambiguous topology”). for more detail understanding and outlines of the project, “ambiguous topology”, please check the video here: https://vimeo.com/  , https://vimeo.com/ ,  and related paper of chang, jia-rey, biloria, nimish, & vandoren, dieter. ( ). ambiguous topology from interactive to pro-ac- tive spatial environments. proceedings of the ieee visap’  conference: data improvisation (pp.  - ). chica- go: ieee visap. (http://visap.uic.edu/ /visap -papers/visap _chang_ambiguoustopology.pdf) toc   from interactive to intra-active body: towards a new organic digital architecture figure  .   hyperloop, a transformable pavilion space the hyperbody research group aims to implement,  with all nodes being transformable and the sensors on the nodes being able to communicate for the purpose of  spatial feedback. please refer to the video: https://vimeo.com/ . figure  .   a scaled mechanical prototype model of hyperloop. the ultimate design goal of metabody was to deliver an intra-active transformable  pavilion. the basic structure of the preliminary design was developed as a giant  transformable mechanical frame structure in the form of an infinite loop (an   shape),  called “hyperloop” (figure  .  and figure  . ). a motion tracking system would  be implemented on each structural node to gather sensed data. the nodes with  embedded microcontroller will have basic intelligence, like the agents of a swarm,  communicating with each other through individual data transmission protocols under  a certain network. and data will be fed back to the motorized joints on each node to  toc hypercell activate physical transformations as the resultant process of collective intelligent  swarm behavior. the idea of space with its own freedom akin to the hyperbody notion  defined by kas oosterhuis can thus be eventually carried out. this behavioral structure  with continuous data processing and actuating abilities is proposed to be covered with  an interactive skin for more local interactions with users (please refer to chapter   for  more details about the hyperloop). § . conclusion within this data driven context, we can conclude that architectural space can transcend  the modernist definition of living machines and tend towards becoming a lively  ecosystem with its own life and will, much like the natural world. this study boldly  predicts that the innovative concept of organic body-like architecture comprised of  intelligent components will soon be realized and will impact not only architectural  design thinking but also the habits and imagination of people as regards the concept  of space. the purpose of proposing the concept of a living space is not to suggest or  predict that this is the only direction/solution for the future of architectural design,  but to expand the young generation of architects’ imagination regarding space. similar  to the avant-grade designs by archigram, the research intends to free the mindset of  young designers from the constrains of conventional/typical trends of architecture  and broaden their horizons for creating new potentialities in architectural design.  furthermore, to improve architectural design, one must not constrain imagination  to currently available technology. if those visionary ideas proposed by archigram had  all stuck to the technology of the  s, their design concepts and projects wouldn’t  have influenced visionary architects in the generations which followed. recently in  the architecture design industry, digital architecture is becoming mainstream with  its associated pros and cons. the advantage is that we gain more design efficiency by  using computational tools, such as parametric modeling, and environmental analysis  simulation, etc., than before. however, with the vigorous development of digital  architecture, digital tools shouldn’t be considered only as assistive, but should rather  be used as generative tools to be used for exploring future possibilities. please refer to https://vimeo.com/ , http://www.hyperbody.nl/research/projects/the-hyper- loop/, and http://re.hyperbody.nl/index.php/msc g :frontpage, for the detailed description of the develop- ment process of hyperloop and the related video. toc   from interactive to intra-active body: towards a new organic digital architecture looking back at the context of interactive architecture’s development, in the early days  when interactive architecture was still in its embryonic stage of kinetic architecture, the  main purpose was to achieve multiple spatial usage with manually movable elements,  such as movable wall panels, or turning on/off of devices by using simple body  gestures. more recently, with further technological development, the aim slowly shifted  towards developing adaptiveness of façades in order to regulate environmental factors  in an automated fashion through centralized data processing systems in an attempt  to mimic how organisms react within nature. a visionary and ambitious goal for the  future has been proposed in this research: to imagine a space having its own will and  behavior akin to a living organism, needing constant negotiation and communication  to explore and establish novel relationships between humans and space. with the  advancement of technology, this notion of interactive architecture is getting closer to  realization. if the principles of building organic architecture still adhere to mimicking  organic designs, then the development of organic architecture will be at a standstill.  in contrast, understanding organic architecture from an interaction design will imply  re-considering our approach from mimicking to understanding the principles of  morphological development and incorporate these in our design thinking. this way,  we can approach the field of interactive architecture in a manner which corresponds  much more closely with the definition of being organic, thus marking the beginnings  of a transition from interactive to intra-active architectural body to truly envision a new  generation of organic bio-inspired architecture. references beesley, p. ( ). architecture in formation: on the nature of information in digital architecture. in p.  lorenzo-eiroa, & a. sprecher (eds.), architecture in formation: on the nature of information in digital architecture (pp.  - ). new york: routledge. benyus, j. m. ( ). biomimicry: innovation inspired by nature. new york: harpercollins publishers inc. biloria, nimish & chang, jia-rey. ( ). hyper-morphology: experimentations with bio-inspired design pro- cesses for adaptive spatial re-use. proceedings of the ecaade conference volume no. , (tu delft) (pp.  - ). delft: ecaade and faculty of architecture, delft university of technology. carroll, s. b. ( ). endless forms most beautiful: the new science of evo devo. new york: w. w. norton &  company, inc. chang, jia-rey, biloria, nimish, & vandoren, dieter. ( ). ambiguous topology from interactive to pro-active  spatial environments. proceedings of the ieee visap’ conference: data improvisation (pp.  - ). chica- go: ieee visap. crompton, d., & archigram (group). ( ). a guide to archigram - . new york: princeton architectural  press. deluze, g., & guattari, f. ( ). a thousand plateaus: capitalism and schizophrenia. london: continuum. frazer, j. ( ). a natural model for architecture/ the nature of the evolutionary mode. in j. frazer, an evolu- tionary architecture. london: architectural association. imperiale, a. ( ). new flatness: surface tension in digital architecture. basel: birkhäuser . mcluhan, m. ( ). understanding media: the extensions of man. new york: mcgraw-hill. menges, a., reichert, s., & krieg o. d. ( ). meteorosensitive architecture. in k. m., & l. hovestadt (eds.),  alive: advancements in adaptive architecture (pp.  - ). basel: birkhäuser. toc hypercell oosterhuis, k. ( ). hyperbodies: towards an e-motive architecture. basel: birkhäuser. palumbo, l. m. ( ). new wombs: electronic bodies and architectural disorders. basel: birkhäuser. van schalk, m., & macel, o. (eds.). ( ). exit utopia: architectural provocations, - . london: prestel  publishing. toc   information processor - digital form with computational means information processor -  digital form with computational means “give me a gun and i will make all buildings move.” bruno latour, albena yaneva § . introduction how computational technology start to take place and gradually become being heavily involved/implemented in the design process of architectural design. in the architecture domain, not only the proportion of the assistance from  computational techniques has been increasing exponentially, but also, the role  they play has been gradually shifting from a supporting one to a generative one. no  longer limited to being a complex mathematics calculator, computers, have become  a ubiquitous necessity in our daily life and even influence the way we live. this, is  especially true for the young generation who were born in this digital world, mainly  referred to as the “generation z” . business insider, a fast-growing business media  website, mentioned that “gen z-ers are digitally over-connected. they multitask  across at least five screens daily and spend  % of their time outside of school with  computers or mobile devices, compared to  %   years ago, according to the  generation z are the cohort of people born after the millennials. the generation is generally defined with birth  years ranging from the late  s through the  s or from the early  s to around  . please see the  details through: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/generation_z toc hypercell sparks & honey report .” when alan turing first invented the room-sized “turing  machine” to decipher nazi codes, he couldn’t have expected that this giant machine  could one day be put into one’s pocket and efficiently compute a million times more  data. as compared to the era of tools, such as paper and pen, the computer, in today’s  context has been heavily utilized and relied upon as a powerful instrument. this change  is remarkable, considering the relatively short period of time, especially after    when the first ibm personal computer was released (mitchell,  ). architecture  design cannot be excluded from this inevitable technological tendency. even the most  conservative architecture firms are now required to deliver digital technical drawings  to communicate amongst designers, clients, and construction firms in the present  scenario. incorporating computer technology in today’s context also provides young  designers the opportunity to experiment with creating relatively complex geometry  based architectural space. but before applying this powerful technology in architectural  design, the crucial knowledge behind it that architects had to understand and realize  was the manner and procedure of “processing of information”. without information,  the computer would be just lying on one’s desk as a useless cube, like a vehicle  without a driver, or a body without a soul. the shifting roles of computer technology in  architectural design are obviously defined by the manner of how designers interpret,  digest and operate/process the streams of information flow. however, dealing with information is not new to architectural design, which already  thrived on multi-stakeholder based information exchange long before computers  arrived. in order to preserve the measurements underlying his design ideas,  brunelleschi, as an architect in the early renaissance, investigated means of making  projective geometric drawings in order to capture  -dimensional information,  which subsequently led to the development of parametric perspective space for  the first time (lorenzo-eiroa, form:in:form on the relationship between digital  signifiers and formal autonomy,  ). during the  th and  th century, girard  desargues developed the concept of “the point at infinity” to create an alternative  way of constructing euclidean geometry in perspective drawings by using vanishing  points as references (lorenzo-eiroa, form:in:form on the relationship between  digital signifiers and formal autonomy,  ). not to mention the great influential  invention of the cartesian coordinate system by rené descartes, who, set up  the fundamental principles of spatial collaboration both in  d and  d graphics.  implausible, in the early  th century, when paper began to replace parchment as  a drawing medium, italian architects had well understood the concept of graphic  projection as communication document shared amongst people dedicated to the  please see the full report and statistics through the website referred: http://www.businessinsider.com/genera- tion-z-spending-habits- - ?ir=t toc   information processor - digital form with computational means construction process (weisberg,  ). the communication documents here refer  to the so-called technical/engineering drawings as a medium where the projects  are represented in a proper scale, with precise measurements and understandable  geometric visualization. to use these technical/engineering drawings not only in  terms of translating, preserving, creating but also communicating information of  their spatial ideas, architects have shown remarkable abilities to confront information  communication as a necessity in the design process, and also reveal the intensive and  intimate relationships between information and form since the renaissance. in other  words, architectural design can be seen as an on-going process coupled with streams  of information in order to seek/generate a relatively rational form as a specific resulting  outcome (with/without computational techniques). figure  .   left: course in airplane lofting, burgard high school, buffalo, ny, usa, january i,  . right:  picture of people working on airplain lofting(source: http://cornelljournalofarchitecture.cornell.edu/read. html?id= , https://i.pinimg.com/ x/ e/ /bb/ e bbaa c fd afb cfe .jpg). with the original intention of “technical/engineering drawings”, designers  (not only architects) basically created two fundamental methods of dealing with  information pragmatically for a long time:  . to store precise references for fabrication  and construction.  . to present design ideas to the clients with understandable  visualization as a communicating medium. but the increasing intricacy of the design,  the precise demands for measurements, and the amount of requirements for the  reproduction of construction drawings made it extremely difficult to manually illustrate  hard copies with hand drawing by traditional tools such as pen, paper, and ruler.  take aeronautical drawings for example, it is even more challenging, because of the  demands to produce accurate drawings at  :  scale for large components of an aircraft,  toc hypercell where it is impossible to convert smaller drawings into the templates needed for  production (weisberg,  )(figure  . ). this is the moment when computers started  to become important and be considered as a new medium/tool to assist and accelerate  both the design and production processes. it was also this time when the terminology  of “cad”(computer aided design) was first introduced to the world. although the main  goals of cad techniques back then still remained embedded in storing and presenting  designs, computational techniques have increasingly changed their role by providing  multiple ways of generating, analyzing and visualizing data. this in-turn has resulted  in developing informed complex geometry based design solution sets as novel spatial  outcomes. the form is interplaying amongst itself as an information emergence by executing particular approaches for conveying information. “design is the computation of shape information that is needed to guide fabrication or construction of an artefact” is an apt definition for the early stage of computer aided  design by william mitchell (mitchell,  ). however, in this case, information is  mainly considered as shape/geometry related data, extracted from a pre-conceived  form to assist in any production process after the design decisions have been mostly  completed. however, since years of developments and evolutions of the computer  technology utilized in architectural design, computers are not treated merely as  drawing machines to generate documents for construction work, or modeling  machines to create fascinating rendering graphics to present and convince clients.  the computation technology has successfully adapted/shifted itself to become an  “information processor” rather than a pure “information duplicator”. in the publication  of “algorithm form” (terzidis,  ), kostas terzids made an explicit distinction  about “computerization” and “computation”. “the dominant mode of utilizing computers in architecture today is that of computerization; entities or processes that are already conceptualized in the designer’s mind are entered, manipulated or stored in a computer system. in contrast, computation or computing, as a computer-based design tool, is generally limited. the problem with this situation is that designers do not take advantage of the computational power of the computer”. this concise quote  not only reveals existing problems of architects being predominantly occupied with  computerization, yet, it also indicates a clear turning point of feeding and extracting  information to and from computers in a different but also efficient way. “form” has always been a complicated and debated topic as regards the role it plays  in architectural design no matter what kind of dogma is followed. here, it’s crucial  to state that this research emphasizes that form should be perceived as having  an intimate relationship with relevant contextual data in a dynamic fashion, and  the approaches involved in processing this data into form-finding information.  toc     information processor - digital form with computational means the key concept delivered here is: “the form can be informed by contextual information as a continual process”. the following sections will open up discussions  focusing on different strategies for associating form and information with different  computational methodologies in architectural design (computation) far beyond the  conventional computational approaches which served towards storing and presenting  (computerization) form. these methodologies have been categorized as: form sculptor, form generator, form animator, and form interactor. § . form sculptor = utilizing d software intuitively as an exploration tool for design purposes/intentions. form sculptor is defined as a method wherein existing  d software is used to explore  design ideas in architecture. it doesn’t sound like an innovative idea at all, but in fact,  this methodology has been only executed since just over a decade. sketchpad (figure  . ), developed by ivan sutherland using the tx-  computer in lincoln laboratory in  , which was around   years before ibm released the first personal computer was  one of the first pioneering cad systems (weisberg,  ). ivan’s original idea about  sketchpad operating in the design process was clearly written in his ph.d. dissertation:  “construction of a drawing with sketchpad is itself a model of the design process”  (sutherland,  ). however, major developments of implementing computer graphic  systems in architectural design went in a contrary direction inclined towards becoming  a convincing visualized representation of the designers’ ultimate vision of the project.  this conservative way of using computer graphic systems as a virtual template/ canvas or material to draw or model the final design project is obviously considered  as a “computerization” process. certainly, there is no design intention involved in the  words and notions of making a “digital drawing” or “digital model”, which is in a sense  the common and typical misleading idea of the terminology of “digital architecture”  and “caad process” prevalent amongst the general public. architects who engage  with reproducing and storing tasks for the purpose of re-presenting their designs  virtually with digital tools should thus not be considered as members of the “digital  architecture” realm. form sculptor does not refer to such kind of computerized  architecture. please check the videos for more information about sketchpad: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=usy- ot_ha_ba and https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bkm cmrqk o. toc hypercell manifesting curvilinear geometries has always been seen as a difficult geometric task  within digital software and fabrication sectors for the architectural community. this  issue, however, has been successfully addressed within the automobile, aircraft and  naval shipbuilding industry with “computer numerical controlled” (cnc) machines  for fabrication purposes. but long before the computer was invented, analog crafting  methods of building curvilinear structures have been developed with relatively  conventional tools and devices. for instance, lofting is one of the crucial techniques  of constructing a boat frame through several sectional profiles, and sweeping is  another approach by carving out clay or sand as a doubly curved surface from the other  directions perpendicular to the lofting axis. both of these are fundamental functions in  surface modeling software (young,  ). it took a few years for computer scientists  to translate most of these crafting techniques into a computer algorithm to build up a  curvilinear line with compatible computational processing power so that it appeared  on screen in real-time. for instance, albeit it’s still being in a wireframe geometric  system, pierre bezier, in  , while working with renault managed to mathematically  define a digital automobile surface and generate data corresponding to it in order to  drive a milling machine for production. this is when he created and implemented  the well-known techniques behind the bezier curves and surfaces. a year later, at the  “prolamat” conference, ian braid from cambridge’s cad center, presented build  using b-rep(boundary representation) technology for  d modeling in  . at the  same conference, professor n. okino from hokkaido university has developed a csg- based solid modeling which could operate boolean combination with primitive shapes.  b-spline(basic spline), originally represented as a long strip of wood or metal to mark  out the curves created by the lofting profiles while building a boat, was also described  as a new digital approach by rich risenfeld, a ph.d. graduate of syracuse university in  the same year. two more ph.d.’s from syracuse university, ken versprille and lewis  knapp, are credited by many people as being the developers and key figures behind the  evolution of nurbs (non-uniform rational b-spline) around   to   (weisberg,  ). all the aforementioned researchers contributed to making a huge leap not only  in the realm of cad but also cg (computer graphics ), but it was still somehow a bit  difficult for architectural designers to execute directly such computer programs even  during the year   when autocad initiated its launch of the first pc version software  and took over the design software market. after years of evolution of ui (user interface)  of modeling software, architects can now freely manipulate and improvise  d modeling  functions to create complex shapes. with this freedom of shape making, computers are  now involved in the design process itself, rather than being used as a representational  machine duplicating the designers’ ultimate ideas. this conclusion coincidentally  matches to what mario carpo stated in his article, an introduction of “twenty years of digital design” (carpo,  ), “in	fact,	in	the	first	instance,	a	meaningful	building	 of the digital age is not just any building that was designed and built using digital tools: it is one that could not have been either designed or built without them”.  toc   information processor - digital form with computational means thus, form sculptor should be seen as an approach where computational power  becomes a necessity for discovering not only the form but also the spatial quality of  architecture. figure  .   introducing and demoing the sketchpad to the general public on a tv program. (source: https:// www.youtube.com/watch?v=usyot_ha_ba). under this definition, architects who have been metaphorically deemed to be  form sculptors, try to explore the diversity of forms to a certain extent by utilizing  the capability of the  d software. forms should be seen as a “formation” process  rather than a static and solid result. unlike the real sculptors, who execute crafting  techniques, like carving, shaping, modeling and fashioning according to chosen  materials in the real physical world, the form sculptor deploys essential transformation  functions within the selected  d software, such as scaling, shifting, twisting, tapering,  etc. in general digital modeling, and lofting, sweeping, patching, fairing, etc. in surface  modeling work with principles of b-spline, b-rep, nurbs or even topological (blob)  calculation to determine the shapes of the objects in a virtual reality space. however,  a crucial aspect has to be repeatedly emphasized here: ideally, form sculpting, as a computational approach, should go beyond utilizing computer technology to produce  pre-determined form. on the contrary, such free form manipulation with user-friendly  interfaces in current  d modeling software undoubtedly enhance design creativity  and tend to further architectural development to challenge the conventional and  conservative definition of space and functions (carpo,  ). in the stage of the form sculptor, the required information for the design tasks can be searched, filtered and  digested during the operations of the modeling process with the powerful  d software,  and simultaneously collaborating with the designer’s mind. architects gain complex  form modeling based advantages from powerful  d modeling software, while the  toc hypercell disadvantages/missed opportunities are revealed from the way these are utilized.  since the form sculptor relies too heavily on existing generic modeling functions,  to a certain extent it constrains the creativity within the box of “default modeling  functions”. besides, the operation of form modeling remains a relatively linear  procedure which also further limits the potentials of computational processes which  could utilize modeling processes from a distributed perspective, akin to a swarm. in  other words, modeling each and every step of the formation process in linear detail is a  misuse of the powerful computational technology in design. the other crucial critique  of form sculptor is that the design output depends too much on an architect’s personal  intuitive sensibility for aesthetics, albeit this also is a central issue in most other design  methods wherein subjectivity determining computational processes remains difficult  to prevent. in order to search for solutions to such challenges, some architects decided  to look for an answer by shifting from the “form sculptor” to the “form generator ”  methodology as a potential escape. § . form generator = development of algorithms with multiple parametric inputs to generate performative forms associated with the appropriate usage of computational power in architectural design. the “algorithm” as an information processor, obviously becomes the crucial element  within the form generating process. but before rapidly jumping into the world of  algorithms, it’s crucial to acknowledge the time when complex geometries were being  visualized without the assistance of computers but via mechanical tools. this will help  in establishing hidden connections leading to today’s algorithmic and coding driven  innovations. so to begin with a different starting point, instead of relating directly to  mathematical formulas, algorithms can in a sense be realized as physical instruments  to illustrate simple to complex geometric principles via mechanical tools since  yesteryears. parametric thinking resembles the logic behind mechanical equipment,  which has been used for decades as tools to record crucial physical notation (such  as a drafting compass). for instance, albrecht dürer, who demonstrated curvilinear- line tracing during the time of german renaissance (cache,  ). the illustrating  instruments albrecht dürer invented to a certain extent have already embedded  the relevant algorithms defined according to the combination of a mechanisms’  movements and the equipment’s dimensions in a parametric relationship. more  importantly, these logics underlie ways in which computers can realize similar  toc   information processor - digital form with computational means graphical effects via algorithms on screen in real time. most of these drafting tools can  be seen as a physical realization of the algorithms/formulas. take the simple drafting  compass as a common example, with its dimensions, it can concisely define the central  point with the needle in one leg and open up a certain distance as a radius with the  other leg attached to a pen. then once the needle is fixed on the paper, the movement  of spinning the head of the compass to make traces of the pen can be interpreted as a  methodology to draw a perfect circle. this fundamental setting can be easily translated  and applied to the computer as an algorithmic code to exhibit another perfect circle  digitally on screen. here, it is crucial to point out that without numerous explorations  with such inventions of illustrating tools, computer graphics as a base of digital design  would have been relatively difficult to realize through scripting alone. figure  .   a drawing showing the usage of the perspective drawing instrument invented by albrecht dürer in  the  th century (source: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/file:duerer_underweysung_der_messung_ fig_ _page_ .jpg ) in “underweysung der messung (instrument in measurement)” (dürer, albrecht &  formschneider, h. andreas (nürnberg),  ) several curvilinear geometries are  seen as the ancestors of b-spline and nurbs used in current cad software, such as  toc hypercell snail curve, spiral curve, epicyclic circle, serpentine curve (even in  d). these were  demonstrated by albrecht dürer’s incredible mechanical drafting instruments.  amongst one of the first theoreticians of perspective, he even invented the first  mechanical imaging device requiring no human eyes as references to visualize  d  space on a  d planar surface (figure  . ). if dürer’s instruments can be interpreted  as a graphics generating tool, so do algorithms in computers which can be seen as  parametric visualization machines. the algorithms and parametric principles executed  by the form generator are akin to albrecht dürer’s physical instruments, attempting  to discover more complex spatial formations with the assistance of computing power.  this kind of parametric design thinking had been ignored for years until the invention  of computers showed their potential in architectural design for generating relatively  complex shapes under the demands initiated from the deconstruction movement  (deconstructivism) (carpo,  ). who would have imagined that this form-finding  process with parametric algorithms would become mainstream today through the  possibilities offered by coding techniques? so far in this section of the form generator, algorithms were interpreted to play the  roles of form finding/generating processes/tools operating on the input of a geno- type, which results in the production of pheno-type, without offering insight into  the generative process (akin to a blackbox). this sentiment is echoed in malcolm  mccullough’s article “ years of scripted space” (mccullough,  ): “first you set up some rules for generating forms, then you simulate them to see what kind of a design world they create and then you go back and tweak the rules”. especially after  user-friendly visual programming languages were introduced to architectural design  within parametric modeling software suits such as grasshopper in rhino, dynamo  in revit, young architects were all fascinated to see what parametric computational  technology can offer and were tempted to use these for the sake of generating more  complex design. instead of manipulating the virtual model with the default modeling  functions of the  d software step by step, architects can now generate thousands of  iterations of emergent outcomes with different sets of input variables fed into the same  algorithm within a short period of time. this ability to discover novel emergent forms by  harnessing computational power can be seen as a push in the right direction if compared  to acts of modeling a pre-determined form. influenced by scientific discoveries, such  as system theory, complex science and genetic engineering, and the improvement of  personal computational processing power, some architects began to execute well-known  algorithms, such as l-system, fractals, subdivisions, genetic algorithms, game of life,  etc., to generate complex geometric shapes related to their design concepts. however, in  less than five years of development, a plethora of misuse of algorithms only for the sake  of making complex desired forms to satisfy the personal desire of architects has become  unprecedented. such a trend of processing computational algorithms in architectural  design fails to empower architecture in the digital age. toc   information processor - digital form with computational means for digital architecture to be seen as a continuation of deconstruction, computation  should have a chance to challenge the stereotypical definition of architecture followed  for thousands of years, not only in terms of “the appearance of form” but also its  fundamental essence, which remains somehow missing in this category. the “form generator”/algorithms applied here should be capable of filtering excessive data  into useful information to produce meaningful results not to be judged by aesthetic  intuitive evaluation. creating an algorithm should be seen as an inclusive part of the  design in the process of the form generator. no matter how simple or complicated the  algorithm is, the utilization of the algorithm should be embedded within contextual  data to aid in the informed generation of form rather than being used as a tool for  purely aesthetics driven form generation. john frazer’s quote in his work, “an evolutionary architecture”, “what we are evolving are the rules for generating forms, rather than the forms themselves” (frazer,  ), adequately portrays the ideal  definition of the form generator. § . form animator = a process wherein surrounding/contextual forces become instrumental in actuating the evolution of form to ultimately reach a dynamic equilibrium in real time. information undoubtedly involves a dynamic flow of data, so should form, if  interpreted as a representation of this information. therefore, the form animator must have the ability to deal with the dynamic flow of information in real time. the  form animator portrayed as a real-time adaptive information processor can drive  its represented form as an actively morphing object following the rules of dynamic  equilibrium. if this is still too abstract to understand, try to imagine a free-falling  raindrop from the sky. it continuously morphs its form each and every minute based on  its interaction with the surrounding forces and the principles of dynamic equilibrium,  until it lands. the name of the form animator is derived from the well-known article  “animate form” by greg lynn (lynn,  ), but the essence of the form animator is mostly pointing against what greg lynn states. greg lynn tried to make a distinction  between “motion” implying movement and action, and “animation” implying the  evolution of a form and its shaping force. but under the definition of form animator, in this research, these two categories of motion and animation involves different time- scales: a relatively slow morphological progress of growth or an immediate reaction  via fast movement. in other words, a form, if seen as a mathematical representation,  should consider relevant forces/parameters as dynamic variables to alter the resulting  toc hypercell shape through time. this, coincidentally, matches the central idea described in “on growth and form” by d’arcy thompson (thompson,  )(figure  . ) long before  greg lynn’s “animate form”. as a digital pioneer, greg lynn, in “animate form”,  attempts to break the dominant cultural expectations from architecture, which implied  architecture to be static and permanent. this is achieved by utilizing computational  topological modeling tools, such as b-spline, b-rep and blob techniques with  continuous mathematical relationships to search for an optimized/universal  geometric solution: a continuous unibody dealing with all the potential vector forces  around it. although simulation engines work in advanced forms in contemporary cad  software, such as maya, it still seems inefficient to manually drag control points of  a relevant b-rep body to model an optimized form and to examine it back and forth  using evaluation tools. the form generator, with the assistance of computational  technology, can generate optimized solutions, given a set of parametric inputs and  fitness criteria. but if we accept that “information is dynamic”, to a certain extent, the  input parameters for generating form could also acquire a dynamic nature. this is  what the form animator takes into consideration and should be thus seen as dealing  with dynamic parametric inputs, which are able to produce multiple optimized sets of  results. figure  .   analyzing the various morphology of animals using deformable grids by d’arcy thompson (source:  on growth and form, the complete revised edition, new york: dover publications, inc.,  ). “the problem with buildings is that they look desperately static,” says bruno latour,  who also further indicates that this is connected with the fundamental communicating  medium, which architects use, namely, “the drawings” which are fixed to a particular  perspective view illustrated in euclidean space (latour, b., & yaneva, a.,  ). he  further states that “euclidean space is a rather subjective, human-centered or, at toc   information processor - digital form with computational means least, knowledge centered way of grasping entities, which does no justice to the ways humans and things get by in the world”. however, since architects work in euclidean  space, it becomes intuitive to ignore the fact that time and matter are actually married  to space in a real living embodiment and not as static illustrations in the form of  drawings. even with current technologies to simulate render and animate, most  building projects use them to merely portray lifestyle pertaining to how people adjust  themselves to “happily” live inside the designed building, rather than using this  data to take active action to influence spatial adaptation in a dynamic manner. the  other issue latour points towards is that since buildings have so many performative  demands and considerations, that there is utterly no possibility to consider buildings  as static artefacts which ultimately need to responsively transform with respect to  internal and external forces they experience from the users and the environments they  are embedded in real-time. he thus comes to the conclusion that “…we	should	finally	 be	able	to	picture	a	building	as	a	moving	modulator	regulating	different	intensities	 of	engagement,	redirecting	users’	attention,	mixing	and	putting	people	together,	 concentrating	flows	of	actors	and	distributing	them	so	as	to	compose	a	productive	force	 in time-space”. this statement and its intent further points towards the essence of the  next category, the “form interactor”, which not only considers architecture as a one to  one responsive system but also engulfs it within the domain of a collective intelligence  based interactive system. “it is a liquidizing of everything that has traditionally been crystalline and solid in architecture.” (novak,  ) unlike greg lynn in animate form who realized static,  yet complex architecture with existing topological modeling software, marcus novak  proposed another vision of “liquid architecture” to liberate rigid architecture from  the physical environment into cyberspace (novak,  ). he argued that it is possible  to envision architecture nested within architecture (cyberspace), which basically  proposed a co-existing environment where physical and virtual worlds bundle  together. within a virtual environment, architecture design can in a sense neglect the  realistic physical constraints, such as gravity, but still, have the capability to deliver  sensory perception via vr (virtual reality). cyberspace is a virtual reality construct  which smoothly liquidizes the hard boundary of physical space. to liquidize entities  which have been crystalized in architecture is just the first phase of marcus novak’s  “liquid architecture”, the ultimate goal is to adapt to real-time information flow  and respond interactively to changing contextual data as an active living organism.  although this mode of conceiving architecture still involves an extensive amount of  time to confront and resolve technical issues too, it still has the potential to ultimately  change the dominant stereotypes of what architects could be doing. in contrast, it is  quite disappointing, yet common, that most architects working in the digital realm do  admit that working with dynamic information flow though does work at a theoretical  and simulation level, but ultimately, they abandon this path to freeze the projects in  toc hypercell a static manner. under the technical limitations of the  d software back then, greg  lynn stood up to the challenge to alter the fundamental essence of architecture from a  computational perspective. his concept of “animate form”, considering todays context  of real-time information management, can now be re-interpreted and re-appropriated  as “animate form (form animator).” in a new interview: pablo lorenzo and aaron sprecher with greg lynn, documented  in the publication “architecture in formation: on the nature of information in digital architecture (lorenzo-eiroa & lynn, interview and projects by greg lynn form,  )”, lynn states: “i had thought it was too simplistic and literal to reduce animation media to the role of designing moving projectiles and transforming objects. but, now i have to admit that a sensibility in culture is willing these moving environments into being. people expect their cities and buildings to literally move for a variety of reasons”,  which to a certain extent is a modification of his former definition of “animate form.”  based on greg lynn’s re-interpreted notion of “animate form”, bruno latour’s,  theories on liberation of building, and marcus novak’s “liquid architecture”, the form animator tends to inevitably operate more likely as a form transformer. this implies  operating akin to a delicate mechanism constantly responding to input forces and  actuating a relevant dynamic form. moreover, the form animator can radically acquire  the scope of a form interactor, which, not only passively react to direct environmental  inputs, but can also pro-actively alter human and spatial behavior. following this  tendency, latour’s daring assertion of “making all buildings move” might actually  come true. § . form interactor = an emergent organic body composed of numerous singular intelligent entities possessing dynamic interaction. this dynamic interaction via internal/external information exchange can be seen during the process of growth and in the pro-active immediate behavior, which the body possesses. embedded in this immersive digital world surrounded by dynamic information flows,  architecture has no excuse to keep with its static or essentially passive response  state. it must be transformed into a living-creature-like entity which can react  instantaneously and possess free will. it seems to be an inevitable trend that architects  are yearning for making buildings as living organisms after adequate exploration of  the form animator. unlike the form animator principles, which are used for projects  toc     information processor - digital form with computational means which acquire algorithmically driven passive formal variations, the form interactor has an advanced proactive system akin to an artificial intelligence to make informed  and immediate decisions compatible with dynamic data. the title of “form interactor” might at first seem misleading with the initial impression of merely focusing on the  creation of an expressive phenotype, however, the “interaction”, is equally crucial for  the creation of an implicit genotype, in an emergent fashion. in form interactor, the issue of interaction is different ways: “internal interaction”, which, takes inspiration  from biological growth processes, and “external interaction”, which mainly deals with  immediate behavioral reaction, and both of these can be associated with the notion of  “emergence”. § . . internal interaction genetic algorithms should not be seen as a process for optimizing form finding functions only: “form generator”, but rather as an environmentally sensitive interactive process involving dynamic information flows: “form interactor”. the body, as a living entity, can be interpreted as a confluence of several complex  systems interacting with each other akin to the multitude of systems which operate  simultaneously to create architecture. during the growing process of an organism,  there is, internal interaction, information embedded in genes as a basic instruction  interacting with external factors from the environment to proportionally produce  organic materials. this self-organizing process interested numerous pioneering  architects to experiment with genetic algorithms, for form-finding purposes. these,  however, turn out to be misleading examples, considering that the processes of  real-time “interaction” within natural growth processes tend to be completely  missing during the computational processes of such algorithms. michael weinstock,  in “morphogenesis and the mathematics of emergence” (weistock,  ) clearly  illustrated the generic computational approach of exploiting genetic algorithms  in architectural design and other research fields, “genetic algorithms initiate and maintain a population of computational individuals, each of which has a genotype and a phenotype. sexual reproduction is simulated by random selection of two individuals to	provide	‘parents’	from	which	‘offspring’	are	produced.	by	using	crossover	(random	 allocation	of	genes	from	the	parents’	genotype)	and	mutation,	varied	offspring	are	 generated	until	they	fill	the	population.	all	parents	are	discarded,	and	the	process	 is iterated for as many generations as are required to produce a population that has amongst	it	a	range	of	suitable	individuals	to	satisfy	the	‘fitness	criteria’”. genetic  algorithms undoubtedly enhance powerful computational applications supporting  toc hypercell the process of morphogenesis in architectural design. however, in most cases, genetic  algorithms in architectural designs, based on defined fitness criteria are used for  obtaining “optimized”, often static, outcomes for digital fabrication purposes. this,  is contrary to the essential notion of “growth”, which, is a real-time adaptive material  producing “process”. according to micahel weinstock (weistock,  ), “strategies for design are not truly evolutionary unless they include iterations of physical (phenotypic) modeling,	incorporating	the	self-organizing	material	effects	of	form	finding	and	the	 industrial	logic	of	production	available	in	cnc	and	laser-cutting	modelling	machines”.	 this illustrates the exact misuse of implementing genetic algorithms. however,  still, a majority of architectural designers still use genetic algorithms specifically for  producing aesthetically pleasing form without considering material performance and  production logics. genetic algorithms directly implemented in architecture in this  sense, act no more than an algorithmic machine akin to the role of the form generator, generating an optimized solution, opposed to john frazer’s idea to take natural science  as a source of inspiration rather than explanation (frazer,  ). john frazer’s idea of taking genetic algorithm as an inspiration implied not to directly  execute these algorithms extracted from nature, but further, translate them into a  design methodology for creating the instructions of the morphogenic formation in  architectural design. “…dna does not describe the process of building the phenotype but constitutes instructions that describe the process of building the phenotype, including instructions for making all the materials, then processing and assembling them…these are all responsive to the environment as it proceeds…”. (frazer,  ).  john frazer emphasized in his significant article“an evolutionary architecture” that “… what we are evolving are the rules for generating form rather than the form themselves. we are describing processes, not components” (frazer,  ). this suggests that  architects should design specific genomes considering the context within which the  design has to be embedded, rather than merely apply existing algorithms as a form- finding tool. under the premise of john frazer’s rule-generating idea, the internal interactions of a living creature/building can be designed/interpreted as several  internal information processing systems embedded in genomes interacting with  each other as well as external environmental inputs, forming a constant emergent  mechanism for the overall growth “process”. the formation of the genome is an on- going process with the inherited relationship of each cell that cannot be simplified  as a one to one input-output mathematical formula neglecting the crucial fourth  dimension, time, which is equal to the role of internal interaction implemented in  the “form interactor”. common sense would state that “living” should be considered  as an activity/state involving a continuous process involving constant data exchange  between the body and its natural context, and thus can never be interpreted as an  ultimate frozen state in time. if the form interactor was seen as a metaphor of a  building, then it should also “live” in the existing environment rather than being  toc   information processor - digital form with computational means “located” or “crystalized” on site. “bones, for instance, which are full of living cells, can heal and adapt to their environment. in particular, the cells will rebuild the structure to	adapt	to	the	load	it	carries;	a	bone	can	change	its	physical	shape	after	a	fracture	that	 heals out of position so that the load is adequately supported” (fox, michael, & kemp,  miles,  ), the internal interaction within the example here reveals the vital ideas  of real-time calculation, immediate adaptation and material interaction by distributed  information systems amongst cells, to carry out the healing task, an which can be  seen as an emergent behavior. extending this healing function is associated back with  the issue of “growth” and “fabrication”, it is not that the internal interaction fights  against the idea of fabrication, but the post-optimised production method is what the  internal interaction refuses to accept in the section of the “form interactor”. the ideal  fabrication process within the concept of internal interaction should be akin to how an  organism builds up its body based on the “genome instructions” and “environmental  influences” in real time. each single moment is unique and with the summation of all  internal and external forces emerging, the organism grows that particular body part  based on each single task assigned to the living cells which cannot be repeated. this  is exactly the emergent performance principles to be traced in external interaction.  (more genetic algorithm and evolution process will be discussed in the chapter of bio- inspired architecture). § . . external interaction external interaction, following swarm behaviors-like principles, a dynamic equilibrium, should have capabilities to confront immediate circumstances locally to take action by individuals but interrelated componential intelligence agents and emerge from bottom- up as a global behavior to embody as a volatile actor. to understand the issue of external interaction in the form interactor, the notions of  emergence and swarm behaviour have to be introduced. “…emergence is applied to the properties of a system that cannot be reduced from its components. properties ‘emerge’ that are more than the sum of the parts”, “the architecture of emergence: the evolution of form in nature and civilisation” (weinstock,  ), which simply  and clearly explained the notion of emergence. michael, further quotes aristotle’s  words to support this explanation, “that ‘whole’ has distinctive properties that emerge	through	the	processes	of	successive	interaction	between	different	levels	of	 organization and integration”. it can thus be said that emergence can be considered  as a process of formation through interaction between different individuals systems/ entities, and the overall property of emergence cannot be observed by studying each  toc hypercell distinctive individual. based on this definition, the internal interaction can definitely  be seen as an emergent behavior, which merges several interactive interacting systems  together to gradually develop the process of growth as a whole. in the case of external interaction, the focus is the individual entity comprising the overall whole and the  networked relationships between them. this idea of a larger property described by  smaller componential entities can be traced back to the philosophical definition of  a “monad” in gottfried leibniz’s monadology back in   (leibniz, monadology,  ). the “monad” here stands abstractly for the simplest substance which cannot  be split apart and considered as a basic element comprising a composite object. as a  result, in this respect, leibniz made his point that “in a plenum [= word that is full], any	movement	must	have	an	effect	on	distant	bodies,	the	greater	the	distance	the	 smaller	the	effect…as	a	result,	each	body	feels	the	effects	of	everything	that	happens	 in	the	universe,	so	that	he	who	sees	everything	could	read	off	from	each	body	what	 is happening everywhere”. therefore, every object, person, and every single matter  existing in the world are all intimately interconnected to each other in this rapidly  dynamic and hyperlinked internet age. one can also connect, emergent behaviour  to principles of monadology, wherein every single monad, as a bird in a flock, has an  influential interactive relationship with each other to emerge as a whole plenum(overall  performative body) in a bottom up fashion. from the historical trajectory of these  philosophic aspects, leibniz’s monadology had great influence on deleuze’s thought  process behind the “folding” and “body without organs” concepts, which profoundly  impacted further philosophical inspiration in contemporary architectural design. in nature, emergence, can be traced in the principles underlying swarm behavior.  swarm behavior principles embody numerous animal species, which tend to move  collectively, for example, a flock of birds, a school of fish and a group of bees (figure  . ). without any leader’s top-down command, each individual forming in such  groups of living entities make bottom-up decisions, resulting in bigger collective  behavior. each entity is equal, in stature, to each other and thus any of singular entity’s  movement/decision, profoundly impacts the overall performance of the whole.  this characteristic fits perfectly with the science of emergence as well as leibniz’s  monadology philosophy. after observing flocks of flying birds, craig reynolds, as  a computer scientist started to develop swarm behavior simulation back in    (reynolds, flocks, herds and schools: a distributed behavioral model,  ). three  major principles of “separation”, “cohesion”, and “alignment  underlying the steering  separation implies avoiding crowding next to each other; alignment implies steering towards the average di- rection of the neighboring flocks; cohesion implies driving the agents’ movement towards the average position  of the local agents. more information can be found referring to craig reynold’s website illustrating the flocking  behavior: http://www.red d.com/cwr/boids/ toc   information processor - digital form with computational means behavior behind a digital flock of birds was thus successfully realized in a virtual  environment with intuitive and smooth movement. since then, this swarm behavior  algorithm has been broadly applied to different paradigms of research including  game design, swarm robotics, distribution and communication systems…etc., and  certainly in architectural design applications as well. john holland, another pioneer  working on emergence and genetic algorithms, pinpointed three major principles  required to set up a basic emergence system: element, rules, and interactions (holland,  ). if we follow john holland’s proposal, the three major principles of  swarm behavior simulation developed by craig reynold can be accordingly modified  by further enhancing the fundamental principles in relation to implementation/task  based deploy ability. computationally speaking, one can modify the basic principles/ rule sets of agent interaction, in order to develop customized “basic intelligence”  within the algorithm associated with smarm simulations. recently, architects have  taken advantage of growing computational power for developing swarm based design systems, as novel approaches in architectural design. figure  .   images exhibiting the swarm idea either in nature or in the film. a swarm is a group of animals  that aggregate and travel in the same direction(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/swarm_(disambiguation)).  from left to right: a swarm of insects, a school of fish, a group of agent smiths in the matrix (source from left to  right: http://www.ayni.institute/swarm, http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article- /divers-caught- middle-huge-school-fish-snap-selfies-them.html, and http://movies.stackexchange.com/questions/ / is-there-a-trope-for-a-pile-on-fight). roland snooks, one of the leading characters in this new domain, also one of the  directors of kokkugia has for years conducted experiments using swarm algorithms  for promoting self-organization principles in architectural design, under the title  “behavioral formation,” which is also the title of his ph.d. dissertation in rmit,  melbourne. some of the experimental designs were developed together with his  design partner, robert stuart-smith in practice, and some with his master students  toc hypercell both at the aa, london, uk and rmit, australia as design research experiments.  roland snooks’ idea of a self-organized body within swarm behavior principles is  explicitly illustrated as follows, “these methodologies operate by encoding simple, local architectural decision within a distributed system of autonomous computational agents. it is the interaction of these local decisions that self-organizes design intention, giving rise to a form of collective intelligence and emergent behavior at the global scale. such	behavioral	formation	represents	a	shift	from	‘form	being	imposed	upon	matter’,	 to form emerging from the interaction of localized entities within a complex system”  (snooks,  ). in other words, the behavioural formation can be interpreted as a  self-organizing system constituting agents of a swarm, which produce unique/local  material properties due to underlying collective decision-making principles set forth by  the designer. akin to the aforementioned concept of internal interaction constituting  the process of growth or similar to the process of self-healing of living bone cells.  however, even volatile topology has been heavily addressed in roland snook’s concept  with swarm logics, as all his computational generative formation processes are frozen  in a particular moment, which, is fundamentally against his original idea of “volatility”.  various young digital savvy architects are extremely fascinated by this emergent  behavior and its capability and have started following this trend of executing swarm  algorithms in architectural design again as a form/pattern finding process. roland  snooks’ approach of utilizing swarm algorithms is still, in general, in a relatively initial  stage. although he advanced the development of algorithms for making local collective  decisions to materialize creative projects, he somehow overlooked the inherent  character of swarms, which, points towards a continual dynamic process, which  cannot be crystallized at any moment in time. for instance, in nature, simply taking  groups of ants for example, they can form an emergent holistic body such as a bridge,  helping each other to cross a pond of water or gap between leaves. however, once  the temporary goal is reached, they will re- distribute themselves going back to doing  their own tasks and form new configurations according to the new tasks they need to  accomplish in time. to a certain extent, we can still interpret this as another much-advanced version of  the form generator/animator due to the fact that it remains frozen in its ultimate  state, which, makes his projects less commensurate to the terminology of “swarm  architecture”. swarm architecture, in its true sense, should possess the substantial  potential to deal with immediate interactions similar to how living entities adapt to  dynamic contextual demands. “swarm architecture” based research should thus be  highly advanced in order to produce intelligent buildings with capabilities of real-time  adaptation and interaction. this is the ideal goal for what external interactions should  embody in a “form interactor”. toc   information processor - digital form with computational means “space is a computation.” kas oosterhuis made this bold and strong assertion in the  very beginning of his article “swarm architecture ii” (oosterhuis, swarm architecture  ii,  ), which was proposed years before roland snooks presented his behavioral  formation idea. according to kas oosterhuis “space computes information”. this  links perfectly with the key concept of this chapter: to consider form(space) as an information processor. following kas oosterhuis’ steps, an architecture can also be  seen as a networking instrument communicating actively with the users of the space in  real-time via various inter-connected actuated building components, “the actuators are being orchestrated like the birds in a swarm”, kas concluded. kas oosterhuis thus  proposed the idea to bring computational technology for practical usage by embedding  it into building components for active internal communication and external adaptation  instead of utilizing the computing power merely as a form generating tool. this mode  of thinking perfectly embodies the authentic intent of the “form interactor.” this  intent can further lead to the production of buildings, which, in essence, become  alive and thus a species in their own right. this is further reinforced by, john frazer’s  statement:“we	never	try	to	copy	the	superficial	appearance	of	a	biological	species.	 rather we try to invent new species which by its complexity and due to their complex behavior may eventually familiarize with living objects as we already know” (frazer,  ). it is time to shift towards utilizing computational power to develop practical  operational spatial solutions rather than for creating front-end form generating  machines. in other words, it is time to utilize the principles of “swarm behavior” as  the fundamental basis behind “form interactor” to develop a novel approach for  integrating computational technologies within building component for developing a  networked distributed system for realizing an architectural body which can adapt to its  immediate context. § . conclusion in this chapter, “form” has been interpreted as an information processor inspired  by kas oosterhuis’ “space is a computation” approach. actually, in every scale, all  existing objects are to a certain extent related to information which can be translated  and represented in diverse forms. simply take a small device like a pen, for example,  it has information embedded associated to its dimension, color of ink, and material  it is made of. furthermore, with its essence of being a pen, it has a given function of  making traces. this kind of “object-oriented” concept is mainly utilized in computer  science to illustrate a category, constituting certain characteristics, where you can  generate objects from its essence, but vice versa it can logically categorize any existing  toc hypercell object with a similar principle. in the introduction section of this chapter, it is clearly  emphasized that people have dealt with spatial information long before the computer  had been invented, the only crucial difference is that the computational technology  accelerated the processing of data. in the digital architecture domain, the means and  degrees of utilizing computational technology have been categorized into different  sections in this chapter, namely: form sculptor, form generator, form animator and form interactor. not only the manner but also the philosophy and the logic of a  computational application in architectural design behind them have been reviewed in  this chapter in order to trace the advantages and disadvantages within each category.  there are definitely “pros and cons” but no “rights or wrongs” of these formative  approaches from the design perspective, it is only a question of the methodologies  and strategies the designer prefers. the form sculptor tends to favor a more intuitive  approach compared to the form generator relying on rational algorithms as a form- finding method. the form animator starts to be aware of the influential impact from  dynamic information flows, while the form interactor takes the dynamic information  into account as either the slow morphing process, in the case of growth or immediate  morphing process, in the case of an immediate reaction. form thus has an intimate  relationship between the architectural design process and contextual information. based on what stephen wolfram has stated in “towards a new kind of science”, “… nature[the universe] as we know it is a pure form of computation” (wolfram,  ),  it is extremely rational to claim that “space is a computation” as proposed by kas  oosterhuis in  . the other crucial factor of “dynamic equilibrium”, indicates the  need to be constantly changing/evolving with information flow, and that this will  drive architectural design to acquire the dimensions of a living organic body. “liquid architecture is an architecture that breathes, pulses, leaps as one form and lands as another…it is an architecture that opens hallways, where the next room is always where i need it to be and what i need it to be” (novak,  ) noted marcus novak who  proposed a volatile architecture operating as a living creature almost   years ago.  during the same period of time, kas oosterhuis has even put this living architecture  idea to the next level with an architecture that actually has its own will by proposing  the hyperbody concept, “true hyperbodies are pro-active bodies…actively propose actions. they act before they are triggered to do so. hyperbodies display something like a will of their own. they sense, they actuate, but essentially not as a response to a single request” (oosterhuis, hyperbodies: towards an e-motive architecture,  ). in  kas oosterhuis’ mind, the way of constructing this intelligent architectural body with  free will is not by complicated ai(artificial intelligence) system, but instead, by using  swarm logic as a system which thrives on collective intelligence. “think of a type of architecture	where	all	building	elements	are	intelligent	agents	flocking	the	herd,	(re) configuring	themselves	in	real	time” (oosterhuis, hyperbodies: towards an e-motive  architecture,  ), this (re)configurable body can achieve real-time interaction  toc   information processor - digital form with computational means with relatively smaller entities with simple intelligence. in this case, computation is  no longer seen as a form-finding machine which generates a nearly optimized, fixed  architecture, but is embedded in building components which can communicate  through protocols and to a certain extent actuate/react akin to living cells in an  organic body. references cache, b. ( ). instruments of thought: another classical tradition. in c. o’donnell (ed.), the cornell journal of architecture : mathematics (pp.  - ). new york: college of architecture, art, and planning, cornell  university. carpo, m. ( ). twenty years of digital design. in m. carpo (ed.), the digital turn in architecture - (pp.  - ). new york: wiley. dürer, albrecht & formschneider, h. andreas (nürnberg). ( ). underweysung der messung . german:  nürnberg. fox, michael, & kemp, miles. ( ). interactive architecture. new york: princeton architectural press. frazer, j. ( ). a natural model for architecture/ the nature of the evolutionary mode. in j. frazer, an evolu- tionary architecture. london: architectural association. holland, j. h. ( ). emergence: from chaos to order. oxford: oxford university press. latour, b., & yaneva, a. ( ). give me a gun and i will make all the buildings move: an ant’s view of ar- chitecture. in r. geister (ed.), explorations in architecture: teaching, design, research (pp.  - ). basel:  birkhäuser. leibniz, g. w. ( ). monadology. (j. bennett, trans.) continuum. retrieved from http://www.earlymodern- texts.com/assets/pdfs/leibniz b.pdf lorenzo-eiroa, p. ( ). form:in:form on the relationship between digital signifiers and formal autonomy. in  p. lorenzo-eiroa, & a. sprecher (eds.), architecture in formation: on the nature of information in digital architecture (pp.  - ). new york: routledge. lorenzo-eiroa, p., & lynn, g. ( ). interview and projects by greg lynn form. in p. lorenzo-eiroa , & a. spre- cher (eds.), architecture in formation: on the nature of information in digital architecture (pp.  - ).  new york: routledge. lynn, g. ( ). animate form. new york: princeton architectural press. mccullough, m. ( ).   years of scripted space. (m. silver, ed.) architectural design special issue: program- ming cultures, ( ),  - . mitchell, w. j. ( ). a new agenda for computer-aided design. in m. mccullough, w. j. mitchell, & p. purcell  (eds.), the electronic design studio: architectural education in the computer era (pp.  - ). cambridge:  the mit press. novak, m. ( ). liquid architectures in cyberspace. in m. benedikt, cyberspace: first step (pp.  - ).  cambridge: the mit press. oosterhuis, k. ( ). hyperbodies: towards an e-motive architecture. basel: birkhäuser. oosterhuis, k. ( ). swarm architecture ii. in k. oosterhuis, & l. feireiss (eds.), the architecture co-labo- ratory: game set and match ii, on computer games, advanced geometries, and digital technologies (pp.  - ). rotterdam: episode publisher. reynolds, c. w. ( ). flocks, herds and schools: a distributed behavioral model. compute graphics, ( ),  - . snooks, r. ( ). self-organised bodies. in lorenzo-eiroa p., & a. sprecher (eds.), architecture in formation: on the nature of information in digital architecture (pp.  - ). new york: routledge. sutherland, i. e. ( ). sketchpad: a man-machine graphical communication system. cambridge: university  of cambridge. terzidis, k. ( ). algorithmic form. oxford: routledge. thompson, d. ( ). on growth of form. london: cambridge university press. toc hypercell weinstock, m. ( ). the architecture of emergence: the evolution of form in nature and cilvilisation. new york: wiley. weisberg, d. e. ( ). the engineering design revolution: the people, companies and computer systems that changed forever the practice of engineering. retrieved from www.cadhistory.net weistock, m. ( ). morphogenesis and mathematics of emergence. in m. hensel, a. menges, & m. weinstock  (eds.), architectural design, emergence: morphogenetic design strategies, volume , issue  (vol.  , pp.  - ). new york: wiley. wolfram, s. ( ). a new kind of science. champaign: wolfram media. retrieved from http://www.wolfram- science.com/nksonline/toc.html young, m. ( ). digital remediation. (c. o’donnell, ed.) the cornell journal of architecture : mathematics, - . toc     body conjunction = wavering between actual and virtual spaces body conjunction =  wavering between actual  and virtual spaces “you take the blue pill, the story ends. you wake up in your bed and believe whatever you want to believe. you take the red pill, you stay in wonderland, and i show you how deep the rabbit-hole goes.” morpheus, to neo (the matrix, ) § . from body measurement to body extension to body without organ in the present digital age, the body tends to extend beyond it being flesh, it can be extended, it is a body without organs, and it might belong to more than your own-self. the “body” as a living entity with its embedded sensory system, not only embodies  who we are but also lets us understand and explore the sensitive, unpredictable but  fascinating world. the body is an information receiver as well as information reactor.  through years of medical experiments and research on the body, medical devices and  instruments are able to allow us to look into the deepest and the most mysterious  spots in the human body. for instance, if seen through an hd monitor, while being  probed by an endoscope, the body appears as an immersive and infinite landscape. by  observing the smoothness and the folds of the surfaces encountered within the body, it  is quite simple to project your individual self into this body-scape for a while to imagine  and experience this immersive organic space. various potential ideas of designing a  body-like space have become the subject of design fantasies of a number of architects.  toc hypercell the “vitruvian man”, which, vitruvius described in the third book of de architectura,  and was later interpreted and illustrated by leonardo davinci, has served as the  human figure/body representation to be used as a measuring unit rather than being  considered as a sensitive object. unsurprisingly, it was a relatively long journey for  architects to abandon this dogma. after the industrial revolution (during the modernist  era), the concrete evidence of considering body proportions as potential measurements  could still be seen in the projects of le corbusier, which accompanied his famous  school of thought: “a house is a machine for living”. he developed the “modular” in  a mathematical proportion of space based on figures and intended to replace the old  vitruvian man with it as a new generation’s typical model. however, with the rapid  development of electronic technology, the trend of realizing sensory environments  akin to living bodies has no longer remained a thought but can be seen as an initial  action to refuse to see the human body merely as a measuring unit. the turning point  came about the time while the medium of news media, television, and social media  became relatively mature, and thus started making people conduct critical reflections.  marshall mcluhan, a well-known pioneering media theorist, stated in his well-known  publication, “understanding media: the extension of man” (mcluhan, understanding  media: the extensions of man,  ). this explicit shot made the researcher foresee the potential and intimate relationships between the body, technology, and space, and somehow have a rational explanation to extend the physical body to endless space, which is crucial in this chapter. “today,	after	more	than	a	century	of	advancements	in	electronics,	we	have	extended	 our central nervous system itself in a global embrace, abolishing both space and time as far as our planet is concerned” (mcluhan, understanding media: the extensions of  man,  ), marshall mcluhan who invented the terminology of the “global village”,  thus opens up a ceaseless discussion around his discussions around “ media being the extension of man”, and by doing so, he profoundly influenced the general perspective/ reflection of technology and helped in reshaping a new relationship between body and  technology. “all media are extensions of some human faculty—psychic or physical”  (mcluhan, m., fiore, q., & agel, j,  ). the “media” here is no longer the synonym  of the press or mass media but rather indicates human technology. for example, “… the wheel (media) is the extension of the foot”; “…the book is the extension of the eye”;  “…clothing, an extension of the skin”; “…electric circuitry, an extension of the central nervous system”. it’s not that the internet or electronic technology which initiated the  extensions of the body. according to marshall mcluhan, body extensions have been  developed for thousands of years, much earlier than the internet and electronics.  although his conceptual idea about “hot & cold media” is controversial due to the  reason that the distinction is based on a relative standard rather than an absolute  definition, he still explicitly argues that the medium/technology requires a critical  degree of audience participation. interactive environments align with this line of  toc   body conjunction = wavering between actual and virtual spaces thought since they serve as a medium of expression and involve real-time engagement  of participants for seeking critical reflection. (“hot media are, therefore, low in  participation, and cool media are high in participation or completion by the audience.”  (mcluhan, understanding media: the extensions of man,  ). eliminating the traditional notion of the medium as the vehicle carrying messages,  marshall mcluhan argued via his revolutionary idea that “medium is the message”.  the medium itself has embodied meaning even without embedding any content. for  instance, an automated machine, in itself is a medium/technology, it has thoroughly  altered the relationship of man-machine in human society, and it thus carries its  own meaning. marshall mcluhan gave a precise and understandable example as  follows, “the railway did not introduce movement or transportation or wheel or road into human society, but it accelerated and enlarged the scale of previous human functions, creating totally new kinds of cities and new kinds of work and leisure”  (mcluhan, m., fiore, q., & agel, j,  ). another example can be listed here, like  human communication methods from the handwritten letter, the telegraph, the  telephone, and today’s smartphones and email technology, are all seen as the medium  only changing the scale and speed of communication. with the rapid development of  technologies, such as the internet and computational processing power, the physical  body is further extended into virtual space while interweaving and interacting with  all the other involved technologies. within this technologically rich context, despite  of being empowered by this medium, the incremental loads and tasks experienced  by the body have to be scaled up to a comparable level. besides, based on marshall  mcluhan’s idea, this kind of imbalanced condition and way of diminishing the natural  role of the senses was initiated long ago while the phonetic alphabet was invented. “… in the tribal world, the senses of touch, taste, hearing, and smell were developed, for very practical reasons, to a much higher level than the strictly visual. into this world, the phonetic alphabet fell like a bombshell, installing sight at the head of the hierarchy of senses. literacy propelled man from the tribe, gave him an eye for an ear and replaced his integral in-depth communal interplay with visual linear values and fragmented consciousness” (playboy interview: marshall mcluhan,  ). since then, the holistic  idea of man became fragmented with ubiquitous professional body extensions catering  to specific missions. this phenomenon gradually leads to a tendency of pushing the  body to the extreme by means of assisting and enhancing various bodily senses via  suitable technological mediums, akin to continuously pressing and pushing, the body  like a massage. this is where the medium appears to become the “massage” rather  than the “message.” in the chapter of “the gadget lover: narcissus as narcosis” in “understanding media”  (mcluhan, the gadget lover: narcissus as narcosis,  ), marshall mcluhan uses an  ancient greek story to bring out the issue of “numbness”. this young narcissus was so  toc hypercell fascinated by his extension: the reflection in the water (although he didn’t know it was  his own reflection), that he transformed himself and his extension into a completely  closed system, or in other words became “numb”. simply saying, the stimulation of  his extension was so powerful that he refused to accept other contextual information  and became operating as a closed loop. from the physiological point of view, marshall  mcluhan found support from two medical researchers, hans selye and adolph jonas,  when he stated: “all	extensions	of	ourselves,	in	sickness	or	in	health,	are	attempts	to	 maintain equilibrium. any extension of ourselves they regard as “autoamputation,” and	they	find	that	the	autoamputative	power	or	strategy	is	resorted	to	by	the	body	 when the perceptual power cannot locate or avoid the cause of irritation (mcluhan, the  gadget lover: narcissus as narcosis,  ). this is the reason why people tend to play  sports in order to combat the irritations and stresses of real life. furthermore, “…in the physical stress of superstimulation of various kinds, the central nervous system acts to	protect	itself	by	a	strategy	of	amputation	or	isolation	of	the	offending	organ,	sense,	 or function” (mcluhan, the gadget lover: narcissus as narcosis,  ), in addition to  this, “…shock induces a generalized numbness or an increased threshold to all types of perception” (mcluhan, the gadget lover: narcissus as narcosis,  ), it is explicitly  clear that the autoamputation, as numbness are ways to protect selves from sudden  superstimulation. to make it easier to understand, take the news reports for example.  through the broadcasting of the news, people might get shocked and have moral  anxieties of seeing these skinny children suffering from the specific problem of famine  in africa. but after every   minutes of constant information bombarding with the  repeated images (massage), people become completely numb (autoamputation). in  accordance with marshall mcluhan’s explanation, the “autoamputation/numbness”  has to happen as a protection mechanism to prevent people from feeling self- condemned from a moral perspective and for survival. nonetheless, reconnecting back  to the title of the reference in this section, the term of “the gadget lovers” nowadays,  can metaphorically and intuitively indicate for those who love to explore/hack  with these small electronic devices with specific applications. under this particular  context, the gadget lovers, with their main bodies, attempt to utilize all the hi-end  technological gadgets to extend their body parts infinitely in time and space. they  almost unconsciously seek temporary immortality in virtual space via the medium  of the internet. there is no way to distinguish each explicit body part in the virtual  world such that the individual thought might not belong to one’s conscious self. the  body extension is thus autoamputated and distributed ubiquitously even after losing  major control by the main body. on the other hand, metaphorically speaking, getting  continuous electronic accumulating shocks by the message, the body will no longer  treat it as stimulation, but rather turn it into the feeling of “numbness”. instead of  peremptorily embracing the temptation of the new technologies, marshall mcluhan  actually would like us to reflect on the relationship between the technologies and the  human bodily senses, and to keep to the qualities of each individual’s authentic self,  toc   body conjunction = wavering between actual and virtual spaces especially in this boundless world composed of the web of the internet where one can  get lost and easily deconstruct with alienation. here, marshall mcluhan’s “body extension” seems to imply a linkage to the notion of  “body without organs” proposed by gilles deleuze and felix guattari (deleuze, g., &  guattari, f.,  ). before finding the linkage between “body extension” and “body without organs”, it is crucial to have a brief and generic understanding of the notion  proposed by gilles deleuze and felix guattari. “body without organs” shouldn’t be  literally interpreted as an organic body. in fact, it represents a concept which has no  hierarchy, is not organized, and has no rigorous system similar to schizophrenia and  tries to break the existing and ingrained mortal dogmas. while talking about “body without organs”, it is undoubtedly necessary to mention the concept of “machine”  or so called “desiring machines” at the same time. gilles deleuze and felix guattari  claimed that everything is a machine and some of them can produce a certain kind of  flow, such as milk, thought, and energy. if accepting the idea of everything is a machine  as a premise, then basically, they claimed that there should not be any distinctions  between nature and industry, and man and nature. because it’s all about the concept  of “produce and products”. for example, a cow produces milk, as well as a meat- machine, produces sausages. according to the notion of machines from gilles deleuze  and felix guattari, there must be another linkage machine connecting to the flow- producing machines to interrupt or draw off part of this flow. (for example, the breast  is the flow-producing machine, the milk is the flow, and the mouth of the baby is the  connecting machine which absorbs the milk and converts the milk into another form).  within the capabilities of connection, these machines are able to link themselves to the  body without organs. in fact, the body has to connect with a certain desiring machine  to keep it alive. this is beautifully illustrated by the painting: “body with machine”  drawn by richard lindner, as an example taken by gilles deleuze and felix guattari in  their article. until now, it seems that there are various possibilities of direct connection  between desire machines and the body without organs. however, a gradually changing  process and subtle relationship build up in different phases between the desiring machines and the body without organs where the ultimate linkage to marshall  mcluhan’s body extensions can be found in the following article: “body without  organs”. first, an apparent conflict arises because the desiring machine (an organ)  tries to invade and break into the “body without organs” which attempts to repel  it. afterwards, according to the article, “in order to resist organ-machines, the ‘body without organs’ presents its smooth, slippery, opaque, taut surface as a barrier”. then,  in the next phase, the “body without organs” transforms itself into a smooth surface,  recording the entire process of desire productions from each machine, thus forming a  more intimate relationship between desiring machine(organ) and the “body without organs”. eventually, “…machines	attach	themselves	to	‘body	without	organs’	as	so	 many points of disjunction between which an entire network of new synthesis is now toc hypercell woven,	marks	the	surface	off	into	co-ordinates,	like	a	grid…no	matter	what	two	organs	 are	involved,	the	way	in	which	they	are	attached	to	the	‘body	without	organs’	must	be	 such that all the disjunction syntheses between the two amounts to the same on the slippery surface”. (deleuze, g., & guattari, f.,  ) (figure  ). to briefly summarize  here, the “body without organs” in the end becomes a smooth and slippery surface  attached with all desiring machines (organ) which equally distributes onto the surface  (the body without organs) with no hierarchy and order. bwo rec ord record d m dm dm dm d m d m d m d m d m d m d m d m bwo = akin surface = smooth surface bwo recordreco rd desgin machine avatars body extensions monads body without organs the internet cyberspace figure  .   diagram outlining the process of relationship changing between the desired machines and the  body without organs from left to right and to the bottom. dm = desire machine, bwo = body without organs.  body without organs initiates with the action of repelling the desire machines but ends up morphing as a  slippery smooth surface attaching with them as a boundless network. after this process, a comparison can be made between the notion of the “body without organs” not only with the “body extension” but also with the idea of “monadology”.  desiring machines here are transformed as monads that gottfried leibniz proposed  in his monadology (leibniz, monadology,  ) which makes each desiring machine have equal impact and influence onto the ultimate grids/surface, the network of the  “body without organs.” it might be difficult to understand with these philosophically  abstract concepts, but within the content of the internet, it can be relatively easy to  explain. in a sense, the internet is the new version of the “body without organs”, with  people who connect to it acquire the form of the desiring/organ machines, and, the  toc   body conjunction = wavering between actual and virtual spaces gadgets, servers, or other devices which are able to have connections to the internet  can be interpreted as machines. then, regardless of how small an impact it would  make, all the “things” connect though the web of the internet, the body without organs, will absorb the forces passing through the internet surface. referring back  to the body extensions idea of marshall mcluhan, under the context of the internet,  the technology/body extensions make people connect to the internet which can be  interpreted as a desiring/organ machine interplaying between other’s body extensions.  under this pre-assumption, body extensions as desiring/organ machines can cling  ubiquitously to the surface transformed from the body without organs and blending  the identification of the you and others, which means you might not be able to find  your own body extensions since it will become more neutral than ever but you can still  feel the influence from one another. another alternative interpretation can be related to the key notion of the “body without organs”, which is the attribute of “schizophrenia”. within the network of the  internet, people can easily have different identities with different characteristics as  their avatars. a male can easily pretend to be a female figure in an on-line game to  fool people; a lower level employee can create a character living in the upper-class level  to fulfill his/her implicit desire, etc. this is quite a common phenomenon with most of  the people living in the current internet era. in other words, people are revealing various  attributes of their explicit personalities to somehow express their hidden emotions or  satisfy certain desires from their not-too-successful lives. this phenomenon already  classifies and qualifies people to be considered, “schizophrenics”. one more quote  from the section of “the body without organ” in the publication of the “anti-oedipus”  (deleuze, g., & guattari, f.,  ), “…the surface of this uncreated body swarms with them,	as	a	lion’s	mane	swarms	with	flea”, and also consider the quote from henry  miller in the introduction of the “anti-oedipus” by mark seem, “we must die as egos and be born again in the swarm, not separate and self-hypnotized, but individual and related”. once again, it refers back to leibniz’s philosophy of monadology to treat each  existing object/machine assembling with a simple substance, which matches not only  the center stage of the “swarm” in nature but also the kernel idea/principle of this  research. “…a body without organs, like a spider poised in its web, observing nothing, but responding to the slightest sign, to the slightest vibration by springing on its prey”  (deleuze, g., & guattari, f.,  ). each of us, as an individual could be the prey, or the  substance falling on the web to make vibrations in order to create a synthesis impact  to the spider (the body without organs), but multi-directionally, the spider (the body without organs) or the interrelation between each individual object can also influence  with each other simultaneously, akin to a swarm of agents to create a collective  intelligent-like creature from bottom up. toc hypercell § . you are in a virtual reality more frequently than you know = where the idea of interaction narratives has been initiated. virtual reality as a terminology is connected with specific technologies with the  help of which, artificial virtual environment can be exhibited either on a screen or  through a glass-like device to make people experience a tangible journey where they  think it is “real” like being in a parallel universe. but somehow, human beings have  the imaginative capability to create their own virtual reality without any assistance  from high-end wearables or simulating technological devices. for example, you must  have had the experience of waking up with a nightmare which you almost felt was  real. in this case, while people are dreaming, they are witnessing a virtual reality via  their unconscious mind. a similar effect is felt while taking hallucinogenic drugs or  while experiencing déjà vu. each of the above examples is conditions that cannot be  controlled and manipulated by our conscious mind. another virtual reality example  without technology involved or which can be controlled is “reading”. “...reading requires the mind to develop the visualization process as ‘imagination’” (de kerckhove,  ).  after years of “training”, not only a mysterious inner subvocalization voice will come  out while reading a text, a sequence of images like a video recording can be created  through the borderless imagination, which is an individual and unique virtual reality  experience of one’s own. while reading a fiction or a novel, such as “harry potter”  or “alice’s adventure in wonderland”, people set their imagination free to go along  with the storyline created by the author and interpret the narrative with their own  imagination based on their life experiences. or novels like “sherlock holmes” will  bring you back to the victorian period in england, looking for evidence or testimonies  and trying to figure out and reveal the truth of the story. although “the author is dead” claimed by french literary critic and semiotician, roland barthes (barthes,  ), readers can in a sense find their own ways of realizing each narrative they  read as a creative immersion through their mind. kerckhove’s in his publication, “the architecture of intelligence”, states, “as readers, we learn to represent and internalize the	visual	field	by	repeating	it	in	our	imagination.	it	is	because	of	this	simple	process	 that quite literally, we ‘make up our mind’.” this mind is equal to the “mental space”  described in the same publication, which has been further explained as a private,  silent, personal, totally individualized visualized universe devoted to imagination  and thought (de kerckhove,  ). therefore, to a certain extent, can it somehow be  interpreted that these inventive immersions are virtual reality experiences co-created  by the authors and the readers? in the section of “literature and virtual realities” of  the publication “on literature” the influential literature theorists, j. hills miller, writes  that “right reading is an active engagement. it requires a tacit decision to commit all one’s power to brining the work into existence as an imaginary space within oneself”  toc   body conjunction = wavering between actual and virtual spaces (miller,  ). hence, reading is quite private but requires an active manner to  engage exactly to match with the aforementioned idea of “mental space” by derrick  de kerckhove. in “on literature”, j. hills miller also tried to explain his observation  of the connection between literature and virtual reality. “literature seizes me and carries me to a place where pleasure and pain join. when i say i am ‘enchanted’ by the virtual realities to which literary works transport me, that is a milder way of saying i am enraptured by reading those works” (miller,  ). if simply replacing “literature”  to “vr (virtual realities)”, every single sentence can still remain valid. long before the  visual environmental technologies and the terminology had been invented, people  had already known how to “project” themselves into an imaginary universe/world with  literature and games by using their minds, in the “mental space”. it’s clear that mental space has similar effects but comes internally from people’s minds, which is totally  private and subjective. the	essential	difference	between	“mental	space”	and	“virtual	 reality (or cyberspace)” is that the former one is made up by our minds with daily experiences	which	are	extremely	personal	and	the	latter	is	an	artificial	product	usually	 created by a third party which is comparably objective. within present technology  development, people still cannot read each other’s minds or copy and reproduce it.  but vr(cyberspace) is meant to be created as a repeatable product for more people  to experience. you might argue that people can have individual experiences through  the pre-set vr environment, but objectively, the invented environment remains the  same for every participant to engage in. nowadays, the ultimate goal and challenge  for current vr simulation are to go beyond these unique imaginary immersions within  mental space and to make an improvement to the “tangibility” aspect by implementing  contemporary visual and sensing technologies. having the assistance from different  aspects of the current advanced technologies, the vr system can be more solid and to  a certain extent bring one to a parallel universe/world with relatively more sensitive  and accurate perception. it is quite obvious why people intuitively tend to connect with	interactivity	using	vr	technology	since	this	enables	an	entire	immersive	artificial	 environment which can fully embrace people to promote active engagement in real- time.	without	interactivity,	the	vr	system	will	work	just	as	a	film	or	tv	program,	which	 is	relatively	passive	in	terms	of	engagement	akin	to	cold	media	defined	by	marshall	 mcluhan. while speaking about vr (virtual realities), “cyberspace” is the term that cannot be  ignored. “cyberspace” was coined by the well-known “cyberpunk”/science fiction  author, william gibson, first in his short story “burning chrome” in   (gibson,  burning chrome,  ), but later in   in his novel “neuromancer” (gibson,  neuromancer,  ), it gained extremely unprecedented popularity. toc hypercell “cyberspace. a con sensual hallucination experienced daily by billions of legitimate operators, in every nation, by children being taught mathematical concepts … a graphic representation of data abstracted from the banks of every computer in the human system. unthinkable complexity. lines of light ranged in the non-space of the mind, clusters and constellations of data. like city lights, receding....” in “neuromancer”, william gibson abstractly defines the meaning of cyberspace. it  is now extremely easy to understand if one replaces the word “cyberspace” with “the  internet”. at present, cyberspace somehow is identified as a term representing on-line  computer networks. cyberspace had already been seriously taken as an actual space  according to anna cicognani’s five criteria to qualify “spaces” (cicognani,  ),  which are:  ) possible interactions;  ) livability or occupy-ability;  ) a community- building capacity;  ) time management; and  ) space management opportunities.  cyberspace, in the form of internet networks, can easily fulfill all of these criteria.  even simply considering cyberspace as an on-line game like “sim-city”, people can,  ) definitely interact with each other;  ) buy a virtual house and have a second virtual  life;  ) set up connections within social communities based on your personal habits;  ) schedule personal timeline compatible with your identity; and  ) even arrange  space as virtual real estate through trading behaviors. cyberspace creates an alternate  universe where people can do all the activities in parallel to the actual world. michael  benedikt, the author of “cyberspace: the first step” (benedikt,  ) states “…with cyberspace, a whole new space is opened up by the very complexity of life on earth: a new niche for a realm that lies between the two worlds. cyberspace becomes another venue for consciousness itself…” claiming a brand-new world with at least   parallel  universes that people have to engage and deal with. in another publication, “v d”  (anders,  ), which mainly discussed the topic of current digital space with the  relationship to the network of the internet, peter anders expressed his prediction of  how cyberspace will influence daily lives of humans if they understand technologies  as sensory extensions, “…we are increasingly dependent on such technologies to sustain our social cultural reality. they are part of being human in our time”. since  the internet and world wide web were invented, humans have no capability to cease  this inevitable trend and must start enjoying surfing on it. the fact is exactly the way  how peter anders described: this task of dealing with cyberspace is a part of being a human at present. this network of systems is everywhere you can imagine, economics,  social communication, education, politics…etc. cyberspace has reached a level of  maturation that humans cannot ignore and one has to not only live in a materialized  physical space, his/her own mental space with imagination, but also this network-like  virtual reality space. therefore, it makes people begin to explore ways in which one can  integrate the virtual and physical universes. before starting this topic, it is imperative  to be more explicit and distinguish the essential difference between cyberspace and  virtual reality. toc     body conjunction = wavering between actual and virtual spaces cyberspace: a network system, the current existing representation is the “internet service”. it is a virtual reality in a sense that people can project themselves and have multiple identities as avatars on-line. through the screen and the internet cable, people can basically navigate to each and every single digit/bit of the global internet system. vr (virtual reality): a tactile and tangible environment creative with computer technology to invoke human’s sensory system in real-time. it can either simulate existing surroundings or create a fantasy experience for people to examine and make people temporary enter an alternative universe by the constant electronic impulse to challenge human body senses. a global networking system such as the internet, which creates a relatively abstract  virtual environment mostly through human sensory spectrum, where vr interprets  senses more related to a local bodily perception, creating an engulfing experience and  gives human sensory systems (with all senses) an immersive stimulation. in fact, the  tasks for the spatial designers is even more crucial, namely, to find the connectivity  between “virtual” and “actual”, and to strengthen the relationship between “vr” and  “cyberspace”. an undivided relationship has been set up between physical and virtual space which  had earlier been neglected. as margret wertheim pointed out in her publication,  “the pearl gate of cyberspace” (wertheim, the pearl gate of cyberspace: a history of  space from dante to the internet,  ), “ironically, cyberspace is a technological by-product	of	physics.	the	silicon	chips,	the	optic	fibers,	the	liquid	crystal	display	 screen, the telecommunication satellites, even the electricity that powers the internet are all by-products of this most mathematical science…”. obviously, cyberspace  cannot stand alone without the support from all the prerequisite hardware devices.  from the notion of the “body extension” point of view, humans expose themselves  timelessly under the boundless information web, they might even unconsciously make  connections to = cyberspace as extending their nervous system without awareness.  for instance, it has become quite common that with portable electronic gadgets, such  as smartphones and tablet with their “wifi” on, they can access to the surrounding  internet connection without explicit awareness. suddenly, these portable gadgets,  metaphorically/eventually connect to humans’ bodies as new sensory organs  pervasively searching for ways to connect to the holistic web-weaving internet, the  cyberspace. a theoretical concept of “hyper-body” (lévy,  ) proposed by pierre  levy can be introduced here, which refers basically to two aspects of this notion.  from one aspect, it can be interpreted that humans literally transplant a new organ to  replace one of the organs of the bodies of flesh, and the new organ can be biologically  natural or artificially made. the purpose of the transplant surgery varies depending  toc hypercell on each case, either to replace the ruined organs to repair it and retain the function  of the bodies, for example, prosthetics, artificial hearts, or the devices like hearing  aids; or to enhance and strengthen the sensory perception of the organs, such as  telescopes and telephones. the other aspect is describing a notion of how humans  plug into the internet system and enhance and accelerate their capabilities and speed  of acknowledgments and communications, which also makes the human body a  hybrid “hyper-body” (lévy,  ) not a pure biological body. in other words, it can  be said boldly that most of the humans are in a sense becoming a hybrid species, the  “cyborgs” which will be discussed later in this chapter. another interesting idea called  “global communications skin” was raised by the experts in bell laboratory who made  a prediction for   back in  . their president arun netravali described the  essential notion of this “web-like electronic skin”. “we	are	already	building	the	first	 layer of a mega-network that will cover the entire planet like a skin. as communication continues to become faster, smaller, cheaper and smarter in the next millennium, this skin, fed by a constant stream of information, will grow larger and more useful. that “skin” will include millions of electronic measuring devices - thermostats, pressure gauges, pollution detectors, cameras, microphones - all monitoring cities, roadways, and the environment. all of these will transmit data directly into the network, just as our skin transmits a constant stream of sensory data to our brains”.  he simply suggested a skin-like network composed of constant data streams with all  connections to the available device which provided data will cover the whole world. it  is exactly akin to gilles deleuze and felix guattari’s concept of “body without organs”  (global communication skin), which initially cannot resist the desiring machines and  eventually transform into a slippery and smooth surface accepting the connection from  all desiring machines (electronic devices) as a network extremely influencing with each  other by the desiring flux (data stream) passing through. this is probably the reason  why the spanish socialist, manuel castells, who specializes in the information society,  communication and globalization stated that “the global city is not a place, but a process”. with the assistance of this boundless cyberspace, there is nearly nowhere  that information cannot reach. until now, the concentration is more on the abstract surface of the cyberspace at a  global level which cannot be reached and touched. it is time to shift the discussion  towards the tangible surface of virtual reality looking for the solution of connecting the  physical and virtual, and especially for interconnecting cyberspace with virtual reality.  although there’s definitely a certain degree of interactivity within cyberspace, virtual  reality can literally stimulate a human’s(user’s) sensory organs and in an immersive  the whole paragraph of the “global communication skin” prediction by bell laboratory in   can be view  with the link provided here: http://seclists.org/interesting-people/ /nov/ toc   body conjunction = wavering between actual and virtual spaces environment, which, people can physically experience in real-time. the relationship  between the user and the computer has been established since the time graphical  displays and data visualization were initiated with the first personal computer, which,  can also be considered as the birth of virtual reality. when ivan sutherland first  demonstrated his pioneering computational tool for  d/ d graphic design on screen  with his magic light pen (similar to the stylus idea nowadays) , the interactivity  between the physical and the virtual had been unconsciously realized. with his light  pen as an input device, he could create points, make the line between points, even  generate  d primitives spinning in virtual space displayed on the  d screen. this was  an intuitive way of drawing and had real-time responsive interaction. after years of  development, the input devices shifted to something everyone is familiar with: the  mouse and keyboard. the whole operation system also became a graphic interface  which was comparable to the mouse and keyboard. the keyboard was implemented  earlier, much before the graphical user interface had been developed maturely. the  mouse, which came later, attained a leading role owing to its intuitive navigation  properties. since then, people became eager to look for more tangible, flexible and  intuitive user interfaces. “…as	we	project	mind	and	hand	into	screens,	we	are	shifting	 from visual dominance to a tactile one” (de kerckhove,  ). the mouse brought  the sense of touching into cyberspace or vr environment which enhanced people’s  engagement together with the vision and auditory senses. that is why derrick de  kerckhove stated that “…the mouse and the pointer (as like a direct extension of the eye) connection on the screen like a hand and the external mind digging, grabbing, pushing, replacing, removing and allowing a concrete operation followed closely by the eyes and the mind of the user. it is like touching idea” (de kerckhove,  ). referring  back to marshall mcluhan’s theory of imbalance of human senses which are highly  focused on the vision in the television era, vr (virtual reality) intended to address  other human senses to bring the sensory balance back, for example, the multi-touch  screen. the “digi” of the word, “digital”, means “finger” in latin which made it an  interesting embodiment and connection between the technology, terminology, screen  and the finger. it is either to say these devices bring the senses back, or these devices  enhance senses as body extensions or embodiments. although most of the people  deny the notion that they are actually a true “cyborg” now, but somehow with all of  these portable and wearable devices as body extensions, the human is not anymore,  the ones fighting against the world with their bare hands and feet. eventually, the  a light pen detects a change of brightness of nearby screen pixels when scanned by cathode ray tube electron  beam and communicates the timing of this event to the computer. since a crt (cathode ray tube) scans the  entire screen one pixel at a time, the computer can keep track of the expected time of scanning various locations  on screen by the beam and infer the pen’s position from the latest timestamp: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ light_pen toc hypercell second definition of “hyper-body” by pierre levy has been fully demonstrated here. the  first definition of “hyper-body” on one hand has been realized by differently abled or  elder persons. but on the other hand, an australian performance artist, stelarc, seems  to process himself into a literal “hyper-body” by experimenting with his body of flesh.  all his projects push the limitations of the human body. his first well-known project is  called “suspensions” in   which he did a couple of retro versions, and the latest is  in  . in this project, he suspended his body from various apparatus by meat hooks  embedded in his skin to test the durability under stress of the body. then, he started to  attach himself with electronic cables, the mechanical motorized structure as a “third hand” (as the project’s title) to make himself as a combination of body and machine,  and to see how to establish cooperation between the two. stelarc tried various body  experiments as his projects including swallowing capsule like sculptures and detecting  the result by medical endoscopy or transplanting a cell-cultivated flesh with synthetic  biological technology onto his left arm. one can say that stelarc has a “hyper-body”  or even has even become a total “cyborg”. he attempted to raise the issue: “within advanced technologies, is there still a boundary between man and machine, virtual and physical body?” in a relatively radical way, which he apparently responded to  negatively. “technology	is	not	only	attached	but	is	also	implanted.	once	a	container,	 technology now becomes a component of the body…it is no longer of any advantage to either remain ‘human’ or to evolve as a species… once technology provides each person with potential to progress individual in its development, the cohesiveness of the species is no longer distinction but the body-species split” (stelarc,  ). at present,  all humans should be considered as “cyborgs” without awareness. it is only a matter  of the proportion of technological attachments to the flesh body either holding in their  hands or embedded into the human biological body. in the end, humans will inevitably  become cyborgs and it’s only about the degree of how addicted one will be to utilizing  the technologies as one’s body extensions. after years of development, wearable technological gadgets like touch screens,  movement detecting controllers, motion tracking devices, sensor gloves, optical  displays such as google glasses, and vr glasses or head-mounted displays …etc., have  gradually threatened and replaced the common sets of input devices of the computer  which used to be the screen, keyboard and mouse. to setup a vr environment,  you need to have required software installed and animation(game) embedded (or  streaming from the central computer) to the head mounted display device, then one  can immediately start a vr journey with one’s body senses connected to electronically  controlled devices. adding sophisticated devices, such as movement detecting  controllers, motion tracking devices, or sensor gloves, to extract physiological data  feedback to central computers can be harnessed for generating real-time visualization  such in a game like setting. all devices basically transmit electronic impulses to create  sensory stimulations a central machine. this kind of electronic circuit loop is akin to  toc   body conjunction = wavering between actual and virtual spaces how the nervous system works in the human body. the nervous system is like a network  of fibers omnipresent inside or attached to the human body. performance wise, neuron  cells can be categorized into afferent(sensory) neurons which convey the information  and send to the central nervous system; efferent(motor) neurons which transmit the  signal from the central to the effector cells to trigger movement; and interneurons  which connect neurons within specific regions of the central nervous system .  basically, the natural routine of the nervous system starts with stimulation from the  environment, senses through the afferent neurons, and transmits the information  through interneurons to the central nervous system for judgement, eventually sending  out the signal again through the interneurons to the efferent neurons to inform and  trigger the required muscles or glands. regardless of which kinds of neurons, they have  to use the electronic impulses generated to transmit the information. this is the core  principle behind the current advanced technologies of prosthetics that can link the  artificial eyes, ears, arms or legs to a physical body and be freely manipulated by the  differently abled person. through the electronic impulses, the stimulation signal can  be generated to make blind people see and deaf people hear. the electrical loop has  literally passed through both the artificial and organic organs to create perceptions and  trigger reactions. it’s the brain which creates “feelings”, making us human. although  the brain is a distributed networking system, which, can summarize an emotional  sense of human feelings. ideally, through the nervous system the brain enjoys  sophisticated manipulability with external circuits of electricity, so one can mimic  “real” feelings. of course, this can also be claimed as a milestone of crossing/blurring  the boundary between virtual and real. but the catastrophe of this scenario can also  happen simultaneously, as the stimulation from the external electricity can accessible  carry out a virtual universe for each individual person who believes this is an actual  existing universe. feelings and emotion can still be true in a virtual reality; it does not  mean that the emotional senses in a “virtual” world are equally fake/artificial. nor does  such a virtual world necessarily entail or alleviate alienation. in his publication, “bergsonism” (deleuze,  ), gilles deleuze stated that “…the possible is the opposite of real, it is opposed to real, the virtual is opposed to actual… the possible has no reality; conversely, the virtual is not actual, but as such possesses a reality”. it should be less complicated after the interpretation here: if possible and  real are in the same category representing the degree of reality, then virtual and actual  are in another category labeling the degree of actuality. virtual is not in the same  category of real. therefore, it is real but not completely actual. furthermore, if another  word, “materialized”, replaces the term “actual” in the sentence, then it can clearly  please check the webpage for more information and clear understandings about the neurons: https://en.wiki- pedia.org/wiki/neuron toc hypercell be concluded that “virtual is real but not completely materialized.” we might find it  difficult for the former generations to understand, but it is quite reasonable for the  young generation who were born and raised in a digital age with their common senses.  the intimate relationship you set up with your friends through the social media, the  war that you fight against the orcs with your partners to win the victory, the bankruptcy  of your virtual company when you’ve been cheated by your biggest opponent…etc.,  these can all be very true feelings and real experiences in terms of being in the virtual  world, but it is not materialized yet in a physical world. but since the virtual engulfs  more and more proportion of one’s life, the “virtual” event can easily have “real”  impact where you live. for example, the physical currency for paying the registration fee  of the social communication networks and buying those virtual properties, weapons,  and arms in the game is the perfect case of illustrating this circumstance crossing both  the virtual and the real world that has to be confronted regardless of where you are  physically present. figure  .   a diagram illustrating the conceptual idea of “brain in a vat”. from another aspect, referring to the aforementioned electronic circuits which can to a certain extent be implemented in simulating the electronic impulse to stimulate the brain to generate all senses of humans, which is also extremely virtual, it makes the body	totally	useless	but	makes	the	brain	sink/engage	into	an	artificial	universe	and	 believe they are vividly living. this kind of hypothetical narrative is fully related to the  theory of “brain in a vat (or brain in a jar)” (figure  . ) which has been applied to many  sci-fi movie scripts. the most famous and popular example is “the matrix”  series. please check the webpage for more information about the sci-fi film, the matrix: https://en.wikipedia.org/ wiki/the_matrix toc   body conjunction = wavering between actual and virtual spaces reality virtual reality virtual realityreality reality figure  .   diagram exhibiting the idea of space that in current condition has blended the virtual and the  reality as a whole. in other words, there is no sharp boundary between vr and reality within the omnipresent  internet. toc hypercell “brain in a vat” is a theoretical hypothesis raised by the american philosopher, gilbert  harman. it outlines a scenario where a mad scientist (machine, or other entity)  takes out the brain from a body and suspends the brain into a vat of life-sustaining  liquid. afterwards, the neurons of the brain are connected to an extremely advanced  computer which can provide electronic impulses identical to those the brain normally  receives and simulate a “reality”. the brain in the vat without the original body of  flesh’s physical container would constantly have access to the conscious experiences  of those people who have their brain embedded . in other words, even though the  brain is in the body, with the constant electronic impulses provided as normal, the  supercomputer can simulate reality as long as the body stays in a condition of life or  being alive. this is a truly virtual life. in the movie “the matrix”, most of the humans  were ruled by ai (artificial intelligence) machines. these machines keep the biological  human being alive with surviving-liquid in a capsule with cables attached to their  brain simulating reality in order to gain the energy they need from those “cultivated”  bodies. most of the humans don’t know about this “reality” because they are enclosed  and fed by the electronic impulses to make them believe they are alive. a series of nine  extraordinary animation films, called “the animatrix” including four stories written and  produced by the director of “the matrix”, the wachowskis (lana & lilly wachowskis),  detailed the backstory of the matrix universe. and one short animation film, “world record” , created by madhouse and directed by takeshi koike, with a screenplay by  yoshiaki kawajiri, gave an explicit example of a “brain in a vat”. it is a story about  a track athlete, dan davis, who set the   meters’ world running records in  .   seconds, but his subsequent gold medal was revoked for drug use. he anxiously wants  to prove them wrong by competing again even with the possibility of a career-ending  injury. nevertheless, after a strong start, the muscles in his legs violently rupture, but  with his incredible willpower, he ignores the injury and runs even faster than before.  suddenly, he sees the “reality” with numerous capsule-like pods, and he is in one  of them and tries to rip off the cables plugged into his physical body. the machine  around him pulls him back and gives him a violent shock of electric restraints to  connect him back to “the world” (virtual/matrix) in which he lives. eventually, he does  break the world record in  .  seconds, but his body cannot bear the high speed and  makes him a differently abled person with a wheelchair. it is not now known if in the  near future “the matrix” like universe will emerge, but it is cogent to remind people  that with current advanced wearable gadgets plugging into our body, and pushing it  please check the webpage for the general theoretical description of “brain in a vat”: https://en.wikipedia.org/ wiki/brain_in_a_vat please check the webpage for more information about “the animatrix” and “the world record”: https:// en.wikipedia.org/wiki/the_animatrix toc   body conjunction = wavering between actual and virtual spaces to extremes, it is possible to end up like living brains with abandoned bodies which  can live forever. this is not, and must not be, the ultimate result of virtual reality.  from the interactive point of view, it is even more fascinating and attractive to create  a universal space including the actual and virtual world. “we are entering an era of electronically extended bodies living at intersection points of the physical and virtual world,” said william mitchell, who pointed out the current conditions we are beginning  to confront. marcos novak stated that “it is possible to envision architecture nested within architecture”. the two architectures here relate to the physical and virtual  spaces, which should be blended and fused into each other as a whole (figure  . ). as a  result, there are two major topics for interaction at this time for the spatial designer to  carry out:  ) designing ways of setting linkages between virtual and real to become one  integrated universe;  ) creating multi-directional and sensory bodily interaction more  akin to marshall mcluhan’s concept of hot media. basically, the second topic could  be the solution for the first topic, which makes the tasks concentrate on the notion of  bodily interaction. the tragic outcome of “the matrix” universe is alienation because  there is no true interaction engaged within the cyborgs. most of the scenes are pre-set  before experiencing them by the signals generated and sent from the matrix, even  the interaction is set by a program or lines of code. according to marshall mcluhan,  this accounts for cold media, which is the same experience as watching a movie. to  prevent the future scenario of choosing the “red pill or blue pill” , it is crucial to shift  the development of virtual reality toward a more intimate and tangible interactive  scenario by intensively and actively utilizing all senses and full body movement.  fortunately, some contemporary projects are engaged with combining virtual reality  and actual physical environments.  is called the year of “virtual reality”. “pokémon go”, an augmented reality mobile  game, just revealed its first release. similarly, many on-going projects are also being  developed with mounted headsets for virtual reality environments and are on their  way to launch their products. an interesting observation is that some of the projects  have already considered the marriage of physical and virtual space. for example,  samsung partnered with six flags amusement parks to build the first roller coaster  where people have to wear vr glasses. while wearing the vr glasses on the roller  coaster, the vision will calibrate with the physical environment but display unexpected  surroundings, such as future cities with aircrafts passing by and attacking; by-products  the idea of “red pill and blue pill” is derived from the line in the sci-fi movie, the matrix. it happened while  morpheus was providing a chance for the main character, neo, to escape or confront the real world by taking dif- ferent colored pills. the red one represents the painful truth while the blue one means the illusion of ignorance.  please check the webpage for more detail information: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/red_pill_and_blue_pill .   toc hypercell of the vr, such as virtrix omni and cyberith virtualizer , are physical motion  platforms allowing players to conduct reaction like walk, run, jump and turn freely in  every direction in a small footprint of area to create immersive gaming experience; “the void”  is a  -minute virtual reality journey in a   by   foot stage filled with dense  foam walls as obstacles, and replete with effects like water and wind, which opened in  utah, in august of  . multiple players wear vr mounted headsets with headphone  embedded, arms with sensors, and a vest with hefty computer and batteries, while  actively navigating and interacting by shooting zombies in a virtual temple inside of  the physical environment which has a radio-frequency system for motion tracking.  this is how ken bretschneider aims to marry the virtual and real through the game  settings of “the void”. in this case, the virtual reality performance is like a decorated  makeup of the physical space. on the contrary, the tangible physical objects enhance  the immersive experience of the virtual reality. such developing projects show proof  that people are not satisfied with only a passive virtual reality experience, and they  want to engage and be in the narrative to interact either with the environment or other  people in virtual reality. it is not anymore like the scenario of vr rooms shown in the  movie “minority report” where people lie on beds with sensor suits passively receiving  and interacting with the visual effects as if watching a video . certainly, this is not  the expectation people want from virtual reality in the future, people want to be “in”  the movie, not just “watching” the movie. that is the obvious reason why computer  games like to visualize their narrative perspective in the first-person perspective. in  the same movie “minority report”, there is the unforgettable scene where tom cruise,  sophisticatedly moves his fingers controlling the transparent screen-like interface of  the future computer showing other ways of interaction in life and space. it implies  a way of communication besides the conventional triangle of the mouse, keyboard,  and screen, or even a virtual reality interface, but embodying a relatively more bodily  engaging possibility. this can be seen as a hint to escape from the phenomenon  of the “brain in a vat”, and it simultaneously brings the balance of human senses  while simultaneously enhancing the intimacy of the virtual and real. from another  perspective, google has invested more than   million us dollars in the company  magic leap for developing hologram vr display without wearable devices to take  please check these   webpages for more information about the physical motion platform of virtrix omni: http:// www.virtuix.com/ and cyberith virtualizer: http://cyberith.com/product/. please check this webpage of mit technology review reporting the information of “the void”:  https://www. technologyreview.com/s/ /inside-the-first-vr-theme-park/ , or check their official webpage for more  information: https://thevoid.com/. please check this clip extracting from the movie, “minority report”, on youtube about the “vr room” idea:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v= tjovosqdq toc     body conjunction = wavering between actual and virtual spaces augmented reality to the next level which can also be seen as an advanced approach  towards weaving the virtual and real together. furthermore, it brings forth the  possibility of merging the concept of virtual reality and cyberspace if the technology  will be carried out in the near future. people can call each other and envision their  figure through magic leap’s hologram technology without wearing vr mounted  headset. a system combining global cyberspace network with local vr displays is not far  out of reach. what would a future party look like? there will be half of the participants  joining the party far from the other side of the planet across time zones and the barrier  of physical “space”. in other words, people can be spatiotemporally present at different  places at the same time visually across time and space similar to the quantum biology  concept of quantum teleportation. on the other hand, there will be the risk of being  hacked and losing one’s identity as a real person or even as an authentic avatar. figure  .   pokémon go is an augmented reality game where the player as a pokémon go trainer has to  catch the wild pokémon monsters in order to battle with other players. the innovation of pokémon go is that  it combines augmented reality technology and the gps system to makes players sense the virtual monsters  vividly as they actually live in reality (source: niantic/nintendo, http://blogs-images.forbes.com/insertcoin/ files/ / /pokemon-go-list - x .jpg ). toc hypercell regardless of how and where the advanced technology can bring us, sensory  engagement is the key to keeping the human aspect of people in order to make them  feel alive and enjoy “tangible interaction”. in the movie, “her” , directed by spike  jonze, theodore twombly (the main character) gradually fell in love with “samantha”,  which is an ai (artificial intelligent) operating system of his computer. in the end, he  noticed that this ai system can have relationships with numerous people at the same  time, which is not specifically unique to him, and he suddenly realizes the weakness of  his relationship. along with the departure of samantha, he confronted his relationship  problems about his ex-wife with his apology, acceptance, and gratitude. and in the  end, he went to the rooftop and saw the sunset with his intimate friend, amy who also  lost her boyfriend as another operating system. one of the interesting things here is  that the main character, theodore, actually fell in love with an ai “voice”, which rarely  happens in any interpretation of novels or movies. and the other crucial point is that  it foresaw a phenomenon of having an intimate relationship with a “virtual” system,  with “real” feelings but somehow challenging the definition of “humanity”. this,  however, is happening, people are fascinated with developing artificial intelligence,  machine learning, and quantum computing to improve computational speed and  create human-brain like neuromorphic devices. for example, in the google annual  io conference  , they revealed their own chip, the tpu (tensor processing unit),  which is specific for deep neuron networks of hardware and software to learn specific  tasks by analyzing the vast amounts of data. and they implanted it in alphago to compete with one of the best professional go players, lee sedol, in go matches. if we  keep concentrating on developing machine learning cooperating with neural network  systems, then operating systems like samantha in “her” is not an unreachable goal  in the future. therefore, it is crucial to keep to our true self by keeping in touch with  “real” people in whatever mediums we encounter whether physical or virtual. there is  nothing wrong with virtual reality or technology or even ai, but humans have to learn  how to get along with them without losing their true selves in their vague or aesthetic  condition in virtual reality created by high-end technologies. physical interactions with  our intuitive sensory organs and movement could be the preventative/cue of this vague  situation. if people lose their physicality and fully dive into the embrace of the virtual  world, the body will eventually end up becoming useless like a shell without a soul or  a brain in a vat scenario. architects, working with such reified materialization whether  virtual or real, have the responsibility to maintain not only the connections but also  the balance between these two contrary universes. while extending one’s body organs  with technologies to plug into the body without organs network, we must be aware of  our own will and consciousness to be freely hovering between virtual and real, but not  please check the webpage for more information about the film, “her”: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/her_ (film). toc   body conjunction = wavering between actual and virtual spaces to be fully amused or dissolve ourselves in the virtual, especially within the high-end  technologies which can easily fool you. in other words, virtual reality can be seen as a  starting point for implementing interactions in real space, but ultimately, it has to be  the bodily interactions that keep us consciously acknowledging our own selves in the  physicality of real space. § . from interface to interact: merging layers of (sur)faces = architecture skin (realize vitality) + technological glasses (virtualize reality): two layers of (sur)faces, which indicate two different scales of objects, two diverse  approaches of viewing, and two kinds of interaction with the surfaces exist. one  expresses the architectural skin, while the other, a wearable device, such as  technological glasses; one is the outer-surface of the overall building body, the other  is the screen in between the retina and the reality. one is the “architecture skin”  which establishes a virtual interfere with reality via multiple display screens with  animation running as a  -dimensional black hole that attempts to take you to another  universe. the other one, “technological glasses”, put a film of glass with information  exhibited correlating to the human vision that tends to merge reality with the virtual,  simultaneously. somehow, these two surfaces should eventually merge into each other  to create a changeable space with more intuitive bodily gestures. first, let us have a glance at the development of the so-called “architectural skin”.  since architects will eventually merge the physical environment with virtual space, how  can we confront the question of bringing virtual reality/cyberspace into architecture?  through the common computer screens with internet connections, space has already  been plugged into the virtual world as marco novak said: “though the computer screen appears two-dimensional, it has a spatial-temporal dimension that allows it to interact with hypersurfaces created mathematically in the space of the computer”  (emmer,  ). due to the internet’s networking connections, the screen is not a  simple monitor constantly displaying stop-motion graphics like television, instead, it  has become real space with depth and time. immediately capturing this surface-depth  idea, the architects are eager to put their focus on the skin of the buildings akin to the  fantasy scenes of city landscapes shown in sci-fi movies, which have capabilities for  displaying graphics or animations as one of their answers as to how to marry the virtual  and reality. plenty of examples have realized such display skin ideas such as media  façades in most of the world’s famous city locations, such as times square, new york,  toc hypercell the shibuya crossing in tokyo, and the commercial signs all around hong kong. as a  result, the skin of the building here represents a passive virtual medium (cold medium  as marshall mcluhan defined) to repeatedly transmit commercial information to  people as a one-directional communication. some architects, like toyo ito, want to  bring the skin of the building to the next level of communication. the “tower of wind”  is a silo-like technical sculpture sitting in the yokohama railway station designed by  toto ito as a public art. the color of the embedded lighting system of the tower’s skin is  determined by detecting the noise levels of its surroundings. this vital surface actively  transmits the information of the noise level no matter if the passengers notice it or not,  which, is akin to a cold medium but at least is initiated by a  . -degree communication  between the building and the passer-by (realized virtuality). the awareness of the  noise level comes from the sensors of the building which makes the skin, not merely an  information deliverer but also an information receiver as well as loader. therefore, the  interaction in a sense starts between the building and the human in a relatively direct  way though the message displaying on the architectural skins. other examples are al  bahar towers in abu dhabi by aedas and arab world institute in paris by jean nouvel.  they all exhibit the light in that one is making shades to avoid direct sunlight and  the other is opening holes for light penetration. although the purposes of these two  projects are totally opposite, by reading the patterns, it is immediately clear where the  solar radiation is stronger which realizes information by communicating it physically  through the architecture skin to the passerby. figure  .   image captured from keiichi matsuda’s animation project “hyper-reality” showing an augmented  reality scenario in a supermarket. toc   body conjunction = wavering between actual and virtual spaces second, the technological glasses here indicate the technology akin to “augmented  reality.” “augmented reality” is a computerized vision correlated with the real  environment through certain devices, such as cameras, special contact lenses, or see- through head mounted displays or eyeglasses like google glasses. basically, a layer of  the transparent electronic film fits in with your vision and the true environment will  display specific information at pre-set marks. simply put, with a certain application  and your smartphone’s camera, you can see through the mobile screen by realizing  a  d animated object on the spot and match it to the existing environment as if  it is literally there. this technology has been broadly applied in different realms  of usage. in architecture, it can match the rendering effect on a real building to  display the appearance when finished; in children’s books, the animated characters  show up through pages of markers as if you are watching a movie; in the military,  useful information and potential dangers can be shown on the soldier’s goggles to  warn them on the battle field; or like google’s translator application that can not  only translate the words but simultaneously map the results onto where the text is  printed through the camera of the smartphone devices. the real-time data has been  visualized and displayed on the “surface” to represent the real conditions (virtualize  reality). most of the applications are aiming to implement vr into daily life to assist  people by exhibiting information of daily used objects, social data, and commercial  advertisements as a virtual interface matching to the existing environment. if staying  confined to showing information about objects, it would end up as the same as the  architectural skin does for architecture, a mere information deliverer, a messenger.  the interesting applications come from the idea of having a virtual interface which  can control the physical objects in real-time by simple interactive hand gestures. in  this sense, augmented reality shows its potential of inducing people’s interactive  movement. keiichi matsuda, a designer and a filmmaker, rendered this idealistic  application with his series of animations called “hyper-reality .” one of the films  rendered a kitchen scenario while you start entering the kitchen. in the film, with a  first-person perspective, you will see plenty of commercials pop up into your eyes, and  the wall above the tank just shows the episode you are watching in the living room.  afterwards, a search engine with screen and virtual keyboard shows up with hand  gestures for you to search for information about making tea. picking up a teabag on  the side and putting it into the cup, tuning the temperature of the electric water boiler,  you can check your status on social media by shifting the mode while waiting. he also  had a version of hyper-reality showing how these virtual interfaces can be used in the  supermarket by showing the gradient, the price, and the caloric information while you  have a glance at the product. these easily understandable but effective animations  please check this video, “hyper reality” by keiichi matsuda through his own website: http://km.cx/. toc hypercell explicitly outline a future life with augmented reality being properly used. the bodily  movements/free-hand gestures manipulate the virtual interface, in a sense, builds  up an interactive relationship between our physical body and virtual environment  correlating and matching back to the existing space. figure  .   a simulation image showing the navigating process by free-hand gestures with the sensor of “soli”  developed by google atap (source: google atap soli project, https:// pobaduekzw jt a-zippykid.netdna-ssl. com/wp-content/uploads/ / /google-project-soli.png ) not only is there extensive work underway on the improvement of augmented reality,  there are also quite a few emerging technologies looking for more intuitive and bodily  movement as communication interfaces, which are implemented mostly in wearable  devices as interfaces. for example, it is not news that google has produced the google  glasses along with augmented reality technology, but they also formed a group called  atap (advance technology and project) to draw attention to developing innovative  devices with technologies. one of the projects utilizes radar detective technology, called  “soli”. “soli” is a sensor device which can analyze sophisticate hand gestures to replace  the performance of a physical knob, button, slider, to create a virtual dial manipulating  toc   body conjunction = wavering between actual and virtual spaces physical devices, such as alarm clocks, radios or watches . not only that, they also  cooperated with world famous jeans brand, levis, to develop a smart jacket, “jacquard”,  which fuses into your daily life combining with the smartphone devices to either assist  you with the direction of your destination, mixing companion music, or cancelling  a phone call while you are biking on the street by simply touching the sleeve of this  smart jacket . this kind of bodily interaction is what should be retrieved, maintained,  developed, and applied to our interactive environments. furthermore, the responsive  reactions to the surrounding environment are where most of the architectural interactive  skins are carried out, but somehow the tendency of the interactions seems to draw more  on users’ requirements than before. “recently	processors	and	sensors	have	shifted	from	 strictly looking at environmental conditions outside the building and performance based aspects of the understanding and monitoring the changing needs of the users of space”,  as cited from “interactive architecture” by michael fox and miles kemp (fox, michael, &  kemp, miles,  ). it is not to say that adaptive architectural skins are less crucial than  interior changeable partitions, but since existing research efforts put more emphasis on  external skins, it is time to draw attention to the reconfigurable scenario of the internal  space according to the users’ needs. the architecture skin represents a sensitive sur(face)  reflecting the surroundings’ information while the technological glasses show a virtual  inter(face) inducing people’s engagement more from the users’ perspectives. eventually,  no matter whether it is an adaptive reaction to external environmental conditions or  direct interaction for internal spatial reconfiguration of users’ demands, they will have  to ultimately merge into each other and find a perfect balance to have the interactive  transition from the notion of interface to interact.” § . body and brain vs. machine and computer under the discourse of interactive architecture after the steam engine had been invented, it not only led us to the industrial revolution  but also raised the never-ending debates on the topics of “men and machines”. since  there have been machines, they have always been treated as the replacement of  human labor which can be seen as artificial bodies insofar as they are not in human  figure shapes/forms. same as with the computer, while it became mature in terms of  please check the “soli” project by visiting the website: https://atap.google.com/soli/ please check the “jacquard” project by visiting the website: https://atap.google.com/jacquard/ toc hypercell calculations, it has always been compared with the human brain (interestingly that is  why it was treated as a “machine” in the first place). when humans started to marry  these two tremendous technologies, the “robot” was born. people are fascinated  with making human-figures like robots (android) which satisfy their desire of being  god-like. before the computer was embedded into the machine, the machines  could basically execute several pre-set tasks that had to be operated manually in the  beginning by humans in order to initiate the procedure. however, after the computer  was involved, the machine became the actuating body and the computer acted as the  brain to receive the commands sent by operators who sat in a monitoring room at a  distance from the giant machine. this is also when the research and terminology of  “hci (human-computer-interface)” were initiated. hci is essentially dealing with the  operational interfaces between humans and computers. for example, the desktop  application of computers, the software gui (graphical user interface), the internet  browser, and also the procedure, instruction, and error reports of the system in the  computer. the ultimate goal of “hci” is to make the interaction between humans and  digital interfaces more efficient, intuitive, and easy to access. and the key point to make  it successful is to make it understandable for the computer instead of improving the  computational calculations behind the computer. through these interfaces, people can  operate the machines relatively easily than in the age of the steam engine. however,  since the robot-kind of object was invented, the interaction interface no longer stayed  on the screen of the computer, it became more tangible and became something  which people had to confront. a crucial topic for interactive architecture is thus to  do extensive research on hci. to make a robot on one hand more sensitive to users’  requirements, and on the other hand more intuitive for users to operate, all kinds of  sensors with their compatible systems must be highly involved. similar principles  should be involved in developing interactive space/environment. furthermore, akin  to building a robot, interactive architecture/environment also need an actuating  body and a neuron-like brain system to achieve the goal of “interaction”. an essential interaction	can	be	interpreted	simply	as	inputs	from	sensor	organs,	transmitting	the	 input data to the brain for decision making, and passing the message to the actuating body to trigger the movement. it indicates the truth that the sensor, the brain, and the body are the three crucial elements in any interactive system. at present, there is research both on the body/the sensor and the brain in interactive space/environment.  from the body aspect, the research relates more to the physical materialization of the  actuating mechanism, which can be motorized or bio-materialized; the sensors can  be seen as part of the body and usually are attached along with the body (actuators) or  even embedded in the body, such as simple distance sensors, sound, pressure sensors  or relatively complex motion tracking systems, which mimic the sensory organs of a  human; and from the brain aspect, besides making intuitive interfaces, it is highly  debated as to whether the neuron system should be considered as a centralized control  or a distributed system to drive the physical actuation. and last but not least is the  toc   body conjunction = wavering between actual and virtual spaces question of how to integrate the body, the sensor, and the brain to realize a suitable  environment for people to engage with. there has never been a serious discussion  before the affordable price and techniques could be applied to architectural design.  the day when arduino kind of microcontrollers were released, marked a new era  when people who had interest in realizing kinetic or even interactive architecture  could pursue it more as a feasible prototyping project. since the body can include the  actuating body and sensory organs, they will be put together for a correlative discussion  of their current developments. and the topic of the brain with neuron systematic  communication will be discussed after that as the critical argument about whether it  can make the interactive environment better. figure  .   images of “hypersurface” project by decoi exhibiting the scale on the left, the details from the  backside on the right top, and the component of each actuating element on the right bottom (source from left to  right: http://fluxwurx.com/installation/wp-content/uploads/ / /pr_ _hyposurface_ _p.jpeg,  http://www.mediaarchitecture.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/ / / /pr_ _hyposurface_ _p. jpg, and http://www.mediaarchitecture.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/ / / /digi gn.jpg). § . . materialize the body: “to motorize or to naturalize”, that is the question starting with the actuated body part, there are two major directions which can be  categorized here which also influence the definition of the sensor parts. one is fully  motorized, which uses motors, gears, electronic devices, actuators, in cooperating  with highly mechanistic approaches to drive the actuation. like da vinci, the master of  inventing classic mechanisms, designers try to realize actuated movement, while the  toc hypercell other designers start to look into different material properties which trigger natural  adaptive reactions in terms of changing shape. with the concept to “materialize the  body”, the discussion will be divided into two segments, which are “motorized” and  “naturalized”. motorized: the machine here refers to what most people would intuitively think of, which has  complicated operating systems with multiple size gears, several different thicknesses of  electronic cables winding around, and can result in massive power compared to human  force. nonetheless, the purpose of using such a machine in interactive architecture  is not to generate power, rather the kinetic movements are the value of using these  machines. one well-known and one of the pioneer project is the arab world institute in paris by jean nouvel. the sophistication of the camera-like shutter form of the  modular façade serves to control the light penetrating into the interior space. this not  only shows the beauty of the mechanism but also practically achieves the intended  performance of the façade. more examples came afterwards with similar electronic  driving motoring façades, including the al bahar towers in abu dhabi by aedas  with its triangular armor-like shading system, and the one ocean thematic pavilion expo  designed by soma with its long thin aluminum stripes controlling the  solar radiance of the building. although the principles of the mechanism employed in  these adaptive skin systems are not as complicated as any of the da vinci machines,  it required a large amount of energy and massive prototyping to make it happen.  another crucial project in the interactive architecture domain is the “hypersurface” by decoi led by mark goulthrope. it employed linear pistons in each single module of  hypersurface to generate radical morphing of the surface. the surface reactions based  on contextual light and sound are actuated by the pushing movement of the piston  influencing the triangular panel attached to achieve the performance. while looking at  the backside of the installation, a huge steel frame with grids was employed to support  all the individual actuator modules. numerous pistons with electronic cables depict  just how much electricity is required to drive the entire installation. another example  of this modular system is the inform/transform  by the tangible media group  of the mit media lab. although it is not an architectural project, it points out most of  please check the video for more understandings of “hypersurface”: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=anx- qrj zksi please check the official webpage for more details about the “inform/transform”: http://tangible.media. mit.edu/project/inform/ toc     body conjunction = wavering between actual and virtual spaces the advantages and disadvantages of building up an interactive space/environment.  on the top surface of the inform/transform, are grids of cubic sticks which can  elevate up and down to create landscape shape-shifting effects for different purposes.  this on-going project aims to make interactive furniture with a pixelated information  display. once again looking at the technical and mechanical setup of this project, it is  surprising how much space it takes to hide/pack the required devices and equipment  such as special sensors, electronic chips, actuators as pistons, power supplies, and  maintenance devices like cooling fans. nine-tenths of the space is used for either  the electronic or mechanical equipment and only one-tenth of the space displays  the extraordinary results. this makes it sound relatively inefficient in terms of space  usage. and that’s the major problem with these motorized spaces, even while making  just a façade/skin of the building, it takes quite a large amount of facilitative space to  achieve the interactive reactions. the sensory organs idea within the motorized options  is also seen as electronic devices especially for the sensing system which has to be  further integrated to make the “embodiment”. these sensory devices can replace the  human senses as vision sensors, light sensors, sound sensors, temperature sensors… etc., which are available on the market at affordable prices. avoiding the complicated  integration of all these different sensor systems, some of the developers/designers  in the interactive space/environment tend to look towards nature as biomimetic  researchers to search for solutions, such as with nano-scale modular elements or by  harnessing natural material properties. smart materials now tend to aid interactive  architecture. but the associated problems remain hidden or neglected, while one  obsesses over the advantages of this approach. naturalized: “intelligent materials and smart materials are general terms for materials that have one or more properties that can be altered”. this is the major reason why designers  are eager to take these materials and implement them into interactive design. in  the publication of michelle addington and daniel schodek, “smart materials and new technologies: for architecture and design profession” ” (addington, michelle &  schodek, daniel,  ), they separated smart materials into two categories: “type one materials undergo changes in one or more of their properties – chemical, mechanical, electrical, magnetic or thermal – in direct response to a change in the external stimuli associated with the environment surrounding the material…type two materials transform energy from one form to an output energy in another form”. type one  materials are relatively more suitable for adaptive makeup, while type two materials  are more beneficial from the sustainability point of view. most of the smart materials  applied in architectural design research are type one materials which mainly address  adaptive performance. toc hypercell figure  .   the images of the “hygroskin” on the left and the “shapeshift” on the right (source from left  to right: icd: http://icd.uni-stuttgart.de/?p= , and see the materiability research network: http:// materiability.com/shapeshift/). one explicit example was provided by materiability research network team in the  leading swiss academic institution, ethz caad. manuel kretzer, the leader of the  team, employed the eletro-active polymer (also known as eap) thin films as a basic  transformable unit while designing a shape-shifting project. the makeup of this eap  film is that while electrifying the film, this thin film will naturally bend with its unique  material properties. manuel kretzer with his team took advantage of this property  and applied them with different shapes for a series of morphing experiments from  , which includes, “shapeshift ( )”, “phototropia ( )”, “resinance  ( )”, and “resinance  . ( )” (kretzer,  ). the bending effect of this  electrified eap film is quite obvious and allows for successful transformation as  expected. however, this eap film seems to lack power to retain the complete surface  with the force of its dramatic morphing. not only do the resulting changes abolish  the surface, during the process of making customized sheets with eap, there are  large percentages of broken sheets which have to be abandoned. this problem proves  that the eap is too fragile to be applied in architecture to achieve the ultimate goal of  creating a changeable supporting structure. this is so even though the eap was carried  out quite successfully as an experiment as a morphing unit and could be manipulated  individually to make a bottom up overall emergent effect. it is obvious that the eap can  toc   body conjunction = wavering between actual and virtual spaces be used as a responsive shading façade system, but can hardly be the key supporting  structure for making real-time re-configurable space . the other example is from icd (institute for computational design), stuttgart  university led by professor, achim menges, which is a series of projects employing  wood film, which, responds to the surrounding’s humidity (menges, a., reichert,  s., & krieg o. d.,  ). the team has been investigating biomimetic principles  of spruce cones and applying them to an engineered material composed of thin  wood film. the principle is the following: humidity change instigates the tissue of  the wood cell film to correspondingly absorb or release the moisture and undergo  significant morphing effects. the first experimental project using this technique  was “hygroscope”, commissioned by and exhibited permanently in the centre  pompidou, paris, to represent an adaptive architectural skin, comprising of numerous  wooden films as a basic unit . the project was housed in a transparent glass case  for artificially controlling the humidity, corresponding to the humidity in paris. the  second project is the “hygroskin”  which involved robotic arms based manufacturing  to materialize a pavilion. the robotic arm fabrication is essentially applied to making  a voronoi structure unit composing the pavilion. within each of the units, openings  were made using the thin wooden panels with an intention to change the amount  of light penetration to the interior space in relation with the surrounding humidity.  the local climate conditions thus actuate the openings to open up while sunny and  close while raining. these material properties perform sensing and actuating roles  at the same time. in the other words, within nature, material systems have always  integrated sensing and actuation system in a fully embedded fashion. such a way of  utilizing material properties and natural principles seems to be a trend for replacing  the relatively heavy and dirty mechanical actuation systems. however, in the case  of the hygroscope and hygroskin, humidity can only produce dramatic changes if  one manually alters the humidity fluctuations rapidly within the glass container. in  the humidity change is not controlled artificially, then the adaptive morphing effect  of the engineered wooden films can only change very slowly and makes it hard for  the audience to observe. consequently, there are arguments to choose between the  options of using motorized electronic driven actuators or employing naturalized  approaches such as utilizing the natural material properties. please check this video, “shapeshift” for further understanding on the application of eap by materiability  research network team, ethz caad: https://vimeo.com/ . please check this video to know more about “hygroscope”: https://vimeo.com/ . please check this video to know more about “hygroskin”: https://vimeo.com/ . toc hypercell to conclude here, the motorized solution can gain the benefits of making relatively  rapid changing, having easier adjustment, and loading comparatively heavier objects  or even people as supporting structures in a larger scale, which also refers to utilizing/ wasting more energy of operating the machine, a separate sensory makeup/system is  needed, and result in taking spaces for all these required equipment implemented to  achieve the preset goal of kinetics/interaction; in the contrary, the naturalized solution  can take advantage by learning from nature and apply the existing natural chemical  makeups in a smaller scale as a basic unit to realize the aim of adaptive/responsive  performance. unlike the motorized one which needs the separate sensors for the input  system, the naturalized one has embedded the systems both from the sensing and  actuating which enhances its benefits from the integration and light-weight points of  view. but most of these smart materials are relatively fragile and embody the weakness  of the long-term maintenance which makes it hardly be the candidate of creating  reconfigurable structure. therefore, the choices of motorized and naturalized solutions  should be corresponding with the question to be solved, for example, to build up  reconfigurable partitions of a smart interior space, no doubted the motorized solution  should be the option; and to develop sophisticate adaptive façade with the idea of  reducing the energy waste simultaneously, the naturalized solution should be the  choice. in the near future, the combination of the motorized and naturalized solutions  should all be both considered and integrated into a hybrid material while creating  interactive architectures aiming for different performance goals. § . . build up the brain: from decentralization to collective intelligence to step into the realm of interactive architecture, it is obvious that one must recognize  that the soul of interaction is the control system. the control system defines the  capabilities and the tasks of interaction. although people might still remain the same  while thinking, the “brain” is a centralized organ which tackles different tasks by  this big intelligent machine in the head. but actually, the main components of the  intelligence of the brain that makes one think, sense, and react are the brain cells  or neurons. based on different regions of the brain, neurons specialize themselves  for specific performance such as movement, sensory processing, language and  communication, and learning and memory. they are constructed nearby and form  the cerebrum. however, this doesn’t make the cerebrum a centralized controller. in  the other words, even though the neurons of the cerebrum are located close to each  other, they are assigned to conduct specific tasks through network communication  and to eventually reach an ultimate decision, making it akin to a more de-centralized  system in terms of its operational logic. undoubtedly, the computer was invented by  toc   body conjunction = wavering between actual and virtual spaces simulating how the brain works in terms of hardware and also the operational system.  but the hidden information needed to be revealed is this “bottom-up” systematic  approach. the neuron works as the smallest entity just like all the other functional  cells in the body, performing properly as a cpu (central processing unit) dealing with  the given mission assigned to it by the embedded dna. to a certain extent, human  intelligence can also be interpreted as a result of collective intelligence gathered from  each single neuron unit. there is an old saying in chinese which translates to “the  wisdom of the masses exceeds that of the widest individual” in english, which explicitly  illustrates the condition of a distributed operating system in the form of collective  intelligence. one of the major benefits of utilizing the distributed system idea in the  form of a swarm is that even if one singular entity malfunctions, it won’t affect the rest  of the entities, thus keeping the whole system still operational. this can also be seen as  the property of being “resilient”, as proposed by kevin kelly in his famous publication,  “out of control: the new biology of machines, social systems, and the economic world” (kelly,  ). according to ieeeieee .  terminology, “a distribution system interconnects basic service set (bss) to build a premise-wide network that allows users of mobile equipment to roam and stay connected to the available network resources” . similar circumstance occurs in nature, and there are plenty of examples  depicting this type of system, such as, a swarm of birds, a school of fish, or a group  of ants. all these examples work in a similar fashion to collectively form a relatively  bigger and abstract object composed of numerous small but smart entities in order  to conduct their mission efficiently. to learn from nature is one of the main principles  this research obeys, and collective intelligence is one of the key to initiate this journey.  not only the inspiration from the birds, fish, and bees pertaining to their swarming  character form an intelligent entity, but also the cells inside plants or animals with their  communication protocols and embedded information literally form intelligent mature  collectives. this principle should be examined for achieving the ultimate feature  that interactive architecture should inherit when one speaks about learning from  nature. “there	are	many	biological	reasons	for	swarm	behavior	related	to	efficiency	 in foraging, hydrodynamics and aerodynamics, protection and reproduction…” (fox,  michael, & kemp, miles,  ). the other benefit is that each of the single entity can  afford to be less intelligent but with relatively simple relationship and communication  abilities since they can eventually form an intelligence beyond what one singular entity  possesses. “the rules of response can be very simple and the rules for interaction between each system can be very simple, but the combination can produce interactions that	become	emergent	and	very	difficult	to	predict.	the	more	decentralized	a	system	is,	 the more it relies on lateral relationships, and the less it can rely on overt commands”  please check the webpage of webopedia: on-line tech dictionary for it profession for the definition of “distri- bution system”: http://www.webopedia.com/term/d/distribution_system.html. toc hypercell (fox, michael, & kemp, miles,  ). in accordance with this, the swarm behavior  system is considered as strategic choice for developing interactive architecture to  either sense and actuate locally, and to produce emergent behavior which affects the  entire form from a bottom up perspective. this modular componential principle is  extremely akin to how biological entities are composed. this is also the reason why  “agent based modeling” is so crucial both from software simulation and hardware for  developing interactive architecture. “an agent-based model (abm) is one of a class of computational models for simulating the actions and interactions of autonomous agents (both individual or collective entities such as organizations or groups) with a view	to	assessing	their	effects	on	the	system	as	a	whole” . therefore, the notion of  “space is computation” has once again been brought forth here with the introduction  of swarm behavior. by giving up the idea of making a powerful centralized computer  taking care of all the adaptations of a building, the ultimate goal that interactive bio- architecture should be composed is thus reformulated to hosting singular architectural  components with specific assigned tasks, which embody simple intelligence aided  cells. in this case, the body, the sensor and the brain are all integrated in one entity.  also, with its interactive capabilities of sensing, computing and actuating, this  emergent architecture will become a holistic sensitive object which is akin to a true  living architectural “hyperbody” in a relatively large scale. § . conclusion in this chapter, the discussions addressing philosophical, social, medium,  technological, virtual/real, interaction, and distributed control system have been  broadly covered within the context of establishing “the relationship between body and space”. the idea of body extensions using artificial technologies, people become  highly connected through the surface of body without organs which also correlates  to the cyberspace notion where the omnipresent internet exists. this inevitable trend  with the development of advanced technologies has started to blur the boundary  between virtual and real, making people co-exist in at least two parallel universes.  the issue of interaction comes to the fore with the advent of virtual reality technology  wherein the discussion around interaction, both in virtual and real spaces gains prime  importance. since space is always the major topic of architectural design, there is no  please check the webpage to understand more details of agent-based modeling (abm): https://en.wikipedia. org/wiki/agent-based_model toc   body conjunction = wavering between actual and virtual spaces way to ignore the design requirements from both virtual and real counterparts and  it has become a crucial task to create a transition in between. from the architectural  design point of view, the interactions taking place have also shifted in scale. in the  beginning, the skin (a surface) of the building was mostly used as an information  vehicle transmitting messages in a one directional communication to the observer.  with wearable gadgets like the google glass (another surface), the interaction smoothly  went to the next phase of “augmented reality” which combines virtual reality as a  display and overlaying it in the real world thus bringing one close to real-life. with  the new technological developments of such wearable gadgets, it potentially extends  the possibility of bringing our natural instincts and senses back as marshall mcluhan  reminded us. therefore, it is not only critical to focus on vision, but also the full sensory  perceptions afforded by the body and human movements/gestures to reach the goal  of creating tangible interactions in space to create an immersive experience. however,  there was a long period of time when architects assigned more attention to adaptive  skin systems and its relation with the surrounding environmental conditions. the  local environmental condition was used as the input parameters to drive the opening  or closing of façade elements in order to optimize the most suitable/comfortable  environmental conditions. although most projects focused on developing adaptive  skins used electronic motorized solutions, people now tend to believe that smart  materials will be the next ideal step for developing interactive/adaptive actuation  systems. meanwhile, the trend of interaction has shifted its focus from addressing  environmental parameters to requirements of the users themselves. this enhances  the possibility for people to own and effectively reside in an intelligent re-configurable  space, which can adapt to their activity patterns and bio-rhythms. following this trend,  a distributed system both in terms of decentralized computational processing and  modular componential assemblies become quintessential to materialize the next  generation of interactive bio-architecture. cooperating with each low-level intelligent  architectural component with embedded sensors and actuators for performing  specific tasks, the whole architectural body can now become efficient, responsive, and  interactive owing to a bottom up decision-making protocol instead of a fully centralized  top-down demand based approach. this kind of collective intelligence based decision  making is omnipresent in nature and it not only exhibits in the form of swarms of  animal to perform variable tasks, but it also takes place inside the natural body for  conducting sophisticated tasks by the living cells starting from the growth period of the  embryo itself. the mystery behind a cell’s emergent behavior relates to the embedded  information in the dna, and how these triggers and informs each other to produce  proteins and take certain actions will be discussed in the following chapter. toc hypercell references addington, michelle & schodek, daniel. ( ). smart materials and new technologies: for the architecture and design professions. oxford: architectural press: an imprint of elsevier. anders, p. ( ). extending architecture throgh electronic media. in c. speed, & g. grinsted (eds.), vo d (pp.  - ). barthes, r. ( ). the death of the author. in s. heath (ed.), image, music, text (s. heath, trans., pp.  - ). london: fontana press. benedikt, m. ( ). cyberspace: the first steps. cambridge: the mit pressed. cicognani, a. ( ). on the linguistic nature of cyberspace and virtual communities. virtual reality society, ( ),  - . de kerckhove, d. ( ). the architecture of intelligence. basel: birkhäuser. deleuze, g. ( ). bergsonism. new york: zone books. deleuze, g., & guattari, f. ( ). anti-oedipus: capitalism and schizophrenia. londom: continuum. emmer, m. ( ). mathland from flatland to hypersurfaces. basel: birkhäuser. fox, michael, & kemp, miles. ( ). interactive architecture. new york: princeton architectural press. gibson, w. ( , july). burning chrome. omni, ( ), pp.  - . gibson, w. ( ). neuromancer. new york: ace books. kelly, k. ( ). out of control: the new biology of machines, social systems, & the economic world. new york:  basic books. kretzer, m. ( ). beyond performance. in m. kretzer, & l. hovestadt (eds.), alive: advancements in adaptive architecture (pp.  - ). basel: birkhäuser. leibniz, g. w. ( ). monadology. (j. bennett, trans.) continuum. retrieved from http://www.earlymodern- texts.com/assets/pdfs/leibniz b.pdf lévy, p. ( ). becoming virtual: reality in the digital age. (r. bononno, trans.) new york: plenum trade. mcluhan, m. ( ). the gadget lover: narcissus as narcosis. in m. mcluhan, understanding media: the exten- sions of man (pp.  - ). new york: mcgraw-hill. mcluhan, m. ( ). understanding media: the extensions of man. new york: mcgraw-hill. mcluhan, m., fiore, q., & agel, j. ( ). the medium is the massage. new york: bantam books. menges, a., reichert, s., & krieg o. d. ( ). meteorosensitive architecture. in k. m., & l. hovestadt (eds.),  alive: advancements in adaptive architecture (pp.  - ). basel: birkhäuser. miller, j. h. ( ). literature and virtual realities. in j. h. miller, on literature (pp.  - ). new york: rout- ledge. playboy interview: marshall mcluhan. ( , march). playboy, pp.  – ,  ,  - ,  ,  . stelarc. ( ). towards the post-human: from psycho-body to cyber-system. architectural design, ( / ),  - . wertheim, m. ( ). the pearl gate of cyberspace: a history of space from dante to the internet. london:  virago. toc   defining a novel meaning of the new organic architecture   defining a novel meaning of the  new organic architecture “machines are becoming biological and the biological is becoming engineered.” kevin r. kelly § . current developments and trends of bio- inspired/organic architecture. starting an overall investigation by categorizing current bio-inspired architectural design developments into “material”, “morphological”, and “behavioral” to explore a novel definition of the “new generation organic architecture”. at present, people are confronting the unprecedented unification of machine and  biology which has been revealed by the means of advancing industrial processes  towards the organic model. in his remarkable publication, “out of control: the new biology of machines, social systems, and the economic world” (kelly,  ), kevin  kelly makes an interesting observation that “machines are becoming biological and the biological is becoming engineered”. in other words, the clear boundary of machine vs  biology is blurring through current technological developments. in “out of control”,  kevin kelly has further made several explicit points to support his views, that industry  will inevitably adopt bio-inspired methods: – it takes less material to do the same job better. – the complexity of built things now reaches biological complexity. – nature will not move, so it must be accommodated. – the natural world itself—genes and life forms—can be engineered (and patented) just  like industrial systems. toc hypercell all the crucial points described above can be easily observed in the architectural  industry as well. each statement corresponds with material optimization, multi- disciplinary technologies, evolutionary processes, and genetic engineering which are all  involved in current digital architectural design developments. after years of evolution,  the developments of “organic architecture” have been now separated into various  research focuses which are distant from the original idea coined by the well-known  american architect, frank lloyd wright. a group of followers still insist on maintaining  wright’s original idea to develop buildings which are green and sustainable, they fit  or even blend into the surrounding environment as a whole. but since the power of  personal computers and sophisticated modeling software has become relatively easy to  access and is employed in all aspects of architectural design, various experiments have  been conducted in the last decade, which try to outline a number of new definitions  pertaining to “what are the essential ideas/principles of ‘organic architecture’?”.  nature has undoubtedly always been the greatest inspiration for the manmade  industry, technology, and architecture. this development has only escalated with the  assistance from computational technology over the last few decades. the thesis will  preview the pros and cons of current design developments under the big umbrella of  digital organic/bio-inspired architecture. this discussion will be categorized into three  major divisions: “morphological”, “material”, and “behavioral” owing to the different  focus of computational applications within each one of them. § . morphological § . . morphological development development pre and post computational assistance. instead of digging deeper into the level of thinking how natural objects, such as animal,  plants, and landscapes, are formed, architects and artists begin with imitating the  appearance of their shapes and analogously re-interpret and re-create them in the  design industry. early architecture examples depict natural forms on engraved layers  of columns or rooftop as ornaments on facades. but things started to changes in the  thcentury, as people started looking towards mimicking the shape of natural entities  and became curios about how these forms were made. for example, ernst haeckel  toc     defining a novel meaning of the new organic architecture as far back as   (haeckel,  ), illustrated living creatures including animals  and plants to study the morphology of natural entities, wherein he concluded that  the morphological development is not only influenced by internal factors but is also  impacted by the natural environment. or consider one of the famous references in  the domain of parametric architecture, “on growth and form” (thompson,  ),  by d’arcy thompson, who focused on analyzing natural forms and studying how to  generate them back in  . through time, several newcomers, such as antonio  gaudi, buckminster fuller, and frei otto all tried to re-generate natural shapes/forms  and apply them into architectural designs from different aspects in terms of their  material properties, geometry, and structure. at the time, there was no assistance from  computational technologies yet, which made their dedication and contribution all the  more admirable. since the application of computational technologies in architectural  design, architects have benefited heavily. however, during the initial phase of computer  aided design (cad), architects still fell into the trap of merely mimicking natural  shapes by using the  d modeling software. nonetheless, interesting buildings were  designed with this mentality of geometric modeling skill by architects during the  “deconstructivist” movement. some of the most prominent ones were designed by  the architects coop himm(l)blau, zaha hadid, and especially the projects of british  architecture firm, “future systems”. almost all the projects of future systems take  inspiration from the nature to design organically shaped architectures over many years.  these have been published in two books: “for inspiration only” (future system,  )  and “more for inspiration only” (future system,  ). the skin of the selfridges  department stores in birmingham  designed by future systems is one such example.  the project is inspired by the eyes of a fly, which, is also the inspiration for their  visionary project “the earth centre” ( http://www.earch.cz/cs/future-systems). § . . morphological development i = chaos theory_ the initial phase of computer aided bio-architecture design. after years of exploration in the field of  d modeling, greg lynn, an architect who has  both an architecture and philosophy background, developed a parametric thinking  approach by using computational techniques based on d’arcy thompson’s analytical  logic stated in “on growth and form” (thompson,  ). lynn used this to generate  please check the wiki page for more details about the selfridges department store by future system: https:// en.wikipedia.org/wiki/selfridges_building,_birmingham toc hypercell a parametric model of a house, called the “embryological house”. as a metaphor of  dna,   control points were able to flexibly manipulate to generate various curvilinear  shapes (blob) using different combinations of control point positions. after this,  an inevitable wave in both digital and bio-inspired architecture realms to push this  parametric thinking to new heights began. not only in architectural design, but all  other sciences are working hard on discovering benefits by following the principles  of nature: for deciphering the hidden code behind structures in nature, such as  the ways a plant grows, or the generation of a panther’s fur patterns…etc. people  intent on implementing algorithms discovered from nature to efficiently complete  their tasks developed genetic algorithms. the same holds true for architectural  design, as architects now attempt to introduce various technological tools like  parametric modeling and applied algorithms to architectural design, especially after  the development of “chaos theory” and its implications on computational design.  since chaos theory was discovered, multiple useful algorithms have been applied  in architectural designs for generating  d and  d patterns with the assistance of  computational techniques which could hardly be down with manual  d modeling  skills. alan turing who had been seen as the inventor of the contemporary computer  had a lifetime interest in biological morphogenesis. although turing could not  witness it himself, but years later, his ultimate dream seems to have come true since  the relationship between computation and biology has been tightly bound. fractals,  cellular automation, multi-agent systems…etc., which all work through complicated  mathematics algorithms, are able to be easily re-invented using current computational  technology. so, pioneering architects have taken these computational techniques as an  inspiration and are implementing them into their design projects. § . . morphological development ii = flourish developments amongst the young generation of architects implementing computational techniques within algorithms extracted from nature as a new organic bio-architectural design. biothing, founded by alisa andrasek, with her colleague, jose sanchez, has been heavily  experimenting with fractal algorithms, multi-agent systems and embodying them  in their design projects (figure  . ). these biological principles give the architects  chances to design generative rules from a bottom-up perspective similar to how  natural objects grow. “code sequences generate ‘immaterial forms of intelligence… coalescence between the organic and the inorganic” (andrasek,  ). in accordance  with alisa andrasek’s thought, computational technology bridges not only the material  toc   defining a novel meaning of the new organic architecture and immaterial but also helps with blurring the boundary between biology and the  artificial which is again akin to kevin kelly’s statement that “machines (architecture) are becoming biological”. theverymany can be seen as another pioneering group  established by marc fornes using computational simulations with recursive logic to  generate coral-like, vaporous membranes as a form-finding process. incorporating the  use of cnc machines, laser cutters, theverymany mostly built  :  pavilions using  sheet-like materials with bending or folding techniques to reinforce the structural  supports with simple plug-in/out assembly methods. like a living plant, the structure  was built up through materials as structure without any redundancy making the  pavilion have a sense of being an organism. michael hansmeyer mainly uses recursive  computation as well as subdivision methods to not only create several large-scale  organic but also slightly baroque-like architectural elements, such as columns and  grottos, and stated that “we	are	not	seeking	to	imitate	forms	of	nature	in	a	figurative	 manner, but instead we reference the processes of their evolution” (brayer, marie- ange,  ). michael’s point actually emphasized the major advantages in this phase  of morphological development that even when the logic was once taken from nature,  it is not simply a matter of reproducing exactly the same what already exists in nature,  on the contrary, the logic with the assistance of computational techniques should be  able to assist people to generate unexpected, optimized, but also beautiful forms and  shapes akin to natural objects. in other words, designers should shift their focus to  designing the principles of growth in architecture rather than sculpting the external  form. nervous system, another young design group was formed in   by jessica  rosenkrantz with both architecture and biology degrees and jesse louis-rosenberg  whose major is mathematics. their biology and mathematics backgrounds make them  a relatively strong team of researchers working on the design of natural patterns. they  focus heavily on the topic of “pattern”; not only patterns seen in natural organisms  but also patterns of growth. coupling with their professions, they executed digital  fabrication techniques, such as  d printing to realize their industrial design projects  from jewelry, lamps, the midsoles of sneakers, and even to a series of  d printed  necklaces and dresses called kinematics, which are all based on the natural growth  patterns they researched. the aforementioned groups are heavily experimenting with digital computational  techniques in architectural design. more groups can be listed here under this digital  form-finding umbrella with utilizing natural algorithms in architectural design, such as  andrew kudless’ matsys, matias del campo’s span, iain maxwell and david pigram’s  supermanoeuvre, who are making numerous fascinating contributions in this field of  design exploration. toc hypercell figure  .   turing pavilion by biothing (alisa andrasek + jose sanche) cooperating with dshape italy based on  the reaction-diffusion algorithms (source: biothing, https://vimeo.com/ ). one of the common points between the above pioneers in computational design  is that they use their knowledge to develop/modify the algorithms to fit their  designs, and most of them consider materialization as a post-design process, which  is totally opposed to how natural organisms develop. although they have heavily  employed digital fabrication to realize their prototypes and mock-ups, this process is  unintentionally akin to finding a materialization solution after generating the code in a  non-physical simulated universe. in other words, the approach of utilizing algorithms  in architectural design in this case is without considering material applications  from the very beginning. the positive aspect of this is that there is more freedom for  architects to visualize their designs via form-finding techniques and to focus on spatial  quality rather than worry too much about construction problems in the early design  stage. but, on the other hand, this is exactly the point where there has always been  challenges and doubts with their designs because they look more like visionary projects  than practical ones which can be actually built. it is not an easy task for architects to  solve these practical construction tasks in the early stage of design, but it is potentially  feasible to start putting the material or environmental factors as input values like  information of a biological embryo to build or even grow with the material properties  from the beginning as initial constraints. it is understandable that the above-listed  architects are confronting so many different difficult design questions and so they  pick their own focus on form-finding process with computational techniques without  worrying about applied materials and solving practical issues cleverly with their later  design stages. however, young architectural students might take their methods as a  given and misuse them with their designs only for generating theatricality, monstrous,  complicated forms and claim their projects are organic in nature. “algorithm” seems to  be the magic term to convince people their projects were based on logical translations  toc   defining a novel meaning of the new organic architecture from organisms to architecture, but as a term of art or nomenclature algorithms in  current architectural parlance are totally abusing the essence of mathematics derived  from living creatures. if one is not acknowledging the essential idea before applying  a specific algorithm, then it is relatively risky in architectural design and fears of  reducing the process to a sophisticated method for merely generating “good looking”  appearance for outer aesthetic purposes become very high. “algorithms” must be seen  as a growing pattern/principle of any organism to be respected and also intensively  included in the “design process”, not just some random formulas for making organic  shapes. in this case, the morphology is truly a process of morphogenesis instead of  morphological mimicry. “genetic algorithm”, as another almost magical term, has  always been seen as another ultimate solution to all the above doubts when utilizing  them in architectural design. since a “genetic algorithm” is a relatively special topic  closely related to this research’s design methodology, it will be intensively considered  after the discussions of three divisions of organic/bio-inspired architectural design  along with the major inspiration of this research as regards biological aspects. § . material § . . materialization with algorithms from the material aspect, several directions are inclusive to this special realm  with different focuses but highly related to the material system and also to digital  fabrication technology used here. several experiments can be seen as an extension  of the morphological approach which takes materials as a factor along with the  development of its unique generative algorithms. take ezct for example, in their  project of “chair model”,   prototypes were generated by the evolutionary algorithm  as a biological formation process with natural selection concerning both the material  and functional aspects. later on, with the “studies in recursive lattices” project, they  kept exploring the combination of developing the unique generative algorithm. in  their study, the recursive algorithm, collaborated with fiber-reinforced concrete as  a material system to reduce the redundancy of the useless volume of the materials.  a similar idea came across with joris laarman lab’s project, “bone furniture”,  collaborating with adam opel’s international technical development center is based  on the inspiration of claus mattheck’s research on the growth of plants and bones.  toc hypercell a series of  d optimization algorithms in charge of both constructing the main  structure lines and conducting the form optimization were employed in the design  process which is way beyond the mere imitation of the natural form in the art  nouveau period (brayer, marie-ange,  ). by considering the qualities of the  applied materials, the algorithms here aren’t merely used as a form-finding tool  without physical constraints but rather become a relatively reliable process engulfing  fabrication and construction. figure  .   bone chair by joris laarman (source: joris laarman lab, http://www.jorislaarman.com/work/ bone-chair/, the optimization process can be observed in the same webpage.). toc     defining a novel meaning of the new organic architecture § . . materialization with real organs figure  .   image on top is the design project “syncretic transplants” of tobias klein under the guidance of  marcos cruz. the bottom image is the “gaming console” derived from the film, the “existenz” (source from top  to bottom: ucl bartlett, https://www.bartlett.ucl.ac.uk/architecture/research/projects/neoplasmatic-design,  and http://acidemic.blogspot.nl/ / /death-to-realism-existenz-oculus-rift.html. the title of “materialization with real organs” applied in architectural design might  sound awkward or even too much science fiction, but it is somehow the simple  interpretation of “neoplasms” (cruz,  ) as claimed by marcos cruz, professor of  innovative environment in ucl. also known as the director of the biota lab in ucl,  marcos cruz revealed his idea of utilizing “synthetic biology” technology to transplant  real organs/flesh onto architecture bodies to make architecture eventually become  a semi-living object. in other words, the real flesh/tissue of an organ is the new  innovative material for building up purposeful bio-architecture. it is obvious that  “neoplasms” (cruz,  ) is a cross-disciplinary research involving diverse experts,  such as biologists, physicians, and engineers to realize his visionary idea. he implied  toc hypercell his “neoplasms” (cruz,  ) idea by taking the movie “existenz”  as a reference  where the organic virtual reality game consoles called game pods have replaced the  electronic ones and have to be attached to “bio-ports” inserted in the player’s spine.  these game pods have a flesh-like appearance which can be seen as the new material  which would be connected to the building through marcos’s perspective. in the movie,  with the bio-port inserted to the player’s spine, the organic game pods gradually  become parts of the player, which have three different phases which can be seen as  an evolving process also for the buildings of “neoplasms” (cruz,  ). within the  steps of “having flesh”, “being flesh”, and “becoming flesh”, the biologic transplanted  flesh emerges as a new material which will gradually blend into each other from both  biological and architectural angles to generate a so-called “semi-living” architecture  which actually responds as a living body instead of utilizing electric mechanisms to  imitate the makeup of living organs. hypothetically speaking, taking animals lungs for  examples, through advanced synthetic biology, numerous lungs can be implemented  onto the building’s façade to filter the air penetrating the façade and literally turn the  whole building into a semi-living space. this is the philosophical and advanced vision  of “organic architecture” from marcos cruz’s point of view. “protocell architecture” can be seen as an alternative branch of the “neoplasms” but  is relatively more practical in terms of its research approach. a series of experimental  projects entitled “protocell architecture” in the architecture design journal guest- edited by racheal armstrong and neil spiller explicitly showed several different  interpretations of the design idea of “what is protocell architecture?”. “protocell do not operate within the realms of biological processes that are associated with living systems, but are driven by primordial organizing forces—the laws of physics and chemistry” (spiller, neil & amstrong, rachel,  ). some try to culture artificial cells  to implement the sustainability of the space, for example, synthetic cells generating  energy for cultivating the electricity or heat of an interior space in a relatively natural  way (applied in philips beesley’s ‘the hylozoic series’ and his later series of projects);  some look into natural principles of physics and chemistry for the solutions from the  material world, such as development of inventing self-healing concrete (for example,  self-healing concrete by bacterial mineral precipitation of tu delft’s micro lab) . “the ‘protocell architecture’ can be thought of as an alternative arrangement of terrestrial chemistry that ultimately results in a new living system that has been ‘midwifed’ into existence by human design and technological innovation” (spiller, neil &  please check the webpage for more information about the film, existenz: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/existenz please check these webpages for more understandings about the “self-healing concrete”: http://www.citg. tudelft.nl/en/research/projects/self-healing-concrete/ and http://www.microlab.citg.tudelft.nl/. toc     defining a novel meaning of the new organic architecture amstrong, rachel,  ). as in protocell architecture, they address a lot of the existing  technology and attempt to push them to the extreme with the material, or to discover  new ways of scientific marriage generating a living system, unlike what marcos cruz  with his “neoplasms” (cruz,  ) idea was trying to do with an uncertain cyborg- kind of surgery between human and buildings. in the end of the introduction article  by neil spiller and rachel armstrong for the protocell architecture issue of the ad  (architectural design) journal, they even wrote a manifesto for protocell architecture  to fight against biological formalism. rachel armstrong believes that imitating nature  is not the ultimate approach, but to reproduce architecture should be akin to the way a  plant produces its fruits in nature. § . . materialization, biomimicry, and digital fabrication technologies figure  .   neri oxman’s gemini (source: neri oxman, http://www.materialecology.com/projects/details/ gemini#prettyphoto). toc hypercell two major series of experimental researches described here as examples are those by  professor neri oxman and professor achim menges who coincidently both have similar  ideas/interests not only on materiality but also on the logic of organisms’ growth  as well as integration with architectural application by means of digital fabrication  technology. in other words, they both look into the ways of growth of natural organisms  and apply these principles in architectural design as fundamentally based on  reproducing material’ properties along with compatible digital fabrication technology.  of course, they both have their own bio-inspired narratives and specific approaches of  digital fabrication. ms. neri oxman, a professor, is known as the director of the mediated	matter	group with the mit media lab, where she started her preliminary transdisciplinary research  between biology and technology from  . by extracting bottom-up principles of  how natural living creatures grow, she utilized computational techniques to simulate  growth pattern and employed digital fabrication methods, such as  d printing and  robotic arms based additive fabrication, to experiment with several prototypes of  synthetic materials. in the project “gemini” (figure  . ), a semi-anechoic chaise  lounge, neri oxman translated the geometry of the ornithogalum dubium’s flower’s  seed which has a star-like cellular shape interlocking with each other to tessellate  the overall form of the lounge, and with the distribution weight simulation ensuring  ergonomic comfort for a typical person’s weight, each of the generative cellular star- shapes reformed constantly to reach the gradient equivalence of the load bearing as  an optimization process. corresponding with the existing  d printing and cnc milling  techniques, each unique and complex generative cellular unit can relatively easily  be fabricated in accordance with the distributed loading simulation result. against  the existing architectural industrial production method of staying homogenous by  composing items of homogeneously defined forms and parts, neri oxman coined the  term “digital anisotropy” to denote the ability of the designer to strategically control  the density and directionality of material substance in the generation of form as nature  normally does (oxman, neri, firstenberg, michal, & tsai, elizabeth,,  ). based  on the above notion cooperating with rapid prototyping methods such as  d printing  technology of object ltd., neri oxman with her team developed several intimate  wearable art pieces corresponding with growth principles of related body parts. for  example, by simulating the approach of how hard tissue (skull) and the soft tissue  (skin and muscle) interact with each other to construct the head part of a figure, an  anisotropy helmet was generated with different thickness and density of material  composition to resemble a human organ. the thought of linking the material and the  production with the goal of functionality is somehow relatively common but brilliant in  nature. while the growth of an organism in nature, the material is always considered in  association with its’ functionality to adjust the density it will inherit and how this would  accommodate the method of producing it. this is core to what neri oxman would like  toc     defining a novel meaning of the new organic architecture to deliver to not only architects but also the general public in order for us to re-think the  means of design concerning the choice of materials, the suitable fabrication methods  of construction in terms of material properties, and the ultimate applied function by  fully utilizing the existing digital techniques. achim menges, professor and the head of icd (institute of computational design,  faculty of architecture and urban planning, university of stuttgart), also a pioneer  in the bio-inspired design field has looked into both biology and material science  with the integration of digital fabrication technology for years. since  , achim  menges with his research team began to deliver a research pavilion each year within  the bio-inspired notion of morphology which has intended to transfer the idea from a  theoretical paradigm to real construction practice. the morphogenesis idea of menges  is the linkage between the ecological capacities of material systems and environmental  modulations. “contemporary architectural design is still characterized by a clear separation and hierarchical conception of the creation of form, space and structure and its subsequent preparation for materialization. in contrast, the approach presented here seeks to employ computational processes for a higher level of integration of form generation and materialization” (menges,  ). it is akin to neri oxman’s  notion of integration concerning space, structure, and material as a whole while  designing a building like a natural organism. with the knowledge of morphogenesis  and the skills of computational technology, achim menges took advantage of material  properties and the constraints of robotic fabrication techniques to experiment  profoundly with the combination of biology and design. every annual research  pavilion has a unique biologic/morphological principle and is translated into actual  construction by utilizing specific application methods of robotic arms as a unique  fabrication process. for example, with the research pavilion in  , achim menges  and his team, took the morphological principles of a sea urchin’s structure, and with  numerous pressure bending testing of plywood strips as the applied materials, and  the computed calculations of the structural stability, eventually, the research pavilion  was merged into an integrated design. examining the exoskeleton of a lobster, instead  of normal hot-wire cutting, or  d printing techniques, in  , their team developed  a customized tool/head for robotic fabrication to weave the carbon and glass fiber  onto a temporary steel frame to build up the pavilion. in  , the latest version of  research pavilion, achim menges and his team investigated the natural segmented  plate structure of a sand dollar as a shell structure. taking timber plates as an essential  material, the challenge is to have a further understanding of its bending limitations  both theoretically and practically, and the applied linkage to the research of shell  structure. the other profound challenge is from the manufacturing point of view. for  this, the team invented novel robotic fabrication methods of sewing in order to connect  each bending plywood component to eventually compose the resulting timber shell  pavilion. wood and the fibers are the two major materials achim menges and his team  toc hypercell mostly addressed with their current robotic manufacturing experiments. moreover,  with his essential focus on material, achim menges also stepped into the exploration  of adaptive architecture. in his other two worlds, renowned projects of hygroscope and  hygroskin (discussed in chapter  ), by implementing the properties that the wooden  film can absorb and release the moisture in the air to morph its shape (inspired by the  pinecone), they developed moisture-driven openings, which, automatically adapt to  the surrounding environment without any electricity and mechanics. “nature as model. biomimicry is a new science that studies nature’s models and then imitates or takes inspiration from these designs and processes to solve human problems” (benyus,  ). broadly speaking, most of the bio-inspired designs can  be viewed as “biomimicry”. this is especially true of neri oxman or achim menges  who attempt to take their inspiration and learn from natural materiality and digital  fabrication perspectives to reveal the potential of implementing them into their  designs. their approach not only imitates the natural logic but also translate them  in accordance to natural materials selected. this, doubles the layers of complexity  but simultaneously increases the depth of their biomimicry based approach unlike  those who just literally use such approaches to mimic the appearance of natural  organisms. regardless of whether we consider neri oxman, or achim menges, and  their followers, they all seem to walk on a path searching for a perfect architecture body  optimally composed of natural materials with properties selected with the assistance  of simulations and digital manufacturing. this, is already a huge step in bio-inspired  architecture with one conflict as compared with living entities in nature. first, let’s  rule out the possibilities of self-division, self-replication based production logics  which can be found in nature, since, these can hardly be achieved by using current  artificial approaches in the physical architectural domain. the real paradox thus lies  in neglecting “the embedded dynamics of natural systems”; the external dynamic  property of the environment and the internal dynamics of metabolism and circulation  which all living creatures possess and confront. from this point of view, achim menges  has realized some ideas with his engineered wooden film experiments in relation  to moisture absorption, but to reach a fully adaptive body, it is still a relatively long  process of development. this is the key point to be considered: how do we enhance  our buildings to evolve from being statically optimized to dynamically optimized  akin to living organisms. so, to explicitly work on reversing this contradiction, some  architects have shifted their focus towards an autonomous swarm based thinking in  architectural design, intent to be relatively closer to the way in which natural entities  operate. instead of sculpting the natural form or taking certain natural mechanisms  applied as artificial technologies, this section has brought the bio-inspiration and its  implementation to a whole new level than merely studying the principles of the natural  system and re-creating the system with its nature-inspired design principles. toc     defining a novel meaning of the new organic architecture § . behavioral § . . more than form finding a swarm behavior should be more than just a trajectory of virtual agents meant for form finding in architectural design. when talking about “autonomous” applications in architectural design, one important  example is that of swarm behavior based design process of kokkugia. co-founded by  roland snooks and robert stuart-smith, kokkugia mostly use swarm behavior logic as  a form-finding tool to generate  d complex geometric space. by coding the swarm with  specific principles, an emergent self-organization process is initiated, which, frequently  results in a frozen fibrous tracing patterns. this is a common approach utilized by the  young generation of architects experimenting with autonomous behavior logics in  architectural design which, opposes theories of marcos novak’s liquid architecture  with its attempts to liquidize otherwise frozen architecture. although swarm behavior  as a form-finding process seems to now be mainstream in architectural design, the  section here will outline a different approach by literally harnessing architectural  elements as the agents of a swarm. this notion of designing an architectural  component as an agent of a swarm composing a building from a bottom up perspective  is in its initial phase and is not yet embodied completely in practice, but has great  potential to do so using the ongoing trends in technological development. § . . a swarm of smart autonomous entities swarm behavior, in the case of this research implies activation of agents to promote processes of self-organization and self-assembly driven by a set of collective principles followed by numerous smart autonomous entities. toc hypercell § . . . autonomous as transportation and assembly figure  .   flight assembled architecture by gramazio & kohler (source: ethz, gramazio & kohler research  and institute for dynamic systems and control, http://www.idsc.ethz.ch/research-dandrea/research-projects/ archive/flying-machine-enabled-construction.html ) one of the pioneering swarm simulation based projects was called “flight assembled architecture” by gramazio & kohler in  . gramazio & kohler was founded in  , and later in  , they found the first robotic laboratory in the renowned swiss  federal institute of technology (ethz, zurich) which started experimenting with  transdisciplinary computational design, new material exploration and  :  prototyping  with digital fabrication. although they are mostly known recently by their projects of  robotic arm manufacturing experiments, the “flight assembled architecture” can be  seen as the first autonomous robotic assembly project which took robotic applications  to the next level in architectural design. cooperating with raffaello d’andrea, the  professor of dynamic systems and control in ethz, also the co-founder of the kiva  system, they developed a hi-end system with a scenario of assembling a non-standard  building using hundreds of autonomous drones (gramazio, f., kohler, m., & d’andea,  toc     defining a novel meaning of the new organic architecture r.,  ) . the flying drones were akin to a flock of birds picking up bricks one by  one and putting them precisely on location in  d space to sequentially construct the  building. in the prototyping process, they used   flying drones which managed to reach  to   meters’ height with polystyrene modules which in reality should be   times  larger in scale to afford  ,  inhabitants homes in the residential tower. this project  showed great potentials for mimicking natural group activities as a physical swarm  instead of simulating the behavior behind the computer screen for generating static/ frozen building bodies. the drones were used as transportation and assembly robots/ tools but it implied near-term development of making each architectural component as  a drone-like module. in other words, each of these drones should be treated as smart  entities and as architectural components rather than just a device for transportation  and assembly. simply speaking, here the flying drones should “be” the architectural  components, like a bird in a flock to form a collective living form. § . . . autonomous as mobile/transformable components in architectural design spending years in developing programmable material, skylar tibbits set up his self- assembly lab under the mit media lab. the lab now has a great reputation, and is  known for its  d printing technology worldwide. skylar tibbits’ ultimate goal is to  find a way to merge the physical and digital as one that you can simulate but at the  same time program with the existing physical materials so as to match the resulting  simulation with the physical outcome. but here, it is interesting to look into his early  stage of research, which is relatively more akin to the componential and autonomous  modular idea while still using the process of self-assembly. from their self-assembly  units of  , macrobot, decibot, even their logic matter, a clear evolutionary process  can be observed. skylar tibbits at the time attempted to develop a modular component  which has automatic transformable mechanisms based connections in between. it is a  bottom-up idea to create/generate complexity out of simple geometric transformation  occurring in each component’s connection parts. akin to scaling-up a rubik snake,  each triangular shape could twist in any angle on every connection to make different  shapes. in other words, all of his projects including the self-assembly unit, macrobot,  decibot, or logic matters, have a regular default shape (the figure of a bird) and with  some freedom from the designed transformation mechanism (a function of flying)  regardless of whether they are electronic or manual, operating under certain principles  (a separation distance in order not to crash into each other), they can self-assemble,  please check the video for the generic idea of “flight assembled architecture” project: https://vimeo. com/ toc hypercell resulting in various expected and unexpected formations (a flock of birds dynamically  composing variable forms). even though skylar tibbits has contributed toward the  development of programmable materials, but in his c-strain project as a playable  reconfigurable sculpture structure or even one of his latest project’s, aerial assemblies,  which are like flying balloons, one can still trace how his autonomous assembly ideas  are realized in his projects. his experiments in materials are crucial to him because it is  possible for him to develop natural mechanisms/robots without any electronic devices.  the morphing effects acquired from programming material properties are however,  still relatively fragile to be implemented as supporting structures employed for spatial  reconfiguration purposes (the most difficult challenge in interactive architectural  designs). but if these natural mechanisms were applied to relatively smaller modules  as a componential system, then the ultimate form can be potentially more effective  in terms of their reconfiguration and self-assembly following a bottom-up logic akin  to the proposal of replacing bricks by flying drones in gramazio & kohler’s flight  assembled architecture. § . . . a vision of autonomous emergent systems theodore spyropoulos and his brother stephen founded “minimaform” in   and  since then have dedicated themselves to researching on computational, parametric,  and interactive design exploring intimate relationships amongst things, objects, and  people. in  , with the “petting zoo” project, they intended to mimic an animal-like  object formed as an elephant trunk hung from the ceiling as an interactive installation.  owing to the approaching movements of the visitors detected by the camera on top,  the microcontroller made decisions based on pre-set code to trigger the movements  of the   trunks to produce an emotional and ambiguous reaction in the visitors. they  are among a few architects who have started to bring the topic of emotion into spatial  design. in “petting zoo”, the atmosphere of interaction between people and life like  objects created vivid impressions of the space to enhance the idea of communication  between space and people. this innovative notion of creating spaces with emotions  will be further discussed in the next chapter. other than discovering the possibilities of  mimicking natural living things and the trend to transform the space into a relatively  sensitive and emotional environment, theodore spyropoulos as a director of aadrl  (design research lab, architecture association) has educated and delivered a notion  of bio-inspired modular componential system to his supervised students since then.  in recent years, theodore’s studio has several innovative experimental projects akin  to skylar tibbit’s early phase of research that worked with modular systems with  mechanisms to build a self-assembly system for architectural design from bottom up.  toc   defining a novel meaning of the new organic architecture “roto”, “anti-bot”, “hypercell”, “nomad” and “owo”  are all projects conceived with  the notion of mobile/transformable architectural components following self-assembly  logic to construct “zero-occupied spaces”. instead of the traditional brick-like  architectural components, the essential components of these project either have the  ability to be transformable or mobile and can geometrically re-configure to construct  immediate response. zero-occupied implies that when needed, the architectural  components can move to the required location to achieve the task but can be dismissed  afterwards. all these mobile/transformable components can be once again interpreted  as agents of a swarm which have relatively simple intelligence with certain freedom of  movement following a set of emergent rules. the only critique of their project is that  almost all the projects appear in a pixelated fashion to regenerate a typical shape of an  object or building without further geometrical explorations. when speaking of “robotic buildings”, people might directly refer to robotically  “manufactured” projects, however, autonomous swarm based robotic componential  systems applied to architectural design should be seen aptly as “robotic building”.  with the development of current technologies, such as artificial intelligence, it is to  be expected that these small entities can become even smarter and dynamic and a  lot more efficient while they act like real living entities. “bio-inspired” design and its  implications can thus be now seen from a very different perspective, wherein, the  collective intelligence of physical agents can now truly mimic processes of natural  growth, self-organization, and emergence. kevin kelly in his publication “out of control” has already stated that “these same principles of biologics are now being implanted in computer chips, electronic communication networks, robot modules, pharmaceutical	searches,	software	design,	and	corporate	management,	in	order	that	 these	artificial	systems	may	overcome	their	own	complexity” (kelly,  ). in terms  of bio-inspired or organic architecture, there should be more and younger and bold  architects ready to contribute their talents in this cross-disciplinary realm of bio- inspired architectural design. “when the technology is enlivened by biology we get artifacts that can adapt, learn, and evolve. when our technology adapts, learns, and evolves then we will have a neo-biological civilization” (kelly,  ). it is this cutting- edge future where there is no clear boundary between biology and mechanisms/ artificial like a cybernetic community that people are heading towards. please check the aadrl website to have a glance of “roto”, “anti-bot”, “hypercell”, “nomad”, and “owo”:  http://drl.aaschool.ac.uk/projects/. toc hypercell § . from static to dynamic optimization from static (genetic algorithm based form finding approach) to dynamic (living creature-like interactive systems). following up from the previous discussion about the application of implementing  natural algorithms in architectural design for optimal form-finding, using genetic  algorithms instead, for mimicking natural evolutionary processes to arrive at an  optimal form could be seen as a more convincing approach. however, the research,  instead, attempts to illustrate a few critical points concerning the use of genetic  algorithms especially in the field of interactive architecture. a genetic algorithm  is defined as a heuristic search that mimics the process of  natural selection using mathematical optimization processes. since d’arcy thompson  started looking into the relationship between mathematics and morphogenesis,  experts like him from diverse research fields have attempted to decipher codes in  nature using math, to see how living things are formed. ultimately, john h. holland  with his team was able to translate charles darwin’s ideas on “natural selection &  survival of the fittest” in his influential publication “on the origin of species by means of natural selection” (darwin,  ) into a computational algorithm, which is since  known as the “genetic algorithm”. the genetic algorithm is the one focusing on the  purpose of obtaining the efficient “optimizing solution” by learning from nature. “genetic algorithms initiate and maintain a population of computational individuals, each of which has a genotype and phenotype. sexual reproduction is simulated by random	selection	of	two	individuals	to	produce	‘parents’	from	which	‘offspring’	are	 generated. by using crossover (random allocation of genes from the parents’ genotype) and	mutation,	varied	off	springs	are	generated	until	they	fill	the	population.	all	parents	 are discarded, and the process is iterated for as many generations as are required to produce a population that has among it a range of suitable individuals to satisfy the fitness	criteria” (weistock,  ). michael weinstock, one of the pioneers addressing  natural morphogenesis has written this explicit description of the genetic algorithm.  simply said, the algorithm is running a process that keeps looking for a solution  relatively close to the defined “fitness” criteria via iterations through a constant  generational production process of selection, crossover, and leaving a small proportion  of mutational chance as a disturbance. the searching process terminates either by  please check the webpage for more information about “genetic algorithm”: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ge- netic_algorithm toc   defining a novel meaning of the new organic architecture the pre-set maximum numbers of generations produced (terminating searching), or  converge into a certain value (result not close to the optimal fitness), or ultimately a  satisfactory fitness level is reached. in terms of architectural applications, the genetic  algorithm has been broadly utilized in searching the optimal solutions for well-defined  form-finding problems, such as sustainability, reducing the materials used, structural  analysis, and thermal and lighting performance, which are easier to set up with the  required fitness in each of these individual cases. nonetheless, these problems are pre- embedded in constructing static buildings, which, is not quite relevant, when it comes  to designing “interactive architecture”. even discussing designing static buildings by  using genetic algorithms, seems to work the opposite way of how nature operates.  it is understandable to take advantage of computational technology to accelerate  evolutionary processes. but buildings are like plants and animals which are all highly  related to their environment. it is thus not convincing to have a “fitness” criteria which  is fixed within a given environmental context. a building is a complex object which  has many demanding requirements, and a designer using genetic algorithms has to  select a certain number of these criteria as fitness values in order to achieve multiple  optimization. however, the number of fitness parameters which can be assigned  has its limitations in order to manage computational speed. if one considers all the  demands surrounding the design of a building as fitness criteria, then it might result in  the production of a relatively average geometric solution, such as spheres, and thus the  outcome loses out on the production of unique architectural qualities. it thus sounds relatively “objective” to use genetic algorithms to do calculations and  produce an optimized solution, while, in fact, most of the demands are still designed  subjectively following the designers’ intentions (such as the maximum population  of individuals in the first generation, the number of iterations, and the crucial  selections of the fitness parameters). moreover, the so-called optimized results are  relative optimizations, not absolute. genetic algorithms here provide a method of  creating a relatively optimized body(building) suitable for handling a certain number  of fitness requirements, which is perfect for optimizing construction and controlling  material usage. however, in terms of interactive architecture, with its inherent need  to be dynamic in nature, it is not suitable to use this bio-inspired algorithm, since an  interactive construct would need real-time optimization based on the slightest change  in its context. in terms of “interactive building design”, this is also the reason why this  research would rather investigate the role of “genes” as the fundamental building block  which regulates morphogenesis. in “deleuze and the use of the genetic algorithm in architecture” (delanda,  ), manuel delanda pointed out a crucial issue pertaining  to the role of an architect in algorithm-driven-design: “thus, architects wishing to use this new (computational) tool must not only become hackers (so that they can create the code needed to bring extensive and intensive aspect together) but also be able ‘to hack’ biology, thermodynamics, mathematics, and other areas of science to tap into toc hypercell the necessary resources” (delanda,  ). as interpreted, architects should not only  remain fixated to extracting principles from other scientific fields and applying them  directly for generating forms. instead, they should further understand the essential  notions of applied sciences and translate them into design strategy. the other issue  brought out here is that this research does not oppose the idea of optimization, but  suggests that optimization should address the context of the dynamic environment.  in other words, rather than running heavy calculations to obtain a singular optimized  result, one should seek for dynamic/real time optimization of designs to deal with a  constantly changing environment and the diverse individuals which live in it. real-time  interactive architectures, which address issues of sustainability and diverse spatial  requirements, can actively sense and adapt to the environment and user’s needs.  eventually, dynamic optimization/customization can be potentially achieved with the  development of computational and mechanic technologies within architectural design.  and this is why architects will eventually “hack” into other related fields. § . evo-devo (evolutionary development biology), the inspiration of new organic bio-architecture evo-devo (evolutionary development biology), the hidden secret of morphogenesis and the inspiration of new organic bio-architecture. instead of directly extracting and applying principles from genetic engineering into  architectural design without any further interpretations and translations, this research  attempts to focus more on extracting hidden secrets behind genes to understand  natural morphogenesis. genes, shall be studied and decoded to develop a novel design framework for living creature-like interactive bio-architectures. evolutionary  development biology (evo-devo) is a genre of biology, which, looks into the diverse  developmental processes in different organisms and discovers how they evolve  according to gene regulation principles, unique to them. by revealing a great deal about  the otherwise invisible genes and the simple rules that shape an animal form and its  evolution, evo-devo introduces the keys to understanding form and its development  via a process initiated from a single-cell egg to a complex, multi-billion-celled animal  body. there was a long period of time that people could only discover that forms  do change, and that natural selection is the driving force, but there was nothing to  outline how forms change (carroll,  ). after decades of research in embryology and  evolutionary biology as two separate sciences, the discovery, that similar structures in  animals, such as eyes, limbs, and hearts, were governed by the same genes, made these  toc     defining a novel meaning of the new organic architecture two disciplines eventually came together to create a new discipline called evolutionary  development biology (evo-devo). this idea that all animals share the same master  gene toolkit is comparable to parametric design thinking which has caught much  attention from architects who are eager to learn from biology and nature. this research  can be seen as a similar effort, which attempts to extract the most crucial and inspiring  principles from evo-devo to create a new organic bio-architecture paradigm. this research gained a clear insight and numerous interesting inspirations from  the publication, the “endless form most beautiful” by sean b. carroll, who is at the  forefront of evolutionary development biology. the title, “endless form most beautiful”  was a quote from charles darwin’s biological classic, “the origin of species” (darwin,  ), which gave an explicit paradigm of darwin’s pioneering belief back in    that the descent of all forms arise from one (or a few) common ancestor. this, has been  further proven and supported by the evidence of the current research from evolutionary  development biology. this leads us to the crucial and fundamental idea propagated by  evo-devo that all animals share the same gene toolkits but have differences in terms  of the number of genes and their regulations, which is responsible for the diversity of  animals worldwide. based on this essential fundamental notion, this research is able  to extract several useful and logical principles, which are interpreted and listed as three  major and interrelated topics: “from simple to complex”, “geometric information distribution” and “on/off	switch	&	trigger”. § . . simple to complex in terms of results, every complex organic body is composed of numerous amounts  of simple and self-similar elements based on information obtained from the gene’s  regulations (which is the on/off mechanism which will be mentioned later in the  section of “on/off switch &trigger”). it is apparent from observation of the spine  structure of the vertebrates which can be varied in numbers from a dozen in frogs,  thirty-three in humans, to a few hundred in a snake (figure  . , left); and diverse  in similar shapes of the cervical, thoracic, lumbar, sacral, and caudal vertebrae. this  modular design with repeated assemblages of similar parts, according to sean carroll,  is the success of evolutionary diversification in biology. this principle can be applied to  architectural designs to initiate a radical design revolution. people are easily trapped  into believing that complex objects should be composed of complicated elements,  but taking a closer look at living objects in nature, it becomes apparent that they are  all composed of relatively simple and self-similar elements, a core principle behind:  “from simple to complex”. the “complicated” and the “complex” have slightly different  toc hypercell interpretations here in that the complicated leans towards a confusing and puzzling  situation where it is hard to find the solution while complex is more akin to a logical  combination of simple elements. this “simple to complex” principle relates to kas  oosterhuis’ “one building one detail” idea in architectural design; “…any building should have only one single parametric detail mapped on all surface, subject to a range of parameters that render the values of the parametric system unique in each local instance, thus creating a visual richness and a variety that is virtually unmatched by any traditional building technique” (oosterhuis, towards a new kind of building,  ). here, one can trace a common idea, seen both in nature and kas’s notion of  architecture; simplicity is not only applied to the shape of a basic element but also to  the logic of the system from how the elements were generated and how the ultimate  body was assembled. “simplicity is thus intrinsically tied to multiplicity” (oosterhuis,  towards a new kind of building,  ). with the differences in the numbers, and  diverse but similar morphological elements, there are plenty of geometric outcomes  which can be generated within this “simple to complex” logic from an architectural  design viewpoint. furthermore, if the evo-devo idea of all animals sharing the  same gene toolkits is taken as an inspiration, then it is easy to relate to the current  parametric world in architectural design. however, it would be a better fit if we consider  this from a modular/self-similar componential design perspective. such a simple  systematic approach will be further discussed in the “on/off	switch	&	trigger” section,  which clarifies how architectural designs can learn from the morphogenesis of an  animal gene’s intelligent mechanisms. § . . geometric information distribution the process of several cleavages, gastrulation, progressing into forming three main  layers of the embryo; the innermost(endoderm), middle(mesoderm), and outer  layers, eventually leads to the development of establishing regions within these layers  to form localized tissues and organs in the embryo’s body based on the “fate map”  (figure  . , middle up). like an instruction, a “fate maps reveals that, at some point in development, cells ‘know’ where they are in an embryo and to what tissue or structures they belong” (carroll,  ). like making a geographical map, through a precise  dividing process of defining poles, axes, longitudes, latitude as a coordinate system, a  fate map will let the genetic switches make marks on the precise coordinates as a gps  system defining the body segments and divisions of diverse cell types, where different  organs and tissues belong. repeating the subdivision process, each organ and body  part will be refined with more details, locally generated via cell interactions besides the  global specifications of the fate map. the formation process of an organism is relatively  toc   defining a novel meaning of the new organic architecture simple than what most people think, in terms of logic, which fits exactly the quotation  from the physicist jean perrin, “to explain the complicated visible by some simple invisible”. as mentioned before, to directly extract principles from biology and reuse  them in architectural design without translation is not the approach of this research.  besides, it is not the ultimate goal to re-create a new species of animal. although the  geometric formation process is quite fascinating and intriguing, this research rather  focuses on how the information process behind formation is assigned and distributed.  a fate map works as a global information protocol for cells as regards the kind of  cellular differentiation and specialization tasks they need to undertake by demarcating  different functional zones. this can be seen as several power-/guide-lines in an initial  stage of design to define certain areas for specific functions either based on internal  functional influences or physical external environmental impacts. after this, the local  information distribution mostly happens while building up the pattern of the hair,  scales, fur or feathers. a quick and simple example from the publication of “endless forms most beautiful” can clearly explain this bottom-up idea: in an initially uniform  field of cells (figure  . , mid-down  ), two cells assigned by the fate map begin to  differentiate and inhibit cells in contact with them from doing so (figure  . , mid- down  ). cells in other regions begin to differentiate and inhibit their nearest neighbors  (figure  . , mid-down  ), which eventually establishes a regularly spaced pattern of  cells (figure  . , mid-down  ) (carroll,  ). regardless of the self-assembly or self- adaptive applications in designing interactive architectures, this kind of bottom-up  information distribution protocol can be perfectly implemented by referring back to the  aforementioned logic of simple-complex modular componential idea while designing  an intelligent interactive architecture based on a swarm logic. § . . on/off	switch	&	trigger the gene switch (on/off switch & trigger), plays an important role in regulating  the formation of an organism. for example, the switches inside the category of the  hox gene tell an organism where and when to evolve different body parts in time.  the hox gene is a collective term including several different types of genes holding a  specific morphological task to turn on the gene switches. for example, the dll(distal- less) genes are in charge of limb formation, pax-  genes play crucial roles in eyes  development, tinman genes are dedicated to the formation and patterning of the  heart, and the ubx genes control the differences of the arthropods’ forewings and  hindwings. but these hox genes can also play roles in different development of the  formation process and that is the reason why the body becomes complex. take dll  genes and butterflies for example, the major task of dll genes are generating the  toc hypercell limb formation, but a moment later, while it goes to the development of the fur on  the wings, the dll genes will shift their tasks to regulate the pattern of the wings.  in other words, these genes switches hold a major and other additional tasks and  precisely switch them on and off to generate different cells and proteins through time  to sculpt the ultimate body. taking a closer look at the switch control, “endless form most beautiful” once again gives a great example of how this gene switch works. the  switch is basically controlled by “lactose”. when lactose is absent, the gene switch is  off, because the lac repressor binds to the switch and represses gene transcription. in  contrast, when lactose is present, the gene switch flips on and the repressor falls off  the switch to trigger the transcription and translation for the enzyme production. this  is the exact process of how dna transcripts to mrna and translates it for producing  demanded proteins (carroll,  )(figure  . , right). these gene switch turn on and  off to trigger the enzyme production process in a highly efficient manner. surprisingly,  only around   percent of the dna regulates an organism’s formation process through  time to produce the intricate complexity of mature animal bodies. this switch, on  and off trigger is on one hand akin to the   and   calculation logic of computational  technology. there is another instance of the on/off switch to exhibit how simple but  powerful this intelligent mechanism can be through the expression of the hox  gene.  the on/off regulations of the hox  genes defines the neck length of different animals.  for example, the position of hox  in a goose is longer than a chicken and a mouse, and  there is no space between hox  to hox  gene in a snake which makes a snake have  no neck in its morphogenesis. it is because of the layering of nested combinations  of the gene switches that make all animal bodies refined and sophisticated in terms  of ultimate shape. “it is by ‘computing’ the inputs of multiple proteins that switches transformation complex sets of inputs into the simpler outputs as three dimensional on/off	patterns	of	gene	expression…” (carroll,  ), which can be seen as a simple- to-complex expression in terms of an organic generating system. one more crucial  morphological idea of this on/off logic is that it takes dynamic movement of the body  after they were built into account. in other words, the gene switches are not only taking  care of the formations but also considering the functions, which the forms will afford  afterwards. ubx gene is the gene which regulates the difference between the hindwing  and forewing of a fruit fly. the ubx gene turns off during the formation of the forewing  making it larger, flat, venated and powerful which is beneficial for flight, while the ubx  gene turns on making the hindwing to balance by sensing and correcting yaw, pitch  and roll during flight (carroll,  ). this particular principle of taking animating  movements of the forms into account makes it even more intriguing and fascinating,  when we try applying it to interactive bio-architectural. toc   defining a novel meaning of the new organic architecture epidermis trigger on dna mrna protein blood kidney somite heart nervous system notochord endoderm global = local = . . . . simple to complex geometric information distribution on/off switch & trigger figure  .   diagrams illustrating the fundamental principles extracted from evo-devo by this research.  “simple to complex” referring to the modular elements idea of constructing animal bodies; “geometric  information distribution” indicating the internal communication globally as a fate map system, or locally as  neighboring distribution protocols; “on/off switch & trigger” implying the essential logic of building complex  animal bodies by following relatively simple rules as an on/off (  and  ) logic to produce proteins as demanded. § . conclusion this chapter starts with a discussion of how the gap between the domain of biology  and engineering is diminishing and how this helps in addressing the question: “what is	the	definition	of	the	organic	bio-architecture”. the chapter further looks into diverse  developments in the realm of bio-inspired architecture design, especially the ones  utilizing contemporary computational technology, but hold different unique design  perspectives. some of them focus on generating forms with algorithms inspired from  nature, some work on material properties with digital fabrication techniques, some  want to push swarm robots further as architectural components, and some literally  utilize genetic algorithms as an optimized form-finding process. this research takes  its’ bio-inspiration mostly from a novel biological field, the evolutionary development  toc hypercell biology (evo-devo) to see what are the crucial and fundamental principles behind  natural morphogenesis of animal bodies. instead of literally/directly employing  the technology from evo-devo, it seeks to take the inspiring principles of evo-devo  and re-creates the useful parts and rules applied to architectural design with the  assistance of computational technology. this concept will lead to a summary of all  the aforementioned ideas of each chapter by generating the design framework for the  bio-inspired interactive architecture entitled “hypercell” which will be thoroughly  illustrated in the next chapter. this research believes that the ultimate goal of  interactive architecture is to become an authentic organic architecture which can  pro-actively adapt and react to the environment as well as the users demands. to  achieve this goal, it is inevitable to understand the morphological principles of living  creature. by learning from evo-devo, based on the fundamental idea of all animals  sharing the same gene toolkits, this research has extracted three major directions/ principles awaiting to be deployed into new organic and interactive bio-architectural  design: “simple to complex”, “geometric information distribution”, and “on/off	 switch and trigger”. akin to the parametric idea in today’s digital architectural design,  it is relatively easier to understand the idea of taking the gene regulations as the  combinations of parameters for generating architectural design. furthermore, “simple to complex”, “geometric information distribution”, and “on/off	switch	and	trigger”  can be simplified and interpreted as essential characteristics of modular componential  systems, bottom-up information protocols, and  /  switches for triggering formation  assembly logic. in other words, the design framework developed by this research  should lead to an intelligent componential idea compatible with the swarm behavior  logic in terms of self-assembly and bottom-up local communication protocols, and its  ultimate geometric form should be generated with simple on/off logic considering the  movements which need to be animated. references andrasek, a. ( ). open synthesis// toward a resilient fabric of architecture. log, ,  - . benyus, j. m. ( ). biomimicry: innovation inspired by nature. new york: harpercollins publishers inc. brayer, marie-ange. ( ). natur and artifice: affects and artifacts in naturalized architecture. in m.-a. &.  brayer, naturalizing architecture (pp.  - ). orléans: edition hyx. carroll, s. b. ( ). endless forms most beautiful: the new science of evo devo. new york: w. w. norton &  company, inc. cruz, m. ( ). synthetic neoplasms. architectural design: neoplasmatic design, ( ),  - . darwin, c. ( ). on the origin of species by means of natural selection. london: j. murray. delanda, m. ( ). deleuze and the use of the genetic algorithm in architecture. in n. leach (ed.), designing for a digital world. new york: wiley-academic. future system. ( ). for inspiration only. new york: john wiley & sons. future system. ( ). more for inspiration only. new york: john wiley & sons. gramazio, f., kohler, m., & d’andea, r. ( ). flight assembled architecture. in m.-a. &. brayer, naturalizing architecture (pp.  - ). orléans: edition hyx. toc   defining a novel meaning of the new organic architecture haeckel, e. ( ). art forms in nature: the prints of ernst haeckel . munich: prestel. kelly, k. ( ). out of control: the new biology of machines, social systems, & the economic world. new york:  basic books. menges, a. ( ). morphospaces of robotic fabrication. in s. n. brell-Çokca, & j. braumann (eds.), rob | arch : robotic fabrication in architecture, art, and design (pp.  - ). berlin: springer. oosterhuis, k. ( ). towards a new kind of building. rotterdam: nai publisher. oxman, neri, firstenberg, michal, & tsai, elizabeth,. ( ). digital anisotropy: a variable elasticity rapid  prototyping platform. virtual and physical prototyping (vpp),  - . spiller, neil & amstrong, rachel. ( ). it’s a brand new morning. architectural design: protocell architecture, ( ),  - . thompson, d. ( ). on growth of form. london: cambridge university press. weistock, m. ( ). morphogenesis and mathematics of emergence. in m. hensel, a. menges, & m. weinstock  (eds.), architectural design, emergence: morphogenetic design strategies, volume , issue  (vol.  , pp.  - ). new york: wiley. toc hypercell toc   hypercell: a bio-inspired design framework for real-time interactive architectures hypercell:  a bio-inspired design framework for  real-time interactive architectures “our furniture might someday be comprised of a multitude of interconnected assemblies of robotic modules that can reconfigure	themselves	for	a	variety	of	desires.” michael fox & miles kemp “liquid architecture is an architecture that breathes, pulse, leaps as one form and ends as another…it is an architecture that opens to welcome me and closes to defend me.” marcos novak § . architecture as body = ideal conceptual principles of interactive architecture in accordance with a bio- inspired logic. toc hypercell dna embryo cell division infancy mature body info mrna gravity switch regulation trigger switches proteins function realtime / reaction/ reflection subjective essentials **design intestion **geometry **color **number objective factors **exterior **interior repeated **self-organization **programmable **bottom-up **muti-functions **self-assembly **adaption **re-configuration **environment sensitive ** user oriented figure  .   diagram illustrating the analog comparison as a conceptual design idea of having an “evolving  architecture” akin to natural growing processes. the mature architecture body would be as a human figure  ultimately interacting with the surrounding environment and additionally fulfilling the user’s demands as  functional requirements. this research believes that understanding the relationship between interactive  architecture and the principles of biology will become a mainstream research area in  future architectural design. aiming towards achieving the goal of “making architecture as organic bodies”, almost all the current digital techniques in architectural design  are executed using computational simulation: digital fabrication technologies  and physical computing. based on its’ main biological inspirations, evolutionary  development biology (evo-devo), this research intends to propose a novel bio-inspired  design thinking wherein architecture should become analogs to the growing process  of living organisms (figure  . ). instead of being born from static optimization  results most of the architecture seems content at aiming for nowadays, this research  is looking towards designing dynamic architectural bodies which can adapt to the  constantly changing environments and are thus seeking optimization in real-time. in  other words, architecture should come “alive” as a living creature in order to actively  optimize itself with respect to dynamic environmental conditions and user behavior’  requirements in real-time. following the notion of “architecture as organic bodies”,  six major topics were derived from the publication of “new wombs: electric bodies and architectural disorders” (palumbo,  ). these topics are aimed at initiating  critical discussions between body and space, which, are used here to re-interpret six  toc     hypercell: a bio-inspired design framework for real-time interactive architectures main traits of being an interactive architecture: dis-measurement, uprooting, fluidity, visceral nature, virtuality, and sensitivity. these six topics merge diverse key points  from aforementioned chapters including outlining the vision of active interacting  architecture, the transformation of human bodies under digital culture, the profound  biological inspiration from evo-devo and the fundamental componential notion of  swarm, which leads to the ultimate notion of embodying organic body-like interactive  bio-architecture. dis-measurement: acknowledging the premise of “architecture (technology) as an extension of human bodies” proposed by marshall mcluhan (mcluhan, understanding  media: the extensions of man,  ), it is, still difficult to explicitly define the  boundary of a space, especially in the context of a borderless cyberspace (the internet).  space in such a context expands more than ever before and thus makes traditional  measurements techniques unfeasible. with cyberspace, people can be virtually present  in different places at the same time, thus breaking existing physical boundaries of  a space. from another point of view, space as an extension of our bodies constantly  adapting to environmental conditions and user demands, creates an intimate linkage  between physical bodies and spatial bodies. interaction in such instances can be seen  from a micro-scale: between biological cells and intelligent architectural components  to the macro-scale: between physical organic bodies and spatial bodies/architectural  space. uprooting: apart from further extending the “dis-measurement” idea by directly  plugging into cyberspace (the internet), “uprooting” is also interpreted as adaptation  devoid of any site/location constraints. in other words, the idea of “uprooting” implies,  generating an architecture that can adjust/modify in accordance with its existing  surroundings by interactions between its smallest intelligent components like cells in  a body searching for dynamic equilibrium. in this case, architecture has no particular  reason to be designed as “rooted” on sites. fluidity: with the neural system inside the body, most of the messages can be  transmitted, received and sent within less than a millionth of a second. to envision  architecture as an information processor, which has abilities to react to dynamic  environmental conditions and user demands, efficient information protocols must  be built into such an organic architectural body to create seamless exterior/interior  transformations. visceral nature: visceral can be interpreted in the form of an embodied organ. this  implies envisioning architecture in the form of a living-entity. it is no longer the case  of mimicking a natural form and thus claiming a building to be organic, but rather  instigates one to look deeper into the principles of a natural form’s morphogenesis  toc hypercell and apply these to generate a truly organic space. through the study of evo-devo,  several principles will be applied to generate an interactive organic bio-architecture.  it is thus not an organic looking shape that matters, but the principles behind the  shape, which matter. for instance, principles of self-organization, self-assembly,  and self-adaptation, providing possibilities of making body-like architectures with  multi-directional and multi-modal communications both inside out and outside in.  an intelligent architecture, should “live” in the environment just as how the body lives  with its’ visceral nature. virtuality: it is impossible to talk about physical space without mentioning virtual space  nowadays. from cyberspace, augmented reality to virtual reality, “virtuality” is related  to “interaction” since the beginning and has gradually become an inevitable aspect of  our daily lives. in fact, virtual space has to still use constraints from the physical world  to enhance experiential aspects. the ultimate goal of virtual reality here is not to end  up with a vr helmet and keep constantly being stimulated by electronic messages, but  to bring the physical to the virtual and in the process, attempt to search for a dynamic  balance between the virtual and real by merging them together. with the assistance  of virtual reality, novel unrealistic space can still be realized into creative tangible  immersive and fascinating spaces, which, earlier was not possible. sensitivity: the notion of “architecture is an extension of human bodies”, is crucial  to embrace, if we consider enhancing the sensing abilities of the space as a body not  only externally but also internally. in a digital space, active sensing can be achieved  by attaching specific devices. in an interactive space, like an organic body, the sensing  capabilities of the space have to be fast, accurate, intuitive, and predictive. the sensing  system should thus not only work externally to sense the surrounding environment but  also internally in order to fulfill the users’ demands in time. with such a connection  between human bodies and spatial bodies, it should become relatively understandable  for the space to know the requirements of the users by means of hand gestures instead  of verbal cues. the sensitivity, in this case, should rely on local information distribution  as a bottom-up system rather than a top-down centralized demanding structure. § . the integration of digital architecture = living interactive architecture = new organic bio-architecture in contemporary architecture, the growing fascination with formal exploration  supported by the increasing sophistication of computer aided design (cad) software  toc   hypercell: a bio-inspired design framework for real-time interactive architectures has led to misuse and misinterpretation of the term organic and bio-inspired  architecture, wherein mimicking of formal attributes has taken center stage. a plethora  of form-finding algorithms are now easily accessible on-line to the young generation of  designers, who, have no idea what about the principles of morphogenesis behind such  algorithms and are thus mostly utilizing them for the sake of generating sophisticated  organic shapes. besides form, there should be a lot more intriguing inspiration  which can be derived from nature. for instance, while an organism is growing, the  material system actively cooperates with its structure and functional systems in an  integrated growth process, which barely takes place in architecture design, in which  construction systems are always separated as a post design attribute. similar to the  developments in digital architecture, through bio-inspired architecture, the diversity  of individual experiments run into different paths that never converge. therefore,  this research believes that such separated development in digital architecture should  come to an end via a convergence of digital techniques, material performance, and  fabrication methodologies in order to become performative akin to a living organism.  the former section gives a conceptual picture of how an organic body-like interactive  bio-architecture in accordance with bio-inspired principle could be. here, this research  attempts to point out the current developments of digital techniques in architecture  from the  f aspects: formation, fabrication, and fluidity to propose an integrated  design thinking under the premise of becoming an organic body-like bio-architecture. formation: as mentioned before, computational technology in digital architecture  is quite commonly utilized with the goal of form generation. most current digital  formations within the bio-inspired domain only address shape without further  understanding the principles behind it. by following applied algorithmic or parametric  principles, the formation process is crystallized in a certain moment, resulting in static/ rigid shapes, which lose the intimate connection between the form and the dynamic  environment. a reversal of such a formation methodology can be achieved by following  d’arcy thompson’s (thompson,  ) well-known research, which proposes looking  at resulting formations in accordance with surrounding forces. this triggers form to  actively interact with the environment. in other words, the formation process using  computational technologies should not only be executed for generating an ultimate  static form, but, should be utilized to make form flexible enough for maintaining  a constant dynamic balance externally and internally between the environment  and users via real-time adaption of the form. in order to reach this state, it is thus  recommended that form should not only follow the crucial modular/componential  idea proposed by this research but should also adhere to constraints from a fabrication  viewpoint. fabrication: digital fabrication has been developed for decades, not only in the form  of using the current trend of utilizing robotic arm assisted manufacturing and  d  toc hypercell printing technologies, but also earlier with conventional cnc (computer numeric  control) milling and laser cutting machines. architects are thus able to learn from  manufacturing processes and experiment with a series of design development  iteration from conceptual development till the final production stage. most digital  fabrication projects are initiated using parametric or algorithmic design techniques  in order to become more precise and efficient regardless of them being carrying a  bio-inspired or purely fabrication focused research component. by gaining inspiration  from natural organisms, some architects have started using digital fabrication  techniques in combination with compatible material systems in order to re-create  structural principles extracted from living organisms. however, such projects mostly  tend to remain static in a so-called optimized phase, which, is in direct contrast to  how animals adapt in time. from the technical perspective, it is known that there  are physical constraints in all machines in terms of their size and applied materials.  and this particular point gives this research a perfect reason to operate at a modular  pre-fabricated alternative. moreover, it makes it perfectly fit in the logic of all complex  living animals that are composed of single and similar elements from the biological  point of view. in this case, it is not the top-down thinking of having the holistic form  and post-subdivision of the form akin to the process of tessellation, form, in this case,  should be approached in a bottom-up fashion. in other words, each single architecture  component should have a certain degree of freedom for morphing physically together  with the chosen digital fabrication process and associated materials. fluidity: fluidity, is akin to focusing the argument of movements in architectures. since  micro-controllers, such as arduino, were invented, numerous architects have dedicated  themselves to the kinetic, dynamic, interactive space field. quite a number of architects  took inspiration from living organisms in nature and attempted to re-generate a similar  effect in architectural design to enhance the sustainability of the buildings. however,  such mimicry was limited to certain mechanics of an animal’s movement and also  constrained the potential of the kinetic/interactive design. the crucial point here is  not literally re-presenting the reified mechanism into architectural design, but from a  bottom up observational principle of morphogenesis to study how a living organism is  built with inherent kinetic abilities. the other crucial aspect of fluidity pertains to local  communication protocols. as a modular system like cells in a body, the communication  is set up locally between cells as a distributed system to improve the efficiency and  precision of passing messages in order to achieve their tasks. under this premise of “following an organism’s morphogenesis principles”, it is  impossible to discuss formation, fabrication, and fluidity separately, because this is  how natural organisms grow: while generating the form (formation), it is necessary to  think of how to physically fabricate and assemble the parts to achieve the overall body  and to even further consider how this ultimate form will eventually have the ability to  toc   hypercell: a bio-inspired design framework for real-time interactive architectures move as a living organism. at present, most bio-inspired architectural designs work  in separate ways. regardless of developing complicated form generating processes,  or re-presenting organic structures cooperating with digital fabrication techniques, or  extracting kinetic mechanisms from animal movements, all of these developments are  in opposition to how natural organisms grow in an integrating fashion. from the bio- inspired design point of view, “integration” should be the center stage of developing  living-creature-like architectures which take the material, fabrication, assembly, and  movement system into account as a whole. from the perspective of digital techniques  applied in architectural design’s, to build up a living-creature-like interactive  architecture can create an opportunity to implement digital tools and techniques in  architecture design and take them to the extreme to create a type of innovative and  authentic intelligent organic architecture for the sake of convenience, comfort, and  sustainability. § . translating principles from evolutionary development biology to organic bio-architecture designs. translating useful principles from evolutionary development biology to rules for an organic body-like interactive bio-architectural design framework. through years of exploration, digital architecture has gained vast inspiration from  nature, especially with the assistance of computational techniques. unfortunately,  too many designers claim their projects deserve the banner of organic architecture,  owing only to the increasing sophistication of the architectural appearance which  misused the inherent meaning associated with the terminology of “bio-inspired” or  “organic”. unfortunately, this has become the current prevalent wave and has taken  the lead in the digital architecture realm. therefore, the research attempts to take  an opposite strategy to search for useful inspirational principles from the intriguing  evolution of morphogenesis and translate them into primary design logic instead of  directly applying them only for mimicking appearances. evolutionary development  biology (evo-devo) is the essential subject of this research owing to its contribution  to discovering how all organisms work under the condition of sharing the same gene  toolkit while still ending up as different species due to gene switches and regulation  from the embryologic phase. as mentioned at the end of chapter  , three major traits  have been extracted from evo-devo by this research, namely, “simple to complex”,  “geometric information distribution”, and “on/off	switch	and	trigger” which will be  further translated into preliminary principles for body-like interactive architecture. toc hypercell design task hypercell: a bio-inspired design framework for real-time interactive architectures. simple-complex = componential system on/off switch and trigger = assembly regulation geometric information distribution = componential system componential system + collective intelligence + assembly regulation = living creature-like architecture defining the essential geometric components and their transformation capabili- ty(degress of freedom) for enabling interactions. geometry a geometry b geometry trandform geometry trandform combination num: a + b combination num: a + b combination num: a + b original stage interactive morphing interactive morphing holistic interactive architectural body developing an assembly principle by involving on/off logic(indicate to simple + or - logic) to generate different numbers and combinations of the derived components to create various temporal forms of mature architectural bodies. there is no certain sequence regarding the above three principles. every aspect should be consider in parellell in a interelated manner. the overall mophology is created by/collected from each individual local mophologic interaction as a bottom-up embergence behavior. setting up the local protocal communica- tions for the local scale interactions by defining the input/output relationship in accordance to the performative ideas (i.e. evironmental factors or users demands) via collectively bottom-up decision making. + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + - - - - figure  .   diagram detailing the generic idea of hypercell: a bio-inspired design framework for real-time interactive  architectures. toc   hypercell: a bio-inspired design framework for real-time interactive architectures § . . from “simple to complex” to “componential system” = defining the basic geometric component. the principles behind the “simple to complex” logic of evo-devo can easily be  observed while studying an organism’s body parts, such as the vertebrate’s spine  structure. each complex organic body is composed of numerous amounts of simple  and self-similar elements, which are repeated with variations in scale of the same  component. this biotic principle can be translated into a “componential system” in  accordance with a natural bottom-up logic. cellular and modular components with a  certain degree of differentiation should be taken as essential elements for building up  a mature architectural body akin to the cells in animal bodies. with certain physical  constraints, such as degrees of freedom of transformation, these components can  operate in a parametric fashion and be divided into different types of components to  develop cellular differentiation. in other words, it implies that with different regulations  (referring to the assembly regulation extended from the logic of on/off switches and  triggers) of a parametric combination of genes, different types of components and  their performance can be defined. “cells” should be the ideal objects to be studied,  especially while dealing with a “componential” approach. in nature, cells are the  essential element of any animal body which have basic intelligence and internal  communications, and some of them can even generate energy to support their own life  and movement. § . . from “geometric information distribution” to “collective intelligence” = setting up local information protocols and individual interactive transformations. in “geometric information distribution”, the emphasis is on local signal induction  outlining the manner in which cells are to be assigned different typologies alongside  diverse tasks assigned to them. besides this, at a local level, propagating signals to  their neighboring cells akin to a distributed system instead of receiving one-to-one  assignments from a central commander, is a trait embedded in the cells. this kind of  information distribution system inside an animal body tends to be more precise and  faster in both sensing, sending, and receiving of data. strictly following this natural  bottom-up principle from a “componential system” logic, implies any formation  process or an interactive reaction should be decided via a process of “collective intelligence” which takes place between the components in accordance with the sets  toc hypercell of parametric transformation rulesets. it is this phase wherein bottom-up information  protocols between components is set up and at the same time constraints of the  individual kinetic mechanism per component are initiated. surounding conditions collective intelligence physical constrains singular cell collective cells intelligent interactions local adaptations emergent body degree of freedom local intelligence collective decision making & adaptation via evolutionary computation neighboring cells figure  .   process of collective decision making through local level adaptive components to the emergent  optimized body for the information distribution idea within the logic of self-organization and swarm  intelligence. § . . from	“on/off	switch	and	trigger”	to	“assembly	regulation” = specifying the rules of assembly with different degrees of freedom for kinetic transformation using simple logic. rather than addressing production processes, while addressing the principle of  “growth”, this research instead focuses on defining assembly logic. the morphologies  of animals are well defined by the mysterious and relatively complex layers of on/off  triggers, which result in simple output commands. the research attempts to follow a  similar, yet, simplified version of using on/off triggers to generate an assembly logic for  interactive architectures. even with the degrees of freedom to transform, it is necessary  to define the generating rules for resulting bodies according to certain principles, which  include the on/off makeup, extracted from evo-devo. as the notion of all animals  sharing the same gene toolkits but only with different numbers and regulation of the  genes turns out to have a diversity of species in nature, the research tests the idea  toc   hypercell: a bio-inspired design framework for real-time interactive architectures of having self-similar geometric components cooperating with different numbers  and combinations of the “on/off” regulation. multiple resulting forms can thus be  generated according to environmental conditions or user based demands. once the  basic geometry of the components is defined, the simple logic (on/off) can be applied  to further construct the assembly logic in this phase of design. § . . living creature-like architecture = componential system + collective intelligence + assembly regulation in brief, this research would like to propose a design framework, “hypercell” for  generating living organism-like interactive architecture by following the above  translation principles from the evo-devo biology. the “hypercell” design framework  works in a fashion such that the essential geometric components and their  transformation capability for enabling interactions can be defined. after this, the  simple on/off logic will be involved to develop an assembly principle to be followed  for creating different numbers and combinations of the derived components to  create various temporal forms of mature architectural bodies. meanwhile, the local  interactions shall imply physical morphing of each constituting component via  collectively bottom-up decision making (figure  . ). janie m. benyus who coined  the term “biomimicry” (benyus,  ) once stated that there are three phases of  learning from nature in order to improve our technology: imitating the form, learning  about natural processes, and getting involved with natural systems . since there  are a plethora of explorations which have taken place in the domain of form mimicry  in architectural design, it is now time to dig deeper into the study of the natural processes, one of the core ideas of the “hypercell” research. unlike most so-called  bio-inspired architectural research which focuses narrowly on the organic formation  process, hypercell intends to focus on setting the rules/principles of generating the  architectural body in accordance with the idea that organic architecture should operate  as a living organism and thus emulate the ultimate form of the interactive architecture  (figure  . ). meanwhile, the componential idea within the simple but highly- interrelated relationship of hypercell fits perfectly with either the swarm behavior  principles that this research has heavily relied on, or the philosophical ideas of deleuze  janine benyus, a biologist, who coined the term, “biomimicry”, has once stated in her ted lecture that there are  three different levels of learning from nature: one is to mimic the natural form of organisms; second is to study  and apply the natural process of organisms; the last is to fuse into the eco-system of the nature. the ted lecture  can be found here: https://www.ted.com/talks/janine_benyus_biomimicry_in_action toc hypercell and guattari’s body without organs (deleuze, g., & guattari, f.,  ) and gottfried  leibniz’s monadology (leibniz, monadology,  ). all the above conceptual logics  are narrowed down into individual entities with embedded capabilities/intelligence  to set up intimate relationships in between each other and based on this intimacy,  operate as a whole, like an organic body. this is to a certain extent the ultimate goal of  this research by which, it attempts to push interactive architecture to the next level of  becoming an organic entity. amount of numbersn design intention genotype phenotype d amount of numbersm material constrain amount of numbersa adaptive mechanism amount of numbersl location condition amount of numbersg geometry possibility amount of numbers i interaction potential amount of numbersp performance property amount of numberse environmental constrain figure  .   diagram portraying possible dna logic implemented in architectural design as a set of  relationships instead of parameters merely for form generation. a little reminder about the conceptual design concerning the translation of dna. it has been observed that genetic processes and evolutionary strategies in natural  systems are easily misunderstood and misused by designers in architecture. geometric  form-finding processes are at times deduced by considering a dna code as a metaphor  for fixed formal attributes while completely ignoring the deeper relational processes  that exist between encoded genetic information and the resultant phenotype. this  dissertation categorically opposes the much-simplified literal translation of a-c-t-g  sequences within the dna into datasets of spatial vertexes, edges, transformation  factors, and other geometric relationships for deriving a shape. on the contrary, the  research premise establishes that all genes in cells should unavoidably interact with  each other as a relational system in a non-linear process in order to successively grow  an organism using cellular differentiation and specialization-based tissue formation  into a holistic body. this necessitates a systematic relationship between genes as a vital  toc     hypercell: a bio-inspired design framework for real-time interactive architectures area of research in order to extract rules for generating information driven performative  form. in other words, the research proclaims that designers should build bottom-up  spatial formations by setting up genetic rule sets within the design process. these will  be inherited within the smallest unit of the proposed space; the spatial component  (similar to the cells in organisms). the number of such cells, their material make-up,  their communication protocols and data exchange routines (gene expression and  signal processing) while interacting with their immediate context in order to arrive at  individual cell specialization (in terms of form and ambient characteristics) result in  the generation of emergent morphological phenotypes (figure  . ). § . the crucial and immediate demands of developing real- time	re-configuring	space	as	a	living	creature = taking the users’ requirements as a fundamental variable for real-time spatial re- configuration in a proactive manner. with the development of advanced medical science and technologies, human life  extends much longer than before, which causes a population growth problem. the  population projections for   show that there will be  .  billion people in the  world and   percent of the population will be staying in urban areas , which rapidly  increase urban density and enormously influences daily lives of humans. the price of  real estate is also extremely high due to the immense spatial demands in urban areas  and the lack of equal supply of the required space, and this naturally results in various  economic and social issues. therefore, the real-time adaptive spatial formations, which  this research proposes, will in their own smart way aim to enhance customizability and  thus enhance adaptive re-use possibilities of architectural space. in other words, this  kind of real-time re-configuring space can remove the redundancy of unused space  by only using a specific footprint of size and yet fulfill essential usability of space in  daily life. therefore, the design experimentations with the hypercells in this research  mainly focuses on residential space with a focus on providing early career professionals  and students with affordable smart living solutions. however, it can also serve as an  experimental case within the domotics sector in order to aid elderly people in their daily  activities via intelligent spatial adaptation. please check the united nation’s webpage for more information about population projections for  : http:// www.un.org/en/development/desa/news/population/ -report.html. toc hypercell this research would like to place a major emphasis upon users demands as a major factor to be considered for real-time spatial interaction. on one hand, as the  aforementioned discussion said, it is advantageous to reduce the redundancy of  unused space but meanwhile be able to fulfill the essential requirements of the user’s.  on the other hand, “to fulfill” would mean “to customize the spatial requirements”. figure  .   diagram illustrating how the computer sees us from the left derived from the publication of  “physical computing: sensing and controlling the physical world with computers”, and on the right-hand side  exhibiting how this research would like the hypercell components to possess essential intelligence. “the kinetics for spatial optimization systems are generally described as how systems can	facilitate	flexible	spatial	adaptability.	multifunction	designs	differs	from	spatial	 optimization	system,	because	these	systems	specifically	provide	the	means	for	 a plurality of optimized states to address changing use,” as noted in “interactive architecture” (fox, michael, & kemp, miles,  ) by michael fox and miles  kemp, re-defining the term “optimization” with multifunctional space from a user  centric perspective is quintessential in interactive architecture rather than adhering  to conventional interpretation of optimization in terms of structure or material  optimization. this reconfigurable space idea can be traced back to cedric price’s “fun palace”, which, operated as a constantly shifting structural framework in accordance  with the spatial usage of the space at that moment in time. more recently, greg lynn  proposed an egg-shaped housing called the rv room , which can be physically  rotated with electric motors to reveal different spatial configurations to fit the user’s  please see greg lynn’s form website for more information about the “rv” project: http://glform.com/build- ings/rv-room-vehicle-house-prototype/. toc   hypercell: a bio-inspired design framework for real-time interactive architectures spatial demands. other solutions like gary chen’s transformable impact furniture  piece (extreme transformer home)  which can turn into almost all the functional  furniture imagined fitting into a single box by manually pulling, pushing or sliding…etc.  or “cityhome”  project done by mit media lab which brought gary chen’s manual  transformable furniture idea even further by contributing to the hi-tech developments  of human machine/computer interface with freehand gestures’ controls. in another project by cedric price, “generator project”, he stated that “…instantaneous architectural response to a particular problem is too slow. architecture must concern itself	with	the	socially	beneficial	distortion	of	the	environment.	like	medicine	it	must	 move from the curative to the preventive (price,  )”. this further gave rise to the  issue of intelligence embedded in architecture. again, from the book “interactive architecture” (fox, michael, & kemp, miles,  ) which foresaw the interesting  applications based on users’ requirements, some interesting ideas, can be further  traced; “adaptive	control	methods	offer	a	means	to	revolutionize	plants	and	process	 efficiency	responsive	time,	and	profitability	by	allowing	a	process	to	be	regulated	by	 a	form	of	rule-based	artificial	intelligence,	without	human	intervention” and also  “recently	processors	and	sensors	have	shifted	from	strictly	looking	at	environment	 conditions outside the building and performance-based aspects of the building to include predicting and reacting to information inside the building, which includes understanding and monitoring the changing needs to the users of space”. these,  illustrate not only a shift in focus from external to internal environments in interactive  architecture but also point towards a key factor; “the intelligence of the building”.  unlike direct interpretations of developing a powerful intelligent centralized system,  following the componential system logic from biology and the agent-based swarm  behavior, this research rather relies on multiple relatively simple but intelligent entities  instead. in the publication, “physical computing: sensing and controlling the physical world with computers” (o’sullivan, dan & igoe, tom,  ), there is a diagram  illustrating how a computer sees a human which has only an index finger(clicking)  with ears on both sides of the face, and an eye in the middle (figure  . , left). but this  research would like to reverse this notation and thus embed each of the “hypercell”  components with essential but crucial intelligence in order to collectively operate as a  holistic intelligent entity (figure  . , right). to have no human intervention and yet to  be able to predict the changing needs of the humans inside, the space has to turn itself  into a living entity with active behavior with the aid of computational technology. please refer to https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wb - j e co for a video regarding the “extreme trans- former home” please refer to https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f gie i cae for the video regarding cityhome. toc hypercell § . a series of experiments with the hypercell system: hypercell, in this section, no longer implies a design framework for bio-inspired  interactive architecture but turns into a design project in itself, attempting to embody  intriguing principles from evolutionary developmental biology. in other words, here,  the term of “hypercell” is not only representing the methodological framework of  organic body-like interactive architecture owing to the componential system but  is also the name given to the prototyped intelligent component system. “for many applications ranging from exploring space to household cleaning, designers are moving away	from	figural	humanoid	robots	to	transformable	systems	made	up	of	a	number	 of smaller robots,” (fox, michael, & kemp, miles,  ) said michael fox and miles  kemp, and this perspective almost perfectly fits in the philosophy of “what hypercell is”. moreover, from the same book, “interactive architecture”, the quote regarding  “...current advancements in metamorphic, evolutionary, and self-assembling robot, specially dealing with the scale of the building block and the amount of intelligent responsiveness	that	can	be	embedded	in	these	modules,	are	setting	new	standards	for	 the construction...” indicates precisely to central notion of developing an intelligent  and transformable “robotic building block” like the hypercell. this hypercell research  insists on utilizing the principles extracted from the study of evo-devo in the following  manner: apply the “simple to complex” principle to develop a modular system for the  cell, utilize the “geometric information distribution” principle to develop the idea  of collective intelligence by means of real-time communication between the cellular  components, and lastly use the principle of “on/off	switch	and	trigger” as a logic  for deriving assembly regulations of the cellular components. the hypercell research  was initiated by aiming to begin with a small-scale idea but having a big impact  via a transformable spatial system in the form of a furniture system; the hypercell furniture. as a transformable block with certain degrees of freedom, it allows users to  initiate diverse functions by combining a different number of hypercells together and  customizing different nature of the output. these re-configurable functional variations  can fulfill the essential user demands throughout time. at another level, these  components can also be seen as agents of a swarm keeping constantly regulating their  emerging shapes by shifting their positions in order to achieve dynamically occurring  goals. in the following sub-sections, this research proposes the possibilities of using  the hypercell furniture system and emphasizes upon its development owing to its  basic geometric principles, the technical protocols via a series of experiments catering  to varied experiential tasks. once again, the hypercell components here are not  exhibited as the ultimate solution but rather provide a potential possibility to stimulate  the development of similar design ideas. toc   hypercell: a bio-inspired design framework for real-time interactive architectures § . . hypercell geometric principles and technical interpretation: basic element shape a b c mirror function axis perpendicular bisector true-true-true true-false-true axis ( true ) ( false ) mirror function d true-false connection t t ft t t figure  .   a) degrees of freedom in terms of dimensions. b) true mirror function. c) false mirror function. d)  an example of true & false regulation between cells. the fundamental geometry chosen here is a regular “hexahedral(cubic)” shape, which,  in real-time adapts and transforms its geometrical shape in response to contextual  factors and user-based activity requirements to generate feasible topologies. the  initial research phase employs a  -dimensional quadrangle-based structure as the  fundamental element of the hypercells. from a parametric design point of view, the  coordination and controls of the constituting four vertices of a single quadrangle shape  contribute towards attaining geometric variability and transformation possibilities for  the hypercells (figure  . a). in other words, different lengths of a basic quadrangular  element’s edges (= basic componential module) define a repeated geometric shape  in order to compose a hypercell by following the “mirror” geometric transformational  function. the mirror function in the mathematical definition is called a reflection  transformation based on a mirror (a line for  d space or a plane for  d space as an axis  of reflection) to map a specific figure to its opposite position creating symmetry. in this  please refer to the following papers of the authors for more detailed information: biloria, nimish & chang, jia-rey. ( ). hypercell: a bio-inspired information design framework for real-time adaptive  spatial components. proceedings of the  th ecaade conference (pp.  - ). prague: ecaade and czech  technical university in prague, faculty of architecture. (http://papers.cumincad.org/cgi-bin/works/show?e- caade _ ) biloria, nimish & chang, jia-rey. ( ). hyper-morphology: experimentations with bio-inspired design processes for adaptive  spatial re-use. proceedings of the ecaade conference volume no. ,   (tu delft) (pp.  - ). delft:  ecaade and faculty of architecture, delft university of technology. (http://papers.cumincad.org/cgi-bin/ works/show?ecaade _ ) toc hypercell research, two different mirror functions have been applied as “true and false” logic  while composing the hypercell organ as their gene switch (= assembly regulation). the “true mirror function” adheres to the general reflection idea to create a symmetric  figure based on one of the original quadrangle’s edges (figure  . b). the “false mirror  function” adds one step after getting the reflected figure by the true mirror function.  instead of using the quadrangle’s edge as an axis of reflection, the “false mirror  function” makes another reflection based on the first reflected shape’s perpendicular  bisector (figure  . c). this “true and false” combination logic is a crucial mechanism  of forming a single hypercell component by connecting the quadrangular cells  together. this can be interfaced with the switch and trigger mechanism derived  from evo-devo biology: for example, if we connect four quadrangular hypercells components, first we have to decide the true or false sequence, such as ttt or tft (t  = true and f = false) as the connecting regulation between cells (figure  . d). this  simple regulation of true and false (= on/off switch) sets up the basic formation of  the hyperbody parts similar to the gene switches controlling the regulation process  of living creatures, which define their body parts. besides this, it strictly follows the  fundamental critical logic that all animals share the same gene toolkits, but within the  variation of combination numbers and regulation, it is allowed to form different animal  forms. this idea has been translated by taking each hexahedral (cubic) hypercell as the basic element and the tf logic as a gene switch re-configuring to generate different  body parts or even diverse holistic hyperbodies composed of hypercells. but how these  hypercells know what types and tasks they will eventually perform, operates pursuant  to the “local protocol” under collective intelligence which makes the idea achievable. this collective decision-making protocol triggers numerous autonomous components  (hypercells) with material limitation driven local degrees of freedom referring  back to cells in an organism. based on local adaptation routines stored within each  component’s dna, efficient negotiation scenarios between immediate neighboring  components are structured in order to collectively decipher performative morphologies  in accordance with user requirements as regards the activities they wish to perform.  this collective decision-making scenario applies to diverse set-up of the components  with differing material and geometric make-up in the form of variable gene regulation  akin to cellular differentiation mechanisms in the natural world. in other words,  instead of a centralized command, through the local communication protocol,  within physical constraints of the hypercells, the hypercells will either change their  assembly regulation or make new transforming mechanisms and evolve a new global  morphology bottom up. particularly in this case, once a specific quadrangular cell gets  its dimensional information from the system to change one of its edge’s lengths, it will  pass this information to its neighboring cells in order to do the same transformation  so that the overall hypercell components can make different bending formations in  toc   hypercell: a bio-inspired design framework for real-time interactive architectures real time for different usages. this data transmission is related to the information  distribution between cells. furthermore, by extruding the  d quadrangular cells of  particular lengths as  d-hexahedral elements, the transformation mechanism can still  be embedded and applied to build a  d hypercell component (figure  . ). sigular cell’s degree of freedom collective cells topology variation sur oun din g local adaptation wall\\seat wall\\shelter wall\\ramp more collective decision making info figure  .   diagram illustrating the bottom-up communication protocols and how it influences the real- time morphology of the architectural element (wall in this case) owing to users’ demands using the swarm  intelligence logic. § . . the applications of a hypercell furniture system and future evolution after having a general picture of its geometric transformation principles as well as how  the hypercell can compose a hyperbody’s parts, it is time to discuss the applications of  the hypercell in terms of a furniture system. the phrase “our furniture might someday be comprised of a multitude of interconnected assemblies of robotic modules that can reconfigure	themselves	for	a	variety	of	needs	or	desires”, as quoted from “interactive architecture” (fox, michael, & kemp, miles,  ) explicitly illustrates the kernel  vision of the hypercell furniture system. instead of directly implementing the hypercell  toc hypercell as real building blocks in construction within an architectural scale, this research  attempts to create variations of the furniture functions to achieve the required usages  within the same footprint of adaptable space. it aims to take transformable robotic  elements as basic components to be self-assembled as real-time re-configuring  space(body) to fulfill users’ demands through time slots, which can also work in  existing buildings for re-use purposes or serve to reduce the re-construction cost of  an old building. with these goals, multi-functional hypercell furniture can, owing to  their adaptation/transformable possibilities, minimize each person’s genetic spatial  volume for daily living. two sets of parameters, logic-dna(l-dna) and dimension- dna(d-dna) drive the main furniture (trans)formation composed of hypercells, such  as chairs, benches, tables, desk, bed, partition walls…etc., with different types. with the  numbers of the components defined, these two sets of parameters are associated with  the aforementioned transformation logic while defining the basic quadrangular shapes  and the manner of connecting them. l-dna is the logic extending the “true/false”  mirror geometric transformation determining the assembly regulation, while d-dna is the logic of defining the basic component’s shape as well as the degrees of freedom  concerning the physical constraints of the component in order to interact with the  users and make the transformation as a bottom-up emergence behavior. table no. logicdna {} dimensiondna [] d table no. table no. c m { , , , , } { , , , , } [ , , , ] [ , ,- , ] [ , ,- , ] { , , , , } c m . c m c m table no. ( tatami ) [ , ,- , ] { , , , , } figure  .   diagram showing types of table variations also as an example for forming the furniture in  accordance with the logic of logic-dna and dimension-dna as this research developed. apart from applying principles of cellular differentiation, the idea that all species share  the same gene tool-kit, involves simple operations to produce complex outcomes  toc   hypercell: a bio-inspired design framework for real-time interactive architectures and attain morphological variation via simple switch and trigger mechanisms which  are perfectly experimented with in this research. although all cells (hypercells) share  the same degree of freedom (d-dna), they have different amounts (number) and  geometric regulation (l-dna), so they create various functional furniture formations  to fulfill different spatial and usage based topological requirements. this on-going  research subsequently aims to develop and market the hypercells as flexible and  transformable furniture pieces apt for adaptive reuse. in other words, a set of  hypercells bought by customers, can be assembled differently by using different  d-dna and l-dna to attain specific furniture functions, or enable the embodiment  of different transforming abilities to existing functions in order to suit the customer’s  spatial requirements in time as regards the active reuse of space (figure  . )  metaphorically speaking, if each of the hypercell furniture in the space is taken as  a body part of an organism, different configurations of the hypercell furniture will  metaphorically represent a specific spatial species (figure  . ). working seat desk bench reception wall figure  .   diagram illustrating the conceptual idea of having different reconfiguration and combinations of  the furniture system as various spatial usages metaphorically representing different species. (i.e. from left to  right: private working space to office space; human being to panther). toc hypercell “in the future, users will be able to purchase these robotic parts with the capability of	adding	their	own	intelligent,	customizable	setting (fox, michael, & kemp, miles,  )”, explicitly outlines the kernel idea of the hypercell furniture system. imagine  a scenario, where you go to a shop like ikea, and you purchase numbers of these  hypercells, once you get home, you are able to assemble them as a default setting  following the instructions and eventually enjoy the transformable feature with multiple  functions. in other words, customers just need to purchase these transformable  yet programmable cubes with instructions, and they can have multiple furniture  functions with these cubes and furthermore customize their own creative furniture  where the “evolution” enters. therefore, the evolution process of the hypercells will mainly come from the end users. although several default settings of the hypercell furniture and configurations will be given while users start using it, the users are  not forced to stay with these settings. in other words, users are allowed to create  their own customized furniture or spatial usages by modifying the two sets of the  aforementioned hypercell parameters (d-dna & l-dna). this evolution idea can  reflect the idea that every natural species are sharing the same gene toolkits from the  principles of evo-devo biology. similar to lego bricks, the hypercell components will  also have the potential to generate various results to challenge the conventional ideas  of furniture and space. moreover, because of the transformable feature of the hypercell components, more flexible spatial ambiance and practical usages will be more suitable  to the users according to their spatial requirement through time. it perfectly fits this  research’s interpretation of taking users’ demands in real-time reconfiguring space as  the environmental factors as in nature which can heavily drive the force of evolution as  customized but also optimized solutions. google, is working on a similar idea on a relatively smaller scale with an exciting project:  ara . ara is a smartphone device with individual units which are called “phone  blocks”. these can be assembled to suit a users’ own needs. the framework of the phone  provides a basic platform for operating, but the inserting units can be purchased  individually and defined by the users. please see the webpage of “google ara” for more details: https://atap.google.com/ara/. toc     hypercell: a bio-inspired design framework for real-time interactive architectures § . . a series of developments with hypercell hypercell: geometric experiments: following the geometric principles, several experiments have been conducted with the  assistance of computational tools. the series of experiments started with exploring the  essential modular components. this research selected the hexahedral(cubic) shape as its  version of hypercell’s essential geometry as modules for further experiments. in the very  beginning, the first version of hypercells, “hypercell . ”, gathered series of hexahedral  hypercells by only regulating each length of the shape’s edges to figure out the variations  using the fundamental principles of sharing the same modified elements to produce the  diverse results. fortunately, even without implementing the “true and false” switches, it  resulted in the production of numerous outcomes in terms of geometric transformations  and produced various visions of practical spatial applications  (figure  . , up). later  on, this “true and false” switch was applied as a reflection transformation function for  the first time not acting as a form regulation factor but rather a reaction/interaction of an  experimental project called the “duchamp wall”, exhibiting the fluidity of a wall which  can interact with the users by changing the length of the element’s edges (figure  . ,  bottom). in “hypercell . ”, the “true and false” geometry reflection transformation has  been implemented as a role of gene switch in the hypercell assembly regulations (the  logic-dna), and with numbers of hypercells components, it can create almost an infinite  set of results. the transforming degree of freedom (the dimension-dna) in addition to the  true/false switches generates the interactive morphology of the overall shape to provide  the flexibility and multi-functional usages. as a result, multiple furniture or architecture  elements such as desks, shelters, seats, or ramps can be realized based on the geometric  assembly and transformation principles owing to the evo-devo based biotic inspirations.  the research utilized digital tools from  d modeling software with its parametric plug- ins, “rhinoceros+grasshopper”, to the open source visualization program, “processing”,  for the purpose of real-time simulation. through processing simulation, more real-time  responsive reactions designed for hypercell’s applications, like walls with doors, walls  with seats, or façades with penetrating light/wind openings, can be much more precisely  exhibited  (figure  . ). to further confirm the feasibility of the hypercell furniture  systems, a catalogue with default settings of these hypercell cubes following the assembly  and transformation principles were made to prove not only that the natural principle of all  please see the video for more details: https://vimeo.com/ . please see the simulation for further understanding: https://vimeo.com/ . toc hypercell animal sharing same gene toolkits which can be applied and can work perfectly but, it also  shows the incredible diversity and functionality the cubes can provide. numerous sets of  furniture, such as chairs, sofa, tables, beds, partition walls…etc. were generated with the  parameters of the amount of hypercells, l-dna, and d-dna. the l-dna basically defined  the category of the furniture, and the d-dna managed to transform interactive physicality  of the furniture owing to its specific utility. for example, by the definition of l-dna  (which is the true and false mirror function), the object can be categorized as a chair,  and following the d-dna (which is the interactive transformation), the resulting sofa  (under the chair’s division) is able to follow the user to generate a comfortable sitting area  (figure  . , the detailed settings of the l-dna and d-dna of the furniture applications  will be exhibited in appendix i). nevertheless, if envisioning each furniture piece as a  particular body part, then all pieces together in a footprint of space can be metaphorically  interpreted as a specific animal body or a species. through different time slots of spatial  requirements, the combination of the hypercells must re-self-assemble and evolve from  one to another species for the sake of meeting user’s demands (figure  . ). in spite of  the originally extracted biotic principles, after translating, the applications of hypercell appear to be not only theoretically meaningful but also practically feasible and have high- potential for further development of the current technologies. figure  .   the first generation of hypercell component on top, and a duchamp wall project following the  same logic with more diversity of the morphing patterns. toc   hypercell: a bio-inspired design framework for real-time interactive architectures figure  .   hypercell  .  furniture applications such as hypercell walls that can reconfigure (transform into) seats, counters,  ramps, waiting partitions, and encountering meeting spots as multi-functional partitions owing to diverse time slots and users’  demands. toc hypercell chairs tables beds walls & partitions stages & others figure  .   a  d diagram exhibiting the collections of the transformable furniture system made of “hypercell” components as a  catalog. these are variations but can include more diversity in terms of form and usage. the catalog with l-dan and d-dna is found  in appendix i. toc   hypercell: a bio-inspired design framework for real-time interactive architectures virtual buttonsslider = distance = value slider figure  .   top image shows the concept of virtual slider and button in accord with hand gestures. bottom  image records the utilization of the hypercell interface in real physical space (see the video here: https://vimeo. com/ ). hypercell: intelligent free-hand gesture graphic user interface (gui) with the availability of motion tracking technology and devices like microsoft  kinect, it is possible to create a graphic user interface (gui) in order to control  the transformations of the hypercells. resisting utilizing common gadgets like  keyboards and a mouse to send messages to a computational device, the goal of  this experiment intended to employ free-hand gesture (body movement) to control  the transformable hypercells. each single hand acts as a cursor that can browse and  push the pre-set buttons of the ui (user interface) to accomplish simple selecting  tasks. besides, this, for detailing the input value on the ui, the distance between  two hands will be remapped and defined relatively as an input value generating the  resulting output. here in the hypercell interface, both hands can be used as cursors  to select the furniture typologies from chairs, tables, beds…etc., and after picking up  a certain category, the chosen furniture can be further detailed with the parameters  toc hypercell manipulated with the distance between hands as sliders. the original vision with  this gui system was to make each hypercell have the possibilities of reconfiguring by  free-hand gestures without driving them always with a set of devices like a desktop  computer with conventional gadgets . furthermore, just as pc stands for “personal  computer”, hypercells furniture system can be regarded as “pf” standing for  “personal furniture” named after the intellectual communication process in between  the hypercells. as concerns the interactive intention between objects and users in  the future developments, this ui system be translated and utilized as a visualizing  software to generate customized furniture pieces. using freehand gestures defining  the furniture types and parameters, it is possible to export the digital files by simply  pushing the “export” button on the ui to create a  d digital model for further detailing  developments which can be available as a producing process for users to design their  own style. to envision a network of communication protocols amongst each hypercell as well as between each hypercell and users, hypercell is just an initial phase of  non-verbal communication with expectations for future enhancements along with  technological improvements (figure  . ). hypercell: turns simulation into an immersive virtual reality experience after exploring the geometric developments of hypercell with several computational  simulations and setting up the gui as manipulating protocols with each hypercell, the research decided to take the whole simulating space composed of the hypercells to an immersive spatial experience. the microsoft kinect device here is used for tracking the   joints of a human body but is implemented differently to arrange a setting to remap  and rebuild the avatar onto the virtual reality world. a series of furniture functions  and architectural elements were applied to be experienced from single user to multiple  users with their intuitive reactions in schematic scenarios: a dynamic landscape will  expand the space for a person presenting underneath; a sensitive wall will open to let  a person pass through; a transformable shelter to provide people with seating as and  when needed…etc. realizing the installation through projections in an extremely dark  room, people can easily experience tangibly the general idea of how these interactive  hypercells would operate in real life as a virtual rehearsal. technically speaking, only  one kinect device was used in this installation and all the computational calculations  were done using processing with a specifically designed library, simpleopenni,  please refer to the video for details of hypercell interface: https://vimeo.com/ . please refer to the video to see the hypercell virtual reality application: https://vimeo.com/ . toc   hypercell: a bio-inspired design framework for real-time interactive architectures to cooperate and collaborate with kinect for tracing the body joints moving in  -dimensional space. through the experience, the skepticism about the feasibility of  hypercells can be rapidly eliminated. during the experience, people learned how to  release and freely manipulate their body and initiate non-verbal communication with  this reacting space (figure  . ). figure  .   images exhibiting the virtual reality space built up by transformable hypercell components  which is able to interact with the users in real-time as an immersive spatial experience by utilizing the  processing real-time simulation and motion tracking technology cooperating with microsoft kinect (please  check the video for more understanding: https://vimeo.com/  ). § . brief conclusion in brief, the research so far illustrated the ideal features of the body-like interactive  bio-architecture (as new organic architecture) which has borrowed the six points from  maria luisa palumbo’s viewpoints of “new wombs: electronic bodies and architecture disorders (palumbo,  )” but re-interpreted them as a summary including the key  points of each former chapter as “dis-measurement”, “uprooting”, “fluidity”, “visceral toc hypercell nature”, “virtuality” and “sensitivity”. after that, it explained the reason why to treat  the organic body-like architecture as an integration of all digital technologies that are  applied in architectural design by the supporting argumentations titled as  f: form, fabrication, and fluidity. moreover, this lead to a proposal of a design framework:  “hypercell”, for developing bio-inspired interactive architectural design by extracting  biotic principles such as “simple to complex to derive componential systems”,  “geometric information distribution to derive collective intelligence protocols”, and  “on/off	switch	and	trigger	to	develop	assembly	regulations” to generate organic  body-like architecture. from a sociological perspective, the research pointed out  the advantages this kind of reconfigurable space can offer to everyday users. in the  last section, the research eventually took the hypercell design frameworks into  account to develop a series of experimental projects, especially the furniture systems,  showing the potential possibilities and applications for user centric real-time spatial  reconfiguration. in the end, the hypercell is not only the title of the design framework  but also a representation of each intelligent component exhibiting the architectural  applications, gui communication interface, and the immersive vr experience. the  transformable cubic shape serving as hypercell’s essential geometric module for  furniture systems here is not claimed as an ultimate solution, but rather as an example  showing the resulting variations and possibilities within this modular system by  following simple logic like swarms. however, until now, this research has always taken  the users’ demands as a critical factor for this active transformable space supposing  that the goal of this robotic re-configuring space is to fulfill the user’s demands.  artistically, however, it implies questioning oneself at another level: how to think of  space as a living entity, possessing its own intelligence and behavior, and how people  will interact with such a space? this is a crucial topic discussed in the following section  in this chapter. § . living creature-like space with its own intelligence and behavior in fact, the argument of “living creature-like space with its own intelligence and behavior” has already been visited in one of the previous chapters. however, here,  the user demands are no longer the first priority for such kind of an intelligent space.  instead, the discussion pursues the relationships and communication between  humans and space. in other words, space is a living object that people have to get  to know/understand and get along with, rather than, in a top-down commanding  fashion instruct it about your wishes. of course, this kind of “space with intelligence”  has not only been discussed in architectural design but has also sparked interest  toc   hypercell: a bio-inspired design framework for real-time interactive architectures in other fields of research, such as electronic engineering, computer science, and  robotic development. douglas engelbart in his article “augmenting human intellect: a conceptual framework” (engelbart,  ) has envisioned an intellectual space  which he called “augmented architecture” as a working space for architects. but it is  more akin to a sci-fi movie imagination, the description of his imagination was mainly  addressed on high-technology gadgets, such as touch screens, holographic display  systems, and how the architect in the narrative uses a pointer and collects data for  improving design, which basically illustrates a scenario in which the intelligent space  itself acts like a huge computer device. certainly, the space should have the ability  to act as an intelligent computational device to deal with all kinds of occasions but it  should perform not only as a tool or device for people to develop “living creature-like architecture”. the vision that “‘ia’ system will disappear into our buildings and become the architecture itself (fox, michael, & kemp, miles,  )” clearly outlines how  the intelligence of a space shouldn’t be embodied only as a top-down commanding  computational device but should be fused within the space itself. “liquid architecture is an architecture that breathes, pulse, leaps as one form and ends as another…it is an architecture that opens to welcome me and closes to defend me…” (novak,  ),  argues marcos novak’s liquid architecture which eventually illustrated a vision of  intra-active architecture with intelligence and free-will for interacting with users in  multiple ways as a living creature. unlike the one-directional interaction operating as  a switch to turn a device on or off, liquid architecture has various sensors omnipresent  on its skin, which filters data to make resulting moves in accordance with the emerging  input values from all sensors. in the research, the componential idea is retained  since the beginning, the intelligence of the space here should come as a collective  intelligence emerging from bottom up. this collective swarm idea cooperating with  intra-active architecture can be observed in the theory of “hyperbodies” of kas  oosterhuis. “true hyperbodies are proactive bodies, true hyperbodies actively propose actions. they act before they are triggered to do so. hyperbodies display something like a will of their own. they sense, they actuate, but essentially not as a response to a single request” (oosterhuis, hyperbodies: towards an e-motive architecture,  ). both  marcos and kas would like to envision a scenario where the space can have its own will  to react with either the environmental conditions or the artificial human movements.  therefore, artistically, the critical problem raised here is to question people involved  in the space as to how they will execute, conduct, react, think of, confronting such a  space with its own will, and how can one set up communication protocols or networks  between the human body and the architectural body. toc hypercell in order to answer such questions, the author was fortunate to be a part of a european  cultural project, metabody  in july of  . media artists, digital music composers,  choreographer, dancers, performers, programmers, designers, and architects from   different countries in europe were brought together to cooperate and develop  performances and spatial projects following the major discourse of the metabody.  the critical idea of metabody is to question the homogenization of expressions in the  current information and controlling mediums and to break through boundaries to  release and provoke the already-formulated body movements by interacting with pro- activeness in architectural space both digitally and physically. during the participation  in metabody, two major deliveries were contributed by the research as concerns both  digital and physical prototyping. these were in the form of two intra-active projects:  “ambiguous topology” and the “hyperloop” pavilion. these, are described in the  following sections. § . . ambiguous topology figure  .   image of “ambiguous topology”. please refer to the links: http://metabody.eu/ or http://www.hyperbody.nl/research/projects/metabody/. toc     hypercell: a bio-inspired design framework for real-time interactive architectures ambiguous topology introduction ambiguous topology  is an installation which incorporates creatively combining  dynamic movement of the human body and swarm intelligence driven generative  geometry production capabilities realized by volumetric projection systems. it is a  five-minute immersive light experience in which the speed, frequency, and intensity  of movement of a participant’s body are used as triggers for activating a swarm of  volumetrically projected digital particles in space in real-time. the usage of fully  immersive volumetric light projection media to visualize  d geometric morphologies  in the swarm of digital particles renders abstract  d topological nuances within which  the participant navigates. this resulted in the generation of both interactive as well as  pro-active behavior from the participants as they experience new states of ambiguity  and dis-alignment. a looped data driven relationship is thus successfully established  between the digital, physical and embodied corporeal space. volumetric projection system desired point in d projection area desired line in d projection area desired polyline in d projection area figure  .   diagrams showing basic principles and setup for  -dimensional geometry realization based on  the volumetric projection system. for more detailed understanding and outlines of the project, “ambiguous topology”, please check the video  here: https://vimeo.com/  , https://vimeo.com/ , and related paper of  chang, jia-rey, biloria, nimish, & vandoren, dieter. ( ). ambiguous topology from interactive to pro-active spatial environ- ments. proceedings of the ieee visap’  conference: data improvisation (pp.  - ). chicago: ieee visap.  (http://visap.uic.edu/ /visap -papers/visap _chang_ambiguoustopology.pdf) toc hypercell “volumetric projection system” is the main technique for materializing the simulated  geometries in real physical space. the interpretation and production of  -dimensional  simulated geometries using the light projection system, or in other words “volumetric projection”, has been developed by the media artist; dieter vandoren (one of the team  members of the ambiguous topology project). this involved the extensive use and  customization of max/msp based routines. in terms of hardware, four high-resolution  projectors are located in four corners of the affective space in order to attain a fully  immersive interaction zone at their point of convergence. besides this, one microsoft  kinect device is used for motion tracking and is placed at the center (front facing) of  the interaction zone. within this physical set-up, unlike with the hologram projection,  specific ways of interpreting geometries with light projection, such as points, lines,  polylines etc. are developed as stated below (figure  . ): . point: a point in  d space is visualized by the intersection of four light beams from four  projectors located in four corners of the space. as a result, participants experience this  specific point as four light beams’ instead of a single light pixel flying in space. this principle  is mainly implemented for realizing each point’s location in space using different colors. . line: a line in  d space is achieved by the intersection of four light planes from four  projectors located in the corners of the interaction zone. in other words, in accordance  with the projection angle, the participants would see a spatial intersection line built up  in the interaction zone as four triangulated planes. . polyline: a polyline in  d space is achieved by the intersection of light planes with a  curvature from four projectors located in the corners of the interaction zone. because of  the original geometry’s curvature and the limitation of the projection angles, participants  mostly will be surrounded in the conical shape created by the light projections. swarm behavior premise: the particle system simulations responsible for the generation of the constantly  transforming topology is essentially based on craig reynolds’ swarm (flocking) behavior  principles developed in   (http://www.red d.com/cwr/boids/) (reynolds,  steering behaviors for autonomous characters,  ) (reynolds, flocks, herds and  schools: a distributed behavioral model,  ). by observing flocks of flying birds,  craig reynolds developed a swarm behavior simulation to mimic numerous animal  species, which intend to move collectively as gigantic creatures, for example, birds, fish,  and bees, etc. separation, alignment, and cohesion are the three major principles of  swarm behavior determining each agent’s intelligence virtually in the flock. separation  implies avoiding crowding next to each other, alignment implies steering towards the  toc   hypercell: a bio-inspired design framework for real-time interactive architectures average direction of the neighboring flocks, and cohesion implies driving the agents’  movement towards the average position of the local agents (figure  . ). using the  combination of the above simple rule sets encoded within each agent, emergent  clustering formations can be derived. ambiguous topology, and its inherent drive to  generate continuously transforming topologies at a global output level, harnesses  these simple rules set based behaviors and embeds them within each constituting  particle in the simulations. emergent topological formation as a result of local level  interactions within the swarm of particles is thus a novel attribute that is exploited  within the installation. separation alignment cohesion figure  .   diagrams of craig reynold’s swarm behavior principles for the flocking simulation; separation,  alignment, and cohesion. (http://www.red d.com/cwr/boids/). furthermore, as an interactive installation, the particles/agents within the installation  specifically, relate to the participant’s body movements in real-time. therefore,  the propulsion of agents is not only influenced by their internally coded rule sets in  accordance with the swarm behavior principles but also driven by the participant’s  reactions. in other words, participants can create attracting or repelling forces by  propelling the agents to affect their  d location, velocities, and accelerations through  different narrative scenes in the installation. in order to communicate the state of each  agent’s locomotion and energy levels to the participants, color gradients within the  projections are utilized as a clear visual cue. aggressive colors, such as red and yellow  indicate high value of locomotion compared to blue and green, which express relatively  passive and stable agent movement. as regards the  -dimensional projection of  agents, all agents are exhibited as “points” using the aforementioned projection logic  with the color gradient representing their energy and movement state. these colorful  light beams strongly encourage the participants to engage in the ambiguous topology  installation without any external persuasion. toc hypercell kinect processing max/msp kinect d + swarm simulation projection system skeleton joints motion tracking (xn, yn, zn) loop figure  .   diagram showing the interactive loop of data streams. technical interpretation: the agent-based simulation is created using an open-source programming language,  processing. hardware wise, the motion tracking system in ambiguous topology is set  up by utilizing the microsoft kinect device and is correlated with simpleopenni which  is a motion-tracking library of processing. all computational processes are calculated  and simulated in processing  -dimensionally based on swarm behavior principles  which, were directly networked with skeleton tracking based data from kinect. during  the computational process, processing simultaneously transmits the required data,  the coordination of the autonomous particles, to a platform set up in max/msp  through osc (open sound control) protocol. by establishing a communication protocol  between processing and max/msp, the x-y-z coordinates of each swarm agent’s  location is synchronized with the projection system to materialize three-dimensional  geometries in space using the aforementioned volumetric projection principles.  furthermore, after receiving the input data from processing, the max/msp patches  are able to adequately implement it with the render mode for the hd projectors  (figure  . ). toc   hypercell: a bio-inspired design framework for real-time interactive architectures figure  .   images showing different modes of the ambiguous topology experience with scenes of  “follow”, “spike”, “disturb”, “attract”, and “nurbs” mode from top to bottom with photos taken on the left and  simulations on the right side. toc hypercell settings	and	the	narrative: after meticulous development and user testing, ambiguous topology, was successfully  set-up as a real-time immersive public installation in media-prado, madrid, in july  of  . the site allocated for the installation allowed, an effective interaction zone  (the convergence point of the four projectors) of   meters in width (x-direction),    meters in length (y-direction) and   meters in height (z- direction).   agents/ particles embedded in the space wait to be triggered by the influx of participants. seven  fundamental narrative modes are developed and arranged in a fluent sequence in order  to facilitate a holistic experience to the participants. these narratives are sequenced as  different modes in the following order: rain mode, follow mode, spike mode, disturb mode,	attract	mode,	nurbs	mode,	and	rain-up	mode. these are described in the  following sections in conjunction with the participant’s experiences. rain mode: the rain mode is triggered by the presence of people (tracked by kinect) within the allocated installation space. a high-velocity downpour of agents/particles constituting the installation akin to heavy rainfall is immediately set in motion. the agents gradually reduce their speed of falling and completely cease to do so in certain locations in space. this is accompanied by a change in the color gradient of the agents (from magenta to dark blue), indicating the change in the velocity levels of the agents; from high velocity to a stable and calm state. follow mode: this is the first instance that participants provide an impulse to the agents. each movement of the participant creates a flux in the agent field (based on the aforementioned swarm principles) within which they are immersed. the swarm logic further entails that the agent propels its movement to the nearest neighbors and thus a ripple is sent through the virtual field as an emergent global outcome. it was observed that over time, the swarm of agents in space tends to follow the average direction of movement of the participants (if they move in the same direction). however, if two participants attempt to move in opposite directions, the swarm tends to remain stable. furthermore, differential agent velocities of the entire swarm are the result of the participant’s movement velocity and thus tend to speed up or slow down, with high-velocity states depicted as magenta and low state as blue. this mode thus subtly engages the participant via responsive interaction and hence provokes physical movement of the participants (figure . , follow). spike mode: the spike mode involves the introduction of geometry using the volumetric projection system. in this narrative, along with all the existing colored agents, pure white lines are toc   hypercell: a bio-inspired design framework for real-time interactive architectures exhibited (line-connections). these lines are directly connected to the distances between the nearest agents of the swarm and are specifically triggered by tracking of the participant’s body joints. both hand and feet joints of the participant’s digital skeletons (as seen via kinect) are specifically chosen. thus, while waving one’s hands and feet, any two agents falling within this waving path, which is triggered establish a connection depicted by a white line to be drawn between them. because of numerous autonomous agents floating around the participants, they can freely and easily generate these flashing lines and start manipulating them once they unravel this simple logic. some characteristics of the follow mode, such as the panning effect and color gradations are retained in this narrative and tend to seamlessly blend with the characteristics of the spike mode. (figure . , spike). disturb mode: the disturb mode is the narrative where a shift from responsive to pro-active interaction germinates. participants lose the ability to influence the movement of swarm agents using their own body movements. additionally, all the agents, as autonomous entities start losing their energy, turn transparent and become almost invisible in space. in reality, once the agents lose their momentum, they become imperceptible and acquire a state of readiness for new stimulation from the participants. by touching, pushing, swinging the invisible agents, the participants actually feed/pass the agents energy and trigger their movement again. each participant’s hands and knees, now, become activating nodes, which, in turn, influence the agents, based on the momentum produced by the movement of the participant’s joints. the faster the participants move, the larger the area of influence of the agents is, and thus the impact on the agent’s velocity and energy is also stronger. the swarm logic behind the scenes implies that active agents seek to influence other passive neighbors and thus set forth a non-linear movement. it was observed that the participants tend to become keen and keep trying different body postures and movements to gradually set the dormant swarm in action once more (figure . , disturb). attract mode: the attract mode involves the swarm of agents to suddenly and aggressively move rapidly towards the participant. this is also accompanied by the agent’s switching their color to an aggressive red and yellow gradient. in this mode, the agent simulations are programmed to be attracted towards the participant’s hands and feet in order to create virtual polygonal geometries in space. over a period of time, these virtual polygons unknowingly produced by the participants also appear in white along with other colored agents thus distinguishing the polygonal geometries the participants generate. once the participants become aware of this game-play, they instinctively start attracting the agents via producing strange but interesting movements, such as changing moving direction rapidly, jumping up and down radically, and curling or stretching bodies oddly (figure . , attract). toc hypercell nurbs mode: in the nurbs mode, the participants are allowed to push, wave, and touch the agents similar to the disturb mode. in addition to this, a continuous transforming nurbs (spline-line) is materialized based on the agent aggregation based density in space. on an average, ten locations coinciding with ten densest locations of the agents in space are selected as control points to construct the nurbs. since the agent densities can be impacted directly by the participant’s influential movement in space, the nurbs geometry fluidly morphs from one shape to another shape (figure . , nurbs). rain-up mode: before the “rain-up mode”, the “follow mode” is exhibited again to gently inform the participants that the experiential installation is nearly towards the end. after a few minutes of “follow mode”, the participants entirely lose their control over all the agent movements and only witness the agents flying back up to the sky. all the agents will fly up with high velocity and gradually slow down to cease in a certain location in space. in terms of color, all the agents start with magenta representing higher speed and become dark blue corresponding to the velocity each agent embodies. towards the end, all the agents lose their momentum, turn transparent and tend to fully disappear. hence, the whole space returns back into an entirely dark state awaiting the next group of participants to engage with. ambiguous topology conclusion ambiguous topology is an innovative experimental installation which intends to  challenge conventional modes of perceiving space as a dormant object and abolishes  the subject-object relationship, which has long been associated with it. space, in  this case, acquires a pro-active character and most importantly is built up via a  non-tangible entity: embodied visible light. the installation also physiologically and  psychologically appeals and instigates our regulated behavioral selves resulting in the  generation of novel reactions and interactions. ambiguous topology thus attempts  to create a fully transformable topology composed of numerous autonomous agents  to achieve a unique e-motive spatial environment. different geometric instances  of the fluid environmental topology are generated via the interplay between the  participants and the conceived system and are materialized via the immersive light  projection (volumetric projection) system as a meta-narrative. as a result, an intimate  relationship between the overall environment and participants naturally appears  during the experiential phase. meanwhile, an information feedback loop is at play,  which binds the physical interactions of the participants, with soft simulation and  computation processes to ultimately impact and influence the participants’ behavior  in real-time. during the interaction process, novel movements, group dynamics, and  toc   hypercell: a bio-inspired design framework for real-time interactive architectures gestural novelty came to the fore. the research was thus able to address an individual’s  innate bodily and mental experiences. in this five-minute immersive/interactive  environmental experience, ambiguous topology gives the participants opportunities to  introspect, engage, influence and explore their perception and inner creative instincts  in an engaging experience. as aforementioned, in ambiguous topology, one of the  main characteristics is to utilize the non-tangible entity: light, to create an immersive  dynamic environment. but in the “hyperloop” pavilion, the research attempts to  develop a physical interactive dynamic space made with real materials so as to be  truly tangible. § . . hyperloop, an intra-active pavilion the preliminary idea of the hyperloop pavilion (figure  . ) is to create a  transformable, portable, mobile space as an interactive environment with abilities  to physically morph akin to a creature with its own will. it is a large-scale real-time  interactive structure which is in a constant state of flux. once again, it is similar to  how marcos novak outlined his “liquid architecture” and kas oosterhuis outlined his  “hyperbodies”: the architecture has embedded emotions and its own behavior which  help it to react in different contexts. “…it is an architecture that opens to welcome me and closes to defend me” (novak,  ) and “…they sense, they actuate, but essentially not as a response to a single request” (oosterhuis, hyperbodies: towards an  e-motive architecture,  ). in this sense, the architecture from the users’ point of  view is never a controllable space which can fulfill their requests. on the contrary, the  user has to find ways to cooperate with this gigantic holistic sensible body by setting  up a relatively intimate relationship with it. this research envisioned this dynamic  interactive space would induce or evoke common people to get out of their comfort  zone to react in unusual/unconventional ways with their body gestures. this is one of  the main goals of the pavilion. the pavilion practically speaking, would also be used as  an interdisciplinary laboratory for scientist, programmers, artists, biologist, performers,  choreographers, designers, architects…etc., who are interested in experimenting with  reversal of homogenization of expression caused by current information technologies  and surveillance mediums. please refer to https://vimeo.com/ , http://www.hyperbody.nl/research/projects/the-hyper- loop/, and http://re.hyperbody.nl/index.php/msc g :frontpage, for a detailed description of the development  process of hyperloop and the related video. toc hypercell figure  .   hyperloop pavilion simulation by v-rep. for executing this interdisciplinary project, the research cooperated with delft robotics  institute to have professional support from their mechanics, electronics, systems and  control faculties. this research mainly focuses on the multi-directional development  of the large-scale dynamic structures and intends to realize it and experiment with it  in a scaled-down prototype. practically, this large-scale structure is composed of    distributed joints with various degrees of freedom, and geometrically takes the form of  an infinite loop (it can also be in a sense seen as an  -shape mobius ring), which can  fully re-configure its constituting components in real-time (figure  . ). therefore,  the joints of the hyperloop play extremely crucial roles from both the design and  engineering points of view. each joint acts as an independent agent in its own right  and hosts micro-controllers, attached to motors/servos in addition to sensing systems (which can track the proximity of people) and local sound and light emitting sources.  in other words, the joint with the structural tube should be seen as the “hypercell”  component in this case which has basic intelligence with degrees of freedom to  physically transform to enable multiple interactions. each joint is thus an agent of the  holistic swam: the hyperloop’s body. in terms of interaction scenarios, the makeup per  joint is aimed at generating a fully kinetic and sonic real-time interaction with people  approaching or leaving the structure as well as moving within the structure itself. the  entire loop is thus being a fully dynamic structure akin to an exploratory robot, which  harnesses different capacities of movement, sound, and light as an active medium of  communication with its visitors. toc     hypercell: a bio-inspired design framework for real-time interactive architectures figure  .   the real-time morphology simulation of hyperloop acting by embracing and repelling movement  among the people surrounding it by v-rep. toc hypercell hyperloop simulation, a mere step before physical prototype = mechanical make-up + consensus algorithm j j j j j ground j figure  .   diagram explaining the mechanical loop structure concerning the capability of the joint against  gravity: no.  joint staying on the ground can possibly hold no.  and no.  joints in the air but no.  joint would  have to stay on the ground in order to support the structural stability. in order to precisely realize the actual conditions of the hyperloop structure, this  research had to rely on professional mechanical engineering software, “v-rep” (virtual  robot experimentation platform) based on a distributed control so that each object/ model can be individually controlled via an embedded script, a plugin, an ros node, a  remote api client, or a custom solution within the software operation. as a loop-shaped  structure, the crucial mechanical task is to retain the connectivity of the structure  keeping the enclosure condition as a chain-like polyline. the key point in making this  task happen also relies heavily on both the mechanical design of the joints and the  mathematical algorithms keeping the overall shape constantly unbroken. within the  v-rep simulation, it can be relatively easy to represent all the different conditions  and configurations of the real dynamic structures but the most important bit is to  embed the limitations/physical constraints, such as gravity, motor torque, and the  mechanical degrees of freedom. the research was able to import the  d model of the  hyperloop structure and examine real-time manipulation of mechanical simulations  virtually within v-rep. one of the crucial mechanical constraints in the design of  hyperloop is that any one joint can at a maximum support   neighboring joints in the  air. in other words, if there are labels tagging on each joint, the j  joint staying on the  ground can possibly hold j  and j  joints in the air but then j  joint would undoubtedly  have to stay on the ground in order to support the structural stability (figure  . ).  certainly, the torque of the joint should be taken into account while simulating the  transformations of the hyperloop. the hyperloop transformation depends highly on  toc   hypercell: a bio-inspired design framework for real-time interactive architectures the interaction scenarios triggered by the data gathered from the embedded sensors  which are fed to microcontrollers mounted onto each joint. therefore, it puts more load  on the computational calculation for searching for a dynamic homeostasis or balance  condition. nevertheless, the v-rep software can provide a  d platform for robotic  simulation, but the calculation of torques, physical constraints as morphological  principles, the interactive reaction driven by the data coming from pre-set sensors,  and the communication protocols amongst each joint in order to balance the overall  hyperloop body, require advanced programming tools to conduct such heavy  calculations. this is done using two software suites, “matlab” and “mathematica”. “matlab” is used initially following all the above constraints and principles to program  suitable algorithms mainly for mechanical examinations. “mathematica” then takes  the algorithms in and sets-up the control system and communication protocols as  a test model meanwhile sending the resulting outcomes for visualizing simulations  under the v-rep’s environment, confirming the feasibility of dynamic stability of this  large-scale transforming structure. the complexity of the hyperloop’s movements  comes from the real-time calculation since each moving step will result in disrupting  the balance of the entire loop instantly and thus requires an immediate response  to gain back the balance. this results in a relatively complicated situation waiting  to be solved owing to the resulting torque and driving angles of the joints. once this  particular angle is decided, the rest of the hyperloop’s joints have to respond in  order to maintain the balance of the overall body while maintaining the closed loop  condition. to keep the balance while simultaneously deriving and communicating  the new adjustments/positioning of the joints, the development of a “consensus algorithm” is critical. consensus algorithm works on the basis of distributed  communication that calculates an agreement/consensus among a number of  processes to obtain a set of data values, in time, which drive the hyperloop’s joints.  for instance, once one of the active joints, joint_ , receives a value(v ) from the  attached sensor for driving this specific joint to move to a certain angle(a ), this  angle value(a ) will pass through to inform all the other joints. after all the rest of the  joints have been informed, they will decide to agree or disagree with this change. if  in agreement, joint_  will move to the angle a , and the rest of the joints will follow  a balancing equation accordingly to change/or not to change their positions; if in  disagreement, joint_  will propose another relatively minor angle value(a ) and once  again pass it through the rest of the joints to search for a possible agreement. the  process goes repeatedly until all the joints entirely agree, and they will eventually follow  the decision and make the resulting movements. thus, every time there is a sensing  value coming in, all the joints mounted on hyperloop will run the whole process again  and again until they reach a consensus. as mentioned before, the task of “matlab” and  “mathematica” are mainly to examine the overall computational calculations virtually  and later on input this into “v-rep” to simulate various morphing conditions in the real  toc hypercell physical environmental settings to prove the correctness, precision and the feasibility of  the sophisticated mechanisms and network protocols. once the applied mechanisms  are proven, both matlab (in terms of mechanisms) and mathematica (in terms of  internal communication) algorithms are translated into a programming language in  accordance with the applied microcontroller, which is an arduino in this case, in order  to develop a scaled prototype. joint design developments before having a strong support from the delft robotic institute, this research was  dedicated to the crucial development of the joint’s design both in terms of its form  and in its mechanism. after the delft robotic institute joined the project, they gave  professional suggestions and re-designed the joint from the sense of efficiency of the  mechanics points of view. several motorized propulsion mechanisms were considered,  such as mechanical, hydraulic, pneumatic, and electrical. hydraulic and pneumatic are  both powerful and controllable but not accurate enough for the hyperloop; mechanical  methods use fuel which makes it heavier to lift as a joint needed to be in the air within  hyperloop; electrical was then deemed as the ideal choice, which is easily controlled  with accuracy and is light weight enough to attain flexible positions. three phases of  developments listed as “initial thought”, “idea proposal” and “physical prototyping”  will illustrate the evolution of the joint design both in terms of form and mechanic  composition. initial thought: this is the phase before having the contribution of the delft robotic institute.  to make an enclosure loop and at the same time provide the joints can be freely  -dimensionally posed in different overall morphologies, the idea was to have   servo  motors which were in charge of   different axial rotations to complete the tasks (figure  . ). as for transportation, it has to be easy to be delivered and assembly on site. this  specific transportation idea drove the joint design to be easily assembled and de- attached. therefore, all the electronic devices, such as microcontrollers, motors, and  sensors, were designed to be impacted and embedded inside the joints for quick and  easy assembly. in this phase, the research set up general principles for the joint design,  and also brought out the confronting problems to be solved by numerous experimental  examinations either with simulations or physical prototyping. toc   hypercell: a bio-inspired design framework for real-time interactive architectures figure  .   diagrams illustrating the flexibilities and the rotation axis of the joint design at the initial  experiment stage. the bottom is the photo of the  d printing prototype embedded with   servo motors as the  rotating actuators. idea proposal: along with the consultants of the delft robotic institute, several undergraduate  students joined the team and made the project a collaborative effort enjoying their  professional contributions. in this phase of design, the motorized devices were reduced  to only two servo motors to keep the same performance, but mechanically simpler and  lighter weight for the sake of lifting the joints as one of the major tasks. mechanically,  two directional rotations are controlled by two motors in a set of joints. by inserting  the structural tube inside the controllable joints, the hyperloop can complete exactly  the same motion as with the three motors version proposed in the initial phase  (figure  . ). the structural tube should be at least   meters in length as a hollow  toc hypercell tube not only for the sake of light-weight but also for the convenience of putting the  required electronic wires inside as connections and for system protection. the joint  was designed as a ball (sphere) shape in order to reduce the friction while touching the  ground which might be taken as extra opposing forces and at the same time protect the  crucial electronic devices inside the joint. figure  .   images exhibiting the simulations and the photos of the  d printing joint as scale models for  examining the flexibility of the pavilions. the sphere shape of the joint reduces one directional rotation to make  it functionally more impactful and efficient and also relatively more protectable for the device when embedded  into the joint against the friction while making the morphology of the whole structure. physical prototype: in order to be examined in a short period of time, the joint was design as a simplified  version without having a ball shape yet. the goal with the physical prototype was to prove  the actual mechanisms work properly. two servo motors in charge of two directions  toc   hypercell: a bio-inspired design framework for real-time interactive architectures (x-axis and z-axis) were mounted onto one side of the joint, and the other side of the joint  mainly harnessed the rotation angle by the assigned motors. several modification steps  had to be done before assembly of the servo motors into the joint. the “mechanic stop”  inside the regular servo motors had to be removed in order to make more rotational angles  than the default constraint by   degrees. in terms of control, the potential meters inside  the regular servo motors had to be taken out and a knob-like gear added for harnessing  the precise angular rotations. a warm gear was required for each servo motor to have  more torque power driving the mechanism (figure  . ). after the motors’ modifications,  by placing them into the proper positions and assembly with the structural tubes and  connecting the wire for signal induction from each of the related arduino boards with  ethernet cables, it was able to drive the hyperloop prototype to life. hypercell = hyperloop? how does hyperloop design fit in the hypercell framework? there is a question if “the hyperloop does not look like a componential system in  terms of its appearance, how could it fit in the framework of ‘hypercell’?”. this question  emerged from a stereotypical view of how a “cell” should be defined. is it necessary to  be a cube, a sphere, a bubble, or a blob-like shape to be claimed to be a “cell”? any form  as long as it has the componential idea should be able to be treated as a “hypercell”.  that’s why a building block can also be seen as the “cell” of a building, as does an  aluminum tube even though they are all static elements. so, the difference of the  “hypercell” component is that it should have the ability of morphing its own structural  makeup. in the case of hyperloop pavilion, the joint with tubes is the form/shape of  the cell. with the   variables of rotations, it creates the morphological transformations  of the cells but at the same time affects the overall shape in the end (figure  . ). not  to mention the internal communication setup in between which makes it a perfect  case study not only as a representation following the swarm behavior logic but also the  expression of the hypercell design framework. the joints should be taken as the agent  of the swarm which has basic intelligence encoded in its microcontrollers. although the  intelligence of the microcontrollers is coded, the resulting outcome works via collective  decision-making in a bottom-up fashion by the joints. this gave it free will and made  it impossible to be predictable with respect to its next moves. therefore, the hypercell should be seen as a design framework rather than an object akin to a transformable  primitive geometry as a box or sphere in terms of design thinking to increasingly evoke  intriguing hypercell typologies. toc hypercell figure  .   images exhibiting the simulations, the prototype scale model of the hyperloop pavilion, and a  closer look at the joint design and prototype. § . conclusion “if a building could change its posture, tighten its muscles and brace itself against the wind, its structural mass could literally be cut in half,” said structural engineer, guy  nordenson. the quote describes a vision that “a building could have its own behavior and will”. this chapter is the summary of all preceding chapters attempting to propose  a new kind of organic bio-architecture which can interact like an organic body. as  a bio-inspired design, unlike conventional ways of implementing the mimicry of  toc   hypercell: a bio-inspired design framework for real-time interactive architectures natural shapes or the existing algorithms generating the natural forms and claiming  them as organic architecture, several useful principles have been extracted from the  fundamental research of the evo-devo biology perspective and have been translated  into crucial design rules to be followed. the principle of integration is the key not only  for translating natural principles but also for potentially applying digital tools and  techniques from the digital/parametric field of architecture. a “hypercell” design framework embeds such principles and logics to evoke a new  kind of design thinking intending to showcase the value of componential systems,  collective intelligence, and assembly systems following the fundamental rules for  morphogenesis in animals. with these principles, one is able to create organic body- like architectural designs which can adapt and interact with user demands in real-time.  in this chapter, the researcher not only indicates the design framework for organic  body-like architectures but also the title of the hypercell is also used to represent a  transformable component in a reconfigurable furniture system which implies more  efficient and novel usage of space. multi-functional furniture and space would be  the next prevalent step from the research point of view. until the discourse of the  hypercell furniture system, the focus of this chapter still remained with taking care of  the users’ demands. but the second half of the chapter started raising critical questions  pertaining to new relationships which would need to emerge between human bodies  and spatial bodies if space had its own behavior and will”. this is an artistically and  theoretically intriguing topic to think of especially in today’s time as we head into a  new era of ai (artificial intelligence). in the not too distant future, people will confront  the issue of intelligent robots regardless of them being shaped as a human figure or  like the hypercell furniture. “ambiguous topology” was exhibited as an experimental  installation under the european culture project, metabody, for encouraging people to  manipulate their body’s in unconventional ways by using immersive light projections  as a medium of non-verbal communication. “hyperloop” pavilion was exhibited as an  interactive structural system in the form of an infinite loop shape which can embrace  people within or repel people based on its physical reconfiguration. the hyperloop also serves as an example to break the stereotypical idea of a cell and its shape. this research also does not claim that projects like the hypercell or hyperloop pavilion should become the ultimate goal for all designers to follow. on the contrary, the  research aims to provide a design thinking direction in order to truly follow natural  principles to develop interactive bio-architectures. from this research perspective, the  novel organic architecture should embody interaction as a generic modality, which  makes such architectures actively confront dynamic contextual conditions via dynamic  optimization processes akin to an organic body. toc hypercell references benyus, j. m. ( ). biomimicry: innovation inspired by nature. new york: harpercollins publishers inc. biloria, nimish & chang, jia-rey. ( ). hyper-morphology: experimentations with bio-inspired design pro- cesses for adaptive spatial re-use. proceedings of the ecaade conference volume no. , (tu delft) (pp.  - ). delft: ecaade and faculty of architecture, delft university of technology. deleuze, g., & guattari, f. ( ). anti-oedipus: capitalism and schizophrenia. londom: continuum. engelbart, d. ( ). augmenting human intellect: a conceptual framework. washington dc: stanford  research institute. retrieved from http://www.dougengelbart.org/pubs/papers/scanned/doug_engel- bart-augmentinghumanintellect.pdf fox, michael, & kemp, miles. ( ). interactive architecture. new york: princeton architectural press. leibniz, g. w. ( ). monadology. (j. bennett, trans.) continuum. retrieved from http://www.earlymodern- texts.com/assets/pdfs/leibniz b.pdf mcluhan, m. ( ). understanding media: the extensions of man. new york: mcgraw-hill. novak, m. ( ). liquid architectures in cyberspace. in m. benedikt, cyberspace: first step (pp.  - ).  cambridge: the mit press. oosterhuis, k. ( ). hyperbodies: towards an e-motive architecture. basel: birkhäuser. o’sullivan, dan & igoe, tom. ( ). physical computing: sensing and controlling the physical world with computers. boston: course technology press. palumbo, l. m. ( ). new wombs: electronic bodies and architectural disorders. basel: birkhäuser. price, c. ( ). generator project. in cyber_reader: critical writings for the digital era (pp.  - ). london:  phaidon press limited. reynolds, c. w. ( ). flocks, herds and schools: a distributed behavioral model. compute graphics, ( ),  - . reynolds, c. w. ( ). steering behaviors for autonomous characters. proceedings of game developers con- ference (pp.  - ). san francisco: miller freeman game group. thompson, d. ( ). on growth of form. london: cambridge university press. toc     conclusion and future recommendation conclusion and future  recommendation “simply stated, what we are evolving are the rules for generating form rather than the forms themselves. we are describing processes, not components; ours is the packet- of-seeds as opposed to the bag-of-bricks approach.” john frazer § . conclusion interactive architecture should embody the features of “information”, “improvisation”, and “integration” in order to generate sufficient “intelligence” to embody the authentic kernel of “organic architecture”. in the domain of interactive architecture, it is quite easy to become trapped in  discussions predominantly focused on technical discourses. this is what can be  observed in most of the published materials on interactive architecture available in  the market today. these publications draw too much attentions in the manner of how  to make technical systems, instead of focusing on why to make it. partly, this may  be because it is necessary to understand hands-on technical issues, however, there  should certainly be more informative material to fertilize design thinking of interactive  bio-architecture. some other publications in the same genre fall into a collection  of on-going case studies in the domain of interactive architecture without properly  arranging them into an organized systemic discourse. unlike such publications,  this research attempts to become a pioneering exploration attempting to address  interactive architecture as the convergence of three areas: computation, embodiment toc hypercell (body), and biology. from the computational point of view, the research outlined the  historic trajectory of computational applications in digital architecture design or caad  (computer aided architectural design) and its evolution from data storage, rendering  representation, towards sophisticated physical computing. from embodiment(body)  perspective, a wide range of issues from diverse fields of metrology, philosophy, media  studies, interactive art, vr and motion tracking technology have been elaborated upon  in order to discover intimate relationships and connections between (cyber)space and  (cyborgs)human. in the section of biology, the discussion ranged from the so-called  organic architecture design that remains at the stage of mimicking organic shapes,  to extracting and translating the fundamental premises of morphogenesis from  evolutionary-development biology (evo-devo) in order to propose computationally  assisted body-like interactive bio-architectures. by leading the arguments slightly  more towards the humanities, cultural, and social or even biological aspects, it aims to  broaden the research scope of interactive bio-architecture to reverse its stereotypical  associations of being extremely technical and engineering oriented. this research thus  concludes by providing critical emphasis on topics such as information, improvisation, integration, and intelligence, which are reflective of the fundamental essence of the  inter-disciplinary research elaborated in each chapter of the thesis. § . . information data is omnipresent in our surroundings. it is not easily noticed in its raw form because  it is translated via different means to produce various information and messages.  sunlight in the form of temperature is a form of information; blood pressure inside  our body is another type of data; the text you put within the email is another one. it is  only recently that through technological means, we can visualize data in multiple ways  and thus a lot of emphases now is put into visual appearance of data via a plethora of  interfaces. however, data has been interpreted and communicated since ancient times  using different expressions. for instance, ancient paintings using animal blood or the  engraved sketches drawn in the caves millennia ago are also a method of storing data.  for that matter, all animals possess their own data storage in the form of their dna.  in nature, not only can the message received from the dna define each individual  animal body, it can also drive the evolutionary processes with respect to environmental  information to make appropriate changes to organic shapes and related bio-functions  in order to ensure survival and breeding. needless to say, may it be the computer or the body, they are both information  processors which deal with data with their internal mechanisms. one of the crucial  toc   conclusion and future recommendation features with data is that its nature is fluid. it is in constant flux and never ceases. it is  either dynamically transforming internally or gradually moving externally which makes  it always different than it was a moment ago. while dealing with such a dynamic entity,  it is relatively unwise to build a cumbersome obstacle, which hosts only one instance of  this dynamic data, which, unfortunately, is a typical way of conceiving a building right  now. as architects, we usually ignore such dynamic environmental data but rather tend  to block them out by using the principles of “utilitas, firmitas, and venustas” from the  “de architectura”. however, in today’s information driven era, one should adopt a novel approach in  architectural design wherein information flow is understood as vital in order to evolve  performative solutions in the form of “interactive bio-architectures”. this is seen  as a natural manner of dealing with a dynamic environment and that is also how  the organic body (of an animal) operates. this is one of the key points emphasized  constantly in this research. computational technology is an accelerator, which assists  us to build adaptable buildings. with the assistance of computation, a sensory space  could eventually be achieved by implementing high-end precise technologies either  in sensing or actuation in order to make the space adapt to the environment (in this  research, the users’ demands) akin to an organic body. § . . improvisation extending the idea of “space as body”, the improvisations can be interpreted as an  immediate reaction coming from both, the body and the space it inhabits. on one  hand, a body manifests immediate external reflexes (external improvisation) in  accordance with changing contextual circumstances. on the other hand, inside of  any organic body, there is always a continuous flow of data in the form of metabolic  activities, in order to keep the body functioning at an optimal level (internal  improvisation). in other words, the body reacts not only to the external dynamic  environmental conditions but also to internal metabolic changes. by replacing the  term “body” with “space”, every sentence mentioned above still holds true, if we follow  the definition of interactive bio-architecture proposed by this research. this implies  a space acting as a body and should thus be real-time adaptive in nature towards its  external environment as well as the towards the internal occupant demands. since  both of these aspects are essentially dynamic and unpredictable, thus, the term  “improvisation”, is apt for communicating the emergent adaptations which such a  space shall embody. the improvisations here are interpreted as functional flexibility  accompanied with appropriate comfort and convenient usage. as a vision, if a building  toc hypercell could adapt in order to optimally harvest sunlight and wind, as well as interact with its  inhabitants it would immediately take appropriate actions to do so. this kind of real- time adaptive space, which can respond to user requirements is an inevitable tendency  of interactive bio-architecture. borrowing its idea once again from marshall mcluhan’s  body extension, an architectural space should be able to operate as an external organ to  the human body, which can be manipulated freely using the users’ body gestures. “our	architecture	is	a	property	of	the	process	of	organizing	matter	rather	than	a	 property	of	matter	thus	organized,” (frazer,  ): this statement can also be  interpreted as a property of space, who’s body/matter is explicitly organized in real- time through a process, which is triggered by user’s demands. in other words, space  should be organized by matter in real-time and change its configuration to adapt to  unpredictable events instead of acting upon pre-set functions. the road to achieve such  intelligent behavior, as proposed via this research, involves componential interaction  and collective decision making akin to the principles behind swarm behavior. following the hypercell design thinking, using numerous intelligent mobile entities  in the form of distributed furniture or building blocks, it is possible to achieve multiple  assembly/deployment configurations in order to fulfill variable functional demands.  for example, an explicit command of “shelter” can be composed of various geometric  forms within these re-configurable/transformable entities following the logic of swarm  behavior. this, quality of hypercells can have a fundamental benefit over typical pre- configured spatial automation systems: one can expect unpredictable outcomes of  spatial formations satisfying the same functional criteria at different points in time.  this quality is also intriguing to the user and is able to portray the essence behind the  concept of improvisation without the space becoming sterile and predictable in the  long run. from the perspective of a user’s body, on the one hand, such improvisation  of space provides for customized spatial usage, while on the other hand, it implies  setting up of non-verbal communication between the human body and architectural  space. space thus literally becomes an extension of the body. “improvisation”, from a  user’s viewpoint, should thus free space from physical constraints of being static/non- responsive and in-turn empowers it with being both flexible and adaptable. § . . integration nature teaches us the importance of integration although there are different organs  and individual systems inside an organic body, they are all interrelated with each other  as a holistic body. this notion of “integration” is pushed to the extreme if we study  toc   conclusion and future recommendation the material properties which make up an organism. for instance, the stem of a plant,  is multi-performative in essence due to its material make-up. the material system  performs not only as a supportive structure, but it also performs efficiently to circulate  water and nutrition from the roots to the leaves, at the same time, it can also generate  sufficient energy from the chloroplast embedded in each of its componential cellular  elements. architecture, in order to embody such integration and multi-performative  behavior, should embrace the direction of harnessing componential systems to build  up an integrated, efficient and intelligent building. the emergent behavior observed  in swarms can also be interpreted as a form of “integration”. a swarm of ant, a flock  of bird, a school of fish…etc., generate a collective body using collective intelligence  in order to act as a gigantic creature by means of following simple communication  protocols embedded within each entity. this phenomenon of simple communication  between the smallest entity/building block is what the research emphasizes as one  of the key points when attempting to form complex objects such as buildings. this  implies that every single decision as regards physical movement from any of the agents  will have an influence on the other agents, which are a part of the object’s ecology.  this inter-activation, can also be traced in the philosophical thinking of deleuze and  guattari’s body without organs (deleuze, g., & guattari, f.,  ) and gottfried  leibniz’s monadology (leibniz, monadology,  ). as the research interprets it, “integration” implies a combination or a connection  between the virtual and the real world. the boundary between the real world and  cyberspace has diminished with the invention of the internet. plus, the increasing  creative exploration in the vr industry has now made it possible to merge multiple  virtual universes together. as a space designer, it is thus immature to ignore current  technological developments as well as social impacts along with it. the integration of  virtual reality and cyberspace can potentially create a wide range of spatial diversity  by either bringing the virtual into the physical world or by merging the physical  environment with virtual reality. “integration” in interactive architectural design  should thus be a major criterion to be considered during the initial design thinking  phase, the form generation phase, and during the development of integrated systems  design. § . . intelligence = information + improvisation + integration by merging the research of computation, embodiment (body related issues), and  biology, and associated cultural and social implications, this research proposes a  design framework for interactive bio-architecture by elaborating upon a series of  toc hypercell experimental design projects, which showcase the potential of this novel design  thinking. once the above features of “information”, “improvisation”, and “integration” are understood and implemented, the aspect of “intelligence” will naturally be collectively generated for the sake of the kernel of interactive bio-architecture as organic architecture. the research also tries to provide a different perspective on the embedded relation  between interactive architecture and organic architecture. interactive architecture  and organic architecture had been put into different genres for years, but by following  this research’s discourse, it becomes clear that they should ultimately reach a point  of convergence to create a new kind of organic bio-architecture. a parallel can be  drawn between how natural organisms live and how organic bio-architectures  should perform: using their collective intelligence, they are able to actively interact (both externally and internally) with contextual data and are able to make immediate improvisations, in order to function as an integrated body/system. § . future recommendation: in this section, including some unfinished efforts, several thoughts of future  developments following the principles and discourse of the thesis will be pointed out  as recommendations under separate topics of “software”,	“hardware”,	and “design thinking”. § . . software following and expanding on the bio-inspired ideas, this research translated essential  rules from evolutionary developmental biology (componential system, collective  intelligence, and assembly system), to set up a set of design rules in the form of a  framework instead of generating an ultimate design result. this is highly related to the  ideas propagated by john frazer’s notion that “…what we are evolving are the rules for generating form rather than the forms themselves. we are describing processes, not components; ours is the packet-of-seeds as opposed to the bag-of-bricks approach…”  toc   conclusion and future recommendation (frazer,  ). this kind of design thinking involves a game design strategy with  customized rulesets. the hypercell experiment, can be designed as a game for other  designers or even its users, to develop and create their own customized furniture  element as well as for developing an overall control system. in other words, with such  rule-based interactive design thinking, it is possible to allow people to participate and  customize design offerings. as gordon pask stated in his article, “the architectural relevance of cybernetics” (pask,  ): “…an immediate practical consequence of the evolutionary point of view is that architectural design should have rules for evolution built into them if their growth is to be healthy rather than cancerous. in other words, a responsible architect must be concerned with evolutionary properties...” the idea of  “a rule-based design framework operates as a game”, thus allowing for certain degrees  of design freedom (for adding, subtracting and modifying rules) for the designers’  and the users’ in order to satisfy their practical usage requirements. while nicholas  negroponte developed his idea of “soft	architecture	machine”, he intended to involve  the users to participate during the design process instead of having an intelligent  computer playing the role of a designer to generate designs which might not match  what the user exactly needs (negroponte,  ). with these settings, the game can be  harnessed by any end-users regardless of whether they are experienced designers or  have non-design oriented backgrounds. nonetheless, there certainly should be a virtual  visualization software to display the design outcome as a reference before proceeding  to manufacture. the designer can play the role of a programmer to develop a game-like  design software, or assume the part of an end user to create various results by utilizing  this design software. from a users’ points of view, with the rapid development in vr technology, it would  be even more impressive to envision not only rendered design results on monitor  screens but allow one to, in real-time, manipulate space using vr and its immersive  experience. this open-gaming idea applied to design provides flexibility to the users  which in a sense becomes an evolutionary democratic process. block’hood is a game-base design tool developed by jose sanchez in which people can “play” the  architectural design by adding cube-like spatial elements, such as private spaces,  staircases, windmills…etc., to generate one’s own unique design. it has been used  in practical projects and planning phases in urban design projects as well. similarly,  hypercells as a furniture system aims to become a real architectural building block.  it would thus be ideal if a gaming-system in the form of an open platform for sharing  different operational protocols driving various “hypercell” installations globally is  please check this website to learn more about the “block’hood”: http://www.plethora-project.com/blockhood/. toc hypercell developed. this will give rise to a strong user community which can share creative rule  sets for further enhancing the adaptability and customizability of the hypercell. § . . hardware the hypercell furniture system has a great potential in terms of practical use. the  research only managed to initiate a relatively rough design process and unfortunately  did not yet have a chance to realize the hypercell component physically. theoretically,  it is feasible to produce building components as hypercells but it might have relatively  high cost with all the required devices. it will thus be a prerequisite task to seek for  proper coordinated peripherals and technologies not only in terms of embedded  mechanisms but also with respect to material systems to be implemented in the  future. referring back to the discussion of merging the naturalized and the motorized applications in terms of material properties in interactive bio-architecture, there  should be practical possibilities to combine the mechanical and biological make-up  together as a novel hybrid material for future development of hypercell components,  which is also an innovative but potential research field awaiting to be explored. hypercells intend to be initially designed as a furniture system in the research, but  the end goal of the hypercell is relatively ambitious: to be utilized as an interactive/ transformable building block. in other words, the pragmatic usage of the hypercell  should not be limited by being functional for an interior space but should be operated  outdoors as a real programmable architecture building block which is robust,  structural, and space-defining. within the idea of hyprcell as a real-time interactive  building block, the pragmatic vision of the adaptive and pro-active environments  will be the space for people to actually cluster, walk upon, and live in with, thus not  merely limited to smaller-scale adaptive furniture to sit on or leans against. the digital  pavilion in seoul designed by kas oosterhuis(onl) back in  , gives a perfect  example of how the “living artificially intelligent space” comprised of programmable/ interactive building blocks should be. by integrating the robotic system, ubiquitous  computing, interaction and new media technology, it realized a living space with  voronoi cells as basic geometric/intelligent components to provide a pro-activeness,  mixed-virtual-reality space people have never experienced. in this case, the digital  pavilion accomplished   years ago has already set up an ideal model for hypercell  please check the website for more information and details about the digital pavilion, seoul: http://www.hyper- body.nl/research/projects/digital-pavilion/ toc   conclusion and future recommendation research to look up to. moreover, if feasible, then this transformable building block  could also be considered to have various mobility properties in order to cater to the  “urban nomad” where the space would only be created by hypercells once there is  a requirement. within this vision, the communication and control system would be  heavily involved in the future development. in terms of organic body-like space, it is  also crucial to think of wearable technology cooperating with the surrounding space to  literally create an intimate relationship between the space and human to be integrated  as a whole. § . . design thinking the goal of this research is to inculcate design thinking addressing interactive bio- architecture as an organic body owing to its componential cellular makeup. the  hypercell component presented in this research is the first version of hypercells.  with its ambition to become an interactive building block, it is extremely important  to develop more intelligent components following the direction of hypercell. such  development will involve inter-disciplinary investigations by talented designers and  experts to promote advanced development and realization. for instance, recently,  google exhibited the latest development of their ara smartphone . unlike the usual  smartphones, which come as a pre-configured package both in terms of their form and  their electronics, the ara phone provides flexibility to customize the phone by means  of assembling the components which you need. this idea not only changes the way of  making the product unique but also modifies the conventional manner of using this  product as a smartphone. such ideas, should not only become an inspiration but could  also lead to real applications for spatial structuring in architectural design. such, user-oriented optimization ideas have been proposed through the research of  the hypercell in the form of a furniture system to customize your own space in time.  to expand this idea to an even larger scale of architectural design, it is possible to  develop multiple customized, replaceable, reconfigurable, and transformable building  components not only different in shape, in material, but also in function. marketing  and business wise, there should be a platform akin to retail/on-line shops for selling  these intelligent building blocks. these intelligent building components should be  treated as hi-end technological products, such as smartphones and laptops, to be  please check the webpage of “google ara” for more details: https://atap.google.com/ara/. toc hypercell exhibited in specific stores where the designers or even users can purchase these  intelligent building components developed by different brands of manufacturers.  envision a scenario where you can walk into a retail shop specifically selling such  building components, and there are even multiple different demonstrations of the  components for various purposes, or even a furniture setting composed of those  components as a demonstrating living room section like how ikea exhibits for  designers or users to look around, experience, and purchase them. by simply filling in  the product number and the brand of the components, they will be delivered by the  supplier to your home the next day either for your own new design of a furniture piece  or your on-going project for luxury housing. it is intriguing enough to expect this future  scenario to emerge and evolve for smart living solutions. while innovation is always easier said than done, to make this multi-functional  building component idea a reality, there is a vast amount of research and prototyping,  which is still needed. the hypercell research envisions a potential to change the  manner in which we conceive architectural and interior designs in order to promote  smarter spatial environments which will result in a better quality of life. references deleuze, g., & guattari, f. ( ). anti-oedipus: capitalism and schizophrenia. londom: continuum. frazer, j. ( ). a natural model for architecture/ the nature of the evolutionary mode. in j. frazer, an evolu- tionary architecture. london: architectural association. leibniz, g. w. ( ). monadology. (j. bennett, trans.) continuum. retrieved from http://www.earlymodern- texts.com/assets/pdfs/leibniz b.pdf negroponte, n. ( ). soft architecture machine. in computer aided participatory design (pp.  - ).  cambridge: mit press. pask, g. ( ). the architecture relevance of cybernetics. architectural design,  - . toc     appendix appendix appendix i hypercell furniture catalogue_ before you read the catalog, you should know the form driven logic behind it. the catalog displayed here only defines the default settings of the hypercell transformable furniture. there is no limitation to explore more potential possible topological, tatami, origami or tangram-like applications following the design principles. // l-dna = the ultimate type and shape. = {n,n,n,n…} the logic extends the “true/false” mirror geometric transformation to determine the assembly regulation of the furniture piece. // d-dna = the interactive movement possibilities. = [n,n,n,n] the logic defines the basic component’s shape as well as the degrees of freedom of the physical constraints of the component in order to interact with the users and make the transformation as a behavior emerging bottom-up. toc hypercell bench no. chair no. chair no. chair no. chair no. chair no. chair no. [ , , , ] c m c m c m c m { , , , , } [ , , , ] [ , , , ] { , , , , } [ , ,- , ] [ , , , ] [ , , , ] [ , , , ] { , , , , } { , , , , } [ , ,- , ] { , , , , } { , , , , } [ , , , ] [ , ,- , ] [ , ,- , ] { , , , , } [ , , , ][ , ,- , ] c m c m c m c m c m c m c m chairs// {logic dna} [dimension dna] toc   appendix table no. table no. bed no. bed no. table no. c m { , , , , } { , , , , } [ , , , ] [ , ,- , ] [ , ,- , ] { , , , , } { , , , , } [ , , , ] { , , , , } [ , ,- , ] bed no. { , , , , } [ , , , ] bed no. { , , , , } [ , , , ] c m . c m c m c m c m c m c m table no. ( tatami ) [ , ,- , ] { , , , , } tables// beds// toc hypercell wall no. wall no. wall no. wall no. wall no. { , , , , } { , , , , } [ , ,- , ] [ , ,- , ] [ , ,- , ] [ , ,- , ] [ , ,- , ] { , , , , } { , , , , } [ , ,- , ] { , , , , } [ , ,- , ] wall no. { , , , , } [ , ,- , ] c m c m c m c m c m c m c m wall no. [ , ,- , ] { , , , , } c m c m walls & partitions toc   appendix stage no. storage no. bathtub no. { , , , , } [ , ,- , ] [ , ,- , ] [ , ,- , ] [ , ,- , ] { , , , , } + [ , ,- , ] [ , ,- , ] { , , , , } { , , , , } c m c m c m stages & others toc hypercell appendix ii ||videos & images links_ - : the videos exhibit the simulations, prototypes, studio & workshop results and other projects: //research related hypercell series: hypercell   hypercell geometric concept simulation: https://vimeo.com/ . hypercell   hypershell processing experiment: https://vimeo.com/ . hypercell   hypercell smartphone wireless control: https://vimeo.com/ . toc   appendix hypercell   hyperwall/furniture: https://vimeo.com/ . hypercell   hypercell processing real-time simulation: https://vimeo.com/ . hypercell   hypercell freehand user interface: https://vimeo.com/ . hypercell   hypercell virtual reality = motion tracking interaction: https://vimeo.com/ . toc hypercell metabody series: metabody   ambiguous topology_teaser: https://vimeo.com/  & technical details: https://vimeo. com/ . metabody   reflect-ego: https://vimeo.com/ , master students’ project tutored by the researcher. metabody   robozoo: https://vimeo.com/ , master students’ project tutored by the researcher. metabody   hyperloop vrep simulation: https://vimeo.com/ . toc   appendix //education related studio & workshop series: studio   interactive-performance environment master studio: https://vimeo.com/ . studio   interactive-activating environment master studio: https://vimeo.com/ . workshop  : interactivebody workshop  . : https://vimeo.com/ . workshop   interactivebody workshop  . : https://vimeo.com/ . toc hypercell workshop   interactivebody workshop  . : https://vimeo.com/ . workshop   swarmmy workshop: https://vimeo.com/ . //others others   a showreel of projects developed in “processing” as a creative coding tool: https://vimeo. com/ . others   an animation illustrating the main visual effects of a cd cover design: https://vimeo. com/ . toc     appendix others   visual design for “immaterialicious”, the first ever interactive fashion show in the netherlands:  https://vimeo.com/ . others   the deep sound of maramure, a real-time interactive performance cooperating with romania  composer who blending the traditional romania music with contemporary electric music: https://vimeo. com/ . toc hypercell toc   curriculum vitae curriculum vitae jia-rey(gary) chang was born in taiwan. after completing his m.arch degree in  architecture and urban design department, ucla, under the direction of neil denari  in  , he came back to his alma mater, the architecture department in tamkang  university, taiwan, researching on interactive and parametric architecture. in  ,  he established “p&a lab” (programming and architecture lab: http://pandalabccc. blogspot.com, and lately integrated into archgary.com: http://www.archgary.com  to continue) exploring the new possible relationship between the programming  and architecture. meanwhile, he also worked in the architecture department of the  national taipei university of technology as an adjunct lecturer. in  , he joined the hyperbody lab (http://www.hyperbody.nl/) to further develop  his preliminary research on the “hypercell”, a bio-inspired architectural component  with intelligence, kinetic energy, self-assemble and self-adaptive capacities based on  evolutionary development biology and swarm behavior principles. cooperating with  choreographers, visual artists, composers, and programmers, he has been involved in  an eu project, metabody (http://metabody.eu/), during  -  to explore the  pro-activeness and intra-action between the human body, its movement and spatial  quality. meanwhile, he is also extremely interested in the transdisciplinary topics of  fashion design, creative coding, visualization,  d/ d simulation, interactive design  and motion tracking technology, and conduct numerous workshops over the years. | cell phone: + ( )  | e-mail: archgary@gmail.com | website: www.archgary.com, http://pandalabccc.blogspot.com/ toc hypercell toc   publications publications biloria, nimish & chang, jia-rey. ( ). hypercell: a bio-inspired information design  framework for real-time adaptive spatial components. proceedings of the th ecaade conference (pp.  - ). prague: ecaade and czech technical university in  prague, faculty of architecture. biloria, nimish & chang, jia-rey. ( ). hyper-morphology: experimentations with  bio-inspired design processes for adaptive spatial re-use. proceedings of the ecaade conference volume no. , (tu delft) (pp.  - ). delft: ecaade and faculty of  architecture, delft university of technology. biloria, nimish & chang, jia-rey. ( ). swarmscape: a synergistic approach  combining swarm simulations, body movement and volumetric projections to  generate immersive interactive environments. advances in swarm intelligence: th international conference, icsi  (pp.  - ). bali: springer international  publishing. chang, j.-r. ( ). from interactive to intra-active body: new organic digital  architecture. new architecture, ,  - . chang, jia-rey, biloria, nimish, & vandoren, dieter. ( ). ambiguous topology  from interactive to pro-active spatial environments. proceedings of the ieee visap’ conference: data improvisation (pp.  - ). chicago: ieee visap. toc hypercell toc 	contents 	list of figures 	summary 	samenvatting 	 	introduction 	§   . 	structural introduction 	§   . 	background and problem statement: 	§   . 	research questions: 	§   . 	research objective: 	§   . 	research methodology and proof of concept: 	§   . 	research outline: 	 	from interactive to intra-active body: towards a new organic digital architecture 	§   . 	background: the origin of interactive architecture 	§   . 	de-skinning of interactive architecture 	§   . 	materialization of interactive architecture 	§   . 	immediate demands and bodily connection/communication of interactive bio-architecture 	§   . 	bio-inspiration of interactive architecture 	§   . 	organic bodies for interactive architecture (from cell to body) 	§   . 	from interactive to intra-active architecture (from inter-activeness to intra-activeness) 	§   . 	conclusion 	 	information processor - digital form with computational means 	§   . 	introduction 	§   . 	form sculptor 	§   . 	form generator 	§   . 	form animator 	§   . 	form interactor 	§   . . 	internal interaction 	§   . . 	external interaction 	§   . 	conclusion 	 	body conjunction = wavering between actual and virtual spaces 	§   . 	from body measurement to body extension to body without organ 	§   . 	you are in a virtual reality more frequently than you know 	§   . 	from interface to interact: merging layers of (sur)faces 	§   . 	body and brain vs. machine and computer under the discourse of interactive architecture 	§   . . 	materialize the body: “to motorize or to naturalize”, that is the question 	§   . . 	build up the brain: from decentralization to collective intelligence 	§   . 	conclusion 	 	defining a novel meaning of the new organic architecture 	§   . 	current developments and trends of bio-inspired/organic architecture. 	§   . 	morphological 	§   . . 	morphological development 	§   . . 	morphological development i 	§   . . 	morphological development ii 	§   . 	material 	§   . . 	materialization with algorithms 	§   . . 	materialization with real organs 	§   . . 	materialization, biomimicry, and digital fabrication technologies 	§   . 	behavioral 	§   . . 	more than form finding 	§   . . 	a swarm of smart autonomous entities 	§   . . . 	autonomous as transportation and assembly 	§   . . . 	autonomous as mobile/transformable components in architectural design 	§   . . . 	a vision of autonomous emergent systems 	§   . 	from static to dynamic optimization 	§   . 	evo-devo (evolutionary development biology), the inspiration of new organic bio-architecture 	§   . . 	simple to complex 	§   . . 	geometric information distribution 	§   . . 	on/off switch & trigger 	§   . 	conclusion 	 	hypercell: a bio‑inspired design framework for real-time interactive architectures 	§   . 	architecture as body 	§   . 	the integration of digital architecture = living interactive architecture = new organic bio-architecture 	§   . 	translating principles from evolutionary development biology to organic bio-architecture designs. 	§   . . 	from “simple to complex” to “componential system” 	§   . . 	from “geometric information distribution” to “collective intelligence” 	§   . . 	from “on/off switch and trigger” to “assembly regulation” 	§   . . 	living creature-like architecture = componential system + collective intelligence + assembly regulation 	§   . 	the crucial and immediate demands of developing real-time re-configuring space as a living creature 	§   . 	a series of experiments with the hypercell system: 	§   . . 	hypercell geometric principles and technical interpretation: 	§   . . 	the applications of a hypercell furniture system and future evolution 	§   . . 	a series of developments with hypercell 	§   . 	brief conclusion 	§   . 	living creature-like space with its own intelligence and behavior 	§   . . 	ambiguous topology 	§   . . 	hyperloop, an intra-active pavilion 	§   . 	conclusion 	 	conclusion and future recommendation 	§   . 	conclusion 	§   . . 	information 	§   . . 	improvisation 	§   . . 	integration 	§   . . 	intelligence = information + improvisation + integration 	§   . 	future recommendation: 	§   . . 	software 	§   . . 	hardware 	§   . . 	design thinking 	appendix 	curriculum vitae 	publications 	acknowledgements newe deutzsche lieder (review) newe deutzsche lieder (review) virginia hancock music and letters, volume , number , august , pp. - 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 #� �� �++� ���� �� ��� ����� ������ ���� ( � visions on the horizon of desire: a painting of henry vii & his family in the presence of st. george & the dragon reconsidered. by margaret wood milne b . f . a . , the university of british columbia, . dip. in art history, university of british columbia, . a thesis submitted in partial fulfillment o f the requirements for the degree of master of arts in f a c u l t y of g r a d u a t e studies department of fine arts: art history, visual art and theory we accept this thesis as conforming to the required standard the university of british columbia september © margaret milne martens, in presenting this thesis in partial fulfilment of the requirements for an advanced degree at the university of british columbia, i agree that the library shall make it freely available for reference and study. i further agree that permission for extensive copying of this thesis for scholarly purposes may be granted by the head of my department or by his or her representatives. it is understood that copying or publication of this thesis for financial gain shall not be allowed without my written permission. the university of british columbia vancouver, canada d e - ( / ) abstract bloodthirsty spectacle and devotional introspection commune together in a curious panel painting presently located at holyrood palace in edinburgh. in the foreground henry v u and his entire family kneel in prayer seemingly oblivious to st. george and the dragon waging mortal combat directly above. in the immediate centre an iridescent angel confronts the viewer with his piercing eyes. this unique panel, commissioned by henry v u in the final years of his reign between - , has proved an enigma. with its iconographic perversity (indiscriminate borrowing from disparate artistic traditions) and stylistic eccentricities (curiously flattened and spatially disjointed figures), the holyrood panel pushes against the boundaries of earlier visual traditions whilst rejecting renaissance paradigms manifest on the continent at this time. the reign of henry vii itself has been seen to straddle the unstable political and cultural terrain between the medieval and the early modern era. therefore this panel provides a unique opportunity to challenge established notions regarding the intersection between vision and politics within the early tudor court. in this thesis then, i examine the visual peculiarities presented in the holyrood panel in order to uncover alternative viewing frameworks operative within the english court at this time. i posit pilgrimage as the structuring frame for the image with allegory as its internal dynamic. allegory is an interpretive mode impelled by desire, which recovers meaning through the assimilation of seemingly disjunctive forms. in order to explore these allegorical trajectories within the panel, i situate the unusual configuration of st. george within an historical symbolic field. i conclude that allegory is a viable mode of political persuasion, which interpolates a predetermined viewer (here the garter lords and knights) into a contractual relationship. commissioned by henry vii at a time of dynastic uncertainty and immanent death, the holyrood panel is a political strategy that attempts to secure tudor succession. t a b l e of contents abstract i i list of figures iv acknowledgments v i p r o l o g u e : stories told in the mausoleums of dead kings i n t r o d u c t i o n : unruly images on the margins of art history c h a p t e r : visionary thresholds i. visionary beginnings ii. apocalyptic journeys iii. pugrirnage and politics i v . tudor vision c h a p t e r : dragon slaying on the borders of the body politic i. exploring possibilities ii. st. george for england iii. o f garter knots c h a p t e r : allegorical visions on the horizon o f desire i. painted identities ii. bloody histories • iii. apocalyptic ends i v . dynastic denouements postscript: battling the beast of oblivion: the tudor legacy selected bibliography figures appendix a : tudor genealogy appendix b : garter knights under henry vii iii list of figures figure the lady chapel, - , robert and william vertue (westminster abbey, london). figure tomb of henry vii and elizabeth of york, , peitro torrigiano (the lady chapel, westminster abbey, london). figure heraldic beasts, - (the lady chapel, westminster abbey, london). figure the family of henry vii with st. george and the dragon, - , attributed to maynard wewyck (royal collection, holyrood palace, edinburgh). figure the madonna of cannon van der peale, , jan van eyck, (groeningemuseum, bruges). figure triptych of john donne, c. , hans memling (national gallery, london). figure st. george with edward iii and family, c - . watercolour reproduction, robert smirke, c. (society of antiquaries, london). figure french tract for nuns, c. , add. m s , folio (british library, london). figure st. john's vision on the island of patmos, c. - , add m s , folio v. (british library, london). figure the angel shows st. john the heavenly jerusalem, english apocalypse, c. m s , folio r. (pierpont morgan library, new york). figure trinity college apocalypse c. (trinity college, cambridge). figure imaginacion de vraye noblesse, , quentin poulet royal m s .c.viii., folio r. (british library, london). figure st. george, moreel triptych, right wing reverse, , hans memling (groeningemuseum, bruges). figure st. george and the dragon, - , rogier van der weyden (national gallery of art, washington). figure monumental brass of sir hugh hastings ofelsing, , (elsing church, norfolk). figure st. george and the dragon, - , vittore carpaccio (scula di san giorgio degli schiavoni, venice). figure st. george arming edward iii, - , milemete treatise, m s , folio r., (christ church, oxford). figure wilton dyptych, after (national gallery, london). figure jerusalem, from the desriptio terrae sanctae, , burchard of mount sion, commissioned by philip of burgundy (british museum). figure windsor chapel, t h century engraving. figure henry vi and the knights of the garter, m s royal e v i , folio (british library, london). figure the grand procession of the sovereign and the knights companion c , engraving. figure the sovereigns of europe worshipping st. george, t h c. manuscript illumination. figure silver testoon (left) and silver groat (right) c. . figure john, duke of bedford before st. george, the bedford hours, , add. m s , folio v. (british library, london). figure impresa shield, late t h century, flemish. figure the whole work of homer, title page, , george chapman (huntington library, san marino, california). figure the marriage tapestry of arthur tudor and katherine of aaragon, c. , attributed to piers enghein (magdalen college, oxford). figure mariage of the princesse (katherine), , woodcut, r. pynson, no. . figure tournament before king arthur, m s douce , folio (bodleian, library, oxford). figure ancestry of john, lord lumley, , lumley inventory no. . figure temptation in the garden, t h century, m s (rare books collection, library of congress). figure christ and st. michael and entry into jerusalem, beaune altarpiece, centre and farleft panels, , rogier van der weyden (musee hotel-dieu, beaune). figure apocalyptic battle over mont st. michel, les tres riches hueres du due du berry, - , the limbourg brothers, m s / (musee conde, chantilly). figure whitehall mural, , copy by remigius van leemput after hans holbein the younger, cat. (royal collection, london). v a c k n o w l e d g e m e n t s there have been many people who have been instrumental in bringing this thesis about. i am especially grateful to my readers, carol knicely and rose marie san juan, for their thoughtful and insightful comments and for their encouragement and availability throughout this process. i would also like to thank margaret and frank fitzsimmons, and sarah and lindsay jones, for their hospitality during my time in london. i am also grateful to sarah, ingrid and bev for pink slippers, meals on wheels and dessert diversions. m y thanks to kathleen wyma for her wisdom and encouragement that has kept me going even when it seemed impossible. i am indebted to my mother for her proof reading expertise and both her and my father for their constant encouragement and prayers. lastly i would like to thank jacob for his invaluable contributions in formatting and editing, but most importantly for his support, encouragement and wisdom. thank you for putting up with me! in all this i would like to acknowledge my creator who is my hope and my provider in all things. vi p r o l o g u e stories told in the mausoleums of dead kings the true image of the past flies by. the past can be seized only as an image which flashes up at the instant when it can be recognized and is never seen again. .... for every image of the past that is not recognized by the present as one of its own concerns threatens to disappear irretrievably. walter benjamin on of may "between eleven and twelve of the clock" henry v i , the politically unfortunate and mentally deficient lancastrian king was murdered in the tower of london, reputedly by the hands of the duke of gloucester, but certainly under the explicit instruction of his yorkist usurper, edward i v . the official excuse for henry's sudden expiration stated that he had collapsed from excessive melancholy and sheer displeasure at his hopeless state of affairs. but in contradiction to these fictions, and to edward's embarrassment, henry's rigid corpse began to bleed profusely while lying in state, first at st. paul's cathedral and then at blackfriars, causing witnesses to speculate on other, more unsavoury explanations. as the harrowing tales accumulated around henry's putrefying body, edward ordered its hasty removal fifteen miles down the thames by barge to chertsey abbey, where it was ignobly buried and left to rot in anonymity. or at least that was the idea - for henry's body continued to exhibit signs of irrepressible sanctity. reports of miracles spread rapidly and images of the martyred king were erected in churches across the country where candles burned incessantly before them, forcing edward into the awkward predicament of quelling the activities of one already dead. walter benjamin, "theses on the philosophy of history," illuminations, ed. hannah arendt, trans. harry zohn, (new york: schoken books, ) . when henry's body was exhumed in to ascertain the cause of death his skeleton was found in pieces and his skull crushed in. alison wier, lancaster and york: the wars of the roses, (london: pimlico, ) . the official records stated that having learned of his family's slaughter and that his cause was "utterly despaired of...with so great despite, ire and indignation that of pure displeasure and melancholy, [henry vi] died." weir . the posthumous activities of henry vi and the cult activities that grew up around them are discussed in weir, . see also g. w. bernard, "vitality and vulnerability in the late medieval church: pilgrimage on the eve of the determined to silence this disruptive cadaver and the bad publicity his burgeoning cult engendered, edward issued prohibitions against the "going of pilgrimage to king henry." this only intensified his veneration and the seditious spread of devotional literature. 'saint' henry was now invoked on behalf of england "to set the realm at rest." petitions for healing thus slipped easily from the individual body to the kingdom corporeal, providing an opportune vehicle for veiled political protest. in edward tv died unexpectedly and was swiftly followed by his son who was prematurely put to rest by the machiavellian ambitions of his brother, richard the duke of gloucester. once king, richard hi took a more outwardly conciliatory approach to the 'problem' brewing on the peripheries of his sovereign authority. under the pretext of restitution, henry's body was disinterred from its remote location at chertsey (his incorruptible body emitting the anticipated odors of sanctity), and installed with all due reverence in st. george's chapel, windsor right next to the corpse of his mortal enemy edward tv. here, conveniently situated at the very epicentre of royal power, henry's body could be kept under the watchful eye of the sovereign. break with rome," the end of the middle ages? england in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, ed. john l. watts (thrupp, stroud and gloucestershire: sutton publishing ltd., ) - and simon walker, "political saints in later medieval england," the mcfarlane legacy: studies in late medieval politics and society, ed. r. h. britnell and a. j. pollard (stroud: allan sutton publishing, ) - and brian spencer, pilgrim souvenirs and secular badges, medieval finds from excavations in london (london: the stationery office, ) . the sheer number and geographical spread of pilgrim badges surviving in relation to henry vi attest to its remarkable popularity. walker and bernard . spencer . this veneration is curiously not limited to lancastrian sympathizers as evidence of pilgrim activity in york minster was recorded in the mid s. arthur penrhyn stanley writes; "in every important church an image of the sainted henry had been erected. even in york minster pilgrimages were made to his figure in the rood screen, which it required the whole authority of the northern primate to suppress." historical memorials of westminster abbey. n d ed. (london: john murray, ) . the body of liturgical and devotional material characterized henry as the suffering lamb and later as peacemaker. walker . simon walker notes that this phenomenon of invoking saints for the healing of a disheveled body politic burgeoned coinciding simultaneously with and functioned in opposition to the growing sacral claims of kingship. a brief summary of scholarly debate around richard's motivation for the translation of henry vi are summarised in bernard - . his personal effects were set up as relics over the burial spot alongside an iron alms box. weir . two years later at bosworth field, henry tudor, aided by a defecting york army, defeated richard hi, restoring the throne irrevocably to the house of lancaster. under henry v h . cult activities were liberated from overtly repressive measures, but were subjected to the subtle manipulations in the myth manufacturing of the early tudor regime. this included massaging the new king's dubious ancestral connections to this saintly predecessor, uncle by way of his uterine brother (appendix a ) , and fabricating a prophetic encounter which anticipated the young tudor's ultimate dominion. henry v u thus bolstered his own legitimacy by virtue of both blood and divine orchestration. he cunningly inscribed his own body into the hagiographic discourse calcifying around the skeletal remains of henry v i , and redirected devotional attentions onto his own person as the living monarch. intending to solidify these discursive maneuvers, henry pursued formal canonization for his uncle, and was granted a papal commission in for which authentic miracles were officially documented as primary evidence. furthermore, in the same year, henry poured money into the rebuilding of the lady chapel at windsor, where he intended to house not only his uncle's body, but also his own. caught in the supernatural exchange reverberating around his uncle's shrine, his own soul's situation would be vastly enhanced. henry was otherwise occupied in suppressing the insurrection of a series of more militantly inclined revenants. the most serious threats being from perkin warbeck posing as richard, duke of york, and lambert simnel as edward, earl of warwick who was at that time imprisoned in the tower but executed shortly thereafter. in the alleged meeting between henry vi and henry tudor arranged by owen tudor, vergil writes that henry vi prophesied "this truly is he unto whom both we and our adversaries must yield and give over the dominion." wier . henry primary claim was through his father edmund tudor, half-brother to henry vi, and son of the queen dowager, catherine de valois' and henry v s page, owen tudor. alternatively, he could and did claim royal blood through his mother, margaret beaufort, the great granddaughter of john, duke of lancaster. see appendix a. "bernard . the intent is recorded in the indenture of which states that according to "the singular affeccion and devocion that his grace hath to his uncle of blessid memory king henry the vjth he has lately begon to make and bilde of new the chapell of our lady within the collegeat church of wyndesore entending to have translatid the body of his said uncle in to the same and nygh unto him within the said chapell to have be buryed hymself." h. m . colvin records , pounds directed towards this end in the history of the kings works vol. - (london: her majesty's stationary office, ) . these architectural dreams came to an abrupt halt, however, when a legal dispute erupted between westminster abbey, windsor and chertsey over the burial rights of this potentially lucrative corpse. on march , , after lengthy deliberations, possession of the holy remains was awarded to westminster by the star chamber. henry v h prudently revised his own prospective burial location, immediately diverting money from the building at windsor to the construction of a new lady chapel at the far east end of westminster abbey. here, in the centre of the new chapel, henry arranged for the holy body to be enshrined in a 'perpetuall sepultre' and "in the same not ferre from his said uncle to be buryed hymself." pope julius ii obligingly granted the necessary license for the translation and rejoiced that henry's miracles would now be lifted out of the "obscurity" in which his enemies had contrived to envelop them. unfortunately, the translation never took place. when henry tudor died in of natural causes, his son henry vijj assumed responsibility for the ambitious funerary undertakings at westminster, albeit with a few modifications. politically, the new monarch had little to gain from his remote miracle working ancestor of dubious political acclaim, but every advantage in monumentalizing his own lineal perfections. therefore, henry vhi, apparently unmoved by the purgatorial afflictions of his late father's soul and against the explicit instructions exhaustively laid out in his dying w i l l , left henry v i unembellished at windsor, and had the bodies of henry antiquarian histories of westminster abbey provide colorful and anecdotal histories of the politicking around henry vps burial spot and the lady chapel. see stanley - and edward frederick carpenter, house of kings: the history of westminster abbey (london: barker, ) - . george fascet, the prior and john islip, the mark bailiff, later abbot, had convincingly demonstrated that henry vi had himself marked out his own burial spot at westminster. e. f. carpenter . in all expenditure on the lady chapel at windsor ceased and was not revived until after by margaret beaufort. work on the new chapel at westminster commenced in . colvin and . l colvin . stanley . in anticipation of this event, woodblock prints were churned out from presses of the abbey precincts, advertising the curative powers of henry vi whose gargantuan body is seen towering over the prostrate supplicants. anthony goodman, "henry vii and christian renewal," religion and humanism: papers read at the eighteenth summer meeting and the nineteenth winter meeting of the ecclesiastical history society, ed. keith robbins (oxford: basil blackwell, ) . v h and his queen duly installed into his vacated shrine in the lady chapel at westminster instead. as it stands, the entire lady chapel at westminster abbey is a breathtaking masterpiece of tudor megalomania, a spectacular reliquary liberally embellished with tudor devices of rose, fleur de lys and portcullis, canopied by rippling fan vaulting laced with silk drop spandrels and surrounded by a whole panoply of saintly intercessors colonizing every available niche (figure l ) . at the locus of this swirling tudor cosmos, enclosed within a gothic inspired bronze grill, the recumbent effigies of henry v h and elizabeth of york lie side by side, immortalized in conjugal harmony and perpetual prayer. they are a sculptural testament to the union of henry tudor, the last lancastrian heir, and elizabeth of york, the eldest daughter of edward tv, whose sacramental vows had miraculously delivered england from the tumultuous chaos of the wars of the roses (figure ). the sacred origins of the tudor dynasty are thus structurally enshrined as a political miracle of peace and the reigning sovereign its living incarnation as a genealogical marvel springing from their mingling loins. this brief detour into the skeletal closets of english history and the discursive afterlife of deceased kings illustrates not only the political havoc caused by revolting corpses, but also the centrality of dead bodies to the political machinery and representational strategies of late medieval kings. this is hardly surprising for a political entity conceived as a corporeal totality. crypt stories surface like resurrection bodies, animating the body politic in a carefully because of the highly unusual position of henry vii's tomb behind the altar, reminiscent of the placement of shrines, scholars have concluded that this spot had been prepared for henry vi. colvin - . it has been a pervasive assumption that that henry vii was too miserly to pay the costs for canonization. it seems that henry vi was in fact awarded canonization but the process was interrupted by the death of henry vii. under henry viii it appears the petition may have been renewed but was eventually dissolved along with the monastic foundations in the s. john n. king, tudor royal iconography: literature and art in an age of religious crisis (princeton: princeton university press, ) - . in his will, however, henry viii requested that the tombs of both edward iv and henry vi be made more princely, again stressing the equality of both strands of his lineal descent. bernard . vergil wrote that henry vii's resting place was "one of the stateliest and daintiest monuments of europe.... so that he dwelleth more richly dead, in the monument of his tomb, than he did alive in richmond or any of his palaces." choreographed dance of death and presenting an ideological gloss on the political present or haunting the living as an inverted mirror of its spectral mortality. history, like hagiography, is written and rewritten around obliging cadavers as persuasive fictions rehearsing the violent beginnings and consequent identities of a social body. the sepulchres are never fully sealed and the carcasses within patiently await future generations to spin their tales anew. relentlessly they come. day in and day out, constrained between velvet cords and regulated by officiating prelates, a human convoy of modern day pilgrims wends its way in irreverent wonder and noisy curiosity through the sepulchers of the dead at westminster abbey in london. a low hum echoes between the lifeless stones as the sound of ghostly whispers emanate from prosthetic audio guides simulating and stimulating the voices of the past. obediently, the dry bones stir from their shrouded sleep (as if anyone could sleep in such a ruckus) to recount their histories in any language of choice. attempting to bridge the impossible gulf separating now and then, historical ventriloquists weave ghostly tales around dismembered corpses, traversing the silent abyss of time's passage in an endless flow of authoritative words. in time, these tales ossify into cumbersome monuments erected by utterance into treasured national myths, effigial substitutes for their objects of desire. today as visitors parade past the tomb of henry vii and elizabeth of york in the hallowed lady chapel at westminster abbey, they are educated on the finer details of the exquisite sepulchre designed by the florentine, pietro torrigiano in . pressing their faces against the cold grill, the inquisitive peer in at the slumbering monarchs whose elegantly quoted by david howarth, images of rule: art and politics in the english renaissance. - (london: contoured features chiseled in gilt marble effect a chilling physiognomic presence. infused with naturalism, flanked on four corners by the requisite putti (though modestly clothed) and inscribed below with a series of dialoguing saints enclosed in laurel wreath roundels, it is a stunning monument materializing on the horizon of an artistic wasteland. it is as .though the trumpeting cherubs herald the long awaited advent of the (italian) renaissance in england. the archival bones of england's visual remains do not yield easily to these grand narratives enfleshing the past, shamefully lagging behind the shining achievements of her continental counterparts, her backward forms grating against more progressive innovations in religion, law and political economy. the reign of henry v u has been seen as particularly bleak. though situated at the cusp of a new kind of monarchy, the arts seem to offer no visual correlative. consequently, with the exception of torrigiano's funerary cenotaph and the indefatigable efforts of scholars like gordon kipling and sydney anglo, his reign has been abandoned for the charisma of later tudor macmillan press, ) - . according to david howard: "the tomb of henry vii was the most triumphant collaboration of the visual arts in the entire english renaissance." howarth . colin richmond laments the absence of taste and the failure of imagination exhibited in fifteenth century visual production in england. richmond writes; "it was an italian, torrigiano, who brought to tomb effigies a vision large enough to make them moving." see his article "the visual culture of fifteenth-century england," the wars of the roses, ed. a. pollard (basingstoke: macmillan press, ) . according to david evett, the lack of royal guidance in matters of cultural aesthetics "contributed strongly to the static, even stagnant case of the visual arts in tudor england." literature and the visual arts in tudor england (athens and london: the university of georgia press, ) . in historical discourse the reign of henry vii is janus faced, teetering on the edge of two worlds, neither medieval nor fully renaissance. although the simplicity of the 'new monarchy' has come under attack in recent years, scholars all seem to agree that something new was happening. s. b. chrimes in his exhaustive work henry vii, (new haven and london: yale university press, ) remains the last extensive treatment of his reign. though refuting the claims for innovation in administration, nevertheless regards the stability of henry vii's rule as an impetus for change. the debates have continued since over whether or not his reign marks a political revolution and a move towards more conciliar government as argued by john watts in his article 'a new ffundacion of is crowne': monarchy in the age of henry vii," the reign of henry vii: proceedings of the harlaxton symposium, ed. benjamin thompson (stamford: paul watkins, ) - ) or a conservative entrenchment in medieval forms of control fueled by his own insecurities and fear of the nobility as christine carpenter does in "henry vii and the english polity," found in the same volume pages - . for a summary of recent debates on these issues see john watts, "introduction: history, the fifteenth century and the renaissance," the end of the middle ages? england in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, ed. john watt (thrupp, stroud and goucestershire: sutton publishing ltd., ) - and steven gunn, "sir thomas lovell c. - : a new man in a new monarchy," in the same volume pages - . heavyweights. encased within a gothic grill and watched by a menagerie of heraldic beasts leering down from the rafters, this memorial aptly positions the reign of henry vii at the threshold of a paradigm shift. it is an embryonic moment, capturing the emergence from a confining mediaevalism into the secular progressivism of the early modern era (figure ). torrigiano's tomb is proclaimed a miracle of art, a national representative worthy of inclusion in art history survey texts. henry vii 's visage in death is transformed into a vision of rebirth through history's necrophilic excursions. . . ' roy strong begins his collection of essays on tudor and stuart painting, for example, with henry viii. both sydney anglo and gordon kipling have recuperated the court of henry vii from the lingering ethos of austerity and gravitas precipitated by francis bacon in his sixteenth century biography. anglo has demonstrated the importance of political pageantry for the tudor regime, suggesting that these spectacles reached their zenith under henry vii. sydney anglo, spectacle. pageantry and early tudor policy (oxford: clarendon press, ). kipling has been the most influential exponent of early tudor visual production, persuasively arguing for a revival of artistic production under henry vii, largely in an attempt to emulate the splendors of the burgundian court. see gordon kipling, the triumph of honour: burgundian origins of the elizabethan renaissance (the hague: leiden university press, ) and "henry vii and the origins of tudor patronage," patronage in the renaissance, ed. guy fitch lytle and stephen orgel (princeton: princeton university press, ) - . hugh honor and john flemming, the visual arts: a history. lh ed. (new jersey: prentice hall, ) - . introduction unruly images on the margins of art history in scotland, banished to the royal collection's exhibitionary peripheries, the less exalted expressions of national history are to be found adorning the walls of her majesty's summer residence, at holyrood palace, edinburgh. here, relegated to the upper reaches of mary queen of scots former bedchamber, and shrouded in gloomy silence, is a very different relic representative of this so-called 'new monarchy' (figure ) . it is a large square panel painting ( . x . cm and here referred to as the holyrood panel) comprised of six boards and coated in a heavy lacquer. a little worse for wear, a dark seep of color has stained the seams, interrupting the painterly facade. nevertheless, by simultaneously craning one's neck and negotiating the spotty glare cast by light straining through tiny stone slit windows, the image begins to emerge under the murky patina. in the foreground, clustered under heraldic pavilions, henry vii, elizabeth of york and all the heirs of their bodies kneel together in pious uniformity. fluttering ambiguously in the vacant space between them, an iridescent angel with flashing wings and an icy stare grasps the curtains of their protective canopy, shielding their vision from the bloodthirsty spectacle ensuing beyond. there framed against the smoldering embers of a fiery sky and a mysterious megalopolis, an intrepid st. george and an odious dragon wage mortal combat over a fair princess and her pert lamb, who anxiously await their fate in prayerful apprehension. on closer inspection, however, the mild eccentricity of the scene gives way to more unsettling irregularities as the entire surface buckles under a teeming mass of bodies and beasts, pavilions and plumes that seem to breed on the surface, reflecting and refracting in signifying obsession. the royal regiment certainly seems i l l at ease. despite the fact that five of the nine are deceased, these royal clones seem to spontaneously replicate behind their parental prototypes, their wandering eyes firing a battery of desperate looks which ricochet across the surface of the picture plane. fervent supplication seems justified in the circumstances. though skewered through the eye, the slimy winged monster is not dead but alarmingly enervated, his splayed limbs dangling perilously above them. smothered in the sticky hues of the apocalyptic sky, the atmosphere is thick with palpable anxiety. the angelic sentinel guarding this disturbing sight pierces the viewer with an ominous stare. discretionary viewing is clearly advised. what could have occasioned this unsettling painting? was it the dementia of a court painter or the devotional eccentricities of a tudor king? the contents of henry's delusional unconscious seem to have emptied out and reassembled here in an interloping convention of mythic beasts, legendary heroes, celestial apparitions and deceased relations. perhaps st. george is harvesting dragon's eyes as a cure for the unsettling effects of bad dreams. although there is no direct reference to this painting in the historical archive, several pertinent facts can be adduced. the profusion of tudor roses and portcullis and the lack of any further heraldic devices locate it squarely within the immediate context of the early tudor court and strongly indicate the personal patronage of henry tudor. its authorship has therefore been provisionally attributed to maynard wewyck, a flemish portrait painter employed at court as early as and recorded in the wardrobe accounts of the time as receiving an annual stipend." as will become apparent, the situation of this painting within the bedchamber of mary queen of scots - unruly monarch threatening the english crown - is rather ironic. in some medieval medicinal concoctions dragons eyes boiled in wine and oil were used to ward off night terrors. in addition, dragon's blood was seen to cure blindness and dragon's fat, weak eyes. samantha riches, st. george: hero, martyr and myth (thrupp, stroud and gloucestershire: sutton publishing ltd., ) - and . the reign of henry vii is notorious for its poverty of documentary sources in contrast to previous reigns. noted by james gairdner in his compilation memorials of king henry vii (london: longman, brown, green, longmans and roberts, ) vii. kipling states that maynard was initially employed as a royal artisan receiving the standard daily wage of one shilling, but was later promoted to a court retainer akin to the royal librarian, earning an annual salary often pounds. his own signature is recorded as 'meynnart wewych'. kipling, "origins" . kipling identifies maynard furthermore, as the painting includes all seven offspring of henry vii and elizabeth of york and given the fact that elizabeth died in february shortly after delivering her fourth daughter, its date of commission can be confidently allocated between this event and henry's own death in april . the art historical literature is almost as dismal as the archive. considering this is the only surviving painting of the period besides portrait busts, and despite the energy devoted to lamenting the desecration of national treasures, the holyrood panel has received surprisingly little attention. granted, it offers few allures, as it stubbornly clings to mediaeval anachronism, flatness and surface. lack of mimetic realism excludes it from biographical utility and pictorial incoherence disqualifies it from more progressive continental paradigms. it betrays no influence of secular humanism, no familiarity with the rudimentary concepts of perspective, disegno or concietto, and no other 'scientifically' based, rational exploration of the visible world. horace walpole in his anecdotes of painting in england found its style so "ancient and singular" that he relegated its description to the painting of the early fifteenth century. " therefore, despite scharf s assertion that this painting is "one of the accepted landmarks of as a flemish trained artist from walloon. helen jeanette dow, has argued for his origins in the north of france. for discussion see, helen jeannette dow the sculptural decorations of the henry vii chapel, westminster abbey, (edinburgh, cambridge and durham: british museum press ltd, ) - . evidence suggests a familiarity with flemish style as the employment of paint rather than gold leaf to represent gold is consistent with flemish productions. george scarf, "on a votive painting st. george and the dragon, with kneeling figures of henry vii, his queen and children, formerly at strawberry hill and now in the possession of her majesty the queen," archaeologia ( ): - . elizabeth gave birth to eight children in total, however one son survived only a few hours. his unbaptised state seems to disqualify him from inclusion here. although it was not inconceivable that children were subsequently added, close scrutiny of the panel has not revealed any trace of over painting. scharf . for a litany of political and natural disasters assailing english cultural heritage see roy strong, lost treasures of britain, (london: viking, ). strong writes; "a votive altarpiece in the royal collection depicting henry and elizabeth and their children adoring st. george. this was probably painted circa - but is too formalised to rely on for correct likeness." tudor and jacobean portraits: national portrait gallery vol. (london: her majesty's stationary office, ) . am not suggesting that scholars have listed these objections to justify its exclusion within art historical narratives nor that they are mistaken in doing so. indeed its very peculiarity does not lend itself to such projects. i merely call attention to the way in which our judgment of 'taste' is undeniably and unwittingly influenced by these founding frameworks and our recuperative instincts latch onto the objects which best exhibit a reflective vision of these projected origins. historical painting in england" and kipling's exclamation that it is "the most remarkable painting done under henry vii's patronage," the holyrood panel remains shrouded in obscurity. following the initial prognosis of horace walpole who purchased the painting in , it has been the unquestioned,assumption by the majority of scholars that the holyrood painting functioned as a typical altarpiece. these terse but persistent accounts go on to surmise that it was commissioned to furnish a private chapel in henry vii's newly constructed palace of richmond or alternatively one of its adjoining monastic foundations. certainly, the aggressive devotional posturing of the royal family in the immediate foreground of the image in conjunction with a scene from sacred hagiography, albeit slightly unusual, seems to support this assertion. or does it? after all, the history of the painting from its original whereabouts to its re-surfacing at the arundelian estate auction in is hidden in complete obscurity." let us briefly consider the visual evidence that warrants the ascriptive term 'altarpiece'. private or votive altarpieces such as jan van eyck's madonna of canon van der paele all adhere to a basic visual protocol in which donors and their offspring kneel on the peripheries of the image in humble deference to the ultimate object of veneration located in the focal centre (figure ). personal saints, such as st. george, act as intercessors by virtue of their gruesome '" horace walpole, anecdotes of painting in england with some account of the principal artists, (london: chatto andwindus, ) - . these adulations were drawn to my attention by neil beckett, "henry vii and his sheen charterhouse," the reign of henry vii: proceedings of the harlaxton symposium, ed. benjamin thompson (stamford: paul watkins, ) , quoting scharf and kipling, triumph . the painting is typically enlisted as supplemental evidence for more ambitious projects, isolating the iconographic particulars that support the larger argument. so for example, beckett calls attention to the resemblance of the architectural backdrop to sheen to support his argument for henry vii's personal attachment to sheen. beckett . king focuses on the piety of the praying royals. king - . kipling explains the prominence of the dragon in relation to the burgundian chivalric ethos of 'facing adversity with equanimity." kipling, triumph . walpole who purchased the painting in was the first to describe it. though correctly assigning it to the reign of henry vii misidentified the principle figures as henry v and his brothers with his wife and her entourage. he writes; "it was an altar-piece at shene, and in all probability painted by order of henry vii, for the chapel in his palace there." walpole . scharf s lengthy article in while correctly identifying the devotional figures concurs with walpole. "there can be no doubt that this picture was a votive altar-piece...with subsidiary figures of royal personages in the foreground below." scharf . other authors have reiterated the same position. kipling, triumph ; beckett ; christopher lloyd and simon thurley, henry viii: images of a tudor king (london: phaidon press, ) ; king to name a few. ' deaths and mediate the encounter between the supplicant and the divine through a gesture of introduction. the mechanics of salvation are clearly articulated through a spatial hierarchy, at once securing the donors eternal presence before god, facilitating the viewers own prayerful meditation, and providing a visual focus for liturgical celebrations performed at the altar. evidence for english conformity in this respect is fairly conclusive, despite the staggering success of sixteenth century iconoclasts. the few surviving fragments indicate the predominance of carved alabaster retables, a homespun variety prevalent in the fifteenth century and a predilection for imported flemish and netherlandish painted altarpieces. exemplary of this later category is the triptych of john donne, attributed to hans memling c. (figure ). sir john donne of kidwelly, a knight for the house of york and his wife elizabeth hastings and daughter are presented by st. barbara and st. catherine to the enthroned virgin and child amused by the musical interludes. st. john the baptist, and st. john the evangelist are depicted on the triptych wings flanking the central scene. the altarpiece is predictable in its articulation of a hierarchical arrangement of bodies from the surface peripheries to the sacred recessed centre, connected through meditative gesticulations. prior to this continental trade in portable retables, ' scharf . barbara g. lane asserts that altarpieces functioned primarily as ecclesiastical objects providing a visual correlative for the sacramental rites performed at the altar. this theological interpretation centered primarily on the sacrificial body of christ would have been evident to contemporaries. barbara g. lane, the altar and the altarpiece: sacramental themes in early netherlandish painting (new york: harper and row publishers, . for alabaster altarpieces see lynda rollason, "english alabasters in the fifteenth century" england in the fifteenth century: proceedings of the harlaxton symposium, ed. daniel williams (suffolk: boydell press, ) - . for a discussion on netherlandish domination of english patronage in the later half of the fifteenth century and early sixteenth century see christa grossinger, north-european panel paintings: a catalogue of netherlandish and german paintings before in english churches and colleges, (london: harvey miller publishers, ) - . it should be noted that with few exceptions the fifteenth and sixteenth century altarpieces presently found in english churches are all nineteenth century acquisitions. the ashwellthorpe triptych is one of the few surviving altarpieces from this period. it is a netherlandish production attributed to the magdalen master and falls into the standard pattern of donor portraits on the wings. the center panel is, however unusual, as it depicts the seven sorrows of mary, providing multiple points of contemplation unified on a single landscape directing the viewer .on a meditative pilgrimage through the image. andrew martindale, "the ashwellthorpe triptych," early tudor england: proceedings of the harlaxton symposium, ed. daniel williams (suffolk: boydell press, ) - . dirk de vos, hans memling, trans. ted alkins and marcus cumberlege (bruges: stedelijke musea, ) . churches relied on wall frescos painted behind the altar. it is from this category that we find the best example of royal votive portraits in the murals painted above the altar at the east end of the st. stephen's chapel at westminster the representational focus of the fresco is drawn from sacred history and depicts the adoration of the magi and the presentation at the temple. underneath, overtly paralleled with the above scenes, edward hi, and philippa of hainault kneel with their ten children in a series of gothic porticos. linking hands, they are directed by st. george to the madonna and child enthroned above (figure ). in the holyrood panel, however, the much-desired chain of salvation is i l l defined and the intended focus for ocular contemplation is highly irregular. the royal penitents vie for our viewing attentions with their pious ostentation, and the ultimate point of visibility is not an image of the passion or the mother of god but a strange architectural conglomeration. st. george, heeding the call of chivalric duty, is busy practicing an intercession of a different kind. the celestial aid turns his back on the sacred scene, unveiling the royal bodies, and presenting them to the viewer instead. therefore, although lloyd and thurley assert the "extreme conventionality" of the painting's vocabulary, namely "votive figures kneeling before their patron saint," the term 'altarpiece' seems to raise more questions than it answers since donor portraits can be seen as the latecomers encroaching on the space of sacred representations their presence alone cannot provide the basis for a positive identification. craig harbison has asserted the term 'altarpiece' was never distinguished in inventories from other paintings and could have as easily furnished a domestic as a liturgical space. hans belting has hans belting, likeness and presence: a history of the image before the era of art, trans. edmund jephcott (chicago and london: the university of chicago press, ) . these murals in st. stephens chapel were destroyed by fire in , but are known from a watercolor copy made by richard smirke c. . strong, lost treasures . lloyd and thurley . craig harbison, "the northern altarpiece as cultural document," the altarpiece in the renaissance, ed. peter humfrey and martin kemp (cambridge and new york: cambridge university press, ) . for an argument against the restrictive consequences of applying the term altarpiece to a painting see paul hills', "the renaissance likewise pointed to the functional versatility of altarpieces, operating as the visible expression of a social body or even as an argument dressed in a liturgical frame. therefore, we should not be overly zealous in our employment of anachronistic classifications. while the holyrood panel deliberately quotes a certain devotional vocabulary, this may be intended as a reference for interpretation rather than indicating a functional necessity. as we have seen, the holyrood panel cannot easily be situated within conventional art historical paradigms. it has been described as an historical illustration of a jousting event held in the grounds at sheen and been adopted by the national portrait gallery for official documentation. consequently, we find it included, albeit begrudgingly, in strong's definitive catalogue of tudor and jacobean portraits. these discrepancies are in themselves instructive and point to the way in which this image pushes against the boundaries of existing conventions as a site of iconographic transformation. i am not interested in embarking on a recuperative project that seeks to reconcile iconographic idiosyncrasies into a predetermined and potentially restrictive frame. rather, i wish to retain the singularity of the image, and pursue alternative viewing modalities utilized by the holyrood panel. i will therefore bracket the term altarpiece for the present and attend to the way in which the image itself directs our viewing. like torrigiano's tudor tomb, the holyrood panel is symptomatic of the shifts and instabilities under girding the changing political and cultural terrain in the early sixteenth century. however, it does not conform to the triumphal tudor conceits of genealogical inevitability monumentalized as a fait accompli in the lady chapel at westminster abbey. altarpiece: a valid category?" the altarpiece in the renaissance, ed. peter humfrey and martin kemp (cambridge and new york: cambridge university press, ) . for his disparaging comment see footnote . strong, tudor and jacobean portraits . interestingly, george scharf, the only author to attempt a sustained analysis of the work was the director of the national portrait gallery at the time. am assuming the proscribed iconography of the panel, itemized in a contractual agreement between patron and painter. these contracts are described by evett as "organized according to a program or prescription drawn up by a rather, and perhaps more intriguingly, the holyrood panel participates in the formation of these tudor mythologies and founding histories, and consequently the insecurities attending their birth. stylistically, then, rather than embracing the streamlined forms of the italianate mode epitomized in the tomb effigies of henry vii and his queen, the holyrood panel evokes the congeries of heraldic beasts surrounding the recumbent pair and eerily watching from the peripheries. stylistically perverse, iconographically transgressive and utterly singular, the holyrood panel stubbornly resists all attempts to delimit it. like the disorderly body of henry v i , the holyrood panel is an unruly stiff, a haunting presence on the borders of art historical narratives and triumphant tudor histories. consigned to obscurity, both in its present location and in the historical archive, its dark brooding forms loom like shadowy apparitions performing history's violent erasures. this project is an attempt to give voice to these silent histories. restored to its central location within the representational strategies of monarchical power, this image offers up exciting possibilities for rethinking not only the role of visual production in the early tudor court, but also for resurrecting the unspoken anxieties and desires that compelled its production. these anxieties can be visually intimated but never uttered. representation as such is not illustrative but productive and actively participates in the operations of power. as louis marin has argued in his work on the absolutist monarchy of louis xtv, power fueled by desire both impels the work of representation and is its chief effect, converting sheer force into symbolic potential in a dialectical escalation. inspired by marin, i am interested in the operational modalities of representation, and particularly the mechanisms, which interpolate the viewer into this reciprocal augmentation of power and desire. scholar in consultation with a patron, setting forth ideas of a proposed work, listing the ideas to which the artist to express them, imposing not only subject matter but often material, scale and overall style as well." evett . am indebted to georges didi-huberman and his recent article "the portrait, the individual and the singular," for these theoretical directions. his thought provoking observations on the bargello bust call attention to the strength a 'misfit' artifact can have in unsettling our historical assumptions. see the image of the individual: portraits in the renaissance, ed. nicholas mann and luke syson (london: british museum press, ) - . like the hagiographic literature erupting around the corpse of henry v i , interpretive possibilities breed in the allegorical disorder that this image invites. rather than recovering meaning through an additive process of iconographic accumulation, i want to investigate the way in which the image opens itself up to be seen. as the act of viewing is always already anticipated, this painting is not only subject to the ideologically spun histories of the present but also participates in the strategic work of history. in this thesis i w i l l investigate these representational strategies, examining the coercive structures that direct the work of interpretation and also the anxieties that rupture its own frame. in the first chapter i w i l l begin by situating the holyrood panel within the viewing paradigms of the early tudor court. in particular i will argue for a politics of vision, calling attention to the structuring frame of pilgrimage and the use of allegory as an integral interpretive mode. here i will suggest that the holyrood panel employs these strategies in order to effect a contractual exchange. in the second chapter i will attend to the iconographic particularities and peculiarities of st. george and his significance in relation to the english crown. by doing so, it will be possible to uncover some of the underlying anxieties that precipitated the production of the holyrood panel as well as identify a prospective viewing audience. in the final chapter i w i l l attend more specifically to the work of allegory, the way in which it participates in the work of history, and the beginnings and ends to which it tends. i will ultimately argue that this painting is an allegorical vision, unfolding in the face of dynastic annihilation. driven by an insatiable lust for perpetuity, it is a political intervention, framed as a pilgrimage of eschatological desire, which intertwines tudor history with sacred hagiography in an attempt to secure the continuity of the tudor dynasty. c h a p t e r visionary thresholds the whole of this fugitive life is divided into four parts; the period of erring, or wandering from the way; the period of renewal, or returning to the right way; the period of reconciliation and the period of pilgrimage.... the period of pilgrimage is that of our present life in which we wander as pilgrims amidst a thousand obstacles. the golden legend he has set eternity into the hearts of men yet they cannot fathom what he has done from beginning to end. ecclesiastes : while peering intently into the dusky shades of the holyrood panel, one has the uncanny sensation of being watched. cloaked in the cover of darkness, a myriad of beady eyes answer our look. pious eyes, fearful eyes, determined eyes and wounded eyes flicker this way and that, dispersing like scattered light or strobes alighting on fragmentary forms. silent and knowing, they witness our probing curiosity. we are caught in a visual trespass, arrested by the blistering stare of the angelic guardian glowing brightly against the gloomy ground as though illumined from within. he is the beginning and end of this viewing encounter, a marvelous magician confounding us with his flourishes, veiling and unveiling the enigmatic forms, taunting and deterring our inquiring eye. these compelling looks have an urgency about them that insert the very act of viewing into the frame of vision. in order to recover the force of this imperative, i w i l l attempt to place the holyrood panel within a context of viewing, tracing out the contours of visionary experience in early sixteenth century england. recognizing that looking is never innocent, i w i l l construct granger rya and helmut ripperger, trans, and ed. the golden legend of jacobus de voraigne (new york, london and toronto: longmans, green and c o , ) . an ocular genealogy to estrange our historically situated eyes, and to recover in part some of the meaningful traces inflecting tudor sight. allegory is crucial to my approach as well as to the forms of viewing within which this panel was situated. i w i l l thus briefly call attention to the theoretical basis underpinning my use of it here. in recent years, largely sparked by craig owens' influential essay in the issue of october, allegory has been rescued from its misapprehension and denigration inherited from nineteenth century classicists and rehabilitated as a viable vocabulary for postmodern critique. walter benjamin preempted this in his work on german mourning plays, finding in baroque allegory a viable theoretical alternative to the modernist symbol. for benjamin, allegory is not mere illustration, but an expression characterized by an animated internal dialectic of sacred idea and profane form. allegory is not the tidy equivalence of figure and corresponding idea as presumed in the nineteenth century. rather, allegory glories in the polysemy of forms, which give rise to an unruly mass of meanings, signifying at once everything and nothing. its exemplary forms are the ruin, the fragment and the corpse, figures that fuse nature and history in a glorious decay. though celebrating allegory's heady nihilism, benjamin admits that allegory tends towards persuasion and though flirting with the death of meaning, it is essentially resilient to it. allegory is instinctively a recuperative mode, a form of resurrection, which rises up in the face of immanent destruction. in answer to this confrontation with loss benjamin writes, "meaning is encountered as the reason for mournfulness." joel fineman, in his essay "the structure of allegorical desire" argues that this ubiquity of expression is essentially structuralist, one of the primary exponents of attending to viewing as a culturally conditioned act is michael baxandall, whose notion of the 'period eye' was first articulated in painting and experience in fifteenth century italy: a primer in the social history of pictorial style (oxford: oxford university press, ) . although baxandall's critics have taken issue with the 'positivist' idea of fully recovering visual experiences of the past, i believe he is more interested in the process of estrangement which seeks to call attention to our present ideologically and culturally informed vantage point rather than erasing the distance between them. owens - . operating within a predetermined frame which directs its unfolding. for fineman, this structural drive which propels itself through time is motivated by a desire to recover the origins which gave rise to it, an impossible project that will be endlessly deferred. it is my intention to chart this impulse within the holyrood panel, recognizing that as allegorical desire is the implicit drive of all analysis, i myself am implicated in this same compulsion for resolution and recovery. i am inclined to agree with fineman in his assessment of the conservative ends to which allegory tends, however, i am also interested in the way in which the unspoken anxieties, which give birth to its expression, surface as a haunting reminder of its unacknowledged origins. having abandoned the category 'altarpiece' and attending to the interdisciplinary character of the image itself, i will propose four alternative viewing modes drawing from medieval visionary theory, apocalyptic visions, pilgrimage literature and court pageantry. these accounts are by no means exhaustive but for the sake of brevity i will restrict my discussion to the points most pertinent to the painting at hand. /. visionary beginnings the visionary sensibility that pervaded the later middle ages began with a rupture in the concept of time. up until the thirteenth century, the prevailing theory followed the teachings of walter benjamin, "allegory and trauerspiel," the origin of german tragic drama, trans. john osborne (london: nlb, ) - . benjamin argues that allegory had served as the constitutional outside against which the symbol might reign. benjamin - . joel fineman, "the structure of allegorical desire," october ( ) - . combining psychoanalysis and jakobson's theory of diacriticality, fineman argues that allegory is essentially a structural pursuit of a lost origin, which is mirrored in the replacement of the primary phonemic utterance with a secondary opposition. allegory in literature occurs at the intersection of narrative and structure or metonymy and metaphor. the interruption of a primary movement, say pilgrimage, with a structural metaphor births the allegorical impulse that replicates this structure through time in a self propelled search for the lost origin that gave rise to the structure. for textual commentary, this is the promise of the withheld meaning of the text. the following discussion was largely informed by frank kermode, "world without beginning or end", the sense of an ending: studies in the theory of fiction (new york: oxford university press, ) - and ernst h. kantorowicz, the king's two bodies: a study in mediaeval political theology (princeton: princeton university press, ) - . st. augustine. this was essentially a dualist framework, juxtaposing two incommensurable realms: time or nunc movens and eternity or nunc stans. time was created, finite and corruptible, and bound to the moral decrepitude of the material world. it had a definite beginning in creation, and an ultimate end at the last judgment. by contrast, eternity was outside time, a "now and ever standing s t i l l . " it was conceived as the mind of god, an ever-present blessedness without quantifiable duration. with the revival of aristotelian philosophy in the thirteenth century, however, this perceived wisdom was thrown into question. according to aristotle, the world was not finite but eternal, and without beginning or end. the world was perpetuated in an endless cycle of corruption and regeneration through the immutable necessity of material forms. this rationale promulgated by the averroists - the prime exponents of aristotelian thought - challenged previously indisputable doctrines concerning the transience of the created world. furthermore, their insistence on one immaterial soul for all men threatened the immortality of the soul. although the church council denounced the averroist heresies in , theologians like thomas aquinas attempted to reconcile these perplexing contradictions to christian doctrine. the result was the creation of a third order of time: aevum. aevum (or aion in greek) was an intermediary dimension that accommodated both the durational momentum intrinsic to time and the endlessness of eternity. aevum was a realm inhabited by angels, who as celestial beings found in book xi of saint augustine confessions, trans. r. s. pine-coffin (london: penguin, ) - . kantorowicz . sinclair b. ferguson and david f. wright eds., "averroism," new dictionary of theology, (downers grove and leicester: intervarsity press, ) - . based on aristotle's theory of matter and immutable forms, the averroists believed that there was one immaterial soul for all man throwing into question the idea of free will, individual accountability, salvation and final judgement. it should be noted that these ideas had been posited long before the thirteenth century, but it was under the averroists with the rediscovery of aristotle's works, that these ideas were considered a serious threat. were privy to the beatific vision of god in eternity, and as created beings participant in the affairs of men on earth." aevum was thus a theological solution to the problem of perpetuity, an innovation preserving the immortality of the soul. in addition, aevum had more practical applications. it offered a new field of investigation for the scholastic imagination - the discipline of angelology - and opened up a visionary aperture for spiritual exploration. as a liminal zone mediating the material and the spiritual realms aevum opened up a cosmic wormhole for time travel, a portal of escape from the bounded frailty and degradation of time's passage for a momentary glimpse of eternity in time. it promised a vantage point from which to apprehend the beginnings and ends of things from the position of one in the middle of their unfolding. correspondingly, at this time we find a veritable explosion of travel narratives or soul excursions into this new dimension. whether accounts of mystical experiences or allegorical dreams, these stories all ultimately unfold as a quest for eternity perceived as a celestial city glittering on the horizon of desire. the primary instrument necessary for embarking on this journey was the eye. sight, in the later middle ages, was regarded as the highest form of sensory perception, the sense most receptive to the presence and experience of god and the basis for all knowledge and understanding. according to medieval theories of vision, an object was an active agent in its own transmission, propagating itself through rays alternatively called 'lumen', 'likeness' or 'species' that penetrated the eye. passing through a series of sensory receptors or ventricles ™ kantoriowicz . kermode identifies this predicament of being in the middle as the primary motivation for apocalyptic stories and/or fictions. kermode . thomas aquinas writes in de anima "the sense of sight has special dignity; it is more spiritual and more subtle than any other sense." mary j. carruthers. the book of memory: a study of memory in medieval culture (cambridge: cambridge university press, ) . for discussions on the primacy of vision in the later middle ages see michael camille, "new ways of seeing gothic art," gothic art glorious visions, (new york: harry n. abrams inc, ) - . also belting ff. and suzanne lewis, reading images: narrative discourse and reception in the thirteenth century apocalypse (cambridge: cambridge university press, ) - . there were several competing theories of vision. the extromission theory stated that the eye emitted capturing rays alighting on an image and illuminating it. this view attributed power to looking giving credence to ideas such and terminating in memory, the 'species' would impress itself like a seal on the sensitive matter of the soul (or sometimes the heart). here, these imago or phantasms would be ordered and stored as a kind of florilegium or anecdotal compendium of mental scenes. as the rays of intromission replicated not only the sensory form of the object but" also its inner truth, viewing was not only seen as a mechanistic and physical activity but also spiritually or morally impacting. the movement of the species inward was a transformative process penetrating the deepest recesses of the soul. in the twelfth century, hugh of st. victor systematized these ocular operations into a hierarchical model of viewing levels corresponding to the exegetical mode of scriptural interpretation. the eyes of the flesh perceive the material forms of the visible world that should be sealed and ordered in memory. the eyes of the mind operate allegorically, scouring memory's storehouse for similar impressions in order to contemplate the self and the world it mirrors. finally, the eyes of the heart, when illumined, contemplate god who is pure light and wisdom itself. painting mental images onto the tissue of the soul was vital for the process of spiritual as the evil eye or the dangerous look of a menstruating woman. the intromission theory, by contrast, attributed power solely to the object in the field of vision. although the intromission theory was at this time most widely credited, roger bacon an english franciscan of the early thirteenth century, attempted to synthesize both theories, suggesting that the eye itself emits species which, when seizing upon the species of an object, ennobles it, enabling it to continue its course and be apprehended by the eye. asserting the importance of vision he wrote; " every efficient cause acts through its own power, which it exercises on the adjacent matter, as the light (lux) of the sun exercises its power on the air.... and this power is called "likeness", "image" and "species" and is designated by many other names, and its is produced both by substance and by accident, spiritual and corporeal...this species produces every action in the world, for it acts on sense, on the intellect and on all matter of the world for the generation of things." david c. lindberg, theories of vision form al -kindi to kepler, (chicago and london: the university of chicago press, ) , - . for a discussion on ventricles, see camille and carruthers - . carruthers . robert grosseteste is credited with articulating the relationship between vision, cognition and the apprehension of spiritual truth. lindberg - . there are multiple versions of this process, which reach back at least as far as st. augustine who articulated a threefold methodology of scriptural interpretation - corporale, spirituale and intellectuale. lewis . cassin in the fourth century expanded this to a fourfold method of interpretation. richard of st. victor adapted this to four levels of vision: historical, allegorical, tropological and anagogical. barbara nolan, the gothic visionary perspective (princeton: princeton university press, ) - . madeline caviness elucidates how artists made use of these different interpretive levels in the twelfth century in "images of divine order and the third mode of seeing," gesta . ( ) . for hugh's emphasis on placing images in memory see daniel p. terkla, "impassioned failure: memory, metaphor and the drive toward intellection." imagining heaven in the middle ages: a book of essays, ed. jan swango emerson and hugh feiss (new york and london: garland publishing inc., ) - and ff. intellection, and the more emotive and bizarre the scenes the better. ' in short: "the eye of the flesh is open, the eye of reason runs and the eye of contemplation is closed and blind." this highest attainment of visual sensitivity sometimes called anagogy, approximated the euphoric experience of the "heavenly homeland" within the contemplative soul. as the pursuit of knowledge was ultimately a pursuit of god, the discovery of both secular and sacred truths passed through the same mechanical operations of vision. intellectual truths were not divorced from spiritual ones, but were ultimately bound on the same path to enlightenment, mirroring each other in the ascent towards the true speculum, or christ himself. vision and knowledge thus become seamlessly intertwined in a journey of 'insight' and ocular purification; it was a progressive ascent from carnal imperfection towards spiritual enlightenment, the material to the immaterial, and the souls fusion with the divine. //. apocalyptic journeys this climate of visual ascendancy had enormous impact on religious practices, which became increasingly oriented around the stimulation of the eye. this was epitomized by the elevation of the host during mass when in the miracle of transubstantiation; the real corporeal presence of christ was made visibly manifest to the celebrants. mystical encounters surpassed scriptural scholasticism as the highest measure of revealed truth, and visionary experiences b i carruthers . jeffrey f. hamburger, nuns as artists: the visual culture of a medieval convent (berkely, los angeles and london: university of california press, ) . noland . "as with augustine, wisdom was for hugh not something but someone. wisdom in the augustinian tradition is the second person of the trinity, christ." terkla . in , the bishop quivil of exeter writes "and the host is thus raised high so that it can be contemplated by all surrounding believers. and by this the devotion of believers is excited and an increase in their faith is effected." the elevation of the mass was officially instituted by the synod of paris in and under bishop odo of sully and fully incorporated into liturgical missals throughout christendom by the mid thirteenth century. miri rubin, corpus christi: the eucharist in late medieval culture (cambridge: cambridge university press, ) , - . the feast of corpus christi was introduced in . see camille . it should be noted that altarpieces, quickly replaced works of charity as the ideal expression of spiritual piety to which the devout aspired. devotional images played a crucial role in cultivating visions, providing meditative foci as well as pragmatic expletives for the would-be visionary apprentice. suzanne lewis has attributed this emphasis on visual prompts to a 'metaphorical drift' from 'imago' as analogy for mental perception to actual pictorial representation. in an illumination from a fourteenth century french codex instructions for visionary success are clearly laid out step by step in the four architectural quadrants and demonstrate the central role of images in stimulating the internal eye (figure ). of further interest is the presence of the celestial agent, perforating the space of the material world to facilitate these internal meditations. the paradigmatic visionary hero was st. john of the apocalypse, whose prophetic visions were recorded in the book of revelation. the proliferation of apocalypse manuscripts produced in england during the thirteenth century with sumptuous illustrations is testament to his growing popularity and chic. as john's visionary role garnered more attention, his portrayal was transformed from passive recipient seen dozing on the margins of the vision, to an active gloss that provided a catalogue of gestural responses to the vision unfolding before him. in one fifteenth century manuscript illumination, st john's vision shrinks into a distant nimbus while john himself becomes the subject of vision, dominating the foreground in an exemplary meditative posture (figure ). in addition to providing instructions on visionary protocol, the illustrated apocalypse functioned as a simulated visionary experience in itself. delving into the painted page, both john often equipped with curtains or opening wings participated in this multimedia sacred spectacle providing the visual backdrop for this sacramental rites, imaging the fleshy corporeality of christ's body in paint. hamburger and belting . lewis . belting . for a discussion on john's shifting role in relation to the illuminated apocalypse see lewis - . michael camille, "visionary perception and images of the apocalypse," the apocalypse in the middle ages, ed. richard k. emmerson and bernard mcginn (ithaca, new york: cornell university press, ) - . and the reader are enlightened by a celestial guide who unfurls his robes in revelation, disclosing the wondrous events that must transpire before the end of time and the establishment of the city of god (figure and ). occupying the liminal zone between time and eternity, the angel becomes an intercessory conduit for the spiritually sensitive reader. the vision unfolds diachronically propelled along by an eschatological impulse. as the pages turn, the reader is introduced to a panoply of mysterious forms, populating the visionary landscape as christian knights, monstrous beasts, dragons, multi-orbed lambs, virgins and whores which materialize before her eyes. internalizing these apparitions, the reader embarks on a secondary excursion, an allegorical rummaging through memory, probing the strange exterior forms apprehended by the carnal eye in search of deeper spiritual truths beneath. with the activating power of sight, these adumbrated and versatile forms were animated by the viewer into present significance, sweeping the reader up into the cosmic drama, and positioning her on the threshold of the impending furor. for this reason, the apocalypse was employed as a polemic text, revived at opportune moments to present an emotionally gripping commentary on the political or ecclesiastical present. in thirteenth century england, the apocalyptic resurgence occurred in the wake of successive crusading disasters in the holy land. with all hope of recovering jerusalem extinguished, christian zealots turned inward, finding adequate expression and consolation for according to st. augustine, all scripture functioned as both veiled and unveiled revelation, which obfuscated the truth to all but the deserving mind, and whose discovery lead to a deeper understanding of the self. allegory as such was useful for "exercising and sharpening the minds of the readers and of destroying fastidiousness and stimulating the desire to learn, concealing their intention in such a way that the minds of the impious are either converted to piety or excluded from the mysteries of the faith." quoted by ann w. astell, political allegory in late medieval england (ithaca and london: cornell university press, ) . suzanne lewis in her work on the illustrated apocalypse discusses these visionary interactions, allegorical engagements and the interpolative effect of the images for the reader. for vision and cognition see pages - . the interpretive shifts since the middle ages have been duly noted as alternately eschatological, or a symbolic transcription of immanent events, and ecclesiological, or a metaphorical allegory of the struggle of the church or the christian soul against the onslaught of evil. bernard mcginn, "symbols of the apocalypse in medieval culture," apocalypticism in the western tradition (hampshire: variorum, ) - . see also, penn szittya, their frustrated ambitions in the pages of the illustrated apocalypse. the apocalypse became a spiritual quest, a surrogate crusade for the yearning soul, whose longing is for the presence of god in the heavenly jerusalem. like the chameleon forms littering the apocalyptic terrain, jerusalem was a fluid concept signifying an earthly city, a future paradise and a metaphorical fusion of the soul with g o d . jerusalem, the multifaceted object of the soul's desiring, is the destination of the pilgrim heart. iv. pilgrimage and politics not only did the apocalypse offer a blueprint for visionary mechanics and a surrogate crusading experience, it also provided a literary framework for the medieval dream quest, in as diverse examples as huon de meri's tournoiement antechrist and guillaume de lords's roman de la rose.so burgeoning in the thirteenth century, these allegorical narratives weave ecclesiastical text with courtly romance and chivalric adventure with divine eschatology. cast in the apocalyptic vein, these are allegorical stories of a tale within a tale. the poet, lapsing into an altered state, embarks on a journey as in a dream and later transcribes his experience and the strange and shadowy forms he encounters there. as the narrative unravels, the boundaries of illusion rupture blurring the dream and real world till the reader becomes increasingly entangled in the stories weave. with attentive eyes the reader embarks on an interpretative foray, "domesday bokes: the apocalypse in medieval english culture," the apocalypse in the middle ages, ed. richard k. emmerson and bernard mcginn (ithaca, new york: cornell university press, ) . lewis attributes the rise in apocalypse manuscripts during the thirteenth century to this new form of internal crusading, and explores the interaction of reader and book and the way in which the reader is interpolated into the structuring framework of the page. see her chapter "the ideology of the book: referencing contemporary crisis within spectacular structures of power," lewis - . "jerusalem is every soul's longing for the vision of eternal peace in the presence of god." lewis . jean de meun is of course the author of the second half of the poem. literature on the allegorical dream quest is profuse. the consulted most frequently for the following discussion include nolan - , j. stephen russell, the english dream vision: anatomy of a form (columbia: ohio state university press, ) and rosumund tuve, allegorical imagery: some medieval books and their posterity (princeton: princeton university press, ) nolan . according to michael zinc this literary genre becomes increasingly contemplative throughout the late medieval period, becoming a site for interior reflection, blurring the boundaries between the dream, the text and the real world. michael zink, "the allegorical poem as interior memoir," yale french studies ( ): - . plunging in and out of the text to discover the deeper meanings cloaked in the material forms. sight becomes a primary metaphor as the eyes of both dreamer and reader are increasingly clarified and enlightened. the pleasure and the power of the allegory is thus in the interpretation itself, where in the process of unraveling the enigma, the reader is shocked to find herself in the tale. like their eschatological predecessors, these narratives emerged in response to contemporary crises, offering a cathartic vehicle for the management of anxiety. born out of mourning, the mood of pilgrimage is longing. pilgrim narratives are visionary tales with words that traverse the existential separation of now and forever in a momentary contraction of time. it is a mournful speech and a consolation for loss. these are desultory narratives spinning their tales across the empty abyss towards the city in the distant view. visionary tales are ultimately soul stories traversing the landscape of the afterlife and culminating in a vision of the heavenly jerusalem shimmering on the distant shore. glimpsed but never realized, the vision dissipates as the dreamer awakes. though yearning is insatiated, the reader is nonetheless changed by her psychological misadventure. excess desire is redirected into new resolve to purge the erring soul of the sins laid bare by the text. the literary aevum is thus an interactive site of recovery, this is a well-discussed phenomenon particulady in relation to the divine comedy. see terkla - . see also a discussion of the plethora of visual accouterments carried by the pilgrim in susan k. hagen, allegorical remembrance: a study of the pilgrimage of the life of man as a medieval treatise on seeing and remembering (athens and london: the university of georgia press, ) ff. and rosemarie potz mcgerr ed. the pilgrimage of the soul: a critical edition of the middle english dream vision (new york and london: garland publishing, inc, ) xxx-xxxi. astell . pearl for example begins with the loss of a beloved daughter. the dream journey towards jerusalem is thus a journey confirming her new residence and the immortality of the soul. rosamund tuve in her discussion of christine pisan's work on allegory notes allegories ultimate recourse to the mirror of the soul and its heavenly journey. see pages - . michael zink writes, "allegory is the privileged mode of expression for the relations of the individual soul with the principle of the universe and with god." zink . reaffirmation and transformation, effecting the re-incorporation of the wandering soul onto the path of salvation. the profusion of works in england in the late s - langland's piers plowman, chaucer's canterbury tales, and gower's pearl - speak to disturbances on the religious front, - wycliff and the papal schism - as well as the political upheavals of the ricardian regime. the resuscitation of lollard teaching in the 's, for example, precipitated the translation of guillame deguilleville's pelerinage de l'ame in by william caxton from his print shop located within the precincts of westminster abbey. while tracing the progress of the christian soul from its departure at death through its preliminary judgement at the court of st. michael, its slow purgation, and its final approach to the heavenly jerusalem, caxton manipulates deguilleville's text to refute the lollard attacks on roman catholic doctrine and to reaffirm the essential tenets of orthodox belief. in these examples cultural trauma and fictional despondency, individual spirituality and political instabilities are thus knit together in this familiar path of assurance and restitution. under henry v u , pilgrimage provided the veneer for political treatises presented to the king. in imaginacion de vraye noblesse, the court librarian quentin poulet relays explicit directives for princely rule and instructions for the revitalization of chivalric code passed on to him by imagination, whom he encounters while on route to pay homage at the church of the glorious virgin (figure ). though the allegorical subtleties are lacking, it is significant that the spiritual dream quest hinges on the dynamic of sin and salvation leading the reader to a state of confession and penance. nolan . szittya . mcgerr xxix. for lollard threats at the turn of the century see kenneth scott latourette, a history of christianity (new york: harper and brothers, ) - . nolan . quinten poulet, imaginacion de vraye noblesse, , london, british library royal ms c.viii. "la premiere partie doncques de ce petit traitie contient comment en alant en pelerinage a nostre dame de hals en la contre de traynaie imaginacion en personage de une dame en moulle marvellous habit et apres plusiers pareoles se noblement me regust que lui baulsisse faire long message aiy princes et chevalerie de la pristience." to cite another example, in the pastime for pleasure first published in , dedicated to henry vii and written by stephen hawes, pilgrimage provides the point of entry for a representational exchange between sovereign and subject. it is surely no coincidence that the only organized challenge to the religious innovations of henry vitj in the thirties took the form of a pilgrimage of grace in . under the tudor regime, pilgrimage could function as a structural ground for theological restitution in the midst of religious controversy and a legitimate cover for more politically motivated polemics. for late medieval men and women, life itself was a pilgrim story, a microcosmic version of the pilgrimage of man capital m , the master narrative that stretched back in time to man's expulsion from eden and forward to the end of time and the day of judgment. in the prologue to the prick of conscience, richard rolle's laborious poem on this topic (with particular attention to the torments awaiting the undeserving soul) writes: for we duelle here als aliens to travail, here in the way, our lyms, til our countre-wards, als pilgryms, this world es the way and passage thurgh whilk lyes our pilgrimage. as an indisputable foundation for exploring truth in the speculum of all things, pilgrimage provided an effective frame for corroborating other ideological persuasions. desire is aroused with mounting anticipation along the well-worn path of the soul's extra-bodily sojourns. with the failure of representation to actualize this coveted end, these pent-up cravings are channeled into an exegetical recovery operating on multiple interpretive levels. pilgrimage thus provided a frame for political persuasion, a ruse perhaps obscuring the real work of allegory's engines, akin to the advertising decoys of today's automotive industry. i would therefore like to consider one of the grooms of his chamber presents the quest of grand amour to capture the hand of his ladylove la belle pucelle. the text itself pays little attention to this romantic frame, offering a lengthy summation of the seven liberal arts gleaned from the margarita philosophica and offering a veiled commentary on the political present, particularly in regard to the avaricious desires consuming both grand amour and henry vii at the end of his life. "my youthe was past and all my lustyness/ and ryght anone to us came palyzy/ with auaryce bryngynge grete ryches/ my hole leasure and delyte doubtles/was sette upon treasure insacyate/ it to beholde and for to agregate." - : bernard - . richard rolle de hample, "hampole's pricke of conscience," the philological society's early english volume (london: asher and co., ) - . i pilgrimage, in the visionary sense, as a legitimizing structure and operative frame for ocular persuasion. before moving to the fourth and final viewing modality, i w i l l briefly summarize the argument thus far. with the revolutionizing of time in the thirteenth and fourteenth century in conjunction with the underlying anxieties about the perpetuity of the soul, aevum emerges as a conceptual alternative, whose discursive explorations offer a representational trail to eternal bliss. visionary excursions, facilitated by image cues, erupt as the coveted aim of devotional practice and literary dream quests, modeled after the apocalypse, proliferate as a pilgrimage of words, bridging the gap between present time and future eternity. the visionary aperture, prized open by longing, attempts to shrink the distance between promise and fulfillment. its failure to realize its object of desire is redirected from narrative chronicity into an internal journey of transformation and insight, an interpretive foray into memory's holdings for the depths of meaning, or an allegorical pilgrimage of desire. allegory is essentially a recuperative mode, which attempts to compensate for an untenable object of its desire. it is therefore both a method and a compulsion. in practice it is the layering of texts reading one through another regardless of their seeming incompatibility in search of meaning. for medieval theoreticians, as we have seen, this process occurred in memory and required the accumulative assimilation of stored phantasmic forms until seemingly incongruous forms clashed in a shock of discovery. allegory was understood as the intermediary step on the path to intellection, bridging the gap between the visible and the invisible world, exterior form and transcendent truth. it is in this gap that we . encounter the allegorical impulse, which is desire. astell . it should be noted that the concept of purgatory also emerged as a concrete concept at this time, theologically anchoring the pilgrimage of the soul. i would like to thank carol knicely for drawing my attention to this point. craig owens, "the allegorical impulse: toward a theory of postmodernism," october ( ) . returning now to the holyrood panel it w i l l be immediately apparent that the image explicitly utilizes the viewing paradigms outlined so far. the tudors kneel collectively before prie dieus, practicing their visionary arts and stimulating the operations of their inner eye. in imitation of the celestial instructor of the illuminated apocalypse, the angel hovers on the threshold of revelation acting as the intercessory conduit between the earthly and the spiritual realms, facilitating both their illumination and ours. unlike the apocalypse illustrations, however, the vision is not contained within the clean graphic edges segregating the sacred from the profane. rather, like the medieval dream quest, it seeps over the entire panel in a diffuse glow of amber light, absorbing into its fabric the royal bodies who hover nervously on its edges, binding their fate to its unfolding. the bleak landscape is colonized by a host of characters vaguely reminiscent of the apocalyptic cast. (sacrificial lamb, imperiled virgin and the air born clash of righteous knight and diabolical beast.) curiously, the angel's contraposto stance and extended wing etch out the contours of a path, wending through barren and perilous terrain, along the edge of the broken lance, and alighting on an architectural vision of eschatological desire. the holyrood panel can be seen as a synchronic site of visual pilgrimage framed between the angelic aperture at the outermost extrusion of the picture plane and the urban citadel positioned at the furthest point of illusory depth. it appears that the tudors are embarking on a collective soul excursion, a moribund family vacation beyond time. between them, the angel, as spiritual conductor, in both senses of the word, taunts our eyes with his ambiguous gestures, simultaneously veiling and unveiling the vision beyond, warning us against the deception of the carnal eye and the alerting us to the presence of deeper truths to be excavated by the eyes of the mind and contemplated in the recesses of the soul. in short, it calls attention to the presence of allegory. the palpable anxiety evidenced by the devotional vigor of the supplicants in astell in her analysis of political allegory in thirteenth century england, argues that the hagiographic narrative conjunction with this foreboding stare suggests the absolute criticality of this interpretive decoding. because of the overt consciousness of the viewing presence within the image it is now necessary to situate these more directly within the representational politics and viewing expectations of the tudor court. for our final viewing paradigm then, we w i l l therefore briefly consider the spectacular policies of the early tudor regime, their operational modalities and chief effects. iv. tudor vision the primary aim of visual production within the tudor court was to maintain the king's magnificence. under the office of the great wardrobe, poetic flatteries, liveries, books, tapestries, paintings and pageants provided the ornamental dressage embellishing, reflecting and augmenting the body of the king, indeed emanating from it. the importance attached to these insulating adornments is evidenced by the exhausting descriptions of costumes and entourages dominating the chronicles of the court. henry v u was well noted for his attentiveness to such necessities. as polydore vergil remarked, "he well knew how to maintain his royal majesty and all which appertains to kingship at every time and in every place." magnificence was therefore, not superfluous luxury, but the radiating glory that befitted the king's royal estate and secured his credibility. magnificence was liquid power, an effusive overabundance flowing from the royal person, a dizzying expenditure securing the obeisance of his subjects and the respect of foreign legates. while scholarly attention to magnificence has underscored the necessity of representation to the maintenance of power, it has also tended to subsume any political functioned to connect the literal story and political intent through allegory. astell . lloyd and thurley, . david loades, the tudor court, (london: headstart history, ) . see thomas hearnii, ed., joannis lelandi antiquarii de reus britnannicis collectanea vol. iv (london: impensis g v l and jo. richarson, ) - . denys hays, ed. the anglica historia of polydore vergil, camden series vol. (london: royal historical society, ) . specificity under a more general policy of ornamentation. however, as sydney anglo and gordon kipling have demonstrated, tudor spectacle was carefully crafted to communicate specific intent and produce material effects. the magnificence of the king was most apparent in the lavish spectacles that accompanied the momentous entries of state: births, marriages, diplomatic visits and the initial progress of the king about the realm. like souls, visually describable at the moment of their departure from the body, the glory of the realm became visible at the threshold spaces of its body politic. these were incorporation rituals that ensured the continuity of the body politic by smothering the edges of dynastic power in a symbolic absorption. the best documented of these were the royal entries proper, elaborate multimedia presentations staged by a city for the king on his first progress. the city, lined with liveried guildsmen, tapestries and cloths of gold, was transformed into a vision of the celestial jerusalem as i f the heavenly and earthly kingdoms had a t fused through the bodily presence of the king. " the king, as both spectator and leading protagonist in the drama, journeyed through and activated a series of interactive tableau featuring a miscellany of biblical, historical or mythological personages. the spectacle was not mere flattery, but a cleverly choreographed contract, which established the terms of the future political relationship between the city and the king. it was a binding agreement ensuring the city's protection (and often forgiveness) in exchange for the abiding loyalty of its citizens. this is the case in john n. king's publication royal tudor iconography: literature and art in the age of religious crisis (princeton: princeton university press, ). king examines the religious significance of various multiple mythic and religious comparisons that tend to serve as flattery only, clustering around the body of each ruler like studded jewels. sydney anglo was the first to draw attention to the political intent of royal pageantry in his groundbreaking study spectacle, pageantry and early tudor policy (oxford: clarendon press, ) - . gordon kipling while attending to the political significance of the civic triumph phenomena throughout western europe is concerned with the artistic forms these take. enter the king: theatre, liturgy and ritual in the medieval civic triumph (oxford: clarendon press, ) especially - . kipling and . for a detailed example see c. e. mcgee, "politics and platitudes: sources of civic pageantry, ," renaissance studies . ( ) - . in the netherlands these pageants carried the force of law. kipling . i w i l l briefly consider one such spectacle orchestrated at the behest of henry v u for katherine of aaragon in on her journey through london, on the occasion of her nuptials to prince arthur, the heir apparent to the english throne. like the marriage itself, this 'piece de resistance' of royal magnificence was intended to be the culminating triumph of his reign and is therefore, a perfect occasion to observe the internal operations and viewing effects intrinsic to the visual politics of the tudor court. the pageant weaves together funerary liturgy and dream vision in a tudor inspired apocalyptic cosmology, casting katherine as the pilgrim soul who journeys after death to her native star in heaven. making her way to st. paul's cathedral, she moved through six elaborate architectural tableau liberally decorated with tudor devices, roses, portcullis and "red dragons dredfull." as katherine is absorbed into the visionary narrative, she embarks on a virtual journey from the earthly realm through the starry cosmos to the celestial court. as primary viewer and key participant katherine initiates the dreams unfolding; inert forms spring to life with her passing presence as castle grates rise, fountains gush forth and astrolabes revolve and she is personally addressed by various angelic beings, saints, prophets, philosophers and kings. swathed in visual and verbal flatteries katherine is transfigured from spanish princess to english consort molded by. the prerogative of the royal w i l l . compelled forward through these mechanistic coercions katherine accumulates cardinal and spiritual virtues necessary for her ascent, instructed on her duties as a prospective queen ("the procreacion of chyldr" and not for "censuall lust and apetyte"), and educated on the perfections of her prospective bridegroom. arthur, envisioned as the son of justice seated on a golden throne at the centre of a revolving stellar universe, is envisioned as the divine bridegroom, and henry v h as god the father. katherine is also advised of her inferior place in this tudor cosmology, for her astral soul dims in the powerful light of arcturus, arthur's star, who must assist this lesser the king's printer published the details of this pageant in the form of a medieval romance. kiplig, receyt xiii-iv. body to his exalted throne. seductive forms yield to more implicit truths in this tudor astrological conceit, as those familiar with the educational curriculum of the aristocratic network and versed in the fourfold allegorical procedure are indoctrinated into these underlying political truths, which visibly evidenced become sealed in memory and imprinted upon the soul. this royal entry is a coercive spectacle, an act of political digestion, blurring the boundaries between play and politics and implicating both witnesses and participants in its insinuated prescriptions. katherine is ensnared by the tentacles of magnificence, which regulate the permeable borders of the body politic, ingesting and reconstituting foreign bodies into the nutritional sustenance necessary for its continuity. to return once more to the allegorical operations of tudor spectacle, it w i l l be immediately obvious that it utilizes the viewing paradigms we have already discussed in relation to the holyrood panel. both painting and pageant utilize pilgrimage as a structuring framework and a mirror for the process of internal intellection. it w i l l also be evident that the holyrood panel participates in the same interdisciplinary mongering characterizing the royal entry, combining devotional themes and political allusions. finally, all are interactive visions in which the viewer is both spectator and animator. it is our presence before the painting that causes the angel to draw aside the pavilion curtains. these correlations are hardly surprising considering that the term 'pageant' could be applied to either a two dimensional depiction or a dramatic spectacle. given these formal similarities, the royal entry provides insight into three further operational features integral to the viewing expectations of the early tudor court. firstly, it is a anglo . kipling. enter the king - . kipling describes these as literally a triumphant procession, tropologically katherine's search for a just ruler, allegorically, the alignment of england and spain in marriage and anagogically the soul's ascent to heaven. kipling, enter the king . singular event. the royal entry is a one time exclusive performance, uniquely tailored for a specific viewer in order to effect an obligatory and knowing agreement between the pageant host and the primary recipient. secondly, this visual performance is contractual, a politically efficacious event which carries the weight of a legal document. and thirdly, it is a theatre of political preservation, which emerges at a moment of dynastic realignment. these features have intriguing implications for the holyrood panel. who are the viewers intended to embark on this visionary venture? what kind of a relationship is being forged between them, and what insecurities or crises loom on the borders of the body politic inspiring this dramatic tableau? in order to answer these questions we must enter through the visionary portal offered up by the angel and embark on a visual pilgrimage into the mystical landscape before us. sir thomas more, "pageant verses '̂ the history of king richard iii and selections from the english and latin poems, ed. richard sylvester (new haven and london: yale university press, ) . kipling, enter the king . anglo notes that only a select audience would have understood the underlying significance of the pageants. anglo . specifically tailoring the imagery of a painting in both iconography and mode of expression would have been a standard practice for artistic patronage within the court. these agreements would be drawn up as a verbal or written contract between the artist and patron, sometimes in consultation with a scholar. david evett, literature and the visual arts in tudor england (athens and london: the university of georgia press, ) . chapter dragon slaying on the borders of the body politic seynt george, oure ladyes knight on whom alle englond hath beyleve, shew us thy helpe to god almyght, and kepe oure kyng from all myscheve thu art oure patronesse knight y-preve to defend wyth fyght oure ladyes fe, seynt george, by oure helpe yn all oure greve, saluum fac regem domine. anonymous, th century. plunging into the visionary landscape we are immediately confronted by a bloodthirsty . contest featuring st. george and the dragon. while displaying the requisite graphic details of violent conflict, this depiction is unusually disjointed. in general, st. george is envisioned as victor, towering over the vanquished monster that is trampled under foot (or hoof) and mortally speared through the throat. in the fifteenth century, the iconographic core tends to be elastically stretched. st. george is found recoiling momentarily from the final thrust of the lance in a penultimate climax of suspended anticipation. in the holyrood panel, however, the dueling pair are stretched to breaking point. silhouetted against the bloody sky, they are petrified mid flight, in an endlessly agonizing suspense. who is st. george? why is he conjured up here for our viewing edification and what could have precipitated this strange depiction? st. george cannot be seen as a stable figure whose significance can be ascertained through biographical retrieval. st. george is a mutable persona whose rather sketchy origins allowed for considerable invention and embellishment throughout his textual history. in the late middle ages, it was generally accepted that st. george was a third century eastern martyr who from an anonymous fifteenth century song, "speed our king on his journey." quoted by samantha riches, . entered the hagiographic hall of fame by virtue of his grueling death at the hands of the pagan emperor diocletian." this event we are told, occurred no less than three times due to his miraculous resuscitations and was visually relished, complete with all the requisite litany of gratuitous tortures, (boiling, sawing, stretching, decapitation etc.) in countless retables in the twelfth and thirteenth century." by the fourteenth century, george's protracted martyrdom was eclipsed by an apocryphal incursion into the standard biographies, which transformed george into a paragon of chivalric virtue." the story as it appears in jacob voraigne's golden legend recounts how george, a crusading knight from cappodocea, liberated the town of lyddia from the clutches of a nefarious dragon. in order to curb the beast's voracious appetite, the citizens were in the habit of daily selecting a sacrificial offering. when the lot had fallen on the only child of the king and queen, the inhabitants were no less democratic, and the doomed princess, arraigned in her wedding finery, was duly banished outside the walls of the city. george, happening upon the helpless girl, subdued the odious beast, saved the princess from certain consumption and converted the entire town to christianity. st. george the dragon slayer was thus the perfect embodiment of saintly virtue and romantic chivalry whose extirpation of evil is co-mingled with the promise of sexual conquest, lending sanctity to the medieval order of knighthood and sex appeal to traditional hagiography. in general, visual depictions of st. george in panels painting, manuscript illumination and retables are narrative embellishments wrapped around an iconic core common to most dragon " as didi-huberman notes, st. george is as mythic as the dragon he fights. although various authors have tried to separate facts from fiction, the story, has since its birth been subject to endless transformation. didi-huberman, saint georges et le dragon: versions d'une legende (paris: a brio, ) - . this is well documented by samantha riches, who itemizes the range of tortures described in a variety of retables. riches - . see also didi-huberman - . jonathan bengston attributes its incorporation to the crusading mania. "saint george and the formation of english nationalism," journal of medieval and early modern studies . ( ) . granger ryan and helmut ripperger, trans, and eds. the golden legend of jacobus voragine (new york, london and toronto: longmans, green and c o , ) - . slaying saints occupying sculptural or painted architectural niches (figure ). in roger van der weyden's panel from - for example, though attended by petulant princess and anterior urban sprawl, george dominates the picture plane, captured in a climactic moment of vindication (figure ). the subjugated reptile is done for, skewered into the lower corner, his head lolling like a decapitated offering. this correlates with standard iconographic depictions of the triumph of good over evil, which is made explicit by the alignment of the red cross on his shield and the plunging lance. light and dark, civility and barbarity, inside and outside, death and resurrection all mingle together in a dialectical augmentation around this central theme. despite the initial appearance of iconographic consistency in narrative depictions of the dragon episode, the significance of its figural evocation cannot be reduced to an interpretive inevitability. visually, the dragon myth was full of cathartic potential, as didi-huberman has clearly demonstrated. monstrous hybridity breeding in subterranean chaos and formed in the outer recesses of the feverish imagination could symbolically substitute for any unruly passion or amorphous fear transgressing the 'natural' order of things. freed from any factuality, st. george and the dragon, operated as a protean iconography malleable to the surmounting anxieties (real or imagined), lurking on the borders of any historically situated social or political body. this said, the holyrood panel cannot be dismissed as simply an enduring expression of pious devotion or the adulation of a chivalric ideal. in order to draw out the specific motive behind his invocation here, we must allow the visual peculiarities of this particular configuration to direct didi-huberman has argued, in fact, that the dragon myth itself evolved from such stock pictorial motifs found in the historiated initials prefacing earlier texts. didi-huberman - . it is worth noting at this juncture that although many images feature a courtly retinue peering over the distant castle ramparts to witness the gruesome spectacle, there are no examples, to my knowledge, and with good reason, that include 'donor' portraits. didi-huberman . didi-huberman argues that it is the place of figuration that allows this transformability. didi-huberman - . kipling has argued that this unusual configuration is a promotion of the burgundian formula of chivalric virtue, which entails facing adversity with equanimity. thus, st. george, his visor lifted, squarely confronts his enemy face to face in a truly terrifying encounter. kipling. triumph of honour - . our investigation. in this chapter i w i l l locate st. george within an historically situated symbolic field. i w i l l begin with addressing two possible intents. /. exploring possibilities gordon kipling has suggested that the holyrood panel is an essentially pietistic gesture intended by henry v h as a visual prayer to st. george on behalf of the souls of his deceased family members. this accords well with the viewing frames already discussed with regard to the pilgrimage of the soul as well as responding to the escalating cultural anxieties over purgatorial affliction promoted at this time. in this scenario, st. george is locked in mortal combat over the fate of the tudor soul. depending on the outcome, it will be consigned to the torments of hell or the equally excruciating but infinitely more preferable, tortures of purgatory. in the holyrood panel, the royal family perch tremulously on the threshold of death. the officiating angel regulates their passage between this world and the next and st. george, staves off the threatening advances of the demonic foe in the intermediary planes beyond. although uncommon, st. george was certainly invoked to guard the passage of the soul after death. in the fourteenth century monumental brass of sir hugh hastings of elsing, for example, this intercessory role is inscribed in architectural clarity (figure ). st. george is located in a cosmic cartouche above the ascending soul, effortlessly squelching the demonic intruder under the feet of his horse, and impaling it with his lance. sir hugh can rest in prayerful serenity as his soul levitates unhindered toward the saviour and virgin enthroned above. in the holyrood panel, however, prayers take on an air of desperation. the dragon is wounded but not dead, lunging menacingly at george in a frenzied counterattack. george, by "above all the altarpiece stands as an act of personal piety: it represents henry's visual prayer to st. george on behalf of the souls of those who kneel before him." kipling, triumph of honour . kipling does not explain why henry should be singled out. in fact, what is striking about this image is his lack of visual preference. contrast seems gravitationally disadvantaged, ponderous, defensive and a trifle worried. his victory is certainly not assured. this seems unusually insecure for a personal familial memorial eliciting the aid of st. george. though it is conceivable that george's difficulty in this respect is a ploy to spur the viewer to fervent prayer, it seems rather a risky move. certainly, henry vii was excessively attentive to all manner of provisions for the souls of his family and especially his own, making arrangements for over , masses to be said within the fist month of his demise. however, in his lengthy w i l l , henry does not elevate the intercessory capacity of st. george over any of the myriad saints attending to his post mortem administrations. in addition to entrusting his soul to the aid of the "moost blisssed moder evir virgyne", henry writes: i trust also to the singular mediacion and praiers of al the holie companie of heven; that is to saye aungels, archaungleles, patricarches, prophets, apostles, evangelists, martirs, confessours, and virgyns, and sp'ially to myne accustumed avoures i calle and crie, saint michaell, saint john baptist, saint johon evuangelist, saint george, saint anthony, saint edward, saint vincent, saint anne, saint marie magdalene, and saint barbara. as henry makes clear, their aid is particularly desirous at the hour of his death to protect his soul from the "auncient and ghostely enemye." the altarpiece intended to furnish his chantry chapel in westminster is no more preferential requesting that "in the mydds....bee made the ymage of the crucifixe, mary and john, in maner accustumed; and upon bothe sids of theim, be made as many of the ymagies of our said advousries, as the said table wol receive." it is clear then, as far as his soul is concerned, that quantity is to be preferred over dubious martial quality. it seems strange then that henry would have commissioned a painting like the holyrood panel in view of architecturally streamlined, hugh is also flanked by two columns of garter knights, who insure that masses are said for his soul. there have been several discussions of henry's anxiety in this department. beckett, .j.p. cooper, "henry vii's last years reconsidered," the historical journal . ( ): ff. on the reasons provoking such anxiety. for a transcription of his enormous will see t. astle, ed. the will of henry vii (london: t. payne, ). in addition, henry drew up detailed contracts between other religious houses, most notably, westminster abbey of the masses to be said by various prelates, lighting of candles and alms to be distributed in his name after his demise as long as the world shall endure. muniments of westminster abbey . for masses arranged with the sheen charterhouse see beckett - . his nonpartisan approach to salvation. these discrepancies should not concern us, but rather alert us to the presence of ulterior motivations. it is certainly clear that the holyrood panel is framed by a soul pilgrimage, but as we have already established, pilgrimage provided a structure through which other more politically sensitive issues might be broached. one distinct possibility is the crusading revival taking place across the continent at this time. indeed, with the fall of constantinople in and the siege of rhodes in the threat of muslim invasion precipitated numerous frescos and panel paintings of st. george across the italian peninsula. the large mural painting by vittore carpaccio, painted in - for the scuola di san georgio degli schivanova in venice, is one such example. carpaccio's massive fresco is a perfect vehicle for channeling mounting fears into a vehement manifesto for mustering crusade support (figure ). george is captured charging across a ravaged landscape strewn with skulls and dismembered body parts, driving his lance through the gaping throat of the cowering fiend. at this time, the conventional choreography of the dynamic duo was being drawn out and exploited for its maximum emotional potential. righteous fury heightened by simmering fear is ignited and brought to a feverish pitch through the horizontal impulse and the vectorial force of the lance and unleashed in a violent thrust onto the surrogate foe, in a visual crescendo of vindication. victory is almost palpable. the holyrood panel, though executed during this period of renewed crusading zeal, does not address the threat of turkish invasion. a private panel would hardly be the forum for such promotions, particularly one that exacerbates anxiety rather than harness it. victory is not imminent, it is not even assured. instead the viewer is left dangling like the dragon in an eternal cliffhanger. indeed, despite henry v u ' s verbal enthusiasms, there is no evidence to suggest any intention to participate in the crusading enterprise. on the contrary, henry vii, though astel . financially supportive, levying a tax on its behalf in - , was not interested in embarking on a religious war. therefore, despite the explicit invitation of pope julius ii to lead the campaign, and the entreaties of his burgundian neighbours, he graciously declined. henry was, at this time, more concerned with protecting the edges of his own sovereign authority than defending the borders of christendom. the conjugal celebrations accompanying the marriage of katherine and arthur in , impregnated with the hopes of dynastic continuity, were unfortunately short lived. less than five months after these exultant festivities, arthur contracted a virulent skin disease, suffering an excruciating death. the city of london received arthur in procession once more, lying within a leaded coffin draped in a black velvet cloth, adorned with a spare white cross. this was a devastating blow to henry, as the representational scaffolding he had lovingly nurtured around this future king came crashing down. the nightmare did not end there. henry's dynastic designs suffered a further blow, when on february , , his wife died in childbed after delivering her eighth child. henry attended once more to the necessary funeral preparations. elizabeth of york was processed in royal dignity to westminster abbey attendant with an effigy of her person, fully adorned in stately attire with orb and scepter and gracing the top of the hearse. henry's dynastic dreams were in shambles. a l l his ambitions were now pinned on his only remaining son, henry, at this time only twelve years old. with his own health declining henry v h was confronted with the possibility of a minority rule, a highly dangerous proposition as attested to by the bloodthirsty machinations of the wars of the roses. more alarming still, in - henry vii raised , pounds for the crusading effort through taxes. maximillian received money from henry vii for this purpose in , though this had the ulterior motive of insuring his support should edmund de la pole, a pretender to the throne, try to garner his support. christopher tyerman, england and the crusades - (chicago and london: university of chicago press, ) - . chrimes notes that henry was able to carry on voluminous correspondences with the pope on the excellence of the cause while craftily avoiding any personal commitments. chrimes . the king of portugal also plied henry vii with a "small book of instruction" containing advice on crusading tactics. tyerman . reports from calais indicated that the nobles were already speculating about the likely succession should "hys grace hapned to depart." distressingly, "some of them spake of my lode of buckyngham.... other ther were that spake in lykwise of your traytor edmond de la pole, but none of them, he said, that spake of my lord prynce." edmund de la pole, one of the lingering yorkist claimants, had slipped away ironically during arthur's wedding festivities and remained ominously at large. in desperation, perhaps, henry began to cast his eyes around for an eligible bride, sending his ambassadors to assess the goods, and may possibly have ruminated on the possibility of courting his son's recent widow. his manner became wildly suspicious, increasingly irascible and notoriously avaricious, tightening his grip on the remaining nobility through heavy recognizances. it is within this climate of death and dynastic fragility, tormented by personal demons and fearful of the myriad dragons prowling around his throne, that henry v u commissioned the holyrood panel. in order to comprehend how st. george could be invoked to assuage these insular fears, we must consider the symbolic relationship between st. george and the english crown. this event must have made an impression on contemporaries, for its description is far more documented than henry's own funeral. in the records kept by the garter king of arms, an ink drawing of her procession accompanies a detailed description of the event. add. ms , folio v- , british library, london. james gairdner, ed. memorials of king henry vii (london: lonman, brown, green, lngmans and roberts, ) . for henry vii edmond's flight to the continent signaled the possibility of a military coup and a threat to the security of the throne. hay - . this was proposed by james gairdner but is flatly denied by chrimes . transactions of the ambassadorial missions for prospective brides are transcribed in james gairdner - . these were financial obligations issued as proof of loyalty. the nature of henry's last years has been hotly debated. cooper, - . j. r. lander, "bonds, coercion and fear: henry vii and the peerage," crown and nobility - (edward arnold, ) - . g. w. bernard, "henry vii and the english nobility," the tudor nobility (manchester and new york: manchester university press, ) - . christine carpenter, - . //. st. george for england though revered across the continent, st. george was held in particular or peculiar affection by the english as protector of their nation. this phenomenon was widespread, as evidenced by the ninety plus wall paintings dedicated to st. george found in parish churches across the country and the numerous records of feast day celebrations and pageants in local communities. the affinity between george and england was first established with the miraculous appearance of st. george to richard the lionheart during the third crusade, and cultivated thereafter as the official propaganda strategy of the english c r o w n . the history of this symbiotic relationship between george and the crown is well rehearsed both in the historical archive and recent scholarship. the following discussion will therefore be restricted to the representational fertility of st. george as a monarchical strategy aiding and obfuscating the operations of power. this will serve to situate st. george historically within the viewing expectations of the early tudor court and draw out some of the subtle undercurrents of meaning inflecting the holyrood panel. st. george was frequently employed in the interests of the crown as a representational lubricant providing a glamorous front for the martial ambitions. in the milmemte treaty of - , for example, george is depicted investing edward i n with the accouterments of war (figure ). this sacramental gesture justifies conquest as the hallowed duty of a christian king, and draws a special bond between edward and george as earthly and spiritual counterparts solemnly fulfilling their sacred obligation. english military ventures were further infused with many of these wall paintings date form early in the tudor period and include the arms of the monarch. miriam gill, "noow help, st. george oure laady knight...to strengthe our kyng and england ryght': rare scenes of saint george in a wall painting at astbury, cheshire," transactions of the lancastrian and cheshire antiquarian society ( ) - . muriel c. mcclendon, "a movable feast: saint george's day celebration and religious change in early modern england," journal of british studies ( ): - . bengtson . divine right when in edward usurped the red cross banner, emblem of st. george and also carried by crusaders as a sign of the resurrection, as a national insignia. this was later reserved by decree under henry v for the exclusive use of the english under pain of death. by the sixteenth century, the english troops were fully outfitted with red and white tunics, causing a george enthusiast in the sixteenth century to remark: "so that it is a seemly and magnificent thing to see the armes of the english to sparkle like the rising sunne." the red cross banner of st. george therefore united the english troops under a single sign overriding the usual heraldic miscellany, and also infused english military ventures with a crusading imperative through its symbolic migration. st. george functions as a representational buffer, appearing at the frontlines to protect the retractable borders of the body politic and justifying their expansion. in the holyrood panel st. george is without doubt english. liberally festooned with national symbols, st. george is resplendent in red cross tunic and sprouting plume. the dragon that rails against him is decorated through with the broken tip of the red and white standard whose tendrils have pulled through the throaty flesh, dangling like blood and tracing the letter g against the glowing sky. st. george is emphatically aligned with the cause of england and the dragon, gruesomely impaled by the national insignia, is her treasonous adversary. england was believed to be the dowry of the virgin and st. george, by virtue of his chastity, the virgin's elected champion. as the earthly protector of this sanctified geography, the king with the aid of st. george, is bound to preserve its untainted borders from unholy contamination. the logistics of this security network are delineated in the much-discussed wilton diptych. (figure ) on the left panel richard li kneels in the company of saint john the riches - . bengtson ff., and rebecca colman, "saint george for england," contemporary review . ( ): - . bengtson ., peter heylyn, the history of the most famous saint and souldier of christ iesus: st. george of cappadocia asserted from the fictions of the middle ages of the church and opposition of the present (london: thomas and harper, ) . baptist, saint edmund and saint edward the confessor, in reverence before the virgin. on the opposite panel, surrounded by an angelic host the virgin presents richard with the red cross standard of the saint by way of an attending angel. on the tip of the banner is a luminous orb that contains within its polished sheen a tiny island representative of england. the king here is entrusted with the safe keeping of this designated holy land and her chosen people nominated, • according to national lore, because of the speediness of their conversion and their subsequent faithfulness. the misidentification of anglorum with angelorum was a celebrated conceit, reputed to have originated with st. augustine who "named these people for their fair countenans. 'englesh' - 'aungels' by his furst nominacion." as the dowry of the virgin, england slipped easily into the marital symbolism of st. john's apocalypse as the bride of christ conceived as celestial city of righteous souls. these sacred associations simmered under the surface of the english imagination, conjured up, like george, at moments of crisis. they were invoked in the heat of battle to inflame the hearts of the english troops or were incorporated into the panegyric of doomsday prophets to stimulate religious reform. indeed, in the holyrood panel, the multi-tiered edifice situated at the focal point of the image and piercing the volatile space between our two assailants bears unmistakable resemblance to standard depictions of jerusalem (figure ). however, the spindly tracery and iridescent glow transform an earthly form into an ethereal one, though strangely reminiscent of the gothic perpendicular style with its elegant flying buttresses or alternatively the dome like keep at l j y riches - . this gesture is disputed in dillian gordon, lisa monnas and caroline elam, eds. the regal image of richard ii and the wilton diptych (london: harvey miller publishers, ). regardless of whether the standard is being donated or returned, the relationship between the players remains the same. dillian gordon, "the wilton diptych: an introduction," the regal image of richard ii and the wilton diptych, eds. dillian gordon, lisa monnas and caroline elam (london: harvey miller publishers, ) - . l .kipling, receyt . knighton, for example, in his chronicles of the french wars had written in - that although the pope had become french, jesus was english. tyerman . for discussion on battle speeches and god's partiality to england in war see tyerman ff. on english eschatology see szittya - . windsor castle (figure ). neil beckett has suggested that the architectural features are a visual reference to henry's newly constructed palaces of richmond and greenwich. tudor egotism aside, the image invites a comparison to contemporary english palatial forms without committing to a specific place. rising on the horizon in splendid isolation its shimmering form slips in and out of focus, teasing the memory as fleeting shadows of recognition flicker across the imaginary facade. this transplanted 'new' jerusalem is without doubt resurrected on english soil, the fantastic ball and turret propped on top like a spoil of war, glorying in its incongruity. in the holyrood panel, england's apotheosis becomes a tantalizing mirage envisaged on the horizon of desire. the very heart (quite literally) of the cult of st. george in england was in the chapel dedicated to st. george at windsor castle, and its high priests, members of the order of the garter, an exclusive chivalric brotherhood dedicated to the virgin, the trinity and of course, st. george (figure ). although edward hi instituted the order in as a ploy to garner support for his campaign against the french, the order of the garter and their annual ceremonials became a permanent fixture of monarchic symbolic ritual. through devotion to st. george, the order effectively interlaced the chivalric code of unswerving fealty to the king's person and latterly channeled the dwindling opportunity for martial excellence (the invention of gunpowder having eroded the opportunity for individual feats of arms) into tournament pageantry and ceremonial pomp. the order convened yearly on april r d , the feast of st. george in windsor chapel. this was the official centre of garter activities and residence to a variety of body parts relinquished by their patron, including a fragment of arm, two finger bones, a vial of blood, a this dome like structure was originally designed to house the 'round table' of the order of the garter and in addition imitates the round temple structures of the templars in england. beckett . skull fragment and the most prized possession of all, a relic of st. george's heart. at each annual convention the chapter attended to general constitutional sundries, the settling of disputes, the election of new members and offered masses for the souls of departed brethren. the remaining duties included attending the king in his private chambers, serving him at the evening feast and accompanying him at daily prayers. the culminating ceremony of the entire feast day celebration was the grand procession around the castle courtyard in which all the garter members outfitted in their new mantles paraded in all solemnity with the heart of george. for those not privy to the ghostly apparitions on the front lines of battle, to witness the heart of their patron thus animated must have been a wondrous sight. this annual procession is captured in a broadsheet souvenir dating from the reign of charles i (figure ). the depiction is largely formulaic, but what is of particular significance is that the king, bringing up the rear and covered by a baldachino, has usurped the position of the heart. under henry vu, the representational fertility of the order was exploited by using the yearly celebration as a platform for magnificence through pageantry. in , for example, he paraded a leg of st. george encased in a silver reliquary, through the streets in solemn procession to st. paul's cathedral. steven gunn has argued that while no direct correlation can be drawn between garter elections and specific political engagements, the order successfully intertwined patronage with politics and military assistance and could serve as a barometer for assessing and ensuring details on the gift of the heart from sigismund in and other relics can be found in hugh e. l. collins, the order of the garter - : chivalry and politics in late medieval england (oxford: clarendon press, ) - . the chapel was further embellished with an enormous altarpiece (transported from nottingham in ten pieces), a roodscreen depicting edward the confessor and saint george, an enormous gilt statue (shown in figure and ) bench ends and narrative window glazes. riches - , . for a detailed account of garter proceedings on the feast of st. george see collins, - . this spectacle was recorded in the great chronicle of london as follows; "upon seynt georges evyn beyng the day of apryll, the king wyth an honorabyll company of ladys spirituell and temporall cam ridyng thoruth the cyte from the towyr unto paulys...and upon the morne yn the sme habyttes cam thidyr agayn and goodon processyon havying ban before hym in the handys of the bysshop of chesstyr a legg of seynt george inclosid in sylvyr porcellis gylt, the which was newly sent unto the kyng's grace ffrom the kyng of the romayns. at this procession were present many knights of the order of the garter." a. thomas and l. d. thornley, eds. the great chronicle of london (london: george w. james, ) . loyalties. under henry vlt, many of those elected occupied key positions within the court. in addition, henry used the order as a forum for international relations, investing select foreign dignitaries with membership. as the order was widely revered, such an honor was coveted. bound together under the sign of saint george and the unbreakable knot of chivalry, the order was a ceremonial vice grip for forging allegiances between kings. the centrality of the garter cult in cultivating these diplomatic ties is evidenced in a now lost manuscript illumination, surviving only as a copied engraving and dating from the end of the fifteenth century (figure ). in this imaginary conceit henry vii nourishes his own reputation as a promoter of peace, possibly as shaw suggests, inspired by henry's instrumental role in securing a treaty between austria and france in . he is depicted alongside the german emperor, the king of spain; the king of the romans, the archduke of austria and the king of france in adoration of an elevated image of st. george ceremoniously unveiled from a tented pavilion. in this fictional scenario the christian kings pay homage to st. george, and inadvertently acknowledge the supremacy of the english crown. this image is a phenomenal conceit and a flagrant assertion of imperial ambition. indeed, henry's adoption of the closed crown as a symbol of his supreme temporal authority is undoubtedly a gesture in that direction, and with its bold inscription in the mintage in conjunction with a new attention to profile portraiture, henry is posturing as a roman emperor (figure ). by the time the holyrood steven gunn, "chivalry and the politics of the early tudor court," chivalry in the renaissance, ed. sydney anglo (woodbridge: boydell press, ) - . in henry used the feast as an opportunity to test the loyalties of members. gunn . sir thomas lovell, chancellor of the exchequer, treasurer of the household and treasurer of the chamber; sir john dynam, lord treasurer of england; sir richard guilford and sir edward pynings, comptrollers of the household; sir william stanley, lord chamberlain; john de vere, constable of the tower and keeper of the lions and leopards; sir charles somerset and sir edward poynings, ambassadorial missions. see appendix b. in order, maximilian the first, emperor of germany, john, king of denmark, guido ubaldo, duke of urbino, philip, king of castile and charles, arch-duke of austria, prince of spain and later emperor of germany. henry shaw, presses and decorations of the middle ages vol. (london: william pickering, ) . the profile portrait on the silver testoon and groat remarked for its verisimilitude was in circulation c. - . chrimes - . the closed imperial crown was adopted as early as . in addition the terms 'lord sovereign" although used prior to henry's reign were instituted as a necessary formality, and in , henry minted the first panel was executed, however, these self-extensions so optimistically assembled were losing their confident lustre. though still donning the imperial crown replicated insistently within the image, the longevity of his dynastic pretentious is threatened by the ravenous dragon skulking around the weakened borders of the body politic intent on consuming all hope of perpetuity. iii. of garter knots as we have seen, the protectorship of st. george was a powerful and persuasive fiction exploited by the english crown. typically, st. george is invoked for militaristic purposes to secure the borders of england's sacred geography. could st. george appear on borders of the body politic to do battle with the formless demons lurking on the edges of henry vits suspicious mind in order to secure the dangerous threshold of dynastic succession? returning to the legend as told by jacobus voraigne, it is of note that the entire dragon episode centers on the problem of dynastic continuity (in addition to the annihilating tendencies of the democratic process). there is certainly no public angst over the devouring of any other of the city's inhabitants. the king and queen have only one issue, a daughter, in whom all their longings are bound. they are thus doubly threatened: by the lusty appetite of a ferocious beast and the inevitable devouring of the bloodline through a marriage. the two threats are not unrelated since the virgin princess approaches the ravenous monster adorned as if on her wedding day. st. george's heroic intervention is similarly twofold, removing the first threat by subduing the wild animal (impaling it to death in visual depictions), and deferring the second by obeying his oath of chastity and refusing the offer of the virgin's hand. st. george secures the borders of the body politic whose protective walls are conceived in terms of sexual purity, expiated through gold coin, a sovereign. richard britnell, the closing of the middle ages? england - (oxford, blackwell publishers, ) - . a monstrous surrogation. george keeps the specters of mortality at bay, preserving the fictions of dynastic continuity. st. george's role in protecting the dynasty was visually appropriated in a manuscript illumination from the bedford hours, c. (figure ) . john of lancaster, the duke of bedford and regent to the young henry v i , is depicted on the left engrossed in prayer. materializing before the spiritually aroused eyes of the pious duke, the deceased king henry v appears before his brother in the guise of st. george, or vice versa, draped in the sovereign's mantle of the order of the garter and attended by a squire carrying his sword and standard. considering that the duke's patron saint was st. john the evangelist, this unexpected visitation is significant. pointing to the garter knot embroidered on his ermine lined robe, henry/george reminds john of his binding oath to guard the regency for his son henry v i until he is of age to rule england and france himself. george, appearing in the vacuous zone of the interregnum, is an ever present witness to the duke's oath of loyalty, an all seeing eye of accountability perpetually revisited on the manuscript page. supplementing the central miniature on the borders of the page are detailed vignettes of the excruciating tortures endured by the saint. encircling these tiny illustrations and prolifically littering the margins are decapitated tree trunks, a reference to the duke's personal insignia of the golden root. in conjunction with the central scene, however, these dismembered bodies take on new significance, their unearthed roots dangling like dripping blood, providing an unsavoury backdrop to the english arms. these decaying trunks draw on the rejuvenating powers of the resurrected saint to resuscitate the severed genealogical tree. in the bedford hours, deceased kings and patron saints haunt the living, interloping in the fissures of royal authority, securing the interregnum. janet backhouse has argued that because the manuscript illuminations contained a political subtext, that the hours were not intended for the duchess as a wedding gift, but rather the duke himself. janet backhouse, " a reappraisal of the bedford hours," british library journal london . ( ) - . i find this invocation of st. george particularly instructive, not only in his ambiguous attire, blurring the boundaries between patron saint and garter king, but also in his role as witness. it is my contention that st. george is similarly invoked in the holyrood panel to secure the tudor succession and that the garter knights were intended as the viewing audience. attending the king in his person during the yearly festivities, the garter knights would have ample opportunity to observe such an image adorning the wall of his privy chamber or alternatively his chapel, i f it served in a more liturgical setting. while praying for the souls of deceased members, including henry's wife and son arthur, the garter members could be simultaneously reminded of their abiding oath of fealty to honor arthur's replacement, henry, the duke of y o r k . the garter lords and knights would have been well versed in the covert operations of tudor vision and particularly attune to the nuanced significance of st. george's invocation and more importantly could and did influence the course of events if the need arose. that several possible rival claimants were amongst the membership is cause enough. but the fact that by an alarming number of these loyal members had fallen from grace, including the king's own chamberlain (lately executed), and the infamous edmund de la pole, suggests a breakdown in the symbolic cohesion of the order and the need for such a prompt. the spatial arrangements at windsor chapel certainly provided visual confirmation for the process of dynastic transfer. the twenty-four garter knights and lords were divided between the running stalls along the north and south walls facing each other like two tournament teams. " the king and his heir apparent occupied the two returning stalls at the west end of the chapel riches, . significantly, in his will, henry bequeathed a large statue of the saint encrusted with jewels from the royal coffers to adorn the garter chapel: "also we geve and bequethe to almighty god, our lady his blessed moder and saint george, within oure college of windsore....a grete ymage of saint george, of gold, peysing ccxl unces, garnished with rubies, pedes, saphires, diamonds and other stones, the which ymage is nowe in our juell house." astle . it is worth noting that during the reign of henry vii the garter surrounded the names of the garter members inscribed above their designated stalls. for unruly members see appendix b. riches . opposite the altar, in a revolving continuum. more conclusively however, the following incident confirms henry's utilization of the order in securing the succession. in a furious storm forced the vessel carrying king philip of castille and his queen joanna to make an emergency landing onto english shores. as the historical chronicles record, the king took advantage of this fortuitous misadventure by cajoling the marooned dignitaries to stay for a time at his expense. it is well noted that after wining and dining philip and wooing him with sporting matches and jousting events, henry was able to pluck the delinquent edmond de l a pole from philip's custody into his own hands for disciplinary measures. however, in an ingenious manoeuver of diplomatic agility henry vii engineered a chivalric swap. hastily assembling the garter members at windsor, philip was inducted into the order of the garter, and his son henry, the new prince of wales into the order of the golden fleece. signing an "amnity of peace...sealed with the great seal and privy seals," philip was bound in an oath of honor and allegiance to this vulnerable king in training. the holyrood panel emerges as a visual solution to the problem of dynastic perpetuity. the desire for self-extension is transformed into a dramatic tableau depicting the pilgrimage of the tudor soul. it is a political strategy disguised under the sacred aura of devotional piety, which attempts to coerce its attentive viewers into a contractual agreement to preserve the continuity of the tudor bloodline. plunging through the visionary aperture, the viewer encounters a vision of an english jerusalem, an emblem of eternity, shimmering on the horizon. so near and yet so far, this tantalizing apparition of sacred national eschatology is blocked by an almighty struggle waged outside its pearly gates. st. george, decked out in his national finery brandishes his sword against the heinous dragon whose lustful eyes spy a genealogical dinner in this spur of the moment orchestration is noted by the herald chronicler: "and as i suppose few or none that were there that ever saw castle or other lodging in all things so well and richly appointed and the great continual fair open the trembling tudor soul. unfortunately the contest is undecided. curiously stilted and almost gracefully levitated, george and the dragon are locked in a stalemate. the promise of eternity tantalizingly offered in the illusory distance is forever deferred by this unresolved conflict. desire is churned up in expectation only to be thrown back to the surface. accumulating in the pregnant space between st. george and his foe, desire spills out into allegory, weaving its connective trails around the fragmentary forms pressed up against the surface. household so many noblemen so well appointed and with so short warning heretofore as i think hath not been seen." campbell . campbell . chapter allegorical visions on the horizon of desire allegory becomes for literature as for theology, a vivifying archaeology of occulted origins and a promissory eschatology of postponed ends.„an essentially pietistic cosmology devoted to the corroboration of divinely ordered space and time. joel fineman the accumulation of signs is none other than an accumulation of force reflected, represented, and reserved in power in proportion to the infinite desire of domination that is its essence. louis marin [the pilgrim] does not know how because it was forgotten, he is unable because even if he had remembered and could retain the content [of his.vision], the word would be lacking. for we see many things with the intellect for which there are no verbal signs. dante aligheri silhouetted and contoured against the lowering sky, st. george and the dragon levitate in meditative isolation, each carving out a distinctive spatial niche. the royal clones, though equally constrained in their shallow frontality are conceived as a unit, like a visual stutter resonating to the edges of the picture plane. pressed up against the surface of the picture plane, these forms are compressed like specimens under a microscopic lens creating an unsettling tension or push and pull between surface and spatial depth. though seemingly haphazard, each element is carefully placed for our maximum viewing inspection, vying equally for focal attention. ambiguously unfettered by geographical stability, these flattened forms seem to come alive, reverberating to the rhythm of our angel friend who swishes the curtains back and forth hypnotically. his wings create a criss cross effect, impelling the forms to resonate diagonally, colliding together in startling similarity. underneath these oscillating figures, identities fineman . marin . in his 'letter to con grande" quoted by terkla . astell . proliferate, oozing out from their contoured confinement, copulating together in allegorical abandon. in the membrane of forms on the holyrood panel surface, as in the liminal dimension of aevum, the sacred and the profane consort together in transcendence of both space and time. flickering in and out of the mind's eye, phantasmal recollections are retrieved from memory as fleeting but insistent correspondences. allegory plunges across the landscape of time, scouring memories residue in an insatiable quest for its reflective beginnings and chimerical ends, weaving her connective histories around these recollected ruins. according to benjamin: "allegory establish[es] itself most permanently where transitoriness and eternity confront each other most closely." in this chapter we will investigate the way in which allegory generates its recuperative histories and the beginnings and ends to which they tend. in the course of this exploration we will discover startling imaginary resemblances certainly circulating within the symbolic reservoir of the nobility at court and more particularly the garter knights. by tracing allegory's trajectories we from tudor history to divine eschatology, we w i l l observe the way in which the image blurs the distinction between the sacred and the secular, mythic time and real time, intertwining history and identity through the structure of allegorical desire. /. painted identities the constricted illusory depth of the holyrood panel and its curiously sequestered forms are, in fact, characteristic of much of sixteenth century painting in england. though seen as retrograde by later historians, these stylistic 'idiosyncrasies' carried a political expediency lacking in the naturalistic modes utilized across the channel. kipling's invaluable work on tudor patronage has unfortunately focused exclusively on the derivative nature of artistic endeavors at benjamin . court, and by his account, the emulation of burgundian style. the problem with this approach is that it fails to account for the 'transformation' inherent in any adoption. a style or mode of expression cannot be seen as a disinterested aesthetic but a politically and culturally embedded signifying practice. therefore what is perhaps more intriguing than patterns of adoption is the way in which the english visual repertoire is resistant to stylistic developments elsewhere. although trained in the flemish style, maynard wewyck, the principal candidate for the holyrood panel 's authorship would have been expected to conform not only to the viewing tastes of the english nobility but also to the relative proficiency of contemporary viewing strategies. in order to understand the political and social significance of such sylistic distinctions within the holyrood panel, let us briefly consider the formal role of painting within the early tudor court. under henry v u the great wardrobe retained two court painters whose areas of expertise encompassed portraiture and heraldic decoration respectively. according to gordon kipling, the employment of a portraitist was prompted by the visit of the flemish ambassadors in who presented henry v u with commemorative portraits of their sovereigns, philip the fair and joanna of castile. as henry was unable to reciprocate this gracious gesture, maynard wewyck was appointed shortly thereafter to avoid any future embarrassments. portraiture, it w i l l be well known, functioned as a form of flattery and diplomacy, an assurance of loyalty and even a , presence by proxy. most importantly, however, portraiture was instrumental in constructing kipling, "introduction," the triumph of honour: burgundian origins of the elizabethan renaissance (the hague: leiden university press, ) - . it is clear by the extant portraits by maynard that mimetic accuracy was a primary concern under certain conditions. a good indication of henry vii's attentiveness to the importance of exactness are found in the amusing and itemized instructions given to francis marsin to obtain a detailed and accurate portrayal of the queen of naples and if it be not accurate to have it fixed by a greater master. see campbell, ff. kipling. triumph of honour . sir thomas lovell one of henry vii's most favored subjects and garter knight possessed only one painting, a portrait of henry vii. gunn, "sir thomas lovell" . and stabilizing identity, fusing a physiognomic facade with an exemplary ideal. the second painter at court was john serle whose primary duties pertained to heraldic work and included designing armorial banners and tabards for funerals, weddings and court spectacles. though serle has elicited little enthusiasm from kipling, heraldry was fundamental to artistic practices for the english nobility. as portraiture was a new venture in painting for the english court, it was functionally integrated into and stylistically adapted to accommodate the heraldic state of mind. it has been noted that no less a master than holbein conformed to these stylistic requirements while under the employment of henry vhi, severely reducing the illusion and spatial depth of his portraits. both henry v u and henry vui have been remarked for their excessive attention to the display of heraldic devices. ~ heraldry is certainly ubiquitous in the holyrood panel, encrusting pavilions, horse reigns and cloths of gold. in addition to these descriptive references, heraldry is present as a mode of expression. by the sixteenth century, heraldry had developed into an erudite science, a lineal cartography systematizing and regulating the genealogical records of the english nobility. coats of arms denoted not only one's aristocratic status but also one's lineal history. they were visual records of blood. the anxieties around these symbols of identification were manifold and disputes over unlawful possession of arms or ancestral rights to a particular emblazon were sometimes settled through the court. in the reign of henry v u and more conceitedly under his son, heralds were utilized as enforcement officers, charged with making regular visitations to see joanna woodall, "introduction: facing the subject," portraiture: facing the subject, ed. joanna woodall (manchester and new york: manchester university press, . - . serle excites little enthusiasm from kipling because of his native origins in england. kipling, "origins of tudor patronage" - . britnell . '"interestingly, heraldic marks originated as wax seals or marks of guarantee appended to contracts anthony wagner, heraldry in england (london and new york: penguin, ) - . wagner cites the three notorious cases of lovel vs. morley, , scrope vs. grosvenor, and grey vs. hastings, . wagner . insure legitimate tenureship and often doubling as surveillance officers and diplomatic spies. ' such vigilance is understandable. power was legitimized through the fictions of blood, that evanescent substance pulsating down through generations, that genealogical soul preserved through the procreation of sons. with the breakdown of feudal society and increasing upward mobility at court, the clamp down on lineal identification calls attention to the erosion of these representational strategies. at the same time that heraldry was becoming increasingly institutionalized, its emblematic forms crossed over from official documentation into more imaginative and recondite allegorical play. tournament impresa shields, for example, were sites for inventing fictional identities cryptically inscribed in paint on the exterior surface, in an emblematic play of vibrant forms for the decoding amusement of the courtly ensemble (figure ). on a more personal level, 'canting arms' used name punning or symbols denoting particular virtues within emblazons. in addition, the constituent parts of coats of arms, colours and symbols, provided a visual springboard for reminiscence and could be used to tell stories of crusading adventures or family history. this association of erudition and wit with heraldry has clear associations with the emblem whose prodigality burgeoned in the later sixteenth century england. emblems were aggregate designs that incorporated an eclectic mixture of visual signs or symbols into a single surface. in emblems, the assortment of seemingly incompatible forms is resolved in the mind of the viewer, or as in courtly spectacles, the body of the k i n g . in the words of david evett: "the work is not a complete image of the idea, but a set of materials for constructing such gunn "chivalry" . heraldry was frequently used as such in romance tales. maurice keen, chivalry (new haven and london: yale university press, ) ff. michael leslie has discussed the way in which portraiture in the sixteenth century can be closely associated with the emblem. "the dialogue between bodies and souls: pictures and poesy in the english renaissance," word and image ( ): - . evett . an idea." interestingly, emblems were employed in the architectural apertures that adorned the frontispieces of books. allegory here retains a residual association with visionary experience calling attention to its absent ecclesiastical roots. it is configured as a transformative gateway introducing the aevum of the text (figure ). though the holyrood panel is not an emblem in the strict sense, its confluence with regards to discordant surface play calls attention to the allegorical operations called up by formal designation. while the tapestries and cloths of arras adorning the walls of the royal residences depicted mythological subjects, historic battles, courtly romance and the leisurely pursuits of the aristocracy, painting within the early tudor court was strictly associated with the work of identification. portraiture grafted a noble ideal onto the external body while heraldry was intent on authenticating that nobility by documenting the ancestry of the blood. encompassing both portraiture and heraldry, painting delineated body and soul, outside and inside, visage and blood. in the holyrood panel, both painterly modes are present. in the holyrood panel, heraldic insignia are blended with corporeal presence in an unstable construction of a tudor identity. in addition to the heraldic insignia embedded in the tournament props and costumes, the delineated contours of st. george and the dragon compressed against the surface of the panel are reminiscent of heraldic emblazonment. more intriguingly, they recall the standards ceremoniously presented by henry v h at st. paul's after his victory at bosworth field: the red dragon of wales, the red cross of saint george, and the dun c o w . in this evocation of heraldry, the holyrood panel calls attention to its function as purveyor of a lineal history. the evett refers here to the triumphal pageants produced under elizabeth i. it is evident, however, that this same kind of resolution within the body of the monarch was already operating in the civic triumphs staged for henry vii and even earlier. evett . • for an inventory of subject matter on tapestries in royal residences in the early sixteenth century see w. g. thomson, a history of tapestry: from the earliest times until the present day (london: hodder and stoughton, ) - . holyrood panel can therefore be seen as a genealogical strategy employing allegory to trace out a legitimating history in blood. to further demonstrate the fluidity between portraiture and heraldry in the english court, consider the genealogical paintings in the great hall at richmond. demonstrating a legitimate bloodline was crucial to sustaining the crown and a virtual obsession with henry, whose rather dubious royal pretensions stemmed from his mother margaret beaufort (a lineal claim absolutely prohibited in fortesucue's text on english governance). cognisant of this, henry took great pains in researching or manipulating his ancient ancestry, tracing his forebears back to brutus, arthur and cadwalader, the last of the britons. henry thus inscribes his own body at the apex of a line of pure english stock. in , polydore vergil was employed by henry v u to inscribe these connections to the ancient britons into official history. these genealogical recoveries evidently pleased henry who delighted in having them recited out loud (repeatedly) at mealtimes. for the great hall at richmond, henry commissioned maynard to flesh out these ancestral selections in paint. in the hall were hung a series of portraits running the length of the long galley and flanking either side. these depicted "the noble kings of this realm... [including brutus, and arthur]...visaged and appearing like bold and valiant knights. and so their deeds delloyd j. guth has identified this heraldic device with the house of warwick, a faction of the house of york. "richard iii, henry vii and the city: london politics and the 'dun cowe,' kings and nobles in the later middle ages: a tribute to charles ross, ed. ralph a. griffiths and james sherborne (gloucester: alan sutton, ) . fortescue writes "for the law of england adjudges that the issue never to follow the condition of the mother, but always that of the father." sir john fortescue, "in praise of the laws of england," on the laws and governance of england, ed. shelley lockwood (cambridge: cambridge university press, ) . for henry's ancestral claims see footnote and appendix a. campbell ix. one of these genealogical charts tracing the ancestry of henry vii back to cadwalader and aligning it with the lineage of christ is found in british library, ms kings . these conceits are further advertised through the naming of his first-born arthur. on arthur's creation as the prince of wales the monk at westminster duly supplied him with a genealogy. for a discussion see mary e. griffin, "cadwalader, arthur and brutus in the wigmore manuscript," speculum ( ) looff. according to vergil, cadwalader was visited by an apparition, which prophesied to him that his descendent (henry) would recover the land. hays . gabrielle m . spiegel has argued for genealogy as a structuring frame for medieval historiography. campbell lx and - . and acts in the chronicles are right evidently both shown and declared." at the apogee of this noble line, placed above the throne was appropriately "the seemly picture and personage of our * most excellent and high sovereign now reigning upon us his leige people." the great hall is transformed into a memory chamber, a visual compendium of reflected similitudes, and a florilegium of heroic kings reverberating through time, finding their ultimate mirror in the living corpus of the reigning monarch. the great hall performs the work of allegorical recovery for those failing to draw out these obvious comparisons. these genealogical conceits were exhibited to captive audiences like the spanish entourage present at the wedding celebrations for katherine and arthur. we can see here how portraiture is conformed to this paratactic mode of allegorical accumulation and assimilated forms. //. bloody histories despite these visual and verbal recitations, blood remained a niggling thorn in the side of the tudor rose. henry's wife elizabeth of york, as the eldest surviving daughter of edward iv, had a far superior claim to the throne, and was more instrumental to henry's accession than he would care to admit. before bosworth, after an abortive attempt to land in wales in to amass an army against richard lu, henry tudor was forced to regroup in brittany. here henry rephrased his entitlement to royal power through the rhetoric of chivalric rescue and consequently ensured the support of his troops. having enumerated richard's treacherous activities, henry pledged: yea, a tyrant more than nero, for he hath not only murdered his nephew, being his king and sovereign lord, bastarded his noble brethren, and defamed his virtuous and womanly mother, but also compassed all the means and ways that he could invent how to stuprate his own niece under kipling, receyt kipling, receyt . the use of painting to educate foreign dignitaries on the preeminence of the king was a tactic employed by henry viii. glenn richardson, "entertainments for the french ambassadors at the court of henry viii," the society for renaissance studies ( ): - . the pretense of a cloaked matrimony; which lady i have sworn and promised to take to my mate and wife, as you all know and believe. if this cause be not just, and this quarrel godly, let god, the giver of victory, judge and determine. after his victory at bosworth field, however, this knight in shining armour seemed far less attentive to the fair virgin that had justified his cause, and only after his own coronation, and the insistence of parliament did henry uphold his oath. this matrimonial gesture proved to be, in the representational politics of rule, henry's most valuable asset, far outweighing the merits of martial victory and the technicalities of blood right. even the papal proclamation declaring henry's legitimacy as ruler addressed the peaceful accord brought about by the union of the warring factions of lancaster and york, before substantiating henry's personal claim. the lust for absolute power fueled by narcissism abides no reflected glory. desiring his own body to be the beginning and end of all historical panegyric, henry commissioned two tapestries to record his glorious deeds, and in the process subjected elizabeth to virtual erasure. these tapestries can be seen as corrective lenses or structural moulds visually clarifying the way in which his reign should be comprehended and memorized. in addition, as will become clear, they have an uncanny resonance with the holyrood panel. the first tapestry represents henry's conquest at bosworth and is recorded in an inventory as follows: "item, one pece of arras of the comyng into englonde ofking henrye yiith taking with thone hand the crowne from king richard the thurde usurper of the same, & with thother hand holding a roose crownde." considering that henry had earlier purchased a detailed series on the destruction of troy, this theme aligns a. f. pollard, the reign of henry vii from contemporary sources vol. (london: longmont, green and c o , ) . chrimes writes that upon hearing henry's intentions to marry elizabeth, "the assembled company swore homage to him as if he were king already." chrimes . for a transcription of the request put forth by sir thomas lovell see nicholas harris nicolas, the privy purse expenses of elizabeth of york: wardrobe accounts of edward the fourth with a memoir of elizabeth of york and notes (london: william pickering, ) ixiii. paul l. hughes and james f. larkin, tudor royal proclamations volume : the early tudors ( - ) (new haven and london: yale university press, ) - . with successive rebellions erupting in the years following, the proclamation was reprinted as a reminder of this in , and . anglo . kipling, "origins" . this victorious act of henry vii with this great myth of urban foundation. the second commission depicted the wedding of arthur and katherine. although the first is no longer extant, and the second survives only as fragments, the central design follows the standard iconographic formula as shown in the woodcut churned out by the westminster printing press to promote the event (figure and ). significantly, in the wedding tapestry henry vii, elevated on the throne in the centre, has usurped the position usually reserved for the officiating priest. in both tapestries, then, henry's body is the beginning and end of visibility, the sacred centre from which these marvelous deeds spring forth. tudor history is encapsulated by these two exultant moments: the foundation of the dynasty and its promise of continuity. henry's peerless victories in battle are celebrated in the miraculous emancipation of england, sans damsel of course, and his incomparable sagacity in matters of diplomacy are declared in the symbolic union of marriage, though not his own. this dialectic of war and marriage is uncannily recalled in the holyrood panel, though with significant alterations. before addressing these, let us consider this dialectic and its visual provocation at the court of henry vli. while under the reign of edward iv, the nation languished in times of peace, demanding war as a sign of the security of the realm and praising the crushing of his enemies in gory details. in contrast, henry cultivated a reputation for diplomatic agility and his shrewd and novel policies of peace were lauded by biographers and historiographers as exemplary. marriage was the supreme expression of peaceful accord, symbolically binding potentially for details on the purchase of the tapestries see thomson, . henry vii claimed to be descended from brutus, the grandson of aeneus who first settled in britain. geoffrey of monmouth, history of the kings of britain, trans. sebastian evans, rev. charles w. dunn (new york: e. p. dutton and co., inc., ) ff. griffin . considering that english use of the printing press for propaganda was fairly late, the importance of this event to henry's power politics is evident. the only other woodcut from his reign is one depicting the towering figure of henry vi presiding over his own shrine in windsor chapel, probably distributed on site for pilgrims. edward hodnett, english woodcuts: - ( ). for backwardness in use of printing press, see richmond, . the book of noblesse written to edward iv to entice him into a war against the french is an example of this warring mentality. john gough nichols, ed., the boke of noblesse addressed to king edward the fourth on his invasion of france in (new york: burt franklin, ). incalcitrant nations in wedded unity. in the prologue to the recevt of the ladie kateryne, the published account of the famous royal wedding, the chronicler condemns the ruinous designs of choleric princes who think that "great praise and magnificence of theym to be in effusion of bloded, stryfe and batelles." henry vii, on the other hand, is adulated for his sagacity in pursuing "unity and peace" through marital alliance. however, as georges duby has astutely pointed out, the arts of courtly love and the arts of war were in fact more intimately related. despite the chroniclers' earlier moralizing on matrimonial peace, his description of the interior of saint paul's cathedral, where the sacramental rites of arthur and katherine took place, presents a different view. the walls were magnificently wardrobed in rich clothes of arras representing "the noble and valient actes, stories and gestes that for the moost partie poetes and oratours writt and remembre in their commentes, bokes and scripture, as well in the besegyng of noble cities as othir batalles and turneis." for anyone who missed this symbolic coupling of sexual union and urban conquest, the disguisings following the event made it abundantly clear. in a variation on the theme of the castle of love, eight "goodly and fresshe ladies" ensconced in a fortress prop resist the seductive entreaties and verbal advances of the spanish armies. the knights of the mount of love however, with "moch males and curragyous myend" charged the castle "which they frothwith assaultid so and in such wise that the ladies, yelding themselvys, descendid from the seid castell and submittid them to the pouer, grace and will of thoes noble knightes." having wrested submission, the knights proceeded to lead the conquered ladies in a vergil wrote "he was most successful in war, although by nature he preferred peace to war." hay . bernard andre, the blind poet of toulouse, exalted the pursuit of peace above all other virtues. campbell xx. "the most noble and prudent kynges in the world as well our excellent sufrayng and prince of england, kyng henry the vii as the worthy and famous prince, fardinand, by provysion of god, king of espayn, in likewise have allowid the sentence of unite and peac to be moost expedient. to thaccomplishment wherof, they have propond everych to tother ther worthy and goodly issue...to be cowplid by the loyng bonde and sacrament of wedlock." kipling, recevt georges duby, "on courtly love," love and marriage in the middle ages, trans, jane dunnett (cambridge: polity press, ) . kipling. recvt kipling . rousing dance. following these dramatic interludes, the tournament events gave full expression to the violence underlying these revelries. uncannily the published descriptions of the trappings of the lavish spectacle seem to resonate with the pageant paraphernalia depicted in the holyrood panel. i am not suggesting that the holyrood panel is a nostalgic retrospective of the jousting tournaments held at richmond, rather, that these similarities carry residual meanings inflecting the holyrood ensemble with latent significance. leading off the sporting events, the duke of buckingham, the chief challenger entered the field enclosed in a covered 'chapell' or pavilion "hangid or arteynyd abouth wyth white and grene satyn palid, brauderid righth goodly upon every side and ende wyth grete rede rosis drawyn on lowe whelys." this description is clearly reminiscent of the holyrood panel and foregrounds the explicit referencing of tournament events within the painting. more interestingly, when the pavilion "came ffore the kyngis tent" the duke "issuyd out" of the pavilion "armyd wyth an excedyng bush of ostrich ffedyrs upon his helmet and his hors." these plumes were obviously the latest in sexy tournament apparel, though unlike st. george in the holyrood panel, were removed before the fighting began. as the presence of the king effects the opening of the pavillion tents, so in the holyrood panel the eyes of the viewer provokes the angel to draw aside the curtains. the defenders entered the in pantomime, drawing from a standard repertoire of chivalric themes. the earl of essex, for example, entered the tilt in a mountain, holding a tree in his hand. perched on top of the mountain was a virgin with a unicorn resting on her lap. this extravagant stage set was wheeled in by a "rede dragunnys", attached by a green and white string fastened around his neck. these romantic trappings provided a veneer of chivalric romance to these violent sports, allowing the courtly spectators to weave an "the sayd duke causid the said bush of ffedyrs to be taken ffrom his hede pese and to be preentyd unto the kyngis tent." thomas chronicle of london thomas . allegorical narrative around the sport of the jousting combatants. in addition to the echoing of tournament paraphernalia in the holyrood panel, the unusual mirroring of st. george and the dragon pitted against each other as equal assailants recalls the familiar images of jousting matches depicted in manuscript illuminations (figure ). formerly used as military lessons for training knights in the arts of war, by the fifteenth century tournaments had metamorphosed into a theatre for royal spectacle. though visually engaging, featuring costumed combatants, pageant floats and an elaborate chivalric tree, tournaments were lessons in royal supremacy, impressing upon attentive spectators the full potential of sovereign power unleashed. in the case of arthur's nuptial festivities, this included the spanish entourage and the scottish ambassadors who were present at the event to negotiate a match between james v and margaret tudor. tournaments, the requisite entertainment at a regal wedding, slipped from the simulated performance of war to a surrogate drama of sexual conquest, from the shedding of blood to its preservation in an endless flow pulsating forward into . time. this genealogical subtext is most apparent in the chivalric tree, generally erected prior to the event to attract contestants for the competition, on which would be hung, the "skuchons, shields and thronys" of the lords and knights participating in the jousts. during the tournament proper this doubled as a programme and tally board with the royal heralds appointed to keep score. accordingly, the chronicler of the tudor royal wedding describes a chivalric tree "empayntid with plesaunt levys, floures and frute" positioned in prominent view at one end of the tilt. again, these performative fictions blur the lines between the real and the imaginary, and kipling writes: "just as the disguisings allegorized the marriage as an example of ideal love, so the tournaments defined that love as a theme of hour worthy of knightly combat," kipling xxix. i believe there are more sinister inter-relations. richard barber and juliet barker, tournaments: jousts. chivalry and pageants in the middle ages (new york: weidenfeld and nicolson, ) . kipling, receyt . richard marks and ann payne, eds., british heraldry from its origins to c.l , (london: british museum press, ) . - . fabricated personas mask the acerbic realities of blood bound identity, and the cruciality of defending its vulnerable borders. chivalric trees and genealogical trees record these bloody histories of conquest, leaving a gruesome trail of casualties symbolically reenacted in the severing of bodies and the quartering of arms (figure ). battle and marriage are visually woven together in the tudor imagination and intimately conjoined in henry's tapestry histories. these illustrated myths of dynastic beginnings are self- aggrandisements, narcissistic mirrors of royal identity reflecting and augmenting the body of the king. however, these glorious fictions were fraught by a libidinal imperative, for with the death of arthur and elizabeth the following year these imaginary facades were fast unraveling. the holyrood panel can be seen as a defensive manoeuver, covering up henry's threadbare histories. strangely reminiscent of earlier fictions, the holyrood panel is an uncanny double, an echo resounding back in time. under the guise of sacred narrative, henry reinvents the drama of his own succession at bosworth field and reverts to the prior act of conjugal amity in his marriage to elizabeth of york, effectively inserting tudor history into national hagiography. as the unstable forms reverberate back and forth on the surface of the holyrood panel, colliding in unexpected resemblance, st george and the dragon begin to take on a distinctly tudor air. st. george and his horse, dressaged in national insignia and tudor emblems, positively vibrate with the coordinated pavilions below. as the tudor liveries were green and white, this alignment with st. george is significant. george is henry performing his chivalric heroics at bosworth field. the trembling damsel dressed in tudor garb is elizabeth fending off the incestuous advances of her detestable uncle, richard ih, who is transformed into a diabolical monster, and disfigured by his infernal desires. much is made of richard's lechery in later tudor histories. his portraits were modified to expose a monstrous hump allegedly caused by the concupiscent misdemeanors of his mother." like the dragon, richard's body became the malleable ground for projected enmity, providing the requisite night against which the tudor light might shine. edward hall, transcribing these histories in salacious detail for the young edward v i , frames henry's conquest in terms of these sexual intrigues which threaten not only to contaminate the royal stock but national security as well. elizabeth shrinking in horror at richard's insinuations, did not only "disagree and repudiate that matrimony but abhorred and detested greatly his abominable desire" at which "most importunate and detestable concupiscence" the common people did also protest. henry tudor by god's design did preserve "that verteous and immaculate virgin from that lascivious and sacinerous acte" and taking her as his own wife allowed, if we are to believe henry's genealogical schemes, the royal veins to flow once more with the untainted blood of the ancient britons. significantly it is with the loss of his wife's legitimizing presence, that henry commissions the holyrood panel, revisiting this miraculous act of restitution noticeably absent from his earlier historical schemes but reiterated ad nauseum in later celebrations of the tudor foundation. at which holy union, writes hall, "peace was thought to have descended out of heaven into england." in the lower register of the panel, drawn together towards the centre in stringent symmetry, henry and elizabeth revisit these sacramental rites of marriage, presided over by an officiating angelic presence and calling up the yoking of family lines on a genealogical tree. in typical representations of the dragon myth, the courtly retinue appears in the recesses of the image, peering over the castle ramparts to witness the gruesome spectacle of their daughter's disemboweling as if it were a tournament joust (figure ). in the holyrood panel however, the royal ensemble have left the safety of their walled enclosure and become edward hall, hall's chronicle: containing the history of england during the reign of henry the fourth and the succeeding monarchs, to the end of the reign of henry the eighth (new york: ams press inc, ) . instead a spectacle for our consumption. with the overabundance of progeny aggressively asserted in the holyrood panel, royal concupiscence thus becomes a barometer for the nation's prosperity, sustained by the purity of its royal bloodline and the promise of lineal plenitude - or at least the assertion of it. the holyrood panel is therefore a performance of origins staged on the borders of the body politic. saint george becomes the structuring frame for these historical assertions, transforming the tudor idea into national myth. interestingly, rebecca colman has argued that st. george took hold in england because it filled an absence in english history, their story of the first settlement of the britons. the dragon myth is after all, a story of urban liberation and as we have seen, it is not so unusual for the king and the saint to cross dress. oscillating back and forth in a mutual augmentation, the hagiographic scene slips in and out of tudor history in a fleeting instance of recognition, flickering phantasms hovering deceptively in the mind's eye. st. george becomes the iconographic ground for these allegorical extrapolations, a feeding ground for the parasitic appetites of kings, who draw their legitimating sustenance from his imaginary body. through its allegorical impulse, the holyrood panel inserts the tudor accession as the founding moment of england's true heritage and her future prosperity. notably, in contradistinction to the tapestries this painting recalls, henry v h has relinquished his position at the apex of visibility. he is no longer the efficient cause of histories unfolding. instead, the mass of forms part in a swirling void, and culminate in a vision of national desire. england's apotheosis at this moment seems perilously in danger of dissipating forever. the holyrood panel is a deflective shield covering up the bloody wounds of dynastic perpetuity. it is an unstable surface for the play of heraldic identities, which attempt to protect according to colman, the norman conquest wiped out any history of the briton settlement. colman - . the body through an assertion of an authenticated tudor identity and a sacred genealogical history declaring the nobility of its blood. the tremulous royal bodies emerge from shrouded seclusion dripping with heraldic over-determination. meaning piles up on the surface hiding naked vulnerability in an over determined furor of symbolic assertion. their invincibility thus threatened they are layered in prophylactic garb, robes of estate and cloths of gold sheathed around their vulnerable bodies in vestmented necessity. progeny embellish the bodies of the king and queen with unfettered prolificacy, coating them in procreative magnificence. swathed in crimson, the royal bodies are dressed in the velvety colour of blood. like the protective layers of kingly magnificence, the holyrood panel participates in the tudor wardrobing instinct. it is a 'coat-ing' of arms, and a deflective shield always diverting the eye elsewhere. st george is an emblem of chastity masking the libidinal imperative of kings, endlessly rehearsing and deferring the threat of dynastic termination. chastity and martial victory sit uneasily together performing a rather disturbing surrogation. the shield of st. george, momentarily withheld from the viewing eye, is reconfigured as the entire painting. as an allegorical tudor tournament impresa, it is powerful insignia of resurrection staving off the infernal beast of dynastic oblivion. as allegory moves relentlessly in and out of the image, weaving its assimilative tales around the constituent parts, expanding in ever widening spheres, henry is caught in a web of destabilizing tales disturbingly conjured up in the mind's eye. and the unacknowledged anxieties, which birthed these earlier subjectivities, return to the surface as the uncanny double. elizabeth reappears on the scene (noticeably without the scepter of state) calling attention to her instrumentality in the stability of henry's rule. the loathsome beast skewered in the sky recalls the red dragon of cadwalader, one of henry's celebrated identities. this monstrous resemblance we can estimate the circulation of these conceits in the popular imagination as one legend dating from the th century identifies george as a son of a noble english family of royal blood marked at birth with a bloody red cross on his right hand, a golden garter on his left leg; and a red dragon on his breast. is not inconsistent with popular disillusionment due to his later policies of rule, nor is it far from his own incestual activities, marrying within the prohibited four degrees of affinity. henry had obtained no less than three papal dispensations to assuage these fears. the royal contingent is nervously lined up like tournament escutcheons on a chivalric tree. emerging from their protective pavilions, these vulnerable bodies appear like contestants preparing to defend their honour in a feat of arms. though initially calling attention to lineal fortitude, this over-exuberant protestation, draws attention to the royal family's diminishing ranks. royal presence replicated as an assertion of procreative strength mutates into a declaration of immanent death through allegory's indiscriminate retrievals. ///. apocalyptic ends as allegory twists its sinuous stories around the congeries of forms on the surface of the holyrood panel, the tudors are intertwined into an ever-expanding interpretive universe. impelled by allegory's narcissistic desire, the tudors and george are locked together in a figural structure, which hurtles backwards and forwards through time, scouring memory for its reflected beginnings and intimated ends. under the momentum of this relentless imperialism, surface gives way to spatial depth and returns to surface again. allegory extends its colonizing influence across the visionary expanse stretching from the flowery meadow at the threshold of vision to the shimmering city at its outermost reaches. the tudors are caught up in this relentless journey, not only incorporated into sacred national mythology, but also situated within a master narrative of eschatological desire. our visionary excursion began with an angelic apparition fluttering in the caesura between eternity and time. this agent of divine revelation unveils a vision of the soul's desiring: the promise of perpetuity envisaged as an eternal dwelling place glimmering in the distant view. though cloaked in the self-assured conceits of the english imagination, this national apotheosis is forever denied. suspended in the gap between hope and its fulfillment is an infernal dragon, hovering ambiguously between defeat and renewed retaliation. our visionary journey therefore ends with the beast of oblivion, whose gaping genitalia serve as an aperture of death recalling the cavernous mouth of hell. winged creatures patrol aevum's borders as accessories of the divine plan, propelling its narrative unfolding from the birth of time in the creation of the world to its climactic closure at the last judgement. flickering in and out of the mind's eye, angels and their fallen counterparts buttress time, beating their wings at the outermost extremities of history's imagining, from the herbaceous border at the fore of the image to the urban sprawl on its illusory horizon. the tudors and england are inserted through allegory into this sacred master plan, from the garden of eden to the city of jerusalem in an eschatological pilgrimage through time. the dragon unmasked in bestiary texts is an evolutionary form of the pestilent serpent. according to bartholemew the englishman, writing in the thirteenth century, this reptilian fiend is a "full thyrsty beaste" whose noxious breath corrupts the air with fiery emissions and infects the world with evil. his natural habitats are the murky rivers and the subterranean caverns of the earth. he is equipped with sharp teeth and a sinuous tail for biting and stinging victims and most intriguingly is endowed with "ryghte sharpe syght". the most famous performance of this winged reptile was in the garden of eden as satan the tempter, whose cunning deceptions ushered death into the world. in this infamous guise, satan tempts eve to eat the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and e v i l enticing her with the promise of perpetuity. "you w i l l not die; for god knows that when you eat of it our eyes w i l l be opened and you w i l l be like god knowing good and e v i l . " and so she and adam ate and saw that they were naked. at the fall, death enters the world with an attendant longing for lost eternity. in some depictions of this rodney dennys, the heraldic imagination (london: barrie and jenkins, ) . origin story, as in this illustration from a fifteenth century manuscript, the female serpent sprouting scaly wings coils around the central tree, making explicit the association between dragons and serpents and their assumed gender (figure ). the conflation of sex and original sin, female seduction and consequent death was commonplace in the medieval period and reformation. interestingly, in alexander barclay's the life of st. george published by richard pynson in , the dragon is cast as female. her notorious appetite is driven by the passions of her insatiable womb, which infects the ground's fertility, transforming lush verdure into a barren wasteland. female lust is incarnated as monstrous animality. we should recall here that it was the unnatural passions of richard hi's mother that affected his deformity. in the holyrood panel the dragon spreads her legs, exposing cavernous genitalia as if emitting one last noxious stench onto the royal entourage below. the womb is both the creator of life and the cause of its extinction. for kings, it is a specter of impotence threatening to devour all hope of perpetuity. when arthur succumbed to a virulent skin disease, henry's anxieties around his own incestual transgressions must have been revived, despite the multiple papal dispensations. john of salisbury had, after all, identified leprous children as one of the punishments for unlawful consanguinity. as exogamous marriage resulted in the diffusion of blood, incest loomed as a temptation on the horizon of genesis v. , new revised standard version. riches . see joseph leo koerner, the moment of self portraiture in german renaissance art (chicago and london: the university of chicago press, ) ff. "whan this deedly monstre lothely of figure had wastyd the bestes about on every syde her wombe insaciate no hunger coude endure." alexander barclay, the life of st. george, ed. william nelson (london: oxford university press, ) . more - . richard's expose of his mother's promiscuity as relayed by more, are interpreted by peter rudnytsky as a psychological referral of his anxieties over his deformity. peter l. rudyntsky, "more's history of king richard iii as an uncanny text," contending kingdoms: historical, psychological and feminist approaches to the literature of sixteenth-century england and france, ed. marie-rose logan and peter l. rudnytsky (detroit: wayne state university press, ) - . . georges duby, the knight, the lady and the priest: the making of modern marriage in medieval france, trans., barbara bray, (new york: random house, inc., ) . q monarchical desire for absolute power. having eaten the forbidden fruits from the genealogical tree, henry and elizabeth have forfeited paradise. as allegory probes the furthest extremities of history's visual imaginings, the enigmatic angel who first appeared as a visionary accomplice flickers in and out of focus, metamorphosing from the celestial sentinel guarding the gates of eden into a chilling harbinger of doom. centrally commanding with fiery wings and piercing eyes, this heavenly emissary masquerades as st. michael, who weighs all souls on judgement day (figure ). ominously, the uncanny symmetry of the scene evokes the precarious equilibrium of judicial scales, wavering before making its final plunge. flanking either side, the penitential royals collectively await their moment of reckoning. like the remnant bodies spewed up by the mouths of animals at the last days, every royal zygote has been gathered together for quality inspection. imperiled souls tremble on the edge of the abyss, fervently praying for merciful intervention. caught up in the menacing sky, the battle between st. george and the dragon takes on cosmic significance as the diabolical master of mutable form metamorphoses from seducing serpent to apocalyptic beast (figure ). perhaps st. george is st. michael subduing the antichrist, perhaps he is the prophesied christian king raised up in the last days to defeat the infidel forces and usher in a reign of peace. regardless, this impending furor is strictly an english affair, an antecedent to the attainment of the new jerusalem and eternal blessedness for the righteous soul. the problem of perpetuity that began in the garden comes to its climactic head in the apocalyptic furor at the end of time. from eden's gates to jerusalem's appearance, the tudor dynasty is sutured into this divine eschatology through an allegorical pilgrimage of desire. marin - . in reality, incest was a highly useful concept that could be used to annul unfruitful unions. for incest as a political tool see, bruce thomas boehrer, monarchy and incest in renaissance england (philadelphia: university of pennsylvania press, ) - . curtis v. bostick. the antichrist and the lollards: apocalypticism in late medieval and reformation england (leiden, boston and koln: brill, ) - . on the brink of dynastic annihilation, the holyrood panel weaves its painted trail across the widening caesura as a pilgrimage through time. pilgrimage as we have seen is an enunciative frame, which parallels the progress of the soul. the promise of perpetuity appears across the desolate planes as a glorious citadel quickening the soul with yearning. promised, but never realized, eternity is always perceived from afar. pictorial visions conjured up by desire are transcendental fictions, two-dimensional deceptions giving way to the cold hard facts of painted materiality. always on this side, standing at the edge looking in, our unsatiated desires are sent right back to the surface, finding release in an allegorical excursion, weaving pilgrim stories around fragmentary forms, in search for truth and meaning. like the prodigality of the tudors replicating on the vision's edge, stories beget stories, winding around the flattened forms, engulfing the viewer in its twists and turns. though ultimately framed and allegorized as a pilgrimage of the soul, the evocation of st. george and the insistent and indeed obsessive attention to national regalia in the holyrood panel draws out the underlying anxiety of the tudor succession. the revered body of st. george provides a nodal point for the allegorical embellishment of the body of the king and his noble line. national hagiography and tudor history are threaded together through allegory's typological desires. structured within these legitimizing frames of saintly virtue and divine eschatology the legitimacy of the tudor dynasty is corroborated as a reflected vision of these divine truths. reflected in the light of this ultimate speculum, the tudor dynasty is inserted as a vital link in the chain of final salvation. hagiography bolsters history as a legitimating ground for tudor allegory, which generates sacred stories of dynastic origins and salvific mythologies of urban liberation, n nourishing english apocalypticism, the holyrood panel provides a tantalizing vision of national desire while st. george and henry become mirrored prefigurations of the ultimate battle of good against evil waged in the last days. scouring memory for its narcissistic reflections, the work of allegory moves back and forth across time, assimilating the recollected phantasms accumulated in memory until seemingly discordant forms collide in a shock of discovery. this flash of revelation is a fleeting encounter momentarily perceived by the mind's eye only to congeal once more into the painterly facade. again and again, allegory spins its desultory narratives as a compensatory substitute for its unattainable object of desire. these relentless excursions are doomed to failure, always frustrated by the unresolved conflict waged across the pinnacle of eternity envisaged but endlessly deferred. as the vision dissipates, the dreamer awakes nonetheless transfigured by this extra- textual meandering. though seemingly undirected, these allegorical excursions are impelled along by their own structural momentum framed at its outer extremities by the pilgrimage of man. however, there are stories and then there are stories. there are the stories that can be spoken and those that can only be seen. these are stories that can be glimpsed but never heard; silent histories, fleetingly conjured up in the mind's eye, and forming a haunting suggestion impressed into memory, more insistent because of its undeclared presence. transformation occurs in this space between sight and introspection. frustrated by the ineffectual efforts of st. george and separated from the promise of what could be, allegory's unquenched desires accumulate in this fissure in time, and are thrown back onto the viewer as burden. confronted by the gallery of imploring looks witnessing this viewing exchange, and pinned by the knowing eye of the celestial emissary, the viewer is compelled to act on the revelations of his own devising. in the early tudor court, in a climate rife with political subterfuge, these silent and stealthy transactions would be most expedient. for the garter lords and knights attending the king's person on the feast day of st. george, and sworn in loyal fealty by a knot of chivalric honor, this burden takes on political effect. trapped in the coercive allegorical operations of tudor vision, the garter knights are contractually bound. the holyrood panel is thus a political intervention painted on the edge of dynastic abyss, which brushes into its imaginary strokes the resurrecting power of st. george. iv. dynastic denouements interpretive analysis, like history, is an allegorical enterprise, weaving recuperative tales around the textual remnants littering the landscape of times passing. interpretation as such is i retrospective pilgrimage, a nostalgic journey back through time. " failure looms large on the horizon of desire, mocking these attempted excursions. but still these corpses impel our allegorical quest, rattling their bones across the ruins of time, enticing our desiring eye with the promise of discovery. on april , henry v u expired. however, his departure from this life was kept secret, even from henry, now prince of wales, to allow the "substance of the lords" to assemble. the unorthodoxy of this delay suggests a political coup to secure the tudor succession. these lords, according to steven gunn, were the garter lords and knights who would be gathering in the city for their annual celebrations. st. george, it seems was protecting the perilous regions of dynastic transfer, staving off the beast of oblivion and ensuring the griffin has argued that saint george was for the english this irretrievable origin. georgone in old english meant by gone days. griffin . shrewsbury, herbert and surrey and probably lovell and poynings. gunn, "chivalry " . see also s. j. gunn, "the accession of henry viii," historical research . ( ) . continuity of the tudor line. henry vltl ascended to the throne on april , which is st. george's d a y . ernst kantorowicz has called attention to the way aevum not only provided a solution to preserve the immortality of the soul but also a political solution for the death of kings. in addition to his material and corruptible natural body, the king was also seen to possess a second body, his body politic. this body politic, modeled after the angels was a persona ficta, an immutable and immaterial corporation, endlessly perpetuated through time. the king's second body thus emerges in the caesura between time, propelled by the desire for perpetuity. this immortal body politic is preserved in part by the fiction of sacred blood pulsating down through its genealogical veins. apocalyptic stories, as kermode has argued, give way to the tragedies of kings, micro-catastrophes rehearsed again and again in the relentless cycle of dynastic renewal, rising like the phoenix from the ashes of the deceased king, compelled to perpetuate the fiction of dynastic continuity. though immaterial, this persona ficta was momentarily visible at the succession in the effigy of the dead king. in the funeral observances for henry vii the mortuary rituals of perpetuity were practiced in england for the first time. covered with black velvet the king's body was overlaid with an effigy of his person affixed above it and processed through the streets of london. the effigy was arraigned in robes of estate with "crown on his head, and scepter and ball in the hands, laid on cushion of gold and envisioned with banners of arms of all his interestingly, as arthur's funeral took place on april , , henry succeeded his brother as well as his father exactly seven years later. it should also be noted that henry viii married arthur's widow katherine of aaragon, shortly after his father's death. these correlations are food for thought indeed. kantorowicz ff. s.kantorowicz - . kermode . stanley . although the duke of bedford used this phrase at the accession of henry vi, kantorowicz explains that this unusual observance was occurred in order to preempt the rival claims of the dauphin charles to the english dominion in france. kantorowicz provides no specific date for the emergence of this political theory given that he intends to trace its evolutionary developments. the theory clearly gained momentum in the later half of the sixteenth dominions, titles and genealogies." henry's corpse was not deposited in a raised tomb as per tradition, but in a subterranean vault beside his queen. when the vault was closed "the heralds stripped off their tabards, and hung them on the rails of the hearse, exclaiming in french, 'the noble king henry v u is dead!' and then immediately put them on again and cried ' v i v e le noble roy henry vm.'" century, but the first references to this double identity in law, are dated from the reign of henry vii. kantorowicz - . astle . stanley . p o s t s c r i p t battling the beast of oblivion: the tudor legacy if you find pleasure in seeing fair pictures of heroes look at these! none greater was ever portrayed. fierce is the struggle and hot the disputing; the question does father, does son - or do both - the pre-eminence win? one ever withstood his foes and his country's destruction finally giving his people the blessing of peace; but, born to things greater, the son drove out of his councils his ministers worthless, and ever supported the just. and in truth, to this steadfastness papal arrogance yielded when the sceptre of power was wielded by henry the eighth under whose reign the true faith was restored to the nation and the doctrines of god began to be revered with awe. whitehall mural in the famous whitehall mural, which furnished the privy chamber of henry vhi, father, son and their respective brides provide a corporeal frame for a monumental stone tablet unveiled n o in the centre of the canvas (figure ). henry vii is positioned in the shallow recess and imbued with ashen severity, appears as a ghostly shadow of the present monarch, cradling the tomb like plinth. etched into the marble surface, is a latin inscription (transcribed above) comparing the respective heroics of the tudor kings; "does father, does son - or do both - the pre-eminence win?" text and image reverberate back and forth in mutual augmentation. words embellish the bodies of the monarchs as the portraits of these mighty men provoke this eulogizing speech. while in the holyrood panel, st. george provided the figural ground for allegorical histories, in the whitehall mural the very bodies of the monarchs fuel allegory's wardrobing adornments. royal corporeality, or rather, as the text declares, henry vhi, "the preeminence won" is the measure for moral authority. historical biography replaces sacred hagiography as the legitimating frame for expounding truth, which finds its ultimate expression the whitehall mural text translation is taken from lloyd and thurley . the mural is no longer extant due to fire, but is known through a watercolor copy made by remigus van leemput in the seventeenth century. in shakespeare's theatre of kings. however, the tension we find between battle and marriage in the holyrood panel, with the aggressive posturing of the royal family competing with the chivalric activities of george, is also played out in the whitehall mural. the ever-present anxiety over perpetuity undercuts the confident posturing of tudor bravado. while the chivalric deeds of great men are openly declared in monumental verse and the cocksure straddle of the hulking king monopolizes our vision, the swelling bellies of their other halves bespeak alternative histories or anxious sub-texts. these silent partners, and their regenerative fertility, are the unspoken foundation of the security of the body politic, whose perpetuity hinges on the procreation of kings. for edward hall, historian and tudor enthusiast, it is the work of the history that keeps the "deadly beast of oblivion" at bay, setting forth the deeds of noble men in literature "that all though they be dead by mortall deathe, yet they by writing and fame lyve and be continually present." but in the whitehall chapel mural, the empty panegyric of text is a cover up for the dynastic insecurity that under girds this painting. like the holyrood panel, the whitehall mural calls attention to the difference between seeing and saying. mute histories in paint reveal the persistent anxieties of dynastic perpetuity that can be visually acknowledged but never declared. it should be noted that in a manuscript illumination, after pope leo x gave henry viii the title defender of the faith in , henry is seen depicted as an embodiment of st. george, debating against charles v in the audience hall of the pope. henry's verbal refutations and have skewered the dragon, representing heresy, writhing in its death throws in the foreground of the image. king - . 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"the allegorical poem as interior memoir." yale french studies ( ): - . figures figure . tomb of henry vii and elizabeth of york, , ,peitro torrigiano (the lady chapel, westminister abbey, london). figure . the family of henry vii with st. george and the dragon, - , attributed to maynard wewyck (royal collection, holyrood palace, edinburgh). figure . the madonna of cannon van der peale, , jan van eyck, (groeningemuseum, bruges). hg. id han* memling, triptych ofjoiui donne, c, i+t>o. london. n.itii!im] gallery figure . triptych of john donne, c . l , hans memling (national gallery, london) figure . st. george with edward iii and family, c - . watercolour reproduction, robert smirke, c. (society of antiquaries, london). figure . st. john's vision on the island of patmos, c. - , a d d m s , folio v. (british library, london) figure . the angel shows st. john the heavenly jerusalem, english apocalypse, c. m s , folio r. (pierpont morgan library, new york) figure . trinity college apocalypse c. (trinity college, cambridge) figure . imaginacion de vraye noblesse, , quentin poulet royal m s .c.viii., folio r. (british library, london). figure . monumental brass of sir hugh hastings of elsing, , (elsing church, norfolk) figure . st. george arming edward iii, - , milemete treatise, m s , folio r., (christ church, oxford) figure . wilton dyptych, after (national gallery, london). figure . jerusalem, from the desriptio terrae sanctae, , burchard of mount sion, commissioned by philip of burgundy (british museum). figure . henry viand the knights of the garter, m s royal e v i , folio (british library, london). figure . the grand procession of the sovereign and the knights companion c , engraving. figure . the soveriegns of europe worshipping st. george figure . silver testoon (left) and silver groat (right) c. . figure . the marriage tapestry of arthur tudor and katherine of aaragon, c. , attributed to piers enghein (magdalen college, oxford) ix (cftcfmttvc nouetnftflfif tour «|hf ixp:c&\ cc we fa nutt^ paffee c r q u e <f tour a fen j dvffmtff c r i j u c c r v w i r a i c « i matnt ktwmtutfc j. fu autirallic il wgintcffc ptc tuur ocuuit cai'tf'rw c^pitf- fpm/rummfv ibtjvuvrrffmplj ait tpue fifuf* »>tti fr wnunoif fount a mouitytaioomc ~tan toft que fa mcfft fu^btttt ctquc tvue fee ihmvm fairfa^bwilr ou cm #utrc i f few awhhtnra figure . tournament before king arthur, m s douce , folio (bodleian, library, oxford). figure . temptation in the garden, t h century, m s (rare books collection, library of congress) figure . christ and st. michael and entry into jerusalem, beaune altarpiece, centre and farleft panels, , rogier van der weyden (musee hotel-dieu, beaune) figure . apocalyptic battle over mont st. michel, les tres riches hueres du due du berry, - , the limbourg brothers, m s / (musee conde, chantilly) figure . whitehall mural, , copy by remigius van leemput after hans holbein the younger, cat. (royal collection, london). appendix a t j s t j « — w *° q o f _ • o o v o t j •*-< fe ~ _ o - » ov g „ ^ cq fe q o cs « v o oo s m >-j q rj t j i o s .s <o vo .s ^ p< tj ov * § r-- o o t j h _ cn s ° • "e es ja i oo i o « ? on ( o ^ -i. - h •g t j g o " t j o g - • £"q cq *° .s • fe _ fc cn o » g ^ t j h § a to s s a • fe cq <« h <h o o g o s " -• (n s ov ov t j s s i/) — c s j m m ,s o t j o • i * < ov a p p e n d i x b garter knights under henry v i i john vere, earl of oxford sir giles daubeny, knight thomas fitz-alan, earl of arundel george talbot, earl of shrewsbury john wells, viscout wells george stanley, lord strange sir edward wydevil, kinght baneret john dynham maximilian the first, emperor of germany sir john savage, knight sir william stanley, knight sir john cheney, knight baneret alphonsus, duke of calabria arthur, prince of wales thomas grey, marquis of dorset henry percy, earl of northumberland henry bourchier, earl of essex sir charles somerset, knight baneret, - robert willoughby, lord brook sir edward poynings, knight sir gilbert talbot, knight baneret sir richard pole, knight - edward stafford, duke of buckingham henry, duke of york, later henry vlti edward courtney, earl of devonshire sir richard guilford, knight baneret edmund de l a pole, earl of suffolk sir thomas lovel, knight (transcriber of the will) (lord chamberlain) (lord steward) (lord treasurer of england) (lord chamberlain, executed ) (imprisoned in calais from ) (lord chamberlain, ambassador) (comptroller of the household, ambassador) (in exile with brother edmund from ) (possible claimant to the throne) (comptroller of the household) (in exile from , imprisoned in tower ) (executor of the will, chancellor of the exchequer, treasurer of the household, treasurer of the chamber) sir reginald bray, knight john, king of denmark guido ubaldo, duke of urbino gerald fitzgerald, earl of kildare henry stafford richard crecy, earl of kent sir rys thomas philip, king of castile sir thomas brandon, knight baneret charles, arch-duke of austria, prince of spain, and later emperor of germany death and the illustrated book: printers, experimentaton and the reinventon of the danse macabre, -c. s by maja dujakovic b.a., the university of british columbia, m.a., the university of british columbia, a thesis submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of doctor of philosophy in the faculty of graduate and postdoctoral studies (art history and theory) the university of british columbia (vancouver) august, © maja dujakovic, ii abstract this thesis considers the adaptation of the danse macabre (dance of death), a popular late medieval visual and literary theme prevalent in mural paintings, into a series of illustrated books published in france towards the end of the fifteenth century. w hile the first known edition, printed in paris in by guy marchant, was based on the famous and now destroyed mural from the cemetery of the holy innocents (painted - ), subsequent editions published by presses in paris, lyons, troyes and geneva included additional figures and often placed the theme together with other texts and images of similar subject matter thus framing the danse macabre in a novel context. despite this, however, previous scholarship has treated the books mainly as replicas of the lost mural and overlooked their status as inventive works of art. nor have the extant editions been studied in detail even though they vary considerably in terms of content, layout and medium, all of which has an effect on how the theme is presented in each book. by studying the series within the context of early printing in france, the thesis situates the books in the transitional period of bookmaking, from scribal to printing culture, and argues that they were a product of collaboration and experimentation among some of the most prolific printers and publishers of the period, including marchant, antoine vérard and mathias husz. in discussing their printing practices, the thesis emphasizes the crucial role the printers had in editing the work and reinventing the theme. the late fifteenth century in france was also marked by an unprecedented exchange of artistic practices across multiple media, facilitated in part by the proliferation of the printed works, which became the locus for diffusion of images and ideas. in this context, the danse macabre books helped to popularize the late medieval theme and even served as the model for mural paintings and an illuminated manuscript. ultimately, the thesis reveals not only that the books are distinctive and innovative works, but also that they participated in a much broader scope of image production than previously assumed. iii preface this dissertation is the original, unpublished, independent work of the author, m. dujakovic. all images from the bibliothèque nationale are reprinted with the permission of the library. all images from the british library are reprinted with the permission of the british library board. all images from the lambeth palace library are reprinted with the permission of the library. iv table of contents abstract .................................................................................................................... ii preface ...................................................................................................................... iii table of contents ............................................................................................... iv list of figures ....................................................................................................... vi acknow ledgments ............................................................................................... xii chapter one introduction ........................................................................................ context and issues .................................................................................................... layout of chapters ................................................................................................... chapter two death in print: the danse macabre and the medium of illustrated books ........................................................................................................................... the printing w orkshop and the bookstore – new spaces of death ..................... the danse macabre mural and the cemetery of the holy innocents .................... a case for printed books......................................................................................... the danse macabre illustrated books: format and diffusion ................................ the ambiguous image of death .............................................................................. questions and issues .............................................................................................. chapter three death and the business of printing: guy marchant and the production of the danse macabre books ................................................................... the printers and the bookseller – new figures in the dance of death ................ early printing in france ( - ) ...................................................................... between script and print: the book in the transitional period ............................. the career of guy marchant ................................................................................... printing the illustrated book ................................................................................... how-to-live and how-to-die: the shepherd’s calendar and the danse macabre ................................................................................................................................ translating, augmenting or reinventing: strategies for marketing illustrated books ................................................................................................................................ chapter four la danse macabre nouvelle: w omen, fools and the agency of the printer ................................................................................................................... the big twist .......................................................................................................... the new danse...................................................................................................... marchant and the framing of the danse macabre of w omen ............................. v w omen and death in french manuscripts and literary traditions, c. - ................................................................................................................................ w omen’s dance of death: layout and content.................................................... on death and dancing .......................................................................................... w omen, sin and the gender of death .................................................................. the here-and-now: paris and the urban context ................................................ the aftermath of death .......................................................................................... fooling with death ................................................................................................. chapter five the salutary mirror: editing and viewing the illustrated book .... death and the viewer ............................................................................................ the material nature of the printed book and the “acts of viewing” ..................... the question of audience ..................................................................................... the impact of color: hand-painted editions published by antoine vérard ......... husz and the total edition ..................................................................................... the viewer in the book .......................................................................................... chapter six conclusion ....................................................................................... figures ................................................................................................................... bibliography ........................................................................................................ vi list of figures figure . the author, la danse macabre, meslay-le-grenet (eure-et-loire), fresco, c. . photo credit: m. dujakovic........................................................................... figure . the pope and the emperor, la danse macabre, meslay-le-grenet (eure- et-loire), fresco, c. . photo credit: m. dujakovic................................................ figure . the peasant and the infant, la danse macabre, meslay-le-grenet (eure- et-loire), fresco, c. . photo credit: m. dujakovic................................................ figure . the king, the patriarch, la danse macabre,meslay-le-grenet (eure-et- loire), fresco, c. . photo credit: m. dujakovic. ................................................... figure . the burgher, the curate and the doctor, la danse macabre,meslay-le- grenet (eure-et-loire), fresco, c. . photo credit: m. dujakovic. ........................ figure . the three dead, la danse macabre, meslay-le-grenet (eure-et-loire), fresco, c. . photo credit: m. dujakovic. .............................................................. figure . the three living, la danse macabre, meslay-le-grenet (eure-et-loire), fresco, c. . photo credit: m. dujakovic. .............................................................. figure . the cardinal and the king, la danse macabre nouvelle, illustrated book, printed by guy marchant, paris, , bibliothèque nationale de france, rés. ye. .............................................................................................................................. figure . four dead musicians, la grant danse macabre des hommes y des femmes, illustrated book, printed by nicolas le rouge, troyes, , bibliothèque nationale de france, rés.-v- .............................................................................. figure . the printers and the bookseller, la grãt danse macabre des homes y des femes, illustrated book, printed by mathias husz, lyons, / , the british library board, ib. ............................................................................................ figure . the king, la danse macabre, illuminated manuscript, c. , bibliothèque nationale, ms. fr. , folio ................................................................ figure . la danse macabre, la ferté-loupière, yonne (burgundy), fresco, c. . photo credit: m. dujakovic .............................................................................. figure . horae beatae virgini mariae, printed book of hours with the danse macabe marginal decoration in the office of the dead section of the book, published by simon vostre, c. , bibliothèque nationale de france, arsenal, -t- ..... vii figure . the legate and the duke, la grãt danse macabre des homes y des femes, illustrated book, printed by mathias husz, lyons, / , the british library board, ib. ............................................................................................ figure . the carthusian and the sergeant, la grãt danse macabre des homes y des femes, illustrated book, printed by mathias husz, lyons, / , the british library board, ib. ............................................................................................ figure . the nun, les simulachres et historiees faces de la mort, designed by hans holbein, lyons, , bibliothèque nationale de france, rés.-z- ........ figure . the merchant, les simulachres et historiees faces de la mort, designed by hans holbein, lyons, , bibliothèque nationale de france, rés.-z- ... figure . the author, la danse macabre, illustrated book, printed by guy marchant, paris, between september and june , bibliothèque nationale de france, rés.-ye- .............................................................................................. figure . the author with the dead king, illustrated book, printed by guy marchant, paris, between september and june , bibliothèque nationale de france, rés.-ye- ................................................................................................................. figure . anonymous, the cemetery and the church of the holy innocents, c. , oil on wood, musée carnavalet, paris ............................................................ figure . the abbot and the bailiff, la danse macabre, printed by gillet coteau and jean menard for antoine vérard, paris, , printed on vellum and hand painted, lambeth palace library, ms ................................................................ figure . the author, the pope and the emperor, the monk and the usurer, the doctor and the lover, la danse macabre, printed by pierre le rouge for antoine vérard, paris, - , originally printed as a placard and hand painted, bibliothèque nationale de france, rés.-te- ........................................................... figure . the archbishop and the knight, the bishop and the squire, the franciscan and the infant, the cleric and the hermit, la danse macabre, printed by pierre le rouge for antoine vérard, paris, - , originally printed as a placard and hand painted, bibliothèque nationale de france, rés.-te- ............................ figure . the three living, la danse macabre nouvelle, illustrated book, printed by guy marchant, paris, , bibliothèque nationale de france, rés. ye. ........ figure . the three dead, la danse macabre nouvelle, illustrated book, printed by guy marchant, paris, , bibliothèque nationale de france, rés. ye. ........ figure . the three living and the three dead, la danse macabre, la ferté- loupière, yonne (burgundy), fresco, c. . photo credit: m. dujakovic .............. viii figure . the pope and the emperor, la danse macabre, illustrated book, printed by guy marchant, paris, between september and june , bibliothèque nationale de france, rés.-ye- .............................................................................. figure . la danse macabre, la chaise-dieu, auvergne, c. . photo credit: alexander hoernikg ................................................................................................... figure . the archbishop and the knight, la danse macabre nouvelle, illustrated book, printed by guy marchant, paris, , bibliothèque nationale de france, rés. ye. ....................................................................................................................... figure . the bishop and the squire, la danse macabre nouvelle, illustrated book, printed by guy marchant, paris, , bibliothèque nationale de france, rés. ye. .............................................................................................................................. figure . guy marchant’s printer’s device showing saints crispin and crispinian and his motto sola fides suffict. detail from the title page of le compost et kalendrier des bergiers, printed by guy marchant, paris, , bibliothèque nationale de france, rés. m. v. .. ....................................................................... figure . guy marchant’s printer’s device showing the figure of prestre jehan. detail from the title page of le compost et kalendrier des bergeres, printed by guy marchant for jean petit, paris, , bibliothèque nationale de france, rés.-v- ............................................................................................................................ figure . death, the infant and the mother and death, the peasant and the sower,le mors de la põme, jean miélot, c. , bibliothèque nationale de france, ms. fr. .............................................................................................................. figure . the legate and the duke, la danse macabre nouvelle, illustrated book, printed by guy marchant, paris, , bibliothèque nationale, rés. ye. ........ figure . the halberdier and the fool, la danse macabre nouvelle, illustrated book, printed by guy marchant, paris, , bibliothèque nationale de france, rés. ye. ....................................................................................................................... figure . pains of hell, showing the gluttons, detail. le compost et kalendrier des bergiers, woodcuts designed by pierre le rouge, edition printed by guy marchant, paris, . bibliothèque nationale de france, rés. m. v. ................................ figure . pains of hell, showing the covetous men and women, detail. le compost et kalendrier des bergiers, woodcuts designed by pierre le rouge, edition printed by guy marchant, paris, , bibliothèque nationale de france, rés. m. v. . ...... figure . mouth of hell and death on a horse, la danse macabre des femmes, illustrated book, printed by guy marchant, paris, , bibliothèque nationale de france, rés.ye. .................................................................................................... ix figure . zodiac skeleton, le compost et kalendrier des bergiers, printed by guy marchant, paris, , bibliothèque nationale, rés. m. v. ................................. figure . la danse macabre, la ferté-loupière, yonne (burgundy), fresco, c. , detail. photo credit: m. dujakovic.................................................................... figure . the peasant, the franciscan and the infant, la danse macabre, la ferté- loupière, yonne (burgundy), fresco, c. . photo credit: m. dujakovic .............. figure . the hypocrite and the female-fool, la danse macabre des femmes, illustrated book, printed by guy marchant, paris, , bibliothèque nationale, rés.ye. ................................................................................................................. figure . the merchant w oman and the bailiff’s wife, la danse macabre des femmes, illustrated book, printed by guy marchant, paris, , bibliothèque nationale de france, rés.ye. ............................................................................... figure . the bourgeois w oman and the w idow, la danse macabre des femmes, illustrated book, printed by guy marchant, paris, , bibliothèque nationale, rés.ye. ................................................................................................................. figure . the regent and the knight’s lady, la danse macabre des femmes, illustrated book, printed by guy marchant, paris, , bibliothèque nationale de france, rés.ye. .................................................................................................... figure . the priestess and the lady, la danse macabre des femmes, illustrated book, printed by guy marchant, paris, , bibliothèque nationale, rés.ye. . figure . the saleswoman and the prostitute, la danse macabre des femmes, illustrated book, printed by guy marchant, paris, , bibliothèque nationale de france, rés.ye. .................................................................................................... figure . master e. s. a couple embracing, engraving, c. - ................. figure . the queen and the duchess, la danse macabre des femmes, illustrated book, printed by guy marchant, paris, , bibliothèque nationale de france, rés.ye. ................................................................................................................. figure . the debate between the body and the soul, la danse macabre des femmes, illustrated book, printed by guy marchant, paris, , bibliothèque nationale de france, rés.ye. ............................................................................... figure . the debate between the body and the soul, la danse macabre des femmes, illustrated book, printed by guy marchant, paris, , bibliothèque nationale, rés.ye. ................................................................................................ x figure . the complaint of the damned soul, the debate between the body and the soul, la danse macabre des femmes, illustrated book, printed by guy marchant, paris, , bibliothèque nationale de france, rés.ye. ....................................... figure . death, the theologian and the fool, le mors de la põme, jean miélot, c. , bibliothèque nationale de france, ms. fr. ............................................ figure . the ship of eve, jehan drouyn, la nef des folles, paris, c. , bibliothèque nationale de france, rés. m-yc- .................................................. figure . the cleric and the hermit, la danse macabre nouvelle, illustrated book, printed by guy marchant, paris, , bibliothèque nationale de france, rés. ye. .............................................................................................................................. figure . the pope and the emperor, la danse macabre, printed by gillet coteau and jean menard for antoine vérard, paris, , printed on vellum and hand painted, lambeth palace library, ms ................................................................ figure . the carthusian and the sergeant, la danse macabre, printed by gillet coteau and jean menard for antoine vérard, paris, , printed on vellum and hand painted, bibliothéque nationale de france, vélins ................................... figure . the archbishop and the knight, la danse macabre, printed by gillet coteau and jean menard for antoine vérard, paris, , printed on vellum and hand painted, bibliothéque nationale de france, vélins ................................... figure . the astrologer and the bourgeois, la danse macabre, printed by gillet coteau and jean menard for antoine vérard, paris, , printed on vellum and hand painted, bibliothéque nationale de france, vélins ................................... figure . the three dead, la danse macabre, printed by gillet coteau and jean menard for antoine vérard, paris, , printed on vellum and hand painted, lambeth palace library, ms .............................................................................. figure . the three living, la danse macabre, printed by gillet coteau and jean menard for antoine vérard, paris, , printed on vellum and hand painted, lambeth palace library, ms .............................................................................. figure . title page, la grãt danse macabre des homes y des femes, illustrated book, printed by mathias husz, lyons, / , the british library board, ib. ......................................................................................................................... figure . cry de mort, la grãt danse macabre des homes y des femes, illustrated book, printed by mathias husz, lyons, / , the british library board, ib. ......................................................................................................................... figure . la grãt danse macabre des homes y des femes, illustrated book, printed by mathias husz, lyons, / , the british library board, ib. ............ xi figure . exortation de bien vivre y de bien mourir, la grãt danse macabre des homes y des femes, illustrated book, printed by mathias husz, lyons, / , the british library board, ib. ......................................................................... figure . title page, la grant danse macabre des hommes y des femmes, illustrated book, printed by nicolas le rouge, troyes, , bibliothèque nationale de france, rés.-v- .............................................................................................. figure . the patriarch and the constable, la grant danse macabre des hommes y des femmes, illustrated book, printed by nicolas le rouge, troyes, , bibliothèque nationale de france, rés.-v- ......................................................... figure . the ship of the w orld, la grant kalendrier, printed by nicolas le rouge, troyes, , bibliothèque nationale de france, rés.-v- ................................. figure . pains of hell, la grant kalendrier, printed by nicolas le rouge, troyes, , bibliothèque nationale de france, rés.-v- ............................................... figure . . pains of hell, la grant kalendrier, printed by nicolas le rouge, troyes, , bibliothèque nationale de france, rés.-v- , detail showing the reader’s marks ........................................................................................................... figure . cry de mort, la grant danse macabre des hommes y des femmes, illustrated book, printed by nicolas le rouge, troyes, , bibliothèque nationale de france, rés.-v- .............................................................................................. figure . the pope, la danse macabre, unknown printer, geneva, , bibliothèque nationale de france, rés.-ye- ....................................................... figure . the monk, la danse macabre, unknown printer, geneva, , bibliothèque nationale de france, rés.-ye- ....................................................... figure . the author with the dead king, la danse macabre, unknown printer, geneva, , bibliothèque nationale de france, rés.-ye- ............................. figure . the author with the dead king, la danse macabre, unknown printer, geneva, , bibliothèque nationale de france, rés.-ye- , detail showing the reader’s writing ........................................................................................................... figure . the compositor and the printers, la grand danse macabre des homes y des femes, illustrated book, printed by pierre de sainte lucie, lyons, , the british library board, c. .h. ................................................................................ xii acknowledgments this dissertation was completed with the help and support from many individuals and institutions. i would like to thank my supervisor, dr. carol knicely, who first introduced me to macabre art in one of her brilliant graduate seminars, for her constant guidance, advice and support during the writing of this thesis. i also wish to thank members of my supervisory committeee, dr. bronwen wilson for her invaluable comments and suggestions, especially in the final stages of completing my text, and dr. maureen ryan for her enthusiasm for my project over the years. this thesis could not have been written without the financial support from the social sciences and research council of canada, which allowed me to pursue my studies and made it possible to take several extended trips to france and england. a travel grant from the department of art history, visual art and theory at the university of british columbia helped fund my trip to lyon to partake in a course on the study of incunabula at the institute for the history of the book. while in france, my research benefited from the guidance and advice offered by professor jêrome baschet, whom i thank. i would also like to express my gratitude to the faculty, staff and students at the department of art history, visual art and theory for their friendship and support. i especially want to thank dr. serge guilbaut who offered helpful suggestions and guidance during the different stages or my research and writing. i also thank my colleagues and fellow students for their years of friendship, support and inspiration: jasmina karabeg, krystel chehab, ivana vranic, ivana horacek, joan boychuk and lisa andersen. lastly, i would like to thank my family and friends both in vancouver and abroad for their love, encouragement and patience. i am grateful to my parents for their support and understanding and to my sisters, bojana and marija, for always being there for me. i thank ivana franovic and vanja petrovic for their friendship and encouragement and stephanie quintin for her help during my travels in france. this thesis would not be possible without kokan and luka whose love and understanding gave me the strength to finish it. chapter one introduction context and issues dressed in a traditional garb of a medieval scholar and seated in an elaborate chair in front of an open book, the figure of the author (l’acteur) gazes at the viewer while pointing to the procession arranged on a wall in a painting (fig. ). appearing twice in the image, at the beginning and at the end of the procession, the author does not actually participate in the dance, but rather functions as a mediator between the beholder and the picture and calls attention to the moral of the image. a line up of figures stretches before the author – an uncanny sight of corpses and men – arranged according to their station in lay and clerical hierarchy, beginning with the pope and the emperor and ending with the infant and the monk (figs. and ). although the figures are located outdoors – the ground is covered in fresh green grass – the space they occupy appears claustrophobic because the bodies of the living and the dead are pressed too close to one another, their arms and legs overlapping. the dead are portrayed naked save for the loincloth that partially covers their emaciated, decomposing bodies. some carry objects associated with death and dying – coffins, spears and scythes – while others are busy holding on to the living figures and urging them to move in the direction of the procession. unlike the dead, the living are fully clothed in the costumes that denote their status and profession and many hold accouterments that further signal their occupation in life. the bearded emperor holds an orb, the king carries a scepter, the clerics are holding on to their crosses, each carefully demarcating their position within the in the literature, this figure is refered to either as the author or the authority. he delivers the prologue and the epilogue of the danse macabre, both of which are directed at the viewer. church, while the doctor examines a urine flask (figs. and ). yet, ironically, their social postion and material possessions are no longer of any importance, for the figures are being forced into the dance that leads to death and the dissolution of worldy goods. in the register below the fresco are verses in french, a cheeky dialogue between each living figure and the cadaver next to him, that are meant to further liven up the image. the verses allude to the fact that the painting portrays a dancing procession, though ironically it is only the dead that are demonstrating any kind of movement. lifting their bony knees up in the air, hopping and twisting, the cadavers are dancing an erratic, wild dance, while the living figures with their stiff bodies and shocked expressions appear immobile. this image is the danse macabre, or the dance of death, one of the most popular visual genres of the late middle ages in northwestern europe (henceforth danse). derived from the religious discourse of the contemptus mundi (“contempt of the world”) tradition and similar didactic literature, the danse is meant to signify the transience of earthly lif e and material possessions while also emphasizing the equalizing power of death. the painting just described is found in a small, twelfth-century church dedicated to saints oriens and blaise in the community of meslay-le-grenet, located about fifteen kilometers from the town of chartres in the eure-et-loire region in france. sometime in the late fifteenth century the church began a program of redecoration at which point several frescoes were painted in the nave, including the image of the danse. the fresco stretches over the lower part of the south and west walls of the nave, right above the rows of pews where the congregation gathers. above the image on the south wall is a depiction of another popular macabre theme, the legend of the three living and the three dead (henceforth the three living) (figs. and ). in the legend the three princely hunters encounter a ghastly sight of the three decomposing cadavers in the forest who warn them to mend their ways and think of the consequences of sinful living. like the danse, the three living is according to elina gertsman, pews were being introduced in christian churches by the fifteenth century and it is possible that they were already there before the fresco was made. see elina gertsman, the dance of death in the middle ages: image, text, performance (turnhout: brepols, ) . also typically accompanied by verses that capture the didactic and often humorous dialogue between the hunters and the dead, yet in the legend the living figures do not actually die and are merely warned. by the time the meslay danse was painted, the theme was already popular in france and there were several mural examples including: the cemetery of the holy innocents in paris ( - ), kernascleden, brittany ( - ), la chaise dieu, auvergne (c. ) and kermaria, brittany (c. ). the mural from the innocents in paris, painted on the interior cloister wall of the cemetery, was particularly influential and well known, generally credited as the first visual depiction of the theme, not just in france but also elsewhere in europe. however, despite the existing murals, the fresco at meslay-le-grenet was not directly modeled after any of the known painted examples. instead, an illustrated book containing woodcuts and verses of the danse – probably an edition published by the famous parisian publisher antoine vérard – was used as the model for the fresco. as i will show, this is because by the late fifteenth century the subject mater was taken up by the medium of illustrated book and the printed image of the danse became the locus for the diffusion of the theme in other media. the process through which the danse macabre illustrated books assumed such prominence and the implications this had on the late medieval theme are among the key issues addressed in the present study. in september of , the parisian printer guy marchant published the first known edition of the danse. the book was printed in folio format and illustrated with fifteen woodcuts that portrayed thirty male characters – two pairs per page – with the accompanying verses (fig. ). marchant modeled the woodcuts after the mural at there is some disagreement with regards to the source for the meslay fresco in scholarly literature. gertsman believes that woodcuts published by parisian printer guy marchant were used as models for the image, while marie-dominique leclerc credits vérard’s edition as the most likely source. see gertsman, - and marie- dominque leclerc, “les fresques”, danser avec le mort: les danses macabres dans les manuscrits et les livres imprimés du xve au xxe siècle, eds. marie-dominique leclerc, danielle ouéruel and alain robert (lyon: musée de l’imprimerie, ) - , . based on the striking visual similarity between vérard’s images and danse from meslay-le-grenet, i would agree with leclerc’s claim. for an electonic facsimile of the first edition see the website of the bibliothèque municipale in grenoble where the only copy of the first edition is preserved ( the cemetery of the innocents, though it is difficult to ascertain how closely the printed images actually resembled the fresco since the painting was destroyed in the seventeenth century during the reconstruction of the neighboring street. shortly after he published the first and the second editions, marchant began the work on an augmented version, which he published in june of under the title la danse macabre nouvelle. the book contained ten new living figures, five addional wooducts, as well as an original image and verses of the four dead musicians inserted at the beginning of the danse, after the figure of the author (figure ). each playing a specific instrument, the musicians visually add a reference to music in the danse, even though, judging by the mismathched choice of musical contraptions, the tune they are producing is likely not particularly harmonious. at this time, marchant also added the poem of the three living, illustrated with two facing woodcuts, which he placed after the danse. marchant’s illustrated editions must have sold well because just a month later, in july of , he published an edition of the danse macabre des femmes – an original work that focused solely on female protagonists and included, in addition to the three living, two more illustrated poems concerned with the subject of death and sin, namely le debat dun corps et dune ame (the debate between the body and the soul) and la compliante de lame dampnee (the complaint of the damned soul) (henceforth the debat and the complainte). marchant’s editions of the danse were among the earliest illustrated books published in paris. the success of his editions prompted other printers and http://pagella.bm-grenoble.fr/img- viewer/i/i /viewer.html?base=bmg&np=i _ .jpg&ns=i _ .jpg the second edition, virtually identical to the first, must have been published after september , and before june , , when the augmented edition was published. the sole copy of the second edition is preserved as the bibliothèque nationale in paris as rés.-ye- (henceforth bn). the new figures added to the danse represent a combination of established medieval social roles such as the pilgrim, the schoolmaster or the duke as well as individuals representing types or professions that became more prominent in the latter part of the fifttenh century like the halberdier and the fool. for an electronic facsimile of this edition see la danse macabre de guy marchant, ed. pierre champion (paris: editions des quatre chemins, ). publishers to produce their versions of the danse, which often diverged significantly from the model established by marchant. between and c. at least nineteen editions of the work were published and the title continued to be printed, though more sporadically, over the course of the sixteenth century by printers working in paris, lyons, troyes and geneva, reflecting the widespread popularity of the books at the turn of the century. the printers who published editions of the danse are some of the most famous individuals in the history of early printing in france and include, besides marchant and vérard, mathias husz, nicole de la barre, gillet couteau, jean menard, pierre le rouge, jean belot and others. in the early years of printing in france, publishing any edition – especially an illustrated one – was a risky and expensive endeavor. for this reason, printers were often forced to collaborate with different presses and with publishers and booksellers in order to secure funds and market their works. the late fifteenth century was also the period of transition in the world of bookmaking – the scribal culture was still in existence and the new printing culture was just emerging and beginning to establish itself – which meant that printers and publishers of illustrated works frequently entered into partnerships with illuminators who helped to design the woodcuts they were using. books produced through such collaborative practices, including editions of the danse, are unique objects that reflect the transitional nature of the period and are marked by continual processes of experimentation in terms of their content, format and medium. however, despite their popularity and range there is of yet no comprehensive study of the danse macabre books. scholars concerned with the history of early printing in france discuss the series in general, as examples of popular illustrated works in vernacular, but pay little attention to the adaptation of the famous medieval theme of the danse in the medium of illustrated book. conversely, studies on macabre art reference the printed books – especially marchant’s first edition that see, for example, lucian febvre and henri-jean martin, the coming of the book: the impact of printing - , trans. david gerard, ed. geoffrey nowell-smith and david w ootton (london: nlb, ) and histoire de l’édition française, tome i, le livre conquérant: du moyen age au milieu du xviie siècle, eds. henri-jean martin, roger chartier and jean-pierre vivet (paris: promodis, ). was based on the fresco from the innocents – but treat them mainly as replicas of the original mural and repeatedly deny them the status of distinctive works of art. authors that do discuss representations of the danse in illustrated books rarely study them in relation to the history of early printing in france or acknowledge the printing practices of the individual printer or publisher. although studies of the danse published by leonard kürtz, joel seigneux or helene and bertrand utzinger do include lists of printed editions, they are typically not discussed in much detail even though they range considerably. especially absent from most studies on macabre art is a question of where the books fit in relation to the larger artistic practices of the late fifteenth-century france, despite the fact that this was the period marked not only by the transition from scribal to printing culture, but also by an unprecedented artistic exchange across multiple media, including illustrated books. contrary to how the danse macabre books were studied in the past, my dissertation considers the series primarily in relation to the history of early printing in france. although marchant’s edition was based on the mural from the innocents, i argue that subsequent editions did not merely replicate the theme, but actually adapted and reframed it and should thus be understood as innovative works. printers such as marchant and husz augmented the work by adding new figures, new verses and additional illustrated texts, hence encasing the danse in a framework that diverges significantly from the original fresco model. furthermore, marchant’s editions of the danse macabre des femmes are particularly innovative see james midgley clark, the dance of death in the middle ages and renaissance (glasgow: jackson, ); jöel saugnieux, les danses macabres de france et d’espagne et leurs prolongements littéraires (lyon: e. vitte, ); gertsman, the dance of death and ashby kinch, imago mortis: mediating images of death in late medieval culture (leiden: brill, ). see jane h. m. taylor, “un miroer salutaire,” dies illa: death in the middle ages, ed. jane h. m. taylor (liverpool: francis cairns, ) - and david a. fein, “guyot marchant’s danse macabre: the relationship between image and text.” mirator ( ): - . saugnieux, les danses macabres de france; leonard paul kürtz, the dance of death and the macabre spirit in european literature (new york: columbia up, ); and and hélène and bertrand utzinger, itinéraires des danses macabres (chartres: garnier, ). because, even though the verses originated in scribal culture, the woodcuts are not based on a previous pictorial model and there were no women included in the mural from the innocents. for these reasons, the women’s series bears little in common with the mural precedent, beyond thematic and compositional similarities. my dissertation emphasizes the crucial role the printers and publishers had in editing the work and reinventing the theme. in the past, the scholarship on macabre art rarely awarded the printers much agency – apart from marchant and occasionally vérard, few printers of the danse books are even identified – and their work is typically described as repetitive rather than innovative. by focusing on the printing practices of individual printers who produced the books and analyzing specific editions in detail, my study demonstrates that the editorial input of early printers was central in shaping the danse in the medium of illustrated book. the choice of medium (paper or parchment), content and format in which editions were published all had a bearing on how the theme was presented to the viewer. the printers, i argue, made use of the ambiguous nature of the dance of death theme, which though religious and didactic in origin could also be understood in less devout terms, and published editions that vary greatly. some books were intended to serve as self - help guides that aided the believer in their quest for salvation, while others celebrated the aesthetic quality of the illustrations and the lure of the visual. printers like marchant did not steer away from underlining their role as the mediators between the book and its reader: his colophons identified the ideal audience (“men and women who desire salvation”) and helped to define the principal purpose of the editions. in the early years of printing, novelty was especially favored by the reading publics and printers frequently marketed their books as augmented, newly translated or revised in hopes of gaining wider readership. editions of the danse convey this concern in their titles (la danse macabre nouvelle, la grãt danse macabre and the miroir salutaire) and in their colophons and title-pages that often allude to ways in which printers had expanded the editions. as i argue, woodcuts and verses of the danse were published together with additional texts and images and the books were conceived as a single cohesive unit from the beginning, a fact rarely acknowledged in earlier studies on macabre art. unlike medieval compendia or miscellany in which disparate texts and images were put together by a compiler, often times haphazardly, illustrated editions like the danse should be understood as compilations or anthologies that reveal a conscious effort on the part of the editor to supply the narrative for the work and in turn inform the viewer’s experience of it. not only do the added texts stem from similar didactic literature, further implying a deliberate effort on the part of the editor to create a cohesive volume, but it is also clear from the more ‘complete’ editions, published in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth century, which begin with the danse and end with the last judgment, that a number of printers were interested in structuring the theme in specific religious contexts. just as the mural examples have recently been studied by elina gertsman in relation to their architectural settings and general pictorial programs of the churches in which they were painted – a methodology that has proven fruitful and which has emphasized the specificity and uniqueness of each fresco – my study reveals the importance of addressing all aspects of the book in order to understand how the danse functioned in the new medium. discussing the illustrated books in relation to publishing strategies of their makers also helps to underscore to what extent the editions were shaped by the emerging printing industry in france. as mentioned earlier, the entrepreneurial aspect of the industry in which presses appeared and disappeared frequently and the success of the business depended on the printer’s ability to recognize the trends in the market, forced the printers into collaborations and partnerships with publishers, scribal workshops and other presses. financing an illustrated editon was particularly challenging since the printer needed to obtain the typographical material it is not often that the other illustrated poems are analyzed in any detail, see for instance, taylor, “un miroer salutaire” and sophie oosterwijk, “dance, dialogue and duality in the medieval danse macabre,” mixed metaphors: the danse macabre in medieval and early modern europe, eds. sophie oosterwijk and stephanie knöll (newcastle upon tyne: cambridge scholar publishing, ) - . see jane h. m. taylor, “a priest of poetry to the people: antoine vérard and the anthology”, the making of poetry: late-medieval french poetic anthologies, jane h. m. taylor (turnhout, belgium: brepols, ) - . and hire an artist to design the images. to make most use of each illustrated volume, printers often issued editions of the same title that catered to different clientele. for example, in marchant entered into partnership with bookseller geoffroy de marnef and printed a latin edition of the danse, which was intended specifically for the customers of de marnef’s shops. likewise, marchant’s editions of the danse macabre des femmes were prompted by the success of the men’s versions and the two works were intended to function as complementary units, thus expanding the impact of the theme. at the same time, his interest in producing a series with female protagonists also reflects the growing trend in the late fifteenth- century printing in france that showed predilection towards books with women protagonists, such as the shepherdesses’ calendar or the ship of female-fools. although the illustrated versions of the danse developed out the earlier fresco example, one of the central features of the printed editions is the way the printers were continually updating the series. even marchant’s first edition – which probably closely replicated the mural from the innocents painted in the s – portrayed the living figures dressed in costumes that reflect the fashion of the s, with round toe shoes, wider crowned hats and calf-length gowns. the edition of the women’s danse, which was illustrated with only two woodcuts, presented the figures of the queen and the duchess in fashionable dresses with cuffed sleeves. yet, by , when marchant issued a full set of woodcuts, the ladies were clothed in wide sleeve gowns modeled to the body that were in vogue in the last decade of the century. such concern with revising the books and making them more relevant to their turn of the century audience was not, of course, limited solely to sartorial matters. sandra l. hindman, “the career of guy marchant ( – ): high culture and low culture in paris,” printing the written word: the social history of books, circa - , ed. sandra l. hindman (ithaca and london: cornell up, ) - , . see, for instance, yona pinson, the fool’s journey: a myth of obsession in northern renaissance art (turnhout: brepols, ). anne h. van buren, illuminating fashion: dress in the art of medieval france and the netherlands, - (new york: the morgan library and museum, ) . ibid. . one of marchant’s main updates in the edition of the men’s danse concerns the insertion of the fool (le sot) at the end of the procession – a decision that was followed in by the inclusion of the female-fool (la sotte) in the roster of figures that made up the danse macabre des femmes. even though marchant was not the first to incorporate the figure of the fool into the danse – a fresco from basel painted c. set the precedent – i argue that the printer’s intention in bringing such characters into his illustrated editions responds to the changing discourse around the theme of folly at the end of the fifteenth century, which culminated in the publication of sebastian brant’s famous treatise das narrenschiff (the ship of fools) in , one of the most frequently printed books of the period. similarly, mathias husz’s edition of the danse, published in lyons in , featured paragraphs taken from an apocalyptic text known as the antechrist that was particularly popular and oft-published throughout europe right at the turn of the century and which expressed the growing anxiety over the belief that the end of time was fast approaching. here again we see the careful editorial strategy of the early printer who chooses from a selection of popular yet relevant treatises in order to expand and update an edition of the danse, in this case by including appropriate eschatological verses that imbue the theme with serious religious context. husz’s edition is also noted, as i will elaborate shortly, for the inclusion of a unique woodcut, inserted in the middle of the men’s danse, that depicts death visiting the printing w orkshop and the bookstore, which introduced the audience to the new technology of printing while at the same time functioning as a sly of advertisement for husz’s own workshop in lyons (fig. ). one of the most common practices of early printers was the reuse of the same woodcuts for different texts. prompted largely by the high cost of designing and publishing an illustrated edition, printers frequently resorted to recycling the same images several times over. however, save for the figure of the author that opens the danse, which was used in multiple editions of the period issued by for examples of this practice see a heavenly craft: the woodcut in the early printed books: illustrated books purchased by lessing j. rosenwald at the sale of the library of c. w. dyson perrins, ed. daniel de simone (new york: george braziller and w ashington: library of congress, ). different presses, this strategy was not possible with other woodcuts in the series because they were designed in close correlation with the accompanying verses and thus not easily adaptable. given their limited usage, the fact that the danse books were published at all and with such frequency at the turn of the century suggests that the printers who published them did so knowing that they would profit because the books were popular. yet despite their limitations, marchant managed to incorporate woodcuts from the series and even a whole set of the danse macabre des femmes illustrations in his other publications, most notably the shepherd’s calendar and the shepherdesses’ calendar, as will be discussed in the third chapter. best described as precursors of modern almanacs, these books were concerned with larger themes including astrology, astronomy and medicine and the presence of the printed image of the danse in such works suggests that theme circulated more widely than usually assumed. the danse macabre illustrated books emerged during the important moment of transition from medieval to renaissance art in france, at the time when artists working in different media favored collaborations and artistic exchange. the collaborative practices were particularly popular in the world of bookmaking because the end of the fifteenth century was also marked by the appearance of the printing culture and the slow but steady replacement of the earlier scribal traditions, as i will dicuss in the third chapter. publishers and printing workshops frequently collaborated with scribes and illuminators, especially in paris, which had a long tradition of manuscript production and was the home of some of the most renowned scribal workshops in europe. very often the same artists illuminated pages of on woodcuts of the author from the danse see cynthia j. brown, “text, image and authorial self-consciousness in late medieval paris”, printing the written word: the social history of books, circa - , ed. sandra l. hindman (ithaca,new york: conrell up, ) - ; and cynthia j. brown, poets, patrons and printers: crisis of authority in late medieval france (ithaca, new york: cornell up, ). the transition from script to print was a long and complicated process. on this issue see julia boffey, manuscript and print in london: c. - (london: the british library, ); brian richardson, manuscript culture in renaissance italy (cambridge: cambridge up, ) and david mckitterick, print, manuscript and the search for order, - (cambridge: cambridge up, ). manuscripts and designed illustrations in printed books. for example, the illuminator known as the master of jacques besançon entered into partn ership with vérard and hand painted many of his printed editions, including a copy of the danse produced for the royal library of king charles viii. likewise, printers and publishers such philippe pigouchet and simon vostre, who specialized in the production of printed books of hours, worked closely with scribal workshops and used the same design for their illustrations as are found in the illuminated manuscripts made in the period. at the same time, it is important to emphasize that the process of exchange between scribal and printing workshops was not simply one directional. w hile printers and publishers borrowed heavily from scribal tradition, the advent of printmaking was also beneficial for illuminators as it provided new opportunities for their work and awarded them even more prominence. the illustrated books were not only modeled after scribal examples, but also occasionally served as prototypes for manuscript copies. this was the case with the famous danse macabre manuscript (bibliothèque nationale, ms. fr. ) produced at the end of the fifteenth century and intended for a royal patron, possibly anne of brittany or margaret of austria, which was entirely based on the editions of illustrated books published by marchant and vérard (henceforth bn) (fig. ). the reuse of models in late medieval art is, of course, not a novelty. throughout the period, artists supplied models for tapestries, embroideries, stained- glass windows and in some cases, even sculpture. however, what is unique about the artistic practices of the late fifteenth century france is that the diffusion of elisabeth taburet-delahaye and séverine lepape, “the diffusion of the w ork of art”, kings, queens and courtiers: art in early renaissance france, ed. martha w olff (new heaven and london: yale up and the art institute of chicago, ) - , . on the exchange of images in printed books of hours and illuminated manuscripts of the period see isabelle delaunay, “echanges artistiques entre livres d’heures manuscrits et imprimés produit à paris,” diss., u of lille iii, . taburet-delahaye and lepape . sandra l. hindman, “the illustrations,” the danse macabre of women, ms. fr. of the bibliothèque nationale, ed. ann tukey harrison (kent, ohio and london, england: the kent state up, ) - , . taburet-delahaye and lepape . models in different media took on an unprecedented scope. the dispersal was in part because the public taste at the time veered towards replicated models rather than original works of art and because the advent of printing made the book into a locus for a dispersal of designs and ideas. the process through which the graphic arts assumed a dominant position in the art of the period has only recently been studied in more detail and scholars are constantly pointing out new similarities among the works produced in diverse media, from stained-glass windows and polychrome enamels to tapestries and illuminated manuscripts. in the context of the danse books that are, ironically, often dismissed by scholars of macabre art as mere copies of the mural – a notion that may not have been seen as a disadvantage by their contemporary audience – the diffusion can be traced in several examples. besides the illuminated manuscript discussed above, the books were also used as models for the murals at meslay-le-grenet and at la ferté-loupière in yonne, burgundy, which was painted in the early sixteenth century (fig. ). w oodcuts of the danse were reused in printed books of hours – a bestseller of the period – in editions published by pigouchet and vostre and later thielman kerver, where they served as border imagery surrounding the prayers and miniatures in the office of the dead (fig. ). in these books the illustrations of the danse were radically reduced in size, the verses were used sporadically and almost always partially and the hierarchical order of figures that was so crucial in the earlier versions of the theme was not always followed. in the printed books of hours, the danse was given an emblematic and ornamental role – its purpose was not narrative, but symbolic. such images aided the believers in recalling the figure of death, but not necessarily dwell on didactic or humorous elements of the danse that marked more traditional renditions of the theme. nevertheless, the fact that the danse was featured in ibid. . ibid. . on this issue see especially w olff, ed. kings, queens and courtiers; ina nettekoven, der meister der apokalypsenrose der sainte chappelle und die pariser buchkunst um , ars nova (turnhout: brepols, ) and katherine eve baker, “painting and the luxury arts in paris, - : objects and their urban contexts,” diss., u of virginia, . numerous printed books of hours meant that the woodcuts were given an even higher prominence since the printed prayer books were so popular and sold widely not just in france but elsewhere in europe. in contrast to the previous attempts at analyzing the danse macabre printed books, which typically focused on one particular edition, my dissertation examines the series as a whole while also emphasizing their range and differences. although the dance of death was taken up as a theme in illustrated books published in germany, such as the totendanz (or der doten dantz) editions printed in heidelberg by heinrich knoblochtzer in - , des dodes dantz published in lübeck by hans ghetelen - or the editions printed in mainz by jacob meydenbach between - , i concentrate on the french examples because the subject was more prevalent in france and the french printers were more prone to experimenting with the theme. the books were especially popular and often published in the period between and c. s, hence the time frame of my dissertation. however, it is important to note that the books were still printed after the s, though much more sporadically and there were even editions of the danse that were published as part see virginia reinburg, french books of hours: making an archive of prayer, c. - (cambridge: cambridge up, ). only marchant’s first edition has been studied in detail, see j. j. champollion- figeac, notice d’une edition de la danse macabre, antéerieure à celle de et inconnue aux bibliographes (paris: de l’imprimerie de j.b. sajou, ); la danse macabre de reproduite l’exemplaire unique de la bibliothèque de grenoble et publiée sous l’egide de la société des bibliophiles dauphinois, ed. pierre vaillant (grenoble: editions de seigneurs, ); david a. fein’s two articles, “guyot marchant’s danse macabre, cited above in note , and “text and image mirror play in guyot marchant’s danse macabre” neophilologus . ( ): - . the article by jane h. m. taylor considers aspects of marchant’s edition of the women’s danse, though she does not discuss the book as a whole, see: jane h. m. taylor, “un miroer salutaire.” the totendanz books were also published in münich in the early sixteenth century by printer johann schobsser. for a digitalized facsimile of von ghetelen edition housed in nurnberg at the germanisches nationalmuseum see: http://dlib.gnm.de/item/ inc /html. von ghetelen’s editions have also recently been discussed in the following text: cordelia hess, social imagery in middle low german: didactical literature and metaphorical representation ( - ), studies in medieval and reformation tradition (leiden: brill, ). http://dlib.gnm.de/item/ inc /html of the bibliothèque bleue in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, reflecting the enduring appeal of the theme in france. by focusing on a specific series of illustrated books, especially the one that develops out of an established late medieval pictorial and literary tradition, my study is aligned with recent trends in the scholarship of early printed books. over the last ten years, there has been a growing interest in the question of translation and adaptation of popular medieval themes into the new medium of illustrated books. for instance, in jane h. m. taylor, a noted scholar of medieval french poetry who also wrote important articles on the danse macabre genre, published a study on the arthurian romance in the printed books of the french renaissance. although arthurian romance was one of the most popular literary genres in the middle ages, portrayed in countless illuminated manuscripts, the development of the theme in the sixteenth century and especially its adaptation into print have been largely ignored. by focusing on the printers and the publishers who produced the volumes, including vérard’s hand-painted presentation copies, taylor explores the differences in editions and the public fascination with the theme. likewise, r.l. schoff has studied the shift from manuscript to print of three important late medieval titles, the canterbury tales, the book of margery kempe and piers plowman, while an edited volume by anna lawrence-mathers and phillipa hardman considers the role of women writers in the transition from manuscript to printed books. the benefits of examining a specific series of illustrated books produced in the early years of printing are multiple. by considering books from the same series we can, for example, see how the new medium of illustrated book was changing over a period of time from marchant’s first edition that included only the woodcuts and verses and no publishing information to an edition printed in by nicholas le rouge that contained a fully developed title-page with an illustration, a table of jane h. m. taylor, rewriting arthurian romance in renaissance france: from manuscript to printed books (suffolk: boydell & brewer, ). r. l. schoff, reformations: three medieval authors in manuscript and movable type (turnhout, belgium: brepols: ) and anna lawrence-mathers and phillipa hardman, the women and writing, c. - : the domestication of print culture (suffolk: boydell & brewer, ). contents and the colophon stating the date and the place of publication. a closer look at the different editions in the series also reveals the extant to which the printers were modifying and adding to the genre. even though all editions i study belong to the danse macabre series, none of them are exactly the same and it is impossible to speak of a standardized version of the books. this is exactly how the books have been studied thus far in scholarship on macabre art, which continually treats different editions of the danse as one cohesive unit and dismisses or ignores the inherent differences in layout, content and medium across the extant copies, which is why it is useful to focus on specific editions. contrary to this approach, my dissertation emphasizes the materiality of the printed editions and considers how the form and medium affected the presentation of the theme. as david areford recently argued, early printed images are unique objects. early woodcuts are inherently hybrid – “printed multiples, yet also handcrafted originals designed to simulate other media like manuscript illumination, colored drawings and woven textiles through the use of colored pigments, metal leaf, and quartz crystals.” even though areford’s study discusses predominately free standing early printed images, his argument that “materiality reinforces [the] singularity” of early woodcuts is also applicable to the fifteenth century illustrated books. vérard’s vellum copies, for example, were designed to simulate illuminated manuscripts, while his edition from c. was printed on carton in a form of a placard intended to be displayed on a wall mimicking paintings or tapestries. such differences in format and medium, complicate the assumption that every edition merely replicates the other – or that the printed books are essentially inadequate copies of the mural from the innocents – and in turn suggest that each edition should be studied independently. studies of early printed images have long been shaped by w alter benjamin’s influential essay “the w ork of art in the age of mechanical reproduction,” first see david s. areford, the viewer and the printed image in late medieval europe (burlington: ashgate, ). ibid. . ibid. . published in germany in . in the essay, benjamin argues that the process of mechanical reproduction eliminated the “aura” or the authenticity from the work of art, which he believed is found in handmade objects. benjamin’s point of departure was the fifteenth century and the early woodcuts, which, because they were reproduced mechanically and distributed widely, could not be seen as unique or original. his assumptions about the “aura” of early woodcuts have been challenged frequently, most recently by areford whose study on the materiality of early woodcuts is in many ways positioned in opposition to the arguments outlined in benjamin’s text. the majority of recent scholarship on early printed images has veered towards the examination of their specificities and unique qualities – whether it is a discussion of the application and meaning of color, forms of display and circulation or a consideration of the audience and, especially, the viewer’s response towards and the handling of the printed works. ultimately, my dissertation addresses a lack in the studies on macabre art that tend to focus, almost exclusively, on monumental mural examples at the expense of the later printed volumes. w hile in the past, the translation of the genre from a large fresco painting located in the heart of medieval paris into a series of illustrated books has been seen as a form of regression, especially where representation of the theme is concerned, my study suggests that it is possible to consider the series in more productive terms. in particular, the printed image of the danse helped to diffuse the genre and place it in multiple and varied contexts, from w alter benjamin, “the w ork of art in the age of mechanical reproduction,” illuminations, ed. hannah arendt, trans. harry zohn (new york: random house, ) - . areford . for opposing views in relation to benjmain’s comments about the early printed image see also jeffery f. hamburger, “’in gebeden vnd in bilden geschriben’ prints as exemplars of piety and the culture of the copy in fifteen- century germany,” woodcut in fifteenth-century europe, ed. peter parshall, studies in the history of art (w ashington, dc: national gallery of art and yale up, ) - and christopher s. w ood, forgery, replica, fiction: temporalities of german renaissance art (chicago: chicago up, ). see for example, susan dackerman, painted prints: the revelation of color in northern renaissance and baroque engravings, etchings and woodcuts (baltimore: the baltimore museum of art and university park, pennsylvania: the pennsylvania state up, ). prayer books and illuminated manuscripts, to almanacs concerned with medical, astrological and religious lore. moreover, the process of exchange and collaboration between printers, publishers and artists working in different media foster ed the need for continual experimentation and adaptation of the danse, which resulted in new and original ways of interpreting the macabre. in particular, the illustrated books should be understood as forming a crucial link between the traditional mural examples and the later reiterations of the theme, particularly hans holbein’s printed series les simulachres et historiees faces de la mort (pictures of death) (henceforth the simulachres). first published in lyons by the brothers trechsel in , holbein’s series is generally regarded, even by scholars of macabre art, as the work that completely reinvented and eventually replaced the medieval image of the danse. however, i argue that even though holbein did not base his work on any particular edition of the danse, the medium of early illustrated books nevertheless allowed for the first conversions of the theme that eventually resulted in holbein’s radical revision. it is also primarily through the printed books that certain features of the danse seeped into other sixteenth century pictorial representations including anatomical illustrations and the german renaissance theme of death and the maiden. layout of chapters in february of , mathias husz printed an important edition of the danse in lyons. often credited with popularizing the genre of illustrated books, husz was one of the most prolific printers in france, known for publishing at least editions. the -leaves version of the danse published by husz contained both the men’s and women’s dances as well six additional illustrated texts concerned with themes of death, sin and judgment. tucked in the middle of the danse macabre of men section of husz’s volume is an unusual woodcut that was probably created specifically for this edition (fig. ). split into two scenes, the image portrays death visiting the printing workshop and the bookstore and taking away the printers and the bookseller. since these figures were not included in earlier versions of the danse macabre, either painted or printed, husz had to hire an artist to design the woodcut and a writer to compose the accompanying verses, which are featured below the image on the same folio. generally regarded as the earliest representation of the interior of a printing workshop, husz’s woodcut has been discussed in many studies on the history of early printing, yet it has received little attention from scholars of macabre art. because husz’s image is simultaneously about the process of printing and about the new way of picturing death, i use it in my dissertation as a platform through which the main points of each chapter are set up. the second chapter, “death in print: the danse macabre and the medium of illustrated books,” discusses the dance of death theme and the issues raised by the existing printed editions. in particular, i analyze the intricate setting of the danse fresco from the cemetery of the innocents and question the process of adaptation of this image into a series of illustrated books, which i suggest is more complex than previously assumed. the third chapter considers the danse in relation to the beginning of printing in france and discusses the collaborative processes and the willingness to experiment with the medium and the genre that marked guy marchant’s segue into the world of illustrated books. to some extent, marchant is the inventor of the series in the new medium, having printed the first edition and published the original danse macabre des femmes books, yet his career is in many ways quite unusual. as sandra hindman has shown, marchant’s career did not revolve around the production of illustrated texts – his business was centered on publishing religious and humanist tracts aimed at the teachers and students of the college of navarre, one of the schools that belong to the university of paris. despite this, however, marchant created two of the most successful illustrated series, the danse and the shepherd’s calendar. the latter was particularly well-regarded and often reprinted with editions being published throughout the course of the sixteenth century. part of hindman, “the career of guy marchant ” . marchant’s achievements with regards to the illustrated editions was prompted by his ability to interpret the trends in the market and publish titles accordingly, but he was also benefiting from partnership and exchange with other printers, publishers and booksellers. ultimately, the chapter highlights the fickle and transitional nature of the early printing industry and discusses the danse books in relation to other illustrated texts produced at the time. the fourth chapter, “la danse macabre nouvelle: w omen, fools and the agency of the printer,” discusses two of the most innovative ways the printers adapted the danse, namely the publication of the women’s series and the inclusion of the fool in the roster of figures. both new features were first introduced in the editions published by marchant and he assembled them from the literature of the period. as i outline in the chapter, the poem of the danse macabre des femmes (but not the images) was probably written in the early s and appeared in several manuscripts that predate marchant’s printed editions. likewise, the interest in combining the themes of death and folly surfaced in the scribal culture of the late fifteenth century and was also taken up in the popular prints in northern europe. in addition, french allegorical poems such as the dance aux aveugles (the dance of the blind), written c. and the mors de la pomme (the bite the apple) from c. s as well as poems written by françois villon or olivier de la marche, already evoked the figure of death and the macabre sentiment in important and innovative ways. at the same time, the society in the late fifteenth-century france was undergoing radical transformation and the fascination with class and hierarchies permeated popular theatre as much as the illustrated book like the danse that catered to the public demand for representation (and ridicule!) of particular social types. relying on the existing interest in literature by and about women and the new found fascination with the theme of folly, marchant modernized the danse by publishing editions which featured these themes. in discussing the danse macabre des femmes edition, the chapter highlights marchant’s editorial strategy and argues that it was the printer’s intervention with the theme and his choice of content that supplied the narrative for the work and structured the viewer’s experience of it. the fifth chapter, “the salutary mirror: editing and viewing the illustrated book,” analyzes different editions of the danse, most notably those published by husz and vérard, and argues that the editorial input of the printers was crucial not just in choosing the content, but also in selecting the format and materials out of which the books were fashioned. although these editions belong to the same series, each book is unique and represents a particular way of representing the danse. that the readers, in turn, responded to the books diversely is also evident from the way they manipulated the books by adding commentary, drawing on costumes or in the margins and even cutting away the faces of the dead in an attempt to manipulate or react to the images. these “acts of viewing” suggests, as areford has argued, that the interaction between the early printed image and the beholder is never passive, a point i highlight in the chapter by focusing on specific examples. taken as a whole, my dissertation aims to emphasize the pivotal role of the danse macabre illustrated books in the history of the genre. at the same time, as my study shows, the books are not solely about the danse but actually reference the late fifteenth-century interests in apocalyptic, allegorical, scientific and satirical discourses. the volumes exemplify the exciting and innovative industry of early printing and demonstrate how the new medium adapted and converted the traditional themes and forms of medieval art. w hile relying on an established tradion of macabre art in a medium that was still novel, printers ultimately offered new ways of picturing death through processes of experimentation and collaboration. areford . chapter two death in print: the danse macabre and the medium of illustrated books the printing workshop and the bookstore – new spaces of death on february , / , the german born printer mathias husz published an important edition of the danse macabre (dance of death) book in lyons. titled la grãt danse macabre des homes y des femes hystoriee y augmentee de beaux dis en latin, the book was printed in folio format and included the dance of death of men and women and seven additional illustrated texts dealing with the subject of death, dying, and the last judgment. husz’s edition is the most comprehensive version of the popular title printed in the fifteenth century since it includes two different woodcut versions of the dance of death of men, the greatest number of additional titles and two original images likely created specifically for this book. one of them, printed on folio b , is part of the danse macabre des homes cycle and portrays the striking image of death visiting the printing workshop and the bookstore (fig. ) (henceforth the printers). smiling at us, the viewers, and awkwardly tiptoeing on their scrawny feet, the three cadavers are shown taking away the printers and the bookseller from their places of work. the living (or more precisely, the dying), though showing signs of resistance are helpless against their horrid attackers; as the dead tell the printers: mourir vous fault certainement. since neither the printers nor the bookseller have been included in previous renditions of the danse macabre, the image is almost certainly husz’s own only two extant copies of the edition survive, one is preserved in london at the british library (ib. ) and the other is in princeton at the scheide library ( . . ). all titles and verses from the danse macabre books are transcribed as they appear in the original documents. i did not add accents and apostrophes or tried to correct the spelling of the words. invention. in order to include the plate in the book and accommodate it into the danse, husz had to hire an artist to design it and a writer to compose the verses, which significantly increased the cost of the production. however, husz’s risk paid off. the woodcut and the verses perfectly capture the theme of the dance of death, demonstrating that the printer had not only understood macabre sensibility, but also managed to put his own spin on it. as is the case with the majority of macabre images, the woodcut functions on multiple levels. it is at once satirical and didactic, but also demonstrative of husz’s entrepreneurial skills and the pride he took in his profession. the image is the first known visual depiction of the interior of an early printing workshop and the printing press and it introduces the viewers to the steps in the process of mechanical reproduction. it could also be construed as a clever advertisement for husz’s own workshop in lyons and as such complements the title page and the colophon at the end of the book, which provides the place and the date of publication. by inserting the woodcut with the printers and the bookseller into the social hierarchy of the danse, husz was also commenting on the increasingly more diversified world of bookmaking in late fifteenth-century france. although the profession of the bookseller did, of course, exist prior to the advent of printing, the scope of this vocation was changing as printing developed to include the so-called libraire-publisher, an entrepreneur whose venture had a major impact on the transmission of knowledge in this period. on the other hand, as we shall see, printers were newcomers in late medieval society and their inclusion and, especially their placement within the hierarchy of the danse, is important to consider. even more significantly, the woodcut is a major adaptation of the dance of death and comes on the heels of other changes imposed on the theme by the medium of print. although husz’s image is part of the danse macabre of men, it is not really a traditional representation of the dance of death theme. in a more conventional rendering of the subject, such as in the mural at meslay-le- grenet, the living and the dead are arranged in a hierarchical procession and are placed in a simple, exterior locale (figs. , , and ). such setting emphasizes the equalizing power of death, which does not discriminate the rich from the poor or the young from the old, and alludes to the fact that the figures in the procession are all dying at the same time and in the same place. the notion of death as a collective, communal event has been one of the principle trademarks of monumental painted versions of the danse since the earliest known version painted at the cemetery of the holy innocents in paris in - . w hen the danse macabre illustrated books first appeared in france, in the mid s, the printers emulated the composition by placing all dancing figures in the same exterior setting (fig. ). in the context of the printed books, which could not reproduce the long chain of figures in a single image, it was especially important to rely on repetitive elements – the layout, the frame and the background – in order to emulate the sense of continuity in the procession of dancers. husz had clearly understood this since he placed all other figures in the danse against an identical background, an outdoors setting embellished with delicate shrubs and foliage, which makes the printers woodcut on folio b all the more unusual (figs. and ). the position of the printers interrupts the narrative of the danse, a point especially obvious when the reader is actually leafing through the book (fig. ). with eight folios preceding it and nine following it, the woodcut is positioned in the middle of the dance of death of men. by the time the reader reaches folio b (fig. ), key compositional elements of the narrative have already been est ablished: two pairs of dancers are shown per page, the figures face the viewer and the procession is moving towards the left (figs. and ). the figures of the printers and the bookseller, however, are placed in specific interior locations and are not promenading or even dancing, at least not in an obvious way (fig. ). rather, they are working. the compositor, a person who sets the type for printing, is featured on the far left. he is not even standing – the image shows him seated at the desk and still picking out type from the cases in front of him. in the center of the printing shop, the puller, the figure that works the press, stands with his back to the viewer (the only figure in the danse to do so) and is, ironically, being pulled into the dance by the cadaver on the opposite side of the printing press. the fate of the third printer, seen in the background behind the press, is more difficult to gauge, since, uncharacteristically, he is not paired with his own dead partner. he might die, but he might also survive the encounter. save for the gestures of the cadavers in the workshop and the bookstore, both of whom point to the opposite directions and thus visually link the woodcut with images preceding and following it, nothing else connects the two scenes with the rest of the danse. how then are we to read husz’s image? are the printers and the bookseller somehow part of the same procession as the other figures? w ill they die at the same time as their counterparts? if so, why are they in different spaces? husz’s insistence on the particularity of spaces is perhaps the most interesting aspect of the woodcut. in the late fifteenth century the printing workshop was the most modern of spaces – the technology was brand new and the industry was just developing. intended as a visual lesson for the beholder, the traditional dances of death portray the living protagonists in contemporary or traditional costumes but make no other references to time or space; the danse, we will recall, typically takes place in an unspecified, exterior locale. both the text and the image suggest that for the living protagonists the moment of death is fast approaching – indeed, they already hover in the liminal state of being neither dead nor alive – but for the viewer, that moment is located at a more removed, indeterminate time in the in the danse macabre certain characters are accompanied by other living figures that are not part of macabre procession. rather, their purpose is either to highlight the sins of the character or portray the nature of their profession. for example, the usurer is shown with the poor man, who is even given some verses, but it is clear from the composition and the text that the poor man is not dying. death does not address him directly and the poor man does not touch the cadaver, which is a crucial sign that he will go on living. from , when the printer guy marchant, expanded the dance of death of men, the printed editions of the danse commonly included the figure of the schoolmaster (teacher) who is shown with his young student. again, the student, like the poor man, does not engage with death and serves in this woodcut merely as a prop to explain the schoolmaster’s profession. however, in husz’s image the third printer is about to strike death with a pair of inking balls, thus his fate is more uncertain. the inclusion of the third worker shows the overriding desire to display an active workshop and to emphasize the steps in the process of printing: composing the type, inking, printing and, finally, selling. the exceptions to this are two paintings, one in lübeck and the other in tallinn (estonia), both painted by bernt notke, which featured an elaborate townscape in the background. for a discussion of the two images and their hanseatic settings, see elina gertsman, the dance of death, especially chapter . future. but, not in husz’s image. by placing the dead in the modern space of the printing workshop, husz “historicizes” death and brings it “into the here and now of the beholder.” moreover, the particularized setting of the woodcut isolates the printers and the bookseller from the rest of the procession and emphasizes their solitude at the face of death – a notion that the late medieval audience accustomed to images of dying accompanied by relatives, clerics and even spiritual beings, would have found especially troubling. after all, as joseph leo koerner explains, in relation to another early sixteenth century macabre print, “there is a kind of comfort in the crowds, even if the crowds are damned”; yet husz explicitly denies the printers and the bookseller a chance to die along with the multitude of humanity. the existence of husz’s woodcut complicates our understanding of how the theme of the dance of death and macabre art in general functioned at the end of the middle ages. scholars have tended to interpret the danse macabre illustrated books mainly as replications of earlier fresco examples and recognized elements of innovation or originality only in the works published later in the sixteenth centur y by artists such as hans holbein, whose printed series les simulachres et historiees faces de la mort, first published in lyons in , is a significant departure from the medieval macabre model (henceforth the simulachres). in holbein’s series, which shows men and women, every person encounters death in a setting specific to the status of the individual and the accompanying text, taken from the bible, is not directly related to the images (figs. and ). however, positioned right at the turn of the century, which modern scholars have come to see as a turn of historical periods, husz’s image demonstrates that aspects of macabre art had not only transitioned into the early modern era, but also that the medium of print had begun to revise the theme in crucial ways long before holbein. through the portrayal of new figures in modern spaces in the printers, its rupture of the traditional joseph leo koerner, the moment of self-portraiture in german renaissance art (chicago: chicago up, ) . although koerner’s comments relate to his analysis of a single-sheet print of death overtaking a knight made by hans baldung grien in - , and not to husz’s image or even to dances of death specifically, i found his approach to thinking about representations of death in printed images to be the most productive. ibid. . composition of the danse and its intense interest in self-fashioning, the woodcut revises earlier approaches to the danse (fig. ). it also anticipates changes that will develop with regards to the theme in later periods. just as the dead confront the living in the danse, in husz’s printers, macabre art confronts the medium of print and the two are folded together in a new and interesting way. this confrontation is the principal subject of my study. the danse macabre mural and the cemetery of the holy innocents by the time husz printed his edition of the danse in , the title was already a bestseller in france. at least twelve editions predate husz’s – an impressive number for this type of publication in the early years of printing. the first known edition was published in paris on september , by the printer guy (guyot) marchant. published in folio format, the book included only the dance of death of men and its text and image were modeled after the famous danse macabre mural from the cemetery of the holy innocents in paris painted in - . likely the earliest painted rendition of the dance of death, the mural inspired other examples in fresco most notably a danse painted in the cloister of st paul’s in london ( ) at kernascleden in brittany ( - ), in the benedictine abbey of la chaise dieu (c. ) and at kermaria-an-isquit in brittany (c. ). the two other french murals, one at meslay-le-grenet and the other at la ferte-loupière (c. ) were modeled after the printed books and therefore indirectly also inspired by the fresco from the innocents. despite its popularity in the late medieval period, the only extant copy of the first edition is preserved in grenoble at the bibliothèque municipale as i. rés; the complete scanned edition can be seen at http://pagella.bm-grenoble.fr/img- viewer/i/i /viewer.html?base=bmg&np=i _ .jpg&ns=i _ .jpgfor sources discussing with marchant’s first edition see introduction, footnote . the dance of death painted in london was demolished in , for recent discussion of this painting see: amy appleford, “the dance of death in london: john carpenter, john lydgate, and the daunce of poulys,” journal of medieval and early modern studies . ( ) however, the mural was destroyed, probably in , during the reign of louis xvi, when the wall on which it was painted was knocked down in order to widen the neighboring street. marchant’s first edition is therefore the only visual document that suggests what the mural may have looked like. according to the contemporary accounts, the danse macabre fresco was a striking image. stretching over twenty meters across the interior cloister wall of the cemetery, it featured thirty male figures arranged according to their station in late medieval ecclesiastical and secular hierarchy. the cast included: the pope and the emperor, the cardinal and the king, the patriarch and the constable, the archbishop and the knight, the bishop and the squire, the abbot and the bailiff, the astrologer and the burgher, the canon and the merchant, the carthusian and the sergeant, the monk and the usurer with the poor man, the doctor and the lover, the lawyer and the minstrel, the priest and the peasant, the franciscan and the child, - ; sophie oosterwijk, “‘fro paris to inglond’? the danse macabre in text and image in late-medieval england,” diss., u of leiden, ; and ashby kinch, imago mortis. it was the widening of the rue de la ferronnerie, which caused the demolition, though scholars still debate as to whether this happened in or some decades earlier. the making of the mural was recorded by an anonymous chronicler who wrote a parisian journal, a book of memoirs. as it states: “in this year the danse macabré was made at the innocents. it was began about august and finished in the following lent.” see: a parisian journal - , trans. janet shirley (oxford: clarendon press, ) . the bibliography on the dance of death and macabre art is extensive and cannot be listed here in its entirety. besides works already cited, the following sources are useful in studying the french examples: clark, the dance of death; andré corvisier, les danses macabres (paris: presses universitaires de france, ); reinhold hammerstein, tanz und musik des todes. die mittelalterlichen totentänze und ihr nachleben (bern: francke, ); georges kastner, les danses des morts (paris: brandus, ); kürtz, the dance of death and the macabre spirit; eustache- hyacinthe langlois, essai historique, philosophique et pittoresque sur les danses des morts, ouvrage complété et publié par m. andré pottier et m. alfred baudry, vols. (rouen: a lebrument, ); gabriel peignot, recherches historiques et littéraires sur les danses des morts et sur l’origine des cartes a jouer (dijon and paris: victor lagier, ); saugnieux, les danses macabres de france; alberto tenenti, il senso della morte e l’amore della vita nel rinascimento (francia e italia) (turin: g. einaudi, ); and hélène and bertrand utzinger, itinéraires des danses macabres. and the cleric and the hermit; each living figure was paired with his own death, portrayed as decomposing and grimacing cadavers. the procession of the living and the dead was framed on either side by the author, a preacher-like figure who delivers the prologue and the epilogue and thus functions as a narrator and not a participator in the dance of death. as in the mural at the meslay-le grenet, the figure of the author at the innocents was likely shown sitting at a desk in the opening section of the danse and facing the prostrated body of the dead king at the closing portion of the fresco (figs. and ). the mural was accompanied by verses written in vernacular, which were placed below each dancing pair and added to the dramatic impact of the pictorial composition. emphasizing his role of the preacher, the verses of the author are written as a sermon or homily and address not so much the figures in the danse, as the beholder who is the ultimate recipient of the visual lesson. in the prologue, the author discusses the image as a “doctrine notable,” and suggests that it should be used as a tool for meditating on death and salvation: o creature roysonnable qui desires vie eternelle. tu as cy doctrine notable: pour bien finer vie mortelle. la dance macabre sappele: que chascun a danser apprant. a homme et femme est naturelle. mort nespargne petit ne grant by addressing the reader specifically (o creature roysonnable), the verses highlight one of the central characteristics of macabre art, namely that both the image and the text implicate the viewer directly. as such, the composition plays out not only on a binary level, emphasizing antithesis between the living and the dead, but on ternary one as well, implicating the “third-party viewer directly,” as paul binski explains the dynamic. the image is a warning, an admonition directed primarily at the viewers who could be, and at one point in the future certainly will be, summoned into the dance. the dialogue section of the text consists of sixty-two strophes, or roughly lines of text, composed as a lively altercation between the living and the dead in which the cadavers ‘invite’ the living into the dance, while the latter refuse, resist or plead to no avail. occasionally, the living figures seem more accepting of death: the peasant explains that he often longed for death (la mort ay souhaite souvent) but would now shun it away (mais volentier ie la fuisse), while the hermit embraces death and prays to god to erase his sins (or requer dieu qun don me face / cest que tous mes pechies efface). the verses are heavily peppered with humor and satire and the dead frequently mock the living, especially those belonging to the upper echelons of society: the emperor for his reliance on accouterments of earthly power (armes: ceptre: timbre: baniere), the abbot for being plump (les plus gras est premier pourry). at the same time, however, even here the dialogue does not take place merely between the living and the dead, but also between the protagonists and the spectator. for example, the cadaver who takes away the pope directs his opening lines to the reader: “vous qui vivez (you who are alive), while the abbot also warns the reader vous qui vivez au demorant (you who are alive right now). in many painted and printed versions, the dead gaze at the viewer, further emphasizing the link between the composition and its beholder and implicating the viewer directly with the drama that is unfolding. this must have been especially effective in the context of the murals, which were typically placed in public spaces of churches or cemeteries and thus benefited from a varied audience including a number of illiterate individuals who could not read the verses, but could probably understand the implication of the striking gaze of the figures of death. paul binski, medieval death: ritual and representation (ithaca, new york: cornell up, ) . for a close reading of the humor and satire in the verses see: jane h. m. taylor, “the danse macabre: reflections on black humor,” comparative criticism: comedy, irony, parody, ed. e. s. shaffer (cambridge: cambridge up, ) - . sophie oosterwijk, “dance, dialogue and duality” . the mural was painted during the english occupation of paris and a particularly tumultuous period of french history known as the dual monarchy ( - ), when france had two kings, the dauphin (future king charles vii) and young henry vi. the ramification of this political situation on the composition and the text of the mural, have, surprisingly, only recently been studied in more detail. in her reading of the mural, sophie oosterwijk has noted the conspicuous absence of the figure of the duke, a major title among the late medieval french courtiers. despite the careful hierarchical ordering of the french danse, at least in the first half of the poem, the line of lay characters jumps from king via constable to knight, skipping the duke entirely. this omission, as oosterwijk notes, is not surprising given the fact that in this period many french and some english dukes were engaged in a viscious political battle over the control of the french throne and a reference to a duke in the image would have been a dicey move. since the early fifteenth century, the dukes of france, most notably those from the houses of orleans and burgundy, were involved in a bloody princely war marked by a series of assassinations and counter- assassinations which have divided the country and prompted the establishment of the dual monarchy in the first place. in , when the mural was completed, the duke of bedford ( - ), acting as a regent for henry vi who was then still a this fascinating period of franco-english history has only recently been studied in detail. for particularly interesting accounts of civic spectacles organized in paris and london see: lawrence bryant, the king and the city in the parisian royal entry ceremony: politics, ritual and art in the renaissance (geneva: droz, ) and robert epstein, “eating their w ords: food and text in the coronation banquet of henry vi, journal of medieval and early modern studies . ( ): - . for studies dealing specifically with the historical context of the mural from the innocents see: valentin dufour, recherches sur la danse macabre peinte en au cimetière des innocents (paris: bureaux de bibliophile francias, ); maja dujakovic, “the dance of death, the dance of life: cemetery of the innocents and the danse macabre,” out of the stream: studies in medieval and renaissance mural painting, eds. luís urbano afonso and vítor serrão (newcastle: cambridge scholars publishing, ) - ; sophie oosterwijk, “of dead kings, dukes and constables: the historical context of the danse macabre in late medieval paris, journal of the british archaeological association ( ): - and ashby kinch, imago mortis. oosterwijk, “of dead kings ” . the duke appears in marchant’s augmented edition. child, was de facto ruler in paris and though he formed an alliance with the duke of burgundy, philip the good ( - ), they did not necessarily share the same political aspirations and were at that time in a stand-off. although more research is needed, it is possible, especially given his predilection for the theme of the dance of death and the fact that the mural was painted in the area of the city that was under burgundian rule, that philip in fact commissioned the mural – another reason to omit the figure of the duke from the image. the less than flattering portrayal of clerics in the image reflects the deeply seated problems the w estern church had faced throughout the fifteenth century. the mural was painted soon after the council of constance ( - ), which, in theory at least, put an end to the great schism, though issues addressed or seemingly resolved at the council still lingered on. the move of the papacy from rome to avignon in had resulted in an embarrassing situation in which rival antipopes ruled the divided christian nation from rome and avignon respectively. this was made even more problematic in with the election of alexander v as the third antipope at the council of pisa, a solution that failed when his counterparts from rome and avignon refused to abdicate. the simultaneous existence of three popes had severely undermined the authority of the papacy – a situation that was not resolved until with the election of martin v who refused the seat in avignon and settled the papacy in rome, where he arrived in . as oosterwijk explains some of the resonance of the recent papal disgrace can be construed from the verses: “[t]he invitation by the mort to the pope to start the dance, ‘comme le plus oosterwijk, “fro paris to inglond” especially chapter . no records have been found regarding the patron or the artist for the danse macabre mural. it is, however, possible that the duke of burgundy had a hand in the making of the mural because he seems to have taken a special interest in the dance of death theme. for example, the duke was the original owner of the manuscript with the transcribed verses from the innocents now preserved at the bn. in addition, it was at his court that a theatrical performance of the danse took place in and the mural was located near philip’s hotel in paris in an area of the city regarded as the burgundian territory. moreover, the duke’s libraire, guillebert de metz, mentions the mural specifically in his account of paris. he certainly had the means to commission the large painting and, in the early period of the dual monarchy, the duke of burgundy aligned fairly closely with the duke of bedford, henry vi’s regent in paris. digne seigneur’ is tinged with irony if one considers his papal dignity and the church’s stance on dancing. this impression is strengthened when the pope proceeds to describe himself as god on earth, “qui suis dieu en terre/jay eu dignite souverainne/en leglise comme saint pierre” – biting satire, the topical cause of which is not often recognized. the political and social readings of the mural in the works by oosterwijk, ashby kinch and others, have pointed out an important aspect of the danse that is worth reiterating here. earlier studies almost unanimously linked the development of macabre art with larger historical developments – most notably the emergence of the plague in the middle of the fourteenth century and its recurring epidemics, the great famine ( - ) and the hundred years w ar ( - ) – all of which increased mortality rates and triggered the predilection for morose subjects in art and literature. in this view, the dance of death is typically interpreted, according to amy appleford, “as a timeless and universal articulation of the human submission to the reality of death.” however, a careful historical reading of circumstances surrounding individual examples of the dance reveals how topical and local many renditions really were. it also points out, as i will discuss shortly, the potential for polyvalent readings of most dances of death – a fact that made the danse particularly open to adaptations. the dramatic impact of the mural was certainly not lost on its contemporaries. just three years after the completion of the artwork, in april of , when paris was still under occupation, the mendicant preacher, friar richard, chose the mural as a oosterwijk, “of dead kings” . on causes of macabre art see: johan huizinga, the autumn of the middle ages, trans. rodney j. payton and urlich mammitzsch (chicago: chicago up; ); danièle alexandre –bidon, la mort au moyen age: xiiie-xvie siècle (pairs: hachette, ); philipe ariès, l’homme devant la mort (paris: seuil, ); t.s. boase, death in the middle ages: mortality, judgment and remembrance (new york: mcgraw-hill, ); and binski. appleford . ibid . appleford makes this argument in relation to the dance of death from london painted in and based on the model from the innocents – but the same can be said about the paris fresco. given the complexity of the political situation in france in the s, a large mural placed in the center of paris which depicted a hierarchical portrayal of different social ranks must have had political dimensions. backdrop for a series of apocalyptic sermons he delivered at the cemetery. as the anonymous author of the parisan journal, a book of memories from that period, explains, friar richard preached at the innocents every day for over a week, each sermon lasting for hours: he would begin to preach at about five o’clock in the morning and go on till between ten or eleven o’clock and there were always five of six thousand people listening to him. he preached from a high platform – it was nearly half toises high – with his back to the charnel houses opposite the charronnerie near the danse macabré. […] indeed, when they came away from the sermon that day, the people of paris were so moved and so stirred up to devotion that in less than three or four hours’ time you would have seen over a hundred fires alight in which men were burning chess and backgammon boards, dice, cards, balls, and sticks, mirelis, and every kind of covetous game that can give rise to anger and swearing. the women, too, this day and the next, burned in public all their fine headgear, the rolls and stuffing, the pieces of leather or whalebone that they used to stiffen their headdress or make them fold forwards. noblewomen left off their horns, their trains, and many of their vanities. indeed, the ten sermons he preached in paris and one at boulogne did more to turn people towards piety than all the preachers who had preached in paris for the past hundred years. friar richard chose the spot for his sermon wisely – not only did the mural portray the transience of earthly life and the leveling power of death, but the cemetery itself, with its ossuaries overflowing with bones of the dec eased eerily reflected and confirmed those very points. the innocents was an ideal location for friar richard’s sermons for other reasons as well. used as a necropolis since the merovingian era, the cemetery lay at the heart of medieval paris. the parish church of les innocents was located in a key spot on the rue saint-denis, the main road that lead from the porte saint-denis to the north; the cemetery, on the other hand, occupied the space a parisian journal, - . along the rue de la ferronnerie close to the city’s main marketplace of les halles. while it was officially under control of the hôtel-dieu, the hospital of sainte- catherine, and the chapter of saint-germain-l’auxerrois, it was seen as a “common resource.” long venerated for its special soil known as the flesh-eater (mange- chair) – it allegedly had the ability to de-flesh a body in about nine days, a quality much admired in late medieval culture that feared the state of in-between the most – the cemetery was a popular burial ground. because of its central location, it was also a gathering place for many city dwellers – scribes and notaries, for example, gathered there, especially in the later periods, and conducted their business on the tomb slabs. the innocents was also a known meeting place for prostitutes and vagabonds, as well as merchants and produce sellers who spilled into the ground of the cemetery from the neighboring marketplace. a painting by an anonymous flemish artist created c. , gives a sense of the layout and the appearance of this popular paris burial ground (fig. ). w hile the church of the innocents is seen in the background, the foreground is occupied by the large churchyard. galleries with ossuaries are visible on either side of the painting and in the background near the church. it is even possible to see parts of the danse macabre mural behind the arcades on the back wall of the south gallery, shown on the right. according to a document dated , just a few years before the demolition of the wall on which the mural was painted, the fresco occupied ten or eleven bays of the south gallery. although the mural showed a continuous oosterwijk, “fro paris to inglond,” . vanessa harding, the dead and the living in paris and london - (cambridge: cambridge up, ) . on medieval cultural beliefs regarding the dead, see jean-claude schmitt, ghosts in the middle ages: the living and the dead in medieval society, trans. teresa lavender fagan (chicago and london: chicago up, ). for a discussion of scribes and notaries that gathered at the cemetery, see: christine métayer, au tombeau des secrets: les écrivains publics du paris populaire, cimetière des saints-innocents, xvie-viiie siècle (paris: albin michel, ). on the issue of prostitutes at the innocents see bronislaw geremek, the margins of society in late medieval paris, trans. jean birrell (cambridge: cambridge up, ). oosterwijk, “fro paris to inglond,” . this comes from an anonymous source, the so-called epitaphier de vieux paris. procession of figures with the poem written underneath, one stanza for each dancer, the setting of the mural as portrayed in this painting raises issues with regards t o how the image was viewed. the figures in the fresco were almost life-size, which meant that the viewer had to step back in front of the arcades and maybe even further towards the center of the churchyard, in order to see the complete procession. from that vantage point, however, the beholder could not read the verses and the viewing of the text and the image would require a constant movement back and forth, away and towards the mural. the performative aspect of viewing the dance of death – the way the unusual composition requires bodily movement (a dance of sorts) on the part of the viewer – has recently been studied by elina gertsman who shows how the fresco would have engaged its audience. for my purposes, however, another point is worth mentioning. since the mural was painted on the wall behind the arcades, the columns, which are clearly visible in the flemish painting of the cemetery, would have obstructed the view of the continuous procession by framing pairs or groups of figures, even if the viewers were standing far enough away to be able to take in the full composition (fig. ). as we will see, one of the main criticisms of marchant’s adaptation of the mural into the illustrated book had to do with the limitations of the print medium which could not reproduce a long chain of figures in a single image. insead, he broke down the procession into two pairs per page, a move that, according to most scholars, severely reduced the impact of the original fresco. however, as the setting of the mural clearly gertsman, dance of death, especially chapter . in her study of the mural, oosterwijk has pointed out other limitations of the setting. for one, as she explains, the mural was painted on the south wall, in the area of the cemetery where the sunlight would never directly light up the image. furthermore, the painting took up only a small fraction of the enormous wall of the cemetery which, according to the account of guillebert de metz, a librarire to both john the fearless and philip the good, the dukes of burgundy, written in and entitled description de paris, actually featured other devotional wall paintings. as guillbert writes, the wall of the innocents portrayed “paintures notables de la dance macabre et autres, avec escriptures pour esmouvoir les gens a devocion,” (remarkable paintings of the danse macabre and other subjects, with inscriptions, to entice the people into devotion). the only extant manuscript of guillbert de metz’s description is preserved in the royal library in brussels, see oosterwijk, “fro paris to inglond”. demonstrates, the possibility of viewing the image in its entirety, especially seeing the figures in an unbroken procession and reading the verses at the same time, would simply not have been possible. because of its location at the popular cemetery, the painted mural was exposed to an audience much greater and wider than those of early illustrated books. a look at the flemish painting is helpful in this regard as well. a large funeral is taking place in the center of the composition while, at the same time, other activities are taking place in different areas of the cemetery: a family of vagabonds is extracting bones from a grave on the left, a dog is defecating in the background and scribes are busy filling documents hunched over a tomb slab near the galleries on the north side. the cemetery, as we have seen, was the site of friar richard’s popular sermons and it was also incorporated in the civic spectacles celebrating the coronation of the young king henry vi at notre-dame in december of . crowned as the king of both england and france, henry’s supporters had to orchestrate a poignant procession to convince parisians that the dual monarchy was the right solution – one of the pageants included a deer hunt at the innocents. like the mural it housed, the cemetery itself was a victim of the changing infrastructure of the city. prompted by the enlightenment and, especially, concerns over salubrity of the air, the innocents was deemed too unsanitary and demolished in , just a few years before the french revolution. the cloistered wall and the church of the innocents was knocked down, the charniers (ossuaries) were demolished and the bones were dug up and relocated to the catacombs of paris, and the entire lot was cleaned up and remodeled. the site was redecorated with a classical fountain (intended to cleanse the air) and an herb market; it was a dramatic a similar argument with regards to the viewing of frescoes at la chaise dieu, berlin and the meslay-le-grenet churches has been made by gertsman in book on the mural examples of the dance of death. the settings for these murals either fragmented the chain of figures or forced the beholder to stand in a specific position in order to view the procession/ see gertsman, the dance of death, especially chapter . the best account of the demolition of the cemetery can be found in richard a. etlin, the architecture of death: transformation of the cemetery in eighteenth century paris (cambridge, massachusetts: mit press, ). end to a famous remnant of a medieval city. the mural, however, did endure, at least to some extent, thorugh the printed editions of the danse initially made by marchant. a case for printed books when guy marchant adapted the mural from the innocents in his editio princeps, he effectively preserved the famous artwork for posterity. it is, of course, impossible to know exactly how close the woodcuts copied the mural – and, as i will demonstrate later in the chapter, certain aspects of marchant’s images that have always been seen as direct references to the mural may not be that at all – but the verses used in the first edition closely resemble those found in two fifteenth-century manuscripts (bn, ms fr. and bn, ms. lat. ) that include the transcribed poem from the innocents, thus we know that the mural did serve as the model. the latter manuscript, dating from the s, includes the danse macabre poem along with tracts written by two important fifteenth century theologians, jean gerson (d. ), chancellor of the university of paris, and his colleague nicolas de clémanges (d. - ), as well as writings of the dominican friar vincent ferrier (d. ). gerson, in particular, was a hugely influential figure in the theological and political life of early fifteenth century france and his devotional tracts remained popular and often printed by early printers, including marchant. gerson played a crucial role at the council of constance, which not only put an end to the great schism but also stressed the importance of devout living among the laity. his both manuscripts have been part of the library of the abbey of st. victor in paris. dating from c. , ms. lat. includes the sentence “prout habetur apud sanctum innocentem, while ms. fr. , which is a compendia of several different texts, reads: dictamina choreae macabre prout sunt apud innocente[m] parisii.” another early manuscript copy on paper (bn, ms. fr. ) created in c. , also includes verses of the danse macabre poem. as oosterwijk has shown, this manuscript belonged to philip the good, the duke of burgundy and contains the anti-dauphinist propaganda poem division des orleanois contre les anglois, another reason to believe that the mural was indeed reflective of the political situation during the dual monarchy. see oosterwijk, “of dead kings.” famous tract, opusculum tripartitum contained a section entitled de arte moriendi, which likely inspired the texts of the ars moriendi (art of dying) tradition. because the danse macabre poem is found in the manuscript that contains tracts by gerson and de clémanges and since gerson’s texts stressed the importance of devout living among the laity, a number of scholars have suggested that the two theologians, or an individual linked with their academic circle, are the likely authors of the verses from the innocents. in adapting the mural from the innocents, marchant, as emile mâle has shown, had made some important changes. for one, the costumes of the living protagonists have been updated to match the fashion of the s, a point especially evident in the depiction of the square-toed shoes, as oppose to the pointed shoes, or souliers à la poulaine, which were worn in the first part of the century. in some instances, there is a notable correlation between the woodcuts and the verses: the emperor holds the globe of the world in his left hand, while the dead tell him to “laisser fault la pomme dor ronde” (leave behind the round golden apple); in the pairing of the archbishop and death, the latter says “que vous tires la teste arriere archevesque” (how you draw back your head archbishop!); and in the woodcuts the archbishop does indeed draw his head back. despite the fact that we do not know for certain what the painting from the innocents looked like, most scholars assume that these correspondences between the text and the image are derived from the mural and, conversely, that the instances in which the woodcuts stray from the verses are marchant’s own interpretation or the fault of the medium. in the verses, the sergeant says: “je suis pris deca et dela” (i am taken from this side and that), which scholars believe means that in the mural the sergeant was binski . the ars moriendi was a late fourteenth and early fifteenth century literary development that is divided roughly into two textual types: the tractatus artis bene moriendi and the ars moriendi itself. the latter was disseminated in the vernacular by block book and incunabula editions that contained illustrations. see clark, chaney and oosterwijk. it is not likely that gerson was the author since at the time the mural was made he was in a voluntary exile from paris. emile mâle, religious art in france: the late middle ages. a study of medieval iconography and its sources, ed. harry bober, trans. marthiel mathews (new jersey: princeton up, ), especially pages - . accompanied by two dead figures, potentially mimicking an arrest, whereas in the books only one is shown. because of the nature of the print medium, which could not reproduce the long chain of figures in a single woodcut, marchant was also forced to depict two figures per page, a point that, according to most writers severely diminished the impact of the original. moreover, as oosterwijk has argued: the designer of the woodcuts may have taken further liberties with the poses of the characters, especially at the start or the end of each arcade, for whereas there is usually physical contact between the figures in each arcade there is nothing to link them to those in other arcades. instead, the dead dancers at the start of each arcade are either turned towards their next victim or are shown holding a large dart or grave-diggers’ attributes, such as a spade and a coffin-lid. the result of marchant’s design was such that readers concentrated even more on the relationship between the image of each pair and the dialogue below. as mentioned earlier, the setting of the mural may have prevented the viewer from ever really seeing the unbroken chain of dancers, to say nothing of the fact that the composition of the fresco made it impossible to read the verses and see the procession all at once. w hile most authors agree that marchant’s first edition resembles the original fairly closely and thus see it as a useful tool through which to study the lost image, they are also often critical of the way the medium of the printed books have altered the theme. in a recent study on the dance of death murals from paris and london, for example, ashby kinch has described the effects of marchant’s translation of the theme as a way of radically reducing “the scope and comprehensiveness of the monumental form” (fig. ). as kinch argues: oosterwijk, “fro paris to inglond ” . kinch, imago mortis . the same argument was made in an expanded form in ashby kinch, “the danse macabre and the medieval community of death,” mediaevalia vol. no. ( ): - . for a link to the electronic facsimile of the first edition, see chapter , footnote . the public space is replaced pictorially by an inset proscenium frame with bordering pillars and an arch, which presents each woodcut as an independent tableau in a series. this proscenium may be an attempt to recreate in a book format the dramatic context that many scholars believe was the original form of the danse, but it radically downplays the social meaning of the image. at the same time, it could be argued that the repetitive usage of the frame in the danse books visually unites the woodcuts and, in turn, allowes the viewer to read each scene as one part of a larger whole. criticism of marchant’s first edition is not surprising given the fact that, any form of “adaptation,” to use linda hutcheon’s words, “is likely to be greeted as minor and subsidiary and certainly never as good as the ‘original.’” the problem of treating adaptations as adaptations, she argues, is that we think of them as “inherently palimpsestuous works, haunted at all times by their adaptive texts. if we know that prior text, we always feel its presence shadowing the one we are experiencing directly.” in the context of the danse macabre books, the question of adaptation is especially pronounced since, despite the rapid proliferation of printed editions and the almost immediate need to change and reinterpret the ‘original,’ evidenced by the introduction of new figures, new texts and even an invention of a whole new series of the danse macabre of women, scholars writing on macabre art continually deny the printed books the status of distinctive works. moreover, only a handful of texts even discuss the printed books as material objects in their own right – and these are concerned primarily with content and offer little with regard to interpretation or meaning – and why most analysis of the first edition remain, essentially, comparative interested mainly in the issue of proximity to the original kinch, “the danse macabre,” . linda hutcheon, a theory of adaptation (new york and london: routledge, ) xii. ibid. xii. at the same time, it is intriguing to consider that some buyers of the danse macabre books, especially those living in paris, were actually familiar with the mural from the innocents and took pride in the fact that they owned a copy of it. work. the question of the printed work’s fidelity to the mural is an especially loaded one since it is predicated on an assumption that as an adapter, marchant, or more precisely the artist who made the woodcuts, simply sought to reproduce the original image. however, as hutcheon reminds us: adaptation is repetition, but repetition without replication. and there are manifestly many different possible intentions behind the act of adaptation: the urge to consume and erase the memory of the adapted text or to call it into question is as likely as the desire to pay tribute by copying. … according to its dictionary meaning, “to adapt” is to adjust, to alter, to make suitable. this can be done in any number of ways. following hutcheon’s definition of adaptation, my study consciously avoids thinking about the books solely as adaptations, as objects haunted by their models. instead, i seek to understand them as distinctive works which function in their own time and space. after all, sixty years separate the creation of the mural and the first printed edition and though some devotional and cultural practices that have informed the interest in the dance of death theme in the s certainly lingered on, there are other important historical developments, not the least of which is the advent of printing, that are specific to the context in which the books participated. the link to the mural is relevant but there is no precise record making comparisons speculative, and the printed editions of the danse vary, making it clear that many printers were not intent on replicating the painting precisely. nor did marchant make any specific reference to the mural in any of his editons, which he likely would have, were it benefical – a point that will be elaborated later – leaving his intentions about publishing the series open to question. for the purposes of this study, then, it is the propensity of the danse macabre itself for adaptation that is crucial. understanding its success and influence is based mainly on its unusual composition, at once general and specific, that attracted the early printers to the theme. the continual process of reinvention and experimentation with the theme and format of the danse ibid. . – evident in the way printers added new figures, introduced complementary poems or placed the theme in new contexts thereby altering its meaning – is a direct response to trends of the printing industry at the turn of the century. in pursuing this approach to studying printed versions of the danse, my project aims to advance current studies on macabre art by emphasizing the importance and complexity of this theme in the print medium, while at the same time discussing the role of illustrated books in the early stages of print production in france. though scholarly interest in the theme of death and dying in the middle ages has been fairly consistent ever since johan huizinga wrote his influential study, the autumn of the middle ages, in , in recent years the fascination with macabre art has grown noticeably. in the last four years, four important studies have been published in english alone (gertsman, oosterwijk and knöll, rooney and kinch) – whereas in the past the majority of publications on macabre art were in german or french – and though these texts offer new and productive ways to think about the dance of death and other macabre themes, they do not, for the most part, consider the printed books in any detail. this is all the more surprising given the fact that both gertsman and kinch discuss holbein’s series, les simulachres, in some detail, yet skip over the french editions almost entirely. the exception is the anthology by oosterwijk and knöll, which includes a section on macabre images in print medium, but again does not discuss the french editions specifically. earlier studies on the dances of death, published mainly by german and french scholars (hammerstein, kastner, langlois, saugnieux, peginot and utzinger) consider the printed books in more detail, but since these authors are concerned primarily with tracing the theme of the danse and cataloguing existing examples, they generally do not address the books in relation to the printing industry nor do they pay much attention to the historical context in which they emerge. articles written by jane h.m. taylor and, more recently david a. fein, analyze aspects of printed books or kenneth rooney, mortality and imagination: the life of the dead in medieval english literature (turnhout: brepols, ). see oosterwijk and knöll, especially the last section titled “the macabre in print” - . see footnote . focus on a specific edition, and though they raise important questions with regards to how the danse functioned in a book format, they do not consider the history or early printing in france or analyze the differences in content and format across existing editions. part of the reason for the neglect of the danse macabre printed editions, is a result of the fact that they are difficult to categorize. the books can be seen as intemediaries between the fresco rendition of the danse and holbein’s adaptations; they are clearly based on the mural from the innocents and steeped in earlier macabre tradition, but also part of the new medium that was at the time still in the process of becoming. they are produced in-between centuries, and more crucially, in-between two historical epochs and are neither necessarily medieval nor are they distinctly early modern. w hile print specialists recognize them as important examples of early illustrations, the woodcuts in the danse macabre editions are not as technically advanced as holbein’s series and not of the same aesthetic value, though this really depends on which edition we are discussing. antoine vérard’s lavish hybrid volumes – printed on parchment and hand illuminated – are among the most advanced examples of early woodcuts and visually are quite striking because of the added color and the variation in faces, costumes and, in some instances, backgrounds (fig. ). vérard’s editions possess what michael camille has termed a “technicolor flashiness” and thus engage the viewer differently from the more typical, ‘cruder’, black and white woodcuts. at the same time, as camille also suggests, the unadorned printed images “creates less of a rift between image and text […] precisely because the image has the same black and white structure as the word, and although it is read in space, it is also read in time, following a liner pattern just as in the flow of language.” in the context of the printed books, this point is see, for instance, jane h.m. taylor, “danse macabré and bande dessinée: a question of reading,” forum for modern language studies . ( ): - and jane h. m. taylor, “un miroer salutaire” - . michael camille, “reading the printed image: illuminations and w oodcuts of the pèlerinage de la vie humaine in the fifteenth century,” printing the written word: the social history of books circa - , ed. sandra l. hindman (ithaca and london: cornell up, ) - , . ibid. - . useful in thinking about the potential positive aspects of the translation of the theme from frescos to books. w e can ask, because the relay “through which the eye must pass to reach the goal is shorter in the print medium” was it easier for the viewer to read the verses and look at the images simultaneously? it must have made reading easier, since printed type, even the early ones that mimicked writing, was more legible especially in comparison to text in fresco paintings which is notoriously prone to fading almost as soon as it is applied. part of the benefit of studying a series of printed books produced in a transitional period is that we can, as camille did in relation to husz’s renditions of the pilgrimage of the human life (pèlerinage de la vie humaine), ponder these questions across multiple editions and understand not only how the images are manipulated depending on the format and the materiality of the book itself, but also study how the illustrated book developed as a medium of art over the course of this transition. to understand the impact of the print medium better, we should turn now to a discussion of format and content of printed editions of the danse. the danse macabre illustrated books: format and diffusion while marchant printed the greatest number of editions – seven in total – the title was also published and adapted by other important figures in the history of early printing in france, including, among others: antoine vérard, pierre la rouge, jean tréperel and mathias husz. between and c. , at least nineteen editions were published in paris, lyons, troyes and geneva and the title continued to be published through the sixteenth century, though with less frequency. it is very likely that many more editions were published in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, but early printed books were often lost, destroyed or cut up (especially by collectors in later periods), so it is difficult to estimate how many editions were actually produced. the series is best categorized as an illustrated devotional work two notable late sixteenth century editions include denis janot, paris ( s) and pierre de sainte lucie ( ). aimed at the general reading public, which in the late fifteenth century still constituted a fairly limited group. it is also an example of incunabula – a term used by book historians to define any type of book, single sheet or broadside that was printed, not handwritten, and produced in europe before the sixteenth century. marchant’s first edition is also one of the earliest illustrated books printed in france. as will be elaborated in the third chapter, the very first illustrated book, a french translation of speculum humanae salvationis was published just five years earlier, in in lyons. printed by mathias husz’s cousin, martin husz, the book included german woodcuts used previously for editions in basel and cologne. in the early years of printing in france it was in lyons that the majority of vernacular editions were published; the printers in paris focused mainly on theological and humanist treatises aimed at the university clientele. for this reason, it was not until that an illustrated book was published in paris, jean dupré’s missale, and not until , just a year before marchant’s first edition, that an illustrated book designed by a french woodcutter was published in paris, also by dupré. in publishing the danse, marchant was therefore at the forefront of a new medium of visual arts and he was a part of an exclusive group of french printers who were developing a specifically french style of illustration. the nineteen known editions of the danse macabre are incredibly varied in terms of format, content and medium. some books, most notably those published by nicole de la barre and jean belot, are printed in quarto format and are small enough on the question of reading practices in late fifteen century see natalie zemon davis, “printing and the people,” society and culture in early modern france (palo alto: stanford up, ) - . bibliography on incunables is vast and can be very technical. for the more recent studies see: kristian jensen, ed., incunabula and their readers: printing, selling and using books in the fifteenth century (london: british library, ); martin davies, ed., incunabula: studies in fifteenth century printed books presented to lotte hellinga (london: british library, ), and bettina w agner and marcia reed, eds. early printed books as material objects: proceedings of the conference organized by the ifla rare books and manuscripts section (berlin and new york: de gruter saur, ). w hile useful for cataloguing and organizing early printed works, the term is also problematic because it uses the year as an arbitrary cut off date, even though there is very little difference between books printed in the l ate th century and those produced in the first decade of the sixteenth century. to fit into a hand, while one edition printed for vérard by pierre la rouge is exceptionally large ( x cm) and was probably initially intended as a placard (figs. and ). the majority of editions are printed on paper, though there are exceptions here as well – vérard’s edition from , the work of printers gillet coteau and jean menard, is printed on vellum and extensively hand illuminated, while his placard copy mentioned above is printed on carton, a kind of stiff posterboard. one of marchant’s editions of the danse macabre des femmes, though printed on paper is also partially hand colored. the series was typically published in french (with some lines of text in latin), but there is an edition from printed by marchant for bookseller geoffroy de marnef, which was translated into latin and as such, as we shall see, reflects the trend in the early printing industry to publish popular titles in multiple languages and thus appeal to a wider audience. save for marchant’s first and second edition of the dance of death of men, all other danse macabre books feature at least one additional title and some, like husz’s, up to seven. the added titles are always illustrated, though not with as many woodcuts as the danse, and reflect the same devotional concerns including death and mortality, the duality of body and soul, sin and punishment and judgment and the apocalypse. the idea to insert additional titles was likely marchant’s – his editions from june and july of were the first to include other texts and images – but it is also reflective of the marketing strategies of early printers and the period’s predilection for compendia. w hile most editions use marchant’s woodcuts for the dances of death, in the late fifteenth century two versions of woodcuts of the male dance circulated in france. one was created for marchant, and the other for vérard. the latter featured only the thirty male figures from the innocents and is found in editions published by vérard, husz, de la barre, and belot. husz’s edition is two copies of vellum edition are preserved, one in london at the lambeth palace library (ms. ) and the other at the bn (rés. te ). i will discuss these copies in detail in the fifth chapter. this edition is preserved at the bn (rés. ye. ). it should be noted here that the idea of appending the three living to the dance of death in the printed editions most likely stems from mural precedents since the two macabre themes have frequently been depicted together in frescoes before and after the publication of the books. especially interesting in this regard since he was obviously in possession of both versions of the cuts – his version of the dance of death of men includes the full set of vérard’s woodcuts and six additional woodcuts taken from marchant’s augmented edition. how popular was the danse macabre series? the fact that it was published at least nineteen times in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, suggests that it was a sought after title. as soon as marchant printed his first edition, he began the process of reinventing the series by adding on new figures and text. by june of , just nine months after the first edition, he published an augmented version of the men’s dance entitled la danse macabre nouvelle, which featured six additional woodcuts and ten new dancers (the dead musicians, the papal legate and the duke, the schoolmaster and the man-at-arms, the proctor and the jailer, the pilgrim and shepherd, and the halberdier and the fool) and was accompanied by the illustrated legend of the three living. a month later, in july of , he published the first edition of the danse macabre des femmes – an original series dedicated to female protagonists. w omen, we will recall, were not included in the fresco from the innocents, although verses of the danse macabre des femmes poem are featured in some fifteenth century manuscripts. it is important to note, however, that these manuscripts were not illustrated and thus the artist who designed the woodcuts did not necessarily have a model to work from. the verses were likely written by parisian poet martial d’auvergne (d. ), though this attribution is still occasionally debated. as ann tukey harrison and sandra hindman demonstrated, the verses of the women’s dance are composed in a distinctly parisian middle french and the city is also bn, ms. fr. , dated , bn, ms. fr. , no year available, bn, ms. fr. , no year available, and bibliothèque arsenal, ms. , dated . save for the arsenal copy, all other manuscripts feature both female and male cycle of dancers. for a discussion of the manuscripts see ann tukey harrison, ed. the danse macabre of women, ms. fr. of the bibliothèque nationale (kent, ohio and london: the kent state up, ). on the danse macabre des femmes poem see p.-l. miot-frochot, ed. la grant danse macabre des femmes que composa maistre marcial de paris d’auvergne procurer au parlement de paris publie pour la première fois d’après le manuscript unique de la bibliothèque imperiale (paris: libraire bachelin-deflorenne, ). reflected in the verses directly in a number of references to places and events, all of which differentiates this poem from the men’s dance of death. the best indicator of popularity is a comparison with other similar titles published at the time. for example, the ars moriendi (the art of dying) tract, which is thematically close to the danse, was published in france in twenty-four known editions. another fifteenth-century bestseller was sebastian brant’s allegorical and moralistic treatise das narrenschiff (the ship of fools) written in basel in . promoting similar theological concepts as the danse, the narrenschiff emphasized the folly of human nature, criticized moral corruption and sinful behavior and reflected the whole of society through the symbol of the metaphorical ship, or the “fool’s mirror.” by the early sixteenth century, brant’s treatise was published in twenty-six editions, seven of which were printed in france. as will be discussed in more detail in the third and fourth chapters, the book was not only translated into french (la grande nef des folz du monde, ), but also adapted into an original series with female protagonists entitled la grant nef des folles (the ship of female- fools) published in for bookseller geoffroy de marnef. jacobus de voragine’s legenda aurea sanctorum (the golden legend), one of the most famous titles in the middle ages illustrated in numerous manuscripts, was also hugely popular in printed books – editions were printed in europe, of which were published in france. another oft-printed work was the mirouer de la redemption de l’humain lignaige, which, as we discussed earlier, was the first illustrated book published in france in – it went on through at least twelve editions. the allegorical poems la roman de la rose (the romance of the rose) by jean de meun (d. c. ) and le pèlerinage de la vie humaine (the pilgrimage of the human life) by guillaume de deguileville (d. c. ), which were derived from scribal tradition, were printed in ten and eight editions respectively. marchant’s second illustrated bestseller, a precursor to the modern almanac , le compost et harrison . see the istc for the list of known editions. yona pinson, the fools’ journey: a myth of obsession in northern renaissance art, turnhout (belgium: brepols) . ibid. . kalendrier des bergers (the shepherd’s calendar), first published in , was printed in thirteen editions and remained a sure seller throughout the sixteenth century. published in at least nineteen editions, the danse was thus one of the most frequently printed illustrated titles of the period. like the danse macabre, the works listed above belong to the category of illustrated books and most of them were published in vernacular, not in latin, as was the case with the majority of publications in the early years of printing. as such, these books represent a fairly small niche. early printed books were not frequently illustrated and, as david mckitterick explains, “most fifteenth-century books were utterly plain.” about % of books published in the late fifteenth and the early sixteenth century were printed in latin; the vernaculars moved to the majority only at the end of the s. in the early years of printing in france, the world of illustrated books was therefore rather small and as a result printers, publishers, woodcutters and illuminators frequently collaborated with one another and exchanged images and ideas. most, if not all, printers, who published editions of the danse macabre books also produced other popular illustrated books of the period we mentioned. mathias husz published several editions of the mirouer de la redemption de l’humain lignaige, the golden legend and the pèlerinage de la vie humaine. marchant invented and popularized the shepherd’s calendar, but also printed editions of the ars moriendi and an unusual flemish translation of brant’s narrenschiff published in paris for geoffrey de marnef in . vérard, whose publishing empire specialized in the production of luxurious illustrated editions and who employed the most popular printing workshops produced copies of the ars moriendi tracts with striking woodcuts made by pierre le rouge, la roman de la rose, the shepherd’s calendar printed by marchant and intended as a presentation copy for king charles viii and the golden legend. in order to understand how the david mckitterick, print, manuscript and the search for order, - (cambridge: cambridge up, ) . andrew petegree, malcom w alsby and alexander w ilkinson, eds. french vernacular books: books published in the french language before (leiden and boston: brill, ) xiv. books altered the theme, we must now consider the dance of death in more specific terms. the ambiguous image of death what exactly is the dance of death? this question, as it turns out, is not easily answered. the dance of death is a late-medieval visual and literary theme that is difficult to define in strict terms. for one, the name itself is variable and translated differently in different languages – the most important point of contention being “the nature of the dead protagonists.” is it the dance of death or the dance of the dead? in germany, the theme is referred to as the totentanz, in dutch as the dodendans, therefore as the dance of dead. in spanish, on the other hand, it is dança general de la muerte, same as in english, the dance of death. in french, it is known as the danse macabre, though the verses from the cemetery of the innocents and marchant’s edito princeps refer to the dead as le mort (the dead person) and not as la mort (death). however, by july of , when marchant printed the first edition of the danse macabre des femmes, the dead are changed into la mort, thus complicating our understanding of whether it is the dance of death or the dance of the dead. the term macabre also has a long and convoluted etymology, which does not help much in resolving the issue, and actually adds more questions in relation to the origin of the french poem. the earliest known use of the term occurs in a poem oosterwijk,”dance, dialogue and duality” . subsequent editions and manuscripts used either le mort or la mort, further obscuring the issue. oostwerijk explains that some of the confusion regarding the nature of the dead in the danse macabre may be linguistic. as she explains, le is the feminine article in some french dialects of the period, including picardian and the anglo-norman dialect. see oosterwijk, “dance, dialogue and duality” . in the hebrew, macabé, stands for “the flesh leaves the bones,” while in the arabic, maqãbir (plural: maqbara) refers to the grave. for further discussion of the term, see kurtz, especially pages - . see also hans sperber, “the etymology of macabre,” studia philological et litteraria in honorem l. spitzer, eds. a.g. hatcher le respit de la mort written in by jehan le fèvre. because le fèvre begins the poem with the sentence je fistz de macabree la dance (“i made/did the dance of macabree”), scholars have wondered whether he was the author of the verses that were eventually used at the innocents or if he had composed an earlier dance of death poem that is now lost. like the other macabre theme, the dance of death poem shares similarities with religious literature of the contemptus mundi tradition out of which it probably developed. in particular, some scholars have drawn comparisons between the dance of death and the vado mori (“i am going to die”) monologue poem, in which a series of living representatives of medieval society lament their immanent death. developed in france in the thirteenth century, the vado mori poetry does not feature a figure of death personified and the distich (two-line) verses are monologues rather than dialogues, but, like the danse, it demonstrates an interest in social portrayal and humor. for instance, the king complains, “vado mori: rex sum. quid honor, quid gloria mundi?/ est via mors hominis regia: vado mori,” (i am going to die: i am the king. w hat use is honor, what use worldly glory? death is the royal road of man: i am going to die.). like the poem from the innocents, the vado mori, featured only male characters (the king, the pope, the doctor), but also characters that are defined by their age or other traits and sins (juvenis, senior, sapiens, and dives) and there is no evidence of a pictorial vado mori tradition. despite these similarities, a direct link between the danse and the vado mori cannot be established; “both may and k. l. selig (bern: francke, ), - and edélgard dubruck, ‘another look at “macabre,”’ romania ( ): - . these questions have never been answered successfully, though most authors agree that la fèvre is not the author of the verses from the innocents. the earliest known dance of death poem proper is the spanish dança general de la muerte, which was composed around . see: gaston paris, “la danse macabré de jean le fèvre,” romania ( ): - and the second chapter of oosterwijk’s dissertation, “fro paris to inglond.” oosterwijk, “dance, dialogue and duality” . see also: w illy f. storck, “das “vado mori””, zeitschrift für deutsche philologie, ( ): - and eleanor prescott hammond, “latin texts of the dance of death,” modern philology ( ): - . quoted in oosterwijk, “dance, dialogue and duality” . simply have been separate compositions within the contemptus mundi tradition.” it is, however, interesting that marchant had added the latin verses of the vado mori poem above the woodcuts in his editions of the dance of death of men, thus further linking the two literary traditions and demonstrating his talent for compiling texts from different sources in a single book. in the late middle ages, the dance of death was an international phenomenon – paintings of the theme appearing in france, england, germany, croatia, the baltic countries and scandinavia. in italy, the theme was not as popular, though elements of it were included in the so-called triumph of death frescoes that showed several related macabre scenes and depictons of the last judgment, popular from the mid fourteenth century onward. most, but not all, dance of death murals were accompanied by verses written in vernacular and the images were typically placed in public spaces of christian churches or cemeteries. up until the emergence of the printed books in the s, the dance of death was mostly depicted in frescoes though there were also examples in other mediums as well: illuminated manuscripts, stained glass windows, sculpture and even theatrical performances. the ability of the danse to be adapted and taken up by multiple media is one of the main reasons for the popularity of the theme at the end of the middle ages. while the painting from the innocents was first officially adapted by marchant, it may have also served as the model for two early fifteenth-century books of hours (bn, ms. rothschild and new york, morgan library, ms. m. ) that have only recently been studied in more detail. both manuscripts contain marginal danse macabre decoration and both are believed to date from the time of the english occupation of paris or shortly thereafter. the rothschild manuscript, probably closer in date to the mural, illustrates the challenges of adapting a fresco composition into a book format – the dancing pairs are placed haphazardly around the miniatures and the procession is arranged in a counterclockwise manner. on the other hand, the ibid. . see oosterwijk, “fro paris to inglond,” especially the second chapter and kinch, imago mortis. book of hours from the morgan library, most likely produced by the bedford master and his workshop c. - , contains an impressive danse macabre cycle that features fifty-seven dancing pairs, almost twice as many as was depicted in the mural. portraying an array of clerics (some almost impossible to identify, in part because no verses accompany the images) civic figures and tradesmen, this manuscript is also important because it places figures in individualized spaces: the apothecary is in store with pots on the shelves behind him, the money-changer is seated at his desk with coins and scales, while the ploughman follows his ox in a field. diffusion in multiple media is also an important characteristic of the legend of the three living and the three dead, which together with the transi tombs and the danse represent the three main categories of macabre art. like the danse, the three living had a long literary tradition, first emerging in the secular context at the court of france in the late thirteenth century and then spreading across europe in multiple forms in the late middle ages. although different variations of the story exist, the three living tells of an encounter in which the three living, typically described as princes or noblemen returning from a hunt, come across the three cadavers. the gruesome sight of the decomposing corpses – usually shown in three different stages of decomposition, from cadavers to skeletons – and the dialogue between the living and the dead that ensues reminds the living of the inevitability of death, the literature on the three living is vast and cannot be fully recounted here. for an in-depth study of the french wall paintings of the story, see groupe de recherches sur les peintures murales, eds. vifs nous sommes … morts nous serons: le rencontre des trois morts et trois vifs dans la peinture murale en france (vendôme: editions du cherche-lune, ). in recent years scholarly discussions of the three living have shifted from a broad analysis of the theme, to a more specific discussion of individual examples. for this reason, authors have been able to note that, like the danse, the theme did not remain static, but changed and adapted over time, see christine kralik, “a matter of life and death: forms, functions and audiences for the ‘three living and the three dead’ in late medieval manuscripts,” diss., u of toronto, , ashby kinch, imago mortis, ashby kinch, “image, ideology, and form: the middle english three dead kings in its iconographic context,” chaucer review . ( ): - . on the transi tombs see kathleen cohen, metamorphosis of a death symbol: the transi tomb in the late middle ages and the renaissance (berkeley: up california, ). need to forgo earthly possessions and avoid sin in order to assure salvation. the depiction of the encounter varies depending on the artist and the medium – sometimes the living are shown as princes or kings wearing crowns and ermine furs, other times they are just noblemen. occasionally, the living are mounted on horses – this is how they are shown in the printed books – and accompanied by dogs and falcons, signifying the hunting spree from which the living are returning. in many renditions, however, the figures are on foot and the reference to hunting is reduced to a single sign, if any. this is how the story is depicted in one of the earliest renditions – the famous miniature from the psalter of robert de lisle, produced c. , which portrays the living and the dead occupying two distinct and abstracted spaces, with the body of a single falcon transgressing the two realms. in france, the theme was incredibly popular and dispersed in paintings, manuscripts and sculpture. at least sixty murals that feature the theme are known and there were possibly even more made which did not survive to the present day. when the danse developed, in the early fifteenth century, it became common to include both themes in the same pictorial program. for example, in the early fifteenth century, jean, the duke of berry (d. ), who seems to have been particularly taken by the three living and had it painted in two of his famous books of hours, commissioned a portal sculpture of the subject for the church of the holy innocents, where it eventually stood in the vicinity of the mural. starting with marchant’s augmented edition of , it became common to include the illustrated poem of the three living in the printed editions of the dance macabre of men and women (figs. and ). late fifteenth-century murals at meslay-le-grenet and la ferté loupière – which, we will recall were based on the printed books – also feature a depiction of the legend above the dancing procession (figs. , and ). for a facsimile edition of the psalter see lucy freeman sandler, the psalter of robert de lisle in the british library (london: harvey miller publishers, ), the miniature with the three living is featured on page , plate . the three living is included in a miniature on folio r of the duke of berry’s petit heures, made in and in the border illumination of the très riches heures, painted by the limbourg brothers between - . the three living is, indeed, a natural companion to the danse with which it shares several important characteristics. both themes rely on the interconnectedness of text and image and though several versions of the poem of the three living circulated, it too was written in a form of a dialogue between the living and the dead. like the danse, the legend is a visual lesson not just for its living protagonists, but for the viewer as well. in the miniature from the psalter of robert de lisle, for example, the living princes turn their bodies and their gazes towards the dead in a gesture that suggests that they are recipients of the visual lesson. the dead, on the other hand, engage with the princes but also with the beholder – a point made especially obvious in the way the third cadaver faces the viewer, and more significantly, gazes out at us with a sinister grin. in one important way, however, the three living differs from the danse. its narrative centers on an encounter – a momentary occurrence – that brings together the world of the living and that of the dead. although transgressive, it is a fleeting moment that passes and from which the living will come back, thus functioning as a memento mori for the protagonists rather than a depiction of actual death as is the case with the danse. late medieval beliefs and burial customs insisted on a clear separation between the realm of the living and that of the dead. elaborate burial practices: anointing, embalming and shrouding the corpse, for example, were all symbolic of the process of purification and separation of the dead from the world of the living. a corpse in the process of decomposition was deemed especially dangerous, hence the practice of burying the bodies only until they de-fleshed after which point the bones were arranged in ossuaries that were typically left exposed. this is precisely why the innocents was such a popular burial ground, its corrosive soil could decompose the body in just over a week. that macabre cadavers are precisely the decomposing, dangerous scepters, and not the ‘safe’ fully de-fleshed skeletons, is one of the main anxieties inherent in this art. in the miniature from the psalter of robert de lisle, as in most other renditions of legend, the two realms are clearly separated. although the living and an especially useful summary of medieval burial practices can be found in binski’s medieval death. the dead converse, there is no physical contact between them and, more importantly, they occupy distinct spaces. arranged in a diptych-like composition, the living are placed against a barren background while the cadavers float (notice how their feet do not touch the ground) in a green- colored space adorned with an abstracted fleur-de-lys pattern. similar concerns are observed in the depictions of the legend in the printed books. in marchant’s the three living, the protagonists are depicted on separate folios, while the cross, located in the middle of the facing woodcuts, further distinguishes the two realms and possibly references the setting of the cemetery in which the danse also takes place (figs. and ). marchant’s rendition is perhaps more dramatic and engaging than the miniature from the ps alter because he includes more narrative elements: the figures are placed outdoors; the living, depicted as noblemen, not princes, are on their horses; and the three cadavers stand near a cave with a hermit in it. the sight of the specters is upsetting not only for the living, but for the animals as well – the horses recoil and the hunting birds are flying away from the gruesome scene. the role of the hermit in the image is especially curious. he is not just a passive observer of the dramatic encounter, he seems to participate in it holding a scroll and gesturing towards the three cadavers with a pensive expression. as kinch has noted, the hermit figure is more commonly found in italian, not french, renditions of the legend, as in, for instance, the famous triumph of death fresco from the campo santo in pisa created c. s. the link between marchant’s version of the legend and a possible italian model merits further research, but it is important to note here that, according to kinch, “the hermit’s role is to offer a model of sanctioned piety [and] inject a sense of proper meditative function.” a similar argument is echoed in marco piccat’s recent article on the italian renditions of the legend. as he argues, the hermit takes on a role “of a historian of sacred plays or kinch, imago mortis, . ibid. . marco piccat, “mixed encounters: the three living and the three dead in italian art”, mixed metaphors: the danse macabre in medieval and early modern europe, eds. sophie oosterwijk and stephanie knöll (newcastle upon tyne: cambridge scholars publishing, ) - , . the singer of oratories,” and is expected to comment, as if from the wings of the stage, on the story represented in the image. because the hermit was given a role of an active agent in the depictions of the legend, the dead in italian examples are thus reduced to silence an are often not even shown standing, but lying in their tombs and assuming the characters of the truly dead – as they are portrayed in the triumph from the campo santo. according to the story of the legend, the living do not die, they are merely warned. in this aspect, the legend differes significantly from the dance of death in which all living protagonists (save for the figure of the author) die the moment they enter the dance. moreover, if in the three living, the worlds of the living and the dead are clearly kept apart, in the danse that separation is removed. not only do the the living and the dead occupy the same space in depictions of the danse, the transgression is further emphasized in the way the dead physically engage with the living: pulling their arms, tugging on their clothes and stepping on their toes (figs. , , and ). the violent nature of this contact renders the living helpless and prevents them from escaping the deadly dance. in marchant’s wooducts, the dead are also armed with shovels, scythes, spears and coffin-lids, adding further to the sinister note of the image (figs. and ). in the context of late medieval beliefs and burial customs, the danse brings forth several frightening notions. in the image, the dead take the living by surprise; they pull them into the dance without warning and kill them instantly. although the living are given a chance to talk to the dead, ultimately, their dialogue is not productive because no living protagonist can argue his way out of death. in the danse, the living die a bad death. no figure in the image is given a chance to repent or confess, and no one is anointed by a priest or given the last rites. this is in stark contrast with the advice given in the manuals on good dying, or the ars moriendi, which were invented at the end of the fourteenth and early fifteenth century and were still, as we have seen earlier, extremely popular at the time the printed books were made. in the illustrated versions of the tract, the dying man, moriens, is shown ibid. . lying in bed and surrounded by a priest, family and friends. the bedside drama is made even more complex by the inclusion of demons who cluster around moriens and hide beneath his bed and the holy presences of christ, the virgin and the saints who also surround him. at the moment of his death, moriens is tempted and has to ponder the routes set out by demons and christ and the saints, “before choosing the latter path and commending his soul to god.” as binski has argued, the theme of the ars moriendi: …plays on the inescapability of death and also on the fragile, but fundamental character of human choice – moriens is in effect controlling the character of his own death , and so of his destiny. the most important thing is that he should die in a state of preparedness, that he should be ‘shriven’ (absolved) of his sins; to give someone ‘short shrift’ means to allow them little time for confessions and satisfaction before death, to treat them curtly. being in control of one’s death, like moriens, and adhering to the rules inscribed by the burial practices, including anoitment, washing and enshrouding the body, processions and interments, protected both the living and the dead and assured a proper transition into the afterlife. that such rituals were of pivotal importance to the late-medieval culture is also evident from the fact that books of hours commonly featured vignettes depicting specfic burial customs in the sections dedicated to the office of the dead. depictions of burial rites in manuscripts were especially for an electronic facsimile of vérard’s edition of l’art de bien vivre et de bien mourir (ars moriendi) published in paris in / see the edition preserved at the library of congress, rosenwald http://lcweb .loc.gov/cgi- bin/ampage?collid=rbc &filename=rbc _ rosen page.db binski . ibid. . on this issue see gloria fiero, “death ritual in fiffteenth-century manuscript illumination” journal of medieval history . ( ): - and alexandre- bidon, a réveiller les morts, especially pages - . prominent during the periods of the plague epidemics suggesting an interest in regulating funerary customs in the moments of crisis. desite the importance of burial rites, such rituals are not portrayed in the danse and the image does not even show an act of dying per se. save for the verses, which imply that the living are about to die, nothing in the image references dying specifically: there is no deathbed, no family members or mourners surround the victims and there is no hint at a proper burial that is to follow. even more disconcerting is the absence of any real sign of salvation or an afterlife for the protagonists in the image. although the dance of death is framed by a preacher-like figure of the author whose verses read like a sermon or homily, neither the image nor the text of the main part of the danse, the procession of the living and the dead make clear references to salvation or the judgment. discussing the verses of the danse, jane h.m. taylor has pointed out that the dialogue section of the text contains very little theological information that can ‘make sense’ of death. neither the image nor, perhaps more surprisingly, the verses of the french danse contain references, religious or teleological, that could help the beholder to grasp the meaning behind the composition. in the dialogue part of the danse, which consists of “some lines out of a total of ,” god is mentioned only ten times and three of those are exclamatory references (a dieu/ hee dieu), heaven is mentioned only once by the figure of the carthusian monk, hell and purgatory not at all and judgment only three times. as taylor explains: elina gertsman, “visualzing death: medieval plagues and the macabre” piety and plague: from the byzantium to the baroque, eds. franco mormando and thomas w orcester (kirksville, missouri: truman state up, ): - , . gertsman,the dance of death . jane h.m. taylor, “the danse macabre: reflections on black humor, with illustrations” comparative criticism: comedy, irony, parody (cambridge: cambridge up, ) - , . ibid. . for example, the carthusian does pray to god for his soul to be taken to heaven after he dies (plaise a dieu que lame ravie / soit es cielx apres mon trespas), yet this is, as taylor points out, the only instance in the poem that heaven is mentioned. addresing the lawyer, the cadaver reminds him that he will have to go to the great judge (au grant juge vous fault venir) to which he replies that god repays everything at a fair price on judgment day (a craindre est le jour de vengence / dieu rendra tout a juste pris). nor – even more surprisingly, perhaps – do the dead offer threats or rewards, heaven or hell, to the living: at no point whatsoever do they admonish them, or recommend further prayer or repentance. all that they do, consistently, is to point to the ironies and absurdities which their mere appearance creates […] the dead, in other words, are retrospective, not prospective: they invite their victims only to the immediacy of the dance, and not to any ‘beyond.’ because, as taylor convincingly argues, the dead in the danse focus, paradoxically, only on life, even the social customs and expectations that have shaped the world of the living become annulled. in the danse, bravery and strength are trumped over by death, status and wealth devoid of meaning (this point is especially problematic because one of the ways in which social identity is constructed in the image, and by extension in medieval society, is through costume and accouterments that the verses render pointless), and even science and knowledge are impotent (as we learn through the dialogue between death and doctor). in other words, salvation is not promised, or even directly mentioned in the danse, and the worldly order is emptied of meaning, leaving the audience very little to feel hopeful about. in fact, outside of specific theological teachings that could endow the composition with the things it is missing – a promise of an afterlife, a hint at ibid. . speaking to the emperor, the dead dismiss wordly status (et vous le non pareil du monde / prince et seigneur, grant emperiere / laisser fault la pomme dor ronde / armes: ceptre: timbre: baniere). also, the dead tell the king that his power and strength is no longer of any importance (venez noble roy couronne / renomme de force et proesse / jadis fustez environee / de grant pompez, de grant noblesse / mais mantenant toute hautesse/ lesseres vous nestes pas seul). likewise, knowledge and science are dismissed by the cadavers and rendered useless. the dead tell the astrologer that his knowledge of the stars will not actually save him from death (maister pour vostre regarde r/ en hault ne pour vostre clergie / ne povez la mort retarder / cy ne vault rien astrologie). the dead also tell the knight, who spent his days enjoying the parties and pretty women that now he has to enjoy a different kind of dance (vous qui entre les grans barons/ avez eu renon chevalier/ obliez trompettes, clarons/ et me suives sans sommelier/ les damses solies resveiller/ en faisant danser longue piece/a autre danse fault veillier). ibid. . judgment or a proof that pious life brings forth rewards – the danse becomes an image that is not necessarily very christian. the inherent ambiguity of the danse has been pointed out by numerous scholars and some, like mâle, natalie zemon davis and jean deleumau, have even argued that the intense focus on the gruesomeness of death and decomposition, could trigger in the viewer an opposite reaction: not a desire to live piously, but on the contrary, a need to embrace the earthly life in its fullest. it is true that the frame of the composition, consisting of the moralizing prologue of the author, placed the danse within a specific religious context, yet in the fifteenth century the majority of the audience viewing the mural in places like the innocents, would have been illiterate and thus likely unable to interpret the more sophisticated meaning behind the image. in the words of zemon davis, “the pictures alone have only one comment on death – it comes to high and low alike and can come at any time.” it did not help either that the satirical portrayal of ecclesiasts and laymen and the prickly tone of the verses, could, again, outside of the religious framework, be construed as a daring social critique or even, in the case of high clerics, downright blasphemy. consider, for instance, the cardinal’s lament who, when approached by death, expresses sorrow for losing his title and his robe, in other words, his status and material possessions, precisely the things the danse warns against (plus ne vestiray vert. ne gris/ chapeau rouge. chappe de pris); or the bishop who worries about being questioned by god (dieu vouldra de tout compte oir: cest ce que plus me desconforte). at the innocents, as we have seen, the hierarchical portrayal of upper class layman and clerics carried within a very poignant commentary on the political context in which the image emerged and there are reasons to believe that the same was true for other renditions as well. often times, the setting of the fresco examples of the danse helped to constrict and clarify some of the ambiguities. the image was almost always placed see natalie zemon davis, “holbein’s pictures of death and the reformation at lyons,” studies in the renaissance vol. ( ): - and jean delumeau, sin and fear: the emergence of a western guilt culture, th - th centuries, trans. eric nicholson (new york: st. martin’s press, ). davis . in churches or parish cemeteries where it could benefit from daily sermons – we will recall how impactful friar richard’s week-long preaching in front of the mural was, even if the account exaggerated the numbers somewhat – and it could also benefit from the accompanying pictorial programs. in fact, as we shall see, many late- fifteenth century versions of the theme seem to have adapted the composition of the danse precisely in order to make references to sin or judgment in more explicit terms, suggesting that very early on contemporaries recognized the inherent ambiguity of the composition and tried to correct it. the danse macabre mural at the benedictine monastery of la chaise-dieu in auvergne, completed in c. , is one example in which the composition was purposely modified (fig. ). although unfinished and poorly preserved, the mural stretches some twenty-six meters along the wall that separates the north aisle of the church from the choir. the placement of the image is especially appropriate: this part of the church was used by the monks to perform funerary rites and the stone slab on which they washed the dead was attached to the wall. executed in red and yellow chalk, which imbued the figures with an eerie, ghost-like appearance, the mural was painted on four panels intercepted by four protruding piers, which were also decorated with images. the dampness of the space, the style of execution and its unfinished state, all contributed to the fact that the line up of figures in this rendition of the danse is sometimes difficult to identify. contrary to the mural from the innocents, this image featured two female characters, the canoness and the religious w oman/nun, and it includes a scene of original sin painted on one of the pillars. the scenes portrayed on the pillars were applied directly onto the surface of the stone and not, as was done with the rest of the mural, on the underpaint, hence they faded over time and are now almost completely erased. however, in the nineteenth century, when the painting was in a better condition, achille jubinal made for a discussion of the fresco see gertsman, the dance of death; kinch, imago mortis; claudie pierre boisse, la danse macabre de la chaise-dieu (brioude: w atel, ), patrick rossi, la danse macabre de l’abbaye de la chaise-dieu: etude iconographique d’une fresque du xve siècle (le-puy-en-velay: jeanne d’arc, ) and véronique duchâteau, la danse macabre de la chaise-dieu (saint-ouen: la goélette, ). sketches of the entire fresco, which although not fully reliable, show that in addition to the author, the first pillar includes the figures of adam and eve standing next to the tree of knowledge. as elina gertsman has pointed out, the scenes depicted on the piers clearly do not comprise a part of the dance, but rather, illustrate another related didactic story, possibly the mors de la pomme, a fifteenth century anonymous moralizing poem that addresses original sin and its effect on the world. like the danse, the mors de la pomme features a variety of protagonists who are forced to come to terms with the inevitability of death and in that sense it is thematically and compositionally an appropriate choice to accompany the mural. by bringing together the figures of adam and eve and the author, the mural at the la chaise-dieu forges a connection between original sin that gave rise to death in the world and the “dance of death, the direct result of this sin.” painted on the same pier, the two iconographic themes were visually linked and, more significantly, the danse was now transformed into a larger narrative, which was placed within specific christian connotations. the ambiguity of the danse is almost certainly one of the reasons why the early printers felt compelled to include additional texts and images in the danse macabre books. marchant’s first edition, we will recall, included only the dance of death, but his augmented edition from june of , and, especially, the danse macabre des femmes, published in july of the same year, began to place the danse within a strict didactic setting. as mentioned earlier, the women’s danse of , included an elaborate subtitle which referred to the book as the miroir salutaire and promoted it as a self-help guide for all who desire to be saved. w hile marchant chose moralizing verses that highlighted the debate between the body and the soul gertsman, the dance of death . the scene on the remaining two pillars are difficult to interpret, at least two figures were painted on the second pier accompanied by two skeletons, one of which appears ready to shoot an arrow. the third pier had two skeletons and two men, one of whom was pierced by an arrow and the final pier included a group of people including also possibly another figure of the author or the hermit. see achile jubinal, la danse des morts de la chaise-dieu, fresque inedited du xve siècle (paris: didron, ). gertsman, the dance of death . ibid. . or listed pains of hell, subsequent printers expanded this further to include exhortation on good death, a text taken from the ars moriendi tracts, descriptions of the antichrist and the last judgment. husz’s edition took the christological references even further, by opening and closing the book with a full page illustration of the trinity or the throne of mercy. i would argue that in the context of the printed editions, adding complementary didactic texts and images was especially important since, unlike murals painted in public spaces of churches or cemeteries or miniatures included in prayer books, in printed books the danse was not initially surrounded with other religious imagery and thus particularly prone to volatile readings. part of the reason it was possible for marchant to add new figures to the danse or even to invent a new series with female protagonists, without necessarily compromising the theme, is the paradoxical quality embedded in its narrative structure. the danse, as gertsman observes, is “simultaneously deeply personal and widely accessible.” in fact, we should wonder, with gertsman, whether the danse is a narrative at all? the principles of narrative structure are based on concepts of transformation – a story has to lead to some form of conclusion/resolution for there to be any story at all. but, where does the danse lead? neither the printed image nor the fresco examples tell a story per se or provide a complete exemplum; rather they depict for the viewer a series of replicating encounters, albeit with different protagonists. in a way, each encounter between the living and the dead protagonists reads as a mini-narrative: death seizes the man, he complains and dialogues with death, the man dies. the image lacks narrative progression because, to cite gertsman again, “in its entirety, it is not driven by the sum of its protagonists’ desires: any one of them can be plucked out of the dance of death procession without disrupting its didactic lesson.” alternatively, new figures could also be added to the composition, as printers did in the illustrated books, without compromising the theme. i will discuss husz’s edition in more detail in the fifth chapter. ibid. . ibid. ibid. . the potential for the double reading of the danse may also be one of the reasons the early printers were attracted to the subject matter. on the one hand, it was possible for the viewer to understand the danse as a moralizing instructional lesson on the importance of piety and repentance and on the other, especially given the lack of reference to god or salvation in the verses and the problematic composition in which the act of dying is not actually shown, it was also likely that some viewers reached an alternate conclusion and decided to live life to its fullest, embracing their status and lusting over worldly goods. in an article on holbein’s simulachres, peter parshall argues that the message of the series was left purposely ambivalent because, as he states the “medium embraced the advantage of double readings not only as a commercial ploy encouraged by the open market but also as pitch that was consistent with an interest in prints as objects of exegesis.” although holbein’s pictures differ from the danse and they are a product of the intense religious climate of s, the universal theme of death, “at once familiar to all but experienced by none”, was a fitting choice for early printers as well because of its inherent adaptability. the theme was applicable to everyone – pour toutes gens: et de tous estaz, as marchant explains in his subtitle – and thus easily marketable, which was certainly appealing to early printers who were always at a risk of losing their business quickly if their books did not sell. at the same time, the composition of the danse was predicated on a portrayal of social classes, which always carried within a potential for double reading even if the books attempted to place the theme within a more constrictive framework. this is especially true for the danse macabre des femmes series which should be seen alongside other popular topsy-turvy subjects such as the ship of female-fools or the power of w omen topos that were commonly depicted in print medium. the former, as i will discuss in the fourth chapter, was especially similar to peter parshall, “hans holbein’s pictures of death,” hans holbein: paintings, prints, and reception, eds. mark roskill and john oliver hand (new haven and london: yale up, ) - , . ibid. . the women’s danse, which as scholars have shown, offered widely divergent portrayal of women, both misogynistic and celebratory. questions and issues judging by the number of the known editions, nineteen in total, by the end of the fifteenth century the danse macabre books were one of the most popular illustrated texts published in france. as paul needham recently noted, “even today, a printer or publisher who finds buyers for six or more editions of a text over a few years is seen as one who has identified a reliable market.” w hat is at stake then is not whether the books were popular, but why. w hat made the theme of the dance of death so appealing that the early printers would return to it with such frequency at the turn of the century? w hat accounts for so many adaptations not only within the medium of illustrated books, but in other media as well? the popularity of the printed books is typically discussed not through the context of the early printing industry or the conditions in france at the turn of the century, as would be logical, but in relation to the mural from which they developed. gertsman’s comment is particularly enlightening in this regard: ibid. . on the power of women theme see also keith moxey, peasants, warriors, and wives: popular imagery in the reformation (chicago: chicago up, ), natalie zemon davis. “w omen on top” society and culture in early modern france (stanford: stanford up, ) - and susan l. smith, the power of women: a topos in medieval art and literature (philadelphia: up pennsylvania, ). on the danse macabre des femmes see ann tukey harrison ed. the danse macabre of women ms. fr. of the bibliothèque nationale (kent, ohio: the kent state up, ); suzanne f. w emple and denise a. kaiser, “death’s dance of w omen”, journal of medieval history ( ): - and josette a. w isman, “un miroir déformant: hommes et femmes des danses macabres de guyot marchant”, the journal of medieval and renaissance studies . ( ): - . paul needham, prints in the early printing shops,” the woodcut in fifteenth- century europe, ed. peter parshall, new heaven and london: yale up, . - , . late-medieval woodcuts disseminated the idea of the dance of death, but did not aspire to originality, referencing, instead, famous large-scale painting. the popularity of the french editions – of marchant or vérard, for instance – was based primarily on the fact that they reproduced and later elaborated upon he existing mural at the parisian cemetery of the innocents. this statement amply summarizes previous scholarly attitudes regarding the printed books, which almost unanimously reduce them to mere copies and place them in a position subsidiary to the mural. part of the problem with the printed books has to do with the fact that the books are difficult to categorize. if, as gertsman argues, the books were primarily popular because “they reproduced … the existing mural”, should we not expect to find at least some reference to the mural in the printed books? there are none. marchant’s first edition, the only one that copied the mural closely, does not mention the innocents or the famous mural and neither do any of the other known editions published subsequently. certainly, in the late fifteenth century, the cemetery was still a popular gathering place; it was frequently mentioned in historical and literary texts of the period. the most famous french poet of the fifteenth century, françois villon, described the charniers of the innocents in his famous testament; poet jean meschinot also commented on the ossuaries and their piles of bones and, as one author recently noted, even françois rabelais evoked the horrors of the cemetery in an indirect way. the innocents was definitely famous enough to be the subject of the late sixteenth century painting discussed earlier in the text. the verses of the danse macabre mural were transcribed by john lydgate in the s and used as the basis for the london dance of death at the old st paul’s and it may have also served as the model for later french frescoes. occasional references to the mural were made in some historical accounts, most notably in the parisian journal and in guillebert de metz’s description of paris, which date from the first half of the fifteenth century. even still, gertsman,the dance of death . julie singer, “eyeglasses for the blind: redundant therapies in meschinot and villon,” fifteenth century studies ( ): - we have to wonder whether the mural was so well known that the audience, not just in paris, but in lyons, troyes, geneva, rouen and other places where the books were printed and sold would immediately recognize the illustrations as copies of the mural without any direct reference to it. besides, while the first edition was based on the mural and this may have contributed to the initial success of the series, in subsequent editions new figures and different texts were appended which effectively made the books into autonomous works with their own sets of issues and correlations, many of which have absolutely nothing to do with the mural. this brings me to the questions about the term “originality.” how can we say that marchant’s edition of the danse macabre of women is not an original work, or that it emulated an existing painting, when, as far as we know, no female characters were depicted in the original image? it is true, as i already pointed out, that the danse macabre des femmes poem was included in several manuscripts, which were not illustrated, and female characters were featured in some french illuminated manuscripts and fresco versions of the danse, but even still, marchant’s edition is an elaboration of the earlier renditions of the poem and no image included more than two women, let alone thirty-four. even if it was derived out of a literary tradition, marchant’s danse of women is still a novel work of art, for after all, most macabre images, including the mural from the innocents, emerged out of previous literature, but are still treated as original works. should this concept not be extended to printed books? and, if not, why? w hat reason is there, except for the oft-criticized practice of traditional art history favoring large scale works, to make the printed editions somehow less original because they reference a previous image or a text all the while producing a new, adapted work? nor should we treat marchant’s versions of the danse macabre of men as mere copies simply because the first edition reproduced the same characters as the mural. for one, as architectural historian robert berger pointed out in his discussion on public art in paris: .[…] the men’s danse macabre, taken from the innocents, marked the first time in the history of art that a fresco cycle was reproduced in its entirety. (previous efforts to record figural cycles, which are very rare, took the form of drawings or manuscript illuminations, which necessarily had a very limited circulation.) marchant’s publications are thus early demonstrations of the power of the new medium – the printing press – to record and disseminate works of visual art.” whether marchant’s edition was indeed the first time a fresco cycle was reproduced in its entirety is perhaps not as important (though it is certainly impressive) as the fact that the print medium did help to popularize the subject matter. while macabre art was widespread before the invention of printing, i am not sure that the theme would have trickled down into as many discourses and visual renditions had it not been for the printed books. as koerner has shown, german renaissance artists like albrecht dürer, hans baldung grien and others, were all influenced by macabre art and baldung’s death and the maiden series, in particular, was directly developed out of the dance of death tradition. the macabre figure of death personified was also included in early modern anatomical theaters where it was typically perched above the dissecting table and signified the famous memento mori message of nascentes morimur (“from the moment we are born, we begin to die”). and, as one author has recently argued, even the famous illustrations from andreas vesalius’ anatomical treatise de humani corporis fabrica libri septem, published in , which depict lone corpses posing in landscape, can be seen as examples of a danse macabre. the partially dissected corpses (or in some cases skeletons) standing in contrapposto or turning their backs to the viewer, are actually in robert w . berger, public access to art in paris: a documentary history from the middle ages to (university park, pennsylvania: penn state up, ) . ibid. . on anatomical theatres and dissection in early modern europe see jonathan sawday, the body emblazoned: dissection and the human body in renaissance culture (london: routledge, ). reinhard hildebrand, “anatomiche darstellungen zwischen kunst und wissenschaft,” zum streben schön: alter, totentanz und strbekunst von bis heute, eds., andrea von hülsen-esch and hitrud w estermann-angerhausen with stefanie knöll, vols. (regensburg: schnell and steiner, ) - . movement, much like the cadavers in a traditional danse – a point which can only be observed in its entirety once the single sheets are put one beside the other. furthermore, marchant added new text and images almost immediately after he published the first edition and, more crucially, began the practice of append ing additional illustrated poems in the danse macabre books, hence placing the theme in a wholly new context. just as the danse macabre frescoes in european churches are part of a larger iconographic program and should be – as gertsman convincingly argued with her discussion of the murals at meslay-le-grenet or berlin, for example – viewed together, text and images in an illustrated book are also part of a whole and their relationship to one another should not be ignored. one more point regarding the notion of originality must be made. in the realm of visual arts, the transition from medieval to renaissance france was marked by an unprecedented collaboration and cross-pollination of different media. as france was becoming more exposed to italy and the italian models of art and philosophy, the production of art and luxury objects was undergoing significant change. it was not only, as we have seen, that illuminators and printers collaborated frequently; rather artisans in different fields – from stained glass windows and tapestries to painted enamels and even playing cards were in close contact and often exchanged ideas and reused models. as authors of a recent exhibition catalogue on french art around explained: “[t]he impetus to create images in multiples and the corollary effect, the tendency to break up the creation of the work of art into a series of steps were among the most significant developments in the period.” creating or reusing models for stained glass windows, tapestries, embroideries or even sculpture was of course not a novel practice, but in this period the phenomenon took on an unprecedented scope. part of the reason was certainly the advent of printing, but also the fact that public “demand was not always directed toward unique, original works.” originality held very little value and copying from models was exactly the type of art making that the audience was looking for. the same argument is echoed taburet-delahaye and lepape, . ibid. ibid. in christopher w oods’ recent book on temporalities of german renaissance art, in which he explains that: in the fifteenth century … on the far horizon of the modern paradigm, things that are today considered works of art and therefore non-substitutable, like statues and paintings, were still constantly standing in for one another. copying was the normal way to make new things. basing a work of art on an established model did not therefore reduce the quality of the work, it did not diminish its ‘aura;’ on the contrary, it awarded it with a greater sense of importance. in such environment, the graphic arts assumed a dominant position and helped to diffuse iconographic themes and stylistic trends. the centrality of the book in the arts of the period should actually help explain how the same image of the danse existed simultaneously in several different media at the end of the fifteenth century. it is now almost a trope to suggest that in reproducing the mural, marchant had hinted on the original setting of the image, painted on the wall below the arcades, by placing the dancing pairs within an architectural frame consisting of arches and columns (figs. and ). the framing also helped to create a sense of continuity in a medium that was unable to reproduce the lengthy procession in a single image. w hile i agree with the latter argument – framing was so crucial in signaling continuity across folios that even husz used it in his otherwise completely unconventional rendering of the dance of death with the printers and the bookseller – i do wonder about it being a direct reference to the setting of the mural. as otto pächt has shown in relation to illuminated manuscripts, using an architectural framework, be it a simple arch and column, or the elaborate gothic framing we find w oods . this argument is reproduced in nearly every study on the danse, even the more recent ones. gertsman, for instances, writes: “marchant’s editio princeps, extant in one examplar, places the protagonists within arches that echo the arches of the cemetery cloister where the original fresco was pained,” . in discussing the translation into print medium, clark explains that the “ornamental arcading of the woodcuts corresponds to the stone arches in the original,” . in miniatures painted by jean colombe, for example, had been a useful pictorial device that helped ‘anchor’ an image to the page since the time codices replaced rolls. such framing prevented a miniature (or in this case a woodcut) from ‘floating’ on the page and aided the act of simultaneous reading and viewing of images and texts in a manuscript – a process very different from viewing other forms of visual arts. w e should remember that marchant’s first edition was one of the earliest illustrated books published in pairs and that it was made in the period of transition from scribal to printing culture, at the time when the new medium still borrowed heavily from the manuscript tradition. dupré’s missale, for example, the first illustrated book printed in paris, reused border decoration from illuminated manuscripts produced at the time to create a distinctly french style of illustration. illuminators worked simultaneously for scribal and printing workshops and publishers like vérard frequently copied miniatures from manuscripts in their printed books. even the typeface in this period still resembled handwriting, so it is not surprising that all other aspects of bookmaking were steeped in scribal tradition. is it possible then, that the framing in marchant’s editions is an example not of the printer’s desire to emulate the original architectural setting of the mural from the innocents, but of the new medium’s emerging pictorial language that was, at the time, in the process of being established? this is all the more possible – and i would even argue highly likely – given the fact that the exact style of framing is found in other illustrated books of the period. for instance, a number of incunabula editions of the speculum humanae salvationis, printed in the s and s, feature an almost identical frame (henceforth speculum). in the speculum, the corresponding stories from the old and the new testament are juxtaposed; hence the book shows double scenes per otto pächt, book illumination in the middle ages: an introduction, trans. kay davenport (oxford and london: harvey miller publisher and oxford up, ) . for an illustration from an edition of the speculum printed in utrecht in c. preserved at the library of congress as incun. x. s rosenwald collection see https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/d/d /loc_shs.jpg page framed, like the danse, by arches and columns. even more impressive is the overall similarity in the layout of the page between the two works, which further suggests that the printers at this time were working towards formulating a uniform pictorial design for illustrated books (figs. and ). arches and columns are also used as frames in the xylographic editions of the biblia pauperum, although in this book each page depicts several typologically connected scenes that are anchored into a larger architectural framing. vérard had also used the same framing for his edition of l’art de bien vivre et de bien mourir, published in / . more importantly, however, a similar framing is found in illuminated manuscripts of the period, such as, for instance, in the manuscript of jacques d’armagnac (bn, ms. fr. ) made before , and even in tapestries woven at the time, as in those depicting the life of the virgin from the church of notre-dame in beaune, which were based on the design by the dijon painter pierre sprice created in but not woven until . these examples point to the level of exchange across multiple media that defined the turn of the century in france, but also demonstrates the importance of studying the danse macabre books alongside other works produced in the same period. in the speculum editions, the column in the middle splits the two narratives. while in marchant’s books, the middle column is not shown probably in order to emphasize the processional aspect of the danse, in vérard’s editions there is a middle column. for a discussion of the history of the speculum in both manuscripts and printed editions see adrian w ilson and joyce lancaster w ilson, a medieval mirror: speculum humanae salvationis - (berkeley and oxford: california up, ). see footnote . see footnote . the miniatures from the manuscript of jacques d’armagnac are discussed and reproduced in mâle, - . the tapestry depicting the life of the virgin from beaune is discussed and reproduced in philippe lorentz, “the genesis of the w ork of art: the patron and the artist in france around ,” kings, queens and courtiers: art in early renaissance france, ed. martha w olff (new haven and london: the art institute of chicago and yale up, ) - , and in fabienne joubert, “nouvelles propositions sur la personnalité artistique de pierre spicre, la splendeur des rolin: un mécénat privé à la cour de bourgogne, ed. maurice- chabard (autun and paris, ) - . the questions raised thus far emphasize the importance of studying the danse macabre books both in the context of the history of printing and in relation to other media produced at the time. the transitional nature of many editions reflects the deep connection between scribal and printing culture of the period, which goes beyond a mere experiment with form and effects the books’ expressive and iconographic meaning, to say nothing of the way it impacts the viewer. following camille, we should wonder whether in leafing through vérard’s hybrid volume “the readers duped themselves into believing that this was a handwritten as well as a hand –painted page.” the wide range of editions within a single series – from nicole de la barre’s quarto format in which the verses and the woodcuts did not always match, husz’s composite volume comprised of woodcuts designed by different artists to vérard’s would-be manuscripts – suggests, as camille has argued, that in the fifteenth century “there were obviously some viewers who wanted to read and some who were more concerned with the “art” in the text.” while studies on macabre art pay little attention to the range of editions or formats in which the books circulated, recent scholarship on early print medium emphasizes the importance of considering materiality and adaptability of these printed images. arguably the most important recent contribution to the study of early prints was the - exhibition origins of european printmaking: fifteenth century woodcuts and their public that highlighted the practical function of early prints which went beyond the aesthetic appeal as many images were pasted into manuscripts, edited, inscribed or otherwise manipulated by their initial audience. there is evidence of the reader’s presence in the danse macabre books as well, as i will discuss in the fifth chapter. the issue of reception has also been at the core of most recent texts on macabre art and the dance of death in particular. one of the most productive aspects of gertsman’s approach has been her interest in locating the viewer of the dance of death murals. in discussing examples from tallinn, lübeck, berlin or camille ibid. . peter w . parshall and rainer schoch, eds. origins of european printmaking. meslay-le-grenet, gertsman continually paid attention to how the audience related to the image, where they stood in relation to it, how they moved along with the mural and how the composition affected the viewing experience. no rendition of the danse is exactly the same and, in fact, each mural adapts or manipulates the theme to fit its architectural or pictorial program. the same can be said about the printed books. if we consider each edition as a space and pay attention to all aspects of the books – images, texts, title pages, colophons, subtitles, or page layouts – we see how differently the theme functions in different books. the transitional aspect of bookmaking in the late fifteenth century has been much studied in the past, but new texts on the french context have expanded the scope of study to include works produced in other media, especially enamels, textiles, stained glass and panel paintings. for example, ina nettekoven’s study has identified a group of artists associated with the ypres family that have been responsible for producing designs for the fifteenth century stained glass rose windows at the sainte chapelle and the metalcuts and woodcuts used for printed books of hours published in paris. the diffusion of models across multiple media has been a subject of a recent dissertation that discusses painting and luxury arts in paris and it was also a subject of major exhibition held at the grand palais in paris and at the art institute of chicago in . as the curators of the exhibition pointed out, “the exuberant outpouring of activity in all media, including monumental bibliography on the transition from scribal to printing culture is extensive, for our purposes useful studies include sandra hindman and james douglas farquhar eds, pen to press: illustrated manuscripts and printed books in the first century of printing (college park: university of maryland, ); david mckitterick, print, manuscript and the search for order, - ; sandra hindman, ed. printing the written word: the social history of books - ; isabelle delaunay, “echanges artistiques entre livres d’heures manuscrits et imprimés produit à paris,” diss., u of lille iii, ; henri-jean martin, roger chartier and jean-pierre vivet,eds. histoire de l’édition française, tome i, le livre conquérant: du moyen age au milieu du xviie siècle (paris: promodis, ). ina nettekoven, der meister der apokalypsenrose der sainte chappelle und die pariser buchkunst um , ars nova (turnhout: brepols, ). katherine eve baker, “painting and the luxury arts in paris, - : objects and their urban contexts,” diss. u of virginia, and martha w olff ed., kings, queens and courtiers. works of sculpture, stained glass, tapestry, refined and intimate illuminated manuscripts, luminous painting on panel, goldsmithwork and prints (then an innovative new medium)” created at the turn of the century have generally been overlooked, even by french scholars, in favor of the glamorous arts produced at the court of francis i just a decade later. my project aligns with this emerging area of focus on the art produced around as the makers of the danse macabre books were active participants in the artistic exchange of the period and helped diffuse the image of the danse in multiple media while also borrowing from other arts to define an essentially french style of illustration in the books they made. the danse macabre books were also a product of transition from one historical epoch to another. the period between to the s, precisely the time the books were most frequently published, was marked by religious upheaval in the w estern church, the rise of humanism, discoveries of the new lands and the emerging interest in the body evident from the scientific and medical treatises produced at the time. it is through the medium of print that many of these ideas were diffused and the danse macabre books, as i will show, are directly or indirectly implicated in the changes that marked the period. for example, part of the humanist discourses at the turn of the century involved a revival of classical theatre in france. the comedies of terence were especially popular and published in multiple editions, sometimes with illustrations, by printers such as husz and vérard. terence’s comedies, much like the danse, invited responses from their audiences through prologues and speeches directed at them and it is probably not a coincidence that the early printers were interested in the theme of the dance of death, which featured strong performative components. before these issues can be explored, however, we must first turn our attention to the study of printers and publishers in fifteenth-century france. w olff . chapter three death and the business of printing: guy marchant and the production of the danse macabre books the printers and the bookseller – new figures in the dance of death folio b in mathias husz’s edition of the danse macabre depicts two distinct spaces: the printing workshop and the bookstore (fig. ). although the thin column, placed to the right, slightly off centre, visually separates the two scenes, they are nevertheless linked through a common narrative. in fact, the woodcut functions much like a diptych and the column – its round base protruding into our space and giving it a sense of three-dimensionality – both splits and hinges the two ‘panels’ together. in the scene on the left, two grinning cadavers are snatching away the printers. the workers are caught unexpectedly, surprised in the middle of the various printing tasks. seated on the bench on the far left, the compositor is still in the process of completing a line of text; he is holding the composing stick and picking out the type from the table in front of him. performing one of the most challenging tasks in the printing workshop, the compositor needed to master a series of movements and work quickly handling letters without pausing or looking. to although the technique of manual typesetting is now rarely used, except in specific artisanal workshops, the process has hardly changed since the beginning of printing. on the techniques used by the early printers see lucian febvre and henri- jean martin, the coming of the book: the impact of printing - , trans. david gerard, ed. geoffrey nowell-smith and david w ootton (london: nlb, ). as febvre and martin explain: “the equipment used is much the same: the compositor stands in front of a ‘case’, a large wooden cabinet subdivided into a series of pigeon holes each containing a different letter or sign. he takes out letters one at a time and places them in his composing ‘stick’, a small slotted receptacle, formerly wooden, now metal. w hen a line of type has been assembled in the stick (i.e. ‘composed’) the compositor places it in a ‘galley’, a small tray in which the lines acquire such dexterity, he had to become an “automaton,” much like the modern typist at the keyboard. the intensity of his focus is captured in the compos itor’s expression. although he tilts his head towards the cadaver, his expression seems withdrawn, as if he has not yet realized what is occurring. w hile the other two printers resist the dead – their open mouths imply that they are also screaming – the compositor is oddly resigned. the second cadaver halts the process of printing. death removes the pressman’s hand from the bar and prepares to drag him away. the pressman’s body shows signs of marked resistance – his right foot is pushed against the body of the press and firmly planted on the ground, his torso pulling away from the cadaver. the other printer, partially visible in the background, is also resisting. although the inker is not actually seized by death (yet?), he attempts to defend his working companion. the inker points his ‘weapon’ at the cadaver, but his effort is futile because the leather ball stuffed with hair or wool will be no match for the awful attacker. the bookseller in the panel on the right does not fare much better. trapped in the tight space between the bookshelves and the counter, the libraire despite attempts to escape, but really has nowhere to go. death stretches his bony arm over the counter and grabs the bookseller by the sleeve of his dress. putting an end to the reading (and the selling) of books, the cadaver tells the bookseller to let go of his books (laissez vos livres maintenant), one of which lies open on the counter. husz’s woodcut is about printing and about death. in the image, he successfully merged the representation of printing with macabre sensibility and in so doing opened up the scene to multiple readings. inherent in the composition of the woodcut is the emphasis on mechanical reproduction of books, hence the of type are held, with a ‘lead’ between each line (the leads are small lead pieces which do not register and which keep the lines apart). he then groups the lines onto pages and assembles the pages in the forme where they are secured with wooden wedges and firmly tied together,” . nowadays, the compositor can tell by touch which letter he is taking out of the case by feeling for the notch cut in its shank. however, early types were not notched and the compositor had to use his eyes to check the letters before placing them in the stick. to be able to work fast, it was necessary that the letters be arranged in the same order in every case he had to work at. febvre and martin . arrangement of printers along the specific steps of production: typesetting, inking, printing, selling and even reading. husz provides not only visual clues to assist the viewer in understanding the sequential process of printing – assembling the lines of the text, pulling the press, selling the books – but the verses placed below the woodcut also reference the words associated with printing such as “presses,” “capses” and “les imprimeurs.” the text of the poem makes reference to the scope of printers’ work as well – they publish books on a variety of disciplines: law, theology and poetry (imprime avons tous les cours. de la saincte theologie. loix /decret / y poeterie). husz therefore comments not only on how the printed books are made, but also what printers are capable of producing and in so doing advertises his profession and his shop. the importance of printers as the new members of society is emphasized in husz’s printers. w hile in the dance of death, social classes are always depicted by a single figure (the abbot, the king, the hermit), in the woodcut the printers are shown by three different individuals and the verses refer to them in plural – les imprimeurs – not in the singular, as is the case with all other protagonists. moreover, in the social hierarchy of the danse, husz places the printers and the bookseller between the figures of the astrologer and the bourgeois and the canon and the merchant, thus giving them a fairly elevated status. how accurate was this placement? as miriam usher chrisman explains: “by traditional definition [printers] were artisans and craftsmen. in reality, they enjoyed a higher status.” in practice, a social status of a printer was rather difficult to define and there was, as husz portrayed in the woodcut, a very specific hierarchy within a printing workshop. the typesetter, or compositor, had an important role in the workshop. he was typically more educated than the pressman and thus had a more secure job and a better relationship with the head printer. the pressmen and inkers were the lowest paid among workers and it was not unusual to find them working for a workshop for a time before they moved on to another press or another town altogether since they miriam usher chrisman, lay culture, learned culture: books and social change in strasbourg - (new heaven: yale up, ) . often belonged to the strata of journeyman. unlike compositors who were generally well paid, the pressmen’s job and financial future were seldom secured. the status of the head printer, as well, varied greatly. master printers with an established shop and a steady clientele, like husz, were fairly wealthy. on the other hand, printers whose enterprise depended on employment from the bookseller- publisher had a very different status. add to this the fickleness of the industry, especially pronounced in the early years of printing, when many head printers opened stores only to find their business dwindle and collapse within months. the social position of the bookseller, another type inserted in the danse by husz, was a bit different. the libraire was a profession of long standing, though, again, the precise social position of a bookseller depended on many factors. the advent of printing began to change the scope of the bookseller’s profession – although many sold printed works along with manuscripts – only a handful recognized the possibilities of the new industry and adapted their business accordingly. printing also gave rise to the figure of the libraire-publisher, typically a wealthy bourgeois who employed numerous presses to print the work, which he then sold through his numerous outposts. some printers sold their stock in a shop appended to their workshop – perhaps this is the setting husz portrayed in the woodcut – but it was more common for books to be printed in a workshop and then sold in shops across the town or country. much of the distribution of early printed works also lay in the hands of the libraire-publisher who had connections and bookstores in multiple places and could dispose of stock fairly quickly. the dichotomy set up by the printers and the bookseller in husz’s images is interesting febvre and martin . chrisman is especially good in pointing out the speed in which many early printing workshops opened and closed in strasbourg as a result of poor business choices of their owners. for a discussion of booksellers in france, see richard a. rouse and mary a. rouse, manuscripts and their makers: commercial book producers in medieval paris - , vol. (turnhout, belgium: harvey miller publishers, ), especially pages - .the difficulty in defining social status, however, was not unique to printers and booksellers. the same can be said about late medieval merchants. some of them were quite wealthy and even held positions of prominence in the city, while others were simple owners of store. precisely because it reflects the collaborative, but also complicated relationship that was established between these two groups in the early years of printing, as i will discuss in this chapter. printers often worked for booksellers, but could also occasionally become booksellers. the bookseller, at least theoretically, had a high er social position, but in the woodcut the bookseller comes after the printers, perhaps because husz was more concerned with emphasizing the process of making rather than selling books. early printing in france ( - ) the printing industry portrayed in husz’s woodcut arrived in france rather late. the first printing workshop was established in , in paris, almost two decades after johannes gutenberg had begun printing in mainz. the first press, erected in the precincts of the old sorbonne, was not really set up as a business venture but rather as “a service to the cause of learning,” explains colin clair, by two professors of the university, guillaume fichet (d. ) and jean heynlin (d. ). both associated with the faculty of theology, fichet and heynlin were great admirers of ancient rome and of the latin classics and formed a circle of scholars and students interested in studying humanist texts. although manuscript colin clair, a history of european printing (london, new york and san francisco: academic press, ) . the history of the first press in france and the list of works published by this workshop has been much discussed, see: anatole claudin, the first paris press: an account of the books printed for g. fichet and j. heynlin in the sorbonne, - (london: chiswick press, ); febvre and martin, the coming of the book; jean-marie dureau, “les premiers ateliers français,” histoire de l’édition française, tome i, le livre conquérant: du moyen age au milieu du xviie siècle, eds. henri-jean martin, roger chartier and jean-pierre vivet (paris: promodis, ), - ; henri-jean martin, mise en page et mise en texte du livre français: la naissance du livre moderne (xive – xviie siècles) (tours: editions du cercle de la librairie, ); and jeanne veyrin-forrer, “aux origins de l’imprimerie française: l’atelier de la sorbonne et ses mécènes,” la lettre et le texte: trente années de recherches sur l’histoire du livre (paris, ) - . although the first workshop did not open in france until , printed texts were known and even sold in paris for several years prior. german printers johann fust copies of some latin classics were readily available, this circle of scholars felt the need for accurate texts of sallust, cicero and virgil, which at the time were rare and faulty. w ith the aim of printing sound copies of ancient texts, fichet and heynlin set up the first press and invited three german printers, ulrich gering, michael friburger and martin crantz, who arrived in paris at the end of , to run it. in the summer of the following year, they published the first book printed in france – the epistolae (letters) written by gasparino of bergamo (gasparinus barzizus) (d. ), which was intended to provide students with an example of elegant and artful writing in latin. the second book printed by fichet’s and heynlin’s press was yet another work by gasparino, a treatise on the orthography of latin words arranged alphabetically, entitled gasparini pergamensis orthographiae liber (ortographia) published in january of . over the next two years, the press published thirty works, including texts by sallust, valerius maximums, cicero’s de officiis (on duties), lorenzo valla’s elegantiae linguae latinae and fichet’s own work rhetorica in which he summarizes the principles of correct latin prose. although the first french press was by all accounts successful – the frequency of publications over the three years the workshop was open attests to that – the market was soon saturated. the circle of humanists in paris was rather small and the clientele interested in purchasing fichet’s and heynlin’s edition limited. and peter schöffer, who together with gutenberg were the pioneers of the printing industry, sold some of their stock in paris and fust visited the city several times on business. according to febvre and martin, fust even had a permanent agent in paris, hermann of statboen. see febvre and martin - . for further information on selling printed books in paris prior to , see rouse and rouse - . febvre and martin . clair . gering was from constance, friburger was born in colmar, alsace, but spent time in basel where we was an arts graduate and probably met heynlin there and crantz was from heynlin’s home town of stein in baden. gasparino of bergamo was an italian grammarian and teacher known for introducing a new style of epistolary latin inspired by the works of cicero. claudin - . consisting of leaves, orthographia was twice the size of the epistolae and, as claudin explains, later copies included two additional treatises, de diphthongis by guarini of verona and de arte punctandi, heynlin’s own text on the art of punctuation. febvre and martin . ibid. . moreover, by late fichet relocated to rome and heynlin resigned from his post as a corrector and as a result the workshop at the sorbonne was permanently closed by april of . the german printers, led by gering, relocated the printing workshop to the rue st. jacques, near the church of st. benoit, at the sign of le soleil d’or (the golden sun). w hile the new workshop continued to print some classical texts, most notably of virgil, once they moved gering and his associates had to widen the repertoire of publications in order to appeal to a larger audience and this meant printing devotional works, treatises on morality and manuals for confessors, all of which were sure to sell. the circumstances surrounding the opening and closing of the first paris press reflect the entrepreneurial nature of the printing industry. as historians lucian febvre and henri-jean martin have argued, “[t]here is no better example of the frame of mind in which, and the motives for which, a small group of clerics could be led to invite some printers into town; nor of the favorable conditions, and the freedom to alter their business strategy, which allowed these early printers to succeed in establishing themselves and prosper.” w hile fichet and heynlin may not have thought of their workshop as a business venture in a true sense of the term, the rules that governed the world of early printing and publishing nevertheless informed the working of their enterprise. as examples of successful – and even more so – failed printing ventures demonstrate, to run a profitable business a printer had to identify an audience (in the case of the first press, this was the circle of humanist scholars), establish connections with printers and publishers beyond their own town and country and, most crucially, be willing to adapt and adjust to the demands of the often fickle marketplace. for the present study, understanding the nunances of the early printing in france and especially the marketing strategies of the makers of illustrated books is particularly important because, as i will argue, adaptations of th e claudin . ibid. . febvre and martin . ibid. . as mentioned earlier, chrisman’s text is great in highlighting the number of short- lived presses established in strasbourg. danse in the printed books were often directly influenced by the workings of the industry. although slow to arrive in france, the printing industry spread fairly quickly. by the time gering relocated from the sorbonne and opened a new workshop at the soleil d’or in , he was no longer the only printer with an atelier in paris. on the same street, two houses away from gering’s workshop, another press opened at the sign of chevalier au cygne (the knight and the swan), run by two germans, peter kaiser, a master of arts, and his associate johann stoll. other presses soon followed and by there were about ten printing workshops operating in paris, many located on the rue st. jacques, which became the hub of printing workshops in the city. even more importantly, the industry expanded beyond paris. in , three years after fichet and heynlin printed the first book in france, lyons was endowed with its own press. a native of liège, guillaume le roy, brought printing to lyons and on september , he published compendium breve by pope innocent iii. contrary to paris where the first press was associated with the university, le roy’s immediate financier was a wealthy merchant named fevre and martin . ibid. . in france, kaiser was known by several names: petrus caesaris, pierre césar, and pierre w agner. latin or french forms of names were often given to foreign printers. clair . the origins and spread of printing in france is a topic that goes beyond the scope of this chapter and my dissertation in general. my goal is to highlight some of the main episodes in the history of the early presses in france in order to produce background for the development of illustrated books and the danse macabre series in particular, not offer an extensive account of printers and presses in existence at the time. for a detailed account of the history of early printing in france see: anatole claudin, histoire de l’imprimerie en france au xve et au xvie siècle, vols. i-iv (paris: impr. natonale, - ); philippe renouard, imprimeurs parisiens, libraires, fondeurs de charactères et correcteurs d’imprimerie, depuis l’introduction de l’imprimerie à paris ( ) jusqu’à la fin du xvie siècle (paris: letters modernes, ). a good overview of early french printing can be found in british museum, department of printed books, catalogue of books printed in the xvth century now in the british museum vol. viii (london: the trustees of the british museum, ) especially pages ix-xviii (henceforth bmc). clair . barthelémy buyer. in fact, the workshop was set up in buyer’s house and it was his name, and not le roy’s, that typically appeared in the colophons of the books issues by this press. buyer was likely introduced to the art of printing in the s when, as a student in the faculty of arts in paris, he must have met fichet and heynlin. as febvre and martin explain, “it is obvious that buyer well understood the twin possibilities latent in the new art [of printing] – as an agency for the diffusion of culture and a means of earning a return on capital.” moreover, it was buyer, not the printer, who chose texts for printing and in so doing paved the way for the type of publishing that was to become unique to lyons – books in french for merchants and the bourgeoisie as well as legal collections. buyer was also a financier and not content to sell only works published by his press. paving the road for later bookseller-publishers – a profession established in the late fifteenth century and best described as a precursor to modern day publishing houses – buyer obliged other printers from lyons to entrust the sale of some of their work to him and both french and foreign booksellers came to him to help sell off their stock. eventually, buyer even opened branches of his store in other french towns where there was a demand for reading matter, such as paris, toulouse and avignon. lyons was not a university town, but it was a major commercial center and one of the most prosperous cites in france. w hile printers in paris, at least at the beginning of printing, catered predominately to the demands of students and teachers at the university and published mainly scholastic works in latin, the presses in lyons specialized in popular and often illustrated works, in french, that appealed to the general reading public. this included devotional texts, historical ibid. . ibid. . as clair explains, during buyer’s lifetime – he died in july of – le roy’s name is mentioned only on three occasions, in , and . febvre and martin . buyer came from a wealthy family. his father, pierre buyer, was a rich local notable who was also devoted to studies of the law – obtaining a doctorate in law just a few months before his death in . ibid. . ibid. . ibid. . ibid. . treatises, legal documents and chivalric romances. although printing houses in paris eventually expanded their repertoires to include a range of popular works, including editions of the danse, the dichotomy between the presses in paris and lyons remained for the duration of the fifteenth century. printers in lyons benefited greatly from the town’s geographical location – on the great commercial route between the ile-de-france, burgundy and mediterranean countries – and from the lyons fairs, held four times a year which brought together merchants from all over europe. for these reasons, lyons proved to be a good market for printed books and before the end of the fifteenth century about printers had worked there, most of them, like husz, of german descent. actually, german printers in lyons were so predominant that printers as a social class became known simply as les allemands. after the opening of presses in commercial and cultural centers of paris and lyons, printing spread to french provinces including albi in , toulouse in , angers in , vienne and chablis in and poitiers and caen in . the industry expanded so quickly that by the end of the fifteenth century about french towns had working presses, though the majority of editions were still published in paris and lyons. in these two cities, the number of printing workshops also grew dureau . clair . the lyons fair took place four times yearly between and . each fair lasted fourteen days and all merchants, except the english, were admitted. in the fair was suppressed because several provinces, most notably languedoc, were envious of the town’s commercial success. however, the four fairs, with all their privileges were re-established in by louis xii. ibid. . ibid. . ibid. . for a good discussion of the way printing was set up in a french province see diane e. booton, manuscripts, market and the transition to print in late medieval brittany, farnham (surrey, england and burlington, vt: ashgate, ). typically, the presses were initially set up in towns that were either affiliated with a university or that were located in a close proximity to a paper mill. as dureau explains, while there was indeed a rapid growth in the number of new presses established in different towns in france in the last two decades of the fifteenth century, paris and lyons still produced about % of printed works, see dureau . rapidly and by there were working presses in paris alone. although france still lagged behind italy in book production, it was catching up fast. for example, between and , venice – which by this time had become the capital of printing – produced editions and paris only ; between and venice published editions, paris and lyons . by the end of the fifteenth century, printing was thus becoming an alluring industry in france and the number of presses that surfaced in paris, lyons and elsewhere point to the demand for printed works and the willingness of printers to join the market and open new workshops. editions of the danse were first published when the printing industry was still in the process of developing and are, as i will elaborate later in the chapter, often indicative of the changes brought about by the rapid spread of printing in france. between script and print: the book in the transitional period the transition from handwritten books to the world of movable type was not immediate. printing did not instantly replace manuscript production and, in fact, r. j. knecht, the rise and fall of renaissance france, - , nd ed. (oxford: blackwell, ) . ibid. . ibid. . in the past, scholars tended to emphasize the profound and almost instantaneous affect the printing revolution had on all aspects of late medieval and, especially, early modern society. this was especially the view in elizabeth eisenstein’s hugely influential book the printing press as an agent of change first published in , which played a central role in shaping the study of print culture and book history, see elizabeth l. eisenstein, the printing press as an agent of change: communications and cultural transformations in early-modern europe (cambridge and new york: cambridge up, ). in recent years, eisenstein’s book has been criticized by scholars who argue that the process of transition from script to print was more prolonged than her study implies. in particular, mckitterick has suggested that many changes associated with printing were only gradually absorbed over years, from the invention of printing in the s to the early nineteenth century. as mckitterick argues: “it is misleading to speak of any transition from manuscript to print as if it were a finite process, let alone an orderly one, or indeed that the process was all in one direction. […] the printing revolution, a phrase taken to heart by some historians, was no revolution in the sense that it wrought instant change. the revolution was the two forms of bookmaking continued to coexist well into the sixteenth century. for these reasons, book historians typically describe the late fifteenth century as a ‘transitional period’ and emphasize the hybrid nature of books and manuscripts produced at the time. as elizabeth eisenstein has recently noted, during this period script and print were so intertwined that sellers and readers of books seldom differentiated between manuscripts and printed texts: whereas manuscripts and printed products are now assigned to separate categories by curators and dealers, fifteenth-century readers found both kinds of books for sale in the same locales, often in the same shops. purchasers placed them together in the same cabinets or on the same shelves and sometimes had them covered by the same bindings. the contrast with twentieth century is striking […] moreover, during the fifteenth century a carryover of format and layout reinforced the impression of similarity when discussing a particular text, readers did not always make clear whether it was hand-copied or not. part technological, and part bibliographical and social. it was prolonged, and like many revolutions its progress was irregular, and its effects were variable, even erratic” (p. ). see mckitterrick. eisenstein’s study sparked many debates among print culture specialists and book historians, see for example: sabrina alcorn baron, erin n. lindquist and eleanor f. shelvin, agent of change: print culture studies after elizabeth l. eisenstein (amherst and boston: massachusetts up in association with the center for the book, library of congress, w ashington d.c., ); adrian johns, the nature of the book: print and knowledge in the making (chicago: chicago up, ); margaret j. m. ezell, social authorship and the advent of print (baltimore: johns hopkins up, ); or sandra hindman, ed., printing the written word: the social history of books, circa - (ithaca: cornell up, ). on the issue of coexistence of manuscripts and prints see: mckitterick, especially chapters and , paul needham, “prints in the early printed shops,” the woodcut in the fifteenth-century europe, ed. peter parshall (new heaven and london: yale up, ), - and j. b. trapp, ed., manuscripts in the fifty years after the invention of printing (london: w arburg institute, ). elizabeth l. eisenstein, divine art, infernal machine: the reception of printing in the west from first impressions to the sense of an ending (philadelphia and oxford: pennsylvania up, ) . eisenstein’s first chapter, “first impression” is also an excellent recent overview of the relationship between scribal and printed culture. at the same time, as eisenstien also notes, it would be wrong to assume that the advent of printing did not make a striking impression on at least some contemporaries. part of the reason that makes the transitional period so interesting is the impossibility of defining it in absolute terms. contemporary attitudes towards printing ranged immensely from “committed acclamation” to “absolute rejection.” certain aspects of printing were immediately embraced. for example, the advantages of typography over hand-copying were frequently emphasized and so, in , fichet, the founder of the first french press, praised the new art in a letter he attached to some printed copies of gasparino’s ortogtaphia: bacchus and ceres were made divinities for having taught humanity the use of wine and bread. gutenberg’s invention is of a higher and more divine order. it enables all that had been thought and said, to be preserved and transmitted to posterity. likewise, the legibility of the type over handwritten text was lauded as was the ability of the press to produce multiple and identical copies. w hile evidence of “absolute rejection” of printing are rare in this period, there is one oft-quoted example in which the invention of printing is discussed in negative terms. w ritten in by the benedictine abbot johannes trithemius ( - ), the treatise entitled in praise of scribes (de laude scriptorum) discusses the effects of printing on the nature of the written word and highlights especially the impermanence of paper as the medium: all of you know the difference between a manuscript and a printed book. the word written on parchment will last a thousand years. the printed word is on for a thorough discussion of this issue see eisenstein’s first chapter. martin lowry, the world of aldus manutius (ithaca: cornell up, ) . quoted in eisenstein, divine art . in a letter written in by aeneas sylvius piccolomini (future pope pious ii) to a spanish cardinal it was said that the [printed] text was exceedingly clean, that it was without error and that it could be read without glasses. quoted in eisenstein, divine art, . paper. how long will it last? the most you can expect a book of paper to survive is two hundred years. yet, there are many who think they can entrust their works to paper. only time will tell. yes, many books are now available in print but no matter how many books will be printed, there will always be some left unprinted and worth copying. no one will ever be able to locate and buy all printed books. even if all works ever written would appear in print, the devoted scribe should not relax in his zeal. on the contrary, he will guarantee permanence to useful printed books by copying them. yet even thritemius’ text reveals contradictory attitudes towards printing that were typical of the period. w hile he is concerned with preservation of knowledge in the new medium, he still praised its fast modes of production elsewhere in his book and actually benefited from it by having his text printed. this is the context in which the danse macabre books emerged. they are a product of the transitional period and reflect the hybrid nature of books typical of this time. guy marchant’s first edition of the danse, published in , is one of the earliest illustrated books published in france using woodcuts made by a french artist. some of the most important printers and publishers of the period printed editions of the danse, not just in paris, but also in lyons, troyes, geneva and possibly other places as well. luxurious editions of the danse printed for publisher antoine vérard epitomize the notion of the composite book – partially hand-made and partially mechanically reproduced so that every copy is unique. the range of editions, from vérard deluxe copies to simple quarto ( o ) volumes is equally striking and points to the diverse way the image of the danse was used in the period. the dance of death books also participated in the multi-medial exchange of texts and images the transitional period was noted for. w oodcuts of the danse found their way into printed books of hours published by simon vostre, philippe pigouchet, and, in the sixteenth century, thielman kerver, whereby they gained an even wider prominence since prayer books were the most frequently published illustrated texts johannes trithemius, in praise of scribes (de laude scriptorum), ed. klaus arnold, trans. ronald behrendt (lawrence, kansas: coronado press, ) - . of the period (fig. ). editions of the danse also served as the model for an illuminated manuscript created in c. preserved at the bn (ms fr. ) and for the two mural paintings located in parish churches of mesely le grenet and la ferté- loupière (figs. - , and ). the career of guy marchant while several printers, publishers and booksellers contributed to the development of the danse in the medium of illustrated books, marchant is neverthelss the central figure. after all, as discussed in the previous chapter, it was marchant who is credited with the idea of copying the mural from the innocents and translating the danse into the print medium. marchant also popularized the books by publishing the highest number of known editions, eight in total, and by inventing the danse macabre des femmes series. for these reasons, the present chapter will dicusses marchant’s printing practices and, especially, his venture into the field of popular illustrated books in vernacular. as sandra hindman has shown, marchant’s career was rather unusual. the majority of the books he published were aimed at the university clientele and included works on theology, grammar and humanist subjects. at the same time, however, he frequently ventured into other genres and experimented with formats as diverse as illustrated books, travel guides or even pamphlets, which opened his business to new publics for prints. such meandering between genres and readers was not generally advisable and most early printers avoided it. however, as i will on this issue see virginia reinburg, french books of hours. as reinburg explains, printed prayer books were “the bread and butter of the printing industry in the early stages of the industry’s growth,” - . hindman, “the career of guy marchant ” . on this issue see see martha tedeschi, “publish and perish: the career of linehart holle in ulm,” printing the written word: the social history of books, circa - , ed. sandra l. hindman (ithaca and london: cornell up, ) - . accounts of business practices of early printers in france recorded in claudin’s, show, marchant’s success as a printer – he is credited with publishing at least editions over the course of his career, which is an impressive achievement – was based on his keen ability to interpret the trends in the market, collaborate with the best publishers and booksellers and continually reinvent his practice. by discussing marchant’s editions of the danse and several of his other publications, i will argue that the making of the series was a product of collaboration with some of the main printers, publishers and booksellers working with illustrated books at the time. although it may have been modeled on the mural from the cemetery of the innocents, the first edition of the danse and the subsequent augmented or adapted versions reflect specific trends of the book market and as such have to be studied against the backdrop of the emerging printing industry. apart from hindman’s article, there is as yet no systematic account of marchant’s career. not much is known, for example, about his early life or the circumstances surrounding the opening of his workshop. several authors have suggested that marchant was of flemish origin, an assumption largely based on the fact that in he published a dutch translation of the hugely popular title das narrenschiff (ship of fools) by sebastian brant. in the colophon, printed on the histoire de l’imprimerie also suggest that printers typically focused their enterprises on publishing specific categories of books. on marchant’s publications and printinting practices see hindman, “the career of guy marchant”; claudin, histoire de l’imprimerie, i, - ; philippe renouard, imprimeurs parisiens, libraires, fondeurs de caractères et correcteurs d’imprimerie, depuis l’introduction de l’imprimerie à paris ( ) jusqu’à la fin du xvie siècle (paris: ) - ; andré blum, les origines du livre a gravures en france: les incunables typographiques (paris and brussels: les editions g. van oest, ) - . marchant’s work on a dutch edition of sebastian brant’s ship of fools is discussed in an unpublished dissertation from the late s, see: john ralph sinnema, “a critical study of the dutch translation of sebastian brant’s narrenschiff, diss., u of cincinnati, . marchant’s career and some of his more famous printer’s marks are briefly studied in edwin elliot w illoughby, “cover design,” the library quarterly . ( ): - . see claudin, histoire de’imprimerie footnote and and sinemma and willoughby. the dutch edition was published on june , under the title der zotten ende der narrenscip and it was the first book in flemish printed in paris. this book, the sole copy of which is preserved at the bn (rés.-yh- ), was made in collaboration with the bookseller/printer geoffrey de marnef for whom marchant also last page of marchant’s dutch translation, the name guide c oopman is given as the printer of this tract. as anatole claudin explains, the word “coopman” means marchand in flemish and hence the name of the printer is actually a translation of marchant’s french name. it has also been implied, based on marchant’s last name and illustrations in some of his printer’s marks, that he comes from a family of tradesmen (“ merchant”), more specifically, shoemakers. this is not surprising since many early printers/publishers came from merchant classes and were able to set up their business in part because their families had already acquired wealth through their respective trades. this was certainly the case with barthelémy buyer, the wealthy bourgeois who established the first press in lyons, but also with jean petit, one of the principal bookseller-publishers in paris and a frequent collaborator of marchant’s, who famously came from a family of butchers. the idea that marchant originated from a family of shoemakers is based on the fact that three of his six known printer’s marks feature the patron saints of published several other tracts, including a latin translation of the danse macabre. the book is illustrated, though according to claudin the cuts used in this edition were borrowed from the french version of das narrenschiff, also published for de marnef. for an electronic facsimile of this edition see http://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/ /bpt k p/f .image claudin, histoire de l’imprimerie . marchant also altered his name when he printed an edition of the danse macabre in latin for geoffrey de marnef in october of . in that book, he signed his name as guido mercatoris. quoted in hindman, “the career of guy marchant” . ibid. . jean petit was probably the most important libraire-publisher working in paris in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries. from to , petit published more than a thousand books, roughly one tenth of the entire production of paris book trade came from his shop. as febvre and martin explain, petit became one of the four great publishers of the university of paris, putting out volumes for students and professors alike. he was also a savvy entrepreneur who collaborated with leading publishers in paris and elsewhere, individuals like geoffrey de marnef, thielman kerver, berthold rembolt and john of coblenz and frequently employed the best printers to work on his volumes, including marchant. on jean petit see febvre and martin, especially pages - and phillipe renouard, “quelques documents sur les petit, libraires parisiens, et leur famille (xv et xvi siècles)” bulletin de la société de l’histoire de paris ed de l’ile de france, vol. ( ): - . shoemakers, crispin and crispinian, making shoes. for example, in marchant’s third catalogued printer’s device, we see the two saints cutting up sheets of leather and putting the shoes together (fig. ). pairs of shoes already made are scattered on the floor between them, while a finished (?) pair of boots hangs over the beam behind the two saints. an emblem featuring an open book, two hands shaking, the initials “g. m” and a rebus make up the upper part of the image. invented at the end of the century, printer’s marks (or devices) were initially placed above the colophons at the end of the book. at first the devices were simple, but over time they became, as febvre and martin have stated, “species of pictorial publicity, not only telling the book’s origin, but adorning it and affirming its quality. typically, booksellers and publishers included their house sign as their device – marchant did this when he opened the second shop on rue cloppin under the sign of prestre jehan – but it was also very common to include emblematic or allegorical illustrations laden with symbolism (fig. ). marchant’s repeated use of saints crispin and crispinian must therefore have been of particular importance to him. w as marchant paying a tribute to his family’s trade or constructing a clever allegory, the meaning of which is now lost? one plausible explanation has thus far been proposed. born to a noble roman family in the third century, the twin brothers, crispin and crispinian, fled persecution for their faith under emperor diocletian and ended up settling in the northern french town of soissons in picardy. w hile in soissons, hindman, “the career of guy marchant,” . the link between shoemakers and marchant was first made by h. w . davies, devices of the early printers and it was then reiterated in the bmc, p. xxv. on marchant’s printer’s marks see louis polain, marques des imprimeurs et libraires en france au xve siècle (paris, ) and philippe renouard, les marques typographiques parisiennes des xve et xve siècles (paris, ). the majority of printer’s devices used in the fifteenth century in france were catalogued by polain. febvre and martin . ibid. . this is one of the two versions of the legend of ss. crispin and crispinian. according to the second one, the brothers originated from a romano-briton family whose father had been killed by a roman emperor living in canterbury. they settled in faversham where they learned how to make shoes. the brothers preached christianity to the gauls during the day and at night they made shoes to support themselves. their preaching enraged the governor of belgic gaul who had them tortured and thrown into the river aisne with millstones around their necks. although they survived this martyrdom, ss. crispin and crispinian were eventually beheaded c. on a plain near soissons. the cult of the twin saints was especially venerated in soissons, where a shrine was erected in their honor, and marchant’s repeated reference to them in his devices may actually indicate that he came from that town as well. while his reference to the twin saints may remain an unsolved puzzle, the upmost register of the printer’s mark features a rebus that is easy to interpret (fig. ). flanked by the two angels is a rectangle which features a sheet of music with notes “sol” and “la” on the left and the words “fides” and “ficit” on the right hand side. the rebus points to marchant’s motto, “sola fides sufficit” (only faith suffices), which is taken from thomas aquinas’ hymn pange lingua gloriosa (“sing, my tongue, the savior’s glory of his flesh”), composed in for the office of the corpus christi. the source of marchant’s motto – the writings of aquinas, the most celebrated theologian of the thirteenth century and a professor at the university of paris – should not surprise us. marchant was an ordained priest and he received the title of the master of arts from the sorbonne, the very place where aquinas taught. marchant’s name appears on the second list (rotulus secundus) of the register of nominations for the master of arts in paris dated march , . although he never received preferment, according to one author, printing was only his second choice for a profession, a common second choice of clergymen in the early years of printing. around the time marchant obtained the title from the sorbonne, he began this point was first made in bmc, see footnote on page xxv. the theory was subsequently supported by hindman, . parenthetically, marchant’s printer’s mark makes reference to hands – we see hands making shoes, hands holding an open book and even two hands shaking in the upper register. w hat is the meaning of this? there is also a reference to pairing or pairs – two hands shaking, pairs of boots, pairs of shoes, and most importantly a pair of twins – their sameness indicated by their identical faces. hindman, “the career of guy marchant” . sinnema xi. the practice of signing his colophons as magister and in a book published in he used the full title maistre es ars. because, as i will explain shortly, marchant’s principal readers were university students and professors, his title and the motto borrowed from aquinas were particularly fitting. marchant’s first shop was set up in paris at the hotel de champ gaillard behind the college of navarre, to which it belonged. founded in by jeanne of navarre, the wife of philip the fair, the college was open to students of grammar, philosophy and theology and it was specifically intended for poor students who received scholarships to pay for their education. the statutes of the college of navarre insisted that students avoid luxury and attend divine offices in the chapel, which was endowed with four chaplains and four clerics. the college was located in the eastern part of the latin quarter between the rue de murs on the east and rue de la porte bordelle on the west. this meant that marchant’s shop was further away from the main hub of printing workshops, most of which were located in or near the rue st. jacques, closer to the sorbonne proper. it is clear that marchant had a particularly close relationship with the college of navarre because in , while retaining the shop at champ gaillard, he opened a second venue at the hotel of beauregard , which belonged to the college of bcm, xxv. hindman, “the career of guy marchant” . the college of navarre was located in the latin quarter, in what is now rue de la montagne-sainte-geneviève. during the french revolution, the college was suppressed, its library dispersed and its archives lost. in , under the reign of napoleon, the buildings of the college were assigned to the École polytechnique, which relocated in . ibid. . for a recent historical account of the college of navarre see nathalie gorochov, le collège de navarre, de sa fondation ( ) au début du xve siècle ( ): histoire de l’institution, de sa vie intellectuelle et de son recurtement (paris: h. champion, ). hindman, “the career of guy marchant” . according to claudin, histoire de l’imprimerie, marchant’s first shop was set in the big house of the champ-gaillard across from the college of navarre, under the sign prestre jehan while the hotel of beauregard was located on rue clopin (cloppin), . in the entry on marchant in bmc, the authors explain that rue clopin and rue gaillard were actually “one and the same” and that the second store was quite close to the first, xxv. both sinnema and w illoughby suggest that marchant boncourt, also part of the college of navarre. the second shop was placed on rue cloppin under the sign of prestre jehan. property records issued in the period between - , right at the time the second shop was open, indicate that marchant had also significantly expanded his quarters “renting premises that took in a portion of the walls of the city between the gates of bordelle and saint-victor, with the intervening three towers and the road.” it thus appears that by the turn of the century marchant had become (or perhaps he had been all along?) a man of means. w as his wealth acquired through his printing enterprise? how was his business organized and what kind of books did he make? in the literature on early printing, marchant is typically presented as a successful printer of popular illustrated books. such a view is based primarily on marchant’s multiple editions of the danse macabre and on another illustrated book he printed continually in the s, the compost et kalendrier des bergiers (henceforth the kalendrier). however, as hindman has shown, while the danse and the kalendrier did sell well (perhaps better than all his other editions), they do not reflect the kinds of books marchant’s workshop typically printed. over the course of his career, which spanned from c. – c. , marchant published at opened his first shop with the help of his uncle, jean de granges who was also a priest, though i have not been able to verify this information. hindman, “the career of guy marchant” . for the history of the college of boncourt see raymond cazelles, “pierre de becoud et le fondation du collège de boncourt,” bibliothèque de l’école de chartes ( ): - . hindman, “the career of guy marchant” . most sources on marchant agree that by the turn of the century, he was indeed fairly wealthy. see bmc, xxv, hindman, “the career of guy marchant , claudin, histoire de l’imprimerie . hindman, “the career of guy marchant” . for example, claudin opens his discussion of marchant’s career by suggesting that together with jean du pré, he was one of the printers that developed the art of the illustrated book, p. . hindman, “the career of guy marchant” . eight extant editions of the kalendrier printed by marchant have been preserved. at least three of those were printed for jean petit (january / , september , september and possibly also august ). ibid. . least editions, more if we include all the works he printed for other publishers. the majority of his publications are short tracts on humanist or theological subjects in latin; the books are mostly in quarto ( ) format – not in folio like the danse and the kalendrier editions – and they are sparsely illustrated, if at all, with woodcuts “of routine workmanship which are reused in other imprints.” the majority of his books are quite short, thirty-six to forty leaves is the average length, but there are a few that are even shorter, consisting of only six to eight leaves. moreover, many of marchant’s texts are put together in the so-called “tract volumes” – books containing several short, usually interrelated texts. such output implies that marchant aimed his books mainly at the university clientele. given the location of his two shops, in the immediate proximity of the college of navarre, and the fact that he printed tract texts on theology, grammar and philosophy – the main subjects taught at the school – it is very likely that his shop obtained an agreement with the college and that he was their exclusive printer/publisher. this is quite possible since his vocation as a priest and later also a master of arts, made him ideally suited to print works for this institution. w e know, for example, that he was collaborating closely with jean le munerat, cantor of the chapel of the college of navarre and theologian at the university of paris, on several according to the authors of the bmc, after marchant apparently worked exclusively for bookseller jean petit and though he signed a book with his own device as late as , from marchant’s own workshop was in the hands of his nephew jean marchant, xxv. by , marchant was dead. hindman includes a preliminary list of marchant’s imprints in her study, which consists of editions. the istc lists editions associated with marchant, by they also include publications printed by his nephew in the early s. hindman, “the career of guy marchant” . in this context, a folio format (fo) refers to a book made from sheets of paper folded only once, thus giving pages half the size of the sheet. books in quarto format ( o ) are made by folding a sheet with two folds at right angles, thus giving pages one quarter the size of the sheet. ibid. . ibid. . ibid. . hindman wonders whether marchant’s shop was similar to barnes and nobles, the firm that now has monopoly on american college bookstores, for the college of navarre. more research needs to be done on the relationship between marchant and the college of navarre, before this question can be answered, but it is certainly a possibility. books including a short tract written by le munerat in entitled de dedicatione ecclesie parisiensis, which marchant printed. w hile the relationship between marchant and the college of navarre merits further research, his connection with the institution must have assured a constant flow of customers, which in turn gave him the financial backing he needed to experiment with other types of printed matter. to consider marchant merely as the printer of scholarly tracts, however, does not do his career justice. as the list of his less scholarly publications show, he was also highly innovative, willing to experiment with different formats and new titles. even if the danse and the kalendrier are not representative of his general body of works, they are nevertheless two of the most successful and oft-copied illustrated books published in france and marchant had ‘invented’ them both. in the following section, i will analyze aspects of marchant’s career in more detail and question how and why he began printing illustrated books. printing the illustrated book the beginning of marchant’s career was slow and punctured with two lengthy and unexplained breaks. his first published books came in october and december of , st. bonaventura’s soliloquium and the anonymous tract de arte bene vivendi beneque moriendi tractatus, or the ars moriendi, respectively. although not signed by marchant, both volumes are dated. he was then allegedly inactive until september , when he issued the first edition of the danse, which is also the first publication to mention him by name. this publication came therefore very early in his career, at the time when he was still setting up his practice. although a ibid. . hindman, “the career of guy marchant” . the year and a half interlude in marchant’s production is difficult to gauge. several catalogues of marchant’s imprints, including hindman’s, lists three potential works he may have printed between december and september of : an astronomical treaty entitled computus cum comment (avec mode d’emploi envers français ) by anianus ( ), jean gerson’s de ecclesiastica potestate et de origine juris et legum tractatus ( ) and thomas aquinas’s confessionale ( ). hindman, “the career of guy marchant” . see also bmc xxiv. short volume, the danse was an expensive book to make, featuring one large woodcut on almost every page. in order to publish it, marchant had to hire an artist to design the cuts, thus further increasing the cost of the production. early printers, including marchant, typically compensated for the cost of woodcuts by reusing the same images for multiple imprints. this strategy, however, was not possible for the woodcuts in the danse. since each cut corresponds to a specific set of verses, the images in the danse could only be used to illustrate the dance of death and no other text. their application was thus quite limited, which in turn made them even more of an investment. moreover, the cuts used in this edition are considered high quality and are often described as one of the best examples of early french illustration. the danse macabre was also one of the earliest illustrated books printed in paris. the very first illustrated book printed in france was published just seven years earlier, in august of . titled the mirouer de la redemption de l’humain lignaige (the mirouer), the book was printed by martin husz and included woodcuts used by german printers several years earlier. although husz for example, in / marchant printed the only french edition of thomas bradwardine’s arithmetica speculativa, which was illustrated with six woodcuts that had appeared in previous books printed by marchant and that had no relation to the mathematical text. see: de simone, a heavenly craft . four of the woodcuts used in arithmetica speculative are from the kalendrier and the other two are from marchant’s edition of petrus de alliaco’s de anima. marchant did manage to reuse some of the danse woodcuts in his edition of the shepherdess’s calendar, printed in , which included a section on death and dying and featured a fully illustrated danse macabre des femmes cycle. martin husz (or huss) should not be confused with mathias husz (or huss) who published the danse macabre book in . both martin and mathias were german (possibly cousins) and both lived and worked in lyons, though they owned different workshops. in the past, the works published by martin and mathias were often confused in literature, which is not surprising since they also often printed similar texts. according to the istc, marin husz produced a much smaller body of works – the catalogue lists editions published by the printer between and , though of the titles listed bear the name of mathias, not martin husz, making it difficult to discern exactly how many of martin’s books are actually known. in any case, mathias was a more prolific printer, of his books are listed in the istc. while martin published the first edition of le mirouer and then reprinted it exactly a year later (on august , ), mathias published this illustrated book five more published the first printed edition, the title had a long manuscript tradition. better known by its latin title, speculum humanae salvationis (henceforth speculum), it was one of the more popular texts of the later middle ages featured in several hundred manuscript copies, blockbook (xylographic) editions and sixteen incunabula versions created between the first quarter of the fourteenth and the end of the fifteenth century. w ritten anonymously and compiled at the beginning of the fourteenth century, the speculum was initially intended for the use of preaching monks and clerics. the work portrays medieval concept of typology, or the thesis that all events of the new testament were prefigured by the events recounted in the old. the speculum is related to the earlier biblia pauperum or biblia picta – another medieval work that enjoyed tremendous popularity in the early years of printing – which were also typological, but they were composed almost entirely of pictures, while the first speculum manuscripts included extensive text to explain the miniatures. lagging behind lyons, the first illustrated book was not printed in paris until , just four years before the first edition of the danse. published by jean du pré, the missale parisiense (missel de paris) was printed on september , using woodcuts designed by the german woodcutter, desiderius huym. dupré was both a printer and a libraire and his workshop specialized in the production of liturgical books often printed on vellum. although illustrated by a german, the missale featured elements that were derived from the french manuscript tradition such as elaborate borders decorated with foliage, animals and the grotesque. with the missale we see the beginning of specifically french style of illustration, which still relied heavily on scribal tradition. by the end of , dupré began the times over the course of the fifteenth century (in , , / , and ). see footnote . w ilson and w ilson . dupré’s name is also often spelled du pré in literature. he was both printer and libraire and was active between and . his workshop specialized in printing liturgical books. febvre and martin . collaboration with a prolific french woodcutter and printer, pierre le rouge. in , dupré published les cas et ruynes des nobles hommes et femmes (the fortunes and ruins of noble men and women) a translation of boccaccio and the first illustrated book in french published in paris using cuts made by a frenchman. in publishing the danse, marchant was therefore at the forefront of a completely new format of printed matter in france – the illustrated book. for a printer who had just opened his shop, he was taking a huge risk. how did marchant fund the publication of the danse? w hat costs were involved in running an illustrated edition? and how much did it take to set up a printing workshop in the first place? such questions are difficult to answer because relevant sources, inventories, accounts or daybooks of early printers are extremely rare. in the context of paris, however, more detailed information is available because of the work of the librarian and archivist ernest coyecque, though much of it relates mainly to the sixteenth century context. according to sources listed in coyecque’s study, gathering the equipment necessary to open up a small press, was relatively inexpensive. the basic equipment did not cost very much and a printer could easily acquire a press, cases, galleys and a number of fonts. for example, an inventory dating from lists equipment that belonged to a small-scale printer jacques ferrebouc, including “one press valued at livres ( livres with its tympans); various pieces valued under livres; fonts of type, more or less worn, amounting to livres.” as febvre and martin explain, “the whole outfit was worth about livres.” a the best source on the le rouge family can be found in henri monceaux, les le rouge de chablis: calligraphes et miniaturistes, graveurs et imprimeurs. étude sur les débuts de l’illustration du livre au e siècle (paris: a. claudin, ). ibid . see ernest coyecque, recueil d’actes notariés relatifs à l’histoire de paris et des ses environs au xvi siècle, vols. (paris: imprimerie nationale, ). while there are very few studies on specific fifteenth century french printers, there are several books on early sixteenth century printers and publishers, including: fred schreiber, simon de colines: an annotated catalogue of examples of his press, - (provo, utah: friends of the birgham young university library, ) and elizabeth armstrong, robert estienne royal printer: an historical study of the elder stephanus (cambridge: cambridge up, ). febvre and martin . quoted in febvre and martin . ibid. . workshop belonging to a more significant printer, didier maheu, was valued at “ livres” in an inventory of . unlike ferrebouc, maheu owned “three presses equipped with an iron screw thread, platens, nuts and bolts, valued at livres ; dies of gothic font, decorated with engraved figures, with two moulds, livres; dies for casting a type called ‘bourgeois,’ livres; the same for a ‘lettre de somme’, livres, and a ‘some angélique, livres, sols; founts, more or less worn, livres.” finally, a workshop that belonged to w olfgang hopyl, a famous printer known for producing theological works and school textbook, was valued at livres in an inventory made after his death in . hopyl’s workshop was equipped with “ presses valued at livres ( livres with tympans); ten fonts in good condition valued around livres; a great quantity of punches and particularly of dies valued at more than livres; some ornamental letters, devices, wooden and copper engravings amounting to more than livres.” what does the information gleaned from inventory lists tells us? the press, as mentioned earlier, was not a huge investment and could be obtained relatively easily. according to the inventories the presses in paris between - varied, based on their condition, from to livres, not a huge sum. moreover, presses could be rented as well; in it was about sols a year to lease one. on the other hand, the purchase of type, which had to be renewed often, was pricey and posed a bigger problem to many printers. in the inventories mentioned above, the price of fonts varied from to livres “depending on the wear on the type face, and variety and importance of the font.” the most expensive parts of the printing equipment, however, were the ornamental initials engraved first on wood and later on copper and the engraved plates which were fond only in the inventories of major printers, such as w olfgang hopyl, that were used in books of hours and other ibid. . ibid. . ibid. . ibid. . for more information on hopyl’s workshop see: henri stein, l’atelier typographique de wolfgang hopyl à paris (paris: h. stein, ). ibid. . ibid. . specialized imprints. such equipment was so prized (and rare) that established libraire-publishers such as antoine vérard or jean petit, who were in possession of ornamental initials or engraved plates, would frequently loan or hire them out to printers employed by them. to the list of expense, we also have to add the purchase of quality paper sufficient for printing, which was not cheap. in the early sixteenth century, the price of a ream of paper varied according to quality between to sols. as febvre and martin explain, the purchase of “paper sufficient for printing one impression represented a large part of the total expenditure.” as this evidence shows, depending on the kind of shop they were running, early printers required considerable resources to get established. however, if a printer was also the publisher of the books he was printing, which was the case with marchant, then his investment in his business was substantial. for example, in the same didier maheu mentioned above, printed missals for the bishop of senils (oise department, northern france) for livres – a total value of his printing enterprise (!). in august of , another printer from paris produced breviaries of the form approved in the diocese of nevers for livres, while joost bade’s edition of folio copies of claude de seyssel’s thucydides required a whooping livres on the basis of this evidence, we can conclude that much more capital was needed to bring out a single edition than to equip a decent size printing workshop, all the more reasons to ibid. . ibid. . ibid. . ibid. . ibid. . ibid. . ibid . joost bade (also known as badius ascensius, josse bade or jodocus van asche badius) ( - ) was one of the main printer/publishers working in france in the sixteenth century. he was also a noted scholar and a writer. initially, bade worked in lyons for the workshop of jean trechsel, but then moved to paris and established his own shop in . bade’s most important business partner was the libarire-publisher jean petit. bade’s edition of thucydides was printed in march of . for information on that edition see ernest coyecque, “josse bade et les traductions de claude de seyssel,” bibliothèque de l’école de chartes vol. ( ): - . question marchant’s decision to publish an expensive illustrated folio volume so early on in his career. w hat was his strategy? did he have a financial backer or a publisher with whom he collaborated? in the early years of printing, books sold slowly and to dispose of an edition (the principal goal for every imprint) the printer was required to distribute his copies to the main european centers. the dispersal of bookshops across europe assured the spread of ideas and the exchange of texts and images that marked this transitional period, but it was still difficult to recoup quickly any capital locked up in the business. for this reason, it was crucial to discover a marketplace, ideally on the spot, and a line of books for which there was a sufficient demand. it was also important to put out a number of titles simultaneously to avoid risks resulting from a poor sale of a single volume, which in turn meant a higher investment of capital and raised an issue of finance. unless they were independently wealthy – and we do not know if marchant was at the time he started his business and published the danse – the majority of printers needed financial backing from a specific institution or an individual to assure a successful run of their enterprise. the latter model was employed by guillaume le roy. as mentioned earlier, le roy set up the first printing press in lyons with the help of barthélemy buyer. buyer was not just backer in this business enterprise; he played an active part in the shop and actually chose the texts for printing. as printing industry developed in the s other publishers began to copy this model, especially in paris. the famous libraire-publishers, jean petit and antoine vérard, rarely printed any books themselves. rather, they employed numerous printers – typically the best of the best – to print the books for them. over the course of his career, marchant collaborated febvre and martin . a great example of a failed printing enterprise can be found in an account of the career of linehart holle from ulm whose workshop operated from spring to late during which time he published six imprints of deluxe illustrated books. because he did not cater to the type of audience who purchased printed books in ulm, he was forced to close his shop in late , declare bankruptcy and was even banished from the town for his debts. this example also shows how quickly things could go bad for printers, holle’s business failed in less than two years. see tedeschi, “publish and perish.” with both. in the s, at the beginning of his vocation, he frequently worked for vérard, printing illustrated books (including an edition of the danse) in / (?), (?), , and . vérard is best known for publishing lavish editions intended for the upper class clientle and for creating the market for printed books of hours in paris. w hat vérard achieved was quite ingenious; he relied on the long-standing tradition of manuscript production in paris, and adapted it to the new medium of print. from his two shops, one located on the notre dame bridge, the other in the palais of the cité, in a very privileged position in front of the sainte-chapelle, vérard employed scribes and printers to work on a new format – the illustrated book. over the course of his career, which spanned from – , vérard published over editions, a quarter of which were printed books of hours. prayer books became the bestseller of the new printing industry and paris led the way, just as it did in the age of illuminated manuscripts. printers in paris, first led by vérard, produced books of hours for customers all over france and as far away as england and flanders. marchant had printed at least one horae for vérard in january of / . it is also believed that he worked exclusively for vérard in the period between july of the most complete study on vérard’s career and publications is mary beth w inn, anthoine vérard parisian publisher, - : prologues, poems and presentations (geneva: droz, ). for an extensive list of publications on vérard or his books, see w inn - . an earlier monograph on vérard was written in the early twentieth century and does contain some faulty remarks, see also john macfarlane, antoine vérard (london: chiswick press, ). the link between vérard’s printed books of hours and illuminated manuscripts is explored in delauney’s thesis. w inn . unlike marchant or printers who set up their shops near rue st jacques, vérard’s two stores were located in the center of scribal book production. moreover, both shops operated under the sign of st john the evangelist, patron saint of scribes and by extension of the book industry in general. ibid. . reinburg . w hile vérard led the way for printed books of hours, other important printers of prayer books were simon vostre, phillipe pigouchet and thielman kerver. hindman, “the career of guy marchant” . and march of / – the second recorded interlude in his career – when he mostly produced illustrated books. marchant had an even closer relationship with petit who must have been his business partner and for whom marchant printed a number of works. despite his upbringing, petit became the leader of the paris book trade at the end of the fifteenth and in the early sixteenth century. as febvre and martin explain, “[f]rom to he published more than a thousand books, most of them of major importance, amounting to one tenth of the entire output of the paris trade.” petit collaborated with many early printers and his shop sold a wide range of books: in latin or french, illustrated and not illustrated, secular and religious and expensive or cheap. most crucially, petit was also one of the four official booksellers/publishers of the university of paris, the main publisher for its students and one of the individuals most responsible for the diffusion of humanism in paris. as such, petit really was the ideal business partner for marchant. as an official bookseller for the university he could easily disperse marchant’s theological and humanist tracts to clientele beyond the college of navarre but he could also act as a financial backer and distributor of marchant’s more risky endeavors, namely his illustrated books. marchant published at least twenty-four books for petit and, from he seems to have only worked for him. it also appears that in marchant temporarily transferred some of his stock to petit’s store because books printed in july, september and december of that year (including an edition of the kalendrier), include a reference to the store located at the sign of the fleur de lys in the rue st jacques, which was petit’s establishment. w hether marchant published the works ibid . during the three years interlude, marchant did not print an edition under his name. the belief that he worked for vérard during this time is based on the appearance of marchant’s typefaces in between two and five of vérard’s books published during this time. febvre and martin . hindman, “the career of guy marchant” . given petit’s role in the paris book trade during the transitional period, it is surprising that as of yet no detail account of his career has been written. febvre and marin . hindman, “the career of guy marchant” and bmc xxv. bcm xxv. at petit’s store or just sold them there is unclear, but this example further testifies to the close businesses connection marchant established with the book magnate. did marchant finance the first edition of the danse alone? w ithout specific archival documents, we can only speculate, but it seems likely that he would need a financier or a partner at least. the fall of seems to have been an important moment for the history of illustrated books in france. marchant had published the danse and vérard had issued the first edition of the horae on september , which was also his very first recorded publication. two months later, in november of , vérard hired du pré, the printer of the first illustrated book in paris, to print an edition of boccaccio’s decameron. the market for illustrated books in paris was thus developing rapidly and it all revolved around vérard. besides du pré, vérard had also collaborated closely with printer/woodcutter pierre le rouge on several editions of the horae printed between and and an undated edition of the art de bien mourir (the art of dying). w e will recall that le rouge made woodcuts for du pré’s first illustrated book and that he is often credited for designing the illustrations used in the first edition of the danse. moreover, according to claudin, marchant frequently sold his stock at petit’s store – and also at the bookstores of other libraires such as geoffroy de marnef, alexander aliate and denis roce, since these shops were located on rue st jacques – in the main hub for printed books and closer to the sorbonne proper. w inn . ibid. . the type used for the decameron belonged to du pré. ibid. . some of le rouge’s woodcuts were also transferred over to vérard’s shop. le rouge came from chablis, from a family of calligraphers and woodcutters, and moved to paris sometime in the mid s when he began to work as a printer as well la rouge had a close connection with the bookseller vincent commin, for whom he printed and possibly also partially illustrated the most ambitious illustrated french incunabulum, la mer des histories (the sea of histories) in / . this publication, which consists of almost leaves printed on vellum and hand- illuminated, is the french translation of a universal chronicle entitled rudimentum novitiorum (a handbook of beginners) first printed in lübeck by lucas brandis in . the book was presented to charles viii and besides the french translation of the rudimentum included added texts, most notably a genealogy of the kings of france extending to the coronation of charles viii in . during this period, le rouge was the official printer of the king and signed his colophons with the title imprimeur du roi. the type used in marchant’s first publications, including the danse, is similar in style to du pré’s type, suggesting perhaps that the two printers had collaborated at some point. w e know that marchant worked exclusively for vérard in the late s and hindman also suggests that marchant’s second edition of the danse, published between september and june , was printed for vérard, so it is possible that the libraire was involved in the creation of the first edition as well. this seems all the more likely since vérard had published his own editions of the danse macabre books: / (?) (printed by marchant), / (printed by pierre le rouge) and (printed by gillet coteau and possibly also jean menard) – and thus clearly had an interest in the series. importantly, vérard’s editions only include the danse macabre des hommes and the three living with no additional texts or figures. vérard also used woodcuts that are different from marchant’s and his editions, as i will elaborate in the fifth chapter, were addressed at the nobility and the upper class clientele. for example, the edition printed by le rouge in / , was originally intended as a placard, hence its unusual size ( cm x cm), and it was part of the royal library of king charles viii at the château de blois (figs. and ). the edition printed by coteau and menard is equally impressive, printed on parchment and hand colored to mimic illuminated manuscripts (fig. ). why did marchant decide to publish an illustrated book on the dance of death? w hat made the subject so appealing to marchant and later other printers that they would decide to make multiple editions of the books? w hy the danse and not some other subject? part of the appeal, as i argued in the first chapter, has to do with the composition of the work – it portrays different classes, laymen and ecclesiasts, and it relies on satire and didactic verses to make its point. the composition, as well, depends on a close relationship between text and image, which made it ideal an ideal subject matter for an illustrated book. claudin, histoire de l’imprimerie . as claudin explains the font that marchant used for his early publications was based on the gothic script used in the missals of du pré. hindman, “the career of guy marchant” . this edition is preserved at the bn as rés. te . on the other hand, marchant had a keen ability to interpret the market and anticipate trends, which must have been a factor in his decision to print the danse. in december of , he published an edition of the ars moriendi, already popular in europe, and knew there was a market for books dealing with death and dying. illustrated books published in france up to that point have either taken up italian authors (du pré’s edition of le cas, for instance) or depicted popular devotional works. for example, the speculum (or the mirouer), the first illustrated book printed in france, belongs to the same genre of books as the danse. as adrian w ilson and joyce lancaster w ilson explain, “[i]n its text and pictures the speculum contains a vivid account of the religious and artistic forces at work in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, when the lessons in piety, the allegories, and all of the arts were devoted to instilling in the minds of the people the need for salvation and the dread of eternal damnation.” w hile the danse is not concerned with typology, its basic premise emphasizes the transient nature of earthly life and demonstrates the importance of piety and repentance. the danse captures the moment of physical death and shows what happens to the body after it dies, but the verses allude to the same theological notions as the speculum books: the last judgment, damnation and the possibility of salvation. it is thus not surprising that when in marchant began to expand the series by adding additional titles and images, he chose the subjects that would address the fate of the soul after death (the debate between the body and the soul, the complaint of the damned soul). as discussed in the previous chapter, the format of the danse and the speculum books is also similar. like the dance of death, the speculum featured two woodcuts per page and included text printed in double columns below. w hile husz’s edition contains simple, unframed woodcuts, more typical versions of the book, printed throughout w estern europe, include the page layout that is almost identical to the one used in the danse macabre books. in the speculum books, the typological pairs, or scenes taken from the old and the new testament are framed with embellished arches and columns (the middle column separates the scenes) and see footnote . w ilson and w ilson . the text is written in double columns and placed below the images. the similarity in the design of speculm books and marchant’s first edition of the danse suggests that the french printer had at least seen some of the latin editions. the word speculum, which means mirror or reflection, was used in the titles of many medieval compendia such as the famous speculum eecleasie of honorious of autun (written in c. - ), the speculum maius of vincent of beauvais (written in mid thirteenth century) or the speculum vitae humanae of rodericus zamorensis (written in ). such works were inspired by the desire to encompass a vast, encyclopedic knowledge within a single text and were hugely popular both in scribal and print culture. it is not incidental therefore that by the time marchant had issued the first edition of the danse macabre des femmes in july of he named it miroir salutaire (salutary mirror) – it was a clever advertising strategy and a way to link his publication to some of the most celebrated texts of the later middle ages. when marchant published the first edition of the danse, macabre sensibility was still prevalent in the art and literature of late-medieval france. fifteenth-century prayer books frequently featured the dance of death or other macabre scenes in the section dedicated to the prayers for the dead. as discussed in the previous chapter, in , the abbey church of la chaise-dieu was decorated with a mural depicting the dance of death. in the same year, a moralistic and allegorical poem, le mors de la põme, was illustrated in a single manuscript preserved at the bn (ms. fr. ) (henceforth the mors). best described as an expanded dance of death, the mors begins with the garden of eden when death first entered the world. w e then follow death through different vignettes, which illustrate apocryphal events (death receives the instruments of his office, death kills abel while cain, the indirect agent of death, ibid. . also, in , printers nicolas phlippi and marcus reinhardt from lyons published le miroir de la vie humaine by zamorensis, which included plates showing representatives of specific trades: physicians, notaries, farmers, etc. like the danse, this book demonstrates late fifteenth century predilections towards portrayal of social classes. for a discussion of this manuscript see leonard kurtz ed., le mors de la põme (new york: publications of the institute of french studies, ). appears armed with a cudgel) and secular scenes (death kills the pope, death takes away an infant) (fig. ). as leonard kurtz explains: the miniature and the accompanying text form an interesting link in the historical development of the motif of the dance of death theme in art and literature. w e observe that the danse macabre has been drawn up as a base, and that the theme has now been expanded in several directions. like the danse, the mors includes the figure of the author and the verses are also set up as a dialogue between death (la mort) and the protagonsts. although the living figures in the mors are not always arranged in a hierarchical order, many of the same characters that appear in the danse are also present in the manuscript. however, as kurtz points out, death in the mors differs from the cadavers in the danse in that it is a single personified figure of death. the poem also includes representations of female protagonists (the queen, the princess and the young girl, for example), which were not featured in the mural at the innocents. french late fifteenth century poets frequently wrote on death and other morose subject matter. the works of the best french poet of the later middle ages, françois villon (d. ) were still popular and often published by early printers, including marchant. in olivier de la marche wrote le chevalier deliberé (resolute knight), another moralistic poem that described the last travels of a knight, including his encounter with death. the book enjoyed great popularity at the time and was illustrated in manuscripts and printed books, including an edition that marchant printed for vérard in june of . elsewhere in europe, macabre subjects were also taken up by early printers. one of the very first illustrated books ibid. v. for example, the king, the cardinal, the peasant and the lover are featured both in the danse and in the mors. ibid. v. on oliver de la marche see catherine emerson, olivier de la marche and the rhetoric of fifteenth century historiography (rochester, n.y.: boydell press, ) and olivier de la marche, le chevalier délibéré, intro. and trans. sylviane messerli (paris: presses universitaires de france, ). printed in europe was albrecht pfister’s der ackermann aus böhmen (the ploughman of bohemia) published in bamberg in c. . w ritten around , der ackermann, like the danse, is composed as a dialogue between the figure of the ploughman and death and was portrayed in illuminated manuscripts before pfister made his first printed edition. the ploughman – a long-standing symbol of bohemian kings – accuses death for taking his wife, margaretha, and the two exchange views on mankind, morality and life. in choosing to print the danse macabre, marchant was therefore responding to the demand of the market for books exploring variations on macabre themes. in addition, one of the most popular subject matters in the early years of printing were books that promoted piety and penance, like the imitation of christ by thomas à kempis. treatises by the french theologians jean gerson (d. ) and nicolas de clamanges (d. ) were also popular and marchant actually published works by both authors. interestingly, gerson and de clamanges were alumni of the college of navarre and thus it is especially appropriate that marchant frequently published their texts since he printed works for the college. although never officially confirmed, gerson and de clamanges, or someone from their intellectual circle, are also often credited for composing the verses that accompanied the danse macabre mural from the innocents. this assumption is based on the fact that the manuscript (bn ms. lat. ), which contains the transcribed verses from the innocents, also includes tracts by gerson and de clamanges. moreoever, the verses of the danse poem, especially the author’s prolouge and the epilogue, contain theologic al and devotional ideas that are often found in the writings of gerson and de clamanges. is it possible for the text of the poem see death and the plowman; or, the bohemian plowman; a disputation and consolatory dialogue about death from the year (chapel hill university of north carolina, ). for example, marchant printed gerson’s conclusiones de diversis materiis moralibus in , / , and / . he also published gerson’s de ecclesiastica potestate et de origine juris et legum tractatus in . in , marchant published works by de clamanges, tractatus super exhortatione peccatoris ad poenitentiam and latinum super duabus materiis divresis. see, for instance, clark - and ann tukey harrison, “the text,” the danse macabre of women ms. fr. of the bibliothèque nationale, ed. ann tukey harrison (kent, ohio and london, england: the kent state up, ): - , - . then that there is a connection between the college of navarre, where the potential authors of the poem studied and where the printer who issued the first edition of the books worked, and the danse macabre poem? more research is needed before any conclusions can be made, but it is a point worth investigating further. marchant’s gamble with the first edition must have paid off, if we are to judge by his subsequent publications. between september of and june of , he published the second edition of the danse, virtually the same as the first and likely printed for vérard, another reason to suspect that the libraire was more directly involved in printing the series. then, in june of , came the augmented edition of danse, with six additional woodcuts that marchant named la danse macabre nouvelle (figs. and ). to complete the edition he had to invest even more capital into the series – it was necessary to hire an artist (not le rouge because he was unavailable at the time working on another volume, but perhaps someone from his workshop) to engrave the woodcuts and a writer to compose the verses. just a month later, in july, marchant published the third (or technically the fourth) edition of the danse, which is actually a completely original work, the dance of death of women. since no female characters were included in the cemetery of the innocents mural, marchant had a chance to invent the whole series. by this time, he also began the practice of appending additional illustrated texts, such as the debate and the complainte no doubt to broaden the appeal of the books and showcase his talent as an editor of tract volumes. the first edition of the danse macabre des femmes, which marchant named the miroir salutaire, seems hastily published as it included the complete verses of the poem, but only two woodcuts. it is likely that marchant, recognizing the popularity of the books, wanted to claim the market for the danse books for himself and hastily issued the first edition of the women’s series before he was able to secure funds for the full set of wooducts. such strategizing was typical for early printers and reveals the precarious nature of the industry. in order to maintain and expand the public interest in his publications, marchant had to opt for versatility and hindman, “the career of guy marchant” . see footnote . innovation, hence the creation of the women’s series as a complementary edition to the men’s danse, but because he was competing with other printers of illustrated works it was also important to issue the new edition quickly, even if it was missing the majority of woodcuts. how-to-live and how-to-die: the shepherd’s calendar and the danse macabre marchant’s more concentrated work came in the s when he published between six and nine books a year; though in exceptionally good years ( , and ) he published as many as thirteen to fifteen. his first book published following the hiatus of the late s was a reprint of bonaventura’s soliloquium. it is during this period, in the s, that marchant established his practice of publishing short tracts intended for the (typically) poor students of the college of navarre. these included theological texts by gerson, de clémanges and raymond lull, but also “time-honored classics in grammar and philosophy, such as works by barzizius and nebrissensis, who had recently been acclaimed in paris, and by aristotle and diogenes, who were old favorites.” among the established titles of grammar and theology, marchant’s repertoire also included texts by contemporary humanist writers. for example, he published letters by erasmus, who in late s was a student at the college of montaigu in paris, and by pico della mirandola, a famous humanist scholar. marchant also published treatises by jacques lefèvre d’etaple, a pre-reformation humanist and a professor at the university of paris and works containing postscripts or edited by jodocus clichtoveus, the humanist scholar who became librarian of the sorbonne in . many of these new authors had never had their works published in manuscript form – an example of how instrumental the medium of print was for the spread of renaissance ideals at the hindman, “the career of guy marchant” . ibid. ibid. . ibid. . turn of the century. that marchant had published these works also suggests that he was in contact with the humanist scholars in paris and thus at the forefront of the new ways of thinking. marchant’s relationship with the humanists may have also sparked his interest in science and, especially, in the works on astronomy, astrology and medicine. he published books on mathematics, such as a folio edition of the popular sphera mundi by johannes de sacro busto and two texts on speculative arithmetic and geometry by the fourteenth-century english prelate and theologian, thomas bradwardine, arithmetica speculativa and geometria speculativa. no other copies of bradwardine were published before , not even in england, which again highlights marchant’s ability to predict or popularize specific titles. in , marchant published the regimen sanitatis salernitanum (the salernitan rule of health), a medieval didactic poem concerned with domestic medical practice such as hygiene, proper diet and the science of phlebotomy, or bloodletting (henceforth the regimen). his press also put out at least one edition of anianus’s computus cum commento, printed for petit in . provided with a prose commentary and elementary arithmetic, the computus was hugely popular in france in the early years of printing; it was published in at least thirty-one editions (printed in paris, lyons and rouen) as opposed to only three in other countries. though the purpose of my project is to understand the danse macabre books in the context of the early printing culture, we should not forget that this period is located on the cusp of major advances in the fields of anatomy and medicine and that the printed books contributed to the spread of medical knowledge – and very crucially – medical illustrations and diagrams that became so important in the mid-sixteenth century with the publication of andreas vesalius’s de humani corporis fabrica in . anianus’s text, for example, is famous for its diagram of the human hand, which explains how the hand can be used as a mnemonic device. ibid. . ibid . for a discussion of hands as mnemonic devices see claire richter sherman and peter m. lukehart, eds., writing on hands: memory and knowledge in early modern europe (seattle: w ashington up, ). it is in the context of his scientific and medical publications, that i would place marchant’s second illustrated bestseller, the kalendrier, which he published at least eight times between and c. . since, as i will show, the kalendrier draws important parallels to the danse and actually includes the danse macabre des femmes cycle in one of its editions (published in ), it is important to consider it here in some detail. moreover, like the augmented editions of the danse, the kalendrier is a publication assembled by marchant from multiple sources, textual and visual, which are then skillfully edited into a cohesive volume. as such, it represents a new type of book that surfaced during the transitional period of bookmaking in france, an anthology for which, in the words of jane taylor, the printer provides “an elaborate narrative-editorial context” and formulates connections between disparate sections in order to guide the reader. a precursor to modern day almanac, the kalendrier is a compendium of practical and religious lore aimed at a wider reading public. it typically consists of five parts: “the calendar”, which includes the prologue of the author and the master shepherd, the calendar proper and the labors of the month and tables that provide instructions on how to calculate movable feasts; a section on the trees of vices and virtues and the pains of hell; “salutary science and the garden of virtues”, which includes specific christian prayers such as the credo, the ten commandments and the five commandments of the church; “of physics and governance of health”, given the fact that the kalendrier is one of the most popular illustrated books in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, it is surprising that it has not been studied in much detail in the past. the most recent publication includes a facsimile of marchant’s edition, see calendrier des bergers, intro. max engammare (paris: presses universitaires de france, ).this book also includes a full list of known imprints of the kalendrier with detailed description of each edition, - ; marie- dominique leclerc, “le macabre des calendriers des bergers,” e congrès international d’études sur les danses macabres et l’art macabre en general ( ): - ; guy marchant and g. c. heseltine, calendar and compost of shepherd (london: peter davis, ), this book includes a facsimile of the english translation from c. ; le compost et kalendrier des bergiers: reproduction en fac-simile ed l’edition de guy marchant (paris, ), intro. pierre champion (paris: editions des quatre chemins, ). jane h. m. taylor, “a priest of poetry to the people: antoine vérard and the anthology,” the making of poetry: late-medieval french poetic anthologies (turnhout, belgium: brepols, ): - , . which discusses anatomy, physiognomy and phlebotomy and includes practical advice on healing and medicine; and “astrology and physiognomy”, dedicated to the twelve signs of the zodiac and their relation to the human body. w hile the kalendrier, unlike the danse, does not include illustrations on every page, it features many large woodcuts and a number of religious, scientific and medical diagrams. the text and the majority of illustrations included in the kalendrier are assembled from multiple sources, but the idea for the book is likely marchant’s own. it is occasionally suggested that the kalendrier originated in germany, but this has never been confirmed and no german sources predating marchant’s first edition in have been found. given marchant’s predilection for putting together compendia of shorter, thematically related tracts and his interest in publishing sources on mathematics and astrology, it is seems very probable that marchant had indeed ‘invented’ this book. like the danse, the kalendrier proved to be an incredibly successful publication. marchant printed the work multiple times over the course of the fifteenth century – a sure sign the book was selling. in addition, marchant printed the book for other printers, most notably petit, and he famously collaborated with vérard on a deluxe edition of the kalendrier from which was printed on parchment and intended for king charles viii (bn vélins – ). the title was so popular that in vérard translated the book into english and began to distribute it through his london outpost. in france as well, the title was popular and often reprinted by different presses through the sixteenth century. heseltine v. for an electronic facsimile of this edition see http://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/ /btv b for the first english edition see the kalendar of shepherds the edition of paris in photographic facsimile. a faithful reprint of r. pynson’s edition of london . edited with a critical introduction and glossary by h. oskar sommer, phd (london: kegan paul, trench, trübner & co., ltd., ). for the most recent list of sixteenth century edition of the kalendrier see andrew pettegree, malcom w alsby and alexander s. w ilkinson, french vernacular books: books published in the french language before , vols. (leiden: brill, ) especially pages - . editions of the book were printed from to c. . in its general theme, the kalendrier can be understood as a complementary book to the danse and it should not surprise us to learn that the two titles were often found in the libraries belonging to the same owners. both are, in a sense, how-to- manuals. w hile the danse reminds us of the inevitability of death and the importance of reaching salvation through devotion, the kalendrier is, conversely, a practical guide listing ways to extend our earthly life. the purpose of the kalendrier is made obvious from the very first page. in the opening paragraph of the prologue of the author, we learn that “the thing we desire most in this world is to live long, and the thing that we most fear is to die soon.” and since, as the author explains, a man should live in the course of nature to seventy-two years, the kalendrier with its practical advice and useful diagrams shows the reader how to achieve this goal. however, maintaining a healthy body is not the book’s sole concern. rather, the kalendrier emphasizes the dual nature of body and soul and offers as much advice – via prayers, diagrams and vivid illustrations – on how to protect the soul and prepare for the afterlife as it does on human anatomy or physiognomy. for example, the second chapter is dedicated to the study of vices and virtues and includes dramatic illustrations of the sinners in hell, their bodies – the source of their moral corruption – being broken, pierced, bitten and boiled by devils and serpents (figs. and ). the striking woodcuts, most likely designed by pierre la rouge, are taken from vérard’s edition of the ars moriendi, which marchant had printed several times prior to . the presence of vérard’s woodcuts and the fact that marchant had printed the deluxe edition of the kalendrier for vérard just two years later implies that the libraire was probably more directly involved in the making of this book. did vérard offer financial backing or other form of support to marchant? this seems as hindman noted “one third of the owners of the dance of death also owned the shepherd’s calendar, so it would seem that the two works were considered comparable by the book buyers and readers of the period,” . in discussing the deluxe editions marchant completed for vérard, hindman suggested that the profit marchant made on the expensive editions for royal and aristocratic patrons may have been the basis for his financial success, . perhaps vérard offered some financial backing for the first edition and helped further by procuring the commission for charles viii. likely given the fact that the kalendrier was en expensive book and, at the time of its original publication, a novel work and thus a risky undertaking. the textual sources marchant drew from in compiling the kalendrier are varied and not always traceable. this is in part what makes the book so appealing – it is an amalgam of texts and images derived from multiple sources and different periods that are put together in a completely new way by a savvy compiler. i have already mentioned the computus com commento and the regimen sanitatis as sources for specific sections of the book, but a few others have also been identified. the trees of vices and virtues have been a popular subject in medieval art and literature, though the text used in marchant’s book likely stems from the work of friar laurentius gallus for philip ii, entitled le somme des vices et des vertus. the idea for the book and the shepherd as the main character is probably derived from a treatise written in c. by jehan de brie. known as le bon berger or le vrai régime et gouvernement des bergers et bergères, it was one of the earliest how-to manuals, which provided information regarding farming practices. divided into thirty-nine chapters, de brie’s book offered advice on how to take care of sheep in different weather conditions, a monthly guide on what to do with the flock and information regarding ways to protect the animals from disease. the popular prayers of the credo, pater, ave and the commandments that were featured in the third section derive from l’art de bien vivre et morir, a translation of the ars moriendi. besides the computus, in compiling the section on astrology, marchant relied on the work of regiomontanus (johannes müller von königsberg, d. ), a german mathematician, astronomer and astrologer. heseltine vii for a recent discussion of de brie’s book see carlton w . carroll and lois hawley wilson, the medieval shepherd: jean de brie’s le bon berger ( ) (arizona state university, ). although written in the fourteenth century, de brie’s title became popular again in the early sixteenth century (perhaps because of the kalendrier?) and was printed in paris by denis jahnot and jean trepperel, who also published sixteenth century editions of the danse. parenthetically, the shepherd as a figure frequently appeared in the literature of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries when it was typically used as a way to lament the agrarian reforms and the changing social order. engrammare . like the text, the images used in the kalendrier are complied from various sources. w oodcuts illustrating the labors of the month are based on the images from printed books of hours, while, as mentioned earlier, representations of hell are borrowed from the ars moriendi. the image of the author comes from the danse macabre des femmes, while a striking woodcut depicting death on a horse and the mouth of hell – which may have been initially made for the first edition of the kalendrier – appears in several dance of death books as well (fig. ). as an amalgam of texts and images, the kalendrier is thus a true product of the transitional period drawing inspiration from both manuscript and printed sources. the book is perhaps best known for its diagrammatic images of the human body and celestial spheres. a particularly curious image, which marries marchant’s interest in the macabre with his knowledge of anatomy and medicine, is the human skeleton (or zodiac skeleton) featured in the fourth section of the kalendrier (fig. ). the full-page woodcut portrays the influence of the planets on dif ferent parts of the human skeleton. the image is based on the so-called bloodletting figures (vein man) and, especially, on the zodiac man (homo signorum) that were popular in late medieval manuscripts. both diagrams are included in the kalendrier, the zodiac man typically precedes the human skeleton and the bloodletting figure follows it. for a discussion on the bloodletting figure and the zodiac man see peter murray jones, medieval medical miniatures (austin and london: university of texas and the british library ) and peter w hitfield, astrology: a history (london: the british library, ). the most thorough discussion of the origins and the usage of the zodiac man diagrams is still found in the following article: harry bober, “the zodiacal miniature of the très riches heures of the duke of berry: its sources and meaning,” journal of the warburg and courtauld institutes vol. ( ): - . these types of anatomical diagrams were also often included in the folding calendar (vade mecum) made for medieval physicians. they were made from six or more small pieces of parchment, folded together in the middle and then folded again into sections. the pages were then sewn together at the bottom and the calendar was carried in a pouch at the belt were they could be accessed quickly. for example, in the edition marchant printed on april , , the zodiac man appears on the first page of the fourth section of the book, on folio h i , the human skeleton is depicted on h ii and the bloodletting figure is placed on h iii verso. the zodiac man and the vein man are complementary images it was believed that one should not engage in bloodletting or any other type of treatment of a particular part of a body if the moon stood in the zodiac sign that governed that body part. the in marchant’s rendition, the human skeleton is surrounded with wavy banderoles, which link specific body parts (or bones) to different planets and with two long scrolls placed on either side that provide instruction on how best to use the diagram. as peter parshall has shown, marchant’s human skeleton is similar in style and content to a german woodcut of the same title printed in nuremburg in . the german cut is believed to have come from the estate of the nuremburg physician, hartmann schedel (d. ), who owned several copies of the diagram, two of them glued into a manuscript containing medical texts. together with marchant’s woodcut printed the same year, schedel’s diagram is one of the earliest depictions of the human skeleton and as such, as parshall and schoch note, it “represents a milestone in the history of anatomical illustrations before vesalius.” the figure of the skeleton, with the left arm bent slightly, and the usage of the descriptive banderoles, imply that marchant’s and schedel’s woodcuts are based on the same model. the xylographic text placed in the upper register of the german woodcut, identifies the french physician, richard helain, as the author of the image. helain was the dean of the medical faculty at the university of paris from to and served as king charles viii’s personal physician from to . he argued that the human skeleton, including the teeth, consists of bones, identified in the german cut by the banderoles in latin or the transliterated greek or arabic. in the sprit of the humanistic science, helain derived his ideas from late zodiac man thus functioned as a visual mnemonic for use in phlebotomy. on the science of astrology and its usage in late medieval and renaissance europe se whitfield, especially pages - . discussed and reproduced in parshall and schoch .further discussion on the history of the human skeleton diagram can be found in christian coppens, “for the benefit of the ordinary people: the translation of the fasciculus medicinae, antwerp ,” quaerendo . ( ): - . parshall and schoch . ibid. . however, this is not the first representation of the human skeleton in a medical book. a frontispiece to a german translation of the chirurgia magna of bruno da longoburgo from features one of the most naturalistic pictures of a skeleton in the middle ages, but this was a manuscript not a printed book. the manuscript is now preserved at the british library as additional ms , the skeleton is shown on folio v. for information on the miniature see murray jones - . parshall and schoch . classical and arabic texts that fell out of use in the middle ages, but were gainin g in popularity in the late fifteenth century. this is especially true for italy where, from the fourteenth century onward, attempts were made at most universities to revive the practice of anatomy by performing autopsies, even though they were banned by the church. since it features fewer banderoles, marchant’s image may appear less scientific or instructional, but the text that accompanies the woodcut implies that, it too, was based on helain’s study of the skeleton. titled les noms des os du corps humain et le nombre diceuly qui sont en somme deux cens xlviii, the caption makes reference to same number of bones as the german cut, . that marchant was familiar with helain’s work is certain. the printer’s close link with the university and the circle humanist scholars working in paris has already been discussed. in addition, marchant’s interest in mathematical and scientific treatises would have also made him aware of the new teachings at the faculty of medicine. marchant’s inclusion of the human skeleton in the kalendrier showcases his ability to fuse together seemingly disparate subjects, an editing strategy that marked his illustated editions. the diagram follows the section of the book, which depicts the scenes of torture and pains of hell (figs. and ). in those images, the body is identified as the source of moral corruption and the naked bodies of the sinners are hence subjected to unimaginable suffering. likewise, in macabre art, it is the body that is continually degraded; seen as a source of vermin and stench. while marchant’s human skeleton is not a macabre image per say, the mocking grin and the strings of hair on the back of the skull (not shown in the german woodcutcut) certainly reference macabre sensibility (fig. ). in fact, the human s keleton is preceded in the volume by a woodcut showing death and the mouth of hell – featuring another grinning skeleton with thinning hair – one that marchant (and later other printers) also incorporated into editions of the dance of death books published in the s (fig. ). however, in the zodiac skeleton diagram, the body is treated differently than in macabre art or scenes showing hell and punishment (fig. ). no longer a threatening, putrid corpse, the skeleton is controlled by stars, which govern its every ibid. . part and consideration of it will promote health. in marchant’s woodcut, as in the german image, the body becomes the source of knowledge and the basis for an emerging science of anatomy. interestingly, schedel, the owner of the german cut, was the author of the famous liber chronicarum (nuremberg chronicle), which was also published in by anton koberger. one of the most lavishly illustrated early printed books, the liber is an encyclopedia of biblical and human histories as well as a chronicle of several important w estern cities. among its many illustrations, diagrams and maps, is the so-called imago mortis – a woodcut that depicts a lively dance of death of human skeletons resurrected at the last judgment and expressing joys of having escaped the imprisonment of the body. this image – about which much can be said – is another adaptation of the danse and together with marchant’s human skeleton, demonstrates how the image of death was beginning to take on new meanings and circulate in different contexts (religious, but also medical and astrological) at the end of the century. one more comment about the body: in the german woodcut, the registers containing information about the image are placed in the two upper corners. in marchant’s image, however, the registers are turned into two long scrolls that are placed on either side of the main figure. in order to look at the figure and read the text, the viewer/reader has to manipulate his body or turn the book around. in so doing, marchant pulls the viewer into the image and makes him explore the diagram the same way a physician would explore the corpse, by moving around it, touching and probing. the same strategy was employed several times in the kalendrier, mostly for diagrammatic images. in an edition now preserved at the british library, a diagram showing the tower of w isdom – a popular medieval mnemonic diagram – ibid. . in the s, nuremberg was the center of humanism in the north, so it is not surprising that the book was published there. see: stephan füssel, die welt im buch: buchkünstlerischer und humanistischer kontext der schedelschen weltchronik von (mainz: gutenberg-gesellschaft, ) and adrian w ilson and joyce lancaster w ilson, the making of the nuremberg chronicle (amsterdam: nico israel, ). parshall and schoch . was printed on a larger sheet of paper and folded into the book. in order to examine the diagram, the viewer had to turn the book sideways and unfold the page. images such as these represent important innovations in the process of reading brought forth by the print medium and also foreshadow the development of the interactive (pop-up) medical books popular from the sixteenth century that included flaps the reader could open or close. the interactive aspect of the kalendrier, in which the relationship between the book and the reader is continually emphasized, is similar to the danse where the dialogue forms the link between the dead and the living and between the protagonists and the viewer. yet, one would read the two books differently. the danse is read in one sitting, whereas the kalendrier is a book examined in sections and over time. it is a more ambitious work; it presents itself as a manual for living and is an encyclopedia of knowledge. like the book of hours, on which it is partially based, it is a type of book that a family would own for generations. in fact, the copy at the british library discussed above, is heavily inscribed with reader’s marks, in different hands, which demonstrates that the book was used for a prolonged period of time. translating, augmenting or reinventing: strategies for marketing illustrated books despite their differences, both the danse and the kalendrier were intended for wider audience than his typical university clientele and marchant employed similar strategies to market the books. these included adapting or reinventing the books, but also collaborating with publishers and booksellers who had acc ess to a british library ib. . this is an edition of the shepherdesses’ calendar (kalendrier et compost des bergeres) that marchant printed in august of . on pop-up illustrations in the renaissance see: andrea carlino, paper bodies: a catalogue of anatomical fugitive sheets, - , trans. noga arikha (london: w ellcome institute for the history of medicine, ). although the print medium had allowed for greater experimentation with interactive aspects of books, it is also important to note that such images were not unknown in medieval manuscripts. wider network of buyers. this is an important point as it shows that the print market had a direct impact on the danse macabre series. for example, like the danse, the kalendrier was also published with female instead of male protagonists, hence the compost et kalendrier des bergères (shepherdesses’ calendar) published on august , . although most authors refer to it simply as the female edition of the kalendrier, it is in fact not. the content of the book – though not the illustrations – is markedly different from the kalendrier, its focus placed more sternly on the relationship between astronomy, astrology and death. structured as a dialogue between the two shepherdesses, bietrix and sebille, and two shepherds, named simply l’un and l’autre, the book follows the women’s visit to the city of paris and also includes sections on astronomy and astrology from the kalendrier. the emphasis on the dialogue between the protagonists, recalls the structure of the danse and the shepherdesses’ calendar actually includes the dance of death of women in its last section. like the poem of the danse macabre des femmes, the text of the shepherdesses’ calendar references late fifteenth century paris – its markets, monuments, and beauty – in very specific terms. as the title-page of the shepherdesses’ calendar explains, marchant had printed two editions of the work, one for his press and the other for jean petit. since the book was published for the two presses at the same time, it is likely that marchant and petit collaborated closely on the making of this edition. as an adaptation of the kalendrier, the book included new text – particularly the verses uttered by the beatrix and sebille and the two shepherds – and marchant would have needed financial support to hire a writer and put together an expensive volume, which petit could provide. moreover, petit had an interest in the kalendrier, marchant had printed an edition of the book specifically for petit in / , and promoting the shepherdesses’ calendar in petit’s store was especially advantageous to marchant. as the main libraire-publisher in for an electronic facsimile of this edition preserved at the bn (rés. v. ) see http://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/ /cb /date the elaborate title page which features the figure of prestre jehan (one of marchant’s printer’s marks) reads: imprime a paris en lostel de beauregard en la rue cloppin, a lensigne du roy prestre i[e]han ouquel lieu sont a vendre, ou au lyon d’argent en la rue sainct jaques. both editions were printed in august of . the store at the sign of lyon d’argent belonged to petit. paris at the time, petit owned several stores in the rue st. jacques, the main hub of the printing shops in the city, and had access to a more varied and affluent clientele. their decision to issue a female version of the kalendrier also reflected the popular trends in publishing devotional works. marchant’s publication of the dance of death of women in was one of the books that generated interest in works with female protagonists, but there are other examples as well. in , just a year before the shepherdesses’ calendar was issued, the flemish humanist and printer/publisher, josse bade, working in lyons and paris, decided to publish a latin supplement in verse and prose to sebastian brant’s ship of fools, titled sultifere naves sensus animosqs trahentes mortis in exitium (the ship of female-fools and the five senses). in his preface, which was written in the form of a letter to his friend and publisher angelbert (enguillbert) de marnef, bede “remarked that his text should be inscribed in the long tradition of edifying literature aimed at enlightening and guiding readers toward prudent and virtuous choices.” de marnef, in turn, wanted to test the appeal of bede’s supplement by publishing a french vernacular adaptation of it. he hired jehan druyon, who had devoted his whole career on the theme of folly and already translated brant’s ship of fools into french (le grande nef des folz du monde), to translate and adapt bede’s text. published by de marnef also in as la grant nef de folles selon les cinq cens de nature, druyon’s work deviated significantly from bede’s addendum and included thirteen additional illustrated chapters. both the shepherdesses’ calendar and the ship of female-fools were popular though not as frequently pinson . ibid . ibid . ibid . note also the similarity in the way the ship of fools and the dance of death were marketed in france – in print medium the titles of both works become le grand… and as publishers add more books or chapters, the names of those are included in the title so that the books become closer to compilations. this is not unique to just these two works, but actually reflects the trend in early publishing used, no doubt, to entice and appeal to a wider audience. printed as the original works from which they were adapted. apart from marchant’s and petit’s edition, only one other issue of the shepherdesses’ calendar is known, printed in paris in by gaspard philippe, whose press was often under employment by the petit family, which is probably the reason he published the title in the first place. w hile the kalendrier enjoyed enormous popularity in the sixteenth century and was printed in france and england, the shepherdesses’ calendar, with its focus on paris and the late fifteenth century urban milieu, was perhaps too specific and hence not as appealing to publishers in later periods. marchant would have been aware of brant’s text and druyon’s adaptation of bede’s addendum, because, as noted earlier, he also printed an edition of the ship of fools and often collaborated with de marnef family. entitled der zotten ende der narrenscip and printed in , marchant’s edition was the first book publis hed in flemish in paris. it was a product of partnership between marchant and geoffroy de marnef, angelbert’s brother, and it was illustrated with woodcuts used in the de marnef’s french translation of the ship of fools discussed in the previous passage. this is yet another example of how tightly knit the community of printers and publishers of illustrated works was at the time and how often images and texts were adapted, translated and reused for different publications. for the purposes of our discussion, marchant’s collaboration with geoffroy on a latin translation of the danse is especially important. the book, chorea ab eximio macabro versibus alemanicis edita, the book was published in october of and translated into latin by pierre desrey (petrus desrey) from troyes (henceforth chorea). it features twenty-three woodcuts and, in terms of the the ship of female-fools was printed three times in the early sixteenth century, whereas brant’s book was published at least twenty-six times across w estern europe. engrammare . a facsimile of this edition is found in the dance of death printed in paris in . a reproduction made from the copy in the lessing j. rosenwald collection, library of congress, with introduction by w illiam m. ivins jr. (w ashington, d.c.: library of congress, ). for an electronic facsimile of this edition preserved at the libray of content, it is virtually identical to marchant’s edition of the danse macabre des hommes except that the verses and the names of the living dancers are given in latin. the chorea includes a fairly elaborate title-page that contains the full title of the volume and provides information on the translator, printer and publisher of the book. below the text is de marnef’s device, an elaborate emblem depicting the pelican feeding its young and another bird nestled in the trees. unlike other editions of the danse, the chorea does not include a colophon at the end of the book, most likely because the practice of printing colophons (a device derived from scribal culture) was beginning to wane at the end of the fifteenth century. in comparison to marchant’s title-page for the edition, the chorea demonstrates just how fast the appearance of printed books was changing at the time. w hile the former featured only a single line of text (la danse macabre nouvelle) and no addional information, the latin version, printed only four years later contains most of the information we would find in books printed today, namely the title-page, publisher’s logo and date of publication. in collaborating with de marnef on the latin edition, marchant yet again displayed his astute commercial skills. originating from a family of established booksellers in paris, de marnef’s shop on the rue st. jacques specialized in popular vernacular books for devout christians. among the books sold at marnef’s shop were bilingual copies, in french and latin, of the rule of st. bendict, bilingual copies of saint jerome’s regle de dévotion, several editions in latin and french of sebastian brant’s ship of fools, and the books of hours in the most popular congress see http://lcweb .loc.gov/cgi- bin/ampage?collid=rbc &filename=rbc _ rosen page.db in addition, unlike the edition, the latin version does not include the poem of the three living, which typically follows the danse, and it includes an additional woodcut showing the author at the end of the book. the full text of the title page reads as follows: chorea ab eximio // macabro versibus alemanicis edita, // et a petro desrey trecacio, quodam orato//re, nuper emendata, parisiusque per ma//gistrum guidonem mercatorem, pro // godeffrido de marnef ad intersignium // pellicani in vico divi jacobi commoranti, anno domini // quadringentesimo nonagesimo supra millesimum, idibus // octobris impressa. pettigrew, french vernacular books xi. hindman, “the career of guy marchant” . liturgical uses, the use of paris and the use of rome. w hat an ideal place to market the latin edition of the danse! moreover, geoffroy de marnef worked with angelbert and another brother, jean, who were also booksellers-publishers and with whom he maintained the paris bookstore and their provincial outlets in poitiers, angers and bourges. expanding the business to smaller towns was a common practice among successful booksellers and de marnefs wer e no exception. in partnering with geoffrey, marchant gained the commission for the latin edition, which de marnef almost certainly fully financed, and an access to a wider audience for his illustrated books, not just in paris but also elsewhere in france. although not directly related to the danse, two other works by marchant should be mentioned as they demonstrate his involvement with broader european market for printed books and his willingness to experiment with format. in discussing his career, hindman had pointed out that marchant’s experience with publishing short tracts had led him to experiment with even more concise formats, most notably letters. one of the markers of the early print culture is the way the medium took over and popularized short works – royal edicts, pamphlets and letters. w hile the practice of printing such documents reached its pinnacle in the sixteenth century when debates concerning the reformation were made public through print, there are examples of it from the fifteenth century as well. for instance, in the french crown made sure that the provisions of the treaty of arras – a document signed by king louis xi and the archduke maximilan i – were made available in print and thus distributed more widely, initiating the tradition that only grew in the subsequent century. although marchant did not print royal documents, his short publications nevertheless participated in the public discourse surrounding historical events. one letter was especially timely: the document announcing christopher columbus’s ibid. . ibid. . hindman, “the career of guy marchant,” . pettigrew x. discovery of the new w orld, which marchant had printed in / . when columbus returned from his voyage to the new w orld in january of , he wrote a letter in spanish recounting his observations and experience. w ritten in lisbon and dated march , , the letter was first published in barcelona by pedro rosa. shortly after, on april , columbus’ letter was translated into latin by leander de cosco (leandre di cosco) and printed in rome in early may as epistola de insulis nuper inventis (“a letter about the islands newly discovered’). following its translation into latin, the letter was rapidly published throughout europe, with editions printed in basel, antwerp, strasbourg and paris. importantly, marchant was the only french printer to publish the letter, which points to his connection with the printing industry outside of france and his keen sense for interpreting the trends in the market. w hat makes this document especially interesting is the format in which it is printed. consisting of a single folio sheet of paper folded twice to make a pamphlet of eight pages, the epistola is a precursor of modern newspaper. marchant’s edition features the title page (hence we know the document was meant to be folded) with the title of the letter and an advertisement for his shop at champ gaillard: epistola de insulis de nouo repertis. impressa parisius in capo gaillardi. on the verso of the title page, he included the epigram written by the bishop of monte peloso, r. l. de corbaria, entitled to the most invincible king of spain, and the woodcut portraying the annunciation to the hindman, “the career of guy marchant,” . marchant had allegedly printed three variants of the letter, all published in , of which there are only two recorded copies of each edition. for a discussion of marchant’s letter and the list of other editions of the work (nine, overall) see w ilberforce eames, “columbus letter on the discovery of america,” bulletin of the new york public library, ( ): - . eams . ibid . hindman, “the career of guy marchant” . eams . for a reproduction of this image, see eams. ibid. . w hile the image of the letter included in this text contains just a reference to marchant’s shop in the title, one of the other two editions actually features his printer’s mark, the sola fides suffict. shepherds. the illustration does not appear in other european editions and hindman suggests that marchant took it from a group of woodcuts that he reused from time to time and “that are thought to come from a book of hours, which has yet to be identified.” as a possible source, hindman lists the fragmentary horae printed for vérard in , now preserved at the bn (réserve b. ). in marchant had also printed two editions of the kalendrier, including the deluxe edition for vérard, in which he used similar cuts depicting shepherds in the fields. it is possible therefore that the woodcut used in the epistola was modeled after the illustrations in his editions of the kalendrier, but what i would argue is more significant here is marchant’s ability to adapt his illustrations to different texts. the figure of the shepherd is an important one in the bible: abel was a keeper of sheep, abraham, isaac and joseph were shepherds, moses kept the flock of jethro, and king david was also a shepherd. in the new testament, the shepherds were the first to hear about the birth of christ from an angel (luke - ) – the scene depicted in the epistola – and jesus is also often described as the good shepherd. by using the image of the annunciation to the shepherds in the epistola, marchant is suggesting to his readers that they too, like the shepherds in the bible, are made privy to a special proclamation, one that will usher in the beginning of a new era. the notion of travelling or exploration was taken up in another publication that deviated from marchant’s general oeuvre of scholarly texts. published in november ibid . as quoted in eames, the epigram reads: “no region now can add to spain’s great deeds/ to such man all the world is yet too small./ an orient land found far beyond the waves/ w ill add, great betica, to thy renown./ then to columbus, the true finder, give/ due thanks; but greater still to god on high./ w ho makes new kingdoms for himself and thee/ both firm and pious let thy conduct be.” hindman,“the career of guy marchant” . as a possible source, hindman lists the fragmentary horae published by vérard in , now preserved in paris at the bn (réserve b. ). ibid. . as the bn catalogue explains, this horae is now bound with another printed book of hours, which includes the sentence sola fides sufficit, thus suggesting that marchant may have been involved in the printing of this volume. heseltine v. in the kalendrier, the shepherd should be understood as a representation of everyman and the figure is used often used metaphorically to describe aspects of the human condition. of , les merveillies de romme (the marvels of rome) was a french translation of the pilgrim guide to the monuments in rome, mirabilia romae vel potius historia et descriptio urbis romae. w hile in the epistola, marchant dabbled in pamphlet publications, here he tackled the format of travel guides. this hugely popular pilgrim’s guide to the monuments in rome, reproduced in many manuscripts, was one of the bestsellers in the early years of printing. the work was translated into vernaculars, multiple editions in german are known, two italian and two french translations, one of which was published by marchant. w hile most editions of the mirabilia were printed in octavo ( ), marchant’s work is unique because it is a dudodecimo ( o ), and as such truly a pocket size book. like the latin danse, marchant’s les merveilles was published for geoffroy de marnef no doubt because it fit perfectly with the types of books – vernacular texts for devout christians – for which the de marnef shop was renowned. when we survey the career of guy marchant in detail, a more complex picture emerges than the one typically found in studies on macabre art. rather than seeing marchant simply as a printer who happened to have published editions of the danse, we see him as a shrewd entrepreneur and an innovator in the field of early printed books. his ability to move fluidly between short, plain tracts intended for the the istc lists editions printed up to throughout w estern europe. the other french translation was printed by pierre le carron after . hindman, “the career of guy marchant” . a duodecimo format refers to a book made by folding a sheet of paper into twelve leaves. hindman mentions that the only smaller version of the book was published in rome by stephan plannck four months after marchant. plannck’s book was a twentyfourmo ( o ), and hindman suggests that is was perhaps made because marchant had such success with his edition. ibid. . hindman also suggests that marchant’s les merveilles was popular in part because it was well marketed through the de marnef operations and available not just in paris, but in their other outposts in france. as a side point, it should also be noted that some of the same printers who had published editions of the epistola also printed the mirabilia, most importantly stephan plannck and eucharius silber, both working in rome. among the titles from their presses de conservations sanitatis and the prognosticon, which are thematically similar to parts of the kalendrier. more research is needed here, but it is likely that marchant had also established connections with italian printers and looked to italy for inspiration for his illustrated volumes. this seems all the more plaus ible since marchant had clearly been involved in the humanist circles in paris and would thus be familiar with italian publications. students of the college of navarre and parchment copies of illustrated books created for the king of france is as remarkable as it is unusual in the world of early printing where such wide range of publishing would often have disastrous consequences. marchant’s education and familiarity with established theological tracts, but also his interest in the emerging humanist and scientific discourses reveal the depth of knowledge a printer needed to have to become successful in the new industry. marchant’s publication of the danse macabre was therefore not a happenstance. he did not print the first edition because the mural was a popular monument; he did it because he knew the market was interested in books on death and dying and probably also because there was the german blockbook precedent, which he must have known. in printing the danse, marchant did not only adapt the late medieval theme to the medium of print, he reinvented it altogether by adding new figures and complementary texts and thus placed the subject into a wholly new context so that it was, especially in the context of the danse macabre des femmes, almost an autonomous work. in the process, marchant created a new type of book – one of the earliest examples of specifically french incunabula, different in style to either german or italian printed books. the same can be said about his other ‘invention’, the kalendrier, which is really the magnum opus of his whole enterprise. although he was not the writer of the texts or the creator of the images, he was the compiler who put together a new product – one that remained popular and often copied through the sixteenth century – and in that sense put a stamp on the history of early printed books. a review of marchant’s career and publications also allows us to see how small and interconnected the world of printing was in the early years of the industry. the majority of printers and publishers collaborated with one another on a regular basis, which helped to popularize the danse and other similar illustrated titles. marchant’s success with the dance of death editions sparked the interest of other printers to produce their own volumes, which vary in terms of format, content and quality. certain printers had clearly worked only with vérard’s illustrations for the danse macabre des hommes, while others copied marchant’s books. as i will elaborate in the fifth chapter, husz was in possession of both versions because he combined vérard’s and marchant’s woodcuts and also included all other appended texts. actually, husz’s book is probably the most comprehensive edition of the danse in the fifteenth century since it included all known woodcuts and his own added inventions. his most famous adaptation of the danse is the woodcut of the printers (fig. ). w hile, as discussed earlier, husz introduces printers as new members of society and celebrates their skills, the image is not entirely positive. revealing his understanding of macabre sensibility, husz creates a self-referential image that combines the notions of death and printing. inherent in the composition is a sense of entrapment and claustrophobia: the compositor is squeezed between the table and the bench, the inker is blocked by the press and the libraire is trapped between the bookshelves and the counter. unlike the other cadavers in the danse, husz’s dead are giants; they are nearly twice as tall as the printers and the bookseller, which makes them particularly threatening. this is especially obvious in the ‘panel’ depicting the printing workshop where the heads of the two cadavers are almost touching the ceiling even though neither is standing fully upright. since one of the dead had seized the pressman in the center of the composition, at this moment no one is pulling the bar on the press or making books. like a weapon, the bar now points into death; into nothingness. even more symbolically, death’s hand and the pressman’s hand are clasped together and hover over the printing pr ess. their bodies too, are mirroring one another – both pulling in the opposite direction. death and the printer, husz tells us, are doubles. in accordance with macabre spirit, death is the future image of the pressman and if the woodcut showed the more common right-handed press, the pressman would actually be standing exactly where death is now. perhaps it is also not a coincidence that the doubling of death and the printer takes place right above the printing press – the machine celebrated for its ability to produce multiple, identical copies. chapter four la danse macabre nouvelle: w omen, fools and the agency of the printer the big twist awkwardly tiptoeing on his left foot, one of the giant cadavers in mathias husz’s woodcut depicting death visiting the printing workshop and the bookstore is shown grabbing the printer and pulling him over the printing press (fig. ). the other workers in the image are also being dragged away from their posts: the compositor is interrupted as he is putting together a line of text, while the bookseller on the far right stands behind the counter in front of an open book. although the woodcut is part of the danse macabre book, the act of dancing – a crucial element of the theme – is not immediately apparent in the image. in a more typical portrayal of the danse, such as the mural painting from la ferté-loupière in yonne, burgundy (c. ), the living and the dead are lined up facing the viewer (figs. , and ). w hile the figures do not hold hands, as they would in many dances, their bodies are in contact because the cadavers yank on the living persons’ sleeves, pull on their belts or grab their arms, which create a sense of a unified, choreographed movement. w hat is especially striking in the example from la ferté-loupière is that the dead appear more energetic than the living: they twist, hop and jump lifting their knees and elbows as they force the living into the dance. their facial expressions are also more animated the dead frequently grimace and grin flashing teeth at their horrified dancing partners. although the exact style of dancing is not often identified in the verses that accompany the danse, the medieval audience, accustomed to dances performed at feasts, processions, courts or even it should be noted that in the printed editions, the difference in movement between the living and the dead is not as obvious as it is in the mural paintings because we can only view two pairs per page. funerary rituals, would no doubt be able to ‘read’ the body-language of the figures portrayed in the picture. as scholars have pointed out, the living and the dead in the danse actually dance two different dances: the sprightly, jerky movements of the dead resemble the peasant dance known as morris dance (or a morisco), while the controlled, gliding motion of the living figures is more typical of the courtly dance style known as the basse-dance (“low dance”). associated with the court, the basse-dance was the most popular style of dancing in the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries. a few extant choreographies of the dance show that the steps are executed close to the ground in order to create “a gentle rising and falling gliding motion.” the dancers shy away from any sudden movements and there is no hopping, twisting or jumping associated with the basse- dance. in fact, as frances eustace has recently noted, the dancers’ steps “remain low even in the more rapid sections” of the dance; this translates into virtual still ness when the dance is depicted in a painting or an illumination. this, at least, is the impression we get when we look at the portrayal of the basse-dance from the italian frances eustace with pamela m. king, “dances of the living and the dead: a study of the danse macabre imagery w ithin the content of late-medieval dance culture,” mixed metaphors: the danse macabre in medieval and early modern europe, eds: sophie oosterwijk and stephanie knöll (newcastle upon tyne: cambridge scholars publishing, ) - , . for a discussion of these two styles of dancing and their social implications see robert i. mcgrath, “the dance as pictorial metaphor,” gazette des beaux-arts ( ): - and d. w . robertson, a preface to chaucer: studies in medieval perspective (princeton: princeton up, ). for an analysis of the dance in the context of the danse macabre see: eustace, “dances of the living and the dead”; elina gertsman, the dance of death, especially. chapter ; jane h. m. taylor, “que signifiait danse au quinzième siècle? danser la danse macabré”, fifteenth century studies ( ): - ; and susanne w arda “dance, music and the inversion of the natural order in the medieval danse macabre eds: sophie oosterwijk and stephanie knöll (newcastle upon tyne: cambridge scholars publishing, ) - . eustace . ibid. . manual on dancing written by guglielmo ebreo in or the figures of the living in the la ferté-loupière (figs. and ). however, in husz’s woodcut no such dances are shown (fig. ). the figures are neither dancing in an obvious way, nor are they arranged in a processional line facing the viewer. w e only know that the living and the dead in the image are meant to be dancing because the verses placed below the image tell us so. venez danser ung tourdion, says le mort to the printers in the opening line of the dialogue, thus referencing not only the act of dancing per se, but also a very specific style of dancing known as la grant tourdion (loosely translated as the “big twist”), which became popular at the turn of the century. on the one hand, husz may have wanted to emphasize that a dance is taking place in the image since the composition does not elucidate that clearly and hence included a reference to the tourdion in the verses and, on the other, his choice of this particualr dance made the woodcut more relevant to its late-fifteenth century audience. updating the danse by referencing contemporary fashion or popular dances as well as by inserting new social types, like printers, into the hierarchy of figures that made up the composition was an effective strategy through which husz made the book appealing and pertinent to wider publics. at the same time, husz’s decision to allude to a particular dancing style in the verses or depict the new technology of printing in the woodcut highlights his crucial role as the editor responsible for assembling text and images and providing the narrative framework of the book. the new danse the practice of updating the danse did not of course begin with husz. w e will recall that even in the first edition of the danse, published in , marchant, the for a color reproduction of the miniature from ebreo’s tract, de practica seu arte tripudii vulgare opusculum (bn, ms. ital. ) see gertsman, the dance of death, plate , page . the translation is found in jody enders, murder by accident: medieval theatre, modern media, critical intentions (chicago and london: chicago up, ) . printer modernized the costumes of the living figures and matched them to the fashion of the s. marchant had also expanded the danse by adding ten new male figures in june of and he published a whole new series with only female protagonists in july of the same year. the rapid expansion of characters in the printed versions of the danse – overall, forty-six male and female figures were added to the series in five years – revealed an interest in exploring the burgeoning social sphere at the turn of the century. part of the reason for the additions was the appeal of the new. nouveauté, as leah chang has recently noted, attracted readers in the early years of printing and printers frequently made an effort to market their work as new or revised. marchant certainly understood this strategy well because he entitled the augmented edition of the men’s danse, la danse macabre nouvelle (the new dance of death). yet, the expansion of figures signified more than just a marketing strategy of a savvy printer. despite its religious and didactic origin, the danse was predicated on a portrayal of society and its satirical verses were often aimed at the secular and ecclesiastic elite. w ho was included or excluded from the danse or how a given figure was represented in the image could (and did) have particular political or social connotations. the best example of this may be the curious absence of the duke – the most prominent title among the french nobles in the later middle ages – from the roster of male figures included in the mural from the cemetery of the h oly innocents in paris. as sophie oosterwijk reminds us, in - when the mural was painted, the complex and often bloody political situation in paris implicated several french dukes and the portrayal of such a figure in the image could have been construed as a risqué political move. sixty years later, however, the stigma surrounding the duke had apparently cleared since the figure was included in it is also worth mentioning that the majority of new figures were actually added in – marchant augmented the men’s danse with ten figures in and published the women’s danse, consisting of thirty-four characters a month later. the last two female figures were included in april of . leah l. chang, into print: the production of female authorship in early modern france (newark: delaware up, ) . see oosterwijk, fro paris to inglond. marchant’s augmented edition of in which the duke is depicted as a handsome man wearing a long brocade coat as befits his status and rank (fig. ). while the hierarchy depicted in the danse macabre printed books should not be read as a literal portrayal of society (characters such as the female theologian ( la thelogienne), for example, unattested in historical records, may have been included as a way to ridicule the idea of women as preachers not to depict an actual social role), in their attempt to modernize the theme the printers nevertheless paid close attention to their social world and so should we. during the transition from the medieval to the renaissance era, french society underwent significant transformation and one of the main ones involved, importantly, the growing prominence of aristocratic women in social and political realms. in particular, the reign of anne of brittany (d. ), twice the queen of france, demonstrated an involvement in political and public life that far surpassed those of her predecessors. aristocratic women were also important patrons of books, both manuscripts and printed editions, and, as martha w olff has pointed out, for some of these women “the opportunity for artistic patronage seems to be tied to some degree of independent political power.” prominent printers and publishers, like antoine vérard worked hard to establish close connections with women at the french court and he published notable volumes (often with women as the main protagonists) for anne of brittany and louise of savoy (d. ), the duchess of angoulême and the mother of francis i. w omen also actively participated in mercantile economy and worked as merchants, artisans and even printers. the case of charlotte guillard, who female saints, such as catherine of sienna (d. ), are exceptions. catherine’s spiritual texts, including her most famous treatise the dialogue of divine providence, were read and respect by the contemporaries and in that sense she may have been viewed as a theologian. however, there are no known female theologians who lived in france at the end of the fifteenth century and though women occasionally preached in paris and elsewhere, they were generally not taken seriously. on this issue see larissa taylor, soldiers of christ: preaching in late medieval and reformation france (oxford: oxford up, ). martha w olff, “princess as patrons”, kings, queens, and courtiers: art in early renaissance france, . for vérard’s relationship with both anne and louise, see mary beth winn, anthoine vérard, especially chapter iv. worked as a printer for fifty years and published editions is quite famous and well documented, but there were other notable female printers working in france at the time including the widow of jean trepperel who even published an edition of the danse in the early sixteenth century. at the same time, as a recent study has shown, notions of masculine identity and especially aristoc ratic masculinity were being re-forged and what it meant to be, for example, a knight, in the early fifteenth century was no longer valid in the context of the late s. given such shifting paradigms of identity and social order, we have to wonder whether the appeal of the danse macabre books in this period has in part to do with an attempt to reinsert older and contested social categories or perhaps provide a tangible means of classifying and hence controlling the transforming public sphere. considering these issues, the present chapter will focus on two specific themes within the danse macabre books that are, as i will show, a particular invention of the print medium, namely the danse macabre des femmes series and the inclusion of the fool (henceforth des femmes). w hile examples of the danse that predate the illustrated books occasionally featured female characters, prior to marchant’s edition there was never more than a few women depicted in the danse and certainly no dance of death that was composed solely of women. although des femmes was likely intended as a companion-piece to the men’s danse and the two books share the same composition and are embedded in the same religious and moralistic concerns, they also differ considerably. developed out of the late fifteenth century allegorical and moralistic poetry, des femmes reveals concerns over women for a discussion of guillard’s career see b. beech, “charlotte guillard: a sixteenth-century business w oman”, renaissance quarterly , ( ): - . information regarding the widow of jean trepperel can be found in: see: stéphanie ohlund-rambaud, “l’atelier de jean trepperel, imprimeur-libraire parisien ( - ), patrons, authors and workshops: books and book production in paris around , eds. godfried croenen and peter ainsworth (leuven, belgium: peeters, , - ). the edition of the danse printed by the widow of trepperel was published in c. in collaboration with her second husband, jean jehannot, is in a private collection. for sources on women in the book industry see chang, into print and susan broomhall, women and the book trade in sixteenth-century france (aldershot: ashgate, ). see darrin m. cox, aristocratic masculinity in france ( - ): from knight to courtier, lewiston (new york: the edwin mellen press, ). as sources of sin and moral corruption, while at the same time attempting to negotiate anxiety over the growing prominence of women in public life of the period. as befits the macabre genre, the work is purposely ambivalent – neither completely misogynistic nor exactly salutary – des femmes is a fascinating portrayal of thirty-six women situated specifically in an urban late-fifteenth century parisian context. marchant’s second important modification of the genre is the inclusion of the fool (le sot) and the female fool (la sotte) in the danse in and respectively (figs. and ). to an extent, the danse was always about the foolishness of the human kind, about the way men and women continually fault by clinging on to their status, beauty or material possessions while disregarding their soul and their chance of salvation. the verses carried within a healthy dose of satire and humor, aimed particularly at the wealthy and the powerful, and as i discussed in the first chapter, depending on the context in which one views the danse, the text and the image could be construed as a farce of sorts rather than a serious contemplation on death and mortality. for these reasons, an inclusion of the fool into the roster of figures that make up the danse may not be so surprising. however, whereas in medieval morality discourse and particularly treatises on vices and virtues, folly held a position opposite prudence and symbolized moral failing, at the end of the fifteenth century in northern europe the theme of folly began to take on an all encompassing meaning, which up until then had been mainly reserved for death. referencing the danse, michel foucault had famously argued that in the last years of the fifteenth century “the mockery of madness replaces death and its solemnity.” as we will see, foucault was only partially right, death did not fully disappear at the end of the century, but the theme of the fool and f olly did begin to challenge death’s position as a common allegorical figure in art and literature of the period. marchant’s inclusion of the fool and the female fool in the danse, and especially, his decision to place them at the end of the dance, standing as the last living figures, i will argue, reveals his interest in adjusting the theme to fit these new yona pinson, the fool’s journey . michel foucault, madness and civilization: a history of insanity in the age of reason, trans. richard howard (new york: vintage books, ) . moral and didactic concerns. it also further highlights the satirical and the topsy-turvy elements already inherent in the structure of the danse. both the publication of the des femmes and the inclusion of the fool opened up the danse to new interpretations and emphasized the crucial role the printer had in designing the book and imbuing it with meaning through a careful editorial strategy. marchant and the framing of the danse macabre of women the women’s dance of death is in part modeled after the men’s danse and the two books were complementary from the beginning. w hile marchant published the first and the second edition of des femmes separately from the men’s series, it is certainly true that many printers, including husz and nicolas le rouge, printed the two dances in single books thus emphasizing their status as companion-pieces. early illustrated books were also typically sold unbound and it is not unreasonable to assume that a bookseller would have pitched the two titles together to potential customers or that readers would have bound the works in single volumes as a complete series. in fact, a study of the notarial inventories of the sixteenth c entury parisian private libraries, suggests that the two dances were frequently bought together as a pair. however, the obvious similarity in theme and composition between the men’s and the women’s series also tends to overshadow the inherent differences between the two works. to see des femmes merely as a variation of the danse with female protagonists, as scholars often do, is to forget that from the very first edition des femmes was marketed in decisively different ways from the men’s series and hence carried its own sets of concerns. it is worth recalling that marchant published the first edition of the women’s series in july of and, importantly, that he entitled the see alexander h. schutz, “vernacular books in parisian private libraries of the sixteenth century according to the notarial inventories”, university of north carolina studies in the romance languages and literatures, ( ). interestingly, this study shows that families that owned copies of the danse also often owned editions of marchant’s other illustrated bestseller, the shepherd’s calendar. work not the danse macabre des femmes (which he probably would if he intended it only as a companion piece to the des hommes), but the miroer salutaire (salutary mirror). much has been made in literature about marchant’s wording of the title, and rightly so. marchant’s use of the word miroer recalls a long established medieval tradition of the speculum works, a smart strategy to use for a new illustrated book as it allowed him to access a wider range of readers and buyers, but it also references the theme of mirroring, and especially the distorted mirror that is so important in the macabre genre. in the memento mori tradition, the dead are what the living (and the viewer) will become at one point in the future. in the context of the danse, as i elaborated in the second chapter, scholars frequently debate about the nature of the dead in the image and question whether they are in fact specters of the living figures in death. is it the dance of death or the dance of the dead? the power of horror in the danse lies not in the fact that the image shows decomposing bodies, though they are certainly meant to shock us, but that we are seeing reflections of ourselves, our own distorted doppelgangers, as dead bodies in a future moment that is fast approaching. marchant’s use of the term miroer may actually have been even more instructive. as he explains in the introductory colophon, the book was intended as a self-help guide for all who desire salvation and want to make sure they achieve it (miroer salutaire pour toutes gens et des tous estats/ et est de grant utilite …pour celux qui desirent acquerir leur salut et qui le voudront avoir). taylor has pointed out that by the late middle ages, the verb ‘se mirer’ had been used not so much to denote an act of looking at oneself in the mirror, as to imply a form of meditation or contemplation, which is exactly what marchant was suggesting in the colophon. for him, the book was an instrument for the betterment of the reader and thus functioned as a contemplative tool. w hat made des femmes different from the men’s danse – itself a form of exempla for the reader/viewer – is that from its inception it only existed within the framework set up by marchant. unlike the men’s danse which was initially published in as a book of fifteen woodcuts and see for instance taylor, “un miroer salutaire.” ibid. . accompanying verses, des femmes was never printed without at least two other didactic texts, namely the debat dun corps et dun ame and the compainte de lame dampnee (henceforth the debat and the complainte). i will discuss the implications of this compilation of texts later in the chapter, but for now i wish to emphasize the importance of marchant’s intervention with des femmes. marchant, as we will recall, was neither the author nor the artist for the works he published. his talent was located not in his ability to compose but to compile texts and images from disparate sources and assemble them in his publications in new and innovative ways. in the context of des femmes, it was marchant’s editorial skills that supplied the narrative for the work and in turn informed the viewer’s experience of it. for this reason, i would argue that our understanding of des femmes has to take into consideration the two other works, the debate and the complainte not only as complementary texts concerned with similar didactic ideas, but as essential components of des femmes and as parts of a unified whole. in the past, des femmes attracted scholarly attention because it is a poignant portrayal of women from all strata of the late fifteenth century society. authors such as ann tukey harrison and sandra hindman, suzanne w emple and diane kaiser and josette w isman have discussed aspects of class, gender, and social and political concerns regarding the representation of women in des femmes, all of which enriched our understanding of the work. scholars writing primarily on macabre art had focused more on the book’s relationship to the men’s danse and typically see it as a work of lesser quality. for example, mâle described des femmes as the product of “an untalented poet”, while for kinch the development of see ann tukey harrison ed. the danse macabre of women ms. fr. of the bibliothèque nationale (kent, ohio: the kent state up, ); ann tukey harrison, “fifteenth-century french w omen’s role names”, the french review ( ): - ; suzanne f. w emple and denise a. kaiser, “death’s dance of w omen”, journal of medieval history ( ): - ; josette a. wisman, “la symbolique du miroir dans les dances macabres de guyot marchant”, romanische forschungen ( ): - and “un miroir déformant: hommes et femmes des danses macabres de guyot marchant”, the journal of medieval and renaissance studies . ( ): - . the women’s series is a sign of the narrowing down of audience, a notion he believes undermines the social impact of the original mural examples. according to kinch, des femmes was intended primarily for “rich, bourgeois women who sought edifying reading material” and who were attracted to work that catered to their own particular interests. kinch’s claim, however, is only partially correct. while it is likely that des femmes appealed to some women, it is doubtful that women were the only readers of the series. in the opening colophon, marchant had clearly stated that the book is intended for both men and women ( pour toutes gens et de tous estates) and, even more significantly, woodcuts from des femmes were frequently included in the margins of the printed books of hours where they were exposed to an even wider community of readers. what has been missing from the studies on des femmes, however, is the acknowledgment of the crucial role marchant had in assembling the book. in the early years of printing in france successful printer-publishers, such as marchant, frequently inserted their agency into the work they were publishing and took it upon themselves to reinvent or even adapt a given text. for instance, lori w alters has studied the process of vérard’s reframing of christine de pizan’s trésor de la cité des dames (treasury of the city of ladies), first written in , that he published in for anne of brittany in which he positioned himself as an intermediary between christine and anne, a move that emphasized his role as the propagator of christian doctrine to the french monarchy. similarly, taylor has show the importance of vérard’s editorial strategy and intention in assembling the jardin de plaisance, an anthology of poetry first published in . i see marchant’s publication of des emile mâle, religious art in france - and ashby kinch, “the danse macabre and the medieval community of death”, mediaevalia ( ): - , . kinch, “the danse macabre,” . lori j. w alters “anthoine vérard’s reframing of christine de pizan’s doctrine for anne de bretagne”, the cultural and political legacy of anne de bretagne: negotiating conventions in books and documents, ed. cynthia j. brown (cambridge: brewer, ) - . see taylor, “a priest of poetry to the people.” taylor’s discussion of vérard’s edition has been instrumental in forming my arguments regarding marchant’s intervention with des femmes. according to taylor vérard’s books exemplifies the femmes as belonging to such practices of early printers which were in part experimental – certain compilations worked and found audiences and others did not – but which also demonstrated an increasing importance of the role of the editor or compiler in giving meaning to the work. while it is true that marchant also reinvented the men’s danse by adding new text and new figures – a strategy that, as we have seen, was later continued by husz – what i think is particularly interesting about des femmes is that marchant did not have a pictorial model to work from. w e will recall that his edition of the danse was likely based on the famous mural located at the paris cemetery of the holy innocents, which marchant adapted to fit into the new medium. such a strategy was not possible with des femmes because prior to marchant’s book, female figures were only occasionally included in the danse. although there was no image to model the book after, the verses of des femmes poem were written several years before marchant’s publication, probably in , and circulated in manuscripts of the period. in discussing des femmes, i will argue that marchant assembled the work by relying on such existing manuscripts and literary traditions and that he also, importantly, borrowed heavily from the pictorial language of satirical prints popular in northern europe from the s onward. his editorial influence is evident from the introductory colophon and the layout of texts which start with the death of the body and end with hell and damnation and in that sense he corrected the inherent ambiguity of the danse; yet unlike the men’s series, des femmes is also more early printers predilection towards assembling (or “packaging” as she states) different texts in new formats. as she explains, it is erroneous to think of vérard’s edition as merely a compendium – a notion that denies a premeditated intention on the part of the collector/compiler. rather, she argues, we ought to think of such works as anthologies or compilations, terms that suggest a conscious intervention on the part of the editor in putting the disparate works together. according to taylor, vérard’s jardin is an anthology made by “using paratexts to create an aesthetic expressiveness, by arranging its miscellaneous contents so as to encourage the perception of an artful whole” ( ). although des femmes is a much shorter and to some extent less complex work than the jardin, i would argue that marchant’s mode of operation functioned in exactly the same way. staunchly urban and topical, interested as much in a serious contemplation on death and salvation as in a satirical portrayal of women and their role in society. women and death in french manuscripts and literary traditions, c. - marchant’s interest in publishing des femmes was almost certainly prompted by the nouveauté strategy frequently employed by the early printers who marketed their books as revised, augmented or otherwise improved in hopes of attracting new or wider readership. at the same time, however, we know from the previous chapter that marchant had a keen ability to recognize the trends in the market and a book with solely female protagonists would have appealed to a number of readers at the time. throughout the fifteenth century in france there was an avid interest in books about women from christine de pizan’s trésor de la cité des dames and pierre michault’s procès d’honneur féminin ( ) to antoine dufour’s vies des femmes célèbres ( ) and symphorien champier’s nef des dames vertueuses ( ). in addition, fifteenth century french poets like as eustache dechamps (d. ), pierre de nesson (d. before ), françois villon (d. c. ) and olivier de la marche (d. ) explored macabre themes in their verses or utilized the figure of death personified in their allegorical poems with female protagonists. to understand the genesis of marchant’s des femmes, it will be useful to explore the conjunctuion of related themes in earlier allegorical poems. of special interest to present discussion are two poems written in the latter decades of the fifteenth for a recent discussion of these works see: helen j. swift, gender, writing and performance: men defending women in late medieval france, - (oxford: clarendon, ) and michel szkilnik, “mentoring notable ladies: antoine dufour’s vies des femmes célèbres”, the cultural and political legacy of anne de bretagne: negotiating conventions in books and documents, ed. cynthia j. brown (cambridge: brewer, ) - . on this issue see christine martineau-genieys, le thème de la mort dans la poésie française de à (paris: h. champion, ). century in which death is linked directly to the original sin and thus given specific historical origin in adam’s and eve’s trespass. around pierre michault composed an allegorical poem la dance aux aveugles (the dance of the blind), which is thematically and compositionally related to the danse. the poem is occasionally referred to as la dance aux trois aveugles (the dance of the three blind) because the work is divided into three sections (blind love, blind fortune and blind death). michault’s poem was illustrated in several manuscripts (most notably arsenal ms. , d. ) and also published in incunabula editions. like the danse, michault’s poem begins with the prologue of the lacteur and includes images of figures from different strata of society dancing, albeit blindfolded. in the work, the personified figure of death is portrayed riding an ox, a point meant to emphasize death’s slow but steady progress. in the verses, death is linked to adam and eve and the original sin, the act blamed for bringing death into the world in the genesis. that contemporaries recognized the similarities between michault’s poem and the danse, by the s already an established pictorial and literary theme in france, is evident from the fact that the two dances were included together in a partially illustrated manuscript dating from c. , which was also, as we will see, the earliest known occurrence of the danse macabre des femmes poem (bn, ms. fonds français ). marchant must also have been familiar with michault’s work since he included a version of the verses from the dance aux aveugles in a section on death and mortality in his editions of the kalendrier. the other important work is an anonymous mors de la pomme (the bite of the apple) that i already discussed in the previous chapter (henceforth the mors). the poem appears in a single illustrated manuscript (bn, ms. fonds français ), in his discussion of death and the maiden series by hans baldung grien, joseph leo koerner makes a point that the historical origin of death was of vital importance to much of macabre imagery, see koerner . for a recent discussion on the image of death riding a bull see sylvie bethmont - gallerand, “death personified in medieval imagery: the motif of death riding a bovine”, mixed metaphors: the danse macabre in medieval and early modern europe, eds. sophie oosterwijk and stefanie knöll (newcastle upon tyne: cambridge scholars publishing, ) - . which also includes poems and translations by jean miélot (d. ), a noted author, translator and illuminator who worked at the court of the duke of burgundy. almost certainly derived from the danse macabre genre the mors consists of individual scenes in which death, referred to as la mort, encounters its victims, converses with them and ultimately kills them (fig. ). as leonard kurtz explains, in the poem “death is depicted as an abstract concept, personified to a high degree. he enters into the social life of mankind and strikes him down with a javelin.” the poem is illustrated with thirty miniatures, twenty-six of which show individual victims, two depict scenes of hell and torture and two small ones portray the figure of the lacteur who provides the prologue and the epilogue. in contrast to the danse, however, the figures in the mors are not arranged hierarchically. the upper sections of the poem feature biblical characters (adam and eve, cain and abel or noah) while in the middle sections are figures that represent specific social types (the king, the cardinal, the queen, or the money-changer) all of which are haphazardly placed. the poem also includes an impressive number of women, ten overall. although presently extant in a single manuscript the mors appears to have been quite influential at the time. according to mâle, in the late fifteenth century, the poem was famous enough to have inspired border imagery included in a printed book of hours published in paris by simon vostre c. , which shows death attacking individual victims in a series of vignettes. mâle even argued that the composition of the mors, which links death with original sin and adapts the danse by portraying not the whole of community dancing together, but independent scenes in which death strikes its victims at their places of rest or work, have influenced the manuscript, which contains folios, is a compilation of various works associated with miélot. although it includes a preface written by miélot and dated , it is possible that the works were assembled over time and that not all of them were completed by this date. for a facsimile edition of le mors de la põmme section of the manuscript see leonard p. kurtz, ed. le mors de la põme, (new york: publications of the institute of french studies, ). ibid. v. mâle . for examples of border imagery featured in vostre’s edition from see mâle, page , figures and . holbein’s simulachres. first published in , the simulachres also begins with adam and eve and is characterized by genre images in which death attacks specific characters (figs. and ). more recently, gertsman suggested that the poem might have served as inspiration for the mural of the danse painted at the church of la chaise-dieu in the s, which includes images of adam and eve and the original sin on the pillars incorporated into the dance of death (fig. ). at present no direct connection between the mors and des femmes can be made, though similarities between the two works suggest that marchant may have been familiar with the manuscript. the existence of these works demonstrates that by the s in france there was an increased interest in the subject of women’s dance of death as well as a tendency to adapt and expand the danse by linking it more specifically to original sin in moralizing and allegorical poems. women’s dance of death: layout and content like the men’s danse, des femmes had literary origns. the earliest known manuscript that includes the des femmes poem dates from (bn, ms. fonds ibid. . more recently, another scholar has shown that holbein’s woodcutter hans lützelburger had based the composition of many of his images in the picture of death series on miniatures depicting the labors of the month from a sixteenth century printed book of hours, which is certainly in keeping with the spirit of the transitional period in which such exchanges were very common, but the idea to include original sin and place the figures in independent vignettes may indeed have come from the mors poem. see stephanie buck, “international exchange: holbein at the crossroads of art and craftsmanship”, hans holbein: paintings, prints and reception, eds. mark roskill and john oliver hand (w ashington, london and new haven: national gallery of art and yale up, ) - . in the second chapter i discussed the possibility of marchant being of flemish origin. if this is indeed true, it would be interesting to research his connection with the court of burgundy. w e will recall that philip the fair, the duke of burgundy has been discussed as a potential patron of the danse macabre mural painted at the innocents and the burgundian court seems to have had a particular predilection for macabre art and the danse in general. since the mors poem was found in a manuscript containing works by jean miélot, who was employed by the duke of burgundy, there is even more reason to look into this connection. français ) and the poem is also featured in three other manuscripts, the last one dating from . on july , , however, marchant printed the first edition of des femmes. the verses used in marchant’s book are virtually identical to those found in the manuscripts although he added two more female characters (l’abesse and la prieure) bringing the number of women from thirty-two found in ms. and ms. to thirty-four. as is evident from the following list, the women are not just characterized by status and occupation, but also by stage in the life span. included in marchant’s edition are: l’acteur, the four dead musicians, la royne (the queen), la duchesse (the duchess), la regente (the regent), la femme du chevalier (the knight’s lady), labesse (the abbess), la femme du lescuier (the squire’s lady), la prieuse (the prioress), la damoiselle (the debutante), la bourgoise (the townswoman), la femme vefue (the w idow), la marchande (the merchant w oman), la balliue (the bailiff’s lady), lespousee (the bride), la femme mignote (the darling w ife or the spoiled w ife), la pucelle vierge (the virgin), la theologienue (the theologian), la nouvelle mariee (the newlywed), la femme grosse (the pregnant w oman), la chamberiere (the chambermaid), la recommanderesse (the hosteler), la vielle damoiselle (the old debutante), la cordeliere (the francsican nun), la femme daccueil (the friendly woman), la nourrice (the w etnurse), la bergiere (the shepherdess), la femme aux potences (the w oman on crutches), la femme de village (the village w oman), la vielle (the old w oman), la revenderesse (the saleswoman), la femme amoureuse (the for a discussion of the manuscripts in which the des femmes poem is featured see harrison, “the text.” the other three manuscripts that contain the poem are: bn, nouvelles acquisitions françaises , bn, ms. fonds. français and arsenal, ms. . it is unclear who wrote the verses for the additional figures. as oosterwijk explains, medieval texts were “subject to scribal variance and the additional stanzas may have already been in circulation.” in other words, there is no proof that marchant commissioned a writer to compose the new text. see sophie oosterwijk, “’alas poor yorick.’ death, the fool, the mirror and the danse macabre”, narren – masken – karneval: meisterwerke vön dürer bis kubin aus der düsseldorfer graphiksammlung “mensch und tod”, ed. stephanie knöll (regensburg: schnell & steiner, ) - , . prostitute), la garde dacouchees (the bathhouse attendant) , la ieunne fille (the girl), la religieuse (the nun), la sorciere (the w itch), la royne morte (the dead queen), lactuer. marchant’s editorial input is evident from the way he expanded the textual framework of the book. as discussed earlier, the introductory colophon names the work the miroer salutaire and outlines the intended usage of the book as a devotional tool for the betterment of the reader. marchant also expanded the author’s prologue and inserted the woodcut and the verses of the four dead musicians – figures he first introduced in the augmented edition of the men’s danse from – and placed it as the beginning of the dancing sequence (fig. ). most notably, the printer added the illustrated poems of the debat and the complainte and placed them at the end of the book. that marchant intended the three works to function as a coherent unit is evident from the final colophon where he states: ce petit livre contient trois choses: cest la danse macabre des femes. le debat du corps et de lame et la complainte de lame dampnee. even though the verses are fully reproduced in the book, marchant’s edition of des femmes is only partially illustrated. since the men’s danse was such a success – selling out three editions in only nine months – marchant may have wanted to claim the market for the dance of death books for himself and hence rushed to publish the women’s danse before he had a full set of illustrations, something he remedied in the edition from . the edition therefore features only four woodcuts three of which (the author, the four dead musicians and the for a discussion of this role see ann tukey harrison, “fifteenth-century french w omen’s role names”, the french review , ( ): - . as harrison explains, the compound term garde d’acouchees is not documented in other contemporary sources. the word acouchee was used since the fourteenth century and refers to a woman giving birth. garde (watcher) is an even older term, first recorded in the tenth century. however, the woman described in the danse is not a midwife. rather, the verses seem to describe a woman who works in a bathhouse: iay voyrement dresse maintz baingz/pour les comperes et commeres (i have certainly arranged a lot of baths/for men and women). if she is indeed a bathhouse attendant, harrison wonders why the author did not use the term estuviere, which was commonly used in the fifteenth century to refer to this profession. the english translations of the roles of women are taken from harrison, the danse macabre of women - . author with the dead king) have been published in previous editions of the danse. only one woodcut, showing the opening pair of the queen and the duchess, has been designed specifically for this edition. the first fully illustrated edition of des femmes, was published in april of at which point marchant had added two new female figures la bigote (the hypocrite) and la sotte (the female-fool), which brought the final number of characters to thirty-six (fig. ). ending the women’s danse with the figure of the female-fool and not the w itch, as was the case with the edition, was probably meant to complement the men’s danse, which also included the fool as the last living figure. the edition is thus the first fully illustrated version of des femmes and one that includes the highest number of female figures. the identity of the artist who designed the woodcuts for marchant’s edition of the des femmes has never been established. w e will recall that pierre le rouge, the famous woodcutter and a printer, has been named as a potential designer of the danse macabre des hommes illustrations and his close connection with both vérard and marchant certainly gives validity to such claims. w e also know that le rouge had published vérard’s edition of the men’s danse c. and that he also designed the striking woodcuts depicting the pains of hell used in vérard’s edition of l’arte bene moriendi and later borrowed by marchant for his editions of the compost et kalendrier des bergiers (figs. and ). however, in the late s and early s, the time period during which the woodcuts for des femmes were likely designed, le rouge was busy putting together the impressively illustrated le mer des histoire and working as l’imprimeur du roi (the king’s printer) and it seems unlikely that he would be commissioned to design the cuts for the women’s the electronic facsimile of this edition preserved at the bn (rés. ye. ) can be found at http://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/ /btv b t the fool was one of the ten new figures added in june of to marchant’s augmented edition. marchant had also updated the edition by adding a new woodcut of the author, now shown indoors writing and reading from an open book, and a revised version of the four dead musicians created by the same woodcutter that designed the other images in the book. unless otherwise noted, my analysis of des femmes will reference this edition. danse. in his study on the paris presses, anatole claudin has noted that the woodcuts found in des femmes are not designed by the same artist who worked on the men’s danse, while henri monceaux argued that it may have been another le rouge who designed the cuts, possibly guillaume, pierre’s son or nicolas, his nephew. w hether it was a member of the le rouge family or another woodcutter altogether that designed the illustrations for des femmes, it is important to emphasize that contrary to the men’s danse which was available in two renditions of woodcuts, one produced for marchant and the other for vérard, this was the only version of the women’s danse that was used in france at the time. on death and dancing three aspects of des femmes differentiate this work from the men’s danse: women are portrayed as more submissive and more willing to dance, the verses and woodcuts include references to the female body as a site of corruption while the interaction between women and cadavers often carries specific sexualized connotations, and the series references late fifteenth century paris and the urban context. in the literature on des femmes, scholars often point out that just like men, women in the book resist the danse and refuse to move along with the cadavers. however, while it is true that women often complain or resist the dead in the verses, for example, the duchess cries out that she is not even thirty years old (je nay pas encore trent ans) and the debutante protests that she is being taken away against her will (oultre mon gre et voulente), i would argue that the confrontation between women and cadavers in the images is portrayed in much more subtle terms. in the men’s danse, cadavers continually push or pull the living into the dance and nearly every male character displays signs of an open resistance. consider, for instance, on le rouge’s career see monceaux. in , pierre did publish an octavo edition containing a poem of martial d’auvergne, le louanges de la vierge marie. monceaux . see for instance the study by harrison, the danse macabre of women. the figure of the knight who crosses his arms in defiance and stubbornly refuses to move or the squire, who turns his entire body away from death, raises one arm in refusal and is even trying to walk away (figs. and ). in contrast, most women turn their bodies towards the cadavers and only some of them raise their hands in protest or turn their heads away (fig. ). among the thirty-six women in the final version of the book, only six are portrayed as openly confronting the dead, as opposed to seventeen men. moreover, in the men’s danse the cadavers hold hands with only two figures (the bishop and the canon), yet in des femmes they hold hands with nearly every woman in the procession (fig. ). the gesture of handholding implies that women are partaking in the danse more willingly than their male counterparts, while at the same time it also functions to emphasize the act of dancing by visually unifying figures across multiple folios. that the figures (both dead and living) are actually dancing together is especially well captured in the woodcut depicting the regent and the knight’s lady (fig. ). in the image, the exuberant nature of the dance causes the regent’s frontlet (the long part of her headdress that frames the face) and especially the cadaver’s shroud to billow wildly in the air. the bodies of the regent and the middle cadaver are also synchronized – they both extend one leg and turn their heads to the right – thus highlighting the uniform choreography of the danse. a similar unity in movement is observed in the woodcut showing the townswoman and the w idow, where the w idow twists her torso and crosses her legs thus mimicking the body position of the cadaver on the far left. in the literature on the macabre art, the allegory of dance in the danse has been interpreted in multiple ways and there is no cons ensus as to what it actually signifies. gertsman has argued that the dance of death can be understood as a visual representation of the moment of passing away. the image shows the viewer exactly what death takes away in the final moments: the ability to move, to see, to hear and, ultimately, to be. for this reason, according to gertsman, it is the dead who are dancing and moving widely, while the living figures appear stiff gertsman . ibid. . and immobile since they have already lost their ability to dance. on the other hand, eustace has noted the subtle ways in which the bodies of the living and the dead actually mirror one another, which she argues corresponds to the norm of the fifteenth century dance styles and denotes a more complex way of reading class relations. however, the difficulty in pinpointing the meaning of dance in the danse may also be tied to the fact that in the middle ages dancing had a polyvalent meaning and was presented as both angelic and divine as well as sinful and diabolical. nevertheless, in the context of the danse books (both men’s and women’s series) evidence suggests that dancing and music-playing is represented in negative terms, not as a sign of aristocratic refinement or the heavenly sphere, but as a symbol of inversion and even a practice associated with hell and damnation. the woodcut depicting the four dead musicians is particularly evocative in this regard (fig. ). the image depicts a musical quartet with four cadavers each playing a particular instrument (from the left): a bagpipe, an organetto (or portative organ), a harp and a pipe and tabor. rather than just posing with the instruments, the dead musicians are portrayed actively playing them – the harpist picks the strings with his bony fingers, while the last cadaver drums the tabor – thus adding a crucial performative element and imbuing the silent and fixed medium of the book with specific auditory reference clarifying that what is being viewed is indeed a dance. the idea that death can play instruments and produce music emphasizes the topsy-turvy element of the danse and the same can be said about the selection of ibid. . eustace . an excellent summary of the different meanings of dance in the middle ages can be found in gertsman, the dance of death, especially chapter . i should note here that authors still debate about whether or not the mural at the innocents featured musicians as well. for gertsman, evidence is inconclusive, oosterwijk claims that it likely did not include music-playing cadavers. however, such figures did appear in other examples that predate the printed books, such as for instance in the totendanz block book from the s and were thus not marchant’s invention. instruments portrayed. instruments such as the bagpipe and pipe and tabor were associated with public processions and carnivals while string instruments such as the harp bear connection with heavenly music or with the king david, the composer of the psalms and biblical prototype of the harp-player. angels in heaven are also frequently depicted playing harps while the organetto was often played in churches and occurs in connection with clerics. the juxtaposition of both ‘heavenly’ and carnivalesque instruments is of course not accidental and it is in fact ques tionable to what extent the loud strident sounds of the bagpipe and the pipe and tabor would fit the more melodic music produced by the harp and the organetto. in other words, are the four dead musicians really making music or merely producing noise? w e know that the music being played in the danse was not pleasant because the king complains that he is not accustomed to dancing to such a savage tune (je nay point apris a danser/a danseet not si sauvaigez). according to theological tradition, hell has no music, only noise, and the usage of musical instruments as tools of torture was frequently evoked in the late fifteenth century eschatological imagery, most notably in hieronymus bosch’s depiction of hell in the garden of earthly delights (c. - ) in which sinners are tormented by devils playing a variety of instruments. in the verses of the danse, dancing is repeatedly associated with vanity and foolish behavior. in the men’s danse, the dead tell the minstrel, who unlike the dead musicians no longer plays the instrument, his lute is on the ground, that his music and dancing have long entertained male and female fools (menestrel qui danses et notes / sauvez et avez beau maintien/ pour faire esioir sos et sotes). many women in des femmes, especially those from the upper classes, described their lives as the most recent discussion of instruments and music playing cadavers in the danse can be found in w arda, “dance, music and the reversal of the natural order,” - . see also: reinhold hammerstein, tanz und musik des todes: die mittelalterlichen totendänzen und ihr nachleben (bern and munich: francke, ) and kathi meyer-baer, music of the spheres and the dance of death: studies in musical iconology (princeton: princeton up, ). w arda . ibid. . ibid. . the bagpipe is a particularly apt instrument for the danse because it is made from dead animals. being filled with enjoyment and dance. for example, the regent lists feasts, weddings and parties as well as musical instruments that have provided great entertainment for her (quant me souvient des tabourins /nopces festes harpes trompetes/ menestrelx doulcines clarins/ et des grans cheres que iay faictes). the only figure in the men’s danse who is actually dancing with the dead is the fool, the significance of which i will elaborate later in the chapter (le sot) (fig. ). shown dressed in the fool’s costume and carrying a marrotte, the fool smiles at death and is shown lifting his right foot off the ground, moving in the direction of the dance. women, sin and the gender of death yet women, as i argued, appear more willing to dance and the act of dancing is more emphasized in the women’s series. w hile it is possible that this is merely a product of design, it could also refer to attitudes about women that were persistent in moralistic literature and art of the period. as descendents of eve, women were held responsible for the loss of paradise and labeled as temptresses and sinners. the patristic literature of the fourth and the fifth century, which was still read widely in the later middle ages and informed the theological thought of the period, was especially responsible for promoting such negative views of women. for tertullian, eve was the eternal temptress and augustine, again relying on the typology of eve, preached that in women “the good christian … likes what is human [quod home est], loathes what is feminine [quod uxor est].” such language is particularly revealing as it implies that humanity is essentially an attribute of the male gender. for early church fathers, evil was identified with the flesh and sexual desire was, from the the same observation regarding the fool dancing was also made by oosterwijk in her article on the fool. see oosterwijk, “alas poor yorick” . on patristic literature and attitudes towards women see christa grössinger, picturing women in late medieval and renaissance art (manchester and new york: manchester up, ). quoted in larissa taylor, soldiers of christ . ibid. . start, linked to death as sign of “fallenness.” that death and the original sin were intrinsically linked is also evident from the fact that the word “cadaver” comes from the latin cadere, meaning, “to fall”. for st jerome, whose adversus jovianum written c. was especially critical of women and influenced much of medieval thinking on the subject - merely touching a woman has evil consequences and that a presence of the wife could distract a husband from his prayer. such views are reflected even in the sermons of a fifteenth-century french preacher like the franciscan michel menot (d. ) who employed specifically macabre themes to evoke his disgust of beautiful women: “nothing comes from a beautiful woman but fetor … alas, that which is pleasing in this world, is nothing but stench!” a very similar attitude towards female flesh is also noted in the verses of des femmes, particularly in the stanzas delivered by the four musicians, which emphasize gruesome aspects of bodily decomposition and putrefaction. consider the verses of the second musician: quoy sont voz corps: ie vous demande femmes iolies tant bien paree: ilz sont pour certain la viande qun iour sera aux vers donne. des vers sera doncques devoree vostre cher qui est fresche et tendre ja il nen demourra goulee. voz vers apres deviendront cendre. such focus on the corporeality of women, on their fresh and tender bodies (vostre cher qui est fresche et tendre) and on their corpses becoming food for worms (ilz sont pour certain la viande/qun iour sera aux vers donne), is very different from the koerner . ibid. . grössinger, picturing women . quoted in taylor, soldiers of christ . the text in latin reads: “non potest exire de pulcherrima muliere mundi nisi fetor …. o quicquid est in hoc mundo placens, non est nisi fetor.” men’s danse in which we do not encounter the same fascination with the body and the flesh. w hile the first musician in the men’s danse warns of putrefaction (et ils seron menge de vers), the other three discuss the dangers of not contemplating death and remind the living that we are all mortal, hence focus more on salvation than decomposition. although it is true, as larisa taylor has shown, that late medieval preachers in france did not always evoke only negative attitudes towards women in their sermons and in fact often praised women for their compassion and devotion, this was nevertheless the prevailing view. that death is linked to the original sin and in turn to eve as the instigator of the sinful act in the garden of eden was the dominant thesis in the allegorical poem the mors de la pomme and the same view is even expressed in michault’s dance aux aveluges which as we will recall also discusses adam and eve in the section on death. as the ordained priest and the official printer for the college of navarre – a school known for its ascetic views – marchant was certainly well acquainted with religious writing on women, but i wish to suggest that in putting the woodcuts for des femmes together he also relied on moralistic and satirical prints popular in northern europe at the time, which often centered on women as source of men’s foolish behavior or even death. in her study of secular and satirical prints, christa grössinger has shown that during the transitional period of bookmaking, prints and engravings replaced ibid. . late medieval preachers praised women for their compassion in healing the sick and for their religious devotion. sermons by preacher guillaume pepin (c. - ), for example, did not categorize women as personifications of either good or evil, but discussed everyday problems of women with compassion and sympathy and often recalled examples of independent and strong minded women. for a discussion of pepin’s sermons on women see larissa taylor, “images of w omen in the sermons of guillaume pepin (c. - )”, journal of canadian historical association . ( ): - . it is interesting, however, to note that according to taylor many important late medieval preachers preferred to place the blame for the trespass in the garden of eden on adam rather than eve. for instance menot – the same preacher who expressed such disgust towards female beauty – shows little sympathy for adam and argues that his attempt to blame the act on eve alone, only made things worse. likewise, guillaume pepin, menot’s contemporary, finds both sexes equally culpable and finds it upsetting that men place all the blame on women, without attributing part of their salvation to a woman. see taylor, soldiers of christ . medieval model books and were used as patterns for a production of art in multiple media, from enamel beakers and wooden caskets to manuscript illumination. while borrowing from secular and profane prints was especially prominent in the netherlands, it was also done in france especially in the last decades of the century. for example, the book of hours of charles d’angoulême (bn, latin ms. ), produced in the early s, features forty-three identifiable examples of miniatures derived from print models. a number of these miniatures are based on secular and profane prints including those that emphasize the folly of love or the power of w omen theme. it is possible then to argue, especially in light of the fact that marchant had no pictorial model to work from, that the woodcuts in des femmes are also, at least in part, modeled after such imagery. in secular prints and engravings of the period, the encounter between men and women is often sexually charged – a point i want to argue is also present in des femmes in ways that has not been discussed much in the past. in the first edition of des femmes, which was only partially illustrated, the cadavers are referred to in the text as la morte (the dead woman). by , however, when marchant issued the fully illustrated edition the word was changed to la mort (death), a modification that i do not believe is accidental. in his discussion of the series, mâle, who did not actually acknowledge the change in terminology between the and editions, argued unequivocally that the dead in des femmes represent female corpses because many have strands of hair still hanging see christa grössinger, humor and folly in secular and profane prints of northern europe, - (london and turnhout: harvey miller, ), especially chapter , “prints as pattern”, - . ibid. . on this manuscript see anne matthews, “the use of prints in the hours of charles d’angoulême”, print quarterly ( ): - . for example, a border illustration for the august calendar page in the hours of charles d’angoulême depicts an image of a man pushing a wheelbarrow with his drunken wife in it. w hile the themes of secular and profane prints varied, they typically centered on women as reasons for men’s wild erratic behavior, on peasants, often featured as bawdy, and soldiers. bibliography on this subject is vast, one of the first studies on the subject was keith moxey, peasants, warriors and wives: popular imagery in the reformation (chicago and london: chicago up, ). on their skulls. a similar view was later expressed in jane taylor’s study on the theme of the mirror in the danse in which she argued, partially relying on mâle, that the cadavers in the woodcuts represent the future mirror images of women, which is to say female corpses. given the history of macabre representations, however, i am inclined to question such assumptions. although death is typically genderless, there are a number of macabre images in which the sex of the corpse, especially the female corpse, is rendered with particular detail. for instance, in the famous imago mortis woodcut included in hartmann schedel’s liber chronicarum (nuremberg chronicle) published in , which shows four cadavers dancing at a cemetery and one emerging from a grave, the figure on the far right with her guts spilling out, is a dead woman. her long blond hair falls down her back, while one of her breasts is sagging awkwardly. a female cadaver, hairless but again with sagging breasts, was also included in the totendanz blockbook from c. and there were at least two specifically male cadavers featured in vérard’s version of danse macabre des hommes woodcuts. in des femmes, however, such obvious allusion to the gender of death is not actually portrayed. although it is true that many cadavers in the book are depicted with strands of hair hanging from their skulls, this does not mean they are necessarily representations of female cadavers. after all, men in the late fifteenth century typically had longer hair – the knight, the squire, or the lover in the danse are depicted with shoulder-length hair (figs. , and ). moreover, many cadavers in des femmes have a particularly masculine physique with broad shoulders and some even have flaps of skin that hang suggestively between their legs, which could indicate that they are male rather than female corpses (fig. ). this is all the more likely when we consider the interaction between cadavers and women in the book, which is often rendered in particularly sexualized terms. for instance, when death tells the newlywed that she will be put in the ground (au mâle . taylor, “un miroer salutaire”, . reproduced in oosterwijk, “dance, dialogue and duality,” page , figure . for an electronic facsimile of this edition preserved at the university library of heidelberg as cod. pal. germ. , http://digi.ub.uni-heidelberg.de/diglit/cpg iourduy serez mise en terre), she replies that death weighs heavily on her (mais la mort de trop pres me charge). on the other hand death is much more direct with the bride, portrayed with beautiful long hair and a belted dress. addressing her, the corpse suggests that she needs to take its hand and take off her clothes (sa la main espousee iolie/ allons nous en deshabiller) to which the bride responds that she has hoped for a special joy in her life on that day (en la iournee quavoye desir/ davoir quelque ioye en ma vie). such evocative language is perhaps nowhere as pronounced as in the pairing of death and the prostitute (fig. ). dressed in a tight v-neck bodice, the prostitute arches her back and gazes flirtatiously at the cadaver. not only is she willingly participating in the dance, the prostitute lures death by offering it a flower, probably a red rose. in the famous thirteenth century allegorical poem the roman de la rose, which was still popular in the late fifteenth century and actually printed in at least ten incunabula editions, the “rose” in the title symbolized both the name of a woman and female genitalia. in the poem, which is rich with symbolism and moralizing warnings about lust and love, the sleeping figure of the lover enters a garden and becomes infatuated with a rosebush enclosed by a hedge. in the hand-colored woodcut included in vérard’s composite edition of the roman de la rose, published in / , we see the figure of the lover at the moment he plucks the rose from the rosebush and gazes at it lovingly. the flower is certainly the dominant feature in the portrayal of the prostitute in des femmes. she holds a plucked flower in each hand, has one tucked into the decorative band on her headdress and the bottom of her dress is covered with them. in other words, as the woodcut tells us, the prostitute is in bloom. harrison, “the text,” . the poem was first written in by guillaume de lorris and then finished in by jean de meun. it is a quintessential example of french courtly love poetry and it is rich with allegory and symbolism. for an illustration of this image see virginia tuttle clayton, gardens on paper: prints and drawings, - (w ashington, dc: national gallery of art, ), figure , page . in her discussion of the prostitute in des femmes, sandra hindman argues that the woman is wearing a “fetching floral-patterned robe”, but i am not convinced that the pairing of death and the prostitute recalls popular prints that satirize the theme of courtly love and depict lovers, typically in a garden setting. in the large garden of love by the neatherlandish master of the garden of love, c. , which is meant as an inverted reference to the idyllic garden in the roman de la rose, we see young couples fashionably dressed offering each other food and drink, playing cards, making wreaths and playing music. such a tranquil place, however, also includes moralizing symbols intended to warn the viewer of the dangers and foolishness of love, most notably the unicorn, a symbol of christ, shown on the right hand side in the middle of the image, who dips its horn into the stream in order to purify the water and erase the sinful acts taking place in the garden. compositionally closer to death and the prostitute are prints and engravings depicting couples such as, van meckenem’s “the knight and his lady”, part of the scenes from daily life series produced c. - , or the bawdy engraving by master e.s., a couple embracing, c. (fig. ). in van meckenem’s image, the knight and the lady are placed in an exterior setting and are shown gazing at each other, much like death and the prostitute in the danse. w hile the knight places his left arm around the lady she in turn points to the keys and the purse hanging from her belt – symbols of her power and avaricious nature – and puts her hand behind her back in a gesture of rejection. a less subtle portrayal of the dangerous allure of women is seen in the image by master e.s. the man – shown with his sword hanging between his legs, fondles the woman’s breast while she makes a token gesture of resistance and at the same time gazes flirtatiously at the viewer. in both images, it is the woman who has the power (fig. ). the flowers on the dress are actual pattern decorations since they are not distributed equally over the entire garment. reproduced and discussed in grössinger, humor and folly - , figure . grössinger, humor and folly . van meckenem series is discussed and reproduced in grössinger, humor and folly, pages - , figures , and . ibid . parenthetically, i should note that the link between women, lust and death developed in the early sixteenth century in germany into the theme of death and the maiden portrayed by artists such as hans baldung grien, hans sebald beham and others. in her study of the theme, jean w irth had famously argued that the death despite such an enticing portrayal of the prostitute in the danse, the verses that accompany the image are more subdued and, in fact, recall sermons by popular preachers at the time. although death calls the prostitute a worthless woman (femme de petite value), she in turn places the blame for her sin at those who have not guided her well and led her astray (pedus sotet ceulx qui my ont mise/ et au mestier habandonnee/ las se ieusse estoy bien menee/ et conduite premierment). a similar criticism can be found in contemporary sermons in which preachers repeatedly underline that creating the opportunity for sin by placing women in morally questionable environments or situations was at the root of the problem. for instance, menot argued – echoing the verses of the prostitute – that if a woman was properly brought up in an honest surrounding she would not succumb to the sin of prostitution. more than giving in to carnal sin, women in des femme are criticized for being vain, envious or avaricious, which are precisely the sins often evoked in sermons and also portrayed in satirical prints of the period. w hile only a few men in the danse – figures such as the merchant or the usurer – are shown carrying money bags, a large number of women in des femmes have one or even two pouches hanging from their belts. that a merchant woman or the resaleswoman would need and the maiden theme developed directly out of the danse macabre tradition, but more recent studies by joseph leo koerner and stefanie knöll have challenged that view and actually linked the theme to the discourse of popular prints, especially representations of voluptas. moreover, knöll has argued that the theme of death and the maiden diverges significantly from the danse because women in such imagery do not resist death and are almost always depicted nude or semi-nude. while i agree with knöll, i also believe that the pairing of death and the prostitute in the danse functions along similar lines, emphasizing the sexual tension between the figures and denoting the prostitute’s willingness to flirt and lure death. for a discussion of death and the maiden theme see: jean w irth, la jeune fille et la mort: recherches sur les thèmes macabres dans l’art germanique de la renaissance (geneva: librairie droz, ); koerner, the moment of self- portraiture; and most recently stefanie knöll, “death and the maiden”, women and death: representation of female victims and perpetrators in german culture - , eds. helen fronius and anna linton, studies in german literature, linguistics and culture (rochester, new york: camden house, ) - . taylor, soldiers of christ . ibid. . a money-bag is clear, but they are also included in the depictions of the w itch and even the young girl, who in theory would not need one, and thus signify more than just a representation of a practical accessory. as in van meckenem’s portrayal of “the knight and his lady”, the purses in des femmes are symbols of avarice and the women’s love of material possessions. the fact that a money-bag is worn by women of different professions and of different ages (the young girl, the pregnant w oman and the spinster) is also meant to suggest that avarice is a sin engrained in women from the beginning and follows them through their lives. in the verses, the debutante laments that she will have to lose her headdresses, her clothing, youth and beauty (que me valet mes gras atours/ mes habitz ieunesse beaute), while the spoiled w ife list her material possessions and the fact that she has a successful husband as main reasons she regrets having to dance with death (jay mary de si bon affaire/ aneaulx robes neuf ou dix paire). even the young girl cries out to her mother to take care of her most beloved things: her dolls, her stones and her beautiful coat (pour dieu quo garde ma poupee/ mes cinq pierres ma belle cotte). such dependence on material possessions – and especially beautiful clothing or jewelry – was particularly condemned by the preachers. evoking a memento mori, the franciscan friar olivier maillard (d. ) warns women where such love of things will lead: “w hen you are at the hour of death and see a thousand devils at your side who want to take your soul, then you will wish that you never had led such a life of pomp and excess. take care!” w omen’s propensity for gossip and mindless chatter is also emphasized in the verses. la mort accuses the bailiff’s wife of chitchatting in the church, instead of listening to the sermon (apres ma madame la ballive/ des quaquetz tenus en leglise), while the chambermaid is criticized for gossiping at the oven or window (bauer au four na la fenestre). in the poem workingwomen were reprimanded for tricking or stealing from their masters or from their customers. w hile it is true that women in des femmes seem to accept death more willingly – some even embrace see footnote . hindman, “the illustrations” . quoted in taylor, soldiers of christ . it (the franciscan, the old debutante, or the prioress, for example) – as in the men’s danse, the poem does not include specific references to either god or salvation and thus appears closer to a satirical portrayal than a serious didactic allegory. the here-and-now: paris and the urban context while it is clear from marchant’s introductory colophon that he intended the book to be a didactic tool, it would be a mistake to assume that this is the only way it was actually used. part of the appeal of the danse, even in the monumental mural examples placed in churches and cemeteries, was the satirical dialogue between the living and the dead and the hierarchical portrayal of social types. in other words, the danse was as much about humor and social critique, as it was about the solemn and the serious. this is perhaps nowhere as obvious as in des femmes, which, as sandra hindman has pointed out, is predicated on “a sense of the nitty-gritty of day- to-day life and a tone of social satire.” although the theme of the danse was first painted in paris in - and the verses that accompanied the mural may have also been composed there, the men’s danse does not emphasize its urban origin openly. in contrast, the des femmes poem is composed using parisian middle french and the city is also referenced in the verses. for example, the squire’s lady laments that she will never be able to wear the textile she purchased at a fair (javoye achete au lendit/ du drap pour taindre en escarlete). the lendit mentioned in the verses refers to the annual fair held in the plain of st. denis north of paris. it was one of the oldest fairs in europe, founded by king dagobert in the seventh century and by the time the verses of des femmes were composed it was renowned especially for its selection of textiles. in another example, the theologian mentions the petit pont, a bridge that connects the latin quarter with the ile de la cité (femme qui de clergie hindman, “the illustrations” . harrison, “the text” . harrison and hindman . ibid. . the fair was held between june - . respond/pour avoir bruit ou quon lescoute/ est des morues de petit pont/qui ont grans yeulx et ne voient goute). the poem’s continual reference to specifically parisian sites and events makes this version of the danse conceptually similar to the hanseatic dance of death paintings, which were unique because they featured elaborate townscapes in the background. painted in lübeck at the church of st. mary’s in and in reval (tallinn) at the church of st. nicholas sometime after by the artist bernt notke (d. ), the two paintings are closely related, yet also quite different. w e will recall that in a typical portrayal of the danse the background is left purposely generic – the flowery exterior locale we see in marchant’s cuts, for example – and the image focuses instead on the dancers, gestures and especially the decomposing bodies of cadavers. there is often little in the composition of the danse that distracts the viewer from the main narrative or gives reprieve from the vivid didactic lesson portrayed in the image. but, this is not the case with the hanseatic examples. as gertsman has shown, the exactness with which the cityscapes are replicated in the lübeck and the reval paintings where recognizable landmarks of both cities are clearly demarcated, transforms the abstracted didactic lesson about the equalizing power of death and locates it in the ‘here-and-now’ of the beholder. for the viewer, this is an important change as it not only transports the spectator into the realm of the image, but also because of it makes the danse more impactful and perhaps also more horrifying. although des femmes does not include a parisian cityscape in the background, the topical references to the city and its sites inform the reader’s experience of the poem and make it more relatable and memorable than the generic tone found in the men’s danse. a similar insistence of the ‘here-and-now’ is also present in the way costumes are rendered in the woodcuts. marchant updated the editions of the men’s as transcribed in harrison and hindman . for the most recent comparative analysis of the lübeck and reval paintings see gertsman, the dance of death”, especially chapter four. for reproductions of the hanseatic murals, see gertsman, foldout and . gertsman . ibid. . danse by changing the costumes and the shoes worn by the living protagonists to match the fashion of the s. the same concern for the accuracy of the dress and the style is seen in des femmes, where costumes are perhaps even more central in constructing the identity of female characters. for example, the only woodcut of des femmes produced for the edition, featuring the queen and the duchess, depicts female costumes that adhere to the fashion of the mid s (fig. ). the queen wears a gown made of brocade and trimmed with ermine fur. her sleeves are narrow – a style popular in the early to mid s – and both the queen and the duchess wear round toe shoes as well as crowns and necklaces. by , however, when the full set of illustrations was issued, the style of dresses was changing and wider sleeves were becoming more fashionable. w e see that change depicted in the woodcut showing the regent and the knight’s lady in which both women wear sleeves widened at the wrist, the first step in the revival of the bombard sleeve (fig. ). their gowns are also molded to the body and provided with a new short v- neck. on their heads the ladies wear longer frontlets and the coifs (a close fitting hat) are more puffed up, as was the style at the time. such close attention to the costumes of the noble women calls to mind the sumptuary laws passed in issued by king charles viii. the concern over clothing as marker of social identity and especially the inappropriate usage of certain materials such as furs or silk by members of the lower nobility or even lower estates was a hot topic in france through the fifteenth century. as early as , the poet christine de pizan repeatedly noted that “people were dressing above their estate: a farm laborer’s wife as the wife of a craftsman, a craftsman’s wife as the bourgeoise, a bourgeoise as a gentlewoman, a gentlewoman as a lady, a lady as a countess or duchess and a countess or duchesses as a queen.” a similar complaint was van buren . that the artist paid close attention to the details of the dress is also evident from the fact that the knight’s lady’s dress has a slit on the right hand side, an adaption that was meant to help her saddle the horse more easily. for the most recent discussion of king charles viii’s edict from see van buren - . the ordinance are also discussed by sandra hindman in “the illustrations” - . van buren . christine’s complains over the misuse of costume was included in her book livre de trois vertus. raised by councilors of king charles vii (r. - ) who asked that he regulate the dress of his subjects: … one cannot tell people’s estate or occupation, be they princes, noblemen, citizens, merchants or craftsmen, because everyone, man or woman, is allowed to dress as they please in cloth of gold or silver, silk or wool, regardless of their origin, estate or occupation. the ordinance of was therefore meant to regulate fashion in france and bring forth a better sense social readability. the king prohibited most of his subjects to wear garments spun with silver, gold and silk, or with linings made out of silk. aside from the princes, only the descendants of the ancient nobility were now allowed to wear silk. as van buren explains, only knights (chevalier) who received an income of , livres a year could wear any kind of silk, while squires (escuier) with the same income could only wear damask or plain and patterned satin. neither category of knight could wear crimson or patterned velvet – material, which was reserved for the high nobility like the queen and the duchess in marchant’s woodcut (fig. ). individuals who ignored the king’s sumptuary law (and there seems to have been many who did) risked having their ‘faulty’ garments confiscated and paying a hefty fine. the careful rendering of costumes in the danse books suggests an interest in adhering to the sartorial rules of the period and the need to rely on garments to further emphasize class and social positions of the different protagonists. given the historical context of both the book and the poem, the portrayal of one aristocratic woman is particularly interesting to consider. in when the first edition of the book was published, king charles viii (b. ) was only sixteen and though he was officially the crowned king of france, the country was ruled by his quoted in van buren . ibid. . ibid. . the queen is the only figure in des femmes that wears a brocade gown, while the duchess is likely wearing a gown made of velvet. hindman, “the illustratons” . hindman explains that even though the sumptuary law “was largely ignored … class differences were understood partially in terms of dress.” elder sister anne of france (anne de beaujeu, d. ) and her husband pierre de beaujeu, the duke of bourbon (d. ). anne assumed the title of the regent of france in upon the death of her father, king louis xi, and held the title until when charles turned twenty-one. the period of anne’s regency was particularly tumultuous and marked by conflicts among the french nobility vying for power over the young king, which eventually resulted in the princely revolt known as the mad w ar (guerre folle) that lasted from to and was aimed directly at the beaujeus. referred to as “madame la grande”, anne was a powerful figure and by all accounts the dominant partner in the beaujeus regency of france. a mbassadors of the time were always received by anne and they were typically instructed to woo her and not her husband in whatever affairs they were coming to discuss. contemporary chroniclers almost always focused on anne, while pierre de beaujeu was regularly passed over. a witness from the period described pierre as “kind and easy-going, with nothing of the severity of his wife” while anne was seen as the master who retained dominancy over pierre because she was the king’s daughter. anne’s political power affronted many because it lacked a historical precedent. w omen such as blanche of castille (d. ) or isabeau of bavaria (d. ) who were also queens and regents were more accepted because they were wives of one king and mothers of another, but, as a sister of a king, anne was in a position besides the princely conflict, the beaujeus also faced problems with the duchy of brittany that aspired to seek independence from france, an issue that eventually resulted in the so-called breton w ars from - . the situation was eventually resolved when charles married anne of brittany in december of , a move that was largely orchestrated by the beaujeus. a good summary of the years that marked the minority of king charles can be found in r. j. knecht’s the rise and fall of renaissance france - (oxford: blackwell, ) especially chapter . for a discussion of women in power at this time, including anne of france, see pauline matarasso, queen’s mate: three women of power in france on the eve of the renaissance (aldershot: ashgate, ). matarasso . ibid . quoted in matarasso . not all accounts of anne were as severe, though it seems that the general impression was that she and not pierre was in control of the regency. that traditionally she had no right to be and criticism spread widely. for example, the conversations between the dukes of brittany and orléans were reported as commenting on the importance of “getting rid of the said lady and sending her back to her house in gien to busy herself with her household duties [tenir et faire son mesnaige]”. it is surprising therefore, in light of such controversy over anne’s regency, that in des femmes, the regent is described as a woman concerned only with frivolous affairs. in the poem, death explains that she is known for good conversations and for making people laugh (qui avez renom de bien dire/ vous soliez autres faire rire), while the regent laments feasts, weddings and music she will miss when she dies. although the sixteenth century dictionaries define the word regente as a woman who governs or rules and is thus active in political terms, as anne of france had strongly asserted, the poem restricts her power and reduces the regent to a mere hostess of a banquet or a feast. it is certainly possible to make an argument that des femmes should not be seen as a literal portrayal of french society or its historical figures, but it is also true, as we know from the mural at the cemetery of the innocents that the danse could be viewed as a clever political allegory. given the topicality of the des femmes poem and the attention the artist paid to the accuracy of costumes and jewelry, there is no reason to assume that the women’s danse was not seen in similar terms, especially since anne’s political power was at the time a contested issue. the aftermath of death in contrast to the men’s danse, however, from its very first publication des femmes included two additional illustrated poems, le debat dun corps et dune ame ibid . this was all the more pronounced because according to salic law that was passed in france women were excluded from inheriting the throne and they were not present at the council chamber meetings, except of course in the case of a queen regent. quoted in matarasso . see oosterwijk, “of constables and kings” and dujakovic, “the dance of death, the dance of life.” and la complainte de lame dampnee, which emphasized direct consequences of sinful behavior (henceforth the debat and the complainte). in the second chapter, i pointed out that neither the verses in the dialogue section of the poem nor the images of the danse include specific reference to god, the last judgment or salvation. perhaps even more troubling for a christian audience is the fact that the danse did not contain allusions to religious rituals that signified good death according to models established in the ars moriendi tracts and other religious texts of the period. in the danse, there is no depiction of a deathbed, no representation of priests administering the last rites and no portrayal of a proper christian burial. actually, the danse does not even show death and dying per se, it only hints at it through the allegory of the death’s dance. in compiling des femmes, marchant must have been aware of such shortcomings of the danse – after all he published an edition of the ars moriendi in and published the title at least one more time during the course of his career – and perhaps sought to correct the danse by adding the debate and the complainte, two works that discuss the fate of the soul in the aftermath of death. derived from the text known as visio philiberti, a work that from the thirteenth century onward helped to shape and popularize the body/soul debates in w estern europe, the debat concerns the period of time immediately following physical death and it is structured as a dialogue between the body and the soul. much like the danse, the debate also includes verses of the author (lacteur), though the actual figure is not portrayed in the woodcuts that accompany the poem. the work is illustrated with nine woodcuts. however a number of them are repeated several times throughout the poem. the opening woodcut, the largest one in the debat, features an elaborate canopied bed with a dying person in it (fig. ). further in the background a nude child-like soul is shown debating with a shrouded body rising from a coffin. oosterwijik has noted that the soul’s position, standing on a ledge and for a discussion of the poem see neil cartlidge, “in the silence of a midwinter night: a re-evaluation of the visio philiberti”, medium aevum, lxxv ( ): - . there are three versions of woodcuts depicting the body/soul dialogue in which the body is in the coffin and the scenes takes place outdoors, that are repeated in the middle section of the work. hovering over the risen corpse signifies its upper hand in the dispute. the composition of the image, and especially the canopied bed with a sleeper/dying person in it, recalls illustrations of medieval allegorical poems such as the roman de la rose and the dance aux aveluges, both of which start with a similar image of a vision, while at the same time the bed alludes to the act of dying and thus to the last rites’ rituals that are missing from the portrayal of the danse. for our present discussion, however, the last image in the debat is especially interesting (fig. ). the woodcut portrays the body, now almost fully shrouded, as was the custom of the period, prostrated in the coffin. above the body, three winged devils battle over the soul – a fearful reminder of the final outcome of sinful living, damnation. seated at the far right, in front of the coffin, is the figure of the hermit, perhaps philibert himself. it is important to emphasize that the hermit does not participate in the drama unfolding in the image he merely observes the scene while holding an open book in his hands. as discussed in the first chapter, the hermit also appears in marchant’s portrayal of the three living and the three dead where he is shown looking but not partaking in the encounter between the living and the dead (figs. and ). as stated in the second chapter, according to kinch, the hermit in the three living provides the viewer with a model of moral behavior, a notion that, i would argue, can also be extended to his role in the debat. in the poem, the hermit becomes the projection of the reader/viewer (also seated in front of an open book), who is meant to observe and learn from the scene and the text before him. the last poem in the book, the complainte, is also the shortest, comprised of only two folios illustrated with a single woodcut (fig. ). the text is derived from the ars moriendi tract and addresses sinners directly (vous pecheurs qui fort regardez). depicting different forms of torture, boiling in cauldrons, hanging from the gallows or being pricked and bitten by devils, the complainte is a logical continuation of the debat and explores the pains of hell that await the sinners. w hat is especially striking about the image is its highly composite nature. lacking an identifiable narrative focus, the illustration is an amalgamation of multiple woodcuts (or parts of sophie oosterwijk, “dance, dialogue and duality” . kinch, imago mortis . woodcuts) that marchant and other printers commonly featured in their illustrated books at the time. for example, a version of the elaborate mouth of hell, portrayed on the right, is also found in marchant’s woodcut with death on the horse that he included in editions of the kalendrier and later even in des femmes (fig. ). the boiling cauldron on the left, packed with sinners, recalls pierre le rouge’s famous woodcut renditions of the pains of hell that accompanied vérard’s editions of the ars moriendi and which marchant had also borrowed for his work on the kalendrier (figs. and ). w hile des femmes is particularly topical, situated specifically in the urban context of the late fifteenth century pairs, the complainte woodcut is exactly the opposite. it is placed in an unspecified moment at the end of time and none of the figures actually retain any markers of their previous social or professional status. rather, the woodcut depicts the inevitable and never ending threat of damnation – a striking warning placed at the end of the book intended as a didactic tool. considering the salutary mirror as a whole, marchant’s editorial strategy becomes obvious: the des femmes portrays sins committed in the present (which the reader can still correct), the debat offers a sense of what happens to the body and the soul after physical death, while the complainte depicts the ultimate result of sinful and foolish living. thus far i argued that the des femmes is a direct product of marchant’s compiling strategy and that it reveals references to sources, both textual and pictorial, that see women as cause of sin and death. w hile it is comparable to the men’s danse in terms of layout and composition, its principal theme is considerably different. this is not merely a case of the printer/publisher playing on variations, though there is an element of that as well in marchant’s decision to publish the female version of the danse, but an example in which careful editorial strategy the grouping of the three hanged sinners in the middle ground is also reminiscent of the image marchant used to illustrate his edition of françois villon’s testament. it is important to highlight that versions of many if not all of these scenes also frequently appeared in other publications by marchant’s and his colleagues. it is not my intention to pinpoint the exact source for each element that makes up the woodcut, but rather to emphasize the process of cutting and pasting from multiple sources that marchant employs here and that, i want to argue, reflects his overall editorial approach. informs our experience of the work. marchant’s colophons at the beginni ng and the end of the books, directly link des femmes with other poems in the compilation and suggest to the reader a precise way in which the book should be used. at the same time, the portrayal of women and especially the satirical nature of the verses evoke a contemporary parisian context and situate the book in a specific time and place, a concept that is markedly different from the men’s danse. w hile the new addition of the dance of death of w omen in the printed books provided a whole new roster of the female gender to consider in parallel with men, the addition of the fool added an altogether different status of being, one that ironically had a lot in common with the figures of death. fooling with death at what point, we might ask, did the fool begin to dance in the danse? w hat role did the fool serve in the composition that already relied on humor and satire even before the jester was added to the roster of figures? in asking these questions, it is important to emphasize that although the figure appeared in earlier german examples, prior to marchant’s inclusion of the fool (le sot) in the augmented printed edition of the men’s danse, it was not featured in any other known french renditions of the theme. it was not depicted in the danse mural from the cemetery of the innocents (or any other french mural that predate the printed books) nor was it included in the two books of hours that featured the dance of death cycles in margins of the office of the dead (bn, ms. rothschild and new york, morgan library, ms. m. ). the insertion of the fool and the female fool into the danse was, at least in france, the invention of the print medium (figs. and ). the allegorical figures of the fool and death share much in common and it is not surprising that le mort addresses the fool as “mon amy sot” in marchant’s edition of the men’s danse (fig. ). in the danse, the dead continually mock or see chapter for a discussion of the danse in these two manuscripts. on this issue see especially sophie oosterwijk, “alas poor yorick” ridicule members of all social classes and pay no respect to status or importance of any living figures in the procession. traditionally, the fool is also no respecter of rank or status and tends to treat everyone alike in his satirical speeches. like death, who stands for everyman, the fool’s position is not easy to define because he occupies an elusive place between masters, courtiers and servants. this is especially significant in the context of the danse, which is structured around a careful demarcation of social status, yet the fool is in a specific position of an outsider, a figure with an indeterminate class and status. in addition, both death and the fool are figures that invite a form of self-reflection. the dead in the danse stand as visual reminders of what the living will become in the future moment that is approaching and the entire composition, as the author implies in the prologue, is envisioned as an instructive mirror aimed at the viewer/reader (en ce miroer chascun peut lire/ qui le convient ainsi danser). similarly, the fool often holds a marotte, a staff carved on the top with a miniature image of fool’s face that functions as the fool’s alter ego (or mirror image) and which he uses during mock- conversations or satirical commentary, which itself mirrors the dialogic set up of the danse. it is perhaps such inherent similarity between the fool and death that had prevented the former from being included in the early depictions of the danse, though curiously the fool (stultus) does appear in the latin vado mori poem, which is often regarded as the precursor of the dance of death theme. in that poem, preceded by the sapiens (the w ise man), the stultus proclaims: “vado mori stultus. mors stulto vel sapienti / non jungit pacis foedera: vado mori (i, the fool, am going to die. death signs a peace deal with neither fool nor wise man: i am going to die). marchant was certainly familiar with the vado mori, because he included the transcribed verses of the poem above the woodcuts in his editions of the men’s ibid. . as oosterwijk points out, in medieval and renaissance culture the fool could be defined in any number of ways. for one, there was a difference between the ‘natural’ and the ‘artificial’ fool, the former being a mere dimwit or a simpleton. the fool could also be a prankster of sorts and his performance would in that sense be defined as a farce or he could be the wise jester whose shrewd and often biting commentary was meant to address (and correct) the foolish acts of his superiors. ibid. . quoted and translated in oosterwijk, “alas poor yorick” . danse, a practice that was also adopted by many other french printers who published the work. although the vado mori is not structured around a dialogue between the living and the dead, but on a series of proclamations made by the dying, the inclusion of the verses in the printed editions nevertheless further heightens the performative aspects of the books. the first dance of death that included the figure of the fool was painted in basel in the churchyard of the dominican convent around . nowadays known only through fragments, the grossbasler totendanz was allegedly painted to commemorate the outbreak of the plague that hit basel in and it included thirty- nine living protagonists with the narr (or jester) being the thirtieth figure. that the fool appears first in basel should not surprise us. the city had a long tradition of the fastnachtspiele (carnival plays) and it was also the place where sebastian brant was to publish the first edition of his famous treatise the narrenschiff (ship of fools) in . the fool was also included in the kleinbassler totendanz produced in the second half of the fifteenth century and it appears in the berlin dance of death painted in the bell tower of the mariankirche church c. . whether marchant was familiar with the grossbasler example is unknown, but even before he published the books there was a growing interest in exploring the themes of death and folly in french manuscripts of the period. for our discussion, a miniature from the mors de la pomme, is especially interesting (fig. ). in this image, death is seen attacking the docteur (a theologian or a scholar figure) who is seated at his desk in the position that mimics that of the author in the danse. pierced by death’s arrow, the docteur is dying amidst the open books, while the figure of the fool, dressed in the traditional costume and holding a marotte, stands near the desk and looks over his shoulder with a sly smile. in the image, the fool is neither a participant in the scene, nor death’s next victim. rather, he is an observer and a commentator and his verse is directed at the reader/viewer qui bien scet morir this mural is typically referred to in literature as the grossbasler totendanz to distinguish it from the second mural of the theme that was painted later in the dominican nunnery in klingenthal known as the kleinbasler totendanz. il est sage (it is a wise man who knows how to die well), the main recipient of the moral lesson portrayed in the miniature. the fool and death are also the main protagonists in the poem complainte contre la mort, written by king rené of anjou’s court jester triboulet, which was illustrated in a manuscript copy of c. (the hague, royal library, ms. g. ). in the poem, triboulet accuses death of attacking him without cause, a complaint that is illustrated in five striking miniatures in which the jester is shown at the court of king rené in a coffin, encountering death in a scene set outdoors and even lying dead in a grave at the cemetery with charnel houses packed with bones – a setting reminiscent of the cemetery of the innocents – surrounded by well-dressed ladies shown gasping in horror. while manuscripts such as the mors and the complainte contre la mort are evidence of the emerging interest in exploring the theme of death and the fool in visual arts at the turn of the century in france, the figure of the jester was becoming increasingly more prominent in the realm of theatre and performance as well. in particular the development of the sottie – a comical play performed by actors dressed like jesters – which flourished at the end of the fifteenth century is important to consider. as heather arden explains, one third of the plays that belong to the genre of the sottie have been written between and , the same time period in which the danse macabre books were also most frequently published. a typical oosterwijk, “alas poor yorick”, . ibid . for the miniatures from the manuscript, see http://manuscripts.kb.nl/iconclass/ f on rené’s manuscript see anne s. korteweg, splendour, gravity & emotion: french medieval manuscripts in dutch collection, trans. beverly jackson (zwolle: w aanders, ), especially pages - . the name triboulet was frequently given to jesters in france and comes from the verb “to torment”. a succession of court fools named triboulet were accompanying french kings in the late medieval and early modern periods, from louis xi to louis xii and françois i. the name also appears in rabelais who has panurge consult the triboulet of françois i on the issue of marriage. on these issues see: heather ardern, fool’s play: a study of satire in the sottie (cambridge: cambridge up: ). arden . according to arden, the second half of the fifteenth century was the heyday of the sottie. of plays were written between and , only four date before and six are believed to have been produced after . http://manuscripts.kb.nl/iconclass/ f sottie is a short comic play in verse, generally less than lines long, which includes five characters that represent specific social types. sometimes the characters are given names denoting particular titles (the general, the abbot, the prince or the doctor) or they are named after a specific personal quality of the character (for example, nyvelet from the verb niveler, ‘to waste one’s time with foolishness’). like the danse, the sottie present women as if they constitute a class apart from the principal estates and satirize them by evoking the same complaints about women that are also present in des femmes: they are described as chatty, as far too changeable and as willing to spend too much of their husband’s money. such similarities between the sottie and the printed editions of the danse suggest a possible crossover between the illustrated books and late medieval theater that is worth investigating further. after all, as discussed in the second chapter, the danse was likely performed at least twice in the fifteenth century and the composition of the work carries within specific performative elements. as gertsman has argued in relation to the danse murals, gestures play a crucial role in medieval theatre and dance and they are also incorporated into the composition of the danse and help to emphasize social roles and the antagonism between the living and the dead. furthermore, the placement of the author at the beginning and at the end of the danse is similar to the role of the expositor, a type of choric figure, who regularly appeared in late-medieval plays (figs. and ). remaining present on the stage during the course of the play, the expositor, much like the author, served as an intermediary between the audience and the actors and helped guide the viewers’ response by occasionally commenting on the play and delivering the prologue and the epilogue. marchant had clearly understood the theatrical aspect of the danse because he imbued the illustrated editions with yet ibid. . ibid. . gertsman,the dance of death . ibid. . ibid. . another performative element: the dissonant tune played by the four dead musicians (fig. ). while the similarities between the painted versions of the danse and medieval theatre have been explored in literature, most recently by gertsman, the relationship between illustrated editions of the theme and early printed plays have not, at least to my knowledge, been discussed in detail. in the late fifteenth century, well established forms of medieval theatre – biblical stories enacted on platforms, mummeries, songs of court poets and costumed civic festivals – were actually being confronted (and eventually replaced) by the fixed medium of the printed play text. as julie stone peters has shown, the printing press had a pivotal role in the rise of the modern theatre because it allowed for a circulation of dramatic texts and renewed interest in classical playwrights, especially terence, plautus and seneca. in france, the comedies of terence were particularly popular and frequently printed often times by the same printers or publishers who produced the danse editions, including husz ( ), vérard (c. ), de marnef ( and ) and petit ( , , and ). terence’s comedies explore social roles and are structured in such a way as to invite responses from the audience through prologues and speeches directed at them, another way they are similar to the danse. the fifteenth century french editions of terence are also often illustrated with woodcuts that feature depictions of actors on stage gesturing and enacting the play, thus adding a performative element to the book itself. although johann trechsel’s edition of terence published in lyons in is perhaps the best known of the french examples, vérard’s version from is interesting because of the innovative technique he used: interchangeable blocks. invented by a publisher from strasbourg, jean gruninger, for his own edition of terence published in and then borrowed by vérard, this technique involves julie stone peters, the theatre of the book, - : print, text and performance in europe (oxford: oxford up, ) . ibid . for a discussion of terence’s comedies in france, see: h.w . lawton, contribution à l’histoire de l’humanisme en france: térence en france au xvie siècle (paris: jouve, ). permuting a series of woodblocks in order to obtain illustrations for every conceivable scene. gruninger’s series of blocks included some thirty-one characters, both male and female, of different age and social occupation depicted with a variety of gestures and facial expressions. included in the series were five architectural settings (two different castles, a city, a tower and a gateway), a set of four varied looking trees and some miscellaneous vegetation such as shrubs and foliage. from this collection of figures, settings and flora, the printer could then create any number of scenes by simply compiling the elements in whatever way he wanted. to make scenes compiled from interchangeable blocks appear close to the text, vérard included banderoles above the figures on which he supplied identification, if needed. illustrations created with interchangeable woodblocks are more extreme versions of the composite images like the one marchant used for the complainte – which he compiled by using scenes borrowed from multiple sources – but they also further emphasize the crucial role of the printer/publisher in manipulating the book. by assembling texts from different sources and placing the work in a specific framework, the printer enforces a particular kind of narrative for the book he prints, the editing strategy we saw marchant employ in des femmes. at the same time, the usage of interchangeable woodblocks allows for an even greater control not only of text, but of images as well, which can now be manipulated in whichever way the printer see fits. in theory at least, the interchangeable woodblocks also diminish the need for the artist (the engraver or the woodcutter) who, once the set of permuting woodblocks is created, is no longer needed to design individual illustrations – an appealing prospect for the printers, no doubt, since it meant lowering the price of running an edition while at the same time ensuring a greater control over the look of the final product. taylor,“a priest of poetry to the people” . ibid. . the interchangeable blocks must have been quite useful to vérard because he used them again for his edition of the jardin de plaisance (bn, rés. ye. ). the woodcuts from this edition are reproduced in taylor, “a priest of poetry to the people” figures , , and . ibid. . the emergence of the sottie as a theatrical genre in this period together with the renewed interest in classical comedies frequently published by french printers suggest that the public at this time was increasingly interested in representation and exploration of different social types. an avid interest in the portrayal of society must be one of the reasons for the popularity of the danse books in this period especially since the books, in contrast to the painted versions of the theme, are characterized by a proliferation of figures. w e will recall that forty-six new characters were added to the series by marchant alone, an impressive number that at least in part reflects the burgeoning public sphere at the turn of the century in france. in her discussion of the sottie, arden has pondered the purpose of satirical texts and performances in this period particularly their social and political implication. w ho exactly was doing the satirizing and why? according to arden, the sottie, though it revealed forms of discontent that affected the lower classes, was essentially a conservative force that sought to laugh away and therefore lessen the impact of any kind of change or nouveauté, whether it was social, political, religious or even sartorial. as she states: “this theater was not fundamentally progressive (in the sense of advocating new forms of social organisation). the sots judge the abuses of the present from a retrospective vantage point: things are not what they should be, the fools believe; but long ago they were as they should have been.” since there is much similarity in the type of humor and the choice of characters used in both the sottie and the danse, i wonder if the latter can also be understood along the same lines: as a moralizing illustrated text that halts rather than embraces any fundamental social change. this may be a particularly apt definition for des femmes, which while portraying an array of female characters and thus giving women visibility in a seemingly new way, also reinforces deeply seated religious and moralistic attitudes towards women that place them in a position of inferiority and describe them as chatty, frivolous or morally corruptive. after all, des femmes was published at the time when women such as anne of france and later arden . ibid. . ibid. - . queen anne of brittany, were actually becoming politically active and involved in the affairs of the state in a way not previously seen, a development that was not met warmly by their male counterparts, as i discussed earlier. though some women in the book are portrayed as exceptionally pious and devout and women do seem more willing to embrace death than men, the des femmes book does not offer a particularly positive portrayal of women in general. marchant’s decision to include la sotte (the female-fool) as the last figure in the dance is particularly illuminating in this regard (fig. ). although death addresses her directly (sus tost margot venez avant), the sotte – wearing a traditional fool’s costume and holding a marotte – offers a reply that is aimed not at her dead companion but at the women who danced before her. referring to them as the “pretty, trim ladies” (entre vous conctes y iolies), the sotte demands that the women listen to what she has to say and let go of their foolish ways ( femmes oyez que ie vous dis/ laissez a heure voz folies). that the sotte is depicted speaking to women rather than conversing with the dead, is quite unusual in the context of the danse. typically, it is only the author, who delivers the prologue and the epilogue and thus addresses both the protagonists of the danse as well as the viewer. the sotte reminds women that they will certainly die (car vous mourrez sans contredis) and also turns her marotte – the staff with a face on the top that normally signifies the fool’s mirror-image or an alter ego – towards the women that precede her in the danse, suggesting perhaps that they are all female-fools. alternatively, the i would therefore disagree with harrison who argues that “the des femmes is objective in its presentation of women, and it is certainly not misogynistic. the faults attributed to participants in this danse macabre arise from their situation in life and its temptations, not from a nature basically flawed from beginning” ( ). w hile the interest in the portrayal of women from different classes is new and reveals an interest in giving women greater social visibility, the poem and the images in des femmes are rooted in views about women that are neither objective nor complimentary. margot is a traditional stage name used by the sotte in the medieval morality plays and the sottie, hence another link between des femmes and late medieval theatre. the word also denotes a magpie, a bird that chatters constantly – a characteristic given to the female-fools, but also women in general. in contrast, the fool in the man’s danse, which is also shown with a marotte, points the staff towards him and is depicted gazing at it with a comical expression. position of the sotte’s marotte may also be understood as reinforcing marchant’s main thesis in the miroer salutaire, betterment through self-reflection, for both the protagonists and the book’s reader. one last illustrated text that references women, fools and death is important to consider as it shares much in common with des femmes and points to the kind of literature about women that was commonly taken up by printers of illustrated books. in france, the interest in the fool as the new allegorical figure is evidenced by the popularity of sebastian brant’s famous treatise, das narrenschiff (the ship of fools), which was translated into french very soon after it was first published in basel in . translated by jehan drouyn, the french version of das narrennschiff (la grande nef des folz du monde) was first published in lyons in and widely disseminated; at least twelve editions were issued in the course of the sixteenth century. that same year, , the flemish humanist and a noted imprimeur- librairie, jodicus badius ascensius (josse bade van asche), working in lyons and paris, decided to write a supplement (additametum) in latin to brant’s narrenschiff titled stultifere naves (the ship of female-fools). bade’s supplement was essentially another example of the printer-publisher inserting his agency by modifying or expanding the original text. it was published in paris in by his friend and colleague angelbert de marnef. interestingly, prior to publishing bade’s original text, marnef wanted to test the appeal of the work for a larger public by commissioning a french vernacular adaptation. he approached drouyn, who had ample experience with brant’s treatise, to translate bade’s supplement and published it as la grant nef des folles (henceforth nef des folles). as yona pinson has shown, the french translation of bade’s text should be treated as an autonomous work since it deviates considerably from the original pinson . the first edition of drouyn’s translation must have sold out quickly. the second edition was published a year later, in . pinson . the edition was printed by thielmann kerver for angelbert and geoffrey de marnef on february , (paris, arsenal, rés.- -bl- ). the book was illustrated with six woodcuts and printed in quarto format. source. drouyn expanded bade’s more refined text by adding thirteen additional chapters, including one entitled la nef de la mort (the ship of death), all of which are illustrated with complementary woodcuts. the book was apparently aimed primarily at a female readership (“affin que les femmes le lisent à leur aise”) and like des femmes it is overtly didactic and, at times, misogynistic. la nef des folles is another important example of the predilection of french printers towards publishing companion-pieces of popular illustrated texts and it is likely that the danse and this book shared the same audience. after all, a number of printers and publishers who produced editions of the danse were also involved in issuing copies of drouyn’s vernacular adaptation. w e will recall that de marnef brothers commissioned marchant to print the latin edition of the danse in october of and they also hired him to print a flemish translation of the narrenschiff in . parisian printers le petits laurens (commissioned by geoffroy de marnef) and jean trepperel, who published editions of the danse also printed la nef des folles in and respectively. both bede’s supplement and drouyn’s adaptation stem from the same religious and didactic literature that describes women as the source of evil. bede’s text includes the woodcut portraying the ship of eve (also reproduced in drouyn’s edition), which leads all other ships filled with fools on their way to the land of venus. two horned grotesque looking fool-devils row the ship, while the banner fluttering above the ship’s prow displays the image of a basilik-like dragon, a symbol of the devil (fig. ). standing at the center of the ship, to the right of the tree of knowledge, eve is visually isolated from the other figures in the vessel, perhaps in order to emphasize her active role in the trespass at the garden of eden. w hile eve is about to touch the fruit handed over by the serpent coiled around the tree, ibid . a full list of illustrations can be found in pinson’s study. for a recent critical edition of the nef des folles see olga anna duhl, la nef de folles, adaptation de jean drouyn (paris: classiques garnier, ). ibid . the six ‘original’ cut that accompanied bade’s latin supplement are also included in drouyn’s adaptation. ibid. . ibid. . ibid. . her accomplice, adam, is shown embarking on the ship and raising both hands in the air – a gesture that denotes his passivity and innocence. in the ship of smell, women dressed as fools pick flowers and offer bouquets to their foolish suitors, while in the ship of touch several couples are shown embracing. although all figures aboard the ship are dressed as fools, the woodcut depicts women, not their male counterparts, as inherently more errant. the main female-fool in the center of the ship, embraces her young lover, while still holding the hand of the older one. the couple on the left recalls secular and profane prints that emphasize female seductive and avaricious nature: while the male fool fondles the woman’s breast, she is shown reaching for his purse. sailing under the banner decorated with a peacock, a symbol of pride, the personification of sight in the ship of sight is an elegantly dressed courtesan holding a comb and a mirror. a long line of female-fools await to embark on the ship, while sight turns her mirror towards the viewer – the ultimate recipient of the moral lesson portrayed in the image. much like marchant’s miroir salutaire, the mirror in the ship of sight functions as an edifying tool for the betterment of the reader. actually, according to pinson, like marchant, drouyn described his edition as a speculum, but for him la nef des folles functioned as “an inverted mirror” reflecting exactly that which the reader/viewer should avoid. given such interest in the themes of death and folly at the end of the fifteenth century, it is not surprising that marchant decided to expand the danse by adding the figure of the jester in both the male and female editions of the book. in so doing, he extended the scope of the danse and made the theme more relevant and appealing to its turn of the century audience. readers interested in moralizing and didactic treatises would certainly find the danse appealing, but so could the audience more fascinated with the folly of human nature and the satirical portrayal of various social types. the implication of marchant’s expansion of the danse is especially evident when we compare the different endings of the and editions of the men’s dance of death. the final woodcut of the edition depicts the pairing of the cleric and the hermit, who is the last ‘living’ figure in the danse ibid. . ibid . (fig. ). curiously placed between two cadavers, the hermit, a model of penance for the viewer, holds an open book and a rosary and looks directly at the viewer. on the other hand, in the edition it is the fool who becomes the last figure in the dancing procession (fig. ). as mentioned earlier, the fool is the only figure in the danse that actually dances along with the dead. lifting his right leg, the fool turns his entire body towards the cadaver and gazes at it with a smile. that his body is in movement is also implied by the fabric on the fool’s sleeve that billows wildly in the air. death, in turn, does not acknowledge the fool, but looks out at us, the viewers, with a coy smile as if suggesting that we are the next ones to go. the dialogue between the fool and death is also a bit unusual since it is not constructed as a typical dialogue per se. le mort addresses the fool with a sense of familiarity (“mon amy sot”) and then goes on to comment in general terms on how every man must participate in the dance (“tout homme danser y convient”) and that everyone progresses towards the final end (“chascune chose a la fin tend). the fool, in turn, does not resist death, but seems to pay homage to le mort by suggesting that it has the power to bring together great enemies and neutralize class and social distinction. the examples derived from scribal culture, popular poetry, and illustrated books discussed in this chapter suggest that the macabre discourse was changing at the end of the fifteenth century. allegorical poems such as the mors and la dance aux aveugles, which were at least partially derived from the danse, offered new ways of representing the figure of death and expanded the framework of macabre art and verses by linking them more closely to biblical texts. at the same time, popular contemporary poets such as françois villon or olivier de la marche imbued their verses with macabre sentiment and extended the interest in the theme beyond religious and didactic literature. the turn of the century in france was also marked by profound changes in the social sphere and especially the growing prominence of women in public and political realms, a development that was both a source of fascination and anxiety. w orks written by women as well as treatises for or about women were growing in popularity and printers were increasingly more interested in publishing editions focused solely on female protagonists, from marchant’s des femmes and the shepherdesses’ calendar to dryon’s ship of female-fools. in addition, the fascination with representation of class and the changing social sphere was also of interest to the late medieval theatre, especially the sottie genre, which shared much in common in terms of language and humor with the theme of the danse. the question of why at the end of the fifteenth century the danse became such a popular subject matter in french illustrated books may therefore be found in the combination of discourses i just laid out. w ith their ever expanding roster of figures and social types, the danse macabre books engaged the public interest in exploring class representations and ridiculing or undermining certain segments of society, while also responding to the need of the more devout audiences, which sought edifying texts and images in their quest for salvation. importantly, the chapter also highlights the crucial role of the printer in editing and constructing a particular narrative for each edition of the work – a point that will be elaborated further in the subsequent section by discussing specific editions in more detail. in particular, i argued that the choice of content included in the danse books was not a happenstance, a mere compilation of texts and images with similar subject matter, but rather a deliberate and conscious effort on the part of the printer to put together a book that would appeal to a wider and ever shifting audience. in so doing, printers like marchant, husz and others, expanded the danse by including new figures – women, workers in the printing industry and the fools – and added a selection of carefully curated texts and images that further extended the implications of the danse. in their pursuit of new readers, the printers continually experimented with the theme and modernized the danse by paying attention to contemporary costumes, social customs and trends in art and literature. marchant’s publication of the des femmes relied on the verses of the poem that already circulated in the scribal and literary culture of the early s, but introduced visual elements in the woodcuts that relate more closely to the realm of popular prints especially those that depicted profane representations of women. such interventions with the theme of the danse on the part of the early printers demonstrate their entrepreneurial skills and their familiarity with visual and literary inclinations of the period while also suggesting that the theme circulated in much broader contexts at the turn of the century than it is typically assumed. chapter five the salutary mirror: editing and viewing the illustrated book death and the viewer although they storm into the printing w orkshop and the bookstore and snatch the living figures from their places of work, the three cadavers in mathias husz’s woodcut, depicted on folio b of his edition of the danse macabre, gaze neither at the printers nor at the bookseller (fig. ). rather, they stare at us, the viewers, with a sinister smile while making pointing gestures for our benefit. husz’s unusual rendition of the danse – the woodcut positions its protagonists in specific interior locations and portrays them as working rather than dancing – nevertheless highlights the central premise of much of macabre art, namely the intricate relationship between the viewer and the image. despite its many variations, the danse had always functioned as a visual lesson intended for the benefit of the viewer. in the verses that accompany the first known visual rendition of the theme painted on the walls of the cemetery of the holy innocents in paris, the author (l’acteur) describes the image as a mirror from which all can read (“en ce miroer chascun peut lire”), thus implying that the danse should be regarded as a didactic and visual lecture for the audience (fig. ). as we have seen, a similar sentiment was expressed half a century later, in , when the printer guy marchant published the first edition of the danse macabre des femmes under the general title le miroer salutaire (salutary mirror). as marchant explained in the colophon that accompanied this edition, the book was to be used by its readers as a self-help guide and a universal tool that would aid in the quest for salvation. moreover, the latin phrase “eram quod es, eris quod sum” (i was what the colophon to the editions of the danse macabre des femmes reads: ce present livre est appelle miroer salutaire pour toutes gens et des tous estats, et est you are, you will be what i am) was frequently evoked in macabre imagery, including versions of the danse. addressing the living figures (and by extension, the viewer) at the beginning of the danse, the first dead musician in marchant’s augmented edition, proclaims: “helas: regardez nous/ mors, pourris, puans, descouvers/ comme sommes: telx seres vous” (alas! look at us: dead, rotten, stinking and naked. as we are so you will be) (fig. ). although there has been much debate as to the status of the dead in the danse – do they represent death personified or the dead in general? are they mirror images of the living in the danse or merely their dead companions? – the dancing corpses in the image are ultimately reminders to the viewers of their impending physical demise. in husz’s woodcut the relationship between death and the viewer is made even more prominent because of the composition and the placement of the image in the book. as discussed in previous chapters, the scene with the printers and the bookseller is preceded by eight woodcuts in which the dancing partners are all situated in a simple outdoor location (figs. and ). by the time the viewer reaches folio b , the model for the danse has already been established through the replicating composition of the preceding images. the woodcut is then followed by nine other scenes that revert back to the conventional framework – the figures dance outdoors in a procession facing the viewer. embedded in the middle of the danse, the woodcut with the printers and the bookseller functions as an interlude in the dance because its composition and arrangement of figures diverges so significantly from the expected model (fig. ). yet, and this is worth emphasizing, it is left up to the viewer to ‘discover’ the image by leafing through the book because nothing in the title or the colophon hints at its existence or placement in the work. the effects of husz’s clever insertion of such an unexpected image are multiple. since the printers and the bookseller are placed in different settings from the rest of the figures in the danse, their professions are emphasized over all others. while other social types are represented though a single figure (the king, the de grant utilite et recreacion pour pleuseurs ensengnemens tant en latin comme en françoys les quelx il contient. ainsi compose pour ceulx qui desirent acquerir leur salut, et qui le voudront avoir. merchant, the schoolmaster), the printing profession is portrayed by three different individuals all of whom are responsible for specific parts of the printing process (the compositor, the inker and the pressman, even the bookseller). in , when the book was published, the printing technology was still a novelty and part of husz’s intervention with this woodcut must have been initiated by his desire to introduce the audience to aspects of the printing process they may not have been familiar with. although neither the printers nor the bookseller will actually survive the deadly attack – as w illiam engel points out, they are mockingly “subjected to the very process [they] strive to allegorize, namely death” – the products of their work will nevertheless continue to circulate and exist in multiple copies long after they are gone. the books piled on the counter and arranged on the shelves behind the bookseller may thus be reminders of the durability of the printed word, which unlike the rotting flesh, is actually enduring. leafing through husz’s volume, the viewer uncovers the image, but also becomes implicated in it. if, as i proposed in the second chapter, husz’s image presents the steps in the production and distribution of the printed word, then as users of books we are also given a role in this process. the books are put together and printed in a workshop; they are sold in a bookstore and, finally, read by a reader. since the cadavers have already captured their victims in the w orkshop and the bookstore and they are shown staring at us with a cheeky smile, it may be that as readers we are the next ones to go. moreover, by looking dir ectly at us, the dead become, in the words of w olfgang kemp, “our vehicles of identification, [or] figurations of the beholder in the image.” they communicate with the viewer not w illiam e. engel, mapping mortality: the persistence of memory and melancholy in early modern england (amherst: massachusetts up, ) . karin littau, theories of reading: books, bodies and bibliomania (malden, massachusetts: polity press, ) . after all, at the time when husz published his book, there were heated debates regarding the longevity of works printed on paper. while some hailed the new technology or at the very least acknowledged its usefulness, others were convinced that books printed on paper were perishable goods, which could never outlive or permanently replace manuscripts. on this issue, see the third chapter. w olfgang kemp, “the w ork of art and its beholder: the methodology of the aesthetic of reception”, the subjects of art history: historical objects in only through their gazes, but also through their gestures though the implic ations of the latter are somewhat ambiguous. the cadaver in the shop may be pointing towards the bookseller; identifying him as its next victim. however, his companion in the workshop, standing behind the printing press, points simply to the left, to no on e person specifically. by pointing in the opposite directions, the two cadavers may be attempting to visually reinsert the unusual image into the dancing sequence that precedes and follows it, or they may be signaling to the viewer that the final outcome of their visit to the w orkshop and the bookstore is exactly the same as with all other scenes of the danse, even if the composition is so very different. in most examples of the danse, the dancing partners are typically shown facing the viewer and there is a sense that the procession of the living and the dead is meant to be observed, hence the author’s comment regarding the mirror discussed above (figs. and ). this is not the case with husz’s printers (fig. ). save for the three cadavers, the other figures in the woodcut are completely unaware of our presence, each of them engrossed in a futile fight for their lives. what’s more, the scene takes place indoors in two distinct spaces that while not necessarily private, are nevertheless places in which the viewer is not expected to be present at that moment. much like the dead, we intrude into the printing w orkshop and the bookstore and become privy to individual dramas that are enfolding. this creates a more personal and to some extent a more impactful effect than previous renditions of the theme. if anything, husz’s image is an example of the narrowing down not only of audience who viewed the image, but also of the sequential procession that aims to replicate the whole of society. a single viewer leafing through the book alone is now presented with a scene that can function outside of the conventional framework of the danse and the woodcut demonstrates how experimentation with the dane in the medium of print offered new and original ways of representing the macabre. contemporary perspective, eds. mark a. cheetham, michael ann holly and keith moxey (cambridge up, ) . the material nature of the printed book and the “acts of viewing” there are approximately nineteen known extant editions of the danse macabre printed books published between , the date of the first edition, and the early sixteenth century. the books continued to be published, though more sporadically, through the sixteenth century and random editions even surfaced as part of the bibliothèque bleue in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. although studies on the danse, such as the ones published by leonard kürtz or hélène and bertrand utzinger, provide description of content for many early printed editions, there is of yet no comprehensive account that acknowledges the diverse the term “acts of viewing” is borrowed from areford’s study on the materiality of the printed image in which he suggests that the act of viewing was rarely a passive experience and typically involved a series of manipulations on the part of the viewer, including cutting away parts of the image, adding paint or painted details, and including hand written text. see areford, the viewer and the printed, especially chapter . the list of known editions and the libraries that house them can be found on the incunabula short title catalogue (istc) published online by the british library. while the istc catalogues only editions published by the early sixteenth century (c. ), the universal short title catalogue (ustc) issued by st. andrew’s college considers a wider scope of early printed books and includes editions of the danse macabre books published up until the end of the sixteenth century. bibliothèque bleue is the term used for a type of ephemera and popular literature that was published in france between c. and c. s. closer to brochures than proper books, works that belong to this category were typically illustrated with low quality prints, printed in small formats and sold with blue paper cover, hence the name. the danse macabre books that belong to this group were mostly published in troyes and can be seen as the continuation of the practice of publishing the title established by the printer nicolas le rouge in the early sixteenth century. the first known edition of the danse that can be categorized as belonging to the bibliothèque bleue was published by nicolas oudot in . later editions include the one printed in by the widow of jacques oudot and by his son jean and the one published in by jean-antoine garnier. these editions typically include both men’s and women’s dances. for information on the books see: danser avec le mort: les danses macabres dans les manuscrits et les livres imprimés du xve au xxe siècle, eds: marie-dominique leclerc, danielle quéruel and alain robert (lyon: musée de l’imprimerie, ). see also marie-dominque leclerc, “les editions bleues de la danse macabre: continuité et rupture”, actes du dixième congrès international sur les danses macabres (vendôme, - septembre ), meslay-le-grenet, association européenne des danses macabres, , ( - ). nature of the editions, especially in terms of their layout and physical characteristics. focused predominately on the painted examples, previous works on the danse tend to discuss the printed books in general terms, as if the extant editions are merely repetitive and identical, when in fact they are not. actually, it would be rather difficult to define what constitutes a ‘typical’ edition of the danse, since the known examples range considerably. it could perhaps be argued that marchant’s books come closest to being the model – no doubt because he published the highest number of editions and his version of woodcuts was most often used by other printers and publishers – but there are notable variations even across his editions. for example, a copy of the danse macabre des femmes he published in and currently housed at the bn (réserve ye. ) features woodcuts that have been hand painted after the book was printed. moreover, in october of marchant printed an edition of the men’s danse translated into latin by pierre desrey and published by the bookseller geoffrey de marnef. much like the hand- colored copy of the women’s danse, the latin edition was modified to cater to specific clientele – the pious christians who frequented de marnef’s shops where ‘popular’ devotional books were sold in both french and latin. editions published by other printers are equally varied. sometime after june of , the libraire-publisher antoine vérard commissioned gillet couteau and jean menard to print a lavish edition of the men’s danse, which was printed on vellum and extensively hand-colored (fig. ). in terms of the content, the two see leonard p. kürtz, the dance of death and the macabre spirit - and hélène and bertrand utzinger, itinéraires des danses macabres (chartres: garnier, ). sandra hindman, “the career of guy marchant” . hindman explains that the hand-colored copy was in the royal library and that it was likely commissioned for an aristocratic or royal patron. as discussed in the third chapter, this book was printed in folio format and titled chorea ab eximio macabre versibus alemanicis edita. hindman, “the career of guy marchant” . as i discussed in the third chapter, de marnef owned a shop in paris but also, together with his two brothers jean and enguilbert, kept store in towns such as poitiers, angers and bruges where the books he published also circulated. two copies of this edition are known. one is housed at the bn (vélins ) and the other at lambeth palace library in london (ms ). information regarding the extant copies are identical. they are printed in folio format and include vérard’s version of woodcuts featuring the men’s danse and the verses of the three living illustrated with two woodcuts. however, subtle variations in the way the woodcuts are painted – especially noticeable in the altering backgrounds of the lambeth palace copy in which even the figures in the same woodcut are occasionally placed against a different setting – make it difficult to describe the copies as being exactly the same. in fact, the two books function in somewhat paradoxical terms: they are at once the products of mechanical reproduction and at the same time each copy is an example of a unique, hand-made and authentic work of art. as such, they are the embodiments of the transitional period of bookmaking during which scribal and print culture were still heavily interwoven and where formal aspects of a given book – in this case, the application of hand-painted color – had significant impact on how the work was perceived. there are also significant differences in terms of content across the extant editions. books published by vérard included only the men’s danse and the three living while marchant, as discussed in previous chapters, began to expand his works with new woodcuts and additional texts just months after he issued the first edition. not only did he add the ten new living figures to the men’s danse by june of , but he also invented a whole version of the women’s danse in july of the same year. by this time, marchant had started to append other devotional texts and images that complimented the danse including the three living, the debate and the complainte. in the s, printers such as guillaume le rouge working in troyes and husz in lyons continued to expand and modify the theme by including other texts and images, related predominately to the themes of sin and judgment. publication of this edition is scarce in part because the colophon printed at the end of the book is does not provide specific information regarding the date of the publication, the printers or the publisher. the istc dates it after june , and state that it was printed for vérard by couteau and possibly also menard. for a brief discussion of the difference between vérard’s and marchant’s version of woodcuts see the first chapter. as with all other editions published for vérard, this one includes only the thirty male characters that are found in marchant’s first edition from and which were based on the mural from the cemetery of the innocents. such diversity in format and content can be, at least partially, explained by two points. first, the assortment of editions reflects the transitional nature of the period in which the illustrated book as the medium was in the process of becoming and still heavily embedded in scribal culture. this is especially true for books produced in paris, which from the thirteenth century onward was the center of manuscript production in europe and where scribes, illuminators and printers frequently collaborated. moreover, printed images and illustrated books produced at the end of the fifteenth century influenced other media – works on enamel, textiles, and stained-glass windows, for example – but were also heavily influenced by them, as i discussed in the second chapter. the collaboration of artists working in different media and the intermediality of much of artwork produced in france at the turn of the century is also reflected in the danse books. w e will recall that copies of the men’s and women’s danse were used to create a lavish manuscript in (bn, ms. fr. ) and that the editions were also used as models for the meslay-le- grenet and la ferté-loupière frescoes produced in the early sixteenth century (figs. - , and ). second, the diversity of the printed editions of the danse was prompted by the demands of the marketplace and particularly the appeal of the new that characterized much of the early printed works published at the time. printers and publishers frequently marketed their works as revised, augmented, newly translated, or recently illustrated in hopes of attracting readers and expanding the market for their books. the need to change or reinvent popular and established titles initiated numerous collaborations between printers and booksellers – such as, for instance, the partnership between marchant and de marnef that resulted in the latin edition of the danse – and also created a demand for experimentation. printers frequently ‘tested’ the market by producing altered versions of popular titles and partnered with other workshops or publishers in hopes of diffusing the costs and protecting their own enterprises since not all of the trial editions were bound to succeed and find sufficient readership. as i suggested in the previous chapter, the creation of the danse macabre des femmes was almost certainly initiated by the appeal of the new see delaunay, “echanges artistiques.” and by marchant’s ability to recognize the market’s need for such a title. by all accounts, the experiment worked – marchant continually published the book and, even more importantly, printers such as husz or nicolas le rouge incorporated the women’s danse in their own editions, thus further expanding the popularity of the title. on the other hand, marchant’s attempt to publish the female version of the shepherd’s calendar, which he produced in collaboration with the publisher jean petit seems to have been much less successful, with only two editions recorded. given the range in the production and content of the printed editions of the danse, any viewer’s impression will be affected by the material aspects of the book itself. one of the goals of this chapter will therefore be to focus on specific editions of the danse and analyze them in detail by focusing both on the content and the material aspects of each book. as areford has argued, the early printed image is not a product of a single artist, but the result of multiple steps and often multiple hands (woodcutter, printer and painter, for example) and as such carries many layers of meaning. at the same time and in contrast to the widespread belief that mechanically reproduced images are inherently repetitive or identical, areford claims that “most early prints are characterized by a materiality that reinforces their singularity.” although his study centers on single sheet prints, areford’s points regarding the materiality of early prints are also applicable to the medium of illustrated books in the fifteenth century. even though early printed images were often designed to purposely simulate other media – colored drawings, woven textiles or, as was the case with vérard’s books, illuminated manuscripts – it would be erroneous to assume that this was done solely for economic purposes in order to substitute for more expensive, hand-made and authentic objects. according to areford, the formal characteristics of early prints go beyond mere imitation or decoration; rather they are often suggestive of the print’s symbolic meaning. crucial among the formal elements is the role of color, as susan dackerman’s study areford . ibid. . ibid. . ibid. . on the painted prints has recently shown. w hile the earlier scholarship tended to view color in prints as inherently corruptive and typically ignored or criticized it, dackerman’s work on the fifteenth and sixteenth century prints demonstrates that the presence of color is often integral in promoting the viewer’s compositional or symbolic understanding the work. in discussing painted prints, barbara w elzel suggested that we should reconsider how we think about editions of prints as identical or uniform objects and disregard the notion that every impression was necessarily intended to have the same meaning or function. such an approach would then result in changing the notion that the application of color diminishes the value of prints and, instead, prompt us to consider other contexts or reasons behind the existence of the ‘altered’ versions. part of my interest in emphasizing the materiality of the different editions of the danse is to show that not only through a selection of content, but also through the choice of design and layout printers such marchant, husz or vérard had a crucial role in representing the theme of the danse. w hat materials were used to fashion an edition, whether it was painted or not, how large or small it was – all these elements had an impact on how the danse was perceived by the viewer. in fact, i would argue that a close examination of editorial strategies used to fashion different editions of the danse is just as important for our understanding of how the theme was see dackerman, painted prints. ibid. . in the introduction of her book, dackerman quotes the statement by the dutchman w ilem goeree who in the late seventeenth century stated that “to color prints is to spoil prints”, a point of view that has pervaded much of the literature on the prints since then. the marginalization of color in the study of prints is prompted, at least in part, by the fact that the hybrid nature of colored prints – at once printed and painted – calls into the question the issue of originality and authenticity of works of art. since color is typically not applied by the engraver/woodcutter, it is seen as a form of alternation that diminishes the inherent value of the original. this was especially problematic since it was believed that color in many prints produced in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries was applied much later than the works were initially produced and hence seen as a mere embellishment. see the introduction of dackerman’s book, - . on w estern contempt for color in art see david batchelor, chromophobia (london: reaktion books, ). barbara w elzel, “zur vielfältigkeit eines bildmediums: monochrome und iluminierte druckgraphik im frühen jahrhundert,” der bordesholmer altar des hans brüggeman: werk und wirkung, ed. uwe albrecht (berlin: d. reimer, ). presented in the medium of print as it is to consider the setting and context of each painted example, a strategy used convincingly in elina gertsman’s recent study of the murals. by analyzing the spatial location and the overall pictorial programs of the churches in which the danse murals were placed, gertsman has shown that each example, though representing the same theme, actually functioned in a unique manner. at the same time, regardless of the differences in layout or design, each fresco implicated the viewer directly and demanded his active participation. the second aim of the present chapter will thus be to address the role of the viewer in the printed books. one of the main criticisms of illustrated books in the scholarship on the danse has been the assumption that the translation of the theme from painted murals to printed books resulted in a narrowing down of audiences and a more prescribed interpretation of the subject matter. in the public spaces of churches and cemeteries, the community as a whole was free to view and interpret the image together whereas the medium of the illustrated book r adically reduces the viewers to a single person leafing through the pages alone. according to gertsman, such a change in audience had a negative effect on how the theme was perceived: in the private viewing experience afforded by the book format, the desire to actively involve the beholder in the process of viewing is tempered, as the life- gertsman, the dance of death, - . in earlier studies on the dance of death murals, the authors tended to isolate the image from the larger pictorial program in a given church and rarely studied the architectural setting of different examples. for examples, in cases in which the danse was painted along a straight wall, as in the church in reval in estonia or at the cemetery of the holy innocents in paris, the beholder was allowed an unobstructed view of the image. however, the monumental nature of frescoes, which typically stretched over twenty or thirty meters in length, required that the viewer perform a sort of dance of her own by coming closer to observe the details and stepping away to consider the entire image while at the same time moving along with the procession. conversely, the murals at la chaise-dieu in auvergne and the church in berlin in which the procession of dancers was divided or obstructed by architectural elements and altered by the changes in design resulted in a markedly different reading of the danse. see gertsman, especially pages - . see, for instance, ashby kinch, “the danse macabre” and gertsman, the dance of death, . size processions of death and the living are replaced by the episodic structure of separate vignettes, which hardly exert the same kind of power over the reader as do the solemn processions of lifelike figures in large-scale paintings.” moreover, in the printed books the danse was almost immediately situated alongside other devotional texts and images and therefore encased in what ashby kinch has described as “doctrinally rigid and interpretively narrow material.” as kinch argues, the choice of texts appended to the danse offered the reading subject a singular view of death and the afterlife with no recourse for an alternative reading of the theme. while it is undoubtedly true that the transition from one medium to another had profound effects on how the danse was presented and viewed, is it actually productive to view the function of the books in such narrow terms, especially given their range and disparity? i have already shown in previous chapters that a broader examination of the historical and cultural contexts in which the books were published, suggests that they participated in discourse beyond the macabre including scientific and astrological debates or the interest in exploring the theme of the folly at the turn of the century. moreover, the very medium of the illustrated book emphasizes the act of reading and looking – both of which are integral in experiencing the theme of the danse. even if, as gertsman argues, the viewing experience afforded by the book format is “tempered”, that does not mean that it is always necessarily negative. in fact, could we not argue that vérard’s painted copies in which the figures of the dead and the living are rendered with extreme attention to detail, afforded a view of the danse that might not have been possible with all mural examples? for instance, the fresco at la chaise-dieu was executed using sgraffito, a technique created by applying layers of plaster tinted in contrasting color, and the image was only partially completed (fig. ). as a result, the silhouettes of yellowish gertsman . kinch, “the danse macabre” . ibid. . figures are shown dancing against a fiery red background, which does imbue the image with an ominous quality, but prevents the viewer from observing the physical differences between the dead and the living or marvel at the opulence of costumes. likewise, the mural at mesely-le-grenet, which is actually based on vérard’s woodcuts, features fully painted figures, but its position, above the viewer’s head, made it difficult to see all the details of costumes and faces while at the same time engaging with the verses below (figs. - ). in contrast, vérard’s books offered the viewer an unrestricted view of both figures and text and the richness of colors used to illuminate the woodcuts highlighted the contrast between the plump clothed bodies of the living and the emaciated, blackened features of the dead (figs. and ). the focus on the details in the woodcuts – a pink rosy glow of the king’s visage, a shiny metal armor that encapsulates the body of the constable or the subtle shading used in the lambeth palace copy – all help to stimulate the viewing process and encourage an active participation on the part of the beholder. a similar point can be made regarding the content of the danse books. medieval manuscripts and printed books often provided instructions on how to read a given text or a set of prayers and even, as laurel amtower has shown, went so far as to project “a reader as a psychological being whose mind, emotion, and personality might be opened up and “completed” by the text.” this is certainly what marchant had in mind when he composed the colophon in in which he referred to the danse as the “salutary mirror” and sketched out the ideal users of the book – devout men and women who desire to obtain salvation. the texts that marchant appended to his augmented editions and those that were later added by other printers and publishers do indeed stem from didactic and religious literature and focus mainly on sin and punishment. as such, they are in kinch’s words “doctrinally rigid and interpretatively narrow”, yet we should not assume that there is only one way in which they were read, especially given the fact that the danse was this is even more true for the mural at la ferté-loupière in burgundy, which is painted high above the viewer’s head and can only be observed from the distance. laurel amtower, engaging words: the culture of reading in the later middle ages (new york: palgrave, , ). from its inception such a malleable theme. after all, as roger chartier reminds us, no written work has a universal, stable or fixed meaning and there are multiple ways in which it can be interpreted by different audiences that take a hold of it. literary reception theorists have long studied the “role of the reader” in the text and explored ways in which reception can often diverge significantly from the intended meaning of a work. however, for my purposes here, the work of cultural historians, especially chartier and more recently karen littau who explore the act of reading as an embodied process and for whom the materiality of the book plays an important role in how the text is interpreted is especially useful. as littau points out: since a text is also […] an embodied material object, this object’s materiality and physical organization conditions our reading. thus conceived, texts bring into contact content, form and matter, and readers respond to linguistic and literary codes as well as bibliographical and medium specific ones. in the context of the danse macabre books that are, as i outlined above, vastly different in terms of medium and layout, littau’s approach could help expand our understanding of how the books may have been read. the readers of medieval and early modern works often left traces of themselves on the pages of books they were using. such ‘remnants’ of the reader in the book, or what areford refers to as “traces of reception”, could take many forms: some users left written prayers, commentary or instructions, others added drawings in the margins or in the main image, and there were also those who cut away parts kinch, “the danse macabre” . roger chartier, the order of books: readers, authors and libraries in europe between the fourteenth and eighteenth centuries, trans. lydia g. cochrane (cambridge: polity press, ) ix-v. see for instance umberto eco, the role of the reader: explorations in the semiotics of texts (bloomington: indiana up, ); w olfgang iser, the act of reading: a theory of aesthetic response (baltimore and london: john hopkins up, ); or susan r. suleiman and inge crossman eds., the reader in the text: essays on audience and interpretation (princeton, new jersey: princeton up, ). littau . of the page or the image and even pasted new material in the book they were reading. according to areford, these alterations of the preexisting text and image suggest that the “act of viewing” was not a passive experience, but one that involved an active participation on the part of the viewer. in terms of the danse books, the presence of the reader can be traced in several copies of the existing editions – a fact that has not been acknowledged in the literature on the subject thus far. such evidence of the reader’s presence in the books adds another layer of meaning and helps to understand how the audience interacted with the theme of the danse in the medium of illustrated books. the question of audience who were the readers of the danse books? w e know that some copies, especially hand-painted ones, were listed in the royal libraries and were obviously intended for aristocratic readers, but what about the other, less adorned editions? in the studies on the early printed books, editions of the danse are often credited as helping to create the market for ‘popular’ illustrated works in paris – a genre previously published mostly in lyons by printers such as husz and others – though we have to wonder what exactly is meant by the term ‘popular’? although the process of mechanical reproduction allowed for the creation of multiple, identical copies and helped to disseminate the theme to a wider group of readers, it would be wrong to assume as david bland and other scholars in the past have done that the editions of the danse are examples of “poor man’s books.” just because printed areford . ibid. . hindman, “the career of guy marchant” . for a discussion of ‘popular’ printing in lyons with a comparison to paris, see dominique coq, “les incunables: textes anciens, texts nouveaux,” histoire de l’édition française, vol. , le livre conquérant: du moyen age au milieu du xvie siècle, eds. henri-jean martin and roger chartier (paris, , - ). david bland, a history of book illustration: the illuminated manuscript and the printed book (london: faber and faber, ) . in his study, bland only books were generally cheaper than illuminated manuscripts, does not mean that they were necessarily affordable and available to members of the lower classes or that they were popular across all strata of late fifteenth century french society. in her seminal essay on early printing in france, natalie zemon davis has shown that popular books were not read and bought only by the “petites gens” and that the content and appearance of books should not be used to define their audiences. because the information regarding the late fifteenth century printing workshops and bookstores – especially data pertaining to the cost of specific titles or the type of clientele that purchased books – is fairly scarce, scholars have been relying on other sources of information to identify the audience of early printed books. chief among these are book transfers, formal catalogues of princely families and appraisals of estates for legal purposes that are found in notarial inventories. although such documents date mainly from the sixteenth century, a study conducted by alexander schutz in which the author examined notarial archives of paris, known as the minutier central des notaires, is particularly useful for our purposes here because it considers vernacular works. schutz consulted approximately inventories of private libraries from the sixteenth century listed in the state appraisals and catalogued popular titles that frequently appeared on such lists, including copies of the danse books and the shepherd’s calendar. according to schutz, the majority of book owners listed in notarial inventories came from the upper middle classes and the lower nobility. among them were members that belonged to the legal circle discusses marchant’s editions and does not acknowledge the existence of other printers and publishers who produced the work. according to him, marchant’s editions of the danse were aimed at “the under-privileged” who must have enjoyed looking at death that strikes the great and the wealthy, . natalie zemon davis, “printing and the people”, society and culture in early modern france (stanford: stanford up, ), - , . one of the most famous studies of french notarial inventories was conduced by albert labarre in the s. see: albert labarre, le livre dans la vie amienoise du seizième siècle: l’enseignement de inventaires après décès, - (paris: nauwelaerts, ). see alexander h. schutz, vernacular books in parisian private libraries of the sixteenth century according to the notarial inventories, university of north carolina studies in the romance languages and literatures, no. (chapel hill, ). ibid. . including counselors at court, members of the parliament, lawyers and notaries. physicians, including surgeons, were also listed as were those belonging to the marchand-bourgeois class and other trades people including apothecaries, innkeepers and haberdashers. as expected, booksellers and members of the clergy owned books, as did individuals that belonged to the noble families. of what value are notarial inventories when it comes to assessing the popularity of a given title? just because a book was listed in a private library, does not necessarily mean that the title was popular at a particular time. much like modern day book owners, individuals in the sixteenth century had books on their shelves that they inherited or received as gifts but that they never actually read. in addressing these issues, schutz makes two important points. one, when it comes to book collecting, the state of affairs in the early modern france was actually quite unusual. during the transition from the fifteenth to the sixteenth century, several strata of french society, especially the bourgeoisie, expanded or came into being at the time, thus constituting a brand new social group. these were groups that burgeoned under the rule of francis i – often stemming from the legal circles – that bought noble lands and elevated their social status rapidly. for the most part, libraries belonging to such families – the nouveaux riches of the period – were typically fairly new and reflected specific tastes of the period. second, the presence of printed books in a given library could help to ‘date’ the collection. in the sixteenth century, printing was stilly relatively new and printed editions dated back to, at the most, the last two decades of the previous century. for this reason, as schutz states, “the gap between the date of the publication and the date of the acquisition had to be more limited than at any subsequent time.” who then were the owners of the danse books listed in schutz’s study? half of the owners came from the bourgeois classes, whereas only one quarter was ibid. . ibid. . ibid. . ibid. . ibid. . found in the noble libraries. among the bourgeois owners of the books, three- quarters were women, though as sandra hindman has argued, this data is difficult to interpret. since in this period women were typically a whole generation younger than their husbands, they may have just inherited their husbands’ libraries. in other words, we should not assume that the danse books were largely preferred by female readers, though the presence of many women owners is certainly interesting and worth researching further. by comparison, the shepherd’s calendar, the other illustrated bestseller first published by marchant, was also largely owned by bourgeois families with a slightly higher percentage of owners from the nobility. in fact, one-third of owners of the danse also owned copies of the shepherd’s calendar – a point that suggests that the two works were seen as comparable by the readers and buyers of the period. interestingly, largely absent from the list of owners of either the danse or the shepherd’s calendar were members of the nouveaux riches, or the freshly constituted classes that developed in the early sixteenth century. libraries of such individuals seem to include works that had a long-standing manuscript tradition among the royal and noble circles such as boccaccio’s decameron or barholomeus anglicus’ on the property of things. as hindman explains, this information is also not easy to understand. it could be that in desiring to mimic the reading practices of the nobility, members of the nouveaux riches classes stayed away from the new works and opted for the more established ibid. . one is a copy that was allegedly owned by anne of brittany, though that book is yet to be located. the second is an edition found at the royal library at the castle of blois. on the missing copy that belonged to anne of brittany see alphonse m. chazaud, enseignements d’anne de france: inventaire des meubles estans en la maison de monseigneur le duc de bourbonnais et d’auvergne estant en sa ville d’aiguesperses (paris: ). hindman, “the career of guy marchant” . for example, claude cousin, the wife of nicolas millot, a docteur regent of the faculty of medicine in paris, was listed as one of owners. two women from amiens, jeanne labbé and jacqueline martin also owned the books. ibid. - . for instance, a copy of the shepherd’s calendar was listed in the princely library of the châlon-orange family and in the library of francis i at blois. hindman, “the career of guy marchant” . ibid. . ibid. . titles. at the same time, the nobility in choosing to purchase the danse macabre and the shepherd’s calendar were expanding their libraries and “setting new patterns of taste.” however, both schutz and hindman suggests that the danse was essentially a medieval work, related more to the scribal than the printing culture and thus hardly an example of a new type of book. alternatively, it may be possible, as i suggested in the third chapter, that the danse was essentially a conservative theme that aimed to halt rather than to embrace any real social change. as such, the work would undoubtedly be more appealing to the aristocracy who whished to maintain their long-standing social status and embrace the view of world as it was, than to those upwardly mobile classes who actually benefited from the ongoing stratification of the late medieval and early modern french society. one last point regarding the data collected from the notarial inventories should be made. w hile the danse and the shepherd’s calendar shared the same audience initially, the popularity of the latter persisted through the sixteenth century whereas the interest in the danse seems to have dwindled by about . the latest occurrences of the danse in the inventories surveyed by schutz date from , but these are libraries that belonged to two booksellers, one of which was gailot du pré. in each case, the booksellers owned a hundred copies of the book, which suggests that they were having a difficult time finding buyers for the title. the inventory of bookseller denis janot, which dates from , lists fifty copies of the ibid. . ibid. . according to schutz, the breakdown of owners of the danse books suggests that the title “essentially a medieval work, but in its day popular in more then one social class”, . on the other hand, hindman notes that the practice of creating hybrid copies of the books, links the subject matter of the danse more to scribal culture and medieval sensibility than to the works produced exclusively in the print medium at the turn of the century, . this is because marchant never published texts by, for example, clichtoveus or other humanists tracts in such dual editions. according to hindman, this may be because the works by these authors were never associated with scribal culture and first circulated in the medium of print, hence there was no need to simulate manuscripts in hybrid editions. the danse, on the other hand was a medieval subject matter and, as i noted in the first chapter, occasionally appeared in the margins of medieval manuscripts and was thus closer to the world of scribal culture than the more modern, humanist texts. schutz . danse – another sign that the interest in the subject matter was beginning to wane. parenthetically, the seemingly large number of copies on stock in three separate inventories of booksellers suggests that the danse was originally published in fairly large editions while it also shows how few copies actually survived to present day. the period that marks the decline of popularity (c. ) also corresponds to the drop in the frequency of editions, another point that implies that the danse was no longer of interest to a wide group of readers. the impact of color: hand-painted editions published by antoine vérard in comparison to marchant’s editions, especially his editio princeps from , the danse books published by vérard are rarely studied in detail. scholarly texts on the danse, even the ones that include color reproductions of vérard’s woodcuts, seldom discuss different features of the editions or even comment on the details of the images. yet, visually vérard’s editions are among the most stimulating examples of the danse in any medium and much of it has to do with the usage of color and the clarity of the design. there are two or possibly three extant editions of the danse that were printed for vérard in paris in the s. as one of the most successful libraire-publishers, vérard rarely printed the books himself, but rather hired other presses in the city to produce the work under his name. during the course of his career at least twenty different printers were under his employment, including those that are associated with the danse books such as marchant, nicole de la barre and pierre le rouge. typically, he financed the editions and provided the typographical materials to the ibid . hindman . for example, gertsman’s study of the danse includes a full page color reproduction of an edition published for vérard by pierre la rouge c. - , but does not discuss the uniqueness of this book, especially in terms of its size, layout and color. see gertsman, “the dance of death,” . to date the most comprehensive study of vérard’s career is w inn, anthoine vérard. printers he employed. as a result, most colophons in the books he issued declare the editions to be published “pour anthoine verard”, while the names of the printers or the presses are not always included. to make matters even more confusing for the scholars of the french incunabula, colophons of vérard’s editions are often partially rubbed off so that the names of the printers or even vérard’s own publishing house are no longer visible. vérard’s books are therefore frequently identified on the basis of the printing materials, such as the type, woodblocks or borders, which he lent to the printers he hired. two of the three known editions of vérard’s danse are hand painted. the first was printed by pierre le rouge c. - , while the second painted edition came from the press of gillet couteau, and possibly also jean menard, sometime after june , . the third edition was also the work of couteau and menard and it was printed in paris on june , . although neither vérard’s name nor his printer’s device are featured in the edition, the book’s content and illustrations are identical to the other two editions of the danse and hence it is possible that it was also printed for the famous libraire-publisher. all three editions feature the same ibid. . ibid. . as w inn explains, a few editions in the period from - indicate printing “par vérard” it is very unlikely that he actually operated the press himself. this is the case with the vellum copies of the danse housed at the bn and the lambeth palace library. although both books contain a colophon, the last few lines are erased. identity of the printers of vérard’s books are typically established by examining the type used in specific editions. ibid . however, in a number of cases, vérard did use his printer’s mark, a heart with the letters av, in the books he published. the sole copy of le rouge’s edition is preserved at the bn as rés te. . this is the copy that was found at the royal library of the castle at blois. vérard’s second painted edition is found in two copies, one at the bn and the other at the lambeth palace library in london. see footnote . the sole copy of this edition is preserved in the library of the petit palais in paris as dutuit . for information on this edition see fréderic barbier, ed, paris: capital des livres. le monde des livres et la presse à paris, du moyen Âge a xxe siècle (paris: presses universitaires de france, ), especially page and image . barbier suggests that it is likely that the book was printed for vérard and a similar assumption is made in the written commentary on the cover page of the edition printed by le rouge (bn rés. te ), which states “…un autre example fait partie de content: text and illustrations of the danse macabre des hommes and three living. the woodcuts used for vérard’s editions differ significantly from those found in marchant’s versions, though the identity of the artist who designed them has never been established. given the prominence of vérard’s publishing enterprise and his trade practices, it is safe to assume that he was the owner of this set of woodcuts (and probably also the person who commissioned them) and that he lent them out to the presses he employed. vérard’s practice of producing vellum copies for his printed editions is one of the hallmarks of his career. according to mary beth w inn, parchment copies exist for some editions published by vérard, which is an impressive achievement. along with publishing new ‘modern’ works, vérard included many established ‘classics’ in his oeuvre and maintained a very traditional typographical style. his books were typically published in folio format, printed in the bâtarde type and heavily illustrated to mimic medieval manuscripts. the idea of simulating manuscripts in the new medium of print was not originally vérard’s – the scribe and printer colard mansion from bruges began the practice – but the parisian publisher really la collection de petit palace.” the istc lists only couteau and menard as the printers of the edition. even though vérard’s cuts were not used in as many versions of the danse books, they must have been fairly well known since they were copied or used as models for representations of the theme in several mediums. printers such as nicole de la barre and matthias husz used vérard’s version for their editions of the danse printed in paris and lyons respectively. likewise, simon vostre and philippe pigouchet, who became famous for their editions of printed books of hours, often relied on vérard’s cuts to make borders with the figures from the danse that decorated the office of the dead. vérard’s woodcuts also served as the model for the miniatures of the men’s danse in the danse macabre manuscript produced c. (bn ms. fr. ) and they were likely used for the creation of the mural at meslay-le-grenet. w inn, footnote , page . as she states, copies on vellum tend to be better preserved than those printed on paper, though we have to assume that even some of those have been lost over time and that the original total number of parchment editions exceeds what is now known. ibid . bâtarde was a gothic script used in france, burgundy and germany in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. the early printers adopted the script and created the new typeface, which was used in france until the mid sixteenth century. popularized the idea. these “printed manuscripts” were meant to attract not only the nobility, though they were certainly one of the main customers, but also the burgeoning classes made up of parliament officials and members of the legal circles who were in the process of assembling their libraries and wanted copies of books that resembled manuscripts. as w inn suggests, although they all belong to a general category of printed manuscripts, there is in fact variation in terms of quality and style amongst vérard’s vellum copies. those aimed at the royal and princely clientele are highly personalized and expertly painted by the finest artists. on the other hand, the more commercial versions include woodcuts painted more hastily with lots of color, but not much skill. each example, however, “alerts us […] to an essential characteristic of vérard’s books: the individuality of each copy.” the traditional account of the history of printed images argues that color diminishes and virtually disappears as the technique of printmaking improved over the course of the fifteenth century. according to dackerman, “is a truism in the history of art that color was applied to the earliest prints to compensate for their technical shortcomings.” yet, as dackerman’s study shows, application of color was practiced and promoted through the seventeenth century and, even more significantly, color often served a pivotal role in the design and meaning of the ibid. . because anatole claudin suggested that vérard was initially a miniaturist and a scribe, scholars have assumed that his interest in vellum copies of printed books is result of his background and that he may have even illustrated the works he published. w inn disputes this idea by arguing that there is not enough documentation to support such a claim, though he must have had some connection with the scribal culture before he ventured into the world of printing. on the issue of scribes who became printers see sheila edmunds: “from schoffer to vérard: concerning the scribes w ho became printers”, printing the written word: the social history of books, circa - , ed. sandra l. hindman (ithaca and london: cornell up, ) - . coq . w inn . ibid. . this point is tied to the argument i suggested at the beginning of this chapter, namely that at this early stage of printing in france editions of the same title, even those issued by the same press, differ considerably and should thus be studied individually. dackerman . printed images. since in the past scholars tended to assume that paint was applied to prints at some later point when the image was already “completed”, not much research has been done regarding the artists that colored the images. typically, the colorist was an individual other than the woodcutter or engraver who was hired to work on the printed image. dackerman’s inquiry into the archival records of the city of nuremberg in the late fifteenth and the sixteenth century suggests that the profession of the print colorists did exist, though it was recorded under several different names. attempting to regulate their trade, the colorists petitioned together with card painters in and and demanded that the court provide classification for the two professions. by , however, the colorists petitioned together with the illuminators – a move that suggests that by the mid sixteenth century the makers of illuminated manuscripts found themselves in need of expanding their trade to include woodcuts and engravings as the popularity of the printed books increased. in paris, as richard and mary rouse have shown, scribes and illuminators collaborated with printers and publishers almost as soon as the printing industry was established in the city in . vérard employed a number of illuminators in his enterprise the most famous of which was the master of jacques de besançon who painted miniatures that depicted vérard presenting copies of his lavish books to royal patrons. even marchant, whose press did not frequently produce hand painted books, seemed to have had a business relationship with jehan le cousturier, the illuminator from the place maubert, though the exact circumstances of their collaboration require further research. it is very likely, therefore, that vérard’s painted editions of the danse were colored by some of the illuminators that ibid. . ibid. . ibid. . ibid. . ibid. . see rouse and rouse, manuscripts and their makers, especially pages - . w inn . jêrome pichon et georges vicaire, pichon and vicare, documents pour servir à l’histoire des libraires de paris, - (paris: n.p., ) . worked for the publisher and it is also obvious from the design that color played an integral role in these renditions of the theme. not only is every costume carefully rendered to denote the status of the living figures, whether lay or clerical, but the artist employed delicate shading techniques in gold to emphasizes the folds of the textile and the three dimensionality of the bodies (figs, - and ). this is particularly obvious in the lambeth palace copy and the version printed for vérard by le rouge in which we also note the striking presence of saturated ultramarine blue in the background (figs. , and ). thomas primaeu, who studied the types of pigments used in renaissance and baroque prints, pointed out that prior to the presence of the color blue is much less common in printed images than hues of reds, yellows or greens. although available from the middle ages to the renaissance and frequently employed in manuscript illuminations and paintings, it was seemingly (especially the precious ultramarine blue) too expensive to be frequently used in print. a closer examination of the pigments used in vérard’s copies of the danse would be necessary to identify the precise hues used in his books, but the frequency of the color blue in the woodcuts certainly further links these editions to scribal culture and emphasizes their uniqueness and opulence. neither of the two vellum copies published for vérard includes the title page, printer’s device or a table of contents. the only information pertaining to the content and publishing details is found in the colophon at the end of the work and in both cases the colophon is partially rubbed off. in their present states, the colophons read: “cy finist la dãce macabre historiee et augmentee de plusieurs nouveaux personnages et beaux dits. et les trois mors y trois vifs enseble nouvellemet ainsi cõposee et imprimee a paris”. the two books begin with a large illustration showing the figure of the author with the two-stanza prologue printed below. the danse is illustrated on both recto and verso pages and each woodcut depicts two pairs of thomas primeau, “the materials and technology of renaissance and baroque hand-colored prints”, painted prints: the revelation of color in northern renaissance and baroque engravings, etchings and woodcuts, ed. susan dackerman (baltimore: the baltimore museum of art and university park, pennsylvania: the pennsylvania state up, ) - . ibid. . dancing partners arranged according to their station in medieval secular and religious hierarchies. as in marchant’s version of woodcuts, the illustrations are framed with arches and columns, though in vérard’s rendition a single column is also placed between the dancing pairs (fig. ). the insertion of the additional column gives the effect that figures are actually dancing beneath an arcade while at the same time it also works to visually separate the two dancing pairs shown on each page. this is especially obvious in the lambeth palace copy in which, as stated earlier, the background for each pair is painted in different colors. for example, the woodcut depicting the abbot and the bailiff shows the figures dancing in an exterior locale, with delicate grass and foliage visible on the ground, yet the abbot stands against a starry blue sky while the bailiff is positioned opposite a plain gray colored background (fig. ). the work is printed using the bâtarde typeface that mimics script and adds to the illusion that we are looking at a manuscript rather than the printed book. remnants of scribal culture are also visible in the decorated initials, painted red, that are placed at the beginning of the poem and at the opening of each new stanza (fig. ). the principal differences between vérard’s vellum copies and the more common editions of the danse such as, for instance those published by marchant, is in the overwhelming dominance of the visual over the textual components. this is obvious even from the first page that depicts the figure of the author seated in an elaborate chair in front of an open book. the woodcut is unusually large, measuring cm x cm and takes up almost the entire page. the author’s prologue, written in double columns is relegated to the lower part of the folio and cannot compete with the vivid colors and the large size of the image above. in marchant’s versions, the woodcuts were typically ‘framed’ by the text since he included verses of the vado mori poem in latin above the illustrations and the dialogue of the danse below, thus delegating practically equal amount of space to both the text and image on a single this is the largest image in the book. as a means of comparison, marchant’s illustrations of the author typically measure cm x cm. page (figs. and ). as a result, the viewer remains focused on the text and the image simultaneously especially because both the word and the picture have the same black and white structure. this is not the case with vérard’s vellum copies that are marked by the “technicolor flashiness” in which the eye of the viewer is continually directed towards the image and away from the text (figs. , and ). for example, the gaunt bodies of the dead are rendered with detail and attention is paid to different aspects of corporeal decomposition. like marchant’s cadavers, the dead in vérard’s books are occasionally shown with blackened torsos filled with vermin, but they are also depicted with worms in their chest cavities or under the stretched skin of the shoulders – a feature not seen in other renditions of the danse (fig. ). in the lambeth palace copy, the cadavers are painted in hues of either ochre or gray – perhaps hinting at stages of decomposition – while also adding visual interest by portraying diverse figures of death (fig. and ). in addition, at least two cadavers in vérard’s books are shown with male genitalia and of them, featured next to the figure of the bourgeois, uncharacteristically, still has a striking human face (figs. and ). the figures of the living are equally individualized not only because their costumes are colorful and hence more impactful, but also because their age and facial expressions are carefully rendered. for example, the bailiff’s youthful visage is in stark contrast to the abbots’ wrinkled face (fig. ). the juxtaposition between the decomposing, vermin-infested bodies of the dead and the clothed and adorned figures of the living is more effective than in the black and white editions and serves to highlight the frivolity of costumes and earthly possessions, while also potentially f ostering an interest in the opulent and a similar point was made by michael camille who analyzed the visual structure of the pictorial narratives in woodcuts and miniatures of the pèlerinage de la vie humaine, another popular illustrated work, and concluded that the most significant changes in the visual representation of the poem occurred not when it was translated from one language to another, but when it transformed from the medium of manuscript to that of print. see camille - . ibid. . camille argues that “the print medium creates less of a rift between image and text than occurs in manuscript illustrations” because the woodcut has the same black and white structure as the text on the page, - . ibid. . beautiful things. the shiny metal armor worn by the constable can provide no protection from the assault by the dead, nor can the sergeant, decked out in the most fashionable red and blue costume with slashed leggings and a hat with large plumes, escape the dance though he is certainly trying to (fig. ). in vérard’s hand painted editions, the application of color thus serves to enhance the impact of gestures, expressions and costumes of the figures in the danse and maintain the viewer’s interest in exploring each woodcut. in the bn copy, the dancing figures are all placed against the same background – they are standing on grass covered ground, while the blue sky behind them is shaded naturalistically from dark to light (figs. , and ). the consistent background visually unites the woodcuts so that the viewer ‘reads’ each scene as taking place at the same time and at the same location. this is not the case, however, with the lambeth palace copy in which backgrounds vary with almost every pair: an azure colored sky speckled with gold stars, burgundy colored background with gold embellishments, and dark blue or simple gray backgrounds (figs. and ). such diversity of colors and choices for backgrounds enhances the opulence of this particular copy, but it also serves to fracture the visual unity of the woodcuts since each pair is presented as being a separate encounter with death. while editions published by marchant, husz or guillaume le rogue, encased the danse in a broader framework by adding other moralizing texts and images, vérard’s books remain focused solely on the danse and its macabre companion, the three living. vérard also never included any additional figures to the male danse or published an edition of the danse macabre des femmes, choosing instead to focus on the original format of the danse as it existed in the mural from the innocents. it is possible that his clientele was more interested in macabre subject matter than in didactic literature in general and hence favored the danse and the three living. it is also true that unlike the other titles typically appended to the danse in the printed books, the three living is the only other one that relies equally on both the text and the image to convey its message – an aspect that was undoubtedly appealing to vérard who preferred to adorn his works with lavish illustrations. in his books, as in all other editions, the three living is placed after the danse on two facing folios (figs. and ). the design of vérard’s cuts is similar to marchant’s although, again, the presence of color and attention to detail enhances the impact of the subject matter depicted. the encounter between the living and the dead takes place outdoors in the presence of a hermit who is pictured seated behind the three corpses on the far left holding a scroll that reads: omnium terriblium mors. in the lambeth palace copy, the three dead are painted in different colors: two are ochre- yellow, while the one in the middle is dark grey, possibly, again, to heighten the visual lure of the image. the dead stand next to the large yellow cross with a crucifix, which functions as a barrier that separates the world of the living from that of the dead in most depictions of the legend. further in the distance is a walled town with rooftops and a church that adds visual interest to the image, but also signals the society at large. as in marchant’s edition, the living figures are portrayed on horses and the woodcut shows them in an attempt to flee the deadly encounter their arms raised in shock and their falcons flying away. in the lambeth palace copy, the horses are painted in different colors (white, brown and black) and the three figures wear costumes adorned with intense ultramarine blue – perhaps another hint at the luxurious nature of this particular copy. vérard’s third hand-colored edition of the danse is probably the most unusual. extant in a single copy preserved at the bn (estampes, rés. te ), the work was printed for vérard by pierre le rouge using the same woodcuts as seen in the other two editions (figs. and ). the book was part of the royal library at the château de blois and it was presented as a gift to king charles viii. that le rouge was asked to print the edition is not surprising: at the time the book was made he held the title of “printer to the king” and produced numerous illustrated books for the collection of charles viii. according to w inn, the artist who painted the woodcuts is also known – the master of jacques de besançon who, as stated earlier, often collaborated with vérard. the format of this edition is exceptional. originally intended as a placard, a poster typically mounted on the wall, it was two w inn . meters long and cm high. in its present state, the placard is cut up into five folios, glued onto a thick, carton-like material and bound in a large book ( cm x cm). the first pages of the book are made of parchment and include a painted frontispiece – two angels holding the arms of france and two falcons standing on the grass covered ground below – along with another inscription. because the original format has been altered, the book now features four woodcuts per page and the hierarchical order of the danse is severely compromised. the danse begins with the figure of the author – in the handwritten inscriptions at the front of the book he is referred to as the moraliste – followed by the new order of dancing figures: the pope and the emperor, the monk and the usurer (with the poor man), the doctor and the lover, the cardinal and the king, the patriarch and the constable, the lawyer and the minstrel, the curate and the laborer, the archbishop and the knight, the bishop and the squire, the cordelier and the infant, the cleric and the hermit the abbott and the bailiff, the astrologer and the bourgeois, the canon and the merchant, the carthusian and the sergeant, the author (moraliste), the three living and the three dead. it is not clear when the placard was cut up and reassembled into a book – the question of whether it was ever mounted on a wall is certainly important and worth investigating further – but it is interesting that this format was chosen over the illustrated book in the first place. the idea to display it on the wall relates to the preferred medium for t he danse in the fifteenth century, namely mural paintings, but obviously on a smaller scale and produced using the new format of the printed and hand painted image. the existence of the placard also points to a wider usage of woodcuts in late medieval france, which circulated not only as single sheets or as illustrations in printed books, but as wall decoration that simulated paintings and tapestries as well. in its present state, each of the five folios feature differently colored margins and the figures are painted using saturated pigments, reds, greens and blues. ibid. . according to w inn, the frontispiece was actually vérard’s printing device – two angels holding a heart – which was initially placed at the end of the placard. it was subsequently altered through painting so that the heart was replac ed by the coat of arms of france. see w inn although the hierarchical order of the danse is fractured, the woodcuts include a uniform border – blue sky adorned with gold stars – that helps to provide a sense of continuity across different scenes. because of its unusually large size and the fact that the woodcuts are glued onto a stiff carton, it is difficult to read this book in its present state while sitting down. to be able to leaf though the pages and observe the details in the woodcuts, the viewer must adjust his or her body and stand up – an action not required to read any of the other editions of the danse. the existence of vérard’s hand painted copies alludes to a broader context in which the danse macabre printed image circulated at the time. the books were not only immersed in the moralizing and religious discourses of the period, but were also appealing to an audience interested in luxurious books that could be modeled to cater to their particular tastes. the cruder aesthetic of the black and white woodcut is purposely altered in vérard’s versions and replaced and improved upon with color applied by the hand of the skilled illuminator. the end result is a striking series of hand painted woodcuts that seem to relegate the text to a secondary function. w hen leafing through the vellum copies, the viewer cannot help but admire the opulence of color and marvel at the details of costumes and faces of the figures portrayed. it is the particular nature of vellum copies, as michael camille pointed out, to pretend to be what they are not, namely illuminated manuscripts. it would be interesting to know whether the owners of such books actually fooled themselves into believing that they were really in possession of a handwritten and handmade manuscript and not a mechanically reproduced and then altered object. conversely, there may have been some viewers who were attracted to vellum copies precisely for their transitional and hybrid nature, as simultaneously products of the new technology and as handmade books. however, it is clear from vérard’s copies that in the late fifteenth century there were some readers of illustrated texts who were interested in both looking and reading and some who were more attracted to the lure of the visual. this is evident even from the two vellum copies of the danse, which as i camille . ibid . ibid . stated earlier although part of the same edition are still individualized to match the particular tastes of their initial owners. the lambeth palace copy was clearly produced for a client fascinated with excess of art and embellishment, hence the varying backgrounds, the differences in the color of cadavers and the exquisite shading behind the dancing figures that gives the whole procession a more naturalistic and three-dimensional feel. it could be argued that such attention to the visual details further dilutes the importance of the text – this was certainly the argument camille made with regards to another series of vellum copies produced by vérard. in the context of the danse, which was intended as a moralizing visual lesson regarding the futility of earthly life and material possessions (including luxurious books), the celebration of art and the visual was to some extent in opposition to the central premise of the theme. in other words, the vellum copies seem to celebrate the opulence of the visual decoration at the expense of offering a stern warning to its viewer in the manner done by marchant in the salutary mirror editions. however, there is evidence in the handwritten notes made by a reader of the bn copy that the user of the book was at least interested in the text, even if we cannot deduce the exact nature of that appeal. in at least four folios of the bn copy, a reader inserted text in the margins next to the verses of the poem. for example, the words “au chartreux” appear in between the third and the fourth line of verses uttered by the dead figure addressing the carthusian monk (fig. ). the same is done with the verses directed at the pope (“au pape”) and the hermit (“a l’hermite), while the opening line of the text aimed at the minstrel includes the word “vous” before the first line (as in “vous menestrier”). the addition of the handwritten notes suggests that the reader was interested in the dialogue aspect of the danse and included the individual words to clarify for himself and for the future user how the living and the dead addressed one another. ibid . camille discussed vérard’s vellum copies of le pilgrimage de l’homme made in . husz and the total edition extant in two copies, one at the british library (ib. ) and the other at the william h. scheide library at princeton (w hs . . ), the danse macabre book published by mathias husz on february , ( ), is probably the most comprehensive of the known editions. it contains not only the complete version of the danse macabre des femmes with woodcuts based on those printed in marchant’s editions, but it also features a composite version of the men’s danse with thirty woodcuts modeled after vérard’s version and the ten additional male figures that marchant included in his augmented edition from june of . w e will recall that marchant did not typically publish the men’s and women’s dances in a single volume, though it is possible, given their complementary nature, that the books were pitched together to potential customers at the time when they were sold. the fact that husz issued an edition of both men’s and women’s danse together is therefore quite unusual and made even more unique by the fact that he combined the woodcuts from vérard’s and marchant’s books. typically, the printers based their editions on a particular version of woodcuts, either marchant’s or vérard’s. for example, when nicole de la barre printed his edition of the danse in july of (british library, ia. ), he relied solely on vérard’s version of cuts. similarly, nicholas le rouge’s edition published in troyes in (bn, rés v- ), did include both men’s and women’s dances but all of his woodcuts were based on marchant’s versions. that husz had access to both versions of woodcuts is certainly not surprising. as i discussed in the second chapter, he was one of the first printers of illustrated books in france and is often credited with helping to establish lyons as the initial during the course of my research, i only examined the copy at the british library. my comments regarding the edition will therefore relate only to that copy. the book is printed in folio format and it contains leaves, collated a-g . the dimensions of the book are cm x cm. this is the case with an incomplete copy of the two dances from the british library (ib. ), which includes works published in april of ( danse macabre des hommes), may of (danse macabre des femmes) and may of (the three living and the three dead), all bound in a single volume. center for the popular books in vernacular. by the turn of the century he was one of the most prolific printers in france, known for at least editions. although much less is known about his collaborations with other printers and publishers than what has been discovered regarding marchant or vérard, husz must have been aware of the types of illustrated books published in paris at the time, since he was the pioneer of the industry and the world of illustrated books was still relatively small. at the same time, the fact that husz had access to copies of both versions of woodcuts suggests that by the end of the fifteenth century, the printed image of the danse circulated in different cities in france and that both adaptations were well known. while husz relied on vérard’s and marchant’s woodcuts, the images included in his edition must have been made specifically for his press since the style of figures and the overall design is quite similar to some of the other illustrated books issued by husz’s workshop. his edition also features the image of the printers and the bookseller, which was probably made specifically for his book since no other precedent has been found, and it includes at least one other original woodcut, the illustration that accompanies the poem exhortation de bien vivre y de bien mourir (folio g r). the content of husz’s edition is impressive as it includes, besides the danse macabre and the three living, six additional illustrated texts, four more than typically printed in marchant’s books. the -leaves edition opens with a title page that features an elaborate decorated initial placed next to the table of contents, which lists the following texts: la grãt danse macabre des homes y des femes hystoriee y augmnetee de beaulx dis en latin, le debat du corpse et de lame, la cõplainte de lame dampnee, exhortation de bien vivre y bien mourir, la vie du mauvais antechrist, le quinze signes and le iugement (fig. ). although not listed in the table of contents, the three living is included at the end of both dances as are two w e do know that , husz entered into a partnership first with petrus ungarus (pierre hongre) and then with johannes schabeler (or battenschne). the latter was still printing with husz in july of . from that point onwards, it appears that husz was working alone, but receiving financial help from jacques buyer in . in the following year, he split his profits with ludovicus de venetia. see catalogue of the books printed in the xvth century now at the british museum, part viii (trustees of the british museum: london, ) . other illustrations that husz borrowed from marchant. the first one features the image of death on a horse and the mouth of hell, which marchant typically included in the shepherd’s calendar and in the later editions of the women’s danse (fig. ). at the end of the men’s danse, husz paired this illustration with a poem in which the viewer – referred to as the sinner – is asked to look at his face which is disfigured in this death (“pecheaux regarde ta figure/ en celle mort desfiguree”). in the women’s danse, the same woodcut of the decomposing cadaver is accompanied by two strophes taken from the danse aux aveugles written in by pierre michault that begin with the following verses: “je suis la mort de nature ennemye. qui tous vivãs finablement consõme.” the second woodcut taken from marchant’s books, features a black man, dressed in simple attire, standing on a rooftop and blowing on a horn (fig. ). the image is meant to accompany a poem entitled cry de la mort and it is actually featured three times in husz’s edition: at the end of the men’s danse (folio c ), at the beginning of the women’s danse (folio c r) and once again at the end of the women’s danse (folio f r). also not listed in the table of contents is a full-page woodcut depicting the holy trinity that appears twice in husz’s book, at the beginning of the men’s danse (folio a r) and at the beginning of the danse macabre des femmes (folio c ). the image shows the figure of god the father placed in a mandorla and surrounded by three angels on either side. below him is the figure of the dove, signifying the holy spirit, depicted with outstretched wings followed by the crucified christ surrounded by the symbols of the four evangelists. for the reasons outlined above, husz’s book can be understood as the most comprehensive and complete edition of the danse. going beyond the macabre subject matter, the book is best described as a type of didactic anthology on death, each time, the illustration is accompanied by different verses. at the end of the men’s danse, the verses declare: to to to que chascun savance/ main a main venir a la dance. at the beginning of the women’s danse, the poem is modified to address the women dancers: tost tost venez femmes danser / apres les hommes incontinent. in its last appearance on folio f r, the verses below the image are actually unrelated to the illustration and relate to the lines uttered by the third dead person in the three living poem. this is the largest image in the book ( cm x cm) and it not accompanied by text. to my knowledge, this image has not reproduced in any sources. dying and the consequences of sinful living. husz’ editorial input is especially evident in the way the printer seemed concerned with structuring the danse in a specific religious framework. contrary to how the theme is depicted in other illustrated books – where regardless of the additional texts, the danse is only paired with the macabre legend of the three living – husz expanded it to include the image of the apocalypse and the mouth of hell along with the figure of the horn blower calling all to join the deadly dance. the book then continues with other moralizing texts and images that focus on the aftermath of sinful living, including the debate and the complaint. the edition culminates with the verses of the fifteen signs of judgment and the last judgment (le iugement), although the latter is illustrated with the small woodcut ( cm x cm) showing christ in majesty surrounded with the symbols of the four evangelists, which denotes the second coming and not the last judgment per se. to the medieval viewer, accustomed to seeing this image on the portals of christian churches, the woodcut would inevitably signal the moment of the second coming, even if the verses were not included on the page. if vérard’s hand colored editions emphasized the captivating juxtaposition between the beautifully dressed living figures and the naked and ghastly rotting corpses, without revealing to the viewer what happens after the danse, husz’s edition suggests that the danse is merely a prelude to the last judgment, which should be the real focus for all devout christians. husz’s was not the first printer to include specific references to the judgment in the danse book – guillaume le rouge’s edition published in troyes in included an elaborate section on the fifteen signs illustrated with striking images of events that precede the judgment day. in fact, the existence of both le rouge’s and husz’ editions demonstrate that in the s printers were continually interested in expanding the theme of the danse and placing it in more serious, didactic the incomplete copy of this edition preserved at the bibliothèque municipale in bourges (inc. ) has been scanned and is available on their website: http://www.bvh.univ-tours.fr/consult/index.asp?numfiche= . the fifteen signs before doomsday or quindecim signa ante judicium in latin, was a popular text in the later middle ages, which lists catastrophic events expected to take place prior to the apocalypse. i will discuss the theme in more detail later in the chapter. http://www.bvh.univ-tours.fr/consult/index.asp?numfiche= contexts. not only do husz’s images show an interest in adaptation of the genre – the most obvious being the woodcut with the printers and the bookseller – but his edition also suggests that the idea of the danse in the book has changed significantly by the turn of the century. if marchant’s first edition merely replicated the mural from the cemetery of innocents and included no additional texts or figures, by the theme was encased in a more comprehensive context. husz’s edition is only thematically related to the mural from the innocents – it contains fourteen more figures in the men’s danse (ten from marchant’s augmented edition plus the three printers and the bookseller), the danse macabre des femmes and seven other illustrated texts that were not part of the original fresco. his edition is therefore not just about the danse, but concerns larger issues regarding the christian faith. w e can also observe the changes in the medium of the illustrated book between marchant’s first edition and husz’s expanded volume. not only does husz’s book feature a title page with the table of contents, but each section of the book is carefully demarcated and includes the introductory headings and the concluding remarks. it is also worth noting that the danse and the three living are the only poems in the book in which the text and the image are of equal importance. in the latter sections of husz’s editions, especially in the last three poems, the illustrations are scarcer, only one per text, they are noticeably smaller and they are only symbolically related to the verses. husz had also made some changes to the structure and the appearance of the danse. although he included the ten additional male figures derived from marchant, he chose not to end the men’s danse with the figure of the fool – as was the case with marchant’s editions – but instead with the hermit who was the last figure in the original mural. this is certainly in line with the more serious tone of husz’s edition, which placed a particular emphasis on piety and redemption from sin. as noted in the previous chapters, the hermit, who appears not only in the danse for example, the men’s danse ends with the following text: cy finist la danse macabre des homes avec les trois mors y les trois vifz. et sensuit la danse macabre des femes. the colophon at the end of the book is simple and refers only to the place and the date of publication without refereeing to husz or the location of his printing enterprise: imprime a lyon le xviii iour de fevrier. lan mil.cccc.xixi. but also in the woodcut of the three living and even in the last image illustrating the debate, can be understood as presenting to the viewer the model for moral behavior or at least serving as a poignant reminder of the need to live a pious and devout life. throughout the book, the text instructs the viewer (sinner) to look at the images and contemplate their didactic message so it is no wonder that figure of the hermit – the most pious christian – is repeated several times in different segments of the volume. as stated earlier, the women’s danse opens with the figure of the trinity and the illustration that accompanies the cry de la mort poem (fig. ). this is the most logical placement for the latter because the black figure standing on the rooftop is meant to summon the women to the dance. the verses included below the image directly reference the men’s danse (“tost, tost vennez femmes danser. apres les hommes incontinent”), and thus present the two dances as complimentary units, which is a novel approach. the woodcuts for the women’s danse, however, appear to be more crudely executed, as if another (lesser?) artist was commissioned to design them (fig. ). this is especially obvious in the way the bodies of the dead are rendered: they appear almost cartoonish and lack details that typically mark their states of decomposition. the same is true for the portrayal of women, which are missing some key elements that helped to define their moral character and position in society. in comparison to marchant’s renditons of the women’s danse, in husz’s version the queen does not wear the brocade dress, the regent lady is not depicted with long hair and her dress is not decorated with a gold chain, while the knight’s lady is missing the falcon – a symbol of her noble status. likewise, the wife is shown without the garland in her hair and the chambermaid is missing keys and the moneybag that typically hang on her belt. these omissions may be merely a choice of the artist, but the roughness of the design also implies that the printer was more concerned with presenting the moralizing aspect of des femmes than with enticing the viewer with details of costumes and accoutrements, a strategy that was prevalent in earlier editions of the poem. kinch, imago mortis . a similar interest in revising the images or reducing the visual details is also seen in other illustrated poems that follow the danse in the book. for instance, marchant’s striking woodcut that accompanied the complainte, which i argued is a composite image made up of several scenes of hell and punishment that appeared in other printed books of the period, is in husz’s volume replaced by a completely new illustration (fig. ). focusing solely on the pain and suffering of a single sinner, husz’s presents a figure of a naked man chained around his waist with his arms raised up in a gesture of surrender. strapped on the belt around his waist are four long chains that are held by four devils, each portrayed differently but all equally horrifying. not only are the devils holding the man captive, they are about to strike him either with their hands or with the weapons that they hold. although the figures are standing outdoors – the ground seems to be covered with small bushes – the background is left unadorned, which only works to heighten the dramatic app eal of the central image. w hile marchant’s illustration of the complaint is visually compelling as he introduces multiple scenes of hell – the large mouth of hell with the sinner being pushed inside, cauldrons in which the devils are boiling men and women and even the gallows in the background – there is actually no single focus in the image and no main protagonist. husz’s illustration is exactly the opposite. it centers on a specific figure through which the horrors of hell are emphasized and the woodcut further underlines the tension of the moment by hinting at more suffering to come when the devils unleash their weapons. the insistence on a single protagonist works well with husz’s overall strategy for the book because it forces the viewer to identify with the sinner and to experience through him the torment of hell. the other four poems that follow the complainte stem from similar didactic and eschatological literature. the exhortation de bien vivre y de bien mourir is taken from the ars moriendi (the art of dying) tract that, as discussed in the first chapter, offered specific instructions on preparing the soul and the body for death and dying to my knowledge, this image from husz’s book is not reproduced in any sources. the woodcut is quite large ( . cm x . cm) and takes up the better part of the folio (f r). one of the devils, depicted on the right, is probably a female since it is shown with sagging breasts. she holds a wooden club and sticks her tongue out at the chained man. (henceforth the exhortation). although written in the early fifteenth century, the treatise was popular with early printers and both marchant and vérard published editions of it. in husz’s book, the poem is illustrated with a single woodcut, which seems to have been made specifically for his edition (fig. ). much like the three living, the woodcut centers on an encounter between the living and the dead, though this time it involves two women. the well-dressed lady on the left is depicted wearing the fashionable wide-sleeve gown as she picks jewelry from the open chest in front of her. she is clearly interrupted in her search – her body hunches forward and hovers over the trunk – by a female corpse that rises from the open coffin and approaches her holding a scythe. the dead woman is nude save for the elaborate henin – a cone shaped headdress – that was in style until about the s, which suggests that she has been deceased for a while. the juxtaposition between the clothed and adorned body of the lady on the left and the nude and vermin infested cadaver is striking and made even more apparent by the fact that the two figures stand on either side of the large cross. alluding to the visual vocabulary of the three living, the cross in the middle of the woodcut functions to separate the realm of the living and that of the dead (fig. , and ). moreover, the frame with the embellished arches and the column on the side along with the fact that the scene takes place outdoors further compares to the woodcuts of the three living but also to the danse. such layout facilitates the act of reading as it relates the disparate poems together while also providing the sense of visual unity throughout the volume. husz’s choice to focus on women in this scene is not, i believe, coincidental. the image helps to balance the macabre themes in the book – not only are there two dances, but there are also two encounters with the dead, one directed at women and the other, the three living, at men. the final section of husz’s book, which includes the poems la vie du mauvais antechrist, les quinze signes and le iugement, functions as a single thematic unit and addresses apocalyptic subject matter. the first two poems and possibly also the text that accompanies le iugement, relate to the popular german work antichrist w oodcuts illustrating these sections of husz’s edition have not been reproduced in any sources i am familiar with. that was written in the late fourteenth and early fifteenth century. itself derived from earlier eschatological literature, the german book was first printed in the mid fifteenth century and went through several different editions and translations. in england, the work was known as the byrth and lyfe of the moost false and deceytfull antecryst and it was first published in . at least partially derived from the german model, the english translation was also influenced by the french versions of the book including the livre de auctorites de sainctes docteurs: touchant de l’advenement et du mauvais antechrist, published in lyons in . vérard is also believed to have published a folio edition of l’advenement de l’antechrist in paris in though no copies of this work have apparently been found. according to andrew gow, the antechrist book was included, together with other didactic literature, in vérard’s edition of l’art de bien vivre et de bien mourir, which was published in paris in . at least one other edition from lyons is known, printed in , the same year in which husz published the danse. w e should not forget that guillaume le rouge’s edition of the danse from included illustrations of the fifteen signs, a text that was often part of the antechrist book, and thus it seems that in including these works in his book husz was following a particular trend of the period. this is not surprising given the fact that the year – being a half-millennium - was rife in apocalyptic fever. contemporaries believed they were living through the last days, apocalyptic preaching was on the increase propagated further through printed tracts such as the antichrist, and even the roman curia, which typically discouraged eschatological speculations, had for a discussion of this work see andrew gow, “jewish shock-troops of the apocalypse: antichrist and the end, - ”, journal of millennial studies, i ( ): - . ibid. . for example, there is a xylographic edition from nuremberg printed in that includes illustrations and a typographically printed one from strasbourg published in also with woodcuts. for a facsimile of the strasbourg edition see karin boveland, der antichrist und die fünfzehn zeichen vor dem jüngsten gericht. kommentarband zum faksimile der ersten typographischen ausgabe eines unbekannten straßburger druckers, um , hamburg, . on the english versions of the books, see joseph m. ricke, “the antichrist vita at the end of the middle ages: an edition of the byrth and lyfe of the moost false and deceytfull antecryst”, diss., u of rice, houston, . gow, footnote . proclaimed the year to be “a special jubilee year, a holy year, where pilgrimage would be particularly rewarded.” the woodcut that illustrates la vie du mauvais antechrist in husz volume is the last large image in the book ( cm x . cm) (henceforth antechrist). in the upper register, it portrays the judging christ surrounded by angles blowing horns and signaling the end of time. below is the figure of st. john the evangelist shown writing the book of revelation on a long scroll. to his left is an eagle, a symbol of st. john in christian imagery. that husz’s illustration makes reference to st. john in this context is, of course, not surprising. from the time of the church fathers, christian theology and biblical exegesis have interpreted the beast of revelation as the source of the antechrist legend. in the woodcut, st. john looks towards the approaching angel holding a large book, while the seven-headed dragon, symbolizing the antechrist, is depicted on the opposite side of the image. although the text of le quinze signes lists the events that will unfold on earth prior to the end of times, including trees and plants sweating blood, earthquakes toppling buildings and the bones of dead men rising, the work is illustrated with a woodcut portraying an indoor sermon. the final image in the book is the woodcut that accompanies the text of le iugement, which, as stated earlier, depicts christ in majesty surrounded by the symbols of the four evangelists. the woodcut marks the end of time and the moment when the dead will rise again in order to be judged. as such, it works well in conjunction with the opening image of the book – the large woodcut depicting the trinity or the throne of mercy – in which christ is shown crucified, sacrificing himself for the sins of the humankind. husz’s edition exemplifies a group of the danse books published from the s onward that reveal a growing interest in framing the theme in strict religious andrew cunningham and ole peter grell, the four horsemen of the apocalypse: religion, war, famine and death in reformation europe (cambridge: cambridge up), . in fact, the fascination and the fear of the apocalypse and the coming of the antichrist was so pronounced in this period that the fifth lateran council held in actually had to forbid preaching about such topics. gow . in the fragmentary edition by guillaume le rouge, these events are actually illustrated by woodcuts. terms. the trend continued into the sixteenth century with editions published in troyes by nicholas le rouge (p. ) and in lyons by pierre de sainctelucie (p. ) that followed the model established by husz. at the same time, husz’s work is also indicative of the continual practice of modifying the danse and imbuing it with new texts and images. chief among these is the printers because it was such a departure from the established model (fig. ). w hile marchant did invent the new male figures and the women’s series, his woodcuts, novel as they may have been, nevertheless replicated the structure established by his first edition and by extension the mural from the innocents. on the other hand, husz’s woodcut, which places death in specific interior spaces, shifts the theme into a new direction and reveals an interest in rethinking the danse in the medium of illustrated books before the sixteenth century. this is particularly interesting in relation to holbein’s simulachres. first published in lyons in by the brothers trechsel, the series is generally credited, even by scholars of macabre art, as the work that transformed and eventually completely replaced the medieval concept of the danse (figs. and ). undoubtedly, holbein’s work is of incredible importance – artistically, it is far superior than any edition of the danse and it offers radically new ways of representing the genre. however, i would argue that while different from the medieval danse, holbein’s series is not as divergent from the illustrated books, such as the one published by husz, as previously assumed. following the trend of augmenting the danse by insisting on a particular christian narrative that defines death – especially its origin and its consequence – holbein expanded the framework of his series and began with genesis and the creation of all things. the book then follows with adam and eve in paradise, the expulsion, a crucial moment in which death entered the world, portrayed by holbein with the skeleton holding a string instrument and both gertsman and kinch, the authors of the newest and most compelling studies on the danse in english, dedicate significant space in their works to holbein and his series. for a discussion of the innovative aspects of holbein’s series, see especially gertsman, the dance of death - . as stated in the previous chapters, it is possible that in designing the simulachres holbein was influenced by the mors poem, which also begins with adam and eve and the original sin. standing next to adam, and adam tilling the soil. like husz, holbein ends the book with an image of the last judgment followed by the escutcheon of death, which portrays death through emblematic coat of arms and an hourglass. as gertsman argues, what holbein depicts is “a comprehensive view of the history of the humankind, from creation through the last judgment, with the dance of death as a necessary and repeating episode in this chain of events.” placed at the beginning and the end of the book, the fall and the last judgment in holbein’s series denote the beginning and the end of time, while the rest of the woodcuts are set between these two events in order to demonstrate the progress of death in the mortal world. this is certainly a more comprehensive account of the role of death in christian terms than what we have seen in husz’s volume, but the point is that the interest in expanding the religious framework of the danse had already begun with the illustrated books a few decades before holbein designed his series. the same can be said about husz’s innovative woodcut of the printers and the bookseller (fig. ). despite the technical advances of holbein’s simulachres, there is not much difference between the composition of husz’s woodcut and the holbein’s series. both works relocate the danse from an unspecified exterior location to a particular place: a printing workshop, a busy harbor or a nun’s room (figs. , and ). both do away with the dance and depict figures caught by death as they are completing their everyday activities: a bookseller seized by death while working in his shop in husz or a merchant captured as he is unloading his packages from a ship docked in a harbor in holbein. finally, both husz and holbein created autonomous images that are able to function outside of the series in which they are placed. the printers is part of the danse, but it is also temporally and spatially divorced from it because the figures do not occupy the same environment as the rest of the dancers. holbein’s engravings are even more fundamentally disconnected from one another because each character is structured within his or her uniquely composed scenes. in holbein’s work, death is no longer merely a dead companion that pulls the living into the dance, but death personified – a singular, gertsman, the dance of death . ibid. . frightening and omnipresent threat. w hat is different between husz’s image and holbein’s series is that the latter splits the image from the text – the verses are biblical and not directly related to the prints – and the simulachres is not nearly as didactic as the danse and thus even more prone to diverse interpretations as studies by natalie zemon davis and peter parshall have shown. according to gertsman, the biblical verses in holbein’s series are aimed at the viewer as a form of commentary that elucidates the images. the cheeky dialogue between the main protagonists – the living and the dead and by extension the image and the viewer – that formed the core of the danse is thus removed from this work. as a result, the complex interplay between reading, looking, and interpreting the danse – that was essential to the medieval experience of the theme – is replaced by a different set of expectations, which detached the viewer from the image and turned him into an observer rather than an active participant. the viewer in the book in the printer nicolas le rouge published an edition of the grant danse macabre des hõmes y des femes in the city of troyes (bn, rés.- v- ). in its present state, the book is bound with le rouge’s edition of the shepherd’s calendar, which was also published in . it is unlikely, however, that the works were published as a single edition – each book features its own title page and colophons at the end – but it is possible that the two books were owned by the same person and bound together in one volume shortly after they were purchased. even a provisional glance at le rouge’s title page for the danse reveals how much the medium of illustrated book has developed in the forty-six years since the publication of marchant’s first edition in (fig. ). w hile marchant’s book featured no title page, not even the printer’s mark, le rouge’s book presents a title see zemon davis, “holbein’s pictures of death” and parshall, “hans holbein’s pictures of death.” gertsman . ibid. . page that in many ways resembles the covers of modern-day publications. using the technique of printing with red and black ink, le rouge’s title page incorporates both text and image. commencing with the decorated initial “l” in the upper left corner of the page, the title of the book, la grant danse macabre des hõmes y des femes hystoriee y augmetee de beaulx ditz en latin, is printed in largest letters. below it is a table of contents – again, printed in interchanging red and black ink – that includes six additional illustrated texts in the following order: le debat du corps et de l’ame, la complaincte de lame damnee, exhortation de bien vivre et bien mourir, la vie du mauvais antechrist, les quinze signes and le iugement. in the middle of the page is the woodcut depicting the four dead musicians, which open the danse, and below it in red ink – to increase its advertising appeal, no doubt – is the publishing information and the address of le rouge’s printing enterprise. as is evident from the title page, the book includes both men’s and women’s dances as well as the same additional works that were featured in husz’s volume, which suggests that by the s the expanded version of the danse became the norm. it is important to note, however, that le rouge’s book is based entirely on marchant version of woodcuts and does not include husz’s images of the printers and the bookseller or the illustration that accompanies the exhortation poem. nicholas came from the long line of printers and engravers of the le rouge family, together with pierre and guillaume, which originated in the town of chablis but eventually moved their enterprise to troyes in the champagne region. in the fifteenth century, troyes became noted for its paper making mills – the industry that eventually facilitated the spread of printing and publishing in the city. nicholas seems to have been focused predominately on publishing illustrated books – he printed at least five editions of the danse ( , , , and ) – much like husz’s volume, le rouge’s edition includes the three living after both dances and the woodcuts that show the apocalypse and the mouth of hell and the cry de mort, though these works are not listed in the table of contents. the text reads: imprime a troyes par nicholas le rouge demourant en la grãt rue a lenseigne sainct iehan levangeliste au presla belle croix. see also monceaux, les le rouge de chablis. along with books of hours and the shepherd’s calendar. according to marie- dominique leclerc, it was probably one of the editions of the danse published by nicholas le rouge that was used as the model for the fresco painting at la ferté- loupière in yonne, burgundy made in the sixteenth century. in historical records, le rouge’s name appears in relation to the spread of calvinism in the region though more research is needed to understand exactly how this affected his printing practices, especially his illustrated books. in the registers of the bishop’s court in troyes in the early s, the printer was accused of repeated offence for “producing ‘superstitious’ literature contrary to the catholic faith”, specifically prayers in latin and french. the material left unsold was burned and nicholas was fined. it appears that the printer was aware of the risks he was taking in producing the ‘superstitious’ work since he was warned before, but given the fact that most of his books were didactic in nature and that his printer’s device contained the motto “mon coeur à dieu”, religion was obviously important to him and he was willing to proceeded despite the obvious objections from the official church. one of the most interesting aspects of the preserved copy of le rouge’s edition of the danse are marks left by the viewer, which may actually reflect the religious tensions of the period. in a number of woodcuts of the men’s danse, the faces of the dead are rubbed off or cut out, a practice seen even in the title page in which the third cadaver’s face is partially damaged (figs. and ). the same for a list of books printed by nicolas, see the ustc. leclerc, danser avec la mort . penny roberts, a city in conflict: troyes during the french wars of religion (manchester: manchester up, ) . ibid. . according to roberts, le rouge admitted to selling two copies of the contested material to friars minor, most likely from the convent of the cordeliers, and it is exactly from within the religious orders in troyes that the first calls for reform were issued. that calvinism spread to troyes early on is not surprising. the city was located on route from paris to geneva and it had ties with meaux, which was the center of religious reforms in france. w hen it began to spread, calvinist thought first attracted individuals working in the printing and textile industry in the city, which would explain le rouge’s involvement in the matter. on this issue see also mark w . konnert, local politics in the french wars of religion: the towns of champagne, the duc de guise, and the catholic league, - (aldershot: ashgate, ) especially pages - . interest in revising the image by cutting its parts – what areford coins “visual subtractions” – is also seen in the woodcut of the black figure blowing the horn that follows the men’s danse. illustrating the poem dictz des trespassez, the woodcut shows the same figure we have seen in marchant’s and husz’s editions, but this time completely missing his head, which was removed by the viewer. w e will recall that in its present state this copy of the danse is bound with le rouge’s edition of the shepherd’s calendar and it is worth noting that the similar marks are also present in that book, suggesting that a single viewer was involved in revising the images. for example, the woodcut with the black figure also appears in the shepherd’s calendar and in this book his entire body is damaged and missing. moreover, much like the dead in the danse, the faces of the devils in the shepherd’s calendar are cut out or erased and eventually patched up by plain pieces of paper (fig. ). one example is especially striking as it demonstrates both the viewer’s interest in removing aspects of the image, but also adding to it by including specific details. in the section of the shepherd’s calendar that illustrates the pains of hell, the face of the devil that stands at the rim of the cauldron and boils sinners is completely cut out and replaced by blank paper (fig. ). typically, this devil looks out at the viewer while pressing a pitchfork into the cauldron and the boiling bodies within. in le rouge’s work, however, he is now missing the face, but the viewer added a pom-pom to each of his horns so that it looks as if the devil is wearing the fool’s hat (fig. ). this is not just an example of revising the image by subtracting from it certain elements, but actually an attempt to reformulate the entire implication of the work. by effacing the devil and transforming him into the fool, the viewer was ridiculing the whole portrayal of hell in le rouge’s work, rendering it inconsequential. such practice of modifying the printed image was not uncommon and it was, as areford has shown, “just another way to interpret the image and reconfigure it to areford . the same woodcut appears one other time, just before the danse macabre des femmes, and this is the only instance in which the image is left intact. fulfill a viewer’s needs.” in the context of le rouge’s book, the viewer was clearly equating the dead with devils and seeing them in negative terms since they were both effaced and removed from the work. this may be prompted by the fear – the notion that even looking at such faces is intrinsically dangerous – or by that viewer’s particular religious and sectarian beliefs. in any case, the need to eradicate death from the images is especially curious given the fact that in the macabre discourse, the dead, though certainly threatening, do not signify devils and wickedness, but the essential aspects of the human condition, namely transience and mortality. in the book, the viewer was essentially denying death the power to speak and interact with the living, which has been the pivotal aspect of the danse from the beginning. the same can be said about the need to efface the black figure from le rouge’s work. to an extent, he is meant to personify death – in le rouge’s book, the words “message de la mort” are actually included in the woodcut – and his role is to summon the dancers/sinners to their final procession (fig. ). actually, he functions in much the same way as the angels who blow trumpets or horns in the depictions of the last judgment, announcing the end of time, except that he leads the dying and declares the end of the physical life. it is possible, especially given the religious turmoil of the period in which the books were published, that the viewer was uncomfortable with the overt insistence on sin and corporeal punishment that both works exude and hence revised the woodcuts to fit his own personal interest. an edition of the danse published by an anonymous printer (bn, rés-ye- ) also features interesting additions made by the viewer. printed in quarto format and published in geneva in , the book contains only the danse macabre des hommes and the three living, all based on vérard’s version of woodcuts. however, this is a much simpler version of the danse than vérard’s lavish volumes. the woodcuts are small and take up just the top part of the page, the rest being filled areford . not all examples of the viewer’s interaction with the woodcuts in the volume involve subtraction. in at least one example, the woodcut showing the halberdier (in the book, he is referred laventurier) and the fool, the viewer added decoration to the costumes of the two figures in a playful manner. the book is smaller than earlier editions of the danse, measuring . cm x . cm. the woodcuts are also significantly smaller, . cm x cm. with text. none of the images feature the arches and columns that typically frame the danse and each woodcut portrays a single pair of dancing figures (fig. ). moreover, the images are outlined by a thick, black border and the figures seem to occupy different spaces: an exterior location, an interior paved with checkered or diamond shaped tiles (figs. and ). although the cuts are made based on vérard’s images, the edition features thirty-four living figures, five of which (the papal legate, the duke, the school master, the promoter and the jailer) are borrowed from marchant’s augmented version. however, the woodcuts used to portray these figures are not marchant’s; instead they are merely repeats of the same images that are already featured in the book. the work does not include a title page – it begins with the figure of the author that is typically shown at the end of the danse – and ends with a simple colophon that reads: “cy fine la dace macabre avecques les ditz des troys mors et de troys vifz. imprime a genesve lan mil. ccccc. iii.” of particular interest for the present discussion is the last page of the book that depicts the repeated image of the author seated in front of the dead king, the only figure who has actually died in the danse (fig. ). in the context of the danse, the last scene can be difficult to interpret. is the prostrated body of cadaver shown next to the toppled crown a reference to the figure of the king depicted at the beginning of the procession, who wears a crown, or is it meant to represent the king of the dead in a metaphorical sense? the verses that accompany the figure seem to allude that the former is true (“si ay je este roy couronnez”) yet remain fairly vague and address the viewer of the image and not the figure of the author: vous: qui en ceste portraiture veez danser estas divers pensez que humainne nature: for example, the woodcut depicting the cardinal is also used to portray the papal legate. likewise, the woodcut for the lawyer also stands for the promoter and the figure of the sergeant becomes the jailer in the latter part of the book. it is also worth noting that the second page of the book includes the four strophes of the verses delivered by the four dead musicians, though they are not illustrated. it appears that by the early sixteenth century, elements added by marchant in his augmented edition were becoming accepted as the norm. ce nest fors que viande a vers je le monstre qui gys envers moy qui estoys roy couronne telz seres vous bons et pervers tous estas sont a vers dõnes. portrayed on the right hand side of the image, the author holds one end of a large banderole, the other tip being held by an angel in the top left corner. as in the opening page, the banderole was left blank by the printer, but in the final image the viewer added several lines of text in french (fig. ). according to areford, it was not uncommon for early printers to leave images of banderols, scrolls or even open books empty and they were almost certainly meant to be inscribed by the users, facilitating the interactive relation between the book and its viewer. although only parts of the inscription from the banderole are legible, the viewer was clearly relating the image of the author with the dead king to his own historical context. containing the words “…le roy charles roy de france est…” the writing on the banderole may be a reference to king charles viii who died a few years before the book was printed, in april of . on the other hand, if the banderole was inscribed later in the sixteenth century, it could also relate to charles ix (d. ), who was involved the verses are transcribed from marchant’s edition of the danse printed in paris between september and june of (bn rés.-ye- ). it should be pointed out that this is the only example in the danse in which there is no dialogue featured between the two protagonists. as stated, the dead king addresses the viewer and not the author. likewise, the author offers a lengthy didactic summary of the usefulness of thinking about death and living a pious life. in most other editions of the danse the banderole features printed text in latin. areford . i wish to thank professors carol knicely and chantal phan for their help in transcribing the inscriptions on the banderole. charles died young, at the age of . his death was deemed an accident – he hit his head on a lintel of a door – though some factions within the french court believed that he was murdered. charles left no heirs and was succeeded by louis xii from the orléans cadet branch of the valois dynasty. in the french w ars of religion. however, regardless of which king charles the inscription refers to – further research may determine this more precisely and it is certainly a crucial point – the fact that the writing relates the image to a specific historical figure and not to a larger religious doctrine is significant. despite its didactic origin, the danse, as discussed in the earlier chapters, was often understood as a poignant political allegory. this is true as much for the painted examples – the lost mural from the innocents being perhaps the best and the most researched case – but also apparently for the illustrated books. contrary to the argument advanced by kinch and others according to which the viewer could not escape the doctrinally rigid framework of the books and was thus driven solely “by individual devotional concerns”, the copy of the geneva edition alludes to the possibility that the users of the books could understand the danse as a didactic in multiple terms. even the copy of husz’s edition at the british library contains marks of the reader. on the page that features the author with the dead king at the end of the men’s danse (folio c r), the viewer added lines on the author’s hat and collar, which mimic the shading used in the woodcuts throughout the volume. the author’s chair is also embellished with further additions to the carving on the side. moreover, in the section on the debate, on folio f r, the margins are filled with inscriptions made by the reader. in the left margin are individual letters, as if someone was practicing writing. in the bottom are two annotations, one in french and the other, seemingly in dutch. the french inscription reads: “plus penser que dire”, while the verses in dutch begin with: “kinderen die niet en willen leeren….” the former was used in heraldic devices, including the coat of arms for the town of bar-le-duc, located in the nothing is known about the provenance of the work, which would perhaps help to ‘date’ the inscription. for example, in an article discussing the political contexts surrounding the creation of the mural from the innocents, i argued that the figure of the dead king almost certainly took on a political dimension. at the time the mural was painted, in - , the political situation in france was dire. both king charles vi and his successor, the english king henry v died three years earlier leaving the dauphin (a bastard child of charles vii) to battle with the english for the rights to the fr ench crown. see dujakovic, “the dance of death, the dance of life” - kinch, “the danse macabre” . meuse region of lorraine in northeastern france. the french motto may thus be a reference to a heraldic device of a family that owned the book – it was common to mark ownership of manuscripts and early printed books by adding the coat of arms – or an allusion to the town in which the owner lived. on the other hand, the dutch verses are more difficult to ascertain and further research into the provenance of the book is needed before they can be explained. the examples listed above are by no means the only copies of the danse that include reader’s marks. i have already discussed vérard’s vellum copy from the bn that contains notes made by the viewer, but there are other cases as well. an incomplete copy of the danse preserved at the british library (ia. ), published on july , in paris by nicole de la barre, is interesting because it contains printed pages as well as folios that are hand painted and hand written, some perhaps in the hands of the viewer. in addition, a copy of marchant’s edition of the shepherdesses’ calendar (british library, ib. ), which features the danse macabre des femmes in the last section of the book, is heavily annotated on many pages by the hand of different users. these copies point to the different ways in which the viewer was involved with the book and reveal layers of reception – some historical or political, others defiant – that complicate the singular way in which the illustrated books and their audience have been discussed in the past. editions of the danse form a link between between the traditional mural examples and the sixteenth century reiterations of the theme, most notably holbein’s printed series. despite being the products of mechanical reproduction, each edition is unique and reveals specific concerns in representing the danse on the part of the printer or publisher. w hile the first edition replicated the mural from the innocents and translated it into the medium of print, subsequent editions sought to expand the traditional framework of the danse by including new figures or additional didactic and eschatological texts and thus distanced the illustrated book from the original painted model out of which it emerged. more then being mere distributors of the this edition is similar to the geneva copy by the anonymous printer (bn, rés-ye- ), though it contains more images. for example, on the back of the title page is a long paragraph in latin written by the reader that begins with the following words: “omnibus christi fidelibus.” printed books, printers and publishers actually had a pivotal role in articulating specific aspects of the danse through their selection of content and format in the works they produced. the diversity of formats in which the books circulated – black and white folios, printed and hand painted vellum copies and even a placard – allude to the transitional nature of bookmaking in the late fifteenth century while also reflecting the varied tastes of readers in the period. w hile some may have been interested in fulfilling marchant’s vision of the danse as the salutary mirror and viewed the book as a self-help guide in their quest for salvation, there were also others who were drawn to the theme for entirely different purposes. the medium reduced the audience of the danse from a community at large to a single viewer exploring the book in private and facing death alone. chapter six conclusion on march , , pierre de sainte lucie (sainctelucie) published an edition of the danse in lyons. titled la grand danse macabre des homes et des femmes, the -folio book was printed on paper and published in quarto format. de sainte lucie’s book was almost certainly modeled after husz’s edition of the danse as it contains the same sections and many of the same woodcuts, including a version of the printers (fig. ). continuing with the tradition of modifying the printed image of the danse, de sainte lucie’s woodcut is a simplified adaptation of husz’s initial image (figs. and ). instead of an elaborate frame with two arches and a column portrayed in husz’s woodcut, de sainte lucie’s image features only part of a carved arch in the upper left corner. w hile husz’s version includes three cadavers that take away the printers and the bookseller, de sainte lucie’s woodcut depicts a single figure of death placed in the middle of the image. most crucially, de sainte lucie’s version revises husz’s image by eliminating the space of the bookstore and the figure of the bookseller, focusing instead only on the compositor, shown on the left in front of a slanted type case, and the two printers standing on either side of the printing press. a sole copy of this edition is preserved at the british library (c. .h. ). the book measures . x . cm. the transcribed title of de sainte lucie’s edition is: la grand danse macabre des homes des femes hystoriee et augmentee de beaulx dictz en latin. le debat du corps y de lame. la complaincte de lame damnee. exhortation de bien vivre y bien mourir. la vie du mauvais antechrist. les quinze signes. le iugement. the edition features an elaborate title page, with the names of the illustrated poems printed in interchanging red and black ink and the woodcut showing the image of the four dead musicians. below the illustration, printed in red ink, is the information regarding the de sainte lucie’s workshop in lyons: on les vend a lion sur le rosne / par pierre de sainctelucte dict le prince / imprimeur pres nostre dame de confort. like husz before him, in order to adapt the image, de sainte lucie had to hire an artist to design the woodcut – likely the same individual who worked on the other illustrations in the book, which are characterized by a cruder aesthetic – as well as a writer to adjust the verses of the accompanying poem. w hile the text printed below husz’s woodcut featured dialogues between death and the printers, as a group, and death and the bookseller, de sainte lucie’s version focuses instead on the conversation between death and the compositor and death and the printers. the changes made to the verses in de sainte lucie’s version are subtle, only several lines are altered; yet the implications of the revised text and image are indicative of the different status of the printing industry by the mid-sixteenth century. as i argued in previous chapters, husz’s printers captures the process of printing and functions as an advertisement that showcases the new tec hnology and the whole enterprise of making and selling books. w hile it conveys certain features typical of the danse, the playful dialogue between the living and the dead or the way the image implicates the viewer, for example, it also diverges from the conventional model of representing the theme by emphasizing the scope of the printing and bookselling vocations. husz’s woodcut portrays the printers in a unique manner, as a group of workers that are involved in and responsible for a particular step in the printing process, while the accompanying verses highlight the range and importance of their work. w hen death approaches them to join the dance, the printers reply by listing their accomplishments and suggesting that they aim to please the diverse demands of the people for books (imprime avons tous les cours / de la saincte theologie loix decret y poeterie / par nostre art plusieurs sont grans clers / relevee en est clergie / les vouloirs des gens sont divers). moreover, by depicting two distinct spaces, the printing workshop and the bookstore, husz’s image underlines the integral link between printers and booksellers that characterized the beginnings of the industry in france. accomplished bookseller-publishers, like vérard or petit, who traded equally in printed books and manuscripts and encouraged collaborative practices between scribal and printing workshops were, as i argued, essential for the success of many printing establishments, especially those that focused on the production of illustrated works. however, in de sainte lucie’s version of the printers the interest in promoting the industry appears more subdued. not only is the figure of the bookseller eliminated from the image, thus dissipating the fundamental link between the two professions, but the verses, especially those assigned to the compositor, seem more limiting in scope. their focus is not so much on the promotion of the printing profession, as on the specific details of the compositor’s work that death strips away. for instance, death asks him to let go of letters and fonts (lettres y capses fault laisse), while in turn the compositor complains that he will miss the noise of the printing press (laisser le bruyur de la presse) and the forme, which he used to compose the lines of text (ma forme fault que la laisse). perhaps because by the mid-sixteenth century the technology of printing was no longer the novelty it was during husz’s career, de sainte lucie did not deem it necessary to promote the profession so heartily; yet the dialogue between death and the compositor is closer in style to the verses that accompanied other living figures in the danse, all of which lament the loss of what is unique to their particular status or occupation. although, as de sainte lucie’s edition demonstrates, the interest in the printed image of the danse continued well into the sixteenth century, the popularity of the books reached their pinnacle in the early years of printing in france, c. - s. the ambiguous nature of the danse, which could be understood both as a stern moralizing lesson or a satirical allegory that ridicules social hierarchies, and the theme’s propensity for adaptation must have been the main reasons that early printers were drawn to the subject matter. actually, i would argue that the danse perfectly complemented or even encouraged the entrepreneurial nature of the early printing industry because it allowed for augmentations, adaptations and constant experiments with the theme. in the context of the early printing industry when publishing illustrated books was a costly and risky venture, editions of the danse prompted collaborations between printers, publishers, illuminators and booksellers, which further popularized the theme and helped to secure the success of the publications. the potential for alterations of the danse in the medium of print were almost limitless. the printer could augment the dancing procession by adding new living protagonists, he could extend the public’s interest in the theme by publishing a volume dedicated solely to women or he could simply issue an edition in a different language and thus appeal to a particular group of readers. furthermore, the adaptability of the theme helped to place the printed image of the danse in editions of varying contents and mediums, from marchant’s salutary mirror books and vérard’s hand-pained vellum copies to vostre’s and pigouchet’s printed books of hours where it served as border illustrations. the composite nature of the printed editions of the danse, particularly those published in the s in which verses and images are assembled from a selection of diverse sources, also meant that a printer had to supply the editing context and establish the narrative framework for each book, requirements that further expanded and complicated the scope of the printing profession. the danse was an ideally suited theme for illustrated books because its composition depended equally on the visual and the textual elements and required an active participation on the part of the viewer in the processes of looking and reading. editions of the danse emphasize the integral link between the text and the image in the physical layout of their pages. in marchant’s editions, the dance of death woodcuts are situated between shorter columns of text above and longer ones below, which delegates equal amount of space on the page to both verses and illustrations (figs. and ). such connection between text and image is present even in the sections of the book that typically feature fewer illustrations. for instance, in the debat, which usually includes one large woodcut at the beginning of the poem and several smaller ones scattered throughout the text, the elongated rectangular shape of the smaller woodcuts actually mimics the layout of verses on the page (fig. ). emerging out of scribal culture and still heavily influenced by it, the fifteenth- century illustrated book was a unique product of the transitional period. editions of the danse, but also of the shepherd’s calendar and other illustrated texts, were developed by printers who, attracted to the possibility of expanding the market for their books, established connections with artists, illuminators and woodcutters and perfected the technique of printing with woodcuts. mainly published in vernacular, the illustrated books produced until c. s were characterized by woodcuts that were meant to elucidate and complement the text. however, as chrisman has shown, the interest in illustrated books was not maintained throught the sixteenth century. although illustrated books did not disappear after the s – editions of the shepherd’s calendar were printed throughout the sixteenth century, for example – the use of illustrations in the printed books did decrease significantly. perhaps prompted by the rise in literacy, images were no longer used in combination with the text, but mainly as embellishments that were only symbolically linked to the main theme of the book. as a result, the quality of illustrations lessened and they were reduced in size taking much less space on the page than the text. some of the changes that marked the illustrated books in the sixteenth century are evident in de sainte lucie’s woodcut (fig. ). w hile his edition of the danse has the full complement of texts as husz’s earlier version, the production is less elaborate, especially in the quality of the images. defined by a simplified, almost cartoonish aesthetic, de sainte lucie’s printers lacks the details present in husz’s rendition (figs. and ). not only is the space of the bookstore eliminated from de sainte lucie’s illustration, but the portrayal of the three dimensional perspective is also less believable. even though the tiled floor suggests that the figures occupy an interior space – the rest of the dancers in de sainte lucie’s danse are all placed outdoors – the background is left blank and no other indication is given of the specificities of the place. de sainte lucie’s edition of the danse is indicative of the dwindling interest in the type of illustrated book that was popular in france in the early years of printing. curiously, at the time when the presence of illustrations was diminishing in printed books, from the early sixteenth century onward, a number of artists, many of them professional painters, were increasingly turning to the medium of print as the means to propagate their work. for the present study, the work of holbein is particularly important (fig. and ). his simulachres series was clearly influenced by the late- chrisman . ibid. . ibid. . medieval theme of the danse, and perhaps even specific editions of the printed books; yet he completely transformed the subject matter by producing images that focus on individual encounters with death. it could be argued that holbein’s simulachres is not really an example of an illustrated book per se, but a series of independed, highly sophisticated images that are linked by a common theme. the complex interplay between image and text that characterized the early editions of the danse is missing from holbein’s renditions in which the text is derived from the bible and is only symbolically linked to the images. in contrast, the danse macabre printed books produced at the end of the fifteenth century depended on the integration of text and image and encouraged the reader to engage in simultaneous acts or reading and looking (figs. and ). the inherent adaptability of the danse attracted the early printers to theme creating a unique match of death and print, one that, ironically, brought life to the new industry. figures figure . the author, la danse macabre, meslay-le-grenet (eure-et-loire), fresco, c. . photo credit: m. dujakovic. figure . the pope and the emperor, la danse macabre, meslay-le-grenet (eure- et-loire), fresco, c. . photo credit: m. dujakovic. figure . the peasant and the infant, la danse macabre, meslay-le-grenet (eure- et-loire), fresco, c. . photo credit: m. dujakovic. figure . the king, the patriarch, la danse macabre, meslay-le-grenet (eure-et- loire), fresco, c. . photo credit: m. dujakovic. figure . the burgher, the curate and the doctor, la danse macabre, meslay-le- grenet (eure-et-loire), fresco, c. . photo credit: m. dujakovic. figure . the three dead, la danse macabre, meslay-le-grenet (eure-et-loire), fresco, c. . photo credit: m. dujakovic. figure . the three living, la danse macabre, meslay-le-grenet (eure-et-loire), fresco, c. . photo credit: m. dujakovic. figure . the cardinal and the king, la danse macabre nouvelle, illustrated book, printed by guy marchant, paris, , bibliothèque nationale, rés. ye. . figure . four dead musicians, la grant danse macabre des hommes y des femmes, illustrated book, printed by nicolas le rouge, troyes, , bibliothèque nationale, rés.-v- . figure . the printers and the bookseller, la grãt danse macabre des homes y des femes, illustrated book, printed by mathias husz, lyons, / , the british library board, ib. . figure . the king, la danse macabre, illuminated manuscript, c. , bibliothèque nationale, ms. fr. , folio . figure . la danse macabre, la ferté-loupière, yonne (burgundy), fresco, c. . photo credit: m. dujakovic. figure . horae beatae virgini mariae, printed book of hours with the danse macabe marginal decoration in the office of the dead section of the book, published by simon vostre, c. , bibliothèque nationale de france, arsenal, -t- . figure . the legate and the duke, la grãt danse macabre des homes y des femes, illustrated book, printed by mathias husz, lyons, / , the british library board, ib. . figure . the carthusian and the sergeant, la grãt danse macabre des homes y des femes, illustrated book, printed by mathias husz, lyons, / , the british library board, ib. . figure . the nun, les simulachres et historiees faces de la mort, designed by hans holbein, lyons, , bibliothèque nationale, rés.-z- . figure . the merchant, les simulachres et historiees faces de la mort, designed by hans holbein, lyons, , bibliothèque nationale, rés.-z- . figure . the author, la danse macabre, illustrated book, printed by guy marchant, paris, between september and june , bibliothèque nationale, rés.-ye- . figure . the author with the dead king, la danse macabre, illustrated book, printed by guy marchant, paris, between september and june , bibliothèque nationale, rés.-ye- . figure . anonymous, the cemetery and the church of the holy innocents, c. , oil on wood, musée carnavalet, paris. figure has been removed due to copyright restrictions. it showed the view of the cemetery and the church of the holy innocents in paris. the image can be viewed at: http://www.gettyimages.ca/detail/news-photo/cemetery-and-church-of-the- innocents-flemish-school-from-news-photo/ ?language=en-gb figure . the abbot and the bailiff, la danse macabre, printed by gillet coteau and jean menard for antoine vérard, paris, , printed on vellum and hand painted, lambeth palace library, ms . figure . the author, the pope and the emperor, the monk and the usurer, the doctor and the lover, la danse macabre, printed by pierre le rouge for antoine vérard, paris, - , originally printed as a placard and hand painted, bibliothèque nationale, rés.-te- . figure . the archbishop and the knight, the bishop and the squire, the franciscan and the infant, the cleric and the hermit, la danse macabre, printed by pierre le rouge for antoine vérard, paris, - , originally printed as a placard and hand painted, bibliothèque nationale, rés.-te- . figure . the three living, la danse macabre nouvelle, illustrated book, printed by guy marchant, paris, , bibliothèque nationale, rés. ye. . figure . the three dead, la danse macabre nouvelle, illustrated book, printed by guy marchant, paris, , bibliothèque nationale, rés. ye. . figure . the three living and the three dead, la danse macabre, la ferté- loupière, yonne (burgundy), fresco, c. . photo credit: m. dujakovic. figure . the pope and the emperor, la danse macabre, illustrated book, printed by guy marchant, paris, between september and june , bibliothèque nationale, rés.-ye- . figure . la danse macabre, la chaise-dieu, auvergne, c. . photo credit: alexander hoernikg. figure . the archbishop and the knight, la danse macabre nouvelle, illustrated book, printed by guy marchant, paris, , bibliothèque nationale de france, rés. ye. . figure . the bishop and the squire, la danse macabre nouvelle, illustrated book, printed by guy marchant, paris, , bibliothèque nationale de france, rés. ye. . figure . guy marchant’s printer’s device showing saints crispin and crispinian and his motto sola fides suffict. detail from the title page of le compost et kalendrier des bergiers, printed by guy marchant, paris, , bibliothèque nationale de france, rés. m. v. . figure . guy marchant’s printer’s device showing the figure of prestre jehan. detail from the title page of le compost et kalendrier des bergeres, printed by guy marchant for jean petit, paris, , bibliothèque nationale de france, rés.-v- . figure . death, the infant and the mother and death, the peasant and the sower, le mors de la põme, jean miélot, c. , bibliothèque nationale de france, ms. fr. . figure . the legate and the duke, la danse macabre nouvelle, illustrated book, printed by guy marchant, paris, , bibliothèque nationale, rés. ye. . figure . the halberdier and the fool, la danse macabre nouvelle, illustrated book, printed by guy marchant, paris, , bibliothèque nationale de france, rés. ye. . figure . pains of hell, showing the gluttons, detail. le compost et kalendrier des bergiers, woodcuts designed by pierre le rouge, edition printed by guy marchant, paris, . bibliothèque nationale de france, rés. m. v. . figure . pains of hell, showing the covetous men and women, detail. le compost et kalendrier des bergiers, woodcuts designed by pierre le rouge, edition printed by guy marchant, paris, , bibliothèque nationale de france, rés. m. v. . figure . mouth of hell and death on a horse, la danse macabre des femmes, illustrated book, printed by guy marchant, paris, , bibliothèque nationale de france, rés.ye. . figure . zodiac skeleton, le compost et kalendrier des bergiers, printed by guy marchant, paris, , bibliothèque nationale, rés. m. v. . figure . la danse macabre, la ferté-loupière, yonne (burgundy), fresco, c. , detail. photo credit: m. dujakovic. figure . the peasant, the franciscan and the infant, la danse macabre, la ferté- loupière, yonne (burgundy), fresco, c. . photo credit: m. dujakovic. figure . the hypocrite and the female-fool, la danse macabre des femmes, illustrated book, printed by guy marchant, paris, , bibliothèque nationale, rés.ye. . figure . the merchant w oman and the bailiff’s wife, la danse macabre des femmes, illustrated book, printed by guy marchant, paris, , bibliothèque nationale de france, rés.ye. . figure . the bourgeois w oman and the w idow, la danse macabre des femmes, illustrated book, printed by guy marchant, paris, , bibliothèque nationale, rés.ye. . figure . the regent and the knight’s lady, la danse macabre des femmes, illustrated book, printed by guy marchant, paris, , bibliothèque nationale de france, rés.ye. . figure . the priestess and the lady, la danse macabre des femmes, illustrated book, printed by guy marchant, paris, , bibliothèque nationale, rés.ye. . figure . the saleswoman and the prostitute, la danse macabre des femmes, illustrated book, printed by guy marchant, paris, , bibliothèque nationale de france, rés.ye. . figure . master e. s. a couple embracing, engraving, c. - . figure has been removed due to copyright restrictions. it showed an engraving with a man and a woman embracing. in the image, the man kisses the woman’s cheek, while she gazes smilingly at the viewer. figure . the queen and the duchess, la danse macabre des femmes, illustrated book, printed by guy marchant, paris, , bibliothèque nationale de france, rés.ye. . figure . the debate between the body and the soul, la danse macabre des femmes, illustrated book, printed by guy marchant, paris, , bibliothèque nationale de france, rés.ye. . figure . the debate between the body and the soul, la danse macabre des femmes, illustrated book, printed by guy marchant, paris, ,bibliothèque nationale, rés.ye. . figure . the complaint of the damned soul, the debate between the body and the soul, la danse macabre des femmes, illustrated book, printed by guy marchant, paris, , bibliothèque nationale de france, rés.ye. . figure . death, the theologian and the fool, le mors de la põme, jean miélot, c. , bibliothèque nationale de france, ms. fr. . figure . the ship of eve, jehan drouyn, la nef des folles, paris, c. , bibliothèque nationale de france, rés. m-yc- figure . the cleric and the hermit, la danse macabre nouvelle, illustrated book, printed by guy marchant, paris, , bibliothèque nationale de france, rés. ye. . figure . the pope and the emperor, la danse macabre, printed by gillet coteau and jean menard for antoine vérard, paris, , printed on vellum and hand painted, lambeth palace library, ms . figure . the carthusian and the sergeant, la danse macabre, printed by gillet coteau and jean menard for antoine vérard, paris, , printed on vellum and hand painted, bibliothéque nationale de france, vélins . figure . the archbishop and the knight, la danse macabre, printed by gillet coteau and jean menard for antoine vérard, paris, , printed on vellum and hand painted, bibliothéque nationale de france, vélins . figure . the astrologer and the bourgeois, la danse macabre, printed by gillet coteau and jean menard for antoine vérard, paris, , printed on vellum and hand painted, bibliothéque nationale de france, vélins . figure . the three dead, la danse macabre, printed by gillet coteau and jean menard for antoine vérard, paris, , printed on vellum and hand painted, lambeth palace library, ms . figure . the three living, la danse macabre, printed by gillet coteau and jean menard for antoine vérard, paris, , printed on vellum and hand painted, lambeth palace library, ms . figure . title page, la grãt danse macabre des homes y des femes, illustrated book, printed by mathias husz, lyons, / , the british library board, ib. . figure . cry de mort, la grãt danse macabre des homes y des femes, illustrated book, printed by mathias husz, lyons, / , the british library board, ib. . figure . la grãt danse macabre des homes y des femes, illustrated book, printed by mathias husz, lyons, / , the british library board, ib. . figure . exortation de bien vivre y de bien mourir, la grãt danse macabre des homes y des femes, illustrated book, printed by mathias husz, lyons, / , the british library board, ib. . figure . title page, la grant danse macabre des hommes y des femmes, illustrated book, printed by nicolas le rouge, troyes, , bibliothèque nationale de france, rés.-v- . figure . the patriarch and the constable, la grant danse macabre des hommes y des femmes, illustrated book, printed by nicolas le rouge, troyes, , bibliothèque nationale de france, rés.-v- . figure . the ship of the w orld, la grant kalendrier, printed by nicolas le rouge, troyes, , bibliothèque nationale de france, rés.-v- . figure . pains of hell, la grant kalendrier, printed by nicolas le rouge, troyes, , bibliothèque nationale de france, rés.-v- . figure . . pains of hell, la grant kalendrier, printed by nicolas le rouge, troyes, , bibliothèque nationale de france, rés.-v- , detail showing the reader’s marks. figure . cry de mort, la grant danse macabre des hommes y des femmes, illustrated book, printed by nicolas le rouge, troyes, , bibliothèque nationale de france, rés.-v- . figure . the pope, la danse macabre, unknown printer, geneva, , bibliothèque nationale de france, rés.-ye- . figure . the monk, la danse macabre, unknown printer, geneva, , bibliothèque nationale de france, rés.-ye- . figure . the author with the dead king, la danse macabre, unknown printer, geneva, , bibliothèque nationale de france, rés.-ye- . figure . the author with the dead king, la danse macabre, unknown printer, geneva, , bibliothèque nationale de france, rés.-ye- , detail showing the reader’s writing. figure . the compositor and the printers, la grand danse macabre des homes y des femes, illustrated book, printed by pierre de sainte lucie, lyons, , the british library board, c. .h. . bibliography alexandre –bidon, danièle. la mort au moyen age: xiiie-xvie siècle. pairs: hachette, . amtower, laurel. engaging words: the culture of reading in the later middle ages. new york: palgrave, . a parisian journal - . trans. janet shirley. oxford: clarendon press, . appleford, amy “the dance of death in london: john carpenter, john lydgate, and the daunce of poulys.” journal of medieval and early modern studies. . 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( ): - . - - -. soldiers of christ: preaching in late medieval and reformation france. oxford: oxford up, . tedeschi, martha. “publish and perish: the career of linehart holle in ulm.” printing the written word: the social history of books - . ed. sandra l. hindman. ithaca: cornell up, . - . tenenti, alberto. il senso della morte e l’amore della vita nel rinascimento (francia e italia) turin: g. einaudi, . trapp, j. b.,ed. manuscripts in the fifty years after the invention of printing. london: w arburg institute, . trithemius, johannes. in praise of scribes (de laude scriptorum). ed. klaus arnold. trans. ronald behrendt. lawrence, kansas: coronado press, . vaillant, pierre ed. la danse macabre de reproduite l’exemplaire unique de la bibliothèque de grenoble et publiée sous l’egide de la société des bibliophiles dauphinois. grenoble: editions de seigneurs, . utzinger hélène and bertrand, itinéraires des danses macabres. chartres: garnier, . van buren, anne h. illuminating fashion: dress in the art of medieval france and the netherlands, - . new york: the morgan library and museum, . veyrin-forrer, jeanne “aux origins de l’imprimerie française: l’atelier de la sorbonne et ses mécènes.” la lettre et le texte: trente années de recherches sur l’histoire du livre. paris, . - . wirth, jean. la jeune fille et la mort: recherches sur les thèmes macabres dans l’art, germanique de la renaissance. geneva: librairie droz, . w agner bettina and marcia reed, eds. early printed books as material objects: proceedings of the conference organized by the ifla rare books and manuscripts section. berlin and new york: de gruter saur, . w alters, lori j. “anthoine vérard’s reframing of christine de pizan’s doctrine for anne de bretagne.” the cultural and political legacy of anne de bretagne: negotiating conventions in books and documents. ed. cynthia j. brown. cambridge: brewer, . - . w arda, susanne. “dance, music and the inversion of the natural order in the medieval danse macabre. eds: sophie oosterwijk and stephanie knöll. newcastle upon tyne: cambridge scholars publishing, . - . w elzel, barbara. “zur vielfältigkeit eines bildmediums: monochrome und iluminierte druckgraphik im frühen jahrhundert.” der bordesholmer altar des hans brüggeman: werk und wirkung. ed. uwe albrecht. berlin: d. reimer, . w emple, suzanne f. and denise a. kaiser. “death’s dance of w omen.” journal of medieval history ( ): - . willoughby, edwin elliot. “cover design.” the library quarterly . 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Бюллетень науки и практики. . № ( ) Бюллетень науки и практики — bulletin of science and practice научный журнал (scientific journal) № г. http://www.bulletennauki.com udc . chromatic “zero signs” in the soviet urban colour design ХРОМАТИЧЕСКИЕ «НУЛЕВЫЕ ЗНАКИ» В ГОРОДСКОЙ КОЛОРИСТИКЕ СОВЕТСКОГО ВРЕМЕНИ ©griber yu. orcid: - - - dr. habil., smolensk state university smolensk, russia, julia_griber@mail.ru ©Грибер Ю. А. orcid: - - - , д-р культурологии Смоленский государственный университет г. Смоленск, Россия, julia_griber@mail.ru abstract. the research object is the tradition of сhromatic colours displacement from the urban environment. the main goal of the study is to analyse the role, that chromatic “zero signs” played in the environment of soviet cities and towns, and to reveal their semantics. the findings and key principles of semiotics are used as the main theoretical and methodological research tool. urban coloristics is seen as a language based on a system of interrelated oppositions, and the non- use of color in urban space is discussed in the context of the role of “zero signs” in sign systems outside the natural language. the author provides an analysis of the history of the development of urban colouristics and, on this basis, justifies the idea of importance for studying and understanding of “zero” colour as a semiotics object the “reflexive symmetry” principle and the usage of an ethnolinguistic strategic line of the analysis as well as a social and cultural one. the paper reveals the unique additional shades of meaning that the non-use of colour in urban coloristics acquired due to a special socio–cultural situation of the soviet period. the social structure of soviet urban society and its change under the influence of urbanization and rural migration are analyzed. we consider the value system of urban residents and analyze its relationship with the social division of urban space. the mechanisms supporting chromophobia in soviet society are described. the specifics of soviet urban spaces are discussed in comparison with the cities of the rest of europe. based on the analysis of architectural features of constructivism, neoclassicism, and stalin empire style, different forms of “zero signs” in the space of soviet cities and towns are identified and characterized. Аннотация. Объектом исследования является традиция вытеснения хроматических цветов из городской колористики. Цель работы заключается в анализе функций, которые хроматические нулевые знаки выполняли в пространстве советских городов, и выявлении их семантики. В качестве главного теоретического и методологического инструмента исследования используются основные положения, разработанные семиотикой. Городская колористика рассматривается как язык, основанный на системе взаимосвязанных противопоставлений, а неиспользование цвета в городском пространстве обсуждается в контексте роли нулевых знаков в знаковых системах за пределами естественного языка. На основе анализа истории развития городской колористики обосновывается идея, что для изучения и понимания нулевого цвета как семиотического объекта, особый интерес приобретает принцип «рефлексивной симметрии» и использование, наряду с социокультурной, этнолингвистической стратегической линии анализа. http://www.bulletennauki.com/ Бюллетень науки и практики — bulletin of science and practice научный журнал (scientific journal) № г. http://www.bulletennauki.com Рассматриваются уникальные дополнительные оттенки значения, которые отказ от использования цвета в городской колористике советского времени приобрел в силу особой социокультурной ситуации. Анализируется социальная структура советского городского общества и ее изменение под влиянием урбанизации и сельской миграции. Рассматривается система ценностей городских жителей и анализируется ее связь с социальным делением городского пространства. Описываются механизмы, поддерживающие хромофобию в советском обществе. Обсуждается специфика советских городских пространств по сравнению с городами остальной части Европы. На основе анализа архитектурных особенностей конструктивизма, неоклассицизма, сталинского ампира выявляются и характеризуются разные формы нулевых знаков в пространстве советских городов. keywords: colour, city, urban coloristis, colour design, sign, “zero” sign, soviet period. Ключевые слова: цвет, город, городская колористика, городской дизайн, знак, нулевой знак, советское время. chromatic colours displacement from urban environment has a long tradition. according to batchelor [ , p. ], “the discrimination against colour” starting from the ancient world was frequently exercised in urban culture (in technics, morality, racial, sexual or social aspects) and often became an object of research (see, e.g.: [ – ]). from time to time there were some strong convictions about colour in urban environment. colour was at times losing the famous renaissance debate disegno versus colore, with its classic example in the opposition between e. delacroix and j.–a.–d. ingres, and with the origin in venice and florence schools of painting. similar colour “negation” in urban objects occurred again many times and in different variants. this idea was especially clear in some particular styles with the ideological basis on an incorrect image of “white ancient world”. starting with italian renaissance (xv–xvi centuries), english and french baroque (xvii century) negated the usage of colour in decoration of exterior façades. later, in the late xviii century a tradition of building colouration was completely lost, classicism took the ancient world as an example (later architecture of german renaissance, gothic, romanesque buildings was also not coloured). such an idea became the basis for an architectural movement called “romantic historicism” or “later romanesque”, which was especially strong in germany and austria from the s onwards, in connection with the rise of the bourgeoisie during and after the industrial revolution. though, according to r. wagner–rieger [ , p. ], its main feature was “colourity”, the main construction material was non-coloured brick, the usage of which provoked the opening of several brick factories in europe (in contrast to england, brick was not used in germany and austria till that time). the marked period of polychromy ended in the second half of the xix century with the expansion of neo–renaissance and neo–baroque tendencies in architecture. fifty years later colour was found inessential, subdued and dependent in the architecture of soviet cities. colour spaces of constructivism, formed by shades of concrete, glass, brick, metal constructions, materialism of neoclassicism, stalinist architecture with carnelian pink shade suggestive of skin, thus taken as colourless — represented in soviet urban environment different forms of “zero” signs. however, in all the mentioned cases colour spaces were only “reflexively symmetrical”. m. a. rozov defines “reflexively symmetrical” acts as those with different understanding of results: “supposing that while taking some actions we consider result “a” as a primary one and result “b” as a secondary one. a change in the reflexive position consists in an interchange between “a” and http://www.bulletennauki.com/ Бюллетень науки и практики — bulletin of science and practice научный журнал (scientific journal) № г. http://www.bulletennauki.com “b”. that means “b” becomes the main result of all the actions and “a” becomes a secondary unit. it’s obvious that the nature of our actions remains the same, i.e. invariant” [ , p. – ]. the difference (and reflexive symmetry) lies in special additional shades of meaning, which are attached to the negation of colour in every particular case. to reveal the psychological mechanisms, the sociological, cultural and philosophical reasons of the principle of “reflexive symmetry” that it is used to organize the colour space of towns, urban spaces of the soviet cities will be considered, where color negation acquired unique additional shades of meaning due to a specific social and cultural situation. with the establishment of the soviet power the urbanization process in russia became the most important meaning of social modernization. a shift from agrarian to industrial economy was rapid. a kind of “urban revolution” led to a tenfold increase in city population and it radically changed the whole pattern of population settlement. waves of rural migration, especially large in the th and then in the – th simply “flooded” russian cities. according to the first russian general population census in urban population was less than million, i.e. accounted for only the seventh part of the population within the modern borders (within the borders of the russian empire — over million), by the end of the th years urban residents accounted for one third of the population of the country, in — for a half [ , p. – ]. rural migration completely changed social and demographic structure of urban population: the nobility and old merchants were destroyed; lower–middle class and qualified, hereditary working class disappeared. peasants who left their native places replaced the main social groups, which had made the basis of a pre-revolutionary city. the process of “krestyanization” (predominance of rural migrants over native urban residents) of the city increased in huge scales and had far–reaching consequences. rapid growth and concentration of urban population after considerably went ahead of adaptation processes of former villagers to an urban way of life, their assimilation to the city culture and a new system of values. new citizens preserved traditional country (communal) attitudes, peculiar world perception and unique mentality, which later laid basis for the social behaviour of a new and very specific member of society — “the soviet person”. such a “simple” person who “wasn’t trained at universities” was considered as a standard of pure kindness and morality. affected by a gradual real decrease in the amount of people with secondary and higher education occupied at the soviet and party work, deputies of party commissions deliberately underestimated the level of their education. no wonder that at this time a sign space was established among such concepts as “hardness”, “force”, “unity”. as a result, there were no such concepts as “social inequality”, “social hierarchy”, “social domination” in sociological models of the soviet society. the social structure of this time was represented by all means as single–level, non-hierarchical. officially it included two equal “friendly” classes (the working class and the class of collective farm peasantry), and also the so called black–coated proletariat, representatives of which were considered not as a class, but “a social stratum of brainworkers”. according to the point of view of official soviet science, there was no privileged ruling class in social structure of the society of this time, and the mentioned classes were considered rather as professional strata. in fact, the social structure of the soviet society was much more stratified. there were considerable distinctions between social groups both from the point of view of power, and prestige. on the basis of political power the main distinction existed between the party nomenclature and the rest of the population. from the point of view of social prestige, the highest class of intellectuals namely outstanding scientists, writers, cultural figures together with the best representatives of working class formed a separate privileged group. http://www.bulletennauki.com/ Бюллетень науки и практики — bulletin of science and practice научный журнал (scientific journal) № г. http://www.bulletennauki.com naturally, such social structure couldn’t but influence the social division of city space. the party nomenclature and the highest class of intellectuals occupied the former quarters of rich aristocracy and upper bourgeoisie. the working class, as well as before the revolution, concentrated in the suburbs. at the same time, the existing marked imbalance of social and cultural opportunities between a small privileged class of political elite, party and government officials and the rest of the population in the soviet society was deliberately concealed. the specific role of the nomenclature together with the exceptional privileges, and even the existence of nomenclature as such were disguised, in contrast to the ruling nobility in old russia. really designated social inequality was masked and hidden. in colouring of the soviet cities such orientation on an illusion of classless society was realized by means of chromatic “zero signs”. all cities started being filled with the identical colour symbols hiding really existing social distinctions. a very important point in understanding of colouring of the soviet cities was that the spaces formed by chromatic “zero signs” stretched, overcame isolation of the centre and filled all the city space. thus, a unique form of chromophobia developed — fear of colour, which d. batchelor compared to a fear of drugs and a panic, connected with it in modern society [ , p. – ] is not the first to identify colour and drugs, and only develops ideas of plato who thought that artists only pound paints and mix drugs, aristotle who called colour a drug — pharmakon, r. barthes who considered colour as a special type of pleasure, a. huxley who described the change in colour perception of a person after a dose narcotic substance called mescaline, p. cézanne, ch. baudelaire, e. delacroix, and other creative personalities of modern age who connected perception and understanding of colour with drug intoxication). chromophobia in the soviet society was supported by means of a scheduled start and a unique state driving mechanism. the establishment of comprehensive ideological and political control of the state over the population or, at least, an aspiration to establish such control inevitably led to the fact that art began to be regulated by special cultural institutes — academies, schools, art criticism which limited any demonstration of social instability chaos in urban environment. in order to establish a new proletarian culture in the fall of at narkompros (people’s commissariat for education) was created the proletkult (proletarian culture) — a cultural–educational and literary–art organization of proletarian amateur performance which had more than two hundred local organizations in various fields of art. large art associations: ahrr (the association of artists of revolutionary russia founded in ) with youth section omahrr (the youth community of association of artists of revolutionary russia), vopra (the all-union association of proletarian architects founded in ), aru (the association of urban architects which existed in moscow in – ), asnova (the association of new architects operating in the – th years), osa (the association of modern architects founded in ) — were supported by the authorities as carriers of art to masses both in form and content. all these organizations and associations helped to subdue city colouring to political and ideological orientations of the soviet state and communist party. architects eagerly worked on creation of the visual environment which would fit new socialist standards. a rather accurate idealized image was created which needed to be realized within long years and which was aimed at transforming the whole concept of architecture. the colour system of the cities became an object of deliberate planning influence, and each decision had to express and support a certain ideological view. constructivism and stalin empire style perfectly fitted for disguising real “declassification” of society and the transformation of its structure in two-dimensional, vertical, consisting of those who ruled and those who were ruled, and creating a feeling of participation of ordinary citizens in http://www.bulletennauki.com/ Бюллетень науки и практики — bulletin of science and practice научный журнал (scientific journal) № г. http://www.bulletennauki.com high culture and high moral ideals which now, in this new, socially fair classless society, became available for everybody. the aesthetics of constructivism was based upon the ideas of democracy and general equality. on the other hand, the style perfectly realized the idea of internationalism and creation of new supranational culture. in fact, constructivists reduced architecture to engineering art. they were guided by a socratic identification of beauty and practicability. extreme simplicity, functionality, art minimalism and asceticism of architectural forms became new aesthetic ideals. an important ideological dominant of new colour spaces was the admiration of seemingly unlimited opportunities of machinery in the th century, which obtained a kind of romantic colouring at the beginning of industrialization. according to these principles, colour (more precisely, its absence) became one of the important means capable to unite a set of historically developed local societies leading their own life. a new creative orientation negated the use of bright paint as an instrument which was not connected with the internal essence of things therefore constructivism buildings had no decoration and colouring. the main construction materials — steel, glass and armored concrete — metaphorically embodied poetics of the scientific and technical progress and the idea of opposition between architectural and organic forms. natural light shades and the structure of these materials were considered beautiful in themselves. colour images obtained such features as dimensions and exaggeration. newly organized city spaces had to soothe and motivate. they fulfilled a function of demonstration of force and power of a new social order or institute. as ballet tights of a gymnast emphasize the bends of his strong muscles (such an interesting parallel between colouring of architecture and a sporty body is drawn by m. arrarte–grau [ ], classifying the ways of colouring which developed in city space), natural, neutral colour put in the front the volume and texture of an architectural material while any other colour would distract the viewer from his perception of space. a change of cultural model outlined itself in the soviet culture in the s [ , p. – ]. according to the decree of the government “about the type of a residential house” dated july , each house had to have its own unique shape. the main goal of architecture was to create smart ensembles, which had to gradually fill the whole urban space, forming a harmonious image of the prospering and dynamically developing socialist society. and that, in turn, demanded the development of rather stereotyped and clear for ordinary citizens town planning principles using the language of classic architecture legacy as a symbol of unity between the soviet architecture and traditions of world culture. all architectural objects of this time symbolically reflected ideas of the epoch and had sign additions to a greater or lesser degree. metaphoricalness and an emblem connotation of a building could be expressed directly in its form. in this case its volume and space structure completely submitted to a drawing or an inscription. thus, the symbolical form often was obvious only on the drawing and wasn’t noticed by a passer-by or a viewer. further the tendency of architectural form submission to the symbolic figurativeness was transformed into usage of ornaments and laid on signs emblems. emblems, coats of arms, lighting chains, figures of people being sculptural additions played a significant role in creation of a graphic structure of architectural objects. despite a change of the architectural style, chromatic “zero signs” still remained a widespread means of symbolism in architectural constructions of this period of time. as a rule, buildings were painted in the natural colours imitating durable construction materials. a special pinkish shade of the painted walls was added to a city palette and quickly gained popularity. v. paperny [ ] explains the domination of the flesh–pink colouring in a pre-war city by the fact that a human being becomes a measure of all things. architecture had to be guided by the tectonics of a cheerful, healthy, well-built person. such anthropomorphous representation of architecture led to an http://www.bulletennauki.com/ Бюллетень науки и практики — bulletin of science and practice научный журнал (scientific journal) № г. http://www.bulletennauki.com unconscious imitation of human skin (and therefore this colour too was perceived as a “zero sign”) and reached its heyday in the early fifties when almost all houses were fronted with flesh–pink ceramic tiles. walls of courtyards as befit, were without “skin”, and i.e. had no colouring. thus, designed at an ordinary person and possessing similar features with other european cities, the soviet urban spaces, at the same time, due to a number of essential characteristics presented a direct opposition to the other part of europe. while european cities of this time were more and more filled with colour, here the urban environment gradually became achromatic and was formed by generally natural material shades. colour remained in city space, but it was no longer understood as an important means of expression and turned into a “zero sign” of colour representation. a “zero sign” as befits, at the basis of the idea of matter submission and widening of material colour meaning lays the following opposition: material colours were opposed to all the others on the principle of presence or absence of colour in general, oppositions of colour and not — colour. there were active urbanization processes, and in new cities appeared new social system features. when there was a new form of a social order, the social system of society was completely reconstructed; age-old traditions and unknown innovations were to get adjusted to each other, achromatic colour spaces “attacked” the soviet cities as some kind of straitjacket. chromatic “zero signs” in the soviet urban space had two evident shades of meaning. on the one hand, an opposition between colour absence and its existence embodied the opposition of naturalness and illusiveness which is a cornerstone of much deeper dichotomy — the real–life and what is seeming, opposition of essence and phenomenon. on that basis, colour was provided with the whole range of negative values, such as variability, inconstancy, emotionality and even ability to cause illusions and to mislead. colour was understood as a deception, as a means which doesn’t render the truth but on the contrary, mostly distorts it in a greater or lesser degree. in time of a social strain in the country it was considered to be a frivolous entertainment, a thoughtless game for which society simply shouldn’t have any time. as a result, one tried not only to avoid using colour. one was afraid to use it realizing that, according to a fair remark of d. batchelor [ , p. ], colour can’t be neutral, it has “power to dream, to think or speak”, it isn’t quite and patient, it is “a very dangerous cosmetic”. connecting itself with the ideas of depth and surface, essence and phenomenon, basis and superstructure which are almost always transferred to moral distinction of deep and superficial, colour was thought to be a “double delusion and double deception”: “if surface veils depth, if appearance masks essence, then make-up masks a mask, veils a veil, disguises a disguise. it isn’t simply a deception; it is a double deception. it is a surface on a surface, and thus even farther from substance than ‘true’ appearance. how things appear is one thing; how things appear to appear is another. colour is a double illusion, double deception” [ , p. ]. there was a cautious attitude towards bright colour, as if it was bright cosmetics which is capable to “make flesh more appealing, flesh that may be tired or old, or flesh that may be diseased, disfigured, decayed or even dead” [ , p. ]. color was considered not as addition, and more likely as “seducing” as “post factum was imposed on initial truth... as a false hair and blush with which paint dead men” [ , p. ]. the same thought is well expressed by d. batchelor: “… there are many ways to fall into colour, so there are many ways of applying the make-up of colour; cosmetics can be laid on thick or thin, with subtlety or with a spade. (…) if colour is cosmetic, it is added to the surface of things, and probably at the last moment. it doesn’t have a place within things; it is an afterthought; it can be rubbed off” [ , p. – ]. a semantic correlation between the notions “paint” and “hide” was clearly seen in a number of european languages. for example, in semantics of the english word “colour”: “the latin http://www.bulletennauki.com/ Бюллетень науки и практики — bulletin of science and practice научный журнал (scientific journal) № г. http://www.bulletennauki.com colorem is related to celare, to hide or conceal; in middle english ‘to colour’ is to embellish or adorn, to disguise, to render specious or plausible, to misrepresent” [ , p. ]. or in the meaning “ukrashat’” (decorate), there are derivatives from common slavic form of the russian words “krasit’” (paint), “krashu” (i paint), ukrainian “krasiti” (you paint), bulgarian “krasya” (i decorate), serbo–croatian “krasiti” (you paint), “krasim” (to do beautiful), slovenian “krásiti”, czech “krásit”, polish “krasić” [ ]. on the other hand, colour negation in soviet urban space had one more expressed shade of meaning. the natural shades filling the entire city environment successfully rendered the idea of timelessness of events. the idea was connected with those colours first of all, because of their colour solidity about which wrote a. ozenfant [ ] and which was historically distributed between colorants not equally. the term colour solidity was borrowed from psychology of visual perception defines a psychological ability to perceive colour of a subject as constant, despite a change in spectral structure of light falling on it, and not to notice the changes which are really happening with the colour of the object. from the psychological point of view of psychology, the colour solidity perception has a noticeable impact on that we perceive environment as something stable. a similar function was carried out by natural colours in urban space where the colour solidity was strongly connected with the quantity and the type of the applied pigments. while material natural colour wasn’t subject to changes was stable, strong and reliable, the surfaces covered with bright paint lost the qualities in the course of time, thus destroying a general impression of a construction. the lifetime of natural shades allowed an urban colour space “to keep the advantage, inspired feeling of safety and security which usually connect with long-term, steady qualities”, — writes and. ozenfant [ , p. ]. on the contrary, intuitive psychology of the residents forced them to treat bright but fragile surfaces (because of use of unstable dyes) with caution and mistrust. natural colours were appreciated here not only because of themselves but also as signs of succession and connection with the past. in this case a natural colour carried out a function of the indicator of stability because it was associated with internal values. a solid, not changing and not consistent in time, rational material colour of such ordered spaces rendered the idea of regularity, practicability and justice of social changes and was considered as a clear metaphor of power, as expression of its might and the guarantor of stability and justice. the natural colour formed an illusion of rationally organized and well-operated life on a society scale, which was actively developing and quite successful. in general, colour retracted giving way to the form because the first was considered to be attractive but still fragile and unreliable means, which didn’t suit for the expression of important social ideas, for rhetoric and speaking. in general, despite quite an obvious external similarity, the chromatic “zero signs” in urban space “are read” differently, obtaining some unique shades of meaning which can be opposite to the original ones just because of a different social and cultural situation. in the soviet cities, e. g., the semantic field was structured by the ideas of naturalness and timelessness. in order to understand, how similar are the chromatic “zero signs” which at first sight seem to be identical, it is necessary to reconstruct the purpose which is the cornerstone of their creation, “to polarize” them. in this regard, for studying and understanding of “zero” colour as a semiotics object, it is necessary to pay much attention to the “reflexive symmetry” principle and the usage of an ethnolinguistic strategic line of the analysis as well as a social and cultural one. the publication is prepared as a part of scientific project no. - - supported by the russian foundation for basic research. http://www.bulletennauki.com/ Бюллетень науки и практики — bulletin of science and practice научный журнал (scientific journal) № г. http://www.bulletennauki.com references: . batchelor, d. ( ). chromophobia. london, reaktion books, . . minah, g. ( ). blackness. whitness. chromaticness. formulas for high visibility in the modern city. color communication and management. aic proceeding. ed. by a. hansuebsai. bangkok, - . . serov, n. v. ( ). tsvet kultury: psikhologiya, kulturologiya, fiziologiya (color of culture: psychology, cultural studies, philology). st. petersburg, rech, . (in russian) . griber, yu. a. ( ). tsvetovye reprezentatsii sotsialnogo prostranstva evropeyskogo goroda (colour representations of social space of european cities). moscow, soglasie, . (in russian) . wagner-rieger, r. ( ). wiens architektur im . jahrhundert. wien, oesterreichischer bundesverlag, . (in german) . rozov, m. a. ( ). istoriya nauki i problema ee ratsionalnoy rekonstruktsii (history of science and the problem of its rational reconstruction). istoricheskie tipy ratsionalnosti. ed. by v. a. lektorskiy. v. . moscow, if ran, - . (in russian) . pivovarov, yu. l. ( ). urbanizatsiya v rossii v xx veke: predstavleniya i realnost (urbanization in russia in the twentieth century: ideas and reality). obshchestvennye nauki i sovremennost, ( ), - . (in russian) . arrarte-grau, m., & ludmir, b. ( ). lima actual: el color de la vivienda. lima, universidad ricardo palma. (in spanish) . griber, yu. a. ( ). istoriya tsvetovogo proektirovaniya gorodskogo prostranstva: sbornik dokumentov i materialov (history of color design of urban space: a collection of documents and materials). smolensk, smolgu, . (in russian) . paperny, v. ( ). muzhchiny, zhenshchiny i zhiloe prostranstvo (men, women and living space). zhilishche v rossii: vek xx. arkhitektura i sotsialnaya istoriya (dwelling in russia: xxth century. architecture and social history). ed. by u. brumfild, b. rubl. moscow, tri kvadrata, - . (in russian) . barthes, r. ( ). camera lucida: kommentariy k fotografii (camera lucida: reflections on photography). ed. by m. ryklin. Мoscow, ad marginem, . (in russian) . vasmer, М. ( ). etimologicheskiy slovar russkogo yazyka. Мoscow, iddkb. (cd- rom). . ozenfant, a. ( ). color solidity. architectural review, ( ), - Список литературы: . batchelor d. chromophobia. london: reaktion books, . p. . minah g. blackness. whitness. chromaticness. formulas for high visibility in the modern city // color communication and management. aic proceeding / ed. by a. hansuebsai. bangkok, . Р. - . . Серов Н. В. Цвет культуры: психология, культурология, физиология. СПб.: Речь, . с. . Грибер Ю. А. Цветовые репрезентации социального пространства европейского города. М.: Согласие, . с. . wagner-rieger r. wiens architektur im . jahrhundert. wien: oesterreichischer bundesverlag, . s. . Розов М. А. История науки и проблема ее рациональной реконструкции // Исторические типы рациональности / отв. ред. В.А. Лекторский. Т. . М.: Изд-во ИФ РАН, . С. - . http://www.bulletennauki.com/ Бюллетень науки и практики — bulletin of science and practice научный журнал (scientific journal) № г. http://www.bulletennauki.com . Пивоваров Ю. Л. Урбанизация в России в ХХ веке: представления и реальность // Общественные науки и современность. . № . С. - . . arrarte-grau m., ludmir b. lima actual: el color de la vivienda. lima: universidad ricardo palma, . . Грибер Ю. А. История цветового проектирования городского пространства: сборник документов и материалов. Смоленск: Изд-во СмолГУ, . с. . Паперный В. Мужчины, женщины и жилое пространство // Жилище в России: век ХХ. Архитектура и социальная история: монографический сборник / сост. У. Брумфилд, Б. Рубл. М.: Три квадрата, . С. - . . Барт Р. camera lucida: комментарий к фотографии / пер., послесл. и коммент. М. Рыклина. М.: ad marginem, . с. . Фасмер М. Этимологический словарь русского языка. М.: ИДДКБ, . (cd-rom). . ozenfant a. color solidity // architectural review. . № . p. - . Работа поступила в редакцию . . г. Принята к публикации . . г. _____________________________________________________________________ Ссылка для цитирования: griber yu. chromatic “zero signs” in the soviet urban colour design // Бюллетень науки и практики. Электрон. журн. . № ( ). С. - . Режим доступа: http://www.bulletennauki.com/griber-yu-a (дата обращения . . ). cite as (apa): griber yu. ( ). chromatic “zero signs” in the soviet urban colour design. bulletin of science and practice, ( ), - http://www.bulletennauki.com/ ancient buoyancy devices in sweden: floats made of reed, club-rush, inflated skins and animal bladders full terms & conditions of access and use can be found at https://www.tandfonline.com/action/journalinformation?journalcode=yfol folk life journal of ethnological studies issn: - (print) - x (online) journal homepage: https://www.tandfonline.com/loi/yfol ancient buoyancy devices in sweden: floats made of reed, club-rush, inflated skins and animal bladders isak lidström & ingvar svanberg to cite this article: isak lidström & ingvar svanberg ( ) ancient buoyancy devices in sweden: floats made of reed, club-rush, inflated skins and animal bladders, folk life, : , - , doi: . / . . to link to this article: https://doi.org/ . / . . published online: jul . submit your article to this journal article views: view related articles view crossmark data https://www.tandfonline.com/action/journalinformation?journalcode=yfol https://www.tandfonline.com/loi/yfol https://www.tandfonline.com/action/showcitformats?doi= . / . . https://doi.org/ . / . . https://www.tandfonline.com/action/authorsubmission?journalcode=yfol &show=instructions https://www.tandfonline.com/action/authorsubmission?journalcode=yfol &show=instructions https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/mlt/ . / . . https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/mlt/ . / . . http://crossmark.crossref.org/dialog/?doi= . / . . &domain=pdf&date_stamp= - - http://crossmark.crossref.org/dialog/?doi= . / . . &domain=pdf&date_stamp= - - ancient buoyancy devices in sweden: floats made of reed, club-rush, inflated skins and animal bladders isak lidströma and ingvar svanbergb adepartment of sport science, malmö university, malmö; binstitute for russian and eurasian studies, uppsala university, uppsala abstract this article sets out to discuss the material culture of traditional physical education from an ethnobiological point of view. the focus is on the use of reed, phragmites australis trin. ex steud., club-rush, schoenoplectus lacustris l., inflated skins and animal bladders when making buoyancy devices used by children and adolescents for learning to swim. as these teaching methods occurred from thousands of years ago up to very recently, it is argued that child-related practices connected with the bio-cultural domain and arising out of human-biota interaction have notice- ably transcended time and societal changes. keywords child culture; ethnobiology; sport history; physical education; swimming equipment; traditional games introduction water has always been an element that human beings have striven to master, either by floating on it or by swimming through it. regarding the latter, several incentives may present themselves that spur a desire to learn the art of swimming. whereas some might consider it as a form of life insurance, others swim just for fun or perhaps even for competitive reasons. swimming has thereby, throughout history, come to exist within different fields, such as play, sport and physical education. among ethnologists, sociologists and sports historians, it is common to make a distinction between the traditional games of pre-modern agrarian societies, and those of modern sports of industrialized society. although this necessarily oversimplifies a complex history somewhat, the latter have been defined as competitive institutionalized physical activities, characterized by elements such as rationalization, standardization and a constant quest for development in which performances are to be improved and records broken. the former, on the other hand, emphasizes recreation, festivity, and communal sociality and interaction. moreover, traditional games, or folk games, vary from place to place in their equipment and rules. additionally, the outcome of the competition is frequently secondary to the joy and amusement arising from participation. when it comes to physical education, there is no clear distinction between past and present learning practices, as is the case with traditional games and modern sports. it is contact isak lidström isak.lidstrom@mau.se department of sport science, malmö university, nordenskiöldsgatan , malmö, sweden. folk life , vol. , no. , – https://doi.org/ . / . . © the society for folk life studies http://www.tandfonline.com https://crossmark.crossref.org/dialog/?doi= . / . . &domain=pdf&date_stamp= - - nonetheless indisputable that, throughout history, there have always been methods for teaching children sports and physical skills. the concept of ‘physical education’ is often associated with formal learning practices in schools, at universities and other institutions. however, in this brief article, one that deliberately chooses an ethnological point of view, the intention is to go beyond the practices that are stipulated in curricula. we will rather discuss traditional methods of physical education, i.e. informal practices that are based on old knowledge and customs with roots in pre-modern society. a special focus here is directed towards the use of implements made from local biological resources within these practices. hence, it is particularly relevant to discuss how the material culture of traditional physical education can be understood as the outcome of a biocultural domain that arises in the relationship between human beings and their surrounding biota. however, it should be noted that the concept of ‘traditional’ is a vague term to use within human science research. in the study of human life and especially in activity contexts within the surrounding biota, many researchers now prefer to speak of ‘local knowledge’ rather than ‘traditional knowledge’. many so-called ‘folk traditions’ may turn out to be neither very old nor traditional at all. to give just one example, it is well known that contemporary swedish christmas customs (including the christmas tree, jultomten i.e. the swedish version of santa claus, typical food for christmas eve, etc.) are largely the result of international, commercial influences promoted during the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries. consequently, one has to be careful when talking about traditions or traditional knowledge. nevertheless, while bearing this caveat in mind, we do sometimes encounter cus- toms and habits that have their roots back in antiquity. one instance worth mentioning is the capture of wall lizards (podarcis muralis, p. sicula) by italian children with the help of a grass snare. this is an ancient technique, reproduced, for example, on the statue known as apollo sauroctonus, from the fourth century b.c., created by the greek sculptor praxiteles (figure ). another example is the custom addressed in this article, namely the making of floats used by those learning to swim. such floats have been made of various materials, whereof the common club-rush, schoenoplectus lacustris, eurasian reed phragmites australis , and pig’s bladders provide a few examples. the common club-rush and eurasian reed are common helophytes that grow in lakes and rivers in most parts of sweden, although they are rarer in the north. both species have been widely used for animal fodder, various kinds of handicrafts, and for thatching roofs respectively, in their various areas of distribution. the data found in swedish folklore archives and in scattered notes in older literature constitute invaluable sources when it comes to mapping and understanding the diver- sity of pre-industrial peasants’ relationship to the biota and their ecology in the eigh- teenth and nineteenth centuries. we have assembled data from various published and unpublished sources about floatation devices made of animal bladders and bundles of reed and rush. i. lidstrÖm and i. svanberg swimming equipment in the classic handbook for swimming de arte natandi, written by academic theologian everard digby (c. –c. ), we read, ‘lesson is learning to swim. this should preferably be done with someone supporting you under the chin, or by using water wings made of two inflated pigs’ bladders.’ the use of inflated animal skins and bladders as floats is a very ancient method in the history of swimming, especially within military contexts. the oldest example can be seen on a bas-relief from nimrud, mesopotamia (now in the british museum). it shows ancient assyrians using skins, presumably of goats, as swimming floats years ago figure . roman copy of apollo sauroctonus from the st– nd centuries ad after a greek original from the th century bc (louvre museum, paris). folk life (figure ). such bladders and inflated skins are known to have been used as swimming equipment in many parts of the world. james hornell discusses the origin and distribution of such equipment, concluding that ’inflated skin-float has a historical record of greater antiquity.’ an interesting example mentioned by hornell is shakespeare’s play henry viii, co-written with john fletcher, and also known by the alternative title all is true, where cardinal wolsey laments that he had ’ventured like little wanton boys that swim on bladders,’ far beyond his depth. from all over nineteenth century sweden, swine bladders are known to have been used for the same purpose. in olaus magni historia de gentibus septentrionalibus (‘description of the northern peoples’) from , we find an illustration (figure ) showing a young man learning to swim with the help of an inflated sack of leather (book , ch. xxvii). such leather sacks used as buoyancy devices are also known from sweden during later centuries. sámi in sweden also used the inflated stomach of a reindeer as a means of floating when learning to swim. figure . assyrian soldier swimming with the help of an inflated goat skin (british museum). figure . floating devices in olaus magni historia de gentibus septentrionalibus (‘description of the northern peoples’) from . i. lidstrÖm and i. svanberg reed bundle floats another man pictured on the left-hand side of the illustration in olaus magnus’s book is using a reed bundle float (see figure ). according to olaus magnus, the boys use a ‘manipulum leuium arundinum fungosarum’, i.e. a float made of bundles of light, spongy reed. as has been pointed out by ethnologist john granlund, such swimming aids were already known of in ancient rome as scirpa ratis. however, the making of swimming floats or ‘swim-belts’ of reed or club-rush has also occurred in more recent times in sweden. in his flora lapponica, carl linnaeus mentions how boys in his home province of småland used bundles of club-rush as buoyancy belts when they were taught to swim. the emergence of modern swimming education in sweden before the industrialization of sweden in late nineteenth century, the ability to swim was a skill that only a few could master. it was up to the individual to learn how to float and how to move through water. in the late eighteenth century, however, the situation changed, and swimming education became a public topic of discussion in sweden. already by , the first official military swimming school in sweden, intended for future officers, was established in karlskrona. alongside military forms of competition such as fencing and riding, swimming became also the first sport to be organized in sweden. this started in , the year when the upsala swimming society (upsala simsällskap) was founded, most likely as the first of its kind in the world. after the foundation, similar organizations were established in several swedish cities. noteworthy is that the establishment of swimming societies was preceded by discus- sions on the societal benefits of swimming skills. in , for example, an essay contest was organized by the royal patriotic society in sweden, whose participants were supposed to write about the best method for teaching young people to swim. among many methods advocated by one of the competitors, arvid faxe, one recommended that the learner should lie prostrate on the water, either with a corkboard or with inflated ox bladders under the chest. another competitor in the essay contest, august nordenskiöld, also supported the use of buoyancy devices, which might consist of empty bottles, ‘cork sweaters’, bladders or two bunches of rush. however, the means of flotation that nordensköld preferred was a sawboard (sågbräde) with rounded edges. all these methods, which included such devices, were nevertheless dismissed by a third participant in the competition, george schumacher. ‘cork sweaters, swine bladders under the chest etc. mean nothing’, stated schumacher, as these methods would make children rely on the buoyancy belt and so on rather than their own strength. the discussions that arose in the late eighteenth century mark a turning point in the history of swimming education in sweden, as swimming skills began to be viewed as a concern not only for the individual but also for the whole nation. in the spirit of utilitarianism, arvid faxe stressed that the art of swimming was an important tool in the pursuit to provide the state with useful citizens. this opinion can be understood folk life in light of a contemporary development in sweden in which physical culture came to have an increasing prominent significance in creating a national identity. in the early nineteenth century, the swedish pioneer of physical education pehr henrik ling founded the subsequently world famous ’swedish gymnastics system’ in which the physical tension of the human body reflected virtues such as morality, discipline and self-control. swimming became a part in this expanding interest in physical culture. the ability to swim began, so to speak, to be closely aligned with the modern idea of citizenship. following these discussions, swimming education became increasingly a social concern in sweden during the nineteenth century, as it was conducted in schools and educa- tional institutions. during the early decades of the century, swimming education was introduced into some secondary schools. from the s onwards, even school children of the elementary schools of stockholm and gothenburg were, during the summer, given the opportunity to learn how to swim. although it is clear that the modern swedish state required subordinates who were able to move through water, the swim- ming knowledge remained low for a long time. in only . per cent of the swedish school children could swim. evidence in folkore archives, newspaper articles and fiction although schumacher opposed instruction methods where swimming aids were included, it is nevertheless clear that bladders, reeds and rushes continued to fill an important function in the traditional swimming education that took place outside schools or educa- tional institutions. this is evident from several accounts in the folklore archives, in which their use is described, from southernmost sweden all the way up to the northern part of the country. an account collected in regarding stenestad parish in the province of skåne briefly states that ‘swim belts’ were earlier made of bundles of club-rush. from alseda parish in småland, gottfried wagnér recorded that the locals gathered reeds in the creek and made buoyancy belts of them. another record from gryteryd parish, småland, mentions the use of reed bundles for the same purpose. ethnologist sven lampa, who had documented local swimming methods in the province of västergötland, mentioned that the children in forshem parish used a bundle of club-rush, which they put under the chest when they learned to swim. club-rush is also mentioned as the usual material from the parishes of v. tunhems parish and alingsås in the same province. in the s in husby parish, in the province of Östergötland, they also used ‘swim belts’ made of club-rush bundles, which were placed in the folds of their arms and connected by a string in front of the chest. the same practice is recorded from västertälje parish. in kimstads parish in the same province, the ‘swim belts’ were made of reed. reed was also used in fläckebo parish, västmanland, when making floatation devices. in the late nineteenth century almost all ten-year-old boys in the parish of tuna, dalarna were taught to swim using ‘swim belts’ made of reed. although buoyancy belts made of cork or a simple wooden plank were predominant in the mid-nineteenth century , reed or club-rush bundles were still in use here and there. swedish author artur lundkvist actually mentions the use of reeds for flotation i. lidstrÖm and i. svanberg in a novel published in . a bathing place by a river is described through the eyes of a young boy as follows: when you went there afterwards there were the remnants of water wings made of reeds and other things too that they had plaited from the same materials, perhaps with water lilies stuck into them; you got the feeling of a lingering scent (of skin, hair and soap) and could see where their bodies had lain in the grass. in the collections of the nordic museum there is also a film recording from , made in n. rörum parish, skåne, in the southernmost part of sweden, which describes how to make a buoyancy device of club-rush. one year earlier, a tragic accident had occurred in northern sweden when a twelve-year-old boy was pulled down by the current and drowned in the river bure in the province of västerbotten, while he was learning to swim with the support of a bundle of club-rush. even today, some people still have their own personal memories of learning to swim with the aid of this traditional method. in , a local swedish newspaper wrote in celebration of ulla johansson’s th birthday. when recollecting memories from her childhood, she particularly mentioned how she had learned to swim by floating on small rafts made of reed. other countries the custom of using bundles of reed or club-rush as buoyancy devices is known from many parts of europe. we have a few scattered notes from the ethnographic and ethnobotanical literature, which can be given as examples. there are, for instance, some records from jutland, denmark. german renaissance botanist hieronymus bock writes in his herbal, new kreütterbuch, about the rush schoenoplectus lacustris, used when boys are learning to swim. we also have evidence from nineteenth century germany, for instance from mecklenburg, where the species was known as swennbeisen (standard german schwimmbinsen ‘swimming-rush’), as it was used for making buoy- ancy belts. furthermore, its use for the same purpose is described from switzerland and from the mountain lakes of upper austria and carinthia. this use of club-rush is also reported from the bodensee area. from the village of urvaste, in the county of võru in estonia (figure ), there is an interesting description of how the children used bundles of rush or reed when they learnt to swim. figure . floating devices on a drawing from võru in estonia. source: a. kalamees, eesti rahvamänge (tallinn, ), p. . folk life concluding remarks what we have described in this article is a widespread custom considered to have been, for the most part, permanently discontinued, since bladders and bundles of reed or club-rush have nowadays been replaced by manufactured plastic floatation devices. it should nevertheless be noted that the use of reed, club-rush and animal bladders in traditional swimming education was a method that lasted for a very long time. this indicates that some practices that are related to the play, games and customs of children and adolescents have been stable phenomena over long periods of time. within these practices, we sometimes encounter fascinating survivals of old knowledge. it seems especially clear that child-related practices connected with the bio-cultural domain and arising out of human-biota interaction, have noticeably transcended time and societal change. notes . e. dunning, ‘the structural-functional properties of folk-games and modern sports: a sociological analysis,’ sportwissenschaft ( ), ; a. guttmann, from ritual to record. the nature of modern sports (new york: columbia university press, ); m. hellspong, ‘slå trilla. en lek på gränsen mellan folklig och modern idrott,’ rig ( ), – ; i. lidström, ‘batting ‘runders’ on the island of runö. the incorporation of english bat-and- ball games into a traditional easter celebration (or how the shoal of ‘donkom’ got its name),’ arv. nordic yearbook of folklore ( ), . . d. b. van dalen, e. d. mitchell and b. bennett, a world history of physical education (new york: prentice-hall, ). . cf m. phillips and a.p. roper, ‘history of physical education,’ in the handbook of physical education, eds. d. kirk, d. macdonald and m. o’sullivan (london: sage publication, ), p. . . c. lévi-strauss, la pensée sauvage (paris: plon, ), pp. – . . w. balée, footprints of the forest: ka’apor ethnobotany: the historical ecology of plant utilization by an amazonian people (new york: columbia university press, ), p. . . c. antweiler, ‘local knowledge and local knowing. an anthropological analysis of con- tested “cultural products” in the context of development,’ anthropos ( ), pp. – . . n-a. bringéus, Årets festdagar (stockholm: carlsson, ), pp. – ; e. j. hobsbawm, ‘introduction: inventing traditions,’ in the invention of tradition, eds. e. j. hobsbawm & t. o. ranger (cambridge: cambridge university press, ), pp. – . . m. hugoson, ‘instant tradition: the introduction of the swedish easter tree,’ folklore ( ), – . . i. svanberg, ‘plant knowledge as indicator of historical cultural contacts: tanning in the atlantic fringe,’ in travelling cultures and plants: the ethnobiology and ethnopharmacy of migrations, eds. a. pieroni and i. vandebroek (oxford: berghahn books, ), p. . . c.a.m. lindman, bilder ur nordens flora, vol. (stockholm: wahlström & widstrand, ), p. ; i. svanberg i., Ł. Łuczaj, m. pardo-de-santayana, a. pieroni, ‘history and current trends of ethnobiological research in europe,’ in ethnobiology, eds. e.n. anderson, k. adams, d. pearsall, e. hunn, n.j. turner (hoboken nj: wiley- blackwell, ), p. . . s. lagercrantz, ‘inflated skins and their distribution,’ ethnos ( ), – . . b. mossberg and l. stenberg, nordens flora (stockholm: bonnier fakta, ), p. , . . k. seidel, die flechtbinse scirpus lacustris l. Ökologie, morphologie und entwicklung, ihre stellung bei den völkern und ihre wirtschaftliche bedeutung (stuttgart: schweizerbart’sche verlagsbuchhandlung, ); e. kiviat and e. hamilton, ‘phragmites use by native north americans,’ aquatic botany ( ), – ; j. f. köbbing, n. thevs and s. zerbe, ‘the i. lidstrÖm and i. svanberg utilisation of reed (phragmites australis): a review,’ mires and peat ( ), – ; i. svanberg, folklig botanik (stockholm: dialogos, ), pp. , – . . sources and their use for historical ethnobiological studies are discussed in i. svanberg, ’fabulat, plagiat och spökuppgifter: att använda berättande källor inom etnobiologi,’ in nycklar till kunskap: om människans bruk av naturen, eds. h. tunón and a. dahlström (stockholm: kungl. skogs- och lantbruksakademin, ), pp. – ; see also i. svanberg and Å. berggren, ‘bumblebee honey in the nordic countries,’ ethnobiology letters , no. ( ), pp. – . . e. digby, de arte natandi libri duo, quorum prior regulas ipsius artis, posterior vero praxin demonstrationemque continue (londini: thomas dawson, ). . lagercrantz, p. . . j. hornell, water transport: origins & early evolution. (cambridge: university press, ), pp. – . . the nordic museum archives, stockholm, sweden: document eu , eu , eu , eu , eu , eu . ethnologist per arvid säve mentions the use of ’pee bladders’ (pissblåsor) on the swedish island of gotland. p. a. säve, svenska lekar. , gotländska lekar (uppsala: almqvist & wiksell, ), p. . . olaus magnus, historia de gentibus septentrionalibus (roma: ioannem mariam de viottis parmensem, ), p. . . j. granlund, kommentarer. olaus magnus historia om de nordiska folken (stockholm: almqvist & wiksell, ), p. . . e. brännström, samiskt liv i äldre tid: uppteckningar från arvidsjaur och arjeplog (uppsala: kungl. gustav adolfs akademien, ), p. . . olaus magnus, p. . . granlund, p. . . c. linnaeus, flora lapponica (amstelædami: salomonem schouten, ), p. . . d. waldetoft, ‘när rya-rya badade,’ fataburen , – . . statens folkbadsutredning, friluftsbad, simhallar, bastur. simundervisning och simlärarutbildning: betänkande (stockholm: nord. bokh., ), pp. – . . h. sandblad, ‘läkaren arvid faxe, en pionjär för svensk simsport,’ idrott, historia och samhälle , – . . a. faxe, ‘swar på kongl. patriotiska sällskapets pris-fråga: hvilken är den bästa, lättaste och på egen erfarenhet grundade methode til simnings-konstens lärande för rikets ungdom?’hushållnings journal (october ), . . a. nordenskiöld, ‘swar på kongl. patriotiska sällskapets pris-fråga: hvilken är den bästa, lättaste och på egen erfarenhet grundade methode til simnings-konstens lärande för rikets ungdom?’ hushållnings journal (augustus ), . . g. schumacher, ‘swar på kongl. patriotiska sällskapets pris-fråga: hvilken är den bästa, lättaste och på egen erfarenhet grundade methode til simnings-konstens lärande för rikets ungdom?’ hushållnings journal (december ), . . faxe, p. ; sandblad. . j. ljunggren, kroppens bildning: linggymnastikens manlighetsprojekt (stockholm/stehag: symposion, ), p. – . . statens folkbadsutredning, pp. – . . e. bergvall, ‘simkunnighet,’ nordisk familjebok, (stockholm: nordisk familjeboks förl., ), pp. – . . the nordic museum archive, stockholm, sweden; folk life records: eu (stenestad, skåne); eu (alseda, småland); eu (gryteryd, småland); . from alseda parish in småland, gottfried wagnér recorded that the locals gathered reeds in the creek and made swim belts of it (nm: eu ). another record from gryteryd parish, småland, mentions the use of reed bundles for the same purpose (nm: eu ). . s. lampa, ‘folklekar från västergötland,’ svenska landsmål och svenskt folkliv ( ), . folk life . the nordic museum archive, stockholm, sweden; folk life records: eu (v. tunhem, västergötland), eu (alingsås, västergötland), eu (husby, Östergötland), eu (västertälje, Östergötland), eu (kimstad, Östergötland), eu (fläckebo, västmanland), eu (tuna, dalecarlia). . the nordic museum archive, stockholm, sweden: folk life records: eu köla parish, värmland, eu graninge parish, Ångermanland. . a. lundkvist, vandrarens träd (stockholm: albert bonniers, ), pp. – . our translation. original quotation: ‘när man gick dit efteråt låg där halvt upplösta simdynor av vass och saker som de flätat av vass, kanske med instuckna näckrosor i; man tyckte sig känna en kvardröjande lukt (av hud, hår och tvål) och spåra avtryck av deras kroppar i gräset.’ . the nordic museum, stockholm, sweden, ‘simdynor av säv’ (film no (norra rörum, s k å n e ) , h t t p s : / / w w w . y o u t u b e . c o m / w a t c h ? v = z h j m r a y w w & l i s t = plbc ae &index= &t= s [accessed march ]. . unknown author, ‘ -årig pojke drunknade i bureälven’, svenska dagbladet, july . . j. schalk, ‘skrattet gav ulla ett långt liv,’ mitt i tyresö, march , p. . . v. j. brøndegaard, folk og flora: dansk etnobotanik, vol. (københavn: rosenkilde og bagger, ), p. . . hieronymus bock, new kreuterbuch von underscheidt, würckung und namen der kreuter, so in teutschen landen wachsen (straßburg: wendelin rihel, ), p. r. . h. marzell, wörterbuch der deutschen pflanzennamen, vol. (stuttgart: hirzel verlag, ), p. . . k. applelt, ‘arundo donax. ein kulturgeschichtliches mosaik,’ wiener zeitschrift für die kunde des morgenlandes ( ), p. ; seidel, p. . . w. ostendorp and m. dienst, ‘geschichte der seeuferröhrichte in der grenzzone des bodensee-untersees,’ mitteilungen der thurgauischen naturforschenden gesellschaft ( ), pp. – . . a. kalamees, eesti rahvamänge (tallinn: eesti riiklik kirjastus, ), p. . . m. anderson, ‘sami children and traditional knowledge,’ in ecological knowledge in the north: studies in ethnobiology, eds. i. svanberg and h. tunón (uppsala: cbm, ), pp. – . disclosure statement no potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors. notes on contributors isak lidström is a sports historian and a phd-student at the department of sport science, malmö university. his research interests include sámi sport history, sport among ethnic minorities and traditional ball games. ingvar svanberg is an ethnobiologist and senior research fellow at the institute for russian and eurasian studies, uppsala university. his research interests include cultural zoology, ethnobo- tany, food culture and local knowledge about the biota. i. lidstrÖm and i. svanberg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v= zhjmrayww % list=plbc ae % index= % t= s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v= zhjmrayww % list=plbc ae % index= % t= s 	abstract 	introduction 	swimming equipment 	reed bundle floats 	the emergence of modern swimming education in sweden 	evidence in folkore archives, newspaper articles and fiction 	other countries 	concluding remarks 	notes 	disclosure statement 	notes on contributors presenting finnish art history in international context: journal of art historiography number december presenting finnish art history in an international context: the case of j. j. tikkanen review of: towards a science of art history: j. j. tikkanen and art historical scholarship in europe, the acts of an international conference, helsinki, december - , edited by johanna vakkari, taidehistoriallisia tutkimuksia / konsthistoriska studier / studies in art history , helsinki: society of art history, , pp., color plates, b. & w. illus., £ . hdbk, £ . pbk isbn - - - - . how to present the history of art history? this collection of papers takes a largely celebratory approach, as is fitting given the event that occasioned it: the th anniversary of the birth of johan jakob tikkanen, first professor of art history in finland. better integrating tikkanen’s contributions and context into the discipline’s history are promising goals. the proceedings of this conference address a range of topics which, in aggregate, underline the particular value of reexamining not only tikkanen’s scholarship but also art and its historiography in nordic lands and their relationships to broader european artistic and academic discourses. while it is left largely to the reader to draw out common themes and overriding questions raised by individual papers, such themes and questions are plentiful, and demonstrate the strengths of highlighting positive contributions made by turn-of-the-last-century art historians to the future of the discipline. at times, however, the papers suggest the corresponding weaknesses inherent in sidelining these same scholars’ engagement with the more disturbing cultural dialogues of their own day or, in the most egregious instance, in sidelining the scholar altogether. johanna vakkari’s brief preface outlines the organization of the conference proceedings into three sections: ‚the role of the arts in finland in j. j. tikkanen’s time,‛ ‚national and international art history,‛ and ‚viewing, experiencing and interpreting art.‛ her introduction provides an intellectual biography of tikkanen. she notes that his early and extensive training in painting, which concluded at the munich academy of art, appears to have informed his considerable skills in formal analysis as well as his interest in the creative process. both are integral to his doctoral work on giotto, completed in in german. here he began investigations of the roles of color and gesture in art that he would pursue throughout his career. he shared this interest in gesture with julius lange (subject of another essay in this collection), whose work tikkanen studied closely ( ). tikkanen’s lifelong work on color, with its forward- thinking technical and scientific considerations, would only be published posthumously ( ). in her notes as well as in her text, vakkari is concerned to emphasize tikkanen’s work on color and gesture as both undervalued and particularly relevant to twenty-first- century scholarly concerns. another forward-thinking aspect of tikkanen’s scholarship addressed in tikkanen’s dissertation was the relationship of giotto’s work to earlier, byzantine- jeanne-marie musto review of: vakkari on tikkanen influenced painting ( ). vakkari notes that, during studies abroad following tikkanen’s doctoral work (from to ), it was the ‚byzantine problem‛ that came to preoccupy him ( ). having acquainted himself with anton springer and his students, tikkanen published studies on subjects that springer had only recently addressed, such as the genesis mosaics in san marco, venice. tikkanen wished to underline the byzantine contribution to western art, which springer had not considered particularly important ( - ). it appears that tikkanen had been encouraged in this bold direction by both eduard dobbert in berlin and eugène müntz in paris, who led him to the work of leading byzantinist nikodim kondakov. by the s tikkanen was corresponding with both kondakov and his student dmitrii ainalov, and studying russian for the purpose of accessing byzantine manuscripts in russian collections ( ). this reader wished that vakkari had not broken up her discussion of this aspect of tikkanen’s scholarship into separate sections of her paper. it would be interesting to know more about tikkanen’s embrace of the byzantine material both because it suggests tikkanen had taken a position relative to geopolitical concerns embedded in the international dialogue concerning medieval art, and because it is a thread that has relevance to other papers presented in the conference. the three essays in the section on the role of the arts in tikkanen’s time highlight common themes. the governing board of the finnish art society during the last decades of the nineteenth and the early twentieth centuries included j. j. tikkanen and the scholar who had guided his dissertation, carl gustaf estlander ( - ). susanna pettersson, in considering tikkanen’s contributions to the society, demonstrates his lifelong efforts to promote contemporary finnish art and artists. at the same time, she addresses tensions between the academic community and the artistic community that even tikkanen, though he had trained as a painter, did not fully manage to bridge. riiitta konttinen presents another angle on these tensions in her essay on the finnish art world at the end of the nineteenth century. both estlander and, to a lesser extent, tikkanen, retained artistic orientations rooted in german idealism. these were strongly challenged by the realist, impressionist and symbolist approaches to painting in france that increasingly fascinated the leading finnish artists ( , , , ). in estlander made his preference for german idealism explicit to his student, the painter helena westermark; her subsequent embrace of french art and ideas, evident in her work by , was subjected to his opprobrium as well as that of tikkanen and the finnish press ( - ). by the tables had turned. the inaugural exhibition of the finnish art society’s collections in a purpose-built space, which estlander in particular had worked hard to achieve, met with such disapproval for its rejection of french ideas from the now numerous finnish artists who had trained in france, that to appease the artists the next exhibition, held in , was jointly organized with the artist’s association of finland. estlander only grudgingly accepted the presence of impressionist works, openly wondering whether the finnish art society should give up holding exhibitions altogether ( ). an intriguing light is shed on this split between artistic and academic orientations in finland by konttinen’s comment that, even during a period of growing jeanne-marie musto review of: vakkari on tikkanen political tensions between the grand duchy of finland and the russian empire, when looking beyond france, finnish painters looked towards russian realism more than towards german developments ( ). the finnish academic community, by contrast, turned increasingly towards german scholarship, as is evident by the languages in which dissertations were being written at the university of helsinki. while dissertations in german were the exception when tikkanen completed his, by more were written in german than in any other language. the triumph of the french-oriented artists’ community is evident in the following essay, in which anna-maria von bonsdorff investigates finnish art at the turn of the twentieth century. the goal towards which axel gallén, pekka halonen and väinö blomstedt, in particular, aspired, was a ‚nordic renaissance‛ ( ). to achieve this they studied assyrian and egyptian art and the italian primitives at the louvre, while absorbing the techniques and ideas of puvis de chavannes and gaugin ( - , - ). through combining historic models and contemporary ideas, these finns sought to produce ‚a mirror of simultaneity, linking time and reflecting the past in the future and the future in the past‛ that would, through their intervention, be specifically finnish ( ). five essays comprise the second section, ‚national and international art history.‛ the first two of these provide a scandinavian context for tikkanen’s work. mai britt guleng’s essay on lorentz dietrichson ( - ) looks at the development of a specifically norwegian art historical narrative. this narrative, she demonstrates, ‚pointed forward to an, as yet, unrealized end: a future golden age for norwegian art‛ ( ). another interesting aspect of dietrichson’s work indirectly suggested by her paper concerns his transition from literary historian to art historian. art history was a subspecialty commonly tied to literature and aesthetics. estlander in helsinki, for example, served as professor of aesthetics and modern literature from to , while carl rupert nyblom in uppsala served as professor of aesthetics, literature and art history from to . dietrichson, who was of the same generation as estlander, began his career as a literary historian in sweden ( n. ). he wrote histories of both danish ( ) and swedish ( ) nineteenth-century literature before turning to the poetry of norway, his birthplace. when, in - , dietrichson turned his efforts towards a history of norwegian poetry, he emphasized that during the period of danish rule norway had not stagnated but rather had experienced inner growth ( - ). dietrichson’s positive assessment of the impact of danish rule was spurred by his political advocacy of a reunited scandinavian monarchy ( ; n. ). the gap in norway’s literary output evidently still troubled him, however. inspired by the cultural approach to literary history taken by hippolyte taine, dietrichson sought other forms of art to fill this gap and so turned to the subject of norwegian woodworking ( ). by this new direction had earned him an extraordinary professorship in art history at the university of christiana (oslo) – the first professorship in art history in norway. one can’t help but wonder whether, if norway’s literary history had been continuous, matti klinge, ‚the germanophil university‛, in finland: people, nation, state, london: hurst, , . jeanne-marie musto review of: vakkari on tikkanen dietrichson would have turned to art at all. marianne marcussen’s essay on danish art historian julius lange emphasizes his european context. lange, after petitioning the university to let him graduate in art history was, in , the first to receive a degree in the discipline as such ( ). marcussen points out lange’s indebtedness to carl friedrich von rumohr who, in the s, had introduced the catalogue raisonée and quellenkritik to denmark, and to niels lauritz høyen, director of the danish royal art collection, who was engaged in inventorying denmark’s medieval architecture at the time he oversaw lange’s examinations ( ; ). for lange, the art of classical greece towered over that of all other times and places ( ). the sculpted nude fascinated him most of all. his unfinished magnum opus on this subject was published, in full, shortly after his death ( - ). within nordic art it is not surprising, therefore, that lange held classicizing sculpture by the internationally- trained scandinavians johan tobias sergel and bertel thorvaldsen in his highest esteem ( ), rather than work in any native specialty (such as dietrichson’s norwegian woodcarving). asked to write a nordic supplement for two danish editions ( and ) of wilhelm lübke’s popular survey of art history, lange obliged ( ). having fought in the second schleswig war against prussia and austria, however, lange bore a grudge against germans that he did not conceal in his explanations to the reader. this reader found amusing some of his changes to the edition – for instance, placing the section on the italian renaissance before, rather than after, the section on the german renaissance ( ). it was lübke who had essentially created the concept of a german renaissance with his monumental study of . that it existed, lange was apparently willing to accept, but that it had superceded the italian renaissance, apparently not. lange’s ambivalence towards lübke’s german-centric narrative highlights his desire and that of other scholars beyond the new german empire, of feeling compelled both to engage with german scholarship and to maintain critical distance. marcussen notes lange’s, estlander’s and nyblom’s participation in a specifically scandinavian forum for art history, tidskrift för bildande konst och konstindustri, founded by dietrichson in , which helped to address this concern ( ). the significance not only of german contributions to art history but also of german art collections only continued to grow. by , within the german empire, increasing interest in the art of non-western peoples had led to the founding of the islamic museum in berlin and the re-establishment of the indian department of the museum of ethnology as an independent entity; by a collection of east asian art was also in the works ( ). that such resources sparked great interest among scandinavians is indicated by minna törmä’s contribution. she documents an excursion to berlin organized by osvald sirén for his students in . this reader would have appreciated a little more background on his studies under tikkanen and his position, as of , as professor of art history at the university of stockholm (apparently the first permanent chair in art history as an independent discipline in the nordic lands). the wilhelm lübke, geschichte der deutschen renaissance, stuttgart: ebner & seubert, . jeanne-marie musto review of: vakkari on tikkanen extensive non-western portions of their visit were presumably informed by sirén’s developing expertise in non-western – and especially chinese art. törmä notes that sirén had taken his first trip to japan the preceding year and, like otto kümmel, the curator in berlin, drew much of his knowledge of chinese art from japanese scholarship, as well as from ernest fenollosa at the museum in fine arts in boston ( ). it is with gianni carlo sciolla’s essay on the origins of ‘kunstwissenschaft’ in italy that we return to consideration of tikkanen’s personal contributions. in tikkanen, towards the end of his post-graduate study tour, arrived in rome. here he met adolfo venturi, a scholar from modena. at that time, as sciolla explains, venturi was engaged in launching a new journal, l’archivio storico dell’arte, with domenico gnoli ( ). venturi encouraged tikkanen to contribute to the journal. tikkanen obliged and for the first volume, published in , submitted an article-length analysis of the mosaics of san marco, which he would expand and publish as a monograph in the following year. a connection could be drawn here to vakkari’s discussion of tikkanen’s analysis of the mosaics, which contradicted springer’s ( ). tikkanen made a second contribution to the journal in – this time a book review. sciolla tells us that tikkanen’s review of josef strzygowski’s das etschmiadzin evangeliar ‚shows extensive learning and knowledge of early christian and byzantine art and iconography, along with the principal related literature (springer, kondakoff, müntz)‛ ( ). what is more, according to sciolla, tikkanen’s articles demonstrated the use of formal and iconographical analysis in a manner that was new within italy. sciolla devotes much of his discussion to the early italian art historians, and in particular to those who founded art-historical journals. he closes by describing a journal launched in that employed ‚a mould clearly deriving from the viennese school of art history, whose methodological approach was, by this time, also spreading in italy, and it will become more noticeable in the years to come‛ ( ). given the significance of the vienna school and strzygowski’s famously difficult relationship with it, it would be satisfying to know more about tikkanen’s reception of strzygowski’s work in the l’archivio review. had venturi or tikkanen already made strzygowski’s acquaintance in rome, as seems likely? reasons why one might be tempted to disregard such questions come to the fore in the next essay. georg vasold considers both the historical and the contemporary reception of josef strzygowski in ‚riegl, strzygowski and the development of art.‛ (a german version of this article may be found in ars, journal of the institute of art history of the slovak academy of sciences, , no. , according to a note at the end of the article.) vasold notes ‚a strikingly intensive involvement with the founding fathers of art historiography has lately given rise to conferences and publications, all of which seek to remind us of the early masters of our discipline and their often forgotten achievements‛ ( ). the present volume celebrating tikkanen might be considered as confirmation of this observation. rather than ‚respect for one’s elders,‛ however, vasold asserts that studying the history of art history ‚is primarily a question of analyzing writings, studying the origin and their impact in context, and keeping that impact in mind.‛ vasold finds alois riegl, for instance, ‚championing the cause of intellectual freedom jeanne-marie musto review of: vakkari on tikkanen and deploring its subordination to political ends‛ ( ). vasold notes that josef strzygowski, riegl’s nemesis, did not follow suit; much of strzygowski’s work reflected an obsession for undermining riegl, or an obsessive anti-semitism, or both. vasold mentions that danish art historian julius lange’s work also contains irrational, even rabidly anti-semitic remarks, and that these have not gained lange equivalent opprobrium ( ). julius schlosser, a leading member of the vienna school, was a great admirer of lange who overlooked the issue ( ); marianne marcussen, in her paper in the present volume, does the same. the reader is left to wonder to what extent anti-semitism played a structural role in lange’s or schlosser’s work akin to that which strzygowski’s played in his. for his part, vasold notes the context of widespread anti-semitism, but finds strzygowski’s work to be uniquely irredeemable. vasold concludes by asking whether ‚there is any real justification to view strzygowski in a positive light, to describe him as pioneer of global art history, and to make a distinction between the ‚early,’ supposedly interesting strzyowski, and the ‘later,’ openly racist scholar? in every respect the answer is emphatically ‘no!’‛ ( ). overt racism dramatically distorted much of strzygowski’s work. vasold’s answer remains, nevertheless confusing. it should be possible to find some aspects of a scholar’s work to be useful, some less so or even problematic, and others reprehensible. strzygowski could well have been both innovative in his global focus, and a virulent racist. what is more, the virulent anti-semitism for which strzygowski is infamous does not come to the fore in his work until , well into his career and over a decade after tikkanen’s review. given his major role in the art-historical dialogue of his day, can we afford to ignore whether anything aside from anti-semitism propelled his thinking? he was an integral part of the larger dialogue; we can’t understand it without him. by the same token, we might ask whether lange’s anti-semitism and schlosser’s indifference have been sufficiently investigated in relation to their broader agendas. racism of one sort or another has informed much of the history of art history. even riegl resorted to racism when it suited his political agenda; his was anti-slavic. vasold’s unmitigated rejection of strzygowski appears in the end to be a foil for his unquestioning praise for riegl, which in turn is rooted in the same search for attractive founding fathers that he rejected at the outset. this search promises misunderstandings. scholarship in art history has been at least as rife with racism and politicization as scholarship in any other discipline. a sanitized historiography can only obscure the scope of the issue. the four papers in the third and final section of the conference proceedings, ‚viewing, experiencing and interpreting art‛, take an eclectic range of approaches to turn-of-the-century art history. altti kuusamo evaluates formalism as an approach to art in ‚the idea of art as a form behind tactile values: the recuperation of art in art schlosser’s ambivalent comments concerning jewish artistic abilities are addressed in matthew rampley, ‚art history and the politics of empire: rethinking the vienna school‛, the art bulletin (dec. ), . ‚strzygowski’s first extended anti-semitic tirade was his article ‘hellas in des orients umarmung,’ beilage zur münchener allgemeinen zeitung, - ( ).‛ see rampley, ‚art history and the politics of empire", n. . this tirade is the focus of vasold’s analysis; he cites no earlier anti-semitic remark on strzygowski’s part. rampley, ‚art history and the politics of empire‛, - . jeanne-marie musto review of: vakkari on tikkanen history c. years ago.‛ kuusamo focuses on the overriding interest in formal qualities in art expressed by bernard berenson, clive bell and roger fry. berenson, kuusamo notes, referred often to the ‚tactile values‛ of artworks, but without concrete explanation of these values ( - ). paradoxically, kuusamo writes, berenson, like other formalists, uses this concept to denote a pure or universal significance that elevates artworks beyond the sensual immediacy that the term ‚tactile values‛ implies ( ). kuusamo cites a variety of authorities to underline the limitations of ‚the culture of form‛ promoted by the ‚atmosphere around berenson‛ ( ). kuusamo underlines at the outset that berenson, bell and fry belonged to ‚different camps‛ of art historical analysis than did j. j. tikkanen and his student osvald sirén ( ). tikkanen, kuusamo notes, took a strong interest in narrative, while sirén wrote that form is merely a vehicle for ‚some indwelling purpose or principle‛ ( ). this reader wished that kuusamo had had an opportunity to delve deeper into the interrelationships between these camps. sirén, for instance, while he sparred with berenson concerning attributions of italian artworks, chose english rather than german as the primary language for his publications at a time when the formalist mode dominated anglophone scholarship, and contributed, along with roger fry, to a pioneering introduction to chinese art (chinese art: an introductory handbook to painting, sculpture, ceramics, textiles, bronzes and minor arts, london, ). a look at just how differently sirén approached artworks from berenson, or just how strongly the methodology of his introduction to chinese materials diverged from fry’s, might yield a more complex discussion of these camps – one that could perhaps shed some light on tikkanen as well. in ‚learning by looking (with words): wölfflin’s legacy,‛ dan karlholm analyzes ‚wölfflin’s scholarly working procedure with respect to the basic human activities of looking and speaking‛ ( ). this approach reveals the significance of lecturing as an analytical framework for wölfflin’s writing, and how his ample use of speech metaphors maintains the primacy of oral presentation in his publications. karlhom explores, furthermore, how wölfflin’s pioneering use of photographic images did not so much demonstrate points concerning the artworks represented by the images, as reify the ability of these images to ‚speak‛ to him while he transmitted to the audience what the images had to say. that these images distorted the size of the originals and omitted their colors and textures further served wölfflin’s purposes, as karlhom elucidates. for wölfflin, the artwork demonstrated less the specific goals or circumstances of any given artist, viewer, time or place, than an abstract concept of ‚classic‛ or ‚baroque.‛ wölfflin, in karlholm’s analysis, thus specifically embraced the disembodied image. wölfflin explained, for instance, of how to establish ideal viewpoints for d works - viewpoints that would allow these works to be analyzed as static, d images. his aesthetic system did not incorporate movement through time or space, and thus it was the d version of a sculpture or work of architecture that captured, for wölfflin, its true, universal image – that is, one that could be projected on a wall adjacent to a similarly abstracted image and so help to establish the dialectic that was wölflin’s larger jeanne-marie musto review of: vakkari on tikkanen goal. at the end of his discussion karlholm notes wölfflin’s interpretation of impressionism not in terms of texture or color, but rather as the physical world transformed into ‚a view of things as they appear to the eye,‛ that is, the transformation of the tactile into the visual ( ). it is in this sense that wölfflin did not merely champion impressionist painting, but found in the term ‚impressionism‛ a means of defining and, thereby, revalorizing the virtues that he found in the baroque. an odd stage for alessandro scafi’s article, ‚warburg and böcklin: myths in word and image,‛ is set by the quotations in vasold’s article that demonstrate strzygowski’s similarly tremendous admiration for böcklin. for strzygowski, böcklin was the modern flower of ‚slavo-celto-german‛ art ( , ). for warburg, böcklin was ‚the champion of a new renaissance< free from the restraints of judeo-christian ethics‛ ( ), that offered ‚a corrective to the bourgeois materialism of modern society‛ ( ). seemingly with the text of the christian sermon preached at böcklin’s funeral still ringing in his ears, warburg struggled through ten drafts of a poem in remembrance of the occasion. scafi focuses on the final draft, noting that earlier drafts of this poem have been quoted in discussions of warburg without attending to their provisional nature ( ). warburg sought to create an alternate, pagan text – one that honored böcklin’s paganism and his specifically pagan funereal imagery ( ). scafi highlights warburg’s literary ambitions and his strong identification with böcklin as a fellow seeker of a better world who had likewise left the germanic north for self-imposed exile in florence ( - ). an investigation of ‚stendhal’s syndrome‛ by anna kortelainen draws the volume to a close. this syndrome, as kortelainen describes it, ‚may occur when a sensitive foreigner is exposed to art, especially renaissance art in florence<dizziness, disorientation, euphoria, rapid heartbeat, confusion, emotional collapse, and even psychosis‛ may result ( ). the diagnosis, as it turns out, is fairly new. it was first made and named by the psychiatrist graziella magherini in ( ). jerusalem and paris lend their names to related syndromes, in which visitors to those cities are overcome by, respectively, religious or cultural euphoria. kortelainen describes stendhal’s experience in florence in , for which the syndrome was named ( ), and anna dostoevskaya’s descriptions of her husband fyodor’s and others’ similar experiences in front of florentine paintings which, at least in fyodor’s case, have traditionally been attributed to epilepsy ( - ). kortelainen’s book on this subject, in finnish, has just been released. the grand duchy of finland in tikkanen’s day occupied a rapidly evolving geopolitical position within the russian empire, near the german empire, and adjacent to sweden, a nation that had once controlled it. this volume provides a useful introduction to issues concerning european art and art history from the perspective of a people striving towards independence while experiencing the pull of russian, german and scandinavian academic and cultural orientations. the issues these papers raise deserve further investigation in the interest of broadening and reframing the historiography of art, which has generally been written from a more narrowly central and western european perspective. that said, a few production issues are worth noting. jeanne-marie musto review of: vakkari on tikkanen translating the essays into english has produced typos and grammatical errors which are occasionally confusing, e.g., ‚we can thus not image that a wide brow denotes intelligence‛ ( ), where ‚image‛ apparently means ‚assume,‛ or ‚the german atropos geographers‛ ( ) meaning, it would seem, germans who investigated human geography, or ‚the mystery of tactile badly values needed a theory‛ ( ), where ‚badly‛ may belong on the other side of ‚values.‛ perhaps owing to their origin as talks, an essay occasionally has not been provided with endnotes sufficient for the reader to trace just what has been pulled from where (e.g., guleng nn. - ). an annotated bibliography of tikkanen’s writings (or a note stating where one might find one) and a brief vita would have been useful supplements to this volume. jeanne-marie musto department of art and art history sewanee: the university of the south university ave. sewanee, tn - u.s.a. jmmusto@sewanee.edu acta ant. hung. doi: . / . . . . - © the author – open access damiano acciarino the nature of renaissance antiquarianism: history, methodology, definition* summary: the aim of this work is to provide a possible definition for renaissance antiquarianism. this cultural pathway, which influenced the way the past was interpreted between the fourteenth and seven- teenth centuries, represented a methodological perspective which involved the cross-referencing of het- erogeneous sources, strongly linked to mankind’s perception of time and that helped shape a renewed historical consciousness. focus will be devoted to a possible history of the phenomenon and a general explanation of its methodology. key words: renaissance, antiquarianism, classical tradition, philology, collecting premises the first attempt to describe the phenomenon of antiquarianism as one of the key moments in the evolution of renaissance thought can be traced back to the s, when the definition formulated by arnaldo momigliano in his seminal essay ancient history and the antiquarian ( ) led to the impact of material sources on the development of modern thought being clearly identified as a crucial factor in the classical tradition and the history of ideas. according to momigliano, antiquarianism was a matter of * this project has received funding from the european union’s horizon research and inno- vation program under the marie sklodowska-curie grant agreement no . momigliano, a.: ancient history and the antiquarian. jwi . ( ) – ; momigliano, a.: contributo alla storia degli studi classici. rome ; momigliano, a.: secondo contributo alla storia degli studi classici. rome ; momigliano, a.: the classical foundations of modern historiog- raphy [sather classical lectures ]. berkeley ; crawford, m. – ligota, r.: ancient history and the antiquarian: essays in memory of arnaldo momigliano. london . damiano acciarino acta ant. hung. historical method, which involved “the systematic collection of relics from the past” and their interpretation with a critical approach. he considered it to be strongly linked to mankind’s perception of time which, thanks to the accumulation of remains over the centuries, helped shape a deeper historical consciousness. scholars such as eugenio garin and roberto weiss attempted to coax out fur- ther details by taking into consideration the experience of philosophers and human- ists from a diachronic perspective: in l’umanesimo italiano: filosofia e vita civile nel rinascimento ( ) and the renaissance discovery of classical antiquity ( ), respectively, they offered a general overview of the many phases of this cultural move- ment. the works carried out in parallel by peter burke, the renaissance sense of the past ( ), the contributions of sebastiano timpanaro, la genesi del metodo di lachman ( ), and silvia rizzo, il lessico filologico degli umanisti ( ), on renaissance philological techniques and the many other studies conducted on the humanistic method all shed further light on its origin and nature. vast contributions to this area have been made by the scholarship of angelo mazzocco, who explored these dynamics during the fifteenth century – especially in his flavio biondo and the antiquarian tradition ( ) – but above all by the studies of anthony grafton, who opened up several pathways for investigating the various aspects of this subject between the fifteenth and seventeenth centuries – his essays on poliziano ( ) and scaliger ( – ), as well as his bring out your dead: the past as revelation ( ) and his what was history? the art of history in early mod- ern europe ( ) all represent milestones in the field. salvatore settis, especially in his memoria dell’antico nell’arte italiana ( – ), increased enormously the paradigms of classical tradition within the arts. the strong foundations put in place by these masters have been built on more recently by several scholars, including leonard barkan, who worked on archaeol- momigliano: ancient history (n. ). garin, e.: l’umanesimo italiano: filosofia e vita civile nel rinascimento. bari . weiss, r.: the renaissance discovery of classical antiquity. oxford . burke, p.: the renaissance sense of the past. london . timpanaro, s.: la genesi del metodo del lachmann. florence . rizzo, s.: il lessico filologico degli umanisti. rome . mazzocco, a.: some philological aspects of biondo flavio’s roma triumphans. humanistica lovaniensia ( ) – ; mazzocco, a.: biondo flavio and the antiquarian tradition. in schoeck, r. j. (ed.): acta conventus neo-latini bononiensis. proceedings of the fourth international congress of neo-latin studies, bologna august to september . binghamton, ny , – ; mazzoc- co, a. – laureys, m. (eds.): a new sense of the past: the scholarship of biondo flavio ( – ) [supplementa humanistia lovaniensia xxxix]. leuven . grafton, a.: on the scholarship of politian and its context. jwi ( ) – ; grafton, a.: joseph scaliger, a study in history of classical scholarship. i. textual criticism. oxford ; grafton, a.: joseph scaliger, a study in history of classical scholarship. ii. historical chronol- ogy. oxford ; grafton, a.: bring out your dead: the past as revelation. cambridge, ma ; grafton, a.: what was history? the art of history in early modern europe. cambridge . settis, s.: memoria dell’antico nell’arte italiana. i: l’uso dei classici, ii: i generi e i temi ritro- vati, iii: dalla tradizione all’archeologia. torino – . barkan, l.: unearthing the past: archaeology and aesthetics in the making of renaissance culture. new haven – london . the nature of renaissance antiquarianism acta ant. hung. ogy ( ); william stenhouse, who mostly investigated epigraphy ( ), collect- ing ( ) and the idea of antiquarianism in general ( ); christian dekesel, who focused on numismatics ( ), ingo herklotz, who analysed the figure of the anti- quarian scholar ( ) as well several cases of ecclesiastical antiquarianism ( ); peter miller, who approached antiquarianism with a geographical print ( ) and its interactions with collecting finds from antiquity ( ); and monica centanni, who carried out a profound analysis of the many manifestations of classical tradition and rebirth of antiquity ( ). all these scholars have brought new readings to the multi- farious and complex interpretations of this field. the research conducted on renaissance antiquarianism still flourishes today, taking the form of several publications and conferences: among the latter, special men- tion should be made of the sessions organised at the rsa annual meeting by ginette vagenheim and joseph connors, interpreting the antique – , and by rich- ard calis, antiquarianism and ethnography in the early modern world, during the course of which several original aspects of renaissance antiquarianism emerged. however, the concept of renaissance antiquarianism per se has not yet been com- pletely and fully defined: this remains very much a work in progress which deserves a thorough multi-disciplinary examination of the phenomenon from a transnational per- spective. the very nature of renaissance antiquarianism means it cannot be reduced to a simple formulation, nor can it be encapsulated in a single history: antiquarianism during the renaissance is in fact represented by a multitude of coexisting formulations that are expressed through a plurality of histories. stenhouse, w.: reading inscriptions and writing ancient history: historical scholarship in the late renaissance [bulletin of the institute of classical studies suppl. ]. london ; stenhouse, w.: antiquarianism. in grafton, a. – most, w. – settis, s.: the classical tradition. cambridge, ma ; stenhouse, w.: roman antiquities and the emergence of renaissance civic collections. journal of the history of collections . ( ) – ; stenhouse, w.: from spolia to collections in the roman renaissance. in altekamp, a. – marcks-jacobs, c. – seiler, p. (eds.): perspektiven der spolienforschung. berlin ; stenhouse, w.: imagination and the remains of roman antiquity. in: caferro, w.: the routledge history of the renaissance. london . bodon, g.: veneranda antiquitas: studi sull’eredità dell’antico nella rinascenza veneta. bern ; bodon, g.: enea vico fra memoria e miraggio della classicità. rome ; on ancient numismat- ics during the renaissance, see also stahl, a.: the rebirth of antiquity: numismatics, archaeology and classical studies in the culture of the renaissance. princeton ; missere fontana, f.: testimoni parlanti: le monete antiche a roma tra cinquecento e seicento. rome ; cunnally, j.: images of the illustrious: the numismatic presence in the renaissance. princeton ; dekesel, c.: bibliotheca nummaria: bibliography of the th century numismatic books. london . herklotz, i.: la roma degli antiquari: cultura e erudizione tra cinquecento e settecento. rome ; herklotz, i.: apes urbanae: eruditi, mecenati e artisti nella roma del seicento. città di castello . miller, p.: history and its objects. ithaca, london , – ; miller, p.: peiresc’s mediter- ranean world. cambridge, ma ; schnapp, a.: world antiquarianism: comparative perspectives. los angeles ; miller, p. – louis, f. (eds): antiquarianism and intellectual life in europe and china, – . ann arbor . centanni, m.: fantasmi dell’antico. la tradizione classica nel rinascimento. rimini . this session was devided in four different panels: (i) architects face the antique ; (ii) archi- tects face the antique ; (iii) the antiquarians and the antique; (iv) the humanists and the antique. damiano acciarino acta ant. hung. therefore, the purpose of this paper is to retrace one of its possible histories from the supposed origins to its ideal endpoint, and to better differentiate between its applied methodologies; taking all these aspects into consideration, the final objective is to provide a reliable but not absolute definition that embraces the complex forms through which antiquarianism could have been interpreted by the various levels of understanding of renaissance scholars. history there are specific historical reasons why renaissance antiquarianism became a vital piece in the puzzle of how to approach knowledge. developing at the same time as new philo- logical trends that found support from the increase in the number of archaeological inves- tigations conducted, its history fully embraces the spirit of humanism. starting in italy, it spread throughout europe between the fourteenth and seventeenth centuries, at which point the new scientific culture, which had initially been favoured by antiquarian studies, began to establish a decisive influence as society moved towards a new phase of modernity. its origins date back to around the beginning of the fourteenth century in padua, veneto, where scholars such as lovato lovati ( – ) and albertino mussato ( – ) began rewriting the history of classics by removing the gothic influences from these texts. the work of giovanni de matociis (death ) of verona is also worthy of mention, as he adorned the margins of the manuscript of his historia impe- rialis with pictorial representations of the emperors that corresponded to his narrative and which were openly inspired by ancient coins. concurrent and corresponding phenomena took place in other areas of italy. in rome and its surrounding areas, interest towards and investigations of ancient ruins can be detected almost simultaneously: proto-humanists among whom giovanni colonna ( – ) and zanobi da strada ( – ) explored libraries discovering ancient manuscripts, and started collecting and interpreting ancient epigraphic inscriptions. cola di rienzo’s ( – ) public reading of the lex de imperio vespasiani represents an iconic transitional moment to a new perception of the antique and its role in history. witt, r.: in the footsteps of the ancients: the origins of humanism from lovato to bruni. leiden . weiss (n. ); billanovich, g.: il preumanesimo padovano. in storia della cultura veneta. vol. ii, vicenza , – ; favaretto, i.: arte antica e cultura antiquaria nelle collezioni venete al tempo della serenissima. rome ; calvelli, l.: un testimone della lex de imperio vespasiani del tardo trecento: francesco zabarella. athenaeum . ( ) – . bodon: veneranda antiquitas (n. ); weiss (n. ). sabbatini, r.: le scoperte dei codici latini e greci ne’ secoli xiv e xv. edizione anastatica con nuove aggiunte e correzioni dell’autore a cura di e. garin, vols. . florence (ed. or. - ), , – ; miglio, m.: scritture, scrittori e storia, vols. . manziana ; internullo, d.: due romani e la riscoperta dei classici a montecassino nel trecento. in capasso, m. – de nonno, m. (eds.): studi paleografici e papirologici in ricordo di paolo radiciotti. lecce ; internullo, d.: ai margini dei giganti. la vita intellettuale dei romani del trecento ( – ca.). rome . the nature of renaissance antiquarianism acta ant. hung. nonetheless, the honorary title of “founding father of renaissance antiquarian- ism” can be attributed to francesco petrarca ( – ), who began developing an interest in the study of remains from antiquity in parallel with the many ancient man- uscripts that he discovered. within the broader restoration of the ‘latin golden age’, petrarca’s followers coluccio salutati ( – ), niccolò niccoli ( – ) and poggio bracciolini ( – ) represent the most prominent examples of how this humanistic sensitivity helped antiquarianism develop in complexity. the loggia dei lanzi was being erected in florence at that precise time ( ca.), clear evidence that the revival in literary output was being matched by a resurgence in classical architecture. a fundamental contribution in the development of this cultural dynamic was provided by ciriaco d’ancona ( – ) who, through his detailed descriptions of antiquity carried out during his many journeys throughout the mediterranean, could very well be considered to be the initiator of modern archaeology. at the same time, giovanni marcanova ( ca.– ) depicted roman antiquities in his manuscripts. it is therefore clear to see how flavio biondo ( – ) rewrote the history of rome and many other italian cities in his roma instaurata and roma triumphans by linking his classical readings with the findings of numerous inspections carried out on loca- tion. it is also interesting to note that filippo brunelleschi ( – ), inspired by the pantheon in rome, projected the dome of santa maria del fiore in florence at the same time by applying the knowledge obtained from his observation of roman ruins. he achieved this through his increased knowledge of forgotten elements of classical architecture and by using them to develop modern solutions: the ancient source became the doorway for a new creation. as sources of different types began to take up a unitary connotation, the under- standing gradually dawned that texts and material findings could be complementary elements. this realisation became essential for the interpenetration of the concept of history and cultural heritage at that time, which implied the development of a renewed sensitivity for the unitary coherence of tradition. in essence, the antiquarian perspective embodied the spirit that allowed leon battista alberti ( – ) to critically read vitruvius, to write de re aedificatoria and to conceive the facade of the basilica of billanovich, g.: la tradizione del testo di livio e le origini dell’umanesimo. padova ; weiss (n. ); miller, p.: major trends in european antiquarianism, petrarch to peiresc. in rabasa, j. – sato, m. – tortarolo, e. – woolfe, d. (eds.): the oxford history of historical writing, – , vol. . oxford , – ; mazzocco, a.: the antiquarianism of francesco petrarca. the journal of medieval and renaissance studies ( ) – ; weiss, r. petrarch the antiquarian. in hender- son, c. (ed.): classical, medieval and renaissance studies in honor of berthold louis ullman. rome , – . witt (n. ). paci, g. – sconocchia, s. (edd): ciriaco d’ancona e la cultura antiquaria dell’umanesimo. atti del convegno interniazionale di studio, ancona – febbraio . reggio emilia . cartwright, s.: the collectio antiquitatum of giovanni marcanova and the quattrocento an- tiquarian sylloge: modena, biblioteca estense universitaria ms. alfa.l. . =lat. . ann arbor . mazzocco (n. ); http://www.repertoriumblondianum.org/ (accessed april ). damiano acciarino acta ant. hung. sant’andrea in mantova as a roman triumphal arch. alberti was also the creator of the certamen coronarium ( ), a poetry contest which celebrated the incorporation of the latin quantitative metric system into the italian language – the purpose here was to translate the structure of ancient poetic ‘architecture’ into contemporary language. in the late fifteenth century, the driving force behind this evolution of thought is considered to be angelo poliziano ( – ), who was capable of building a critical method in his miscellanea that was so impacting as to develop into a standard and became the benchmark for the antiquarian scholars who followed. his intuitions in the field of classical philology, which were based on manuscript witnesses, the identification of linguistic usages through the history of language, the constitution of cultural models, the comparative technique and a rudimentary palaeography, brought to light what was later referred to as “the history of tradition”. in this way, he approached the text as an ancient finding and heritage of the past from which tangible data could be drawn. however, this approach, the purpose of which was to reconstruct the original shape of this cultural bequest, was not substantially sufficient to fulfil the voids in the tradition. in response, the humanists compiled a diverse range of interpretative systems to tackle this issue. one example: in his castigationes plinianae, ermolao barbaro ( – ) drew analogies with the world around him, especially when explaining naturalistic items, in order to compensate for the general lack of knowledge of these matters at the time. this comparison became a necessary passage adopted by the entire scholarship in order to comprehend the ancient universe through known and controllable parameters. in parallel, encyclopedic treatises started to flourish. even if biondo’s works, the elegantiae by lorenzo valla ( – ) and the ortographia by giovanni tortelli ( – ) could be recognized as a significant prefiguration of this genre in an antiquarian perspective, a mature expression of renaissance antiquarian encyclope- dism can be found in raffaele maffei’s ( – ) commentaria rerum urbanarum, alessandro alessandri’s ( – ) dies geniales and celio rodigino’s antiquae lectiones ( – ). these treatises attempted to approach the ancient world from a universal perspective, cross-referencing different literary and material sources, trying to provide a complex idea of history. the idea that history resided in ancient findings and that, through these ancient findings, history still maintained its vitality in the present, sparked the research of cardini, r. – regoliosi, m. (edd): alberti e la cultura del quattrocento. atti del convegno internazionale del comitato nazionale vi centenario della nascita di leon battista alberti, florence, – dicembre . vol. – . florence ; grafton, a.: leon battista alberti: master builder of the italian renaissance. new york . branca, v.: poliziano e l’umanesimo della parola. torino . viti, p. (ed.): cultura e filologia di angelo poliziano: traduzioni e commenti. atti del convegno di studi (florence, – novembre ) [edizione nazionale delle opere di angelo poliziano – stru- menti, vol. ]. florence ; rizzo (n. ). griggio, c.: appunti sulla ricezione classica in poliziano ed ermolao barbaro. florence ; pozzi, g.: barbari castigationes plinianae et in pomponium melam. padova . blanchard, s. – severi, a. (eds.): renaissance encyclopaedism: studies in curiosity and ambition. toronto . the nature of renaissance antiquarianism acta ant. hung. material evidence to the indiscriminate action of counterfeiters. forgeries were cre- ated for the purpose of supporting positions that lacked reliable data; and the frequent attempts to unmask their mendacious nature, at times in vain, represented one of the crucial aspects of the antiquarian investigation. by rejecting the authenticity of the donation of constantine, lorenzo valla opened a season of opposition to falsifica- tions. having rejected a testimony which had been fully trusted during the middle ages, this clearly demonstrates how the new vision of sources in their material con- sistency would have marked a change in thinking. among the most famous antiquar- ians who were deemed as counterfeiters worthy of mention are annius of viterbo ( – ) and alfonso ceccarelli ( – ). the works of annius became very popular: he produced literary and epigraphic apocryphal texts (berosus, fabius pictor, cato, the decretum desiderii) in order to offer a new cabalistic and esoteric reading of the history of civilisation that had been handed down directly from hebrew and etruscan roots. the extensive work of ceccarelli, which remained predominantly in manuscript form, was put to use in genealogical and historiographic studies. antiquarian studies were conducted, even within humanistic circles, the most famous of which was the academia romana of giulio pomponio leto ( – ). figures as bartolomeo platina ( – ) and niccolò perotti ( – ) main- tained a relatively constant presence at these sessions. the humanistic inclination of this circle and its desire to ‘revive’ antiquity triggered an interest in ancient sources, the rediscovery and publication of manuscripts (one of the most important cases being the unearthing of festus’s codex farnesianus), the study of material findings (epigraphs, coins, statues, etc.), research into institutional and social history, and the customs of ancient rome. one of the heirs to this cultural experience was angelo colocci ( – ), who continued this intellectual circle at horti sallustiani, where antiquarian interests flourished. among the participants, baldassarre castiglione ( – ), giovanni pierio valeriano ( – ) and pietro bembo ( – ), in particular, are wor- thy of mention. the presence of the three humanists, bembo, valeriano and colocci, confirms that the antiquarian perspective was carried out in parallel with the histor- chabod, f.: lezioni di metodo storico. bari . fubini, r.: storiografia dell’umanesimo in italia da leonardo bruni ad annio da viterbo. rome ; parente, f.: liber antiquitatum biblicarum e i falsi di annio da viterbo. in naldini, m. – privitera, a. g. – burini, c. et al. (eds.): paideia cristiana: studi in onore di mario naldini. rome , – . fumi, l.: l’opera di falsificazione di alfonso ceccarelli. bollettino della deputazione di storia patria per l’umbria ( ) – . http://www.repertoriumpomponianum.it/ accessed april ; stenhouse, w.: imagination (n. ) – ; modigliani, a. – osmond, p. – pade, m. – ramminger, j. (eds.): pomponio leto tra identità locale e cultura internazionale. rome ; bianca, c.: pomponio leto e l’invenzione dell’accademia ro- mana. in deramaix, m. – galand-hallyn, p. – vagenheim, g. – vignes, j. (eds.): les académies dans l’europe humaniste. idéaux et pratiques. actes du colloque international de paris, - juin . paris , – ; accame lanzillotta, m.: pomponio leto: vita e insegnamento. tivoli . glinister, f. (ed.): verrius, festus, and paul: lexicography, scholarship, and society. london . fanelli, v.: ricerche su angelo colocci e sulla roma cinquecentesca. città del vaticano ; damiano acciarino acta ant. hung. ical-linguistic theories debated at the time, and perhaps had an influence on them. its influence on the works of theodore bibliander ( – ) and joachim périon ( – ) is clear from de ratione communi omnium linguarum et litterarum com- mentarius and dialogorum de linguae gallicae origine, eiusque cum graeca cogna- tione, respectively. between the end of the fifteenth century and the beginning of the sixteenth century, antiquarian studies gradually became inextricably linked with collections of antiquity. although important private collections also existed, the main collections of antiquity produced during the renaissance were owned by the political and ecclesi- astic aristocracy and were often linked to the royal courts. this created a close bond, often of subordination, between antiquarian erudition and power, putting the first at the service of the second. beyond the political interferences that may have taken place, the most important antiquarian works of the sixteenth century emanated from the richest and most heterogeneous collections, such as those which belonged to the farnese fam- ily in rome, to the medici in florence, to the este in ferrara, or the palatine collection in vienna and the royal collection in madrid. many erudite works flourished within these environments. these included, for example, the philological and numismatic investigations carried out by antonio agustín ( – ), and fulvio orsini ( – ), the ecclesiastical and juridical enquiries by onofrio panvinio ( – ), and the extensive antiquarian encyclo- paedia written by pirro ligorio ( – ), which all benefited from the vitality bologna, c. – bernardi, m. (eds.): angelo colocci e gli studi romanzi. città del vaticano ; beltramini, g. – gasparotto, d. – tura, a. (eds.): pietro bembo e l’invenzione del rinascimento, catalogo della mostra (padova, febbraio- maggio ). edizione illustrata. venezia ; vine, a.: etymology, names and the search for origins. deriving the past in early modern england. the seventeenth century . ( ) – ; pozzi, m.: discussioni linguistiche del cinquecento. torino ; bibliander, t.: de ratione communi omnium linguarum. amirav, h. – kirn, h.m. (eds.). geneva ; simoncelli, p.: la lingua di adamo: guillaume postel tra accademici e fuoriusciti fiorentini. florence . considine, j.: dictionaries in early modern europe: lexicography and the making of heritage. cambridge . goenig, a. – grafton, a. – michel, p. (eds.): collectors knowledge: what is kept, what is discarded/aufbewahren oder wegwerfen: wie sammler entscheiden (brill’s studies in intellectual histo- ry) leiden . nalezyty, s.: pietro bembo and the intellectual pleasure of a renaissance writer and art collector. new haven, ct, london ; stenhouse, w.: roman antiquities (n. ); stenhouse, w.: from spolia (n. ). alcina franch, j. f.: la biblioteca de antonio agustín: los impresos de un humanista de la contrarreforma. alcañiz ; soler, a.: la correspondència d’ottavio pantagato ( – ). phd thesis, universitat autònoma de barcelona ; carbonell i manils, j.: epigrafia i numisma- tica a l’epistolario d’antonio agustìn ( - ). phd thesis, universitat autònoma de barcelona . missere fontana (n. ). cellini, g.: le imagines di fulvio orsini nella calcografia nazionale. rendmemacclincei ser. ix, ( ) – ; nolhac, p.: la bibliotheque de fulvio orsini: contributions à l’histoire des collections d’italie et a l’etude de la renaissance. paris . bauer, s.: onofrio panvinio. in dizionario biografico degli italiani [dbi] vol. (rome ) – ; ferrary, j-l.: onofrio panvinio et les antiquités romaines. paris . ligorio’s works are being published by de luca editore with the title edizione nazionale delle opere di pirro ligorio; occhipinti, c.: pirro ligorio e la storia. atti della giornata di studio (pisa, scuola normale superiore, - settembre ). rome ; gaston, r.: pirro ligorio artist and antiquarian. milan . the nature of renaissance antiquarianism acta ant. hung. of the roman environment. the philological studies on classical texts conducted by piero vettori ( – ) and the antiquarian studies by vincenzio borghini ( – ) were deeply rooted in the florentine context, as well as the mythographic stud- ies of lilio gregorio giraldi ( – ) and agostino mosti ( – ) in the ferrarese court. austria and spain were also fertile grounds for the works of wolfgang lazius ( – ) and jeronimo zurita ( – ) respectively. the connection with the political power of the time permitted the antiquarian investigation to break free from the closed circles of collections and libraries and to be disseminated into the collective imagination, thereby developing into one of the col- umns of the triumphant renaissance. in fact, when planning their works, it was com- mon practice for artists and architects to receive support from antiquarian scholars, who took on the role of iconographic advisors and enhanced the conceptual coherence of the patron’s projects. giorgio vasari ( – ) was supported by borghini when decorating the palazzo vecchio in florence, the zuccari brothers by orsini or panvinio for the palazzo farnese in caprarola, or rosso fiorentino ( – ) by a figure who remains anonymous for the gallery of francis i in fontainebleau (probably lazare de baïf) – more rarely, the same artist took on the role of iconographer and this was perhaps the case with jacopo zucchi ( – ). in artistic contexts, it was possible for a stylistic feature of antiquarian origin to enter into the decorative standard, meaning that it was difficult to distinguish between the re-use of a classical stilema and a voluntary or unconscious citation: this was espe- cially the case with grotesques, which became commonplace after their re-discovery in the domus aurea ( ca.) and brought about a debate on their legitimacy and their consequent censorship. anton francesco doni ( – ), francisco de hol- landa ( – ) and gabriele paleotti ( – ), among others, were prominent in these disputes. baldi, d.: il greco a firenze e pier vettori ( – ). alessandria ; carrara, e. – ginzburg, s. (eds.): testi, immagini e filologia nel xvi secolo. pisa . drusi, r.: ricercando scrittori e scritture. studi su vincenzio borghini. padova ; belloni, g. – drusi, r. (eds.): vincenzio borghini: filologia e invenzione nella firenze di cosimo i. [biblioteca di bibliografia italiana, vol. ] florence . foà, s.: giraldi, lilio gregorio. in dbi ( ) – . russo, e.: mosti, agostino. in dbi ( ) – . jerónimo zurita: su época y su escuela. congreso nacional, zaragoza, - de mayo de . zaragoza . pinelli, a.: ‘intenzione, invenzione, artifizio’. spunti per una teoria della ricezione dei cicli figurativi di età rinascimentale. ricerche di storia dell’arte / ( ) – . panofsky, d.: the iconography of the galerie françois ier at fontainebleau. gazette des beaux- arts ( ) – . d’amelio, a. – morel, p. – rigon, f. (eds.): storia di una galleria romana: la genealogia degli dèi di jacopo zucchi e le famiglie rucellai, caetani ruspoli, memmo. rome . dacos, n.: la découverte de la domus aurea et la formation des grotesques à la renaissance [studies of the warburg institute xxxi]. leiden ; chastel, a.: la grottesque. essai sur «l’orne- ment sans nom». paris  ; morel, p.: les grotesques: les figures de l’imaginaire dans la peinture italienne de la fin de la renaissance. paris ; scholl, d.: von den grottesken zum grotesken: die konstituierung einer poetik des grotesken in der italienischen renaissance. münster ; zamperini, a.: le grottesche: il sogno della pittura nella decorazione parietale. san giovanni lupatoto . damiano acciarino acta ant. hung. the fundamental role played by architecture underwent a revival in the develop- ment of the renaissance antiquarian spirit. after the fifteenth century, this took the form of evocations inspired by classical buildings; and during the sixteenth century, several treatises attempted to provide a more precise and complex codification of the matter. sebastiano serlio ( – ), paolo giovio’s accademia dei virtuosi ( – ), daniele barbaro ( – ), jacques androuet du cerceau ( – ) and, perhaps most importantly, andrea palladio ( – ) conjugated the study of vitru- vius with practical knowledge, paving the way for a season of deeply rooted classicism. another form of antiquarianism in renaissance cultural life can be seen in the building of imprese. this genre, which was openly inspired by emblems, combined images and short texts (usually a motto), often reutilised the erudite elements of the anti- quarian investigation and related them to the addressee. starting with andrea alciati ( – ), who was the first to codify this ‘figurative literature’, a widespread edito- rial phenomenon took place which involved scholars from all over europe, including girolamo ruscelli ( – ), jános zsámboky ( – ) and jean jaques boissard ( – ). the most famous motto of the renaissance was perhaps festina lente, most commonly presented as an anchor and a dolphin. originally, this figuration was minted on the reverse side of a coin of the roman imperial series of augustus and titus. the image and the adage were represented and cited in the hypnerotomachia polyphili ( ), adopted by aldo manuzio ( – ) as the symbol for his publishing house, explained in their original sense by desiderius erasmus ( – ) in his adagia, and reinvented by cosimo i de’ medici, the grand duke of tuscany in his impresa. the re-discovery of the fasti consulares in the roman forum ( ) repre- sented a pivotal moment in the growth of this movement. this epigraphic finding was transferred to the capitolium under the supervision of michelangelo. the edition of the text transmitted in these inscriptions triggered a debate among the experts of epigraphy and chronology, in particular bartolomeo marliani ( – ), francesco robortello ( – ), carlo sigonio ( – ), panvinio, martin smetius ( – ) and stephan winand pigge ( – ), who all published it within a few years of each other. the major contribution to antiquarian scholarship provided by this finding was that it represented a new source for ancient roman chronology, which until then had been obtained only through literary histories, and represented an official document tafuri, m.: interpreting the renaissance: princes, cities, architects. new haven ; nas- selrath, a.: the census of antique works of art and architecture known to the renaissance. archeo- logia e calcolatori ( ) – ; nasselrath, a.: raffaello e lo studio dell’antico nel rinascimento. in from mel, c. l. – ray, s. – tafuri, m. (eds.): raffaello architetto. mailand , – . http://www.emblematica.com/en/colophon.htm; accessed april ; d’elia, u. r.: rapha- el’s ostrich. university park, penn . ric ii (r ). colonna, s.: hypnerotomachia poliphili e roma.  metodologie  euristiche per lo studio del rinascimento. rome . mccuaig, w.: the fasti capitolini and the study of roman chronology in the sixteenth cen- tury. athenaeum ( ) – ; stenhouse (n. ); mayer, m.: el canon de los humanistas de su tiempo interesados en la epigrafía y las antigüedades clásicas según el criterio de onofrio panvinio. syl- loge epigraphica barcinonesis ( ) – . the nature of renaissance antiquarianism acta ant. hung. directly connected to roman imperial institutions. previously, roman chronology had often been reconstructed by comparing livius and dionysius of halicarnassus (whose accounts often contradicted each other), as demonstrated by the roman chronotaxes of gregorius haloander ( – ), johannes cuspinianus ( – ) and heinrich glareanus ( – ). the number of findings from classical antiquity was higher in italy than the rest of europe. and, although many humanists of other nations travelled to and resided for long periods in italy, it was not possible for everyone to directly access a wide range of ancient findings. nonetheless, the level of antiquarian understanding had developed in the rest of europe by the mid-fifteenth century, and gradually strengthened throughout the years to the point where italy’s leading position in governing this area of knowledge was challenged. one of the earliest examples of this circulation of ideas is represented by the arrival in germany of a partial copy of the commentaria of ciriaco d’ancona, brought by hartmann schedel ( – ), which had a significant influence on the compila- tion of peter apian’s ( – ) epigraphic collection and some of the later works of albrecht dürer ( – ). furthermore, jacopo strada’s ( – ) arrangement of his own magnum ac novum opus for the fugger bankers is clear in describing how antiquarian culture passed across the alps. and the studies on roman antiquity conducted by johann roszfeld ( – ) clearly show the fortune and impact of this tradition on german erudite environments. in france, the growth of antiquarian scholarship was encouraged by king francis i and by the circle of humanists who gravitated around him. the studies conducted by guillaume budé ( – ), who was an ambassador to rome, and the journeys he made to italy helped him amass a weight of numismatic knowledge that led to the publication of the most important renaissance metrological treatise, de asse. the research carried out by lazare de baïf ( – ) was also pivotal; he was an ambas- sador to venice, from where he sent several antiquities to his homeland, and arranged for innovative antiquarian investigations to be carried out on clothing, vases and ves- sels. guillaume du choul ( – ) investigated several aspects of roman reli- gion by cross-referencing material and literary sources. joseph scaliger ( – ) this was argued by stefano casu in a paper entitled the reception of ciriaco d’ancona in ger- man renaissance, which was presented in the session german humanism and its influences at rsa annual meeting in boston. these studies are conducted within the dfg-projekt jacopo strada’s magnun ac novum opus: a sixteenth-century numismatic corpus at the gotha research center of the university of erfurt, under the direction of martin mulsow; https://www.uni-erfurt.de/en/gotha-research-centre-of-the-university- of- erfurt/projects/dfg-projekt-jacopo-stradas-magnum-ac-novum-opus/; accessed april . cooper, r.: roman antiquities in renaissance france, - . farnham . jouanna, j. – fartzoff, m. – bakhouche, b. (eds.): l’homme et la science. actes du xvie congrès international et quinquennal de l’association guillaume budé à montpellier – . . . paris ; boehm, i. – ferrary, j-l. – franchey d’espèrey, s. (eds.): l’homme et ses passions: actes du xvii e congrès international de l’association guillaume budé organisé à lyon du au août . paris ; a particular mention should be made of les noces de philologie et guillaume budé, a collo- quium held in on this heterogeneous figure of humanist and antiquarian. damiano acciarino acta ant. hung. demonstrated his antiquarian scholarship in his editing of ancient authors and his work on historical chronology. antiquarian erudition was also practised at the highest level in the low coun- tries. hubert goltzius ( – ), one of the most famous numismatists of the second half of the sixteenth century, developed his scholarship while travelling from netherlands to italy: the purpose of his publications was to reconstruct the history of the roman empire by drawing links between ancient coins and epigraphs and their related narrative sources. justus lipsius ( – ), who spent part of his life in rome, investigated many aspects of classical and biblical antiquity, including banquet- ing, the real nature of the christian cross and more complex analyses of roman civili- zation: even if his focus was mainly philological in nature, lipsius often used material findings to carry out his emendations and corrections of ancient texts; his antiquae lectiones represent a clear example of this methodological approach. the long journey through italy completed by peter paul rubens ( – ) also contributed signifi- cantly to the antiquarian scholarship: he was a learned painter, and it has been proved that his drawings of statues and ruins increased the knowledge on the material bequest of antiquity. the main viaticum through which antiquarianism became a continental phe- nomenon was the circulation of published books. the philological editions of ancient authors and historiographic texts, especially if they also included images, had a signifi- cant positive effect on the understanding of indirect records. in this way, the knowledge acquired in italy was made available to the rest of the european humanistic commu- nity, allowing research to be undertaken where findings were missing. among the oth- ers, the works of antoine lafréry ( – ) is worthy of mention. the antiquarian surveys also included national investigations, the purpose of which was to reconstruct a reliable history for a specific territory, following the model for the studies undertaken on roman antiquity. therefore, by comparing local liter- ary sources with local ruins, it was possible to give a new shape to the origins of: (i)  france, which were described for example in the works of pierre pithou ( – ); (ii) england, owing to william camden’s ( – ) britannia; (iii) germany, which were investigated in johan månsson’s ( - ) and philipp clüver’s ( - ) treatises; and (iv) spain, through the histories of zurita’s and francisco padilla’s ( – ). in the same period, the polish scholar jan Łasicki ( – ) attempted to complete the first erudite history of russia, while histories of the turkish empire, grafton and (n. ). napolitano, m.: hubertus goltzius e la magna grecia. dalle fiandre all’italia del cinquecen- to [itala tellus ]. napoli ( ). hendrickson, t.: ancient libraries and renaissance humanism: the de bibliothecis of justus lipsius. leiden ; papy, j.: an antiquarian scholar between text and image? justus lipsius, humanist education, andthe visualization of ancient rome. the sixteenth century journal . ( ) – . van der meulen, m.: rubens: copies after the antique. london . jannsen, l.: antiquarianism and national history. the emergence of a new scholarly para- digm in early modern historical studies. history of european ideas . ( ) – . the nature of renaissance antiquarianism acta ant. hung. china and the new world, contaminating travel literature with antiquarian accounts, also flourished. the hypothesis that there was a relationship between the triumph of antiquarian culture and the explosion of religious controversies in northern europe is very inter- esting, especially given the impact of the reformed approach to sacred scriptures on spiritual life. for example, the new testamentary comment of erasmus could have taken advantage of the experience acquired in his antiquarian publications. as one would expect, humanists and theologians (catholic and protestant alike) used anti- quarianism to support their own positions and contest opposing views. the magde- burg centuries, which was overseen by matija vlačić ( – ), represented the high point for protestant antiquarian writings and breathed life into a constellation of analogous works by authors such as matthew parker ( – ), johan jakob gryner ( – ) and johann wilhelm stucki ( – ). on the catholic side, the most complete and organised response is represented by the annales of cesare barionio ( – ), the purpose of which was not only to rehabilitate the roman vision of christianity from a historiographic perspective but also to utilise a more precise and systematic antiquarian approach. these patterns remained popular for most of the seventeenth century, as demonstrated by the monumental italia sacra written by fer- dinando ughelli ( – ). although the antiquarian tradition continued to generate very important epigones during the centuries that followed, the turning point for renaissance antiquarianism can be narrowed down to the early seventeenth century, when it started to become unsuitable for dealing with new scientific enquiries. hybrid figures who continued to follow the traditional path began to emerge, but they were unable to remain indifferent to the impending new developments: this was especially the case with the medical, zoological and botanical studies carried out by conrad gesner ( – ), girolamo markey, l.: imagining the americas in medici florence. university park, pa ; schnapp (n. ). van liere, k. – ditchfield, s. – louthan, h. (eds.): sacred history. uses of christian past in the renaissance world. oxford ; backus, i. d.: historical method and confessional identity in the era of the reformation, – . leiden ; dost, t.: renaissance humanism in support of the gospel in luther’s early correspondence: taking all things captive. burlington . rummel, e.: biblical humanism and scholasticism in the age of erasmus. leiden . mentzel-reuters, a. – hartmann, m.: catalogus und centurien: interdisziplinäre studien zu matthias flacius und den magdeburger centurien. tübingen . guazzelli, g. – michetti, r. – scorza barcellona, f. (eds.): cesare baronio tra santità e scrittura storica. rome ; caliò, t. – duranti, m. – michetti, r. (eds.): italia sacra: le raccolte di vite di santi e l’inventio delle regioni. rome . goeing, a. s.: reading books in natural philosophy: how conrad gessner’s commentary on ‘de anima’ ( ) was annotated and interpreted. bulletin of the john rylands library . (autumn ) – ; siraisi, n.: history, antiquarianism, and medicine: the case of girolamo mercuriale. journal of the history of ideas . (apr., ), – ; feola, v.: antiquarianism and science in early modern urban networks [sciences et techniques en perspective, deuxième serie, vol. , fasc.]. paris ; olmi, g.: l’inventario del mondo: catalogazione della natura e luoghi del sapere nella pri- ma età moderna. bologna . berns, a. d.: the bible and natural philosophy in renaissance italy: jewish and christian physicians in search of truth. cambridge . damiano acciarino acta ant. hung. mercuriale ( – ), ulisse aldrovandi ( – ) and giovanni battista della porta ( – ), and most of all with the astronomic and scientific investigations conducted by nicolas fabri de peiresc ( – ) and pierre gassendi ( – ). however, there are two dates in particular which encapsulate this moment of transition: , the year in which francis bacon ( – ) published his novum organum, and , the year rené descartes’ ( – ) discours de la méthode was pub- lished. the emerging empiricism of evidence-based enquiry and philosophical scepti- cism started undermining the reliability of the antiquarian investigation, questioning the nature of the source and hence the value of the method, opening the way to a new phase in the development of knowledge towards modern times. methodology in renaissance antiquarian studies, the source began to take on a central role in the entire intellectual system and became the key aspect to consider when search- ing for knowledge about the past, thereby exerting an influence on the hermeneutical approach. during the renaissance, many scholars debated the practical applications of the antiquarian methodology. beyond specific objects of study, antiquarian techniques generally converged on a dual scheme which included a cataloguing phase and an interpretative phase. a large number of records had to be compiled (both directly and indirectly) in order to create a solid foundation; the records were then divided into dif- ferent categories – in which the formal, geographical, political and typological param- eters were considered. after this descriptive stage, a process of amalgamation took place, which involved the cross-referencing of the data according to its common or distinctive elements, thereby establishing links with its cultural context in the process. the aim was for the interpretation of each finding to be subjected to a comprehension of its morphology, and these records were mainly used to fill gaps in knowledge, pro- viding a plausible reconstruction through analogy. personal observation (autopsia) became essential in order to ascertain the reli- ability of the antiquarian method and allowed other scholars to verify evidence or findings. it was no longer deemed sufficient to settle for texts that simply referred to an issue – it became necessary to elicit primary information and examine the works and pieces that developed around it. it was therefore important to study both primary and secondary sources, such as analogous treatises or commentaries, from a unitary perspective because they could provide further lost information. collections permitted the antiquarian practice to be carried out widely. thanks to the collections of ancient findings available, it was possible to carry out multidis- ciplinary excursions aimed at identifying the links between the different findings and the texts, transforming a general humanistic interest in antiquity into a systematic approach to the subject. although these collections cannot be identified with antiquar- ianism in and of themselves, they do retain its premise. the purpose of antiquarianism instead lays in its capacity to make the data react with the cultural context from which the nature of renaissance antiquarianism acta ant. hung. it derived, utilising new instruments to understand the stratification of meanings, where the links between witnesses and time could be found. through the propagation of the antiquarian approach during the renaissance, the past acquired a tangible and measurable connotation which was identified through its remains. the ‘materialisation’ of the object of study transformed each finding into a ‘semiotic’ vehicle of unexpected meanings. this progress is particularly meaning- ful in that it moved away from the literary world: the written form lost its oracular connotation thanks to the objectivation of the support (codex/finding) and medium (the language). this represented the fundamental passage in renaissance antiquarian erudition: the awareness of the genre’s equivalence of sources. this equivalence was based on general categories which were subordinated to specific approaches. it was possible to obtain meaningful data from manuscripts, inscriptions, coins, statues, and the like due to the endeavours made in each specific discipline, e.g. philology, epig- raphy, numismatics, archaeology, iconography, etc. for each field, the findings were ranked according to their reliability (the most consistent manuscripts, the most relevant inscriptions, the best-preserved coins, etc.). it was from this awareness that efforts were made to commence with the colla- tion of manuscripts, the association of different pieces of material evidence to confirm the existence of a historical fact, and the evaluation of data from different and osten- sibly incompatible cultural areas. this also resulted in parallels being drawn between the past and present. for example, by using descriptions from ancient sources, it was possible to compare geographical places with their modern status and characteristics. different linguistic domains (ancient languages vs. current vernaculars) could also be compared in order to explain the lost meanings of words and expressions. it is therefore clear that the convergence of disciplines in the antiquarian method derived from the mutual irradiation of specific and coherent methodologies, which ultimately modified the conformation of the entire system. the advancements of one derived from the advancements of the others, but only progressively, and it was under- stood that all were part of the same whole. the reconstruction of the past (or the idea of the past) depended on the relationship between the plethora of aspects linked to a source and to the phenomena that occurred within the history of tradition. through conjecture, hypotheses were formulated on the remains for the purpose of restoring their original status, which required a theoretical cognition of their essence. this was based on the philological principle of respecting the ‘text/object’ as handed down, which was the precondition for any amendment or modification. this meant that the criteria of emendation (emendatio) had to be applied to the explanation (explicatio): clarifying the nature of a source through its tradition, i.e. the recovery of a reliable lesson (accuratam lectionem), also became essential for its interpretation (lectionem utilem). the relationship between documentary voids and hypotheses of reconstruction emerged: all the lacunas could have been potentially fulfilled because they were part of a ‘cultural grammar’, the rules of which were deduced through antiquarian investigation. the illusion of a coherent reconstruction of the heritage of the ancients became the foun- dation for the construction of a culture of the present in a universal perspective, rooted in the remains of a past perceived as incomplete but also solid in its material substance. damiano acciarino acta ant. hung. scholars were encouraged to draw a distinction between their conjectures and hypothetic reconstructions, and the data transmitted. only in this way was it possible to preserve the integrity of the tradition without contaminating the evidence and to allow future scholars to solve the problems faced. ignoring the origins of remains often not only opened the door to a new layer of corruption of tradition, but also represented the limits beyond which it was not possible to push forward conjecture in all of its forms: the ‘void of knowledge’ was considered somehow to be a starting point for research to be undertaken. this focus on rejecting or accepting conjectures reinforced respect for tradition: the preferred solution was to adopt the ‘principle of authority’, defending the stability of tradition rather than accepting positions that could have potentially undermined the legacy of knowledge. at the same time, there were also scholars who claimed that real progress could only be achieved in antiquarian studies if new discoveries were made, pointing to the limits of the auctoritas and the lack of canon sources. this also implied the possibility of a credible reconstruction of the matter using external arguments (argumenta). in order to obtain a thorough comprehension of remains without omitting the complex weave of meanings involved, it was necessary to examine their connection with their historical background. although these endeav- ours occasionally did not reap any rewards, they remained a mandatory passage of the investigation in that they considered the source as part of a context from which it was possible to glean parallel or additional information. contradictory data emerged from this process, a problem that encouraged the development of alternative solutions to preserve the coherence of the entire system. in this phase, the concept of ‘error’ (or the ‘nature of errors’) became a further instrument to be used in understanding sources more fully. it was hypothesised that the permanence in the tradition of errors was made by those who physically assembled the object analysed. this permitted a distinction to be made between the identity of the ‘author’ (the creator) and the ‘maker’ (a scribe, an engraver, a sculptor – but some- times also the author), admitting the possibility of an unintentional fallacy despite the authority and antiquity being known. this distinction opened new perspectives: the admission that the error was potentially common to any type of writing, and hence to any type of communication, went straight to the core of the problem, i.e. the hand of the writer, as opposed to the surface on which the wording was written. this represented the first emergence of the awareness that all the data deriving from sources could be influenced by several variables, which had to be understood in order to fully grasp the subject matter being studied. the source was considered to be influenced by contingencies (e.g. the social or economic status of the executor), imply- ing that quantitative differences did not necessarily correspond to qualitative dynamics (e.g. if the errors were more frequently found in manuscripts or epigraphs). this implied that all types of writing were governed by similar mechanisms, fostering the understanding of the two laws that influenced its morphology: norm and usage. all the potential fluctuations within these factors started to be considered, with each specific occurrence assessed in accordance with diatopic, diachronic and dias- tratic parameters. the nature of renaissance antiquarianism acta ant. hung. conclusion: a new definition the intellectual phenomenon of renaissance antiquarianism developed throughout europe, manifesting itself in a plurality of works influenced by the origin, the environ- ment and the personal approach of each author, the language adopted, the publishing house involved and the commissioner. these works were related to a multitude of dis- ciplines, which can be broadly identified by following the setup of angelo poliziano’s panespistemon ( ). the production of antiquarian works reached its peak during and after the mid-sixteenth century, a period when antiquarianism transitioned from a phase of growth and consolidation to maturity, and the advancements made in previous centuries were systemically classified and widely utilised. antiquarian interests can be divided into two key areas, both of which connect all deriving disciplines: the first could be defined as ‘orthographic’, in which the mate- rial finding transmitted a written witness, in any form, in various languages; the second as ‘iconographic’, in which the investigation was based exclusively on the morphologi- cal aspect, beyond the linguistic factor. it was inevitable that these two contexts would be complementary and that they went hand in hand, benefiting mutually from their respective development. from here, different disciplines emerged, each with their own peculiarities, passing from the literary to the artistic to the scientific and many other areas of enquiry, each with clearly defined cultural horizons. the antiquarian writings of the renaissance were generally categorised accord- ing to two models: miscellanies of scattered records and organic works which often con- tained an encyclopaedic print. in the first case, these works comprised an explanation of a plurality of misinterpreted or misunderstood passages referring to the antiquarian corpus in the broadest sense, frequently with the title of variae or antiquae lectiones. the works in the second case, on the other hand, comprised systematic expositions of antiquarian themes or topics that would also take related contexts into consideration, thereby significantly widening the possible implications of a single study. therefore, renaissance antiquarianism could be defined as a cultural phenome- non aiming at interpreting the past by cross-referencing heterogeneous sources thanks to accumulation and collection. this implied the use of new investigative techniques which involved the combination of literary sources and material findings in order to provide a reliable foundation for the idea of history. however, renaissance antiquari- anism must not be reduced to the mere collecting, nor can it be condensed to an intel- lectual interest or a general fascination with antiquity. it is reasonable to assume that renaissance antiquarianism first emerged from the study of the classical world, but it eventually evolved beyond these boundaries to become a method of approaching an object of study rather than simply a discipline. since the universality of the method became potentially applicable to all fields and times, its essence was manifested in the methodological pathway and perspective applied. in fact, the broadening of the sources from which it was possible to obtain historical data triggered the development of competencies and interpretative instruments, which allowed the identification of evidence from an array of objects of study. from this, it can be seen that renaissance antiquarianism represented a methodological perspective, the purpose of which was to damiano acciarino acta ant. hung. rethink the way the past was viewed through a critical analysis of sources, producing a renewed approach towards history, which stimulated the interaction of disciplines and influenced the intellectual life of the time. damiano acciarino università ca̓ foscari venezia – department of humanities university of toronto open access. this is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution-noncommercial . international license (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/ . /), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium for non-commercial purposes, provided the original author and source are credited, a link to the cc license is provided, and changes – if any – are indicated. fig. . josef strzygowski, . © archiv der universität wien. the viennese art historian josef strzygowski ( – ) has recently attracted conspicu- ous scholarly attention. (fig. .) this is re- markable given that, until recently, his reputa- tion has been that of a thinker blinded by ide- ology, a crude and at times openly racist ideo- logue, and a willing servant of the national socialist regime. for this reason, it would be all too easy to renounce any consideration of this thinker, and to relegate his work to where it belongs, in the dark corridors of a dusty ar- chive, never to see the light of day. for a few years, however, there have been more and more voices calling for a fresh ap- praisal of strzygowski. strzygowski’s writings, these voices insist, should not be rejected in their totality, particularly given the consider- able farsightedness of his early work. suzanne l. marchand’s “case” of strzygowski is but one of many examples of works in which the viennese scholar has been treated with at least cautious respect. since then there has been an attempt at the university level to re- appraise his work; a proposed master’s thesis on strzygowski was recently approved at the university of vienna, and there is another the- sis as well as a dissertation underway there. and at the university of frankfurt am main, a research project on near asian art, in which strzygowski plays a prominent role, has been established. moreover there have been many papers dealing with the austrian scholar’s influence on the international level. finally, the high point of these endeavors to date took place in in budapest, at a conference in which the sphere of influence of the hitherto ostracized scholar was subjected to compre- hensive discussion. two factors can be cited to explain the re- cent interest in strzygowski. first, it must be stressed that his thinking shattered geographi- cal boundaries. today, in an era of increasingly global cultural awareness, strzygowski’s rest- less explorations of the frontiers of art history, including his travels to remote areas and his exploration of works largely unknown outside of europe, must be regarded as progressive. in this respect he is cited in many recent studies as a pioneer of “global art history,” as for exam- ple an explorer who stressed the limitations of europe’s eurocentric views on art and science. secondly, the critical revision of his work can also be attributed to an academic stance in which the historiography of art has emerged as an increasingly serious sub-discipline within the field of art history. a strikingly intensive involvement with the founding fathers of art historiography has lately given rise to confer- ences and publications, all of which seek to remind us of the early masters of our disci- pline and their often forgotten achievements. the foremost goal in that connection is the attempt to contextualize academic traditions. the question regarding the conditions under which the history of art was pursued around , matters of cultural politics, institutional strategies underlying art scholarship, and more precisely, which inclusionary and exclusionary procedures were developed – these and related questions have led to a series of detailed analy- ses, which have sought not only to deepen our knowledge about individual scholars, but also georg vasold riegl, strzygowski and the development of art to scrutinize the institutions at which they were active. strzygowski’s colleague in vienna, alois riegl, can be pointed to as a leading subject of such an approach. (fig. ). certainly the enor- mous international interest in riegl mainly concerns his work in the field of art history, and above all his considerable influence on art-historical scholarship in the th century. but at the same time this exploration of his milieu has yielded a clear and deep knowledge of the professional and institutional difficul- ties he faced as a contributor to the decisive, watershed issues of austrian cultural politics. thanks to diana reynolds cordileone’s works on riegl’s activities at the austrian museum for art and industry (“mak”), we now know how much he suffered under the bureaucratic limitations of the late habsburg empire. in many of his writings he stood up against the prevailing opinions in vienna, championing the cause of intellectual freedom and deplor- ing its subordination to political ends. par- ticularly in his early texts he did not hesitate to hold a “state-controlled” circle responsible for the failure of a conclusive art and cultural politics. in this respect riegl was perceived not only as a prudent scholar, but also as an active participant in the intellectual life of the viennese fin de siècle, and was given credit for his unshakable conviction that an art historian can and should speak out about the social and political problems of his time. thus, what in- terests scholars of early th century art history only secondarily concerns respect for one’s elders. it is primarily a question of analyzing writings, studying the origin and their impact in context, and keeping that impact in mind. it concerns the search for the theoretical founda- tions underlying the scholarly work, the ques- tion of which intellectual tradition it belonged to, against whom or what it was directed against, which social and political implications it expressed, and how the disciplinary and his- torical principles from which scholars derived their theories were developed. the following text attempts to settle some of these principles. above all it attempts to sub- ject strzygowski’s early work, the work that is awakening so much interest today, to a critical analysis. riegl’s work may be viewed as noth- ing less than an obsession for strzygowski, for, as will be shown, strzygowski concerned him- self for decades with his colleague and, despite his assertions to the contrary, could never free himself from his persistent engagement with riegl. riegl vs. strzygowski: opponents on common ground reviewing the relevant literature assessing strzygowski’s intellectual contribution to the vienna school of art history, one quickly finds oneself at a loss. in his still worthwhile article entitled die wiener schule der kunstgeschich­ te. rückblick auf ein säkulum deutscher gele­ hrtenarbeit in Österreich julius von schlosser certainly mentions his colleague, but the tone of his remarks on that subject is exclusively negative. strzygowski, we are told, has noth- ing to do with the tradition of art-historical scholarship in vienna. schlosser contends that his entire academic orientation has been the counterpart, even the antithesis, of the vienna school; his “particular goals and aims [have] scarcely anything in common with the vienna school; indeed they often run deliberately to the contrary.” schlosser’s refusal even to discuss strzy- gowski’s achievements is doubtless grounded on the deep grudge that he nursed against his colleague. at the same time we must consider the date when the piece was written. schloss- er’s history of the vienna school appeared in , the year of the austrian civil war, and the date that marks the beginning of austro- fascism; at that point the country had skidded into a deep political, economic and, not least, academic crisis. the previous years had already been marked by persistent struggles in higher educational circles. with this article schlosser at last had his final reckoning with his adver- sary. he aimed to portray strzygowski’s teach- ing as defectively developed and hardly worthy of note, and thus to “completely eliminate” him from the annals of vienna school art history. in counterpoint, he had to portray his own re- search, which was linked back to eitelberger, wickhoff and riegl, in the most flattering light possible, to please the new political leaders. schlosser accordingly described the vienna school as a richly traditional, self-contained institution, which in its intellectual homoge- neity was a guarantor of native study. discord- ant or ambiguous views, which strzygowski regularly produced, were not desired. it seems needless to say at this point that the respectful portrait that schlosser painted of the vienna school in no way accorded with the facts. given the irreconcilable polarity that he stressed between riegl and strzygowski, his study cannot withstand critical examination. in fact, it is truly astonishing how similar the foundations of their academic interests actual- ly were. a comparison of their writings clearly reveals that riegl and strzygowski steered the same course, and that in terms of the content of their work they marched in lockstep. the two were both in rome as young men, where they increased their devotion to baroque art, specifically to the question of its emergence. at the same time they researched the art of the middle ages. a few years later their first ex- pansive studies on the late antique appeared, almost simultaneously. the art of rembrandt seemed to fascinate them in similar ways. while riegl lectured many times at the uni- versity of vienna between and on dutch painting generally and on rembrandt in particular, strzygowski published an ap- pendix on rembrandt’s work in his book on baroque art. riegl’s essay on the dutch group portrait was published in ; in the same year strzygowski published an article on “the anatomy lesson of dr. tulp.” the two had other interests in common, including oriental textile art, dalmatian monuments, the golden treasure of nagyszentmiklós, and the theme of folk art in general. in addition to this substantive common ground between riegl and strzygowski, there were also a great many methodological simi- larities between the two art historians. like riegl, strzygowski insisted that the art histo- rian’s attention be directed primarily to the ap- pearance of form. for that reason both privi- leged style as a subject of scholarly research. both took pains to repress the influence of philology on art history. and both explicitly privileged the role of the observer in art. late antiquity and modern times this wealth of similarities between the two scholars begs the question where their disa- greements lay. before a satisfactory answer may be given, it must be recalled that even in their student days, when they were enrolled together in courses with mortiz thausing, a strong personal animosity existed between riegl and strzygowski. we do not know the reason, but in any case the mutual mistrust fig. . alois riegl, ca. . © archiv der universität wien. was so deep that riegl accused his rival of fal- sifying documents. their rivalry continued into , when riegl reviewed strzygowski’s study on cimabue and reproached him for intellectual shortcomings: “[…] the evidence that the author cites as crystal clear support for his argument […] in fact could as eas- ily support the opposite proposition.” when strzygowski applied in for a post at the university of graz, the two once again got in each other’s way, so to speak: riegl applied for the same place, but he was given a subordinate position, while stryzgowski received the first ranked professorship. a high point of their mutual mistrust, which quickly deepened into venomous hostility, oc- curred in , when strzygowski published a review of riegl’s spätrömische kunstindustrie in a supplement to the highly regarded allge­ meine zeitung (munich). not only does this article enhance our understanding of strzy- gowski’s views on art, but it also establishes a particularly deep insight into his world view. it is well-known that riegl’s approach to late antique art is based on the conviction that, far from a sign of decadence, it is on the contrary a profoundly innovative art. for riegl the late antique tendency for example towards spatial shading and distorted proportions, is obvi- ously not a sign of incompetence, but rather an expression of a specific will to form (“kunst­ wollen”), that is, of an alternative aesthetic principle that paved the road to modernism. the purpose of art history should be to accept this significant difference, and to value it as a positive quality on its own terms. josef strzygowski was not willing to ac- cept this line of argument. for him the art of the late antique was an unequivocal sign of decadence – “the decay is unmistakably there and unstoppable” – and he dismissed riegl’s remark to the effect that space itself was an art- historical category: “i cannot agree with the principal content of rieglian books, the chief characteristic of his so-called late antique art. i fault his focus to the development of a spatial sense, which completely overlooks the case of mesopotamia.” already in , as in his later works, strzy- gowski emphasized the need to study middle eastern art and to take it into art-historical consideration. this was a valid critique of grave deficits in academic research; his argu- ment, that european art could not be properly understood without the contribution of the “orient,” is perfectly justifiable. the problem that strzygowski’s texts pose for today’s reader concerns not his claim of this purported con- tribution, but rather the way in which this contribution was described. for strzygowski the relationship between europe and asia was characterized throughout as one of rivalry, war, and violence. to emphasize his stance as pointedly as possible, he constructed an im- age of a peaceful ancient greece (“the beautiful child”), who was beset by her neighbors, se- duced, disgraced, and finally crushed. respon- sible for this were, so we are told, the jews. “i see the pure, gossamer psyche of hellas, from the start circled by her native enemies, who greedily stretch out their arms to surround her, to crush her. as long as this beautiful child is bursting with strength and growing up in happy oblivion in her own land, these lurking evils have no strength. they wait, and as soon as they seek hellas in their own land, they gain first influence, then power, and finally victory. the tenacious nature of the orient cannot be overcome; it appears in the image of the eternal jew. what we call byzantine art is the old orient, that is the victory of the old ahasverus over the beauty of hellas and the imposing greatness of rome.” greek art, strzygowski continues, originat- ed in the north, but when it came into contact with semitic people, her fate took its course. “in an attempt […] to portray the fate of classical greek art, i would make a series of illustrations whose first leaf showed how its ancestors migrated from the north, while the child of an oriental muse lay flourishing in their arms. i would then paint a spring picture in the style of böcklin or puvis de chavannes, showing mankind going forth in breathtaking beauty and grace, in the flowering and pros- perity of its own existence; a psyche, admired, cultivated, and adored by all her fellow men and those to come. in the third picture i would show the mature beauty, in her sense of power and possession, sold by an old semite; she is the most prized of the treasures of his harem. splendid cel- ebrations will be held, at which hellas sets the tone; there is the semitic tribe, decked out in silk, gold and precious jewels. and finally i would show how this tribe inherits the very legacy and comes into the splendor of the entire ro- man empire, after the death of psyche of hellas.” having given what he thinks is a plausible explanation for the fall of greek art, strzy- gowski once again composes his history paint- ing to stress the consequences of any “oriental” influence: “art tumbles from its high pedestal, upon which the greeks have raised it; it is the oriental tribe that betrays its beauty. schwind’s melusine here represents a symbolic illustration. in the place of the high-born lady, full of no- ble self-determination, the slave returns, offering herself around […] and so becomes a whore.” there is no need to go any further into strzygowski’s anti-semitic attacks. margaret olin has already done justice to the cited pas- sages. it is nevertheless interesting as a mat- ter of intellectual history that strzygowski’s academic essays, in which he viewed europe as the victim of jewish greed, are by no means unique. the danish art historian julius hen- rik lange ( – ) for instance, who in- cidentally was also esteemed by julius von schlosser, wrote at the same time of the “ha- tred and brutality” of the “semitic people[s],” whose “monotheistic and polemical religion […] gradually conquered europe and the near east.” and certainly it is no accident that strzygowski used the motif of the “eternal jew” in his text. in those years, at the end of the th century, the medieval legend of ahasverus had returned as a subject of increased discussion. in vienna, the wiesbaden-born oriental- ist adolf wahrmund in particular spread the legend and crafted the image of the parasitic jew. in any case the munich article is compelling evidence that those writers who discern a racist tendency only in strzygowski’s later writings are plainly wrong. josef strzy- gowski was an aggressive anti-semite. he was so from the beginning, and he remained so until his death. riegl did not immediately react to strzy- gowski’s review. it was not until nine weeks later that an extensive report appeared in the same journal, in which he clearly es- tablished that he himself was not prepared to argue on this level. strzygowski’s critique was so malicious in itself, and was above all so muddled in its content, that riegl suggested that the author’s health must be questioned: “strzygowski appraises the late antique […] as an art of decadence: his comparison of the classical hellenic virgin with a whore must be excused as a kind of madness brought on by overwork [“schreibtischfieber”]. riegl nev- ertheless took up the gauntlet in his report: he responded to strzygowski’s attack point by point, lucidly setting forth his views and argu- ing that “the problem of the late antique […] in my opinion [is] the most important and de- cisive one in the entire history of humanity to date.” this sentence may astonish us now; it must be remembered, however, that the great mean- ing that riegl attached to the late antique also had a subtext of cultural and educational policy. the austrian government expressly de- manded that the little known native evidence of late antique art be subjected to large scale research projects. the decision to do this was made in , when an international con- ference of german philologists and schol- ars was held in vienna. this conference, in which more than one thousand scholars took part, made those in austria with responsibil- ity for culture aware that, in comparison with germany, austria had fallen behind in the analysis of antique and late antique culture. in order to correct this, a five volume survey was proposed, on which the leading austrian authorities were to collaborate. alois riegl’s spätrömische kunstindustrie represented the first volume of this project. the investigation of the late antique, which towards be- came “the general theme of the first vienna school” must be understood as a project of national art competition, particularly with germany; thanks to the well-established phil- hellenism of its scholars, germany’s interest in the antique was incomparably higher than that of austria. yet another factor contributed to the revival of academic interest in the late antique, which can partly explain the vehemence with which it was discussed. once riegl and strzgowski’s concept was applied to a modern context – as a subtext, in other words, of the act of histori- cal analysis – it became clear that it reflected the contemporary european situation. indeed, the central issues within the argument could easily be applied to the fin de siècle: it revolved above all around the question, revived in the wake of jacob burckhardt’s study on the em- peror constantine ( ), of when and under what circumstances a great empire could fall, which symptoms political decline entailed, and the fundamental meaning of decadence; the phenomenon of migration was also in the foreground, i.e. answers were being sought to the question how cultural influences manifest- ed themselves outwardly. in that connection the problem of historical continuity was also touched on; basic ideas about cultural hegem- ony, which were particularly apt in the ethni- cally diverse habsburg empire, resonate in the discourse on the late antique, as well as in the debate over cultural legacy. finally there was the question of modernism as such, namely on the relationship between a dominant high cul- ture and a more autonomous often conflicting popular culture. the close relationship between these ut- terances and contemporary political events is shown particularly clearly in the case of strzygowsky, who allowed his openly political views with respect to the world at large to in- vade his scholarly texts. his approval seeking anti-semitism found cheap ideological sup- port in the turbulent austrian political land- scape, above all in the circle of georg ritter von schönerer, who designated anti-semitism as the “cornerstone of national politics.” with his radical all-german party schönerer re- ceived enormous political support; in the election, of his fellow members were voted into the chamber of deputies. a central ele- ment of his politics comprised his “ideological negativism (anti-socialist, anticapitalist, anti- catholic, antiliberal, anti-habsburg).” strzy- gowski was particularly interested in schö- nerer’s “free from rome” movement, which in its typically aggressive manner beat the drum against, specifically, any roman influence on austrian culture and politics. a more direct and, for the then readers of the allgemeine zei­ tung, recognizable allusion to schönerer may also be found in hellas in des orients umar­ mung, in which strzygowski fired off a broad- side against romanism: “they don’t know the orient. both wickhoff and riegl have rome in their blood; as much as riegl in particular may exert himself to proclaim the opposite, they are both knee-deep in what one might call an ultramontane direction, the conviction that all roads lead to rome […].” strzygowski’s critique was directed here not only against riegl and wickhoff, but above all against the institut für Österreichische ge- schichtsforschung, which had traditionally cultivated good contacts with roman scholar- ship. his reproach of the blindly loyal rom- anists was so serious that it could only have been borrowed from schönerer’s dreadful, off- handedly combative rhetoric. in a next step he further augmented his negation of rome and flatly classified the entire development of european art, insofar as it led back to the late roman period, as an error and a “plague,” that stood in the way of the free unfolding of ger- manic art: “our modern art developed from the decorative style of the nomadic germans or slavo­celto­germans […] the dignified blossoms of the gothic, the joy in the natu- ral landscape that, counter to the anthropomorphism of the antique, was heralded by the colorful interior of its cathedrals and their exterior sculptural ornament. it achieved incomparable greatness in the draperies of the statues, then attained its great flowering in netherlandish landscape painting, and now in böcklin. what is forever standing in its way is the antique. in renaissance italy […] the gothic was propagated from its sturdy germanic stem; that offspring thrived and blossomed splendidly in italian soil, but when planted across the alps became a mannered, lifeless thing which still plagues us with its af- fectations.” strzygowski’s historical constructions would be scarcely worth mention, were they not so seamlessly integrated into a scholarly discourse in which – arising in the channels of arthur comte de gobineau’s turgid theories and brought back to germany and austria by people like ludwig woltmann – the polarity between the italian and the german renais- sance flared up in a racist direction. as a con- sequence of this polarity works were written in which aspects of early post-medieval culture, specifically humanism, were flatly rejected. for decades strzygowski himself tirelessly identi- fied the character of the italian renaissance as the source of repression. “one never forgets that ‘medieval’ blood was our blood, and that the ‘renaissance’ was an invasion of the south into the native ground of the north.” such a view was also spread outside of strzygowski’s faculty. a random example may be taken from franz zachs’s influential study christlich­ger­ manisches kulturideal. Österreich auf dem re­ chten weg ( ), in which the author empha- sized that “our modern humanistic education. . . [injects] the young with a deliberately dis- torted portrayal of the development of our cul- ture,” for that reason we demand to do “away with the false educational ideal of the renais- sance! we must first clear away the rubble!” what particularly disturbed riegl about strzygowski was his habit of seeing cultural transformations exclusively from this point of view. for strzygowski insisted that the decline of antique art was a clumsy act of jewish ag- gression, introduced through the influx of se- mitic masses into the west and north. riegl fiercely protested: “strzygowski’s hypothesis would be barely worth discuss- ing if mediterranean people of indo-germanic origin had been utterly eradicated from the start of the roman em- pire, and replaced by oriental nomads. but this was not the case, and his faulty and exaggerated argument, based upon the immigration of aliens to the roman empire in the form of mercenary soldiers, fails because the intel- lectual conversion process was already far advanced; any attempt to find an actual explanation must proceed from the change that was evident since constantine the great, emerging […] directly, as a necessary product of the im- mediately preceding developmental phase […]. evolution, not revolution.” mutual fusion and the fear of mixing evolution – the central paradigm of all rieg- lian art theory. just as in his stilfragen ( ) riegl made use of that “model for diachronic ornamental transformation” so he insisted on the idea of a progressive development of art in his studies on the late antique. it is highly significant that even between these competi- tors – at least at first glance – there was unity on this point. like riegl, strzygowski also stressed that the representation of artistic de- velopment should be a scholarly priority. both were clear that the history of art, if it were to become a modern field of academic research, could not release itself from schol- arly paradigms of development and progress. this is not surprising, as outstanding human- ists of the time – comte, marx, darwin – had already adopted this thought in their studies. furthermore, although this line of generally progressive optimism was already fractured at the turn of the th century, and was com- pletely shattered with the first world war, the idea of historical progress nevertheless persisted. it can even be said that the question of developmental progress – whether it exists and how it occurred – was still growing in the field of art history. in those years, in addition to julius meier-graefe’s internationally suc- cessful entwicklungsgeschichte der modernen kunst ( ), a great many treatises appeared that took up this theme. in vienna in max dvořák published his monumental study on the art of the van eyck brothers – and was promptly criticized by strzygowski for the de- velopmental concepts that he outlined in it. a few years before burckhardt’s disciple hein- rich alfred schmid, then active in berlin, had already likewise discussed how for him devel- opment existed principally in the increasing ability to represent space and inner life. according to georg iggers the core of his- toricism as a movement of thought lies in the assumption that humanity – and culture as well – is changeable: “the world of man is in a state of incessant flux, although within it there are centers of stability (personalities, institu- tions, nations, epochs), each possessing an in- ner structure, a character, and each in constant metamorphosis in accord with its own inter- nal principle of development. history thus be- comes the only guide to an understanding of things human. there is no constant human na- ture; rather the character of each man reveals itself only in his development. ” it was precisely this thought that strzy- gowski found insupportable. certainly he was completely prepared to recognize the fact of historic development, yet he could not bring himself to accept the possibility of artistic change. nevertheless he obviously had con- siderable trouble with the idea that a change demanded by development (whether in indi- vidual form, or in overall artistic orientation) from the original meaning – in strzygowski’s terminology, the essence – of an art work con- ceals it or makes it unrecognizable. his entire work was consequently aimed at uncovering the pure heart of a work or of an epoch. as if driven he pursued the genuine, undisturbed artistic vision, the quintessential, primitive form of art. accordingly in strzygowski’s writ- ing he speaks of “sprouts,” of “origins” and “be- ginnings.” riegl and particularly wickhoff, who was likewise the subject of strzygowski’s attacks, dismissed this ever more obsessively driven search for roots as a pointless exercise: “in most cases […] it is not so important when a motif appears for the first time. art is as wasteful with her motives as nature is with her seeds.” if we sum up the differences in interpreta- tion of the concept of development in riegl and wickhoff on the one hand and strzy- gowski on the other, we can conclude that strzygowski always looked backwards – to actual or supposed beginnings – whereas his viennese counterparts studied development in the opposite direction. in particular, they fo- cused on the moments in which a form visibly changes and takes on a new character. the fundamental difference in their inter- pretations of developmental concepts may also be grasped in their approach to folk art, com- monly viewed as being particularly resistant to change. in his study volkskunst, hausfleiβ und hausindustrie riegl, who has much to say about this point, clearly refuses to interpret folk art as the source of purity or the locus of national self-discovery, despite all attempts to do so. like every other art form, folk art nec- essarily enters a state of transformation when exposed to external influences. this, as riegl says, is not at all deplorable, but on the con- trary is the principle of every further change: once a stranger comes into close, lasting con- tact with another stranger, the process of fur- ther education is launched. riegl formulated this in a similar fashion in his answer to strzy- gowki in which he says: “in the life of art there is no death, but only a continually progressive, reciprocal fusion of everything that ever was, in a continuous, endlessly wavering line.” this approach, which explained this con- tinual, mutual fusion, i.e. the incessant influ- encing and blending, as the epitome of artistic principle, strzygowski flatly rejected. in his analysis of an embroidered piece from cz- ernowitz, which was acquired as a gift by the austrian museum of folk life and folk art in , strzygowski gives a detailed description that immediately reverts to his typical view: he insists that “the artistic values of the above piece are not pure”; that one “can always detect the influx of elements that disturb its artistic effect”; that the goal of the examination must be to “uncover the spirit of the whole in its original appearance and meaning”; in order to grasp the “developmental historical position” of this th century piece, one must look at the “beginnings of christian art and the prior syr- ian-persian procession” for there one would find that the “pre-conditions of the individual motif,” originating in “persia […] thence to syria and armenia, and on to the artistic ter- ritory of the mediterranean and northern eu- rope” are at work there. despite an inferior methodology, strzy- gowski undertook a perfectly interesting ex- periment in this analysis: to apply the criteria of art history to an anonymous work of folk art; but the way that he analyzed the embroi- dery was significant: again he sees impure ele- ments, an alien influx, that disturbs the artistic impression; the focus of the research calls for the divorce of native from foreign influences, in order to search for the origins of the relevant motives. this is not the place to evaluate strzy- gowski’s psychic profile; it suffices to point out, however, that the quest for purity and the fear of mixing was described as the most dis- tinctive feature of the “soldierly man” (klaus theweleit): the man who searches for an origi- nal state, the authentic, and who perceives any cultural or physical hybridization as a threat. the remarks of a disparaging and equally anguished strzygowski regarding changes or, to be precise, departures from an originally clear and manageable artistic appearance, riddle his observations on the history of ornament. in clear allusion to riegl’s stilfragen ( ), in which the latter traced the border-crossing transformative process of an ornamental mo- tif through centuries, strzygowski in hellas in des orients umarmung now presents his view of the matter. for him there was absolutely no doubt that the forms of the tendril motif bore witness to clear artistic origins. however, once the motif fell under oriental influence, it be- came for him play with lines, began to prolifer­ ate and finally ended in orgies of the arabesque: “the intimate, quiet relationship that greek artists had with nature and which was first […] expressed in the in- troduction of the tendril and the acanthus […] whether a hellenistic or early oriental spirit […] predominates, be- came a crude naturalizing […] or is mangled into a play of line with vegetable and animal motives, in particular in an annexation of old mesopotamian cane work bands and the endless proliferation of lattice and network motives. the emphasis upon spatial boundaries inherent in the new style, i.e. upon broad, completely filled-in expanses, had in a short time led to the proliferation of new, un-greek elements, allied in spirit to old oriental art, that then cel- ebrated their orgy in arabesques.” it is not hard to guess the origin of the rhet- oric here: once more strzygowski writes about his anxiety regarding an oriental, i.e. jewish, culture, a culture that knows no boundaries, occupies spaces, starts to proliferate, and cel- ebrates orgies. strzygowski structured his thought along racial categories; implicitly even early on, and explicitly in his works around , he organ- ized his thought according to geography; in time this approach hardened into a rigid value system. increasingly one reads, as in his book altai­iran und völkerwanderung ( ), of an “inborn peculiarity,” of the “german people’s body” or that “the gothic is much more ra- cially pure than the greek was.” in the ad- vancement of such thought he was, as is well known, not alone; the overall trend toward geography as a determinant of style, in which members of strzygowski’s department eagerly collaborated, tended in precisely this direc- tion. just how authoritative developmental history would be for a race- and easily even racist-based art and art history is the subject of a concluding, cursory glance at the further history of the concept. the development of art: a discourse of nationalism in the midst of the first world war, while the department was already showing symptoms of a crisis, rudolf kautzsch, professor of art history at the university of frankfurt am main, gave a speech on the occasion of the birthday of the german kaiser entitled “the concept of development in art history.” kautzsch, who was a member of the faculty specializing in late antique and early medieval art, and who was naturally acquainted with the “orient vs. rome debate,” summarized the achievements of re- cent art historians; he praised viennese research in particular for its description of “artistic pro- duction as a component in a compelling causal chain of the developmental orders.” “i do not wish to say here that this view was a necessary reaction to old fallacies, or that it had a very salutary peda- gogical effect, though it must be said: i hope it did […] but when our assessment of problems of formal representation in a comprehensive context proceeds so gradually, is that really enough? is it not so, that in this direction we are cer- tainly very experienced, as everything came, but not really, why it happened so and not in some other way […] from where does this direction originate? […] must we really abstain from asking the reason for the development?” with astonishing clarity kautzsch aimed in his speech at the boundary that stood between riegl and strzygowski. a paradigm of the vi- enna school – the representation of artistic existence in and of itself – was in kautzsch’s view certainly important, yet in the end he dis- missed it as an anachronistic undertaking, for it did not seek the roots of a national art. in contrast to riegl, strzygowski approached this challenge willingly. kautzsch’s question about the “why of development” completely legiti- mized strzygowski’s quest for the beginnings of art. somewhere, the thinking ran, northern art and northern “nature” must have a point of departure. to uncover this – what in strzy- gowski’s case we must simply refer to as “ar- yan” – beginning offered not only the chance to be freed from rome-centrism with its un- fortunate humanism, but also the possibility of shoring up german national feeling, which had been beaten down first in the habsburg monarchy and then in the first world war. that strzygowski, who by spoke of his “legitimate partiality for the german nation,” came almost inevitably to adopt nationalistic language hardly needs mentioning; and his use of linguistics and ideology as the starting point for an attack, directed in an increasingly ag- gressive manner against the jewish people, is well known; “it is not difficult to see where all this was leading.” with his jingoistic attempts, strzygowski volunteered his observations on the german- ic creation myth, not only in clear opposi- tion to riegl, but also to people like michael haberlandt, the first director of the austrian museum of folk life and folk art haberlandt was himself clear on the subversive power of a nationalistically-inflected scholarship, and for that reason he called for moderation, recalling that in scholarship there was “a deeper devel- opmental principle than nationality.” in the event, however, the notion of a na- tional sense of intellectual and artistic devel- opment remained a central area of academic analysis under national socialism. in , in his broadly aimed study of the meaning of the concept, christian töwe listed eleven art-historical approaches that all concerned the concept of development. “kunsthisto- rie als rassenkulturhistorie” [“art history as race-cultural history”] encompassed a broad sphere in which the proponents of this ap- proach, among them wilhelm pinder, kurt gerstenberg, dagobert frey und alfred stan- ge, were cited. although josef strzygowski is notably absent from this list, it would be in- teresting as an intellectual matter to discover why the viennese fell into the disfavor of the national socialists. the fact is that, despite his sympathetic statements about adolf hitler, the nazis evidently had little sympathy for strzygowski. around hans jantzen was obviously constrained to draw a line between strzygowski’s ideas and those of the national socialists: “in the last years of his life josef strzygowski stressed that the ‘north’ brings its own creative powers and ideas to the unfold- ing of european art, a remark that admittedly lacks any regard for ‘history.’ also, his idea of the ‘north’ must not be confused with what we are accustomed to term nordic-germanic.” late roman art industry: the edict of tolerance given all of this, to return to the questions posed at the beginning of this essay, is there any real justification to view strzygowski in a posi- tive light, to describe him as a pioneer of global art history, and to make a distinction between the “early,” supposedly interesting strzygowski, and the “later,” openly racist scholar? in every respect the answer is emphatically “no!” strzy- gowski was a scholar who, despite his many innovative approaches, had a life-long attach- ment to his prejudices. a deep-seated anti- semitism, coupled with an irrational fear of mixed, hybridized cultural forms, hindered his serious engagement with the complex unfold- ing of european and non-european culture. his views on coptic art for example – in maria cramer’s words the “mixed art” par excellence – are useless and, as lászlo török stressed, of absolutely no scholarly value. one may con- ditionally accept that strzygowski’s occupation with armenian architecture was an expression of sympathy for the modern-day genocide committed against the armenian people. but this argument is not convincing. for with this term strzygowski all too likely implied “ary- an,” and not “armenian” as such. to the very end, there pours from every line of his work a profoundly hostile contempt for humanity, a devotion to an ideology of blood and soil, and never the slightest trace of empathy or com- passion. the aggressiveness, with which he at- tacked riegl, wickhoff, schlosser, dvořák, and tietze, betrays much about the position from which he wrote about art. strzygowski needed enemies, with whom he could do battle. alois riegl had his hands full fending off strzygowski’s attacks. at the high point of their conflict riegl apparently wrote a letter to his opponent, in which he set forth his views once again, and openly called for a truce. in vain: even after this, strzygowski never missed an opportunity to discredit riegl. what most characterized strzygowski was his intolerance. ultimately it was a question of the struggle between the two scholars. where- as strzygowski in his preoccupation with the late antique celebrated a cult of the strong, the powerful, and the white, (“the high-born lady, full of noble self-possession”), riegl in- sisted not only on prizing “victory, beauty, and nobility,” but also on respecting the “weak, base, ignominious, and ugly.” perhaps no one has more clearly perceived this undeni- able, fundamental tendency in riegl’s work than otto pächt. toward the end of the course he taught in vienna in the winter semester of – entitled “methods of art historical praxis,” pächt spoke of his own opinion about what stood behind riegl’s intense engagement with the late antique: “when we say today that a work of another culture is based on premises that are not our own, and that it can be understood only by first finding the right approach, then we are subscribing to priorities and methods that have entered the purview of scholarship only since riegl first called for the relativization of aesthetic values. his late roman art industry […] was the edict of tolerance for the whole discipline of art history.” translated by margaret schwartz notes zaloscer, hilde, kunstgeschichte und nationalsozia- lismus. in kontinuität und bruch – – . beiträge zur österreichischen kultur­ und wissen­ schaftsgeschichte. ed. by friedrich stadler. wien , – . a few years ago there was a discussion at the vien- nese institute of art history at the university of vi- enna about how strzygowski’s legacy might be han- dled. at that time the then managers of the library planned to put his writings into storage so as to pro- tect students from their negative influence. marchand, l. suzanne, the rhetoric of artifacts and the decline of classical humanism: the case of josef strzygowski. in proof and persuasion in history (his­ tory and theory. studies in the philosophy of history. theme issue ). ed. by anthony grafton and su- zanne l. marchand. wesleyan university press , – . berggren, lars, josef strzygowski – en främmende fägel i finland. in the shaping of art history in fin­ land (taidehistoriallisia tutkimuksia/konstistoriska studier ). ed. renja suominen-kokkonen. helsin- ki/helsingfors , – ; wood, christopher s., strzygowski und riegl in den vereinigten staaten. in wiener schule. erinnerungen und perspektiven (=wiener jahrbuch fűr kunstgeschichte, / ). wien , – ; maranci, christina, the his- toriography of armenian architecture: josef strzy- gowski, austria, and armenia in revue des études arméniennes, – , – ; goss, vladimir p., josef strzygowski and early medieval art in croatia. in acta historiae artium xlvii/ , – . the conference, entitled “universal and/or particular values in art history: universal vs. migration – the work of josef strzgowski” was held from sept. – , at the budapest collegium; see http://www.col- bud.hu/mult_ant/getty-workshops/universal.htm. früchtl, andreas, strzygowski als wegbereiter einer vergleichenden weltkunstgeschichte? untersuchung zur genese der strzygowskischen kunstwissen- schäftlichen methode von – . univ. dipl.- arbeit wien ; frodl-kraft, eva, ein aporie und der versuch ihrer deutung. josef strzygowski – ju- lius von schlosser. in wiener jahrbuch für kunstge­ schichte / , – ; scholz, piotr o., wanderer zwischen den welten. josef strzygowski und seine immer noch aktuelle frage: orient oder rom. in: kunstgeschichete an der universität graz eds. walter höflechner & götz pochat, graz , – altmeister moderner kunstgeschichte, ed. by heinrich dilly. berlin ; klassiker der kunstgeschichte, ed. by ulrich pfisterer. münchen . see also in this connection the conference on “german art histori- ography,” held in glasgow from oct. – , . symposia were held in rome, vienna, and milan ex- pressly to mark the occasion of the one hundredth anniversary of riegl’s death in . as was emphati- cally noted at those meetings, they were concerned with a scholar who forged completely new paths in his discipline, opening many new pages in the field, and whose reflections even now have an astonish- ing currency. the conference journals are still in press. within the framework of the vienna confer- ence margaret olin, the doyenne of riegl studies, analyzed the extent to which alois riegl anticipated the field of “visual studies,” and how progressive his reflections on the haptic, or physically apprehended perceptions, were. regine prange presented a related view, in which she drew a line connecting riegl to max imdahl, clement greenberg, and rosalind krauss. riegl, alois, volkskunst, hausfleiβ und hausindu­ strie. berlin , . reynolds, diana, die öster- reichische synthese. metropolen, peripherie und die kunstgewerblichen fachschulen des museums. in kunst und industrie. die anfänge des museums für angewandte kunst in wien. ed. peter noever, ostfil- dern , – . see further vasold, georg, alois riegl und die kunstgeschichte als kulturgeschichte. Űberlegungen zum frühwerk des wiener gelehrte. freiburg im breisgau . the relationship between the two scholars has for years been a theme in the work of margaret olin. for that reason my version, needless to say, simply serves as a supplementary footnote to olin’s exemplary analysis. cf. olin, margaret, art history and ideol- ogy: alois riegl and josef strzygowski. in cultural visions. essays in the history of culture. eds. penny s. gold & benjamin c. sax. amsterdam , – ; olin, margaret, the nation without art. examining modern discourses on jewish art. nebraska u.p. . schlosser, von julius, die wiener schule der kunst- geschichte. rückblick auf ein säkulum deutscher gelehrtenarbeit in Österreich.in mitteilungen des Österreichisches instituts für geschichtsforschung, ergänzungs-band xiii, , no. , – . as evi- dence of the continued usefulness of schlosser’s text, it is shortly become available, at least in excerpts, in an english translation, cf. framing formalism: riegl’s work. ed. by richard woodfield, amsterdam , – . an italian translation has been available since ; in the text was translated into croatian; and it appeared in japanese in . ibid., . frodl-kraft , . schlosser , . in – riegl gave a three hour lecture at the university of vienna on baroque art. in stryzgowski published his book das werden des barock bei raphael und correggio, strassburg . strzygowski’s stay in rome dated from to ; riegl was there in and returned in , cf. olin, margaret, forms of representation in alois riegl’s theory of art. university park, pa, , n. . as a recognized expert on the middle ages (his dis- sertation concerned the high roman schottenkirche in regensburg), riegl took on a project on the rep- resentation of late antique and early medieval exca- vations in austro-hungary. in the same year, , strzygowski published a work on the austrian mid- dle ages, cf. strzygowski, josef, das frühe und das hohe mittelalter. in kunstgeschichtlichte charakter­ bilder aus Österreich­ungarn. ed. by albert ilg. prag, wien & leipzig , – . strzygowski’s orient oder rom appeared in , thus in the same year as riegl’s spätrömische kunst­ industrie. whereas in his holländischen gruppenporträt riegl analyzed the function of the viewer, strzygowski had for years tried to construct his own branch of re- search, which he called “beschauerforschung” (view- er studies), see die kunstwissenschaft der gegenwart in selbstdarstellungen. ed. by johannes jahn. leipzig , – . cf. olin , , n. . riegl, alois, josef strzygowski: cimabue und rom. in kunstchronik. wochenschrift fürkunst und kunst­ gewerbe, / – , no. (feb. , ), . riegl argues that particularly in monuments of the th century there lurks an “absolutely radical antici- pation of modern concepts,” cf. riegl, alois, spätrö­ mische kunstindustrie. berlin (revised ed.), . strzygowski, josef, hellas in des orients umarmung. in beilage zur allgemeinen zeitung (munich), , no. (february ), . ibid. ibid., ibid., – . ibid., . olin , – ; olin , – . schlosser was so taken with lange that he even (though unsuccessfully) began to learn danish, cf. lange, julius, vom kunstwert. mit einem geleitwort von julius schlosser. zürich , vii–xv. lange, julius, die menschliche gestalt in der ge­ schichte der kunst. von der zweiten blütezeit der grie­ chischen kunst bis zum . jahrhundert. strassburg , – . mosse, georg l. , toward the final solution. a his- tory of european racism. new york , – . see among others frodl-kraft , . riegl, alois, spätrömisch oder orientalisch? in bei­ lage zur allgemeinen zeitung (munich), , no. (april ), . ibid., . cf. vasold, georg, der blick in den tragischen spie- gel. zur kunsthistorischen erforschung der spätan- tike in wien um . in the nineteenth­century process of “musealization” in hungary and europe. ed. by ernő marosi and gabor klaniczay. budapest , – . frodl-kraft , . marchand, suzanne l., down from olympus. ar­ chaeology and philhellenism in germany – . princeton . spätrömische kunstindustrie ( ) was to have had as a second volume an account of the art of the migratory period. riegl’s early death hindered the publication, and it was published only in , un- der another title and with the aid of riegl’s notes, cf. zimmermann, heinrich e., kunstgewerbe des frühen mittelalters. auf grundlage des nachgelassenen mate­ rials alois riegls. wien . in the meantime strzy- gowski also devoted himself to the theme of the mi- gration, cf. particularly strzygowski, josef, altai­iran und völkerwanderung. ziergeschichtliche untersu­ chungen über den eintritt der wander­ und nordvöl­ ker in die treibhäuser geistigen lebens. leipzig . cited in rumpler, helmut, eine chance für mitteleu­ ropa. bürgerliche emanzipation und staatsverfall in der habsburgermonarchie. wien , . cf. fuchs, albert, geistige strömungen in Österreich – . wien , – . schönerer’s popu- larity soon dropped precipitously when it became known that his wife had jewish roots. rabinbach, anson. the crisis of austrian socialism. from red vienna to civil war. chicago & london , . trauner, karl reinhart, die los­von­rom­bewegung. gesellschaftspolitische und kirchliche strömung in der ausgehenden habsburgermonarchie. szentendre . strzygowski, hellas in des orients umarmung, . theodor sickel, the director of the institut für Öster- reichische geschichtsforschung in vienna from to , was significantly involved with the found- ing of the Österreichisches historisches instituts in rom ( ), and led it from until . a direct cause for the increased scholarly change of di- rection toward rome was the opening of the vatican archives under pope leo xiii in , cf. lhotsky, alphons, geschichte des instituts für Österreichische geschichtsforschung – . graz , . on strzygowski’s contempt by colleagues of the institut für Österreichische geschichtsforschung see march- and , – . strzygowski, hellas in des orients umarmung, . mosse , – . the theories of the german anthropologist woltmann were broadly received by academics, cf. for example: schulz, alwin, die ger- manen und die renaissance in italien. in monatshef­ te der kunstwissenschaftlichen literatur, , no. , – . strzygowski, josef, die baukunst der armenier und europa. wien , . zach, franz, christlich­germanisches kulturideal. Österreich auf dem rechten weg. klagenfurt ( th ed.), – . riegl, spätrömisch oder orientalisch?, . elsner, jas, the birth of late antiquity: riegl and strzygowski in . in art history, / , . strzygowski, josef, kunde, wesen, entwicklung. eine einführung. wien . by , when strzygowski undertook a first attempt at systematizing the de- partment, he demanded that “new developmental groups and names” be coined, cf. strzygowski, josef, die zukunft der kunstwissenschaft, münchen , . on the progressive thought formulated in antiq- uity and its turbulent subsequent history in art see ernst gombrich’s still pioneering study the ideas of progress and their impact on art. new york . strzygowski , . schmid, heinrich alfred. was ist kunstentwicklung? ( ). in heinrich alfred schmid, gesammelte kunsthistorische schriften. leipzig , – . iggers, g. georg, the german conception of his­ tory. the national tradition of historical thought from herder to present. wesleyan university press , . wickhoff, franz, römische kunst (die wiener ge- nesis) (=franz wickhoff ’s writings, vol. ). berlin , . at nearly the same time as wickhoff lud- wig von sybel expressed the same idea. of him ed- mund weigand reported in , “in terms of prior- ity the discussion of matters of origin, whose various solutions are only a matter of heuristic hypotheses, seem to him practical preliminary work, above all the chronology of historic monuments, which was his principal work.” cf. weigand, edmund, die ori- ent-oder-rom-frage in der frühchristlichen kunst. in zeitschrift für die neutestamentliche wissenschaft und die kunde der älteren kirchen, / , . riegl , . riegl, spätrömisch oder orientalisch?, . strzygowski, josef, ein werk der volkskunst im lichte der kunstforschung. in werke der volkskunst mit besonderer berücksichtigung Österreichs. organ des k.k. museums für österreichische volkskunde in wien, / , no. , – . strzygowski took individual motives at random from sassanian stone reliefs from taq-e bostan (western iran, th or early th century) and related them in all seriousness to this th century embroidery from bu- kovina. theweleit, klaus, male fantasies. university of min- nesota press . strzygowski, hellas in des orients umarmung, . strzygowski , . ibid. ibid., . da costa kaufmann, thomas, toward a geography of art. chicago university press . da costa kaufmann’s study is in many respects overly super- ficial. his portrayal of alois riegl as a proponent of a nationalistic art historiography in particular, stands the true facts on their head. we must thank jan bakoš for putting things right, cf. bakoš, jan, alois riegl – otec umeleckohistorického nacionalizmu? [alois riegl – father of art historical national- ism?] in regnum bohemiae et sacrum romanum imperium. (sborník k poct jiřího kuthana) praha , – . cf. also bakoš, jan, vienna school disciples and ‘the new tasks’ of art history. in ars / , no. , – . richard hamann spoke in , on the occasion of a review of hans tietze’s die methode der kun­ stgeschichte ( ), of a “crisis, in which art his- tory found itself at the time,” cited in halbertsma, marlite, wilhelm pinder und die deutsche kunstge­ schichte. worms , . tietze came to the same conclusion a few years later, cf. tietze, hans, leben­ dige kunstwissenschaft. zur krisis der kunst und der kunstwissenschaft. wien . two years earlier the institutional crisis had already appeared as a theme in strzygowski’s writing, cf. strzygowski, josef, die krisis der geisteswissenschaften vorgeführt am bei­ spiele der forschung über bildende kunst. wien . kautzsch, rudolf, der begriff der entwicklung in der kunstgeschichte. rede zur geburtstagsfeier am . januar (frankfurter universitätsreden vii). frankfurt am main . kautzsch was by and large on strzygowski’s side, cf. metzlers kunsthistoriker lexikon. ed. by peter bett- hausen, peter h. feist & christiane fork. stuttgart & weimar , . kautzsch , – . strzygowski, josef, die bildende kunst der gegen­ wart. leipzig , ix–x. elsner , . haberlandt, michael, zum beginn ( ), as cited in beitl, klaus, jahre Österreichisches museum für volkskunde. in Österreichische zeitschrift für volks­ kunde, neue serie vol. xxxix[ ]/ , . töwe, christain, die formen der entwickelnden kunstgeschichtsschreibung. zugleich ein beitrag zur deutung des entwicklungsbegriff. berlin . cf. zaloscer , , n. . jantzen, hans, deutsche kunstgeschichtswissen- schaft bis . in forschungen und fortschritte / , no. / , , n. . cf. zaloscer, hilde, zur genese der koptischen kunst. wien , – török, lászlo, strzygowski’s coptic art. in acta his­ toriae artium, xlvii/ , : “as a conclusion, i should like to repeat what i said in the introduction: even if strzygowski’s views on coptic art may de- serve the attention of the historian of the irrwege of early twentieth-century european thinking, for the historian of coptic art they remain completely irrel- evant.” strzygowski explained his interest in armenia this way: “this is a case of evidence of a great religious art, which moves us that much more, as its emergence owed to the earliest attempt of an aryan people to erect a nation-state on the soil of christendom.”, see strzygowski , v. in the foreword to altai­iran und völkerwanderung ( ) strzygowski wrote, alluding to riegl: “the struggle once [. . . ] commenced thus continues [. . .],” cf. strzygowski , ix. ibid., . riegl, spätrömisch oder orientalisch?, . pächt, otto, the practice of art history. reflections on method. london , – (originally pub- lished as methodisches zur kunsthistorischen praxis. ausgewählte schriften. münchen ( nd ed.), . a german version of this article has been pub- lished in ars – journal of the institute of art history of sas / on the right: j. j. tikkanen’s sketch from on eduard manet’s the balcony ( – ). private collection. ©de­ partment of art history of the university of helsinki. beyond the mirror - seeing in art history and visual culture studies susanne von falkenhausen beyond the mirror image | volume two foundations have helped to finance my sabbaticals for the research on this book: the deutsche forschungsgemeinschaft (dfg) and the fritz-thyssen- stiftung (opus-magnum-programm). the clark art research center in william- stown, massachussetts let me stay for five months of peaceful work in a beautiful location, with michael ann holly being an extraordinary host. over the years many students took part in the discussions around the topic of this book, and, in order of appearance, bettina uppenkamp, valeria schulte-fische- dick, ildikó szántó, margret lüters-bach have been patient and rigorous readers of the german manuscript. hanne loreck and birgit pelzer have helped to deal with lacanian implications. with his translation nicholas grindell lifted my kind of idiom to a higher level of exactitude. marcia pointon undertook the heroic task of going through the english manuscript with me. i cannot but repeat my thanks to them all. any incoherences and errors are of course my responsibility. susanne von falkenhausen is professor emerita of modern and contemporary art history at humboldt university berlin. susanne von falkenhausen beyond the mirror seeing in art history and visual culture studies translated by nicholas grindell the publication was subsidized by the open-access-publikationsfond of hum- boldt-universität zu berlin. the translation was subsidized by humboldt-universität zu berlin on behalf of the exzellenzinitiative von bund und ländern. bibliographic information published by the deutsche nationalbibliothek the deutsche nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the deutsche nationalbibliografie; detailed bibliographic data are available in the internet at http://dnb.d-nb.de this work is licensed under the creative commons attribution . (by) license, which means that the text may be be remixed, transformed and built upon and be copied and redistributed in any medium or format even commercially, provided credit is given to the author. for details go to http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/ . / creative commons license terms for re-use do not apply to any content (such as graphs, figures, photos, excerpts, etc.) not original to the open access publication and further permission may be required from the rights holder. the obligation to research and clear permission lies solely with the party re-using the material. first published as jenseits des spiegels. das sehen in kunstgeschichte und visual culture studies by wilhelm fink verlag, paderborn . english edition, slightly revised, published in by transcript verlag, bielefeld. © susanne von falkenhausen cover layout: maria arndt, bielefeld cover illustration: man ray, »gräfin casati«, , © man ray trust/vg bild- kunst, bonn printed by majuskel medienproduktion gmbh, wetzlar print-isbn - - - - pdf-isbn - - - - https://doi.org/ . / printed on permanent acid-free text paper. contents introduction........................................................................ seeing and the concept of visuality.................................................................... trains of thought – readings ............................................................................ art history and seeing .................................................................................... seeing in the visual field: visual culture studies................................................... seeing as an ethical question .......................................................................... part one: how do art historians see? . interpreting forms of representation........................................ visual order as concretized worldview – erwin panofsky’s perspective as symbolic form ......................................................................................... seeing as an approach to reality – ernst gombrich’s art and illusion ....................... . experience and the visual ................................................... the “period eye” – michael baxandall’s painting and experience ............................. between presence and representation – svetlana alpers’ the art of describing .......... . through the eyes of the spectator........................................... seeing the other – otto pächt’s the practice of art history: reflections on method ...... focus on reception - wolfgang kemp’s der anteil des betrachters ............................ part two: visual culture studies – looking at the visual . visual culture studies – concepts and agendas.............................. culture, the political, and visual culture ............................................................ identity as a cultural and political concept ......................................................... political visuality: visibility as a contested resource ............................................ the academic discourse of visuality................................................................ one-point perspective as a metaphor for rationalist cultures of power................... . visual culture studies’ foundational concept ................................ the model of the gaze ................................................................................... the threatened subject – norman bryson .......................................................... the evil eye and a counter-model – margaret olin .............................................. . visual culture studies’ operational concept ................................ what is visual culture? w.j.t. mitchell............................................................... visuality as event – nicholas mirzoeff ............................................................... seeing is reading – mieke bal ......................................................................... . seeing as a political resource in visual culture studies ..................... the stigmatizing gaze – ‘integration and positive revaluation’ – norman bryson ........ the discriminating and the oppositional gaze – bell hooks .................................... an attempt at integration from art history – lisa bloom ....................................... evidence .................................................................................................... evidence of the non-visible – martin a. berger.................................................... the utopian gaze and its failure – nicholas mirzoeff ............................................ part three: towards an ethics for the act of seeing . questions of ethics ......................................................... historical unfamiliarity in art historical seeing .................................................. cultural unfamiliarity – the “other” in the gaze of visual culture studies.................. the narcissistic circle – a critique .................................................................. attention and recognition............................................................................... visual spaces of the subject: narration and observation ...................................... “self-identity is a bad visual system. fusion is a bad strategy of positioning.”........... seeing the other .......................................................................................... outlook: the digital world and its consequences ................................................ bibliography...................................................................... index............................................................................ introduction in the early s, the political battles of the s seemed to be over, with class struggle as a driving force supposedly rendered obsolete by the end of thecoldwar.certainaspectsofthesebattleshadshiftedintotheuniversities, mainly thanks to teachers who themselves had participated in the political movements of the s. i was one of those teachers. as an art historian i found myself within a discipline that i wanted to teach,but that in many ways did not satisfy me.the s had brought feminism into academia,reshaping it intogenderstudies,atransformationihadtriedtobepartof.andinbritain and the united states, not only women asserted themselves as new subjects in academic discourse,but also those groups of individuals who were fighting for visibility and a voice as the other of dominant ethnic, cultural and sexual categories. visibility became a currency of social recognition, and a political issue. from the late s, it also became an academic issue. and from the early s in britain and the united states it brought forth a new discipline, visual culture studies, which in turn brought forth a new concept: visuality. thisbookisaboutaparticular intellectualstrugglethatoriginatedinthe s and continues today. two disciplinary fields will be in play in my analysis: art history and visual culture studies. a hotly contested debate in the early s unfolded between art history and visual culture studies over the interpretation of contemporary visual cul- ture, a dispute whose impact can still be felt today. visual culture studies declared art history incapable of responding to the specific problems result- ing from global migration flows, identity politics in the conflict between the global and the local, new media technologies and the media cultures emerg- ing from them. in the view of visual culture studies, art history represented elitist western traditions that manifested themselves in a hierarchical con- cept of “high” art versus “low” popular culture, in a colonializing view of the art of other cultures, in the mythologization of the (male) artist, in the per- beyond the mirror petuation of a history of styles associated with national traditions, and in an inability to respondto the revolutionin media technology thathas takenplace in recent decades. where, in art history, were the voices of new, postcolonial subjects?wherewasthecritiqueofthewesterncanon?wherewasthediscus- sion about the power and consumerist exploitation of the art market? where was the questioning of the elitist distinction between high and popular art? faced with this situation, art history in both the english- and german- speaking worlds was put on the defensive. new political and ethical dimen- sions had opened up that went beyond attempts by left-wing art historians in the s to add class struggle to the epistemic interests of the discipline. those wishing to take these new dimensions seriously had to call the existing cognitive fundamentals of the discipline into question. in germany since the mid- s, it had been feminist art historians (a marginal group within academia) who asked such questions, me among them. with regular conferences and publications, we had tried to shake up the heuristic status quo of the discipline, and we found ourselves obliged to look beyond its boundaries for suitable theoretical tools. we read michel foucault, louis althusser, jacques derrida, gayatri chakravorty spivak, ju- dith butler, teresa de lauretis and kaja silverman. we also read our british feminist colleagues griselda pollock, marcia pointon and irit rogoff, whose academic context was very different to our own,shaped by the intellectual cli- mate of universities like manchester, birmingham and leeds where cultural studies had become established in the s, laying the theoretical basis for visual culture studies. by comparison, the culture of art history in germany felt confined. see publications resulting from the conferences of women art historians held from , including: ilsebill barta, zita breu, daniela hammer-tugendhat, ulrike jenny, irene nierhaus, judith schöbel (eds.): frauen. bilder. männer. mythen. kunsthistorische beiträge (berlin ); ines lindner, sigrid schade, silke wenk, gabriele werner (eds.): blick-wechsel. konstruktionen von männlichkeit und weiblichkeit in kunst und kunstge- schichte (berlin ); silvia baumgart, gotlind birkle, mechthild fend, bettina götz, andrea klier, bettina uppenkamp (eds.): denkräume zwischen kunst und wissenschaft (berlin );susannevonfalkenhausen,silkeförschler, ingeborgreichle,bettinaup- penkamp (eds.): medien der kunst. geschlecht metapher code (marburg ). more on this in chapter , and in margaret dikovitskaya, visual culture. the study of the visual after the cultural turn (cambridge, ma ). introduction some of our american colleagues, too, were clearly unhappy with art history and “defected” to the new field of visual culture studies. in the united states, the culture within art history was different, shaped by a double legacy: on the one hand, the german strain of art history that erwin panofsky brought with him to his american exile, a scholarly history of ideas with its method of iconology; and on the other, a heightened formal- ism that had gained new topicality thanks to america’s “high modernist” painters (jackson pollock, mark rothko, barnett newman) and the critics who supported them (clement greenberg, michael fried). both of these schools were now attacked by the representatives of visual culture studies – including “defectors” from art history (e.g. michael ann holly) and literary criticism (e.g. norman bryson, mieke bal) – for being elitist, unpolitical and western-white-male-dominated. american art history responded with a series of articles in its journal of record, the art bulletin, running from to under the title “a range of critical perspectives”, asking leading representatives of the discipline to reflect on the need for new approaches, with topics directly related to these issues: the object of art history; the subject in/of art history; aesthetics, ethnicity, and the history of art; rethinking the canon; art history and its theories; money, power, and the history of art. as i remember it, this series went unnoticed by art history in germany. in , a counterattack was mounted by october magazine in a survey of art historians making a vehement appeal against extending the domain of art history beyond art and in defence of the special position of art within society – an energetic attempt to secure the discipline’s status and salvage it as a specialist domain.interviewed in , the magazine’s co-editor rosalind krauss clearly stated the motivation for this survey: “rk: i hate visual culture. sr: you hate visual culture? rk: in fact, october magazine, which i coedit and cofounded in , recently more on this in part two, . the art bulletin, statements for the series “a range of critical perspectives” in the years to under the following titles: : “the object of art history”, “the subject in/of art history”; : “art> <history”, “inter/disciplinarity”, : “aesthetics, ethnic- ity, and the history of art”, “rethinking the canon”, “art history and its theories”; : “money, power, and the history of art”. beyond the mirror did a special issue that was an attack on the visual culture project. like cul- tural studies, visual culture is aimed at what we could call pejoratively, abu- sively, deskilling. part of that project is to attack the very idea of disciplines which are bound to knowing how to do something, certain skills.” from the mid- s onwards, then, hostility reigned between the old- established discipline of art history and the young discipline of visual culture studies. portrayals of visual culture studies as anti-elitist, multicultural, postcolonial and democratic depended on art history being described in negative terms as elitist, formalist-cum-hegelian, nationalistic and obsessed with artistic genius. however, the rebuttals of these mutual accusations remained within a close-up view that obstructed critical reflection on each side’s own contexts and cognitive objectives. this became very clear when i read the texts generated by this dispute with my students, reinforcing my wish to overcome the mental and discur- siveblockadesoftheseincreasinglyclichéddebatesbyanalysingselectedtexts by the antagonists in terms of the history of academic discourse, seeking out their inner motivations. in order to get away from the turf wars and bor- der patrols between visual culture studies and art history, and to probe each side’s epistemic interests for their theoretical and methodological implica- tions, i developed a research project that was originally titled “visuality as a paradigm: art history and visual culture studies”. the plan was to make a comparative study of the concept of visuality in terms of its application and effectiveness. it soon became clear, however, that visuality would not work as the main term for such a comparison since it did not feature in the methodological vocabulary of art history – even if this hard-to-define concept from visual culture studies certainly can also be related to the context and practice of art history. as a specialized visual practice, art history could become subject matter for visual culture studies with a focus on visuality, but the reverse would not be possible. using visuality as the key term of comparison would have oriented my readings more strongly towards visual culture studies, thus disturbingthedesiredbalance.ineededtofindatermthatappliedtobothart seethevisualculturequestionnaire, in:october (summer ): - ;fortheinter- viewseehttp://www.thecrimson.com/article/ / / /krauss-and-the-art-of-cultural/ (accessed sept ). see also rosalind krauss, “der tod der fachkenntnisse und kunstfertigkeiten” in texte zur kunst ( ), - (unpublished in english: “the de- ath of skills”). http://www.thecrimson.com/article/ / / /krauss-and-the-art-of-cultural/ http://www.thecrimson.com/article/ / / /krauss-and-the-art-of-cultural/ http://www.thecrimson.com/article/ / / /krauss-and-the-art-of-cultural/ http://www.thecrimson.com/article/ / / /krauss-and-the-art-of-cultural/ http://www.thecrimson.com/article/ / / /krauss-and-the-art-of-cultural/ http://www.thecrimson.com/article/ / / /krauss-and-the-art-of-cultural/ http://www.thecrimson.com/article/ / / /krauss-and-the-art-of-cultural/ http://www.thecrimson.com/article/ / / /krauss-and-the-art-of-cultural/ http://www.thecrimson.com/article/ / / /krauss-and-the-art-of-cultural/ introduction history and visual culture studies, if not in the same way then at least with the same weight. this term is seeing: it structures the visuality of visual culture studies as fundamentally as it does the modus operandi of art history. seeing and the concept of visuality the concept of visuality is, i argue, closely associated with a specific politi- cal agenda: visibility as a socio-political resource. the visual, or visuality, has become a political category, and visibility has become a resource in struggles for recognition by marginalized identities. this is the main basis for the ar- guments used by visual culture studies against art history. but what status does seeing have within this concept and within the resulting practice of vi- sual culture studies as a discipline? besides the huge implications in terms of method, i began to ask myself whether this basic strategic interest might actually limit the heuristic usefulness of the concept of visuality itself. on the other hand, with its emphasis on relationality, communication and agency, one can also ask whether the approach in which seeing is embedded here might also be rendered productive for art history with its focus on objects. in the course of my reading, i soon came across differences between art history and visual culture studies which derived from their respective roots in the history of academic disciplines: art history, developed as a discipline devoted to the classification (by period, style, artist, region) of (art) objects, encounters a new player whose agenda is anchored in a single core concept, that of visuality. and in turn, rather than referring to definable objects, this concept of visuality is itself both object and theory of a social, cultural and political field insofar as it manifests itself visually: in objects, but also and above all in practices and technologies of seeing and being seen, of seeing in the sense of an exchange between people on all levels of culture and sociality. visuality describes events as well as actions, communication and symbolic production; it is a concept that attempts to grasp the visual aspects of the relationality and performativity of human life (or of subjects) in societies and cultures.this is a significant structural difference to the genesis of art history with its focus on objects (however much art history, too, may take the context ofitsobjectsintoaccountinitsanalyses).inasense,then,wehavenownamed the elements of parallel but also conflicting structures, and thus several key coordinates inthecomplexrelationshipbetweenarthistoryandvisualculture studies which will guide the close readings in this book: beyond the mirror   art history visual culture studies art visuality focus on objects focus on performativity/relationality object/artwork visual these elements are not identical with the concepts my readings will ex- plore,such as culture, identity, the gaze,or representation.they offer a struc- ture, albeit binary and simplified, for addressing the basic assumptions of the two disciplines regarding their practices of scholarly seeing. it may seem strange that visibility is not included here. visibility as a political resource in the struggle for recognition is central to identity politics. as such it is linked to the political agenda of visual culture studies and has no counterpart in art history. visibility is vital to any understanding of the concept of visuality, but it is not identical with it, being just one of its multiple aspects. narrowing visuality to this aspect alone would thus seriously impede the methodological possibilities of this concept that i regard as the most important contribution of visual culture studies to the humanities. trains of thought – readings as mentioned above, i wanted to explore the complex relationship between visual culture studies and art history beyond the usual barriers to thought and dialogue,and beyond the increasingly abbreviated debates,by examining exemplary texts from the perspective of the history of discourse and learn- ing/science. this led to a research project and eventually to this book. above all, then, it is a project based on reading,rather than a synthesizing overview. large-scale syntheses tend towards distortions and a lack of transparency; however easy they seem to make it for the reader, they can also be conde- scending. i aim to be transparent, most importantly about the situatedness of my readings, which aim not to be objective but to create and be part of an open debate. the reader should be able to follow my reading closely and grasp it in critical terms. this book, then, is neither an introduction nor a grand narrative, but a kind of archaeology, an excavation of texts that ex- poses and renders visible their various layers. of course, the choice of texts introduction is crucial here: they have influenced and continue to influence debates both within and between disciplines. the texts chosen involve the history of the two disciplines and their discursive links that focus on seeing as a key factor determining their practice. the book concentrates on the complex relationship between art history and visual culture studies; what it does not deal with is their relationship to the discipline of bildwissenschaft (literally “picture studies”) that has emerged in the german-speaking world. today, bildwissenschaft has developed a dif- fuseness similar to that of visual culture studies, and some german speakers mix the two terms to the point of indifference or use them as synonyms. this does not foster clarity when attempting to grasp the (not always evident) epistemic interests involved or to reflect on the theoretical and methodolog- ical conditions of one’s own academic activity, which is why i chose not to broaden my focus here. this also bears on the question of my position as an art historian: i am not interested in expanding the remit of art history; i also remain committed to it as a discipline, since its object, art, is not just one instance of visuality among others. the status of art, as well as the status of individual art objects, is not a given; it is subject to discursive negotiation. nonetheless, or precisely for this reason, there is a need for skills informed by art history that allow an engagement with the complexity that inheres in a discrete object, the artwork, as the result of a specific differentiated cultural i have commented on this relationship elsewhere: susanne von falkenhausen, “ver- zwickte verwandtschaftsverhältnisse: kunstgeschichte, visual culture, bildwissen- schaft”, in philine helas, maren polte, claudia rückert, bettina uppenkamp(eds.), bild/geschichte. festschrift für horst bredekamp (berlin ), - . recent publications: marius rimmele, bernd stiegler: visuelle kulturen/visual culture (hamburg ) trace a genealogy of visual culture outlining differences and similari- ties between bildwissenschaft and visual culture studies based on gottfried boehm and w.j.t. mitchell (see p ff.). on the current tendency to integrate visual culture studies into bildwissenschaft, see gustav frank, barbara lange, einführung in die bildwissenschaft (darmstadt ); klaus sachs-hombach (ed.), bildtheorien. anthropologische und kul- turelle grundlagen des visualistic turn (frankfurt ). by contrast, in their book studi- en zur visuellen kultur. einführung in ein transdisziplinäres forschungsfeld (bielefeld ), sigrid schade and silke wenk give a differentiated view of the position of bildwissen- schaft in the german academic landscape (see p. ff.). in their view, the “research field” of visual culture is founded on semiotics; in this they follow mieke bal (see chap- ter ). in their portrayal of this research field, they essentially follow the themes of their own art historical practice; consequently, their book differs from my project in its orientation. beyond the mirror practice and discursivity. but the discipline of art history can only retain its vitality by constantly calling its epistemic interests into question and by com- municatingwithotherfieldsanddisciplinestokeepabreastof theiractivities. my comparative survey of art history and visual culture studies is thus under- taken from a position of a restless art historian who has been shaped by this discipline but who does not unquestioningly identify with it. art history and seeing strangely, approaches that address the activity on which art history is based have a hard time in art history today. in descriptions of art historical method and theory, seeing remains underexposed. and the kind of seeing we were encouraged to “practise” when i began studying in vienna in struck me as a tenuous affair. no one could tell me what it actually was and how it was supposedtoaffectarthistoricalpractice.thesameapplied,incidentally,tothe “style analysis” that seemed at the time to be the ultimate heuristic exercise. taken together, these implicit notions of seeing plus style as a hermeneutic benchmark constituted the mystifying and highly imprecise ideology of art history at the time, which still followed the pattern of the post-war decades. years later, in , otto pächt’s the practice of art history: reflections on method was published, a collection of texts including the lecture which, unsuspecting and with the beginner’s lack of understanding, i had heard in vienna in and which, had i read it with the requisite concentration, could have helped me understand better.only today do i consider myself capable of reading this text. the status of the image is less fraught than that of seeing in german-lan- guage art history.although seeing has been explained physiologically to a cer- tain degree, it remains hard to “grasp” in thoughts and words. and although something similar applies to images, there is at least a seemingly ineluctable, materially verifiable object for theorists to engage with – ineluctable insofar as it ultimately has no analogue in language, in spite of all the various en- deavours of art historical interpretation. this quality seems to be what fuels the abiding fascination of bildwissenschaft with a leading question like: “what is an image?” my scepticism towards such leading questions focuses above otto pächt, methodisches zur kunsthistorischen praxis. ausgewählte schriften, jörg ober- haidacher, artur rosenauer, gertraut schikola eds., ( . edition, münchen ). introduction all on the desire for definitions that tend to act more as axioms. to quote gombrich, “there are no axioms, only agreements.” definitions are figures of thought which (at least when they represent an end in themselves) block relational thinking. and thinking about seeing is necessarily relational. as an art historian, one of the metaphors for which i envy visual culture studies, and which i have appropriated, is that of the “visual field”. it covers both the realm within which visuality operates and the realm of its theoriza- tion. this opens up potential applications and intellectual spaces for art his- tory that go beyond the simple duality of (art) object and context, rendering this duality multiple and dynamic. so how can this visual field be conceived of in relation to seeing in art history? in the practice of art historians, seeing the object marks the beginning of any cognitive approach. we look at the art- work because we want to analyse it. this seeing is an active kind that opens up a field of relations: between the object, the viewing art historian and the producer/artist. the metaphor of the visual field is very well suited to these relations, making it possible to reflect on one’s actions as an art historian in terms of interdependences. moreover, the visual field can be extended to include the framing of its protagonists: the historical and cultural factors re- lating to the history of academic discourse that influence viewer, artist and artwork.it configures the acts of seeing of all involved –the viewer, the artist, and the artwork that “looks back”. this may sound simple, but it turns out to be a theoretical minefield that art history has to date largely avoided. it is symptomatic of the way art history takes the practice of seeing for granted that this practice itself is barely subjected to theoretical scrutiny, giving the impression that this key cognitive tool exists without presuppositions. con- sequently,my reading of texts from art history extrapolate the theoretical and methodological presuppositions for this kind of knowledge-generating see- ing. the texts of art history art history does not make it easy to find out about its past and present think- ingonthesubjectof itsownactsofseeing.inmostcases,itremainsanunspo- ken presupposition of the discipline’s practice. to coax it out of this latency ernst h. gombrich, “‘wenn’s euch ernst ist, was zu sagen …’ – wandlungen in der kunst- geschichtsbetrachtung”, in martina sitt (ed.),kunsthistoriker ineigenersache: autobio- graphische skizzen (berlin ), . beyond the mirror into a more open, manifest form, it must be surgically extracted from the methods and objectives of the discipline. as a relatively long-established dis- cipline, art history possesses a differentiated structure of positions, methods and practices – sediments laid down over two centuries. for a comparison with the young discipline of visual culture studies, providing a full overview of this period seemed as unhelpful as including every single historically de- fined position.my choice of reading matter was guided by two criteria: firstly, the texts should deal explicitly or implicitly with the theme of seeing/looking, and secondly they should be “canonical” texts that have been and continue to be influential in the discipline’s internal discussions of objectives and meth- ods. my readings include the reception history of these texts, as this history often displays connections with visual culture studies, highlighting moments of shared background. one might think there is a contradiction with what i stated above: that art history does not reflect on its own ways of seeing. in different ways, the texts analyse how images are formed by viewing processes: of the painter (panof- sky, gombrich), of the painter’s customer or the general public (baxandall, alpers), or of the spectator (pächt, kemp). but i found only one text dealing directlywiththearthistorian’sownactofseeing:ottopächt’sthepracticeofart history:reflectionsonmethod.the positions on the activity of seeing underlying art historical interpretation are structured by pairs of opposites: culturally in- formed versus empirical seeing, interpretative versus scientifically verifying seeing, historically evolving versus biologically/optically fixed seeing. each of these positions implies a specific relationship between subject and object,be- tween interpreting present and historical alterity, or unfamiliarity, between the object and its context. the questions i address to the texts of art history are as follows: in which discourses are the positions of seeing embedded and which metaphors are used to articulate them? does seeing have to do, for ex- ample, with authenticity or purity? does it imply a concept of truth? how is the threefold seeing that“surrounds”an artwork (making,viewing, interpret- ing) dealt with? how is seeing (all three kinds) historicized? how is it (explic- itly or implicitly) “constructed” as a presupposition of method and practice? does the concept of seeing in question bring context into its interpretation, or does it view art in isolation? how is the act of seeing situated within the basic assumptions of scholarly research? which relationship between subject (artist/viewer) and object do these assumptions imply? the six selected texts are grouped under three headings indicating the motivations that informed their authors’ acts of seeing: “interpreting forms of representation” (panof- introduction sky and gombrich), “experience and the visual” (baxandall and alpers), and “through the eyes of the spectator” (pächt and kemp). my readings begin with panofsky’s essay on perspective as symbolic form ( ). this text, which remains hugely influential, is a good place to begin for several reasons: for one thing, it received renewed attention in the context of the new art history of the s, thus providing a bridge to the art history immediately involved in debate with visual culture studies; for another, it offers a macro-historical view of models of seeing as visualized in art. the potential links to recent constructivist models of seeing are also clear. like panofsky’s essay, ernst gombrich’s art and illusion. a study in the psychology of pictorial representation ( ) has had a long and controversial reception, cen- tred on the question of whether its model of seeing is empirical-scientistic or constructivist-subjectivizing. the texts by panofsky and gombrich are not about seeing as practised by those who interpret, but about the forms of rep- resentation in which seeing the world appears in art, as a subject of art his- tory. what their reflections on this subject reveal about their own mode of seeing as an instrument of scholarly research has to be inferred from their texts. michael baxandall’s painting and experience in fifteenth century italy ( ) is associated with the concept of the “period eye”. with his reconstruction of historically unfamiliar modes of seeing, baxandall links empiricism and constructivism in a way that prompted clifford geertz (in ) to formulate ideas that became central to cultural anthropology. here, the focus is nei- ther on exploring the difference between the picture and the reality portrayed (gombrich), nor on the analytical gaze of the art historian (pächt), but on reconstructing the experiences of seeing that shaped both the painters and those they painted for, thus also determining what the period expected from artistic forms. for this reconstruction, painting is a historical source. with the art of describing ( ) by svetlana alpers, we come to a position that is often thought to have sparked the concept of visual culture studies. based on dutch painting of the th century, she reconstructs a culture in which the practice of visual observation was held in high esteem and which she refers to as a visual culture. this clearly forms a bridge between the two disciplines, see jonathan harris, the new art history. a critical introduction (london, new york ). seechristophers.wood,“introduction”, inerwinpanofsky, perspectiveassymbolicform, translated and with an introduction by christopher s. wood (new york ), - . beyond the mirror but one that must be carefully contextualized in order to highlight its distinct position as compared with the subsequent program of visual culture studies. the final readings from art history are from the german-speaking world: otto pächt’s the practice of art history: reflections on method, the only text re- flecting on the discipline’s own modes of seeing, offers in its precision and focus on concrete objects, paired with theoretical restraint, important in- sights into the problems connected with overcoming the historical remote- ness of the object via a hermeneutically empathetic gaze. unlike gombrich’s book, pächt’s text has been and continues to be little discussed, confirming my impression that art history as a discipline tends to avoid reflecting on its own (seeing) actions. for all its focus on the art historian’s practice, pächt’s book has made little concrete impact on the culture of the discipline. with my reading, i therefore also want to strengthen his position within the dis- cipline and examine its current relevance, following its introduction into the anglo-american debate by christopher wood in . wolfgang kemp’s der anteil des betrachters (the beholder’s share, ) po- sitions seeing within the framework of reception theory. with reference to diderot’s reviews of the paris salons and the reader response theory of iser andjauss,seeingisconceivedofherefromanarratologicalperspective.kemp sees the viewer prefigured in the picture’s internal eye-directing structure. hence, although his approach has the viewer’s response in mind, this re- sponse is seen as being determined by the picture and its narrative strategies. the texts by alpers and kemp were published the same year. although alpers’ text could be read as a transitional position to visual culture studies, i discuss kemp after alpers – firstly because alpers’ reference to baxandall’s concept of “visual experience” from strikes me as more important than her sta- tus as a conceptual precursor to visual culture studies, and secondly because i see kemp’s narratological approach as more closely related to the methods of visual culture studies (especially bal) than the descriptive approach taken by alpers. moreover, kemp links his position, among others, with those of bryson and bal, who soon after became key figures in visual culture studies. otto pächt, the practice of art history: reflections on method, trans. david britt, with an introduction by christopher wood (london ). introduction seeing in the visual field: visual culture studies for visual culture studies, unlike for art history, seeing is a point of intense theoreticaldebateonseveral levels.readingthetextsofvisualculturestudies, one gains the impression that any analysis of an object must be preceded by a clarification of the specific concept of seeing being applied. and since the object is more often a starting point for such a positioning than an end point, the object in question is often chosen from the viewpoint of the theoretical model to be underpinned, and not the other way round. for visual culture studies, then, the concept of visuality is not only an analytical tool but also an object of study in its own right. the resulting interplay of (visual) object, viewer and producer is thus entirely different to that found in art history. the point of departure for the concepts of visuality found in visual culture studies is the kind of seeing discussed in anglo-american theory, via sartre and lacan, as the gaze. it centres on a subject that sees and is seen. as well as constituting the subject, this seeing and being seen also threatens it. finally, the subject figures here as both the starting and end point of the analytical activity; thishasfar-reachingconsequencesforthestructureofsubject-object relations, and it also represents a crucial difference between visual culture studies and art history. the texts of visual culture studies as a young discipline, visual culture studies has yet to pass through a canon- ization process comparable to that undergone by art history. looking at its short history, one is confronted with a flood of texts; typically for a young player in the field of academic politics, there is a strong wish to give the dis- cipline a solid theoretical foundation. in addition, a number of diverse dis- ciplines were and still are involved in the emergence and evolution of this discipline (or “indiscipline”, as w.j.t. mitchell has termed it). as a result, a very revealing internal debate is taking place over the key concept of visuality, with direct implications for the theoretical basis, conceptual framework and see chapters and . w.j.t. mitchell, “interdisciplinarity and visual culture” in art bulletin , no. ( ): . beyond the mirror statedfocusofvisualculturestudies.withinthisdebate,there isconsiderable potential for conflict between the different positions. the canonization of visual culture studies has, however, progressed far enough for there to be a first history of its introduction into american uni- versity teaching. this was preceded by several scholarly introductions fea- turing american and british authors that offered canons both of methods and of texts and theories. such books included (and continue to include) names from various different disciplines (sociology, anthropology, communications studies, cultural studies, film studies, design, art history). in , a new (to me)genreappeared:ameta-reader,bringingtogetherintroductorytextsfrom a large number of introductions and readers on visual culture studies – of- fering an overview of the superabundance of different attempts to define and situate the discipline.unlike in the case of art history, this sprawling diversity prompted me to preface my readings with a brief genealogy of visual culture studies. it is intended to illuminate what i consider to be the two key con- texts in the emergence of the discipline (the political and the academic) and outline its key categories (visuality and identity).the questions guiding my reading of the texts of visual culture studies are: how is the field described in which seeing is embedded? what is the relationship between seeing and sociality? to what extent is seeing conceived of as an activity? how important see for example the confrontation between bal and mirzoeff over bal’s identification and rejection of “visual essentialism”: mieke bal, “visual essentialism and the object of visual culture”, in: journal of visual culture , no. ( ), - , and: “responses to mieke bal’s ‘visual essentialism and the object of visual culture’, ibid., - . see dikovitskaya, visual culture. lisa bloom (ed.), with other eyes. looking at race and gender in visual culture (min- neapolis ); fiona carson, claire pajaczkowska (eds.), feminist visual culture (lon- don/new york ); jessica evans, stuart hall (eds.), visual culture: the reader (lon- don ); chris jenks (ed.), visualculture (london/new york: routledge, ); amelia jones (ed.), the feminism and visual culture reader (london/new york ); nicholas mirzoeff, an introduction to visual culture (london/new york ); nicholas mirzoeff (ed.),thevisualculturereader (london/new york ) (first ed. ); gillian rose, vi- sual methodologies.an introduction to the interpretation of visual materials (london ); maritasturken,lisacartwright,practicesoflooking.anintroductiontovisualculture (ox- ford ). joanne morra, marquard smith (ed.), visual culture. critical concepts in media and cul- tural studies, vols. (london/new york ). on debate over whether visual culture studies should be called a discipline, see w. j. t. mitchell, “showing seeing: a critique of visual culture,” in journal of visual culture , no. ( ), - ; and bal, visual essentialism. introduction is the passive side of seeing (i.e.being seen),especially in connection with the identity politics of visibility? what kind of subject-object (and subject-sub- ject) relationship does this imply? what influence does the political agenda of visual culture studies have on its understanding of seeing, and what impact does this have on its interpretative practice? the texts i have selected stand for the diversity of concepts of visuality within visual culture studies. in spite of this variety, they have one thing on common: they all build (in very different ways) on the above-mentioned the- ories of the gaze developed by sartre and lacan. i have therefore grouped the most influential variants into themed chapters with individual readings: “visual culture studies’ foundational concept: the gaze - looking and power” uses two examples (norman bryson, margaret olin) to analyse reception of the gaze as a regime of power; “visual culture studies’ operational concept: visuality - seeing in the cultural field” deals with attempts to define visual culture and visuality that were particularly influential in discussions within the discipline (w.j.t.mitchell,nicholas mirzoeff,mieke bal); and“seeing as a political resource in visual culture studies” presents two extremely contrast- ing examples of the use of the theory of the gaze in the register of visibility as a political resource (norman bryson, bell hooks), plus a case study focussing on the production of evidence on the basis of the model of the gaze (martin a. berger). this chapter concludes with an analysis of two texts by nicholas mirzoeff, from and , that propose two models of the gaze as new paradigms for visual culture studies. these models are an attempt to position visual culture studies as a practice of political resistance via definitions of utopian-subversive gazes. with the model of countervisuality, mirzoeff em- beds visual culture studies into a historical construction with an extensive claim to validity, and he insists on the political relevance of the discipline. beyond the mirror seeing as an ethical question the final chapter, “towards an ethics for the act of seeing”, draws conclusions that have both a critical and a questioning dimension. the recognition of al- terity, of that which is unfamiliar, in the act of seeing has emerged as a core problem, a mode of seeing that perceives and accepts the otherness of what it sees, be it an object or a subject. art history and visual culture studies deal very differently with this problem. art history is mainly confronted with the historical otherness of its objects, visual culture studies with the cultural oth- erness of objects and subjects. this final chapter discusses the disciplinary “scopic regimes” that shape approaches to the problem of alterity in terms of their methodological impact on interpretative seeing: brief outlines of his- torical and cultural otherness are followed by a critique of the reception of lacan’s model of the gaze in visual culture studies concerning its impact on interpretative seeing (the narcissistic circle). i then bring approaches to inter- pretative seeing in art history and visual culture studies together under the headings “attention and recognition” and “narration and observation”, com- paring them in terms of an ethics of seeing as an activity of scholarly research that recognizes the otherness of what is seen. this raises an old theoretical problem concerning the relationship between an object and the person in- terpreting it, as reflected in strategies and concepts like objectification and distance on the one hand and identification and subjectivity on the other. although at the time of its publication in , donna haraway’s now some- what forgotten text on “situated knowledges” was aimed at the natural sci- ences and their objectivizing hegemonic gaze, it can be referenced today to prompt an approach to this problem that preserves the tension between the susan sontag (on photography, first published new york ), ivan illich (“guarding the eye in the age of show”, in res: anthropology and aesthetics, , , - ) and kaja silverman (the threshold of the visible world, london, new york ) have spo- ken of ethical implications of looking from very different viewpoints. the issue is also raised in discussions of georges didi-huberman’s book images in spite of all (chicago , originally published in french in as images malgré tout) on the photographs from the auschwitz-birkenau concentration camp, and more generally concerning the representability of violence. i use it here only with reference to the ethical dimension of seeing as a practice of scholarly research. donna haraway, “situated knowledges: the science question in feminism and the privilege of partial perspective,” in simians, cyborgs, and women (london, new york ), - , first published in: feminist studies , no. ( ), - . introduction interpreting viewpoint and the otherness of what is being interpreted. har- away explains her critical model using metaphors of visuality (“self-identity is a bad visual system”), and her aim is to uphold the tension between the object under study and the studying subject (and their respective contexts), between objectivity and subjectivity. moreover, she clearly rejects a moraliza- tion of academic rigor that demands identification with the victim based on a logic of sympathetic concern, as such an approach resolves this tension in a subjectivity based on morals. where the tension between the interpreting subject and the otherness of the object is preserved, on the other hand, it cre- ates a destabilization that makes a key contribution to a capacity for critique of the structures of power and discourse in which our subject matter has its origins and within which we work. one last point, dealt with in my concluding remarks, is the rapid techno- logical change often referred to as the digital revolution. while the readings in the book do not deal with this,i conclude with an outline of the prospective consequences of this development, especially for the central notions of visual culture studies (visibility as a political resource in the form of the visual rep- resentation of identity) and art history (art as object and subject). part one: how do art historians see? . interpreting forms of representation visual order as concretized worldview – erwin panofsky’s perspective as symbolic form described by w.j.t. mitchell as an “epic of visuality”, panofsky’s essay on per- spective, originally published in , is a concentrated synthesis of the his- tory of perspective, as well as a history of visuality as cultural practice. the text has received renewed critical attention during the founding phase of vi- sual culture studies. perspective–“seeingthrough”asdürer,quotedbypanofsky,called it ( ) – refers not to the process of seeing but to the method of translating what is seen into a representation, with reference to the transfer of seen three- dimensional space onto the two-dimensional picture plane. the best-known technique of this kind is central or one-point perspective, an achievement at- tributed to the italian renaissance that has shaped european painting in its quest for accurate portrayal of objects in space ever since. although it is just one of the available options,one way among many to produce an image of the world,centralperspectivehassincebecomeametaphorforthemodernwayof viewing the world. in recent decades it has faced criticism on several fronts. most interestingly in the context of this book, poststructuralist critiques of the claim to truth made by enlightenment rationality deployed perspective as erwin panofsky, perspective as symbolic form, trans. christopher wood (new york ). mitchell’s essay “the pictorial turn”, which announced the turn designed to dethrone the “linguistic turn”, offers a very positive rereading of panofsky’s essay on perspective: “it aims at nothing less than a critical iconology, a self-theorizing account of visual culture.” this is also mitchell’s yardstick for jonathan crary’s techniques of the observer: w.j.t. mitchell, “the pictorial turn”, in mitchell, picture theory (chicago ), - : . for smoother reading, page numbers for quotes in part one are placed in brackets in the text rather than in footnotes. beyond the mirror a metaphor for cartesianism, logic and western reason’s hegemonic world- view. this critique also played a part in the genesis of visual culture studies, something i will return to in chapter . as early as , panofsky attempted to historicize the changes under- gone since antiquity by perspective as a “symbolic form” in the sense of ernst cassirer’s philosophy of symbolic forms. from this viewpoint, one-point per- spective, like the other techniques, is a phenomenon that can be explained in historical and cultural terms, but it is not the only “correct”, objectively right method of depicting the world with a unique claim to truth. according to a quotation from ernst cassirer cited by panofsky, in symbolic forms “spiritual meaning is attached to a concrete material sign and intrinsically given to this sign” ( ). perspective as a model for representing three-dimensional seeing on the picture plane is thus the concrete material sign that panofsky will link back to the spiritual meanings which have been (and continue to be) “intrin- sically given” to it. although perspective can be seen, it is not simply “visible”, needinginsteadtobeextractedfromitsspecificapplicationinagivenpicture. panofsky carefully examines his prize witnesses (frescoes, vases and canvases from antiquity to the renaissance) in search of evidence pointing to their spe- cific model for converting three dimensions into two. this raises the question of whether panofsky’s interpretation “proves” something that is undeniably there, or whether he presupposes something that his seeing then detects or, to put it more pointedly, constructs. by describing perspective not just as a practical artistic technique, but as a “sign” linked with a “spiritual meaning”, he also turns the artist’s seeing into a construction in the sense of something culturally determined, a cultural practice, subject to historical change. this construction even extends to the physiological conditions of seeing itself; the eye is a creature of habit, so to speak, and not just an optical bio-mechanism. as an example,panofsky cites kepler,who“fully recognized that he had origi- nallyoverlookedorevendeniedthese illusorycurvesonlybecausehehadbeen schooled in linear perspective. he had been led by the rules of painterly per- spective to believe that straight is always seen as straight, without stopping to consider that the eye in fact projects not on to a plana tabella but onto the inner surface of a sphere” ( ). from his own observations, combined with source texts and the results of previous research, panofsky extracts descriptions of three models of per- ernst cassirer, philosophy of symbolic forms: vol. , language, ; vol. , mythical think- ing, ; vol. , phenomenology of knowledge, . . interpreting forms of representation spective – for antiquity, the middle ages and the early modern era. he then reads each model as a sign of basic intellectual dispositions specific to the historical period in question. in the art of antiquity, for example, the render- ing of bodies is persuasively illusionistic; it focuses on bodies and surfaces, showing only what is tangible as well as visible ( ). but these bodies remain isolated, not inhabiting a homogenous overall space. instead, space here is “only that which remains, so to speak, between the bodies” ( ); there is no “continuum of a higher order” ( ). at this point, panofsky introduces the key conceptual distinction between “aggregate space” and “systematic space”: the space of antiquity is an“aggregate space; it never becomes that which moder- nity demands and realizes,a systematic space” ( ).this is then applied to the worldview of ancient philosophy ( - ). based on pictorial structure, then, panofsky draws a parallel between perspective, view of space and worldview in which what is true of this pictorial structure is also claimed to be true of the corresponding view of space and worldview. the heuristic advantage of this approach lies in the elucidation of the uniform spiritual character of an age via its individual components, as well as the integration of art into the character of a historical period. the periods are in turn integrated into a telos that transfers horizontal period-uniformity onto the vertical axis of histori- cal time: modernity with its notion of homogenous and infinite mathemati- cal space. however, when panofsky postulates that modernity “demands” this space (and, apparently, none other) then his logic of analogy, structural par- allel and mutual elucidation begins to smack of circular reasoning. the same paradigm of uniformity and development is used to explain the apparent break with antiquity’s body-space illusionism in the art of the middle ages. panofsky’s argument is as surprising as it is brilliant: “if ro- manesque painting reduced bodies and space to surface, in the same way and with the same decisiveness, by these very means it also managed for the first time to confirm and establish the homogeneity of bodies and space.” ( ) although romanesque art abandoned the reproduction of physical three- dimensionality, it overcame the additive structure of antique space in favour of a unity, thus creating the basis for the systematic space of the early modern period.here,too,panofsky draws parallels with the history of ideas, this time to the theological worldview of the middle ages. but with giotto, the “vista or ‘looking through” that was blocked in the middle ages begins to open ( ), becomingawindow–alberti’smetaphorforpainting.withvaneyck,thepic- ture becomes a “slice of reality” ( - ) and with the invention of “costruzione legittima” in the development from aggregate space to systematic space beyond the mirror is complete ( ). this systematic space is “nothing other than a concrete ex- pression of a contemporary advance in epistemology or natural philosophy”: the development of the concept of “an infinity not only prefigured in god, but indeed actually embodied in empirical reality” ( ). from the additive, body-oriented worldview of antiquity, the path leads via the christian postu- late of unity – oneness in god – to the mathematically unifying abstraction of empirical reality as infinite space. having reached the goal of his developmental history, with perspective as a necessary concretion of the modern worldview, panofsky opens up the supposed closure of this model of seeing by highlighting its ambivalences. centralperspectiveasan“objectificationofthesubjective”provestobea“two- edged sword” ( ): “perspective creates distance between human beings and things […] but then in turn it abolishes this distance by, in a sense, draw- ing this world of things, an autonomous world confronting the individual, into the eye. perspective subjects the artistic phenomenon to stable and even mathematically exact rules, but on the other hand, makes the phenomenon contingent upon human beings, indeed upon the individual: for these rules refer to the psychological and physical conditions of the visual impression, and the way [these rules] take effect is determined by the freely chosen po- sition of a subjective ‘point of view.’” ( ) the following sentences are worth quoting in full: “the history of perspective may be understood with equal jus- tice as a triumph of the distancing and objectifying sense of the real, and as a triumph of the distance-denying human struggle for control; it is as much a consolidation and systematization of the external world, as an extension of the domain of the self. artistic thinking must have found itself constantly confronted with the problem of how to put this ambivalent method to use.” ( ) the telos of this history of development is thus, on the one hand, a “sense of the real” whose mode of seeing combines distance and objectivity, and, on the other, its opposite, described as a struggle for power expressed in the de- nial of distance.for readers today, this is surprising insofar as recent decades have produced a discourse on perspective that views objectivizing distance as a function of control and power; a discourse that emerged, among others, in feminist art history and which, interestingly,coincided with the perfection of techniques of visual simulation aimed at negating distance between the see also a more recent publication: linda hentschel, pornotopische techniken des be- trachtens.raumwahrnehmung und geschlechterordnung in visuellen apparaten der moderne (marburg ). . interpreting forms of representation viewer and what is viewed (as for example in virtual reality and other immer- sive image-technologies), a development that cannot be seen as an emanci- patory counter-model to the controlling distance of the viewer. with regard to seeing, distance and immersion constitute a pair of opposites that reflects the old problem of the differentiation of subject and object in updated form, with all the attendant consequences (e.g. for questions of power and control). panofsky clearly stands on the side of the enlightenment model of distanced and distancing looking, describing it as the “consolidation and systematiza- tion of the external world”. proximity or even merging of subject and object, on the other hand, he finds suspect; denial of distance is human struggling for power,something he describes as an“extension of the domain of the self”, as if an undistanced gaze would result in the subject incorporating the object. in such a scenario, the subject’s struggle for control would come at the cost of the external world. such rebellion against perspective is not a phenomenon of recent decades, however: panofsky refers to the “most modern aesthetic thinking” that accuses perspective of being “the tool of a limited and lim- iting rationalism” ( ), and in a footnote he describes el lissitzky’s critique from : perspective allegedly “limited space, made it finite, closed it off”, conceiving of it as “rigid three-dimensionality” ( ). the most recent art, he claims, tries to break these bonds, “exploding the entire space” by “dispersing the centre of vision” ( ). for panofsky, perspective as an “ordering of the visual phenomenon” ( ) becomes an arena for conflicting forces: objectivity, distance, solidity and ra- tionality face off against subjectivity, volatility and denial of distance. per- spective signals the end of antique theocracy and the emergence of “modern anthropocracy” ( ) – panofsky’s scepticism towards this new ruler is unmis- takeable. for christopher wood, panofsky’s perspective is a metaphor for an- other metaphor: “it is perspective, after all, that makes possible the metaphor of a weltanschauung, a worldview, in the first place.” insofar as worldview is criticized by theories of difference as a model tending to promote unity, the same will apply to perspective. panofsky’s analogy between perspective and modern anthropocracy, on the other hand, at least opens up the criticized unity of his model of progress to doubt. seeing, for panofsky, is an activity whose psychophysical character can be studied, but which only becomes visible in the depiction of something seen. and this depiction, in turn, can only be the result of a cultural and in some wood, “introduction” in panofsky, perspective as symbolic form, . beyond the mirror cases symbolizing activity – making it an object of study for the iconologist. together with perspective, however, panofsky also turns the visual order on which it is based into a sign, a symbol in cassirer’s sense. the ordering or convention that governs depiction is just as open to interpretation as the de- piction itself. what is not covered by this system of interpretation is the gaze and act of seeing of the one doing the interpreting. it reveals itself implicitly in the evidential power of those elements that are “extracted” from what is seen (the artworks) by this gaze. seeing in panofsky’s essay is highly selective. it looks for both similarity and difference, it compares and abstracts from isolated cases to groupings of similarities oriented towards clearly defined historical periods. it is a structural seeing, guided by the aims of inquiry, but panofsky does not specifically address it as such. one could refer here to the well-known fundamental problem in the theory of science that struc- tural interdependencies may exist between epistemological interest, research method, interpretation and result, potentially leading to tautology. far more interesting, however, would be to ask how, if this is the case with panofsky’s essay, it is still possible to get so much out of reading it? we could ask a different question: what does panofsky actually see? one criticism often levelled at iconologists is that they see not forms but only ob- jects that mean something, that they look beyond or through the forms at an object (such as the lily that symbolizes mary’s innocence). in panofsky’s case, thiswouldmeanthat ifhewishestostudythevisualorderofspatial represen- tation,heseesthesurfaceandtheformsthatdeterminehowtheobjectsstand on the surface and in relation to each other.but his descriptions show that he deliberately abbreviates this moment of seeing to those formal elements that provide evidence for his argument – as in the case of the floor tiles in th- century painting that allow vanishing points to be more precisely identified. in the unwieldy concept of the symbolic form, this tautological tendency is already present: this form is actually an object, an object of symbolization. seeing as a psychophysical process only figures in panofsky where it is a matter of underlining its distinctness from constructed perspective. this cre- ates a kind of base and superstructure model: the empirical process of seeing as the base for the superstructure of perspective construction. finally, it re- mains uncertain how the relationship between base and superstructure is to be conceived of. we are left with a dichotomy of nature (empirical seeing) and culture that displays parallels with recent debates such as those between one lovely example being that of master bertram of minden ( ). . interpreting forms of representation empiricist and constructivist positions. for panofsky, this doesn’t seem to be a problem: he addresses the phenomenon of seeing where it becomes visible – in cultural practice. from today’s viewpoint, he reinforces the construc- tivist position when he uses the example of kepler to show how perspective as a cultural convention dominates and transforms empirical seeing. this is doubtless one of the reasons for the current renewed interest in his essay and for its compatibility with today’s concepts of visuality. what is problematic is the importance accorded to the authorial prerogative on interpretation – a prerogative which includes, as both precondition and consequence, the fact that the act of seeing itself remains undiscussed. the essay is also problem- atic in terms of its macro-historical findings. such aspects are criticized by current constructivist-leaning readings like that of christopher wood. seeing as an approach to reality – ernst gombrich’s art and illusion the book’s cover shows magritte’s painting le palais des rideaux, iii. against some wooden panelling, on bare floorboards, a small distance apart, stand two identical, irregular seven-sided pictures in pale grey frames. on closer inspection, the obviousness of the way the pictures are arranged in space becomes less clear, causing a strange flickering of the visual effect: are the pictures resting against the wall? their slight backwards inclination suggests this, but the shadows on the floor and wall suggest not. on a pale grey- blue ground, the picture on the right features the word “ciel” (sky) in cursive script. the left-hand picture shows a slightly cloudy sky in blue-grey-white. magritte’s picture offers a pointed visual remark on the question of painterly representation, but with a thrust that differs from gombrich’s: the painting points to the difference between text and picture, while gombrich is inter- ested in the difference between perception and picture. gombrich begins with a question: why does pictorial representation have a history? the backdrop against which this question makes sense is a pre- supposition that he formulates as another question: why did it take so long ernst h. gombrich, art and illusion. a study in the psychology of pictorial representation (first published ), eleventh printing with a new preface (princeton, oxford ). the palace of curtains iii, - , museum of modern art, new york. this cover was used for the eleventh edition, published in (princeton paperbacks). other edi- tions have had different covers. beyond the mirror for humanity to develop the means for plausible rendering of visual effects, to createthe illusionof“lifelikeness”? ( )this impliesakindofhistoricaldeter- minism: the history of the picture or, more narrowly, the history of painting, is placed under the necessity, the telos, the unwavering goal of achieving such “lifelikeness”. illusionism becomes an anthropological constant, or at least a dimension welcomed by all people. this opens up the problem also posed in a certain way by panofsky in his perspective essay: how to explain the fact that there have been periods in the history of (european) art when painting did not look at all as if it was concerned with a plausible rendering of reality? panofsky locates these differences in the field of historically changing ideas about the world; for him, the various ways of portraying figure and space are symbolic forms of the specific worldview in question. gombrich constructs a different model to explain the differences between representation and re- ality: in a first step he tries to understand perception with the help of ex- perimental psychology (very popular in the s) and gestalt psychology. by referring to disciplines that have the status of natural sciences capable of generating falsifiable results,he wishes to show that art history, too, is able to bring forth such results. he assembles a series of arguments around seeing that show him in a fundamental dilemma: on the one hand,he writes against the myth of the “innocent eye” according to which seeing is understood as a purely passive registering of the outside world, uninfluenced by any knowl- edge, unformatted (to use a fitting metaphor from computer culture), and against painting as a faithful reproduction of the image on the retina. here, he follows psychology in assuming that seeing takes place on the basis of sub- jective “schemata” that format perception (to stick with that metaphor), thus opening up his construction to the subjectivity and relativity of what is seen and depicted. on the other hand, he insists on an objectivity not subject to hu- man influence that must remain a benchmark for the representation of what is seen. and this benchmark can only be the outside world – that which is represented. gombrich’s dilemma is essentially the elementary conflict that runs through western attempts to explain the relationship between individ- ual and world –the conflict (in very simplified terms) between constructivism and positivism. he refers, for example, to: rudolf arnheim, art and visual perception ( ); edwin g. boring, sensation and perception in the history of experimental psychology ( ); f.a. hayek, the sensory order ( ); charles e. osgood, method and theory in experimental psychology ( ). . interpreting forms of representation to my mind, experimental psychology seems to reflect this conflict rather thanbridgingit,whenitattemptstorendertheprocessesofperceptionthem- selves objectively understandable by means of experiments. here, too, the question is: is seeing purely passive (with the objectively existing world en- countering“empty”perceptiveorgans)or is it subjectivelyshapedandfocused by pre-existing knowledge? the psychology of perception assumes the latter, while attempting to generalize this subjective element in terms of objectifi- able patterns (“schemata”). these patterns are considered not as individually unique, and thus subjective, but as common to all people. and if these pat- terns and schemata are assumed to be universal, then perception, located within the subject and its pre-knowledge, can be objectified. gombrich takes these insights from psychology and applies them to his thinking about the kind of seeing that is relevant to art history: the seeing of painters and viewers. as mentioned above, he believes painting to be driven by the desire to achieve a plausible representation of the illusion of “lifelike- ness”.he thus considers seeing under this premise.what does this have to do with historically changing ways of representing reality in art? art shows itself as historical precisely by these changes,be it a development towards a specific endpoint (for gombrich: the perfect illusion of three-dimensional space on a flat surface) or not. gombrich calls this historical quality “style” or “manner”. measured against what he sees as the endpoint of the development, style is what deviates from the perfect illusion, and thus also what confounds the viewer attempting to reconcile what she sees in the picture with external re- ality.style is convention ( ), the share of seeing based on patterns which the viewer(referredtobygombrichalwaysasthe“beholder”)bringswithher,pat- terns that guide seeing and make it an active process; conventions,schemata, prior knowledge are modified and corrected in seeing via a comparison with reality. at this point in my very brief account it becomes clearer that linking magritte’s palace of curtains with gombrich’s agenda brings forth a strange reading of the painting – as if magritte’s aim had been to highlight this dif- ference between perception and objective reality, between image and reality, between innocent seeing and convention. but magritte seems to have placed enough clues in the picture that constantly lead the viewer back only into the picture’s own reality, also blocking the path into another parallel world, that of text. beyond the mirror in his review of art and illusion, nelson goodman gave a brief account of its basic questions that can be summarized as follows: to say that we know what we see is no more true than to say that we see what we know.perception dependsonconceptualpatterns; there isnoinnocenteye.the“rawmaterialof seeing” cannot be extracted from the “finished product”. representation can- not consist in simply rendering the world as it is or as it is “correctly” seen. differences in style are not explained by differences in eyesight or dexter- ity; what is to be represented depends on the schemata within which things are seen. conversely, one cannot say that the painter reproduces what s/he knows rather than what s/he sees. a painterly representation transfers some- thing into two dimensions; it does not duplicate, but describes in painterly language. gombrich explains the evolution of representation in terms of the development of such a language. by trial and error, via ongoing experimen- tation and modification of our perception and our methods of transferring what we see, we gradually realize increasingly effective representations. for gombrich, this activity based on trial and error resembles a scientific approach, both on the side of the painter and on that of the viewer: “… the very process of perception is based on the same rhythm that we found gov- erning the process of representation: the rhythm of schema and correction. it is a rhythm which presupposes constant activity on our part in making guesses and modifying them in the light of our experience. wherever this test meets with an obstacle, we abandon the guess and try again, much in the way we proceeded in reading such complex pictures as piranesi’s carceri.” ( / ) seeing is equated with the acquisition of knowledge,as described by karl popper, whom gombrich cites: “in this emphasis on elimination of false guesses, on trial and error in all acquisition of knowledge ‘from the amoeba to einstein,’ i am following k. r. popper.” ( ) the problem to be solved by painter and viewer is described by gombrich as follows: the painter transforms the visible world into a piece of painted canvas. but he cannot simply copy what he sees, since “the successful trompe l’œil no less than the striking caricatureare not only the resultsof careful look- ing but also the fruit of experimentation with pictorial effects. the invention of these effects, as i have tried to show, was stimulated by the dissatisfaction which certain periods of western civilization felt with images that failed to look convincing.” (xli) this “gradual modification of the traditional schematic in the journal of philosophy , no. ( ), - . . interpreting forms of representation conventionsof imagemakingunderthepressureofnoveldemands”(xlii) con- stitutes the history of art. by analogy, the same applies to the viewer, whose “reading” of the picture means “to collaborate with the artist and to transform a piece of coloured canvas into a likeness of the visible world”. in the case of piranesi’s carceri with their baffling spatial structures, this is especially problematic, as gom- brich explains, since it proves impossible to understand the illusion of three- dimensionality based on the logic of strict perspective. gombrich is sure: “we enjoy nothing more than the demand made on us to exercise our own ‘imi- tative faculty’, our imagination, and thus to share in the creative adventure of the artist.” in this context, rather than creating fantasy worlds, the imag- ination reconstructs the reality whose illusion is created by the picture: the pleasure we derive from illusion lies in the intellectual effort of bridging the difference between art and reality, as gombrich says, quoting quatremère de quincy ( / ). as a result, his suggested approach to an interpretation of the carceri involves imagining the stage set that could have served as the model for the illusions in piranesi’s etchings ( / ). this brings to mind the concept of narrative: the viewer is called on to develop the narrative of a plausible spatial continuum for the picture. when gombrich uses this construction to resolve the conflict between the subjectiv- ity of seeing and the “objective standards of representational accuracy” (xli), he is basically fulfilling a need of his own, though one that remains latent: just as he claims that the “beholder” (who, for all the historicization of his schemata, remains abstract) desires to perceive a plausible illusory space, he himself clearly follows his desire for a logical correlation between imagina- tion and picture. there must, then, be an explanation for the unfathomable interweavings of space in piranesi’s work; faced with such resistance to inter- pretation, the creativity of the viewer’s imagination lies in devising a seman- tics that secures the picture as a (spatial) unity. for the carceri, this would be the construction of a stage set. similar to words forming a plausible sentence or the sequence of film images forming a narrative continuum, the focus in gombrich’s model (plausibility, matching with reality, picture making) seems to be on perceiving logical units rather than fragments or, rather, on cogni- tively shaping perceived fragments into units. it is in these activities that the psychologicalelementhereferstoinconnectionwithpainterlyrepresentation resides. any engagement with art and illusion must itself remain fragmentary. even examining the different readings of gombrich’s book since its pub- beyond the mirror lication, in various disciplines from philosophy to art history, would be a worthwhile large-scale project – and a contribution to the history of science. criticism of gombrich’s ideas has been diverse: the earliest and most theoret- ically rigorous critique came not from art history but from anglo-american philosophy, the main focus here being the confrontation between objectivity and relativity of cognition. in recent decades, with changing paradigms in the humanities, the character of the critiques has shifted. in art history since the s, gombrich’s aim to establish a history of style in scientific terms (for him this means falsifiable in terms of popper’s critical empiricism) has been resisted on several grounds: on account of his popperian rationalism, his emphasis on a biological basis for perception, his clinging to objective standards of representation and what would now (from a poststructural- ist viewpoint) be called the “grand narrative” of naturalism as the telos of western art history – resulting in gombrich’s inability to integrate the art of the th century into his historical model. the fact that this critique was formulated primarily within anglo-american art history can be linked to the key influence exerted by gombrich (and panofsky) on the whole field of art history in britain and the united states – so that the so-called new art one example of a relativist critique is dominic lopes, “pictures, styles and purposes” in british journal of aesthetics , no. ( ), - . in his review of gombrich’s the image and the eye (the journal of aesthetics and art criticism , no. ( ), - ) david blinder gives an instructive insight into the debates between objectivist and relativist positionsongombrich’spsychologyofperception.thisdebateinvolvesprimarilygom- brich himself, nelson goodman and j.j. gibson. in this book (the image and the eye: further studies in the psychology of pictorial representation, oxford ) gombrich un- derpins his theory of “innate” schemata from art and illusion, originally based on psy- chology, with more recent findings from neurology and information science. among others, he claims (in blinder’s paraphrase) that we are “biologically programmed to react to certain configurations” (blinder, ). according to blinder, gombrich shifts his argument from physiological mechanisms towards “information-processing systems” (ibid., ). a very different and essentially uncritical review came from leslie cunliffe, “gombrich on art: a social-constructivist interpretation of his work and its relevance to education” in journal of aesthetic education , no. ( ), - . the philosopher david carrier was highly critical: “gombrich on art historical explanations” in leonardo , no. ( ), - . carrier also raises the question of whether geometric perspec- tive is a convention (goodman) or whether it possesses objective status (gombrich), highlighting the conflict between the constructivist-relativist approach (goodman) and gombrich’s objectivization of perception in a concrete example: “perspective as a convention: on the views of nelson goodman and ernst gombrich” in leonardo ( ), - . . interpreting forms of representation history couldn’t help but adopt a critical position with regard to these father figures. at this point, it is useful to recall what gombrich’s attempted scientifi- cation of art history was directed against, which involves shedding light on the historical situation from which he was arguing, eleven years after the end of world war ii, when he delivered the lectures that formed the basis for art andillusion.gombrich was turning against the post-hegelian historical deter- minism in german art history that spoke of zeitgeist and kunstwollen (the will to form), the latter a metaphor used by riegl which gombrich calls a“ghost in the machine, driving the wheels of artistic developments according to ‘inex- orable laws’” ( ). be it kunstwollen, the spirit of an age, race or period, he saw such “mythological explanations” as a danger because “the habit of talking in terms of collectives,of ‘mankind’, ‘races’,or ‘ages’,…weakens resistance to to- talitarian habits of mind” ( ). his main witness on this point is a compatriot of his own generation,the former nazi acolyte hans sedlmayr,against whose “meaningful self-movement of the spirit which results in genuine historical totalities of events” ( ) he quotes popper, who considered such “spirits” to be nothing more than symptoms of a vacuum that was meant to fill sociology with something more sensible such as the analysis of problems arising within a tradition. for gombrich, styles are elements of such traditions that cannot be explained in terms of supraindividual “spirit” ( ). instead, their history is one of “preferences, of various acts of choice between given alternatives” ( ). as pragmatic as this may sound, however, gombrich’s concept of scien- tificity ultimately requires a considerable degree of normativity. by founding the universality of his model of perception on the scientifically obtained in- sights of experimental psychology, he believes he is able to replace totalizing mythology with falsifiable results. this has been argued against not only by constructivist philosophers like goodman, but also by a younger generation of aesthetic theorists and art his- torians who criticize determinisms found in gombrich’s approach, be they methodological (borrowing scientific falsifiability for fine art) or theoretical (the holism inherent in a teleological view of attaining painterly life-likeness). in , alan woods argued energetically against equating scientific and artistic problems. more influential was the critique formulated by norman alan woods, “gombrich’s art and illusion” in the cambridge quarterly , no. ( ), - . beyond the mirror bryson in his book vision and painting: the logic of the gaze. bryson rep- resented a poststructuralist-semiotic school of art history that shared at least one concern with gombrich: a critique of the totalizations and great myths of traditional art history, such as the cult of genius. bryson also disagreed with biological explanations of perception. his position was one of sociocultural constructivism that viewed perception as dependent on culture.compared to goodman’s ideas, this was a further shift, this time towards a cultural semi- oticization of perception and representation. in this way, bryson also shaped the later (rather simplified,one-dimensional) reception of artandillusion that accused gombrich of understanding visual representation as being based ex- clusively on biologically determined perception, i.e. without taking cultural influences into account. but this would be precisely the “innocent eye” that gombrich specifically opposed – although art and illusion remains relatively unclear on whether the “schemata” that format seeing might be explainable not only as patterns in the sense of experimental psychology but also as cul- tural constructions. in , christopher wood edited an anthology of texts by art historians of the vienna school (riegl, sedlmayr, pächt, kaschnitz von weinberg, novotny). in his extensive introduction, an interesting reading from the viewpoint of the “new” anglo-american art history, he comments on the “structural analysis” practised by these writers, which he says robs artworks not only of their mimetic reference but of meaning altogether. in contrast to this, he argues, panofsky and gombrich tried to “heal” the instability they found in the artworks of the past by injecting them, wherever possible, with some “redeeming universal or humanist content.” for wood, both positions give rise to problems – on which i cannot go into more detail here. finally, gombrich addressed a phenomenon of art history (changes in the pictorial style of representation) not through an art-historical but a scientific approach. seeing interested him only insofar as it was relevant to the search norman bryson, vision and painting: the logic of the gaze (new haven ). christopher s. wood (ed.), the vienna school reader. politics and art historical method in the s (new york ). nine years later, wood widened his overview of the recep- tion of gombrich’s art and illusion, including not only art historians and philosophers but also the literary critic wolfgang iser with his narratological approach: see christo- pher s. wood, “art history reviewed vi: e.h. gombrich’s ‘art and illusion: a study in the psychology of pictorial representation’, ” in theburlingtonmagazine ( ), - . christopher s. wood, “introduction” in the vienna school reader, - : . . interpreting forms of representation for “an explanation for the phenomenon of style. […] style became one of my worries, one of my problems, because the idea that style is simply the ex- pression of an age seemed to me not only to say very little, but to be rather vacuous in every respect.” there is another thing gombrich shares with the “new art history” – his low opinion of connoisseurship. but his reasons were different: rather than accusing connoisseurial art history of being partly re- sponsible for the art market, he simply wasn’t interested in it at all. history as a factor of change, which had been the main focus of previous art history, was of secondary importance to gombrich – because history as a discursive practice had often enough been guilty of politically suspect forms of mythol- ogization. as the academic discipline of history in the tradition of the th century offered no way out of this dilemma, he looked for one in the “hard” sciences. this in turn meant that in contrast to panofsky’s iconology, his fun- damental research gained little influence in art-historical practice. ernst h. gombrich, “an autobiographical sketch and discussion” in rutgers art review ( ), - . . experience and the visual the “period eye” – michael baxandall’s painting and experience the notion of the “period eye” was put forward by michael baxandall, an approach exemplified by his book painting and experience in fifteenth-century italy. a primer in the social history of pictorial style, which has been through several editions since it first appeared in . baxandall’s first sentence – “a fifteenth-century painting is the deposit of a social relationship” – reveals his specific approach: for baxandall, the artwork does not depict such a deposit, it is a deposit. in other words, the point of departure, centre and task here is not an artwork but a social relationship. in this view, the artwork is the visual materialization of this relationship. baxandall develops his model using the painting of the quattrocento in florence – more precisely: using his description of the social relationships that determined the production of this painting. the painters’ “clients” dictated the framework within which artists produced their commissions; individual talent or even genius played a marginal role. as baxandall writes with typical dryness: “in the fifteenth century, painting was still too important to be left to the painters. the picture trade was a quite different thing from that in our own romantic tradition, in which painters paint what they think best and then look around for a buyer. … the fifteenth century was a period of bespoke painting, however, and this book is about the customer’s participation in it.” ( ) reviewing the book’s second edition in , a sociologist made a telling link to her own discipline: for her, the “period eye” is “a deep account of the ideological congruence between the habitus of a class of men, as bourdieu would say, and meaningful michael baxandall, paintingandexperienceinfifteenth-centuryitaly.aprimerinthesocial history of pictorial style ( ), nd edition (oxford ). beyond the mirror cultural forms”. rather than being static, however, this habitus is a cognitive style, rooted in the visual practice of the client that became the raw material for the painter. so much for the sociological recasting of baxandall’s project. this brings us to the subjects of the “period eye” – the clients. it is their seeing that baxandall attempts to reconstruct.he develops a method to make the eye of the historical client accessible to today’s viewers and readers. this takes place not via a process of seeing today,but by reconstructing the context of seeing at the time in question –from an outside,so to speak. this seeing is a skill, a learned ability that arises not primarily from dealing with art but as an everyday visual practice that in turn impacts on what clients expect from painting. for the florentine art of the th century, baxandall locates his historical point of departure in the practices of art trading (and other kinds of trade), because the social group commissioning the works consisted essentially of the patrician merchant class. he thus begins by giving a vivid picture of the customs of this clientele when dealing with art, in particular the modalities of contracts between customer and artist – an unusual choice of subject mat- ter to get readers in the mood for the painting of the quattrocento. these modalities are of interest above all insofar as they show how the value of art was perceived: gradually, for example, the use of precious materials became less important than the personal involvement of the master of a given artist’s workshop; rather than buying a specific amount of gold and lapis lazuli in the picture,then,thecustomernowpaidforthemaster’sparticularskill,ashift in values for which baxandall supplies documentary evidence. apart from stat- ing what should be done by the master and not by his assistants, however, these contracts provide no further description of the skills in question, and other sources on the painting of the time use qualitative linguistic metaphors that can no longer be translated into a visual-painterly equivalent,prompting baxandall to inquire into “how quattrocento people, painters and public, at- tended to visual experience in distinctively quattrocento ways, and how the quality of this attention became a part of their pictorial style” ( ). this intro- duces the key concept of experience. we are not talking about a hypothetical, abstractviewerliketheoneassumedinthemathematicalconstructionofone- point perspective (where this viewer is even reduced to a single eye),nor about the similarly hypothetical viewer of experimental psychology as presupposed magali sarfatti larson, review of painting and experience in contemporary sociology , no. ( ), . . experience and the visual bygombrich.baxandall’sviewerisahistoricalandsocialvariable;his/hereye, or rather his/her seeing as a cognitive activity, is shaped by experience and by the physical, mental and emotional skills, habits and activities required by everyday life in the art-consuming social groups in florence at the time. this shares certain implications with the metaphor of the “embodied eye” as used since the late s within art and cultural studies in discussions of the body as a focus of social, media, technological and cultural processes. the“periodeye”beginsatthepointoftransitionbetweenthephysiological process of seeing and the interpretation of the optical data in the brain ( ). this interpretationisbasedon“innateskills” ( )andskillsdevelopedthrough experience. baxandall groups these acquired interpretative skills, “the cate- gories, the model patterns and the habits of inference and analogy” ( ), un- der the concept of “cognitive style” ( ). in this way, he turns “style” from a category for describing art into a category for describing the way art is seen. this cognitive style, on which the period eye is based, consists of “a stock of patterns, categories and methods of inference; training in a range of repre- sentational conventions; and experience, drawn from the environment”. the process within which these factors take effect is “indescribably complex and stillobscureinitsphysiologicaldetail” ( ).toillustratewhatisdescribedhere in brief, abstract terms, baxandall offers practical examples relating to tech- nical issues of artistic practice in contemporary florence (the arrangement of figures, the construction of three-dimensionality on a flat surface, colour, the figures’ body language). baxandall’s seeing is practical and physical, for example translating expe- rience with dance as a social practice among the educated classes into an abil- itytointerpretpatternsoffigures.baxandallseesthisasavisualskillandaset of expectations shared by the painters and their clients, forming the context and background for the arrangements and gestures of figures in botticelli, a claim he backs up with treatises on dance and other written sources that link botticelli’s the birth of venus, the group of persons involved, and a dance composition ( - ). another specifically florentine context cited by baxan- dall for the visual expectations of customers and the visual habits of artists christopher s. wood, “when attitudes became form. christopher s. wood on michael baxandall ( - )” in artforum , no. ( ), - . “cognitive style” is a concept from anthropology and psychology. see allan langdale, “aspects of the critical reception and intellectual history of baxandall’s concept of the period eye” in art history , no. ( ), - : . in baxandall’s work, the background of this concept (and of some others) remains unexplained. beyond the mirror is religious drama which, as he shows, features constellations of figures and narrative strategies similar to those found in painting ( - ). a highly prac- tical skill possessed by merchants that influenced the way they perceived art is the calculation of the capacity of barrels using geometry and mathematics ( / ); such three-dimensional seeing aided comprehension of the volumes portrayed in the painting of artists like piero della francesca or pisanello. here,too,baxandall cites sources that convincingly link context and painting, including a mathematical handbook for merchants by piero della francesca ( ). themetaphorofthe“periodeye”doeswhatfiguresofspeecharesupposed to do: it blurs categorical boundaries of the kind that hinder comprehension of historically “unfamiliar”phenomena (as pächt would say,see chapter three) but that accompany most debates on method in art history: the line between art and context, between historical and present-day reception; between artist andconsumer;betweentheoptical-physiologicalbasisofseeingandwhatone would now call its cultural construction; between physicality and sociality; but also,and this is a difficult point in methodological terms,between historically specific but not reconstructable individuals (in this case artist and client) and what can be said in general terms about these individuals in the sense of a typical viewer of a specific place or time. this last point drew criticism from gombrich, for example, concerning the use of totalizing concepts like zeit- geist, national style or kunstwollen. sociologists like pierre bourdieu and an- thropologists like clifford geertz, who were interested in insights into social groups,andthus inthegeneralizabilityof individualobservationswithinspe- cific limits, were significantly more sympathetic to the “period eye” than their art historian colleagues. for bourdieu, who in published the chapter of painting and experience dedicated to the period eye in french with a foreword of his own, it offered the methodology for a sociology of perception; in his article art as a cultural system, geertz took it as his point of departure on gombrich’s critique of baxandall’s “period eye”, see langdale, “aspects”, . unfor- tunately, langdale gives no more specific details, except for a reference to an interview with baxandall conducted for his unpublished dissertation (see ibid., footnote ). michael baxandall, “l’Œil du quattrocento” in actes de la recherche en sciences sociales ( ), - ; pierre bourdieu and yvette desault, “pour une sociologie de la percep- tion”, ibid., - . . experience and the visual for an analysis of the visual culture of a society, providing one of the most important stimuli for the subsequent emergence of visual culture studies. what progress did baxandall’s method offer in cognitive terms? he takes art as his starting point; he treats style as an important concept. however for baxandall art is the starting point but not the end of his endeavours. he has a concept of painting, at least in the specific case of the quattrocento, which leads away from painting itself towards an epistemic interest that lies beyond it – to the “social relationship” of which painting is the “deposit”. this sounds like a social history of art of the kind we have known since arnold hauser – an approach that offers no answer to the question of the inner connection between the manifestations of art and sociality, working instead with mostly suggestive,non-verifiableanalogiesbetweenstylisticperiodsandformsofso- ciety.withhis period eye,on the other hand,baxandall inquires,with a preci- sion based on historical evidence, into the verifiable relationship between the manifestations of art and the visual conditions dictated by the society where its production and reception take place. in this way, he finishes by bringing the way we see today into play: based on the assumption that forms and styles of painting respond to social conditions, a knowledge of social practices and conventions may “sharpen our perception of the pictures” just as, conversely, the forms and styles of painting can sharpen our perception of society ( ). according to baxandall, the possibilities within social history for reconstructing past societies are limited to written sources, imposing a crucial limitation on attempts to reconstruct experience. and this is where painterly style becomes important: “a pictorial style gives access to the visual skills and habits and, through these, to the distinctive social experience” ( ). this implies that a painting can be read like a written source, and the period eye is baxandall’s proposal for such a method of reading. this makes it possible to avoid both the mistakes of an “illustrated social history” and “facile equations” between social milieus and painterly styles – his negative examples being the equations of bourgeois milieu with realistic style and aristocratic milieu with idealizing style ( ). at the end of his book, baxan- dall clearly states the essence of what he wants to achieve with the “period eye”: for the “students of charters and parish rolls”, the visual facts may appear “hopelessly lightweight”; “they are certainly a distinct kind of fact: what they offer is an insight into what it was like, intellectually and sensibly, clifford geertz, “art as a cultural system” in modern language notes , no. ( ), - . cf., langdale, “aspects”. beyond the mirror to be a quattrocento person. such insights are necessary if the historical imagination is to be fed, and the visual is here the proper complementary to the verbal.” ( - ) the path of an empathy that overcomes historical time thus leads not back to art but through art to the historical individual; however, and this is important, this historical individual is typified and generalized at the level of relatively homogeneous social groups – like the “church-going business man, with a taste for dancing” ( ). experience is joined here by two more concepts that are just as impossible to reduce to language: insight and imagination. here, then, baxandall takes his metaphors for the process of scholarly learning from the field of the vi- sual, deploying them against the supposed facticity and objectivity of a form of historiography reduced to written sources; herein lies their significance and their methodological weight. baxandall tries to introduce visuality into the academic discipline of history as a fact. in subsequent decades, however, as mentioned above, his proposal was taken up mainly by other disciplines with more of a focus on the present, in particular sociology and anthropol- ogy – disciplines that later came to occupy places at the core of visual culture studies.suchuptakeoftheperiodeyehasincreasedespeciallysincethe s, always with the same motivation: an analysis and critique of culture based on the relations of the social – and not, for example, on the isolated specifics of an object or a genre of cultural production. these readings are exemplified by clifford geertz’s article “art as a cul- tural system”. geertz is often named as being partly to blame for two of the “turns” of recent decades: the cultural and the linguistic turn. it is true that his text combines culture and semiotics, but it specifically opposes a brand of semiotics that views signs merely as a means of communication, a code to be deciphered. he calls on the analytical forces of semiotic theory, “whether peirce’s, saussure’s, lévi-strauss’s, or goodman’s”, to turn their attention away from an “investigation of signs in abstraction toward an investigation of them in their natural habitat – the common world in which men look, name, listen, and make”. this embedding of experience into semiotics is his adap- tation of the period eye: as his chief witness for experience as the site where art, seeing, everyday practices and society meet, he cites baxandall’s example of theflorentinemerchant.inhisbook,baxandallhimselfneverargues inthe sense of semiotics; he sticks with experience as the concept that brings the geertz, “art as a cultural system”, , (my italics). . experience and the visual various fields together. the reason for this, presumably, is that he is not in- terested in interpreting the pictures he cites as examples. this in turn means that the horizon of experience shared by painter and viewer,which he defines as the medium of art ( ), is not something he wishes to apply to the pictures as an interpretative tool.baxandall does not establish a system,not even a sys- tem of signs; in contrast to the comprehensive,emphatic definition of culture put forth by geertz, he uses the concept of culture very pragmatically and very sparingly. today,“experience” is making a comeback in cultural studies; evidence for this includes christopher wood’s reading of the period eye, published in his obituary for baxandall. he describes baxandall’s approach in painting and experience in a way that is characteristic of the altered perspectives of recent years: baxandall, wood writes, called on the reader “to occupy the body of the fifteenth-century florentine patron of altarpieces and frescoes, typically a ‘church-going business man, with a taste for dancing’”. this is where the metaphor of the “embodied eye” comes into play; the embodied eye belongs to the body of this businessman. the reader, wood argues, is invited to par- ticipate in the historically remote everyday life by a “process of bodily trian- gulation: we would feel with our bodies, and see with our embodied eyes, what the beholders of masaccio and filippo lippi saw.” this body metaphor is one of his adaptations of the category of “experience”; another is to be found in the time-oriented concept of “process”. in wood’s view, baxandall demys- tified the art of the renaissance, releasing it from the grip of iconological expertise and references to antiquity, recasting it as “process art, whose very content ismaterials, labour,themassofthebody,theforceofgestures”.wood then makes an astonishing link to when attitudes become form, an exhibition of contemporary art shown in bern and london in featuring concep- tual, performance and installation art – currents within the neo-avant-garde that sought to revolutionize the concept, genres, spaces and institutions of contemporary art. for wood, the parallel between the painters of the quat- trocento as described by baxandall and the artists of the neo-avant-garde lies he addressed the problem of interpretation in a later book, patterns of intention: on the historical explanation of pictures (new haven, london ), a series of “fiercely antime- thodical lectures”, as wood remarks in his obituary: wood, “when attitudes became form”. for geertz, culture is “the general system of symbolic forms” (geertz, “art as a cultural system”, ), a position that echoes cassirer’s philosophy of culture. wood, “when attitudes became form”. all quotes in this paragraph, ibid., . beyond the mirror in the interaction of work and materials, in the emotional commitment of the artists, and in their direct link with the audience. baxandall’s readers in the s,wood writes,would have appreciated the description of an art con- text where painters and audience escaped the control of the church and which had not yet withdrawn into the cabinets of the collectors, taking place instead “in the piazza, in public, where they listened side by side to the mendicant preacher who coordinated the biblical tales with the affections of the heart, and where all practical men, susceptible to the beauty of things, could openly share their intimacy with materials, tools, and craft. in this way, inside the scholarly treatise, art and life find their way back to each other.” baxandall’s quattrocento was attractive to the s, then, because it spoke to the utopia of a unity of art and life in a harmonious society –for as wood critically adds, baxandall’s “social history” is not dynamic, knowing no diachrony, conflicts or breaks.this contrasts strongly with early cultural studies and john berger’s approach based on a marxist critique of ideology in ways of seeing. wood’s description of baxandall’s “scholarly treatise” is so lively that one forgets that baxandall meticulously backed up every one of his links between lived reality and pictorial form with references to written sources – sources that had previously gone largely unnoticed by art history because they did not belong to the canon of iconology. since the s, this in turn marked baxandall out not only as a contemporary of recent ethnology, but also of recent academic history with its interest in everyday life and mentalities. although his approach did meet with interest in the context of anglo- american adaptations of structuralism, it is not easy, however, to describe baxandall’s linking of everyday life and cognitive style as structural. the cat- egory of experience, with its refusal of a structurally fixed outline, strikes me as a more fitting one to describe his approach with its pragmatic restric- tion of its methods’ scope and a refusal to construct closed theoretical frame- works. his method implies an appeal to today’s viewers: in order to be able to comprehend the life and art of a given historical period, they must learn something that is historically unfamiliar and that goes beyond what has been reproduced in language. baxandall calls for an understanding of unfamiliar cognitive skills in order to recognize historical habits of seeing. with sven blomberg, chris fox, michael dibb, richard hollis, bbc tv series, book published the same year. . experience and the visual between presence and representation – svetlana alpers’ the art of describing in her article “is art history?”, svetlana alpers reviewed the main ten- dencies of the new art history in terms of method. this new current first announced itself in a series of studies of individual artworks under the ti- tle art in context, published from by john fleming and hugh honour as a counter-model to the traditional art-history-by-period of the“pelican history of art” series. for alpers, the main concerns of this “new” art history lay in a shift of attention to the context and reception of art; as its most interesting proponents she named t.j. clark with image of the people: gustave courbet and the revolution and baxandall with painting and experience. for alpers, as her title suggests, the key here was that the individual artwork was treated as a piece of history. one might say that the question of art’s context (who commissioned it,who was the audience,where was it shown,etc.) made such a focus on individual works necessary. alpers describes the new art history as a movement to democratize the discipline: clark uses context to demystify the concept of solitary artistic creativity by embedding it in its social setting; and baxandall does the same to seeing by situating it as a social practice. alpers’ thoughts on whether art is history then take an unexpected turn: inquiring after the epistemic interests of the “new” art historians, she ac- cuses them of having neither a subjective standpoint nor a shared position. instead, she argues, their project of reconstructing context pursues a “notion of objective historical research”. what alpers demands is, firstly, clarifica- tionof individualarthistorians’ownsubjectivepositionsasapreconditionfor research, and secondly, going beyond this, a moral humanist commitment to research of the kind advocated by panofsky and warburg, and by gom- brich with his harsh critique of totalizing zeitgeist concepts. alpers criticizes baxandall as “a most sophisticated spokesman” of this supposed objectivity and quotes a phrase from painting and experience ( ): “quattrocento inten- tions happened in quattrocento terms, not in ours”. for alpers, “baxandall’s svetlanaalpers,theartofdescribing.dutchartintheseventeenthcentury (chicago ). svetlana alpers, “is art history?” in daedalus ( ), - . t.j. clark, image of the people: gustave courbet and the revolution (berkeley, los an- geles, london ). alpers, “is art history”, . ibid., . beyond the mirror disembodied desire – one shared by many art historians today – to see quattro- cento art in quattrocento terms is as much an intellectual structuring of our times as the others. this too is knowledge we make.” why mention this debate? one reason is the metaphor of the disembod- ied desire for objectivity, which matches that of the disembodied eye in the later debate surrounding the critique of perspective as logocentric and ab- stract. interestingly, baxandall’s “objective historicization” of visual practices was meant to combat precisely this abstraction of seeing –contrasting it with the seeing body of a quattrocento businessman “with a taste for dancing”. for alpers, however, the assumption of having reconstructed this body as an objective historical reality implies the elimination of another seeing body, i.e., that of the viewer who erroneously believes it is possible to disregard his/her own condition of seeing as a situated practice. pächt did not pursue this strategy: like baxandall, although he spoke of the unfamiliarity of histor- ical modes of seeing, he tried to integrate the stylistic preferences from the viewer’s present into his analysis as factors influencing his/her perception and choice of historical image structures. we might also note that pächt’s view did not take the artwork purely as its starting point, but also returned to it. in other words, he looked back and forth between artworks as a way of accessing historical formal structures, both synchronously and diachroni- cally – an operation that might be theoretically linked with today’s concept of interpictoriality. baxandall takes a different approach, viewing artworks as “lenses bearing on their own circumstances”, as something through which to view history. “the suggestion is not that one must know about renaissance germany to enjoy the sculpture, but that the sculpture can offer a fresh focus on the cultural history of renaissance germany.” this view is what gave rise to the concept of visual culture, sometime be- tween and . it came into the centre of art historical debate with the publication of alpers’ the art of describing. dutch art in the seventeenth century ibid., , my italics. several “inter”-concepts are in circulation in the field of visual culture studies and me- dia studies, inspired by the poststructuralist concept of intertextuality (see, for ex- ample, ralf adelmann, andreas fahr, ines katenhusen, nic leonhardt, dimitri lieb- sch (eds.), visual culture revisited. german and american perspectives on visual culture, cologne ) which rebutted the notion of authorship, arguing that texts arise from interaction with other texts. michael baxandall, the limewood sculptors of renaissance germany (new haven, london ), vii. . experience and the visual ( ): “what i propose to study then is not the history of dutch art, but the dutch visual culture – to use a term that i owe to michael baxandall.” alpers does not provide a reference for this; surprisingly, the term is not used in painting and experience, first appearing in baxandall’s book on german re- naissance sculpture. this work has a similar structure to painting and experi- ence: here, too, there is a chapter entitled“the period eye”,but since germany, unlike italy, lacks treatises on art that give a primary insight into the visual habits and aesthetic judgements of the time, it is necessary to look elsewhere, “in the wider visual culture”. this is intended to provide insights into cat- egories that might be authentic for the “general visual experience” of the pe- riod in order to get closer to its sculptures, and it is also meant to offer a view “through and beyond the sculpture” to the culture that influenced the “artistic manipulation of visual experience”. i quote these passages at such length be- cause they illustrate the links installed by baxandall via the concepts of visual culture and visual experience. with his concept of “visual culture”, then, baxandall almost incidentally bringsintoplayabridgingconceptthat linksconditionsofseeingandculture. the concept’s “right of primogeniture” lies with art history, inspired by input from other disciplines,primarily the cultural ethnology of clifford geertz and new approaches in the humanities dealing with the history of mentalities and everyday life. in the years that followed, rather than systematically pursuing this approach, baxandall turned to other methodological problems, which explains the pragmatically limited reach of his concept. alpers,on the other hand, is less pragmatic than programmatic in her use of the concept when she proposes to study not the history of dutch art but dutch visual culture (xxv). how can this programmatic aspect be described morespecifically?intheartofdescribing,concreteapplication,theoreticalcon- siderations and engagement with art history as a discipline are so tightly in- terwoven that it is hard to focus on a single aspect. instead, a look back to an article published in , describe or narrate? a problem in realistic represen- alpers, the art of describing, xxv, my italics. baxandall, the limewood sculptors, . see in particular michael baxandall, patterns of intention. beyond the mirror tation, will help to shed light on the context in which she first encountered this problem to which she would go on to devote her book. alpers’article is an appeal for a new focus on painting that is not narrative but descriptive. the major theme of her book is already fully formulated here: she “rebels” against the dominance of iconographic readings of art, a domi- nancewhosehistoricalroots lie inthefactthateuropeanarthistoryasawhole is assessed using criteria derived from the position of high esteem occupied by the art of the italian renaissance. narrative, idea and history (the inherent textual quality of italian painting since the renaissance which, with alberti’s “istoria”and“costruzione legittima”, links storytelling with the pictorial space of one-point perspective as a narrative space) have, according to alpers, been the benchmark of success in the history of european art since giotto, just as interpreting this content has been the benchmark in art history. this em- phasis,whichalsoimpliesamethodologicalrestriction,iscounteredbyalpers withsomethingsherefersto intheartofdescribing ( )as“descriptivepaint- ing”. in “describe or narrate?” she speaks of the “dazzling descriptive surface of dutch painting” and confronts “the renaissance commitment to narrative art … which continued to challenge ambitious artists well into the nineteenth century” ( ) with those descriptive tendencies in art, especially the art of the th and th centuries, that were discussed in the s under the heading of realism. with a wealth of source material from art theory and art descrip- tion since the early renaissance, she shows that in the traditional hierarchy placing the intellect over the senses, the argument in favour of a legible, nar- rative art goes hand in hand with an attack on art that “delights the eyes of the ignorant”. this is the basic agenda that also motivates the art of describing: alpers wants to revise this hierarchy by focussing her work on painting that (also) describes rather than (only) narrating. but is it “merely” a question here of svetlana alpers, “describe or narrate? a problem in realistic representation”, in new literary history ( : , ), - . interestingly, this issue of new literary history was subtitled readers and spectators: some views and review, and the contributors included gérard genette, the poststructuralist literary theorist and proponent of narratology, and the film semiologist christian metz. the focus was on the reception of art, on leg- ibility and visibility, an approach pursued by literary theory since the late s that was only gradually becoming established in art history. alpers, “describe or narrate?”, , translation of a quotation from boccaccio about giotto, who he praises because his art “addresses the intelligent with recognizable fig- ures”. . experience and the visual stepping into the academic breach to defend undervalued works? several metaphors in “describe or narrate?” offer clues to additional, implicit mo- tives. discussing caravaggio’s conversion of st. paul, she claims that the light interpreted by scholars as heavenly “illuminates and thus involves us in the material things of this world rather than in the miracle of another”. however much the light is meant to point to the miracle of conversion, in worldly terms it also makes the viewer “physically part of the event that took place on the roadto damascus”.foralpers, it is thus entirelyclear that forcaravaggio, “the road to salvation is through immersing oneself in this world” ( , my italics). what is appealing about caravaggio’s art, she argues, is the direct, immediate quality of his description. the life imitated in intense painterly description breaks through the art into “our” space ( / ). “we are party to the undoing of art as the tables are turned by life.” ( ) caravaggio’s painting plays with the possibility of tearing down the barrier between “artifice and life, between the fictive world and the actual world of the beholder” ( ). this is surprisingly similar to the metaphors of a blending of art and life in the avant-garde discourse of the th century: immediacy, immersion, presence without (narrative) representation. and indeed, alpers cites michael fried here ( ), a writer associated with new art history who has argued along these lines concerning the art of the s and in his studies of the art of the th and th centuries. in his now-famous polemic against the large objects of minimal art published in , fried called for a “pure” presence of art that does not distract the beholder from his/her equally pure contemplative state by asking him/her to read –that does not destroy the asemantically pure presence of art in favour of inherently narrative structures of representation. alpers’ agenda can thus be summed up by terms like authenticity, pres- ence, directness and anti-narrativity. it is an approach that finds itself con- fronted (like the artists of the neo-avant-garde) with the problem that the status of pictures is caught in an irresolvable (and unavoidable) tension be- tweenpresenceandrepresentation.inher introductiontotheartofdescribing, alpers speaks of the “pleasurable effect of the suspension of narrative action michael fried, “art and objecthood”, artforum ( ), reprinted in gregory battcock (ed.): minimal art. a critical anthology, introduction by anne m. wagner (berkeley, los angeles, london ), - . this is why i would say that in historical terms, her discourse belongs more in the con- text of the art-life discussion of the neo-avant-garde of the late s than in that of a structural or structuralist renewal of art history. beyond the mirror in the name of delight in representational presence” (my italics) in order to crit- icize the polarization between narrative and descriptive pictures in the work of writers like louis marin, roland barthes and leo bersani. this polariza- tion and what alpers says about it are interesting in the context of this book insofar as the equation of action with narrative and of passivity with descrip- tion, which she criticizes, addresses types of seeing. for dutch painting, at least, alpers rejects this dichotomy: “far from being the ideal suspension of a restless narrative mode, descriptive images, in the seventeenth century at least, were central to the society’s active comprehension of the world”. for alpers, both descriptive seeing (by the painter) and the viewer’s seeing what is depicted as such (and not as something else, e.g. as part of a narrative), are active attitudes towards the world. in order to make her claim suitably incisive, however, she dramatizes the narrative mode as “restless”, implying hyperactivity. the polarization between narration and description in literature and fine art raises complex theoretical and methodological problems. alpers picks up on the connotations of the two poles and harnesses them to her position.nar- ration is associated with action, activity, active reading/seeing, with a mean- ing “behind” the surface of pictures, with the iconography that interprets this meaning. there follows the denial or dismissal of the painterly surface and of the forms and materiality of painting. to wollheim this denial constitutes a “transparent view of art” because it looks “through” the surface at the mean- ing that lies behind. narration also implies a hierarchy of pictures and how they are dealt with - history painting then being the highest in the hierar- chy of genres - and a narrative space based on perspective. all this for alpers is incorporated in the italian model of fine art. on the other hand she links description with passivity since no action is narrated.in her account descrip- tion is linked with the surface and materiality of the pictures, with show- ing only what is, and with a perceptually pragmatic approach to a pictorial space that deviates from the mathematical model. her approach concerns itself with seeing pictures rather than reading them. alpers’ aim is to reval- uate the descriptive mode, one that is not exclusive to dutch painting, and alpers,theartofdescribing, f.theassociatedtheoreticalproblemsanddebatescon- cerning the status of the picture cannot be gone into in more detail here. ibid., . see ibid., xxiv, where she quotes wollheim. often known as realism, although alpers does not wholly agree with this, alpers dis- cusses this in detail in “describe or narrate?”. . experience and the visual to render it productive. and she feels justified in this by reference to an art- historical tradition that is interested in art beyond the norms of italian art. she names riegl for dutch group portraits, pächt for the art of northern eu- rope, baxandall for german limewood sculpture and fried for “absorptive or anti-theatrical (for which we may read anti-albertian)” french painting (xx). alpers asserts: “the dutch present their pictures as describing the world seen rather than as imitations of significant human actions.” (xxv) however simple this characterization of dutch painting may appear, it should be clear by now that the consequences are less straightforward. we can see this in the art of describing, which opposes the “recent rash of emblematic interpretations of dutch art” (xxiv). in his early netherlandish painting, panofsky had already examined this painting in terms of its “disguised symbolism” by which (to use alpers’ terminology) he meant that painting concealed meaning under its realistic surfaces (xxiv). if there is no hidden meaning in dutch painting, alpers asks, how should we view it? (xxiv) this is a revealing question as it implies that for alpers, too, there is a fundamental link between the act of viewing and the search for meaning. any form of seeing without this search is alien to her, or at least hard to justify, as well as being hard to structure in methodological terms – a gaze into the void, so to speak. and what does alpers do? instead of turning firmly towards the surface, towards the painterly appearance of things – as pächt does, for example, in his description of the miniatures in the admontgi- ant bible – she refocuses her attention from the picture to its circumstances: “my answer has been to view [dutch art] circumstantially” (xxiv, my italics). what she refers to here as “circumstances” is what we already know as con- text: “i mean not only to see art as a social manifestation but also to gain access to images through a consideration of their place, role, and presence in the broader culture.” (xxiv) what i assume she is doing here is avoiding the potential accusations of formalism that make focussing one’s attention on the formal appearance of things in painting so risky. in various guises, the dichotomy of form and content has always been a part of german art history, and it also touches on the status of art-historical seeing. the problem may be suppressed in anglo-american art history of the the drastic choice of the word “rash” and an epilogue that tries once again to specif- ically refute this approach may explain why alpers’ book received such a polemic re- view from e. de jongh, the main practitioner of this kind of interpretation (see simiolus, netherlands quarterly for the history of art , no. , , - ). beyond the mirror gombrich-baxandall-alpers line in a way that can be felt in the “emptiness” of the image beyond meaning (as suggested in the above-quoted question by alpers) and in the way she redirects attention away from pictures towards context. whereas baxandall’s pragmatic reserve (diagnosed by alpers as ob- jectivization) leaves little scope for attack on this count, alpers’ struggle for a position and method is far more openly symptomatic. to put it concisely, one could say that the attention she devotes to the context of painting is intended to cover up the self-reflexivity (or “emptiness”) of its surface, but also to open it up to the outside. where iconography scans painting for symbolic-textual prefigurations,acontext-basedapproachlooksatthesocioculturalconditions of its production. to return to alpers’ characterizations of dutch painting, whose descrip- tive character she sees as being based on active seeing aimed at a knowledge of the world: “already established pictorial and craft traditions, broadly rein- forced by the new experimental science and technology, confirmed pictures as the way to new and certain knowledge of the world.” (xxv) she names and interprets qualities that she attributes to this orientation: departures from a viewer position determined by one-point perspective (“positioned viewer”) in dutch painting give the impression that the world is more important than the viewer; the use of major contrasts in proportion shows that man is not the measure of all things; the absence of a frame within the frame implied by the composition (framing groups of trees in landscapes, for example, or the order of figures in a space determined by perspective) makes the picture appear a random segment of the world that continues beyond the arbitrary limits of the frame. also notable is a marked sense of the picture as surface, resembling a mirror or a map but not the albertian window,and an emphasis on craft skills in the painterly rendering of objects (xxv). all of these attributes, then,have to do with the status of painting as a site of knowledge about the world. visual culture, discussed here prominently for the first time, is thus a culture of knowledge. alpers even claims that it played a key role in society: “one might say that the eye was a central means of self- representation and visual experience a central mode of self-consciousness.” (xxv) this goes far beyond the role of everyday skill attributed to seeing by baxandall; its elevation of visual culture to the status of a paradigm of so- ciality comes closer to the later basic assumptions of visual culture studies – with one crucial difference, specifically with reference to dutch painting and culture. “in holland,” baxandall states, “if we look beyond what is nor- mally considered to be art, we find that images proliferate everywhere.” (xxv) . experience and the visual this resembles the self-legitimization of today’s visual culture studies when it diagnoses a new age of relentless, omnipresent images. images are not only everywhere – in books, on fabrics and carpets, on tiles and in frames on the wall – they also show everything, from insects and flowers to brazilian tribespeople to the interiors of houses and churches. central examples of the importance of visuality in the dutch culture of the th century are maps and atlases that describe “the world and europe to itself” (my italics). knowledge about the world, articulated and communicated in seeing and visual descrip- tion, is thus also a factor of self-consciousness. intheartofdescribing,alpersbuildsupcontext (whichshesuggestsshould be studied in dealing with non-narrative painting) in layers: she begins with constantijn huygens who as a leading figure in the country’s cultural life tes- tifies for dutch visual culture as a contemporary witness to the intellectual, cultural and scientific currents of the period, as well as its taste in art. huy- gens enthuses about new optical instruments like the camera obscura, the microscope and the telescope, and his writings provide detailed support for alpers’ theory of a visual culture of knowledge via observation of the world. the next layer deals with a specific quality of the pictures in this culture: their “lifelikeappearance”( ).thislifelikenessisnottobetakenforgranted,itgoes beyond the usual standard of mimesis in painting since the renaissance and needs to be explained.to this end,alpers introduces kepler’s model of the eye and seeing as a factor of the cultural milieu, providing her with a workable model for dealing with dutch painting.this is followed by a contextualization of painting as a highly skilled craft of the kind required for lifelike portrayals. as well as a steady hand, this also depends, even more crucially, on an atten- tive eye. here, then, a culture of knowledge based on observation (layer ) is linked with a school of painting whose “model” alpers bases on kepler (layer ). this layered structure culminates in the theory of a “mapping impulse in dutch art” ( ff). here, the map as a pictorial genre brings visually rep- resented knowledge about the world together with the mode of the picture itself. with this strategy, alpers means to escape from the argumentative structure of analogy (e.g., the analogy between kepler’s model of seeing and descriptive painting) into the concretion of an object. her main example is vermeer’s the art of painting ( ), a picture whose theme is painting itself one example among many: nicholas mirzoeff, an introduction tovisualculture (london ). beyond the mirror and which features a map in a prominent position as a picture within the pic- ture. at this point, then, the path leads away from context into the picture – and back out again towards the dutch love of cartography. from this broad but detailed spectrum of historical contextualizations, i take a closer look at the analogy between kepler’s model of the eye and paint- ing. “where is the art?” alpers asks when pictures show something that looks like a copy of reality without telling a story: “when images are situated at the threshold between the world and our perception of it how can they be consid- ered as art?” vermeer’s view of delft, for example, “is just there for the looking” ( ).inthispainting,alpersargues,theworld(notthepainter!) stainsthesur- face of pictures with colour and light, “impressing itself on it” ( ) – a use of metaphor that recalls william talbot’s description of photography in the pen- cil of nature. and alpers really does view dutch painting as a historical pre- cursor to photography; the nordic descriptive mode of painting shares many qualities with photography ( ) – its fragmentariness, the arbitrariness of its framing,theimmediacyof itscontactwithreality.this immediacyrefersboth to seeing and to the transfer of seeing into painting; it is also guaranteed by the camera obscura, the microscope, the telescope and other lenses that acted as optical aids at the time, ensuring maximum analogue transfer of what was seen into the image. in alpers’ model, this mode forms the historical equiva- lent of photography,understood as the indexical transfer of the world into the image. what alpers’ argument does not take into account is that right from the start, photography was never a “purely” descriptive medium. in other words: the photographic image, too, is not merely a media transcription of the world; instead it involves a selecting and composing authorial eye that orients itself towards the aesthetic norms of its time. as a metaphor, immediacy must be read here against a mediatedness like that introduced by the narrative function of italian painting between the world “as it is” and the picture/viewer. this gives rise to a chain of signifiers of world, description, immediacy, northern painting and photography that seems to lack what its counterpart (narrative, mediatedness, southern paint- ing) brings with it in and of itself: meaning and with it the possibility of in- tegrating the picture into the broader context of interpreting the world. the series of polarizations could thus be continued: meaning versus “the world is as it is”; painting as a function of narrative versus painting as tautology: william henry fox talbot, the pencil of nature (london - ). . experience and the visual “what you see is what you see”, as frank stella remarked in on the self- referentiality of his pictures. tocounterthisdangerofthetautologyofworldandlifelikeimage,iwould argue, alpers introduces kepler’s model of seeing as a historical context, but also as a model that structures both seeing and image production in th- century dutch culture. kepler’s definition of the human eye as a “mechanical makerofpictures”andhis formulationthatseeingcreatesapainting(pictura) of what is seen on the surface of the retina ( ) form the basis for alpers’ ar- gument. kepler views the eye in isolation as a seeing mechanism and he also accepts its distortions as optical facts ( ). this lends seeing a new, emanci- pated status; the sense of sight is relieved of the usual charge of deception; seeing including its naturally inherent distortions is accepted and isolated as scientific fact – and it is in this sense that alpers uses it as the context for dutch painting. this signals another contrast to baxandall’s “period eye”: the period eye is not a natural mechanism, but a “skill”, a socially and culturally conditioned and trained eye that brings forth corresponding forms such as the creation of volumes inthe quattrocento or the floral forms of german late gothic – forms that have to do with learned habits of the eye that lead to the objects of the world being seen and painted in a particular way. kepler equates seeing with “picturing” ( ). “visual perception is itself an act of representation in kepler’s analysis.” ( ) this is the bridge established by alpers between seeing and the painting of pictures: the “artifice” then lies not in the invention of a picture,but in the coincidence of nature and art.ver- meer’s view of delft, which kenneth clark called “the nearest which painting hasevercometoacolouredphotograph”( ),couldthusbeseenasadisplayof this artifice.“a claim is made on us that this picture is at the meeting-place of theworldseenandtheworldpictured.”( )inthenetherlands,kepler’smath- ematically defined line between nature and “artifice” is a matter for painting, and not just since kepler, but beginning with van eyck. with her analogy between the models of mechanical seeing and descriptive painting, alpers secures a further bridge: that between the world and its representation. just as a trompe-l’oeil is an optical fact, the deception in painting (of which it is accused) is not a moral problem but an epistemological one: “there is no es- cape from representation” ( ). if the eye sees not “what is” but what the eye’s optical mechanism makes out of what is, then this divergence contains the bruce glaser, “questions to stella and judd” ( ) in battcock (ed.): minimal art, - : . beyond the mirror unavoidable fact of representation – because seeing is already representation. in this way, representation in descriptive painting is marshalled on the side of nature. now the difference between the narrative, italian norm and the descrip- tive dutch mode of painting becomes clearer: on the one hand, the framed picture as an object in the world, the albertian window through which we look, from a position defined by perspective, at a narrated world; and on the other, the picture that takes the place of the eye itself, leaving the frame and the viewer-position undefined ( ). the latter also applies to the position of the painter: according to alpers, it is dissolved within the picture; the painter,ab- sorbed in attentive observation of the details of the world, “merges” with the picture, anonymizing him-/herself in this kind of “selflessness” ( ). in ver- meer’s the art of painting this manifests itself in the back view of the painter: “like a surveyor, the painter is within the very world he represents. he disap- pears into his task, … observation is not distinguished from the notation of what is observed.” ( ) the image of the painter disappearing into the painted world would be a good place to link alpers’ model with the critical theories of the subject and authorship proposed by foucault and barthes. apart from a cursory refer- ence to foucault’s the order of things, however, alpers herself does not situate her approach within a structuralist or poststructuralist context. interesting here is louis marin’s review of her book, under the ambiguous title “in praise of appearance”. marin sees parallels and differences between alpers’ model and structuralism. as one key difference he cites the fact that alpers does not abstractly deduce her fundamental oppositions (e.g., narrative versus de- scriptive) from a “basic structure of signification; rather, they are discovered in history”. conversely, he credits alpers with “magnificent appreciation of appearanceandsurface”,culminatinginhercritiqueofthe“albertian”subject, which she counters with a multiple, fragmented subject, even a “nonsubject, at once everywhere and nowhere”–a verdict in which marin gathers together all of the motifs of poststructuralist critiques of the subject that have since become common currency. and marin’s reading gains something else from alpers’ version of the disappearance of the author, arguing that it paradox- ically brings forth an animation of the objects themselves in their representa- tion,a kind of“visual autorepresentation,a kind of ‘object-consciousness’” – louis marin, “in praise of appearance” in october ( ), - : . ibid., . . experience and the visual which brings us back to the void around which alpers’ book revolves: the tau- tology of an “unmediated” representation of things. it is this tautology that makes her less a structuralist and more a contemporary of the neo-avant- gardeofthe swithitscall fora“pure”presenceofobjectsbeyondmeaning and interpretation. i am thinking, for example, of carl andre with his brick works, about which the critic peter schjeldahl wrote, on first encountering them: “the bricks were. … here, at last, was the purely and clearly existing heart of the matter.” in the avant-garde discourse of presence, a central role is played by michael fried’s engagement with minimalism. for fried, minimalist objects have no presence because they are theatrical. this suggests an analogy in which the stage is a context that determines meaning, deflecting attention from the non-functional absorbed state of seeing and rendering presence as an effect of perception impossible – comparable with alpers’ critique of emblematic readings of dutch art. fried’s “tautology of presence” certainly bears similarities with alpers’ argument: “it is this continuous and entire presentness, amounting, as it were, to the perpetual creation of itself, that one experiences as a kind of instantaneousness: … it is by virtue of their presentness and instantaneousness that modernist painting and sculpture defeat theatre.” the “perpetual creation of itself” and the “instantaneous- ness” both recall alpers’ take on vermeer’s view of delft: it is “just here for the looking”. in this reading, the non-interpretative seeing of the dutch painters is a historical equivalent to the avant-garde discourse of presence. both focus on an “object-consciousness” that creates an “immediate” link between viewer/artist and art/world. but alpers leaves a certain tension between object and seeing: she situates seeing in a historically determined field – the field of visual culture as a culture of knowledge. the question of what art might be, beyond meaningfulness, is also ad- dressed by both fried and alpers. for both of them, the key to the answer lies in the type of perception dictated by the artwork, and for both of them what characterizes art is the “absorption” of the gaze of an isolated eye, the eye of both producer and recipient: in its aesthetic make-up, art shows that the eye of both artist and viewer is absorbed in its seeing, isolated in the sense of an independence from the surroundings in the moment of seeing – a gaze peter schjeldahl, “minimalism” in malin wilson (ed.), the hydrogen jukebox, selected writings of peter schjeldahl - (berkeley, los angeles, london ), - . fried, “art and objecthood”, . beyond the mirror that is not “pure” in the sense of a biologically fixed predisposition, but that is extremely focused on what it perceives. . through the eyes of the spectator seeing the other – otto pächt’s the practice of art history: reflections on method while gombrich views art history from outside, otto pächt adopts a dif- ferent position: pächt, who, like gombrich, studied in vienna, argues from within the discipline. or, more precisely: from within its practice. the above- mentioned lectures from / , first published in german , systemati- cally describe what remained vague to me as a beginner: seeing in art history as an analytical activity. in my conversations with fellow students and staff at the vienna institute of art history at the time, there was much talk of “style analysis”, a term no one was able to adequately explain to me and which, in- terestingly, pächt does not use. pächt’s lectures have also been translated into english and published as the practice of art history: reflections on method, with an introduction by christopher wood, revealing that wood’s reserva- tions concerning pächt are considerably less serious than the reservations harboured by recent anglo-american art history with regard to panofsky and gombrich. one reason for this may be that pächt’s influence in the english- speaking world never reached a level that would have called for distancing gestures in the sense of a “rebellion against the father figure”. another aspect also strikes me as important. pächt did not claim to offer a complete the- oretical framework. rather he was interested in: “finding initial approaches to a method that is not devised speculatively but obtained by developing an awareness for the processes of perception that take place when we are ‘getting gombrich, born in , studied from to and emigrated to england in , like pächt. pächt, born in , obtained his doctorate in vienna in . beyond the mirror our eye in’ with artworks.” any accusation of a holistic or determinist basic position, as formulated by wood against gombrich, panofsky, and the struc- tural analysts of the vienna school, can thus not be levelled at pächt – who systematically examines practice without subjecting it to a unified theoreti- cal model. rather than offering closed answers to questions such as the value of an artwork or the telos of art history, he addresses these issues as open problems for which there are no pertinent solutions – although he is also at pains not to abandon art history as an academic discipline to unrestricted relativism. this preserves the processual openness of research itself, which is far closer to the critical thinking of new art history than the universal or scientistic models of people like sedlmayr and gombrich. pächt’s art historical practice also differs from that of panofsky and gom- brich in the place it accords to seeing as the central heuristic operation of the discipline, defining its methods and objectives in processual terms. in par- ticular, this approach problematizes the heuristic trap of seeing what one is looking for, what one wants to see. hence pächt’s attempts to describe how it might be possible, via a form of “analytical” seeing (my term, not pächt’s), to set aside what one is looking for and then, by comparing it with the results of this other seeing,to check and if necessary revise it.attendant questions here include: what can be seen by seeing an artwork? how does seeing an individ- ual artwork and reaching specific conclusions relate to arriving at conclusions that apply to a group of works? how does today’s seeing relate to the unfamil- iarity of a historically remote culture whose artistic legacy one is looking at? what is the situation concerning the verifiability of such findings and their claim to scholarly rigor? what does such analytic seeing focus on? as these questions show, pächt’s attempt to frame seeing as a heuristic activity gives rise to conflicts that are usually either not addressed at all (as was the case when i was studying in vienna) or compensated for by models that are super- imposed over the empirical practice of visual knowledge production (mod- els that pächt criticizes in emphatic terms): the conflict between “innocent” and pre-informed seeing, between individual findings and the generalizabil- ity required by scholarly method, between the cultural and visual influences on interpreters today and their historically “foreign” object, between seeing and the transfer of its results into language, between form and content (this from pächt’s forword to the third, revised edition of the book: otto pächt, methodisches zur kunsthistorische praxis. ausgewählte schriften (munich ). (trans. ng). all other quotations are taken from the english edition. . through the eyes of the spectator latter being a basic conflict within art historical tradition, especially in ger- many). all of these conflicts have genealogies and effects both theoretical and methodological. in the following i will subject pächt’s text, which fills a small book, to a selective reading, concentrating on his discussion of the art-historical act of seeing. as he says in his introduction, he is interested in arbeitshygiene (work hygiene), stressing the importance of a clear-cut approach “to the practical exercise of our craft as art historians.” for him, this means developing both the “mental and sensory receptive organs” and the “conceptual apparatus”, in turncallingfor“introspection:wemust look bothatourselves,theviewer,and at our object, the work of art” ( ).here, then,attention is focused for the first time on the viewer as a practicing art historian,for only via historical scrutiny is it possible “to transform object into work, the material substrate into the artistic phenomenon” ( ). it should be added that this relationship between artwork and viewer is being discussed here with specific reference to art his- tory. i emphasize this because the history of th-century art is marked by a similar view whose influence is felt not only in interpretation but also in the production of art itself – the view that an artwork is only realized in the eye of the beholder/viewer. pächt, by contrast, does not deny art material- ity or reality beyond its perception. instead, he is interested in the character of art history as a historical discipline and the resulting problem of the un- familiarity of the “art objects” under study that are to be released from this unfamiliarity by a specifically trained mode of seeing, rendering them visible as aesthetic phenomena to today’s eyes.in a single sentence,pächt then man- ages to make a fundamental critique of gombrich in passing, without men- tioning him by name: “the danger of mistaking the art object for the work of art is greater with naturalistic representations than with non-naturalistic ones.” ( ) we recall: gombrich’s narrative of progress in fine art turns on the problem of imitating nature. as deviations from this narrative, styles like that of the middle ages require complex explanations. for pächt, by contrast, rather than being special cases, they actually justify the practice of historical seeing on account of their specific “unfamiliarity” to today’s viewers. this “unfamiliarity” is pächt’s way of rephrasing a central problem in art- historical research; on the one hand, it brings the necessity of interpretation into play (how else can today’s viewer attend to an art object from a bygone period?), while at the same time implying the relativity of interpretation and the embeddedness of art object and viewer in a network of relationships. if something is unfamiliar, why, and from which viewpoint? assuming artist beyond the mirror and viewer to be in possession of an “innocent eye” would be quite wrong. this unfamiliarity refers not only to the content of the work in the sense of conventions, symbols, gestures, objects and customs that would have been known to viewers at the time (and that are deciphered within art history as material culture and iconography),but also to the“habits of seeing and think- ing, modes of the pictorial imagination. the question, therefore, is this: how are we to make ourselves familiar with these idiosyncrasies of vision?” ( ) while baxandall develops a method to make the eye of the historical client accessible to today’s viewers and readers,based on its reconstruction through written sources, pächt wishes to historicize the eye of today’s viewer by em- bedding his/her seeing in a process of learning historically unfamiliar visual habits. he calls on the viewer to pay attention to him-/herself, his/her own habitual ways of seeing; he cites examples of the rediscovery of art from the past in which a significant role is played by an “affinity with the prevalent stylistic fashion of the age when the rediscovery takes place” ( ), as in the love of the impressionists for the painting of late antiquity. but he finds such dependence on fashions of taste problematic: he is interested in insights that can be rendered objective: “when we think we have finally managed to see the work of art correctly, how do we know that this is really so?” ( ) – that we are not taking a subjective interpretation for the correct one? this is where the above-mentioned “work hygiene” comes into play, requiring hypotheses to be verified. art history does this by viewing the individual artwork in “genealog- ical perspective”, which for pächt means situating it within a development. “if we can manage to locate the work within a genealogical sequence – that is to say, if the properties that we discover in it turn out to follow logically from something outside it – then we can safely regard our findings as verified.” ( ) this frees the individual work from its isolation, thus “eliminat[ing] the open-endedness that lays it wide open to subjective interpretation” ( ). for readers today, it may seem strange that the artwork is to be stripped of so much open-endedness (elsewhere, pächt writes that “artistic phenomena are notoriously open to multiple interpretations” ( )). after all, it has since been widely agreed that the artwork is something “open” and polysemic, a con- sensus based primarily on contributions from the field of semiotics. but for panofsky, gombrich and pächt, this would not fulfil the conditions for schol- arly rigour that prevailed when they were writing. the way pächt deals with this refers, of course, to umberto eco, opera aperta, (the open work, cambridge ma ). . through the eyes of the spectator this, however, is remarkable: he sets the bar for objectivity pragmatically low; subjective interpretations undergo thorough scrutiny via comparisons with earlier, later and contemporary works, and via the conclusions drawn – but not within the framework of a metahistorical interpretative model. pächt describes the process of seeing in diverse, eloquent terms, for example with the colloquialism “getting one’s eye in” ( ), sometimes with metaphors drawn from work with texts, with pictures also being “read” ( ). for pächt, interpretation involves both “seeing-with-understanding”, which he also calls “adapting our vision” ( ), and “enunciating the vision once correctly seen” ( ), by which he means description. he demonstrates this using examples of painting, sculpture and architecture from the medieval and early modern periods, each of which highlights one basic problem of “getting one’s eye in”. two miniatures from the admont giant bible with moses receiving the laws on mount sinai ( - ) show how an “unfamiliar conception of space” ( ) is translated into two dimensions; the holy sepulchre in the minster at freiburg im breisgau shows how “an unfamiliar attitude to time” creates an “obstacle to access” ( - ); unlike the initial unfamiliarity of medieval renderings, donatello’s judith und holofernes initially appears easily comprehensible on account of its naturalistic “visual logic” ( ), but on closer inspection it becomes increasingly puzzling ( - ); at first glance, the pazzi chapel by filippo brunelleschi ( - ) seems to be accessible via a purely factual description, but this impression is short-lived. in his introduction,christopher wood focuses primarily on pächt’s treat- ment of the miniatures from the admont giant bible, doing so for reasons that are interesting in terms of a history of reception: pächt describes the minia- tures not as deviations from the standards of illusionist rendering of space, butviatheformalpeculiaritiesofasystemofrepresentationthatmustappear unfamiliar to our eyes accustomed to naturalism. he describes a layering of zones separated by bands of colour; there is a “definite indication of behind and before, and therefore a rudimentary space; but everything constantly re- verts to the picture plane” ( ). the logic here is not one of space but of the picture plane, causing this system of representation to resemble ornament. to enable himself to see this, pächt begins by suppressing his prior knowl- edge on the subject and avoids an object-based reading: “of course, such an inhibition is rather artificial. in practice, our eyes react quite differently. led on by our own prior knowledge, they see what they expect to see: […] for this very reason, it is often a useful corrective to experiment with an object-blind vision.” ( ) according to wood, pächt rewrites the story of moses receiving beyond the mirror the laws as a “formal narrative. he flattens the representation into a pulsat- ing, mesmerizing pattern of interlacing bands of colour. by the end he has in effect created a new work that looks more like one of kandinsky’s compo- sitions from the early s.” he describes pächt’s approach as the “extraction of formal dramas out of non-classical … or even ugly pictures” ( - ). by identifying formal structures in their specific and unique character, pächt can interpret modes of portrayal and systems of representation from different periods and styles in a way that is free from the allegiances and preferences of someone like gombrich (illusionism) or panofsky (renaissance humanism). in this phase of analysis, forms are viewed neither in terms of their references to reality nor in terms of their correspondence with an iden- tifiable object, but in relative autonomy as a formal event, before they are historicized by means of comparison; for, as mentioned above, the individual work of art must be “released” from its isolation ( ) and embedded within a genealogical perspective. the aim of such a perspective is “a new attribution – to period, place or artist” in order to establish “whether or not the work fits organically into a particular slot in a particular historical context” ( ). onepossibleproductofthisapproachisthebringingtogetherofartworks that have previously resisted attribution, creating a consistent œuvre whose supposed author is then given a name. this search for an author-subject is particularly characteristic of research into the late middle ages as practised from the late th century. for this practice, too, pächt offers a prominent example, the master of flémalle, discussing the ways this “case” bears on the history of science ( - ). what is at stake here is not merely attribution, as that depends on the existence of a reliably identified œuvre with which the authorless works might be compared; here, by contrast, the comparability of the “formal opportunities” for the authorless works is what makes it possible to deduce and create an author. at the end of the th century, the “flémalle question” ( ) was still dominated by the “idea of personal styles”, a param- eter that was later replaced by the concept of a period style. pächt describes the historical development of research into “the master of flémalle” as an in- creasingdifferentiationofseeing:“theprocessofseeing–ofvisuallygrasping the identity of a work of art or of an artist – is a process of growing differ- entiation. when we first encounter a work of art, what we perceive is not its specificitybut itsanalogieswithwhatwealreadyknow.…inagradualprocess of visual differentiation, the specific crystallises out of the general. this is a fact that has still to be properly faced. indeed, it stands in blatant contradic- tion to everything in the literature of the subject. far from being abstracted . through the eyes of the spectator from many individual cases, the generalised impression is the primary expe- rience that affects us when we confront the individual work of art.” ( ) what does this mean? pächt offers a very basic explanation of his view of seeing as a research activity. this implies a constant switching between individual observation and reference to a more general position. the one feeds the other as possibility: we see individual works by rogier van der weyden and other works from his period and milieu, among them those later grouped together into the œuvre of a newly identified master. out of this singular seeing of individual works arises a background of visual knowledge that leads to new resultswhentheindividualworksare lookedatagain.thisseeingis“primary” not in the sense of purely optical registering; it is a seeing-with-thinking for which the “dismissal of normative aesthetics” ( ), the relativization of aes- thetic standards, is of crucial heuristic importance. in this model, it is only once aesthetics is relativized that art-historical seeing can be rendered objec- tive. this makes it clear that pächt is interested not in recognizing the situ- atedness of seeing, but in overcoming it. although the art historian sees sub- jectively,using pächt’s method of seeing s/he is able to check his/her insights, to generalize them, and thus to objectivize them. i return now to the generalised impression of seeing an artwork for the first time. with this approach, pächt opposes another method of seeing that aims to isolate small details with the smallest possible meaning as a way of obtaining objectivizable results when attributing artworks: the so-called “morellian method”, developed in the late th century by the medic and art connoisseur giovanni morelli. for pächt, the matching of small details like the shape of earlobes or fingernails “affords no valid evidence unless they [the details] can be made to harmonise with the overall design principle of the work in question” ( - ). we recall: this “overall design principle” can only be seen by first acknowl- edging the unfamiliarity of what is to be looked at, rather than judging it by an aesthetic norm. in practice, this means that the viewer must overcome his/her visual “prejudices”, such as the influence of the fashions of the mo- ment. this in turn happens, secondly, by “getting one’s eye in” with the unfa- miliar, learning the visual language that brought forth this work.the fact that this learning process might itself be effected by fashions and the viewer’s own pächt considers this problem of normative seeing (such as burckhardt’s dismissal of the baroque as a “renaissance gone to seed”) to have been overcome by riegl; see pächt, the practice of art history, - . beyond the mirror preferences (as wood suspects is the case with pächt’s analysis of the admont bible, in my opinion correctly) is clearly of no importance to pächt, as this can be neutralized by the verification techniques of comparative art history. in any case, this temporal fixedness of the viewer can offer new perspectives on historically “unfamiliar” aesthetics, although this is something pächt him- self does not discuss; in his view, the changing fortunes of specific styles and periods can only be identified retrospectively by studying reception history. only by overcoming a normative way of seeing the art of past eras does it become possible to use the interplay between artwork and seeing and to turn art-historical seeing into a heuristic tool. pächt describes this process using metaphors from optics: “the instructions that works of art give us are like an invitation to try out different lenses. initially, many aspects of the object may seemtomakenosense.…throughonelens,muchisclear,butsomethingsare distorted or blurred; through another, this may be reversed. clearly we want a lens through which as much as possible, and indeed everything, is clearly in focus.” it is a matter, then, of finding the right approach, one that “succeeds in eliminating all contradictions,anomalies and inconsistencies: an approach that makes a thing that might be otherwise into a thing that has to be just the way it is. that is an approach that turns chaos into order … an approach that allows as many details as possible to be understood in terms of a small number of design ideas or principles; an approach that reveals a maximum of referentiality” ( ). the artwork should be assessed “not by inappropriate, alien criteria” but by “its own, inherent criteria” ( ). the problem pächt tries to solve here in a series of formulations recalls more recent debates, in fields including ethnology, on how to deal with the other and the challenge of un- derstanding it without annexing it, thus rendering it newly unrecognizable. pächt’s concern here is to avoid absolutizing ways of thinking that result in dichotomies, like those he finds in sedlmayr – whose approach of gestaltetes sehen (configured seeing) he otherwise approves of ( - ). what later generations would refer to as function, pächt calls a “formal opportunity” ( ). discussing the wellhead for which donatello made judith and holofernes, he makes a significant distinction with regard to the concept of function: “the sculpture or the painted image must subordinate itself to an overall structure: a structure with an artistic organisation with its own, infinitely variable but always tied to function. the sculpture or painting thus published translation (from page ) altered for meaning. . through the eyes of the spectator becomes part of a whole – which means that it will possess a number of char- acteristics that cannot be deduced from its essential nature as art.” ( ) in this way, pächt insists specifically on the historically immanent relativity of the forms as we see them, and he does so in a way that describes form and function within a tension between aesthetic autonomy and functional depen- dence, but without submitting to the temptation to resolve this tension. this strikes me as a very typical example of pächt’s thinking. pächt’s system does have a centre: the artwork in its historicity. but in the process of art-historical seeing, he tries to (re-)activate the relations embed- ded in and accreted to this centre without bringing a meta-history or other totalizing model into play that would isolate one of these elements (artistic genius, the autonomy of form, meaning, etc.) and allow it to prevail over the “uncertainties of the visual dimension” ( ). let us once again inquire into pächt’s aims of inquiry: according to what we have described so far, one might gain the impression that pächt adhered to the conventional “ways of art historians” ( ) with their focus on attribution and dating.he was clearly aware of this,and he asked himself and his reader: “why do we take such a burning interest in the attribution of works of art, the determination of date and authorship? is there not something obsessive about the way in which … art historians, when they see an object, know no peace until they think they have found the right pigeonhole for it?” could they not be interested solely in the content of an artwork, leaving aside the “historical classification that leads to a museum label”? his answer: “a correct attribution defines the view that alone reveals the true essence of the work … attribution is … ultimately … a matter of content.” ( - ) pächt does not state the exact nature of this content.the key basis for all that follows involves though i will not reproduce it in all its complexity and incisiveness here, pächt’s cri- tique of iconology is similar. he criticizes its monopoly on the interpretation of art, instead assigning it a clearly circumscribed task: “what was once a living visual expe- rience may well have vanished long since – or, where the civilisation concerned is an alien one, it may never have belonged to our store of notions at all. here, then, some artificial help is required. and this is where iconography comes in. i would define its primary task as that of teaching us what knowledge we need to have in our minds when we look at historic works of art. we need iconography to reactivate whatever was spontaneously known at the relevant historical moment.” ( ) iconography should thus help to reconstruct the historical act of seeing in its spontaneity, but it should not reduce the artwork to a pictograph or hieroglyph. see especially pächt, the practice of art history, - . beyond the mirror ascertaining the historical peculiarity of the object under study.art-historical seeing involves finding out the situatedness of the object in historical terms by taking into account the situatedness of the art historian’s gaze. this gives the relationship between the situatedness of the object and its viewer, the relationship present in the act of seeing and interpreting, a specific weight. this relationship between the art historian and his/her“other”, the art object, is built on the recognition of the (historical) otherness or “unfamiliarity” of the object. pächt is the only scholar in art history to thoroughly investigate this relationship and to reflect on the methodological consequences of it. the recognition and acceptance of the object’s otherness is of central concern also for the discussion of the modes of seeing in visual culture studies later in this book. focus on reception - wolfgang kemp’s der anteil des betrachters wolfgang kemp’s contribution to art history’s engagement with hitherto un- derexposed elements of the triad “artist – artwork – audience”, differs from that proposed by baxandall and alpers. kemp’s approach is via literary the- ory, from which he borrows the concept of reception aesthetics for his project of finding a theory and method for the share of art that is addressed to the viewer. with the concept of reception aesthetics, kemp situates his approach in the field of theory, more precisely in the sub-discipline of philosophy deal- ing with art: aesthetics.at the same time,he also wishes to develop a method and apply it in practice. a third important point is typical for art history as a discipline: its focus on objects. kemp’s reception aesthetics sticks close to the artwork. in order to get from this to a theory and model of reception, he wolfgang kemp, der anteil des betrachters. rezeptionsästhetische studien zur malerei des .jahrhunderts (munich ). not published in english; all quotations here translated by ng. the title refers to gombrich’s concept of “the beholder’s share”, see gombrich, art and illusion, section . wolfgang kemp (ed.), derbetrachter ist imbild.kunstwissenschaft undrezeptionsästhetik ( ), new edition (berlin ), . by referring to the object as art, i make clear that here, unlike in visual culture studies, it is not (yet) about abolishing the special status of art with regard to other artefacts. the context of art, which in the work of alpers, for example, is central to reconstructing the visual culture of the viewer, is only taken into account by kemp to the extent that it determinesstructureswithinthepicture.thisalsosetshisapproachapartfrombaxan- dall’s model of the “period eye” that reconstructs the culturally and historically deter- . through the eyes of the spectator looks to literary theory where he finds an approach dealing with the reading of literature and adopts it for the viewing of art. kemp’s viewer is an implied viewer, he is quite literally in the picture. as with alpers, it is worth taking a look at the specific object of kemp’s analysis. what th-century dutch painting was for alpers, the painting of the th century is for kemp in der anteil des betrachters. while alpers focuses on the “immediacy” of descriptive non-narrative, kemp deals with painting that is narrative in the broadest sense: the th century offers him an ani- mated field between the tradition of history painting, as it continued to be celebrated in the paris salons, and the emergence of modernist painting that paid less and less heed to conventions of pictorial narrative like perspective and framing. the roots of his approach actually lie in the th century, in the “picture of the crowd” of the french revolution, whose programmatic pic- tures “demanded participation” ( ), and in diderot’s ideas on the relationship between viewer and picture. participation is a good keyword for diderot’s aesthetics, whose driving paradoxkempsumsupinhisopeningsentence:“theviewerentersthesphere of art theory in the th century only to be told he is not to enter the sphere of art.” ( ) strictly speaking, diderot’s ideas aim not to keep the viewer out of the sphere of art, but to keep art from intervening in the realm of the viewer, as this would disturb the viewer’s communication with the picture. for his model of how a painting should be in order to allow viewers to connect with its contents, diderot turned to the theatre. contrary to the then common practice of actors addressing the audience directly, diderot thought that the action on stage should be presented as if the viewer were not there: “when speeches are directly addressed to the audience, then the playwright has de- parted from his subject, and the actor has stepped out of his role. to me it is as if they had both left the stage and come down into the audience. as long as the monologue continues, the action is suspended for me and the stage is empty.” thestageandtheauditoriumshouldremainstrictlyseparatespaces; only then does the “action” acquire the unity and plausibility that allows the mined preconditions for seeing on the part of both artist and viewer as a “medium” for the painting of the quattrocento. see wolfgang kemp, das bild der menge ( - ), in städel-jahrbuch ( ), ff. denis diderot, “conversations on the natural son” ( ) in sources of dramatic theory, vol. , voltaire to hugo (cambridge ), . beyond the mirror viewer to project him-/herself into it; only an intact fourth wall makes identi- fication with the protagonist possible. modern narrative cinema is based on the same conditions. both resemble a (moving) painting. in narrative painting, too, it had been common practice into the th cen- tury to make figures in the picture communicate with the viewer via glances and gestures. around , diderot still experienced this technique as pleas- ant,as longasthefiguresdidnot“stepoutof thescene”, buthe laterrejected it on the grounds that “the canvas encloses the whole space and there is no one beyond it.” only when the action portrayed in the picture “knows noth- ing” of the viewer can s/he become wholly absorbed in these events. kemp describes this as follows: the “picture should make an impact, but if it is to make an impact, it must do so via the stringency of its inner action and all of the strength of the figures and all of the artistic means must be invested in this procedure, any reference to the outside would weaken the unity of ac- tion.” ( ) kemp, too, is referring to theatre when he speaks of the “unity of action”. there is an element in kemp’s take on diderot that modifies the exclu- sive anchoring of a painting’s impact in the picture by making the viewer not only implicit but also active: diderot does not allow his absorption in a pic- ture to be disturbed by small formats and heavy frames of a kind that would prevent a viewer accustomed to today’s standards of immersive visual expe- rience from forgetting that s/he is looking at a picture rather than a reality. what is important is the viewer’s imagination, enabled by the picture’s in- ner dramaturgy to experience the painted scene as something happening in time and space, even with sound – as in a small painting of a shipwreck by vernet described by diderot in the salon of : “i saw or believed i saw, as you prefer, a vast expanse of sea opening before me. i was distraught in the shore, having discerned a burning ship … i saw the unfortunates … run along the deck, start screaming.” vernet had clearly done a good job, then, even diderot, “salon de ” in Œuvres complètes x (paris ), . “j’aime assez dans un tableau un personnage qui parle au spectateur sans sortir du sujet.” diderot, “pensées détachées sur la peinture” ( ). in Œuvrescomplètesxii (paris ), . “la toile renferme tout l’espace, et il n’y a personne au delà.” diderot, “the salon of ”, in diderot on art ii (new haven, london ), . see al- so susanne von falkenhausen, kugelbauvisionen. kulturgeschichte einer bauform von der französischen revolution bis zum medienzeitalter (bielefeld ), f. in this book, i address the dynamic of immersion and viewer distance in connection with new tech- nologies of visual immersion. . through the eyes of the spectator though the figures are so small as to make facial expressions, for example, all but indistinguishable. diderot’s “i saw or believed i saw” refers to a fac- tor of his reception that kemp does not discuss: the imagination that is the driving force behind the viewer’s absorption in the painted action.immersive experience of a picture depends on an obliging, willing viewer with an active imagination. kemp takes diderot’s paradox of the independence of the action in the painting from the viewer and makes it the precondition for reception, estab- lishing it as the basis for his question about the “share of the beholder”. in so doing, he also solves a key methodological problem of historical reception studies: it may be hard to research the reception behaviour of today’s audi- ences,butforahistoricalaudienceit ismoreor lessimpossible,sincethereare few historical sources documenting responses to paintings (apart from texts by professional critics, who follow the laws of their literary genre and thus barely qualify as “authentic” sources of visual experience). from what i call diderot’s paradox –the picture’s autonomy from the viewer as a precondition for the viewer’s communication with that picture – it follows that reception can be deduced from the picture’s inner structure. before discussing the consequences kemp draws from this, i want to take a brief look at his historical review of reception aesthetics, whose roots he traces from diderot to the end of the th century in the work of john stuart mill, hegel, ruskin and riegl. for the th century, on the other hand, he notes a limited interest in the question of the relationship between viewer and work. “the already flimsy and vulnerable tradition running from diderot via hegel to riegl breaks off with [riegl’s] the group portraiture of holland,” the reason being art history’s now dominant interest in “questions of formal and stylistic analysis, in the analysis of content and structure” ( ). we might add that the th century also saw a golden age of “autonomous art”: the self- referential painting of abstraction that refuses any kind of “legibility” (in the sense of structures of reference to anything outside the painting) in order to achieve the kind of pure being and pure presence that michael fried, for example, had in mind. concerning the decision in favour of an exclusively immanent meaning of the aesthetic object, art history and art occupied the same discursive field, especially in the early post-war decades. according to kemp, it was literary theory that caused the aesthetics of re- ception to regain currency in the s. from literary theory he borrows the model of an aesthetics of reception and applies it to art history. we might add that here, too, art was a precursor: new practices of the neo-avant-gardes beyond the mirror since the late s, such as happenings, and their new media, such as closed circuit television and video, aimed to address the audience directly, to en- courage audience participation, and to break out of the isolating “autonomy” of modernist art. artists often referred to theories and academic disciplines beyond art, above all phenomenology, cybernetics, sociology and psychology, in order to develop and explain their approaches. at the time, especially in the german-speaking world, as well as having no answer to this, art history actively excluded contemporary art from its remit, leaving it to art criticism. kemp’s project of applying the model of reception aesthetics to art history can thus also be understood as a contribution to overcoming this methodological stagnation. let us briefly follow kemp’s systematic account of this approach: “an aes- thetics of reception aims to take into the account the simple fact that a text is read, a picture looked at, a piece of music listened to. that every work is part ofaprocessofcommunicationthatcannotbebrokendownintotheactiveand passive roles of transmitter and receiver, but which instead can only be un- derstood as a dialogical process. the work is made to be received, it possesses certain means of creating, shaping and maintaining a relationship with the recipient. and rather than being a pure medium in which the intentions of the artwork are fully realized, the recipient is configured for reception by aes- thetic and non-aesthetic norms and forms of behaviour.” ( ) in the light of our previous readings, links, analogies and differences emerge. we start with the activity of the recipient, in this case the act of viewing; this act meets with a work that is already “waiting” to be viewed. this resembles the posi- tions of baxandall and alpers. both work and viewer actively participate in a dialogue, meaning that there can be no “pure” or passive seeing. this, too, matches baxandall and alpers, as well as gombrich. the last sentence of the passage quoted implicitly brings an interesting factor into play: if no identity is established between the intention and the reception of the artwork because the viewer is not a pure medium, shaped instead by norms and behaviours, this can only mean that the factors shaping the viewer are different to those shapingtheartwork(baxandallwouldhavespokenhereof factorsshapingthe artist). kemp does not go into the implications of this difference here. only later does it become clear what he might mean by it: the historical difference between artwork and today’s viewer that is not discussed by alpers or baxan- dall, but is seriously addressed by pächt. while in the studies of alpers and exemplified by the work of nam june paik, dan graham and vito acconci. . through the eyes of the spectator baxandall the historical context is identical for viewer and art ( th-century holland and th-century florence respectively) pächt is interested in over- coming the hermeneutic divide between the historically unfamiliar and to- day’s viewer – the art historian. kemp’s motivation is hermeneutic: the artwork is to be interpreted. this contrasts significantly with alpers and baxandall, but not with panofsky or pächt. one fundamental problem addressed by kemp in connection with interpreting art is already familiar from our readings of gombrich and pächt: theconflictbetweenatotalizingimpetusandalimitationoftheclaimtovalid- ity of method and interpretation/cognition. here, kemp relates this problem only to method. he insists that reception theory makes no claim “to be able to interpret the artwork in all its referential complexity” ( ) and in this he follows hans robert jauss who described it as “a methodical reflection that is partial, extendable and dependent on collaboration”. in spite of this, kemp seems reluctant to relinquish his method’s claim to a broader competence: “admitting the ‘partiality’ of an aesthetics of reception [my italics] does not free oneself from the task of maintaining an open view of the whole.” one must thus examine “the extent to which reception aesthetics, as a perspective at least, represents the whole” – only this seems to ensure the hermeneutic value of the procedure.“perspective” here refers to the interpretative horizon; it should not be too narrow, thus remaining immanent, as kemp observes in formal analysis, and it should not be too broad, thus “losing itself in the non- aesthetic”, as in the case of iconology. instead, the “reception structure of the artwork brings a sufficiently immanent and a sufficiently externally defined category of the aesthetic into the focus of attention …: in the image of the this feeds suspicions that precisely this motivation, regardless of which method is used, is specific to the german-speaking tradition in art history, and that it is so self- evident in that context that the notion that there might be other motivations for the discipline and for dealing with art is not even raised. by analogy with psychoanalysis, the need for meaning and interpretation could thus be situated on the level of the discipline’s unconscious. in this light, it comes as no surprise that until , when os- kar bätschmann published his einführung in die kunstgeschichtliche hermeneutik (intro- duction to art-historical hermeneutics), a theoretical approach to hermeneutics was found in philosophy and literary criticism, but not in art history. hans robert jauss, “racines und goethes iphigenie. mit einem nachwort über die par- tialität der rezeptionsästhetischen methode,” in neue hefte für philologie ( ), ff., quoted from kemp, anteil des betrachters, . beyond the mirror dialogue between viewer and work, we grasp the tense balance between art and society.” ( ) it is interesting how kemp tries here to overcome the problem of ten- sion between “inside” (artwork) and “outside” (viewer): he uses the image of a dialogue in which the duality of work and viewer remains present, the two sides relating to one another. but this figure of relation does not seem to be enough: he needs a figure of unity – the picture as which this relation is grasped. in other words, when thinking of reception, we are always dealing with a relation – between the recipient and what is being received. so far, so simple. as with desire for meaning and interpretation, however, the desire for unity seems to belong to the unconscious of the practice of art history; in freudian terms this desire produces considerable repressive energy when it comes to thinking in relational terms.if we now view meaning/interpretation and unity as mutually dependent figures of thought (meaning/interpretation must be true, which is why there can only be one, and it is true because it refers to a unity) then we soon arrive at claims to truth as a tradition of ger- man idealism, which in turn “encodes” the claim to objectivity made by re- ception aesthetics. in methodological terms, this manifests itself, though not uniquely, in the need to establish a priority in the work/recipient relationship. “for centuries, the premise has been upheld that in the relationship between work and recipient, the work was the most influential, its intentions merely being fulfilled by the viewer. this was certainly wrong, but it would be just as wrong to assert the opposite by attributing all authority to the recipient.” (my italics) here kemp now proposes the model of a dialogue as a solution, but this, too, is clearly not enough: “furthermore, it seems not unreasonable to call for the initiator of an interaction – and this is and remains the work – to be granted a certain methodological precedence.” in this model, too, then, the work retains its authority, as it is “recognizably involved in shaping the reception procedure”. this argument brings to a close kemp’s explanation of “reception aesthetics applied to the artwork” ( ). my questions are: where in this model is it possible to situate seeing or visuality more broadly? how is it conceived of: as a process, as an activity, as a relationship? as his point of departure,kemp borrows the figure of the“im- plied reader” from the literary theory of wolfgang iser, replacing the reader with a viewer but otherwise following iser’s definition word-for-word. this makes it possible to reintroduce the recipient into the work as “the way the work relates to the reader” ( ): the implied viewer“embodies all those predis- positions that a work offers to its potential viewers as conditions of reception. . through the eyes of the spectator the implied viewer is thus anchored not in an empirical outside reality,but in the structure of the work itself. … assuming that works take on their reality by being seen, works must already contain certain conditions of actualization that will allow their meaning to be assembled in the responsive mind of the recipient.theconceptof the impliedviewer is thereforeastructurewithinthe work anticipating the presence of a recipient, and this holds true even when works deliberately appear to ignore their possible recipient or use strategies to actively exclude him.” the last sentence of this quotation can be directly linked back to kemp’s discussion of diderot’s notions of pictorial and theatri- cal dramaturgy. after all, it would be hard to imagine a better explanation of the viewer implicit within the picture than his/her exclusion from the events portrayed. kemp distinguishes a picture’s immanent “response-inviting structures” fromtheexternal“conditionsofaccess” ( ),what isnowusuallyreferredtoas context. among the latter he names material conditions of access such as lo- cation, sociological factors such as ritual, liturgy and art contemplation, and human factors by which he means the viewer’s “individual and social pre- dispositions” ( ). kemp’s interest, however, focuses not on this context but on the picture’s immanent response-inviting structures, because “everything that ‘happens’ here [in the artwork] has meaning for a viewer, it also happens as a fulfilment of being viewed” ( ). he quotes gadamer: “the way the spec- tator belongs to it [art] makes it apparent why it is meaningful to figure art as play.” (my italics) in other words: the viewer is prefigured in the man- ifest form of the picture, which kemp also calls presentation and which he sets apart from representation as its subject. the presentation “involves the viewer in the work by drawing him into a second communicative procedure in which he himself is not involved: representation” ( ). unlike the voyeur, then, who looks at events that are not performed for him, that do not reckon with him, the artwork reckons with its viewer. art is always already there for the viewer. the heuristic status of reception aesthetics is now clearer: it is a tool, a method of interpreting instances of meaningfulness. its genesis can thus be traced back not only to diderot (who was interested less in interpreta- tion than in visual empathy in the form of imagined immersion in a scene), wolfgang iser, the act of reading (baltimore ), , quoted here as rewritten by kemp, anteil des betrachters, . hans-georg gadamer, truth and method ( ) (london, new york, ), . beyond the mirror but also, within more recent academic history, to hermeneutics in the spirit of gadamer, to whom jauss, too, refers. we are thus far removed from the anglo-american positions of baxandall and alpers who stand for a pragmatic approach to visual culture oriented towards a history of experience, an ap- proach that can be traced back,among others, to gombrich’s scientistic study of perception. let us return to the prefigured, implied viewer: in deranteildesbetrachters kemp deals above all with perspective, frames and framing in th-century painting. in his final chapter on “art reception and reception art” he dis- cusses the reasons for this choice, and it is the conditions of external recep- tion of art in the th century that explain his focus on the work’s internal conditions of reception: the pictures can no longer rely on a fixed place of re- ception as they could in churches or at court; artists must reckon with an un- predictable mobility of pictures and thus with unforeseeable visual exchanges between the actual viewers and the painting. at the annual paris salon, thou- sands of paintings were hung close together and with no logic in terms of format or composition. kemp recounts géricault’s outrage over the hanging of his monumental raft of the medusa in the salon of . he successfully in- sisted on a rehang, but only once the picture had been moved did he realize that this solution made the reception situation worse still ( ) – in other words, even the artist, having made the work himself, was not able to know where and how it should hang. the problem is that even “a painting measur- ing . x . metres … is conceived without a concrete notion of its future purpose” ( ). the work becomes “placeless” ( ), resulting in considerable uncertainty:“ifapicture’sfirstappearance,andthusits futureexistence,were unpredictable, then one could just as well paint to be viewed from close-up or far away, one could emphasize the foreground or treat it vaguely (which was then happening for the first time, in the work of turner), one’s com- position could be closed or open.” ( ) artists must devise their pictures for an unknown reception situation and this brings into play diderot’s call for a pictorial dramaturgy that seems to be independent of the viewer, which an- ticipates him without addressing him, behaving instead as if he didn’t exist. the painting on which kemp bases his theory of reception aesthetics thus features historically determined predispositions that support this theory: the autonomy of events within these pictures constitutes the implicit viewer. . through the eyes of the spectator in , in the third edition of an introduction to art history, kemp was given the opportunity to add reception aesthetics to the discipline’s canon of methods. in a section on the precepts for reception, he lists the principle “means of structuring” the “inner orientations” by which the viewer becomes “the function of the work”: firstly, the connections between objects and people in the picture, their distribution in the pictorial space, “the position that they take toward one another and toward the beholder, their gestures and visual contact”; secondly, the so-called “personal perspective” by which he means those figures who orient the viewer towards the action in the picture; thirdly and fourthly the way the scene is framed, and perspective “in all of its mani- festations”; and,fifthly,asanewaddition,blanks,atermfromliterarytheory coined by wolfgang iser. blanks are areas where the picture is incomplete, to be completed within the viewer. such blanks are intentional, constituting a narrative strategy. by signalling “the absence of a connection” they make space for the viewer’s imagination to fill this absence and establish the con- nection. according to iser, blanks are “an elementary matrix for the interac- tion between text and reader”, in this case between painting and viewer. in , kemp applied this model to the example of th-century painting. let us take a brief look at this case study to see how the transfer works in practice. his approach here is based on the premise “that every work of art is left incomplete, in a precisely focused manner by its maker, in order that it might be brought to completion in and through the beholder.” the emphasis here lies on the work’s incompleteness being “precisely focused, program- matic or constructive” in character, for only when it is intentional can the blank acquire heuristic significance, meaning in turn that great importance is attached to artistic intention, assuming a causal connection between the hans belting, heinrich dilly, wolfgang kemp, willibald sauerländer, martin warn- ke(eds.), kunstgeschichte. eine einführung ( ), third revised and expanded edition (berlin ). wolfgang kemp, “kunstwerk und betrachter: der rezeptionsästhetische ansatz” in: ibid., - : - . published in english as “the work of art and its beholder: the methodology of the aesthetic of reception” in mark a. cheetham (ed.), the subjects of art history: historical objects in contemporary perspectives (cambridge ), - : - . see iser, act of reading. ibid., . ibid. wolfgang kemp: “death at work: a case study on constitutive blanks in nineteenth- century painting”, in representations (spring ), - . beyond the mirror understanding of artistic intention and the truth of interpretation resulting from the recipient’s analysis of the blank. kemp conducts such an analysis of a history painting that is extraordinarily untypical in character: the death of marshall ney by léon gérôme from . it shows a dead man in dark civilian clothing, lyingonhisstomach,hisheadturnedtowardstheviewer,his tophat next to him on a street that runs diagonally from the foreground at the right into the background on the left, lined by a high wall. a group of soldiers is moving away to the left, the officer looks back towards the dead man; between the soldiers disappearing off towards the left-hand edge and the corpse in the foreground to the right lies an unusually wide empty space showing only the street and the raw surface of the wall with its crumbling plaster and graffiti – an area within the picture plane which, against the conventions of history painting at the time, contains no persons involved in the events depicted. the centre of the picture, then,usually the figurative focus of a pictorial narrative, remains empty. kemp defines this area as a blank that signals the absence of a connection, as iser defines it, thus obliging the viewer to make the link. in this way, the blank complicates the establishment of a narrative continuum in the picture, thus also making it harder to understand the scene as a whole. the empty area is the blank; from here, our gaze slides “into the picture’s depth, or down to the prostrate dead man, and from him onward … into the perspectival depth of the composition, where a squad of uniformed soldiers is leaving the scene of the action and the picture. our regard is not, however, pulled into the picture’s depth and lost there. instead it is halted and redi- rected by the figure of a backward-looking man clothed in black, presumably the adjutant in command of the execution.” after a first consideration of the painting, kemp finds “a compositional schema consisting of three elements presented as ideal types: a blank [the wall]; a participant in the action, more accurately an object of the action [the dead man]; and an element helping to create the picture’s perspective and that is the representative of the group of participants in the action [the man looking back]”. in the german version of the essay, kemp refers to the man looking back as a perspektivträger (bearer of perspective), denoting his function of redirecting the viewer’s gaze; the man looking back is “an aid to the reception of the picture that has taken the form of a person; he confirms and helps us to grasp the significance of two large blanks.” these blanks, the empty space of the wall in the picture and the kemp, “death at work”, . ibid., . . through the eyes of the spectator space occupied by the viewer in front of the picture, are closely linked via the picture’s diagonal axis. kemp analyses the construction of this pictorial narrative, whose blank paradoxically brings the action to a standstill.the above-mentioned elements of gérôme’s picture connect “space and time, the area before the picture and the area shown in the picture, the beholder and the depicted scene, blank and intelligible facts”. as a precondition for interpretation, kemp’s analy- sis, which i have only outlined here, follows the movements of the viewer’s gaze that are unavoidably directed by aspects of the picture – blank, figures, perspective. these movements do not compare existing reality with the pic- ture as in gombrich, nor do they primarily register formal structures as in pächt, and the focus is also not on sociocultural influences as in baxandall. in kemp’s model, the movements of the viewer’s gaze correspond to reading: as they scan the visual data in the painting, they make narrative links and estab- lish plausibilities, just as reading generates coherent sentences and narrative logic. the way kemp looks at the death of marshall ney is grounded in his visual experience with other contemporary painting; only in this way is he able to identify the peculiarities of this “case” and to decide how to classify the ele- ments of the picture, such as defining the painted wall as a blank. he then uses these specific qualities to arrive at a more general qualification that sees thisblankasasymptomofahistoricalprocess: forkemp,thewall,renderedin great detail, is not just a blank in the sense of reception aesthetics, but also “a large fragment of pure painting”. it anticipates modernism: “the extensive and effective utilization of blanks by nineteenth-century realism can reach a point where these acquire an autonomy and can thus lead over into mod- ernist art, which interrupts or misdirects communications both within and with the work.” this calls for more work than the kind of history painting that puts all of the narrative facts on the table without gaps; here the viewer must “bring together what is unconnected; endure the tensions; determine what is indeterminate”. this added work is measured against the yardstick of a plausible narra- tive logic. as well as recalling the legacy of diderot, this begs the question of ibid. ibid., . ibid., . ibid., . beyond the mirror whether the method of the implied viewer might be restricted in its applica- tion to precisely the kind of narrative painting on which its definition is based – a type of painting which, significantly, is already in crisis as a narrative genre. the blank as one of the models of immanent structuring of reception is a symptom of this crisis. one indication of this is the outlook with which kemp concludes his analysis in : moving away from painting, he finishes with the art that perpetuates the tradition of identificatory narrative in the twentieth century: cinema. so much for the state of affairs in .by ,the situation in art history had already changed. this is made clear by kemp’s review of john shearman’s only connect: art and the spectator in the italian renaissance. here, kemp re- acts to the shift from artwork to viewer widely seen in the practice of anglo- american art history since the s. the review focuses primarily on recep- tion studies – both on shearman’s practice and on kemp’s own approach, which he aggressively tries to position within anglo-american discourse via this critique. what, for kemp, had changed since , or ? with the spread of viewer-oriented studies, the nature of the conflict had shifted. from for- malism and iconography, the old rivals within german art history, the focus had switched to the figure of the viewer – in other words, the dispute was now taking place within reception studies as a methodologically differentiated sub-discipline.inhisreview,kemparguesagainstshearman’sproposalofthe viewerasexternal tothepicture.shearman’svieweristhe“moreengagedspec- tator”, referring to a growing involvement of the renaissance viewer with the picture’s subject and narrative, and to the “complicity of the spectator in the very function of the work of art” on which the artist could count. this sounds wolfgang kemp, “only connect: art and the spectator in the italian renaissance by john shearman” in the art bulletin , no. ( ), - . shearman offers a version of this practice that is applied pragmatically to a central field of the discipline, the art of the italia renaissance, clearly setting itself apart from the more recent influences from social history, feminism, psychoanalysis and semiotics, which shearman refers to as “pseudo-iconography”. this distinction is interesting insofar as it turns against the very influences that laid the ground within art history for a rapprochement with visual culture studies. surprisingly these influences are associated with the discipline’s “en- emy within” against which shearman’s viewer focus is directed, i.e. iconography; this is interesting because visual culture studies, that was in the process of establishing itself as an academic discipline when the book was published, was by definition oriented towards visuality and against iconography as an outdated approach of art history. . through the eyes of the spectator like an extension of baxandall’s concept of visual skills shared by artist and viewer and which are considered as the medium of the picture. shearman’s aim is to particularize this viewer, leading to a clear shift within the reception situation (as modelled by kemp) towards the external viewer and the subjec- tive factors shaping her reception. kemp accuses shearman of failing to distinguish between the two strands of reception theory, i.e. the implied viewer on the one hand and, on the other, the external viewer and the external conditions of reception within which art- work and viewer face each other (although it remains unclear whether this distinction is also valid in the anglo-american context). kemp makes it clear that for him, the problem lies in the shift to the external viewer. his reason- ing is revelatory concerning the subsequent relationship between german art historians and visual culture studies: the external viewer is the “new” subject of art history. or rather, the many new subjects of art history and above all of visual culture studies, as they had emerged from the critical and political discourses of difference in the s and ‘ s. or, in kemp’s more polemical version: “… the recipient as woman,as man,as child,as native,as alien”.with this last item on his list, he refers to the then high-profile “ethnically other” subjects, doing so discretely and with no racist implications; gay-lesbian sub- jects are also treated discretely,not being mentioned at all.here, i cannot but voice my suspicion that, faced with the growing diversity of viewer subjects and subjectivities, kemp pre-emptively advanced (or retreated, depending on one’s position and viewpoint) into the picture, where the implied viewer is supposed to be at home and where his reception aesthetics, guided by the european enlightenment model of diderot, has its source. in this way, kemp also links the issue of the gender of the “more engaged spectator” back to the implied viewer, helped by the semiotic model of mieke bal and norman bryson who classify the relationship between viewer and in the years - , the art bulletin hosted a broad debate on the fundamentals of the discipline under the series title a range of critical perspectives. these texts on the new subjects of art history included: lowery stokes sims, “subject/subjectivity and agency in the art of african americans” in the art bulletin , no. ( ), - , and ikem stanley okoye, “tribe and art history” in the art bulletin , no. ( ), - . on this discussion, see also: mark a. cheetham, michael ann holly, keith moxey (ed.),thesubjectsofarthistory.historicalobjects incontemporaryperspective (cambridge ). beyond the mirror work in terms of “degrees of access to codes” – which can also be read as a version of the implied viewer, since the “codes” in question are found by the viewer in the work. kemp deploys this model against the two conventional approaches commonly used in art-historical gender studies, both of which he considers inadequate: one seeks gender in the content (his example here: the female nude), the other in the addressee (his example here: a convent). kemp also criticizes shearman’s treatment of the external conditions of access to art as too undifferentiated, before finding a way of linking these, too, with the immanence of the artwork: works were conceived with a mind to these conditions.ultimately, then, the work provides information about all external conditions of reception,both viewer and context,by,i would say,“in- corporating” them. what kemp doesn’t mention here is what bal and bryson call the institutionalized “narratives” of art history. these narratives also formthebasisofkemp’sreceptionaesthetics: the insistencewithwhichhere- peatedly links the art/viewer relationship back to the artwork itself may avoid thefictionofan“idealviewer”,but itdoes leadtoafigurethatnonethelesson- tologizes the artwork by incorporating the viewer into the work. this is made clear by another “symptom” in kemp’s model of the implied viewer, as men- tioned above,namely its omission of the situatedness of the viewer herself.at this key point, then,the hermeneutic circle (and kemp bases his approach not only on diderot’s model of the theatre but also on gadamer’s hermeneutics) is broken. the way kemp positions it, this reception aesthetics is part of (and some- times the only instrument in) the toolkit of art history as interpretative ap- paratus. its roots in diderot’s aesthetics of narrative imagination and in the literary theory of narratology also point to a significant limitation of its field of application: fine art as narrative in the broadest sense. anyone deal- ing with the art of the th century, on the other hand, will often find this toolkit unfit for use. and, as svetlana alpers has shown, the same is true of the art of the th century, whenever the focus is not on a picture’s narra- tive structures. finally, the implied reader/viewer remains a deictic function here kemp quotes mieke bal, norman bryson, “semiotics and art history” in the art bulletin , no. ( ), - : ; under the heading “receivers”, bal and bryson also devote a section to kemp’s reception aesthetics ( f.). for example, the “totalized narrative of the-man-and-his-work”, ibid., . in der anteil des betrachters ( ) and der betrachter ist im bild ( ), kemp systemat- ically demonstrates its reach with a hegelian totalising claim, while his own specific interests remain strangely unarticulated. . through the eyes of the spectator pointing to narrative and thus to the creation of a narrative continuum, but nottobreaking/interruptingit,or toanyof theotherstrategiesof irony,mon- tage or tautology encountered in the arts of the th century. paradoxically, reception aesthetics emerged at the same time as these artistic practices, in fact only becoming possible as a result of their reflexive turn. but this art in particular, especially that of the s and ‘ s, reflects its own reception, integrating it conceptually into its practice; and this is what leads to radical strategies of breaking with narrative continuum and of anti-narrative tautol- ogy. one can thus ask whether kemp would still uphold his own verdict that the art of modernism interrupts communication in and with the work. for this verdict implies that communication is synonymous with narrative co- herence within the object – a very narrow definition of communicability. in addition, it ignores the field of association within the viewer’s imagination which is capable of linking each detail of perception with a story. part two: visual culture studies – looking at the visual . visual culture studies – concepts and agendas culture, the political, and visual culture whereas art history is a discipline in the classical sense, with a history of its own, visual culture studies is the product of a series of “turns” (linguistic, cultural, visual, pictorial) since the s. this makes itself felt in the way visual culture studies has taken over concepts from various disciplines and theoretical fields. the following chapter therefore draws a map of the main concepts involved in framing visual culture studies’ ways of seeing: identity, culture, visuality, and visibility. these in turn are framed by a political agenda whose lines are also drawn into this map. visual culture studies is a child of the present, of a reflexive movement in academia where paradigm shifts are proclaimed and institutionalized al- most as soon as they occur (instead of this happening retrospectively, with a historicizingdistance,asismoreusual).thisreflexivityhasnot,however,pro- duced consensus on a definition of the discipline’s name: the field is diffuse, the implications limitless,and there are as many genealogies of visual culture studies as there have been attempts to canonize this “indiscipline” (mitchell), mainly in the form of readers and introductions published since the s. each of these books has a specific focus,shaped by the respective“native”dis- cipline of the authors, by their critique of that discipline and, in some cases, by their hopes for the new field of visual culture studies. even saw the publication of a first “meta-reader” which brought together the introductory texts from the most important visual culture studies readers. morra, smith, visual culture, vol. i-iv. the first volume brings together introductions from other readers on visual culture studies, pre-faced with the editors’ own version of a genealogy. beyond the mirror my approach to this sprawling situation is guided by the question of epis- temic interests and their implications for the related concepts of visuality. my discussion of these concepts will trace two distinct developments, one aca- demic and the other non-academic, the latter being, in my opinion, the fun- damental one (in terms of both epistemic interests and models of visuality) and, chronologically speaking, predating the academic development by sev- eral years. the non-academic nexus joins politics and art, and my examina- tion of it focuses mainly on britain and the united states, beginning in the s when the social and cultural tensions of the reagan and bush years culminated in the so-called “culture wars”. artists like robert mapplethorpe, andres serrano, jenny holzer or barbara kruger and activist groups of artists against aids,racism and sexism provoked the censors with their works, lead- ing to withdrawals of public funding, in turn triggering fierce debates about artistic freedom and political activism in the struggle for social recognition of marginalized identities. the paths of politics and art crossed here with un- usual intensity,as the artistic strategies of the works deliberately involved im- ages from non-art archives, subcultures and media, often using the methods of quotation and montage to highlight the social wounds of discrimination and a lack of recognition for specific ethnic and sexual identities. after decades when political struggle and subversion had been associated with other things, above all equality before the law and access to education andeconomicresources (fromclassstruggletofeminismtotheindependence struggles of former colonies) how did visual culture become a political battle- ground? this question of a concept of culture as a political resource brings us to the second development, beginning with the emergence of british cul- tural studies. in a essay, stuart hall, who founded birmingham’s centre for contemporary cultural studies in the s and became one of the most important figures in the field, described how cultural studies formulated the concept of “culture as a social problem and a political task” against the back- ground of a british class-dominated society plunged into profound crisis by the loss of empire. “for me, cultural studies really begins with the debate about the nature of social and cultural change in post-war britain.” ( ) the for an in-depth account, see brian wallis, marianne weems, philip yenawine (eds.), art matters. how the culture wars changed america (new york ). stuart hall, “the emergence of cultural studies and the crisis of the humanities”, in october ( ), - . . visual culture studies – concepts and agendas hierarchical structure of british society was shaped by traditional class struc- tures which were now being shaken up by the new forces of mass culture and consumerism. previously, “culture” had been the highbrow culture of the elites, only being considered culture if it stayed away from politics. in this crisis, the representatives of highbrow culture reacted with pressure and a restrictive, conservative definition of culture. there was increased insistence on preserving canonical national cultural assets, and this extended to knowl- edge policy in the humanities. in response, the new left launched a debate on a new concept of culture in which it was less a matter of definitions and more about opening culture up to politics and sociality. what was new here was precisely this linking of culture with socio-political structures and issues – “the dirty outside world”, as hall called it – an approach for which a theo- retical basis had first to be created.“contemporary cultural forms”, he wrote, “did not constitute a serious object of contemplation in the academic world.” ( )thecentreforculturalstudiesthereforedevelopedastrategyof“raids”on other disciplines “in order to construct what we called cultural studies or cul- tural theory”. ( ) this was joined by reading matter “from traditions that had had no real presence in english intellectual life” ( ): since the s, gramsci, benjamin and the frankfurt school had been translated into english, pub- lished and discussed in the context of the new left review. the key to hall’s account is that this linking of the concept of culture with politics was new in britain at the time, resulting from upheavals in society after . a further decisive novelty was the appearance of new social sub- jects in the ossified hierarchies of british society with the start of postcolonial migration. this marked the beginning of the “postcolonial, posthegemonic crisis” ( ) which, according to hall, still marked the late thatcher era. it is here that we must look for the basic factors influencing the question of how culture was able to replace the previous key concepts in the political struggle: accessto legislativeandeconomicpowerwasreplacedbycultural recognition. culture thus became a central arena of political battles, and the political was understood as highly symbolic: following levi-strauss, culture was defined as “the categories and frameworks in thought and language through which different societies classified out their conditions of existence…”; the way these categories are produced and transformed was conceived of by analogy with language, as an operation of producing meaning, as “signifying practices”. stuart hall, “cultural studies: two paradigms”, in media, culture and society , no. ( ), - : . i do not deal here with the two paradigms discussed by hall, the cul- beyond the mirror these concepts from the theories of structuralist linguistics and anthropology were to shape the interpretations of visual culture studies: here, too, the focus is on the production of “meaning” by “signifying” as a practice which forms both collective and individual identity constructions. their medium consists of (visual) representations which now move into the centre of the struggle for political and societal recognition – and this not only and certainly not pri- marily in (academic) theory, but eminently in the political practice of activist groups since the late s, including groups formed by artists. the best ex- ampleofthisparadigmshift towardsstrategiesof symbolicvisibility isprobably the slogan of the black pride movement of the s, “black is beautiful”. in , the success of this signifying practice was summed up by some- one in the fashion scene as follows: “i absolutely think people are embracing the notion of ‘black is beautiful’ – and i think we’re better able to embrace it today than at any other time in this country. the ‘ s started the notion, but today i think we are truly living it.” since racism operates with visual metaphors of colour, this paradigm shift which turns visibility into a resource for social presence is an especially fitting political strategy. at this point poli- tics and visual culture become intensely interconnected. three terms are cen- tral for a theoretical approach to this constellation of culture, visuality and politics: identity,signifying practice,and representation.offundamental im- portance to an in-depth understanding of concepts of visuality in visual cul- ture studies is the concept of identity as it was discussed earlier in cultural studies. turalist and the structuralist. in the anglo-american world, the structuralist approach has dominated which, as hall shows, helps to avoid the dangers of essentializing ten- dencies. in german-language bildwissenschaften, on the other hand, especially in hans belting’s bildanthropologie. entwürfe für eine bildwissenschaft (munich ), the conse- quences of culturalist essentialism are clear. see hanne loreck, “bild-andropologie? kritik einer theorie des visuellen” in susanne von falkenhausen, silke förschler, inge- borg reichle, bettina uppenkamp (eds.), medien der kunst, - , and von falkenhau- sen, “verzwickte verwandschaftsverhältnisse”. mikki taylor, beauty director und cover editor of the magazine essence, quoted in kendra hamilton, “embracing ‘black is beautiful’ – african american involvement in fashion industry, and consumer spending on apparel and beauty care products – statistical data included”, in black issues in higher education , no. ( ). . visual culture studies – concepts and agendas identity as a cultural and political concept in , jacqueline rose, whose book sexuality in the field of vision combined feminist and psychoanalytical theory with visuality, built a bridge between feminist approaches to identity as a political concept and psychoanalysis: “the question of identity – how it is constituted and maintained – is … the cen- tral issue through which psychoanalysis enters the political field. this is one reason why lacanian psychoanalysis came into english intellectual life,via al- thusser’sconceptof ideology,throughthetwopathsoffeminismandtheanal- ysis of film.” the same year, she took part in a symposium at the common- wealth institute in london that introduced a further difference/identity as a position within the field of seeing: cultural identities. theorists and filmmak- ers came together to talk about the possibilities for political avant-garde film. cultural identity in the visual field was discussed in the context of tension be- tween political activism and deconstruction. films were shown by artists like trinh t. minh-ha, chris marker, isaac julien and by groups like the black au- dio film collective founded in ,that dealt with political and social aspects of postcolonial life under thatcher: the position of immigrants from former british colonies and their hybrid identities as black british citizens. the reader identity. community, culture, difference, edited by jonathan rutherford, was published in ; questions of cultural identity, edited by stuart hall and paul du gay, appeared in with an introduction by hall provocatively titled “who needs ‘identity’?” and in , in his book after identity,rutherford noted: “by entangling identity in market transactions and see for example teresa de lauretis, alice doesn’t: feminism, semiotics, cinema (bloomin- gton ), the first book on the subject, and kaja silverman, the acoustic mirror: the female voice in psychoanalysis and cinema (bloomington ). jacqueline rose, “feminism and the psychic”, in sexuality in the field of vision (london ), - : . thepapersanddiscussionsfromtheconferencewerepublishedinaspecial issueofthe magazine undercut ( / ) and republished in nina danino, michael mazière (eds.), the undercut reader: critical writings on artists’ film and video (london ), - . i mention this here because reviews of the debates on race, class, sexual orientation, and gender mostly centre on discussions in america; however, as has already become clear concerning the genealogy of cultural studies, the postcolonial aspects of this de- bate were particularly acute in the former british empire, recast as the commonwealth of sovereign states, in turn influencing debate in the united states. jonathanrutherford(ed.), identity:community,culture,difference (london );stuart hall, paul du gay (eds.), questions of cultural identity (london ). beyond the mirror commodification, consumer culture has turned it against the individual.” this had already been stated in similar but far more political terms in by gayatri chakravorty spivak, who calls herself a “decolonized subconti- nental”. in acting bits/identity talk, she discusses the identity politics of the (de-)colonialized in terms of their complicity in current forms of imperial- ism, prompted by the gulf war: “our own complicity in our production [of identity] is another kind of translation of cultures, access to a ‘museumized’ identity, roots in aspic. … identity as commodity.” another book with after identity in the title, a reader in law and culture published in , contains a passage which i find helpful in addressing the historyoftheemancipatoryconceptof ‘identity’: “inwhatcouldbeconsidered the first stage of identity politics, individuals identified with general charac- teristics such as race, gender, or national origin to contend that discrimina- tory distinctions should not be made on the basis of those categories. the early civil rights and women’s movements, for example, argued that african americans and women were entitled to the same rights as white men. as- serting that there was no significant difference between blacks and whites or between women and men, these movements aimed to achieve a system by which skin color or sex did not determine one’s place in society. subse- quent movements rejected this paradigm of liberal pluralism on the ground that its colorblind and sexblind mentality obscured real cultural and political (and some even argued biological) differences between the groups. some in- dividuals and groups in a proliferating list of movements based on identity began proudly to (re)assert, or perhaps reclaim, their identities – as african- american, asian-american, latino or native american, as female, as gay or lesbian, as disabled, as working class and so forth.” the concept of identity as a collective definition thus derived from a form of negative identification for the purposes of exclusion from rights such as the right to vote. the early emancipatory movements then fought to neutralize this negation before the law. from the outset (and this is overlooked in the jonathan rutherford, after identity (london ), . the same year, georgia warnke published after identity.rethinking race,sex and gender (cambridge ), with a prag- matic approach focused on multiple identities realized in the everyday life of an indi- vidual, and the consequences for normative processes in society. gayatri chakravorty spivak, “acting bits/identity talk” in critical inquiry ( ), - : . dan danielsen, karen engle (ed.), after identity: a reader in law and culture (london, new york ), introduction, xiv. . visual culture studies – concepts and agendas legal overview quoted above) it was clear that the definition of these identities – woman, “negro” – went far beyond the legal context, being culturally and socially re-/produced. the problem of exclusion, then, could not be dealt with by policies of equality alone. researchers of stereotypes within women’s and african-american studies since the s were not the first to examine the functioningofsuchreproductionandtheimpactofsuchdefinitionsviavisual representation. as early as , with his portrait albums types of american negroes, the black scholar and civil rights campaigner w.e.b. dubois tried to counteract the negative image of african americans.he did this not by taking the stereotypes and trying to give them a positive spin, as in the aesthetic of “black is beautiful” and “back to the roots” more than years later, but by clothing the image of the “negro” in the dress codes of the white middle- classmale. thevisualevidenceofthese“bourgeois”portraitswasintendedto show that the “american negro” had a self-evident claim to equal citizenship. in its theoretical ramifications, the debate on identity as a cultural and thus political concept since the s has drawn above all on theories of dif- ference and hybridity; i will focus here on the central problems that also make themselvesfelt invisualrepresentationsof identitybybothartistsandactivist groups. the basic problem with deploying identity as the basis of a political strategy lies in its imposition from outside, from where the power lies. iden- tity thus involves defining difference from groups of others for the purpose of discrimination and exclusion based on criteria of race, class, sexual orien- tation and gender. identity in this sense is understood as immutable being, mostly on a biological basis, to which social and cultural stereotypes accrue in the course of history – or conversely: the historically formed stereotypes and their exclusion have often been justified, since the end of the th century, in biological terms. and in the s and early s, when the black liberation and women’s movements, but also the gay and lesbian movement, picked up these stereotypes and attempted to give them a positive value, using them as representations to fight for recognition, opposition to this strategy soon emerged within these movements. i remember from the women’s movement of the mid- s being accused, as an intellectual, of having a “male” social- ization. see shawn michelle smith, “photographing the ‘american negro’. nation, race, and photography at the paris exposition of ” in lisa bloom (ed.), with other eyes. look- ing at race and gender in visual culture (minneapolis, london ), - , in particular - . beyond the mirror adopting the familiar stereotypes, even as an attempt to give them a pos- itive turn, brought the associated exclusion into the groups concerned: those who didn’t match the stereotype did not belong. hall summarizes the prob- lem in theoretical terms: “precisely because identities are constructed within, not outside discourse, we need to understand them as produced in specific historical and institutional sites within specific discursive formations and practices, by specific enunciative strategies. moreover, they emerge within the play of specific modalities of power, and thus are more the product of the marking of difference and exclusion, than they are the sign of an identi- cal, naturally-constituted unity – an ‘identity’ in its traditional meaning (that is, an all-inclusive sameness, seamless, without internal differentiation). … it is only through the relation to the other, the relation to what it is not, to precisely what it lacks, to what has been called its constitutive outside that the ‘positive’ meaning of any term – and thus its ‘identity’ – can be constructed. throughout their careers, identities can function as points of identification and attachment only because of their capacity to exclude, to leave out, to ren- der ‘outside’, abjected.” but belonging was the basic condition for political effectiveness; individuals came together in groups via a shared identity. how, then, were differences within groups to be dealt with? firstly, it was necessary to confront the normative power of the term, its so-called essentialism – identity as destiny in the sense of an immutable be- ing,based,forexample,onbiology.thiswasachievedbyexaminingidentityin theoretical terms as a cultural and social construction. identity as destiny that offered a feeling of unity and community was now faced with anti-essentialist positions that conceived of identity as a formative process. the essential- ism,unity and continuity that characterized modern identities (including the hegemonic identitiesofnationality)werecontrastedwiththeanti-essentialist figures of discontinuity, construction/constructedness/deconstruction, plu- rality, fluidity and hybridity. behind these theoretical impulses stood fou- cault’s postmodern critique of the subject and derrida’s theory of difference. for the liberation movements of the time, these theoretical developments brought a new dilemma: on the one hand, a theoretical revision of the en- lightened humanist philosophy of emancipation, calling the concept of the bourgeois, sovereign, self-identical subject into question; on the other, those hall, “who needs identity?”, - . he refers here to jacques derrida, positions (chicago ); ernesto laclau, new reflections on the revolution of our time (london ); and judith butler, bodies that matter (london ). . visual culture studies – concepts and agendas groups to whom this status had to date been denied, also referred to in theo- retical discourse as subaltern, campaigned to be recognized as “new” subjects of history and to have a “voice”. the conflict between these positions led to proposals like that of “strategic essentialism” as a way of legitimizing the formation of identity-based groups and consciousness for a political prac- tice of self-empowerment, even within the theoretical framework of radical deconstruction. however, such strategic essentialism demanded a constant awareness of the limitations and constructedness of the very identity that was supposed to be the driving force behind the cohesion and political ac- tivism of these groups – a psychodynamic balancing act both individual and collective. looking back, it seems to me that the concept of identity never lost its fundamental stigma, its birth defect. critiques of the concept of “identity politics” began to appear around (and this too is revealing in retrospect) around the time of the gulf war that reinvigorated the debate on postcolonial imperialism, at a time when the discussion of multiculturalism was making waves in the united states. the identity debate was thus a highly political one, as highlighted by a critical comment by judith butler from : “i don’t believe that gender,race,or sexuality have to be identities, i think that they’re vectors of power.” backtovisualityasafactor inidentity-basedstrategies,andtotheconflict that exists between the strategies of dubois and the black liberation move- ment. although dubois drew on a pseudoscientific discourse of race when he spoke of “types”, his visual tactic produced positive evidence by trying to con- stitutethese“types”viatheculturalcodesofclothing,thusarguingforculture, and specifically hegemonic culture, as a factor in identity: biologism crossed an important contribution to this discussion was gayatri chakravorty spivak’s “can the subaltern speak?” in cary nelson, lawrence grossberg (eds.), marxism and the interpre- tation of culture (urbana ), - . spivak speaks of the “strategic use of positivist essentialism in a scrupulously vis- ible political interest” by subaltern subjects. as part of a “strategic interest in the self-alienating displacing move of and by a consciousness of collectivity, … self-determination and an unalienated self-consciousness can be broached.” from “subaltern studies: deconstructing historiography”, in spivak, in other worlds: essays in cultural politics (london, new york ), - : ). her “strategic essentialism” became a key concept of identity politics in the age of deconstruction. see arthur schlesinger, jr., the disuniting of america: reflections on a multicultural society (new york ). “the body you want: liz kotz interviews judith butler” in artforum , no. ( ), - . beyond the mirror with cultural (hegemonic) identity as appropriation and process, which in turn points to another serious conflict within his strategy. “black is beauti- ful,” on the other hand, together with the “back to the roots” movement, with its insistenceon,forexample,theafroasanappropriate,non-whitehairstyle, constitutes visibility in the field of white hegemony via an image of african- ness for which spivak’s biting remark on “‘museumized’ identity, roots in as- pic” is apt. conversely, this image could also fit into the category of strategic essentialism, as developed by spivak, as a group identity that supports sol- idarity and activist energy in what is referred to abstractly as “otherness”. once again here, the basic problem of identity politics becomes clear: ulti- mately, there was no way out of the dilemma of the gap between negative definition from outside and positive definition from within which is always based on the original negative definition. this dilemma is not even resolved by a potentially endless multiplication of minority identities based on crite- ria of race, sexual orientation, and gender that would conflict with individual processes of attribution. in the s, a polemical version of such multiple identities circulated in the debate on political correctness in the form of the “black, jewish, disabled lesbian”. since , when judith butler published gender trouble: feminism and the subversion of identity, queer theory has sought to respond to the normative structure of these processes of attribution with a variant of anti-essentialist critique based on performativity. in art, this was reflected in a heightening engagementwiththesocialsignificanceof identity-basedvisibilityanditsforms of visual representation. political visuality: visibility as a contested resource “hardly a week has passed in the last two years without public attention be- ing drawn to yet another battle over identity and culture.” this is how the in , to address this problem, kimberlé w. crenshaw proposed the concept of inter- sectionality, which plays an important role in feminist and queer theory. see kimberlé w. crenshaw, “mapping the margins: intersectionality, identity politics, and violence against women of color”, stanford law review , no. ( ), - . judith butler, gender trouble: feminism and the subversion of identity (london, new york ). for an introduction to queer theory, see judith butler, “critically queer”, in paul du gay, jessica evans und peter redman (eds.), identity: a reader (london ), - . . visual culture studies – concepts and agendas artist, activist and writer coco fusco began her text for the whitney bien- nial catalogue in , and she offers some examples: who are we? asks time magazine. whose values? asks newsweek. whose museums and whose aesthetics? ask the artists and curators. whose icons? ask the multicultural theorists and activists. that sums up the situation quite well: the “ethnic makeup” of amer- ican society is changing colour, its basic tone becoming “increasingly non- white” – a threat not only to the white right, but also to the liberal notion of a universally valid culture of values which, in the eyes of the “subaltern peoples”, too often merely cements western-white power. in europe, fusco continues, these ideological struggles usually have a geopolitical theme, whereas in the united states they focus on symbolic rep- resentation. not only access to political power, she claims, but also the con- trol of subaltern communities over their symbolic representation is restricted by the dominant culture. systematic misrepresentation via stereotypes fuels their “disempowerment”; it offers the starting point for an understanding of “the racially inflected, voyeuristic impulses in euro-american and other col- onizing cultures”. in the case of appropriation, for example, a buzzword of the postmodern art elite of the s, this involved not just “disinterested pastiche or tracing one’s creative bloodlines to marcel duchamp and andy warhol”, but also, where non-western cultures and people were concerned, “forms of appropriation as symbolic violence”. fusco offers the following ex- ample: in , chicana actresses protested against hollywood plans not to cast a chicana actress in the role of frida kahlo in a film. this example shows why the battle for symbolic representation is fought not only, but primarily in the field of visibility. the defining and normative power of (visual) media in the united states seems to far outstrip anything yet seen in european societies. as a consequence, the activists of the gay and les- bian, feminist and african-american groups, including many artists, who in the s fought for recognition (the feminist artists of the guerrilla girls, the black artists of the pests group) and against aids (act up), were tactically correct to concentrate on culture and the media as their battleground. their protest actions criticized the relations between culture, art practice, commu- nities and public space; for fusco, they are“some of the most interactive pub- coco fusco, “passionate irreverence: the cultural politics of identity” in elisabeth suss- man et al. (eds.), whitneybiennialexhibition (new york ), - , reprinted in wallis, weems, yenawine (eds.), art matters, - : . fusco, “passionate irreverence”, - . beyond the mirror lic engagements with the media and the arts that have emerged in the past decade. … merging activism with spectacle”. for fusco, the conflict over an essentialist concept of identity and its cri- tique via a processual, open-ended concept of identity is a problem reflected strategically in a double objective: on the one hand, it is about the right to self-determination of one’s “own” culture (this is especially true of ethnically defined groups in the diaspora) and on the other it is about a hybridization of these same cultures in the face of diverse, wandering influences and mi- gration biographies. what is “one’s own” must be kept open and constantly reshaped in order to integrate this hybridization – a balancing act of identity construction. fusco herself, who migrated from cuba to the united states as a child, tries to achieve this in her own work as an artist. looking back at the act up protests, mary patten summed up as follows: “but perhaps we need to examine more closely and critically our notions of ‘visibility’, a key political buzzword used by the lesbian/gay/bisexual/trans- gendered (lgbt) communities.… ‘visibility’ is posed as an inherent undiffer- entiated good – even necessity – whether we’re debating our participation in the political process, examining images/representations of queers or homo- sexuality in the media and popular culture, or ‘discovering’ and ‘reclaiming’ literary or historic figures from the closets of the past. only if we are collec- tively visible, the argument goes – … will we have power and be regarded as a force to be reckoned with in the larger culture.” the success of this strat- egy has its price, however: “but we need to acknowledge that our heightened visibility – even on our ‘own’ rebellious, seemingly autonomous terms – has hastened the absorption of ‘queered’ representations into the mainstream.” the hallmarks of queer identity, she writes, once “markers of rebellious sub- cultures” are now “individual identity ornaments promising the fulfilment of our desires”. ibid., . mary patten, “the thrill is gone: an act up post-mortem (confessions of a former aids activist)”, in deborah bright (ed.), the passionate camera. photography and the bodies of desire (london ), - : . . visual culture studies – concepts and agendas the academic discourse of visuality one of the two genealogical keys to visual culture studies is public visibility of subaltern and subcultural identities, marked by symbolizations imposed from without or claimed from within, understood as a strategy of subver- sion and self-empowerment, and practised by artists and/or activists on the streets, in the media and in the venues of alternative and established culture. this agenda also entered the university as countless individual studies on vi- sual culture indicate which already in the title refer to identity, be it regional and national or relating to race,class,sexual orientation and gender. it is all the more surprising that in the academic discourse of visual culture studies, two texts from art history that i have already presented as classics are of- ten mentioned in connection with the search for the “roots” of the discipline: baxandall’s painting and experience in fifteenth-century italy and alpers’ the art of describing: dutch art in the seventeenth century. in view of attempts by visual culture studies to distance itself from art history, this is as astonishing as it is understandable, as such distancing manoeuvres concern close neighbours. other often-cited “founding figures” are warburg, kracauer and benjamin for german-speaking cultural studies, barthes for semiotics, british cultural studies in general and specifically the “material culture” approach developed at british polytechnics, where training in creative practice in the broadest sense has been interdisciplinary since the s. more important for the academic positioning of the discipline was the de- bate about a revision of the western-rational model of seeing, mostly exem- plified by the philosopher rené descartes.the historian of philosophy martin jay called this model “cartesian perspectivism”; in , he opened a confer- ence on visionandvisuality at the dia art foundation in new york with a con- centrated summary of the debate and its prehistory. the conference brought together five writers from philosophy, art theory and psychoanalysis; it was followed by a publication of the same title that jay later named as the mo- ment“whenthevisual turn…reallyshowedsignsofturningintotheacademic of the veritable torrent of such publications, i will name just two examples here (more are listed in dikovitskaya, visual culture): james m. mcclurken, the way it happened: a visual culture history of the little traverse bay bands of odawa, east lansing (michigan state university museum ); gen doy, blackvisualculture–modernityandpostmoder- nity (london ). here i am following morra, smith, visual culture, vol. , . see also daniel miller, ma- terial culture and mass consumption (oxford ). beyond the mirror juggernaut it was to become in the s”. in retrospect, vision and visual- ity proves to be an exemplary “symptom” of the emergence of visual culture studies as an academic discipline. by this time “cartesian perspectivism” had already become a key negative metaphor in the poststructuralist critique of logocentrism.in psychoanalysis, philosophy, media studies, cultural studies and art history (with one exam- ple being alpers’ art of description), perspective as an early-modern model of seeing became the matrix of a western-rational, pseudo-humanist project of enlightenment that used reason as a practice of power.this ‘project of moder- nity’ was judged as failed, especially in view of the genocides of the th cen- tury. in his book entitled downcast eyes: the denigration of vision in twentieth century thought jay explains this critique and centres it within the history of french philosophy. the aim now was to break down the monolithic character of cartesian perspectivismwiththetwinconceptsofvisionandvisuality.ontheonehand, seeing (vision) was no longer conceived of (only) as a mechanically-physically determined, predictable optical process, but (also) as socially and historically determined and hence subject to change.on the other hand,visuality brought a new concept into play, an umbrella term for all relations ofseeing (and being seen) concerning the social as well as body and mind. one-point perspective as a metaphor for rationalist cultures of power what exactly are the accusations levelled at seeing as “the master sense of the modern era”, at one-point perspective as the practice corresponding to cartesian perspectivism, at the theory on which it is based, and at the conse- quences of all three for visual practices and cultures? in oversimplified terms, martin jay, “cultural relativism and the visual turn” in journal of visual culture , no. ( ), - : . on the conference, see hal foster (ed.), vision and visuality (seat- tle ). those involved were martin jay, jonathan crary, rosalind krauss, norman bryson and jacqueline rose. martin jay, downcast eyes: the denigration of vision in twentieth century thought (berke- ley, los angeles ). i do not share jay’s position on french post-structuralism; it should be taken with a grain of salt, bearing in mind jay’s roots in critical theory. martin jay, “scopic regimes of modernity” in foster, vision and visuality, - : . . visual culture studies – concepts and agendas here are some of the charges (some of which have, in the ever-growing liter- ature on modern visuality since the s, certainly degenerated into preju- dice): central perspective is a gaze that makes a clear distinction between its subject and its object; it is static and abstract, though pretending to be em- pirically “true”; it implies absolute control of the subject over what is seen; it is per se male (the usual example cited being dürer’s draughtsman making a perspective drawing of a reclining woman); it claims to give a consistent picture of the world and to be scientifically reliable; of what is seen, it implies “this is how it is”, claiming an objective truth for its representation. in brief terms, it serves “metaphysical thought, empirical science, and capitalist logic all at once”. the model of perspective as a way of viewing the world is seen as the foundation on which the western, white, male, autonomous subject is con- structed: “certainly the entire discussion draws on analyses of the subject and the image derived from poststructuralism and psychoanalysis; in fact, vision is investigated as a structure instrumental to the (dis)placement of both these terms.” the debate on identity also touched on critiques of the subject; and the two debates meet up in visual culture studies: a specific gaze becomes a metaphorfor thehegemonyof themodern,autonomous,white,malesubject. onestrategyusedbycriticsofcartesianperspectivismisthesearchforal- ternatives: examples named in visionandvisuality are the cartographic gaze in the netherlands of the th century, the multi-perspective spatial order of the baroque,and the subject-less aesthetic of japanese art.butvisionandvisuality had already set itself the task of criticizing just such critiques of perspective: the search for alternatives, it argued, led to new fixed oppositions, obscuring thefact that inhistoricalpractice,themodelbeingcriticizedwasanythingbut consistentorubiquitous.divergentpracticeshadalwaysexisted.thiscritique of the search for alternatives as a way out of the constraints of perspectivism, “whether these are to be located in the unconscious or the body, in the past (e.g., the baroque) or in the non-west (e.g., japan)”, aimed to avoid rendering these differences uniform again,keeping them open,“so that different visual- ities might be kept in play, and difference in vision might remain at work”. vision and visuality, then, is about the deconstruction of unitary concepts of modern seeing, not the establishment of alternatives that fall victim to the hal foster, “preface” in foster, vision and visuality, x. ibid., xiii. ibid., xiv. beyond the mirror very thing they claim to criticize: the claim to universal validity. this conflict recalls the above-mentioned dispute over the de-/construction of alternative identities inthefieldofvisibility:consolidateandsecureviaexclusionandho- mogenization, or open up and expose to permanent precariousness? to this extent, the ideological and theoretical conditions for the two debates (on po- litical identity and on perspective as hegemonic gaze) resemble one another. the debate touches on other areas such as the implications for the disciplines that deal with seeing. for hal foster, perspectivism is a concept on which the discipline of art history is founded; hence this debate “is also allied with a certain ‘anti-foundational’ critique, i.e. a critique of the historical concepts posited by a discipline (e.g., art history, for instance) as its natural epistemo- logical grounds (my italics).” in other words, by engaging with the historical evolution of visuality, by introducing mental, sexual and gender-critical di- mensions into its repertoire, and by developing a “semiological sensitivity to the visual as a field of signs produced in difference and riven by desire”, art history is touching on its epistemological foundations. jayiscertainlyrighttoseevisionandvisualityasasymptomoftheacadem- ization of visual culture studies. but it is worth noting that the three art his- torians involved, norman bryson, rosalind krauss and jonathan crary, did not whole-heartedly defect to visual culture studies in the following decade like other representatives of their discipline. one reason for this may be their insistence on the special status of art as practice in contrast to the broad field of the visual – an insistence that manifested itself several years later in the much-quoted questionnaire on the relationship between art history and visual culture studies, and in a similarly much-quoted article by ros- alindkrausspolemicizingagainstthe lossofart-historicalskills (deskilling). what was mainly at stake here, then, was the revision of art history as a dis- cipline. the theoretical framework is, however, brought to the discipline from “outside”: critiques of the subject from poststructuralism,psychoanalysis and semiotics, applied to vision and visuality, not only touch on the epistemolog- ical foundations of art history, but also produce new epistemes that visual culture studies seeks to incorporate. at the same time, the debates on vision and visuality really do feature many politically committed interests and posi- tionspregnantwithmoralsignificancethatwerenotpreviouslyathomeinthe ibid., xiii. “visual culture questionnaire” in october ( ), - ; krauss, “tod der fachkennt- nisse”. . visual culture studies – concepts and agendas fieldoftraditionalarthistory; thecorrespondingly interest-drivenprojections associated with this from the outset, as well as the critiques and deconstruc- tions of these projections, are also revealing, especially concerning questions of seeing and visuality. the first such projection is the generalization that defines perspective as the modern scopic regime tout court. this basic assumption feeds into other projections – that can also be referred to as interpretations. i use the term projections because they set up an ideal opponent against which to argue; cri- tiques of these projections can then be understood as deconstruction. one ex- ample: the assumption of a single, immutable, fixed perspective sees itself confirmed in a model of seeing which takes not two eyes but one, abstract eye as the basis for its construction of space in two dimensions. this model is critically deconstructed by assuming and researching a historically changing diversity of models of seeing, that is via a historicization of visuality. in this debate,panofsky’s essay on perspective is thus considered a pioneering work. martin jay’s discourse-historical introduction to vision and visuality com- presses the critique of perspective into two pages (whereby it remains unclear whether or not he recognizes its implications in terms of projection). in his account, one-point perspective, described as a scopic regime, is the object of several such projections. firstly, the gaze of perspective is abstract, disem- bodied and therefore cold (an anti-rationalist assessment) –the result is the emotionalwithdrawalof thepainter fromtheobjectscapturedinthisabstract andthuscold,geometrizedspace.(buthow,onemightask, lookingatapaint- ing, are we supposed to know about this supposed withdrawal? this assump- tion is, in other words, a projection.) secondly, the participatory involvement of previous “more absorptive visual modes” has been reduced, “if not entirely suppressed”, because the gap between “spectator and spectacle” has grown. (but, one might ask again, which visual modes before the renaissance are supposed to have been “more absorptive”? medieval stained glass windows? they had to be impressive as a visual event as a whole, but their sequencing of tiny, highly encoded scenes can hardly have fostered participatory involve- ment in the sense of identification). and thirdly, within the scopic regime of jay, “scopic regimes of modernity”, especially - . the writer jay mainly refers to for these positions appears to be norman bryson, as well as christian metz, rosalind e. krauss, sarah kofman, svetlana alpers, rodolphe gasché, christine buci-glucksmann, irit rogoff. this criticism can essentially be traced back to bryson’s vision and painting. beyond the mirror one-point perspective the element of erotic desire in the gaze,as condemned, for example,by st.augustine, is lost because the bodies of painter and viewer areeliminatedfromthisregimeinfavourofan“allegedlydisincarnated,abso- lute eye” (jay’s use of “allegedly” here is the only sign of his distancing himself from these projections). where this kind of disembodied, male gaze falls on a desirable body, as in dürer’s draughtsman making a perspective drawing of a reclining woman, it objectifies this body and turns it to stone. jay names ex- ceptions: titian’s venus of urbino and caravaggio’s seductive boys avoid this fate because they look at the viewer, as does, much later, manet’s olympia. here, if not earlier, confusion sets in. what does this looking out of the picture have to do with one-point perspective? does it counteract it? no – it counteracts the projection of the divide between viewer and viewed allegedly created by perspective as a scopic regime. and it promotes a further pro- jection: according to jay, nudes that do not look out at the viewer radiate no erotic energy towards the viewer, meaning, conversely, that the figure’s gaze at the viewer generates this energy. the opposite conclusion could also be drawn here: if the eyes of the (mostly) female nude are averted, although no dialogue ensues, the viewer absorbed in the act of seeing (if we follow diderot’s dramaturgy of empathy as discussed by kemp) can give free reign to his erotic imagination. in any case, jay equates perspective representation with de-eroticization. it wouldn’t take much effort to turn these analyses on their heads: perspective aims to perfect mimesis, a goal produced by desire itself – a desire that can be traced from photography and film through to the latest achievements of imaging technology, always hand in hand with eroti- cism. on to the next projection: the scopic regime of perspective is to blame notonlyforde-eroticization,butalsofor“de-narrativizationorde-textualiza- tion”. this is an astonishing conclusion, as just a few years earlier, in the art of describing, alpers had proposed a different polarization – associating text and narrative with the scopic regime of italian one-point perspective which was created to tell stories with close textual links, whereas de-narrativization wasassociatedwiththeempiricallyorientedmultiple-pointapproachesofde- scriptive dutch painting. from this charge, jay then deduces that of formal- ism: the painter is more interested in reproducing “abstract, quantitatively conceptualized space” with the help of perspective construction than in the “qualitatively differentiated subjects painted within it” – three-dimensional whether jay shares this view or whether he is merely reporting it is not always clear. . visual culture studies – concepts and agendas representation as an artistic end in itself. “thus the abstraction of artistic form from any substantive content, which is part of the clichéd history of twentieth-century modernism, was already prepared by the perspectival rev- olutionfivecenturiesearlier.” therealismeffectofperspective,hecontinues, also led to pictures being enriched with more and more information that had nothing to do with the story being told, designed only to showcase the artist’s technical virtuosity. for critics of cartesian perspective, mathematically structured space as reflectedinperspective-basedpaintingstandsfortheneutral researcher’ssci- entifically dispassionate view of the world and for the “fundamentally bour- geois ethic of the modern world”, thus elevating the critique of perspective to the status of a political project –and this in vehement terms: perspective is to be equated not with alberti’s window, for example, but with a “safe let into a wall, a safe in which the visible has been deposited”. this raises the ques- tion of who knows the combination for the lock on this safe, the combination needed to free the visible from the strictures of perspective’s scopic regime? jay then mentions some of the ‘emancipatory’ alternatives, including that of the baroque: anti-static, anti-classical, open, “soft-focused, multiple”. jay refers here to christine buci-glucksmann,who suggests the“explosive power of baroque vision … as the most significant alternative to the hegemonic vi- sual style we have called cartesian perspectivalism”. from an art-historical viewpoint,this is an astounding conclusion,sincethis alternativeto the hege- monic visual style was in itself the expression of political hegemony: it was jay, “scopic regimes of modernity”, - . according to jay, this idea, which surprisingly links the representational realism of per- spective space with the charge of formalism levelled at the “content-free” abstraction of modern painting, comes from bryson: norman bryson, word and image: french paint- ing of the ancien régime (cambridge ), ch. . like the polarization between realism and formalism as contested during the th century, however, this anti-formalism has a peculiarly moralizing tone. jay, “scopic regimes of modernity”, . here, jay, ibid., is quoting john berger, ways of seeing (london ), . jay, “scopic regimes of modernity”, . ibid.. see christine buci-glucksmann, la raison baroque: de baudelaire à benjamin (paris ) and la folie du voir: de esthétique baroque (paris ). however, foster’s above- mentioned scepticism with regard to what i consider to be the highly projective search for alternatives shows that in the later s, the discussion enters a new phase: from thenon,itwasimpossibletoattributespecific modelswiththedesiredliberatingeffect. beyond the mirror commissioned by absolutist monarchs and the counter-reformatory catholic church. if we give this range of negative attributions a positive turn, the agenda drivingtheseprojectionsbecomesclearer.twomaintrajectoriescanbenoted: firstly, the body must be re-inscribed within the gaze – hence the accusations concerning both the abstraction of the viewing subject and de-eroticization; secondly, the power structures inherent in this gaze must be abolished – this also applies to the power structures of gender relations as analysed above all in feminist film theory and history of photography. this is where the lacanian model of the gaze enters the stage. see, among others, mulvey, solomon-godeau. . visual culture studies’ foundational concept the gaze – looking and power the model of the gaze the model of the gaze is perhaps the most important gift from french poststructuralism to those anglo-american art historians who from the early s were becoming increasingly discontented with the state of art history as a discipline. their aim was to fundamentally revise the discipline, or, as hal foster put it in , to critique perspectivism “as its natural epistemo- logical grounds”. according to foster, the disembodied, abstract eye of art history needed to take on a “semiological sensitivity to the visual as a field of signs produced in difference and riven by desire.” and this is where the concept of the gaze came into play, introducing psychological, sexual and gender-critical dimensions into the apparatus of art history. and then the exact thing foster had warned of in in vision and visuality happened: a counter-model to one-point perspective was fielded and it became dominant from , although less so in art history than in visual culture studies. the lacanian concept, evolved from sartre, provided the necessary theory. as well as involving the body and the unconscious in the act of seeing, it also addressed the relationship between seeing and signs. this concept, most usually reduced to the term “mirror stage”, manifests itself primarily in hal foster “preface” in foster (ed.), vision and visuality, xiii. foster, “preface”, xiv. beyond the mirror two texts: the mirror stage as formative of the function of the i as revealed in psychoanalytic experience and the four fundamental concepts of psychoanalysis. lacan’s model has become something akin to a founding theorem of vi- sual culture studies. it is responsible (and provides academic legitimacy) for the above-described political agenda of visibility as a strategy and badge of social recognition. this already points to what i will deal with in more de- tail later: as received within visual culture studies, lacan’s model of the gaze, which conceives of subjective identity as an illusion,becomes a model forming the basis for the recognition and hence the affirmation of the identity of the subject. i begin by offering a brief prehistory of this model. sartre: being-looked-at the story begins with sartre, but it could be traced back further to the early days of western philosophy, as martin jay does in his history of the denigra- tion of vision in th-century french thought. beingandnothingnesscontains the famous scene in which sartre explains his model using the example of the voyeur. while looking through a keyhole, he is caught by someone else’s gaze: “i hear footsteps in the hall. someone is looking at me!” the result is shame and a sensation of being-as-object for the other. more critically, he now sees himself because someone else sees him. the gaze of the other alienates him from himself and takes away his freedom. this gaze does not have to be an actual look;awareofbeinglookedat,thesubjectbecomesawareof itself–and alien to itself. moreover, “the alienation of myself, which is the act of being- looked-at, involves at once the alienation of the world which i organize.” this gaze,then,is threateningtothesubjectprecisely in itssubject-foundingqual- ity; it cannot be returned, it must be repaid in kind so as to avoid becoming jacques lacan, “le stade du miroir comme formateur de la fonction du je: telle qu'elle nous est révélée dans l’expérience psychanalytique” in revue française de psychanalyse , no. ( ), - . english translation in Écrits, vol. (new york ), - . on the com- plicated publication history, see jane gallop, “lacan’s mirror stage: where to begin” in substance + ( ), - . jacques lacan, seminar, vol xi ( ), in english, the seminar, book xi: the four funda- mental concepts of psychoanalysis (new york ). jay, downcast eyes. jean-paul sartre, being and nothingness (new york/london ), . ibid., . http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/revue_fran%c %a aise_de_psychanalyse . visual culture studies’ foundational concept an object oneself. a dialogical encounter of gazes between human individu- als is impossible, replaced by a “hostile contest of wills between competing subjects”. this threatening feeling of being looked at resembles the always- already-looked-at subject in lacan’s four fundamental concepts (discussed be- low under the heading “gaze, screen, identity”). lacan: the mirror stage sartre began work on beingandnothingness in ,publishing it in .three years previously, jacques lacan had given his lecture on the mirror stage that was published in in reworked form under the title the mirror stage as for- mative of the function of the i as revealed in psychoanalytic experience, going on to make waves,decades later,first in film theory and then in visual culture stud- ies.inthe phase referredto by lacanas the mirror stage,the child reacts to its own image in the mirror. samuel weber offers a concise outline: “the mirror stage described by lacan can be briefly summarized as follows: between the ages of six and eighteen months a child displays a reaction to its mirror im- agethat strikingly distinguishes it fromother creaturessuchas chimpanzees. the chimpanzee loses interest in its mirror-image as soon as it recognizes it to be an image; a child, on the contrary, displays a jubilant reaction when it recognizes its own reflection. from this jubilant acknowledgement of one’s mirror-image, lacan does nothing less than to derive the constitution – and above all: the destiny – of the ego. at this point in time, the child is not yet in control of its body and finds itself in a state of total helplessness and depen- dency. this situation is an effect of the ‘premature’ birth peculiar to human beings, a consequence of which is that visual perception is much more highly developed than the motor function. a human being is thus able at a much earlier stage to perceive the unity of an image than it is to produce this unity in its own body. the look of another human being, be it the mother, nanny, or even one’s own mirror-image, becomes the matrix of a sense of unity, identity and continuity which the child’s bodily existence is incapable of providing. … the jubilant reaction of a child that has recognized its mirror image is a sign not of the recognition of the subject’s identity but of its constitution.” jay, downcast eyes, . samuel weber, return to freud. jacques lacan’s dislocation of psychoanalysis (cambridge ), - . originally published in german as rückkehr zu freud (frankfurt ). mi- nor alterations made to published translation, ng. beyond the mirror according to lacan, the child reacts “in a flutter of jubilant activity” be- cause it wishes to “take in an instantaneous view of the image in order to fix it in his mind”. this activity “reveals both a libidinal dynamism … and an ontological structure of the human world that fits in with my reflections on paranoiac knowledge. it suffices to understand the mirror stage in this con- text as an identification, in the full sense analysis gives to the term: namely, the transformation that takes place in the subject when he assumes [assume] an image. […] the jubilant assumption [assomption] of his specular image by the kind of being—still trapped in his motor impotence and nursling depen- dence—the little man is at the infans stage thus seems to me to manifest in an exemplary situation the symbolic matrix in which the i is precipitated into a primordial form, prior to being objectified in its function as subject. […] but the important point is that this form situates the agency known as the ego, prior to its social determination, in a fictional direction that will forever remain irreducible for any single individual or, rather, that will only asymp- totically approach the subject’s becoming, no matter how successful the di- alectical syntheses by which he must resolve, as i, his discordance with his own reality.” reception of the mirror stage in film studies and later in visual culture studies centres on the mirror that shows the baby an image with which it identifies. the mirror becomes a metaphor for the relationship between sub- ject and society, as well as being equated with the visual media under dis- cussion, such as the film screen. in visual culture studies, this model came to be read as an affirmation of the subject: the mirror becomes a self-image to whose visibility within society the subject has a right. not only does the subject feel him/herself to be represented by this image, this actually is the case. it is worth noting, however, that although the mirror offers the baby a jubilant self-image that glosses over its “motor impotence”, the baby identi- fieswitha fiction,resultingina lifelongstrugglewiththediscrepancybetween this triumphant fiction and its actual reality,creating a feeling of inadequacy. this is the starting point for my critique of the identity model of affirmative representation on which the political agenda of visual culture studies is based – more on which later. with the mirror stage, parallels between lacan and sartre are already ap- parent: both use visual metaphors to show that ego identity is an illusory lacan, “the mirror stage as formative of the function of the i”, . . visual culture studies’ foundational concept representation. the proximity between lacan’s approach and sartre’s being- looked-at becomes clearer still in lacan’s later model of a gaze that is often conflated with the mirror stage. weber thus introduces the gaze of an other, “the mother, nanny, or even one’s own mirror-image”, that is not (yet) men- tioned in the mirror stage, that becomes the “matrix” of the child’s “sense of unity, identity and continuity”. here, then, a third party is involved – appear- ing in lacan’s text not as someone looking but only as a person or device (the french trotte-bébé) that supports and surrounds the infant that cannot yet walk or stand.weber thus integrates the gazeof theother into the mirror stage – something that takes a central position in lacan’s later model of the gaze from the s. here is the often-cited passage that incorporates the gaze of the other into the mirror stage: “for the other where discourse is situated, which is always latent in the triangulation that consecrates this distance, is not latent as long as it extends all the way to the purest moment of the spec- tacular relation: to the gesture by which the child at the mirror turns toward the person who is carrying him and appeals with a look to this witness.” the fundamental fragility of the ego function achieved by looking in the mirror is underlined again when weber makes the gaze of this other overlap with the gaze of “one’s own mirror-image”: is the figure in the mirror i or an other? gaze, screen, identity – lacan in film studies and visual culture studies the mirror stage is still relatively simple in structure; and,according to mar- garet iversen and stephen melville, it was mainly to the mirror stage that models of the gaze in the film theory of the s and ‘ s referred. but two metaphors that were to be important for film studies and later visual culture studies come from the four fundamental concepts of psychoanalysis, a jacqueslacan,“remarquesurlerapportdedaniellagache:psychoanalyseetstructure de la personnalité” in lacan, Écrits (paris ), - : . in english, “remarks on daniel lagache’s presentation: psychanalysis and personality structure” in Écrits, - : . it was based on experiments conducted by the psychologist henri wallon to compare the reactions of animals and human infants to their image in the mirror. see jay, down- cast eyes, . margaret iversen, stephen melville, writingarthistory.disciplinarydepartures (chicago ), . on film theory, see above all laura mulvey, “visual pleasure and narrative cinema” in screen , no. ( ), - ; christian metz, the imaginary signifier. psycho- analysis and cinema (london, bloomington, ). beyond the mirror long, highly complex work published three decades later; jacqueline rose and kaja silverman in particular engaged intensively with the four fundamental concepts. the theoretical fabric woven by lacan here is highly complicated and his use of meandering chains of association and metaphor to avoid clar- ity does not make things any easier. interpretations of lacan are marked by the temptations or projection traps laid by his metaphorical language. this is especially true of gaze and screen, two metaphors that seem to invite direct ap- plication to the concepts and media of the disciplines under discussion here – the extent to which this was a matter of projection will become clear below. lacan’s famous diagram of interlocking triangles illustrates the re- lationship between “the gaze”, “the subject of representation” and the “image/screen”.   the screen (écran in french) forms the vertical line that links the intersec- tions of the two triangles. each triangle’s point bisects the other’s base, la- belled “the gaze” and “the subject of representation”. this diagram shows the interlocking of seeing and being seen, thus displaying parallels with sartre’s model of being-looked-at. but however simple this diagram may appear,the possible interpretations are unlimited. i associate the vertical line between the two points/layers of gaze and subject with the figure of a filter that sieves the information passing between these two points (gaze and subject), thus “formatting” it, to use a metaphor from the digital realm. in sexuality in the field of vision (london ) jacqueline rose offers an immensely precise and intensive analysis of lacan’s models of the gaze in connection with film theory,especially inthebook’ssecondsectionundertheheading“theimaginary”( - ). see also kaja silverman, male subjectivity at the margins (new york, london ). to be found in lacan, the four fundamental concepts of psychoanalysis, . on these parallels, but also on lacan’s critique of sartre’s notion of an autonomy of the subject, see jay, downcast eyes, especially chapter . . visual culture studies’ foundational concept nowfortheexplanatorydescriptionsof thediagram’selements: “images are a result of projection. this is especially true of the images to which lacan attributes a role in the genesis of the subject. these include the prototype of the lacanian concept of the image, the mirror-image (l’image speculaire)” with which the baby reassures itself of its own body in the mirror stage. ac- cording to lacan, this “emerging subject” (that cannot yet speak) is subject to the “predominance of the visual”. in the diagram, image and screen lie on the same line, leading to many interpretations where they are equated with one another. “the image as screen frames the subject’s perception. in a first approximation, it can be seen as the basis of cultural standards that al- lows individual experience to become understandable. […] the screen points to the other, allows access to the discourse of the other, and thus to the un- conscious.” for lacan, image and screen are “sites of an immobilization” of memory, but the screen is also “the site of mediation [between subject and world]. it serves to overcome an innate solipsism by offering a path to inter- subjectivity.” but like the image, the screen is subject to lacan’s anti-ocular verdict: “an image always blocks the truth.” beginning in the s, it was film studies that received and transformed lacan’s models of the gaze in a way that significantly aided their transfer into visual culture studies, in particular in the form of apparatus theory that re- lates the setting of the cinema to lacan’s mirror stage and connects it with althusser’s concept of ideology. “during this period, the cinema appeared as the place to illustrate the ideological construction of the subject”, as marie- luiseangererremarks. infassbinderandlacan:areconsiderationofgaze,look, and image, kaja silverman, whose analyses are a frequent point of reference i have based my brief outline of the theoretical network established by lacan around the gaze on the remarks of the lacanian psychoanalyst ulrike kadi: ulrike kadi: “‘… nicht so einen geordneten blick’. bild, schirm und drittes auge” in claudia blümle, an- ne von der heiden (ed.), blickzähmung und augentäuschung.zu jacques lacans bildtheorie (berlin, zurich ), - . kadi, . ibid., . ibid., / . ibid., . “uneimagebloquetoujourslavérité.”jacqueslacan,“yaleuniversity:kanzerseminar” in scilicet + ( ), - : . marie-luise angerer, desire after affect (london, new york, ), . kaja silverman, “fassbinder and lacan: a reconsideration of gaze, look, and image,” in silverman, male subjectivity at the margins (new york, london ), - , slightly beyond the mirror in the reception of lacan in film studies, links the concept of identity (cen- tral to the agenda of visual culture studies) with the gaze in specifically filmic terms. in the mirror stage, she argues, lacan highlights the significance of in- ternalizing things external to the subject in the process of identity formation, first in the guise of a mirror image, then in the form of parental imagoes, and later still “in the shape of a whole range of cultural representations, the moi becoming over time more and more explicitly dependent upon that which might be said to be ‘alien’ or ‘other’. what lacan designates as the ‘gaze’ also manifests itself initially within a space external to the subject, first through the mother’s look as it facilitates the ‘join’ of infant and mirror image [the same moment referred to by weber in his account], and later through all of the many other actual looks with which it is confused. it is only at a second remove that the subject might be said to assume responsibility for ‘operating’ the gaze by ‘seeing’ itself being seen, even when no pair of eyes are trained upon it – by taking not so much the gaze as its effects within the self.” here, then, identity is the internalization of the external gaze, with the gaze taking on a relatively specific formulation as the gaze of the other. in silverman’s model, the screen is responsible for filtering the “whole range of cultural representations” with which the subject is confronted after its entry into language.thismodelofthescreenis importantforthereceptionoflacan in visual culture studies. by focusing on the identity-fixing internalization of the gaze in this way, silverman obscures the flipside – the destabilizing effect of the gaze on this same identity. in the threshold of the visible world ( ), she goes further still in this positive recasting of the gaze in the context of what mieke bal calls her utopian project of an “ethics of vision” – utopian in its desire to find a dimension of love in the narcissistic constellation of lacan’s gaze, in order to postulate utopian potential for visual representations such as those of film reworked version published in norman bryson, michael ann holly, keith moxey (eds.), visual culture – images and interpretations (hanover, london ), - , on the la- canian model of the gaze see in particular - . i refer in the following to the version, as it appeared in the context of the debate on visual culture. in terms of cul- tural images of identities, silverman’s focus shares the horizon of visual culture studies to a different extent than the earlier texts by rose that respond to the poststructuralist and feminist debates on film. silverman, “fassbinder and lacan”. here silverman links lacan’s early mirror stage with his later four fundamental concepts. . visual culture studies’ foundational concept and photography. this has consequences for silverman’s rewritings of the screen, which are now even more specifically linked to its analogy with the film projection screen. the screen renders culturally determined images and ideal images visible to the gaze, enabling the subject to read them, and in its media structure, film is “almost an embodiment – at least a metaphor – of the screen”. the film as screen is now the site for silverman’s utopia of the gaze. bal welcomes this clarification of the screen as a utopian rework- ing of lacan: “for a feminist film theory that wishes to move beyond the cri- tique of what is damaging in dominant culture, that wishes to understand how film works and how effects other than the usual ones can be achieved, the screen is the workshop or arena or stadium in the middle of the visual field.” but this analogizing of the screen with the film projection screen, the founding trope of psychoanalytical film theory since christian metz’s psy- choanalysis and cinema. the imaginary signifier, was also criticized, in partic- ular by anglo-american feminist film theorists, including mary ann doane in and joan copjec in . doane criticizes the analogizing of mirror stage and cinema in metz: because the movie does not show a mirror image, metz concludes that the spectator identifies with his own gaze and thus with the camera. doane criticizes this notion of identification on the part of the spectator subject on the grounds that it implies a coherence of the gaze in the sense of a “guarantee of the untroubled centrality and unity of the sub- ject”. but this, she points out, no longer corresponds with lacanian theory. copjec, too, criticizes film theory for analogizing the screen (in this case the cinema projection screen as well as the lacanian écran) and the mirror of the mirror stage, thus founding its conception of the cinematic apparatus on a misunderstanding of lacan. the critique levelled by doane and copjec ba- sically concerns a tendency to take lacan’s metaphors of the gaze literally, silverman, the threshold of the visible world. cf. mieke bal, “looking at love. an ethics of vision” in diacritics , no. ( ), - . bal, “looking at love”, . ibid. originally published in paris in as le signifiant imaginaire. psychanalyse et cinéma. see mary ann doane, “misrecognition and identity” in cine-tracts , no. ( ), - ; joan copjec, “the orthopsychic subject: film theory and the reception of lacan” in october ( ), - . mary ann doane, “misrecognition and identity”, - . the urge to over-clarify not only lacan’s linguistic metaphors but also his use of images and diagrams has also been remarked on by claudia blümle and anne von der heiden, who write that he seduces the reader “into wanting to understand him in strictly sys- beyond the mirror thus rendering them one-dimensional.in contrast,doane and copjec wish to preserve the complexity and unsettling potential of lacanian theory, in par- ticular for film theory. silverman goes beyond a critique and tries to rewrite lacan’s models of the gaze for her utopia of a positive identification of the subject. to sum up, there are two contrary effects of the gaze on the “function of the i”: on the one hand, the attempt to internalize the gaze to achieve “the agency known as the ego”, and on the other a threatening quality, an aware- ness of lack. these contrary effects are given very different weightings in re- ception, especially with regard to visuality as a factor in identity. as will be seen later, the way visual culture studies have taken up the lacanian model of the gaze is indebted to its one-dimensional reception by film studies in so far as it, too, tends to take lacan’s metaphors of the gaze literally. the reason for this may well be the political agenda of visual culture studies with regard to identity politics. identities cannot be affirmed and reassured through an awareness of lack in the subject; on the contrary, the strategy of identity poli- tics needs to reinforce the “agency known as the ego”. the critique articulated by doane and copjec in the decade before visual culture studies was estab- lished could also be levelled against the new discipline’s version of the gaze. the threatened subject – norman bryson one of the first to introduce lacan’s model into art history, mainly via his readings of film theory in the s,was the literary theorist norman bryson, who was also involved in the academic establishment of visual culture studies at universities in the united states and who features in vision and visuality with his essay “the gaze in the expanded field”. this and one other text by bryson, his introduction to the anthology calligram. essays in new art his- tory from france, deal with the model of the gaze, and they can also be read tematic terms, but this is constantly thwarted by his discourse”. claudia blümle, anne von der heiden (eds.), blickzähmung und augentäuschung. zu jacques lacans bildtheorie (berlin, zurich ), . norman bryson, “the gaze in the expanded field” in foster, vision and visuality, - . norman bryson, “introduction” in norman bryson (ed.), calligram. essays in new art history from france (cambridge, new york, melbourne ), xiii-xxix. in this volume, bryson published essays not by art historians but by french poststructuralist theorists likejuliakristeva,michelserres,rolandbarthes,jeanbaudrillardandmichelfoucault, . visual culture studies’ foundational concept as a deliberate effort to make this model appeal to his colleagues in art his- tory.these texts are rhetorical feats designed irrefutably to show the heuristic benefit of the model for art history, a discipline bryson claimed had grown tired; in terms of a history of discourse, i see them occupying a position at the interface of art history and visual culture studies. a little detective work shows that in his first book, word and image. french paintingoftheancienrégime ( ),theliteraryscholarbrysonreferredtoseeing as looking, discussing it in connection with gender. two years later, in vision and painting: the logic of the gaze, he tried to bring seeing and sign together through his reception of lacan’s model of the gaze. his aim was to create a theoretical basis for the assumption of textual structures for the field of the visual, thus radically altering the foundations of art-historical interpretation. in his texts for visionandvisuality and calligram,both published in , these positions were further radicalized and focused. inthegazeintheexpandedfield,bryson’sprogrammaticpointofdeparture is the “radical decentering of the subject”. this leads logically to a dethron- ing of perspective as a model which constructs seeing from the position of a subject that forms the centre of the world.this“self as focus of its visual king- dom” and one-point perspective belong together, and both must therefore be rethought. according to bryson, sartre and lacan, too, were influenced by this model. a “residual centering upon the standpoint of the subject” can be detected, he argues, in the way they conceived of seeing as being threatened, grouped under the label of “new art history” with louis marin, jean-claude leben- sztejn and yves bonnefois (who were art historians, but not exclusively) on the grounds that “recent innovation has taken place extra-territorially”. (ibid., xii). for fragonard’s the swing, he (rather mechanically) borrows the feminist model from laura mulvey’s famous essay “visual pleasure and narrative cinema” ( ): “within a ‘heterosexual’ optic where specialised functions are assigned to each sex, pleasure in looking is broken between active (male) and passive (female).” bryson, word and im- age, . cf. mulvey, “visual pleasure and narrative cinema”. in her model of the gaze, mulvey refers to freud’s concept of scopophilia, combining it with lacan’s model of “the mirror stage as formative of the i function”; she uses the term looking; gaze only appears as a generalizing noun (“the male gaze”) corresponding to its character as a theoretical model that does not refer to the factual activity of individual seeing. mul- vey’s essay broke new ground in two ways: it made seeing a matter of (patriarchal) power, and it offered a psychoanalytical model for this. bryson, vision and painting. bryson, “the gaze”, s. . ibid., . ibid. beyond the mirror even persecuted, at this centre (the site of the subject) by the gaze. here we findafirstvaguenessinbryson’sformulationthatrendersseeingandthesub- ject indistinct because what is under threat and what is decentred by the gaze of an (imagined) outside is primarily the subject. in the gaze in the expanded field, bryson proposes a radical alternative model. it is taken from the culture of japan, from the religious philosophers of the kyoto school who combined eastern concepts of the void and the non-ego with european existentialism. and,compared to lacan,it represents a“much more thoroughgoing displace- ment of the subject in the field of vision”. as a theoretical strategy, this ap- proach is strange: lacan’s thinking (and that of other poststructuralist theo- rists like foucault) did involve a critique of the humanist model of the subject, but in spite of this (or precisely because of this) there can be no question of thesubjecthavingthealternativeofsimply leavingitssymbolicorderandlan- guage.this seems to be bryson’s wish,however,when he replaces the western model with one from an entirely different culture, thus attempting to shake off the “paranoid” lacanian construct of the gaze and its threat to the ego. let us take a brief look at bryson’s account of lacan’s model of the gaze, which he contrasts starkly in its threat to the i with the positive example of the japanese model. according to bryson, in lacan – unlike in sartre – it is not the gaze of the other that thwarts and threatens the autonomy of the sub- ject in the visual field, but “the irruption, in the visual field, of the signifier. when i look, what i see is not simply light but intelligible form: the rays of light are caught in a rets, a network of meanings.” as such, seeing is so- cialized: “for human beings collectively to orchestrate their visual experience together it is required that each submit his or her retinal experience to the socially agreed description(s) of an intelligible world.” deviations from this see bret w. davis, “the kyoto school”, especially paragraph . : “the ‘self that is not a self’ and the nothingness of radical subjectivity” in stanford encyclopedia of philosophy, first published feb , ; substantive revision may , (http://plato.stanford. edu/entries/kyoto-school/, accessed sept ). bryson, “the gaze”, . see jacqueline rose’s contribution to the discussion of his text, in which rosalind krauss, martin jay and jonathan crary also took part. in foster (ed.), vision and visu- ality, - . beyond bryson’s, one of the most accessible accounts of this confusing model is kaja silverman’s essay “fassbinder and lacan”. bryson, “the gaze”, . http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/kyoto-school/ http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/kyoto-school/ http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/kyoto-school/ http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/kyoto-school/ http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/kyoto-school/ http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/kyoto-school/ . visual culture studies’ foundational concept “social construction of visual reality” can be measured and named as disrup- tions. here, a concept comes into play that was to take a central place in theoretical debates surrounding visual culture: visuality. “between the sub- ject and the world is inserted the entire sum of discourses which make up visuality, that cultural construct, and make visuality different from vision, the notion of unmediated visual experience.” bryson gives another descrip- tion of this visuality in lacanian terms, in particular the screen that stands between the subject/retina and the world: “between retina and world is in- serted a screen of signs, a screen consisting of all the multiple discourses on vision built into the social arena.” hans holbein’s painting theambassadors with the anamorphically distorted skull in the foreground becomes bryson’s example for the effect of this screen: the seeing subject (by which he means the viewer who cannot identify the skull as such from the usual position in front of the picture dictated by one-point perspective,but only by viewing the painting at an angle while standing to the right of the frame) is as little the centre of its visual experience as it is the centre of its speaking. this screen, a central concept in the film theory of those years, introduces the sign into the visual field, supplying the tool for semiological interpretations. with this approach, which uses lacan’s linking of semiotics and psychoanalysis, thinking about seeing can now be freed from the inadequacies of perceptu- alist definitions that understand the image only as a perfect reproduction of the perception of a prior reality. bryson used this, for example, as the basis for his attack in vision and painting on ernst gombrich’s “mimetic doctrine”, contrasting the view of painting as the replication of a perception of external reality, that takes place ibid. ibid., . , national gallery, london. see jacques lacan, “anamorphosis” in the four funda- mental concepts of psychoanalysis, - . many writers have discussed lacan’s reference to holbein for his model of situating the subject in the visual field; to mention just two from art history: hubert damisch, l’origine de la perspective (paris ); tom con- ley, “the wit of the letter: holbein’s lacan” in teresa brennan, martin jay (eds.), vision in context. historical and contemporary perspectives on sight (new york ), - . seminal books in the fields of film theory, semiotics and feminist theory have been written by the theorists kaja silverman (until , especially: the subject of semiotics, , and the acoustic mirror, ) and teresa de lauretis (until , especially: tech- nologies of gender: essays on theory, film, and fiction, , and alice doesn’t: feminism, semiotics, cinema, ), neither of whom is mentioned by bryson. bryson, vision and painting, . beyond the mirror independently of social and cultural contexts, with the character of the im- age as a sign. in other words: for bryson, the entry of the social (and thus of meaning) into the picture and its interpretation is only possible via the as- sumption of the image as a sign. ultimately, bryson equates the physical picture with the lacanian screen.he takes lacan’smetaphorof the screenlit- erally. a strangely retrogressive consequence of this kind of transfer is that by equating it with the lacanian screen, the picture/painting is fixed to the model of one-point perspective that imagines the picture as a section through this perspective – the model of painting as an albertian window. with this literal transfer, then, art is taken back to the very model of perception that bryson criticizes so vehemently in vision and painting: gombrich’s perspec- tivism. more problematic, however, is another consequence of this position. the concrete object of interpretation disappears for the interpreting subject inthemirroringfunctionofthescreen.inthisway,astrangelyparadoxicalef- fect occurs: the viewer/subject who in the lacanian model is not autonomous (and this aspect is crucial to the critical force of this model) re-autonomizes itself from the outside world in a kind of narcissistic circular reasoning. before outlining the japanese alternative, bryson again summarizes the threatening consequences of the lacanian model of the gaze: “the viewing subject does not stand at the center of a perceptual horizon, and cannot com- mand the chains and series of signifiers passing across the visual domain. vision unfolds to the side of, in tangent to, the field of the other. and to that form of seeing lacan gives a name: seeing on the field of the other, seeing under the gaze.” under the gaze of the other as the social field (unlike in the model of one-point perspective, which in this theoretical context is also identified with the cartesian “cogito ergo sum”), the subject is not the centre of its field of vision, fittingly referred to here as the “visual domain”. at this on its publication, the books was criticized, among others, for over-simplifying gom- brich’s position. see david ebitz, “vision and painting: the logic of the gaze by norman bryson”intheartbulletin( : , ), - ;alexpotts,“difficultmeanings.visionand painting: the logic of the gaze by norman bryson” in the burlington magazine ( : , ), - . this problem with the treatment of lacan’s theoretical language is familiar from the much-practised and much-criticized identification of lacan’s phallus-metaphor with the actual, physical penis. lacanhimselfreinforcedthis,however,sincehisexampleofanamorphosis inholbein’s the ambassadors reads a deviation from this model as a symptom, thus confirming the normativity of one-point perspective beyond the historical evolution of scopic regimes. bryson, “the gaze”, . . visual culture studies’ foundational concept point, bryson’s basic claim is that the cartesian model implies and produces nothing but power and control of the subject over the world. what he doesn’t even consider as a possibility is dialogue, as a relation of the subject to the outside world, or communication. as a solution to the “cartesian self-enclosure of the cogito,” bryson pro- poses the model of the japanese philosopher nishitani from the kyoto school, whose aim is “to dismantle this anthropocentric subject” – and to do so more radically than sartre and lacan with their threatening scenarios. with refer- encetobuddhist teachings,this involvestheconceptof shunyata, translatedas emptiness, radical impermanence, blankness, nihility, which is intended to override the subject-object problem of western philosophy at a single stroke. on this basis,bryson develops a model of the gaze that is more like a promise – and which remains without consequence in his own work and in the subse- quent debate. but bryson clearly sees in it a force that is more positive than the “negative or terrorizing gaze” of lacan. for him, precisely this “para- noid coloration given to the gaze” is an indication that lacan is still thinking from the position of a certain “intellectual enclosure”, by which he means the above-mentioned residual subject-centeredness. nonetheless, bryson comes to a point where he needs lacan’s version of visuality precisely for its critical negativity, since it is capable of doing some- thing the positive promise of the buddhist model cannot, that is, offering a critique of previous models of the gaze and their political consequences. among these he counts: for the th century, the “truth of vision” in the phys- iology of the eye and the neurology of the optical apparatus; in the art history of the th century, he argues, this truth of the retina gave rise to formalism, inart theorytothepositionsofgombrichundarnheimbasedonapsychology of perception, and in the exhibition policies of museums to the decontextu- alization of pictures to achieve direct communication between the viewer’s eye and pure form. in short, art as a matter of pure perception, timeless, “se- questered from the social domain, universal”. this is the art history soon to be taken on by visual culture studies –or, to be more precise,a simplified and in many ways abbreviated version of that art history, especially with regard to the german practice oriented towards cultural history and to books like ibid. ibid., . ibid., . ibid., . ibid., . beyond the mirror baxandall’s painting and experience in fifteenth-century italy and alpers’ the art of describing. as a key element for bryson, lacan’s model brings culture into the field of visuality, or rather, it is culture that turns pure seeing into a visual field consisting not only of forms but of meanings “permeated by verbal and visual discourses, by signs”. this also brings the dimensions of the social and of power into play: “what is at stake is the discovery of a politics of vision.” in this way, bryson gives lacan’s gaze a political turn that in a certain way disarms its “paranoid or terrorist coloration” by transporting the gaze away from the subject into the field of power: “it is a bit easier,since lacan,to think of visuality as something built cooperatively, over time; that we are therefore responsiblefor it,ethicallyaccountable.” asexampleshecitesthevoyeuristic male gaze and the colonialist gaze, structured by power and powerlessness. now, bryson concludes, it is a matter of analysing how power uses the social construction of seeing and how it hides its manoeuvres in the field of visuality “in myths of pure form, pure perception, and culturally universal vision”. what role does art history play here? this question takes us away from the gaze. bryson’s answer would probably be as follows: were it to radically revise its basic assumptions, art history could become a kind of auxiliary dis- cipline for the analysis of social power relations to the extent that they are represented in visual culture. it could unmask what the image conceals – the exercise of power. this is strongly reminiscent of a vulgar marxist notion of ideology as the masking of power relations, which is based on a concept of power as repression and which falls behind the concept of power proposed by foucault as not only repressive but productive and as being active throughout the social body.moreover, this notion is exceedingly hostile to images,casting them as lies that help to shape a visuality that also acts in the service of power. the lack that constitutes the lacanian subject (and which, in a terminological shift, “threatens” the brysonian) is thus wholly repositioned in a political out- side.inbryson’s view,this outside in turn manifests itself in theart-historical myths of purity and universality of form and perception – a rather restricted understanding of the political that seems paradoxically linked to the notion of visual immanence. this relationship between the inside of a subject and its outside, less fraught than unclear,obscures another important tension within the triad of artist/work/viewer that is key to the status of seeing in art history ibid. ibid., . . visual culture studies’ foundational concept and visual culture studies: that between subject, be it artist or recipient, and object. will the object (here the object of art history) become another mirror of the subject? in bryson’s model, will it coincide indistinguishably with the screen of the network of signs (which he sees as a threat to the subject)? is it ultimately a matter of contesting the myth of the autonomy of the object/art- work that results from the myth of purity? what importance does this “battle” against the concept of autonomous art still have at the end of the s? for the time being, i only have a clear answer to the last of these questions. with the discourses and art practices of postmodernism, such as appropriation, and essentially already with the neo-avant-gardes of fluxus, land art, body and performance art or happenings in the s and ‘ s, this battle was over (at least in the absolute, either/or terms of autonomy on the one hand and a dissolution of the object in its context on the other). this is also true within art history as a discipline, where the autonomy of art in relation to sociality and/or function is no longer the founding principle for a definition of art as the discipline’s object. in all fairness, it must be said that bryson’s main focus in the gaze in the expandedfieldwasnotonarthistorybutonadiscussionofthegazeinconnec- tion with an expanded concept of the visual field. in his editor’s introduction to the calligram anthology, on the other hand, he positions his collection of (post)structuralist texts “from france” clearly against “official art history”. there is an attack on gombrich’s perceptualism and a critique of so-called social art history that follows the marxist distinction of base and superstruc- ture, assigning art to the latter, unable to connect it with the former except as an illustration. to both, perspectivism and social art history, bryson pre- scribes the insight that painting is an art of signs, as a cure for the isolation of art from the social. what interestsmeaboutthis text is theconstructionofthenexusbetween sign, historicization and interpretation that can be isolated within it – which bears on central issues of art-historical practice that also determine the sta- tus of seeing in the discipline (and vice versa). bryson claims that: “prevailing art history famously insists on limiting itself to ‘what was possible in the pe- riod’: its historicism demands a purity or puritanism of perspective in which bryson, “introduction” in calligram, xv-xvi. an interesting comment on bryson’s restricted reception of gombrich as exclusively perceptualist is to be found in christopher s. wood, “art history reviewed vi”. beyond the mirror ‘leakage’ from the present into the past is viewed with suspicion and alarm.” although art history insists on the present of the artwork in question, it is not, bryson argues, interested in its own present. consequently, art history must adopt the theory of french (post)structuralism that has “a far more so- phisticated understanding of the relations of signs to history”. the question, he claims, is why “we, in england and america” choose to work within self- imposed theoretical limits when literary criticism has broadened its theoret- ical horizons, “so self-aware in methodology, so confident in its right to read from the present?” i am interested in this idea of “confident in its right to read from the present”. the implications are many and varied. bryson’s focus is clearly on the right to interpret from the present, and less on explaining the theoretical necessity of doing so. this is an interesting take on the postmod- ern critique of objectivism that highlighted the latency of position and thus the presence of the viewer in the act of interpretation. bryson’s take on this approach turns the negativity of critique into a positive right – the right of the viewer, that is, bryson’s right to read the work from his present. this is not just a critique of the supposed objectivity of art-historical fact-production – a critique i share; bryson goes further, shifting the weight within the triad of artist/work/viewer in favour of the last in a way that largely abolishes not only the relation between viewer/present and work/past, but also the rela- tional tension between all three poles. to my mind, this shift goes so far as to suggest that the author disempowered by poststructuralism has been re- placed by (the power of) the interpreter. how does bryson connect this argument with the sign? here, too, he opensupapolarizingbattleground:arthistory“reactstotheimagebyseeking documentation” (he always refers to the object of art history as “the image”); to date it has not conceived of the image “in terms of signs”, “as something to be interpreted”. the new art history he is presenting in calligram, on the other hand, “reacts to the image as to any other work of signs. it is naturally hermeneutic, and it knows reading to be as complex and intricate a process as, for academic or warburg iconology, it is the comparatively simple decod- ing of emblems and motifs.” this is a highly polemical view of iconology which bryson claims is not a hermeneutic activity. bryson, “introduction”, calligram, xvi. ibid. ibid. ibid., xvii. . visual culture studies’ foundational concept apart from the fact that using the word “naturally” in the context of post- structuralist theory feels strange, the problem with this attitude is the mix of general accusations and simplification, as reflected in the reviews of vision and painting. particularly annoying is the way bryson’s very simple view of art history seems to be guided by a tactical ignorance that aims to present the discipline of literary criticism, from which he comes, as a methodological role model so that it remains unclear, looking back, how much of his polemic is motivated by academic politics. so why do i take it seriously? bryson is not the only literary critic/theorist who switched to art history, and he exerted a major influence on the academic context in which the first university course on visual culture was founded soon after. more interestingly, bryson’s for- mulations also seem to express a desire that was also crucial to the founding and the programs of visual culture studies: with the overly one-sided shift in emphasis to the viewer/interpreter within the triad of artist/work/viewer, the author, at least theoretically abolished by poststructuralism in favour of tex- tual interdependence, is replaced by the viewer,who according to bryson now has the right to interpret, independently of the historical unfamiliarity (and other unfamiliarities) of the object. but what is the nature of an interpreta- tion that does not acknowledge its object as other? does this object then take on the function of a mirror for the viewer? another revealing choice of words, offering an insight into the role of the gaze, comes in bryson’s arguments against the “perceptualist account”, wherehespeaksofrecognition(awordwhosemeaningsrangefromcognition to identification, and to approval). to refute gombrich’s method of a percep- tual comparison between a painting and reality outside the picture, bryson examines picture-making from the position of the “viewer’s gaze,” using the example of a particularly realistic representation. in this case, he writes, it is possible for the viewer to re-experience “the original vision, retinal or imagi- nary, of its creator”. but such matching, he argues, can hardly be a necessary criterion for the “recognition of a painting” since the viewer knows nothing of the original intention or vision of the painting. from this he concludes that the “act of perception in the viewing gaze cannot of itself provide criteria of recognition”. the examples given for what he understands by recognition are the ability to comprehend mathematic formulae and a child’s learning to especially potts, difficult meanings. bryson, “introduction”, calligram, xix. beyond the mirror read. his conclusion: not only mathematics and learning to read are “activi- ties of the sign”, but also painting. recognition of a painting calls for skills in “social codes of recognition”. here, then, perception is replaced by recogni- tion as the term for the viewer’s act of seeing. in this way, seeing as the form of perception specific to the sense of sight becomes the act of cognition via the recognition of social codes – an act that reads signs to derive meaning from them. elsewhere, he takes this distinction one step further, describing purely perceptive seeing as an individually isolated act,contrasting it with the recognition of signs as social interaction: “it takes one person to experience a sensation; it takes (at least) two to recognize a sign.” by basing his argument on an isolation of the act of seeing as (pure) per- ception in this way, he contradicts his own claim that no such thing as pure seeing exists.at the same time he asserts that the formal properties of the ob- ject that are perceived by “pure” seeing are not socially and historically coded, that is to say, they lie below the threshold of legibility or encoding (and thus of the social). these would be, for example, those elements grouped together by conventional art history under the heading of style, from ways of applying paint, to palettes, and to modes of composition. studies exist, however, even for non-representational painting of the th century, which analyse these factors of painting – often labelled as “formalism” and treated with suspicion – as socially, culturally and historically structured. dealing with such paint- ing though involves using a descriptive vocabulary other than that found in conventional art-historical accounts of style. in brief, this is the package offered by bryson: with the gaze, the sign enters art (interpretation), bringing with it power and the social; the social is identical with the screen, which in turn coincides with the image; the gaze becomesanactofreading,basedonthesocialcodescirculatinginthepresent of the viewer/interpreter. what bryson then fails to address, however, is the restricted authorial autonomy of the viewer/interpreter within the coding of his/her own present.he limits himself to deducing the right to interpretation. the latent desire that speaks through his text is, i propose, as follows: the in- terpreter takes on the position of the author/artist as criticized by poststruc- turalism, and the object of interpretation is reduced to an outside, present and ahistorical, whose existence does not go beyond its own interpretation. all quotations from bryson, the gaze, xix-xx. ibid., xxi. for painting, see, for example, yves-alain bois,painting as model (boston ). . visual culture studies’ foundational concept similar to the mirror in lacan’s model of the mirror stage as formative of the function of the i, it serves to show the viewer/interpreter a self-image via whose recognition the plausibility of the viewer-ego/i is secured. moreover this model collapses the tension, or relationship, between the elements in- volved in art-historical seeing (the triad of artist, object/work and viewer/in- terpreter) because the element artist no longer features, while object/work and viewer/interpreter collapse into the interpreter-i. when the viewer has no counterpart, all that remains is the viewer him/herself. why is this? four basic factors come together in bryson’s position: ) the gaze is understood as a threat to the i; ) for this reason it is pushed away from the i into an out- side; ) the lacanian screen is literally equated with the art image; ) the i, which in the lacanian model can only deceive itself about its own wholeness, seems to be salvaged in an interpreting i whose irreparable lack is not open to debate. this is the effect of equating screen and viewer/interpreter in the act of interpreting. the evil eye and a counter-model – margaret olin “there is usually something negative about the gaze as used in art theory”, writes margaret olin in her article “gaze”, included in critical terms for art history ( ), a handbook on new concepts “in the late twentieth century” including those borrowed from poststructuralist, feminist and psychoanalyt- ical theory like sign, representation, simulacrum, fetish, gaze and gender. olin places the negative reading of the gaze at the centre of her text: “the notion of the pernicious power of the gaze. the gaze, it seems, destroys.” in her view, there are historical antecedents, like the myth of medusa or a be- lief in the power of the gaze as manifested in the “evil eye”, but also cultural rules like asking someone before taking their picture. in th-century dis- course, “the gaze has taken on new villainous qualities”: hitler’s “hypnotic” gaze could have played a part when sartre was writing being and nothingness during the german occupation of france; foucault linked the gaze with the apparatus of surveillance, and guy debord warned of the “dehumanizing as- pect of being a spectator”. the key point in lacan, she remarks, is that the eye robert s. nelson, “at the place of a foreword: someone looking, reading, and writing” in critical terms, ix. margaret olin, “gaze” in critical terms, - : . beyond the mirror and the gaze, although separate, are parts of the same person because “the gaze is projected, imagined. it is not the gaze of a real person who wishes malevolently to deprive us of our independence as subjects, but the result of our own struggle for self-mastery.” precisely this aspect of the function of the viewer/interpreter is what is lost in bryson’s approach, as the gaze, sepa- ratedfromtheeye,thatgoeshandinhandwiththe“desireforself-completion through another”, is relocated within this very other/outside. olinaptlysumsupthedimensionofpowerinthegaze:“thereisastruggle over the gaze: one gets to look,to be master of the gaze; the other (or other) is looked at.” this struggle involves a clash of gazes each based on the desire to complete the self. it goes beyond the struggle between the sexes; it concerns the relations between majority and minority, between the west and the so- called global south, “whose inhabitants can be the object of the gaze because they are viewed as exotic … the subject-turned-object sees itself as the other sees it: it internalizes the gaze. thus the poor self-image and limited sense of one’s own possibilities that result when women see themselves as men see them, when minority groups see themselves as the majority sees them.” this brings us back to the problem described above with reference to the identity politics of these minorities: how can this power relation and this gaze be altered? can it be achieved by giving the cliché, the stereotype, resulting from such a gaze,a positive turn,continuing to relate it to oneself –a strategy that has been both used and contested by all minorities, both ethnic groups and women, gays and lesbians? is it possible to exit this dynamic by creating a “new” self-image? this in turn recalls bryson’s manoeuvre of avoiding the gaze’s threat totheselfbyadoptingamodel fromanon-westernculturebased on a non-i – what olin calls an attempt “to find an alternative to the notion of the subjugating look in other cultures”. olin herself has another proposal that departs from the “paranoid” la- canianmodel.shesuggestsapositiverewritingofthegazeofthekindalready conceived of in other theories. one example she gives is martin buber: in his thinking, she writes, there is an attempt to replace the i-it with an i-thou re- lationship; something similar is to be found, she adds, in mikhail bakhtin’s heteroglossia (multiple voices, equally weighted). what these models have in ibid., . ibid. ibid. ibid. ibid., . . visual culture studies’ foundational concept common is that they take dialogue as the basis for thinking relations. the gaze that is returned in the dialogical model rescues the sense of self of the one being looked at. “if you can look back, you cannot be possessed by the gaze of the other. what is proposed is not a stare-down. it is a shared gaze. rather than emphasizing the power of the gazing one to make the one gazed at into an object, this idea suggests responsibility toward the person looking back at one.” this model is ethically founded and as such highly volitional. it appears as optimistic regarding the possibilities of human communication as lacan’s model is pessimistic. what remains intact here is the relation be- tween the looking subject and what is being looked at,be it artist and work or work and viewer/interpreter.with this model there is no need to deny the un- familiarity of the other. in this it resembles pächt’s approach; but it describes more of an attitude than a method – an attitude that may colour both cogni- tive aim and methodology, just as a “paranoid” attitude does. in both models, the dialogical and the lacanian, the emphasis is on recognition, but with one key difference: in the lacanian model, it is (self-)recognition of the i, in bu- ber and bakhtin the recognition of the other. the lacanian model has been adopted much more frequently than buber’s or bakhtin’s – which is hardly surprising; for with this model, it is possible to pose the question of power relations within the gaze that is not possible with the dialogical model, as it postulates a form of communication without a hierarchic divide. olin’s article on the gaze has just a single illustration: walker evans’ pho- tographic portrait of annie mae gudger, the wife of a tenant farmer. it shows thefaceofawhitewoman,herhairpartedandpulledback, lookingstraightat the photographer, and thus the viewer, with a frown. any further characteri- zation of her gazewouldbe interpretation.annie maegudgerand the picture look at the viewer – a picture that looks back, in the most obvious way imag- inable: the person in the picture looks back, which means: “our gaze does not hit the side of her face but the front” – an allusion to barbara kruger’s work entitled your gaze hits the side of my face. “she looks at us and we meet her gaze directly.” this portrait could thus become a concrete example of the dialogical constellation of gazes proposed by olin. in western art since the renaissance, figures looking out of the picture at the viewer have not been the rule, especially where female figures are con- ibid., . title of a photo collage by barbara kruger ( ). olin, “gaze”, . beyond the mirror cerned, which brings us to art history as a discipline and the way it has dealt with this problem. famous exceptions include tizian’s venus of urbino, goya’s nude and clothed maja and manet’s olympia, all from the genre of the female nude. for this genre, the rule was that the nude does not look at the viewer, casting her eyes instead discretely and modestly to one side. and the majas and olympia were often the focus of scandalized outrage on account of their “obscene”character. in most cases, this was the effect of a naked woman look- ing at those looking at her – an unwelcome, disturbing dialogical exchange of gazes that startled the viewer out of his position of a gaze that controls its object. elsewhere, another remarkable effect can be observed: some critics seem to forget that they are looking at a picture, speaking of the image of a female body looking at them as a subject: this maja “is aware of power and her entirely unsentimental, even aggressive gaze definitively turns her into a subject,evenas an unclad woman”. t.j.clark is not the only one to see in the gaze of olympia the self-determined desire “of the female subject herself”. this raises the question of how such a neutral, indifferent gaze becomes, in the eye of the (male) viewer, a signifier of self-determined female desire, and whether it is perhaps this gaze that causes the medium of representation, the painting, the canvas, the pictorial codes, to become invisible, allowing the woman portrayed to achieve a presence in the present and in the perceptive space of the viewer. according to olin, the eyes of anna mae gudger are “meant to urge us into a relation. … we are asked to be her partner, to offer her ‘respect’, which means literally a returned look. her look is intended to empower her.” un- like the above-quoted interpreters of the majas and olympia,olin does not fall into the trap of presence. instead, she understands the woman’s gaze clearly werner busch, “goyas ‘nackte und bekleidete maja’” in claudia von braunmühl (ed.), etablierte wissenschaft und feministische theorie im dialog (berlin ), - : . timothy j. clark, the painting of modern life: paris in the art of manet and his followers (london ), . besides busch and clark, it is also worth mentioning charles bern- heimer, “manets olympia: der skandal auf der leinwand” in weissberg, weiblichkeit als maskerade, - , especially . seesusanne vonfalkenhausen, “majaundolympia: derstreit umden weiblichenakt” in von braunmühl(ed.), etablierte wissenschaft und feministische theorie, - . fou- cault takes a different approach to viewer positions with regard to olympia, see ibid., , and michel foucault, manet and the object of painting (lecture originally delivered in ), - . olin, “gaze”, . . visual culture studies’ foundational concept as a strategy on the part of the photographer that is often seen in documen- tary photography with a social agenda. and she finds fitting words for this “perceptive phenomenon” of the tension between the presence of the person portrayed, occasioned or reinforced by his/her gaze out of the picture, and this representation in its quality as a media artefact: “depiction of eyes look- ing out from the image is only one way to seek to achieve such a presence.” for today’s viewers, she continues, the powerful presence of the photogra- pher might actually seem stronger than that of the woman – a remark that brings the artist back into play via the reality of the photograph, rendering the triad of artist/object/viewer complete again in its communication through the picture. in a nutshell: “it is the sense of a human presence who is alive to our own presence that constitutes the encounter theorized as the gaze.” olin’s model of a dialogical exchange of looks draws on her study of alois riegl’s concept of attentiveness, on which he founded his pictorial analyses above all in the group portraiture of holland ( / ). for riegl, the atten- tiveness of the figures inside the picture towards one another, perceivable in the form of exchanged looks and facial expressions, generates an empa- thetic attentiveness in the viewer. this attentiveness is based on respect for the other – be it someone else portrayed in the same picture or the picture itself, or rather what is portrayed in the picture. in a broader sense, it is an ethically motivated concept for intersubjective communication.in any case, it is firmly rooted in the picture, making it reminiscent of wolfgang kemp’s re- ception aesthetics that is not ethically founded but whose model of reception is also based on the object. another link to riegl is found in alpers when she describes the visual culture of the netherlands in the th century as a culture of visual attentiveness. but there is one key difference: while alpers identifies description as a structural characteristic of dutch painting, in riegl’s model, as interpreted by olin, attentiveness has a narrative structure. in conclusion, the positions of bryson and olin on the gaze can be dif- ferentiated on the basis of their respective weighting of the communication olin, “gaze”, . margaret olin, “forms of respect: alois riegl’s concept of attentiveness” in the art bul- letin , no. ( ), - . she also embeds this concept in the intellectual currents of turn-of-the-century vienna, examines its adoption by bakhtin and buber, and sit- uates it within the modern discussion of the theatricality of art initiated by michael fried. kemp, too, refers to riegl. olin, “forms of respect”, here, for example, . beyond the mirror triangle artist/object/viewer: while bryson centres this relational structure on the viewer, olin seeks a dialogical structure that focuses on the object but connects it with artist and viewer. in this way, olin also postulates a commu- nication between producer and viewer via the object. bryson’s model of the role of the viewer depends on the character of the picture as sign; as well as being the precondition for interpretation, this qual- ityalsoturnstheactofperceptionintoanactofreading.forolin,ontheother hand, this act can be described as a dialogical exchange of looks with the ob- ject.thisalsopermitsarecognitionoftheobjectasother, inturnallowingthe historically unfamiliar to be integrated not into the interpreting subject but into relations within the communicative triangle. bryson, by contrast, must deny this unfamiliarity as it cannot be integrated into the viewer. a comparison between the two positions is more difficult on the question of the power of the gaze. bryson situates it twice: in the gaze of the person who crosses one’s own gaze and threatens the subject, and as an imbalance of power in the social field. these sites of power have two things in com- mon: both endanger identities, that of the individual and that of the social group, and in both cases those endangered are the objects of the gaze. in this light, interpretation becomes something like a struggle for recognition of the self/group in the eyes of the other. with her dialogical model, on the other hand, olin offers an ethical so- lution to the problem of identity in confrontation with the other. it calls for a conscious positioning of the viewer towards the other and therefore im- plies the volitional agency of the viewer. the dialogical model demands the acknowledgement of the other, but without demanding one’s own recogni- tion in the eyes of the other – a model of nonviolent communication that recalls the ideals of gandhi or martin luther king, but that seems hardly ca- pable of doing justice either to the realities of a political struggle between identity-based forces, or to those of a paranoid subject. comparing these concepts of the gaze highlights the dynamic of politi- cal thinking associated with them. as we will see, however, the question of how this dynamic shapes the practices and methods of visual culture studies and art history is easier to answer for visual culture studies than it is for art history. . visual culture studies’ operational concept visuality – seeing in the cultural field visuality must be considered the key concept in the theoretical and practical basis of visual culture studies. the word is not a poststructuralist neologism, nor is it precisely situated in theoretical terms. therefore i can only describe its use in these texts: as a metaphor that is deployed in different ways and as an abstract concept with similarly diverse definitions. the first usage cited is from thomas carlyle, praising dante for the intensity with which he works out not just the whole,but every detail “into truth, into clear visuality”. here, visuality is that quality of a text whose intensity allows the reader to imagine something with the clarity of vision; at the same time, this “clear visuality” is equated with truth. for carlyle, visuality is the essence of a historiogra- phy which, imagined from the elevated position of the hero, shows the grand heroic whole of history, like history painting, defying the revolutions since and the rise of positivism. the key here, it seems to me, is that this visuality does not mean the actual seeing of a visual object or an exchange of glances between people, referring instead to what the text evokes in the reader’s imagination while it is being read. in order to trace the ways the term visuality is used in visual culture stud- ies – however unclear this usage may be – there follow readings of texts by three writers: w.j.t. mitchell, nicholas mirzoeff and mieke bal. if one wished to situate their positions between the poles of essentializing the visual on thomas carlyle: on heroes, hero-worship, and the heroic in history, lecture iii. the hero as poet. dante: shakespeare (may , ): “not the general whole only; every compartment of it is worked out, with intense earnestness, into truth, into clear visu- ality.” http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/ (accessed sept ). on carlyle and visuality, see also nicholas mirzoeff, “on visuality” in journal of visual culture , no. ( ), - . mirzoeff situates this visuality in the context of reac- tionary and anti-modern currents of the time. http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/ http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/ http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/ http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/ http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/ http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/ beyond the mirror the one hand and constructivism on the other, mirzoeff would be on the side of essentializing, mitchell would stand halfway between the two with his at- tempt to maintain the two extremes in a relationship of tension and paradox, and bal would represent the constructivist-semiological pole. in this light, the three positions i have chosen as examples cover the full breadth of the discussion. what is visual culture? w.j.t. mitchell in , when w.j.t. mitchell published what is visual culture?, the first courses in visual culture were just a few years old; they were developed not on a common basis but according to the interests and disciplines of those involved and the existing structures at the institutions in question, giving each course its own genesis and its own focus. in what is visual culture? mitchell presented his version of visual culture studies, developed in with a corresponding syllabus as an internal memo for a working group on visual culture at the university of chicago including colleagues from literary criticism, film studies and art history. as mitchell writes, the group’s members agreed that it could not just be about uniting humanities scholars around the problem of visual culture, but that social and natural sciences should also be involved, as well as non-western concepts and practices of the visual. this is followed by a long list of key questions for the “study of human visuality”, including cultural otherness, the society of the spectacle, scientific research on vision and imaging, imaging technologies, and prosthetic “extensions” of the visible. he thus formulates a comprehen- sive collection of themes for knowledge production on visuality, while avoid- ing any fixed definition of the term. his approach is characterized above all in her essay “visual essentialism and the object of visual culture”, bal accuses mirzoeff of visual essentialism. see the section on mieke bal in this chapter. w.j.t. mitchell, “what is visual culture?” in irving lavin (ed.), meaning in the visual arts. views from the outside. a centennial commemoration of erwin panofsky (princeton ), - . in cornell, harvard, rochester, irvine, santa cruz and chicago. see w.j.t. mitchell, “in- terdisciplinarity and visual culture” in the art bulletin , no. ( ), - : ; see also dikovitskaya, visual culture, chapter . mitchell, “what is visual culture?”, . . visual culture studies’ operational concept by two further strategies: he avoids being pinned down on the basis of po- larizations, and he juxtaposes approaches that seemed to be the subject of consensus with their opposites. as one example, he contrasts the consensus on the social and cultural construction of visuality with the question of the natural dimension of the visual: “what is the boundary between visual cul- ture and visual nature?” – a question rejected by mieke bal, who insists on the cultural construction of the visual. it is interesting to see the context in which mitchell published this “failed attempt at a manifesto”, as he calls it: meaning in the visual arts. views from the outside. a centennial commemoration of erwin panofsky is an anthology edited by art historian irving lavin that examines panofsky’s art history, as the title claims, from outside the discipline. and indeed, of the scholars who came to visual culture studies from outside art history, mitchell is the one who has declared and maintained the greatest affinity with the latter discipline. this is reflected in his adoption or “reconstruction” of panofsky’s iconology. on another point, too, mitchell appears as panofsky’s ethical heir: taking his ex- ample of the greeting (the “primal scene” for panofsky’s iconology in which he meets a man who greets him on the street and he recognizes his gesture as a greeting) he reinterprets it in the sense of a critical iconology. mitchell also refers to this scene in other texts; it is a very vivid, narrative-dramatic metaphor that makes a brief and striking appearance in what is visual cul- ture?, where he states: panofsky’s “comparison of looking at painting to greet- ing other persons has deep resonances for the whole issue of visuality and alterity”. to greet means to recognize; extending this into greeting one an- otherturnsthesceneintoadialogical situationthatbringsfortharecognition of the other. because mitchell does not state whether this other is an object in the sense of an artwork or another subject, the metaphor applies both to the act of interpreting an object and to communication between people. as well as allowing mitchell to conceive of visuality as a social field, this allows me to refer back to olin’s dialogical concept of the gaze, which i contrasted ibid., . see bal, “visual essentialism”. see w.j.t. mitchell, iconology: image, text, ideology (chicago ) and mitchell, picture theory (chicago ), especially chapter . inerwinpanofsky,“iconographyandiconology:anintroductiontothestudyofrenais- sance art”, in panofsky, meaning in the visual arts: papers in and on art history, (garden city, ny ), - : . mitchell, “what is visual culture?”, . beyond the mirror with the narcissist model of lacan as interpreted by bryson. unlike bryson, then, mitchell takes a dialogical structure of seeing as the point of departure for both the social and the object-based dimension of visuality. whatisvisualcultureclearly reflects the aim of bringing together all of the various facets of a discussion on visual culture that had not, until then, been conducted systematically, though it can hardly be called systematic. rather than any attempt to define key concepts, there is more of a quest to describe andredefineafieldthat isnot (yet)adisciplineanditscentralconcerns.afirst indication is given by a brief account of the genesis of visual culture: a revo- lution in literary theory, new philosophical approaches to representation and its connection with language, and new developments in art history (we are not told which) have, mitchell argues, laid the foundations for thinking “vi- sual realities (including everyday habits of visual perception) as cultural con- structions, therefore interpretable or readable”. neither film studies with its strong feminist theories nor cultural studies,whose agenda in the s was far more political than that of literary theory or art history, are mentioned at this point. this may be because for mitchell, with his doctorate in literature, there is another central problem that now becomes critical again as the em- phasis is placed on the visual: the difference between language and image that is also reflected in the division of the humanities into “verbal” and “vi- sual” camps. the new field of visual culture is associated with the promise of overcoming these divisions or at least loosening them in the sense of inter- disciplinarity. in view of the analysis of language by linguistics, the lack of a corresponding system for the image – or the visual – is an unsettling flaw (and mitchell is not the only one to address it). this applies in particular with respect to the institutionalization of the field as a discipline. here, mitchell is concerned above all with avoiding definitions and delimitations that might lead visual culture studies to ossify into a discipline in its earliest years; he re- peatedlyemphasizestheimpossibilityofseparating languagefromthevisual, ibid., . see also chapter , the model of the gaze, on the reception of lacan’s model of the gaze in film studies. this begins with his dissertation, blake’s composite art (princeton ). further titles include: iconology ( ) and picture theory ( ). on interdisciplinarity in relation to visual culture studies, see mitchell, interdisciplinar- ity and visual culture. in my opinion, the line between the two, where it is deliberately discussed at all the debates surrounding visual culture studies, is extremely blurred. . visual culture studies’ operational concept highlightingtheirfieldsofinteraction.formitchell,this impliesaspecialmis- sion for visual culture studies: “the emergence of visual culture is a challenge totraditionalnotionsofreadingandliteracyassuch; it isasmucharevolution inverbalcultureas it is inthestudyofthevisual imageproper.” mitchell sees fit to address the challenge of renewal to literary studies and to art history in equal measure. art history can no longer rely on the traditional concepts of beauty and aesthetic meaning to define its object, he claims. as examples of such concepts, however, he then names myths that have been subject to criti- cism in the practice of left-wing and feminist art history in both the english- and german-speaking worlds since the s, if not before: aesthetic hierar- chy, the discourse of mastery and genius. like the other advocates of visual culture studies, mitchell draws a narrow, reduced picture of art history as a discipline, constructing it as the other of visual culture studies. finally there is a conciliatory turn in the form of a dialectical argument: juxtaposition with the productions of kitsch and mass culture, he claims, will actually reinforce the greatness of “authentic artistic achievements” – a conservative appeal to quality and authenticity that recent art history would hardly endorse. with the transfer of theory from the “verbal” camp, then, “visual realities” become “legible” as social constructions. this gives us a first description of the visual. but what are these visual realities? less abstract than “visuality”, this description seems to point not to exchanges of looks between people, but to looks directed by the perceiving subject towards external reality. although there are signs of approaches like the gaze or the visibility of the subject itself being involved, the main emphasis here is clearly the gaze that the subject fixes on external object-reality. soon after, mitchell was to ask a question that seemed to reverse this direction: what do pictures really want? this essay, later followed by a book, contains a sentence that may illustrate his attitude to visuality: “what pic- tures want from us, what we have failed to give them, is an idea of visual- ity adequate to their ontology.” (my italics) just as pictures have an ontology, he claims,thereshouldalsobeanontologyofvisuality.thiswouldcertainlymake mitchell’s opening up of cultural constructivism towards the “nature” of the visual (more) understandable. but the following passage marks a clearer dis- tancing than previously from the semiotic model: “contemporary discussions mitchell, “what is visual culture?”, . w.j.t. mitchell, “what do pictures really want?” in october ( ), - , and what do pictures want? the lives and loves of images (chicago ). beyond the mirror of visual culture often seem distracted by a rhetoric of innovation and mod- ernization. they want to update art history by playing catch-up with the text- based disciplines and with the study of film and mass culture. … they appeal to ‘semiotic’ or ‘discursive’ models of images that will reveal them as projec- tions of ideology, technologies of domination to be resisted by clear-sighted critique.” these words betray a certain anger directed, as i see it, against the instrumentalization of pictures (and the visual, terms mitchell uses more or less interchangeably) and against the semiotic equating of language and im- age. once again, panofsky’s “greeting acquaintance” comes into play; here it supports mitchell’s appeal for a hermeneutics that does justice to pictures, one “that would return to the opening gesture of panofsky’s iconology”. but mitchell cannot be simply tied down to an ontology of the visual beyond cul- ture: “the most far-reaching shift signalled by the search for an adequate con- cept of visual culture is its emphasis on the social field of the visual, the every- day processes of looking at others and being looked at. this complex field of visual reciprocity [my italics] is not merely a by-product of social reality but ac- tively constitutive of it.vision is as important as language in mediating social relations, and it is not reducible to language, to the ‘sign’ or to discourse.” in connection with panofsky’s metaphor of the encounter,“reciprocity”supports mitchell’s vehement defence of the picture as an other. let us return to mitchell’s promisingly titled what is visual culture? here he brings us no closer to a definition of visuality. instead, he makes it clear that visual culture studies in the mid- s is a very open field, so open that mitchell hopes (in contrast to later statements) that the field could become a “coherent discipline”. he backs up this hope with a clever paradox: pre- cisely the “self-critical tendencies of its principal constituents” give grounds for such a hope, self-critique as a path to consolidating a discipline. later, in , with increasingly successful institutionalization, mitchell feels obliged, as a note informs us, this anger is directed against the introduction to the anthology visual culture. images and interpretations (london ) written by its editors norman bryson, michael ann holly and keith moxey. mitchell, “what do pictures really want?”, . on certain basic points, i agree with mitchell’s vehement defence here; what i find problematic is that his list of interpretative approaches to be rejected includes dis- course theory. the visual in its distinct way is part of discourse as is language. in mitchell’s version, situated beyond discursivity, the concept of visuality appears to end upinanontologythatisneitherculturallyorsociallyaccessible.thisiswheremitchell’s desire of having it both ways comes up against its limits. . visual culture studies’ operational concept in showing seeing: a critique of visual culture, to write against the creeping os- sification of the discipline. visuality as event – nicholas mirzoeff in , nicholas mirzoeff opened his introduction to visual culture with the apodictic statement: “modern life takes place onscreen.” for mirzoeff, the screen, understood here as the television or computer screen, is the site of vi- sual consumption. from this, he infers that visual culture is a modern and especially a postmodern phenomenon. it also marks a boundary between epochs: the period from to was dominated by the formal logic of the “ancien régime image”, followed by the modern era ( - ). the dif- ference between the two periods is that until , visuality was dominated by the logic of the image, whereas in modernity the visual stimulus, ampli- fied to a “hyper-stimulus”, is the stronger influence: “visual culture does not depend on pictures themselves but the modern tendency to picture or visu- alize existence” – whether this is a fundamental structural difference or a quantitative one remains unclear. in postmodernity, he claims, the kind of visualization specific to modernity is further heightened: “it [visualizing] has nowbecomeallbutcompulsory”. formirzoeff,postmodernityasaso-called crisis of modernity is the consequence of modernity’s inability to deal with the failure of its strategy of visualization: “in other words, it is the visual crisis of culture that creates postmodernity, not its textuality. while print culture is certainly not going to disappear, the fascination with the visual and its ef- fects that marked modernism has engendered a postmodern culture that is most postmodern when it is visual.” these are strong words, and they make no effort to cultivate the interlocking of textuality and visuality favoured by mitchell, “showing seeing”. mirzoeff, an introduction to visual culture, . moreover, mirzoeff always speaks only of visual culture, regardless of whether he is talking about the discipline’s subject matter or the discipline itself. ibid., - . ibid., . ibid., . ibid., . beyond the mirror mitchell.formirzoeff,visuality is thecharacteristicofpost-/modernity,which is also why visual culture deals primarily with this period. “visual culture is concerned with visual events in which information, meaning, or pleasure is sought by the consumer in an interface with visual technology. by visual technology i mean any form of apparatus designed either to be looked at or to enhance natural vision, from oil painting to tele- vision and the internet.” this gives an indication that mirzoeff conceives of visuality as a visual event that takes place at the “interface” of consumer and visual medium. the specific quality of this visuality, analogous to the “disjunctured and fragmented culture that we call postmodernism”, is that it must react ever more quickly to the ever-increasing numbers of different, fragmented,simultaneous stimuli –“the constant swirl of the global village” – which also impacts on a perceptive apparatus that possesses a seemingly unlimited capacity to adapt to these growing demands; “the hyper-stimulus of modern visual culture from the nineteenth century to the present day”, he asserts, “has been dedicated to trying to saturate the visual field, a process that continually fails as we learn to see and connect ever faster.” there is a causal link between this hyper-stimulus and the circulation of images that are no longer indexically connected to realities, as was still the case with the analogue versions of film and photography, but that now pro- duce virtual realities. as mirzoeff wishes to focus his discussion of visual cul- ture mainly on new media and their consumers, it is understandable that for him, unlike mitchell or bal, the concept of the simulacrum from the french postmodern theory of writers like virilio,baudrillard and lyotard plays a ma- jor role. “the (post)modern destruction of reality is accomplished in everyday life, not in the studios of the avant-garde.” mirzoeff links the notion of the simulacrum as reality substitute with the metaphor of the “visual event” that emphasizes the visual-sensory experience and supposed immediacy already implicit in “event”. the relationship between the virtuality and constructed- ness of media/realities on the one hand and, on the other, the “immediacy” of visual experience, however, remains unexplained. with this metaphor of although mirzoeff never states this explicitly, he would therefore find it hard to apply visual culture studies to older periods. mirzoeff, an introduction to visual culture, . ibid. ibid., . ibid., . ibid., . . visual culture studies’ operational concept the “visual event”, mirzoeff wishes to make it possible “to advance interpre- tive strategies beyond the now familiar use of semiotic terminology”. for him, then, the “sensual immediacy” of the visual constitutes the fundamen- tal difference between image and text/language (a point on which he has been accused of visual essentialism by critics including mieke bal, of which more later). mirzoeff proposes a theoretical keyword for the experience of sensory immediacy that results from “intense and surprising visual power”, promptingreactionsof“admiration,awe,terroranddesire”: thesublime:“the sublime is the pleasurable experience in representation of that which would be painful or terrifying in reality, leading to a realization of the limits of the human and of the powers of nature.” for mirzoeff the sublime becomes the central dimension of visual culture, “at the heart of all visual events”. an aesthetic concept originating in the eighteenth century, the sublime is taken up here to strengthen his description of the visual event as going beyond lan- guage, and thus to position visual culture studies against semiotics. what this theoretical shortcut ignores or bypasses is the factor of me- diality structuring the “interface” between picture and consumer. although mirzoeff is interested in experience with post-modern media, he has no con- cept of media. in mirzoeff’s view of the relationship between consumer and medium, the experience of consuming has far greater weight than that of the image/medium: “visual culture [does] prioritize the everyday experience of the visual, from the snapshot to the vcr and even the blockbuster art exhibi- tion.” apparently, the ever-changing media landscape is sufficient reason to forego a conceptualization of mediality in favour of visual experience. as a result mirzoeff emphasizes all the more the external conditions of this expe- rience. more than in traditional locations such as museum or cinema, “most of our visual experience takes place aside from these formally structured mo- ments of looking”; we watch movies in planes or at home, we see paintings on book covers or posters.for mirzoeff, these conditions seem to have a more serious impact than media specificity on spectatorship, a term that goes be- yond the process of perception itself to include all the accompanying factors ibid., . these are the also the grounds given for his critique of the semiotic approach, ending with the verdict: “structuralism was in the end unproductive.” an introduction to visual culture, - . ibid, . ibid., . ibid., . beyond the mirror of time, space and setting, as well as the social and cultural practices of visual consumption. “visualcultureisatacticwithwhichtostudythegenealogy,definitionand functions of postmodern everyday life from the point of view of the consumer, [my italics] ratherthantheproducer.” sowhatof thetriadofproducer/object/in- terpreter? in mirzoeff’s analysis the author or producer is no longer relevant to the visual culture of postmodernity. in this, he draws a logical conclusion (realistically, i would say) from the actual weakening of authorship that can no longer even be theoretically founded since it takes place in the copy-and- paste practice of the internet. images, on the other hand, come in mirzoeff’s argument to represent compulsory visualizing itself. once again, then, the viewer stands at the centre, without a dialogical point of reference. in con- trast to bryson’s model, however, the viewer here is not an interpreter but a consumer, the“key agent in postmodern capitalist society”. but there is one important parallel: bryson seeks the recognition of this interpretative role, the empowerment of the viewer as author, while mirzoeff seeks the empow- erment of the consumer who is to be emancipated from the vortex of capi- talist over-production with the help of the insights of visual culture studies. but mirzoeff does not behave like the classically marxist, anti-visual enemy of the culture industry (the negative example he gives being frederic jame- son ). mirzoeff’s agenda takes the viewer’s pleasure into account rather than damning it. this brings me to the question of the political implications of mirzoeff’s version of visual culture studies. what, i would ask, is he writing against? in terms of academic politics, he is writing against the linguistic turn and the influence of structuralism on the study of visual culture. his argument links theviewofapostmoderncultureofsimulacrabasedonvisualitywiththesen- sory “immediacy” evoked in the consumer by these simulacra, an immediacy surpassing the analytic power of semiotics. there are other villains, too, ex- plicit and/or implied, including “spin doctors, pollsters and other demons of the contemporary imagination”, against whose manipulative power to launch and spread discriminatory or politically hegemonic narratives “everyday vi- sual experience” offers a reservoir of resistance that is beyond the reach of ibid., (my italics). ibid., . see ibid., f.; another anti-visualist he writes against here is pierre bourdieu. . visual culture studies’ operational concept the manipulators on account of its unpredictability. according to mirzo- eff, then, visual culture has a special potential for political resistance: “visual culture is new precisely because of its focus on the visual as a place where meanings are created and contested.” western culture, mirzoeff argues, has privileged the spoken word (and not the written word, which, according to mitchell, inevitably also has visual aspects) as the highest form of intellec- tual practice, considering visual representations as “second-rate illustrations of ideas”. put this way, mirzoeff’s militant vindication of visual culture in the face of discrimination appears as a logical reflex. the combative structure of this argument, fighting for the visual, popu- lar culture of discriminated identities of race, class, sexual orientation and gender, seamlessly gives rise to a catchy metaphor describing visual culture studies: not a discipline, but, with deliberate reference to military parlance, a tactic: “a tactic is carried out in full view of the enemy, the society of control in which we live.… in the ongoing culture wars, tactics are necessary to avoid defeat.” visual culture is “a fluid interpretive structure, centered on under- standing the response to visual media of both individuals and groups. … like the other approaches mentioned above, it hopes to reach beyond the tradi- tional confines of the university to interact with people’s everyday lives.” this makes clear the extent to which mirzoeff derives his motivation from the militant identity politics of the s and ‘ s, and his desire to conduct politically engaged studies for “people’s lives”. such a desire is often accom- panied by a denial of the difference between theory and practice. wanting to bridge this gap brings with it the risk of theoretical pitfalls such as fail- ing to take into account a further difference – that between simulated reality and the medium of its simulation. where the militant side of the genesis of visual culture studies in identity politics is concerned, mirzoeff is certainly the most explicit of the three writers discussed in this chapter. he links the struggle with something i would call visual vitalism. this is localized in the recipient’s fascination with visually simulated realities, leading ultimately to what mieke bal was to refer to several years later, in a text that triggered an intense debate, as “visual essentialism”. ibid., . here mirzoeff refers to appadurai and rogoff. ibid., (my italics). ibid., . ibid., - . see bal, “visual essentialism”. the debate on this text also took place in the journal of visual culture, in the following issue ( : , ), - . beyond the mirror seeing is reading – mieke bal unlike mirzoeff, mieke bal never figured as a proponent of visual culture studies in the narrow sense. but she was involved in founding the first vi- sual culture program at the university of rochester in / , together with michael ann holly, norman bryson, kaja silverman and craig owens. and in the s, together with bryson, she pursued a project i propose to call the semioticization of art history. like bryson and mitchell, bal’s background is in literary criticism; like mitchell, she is writing against a polarization of text and image, language and vision. with her article visual essentialism and the object of visual culture – a fundamental critique of visual culture studies – bal launched a self-reflexive debate within visual culture studies that signals the end of the first phase of the academic establishment of the discipline.this debate had been heralded a year earlier by mitchell’s article showing seeing: a critique of visual culture. un- like mitchell, however, bal made direct attacks on several colleagues so that the journal of visual culture, where both texts were published, devoted space in the following issue to responses from within the field (not only from those who felt attacked). i will be focussing here on bal’s concept of visuality, char- acterized by a radically semiotic approach which mirzoeff rejects and which mitchell tries to combine with the dimension of the visual. in , bal caused a sensation and drew sharp criticism from art his- torians with reading “rembrandt”. beyond the word-image opposition, her first book on images and visuality. later reflecting on this work, she wrote: “throughout the book, i studied visuality in discourse and discursivity in images, relations between the two, and the cultural impact of events of encounter or struggle on vision and subjects. instead of trying to define visuality per se, i explored aspects and effects, forms and meanings that see mieke bal, a mieke bal reader (chicago ), . she notes that vision is a “semi- otic activity of an inherently rhetorical kind”. see bal, bryson, “semiotics and art history”. mieke bal, reading “rembrandt”. beyond the word-image opposition (cambridge, new york ). the critical reactions included michael podro, “reading ‘rembrandt’. beyond the word-image opposition by mieke bal” in the burlington magazine , no. ( ), - , and roger seamon, “reading ‘rembrandt’. beyond the word-image opposition by mieke bal” inthejournalofaestheticsandartcriticism , no. ( ), - . an enthusi- astic response came from griselda pollock, “reading‘rembrandt’.beyond the word-image opposition by mieke bal” in the art bulletin , no. ( ), - . . visual culture studies’ operational concept visuality possesses or makes possible. …, visuality gained the status of a discourse, not as subjected to language but as a kind of language with its own capacity of meaning production.” without going into detail on this controversial book here, i will outline only those issues that relate to visuality. in the foreword, bal explains what moved her, as a literary scholar, to work with images: “i could not remain blind to the fact that the overt emphasis on the word hardly conceals an overwhelmingly visual dimension in our culture, including both literature and the study of it. this prompted me to study systematically the interplay of visual and verbal elements.” on the one hand, bal writes against the separation of writing/text and image, verbal and visual communication. on the other, she picks up on two strands of feminist theory and art history: firstly, the feminist revision of freudian and lacanian psychoanalysis developed by laura mulvey, kaja silverman, teresa de lauretis and jacqueline rose in connection with questions of looking and the gaze; and secondly, a critique of the concept of male artistic authorship discussed in feminist art history since the early s. the latter is the reason for the inverted commas around rembrandt in the book’s title, labelling the artist and his œuvre as constructions of traditional art-historical dating and attribution. bal’s focus as a literary scholar is on narratology, and thus she draws an analogy between verbal and visual narrative strategies: “if we are to bring the verbal and the visual together, we must consider the relationship between the position of the focalizer in the verbal narrative and the viewer in the visual.” here she takes the concept of the focalizer from gérard genette, who dis- tinguishes between narrator (the person telling the story) and focalizer (the person who sees),and develops it further. the focalizer is the figure through whose eyes and thoughts the story is seen; the reader follows and identifies with the viewpoint of this figure – with seeing used as a metaphor here for the function performed by the focalizer in the narrative text: “focalization be- mieke bal, looking in: the art of viewing (introduction by norman bryson) (amsterdam ), . bal, reading “rembrandt”, xiii. ibid., . on focalization in narratology, see gérard genettegenette, narrative discourse (new york, ). french: discours du récit in figures iii (paris ). on focalization in bal, besidesreading“rembrandt”,seealsothechapteron“dispersingthegaze:focalization” in looking in, - . http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/g%c %a rard_genette http://de.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=die_erz%c %a hlung&action=edit&redlink= beyond the mirror longs to the story; it is the layer between the linguistic text and the fabula”, fabula being the story that is read or seen. by creating this analogy between focalization in the text and seeing in the visual (text), bal interconnects text and image – although she limits seeing to the function of producing mean- ing in the context of the narrative and its reception. the example she uses to illustrate this interconnection is rembrandt’s painting susanna and the el- ders, which is based on a written story: “i shall propose a visual reading of the biblical susanna story and a narrative reading of the paintings.” this process of seeing linking text/image and reader/viewer as the basis for interpretation, is expressed via a feminist terminology of “voyeurism, the glance,and the gaze”. bal thus borrows narratology with its visual metaphor of focalization from literary theory and then transfers it back to its visual source, linking it with the feminist critique of the patriarchal scopic regime. this is based on a key assumption: that seeing, which bal treats as both visual and verbal, is the semiotic activity.seeing is thus not only responsible for col- lecting the information for an interpretation; the interpretation already takes place in the act of seeing. “in narrative discourse, focalization is the direct content of the linguistic signifiers. in visual art, it would thus be the direct content of visual signifiers, such as lines, dots, light and dark, and composi- tion. in both cases, focalization is already an interpretation, or subjectivized content.” those elements of a picture discussed in art history under cate- gories of form, technique and style – the aesthetic and material constitution of the painted surface – are thus included here in the production of mean- ing and its interpretation as signifiers. focalizers within the picture, such as eye contact, directed gazes or pointing gestures between figures, are just as important as similar focalizers linking the figures in the painting with the viewer. the connections between narratology and reception aesthetics, as im- ported from german literary theory into art history by wolfgang kemp, are twofold: both are oriented towards reception, and both view pictures in terms of narrative. the meaning produced in the act of seeing is a narrative. as a basic assumption this is, i suggest, too narrow a view of what visual objects can evoke in the recipient and of what might count as meaning. if bal, looking in, . see bal, reading “rembrandt”, chapter , . ibid. bal, looking in, (my italics). . visual culture studies’ operational concept one does not follow this assumption of narrative as the ultimate producer of meaning in the sense of an anthropological constant, one must ask whether focalization can only work for narrative pictures – like susanna and the elders, which can be classified within the genre of history painting due to being based on a biblical story. focalization and focalizer are metaphors for a model of communication between object/picture and viewer that functions via an identification of the viewer with the focalizing agent. the focalizing agent generates an “appeal to identification”. this basic assumption concerning the communication be- tween text/image and reader/viewer is unthinkable without psychoanalytical theory. in film theory, for example, the psychoanalytical concept of identifi- cation formed the basis of laura mulvey’s conception of the male gaze and visual pleasure. mulvey identified an active (male) and a passive (female) pole of reception, tracing this back to the filmic structure of identification within the rigid setting of consuming hollywood movies. and her proposed strategy ofresistancetothispowerconstellationofthegazeisalsodirectedagainst the inner narrative structure of such movies: this structure should be destroyed by means of avant-garde filmmaking and with it the conditions for identi- fication within the scopic regime of the gaze. bal’s assumptions concerning the conditions of communication between visual object (picture, film) and viewer differ from mulvey’s.bal sees potential for resistance to the gaze in her reading-based strategy of focalization: “as i see it,at the heart of focalization, and hence, of both linguistic narrative and visual art, is a hub that shifts and destabilizes the gaze.” while mulvey argues in terms of production (the film itself must change), bal proposes a specific strategy for reception. inhis introduction to a collectionof bal’s essays,norman bryson gives his analysis of the differences between the strategies marshalled by mulvey and bal against the gaze, referring to mulvey’s theory of the gaze as optical and to bal’s as rhetorical or semiotic. mulvey’s stage for the gaze is the cinema: a darkened room, the audience fix their gaze on the screen, only the beam of light from the projector and the surface of the screen are visible. as a space, this setting, as i indicated earlier, resembles the albertian construction of bal, reading “rembrandt”, . bal, looking in, chapter on “dispersing the gaze: focalization”, . norman bryson, “introduction” in bal, looking in, - . on mulvey and bal, see espe- cially - . beyond the mirror perspective with a fixed viewer position and the visual pyramid between pro- jector and screen, into which the viewer inserts herself.“mulvey’s model reca- pitulates centuries of optical speculation in the west, faithfully retracing its perennial geometry: the retina, the lens, and the plane of representations.” hereit isagain,thatreprehensiblewesternone-pointperspective,whichfixes the gaze within an order and knows only one direction of looking, only one focus. not so bal’s model. in her work, bryson asserts: “sight is figured not as scenic but as semiotic.the first step is to postulate signs rather than scenes as the basic stuff of vision.” he continues: “the space is that of discourse rather than projective geometry: of any human language where there are signs for i, you, she, he – and where there exist stories, narratives (perhaps the key term in all of bal’s work).” in contrast to the “implacable dualism” of active sub- jectpositionand passiveobjectposition inmulvey’smodel,bal’s ismultifocal. hertransferoffocalizationfromliterarytheoryintothevisualrealmopensup possibilities of seeing that are not subject to any polarization. it can be read as a kind of counter-model to one-point perspective and thus as an eman- cipation of the viewer position from perspective’s fixedness: “resistance is built into each point of the image’s field: the narrator ‘rembrandt’, lucretia, the viewer. that each point possesses powers of resistance creates a far more complex and volatile arena of power in vision …: power not as a monolith, or pyramid (the ‘visual pyramid’), …, but rather a set of relations or a ‘swarm of points’ (foucault) such that the possibility of reversing the power relation is present at each node of the image’s focalization.” but bryson’s characteriza- tion of bal’s approach, making her semioticization of seeing responsible for emancipating it from a fixed dualism,seems to me inherently indebted to the antivisualism of french poststructuralism as diagnosed by martin jay. in her rembrandt book, bal’s use of the term visuality is correspondingly flexible. it covers more than the gaze or the glance. in specific cases, it may be about the visuality of a picture, as when bal writes of the “self-evidential effect of the painting” that is attributed to the visuality of the picture. this kind of visuality relates to reception (the effect) and is not conceived of in ibid., . ibid. ibid., . ibid., . see jay, downcast eyes. bal, reading “rembrandt”, . . visual culture studies’ operational concept ontological terms. but visuality is also the other of discursivity, two poles that bal is interested in interweaving not in the sense of an abolition of the difference between image and text, but by integrating discursivity “into the very center of visuality. thus she approvingly notes of alpers’ and steinberg’s interpretations of velasquez’s las meninas that, rather than reading the pic- ture with a “stable conception of the sign”, they explain it as a “sign event” between image and interpreter, integrating the discourses about the picture into the interpretation. the sign event in bal corresponds to the visual event in mirzoeff. bal’s founding of visuality in psychoanalysis is theoretically pivotal, as it forms the basis for her other case studies. it is also here, however, that an an- thropologicalconstantcreepsinofthekindthatbecomesinevitableassoonas psychoanalysis is deployed as a metatheory: bal speaks in a freudian sense of “primary visuality” as the experience that brings forth a fear of castration. vi- suality is thus an experience that is both a fundamental and a gender-specific part of identity formation. another fundamental nexus between self and visuality in bal is the psychoanalytical concept of narcissism, which is based on the motif of the mirror and in which the fraught relationship between self and other is read as a kind of visual allegory. this motif runs through the rembrandt book in various combinations; to borrow a metaphor from music theory it forms the dominant of bal’s thinking. finally, bal’s intellectual trains of thought and arguments seem to me to be based on metaphors of the visual. one might even say that visuality is the allegory of her theory and of her modus operandi. the result of this, as michael podro puts it in his review of the rembrandt book, is “to make the picture an image of its criticism”. looking back, she described her personal turn towards the visual: “i felt empowered by visuality and knew that … i had to explore this concept further.” it seems to me that bal tries to speak/write visuality, or, conversely, to bring forth visuality in writing. what of the relationship between artist/object/interpreter? in podro’s view, bal’s interpretative practice does not offer a dialogical relationship be- tween interpreter and object because its self-reflexivity (which he sees as the core of her writing) ends up with the work reflecting her own process back at ibid., . ibid., . see in particular bal, reading “rembrandt”, f., and chapters , and . podro, “beyond the word-image opposition”, . bal, looking in, . beyond the mirror her. bal’s basic assumption that signs receive their meaning from the viewer, he claims, leads to the difference between the work and our “discourse upon it” being overwritten or suspended. this is contrasted with his view that “if we recognize that utterances and depictions address and show themselves to a viewer and that this is a fact internal to their making, then we see that at the centre of our activity is the respect of painter for viewer and vice- versa”. and he adds: “the reciprocity of conversation is a better model for the relation of viewer to work than interpreting our own dreams.” to this reciprocity, he adds the distancing motif of historical imagination, because “otherwise we simply allow our own concerns and obsessions to feed on the works at which we look”. but is the dialogical model, characterized by podro as an ethical one via his use of the word ‘respect’, even compatible with lacan’s narcissistic model of the gaze on which bal’s position is based? this question implies further problems for both art history and visual culture studies, such as that of the relationship between interpretative present and historical alterity, or unfa- miliarity, of the object. like bryson, bal argues for the present as the sole legitimate moment of interpretation, while the historicity of the object must be considered as inaccessible and any effort in this direction, out of a desire for objectivity, can only be “pseudo”. but quite apart from the fact that the very intensity of the recurring dis- putes over the relevance of history to the present speaks in favour of such a relevance, it is the material presence of the historical object in a context de- termined by contemporary culture that sets in motion the interpreter’s con- frontation with the object.what is most interesting here is the way this ques- tion of historicity, which plays an important role in the academic policing of the borders between art history and visual culture studies, acquires relevance precisely in connection with visuality. bryson, mirzoeff and bal share a ten- dency towards a certain presentism. for mirzoeff, it is the presence of the fascinated and manipulated consumer; for bal and bryson, that of the see- ing, reading interpreter. podro, “beyond the word-image opposition”, . . seeing as a political resource in visual culture studies visual culture studies has become a sprawling field. every conceivable disci- pline is now making links to visual culture, from art history to art education, film, media and theatre studies, literary theory, and the other usual suspects, through to anthropology, history, sociology, theology, jurisprudence, theol- ogy and even computer science, neurobiology, medicine, and other natural sciences. in , marquard smith remarked: “the huge number of books [about visual culture] tells us that the phrase ‘visual culture’ is becoming ubiq- uitous,omnipresent,that itcanandisbeingusedtosignifyworksorartefacts or spaces from any historical period,geographical location,thematic concern, or combination of methodological practices.because of this, the phrasevisual culture conveys little that is specific to our past or present visual culture per se. it seems that visual culture is everywhere, and thus nowhere, wholly over- determined and almost meaningless simultaneously.” in the same spirit, vi- sual culture was often included in the titles and introductions of publications to give conventional takes on subject matter from all manner of disciplines an aura of topicality. eleven years after being cited by mitchell in as prospects, the themes, objects and methodologies listed by smith give a picture of the field that is every bit as vague as mitchell’s attempt to characterize visual culture with- out restrictive definitions. the thematic framework of the publications may be historically synchronous or diachronic, regional or national; it may orient marquard smith, “visual culture studies: questions of history, theory, and practice” in amelia jones (ed.), a companion to contemporary art since (oxford ), - : . over a few pages, smith also offers a survey of the publishing history to date that tries to tackle the full breadth of applications, as well as his version of a possible genealogy for visual culture studies. beyond the mirror itself towards themes of race, class, gender and sexuality that emerged from the political agenda of recent decades and which shaped visual culture stud- ies as a “political and ethical field of study”. smith also notes that most of these books with “visual culture” in the title are readers and introductions for a student readership. he describes them as “methodological inquiries, cabi- nets of curiosity” that deal on the one hand with the production, circulation and consumption of pictures and the “changing nature of subjectivity” and, on the other,with gazes,visual practices and technologies.what they all have in common is that they identify the points where “images and objects and subjects and environments overlap, blur and converge with and mediate one another”; using a metaphor from digital culture, these points could also be referred to as interfaces. to come to terms with this wealth of material beyond smith’s loose struc- turing, i will therefore examine three strategies used in studies of the gaze to deal with concepts of seeing in their specific application to visual objects. the main question here is that of how the concept of the gaze is linked with the problems inherent in the category of identity. as examples i have chosen two texts that represent opposite extremes. in both cases, it is a matter of how to deal with the discriminating gazes in such a way that the discrimi- nated groups in question might transform their situation within this field of discriminatory visual practices and arrive at pictures of their “own” identity. these are: gay and lesbian in the case of norman bryson’s “todd haynes’s poi- son and queer cinema”, and afro-american female in the case of bell hooks’ “the oppositional gaze – black female spectators”. a third text by martin a. berger serves as an example of how evidence of a normative visuality is de- fined, based not on discriminatory stereotypes but on visual representations of theworld, inthiscasetheamericanwest,seenoncethroughtheeyesof the conquering “white man” and once through those of the “native”. for bryson and hooks, the political agenda of visual culture studies is the driving force, claiming recognition for the identity of discriminated groups. berger, on the other hand, links the academic perspective (with its critique of one-point per- spective as a figure of power and logocentrism) with the political agenda. smith, “visual culture studies”, . ibid., . . seeing as a political resource in visual culture studies the stigmatizing gaze – ‘integration and positive revaluation’ – norman bryson norman bryson’s text todd haynes’s poison and queer cinema from ex- emplifies the transformation of the evil eye into the metaphor of the socially controlling and repressive gaze, as outlined not only by martin jay but also by margaret olin. based on his critique of gay and lesbian studies,bryson com- bines the model of the gaze with the heteronormativity of society. in bryson’s view, gay and lesbian studies have a problem similar to that faced more than two decades previously by feminist art historians: it could not be merely a matter of healing the discrimination of women/lesbians/gays by discovering the forgotten heroes of these “minorities” and making them public. around , feminist art history began with the objective of expanding the conven- tional canon to include forgotten and repressed “female” artists, only to dis- cover that this resulted in neither a critique nor a disempowerment of the pa- triarchy. and in the late s, the art historical branch of the gay and lesbian movement, that wanted to canonize leonardo, michelangelo, david hockney or robert mapplethorpe as gay artists, came to similar conclusions, accen- tuated by the political experience of being made responsible for the aids epidemic. bryson seeks to respond to this “minoritarian” strategy with a “majoritar- ian position” along the lines of queer studies: the stigmatization of gay and lesbian people and their culture is not a local problem that could be dealt with via a politics of inclusion. instead, it is linked to all of the various dimensions of cultural normativity. which is why it cannot be a matter of adding gay and lesbian positions to the “normal” canon to gain access to “the club”. instead, one must study the structures of coercive heteronormativity which shape the cultural canon and its organization – while bearing in mind that this same coercive heteronormativity also permeates the visual field of the homosexual scene. with this argument, bryson achieves two things: he declares the “visual field” to be the central element of heteronormative coercion and culture, and norman bryson, “todd haynes’s poison and queer cinema” in invisible culture. an elec- tronic journal for visual studies, , http://www.rochester.edu/in_visible_culture/is- sue /bryson (accessed sept ). see chapter , the evil eye and a counter-model – margaret olin, in this book. bryson, “todd haynes’s poison”, . http://www.rochester.edu/in_visible_culture/issue /bryson http://www.rochester.edu/in_visible_culture/issue /bryson http://www.rochester.edu/in_visible_culture/issue /bryson http://www.rochester.edu/in_visible_culture/issue /bryson http://www.rochester.edu/in_visible_culture/issue /bryson http://www.rochester.edu/in_visible_culture/issue /bryson http://www.rochester.edu/in_visible_culture/issue /bryson http://www.rochester.edu/in_visible_culture/issue /bryson http://www.rochester.edu/in_visible_culture/issue /bryson http://www.rochester.edu/in_visible_culture/issue /bryson beyond the mirror he makes it clear that the task of queer art history and visual culture studies consists in studying this visual field with its preordained structures for het- eronormative inclusion and exclusion. this in turn has further consequences, since the assumption of a heteronormative structuring of society depends on the assumption of social and cultural constructivism. this implies a critique of the identity politics of “minorities” that is already familiar: “an acute prob- lem within minoritarian cultural politics is the tendency to dramatize and to valorize authentic expressions of the minority in question: the minority is thought of as embodied in a particularly radical or foundational way,” a position also known as essentialism that insists on authenticity of identity beyond the shaping influence of culture – identity in aspic, as gayatri spivak has called it. for bryson, then, it cannot be a question of looking for visual evidence of gay and lesbian “authenticity”. instead, it is about examining coercively heteronormative structures since it is they that produce not only the subjects included in heteronormativity but also those it excludes. for both, this pro- cess is crucially accompanied by desire and the denial of desire, as expressed, among others, in homophobia. at this point in bryson’s argument, the gaze comes into play, as homophobia is a “visual operation”. the precondition for this is the historical shift,described by foucault, from the sodomite act to the homosexual type as the basic marker for homosexuality and its punishment. since the early th century, techniques of visual taxonomy such as photogra- phy made it possible to catalogue, archive and manage what was considered socially, ethnically, racially and sexually “abnormal” – from criminals, the in- sane and the ill, through to jews, homosexuals, and so forth. abnormality is thus produced in a form “that manifests it directly to the naked eye: de- viance or degeneration as a face”. but the homosexual was a “notoriously elusive type”; the signs of homosexuality were “penumbral and deceptive” and mostly only decipherable by members of the scene themselves. “among the myriad forms of deviancy, it is homosexuality, in fact, that tests the powers of the normalizing gaze to its limits.” ibid. ibid., . see michel foucault, history of sexuality, vol. : the will to knowledge (histoire de la sexu- alité, i: la volonté de savoir, paris ). bryson, “todd haynes’s poison”, . ibid., . ibid., , (my italics). . seeing as a political resource in visual culture studies the ‘normalizing gaze’, the ‘homophobic gaze’, the ‘gaze of the stigma- tizor’, the ‘diagnostic gaze’ – with these variants, bryson creates pointed metaphors in his description of the visualization strategies of heteronorma- tive taxonomy. this gaze is not a simple look; it stares, bores, penetrates to the stigmatized body’s most intimate places to shed light on the “penumbra” of the elusive homosexual “type” and render it visible. this “gaze seeks out its enemies”; the stigmatizor must get dangerously close to the deviant body in order to even find out whether/that it is indeed deviant. “from the stigmatizor’s viewpoint the stigma is intended as a brand, an inscription of the sign of criminality; but at the same time the stigma is the very point closest to desire, where complicity becomes inescapable, and alien desire irrupts into the visual field of the stigmatizor.” at this point, the stigmatizor is gripped by a visual panic, a “disruption of the visual field that lies at the foundation of heteronormative visuality”. the diagnostic gaze is contradictory, it is a sadistic, invasive procedure likened to branding the deviant body, but at the moment of applying the hot iron “the whole visual field suddenly buckles and bends around”. in ever more metaphorically charged language, bryson describes how a secretion oozes through stigmata from the deviant side to the “normal” side of the stigma- tizor, “the secretion of a secret”. the stigma, inflicted by the invasive gaze, becomes the membrane that overcomes, or at least jeopardizes, the division between deviance and normality. the “brand-become-infection” defines ho- mophobic panic as a visual field. this gaze is closely related to the evil eye. one key difference results from its link to the construction of identity – both “normal” identity as secured via a distinction based on visual evidence and “deviant” identity established by inflicting a mark by which such an ‘identity’ will be recognized. bryson turns the tables and asks how a reversal of this stigmatization might look. if we follow bryson’s version of the gaze, cast by the stigmatizor onto the deviant subject (it remains unclear whether the stigmatizor is meant as a subject or as a foucauldian dispositif ), then it must involve, i suggest, turning the gaze from the deviant back onto the stigmatizor. bryson makes another proposal that adopts the strategies of the lesbian and gay subculture: those who have been socially nullified and rendered invisible by this stigma all quotations in this paragraph, ibid, - . ibid., . ibid., . beyond the mirror reclaim it, making it their own in erotic and critical terms. i suggest a de- scription of this process as a libidinous reconfiguration. “the stigmatization could itself be treated as a modality of desire, whose origins lay ultimately in the brand, the mark, the seal.” in bryson’s model, the stigma becomes the site of queer desire. gay subculture in particular offers countless examples of this tactic. bryson chooses todd haynes’s film poison. he is especially interested in the film’s plot, whereas he devotes little attention to the way it is made in terms of the gaze, although such a focus would bring cinema itself as a visual apparatus and scopic regime into play, allowing the theoretical concept of the gaze to be adequately applied to the film (it is worth recalling that in her analysis of fassbinder’s film based on the same material by genet, kaja silverman deals with the gaze entirely on this level. ) instead, bryson focuses on haynes’s stylistic use of parody and the artificiality which, he claims, produces a brechtian alienation effect, preventing identification. in this way, poison is reduced to the function of evidence for bryson’s pro- posal to recode the stigma into a marking of gay identity that is positively coded in terms of “deviant” desire – an identity that also has a supposedly critical quality (via alienation). for my questions on the practice of visual culture studies, bryson’s remarks are interesting because they introduce the concept of the gaze into visual culture studies in connection with a specific identity politics. he does so via a rhetoric whose persuasive power derives from metaphors of the visual: visual panic, visual field, visual operation, homophobic, diagnostic, medico-juridical gaze. in his discussion of poison bryson’s gaze goes in one direction only. the stigmatizor looks, the person looked at does not look back, but appropriates the look and integrates it into the structure of his own desire. this gay tactic is the most radical manifestation of the issue raised by identity politics of visibility, whatever their strategic limitations: the appropriation of external images as self-images in groups whose internal structures of belonging are also determined via these images. this tactic is also radical in its narcissistic ibid., . silverman, “fassbinder and lacan”. it is also surprising that bryson doesn’t even men- tion this fundamental text, in spite of its thematic and theoretical relevance, and in spite of the fact that it was published under his editorship. in , such a claim is more the re-enactment of an already established practice that canonlybeseenaspoliticallyurgentifonetakesgayaidsactivismintoaccount(which had been ongoing outside universities since the mid- s). . seeing as a political resource in visual culture studies structure. such attempts to force recognition of deviance within a normative framework by recognizing oneself in the image of this deviance may have the short-term success of shifting the borders of what is recognized,but the price is high: for one thing, these images will have to be internalized to a certain degree and, for another, the groups showing themselves in this way not only become visible, but their distinctive markings become consumable. how can bryson’s view of the relationship between gaze and object be summed up? the gaze produces the stigma (it remains unclear whether this gaze is meant to stand for the social discourse of homophobia in general or a characterization of the homophobic activity of a perpetrator, the stigmatizor –probably both); the visual representation of the stigma becomes the thing that is sought out in the object (in this case the film). what can be considered or referred to as such a representation is a matter of interpretation. we could also say that the stigma is bryson’s main aim of inquiry, which in turn struc- tures both his use of the gaze concept and his pinpointing of the stigma in specific iconographic and narrative elements of the film. the interpretative tools of his approach, then, are iconography/motifs and content/plot, rather than any focus on media-specific characteristics of film itself, shot and edited using specific technologies and procedures with regard to gazes both within the film and between film and viewer. the potential for such a dialogical ap- proach to the film medium (an exchange of gazes between film and viewer forms the basis for interpretation) is demonstrated by silverman’s fassbinder essay. for bryson, the film is not a counterpart of the viewer/interpreter in the sense of dialogical seeing, but a reservoir of evidence (in the form of mo- tifs and storylines) for the detection of a homophobic stigma and its inversion into homosexual desire. for bryson, at the time of its publication in at least, this text was programmatic – politically for the queer movement and academically for vi- sual culture studies and art history. with regard to my examination of visual culture studies, i consider bryson’s text to be symptomatic and thus impor- tant. and my reading of it is guided not only by the questions i address to visual culture studies, but also by my own experience as a feminist activist and intellectual since the s, when i was soon confronted with the pitfalls of identity politics. the text shows how an intensely identity-focused agenda based on visuality impacts on the process of interpretation.by , the tactic of integratingdiscriminatorystereotypesintotheself-imageofdiscriminated groups, a tactic radically demonstrated by bryson here, had already been the subject of critical discussion in political circles for years – highlighting the beyond the mirror way academic agendas tend to lag behind political activism. the essay is also symptomatic in what i see as its narcissistic tautologization of the exchange of glances between film and viewer.by this i mean a closed circuit established between the gaze of the viewer, in this case the interpreter and – that same viewer. the film itself is but the trigger for this tautology of the gaze. in what follows i will examine a position that responds to the discriminating gaze not with integration, but with opposition. the discriminating and the oppositional gaze – bell hooks on account of the word’s double meaning (“degrading or excluding individ- uals or groups” but also “capable of making fine distinctions”) a “discrimi- nating” gaze may be about selecting nuances of colour for sofa cushions, but also about using socially constructed markers to make distinctions that play a crucial role in determining whether or not a person belongs to a discrimi- nated group. bryson’s stigma is a metaphor for such markers, adding a sub- text charged with christian associations of suffering,sacrifice and desire.the gaze produces the stigma, seeks it out and finds it in a circular movement, as a productive and reproductive part of visual discourses. in bryson’s version, as in that of laura mulvey, for example, this gaze falls on a passive object that is ultimately the victim of this gaze and the discourses in which it partakes. many texts in visual culture studies follow this pattern when they study the stereotypeswithwhichdiscriminatedgroupsarevisualised.thisresearchwas and is important in order to render the history of such stereotyping visible and thus to underline the visual dimension of both manifest and, more espe- cially, latentracisminall itsmanifoldculturalsymptoms.but itdoesalsohave its strategic pitfalls: when the concept of the gaze is used in this way, the gaze is identical with the images it has produced. put another way: the images of racism give a transparent view of the discriminating gaze, of which they are also evidence. such an approach to visual culture cannot escape a politics of the victim,since the possibility of looking back is not considered.the master- servant relationship is unambiguous. in methodological terms, the result of deploying the gaze in this way, in the study of racist, sexist, ethnic and other stereotypes, is closely related to art-historical iconography: pictures and their components are viewed as representations of something else. unlike in art history, however, such gathering of visual evidence of social discrimination is . seeing as a political resource in visual culture studies underpinned here by an openly articulated agenda that is highly dramatic in political terms. in , early in the history of visual culture studies (but years after mulvey’s visual pleasure and narrative cinema claimed the impossibility of ac- tive looking for women in hollywood movies), the african-american theorist, film critic and artist bell hooks made a counterproposal, opposing a strategy of resistance to the passivity of those touched by the gaze. her essay was ti- tled“the oppositional gaze –black female spectators”. it came neither from art history nor from visual culture studies itself, but, once again, from film studies which, since mulvey if not before, had been strongly shaped by fem- inist ideas and engaged intensively with questions of viewer positions and the gaze. in hooks’ text, gaze, identity, agency, gender and race are dealt with together. like bryson, hooks proposes countering the discriminating gaze. but there is a radical difference between their positions: rather than the dis- criminated appropriating the stereotypical image produced by this gaze and integrating it into their own desire (as with bryson’s stigma), her strategy involves staring back. rather than establishing it as something that must first be established, hooks derives this “oppositional gaze” (that seems to be the exact opposite of the “stigmatizing gaze”) from a way of looking already practised by slaves. the ban on looking to which they were subjected (looking back was punished) produced in them an overwhelming desire “to look, a rebellious desire, an oppositional gaze”. even in situations of the worst oppression, the ability to manipulate one’s own gaze in the face of structures of power that seek to restrict it opens up the possibility of agency, a key concept in the debate on poststructuralist critiques of the subject and their impact on thinking about the subject’s scope for action in the political struggles since the s. in the texts on gaze and visuality discussed above, this concept played no part; this may have to do with the passive-paranoid readings of the concepts of the gaze which (as the example of bryson shows) bell hooks, “the oppositional gaze – black female spectators” in black looks: race and representation (boston ), - . i do not mean to suggest that there were no pre- vious critical responses to mulvey’s text; other feminist film critics criticized mulvey’s gender-specific distinction between an active male position of visual pleasure and a passive female one of being looked at, the earliest such critique coming from kaja sil- verman, “masochism and subjectivity” in framework ( ). - . hooks, “the oppositional gaze”, . beyond the mirror lead to a victimization of the subject by the gaze. it is this that hooks is writing against. hooks wants to take a practice of looking that emerged in a situation of oppressionandupdateitforuseinresistancetopower.sherefersnottolacan but to foucault, according to whom the potential for resistance exists within all relations of power; critical thinkers must seek out the “margins, gaps and locations on and through the body where agency can be found”. for hooks, the gaze is one such location: “subordinates in relations of power learn expe- rientially that there is a critical gaze, one that ‘looks’ to document, one that is oppositional.” african americans, then, derive this specific gaze from the experience of slavery.for the current media situation this entails a special ex- perience of looking: “to stare at television, or mainstream movies, to engage its images, was to engage its negation of black representation.” resistance, she argues,thus takes the form of rejecting a certain identity-based represen- tation in the narrative medium.the oppositional black gaze responded to this by developing independent black cinema; the progress of the political move- ments for racial equality could be gauged by the construction of new images of black identity. hooks’ construction of a “black female spectatorship” that resists the white mainstream is framed by three concepts: agency, narration and repre- sentation. quoting manthia diawara, she asserts that “every narration places thespectator inapositionofagency,”especiallyatmomentsof“rupture”when the viewer resists identification with the film’s discourse. unlike mulvey, however, hooks sees such “ruptures” not in the filmic mode itself, as when a plot is interrupted,fragmentedorundermined,butinthenarrativetreatment of stereotypes of race and gender. in other words: not the formal structure, but the plot, and especially the use of characterization (a typical example be- ing the matronly black servant who can only stand in for the white children’s mother because she is not allowed to have children herself), give rise to the kind of experience that brings forth the oppositional gaze: the negative or withheld representation of an identity that is both black and female, as hooks focuses on this double discrimination. the paradigm of representation as the ibid. ibid., . ibid., . ibid., . here i would refer again to mulvey’s call for an avant-garde aesthetic of fragmentation as a weapon against the identificatory pull of narrative hollywood cinema. . seeing as a political resource in visual culture studies key element of identity politics, on the other hand, is something hooks bor- rows from stuart hall. so what does the oppositional gaze do? “within my family’s southern black working-class home, located in a racially segregated neighborhood, watching television was one way to develop critical spectatorship. unless you went to work in the white world, across the tracks, you learned to look at white people by staring at them on the screen. … before racial integration, black viewers of movies and television experienced visual pleasure in a context where looking was also about contestation and confrontation.” the oppositional gaze overcomes the pain of being confronted with humiliating portrayals of black female stereotypes in the film by learning how racism determines the visual construction of gender in cinema. while mulvey, for example, situates female criticality in a position “outside that pleasure of looking”, in hooks’ model the black female viewers actively refuse to identify with the “imaginary subjects” of the film because “such identification was disenabling”. mulvey’s distinction between active/male and passive/female becomes irrelevant for the oppositional gaze of the black female viewers insofar as they refuse to identify with the film representation of white womanhood that forms the passive pole in mulvey’s model. “black female spectators, who refused to identify with white womanhood, who would not take on the phallocentric gaze of desire and possession, created a critical space where the binary opposition mulvey posits of ‘woman as image, man as bearer of the look’ was continually deconstructed.” hooks thus identifies specific differences between the viewer positions of black and white women that are the result of lived, historically determined experience with the socio- cultural conditions and effects of racism. for mulvey, the strategic goal is a feminist “disaffection” with hollywood cinema, whereas for hooks resistance to the role models for black women presented in films is the “starting point for many black women approaching cinema within the lived harsh reality of racism”. this is also the starting point for hooks’ critique of feminist film criticism’s blindness to racism, as black women viewers identify with none of the postulated viewer positions – neither with the phallocentric gaze nor with the construction of white womanhood as a lack. critical “black female hooks, “the oppositional gaze”, . ibid., . ibid., - . ibid., . beyond the mirror spectators construct a theory of looking relations where cinematic visual delight is the pleasure of interrogation”. for hooks, this practice of critical questioning then gives rise to the discursive space that makes it possible for black women directors to formulate narratives with different representations of black womanhood; the aim is to find new transgressive possibilities for the formulation of identity and “new points of recognition”, thus helping to construct a radical black female subjectivity. the examples given by hooks for such moments describe eye contact between black characters in films, a “shared gaze” that testifies to solidarity between women and to their subjecthood. hooks’use of the gaze is ambivalent –besides the oppositional gaze, there is also the repressive gaze that makes women the victims of looking and of male desire. hooks uses the terms gaze and look with no clear theoretical dis- tinction, more on the basis of mood: the gaze is either discriminating, mak- ing victims,or it is actively turned against this dominant gaze by the victim,a gaze that stares back – in both cases, it implies a form of aggressiveness and a corresponding directedness; the look, on the other hand, comes into play when it is a question of the investigative, analytical, learning visual mode which, in hooks’ view, characterizes the visual pleasure of black women in particular, including their enjoyment of hollywood movies. seeing relates here on the one hand to a discursive, critical practice of watching and, on the other, to glances exchanged within the film narrative. critical spectatorship in turn focuses on unmasking stereotypes, but also on recognizing and ac- knowledging counter-models of identity devised by the narratives in films by black women directors. in both cases, the narrative is the object of seeing. for hooks, the pleasure of the critical gaze derives from the contrary movements of unmasking negative identity models and the construction and perception of new, positive identities. this pleasure arises not in individual, isolated seeing but in a political context of community,discussion and aware- ness. while this seeing itself can therefore not be described as dialogical with regard to its object (film), the context of this seeing is distinctly dialogical. this is also apparent in hooks’ descriptions of specific, shared moments of such visual experience and the ways they are dealt with. what is actually ibid., . ibid., - . by contrast, mulvey opposes hollywood films with avant-garde strategies to aestheti- cally thwart all visual pleasure. . seeing as a political resource in visual culture studies being looked at and discussed here are identity models as represented in film. these models become visible in the (film) narrative, in turn offering the spectator scope for agency. the aim is the construction of new, politically resistant identity models whose visibility is considered as a political resource. this follows the above-mentioned political agenda of visual culture studies, with a terminology drawn from cultural studies, especially that of stuart hall. forall thedifferencesbetweentheirpositions,hooksandbrysonbothtake their evidence from the elements of narrative,of filmic plot.this is a common methodological consequence of the focus on identity politics within visual culture studies.the theoretical basis for this focus,formulated in the writings of stuart hall, is the equation of culture with the production of meaning and of visual objects as sites of representation of such meaning. this in turn leads to what might loosely be termed a “content-focused” position with regard to the objects under interpretation. an attempt at integration from art history – lisa bloom thestigmatizingandtheoppositionalgazeareeachusedtoconstructadiffer- ent model of the acting political subject. the evil, dominating, heteronorma- tive,racist gaze is one side of this construction; this is countered by strategies of the resisting gaze that are intended to foster and safeguard the agency of discriminated subjects. these gazes are both directed at identifying external images of stereotypes which, in a second step, evoke identity-based self-im- ages. this second step takes different forms: while the stigmatizing gaze is integrated into the self-image of the political subject in a narcissistic loop, the model of the oppositional gaze describes the acting subject as one that looks back critically, deriving a newly constructed self-image from this inter- action in opposition to the external image. these models show the extremes between which discriminatory stereotypes are mostly dealt with: integration and resistance, masochism and combativeness. one of the early readers on visual culture studies, with other eyes: look- ing at race and gender in visual culture, edited by lisa bloom and published in , can be used to explore briefly attempts to transfer such concepts into lisabloom(ed.), withothereyes:lookingatraceandgenderinvisualculture (minneapo- lis, london ). beyond the mirror art history, revealing parallels with the academic perspective of visual culture studies. the book’s stated aim was to revitalize art history, which clings to an “idea of innocent vision as simple perception”, by using concepts of the gaze from visual culture studies. the texts, all written since the mid- s, bring together the main themes of the political agenda as it affects art his- tory:feministandantiracistcriticism,expandingthediscipline’sbrieftocover mediaandtheproductsofpopularculture,visualrepresentationsofdiscrimi- natedandmarginalizedidentities,critiquesofnationalisticvisualdiscourses. bloom presents a rigid and ultimately clichéd version of “traditional” art his- tory based on “innocent vision” as a negative foil for her aims. but art history certainly does not work on the basis of an innocent vision, in fact it could not even have come into existence on such grounds: a historically informed vision cannot be innocent. as otto pächt’s treatise on art historical method has shown, it involves the situatedness of the object of investigation as well as the situatedness of the interpreter’s gaze. bloom, however, uses “innocent vision” to describe the gaze of the male art historian as normative practice in the discipline.of interest here is not only that bloom uses this model of inno- cent vision to describe art history as a discipline in need of renewal, but also what alternatives she brings into play – alternatives that blend metaphors of thegazefromthepoliticalandacademicdiscoursesofvisualculturestudies. bloom speaks from the position of a feminist critique of the universal- izing, objectifying male gaze that the “pure seeing” of traditional art history reveals itself to be. this gaze is prolonged and contemplative; it takes as long as it needs to coax the secrets from the artwork, since a great work of art “does not spontaneously lay itself open to us”, as she quotes her chief witness mark roskill, before laying her critical finger in the wound of this chau- vinistic metaphor that draws its vividness from a patriarchal semantics of gender relationships.for bloom,this seeing that is supposedly so pure is con- structed “as an ordinary part of the development of a craft or skill in which an opposition between woman as image and man as bearer of the look is nat- lisa bloom, “introducing with other eyes” in: lisa bloom (ed.): with other eyes, - : . see chapter , first section, in this book. she uses a model of “pure vision” that would be easy to refute, but that is not my point here. as described in chapter of this book. mark roskill, what is art history? (amherst ), , quoted from bloom, “introducing with other eyes”, . . seeing as a political resource in visual culture studies uralized as part of an apprenticeship that leads to art historical mastery”. this echoes mulvey’s division of the gaze into active-male and passive-female, which bloom, too, criticizes as overly monolithic. in bloom’s view, the fem- inist critique of this gaze as an art-historical practice that defines the disci- pline’s “gendered process of investigation” must be expanded to include a critique of racism, thus also thwarting monolithic identity constructions of the female. as alternative practices of looking, bloom offers two examples: one is bell hooks’ oppositional gaze, that makes the gaze the site of resistance, while the other is based on imitation and parody, suggesting a process of seeing in which the meaning of race and ethnicity is not uniform, since race, ethnicity and sexuality vary between ethnic and social groups and within those groups themselves. with this position, bloom also articulates criticism of identity- based essentializations within the groups. her specific example of such a practice is from outside art history: the jewish lesbian performer sarah bern- hardt imitated black singers as a parody of her inability “to translate herself across racial boundaries”. for bloom, this is the third possible position that corresponds neither to the universalizing gaze of art history, nor to the op- positional gaze of hooks that still runs the risk of fixing identities. so much for the political agenda proposed by bloom for traditional art history. it intersects with the academic agenda insofar as she relates the uni- versalizing gaze of art history to a general critique of science as formulated by donna haraway. science as hegemonic knowledge, she argues, is charac- terized by “disengagement” and “detachment”, both of which imply a “gen- dered privilege of knowing no bodies” via what haraway calls a “conquering gaze from nowhere” that has the power to see without being seen. in the critical discourse of academic visual culture against art history, this kind of gaze is epitomized by body-denying, predictable and static one-point per- spective; proposed alternatives pin their hopes on the multi-perspectival art of the baroque or the descriptive art of dutch painting. for bloom’s political agenda, however, i assume that this would be too rooted in the conventional frameworkofthediscipline; insteadshereferstoademandmadebyharaway: bloom, “introducing with other eyes”, . ibid. ibid., . ibid., . haraway, “situated knowledges”, , quoted from bloom, “introducing with other eyes”, . beyond the mirror “feminists should work from their embodied perspectives in order to produce what she [haraway] calls ‘situated knowledges’”. these “embodied perspec- tives” form the basis for bloom’s project of changing art history in a way that makes it compatible with “feminist cultural studies but with an emphasis on the visual arts”. where does she locate this knowledge via embodied perspectives? bloom speaks of an autobiographical turn; not as a return to authorship deconstructed by barthes et al, but based on the assumption of a subject “as an embodied individual within the process of cultural interpretation”. and this subject – both artist and viewer – is situated within the categories of gender, race, class and sexual orientation. bloom’s own contribution to the reader, “ghosts of ethnicity: rethinking art discourses of the s and s” looks at the way “even the most formalist aesthetic positions are inescapably imbricated by the politics of identity”. her approach, the discourse analysis she applies to the texts of art criticism, makes it clear that she uses the concept of perspective not in relation to seeing as a physical and mental act or socio-cultural practice, but as a metaphor for the position from which questions are formulated and discourses interpreted. this perspective, which in bloom’s writing corresponds to the political agenda of visual culture studies, is thus the place from which the epistemes of traditional art history (the questioning of which foster had announced as early as on the basis of new problematizations of seeing) must be attacked and changed. what this might mean for the relationship between the interpretative act of seeing and its object remains unclear. evidence having looked at concepts of the gaze in the political agenda of visual cul- ture studies and the impact of this agenda on the search for a revised art bloom, “introducing with other eyes”, . see haraway, “situated knowledges”. bloom, “introducing with other eyes”, . ibid., . however, bloom’s reception of haraway’s critique of science does not uphold the dialectic between the positioning of the scientist and the objectivity of her object of study, a dialectic on which haraway insists, see chapter in this book. in bloom (ed.), with other eyes. bloom, “introducing with other eyes”, . in foster, vision and visuality, see chapter of this book. . seeing as a political resource in visual culture studies history, i want to turn now to a problem that bloom clearly did not ask her- self: what is used as evidence? which kinds of evidence can be found for questions concerning new political subjects and the visual representations of their identities? where and how should such evidence be looked for? thequestionofevidencecanbeaskedindependentlyoftheobjectofvisual culture studies – since, as we have seen, the question of the object of visual culture studies is an open one.for mitchell, this undefined,open quality con- stitutes the pioneering character of visual culture studies as an “indiscipline”. as marquard smith said, “whether we are discussing objects or subjects or media or environments or ways of seeing and practices of looking, the vi- sual, or visuality, visual culture studies as an interdisciplinary field of inquiry has the potential to create new objects of study, and it does so specifically by not determining them in advance”. these “new objects of study” are taken almost word-for-wordfromatextoninterdisciplinaritybyrolandbarthesfrequently quoted in theoretical texts seeking to underpin and legitimize visual culture studies, a quotation that has clearly become so canonical as no longer to be labelled as a quotation or reference: “in order to do interdisciplinary work it is not enough to take a ‘subject’ (a theme) and to arrange two or three sciences around it. interdisciplinary study consists in creating a new object, which belongs to no one.” whereas barthes was interested in freeing interdisciplinary work from theconstraintsof institutionalizeddisciplines,hisstatement isusedbysmith to give visual culture studies a unifying foundation – a paradoxical move that uses a statement of radical interdisciplinarity to found a discipline. as a re- sult, visual culture studies inhabits the tension between its academic institu- tionalization and its claim to create something which, in terms of academic politics, “belongs to no one”. this has consequences for the question of evi- dence. the use of evidence, as proof, is part of the register of scientific ob- smith, “visual culture studies”, . as for example in the work of bal and mitchell. roland barthes, “research: the young” in the rustle of language (berkeley, los ange- les ), - : . barthes continues: “the text is, i believe, one such object.” original quote from “jeunes chercheurs” in communications , no. ( ), - : : “l’interdis- ciplinaire, dont on parle beaucoup, ne consiste pas à confronter des disciplines déjà constituées (dont, en fait, aucune ne consent à s’abandonner). pour faire de l’interdis- ciplinaire, il ne suffit pas de prendre un ‘sujet’ (un thème) et de convoquer autour deux ou trois sciences. l’interdisciplinaire consiste à créer un objet nouveau, qui n’apparti- enne à personne. le texte est, je crois, l’un de ces objets.” beyond the mirror jectivity; but how does such an object of investigation take shape when visual culture studies does not have a defined, concrete object (in the sense that the object of art history is art)? or should visual culture studies itself, by analogy withbarthes’stext (capitalizedintheoriginal)beclassifiedasan“objectwhich belongs to no one”? but studies cannot be equated with their object of study. so could visualculture be analogous to barthes’s text as the object of visual cul- ture studies? then visual culture would be to visual culture studies what text is to semiotics, an analogy that fails in my opinion because visual culture stud- ies is not secured by a theoretical framework comparable to that possessed by the text in barthes. visual culture was born as a combination of concepts (vision and culture) that are not capable (individually or together) of bringing forth a coherent theoretical framework, being shaped instead by a diversity of positions, interests and discourse histories. conversely, this makes visual culture studies more flexible than semiotics as it has not only produced no co- herent theory,butalso nomethod.asa result,unlikesemioticsas thestudyof text, visual culture studies cannot be criticized as a totalizing interpretative model. visual culture studies lives as long as its theoretical and methodolog- ical eclecticism can react to historically evolving issues. evidence in visual culture studies, then, must relate not to a single object (as in the case of art history, which has art as its object of inquiry) but to many. object and evidence alike result from the specific line of inquiry, and not vice versa. neither is objective in the sense of pre-existing as things; they are extremely discourse-dependent and must be constructed. in view of the diversity of themes and approaches in visual culture studies, i will now read a text whose academic research comes from the political agenda of visual culture studies not only in terms of its position with regard to seeing, but also concerning its construction of visual evidence, which in turn follows the academic discourse of visual culture studies with its negative view of one- point perspective. evidence of the non-visible – martin a. berger in sight unseen. whiteness and american visual culture ( ), martin a. berger studies “the links between racial identification and vision”. his book re- martin a. berger, sight unseen. whiteness and american visual culture (berkeley, los an- geles ), . . seeing as a political resource in visual culture studies sponds to problems resulting from research into the visual “politics of rep- resentation” on race and racism in the united states. he gives a precise analysis of the dilemmas faced by white scholars wishing to work on race, the first and most difficult being that in their attempts to study visualiza- tions of race, and in their desire to shed light on racist stereotypes, they risk not only consolidating such images of the “racially” other, but also, in pos- itive terms, sexualizing, idealizing and romanticizing them. “in critiquing the dominant construction of black, brown, or red identity, such studies have had an undeniable impact on the material conditions of nonwhite peoples. yet in the light of the pernicious legacy of whites’ taking both vicarious and physical pleasure in the bodies of nonwhites, it seems prudent to consider the investment of whites in producing even the most progressive analyses of nonwhite representations.” berger doubts that well-meaning whites are ca- pable of transcending “their race’s investment in depictions of nonwhites”. from this he draws the logical conclusion: since even progressive whites are still white, those interested in “racial justice” should study the ways that white identity influenced the lives of white and non-white peoples. the first step would be for “european-american scholars” to shift their primary evidence for race from black to white representations. here he quotes bell hooks, who made this demand as early as : it is time, she writes, for “righteous white people, to begin to fully explore the way white supremacy determines how we see the world, even as their actions are not informed by the type of racial prejudice that promotes overt discrimination and separation”. in connec- tion with the visual conditions and effects of racism, the visual metaphor how we see the world (recalling but not identical with the concept of worldview) takes on a particular weight, as it highlights the dramatic importance of visual rep- resentations of race not only in the history of racism in the united states, but for american culture in the broadest sense. visuality and race also have a special connection via racist metaphors of colour. smith, “visual culture studies”, . berger, sight unseen, . ibid., . berger, ibid., introduces this category as a parallel to the way whites name non-white populationgroupsintheunitedstates(afro-american,asianamerican,nativeameri- can), labellingwhitesasonegroupamongmany,counteringimplicitracialhierarchies. bell hooks, killing rage: ending racism (new york ), , quoted from berger, sight unseen, . beyond the mirror with regard to evidence, berger draws a seemingly paradoxical conclu- sion.he selects his materials “for their conspicuous distance from the politics ofrace.thisbooknotonlyshunsartworkscontainingobviousracial themesor tropes, but also avoids analyzing images that include nonwhites.” his theory is that “a decidedly racialized perspective animated even those cultural prod- ucts most removed from racial concerns”. the “unseen” in his book’s title refers to his basic theory that the power and omnipresence of race conditions the meaning of american culture as a whole; his aim is to demonstrate this using those visual artefacts that do not visibly point to racism. in this way, he avoids not only the trap of an “insatiable white desire for racial others” but also the risk of duplicating or even consolidating the obvious (racist stereo- types) in his interpretation, even if this is done with informative intent. but where does he see this unseen becoming visible? which objects does he con- sult in his search for evidence? since he assumes the cultural omnipresence of the racial paradigm, the question is not whether but only how the paradigm of race “hides” in the visual “texts” in which he will discover it. berger’s strategy, then, consists on the one hand of shifting the focus of attention to “white” representations and on the other of selecting material in which the racial paradigm is not present as a theme or motif (unlike in the portrayal of stereotypes). what does he class as “white” representations? the answer to this question lies in his quotation from bell hooks: how we see the world, or in the corresponding metaphor of perspective. berger finds his evidence in representations of how whites see the world – representations based on “racialized viewing practices of which european americans were utterly unaware”. berger describes his turning away from obviously racist themesasaradicalshiftingof thebordersofwhat isconsidered“racial”.since changesintherepresentationofwhitesandnon-whitesneithercausenorheal racial inequalities, which are rooted in structural and discursive systems, he argues that it is of central importance to look beneath the narrative surface of images. he speaks of an “operational logic of race and its manner of guiding the interpretation of our visual world”. he sees his task as “excavating” this logic,foronly inthiswaycanitspowerinamericanculturebeunderstoodand ibid., . ibid., . ibid., . . seeing as a political resource in visual culture studies eliminated – a strong programmatic statement with which he positions his methodological approach. as an example of berger’s analysis, let us consider his chapter on “landscape photography and the white gaze”. he begins by explaining the theoretical basis for his choice of landscape photography as an object for racism research into “white” identity. unlike landscape painting, landscape photographs from the american west show no human figures, thus ruling out the narrativity that characterizes history and genre painting. in spite of this, berger argues, pure landscape photography is still involved in the racial politics of its time since the cultural values active within it are the same as those shaping the production and reception of narrative painting. he also rebuts objections that the contemporary audience of landscape photography around viewed photographs as faithful records of reality: photographs appear less real when the viewers perceive a discrepancy between their values and what the photograph shows. conversely, they appear more real when the photograph reflects the ideologies of the viewers. from this, berger concludes that photographs accepted as true by a society have a unique potential to reveal that society’s values. he also assumes that images do not shape discourse but affirm it. in other words, he constructs a chain of causality, with ideology/discourse (berger treats the two terms as synonyms) as the cause and the image as the effect. which characteristics of landscape photography does berger cite as ev- idence of the white gaze? as specific examples he takes carleton watson’s photographs of the yosemite valley taken during a surveying expedition in . berger names two kinds of photographic gaze: “tightly focused close- ups of monumental geological features and distant overview shots”. one such distant overview shot became famous under the title the yosemite valley from the best general view. for berger, this “best general view” is evidence of the white way of looking at the nature of the american west. how does berger construct this evidence? in a first step, he asks what it means to pro- duce the best general view of an amorphous object like a rugged valley seven miles long and two miles wide. he argues that a belief in the best view of the ibid. ibid., . see ibid., . i see this very differently. for me, visual artefacts (not just pictures) are part of discourse history as both producers and effects. ibid., . see illustration, ibid., . beyond the mirror valley implies that its component parts can be quantified, and it is true that the photograph highlights a fixed number of landmarks that have become the standard repertoire of postcards and tourist guides on yosemite. in this process, the detailed views of individual landmarks and the general view in- terlock: the individual images of rocks, mountains and waterfalls “provided thevisualandideologicalbuildingblocksoutofwhichthe‘general’vistaswere created”. the result is a “value system” that notes the valley’s natural won- ders in numbers that are talked up in tourist guides and integrated into the corresponding maps. berger’s description of this value system makes clear what he considers to be specifically white: quantification, control over nature via panoramic views,touristic exploitation by limitation to an unchanging set of attractions, cartographic measurement. although these are characteristics commonly attributed to modern western culture, they do not yet specifically imply the category of whiteness: this is focused by berger in a further step by introducing the “racially other” of the “white man”, the native american, in the form of a comparison: “we can gain a sense of the visual and cultural bias of watkins and his white contemporaries by considering how indigenous peoplesviewedtheirenvironment.”hethencomparesthe“white”cartography of yosemite with maps made by the region’s indigenous population, of which only a few are documented. his example, drawn on birch bark, was found in by an officer of the royal engineers, fixed to stiff paper, copied and an- notated, and is now in the british library in london. the map was fastened by two native american travellers to a tree along their route to give those who came after them information about the route. unlike “white” maps, it repre- sents not a large section of the area but just a thin strip marking daily stages with no differentiation between types of terrain. the map thus shows only the traveller’s immediate surroundings, it follows no cartographic scale and is not aligned with the compass. the size of natural phenomena is adapted to the shape of the medium on which they are marked (in this case the piece of bark). it is not hard to imagine the conclusions berger draws from the extreme differences between these two examples: while ‘white’ cartography fulfils the requirements of objectivizing western science, the other map shows no inter- est in scale; it adheres only to criteria that result from the “personal experi- ibid., . ibid., . see illustration, ibid., . . seeing as a political resource in visual culture studies ence” of the travellers.a mountain was interesting because of its connection with the history of the community, to the spirits and ancestors, and to usable natural resources. unsurprisingly, then, objectivity (however constructed the concept may be) was not a criterion for the native americans, and nor was a comprehensive, panoramic view of the region. berger’s argument has two strands: first, he shows that the objectivity of ‘white’ maps and of landscape photography is illusory, that the representational systems of cartography and photography help to shape the way society sees the world; second, he frames this gaze, beyond its categorization as western and rationalist, as white, by contrasting it with the gaze of the native american as the ‘racially other’, less a view of the world as a view of his/her world. furthermore, he situates the categories of gender and class in the hierarchy of the dominant ‘white’ system of representation: “in the symbolic system applied to yosemite, race always trumped gender and class.” he continues: “there are obvious social and polit- ical drawbacks inherent in any attempt to establish a hierarchy of suffering, but it remains important to appreciate how individuals who depart from re- ligious, gendered, racial, sexual, political, or class norms pay unequal prices for their outsider status.” this passage highlights the huge difficulty of an argument that moves between the proliferating categories of marginalized or oppressed minorities within the political project of visual culture studies. in this argument, for all its attempts at precision, and in particular its efforts to avoid essentializing the category of race, the category of ‘white’ remains unclear, which also has to do with the problematic fact that this category usually remains unnamed in the cultural system as the denomina- tion of the dominant group with regard to racial others, just as other nor- mative and hegemonic categories (masculinity, heterosexuality, etc.) remain unnamed with regard to the deviations from them. in the course of the argu- ment, however, it becomes clear that berger is speaking of the whites as the dominant group that shapes and imposes its worldview in accordance with its interests. this prompts him to conclude the following on different ways of seeing nature among whites: “if a white gaze might usefully be said to ex- ist, it constitutes a common interest, stemming from often distinct ways of looking, rather than a shared view of – in this case – the landscape.” it is unclear, however, what can be meant by “racialized meanings of the images” ibid., . ibid., . ibid., . beyond the mirror other than a representation that corresponds to such interests (exploitation and protection of nature, for example). or, conversely: “landscapes advanc- ing a white perspective promote the varied interests of whites rather than depict particular forms in regularized arrangements,” by which he presum- ably means that, where the “white gaze” is concerned, the interests are more important than the form, and that therefore the forms have no determin- ing role when it comes to diagnosing this white gaze on the basis of images. berger formulates a layering of the constitution of meaning with regard to whiteness: in watkins’s photographs meanings are “circumscribed by the in- visible discourse of whiteness (residing in viewers), then particularized by the visible discourse of nature (suggested by the subject matter of the works),and ultimately refined … by formal evidence”. the pictures, then, are sources of evidence (forms) for the invisible discourse of whiteness that must be sepa- rated out from the forms as a visible and thus assailable identity of whiteness with its various interests. the yosemite valley from the best general view, which according to berger was seen and produced through the lens of whiteness, thus offers him a model for the westward spread of european-american so- ciety into surroundings that the whites would alter irrevocably. in berger’s terminology,gaze and perspective are used interchangeably as metaphors for the ideology, discourse and interests of the dominant group, and they are evidenced and thus made visible in the forms of image pro- duction. these forms presented by berger as evidence (panoramic view and cartography as gazes of power and exploitation) are indebted to the academic discourse of visual culture studies (with its roots in critiques of one-point perspective as a rationalist-objectivizing gaze). in berger’s analysis, beyond their association with modern western culture, they now become represen- tations of whiteness. at this point, the political and the academic discourses of visual culture studies intersect, combined in the figure of representation: rather than racist stereotypes, here it is ideologies, discourses and interests that are visually represented as self- or external image. in methodological terms, however, an aporia appears which originates in visual culture studies’ academic discourse, and whose ubiquity in visual culture studies tends to reduce it to the status of a prejudice: one-point perspective as the gaze of the powerful, objectified in the photographic apparatus. ibid., . ibid. see chapter , last section, of this book. . seeing as a political resource in visual culture studies the utopian gaze and its failure – nicholas mirzoeff in the texts from visual culture studies that we have examined so far,concepts of the gaze move between a critique of representations of the others of the dominantnormontheonehandand,ontheother,positiveturnsgiventocon- structions of self from a position of alterity. the examples deal with gender, sexandrace–towhichothercategoriesofalteritycouldbeadded.thefollow- ing readings explore two concepts of the gaze that go beyond these positions, displaying a utopian character. they are closely linked with the claim to push visual culture studies beyond academia towards a political impact.the author of both concepts is nicholas mirzoeff whose definition of visual culture stud- ies as a tactic in the political struggle against the “society of control” we have already encountered. rather than attempting any in-depth portrayal of the political agendas associated with these concepts, my reading concentrates on uncovering their methodological status. the multiple viewpoint. diaspora and visual culture in , mirzoeff edited the visual culture reader. the book contained his es- say “the multiple viewpoint. diaspora and visual culture” that he used the following year as the introduction to diaspora and visual culture: representing africans and jews, which he also edited. in this text, he uses the concept of the diaspora and its representation as the focus of a program for visual cul- ture studies that aims to point the way forward, captured metaphorically in the terms multiple viewpoint and intervisuality. thirteen years later, in , mirzoeff published a new proposal for a general political criticality in visual culture studies under the title the right to look. a counterhistory of visuality. the multiple viewpoint is an attempt to transfer the theoretical approaches of post-colonialism with its concepts of hybridity and créolité, as developed by writers including arjun appadurai, homi bhabha, paul gilroy and stuart hall, to the field of visual culture. the concept of diaspora, that draws on see chapter of this book, the section on nicholas mirzoeff. see nicholas mirzoeff, “the multiple viewpoint. diaspora and visual culture” in mir- zoeff (ed.),thevisualculturereader, - ; and mirzoeff (ed.), diasporaandvisualcul- ture: representing africans and jews (london, new york ), - . mirzoeff, the right to look. a counterhistory of visuality (durham, nc ). see patrick williams, laura chrisman (eds.), colonial discourse & postcolonial theory: a reader (new york ). beyond the mirror these approaches, is summarized by hall as follows: “the diaspora experience as i intend it here is defined, not by essence or purity, but by the recognition of a necessary heterogeneity and diversity; by a conception of ‘identity’ which lives with and through, not despite, difference; by hybridity. diaspora iden- tities are those which are constantly producing and reproducing themselves anew, through transformation and difference.” in contrast to more conven- tional notions of diaspora, as with regard to the jews, rather than a culturally and ethnically fixed identity that is inclined to shield itself from external in- fluence in the diaspora (or obliged to do so, as in the case of ghettos), the focus here is on a diasporic identity that is constantly changing as a result of diverse migratory movements in the course of globalization, a development that also breaks down the hierarchy between centre (the west) and periphery (all other parts of the world). for my reading, what is important is why and how mirzoeff relates these ideas to seeing and its theoretical derivatives such as visuality and perspective. the why is best explained in terms of mirzoeff’s opponents, first and foremost the nation state, that he contrasts (in the same apodictic style he applied to his underpinning of visual culture: “modern life takes place on screen.” ) with the post-national world: whereas the diasporas of the th century “revealed interconnected nations, our current experience is of an increasingly interdependent planet”. this means that the culture that had been installed over centuries by (colonialist) western nation states and that was meant to prove their “superiority” is now obsolete, including, for example, national museums and national styles, as constructed by tradi- tional art history to demonstrate an essentialist vision of national identity. the essence of these styles was “of course, race”. mirzoeff thus frames the project of a history of “diaspora visual cultures” as a critique of the now ob- solete culture of dominance by western-colonialist nation states; and he sees art history as their accomplice. this also means integrating a notion of future into the “diaspora identity” which in the th-century model was still fixed on the search for roots. if it were possible to rethink diaspora today as “an stuart hall, “cultural identity and diaspora” in williams, chrisman (eds.), colonial dis- course&postcolonialtheory, - : - . essay first published in jonathan ruther- ford (ed.), identity: community, culture, difference (london ), - . mirzoeff, “an introduction to visual culture”, . mirzoeff, “the multiple viewpoint”, . ibid., . ibid. . seeing as a political resource in visual culture studies indeterminate future to come” then, according to mirzoeff, this could result in “a significant reevaluation of diasporas past, present and future”. in order properly to represent post-national diasporas, national culture, metaphorically linked by mirzoeff to“one-point perspective”, must be coun- tered by the titular “multiple viewpoint”. such a multiple viewpoint is im- portant not only as a critique of national cultures with their implications of essentialist identities, but also as the condition for a dialogical relationship between diasporic groups that often inhabit the same geopolitical context but thatoftenfighteachother.mirzoeffcites theexampleofconflictsbetweenthe jewish and african diasporas in the united states in which backward-looking identity definitions based on origins (what he calls a one-point perspective) were used by each group to contest the status of diasporic chosenness. mir- zoeff thus uses visual metaphors to develop political arguments. one-point perspective as a scopic regime of western-rationalist power is contrasted with multiple perspective as both a critique and a vision for the future: “the mul- tiple viewpoint moves beyond the one-point perspective of cartesian ratio- nalism in the search for a forward-looking, transcultural and transitive place from which to look and be seen.” in this model, looking and being seen correspond to the theoretical concepts of the gaze and spectatorship, which mirzoeff argues could also benefit from this new viewpoint. here,onceagain,thetheoretical foundationsofvisualculturestudiesgive reason to investigate the discipline’s position on seeing concrete objects. “to look and to be seen” refers exclusively to structures of the gaze between sub- jects in society; what remains unclear is how these concepts might be trans- ferred to relationships with the visual artefacts that enter into this visual re- lationship as a third party. do they feature in visual culture studies only as evidence of seeing and being seen? we have encountered this question several times already, mainly as the problem of a narcissistic-tautological relation- ship between the interpreting subject (viewer) and the object under interpre- tation. in most cases, the filter or medium of this relationship is represen- tation, its result is meaning (the meaning of this representation), while this meaning in turn refers to the complex of identity constructions. but can or must this be the only way for the subjects practising visual culture studies to relate visually to the objects of the world? ibid., . ibid., . ibid., . beyond the mirror which relationship with objects does mirzoeff propose in the context of a visual culture studies diasporically renewed by the multiple viewpoint? he notes that the diaspora as he conceives of it generates a multiple viewpoint in every diasporic image. this viewpoint, he claims, incorporates both what derridacalled différance and“polycentricvision”,asdefinedbyellashohatand robertstamintheiressay inthesamebook(thevisualculturereader editedby mirzoeff) where the visual is situated between individuals and communities in the process of dialogical interaction. mirzoeff then claims that “changing the way in which people see themselves is in all senses a critical activity”. as this once again makes clear, the focus here is on identity constructions that may lead to conflicts between communities. mirzoeff’s utopia thus appears to involve the possibility of positively influencing the process of negotiation between these communities by working on a new understanding of diasporic identities in their visual representation, understood as a critical activity. in methodological terms, this prompts him to propose transferring intertextu- ality as“a matter of interlocking texts” to the“interacting and interdependent modes of visuality that i shall call intervisuality”. surprisingly, his concrete example for this comes not from the visual but from the auditory field: the yodelling of the pygmies, “gateway to a multiple viewpoint on the african di- aspora”, points to congolese music and the blues of the mississippi delta, from there to the whistling of steam trains and the migration of black former slaves from the south to the north of the united states. the yodel becomes a hyperquote with multiple intertextual references. in the objects of visual cul- ture, mirzoeff looks for “polyvalent symbols” as transcultural evidence for diasporic cultures. these symbols cannot be reduced to static constructions of identity, and in their hybridity they represent post-national diaspora as a now global condition of life.the polysemy of these symbols through historical and transcultural change is referred to by mirzoeff as intervisual. in this way, concepts like the gaze or visuality lose their specifically visual quality: the gaze loses itself in the symbol, and intervisuality has little to do with a gaze between individuals or communities, instead closely resembling thepolysemiaof theopenartworkinthewritingsofumbertoeco.ultimately, ella shohat, robert stam, “narrativizing visual culture: towards a polycentric aesthet- ics” in mirzoeff (ed.), the visual culture reader, - . mirzoeff, “the multiple viewpoint”, . ibid., . ibid., - . ibid., . . seeing as a political resource in visual culture studies where the relationship between visual culture studies and the object is con- cerned, mirzoeff’s focus is on finding iconographic elements in which the shifts of cultural meaning related to identities that mix and change via pro- cesses of migration become tangible. a political agenda that brings forth new subjects is allied here with an old method from art history, namely iconog- raphy. paradoxically, however, the visual metaphors in which this alliance is clothed – viewpoint, intervisuality, “to look and to be seen” – refer neither to the visual object nor to the relationship between viewer/interpreter and object, but to the diasporic agenda. another link to traditional art history, on the other hand, is rigorously cut off by mirzoeff for political reasons: as mentioned above, he places the category of style in the enemy camp, in the discourse of the national, and he further sharpens this verdict by describing style as visual evidence of this na- tional character. thus, while giving the legibility of pictures a figurative level by adopting iconography, which can in turn quite naturally be linked to an agenda-drivensearchforidentity-basedmeaning,thecategoryofstyle,which is essentially an aesthetic category calling for a way of seeing the object other than that practised by iconography, is accused of formalism. mirzoeff’s visu- ality already reflects the above-mentioned movement of visual culture studies away from the formalist tradition of american art history. it is the figurative iconography – foremost the human figure itself – that visualculturestudies looksforbecausethisiconography,farmorereadilythan aesthetic qualities, facilitates a reading in terms of recognizably coded signs of identity. it is also the gateway to what i call the narcissistic circle of in- terpretation, where the figure (and its gaze) may serve as a mirror for in- terpretive projections (which results, as described above, from an affirmative transcriptionofthelacanianmodelof thegaze). withinvisualculturestud- ies, iconography’s figurative relationship to the visual object thus facilitates a trend towards narcissistic, identity-based interpretations that could not be arrived at via the observation of formal properties. see, among others, the introduction to this book. for the reception of the lacanian gaze see chapter . for examples of narcissistic in- terpretations see also chapter . for a critique of the narcissistic circle, see chapter . beyond the mirror counter visuality: the right to look between mirzoeff’s utopia of the diasporically multiplied gaze and his book the right to look: a counterhistory of visuality ( ) came the september at- tacks and the wars in iraq and afghanistan – the first decade of the st cen- tury, marked by america’s “global war on terror”. this may explain why in this book mirzoeff changes his strategy: he abandons the ideal of multiple view- points that he formulated as his conclusion from the debates on ethnic iden- tities in the age of post-national migratory movements, and returns to the binarism of a friend-foe perspective. the conflict between postmodern cap- italism and the consumer from mirzoeff’s introduction to an introduction to visual culture ( ) has given way to that between repression and rebellion. mirzoeff tells the story of repression and rebellion,slavery and emancipation, as the history and genealogy of modernity, structured around the nucleus of thedialecticofcolony/plantationandcolonisingempires/nations.thishistory is not hard to understand. mirzoeff brings together an impressive quantity of research literature, mainly from colonial studies; he is also a good sto- ryteller. more difficult to understand, however, is how visuality is or should be the key to this story. as early reviews show, the book raised hopes of a more systematic orientation within visual culture studies that was felt to be somewhat “every which way” on account of its diffusion across disciplines and themes. the cover of the right to look already signals its departure from the multi- ple viewpoint.the circles of the two os of look contain details from graphics showing the heads of a white man with a late th-century hairstyle and of a maori, both in side profile, their gazes fixed on each other. one white, one mirzoeff, “an introduction to visual culture”, see also chapter in this book. here he seems to have drawn in particular on catherine hall, civilizing subjects: metropole and colony in the english imagination, - (chicago ), as in his con- trasting of metropole and plantation and his discussion of the colonial imagination. t.h. milbrandt in surveillance & society , no. ( ), - , http://www.surveil- lance-and-society.org (accessed sept ); jan baetens in leonardo online, http:// leonardo.info/reviews/may /mirzoeff-baetens.php (accessed sept ); terry smith, “if looks could kill empires” ( july ), www.publicbooks.org/nonfiction/if- looks-could-kill-empires (accessed sept ). smith, “if looks could kill empires”. terry smith is professor of contemporary art his- tory and theory at the university of pittsburgh. detail of maori from anonymous, johnny heke (i.e. hone heke) ( ), reproduced in mirzoeff, the right to look, plate . http://www.surveillance-and-society.org http://www.surveillance-and-society.org http://www.surveillance-and-society.org http://www.surveillance-and-society.org http://www.surveillance-and-society.org http://www.surveillance-and-society.org http://leonardo.info/reviews/may /mirzoeff-baetens.php http://leonardo.info/reviews/may /mirzoeff-baetens.php http://leonardo.info/reviews/may /mirzoeff-baetens.php http://leonardo.info/reviews/may /mirzoeff-baetens.php http://leonardo.info/reviews/may /mirzoeff-baetens.php http://leonardo.info/reviews/may /mirzoeff-baetens.php http://leonardo.info/reviews/may /mirzoeff-baetens.php . seeing as a political resource in visual culture studies “indigenous” – it looks like a warlike clash, and that is what the book de- scribes. contrary to what the image suggests, however, this white man is not a coloniser but a revolutionary from the jacobin phase of the french revo- lution, when slavery was briefly abolished. the glances exchanged by the two men thus stand not for a confrontation between colonizer and slave, but for an encounter between two political subjects who share a rebellion against those in power. the cover image uses the gaze to present a non-hierarchical relationship between the “native” and the white; and this also characterizes the right to look postulated by mirzoeff in the title: “because the right to look is a consenting exchange between two (or more) it is by definition non-hier- archical.” mirzoeff’s “counter-history of visuality” is based on a notion of visuality that differs from that previously current within visual culture studies. mir- zoeff’s article “on visuality” forms the basis for his definition: in it, he attemptstoredrawthegenealogyof theconcept,tracingitsoriginstothomas carlyle. readingthearticle,whichalreadycontainsthebook’sconcernsand concepts inembryonicform,gavemeabetter insight intotheinnerstructures of a book often driven more by associations than by arguments. firstly, then, a few words about “on visuality”. having named visuality as an epoch-specific phenomenon of postmoder- nity in , mirzoeff now notes that it is not a poststructuralist term, but one coined, along with other related concepts such as “visualize”, by the scot- tish historian thomas carlyle and later forgotten when carlyle was branded anti-democratic and racist, vanishing from discussions of visual culture. as an opponent of all of the emancipatory movements that emerged from the frenchrevolution,mirzoeffwrites,carlyledevisedthevisualizednarrativeof a moral imperialism led by “great men” that resonated both with his contem- poraries and with later generations. but for “many key figures in the emanci- patory movements of the period, carlyle’s vision of the hero had to be stood on its head, as marx did to hegel, in order to create a sense of possibility.” detail from the pamphlet la chute en masse (paris ) reproduced in mirzoeff, the right to look, . mirzoeff refers to the man as a sans-culotte. from nicholas mirzoeff, “the will to justice”, posted on september as part of his blog about the occupy movement: http://www.nicholasmirzoeff.com/o / / / /the-will-to-justice/ (accessed sept ). mirzoeff, “on visuality” and mirzoeff, the right to look, chapter , - . carlyle’s ver- sion of visuality is briefly mentioned in chapter of this book. http://www.nicholasmirzoeff.com/o / / / /the-will-to-justice/ http://www.nicholasmirzoeff.com/o / / / /the-will-to-justice/ http://www.nicholasmirzoeff.com/o / / / /the-will-to-justice/ http://www.nicholasmirzoeff.com/o / / / /the-will-to-justice/ http://www.nicholasmirzoeff.com/o / / / /the-will-to-justice/ http://www.nicholasmirzoeff.com/o / / / /the-will-to-justice/ http://www.nicholasmirzoeff.com/o / / / /the-will-to-justice/ http://www.nicholasmirzoeff.com/o / / / /the-will-to-justice/ http://www.nicholasmirzoeff.com/o / / / /the-will-to-justice/ beyond the mirror mirzoeff sees this manoeuvre of “reverse appropriation” as part of the mod- ern production of the “visual subject, a person who is both the agent of sight (regardless of biological ability to see) and the object of discourses of visual- ity”. furthermore, he argues, carlyle’s discourse of visualized heroism was so central for anglophone imperial culture that any claim to such a subject status had to be made in terms of such visuality – a theory with far-reaching theoretical implications. basically, mirzoeff is claiming that such a subject status is inconceivable without visuality. or, to put it another way: the forma- tion of the western-imperial subject in the th century (and thereafter) took place primarily through this visuality. what does this visuality have to do with seeing, whether as a biological or a sociocultural practice? little or nothing. in the right to look, mirzoeff begins by noting: “the right to look is not about seeing.” he develops the concept “by thinking how it emerged into western discourse at a specific and charged moment of modernity as a conservative critique of enlightenment and its emancipations”. in a counter-movement, it was appropriated, inverted and disguised by subcultural practices as a strategy of emancipation –in theright to look he calls the result countervisuality. to return now to mirzoeff’s reading of carlyle, he borrows the highly metaphorical language of the period - , as when he speaks of the “eye of history”as the embodiment of historiography,referring not to the objectiv- ity of a source-based science of facts but to an “idea of the whole” that carlyle sought to portray in a “succession of vivid pictures”. this in turn recalls the then highly appreciated large-format history paintings like those com- missioned by carlyle’s hero napoleon i for his imperial propaganda. if that were all, however, it would be no more than the description or justification of a pictorial narrative style in historiography. carlyle, and with him mirzo- eff, goes far beyond this: the historian is a visionary, seeing history with his inner eye, as if from a “mount of vision”, gaining an overview not accessible to historical figures themselves – although carlyle named one exception: the hero. only the hero was able to see history as it unfolded. the mount of vi- sion,affording the hero a historical overview,invites a contemporary analogy: the military commander positioned on a piece of high ground as portrayed in mirzoeff, “on visuality”, . mirzoeff, the right to look, . mirzoeff, “on visuality”, , my italics. for this abridged account of carlyle, see mirzoeff, “on visuality”, ff. . seeing as a political resource in visual culture studies battle pictures of the period and in topographical portrayals of battles since the baroque. carlyle wrote his history as a heroic story; he “imagined the eye of history sweeping across what he called ‘clear visuality’, ‘visualizing’ what could not be seen by the minor actors of history themselves. visuality was, then, the clear picture of history available to the hero as it happens and to the historian in retrospect.” the simple observations of simple people, on the other hand, “didnotconstitutevisuality”. andwhatwasexpectedofthesesimplepeople was not visuality but hero-worship, “a proper submission to the quasi-divine authority of the hero”. at the end of the th century, jeremy bentham sought to reform prisons using the model of the panopticon; he also wrote a pamphlet against britain’s penal colonies in australia. carlyle rejected the model of the panopticon, and he also favoured the penal colonies because, as mirzoeff deduces, “a world dominatedbyheroesrequiredthat itsanti-heroesbetreatedwithseverity”. mirzoeff now links carlyle’s heroic visuality with his rejection of bentham’s panoptic gaze (that was meant to replace the previous draconian measures used to control prisoners) and with his advocacy of deportation and penal colonies, thus making visuality a key category in the imperial structures of power and repression in the modern world. in the right to look, he extends this right up to the current imperial behaviour of the united states, allowing his narrative,that begins in the th century with references back to antiquity, to be read, in a reflexive movement,as a genealogy of america’s current global policy. in very general terms, therefore, this visuality has something to do with the actions of political subjects. the implications of this broad description are diverse and in some cases contradictory.one such contradiction concerns the concept of representation. at one point, mirzoeff defines visuality as “a point of contestation in political and cultural discourse over the very meaning of representation”. is this political or symbolic representation? he continues by asking: “was representation possible only through a heroic male body or could others represent? must others be individuals or could there be a collec- tive representation? how, then, might the subaltern and subcultural groups ibid., . ibid., . see ibid., . beyond the mirror in the metropole and the colonies come to representation?” the way these questions are formulated brings no real clarity; the reference to the “heroic male body” makes it probable that the focus is once more on visibility and the right to visibility, on the kind of symbolic-visual representation we know from the political agenda of visual culture studies. this is confirmed by an- other definition of visuality: “visuality, far from being a postmodern solution predicated by contemporary visual culture to the problems of medium-based visual disciplines, is therefore a problem of the conceptual scheme of moder- nity and representation that underlies it.” in this way, he departs from the two definitions we have already encountered (visuality as a mode of techno- logical postmodernity and as a diasporic, multiperspectival gaze), ending up with the confrontation between ruling subjects and the representations that legitimize them, and subaltern subjects to whom representation is denied. this, too, is already familiar; the stigmatizing and the oppositional gaze also draw on this struggle for recognition via visibility.which is why,for mirzoeff, visuality has “very much to do with picturing and nothing to do with vision, if by vision we understand how an individual person registers visual sensory impressions”. in this light, his apodictic claim that “the right to look is not about seeing” is easier to understand: he is rejecting seeing as a sensory ac- tivity. but this draws a clear line between the two factors of the visual that mitchell, for example, does not want to separate: the nature and culture of seeing. it also raises the question of how this negation of the act of seeing influences the treatment of the objects of analysis (e.g. their form and medi- ality) through which mirzoeff intends to study the genealogy of modernity: “for contemporary critics, then, visuality has a complex and challenging ge- nealogy. rather than lead us into the complexities and redundancies of th- and early th-century optical sciences,visuality implies an engagement with the politics of representation in transnational and transcultural form.” this program, formulated in , is surely what gave rise to mirzoeff’s broad-basedcounterhistoryofvisuality,therighttolook, in .havingtaken carlyle’s concept of visuality as his point of departure for a politicization of the term as an imperial practice of power and authorization in “on visual- ity”, here mirzoeff writes the decolonial genealogy of this visuality. in doing ibid., f. ibid., . ibid. ibid., . . seeing as a political resource in visual culture studies so,he assumes that the current policy of global counterinsurgency (georgew. bush’s “post / war on terrorism” that was ongoing under obama) is being implemented with practices of “post-panoptical” visuality that can be traced back to the oppressive practices of slavery in the th and th centuries and to the colonial politics of imperialism in the th and th centuries. these practices include control, surveillance and classification as well as killing in the name of freedom and democracy, the most striking example of this be- ing visual technologies for remote-controlled killing with no risk to the killer (drone warfare). visuality is contrasted here with countervisuality. this is mirzoeff’s term for resistance against this visuality by subalterns (slaves, workers, the popu- lations of colonized countries). it manifests itself in practices of self-empow- erment that are developed in the places where visuality is deployed against those slaves and workers: on the plantations in the colonies, on the streets of the metropoles. the history of visuality and countervisuality since the th century as a history of western dominance and resistance to that dominance is subdivided by mirzoeff into three phases: the ‘plantation complex’ ( - ), the ‘imperial complex’ ( - ) and the ‘military-industrial complex’ ( onwards), with ‘complex’ referring both to the production of structures of social organization that shape a specific complex like the ‘plantation com- plex’, and to the mental economy of individuals, like the oedipus complex. “the resulting imbrication of mentality and organization produces a visual- ized deployment of bodies and a training of minds,organized so as to sustain both physical segregation between rulers and ruled, and mental compliance with those arrangements.” here, mirzoeff describes technologies of power as discussed by foucault in his lectures of / : “in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, we saw the emergence of techniques of power that were essentially centred on the body, on the individual body. they included all devices that were used to ensure the spatial distribution of individual bodies (their separation, their alignment, their serialization, and their surveillance) and the organization, around those individuals, of a whole field of visibility. they were also tech- niques that could be used to take control over bodies. attempts were made to increase their productive force through exercise, drill, and so on. they were alsotechniquesforrationalizingandstrictlyeconomizingonapowerthathad mirzoeff, the right to look, . beyond the mirror to be used in the least costly way possible, thanks to a whole system of surveil- lance, hierarchies, inspections, bookkeeping, and reports: all this technology can be described as the disciplinary technology of labour. it was established at the end of the seventeenth century, and in the course of the eighteenth.” as the primal scene for these technologies, mirzoeff sees the organization of the slave plantation. and, unlike foucault, he places the entire genealogy of modernity under the paradigm of carlyle’s visuality. this creates a peculiar tension between bentham’s panoptic gaze that served foucault as an exam- ple and metaphor for the mechanisms of control in the late th century, and carlyle’s visuality. bentham was among the reformers of the late enlighten- ment, while carlyle, as described above, vehemently resisted the enlighten- ment’s emancipatory consequences.this tension between an enlightened and a reactionary gaze, both of which are described as technologies of power (by foucault and mirzoeff respectively) repeatedly frustrates mirzoeff’s attempts to describe an order of visuality and countervisuality with the corresponding practices of dominance and revolution. let us return now to the three complexes and the practices and agents of their visuality: the plantation complex is represented by the forms of classi- fication, segregation, legislation, control and organized labour, especially on the british and french slave plantations of the caribbean. all of these factors are underpinned by visuality. first, the ‘slave’ is classified as a species on the basis of ‘natural history’ before being separated from ‘free’ space by means of cartography. the slaves’ work was monitored by the overseer and misconduct was punished with violence.special laws declared all of this legal and, in mir- zoeff’s argument, thus ‘aestheticized’ it. the key figure in these practices and their visuality was the overseer who – not unlike carlyle’s example of a hero of history, the military commander – has an overview of what is happening from a piece of higher ground. this order was confronted via slave rebellions and the struggle for freedom, which mirzoeff classifies under the heading countervisuality. according to mirzoeff, this organization of the plantations on the basis of visuality exerted a key influence on the use of visuality and visual technologies in western societies. michel foucault, “society must be defended“. lectures at the collège de france ( - ) (new york ), . this remark is made in passing only, since it is not my aim here to mine mirzoeff’s wealthofsometimesassociativeandmetaphor-ladenargumentsforpotential internal incoherencies in his theoretical references. see mirzoeff, the right to look, - . . seeing as a political resource in visual culture studies “in a sense, all visuality was and is imperial visuality, the shaping of modernity from the point of view of the imperial powers.” this definition of visuality opens the chapter on the ‘imperial complex’, dated between and , which covers the strategies of dominance of the colonial powers at home and in the colonies. having shown how western empires shaped their technologies of power outside their ‘own’ countries, the focus here is on the blending of colonial plantation and home city as sites of orders of bio-power where colonizing authority is crossed with the “hierarchy of the ‘civilized’ and the ‘primitive’”. the slaves on the plantations corresponded to the workers in the cities, except that the latter were not pseudo-scientifically classified as a separate species. thus, although the dividing line between rulers and proletariat was not drawn by a racially implemented hierarchy, workers and slaves shared a lack of rights, as reflected, for example, in the practice of deportation. for mirzoeff, missionaries were the key figures or agents of the spread of western modernity to non-western societies, as well as being “products of its [modernity’s] emerging hegemony”. as an example, mirzoeff names the missionaries in the british crown colony of new zealand, whose activities he contrasts with the resistance of the maori that led to an “indigenous countervisuality”. immediately after this he discusses proletarian countervisuality in the cities of england and france, by which he means primarily the forms of self-organization in the workers’ movement of the th and early th centuries and their symbolic representation, as expressed in the general strike and the may day festivities. for mirzoeff, the general strike is a “counterpoint to the hierarchy of imperial visuality”, “a tactic for visualizing the contemporary by creating a general image of the social”. this chapter clearly presented considerable structural problems, as the imperial visuality he postulates is conceived of in historical and territorial terms that are very broad. the history of discourse, decades of theory, and historical research are woven together to construct exemplary moments of countervisuality. the examples for the th century are the former colonies’ struggle for liberation, illustrated by visual evidence such as the paris match cover photograph portraying a young black soldier saluting as a french both quotes, ibid., . ibid., . here he is quoting ryan dunch, “beyond cultural imperialism” in history and theory ( ), - : . ibid., . beyond the mirror patriot (an image made famous by roland barthes’s analysis ) and the film the battle of algiers. in his chapter on the period since , mirzoeff refers to dwight eisen- hower’s famous warning about the total influence –“economic,political,even spiritual” – of the constellations of power that brought forth the cold war arms race and which he called the ‘military-industrial complex’. mirzoeff describes the technology of this period as “aerial visualization”, which has grown since , and especially since / , into a “post-panoptic visuality” that brings together electronic and digital technologies in the global war on terror.thispost-panopticvisuality isbasedontheassumptionthat“anywhere may be the site for an insurgency, so everywhere needs to be watched from multiple locations”. the‘military-industrial complex’ is marked by a“global counterinsurgency as the hegemonic complex of western visuality”. mir- zoeff’s main examples here are the algerian war and the war on terrorism. here, in post-panoptic visuality, the parallels between the concept of vi- suality and the visual technologies of power that are actually used are obvi- ous: closed-circuit television surveillance,satellite images, infrared and other technologies render visible what was previously unseen. they are joined by military technologies like armed drones that can be operated from locations far away from the theatre of war. mirzoeff also combines these effects with carlyle’s visuality as a producer of authority: “the post-panoptic visuality of global counterinsurgency produces a visualized authority whose location not only cannot be determined from the visual technologies being used but may itself be invisible.” for the current situation, mirzoeff uses the term ‘neovi- suality’: “neovisuality is a doctrine for the preservation of authority by means of permanent surveillance of all realms of life, a gesamtkunstwerk of necropol- itics.” inthefaceofsuchconditions,it ishardtodefineacorrespondingcounter- visuality of resistance. according to mirzoeff, the counterinsurgency’s striv- ing for a “totalizing vision” has the effect that “no countervisualization can damage its claim to totality”. furthermore, the objective upheld by the ter- seerolandbarthes,mythologies (newyork ), ff.french:mythologies (paris ). mirzoeff, the right to look, . ibid. ibid., . ibid., . ibid., . ibid., . . seeing as a political resource in visual culture studies ror against which this neovisuality is directed is hardly the kind of power- free society dreamed of by mirzoeff with his metaphor of the “right to look”. on the contrary, both sides, insurgency and counterinsurgency, continually rearm their respective “necropolitics”, meaning they are inseparably inter- twined. but, mirzoeff hopes, precisely this intensifying of visuality will lead to its crisis.for him,the arab spring –unfolding as he was finishing his book –isasignof this;andoneyear later,hesupportedtheoccupymovementwith a daily blog on his website. whatdoesmirzoeff’sconceptofvisuality involve?twopolescanbenamed to which this visuality obviously refers: firstly,representation (of power,of the hero, of history) for the purpose of legitimating power, and secondly the kind of practices, technologies and cultures of power discussed by foucault un- der the heading of bio-power (surveillance, violence, segregation, legislation, classification). countervisuality responds to the representation of those in power with strategies of self-empowerment via representations that may also appropriate the patterns used by those in power. one example of this is the hero of the haitian revolution, toussaint l’ouverture, represented as a mil- itary commander on horseback modelled after jacques-louis david’s eques- trian portrait of napoleon. mirzoeff also sees the responses of resistance to practices of power that constitute countervisuality (general strike, may day, forms of self-organization, liberation struggle) as forms of representation in thesenseofvisibility.but ifvisibility isultimatelyequatedwiththepolitical in the broadest sense, then (in the light of the all-explaining claim of mirzoeff’s project) this begs the question of whether and why the concept of visuality is supposed to be able to deliver this, and whether we might not be dealing, conversely,with a piece of sophistry or circular reasoning (the visual is always political, ergo the political is always visual) that reduces the political to the visual. mirzoeff’s approach to visual objects also manifests his fixation on repre- sentation in a double sense: of portrayal and of political representation. the former is most obvious in the “visual guide” that opens the book and that is intended to promote a systematic overview. it contains examples of the categories and practices of visuality and countervisuality. an engraving from the th century shows the layout of a plantation with the work routines and the overseer at his raised post; he represents surveillance and a command- ing position. a battle plan from waterloo shows the central role of visuality see illustration in ibid., . beyond the mirror for warfare in the form of cartography and overview; a panoramic bird’s eye view as an example of imperial visuality shows a battle zone region during the american civil war; military-industrial visuality is represented by a technical diagramontheproductionofaerialphotographsandtheiruseintheprepara- tion of aerial warfare; and a photograph of soldiers sitting in front of screens likevideogameplayers,steeringsurveillancedronesontheus-mexicoborder, stands for post-panoptic visuality. the examples of countervisuality show the revolutionary hero: the haitian revolutionary leader on horseback and a pam- phlet with a sans-culotte toppling despots; a photograph of slaves gathering stands for the general strike against slavery in south carolina; emilio lon- goni’s painting l’oratore dello sciopero from , that shows a speaker stirring up demonstrating workers, stands for general strikes in major cities. this image material does not go beyond the function of evidence, being essentially self-explanatory. mirzoeff writes: “i have used images – or some- times even the knowledge that there were images which have been lost – as a form of evidence.” he thus deals with images as a historian would; they are sources that he takes from the “visual archive”. and he treats them indis- criminately; the important thing is what they show, regardless of medium or genre, regardless of whether or not they are art. they are summoned as wit- nesses who mirzoeff, like an attorney,presents as part of his case.in method- ological terms,thishardlymatchesuptoaconventionalpolitical iconography. when, in his call for a “right to look”, mirzoeff says that “my right to look depends on your recognition of me, and vice versa”, one might think that hispoliticalagenda wouldbea goodmatchfor theethicsof adialogical seeing formulated by margaret olin with regard to art history. but mirzoeff formu- lates it as an appeal against a ban on seeing, imposed by visuality and mani- fested by the policeman who sends us on our way: “move on, there’s nothing to see here.” this seeing is a metaphor for another right – “the right to the real” – in an “attempt to shape an autonomous realism that is not only out- sideauthority’sprocessbutantagonistic to it”.thisrighttoperceivethereal is meant to prevent the dominant authority from legitimizing and naturalizing its interpretation of the world via visuality. it thus has less to do with dialog- ical-communicative seeing and more with recognizing the reality of power which, in marxist terminology (not used by mirzoeff), is veiled by ideology – ibid., xv. ibid., . mirzoeff, the right to look, . . seeing as a political resource in visual culture studies a realization on the part of those being ruled that is meant to be prevented by the visuality of those in power. the question of the relationship between object and interpreter/viewer plays no part here. and nor does the question of the ones recognizing the discriminated identities of the others that was (and still is?) central to visual culture studies, because for mirzoeff the ones are the abstraction of power (of the imperial or military-industrial complex). they are not able to recognize those they rule over without losing this very power. it is thus a matter of struggle, not dialogue. representations are tools in this struggle – instruments of power or rebellion. mirzoeff’s is a radical departure from the political theories of the s that espoused the approach of a dialogical seeing by discussing societal pro- cesses of negotiating difference as part of the conflict between universalism and particularism – i am thinking above all of ernesto laclau. ultimately, he revives the binary structure of class struggle, clad in the terminologies of foucault, rancière and negri/hardt, in updated, decolonial guise. for him, today’s revolutions are the arab spring and the occupy movement. in his at- tempt to draw up a genealogy of modernity, mirzoeff has taken the current eminence of visual media in the dissemination of the political as his bench- mark, and projected this back onto the last three centuries. but he does so, and i see this as another “birth defect” of his model, through the lens (to stick with the optical metaphors) of the visuality of carlyle, a th-century anti- revolutionary racist. in this way, carlyle’s friend/foe dynamic structures the genealogical model. or, put differently: not only is the view of the past de- termined by today (a basic theoretical assumption now taken for granted in historiography) but a conservative perspective from the th century deter- mines the view of today. mirzoeff elevates carlyle’s visuality to the status of an episteme of modernity, then writes against it with a ‘counterhistory of visuality’. for terry smith,mirzoeff’s book marks“a coming of age that has brought cultural studies past the variability and the enchantments of its postmodern moment. it highlights the need for responsibility toward actual pasts, and the actual demand of contemporary realities.” i do not share this view. to me, invoking political responsibility as a rejection of postmodern arbitrari- ness seems too heavily indebted to a theoretical cluelessness in the face of the see for example ernesto laclau, “universalism, particularism, and the question of identity” in october ( ), - . smith, “if looks could kill empires”. beyond the mirror ideological rearmament of the west in the wake of / , resulting in a hasty retreat to an interpretative framework of the present that is no less totalizing than hegel’s vision of history. the result is an actual dedifferentiation in the sense of a loss of difference. one example is the way mirzoeff deals with fas- cism: “the work of genocide was to make the other permanently invisible.” visuality in this account becomes the key to understanding – even to under- standing the shoah.what new knowledge does this bring? to me it seems too rash, too reductive, too in love with its own model. as a result, antifascism is no more than an antifascist countervisuality that demands a place “from which there is a right to look, not just behold the leader”. and that, to my european-german ears at least, sounds naïve. for me, the idea that such a one-dimensional model should be able to capture historical and political re- ality at the same time as formulating the utopia of a non-hegemonic space (that of the right to look) does not add up. i have no answer to the question of what the benefits of such an extensive definition of visuality might be. overstretching the concept in this way does not strike me as a valid strategy against the postmodern “every which way” of visual culture studies; on the contrary, it looks like a symptom of a crisis in the field rather than a remedy. this totalization of visuality can also be read as a symptom of a paradox that seems to have accompanied seeing from the outset: the belief in the visual as an anthropologically founding force, and its opposite, demonization: “the evil eye emerged from the realm of superstition to become the ruling metaphor of social control and political oppression at its most insidious.” mirzoeff, the right to look, . see also f. ibid., . jay, downcast eyes, . this sentence of jay’s pointedly sums up the critique of “occu- larcentrism” by lacan, foucault and debord. part three: towards an ethics for the act of seeing . questions of ethics seeing as an act of scholarly research the central task resulting from my readings was to inquire into the ethical dimensions of seeing that can be negotiated between the fields of art history andvisualculturestudies.inotherwords,myfocusonseeinglednottoacon- frontation along the lines of “who does it better” in terms of method, scope and object, but to an attempt to link the question of the relevance of each dis- cipline with the fundamentals of its engagement with its object.these funda- mentals, which i read as each discipline’s immanent scopic regime, emerged quite clearly from my readings, with their various advantages and pitfalls. the ethics i am referring to here might also be called stance or responsi- bility – responsibility for the other of one’s research activity, or one’s seeing as researcher. my readings made me more keenly aware that the seeing of art historians, with regard to discrete objects, is often hidden behind the classi- fying procedures of art-historical objectification. these procedures mask the reputationofseeingasunpredictable,unquantifiableandsubjective,andthus reputedly unscientific. art history clearly has surprisingly little confidence in the objective reliability of its key form of data collection; either that or it wishes to avoid being infected with this reputation. art history pursues an ethics of objectivity; what this overlooks is seeing’s subjective side, which is also authorial: the subjectivity of the interpreting viewer. for visual culture studies, the opposite applies. the discipline’s scholarly activity centres not on the object but on the subject – a subject that must fight for recognition, in turn measured in terms of the subject’s visibility in a society and its visual culture. the ethical dimension here is rooted in the beyond the mirror political agenda that determines the relevance of the discipline. the presup- position of visual culture studies that modernity is visual, making visibility a key precondition for the representation of identity, alters the dynamic of the three-way relationship between visual object, producer and viewer, with consequences that only became clear to me in the course of my readings. my interest in engaging with visual culture studies grew out of my critique of hegemonic and pseudo-objective discourses in art history.i saw in it a chance both to find approaches allowing the viewpoints of “others” to be introduced into art history and to reflect on the discrepancy between the questionable objectivity and the masked subjectivity of the art-historical viewer position. i was all the more surprised, then, by what my readings revealed: the “other”, the recognition of which is supposedly the focus of visual culture studies,sur- reptitiously became a huge i (the i of the interpreting viewer) in an interpre- tative manoeuvre i refer to as the narcissistic circle. the slippery surface on which this circular movement takes place is the model of the gaze after sartre and lacan: out of the model of a scopic regime that highlights the fragility of ego constructions, and which was thus also a critique of the illusory quality of identities per se,visual culture studies made a strategy affirming positively framed identities. of central methodological importance here, i propose, is the question of the relationship between historicity, alterity and models of seeing in art his- tory and visual culture studies. this question necessarily arises from the dou- ble critique of objectivist seeing in art history and of narcissistic seeing in visual culture studies. historicity and alterity have one thing in common: they constitute the unfamiliarity of the object and other in the eyes of the viewing, interpreting subject. they show this subject its limits, the ultimately uncrossable threshold that lies between the i and what lies outside it.in many respects, how this threshold is negotiated is the biggest problem between art history, with its focus on objects, and visual culture studies, which has been dedicated from the outset to rendering the subject visible. it is the approach to this threshold that i call a stance in the sense of an ethics of scholarly re- search; it is of importance to both art history and visual culture studies. see mieke bal, “the commitment to look” in journal of visual culture, ( ), - , who speaks in this context of an ethics of seeing. she also comments on the conflicts between art history and visual culture studies from the viewpoint of the latter. . questions of ethics historical unfamiliarity in art historical seeing let us briefly recap on approaches to the unfamiliarity of the art historical ob- ject (which i refer to, by analogy with cultural alterity, as historical alterity), with respect to the gazes exchanged between the viewing, interpreting sub- jectanditsobject.thereadings inthisbookhaveshowntwobasic forms,both of which implicitly aim to overcome this unfamiliarity of the object. firstly, an objectification of the subjective factor in interpretative acts via analytical categories, trying to neutralize the subjective dimension of dealing with the object with the aim of attaining verifiability or something approaching a sup- posed historical truth. and secondly, an approach involving the hermeneutic circle.panofskyandgombrichstandforthefirstposition,wolfgangkempfor the second.all three more or less ignore the seeing of the interpreting viewer, going to great lengths to develop approaches and procedures that integrate this seeing back into the object. gombrich tries to achieve this by framing perception as an activity that compares pictures with reality on a trial and error basis, placing it on a ver- ifiable basis that is only marginally impacted by historical change and that applies to producer and viewer in equal measure. panofsky does it by assum- ing that historical periods have distinct underlying intellectual dispositions that are expressed in the symbolic form of perspective as a necessary concre- tion of worldview. his characterization of perspective as a model of seeing that is distancing and objectifying, but also distance-denying, also prompts him to make a political critique that i will now apply to those models of seeing that centre on the position of the viewer. to the distance-denying model of perspective, panofsky attributes aims he finds politically suspect and which today would be referred to as narcissistic – the striving for power and an ex- pansion of the sphere of the i. what would a dialogue between panofsky and brysonorbal onthe relationshipof viewerand object look like?it is likely that panofsky would firmly reject bryson’s and bal’s appeal for the viewer’s right to interpret the object from his/her own subjective viewpoint, dissolving the historical and cultural unfamiliarity and thus the tension between viewer and object, in favour of the interpreting subject. i, too, do not see this form of power over object and interpretation, that finally puts the interpreter in the place of the author stripped of power by poststructuralism, as a viable alter- beyond the mirror native to the objectification of the interpreting subject in analytical categories or holistic concepts of truth (a charge levelled at panofsky). kemp, on the other hand, short circuits the hermeneutic circle of un- derstanding by locating the viewer as an implied viewer within the picture. he works with the paradox of not locating reception with the recipient but putting it back into the picture, whose internal structure always already de- terminestheviewer’sperception.inthisway,thepictureretains itsautonomy with regard to interpretations imposed from outside. the interpreting viewer has no place. one could go so far as to say that this model allows no interpre- tation whatsoever in the sense of a subjectively motivated difference between the picture and its reading. here, good interpretation consists in the abil- ity to identify and read the picture’s narratological cues. this could be called the extreme opposite of bryson’s model of the dominance of the interpret- ing viewer – and this even though kemp’s focus is on the reception of the artwork. in this constellation, what becomes of the unfamiliarity or alterity of the object? it dissolves, so to speak, as the viewer follows the reception- guiding prompts of the artwork; the viewer is “obedient”, submitting to the authority of the work, in turn meaning that his/her subjectivity is not taken into account,necessarily remaining latent.while bryson and bal make a rad- ical appeal for the recognition of the viewer’s interpretation, thus negating the picture’s alterity, in kemp’s model the act of interpretation is reduced to following instructions communicated by the picture. baxandall, pächt and alpers pursue different strategies with regard to the historicity of their object. they want to understand the historical unfamiliar- ity of the picture, thus facilitating something for which one might use the metaphor of empathy (of the interpreting viewer with the object in its alter- ity). in different ways, all three put seeing centre stage. baxandall goes in search of the “period eye”of the th century by reconstructing the knowledge ofatypicalflorentinebusinessmanderivedfromthepracticeofeverydaysee- ing. he is interested not in the seeing of the interpreting viewer but in the modeofseeingthatwascommontobothartistsandtheirclients,formingthe basis for the formal qualities of their pictures. within the bounds of what is pragmatically feasible, baxandall wishes to overcome the alterity of visual ex- perience at the time the pictures were painted. in relation to the historicism of art history, this is the most radical position because it tries to neutralize thesubjectiveinputoftheinterpretingviewer.consequently,onemightspeak especially by christopher wood, see chapter of this book. . questions of ethics here more of reconstruction than of interpretation, not so much of art but, through art, of the historical culture from which the art emerged – artworks understood as “lenses bearing on their own circumstances”. alpers, too, has a historicizing position. her focus is on the visual activity of a time and place in which obtaining knowledge via observation had great cultural importance – the netherlands in the th-century. she embeds her interest in observation as a historically specific cultural practice in art history by studying art that shows this practice in action. in this way, she too takes art as a cue to reconstruct something else – in this case th-century dutch visual culture. she thus interprets art as evidence, similar to the way histo- rians interpret sources. in the art of describing, art provides evidence of the visual culture of observation that was held in high esteem within society as a practice of knowledge acquisition. pächt is the only one to focus attention on the seeing of the interpreting viewer, treating it as a problem of art-historical method in the face of the historical alterity of the discipline’s object. for pächt, art historical practice mustbebasedon“gettingone’seye in”withartworks. thisincludesthevisual habits of the period in question, which he says can be accessed via extensive experience of looking at artworks from that period. although pächt is aiming forverifiability, it should be derivedfromthis seeing,which he conceivesof as a relation between the unfamiliar object and the viewing art historian, a rela- tion in which the tension between the viewer’s background and visual habits and the unfamiliarity of the object are not neutralized in holistic or objectify- ing basic assumptions. while “getting their eye in”, pächt calls on viewers to begin by suppressing their own wishes, such as the search for iconographic meaning, in favour of a mode of looking geared towards describing the art- work’s material and formal structure. such precise observation is intended to weaken the dominant normative aesthetic that influences the way art his- torians see, achieving openness with regard to aspects of the work that may be unfamiliar to the interpreting viewer. while pächt’s call to maintain an awareness of the difference between the seeing of the viewer and the histor- ical artwork in the process of art-historical analysis accepts the situatedness of the interpreting viewer, it also looks towards methods of overcoming this situatedness. for pächt, obtaining verifiable insights depends on the visual, baxandall, the limewood sculptors, vii. cf. chapter one, . pächt, the practice of art history, foreword. beyond the mirror dialogical interplay between the interpreting viewer and the object in its ma- terial and formal qualities. all of these positions share a focus on the historicity of their object. one might conclude from this that historical alterity necessarily implies a greater orientation towards the object than towards the interpreting subject, accom- panied by models for objectifying the resulting historical knowledge. one might add that this object does not always have to be an artwork: for baxan- dall and alpers, the gaze leads through the artwork to its context as the pri- mary focus of interest –and their positions are also the ones with the greatest affinity to visual culture studies. cultural unfamiliarity – the “other” in the gaze of visual culture studies unlike in art history, in visual culture studies the other is a key concept both politically and in terms of legitimizing the discipline – the other here always being a person, it should be noted, rather than an object. attention is focused on the recognition of such others in their identity as others; in other words, the object of visual culture studies is not the art object, as in art history, but subjects. in visual culture studies, objects usually feature as evidence of the representation of negatively or positively shaped and connoted identities of such others, or of power constellations within the socially dominant scopic regime in which both the “ones” and “others” have their place. the range of objects examined by visual culture studies goes beyond that usually classified as art. however much this political agenda seems to imply a dialogical approach (betweentheonesandtheothers),thetheoreticalmodelofvisualityonwhich the relationship between one and other is based surprisingly leads, as my readings of what can now be called “classic” texts from visual culture studies have shown, to processes of mirroring that i have described as narcissistic. iamnotclaimingthatarthistorypractisesthedialogicalgazewhilevisual culturestudiesremainslockedinanarcissistic loop.myreadingsoftextsfrom art history have shown that the dialogical gaze leads a marginal existence in the methodological thinking of the discipline (riegl, pächt, olin). for visual culture studies, on the other hand, my readings show the problematic recep- tion of the lacanian model of the gaze. whereas the lacanian gaze demon- . questions of ethics strates the illusionary character of self-identity, visual culture studies basi- cally turns it into its opposite, the theoretical affirmation of identity-politics. the narcissistic circle – a critique this rewriting of lacan is a central conclusion from my readings,and it is cer- tainly not something i was expecting when i began work on this book. orig- inally i was seeking to understand the way visual culture studies succeeded in introducing new, political subjects and subject-matter into the investiga- tion of visual culture. my intention was similar to stuart hall’s: a “raid” on another discipline in order to widen the possibilities of art history. driven by its political agenda, visual culture studies extracts positive-af- firmative identities from the critical negativity of the lacanian approach – making it possible to transform the interpretative act of seeing into a nar- cissist circle. unlike language, seeing has always been considered as intrin- sically narcissistic, beginning with the myth from which narcissism takes its name. in , baudelaire linked portrait photography with the myth of nar- cissus, equating it with the mirror. not only psychoanalysis connects seeing andnarcissism,butalsothephenomenologyofmerleau-pontywhenhestates that “there is a fundamental narcissism of all vision”, a statement for which he in turn drew on psychoanalysis. the reception of lacanian models of the gaze by visual culture studies has methodological consequences for its interpretative practice. in the model of the mirror stage, it is only the transition to language that enables the narcis- sism of the infant mirror stage to give way to an i capable of dialogue.the use of this model within visual culture studies as a model of visuality means that the interpreting viewer is assumed, in the act of seeing, to be caught in the infant stage. this in turn means that language/speech and seeing as activities stuart hall, “the emergence of cultural studies and the crisis of the humanities”, in october ( ), . see also chapter , first section, in this book. a concept from critical theory that can be applied here. “À partir de ce moment, la société immonde se rua, comme un seul narcisse, pour con- templersa triviale image surle métal.”charles baudelaire, “lesalon de ” inbaude- laire, curiosités esthétiques, (paris ). maurice merleau-ponty, the visible and the invisible (evanston ), . original french: “il y a un narcissisme fondamental de toute vision”, in levisibleetl’invisible (paris ), . beyond the mirror of the subject, with their consequences for the i, are assumed to be separate and unconnected – a problematic assumption. a strange paradox arises here: when the lacanian model of the gaze is used to analyse visuality, and when this analysis sticks to and generalizes the pre-linguistic infant model of the mirror stage, then language, of all things, is omitted from the construction of the seeing and interpreting subject – as if the subject automatically regressed to infancy in the act of seeing. this the- oretical separation of seeing and speaking reflects something that could be described, in the term used by bal, as visual essentialism: the isolation of vi- suality from language and from the other senses. in the specific focus of this reading,infantnarcissismbecomesanecessaryaspectofseeing.accordingto another reading, only the child’s entry into language makes “mutual recogni- tion beyond personal narcissism”possible. this would mean that seeing and speaking, which i discuss here as media between the subject and the world, structurethisrelationshipinfundamentallydifferentways:seeingassolipsis- tic, speaking as dialogical – a conclusion that is contradicted, for example, by olin’s dialogical model of seeing. for art history and visual culture studies, it should be noted at this point that increased attention and self-reflection needs to be devoted to the relationship between interpretative seeing and its articulation as or transformation into language and text. the discourse of visual culture studies also adopted lacan’s later model of the gaze. this deals with looking on a metaphorical level; the gaze here is a metaphororparable,asimileforthebeing-in-the-world-and-always-already- looked-at of the lacanian subject.whereas the mirror phase describes a typi- cal experience of actual children, for which lacan provides evidence, i see his model of the gaze with the diagram of the gaze and the screen as being more figurative in character, meaning it cannot be transferred literally to real pic- tures and situations of visual reception. and here lies another fundamental problem in the reception of the lacanian model within visual culture studies. due to their metaphorical links with seeing itself and with the visual ma- terial focused on by visual culture studies, such a literal application of lacan’s models of the gaze within the discipline strikes me as dangerous: language as symbolic takes second place to the imaginary, which in turn is duplicated or linguistically mirrored in metaphors of the visual, and then transferred back see bal, “visual essentialism”. gerda pagel, lacan zur einführung (hamburg ), . . questions of ethics into a language that revolves around recognition of the self that must set it- self apart against the threat emanating from the gaze of the other. when the lacanian models are adopted like this as a metatheory of visuality, interpre- tation becomes a narcissistic “event” in its own right. there is another paradox here: such oversimplification reduces the psy- choanalytical theory in question to seeing, which is used by lacan himself, with its implications of optics and scopic regimes, as a metaphor, a figure of speech and/or simile for structures of the unconscious and the “illusion of consciousness”. as a result, those who interpret visual objects fall once more into the “presence trap” of this “medium”, and the subjects of their in- terpretation (including,specifically, themselves) run the risk of being reduced to infant narcissism. the only theoretical way out of this trap is to construct seeing as reading; otherwise, seeing rather than reading would be the central heuristic concept for the cultural production of meaning. in cultural studies, as in visual culture studies (for which it prepared the ground), the production of meaning is the activity that defines culture. as yet, however, no models exist for how meaning is produced via seeing/the image/the visual that might matchtheabstractrigorofthemodelsputforthfor languagebysemioticsand linguistics. finally, seeing is not merely an activity of decoding. other questions are also raised. if, following bal, meaning is understood as the production of narrative in the act of reception, then applied to art it would mean that much of what has been addressed by art history, such as style, and other questions of the aesthetic qualities of the object, would fall outside the realm of reception. conversely the residue in the object that can- not be subsumed within a narrative could be defined as the remit of its aes- thetic properties – drawing a line between narrative and aesthetics in the- oretical discussions of reception. in such a model, then, the production of meaning is conceived of as distinct from the aesthetic dimension; elements lacan, fourfundamentalconcepts, . see also georg christoph tholen, “auge, blick und bild. zur intermedialität der blickregime” in bohrer, sieber, tholen, blickregime und dispositive, - . “to put it simply: culture is about ‘shared meanings’.” stuart hall, “introduction” in stuart hall (ed.), representation:culturalrepresentationandsignifyingpractices (london, thousand oaks, new delhi ), . the same applies, i suspect, to the act of reading, but this comment is only a weak articulation of my scepticism towards the gesture of controllability on the part of lin- guistics. beyond the mirror of form and materiality can then be registered only as non-aesthetic. accord- ing to this logic, these elements can only be perceived within a narratological straightjacket, as is the case with bal’s reading of rembrandt. attention and recognition in this light, the classificatory approach of classical art history takes on a dif- ferent relevance: it has brought forth an attention to and observation of those elements (commonly referred to in art history as style, facture, etc.) that are not subject to such a constraint. but are they not subject, instead, to other constraints, such as those imposed by the museum and other administrative institutions? yes, they are. however, if one is to believe the arguments used by visual culture studies to set itself apart from and legitimate itself in the face of its other, art history, this also happens, if one assumes the autonomy of art or, to put it another way, if one assumes an aesthetics of art that can- not be functionalized. the attention of art history is thus not limited to those elements that can be used to construct a narrative which derives its coher- ence from the perspective of the interpreting subject. art historical practices of seeing, then, insofar as they are not geared exclusively towards the read- ing/construction of meaning and narrative, are more broad-based. at this point one must ask how, in methodological terms, might it be possible to conceive of and practise an ethics of seeing that can lead to the recognition of the visually other – a recognition of what may be historically or culturally ‘other’ that is not focused on an interpretative identification with the mirror image? could this attentiveness as a practice of dialogical seeing beyond the limited cognitive objectives of classifying art history (as outlined, for example, in my reading of otto pächt) be of significance to such an ethics? and what might be the contribution of visual culture studies to this project? after all, the discipline pursues a social and political agenda. in contrast to art history,ethics seems to be inscribed in the project of visual culture studies from the outset, as part of its program. as i see it, the problem of ethics as it poses itself here lies in the methodological consequences of this program and thus in the position of the interpreting subject with respect to what is being looked at. see chapter of this book. . questions of ethics visual spaces of the subject: narration and observation in the course of my readings two main focuses of interpretative activity have emerged: the search for a narrative and observation. in the former, what the interpreting viewer does with the object is usually referred to as read- ing; drawing on literary criticism, this approach is referred to as narratology. mieke bal and wolfgang kemp explicitly base their models on this approach, and it is also implied in the work of other authors discussed. in most cases, it manifests itself in focussing more attention on content (or, in film studies, plot) than on the conditions/media of production or the forms of the object. in this, it resembles the method of iconography: narratology largely ignores the aesthetic specificity of the object, focussing instead on its representation of content, as well as analysing its formal elements in terms of this crite- rion. this interpretative technique has a major subjective component, which is rarely acknowledged or highlighted.the second focus,observation, is com- monly understood as a procedure of distancing the subject from the object, but it can slip into the opposite, a state referred to by michael fried as ab- sorption – as i have pointed out above in my reading of alpers. both of these positions, which i describe as stances towards the object, make possible, by categorizing the corresponding procedures as a method, the objectification of the subject, thus rendering it invisible, so to speak. in extreme cases, both also facilitate narcissistic coupling of the object to the interpreting viewer, projections of a narratological interpretation (as we have seen in the case of bryson), and absorption in the object. this absorption depends on the aesthetic quality that consists in the viewer becoming drawn into the act of perception, “forgetting” him/herself, which is also a type of narcissistic circle, less in the form of incorporating the other and more of expanding the i to include the other via an experience of merging. in art history, on the other hand, observation as a rule is linked to a non- identificatory distance with regard to the object that permits no such experi- enceofmerging–sinceit isapracticeofacquiringknowledgeabout theobject thisabsorptiveexperienceisthebenchmarkofqualityrequiredofartbymichaelfried; it cannot be identified in any of the positions under discussion here, however, because itcannotbepinneddowninscientificterms.it isnotatheoreticalpositionbutasubjec- tive experience of perception that depends on the aesthetic autonomy of the artwork and that seeks neither representations nor narratological coherence. see fried, “art and objecthood”. beyond the mirror (pächt) or its surrounding historical culture (alpers). in visual culture stud- ies, such distancing has a bad reputation that is articulated via metaphors of seeing: seeing as an objectifying and distancing sense that claims to provide evidence of truths it constructs itself,as epitomized by one-point perspective. against this backdrop, i thought it important, in my reading of panofsky’s essay on perspective, to highlight the political implications of distance and closeness that he identifies in this symbolic form. from what we have said so far, one might deduce an irreconcilable oppo- sition between two interpretative procedures: narratology and observation. it is tempting to assign them to the extreme poles of the relationship be- tween interpreting subject and object – distance and closeness. within the discursive framework of this polarity, distance belongs with objectivity and the masking of subjective elements in interpretation, while closeness is cou- pled with presentism, immersion and subjectivity through to the narcissistic circle. but narratology and observation cannot be clearly assigned to these poles. kemp’s version of narratology, for example, is ultimately an objectify- ing procedure from art history like any other. in the approaches of bal and bryson, however, it is accompanied by an empowerment of the interpreting viewer over the object,coupled with anti-historical presentism and a high de- greeofnarcissisticprojection.observation,ontheotherhand,cannotbesim- ply associated with objectifying distance, as shown by absorption as its most extreme case. but i do think that in visual culture studies, there is a predom- inance of narratology, or of a desire for narrative and for a form of realism in the sense of a narrative continuum in the representation of the world. and i identify the reason for this in the political agenda of visual culture studies: the desire for narrative is fed by the desire for identity, for a wholeness of the subject, be it an individual or a collective. in narratology, narrative is viewed as a social and cultural practice that supports identity-formation; narratives are considered, in the sense of an anthropological constant, as “distinct bear- ers of meaning, cognitive tools in the formation of meaning and identity”. mieke bal has rendered structuralist narratology “productive for the analysis of cultural phenomena”, especially with her work on the concept of focaliza- ansgar nünning, “wie erzählungen kulturen erzeugen: prämissen, konzepte und perspektiven für eine kulturwissenschaftliche narratologie” in alexandra strohmai- er(ed.), kultur – wissen – narration. perspektiven transdisziplinärer erzählforschung für die kulturwissenschaften (bielefeld ), - : . see ibid., . . questions of ethics tion. narrative, then, offers a sphere of action for the subject, not just for the narrating subject but also for the interpreting subject, as both are driven by a desire for meaning and identity. and when the desire of the subject deter- mines his/her view of the object to the point where it only reflects this desire back, then we have the narcissistic circle. how can such a position deal with objects that do not narrate, that do not use narrative to produce meaning and thus identity? in art, we know such objects from the avant-garde of the th century. as pächt’s example of the illuminations from the admont bible show, pictures whose meaning is unfamiliar to the viewer, too, can fall out of the narrative into the abstract mode – the forms of an intended but no longer comprehensible narrative elude the construction of meaning. conversely, forms that refuse a realistic mode of representation (or, in more general terms, that do not match the viewer’s mimetic standards) but that still tell a story, may also be perceived as abstract – this, too, is seen in the case of the admont bible. this denial of obvious meaning, however, is what calls for precise observation of the object. what does this mean? is an observing, attentive focus on an object only pos- sible when narrative is not possible? abstract, non-figurative art would then be opaque in more ways than one: it would be neither a window onto reality, nor onto a narrative, nor, in the sense of a mirror, onto the viewing subject. but for all this autonomy, for all this hermetic quality, it remains an other for observation and dialogue – a thought that prompts me to make an appeal for an approach to objects beyond the control of narcissistic desire. “self-identity is a bad visual system. fusion is a bad strategy of positioning.” visuality and art, the founding concepts of visual culture studies and art his- tory respectively, can both be conceived of in essentialist terms. for an ethics of seeing with genuine methodological consequences, however, i would ar- gue that it is necessary, in both fields, to conceive of these founding concepts as categories that have been agreed on, and not as anthropological constants. this isalsothebasis forthinkingabouttheperennialproblemofhowtostruc- ture the relationship between the object of research and the researching sub- ject now that claims to objectivity in this relationship have been debunked as haraway, “situated knowledges”. beyond the mirror myths and historical constructions by poststructuralist and feminist critiques of science.in the context of her feminist critique of the“objective”natural sci- ences, donna haraway’s concept of “situated knowledge” proposed a solution that became very influential, although it made little impact on either art his- toryorvisualculturestudies.thetitleof thissectionisaquotationtakenfrom her essay situated knowledges: the science question in feminism and the privilege of partial perspective, first published in . haraway offers a drastic description of the situation in which feminist criticism found itself at the time, faced with a radical constructivism that was “conjugated with semiology and narratology”: “we unmasked the doctrines of objectivity because they threatened our budding sense of collective historical subjectivity and agency and our ‘embodied’ accounts of truth, and we ended up with one more excuse for not learning any post-newtonian physics and one more reason to drop the old feminist self-help practices of repairing our cars.they’re just texts anyway,so let the boys have them back.” it was a mat- ter of finding out “how to have simultaneously an account of radical historical contingency for all knowledge claims and knowing subjects, … and a no-non- sense commitment to faithful accounts of a ‘real’ world”. she does not see this divide as unbridgeable. as her linking metaphor, she chooses “a much maligned sensory system in feminist discourse: vision. vision can be good to avoid binary oppositions”. this brings together the two factors that interest me as scholarly positions with regard to the object: a critique of the concept of objectivity, as it applies in one form or another to art historical positions, and the use of seeing as the founding metaphor for the positions of visual culture studies. how does haraway use seeing as a metaphor? and what does she need it for? she begins with the discursive figure of the “disembodied gaze” that we know in its symbolic form as one-point perspective: a gaze that promises ob- jective, hegemonic knowledge about the world without disclosing its stand- point: “the eyes have been used to signify a perverse capacity – honed to per- fection in the history of science tied to militarism, capitalism, colonialism, and male supremacy – to distance the knowing subject from everybody and everythingintheinterestsofunfetteredpower.”thisisagoodsummaryofthe feminist critique at the time, to which the discourse of visual culture studies ibid., - . ibid., . ibid., . . questions of ethics also refers,right through to mirzoeff’s right tolook in .haraway counters this gaze with the “particularity and embodiment of all vision” as the prereq- uisite for a “doctrine of embodied objectivity”. in this way, she does not separate seeing from objectivity in order to claim it for what she sees as the obviously partisan feminist critique; but neither does she equate it exclusively with subjectivity. instead, she seeks to connect embodied seeing with objec- tivity. this seeing is embodied because “all eyes, including our own organic ones, are active perceptual systems, building in translations and specific ways of seeing,that is,ways of life.” the eyefunctions as a medium that translates the world for and within its specific context/body. translation is to be under- stood here as a metaphor for the fact that seeing can never be immediate, only mediated. in haraway’s view, this is just as true of technical optical sys- tems as it is of natural ones.in her view,this situatedness of embodied seeing must be linked with the demands of an objectivity based on a viewpoint that is partial rather than total, because “only partial perspective promises objec- tive vision. this is an objective vision that initiates, rather than closes off, the problem of responsibility for the generativity of all visual practices.” this responsibility for the generativity of visual practices is an important cue for an ethics of seeing. and it is only logical that haraway demands the same responsibility for feminist theory, criticizing a modus operandi that adopts the viewpoint of the repressed in a manner that is uncritical and ro- manticizing. haraway has no time for “innocent ‘identity’ politics … as strate- giesforseeingfromthestandpointsofthesubjugatedinordertoseewell.one cannot ‘be’either a cell or molecule –or a woman,colonized person, labourer, and so on – if one intends to see and see from these positions critically.” just as it is impossible to identify with the repressed person in order to adopt their viewpoint, it is impossible to be immediately present unto oneself: “self- identity is a bad visual system.fusion is a bad strategy of positioning.” har- away insists that identity, including i-identity, does not produce science, but that “critical positioning does, that is, objectivity”. haraway’s critique of identity positions as perspectives for a knowledge of the world was first published in , shortly before the founding phase ibid. ibid., . ibid. ibid., . ibid. ibid., . beyond the mirror of visual culture studies around . to my knowledge, it met with little re- sponse during that phase. clearly, her critique resonated more strongly with those (natural) sciences that were sure of their store of objective facts and knowledge. i, too, will deal with just a selection from her thought, as i am interested in the way she links a critique of identity with visual metaphors in relation to the problem of the relationship between interpreting viewer and object. the reasons for this lack of interest in haraway are clear: in theoreti- cal terms, visual culture studies moves between foucault’s discourse analy- sis, lacan’s concepts of the gaze, and a more general basic assumption of the social and cultural constructedness of knowledge, and hence within the framework of poststructuralist and postmodern theory that haraway in turn recommends to the natural sciences as a way of reflecting critically on their own constructedness. the critical acuity of this theoretical framework is en- dangered, however, by the way visual culture studies deals with the concept of identity. two specific variants are important here: the political version of positive amplification of identity often leads to what haraway describes and criticizes as identification with the perspective of the “subjugated”; the other version is the radical subjectivization of interpretation, legitimized via what i consider to be a literalist misunderstanding of lacanian models of the gaze, leading to a radically narcissistic self-empowerment of the interpreting viewer/subject. for haraway this results in “self-identity”, which she consid- ers to be a bad visual system because it allows no distancing, either between the interpreting self (that is unable to situate itself) and the world,or between the viewer and the object, which is only seen insofar as it can be integrated intotheviewer’sself-imagewithoutthreateningit.thisobject is then,ashar- away puts it, “a resource for appropriation” to which “any status as agent in the productions of knowledge” must be denied. haraway’s model of situated knowledge uses metaphors of seeing and perspective in a way that suggests a link with a model of dialogue between object and interpreting subject as developed by margaret olin with reference to art-historical precursors like riegl and as hinted at in pächt’s thoughts on interpretative practice. haraway’s characterization of the object as an “agent” corresponds with the role played in art history and visual culture studies by the historical and cultural alterity of the object. this alterity is not something ibid., . . questions of ethics whose resistance to being incorporated into the construction of the interpret- ing subject must be overcome (be it via objectification or identification) but the element that turns the relationship between interpreting viewer and ob- ject into a dialogical one. and this relationship gives rise to situated knowl- edge insofar as the object recognized in its unfamiliarity is able to call the world-viewandperspectiveoftheinterpretingviewerintoquestion.thiscon- stitutes the action of the object understood as agent. seeing the other while art history focuses its gaze all too rigidly on discrete objects, forget- ting or denying that this gaze is shaped by subjective factors, visual culture studies does focus its gaze on the “other”, but what it sees there is above all that which can be reconciled, for whatever reason, with the interpreting i. this gaze is a look in the mirror. the element of the unfamiliar that identifies the other as other in the gaze of the one becomes or remains hidden, be- cause it threatens the identity of the interpreting viewer. the methodological and theoretical ramifications of these two specific scopic regimes unfold in the concrete situations where they are applied, where the exchange of looks within the triad of object, producer and viewer are subjected to a variety of challenges. they also raise the question of the viewer’s relationship to past and present: the art-historical interpreting i operates on the assumption that it is capable of objectivity in dealing with history; and while the interpreting i of visual culture studies, in its radical form at least, engages with theoretical critiquesofobjectivity,theconclusionitdrawsis that itsownsubjectivity,and thus its own present, must form the sole basis for interpretation. in ethical terms, this form of seeing means a denial of or failure to recognize the other, be it a discrete object or a subject. this can only be overcome in the form of a dialogical seeing that recognizes the unfamiliarity of the other: such seeing is aware of its desire to rewrite this unfamiliarity and to reduce it to what can be integrated into its own identity construction, whereas dialogue keeps the tension between identity and alterity open. this position is not identical, however, with the well-known calls for “self- critique and relativization of one’s own supposedly sovereign and certainly western, historically determined ethnological way of looking at different, for- beyond the mirror eign cultures”, as formulated especially in the context of postcolonial cri- tiques of science. as a consequence, the discipline of ethnology developed the method of participant observation in order to remove or at least reduce the imbalance of power between field researchers and those under study. how- ever,alteritydoesnotbeginwiththeexoticismofothercultures; thereception of lacan’s model of the gaze has brought a more radical position into play here, based on the subject’s being-other-unto-itself in the gaze of the other and the (vain) attempts to resolve this into a narcissistic gaze.by reading it as a positive affirmation of identity, visual culture studies deprive the lacanian model of the gaze of its critical potential. instead, the emphasis should be on enduring the unfamiliarity of the other, be it object or subject, and on keeping it alive. outlook: the digital world and its consequences not so long ago, art history focused entirely on historical alterity, with con- temporary art considered the remit of art criticism. in recent decades, this haschangedfundamentally,asthedisciplinedealswithobjectsrightuptothe immediate present. this has gone so far that teaching staff are increasingly complaining that their students are losing their awareness of history. they prefer studying the present, it is claimed, in order to avoid the unfamiliarity of historical objects and the attendant need to acquire specialist knowledge. such complaints are often accompanied by a broader verdict on the times: the politics and practices of knowledge displayed by the media, especially the internet, are geared towards simultaneous retrievability of information re- gardless of its historical situatedness; attention spans are shorter; the status of information is arbitrary and it can be combined at random. historical al- terity is broken down into individual information units, making it possible to absorb the past into a puzzlingly structured, ever-changing, ever-present data network in which the active subject no longer features. martin schulz, ordnungen der bilder. eine einführung in die bildwissenschaft (munich ), . see james clifford, “on ethnographic authority”, in representations , no. ( ), - . superficially (and cynically) speaking, it seems as if this diffusion of the subject into information networks has now realized on a technical level what poststructuralist cri- . questions of ethics the texts read in this book do not address this technological change, a de- velopment that will force art history and visual culture studies to re-examine their approaches. the fundamentally altered conditions of access to and use of knowledge brought about by information technology and the culture of the world wide web have consequences for the categories on which the practice of visual culture studies and art history are based. they also affect my thinking about an ethics of seeing in these two fields: for visual culture studies this category is visibility as the visual representation of identity; for art history, art as object. both are exposed to huge forces of change by the conditions of the digital world, the consequences of which i will in these concluding words sketch in. it is questionable, for example, whether the political agenda of visual cul- ture studies, framed as a matter of visibility within society,which involves in- tervening in the struggle for the right to identity-based representation of the “subjugated” (haraway) or “subalterns” (gayatry spivak), is still sustainable in the face of ever-louder criticism of the endless, uncontrollable circulation of representations inthemedia,fromtelevisiontosurveillancecamerastosocial media and mobile phone cameras. for media artist and theorist hito steyerl, thefascinationwith andmimetic desire forattractiveself-images hasbecome a threat: “as we register at cash tills, atms, and other checkpoints – as our cellphones reveal our slightest movements and our snapshots are tagged with gps coordinates – we end up not exactly amused to death but represented to pieces.” shenotes a growing tendency towards withdrawal from representa- tion: “… people have started to actively, and passively, refuse constantly being monitored,recorded,identified,photographed,scanned,andtaped.withina fully immersive media landscape, pictorial representation – which was seen as a prerogative and a political privilege for a long time – feels more like a threat.” within these structures of image exploitation, the right to symbolic representation and visual presence in the cultural field has become a danger, the political resource of visibility has become a further instrument of con- trol and marketization of both individuals and social groups. the consumer, for whose rights mirzoeff was still campaigning in , is now entangled in tiques of the subject were calling for. but this would imply that this effect was a critical activity, and not something that must itself be criticized. hito steyerl, “the spam of the earth: withdrawal from representation” in e-fluxjournal (eds.: julieta aranda, brian kuan wood, anton vidokle), # ( / ), http://www.e- flux.com/journal/the-spam-of-the-earth/ (accessed sept ). ibid. http://www.e-flux.com/journal/the-spam-of-the-earth/ http://www.e-flux.com/journal/the-spam-of-the-earth/ http://www.e-flux.com/journal/the-spam-of-the-earth/ http://www.e-flux.com/journal/the-spam-of-the-earth/ http://www.e-flux.com/journal/the-spam-of-the-earth/ http://www.e-flux.com/journal/the-spam-of-the-earth/ http://www.e-flux.com/journal/the-spam-of-the-earth/ http://www.e-flux.com/journal/the-spam-of-the-earth/ http://www.e-flux.com/journal/the-spam-of-the-earth/ beyond the mirror a regime of “(mutual) self-control and visual self-disciplining, which is even harder to dislocate than earlier regimes of representation”. under these conditions, visual representation can no longer be a political resource.the hope that symbolic representation of subaltern identities might lead to enhanced political and economic equality is in crisis; ultimately, hard- won visual presence based on fixed identities resulted in a situation where minority groups are now seen, recognized and addressed in precisely these formats of fixed diversity – as consumers. instead of political participation, this regime of representation delivers “gossip, surveillance, evidence, serial narcissism, as well as occasional uprisings”. it is a common theme in the debate surrounding the status of images in the world of digital media that as signs these images have neither an au- thor nor a referent. if images in the digital world no longer have a referent, then visual representations of identity, the currency of visual culture studies, also have no referent (i.e.no subject). it follows that these representations put identitiesinto circulation that have no referent.at the very least, these identi- ties have detached themselves from the subjects who provide the images/data to look at, in order to float “freely” and uncontrollably in the network where, reduced to information, they can also just as uncontrollably be “harvested”. in such a subject-less visual regime, the lacanian models of the gaze adapted by visual culture studies are no longer effective,since representation has been suspended. as well as the subject, what is also diffused in the world wide web is alter- ity, the unfamiliarity of the other that can only come into play as the other of a subject. steyerl’s “serial narcissism” comes to mind: in the world wide web, technology has led to an effect that can be conceived of by analogy with the narcissistic circle triggered in the interpretative practice of visual culture studies by lacan’s models of the gaze, working against the alterity/unfamil- iarity of this other in an attempt to smooth it over or mirror it into the self of the interpreting viewer – accompanied by a denial of objectifying distance. here, the object as an other, as something in dialogue with the subject, comes back into play – for example the object of art history, the individual work of art. in the age of google, the artwork, too, has altered its character and status, writes david joselit in after art. to grasp this development in ibid. ibid. david joselit, after art (princeton, oxford ). . questions of ethics theoretical terms, he borrows metaphors from the financial markets and the internet–fromthosefields,then,inwhichtheaggressivecapitalismofrecent decadesculminates.hedoesthisnot fromapositionofcriticalnegativity,but because he wishes to refute what he considers to be the underestimated sta- tus of today’s art. in his view, art needs this support. against the idealization of the artwork as a unique au-ratic object – based on simplified readings of benjamin – joselit upholds the circulation of digital images, which he ap- plies to art. he pursues a strategy of positively revaluating something that seems to be in need of help – an approach that is familiar from visual culture studies. joselit tries to rethink the current status of art by dressing its system of values, its forms of production and its manifestations, in the dynamics of finance and the internet. the new values of art in the age of its digitally en- hanced reproduction are based on the concepts of ‘circulation’ and ‘currency’; the concept of media is replaced by that of format, the concepts of form and content by information. the image is “a visual byte”, a form of information, whose power joselit sees not in its ontology but in “a current or currency” that is activated on contact with the viewer. the more points of contact are established,thegreater thepower–ametaphorthat linksthe (monetary)cur- rency of images with the currents and networks of electricity.in joselit’s view, there has been a shift from the individual artwork to“populations of images”, leading to “changing formats of contemporary art”. today, it is saturation via mass circulation –“the status of being everywhere at once rather than be- longing to a single place” – that creates value for and through images. he thus contrasts two main aspects with the conventional status of the artwork: the shift away from individual picture to a “swarm of images” that produce a “buzz” rather than a benjaminian aura, and uninterrupted global circu- lation, reproduction and combination in digital media. here, however, the digital image does not take the place of the artwork; instead, joselit sees an for benjamin’s theory of the loss of aura, associated with art’s mechanical reproduc- tion, is still being used in art discourse as evidence of art’s loss of value, while prices on the art market have soared. this limited reception turns benjamin into a nostalgic fig- ure yearning for the fixed, auratic artwork of old and forgets the political expectations that he associated with art’s mechanical reproducibility and with this loss. joselit, after art, xv. ibid. xvi. ibid., . ibid., . ibid. beyond the mirror obligation for art to respond to this development. he claims to have observed that contemporary art is moving away from individual or serial art objects towards “the disruption or manipulation of populations of images through various methods of selecting and reframing existing content”. the what be- comes less important than the relationship between the “discrete images and their framing network”. in his view,art criticism must adjust to a shift from an object-based aesthetics towards a “network aesthetics of images premised on the emergence of form from populations of images”. form and medium are subsumed under the concept of ‘format’, superseding the individual art- work as a discrete object: “formats are dynamic mechanisms for aggregating content.” the economies of this “overproduction of images” can only be un- derstoodandprocessedviaan“epistemologyofsearch”,becausetheyfunction via “connectivity”. joselit sees his political project exemplified in fairytale, ai weiwei’s con- tribution to documenta in , for which the artist brought chinese to kassel: rather than criticizing the power of images, he argues, ai used the power of art – in this case its (or rather his) prestige and economic power – to transport people and objects both in space and in the imagination. “this is ourpoliticalhorizon,afterart.” inai’selaborateoperationheseesproof that connectivity produces power.“one need not exit the art world or denigrate its capacities.insteadwemustrecognizeandexploit itspotentialpower innewly creative and progressive ways. our real work begins after art, in the networks it formats.” this closing sentence highlights another of joselit’s concerns: he isclearlyof theopinionthatasapart ofaggressiveglobalizedcapitalism,art is intheprocessof losingits legitimacyasacritical force,especially intheeyesof radical opponents of capitalism. he thus attempts a difficult volte-face: pre- cisely this integration into the networks of turbo-capitalism, he argues, gives art a power that must be exploited. which raises the well-known question: is there such a thing as a critique of capitalism from inside? this question might also be asked the other way round: is there such a thing as a critique ibid., . ibid., . ibid., . ibid., . ibid., . ibid., . . questions of ethics fromoutsidethesystem?joselit’sessayprovokedarangeofresponses. what interests me here is something else, namely joselit’s view that art should set more store by networks than objects. the examples he gives include discrete objects, like the photographs of sherrie levine, ai’s chair installation at the venice biennale, or wang guangyi’s painting coca cola ( ). there are also the usual formats of contemporary art: videos, performances, sculp- tures,social interventions like those of rirkrit tiravanija and santiago sierra, as well as references to the art strategies which since the s replaced high modernismàlagreenberg.hisexamplesthuscomeessentiallyfromthewest- ern canon of neo-avant-garde,conceptual art and post-avant-garde, i.e. those currents that have an inbuilt reflexive element, be it with regard to their own artpracticeortotheartsystemwithits institutionsanddynamicsofexploita- tion,extended to include formats that are explicitly critical of capitalism such as tania bruguera’s generic capitalism ( ). the departure of the discrete object from art production, then, is a topic that already has a history and a discourse. joselit now describes it as an integrative moment of digitally ac- celerated capitalism; its critical thrust must come from its success within the system. this may also be the reason why, surprisingly, he does not address internet art, since it is not (yet) integrated into the existing value creation chains of the art market. in their analyses, both steyerl and joselit presuppose the power of to- tal media immersion as a fact of conditions today. for steyerl, however, this does not immediately lead to a baudrillardian merging of the real world with media simulacra; instead, she contrasts the identity simulacra of the world wide web with the resistance of real people/subjects – their withdrawal from representation. joselit’s position is necessarily less clearly defined because a separation of network images from reality would go against his argument; in for critical reactions to joselit’s political repositioning of art, see, for example, todd cronan, “neoliberal art history” in radical philo-sophy (jul/aug ), - , http:// nonsite.org/review/neoliberal-art-history (accessed sept ). value creation chains that are (still) strongly shaped by criteria which internet art does not (yet) offer or actively seeks to undermine: authorship, object character and the in- stitutions of display. it should be noted here that this art system has learned to exploit even such art forms as do not produce objects in the strict sense, like performances and site-specificactions. intermsofexploitation,bruguera’sactionorsantiagosierra’shir- ing and arrangement of workers in relation to their skin colour (shown in at kun- sthalle wien) could be said to be objects in this sense, even if joselit describes them as formats. see joselit, after art, f. http://nonsite.org/review/neoliberal-art-history http://nonsite.org/review/neoliberal-art-history http://nonsite.org/review/neoliberal-art-history http://nonsite.org/review/neoliberal-art-history http://nonsite.org/review/neoliberal-art-history http://nonsite.org/review/neoliberal-art-history beyond the mirror his model, the dividing lines between the discrete objects of art and the image clusters of digital circulation are fluid; the materiality of the art object does not feature in his argument. media technologies, their economies and their usage change so fast as to make it impossible to propose definitions and recommend paths of action for the long term on the basis of today’s situation. and there is certainly no question of formulating strategies on the basis of one-sided descriptions of the current state of affairs. many such analyses and declarations of paradigm shifts have been absolutizing, putting them at odds with the ambivalences of real developments; one need only think of the “end of history”, the “end of art”, or “globalization” that was soon joined by its opposite, an insistence on the local, leading to the portmanteau concept of the“glocal”.absolutizing talk of total media immersion also shows a dubious one-sidedness, regardless of whether it is due to unfettered techno-optimism, a media critique, or a more general critique of culture, often with a moralizing character. i would argue in favour of insisting that art, in the broadest imaginable sense and in ways that constantly reflect changing conditions, contests the power of the factual. for today, this would also mean contesting the power of “total” media immersion, even and above all when this power is (merely) imagined, because such imaginings, too, play a part in the transformation of the factual, as does a critique that speaks of the media, of images, of the in- ternet as an overwhelming flood to which people are helplessly exposed. the fact, for example, that joselit does not elaborate on possible differences be- tween art and media circulation at least suggests that art is indeed involved in the corresponding processes of change. or to put it differently: art’s au- tonomy can no longer be the basis for its ability to critique or contest; art is involved and distanced at the same time – as discussed above with regard to haraway’s “situated knowledge”. the ties between art and visual culture are closer today than ever before. and in contrast to what was implied by the distancing rhetoric of visual cul- ture studies in the s about art history being an elitist, bourgeois prac- tice, this does not mean that art no longer has any critical legitimacy. on the contrary, its critical, contesting voice is necessary – and not so much in the visual forms of political agitation, as they are known from bygone eras of clearly drawn political battle lines. these new ties can also act as a meeting for this succinct formulation i am grateful to bettina uppenkamp. . questions of ethics ground between arthistory and visualculture studies.art history might prof- itablydepart fromitsstructuralfixationonadiscreteobject–foralthoughart itself has not abandoned the discrete object, its strategies are more open in theirconnectivemobility.arthistoryshouldalsoopenitsheuristiccategories, categories that belong to an episteme of objectivity, to thinking in relational terms, and here it can profit from the dialogue with visual culture studies. thinking its main activity of seeing as being embedded in the relational could then also be described in correlation with what joselit calls connectivity. in very simple terms, one might say: connectivity is to today’s mobile art what context is to the art of discrete objects. the growing resistance to digitally inflated presentations of identity di- agnosed by steyerl, on the other hand, will have very real consequences for the basic assumptions of visual culture studies, since public visibility now manifests itself as a kind of crazy hall of mirrors. it can be assumed that the strategy of visibility as a political resource in the struggle for recognition of subaltern identities is coming to an end, and with it the fixation on identi- ties that had, in their affirmative function, long become prisons, especially in times of increased transcultural circulation. this can be beneficial in sev- eral respects: freedom from narcissism as the driving force behind visibility in identity politics, accompanied by the possibility for visual culture studies to focus its gaze beyond an identity-based framework more strongly on its object, visuality – visual phenomena of cultural production in the broadest sense, exchanges of gazes and scopic regimes in which relationships between subjects and media situations manifest themselves, their social and cultural interplay,theirtechnologies,theirsocialandeconomiceffects,theiraccompa- nying cultural practices. and art has a special function in this field: to contest the power of the factual, be it visual or not, it bundles (in concentrated and, ideally, surprising form) aesthetic and critical-analytical forces of a kind that are not to be found in any other cultural production. i imagine the respective objects of art history and visual culture studies as being positioned between the relational factors of visuality and the discrete objects of art. they relate to each other not in the sense of a hierarchy where art history features as a special case of visual culture studies, but in the in- terplay outlined above that situates art as a condensation and contestation of those conditions examined by visual culture studies. this is territory where art history and visual culture studies can meet,with attentiveness, in a seeing that orients itself towards the outside of the subject while remaining aware of its subjective genesis. bibliography adelmann,ralf,andreasfahr,ineskatenhusen,nicleonhardt,dimitrilieb- sch (eds.),visualculturerevisited.germanandamericanperspectivesonvisual culture (cologne ). alpers,svetlana,“describe or narrate? a problem in realistic representation” in new literary history , no. , , - . alpers, svetlana, “is art history?” in discoveries and interpretations. studies on contemporary scholarship, vol. i, issue of daedalus , no. 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( ), - . beyond the mirror smith, marquard, “visual culture studies: questions of history, theory, and practice” in amelia jones (ed.), a companion to contemporary art since (oxford ), - . smith, shawn michelle, “photographing the ‘american negro.’ nation, race, and photography at the paris exposition of ”in lisa bloom (ed.),with other eyes. looking at race and gender in visual culture (minneapolis and london ), - . smith, terry, “if looks could kill empires” in publicbooks.org ( july ), www.publicbooks.org/nonfiction/if-looks-could-kill-empires (ac- cessed sept ). sontag, susan, on photography (new york ). spivak, gayatri chakravorty, “acting bits/identity talk” in critical inquiry ( ), - . spivak, gayatri chakravorty, “can the subaltern speak?” in cary nelson and lawrencegrossberg(eds.),marxismandtheinterpretationofculture (urbana ), - . spivak, gayatri chakravorty, “subaltern studies: deconstructing historiog- raphy” in spivak, in other worlds. essays in cultural politics (london and new york ), - . steyerl, hito, “the spam of the earth: withdrawal from representation” in e- flux journal, julieta aranda, brian kuan wood, anton vidokle (eds.), # (feb. ), http://www.e-flux.com/journal/the-spam-of-the-earth/ (ac- cessed sept ). sturken, marita, lisa cartwright, practices of looking. an introduction to visual culture (oxford ). talbot, william henry fox, the pencil of nature (london - ). the art bulletin, statements for the series “a range of critical perspectives” in the years to under the following titles: : “the object of art history,” “the subject in/of art history”; : “art> <history,” “inter/dis- ciplinarity”; : “aesthetics, ethnicity, and the history of art,” “rethink- ing the canon,” “art history and its theories”; : “money, power, and the history of art.” tholen,georg christoph,“auge,blick und bild.zur intermedialität der blick- regime” in nadja elia-bohrer, samuel sieber, georg christoph tholen (eds.), blickregime und dispositive audiovisueller medien (bielefeld ), - . “visual culture questionnaire” in october (summer ), - . http://www.e-flux.com/journal/the-spam-of-the-earth/ bibliography wallis, brian, marianne weems, philip yenawine (eds.), art matters. how the culture wars changed america (new york ). warnke, georgia, after identity. rethinking race, sex and gender (cambridge ). weber, samuel, return to freud. jacques lacan’s dislocation of psychoanalysis (cambridge ).german: rückkehrzufreud.jacqueslacansent-stellungder psychoanalyse (berlin ). williams, patrick, and laura chrisman (eds.), colonial discourse & postcolonial theory. a reader (new york ). wood, christopher s., “art history reviewed vi: e.h. gombrich’s ‘art and illusion: a study in the psychology of pictorial representation,’ ” in the burlington magazine , no. ( ), - . wood, christopher s., introduction to perspective as symbolic form, by erwin panofsky. trans. christopher s. wood (new york ), - . wood, christopher s., introduction to the vienna school reader. politics and art historical method in the s, edited by christopher s. wood (new york ), - . wood, christopher s. (ed.), the vienna school reader. politics and art historical method in the s (new york ). wood, christopher s., “when attitudes became form. christopher s. wood on michael baxandall ( - )” in artforum , no. ( ), - . woods, alan, “gombrich’s art and illusion” in the cambridge quarterly , no. ( ), - . a act up - adelmann, ralf ai weiwei alberti, leon battista , , , , , , , alpers, svetlana – , – , , , , , , , , , , , , , , – , , , , andre, carl , , , , , appadurai, arjun , arnheim, rudolf , , b bakhtin, mikhail , , bal, mieke , , , , , , , , , , – , , , – , , – , – , – , , , barthes, roland , , , , – , , bätschmann, oskar , battcock, gregory , , , baudelaire, charles , , , baudrillard, jean , , baxandall, michael – , – , , , , , , , , , , , , , – , , , belting, hans , , , benjamin, walter , , , , bentham, jeremy , berger, john , , berger, martin a. , , - , bernhardt, sarah bernheimer, charles , bhabha, homi birmingham center for contempo- rary cultural studies black audio film collective blinder, david , blomberg, sven bloom, lisa , , , , – , , , , , bois, yves-alain , bondone, giotto di , bonnefois, yves boring, edwin g. , bourdieu, pierre , , , braunmühl, claudia von , , bredekamp, horst , index b eyond the mir r or brennan, teresa , bright, deborah , bruguera, tania bryson, norman , , , , , , , , , , , – , , , , , , , , , , , – , , , , , , – , , , buber, martin , , buci-glucksmann, christine , , busch, werner , butler, judith , – , , c caravaggio, michelangelo merisi da , , , carrier, david , cassirer, ernst , , , cheetham, mark , , , chrisman, laura , , , clark, kenneth , , , conley, tom , crary, jonathan , , , , cronan, todd , d damisch, hubert , danielsen, dan , danino, nina , davis, bret w. , debord, guy , derrida, jacques , , , desault, yvette , descartes, rené diawara, manthia dibb, michael diderot, denis , – , , , , , , , dikovitskaya, margaret , , , , dilly, heinrich , , , donatello , dubois, w.e.b. , dunch, ryan , dürer, albrecht , , e ebitz, david , eco, umberto , , elia-bohrer, nadja engle, karen , evans, jessica , , , evans, walker eyck, jan van , f falkenhausen, susanne von , , , , , , flémalle, master of förschler, silke , , , foster, hal – , , , , , , , , foucault, michel , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , fox, chris , , francesca, piero della index fried, michael , , , , , , , fusco, coco , , g gadamer, h.g. , , , gasché, rodolphe gay, paul du , , , , , , , , , , geble, peter genette, gérard , , gérôme, léon , glaser, bruce , gombrich, ernst – , – , , , , , – , , , , , , , – , , , , , , , goodman, nelson , – , , , , goya, francesco de , graham, dan gramsci, antonio greenberg, clement , grossberg, lawrence , guangyi, wang guerrilla girls h hall, catherine , hall, stuart , – , , , , , , , , , hamilton, kendra , haraway, donna , , , , – , , , hauser, arnold hayek, friedrich august von , haynes, todd – , , hegel, georg wilhelm friedrich , , , , , helas, philine , hentschel, linda , holbein, hans , , hollis, richard holly, michael ann , , , , , , , – , , , holzer, jenny hooks, bell , , - , , , , i iser, wolfgang , , , , , , iversen, margaret , j jauss, hans robert , , , jay, martin , , – , , , , , , , , , , , jongh, e. de , joselit, david – , julien, isaac k kaschnitz von weinberg, guido kepler, johannes , , – kofman, sarah kristeva, julia kruger, barbara , kyoto school , , b eyond the mir r or l lacan, jacques , , , , – , – , , , , , , , , , – , , , , , , , , , , , laclau, ernesto , , langdale, allan – , larson, magali sarfatti , lauretis, teresa de , , , , lavin, irving , , lebensztejn, jean-claude levine, sherrie lévi-strauss, claude lissitzky, el longoni, emilio lopes, dominic , loreck, hanne , lyotard, jean-françois m magritte, rené , manet, Édouard , , , , mapplethorpe, robert , marin, louis , , , marker, chris mazière, michael , melville, stephen , merleau-ponty, maurice , metz, christian , , , , michels, karen milbrandt, t.h. , mill, john stuart , miller, daniel , minh-ha, trin t. mitchell, w.j.t. , – , , , – , , , , , , morelli, giovanni morra, joanne , , , moxey, keith , , , , , mulvey, laura , , , , , , – , , n novotny, fritz nünning, ansgar , o occupy movement okoye, ikem stanley , olin, margaret , – , , , , , , , osgood, charles e. , p pächt, otto , – , , , , , – , , , , , , – , , , , , pagel, gerda , paik, nam june panofsky, erwin , , , – , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , patten, mary , peirce, charles sanders piranesi, giovanni battista , pisanello, antonio podro, michael , , , pollock, griselda , , , index polte, maren , popper, karl , , potts, alex , , q quatremère de quincy, antoine- chrysostome r redman, peter , reichle, ingeborg , , , rembrandt, harmenszoon van rijn – , , , , riegl, alois , , , , , , , , rose, jacqueline , , , , , , , , , roskill, mark , rückert, claudia , ruskin, john rutherford, jonathan , , , , s sartre, jean paul , , – , , , , , , sauerländer, willibald , , saussure, ferdinand de schjeldahl, peter , schlesinger, arthur jr. , seamon, roger , sedlmayr, hans , , , shearman, john – , shohat, ella , sieber, samuel , sierra, santiago silverman, kaja , , , – , , , , , , , , sims, lowery stokes , smith, marquard , , , , , , , , , , , smith, shawn michelle , smith, terry , , spivak, gayatri chakravorty , , , , , , stam, robert , steyerl, hito , , , , strohmaier, alexandra , sussman, elisabeth , t talbot, william henry fox , taylor, mikki tiravanija, rirkrit tizian (tiziano vecellio) u uppenkamp, bettina , , , , , , v velasquez, diego vernet, joseph vienna school , , virilio, paul w wagner, anne m. , warnke, georgia , , , , , warnke, martin , b eyond the mir r or weber, samuel , , , weems, marianne , , , weissberg, liliane , weyden, rogier van der williams, patrick , , , wollheim, richard wood, christopher s. , , , woods, alan , y yenawine, philip , , , all print, e-book and open access versions of the titles in our list are available in our online shop www.transcript-verlag.de/en! cultural studies elisa ganivet border wall aesthetics ar tworks in border spaces , p., hardcover, ill. , € (de), - - - - e-book: , € (de), isbn - - - - andreas sudmann (ed.) the democratization of artificial intelligence net politics in the era of learning algorithms , p., pb., col. ill. , € (de), - - - - e-book: free available, isbn - - - - jocelyne porcher, jean estebanez (eds.) animal labor a new perspective on human-animal relations , p., hardcover , € (de), - - - - e-book: , € (de), isbn - - - - all print, e-book and open access versions of the titles in our list are available in our online shop www.transcript-verlag.de/en! cultural studies burcu dogramaci, kerstin pinther (eds.) design dispersed forms of migration and flight , p., pb., col. ill. , € (de), - - - - e-book: , € (de), isbn - - - - pál kelemen, nicolas pethes (eds.) philology in the making analog/digital cultures of scholarly writing and reading , p., pb., ill. , € (de), - - - - e-book: , € (de), isbn - - - - pablo abend, annika richterich, mathias fuchs, ramón reicher t, karin wenz (eds.) digital culture & society (dcs) vol. , issue / – inequalities and divides in digital cultures , p., pb., ill. , € (de), - 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 	contents 	introduction 	seeing and the concept of visuality 	trains of thought – readings 	art history and seeing 	seeing in the visual field: visual culture studies 	seeing as an ethical question 	part one: how do art historians see? 	 . interpreting forms of representation 	visual order as concretized worldview – erwin panofsky’s perspective as symbolic form 	seeing as an approach to reality – ernst gombrich’s art and illusion 	 . experience and the visual 	the “period eye” – michael baxandall’s painting and experience 	between presence and representation – svetlana alpers’ the art of describing 	 . through the eyes of the spectator 	seeing the other – otto pächt’s the practice of art history: reflections on method 	focus on reception - wolfgang kemp’s der anteil des betrachters 	part two: visual culture studies – looking at the visual 	 . visual culture studies – concepts and agendas 	culture, the political, and visual culture 	identity as a cultural and political concept 	political visuality: visibility as a contested resource 	the academic discourse of visuality 	one‐point perspective as a metaphor for rationalist cultures of power 	 . visual culture studies’ foundational concept 	the model of the gaze 	the threatened subject – norman bryson 	the evil eye and a counter-model – margaret olin 	 . visual culture studies’ operational concept 	what is visual culture? w.j.t. mitchell 	visuality as event – nicholas mirzoeff 	seeing is reading – mieke bal 	 . seeing as a political resource in visual culture studies 	the stigmatizing gaze – ‘integration and positive revaluation’ – norman bryson 	the discriminating and the oppositional gaze – bell hooks 	an attempt at integration from art history – lisa bloom 	evidence 	evidence of the non-visible – martin a. berger 	the utopian gaze and its failure – nicholas mirzoeff 	part three: towards an ethics for the act of seeing 	 . questions of ethics 	historical unfamiliarity in art historical seeing 	cultural unfamiliarity – the “other” in the gaze of visual culture studies 	the narcissistic circle – a critique 	attention and recognition 	visual spaces of the subject: narration and observation 	“self‐identity is a bad visual system. fusion is a bad strategy of positioning.” 	seeing the other 	outlook: the digital world and its consequences 	bibliography 	index julius schlosser, the vienna school of the history of art - review of a century of austrian scholarship in german journal of art historiography number december julius von schlosser, the vienna school of the history of art - review of a century of austrian scholarship in german translated and edited by karl johns members of the profession are immediately aware of what is meant with the expression ‘vienna school:’ the center for art historical teaching, closely related to the austrian ‘école des chartes’, organized by theodor von sickel, and today called the ‘ii. kunsthistorisches institut der universität wien’ (‘second department of the history of art in the university of vienna’) – a designation only ten years old and in no way expressive of chronology or quality, as only those completely ignorant of academic customs might require reminding. austrian daily newspapers have especially recently published repeated reports that might lead to a complete misunderstanding of the situation. for this reason, and since many specialists are barely aware of the history of this respected ‘school’ which has produced so many distinguished scholars, we offer a brief sketch of its origins and development. it has been almost completely forgotten that it originated in the period of german romanticism and that its nearly century-old history represents a considerable chapter in the history of german language scholarship and intellectual history in austria. josef daniel böhm and his circle its ‘prehistory’ in fact began with a very remarkable figure of the period before the revolution of : the medalist josef daniel böhm († ), born in an old german language colony in the eastern slovak zips region, and a pupil of the well- known classicistic sculptor franz zauner, who is known so well to all viennese by his equestrian portrait of the emperor joseph ii that still stands in one of the unscathed beautiful city squares before the former imperial library. the young medalist had the good fortune of emphatic patronage from the viennese nobles of julius v. schlosser, the vienna school of the history of art - review of a century of austrian scholarship in german including a list of members edited by hans hahnloser dedicated to the spirit of theodor von sickel and franz wickoff on the th anniversary of their deaths and the occasion of the th anniversary of the Österreichisches institut für geschichtsforschung a translation of ‘die wiener schule der kunstgeschichte‘, mitteilungen des österreichischen institut für geschichtsforschung ergänzungs-band , heft , innsbruck: wagner julius von schlosser the vienna school of the history of art the period of beethoven and schubert - especially count moritz fries, who is remembered not merely as a wealthy banker, but who played an important role in the history of early viennese art collecting, and also provided the means by which the young artist was able to visit italy in . having converted to catholicism in rome like so many of his fellow german-speaking artists, böhm joined the circle of the german nazarenes, and especially that of johann friedrich overbeck, who became his close friend, and who had also converted. from to , böhm was again in rome on a fellowship as medalist, living in the tower of the palazzo venezia, which until the first world war became the home of so many austrian artists. one should mention his friendship with bertel thorvaldsen and with eduard jakob von steinle, which were formed here during this time. after returning to vienna, he soon achieved a distinguished position as director of the old and prestigious ‘academy of engraving at the imperial and royal central mint’, which he held until his death. he occupies a venerable place in the history of the austrian medal. his works are characterized by technical and artistic ability. he was as excellent a teacher and as memorable an artist as was our own anton scharff († ), who was still inspired by his example. with the meager means at his disposal, böhm had already begun collecting art during his years in rome. in vienna he rose to become one of the greatest middle class collectors. his holdings, which were auctioned by the vienna art dealer alexander posonyi after his death in , are listed in a catalogue with entries. they covered a wide range, including a large number of prints and drawings, as well as paintings and ancient and near eastern decorative arts (particularly cameos). ‘german primitives’ received a special emphasis, as could only be expected with a man trained in the period of classicism who found his artist friends among the nazarenes in rome. the most valuable elements were the small german sculptures of the th and th centuries, particularly relevant to böhm for his own artistic activity – since he had begun as a sculptor in wood. some of these are still today among the proudest holdings of public collections: a statue of ‘adam’ by tilman riemenschneider and a proportion figure derived from albrecht dürer in the kunsthistorisches museum in vienna, also the ‘adam’ by konrad meit in the Österreichische galerie, and above all böhm’s favorite items, which he refused to part with throughout his life in spite of repeated lucrative offers - the two portrait busts identified as charles the bold and his wife, now in the victoria and albert museum in london. at the sale, these were also appraised most highly, which strikes us today as naïve, but in fact they brought the highest prices, the portrait busts being knocked down for guilders – unique at the time. in our context it appears most significant that the entire collection was conceived from the didactic point of view, and ‘art historically’ in the strict sense. böhm, was by nature a teacher, had sought to broaden his narrow literary training by studying the writings of goethe about art, and according to his pupil, robert von eitelberger, these informed the simple and informal lectures which he liked to give in his welcoming house in the suburb on the wieden. he was consulted by count julius von schlosser the vienna school of the history of art leo von thun in the remarkable reform of austrian education at the beginning of the ’s, and stressed the history of art with particular emphasis. in keeping with his intellectual origins and training, he remained devoted to the true greek antiquity – he had studied the sculptures from aegina which thorvaldsen was restoring in rome, and the casts of the elgin marbles that belonged to the pope - as well as the art of the medieval period, especially the german late gothic and early renaissance. his humble abode outside the walls of the city became the center for those viennese interested in the history of art in the period before the revolution of , and this in fact laid the foundation stone for the ‘vienna school’. it was here that the people met who became its ancestors through the direct study of original objects under the tutelage of their host. this is the reason that we have dwelt on this old viennese ‘salon’. on the basis of long years of experience and with an exaggerated systematization, a hungarian archaeologist, emmerich henszlmann (born in kaschau - košice in the present slovakia) published a characterization of böhm’s didactic methods after his death (Österreichische revue, january ). it was characterized by an inductive approach, based on the direct examination of individual works of art. this alone was to provide the point of departure for general rules of historical development or the psychological analysis of artists. böhm strongly opposed the abstract and dogmatic artistic theories that still predominated in the academies of that time. this affected his attitude to the medieval period as well as to greek antiquity, which he had discovered so early in his development. as a practicing artist, he placed the greatest emphasis on the technical aspect, deriving ‘style’ from the basic material. böhm became a staunch defender of that thesis which was first expressed by his contemporary karl friedrich von rumohr – although it is doubtful whether he knew of rumohr – and which found its greatest expression in the positivism of the famous publication of gottfried semper, before it was successfully refuted by alois riegl. it is also important that, together with rudolf eitelberger and dominik artaria, böhm in organized the first exhibition of older art to be held in vienna. at this point we should briefly recall the development of early modern art history during the first half of the th century. it is important to realize the situation of this field at the time when these men met in the house of böhm, and began to make their austrian home, and particularly vienna, a prominent center of scholarship in the german tradition. before this, there had been very little such activity here. aside from the work of local antiquarians, among them alois primisser, who became the first to publicize the ‘ambras collection’ in – removed by the french – almost nothing of importance had been achieved. he was the son of that doughty keeper of ambras castle, who discovered the salt cellar by benvenuto cellini, the fame of which was then spread by the cellini translation made by goethe. the manifold of diverse secondary literature which set in at the beginning of the th century was eagerly assembled and employed in the earliest austrian artistic topography published by the good franz tschischka: kunst und altertum im österreichischen kaiserstaate, vienna - and including the occupied julius von schlosser the vienna school of the history of art provinces of italy. this inwardly and outwardly unprepossessing book is the first of its kind, and placed austria in the vanguard of such scholarship. it was to be another two decades until the appearance of the mittelalterliche kunstdenkmale des Österreichischen kaiserstaates, by gustav von heider and rudolf eitelberger, which was already conceived art historically and richly illustrated. it was not until that max dvoř{k vigorously began the systematic inventory of austrian artistic holdings along the lines of german models. austria assumed a far greater place in another given field, the study of engravings and drawings, in which vienna, by its superb collections, was destined to play a prominent part. this is a subject that assumed a prominent place during the days of moriz thausing and franz wickhoff, and will be discussed further on. one should note that a connection to the french culture of amateurs and connoisseurship existed at this early time. since the napoleonic period, italy, the traditional center for theoretical and historical study of art, lost its hegemony, which had already been shattered by the th century – partially due to the political situation of the peninsula. certainly fundamental works still appeared there, such as the two pylons of the older and more recent period, the history of italian painting first published in by abate lanzi and often reprinted, as well as the valuable catalogue of the mighty art library of count cicognara († ), now belonging to the vatican, and his history of sculpture until canova, written in a classicist spirit and published in . the earliest history of european art since christian antiquity ‘on the basis of the monuments’ and as richly illustrated with line engravings as the folios of cicognara, was also written in italy by the frenchman d’agincourt († in rome) but published only posthumously in paris in . these were fundamental books for the period of böhm and german romanticism, and they remained so until the end of the th century. romanticism brought a new historical and critical spirit to the history of art. it was germany that assumed a guiding and still unbroken role in the historical- philological ‘humanities’, that was supported by the european predominance of its grand idealist philosophy from kant, through fichte, schelling and hegel down to herbart. it was not until the beginning of the th century that again in italy the idealist philosophy of benedetto croce – aesthetic as science of expression and general linguistic of - brought a turn of events nurtured in the soil of naples, that had remained faithful to hegelianism, just as our vienna had been the final fortress of herbartianism into the final third of the th century. this was not a trivial fact for the development of the viennese school of art history, since, completely aside from the widespread little book by the musicologist hanslick, the herbart influence can still be felt in the thinking of alois riegl. carl friedrich von rumohr was nurtured in the spirit of romantic philosophy and became the founder of the modern german art history, but also anticipated the positivism and empirical bent of the later century (i might refer to the introduction of his main work, which i republished in ). in spite of, and alongside the enthusiasm for local national traditions on the part of wackenroder, tieck, and the julius von schlosser the vienna school of the history of art activities of the boisserée brothers, the relation to italy remained central to german romanticism, and was typical of rumohr. it had a source in the remarkable german scholar of italian descent, dominik fiorillo († ) who had been born in hamburg as early as , and as a painter had traversed the final baroque workshops of italy before becoming the first academic instructor of art history, still involving practical drawing instruction, at the university of göttingen – where he was a colleague of the great lichtenberg. his diligent geschichte der zeichnenden künste (‘history of the graphic arts’), which began to appear in , is largely based on written sources, devoid of opinions as goethe remarked critically, and has still not completely lost its value today. it has the character of th century italian polyhistory. the aforementioned opus magnum of karl friedrich rumohr consists in the italienische forschungen, - , also largely based on secondary sources and particularly on documents that had been assembled by earlier italian historiography. this was done in a new exemplary critical spirit, and combined with fundamental epistemological reflection of contemporary romantic philosophy, both of which had remained remote to the good fiorillo. rumohr was a nobleman from the same north german hinterlands along the baltic sea that had already spawned johann joachim winckelmann, the great genius of the th century. like so many of the northern german pre-raphaelites, and we might add our own josef daniel böhm, he had converted to catholicism. in fact, the entire generation of great art historians of the early th century were of northern german origins, with berlin at the center of german romanticism - which also benefited from the jewish converts to catholicism. this romantic berlin of the hohenzollern, which also produced the first picture gallery organized along art historical principles, was colorfully described by immermann, another northern german from magdeburg, in his unduly neglected novel die epigonen. this entire generation was deeply indebted, reinforced and invigorated by the critical philosophy that, in spite of schelling and especially hegel from swabia, remained typical of northern germany and particularly berlin. it was not merely rumohr from holstein, but his later collaborators on the work were also from northern germany. gustav friedrich waagen ( - ) from hamburg was director of the berlin picture gallery beginning in , the most versatile connoisseur of that time, in produced his survey wiener kunstschätze, and remains remarkable in our present context by the fact that in he almost reluctantly assumed the first purely art historical teaching chair at a german university. then there was franz kugler ( - ) from pomerania, who assumed particular prominence, among other reasons for being the art specialist in the berlin ministry. it is well known that the young swiss jacob burckhardt and the westfalian wilhelm lübke proceeded from his convivial home. they revised his somewhat dry handbuch der kunstgeschichte in renewed editions and guaranteed its great popularity. his geschichte der malerei first appeared in and, with the handbuch der kunstgeschichte of , represented the first attempt to place the history of art from the earliest times to what was then the present in the context of a philosophy of history. in his (uncompleted) geschichte der julius von schlosser the vienna school of the history of art bildenden künste of - , carl schnaase of danzig expanded this very broadly into a standard work of german art historical writing that has still not been surpassed, and remains unrivalled outside of germany. a ‘northern’ citizen of the old austria and native of prague, anton springer ( - ) in first published his handbuch der kunstgeschichte which remains in print today. he also began from hegelianism, having defended a dissertation about hegel’s conception of history before friedrich theodor von vischer in , but first worked as an historian, primarily in austria. he was forced to flee to germany before the concordat, where he produced his ‘habilitation’ in bonn in . his teaching at the newly instituted chair for modern art history at the university of leipzig made that the most prestigious in germany for that time. it was most notably his studies of medieval iconography that brought him close to the circle of böhm, eitelberger and heider. in france, the other country of relevance beside germany, the development of art history had taken a completely different course. national ‘gauloise’ history was already being researched during the th century with a strongly antiquarian cast. this is the world of the grand thesauri and philological-historical corpus editions of montfaucon, ducange, the maurins and bollandists, on to the patrology of migne. it is significant that the foundation of theodor von sickel which became so fundamental to viennese art history was conceived as following the model of these paleographers and diplomaticists of the École des chartes, although naturally in a more german philologically historical spirit. we have seen that the first universal history of art was not conceived as an intellectual scheme in the sense of winckelmann, but had instead proceeded from the individual monuments, and was the work of a frenchman, séroux d’agincourt, even if it originated in the ancient seat of all history of art, in italy. however different the intentions of d’agincourt, clarac and the short-lived napoleonic central museum in paris, a strong impulse began with the empire, and flourished remarkably in the work of ‘archéologie’ in the french sense. this was not limited to antiquity as in german usage, but applied also to the aforementioned national past of one’s own ‘gallo-roman’ period as a preface to the ‘middle ages’ - where the imperial spirit of the french, unlike the holy roman empire of the germans, was linked most recently by napoleon to the practical memory of the roman empire - just as it also raised its ‘gothic’ to an international status. we can only mention the names of a few of the relevant authors and the titles of their works. a. de caumont ( - ) appears as a patriarch of french ‘archéologie’, gifted with a typically french talent for organization, in some ways recalling eitelberger in austria. it was he who originated the most felicitous stylistic term for post-antique art history, that of the ‘romanesque style’ which was gleaned from an insight into the development of the romance languages, as it is so apparent to the gallo-latin-germanic traditions of france, and was later taken over by germany. it is characteristic that the historical phenomenon referred to in the time of goethe as ‘wiedergeburt’ has survived in its french translation since the work of jacob burckhardt from switzerland. caumont’s cours d’antiquité appeared in , his bulletin monumental has been appearing since . the ‘société nationale julius von schlosser the vienna school of the history of art des antiquaries de france’, that excellent institution of historical research and model for countless smaller local organizations, providing valuable information to the present day, has been in existence since . the annales archéologiques were published by didron beginning in , and include illustrations many of which have artistic value in and of themselves, and continue to provide a boundless source of knowledge. all of these revolve around ‘archéologie du moyen-âge’, particularly medieval symbolism – the research of which began in france and continues there unabated. in spite of numerous errors, the study by charles cahiers and arthur martin of the typological glass painting at bourges ( - ) retains its value. as we shall see further on, this is connected to the austrian school in many ways, as is so much of the other french work. numerous examples, such as the brilliant work of brutails, show that the character of french ‘archéologie’ is still very much intact. it provides a supplement to the romantic philosophical-historical spirit of historical thinking of the northern german art historians of the earlier th century. in france by contrast, the pragmatic th century approach to history survives in many ways, as embodied in the enlightenment, and remains apparent in the artist-‘archeologists’ of the viollet-le-duc following. albert von camesina we return to the circle of josef daniel böhm. we are primarily concerned with four men. the oldest among them was albert von camesina ( - ), from a family of stucco artists from bünden [the swiss kanton of grabünden], resident in vienna since the th century, a typical viennese, but never oblivious to the ancestral home – much as the surviving artaria family of art dealers remain devoted to their ancestry on the bank of lake como. dominik artaria († ) and his son and heir august were also close friends of böhm. camesina was primarily an archaeological draftsman, active in the mitteilungen der k. k. zentralkommission, to which we shall return, and the ‘wiener altertumsverein’, but also author of many an historical notice. the publications of the verdun altar in klosterneuburg, made in collaboration with josef calasanz von arneth (for many years director of the cabinet of coins and antiquities), and of the important manuscript of the biblia pauperum at st. florian (in collaboration with gustav adolf von heider on whom cf. below), had their origins with him. eduard von sacken the youngest man in the circle was eduard freiherr von sacken ( - ) of an old noble family of courland, but also completely acclimatized to vienna, a splendid example of an archaeologist in the french sense of the word, equally versed in local pre-history, classical archaeology and art of the medieval period. his life as a scholar occurred in the service of the imperial collections to which he made great contributions (to mention only one - the discoveries of the culture at hallstatt). he julius von schlosser the vienna school of the history of art was the author of the exhaustive catalogue of the collection at ambras which he already arranged as a young man ( - ), as he also did with the cabinet of coins and antiquities, which was under his direction from until his death. his katechismus der baustile (‘catechism of architectural styles’) had a wide circulation. gustav adolf von heider the figure of gustav adolf freiherr von heider arouses our particular interest – born in vienna, retired already in as sektionschef, dying at a great age almost forgotten in - the same year as his berlin contemporary franz mertens, who contributed to the history of the gothic and experienced a similar fate. like kugler and schnaase, heider had also not been trained in the field, but rather in law. he had begun as secretary of the academy of art in vienna, but transferred already in to the ministry of education, just as it was entering a prosperous period under the direction of count leo von thun. heider embodied that type of high official sensitive to art and history, as it flourished then as now in the ministry of education. he was of a definitely scholarly disposition. his studies of medieval iconography (‘Über die typologie der mittelalterlichen bilderhandschriften’ , ‘die kirche von schöngrabern bei wien’ among others) run parallel to those in france particularly of didron – which was not trivial considering the factors discussed just above - and provided a valuable basis for subsequent work (including that of anton springer). most of heider’s essays appeared in the mitteilungen (and jahrbuch) der k. k. zentralkommission zur erforschung und erhaltung der kunst- und historischen denkmale, published since , and which he himself edited since . he provided the actual soul of this remarkable periodical, as it rose to become the virtual focal point and central medium for all research in the history of art written in german during the ’s and ’s. one should recall that schnaase, lübke, springer and many others made contributions, not least since it is easily forgotten that austria assumed the leading position in such things at this time. this was the earliest and most prominent publication of this kind in the german language, comparable only to the slightly older anzeiger für kunde der deutschen vorzeit (from the germanisches museum in nuremberg) or the kunstblatt, edited by kugler, s c h o r n , förster and later egger, but which folded already in . only england and france could boast similar publications, archaeologia founded in , and the aforementioned annales archéologiques founded by didron, and appearing since . heider was by nature more of a scholar than rudolf eitelberger, whose practical and organizational panache was directed more toward covering broad expanses. the two men collaborated for many years, but there can be no doubt that heider, although a few years younger, was an important scholarly influence on eitelberger. julius von schlosser the vienna school of the history of art rudolf von eitelberger rudolf eitelberger (von edelberg - ) was born in olmütz (olomouc) and must be considered as the actual father of the ‘vienna school’, having anticipated many of its salient qualities, in spite of the fact that his scholarly aspirations were overshadowed by heider. it was typical of his own personal attitude, and that of the time, that eitelberger began as a jurist, but very soon transferred to philosophy and ancient literature. as a young man, he was already holding private lectures about the philosophy of hegel, then active as assistant in the field of ancient literature under [franz] ficker, and offering courses in his own right. this interest in teaching brought him into the circle of böhm, to whom he was introduced by heider. this became the decisive step in his life: here he was exposed to the history, theory, and technical aspects of the visual arts in their classical and romantic cast, with exactly the practical connection to collecting, artists and related types as would later become so important for the future founder of the Österreichisches museum [museum für angewandte kunst]. the following is generally based on the obituary by jacob von falke, his northern german successor as director of that museum, which appeared in the wiener zeitung of . after wide reaching travels in italy, france and england, he was characteristically focused in a western direction, when in , count thun appointed him ‘außerordentlicher professor’ (assistant professor) for the history of art at the university of vienna, a position which he held and practiced - later as ‘ordinarius’ (full professor), and in spite of other momentous duties assumed in – continuously until his death. this was the second chair that was founded to specifically teach the history of art at a german language university – we have seen that that held by gustav friedrich waagen in berlin since was only a few years older. as we can read in the excellent study by wilhelm waetzoldt, waagen, quite unlike eitelberger, never performed his teaching duties with a particular interest. as one can see from the development of jacob burckhardt and carl justi, academic art history long remained intimately related to the subject’s history and especially cultural history (though not to its disadvantage). springer, and more recently riegl and dvoř{k, also began their careers with publications in the field of history. eitelberger’s entire academic career was determined by his background in classical philology with its tools of hermeneutics and criticism as they had been refined through the centuries, and also by the experiences which this natural teacher gained among the collections in the house of böhm. in a devoted obituary which he later wrote, eitelberger himself characterized josef daniel böhm as his first and only mentor (reprinted in rudolf eitelberger, gesammelte kunsthistorische schriften, vienna: w. braumüller , volume , pp. f.) we can only refer in passing to his greatest achievement, founding the Österreichisches museum für kunst und industrie [the present museum für angewandte kunst] in - inspired by archduke rainer, who remained a central figure in austrian intellectual life for some time to come. in , eitelberger returned from a visit to the world exhibition in london, and bringing with him an julius von schlosser the vienna school of the history of art important idea that had been born there, he created the first museum for applied arts on the european continent, and with the assistance of jacob von falke who had already come to vienna in , served as its director until his death. at first, this was limited to humble holdings, largely loans from the collections of local nobles and abbeys, but it then long remained a leading institution of its kind. the thought of assembling a collection on the basis of the previously disdained applied arts that might serve with models for living artists, quite clearly recalls the example of böhm. the ‘archaeological’ exhibition of in which eitelberger had already participated, and to which we have already referred, became the precedent for that remarkable exhibition of loans and galvanized copies of sculpture in the old ‘ballhaus’, which then later developed into the Österreichisches museum. it is striking how eitelberger was able to combine the activities of this his primary preoccupation with the stressed functions of his academic duties, as well as his prodigious work in publications as scholar and publicist. he was well organized and practical. we have already mentioned that he founded the ‘zentralkommission’, the predecessor of the ‘bundesdenkmalamt’ together with heider, who in spite of his slightly younger age was a teacher to him. it was in collaboration with heider that he published the large two volume work kunstdenkmäler des österreichischen kaiserstaates, stuttgart - , which became the first monumental achievement in the field of artistic topography. one must not forget his work as a journalist. for years, he supplied the wiener zeitung with reports about art, and it is again worth mentioning that he directed his attention towards western europe. his coverage in that widely read newspaper of the paris world exhibition of became the first source of information for the austrian public about the influential role of contemporary french art. all of this is meaningful and instructive in relation to the academic activity of this unusual man, the veritable heros ktistes of the ‘vienna school’. the founding of his museum itself already took place in connection with that historical nursery, the vienna school. it was with a secure intuition that he chose a young student from the recently founded ‘institut für österreichische geschichtsforschung’, franz schestag, who then worked with him for years at his museum. in , schestag was sent on travels into the provinces of the empire, as it then existed in its entirety, to find materials for the original loan exhibition. he realized the seminal idea from böhm of basing his academic instruction on the individual artifact in technical, historical terms, and thereby escaped the danger of theoretical ramblings. eitelberger taught classes uninterruptedly until his death – i myself participated in some of the last of these, ‘Übungen im erklären und bestimmen von kunstwerken (‘seminar in the interpretation and attribution of the work of art’, held in the museum around its objects. it was a custom continued by moriz thausing and my teacher franz wickhoff, extended then to other collections (the picture gallery, then in the belvedere, the albertina, the imperial library) - and which i myself have continued to practice in forty years of academic teaching to the present day. the successful combination of university and museum was first instituted in vienna. the great julius von schlosser the vienna school of the history of art institution of eitelberger became a nursery for instructors. above all, the department of textiles which played a prominent part for many years, producing scholars such as franz wickhoff, alois riegl and more recently moriz dreger, later professor in innsbruck, and whose main work, die künstlerische entwicklung der weberei (‘the artistic development of the arts of textiles’) is based on that experience. we will later have to speak about the albertina, where moriz thausing was employed. even the greatest of the art collections from the old monarchy, those to have been united in that opulent palace on the burgring since the ’s, have taken up higher education in their programs. one must admit that this has been to the advantage of both, and has continued to characterize the truly monumental publication, the jahrbuch der kunsthistorischen sammlungen des allerhöchsten kaiserhauses, founded by quirin von leitner and edited for many years by the excellent librarian heinrich zimmermann. it has included archaeologists such as my unforgettable colleague and friend robert von schneider, hans schrader, more recently fritz eichler now in charge of the department of ancient art, as well as numismatists and economic historians such as wilhelm kubitschek and august von loehr, and last but not least actual art historians, aside from myself, my early departed classmate hermann dollmayr, my most excellent friend and successor hermann julius hermann, and in the picture gallery most recently ludwig von baldass - all have filled this double role following the example of eitelbeger. further goals common to the ‘vienna school’ can also be discerned in this honorable man, and leave a sense of the continuing influence from josef daniel böhm. beginning in , eitelberger published the series, quellenschriften für kunstgeschichte und kunsttechnik des mittelalters und der renaissance (‘sources for the history of art and technology from the medieval and renaissance period’) with the support of the ministry of education. these were originally limited by the state of research of the time, but in doing so, he founded the philologically-historical textual approach which has been particularly cultivated by wickhoff and his pupils, and which has given the ‘vienna school’ a well deserved reputation. the series survived directly up to the beginning of the first world war. in this series, i was able to posthumously publish the vasaristudien of my colleague wolfgang kallab, who sadly died so early. aside from eitelberger himself, such excellent university teachers as moriz thausing, hubert janitschek, alfred woltmann and hans semper collaborated on these volumes. due to his position, eitelberger was able to exercise a decisive influence on the development of higher education in austria. he had been summoned by the emperor francis joseph i into the offices of the monarchy and was given an influential spot in the ministry beside his friend heider as an adviser on matters of art. he was able to establish a chair in the history of art at the university of innsbruck for hans semper, son of the great architect gottfried semper, and also in prague for alfred woltmann. above all however, one must mention the hiring of moriz thausing at the university of vienna, which cemented the relationship of art history with the institut für österreichische geschichtsforschung, as it has survived julius von schlosser the vienna school of the history of art into the present. in theodor von sickel’s reorganization scheme of this nursery for historians, which had already existed since its original foundation by [pater] albert [josef] jäger ( ), the history of art from the modern period was instituted as a required subject in the curriculum, and has prospered since then to the mutual benefit of both. thausing became the first professor of the subject within the institut für österreichische geschichtsforschung, and this brings us from the pre-history and antiquity of the ‘vienna school’ into its ‘medieval’ period. moritz thausing moritz thausing ( - ) was born into a family of bohemian german descent, and was originally trained in german literature, but transferred to the history of art under the influence of eitelberger. he became a graduate of the institut für österreichische geschichtsforschung, where he had been enrolled since , impressed by the incomparable didactic personality of sickel, who had by then been in charge for two years. the great advantages of the strict historically-philological foundation for the history of art were already becoming apparent. until i had a chance to recall these facts in an obituary written in honor of my friend and benefactor wilhelm von bode, it had been almost entirely forgotten how great an influence vienna and the institut under the guidance of sickel had been on the wider practice of the history of art in those times. at the suggestion of anton springer, wilhelm von bode - who would later become the mighty director of the berlin museums - attended the courses at the institut in - as a visiting member, where he too experienced the teaching of eitelberger and his colleague, the famous archaeologist alexander conze - whose significant role in our story will emerge further on. thausing remained attached to the institut throughout his career. he had been made professor in , ordinarius , and even into the final days of his emotional sickness in , taught as an interim director of the ‘istituto austriaco di studi storici’ in rome, which sickel had recently founded. his inaugural lecture of , ‘the place of the history of art as an objective discipline’ (‘die stellung der kunstgeschichte als wissenschaft’) – which he reprinted as the first essay in his collection ‘letters from vienna on subjects of art’ (wiener kunstbriefe) - is still estimable today, and clearly expresses the point of view of the emergent ‘vienna school’. like eitelberger, thausing also worked as a journalist, although in a very different way of course. he was a brilliant essayist, intelligent and witty as in life, as well as being very capable of presenting purely scholarly arguments in a stimulating and elegant manner. the wiener kustbriefe presents a collection of precisely such popular short essays. like his teacher and later colleague eitelberger, thausing had a double appointment. already in , he had been employed in the famous collection of graphic arts formed by the duke of sachsen-teschen, which still bears the name ‘albertina’, and in was made its director – probably due to his large and still valid monograph about albrecht dürer ( ). in this marvelous old milieu which julius von schlosser the vienna school of the history of art will remain unforgettable and incomparable to those who can remember its art collections, an incident occurred which was to be decisive for the development of the ‘vienna school’. thausing met the debonair connoisseur, who was among the most intelligent and original minds of the time, and hid behind the strange muscovite pen name of ivan lermolieff and his putative german translator johannes schwarze. he was able to revolutionize the german practice of art history completely from outside of the establishment, and revealed himself to be none other than giovanni morelli, senator of the italian realm. his earliest essays were published in the zeitschrift für bildende kunst - . this no longer exists, but had led the field for many years under the informal name of ‘lützow’s zeitschrift’ since it was edited by carl von lützow from hanover, professor at the akademie der bildenden künste in vienna since - again significantly edited in vienna. in one of his most humorous essays published in the neue freie presse in , thausing characterized the intellectual approach of the connoisseur for a wider audience. his final volume of essays, the wiener kunstbriefe is dedicated to this ‘friend and brother in raphael’. in the ideally quiet and bright spaces of the albertina, thausing introduced the senator to his young pupil franz wickhoff, who was to become a great apostle of the method. in the very same place, wickhoff himself later introduced his own pupils whom he led in the same direction, above all hermann dollmayr, but also me, to the ‘senatore’, and left us with memories that remain among the most cherished of our lives. franz wickhoff this brings us to the man who must be seen as the actual founder of the ‘vienna school’ in the true sense, franz wickhoff (born in steyr , † venice , where he is buried). he is the one who united the constructive elements that we have until now seen in isolation into a grand synthesis of the most intimately personal sort, which revealed itself both in his development and his academic and literary work. this became the beginning of what had previously only existed rudimentarily, the renaissance of the vienna school – a mythological term we specifically apply to wickhoff’s actual and intimate personality – where (after the closely successive deaths of eitelberger and thausing) he assumed the chair of art history, which had been so organically integrated into the institut für österreichische geschichtsforschung, and gave it an institute of its own. five men provided the decisive impulses for his intellectual development: eitelberger, thausing, sickel, conze as academic teachers, and giovanni morelli the outsider. when wickhoff arrived at the university in the mid ’s, he found eitelberger and thausing teaching in the subject which he ultimately chose. although eitelberger had less to offer academically by this time, he did hire wickhoff after the completion of his studies at the institut in at his museum in the famous department of textiles, and this became decisive in his education (as it did yet more for riegl later on). it was here that he was able to learn the techniques julius von schlosser the vienna school of the history of art and history of the arts as well as the activities of museum officials. wickhoff honestly honored and admired eitelberger, although he liked to compare him to grillparzer’s character of haman, while his weaknesses and peccadilloes provided his unshakable sense of humor with material for amusing anecdotes to the end of his days. through eitelberger, and having completed his habilitation at the university in , he received an inheritance from the böhm circle which appealed particularly to his innate tendency to ideas and scholarly precision – his original enrollment in the natural sciences was not lost on him: to begin didactically with the original study of an individual work of art. when i was still a young student, he held lectures around carefully chosen objects in the galleries of the Österreichisches museum on the history and technique of ‘the technical arts’, as they were then called. it was excellent training for future museum curators being trained for the official examination (as it still exists today) according to the curriculum established by sickel. there was another thing. by this time, the series of source publications for the visual arts founded by eitelberger was in full swing. this idea of making the primary and secondary sources systematically available – this had been underway for centuries in italy - was another impulse that wickhoff, a pupil of sickel, bequeathed to the ‘vienna school’. in his seminars he relished the reading and careful interpretation of literary sources, primarily of the early christian period. he urged his earliest pupils to make collections of written sources from the merovingian, carolingian and ottonian periods in which the monuments are almost completely lost. of these, only the second category ever appeared in an edition which i prepared, while the first has remained a fragment due to the early death of my classmate karl hecke, and the third by j. mantuani was never published. along with a subsequent volume, my edition was published in the series of sources founded by eitelberger. one must recall that we had the model of overbeck’s edition of ancient written sources for the history of greek art from . the sources for the history of art in the byzantine empire appeared in the eitelberger series (imperfectly) edited by friedrich wilhelm unger exactly a decade later ( ). i will later relate the great extent to which my own academic and editorial activity had a source in this. yet the corpus inaugurated by eitelberger was not limited to the medieval sources (such as theophilus, heraclius and cennini). completely in keeping with the spirit of the ’s and ’s as seen in gottfried semper, theophil hansen and heinrich ferstel, as well as the Österreichisches museum, where the italian and german renaissance was already represented (with eitelberger’s edition of lodovico dolci and condivi, albert ilg’s of biondo, hans semper’s donatello biography of vasari and janitschek’s of alberti). during the preparation of his large monograph about the artist, thausing had provided an edition of the letters and diaries of albrecht dürer. the series also already included publications of account books and documents (stockbauer, patronage and collecting at the bavarian court ) as they were later included in the jahrbuch der kunsthistorischen sammlungen des allerhöchsten kaiserhauses on a grand scale since . the careful textual criticism begun by wickhoff, exemplified in his insightful julius von schlosser the vienna school of the history of art essay about the period of guido da siena, had its further influence on the editors of th and th century texts, not forgetting the assiduous work of my old friend cornelius von fabriczy in stuttgart, and above all of karl frey in berlin. my own studies of ghiberti belong to this tradition. the work of our own scholarship holders at sickel’s ‘istituto austriaco’ in rome bore fruit, particularly for giorgio vasari. of course, wolfgang kallab (who came to wickhoff from graz and pre- deceased him in ) was no more able to finish those (these being the aforementioned fragments of vasari studies which i edited) than the completely unpublished tract by giulio mancini which i am finally now hopeful of bringing into print – almost thirty years later! these were the beginnings of source work on the roman baroque – the groote schouburg of arnold houbraken had already appeared during the time of eitelbeger - as riegl had brought it to the fore and max dvoř{k continued. ludwig pastor encouraged his assistent ludwig pollak to pursue the great corpus of sources for the history of baroque art in rome, but this was left incomplete by the death of this excellent man as a volunteer on the galician front in . his successor in this, georg sobotka who was also planning to complete kallab’s mancini edition, then also died on the italian front. dvoř{k himself did not survive to see the publication, which was finally completed in by another dvoř{k pupil, dagobert frey. now, with the effective assistance of my old friend j. ph. dengel, currently director of the new institute in rome, i hope that another of my students will succeed in publishing the estate of pollak. it is clear that the tradition inaugurated by eitelberger has grown far beyond its original conception and continued to have its effect in the vienna school of wickhoff. since he had been his actual mentor at the institut in his own subject, the teaching of thausing had a great influence in wickhoff – as we have already stressed. although he always spoke reverently of thausing, the influence in the younger scholar could still not be characterized as profound. i myself did not ever know thausing – he had died by the time i first enrolled at the university late in . although both men were animated, chatty and humorous, i knew wickhoff very well, and cannot but surmise that a certain antagonism must have existed between the more southern character of the upper austrian and the spikier humor of the german from the sudetenland. thausing was director of the albertina by the time wickhoff approached him, and this center of polished erudition assumed a particular importance for the remainder of his life. it was here (and in the imperial library) that he gained the extended knowledge of prints and drawings (as he had done with the decorative arts at the Österreichisches museum) that became a mainstay of his teaching methods. his dissertation about albrecht dürer’s study of antiquity was published in the mitteilungen des instituts für österreichische geschichtsforschung of and was clearly linked to the dürer studies by thausing. this was combined with another attraction of his youth and which grew to become the greatest experience of his life – classical archaeology. in his final years he again returned to these youthful climes with the ‘dürerstudien’, published in the jahrbuch julius von schlosser the vienna school of the history of art der zentralkommission . his illuminating study about the role of italian engraving with a primarily reproductive function, ‘the entrance of marcantonio into the circle of roman art’, published in the jahrbuch der kunsthistorischen sammlungen des allerhöchsten kaiserhauses , was born directly from the milieu of the albertina. it was related to his studies of raphael, which was an interest he shared with anton springer. in the anzeiger of the vienna academy in , wickhoff proposed a corpus of raphael drawings, which again related to the albertina and to the programmatic catalogue raisonné of its italian drawings which he developed, in the jahrbuch der kunsthistorischen sammlungen des allerhochsten kaiserhauses, volumes and . he led one of his earliest students, hermann dollmayr ( - ) in this direction. the first work by dollmayr about the workshop of raphael appeared in the same volume of the jahrbuch, and his second study of the development of michelangelo appeared there in . after dollmayr died at a young age, wickhoff published his third study about the relation of giulio romano to classical antiquity from his estate in the volume of . this again vaguely recalls thausing, who had dedicated his volume of wiener kunstbriefe to giovanni morelli, describing himself in a mixture of german and italian as his ‘fratello in raffaele’. during the critical early years of his development in the albertina, wickhoff had been introduced by thausing to this remarkable man. in this way he became the third ‘extramural’ mentor to wickhoff (born in verona , † milan ). morelli is of great importance for the history of our discipline, and particularly for the ‘vienna school’, since he led the way out of german romanticism into the positivism of the second half of the th century. since a reactionary movement has recently set in, this historical role is often overlooked and underestimated. morelli, whose ancestors had been southern french huguenots who arrived in lombardy through switzerland, was given a german education, and had also been a friend of the german-italian bonaventura genelli, of cornelius and kaulbach in munich, as well as of rückert, clemens and bettina brentano and görres in berlin, where he had also still attended the lectures of schelling. this man was a significant player in the history of the period – yet how few of the younger art historians have consulted the edifying biography, which his friend and pupil gustavo frizzoni from bergamo (in touch with c. f. von rumohr) appended to the third volume of his collected writings? all of the essays published under the pen name ‘ivan lermolieff schwarze’ were written in a german which would do credit to most art historians of today. as lombard ambassador to the frankfurt parliament of he embodied the same unity of german and italian culture that had been anticipated by the old bicultural figure of johann dominicus fiorillo. by its contact with the scholarship of northern german romanticism in the wake of rumohr, the old homeland of art criticism and art history gained a new vigor which developed in the th century. after morelli, as a native of lombardy, had opposed it in in favor of a unified italy, austria again assumed its position of mediation between the north and south, as we shall soon see. morelli had begun in the natural sciences, having received his doctorate of medicine in berlin in . for wickhoff, this was a circumstance of no mean julius von schlosser the vienna school of the history of art importance. he himself had originally been a student of the natural sciences, and attended the lectures of the botanist josef böhm, who was later to become his brother-in-law. he was especially attracted to the theory of evolution, as it was widely discussed at that time, and this undoubtedly influenced his genetic interpretations. again under certain german influences, morelli had developed into a connoisseur and collector, based on the practical and empirical attitude common to his profession: he ultimately bequeathed his beautiful collection to his actual native city of bergamo. in paris, he became a particular friend of otto mündler, that unique intellectual character and excellent connoisseur of the ’s, who collaborated almost anonymously on the later editions of jacob burckhardt’s cicerone. yet this sort of connoisseurship remained uncomfortable since it was based on a silent intuition and could not satisfy a spirit so sharply and critically trained as morelli. as a natural scientist and empiricist he required objective criteria. this led him to his famous ‘method’ which he first laid out in his witty and original dialogue ‘on principles and method’. it was not long earlier that fechner, himself very original and devoted to science, had organized the almost comical inquiry into the dresden holbein dispute, which was doomed to fail by being based in the emotional judgments of laymen or semi-laymen. morelli intervened to place the judgments about artistic personalities on a basis of precise observation of the unadulterated artistic handwriting, on the ‘maniera’ in the true sense of the old term, as these are available through the minutest and therefore most indisputable characteristics, the ‘calligraphic’ curlicues which constitute this handwriting and fix precisely this individual ‘manner’. this began with the forms of ears, hands and fingernails, as spoofed by otto von thoren and others, a method that had long been current in the ‘bertillonage’ system of handwriting analysis. we shall presently see why this method had a particular appeal in vienna. from this standpoint, with its basic, enduring truth as well as ineradicable errors, morelli critically analyzed the great german collections in munich, dresden and berlin, but then also those of the borghese and the doria-pamphilj in rome. these publications appeared exactly during the time in which thausing and wickhoff were teaching. morelli recognized that in dealing with the burning questions of authenticity and spuriousness, originality, semi-originality, copies, imitation and open forgery, the painterly work of the artists as it stands in the churches and collections, and is reasonably authenticated by inscriptions, documents and contemporary sources – this is the place of philological criticism - cannot provide a basis for secure knowledge. it is instead necessary to study the most immediate evidence of the artistic handwriting, and that one must therefore consider the drawings, as they had already been used in italy by vasari, and especially in the period of baldinucci – however unsystematically and uncritically. in the critical studies of rumohr, drawings do not yet play a part. this was to come later. morelli was very shrewd in defining his field of study. this was italian painting of the quattrocento, the ‘et| d’oro’, in which the flow of direct documentation of artists is richest and clearest. this unusually knowledgeable author was fully aware that the julius von schlosser the vienna school of the history of art application of his method to earlier or later periods or to sculpture would require adjustments. it has often been crudely misunderstood, but morelli never envisioned his ‘method’ as a mnemonic device for the untalented. he was far too fine and educated a mind, far above the crowd of average art historians of his time, and above all gifted with a connoisseurship rooted deeply in a knowledge of the italian popular spirit. he saw the configurations of artistic language arising from the great variety in the populace and landscapes of his native land, as wickhoff once commented: ‘like an experienced dialectologist’. he was also a man who felt the will and the need to do homage to the positivism of his day, in attempting to make the subjective judgment of the connoisseur as objective and teachable as possible - didacticism that is of course only possible for those in possession of the necessary aptitude and educational background. it was inevitable that morelli, whose innate sarcasm had an effect of a ‘frusta letteraria’ and a ‘vespajo stuzzicato’ – to mention two phrases from italian book titles – would arouse many opponents, particularly in northern germany, where he faced wilhelm bode as a spirited warrior working with different weapons. there were particular reasons for the fact that vienna, with the albertina and the ‘vienna school’ at the university, became the first (and possibly only) place where he met with complete agreement and a following. as we have already heard, moritz thausing became the first to endorse him, and directed his pupil wickhoff with the same provenance from the institut in the same direction, and left him an inheritance, having recognized the positivist and scientific streak and become the first to announce this in his essay in the wiener kunstbriefe. in his aforementioned catalogue raisonné of the italian drawings of the albertina, which would be unthinkable without the example of morelli, wickhoff piously recalled a letter sent by his mentor thausing on the day before his unexpected death (august , ), conveying the task of the critical catalogue to a younger generation, after having hoped that it would become his own final work. in the brilliant and eminently readable introduction to that catalogue, which is the first of its kind to be based on the method of morelli, wickhoff expounded the reasons why the way had been prepared for such studies in vienna, the city which today is still the only place where an international periodical is published devoted exclusively to graphic arts of the older and newer periods, die graphischen künste, documenting that genre since . vienna possessed two large collections of graphic arts from a much earlier period, the engravings belonging to prince eugene of savoy which later entered the imperial library along with his marvelous collection of books, and the collection of prints and drawings belonging to the son-in-law of the empress maria theresa, albert von sachsen-teschen, of thausing’s albertina. this also includes parts of the collection of another original character from viennese history, the belgian prince de ligne (described by j. a. bartsch, vienna ), as well as that of count fries, the aforementioned patron of josef daniel böhm. the first of these had already been catalogued by the important french connoisseur, collector and author j. p. mariette († ), and it was these studies which provided the basis julius von schlosser the vienna school of the history of art for the earliest and still valid and unsurpassed handbook of engravings, the peintre- graveur by the viennese engraver adam bartsch (published vienna - ). at the same time there was an influx from switzerland, with johann rudolf füeßli ( - ), scion of the zürich family of painters and writers on art, who ended as archivist of the akademie der bildenden künste, where his father johann kaspar had already studied. this associate of winckelmann and mengs was commissioned with the task of forming a collection of engravings for the library of the akademie, and published here in - the first four volumes of a critical catalogue of engravings by the greatest masters of all schools. his annalen der bildenden künste für die österreichischen staaten, which only appeared in two volumes in vienna - , bear directly on austria. in vienna, the well considered conviction of mariette left its mark, according to which a survey of engraving, which provides the vehicle for our knowledge of the history of painting, must be based on a close study of the individual artistic handwriting. since vienna pursued this idea, it still possesses the richest and most valuable collection of this kind, along with those of the medici in the uffizi in florence that was once organized and supervised by filippo baldinucci, as well as those in paris and most recently in london. it was natural that giovanni morelli should have found an attractive and facilitating scholarly atmosphere in the albertina as it was run by thausing. in fact, his activity (cf. carl lützow’s zeitschrift für bildende kunst) and his controversial fame emanated from our city. this came about since franz wickhoff followed thausing to become his scholarly apostle. he was the first to introduce his method as an academic instrument, and led his student hermann dollmayr – another member of the ‘school’ to have died too early - in this direction. this can be seen in dollamyr’s aforementioned publications as well as his work on the reorganization of the picture gallery of the kunsthistorisches museum (since ). it is worth stressing that dollmayr had attended the courses at the institut für geschichtsforschung, and after completing his habilitation in used examples in the academic activities of the seminar from the works of morelli’s collection, who by then had recently died. wickhoff also warmly welcomed the appearance of that significant american critic resident in italy, bernhard berenson, who was also inspired by morelli, also worked outside of academia, framed the method more rigorously, deepened the concepts as ‘rudiments of connoisseurship’, and presented a summary in his book, the study and criticism of italian art and the drawings of the florentine painters of . in many later writings, berenson felt the need to progress beyond the necessary elementary level of ‘textual philology’ or ‘lower’ criticism to the ‘higher’ and more innately art historical criticism, from ‘individuality’ to the actual ‘personality’ of the artist, from the ‘outer’ to the ‘inner’ linguistic form. his entire background and fundamentally positivist attitude prevented wickhoff from following this. he recoiled from the thought of a return to the connoisseurship of a period preceding objectivity, and in his hard-won position he was largely correct in this warning, particularly in regard to later imitators. in reviewing one of the very few truly ‘art-historical’ monographs, the giotto biography of fritz rintelen, wickhoff’s pupil max dvoř{k expressed the same julius von schlosser the vienna school of the history of art reservations with a greater differentiation. although not an immediate pupil of theodor von sickel, this insightful man was imbued with this strict historical schooling and even spoke of ‘transferring the ‚morelli method‛ to the inner structure of the art work’. we are not being impious to touch on the limits of wickhoff’s gifts (conditioned by the historical situation). his was an essentially un- philosophical, even anti-philosophical mind who naturally reacted negatively to all schematic aesthetic jargon, against all pure formalism of ‘cobbler’s aesthetics’ (‘schusterästhetik’), as he loved to call it in his typically amusing way, but basically against all manifestations of aesthetics. he still lived to experience that important event from the beginning of the th century, croce’s aesthetics as science and general linguistic of , the first part of his philosophy of the spirit which led the speculative and historical insight into the phenomenon of art in new directions, departing from the grand tradition of german romantic philosophy (consonant with the traditions of naples where he lives) and which became the beginning of my decades old intellectual friendship with its author. in the kunstgeschichtliche anzeigen of , wickhoff wrote a review of the german translation of the estetica. this edition had been prepared by a gifted pupil, robert eisler, who later turned to completely different subjects. of course, this has always seemed an overly subtle and exaggerated formulation to me, and croce later expressed himself more perfectly and with greater modulation. i recall speaking about this with wickhoff on numerous occasions. he acknowledged the historical chapters unreservedly. however, he was as unable to recognize either that this is the necessary complement of the theoretical chapters, or the closely attached concept of the whole or totality – these being worlds away from his own experience of ‘aesthetics’. it is necessary to return to morelli. wickhoff was attracted not merely by the ‘objective scientific’ disposition of his method that had already impressed thausing, but also the connection to the historical and philological conceptions which he had assumed through the teaching of theodor von sickel. this brings us to a deeply decisive element in the development of this great scholar, which wickhoff attributed throughout his life to theodor von sickel, the man he considered to be his actual mentor (besides the great archaeologist conze, to be discussed below). it is ironic for the typical austrian character of wickhoff and appropriate to his sense of humor, himself having said that (in spite of an admiration for bismarck) he felt reluctant and hesitant to travel north of the main, that his two most influential intellectual models should have been natives of northern germany. as fortune would have it, he chose to devote himself to a discipline that had been essentially inaugurated in the northern regions of germany. theodor von sickel as a student of the famous École des chartes in paris, theodor von sickel (born in aken in prussian-saxony, died in merano in , just one year before his pupil) had assimilated the tradition of historical diplomatics as it had flourished in france julius von schlosser the vienna school of the history of art since the th century. since the ’s, he had been active in the institution founded by jäger, the institut für geschichtsforschung, which he led as director from until he founded the ‘istituto austriaco’ in rome during . we have already repeatedly referred to his reform of the vienna curriculum ( ), in which he wisely included the history of art, where thausing was put in charge as the first specialist within the institut. from the beginning, the institute in rome had also been conceived to include art historians as well, taking their place beside the austrian colony of artists as it had resided in the palazzo venezia since the days of josef daniel böhm. until the beginning of the war, the scholarship holders of the ‘vienna school’ were still able to enjoy that residence. we have already belabored the good amount of source work and archival research that was completed here. with his revision of the honorable program of french ‘archival studies’, sickel stressed and lent an autonomy to the ‘auxiliary sciences’ of history, paleography, chronology and diplomatics, removing them from their subservient place and bringing them into the company of that which is today often tautologically referred to as ‘intellectual history’ (‘geistesgeschichte’). any of those who had the good fortune to hear him lecture, and i was one of the last direct pupils of sickel, will recall the mighty impression of his gift to invigorate and intellectually illuminate a material that might at first glance appear dry. his instruction on the subject of imperial diplomatics was ultimately an architectural work of art. in the following and less internally coherent subject of papal documents, he also conveyed surprising insights into ‘cultural history’. art historians could learn an endless amount from this. sickel was completely conscious of having included the history of art as an integrated, required element rather than a mere appendix to the curriculum for students of history. what it received from the historical and philological method, it returned in spades. by its relation to graphic forms of art, the development of medieval scripts in latin paleography provided a very useful introduction to the study of artistic forms. it is unnecessary to belabor the fact that image and script are related, and that particularly in the medieval period which provided sickel’s exclusive interest, the two developed in tandem. the individual (stylistic) element was not neglected. by his reform of the traditional study of documents, sickel intended to provide a solid foundation for the study of history by systematically treating the basic problems that had already preoccupied those great predecessors of the École des chartes - the learned benedictines from the schools of st. denis and st. maurus. these are the problems of ‘authenticity’ and ‘originality’ - not always identical as might at first appear - on which the synthetic activity of the historian is based, and which can be pursued with an exactitude that approaches the (fundamentally different) methods of natural science. paleography provided a firm basis for this. beyond the conditions of the general formal language of the period, this included observation of the particular qualities of the individual scribes, as well as the actual topic of documentary studies, the structure, the habits and organization of the chancelleries, which assume their individual character by the peculiar color of their truly medieval formulae and use of models - the ‘similia’ that are so important julius von schlosser the vienna school of the history of art for the history of art as well. this gives the appearance of presenting petty and workmanlike questions. without its backbone in this ascetic preparatory work, all truly historical research could lapse into amateurism. we should recall the figure of wagner, the intern to faust, who is always treated crudely and simplistically by actors, but whose pedantry was brilliantly characterized by goethe as merely apparent. even if the narrow quotidian view might cause a comparison to qualities of the character of wagner in faust, this in no way diminishes the work of a great scholar. wickhoff completed the courses at the institut für geschichtsforschung under the direction of sickel in - and, as we have already mentioned, so thoroughly internalized these teachings as to refer to his mentor as κατ’ έξοχήν. he then became the successor to thausing at the ‘kunsthistorisches lehrapparat’ of the institut, as the professorial chairs were then still called. this makes it clear how he could discover morelli through the introduction by thausing, and then on the basis of sickel’s method in diplomatics, become his defender in academia, much in the character of his predecessor. both shared a concentration on the exact, nearly experimental observation of small and minute characteristics to distinguish authenticity, inauthenticity, originals, copies and forgeries. aside from this, the subject at hand was true historical scholarship and its foundations. the words which the aging teacher addressed to him on the occasion of his anniversary were borne by wickhoff deeply within his spirit - he was confident that his former student ‘would never make a pact with amateurism’. at his address celebrating the th birthday of sickel in , he cited that sentence as ‘the core of sickel’s exemplary character’. it has remained the motto of the vienna school to the present day, and wickhoff had no doubt about his reasons for insisting that his pupils all complete the courses at the institut für geschichtsforschung. this was the attitude that led him to found the kunstgeschichtliche anzeigen in as a supplement – symptomatically - to the mitteilungen des instituts für österreischische geschichtsforschung, in which he was supported by an excellent group mostly of his own pupils – including max dvoř{k, who continued after his death until . in his preface to the first issue, wickhoff clearly declared his goals, ‘to separate the wheat from the chaff among publications’ completely in the sense in which sickel and morelli distinguished ‘authenticity’ from ‘inauthenticity’. ‘this has not been fulfilled whatsoever. in spite of many scholarly achievements, the history of art is still not accepted by academic organizations or colleagues in related fields of history and literature. one must admit that this does not occur without reason, for there are very few disciplines other than the history of art, in which such verbal squalls and shallow misunderstanding find an unchiding audience, and that essays ridiculing the principles of objectivity are published and taken seriously’. these are words that could be spoken now, thirty years later, perhaps even with greater justification. any of those familiar with wickhoff’s temperament will know that this new ‘frusta letteraria’ (’literary lashes’) did not the title of a short-lived journal published in venice. julius von schlosser the vienna school of the history of art exist in an atmosphere of academic coolness and olympian peace. it is not difficult to imagine what this dear man would have said to the publications that have been appearing since the war and during the period of the inflation! this deep feeling for authenticity and truth in scholarship, and abhorrence of all that is slipshod, inexact or dishonest, also led wickhoff to classical archaeology, where the methods that had been refined through the centuries together with philology, provide a solid foundation to prevent excesses such as those that show themselves in the younger sister discipline, with its occasional growing pains. ‘den bönhasen ist hier sehr bald das maul gestopft’. (‘it is easy to silence these blunderers’.) wickhoff had the good fortune to study with one of the most excellent archaeologists, whose vision – like that of heinrich brunn - reached far beyond the limits of his academic discipline and included the entire development of art, a true representative of the history of art as it progressed beyond antiquarianism, κ.ε. antiquity, and who became the leader of the modern stylistically oriented ‘archaeology’. alexander conze (born in hanover , died in berlin ), who taught in vienna - , became the actual second mentor for wickhoff. he often stressed this in lectures as well as privately during the years when i was still a student. conze was followed by otto benndorf († ), who was also an excellent and very vivid teacher, whom i still gratefully recall. wickhoff introduced me to him privately in his receptive and stimulating household. in combination with classical archaeology and the historical ‘auxiliary sciences’, this provided the triangle of art historical instruction as it formed the basis for the earlier generation of wickhoff pupils, nearly all of them graduates of the institut für geschichtsforschung - and as i myself attempted to restore it when i was forced to assume the teaching chair that had once been his. another interjection becomes necessary here. this also refers to the role of vienna, which had a special place in the field of classical archaeology since the days of the great habsburg emperor leopold i. petrus lambecius († ) from hamburg had been prefect of the imperial library here since , and karl gustav heraeus (born ), a swede of mecklenburgian descent, worked in the imperial art collections during the reign of joseph i. and charles vi. he became most active in the field of numismatics, that assiduously cultivated archaeological ‘auxiliary science’, so important to cultural history and art history of the th century. the name of heraeus is linked to the earliest illustrated architectural history done in austria, the entwurf einer historischen architektur of by the elder fischer von erlach. heraeus, who was a friend of the great [gottfried wilhelm] leibniz, and was involved with him in the plans to create an imperial academy of sciences, also played a part in the plan to unite the habsburg holdings of art in the residential city, as it only came to be realized during the reign of francis joseph i. what they did achieve at that time was a unification of the antiquities, including the coins. francis i of lotharingia, himself a collector of coins, was able to attract many notable scholars of french origin to vienna and to establish the connection to french archaeology which we have already noted a few times. one must also not forget that the second julius von schlosser the vienna school of the history of art edition of the history of art by [johann joachim] winckelmann - who had been murdered and buried in trieste on austrian soil - was published in in vienna at the expense of the academy (akademie der bildenden künste). this was done quite negligently, edited by justus riedel, in a way that would certainly have annoyed the great german-roman (‘deutschrömer’) whose youth was spent with strict textual criticism, and studying diplomatics of the german imperial chancellery. it was during this time that the ‘royal and imperial cabinet of coins and antiquities’ (‘k. k. münz- und antiquitätenkabnett’) was founded, of which we have heard in connection with eduard von sacken, the youngest member of the böhm-circle, and where i myself held my first curatorial position (as a numismatist!). it was there that the abbot joseph hilarius von eckel ( - ) was active - a native of vienna, and member of the highly learned society of jesus, which assumed such an important place in the intellectual history of the th century. with his publication of the doctrina nummorum veterum, appearing in eight folio-volumes from to , he actually founded the systematic discipline of numismatics. its famous prolegomena includes a delineation of his system as an ‘ars critica nummoria’, in which each line breathes the spirit of this fine and liberal man who taught at the university of vienna from as professor of ‘antiquities and historical auxiliary sciences’ (‘antiquitäten und historische hilfsmittel’) - as well as anticipating the productive combination of museum and university. the critical system proposed in that prolegomena is based on the subtle distinction of ‘authentic and inauthentic’ – original – copy – forgery. this is the same problem which occupied wickhoff, sickel and morelli, and again demonstrates how deeply rooted it is in vienna. when i myself wrote my lectures for the habilitation on ‘the significance of the sources for modern art history’ (printed in the beilage der allgemeinen zeitung münchen , numbers - ), i was still employed in the department organized by eckhel, and consciously based my reflections on the scale of values from ancient numismatics. to return to wickhoff, one must stress that he remained devoted to classical archaeology throughout his life. as a student, he eagerly participated in the tutorials which conze sponsored in connection with the department of archaeological epigraphy, founded by the noted historian [otto] hirschfeld, and to the end of his days participated in the philological club known as the ‘eranos vindobonensis’, which still today meets in the same rooms. this was a circle of scholars to whom he felt a special affinity, and where he felt more at home than anywhere else. it was here that he formed the friendships that lasted throughout his life - with otto benndorf, theodor and heinrich von gomperz, emanuel löwy who later taught in rome, his close friend e. szanto (who died at a young age), but above all, robert von schneider, director of antiquities in the imperial collections, and of the department of archaeology. schneider became his colleague in the university and at the academy of sciences, a fine mind with a universal education, hardly known to the general public today from his sparse publications, but to whom i myself still owe decisive impulses from the time of my own introduction to work as a young turk within the julius von schlosser the vienna school of the history of art museum. we have already noted that wickhoff in his earliest publications illuminated the connection of german and italian renaissance art with antiquity. in fact, these were the two subjects which preserved a spirit related to jacob burckhardt. by now, it is common knowledge that his main work in the field of ancient art with the philologist wilhelm von hartel, the supplemental volume of the jahrbuch der kunsthistorischen sammlungen des allerhöchsten kaiserhauses, publishing the ‘vienna genesis’, presents nothing less than the earliest actual historical account of roman art, that period which lies chronologically between archaeology and the history of ‘modern’ art, and itself presents the first manifestation of occidental art. it was often ignored in the years after wickhoff. in his excellent introduction to the edition of the archaeological handbook of geercke and norden, franz winter dealt with greek art, but completely ignored roman art. when it appeared, this volume devoted to the ‘vienna genesis’ was subjected to an uncomprehending and sardonic criticism, and posthumous justice appears to have taken place since the name of wickhoff seems to have acquired prestige among a new generation of archaeologists that devotes itself to the study of roman art in art historical terms. this work, which will ensure that wickhoff’s thought remains a factor in the discipline, has an additional value in that it did not merely come about along the ‘cold’ academic path, but instead arose out of an artistic participation in its own period. wickhoff had assimilated ‘impressionism’ as an antithesis to the positivism of the second half of the th century, and discovered it as a ‘ricorso’ in roman antiquity. this was only possible for a spirit of artistic sensibility and training. of all of his students, hermann dollmayr came closest to him in this, and was adept with the pencil and water color brush. it was only late in life, and of course in complete privacy, that wickhoff devoted himself to painting, not merely technically but also making achievements on the artistic level. this can be seen among the effects of his estate, which we have piously preserved in our department at the university. this had arisen as an extension from his artistic intuition with the actual fireball of his earlier life, goethe, whose pandora he completed with no pretensions. as his last friends, and in commemoration of the goethe anniversary of , we were able to publish this small work in the city where pandora was originally written. a portrait of wickhoff would be incomplete if another aspect remained absent which was important to him, his preoccupation with the subject matter of art, commonly described as ‘iconography’, a traditional term adopted and misapplied from classical archaeology. here again, the threads lead back into the ‘prehistory’ of our vienna school, into the meritorious contributions of gustav adolf heider in this field. naturally, the approach taken by wickhoff was no longer antiquarian, but that of universal history. when he contributed an essay with the title ‘on the historical unity of the universal development of art’ (‘Über die historische einheitlichkeit der gesamten kunstentwicklung’) to the festschrift of max büdinger, the last run down and misunderstood universal historian at our alma mater, this was spoken from the deepest recesses of his personality. as a didactic device, iconographical study always assumed a primary place in the wickhoff seminars. for the early julius von schlosser the vienna school of the history of art stages of university training, it presented a natural entry point into the study of the material and comparative reflection, something akin to the interpretation of texts. yet it would certainly not have been acceptable to submit a dissertation topic to him from such an elementary academic level - and this in a time when trivial dissertations of the most shallow sort about individual sacred or secular subjects, torn completely from their context, have become such a widespread feature in academic art history. within the practical limitations that were given, he demanded an original approach that was not arbitrarily chosen, a solution to an actual art historical problem - a principle in which i have followed him unto the present day. this reveals another aspect of wickhoff’s character on which we have touched once already. with his own artistic gifts and training in the methods of sickel and morelli, where all attention was devoted to the individual form, he was animated by an almost fanatical aversion to the purely formal consideration of art and its abstractions. he spurned and looked askance at the ‘historical grammar’ of forms – a linguistic construction that has since been recognized as a mere chimera. riegl was also able to avoid that trap - benedetto croce later subjected it to a sharp but justified criticism. the fact that it takes a genius such as heinrich wölfflin to successfully deal with it becomes most apparent where it was taken up by his imitators and even applied to the history of poetry. it is impossible to overlook that wickhoff was just in his youth when the heated dispute took place between the aesthetics of content and of form during the ’s and ’s, between the hegelian friedrich theodor von vischer, whose system of aesthetics was published in , and the herbartian robert von zimmermann († ) whose ‘general aesthetics as the science of form’ (allgemeine asthetik als formwissenschaft) had appeared in vienna in , where he had been teaching philosophy since . as he felt with all philosophical speculation, wickhoff had no more than a very superficial relation to the latter, under whom he had taken his university examinations and who then became his colleague. it was nonetheless inevitable that so broad-minded and versatile a person should have been touched by this in some way. in , there appeared the small book ‘on beauty in music contribution to a revision of musical aesthetics’ (vom musikalisch schönen ein beitrag zur revision der Ästhetik der tonkunst), written by eduard hanslick, a near contemporary and prague compatriot of zimmermann, which was reprinted and translated innumerable times, and vaguely related to the teachings of herbart. the book was not unintelligent and did have a certain purgative effect on the pseudo-aesthetic journalism that surrounded these subjects. hanslick, who lived until , was also a professor of music history and colleague of wickhoff from until . in the light of his great admiration for the house of wahnfried and cosima [wagner] in particular, i must doubt all the more that wickhoff read this book by the influential music critic of the neue freie presse. one must assume that that most unaccepting editorialist against richard wagner must have annoyed him. since his earliest youth, this unmusical person – itself a rarity in our possibly ‘overly musical’ vienna - had been drawn in less by the julius von schlosser the vienna school of the history of art musical language of the great music dramas, but more by their poetic and also national character. it was a justifiable demand on the part of wickhoff to his students, and anchored in his deepest convictions, that the subject matter should never be considered in isolation from the formal aspect of an art work. in spite of the fact that the periods under scrutiny might be intellectually inaccessible to us, or poorly documented, it is necessary to know what was being ‘depicted’ in the context of the earlier period. this had been a particular strength in the work of the older ‘archaeological’ generation from [gustav adolf] heider all the way to [anton] springer, and with its philological acuity worked against spurious romantic-mystical interpretations. otherwise one would arrive in a spot like the european connoisseurs who refer to eastern asian art in purely formal terms with no knowledge of the subject – as this has often been satirized by specialists in japanese art. there could be no return to the earlier ‘anecdote painting’ and historical ‘theater opinions’ of the bygone times of amateurism, which aroused wickhoff to such passionate commentaries, primarily against the foggy mystification (‘blaublümelei’) common among germans, as opposed to the french and english, and especially against arnold böcklin whom he disliked - but he was often led by his congenital feistiness to overshoot the mark. phenomena such as those which he liked to call ‘cobbler aesthetics’ in a derivation we have already noted from the traditional painter’s anecdote, and an inability to progress beyond the ‘crepida’ or shoe level, could only arouse such a man to emotional outbursts that appeared grotesque at times. like jacob burckhardt, with whom he otherwise had little in common, wickhoff demanded a consideration of the cultural ambient, or what is today, from a fear of causing offence, more commonly called ‘intellectual history’ (‘geistesgeschichtlich’), in which the work of art was born and flourished. in his bachelor existence, wickhoff lived surrounded by a splendid specialized library and was always an eager reader and connoisseur of the literature, which he pursued to the farthest source. i recall him learning hebrew during his work on the ‘wiener genesis’. he commanded a universal education which placed him more in the company of the earlier art historians, and separated him from his academic colleagues. it went without saying for him that the art historian is required to familiarize himself with the literary and intellectual atmosphere in which the patrons and the artists themselves moved. this was how his essays came about, particularly those dealing with his favorite period of the italian rinascimento, that make up the larger part of his not particularly voluminous output, and particularly those which appeared in the jahrbuch der königlich preußischen kunstsammlungen - . among the most beautiful and finest is that dealing with the figure of amor in the italian medieval imagination (in ), but also that concerning ‘the library of pope julius ii’ ( ) and ‘giorgione’s paintings of roman heroic poetry’ ( ). the attitude and teaching methods that were typical of wickhoff were expressed in a subject more remote from his greatest interests, ‘academic studies of julius von schlosser the vienna school of the history of art rembrandt drawings with biblical subjects’ (‘seminarstudien über einige zeichnungen rembrandts mit biblischen vorwürfen’) which he still published in . here one sees how knowledgeable he was of the bible, a quality that one does not always find among roman catholics. those of us who were among his earliest students attempted to follow wickhoff in this. we were led by hermann dollmayr, whose important and comprehensive study of ‘hieronymus bosch and the apocalypse in netherlandish art of the th and th centuries’ appeared in the jahrbuch (‘hieronymus und die darstellung der vier letzten dinge in der niederländischen malerei des xv. und xvi. jahrhunderts’, jahrbuch der kunsthistorischen sammlungen des allerhöchsten kaiserhauses, volume , , pp. - ). one might also mention the studies by hans tietze, a long time and excellent teacher at our university, dealing with typology in medieval manuscripts, picking up where heider had left off, as well as the farnese gallery of annibale carracci ( ), and the programs and subjects of the great austrian baroque frescoes ( ) - to name only a few. i might also mention my own essays about the ‘courtly’ art of the later medieval period, in the jahrbuch der kunsthistorischen sammlungen des allerhöchsten kaiserhauses, - . although the actual medieval period in northern europe did not loom very large to him, wickhoff nonetheless provided the impulse – one thinks of janitschek’s publications - for the study of manuscript illumination, which was then still so inadequately and incompletely known. he was animated by the idea of a corpus edition, as this has borne fruit in ancient studies, especially classical archaeology. one has but to think of the great name of [theodor] mommsen, but also of conze. this became the genesis of the large and ambitious ‘descriptive catalogue of the illuminated manuscripts in austria’ (‘beschreibendes verzeichnis der illuminierten handschiriften in Österreich’), the first volume of which appeared in , and was then continued by *max+ dvoř{k, and most recently by my excellent friend hermann julius hermann. we have discussed isolated aspects of wickhoff’s character. from what we have said, it should be at least approximately possible to imagine, to whatever extent this is possible, how they united to form the complex of his rich personality, the richest one of the vienna school, which he led. i hope that the reader can forgive his second oldest living pupil, whose friendship lasted for a quarter century, for dwelling on the figure of his teacher to such an extent. it was wickhoff who provided for the publication of my earliest book on the architecture of european abbeys (vienna ). still today, i am all the more pained at my exaggerated reserve in not having dedicated it to him - since it grew from his seminars about written sources and his essay about the ‘monasteria in agnellus’. because there were so many fewer students in those days, the relation to the teacher was much closer than was possible later, and i was able to assimilate the best as far as i could, quantum satis – as the aforementioned examples should show - and cannot, and will not ever forget it. especially in the early years, it was difficult to follow his halting lecture style before he finally reached his conclusions, which were always dignified. as great a stylist as he was in print, wickhoff did not possess the rhetorical gift. in julius von schlosser the vienna school of the history of art spite of this, his lectures were more engrossing to us than many great speakers. in the obituary which he himself wrote for hermann dollmayr (jahrbuch der kunsthistorischen sammlungen des allerhöchsten kaiserhauses ), he discussed his own academic method of teaching. alois riegl beside wickhoff, another important figure of a very different character, origin, and development emerged ‘like a disappearing comet’, and provided very original impulses for the ‘vienna school’. in spite of not having taught more than a decade, and never having been in charge of the ‘lehrapparat’, he might in some ways be seen as a stronger and more lasting influence than those of its actual founder or its renewer. this is alois riegl, born in linz, close to the place of wickhoff’s birth, only five years later, and dying in , just a few years before wickhoff. both his earlier and later work was inhibited and not rectilinear, but always essentially original. after a few years of studying law, forced upon him by meager circumstances, he decided to study philosophy and general history, which were then being taught in vienna by the final herbartian, robert zimmermann († ), and the last ‘universal historian’ max büdinger (from kassel, - , active in vienna since ). it is not in and of itself surprising that riegl soon lost interest in these subjects and turned to different things. already as a young student this reveals the symptomatic attitude that remained important to his development. in fact, riegl was also immersed in the fluid of herbartian realism (in truth the last great classical german philosophical system) which persisted in austrian school psychology for a very long time, and his later development might reveal more than one spot, where one can sense an influence of herbart’s formalism as it reached him in a very diluted form through the aesthetics of zimmermann. more symptomatic still is the turn to büdinger’s polyhistory, which extended in the traditional way from greco-roman antiquity through the medieval into the modern period. its goal was to recognize the grand internal and universally historical coherences as they were not imposed from without, as had been the case with ancient polyhistory, but instead expressing themselves spontaneously. like his autonomous approach to epistemology, this also distinguished him from the positivist, anti-philosophical empiricism of his later university colleague wickhoff. this upright and straightforward man was certainly not animated by connivance or a sympathetic compliment when late in his career, in the festgabe zu ehren max büdigers, innsbruck (where we have already noted that wickhoff was also represented), he published ‘kunstgeschichte und universalgeschichte’ to honor his teacher who in spite of many strange excesses was often underestimated. after this, riegl entered the strict philologically historical school of sickel, and although he was following the advice of a fellow student, this was certainly the result of a deep conviction on the part of his serious and profound personality. from to he was a member of the institut für geschichtsforschung (and held a julius von schlosser the vienna school of the history of art scholarship in rome after this). this was the third course to be headed by wickhoff, and it was only here and, again from external impulses, that what had been developing within him was evoked, and he found his calling for the history of art, where thausing was still teaching (beside eitelberger). aside from wickhoff, he became the most distinguished pupil of that good man. when wickhoff left the Österreichisches museum, it was he who was appointed as a successor to the post in the famous department of textiles ( ), which he then headed for more than a decade (until ), and where he received decisive scholarly impressions. his systematic intellect - which had already revealed itself in the essays on medieval calendar illustration in the mitteilungen des instituts für österreichische geschichtsforschung volumes - - honed by the instruction of sickel, here came into contact with what goethe called ‘the oldest and most magnificent art’, and the abundant sources of that most ancient art, and was able to develop richly. as it had been created by the founder of our school, that institution once again proved its reputation as a nursery for philologically and historically schooled research. of course riegl remained the constantly revising autodidact that he had been from the outset. in later years, his increasing deafness further heightened the interiority of this lonely man. his numerous essays on the textile arts which appeared in the mitteilungen des Österreichischen museums from to show how seriously he took his duties. the broad range of his intellectual interests came to include the so- called ‘folk art’ and that of non-european cultures, making riegl one of the most seasoned curators of the Österreichisches museum, then being led by eitelberger’s successor jakob von falke ( - ) from mecklenburg - whom we already saw to have been nurtured in the circle of josef daniel böhm. from the collection of textiles, riegl came to occupy himself in greater depth with the near eastern carpets, particularly in the years - , as preparation for that book of truly universal history, ‘questions of style’ (stilfragen), ( ) which established his reputation and actually remained his main work. the whole man appears before us here, including his difficult struggle with expression and his painstakingly original terminology. he demonstrated universal history in the masterly way in which he was able to trace the genetic development of the acanthus ornament ‘in nuce’ from ancient egypt into the period of islam. by comparison with previous mostly dilettantish theories, he provided a fundamental illumination of the role of hellenistic antiquity in the east both before and after the advance of islam – revealing his unmistakable background in the strict schooling of sickel in paleography and diplomatics. this led to riegl’s presentation of ‘late antiquity’. the title of his book reveals the polemic intentions which riegl, although always declaring himself to be a ‘positivist’, consistently felt in relation to the materialist conception of art, as this had been expressed in a truly important and influential book, ‘style in the technical and tectonic arts’ (der stil in den technischen und tektonischen künsten) by gottfried semper from hamburg ( - ), and in ‘practical aesthetics’ (praktische Ästhetik). riegl appeared as the victorious opponent of the fundamental tenet (already present in rumohr and böhm !), that the (objective) ‘style’ is conditioned by material, technics and function, with julius von schlosser the vienna school of the history of art all of its subsequent corollaries, whose characteristic late nineteenth century materialism he could oppose with an idealistic principle that anticipated the twentieth century. he derived this from the national ethos, this ‘spirit of art’ which then congealed into the idea – not a concept - of the ‘kunstwollen’, and ultimately survived to become famous and degraded into a slogan for journalism. it is typical for the development of riegl that a psychological and genetic conception is used to replace a more traditional aesthetic and dogmatic one. it should not be forgotten that long before semper and riegl, the hegelian schnaase had energetically stressed the role of the intellectual principle against rumohr’s conception of style. riegl had completed his habilitation at the university in , was awarded the post of ‘extraordinarius’ in , ‘ordinarius ad personam’ in and only very reluctantly’ gave up his employment at the Österreichisches museum. conditions there became difficult for him. he felt bitter, and forsaken at losing his daily contact with the living original objects, itself a traditional and healthy feature of the vienna school. when he told his student max dvoř{k that he felt as if he had lost his actual profession, this expressed a deep insight into his own personality, which tended to abstraction, psychology, and even speculation tipping into metaphysics. he was only to have eight more years of academic activity, yet these became the richest and most fruitful of his intellectual life, and the incredible effect he had on his audience must have provided a thorough compensation. i myself no longer experienced this since i had already left the university in , but i know this from those who did, and could also tell from my personal contact with this unusual man. beside wickhoff and together with him, riegl assumes a most eminent place in the history of the vienna school, since he provided such a supplement to the completely different personality of wickhoff. as long as they lived, both held to the basic historical and philological tenets of sickel’s school as the most reliable foundation for their academic convictions. riegl had been primarily an historian, and his earliest publications are definitely in that field. yet the urge to universal history which had drawn him to büdinger – and at first appeared to be an aberration - turned out to be instinctively fortunate, and much more than had been the case with wickhoff, grew continuously with his personality in an original and characteristic manner. wickhoff who was planning a history of naturalism as his crowning achievement, and which would have been completely in keeping with his entire approach, had always remained the ‘humanist’ - similar to jacob burckhardt to whom he otherwise bore very little relation. the two fields closest to his heart had always been classical antiquity with its later roman and even ‘early christian’ variants, and the ‘rinascimento’ in the italian sense. aside from the occasional comparison, he only rarely considered the medieval and the ‘baroque’ - two periods, which with a certain justification are often considered ‘spiritual’. these were precisely the periods in which riegl became a pioneer and a trend setter, characteristics emanating directly from his personality. his second main work, the spätrömische kunstindustrie (inaugurated by the Österreichisches archäologisches julius von schlosser the vienna school of the history of art institut) the first volume of which appeared in , was similar to the ‘vienna genesis’ (‘wiener genesis’) by wickhoff, in that behind an insignificant title, it also concealed an entire history of ‘late antiquity’ that prelude to the ‘medieval’ art of western and eastern europe - which could never be understood in isolation from it. he did not live to complete the second volume, which was to deal with the art of the migration period and lead more deeply into the ‘medium aevum’. he resumed the story exactly where wickhoff’s observations about roman art had left off. in the deepest sense of a hegelian ‘aufhebung’, more recent archaeological research has been lavishing more intensive attention on these formerly disdained and ignored periods, and in doing so, their recognition and revision owes a great deal to these predecessors. during the lifetime of riegl, the older and more solidly and philologically based discipline maintained a more stand-offish attitude to his completely original results than it had to those of wickhoff’s ‘vienna genesis’. just as riegl had overcome the technological-materialistic direction of the positivism of the preceding half century in the questions of style (stilfragen), so did he here surpass its historical and dogmatic tendencies – as max dvoř{k has already underscored in his obituary of riegl, published in the jahrbuch der zentralkommission of . in this he agreed with the old views of schnaase, themselves based on hegel and savigny, especially regarding the first of these points (as we have said above). this presented the genetic reaction against the dogmatic conception of the development of art, addressing above all the question of ‘decadence’ or ‘decline’ – as this was seen to have existed in the late antique, medieval (in spite of antiquarian archaeological interests) and what classicism decried as ‘baroque’ – in disdainful term a similar to the ‘gothic’. it is here that the strongly psychological attitudes of riegl inserted the idea of ‘kunstwollen’ with an intellectual principle naturally appealing to these periods with a ‘spiritual’ bent and characterized by intensive conflicts of ‘nature’ and ‘spirit’. this principle urges toward a definition in overly mythological terms as ‘national character’ or even as a very dubious ‘racial’ psyche, and enters in where riegl proposes an opposition between ‘optic’ and ‘haptic’ qualities. these two concepts are derived from modern psycho-physics, along with a general shift of historical into psychological terms. it is also worth mentioning as symptomatic, that the first volumes of the ‘elements of folk psychology’ (völkerpsychologie) by wilhelm wundt had already appeared while riegl was living, exactly at the turn of the century, although i am not aware whether riegl knew of them. it was in this context that riegl insisted on the world views of individual historical periods, with his strange point of view also applied to ‘iconography’, situated very differently than in the sensual-objective thinking of wickhoff. as a true historian, in dealing with ‘late antiquity’ and the early medieval period, riegl saw himself facing the question of cultural decline, and could not accept this idea. the way in which he analyzed and illustrated the thoroughly original ‘kunstwollen’ of each period is masterful and of lasting value. this remains true however much – just as with wickhoff’s ‘vienna genesis’ - his conclusions in die spätrömische kunstindustrie continue to be endlessly expanded, and in some case julius von schlosser the vienna school of the history of art corrected by subsequent archaeological research. even if every single element were to be contested, both of these have become and will probably remain classics of academic art history. they probably have this in common with winckelmann’s history of art in antiquity. it might have been inevitable that riegl was led to another problem of cultural ‘decline’, namely the baroque, which carries the traditional stigma in the meaning of the name. it is not as if the previous generations of art historians had not dealt with this period. indeed, they had written a great amount, especially since the slackening of the ‘renaissance’ revival in the final decades of the th century, and particularly in vienna this ‘style’ was felt to be native. one should recall that in his timeless cicerone, jacob burckhardt gave a description of the genuine italian ‘barocco’ which is among the most brilliant and profound passages of the entire book, and has gained renewed importance in our own time. his attitude remained negative, and this might have been inevitable from the author who inculcated his contemporaries with the name and concept of the renaissance. traces of his attitude are of course still to be found in his pupil and successor heinrich wölfflin as well as in the first systematic survey of baroque architecture by cornelius gurlitt, which after all presents a continuation of the history of architecture written by kugler and burckhardt. both of these books were known to riegl (that of wölfflin in its earlier inchoate version). burckhardt’s masterful erinnerungen aus rubens was only published posthumously in , when riegl had already immersed himself in the material with his first lectures about baroque art ( - ). it is well known that the great swiss historian assumed a completely different point of view in dealing with the great individual artist of the northern baroque, that he was not interested in the artistic language of a period, but in a profound individual art historical problem. it is not completely irrelevant that when riegl turned to baroque art, he was dealing with something of a native local austrian subject. here in the capital and residence of vienna, the italian baroque (in the broadest sense and not merely in the visual arts) did in fact become a great force since the counter-reformation, continuing almost seamlessly from its most prosperous years of the medieval ‘romanesque-gothic’. eager local historians such as kábdebo had studied the local ‘baroque’ including raphael donner, the pupil of giuliani. above all, one must however mention albert ilg ( born , † as director of the former ‘ambras collection’) a genuinely gifted if undisciplined intellect. he was a pupil of eitelberger, who also employed him at his museum from , and associated with him particularly in editing the ‘quellenschriften’. already in , he published a humorously written short polemic the future of the baroque style vienna: manz , under the pseudonym bernini the younger. here as in other publications, he passionately endorsed the emerging neo-baroque, which in his strange and not always unmotivated character as quintessential austrian (‘stockösterreicher’), he described as the austrian ‘national style’. it is a subject that does not ring at all gracefully in our ears these days, and for so interesting and paradoxical an author as hermann bahr (another upper austrian like both wickhoff and riegl!), it still today julius von schlosser the vienna school of the history of art constitutes that shibboleth of the ‘austrian type’. the collection of sources about the biography of johann bernhard fischer von erlach (and it is no more than that) was not published until , just shortly before he died. study of the austrian baroque has remained a serious matter for our vienna school down to our own time. pupils of wickhoff, riegl, dvoř{k, as well as my own, have produced valuable studies to illuminate its history in all aspects, with hans and erica tietze deserving special mention. this research was only possible in conjunction with that of the italian and specifically roman baroque, that place where the style actually originated - as ilg completely omitted to consider. we have already mentioned the studies of documents and written sources made by wolfgang kallab and oskar pollak as scholars in residence at the istituto austriaco. finishing touches are just now being put to the exemplary edition of the lives by passeri, by jakob hess, in munich, who might be considered an ‘affiliate’ of our institute. all of this is another subject and undoubtedly owes something akin to intellectual paternity to riegl. he held grand lectures and seminars three times on the subject of the roman baroque, - , - , - , and made an indelible impression on his audience. it was a typically tragic delay in the sad life of riegl that this material could only be published posthumously, necessarily imperfect and incomplete by his true friends artur burda, librarian of the kunsthistorisches museum for many years, and oskar pollak – first ‘the origins of baroque art in rome’ (die entstehung der barockkunst in rom) vienna and ‘the life of gian lorenzo bernini by filippo baldinucci’ (filippo baldinuccis vita des gian lorenzo bernini) vienna . in , riegl had himself published his large study of ‘dutch group portraiture’ in our jahrbuch (‘das holländische gruppenporträt’, jahrbuch der kunsthistorishen sammlungen des allerhöchsten kaiserhauses, , pp. reprinted, vienna: Österreichische staatsdruckerei ) which reveals his scholarly character more clearly than any other publication. with it, his expansive ‘universal historical’ intellect turned to the northern european ‘baroque’ – a term that is of course not apt. the continuity among these studies seems clear. from the ‘baroque’ of late antiquity - a term that has occurred more than once in recent archaeological publications such as those of a. von salis - riegl followed a genetic reversal to its more recent manifestation, which alone deserves the name. even for so secluded an individual as riegl, this also was related to his experience of the present. as much as he disliked the art of his own time, as dvoř{k has testified, he could discover meaning and insight when the context became that of the universal historian, as he then also did as the official concerned with historical preservation of monuments. i recall an interesting conversation during the final year of his life in which i spoke to him about a performance in vienna in of the sinfonia domestica by richard strauß, who was just then rising to fame as a composer. although this sort of art did not appeal to him, i vividly recall his interest in the new element in this music of the ‘natural sound’ (‘naturlaut’), which he somehow related to his historical theories. his approach as an author of speculative history made him something of a true ‘reversed prophet’ of that artistic current of ‘expressionism’ which he himself lived julius von schlosser the vienna school of the history of art to see emerge in its very beginnings. this again stood in the starkest contrast to wickhoff who was based in the final manifestation of positivism, impressionism, who found his artistic experience here, and projected into the ‘vienna genesis’. in the case of riegl, the motion occurred in reverse. we can believe dvoř{k when he said that riegl viewed art according to his ‘intellectual conclusions’ rather than any given preferences. this remark by his pupil reveals itself again in our context, and illuminates his character quite deeply: ‘in his view, the best art historian would be the one with no personal ‘taste’. we have already mentioned that riegl differed completely from wickhoff by his devotion to speculation. even if this was not presented to him in a very appealing form by the herbartianism of his early university training, one nonetheless has the feeling that he continued to be animated by this very fine fluid of strict formalism from the last grand system of german classical philosophy. as an isolated man, he constructed his very own type of psychology to accommodate his historical system, and accompanied this with a completely original terminology. the concept of ‘attentiveness’ (‘aufmerksamkeit’) which he uses so extensively in the ‘dutch group portrait’ seems to belong to the sphere of his opposition optical – tactical (later replaced with the word ‘haptic’) derived from the physiology of perception and employed in an unprecedented way. this sensitive point, as well as the entire work of so unusual a mind as riegl, whose negative aspects are also having a fruitful and fostering effect, must be seen in a very particular way. by the remorseless death which destroyed his personality, riegl was never able to bring his profound thoughts to a proper conclusion, and the danger exists, and it has already occurred, that they can disappear behind a ‘system’ and become ‘mythological’. in spite of complete consciousness of the situation, and great care, one of my most gifted pupils, hans sedlmayr, has not been completely able to escape this in an exposition of the ‘quintessenz der lehren riegls’. riegl’s historical construct does in fact include an element of neo-vitalism. the ‘development of art’ is presented as emanating from a ‘collective popular character’ (‘volksgeist’) in the form a personification or allegory of a concept, something like an hypostasized organism, governed by an internal necessity. in a similar way to the ‘history of sight’, expressed along lines kept closer to the individual artistic object by heinrich wölfflin, the history of art presents itself as a history of problems. today, we believe to recognize that this sort of thing is possible within the logical sphere of thoughts (as shown brilliantly in windelband, history of philosophy), but not, or only very conditionally, within that of aesthetics. this would annihilate the individual and the personal element, which provides the very basis of the discipline, just as the physicist or chemist has no need for the individual object, which is merely an exponent of the ‘laws’ which they study. from his interest in historical periods in which the anonymous – not biographically anonymous - aspect of art was particularly strong, it is again no coincidence that riegl provides a contrast and a complement to wickhoff. in so characteristic an essay by riegl as ‘the dutch group portrait’, it is striking how the julius von schlosser the vienna school of the history of art original, highly wrought ‘artistic will’ recedes behind the ‘kunstwollen’ in itself. the ‘stylistic document’ always provides the center of attention, and always presents itself in an abstract, conceptual setting, so that the visual and reflective impression, the aesthetic, is violated by the logical aspect. the objectification of judgment - which, contrary to past and some present opinion, is not universally subjective and hedonistic in the aesthetic field - appears here as an ominous downside. the brilliant accomplishment of riegl belongs to an area completely other than the pure and genuine history of art κατ’ έξοχήν, as the only place where the aesthetic vantage point is possible, and this has again become possible since the necessary and justified reaction of positivism against the old aestheticism has been overcome. one can and must mention the great names of benedetto croce and karl voßler. we are dealing here with the linguistic history also of the visual arts, which stands, aware of its abstract nature, on an equal footing beside the history of art in the narrower sense, as this has already been recognized in the field of poetry (and in music which remains inseparable from it). the idea of ‘decadence’ had actually driven riegl to a fruitful revision of its older dogmatic conceptions, and it is now becoming clear that in the field of pure stylistic history, dealing with the original creative and effective individual, he played another very different role than within the objectified history of style (or linguistic history of style). this was already realized by ernst heidrich, who contributed one of the most searching reviews of riegl’s method, and whose early death on the western front in was one of the greatest losses to our discipline. the recent book by [benedetto] croce about the period of the baroque ( ), although limited to the subject of italian poetry, social and ethical life of the time, and consciously omitting the visual arts, is nonetheless of great importance for us since he dealt with the idea of ‘decadence’ from an autonomous art historical point of view. as heidrich has demonstrated so excellently, the relation of riegl to wickhoff can be compared ‘typologically’ to that between schnaase and burckhardt (or even by extension to their predecessors hotho and kugler). the intellectual similarity has also been stressed by one of the most original archaeologists currently working, guido kaschnitz von weinberg, now teaching in königsberg, but with his origins in austria is closely familiar with the ‘vienna school’. in spite of his thorough criticisms in a review of the new edition of die spätrömische kunstundustrie (gnomon, volume , ), he stresses the brilliant achievement and nearly tragic intellectual struggle of this incomplete work, that (in spite of its undeniable mistakes of detail) has not been seen since hegel’s thoughts about history, and which can only be understood in terms of the historical situation of riegl between the impressionist- positivist thought of the th , and the expressionist-idealist thought of the th century. shortly before his early death, riegl once again revealed his unique character. a few years before his death, riegl agreed to assume the great task of completely reorganizing our old and prestigious zentralkommission after the death of the freiherr von helfert. in spite of the fact that he was himself already quite ill julius von schlosser the vienna school of the history of art and aware of his condition, i clearly recall urging him to accept the responsibility of this office. i believe that my arguments were not ineffective, for it was quite clear to me that in spite of his great success, he felt his academic activity to be secondary, and that his restless nature craved an occupation closer to that of the museum and the return to the living aesthetic objects - which it had so disappointed him to leave those years ago. in this way he found himself back in the ambient which had played such an important part far beyond the borders of the old austria in the times of heider and eitelberger at the beginning of the vienna school. this became a true homecoming, and riegl was able to leave an important inheritance to his pupils and their own pupils, above all [max] dvoř{k and [dagobert] frey. his proposals for the legal reorganization of the commission for historical monuments were not realized. the law for the protection of monuments as he had written it was published posthumously in the neue freie presse in vienna on february . from the high horse of his philosophical and historical thoughts, he was only able to see the promised land from a distance, for he only had a few more years to live, and then died in . it is difficult to guess if this lofty intuition would have been possible to completely realize. his lecture with the title der moderne denkmalkultus sein wesen seine entstehung, provided an introduction, and shows all of the typical qualities of his latest work. from a very high vantage point, he again made the attempt to identify the values that had emerged from historical preservation of monuments through the centuries and clarify them in terms of the history of philosophy. it should be noted that here again, as in all of riegl’s work, there are typically austrian characteristics. with the influence of karl menger (professor at the university of vienna since , † , in the same year as *max+ dvoř{k), the austrian school of economics arose, which either directly or indirectly related to the theory of value expounded by the followers of herbart. these theories have been pursued and played a great role down to the present day among the ‘graz school’ of [alexius] meinong and in that of [christian von] ehrenfels in prague – where zimmermann and hanslick had begun. in this connection, one should record that a pupil of wickhoff, robert eisler, whom we have already once mentioned, published a book of studies on the theory of value. leipzig , still a few years before the death of riegl, in which he delineated certain principles of aesthetic judgment, although with only partial success. max dvořák [franz] wickhoff was able to lead the vienna school for the lustrum from the death of riegl in until the spring of . he was assisted by his second oldest and by one of his younger students. i myself had completed the habilitation in , and then there was his particular friend max dvoř{k, who had been his assistant since and completed the habilitation in . with the death of riegl, dvoř{k was given the post of ‘extraordinarius’, while i had the title of ‘titular-ordinarius’ with the appointment to lecture - my independent chair, as i liked to call it, in lectures julius von schlosser the vienna school of the history of art and seminars held in the museum. my specialization lay in my old place of employment – among the ‘sculpture and applied arts’ (‘sammlungen für plastik und kunstgewerbe’) as i changed the title to help it sound less cumbersome - at the kunsthistorisches museum, where i had become director at the turn of the century. in these circumstances, i was happy to increasingly leave the more strictly academic duties of dissertations, examinations, conferences etc to my esteemed younger colleague who worked closely together with wickhoff. i only rarely attended the meetings of the college (‘kollegium’). i only mention such trivia since it explains some of the later developments. when in the spring of , the kiss of death on his bonny afflicted forehead prevented wickhoff in returning from venice, the city of his heart, a critical period began for our vienna school. although the ad hoc committee had voted in the majority ( to ) for me in the first place and dvoř{k as the second choice, this was done with the condition that changes might be made to the art historical curriculum after the wickhoff chair was again filled. the minority had voted in the first instance for josef strzygowski - who had been teaching as ‘ordinarius’ in graz since - as the successor to wickhoff, with the reverse condition of arranging changes in the curriculum to accommodate the needs of the Österreichisches institut (as seat of the ‘vienna school’). a strange incident occurred at the meeting of the faculty on july which reversed the majority vote, although only by a very narrow margin and following a violent and unusually long debate. this deflection did not occur by the specialists in related subjects in the philosophical and historical subjects, but primarily by the natural scientists who had to some degree certainly been misinformed. from the very beginning, i was completely happy to turn down the appointment, not merely because i felt the far younger dvoř{k to be much more capable, but also because i was quite content in my old spot in the museum surrounded by a circle of colleagues and friends - and that my ‘free’ chair perfectly fulfilled my desires for academic activity as it stood. i had already consciously decided to avoid the traditional university career in , when in spite of the great honor of being elected unanimously as the first choice, i had without negotiation refused the appointment to the professorial chair vacated by alwin schultz in prague. i thus requested my colleague from the museum and university, robert von schneider – himself to follow our mutual friend wickhoff to the grave that fall - to convey my written waiver to the faculty. in the meeting of july , a compromise was reached and dvoř{k was appointed as ‘ordinarius’ in the history of art beside strzygowski. after another long debate, this arrangement was accepted and confirmed by the ministry. since this time, there have been two chairs in two separate departments of the history of art (called the i. and the ‘ii. kunsthistorische institut’ only since my time and at my suggestion). the ‘second’ is historically in fact the first, and due to the ‘personal union’ with the institut für geschichtsforschung, it is the traditional seat of the ‘vienna school’, and continues its unbroken tradition. since the other chair was created for strzygowski to meet his personal goals and purposes, and these have nothing in common with the vienna school, indeed often julius von schlosser the vienna school of the history of art contradict them, it can be completely omitted from our historical sketch. it was the older rather than the newly created department which sickel in his reforms had given the role of training professionals for the museums and commission for the preservation of monuments. now, eighty years later, it has maintained this function. the great majority of museum curators of old and new austria, even in what are now ‘foreign’ countries, were trained in this school, especially those who also completed the courses at the institut für geschichtsforschung as regular and visiting members, and the by no means simple ‘national examination’ (‘staatsprüfung’). max dvoř{k (born in raudnitz on the elbe *rudnice nad labem+ and died ) did not assume his position in simple circumstances, and he was verily not spared life’s difficulties. of the dozen years he was still to be granted of academic activity, more than half were taken up by the grievous war years and the yet more severe post-war years. what he was able to achieve in this time is worthy of admiration. as a child of the bohemian soil, dvoř{k appeared to us a close neighbor, but of different descent. this also did not simplify matters for him in the beginning. it is a sign of the success of our historical school that this young czech was so fascinated and won over, that he became immersed and joined without reservations, remaining true and appreciative even beyond the collapse of the old monarchy which drew rigid boundary walls between his old and his new homes. in spite of the fact that he never denied his origins, and that a fair part of his publications were conditioned by this affiliation, he nonetheless remained beholden to his true intellectual home, and spent even the final years of his life as an official in the new austria uprightly and stoutly defending and preserving the monuments in this period when the artistic patrimony was exposed to decay and capriciousness. his relation to german scholarship – where he was involved in [wilhelm von+ bode’s foundation of the ‘deutscher verein für kunstwissenschaft’ - was so close that in , shortly before his death, he was honored with the offer of the chair in art history at the newly founded university of cologne. from the fact that he did not accept this, one can see his devotion to vienna. he was also shown gratitude by the austrian academy of sciences when they elected him as one of their regular members, although he only lived a few months in that capacity. like riegl, whom he later followed so closely, dvoř{k also began as an historian (at first at the czech speaking university of prague) while his doctorate was also in this field. he had been well prepared for this by the atmosphere of his father’s house – his father was archivist for prince lobkowitz. when he arrived in vienna as a very young man and enrolled in the institut für geschichtsforschung, that nursery for austere german historical culture covering the entire old monarchy, he discovered his teacher and friend, who became like a second father, as well as his family and home, alas, disrupted by the early death of his wife. he had become familiar with death at an early age, when a sister was torn away as a beautiful girl in the prime of life and he himself only escaped the same by a sliver, as if by a miracle. julius von schlosser the vienna school of the history of art this must have contributed to his appearance of maturity and solidity at a young age. i recall his handsome serious youthful figure as if i had just seen him yesterday. although he no longer studied personally under [theodor von] sickel, he was trained entirely in the same spirit. he attended the course at the institut für geschichtsforschung in - . his earliest publication was based on the strict examination of documents used in his dissertation about a subject from his native area – the sources for cosmas pragensis. this became his farewell tariff to the rigorous school he had gone through, for under the influence of wickhoff and riegl he had turned to art history of the early modern period. while the first of the two became such a close friend, there can be no doubt that the latter had an undeniable similarity of character and provided the greater model for his scholarship. both were devoted to research, true historians by nature and training, more intellectual than descriptive, as dvoř{k himself once said of riegl (and we have already ourselves noted). in this way he became his successor in more than a merely external sense, at the ‘institut für denkmalpflege’ [bundesdenkmalamt] as riegl had reorganized it. it was in the spirit of riegl that dvoř{k not merely continued its publications such as the jahrbuch für denkmalpflege, but also founded the ‘Österreichische kunsttopographie’ ( ), a project whose contours had become discernable in the prehistory of the vienna school (as we have already mentioned). nothing stood in the way of his continuing wickhoff’s teaching activity as a member of the institut für geschichtsforschung, continuing the kunstgeschichtliche anzeigen as well as the great publication of the catalogue of illuminated manuscripts in austria, but then also his own collaboration with the ‘deutscher verein für kunstwissenschaft’ and its ‘monumenta’ which must have appeared natural in comparison to the old and prestigious series of the ‘monumenta germaniae’. in all of his work, he was assisted by an excellent group of pupils, of which i single out only karl maria swoboda, especially since he served as his assistant and mine, guiding the department through the difficult period of transition after the death of dvoř{k. for me, it was a great source of satisfaction to sponsor the habilitation of this young scholar who also had great gifts as a teacher. in a certain sense, dvoř{k seemed to combine qualities of both wickhoff and riegl, but for his original and independent spirit, whose development grew more to resemble riegl in the final years. seen in purely bibliographical terms, dvoř{k’s work as a scholar seems to recall wickhoff in not being as voluminous. in spite of certain restraints which this might have caused, it is so closely interwoven with his activities as a teacher and administrator of the ‘denkmalamt’ as to be indistinguishable. this is apparent when reviewing the unusual amount which he achieved as administrator, editor, reviewer, both in small and large formats. the sum of all of this is so great that one must marvel at the tenacity of a person who was never completely healthy and who died prematurely. the lectures which he very carefully wrote and prepared might have left a stronger impression on their audience than those of riegl. in any case they enthralled his listeners in a way which these people still describe today. this can account for the fact that two of the most devoted of their number, karl maria julius von schlosser the vienna school of the history of art swoboda and johannes wilde, were able to reap such a rich harvest in the posthumous publication of these lectures - filling five volumes of the collected edition (munich: piper, since ). to summarize the entire diversity of his production seems impractical at this spot. he only left us less than a decade ago and seems too close to discuss ‘historically’. in the case of dvoř{k (indeed as with riegl), it seems natural to recall the words spoken by grillparzer at the grave of schubert: death has here taken a rich possession, but perhaps yet more in beautiful promise. the life of a person itself creates its fate, and to the historian it is as pointless to speculate as to what might have been as it would be to fathom a deeper ‘metaphysical’ significance. we can however refer to an appraisal of dvoř{k in historiographical terms by a devoted pupil, dagobert frey, ‘dvoř{ks stellung in der kunstgeschichte’, wiener jahrbuch für kunstgeschichte, volume , , pp. - (himself the successor of his mentor at the bundesdenkmalamt until his recent appointment at the university of breslau). beside this there is also the – for all its brevity - beautiful and sincere obituary by another faithful student and wickhoff’s final assistant, now working in weimar and jena, wilhelm köhler - in the mitteilungen des instituts für österreichische geschichtsforschung, volume . a reflection of the deep impression of ethos made by dvoř{k’s lectures has been emphatically recorded by another enthusiastic student, otto benesch, ‘max dvoř{k ein versuch zur geschichte der historischen geisteswissenschaften’, repertorium für kunstwissenschaft, volume , , pp. - . at the beginning of his career, dvoř{k’s publications stood in the sign of sickel and wickhoff. from his first article about byzantine influence on italian miniature painting (which appeared in the mitteilungen des instituts für österreichische gesichtsforschung of as did the aforementioned study in diplomatics), the development led first to a subject from his native region, the internationally influential bohemian art during the reign of the luxemburg kings and the essay about the illuminations of johan von neumarkt, (jahrbuch der kunsthistorischen sammlungen des allerhöchsten kaiserhauses ), concealing a broad universal topic behind a humble title, a few years later expounded in a seasoned way with ‘rätsel der kunst der brüder van eyck’ (jahrbuch der kunsthistorischen sammlungen des allerhöchsten kaiserhauses ), which might be said to have taken the morelli method to its most mature and profound level. the culmination of his work, as published during his lifetime, came with his final published essay ‘idealismus und naturalismus in der gotischen skulptur und malerei’ significantly published in the historische zeitschrift . this thin volume, as it was later reprinted, rightly caused a certain sensation and placed its author among the foremost art historians in the german language. the reason was that this brought out his central characteristic, the history of art as intellectual history (‘kunstgeschichte als geistesgeschichte’), turning the history of art into the history of ideas. it was correct of the aforementioned pious editors of one of his posthumously published collections of essays to give it the title kunstgeschichte als geistegeschichte. it reflects the shift that occurred in german intellectual life around on the basis of the distinctions between the humanities julius von schlosser the vienna school of the history of art and the natural sciences as they were drawn by [heinrich] rickert and [wilhelm] dilthey. the latter was a particular influence on dvoř{k, and frey was correct to stress that this influence was already apparent in ‘les aliscans’, the contribution which he made to the festschrift for wickhoff in . the art historical problems as they were laid out by riegl are here developed in an idiosyncratic way. after he had already vaguely pondered the ‘medieval’ and ‘renaissance’ periods in his earlier writings, as a mature scholar he now followed the thinking of riegl and with a study of the emerging baroque from italian ‘mannerism’. this is the point at which the intellectual affinity between the two become particularly apparent. here again, the present played a part, the question of their art in relation to their ‘world view’. like riegl before him, dvoř{k also showed little interest in the art of his own time. like his predecessor, he also projected the past onto the present, drawing ‘intellectual’ conclusions, while wickhoff by contrast traversed the sensual view of the impressionism of his youth (‘sinnlich anschauend’), and himself said that this experience opened his eyes to the related phases in ancient art. the most illuminating evidence of this is in the introduction which dvoř{k wrote for a series of lithographs by his friend the austrian artist oskar kokoschka, his only publication dealing with modern art. the comparison between the famous haystacks by [claude] monet and the variations on the head of a young woman by the contemporary artist, which he keenly contrasts as examples of impressionism and expressionism, immediately becomes a problem of ‘intellectual history’ (‘geistesgeschictliches problem’) for him, the overcoming of pure observation by the arrival at a ‘world view’ (‘die weltanschauliche’). this is the attitude that came to the fore in dvoř{k’s final writings. it is the ‘double track’ (‘zweigeleisigkeit’) that has been attributed to the great work of [karl] schnaase, a parallel movement of stylistic history and cultural history, that is dissolved into a synthesis, fusing those elements requiring an aesthetic reading with those of a logical historical nature. one is reminded of a statement that wickhoff made about his beloved and revered pupil, as once recalled by wilhelm köhler: ‘it is a shame that dvoř{k did not become a cultural historian instead of an art historian’, which reveals as much about wickhoff as it does of dvoř{k. the question arises whether the history of art and its language does not run the risk of being mediatized. in fact, [guido] kaschnitz-weinberg has already made this point clearly and forcefully in his aforementioned review of riegl. the work of art is placed in the opposite spot from that of those strict formalists who would degrade it to a pure document of style and nothing else, allowing it to appear abstractly objectified, but still closer to its primal phenomenon, its creation. the danger of replacing aestheticism with a logicism (or in the case of riegl a psychologism) and pressed into service of a priori formulations of theories of the world, the autonomous character of the discipline would be lost on the basis of a very insecure interpretation of written sources. this presents itself at more than one spot in his essay about medieval idealism and naturalism. an intellect such as his was able to avoid the problem, but most recently, weaker and less critical types have succumbed to it more than once. julius von schlosser the vienna school of the history of art these remarks are intended to do no more than to stress in passing the unavoidable limits that are also set for those with the greatest gifts. we allude to this since, the question has become more ‘pertinent’ today than ever, namely those essential questions that riegl had already occasionally brushed - the ‘inner linguistic form’, the ‘structure’ of the art work within its historical context. with a certain youthful impetuosity, one of my most original students, hans sedlmayr, whom i have already mentioned, has sought to establish a connection to the ‘gestalt psychology’ that has again flourished in austria, particularly developed by [christian von] ehrenfels. the younger generation has again begun to show an urge toward psychology similar to that felt by riegl. i must mention my own dear ‘primal student’ (‘urschüler’) ernst kris, whose most recent research (on [franz xaver] messerschmidt, the artist anecdotes etc.) steers precisely in this direction, but with a very remarkable cautiousness. one thing can be stated with certainty – in spite of the considerations we have just mentioned, nothing can diminish the significance of max dvoř{k as a scholar. they simply cast his qualities in a clearer light. incipit auctor when dvoř{k was torn from us so suddenly in , at the age of only – exactly that of riegl - the vienna school seemed to be faced with a crisis more ominous even than that in after the death of wickhoff, and threatening even its very existence. with the vacancy left by wickhoff, dvoř{k has been the obvious choice. as we have already said, i myself had long ago decided against the strictly academic life, and never thought that i would again be faced with the question, and least of all that an older person might be called to succeed the younger. to the very end of his days, dvoř{k had always identified himself to me as a ‘grateful student’, which i of course took to be more of a polite turn of phrase on the part of that fine person than a felicitous description of the actual situation. friends and opponents will probably confirm uniformly that when the commission of the faculty approached me, i had not previously expressed any interest whatsoever in assuming the chair. the conditions at my old position at the museum (and this was a true museum in the traditional sense, and more congenial to me than the more recent arrangements with so much broader goals) had completely changed since the collapse of the monarchy and the administration by the state. one can understand that i was very happy there, even if the days of my professional career were certainly drawing to a close. i was after all not a natural fit in the new system, and in the further aggravated economic situation with such greater pressures, did not wish to diminish my younger and more energetic colleagues and friends from their hour in the sun. there is no need to reiterate that the divorce from the daily contact with the world of the ‘objects’ appeared to me painful and even dangerous, as to riegl before me. my ‘free’ professorship completely satisfied my modest ambitions, i had no desire for additional academic duties. this was especially true since my ‘asocial’, not very expansive, and somewhat skeptical nature had long made me an ‘outsider’ in the julius von schlosser the vienna school of the history of art faculty, and i did not feel any particular calling as a teacher, and not at all the ‘head of a school’ (‘schuloberhaupt’). to be honest, the peculiar situation of our subject at the university was not appealing. for some time already, i had imagined myself retiring into a comfortable scholarly existence, which even in these harsh times i felt to have earned after thirty years of public service. just at that point, the possibility also presented itself of ending my days on the italian soil, which certain family traditions and part of my ancestry had led me to regard as my second home. it was not pointless, but with an ambivalence only apparent to my closest friends, when a few years before the war i dedicated my large edition of the commentarii of [lorenzo+ ghiberti to the ‘terra madre italia’. it should therefore not appear completely inexplicable that i attempted two other resolutions of the university appointment without involving myself. for one, i suggested wilhelm pinder, then teaching in leipzig and admired by both dvoř{k and me. when pinder ultimately declined after initially accepting, i suggested the excellent wilhelm köhler, who had been a product of our own tutelage, long director of the museum in weimar and then completing his habilitation at the university in jena. as long as i could still be of use, i imagined a forbearable future and a fruitful period for our vienna school with him in the post of an ‘extraordinarius’ possibly my successor. when this arrangement was vetoed by the ministry, it was without a light heart that i assumed the chair and responsibility for the institut, combined in the traditional ‘personal union’ with the post within the institut für geschichtsforschung out of a soldierly duty and gratitude to the nursery where i had been trained. whether i have been able, or to what extent, to steer perforce the unmanned ship, is a judgment that must be left to others and a later generation. it is unbecoming to me to make statements about my own scholarship. i can only allude in passing to an essay, not about my ‘empirical’ biography but rather my inner thoughts which addressed the period before assuming the university chair and was intended for the edification of my pupils, which i entitled ‘commentary on my life’ (‘lebenskommentar’) in memory of my old friend ghiberti. it was published in kunstwissenschaft der gegenwart in selbstdarstellungen, edited by johannes jahn, leipzig: meiner verlag . an affectionate list of my publications was compiled by my faithful student and former second assistent, hans r. hahnloser in the festschrift that a small circle of close friends and pupils presented on my th birthday, edited by arpad weixlgärtner and leo planiscig, in vienna by the amalthea verlag . it does however behove me to account for the scope and goals of what has in the mean time become my twelve year activity in the so-called ‘ii. kunsthistorisches institut’ *the ‘ nd department of the history of art’+, the seat of the ‘vienna school’. it soon became clear – and this was a reason for my initial rejection of the appointment - that there could be no fruitful cooperation with the department founded in , since i do not possess the accommodating personality of dvoř{k and compromises have always been an abomination to me. i was more inclined to relinquish my position than to become involved in this, and am grateful that the separation of the two could be achieved as smoothly as it in fact occurred: from that julius von schlosser the vienna school of the history of art time, both departments have gone their own way. far be it from me to claim that this is an ideal situation in which two classes of art historians are being trained totally differently, and i have been completely conscious of this. i could not burden my students with two completely divergent methods, each negating the other, ultimately causing more confusion than clarification or possibly leading them to a mechanical sort of ‘memorization’. this division was not the result of mutual personal incompatibility as one might presume, but was instead purely objective - although not such that it could be productive or even a condition for illuminating problems in terms of differences of approach and method. it was more the result of a contradiction in scholarly creed, and not of a total opposition between an orthodoxy and heterodoxy defying any dialectical resolution, more the result of two completely irremediably differing languages and conceptions of those two fundamental pylons of the humanities - philosophical and historical knowledge in their reciprocity. this is not the place to do so, and it would be pointless to enter into criticism or polemics. it is sufficient to make note of the facts as they exist. as a result of this, it was natural that the ‘ordinarius’ of the closest related field should stand in as second reader and in conducting intermediate and doctoral examinations – in this case my venerable friend and colleague emil reisch from classical archaeology, and i remain most grateful to him. this had the result that my students were forced to study that subject more closely than otherwise. this extended beyond the mere formal aspect into the substance, accorded with the tradition dating from böhm and eitelberger, and one need not belabor the point that it was lent further importance by the work of wickhoff and riegl as well. this had the effect of restoring the relationship as it had existed before the turn of the century. when i myself completed my doctorate, the committee for the examinations consisted of wickhoff, benndorf and sickel, the triumvirate of ancient, modern art, and the historical auxiliary sciences, a model that has always seemed ideal to me, and presumably to all historians. we were lacking only one final important element, the strict method of all historical research that had traditionally been so close to us in the school of sickel. in the two year curriculum of the institut für österreichische geschichtsforschung there had always been at least one art historian subsidized with a scholarship (with the possibility of applying this to the institute in rome) and administrator of the so-called ‘lehrapparat’ who had completed his three year ‘tirocinium’ (including the introductory course’ *‘vorbereitungskurs’]), to which they could only be admitted after completing the fourth semester at the university and successfully passed the admission examination. it was natural that the relations between the two departments should have grown looser in the years since the (then unique) kunsthistorisches institut first gained its autonomy under wickhoff, and in spite of the fact, which we have frequently noted, that the two functions were always fulfilled by the same person. one might say that there were art historians of the first and of the second grade, those having passed the ‘national examination of the department’ (‘instituts- staatsprüfung’) that entitles them to employment in museums and libraries, and the others with a simple doctorate, and that this might have led to an atmosphere of julius von schlosser the vienna school of the history of art competition to the detriment of the sustaining institution. on the other hand, the group of art historians had grown much larger in comparison to the small numbers of the earlier generations, and it was no longer possible for all of these to complete the curriculum of the institut für österreichische geschichtsforschung, even as ‘außerordentlich’. for this reason and to eliminate those without the necessary prerequisites, i then decided to introduce a two year introductory curriculum that would teach the theory and practice of the most important ‘auxiliary sciences’, latin palaeography and diplomatics of at least the imperial documents, and which would then be examined orally. only when they have passed this do i accept them as regular members of my department. it is a system that i believe to have been successful. i am grateful to my esteemed colleague hans hirsch, then the director of the institut für österreichische geschichtsforschung, for adding the heavy burden of these classes to his other responsibilities, and whose careful and inspiring teaching has provided a great asset to my students. i only hope that i have been able to offer something of equal value to the historians of the institut für österreichische geschichtsforschung, whose curriculum has included the history of art since the period of sickel, and who have always remained close to our department – one has but to recall riegl and dvoř{k. in this, i have also benefited greatly from the collaboration of my seasoned associate and colleague, professor karl maria swoboda, an excellent teacher, for whom i have recently been able to create a chair for the study of austrian art on the conviction that not merely historians, but also beginning art historians can gain the best introduction from lectures and seminars about monuments available to be seen in the original and locally. this has prepared my students to deal fastidiously with historical sources and it has maintained the traditional system of examinations, as we have discussed it above - as far as has been possible. i also by no means refrain from urging my students to pursue the modern languages, especially the important romance languages, and this too has borne fruit. one can also imagine that i encourage a serious study of philosophy, in which they are already obliged to pass the ‘secondary oral examination’ (‘nebenrigorosum’). here there has also been fortunate progress from the time when i was a student. it is no longer a matter of simply ‘learning’ formalities, but the present exponents take their subject seriously. in the more than four decades that i have now been teaching, i have always emphasized lectures and seminars around the artistic objects, primarily those of the former ‘hofmuseum’, where i could of course move more freely as a member of the staff. since i am of the opinion that seminar activity provides the core of academic instruction, and encourages contact between the teacher and student, i have for a good dozen years now continued that well known tradition inherent in the vienna school from the days of böhm-eitelberger through thausing and wickhoff. direct autopsy proves its importance here once again. it is well known that judgments based on photographs and now also zincographs, have led to some of the most grievous mistakes - especially of sculpture (on which i have concentrated since it can often assume the role of a cinderella in relation to its more widely available sister). julius von schlosser the vienna school of the history of art some years ago now, konrad lange made a humorous reference to ‘autotypitis’ [‘die autotypitis eine moderne illustrationskrankheit’, der grenzbote, , , ]. this sort of academic studies within the museum gain particular value in the hands of such excellent connoisseurs as ludwig von baldass, a fact which i stressed during his ‘habilitation’. i am further grateful to my esteemed colleague emanuel löwy that my students have also been able to train their eyes practically in the ancient collection. i have welcomed and encouraged a continuation of this practice by the current director of the ancient collection, fritz eichler. this is then supported by my own lectures at the university using a splendid episcope that has been funded in our department by personal friends, and which provides an introduction to the secondary, written sources and the questions surrounding them. this again is an old local tradition of our school, dating from eitelberger. it is only natural that the study of giorgio vasari’s writings should continue to stand at the center of this study, since vasari remains the exemplary figure on this subject, with italian art theory and historiography providing the greatest achievement in this field and a model for the rest of europe. in spite of this, it has still not received the attention that my long departed colleague wolfgang kallab called for, including a recognition of some of the pernicious effects vasari has had in preventing an objective history of art in an equal standing to the other disciplines. this is hardly the be all and end all of these exercises, as some have occasionally objected. as with the sessions held in the museum, my students and i have in fact have covered the entire broad field from late antiquity (such as the passio iv coronatorum and ‘heraclius’) into the baroque, not merely in italy, but also the northern european, germanic and french areas. some of these seminars, to which my assistant hans r. hahnloser participates with separate introductory exercises, include an introduction to the viewing of art, including modern art as well as papers read by more advanced students about important subjects for the general history of art, and by no means limited to european subjects. as in the museum, in this we have not shunned to look into neighboring subjects of archaeology, and even islam, which is so important for the christian medieval period. these exercises have provided the impulse for a considerable number of dissertations, as they should, although i agree with wickhoff and have reiterated, that i do not believe that a dissertation topic should be assigned as in a grade school, because the independent and unimpeded choice of the topic already involves a certain proof of the necessary level of education. these topics must involve actual and not merely sham questions (‘scheinprobleme’), and cannot be limited to simple preliminary collections of material either. if there are some who might be led by this to classify me as a ‘philologist’, then i would be content, but not in the condescending sense in which the term is often used. i did in fact begin as a student of ancient literature, and it was through classical archaeology under the tutelage of [otto] benndorf and w. klein that i arrived at the history of art. my early experience as a young museum curator in the old and venerable ‘münz- und antikenkabinett’ above which the name of eckel still glowed, certainly did me no harm as an ‘art historian’. i have always understood ‘philology’ in the julius von schlosser the vienna school of the history of art accepted sense as the old established discipline which extends from the unavoidable and fundamental textual criticism forward to the ultimate sources of historical recognition. my thirty year intellectual affinity with bernedetto croce and karl voßler might at least serve as a symbol of this. when the latter dedicated his gesammelte aufsätze zur sprachphilosophie of to me, i felt this to constitute one of the greatest honors of my rather secluded existence. i conceive my lectures as complementary to the seminars, ideally providing a synthesis of these, and in them i have always sought a synopsis in universal history. from an early and uncertain stage, i have attempted a didacticism in the history of art centered on the philosophical attitude that the historian should approach the phenomena as in ‘inverted’ philosopher, and above all ask the questions: what is art? what is history ? by clarifying the synthesis of these two, both for myself and my audience, as well as the other necessary aspect of the genesis of art historical problems we arrive at a survey of the ‘history of art history’. this led me from the well known example of language and ‘literary history’ - as it is so brilliantly illuminated by voßler in the subjects he has treated – and to the distinction of pure, autonomous art history (which deals with the great original creations from the ‘schools’, imitators, copyists or industrious subjects) and the ‘linguistic history’ of art - what voßler already in distinguished as the ‘creation’ and ‘development’ in language. i have attempted to clarify both of these problems in cycles of lectures about italian art from the dugento to the quattrocento - consciously choosing subjects that i had studied over a long period, as the problem requires - and since this period harbors all of the sources for an understanding of what is essentially ‘medieval’ art, i have attempted to delineate the history of the ‘artistic language’ on the basis of late antiquity. all of this is not done in the sense of a ‘historical grammar’ which has long been recognized as an aberration and a sham (‘scheinproblem’). i happily and graciously acknowledge that my aspirations have had support and direction from the ‘neo-idealism’ of croce’s thinking. this was the reason that i devoted a few years to making translations of a series of the relevant publications by croce. in my youth, ‘aesthetics’ had been a dread and an abomination to art historians. [robert] zimmermann, who was the last to propound a system of herbartian aesthetics, had stopped teaching long before i entered the university. i vividly recalled how the fine literary and art historian hermann hettner, whose influence still survives today, was misled into dogmatic thinking by the denial of all aesthetics. as a young lecturer, i was lost in that maze, and in secondary school was touched by the disdained ideas of [friedrich wilhelm joseph] schelling, and preoccupied myself with some of those ‘systems’. finally i also delved into that of the art historian konrad lange (vom wesen der kunst, ), until the estetica of , and the friendship of croce ultimately liberated me from all of that. everything that i have said relates to what i might call an upright will. whether this is matched by the necessary ability is something that my natural skepticism has often led me to doubt. julius von schlosser the vienna school of the history of art i have digressed too far into personal matters, and must change the subject, since i see my own role in the history of the ‘vienna school’ as nothing other than that of a ‘torch bearer’, to again borrow the phrase from the lucretius that i have loved since my school days. i am happy to see my mission as having been to maintain the tradition of our old school, and above all of transferring the heritage of my teachers sickel and wickhoff into the hands of my successor – when the time comes. for this reason i would not like to end this historical sketch with my ephemeral name, but instead to direct attention to the place in which our school has arisen and flourished, our city of vienna - even if i myself was born here almost by coincidence, and belong here neither by descent nor mentality, but only by my education. it is characteristic of the colorful mosaic and the particular mission of the second largest german speaking city of the former holy roman empire, that not a single professor in this department from eitelberger to dvoř{k was a native – this can also be seen in the appended list of graduates and ‘affiliates’ of our ‘vienna school’ by my faithful assistant hans r. hahnloser. at a number of points we have spoken of the viennese character and the particular atmosphere that surrounds it and might summarize at the conclusion. the ancient roman border castellum that lay at the crossing point of the land route from north to south and on the river route from west to east was always as subject to influences from all four parts of the world as it also gave them off itself. this city with its diverse ethnic mixture since before recorded times, celtic-roman in antiquity, germanic and romance in its development with slavic influences, has always been observed to combine deeply rooted tradition with sensual demonstrative movement – it has all too often been the necessary down side of its character that were emphasized resentfully from aeneas sylvius to [otto] nicolai and [friedrich] schiller. it has probably been the unique mixture of northerly- southerly and westerly-easterly elements that have accounted for the magical attraction of this only true ‘imperial city’ in the german speaking area. this shows itself in the ‘school’ that has arisen in this place. its patriarch was a protestant colonist from the german minority in hungary, whose circle included true viennese such [gustav] heider, [eduard von] sacken, but also [albert von] camesina, the descendent of a family from the romance regions of switzerland. the most important of them was a native of the sudetenland, whose decisive energy has always distinguished itself from those of the alpine areas, where wickhoff and riegl had been born. thausing whose unforgettably distinct character stood out both in prague and vienna, was a native of the ‘fields and meadows’ of the royal city on the moldau which has always been so closely related to vienna. [giovanni] morelli from lombardy, who had been so deeply involved in german intellectual history, began as a (political) enemy of vienna, to become a friend and guide, and had a greater influence here than anywhere else - while it was two northern germans, above all sickel and then conze who lent the ‘vienna school’ its characteristically objective profile. finally this old city whose true population often satirizes it as the ‘capua of julius von schlosser the vienna school of the history of art the intellectuals’ succeeded in making one of its best discoveries and acquisitions in *max+ dvoř{k, that son of czech soil, whom the viennese, austrian, german cultural sphere won over nearly completely. the author of these lines, who became his successor in the ‘vienna school’ against all expectation and aspiration, can end these pages in no better way than with his unforgettable name. karl johns completed his doctorate in the history of art at the fogg art museum, and has worked with the dallas museum of art, the rijksmuseum, amsterdam, the museum für kunst und gewerbe in hamburg, and the los angeles county museum of art among others. his publications have centred on the art of the netherlands in the early modern period and the earlier viennese art historians. karl johns goins court riverside ca karltjohns@aol.com issue- -specialist-knowledge-for-a-non-specialist-audience british art studies september elizabethan and jacobean miniature paintings in context edited by catharine macleod and alexander marr british art studies issue , published september elizabethan and jacobean miniature paintings in context edited by catharine macleod and alexander marr cover image: left portrait: isaac oliver, ludovick stuart, nd duke of lennox, later duke of richmond, ca. , watercolour on vellum, laid onto table-book leaf, . x . cm. collection of national portrait gallery, london (npg ); right portrait: isaac oliver, ludovick stuart, nd duke of lennox, later duke of richmond, ca. , watercolour on vellum, laid on card, . x cm. collection of fitzwilliam museum, cambridge (fm ). . digital image courtesy of national portrait gallery, london (all rights reserved); fitzwilliam museum, cambridge (all rights reserved). pdf generated on february note: british art studies is a digital publication and intended to be experienced online and referenced digitally. pdfs are provided for ease of reading offline. please do not reference the pdf in academic citations: we recommend the use of dois (digital object identifiers) provided within the online article. these unique alphanumeric strings identify content and provide a persistent link to a location on the internet. a doi is guaranteed never to change, so you can use it to link permanently to electronic documents with confidence. published by: paul mellon centre bedford square london, wc b ja https://www.paul-mellon-centre.ac.uk in partnership with: yale center for british art chapel street new haven, connecticut https://britishart.yale.edu issn: - doi: . /issn. - url: https://www.britishartstudies.ac.uk editorial team: https://www.britishartstudies.ac.uk/about/editorial-team advisory board: https://www.britishartstudies.ac.uk/about/advisory-board produced in the united kingdom. a joint publication by contents a very proper treatise: specialist knowledge for a non-specialist public, annemie leemans a very proper treatise: specialist knowledge for a non-specialist public annemie leemans abstract this paper discusses the authorship and audience of england’s first printed recipe book which is entirely dedicated to the practice of limning. a number of older sources show congruency with a very proper treatise ( ), both in manuscript and print, and in the various languages it was transmitted. the contribution of the printer–publisher richard tottel is that of a compiler. i have identified three categories of public or audience: the intended audience (promoted by the book itself); circumstantial audience (the clients of the bookshop); and actual audience (owners that have been traced through material investigation of individual book copies and archival research). among this audience, there is a strong correlation between heraldic and artistic interests, which matches the intention of the compiler, who created a book that reaches out to individuals with an interest in painting, writing, and heraldry. authors acknowledgements the author owes sincere thanks to the editors for their comments, to the paul mellon centre for studies in british art for allowing me access to source material, and to the organisers of the conference “hilliard, oliver and the miniature in context”, for creating opportunities. special thanks to liam benison, who has been my sounding board during the editing process of this article. cite as annemie leemans, "a very proper treatise: specialist knowledge for a non- specialist public", british art studies, issue , https://dx.doi.org/ . / issn. - /issue- /aleemans introduction: positioning limning this paper discusses the authorship and audience of england’s first printed recipe book which is entirely dedicated to the practice of limning. richard tottel printed the first edition of a very proper treatise in . it offers technical instructions on painting in books. the title a very proper treatise describes the intention of the book, to “briefly sett forthe the arte of limming” (fig. ). this objective is repeated in the abbreviated or running title at the top of each page: the arte of limming. the same title, the arte of limning, was used later, around the turn of the century by the portrait miniature painter nicholas hilliard. his manuscript, in the words of mary edmond, is "one of the most important documents in the history of english art”. hilliard, followed by fellow limner edward norgate, referred to portrait miniature painting as “limning”. richard haydocke gave an explanation of the material quality and technique of limning: “limming [is] where the colours [pigments] are … mixed with gummers, but laied with a thicke body and substance: wherein much arte and neatnesse is required.” a very proper treatise addresses the preparation of paper and pigment for painting in books, but also contains specific directions for portraiture and the rendering of flesh and hair. in fact, the book treats figurative elements in coats of arms. considering the meanings used in the various written works that talk about limning, one can see that this term was charged with more than one meaning. limning indicated the practice of book illuminations as well as portrait miniatures. figure . anonymous, a very proper treatise, (london: richard tottill, ), fol. r, title-page with signature and coat of arms of robert thorne. collection of the huntington library, art museum and botanical gardens. digital image courtesy of hathi digital trust (public domain). specialist artistic knowledge and the dynamics of its transmission a very proper treatise promises in the title that it will (fig. ): teacheth the order in drawing & tracing of letters, […] & the maner how to make sundry sises or grounds to laye siluer or golde uppon, […] & the waye to temper golde & siluer […] and diuerse kyndes of colours to write or to lime withall […] & howe to vernish yt when thou hast done. the various recipes describe the materials and methods for executing a limning—practical instructions that pertain to specialist knowledge. specialist artistic knowledge, as with any area of learning restricted to a select group of practitioners, precludes widespread transmission of its precepts. it was something that originally belonged to the context of practitioners and professionals, often tied to a workshop and embedded in a network. the continuation and longevity of a professional enterprise benefitted by protecting its knowledge from competitors and preserving “secrets” within a hierarchical and often hereditary workshop system. a very proper treatise was a significant contributor to wider dissemination. visual communication of artistic knowledge can be easily conveyed through demonstration, a viable technique to transmit knowledge. not everything an artist does can be articulated through the spoken or written word. demonstrations come in handy to communicate certain subtleties. a part of practical knowledge transmission can be categorised as “silent” or “tacit” knowledge, as determined by michael polanyi in his body of work. an example is facial recognition. polanyi says: we can know more than we can tell. this fact seems obvious enough; but it is not easy to say exactly what it means. take an example. we know a person’s face, and can recognize it among a thousand, indeed among a million. yet we usually cannot tell how we recognize a face we know. most of this knowledge cannot be put into words. in addition to the oral and demonstrational mode of conveying information, a significant body of historical accounts are found in textual sources. texts containing practical knowledge are mostly compilations. they are rarely the reflection of the authentic work of a single author, or practitioner. the copying of texts was a common early modern practice. not only does the number of surviving copied manuscripts and printed books bear witness to this practice, it was also actively promoted as a didactic means. this can be illustrated through an undated work by giovanni battista volpato ( – ) modo da tener nel dipingere. this seventeenth-century fictional dialogue has an educational function; two authors in particular are recommended: giovanni battista armenini and raffaello borghini. armenini ( – ), published de’ veri precetti della pittura ( ), a work expounding on the basics of the painting trade and iconography. borghini (ca. – ) is known for his work il riposo ( ), which teaches the basics of painting and sculpture. these two important sixteenth-century treatises are part of the canon of textual sources about practical knowledge. volpato’s didactic dialogue indicates that an apprentice was encouraged to copy these two authors as part of the learning process in a seventeenth- century studio. copying texts was considered to have a pedagogical value. the copying of texts in early modern england did not proceed according to today’s conventions. michelle dimeo points out that two seventeenth-century british library recipe books from the brockman family contain the same recipe to make cherry water. granddaughter elizabeth copied this recipe from the recipe book of her grandmother, ann. what, by early modern standards would be considered the same, to our eyes, is still characterised by a lot of differences. ann generally writes numbers with full words and she uses punctuation, while elizabeth writes the numbers with numerals and uses almost no punctuation. also, word order and word choice differ. clearly copying involved a good amount of personal interpretation. several recipes from a very proper treatise can be found in other printed books and manuscripts. a copy of the recipe “to make letters of the colour of gould without gould” is encountered in ms harley , a heraldry manuscript from the british library. ms harley is presumably copied from a very proper treatise. the harley recipe is a foreshortening of the recipe in a very proper treatise, by leaving out the advised work tools, such as a “brazen morter” and “a paynters stone”. it also simplifies technical vocabulary: glayre is being replaced, or explained, by “the whyte of egges” (figs and ). figure . anonymous, a very proper treatise, (london: richard tottill, ), fol. r, “recipe to make letters of the colour of gould without gould”. collection of the huntington library, art museum and botanical gardens. digital image courtesy of hathi digital trust (public domain). figure . fragment of the recipe “to make letters of the coloure of gold without gold”, collection of british library, london (ms harley ), fol. v. digital image courtesy of british library board (all rights reserved). to get an idea of the complex patterns of dissemination, another example of the recipe for gold paint without gold will be briefly discussed. the practical knowledge of alessio piemontese was widely disseminated, and his work was published posthumously by girolamo ruscelli. one example of the recipe “to make gold painted letters without gold” appears in the dutch de secreten van den eerweerdigen heere alexis piemontois (the secrets of the reverend master alexis of piedmont): “take one ounce of orpiment and one ounce of fine crystal. break each specifically well, where after mingle it with the white of eggs and write with it.” this dutch version shows a remarkable degree of concord with that of ms harley . the complexity arises when we learn it was translated from french, but publications in the name of piemontese appeared also in latin, italian, german, and english as well. not all translations and editions are the same, as parts were omitted, and new material was added, which suggests little text fixity. in this regard, the publication a very proper treatise appears more stable, as there are only minor, although significant, changes in the last edition, which will be discussed below. the precise source of a very proper treatise remains thus far unknown. possibly different sources were used to compose the work. one of the sources with a common root of a very proper treatise is a manuscript compiled in by a clerk and freeman of the mercers of london, robert freelove. the full english title is the art of making the gilded and painted letters which we see in old mss, hereafter referred to as the art of making. the same manuscript was attributed the latin title artem illuminandi libros (the art of illuminating books) and was described as tractatu de decorandis & pingendis literis (treatise about the decorating and painting of letters). no trace of this physical manuscript can be found, however, the text is not lost. we know what was written in the manuscript through a series of copies made by humfrey wanley, elizabeth elstob, and george ballard. the compilation of robert freelove has forty-six recipes. a very proper treatise contains forty-four recipes, of which thirteen have a significant textual overlap with the art of making. in order to demonstrate the textual overlap, i will compare the recipe on how to draw imagery (figs and ). where a very proper treatise has “pencell of blacke lead, or with a cole made sharpe at the poynte”, the art of making uses the word “plummet”. according to the oxford english dictionary, “plummet” was used to refer to “a stick of lead for writing, ruling lines”, so it may very well refer to the same writing device. figure . anonymous, a very proper treatise, (london: richard tottill, ), fol. r, “the order of drawing or tracing.” collection of the huntington library, art museum and botanical gardens. digital image courtesy of hathi digital trust (public domain). figure . “how to make gilded letters”, collection of university of glasgow (ms hunter ), . digital image courtesy of university of glasgow (all rights reserved). in another recipe, the art of making mentions the word “books”, referring to a parchment surface, meanwhile a very proper treatise uses “vellym, parchement or paper” instead. likewise, the art of making advises the reader to soak azure in clean water multiple times, because “mercers medle chalke therewith for to multiplie it for their profits”. this is echoed in tottel’s warning “for the potecaries minge chalke there with to multiplie it to there profit”. these instructions positions both works in their context. a very proper treatise is a book made for an audience with artistic interests. through the list of ingredients, it helps readers to put the recipes into practise by guiding them to the place where they can buy specific ingredients: the apothecary. as mentioned above, robert freelove was a mercer’s freeman and clerk. in an autograph manuscript from the british library, sloane , freelove indicates himself as a mercer: “p me robertum ffrelove mercerum london / ρωβερτοs ελεφθερη`oς”. his known manuscript production shows an interest in writing, calligraphy, drawing, copying artwork, and painting initials. freelove might have turned to his own livery company for his equipment. there is evidence in the structure and sequence of the recipes in a very proper treatise that the entire work has a compilatory nature. the various discrepancies related to the audience are seen as a result of an editing process. this will be discussed below because they are clearly of a more “recent” date than certain features of the body of the text, and therefore attributed to the printer richard tottel. the body of the text contains structural features that may be related to older texts. “the waies howe to make sundry kindes of colours by tempering & mingling of colors together” contains a series of prescriptions that are presented as one block of text. there is no space left between the various colour combinations. instead of announcing every colour with a title, the colour names and their purpose appear in the margin of the text. this approach matches that of the art of making in the part “here shall i tell the shortelye how to temper thie coloures” and “these be mynglyngs of goode worke”. both sets of instructions have a tightly woven layout, without titles, subtitles, or blank spaces. there is no significant textual concordance between a very proper treatise and the art of making in these recipes, only a visual and structural one. publishing, editing, and copying entailed personal interpretation. this is exactly what the compiler of a very proper treatise did. the application value of the recipes is broader and more concrete, which makes the book more accessible for its users. issues of authorship the correspondence between recipe books, as illustrated above, shows that textual sources like a very proper treatise are compilations that adopt material from different sources. rather than searching for the actual “author” of a recipe book or the “inventor” of knowledge, certain viable contributions discuss the consumers or users of practical knowledge: hence, this article’s interest in the search for the non-specialist reader, which will follow below. however, first, a word on the anonymous authorship of a very proper treatise. only a very limited amount of in-depth scholarly research has been done on this subject. the central question tackled by most studies of an anonymously published source is the issue of authorship. in her book the feminine dynamic in english art, susan e. james hypothesises that levina teerlinc is the author of a very proper treatise. james’s arguments arise from the anonymity of the work, teerlinc’s network, and linguistic indications. james compares the anonymous authorship of a very proper treatise to that of a topic very well known to her. queen catherine parr’s first two works, titled psalms or prayers ( ) and prayers or meditations ( ), both appeared anonymously. however, parr’s works appeared several decades earlier than a very proper treatise. there is a difference in subject matter of the printed works: parr published religiously inspired works, whereas a very proper treatise is instructive literature for art practice. the different context may result in a different case of anonymity. another context of an anonymously published work is that of the network. james highlights the connection between levina teerlinc and the printer of a very proper treatise richard tottel (ca. – ), relying on tottel’s father- in-law richard grafton, as both teerlinc and grafton were protégés of queen catherine parr. however, this is not a direct connection between the proposed author teerlinc and printer tottel, but rather a secondary connection. secondary connections must be handled with care. another lineage between a very proper treatise and richard tottel can be suggested. provided that there is a textual reliance between a very proper treatise and the art of making, one can start investigating if and how richard tottel and robert freelove were connected, or, how tottel could have read freelove’s source. multiple secondary connections could be found between robert freelove and richard grafton. we know through letters to thomas cromwell from one of his diplomats, stephen vaughan, that both men knew robert freelove. being a mercer freeman and clerk, freelove was part of vaughan’s mercantile network. personal contact between the three men is testified by a letter where it is stated that freelove brings a globe to cromwell, offered by vaughan. robert freelove can be linked directly to sir thomas cromwell. but also richard grafton is part of cromwell’s direct network, as grafton was cromwell’s protégé. in this way, we can establish an indirect link between grafton and freelove. the printer richard tottel and printer–historian richard grafton are linked through a family tie and their business relationship. tottel married within the printing trade, a common practice in the early modern period. in , he married joan, the daughter of richard grafton, who was seventeen years his junior. tottel benefitted through this marriage from grafton’s types and woodcuts. later, tottel printed one of grafton’s historical works. there exists ample evidence that tottel and grafton belonged to the same network and that they maintained an ongoing relationship. questions arise as to whether grafton built relationships with other protégés of his patrons, such as katheryn parr or thomas cromwell. so far, no known source shows grafton interacting with teerlinc or freelove. richard grafton is pivotal in this search for a network, but this is problematic because he is not the printer. in the teerlinc hypothesis, grafton would function as a mediator, introducing potential author and printer to one another, giving teerlinc the opportunity to publish and be a “literate, articulate woman”. in the freelove hypothesis, grafton may have had access to freelove’s work or his sources. network studies proves a useful discipline; however, this type of research uncovers multiple potential networks, where it is hard to ascertain actual contact. the second argument james uses for understanding the identity of the author is linguistic indications, which may indicate a non-native speaker. james correctly saw that a very proper treatise contains several examples where colours and colour names are indicated as “male”. for example the recipe “to temper redde leade” uses this grammatical gender: “of this you shal make no false color, but of him selfe” (see fig. ). the use of grammatical gender could be an indication of the foreign roots of the writer. however, the following recipe “to temper blacke leade” uses the impersonal “it selfe” to refer to the colour (fig. ). the same book uses two genders to refer to colours: the masculine and the impersonal. when compared to freelove’s work, one can see a similar tendency of referring to colours as masculine. historical linguistics have since long described the phenomenon of “the loss of grammatical gender concord by middle english”. figure . anonymous, a very proper treatise, (london: richard tottill, ), fols v– r. collection of the huntington library, art museum and botanical gardens. digital image courtesy of hathi digital trust (public domain). the appearance of non-corresponding reflexive pronouns may be due to a problem in translation. the latin words for colour and pigment, color and pigmentum, are both masculine nouns. the reflexive pronoun ipse is used to refer to both neutral and masculine words, “itself” and “himself”. in other words, the odd formulations may be a result of a translation from latin. robert freelove translated alchemical, medical, and botanical works from latin to english. a good example is mellon ms from the beinecke collection at yale. the manuscript contains seven texts, which are announced in the beginning as being “translatyd out of latyn into englyshe” by “robertus freloue”. the catalogue reports the following texts: ) an unidentified alchemical work; ) jean de meung, liber lapidis mineralis, book ii only, translated into english by robert freelove, ; ) the practys of lyghtes; ) roger bacon or johannes sawtre, radix mundi, translated into english by robert freelove, ; ) rudianus, liber trium verborum, translated into english; ) khalid ibn yazid, liber secretorum philosophorum, translated into english, ; and ) an unidentified alchemical work. latin has been often considered an authoritative language throughout european history. ryan szpiech discusses the status of latin as connected to the roman empire, as the language of learning and wisdom and as one of the three holy languages. thomas burman states that in medieval european christianity, and especially in the mediterranean world, there was a culture to translate into latin. this tradition of using latin is also common in recipe culture of art technology during the medieval period. the medieval corpus of technological instructions was predominantly a latin one. by the sixteenth century, there was apparently a need to translate latin text into vernacular. the luther bible is certainly a representative example of this need for vernacular bibles, or texts in general. elizabeth eisenstein described this as the vernacular translation movement. through translation, text became available to “readers who were unlearned in latin”. this is not a claim that latin disappears, but that the scenario of translating latin into vernacular seems to be a valid working hypothesis for art technological recipe books. robert freelove’s recipe collection is most likely a translation. a latin title appears in the work temperantia colorum alumnata, which groups together the last twenty-two of the forty-six recipes of the art of making. this is a strong indication that at least that part is translated from latin. this same consideration can perhaps be made for the entire work, as a significant corpus of art technological appeared in latin prior the vernacular translation movement and signs of translation can be found. in this case, the anonymity does not indicate female authorship per se. the scope and method used in this article point towards a different conclusion. this article takes the pre-existing corpus of texts that were copied and translated into account, among other ways of handling texts. various people interacted with individual copies of a very proper treatise, a topic which this article will explore below. in what follows, the contribution of the printer–publisher will be examined. richard tottel as a compiler richard tottel is best known for his achievements as a printer–publisher and bookseller. tottel was granted his first printing patent in during the reign of edward vi, which was continued by both queen mary and queen elizabeth. he is mostly remembered for his capacity to understand the book market and adapt his products accordingly. before tottel’s law books appeared on the market, students and lawyers often had to deal with latin and french documents. tottel provided the market with accurate english translations and clear explanations. the hypothesis sustained here is that the involvement of richard tottel goes beyond the mere printing of a very proper treatise. he is considered the compiler and editor of the very first edition of the booklet. evidence was drawn from the study of tottel’s body of work, where unique working methods attributed to him can be identified in several different books. these include thomas tusser’s hundreth good pointes of husbandry. the first of tottel’s books about heraldry is gerard legh’s the accedens of armory ( ). his second is john bossewell’s workes of armorie ( ). he is above all remembered for his long-lasting printing success songes and sonnets, also known as tottel’s miscellany. this anthology bears the signs of tottel’s working methods and marketing strategies. by marketing strategy is intended a product-centred approach, where the printer studies the needs of the readers and adapts the product accordingly. in this regard, the title-page may be seen as a means of advertising. there are strong indications that tottel is the originator of a very proper treatise. signs of editing are present in this work, as well as the marketing and business style identified here as tottel’s. he subjected existing text(s) to a fierce editing process: introducing order, sequence, internal coherence, and friendly navigation tools. a few inconsistencies hint at an editor’s hand. described below is a lapse in the editing process, a discrepancy between the body of the text and index that reveals a deliberate shift in the book’s intended audience. a very proper treatise contains two indexes: an ingredients index and a recipe index. the recipe index is of interest to demonstrate the friendly navigation tools tottel created. meanwhile, the ingredient index is of interest to demonstrate a lapse in the editing process. the recipe index is described as “a table of suche things as be contained in this present booke”. it contains recipe titles and folio numbers and it is a useful tool for the reader to swiftly navigate through the work. in order to fulfil this scope, tottel kept recipe titles relatively complex, meanwhile the corresponding titles in the recipe index were a simplification of the information. “to make a grounde or a syse to lay golde or silver upon” refers to “to make a dooble syse or bottome to laye or settle silver or goulde upon called an embossed ground”. “to make syses other maner of ways” refers to “to make a thinne sise or bottome to laye or settle silver or golde upon called a single grounde”. the different methods it refers to are not related to silver or to gold, but to the many different ingredients that can be used to prepare the preparatory layer: with heat, or without heat, with old parchment, or leftovers of new parchment, or with gummed water made with arabic gum, regulating the thickness with old glair, green fig milk, spurge milk, wartweed, green saladine milk, garlic or onion juice, or the grease of snails. this large variety of ways of obtaining a preparatory layer for silver or gold is summarised by “other maner of ways”. this way the reader does not get lost in detail but can focus during a search for information. this is a sign of an editing process. figure . anonymous, a very proper treatise , (london: richard tottill, ), fol. r. collection of the huntington library, art museum and botanical gardens. digital image courtesy of hathi digital trust (public domain). the ingredient index provides the names of the colours and the ingredients that one can acquire at the “poticaries” or apothecary (fig. ). this list purports to be complete and representative of the ingredients used in the recipes. however, not all the ingredients on the list appear in the body of the text. here it is contended that this disparity is a sign of editing. the ingredients that are not mentioned in the recipes, which include alabaster, cow milk, ewe milk, rue juice, red nettle juice, scraped cheese, and lye, have a purpose in art technology but not to the aspects of limning tottel wished to include. presumably, the recipes corresponding to the solitary ingredients disappeared during the editing process, whereas their references in the index remained. all these examples contain crucial indicators of tottel’s working method and trademark, which can be summarised in three things: ) he took into account the market and his public; ) he assembled texts into publishable books; and ) he made user-friendly volumes. all three aspects are applicable to a very proper treatise. non-specialist audience long before a very proper treatise appeared in tottel’s bookshop, he had been working with people who were interested in law, either professionally, scholarly, or educationally. tottel adapted his texts to this audience. students of law would be potentially interested in embellishing their texts, which is the target of a very proper treatise. as mentioned above, copying texts was considered to have a pedagogical value, but it was also done for practical reasons, such as making a customised copy. there was also interest in embellishing printed texts, which will be discussed below. as mentioned above, the audience of this book is divided into three categories: ) the intended, ) the circumstantial, and ) the actual audience. the intended audience is the public whom the compiler had in mind while assembling the book. this audience is defined on the title-page and in the concluding words of the text itself. these two different places in the book show a variegated image of the intended audience. the title-page itself specifies two groups as its audience. the first is “all suche gentlemenne” (fig. ). the concept of a gentleman in the early modern period was characterised by variation and fluidity; it was not a legal categorisation. in various instances, the gentle birth, heraldic status, and economic situation of a person played a role in defining whether the person was a gentleman or not. other ideas circulated about education and behaviour being the prime characteristics of a gentleman. the status of the coat of arms was a point of discussion, but a very proper treatise promotes the interest and making of coats of arms in its title and also in the margins of the book. some recipes are accompanied with extra instructions in the margin on how to use colours for heraldic purposes (fig. ). figure . anonymous, a very proper treatise, (london: richard tottill, ), fol. r. collection of the huntington library, art museum and botanical gardens. digital image courtesy of hathi digital trust (public domain). the second category of intended audience in the title of a very proper treatise includes “persones as doe delite in limming, painting or in tricking of armes in their right colors” (fig. ). in other words, a group of people with heraldic interest who limn for pleasure. at times, “pleasure” was a determining factor in the understanding of what a gentleman was. the title-page gives yet another insight. this book belongs to a group of books named “the bookes of armes”. words in titles are rarely chosen randomly. in fact, tottel had, prior to the publication of a very proper treatise, published two books about heraldry, mentioned above: gerard legh’s the accedence of armorie and john bossewell’s workes of armorie. together with a very proper treatise, these are the only book titles tottel ever published dealing with heraldry and armoury. the gentleman with painterly and heraldic interests, and spare time, stands in contrast to the intended audience discussed at the conclusion of the recipes, being “paynters & scriveners”. the meaning of a painter will not be scrutinised, but some clarification on the role of a scribe is in order. according to daybell, scriveners were “semi-professional letter-writers”, but the oxford english dictionary extends the function of a scrivener to the writing business in general. these indications at the conclusion of the text point towards a professional audience. even though authors like peacham, norgate, and castiglione have put gentlemen in relation to painting, it was never intended as a professional occupation. the intended audience of a very proper treatise is not homogenous. it is argued here that this is due to an editing process. the point of interest addressed here is whether or not the book’s intended audience corresponds to the circumstantial audience – the customers of tottel’s printing shop – or the actual audience, the various book owners of whom the ownership of the book could be confirmed through material and archival evidence. tottel’s business was located in “fleetestreet” in london, at the “sign of the hande and the starre”. this information can be retrieved from the colophon (fig. ), but it is also seen in tottel’s printer’s device. the customers coming to his printing house were mainly students and practitioners of law, a topic brought up by christopher warner in his work about songs and sonnets. these students, for instance, might have showed interest in the embellishment of documents, for which a very proper treatise offers suitable instructions. we also saw that tottel had an audience interested in songs and sonnets, and that people had already bought “bookes of armes”, as mentioned earlier, meaning that he might have targeted those groups as well. tottel knew his audience and adapted to his customers and the existing market. tottel printed with a purpose. to prove this argument, the provenance and materiality of all the remaining copies of the treatise were investigated. it has been possible to trace thirty- seven surviving copies of a very proper treatise, spread over six known editions. this corpus brought various names of people and interactions to light. in the table below, you see the statistics of the extant copies mapped out (fig. ). view this illustration online figure . table of chronological and geographical distribution of the extant copies per edition, a very proper treatise, however, much of the evidence of provenance, ownership, and use was neutralised during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, through actions such as washing, cropping, and rebinding. comparison between the diverse types of audience and the actual users are based on the remaining user traces. listed below are sixteenth- and seventeenth-century names culled from material and archival research. they correspond to only eight volumes. some of them were passed on to heirs, of which few names could be traced. in this list, heirs are indicated after the arrow. . william neile ( – ) ( , bodleian library) . james ussher ( – ) ( , tcd) . phebe challoner (?) ( , tcd) → daughter elizabeth, wife of timothy tyrrel . william le neve ( – ) ( , british library) . robert(us) thorne (?) ( , huntington library) . elias ashmole ( – ) ( , bodleian library) . john aubrey ( – ) ( , bodleian library) . william goodman (?) ( , bodleian library) . john dyson (?) ( , bodleian library) . andrew astley (?– ) ( , bodleian library) → son thomas astley . jenny myll (?) ( , cadbury library birmingham) . brian twyne ( – ) ( , corpus christi oxford) unfortunately, most of these individuals can be excluded as tottel’s direct customers. archival research presents brian twyne as a potential customer with antiquarian interests, and a contemporary of a very proper treatise when newly printed. a letter dated places him in london—the same year his copy of a very proper treatise was printed. however, twyne would have been a customer of tottel’s follower for the publication of this treatise, thomas purfoot, who published a very proper treatise from onwards. another potential customer of thomas purfoot was jenny myll, whose identity remains unknown. an inscription notes that she bought a fifth edition copy in the year it was printed: “jeny myll owe this booke / ”. jenny myll is probably the individual closest to the original setting of the book market. she embraces the function of circumstantial and actual audience. regrettably, she was not a customer of richard tottel, nor could she have been the hypothetical reader he had in mind when editing a very proper treatise. myll’s copy shows minor painterly interactions. the title-page contains traces of paint. two brown brushstrokes, traces of an oilier green paint, and a tiny dot of red paint on the title-page. it is unclear whether these painterly daubs were created by jenny myll, thus far the interactions remain of an unidentified consumer. among the recorded owners, there is only one known artist, john aubrey ( – ), who shared heraldic interests with elias ashmole ( – ). both users were born in the beginning of the seventeenth century. these individuals were not direct customers of tottel. another individual with heraldic interests is robert thorne. he expressed his ownership through the writing of his name and through the painting of his coat of arms on the title-page of a copy (fig. ). the coat of arms contains a chevron between three crescents. figure . anonymous, a very proper treatise, (london: richard tottel, ), fol. r, title-page with signature and coat of arms of robert thorne. collection of the huntington library, art museum and botanical gardens. digital image courtesy of hathi digital trust (public domain). a very proper treatise shows interest in the painting and writing of letters. this interest is shared by william neile, who signed his copy with a calligraphic inscription on the title-page. neile has a very recognisable calligraphy, which is shared by his relatives. both william and mildred add a similar calligraphic embellishment to their names. what brayman hackel calls “sassy records of ownership” can be applied to the herald and genealogist william le neve as well. william le neve speaks in name of the book with his inscription: “willym le neve me iure possidet” (william le neve is my legal owner). the precise identities of william goodman and john dyson could be verified through a bookplate and a signature respectively, but not much information in their interest has been found. another female book owner in the list, phebe challoner, inherited an impressive book collection from her father, luke challoner, the provost of trinity college dublin. this means that phebe owned the first library nucleus of trinity college dublin. a material investigation of the collection brought several of her signatures to light. phebe faithfully signed over the signature of her father. she would turn the “l” of luke into a “p”, sometimes continuing to write her name over her fathers. luke’s collection contains a fair amount of theology works. he signed, for instance, the title-page of the master of bezaes sermons with his family name only. phebe then added her first name before luke’s family name (fig. ). figure . théodore de bèze, master bezaes sermons, (london: joseph barnes, ), title-page with luke and phebe challoner’s signature. collection of trinity college dublin (tcd cc.l. ). digital image courtesy of the board of trinity college dublin (all rights reserved). in the case of the volume containing a very proper treatise, this pattern of phebe overwriting her father’s signature cannot be confirmed. tcd volume ee.k. binds three books together: . gerard legh, the accedens of armory, (tcd ee.k. .n°. .) . john bossewell, workes of armorie, (tcd ee.k. .n°. .) . anonymous, a very proper treatise, (tcd ee.k. .n°. .) it is the first book in this volume that contains phebe’s maiden name, entirely written by herself (fig. ). in contrast with most other books in the original collection, this precise volume (which remained unchanged until today) appeared in the catalogue of james ussher’s book collection. he had acquired several books in england in and brought them to ireland, among which tcd ee.k. . these facts precede the death of luke challoner in and james’ and phebe’s marriage in . this is a strong indication that james ussher, the later archbishop of armagh and phebe’s husband to be, gave this volume as a token of friendship, or love perhaps, prior to their wedding. figure . gerard legh, the accedens of armory, (london: richard tottel, ), fol. r, with phebe’s signature in the lower margin. collection of trinity college dublin (ee.k. .n°. ). digital image courtesy of board of trinity college dublin (all rights reserved). the tcd volume contains the most interactions in the first two books. the frontispiece was partially painted in yellow, indicating the heraldic or (gold) (fig. ). the other consistent interest is the copying of imagery. the coat of arms with “the virgin marie, with her chylde, standing in the sonne” has been superimposed with a drawing grid (fig. ). this grid is numbered horizontally and vertically, mimicking a system used by artists to transpose an image to another surface, and allowing artists to scale the image up or down. the other technique to transfer images is through burnishing the paper with printers’ ink soaked in oil and pressing it onto another surface. this way the image is reproduced (fig. ). it is unknown whether these interactions with the volume were phebe’s or james’s, or made by other users. the volume was bound together between and , being merit of a previous owner. the precise selection of these three books together is not a coincidence, as it echoes the printer’s intention to see these three books as a united group. the title of a very proper treatise says that it is “a worke very mete to be adioined to the bookes of armes” (fig. ). figure . john bossewell, workes of armorie, (london: richardi totelli, ), fol. v, a pencil grid with numbering in brown ink, superposing a virgin with child. collection of trinity college dublin (ee.k. .n°. ). digital image courtesy of the board of trinity college dublin (all rights reserved). figure . john bossewell, workes of armorie, (london: richardi totelli, ), fol. v, a pencil grid with numbering in brown ink, superposing a virgin with child. collection of trinity college dublin (ee.k. .n°. ). digital image courtesy of the board of trinity college dublin (all rights reserved). figure . john bossewell, workes of armorie, (london: richardi totelli, ), fol. v, inkloss in the region of pacis nuntia dove. collection of trinity college dublin (ee.k. .n°. ). digital image courtesy of the board of trinity college dublin (all rights reserved). this article evaluated the audience of a very proper treatise through the material investigation of all surviving copies and through archival research. among the signatures, some strong claims of ownership appear, such as that of jenny myll and william le neve. only one artist emerges from the group of identified owners: john aubrey, and several individuals who can be seen as amateur artists, with heraldic and calligraphic interests. three among the book owners are female. this actual audience coincides with the intended audience from the title-page of a very proper treatise: “gentlemenne” and “persones as doe delite in limming, painting or in tricking of armes in their right colors”. the term “persones” includes both male and female readers. in addition, painters showed an interest, a category of intended audience met at the closing of a very proper treatise. the printer richard tottel edited specialist knowledge as a marketable product for wider dissemination, while keeping a specific non-specialist audience in mind. and this printer's intention found its way to the public. footnotes a very proper treatise was published six times between and . the six editions appeared in , , , , , and . only the first two were printed by richard tottel and the remaining editions were printed by thomas purfoot. tottel uses several variants of his name for publishing: richard tottel, tottill, tottyl, richardum totell, richardum tottellum, etc. anonymous, a very proper treatise (london: richard tottill, ). for a recent biography, see elizabeth goldring, nicholas hilliard: life of an artist (new haven, ct: published for the paul mellon centre for studies in british art by yale university press, ). mary edmond, “hilliard, nicholas ( ?– )”, oxford dictionary of national biography, january , doi: . /ref:odnb/ , accessed february . arthur f. kinney, linda bradley salamon, and john pope-hennessy (eds), nicholas hilliard’s art of limning: a new edition of, a treatise concerning the arte of limning (boston, ma: northeastern university press, ); edward norgate, miniatura or the art of limning, edited by martin hardie (oxford: clarendon press, ). richard haydocke discussed limning in his translation of gian paolo lomazzo’s treatise. the quotation was taken from victoria button, katherine coombs, and alan derbyshire, “limning, the perfection of painting: the art of painting portrait miniatures”, in catharine macleod and rab macgibbon (eds), elizabethan treasures: miniatures by hilliard and oliver (london: national portrait gallery publications, ), . anonymous, a very proper treatise, fol. r. anonymous, a very proper treatise, fol. r. jo wheeler, renaissance secrets, recipes & formulas (london: v&a publishing, ), and . for examples of specialist knowledge in wider dissemination, see mark clarke, “writing recipes for non-specialists c. : the anglo-latin secretum philosophorum, glasgow ms hunterian ”, in erma hermens, joyce townsend, and art technological source research (study group) (eds), sources and serendipity: testimonies of artists’ practice (london: archetype, ), – ; and jeffrey m. muller and jim murrell, “the actual audience, purposes, and uses of norgate’s treatises and their derivatives”, in edward norgate, miniatura, or, the art of limning, edited by jeffrey m. muller and jim murrell (new haven, ct: yale university press, ), – . connected to this is the topic of the artist in his capacity as reader, see heiko damm, michael thimann, and claus zittel (eds), the artist as reader: on education and non-education of early modern artists. intersections: interdisciplinary studies in early modern culture (leiden: brill, ). for early modern copying, see the recent special issue of word & image: sietske fransen and katherine m. reinhart (eds), “the practice of copying in making knowledge in early modern europe”, special issue, word & image: a journal of verbal/visual enquiry , no. ( ): – . on dissemination issues of a very proper treatise, see mansfield kirby talley, “repetition and plagiarism”, in mansfield kirby talley, portrait painting in england: studies in the technical literature before (london: the paul mellon centre for studies in british art, ), – . talley notices that two books use recipes from a very proper treatise. a recipe for varnish (“vernix”) and size are copied into the anonymous a book of drawing, limning, washing or colouring of maps and prints, st edn (london: m. simmons, ). talley states that john bate copied a recipe for varnish into what he identifies as bate’s third edition of the mysteries of nature and art, th edn (london: thomas harper, ). the textual interdependency between a very proper treatise and the mysteries of nature and art deserves more scholarly attention. his book treats on waterworks and hydraulic machinery, fireworks, various arts (drawing, limning, painting, engraving, metalwork, and glasswork) and medicine. little is known about john bate, but he may have been a gunner. for speculations on the identity of bate, see s.a. walton, “bate, john (fl. – )”, oxford dictionary of national biography, september , doi: . /ref:odnb/ , accessed august . recipes from a very proper treatise ended up in both manuscript and print. michael polanyi, the tacit dimension (chicago, il: university of chicago press, [ ]), . ann blair's research on intellectual history has focused on technological continuities, in particular when manuscripts were copied from printed books. the practical and the educational are just two of the many reasons why people copied books. see ann blair, “reflections on technological continuities: manuscripts copied from printed books”, bulletin of the john rylands library , no. ( ): – . see mary p. merrifield, medieval and renaissance treatises on the arts of painting: original texts with english translations (new york: dover publications, [ ]), – . giovanni battista armenini, de’ veri precetti della pittura (ravenna: francesco tebaldini, ). raffaello borghini, il riposo (firenze: giorgio marescotti, ). on learning process of artists, see damm, thimann, and zittel, the artist as reader. michelle dimeo, “authorship and medical networks: reading attributions in early modern manuscript recipe books”, in michelle dimeo and sara pennell (eds), reading & writing recipe books – (manchester: manchester university press, ), – . there are still a lot of mysteries around ms harley . it is unclear when this manuscript was made, and it does not frequently appear in catalogues. i thank the staff of the british library for their communications. in the catalogue of manuscripts in the harleian collection, it is described as an “old paper book”. rosamund drusilla harley noted that fols – v contain recipes from a very proper treatise. she points out that there is a connection to peacham’s graphice ( ). whereas jim murrell situates it as “pre- ”. see humfrey wanley, david casley, william hocker, and charles morton, catalogue of the harleian manuscripts in the british museum, vol. (london: george eyre & andrew strahan, ), – ; r.d. harley, “literature on technical aspects of the arts: manuscripts in the british museum”, studies in conservation , no. ( ), – ; jim murrell, the way howe to lymne: tudor miniatures observed (london: victoria and albert museum, ). alessio piemontese is often seen as a pseudonym for girolamo ruscelli, however, there is clear evidence to assume that they are two separate persons. see ad stijnman, “a short-title bibliography of the secreti by alessio piemontese”, in sigrid eyb-green, joyce h. townsend, mark clarke, jilleen nadolny, and stefanos kroustallis (eds), the artist’s process: technology and interpretation. proceedings of the fourth symposium of the art technological source research working group (london: archetype publications, ), . for an examination of the entanglement of piemontese and ruscelli, see annemie d.g. leemans, contextualizing practical knowledge in early modern europe (berlin: peter lang, ), – . the translation was made by this author. transcription of the recipe: “om gout-verwinghe letteren sonder goudt te maken. neemt een once orpiment / ende een once fijnen cristael / breeckt elck bysondert wel / daer na menghet onder een met het wit vanden eye / ende schryfter mede.” alexis piemontoir, de secreten van den eerweerdigen heere alexis piemontois (antwerp: christoffel plantijn, ), fol. v. leemans has discussed the transmission of practical knowledge as rhizomatic, borrowing deleuze and guattari's concept. sources that borrow from each other could potentially also engage in metaphorical cross-pollination. for a graphic, see leemans, contextualizing practical knowledge in early modern europe, – , especially . in general, none of these recipes can be regarded as stable or fixed texts during the early modern period, although their similar structural layout and wording in different editions of the same early modern book, such as a very proper treatise, might give the appearance of text fixity where none exists. his autograph manuscript confirms his status in various places: london, british library: ms sloane , fols r, v, v, r, v, r, v. the source stating that robert freelove’s manuscript was written in english comes from thomas tanner. another author, albrecht von haller, reported that freelove’s manuscript was bound to a herbal codex. see thomas tanner, biblioteca britannico-hibernica (london: gulielmus bowyer, ), ; and albrecht von haller, biblioteca botanica (tiguri: orell, gessner, fuesslu, et socc., ), . these copies are preserved at the university of glasgow as ms hunter , at the society of antiquaries as ms sal/ ms/ , and at the bodleian library as ms douce . elstob titled the work to make such coloured and gilded letters, as are to be seen frequently in old mss. ballard extended the title: directions how to make such coloured and gilded letters, as are to be seen frequently in old manuscripts. see leemans, contextualizing practical knowledge in early modern europe, . “plummet”, oxford english dictionary, nd edn vols (oxford: oxford university press, ). continually updated at http://www.oed.com/. glasgow, university of glasgow, ms hunter ; and anonymous, a very proper treatise. glasgow, university of glasgow, ms hunter , – ; and anonymous, a very proper treatise, fols r-v. london, british library: ms sloane , fol. r. this manuscript contains multiple references to freelove’s identity. his autograph manuscript confirms his status in various places: london, british library: ms sloane , fols r, v, v, r, v, r, v. the current one is in latin and greek, which is a reference to his learned status. london, british library: ms sloane . freelove may or may not have been aware of any malpractice. he could have copied this from another source, with or without adaptations. he takes a position of an outsider in his writing of . two years later, at the closure of an apprenticeship with robert packington, he joins the mercers as a freeman. i thank anne f. sutton for communications about this topic. anonymous, a very proper treatise, fols r-v. glasgow, university of glasgow, ms hunter , – . this argument is only valid where the various transcriptions of robert freelove’s work maintain these structural features of the layout, which is very plausible. other than linguistic or practical considerations, there are conceptual notions inherent to both works which are worth discussing. both works proclaim a notion of perfect knowledge, which will be explored in the chapter “the secrecy trope in prescriptive literature: a literary investigation” by annemie d.g. leemans in the series of studies in the history of knowledge from the amsterdam university press (publication forthcoming). noteworthy are mansfield kirby talley, portrait painting in england: studies in the technical literature before (london: paul mellon centre for studies in british art, ); susan e. james, the feminine dynamic in english art, – : women as consumers, patrons and painters (burlington: ashgate, ), – ; and leemans, contextualizing practical knowledge in early modern europe, – . i am indebted to the work of susan e. james, as her work on levina teerlinc was an inducement to pursue research in this field, write my master thesis, and later my phd thesis. susan e. james, the feminine dynamic in english art, – . james does not provide a precise reference, but she has written about this precise topic in susan e. james, kateryn parr: the making of a queen (aldershot: ashgate, ). susan e. james, the feminine dynamic in english art, . london, british library: ms cotton galba b x, fol. ; london, national archives, state papers: sp / , fol. . london, national archives, state papers: sp / , fol. . j.e. sherwood, “a variety of response to the henrician reformation: some members of the twelve great livery companies of london”, historical magazine of the protestant episcopal church , no. ( ): – . anna greening, “tottel, richard (b. in or before , d. )”, oxford dictionary of national biography, september , doi: . /ref:odnb/ , accessed february . for richard tottel’s biographical details, see h.j. byrom, “richard tottell—his life and work”, the library, no. ( – ): – . for further elaboration of the lacunae byrom left, see anna greening, “a th-century stationer and his business connections: the tottell family documents ( – ) at stationers’ hall”, in arnold hunt, giles mandelbrote, and alison shell (eds), the book trade & its customers, – : historical essays for robin myers (winchester: st. paul’s bibliographies, new castle: oak knoll press, ), – . the precise title is a chronicle at large and meere history of the affayres of englande and kinges. connections between grafton and tottel are discussed in meraud grant ferguson, “grafton, richard ( / – )”, oxford dictionary of national bibliography, september , doi: . /ref:odnb/ , accessed july . james, the feminine dynamic in english art, . anonymous, a very proper treatise, fols v- r. james, the feminine dynamic in english art, . anonymous, a very proper treatise, fol. v. this article focuses on examples using “himself” and “itself” as gendered words. in some occasions, “his” is used, but this was used both as masculine and neutral. more examples can be found in figure . in , michael newman was able to trace this back to chaucer; anne curzan goes as far as beowulf. curzan discusses the work of newman: michael newman, epicene pronouns: the linguistics of a prescriptive problem (new york: garland, ). see anne curzan, gender shifts in the history of english (cambridge: cambridge university press, ), . i thank professor peter petré of the university of antwerp for his help on this topic. the same reasoning can be made for italian: colore and pigmento are masculine, in which case the reflexive pronoun is se stesso. new haven, yale university library, beinecke rare book & manuscript library, mellon ms , fol. r. mellon ms , yale university, beinecke rare book and manuscript library, general collection of rare books and manuscripts, medieval and renaissance manuscripts, https://pre ms.beinecke.library.yale.edu/docs/ pre .mell .htm, accessed july . ryan szpiech, “latin as a language of authoritative tradition”, in ralph hexter and david townsend (eds), the oxford handbook of medieval latin literature (oxford: oxford university press, ), . thomas burman, “the cultures and dynamics of translation into medieval latin”, in ralph hexter and david townsend (eds), the oxford handbook of medieval latin literature (oxford: oxford university press, ), – . a scholar of reference in the domain of medieval and renaissance art treatises is mary p. merrifield, who transcribed several authentic treatises and translated them in english. the majority of merrifield’s working materials are texts in latin, with a few in italian and french. the corpus of medieval recipe books for painters and illuminators published by mark clarke contains a language index; from roughly manuscripts, contain latin. the second most used language is german: of these approximate manuscripts, contain german. the third place is taken by italian: ; followed by english: . likewise, a consultation of julius schlosser’s kunstliteratur ( ) reveals plenty of works in latin. this last source was consulted in italian: julius schlosser magnino, la letteratura artistica: manuale delle fonti della storia dell’ arte moderne (firenze: la nuova italia, [ ]); mary. p. merrifield, medieval and renaissance treatises on the arts of painting; and mark clarke, the art of all colours: medieval recipe books for painters and illuminators (london: archetype publications, ), , – . eisenstein discusses this topic throughout her work. she also advocates that vernacular translations have anti- intellectual implications, a topic not sustained in this article. see elizabeth l. eisenstein, the printing press as an agent of change: communications and cultural transformations in early-modern europe, volumes i and ii (cambridge: cambridge university press, ), ; . thomas tanner stated that freelove’s work was written in english but does report the work itself with a latin title, such as albrecht van haller in his catalogue. perhaps this is the recognition of the original title. see above. tanner, biblioteca britannico-hibernica, ; and von haller, biblioteca botanica, . christopher a. knott, “richard tottell”, in james bracken and joel silver (eds), the british library book trade, – , dictionary of literary biography, (detroit, mi: gale research, ), . paul a. marquis, “printing history and editorial design in the elizabethan version of tottel’s songes and sonettes”, in stephen hamrick (ed.), tottel’s songes and sonettes in context (farnham: ashgate, ), . a hundreth good pointes of husbandrie is an instructional poem. the first edition of is a modest book of pages and has a little elaborate title-page. it contains a small introduction, points organised by month, a conclusion, and an anonymous sonnet. the third edition of counts pages and comes with an elaborated frontispiece. it contains various introductory parts, an index, the numbered points organised per month, an overview of the months, comparisons, and a sonnet attributed to tusser. in the year , the same year as the publishing of a very proper treatise, the book was extended again to points. this edition uses the same frontispiece as the edition. details about the first edition: stc ; thomas tusser, a hundreth good pointes of husbandrie (london: richard tottel, ). the first edition: stc ; gerard legh, the accedens of armory (london: richard tottill, ). the first edition: stc ; john bossewell, workes of armorie, deuyded into three books, entituled, the concordes of armorie, the armorie of honor, and of coates and creastes (london: richardi totelli, ). songs and sonnets, known as tottel’s miscellany, has a fascinating printing history. it is marked by translations, arrangements, and re-arrangements. the first edition appeared on june of the year . the second thoroughly revised edition appeared immediately after on july, with a third one in the same year, and several other editions in the years that followed. the first edition's details are: stc ; henry howard, songes and sonettes (london: richardum tottel, ). on the topic, see jason powell, “the network behind ‘tottel’s’ miscellany”, english literary renaissance , no. ( ): – ; stephen hamrick (ed.), tottel’s songes and sonettes in context (london: taylor & francis group, ); j. christopher warner, the making and marketing of tottel’s miscellany, : songs and sonnets in the summer of the martyrs’ fires (farnham: ashgate, ); and paul a. marquis (ed.), richard tottel’s songes and sonettes: the elizabethan version (tempe, az: arizona center for medieval and renaissance studies, ). for arrangements of tottel’s miscellany and adaptations for the audience, see especially the chapters and of warner, the making and marketing of tottel’s miscellany, . anonymous, a very proper treatise, fol. v. anonymous, a very proper treatise, fols r; v. anonymous, a very proper treatise, fols v; v. leemans, contextualizing practical knowledge in early modern europe, – . early modern books with hand-coloured initials by book owners are countless. a beautiful example is a copy of tottel’s publication of gerard legh’s the accedence of armorie ( ), which is found at the library of congress in washington (ndlc cr .l ). this copy was signed by “horace w. smith”, presumably the writer. another, earlier handwriting appears in the margins of the book, together with the colouring of the frontispiece, initials, and escutcheons. these practices are described in david pearson, provenance research in book history: a handbook. the british library studies in the history of the book (london: the british library & oak knoll press, ), – ; and nigel thorp, the glory of the page: medieval & renaissance illuminated manuscripts from glasgow university library (london: h. miller, ). leemans, contextualizing practical knowledge in early modern europe, – . for the concept of circumstantial audience, this research is indebted to the work of warner, who described the audience frequenting tottel’s print shop: warner, the making and marketing of tottel’s miscellany. for the concept of the actual audience, this research is indebted to the work of jeffrey m. muller and jim murrell. the concept used here is slightly adapted to the precise book of interest: the anonymously printed a very proper treatise. muller and murrell discussed the actual audiences of edward norgate’s treatise miniatura or the art of limning. the originally intended audience of this work was de mayerne only, but eventually a larger audience got hold of his work. this is a valid reason for fragmenting the concept of the audience into intended audience and actual audience. see muller and murrell, “the actual audience, purposes, and uses of norgate’s treatises and their derivatives”, – . this article focuses on the material copies and archival research. copying practices are not taken up in the current selection of the audience, even though it could be argued that they provide evidence of book consumption. anonymous, a very proper treatise, fol. r. keith wrightson, english society – (london: routledge, ), . steven hindle, “social classes and the social order”, in arthur f. kinney and david w. swain (eds), tudor england: an encyclopedia (new york: garland publishing, ), – ; wendy wall, the imprint of gender: authorship and publication in the english renaissance (ithaca: cornell university press, ), ; and wrightson, english society – , – . anonymous, a very proper treatise, fol. r. bartholomaeus anglicus, batman upon bartholome his booke de proprietatibus rerum (london: thomas east, ), fol. r. both of the heraldry book titles know several editions. anonymous, a very proper treatise, fol. v. james daybell, the material letter in early modern england. manuscript letters and the culture and practices of letter-writing, – (london: palgrave, ), and ; oxford english dictionary, nd edn vols (oxford: oxford university press, ). continually updated at http://www.oed.com/. leemans, contextualizing practical knowledge in early modern europe, – . material evidence is understood as notes and annotations, and interactions of all kinds. william sherman points out that not all writings in books qualify to be annotations (for instance, doodling). he refers to them as graffiti, in line with the work of juliet fleming. see william h. sherman, used books: marking readers in renaissance england (philadelphia, pa: university of pennsylvania press, ). for the work of fleming, see juliet fleming, graffiti and the writing arts of early modern england (london: reaktion, ). the notes which owners and users of a very proper treatise made, comply to the observations of sherman. anonymous, a very proper treatise, fol. r; anonymous, a very proper treatise (london: richarde tottill, ), fol. r. warner, the making and marketing of tottel’s miscellany, . the sixth edition has a slight alteration in the title: a proper treatises. the stc number ( ) coincides with that of a profitable booke, because the printer thomas purfoote printed and sold these two book titles together. for this book title, light adjustments were made in the text, such as the omissions of the printed words in the margins. this measure, as a few others, have principally led to a different layout of the work. for the various editions, the individual copies, and the collation, see the appendix in leemans, contextualizing practical knowledge in early modern europe, – . later book owners are disregarded in this article. strickland gibson, “brian twyne”, oxoniensia ( ): – . thomas purfoot published the editions of , , , and . tracing a female (miniature) painter would be of great interest. however, it would be necessary to find further evidence on jenny myll in order to draw this conclusion. the painterly daubs may or may not come from jenny myll. there is no information on whether myll was her maiden name, in which case a marriage would have made her change her name. jenny myll (and variations of “jeny”, “jennifer”, and “mill”) is a name that does not appear in the national archives, or the oxford dictionary of national biography. john aubrey is discussed as an artist in ruth scurr, john aubrey: my own life (london: chatto and windus, ), . a potential connection between robert thorne and elias ashmole needs to be further explored, if at least robert thorne is a descendent of the thorne’s, a trader’s family of bristol. the thorne family was befriended by john dee and his son arthur dee. john dee, in turn was a “cosin” and friend of william aubrey, the great-grandfather of john aubrey. a hypothetical network between the owners of a very proper treatise would be interesting but is at this stage far from being confirmed. see michael c.w. hunter, john aubrey and the realm of learning (london: duckworth, ), , n. ; and anthony powell, john aubrey and his friends (london: hogarth press, ). this embellishment is a series of organised curls, seen also in the initials of robert freelove. see anonymous, the art of limming. a reproduction of the edition newly imprinted, edited by society of scribes and illuminators (london: the federation of british craft societies, ); and jason scott-warren, “reading graffiti in the early modern book”, huntington library quarterly , no. ( ), . heidi brayman hackel, reading material in early modern england: print, gender, and literacy (cambridge: cambridge university press, ), – . leemans, contextualizing practical knowledge in early modern europe, – . six volumes with phebe’s signature were found, of which five show some interaction with her father’s signature. leemans, contextualizing practical knowledge in early modern europe, – . leemans, contextualizing practical knowledge in early modern europe, – . stc ; théodore de bèze, master bezaes sermons upon the three first chapters of the canticle of canticles (oxford: joseph barnes, ). dublin, tcd ms , fol. r contains the description of the three works in tcd ee.k. as being one volume. for the calculation of the wedding date of james ussher and phebe challoner, see leemans, contextualizing practical knowledge in early modern europe, – . the earliest sign of acquaintance or friendship goes back to at least , where james borrowed a book from phebe. see leemans, contextualizing practical knowledge in early modern europe, . for literature on practices of copying in art, see maddalena bellavitis (ed.), making copies in european art – : shifting tastes, modes of transmission, and changing contexts. brill’s studies in intellectual history, volume (leiden: brill, ); and christopher s. wood, forgery, replica, fiction: temporalities of german renaissance art (chicago, il: university of chicago press, ). the concept of imitation is discussed in eric jan sluijter and anton w.a. boschloo (eds), aemulatio: imitation, emulation and invention in netherlandish art from to : essays in honor of eric jan sluijter (zwolle: waanders, ). for the use of heraldry as decoration, see thomas woodcock and john martin robinson, the oxford guide to heraldry (oxford: oxford university press, ). all stains in this volume rigorously coincide with imagery; dublin, tcd, ee.k. . see leemans, contextualizing practical knowledge in early modern europe, – . the last of the three books to be published was , and the year in which james ussher acquired the already bound together volume, was . anonymous, a very proper treatise, fol. r. bibliography anglicus, bartholomaeus ( ) batman upon bartholome his booke de proprietatibus rerum. london: thomas east. anonymous ( [ ]) the art of limming. a reproduction of the edition newly imprinted, edited by society of scribes and illuminators. london: the federation of british craft societies. anonymous ( ) a very proper treatise. london: richard tottill. anonymous ( ) a very proper treatise. london: richarde tottill. anonymous ( ) a book of drawing, limning, washing or colouring of maps and prints, st edn. london: m. simmons. armenini, giovanni battista ( ) de’ veri precetti della pittura. ravenna: francesco tebaldini. bate, john ( ) the mysteries of nature and art, st edn. london: thomas harper. bellavitis, maddalena (ed.) 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art studies 	september 	elizabethan and jacobean miniature paintings in context 	edited by catharine macleod and alexander marr 	contents 	a very proper treatise: specialist knowledge for a non-specialist public 	annemie leemans 	abstract 	authors 	acknowledgements 	cite as 	introduction: positioning limning 	figure . 	specialist artistic knowledge and the dynamics of its transmission 	figure . 	figure . 	figure . 	figure . 	issues of authorship 	figure . 	richard tottel as a compiler 	figure . 	non-specialist audience 	figure . 	figure . 	figure . 	figure . 	figure . 	figure . 	figure . 	figure . 	footnotes 	bibliography 	licensing learning to see in the pietist orphanage: geometry, philanthropy           learning to see in the pietist orphanage: geometry, philanthropy   and the science of perfection,  ­       by    kelly joan whitmer    b.a., colgate university,    m.a., western washington university,               a thesis submitted in partial fulfillment of  the requirements for the degree of    doctor of philosophy      in      the faculty of graduate studies    (history)          the university of british columbia    (vancouver)        september            © kelly joan whitmer     ii  abstract    this is a dissertation about the halle method, or the visual pedagogies of the  pietist orphanage as they were developed in the german university town of halle from   until  .  a “pietist” was someone who was affiliated with an evangelical reform  movement first initiated by philipp jakob spener in the  s.  a long and deeply  entrenched historiographical tradition has portrayed the halle proponents of this  movement—especially their leader august hermann francke—as zealous, yet practical,  lutheran reformers who were forced to directly confront the ideals of early  enlightenment in conjunction with the state­building mandate of brandenburg­prussia.   this has led to a persistent tendency to see halle pietists as “others” who cultivated their  collective identity in opposition to so­called enlightenment intellectuals, like christian  wolff, at the same time as they exerted a marked influence on these same persons.  as a  result of this dichotomous portrayal over the years, the impact of the halle method on  educational reform, and on the meanings eighteenth­century europeans attached to  philanthropy more generally, has been misunderstood.  i argue that the pietist orphanage  holds the key to remedying several problems that have impeded our ability to understand  the significance of pietist pedagogy and philanthropy.  this was a site specifically  designed to introduce children to the conciliatory knowledge­making strategies of the  first berlin academy of science members and their associates.  these strategies  championed the status of the heart as an assimilatory juncture point and were refined in  the schools of the pietist orphanage, which itself functioned as a visual showplace that  viewers could observe in order to edify and improve themselves.  it was the material  expression of halle pietists’ commitment to a “third way” and marked their attempt to     iii  assimilate experience and cognition, theology and philosophy, absolutism and  voluntarism.  the dissertation examines several personalities who had a direct bearing on  this conciliatory project: namely e. w. von tschirnhaus, johann christoph sturm,  leonhard christoph sturm, gottfried wilhelm leibniz and christian wolff.  it also  examines how the method was applied in the halle orphanage schools and extended  elsewhere.     iv  table of contents:    abstract ............................................................................................................................... ii  table of contents ............................................................................................................... iv  acknowledgments.............................................................................................................. vi  dedication ......................................................................................................................... xii    introduction ..........................................................................................................................       part i: making a conciliatory method ...............................................................................     chapter  :  tschirnhaus’s medicine for the mind and the new method ...........................     chapter  :  sturmian eclecticism and the technologies of discernment .........................     chapter  :  illuminated missions of conciliatory love:    leibniz, francke and the berlin academy of mathematics and physics ........................     chapter  :  measuring virtue, character and faith:  the mathematical sciences as paideia for francke and wolff .......................................       part ii: applying the method ...........................................................................................     chapter  :  orientation through anschauung:   three­dimensional models as tools of philanthropy .....................................................     chapter  :  drawing to see: perspective as conciliatory gesture...................................     chapter  : seers, machines, naturalia and song in the culture of understanding ........       part iii:  extending the method .......................................................................................     chapter  : the pietist orphanage as vorbild ..................................................................     conclusion .......................................................................................................................     bibliography ....................................................................................................................     appendices  :  “das historische waisenhaus” ( ) ........................................................................     :  texts recommended to a. h. francke by e. w. von tschirnhaus .............................         v  :  title page from tschirnhaus’s beginner’s guide to the useful sciences ( ) .......     :  members of the berlin academy of mathematics and physics   with correspondence in francke’s archive ( ­ ) .................................................     :  gottfried wilhelm leibniz’s letter to philipp jakob spener ( ) ...........................     :  frontispiece from conrad mel’s thoughts concerning a universal character ........      :  frontispiece and title page from claude fleury’s sitten der israeliten ( ) ..........     :  frontispiece and drawing of a model from christoph semler’s   der tempel salomonis (halle: waysenhaus,  ) ........................................................     :  semler lesson on optical instruments ........................................................................     :  frontispiece from christoph semler’s methodus inveniendae longitudinis  maritimaee per acus verticales magneticas (halle: waysenhaus,  ) ......................     :  excerpt from christoph theodosius walter letter ( ) ........................................     :  christian wolff’s assessment (gutachtung) of the christoph semler / christian  eberhard methodus inveniendae longitudinis maritimaee per acus verticales  magneticas for the academy of science in st. petersburg ( ) ..................................     :  frontispiece and title page from the halle orphanage’s graphice guide (halle:  waysenhaus,  ) ..........................................................................................................     :  excerpt from “semler” painting and drawing guide ................................................     :  semler lesson topics..................................................................................................      :  pietist orphanages, affiliated individuals and related primary materials ..................     : the halle orphanage as schauplatz ( ) ..............................................................        vi  acknowledgements      finishing this project marks both the beginning and the end of a kind of journey.   so many of those i have encountered along the way have helped in ways they often did  not realize.  as an undergraduate at colgate, george hudson, joanna drell and deborah  harkness played critical roles in my intellectual development and orientation towards  history.  jürgen meyer­wendt, dierk hoffmann and their department’s weekly  stammtische helped me begin cultivating the german language skills i never dreamed i  would come to rely upon so heavily.  several of my high school teachers taught me how  to seek out knowledge and to express myself in writing, including bill brouwer, lori  dekruyf, bruce rotter and fred ypma.  but the journey that resulted in this dissertation  actually began when i arrived in halle/saale in the fall of   as an efl assistant with  the fulbright program.  teaching in the latina “august hermann francke” was a life  changing experience, only enhanced by the friendship of the many fellow teachers and  former students of mine who have lent their wisdom to this project.  i owe much to the  support of sabine and torsten otto, henrike krauss (and her parents gerd und gundrun),  yvette mahrenholz, conny wernig, gabriele adelt, annett dannehl and christa michler.   when i left halle, these ties remained and were part of what made returning to conduct  research for this dissertation all the more appealing.        back home i learned a great deal about what being a historian means from several  gifted members of wwu’s history department:  including susan costanzo, peter diehl,  amanda eurich, chris friday, steven garfinkle, leonard helfgott, georg mariz, harry  ritter and nancy van deusen.  especially amanda eurich helped me develop my  expository skills as my thesis advisor in ways that i still benefit from and nancy van     vii  deusen furthered my historiographical kenntnisse in her excellent methods seminar.  my  graduate colleagues and good friends, brendan burckhart, edward echtle and ruth  steele made sure i kept hiking and living in the city of subdued excitement.             at the university of british columbia i have been fortunate enough to encounter  more individuals, whose interest, insights and support have had a marked impact on the  orientation of this project—and the journey.  my dissertation advisor, christopher  friedrichs has offered me advice whenever i have indicated i needed it, all the while  encouraging me to my find my own way.  in the summer of  , chris visited me in  halle and insisted that i needed to be bolder about how i formulated the unique  contribution i envisioned myself making.  his comments came at precisely the right  moment, inspiring me to do precisely this in the end.  i am fortunate to have someone so  attuned to the finer details of the historian’s craft involved in this project.  it is better as a  result of his careful eye.      robert m. brain has also been a valued mentor and advocate, to whom i am  deeply indebted.  it was in his seminar that i undertook my first real foray into the history  of science—an experience that provided me with a set of tools that turned out to be  precisely what i needed to begin making sense of my sources.  several things discussed  in this study—especially the fundamental importance of practical geometry for pietists— i only really began to understand after conversations with bob.  his enthusiasm and  interest in what i was up to in halle, including what i always felt was his conviction that  the project was worthwhile doing, sustained me through periods when i was struggling to  maintain my momentum.              viii    from the moment i set foot in her graduate seminar in the history of childhood, i  knew that i wanted mona gleason involved in my project.  mona has helped me wrestle  with how to situate this project’s significance within a much larger history of youth by  consistently asking probing and insightful questions.  i also drew special sustenance from  participating in a childhood and youth studies conference with her in norrköping,  sweden in the summer of  .    early on at ubc, i benefited from the feedback and encouragement of joy dixon,  anne gorsuch and glen peterson.  the conway fellowship allowed me to undertake a  preliminary trip to germany in the summer of  , which helped me better prepare the  grant applications so essential for carrying out my archival work.  i also drew much from  the morale support of several of my colleagues in ubc’s graduate program, especially  desmond cheung, sid della santina, chelsea horton, abhishek kaicker, andrew king,  david luesink, jolene mccann, catherine paul and tim sedo.     i have the fulbright commission to thank (heartily) for supporting my proposal to  return to halle in the fall of   with a  ­month graduate fellowship.  i appreciated  program director reiner rohr’s efforts to contact the ausländerbehörde in halle on  behalf of my husband and me when we first arrived.  the experiment in international  living did an exceptional job of placing us with our host family, the wunder/lichs, who  remained true, in every possible way, to their namesake.  lina wunderlich (and annette  & holm) and axel and anke wunder made sure we were properly oriented (and fed) as  we reacquainted ourselves with halle.  mama and papa wunder even found us a garden.   the year was also greatly enhanced by the presence of fellow fulbrighter, rose ruther,  whose positive energy and good cooking were welcome after a long day at the archive.         ix  francke foundation director, thomas müller­bahlke, took time out of his very  busy schedule to meet with me.  i appreciated his attempts to connect me with several  semler­related sources in halle’s marienbibliothek and his willingness to allow me  unencumbered access to the wunderkammer models.  the centre for pietism studies  director, udo sträter, also offered me several useful tips.  i drew much from our  conversations and especially appreciated his willingness to share with me some of what  he had learned from reading francke’s diary.  christian soboth’s comments on a paper i  presented in january of   were very helpful, as was museum director klaus  veltmann’s willingness to frequently engage me about my findings.  professors berthold  ebert, pia schmidt and jürgen helm listened attentively as i endeavored to explain  myself and all provided sound advice.  upon completion of my fulbright, dr. müller­ bahlke, in conjunction with the centre for pietism studies and the fritz­thyssen  foundation, granted me a short­term thyssen­fellowship that allowed me to extend my  stay in francke’s archive.    several of the individuals working in the francke foundation’s studiumzentrum  are deserving of my heartfelt thanks.  anke mies helped me get my bearings when i  reappeared on the grounds of francke’s schulstadt and made herself readily available as  a resource.  the study center’s director, britta klosterberg and archivists jürgen groschl  and erika papst met with me early on to help me identify sources relevant to my interests.  katharina loos, doris zosel and christine voigt helped me manage the piles of material  i very often accumulated.    yet another advantage of working in francke’s archive was meeting scholars  interested in pietism from around the world.  mattias graf, elizabeth quast and inga     x  strungyte were among the first i encountered and warmly welcomed me into their fold.   it was an honor to discuss my work with renate wilson, who visited early on in my stay.   gita rajan’s presence helped keep me anchored and upbeat even on rainy days; her  passion for her project and ongoing interest in my own gave us much to talk about over  our regular lunches in the mensa.  i also enjoyed my lunchtime conversations with  gunhild berg, simon grote, stephan laube, lucinda martin, marcus meier and  alexander schuncka.  alexander’s specific comments on an early draft of chapter two  were much appreciated, as was his and gunhild’s help with the german­language­ mechanics of my thyssen research presentation.  simon grote offered extensive  comments on several chapters and shared a preliminary piece of his own work.  i am  grateful for his thoughtful assessment of the project’s central contributions and always  probing questions.      matthew jones offered many suggestions over coffee in berlin that i derived a  great deal from.  margaret schabas was very encouraging during our brief meeting at the  mpi last summer.  andre wakefield also asked excellent questions about the orientation  of the project and gave me several good ideas.  simon schaffer read some very rough  drafts of my first few chapters and invited me to spend some time at cambridge, which  has been hugely inspiring and beneficial.  at the institute for european history in mainz, i received a warm welcome as  well as quiet space in which to write.  i attribute my ability to finish this project in a  timely manner to their support, in conjunction with funding from the german academic  exchange service (daad). especially heinz duchardt, irene dingel, joachim berger  and my mentor in the institute, rainer vinke, are deserving of many thanks.  i also     xi  appreciated ulrike moritz’s kind assistance with all of the organizational details and the  camaraderie of my fellow ieg stipendiaten.  finally, and most importantly, i must acknowledge the support of several friends  and members of my family, who have sustained me throughout much of this journey:  especially lisa arakelian, brooke & jack dewaard, jill eelkema, elaine eldersveld,  lois & bob franco, julie & raul iribarren, amy kooistra, heather maisel, megen &  corey nachreiner, laurie & vaughn olthof and david whitmer.  i owe a special debt of  gratitude to my parents­in­law kathryn & john whitmer and to my own parents, marcia  eldersveld & richard dewaard.  my husband charles came to germany with me without  the language or much sense of what, exactly, the experience would hold for him.  he  knows that this is his dissertation, and journey, too; it has been infinitely more enjoyable  since we decided to travel together.       xii                to my parents:   marcia joan eldersveld and richard jay dewaard              introduction                    pietist orphanages were both real and imagined spaces.  they did and did not  house orphans.  their founders were and were not pietists.  they were funded by  everyone and no one (with the exception of god).  they were and were not supported by  the state.  they were inclusive and exclusive.  they existed to regulate both the  environment and the soul. the educational programming in place within these sites aimed  to create a world in which there was no difference between thinking and feeling, or  between knowing and doing.  here the seemingly impassable fissure imagined as existing  between the world of the mind and the world of the hand had been bridged and cartesian  dualism mediated.  the founding of a pietist orphanage, or application of its pedagogies  in other institutional settings, signified the pursuit of a rigorous method of action and  assimilation, a middle way.  following the example of the jesuits, whose prowess as  educators was widely known, pietists cultivated the “visual aptitudes” of children and  held up the eye as the perfect conciliatory, didactic and edificatory medium.   in the  spaces touched by their methods, the eye and the heart became fused together into a  single entity that observed, reconciled and loved.      this is a dissertation about the visual pedagogies of the pietist orphanage, or  what was referred to collectively as “the halle method” by the turn of the eighteenth  century.  in a manner markedly similar to that of its subject, which aimed to reconcile  competing epistemological stances with each other, the dissertation weaves together and  thereby contributes to several historiographical problems, conversations and disciplines at  once.   one could say that it does this simply by making a case for the pietist                                                     for the phrase “visual aptitude” see barbara maria stafford, artful science: enlightenment entertainment  and the eclipse of visual education (cambridge, mass: harvard university press,  ).      orphanage’s significance beyond the specific moment or historical milieu that produced  it at the same time that it demonstrates why and how a unique set of concerns about  “seeing” and “reconciling” coalesced at this moment (in brandenburg­prussia, around  ) to forge a universalizing edifice—something solid yet not entirely tangible.  the  edifice itself, the physical structure of the pietist orphanage building and the varied  forms of practices it contained, signified a vision of universal benevolence, of  philanthropy, to eighteenth­century contemporaries (see appendix  ).   it was a vision  that placed the very act of making and transmitting knowledge—via experiment and  demonstration, sensation and intuition—at the heart of a new, privately sponsored yet  state­supported enterprise that set out to improve and ultimately perfect the world by  subjecting individuals, one by one, to the rigors of conciliatory exercise.    until now, the meaning and import of the “halle method” has been little  understood, no less for its impact on modern educational systems via the method’s  influence upon some of the first prussian experiments in compulsory education than for  its impact on a similar mandate of universal benevolence or improvement still very much  at the heart of modern philanthropy.  an altruistic concern for human welfare, including  the circulation and distribution of private donations, is a vital part of widespread efforts  to promote public health and educational programming in the world today.  philanthropy  is a subject critical to contemporary debates around globalization, or the unprecedented  degrees of global interconnectivity, international marketplaces and humanitarian issues  that inspire private, voluntary associations of benefactors to become activists.  because  the mandate of philanthropy still remains very much oriented around the idea of  children’s innocence and “improvement” as something visible, something universally      recognizable, we ought to pay careful attention to the relationship between visuality,  pedagogy and evangelical voluntarism as it was imagined by some of the first “global”  philanthropists in the histories we now write.     the eighteenth century marked a pivotal moment in the history of philanthropy  and education more generally.  it saw debates concerning public versus private charity in  europe give way to new, privately sponsored institutions such as orphanages that were  “evangelical” rather than “civic” in nature and global in scope as opposed to responding  only to local needs.    the marked shift in ideas about charity and the role of those who  dispensed it was spearheaded by revivalist religious movements both in the german  states and in great britain.  in britain, the society for the promotion of christian  knowledge (spck) was formed in   with the hope of sponsoring spiritual  regeneration in children through the founding of hundreds of charity schools.   its  directors were in frequent contact with the radical lutherans who supported pietist  orphanages.   together, these groups would claim to be surmounting local problems of  poverty, illiteracy and displacement by developing extensive faith­based networks,                                                     visuality connotes the idea, popularized by descartes, that the images we see are not actual forms emitted  by objects but perceptions that function like words or signs; they convey meaning and yet do not exactly  resemble the objects they represent.  as i will show, members of halle’s intellectual community sought to  remedy this problem by promoting new strategies for producing resemblance.  this required them to pay  special attention to how images, words and signs acquire their meanings, including how individuals could  better regulate this process.     renate wilson has attempted to integrate pietism into a global history of philanthropy; but because of her  special interest and expertise in eighteenth­century pharmaceuticals, her work has not addressed the  meaning and import of the halle method for our understanding of pietist philanthropy more generally.  see  renate wilson, “philanthropy in  th­century central europe: evangelical reform and commerce,”  voluntas: international journal of voluntary and nonprofit organizations  :  (march,  ):  ­ ; paul  slack, from reformation to improvement: public welfare in early modern england (oxford:  clarendon  press,  ); mary fissell, “charity universal? institutions and moral reform in  th century bristol,” in l.  davison, t. hitchcock, t. keim, and r. b. shoemaker (eds.), stilling the grumbling hive: the response to  social and economic problems in england,  ­ . (new york: st. martin’s press,  ); hugh  cunningham and joanna ines ed., charity, philanthropy and reform from the  s to   (basingstoke:  macmillan; new york: st martin’s press,  ).   daniel l. brunner.  halle pietists in england: anthony william böhm and the society for promoting  christian knowledge.  göttingen: vandenhoeck & ruprecht,  .      including teachers and missionaries who claimed to possess the secret to the perfection of  mankind through the reconciliation of all faiths or all ways of knowing.  a conciliatory  pedagogy formed the crux of the secret, making it central to my story.   by exploring the context in which conciliatory visual pedagogies were imagined  as “the halle method” by a prominent pietist leader and several of his associates in early  eighteenth­century halle (part i), how the method worked (part ii) and how it was  transmitted (part iii), i hope to fill a very large gap in our understanding of the origins of  a universal, evangelical and child­centric philanthropy at the same time as i offer a new  way of appreciating or situating the pietist orphanage’s impact on eighteenth­century  pedagogies and its effect on the circulation of knowledge more generally.  these sites  provide very powerful examples of exactly the kind of convergence between inquiry and  invention that simon schaffer and lissa roberts have recently insisted was at the heart of  knowledge making enterprises from the late renaissance until early industrialization; the  pietist orphanage invites new ways of understanding philanthropy as an extension of this  pairing—that is, an attempt to embed a moral compass into the “handy minds” and  “mindful hands” who also embraced the mandate of improvement as they observed,  engineered and often radically altered their surroundings with the help of new  technologies.                                                         lissa roberts, simon schaffer and peter dear eds. the mindful hand: inquiry and invention from the  late renaissance to early industrialization (amsterdam: koninklijke nederlandse akademie van  wetenschappen,  ).  universal benevolence, or improvement, is bound up with the concept of “utility,”  which, among others, roger chartier has argued was central to enlightenment epistemologies.  see roger  chartier, the cultural origins of the french revolution [transl. lydia g. cochrane] (durham, nc: duke  university press,  ).  i agree with lissa roberts, who insists that “utility” should be understood as  encompassing “a multifaceted set of discourses that were deployed in keeping with the variety of meanings  and purposes with which actors at the time charged the term.”  she continues, “utility referred to a cluster  of philosophical usages: (scientific) knowledge in the service of society and the furtherance of both secular  and religious enlightenment.  but it was also invoked to justify or criticize practices aimed more directly  (though not always consciously) at extending institutional, cultural or socioeconomic power and control.       aiming to contribute to several fields at once, especially the history of  philanthropy, visuality, education and science, may seem overly ambitious for a single  dissertation project; however, the subject it takes as its focus is uniquely suited for such  an undertaking.  because the practitioners of the method it housed endeavored to engage  and assimilate all forms of knowledge, the pietist orphanage is situated squarely at the  intersection of several disciplinary trajectories.  yet virtually all of these fields or  disciplines have collectively underestimated or ignored its significance.  the reasons for  this involve a tendency, already prevalent in early eighteenth­century texts, to deride  pietists as irrational (i.e. anti­reason, anti­enlightenment) religious enthusiasts, who then  got to serve as “foils” in the positivist historiographies of the late eighteenth and  nineteenth centuries.  also, the archival materials so central for understanding halle  pietism, not to mention the meaning and import of the “halle method,” were not readily  accessible to the international academic community prior to collapse of the german  democratic republic.   fortunately, the situation is rapidly remedying itself, as we are  currently in the midst of a kind of “renaissance” of pietism studies that is drawing  scholars from all over the world to halle and prompting vigorous discussions about how  to understand pietism’s wider significance.  yet even in these very recent discussions,                                                                                                                                                    finally… it provided a watchword for various forms of sociability that developed during the eighteenth  century.”  in lissa roberts, “going dutch: situating science in the dutch enlightenment,” william clark,  jan golinski and simon schaffer eds., the sciences in enlightened europe (chicago, the university of  chicago press,  ):  ­ .  for a genealogy of the idea of “improvement” as it acquired various  meanings in britain and affected the construction of empire see richard drayton, nature’s government:  science, imperial britain, and the ‘improvement’ of the world (new haven, conn.: yale university press,  ).   in the second half of the nineteenth century, due to circumstances that remain unclear, over  ,  pieces  of archival material were removed from the francke foundation archive.  a substantive portion of the  materials found their way to the state library of berlin, where they are now part of what is called the  francke nachlass.  they are available for use in halle on microfilm.      halle pietists’ preoccupation with visuality, including their interest in the eye­oriented  mathematical sciences as conciliatory practices, has been almost entirely neglected.    the phrase “mathematical sciences” (mathematische wissenschaften) was used  often by pietists and their contemporaries in conjunction with the phrase “useful  sciences” (nützliche wissenschaften) or “practical mathematics.”  yet historians of  science have tended to underestimate the status of the mathematical sciences as  conciliatory or “middling disciplines” by preferring to focus on the very real tension  between higher mathematics and experimental philosophy in this period.    thomas  kuhn, steven shapin and simon schaffer have affirmed that a kind of “essential tension”  had come to dominate europe’s epistemological landscape by  , separating  practitioners of highly esoteric (i.e. hard to access) mathematical or geometrical methods  from those like robert boyle and the earliest members of the british royal society, who  preferred the new experimental method—a method rooted in the conviction that the only  way to produce universal truths was to ground these same truths in collectively verifiable  experience.   the various disciplines of the “mathematical sciences,” including optics,  dioptrics, perspective, mechanics, astronomy, architecture and fortification, drew readily  from both mathematics and physics and had one striking feature in common: their  reliance on practical geometry.  this project shows how the technologies of geometrical                                                     see j.a. bennett, “the challenge of practical mathematics” in stephen pumfrey, paolo l. rossi and  maurice slawinski eds. science, culture and popular belief in renaissance europe (manchester and new  york: manchester university press,  ).  the practical mathematical sciences, “in which the practices  and instruments of the new experimental strategies appeared, have too often been spurned.”  in simon  schaffer, “godly men and mechanical philosophers: souls and spirits in restoration natural philosophy,”  science in context   ( ):  .   thomas s. kuhn, “mathematical versus experimental traditions in the development of physical  science” in the essential tension: selected studies in scientific tradition and change (chicago: the  university of chicago press,  ):  ,  ; steven shapin, “robert boyle and mathematics: reality,  representation, and experimental practice,” science in context  ,   ( ):  ­ ; steven shapin and  simon schaffer’s leviathan and the air pump: hobbes, boyle and the experimental life (princeton:  princeton university press,  ).      projection, including the practical methods of surveyors, architects and geometers, get  held up in early eighteenth­century halle as expressions of a conciliatory “middle way”  that could help further the mandate of philanthropy and universal reform that pietists  championed.   instead of seeing halle pietists as anti­rational enemies of all forms of knowledge  that were not divinely inspired, i see them as passionate inquirers, observers, consumers  and assimilators of the cacophony of materials and methods so characteristic of  knowledge making in eighteenth­century europe.  like robert boyle, robert hooke and  other members of the royal society in england, they believed in the possibility of  reconciling several forms of knowledge (and knowledge­making) by exploiting the  potential of middling objects and instruments.  in doing this, they participated in the same  sorts of conciliatory knowledge­making as the polymaths they associated with:  ehrenfried walters von tschirnhaus, gottfried wilhelm leibniz, johann christoph  sturm, leonhard christoph sturm, christian wolff, christian thomasius, friedrich  hoffman, georg ernst stahl, daniel ernst jablonski, even frederick slare (a former  student of boyle’s and royal society member).   in its reliance on projective geometry,  the mathematical sciences placed a great deal of emphasis on the eye’s ability to  reconcile magnitudes and perceptions with the help of several sorts of assimilatory tools.   one could become adept in the art of using these tools and produce representations of  objects that were proportionally perfect copies.  pietists accepted that as one’s ability to  do this improved, one also improved oneself; they were also convinced of the possibility  that one could produce perfect, three­dimensional forms of representation if one                                                     daniel brunner notes that in slare, halle pietists found their “closest friend.” see idem, halle pietists in  england: anthony william böhm and the society for promoting christian knowledge (göttingen:  vandenhoeck & ruprecht,  ):   n. .      incorporated geometry into an array of spiritual practices or practiced geometry while  “illuminated” or filled with divine love.    halle pietists believed in the promise of helping individuals acquire “visual  aptitudes” through training in the mathematical sciences, which provided a  methodological point of orientation for solving the problem of dissonance between  competing regimens of truth—including competing confessional systems.  although, as  lorraine daston has noted, “the divergence, integration and transcendence of individual  perspectives were the province of moral philosophy and aesthetics” in the eighteenth  century more generally, in halle, around  , this group of radical lutheran theologians  attempted to link moral philosophy and aesthetics to “primitive christianity” or the idea  of a universal faith.   like gottfried wilhelm leibniz, whose “perspectival metaphysics”  and preoccupation with harmony is well documented, halle pietists pursued a pansophic  vision of universal harmony, justice or benevolence; only they institutionalized their  version of this vision in an orphanage and placed it at the center (or heart) of a self­ enclosed “city of schools.”   they were participants, like leibniz and so many others, in  a culture of reconciliation, or what the noted professor of medicine at the university of  halle, friedrich hoffmann, called a “culture of understanding,” and their conciliatory and                                                     daston carefully points to the “perspectival metaphysics” of gottfried wilhelm leibniz’s monadologie  as an exception to this; however, i think the entire pietist program should be viewed as an exception to  this—as an attempt to bridge the gap between philosophy and theology more generally.  see her discussion  of perspectival and aperspectival objectivity in “objectivity and the escape from perspective” in the  science studies reader (new york, ny: routledge press,  ):  .   halle pietists and leibniz’s understanding of philanthropy were very similar, yet they are consistently  treated in entirely separate literatures and as ideological opposites.  in order to make my case for the  significance of the halle method, my dissertation must, in part, attempt to mediate this rift.  see chapter  three for a thorough discussion.      vision oriented method was hugely influential precisely because of their ability to  replicate it in new and existing institutional settings.   to summarize and offer a roadmap for the discussion contained in the rest of this  introduction, my project  ) offers a new way of understanding pietist philanthropy as a  conciliatory practice—an expression of one’s ability to see correctly;  ) challenges the  historiographical tendency to see pietists as enemies of science, rationality and  enlightenment or the construction of “pietism” and “enlightenment” as oppositional  categories;  ) challenges the characterization of early eighteenth­century halle as conflict  or controversy ridden (on the contrary, my research points to an overwhelming  preoccupation with new methods for promoting friendship, reconciliation, union,  illumination and love in this setting); and  ) offers a kind of corrective for a tendency  among church historians and theologians to underestimate philipp jakob spener and  august hermann francke’s interest in the conciliatory promise of visual exercise,  including the overwhelmingly vision­oriented mandate of johann amos comenius  ( ­ ) and pansophy.  halle pietists were just as concerned as generations of  orthodox lutherans with how to bring heads, hands and hearts together so as to infuse all  human action with principles that were simultaneously ethical, rational and useful.  only  they held up light, perspective, three­dimensional models, the mathematical sciences,  motion and the medium of the eye as keys to producing the idealized consilia of thinking,  feeling and loving that so many contemporaries sought.  in other words, halle pietists’  emphasis on the conciliatory qualities of seeing, including their emphasis on vision­                                                    friedrich hoffmann’s foreward to johann hecker’s, einleitung in die botanie, worinnen die nöthigste  stücke dieser wissenschaft kurzlich abgehandelt werden, mit einer vorrede herrn friedrich hoffmann’s  med. d. königl. preussischen hofraths und sowol der medicinischen facultät, als auch der hiesigen  friederichs universität senioris, cet. von der rechten anführung der jungen auf schulen zu erlernung  realer wissenschaften und der wahren weisheit (halle: waysenhaus,  ).      oriented pedagogies, is one way of understanding both what set their movement apart  from orthodox lutheranism (which stressed rote memorization and repetition of various  catechisms in schools ) and what they held in common with the “enlightened”  luminaries of their day—ehrenfried walthers von tschirnhaus, gottfried wilhelm  leibniz, christian wolff, to name just a few.  in effect, the pietist orphanage becomes a  site for the resolving of paradoxes.  and so it follows that in understanding the  institutionalized “middle way” that halle pietists championed, we can actually acquire a  better sense of just how much they had in common with other members of their  community, including how deeply engaged they were with assessing and resolving the  major problems of their age.   i have chosen to work my way backwards through the list presented above if only  to more quickly address what is likely by now a pressing question for many readers.   what is pietism anyway?  how do i define it?  how have others defined it?  and, more                                                     for the rudiments of lutheran schooling see gerald strauss’s luther’s house of learning: indoctrination  of the young in the german reformation (baltimore: john’s hopkins university press,  ); there is a  huge literature around the concept of “social disciplining” or the technologies of “confessionalization” that  lutherans and other politically legitimated religious groups used to indoctrinate the members of their  communities in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.  until fairly recently, social discipline  (sozialdisziplinierung) formed the central research paradigm for scholarship on seventeenth and eighteenth­ century poor relief institutions – including prisons, workhouses and orphanages—and post­reformation  schooling.  the concept itself is derived from the work of gerald oestreich who argued that the neo­ stoicism of justus lipsius (a sixteenth­century humanist) provided early modern princes with an overtly  secular philosophy for fostering new attitudes to state authority among their subjects.  the term  “confessionalization” (konfessionalisierung) refers to a series of modernizing strategies employed by these  princes (as heads of territorial states) in order to consolidate and reify confessional boundaries in europe  from roughly   to  .  ernst walter zeeden first advanced the term konfessionsbildung in die  entstehung der konfessionen:  grundlagen und formen der konfessionsbildung (münchen,  ).  see  also ronnie po­chia hsia’s discussion of zeeden in social discipline in the reformation (new york:  routledge,  ):  .  heinz schilling and wolfgang reinhard have been the most outspoken advocates of  confessionalization in germany.  see reinhard’s “zwang zur konfessionalisierung? prolegomena zu einer  theorie des konfessionallen zeitalters,” in zeitschrift für historische forschung   ( ):  ­  and  schilling’s religion, political culture and the emergence of early modern society: essays in german and  dutch history (leiden: brill,  ).  for a short summary see carl härter, “sozialdisziplinierung” in  annette völker­rasor ed.  frühe neuzeit (münchen: r. oldenbourg,  ):  ­ .  recent scholarship  has challenged the totalizing effects of the paradigm and attempted to offer more nuanced treatments.  see  james van horn melton ed., cultures of communication from reformation to enlightenment.   construction publics in early modern german lands (burlington vt: ashgate press,  ):  ­ .         specifically, what is the relevance of its portrayal over the years by church historians and  theologians for my own concern with visual pedagogies?  most scholars working on  pietism today would agree that it was a grassroots movement or collective reaction to  lutheran orthodoxy that was oriented around the personality of philipp jakob spener, a  lutheran minister active in frankfurt am main, in and around  .   predominantly  north american historians who have dealt with some aspect of pietism in their work have  tended to portray the movement as a deliberate response to the chaotic aftermath of the  thirty years war, or a need to sanctify and regenerate a “fallen” society, torn apart by  religious strife, that god had punished severely from   to  .   revealingly, this  juxtaposition has been noticeably absent in the german literature on pietism, which has  emphasized the twenty­year gap between the war and spener’s movement, as well as the  verifiable continuity of orthodox lutherans’ ongoing interest in carrying out the project  of reformation, including a general preoccupation with regeneration, reconciliation, lay  bible reading and personal edification—both before and after westphalia.      recent debates have revolved around identifying the peculiar qualities of  lutheran pietism in comparison with other pan­european quietist movements, for  example.  martin brecht especially has emphasized its origins in a general “crisis of  piety” that affected all protestants in the seventeenth century, eliciting similar reactions in                                                     andreas depperman’s study of johann jakob schütz and his influence on spener offers some much  needed contextualization of the circles in which the new movement blossomed.  see his johann jakob  schütz und die anfänge des pietismus (tübingen: j.c.b.mohr,  ).   a good example is james van horn melton’s discussion of pietism in absolutism and the eighteenth­ century origins of compulsory schooling in prussia and austria (cambridge: cambridge university  press,  ):  ­ .  this may have a lot to do with the way in which pietism was portrayed by german  historians after world war i; having experienced the war firsthand, for example, karl holl argued in    that the thirty years war made the zeal for a realization of the reformation project grow stronger for  spener and other members of his circle, who became convinced that the orthodox lutheran church was not  doing enough to bring about the true church.  see karl holl, “die bedeutung der grossen krieg für das  religiöse und kirchl. leben innerhalb deutschlands“ gesammelte aufsätze zur kirchengeschichte, vol.    (tübingen: mohr,  ).        england (puritanism, quakerism), the netherlands (nadere reformatie) and germany  (arndtsche frömmigkeitsbewegung).  all represented an intensification of piety that  emphasized repentance, sanctification and imitatio – seeking to resemble god.   in  opposition to brecht, johannes wallmann has insisted upon the historicity of spenerian  reform and sees it as distinguishable from these other piety movements.    when  spener’s protégé, august hermann francke, acquired a pastorate and professorship in  halle in the  s, he adopted the special mandate of the movement and associated the  city of halle with spenerianism.  according to wallmann, the three defining features of  spenarian pietism included  ) “ecclesiola in ecclesia,” i.e. the formation of conventicles  or small, private gatherings of believers who met regularly and outside of sanctioned  church times to discuss the scriptures in conjunction with their own spiritual  development;  ) the chiliastic hope for better times or general improvement of society;  and  ) biblical devotion and exegesis.   yet those who participated in the movement  rarely called themselves pietists.  spener described the word pietist for the first time in a                                                     see martin brecht, “die umstrittenheit des gegenstandes und die begründung der vorliegenden  konzeption,” geschichte des pietismus ed. martin brecht (göttingen: vandenhoeck & ruprecht,  ) and  idem “probleme der pietismusforschung,” dutch review of church history   ( ):  ­ .  brecht sees  parallels between pietism and jansenism in catholicism or hassidism in judaism, but does not consider  them part of the same movement.  albrecht ritschl was the first german scholar to link pietism to  reformed piety movements in the netherlands and germany.  see his geschichte des pietismus   vols.  (bonn,  ­ ) and three essays (philadelphia: fortress press,  ):  ­ .   for a summary of these  debates see jonathan strom, “problems and promises of pietism research,” church history  :   (september  ):  ­ .   johannes wallmann, “was ist pietismus?” pietismus und neuzeit  ( ):  ­  and idem “vom  katachismuschristentum zum bibelchristentum.  zu bibelverständnis im pietismus,” in die zukunft des  schriftprinzips ed. richard ziegert (stuttgart: deutsche bibelgesellschaft,  ):  ­ . he insists that spener  was not as reliant on the writings of johann arndt ( ­ ) as scholars have seen him to be.  for brecht’s  critique of wallmann specifically, see his “zur konzeption der geschichte des pietismus.  eine entgegnung auf  johannes wallmann,” pietismus und neuzeit   ( ):  .   see strom,  ­ .  wallmann has insisted that spener was not as reliant on the writings of johann arndt  ( ­ ) as scholars have seen him to be, however arndt’s influence cannot be denied.  arndt  promoted “true christianity” (wahres christentum, his principle work) but steered away from advocating  lay bible reading; see strom,  .        letter from   as a “term of abuse and derision.”   he urged those receptive to his  efforts to rejuvenate or revive the lutheran church to avoid employing the term openly so  that his movement would not be labeled a sect.  but the term never went away.    following wallmann, i too see halle pietism as a distinct movement comprised  of men, women and children whose spiritual identity was somehow, even loosely, aligned  with spener or with francke and the orphanage he established in the city of halle in  .  at the same time, wallmann’s assessment of pietism is based almost entirely on  his reading of spener’s letters and texts.  his definition overlooks the way in which  francke adapted and added to spener’s vision, often borrowing from the philosophical  practices of the “heathen philosophers” (to use francke’s words), the didactic and  edificatory strategies of johann amos comenius (which comenius himself admitted were  sometimes directly drawn from jesuit teaching manuals), e.w. von tschirnhaus (who  stood in direct contact with spinoza, leibniz and several members of the royal society)  and several of his famous colleagues (stahl, hoffmann, thomasius, wolff) at the  university of halle.  when francke’s contributions to spenerian pietism are taken into  consideration in conjunction with the broader epistemological context in which the  movement blossomed, a much more dynamic portrait of halle pietism emerges.    ongoing discussions among historians and philosophers of science, when  juxtaposed with the work of other theologians and church historians who have looked  closely at pietism and its precedents have much to offer this portrait.  in a recent study                                                     carter lindberg, “introduction,” to the pietist theologians: an introduction to theology in the  seventeenth and eighteenth centuries (oxford: blackwell press,  ); lindberg cites the often quoted  verse by joachim feller ( ­ ), who used the term shortly after spener in a poem composed for the  funeral of a young theology student and member of a spenerian conventicle in leipzig.  “pietists—the  name is now well­known throughout the world.  what is a pietist?  one who studies god’s word and also  leads a holy life according to it.”  also quoted in  peter schicketanz, der pietismus von   bis  .  (leipzig: evangelische verlagsanstalt,  ):  .      that draws from the insights of the french philosopher pierre hadot, matthew jones  makes a compelling case for the juxtaposition of mathematics, natural philosophy and  self cultivation (improvement, moral regeneration) as spiritual exercise in the  philosophies of descartes, pascal and leibniz.    jones shows how each one of these  figures was convinced that rigorous cognitive exercise was necessary in order for one to  know or to begin to understand how one might come to recognize truth.  each offered  new mathematical mechanisms, including new geometries, for exercising the mind that  were derived from age­old concerns about the fate of humanity and man’s moral  obligation to improve and apply his mind to the solution of some pressing social  problem—or at the very least to the perfection of himself.  a climate conducive to the  articulation and refinement of spiritual exercise was precisely what a.h. francke set out  to achieve in his educational institutes and it is in keeping with these aims that the pietist  orphanage, a symbol of eighteenth­century philanthropy, emerged.    the work of several theologians and church historians confirms that a general  preoccupation with “spiritual exercise” animated both orthodox and radical lutherans  alike in the seventeenth century.  the church historian udo sträter, for example, has  studied the climate of orthodox lutheranism that gave way to spenerian reform and has  stressed the enormous interest in meditation, spiritual exercise or praxis pietatis in                                                     pierre hadot, philosophy as a way of life: spiritual exercises from socrates to foucault.  edited by  arnold davidson; translated by michael chase (oxford: blackwell press,  ) and pierre hadot, what is  ancient philosophy? translated by michael chase (cambridge, ma: belknap press,  ); matthew l.  jones, the good life in the scientific revolution: descartes, pascal, leibniz and the cultivation of virtue  (chicago: university of chicago press,  ).  jones distinguishes “religious” spiritual exercise from what  he calls its more “philosophical guises,” noting that “religious” or “mystical” spiritual exercises like prayer  and meditation fall outside the scope of his study.  i would not so rigidly distinguish between “religious”  and “other” spiritual exercises in the case of the pietists, who, as i will show, saw the observation of  models, machines and other forms of mathematical exercise as an opportunity to meditate, to cultivate  “pious desires” and to acquire certain kinds of spiritual gifts.  i am not a leibniz scholar, and yet i question  whether the exercises contained in leibniz’s vision can be fully appreciated without a careful look at the  theological context (including his close ties to spener) in which he created his metaphysical system.        germany by  .   sträter’s work also explores the very real impact that translations of  english devotional literature (or erbauungsmaterialen) had on the german book market  in the seventeenth century.  “hot sellers” included short postilles by english jesuits  intended to walk individuals through the steps of meditation, imitation and edification.   an especially popular collection of exercises was emanuel sonthom’s göldenes kleinod,  which was mostly a translated copy of the jesuit robert parson’s book of christian  exercise.   lewis bayly’s praxis pietatis and joseph hall’s arte of divine meditation  were also quite widely distributed.   sträter has also dealt with the reception of johann  amos comenius and johann valentin andreae ( ­ ) by spener and francke, who  were especially interested in establishing a utopian city, or a “christian­opolis” (closely  mirroring both andreae and comenius’s visions), where individuals proficient in their  own exercises would live in harmony and, in turn, perfect the world around them.                                                      udo sträter, meditation und kirchenreform in der lutherischen kirche des  .jahrhunderts (tübingen:  j.c.b.mohr (paul siebeck)  ).  see also his essay „wie bringen wir den kopf in das herz?“ in gerhard  kurz ed. meditation und erinnerung in der frühen neuzeit (göttingen: vandenhoeck & ruprecht,  ):  ­ .   udo sträter, sonthom, bayly, dyke und hall: studien zur rezeption der englischen erbauungsliteratur in  deutschland im  . jahrhundert (tübingen: mohr,  ):  .  robert parsons, gülden kleinod der kinder  gottes, das ist: der wahre weg zum christenthum, herrn emanuel sonthoms [d.i. thomson], aus dem  englischen, in das teutsche versetzet, u. jetzo aufs neue, ... an vielen orten geändert, und mit zwey  herrlichen neuen tractätlein vermehret, deren das i. von dem gespräch deß hertzens. ii. von der  geistlichen hoffart handelt ; benebens zweyen nothwendigen registern; samt einem bericht johann  michael dilherrns, an den christlichen leser (nürnberg: endter,  ).   lewis bayley, praxis pietatis: das ist, Übung der gottseligkeit ... anfänglich in englischer sprach  beschrieben durch doct. ludwig bayli, ... hernacher auch in unsere teutsche sprach übersetzet ... theil  : darinn begriffen, wie ein christgläubiger mensch in wahrer erkanntnuß gottes und seiner selbst  zunem[m]en, sein leben täglich ... beschliessen könne.  theil  : in sich begreiffend die fürtreffliche ubung  gottseliger und andächtiger meditation (basel,  ); joseph hall, the arte of divine meditation:  profitable for all christians to know and to practice (london,  ); joseph hall, himmels­lust auff erden  oder die wahre seelen­ruh (helmstädt,  ).  see also frank livingstone huntley, bishop joseph hall  and protestant meditation in seventeenth­century england: a study with the texts of the art of divine  meditation ( ) and occasional meditations ( ) (binghamton, n.y.: medieval and renaissance  texts and studies,  ).    see johannes wallmann’s discussion in philipp jakob spener und die anfänge des pietismus (tübingen,  ).      because of the longstanding reputation of pietists as enemies of science in  eighteenth­ and nineteenth­century historiography, however, the link between imagining  the mathematical sciences as spiritual exercise has been left underutilized and unexplored  by these theologians and in pietism studies more generally.  my project marks an attempt  to connect what theologians and church historians have long confirmed about the  widespread interest among early modern contemporaries (not only pietists!) in how to  articulate and to improve their spirituality with what jones and others are showing was  extremely influential in the construction of the new technologies, geometries and skills  sets that we now take for granted as modern science.  jones’s work especially invites one  to think carefully about leibniz’s juxtaposition of mathematical exercise with the  mandate of universal justice, charity and improvement and lays the groundwork for  imagining how a similar juxtaposition may have worked itself out in early eighteenth­ century halle.  jones writes, for example, that leibniz sought to institutionalize  “prudential techniques for reforming others,” and described in several late seventeenth­ century proposals “an order of charity” or “a society of the love of god” modeled after  the jesuits.   he continues:  this society would use ‘god’s works worthy of astonishment’ as well as medical cures  and chemical mysteries to attract people, fight atheism, and lead them toward the love of  god.  members of this society were to speak ‘without scholastic style’ and to strive ‘for  the manner of common speech’—to pursue decorous, if sometimes temporarily  deceptive, means to bring as many people into the fold of proper belief and christian  action as possible…     leibniz’s vision, as jones’ describes it here, was the pietist orphanage, in theory and in  practice.  it was a site for the realization of a higher, prudential vision only rooted in  visibly accessible gestures.  it was a site of reconciliation—a place for marrying together                                                     jones,  .  jones notes that leibniz even developed a set of rules [“societas sive ordo caritatis” and  “societas theophilorum ad celebrandas laudes dei” ( )] for the society, see pg.  , n. .      ibid.,  .      exercises of the hand, head and heart.  the “society of the love of god” that francke  directed in halle was oriented around the honing of a specific set of spiritual exercises  imagined as uniquely suited to early modern cultures of perspective.   it was a “vision­ oriented” society, like the jesuit order, that linked the perfection of perception to the  anatomy of heart at every turn.  this requires some explanation and only makes sense  when the pietist preoccupation with christian perfection,  with love or “the heart,”  including the cultivation of “pious desires” (pia desideria), is situated alongside the  swirling debates about reconciliation, perspectivism and the mechanics of seeing that  were occurring precisely at the moment when the pietist orphanage, and pietist  philanthropy, came into being.    historians have only really begun to write the history of visuality.  several studies  have appeared in recent years that have emphasized the unique combination of skill,  technology and cultural practice that determine a given historical epoch’s relationship to  sight.   stuart clark’s new study of vision in early modern culture posits that it was early  modern individuals’ fears about the intrinsic unreliability of sight, i.e. their eyes were  always deceiving them, which led them to embrace linear perspective and develop new                                                     jones has stressed the importance of perspective for leibniz, including his interest in new technologies  for “seeing all at once.”  i am contextualizing jones’ deliberately focused treatment of leibniz here,  showing specifically how francke picked up on several of these ideas and employed them in order to  perfect the visual aptitudes of individuals.    see august hermann francke, “on christian perfection,” in peter erb ed., pietists: selected writings.  (new york: paulist press,  ):  ­ .      for some examples see b. m. stafford and f. terpak, devices of wonder: from the world in a box to  images on a screen (los angeles,  ); b. m. stafford “presuming images and consuming words: the  visualization of knowledge from the enlightenment to post­modernism,” in john brewer and roy porter  eds. consumption and the world of goods (london: routledge press,  ); d.m. levin ed. sites of  vision: the discursive construction of sight in the history of philosophy (cambridge, ma: harvard  university press,  ); c. swan, “eyes wide shut: early modern imagination, demonology and the  visual arts,” zeitsprünge: forschungen zur frühen neuzeit   ( ):  ­ ; kate flint, the victorians  and the visual imagination (cambridge: cambridge university press,  ); jutta schickore, the  microscope and the eye: a history of reflections  ­  (chicago: university of chicago press,  ).       techniques of geometrical projection.   by the end of the seventeenth century though,  pyrrhonic skeptics had mounted a significant attack on what they felt was the entirely  naïve and unrealistic promise of perspective.   in other words, they renounced the very  possibility of ever reconciling viewer and object.  clark explains that in response to this  attack, many intellectuals adopted a “constructive skepticism.”  this means that they  accepted the subjective qualities of seeing at the same time as they insisted that “modest  levels of certainty” could still be attained by using tools god had given mankind to  remedy this problem after the fall—the senses, intellect and new instruments like the  microscope.   but for some early eighteenth­century intellectuals, christian wolff for  example, a constructive skepticism was not enough.  accepting the impossibility of  resemblance, including the ability of geometrical projection techniques to reconcile  objects and their images, was a fundamentally hopeless act; it went against the very  mandate of improvement at the heart of pansophy.  viewer and object, objects and  images could be reconciled.  it was simply the visual aptitudes of individuals that needed  honing.  and it was through the conciliatory mathematical sciences that they could be  honed, or that individuals could learn how to see correctly.  during wolff’s tenure in  halle, pietists devised an ambitious program of visual education that drew readily from  wolff’s own attempts to standardize training in the mathematical sciences.            wolff, leibniz and other early eighteenth­century intellectuals’ (including  francke’s) interest in reconciliation, especially the refinement of conciliatory gestures,                                                     stuart clark, vanities of the eye: vision in early modern european culture (oxford: oxford university  press,  ).   for an introduction to skepticism see richard popkin, the history of scepticism from savonarola to  bayle (oxford: oxford university press,  ).   ibid.,  ­ .  for a study of the myriad problems protestant reformers had with skepticism in the  sixteenth­ and seventeenth­centuries, see robert rosin, reformers, the preacher and skepticism: luther,  brenz, melanchthon (mainz: verlag philipp von zabern,  ).      was closely connected to the peculiar contours and concerns of the culture they lived in.   the city of halle was, in this period, one of the most vibrant university towns in central  europe but was also reputed to have been extremely conflict­ridden, with constant  animosities brewing between the members of the theology faculty and everyone else.  while i certainly do not deny that there were several kinds of ideological or  epistemological disputes going on between the various faculties and personalities active  in halle in this period, historians’ and philosophers’ interest in the nuances of these  squabbles has meant that they have underemphasized the overwhelming interest in love  and reconciliation in halle in precisely this period.  this was an interest that captivated  all members of a consistently fractious literati.    halle’s university, founded in  , was deliberately constructed to become  prussia’s flagship centre of higher learning—one that would rival the leading european  universities of the day.  it was, like the city of halle itself, strategically located on the  fringes of an expanding brandenburg prussia—on the border of the kingdom of saxony,  with france and the netherlands to the west, the kingdoms of denmark and england to  the north, russia, the kingdom of poland, pomerania and silesia to the east and  switzerland, italy and austria­hungary to the south.   it was in the middle.  some would  say brandenburg­prussia was perfectly located at a kind of literal and figurative  crossroads; it was not only poised to mediate the confessional diversity of the holy  roman empire but the diversity of europe in general. the rulers of brandenburg                                                     for halle’s status as a residenzstadt for the bishops of magdeburg and the role that its precarious  “borderland” position played in urban politics before the electors of brandenburg gained control of it, see  andrea thiele, “grenzkonflikte und soziale verortung in der ‘residenz auf abruf: halle unter dem letzten  administrator des erzstifts magdeburg, herzog august von sachsen­weiβenfels ( ­ )” in christian  hochmuth, susanne rau eds. machträume der frühneuzeitliche stadt (konstanz: uvk verlagsgesellschaft,  ):  ­ .      (frederick i, whose official title was elector from   to   and king in prussia from   to  , and his son fredrick william i, who was king from   to  ) were  often likened to the biblical figure of solomon, whose wisdom had allowed him to  reconcile competing points of view and to rule according to universal principles that were  just and true.  both were extremely interested in the conciliatory potential of their  territories’ strategic geopolitical position, which they knew could only be strengthened by  confessional and cultural cohesiveness.     by this point brandenburg­prussia was a calvinist dynasty whose electors were  also convinced that there were political gains to be had by allowing persecuted  protestants from other parts of catholic europe settle in their territories.   it had adopted  and pursued a formal policy of religious toleration amicably disposed to the promise of  irenicism since the early seventeenth century.   in  , after the revocation of the edict  of nantes (which had allowed french protestants to practice their faith without fear in  french territory), friedrich i issued the edict of potsdam, inviting those effected by the  revocation to come to brandenberg­prussia.  approximately  ,  french huguenots  took him up on the offer and relocated to berlin.  several rapidly acquired elite posts in  the prussian governing apparatus and became involved in attempts to found an academy                                                     while the story of the hohenzollerns’ strategic conversion to calvinism, their interest in protestant union  and alliance with spener and francke has been told several times, it has mostly been viewed as an  opportunity to measure how the marriage of religion and political authority determines social change and  has contributed to “the rise” of modernity.  for an example of studies that have participated in this kind of  project, see robert merton, “puritanism, pietism and science, sociological review   ( ):  ­ ; mary  fulbrook, piety and politics: religion and the rise of absolutism in england, württemberg and prussia  (cambridge: cambridge university press,  ); marc raeff, the well­ordered police state: social and  institutional change through the law in the germanies and russia,  ­  (new haven: yale  university press,  ); richard gawthrop, pietism and the making of eighteenth­century prussia  (cambridge: cambridge university press,  ); and most recently phil gorsky, the disciplinary  revolution: calvinism and the rise of the state in early modern europe (chicago and london: university  of chicago press,  ).   see bodo nischan, “john bergius: irenicism and the beginning of official religious toleration in  brandenburg­prussia,” in church history  :  ( ):  ­ .      of science there;  a.h. francke was in contact with some of these individuals.   and  during his tenure in halle, francke interacted with intellectuals like christian thomasius,  who had been profoundly influenced by samuel pufendorf’s and hugo grotius’s efforts  to produce laws that were universally applicable and, therefore, better suited to  increasingly pluralistic metro poles.   this was a culture especially attuned to the ever  increasing varieties of difference in the world and consumed with the problem of how to  mediate this difference by creating truths that everyone could agree upon.       the need for universal truth manifested itself in every discipline, every situation,  including faith.  the electors of brandenburg­prussia, while nominally calvinist, prided  themselves on the confessional pluralism of their lands, as the edict of potsdam clearly  shows.  in a similar gesture ( ), fredrick william i would relocate a group of  protestants who had been driven out of salzburg to halle, where they too were integrated                                                     francke corresponded with charles ancillon ( ­ ), for example, who had produced a first hand  account of the hugenot removal to brandenburg­prussia soon after settling in berlin: histoire de  l'etablissement des françois refugiez dans les etats de son altesse electorale de brandenbourg  (berlin,  ).  for a discussion of ancillon’s impact on local efforts to start a science academy see a.v.  harnack, geschichte der kgl. preussischen akademie der wissenschaften zu berlin, vol.  ­  (berlin,  ).  for the important and often overlooked role of the swiss diplomat, ezechiel von spanheim in these  efforts, including his impact on leibniz, see ines böger, “der spanheim­kreis und seine bedeutung für  leibniz’ akademie pläne” in hans poser und albert heinekamp, leibniz in berlin: symposion der leibniz­ gesellschaft… (stuttgart: albert heinekamp,  ).   thomasius was a law professor who also directed the university and frequently associated with francke.   see thomas ahnert, religion and the origins of the german enlightenment: faith and the reform of  learning in the thought of christian thomasius (rochester, n.y.: university of rochester press,  ) and  max fleischmann, christian thomasius: leben und lebenswerk (halle,  ; aalen: scientia­verlag,  ).  for some recent work on pufendorf that explores his influence on thomasius (leibniz and wolff  too) see timothy hochstrasser, natural law theories in the early enlightenment (cambridge: cambridge  university press,  ).   for grotius’ influence on pufendorf see knud haakonssen ed., grotius,pufendorf  and modern natural law (aldershot [u.a.]: ashgate/dartmouth,  ).  pufendorf’s on the duty of man and  citizen according to natural law has been translated in printed by cambridge press ( ).  for grotius and  skepticism see thomas mautner, “grotius and the skeptics” in journal for the history of ideas  :   (october  ):  ­ . hugo grotius was a famous child prodigy from holland who wrote de veritate  religionis christianae [on the truth of the christian religion] (paris,  )—which was widely distributed  and translated.   lorraine daston and peter galison, objectivity (new york: zone books,  ).   http://haweb .bibliothek.uni-halle.de: /db= /set= /ttl= /mat=/nomat=t/clk?ikt= &trm=grotius http://haweb .bibliothek.uni-halle.de: /db= /set= /ttl= /mat=/nomat=t/clk?ikt= &trm=pufendorf http://haweb .bibliothek.uni-halle.de: /db= /set= /ttl= /mat=/nomat=t/clk?ikt= &trm=and http://haweb .bibliothek.uni-halle.de: /db= /set= /ttl= /mat=/nomat=t/clk?ikt= &trm=modern http://haweb .bibliothek.uni-halle.de: /db= /set= /ttl= /mat=/nomat=t/clk?ikt= &trm=natural http://haweb .bibliothek.uni-halle.de: /db= /set= /ttl= /mat=/nomat=t/clk?ikt= &trm=law     into a multi­confessional landscape.   early eighteenth­century halle had a fairly large  jewish community, a reformed community, a few catholics and a substantial population  of lutherans—many of whom were not interested in actively participating in the  spenerian reforms francke was initiating there.  it was a microcosm of the entire  prussian principality and the empire; a place where new strategies or methods for  enforcing unilateralism, cohesiveness and universality could be tried out.  the debates  about which methods to adopt were often fierce and divisive but, in principle, they were  mostly debates about how to get along—how to create a society where violent conflict no  longer existed and where people of every imaginable creed, culture and class, could join  together in love and harmony.    one can see this interest in even just a cursory glance at the kinds of texts being  published by the wide assortment of intellectuals—and these literally were some of  central europe’s most brilliant minds—who were lured to halle in the first decades of  the eighteenth century to participate in what must be understood as a collective  experiment in the institutionalization of love.  francke preached and wrote often about  love in halle, following in the footsteps the early advocates of spiritual regeneration who  had influenced him, like johann arndt.   christian thomasius urged the members of the                                                     for an enjoyable account of this story see mack walker’s the salzburg transaction: expulsion and  redemption in the eighteenth century (ithaca: cornell university press,  ).   to be clear, i am not insisting that a preoccupation with methods of reconciliation was an exclusively  prussian phenomenon. however, given brandenburg­prussia’s interest in institutionalizing various  expressions of reconciliation at this time, it became an especially powerful force here. several texts  promoting a consilia of theologians had come out of wittenberg university in the  s, for example;  joachim pollio had written about this already in the  s.  see consilia theologica witebergensia  (frankfurt,  ) and joachim pollio, consiliorum theologicorum centuria ... oder theologisch fragbuch  (leipzig,  ).   for example arndt’s, vier uralte geistreiche büchlein ... ii. von der holdseligen liebe gottes (frankfurt,  ); august herman francke, philotheia, oder die liebe zu gott : der jugend in den schulen des  wäysen­hauses zu glaucha an halle, als ihre allerhöchste und theureste pflicht, nach gehaltenem  examine, den  . martii   vorgestellet und übergeben (halle: waysenhaus,  ); idem, die erste  liebe zum herrn jesu: aus dem evangelischen text luc. ii,  ­  ; am sonntag nach dem christ­tage in      new university community that he addressed in a   inaugural speech to pursue union  (einigkeit) and conciliation (vermahnung) at every turn.   these metaphors figure  extensively in his writings as well—including, for example, a   treatise that offered  tips for cultivating impassioned reason, or linking up the mind and the heart.   johann  franz buddeus, who taught theology in halle from   to   before accepting a post  in nearby jena, produced an introduction to contemporary religious controversies, an  introduction to caspar sandhagen’s harmonie of the four evangelists, a dictionary of  the patriarchs, prophets and apostles emphasizing their love and divinely inspired  wisdom, a dissertation on imposing religious concord among christians via civil statutes  (published by the halle orphanage press), a “discourse on the causes and ways of freeing  intellectuals from their defects and misery” through love, a preface to martin musig’s  treatise on the light of wisdom, and several introductions to the elements of an “eclectic  philosophy”—which i will explore in chapter two.   suffice it to say that buddeus, like                                                                                                                                                    der s. ulrichs­kirche in halle (waysenhaus,  ); idem, die beschauung der geoffenbarten ewigen liebe  gottes ... : am tage der verkündigung mariae   in der st. ulrichs­kirchen in halle vorgestellet  (waysenhaus,  ).   christian thomasius,. bey der inauguration der friederichs­universität zu halle, denen gesamten  professoribus so theuer anbefohlenen einigkeit, sich selbst eine nachdrückliche und scharffe lection, und  wiederholet als ein wiederhall die empfehlung gleicher einigkeit in einer treugemeinten vermahnung an  die gesamte studierende jugend (halle,  ).   ibid. von der artzeney wieder die unvernünftige liebe, und der zuvor nöthigen erkäntniß sein selbst.  oder: ausübung der sitten­lehre... (halle,  ).  for the meaning of consilia as a legal term in the first  half of the eighteenth­century, see werner kellner, consilia hallensium jureconsultorum: die  spruchpraxis der halleschen juristenfakultät in der ersten hälfte des achtzehnten jahrhunderts  (magdeburg,  ).   johann franz buddeus,  historische und theologische einleitung in die vornehmsten religions­ streitigkeiten (jena,  ); caspar hermann sandhagens, kurtze einleitung zur harmonie der vier  evangelisten und der geschichte der apostel: ... auch einem vorberichte von denen scriptoribus  harmonicis vermehret; nebst einer vorrede tit. hrn. jo. franc. buddei, ( berlin,  ); allgemeines  historisches lexicon: in welchem das leben und die thaten derer patriarchen, propheten, apostel ... in  alphabetischer ordnung mit bewehrten zeugnissen vorgestellet werden (leipzig,  ­ );  de  concordia religionis christianae statvsqve civilis (halae saxonum: orphanotropheum,  ); martin  musig, licht der weißheit: in denen nöthigsten stücken der wahren gelehrsamkeit, zur erkänntniß  menschlicher und göttlicher dinge, nach anleitung der philosophischen und theologischen grund­sätze  (frankfurt/leipzig,  ­ ); for some treatment of the metaphors of reconciliation and unity in buddeus’      so many of his colleagues, spent his entire academic career patching together a coherent  philosophical framework for reconciling competing epistemologies via a return to the  basic, moral principles contained in the bible, or the fundamental and unifying love and  obedience of the apostles.   he embraced and helped construct a moral philosophy that  was fundamentally theological; he and his colleagues aimed for no difference between  the two disciplines.  his contributions found their institutional outlet in the halle  orphanage, which published several of buddeus’s writings and assimilated his  formulation of a “christian philosophy” into its complex epistemological landscape.   like francke, buddeus was also a member of the berlin academy of science.   buddeus, francke and his colleague christoph semler, whose efforts to start a  school for the teaching of the mathematical and mechanical sciences in halle coincided  with francke’s tenure there, were interested in what they often called “true christianity”  (wahres christentum) but what was also sometimes referred to as “original” or  “primitive” christianity.   in his primitive christianity revived, william whiston ( ­ ) had defined a primitive christianity as one that was oriented around intensive  scrutiny of the words of christ and those that were closest to him.   this was a central                                                                                                                                                    work see friederike nüssel, bund und versöhnung: zur begründung der dogmatik bei johann franz  buddeus (göttingen: vandenhoeck & ruprecht,  ).    this was not only a preoccupation of german theologians.  the french mathematician and theologian,  bernard lamy ( ­ ) also produced a tract about the harmony or concordia of the four gospels that  was quite influential: harmonia, sive concordia quatuor evangelistarum (paris,  ).   francke joined the berlin academy on october  ,   and buddeus shortly after, on december  st.   see chapter three.     primitive christianity also involved careful attention to the patriarchs and prophets of the old testament;  see, for example, christoph semler’s antiquitäten der heiligen schrifft, oder biblische fragen, von dem  paradise, archa noä ... welche der jugend zum unterricht und denen gelehrten zur repitition (halle:  renger,  ;  ;  ;  ­ ) or his description of solomon’s temple, der tempel salomonis  (halle: waysenhaus,  ).   william whiston, primitive christianity reviv’d: in four volumes. vol. i. containing the epistles of  ignatius, ... vol. ii. the apostolical constitutions, ... vol. iii. an essay on those apostolical constitutions.  vol. iv. an account of the primitive faith … (london,  ); william whiston, primitive christianity  reviv’d. volume v, containing the recognitions of clement: or the travels of peter (london,  ).   http://haweb .bibliothek.uni-halle.de: /db= /set= /ttl= /mat=/nomat=t/clk?ikt= &trm=der http://haweb .bibliothek.uni-halle.de: /db= /set= /ttl= /mat=/nomat=t/clk?ikt= &trm=tempel http://haweb .bibliothek.uni-halle.de: /db= /set= /ttl= /mat=/nomat=t/clk?ikt= &trm=salomonis     preoccupation for francke, who, following in the footsteps of the theologian johann  conrad dannhauer ( ­ ) and spener, placed a rigorous method of interpretation, or  hermeneutics, at the centre of their reformative programs.  if “true christianity” or love  held the key to the reconciliation of all forms of knowledge, then understanding every  aspect of the actual words of christ, love incarnate, and those who knew him best was  exceedingly important.  only when these words were grasped more effectively would  reconciliation be more likely to occur.  francke endeavored to teach his students how to  access the “living” word of god by seeking out the spirit behind the text, including the  affective state in which the text itself had been written.   he was a hermeneutical master  and extended his careful scrutiny of the words of christ and his apostles to interpretations  of old testament texts as well.  hermeneutics offered francke a means of actively  participating in ongoing efforts to construct the perfect conciliatory methodology in halle  because adopting a hermeneutical approach in any context involves opening oneself up to  the intrinsic subjectivity of interpretation.  francke’s central contribution to his  colleagues’ collaborative (but not always congenial) attempts to produce perfect universal  truths was his insistence on the intrinsic subjectivity of the entire project.  if competing  epistemologies, including creeds, could only be reconciled in the heart, then the entire  project could only be carried out by using the heart to assimilate the literal, figurative and  affective messages of god’s word.  this meant being open or receptive to the myriad                                                     to interpret the “literal meaning” of a biblical text, francke argued that one needed to “distinguish  between the concrete intention of the author (literalis) and the hidden intention of god in the historical  matters of fact (mysticus).” those who had not experienced a true conversion could still do this kind of  exegesis at the theoretical level (cognitio literalis) but only those who were reborn could obtain a higher,  “living” knowledge (cognitio spiritualis) that would allow them to “assimilate” the subjective scopus they  brought to bear on the scriptures (or the own unique edificatory needs stemming from the state of their  will—a province of the passions or affections) with the objective scopus of the scriptures themselves.  see  markus matthias, “august hermann francke,” in carter lindberg ed., the pietist theologians.  i am  grateful to simon grote for his help with navigating the often strenuous terrain of franckean theology.      personalities one encountered in the bible in order to discern the truths that their words  and their deeds offered the reader.  it follows that those theologians who offered  hermeneutical readings of texts usually attached a great deal of importance to the act of  being able to understand something from someone else’s point of view.    seeing, understanding, accepting and assimilating a rival stance was an act of love  and the key to reconciliation.  to help individuals understand and appreciate this, several  introductions to the fundamentals of consilia—which can mean a collaborative advisory  body or council and also sense, invention or the capacity for judgment—began  circulating at this time.  philip jakob spener, who spent the last years of his life in berlin  as a court preacher and could therefore closely monitor (and influence) the climate in  halle, wrote about consilia, especially the pressing question of how to bring together the  mind and the heart.   if people thought with their hearts, or became entirely unselfish  and loving creatures, then their inquiries into nature and forms of insight always, without  fail, would improve and perfect the world, not denigrate or corrode it.  sträter is one of  the few scholars to have actually addressed this specific concern of spener’s in a broader  context and has noted that it was also a pressing concern of veit ludwig von  seckendorff, for example, who was active in halle in the years immediately preceding  the founding of the university.   we see it represented in carl hildebrand von  canstein’s version of the harmonie of the four evangelists, printed by the halle  orphanage press in   and often associated with francke’s movement.   we also see                                                     philipp jakob spener, consilia et judicia theologica latina (frankfurt,  )   especially in veit ludwig von seckendorff’s christen staat (leipzig,  ;  ).   carl hildebrand freyherrn von canstein, harmonie und auslegung der heiligen vier evangelisten. oder  die schriften der evangelisten,in eine zusammenfügung gebracht, und nach ihrem wort­verstande von  versicul zu versicul erkläret, samt daraus gezogenen lehren und erbaulichen anmerckungen (halle:  waysenhaus,  ).      it in the writings and preoccupations of daniel ernst jablonski, who would establish, with  leibniz, the berlin society for the study of mathematics and physics in   as an  expression of this conciliatory ethos.   jablonski also routinely stressed his conviction  that the anglican liturgy held the key to unifying all protestants.  situated in a formally  calvinist principality that was increasingly receptive to the spenerian reform of orthodox  lutheranism, jablonski tried to introduce a third and tangible object, the liturgy of the  church of england, which could serve, like the orphanage, as a neutral space for the  reconciliation of dogmas.  with all of this in mind, it becomes especially hard to separate pietists out of the  early enlightenment context in which they operated.  and yet, this is precisely what has  happened.  despite recent attempts by david sorkin, james bradley, dale van kley and  several others to illustrate how the enlightenment itself was “a product of religious  debate and not merely a rebellion against it,” that it emerged out of theological  discussions and controversies, there remains a very persistent tendency to want to see  pietism as something distinctly different from enlightenment, in a kind of contest with  it.   in effect, pietism has its own, entirely separate historiography that has been  relegated to the margins of a much broader historiography of enlightenment—one that  readily accepts figures like thomasius but not francke because, well, he was a “pietist.”   those working on the problem today will willingly talk about the “reception” of what                                                     dietrich meyer, “daniel ernst jablonski und seine unionspläne” in: harm klüting ed. irenik und  antikonfessionalismus im  . und  . jahrhundert hildesheim: olms,  ):   ­ .   james e. bradley and dale k. van kley eds. religion and politics in enlightenment europe (notre  dame,  ); david sorkin, “reclaiming theology for the enlightenment: the case of siegmund jacob  baumgarten ( ­ )” in central european history  :  ( ):  ­ .  evidence of the retinence of  the pietism/enlightenment dichotomy include: martin gierl,  pietismus und aufklärung: theologische  polemik und die kommunikationsreform der wissenschaft am ende des  .jahrhunderts (göttingen,  )  and josef neumann und udo stäter eds.. das kind in pietismus und aufklärung (tübingen: max niemeyer  verlag,  ).      they imagine as solid, active and preordained “enlightenment ideas” affiliated with  figures like thomasius and christian wolff on a pietist collective that then gets portrayed  as passive, predictable and otherworldly.  some insist on even exchange between the two  sites, between “the pietists” and “the enlightened luminaries,” with “the pietists”  sometimes getting to serve as the active agents.  but i think my project demonstrates that  neither of these configurations works very well.  on the contrary, it shows that what we  now like to call enlightenment, or “enlightenment ideas,” were by no means solid or pre­ determined “truths” that somehow, through a series of complicated circumstances, get  “discovered” and held up in the early eighteenth century.   instead, my project offers an  opportunity to see how these ideas—this unique configuration of knowledge that  coalesced to produce the first pietist orphanage and the practices it contained—get  constructed and how pietists were intimately involved in constructing them.    in eighteenth­century halle, some pietists got to be enlightened luminaries and  vice versa.  there were not two distinct sites or insurmountable boundaries between  individuals like thomasius and francke; or even francke and wolff.  this does not  mean, of course, that there were not differences.  but when situated within a wider  culture of reconciliation, the lines between pietism and enlightenment dissolve into a set  of problems that all learned individuals in the early eighteenth century felt urgently called  upon to resolve.  their methods of resolution were frequently pedagogical in nature but  very often emphasized the need for neutrality and universality, for untouched third                                                     and then parsed up into smaller categories like “religious enlightenment,” “radical enlightenment,”  “moderate enlightement” or “mainstream enlightenment.” i agree with david sorkin, who laments the  manner in which eighteenth­century theology has been treated both by theologians (who have presented it  as largely derivative) and students of enlightenment, who have considered as “beyond their purview.”  this  neglect has adversely affected our understanding of eighteenth­century halle and its significance.  see  david sorkin, “geneva’s ‘enlightened orthodoxy’” the middle way of jacob vernet ( ­ )” in  church history. studies in christianity and culture   (march  ):  .        spaces, where competing programs, ideologies, epistemologies could be made to cohere  in entirely new ways.  i think that this is why the program of spenerian reform held such  an enormous appeal to usually pious intellectuals in this context; it held up the heart as  that third space.  this is one way of explaining why three­dimensional models became so  important to this community as well (see chapter five).  models were neutral, third sites,  where individuals could see reconciliation occurring before their eyes—a process that  increased their desire, their ability to love and ultimately helped them obtain higher  modes of understanding.  comenius’s ability to link the heart and eye in his scheme of  pansophic regeneration appealed to a culture absolutely enthralled with perspective, with  light, with projective technologies, microscopes and with the eminent possibility resident  in the very act of observation.               if we try for a moment not to think of pietism and enlightenment as separate  categories and situate early eighteenth­century halle in the culture of conciliatory  observation and exercise that i think more accurately defines it, several new ways of  understanding the differences that let to the famous ousting of christian wolff from the  university of halle emerge as well.  by the middle of the eighteenth century, christian  wolff had acquired an international reputation as one of europe’s premier philosophes;  for many he was literally the symbol of enlightenment, the physical embodiment of  reason’s victory over superstition.  but during the years upon which this study is focused,  wolff was a young, gifted and ambitious mathematician, whose tenure in halle (he  arrived in  ) coincided with francke’s efforts to grow and perfect his project.  the  extent of their conversations and interaction with each other is mostly unknown;  however, considering francke’s role in securing wolff’s banishment, it would seem that      they did not get along very well.  according to the traditional telling of the story, on july  nd,  , christian wolff gave a speech marking the end of his tenure as pro­rector of  the university of halle that he dedicated to the “practical philosophy” of the chinese.   wolff had long championed the merits of “practical philosophy” and his thoughts about  chinese morality represented no major departure from leibniz and francke’s own  thoughts on the issue (see chapter three).   the speech was instantly sensationalized.  two years after he delivered it, he would be charged with corrupting the youth through  the proffering of dangerous, atheistic doctrines and ordered to leave the city.     the bold quality of the confucius speech, combined with the dramatic  circumstances surrounding wolff’s leaving, was great entertainment. it became a legend  while wolff was still alive because it perfectly illustrated the kind of story many  contemporaries believed needed to be told.  it even had a happy ending.  wolff, the  persecuted and wise protagonist, would eventually be asked to come back to halle in  what was heralded as reason’s triumphant return—and eminent victory—over religious  enthusiasm, dogma and ignorance.   pietists in halle were portrayed as having lost their  battle to prevent reason’s “rise” above all other existing forms of knowledge.  in the wake  of the controversy, several anti­wolff texts were printed on the halle orphanage press  and widely distributed.  francke’s colleague in the university theology faculty, joachim  lange, was especially indisposed towards wolff (for reasons that to date have not been  adequately explained) and saw the speech as an opportunity to take action.  he led an all                                                     it was later published as oratio de sinarum philosophia practica (frankfurt am main: andreae & hort.,  ); idem. rede über die praktische philosophie der chinesen, trans. michael albrecht (hamburg: felix  meiner,  ).     see his philosophia practica universalis, mathematica methodo conscripta (leipzig,  ) for example.   when the decree came down from friedrich wilhelm, wolff was given   hours to remove himself from  prussian territory under penalty of death; he fled almost immediately and found refuge in the university  town of marburg, where he held a professorship until his return to halle in  .      out campaign against wolff, both before and after the ousting, and was able to mobilize  certain members of francke’s organization, including the halle orphanage printing press,  around his cause.    francke’s role in this entire incident is noticeably and mysteriously minor; it is  clear from a letter wolff wrote to him in   that he found something about wolff  “distasteful” and he was willing to use his influence at court in berlin to persuade the  king to take action.   but why?  again, to adequately explain this, the traditional  categories of francke vs. wolff (i.e. enlightenment) do not work.  on the eve of wolff’s  departure, francke frequently visited his colleague christoph semler, who reportedly  remained neutral throughout the controversy, to learn about the mechanical models  semler was building; his schools had integrated wolff’s beginner’s guide to the  mathematical sciences into their curriculum.   both francke and wolff were members  of the berlin academy of science.  in the early years of his project, francke had also  personally met and corresponded with two individuals who had both played pivotal roles  in wolff’s own intellectual development and orientation—e.w. von tschirnhaus and  g.w. leibniz (see chapters one and three, respectively).  a major clue for understanding the tension between wolff and francke that  allows us to escape illusory polarities can be found in wolff’s autobiography.  he states  quite clearly that francke’s main problem with him or the “cause of the whole thing was”  that the pietist professor had become convinced, “through experience,” that “he could not                                                     afst/h c  :  [july  ,  ] “warum meine neulich gehalten oration allen membris ihrer facultät  anstössig vorkommen, kan ich nicht begreiffen. ... solte ihnen bleiben meine oration zu schelten, so kann  ich es willig geschehen lassen, und versichere dass ich deswegen kein beschwerde schweren will. ich will  sie nur drucken lassen und an alle orte in europa wo gelehrte sind hinschicken: ich trage keine zweiffel,  sie wird so wohl aufgenommen wurden, wie meine ubrige sachen die nicht nach ihren geschmack sind....”.   i am grateful to udo sträter for pointing me to the various sections in francke’s diary where he notes his  visits with semler.        make someone into a christian by handing them euclid.”   while this statement is quite  revealing, it is also misleading in that it implies that francke had a radically different  (anti­mathematics, anti­reason) program than wolff.  but wolff’s program, as i will  show in chapter four and throughout most of part ii, fit in many ways quite nicely with  francke’s own.  his was also a universalizing program that privileged the unifying and  perfecting potential of “the mathematical sciences” because of their ability to reconcile  through visual exercise.  just as leibniz championed the materiality of philosophy— concrete strategies for making knowledge useful and beneficial to society as a whole— wolff saw his systematization of the mathematical sciences as a set of conciliatory, visual  practices that were useful or widely applicable.  geometrical projection was a perfect  expression of the union between a divinely inspired, intuitive reason needed to grasp  higher mathematics and experience, or the properties of a substance that presented itself  to be measured; and it was through rigorous exercise in the mathematical sciences that  one perfected one’s self—both the higher and lower faculties of one’s spirit or soul.    wolff, following tschirnhaus, wrote often in his early years in halle about the  potential of the mathematical sciences, and of measurement, to produce virtuous,  christian subjects by enhancing their ability to understand.   training in these sciences  conditioned conciliatory personalities or made one predisposed to consilia first and  produced virtuous, moral, loving or christian subjects second, as the end or net result;                                                     heinrich wuttke, christian wolffs lebensbeschreibung (leipzig,  ):  ­ .  “unter den theologis  war ohnedem h. francke der meinung, er könnte einen zu keinen christen machen, der den euclidem  studirte, wie er solches ausdrücklich gegen den seel.h.prof.mathes.zu erfurt rudolph sagte, als er ihm  rieth, er möchte der jugend auf dem waysenhause und paedagogio den euclidem in die hand geben, ob er  ihm gleich keine raison geben konnte, sondern sich blos auf die erfahrung berufte.”   christianwolff,  wie die messkunst den menschlichen verstand ausnehmend bessere [october,  ] in  wolffs gesammlete kleine philosophische schriften, (halle,  ):   ­ .  reprinted in christian wolff,  gesammelte werke (hereafter gesammelte werke) j.École, h. w. arndt, ch. a. corr, j. e. hoffmann and  m. thomann eds. (hildesheim: georg olms,  ) part one: volume  ­ .      geometrical exercise turned people into christians, in wolff’s view.  the curricula of his  schools suggest that francke was willing to initially accept or to assimilate this point of  view; however, by  , his organization was not willing to endorse it entirely.   the  mathematical sciences remained embedded in the curricula of the stiftungen schools,  even the lower ones, throughout the wolff controversy, and i think francke appreciated  their ability to bring together cognition and experience as “middling,” vision­oriented  disciplines.  however, the pietist professor’s understanding of spiritual exercise seems to  have become less hierarchical than wolff’s, whose comments also confirm that  experience had convinced francke that a rigorous training program in geometry was not  enough to turn anyone into a virtuous, christian subject.  by  , his organization began  requiring letters of introduction by a family member or patron who could vouch for the  spiritual gifts already visually manifest in a potential pupil.   not just anyone would  benefit from the conciliatory exercises of francke’s schools.  only those who had been  designated, on account of the things they said and did (visible signs), as especially gifted  could come and train here.  i do not think this was intended to always be the case.  as the  project grew, intensified and more orphanages were built, more children could train and  participate.  but in this initial stage, francke had learned from experience, it was best not  to orient the conciliatory program around just anybody—only those who seemed                                                     it is not a coincidence that this same year, the halle orphanage press produced an updated or improved  version of the new method; hieronymous freyer, verbesserte methode der ädagogium regium, glaucha  (halle: waysenhaus,  ):  .   francke stipulated that even poor children now needed proof of legitimate birth to be considered for  admittance and a letter from their patrons or guardians; see august hermann francke, kurzer nachricht  von den ordinairen und extraordinairen tischen im waysenhause zu glaucha an halle, in rosemarie  ahrbeck­wothge, "Über die tischordnung und die aufnahmebedingungen des waisenhauses aus dem  jahre  ," a.h.francke: das humanistische erbe des grossen erziehers (halle,  ):  ­ .  several  letters describing the special gifts and potential of children by their parents and patrons still reside in  francke’s archive.        exceptionally promising or whose parents could finance their children’s stay in the  schulstadt.    francke was also convinced, as leibniz was at one time, of the necessity for a  third, neutral or extended space (an orphanage, a voluntary society of the love of god) for  reconciliation to occur.  this neutral space mimicked or signified the manner in which  the heart reconciled.  in wolff’s view, reconciliation occurred in the act of geometrical  projection; when one used an instrument to take precise measurements, the act itself was  a single and unifying conciliatory gesture that improved or made the actor more virtuous  or loving as the net result.  in francke’s view, we could not be certain that love and virtue  would result.  love needed to be integrated into the act of measuring, into the very  moment of the gesture—otherwise the gesture itself was not truly conciliatory.  one  needed to measure, to practice the mathematical science, in love—in a third, extended  site or state.  one did this by embracing the “seeing heart,” following comenius and  spener, as the neutral space where reason and experience came together.  like a three­ dimensional model, or a pietist orphanage, the site itself—in this case the heart, which  served as a kind of eye—offered new opportunities to bring one’s desire, one’s passion or  affections, one’s aesthetic sensibility to bear upon mathematics, physics and the entire  project of reconciliation.    the problem was that the passions, while powerful, were unpredictable—and  even dangerous.  they also had a bad reputation as something that religious enthusiasts,  or schwärmer, let get the better of them, which explained why they claimed to see and  know things that others did not.  fears concerning the devastation, even madness, that an  unhabituated passion could cause kept most people from seeing, realizing and drawing      upon the potential of their passions.   spener and francke’s movement promised to help  people do just this.  francke’s institutes offered exercises that were intended to “stir up,”  in a controlled or carefully regulated manner, individuals’ passions, their love, and help  them undergo an authentic conversion to “true” christianity at the same time as these  individuals were offered training in the mathematical sciences.  geometrical exercise was  only one expression of a set of unifying spiritual exercises, such as singing arias or  meditating on the bible, which needed to be engaged in all at once.  for francke and the  theologis, as wolff called them, geometry alone could not produce christians; it  contributed to a much more broadly conceived but always vision oriented project that  also involved rigorous exercise of the body, or motion, and manipulation of the active  principles of various substances.  true christians embraced and exploited both the  teachings of the aristotelians and the platonists—assimilating them in their hearts.  true  christians, whose senses and cognition had been enhanced by geometrical exercise, felt  geometry—for them thinking and experiencing were conjoined in the same act, and it  was an act of love.      when the mathematical sciences are situated at the centre of attempts to explain  the differences between wolff and francke, we see that it was not necessarily their  oppositional stances relative to some universal standard of enlightenment that animated  them but their differing opinions about how to reconcile, about how to construct  universally valid, sustainable and ethical ways of knowing the world.  they had much                                                     see adrian johns’ discussion of the passions in the nature of the book: print and knowledge in the  making (chicago: university of chicago press,  ): esp.  ­ .  descartes also intensively studied the  passions; like many others, he wanted to understand the manner in which the passions mingled (in the  common sense or some neutral, third site) with the perceptions of images contained in the brain.  see gary  hatfield “descartes’ physiology and its relation to his psychology” in john cottingham ed. the  cambridge companion to descartes (cambridge: cambridge university press,  ).       more in common with one another than they did antagonisms; however, one can see how  in stressing the love of christ and conversion (which he did often) as central to his own  project, it was easy for non­theologians to disregard francke as someone who had  deliberately placed himself in opposition to modernity.  this was, of course, simply not  the case; and i think the chapters that follow illustrate quite clearly how and why training  in geometrical projection (as well as mechanics, astronomy etc.) was a central part of  pietist pedagogy.  pietist philanthropy, then, becomes a visible extension or expression of  the conciliatory exercises contained in the halle orphanage, or the city of schools it  signified.   participating in this new philanthropic enterprise as a teacher, as a student or  pupil, as a missionary, as a benefactor or even simply as an interested observer, was a  conciliatory gesture because it arose out of and engendered more love.  when pietist philanthropy is understood (as its contemporaries understood it) as a  collection of vision­oriented conciliatory practices, the halle orphanage’s status as  assimilatory edifice and not a civic “relief institution” also becomes clearer.  those who  have studied its institutional structure, such as thomas müller­bahlke and juliane jacobi,  have already called into question francke’s interest in and ability to house “poor  orphans.”   the detailed lists of children who were housed in the facility show minimal  numbers of truly destitute and abandoned children and instead present large numbers of  children from the middling and higher estates—many of whom often had living family  members and whose fathers were clergymen.  in some ways this should come as no  surprise since most early modern german orphanages were built to house children of                                                     juliane jacobi, “’man hatte von ihm gute hoffnung’. die soziale kontur der halleschen waisenkinder”  and thomas müller­bahlke, “die frühe verwaltungsstrukturen der franckeschen stiftungen,” in udo  sträter, joseph n. neumann and renate wilson eds., waisenhäuser in der frühen neuzeit (halle: verlag  der franckeschen stiftungen,  ):  ­ .  see also benjamin marschke’s review in pietismus und  neuzeit   ( ):  ­ .      “legitimate” or “honorable” parentage, whose parents were members of the civic  community; truly destitute and abandoned children were usually taken care of in hospitals  and sometimes even prisons.   in this case, the status of francke’s orphanage as a “relief  institution” has been complicated by the legacy of p. j. spener’s founding of an  orphanage/workhouse in frankfurt a. m. in   that actually endeavored to service  destitute communities.   because of francke’s status as spener’s protégé, he was able to  align himself with spener’s commitment to solving the problem of poverty at the same  time as he, as udo sträter has also confirmed, founded a very different kind of  orphanage.      long standing hagiographic portrayals of francke have tended to stress his  compassion for the poor and destitute children he encountered playing in the slums  outside of halle when he first arrived there and insisted that this is why he decided to  build his orphanage.   obviously my work directly challenges this assertion in light of                                                     thomas safely’s work on the city orphanages of augsburg offers an overview of how civic orphanages  worked.  see his charity and economy in the orphanages of early modern augsburg (atlantic highlands,  nj:  humanities press international,  ) and his most recent children of the laboring poor: expectation  and experience among the orphans of early modern augsburg (leiden; boston: brill,  ).  otto  ulbricht has argued that before   there were few foundling hospitals in central europe that would  accept illegitimate or otherwise dishonorable children.  they were often “sent to houses of correction to  live with criminals and the insane,” he writes.  see his “foundling hospitals in enlightenment germany:  infanticide, illegitimacy and infant mortality rates,” central european history   ( ):  .  however,  safely (ibid.) provides some evidence that city orphanage inspectors often looked the other way and took in  dishonorable children when no other alternative existed.     udo sträter, "pietismus und sozialtätigkeit: zur frage nach der wirkungsgeschichte des 'waisenhauses'  in halle und des frankfurter armen­, waisen­ und arbeitshauses" in pietismus und neuzeit   ( ):  .   ibid., esp.  ­ .   examples of nineteenth­century hagiographic portrayals of francke include karl richter’s introduction  to a.h. francke’s schriften über erziehung und unterricht  (berlin,  ), gustav kramer, august  hermann francke: ein lebensbild.  two vols. (hildesheim,  ­ ); and gerhard uhlhorn’s die  christliche liebestätigkeit (darmstadt,  ):  ­ .  contemporary historians have continued to rely on  these portrayals for their own understanding of francke’s project. melton (relying on richter) writes that  francke’s first orphanage school “was originally a charitable institution for the children of beggars and  similarly destitute parents” that “gained such a reputation for piety and orderliness that artisans and middle­ class parents began enrolling their children as well;” in absolutism and the eighteenth­century origins of  compulsory schooling in prussia and austria,  ­ . on the contrary, i contend that from the very  beginning, francke set out to construct a educational community modeled after jesuit colleges and saw      recent scholarship and my own discovery, while working in the geheimes staatsarchiv  preuβischer kulturbesitz in berlin, that in   a very detailed proposal was drawn up by  civic authorities in halle that involved the construction of a city orphanage.   clearly,  francke’s orphanage was not meeting local needs.  as we have already seen, francke  required letters from patrons and proof of status to gain entry into the enclosed  schulstadt, which functioned more like an elite boarding school than a relief institution.   most of the children housed there came from places well beyond halle: including  leipzig, dresden, berlin, magdeburg, hamburg, heidelberg, frankfurt am main, gotha,  erfurt, weimar, and zörbig.  four thirteen­year­old boys arrived from london on  december  ,  ; they were housed in the orphanage and would attend halle’s  university.   by  , francke’s organization had taken in four boys from schlesien,  one from prague and one from holland; his international contacts continued to send  gifted children from as far away as moscow, sweden and denmark.   clearly, the halle  orphanage is better understood as an assimilatory showplace (schauplatz) that signified  the set of conciliatory practices contained inside of it.  it was associated with halle’s  university and the berlin academy of science as a kind of visual “trophy” of the ruling  elite who had allowed it to exist, often referred to as an orphanotropheum.  pietists were  not the only builders of orphanotropheums but they seem to have been the first to have  seized upon the use of this specific terminology.  following their lead, the catholic                                                                                                                                                    potential in the edifice of the orphanage as a symbol of universal benevolence.  like other contemporary  orphanages, it housed mostly children from legitimate families.  while i concede that at the very beginning  there were some attempts to house and educate poor children (such as nikolaus krell, whose story is  conveyed in the waisenalbum), this was always done in conjunction with the original vision.     gspk i h rep.   nr.  b ( ­ ):     bilder,  ­ .   discussed by thomas müller­bahlke in “introduction,” um gott zu ehren und zu des landes besten. die  franckeschen stiftungen und preuβen: aspekte einer alten allianz (halle: franckesche stiftungen,  ):  .   juliane jacobi ed., "man hatte von ihm gute hoffnung": das waisenalbum der franckeschen stiftungen,  ­  (halle: franckesche stiftungen,  ):  .      prince­bishop of breslau, franz ludwig von pfalz­neuburg ( ­ ), opened one in  —at precisely the same moment the new catholic university of breslau (christian  wolff’s home town) opened its doors.  this same year, francke published two thorough descriptions of the organization  and teaching art of the schools that belong to the orphanage and the pädagogium.      he wanted to show his reader “how the children in and outside of school, are directed in  christian behavior (zucht), reading, writing, calculating, music and other useful  things.”   by this point, still in the early stages of the project, there were approximately   schools operating on the premises of the schulstadt plus the pädagogium.  in the first  three or most advanced orphanage schools, francke explained, “the boys are not only  taught to write and to calculate, but are also given lessons at certain hours in history,  geography, physics and botany, as well as music and mathematics (mathesis).”    because his plans had included the establishment of an elite boarding school for children  of titled parents, who were paying for their education, francke seems to have been  compelled to add the following note, “it is important to know though that even though the  boys in these three schools or classes are taught the same languages and sciences, they do  not belong to the pädagogium.  this is another institution (anstalt) wherein only those  boys are taught who can pay for their lessons so that they do not entirely belong to the                                                     a.h. francke, ordnung und lehr­art, wie selbige in denen zum wäysen­hause gehörigen schulen  eingeführet ist: worinnen vornemlich zu befinden, wie die kinder in und ausser der schul in christlicher  zucht zu halten, und zum lesen, zierlichen schreiben, rechnen, wie auch zur music und andern nützlichen  dingen anzuführen sind (halle: waysenhaus,  ); a.h. francke, ordnung und lehr­art: wie selbige in  dem pädagogio zu glaucha in halle eingeführet ist: worinnen vornemlich zu befinden, wie die jugend,  nebst der anweisung zum christenthum, in sprachen und wissenschaften, als in der lateinischen,  griechischen, ebräischen und französischen sprache ... auf eine kurtze und leichte methode zu  unterrichten, und zu denen studiis academicis zu præpariren sey (halle: waysenhaus,  ).   a.h. francke, ordnung und lehr­art... waysenhaus schulen ( ):  ­ .   ibid.       orphanage.”   the statement is characteristically oblique, meaning it expressed what  likely needed to be said in order to justify the fees francke was charging the ennobled  parents of his pädagogium pupils; it also clearly signaled that boys who had been deemed  capable of studying were still being introduced to exactly the same forms of knowledge  as those who were paying for it.  the statement, and francke himself, skillfully  negotiated between acknowledging the pädagogium as an extra special school only for  the elite, while indicating that it was connected to the orphanage and offered a curriculum  similar to the most advanced “orphanage schools.”        it is important to keep in mind that a very distinct hierarchy of knowing was in  place in the landscape of francke’s educational complex, despite his interest in exposing  all children, regardless of their backgrounds, to several forms of knowledge at once.   eventually the three “advanced” orphanage schools would be merged together and  referred to simply as a latin school—second only to the elite pädagogium within the  complex.  the next group of schools included “one school for orphan boys who can read  perfectly and who will soon teach other children in the german school… only they also  learn a bit of latin, history, geography and physics,” and one school for younger boys  who “cannot quite read yet,” but who were being groomed for the same occupation.   there were several other lower schools for “poor boys” and “poor girls” as well but  (unfortunately) their orientation and length of existence is difficult to determine in any  great detail.  what does emerge from the   descriptions of the orphanage schools and  pädagogium, however, is a very clear summary of the kinds of exercises important to  francke and those involved in carrying out this project.  the pedagogical regimens of the  schulstadt are notable for their sheer diversity.  self­cultivation, francke knew, required                                                     ibid.,  .      training in several ways of knowing that would become progressively more challenging  the further one proceeded down the path of wisdom.     i have divided the dissertation into three parts in order to most effectively make  my case for the pietist orphanage’s status as a signifier of the conciliatory gestures  perfected there—gestures that wove together loving and seeing while generating wisdom  and consensus.  part i examines the origins of the halle method by focusing on the five  figures whose preoccupations—usually conveyed in their writings—and interactions with  francke and other members of his community most profoundly influenced its orientation.   these five figures—ehrenfried walthers von tschirnhaus, johann christoph sturm, his  son leonhard christoph sturm, gottfried wilhelm leibniz and christian wolff—are  generally not placed alongside or in dialogue with francke, but they very much were so.   all five of these figures have been treated in varying degrees by philosophers, who have  done much to further our understanding of what were highly cohesive philosophical  systems (especially in the case of leibniz and wolff).  but their accounts often tend to  detach these savants from the social and cultural contexts that gave way to their ideas.   when their philosophies are appreciated as practices that were intended to be actualized,  several points of convergence between their goals and the goals of francke’s  orphanage—a material expression of an idea, a house defined by the practices contained  inside of it—emerge.      in chapter one i look at francke’s relationship with e.w. von tschirnhaus, who  arrived in halle after having met and collaborated with leibniz and spinoza in paris and  several members of the royal society in england.  i argue that tschirnhaus’s interest in  pietism stemmed from his interest in mediating mathematics and physics through the      cultivation of instinct—or a drive capable of assimilating competing strategies for  producing truth.  spener and francke’s movement claimed to offer the keys to  understanding and cultivating this instinct.  they had something to offer him and he, in  turn, offered his support and advice.  in chapter two i argue that the eclectic  methodology of j.c. sturm, which would later be extended by his son, also profoundly  influenced the orientation of francke’s project, as it had influenced tschirnhaus.   eclecticism marked a serious attempt to construct a foolproof method of reconciliation  that involved accepting all positions as true and then mediating them in the soul.  it  involved a set of practices that several jesuits were proficient in as well—especially  andreas tacquet, whom tschirnhaus and sturm cite frequently.  chapter three offers a  new assessment of leibniz and francke’s relationship; here i argue that, in some ways,  the halle orphanage or the new method must be understood as an arm of the berlin  academy of science, of which francke was also a member.  and finally, in chapter four  i demonstrate how both francke and wolff valued the mathematical sciences as  intrinsically conciliatory areas of inquiry and appreciated their status as forms of spiritual  exercise or paideia.   after exploring why it came into being, in part ii i focus exclusively on a  collection of handwritten lesson plans (approximately   pages) that now reside in the  francke foundation archive and that help us to understand how the halle method was  supposed to work.  the majority of the lesson plans originated with francke’s colleague  christoph semler, who produced them in conjunction with his own attempts to start a  realschule (a school specifically oriented around the teaching of the mathematical and  mechanical sciences) in  —literally at the same moment wolff arrived in halle.       several of the lesson descriptions are in semler’s hand but some appear to have been  written by the university students that he enlisted as his co­instructors.  the school did  not stay open for long and we know that semler eventually gave the lesson plans to  francke for use in his own schools.  because of this, i have proceeded, carefully, on the  assumption that the plans themselves have something to tell us about how francke and  other members of his organization understood and allowed that the mathematical sciences  be taught.  the plans beautifully illustrate how a consilia of mathematics and physics  could be brought about through the observation of three­dimensional models especially.   models of all kinds were to be seen on the grounds of francke’s city of schools and, as i  have indicated, francke himself regularly recorded in his journal his visits to semler’s  house to look at the new ones his colleague was building.    i argue in chapter five that the use of three­dimensional models was perhaps the  hallmark of pietist pedagogy because these objects perfectly illustrated the way in which  the new method was supposed to work.  models linked together experience and intuition  in a neutral, third site.  one’s senses “were opened up” upon viewing them, semler  explained, and at the same time, one’s cognitive abilities were heightened as one began to  recognize certain truths “more clearly and distinctly.”  this does not mean that halle  pietists did not duly appreciate the techniques of geometrical projection that wolff was  advocating; on the contrary, they seemed to have appreciated the value of these  technologies as long as they were conjoined with attempts to include the affections in the  representations of objects or experiences.  in chapter six, i analyze two texts on painting  and drawing—one contained in the semler lesson plans and one printed by the halle  orphanage press—and argue that halle pietists, like wolff, were endeavoring to improve      the science of perspective by standardizing (thereby making easier) painting and drawing  techniques because they believed in its ability to condition conciliatory gestures.    chapter seven presents other ways in which the halle method linked together  hearts, hands and minds.  using remaining sections of the semler lessons in conjunction  with several published descriptions of the curricula of francke’s schools, i argue that  halle pietists attached special significance to the visual and conciliatory properties of  motion; they were interested not only in the machine’s ability to represent the union of  body and soul but the love or motion that was affected by this union.  they were  interested in the promise of perpetual motion, like so many of their contemporaries,  because they were in the business of sculpting perpetually moving machines—young  men mainly, whose every movement was an intrinsically assimilatory act of love.  i  situate this discussion alongside my (admittedly all too brief) discussion of the plans’  treatment of the visualization of substance or naturalia and music—itself a kind of  substance, made accessible through signs that came together in the arias or pietist lieder  (another third site) for which the halle orphanage was famous for.   part iii represents my first foray into what will have to remain mostly uncharted  terrain for now.  in order to illustrate the impact and significance of the halle method, i  consider its extension and replication though the founding of new orphanages and the  reconfiguration of existing orphanages’ own educational programming.  new pietist  orphanages visibly marked or demarcated a region in which reconciliation was  supposedly occurring, where the conciliatory gestures of the seeing heart were being  implemented and local forms of knowledge were being assimilated into a single,  universalizing edifice.  they too were idealized spaces in which all the scattered objects,      ideas, practices and problems of the outside world be gathered up, assembled and  reoriented around a single point of light, love and universal goodness.  also in these  spaces, i contend, the ability of halle pietists to extend or replicate their method in other  parts of the world hinged on visualization—on the ability of the potential donor to  observe, thereby instinctively understanding, the value of the conciliatory exercises these  institutions offered in addition to the power of the objects (including the hard currency)  that made the entire enterprise possible.           ! ! "#$%!&'!!(#)*+,!#!-.+/* *#%.$ !( % . !           yes, this [commune] would be a kind of unrestricted orphanage where all poor orphans  and foundlings could be fed, put to work and either raised to study or to participate in  mechanics or commerce…      ­gottfried wilhelm leibniz ( )          all wisdom (klugheit), whether true or false, rests upon two main pillars, namely  knowledge (wissenschaft) or cognition (erkenntnis) and experience (erfahrung); either  pillar can be misused on its own but together they can both be used correctly.  and the true wisdom is nothing other than the eye in people, through which one sees what serves  the best and protects oneself from damage.     ­august hermann francke ( )      - # % $! + :  tschirnhaus’s !e#$%$&e (or t,e !$&#!#+ !% ! !( % . ! you, oh worthy one, have asked for a detailed description of how the real method works, how to bring habile subjects to cognition and how to introduce the study of mathematics (which is one of the most useful studies of the youth when they first learn the fundamentals from mathesis and then experience the application!like the neoterici applied the study of physics.) all of this i recognize as a gesture of special friendship and trust. ­e. w. von tschirnhaus to a. h. francke ( )     in early january of  , a dashing, well traveled and highly learned visitor  stopped in halle to see a.h. francke’s new educational complex, his city of schools, with his very own eyes.  it was a complex that took a great deal of seeing to believe and, even  then, often escaped description.  it was difficult for contemporaries and even for francke  to capture with words and seems to have been changing its composition from month to  month.  by  , francke had published what would become a standard work of pietist  propaganda, his marvellous footsteps of divine providence, in which he gave a blow by  blow account of the miracles and wondrous gifts of god that had allowed him to found  his organization.  this portrayal mainly focused on the status of the new orphanage he  had founded in glaucha as a site for housing orphans and other “poor people.” but in his outline of all the institutes at glaucha near halle ( ), he had made of point of  explaining that the institutes were to "provide special blessings partially for the education  of youth and partially for the maintenance of the poor."   in another one of the earliest  descriptions he offered of this project, titled the historical news of the care of the poor and education of the youth in glaucha, francke noted that the schools he was  developing would do more than simply produce children who knew the basic tenets of                                                     afst/h c  :  [january  ,  ]   august hermann francke, outline of all the institutes at glaucha near halle (halle: waysenhaus,  )      christianity and could read, write and calculate, “like other children.” instead, he explained that “what is intended here is to search out the individual talents that god and  nature had instilled in each one and through true instructions to lead them to their  intended purpose.” in these schools, children who were being groomed to become apothecaries, printers and merchants would be taught the fundamentals of latin “because it is needed in these professions.” in the periods when they were not in school, francke continued, they would either be taught how to make socks with the help of a local sewing  master, or they would be “taught the fundamentals of geometry, geography, history,  astronomy and physics “so that when they are apprenticed in a particular craft they will have at least some knowledge of the useful sciences, which are very important to the  common way.”   the mysterious guest who arrived at francke’s door in   knew a  little something about these “useful sciences.” he was ehrenfried walters von  tschirnhaus ( ­ ).  e.w. von tschirnhaus was one of the most famous german intellectuals of the  seventeenth century—yet he left behind relatively few original traces of this thinking.  he  published a very small amount, burned most of his personal papers before he died and  never held a formal post at a university.  despite this, he wielded a remarkable influence  over all those who came into contact with him.  especially the german literature on early  enlightenment has consistently judged the nobleman from saxony to be an especially  charismatic figure who paved the way for the introduction of “enlightenment ideas” in                                                    august hermann francke, “historische nachricht von verpflegung der armen und erziehung der jugend  in gedachtem glaucha” in philip jakob spener’s christliche verpflegung der armen, als aus churfürstl.gnädigester verordnung das gassen bettlen in den churfl. residenz städten abgeschaft...  (frankfurt a.d.o.,  ):  ­ .      the german states especially.   after leaving saxony at the age of eighteen to study in  leiden, the young tschirnhaus spent several years traveling extensively throughout  europe, collecting ideas and building friendships with some of its brightest minds— especially pieter van ghent, baruch spinoza and gottfried wilhelm leibniz.  notably, he  spent a year or so in england ( ­ ) where he met with members of the royal  society, including robert boyle, denis papin, john collins, henry oldenbourg, isaac  newton and john wallis; but despite their repeated requests for him to join the royal  society, tschirnhaus refused .   he probably became best known for his secret work on  developing a recipe for porcelain that would result in germany’s first porcelain factory in meissen (saxony).  recent scholarship has also reiterated the importance of  tschirnhaus’s writings on the young christian wolff, who himself tells a short but captivating story in his autobiography about his pilgrimage to meet the famous nobleman  at the leipzig book fair in  .     tschirnhaus’s relationship with august hermann francke has received some  scholarly attention; however, most accounts have tended to gloss over why these figures  were interested in each other in the first place.  why would one of the most famous  intellectuals of the hour, with contacts in virtually every major centre of learning, bother  to “drop by” halle specifically to visit francke? why was francke interested in playing                                                    siegfried wollgast, e.w.v.tschirnhaus und die deutsche frühaufklärung (berlin: akademie verlag,  ):  .   uwe mayer “am rande der gelehrtenrepublik—tschirnhaus als mathematiker,” ehrenfried walther von tschirnhaus ( - ): experimente mit dem sonnenfeuer; sonderausstellung im mathematischen- physikalischen salon im dresdner zwinger vom . april bis . juli . (dresden: staatliche  kunstsammlungen,  ):  ­ .  john collins famously described tschirnhaus as the “most knowing algebraist in europe;” see mayer, . gottschling remarks that the young nobleman got to know wallis, oldenbourg and newton especially well.  per caspar gottschling’s lebens-beschreibung gelehrter und geschickter edelleute: jacob wellers von molsdorff, wolffgangs von bock, ehrenfried walthers von  tschirnhaus, hans albrecht von hengel (brandenburg,  ).    also retold by wollgast,  ­ .      host?  what was it that tschirnhaus was actually suggesting francke do in his schools  and why was it so important? here i take a closer look at tschirnhaus’s description of a “new method” for introducing children to mathematics and physics and attempt to explain why he (and francke) may have felt it was the perfect fit for francke’s universal project.  this requires, of course, some discussion of tschirnhaus’s mandate. one major problem in the literature around tschirnhaus has been its tendency not to critically  examine his writings, but instead to simply link him up with leibniz, label him a closet  spinozist or place him firmly within an “enlightenment tradition” that is never explicitly defined.  to remedy this tendency, i offer a much needed reassessment (and  contextualization) of two underutilized tschirnhaus texts in which he attempts to explain  his mandate. when the participation of tschirnhaus via these texts in francke’s city of schools is considered, they help bolster my case for the pietist professor’s interest in imagining the “useful” or mathematical sciences as a way of mediating all forms of knowledge. the texts include tschirnhaus’s medicine for the mind, or general guidelines for the art of invention and his basic guide to the useful sciences, especially mathematics and physics (gründliche anleitung zu nützlichen wissenschafften absonderlich zu der mathesi und physica), portions of which are directly derived from  the medicina mentis.   the medicina mentis was first published in amsterdam in    and then again in leipzig in   with the additional title: for explaining the generation of curves through focal points (zur erläuterung der generatio cuvarum per focus).                                                      tschirnhaus published a sequel to his medicine for the mind that same year entitled medicina corporis, or medicine for the body (amsterdam,  ) and planned a third volume that he never finished.  a  handwritten copy of the gründliche anleitung zu nützlichen wissenschafften absonderlich zu der mathesi und physica. wie sie anitzo von den gelehrsten abgehandlet worden first surfaced in halle in   and still  resides in francke’s archive: afst/h d  .  the medicina mentis, sive artis inveniendi praecepta generalia has been translated into german by j. hausleiter (leipzig,  ); my discussion is based on the  translated text.        tschirnhaus wrote the basic guide to the useful sciences upon francke’s request in ; two additional printed versions of the guide were published in halle in   and in  frankfurt am main and leipzig in   (see appendix  ).     once it becomes clearer what tschirnhaus was trying to do, including the kind of  curriculum he imagined for francke’s schools, several features of the science of perfection under construction in halle will emerge.  perhaps the most important feature  of this curriculum was its interest in reconciling what had by   become two divergent  programs for producing knowledge:  the experimental method (advocated most famously  by robert boyle) and the geometrical method.  steven shapin, following thomas kuhn,  has defined experimental philosophy and non­experimental mathematical science as two  separate cultural forms, each exhibiting “divergent procedures for regulating access to their communities and for defining who was competent to participate.”   while my  argument relies heavily on this distinction, it also probes its validity for understanding the  application of tschirnhaus’s method in halle, where methods of conciliation dominated (the subject of chapter two).  tschirnhaus’s innovation lay in his attempt to find concrete ways of making sensory data – subject to the powers of the imagination– more  reliable.  by training the imagination and the intellect, one would be better able to  integrate new methods of inquiry (such as boyle’s) that relied primarily on sensory experience with truths derived from interior acts of “concipi”–conceiving or grasping                                                     steven shapin, “robert boyle and mathematics: reality, representation, and experimental practice,” science in context  ,   ( ):  ­ .  shapin draws specifically from thomas s. kuhn, “mathematical versus experimental traditions in the development of physical science” in the essential tension: selected studies in scientific tradition and change (chicago: the university of chicago press,  ):  ,  .        cognitively.   tschirnhaus was especially interested in adapting insights from the jesuit  mathematician, andreas tacquet’s elements of geometry, archimedes’ work on conic sections and isaac barrow, whose geometrical principle of image location fascinated  him.    his recommendations to francke constituted a select body of texts that linked the  study of mathematics with the study of experimental physics in innovative ways.  texts  from archimedes, such as de centris gravium (on the equilibrium of planes) and de insidentibus aquae (on floating bodies), actually introduced a system based on pure  mathematics into mechanics, for example.   this is precisely what tschirnhaus was  after; his strategy for bringing about reconciliation involved the application of principles  derived from archimedes’ geometry (which descartes had discarded) and optics.       :/ *$+ #;:!#+ !"* %*:<! long before tchirnhaus paid francke a visit in that first week of january,  ,  both figures had come into contact—each of his own accord—with the charismatic  founder of pietism, philipp jakob spener. francke’s first encounter with spener was dramatic.  he professed to having undergone an emotional conversion experience in                                                     my appraisal of the singularity of tschirnhaus’s method is indebted to c.a. van peursen’s assessment of the medicina mentis (in ); it is the only one currently available in english or german. see his “e.w. von tschirnhaus and the ars inveniendi,” journal of the history of ideas  :  (july  ):  ­ .     it is important to recognize that after , euclid’s geometry had become so mainstream that mathematicians were turning to other classical sources and developing new geometries.  these sources  included the conica of apollonius, arithmetica of diophantus, various writings from archimedes and the  collectiones mathematicae of pappus, all of which contained problems that could not be solved by a  compass or ruler. in kirsti andersen and henk j.m.bos, “pure mathematics,” in katherine park and lorraine daston eds., the cambridge history of science vol.  : early modern science (cambridge:  cambridge university press,  ):  .     this according to domenico bertoloni meli, “mechanics,” in park and daston eds. cambridge history of science vol.   (cambridge: cambridge university press,  ):  ­ .   kirsti andersen and henk j.m. bos explain how descartes’ geometry contains a classification of all  geometrical problems, including curves; those with algebraic equations he classified as “truly geometrical.” at the same time, “he expelled other curves (now called transcendental) from geometry, excluding explicitly archimedes’ spiral, the quadratix and the cycloid.” in park and daston eds. ( ):  .        lüneburg shortly after having met spener in leipzig (in  ).  that same year spener  had taken up a coveted post as senior court chaplain to the saxon elector, johann georg  iii, in dresden, where he would wield a commanding influence.   spener took a liking to  francke and invited him to stay with him in dresden in  .   upon emerging from this  extended stay at the saxon elector’s court, francke became a passionate spokesperson for spenerian reform—often preaching spontaneously in public spaces and drawing huge  crowds to his lectures back at the university of leipzig.  rumor had it that after hearing  francke speak, students burned their textbooks, formed conventicles and were openly  undermining the authority of their professors.  francke was eventually forced to leave  leipzig in  , took up a pastorate in erfurt for a year (where he was mostly looked  upon unfavorably) and then, with the help of spener, landed in halle in . spener’s tenure in dresden was short lived as a result of his constant clashes with the saxon  elector over what spener considered an excessively secular court culture; he was invited  to serve as the hohenzollerns’ court preacher in berlin, where he learned of friedrich  iii’s plans to found a new university. spener saw to it that francke was offered a pastorate in halle as well as a chair in greek and oriental languages when the new  university opened in  .  it was upon commencing the duties of his professorship that  francke would found his orphanage and begin seeking input from individuals like  tschirnhaus regarding the methodological orientation of his schulstadt’s curricula.   tschirnhaus also openly aligned himself with the mandate of spenerian reform  and had long stood in contact with the prolific pastor.  in the introductory pages of his  basic guide to the useful sciences, tschirnhaus explained that spener had offered a                                                     see tanya kevorkian, "piety confronts politics: philipp jacob spener in dresden,  ­ " german history :  ( ):  ­ .      similar description of the “faith” he was setting out to describe in this text. they were both interested in strategies for cultivating an “instinct” or “drive” (trieb) so one could  feel and experience the divine. because we “so often only pay attention to outward appearance,” tschirnhaus wrote, “we miss the feeling of godly operations (göttliche operationes) and often even find ourselves diametrically opposed to them, so that they  bear no fruit.” he said he developed his method to show   the right way to recognize the unchangeable instinct of god’s peace for oneself, how to  follow it and not to detract from this way or to hinder it.  this involves the active reading  of the holy scriptures, especially the new testament and the speeches of christ, which  can teach us a lot.  and we also have many writings of spiritually rich people—praise  god!—such as gerhard, arndt, lükemann, scriveri, müller etc. … but the spiritually rich writings of the theologian herr d. spener, especially his “teaching­fruits and  treasures of belief”… are recommended here, in which the attentive reader will easily acquire things that require a lot of energy and work to acquire in many other books—and  that sometimes still cannot be found.  one will find [in spener] a thorough and clear  description of the same faith i am speaking about here…     in spener, tschirnhaus recognized a similar calling and method for experiencing the  meaning of divine revelation by learning to recognize divine messages or operations  instinctually.  instinct helped one acquire the powers of discernment necessary to  distinguish between true from the false or to assimilate several, seemingly contradictory  points of view. cultivating one’s instinct could help one overcome the errors of perception.  but for tschirnhaus and spener, perfecting this instinct required that one  practice a certain kind of faith—one rooted in meditation or the observation of the holy  scriptures.  in the theologische bedenken, a posthumous collection of his writings, spener’s interest in defining practices for engaging the scriptures in order to make one more  attuned to the subtleties of divine operations is manifest.  his central concern, following  in the footsteps of johann arndt (d. ) and lewis bayley ( ­ ), was with                                                     tschirnhaus, gründlich anleitung ( ):  ­ .      forging a “practice” of piety (i.e. praxis pietatis).   one practiced one’s faith internally through a combination of meditation & erudition, and externally through manifold  outward expressions.   the theologische bedenken contain his description of the  “proper use of reason, meditation and erudition,” in addition to several sections on the how to engage in material or practical forms of piety.  these outward expressions were  rooted in the senses in that they required one to rely on the imagination’s assimilation of material impressions in order to determine where and how to direct a pious act.  they  were visible acts, easily witnessed and engaged in with help from the intellect in order to  affect a visible change.  but since the imagination was notoriously unreliable—often  misreading or misinterpreting incoming sensory impressions—this presented a bit of a  problem.  what if the senses perceived a need to direct a pious action where there was  none?  so spener provided instructions for discovering how divine operations felt; the  theologische bedenken contain a section on how to properly recognize sensations from  the holy spirit while reading the scriptures, for example.   this required learning to  distinguish true operations from other feelings generated by our senses’ distortions of                                                    lewis bayley is a figure sometimes overlooked in pietism studies; he was instrumental in popularizing  the phrase praxis pietatis on the continent in the seventeenth century.  this phrase became the mantra of  pietist circles in the german states. bayley’s treatise entitled the practice of piety: directing a christian how to walk that he may please god was widely circulated.  it was printed in french in   (jean  verneuil) and in german in   &   (lüneburg),   (in basel) and   (berlin).  carl hildebrand  von canstein noted in his preface to spener’s theologische bedenken (halle: waysenhaus,  ) that in  his youth, spener was especially influenced by lewis bayley’s praxi pietatis; see  ­ .  see also sträter,  sonthom, bayly, dyke und hall ( ).   the best formal statement of spener’s interest in improvement as an expression of piety is his pia desideria or heartfelt desires for an improvement of the true evangelical church pleasing to god; pia desideria: oder hertzliches verlangen nach gottgefälliger besserung der wahren evangelischen kirchen (frankfurt,  ). in this text, spener talked about the importance of “verifying faith” through action. internal and external modes of faith coexisted in active state of dialectical exchange.  the dialectical  qualities of pietism have been acknowledged by james van horn melton, absolutism and the eighteenth- century origins of compulsory schooling in prussia and austria  (cambridge: cambridge university  press,  ):  ­  and jonathan sheehan, the enlightenment bible: translation, scholarship, culture  (princeton: princeton university press,  ):  ­ .   philipp jakob spener, theological bedenken ( ):  . “von der erleuchtung des heil. geistes bey  lesung der heil. schrift.”      truth.  for tschirnhaus, separating the true from the false involved the cultivation of  instinct and the mediation of perception; spener preferred to talk about instinct as an  inner light, or illumination (erleuchtung) of the senses.    without light—a material medium that began in the soul and projected outward— and the intellect to direct light rays to proper ends, there was only darkness. spener’s brand of spirituality was firmly rooted in visual metaphors:    admittedly, the person is darkness before he receives this light; i also confess that he  does not receive light through prayer alone, instead the holy spirit makes the light  happen through preparation of the heart…. so speaks this light, as does my understanding and my will, and it becomes love.  for this reason the soul must be brightly illuminated  und born again so that such things can happen inside of it and take hold.  the inner light  or the new way … is not belief alone but all of godly nature… belief is the “causa instrumentalis” of blessedness (seeligkeit) but love is blessedness itself…. when we see love as the light of heaven, understand the essence of this light and “the new nature,’ then the love has taken us over from within.         for spener, light emanated (actively) from a divine source, was the essence of love,  spoke through the scriptures and was manifest in nature.  it was a material substance that  introduced real change and helped the senses properly intuit divine messages.  his stance  here is similar to that of descartes, who conceived of light as an active material  substance, or “the action of a subtle matter or ether filling the whole of space;” the sun or another light source inside of this matter “produced a tendency to motion” that was then transmitted along straight lines (or light rays) in the ether until it hit the eye.    for  spener, the divine constituted “another light source” that was constantly in motion and capable of being transmitted between individuals or directed towards pious acts—which                                                     ibid.,  ­ .   caspar hakfoort, optics in the age of euler. conceptions of the nature of light, -  (cambridge:  cambridge university press, ): . according to a. rupert hall, “descartes taught that light is ‘a certain motion, or prompt and vivid action, in the luminous body’ (dioptrique, ch. i, section  ) transmitted  instantaneously through the optical aether and penetrating all transparent bodies until it reaches the eye (it  is like a quick blow transmitted down a rigid stick from one end to the other.)  the aether consists of very  small, perfectly spherical particles, which rotate as they move.” see a. rupert hall, all was light. an introduction to newton’s opticks (oxford: clarendon press,  ):  .      were manifestations of it.  to fully exploit the power of this light, the pious acts it  inspired had to be directed by reason.  one engaged in interior exercises of the intellect in  order to learn how and where to direct material expressions of divine love.  suffice it to  say at this point, that tschirnhaus saw some very clear parallels between spener’s “faith” and his own method for conditioning the senses and the intellect, or for linking  mathematics and physics.    the spirit of camaraderie tschirnhaus detected between himself and spener was  apparently mutual.  in response to stinging criticisms of the medicina mentis published  by christian thomasius (halle, ), spener defended tschirnhaus’s method enthusiastically.   in , he also recommended and sent a copy of tschirnhaus’s sequel to the medicina mentis, the medicina corporis to anna elisabeth kissner in  frankfurt am main.   udo sträter reports that in a letter spener wrote to his son, johann  jakob ( ­ ), while the latter was taking advanced courses in mathematics at  university, the eager father mentioned tschirnhaus as someone his son should consider  studying with for a time.  he described tschirnhaus as “a man, to whom few can hold a candle to in mathematics” and who had already offered his support of johann jakob’s                                                    thomasius accused tschirnhaus of being a spinozist even though spinoza’s name is never mentioned directly in the text.  wollgast, van peursen and israel all suggest tschirnhaus carefully references his  friend, but van peursen sees the medicina mentis as tschirnhaus’s attempt to remedy or improve upon  spinoza’s method, not to further it.  spener makes his support of tschirnhaus clear in a letter from  september  ,  ; see philipp jakob spener, briefe aus der dresdner zeit: . vol.  :  .  johannes wallmann et al eds. (tübingen: j.c.b. mohr siebeck,  ):  letter  .  the letter also appeared  in philipp jakob spener’s theologische bedenken ( ):  ­ .  christian thomasius’s remarks appeared in his schertz- und ernsthafter, vernünfftiger und einfältiger gedancken über allerhand lustige und nützliche bücher und fragen dritter monat oder martius. in einem gepräch vorgestellet durch e.d.f.u.k. (halle,  ):  ­ ,  ­ .   philipp jakob spener, briefe aus der dresdner zeit: - . vol.  :  ­  (tübingen: j.c.b. mohr  siebeck,  ):  ­ .  e. w. von tschirnhaus, medicina corporis seu cogitations admodum probabiles de conservanda sanitae (amsterdam,  ).      endeavors.   before his untimely death in  , johann jakob spener was to become the  first mathematics professor at the new university of halle; this was the position that  christian wolff would eventually fill.     spener also often emphasized the ability of mathematics to serve as a  “propaedeutisches mittel,” which suggests another reason he was so interested in the  consilia of mathematical practice and experience tschirnhaus’s medicina offered.   sträter points to a passage from spener’s introduction to the study of theology as an example:  while practicing our understanding through physics or natur­lehre, it would be better if  we concerned ourselves with more than just the outer shell and let the underlying seed  move us.  we have to praise it as a well intended, godly deed that in this age more and  more progress in the investigation of the properties of natural things has been made…. and it is praiseworthy that famous men not only rely on their own abilities, but from year  to year through certain experiences present things to us that we can see with our eyes and  touch with our hands, so that we are forced to make known the things those before us did  not…therefore, this kind of learning, next to the growth of the mathematics, is the  largest contribution of this time.      this is an especially revealing passage because it offers proof of spener’s own awareness  of two distinct means of acquiring knowledge about the natural world—one that relied on   “abilities” of famous men (i.e. mathematics) and one that relied exclusively on the experience of things that could be seen and heard.  he presents the two modes as not  necessarily existing in competition with each other, but rather as complimentary.  in a   letter to gottlieb spitzel, spener describes cartesian philosophy as ignorant of the  inward and articulates a need to more clearly define the relationship between                                                     “ein mann, dem in der mathematik wenige das wasser reichen könnten.”  see udo sträter, “zum verhältnis des frühen pietismus zu den naturwissenschaften,” in pietismus und neuzeit   ( ):   .    mentioned in sträter, “zum verhältnis” ( ):   and in wilhelm schrader, geschichte der friedrichs- universiät zu halle vol.   (berlin,  ):  .       quoted in sträter, “zum verhältnis” ( ):  .  the passage is taken from philipp jakob spener, von den hindernissen der gottesgelahrtheit (de impedimentis studii theologici) in johann adam steinmetz ed.   kleine geistliche schriften vol.   [magdeburg and leipzig,  ] (reprinted in hildesheim [u.a.]: olms,  ).       mathematics and demonstration.   as we will see, an interest in celebrating and drawing  from both modes is what animated tschirnhaus’s presentation of an antidote, or medicine, for the mind.   after their initial meeting in the first week of  , francke and tschirnhaus  began to correspond.   four letters in tschirnhaus’s hand and addressed to francke indicate that by the end of the  s, they had taken up a lively correspondence.  in a  particularly revealing letter from january  ,   (shortly after his first visit to halle)  tschirnhaus told francke:  i have felt for a while now with great contentment that like the right way to achieve  gottseeligkeit, in order to raise up a fallen christendom your high worthy and diligent  efforts and concern about how to provide the youth with a truly useful education are  greatly needed.  you have founded your seminars so that over time we will not lack  virtuous subjects.  i am particularly excited about your plans to teach other good sciences,  including the study of mathematics: … what an unbelievably horrible shame for the youth that euclid and archimedes are currently as good as banned from the  gymnasiums….     it is especially clear from this letter that tschirnhaus saw in francke’s efforts to provide a “useful education” to the youth some clear alliances with the method at the heart of his medicina mentis.  how to most effectively organize a study of mathematics—one that  introduces young people to euclid and archimedes’ geometry so they are prepared to undertake a study of natural phenomenon —was the central subject of their  correspondence.  as tschirnhaus indicated in the passage quoted at the outset of this                                                     philipp jakob spener, briefe aus der frankfurter zeit - . volume : -  ( ): to  gottlieb spitzel (september  ,  ) .   mathias ullmann, “august hermann francke und ehrenfried walter von tschirnhaus.  eine  bekanntschaft im spiegel der quellen im achiv der franckeschen stiftungen halle/saale” in thomas müller­bahlke, ed.., um gott zu ehren und zu des landes besten. die franckeschen stiftungen und preussen: aspekte einer alten allianz.  katalog der austellung in den franckeschen stiftungen zu halle  vom  .juni bis  .oktober   (halle: verlag der franckeschen stiftungen,  ):  .  carl hinrichts,  preu entum und pietismus,  .  see also thomas müller­bahlke’s discussion in “naturwissenschaft und technik. der hallesche pietismus am vorabend der industrialisierung” in geschichte der pietismus band   (halle: verlag der franckeschen stiftungen,  ):  .   afst/h c  :   [january  ,  ] e. w. von tschirnhaus to a. h. francke      chapter, francke had “asked for a detailed description of how the real method works, how to bring habile subjects to cognition and to introduce the study of mathematics.” mathematics, he explained to francke, should be considered “one of the most useful studies of the youth when they first learn the fundamentals from mathesi and then  experience the application—like the neoterici applied the study of physics.”  his  reference to the neoterici, a group of avant­garde poets from (first­century) rome who  experimented with evocative poetic forms, and their “application” of these forms to physics is especially suggestive—albeit cryptic.  both boyle and descartes had pointed  to the value of rhetorical exercise, or learning to evoke clear and distinct images or  enargeia, as having much to offer their studies of natural phenomena; tschirnhaus is  gesturing towards a similar pairing here.   finally, tschirnhaus indicated that francke  had asked him to provide a “detailed description of how the real method works;” the basic guide to the useful sciences was his response to this specific request.   close associates of francke, namely johann julius elers ( ­ ) and baron  carl hildebrand von canstein ( ­ ), were also in contact with tschirnhaus  regarding plans to manufacture glass in francke’s orphanage. francke and his circle were interested in producing their own lenses for optical instruments and wanted to know  more about tschirnhaus’s secret experiments surrounding the recipe for porcelain.    elers made at least one trip to dresden to learn from tschirnhaus about how the process  worked. in his remarkably preserved “journal about the trip to dresden” from ,                                                    ibid.   for boyle see michael wintroub, “the looking glass of facts: collecting, rhetoric and citing the self in the experimental natural philosophy of robert boyle” history of science   ( ):  ­ , esp.  .   for descartes see jones, “a rhetorical history of truth” in the good life ( ):  ­ .   müller­bahlke and ullmann also take the letter quoted above as evidence that tschirnhaus composed the  gründliche anleitung specifically for francke.  müller­bahlke, “naturwissenschaft und technik” ( ):   .   this per müller­bahlke ( ) and ullmann.      elers recorded very specific descriptions of what he observed.  he noted, for example:  “on july th i was with tschirnhaus for four hours in the afternoon; he asked if i had any  new strategies for making the fire grow hotter…. july th, four hours with tschirnhaus  in the glashütte…. july th, tschirnhaus showed me the oven built into the wall of the  glashütte…” and so on.   on june  ,  , canstein reportedly told francke about a  conversation he had with tschirnhaus, where the nobleman “began to speak about the secret to making porcelain;” according to ullmann, francke was one of several individuals who tried to pressure tschirnhaus into revealing the secret to him.   after his  death, tschirnhaus’s name still appeared frequently in francke’s correspondence. for example, in a letter from  rd of november, , canstein wrote to francke: “it occurred to me that i wanted to send you one of tschirnhaus’s large burning mirrors. herr john could use it in the pädagogium in the experiments undertaken by the youth there.”            printed descriptions of the curricula of francke’s schools also reveal much about the nature of tschirnhaus’s influence. again, these influences have not gone completely unnoticed but they have not been utilized to their fullest potential.  richard klüger wrote  (in ) that “we not only know a meeting took place between [tschirnhaus and  francke] in january of   during the period of the swift construction of the  foundation, but the influence of tschirnhaus can be seen in many of the different school  ordinances, which already in relied on tschirnhaus’s philosophy in explaining the value of mathematical and mechanical lessons.”   an anonymous tract from   called                                                     afst/h d a heinrich julius eler’s journal über die reise nach dresden   ullmann,  ­ .   in peter schicketanz ed., der briefwechsel carl hildebrand von cansteins mit august hermann francke. texte zur geschichte des pietismus iii,   (berlin,  ):  .  reprinted in müller­bahlke,  “naturwissenschaft und technik” ( ):  n.  .   in a letter to spener from january  ,  , francke mentioned that tschirnhaus visited the orphanage;  see gustav kramer, beiträge zur geschichte a.h. franckes: enthaltend den briefwechsel franckegs und     the founding of the pädagogium of glaucha in halle reported that tacquet’s geometry  was being taught, “according to the advice of herr von tschirnhaus;” and in another anonymous text from  , entitled rules and style of teaching employed in the  pädagogium of glaucha in halle, the author explained that “following the advice of herr von tschirnhaus, andreas tacquet’s introduction to the elements of geometry is used as  the main mathematics textbook.”   the author also noted that “we are trying (in mathesi) to develop the method that has been published by one well versed in this  knowledge and a certain very famous statesman who knows our pädagogium.”     developing tschirnhaus’s method involved a conscious choice to follow a new path or to go “the other way.” this according to the final passage of the letter from  january of   already quoted above, where tschirnhaus explained to francke the  following:  in this program of study, as in other useful sciences, many unnecessary and ostentatious  things, not useful to solid erudition, are taught.  there are especially two ways of  acquiring knowledge in the world: one way may take ten years where one learns a lot, but  this way is not worth much in respect to the other way.  the other way is cast aside by  most but it is the best.  one learns the genuine method of demonstration and how to  distinguish the true from the false through practical experience (per ipsam praxin).  in a  way that does not happen through the teaching of logic, one acquires the right method for  finding the truth inside oneself—including how to meditate well, to sit still and to be  attentive (strange qualities for youth).  finally, one learns how to treasure the truth  against all other ‘gods’…making this happen requires time to bring into order all the many conversations of your thoughts…     going the “other way” involved acquiring proficiency in a “genuine method of demonstration” that taught one how to “distinguish the true from the false” by going                                                                                                                                                   spenergs (halle: waysenhaus,  ) and richard klüger, die pädagogischen ansichten des philosophen tschirnhaus: inaugural-dissertation (leipzig,  ):  ­ .     august hermann francke, einrichtung des pädagogii zu glauch an halle (halle: waysenhaus,  );  ordnung und lehrart wie selbige in dem pädagogio zu glaucha an halle durchgefuhrt ist (halle:  waysenhaus, ). andreas tacquet’s elementa geometriae ( ,  ) is specifically referenced.   ibid. ( ) “man suchet aber hierinne (in der mathesi) die methode also einzurichten wie sie ein vornehmer und in dieser wissenschaft sehr berühmter staatsmann unserm pädagogio vor zuträglich  erkannt und in öffentlichen druck herausgegeben.” the statesmen referred to here is likely tschirnhaus.   afst/h c  :   [january  ,  ] e. w. von tschirnhaus to a. h. francke      “inside oneself.” in that sense embracing the “other way” was also about illumination.  it  was a way “frequently cast aside” that linked the study of mathematics to experience. it placed “the useful sciences” at the heart of both cultures of demonstration and experience thereby reconciling them with each other.    ! !( % . !   tschirnhaus was extremely attuned to the latest natural philosophical debates,  trends and the respective intellectual communities that produced them; his method for  reconciling the study of mathematics and physics is a result of direct engagement with the  most pressing issues of his time.  c.a. van peursen has argued that the significance of the  medicina mentis lies in tschirnhaus’s stated interest in developing a new method of invention (in keeping with a baconian configuration of ars inveniendi) that would extend  and correct the philosophies of descartes, malebranche and spinoza.   even a cursory  glance at the text itself reveals tschirnhaus’s preoccupation with descartes; references to spinoza are inexplicit, although van peursen does make a convincing case for their  resonance. tschirnhaus’s interest in application—specifically the application of  geometry to physics—and reconciliation has not been sufficiently emphasized.  while  indebted to the ideas of descartes, spinoza and boyle (and many others), tschirnhaus’s method claimed to be able to interweave these philosophies in new and highly productive  ways.  matthew jones has recently pointed to the profound impact that rené descartes’ geometry had on the pedagogical regimens for teaching mathematics throughout  europe—regimens very much in tune with descartes’ conviction that one should view                                                    van peursen,  .      geometry as a form of spiritual exercise that could train and sharpen the mind.   “late­ seventeenth­century figures,” jones writes, “saw descartes as more than a mathematician, epistemologist, natural philosopher and metaphysician; he was  understood as a philosopher offering a way of life with a central mathematical  practice.”   bernard lamy, a jesuit teacher of mathematics who taught the young jean­ jacques rousseau and produced an elements of geometry textbook in  , as well as  nicolas malebranche, pierre nicole and antoine arnauld, “all developed descartes’ account of the power of mathematics to train the intellect and sought to put it into  institutional practice.”   each of these thinkers was interested, like descartes, in  developing and drawing upon new geometrical methods that would not simply provide a  “chain of demonstrations” or a “series of formally true propositions” but instead would “make evident the interconnections of ideas.” this was a mode of geometrical practice or exercise that could be used to gauge and promote the health of the soul by teaching the  intellect to discern order, or truth.  jones continues:  with his new geometry, descartes did not offer algorithms that mechanically yielded  certain knowledge about mathematical objects and a world governed by mathematical  laws.  his geometry offered exemplary practice in seeing and thinking clearly, in  experiencing with a healthy soul.  such practice was essential both to improve  mathematics and to heal the self.  geometrical exercise could help cultivate discernment  needed for choosing among philosophical doctrines and practices, for finding purpose for  one’s life, and for prescribing the means necessary to achieve that purpose…     geometrical exercise as a tool for the cultivation of discernment for the learned subject  was to promote the soundness of individual judgment or to render human judgment  infallible–a frightening prospect, jones notes, for those who did not believe such  infallibility was possible.                                                      see jones, & and especially pierre hadot’s what is ancient philosophy? ( ).    ibid.,  .   ibid.,  ­ .   ibid.  .         following in the footsteps of contemporaries who heeded descartes’ call to use geometric exercises to feed the soul and to foster a heightened awareness of individual  perfectibility through rigorous cognitive training, tschirnhaus put geometrical exercise at  the center of his medicina mentis.  and like descartes and leibniz, in developing his  method he was influenced by the rhetorical strategies of cicero, to whom the phrase  medicina mentis actually belonged.   descartes derived his emphasis on the importance  of training people to grasp ideas clearly and distinctly from the roman rhetorician  quintilian’s characterization of evidence.   jones notes that quintilian (and descartes)  used the term evidentia as a translation of the term enargeia; cicero defined enargeia as  “certain experiences, which the greeks call phantasias, and the romans call visions,  whereby things absent are presented to our imaginations with such extreme vividness that  they seem actually to be before our very eyes.”   the imagination had a crucial role to  play in determining the quality of virtual experience; it also was, as descartes knew,  especially sensitive to poetic or beautiful forms of knowledge—ones that stirred the  passions.  these forms were to be preferred, in fact, precisely because of their capacity to  enhance vividness and, by extension, experience.  but they needed to be used carefully,  for the passions were unpredictable and the imaginations they influenced easily swayed.   in invoking cicero, as tschirnhaus does throughout the medicina mentis, the nobleman  hitched himself to a similar set of discussions about how to harness the imagination’s ability to inspire, to assimilate instinctual drives or essences and even to invent entirely                                                     van peursen, . n. ; see also matthew jones’ treatment of leibniz’s text entitled “the utility of  geometry as a medicine for the mind” ( ) in the good life ( ):  .      jones,  ­ .  jones notes that stephen gaugkroger has also argued for the influence of classical rhetoric,  namely the rhetorician quintilian, for conditioning descartes’ lingering interest in the psychological processes through which clear and evocative images are produced in people’s minds. see stephen gaukroger, descartes: an intellectual biography (oxford: oxford university press,  ).   ibid.,  .      new forms of knowledge.  cicero also coined the phrase ars inveniendi, van peursen  notes, and “changed the sequence of the traditional logic of demonstration and of  invention by giving priority to invention” over justification. this is precisely what  tschirnhaus was interested in.      van peursen contends that tschirnhaus developed “original methodological directives,” based on the claim that “a person can perform intellectual and other operations without knowing how they actually work;” to illustrate this he “frequently gives the example of the way in which we use our hands without any knowledge of their  physiological structure.”   while descartes’ method involved the refinement of various mental processes to facilitate man’s understanding of mechanical practices, jones  explains that descartes’ account of intuition rejected the imagination’s contributions to these processes “if their products were held by minds that were not clear and attentive.”    tschirnhaus was convinced that in the interest of making philosophy more useful to  people, certain mechanical operations needed to be grasped intuitively, or by inattentive  minds. whereas descartes had emphasized “not trying to intuit complex things immediately,” because “whoever tries to look at many objects together with one and the  same intuition sees none of them directly,”  tschirnhaus’s method was about doing precisely this—intuiting complex things instantly by using one’s instinct or drive without a full understanding of the rules informing the operations themselves.  this is why he was  so interested in spenerian pietism’s claims to be able to help individuals cultivate their instincts by initiating and deriving benefits from the process of divine illumination.                                                     van peursen,  . he cites pgs vi­vii,   and   of the medicina mentis as evidence of this tendency.   jones,  .     ibid.        tschirnhaus believed, for example, in the possibility of intuiting a whole series of  mathematical relationships by glancing at a single curve without necessarily  understanding the intricacies of those same relationships.  in the first section of the  medicina mentis, he commented on the utility of straight lines. “these alone are very easy for us to imagine,” he explained; “we can trace back all subjects of mathematics to these lines…straight lines present the entire proportion or relationships most easily.” he then drew a series of straight lines, one below the other, all with varied lengths.  drawing  the reader’s attention to the endpoints of lines he noted:   the end points of lines g, h, i, k, l begin to make a curve.  from this it becomes clear to  me that in order to discover everything that is still not known (or only partially known) in  mathematics, it is important to look at all possible curves, as much as we can understand  them.  by doing this, i hope to show all of the possible relationships between all subjects  of mathematics so that if there is later some difficulty in some portion of this science, all  that will be needed to remedy this is to display the relevant curve.  since a curve contains  an infinite number of points, with one stab (the drawing of a single curve), we can solve  an infinite number of problems.  in this way we will call the science that relies on the  recognition of such objects, or curves, mathesis universalis—for us curved lines will  become rational essences.     tschirnhaus positions himself throughout the medicina as in a kind of discussion with  those interested in the project of universal mathematics more generally.  descartes had  discussed mathesis unviersalis in the fourth rule of his rules for direction of the mind but he was certainly not the first; this was a project already long underway.  it owed  much to the figure of archimedes and the “great universal art” of combinatorics popularized by raymunus lullus in the thirteenth century.   tschirnhaus’s quest to extend the project of universal mathematics relied exclusively on intuitively assimilating  various simple impressions.  at one point in the medicina mentis he insists that descartes  had made startling progress in this realm by offering “so many new curves and had added                                                    e. w. von tschirnhaus, medicina mentis ( ):  .   see eberhard knoblauch, “mathesis—the idea of a universal science,” in rudolf seising, menso  folkerts, ulf hashagen eds. form, zahl, ordnung (franz steiner verlag,  ):  ­ .      so many astounding things to our ability to recognize their interior qualities,” but he had not gone far enough.  he had opened the door and then closed it again or not opened it as  widely as he could have, and for no comprehensible reason.   tschirnhaus argued that all  humans were perfectly capable of instinctively recognizing all of the myriad connections  manifest in all curves, and not just the ones descartes had designated. the possibilities  were endless.  we simply needed to realize the possibilities of our instincts, our abilities  to invent or to capitalize on our passions.  yes, our passions and the imaginations they  affected were fallible, but if we could remedy this fallibility by training our cognitive  faculties and our sensitive ones as well, then we were one step closer to perfection.   tschirnhaus, like spener and francke, was interested in more intensively probing  and refining the ability of instinct to mediate the relationship between man’s imagination and intellect; and in going down this road, he was taking issue with some of the boldest  claims of his mentor and friend, baruch spinoza.  van peursen points out that  tschirnhaus simply did not accept spinoza’s strict separation of the intellect from the imagination. this careful separation in spinoza’s philosophy lay at the heart of spinoza’s criticism of boyle’s experimental philosophy, which spinoza felt relied much too heavily on the faculty in humans most prone to producing errors and “did not put forward any mathematical proofs.” shapin writes that “there was, in spinoza’s view, a fundamental contrast between experiment and mathematics in their respective abilities to  secure conviction;” because boyle did not offer mathematical proofs of his experiments,                                                    “daher hat herr descartes am besten von allen unendlich viele neue kurven dargeboten und vieles  ausgezeichnete zur erkenntnis ihrer innersten natur hinzugefügt; aber wie er in der tat begonnen hatte,  hier eine vortreffliche tür zu öffnen, durch die man zu dem sehr weiten gefilde der spekulationen  abschweifen kann, so hat er diese gleichsam zum zweiten mal völlig verschlossen oder sie wenigstens nicht  so weit, wie er konnte, geöffnet, indem er eben hierdurch alle übrigen kurven, die nicht eine solche natur  haben, wie er sie bei den von ihm geometrisch genannten kurven fan, ausschloss, und zwar nach meinem  urteil aus keineswegs ausreichenden gründen.” e. w. von tschirnhaus, medicina mentis ( ):  .      they could not convince. boyle countered that he was right to be “wary” of mathematical  proofs and to “consult sense” in order to check “whether men have not been mistaken in their hypotheses and reasonings.”   tschirnhaus claimed to be offering a way of  mediating the tension between spinoza and boyle.   he staunchly advocated “the use of  a good method in which the intellect, imagination and senses cooperate,” which, in a way reminiscent of leibniz’s interest in the same phenomenon, “would lead to the ideal situation where the ‘school’ can become ‘ludus’ or ‘play’.”   children would be inspired  to learn via their instincts; they would use these instincts to assimilate formal  mathematical proofs and experience, which would lead to new inventions.  the medicina mentis taught one how to successfully negotiate the tension between cognition and  sensation.   it offered ways of training cognition through geometry and experiments for  training the senses. spener and francke’s movement would help individuals train and sharpen their instincts—or internal mediators.   in keeping with the embodied triad of cognition, drive, experience he was  interested in championing, tschirnhaus identified three essences (wesenheiten) in the  world:  imaginables, mathematical/rationales, and physical/reales.  imaginable  essences corresponded to the functions of the imagination: to feel, to create pictures and  to perceive truth.   a brief summary of how he understood the distinctions between these  essences followed:                                                        in steven shapin, “robert boyle and mathematics” ( ): ­ .     van peursen,  ­ .   ibid.,  ­ .  discussed in detail in e. w. von tschirnhaus, gründliche anleitung ( ):  ,  ­ .   van peursen also points out that tschirnhaus’s interest in the ‘elimination of errors’ represents an extension  of malebranche who had argued in recherche de la vérité ( ) that there could be no investigation, no  discovery of truth unless errors of the senses, imagination, intellect and passions were entirely eliminated.   van peursen,  .    e. w. von  tschirnhaus, medicina mentis ( ):  .      when i think about everything that i have become acquainted with since childhood  through seeing, reading or hearing, and i reflect awhile on the order in which i acquired  these thoughts, a kind of chaos emerges…. some of these thoughts are strong essences, which, it appears, are taken as truth by me earlier than they are understood.  these often  influence my spirit…as appearances that act upon me from the outside… in active ways…. i will name such appearances that act upon me in this way “imaginables” or “feel­able” or, if one prefers, phatasmen.    …  some things are grasped by me in different ways, for example, what i know from figures,  numbers, movements and similar things…. such essences, which… appear to have no existence outside of my person and of which i grasp only the clean or very abstract… i will call “rationales” or “mathematical.”  …  finally, i observe that i have thoughts from some essences, which, unlike the preceding  rationales, can be grasped in multiple ways rather than in singular and unchangeable  ways…. for example, all that we grasp as material, unclean or non­transparent.  these  essences i will name “reales” or “physisches.”     imaginables or phantasias (i.e. enargeia) were more than vivid pictures or experiences  that could be harnessed by a gifted rhetorician to make events “appear” real. phantasias  were real or essential.  they made impressions upon the spirit; their presence could be  physically felt.  if their effects on the individual could be harnessed and errors of  perception remedied, anything would be possible.  tschirnhaus would later explain to  francke in his basic guide to the useful sciences that one of his most basic concerns in  the medicina had been to “expose the obstacles and what comprise the largest and most  comprehensive errors” in the act of “recognizing truth,” both “through the senses and  through the power of the intellect.”   his program was concerned with geometry’s potential to produce an increasingly infallible intellect and experiment’s ability to remedy perception.    to alleviate the tendency of the senses to produce errors, tschirnhaus offered his  readers a set of rules for conducting experiments.  the experiments would help                                                     ibid.,  .  points, lines and curves are the only rational essences.    “because it is my intent to show the best way to teach the youth how to recognize truth through the  senses and through the power of the intellect, it is very important to expose the obstacles and what  comprise the largest and most comprehensive errors.”  e. w. von tschirnhaus, gründliche anleitung  ( ):  .      individuals better understand their phantasias.  “one learns about imaginable essences by  doing countless careful experiments,” he wrote, “which should be performed according to  specific rules.”   the performance of an experiment offered a great opportunity to  improve upon the senses, including their ability to serve as a point of access to real  essences, while learning about how sensation affects the creation of imaginable essences.   first, one needed to consider the room in which an essence is going to be observed,  tschirnhaus wrote, “in part so that we can see the nature of the outer or surrounding body  and its influence upon another; … and in part so that we recognize in which order the experiments, or attempts, should be made;” carving out a space to investigate phantasias  was also important to tschirnhaus because “when someone sets aside a room for the teaching of some thing, that thing is more quickly learned.”   the next step involved  “recognizing through experiments” what was necessary for the production of an imaginable essence. those who performed experiments in an “empirical manner” (like boyle) were so concerned with understanding the properties or operations of some thing  that they did not use the site of the experiment to recognize how phantasias were  produced.  they missed or disregarded the connection and the broader opportunities that  better understanding this connection could offer the world.  finally, tschirnhaus  explained:  one must keep trying and not give up until the eyes (and if its not possible with the naked  eye then dioptric lenses can be used to enhance vision) become aware of an opening.   and when as much as possible is discovered through this art it will not be difficult to  observe that which is resident in the many products….                                                         ibid.,  .   ibid.    ibid.   ibid.      cognition was implicated in this set of practices by virtue of its role in helping to make  sense of the relationship between real and imaginable essences (or experience and  phantasias).  even if one grew discouraged and convinced that it would be “impossible for the intellect to take something further because of the multidimensionality of the  particular thing,” tschirnhaus advised that one should “think about the universal guidelines that are presented to us through the true physics … from this something will be achieved that is absolutely impossible for empirkern to accomplish because they order  their experiments without the direction of reason,” he wrote.       tschirnhaus offered a kind of corrective to a purely empirical or a purely  mathematical program.  in the basic guide to the useful sciences, he emphasized that the  corrective lay in juxtaposing the study of mathematics with the practice of experiment  and taking them both as true.  doing this involved championing the cause of useful or  practical mathematics. first, and “above all,” tschirnhaus wrote, “one must teach the beginners the most important practices from all of the mathematical disciplines.” to “awaken a love of mathematics,” the teacher must appeal to children’s tendency to accept without questioning information revealed to them by their senses; the end goal was to  remedy this tendency in the end, but at least in the beginning one could use it to the  teacher’s advantage. they were to be taken outside to measure fields (using schwenter’s geometry) or taught how to make their own sundials and optical lenses.  the full  implications of cicero’s insistence that the context of discovery was more important than the context of justification became clear in step one; here lay the engine of invention  and, as cicero recognized, the beginning of practices (for cicero rhetoric) so central to                                                     ibid.,  .      the healing of the mind.   step two involved making use of the passion for the  mathematic sciences awakened in step one and starting with mathematical theory.  here  select exercises from archimedes’ theoremata and andreas tacquet’s seciones conicas  as well as bernard lamy’s nouveaux elements de geometrie were essential.  step three  was about application and learning the numerosam analysin, with the help of descartes’ geometrie.  but in step four, one would be ready to begin an intensive study of physics;  tschirnhaus remarked that when one had advanced to this point, it would be “worth consulting the utilitas philosophiae experimentalis of the learned englander, robert  boyle” (see appendix   for a complete list of recommended texts).    he also recommended studying altdorf professor johann christoph sturm’s collegium experimentale (see chapter two) and studying mechanics, because it was  held “in such high esteem” by the neoterici and “almost became the most important area of study for them.”   just as they recognized how certain rhetorical forms affected the  production of phantasias in barely discernable ways, the neoterici also understood that  the subtleties of the operations produced through mechanical processes were often  undetectable to the senses.  following their lead, tschirnhaus was convinced that the  study of mechanics could also be used to condition a kind of instinctual grasping of  complex phenomena, without understanding each individual part.  studying mechanics, a  middling mathematical science, could help one instinctually mediate rational and real                                                     van peursen,   n.  .   e. w. von tschirnhaus, gründliche anleitung ( ):  . “the uses for the study of physics i deal with  extensively in the third part of the medicina mentis… by considering that through natural recognition we  can derive the fullest ethics, the best medicine for the body and the best mechanics, one can easily form a  general idea of the present state of physics.”    ibid.,  .      essences—via imaginable essences, via feelings.   tschirnhaus was integrating several  insights from archimedes and what historians of technology refer to as “pre­classical  mechanics” and bringing them to bear on his own project.   sixteenth­century italian writers on mechanics, like guidobaldo del monte, liked  to talk about how those who understood machines did so through a combination of their  intuition and their bodies.  they did not necessarily need a full understanding of rational  causes.  henniger­voss writes that according to guidobaldo:  theoretical understanding of the causes behind the effects of mechanics was beyond the  ken of workers. in fact, the mechanic as a human agent is of minimal importance…  perhaps extrapolating from the pseudo­aristotle’s prologue to the questions on mechanics, guidobaldo holds that the common mechanic could understand the machines  with which he worked only intuitively, while the man of erudition had knowledge of  causes.  the difference between the learned response to machines and that of the  common people is a kind of leit motif in guidobaldo’s prefatory essays. the essays introducing both the equilibrium of planes and his last work, on screws (de cochlea)  discuss in detail the very different responses of admiration (admiratio) expected of  people who only know effects, and of reason (ratio) anticipated from the speculative  philosopher who knows causes.      tschirnhaus’s method drew readily from the idea that individuals who worked with their hands often had an intuitive grasp of how machines functioned but could usually not  explain the reasons for these functions.  he wanted to make the cultivation of this  intuitive grasping a central component of schooling regimens at the same time as children  were trained to know causes by honing their intellects.  there would be, in the end, no  distinction between “the people who only know effects” and the “philosopher who knows causes.” each individual would instinctually know both by making his instinct the assimilatory site of all his knowing.                                                       ibid., . “das studium mechanicum. dieses ist zwar bey ordinair gelehrten fast das allerverachteste  studium.  es ist aber von den neotericis in solche hohe würde gesetzt dass es fast zu dem  allervornehmsten worden. massen die physica nach ihnen fast alle ihre operationes durch mechanische  wirckungen verrichtet.  und ist nur dieser unterscheid dass hier die operationes so subtil, dass sie von den  sensibus nicht, wie in den ordinair machinen die räder können bemercket werden.”    mary henniger­voss, “working machines and noble mechanics: guidobaldo del monte and the  translation of knowledge” isis  :  (june,  ):  .        tschirnhaus was also especially interested in the promise of a “geometrical optics” for reconciling mathematics and physics. he was likely influenced in this regard by his stay in england, where he met with newton and seems to have become especially  enamored with the work of newton’s teacher and mentor isaac barrow.  antoni malet  has shown how barrow was championing a “geometrical optics” as a way of remedying errors of perception by making it possible to predict, through a series of calculations, the  physical location of objects.   “barrow's optics rested on a mathematically construed  notion of optical images,” malet explains; in collaboration with his colleague james  gregorie, barrow developed a mathematical principle of image location that relied on “a debated interpretation of a well­established phenomenon, ocular accommodation:  the gregorie­barrow principle of image location describes mathematically where the  object a should be perceived… the theoretically derived location of the image, a', will  change as a is removed to another location, or the shape of the reflecting surface is  changed, or the eye gains a new situation, or the light is refracted instead of reflected.  this provides innumerable occasions to test the "definition" of images, and that is what  we find in barrow's optical lectures. he highlighted results that explained observational  facts, particularly those concerned with the working of lenses and telescopes, but it was  one of barrow's main concerns to show that the geometrical image agrees with the  observed image. he allowed that some evidence did not support his mathematical  characterization of images, but dismissed it as being inconsiderable vis­à­vis the evidence  supporting it.      as alan shapiro has also explained, barrow’s theory actually made it possible to mathematically determine the physical location of optical images “for any refraction or reflection on plane and spherical surfaces.”   he was one of the most vocal proponents  of the idea that mathematics was actually a causal science and was joined by john wallis,                                                     antoni malet, “isaac barrow on the mathematization of nature: theological voluntarism and the rise of geometrical optics,” journal of the history of ideas  :  ( ):  ­ .   ibid.,  . n.    this per paolo mancosu’s discussion of both malet and shapiro’s work on the barrow­(gregorie)  principle. paolo mancosu, “acoustics and optics,” in park and daston eds., ( ): . see also alan e. shapiro, “the optical lectures and the founding of the theory of optical imagery,” in mordechai feingold ed., before newton: the life and times of isaac barrow (cambridge: cambridge university  press,  ):  ­ .       who was engaged in a similar project of geometrical motion (or geometrical mechanics)  in reiterating this claim.       peter dear also confirms that barrow, following aristotle, “had allowed that knowledge of a universal in geometry could be acquired through experience of a single  example—as, for example, in the inspection of the properties of a single triangle.”   this  is reminiscent of tschirnhaus’s interest, discussed above, in intuiting the three variations of essences he identifies by glancing at a single curve without necessarily understanding  the operations behind the production of the curve itself. isaac barrow’s lectiones opticae et geometricae ( st ed. ), from which his mathematical principle of image  location is derived, were republished in   with an added section entitled on conic sections, derived from apollonius of perga, as well as a lengthy commentary on archimedes.   clearly, archimedes also had a direct bearing on barrow’s project. direct evidence of tschirnhaus’s engagement with barrow’s principle comes to us from  christian wolff, who remembered how during his legendary meeting with the nobleman                                                     r.j. searjeanson notes that barrow’s lectiones mathematicae (delivered in  ) were supposed to be a  direct challenge to pierre gassendi, who had argued in part ii of his exercitationes paradoxicae adversos aristoteleos in   that no science, including mathematics, could be said to provide causal knowledge in  aristotle’s terms. see his “proof of persuasion” entry in park and daston eds. ( ): . wallis’s mechanica sive de motu tractatus geomtericus (mechanics or geometrical treatise on motion,  ­ )  was supposed to be provide a mathematical solution to the problem of motion.  see kirsti andersen and  henk j.m.bos, “pure mathematics” in park and daston eds. ( ): . see also d.m. jesseph, squaring the circle: the war between hobbes and wallis (chicago: university of chicago press,  ); p. beeley  and c. j. scriba eds., the correspondence of john wallis ( ­ ), vol.  :  ­  (oxford: oxford  university press,  ); a. g. debus, science and education in the seventeenth century; the webster- ward debate (london: macdonald,  ).   peter dear, “the meanings of experience,” in park and daston eds. ( ):  .     m. feingold and j. gascoine in before newton: the life and times of isaac barrow, ed. m. feingold  (cambridge,  ); barrow's three main scientific works are the mathematical lectures ( ), optical lectures ( ), and geometrical lectures ( ).  see also w. whewell ed., the mathematical works of isaac barrow (cambridge,  ); john kirkby, the usefulness of mathematical learning explained and demonstrated (london,  ); optical lectures from isaac barrowgs optical lectures, a. g. bennett, d. f.  edgar eds., tr. h. c. fay (london,  ).      in leipzig, tschirnhaus recommended that he study barrow’s lectiones geometricas if  he wanted to take his study of mathematics further.   in the third section of the medicina mentis, tschirnhaus discussed a passage from  isaac newton’s mathematical principles of natural philosophy, where he says newton  offered “beautiful meditations about the development of curves.” but, he continued:  what i have against this is that i want to know how all possible geometrical curves can  be taught in the easiest way, and after thinking it over in some basic terms, i have  observed that there is no easier way than through focal­points (brennpunkte).  as i have  tried the same with mechanical curves, i have learned that most importantly here the  focal­points are not actually points but curves….         in the second edition of his medicina mentis (leipzig,  ), tschirnhaus added a  section about furthering the generation of curves with focal points where he claimed to  introduce new and universally applicable ways of constructing curves.  the key was the  brennspiegel, or burning mirror.   tschirnhaus’s numerous experiments with burning mirrors also formed a part of his conciliatory program.  canstein’s report of sending one of tschirnhaus’s mirrors to the franckesche stiftungen in service of the “experiments undertaken by the youth” there confirms the significance of the instrument for members of francke’s organization as well.     tschirnhaus concluded that his method could either be inculcated in a very short  time but with concerted effort by someone who appreciated its value, or one could                                                     christian wolff explains that while questioning the nobleman about some of the medicina mentis’s  specific claims, tschirnhaus conceded that he had not followed his method through to its fullest conclusion.   in fact, he had a third volume planned, he said, where he more thoroughly applied his method to physics  and this tome would truly astound people.  wolff also notes that tschirnhaus recommended he study  nieuwentiit’s analysin infinitorum ( ) and jacques ozanam’s nouveaux elements d’algebre ( ).   ozanam was a french mathematician who became a member of académie des sciences in  ;  tschirnhaus was especially fond of his récréations mathématiques et physiques ( ,   vols), which he  also recommends in the gründliche anleitung ( ).   e. w. von tschirnhaus, medicina mentis ( ):  .     uwe mayer briefly discusses the importance of the burning mirror for e.w. von tschirnhaus in “am rande” ( ):  ­ .   peter schicketanz ed. der briefwechsel carl hildebrand von cansteins mit august hermann francke ( ):  .  reprinted in thomas müller­bahlke, “naturwissenschaft und technik” ( ):   n.  .      acquire the understanding it promised with the help of “a small book by andre tacquet entitled: elements of plane and solid geometry with selected excerpts from archimedes.   in tacquet, tschirnhaus emphasized in the medicina mentis, “everything is explained so transparently, that i know many who attack him and think that they can  happily achieve awareness (kenntnis) by themselves without the instruction of some kind  of teacher.” but these people, who held such differing opinions from tacquet’s and his own, he argued, “have not yet properly formed the natural idea of physics, of which i speak here, in their spirit (geist).”   the careful study of tacquet could actually function  as a viable substitute for his own method but one had to accept its status as a product of  jesuit learning—a problem for some in a multi­confessional landscape fraught with  several kinds of tensions. taught by st. vincent and francois d’aguilon, the jesuit mathematician andre tacquet is also famous for influencing john wallis, newton and  leibniz.   while the opera mathematica (antwerp,  ) was probably his best known  work, he also sought to further aguilon’s active attempts to apply geometry to the study of perception.   in the optica section of the opera, tacquet attempted to establish a  mathematical law of reflection that was universally applicable.  vanpaemel points out  that despite his interest in understanding physical processes, for tacquet “the mathematical disciplines were a genuine science about the real world, not just an abstract                                                     andreas tacquet, elemente der ebenen und festen geometrie mit ausgewählten abschnitten aus archimedes (anvers,  ; amsterdam,  ).   e. w. von tschirnhaus, medicina mentis ( ):  . “ich weiss, das viele, die dieses lessen, andere meinung als ich sein werden, und die ursache hierfür ist mir keines wegs verborgen; denn sie haben  natürlich die idee der physik, von der ich spreche, bis jetzt nicht richtig genug in ihrem geist gebildet.”   william whiston, frequenter of the royal society and member of the society for the promotion of  christian knowledge, also published an english translation of tacquet’s geometry in  : the elements of euclid with select theorems out of archimedes (london,   &  ).   henri oldenbourg called it “one of the best books ever written about mathematics;” aguilon published the opticorum libri sex philosophis juxta ac mathematicis utiles (anvers,  ) or book of six optics, useful for mathematicians and philosophers alike.       model of it.  they were not based on fictitious hypotheses to save the appearances, but on  statements believed to be true in nature.”     further evidence of tschirnhaus’s interest in andreas tacquet’s geometry  appears throughout the gründliche anleitung.  after awakening the passion for  mathematics through praxis in the first step, tschirnhaus explained that “one must soon begin with a theorica in order to show what all of the practices flow out of; this works if  one teaches euclid and here no book is better to start with than tacquet, because he  provides evidence of the continuing relevance of the ancients and derives detailed  explanations from them.”   emphasizing that selected exercises from archimedes’ theorems was especially important at this stage, tschirnhaus went on to explain that the  singular quality of tacquet’s geometry (also manifest in his opere) is simple: “one understands more easily the ancient and neotericorum scripts cited by euclid in the order  that tacquet puts them in, in such a way that the same understanding can not occur in the  arrangements of père lamy.”   while tschirnhaus recommended bernard lamy’s nouveaux elemens de geometrie, as a useful source for additional training in  mathematical theory, no one had yet matched tacquet’s organization of ancient knowledge—especially his juxtaposition of euclid, archimedes and neoterician  mechanics.  only after the instinct was awakened (in step one) and the intellect had  engaged with the geometrical precepts as arranged by father tacquet (step two), was one  prepared to undertake a study of physics.  tschirnhaus assured his reader, initially                                                     g.h.w. vanpaemel, “jesuit science in the spanish netherlands” in mordechai feingold ed., jesuit science and the republic of letters (cambridge, mass: mit press,  ):  ­ .   e. w. von tschirnhaus, gründliche anleitung ( ):  .   ibid.,  .  bernard lamy, nouveaux elemens de geometrie, ou de la mesure du corps (paris,  ).      francke, that he could rest assured that this study “would eliminate the errors affecting us  all that cannot be gotten rid of through rational processes.”        one final characteristic of tacquet’s writings that appealed to tschirnhaus’s interest in reconciling mathematics and physics was his emphasis on considering multiple  points of view. vanpaemel notes that a distinctive feature of tacquet’s texts was his “reluctance to discriminate between competing explanations;” for example, in the jesuit’s discussion of the scintillation of the stars:  tacquet explained this phenomenon first according to aristotle, who ascribed it to the  distance between the stars and the viewer.  then he proceeded to the explanation of  scheiner and biancani, who sought the cause in the influence of the atmosphere.  a third  explanation was given by bruno, kepler und riccioli, who presume a rotation of the  stars…. he concluded his review by accepting the veracity of all explanations. no explanation was to be absolutely discarded, all explanations were useful and  complemented each other.     while tacquet does not mention his adherence to a particular brand of philosophical  reasoning or method, the parallels between this tendency and the conciliatory eclecticism  of johann christoph sturm (discussed in the following chapter) is quite remarkable.    “this reluctance to discriminate between competing explanations” also became a hallmark of francke’s pedagogy, which frequently presented pupils with competing explanatory models in the interest of training them to derive their own conclusions.  if  their instincts had been properly trained, the conviction was that they would each derive  the same truths from the exhibited phenomenon, despite visible contradictions.      -.+/ ;:*.+!                                                    ibid.,  .   vanpaemel in feingold ed. ( ):        tschirnhaus’s method for reconciling mathematics and physics through instinct  has enormous implications for our understanding of pietism and vice versa.  for  tschirnhaus and ultimately for francke, using geometry to hone the intellect and rules for  experiments to regulate sensation while assimilating what was produced by these  activities instinctually—or using the soul—lay the key to reconciliation and the  perfection of mankind. because he actively sought out tschirnhaus’s advice and by all appearances applied it, francke’s pedagogical program must be understood alongside  tschirnhaus’s program in order to be most fully appreciated. francke’s interest in implementing tschirnhaus’s method indicates his acceptance of several powerful assumptions:  namely that mathematics and physics actually could be merged  productively, that experimentation was more about perfecting sensation than  understanding natural processes, that geometrical exercise was central to improving  cognition and that the phantasias of our instinct held the key to the entire conciliatory  project.    cultivating the instinct or drive was an exceedingly important task that created  opportunities for individuals like spener and francke to step in and teach others  (including tschirnhaus) what they knew about how the cultivation of instinct worked  through illumination, meditation and exegesis.  francke carved out a program that  implemented tschirnhaus’s method for reconciling mathematics and physics because he recognized that he, and spenerian reform more generally, had a powerful place in it.  i  think he knew that championing the conciliatory potential of instinct and the middling  mathematical (or practical) sciences was quite a bit like championing a practical faith— one that taught individuals how to assimilate essences handed down from the divine in      the bible with their own subjective experiences of that same divine.  they, too, were to  do this instinctually—in their hearts.  each of these figures believed in the potential of  perfecting both experience and cognition so as to affect changes in the world that would  manifest themselves as phantasias, to be read or registered in heightened (illuminated)  conciliatory drives.  they were not the only ones.  a father and son from altdorf  recognized the possibility of perfection in a conciliatory program as well, influencing its  orientation and quite possibly inspiring the specifics of tschirnhaus’s method in the first place.        chapter two:  sturmian eclecticism and the technologies of discernment       …neither the reception of the species into the eye nor the material perception of those  images in the brain can render the sense of seeing perfectly compleat as it is generally  and ordinarily exercised in rational creatures: but there is required again,  rdly, a  mental perception with true, internal knowledge and consciousness of the impression  which usually produceth some judgment consequential thereupon.     ­johann christoph sturm         putting into practice the instructions contained in tschirnhaus’ basic guide to the  useful sciences was inextricably linked to the construction of an institutional landscape  oriented around the idea of reconciliation more generally.  a conciliatory method for  teaching mathematics and physics needed to be situated within a specially designated  space—a neutral or middling space, like judgment or the heart, where the union of the  two could take place through various forms of exercise in the “middling” mathematical  sciences.  the need for this separate or extended site becomes especially clear after  considering francke’s interest in eclecticism, including his own connections to a pair of  father and son mathematicians from altdorf (just outside of nürnberg), johann christoph  ( ­ ) and leonard christoph sturm ( ­ ).  until now, the influence of this  duo on the curricula and construction of the pietist orphanage have been almost entirely  overlooked.  also unrecognized have been tschirnhaus’s repeated references to johann  christoph sturm both in the medicina and in the gründliche anleitung.  his brief  remarks to francke at the end of the anleitung about the similarities between his own  method and sturm’s philosophia eclectica will receive some much needed attention here.                                                     johann christoph sturm, in mathesis juvenilis: or a course of mathematicks for young students, made  english from the latin of jo. christopher sturmius, by george vaux, m.d.   vols. (london,  ­ ).      this chapter is concerned with making the relevance of eclecticism and the  sturms’ interest in the mathematical sciences clear for the formulation and expression of  francke’s science of perfection.  here i engage recent scholarship that has rediscovered  j.c. sturm and his formulation of an “eclectic method” of philosophical inquiry.  i do this  in conjunction with a brief introduction to the debates around irenicism that were  occurring among theologians precisely at the time that sturm began to popularize  eclecticism.  i especially consider the contributions of georg calixt ( ­ ), whose  work on developing concrete strategies for the unification of all confessions wielded a  powerful influence upon most german theological faculties and territorial rulers of the  seventeenth century, his most vocal opponent in what are now referred to as the  “syncreticist controversies,” abraham calov ( ­ ), and the famous reformed  irenicist, david pareus ( ­ ), with whom johann amos comenius interacted  while studying heidelberg in  .   finally, i use correspondence between francke and  leonard christoph sturm, in tandem with l.c. sturm’s interest in architecture, to  consider how the orphanage building was able to function as a kind of conciliatory  space—a symbol of the method it housed.  the parallels between j.c. sturm’s eclectic  method (extended and refined by his son), boyle’s experimental method (including his  interest in “reconciling reason and religion”) and tschirnhaus’s medicine for the mind  are striking.  a fuller treatment of the sturms’ contributions will make these parallels  much clearer and demonstrate their relevance for francke’s pedagogical community.                                                       i rely on johannes wallmann’s treatment of calixt and calov in his essay: “union, reunion, toleranz:  georg calixts einigungsbestrebungen und ihre rezeption in der katholischen und protestantischen  theologie des  .jahrhunderts,” in heinz duchhardt und gerhard may eds. union­konversion­toleranz:  dimension der annaerhung zwischen den christlichen konfessionen im  . und  .jahrhundert (mainz:  verlag philipp von zabern,  ):  ­ .  my brief treatment of pareus is drawn from howard hotson’s  “irenicism and dogmatics in the confessional age: pareus and comenius in heidelberg,  ,” in journal  of ecclesiastical history  :   (july  ):  ­ .      while going down this path, i show that there was much more to sturmian  eclecticism than integrating mechanical philosophy into an aristotelian metaphysics.   treatments of j.c. sturm to date have tended to portray his method as “fundamentally  based on the system of aristotle,” or as kind of “eclectic aristotelianism” that borrowed  readily from several philosophical schools; however, in stressing aristotelianism as the  starting point or site into which neo­platonism and all other schools were to flow,  scholars working on the subject have slightly misinterpreted how the method was  supposed to work.    christia mercer and r.c. sleigh jr. explain in their introduction to  leibniz’s early metaphysics that for german eclectics like sturm, “the proper way to find  what is ‘most true’ is to rid oneself of the dogma of any particular philosophical sect and  to acquire knowledge of all the significant intellectual traditions,” yet they conclude that  what this ultimately amounted to was a system “fundamentally based in the philosophy of  aristotle.”   i am certainly not denying that aristotle was very important to sturm, but i  do not think the entire system was based “in” aristotle.  it was based in the soul and its  ability to judge.  the end goal may have been “the truth, as aristotle taught it,” but the  key was not to start with aristotle or with plato for that matter.  the key was to start with  oneself, in the middle, and to weave together all the insights of the various schools into a  coherent tapestry in separate, third site—in one’s heart.  doing this successfully required  god; it required a great deal of prayer, supplication and contemplation.  we miss  something very critical to understanding the orientation of the pietist orphanage when we  start “in” aristotle.  one started “in” the orphanage.  one started in a space both                                                     see christia mercer and r.c. sleigh jr., “metaphysics: the early period to the discourse on metaphysics,”  in nicholas jolley, the cambridge companion to leibniz (cambridge: cambridge university press,  ):  esp.  ­ .   ibid.      physically and figuratively suspended from the norms of the outside world.  this is why a  more accurate understanding of j.c. sturm’s eclecticism is so critical to understanding  what both leibniz (see chapter three) and francke were up to.   if we start “in” the pietist orphanage and examine the diversity of j.c. sturm’s  work in mathematics (including his special interest in archimedes’ geometry) and his  work in experimental physics in conjunction with his spirituality, we acquire a much  fuller understanding of the power of the eclectic method that francke eventually brought  to bear on his own pedagogies.  j.c. sturm’s eclecticism is also inextricably linked to the  mathematical sciences and especially the mediatory capacity of certain optical  instruments like the camera obscura that could be used to produce agreement between  real and projected images.  like tschirnhaus, j.c. sturm was very interested in  geometrical optics, and the potential of the camera obscura to also serve as a critical,  third and neutral mediator (like the halle orphanage) between experience and cognition.   leonhard christoph’s work conveys a similar preoccupation with the mathematical  sciences, especially architecture and mechanics.  references to both father and son  appear often enough in the curricula of francke’s schools, tschirnhaus’s gründliche  anleitung and francke’s correspondence to warrant an investigation of their roles in the  pietist orphanage’s epistemological landscape—and an appeal for their singular  contributions to a conciliatory science of perfection.      johann christoph sturm     while perhaps not as famous e.w. von tschirnhaus, j.c. sturm was known  internationally and admired by several of the leading intellectuals of his day. both  tschirnhaus and gottfried wilhelm leibniz made frequent references in their own      writings to the altdorf professor and kept track of his various endeavors.  “like leibniz,”  notes c.a. van peursen, “tschirnhaus frequently praises the works of johann christ(oph)  sturm, whose collegium experimentale sive curiosum offered him many examples on  how to cultivate the human mind through easy scientific experiments.”   according to  stefan kratochwil, leibniz first alluded to j.c. sturm’s work in his dissertation on the  art of combination ( ) and carefully followed several of the experiments sturm was  conducting in his physics collegium in altdorf; he was especially interested in those  involving the observation of microorganisms with a microscope.   leibniz, tschirnhaus  and j.c. sturm also all studied under the same charismatic professor of mathematics in  jena, erhard weigel ( ­ ), who was quite highly regarded for his attempts to  make mathematics more useful and founded a school in his home for the teaching of  mathematical sciences.   weigel transferred his interest in applied mathematics to these                                                     c.a. van peursen, “e.w. von tschirnhaus and the ars inveniendi,” journal of the history of ideas  :   (july  ):  ­ .  johann christoph sturm, collegium experimentale sive curiosum (nürnberg,  ):  programma invitatorium. e.w. von tschirnhaus, gründliche anleitung ( ):  ,  ­ ,  ­ .     stephan kratochwil, “johann christoph sturm und gottfried wilhelm leibniz,” in hans gaab, pierre  leich und günther löffladt eds., acta historica astronomiae: johann christoph sturm (frankfurt: verlag  harri deutsch,  ):  ,  .  leibniz and j.c. sturm had one public dispute, documented in the acta  eruditorum, in  ­ .  leibniz defended the idea of the world, god’s creation, as a perfect machine that  functioned according to internal laws; god did not have to intervene in the daily affairs of mankind.  sturm  argued (following boyle) against this idea and for the possibility that god intervened regularly in the  world; he said the effects of divine interference could be felt physically. in kratochwil,  ­ .   see günther mühlpfordt “gelehrtenrepublik leipzig. wegweiser und mittlerolle der leipziger  aufklärung in der wissenschaft” in zentren der aufklärung iii leipzig: aufklärung und bürgerlichkeit. ed.  by wolfgang martens (heidelberg: verlag lamber schneider,  ); reinhard schlelicke, klaus­dieter  herbst und stefan kratochwil, erhard weigel: barocker erzvater der deutsche auflklärung (harri  deutsch, frankfurt,  ); christa schaper, aus dem kreis der weigel­schüler im franken. archiv für  geschichte von oberfranken   ( ):  ­ ; hildegard schlee, erhard weigel und sein süddeutscher  schülerkreis. eine pädagogische bewegung im  .jahrhundert (heidelberg: quelle & meyer,  ).  the  best expression of weigel’s mathematics is his philosophia mathematica,theologia naturalis solida ( ),  which contained a discussion of archimedes entitled archimetria; u.g. leinsle discusses the influence of  weigel on j.c.sturm, but does not explore how he endeavored to link mathematics to his interest in  physics.   see u.g. leinsle, “universal mathematik und metaphysik bei johann christoph sturm” in hans  gaab, pierre leich und günter löffladt eds., acta historia astronomiae: johann christoph sturm vol.   (verlag harri deutsch,  ):  ­ .      figures; he played a powerful formative role in directing the interests of all three of his  former students in the mathematical sciences.  in several sections of the gründliche anleitung, tschirnhaus made his own  affinity for the elder sturm very clear.  he described j.c. sturm’s method as a set of  practices that used “sensual experience” as a means of exciting or producing wonder in  order to awaken the “natural inclination of all people toward the truth.”   only a few  books showed one how to use experience in this way, he explained to francke, and j.c.  sturm’s was one of them.  his collegium curiosum was to be read alongside daniel  schwenter’s delicaie physico­mathematicae and ozenan’s recreations mathematiques  & physiques to maximize the potential resident in a child’s first exposure to the  mathematical sciences.   in another instance, after underlining the importance of using  “many examples” to teach children new mathematical concepts, tschirnhaus points to  sturm’s mathesi enucleata as an illustration of what he is talking about.   finally, in the  gründliche anleitung’s concluding section on the study of physics, tschirnhaus  emphasizes the importance of teaching youth how to derive meaning from “useful  experiences;” he explained that “herr sturm does this very well in the second portion of  his collegii experimentalis because he shows how with the simple extrication of the air a  new philosophy in physics has emerged that tosses the old, tenacious opinions into a  waste pile before our eyes.”                                                          tschirnhaus, gründliche anleitung ( ):  .  “…eine verwunderung excitiren um die natürliche  begierde so bey allen menschen ist zu der wahrheit.”   ibid,  ­ .  daniel schwenter, delicae physico­mathematicae (nürnberg,  ); jacques ozanam,  recreations mathematiques et physiques (paris,  ,   vols.).  for the varied uses of “wonder” in a  variety of contemporary contexts see lorraine daston and katherine park, wonders and the order of  nature  ­  (new york: zone books,  ).   sturm, mathesi enucleata (nünberg,  ).   tschirnhaus, gründliche anleitung ( ):  .          a closer look at the lesson plans of francke’s schools also reveals several  references to the work of j.c. sturm.  in  , krüger writes, a tract entitled the “true  news about the condition of the orphanage and related institutions up to now” reported  that “in the elementary mathematics classes (classe prima) the art of gnomonicam (sun  dials) from sturm’s mathesis juvenilis is being taught.”   in one stiftungen text,  tschirnhaus, tacquet’s geometry and sturm are mentioned in the same context.  joachim  lange reported in his “improvement of the art of schooling” that in the stiftung’s  pädagogium:  geometry and trigonometry are taught according to sturm’s mathesis juvenilis, from  which the scholars are taken for a specific period of time to the fields and are taught how  to measure the length, width, height and density of physical bodies.  for those who can  prove their proficiency in the above exercises, a few things from civil architecture,  statics and mechanics are taken up; and yes, if a few are found who acquire a taste for  these things and can demonstrate a special desire and proclivity to the study of  mathematics, then they can lead demonstrations themselves, according to explanations of  selected theories from archimedes found in a. tacquet’s elements of geometry.  sturm’s  lesson book has been introduced so that one can avoid having to purchase all of the many  costly books recommended by tschirnhaus.     this passage provides a particularly powerful example of how interwoven the  contributions of tschirnhaus, sturm, tacquet (and archimedes) were in the franckesche  stiftungen and why a careful investigation of their points of convergence is so necessary.                                                      krüger,  .  johann christoph sturm, mathesis juveniles teil  : accessit consilium de mathesi in  scholarum triialium & gymnasiorum classes omnes, etiam puerorum legere discentium infimas, ingenti  juventutis commodo postlimonio introducenda (norimbergae : hoffmannus,  ) and mathesis juveniles  teil  : opticam cum catoptrica & dioprica, astronomiam cum usu globorum ... complexus (nürnberg,  ).   ibid.,  . andreas tacquet, elementa geometriæ planæ ac solidæ: quibus accedunt selecta ex  archimede theoremata (anvers,  ; amsterdam,  ); lange, von verbesserung des schulwesens  ( ),  : “die geometrie und trigonometrie werden nach sturms mathesis juvenilis gelehrt, wobei die  'scholaren auch zu gewissen zeiten aufs feld geführet und zur ausmessung mancherlei länge, breite und  höhe körperlichen raums und dichte angewiesen werden.  mit denen welche in gedachten Übungen sich  vor andern fleissig bewiesen, hat man etwas aus der architectura civili, statica und mechanica  vorgenommen, ja, wenn sich einige finden, die von allen diesen dingen einen vorschmack erlangt und zu  dem studio matheseos eine sonderbare lust und geschicklichkeit bewiesen haben, so können sie zu den  demonstrationibus selbst angeführt werden, wie denn um deswillen des a. tacquet elementa geometriae  und dessen theoremata selecta aus dem archimede vormals erklärt worden sind.’ – sturms lehrbuch hatte  man eingeführt 'um die anschaffung so vieler kostbarer bücher’ wie tschirnhaus als fordere zu  vermeiden.”       while the use of tacquet’s geometry indicates that tschirnhaus’s recommendations were  taken seriously, sturm’s book apparently helped bridge the gap between what francke  wanted to teach in his schools and what kind of curricula he could actually afford.   it  offered enough of what was needed for introducing pupils to the proper study of both  mathematics and physics.  a few pieces of information about j.c. sturm and his significance also emerge in  the handwritten lesson plans that will become the primary focus of part ii.  in a section  containing detailed descriptions of the models of the universe (himmelsphären) on view  in certain european cities, the author mentions that the city of altdorf was famous for its  himmelsphären based on the system of copernicus; he then provides the following  summary of j.c. sturm’s significance:    the famous johann christoph sturm, who is a professor of physics and mathematics in  altorff described the sphaera altorffina in  .    he taught there himself for   years and achieved great renown.    wrote archimedem germanicum, physicae conciliatricis, conamina, collegium curiosum.   he introduced there the eclectic philosophy in opposition to the philosophy secatrice.   he had to send his portrait to the society of science in england, which was shown to the  foreigners (this was not without some hesitation—he did not want to let himself be  painted…but then a painter was offered to him gratis).     in only a few short sentences, this anonymous text captures a few critical pieces of  information about j.c. sturm that also help to explain why he was important to francke  and tschirnhaus.  he was quite well known in his day as a professor of both mathematics  and physics and his publications were widely circulated.  he valued archimedes and tried  to make his ideas more accessible in the vernacular.  he had acquired fame both at home  and abroad for his introduction of an “eclectic philosophy”—a method that had  apparently attracted the attention of the british royal society.                                                     the list of books tschirnhaus recommended was indeed quite long.  see appendix  .   afst/h  e   semler lehrplan,  .          like most intellectuals of his day, including several members of the royal  society, j.c. sturm was preoccupied with the idea of confessional (including political)  and epistemological cohesiveness.  i think he was entirely conscious of a perceived  “impasse” between platonists and aristotelians or between those who preferred an  experimental philosophy (especially its practices) over mathematical method that  historians of science have repeatedly insisted was so characteristic of his time.   but he  was just as convinced, i propose, that the impasse was resolvable—and that it stemmed  from people not knowing how to most effectively integrate mathematics and  experimental physics without choosing a side.  in refining and popularizing an eclectic  method for philosophy, then, j.c. sturm was making a singular contribution to this  problem.  and it was in this method that he found the ideal solution: neutrality, tolerance,  coexistence—precisely the solutions that theologians throughout the holy roman empire  were insisting held the keys to unifying all confessions at precisely the same time.  like  his colleagues in the theology faculties, j.c. sturm was convinced that a properly  construed conciliatory methodology, an eclectic method, began and ended with  individuals, or more specifically with the training of their souls.  this was something that georg calixt, a lutheran theologian who held a chair  (lehrstuhl) in controversial­theology (kontroverstheologie) in helmstadt from    until  , also believed.  living and writing before, during and after the thirty years  war, he grew increasingly convinced that a mandate of toleranz held the key to the  eventual unification of all confessions.  calixt railed against the famous cuius regio, eius  religio (whose region, his religion) principle of the peace of augsburg ( ), for                                                     kuhn, “the essential tension” et al.  see my discussion in the introduction, page  .      example, which was reaffirmed again in the peace of westphalia ( ).   the entire  concept needed to be done away with, he argued, because it placed limits on the promise  of tolerance.  while westphalia at least allowed those who practiced a faith that was  different than that of their region’s established church to do so publicly during certain  hours and in private, the principle itself still upheld a fundamental confessional hierarchy.   it allowed a set of practices associated with one community to dominate or take  precedence over others and this, in and of itself, was dangerous.  in opinions he espoused  and distributed broadly, calixt insisted that the principle should no longer be upheld,  toleranz and coexistence should be enforced, and then vigorous inter­faith discussions  should take place oriented around devising a consensus antiquitatis based entirely on  careful exegetical readings of the fundamental tenets of apostolic christianity.  once  everyone was made to agree on the common truths animating all of their various  expressions of faith, longstanding differences and resulting conflicts would fade away.   calixt’s opponents, especially abraham calov, branded him a syncretist, or saw  him as someone who would ultimately do away with (if given the chance) the unique  characteristics of each confession.   calov and others’ criticisms led to a series of very  heated disputes that pitted the theology faculties of the empire against one another.    calov’s main concern was that by reverting entirely to a common or neutral source,  syncretic methods undermined the integrity of varying confessional practices—or the  aesthetic of the spiritual exercises that were the unique signature of each group.  but the                                                     wallmann, “union, reunion, toleranz,”  .   for discussion of calixt’s theological ethics see inge mager,  georg calixts theologische ethik und ihre  nachwirkungen (göttingen: vandenhoeck & ruprecht,  ).   for calov see volker jung’s das ganze der heiligen schrift: hermeneutik und schriftauslegung bei  abraham calov (stuttgart: calver verlag,  ).   ibid., esp.  ­ .      return to primitive or apostolic christianity, which also became one of the defining  characteristics of spenerian pietism, was viewed in calixtean circles as a serious and  necessary step to the elimination of strife and the restoration of what calixt called a pax  ecclesiae germanicae.  evangelical revivalism—or a return to a catholic or universal  christianity—was posited as a viable political solution to a complex set of geopolitical  problems, explaining the enormous influence that theology faculties wielded in central  europe more generally in this period.  of course, implementing calixt’s solution had to  involve more than exegesis.  it involved forcing all contemporaries, regardless of their  social status, to directly confront the message of christ and his apostles and to bring this  message to bear on their souls.  each individual needed to be taught to how to exercise  and monitor their spirituality so as to acquire “the true faith” and the message of love that  is at the heart of the new testament.  it is not a coincidence that devotional literature as a  genre proliferated in germany at this time as contemporaries got caught up in this cause.  spiritual exercise was imagined as the only way to arrive at neutrality and then,  ultimately, consensus and a universal faith.  one had to return to the bible (more  specifically the figure of christ), the third site, and in doing so one had to become fixated  on one’s soul.   both calixt and calov were considered irenicists because both believed in the  need for a union of christian confessional systems and advocated policies of toleration,  pacifism and neutrality.  they were participating in what is sometimes referred to as  “the  syncreticist controversies,” a multigenerational series of disputes oriented around the  fundamental problem of how to affirm the integrity of diversity without gradually  eliminating it by allowing one community or only certain ways of knowing dominate.       david pareus, a reformed theologian active a generation before calixt and calov at the  university of heidelberg (then a centre of calvinist learning) had defined the  preoccupations of an “irenicist movement” with the publication of his irenicum sive de  unione et synodo evangelicorum concilianda liber votives in  .  scholars have noted  that pareus and the priorities of irenicists must have influenced johann amos comenius’  program of pansophic regeneration, which i discuss in greater detail in the following  chapter.  comenius studied in heidelberg from   until  , precisely at the moment  pareus published his irenicum.  pareus also influenced the calvinist theologian john  bergius ( ­ ), who became the primary religious advisor to the first three electors  of brandenburg­prussia and also befriended calixt in  .   bergius had met pareus  while attending the university in heidelberg and also come into contact with the famous  huguenot irenicist pierre du moulin (while living in france in  ); as bodo nischan  has shown, these contacts influenced his own passion for irenicism, which he was able to  bring to bear on the forging of an official policy of religious toleration in brandenburg­ prussia during the period of the thirty years war.              this was the context into which j.c. sturm introduced his own conciliatory  methodology to the world after arriving at his post at the university of altdof in  .   given the important role that the irenicist controversies had played in the confessional  politics of this period, it is not at all surprising that sturm would see himself as having  something new to offer their cause.  scholars who have studied eclecticism, especially  christia mercer and donald kelley, have rightly pointed out that sturm drew readily                                                     bodo nischan, “john bergius: irenicism and the beginning of official religious toleration in  brandenburg­prussia,” church history  :  ( ):  ,  .   ibid.,  ­ .       from the spiritual exercises of the stoics.   they point especially to the influence of the  humanist scholar justus lipsius, who had insisted on a method of choice or election in  philosophy so as to reconcile the widely varying practices of the schools.   by the time  sturm was in altdorf, the influences of galileo, descartes and gassendi were so  resounding that some saw potential in lipsius’ methodology as a means of getting  mechanical philosophy and aristotelian metaphysics to cohere.  jean­baptiste du hamel  ( ­ ) of paris, johannes de raey ( ­ ) of leiden and johann clauberg  ( ­ ) of duisburg are examples of figures who took this project very seriously,  mercer notes.   sturm studied with de raey in leiden from   to  .   the method  he brought home to altdorf then, in mercer’s view, “perfectly represents what happens to  the conciliatory methodology of the stoics (as espoused by lipsius) when it is charged  with the task of assimilating the new mechanical philosophy.”   but as the preoccupation  of sturm’s contemporaries with irenicism illustrates quite clearly, neo­stoics were not the  only ones championing a conciliatory methodology.  sturm’s construction of an eclectic  method can be read as a response to the syncreticist controversies of the world he lived  in—offering a set of technologies and/or practices for producing the consilia that all  irenicists wanted, without forcing them (or anyone else for that matter) to choose a side.                                                     christia mercer "platonism and philosophical humanism on the continent" in a companion to early  modern philosophy ed. steven nadler (oxford: blackwell publishers,  ):  .  donald kelley,  “eclecticism and the history of ideas,” journal of the history of ideas ( ):  .   the manductio ad stoicam philosophiam of justus lipsius ( ) argued “that the method of critical  choosing or election should have guided philosophers all along and helped them avoid sectarian disputes or  dogmatic errors.” ibid.  matthew jones points out that lipsius offered a form of “spiritual exercise” that  “focused on moralities grounded in knowledge of nature” in the good life in the scientific revolution  ( ):  .     mercer, "platonism and philosophical humanism on the continent" in nadler ed. ( ):  .     according to michael albrecht, j.c. sturm completed a “mathematisch­metaphysische abhandlung”  under de raey and then headed to jena, before taking up a professorship in mathematics and physics in  altdorff in  .  see albrecht’s eklektik. eine begriffsgeschichte mit hinweisen auf die philosophie­ und  wissenschaftsgeschichte (stuttgart­bad cannstatt: friedrich fommann verlag,  ):  ­    mercer, "platonism and philosophical humanism on the continent" in nadler ed. ( ):  .      the key lay in emphasizing the importance of a neutral space where reconciliation could  more easily occur.    sturm called his method a philosophia eclectica, thereby permanently associating  his name with the cause.   in the ( ) introduction, he wrote that he wanted to show  his readers “how to break through the fortress of concealed truth” so as to discover the  “secret workings of nature” by becoming a collector of ideas.  one’s status as an able  idea­collector was, in turn, defined by his or her ability to be discriminating while  gathering these ideas up.  discrimination required one to be, first and foremost, neutral.   sturm urged practitioners of his methods to use their eyes correctly, to “avoid blindness,”  to “seek a variety of opinions,” and to be willing to use “any method” to extend their  minds “to the whole of nature and reason” so as “to recognize the truth and to  distinguish it from the untruth.”    practicing eclecticism involved being a discriminating  idea gatherer; someone who stepped outside his affiliations, obligations and assumptions  and resided in a space of intrinsic neutrality, above the fray.  one devised a coherent  strategy for assimilating variety—for making it meaningful and productive—and this  strategy revolved entirely around the faculty responsible for producing judgments, the  soul.  but instead of subsuming or boiling down the diversity of these varied stances to a  single core (like calixtean syncretism), sturm’s method promised that each stance, each                                                     he published a dissertation entitled de philosophia sectarian et elective in  , and would come out  with the first volume of his philosophia eclectica in  ; the second volume appeared in  , during the  intense period of collaboration between tschirnhaus and francke.  he played with the words election and  eclectic in ways that indicate he saw them as virtually interchangeable; he distinguished between an  eclectic/elective philosophy and an elective physics as well.   texts oriented specifically around an eclectic  or conciliatory physics include physicae conciliatrix (nürnberg,  ) and physica eclectiva sive  hypothetica. tomus primus partem physicae generalem complexus (nürnberg  ).  see michael  albrecht, eklektik ( ):  ­  and his “hypothesen und phänomene. zu sturms theorie der  wissenschaftliche methode” in hans gaab, pierre leich und günther löffladt eds. acta historica  astronomiae vol. : johann christoph sturm,  ­  (frankfurt: verlag harri deutsch,  ):  .   sturm quotes from mercer, "platonism and philosophical humanism on the continent" in nadler ed.  ( ):  ­ .      rival epistemology would be upheld, vindicated and accepted as true at the same time as  they were reconciled and/or assimilated with one another.  michael albrecht has noted that the signature of sturm’s physics was his  insistence that the practitioner needed his senses to observe an experiment and his reason  to explain the meaning of that same experiment.   but in order to produce new  knowledge about natural phenomena, including causes, sturm also emphasized that one  had to rely on the judgments of one’s soul.   instead of integrating the new mechanical  philosophy into a predominantly aristotelian framework, or arguing that the stark  differences between the two systems would disappear when their common links were  discovered, sturm’s method stressed new ways of linking together mathematics and  physics while taking all of their axioms as true, while accepting and celebrating their  differences.  like descartes, sturm also distinguished between the mechanics of seeing  and the soul’s ability to make judgments about what was seen, only he did not adopt a  skeptical stance towards the possibility of forcing resemblance between objects and their  images.   instead, he drew some inspiration from the example of archimedes, whom he  described as a figure who had stood in the middle, in neutral territory, and drew readily  from mathematics and physics to create useful machines; the insights from his work had  not been fully appreciated (or understood) in sturm’s view.  as archimedes had done,  sturm insisted that individuals should cultivate their ability to make judgments that could                                                     albrecht, eklektik ( ):  .     albrecht briefly engages the role of the “mathematical” in sturm’s physica elective. he notes that while  sturms physik “ist nicht nach mathematischer methode abgefasst,” in   sturm came out with a  mathematical method as an anhang to his physik that he called theosophiae h.e. cognitionis de deo  naturalis specimen methodo mathematica conceptum (altdorf  ).  albrecht sees this as proof that  sturm valued mathematical method but thought of it as something entirely different from the new  methodology he was developing for the study of physics.  i tend to question this interpretation and read  sturm’s juxtaposition here as more evidence of his interest in applying mathematical method to the study of  natural phenomena.  see albrecht, eklektik ( ):  ­ .   see stuart clark’s discussion of descartes’ skepticism in vanities of the eye ( ): esp.  ­ .        mediate what sturm called the “innate geometry inside all people” (even the blind) and  the perceptions of their senses.     even a cursory overview of j.c. sturm’s extensive writings on mathematics  reveals his commitment to recovering the insights of archimedes and to championing the  assimilatory powers of the soul as a neutral, self­regulating, judgment­ (and virtue­)  producing faculty—a key element of stoicism.  sturm published a study of aristotle’s  mathematics in   and a text he called the universal euclid in  .    his  incomparable archimedis sand arithmetic, subtitled or deeply meaningful discovery of  an especially easy­to­say number, which he [archimedes] unquestionably proves to be  larger than the number of all of the grains of sand that could fill the entire world,  appeared in  .    only three years later, in  , sturm came out with what came to  be known as the german archimedes or opera archimedes (the first german translation  of archimedes’ opera), which he titled “the incomparable archimedes books of art, or  the writings of his that can be found today, translated into high­german with important  commentaries throughout.”   finally, in  , he published the mathesis enucleata, in  which he tried to determine the length of curves derived from archimedes’ spirals.    the soul, or more specifically its ability to discern, comprised the middle ground  between the altdorf’s mathematics and physics faculties; aptly, sturm held a chair in                                                     see sturm’s discussion of the “ways of knowing and estimating distances” in the vaux ed. mathesis  juveniles ( ­ ):  ­ .   aristoteles mathematicus (jena  ); universalia eucliden (den haag,  ).   johann christoph sturm, des unvergleichlichen archimedis sand rechnung oder tiefsinnige erfindung  einer mit verderlicher leichtigkeit aussprechlichen zahl welche er unfehlbar beweiset grosser zu seyn als  die anzahl aller sandkörlein mit welchen die höhle der ganzen welt biss an den äussersten fir­ oder haft  sternen himmel könnte ausgefüllet werden. (nürnberg,  ).   johann christoph sturm, des unvergleichlicher archimedes kunst­bücher, oder heutigs tags  befindliche schriften, aus dem griechischen in das hoch­deutsch übersetzt und mit notwendigen  anmerkungen durch und durch erläutert (nürnberg,  ); it also appeared as opera archimedes quae  extant graeco germanice versa & notis (nürnberg,  ).   johann christoph sturm, mathesis enucleata (nürnberg,  ).      each one.  in the two­volume text he wrote specifically for use in schools (including  francke’s), mathematics for juveniles, sturm emphasized the special role that the eye  and the soul had to play in the cultivation of discernment.   book one of the mathesis  introduced children, first, to the study of universal mathematics and second, to the study  of optics, especially the study of “rational vision applied through exercises with the  camera obscura.”   here he described a series of exercises one could engage in, using  the camera obscura, in order to “cultivate diligent eyes” (diligentem oculi).  vaux’s  rendering of sturm’s juveniles into english notes that there were especially two things  required for seeing: “reception of the species into the eye and the material perception of  those images in the brain.”   but perfecting vision required something more, a third  space, entity or a “mental perception with true internal knowledge and consciousness of  the impression which usually produceth some judgement consequential thereupon.”    perfecting vision through the cultivation of this peculiar “mental perception with true  internal knowledge,” the ability to make sound judgments, was bound up with the  laborious interrogation and exercise of one’s soul that calixt and practitioners of  spenerean pietism insisted was necessary for the production of neutrality, consensus and,  eventually, universal truth.                                                          johann christoph sturm, mathesis juveniles i (nürnberg,  ); mathesis juveniles  : opticam cum  catoptrica & dioprica, astronomiam cum usu globorum ... complexus (nürnberg,  ).   ibid (book i): matheseos ad visionis rationem ex obscura camera declarandam applicatae, sive  scientiae opticae praefamen   j.c. sturm, mathesis juveniles (vaux ed.,  ­ ):  ­ .  the term species denotes an image or  something detected by the senses here.  for a discussion of the aristotelian concept of species see stuart  clark, vanities of the eye ( ):  ­ .     ibid.,  .  for more discussions of this “internal sense” or “mental perception with true internal  knowledge” in the late medieval/early renaissance context in which perspective first appeared see michael  camille, “before the gaze: the internal senses and late medieval practices of seeing” in robert nelson  ed. visuality before and beyond the renaissance: seeing as others saw (cambridge: cambridge university  press,  ) and david summers, judgment of sense: renaissance naturalism and the rise of aesthetics  (cambridge: cambridge university press,  ).      the chapters of sturm’s mathesis juveniles (especially book two) are mostly  concerned with explaining the mechanics and means of seeing, including the similarities  between the “causes of pictures in the camera obscura and those generated in the  imagination,” (chapter one) and the differences between daylight, direct, figural,  situated, distant, broad, big, numeral, active and quiet vision.”    they mostly offered up  a series of strategies or tools for assessing the space or object in question so pupils knew  how to determine which kind of visual modality was operating in any given context.  the  attempt seems reminiscent of newton’s own efforts to merge the “evident­ness” of  sensory experience (like the experience of a color) with mathematics.  as he explained in  the introduction to his optical lectures ( ­ ):  the generation of colors includes so much geometry and the understanding of colors is  supported by so much evidence that for their sake i can thus attempt to extend the bounds  of mathematics somewhat, just as astronomy, geography, navigation, optics and  mechanics are truly considered mathematical sciences even if they deal with physical  things: the heavens, earth, seas, light and local motion.  thus although colors may belong  to physics, the science of them must nevertheless be considered mathematical, insofar as  they are treated by mathematical reasoning.     newton’s message was not lost on j.c. sturm, a mathematician and physicist, whose  attempts to make the mathematical sciences accessible involved treating “physical  things” with “mathematical reasoning.”  he was extremely optimistic about the camera  obscura’s ability to further mediate, and thereby extend and refine, this relationship.  it  could serve as the third, neutral space, which—like the eye or the soul—played an                                                     j. c. sturm, mathesis juveniles i:  . de causis pictarum in utroque camerae obscurae genere imanginum;  . de oculi praerogativis, arti in parandis cameras obscuras inimitabilibus;  . visione ac simplici videndi  modo;  . de visione lucis, colorum, umbrae &c tanquam visibilibus propriis proprieque sic dictis;  . de  visionis directae requisites ac praecipuis conditionibus;  . de visione figurae   . de visione situs ac  distantiae;  . de visione magnitudinis;  . de visione numeri;  . de visione motus & quietis   isaac newton, optical lectures ( ­ ) in alan shapiro ed. the optical papers of isaac newton vol.   (cambridge: cambridge university press,  ).      absolutely pivotal role in the production of judgments that were not only sound, but  moral.  j.c. sturm and his contemporaries were fond of pointing to the camera obscura as  the perfect model of the eye’s machinery.   they understood the value of the instrument  as somehow contingent on its status as a mediator, which, like the eye, brought together  the species that it received (via rays of light) from the outside and the perception of its  meaning in the brain.  some saw the camera obscura apparatus as a kind of soul that  could mediate divine and human forms of knowledge—as solomon had been able to do  from his temple in jerusalem.  samuel rehyer, a mathematician/philosopher at the  university of kiel while sturm was in altdorf, wondered if solomon’s temple should  not also be thought of as a kind of holy camera obscura, “where the hole was not placed  on the sides like today’s optical window cameras, but instead had a small, round hole on  the top through which the glow of heaven could come in and illuminate the throne of  mercy.”  reyher also wondered:  how the camera obscura could be used to help explain the secrets of the incarnation.   because just like the camera obscura takes in the highest heavenly bodies and projects the  lowest and strangest things above, in the same way the incarnation [of christ] has taken  godly nature itself and elevated man’s nature—as christ said, the biggest people are to  become children and the smallest of these shall be raised up the highest in heaven.  when  the hole is placed above, nothing false can shine through it, instead only the heavens are  allowed to shine through and overshadow the lowest of the chamber.     the camera obscura served in this culture as a kind of metaphor for the holiest of  christian shrines; it mimicked a process that the wisest and divinely inspired king                                                     samuel reyher, kurzter auszug aus d.samuelis reyheri vornehmen profess. publ. mathesi mosaica  (lünberg,  ):  .  samuel reyher was the oldest son of andreas reyher ( ­ ), who directed the  gymnasium in gotha where duke ernst the pious introduced his new schulmethode in the  s.  andreas  reyher authored a school book in   called “short lessons on natural things” (kurzer unterricht von  natürlichen dingen) which first introduced the concept of object lessons (realienunterricht) into german  schools.  francke attended this gymnasium while andreas reyher was the director and knew his son.  see  chapter three.      solomon understood as necessary for filtering out falsehoods in order to read the will of  god.  the instrument could be invested with a kind of spiritual significance appealing to  those interested in new ways of mediating several competing versions of truth.  francke’s  careful records of the instruments and machines he purchased “for training in the  mechanical disciplines” indicate he had acquired a camera obscura (possibly more than  one) by  .   contemporary histories of vision and visuality have tended to point to the camera  obscura’s capacity to serve as metaphor for early modern ways of seeing more generally.   art historian jonathan crary in particular has argued that before  , early modern  theories of vision were rooted in johannes kepler’s location of the act of seeing in the  retina and the idea that seeing should be understood as an unembodied, mechanical  process that worked basically like a machine, or camera obscura.    he points to john  locke’s use of the camera obscura as a metaphor for how the senses make impressions  on the “screen” of the mind in his essays concerning human understanding and  leibniz’s willingness to accept the validity of the metaphor in his response to locke.    but this entire configuration rests on an assumption of the dominance of this model,  which crary calls a “classical episteme,” for early modern theories of perception.  for                                                     afst/w rep.  fach   nr.  specification der einahmen und ausgaben wegen der mechanischen  disciplinen   bis  .   jonathan crary, techniques of the observer: on vision and modernity in the nineteenth century  (cambridge, ma: mit press,  ) and idem. suspensions of perception: attention, spectacle, and  modern culture (cambridge, ma: mit press,  ).  see also stephen straker, “the eye made ‘other’:  dürer, kepler and the mechanisation of light and vision,” in l. a. knafla, m. s. staum and t. h. e.  travers et al. science, technology and culture in historical perspective, university of calgary studies in  history   (calgary: university of calgary press,  ):  ­  and idem., “kepler, tycho and the ‘optical  part of astronomy’: the genesis of kepler’s theory of pinhole images,” archive for the history of exact  sciences   ( ):  ­ .   john locke, an essay concerning human understanding; gottfried wilhelm leibniz, essays on  human understanding, trans. and ed. peter remnant and jonathan bennett vol.   (cambridge: cambridge  university press,  ):  xi,  .      j.c. sturm and other practitioners of eclecticism, designating the operation of seeing as  akin to the operation of a camera obscura did not eliminate the problem of how to  understand where the moment of recognizing the meaning of what was seen actually  occurred.  on the contrary, the problem itself presented a prime opportunity to reach for a  conciliatory methodology because the act of seeing can be understood as a physical  process involving the eye’s mediation of material light rays and as a rational process,  involving acts of interior grasping or cognition.  the camera obscura offered hope (as a  neutral site) to those convinced that competing epistemological strategies for  understanding the world (not to mention competing confessions) could be compatible  somehow.    david summers has offered a compelling critique of crary’s argument for the  dominance of mechanical theories of vision in the early modern period, stating that it  greatly oversimplifies the variety of discourses readily acknowledging seeing as an  embodied act.   he points out that despite his reputation as a “mechanist,” descartes  maintained that the actual act of seeing did not happen in the eye but in a “pineal gland”  in the brain.  the problem of how to reconcile the mechanics of seeing with cognition  was important to descartes, as it was also to locke and leibniz.  even in antiquity, optics  (specifically geometrical optics) seemed to offer some sort of solution.  summers writes  that “optics was what came to be called a ‚middle science’ which argued about real  physical phenomena in terms of unreal geometric lines.”   it served as a kind of  epistemological bridge between real and abstract and animated the preoccupation with  perspective in the renaissance.  leon battista alberti and leonardo davinci understood,                                                     see david summers, “suspension of perception (book review),” art bulletin  :  (march  ):  – .   ibid.,  .      summers continues, that “one point perspective construction precisely locates a viewer;  however, the nature of the ‘point’ affecting this actual location is crucially important.  if  the point is geometric, then the viewer is by implication an abstract entity in an abstract  world; if the point is physical, an actual area or surface, then the viewer is by implication  corporeal, connected to a physical world, and light, rather than geometry, is finally  physical energy that behaves within a mathematically describable consistency.”   like  tschirnhaus, j.c. sturm recognized the power of geometrical optics to act as a  conciliatory “middle science” that both necessitated and refined the abilities of  individuals to perfect their vision, and their abilities to judge.    the mathesis juvenilis was not the only text in which j.c. sturm’s preoccupation  with the conciliatory potential of optics and the mathematical sciences emerges.  this  pairing is also evident in the philosophia eclectica as built into the strategies sturm  proposed for assimilating a variety of opinions.  sturm made the conditioning of vision  central to the project of conciliation, or his eclectic methodology.  implementing the  method involved exercises that merged analysis of the esoteric qualities of archimedes’s  curves with physical experiments.   all of the exercises contained in the philosophia                                                     ibid.,  .   j.c. sturm’s collegium experimentale sive, curiosum ( ) contained the first reference to a portable  reflex camera.  this per john ward’s “camera obscura” entry in robert bud, deborah jean warner eds.  instruments of science. an historical encyclopedia (new york & london: taylor & francis group,  ):  ­ .   in  , as a supplement to his famous optiks, newton published a treatise on cubic curves in which he  linked his interest in identifying the physical properties of light and color with studying curves projectively  or by means of observing their projection onto a plane.  he had been studying cubic curves intensively  since the  s —during the period when tschirnhaus visited him and while sturm was developing his  eclectic methodology.  i think there is a great deal of overlap between newton’s early endeavors (as a  student of isaac barrow) and the projects of both tschirnhaus and j.c. sturm.  for a brief discussion of the  impact of newton’s studies of projective curves on patrick murdoch, a priest, and others see kirsti  anderson ( ):  ­ .  see also isaac newton, “genesis curvarum per umbras” section   in  enumeratio linearum tertii ordinis [optiks] (london,  ).  reprinted in d. t. whiteside, the  mathematical papers of isaac newton (cambridge: cambridge university press,  ).  murdoch, a  fellow of the royal society, published a treatise called neutoni genesis curvarum per umbras seu      eclectica deal with the intersection of cognition and experience in the act of seeing.    sturm emphasized in this text too that he was captivated by the camera obscura’s  potential to contribute productively to an eclectic philosophy; it could also serve as a  corrective and help to perfect sight.  he explained that “seeing can actually be taught by  the camera obscura, which, when ingeniously positioned can be used for the perfection of  all mankind: in every case it exposes clear and evident vision.”   for sturm, the camera  obscura’s potential as an assimilatory medium was beyond obvious.  it could help perfect  individuals’ abilities to form judgments—a process that involved their souls and at least  invited speculation about the very real possibility that the power of the passions could be  harnessed to ensure that all judgments (and the actions that followed them) were always  virtuous.  perhaps the best known of sturm’s texts, and the one that seems to especially  invite comparison with robert boyle’s experimental method, was his collegium  experimentale sive curiosum.  while the text itself offers clear evidence of their mutual  interest and influence upon each other, the respective methods for the reconciliation of  viewpoints that boyle and sturm offered differ from each other in ways worth  considering briefly here.  it is also important to remember that sturm’s collegium  experimentale was the same text that tschirnhaus recommended in the gründliche  anleitung for getting children excited about the study of mathematics.   as we have                                                                                                                                                    perspectivae universalis elementa (newton’s generation of curves by shadows or elements of general  perspective) in  .   j.c. sturm, philosophia eclectica, part i ( ):  .   j.c. sturm, philosophia eclectica, part ii ( ):  .  “oculum revera cameram obscuram esse docet  sed perfectiorem multo quam ulla unquam hominis manu aut ingenio parari: modum adeo visionis  evidentem & clarissimum exponit.”   thomas ahnert has speculated that in the collegium experimentale we begin to see the dawning of an  experimental program (linked directly to boyle and the royal society) in the holy roman empire.  he  points to sturm’s defense of boyle’s tractatus de ipsa natura in the leipzig acta eruditorum as evidence      seen, in tschirnhaus’s method, sturm’s collegium experimentale was to be used only at  the very beginning of the training program in order to produce wonder.   once the child  was hooked, the focus of training was not to remain on the physical experiments  described in sturm’s text (as one might expect) but instead was to start with a selective  introduction to the study of mathematics using especially the geometry of andreas  tacquet first.  underlying sturm’s lessons was his belief in the perfectibility of the  reader’s judgment; physical experiments would inspire a course in conciliatory seeing  rooted in geometry that would eventually allow one to reconcile the wondrous  experiments shown at the beginning with their intrinsic geometry using this third sense,  or judgment.  boyle’s method, on the other hand, stressed the fallibility of human  judgment and demanded replicable evidence to verify speculative statements.   boyle’s  method involved producing meaning through gentlemanly or “civil” dialogues.  sturm’s  method relied on the special conciliatory powers of practical optics, stereometry and the  soul’s ability to make increasingly better judgments the more one experienced and  studied mathematics.        boyle came out openly against mathematical methods for acquiring knowledge  precisely because such methods were not accessible to most people and did not rely on                                                                                                                                                    for sturm’s support of boyle’s program but does not consider sturm’s lingering belief in the validity of  mathematical methods.  see thomas ahnert, the culture of experimentalism in the holy roman empire:  johann christoph sturm ( ­ ) and the collegium experimentale (unpublished paper,  ).     daston and park ( ).   shapin and schaffer ( ).   steven shapin and mario biagioli have written extensively on the importance of civility and good  manners in these discussions.  see shapin’s “the house of experiment in seventeenth­century england,”  isis   ( ):  ­  and biagioli’s galileo, courtier: the practice of science in the culture of  absolutism (chicago: university of chicago press,  ).      communally verifiable technologies of experimentation, replication and witnessing.    while the experimental philosopher maneuvered in the visible realm, the mathematician  participated in a highly “abstract and esoteric” form of culture; the two modes of  acquiring knowledge about the natural world—two distinct cultural forms—seemed to  boyle to be fundamentally incompatible or irreconcilable.  only it was precisely the  reconciliation of these cultural forms, or ways of knowing, that concerned j.c. sturm and  tschirnhaus.  like boyle they sought consensus.  but they were trying to make the  convergence of interior and exterior knowledge­making processes communally verifiable  by introducing a method for perfecting the act of seeing itself—so that the consensus­ driven conversations of the royal society (oriented as they were around producing  meaning) would no longer be necessary.  if everyone saw correctly, then there really  would be no need to participate in the contrived, civil dialogues boyle and his associates  were advocating.  there would be no need for these dialogues if the souls of individuals  were already perfect.  conciliatory eclecticism offered an especially appealing alternative  for individuals who appreciated the value of experimentation and who, in keeping with  the method’s mantra, wanted to take experimental philosophy as true but who, at the  same time, were not willing to discard mathematical methods.  many of j.c. sturm’s  surviving texts make clear that he deeply admired boyle; however, he also deeply valued  the insights and perfecting abilities of mathematicians.    there is no question that boyle’s and the royal society’s influence was felt by  pietist intellectuals in halle by the end of the seventeenth century.  francke appears to  have especially cherished boyle’s treatises on reconciling reason with religion, in                                                     see especially steven shapin, “robert boyle and mathematics: reality, representation and  experimental practice” in science in context  :  ( ):  ­ ; and idem, a social history of truth  (chicago & london: the university of chicago press,  ): esp.  ­ .      addition to his ruminations on the meaning of “seraphatic” love.   in   and  , two  compilations of robert boyle’s writings were published by the halle orphanage press,  “because of their worthiness” (wegen ihre würdigkeit), as the preface notes.  these  included:  ( .) gedancken vom stilo und schreib­art der heil. schrift; ( .) von der  vortrefflichkeit der theologie in vergleichung mit der philosophie; ( .) von der  veneration und verehrung so der menschl. verstand gott schuldig ist; and ( .) von der  seraphischen liebe.   the community also translated into german one of boyle’s most  famous texts, his considerations about the reconcileableness of reason and religion  ( ), and was literally one of the only places in the empire to acquire a vernacular  copy of these texts.   their interest in doing this speaks to francke’s engagement with  the same sets of questions that animated boyle’s lifelong quest to study natural  phenomena empirically without disrupting a worldview that accepted the mysterious  capabilities of divine providence and authority.  they also confirm in some ways the  extent to which francke and his circle may have seen themselves as distant members of  the extended community boyle was endeavoring to create— members who appreciated                                                     robert boyle,  ) an essay upon the style of the holy scriptures (london,  );  ) excellence of  theology compared with natural philosophy (london,  );  ) of the high veneration man’s intellect  owes to god, peculiarly for his wisdom and power (london,  );  ) seraphic love (london,  / ).   idem, amor seraphicus. die seraphische liebe, oder einige anreitzungen zur liebe gegen gott ... in  einem sende­schreiben an einen freund geschrieben von roberto boyle. ... aus der lat. version (halle,  waysenhaus  ); des edlen roberti boyle, weyland mitglieds der königl. societæt der wissenschaften  in england auserlesene theologische schrifften: als erstl. dessen gedancken vom stilo und schreib­art  der heil. schrift; ( .) von der vortrefflichkeit der theologie in vergleichung mit der philosophie; ( .) von  der veneration und verehrung so der menschl. verstand gott schuldig ist; ( .) von der seraphischen  liebe; nunmehro wegen ihrer würdigkeit zum gemeinen nutzen ins teutsche übersetzet und mit  gehörigem register versehen (halle, waysenhaus  ).  i discuss boyle’s seraphic love in conjunction  with how francke and leibniz understood the meaning of philanthropy in chapter three.    afst/h b  : ; the translated title reads: einige betrachtungen von der möglichen vereinbahrung der  vernünft und religion, vorgeleget von boyle.  it was never printed.      the same rhetorical tropes or strategies (energeia) one employed to produce clear and  distinct visual images that could also be used to “call forth god’s real presence.”         apart from a kind of nascent fascination with boyle and the experimental method  in general, j.c. sturm’s eclecticism as a mode of philosophical inquiry was much more in  fashion in halle around the time francke started to build his foundation.  two of its most  prominent practitioners, johann franz buddeus and christian thomasius, were francke’s  colleagues at the newly opened university (founded in  ) and certainly understood  the method’s purpose and orientation.  kelley notes that thomasius’ understanding of  eclecticism was taken directly from sturm, as his definition of it in his introductio ad  philosophiam aulicam of  , reveals.   “i call eclectic philosophy not what depends on  the teaching of an individual or on the acceptance of the words of a master,” he wrote,  “but whatever can be known from the teaching and writing of any persons on the basis  not of authority but of convincing arguments;” even denis diderot accorded thomasius a  place “among the reformers of philosophy and the founders of a revived eclecticism.”    although thomasius was sometimes openly critical of francke’s project, thomas ahnert  has recently shown just how closely linked thomasius’ ideas were with certain tenets of  pietist theology.     thomasius was soon joined by buddeus, who, even after leaving halle for a post  in jena’s theological faculty, also strongly championed the merits of a conciliatory or                                                     wintroub, “the looking glass of facts” ( ):  ­ , esp.  .   kelley, “eclecticism,”  .     ibid.,  .     thomas ahnert, religion and the origins of the german enlightenment: faith and the reform of  learning in the thought of christian thomasius. (rochester: university of rochester press,  ):  .        eclectic philosophy.   buddeus’s most influential contribution was probably his  elements of instrumental philosophy ( ) or elementa philosophiae instrumentalis,  seu institutionum philosophiae eclecticae, tomus primus, which teachers in francke’s  paedagogium were asked to read before taking on their teaching duties.   the francke  foundation press eventually published its own version of this text in  ; yet the name  of the halle orphanage appeared in conjunction with so many buddeus texts that his  influence is worthy of more discussion than i have been able to provide in this project.    the francke’s orphanage press printed buddeus’ history of the philosophy of the  hebrews ( ), his preface to johann amos comenius’ history of the bohemian  brethren ( ), his elementa philosophiae instrumentalis seu institutionum  philosophiae eclecticae ( ); his introduction to the letters of martin luther ( ); his  history (written with p.j. spener’s son, jacob carl) of mankind’s middle way ( );  selected exercises in the history of  philosophy ( ); his introduction to georg  michael laurenti’s explanation of paul’s letters to the corinthians ( ); his  commentary on de concordia religionis christianae statvsqve civilis ( ); and  various ecclesiastical histories ( ­ ).  francke and buddeus were in close contact                                                     kelley, “eclecticism,”  .  see also albrecht, eklektik ( ).   hieronymous freyer, verbesserte methode der pädagogium regium, glaucha (halle: waysenhaus,  ):  .  see also martin mulsow, “idolatry and science: against nature worship from boyle to  rüdiger,  ­ ” journal of the history of ideas  :  (october,  ):  ­ .     buddeus, in turn, was joined by j.g. heineccius (also an associate of francke’s), who gave further  methodological shape to eclecticism, concluding that “one should not seek truth by oneself, nor accept or  reject everything written by ancients and moderns” and that “no other method of philosophizing is more  reasonable than the eclectic method.”  in kelley,  .  martin mulsow has argued that buddeus borrowed  extensively from the philosophies of john tolund and henry more in his work; see mulsow’s “idolatry and  science: against nature worship from boyle to rüdiger,  ­ ” journal of the history of ideas    (october  ):  ­ .  the francke foundation library contains two toland texts (london,   and  ) and four more texts (london  ,  ,  ,  ).         for the majority of their adult lives and even a cursory glance at the character of their  correspondence indicates an amicable relationship.        yet it is in the handwritten lesson plans that formed the backbone of the  mathematical sciences curricula in francke’s schools where we find perhaps the best  evidence of how eclecticism adapted as pedagogy here actually worked.  the plans  indicate that pietist teachers were using heavenly spheres (himmelsphären) like sturm’s  own sphaera altdorfina in their lessons on a regular basis.  samuel lange would later  confirm this in his biography of georg frierich meier, noting that unlike in altdorf (and  in most cities), where only one himmelsphära was on display, francke’s orphanage  offered two large spheres to viewers.   he explained that the spheres on display in the  orphanage “present the systems of tycho brahe and copernicus.  both are ordered in  such a way that the precise movement of the whole universe and individual pieces,  including the moons of the planets, can be guided with a single twist so that they agree  with real time, eclipses and all other movements.”   lesson plans now resident in  francke’s archive (see part ii) note that not only the most current heliocentric theory of  the universe was shown to pupils but also a geocentric theory.  in a section entitled,  astronomia mechanica or actual models of the universe after the systems of copernicus  and tycho brahe, the author indicated that the following statements should be made to  pupils:                                                     stab/f  / :  ­ ,  ­  (february   &  ,  ; march   &  ,  ; february   &  ,  ). a  series of letters from february   to   include long digressions by buddeus about how much he  enjoyed hosting and mentoring francke’s son gotthilf while the latter was studying at the university of  jena, for example.   in samuel gotthold lange, leben georg friedrich meiers (halle,  ):  ­ .   ibid.      regarding the structure, order and arrangement of the entire universe, we find especially  two hypotheses and opinions.  the one according to tycho brahe’s guidelines puts the  earth at the middle of the world; the one according to copernicus’ opinion, however, puts  the sun in the center of the universe.  .…  this himmelsphaera presents the systema tychonicum, where the earth is at the center of  the world and the entire firmament of the heavens, including the stars, turn and move  around it from morning til night  ….  this himmelsphaera, however, presents the system of copernicus.  according to the  same system, the sun sits in the middle, in the center; the planets go around it and the  firmament of the heavens stays still.  ….  that one has here both systems side by side in such an unusually large size and with  more movements represented than in other models is a singulare, neither to be found in  paris, nor in london or st. petersburg.     the detailed descriptions of both systems that appear in this section offer proof of the  eclectic method at work in the pedagogical landscape of the franckesche stiftungen.  the  author’s claim to be doing something different by “showing both systems side by side”  speaks to how practitioners of an eclectic method imagined themselves as engaged in a  very special project, a singulare.  it speaks to the ability of the pietist orphanage to  become a symbol of this singulare by housing it.  presenting both models to viewers who  witnessed the models inside the orphanage seems to indicate francke’s interest in  exposing the pupils of his schools and all those who viewed the two spheres in his  orphanage to competing points of view; following sturm, he did this in the interest of  mediating these different positions by getting individuals to understand and accept the  merits of both systems.  only then could they reconcile them.    perhaps the defining feature of francke’s schools was their ability to appropriate  sturm’s eclectic methodology to not only show pupils several “points of view” or  competing theories but to introduce all children, regardless of class or status, to as many  forms of knowledge as possible.  this meant exploiting the mediatory potential of the                                                     afst/h e  , semler lehrplan,  ,  ,   and  .      mathematical sciences and their ability to assimilate higher mathematics, experimental  physics and what pamela smith has called “vernacular science.”   especially the printed  descriptions of pietist curricula consistently cite this juxtaposition as the most unique  feature of their schools.  in the elite pädagogium, boys who were destined to inherit their  titles and (following tradition) would never have to work with their hands were visiting  artisans in their workshops and learning how to use wood lathes.  as hieronymous  freyer explained:  informatores actually go with their assigned scholars to the houses of artists and  handworkers… who show and tell the scholars what belongs to their profession; the  scholars can ask content related questions—if the profession was handed down to them or  not, how long one needs to learn it, where they get their materials from, where they get  their wares from and how, etc.  they also visit large offices, factories and institutions  where there is something useful to observe, because these things will help them in many  ways lead a virtuous life.     boys destined to a life of the mind—perhaps training to become theologians or  clergymen like their fathers and, therefore, learning latin, greek and hebrew—were  building optical and astronomical instruments with their hands and were encouraged to  do this because it would make them more loving.    the famous professor of medicine at the university of halle, friedrich hoffmann,  remarked that francke’s orphanage schools “provided youth with opportunities to  practice being better people, including learning to grasp the mathematical and physical  sciences through many experiments.  no one is denied enough advice pertaining to the  costly instruments and all are encouraged to research the nature and strength of the  elements, such as air, water and fire, as well as other natural things to the extent they see                                                     pamela smith, the body of the artisan: art and experience in the scientific revolution (chicago:  chicago university press,  ).   freyer, verbesserte methode ( ):  .      fit.”   in a handwritten register entitled specification der einnahmen und ausgaben der  mechanische disciplinen, august hermann francke kept detailed records of the  materials and machines he purchased and received as donations for these lessons.    spending thousands of thalers, francke purchased globes, a laterna magicum and  pneumatic airpump from holland, a camera obscura, measuring instruments (masstäbe),  various astronomical instruments such as quadrants, a herbarium viuum, barometers and  thermometers, a microscope and skeletons for lessons in anatomy.  he also kept careful  records of the individuals he paid to offer specific lessons in the use of these instruments  and to repair or recalibrate them when necessary.  tschirnhaus’s name appears more than  once as someone to whom francke directed payment for the optical instruments the  “experimenting youth” of his instruments were using to help them assimilate by honing  their visual (and thereby moral) acuity.      leonard christoph sturm   it is likely that j.c. sturm’s son, leonhard christoph, also had much to do with  making his father’s eclectic method central for francke—although the elder sturm’s  reputation was certainly large enough as to allow relatively easy and independent access  to his insights.  between   and   l.c. sturm studied mathematics and theology in  altdorf before moving to leipzig in   to study with thomasius.  in   he took a  position at a ritterschule in wolffenbüttel as a professor of mathematics before accepting                                                     friedrich hoffmann in johann heckers einleitung in die botanie ... (halle: waysenhaus,  ).   afst/w rep.  fach   nr.  specification der einahmen und ausgaben wegen der mechanischen  disciplinen   bis  .      a professorship in frankfurt an der oder in  .   he became a member of the berlin  academy of science this same year.   during this period he published several tracts on  the mathematical sciences that seem to owe much from the work of his father; yet his  architectural treatises are derived almost entirely from translations of a little known  architectural theorist from leiden named nicholas goldmann.   in   he moved to the  court of duke friedrich wilhelm of mecklenburg in schwerin ( ­ ) to serve as  the head architect there and, after eight years, he took a similar position back in  wolffenbüttel.  in his autobiography, l.c. sturm cites his engagement with pietist circles  in leipzig as central to his spiritual development; however, bernet notes that l.c.  sturm’s millenarianist leanings (he was obsessed with mathematically predicting the  arrival of the apocalypse) won him few friends.   these sensibilities are often cited as  the reason he ultimately distanced himself from pietist circles (or they from him) and  converted to calvinism.    despite their differences, francke and l.c. sturm were still engaged with each  other in ways that suggest a high degree of mutual respect and influence.  sturm donated  money specifically to further francke’s mission plans (discussed in conjunction with  leibniz in chapter three), and he corresponded with francke regarding the plans he had  for the education of his own son, samuel christoph.   apparently francke had sent l.c                                                     for sturm’s biographical details see claus bernet, “leonhard christoph sturm,” biographisch­ bibliographisches kirch­lexicon vol.   ( ):  ­ .       he became an abwesentes mitglied on july  ,  .  see werner hartkopf’s die berliner akademie der  wissenschaften. ihre mitglieder und preisträger  ­  (berlin: akademie verlag,  ):  .   leonard christoph sturm, kurzer begriff der gesamten mathesis. nicht nur den lehrenden und  lernenden zum nutzen aufgesetzet, sondern auch vor die geübten hin und wieder mit neuen anmerckungen  kurtz und zu weiterem nachsinnen untermenget. (frankfurt an der oder  ); nikolaus goldmann  vollständige anweisung zu der civil bau­kunst herausgegeben von l.c. sturm (wolfenbüttel,  ).   in ibid.  two tracts in particular convey a sincere interest in millenarian numerology: mathematischer  beweis des heiligen abendmahls (frankfurt,  ) und von der apocalyptischen zahl   (rostock,  )  or mathematical proof of the holy supper and about the apocalyptical number  .      sturm a young man from his stiftungen schools to serve as samuel christoph’s private  tutor; the placement did not go smoothly, and when l.c. sturm complained to francke  that the young tutor (informator) was incompetent, francke offered to take samuel  christoph into his pädagogium to be educated.   at least in theory, seats in the  pädagogium were reserved for the children of gentry who were in a position to pay for  the education they received; francke’s willingness to take samuel christoph into his  most elite school in this instance suggests that his relationship with samuel’s father  merited special treatment in this case.   but possibly the best evidence of sturm and  francke’s mutual interest in each other comes to us in one of sturm’s earliest letters to  francke, from june of  .  l.c. sturm answered what seems to have been a pointed  request from francke for help with the design of the stiftungen buildings, stating clearly  that he looked forward to being able to offer francke his services in all questions relating  to their construction.   in the same letter, he asks for francke’s opinion on whether he  might potentially be considered for the mathematics professorship currently vacant at the  university (the one christian wolff would eventually fill).     francke’s archive also contains a mysterious handwritten text entitled collegium  sturmihnum pantomathematicum (dated august  ,  ) that seems to have been  almost entirely derived from a treatise on the nature and constitution of mathematics…                                                     for l.c. sturm’s detailed request of francke and description of the kind of education he imagined for his  son: afst/h c  :  [april  ,  ]; he describes ten­year old samuel christoph as having a “very  good disposition (gemüth) but a very weak body.”  he hoped that if young samuel was surrounded by  other “well­bred” children, his physical health would improve.  as proof of his son’s potential and  character, he relays the story of how, after reading francke’s fusstapfen, samuel sent   thalers to help  orphaned children his own age in francke’s waisenhaus.  for other letters in which l.c. sturm conveys his  frustration with the tutor francke sent him:  stab/f  ,  / : ­  ( . .  and  . . ).  the tutor  (domke) is described as suffering from “malo hypochondriaco.”     it is not clear if l.c. sturm was expected to pay for his son’s education or not.   unfortunately francke’s original letter to sturm is lost. ( . . ) stab/f  ,  / ,  ­ :  .     in another letter from june  ,  , l.c. sturm asks francke to send him medicine and to please not be  secretive about the exact recipe.      for the studying youths of the collegium pantomathematicum, that he published in  .   it does not figure prominently in the printed descriptions of francke’s schools,  nor has it received any attention in the secondary literature on pietism.  but its residence  in halle and contents are worth considering—even comparing to the mathesis juveniles  of j.c. sturm and the specific prescriptions of tschirnhaus’s gründliche anleitung.   introductory statements from the printed version note l.c. sturm’s reliance on the  contributions of erhard weigel’s analysin aristotelico, euclideam; malebranche’s de  inquirenda veritate and a certain “illustrious tschirnhaus’s” medicinam mentis.   citing  his reliance on jesuit contributions to the mathematical sciences, namely gaspar schott’s  cursum mathamaticum, miliet de chales’ mundus mathematicus and athanasius  kircher, he divided mathematics into two already widely observed categories: abstract  and applied.   he conveyed his preference for applied mathematics, especially geometry,  making a point of citing the same figures tschirnhaus cites in the medicina mentis; he  pointed to the singular importance of bernard lamy’s elementa mathesis ( ) and  nova geometria elementa ( ), j.c. sturm’s opera archimedes ( ), isaac  barrow’s euclidis elementorum ( ), andreas tacquet’s elementa geometriae plane  & solide quibus accessere selecta ex archimede theormeata ( ), samuel reyher’s                                                     afst/h  :   collegium sturmihnum pantomathamaticum, [august  ,  ] hoc ms continentur  arithmetica cum algebra et analysi speciosa, geometria, optica et astronomia.  leonard christoph  sturm, tractatus de natura & constitutione matheseos (frankfurt,  ).   as quoted in ibid.,  ­ .  “atque utinam omnes, qui academias ingrediuntur, erh: weigelii analysin  aristotelico euclideam, malebranchii de inquirenda veritate, illustrisque dn. de tschirnhausen medicinam  mentis legere possent atque vellent.”  as i mentioned in chapter one, malebranche’s recherche de la  vérité ( ) contended that without conditioning the senses, one could never arrive at truth. l.c. sturm  also specifically mentions tschirnhaus in lesson   of the printed pantomathematicum in a discussion of a   concave speculum.    gaspar schott, cursus mathematicus (frankfurt,  ); claude francois milliet de dechales. amantus  varcin eds. cursus seu mundus mathematicus (lyon,  ).        euclidis libb. vi priores kilon ( ), william whiston’s taqueti element ( ) and  the works of john wallis.    a “panto” or “everything” mathematics, l.c. sturm explained, could be used to  glorify god through its ability to help man assimilate a wide variety of objects.   the  pantomathematicum marked his contribution to this project, to the forging of a  mathematics that would prove its inherent utility to the world precisely because of the  assimilatory technologies it drew upon.   this was a form of mathematics that relied on  the conciliatory power of the eye, the soul and projective geometry.  “our souls,” he  wrote in his short conception of all of mathematics (kurtzer begriff der gesamten  mathesis) “see objects in the places where they are,” thereby eliminating the distance  between projections of these objects and the objects themselves.  he continued:  if you were to look at a picture that is projected onto a plane from behind in a camera  obscura … you would see it standing upright behind the screen and would receive in your  eyes what in truth actually stands there.  the human soul sees this thing more exactly and  discerns from the picture rays (bild­strahlen) of the object, not only the picture into the  eye but rather to the end of the origins of the object itself, like one of the many who goes  around with the camera obscura and in the same way becomes accustomed to the true  object through the picture—or has a much better sense of it than someone who only looks  at the object for the first time.       a panto­mathematics was useful precisely because of its engagement with, rather than its  disassociation from, the realia of the world.  and not only was it concerned with the  “truth” of objects, it offered the practitioner a set of tools for reconciling this truth with  its representation.  the soul’s ability to discern was at the heart of pantomathematics.   l.c. sturm’s father, tschirnhaus, leibniz, even wolff—all of the major figures francke                                                     leonard christoph sturm, tractatus de natura & constitutione matheseos ( ):  ­ .     knoblauch notes that sturm’s conception of panto­mathematics was heavily influenced by descartes,  especially his treatment of mathesis unviersalis in the fourth rule of his rules for direction of the mind.   see knobloch,  ­ .    leonhard christoph sturm, kurtze begriff der gesamten mathesis (frankfurt a.d.o,  ):  .      drew readily from in order to define the pedagogical orientation of his schulstadt—were  engaging in and endeavoring to extend it.      l.c. sturm’s own interest in improving and extending panto­mathematics is  especially apparent in his work on developing a “mathematical” geography and  architecture.   in  , he came out with a short text called geographia mathematica, in  which, he announced he was endeavoring to provide a much needed “mathematical  footing (or grund)” to the study of geography.  “without mathematical knowledge,  globes and maps cannot be properly used,” he insisted.  in fact, “so much from geometry  and astronomy affects geography,” he continued, that the study of it deserved to be  renamed mathematical geography, and discipline divested of its connections to the study  of history entirely.  he promised to “show the youth” in this text, using some of his  father’s correspondence “with famous mathematicians,” the proper method for finding  the lineam meridianam by teaching them how to perform various experiments using the  declinationem magnetis.  his book provided instruction in methods for constructing  globes, using a panto­meter to solve the problem of measuring longitude and constructing  topographical maps.     so important was furthering the study of architecture as a form of practical  mathematics for l.c. sturm, that he treated it in several treatises.  the most important  one was a multivolume synthesis (with some original commentary) of nicholas  goldmann’s writings on architecture called vollständige anweisung zu der civil bau­                                                    leonard christoph sturm, geographia mathematica oder kurtze u. gründliche vorbereitung zu  rechtschaffener erlernung der geographia: worinnen von der construction ... der erdkugeln und aller  sorten von land­carten gehandelt und mit nöthigen figuren und tabellen erläutert wird (frankfurt a.d.o.,  ). athanasius kircher’s “pantometer”—or tool for measuring everything—was also especially popular  and often copied; see chapter three.      kunst (thorough instructions in the art of architecture).  according to johann  doppelmeyr’s account, l.c. sturm’s father met goldmann while he was studying  mathematics in leiden; goldmann was not a professor but apparently instructed j.c.  sturm privately in architecture.   goldmann’s architectural manuscripts were never  published in his lifetime but found their way into the sturm household and, by all  indications, were highly prized by both father and son—who were determined to make  them available to the public.  the single most important reason goldmann’s work needed  to be published, wrote l.c. sturm in the preface, was that “all of goldmann’s  architecture presents an accurate mathematics and a judicusen eclecticum.”   he would  eventually apply the principles of eclecticism in his own architectural treatise—a text he  called miliatris hypothetica & eclectica.    in the vollständige anweisung, goldmann commented extensively on vitruvius,  leon battista alberti, sebastiano serlio, andrea palladio und vincenzo scamozzi’s  application of linear perspective to the design of buildings.   he wanted the reader to  understand architecture as a form of projective geometry.  he also explicitly aligned civil  architecture with a form of activity that was very important to many of europe’s  intellectuals in this period: measuring solomon’s temple.  juan villalpando, samuel                                                     nicholas goldmann, vollständige anweisung zu der civil bau­kunst (wolfenbüttel,  ).  it was a  multivolume work republished in   by category; for example: allerhand Öffentliche zucht­ und liebes­ gebäude, als hohe und niedrige schulen, ritter­academien, waysen­häuser, spitäle vor alte und krancke  und endlich besonders also genannte zucht­häuser und gefängnisse wohl (augsburg,  ).     johann gabriel doppelmayr, historische nachricht von den nürnbergischen mathematicis und  künstlern [nürnberg,  ] (reprint. hildesheim, new york: georg olms,  ).  doppelmayer was also  a member of leibniz’s academy of science.   leonard christoph sturm, “vorrede,” vollständige anweisung ( ); also mentioned by hans gaab,  “sturms studienzeit an der universität leiden und sein lehrer,” in hans gaab et al. acta historica  astronomiae vol. : johann christoph sturm (frankfurt: verlag harri deutsch,  ):  .   leonard christoph sturm, architectura miliatris hypothetica & eclectica (nürnberg,  ).   vitruvius’s manuscript on architecture (de architectura) is from the first century bce, trans. frank  granger,   vols. (london,  ). leon battista alberti’s on painting (or de pictura) marked the first  formal codification of perspective; see chapter  .      reyher, william whiston, isaac newton and countless other members of the royal  society and the berlin academy, including l. c. sturm himself, were extremely  interested in the temple of jerusalem’s proportionality.   another of goldmann’s texts  conveys this interest more directly: his heilige bau­kunst oder des vilalpandi,  beschreibung des tempels salomonis provides a running commentary on villalpando’s  measurements.  l.c. sturm also made his own contribution to ongoing discussions; he  called it: the unbreakable rules of symmetry… how they can be applied using the  beautiful example of the godly temple of solomon.”   for l.c. sturm and others  preoccupied with measuring solomon’s temple during this time, making the temple’s  measurements relevant to the world held an enormous amount of potential.  proportional  measurements handed down by god himself could be used to inform the construction of  every sort of civic building imaginable.  people would look at buildings and see nothing  but perfect yet substantial forms.  these perfect buildings would communicate divine  will—serving as mediators between god and man.    but first, in order for the temple’s measurements to be useful and universally  applicable, they had to be calibrated.  and calibration took time; it also required                                                     juan bautista villalpando ( ­ ) was a jesuit who studied geometry and architecture with juan de  herrera, the royal architect of philip ii of spain; he applied euclid’s propositions to architecture and  developed a scale model of solomon’s temple that was frequently cited by newton and whiston [known  as ezechielis explicatio ( ­ )].  william whiston’s comments on the temple appeared in a short  view of the chronology of the old testament, and of the harmony of the four evangelists (cambridge,  ) and a text that was translated and printed into germany by siegmund jacob baumgarten as herrn  wilhelm whistons beschreibung der stiftshütte und des tempels (halle,  ).  isaac newton wrote about  the features of the temple in his observations upon the prophecies of daniel and the apocalypse of st.  john (london,  ) and in his chronology of ancient kingdoms amended (london,  ).  see s.  snobelen, “ ‘the mystery of this restitution of all things’: isaac newton and the return of the jews,” in  j.e. force and r.h. popkin eds., millenarianism and messianism in early modern european culture: the  millenarian turn (amsterdam: kluwer academic publishers,  ):  ­ .   leonard christoph sturm, die unentbährliche regel der symmetrie oder: des ebenmaasses: wie sie  zuförderst an dem herrlichsten exempel des göttlichen tempels von salomone erbauet, wahrzunehmen; ...  von uns hingegen heut zu tage in ausübung zu bringen; alles auf das deutlichste angewiesen und durch  behörige kupffer erklähret (augsburg,  ).      exchanging notes, opinions, and demanded extensive deliberation—even dispute.   leibniz and jablonski’s academy, modeled as it was on the royal society, provided the  perfect venue for participating in these calibration exercises.  my investigation of how  they worked is at this point only preliminary; however, the berlin­brandenburgische  akademie der wissenschaft’s archive in berlin contains several documents that provide  some useful traces.  they especially demonstrate just how closely linked “holy  architecture” was to proficiency in several other forms of practical mathematics,  especially mechanics.  when he built scale models of machines powered by water, which  he did as well, leonard christoph sturm imagined his fountains and watering devices as  components of the perfectly proportional scale model of solomon’s temple he was  building at the same time.   in his report (gutachtung) “regarding the attachment sent by  l.c. sturm of the fountain (springbrunnen) that king solomon had built for jerusalem’s  temple” ( ), fellow academy member j. l. frisch first made what he called  “mathematical comments” and discussed the fountain’s place within the “order of the  entire work,” before he took issue with sturm’s interpretation of the “meaning of the  hebrew words” and the style of handle (handgriff) he had chosen to depict.    those  who witnessed l.c. sturm’s presentation of the temple would be moved, frisch noted,  and would intuit the perfect temple’s holy mandate in conjunction with the technologies  solomon had employed to direct water from the large lakes to jerusalem and the temple  itself.       l.c. sturm’s treatises on what he called an “eclectic” architecture—one capable  of bringing several forms of practical mathematics and holy baukunst to bear on the                                                     see my discussion of three­dimensional models in chapter five.   bbaw/a: i­v,  a: gutachtung von j.l.frisch zu der von l.ch. sturm eingesand abhandlung über den  von könig salomo im jerusalemer tempel gebauten springbrunnen um  ,  ­ .      design and construction of buildings—marked his contribution to a set of much broader  discussions about eurythmie (wohlgereimheit) or symmetrie occurring in this period.   several years before sturm’s treatise, christian wolff had defined eurythmie as “the  similitude of the sides in relation to a dissimilar middle” in his beginners guide to  mathematics.  “the french call it symmetrie,” he continued, “and the external shape of  our bodies is one example of it.”   the beautiful or graceful appearance of buildings  was contingent on the “quality” of the proportional relationships (or the soundness of the  mathematical principles) they employed in their assimilation of a building’s physical  components.  “the ancients took these relationships from the human body,” wolff noted  and several individuals had provided a solid foundation for understanding them— especially perrault, whose commentary on vitruvius both sturm and wolff heartily  recommended.  regarding the soul wolff wrote: “why eurythmie stirs up such a special  pleasure in us, we will not investigate here because in architecture it is enough that we  know that it does this.  i will remind you only of this,” wolff continued, “that the soul is  helped when it can clearly grasp the figure of a building without much effort and that  essential perfection (wesentlichen vollkommenheit) is realized in works of art and nature,  as well as in buildings.”     that francke’s orphanage building—and those gradually added to his rectangular  complex of buildings—made powerful impressions on those that witnessed it is  undisputed.  perhaps the most famous record of a person’s reaction upon first seeing the  stiftungen buildings is a report detailing the prussian crown prince’s surprise visit to  francke’s orphanage in august of  .  upon seeing the building for the first time, the                                                     christian wolff, anfangsgründe aller mathematischen wissenschaften [first edition  ] (halle,  ):  . reprinted in gesammelte werke, part one: vol.   (hildesheim, georg olms,  ff).   ibid.      prince supposedly exclaimed in an exuberant tone, “is that not a building!” (ist das nicht  ein bauen!”) and ordered his driver to circle it a few times before he went inside.   at  the time it was constructed, there was really no other building quite like francke’s  orphanage in all of brandenburg­prussia.  while we cannot know for certain if l.c.  sturm’s plans were applied to its construction, the younger sturm’s   letter is a clear  response to francke’s plea specifically for architectural advice.   the model of  solomon’s temple housed in the orphanage was widely regarded for its perfect  proportionality and ability to speak to people’s souls (see chapter five).  and francke  also openly referred to his universal­anstalt as a kind of prophet school, like the schools  housed in the temple (see chapter seven).  interestingly, in l.c. sturm’s kurzter begriff  der gesamten mathesis, which is also occasionally referenced in descriptions of  stiftungen curricula, there is a building prototype that corresponds almost exactly to what  francke’s flagship building would eventually look like.   it is highly likely that the first  pietist orphanage was designed with the proportions of solomon’s temple in mind.    conclusion                                                     “bericht von  ” in gustav kramer, neue beiträge zur geschichte august hermann francke's  (halle: waysenhaus,  ):  .  this is also mentioned by carl hinrichs, preußentum und pietismus: der  pietismus in brandenburg­preußen als religiös­soziale reformbewegung (göttingen: vandenhoeck and  ruprecht,  ):  .   the secondary literature around the design of francke’s orphanage building has suggested that francke  derived the plans for its design from dutch orphanages; he even sent his close associate, georg friedrich  neubauer, to the netherlands on a kind of a scouting trip.  this does not detract my claim in any way,  especially when one considers that nicholas goldmann was from holland and l.c. sturm derived many of  his ideas, sketches for buildings etc. from him.  see joke spaans, “early modern orphanages between civic  pride and social discipline.  francke’s use of dutch models,” udo sträter ed. waisenhäuser der frühen  neuzeit.  tübingen: nieymer verlag,  ):  ­ .    leonard christoph sturm, kurzter begrif der gesamten mathesis. (frankfurt a.d.o.,  ): appendix.   l.c. sturm also designed a mission church in madras, india called “new jerusalem” (built in  ) that  francke’s organization was also involved in maintaining.  burnet notes that dresden’s annenkirche,  hamburg’s st. michaeliskirche and münster’s lotharinger kirche were likely built according his plans.      johann christoph and leonard christoph sturm are two figures rarely associated  with halle pietism, the orientation of francke’s pedagogical program or his orphanage.   yet they were central to francke’s project in its formative stages.  j.c. sturm’s interest in  reconciling physics and mathematics, including the exercises he developed in order to  accomplish this, had certainly attracted the attention of tschirnhaus by  , who  specifically mentioned the elder sturm’s efforts to francke.  in the final pages of his  gründliche anleitung he recommended sturm’s philosophia eclectica as a kind of  figurative icing that would perfectly accent the synthesis of the medicina mentis he had  just presented.  j.c. sturm’s juveniles mathesis was used as a substitute for all the books  tschirnhaus had recommended thereby associating the stiftungen schools with an eclectic  methodology.  in honing and popularizing this method, j.c. sturm was offering a set of  technologies for helping individuals learn how to discern, how to make judgments by  choosing to reside in a state of constant and affective neutrality.  he was offering his  contemporaries a coherent methodology for producing the consilia generations of  irenicists had been seeking.  his method claimed to be able to help individuals avoid  collapsing distinctions between various points of view.  one took all ways of knowing as  true at the same time as one used one’s soul to mediate the tensions and problems these  differences caused.  j. c. sturm’s method especially privileged the conciliatory potential  of the camera obscura and the “middling” mathematical sciences.  this mandate was  taken up and extended by his son, leonhard christoph, who aimed to improve these  sciences by promoting the conciliatory potential of architecture, geography and  mechanics.  especially l.c. sturm will appear again in the narrative that follows; he was,      after all, francke’s colleague in the berlin academy and a supporter of francke’s cause.   he, like leibniz, was a proponent of pietist philanthropy.       chapter three: illuminated missions of conciliatory love.  leibniz, francke and  the berlin academy of mathematics and physics      god always acts geometrically  how great a geometrician art thou, o lord! for while this science has no bound;  while there is for ever room for the discovery of new theorems, even by human  faculties, thou art acquainted with them all at one view, without any train of  consequences, without any wearisome application of demonstrations. in other  arts and sciences our understanding is able to do almost nothing; and, like the  imagination of brutes, seems only to dream of some uncertain propositions:  whence it is that in so many men are almost so many minds.  but in these  geometrical theorems all men are agreed: in these the human faculties appear  to have some real abilities, and those great, wonderful and amazing  ….  [i] pant after that day, with the earnest breathings of my soul, when thou shalt be  pleased, out of thy bounty, out of thy immense and sacred benignity, to grant me  the favour to perceive, and that with a pure mind, and clear vision, not only these  truths, but those also which are more numerous, and more important; and all this  without that continual and painful application of the imagination…    ­isaac barrow         in  , gottfried wilhelm leibniz—court philosopher, polymath, savant—and  his associate daniel ernst jablonski founded the kurfürstlich­brandenburgische societät  der wissenschaften, in berlin.  modeled after the royal society in england and the  académie royale des sciences in paris, both organizations to which leibniz belonged,  the academy was renamed the königlich preußische sozietät der wissenschaften after  the crowing of king frederick i in   and was especially oriented around furthering  the dissemination of “practical” forms of knowledge.   it was very often simply referred  to as the berlin academy in this period, which is the designation i will also employ here.   as michael duchesneau has noted, from the very beginning leibniz articulated a clear                                                     isaac barrow, apollonii conica: methodo nova illustrate, quoted in william whiston, the elements of  euclid with select theorems out of archimedes. by the learned andrew tacquet. to which are added,  practical corollaries, shewing the uses of many of the propositions.  the whole abridg’d and this fourth  edition publish’d in english, by william whiston, m.a. mr. lucas’s professor of the mathematicks in the  university of cambridge (london,  ).   this is confirmed by lorraine daston in her essay: “die akademien und die einheit der wissenschaften:  die disziplinierung der disziplinen,” in jürgen kocka eds. die königlich preussische akademie der  wissenschaften zu berlin im kaiserreich (berlin: akademie verlag,  ):  .      agenda for this academy that involved a “conciliation of observations.”  he readily  acknowledged that his main goal was “to unite in a happy wedding theoreticians and  observers so as to improve on incomplete and particular elements of knowledge.”   as we  have seen, for e.w. von tschirnhaus and j.c. and l.c. sturm, uniting theoreticians and  observers through the deliberate mixing of geometrical and experimental method was the  key to producing knowledge that was useful in its capacity to generate the reconciliation  required for improvement.  finding new ways to make geometrical projections of images  agree with their physical location was a poignant expression of this goal, as were  attempts to apply the proportionality of solomon’s temple to civil architecture.  it will  come as no surprise that calibrating measurements of solomon’s temple was a major  preoccupation of several of the earliest members of leibniz’s academy, one of whom  was august hermann francke.        underemphasized in histories of this new, conciliatory academy is that leibniz  himself conceived of it as a mission organization that would send protestant missionaries  to china to counterbalance the influence of jesuit missionaries there.   he made no secret                                                     michael duchesneau, “leibniz’s model for analyzing organic phenomena,” in perspectives on science  :  ( ):  .  duchesneau uses leibniz’s conciliatory vision for his academy to explain his  “combinatorial approach” to the study of medicine and disease; this involved replacing the theory of  temperaments at the heart of galenic medicine with “a more complex one, based on the indications and  counter­indications of various temperaments—as re­conceptualized in the form of a combinatorial  representation of chemical processes analyzed into the smallest and ultimate subdivisions.”  leibniz  articulated several plans for his academy between   and  .   francke was formally accepted into the academy on october  ,  .  his entry in the first “table of  academy members” reads: “the high worthy, hugely noted and highly learned herr magister august  hermann francke, greek and oriental language professor ordinarius at king frederick’s university in  halle and pastor in glaucha, because of his special talents, understanding and learnedness—especially in  the languages of the far east (morgenland), as well as his efforts to plant the message of the evangelists.   also in these places his sermons have been sent.”  in bbaw/a i­iii­  table of academy members.   francke was designated an abwesendes mitglied, or a member in absentia. see werner hartkopfs, die  berliner akademie der wissenschaften: ihre mitglieder und preisträger,  ­  (berlin: akademie  verlag,  ):  .     for example, leibniz’s mission plans are only briefly treated in an often cited academy press publication  about its earliest history: hans­stephan brather ed., leibniz und seine akademie. ausgewählte quellen zur      of his interest in introducing new methods of reconciliation abroad and was especially  supportive of his co­founder daniel ernst jablonski’s detailed plans to unify german,  swiss and english protestants in pursuit of this goal.   the figure of jablonski is also a  critical and mostly overlooked part of this story; he corresponded extensively with both  francke and leibniz, serving as a kind of go­between.  at the time he participated in the  founding of the berlin academy, jablonski was the prussian elector’s reformed court  chaplain and was a bishop of the bohemian brethren.  he was also johann amos  comenius’s grandson.  in  , he took over the inspection of the new pietist “military­ orphanage” that francke was helping get off the ground in potsdam.   before becoming  involved in all of this, jablonski had spent two years at oxford in the  s, where he  became drawn to the church of england.  back in germany, he tried to unite the  lutheran and reformed churches around the anglican liturgy, translated the english  book of common prayer and corresponded with several anglican clergymen.  in  , leibniz published his novissima sinica (the newest from china) and  sent copies of it to his own contacts in england, namely john wallis, gilbert burnet and  thomas burnet.   relying on their updates, he followed the plans of two newly                                                                                                                                                    geschichte der berliner sozietät der wissenschaften,  ­  (berlin: akademie verlag,  ):  ­ .    scholars have mostly emphasized how and why d. e. jablonski’s efforts failed rather than exploring the  links between his interest in church union and the conciliatory eclecticism of g.w. leibniz or j.c. sturm.   for example, n. sykes, daniel ernst jablonski and the church of england (london,  ); b. levis, “the  failure of the anglican­prussian ecumenical effort of  ­ ,” church history   ( ):  ­ .  for  an introduction to jablonski and his relationship with the spck see daniel l. brunner, halle pietists in  england: anthony william böhm and the society for promoting christian knowledge (göttingen:  vandenhoeck & ruprecht,  ):  ­ .      stab/f  , / :  ­  [ ] johann porst to a.h. francke re: jablonski and potsdam waisenhaus; see  carola wolf and steffi wunderlich, ziel, inhalte, organisationsformen und methoden der bildung und  erziehung im "großen potsdamer militärwaisenhaus" von   ­   (potsdam,  ); hermann dalton,  daniel ernst jablonski, eine preußische hofpredigergestalt in berlin vor zweihundert jahren (berlin:  warneck,  ).   the novissima sinica contained letters and updates from jesuit missionaries about the chinese  “tolerance edict” ( ), the russian­chinese peace of nerčinsk ( ) and the chinese emperor’s      established voluntary societies in england who shared with him and jablonski the goal of  sending protestant missionaries to china: the society for the promotion of christian  knowledge (spck), founded in  , and the society for the propagation of the gospel  in foreign parts, founded in  .  leibniz, jablonski and francke each corresponded  with members of these societies and they imagined themselves as working together  towards similar ends.  this added dimension of the berlin academy’s activities helps  explain a great deal about its earliest membership and orientation.  leibniz and jablonski  saw it as a conciliatory body concerned with assembling various bits of knowledge to  affect universally applicable changes that were inseparable from the form of spirituality  both he and francke championed.  spiritual regeneration and improvement of the entire  world would result if realia could be reconciled, via the heart, with their universal— geometrical, proportional, perfectible—forms.   this chapter takes on two specific tasks that are extremely important for  understanding the pietist orphanage’s status as a material manifestation of divine will  (both rational and benevolent) orientated around the implementation of tschirnhaus’s  method and the furthering of the berlin academy’s goals.  first, it offers a  reinterpretation of leibniz and francke’s interest in each other, querying specifically  what each considered the value and meaning of spiritual practice for their respective, but  closely related, causes.  the correspondence between leibniz and francke has certainly  not gone unnoticed by contemporary scholars, but their relationship is generally                                                                                                                                                    interest in astronomy.  see brather, “projekte der ersten jahre,” leibniz und seine akademie,  ­   n.  and franz rudolf merkel, g.w. von leibniz and die china­mission (leipzig,  ):  ­ .  wallis  shared with leibniz an interest in geometrical mechanics; gilbert burnet ( ­ ) was a theologian,  bishop and member of the royal society; thomas burnet ( ­ ) wrote the telluris theoria sacra, or  sacred theory of the earth ( ).       portrayed as fleeting and forged out of necessity, not choice.   but when one considers  leibniz and spener’s early contact and engagement with the ideals of pansophy,  leibniz’s own “thoughts” about how to reform schools, francke’s interest in the contents  of leibniz’s theodicée, and how both men understood the meaning of philanthropy and  philotheia, some new ways of thinking about the meaning of pietism emerge.  both  francke and leibniz used two main metaphors, light and love, to express a vision of  reconciliation each one of them recognized in the other.    second, this chapter also reassesses the relationship between francke’s  organization and leibniz’s academy of science.  not only did francke serve as one the  very first members of leibniz’s academy, he also personally corresponded with at least   of its original members (see appendix  )—a few of whom i will introduce here.   he  and daniel ernst jablonski exchanged literally hundreds of letters and much of  jablonski’s academy­related correspondence (over   letters he composed and                                                       several foundational studies of pietism and leibniz’s mission plans discuss the correspondence briefly in  these terms and contain some of the first published copies of these letters.  see: kramer, august hermann  francke ( ); merkel, g.w. von leibniz und die china­mission ( ); edward winter, halle als  ausgangspunkt der deutschen russlandkunde im  .jahrhundert (berlin: deutsche akadmie der  wissenschaft,  ).  some letters have been republished in gottfried wilhelm leibniz, sämtliche schriften  und briefe. first series: allgemeiner politischer und historischer briefwechsel.  vol.  : may – december,   (berlin,  ). gerda utermöhlen offers a highly necessary (albeit brief) synthesis of this scholarship  but also reaffirms many of its assumptions; see “die russlandthematik im briefwechsel zwischen august  hermann francke und gottfried wilhelm leibniz” in johannes wallmann und udo sträter eds. hallesche  forschung  : halle und osteuropa zur europäische ausstrahlung des hallischen pietismus (tübingen:  max niemyer verlag,  ).  her article contains the only published copies of three letters the pair  exchanged in  .  carl hinrichs and erich beyreuther discuss francke and leibniz’s relationship in  broader terms that have informed my discussion below.  see beyreuther’s august hermann francke und  die anfänge der ökumenischen bewegung (hamburg: herbert reich evangelischer verlag  ).   some of the studies cited above have noted francke’s membership in the berlin academy of science but  downplay its significance. hinrichs briefly notes the similarities between francke’s “universal goals” and  leibniz’s goals but he sees their mutual interest in russia and protestant mission as unabhängig  voneinander or not closely intertwined with one other; see hinrichs,  .  this chapter challenges hinrichs’  assessment, which has continued to dominate the way in which francke and leibniz’s relationship is  understood.          addressed to him) at one time resided in the archive of the franckesche stiftungen.   in  light of this evidence, i argue that francke’s orphanage was serving as the institutional  arm of leibniz’s academy—as a kind of educational outpost.  from the very beginning it  was a living expression of leibniz’s “plans” for the reform of education and the  development of missionary training institutes modeled after jesuit colleges.  this in no  way detracts from my case in the previous chapters for tschirnhaus’s and the sturms’  influence on francke; on the contrary, all of these men also corresponded individually  with leibniz, articulated conciliatory positions and should be seen as close allies of his.   to be clear, i am arguing that francke’s schulstadt was also a manifestation of leibniz’s  “thoughts;” both figures embraced tschirnhaus’s “method” and attached similar  meanings to the terms pietism and philanthropy.  i acknowledge that this upsets  longstanding, historiographical distinctions between pietism and leibniz/wolffianism,  but this is precisely what the sources suggest must be done.      pansophy and the children of light    as with tschirnhaus and francke’s introduction to each other, philipp jakob  spener is an important part of the leibniz­francke story.  we have evidence of a fairly  sustained correspondence between spener and leibniz dating back to the  s.  several  of their letters indicate that the two were exchanging information about a series of                                                    the majority of these materials are now in the staatsbibliothek (preuβischer kulturbesitz) francke  nachlass [berlin].    i am not saying that leibniz was a pietist, but i am historicizing his and francke’s use of the term in their  correspondence.  both figures readily acknowledged it was “only a name”; leibniz lamented all of the  “dissonance” the term had caused in germany in his theodicée, which he first published in france in  .   i rely on the following translation from  : essais de theodicée, oder betrachtung der gütigkeit gottes,  der freyheit des menschen u. des ursprungs des bösen ..welcher vorgefügt ein discours von der  Übereinstimmung des glaubens mit der vernunft sammt angehängten anmerkungen über mr. hobbes alles  in französischer sprache geschrieben von leibnitz, anitzo aber ... in die deutsche sprache gebracht  (amsterdam: boudenstein,  ):  .      controversies involving jean de labadie ( ­ ), the jansenist theologian antoine  arnauld ( ­ ) and hugo grotius ( ­ ); in one of these, spener asked  leibniz where labadie stood in relation to descartes.   after leibniz left for paris in  , spener told another correspondent that leibniz had written him to say he had  arrived and that he would stay as long as he needed to ensure the success of his efforts; in  the same passage spener mentioned that leibniz was undertaking a study of both  mathematics and mechanics.   to another correspondent, spener also reported having  shown comenius’s collection of millenarian prophecies, lux en tenebris (light in  darkness), to leibniz.   recent scholarship has suggested that both spener and leibniz  had been influenced by jan amos komeský ( ­ ), or comenius, whose vision of  a pansophic movement of spiritual regeneration—included the founding of a schola  ludus (school of light)—has also been closely linked with the utopian visions of  tommoso campanella and johann valentin andreae ( ­ ).                                                       johannes wallmann, udo sträter und markus matthias eds., philipp jakob spener, briefe aus der  frankfurter zeit  ­  vol. one:  ­  (tübingen: j.c.b mohr,  ).  the volume contains at  least six letters from spener to leibniz about these and other figures.  labadie was a jesuit who became a  calvinist and attracted followers (notably anna maria von schurmann) throughout the netherlands who  established separatist utopian communities; according to wallmann, spener visited labadie in geneva in  / ; see idem,  , n. .  t. j. saxby, the quest for the new jerusalem. jean de labadie and the  labadists,  ­  (dordrecht,  ).  arnauld was involved in several conversations with blaise  pascal and pierre nicole about how to improve mathematics and the human mind around this time; see  jones,  ­ .  tschirnhaus recommended arnauld’s new elements of geometry in the gründliche  anleitung; antoine arnauld, nouveaux éléments de géometrie, contenant des moyens de faire voir quelles  lignes sont incommensurables (paris,  ).      wallmann et al. spener briefe aus der frankfurter zeit, vol. one.       this reported by maria rosa antognazza and howard hotson, alsted and leibniz: on god, the  magistrate and the millennium wolfenbütteler arbeiten zur barockforschung (wiesbaden: harrassowitz  verlag,  ):  ; they note that leibniz wrote an epitaph for comenius shortly after the latter’s death in  .  see also wallmann et al. spener briefe aus der frankfurter zeit, vol. one,  ; josef brambora,  ‘comenius und leibniz,’ akten des [i.] internationalen leibniz­kongressees, hannover,  ­ . november   studia leibnitiana, supplementa,   vols. (wiesbaden  ­ ): v,  ­ .  johann amos comenius,  lux en tenebris (amsterdam,  ).   carl hinrichs provides a useful discussion of pansophy and pietism in preuβentum und pietismus to  which i am deeply indebted.  however, he is less willing than i am to see a pansophic worldview as more  than an idealistic backdrop for francke’s project.  more recent studies of pietism have continued to foster  false distinctions between francke’s “plans” and what he “actually” did; even udo sträter’s recent attempt      the many important parallels between comenius, spener and francke’s  preoccupation with divine illumination, moral improvement and perfection are worth  considering.  comenius was originally from bohemia but in his early twenties spent a  year in heidelberg ( ­ ), where he came into contact with johann valentin andreae  and certain rosicrucian groups that were active in this area of germany at the time.   he  became a bishop of the czech unity of brethren, was exiled from bohemia during the  thirty years war and landed in poland, where he became rector of a gymnasium and  began to develop his “christian philosophy” or pansophy.  jim bennett and scott  mandelbrote have emphasized just how influential comenius’s attempt to “harmonize the  senses, reason and scripture” was, including his attempts to develop a pansophic language  that would serve as a universal carrier of light.”   at the invitation of samuel hartlib, he  went to england and made the acquaintance of francis bacon and other members of the  “hartlib circle”—a nebulous group of individuals mostly oriented around harlib’s  personality who were concerned with devising “practical” schemes for moral  improvement and education.  their schemes almost always linked natural philosophy and                                                                                                                                                    to situate halle pietism “somewhere between utopia and reality,” downplays the significance of the  similarities between leibniz and francke’s visions he mentions.  see udo sträter, “der hallische pietismus  zwischen utopie und weltgestaltung” in udo sträter, hartmut lehmann, thomas müller­bahlke und  johannes wallmann eds. interdisziplinäre pietismusforschungen. beiträge zum ersten internationalen  kongress für pietismusforschung  .    vols. (tübingen,  ):  ­ .  there is an extensive literature  around both campanella and andreae; for an introduction see john m. headley, tommoso campanella and  the transformation of the world (princeton: princeton university press,  ) and donald r. dickson the  tessera of antilia: utopian brotherhoods and secret societies in the early seventeenth century (leiden: brill,  ).   while the origins and meaning of rosicrucianism have been subject to a great deal of fanciful  speculation over the years, historians mostly concede that it was a movement founded between   and   by german protestants, who published three widely circulated texts: fama fraternitatis rosae  crucis, confessio fraternitatis and the chymical wedding of christian rosenkreutz.  johann valetin  andreae would later claim authorship of the fama fraternitatis.  see the (now classic) francis yates, the  rosicrucian enlightenment (london & boston: routledge & kegan paul,  ).     jim bennett and scott mandelbrote, the garden, the ark, the tower, the temple. biblical metaphors of  knowledge in early modern europe (oxford: museum of the history of science,  ):  ­ .      the mechanical sciences with a configuration of the divine that affirmed the possibility of  human perfection.    comenius made pansophy the centerpiece of his school of light and several of his  schemes for the reformation of education that hartlib and countless others embraced in  his wake.  his plans would play an especially important role in the milieu in which  francke himself was educated.  perhaps the most popular expression of his comenius’s  vision for the reform of education appeared in his janua linguarum reserata or gate of  language unlocked ( ).   in the introduction of this text, he admitted that he had  been deeply influenced by a similarly titled latin­teaching guide circulated by the jesuit  college in salamanca.  comenius eventually wrote the orbis sensualium pictus in the  s as an introduction to the janua linguarum reserata.  erwin schadel reports that he  was not only influenced by the lesson plans of jesuit colleges, but by descartes, whom he  met in person in endegeest in  .  by the time francke began attending school in  gotha, where his father was a political advisor to duke ernst the pious, it was in his  gymnasium that the duke and his advisor andreas reyher first introduced a new  schulmethode (kurzer unterricht von natürlichen dingen) that was derived from  comenius’s philosophy.   francke himself noted in his organization and teaching art  of the orphanage schools ( ) that that he was using a small büchlein here that had  been produced for duke ernst of saxony in gotha; the text, he said, summarized the most                                                     johann amos comenius, janua linguarum reserata: the gate of language unlocked (lissa,  ).     see erwin schadel, sehendes herz (cor oculatum)­zu einem emblem des späten comenius. prämodernes  seinsverständnis als impuls für integral konzipierte postmoderne (frankfurt.a.m: peter lang,  ):  ­ .   before becoming rector of the gotha gymnasium in  , reyher directed a gymnasium for thirty  years in schleusing, where he corresponded with another pedagogue, sigismund evenius.  albrecht­ birkner reports that the contents of their letters revolve extensively around the pedagogical ideas of  comenius.  see veronika albrecht­birkner, reformation des lebens.  die reformen herzog ernst des  frommen von sachsen­gotha und ihre auswirkungen auf frömmigkeit, schule und alltag im ländlichen  raum ( ­ ) (leipzig: evangelische verlagsanstalt,  ):  , n.       important principles from the useful sciences for the children’s benefit.   duke ernst’s  method was also influenced by wolfgang ratke ( ­ ), whose pedagogical  imperatives have been directly linked to both francis bacon and comenius.     francke acquired several of comenius’s texts for his anstalt, including some  original manuscripts, and his press reprinted at least two of these texts, de rerum  humanarum emendatione consultatio catholica and historia fratrum bohemorum, in  .   the conciliatory aims of the berlin academy that jablonski and leibniz founded  and francke participated in as a member can be read as an expression of comenius’s  irenic vision.  just as comenius endeavored to link together observation (anschauung)  with application (anwendung), so too did leibniz and jablonski’s academy stress the  importance of linking together immaterial ideas with real objects (realia).    comenius’s writings are also replete with visual metaphors.  comenius believed  that god had spread pieces of his light throughout the world that needed to be collected  and reassembled in a single point, “not through an encyclopedic systemization,” as                                                     august hermann francke, ordnung und lehrart... waysenhaus gehörigen schulen... (halle,  ): “es  ist das fürnehmen gewesen des hoch seel. herzog ernsten zu sachsen gotha, welcher nicht allein für  diejenigen knaben welche nicht studiren sondern zu handwerckern, künstlern und kauffleuten gethan  werden sollen, eine besonder teutsche schule geordnet, sondern auch zu solchem zweck ein besonder  büchlein in teutscher sprache, darinnen die principia der vornehmsten und nützlichsten wissenschaften  kurtz verfasset sind, heraus geben lassen, welches büchlein denn auch bishero bey den waysenkindern  dazu gebrauchte worden.”    for ratke’s pedagogy and connections to comenius and gotha see gerhard michael, die welt als  schule. ratke, comenius und die didaktische bewegung (berlin,  ); detlef ignasiak, magister andreas  reyher ( ­ ). handschriften und drucke. bestandsverzeichnis bearbeitet von annett gerlach,  cornelia hopf, susannee werner (forschungs und landesbibliothek gotha,  ).   for many years, several manuscripts in comenius’s hand resided in francke’s archive until they were  given to the staatsbibliothek in prague (in the early years of the gdr).  francke’s press printed:  jo. amos  comenii, de rerum humanarvm emendatione consultatio catholica, ad genus humanvm ante alios vero  ad eruditos, religiosos, potentes evropae (halae, typis & impensis orphanotrophii,  ) and historia  fratrum bohemorum, eorum ordo et disciplina ecclisiatica, ad ecclesiae recte constituendae exemplar  (halae, typis & impensis orphanotrophii,  ). francke and jablonski discussed the publication of de  rerum humanorum emandatione in several letters from  ; see erhard peschke, “die reformideen des  comenius und ihr verhältnis zu a.h.francke’s plan einer realen verbesserung in der ganzen welt” in  heinrich bornkamm, friedrich heyer, alfred schindler eds. die pietismus in gestalten und wirkungen  (bielefeld: luther verlag,  ).   johannes kühnel, comenius und der anschauungsunterricht (leipzig: klinkhardt,  ):  .      hinrichs observed, but through their holistic unification with each other expressed in a  single form of recognition.   the source of everything that was wrong in the world, he  explained in his unum necessarium, was that people did not know how to recognize  divine essences; they could not see in such as way as to allow them to discern true and  necessary knowledge.   their training needed to involve the inculcation of strategies for  reading the scriptures and for recognizing, seeing the light of the divine in the natural  world.  comenius emphasized the need for new practices to help reel in and derive  meaning from this light—accumulating its rays around a single focal point.  in a tract he  called oculus fidei (auge des glaubens or eye of belief), he explained that he was  engaged in a project that linked the discovery of a “catholic” or universal truth to the sun,  which shone for all people, regardless of creed or nation.   spener, as we have seen,  frequently used light as a way of talking about divine energy, or the essence of love.   johannes wallmann has suggested that comenius’s emphasis on cultivating certain forms  of recognition, or seeing the divine, in the una necessarium inspired the method spener  embraced for the “college of piety” he started in frankfurt in  .     especially francke’s sermons are full of visual metaphors that emphasize man’s  need to embrace the divine light as the source of all knowledge and to apply that light  first to himself and then to the world.   in a move signaling his alliance with comenius,  he gave a sermon in   called das auge des glaubens (the eye of belief), in which he  told his listeners to direct their eyes to the “higher principles” of the holy scriptures and                                                     hinrichs,  .     johann amos comenius, unum necessarium (amsterdam,  ).   he wrote the oculi fidei ( ) as a shorthand version of raymund von sabunde’s (professor of  theology in toulouse in the  s and  s) liber creaturarum.  see schadel,  ­ .   see his philipp jakob spener und die anfänge des pietismus (tubingen; j.c.b. mohr,  ):  ­ .        to the example of christ.   in another sermon titled the intelligence of children of the  light (die klugheit der kinder des lichts), francke explained that when one “turned  from the darkness to the light,” one became a child of that light, but needed to learn how  to express the forms of knowledge it had to offer:     even if there is only a small ray of the divine light in a person’s soul, he will very easily  recognize how all the things that belong to an earthly life are small in comparison to the  heavenly and spiritual things offered to us through jesus christ.  yes, wherever, through  the grace of god, there is even only the beginning of a living recognition of the light in  someone, soon that person receives so much light in his soul that he does many higher  and larger works of christ…throughout the entire world using everything that is inside of  him….     the entire sermon revolved around providing the listener with instructions for  “exercising the true intelligence of the light.”  francke also offered his followers practical  instructions for illumination (erleuchtung), in a sermon of the same name.   he  explained how one became illuminated through a combination of self­knowledge  (obtained by directing the eyes to certain (not uncertain) things, rigorous study of the  bible and prayer. this allowed one’s abilities to recognize, one’s faculties of perception,  to become increasingly perfect so that one was better able to see things others could not  and affect noticeable, useful, changes in the world.   like comenius and spener, francke encouraged his followers to use their  possession of divine light to introduce radical material change.   one used the intellect to                                                     august hermann francke, das auge des glaubens (halle: waysenhaus,  )   august hermann francke, die klugheit der kinder des lichts [luke  : ­ ] (halle: waysenhaus,  ):  ; he preached the sermon for the first time on august  ,  .  reprinted in august hermann francke  predigten und tractätlein, vol..   (halle: waysenhaus,  ) and august hermann francke sonn und  fest­tags predigten (halle: waysenhaus,  ).   august hermann francke, “die lehre von der erleuchtung ( .märz  )” in erhard peschke, august  hermann francke predigten i (berlin: walter de gruyter,  ):  ­ .   antognazza and hotson argue that spener’s aims were not overtly materialist, or that he “believed that  the millennium would be an exclusively spiritual phenomenon…without prominent material blessings  except insofar as they stem very directly from these spiritual ones.”  they place spener’s millenarianism in  direct contrast to that of the “baconian universal reformers such as comenius… henry more, thomas  burnet, john evelyn, isaac newton and william whiston,” who “associated the millennium with a reform      direct the material substance of light—which contained its own infinite measure of  intelligence—towards charitable acts that would become manifest as symbols of divine  love.   and this involved consistently seeing the figures (gestalten) of the world for what  they really were—appearances or mirages that did not contain within themselves the  essence or energy of the divine:  our holy master says clearly that people will never be trusted with the truth and christ  will have reservations about entering their souls… until they discover that the error­ ridden and the foreign, the silhouettes (schatten werken) and the most insignificant of  things, are not true.     silhouettes, shadows or the figures produced by an absence of light were empty, strange  and caused errors because they were often mistaken for truths.  francke was concerned  with helping his followers recognize the essence of light and to avoid errors of  perception.  “teach us how to properly understand and practice the true intelligence of  the children of light through yourself and your recognition,” he pleaded in the closing  prayer of the klugheit sermon.  francke’s prayer corresponds directly to the sentiments  expressed in the prayer from isaac barrow’s apollonius that opened this chapter.  both  barrow and francke believed in the power of the divine to bestow a gift of recognition  that would allow one to grasp his will.   francke and spener’s use of visual metaphors is also a mark of their engagement  with the “culture of perspective” that surrounded them.  leibniz too was preoccupied  with perspective, with “mutations of appearances” (or anamorphosis), optical tricks,                                                                                                                                                    of philosophy, science, education, agriculture, medicine, law and politics.”  my reading challenges this  distinction.  i see spener as a “materialist millenarian,” profoundly influenced by baconian empiricism.   the authors are in some ways mimicking charles webster’s stance in the great instauration, which  introduces a false distinction between pietist and baconian reformers.  see antognazza and hotson,  ;  charles webster, the great instauration: science, medicine and reform,   –   (new york: holmes  & meier,  ).    august hermann francke, die klugheit der kinder des lichts (halle: waysenhaus,  ):  .   isaac barrow, appolonius, quoted in william whiston, elements of euclid [by andreas tacquet] fourth  edition (london,  ).      machines, illusions and strategies for helping people see many things all at once, and see  them clearly and distinctly.  but this interest, apparent also in his development of the  quadrature (which divided a circle into triangles from only a single point), can be read as  his unique response to the mandate of pansophy—or what was a multigenerational  attempt to discern and reassemble pieces of a divine light around a single point.  leibniz,  francke and spener’s interest in the metaphor of the city—including its use by the  earliest proponents of pansophy as an expression of a lived utopian ideal—must also be  understood in this context.  in a culture of perspective, cities in miniature could be  constructed so that their material components provided a clear and distinct visual  impression of the rational principles behind their organization.  the city could become a  metaphor for reconciliation and the power of a mathematical architecture to produce  perfectly proportional structures.  leibniz frequently talked about the beauty of tomasso campanella’s civitate  solis (city of the sun), johann valentin andreae’s christianopolis, the utopia of  thomas more and francis bacon’s atlantide as akin to the kind of consilia among men  he longed to create.   even before his paris years, jones notes, the cityscape figured  prominently in leibniz’s thinking.  in a portion of   letter to jacob thomasius, for  example, he plays with the relationship between the city, perception and the body:  just so, the same city presents one aspect if you look down upon it from a tower placed in  its midst; this is as if you intuit the essence itself.  the city appears otherwise if you  approach it from without, which is as if you perceive the qualities of the body.  and just                                                     “solche glückseeligkeit menschliches geschlechtes wäre möglich wenn eine allgemeine conspiration  und verständnüss nicht inter chimaeras zu rechnen, und zur utopia mori, und civitate solis campanellae  und atlantide baconi zu setzen und gemeiniglich der allergrössten herrn consilia von allgemeineter  wohlfart zu weit entfernet werden.” g.w. leibniz, “grundriss eines bedenkens von aufrichtung einer  societät,” in gottfried wilhelm leibniz, sämtliche schriften und briefe.  fourth series: politische schriften  volume one (berlin,  ):  .        as the external aspect of a city varies as you approach it differently, …the qualities of the  body vary with the variety of the sense organs.     the tower in this instance offers a “superior perspective” or “privileged epistemic access  to essence,” in jones’ words, which certain relationships are understood in such a way  that one entering a city on foot and viewing it from a horizontal perspective could simply  not appreciate.   to counteract the tendency of human beings to confine themselves to  only one point of view, which only inhibited their understanding of universal harmony,  new kinds of training institutes needed to be devised to help people climb up to the top of  the tower—to teach them how to appreciate and reproduce a variety of perspectives.  this  involved extensive training in the technologies of representation: using mirrors, new  optical machines and lenses and creating ichnographies.     the metaphor of the city, or specifically the kind of city detailed by andreae, was  important to both francke and spener as well.  they discussed andreae’s christianopolis  in their correspondence—specifically their interest in disseminating a new version of it.    martin brecht, who has become the most outspoken advocate of defining pietism  broadly, has emphasized the numerous points of convergence resonant in both andreae  and spener’s plans.   and wallmann has confirmed that andreae’s influence on spener  is especially apparent in his pia desideria.  francke mentions andreae explicitly in his  grösser aufsatz, a detailed summary of his vision for his schulstadt.  he wrote that                                                     quoted in jones,  ­ .     ibid.   ibid.,  .   spener wrote that he often thought of offering a new version of andreae’s christianopolis.  in a letter  from leipzig (november  ,  ), francke told spener he had just completed the preface to a new latin­ german version of christianopolis being printed by a local press.  noted in udo sträter, “der hallische  pietismus zwischen utopie und weltgestaltung” (halle, tübingen: max niemyer verlag,  ):  , n.  .   see also johannes wallmann, philipp jakob spener und die anfänge des pietismus (tübingen,  ).   brecht has placed selected writings from spener, andreae, johann albrecht bengel and philipp mattias  hahn together in a single volume to demonstrate the enormous degrees of similarity between them.  see  martin brecht, ausgewählte aufsätze vol.  : pietismus (stuttgart: calwer verlag,  ).       several upstanding individuals had already detailed the ruined condition of all three  estates, which was living proof of god’s frustration with the current state of society, and  he specifically pointed to the concerns and regenerative schemes of spener and andreae  to confirm the legitimacy of his own efforts.     the cityscape’s capacity to “bring things into perspective” also served francke  well as an all­purpose metaphor.  he repeatedly pointed to the capacity of his anstalt or  schulstadt to serve as a “universal seminar” that would “bring into order” a myriad of  relationships around a single point.  “my purpose,” he wrote in a letter to a pastor ring  from grünebartau (october  ,  ), “is to develop a universal institution, useful for  bringing into a good and holy order everything that is important for the christianity of all  orders of society—that all in someway relates to the healing power of the soul.”   his  orphanage or seminar universali, he insisted, should be understood as an “orderly  medium” for communicating god’s intentions for the organization of society—just as  god’s plan for the israelites could “be seen,” in all of its variety, in the single temple of  jerusalem or the stiftshütte of moses; these physical structures, francke wrote, taught  their viewers how to love and to perform good works.    like the “prophet schools”  started by the prophet samuel “when the people of israel stood in a state of great decay,”  francke explained that he was endeavoring to create a useful seminarum rei publicae                                                     august hermann franckes schrift über eine reform des erziehungs­ und bildungswesens als  ausgangspunkt einer geistlichen und sozialen neuordnung der evangelischen kirche des  .jahrhunderts.   otto podczeck ed. der grosse aufsatz (berlin: akademie verlag,  ):  . francke also mentioned veit  ludwig von seckendorff’s christen staat (leipzig: gleitsch,  ).  he continually added to his grosser  aufsatz over the years but never published it; i am quoting from the earliest version, from  .    august hermann francke’s project zu einem seminario universali oder anlegung eines pflanz­gartens  in welchem man eine reale verbesserung in allen ständen in und ausserhalb deutschlands, ja in eruopa  udn allen ueberigen theilen der welt zu gewarten. gratulationsschrift zum fünfzigjährigen lehrer­ jubiläum st. aug. eckstein’s (halle: verlag der buchhandlung des waysenhauses,  ):  .  this is a  printed version of a manuscript in francke’s hand with no date; the editor, dr. otto frick argues that  francke wrote it shortly before easter,  ; see page  .   ibid.,        vere christianae oriented around a single purpose—discovering and applying god’s  allerbeste intention or a divine will always pointing one toward what was best:    the purpose is to present the simple essence of the thing itself, whose foundation was  partially laid by god and can partially be found in the gemüth; and to present it before  the eyes of those people who are deemed worthy by god and who can see correctly the  cause of common depravity, who long for improvement and are ready to cooperate.     in this universal seminar, or what he also called a seminar of nations, “children sent  from many different, far away lands” would travel to a single point to be raised and  educated.  in addition to learning several languages so that they would be “prepared to go  to unbelieving lands,” they too would become able to instinctively able to reconcile  competing points of view.  they would become material expressions of light—or  mustard seeds, as francke liked to call them—who would leave the “garden” of his  seminar and spread themselves throughout the world.  even university students (studiosi)  could be introduced to the sciences that have “a real use” and shown how their studies  could be “applied to a much larger perfection” or be made to serve a greater good.     conciliatory visions & missions    as we saw in chapter one, tschirnhaus too was drawn to the teachings of philipp  jakob spener and employed the same kinds of conciliatory and vision­oriented metaphors  so central to pansophy.  as in the case of lebniz, his early exposure to the conciliatory  thinking of j.c. sturm, weigel and spener compelled him to carve out of a new method  or scheme for improvement.   both he and leibniz recognized in the geometrical                                                     francke, project zu einem seminario universali ( ):  .   ibid.,     throughout his life he insisted “on a moral, as well as epistemological, need to consider and to weigh  carefully the view of others;” and in a manner reminiscent of j.c. sturm, “called for technical means to  recognize what aspects of truth were to be found in these views.”  in jones,  ­ . see also christia  mercer, leibniz’s metaphysics: its origins and development (cambridge,  ):  ­ .      methods of descartes and spinoza the kind of gesture towards moral improvement that  they themselves sought, only both would ultimately contend that neither figure had gotten  the recipe for improvement quite right.  tschirnhaus eventually printed the summary of  the medicina mentis he had written for francke, the gründliche anleitung, and upon its  completion sent a copy of it to leibniz.   that spener had also tried to ensure a copy of  it landed in leibniz’s hands is evidenced by leibniz’s letter to him, dated june  ,    from berlin (see appendix  ):  i am sending back herr von tschirnhaus’s beautiful thoughts expressed in the gründliche  anleitung zu nützlichen wissenschaften with my indebted gratitude; i would have wished  that they were more extensive and that he, so as with others before him, would be more  oriented towards the specifics (ad specilia).  but there are certainly already many good  and useful things in here.  in the meantime, i have also received a letter from him and see  that he has also sent me an exemplar of the text.       leibniz then wrote a fairly detailed review of the  ­page text; he later sent a copy of the  review to tschirnhaus as an attachment to one of his letters.    in the review leibniz also made no secret of his affinity for the gründliche  anleitung, again describing it as “beautiful” and offering his summary of its most useful  insights:  nowhere is the truth more apparent than in mathematics, which also can be usefully  applied to water and land in war and peace, but even more because mathematics transmits  before the eyes key proofs of the pure truth and shows the way to correctly recognize this  truth… the mathematical method allows itself to be applied in physics, politics and  ethics, just like the neoterici let themselves be served by it.   and plato has already  shown in his speeches that it is also needed for the common good, as the translation [of  these speeches] into french shows.  two ways to mathesi are followed: one way uses  many instruments, praxis and books but does not bring one closer to the truth.  the other  way is through the theory of euclid, archimedes, apollonius and analysin, which seem  at first to slow up things because of the emphasis on major findings from the past, but  only this way provides the grounds for one to find oneself—something that others search  for with many costs.  indeed, because of what the youth want, one must take the middle  path and teach the beginners only the most important practices from the discipline of                                                    c.i. gerhardt ed., der briefwechsel von gottfried wilhelm leibniz mit mathematikern. tschirnhaus,  huygens, newton  nd edition (berlin:  ) [reprinted in hildesheim: olms,  ].     from gottfried wilhelm leibniz, sämtliche schriften und briefen.  first series: allgemeiner, politscher  und historischer briefwechsel, volume  : january – august   (berlin,  ):  ­ .      mathematics in order to awaken a passion and a light within them, after which they can  be shown causes and led through theory.       here leibniz managed to boil down the essence of tschirnhaus’s medicina mentis to a  few key sentences.  his review made clear that both he and tschirnhaus saw the  nobleman’s method as a “middle path” between mathematical and experimental method.   it deliberately mentioned tschirnhaus’s repeated references to the neoterici’s willingness  to “let themselves be served” by applied mathematics.  it also reiterated tschirnhaus’s  emphasis on awakening the passions of youth, or “a light within them.”  in the final  portion of the review, leibniz echoed tschirnhaus’s sentiment that “if one were to teach  these things in the schools, learning would become recht ludus,” or real fun.     in another letter to leibniz from this period, tschirnhaus referred to leibniz’s  new academy as “eine academia ad mathesin et physicam”—one that (like his method)  endeavored to link the study of mathesis and physica in new ways.  on the eve of the  academy’s founding, he wrote, “by the way, do not let go of this moment to stabilize the  plans for an academy of mathematics and physics in berlin; maybe something will come  of them that cannot yet be discerned externally.”   several of leibniz’s letters from this  period indicate his interest in tschirnhaus’s inventa optica, which, in one instance, he  described as having provided the academy “with a huge light and help.”   in a related  passage, tschirnhaus referred leibniz explicitly to his description in the medicina mentis  of creating curves through rays of light that “requires only a small reflexion.”  the kind                                                     gottfried wilhelm leibniz, sämtliche schriften und briefe.  first series: allgemeiner, politischer und  historischer briefwechsel. vol.  : september   – may   (berlin,  ).  the attachment (beilage)  was appended to a letter leibniz sent to tschirnhaus from hannover, dated april  ,  .  it was printed  in a journal called monthly excerpts from new books.   gerhardt ed., briefwechsel,  . “solte man die sachen in schulen lehren, würde schola recht ludus  werden.”  school as fun (or play) is also the title of one of comenius’s best known treatises, the schola  ludus d. i. die schule als spiel. trans. wilhelm bötticher (langensalza: beyer,  ).      gerhardt ed., briefwechsel,  . october  ,  : tschirnhaus to leibniz (from leipzig).   ibid.,  .  april  ,  : leibniz to tschirnhaus (from hannover)      of geometrical optics tschirnhaus was engaged in merged higher and lower forms of  geometry through the material medium of light—the central metaphor of pansophy.  his  inventa optica provided a set of technological strategies for bringing about the  reconciliation and improvement both leibniz and francke desired.   leibniz devised countless “schemes” for the improvement of society over the  course of his lifetime—so many that they are rarely taken very seriously.  but several of  his plans correspond so closely to the kind of project francke developed that one wonders  if francke—through spener or tschirnhaus—had read some of them.   in a manner  reminiscent of francke’s interest in teaching children forms of knowledge that had “real  use,” leibniz sketched out new ways to introduce youth to the applied sciences.  for  example, in a short piece he entitled grundriss eines bedenkens von auffrichtung einer  societät ( ), leibniz described his interest in founding a society that would work  together:   to improve the schools, to exercise the youth in languages and the reality of the  sciences… to develop a kind of gentry school (ritterschule) institution that teaches  handcrafts with new instruments…that is able to allow pupils to try everything in  chymicis and mechanicis—including glass making, the study of perspective, machines,  water­arts (fountains etc.), clock­making, turning wood, painting, printing books, dying  wool, weaving, ironworking…also to develop funds of curious things, a “theatrum  naturae” and art, rare and anatomy chambers, for the easy learning of all things… to  collect relations, experimenta, correspondez letters, to have everything in order and  “indicibus”, to give poor students room and board and at the same time create an  institution that can use their work (where they can be useful)….     francke’s pädagogium could easily be described as a kind of ritterschule that was  oriented around the teaching of languages, especially latin, greek, hebrew, arabic and  russian.   his organization became known for its large wunderkammer, or its extensive                                                     leibniz’s “grundriss eines bedenkens von aufrichtung einer societät” from  (?) presents this and  many other sketches or ideas regarding what such a society should look like.  in gottfried wilhelm leibniz,  sämtliche schriften und briefe. fourth series: politische schriften. vol. one (berlin,  ):  .  http://gso.gbv.de/xslt/db= . /set= /ttl= /mat=/nomat=t/clk?ikt= &trm=politische+schriften http://gso.gbv.de/xslt/db= . /set= /ttl= /mat=/nomat=t/clk?ikt= &trm=politische+schriften http://gso.gbv.de/xslt/db= . /set= /ttl= /mat=/nomat=t/clk?ikt= &trm=politische+schriften http://gso.gbv.de/xslt/db= . /set= /ttl= /mat=/nomat=t/clk?ikt= &trm=politische+schriften http://gso.gbv.de/xslt/db= . /set= /ttl= /mat=/nomat=t/clk?ikt= &trm=politische+schriften     collection of curious objects that were used in lessons.   he gave hundreds of university  students room and board in exchange for their labor, as instructors, in his schools.  from  the very beginning his organization had an archive; he and his staff kept meticulous  records and kept most, if not all, of the correspondence they received.   in other words, it  could be described as a material expression of the sketch of leibniz’s thought portrayed  above.  francke was also able to create opportunities for his pupils to “try everything in  chymicis and mechanicis”—in a way that mirrored precisely what leibniz had expressed  in his   sketch.  in the following excerpt from a foundation text called description of  the pädagogium, francke’s associate, heinrich neubauer, described a form of learning  that was ludus:  it is very good to observe when the scholars have their divertissement.  here sits one for  an hour on the turning wheel (lathe bank) and turns under the direction of an agreeable  master; there another polishes pieces of glass.  others grind the glass into lenses for  telescopes, microscopes and the kinds of lenses called for in sieges…    others prepare the tubes of telescopes out of cardboard.  others practice on the air pump  and are called upon to show how the air compresses all things and how one could  increase and decrease most observations through artistic machines, an understanding of  which can lead an educated mind to many new discoveries.   the divertissement of others involves taking mice, frogs and other animals, including fish  in water, and extracting air from them with the airpump to see how they react—also  afterwards when the air is put back into them again…   on the roof is a balcony where those with finished lenses observe stars and also eclipses  of the sun and moon.      the pupils of francke’s elite school were able to “exercise themselves” in the “reality of  the sciences,” in manner strikingly similar to what leibniz had envisioned thirty years  earlier.  but francke also frequently referred to his entire organization—including the  ritterschule—as “an orphanage,” thereby exploiting its potential as an easily                                                     see thomas müller­bahlke, “der realienunterricht in den schulen august hermann francke” in  schulen machen geschichte:   jahre erziehung in den franckeschen stiftungen zu halle (halle: verlag  der franckeschen stiftungen,  ):  ­ .   afst/h a b:  beschreibung des paedagogii.       recognizable cultural symbol that would allow him to directly link his project to a  philanthropic ideal.  leibniz had already played with the term orphanage in a similar  manner.  after describing a “sort of ritterschule institution” in his “sketch of a thought’  he reworked a portion of his scheme, stating that what someone should create was “an  institution that takes the seeds out books and turns them into a profitable local  commune…”.  he wanted this commune:  to take over the education and administration of gifted pupils who have achieved some  recognition so that they are not raised poorly and debauched by friends and tutors.   …  yes, this would be a kind of unrestricted orphanage [my emphasis] where all poor  orphans and foundlings could be fed, put to work and either raised to study or to  participate in mechanics or commerce.     this is precisely what francke’s commune or orphanage offered those it housed and  educated.  “gifted” children, including foundlings, were trained to go on to the  university; those that francke’s staff deemed unsuitable for advanced studies were taught  the rudiments of the mechanical sciences and entered trades.  it is little wonder, then, that  leibniz was so receptive to francke’s historische nachricht when it was first brought to  him in  .  for him francke’s plans marked the material implementation of a carefully  calculated, rational thought—in this case leibniz’s own.     francke and leibniz exchanged at least eight letters with each other between   and  .  in the earliest stages of his project, francke sent heinrich neubauer to  the netherlands on a kind of scouting trip with a set of very specific questions about the  structure of relief organizations there that he wanted answered.   on his way to holland,                                                     leibniz, “grundriss eines bedenkens” ( ) in gottfried wilhelm leibniz, sämtliche schriften und  briefe. fourth series: politische schriften, vol. one (berlin,  ): nr.  ,  .   georg heinrich neubauer, was bey erbauung unseres waysen­hauses zu wissen nöthig sey: der  fragenkatalog georg heinrich neubauers für die hollandreise  .  kleine texte der franckeschen  stiftungen nr.    (halle: verlag der frankeschen stiftungen,  ); stab/f  / :    [ ] ergänzende      neubauer stopped in hannover and personally gave leibniz a copy of the historische  nachricht, one of francke’s many formal expressions of his project’s vision.   neubauer  also relayed francke’s approval of leibniz’s novissima sinica, in which leibniz had  presented a detailed plan for a protestant missionary enterprise to china, via russia.  in  voicing his approval, francke also clearly stated that “through god’s grace, the field in  russia had already been opened,” and that his project in halle was strategically necessary  for accomplishing the objectives leibniz had articulated.   leibniz responded in turn  with a long letter to francke in which he made clear that he fully appreciated the  powerful points of convergence between their plans.  he said that he saw in francke’s  project the culmination of several attempts by others, especially erhard weigel, to teach  useful sciences and expressed his hope that several large cities would adopt the model  francke was introducing in halle.     in this same letter, leibniz recommended that neubauer be sent to hamburg to  meet with leibniz’s correspondent there, vincent placcius, so that the two could discuss  other issues related to reforming germany’s schools; there, he suggested, a propaganda  campaign should be launched promoting the founding of new schools after the “halle  model.”    he also indicated that he immediately recognized in francke’s plans a set of                                                                                                                                                    fragen georg heinrich neubauers zum studium der waisenhäuser in holland; stab/f  / :  ­  [ ]  aufzeichnungen von georg heinrich neubauer.   hinrichs reports that neubauer gave leibniz a copy of francke’s historische nachricht von verpflegung  der armen und erziehung der jugend in gedachtem glaucha in preuβentum und pietismus,  ­ .  it was  printed as an attachment to philip jakob spener’s christliche verpflegung der armen, als aus  churfürstl.gnädigester verordnung das gassen bettlen in den churfl. residenz städten abgeschaft...  (berlin,  ).    letters reprinted in leibniz, sämtliche schriften und briefe. first series: allgemeiner, politischer und  historischer briefwechsel vol.   (berlin,  ):  . francke’s “begeisterte zustimmung” is letter n.  .   for a brief summary of these events see utermöhlen,  ­ .   in merkel, anhang i briefwechsel (august  ,  ):  ­ .  see also utermöhlen,  .   a letter from vincent placcius ( ­ ) dated march  ,   resides in francke’s archive, indicating  that possibly spener had made contact with him earlier.  afst/h a  :  .      educational objectives already resident in similar projects underway throughout the  continent—projects often expressly modeled after jesuit colleges, he explained:   now in paris and elsewhere—all over the place—there are training academies that are  privately organized by skilled men and pensioners who are called upon to do so by the  state and who emulate the example of the jesuits.     leibniz situated francke’s project in the pan­european context he knew well, but he also  made a point of indicating how francke’s plans were different from those academies “in  paris and elsewhere.”  leibniz was especially pleased, he wrote, that francke would be  reaching “young men before the age of thirty” with “the new method” (novae methodi)  because wherever this method was applied, he wrote, “cognitions are turned into  expressions that cannot be called into doubt.”        in the preface of the novissima sinica, leibniz famously explained that both  china and europe could improve themselves if they became open to what they each had  to teach one another.  he expressed his interest in a kulturelle vereinigungswerk, a  project of cultural reconciliation that made russia, specifically the person of tsar peter  the great, the critical bridge, or centre point.   often unacknowledged is that in the  novissima, leibniz also made extensive use of plato’s link between virtue and geometry  (in the meno mainly), where, as patrick riley explains, “knowledge of geometry (as  something ‘amounting’ to a faith) is crucial.”   in the novissima, we have the essence of  leibniz’s theory of universal justice or philanthropy, where, following riley, “all good                                                      in merkel, anhang i: briefwechsel (august  ,  ):   .  “nam et lutetiae parisiorum et alibi passim  academiae exercitiorum a privates habentur et van den enden belga, homo doctus (sed cuius quod  rohanaei equitis conspiritioni miscuisset, exitus infelix fuit) pensionarios quos vocant in eadem urbe regia  habebat exemplo et aemulatione jesuitarum.”     ibid. “nescio an videris quae juvenis ante   annos edidi titulo novae methodi docendae discendaeque  jurisprudentiae, juvenilia quidem, sed quae nunc quoque viris quibusdam egregiis magis quam mihi ipsi  placent.  ibi cogitations quaedam meae sunt expressae quibus ne nuc quidem renuntiavi.”       hinrichs,  .   patrick riley, “leibniz’s political and moral philosophy in the novissima sinica,  ­ ” in journal  of the history of ideas   ( ):  .      things—truth, wisdom, platonic geometry, charity, justice, virtue, popular happiness—are  strongly related to one another, if not fully equated.”   leibniz insisted that the chinese  people had been better able to “realize” wisdom in their daily lives.  they “behave to  each other so lovingly… almost in emulation of the teachings of christ,” and are “averse  to war,” he wrote.   in voicing his “approval” of this text to leibniz, i think francke was  doing much more than simply expressing his mutual interest in a protestant mission to  china.  he was conveying his alignment with leibniz’s brand of christian platonism.   riley describes leibniz’s christian platonism as able to merge a geometrical  configuration of eternal virtue or truth with the apostle paul’s insistence that charity, a  material expression of love, is the most important of these virtues.   this was a   configuration resoundingly similar to spener and francke’s juxtaposition of reason (or  the training of cognition) and praxis.  several of francke’s activities during this period of time, including his interest in  describing his project as a “seminar of nations,” suggest that he saw himself as leibniz’s  ally in the extension of a global vision of conciliation.  his remaining correspondence  with leibniz from   to   is about how to strategically maneuver to make contact  with the individuals closest to tsar peter i.     had been the year of the young tsar’s  famous tour of europe and both leibniz and francke’s saw the visit as their chance to  secure the tsar’s personal support of their mission plans. they attempted to convince  peter i to come to halle so that he could see francke’s training institutes for himself; by                                                     ibid.,  .   ibid.,  .   ibid.,     they touch on all the rudiments of whom to talk to and when and how.  upon finding out that the  children of tsar peter’s general golav had been placed at a school in berlin while their father was touring,  leibniz specifically asked francke to recommend to spener that he look in on them occasionally.  spener  was serving as the prussian court preacher at the time so he would have been in a position to extend them  special privileges. utermöhlen,  ­ .      placing the buildings before his eyes, they expected that he would be moved, literally, to  set up similar institutes throughout russia.   although the tsar never came, someone  who had lived in russia from   to   and had become close to peter did arrive in  halle to observe the new method in action and to advise leibniz and francke on how to  proceed:  heinrich wilhelm ludolf ( ­ ) stayed with francke from the end of   to april of  .  he corresponded extensively with leibniz during this time and  served as the kind of critical middleman francke and leibniz needed to get the tsar on  board with their plans.     in a letter to johann fabricius (also a berlin academy member) from may of  , francke gave a rundown of the events that had transpired since his first exchange  with leibniz.   he told fabricius how pleased he was that leibniz was so interested in  the halle schulformen he had constructed and hoped that his institutes could eventually  be used to build a “commercium litterarum” with china.  he also told fabricius that the  tsar’s emissaries in europe were now fully aware of his schools and plans and that the  russian nobleman postnikov had come to visit.  francke saw this as his chance to prove                                                     ibid.   heinrich wilhelm ludolf is a pivotal figure in this discussion, deserving of much more attention then i  can give him here.  he had familial connections to the danish crown and spent several years (  to  / ) in london before leaving for russia on a kind of diplomatic mission (in the service of king georg  of denmark).  the francke foundation archive contains a great deal of his correspondence.  in one letter to  his brother, he explained that he was “undertaking a trip to moscow until the european relationships were  further developed;” see afst/h c  a  .  for a recent attempt to synthesize and extend our  understanding of ludolf’s relationship with francke, see renate wilson, “heinrich wilhelm ludolf,  august hermann francke und der eingang nach russland,” in johannes wallmann und udo sträter ed.  hallesche forschung  : halle und osteuropa zur europäischen ausstrahlung des hallischen pietismus   (halle: franckesche stiftungen verlag,  ). by all indications, he became part of peter i’s inner circle.  leibniz corresponded with him and with his uncle, hiob ludolf, who resided in halle from november   to march   and became one of the first members of the berlin academy.     johann fabricius was a theology professor from helmstedt, who would join leibniz’s academy on  march  ,  .  utermöhlen summarizes the most important points from francke’s letter to fabricius,  . it is reprinted in gottfried wilhelm leibniz, sämtliche schriften und briefe. first series: allgemeiner,  politischer und historischer briefwechsel volume   (berlin,  ): n.  .  leibniz wrote to fabricius  around the same time saying he had some thoughts to share with francke; idem, n.  .       to tsar peter’s closest associates that he took the teaching of the russian language very  seriously.  he discussed with postnikov the problems still present in the russian  dictionary h. w. ludolf had written and gave him his short introduction to christianity  (kurze anleitung zum christentum) and johann arndt’s four books of true christianity  (vier bücher vom wahren christentum).   a few months later, francke would tell leibniz  that he was hopeful that the russians’ interest in the “halle method” would grow; he said  he agreed with leibniz that the first priority was to support the russians in their attempts  to reform their educational system.  then the ultimate goal of christianization and a  mission to china would logically follow.   leibniz had expressed this same sentiment to  ludolf in january of  —the dissemination of “true christianity” would follow  naturally by simply helping the russians with their attempts to “build up their culture”  (their kulturelle aufbauarbeiten).  the introduction of a certain kind of education—or  method—was to be the first priority.    elaborating on the components of the halle method was certainly a big part of  francke’s direct correspondence with tsar peter about establishing likenesses of his  schulstadt throughout russia.  while virtually no examples of the nature of these  exchanges remains, we do have a gutachtung, or some formal comments, that francke  sent to peter the great about an orphanage founded in russia in  .  here francke  emphasized the importance of introducing the study of geometry in the new institution:     for a good upbringing it is necessary to make them learn well about christ’s teachings,  sin, conversion, how to live a blessed life pleasing to god… how to read, write, a little bit  from geography and history (at least enough so that they can recognize the most  important countries and cities from maps and the most important stories about the  beginning of the world from the bible), and finally introduce them to geometry, the first                                                     in utermöhlen.      of all sciences, in which certain boys who are naturally adept can be further trained quite  easily.  of these, some boys can be selected to learn other languages deemed useful.      francke’s emphasis on teaching geometry—the “first of all sciences”—in conjunction  with geography and language learning is an expression of the conciliatory method’s  critical coupling.  combining the study of geography, languages and geometry placed  mathematical exercise alongside activities that conditioned the senses—i.e., to recognize  inscriptions on a map or to derive meaning from the new configuration of symbols and  sounds of a foreign tongue.  proficiency in map reading and languages were the most  important practical skills a missionary could hope for in order to successfully maneuver  about new lands.      it is not a coincidence that this juxtaposition of handling real objects with  geometry became the hallmark of the “halle method” and served as the central rallying  point for members of the berlin academy.  geometry was a form of mathematics that  lent itself to the calibration of material objects.  it required the consilia of higher forms of  cognition and experience and, therefore, seemed the perfect tool to use in order to further  a consilia of protestants—and eventually all believers.  geometry signified the  materiality of divine reason, and it could be used to disseminate divine love.  francke and  leibniz’s correspondence provides perhaps the best evidence of how the two men linked  the study of geometry with mission and a universal project of cultural reconciliation.  in  his first letter to francke, leibniz made a clear link between francke’s institutes and  jesuit colleges, which also served as training institutes for missionaries; francke  indicated in the same set of exchanges that he saw his schools as critically important for  the realization of a protestant mission.  a correspondent that they each held in common,                                                     afst/h c   [ ] gutachtung franckes über die errichtung von waisenhaus in russland für peter  i; quoted in eduard winter, russland als ausgangspunkt, appendix.       conrad mel, would also formally link the new berlin academy with a mission­oriented  agenda that required the very kind of training institutes francke had developed in halle.    mel’s point of observation (schauburg)    conrad mel was a preacher from hersfeld who served most of his life in  königsberg.  he became a member of leibniz’s academy in january of  , the second  official member after gottfried kirch, and, shortly afterward, produced a key text that  endeavored to explicitly pair mission with science as equally valid expressions of the  academy’s mandate.   he called it his point of observation of the evangelical legation  (schauburg der evangelischen gesandtschaft) ( ) and explained in the introduction  that the purpose of the newly founded brandenburg society:    not only includes the practicing of sciences in the service of the free arts, the study of  nature, and the description of the earth, but also sacred missions…i plan to offer the  society here a few words of advice about how best to send the barbarous folk in china  the light of christendom and the pure evangelii…                                                      as the first member of leibniz and jablonski’s academy, gottfried kirch ( ­ ) provided expert  advice on making calendars (for which leibniz had obtained a license allowing the academy to produce  and sell calendars to fund their projects) and on building an observatory, also a central activity of early  members.  his correspondence has been published recently: klaus­dieter herbst unter mitw. von eberhard  knobloch eds. die korrespondenz des astronomen und kalendermachers gottfried kirch ( ­ )  three vols. (jena: garamond,  ).    for many years, authorship of the latin version of this text was attributed to francke because it resided  in his archive: pharus missionis evangelicae se consilum de propaganda fide per conversions ethnicorium  maxime sinensium, prodromus fusioris opeis ad potentissimum regem prussiae fridericum, in quo veritatis  demonstration, causae moventes, conversionis praeparatoria, tentamen legationis evangelicae, subsidia  necessaria, obstacula, ut et modus conversionis et conversorum conservation primis fundamentis  delineantur et censurae societatis brandenburgicae scientarium, ut et eruditorum omnium et piorum seriae  deliberationi subjiciuntur ( ); the full title of the german version is:  die schauburg der evangelischen  gesandtschaft oder ohnmassgebliche vorschläge wegen fortpflanzung des allerhieligsten glaubens durch  bekehrung der heiden sonderlich in china, worin zu sehen:  ) dass eine allgemeine bekehrung der heiden  zu hoffen;  ) was vor ursachen uns bewegen, dieselbe zu befördern;  ) wie man anstalt machen musste,  solche ins werck zu richten;  ) wie ein versuch zu thun durch eine gesandschaft;  ) woher die holfsmittel  und unkosten zu nehmen;  ) was vor hindernisse möchten vorfallen auch wie dieselben zu heben;  ) wie  die bekehrung anzugreifen;  ) wie endlich die bekehrten zu erhalten seien: alles kürzlich entworfen, auch  von ihro majestät dem grossmächtigen könig in preussen friderico genehm gehalten—von der  brandenburgischen societät der wissenschaften approbirt und allen frommen christen und eyfferern vor  gottes ehre zu weiterer heiligen überlegung und beförderung vorgestellt von conrad mel, konig.  hofprediger in preussen ( ).  the schauburg was reprinted by merkel,  ; the pharus missionis  evangelicae appears in kramer, august hermann francke ( ):  ­ .        mel then offered up a detailed plan for preparing an “evangelical mission” that included  the intensive teaching of mathematics in academy­organized, missionary training  institutes.  in his rationale, he directly attributed the success of jesuit missions abroad to  the order’s ability to provide their missionaries with rigorous mathematical training:  the mathematical sciences deserve to be paid attention to above all else because the kind  of progress the roman catholics have had through teaching them is well known.  it is to  be advised that one should look for the best mathematicians from all the universities,  who can present their thorough understanding of these arts so that they can (unlike  before) at least challenge the roman catholics’ superiority.    above all things, it should be ensured that all ground­rules and teaching clauses should  be taught by introducing trustworthy test cases from physics, mathematics and  oeconomie for practice; such figures that can help a common essence grow out of a basic  knowledge of the sciences should be presented before the eyes.     the jesuits’ success in using mathematical knowledge to the benefit of their missionary  ventures was apparent to all; in his assessment of their activities, mel mentioned the  study of physics and the need to produce common essences out of shapes and figures that  could be visibly “presented.”  following this section, he emphasized the importance of  experiencing the mechanical arts and made some very direct remarks about how, despite  their success, jesuits used their mathematical knowledge improperly:  the mechanical arts must be experienced so that those being sent abroad can profit from  them.  experience has consistently shown what the jesuits have been able to accomplish  through their mathematical arts.  through their knowledge of the arts of observing the  stars they were able to put their foot in the middle of the chinese kingdom; …but in  discovering new knowledge of the entire earth, they have furthered a divided christian  israel among the heathen caananites.  it is not difficult to see how if we also bring art and  sensible masters in painting, clock­making and glassworks… our main goals can also be  furthered.     mel’s polemic in this passage is clear; while emulating the jesuits’ training programs the  proponents of evangelical mission would seize control over and reapply the jesuits’                                                     conrad mel, schauburg, reprinted in merkel,  .   ibid.,  ­ .      monopoly over certain forms of mathematical knowledge to the proper ends.  jesuits  were perpetuating divisiveness, mel argued, not reconciliation.     in his plan, mel also emphasized that the missionary training institutes should  provide training in languages and theology in addition to “worldly knowledge”:     the practice of languages is especially recommended, not only the three most popular— latin, greek and hebrew—a knowledge of which we will expect of our candidates, but  also those languages useful in the areas where trips will be directed, especially  russian/moscovite, chinese, arabic and others…  the practice of god’s teachings should be taught intensively so that the destined to be  theologians have more than written teachings of godly truths to offer… but instead  embody these truths themselves…  the practice in worldly knowledge must be emphasized, especially naturkunde and  ethics (sittenlehre).     in addition to offering several languages in his pädagogium, in   francke founded his  collegii orientalis theologici, whose purpose was to offer rigorous instruction in the  “chaldaeic, syrian, arabian, rabbinic, talmudic and ethiopian languages,” as well as  ancient greek, hebrew, latin, and, whenever it was possible, armenian, persian,  chinese, turkish, new­greek, polish, slavonic and russian.    he also offered several  collegia in theology and published manuductio ad lectionem scripturae sacrae ( ),  einleitung zur lesung der h.schrift ( ) and definitio studii theologici ( ) as  general guides for students of theology.   his institutes were known for their emphasis  on the study of ethics and several forms of “worldly knowledge.”                                                     ibid.   francke, project des collegii orientalis theologici, reprinted in kramer ( ):  .   anton böhm reportedly told francke that he had published the definitio in england (london,  ) so  that theology students at oxford would become familiar with it. “um selbigen unter denen oxfurtischen  studenten bekand zu machen.” afst/h c  :   [july  ,  ] anton wilhelm böhm to august  hermann francke; quoted in brunner,  .  francke’s introduction to reading the holy scriptures or  einleitung zur lesung der heilige schrift, insonderheit des neuen testaments (halle,  ) was reprinted  in  ,  ,  ,  ,   and  .        mel insisted that the training institutes should be organized at the discretion of the  berlin academy; the missionary training institutes would rely exclusively on the expert  guidance and “protection” of academy members:  preparation of an evangelical mission involves founding an academy or school where  the persons destined to become missionaries can be trained.  i.  the persons who will direct this large work are:  . our king…  . the brandenbug society because the members are sought after in all sciences for their  learning and have a basic knowledge of things abroad...  the teachers of this academy will be  . exceptional professors from different locations, faculties and sciences.  . … exceptional students from academies and from all kinds of faculties and sciences,  who are recommended by the professors, examined and approved by the society,… and  who have a noticeable fear of god …      in other words, overseeing missionary training institutes oriented around the teaching of  the mathematical sciences was to become one of the academy’s main tasks.  it is not too  great a leap to suggest that francke’s institutes and the ones mel describes here were  actually one and the same.  francke’s method, which leibniz had affirmed was an  expression of “the new method,” offered the same kind of approach to knowledge­ making that those members of the berlin academy preferred, a method that merged  mathematics and experience by privileging the middling, mathematical sciences (like  geometry).  francke, as an early member of leibniz’s academy, was part of a cohort that  had a stake in his own institutions’ success—and helped further them.  these were  institutions entirely oriented around the precisely the “practice and studies” described  above.    members of the academy situated francke’s institutes, the mathematical sciences  and the idea of a protestant mission in the very same discursive context, including  discussions of various technologies and ongoing projects.  leibniz often set the tone of                                                     ibid.,  ­ .      these discussions, noting in his bedenken ( ) that the success of the mission was  contingent on education and the society’s ability to develop the technological means of  reaching distant lands; he specifically mentioned tsar peter i’s interest in the longitude  problem, for example, and the need to devise a solution to impress him.   francke’s  orphanage press published a solution to the longitude problem in  .   mel also  heeded the call; while working on his own detailed model of solomon’s temple, he  developed a pantometrum nauticum, a device for taking all kinds of measurements  (including longitude) at sea, which he sent to the society for comment.   in  , he sent  the academy an illustrated report about a watering device (bewässerungsanlage) for the  temple with some news and a request that involved halle:  i am also sending herein an exemplar of my mission wishes… and am hoping to gain the  trust of a highworthy member of the english society for the propagation of truth… my  current occupation is to finish up my preacher solomon text and then to bring my  weighing machine into better state of perfection.  the mathematicians in rome have  gotten me excited about this but through a very costly exchange;  …   my oldest son has gone through all the classes of his current gymnasium, which have  laid a foundation in languages, mathematics and philosophy.  i would like to send him to                                                     leibniz, bedenken ( ) in brather,  .  “es ist nehmlich bekand dass der tzar die schiffarts­sachen  ueberauss liebet und der compass gleichsam vor die seele der seefahrt zu achten, selbiger aber von norden  etwas abweichet und zwar an unterschiedenen orthen unterschiedlich.  worinn ein noch nich ausgelösetes  Änigma naturae stecket, welches aber wenn es vollende entdecket, ein succedanum der logitudinum und  eine uberauss grosse hulffe vor die piloten dargeben würde.”     francke published his friend and colleague christoph semler’s solution to the problem, which i discuss  at greater length in chapter four; christoph semler, supremo magnae birtanniae senaturi illustrissimo  parlamento consecrata humillimeque submissa methodus inveniendae longitudinis maritimaee per acus  verticales magneticas, evidentissimis superstructa experimentis terra marique factis ( halae  magdeburgicae: orphanotropheum,  ).   leonard christoph sturm offered an assessment (a gutachtung) of mel’s pantometer for the academy  in  ; see bbaw/a i­v,  a [ ] gutachten von l.ch. sturm über das pantometrum nauticum des k.  mel. christian wolff offered his comments in the acta eruditorum in  : in dr. conrad mel: ein  lebensbild ( ).  conrad mel worked many years on his model of solomon’s temple and published a  description of it under the following title: salems tempel; oder beschreibung des herrlichen tempels  salomons, wie auch ...; und dessen structur, eintheilung u. vorhöfe, samt dem heiligen geräht u. dessen  geheimniß­vellen bedeutung; mit behörigen abrissen u. kupffern ausgefertigt von konrad mell (frankfurt;  leipzig,  ).  he also wrote a treatise on solomon as a preacher, der prediger salomo oder die eitele  welt: durch predigten erkl. u. zueeign (leipzig,  ).        halle if it could be hoped that the herr majesty, the king, would make the price lower or  that i could receive some kind of a subsidy for him.     mel did not direct this request to francke personally, despite their direct correspondence  with each other.  instead it came in the middle of his descriptions of the swirl of activities  he was engaged in—activities deemed relevant to the collective’s main program.  after  vouching for his son’s solid preparation in “languages, mathematics and philosophy,”  which were central to francke’s schools, he made a pointed request to the academy  members for help in sending his son to halle.      mel’s correspondence with francke is even more telling.  he wrote to francke in  march of  , for example, to explain that he had been called back to hersfeld to  become the inspector of the churches and rector of the gymnasium there.  in hersfeld, he  lamented, the teaching of “true christianity” had gone into steady decline which had  prevented the teaching of “good sciences” (guter wissenschaften) in the churches and  schools.   mel told francke of his plans to “imitate” the “praiseworthy institutes of  halle” and their “famous method” (beruhmte methode).  he then asked francke if he  would please send him a student with a “good and solid education in latin, greek,  hebrew and mathematics” to help him begin the process of reforming the curriculum of  hersfeld’s gymnasium.    on february  ,  , he wrote to congratulate francke on  the good success of the mission to coromondel, told him of his plans to start a  seminarium missionarium in hersfeld and to send francke several texts he had sent other                                                     the “mission wishes” he refers to here are contained in text he was circulating around the same time that  he sent this report; it was printed the following year: conrad mel, missionarius evangelicus: seu consilia  de conversione ethnicorum, maxime sinensium (hersfeld,  ).  he called his weighing machine a  pantometrum carolinum.    stab/f  ,  /  [march  ,  ] conrad mel to august hermann francke   ibid.       members of leibniz’s academy, including l.c. sturm, for comment.     “i am sending  herein some of my thoughts about a universal character; if only such a thing were to be  used it could further the propagation of truth,” he wrote.  “i have set next to this my  thoughts about the inveniende longibundine locorium in mari, which was born out of  my school work in mathematics…”   he closed the letter with a promise to send one of  the students he was training to teach in francke’s orphanage.     that mel sent francke a copy of his “thoughts” about a universal character, also  a major concern of leibniz’s, is evidenced by the residence of a text in francke’s archive  entitled “conrad mel’s opinion about the project initiated by the royal prussian society  of science (because of a sensible author) and their master, the king of prussia, to develop  a universal character…to speak with all people of the world” (see appendix  )   this  “sensible author” was likely leibniz, whose preoccupation with developing a universal  character that was ideographic or could be used to convey a complex set of rational  sequences in a single, visible and instantly recognizable symbol, has been well  documented.    leibniz shared his interested in developing a universal character with  other practitioners of a conciliatory pansophy, including comenius, whose preoccupation  with developing a pansophic language of light stood at the heart of his own mandate of                                                     ibid. february  ,  .  by this time francke’s organization had successfully sent two missionaries to  the southeast coast of india, known by contemporaries as the coast of coromondel.   ibid.   afst/w xi/­/   d mell(eng) judcivm und entdeckte meynung um sie erlangte königliche  preussische societät der wissenschaften wegen des von einem sinnreichen author; ihrer königlichen  maiester von preussen übergebenen projects vom einem charactere universali ob und weit derselbe  practicabel durch   characteren und deren determinitiones ohne erlernung fremder sprachen mit  allerley volckern der welt zu reden   leibniz’s projekt der characteristica universalis ( ) is an early expression of his interest in this  project; see his von ideen ( ) as well.  there is an extensive secondary literature; for example, jaap  maat’s philosophical languages in the seventeenth century: dalgarno, wilkins, leibniz (dordrecht:  kluwer academic publishers,  ) or paulo rossi, logic and the art of memory: the quest for a  universal language (chicago: chicago university press,  ).      universal reform.  responding to leibniz’s call, mel sent francke a text specifically  written for the members of leibniz’s academy.  by all indications, mel saw francke as  someone who would be interested in receiving such a text—someone aligned with a  conciliatory project embraced by himself and by leibniz.          pietism and philanthropy     after  , we only know of three more letters exchanged between leibniz and  francke, all in  .  while it difficult to know for certain, they indicate that many more  conversations between the two men took place , and in some ways provide the perfect  means of bringing the discussion back to pansophy—and the meaning of philanthropy.   read with the evidence of the important parallels and partnership between their  organizations in mind, these last remaining letters also speak powerfully to the pressing  question of what the word pietism may have meant to both francke and leibniz.  we  literally see them here querying its meaning and defining the boundaries of their alliance  with each other.  francke, writing from halle on january  ,  , started this exchange  with a bold request for leibniz’s help in salvaging the name pietist, which, he notes, had  been tarnished unjustly:  now, your excellency knows for himself, so that a demonstration will not be required,  how ‘pietism’ is nothing other than a name for men who are obliged to respond to  morally unsound men through the study of the literal word and truth of piety, thereby  restoring and increasing credulity…. of course since this name first came into being in  leipzig and the leipzig theologians could give their own certain information about it, i  have attached one of their notices (informat); there around   a commission was  established to investigate the entire thing…something was published… that attested to  the purity of our theological readings but pietism was still publicly declared a pur lautere                                                     according to gerda utermöhlen, leibniz supposedly spent time in halle in  ,   and  ; she  implies that more evidence of meetings and correspondence between the two figures may exist but has not  yet been unearthed.  in  , leibniz reported to jablonski that he stopped in halle “incognito” to pay h.d.  hoffmann a short visit, taking care to remark that he found “his experiments very beautiful.”  in  utermöhlen,  ­  n.  .        calumnie… your excellency will not only be familiar with the holy d. spener’s  theologische bedenken and his edited history of pietism, but also the famous tract by h.  von seckendorf… both of which place the entire affair in a clearer light.      drawing on leibniz’s affinity for spener’s writings and the philosopher’s interest in him  and in halle, his specific request of leibniz followed:   now that your excellency has been here in person and given me the honor of viewing my  institutions for taking care of the poor and raising the youth, and has also spoken with me  about them many, many times, and from this has undertaken a fundamental investigation  of what people like to call pietism, i would like to ask you to please, for the love of truth,  to provide the king and his ministers with the proper picture of the entire saga…     francke’s request was specifically linked to his discovery that two of his former students  were being denied employment in the kingdom of hungary (siebenbürgen or  transylvania) because of their reputation as pietists.  leibniz was in vienna at the time at  the court of karl vi and, as utermöhlen and others have pointed out, francke saw this as  a great opportunity to lean on the emperor to intervene.  but the problem, as he and  leibniz both knew, was a much more complex one about the meaning of “what people  like to call pietism.”      leibniz had taken it upon himself, francke noted, to undertake his own  investigation of pietism.  in leibniz’s response—a clear statement of support for francke  indicating that he had, indeed, asked the austrian emperor to intervene—he defined  pietism as a set of practices with no underlying dogma:  … it appears that people see your innocence but are seized by dilatoria effugia… because  the kaiser is interested in the circumstances in siebenbürgen, i hope he will be able to  right the wrong and that restitution will follow.    thanks for sending me the leipzig response against pietists.  how could one think that  they are members of a new sect when they have no dogmata improbata but instead focus  on getting to know symbols & words (libris symbolicis) and on practicing christianity  (praxin christianam)?                                                       ibid. appendix   ibid.      leibniz then made a very pointed statement about juxtaposing spiritual training with  training in the sciences so that individuals would recognize “outward manifestations of  godly works” and participate in the regenerative cycle of conciliatory love.  just as  pietists juxtaposed the study of holy words with pious practices, “furthering the sciences”  had to be joined with spiritual training:  in my estimation, the most important thing is that one strives to make the education of the  youth better.  and to do this it is to be hoped that the furthering of the sciences will be  combined with promoting the fear of god and that this will shed more light on the way to  a natural recognition of god; through this the manifest religion will be furthered,  strengthened and transmitted as the outward manifestations of godly works awaken the  inner grace of godly love more and more—just like i prove in my theodicaea with great  approval to prominent people in different religious parties….     he closed by mentioning that the austrian emperor was “well disposed towards funding  a society of science” and was seeking his advice in this regard.    in the letter that marks the end of this exchange, francke conveyed his feelings  about a text leibniz had just published in france and that he described in the excerpt  cited above as a conciliatory piece, directed at “different religious parties”—his  theodicée.  francke also echoed leibniz’s sentiments linking the “furthering the fear of  god” with “furthering the sciences”:  …i am of the opinion that furthering the fear of god and furthering the sciences are two  tasks that want to be joined, indeed must be joined, and my few institutions, in which  now   children and scholars and   teachers can be found, show how this can be  done.  god bless your good advice, and that of the emporer’s, for the funding of a society  to honor his holy name and to bring about a unified church.  as for the badge of truth that  you have laid forth in your theodicéée, we rejoiced heartily to receive it.     in aligning himself with leibniz’s goals and the sentiments expressed in the theodicée so  overtly, francke was making a very important statement about the nature of his circle and  self­identity.  the above cited excerpts clearly show how francke’s vision for his                                                     ibid. leibniz also explicitly mentions the term pietism in his theodicée.  see below.   ibid.       institutions, his understanding of himself as a pietist (“nothing other than a name”) and  his appreciation of leibniz’s theodicée as “badge of truth” were not mutually exclusive.   they involved a common set of convictions about how to merge operations of the  intellect with material expressions of faith.      while this is certainly not the place to undertake a thorough analysis of the  theodicée, the most obvious similarity between the metaphysical stance leibniz takes in  this text and spener’s stance (extended by francke) in his theologisches bedenken is  worth restating here.  in a manner reminiscent of leibniz’s earlier emphasis in the  novissima sinica on the chinese people’s ability to “practice” their wisdom—which  amounted to an authentic expression of christian piety—spener had also emphasized the  “proper use of reason, meditation and erudition” for belief, i.e. for conditioning practical  expressions of piety.  he championed the need to partner interior and exterior  manifestations of the divine and saw the formation of charitable institutions as the best  material expression of a rational, pious impulse.  leibniz extended this discussion in the  theodicée.  as material manifestations of a divine or supreme reason, he insisted,  humans have a natural inclination to obey or follow this reason, which means that every  time one physically implemented a fully comprehended rational act, one carried out the  will of god.  and, in carrying out the will of god, one was acting charitably or for the  common good.  while some forms of reason were handed down through the mysteries of  faith and others required effort or exercise; all reason was the essence of perfection, of  love.  and when it dictated an act or expression (the construction of an orphanage  building, a new universal language) the act itself was the physical expression of divine      love, or philanthropy, showing the way to improvement.   the greek word  philanthrōpos, he had explained many years earlier ( ) in the codex iuris gentium, is  affection regulated by divine wisdom.  it is a “universal benevolence,” and benevolence  is “the habit of loving or of willing the good.”   leibniz’s description of the essence of philanthropy as love regulated by divine  wisdom very closely resembles francke’s description of that same love and robert  boyle’s expression of a “seraphic love” in two key texts: the philanthropia dei ( )  and philotheia (the love of god) ( ).   “god’s love is the weight of the soul,”  francke explained in the philotheia, and the degree to which one imbibed this love  determined the forms of knowledge the divine master allowed one to see and to express.   the spirit of god illuminated man’s capacity to grasp or understand things, francke  continued, as the sun illuminated the earth with an unexplainable liebeskraft, or love  force.  in the philanthropie dei, francke also emphasized the power of this force, this  love, which gave humans the power of recognition, of erkenntnis; only through this love  force did man have the ability to recognize virtue, beauty and the fact that he was a being  whose senses were oriented towards the spirit, not the flesh—in short, that the spirit,  through the cultivation of the love force and the power of recognition it provided, could  help one manage, control the physical (body and world).   everything associated with                                                     he also writes in the theodicée about the art of doing geometry “empirically’ as linked to the preceding  juxtaposition of interior and exterior manifestations of piety ( ): ccxiv.    leibniz, codex iuris gentium in patrick riley ed. and transl., leibniz: political writings (cambridge:  cambridge university press,  ); in riley, “novissima,”  .   he published a version of the philanthropia dei in french as well: la philanthropie ou l'amour de  dieu envers les hommes: propose aus jeunes gens, qui êtudient dans les ecoles dependantes de la maison  des orfelins, à la fin d'un examen, pour le mediter soigneusement, & exciter à la pieté,  par auguste  armand francke, professeur en theologie à halle, ... traduit de l' allemand (halle: waysenhaus,  ).   “betrachte, dass diese liebe allerley göttliche kraft, was zum leben und göttlichen wandel dienet, dem  menschen schencket durch die erkentniss des, det ihn berufen hat durch seine herrlichkeit und tugend;  welche göttliche kraft ihn von aller weltlichen lust entfernet, und ihn der göttlichen natur theilhafftig      one’s self, francke wrote—one’s “actual senses (gegenwärtigen sinne), perspectives and  goals, undertakings, words and works, external and internal conditions”—were signifiers  or expressions of the degree of one’s engagement with the divine.   and the divine  provided the wisdom so essential for directing manifold expressions of love; this is a  configuration of philanthropy that closely followed leibniz’s own.  only a year before francke’s organization translated and published his  philanthropie dei into french, he published a translation of robert boyle’s amor  seraphicus, or seraphic love.   here boyle explicitly linked the love of god with an  ability to recognize, to see the beauty of creation clearly.  “the love of god comes from  gazing upon (anschauen) god,” he explained; but “in order to observe and to recognize  god, one must have illuminated eyes.”  although francke believed, like leibniz, in the  mysteries of faith and the need to ask the divine—as barrow did in his preface to  apollonius—for the ability to perceive, he also accepted boyle’s insistence here that one  could also improve one’s vision and propensity to love by gazing on “outwardly beautiful  figures.”  boyle wrote in amor seraphicus that   the observation of an outwardly beautiful figure, when one looks at it often…moves us to  love this figure—the greeks had a saying for this: from the gaze comes love.  in this way,  we will be more inclined to love god when we observe his holy ways correctly and let  these flow into us—the more beautiful and wonderful things we see, the more we see and  discover.     boyle advocated a form of visual training that provided the individual with the  opportunity to acquire divine love through experience; he explained that one could do                                                                                                                                                    machete, dass er nun nicht mehr fleischlich, sondern geistlich gesinnet ist...” francke, philanthropie dei,  ­ .   ibid.,  .   amor seraphicus.  die seraphische liebe, oder einige anreissungen zur liebe gegen gott.  in einem  sende schreiben an einen freund geschrieben von roberto boyle.. (halle: waysenhaus,  ). according  to boyle, “seraphim comes from saraph, which means hot flame or burning fire.”    ibid.  ­ .      more than hope that the divine would bestow the gift of recognition or wisdom upon  oneself.  one actually could take some initiative—by directing one’s gaze to certain  figures, to expressions of god himself—to acquire this wisdom for oneself.   this is  fundamentally different from the expression of philanthropy francke described above;  yet it is precisely these two approaches to the acquisition and expression of knowledge  that tschirnhaus, leibniz and francke were interested in reconciling.  in his medicina  mentis tschirnhaus had advocated training cognition and perception—in mixing  mathematical and experimental methods.  that francke’s press would print boyle’s  “method” for acquiring divine love through observation only a year after he printed his  own discussion of the mysterious love force that grants one the gift of recognition  suggests his willingness to engage with (and potentially reconcile) both approaches to the  problem of knowing and making manifest the divine.     conclusion  instead of assuming that francke and leibniz were engaged in fundamentally  different projects that happened to involve a common interest in protestant mission, i  have endeavored to illustrate some powerful points of convergence between their ways of  approaching the world.  i see them as deeply engaged in a multigenerational conciliatory  project that had finally arrived at pivotal moment.  leibniz and tschirnhaus claimed to  have finally found the right method or “middle way,” francke was applying that method  in his schools, and several conciliatory organizations oriented around protestant mission  were forming.  several conciliatory visions were finally materializing in the form of the  berlin academy and francke’s orphanotropheum.  according to leibniz, pietists                                                     ibid. “no one likes a person who is not somehow striving after his improvement.”      merged the study of divinely inspired symbols with activities that allowed them to  express, physically, what these symbols meant (and how they could be usefully applied in  the world).  this is precisely what members of the berlin academy did as well; they  studied divinely inspired, mathematical symbols (or traces of rational essences) and  applied them to affect change in the physical world (or to better understand the physical)  according to a pre­determined set of calculations.  they strove to produce accord,  agreement between material phenomena and intuition.  francke, a pietist, was not ill­ disposed to the conciliatory method of the berlin academy and academy members— mel, jablonski, l.c. sturm and leibniz—were very fond of the way in which pietists  linked praxis with symbols and words in love.  another member of this academy,  christian wolff, would become part of this milieu and work to extend the conciliatory  mandate that both he and halle pietists embraced.        chapter four:  measuring virtue, character and faith: the mathematical sciences  as paideia for francke and wolff      the eyes of a properly fashioned christian rest constantly upon the uncertain with a kind  of illumination that makes all of his senses blind to this uncertainty.  he sees what is  omnipresent but even more he sees what lies ahead… his understanding is illuminated by  divine rays and he has just as much love in his heart as words of conciliation on his  tongue.     ­joseph hall     the mathematical sciences suit young people well because they prepare the character  (gemüth) and free them from doubt so that they can become virtuous enough to  understand the knowledge of the world.    ­christian wolff quoting plato          when christian wolff became a member of leibniz’s conciliatory academy in  , he was   years old and had been serving as a professor of mathematics in halle  for four years (since  ).  many years later—in his autobiography—wolff would  reflect that he had taken up mathematics because at some point it became very clear to  him that the mathematical sciences held the secret to resolving competing definitions of  truth.  the methods mathematicians used to derive universally applicable theorems, he  was convinced, needed to be adapted for use in other disciplines, like theology.  so, he  applied himself to the rigorous study of the mathematical sciences and his special  “talents” for them soon emerged.  leibniz would ultimately take a personal interest in the  young wolff and was responsible for securing him (through his friend friedrich                                                     from joseph hall, characteres der menschen: oder die entlarvete welt, an ihrer innerlichen  eigenschafft, handlung und betrüglichkeit. worinnen allen ständen der welt die ... der falschheit  abgezogen an dero statt aber ihnen die tugend, thor und schwachheiten in ihrer natürlichen blösse, als in  einem helleuchtenden spiegel (amsterdam,  ):  ; christian wolff,  wie die messkunst den  menschlichen verstand ausnehmend bessere [october. ] in wolff’s gesammlete kleine philosophische  schriften (halle,  ):  . reprinted in chrisian wolff, gesammelte werke, part one: vol.  ­ .       hoffmann) the coveted mathematics professorship in halle.   wolff would spend two  extended periods living, writing and teaching in francke’s city: from   until  ,  when he was forcibly expelled in a still legendary episode (see my introduction) and from   until his death in  .     the first period may have been the most conflict ridden, but it is also the least  understood.  it continues to be characterized by statements such as this one: “in halle  wolff and the pietists never really got along,” which are generally made in passing and  are based on little or no evidence.   according to carl hinrichs’ assessment of the  relationship between wolff and “the pietists,” what really distinguished wolff from  francke (and thomasius) was that he “tried to determine and to unify the relationship  between reason and faith, two areas that were absolutely separate for thomasius and  francke, in a manner reminiscent of the scholasticism of the high middle ages and the  lutheran orthodoxy of the seventeenth century.”   as i have emphasized in previous  chapters, spener and francke’s understanding of the relationship between reason and  faith was also an integrative or conciliatory one; they were not two “absolutely separate”                                                     this is confirmed in a recent biographical sketch of wolff (the first published in english since  ) by  wolfgang drechsler, “christian wolff ( ­ ) a biographical essay” in the european journal of  law and economics   ( ):  ­ .  leibniz’s role in securing wolff the position is also mentioned by  william clark in “the death of metaphysics in enlightenment prussia” in william clark, jan golinski and  simon schaffer eds. the sciences in enlightened europe (chicago: university of chicago press:  ):  .    frederick the great (friedrich ii) invited wolff back to halle when he came into power in  .  only  after he was forced to leave halle in   did wolff acquire a reputation (and international following) as a  philosopher.    i took this statement from william clark’s “death of metaphysics” article in the sciences in  enlightenment europe,  .  while clark’s assessment of the tension between wolff and joachim lange  over the problem of mechanization, dehumanization and fatalism is quite sound, it relies on the same false  dichotomy between wolff and the collective mentality of halle pietists (or “lange and his pietist pals” as  he calls them) that continues to adversely affect our understanding of early eighteenth­century halle.     carl hinrichs, preuβentum und pietismus,  ,  .  hinrichs calls wollf’s expression of spirituality a  “philosophical religion,” which, as we will see, is not a far cry from francke’s understanding of “true  christianity.”  in support of his reading here, hinrichs cites max wundt’s die deutsche schulphilosphie im  zeitalter der aufklärung (tübingen,  ):  .  wundt places halle pietists “in stark opposition to the  antecedent age and its school philosophy,” which is simply a false assessment; quoted by clark,  .      areas for them either.  reason was to be employed in the service of faith and vice versa.   wolff’s metaphysics, published in   as reasonable thoughts about god, the world  and the soul of a person, must be situated within a broader reassessment of halle’s  intellectual culture leading up to its debut—one in which the “lutheran jesuits” of  francke’s institutes had long been endeavoring (through visual training and other forms  of spiritual exercise) to determine or fix the relationship between reason and faith that so  greatly preoccupied wolff.   both wolff and francke had been profoundly impacted by  the conciliatory mandate of tschirnhaus, sturm, leibniz and so many others and the  traces of this influence are apparent in the orientation of wolff’s writings during his first  tenure in halle and the pedagogical orientation of francke’s schools.  this chapter is concerned with the pre­  wolff—the young mathematics  professor who arrived in halle precisely at a moment when some were growing skeptical  of eclectic philosophy’s capacity to actually foster a reconciliation of multiple views.  a  resurgence of pyronnic skepticism was sweeping the city as an increasingly appealing  alternative to eclecticism.   because it posed such a formidable challenge to the eclectic                                                     christian wolff, der vernünfftigen gedancken von gott, der welt und der seele des menschen, auch  allen dingen überhaupt [ st ed.  ] (frankfurt,  ,  ).  the phrase “lutheran jesuits” was used to  describe francke’s community in his own lifetime.  for a recent use of the phrase see ben marschke,  “lutheran jesuits” in covenant quarterly  :  (november  ):  ­ ; hans ahrbeck mentions christian  thomasius’ insinuation that francke’s pädagogium offered a “jesuit education” [in max fleischmann,  christian thomasius ( ):  ] as does sebastian edzardi in der labadismus die quelle des pietismi  ( ) when he refers to francke’s community as a “generalem jesuitarum.”  in hans ahrbeck, “Über die  erziehungs­ und unterrichtsreform a.h. franckes und ihre grundlagen,” in   jahre martin­luther­ universität halle­wittenberg band ii (halle: selbst verlag der martin­luther­universität,  ?):  ­ .  hinrichs relays evidence of jesuit interest in wolffian metaphysics without acknowledging the clearly  discernable (and deliberate) links between the orientation of pietist and jesuit training institutes.  “in der  tat urteilten die jesuiten von wolffs metaphysik,” relays hinrichs, “es sei dieses buch zum verstande der  theologie sehr nützlich, aber nur zu bedauern, dass es in der deutsche sprache geschrieben worden,”  .   martin mulsow has made a case for the increasing importance of pyrrhonic skepticism in halle by the  first decade of the eighteenth century perhaps due to a mounting sense that eclecticism had failed as an  autonomous method of philosophical inquiry—that it had simply produced yet another philosophical sect.   see his “eclecticism or skepticism? a problem of the early enlightenment” journal of the history of ideas  :  (july  ):  ­ .  however, in making his case, mulsow embraces the longstanding  historiographical tendency to view all pietists as skeptical of over­valuing human reason and generally      ethos that had come to characterize halle’s intellectual culture—especially manifest in  the scholarship of christian thomasius and johann franz buddeus—in some ways the  mounting tensions among wolff’s colleagues around his presence and lectures at the  university may only begin to become legible with this in mind.   michael albrecht has  suggested that the increasingly conflict­ridden institutional culture wolff encountered in  halle when he first arrived led him to conduct a critical appraisal of eclecticism and its  aims.  he began to publicly lament the dangers of eclectic posturing—or inauthentic  conciliatory stances tainted by prejudice.  and considering that he was experiencing these  prejudices first hand, especially from his colleague in the theology faculty joachim  lange, it makes sense that he would “appear” as an opponent of eclecticism.  however,  part of what i aim to show here is that despite his caution and criticism, wolff remained  fundamentally committed to authentic expressions of eclecticism, especially conciliatory  ways of knowing.  he believed that the rigorous practice of mixed mathematics “freed  one from the dominance of the imagination,” which he also saw as the singular cause of  the errors of perception that led to prejudice and misconception.   practical mathematics  or mathematical sciences provided the best expression of a form of reconciliation that  earlier practitioners of eclecticism had also heartily embraced.  following in the footsteps                                                                                                                                                    prone to thinking alike.  in a related text, he writes:  “pietisten waren in hohem masse skeptisch gegenüber  allen errungenschaften blosser vernunft, und das projekt einer geschichte des nicht­wissens musste ihnen  unmittelbar einleuchten.” in martin mulsow ed. skepsis, providenz, polyhistorie: jakob friedrich  reimmann ( ­ ) (tübingen: niemeyer,  ):  .      thomasius associated himself with eclecticism in his introductio ad philosophiam aulicam of  ; see  chapter two and kelley, “eclecticism,”  .      see the introduction to his anfangs­gründe aller mathematischen wissenschaften (beginners guide to  the mathematical sciences)[ st ed.  ] (halle,  ). reprinted in christian wolff, gesammelte werke,  part one: vol.  .  “there is no other way to recognize the power of a person’s understanding than  seriously practicing the mathematical sciences, and because one cannot reach an end without steady  practice, this is the most certain means of using reason—in discoveries of things still unknown and to  advance/spread things already known—and of freeing oneself from the dominance of the imagination,  thereby eliminating errors and prejudices.”       of tschirnhaus, leibniz and isaac barrow, christian wolff saw a mathesis universalis as  the key to a form of reconciliation that was simultaneously real (material) and true  (rational).     wolff often wrote about the necessity of applying mathematical reasoning to the  physical sciences in order to acquire erkenntnis—or the form of recognition necessary  for grasping meanings that were universally resident in nature.  “neither nature’s laws of  motion, nor the power of its forces can be recognized (erkannt) without the art of  geometry and arithmetic,” he wrote in his beginner’s guide to mechanics or the art of  movement; “without mathematics, one can do as little philosophizing as someone who  has no feet, or is at the very least lame, can run spryly or walk.”   mathematics was for  wolff a rational or philosophical language that had to be applied to the experimental  study of natural phenomena in order to make this language legible and relevant.  it had to  be strategically combined with knowledge acquired through experience—the two forms  of acquiring knowledge were entirely dependent upon each other.    as a key excerpt from francke’s short and simple lessons (kurz und einfältiger  unterricht) signals quite clearly, wolff was joined in this conviction by the very person  who appears in the story of wolff’s banishment as his ideological opposite.  despite his  (still disputed) role in wolff’s expulsion from halle, francke’s position concerning the  relationship between intuition and experience is markedly similar to wolff’s.  francke                                                     to signal this commitment, he wrote his elementa matheseos universae ( ­ ), an exhaustive  synthesis of all mathematical forms of knowledge; he first produced the shorter, vernacular version of the  elementa (i.e. the anfangsgründe).  elementa matheseos universae reprinted in christian wolff,  gesammelte werke, part two: vol.  .   christian wolff, anfangs­gründe der mechanick oder bewegungskusnt in anfangsgründe aller  mathematischen wissenschaften, anderer theil, welcher die artillerie, fortification, mechanick,  hydrostatick, aerometrie und hydraulick in sich enthält, und zu mehrerem aufnehmen der mathematik so  wohl auf hohen, als niedrigen schulen aufgesetzt worden (halle,  ):  .  reprinted in christian wolff,  gesammelte werke, part one: vol.  .      also understood erkenntnis to be the heart of all wissenschaft.  it comprised the first  pillar of wisdom, he wrote; experience (erfahrung) comprised the other:  all wisdom (klugheit), whether true or false, rests upon two main pillars, namely  knowledge (wissenschaft) or cognition (erkenntnis) and experience (erfahrung); either  pillar can be misused on its own but together they can both be used correctly.  and the  true wisdom is nothing other than the eye in people, through which one sees what serves  the best and protects oneself from damage.     the key to the proper application of cognition and experience was using them both,  simultaneously, through the eye (equivalent to the heart in comenius).  taking the  fundamental importance both francke and wolff attached to the two pillars of  recognition and experience as my starting point, i argue that the mathematical sciences  (and eclecticism more generally) hold the key to bridging the gap that continues to exist  between these two figures and their legacies.  the two separate historiographical  traditions that have been built up around francke and wolff have overlooked both men’s  prolonged engagement with a conciliatory project that sought to refine and extend new,  concrete strategies for merging cognition and experience through visual training.    the first section of this chapter is concerned with the two significant ways in  which wolff endeavored to contribute to this project: ( ) by formalizing proofs for a  projective geometry and ( ) by championing the art of measurement.  in his elementa  matheseos universae, wolff included a section on the elements of perspective (elementa  perspectivae) derived almost entirely from andreas tacquet—whom we met in chapter  one.   he also included a discussion of perspective in his beginner’s guide to all of the                                                     august hermann francke, kurzer und einfältiger unterricht: wie die kinder zur wahren gottseligkeit  und christlichen klugheit anzuführen sind (halle: waysenhaus,  ).   christian wolff, elementa matheseos unviersae ( ­ ) in gesammelte werke part two: vol.  ; idem.  mathematisches lexicon (leipzig,  ).  reprinted in gesammelte werke, part one: vol.  .  according  to kirsti anderson, wolff was the first person in germany to publish a formal proof of a mathematical  theory of perspective; see the geometry of an art: the history of the mathematical theory of perspective      mathematical sciences (anfangs­gründe aller mathematischen wissenschaften), one of  the most important german mathematics textbooks of the eighteenth­century—a text  used in francke’s schools.  his systematic treatment of perspective (or projective  geometry) was one of its first formal presentations in a vernacular german; only the  jesuit mathematician gaspar schott (in cursus mathematicus,  ) and johann  christoph sturm (mathesis juveniles,  / ) had touched on “practical optics” in a  german language textbook before him.  in addition to formalizing the study of  perspective, wolff also became an advocate of the “art of measurement” (meβkunst)  more generally.  of course, the application of precise mathematical proportions to  physical bodies, including the air (aerometrie), was an inherently conciliatory practice.   when one measured something, one performed a conciliatory gesture involving the  senses and the intellect.  the gesture itself was supposed to bring about understanding  and virtue by fostering congruence—namely the reconciliation or calibration of multiple  views.    in the second section of this chapter, i consider specifically how francke linked  visual training to the measurement and training of character, a process he specifically  referred to as gemüthspflege or cultura animi.  francke also saw the mathematical  sciences as an expression of the reconciliation he sought for the individual—who longed  for reunification (versöhnung) with the divine—and as a tool for conditioning virtue.   just as wolff recognized the soul’s power of recognition (erkenntnis), francke also  believed that recognition, like faith, could be cultivated through observation and  meditation—through gazing upon beautiful or perfect forms (in a way reminiscent of                                                                                                                                                    from alberti to monge [sources and studies in the history of mathematics and physical sciences] (new  york: springer,  ):  ­ .      boyle’s assertion in seraphatic love) and taking care of the gemüth.   likely through  his sustained periods of reflection upon ancient texts, francke knew that the ancient  greeks and the first christians had made no distinction between their faith and  philosophy; they saw spiritual exercise, or askesis, as central to their expression of a  christian way of life—or way of being.  in pierre hadot’s formulation, “exercise”  connotes askesis or melete in the ancient greek context, designating “inner activities of  the thought and the will” and was received into christianity in the second century by a  group of writers commonly referred to as the apologists.  “they believed,” hadot writes,  “that that which had been scattered and dispersed throughout greek philosophy had been  synthesized and systematized in christian philosophy.  each greek philosopher had  possessed only a portion of the logos, whereas the christians were in possession of the  logos itself, incarnated in jesus christ.”  he emphasizes that christianity, despite its  “incomparable originality,” still successfully assimilated the “style of life, spiritual  attitude and tonality” of philosophy precisely because philosophy was already “above all  else, a way of being and a style of life.”   for francke too, caring for the self, or for the  soul, required rigorous spiritual exercises that involved the practice of mathematics—the  most basic of these exercises.  i aim to lay the groundwork for this assertion in what  follows.  the lesson plans from francke’s schools that i analyze in part ii will help me  demonstrate the same assertion even more conclusively.                                                       christian wolff most famously discussed the power of the soul to “recognize” in his vernünftige  gedanken von den kräften des menschlichen verstandes und ihrem richtigen gebrauch in der erkenntnis  der wahrheit (‘rational thoughts on the powers of the human understanding and their correct  employment in the cognition of the truth’) [german logic] (halle:  ).  reprinted in gesammelte  werke, part one: vol. one.   see pierre hadot, philosophy as a way of life: spiritual exercises from socrates to foucault [arnold i.  davidson ed., trans. michael chase] (oxford, uk and cambridge, ma: blackwell publishing,  ):  ­ .         congruence through perspective and measurement  in the final volume of his beginner’s guide to the mathematical sciences,  christian wolff provided a “short lesson on arithmetical writings” in which he made  several observations about the most important developments in mathematics since  antiquity.  he carefully wove the contributions of archimedes, andreas tacquet, isaac  barrow and johann christoph sturm into the following narrative:  whatever is missing in euclid about circle, sphere and cylinder calculations, archimedes  resolved with his two books, on spheres & on cylinders and the smaller book, the  dimensions of circles, from which tacquet provides the most useful lessons in his  elementis geometriae—called selected exercises in archimedes’ theorems. this same  archimedes left us behind a few writings in higher geometry, namely a book on spirals,  another on cones and sphaeroids and one on the parabolic quadratur.  all of his works,  next to the first four books sphaericorum theodisii, isaac barrow published with a few  of his own demonstrations. beyond the geometrical writings, barrow still planned to  work on [archimedes’] books de aequiponderanibus & infidentibus humido, but he left  aside the grain of sand calculations….these works of archimedes, up through the books  de insidentibus humido, johann christoph sturm translated into german and published in  nürnberg ( ).     in this single excerpt, wolff linked the geometry of archimedes up with the contributions  of andreas tacquet, isaac barrow and johann christoph sturm in a manner reminiscent  of tschirnhaus’s juxtaposition of these same personalities in the basic guide to the  useful sciences.  tacquet’s geometry, a text that was used in francke’s schools and  championed by tschirnhaus, contained “useful” lessons about how to apply the advanced  principles of spheres, cylinders and the dimensions of circles to the real world, wolff  explained.  tacquet (following archimedes) made mathematics useful and entirely  necessary for the study of mechanical phenomena.  barrow had extended almost all of  archimedes’ works and published them “with a few of his own demonstrations.”   j.c.                                                     christian wolff, kurtzer unterricht von den arithmetischen schriften in anfangs­gründe aller  mathematischen wissenschaften.  reprinted in gesammelte werke, part one: vol.  .   in a recent dissertation entitled, kant on the reality of mathematical definitions (ucla,  ),  katherine dunlop discusses the significance of isaac barrow’s emphasis on “sensible representation” for      sturm also contributed a translation of the “grain of sand calculations.”  throughout this  text, wolff consistently pointed to archimedes, barrow, sturm, tacquet and tschirnhaus  as contributing to the superior or ideal expression of the mathematical sciences as they  should be understood by others.    in an early passage from his autobiography, wolff recounted the various currents  and texts that determined his own intellectual trajectory.  not surprisingly, barrow,  sturm, tacquet and tschirnhaus figure prominently in the narrative he offered.  first he  provided the reader with an explanation as to how he became interested in mechanisms  for determining truth mathematically from a variety of competing viewpoints:    because i lived under the catholics [in breslau] and, already in my earliest childhood,  understood there to be animosity between catholics and lutherans, i noticed that each  one always claimed that they were right; i wondered if it might be possible to show the  truth in theology so clearly that it would allowed no contradiction.  when i heard that  mathematicians proved their things so certainly that everyone had to recognize them as  true, i was motivated to learn the mathematical method and to work hard to bring  theology to an incontrovertible state of knowing.           reflecting, admittedly very late in life, on what inspired him to take up the study of  mathematics, wolff pointed to animosity grounded in competing definitions of truth.  if it  were possible to apply the methods mathematicians used to illustrate a single, universal  truth in theology, animosities and disputes could be mediated.  it was then, wolff  explained, that he set out to learn which of these methods was superior.  he began to  study tacquet’s elemente euclidis, “because herr von tschirnhaus recommended it in  his lessons in mathematics and physics (the gründliche anleitung);” he also “took the                                                                                                                                                    wolff’s mathematical method, which would subsequently impact immanuel kant.  barrow argued that the  knowledge of axioms or definitions in geometry fundamentally relied on the senses.  he claimed that  “euclid’s postulates asserted the possibility of certain motions, which can only be known through the  senses,” and raised the issue of the “affections of magnitude obvious to any sense”—in other words, the  issue of congruence, or how magnitudes can be compared; dunlop (unpublished dissertation),  .     christian wolff, eigene lebensbeschreibung,  ­ . reprinted in gesammelte werke, part one: vol.  .      opportunity to demonstrate certain propositions from herr sturm’s corollaries.”  from  tacquet and sturm, wolff wrote, he received “the first light of the method of  demonstrating truth.”     wolff remembered while he was in jena that he slowly began to understand  tschirnhaus’s medicina mentis better than he had initially, when he “knew nothing of  mathesis” and still had not learned how “to study physics correctly.”   but what started  to bother him about tschirnhaus’s text, he explained, was that the nobleman had not  provided a clear enough idea of “das concipere,” nor did he show clearly enough how  “real definitions” were supposed to be discovered.  wolff explained that at the time:  i was not only familiar with the definition of reales that sturm gives in his mathesi  enucleata, but i also knew the one that barrow had given in his lectionibus  mathematicus, and i was also accustomed to how one abstracts rules like this in  mathematics.  it did not take much to appreciate that the rules that tschirnhaus gave for  the discovery of the reales definitiones almost allow themselves to be abstracted from the  definition of a circuli genetica.  i found it especially difficult to show how the elements  of the definitions that tschirnhaus provided could be found.  but after thinking about it, i  developed my own way of finding the definitiones reales—partly a priori and partly  posteriori—which i have described in my logick…..         in one of his best known texts, often referred to simply as the german logic (deutsche  logick), wolff presented what he called his own method for determining real  definitions.   here wolff offered what must be understood as a corrective to  tschirnhaus’s plan to reconcile the study of physica and mathesis in the medicina mentis.      just as a mathematical proof starts with definitions, upon which theorems or rules  can be based, tschirnhaus and wolff were endeavoring to provide definitions for reales  that would duly allow for rules governing natural phenomena to be generated—rules that  were incapable of being disputed.  as we saw in chapter one, tschirnhaus had defined                                                     ibid.,  .   ibid.   ibid.,  .   christian wolff, deutsche logick (halle:  ). reprinted in gesammelte werke, part one: vol. one.      reales as “essences, which, unlike rationales, can be grasped in multiple ways rather  than in singular and unchangeable ways…. for example, all that we grasp as material,  unclean or non­transparent.”    but in wolff’s opinion, tschirnhaus had not taken his  study of reales far enough.  pressed by wolff on this issue, tschirnhaus conceded that  the medicina had been much more oriented around rationales and phantasias—the other  two essences tschirnhaus identified; he said he had planned another volume to address  this problem, but it was never forthcoming.   wolff claimed to be offering, then, a way  of showing how the definitions reales themselves could be found.  for example, in his  logick, wolff explained that definitions are either nominal (involving the enumeration of  some properties) or real (involving the manner in which a thing is possible).  actually  pointing out the internal structure of a clock constitutes a real definition, whereas simply  saying a clock is “a machine which shows the hours,” is nominal.  in the same way,  wolff wrote, “if i say that reason is the faculty of perceiving the connection of general  truths, i give a nominal definition of reason; but if i show how such perception is  possible by the powers of the soul, the definition becomes real.”   more than simply  observing the relationship between the soul and sensation for certain signs (in order to  know when the holy spirit was materially present), wolff wanted to show how the  powers of the soul make perception possible.    part of reconciling intuition with sensation, or mathesis with physica, involved  acknowledging that real and nominal definitions of an object (such as a clock) or a                                                     tschirnhaus, medicina mentis ( ):  .   as we saw in chatpter one, tschirnhaus frequently pointed to his interest in promoting the  understanding of complex phenomena in individuals, who did not necessarily need to be provided with real  definitions—like the way we use our hands without understanding the intricacies of their inner structure or  composition.   christian wolff, logic, or rational thoughts on the powers of the human understanding: with their use  and application in the knowledge and search of truth (london,  ).  reprinted in gesammelte werke,  part three: vol.  :  ­ .      concept (like reason) are both equally valid and necessary expression of that same single  object or concept.  in effect, the act of providing real and nominal definitions for all  objects and concepts can be considered a fundamentally conciliatory or eclectic practice.   in the german metaphysics ( ), wolff explained that he was trying to offer—in the  face of a dangerous brand of sectarianism that some were endeavoring to disguise as  eclecticism—the “right method for a philosophia eclectici.” he wrote:  one can see again that i do not advocate anything sectarian (dass ich nichts sectirisches  verlange)…but rather that i am searching for ways to hold onto all that is good, and i will  find it wherever it is… this, i think, is the right method for an eclectic philosophy, or a  way of knowing the world (welt­weisen) that does not belong to any flag but rather tests  everything and retains the things that can be joined together with reason, or that let  themselves be brought together in a system of harmony.     wolff’s brand of eclecticism sought to generate real and nominal definitions by “testing  everything” and, ultimately, the joining up of certain things (material objects) with  intuited ones.   it was about creating new strategies for demonstrating how the process of  reconciliation worked via the material medium of the soul, which somehow contained the  power to make natural objects legible.  two strategies in particular wolff saw as  particularly promising in this regard: projective geometry (especially the formalization of  proofs for the science of perspective) and measurement.   in another excerpt from his short lesson on famous arithmetical writings, wolff  explained that several others, especially johannes kepler, had recognized measurement                                                     christian wolff, der vernünfftigen gedancken von gott, der welt und der seele des menschen, auch  allen dingen überhaupt [ st ed.  ]:  . reprinted in gesammelte werke, part one: vol.  .   in his ambitious attempt to write the history of eclecticism from antiquity to the present, michael  albrecht argues that it was not important for wolff.  he titles one of his chapters “wolff hat eklektik nicht  nötig,” and insists that wolff both never openly identified himself as a practitioner and came out against it  in his response to j. f. buddeus’s bedencken über die wolffianische philosophie.  wolff’s statement (in the  bedenken) that eclectics tended to choose poorly despite all their talk of the power of choice should not be  construed as evidence that eclecticism was not important for wolff.  he was deeply concerned with its  ability (like all methodologies) to become corroded or misused.  see michael albrecht, eklektik ( ):  ­ ; johann franz buddeus, bedencken über die wolffianische philosophie [frankfurt,  ]  (hildesheim: olms,  ):  .        as the logical (and perfectible) extension of archimedes’ contributions to the  mathematical sciences:  in his new stereometria doliorum vinariorum (linz,  ), johannes kepler made a  start at extending and improving archimedes teachings... he published his work in  german... the title of the book is extracts from archimedes’ ancient art of  measurement… but because he didn’t discern more ways of measuring bodies than could  be useful to the art of seeing (visirkunst), bonaventura cavalerius, of the jesuit order of  s. hironymi, was encouraged to still go further and to investigate the contents of more  bodies than archimedes and kepler had done; he made this known in the preface of his  geometria indivisibilus continuorum noua ratione promata bononiae ( )     while kepler may not have fully realized the implications of his derivative art of  measurement for the art of seeing (in wolff’s opinion), others had.  wolff goes on to list  the work of the jesuit stephen angli, evangelista torricelli of florence, who “also took it  upon himself to elaborate and extend the discoveries of archimedes” and the jesuit  paulus guldinus—whose work “des chales presents very clearly in his mundus  mathematicus.”   he also mentioned isaac barrow as someone who understood the  power of archimedes’ ancient art of measurement and merged the fundamental  principles from his lessons in optics (london  ) with his lessons in geometry.    now that leibniz has discovered his differential­calculus, “everything can be shown  much more easily,” wolff explained.   leibniz’s differential calculus, the esoteric  properties of curves, archimedes’ art of measuring physical bodies and the art of seeing  were woven together by wolff in such a way as to constitute an improved method for  conditioning conciliatory ways of seeing.     kirsten dunlop has explained that in barrow’s estimation, “congruence is  superior to other affections in two ways: it is more easily grasped by the intellect and                                                     christian wolff, “kurtzer unterricht von den arithmetischen schriften” in anfangs­gründe aller  mathematischen wissenschaften,  .  reprinted in gesammelte schriften, part one: vol.  .   ibid.,  ­ .  tschirnhaus also recommended des chales’ mundus mathematicus to francke in the  gründliche anleitung.      ibid.      more evident to the senses.”  the best way to determine the congruence of two  magnitudes, he insisted, was to “compare conceptions of their locations in space.”     while making this comparison, the senses “grasped” the materiality of congruence at the  same time as the mind made judgments about its quality.  barrow also emphasized, like  j.c. sturm, the importance of judgment—a province of the mind affected by the lower  faculties of the soul—to perform congruence, noting that “geometricians do not perform  their congruity by the hand but by the thought, not by the sense of the eye but by the  judgment of the mind.  they suppose an accurate and perfect congruence… and from  the supposition, draw just and logical consequences.”   barrow stressed that “every sort  of magnitude” is “involved in some sort of matter” and that, therefore, every magnitude  could be made “visible or palpable; so that what the mind demands to be understood, the  hand can execute in part, and the praxis can in some measure emulate the theory.”     in his own mathematical lexicon, wolff emphasized that the science of  magnitude, or stereometrie, was a “part of practical geometry, which teaches how one  should calculate the contents of material bodies.”   he cited the géométrie pratique of  mallet and his own elementis geometriae as examples of texts that presented and  extended the findings of euclid and archimedes—especially his books de sphaera and  cylindro.   in his lessons on famous arithmetical writings, he also cited specifically the  advancements in the science of “field measuring” or surveying that had been described                                                     dunlop,  ­ .     ibid.   in isaac barrow, optical lectures (lectiones xviii). h.c. fay transl., a.g. bennett and d.f. edgar eds.   (london,  ):  ­    christian wolff, mathematisches lexicon (leipzig,  ):  .  reprinted in gesammelte werke, part  one: vol.  .   alain manesson mallet was a french cartographer and military engineer who wrote a number of treatises  on fortification and surveying.  his géométrie pratique was published in  .  wolff’s elementis  geometriae is contained within his elementa matheseos universae ( ­ ).      specifically by de la hire and ozenam (in paris) and henry wilson (in london).   yet  the combination of theory and praxis manifest throughout wolff’s work in this period  must also be understood in the sense that barrow describes it here.  producing  congruence through visually (or materially) palpable magnitudes was a moral imperative,  rooted as it was in solid or sound judgments of quality.  i also think wolff’s interest in  measurement (and also tschirnhaus and francke’s own interest in teaching young  children how to measure fields) must be linked to barrow’s contention that “congruence  is more easily grasped by the intellect and more evident to the senses.”   from this  contention could easily follow the idea that children could be taught how to measure or to  recognize congruence at an early age.  by conditioning a child’s abilities to recognize  congruence and to apply this skill to other areas of their lives, competing viewpoints  could be more easily reconciled with one another.  congruent magnitudes, including  universal truths, could actually be generated. measuring fields was the perfect expression  of conciliatory visual exercise.  it required the intellect and the senses to work  collaboratively to form judgments.   long before wolff and francke began advocating that children should be taught  to measure fields and physical bodies,  plato added “an entirely new kind of  mathematical science” to the mathematical lessons of his academy, which had been  mainly oriented around arithmetic, geometry, astronomy and music (or the quadrivium).    in plato’s academy, the science of measurement became an integrated into a set of                                                     christian wolff, “kurtzer unterricht von den arithmetischen schriften” in anfangs­gründe aller  mathematischen wissenschaften.  reprinted in gesammelte werke, part one: vol.  ; de la hire, l’ecole  des arpenteurs oder die feldmesser schule   vols. (paris,  ) and jacques ozanam edirte methode facile  pour arpenteur, ou mesurer toutes fortes de superficies & pour toiser exactement (paris,  ).   see chapter one for evidence of francke’s pädagogium pupils measuring fields.   werner jäger, paideia: die formung des griechischen menschen. vol.   (berlin: walter de gruyter &  co.,  ):  .      mathematical practices that were, in effect, spiritual exercises intended to improve the  self.  in the republic, socrates argues that even though geometers were concerned with  “doing things,” their actions always involved acquiring new knowledge of magnitudes;  practical geometry, then, could help orient the soul towards truth and produce  philosophical thought.    measurement, a form of practical geometry, came to be seen as  one of the many technologies of paideia—or the formation of self.   jäger’s still  authoritative study of the subject explains that the term paideia connotes a life­long  process of spiritual exercise in which the individual is empowered to realize his essential  qualities and destiny.  the individual is invited to participate in the formulation of  himself, which involves careful reflection on the inherent gifts, predilections and  tendencies of his “interior culture.”   measurement, as a mathematical way of knowing,  was seen as a way of purifying the mind of sensible impressions—in pursuit of a higher  ethical obligation or aim.   it helped one cultivate the soul, which was (for plato) “more  important than ten thousand eyes.”   and yet measurement relied on the eyes.  while it certainly depended upon the  axioms of euclid and archimedes, considered universally sustainable and true, it  simultaneously depended upon some kind of normalization of sensation.  the science of                                                      ibid.     for the relationship between paideia and individuation in jungian psychology see luigi zoja,  “individuation and paideia” in the journal of analytical psychology   ( ):  ­ .  scholars  interested in the origins of the discipline of psychology have also cited wolff’s interest in the cultivation of  the soul as fundamental.  by the end of the  s (beyond the parameters of my study), wolff was  distinguishing between a “rational psychology” (or the “science of what was possible by the human soul”)  and an “empirical psychology” (or the “science that identified psychological principles with the help of  experiences regarding what actually happened in the human soul”): in thomas teo, “local  institutionalization, discontinuity, and german textbooks of psychology,  ­ ,” in the journal of  the history of the behavioral sciences  :  (spring  ):  .  christian wolff, psychologia empirica  [ ], reprinted in gesammelte werke, part two: vol.   and idem, psychologia rationalis [ ] in  gesammelte werke, part two: vol.  .    hadot, what is ancient philosophy?  .   jäger, vol.  ,  .      perspective held a great deal of potential in that, as a form of measurement, it could  calibrate or normalize sensory impressions alongside those forms of recognition  contained in the soul; however, in wolff’s estimation, perspective had been neglected— its potential unrealized.  he indicated in his short lesson on optical writings (contained  within the arithmetical writings text) that andreas tacquet’s optica, which was to be  found in his opera mathematica, was “the only text” currently available that actually led  one through the rules of perspective.   several other individuals, including johannes  zahn and athanasius kircher, had dealt with practical optics, he explained, but they had  not offered sufficient proofs for the study of perspective.   this field, wolff explained,  was best treated by andreae alberti, girard desargues and abraham bosse, the jesuit  johann christoph rembold, bernard lamy and jean­françois nicéron.   he was also  especially interested an essay on perspective by wilhelm jakob gravesand, a professor  of mathematics from leiden, because ’s gravesand, like tacquet, “demonstrated  everything,” he said.   this was the only way to establish “rules” that the science of  perspective needed.                                                      christian wolff, “kurtzer unterricht von den arithmetischen schriften” in anfangs­gründe aller  mathematischen wissenschaften,  .  reprinted in gesammelte werke, part one: vol.  .  “andreas  tacquet hat in seiner optica, welche unter seinen operibus mathematicis zufinden ist, dasjenige gegeben,  woraus sich die regeln der perspectiv herleiten lassen, welche er zugleich mit durchnimt: in seiner  catoptrica aber die egenschaften der platen, hohlen und erhabenen spiegel erwiesen.”     johannes zahn, oculo artificiali teledioptrico (nürnberg,  ); “dieses buch ist denen zu  recommendiren, welche sich auf praxin legen,” wolff noted in ibid.  athanasius kircher, ars magna lucis  & umbrae (rome,  ).   christian wolff, “kurtzer unterricht von den arithmetischen schriften” in anfangs­gründe aller  mathematischen wissenschaften,  .  reprinted in gesammelte werke, part one: vol.  .  “andreae  alberti zwey bücher von der perspectiv (nürnberg,  ) sind allen leibhabern dieser kunst sehr zuloben,  und nicht weniger des desargues’ maniere universelle pour pratiquer la perspective, welche anfangs von  abraham bosse heraus gegeben... welches letztere für das hauptbuch in der perspectiv von verständigen  gehalten wird” (amsterdam,  ).  johann christoph rembold, perspective practique (paris,  ).  he  also recommended bernard lamy, perspective (paris,  ), jean­françois nicéron, thaumaturgum  opticum (paris,  ) and idem, perspective curieuse (paris,  ).      w. j. s’gravesande ( ­ ) also eventually came out with an elementa matheseos universalis  (leiden,  ); esaai de perspective (haag,  ).      in a recent study, stuart clark discusses seventeenth­century attempts to remedy  the inadequacy of the “resemblance model” of seeing inherited from medieval  perspectivists.   he explains that rené descartes recognized a “lack of correspondence  with things” in the science of perspective, not a “rational presentation” of them—which  had been the original goal.  the renaissance innovation of perspective, clark argues, was  based on the principle of resemblance, or the idea “of the world being essentially what it  appeared to be in human consciousness.”   over time, the model became incapable of  dealing with “the vastly multiplied instances of visual experiences where appearance and  reality bore little or no resemblance to each other;” nor, in clark’s estimation, could it  survive “the rebirth of a skeptical philosophy…that denied the possibility of establishing  cognitive resemblance altogether.”   despite the capacity of perspective to stabilize the  relationship between objects and their images, there were still so many mismatches that  the science itself seemed to hold little promise.  for descartes, the science of  anamorphosis was more appealing because it had the capacity to exaggerate and expose  the deceptions of perspective; clark writes that anamorphosis reinforced descartes’ view  that “there was no place for the principle of resemblance in visual cognition.”   in other  words, at the time wolff set out to create proofs for the science of perspective in the first  decade of the eighteenth century, it had long been the object of derision and skepticism.                                                        stuart clark, vanities of the eye,  .  following closely the work of martin kemp, clark explains that  “the geometry that informed perspectival representation was thought to be inherent both in the objective  world being depicted and also in the natural processes of human vision.  to look this way at the world was  therefore to capture (‘reflect’) in true reality and ‘mirroring’ was indeed the ubiquitous metaphor applied to  it.”  see also martin kemp, the science of art: optical themes in western art from brunelleschi to seurat  (new haven,  ):   and idem. “perspective and meaning: illusion, allusion and collusion,” in a.  harrison ed., philosophy and the visual arts: seeing and abstracting (dordrecht,  ):  ­ .   stuart clark, vanities of the eye,  .   ibid.  .      in my view, wolff wanted to breathe new life into the science of perspective  because of his confidence in geometry—especially the conviction held by late medieval  perspectivists like alberti that universal geometrical laws were resident in both the  material world and its representation.  all natural objects were magnitudes and, as john  wallis and isaac barrow had argued, contained within themselves geometrical principles  of motion that could be extrapolated, studied and measured to determine or affect  congruence.   “perspective is the science of drawing the figure or likeness of some  (material) thing as it appears in a certain length and height in the eye on a transparent  board, which is placed perpendicular to the horizontal space between the eye and the  object,” wolff explained.  his expression of the science of perspective amounted to a  standardization of the principle of resemblance, or agreement between object and image,  and marked simply another way of thinking about the reconciliation of cognition and  sensation that he was interested in promoting.   wolff’s discussion of geometry in his  mathematical lexicon also emphasized its capacity, as a science of measuring “the space  taken up by corporeal things,” to “sharpen the understanding, … to condition humans to  see things more deeply” and to “consider things more deliberately.”  he added that “in  the time of plato and the other philosophers no one was allowed to study who had not  learned geometry.  and if one would follow this praiseworthy example today, geometry  would acquire a much higher status in all sciences.”                                                       i have not done justice to wolff’s interest in the geometrical physics or mechanics of john wallis, which  is closely related to barrow’s project.  wallis, who had also written a mathesis universalis (oxford,  ),  is cited throughout wolff’s mathematische lexicon and anfangs­gründe aller mathematischen  wissenschaften.   christian wolff, mathematisches lexicon (leipzig,  ):  .  reprinted in gesammelte werke, part  one: vol.  .      according to kristi andersen, most of the proofs wolff offered in his  introduction to perspective were derived directly from tacquet; yet the synthesis he  offered was only preceded by gaspar schott and sturm’s mathesis juveniles (used in  francke’s schools, see chapter two) in a vernacular german textbook.   for wolff, as for  j. c. sturm, the key to the proper assimilation of expressions of particular things and their  signifiers lay in the soul’s ability to recognize these things through feelings or sensations  and rationally intuited signs.   a person’s soul was where divine “likenesses” were  developed in which god revealed his will—facilitating understanding and, in the soul’s  higher faculties, the cultivation of reason.  seele or soul was often used in combination  with the word gemüth in the german context, a term connoting the character or the inner  essence of a person that presented itself to the eye through certain traits or behaviors.   one’s essence or character was determined by the soul and vice versa, meaning that  improving the soul’s ability to understand, to judge or to recognize magnitudes was  inextricably linked to improving one’s self.  wolff insisted that the art of measurement  helped the essence of an individual become fully realized because it taught the gemüth  how to apply the knowledge of the world (weltweisheit).  in an essay he called how the  art of measurement can dramatically improve human understanding, he wrote that  measurement gave the gemüth an unexpected yet helpful tool (unverhoffte hilfsmittel) for  promoting learnedness and for applying this learnedness to the improvement of the  world.   wolff advised that those who doubted him should read philipp melanchthon’s                                                     see christian wolff’s vom dem nutzen und der lehrart, in der erfahrenden lehre von der seele (or  seelenwissenschaft) (marburg,  ) in gesammelte kleine philosophische schriften (halle,  ):  ­ .  reprinted in gesammelte werke, part one: vol.  ­ .   christian wolff, wie die messkunst den menschlichen verstand ausnehmend bessere [october. ] in  gesammelte kleine philosophische schriften (halle,  ),  .  reprinted in gesammelte werke, part  one: vol.  ­ .      foreword to johann vogelius’s introduction to geometry.  wolff understood that the  legendary protestant reformer melanchthon was known for his religious doctrine of  moderation and universal brotherhood; he too saw potential in the conciliatory exercises  that practical geometry offered mankind.     when one measured something, one was forced to rely, at the same time, on  “expressions of particular things” that are recognized through feelings (wolff’s definition  of experience), explanations that express “the manner in which something is made  possible” (reales definitiones) and signs “from which something can be recognized”  (nominal definitiones).  the experience oriented applications of mathematics he offered  in the beginner’s guide relied explicitly on wolff’s interest in not only creating rational  explanations (erklärungen) comprised of both rational and nominal definitions, but in  creating a more systematic method for stabilizing the relationship between these  explanations (real and nominal) and experience (erfahrung).   like francke, he believed  in the power of joining together the pillars of wisdom.  forms of knowledge, including  physics, which rested upon the foundation of measurement were intrinsically more sound,  in wolff’s view, because they reconciled rational explanation with experience.  “i am not  surprised at all,” he wrote, “by robert boyle’s acknowledgement that his mechanical  pursuits have shown him the enormous utility of the art of measurement in deciphering  nature’s laws.”    boyle stated that he wished he had spent more time and energy                                                     ibid. he called melanchthon “a man who is known for his fine mathematical knowledge, but also for his  beautiful philosophical and theological knowledge and who deserves to be called the communal teacher of  all of germany.”  r. j. w. evans describes melanchthon as a conciliatory figure and “creator of a natural  philosophy which has much in common with the great medieval syntheses.” see r.j.w. evans, rudolf ii  and his world: a study in intellectual history  ­  (oxford: at the clarendon press,  ):  .   christian wolff, der anfangs­gründe aller mathematischen wissenschaften ( ): preface.     christian wolff, wie die messkunst... (october,  ) in gesammelte kleine philosophische schriften  (halle,  ):  .      learning geometry and the arts of calculation.   and while wolff claimed not to fault  boyle for admitting that measurement was essential for the experimental studies of  natural phenomena he and the members of the royal society had undertaken, he used it  as more evidence in support of his central claim in the text that “one can only approach  the science of nature more certainly and accurately, thereby achieving mastery over  creation, if one uses messkunst in the naturlehre.”   measurement offered a kind of  “certainty and accuracy” to ways of knowing that began in the soul or in the world,  thereby perfecting cognition and perception simultaneously.  wolff was convinced that if  people could be introduced to the art of measurement before any of the other  mathematical sciences, they would be able to advance more quickly, easily and properly  through these exercises for perfecting, or realizing, themselves.   measuring fields was a  way of sharpening children’s intuitive and perceptive abilities to recognize congruence; it  would also prepare them to better grasp the demonstrations so central to his expression of  the mathematical sciences.    “to demonstrate everything” is exactly what wolff set out to accomplish in his  beginners guide to the mathematical sciences, which, as i have mentioned, was a text  used in francke’s pädagogium.  he divided his guide into four key volumes, which  would lead the practitioner down the path to the proper assimilation of knowledge  derived from mathematical exercise.  newcomers to the study of mathematics needed to  have it presented to them in such a way that they would “glimpse, without noticing it, a  picture of the right order of mathematics in their understanding and acquire a taste for it,”                                                     this famous lament of boyle’s is discussed by steven shapin, “robert boyle and mathematics: reality,  representation, and experimental practice,” science in context  ,   ( ):  ­ .   christian wolff, wie die messkunst... (october,  ) in gesammelte kleine philosophische schriften  (halle,  ):  .  reprinted in gesammelte werke, part one: vol.  ­ .   ibid.,  .      he explained in the preface; his beginner’s guide, like tschirnhaus’s (only much more  systematic) placed things in their proper order so as to awaken interest.   part one  provided a basic introduction to the art of calculating and the rudiments of geometry and  trigonometry, but ended with a section on architecture—including a series of exercises  for applying the theoretical principles discussed in the previous sections.   part two was  devoted to discussions of the art of fortification, mechanics, hydrostatics, aerometrie and  hydraulics—all “physical” sciences.  part three he devoted to the science of optics,  catoptrics, dioptrics, perspective, spherical trigonometry, astronomy, chronology,  geography and gnomonics (the art of sundials).  and part iv reverted back to a purely  theoretical discussion of algebra or differential calculus derived from leibniz (to  “further barrow’s project”—as we have seen).  throughout the beginner’s guide, wolff  offered a series of very carefully constructed demonstrations that were essentially  exercises for training both the feelings of “expressions of particular things” alongside the  rational soul’s capacity to recognize the truths resident in the explanations he provided.    cultura animi, paideia and francke’s pedagogy    when historians talk about the prevailing pedagogical strategies applied in  precisely the period in which francke and wolff were teaching in halle, they often use  the term “habituation” to describe the process of implanting habits in children as a means  of overcoming the unpredictability of the passions.  john locke’s thoughts concerning  education famously (and influentially) characterized the child as a tabula rasa who  needed to be instilled (“by little and almost insensible impressions”) with good habits so                                                     christian wolff, der anfangs­gründe aller mathematischen wissenschaften [ st ed.  ] (halle,  ): preface.  reprinted in gesammelte werke, part one: vol.  .        it could become better able to overcome dangerous desires.   in his astute examination of  the physiology of reading in seventeenth­century england, adrian johns argues that the  very act of reading was contingent upon “a habituated passion,” which was universally  regarded as “the best hope an individual had of countering immoral, unhealthy, excessive  or erroneous passions.”    generations of men and women—in the british context here— were told again and again that if the habituation process was initiated early enough, it  would be possible to initiate an internal “civility of the mind.”  hundreds of manuals  spelling out precisely how this process worked and should be initiated were circulated,  including parenting manuals and guides promising to teach readers how to read correctly,  or virtuously.    like his contemporaries in england, francke was very interested in how reading  and other visual exercises could be conditioned so as to produce desired responses in  people.  as professor of greek and oriental languages and, later, a professor theology,  he was an expert in exegesis—the science of offering nuanced readings or commentaries  on texts.  he was known among his contemporaries for his attempts to breathe new life  into the art of exegesis in the collegio paraenetico he established for students of  theology at the university of halle.    one of his most widely read and circulated tracts                                                     several translations of locke’s treatises found their way into library of francke’s foundation and seem  to suggest francke was familiar with them.  these include herrn johann locks unterricht von erziehung  der kinder: aus dem englischen; nebst herrn von fenelon ertz­bischoffs von cammerich gedancken von  erziehung der töchter aus dem frantzösischen übersetzet (leipzig,  ) and a french version of locke’s  most famous thoughts concerning education entitled: de l´education des enfans, traduit de l´anglois  de mr. locke (amsterdam,  ).   adrian johns, the nature of the book: print and knowledge in the making (chicago: university of  chicago press,  ):   ­ .   see his lectiones paraeneticae oder Öffentliche ansprachen an die stuidosos theologiae auf der  universität zu halle in dem so genannten collegio parenetico, in welchen dieselben zur gründlichen  hertzens­bekehrung und zum christlichen und exemplarischen wandel, auch zu einer ordentlichen und  weislichen art zu studieren angewiesen, erwecket, ermahnet und aufgemuntert sind (halle: waysenhaus,  ­ ).      was about how to read the bible in order to experience real or true edification.   but  instead of only encouraging his readers to habituate their passions so as to fully  comprehend the teachings of the bible, thereby becoming better christians, he also  wanted them to see the act of reading itself as an opportunity to stir the passions  productively—to fully utilize and draw sustenance from the emotions of the soul.   reading was, in francke’s view, a spiritual exercise that required intense concentration  and an opening of the self to the didactic or self­forming potential of the text at hand.   francke explained that before one even opened the physical book, one was to spend a  considerable amount of time and energy praying or “in rapt contemplation” that god  would send his holy spirit “to open [his] eyes to see the wonder in god’s law.”   the  reader allowed him or herself to become fully overcome with “prayers and sighs”  directed toward praising and thanking god, and then, when it was over, let things  “settle.”  francke liked to remind his theology students that the art of prayer was  something that required constant practice and needed to be done in conjunction with  reading.  he urged them not to spend the whole day studying but to “take a couple of  hours every day and to use them to come into a closer communion with god by turning to  prayer and trying to restore the poor heart to its proper strength….it well often takes more  than a half hour,” he explained, “before one can collect his gemüth properly.”   francke understood his techniques to be fundamentally different from those  employed by enthusiasts. schwärmer, as they were called in german, may have relied  upon the stirring up of passions in a manner that appeared, on the surface, very similar to                                                     august hermann francke, einfältiger unterricht, wie man die h. schrifft zu seiner wahren erbauung  lesen solle: für diejenigen, welche begierig sind, ihr gantzes christenthum auff das theure wort gottes zu  gründen, entworffen (halle,  ).   august hermann francke, lectiones paraeneticae ( ­ ):  ­ .      ibid.      what francke urged members of his own community to engage in; but enthusiasts did not  properly manage their passions so as to allow them to see properly.  according to henry  more and meric casaubon, those affected by “enthusiasm” suffered from an excess of  “ecstatical passion” which reinforced “illusions of the imagination.”  thus, their claims  of divination posed dangerous and unpredictable threats to the social order.  although  francke’s critics may have been quick to label the members of his community  schwärmer, he certainly never saw himself as one.  his reading and teaching methods  must be understood as a corrective to the dangers of enthusiasm     after the emotions of the soul had been stirred, the heart was to be held very still  so that a moment of enlightenment could occur.  “as the sun is to be seen in still water  and strongly warms everything that cannot be seen in the water around it,” francke  explained, “you will become illuminated;” you will “see god’s grace and wonder so that  your heart will become enflamed, enlightened, rapt and happy.”   the very act of  reading the bible, for francke, required one to inflame the passions so as to properly see  and experience the grace of god. then one was in a position to comprehend and  assimilate his teachings for a general improvement of himself and, subsequently, the  world.  a critical part of this moment of comprehension involved acquiring a picture or  vision upon which to focus the attention.  francke told the readers of this widely  circulated text to stir up their emotions, to manipulate or to rationally appropriate  enthusiasm in order to push themselves into a higher level of consciousness.  “go there,”  he pleaded, “go to that place where you can be still, and grasp the picture deep in your                                                     for more and casaubon’s definitions of enthusiasm see johns,  .    august hermann francke, einfältiger unterricht, wie man die h. schrifft zu seiner wahren erbauung  lesen solle (halle,  ):  ­ .       heart.”   it was only by initiating a process of ideographic mediation that the powerful  messages of the word of god could be discerned.   like wolff, francke was interested in how the powers of the soul make  perception possible; this involved appealing consistently to christ to bestow the gift of  recognition (erkenntnis) on the soul.  the only way this was possible, francke explained  in a sermon he called a short guide to jesus christ’s true and noticeable recognition,  is through reconciliation with this same christ—the kind of reconciliation paul described  in   corinthians  :  whoever has read the texts of the new testament, especially paul’s epistles, has  certainly discovered that the apostle uses the word “reconciliation” again and again,  although the expression is not always used in the same way.  many have heard or read an  explanation of the term reconciliation but one seldom meets someone who has a proper  understanding of it, meaning their heart has been fundamentally moved because of the  understanding they have acquired—as though they have been awakened from a deep  sleep.       god only opened the “teachings of the word” up to those who had been properly unified  with him.  union with christ was the first step toward acquiring the recognition so  essential to understanding the relationship between the soul or the gemüth and sight.   those who had been properly reconciled to christ would receive “the real ability to grasp  in the soul.”  they would also be able to recognize a divine presence in the world because  christ would intervene and “adjust [their] ability to perceive.”   the most important task                                                     ibid.,  .  this represented a very different stance than those taken by several of francke’s  contemporaries in england; for example, edward reynolds argued that expulsion from eden had destroyed  the harmony that had once existed between the senses and reason “throwing distortive passions between  the human soul and the rest of creation.” see johns,  .  in other words, for him the passions stood in the  way of reconciliation with christ whereas for francke, a reasoned manipulation of the passions held the  key to becoming unified with him—thereby restoring harmony between sensation and intuition.  see  edward reynolds, a treatise of the passions and faculties of the soul of man. with the several dignities and  corruptions thereunto belonging (london,  ).   august hermann francke, kurtze anweisung zur wahren, lautern und apostolischen erkentniss jesu  christi; da in zehn puncten, wie dieselbe nach dem sinn und lehrart der apostel richtig und nachdrücklich  zum wahren heyl der seelen zu fassen sey, gezeiget wird (halle: waysenhaus,  ).   ibid.,  .      of the teacher, francke continued in this text, is to introduce their pupils to the process of  bekehrung, or conversion, necessary for reconciliation to occur.   francke’s pedagogy, with its emphasis on the cultivation of character through  conversion and the mathematical sciences, must be understood with all this in mind.  it is  actually quite different from the lockean model of education that has dominated  historians’ attempts to understand the pedagogical innovations and orientation of the  early enlightenment.  francke’s own use of the phrase cultura animi is a clear signal of  his interest in self­formation, or paideia, as it was practiced by the “heathen”  philosophers of ancient greece and, ultimately, adapted by the first christians.  in  ,  one year after he had provided a thorough description of his project plans in the grosse  aufsatz (or large essay), francke produced a summary of his pedagogical techniques that  cited the “cultivation of character” (gemüthspflege) as the “only tool” (einzige mitte)  capable of awakening a fear of god in youth so that they will become obedient and  diligent.  characters that were “fresh” and properly “cleaned up” (aufgeräumt) through  gemüthspflege, francke wrote, were more open to the lessons their teachers had to offer  them.  he also used the phrase when describing his method for teaching theology, stating  explicitly that “the study of theology is cultura animi.”   when individuals embarked on  this course of study, what they were really engaged in was the cultivation, that is,  perfection of their souls.                                                       ibid.,  .   “cultura animi oder die gemüthspflege ist das einzige mitte wodurch dieser hauptzweck in anweisung  der jugend erhalten wird.”  in august hermann francke, kurzer und einfältiger unterricht: wie die kinder  zur wahren gottseligkeit und christlichen klugheit anzuführen sind. (halle: waysenhaus,  ):  .   nowhere in the text does he employ the word bildung—a term that has been used to describe the emphasis  on self cultivation resident in german pedagogical strategies from the late eighteenth­ into the nineteenth­ centuries.  see for example w.h. bruford, the german tradition of self­cultivation: bildung from  humboldt to thomas mann (cambridge: cambridge university press,  ).  for francke’s statement that  the “studium theologicum est cultura animi,” see erhard peschke, studien zur theologie august hermann  franckes, vol.   (berlin: evangelische verlagsanstalt,  ­ ):  .       in plato’s formulation, the highest goal of any state should be to sponsor the  “inner transformation and purification of the soul” of all its citizens.  in effect, true  education or “cultivation of character” was about being given license (by a herrscher, or  overseer of the process) to participate in a purely educational space within which  individuals acquired the autonomy and sustenance they needed to push their souls down  the path toward illumination.   cultura animi connoted a process whereby the soul was  continually filled with new knowledge and experienced feelings similar to what someone  who had been blind for many years might feel upon being granted the power to see.   following plato’s description of the process in the republic, jäger wrote:  true education (erziehung) is the awakening of abilities resident in the soul.  it initiates  the organ with which one learns and grasps things… it involves the right orientation of  the soul towards the source of the light, or recognition.    ...  the essence of philosophical education (philosophy as a way of life) is, in effect,  “conversion“—in the most original, solid meaning of this word.  it involves the complete  metamorphosis or transformation of the entire soul toward the light of the idea of the  good, the source of everything.     this is not a (lockean) form of education that endeavors to inculcate values and ideas  found to be lacking in the animus; rather, it presents itself as a way of life that is about  cultivating awareness of the gifts of recognition, goodness and virtue that are already  manifest in all people.  hadot likens it to the art of sculpting, which involves a gradual  chipping away—not the laying on of additional materials.  he notes that plato derived his  understanding of it from socrates, who explained (in the theaetetus for example) that  true education should not be about filling up empty vessels or writing on blank slates;  instead it is about opening the eyes of each individual so that they see that while they are  already full of potential, they actually know nothing and must work to realize what has                                                     jäger, vol.  ,  .   ibid.      already been given to them.   it involves regular participation in a set of practices,  which, as we have seen in previous chapters, were central to the articulation of faith for  virtually all of the texts considered central to the expression of pietist spirituality (arndt,  arnold, spener etc.).        for the ancient philosophers, recognizing that knowledge resides in the soul and  not in the world was the secret to the production of virtuous citizens.  it was the end goal  of an educational process that endeavored to move its participants towards conversion  (bekehrung)—a process that bears a remarkable resemblance to the kind of conversion  francke insisted was necessary for full membership in his community—and the  cultivation of their innate abilities to discern the truth.  this was not a form of conversion  that happened in a single instance and then affected an instant change in the way in which  one sees the world and relates to other people; for francke and the “heathen”  philosophers who influenced his interest in gemüthspflege, conversion was a lifelong  educational process aided by edification, the reading of god’s word and the channeling of  the mysterious gift of recognition, granted by the holy spirit, towards virtuous acts.    wolff evoked similar metaphors of illumination and self realization as resulting from                                                     pierre hadot, what is ancient philosophy?  .     in addition to his wahre christentum (true christianity), johann arndt’s paradiesgärtlein [c. ]  would be translated into english in   and given a title indicating the contents’ preoccupation with  spiritual exercise; it was called, the garden of paradise: or, holy prayers and exercises; whereby the  christian graces and virtues may be planted and improved in man, the divine image renew'd true  christianity promoted, the kingdom of god established, and heavenly life raised up in the spirit. pursuing  the design of the famous treatise of true christianity (london,  ).  francke printed his own version of  arndt’s true christianity in  : vier bücher vom wahren christenthum, das ist: von heilsamer buße ...  versehen mit vielen schrifft­allegaten, neuen numern der paragraphen und nützlichen registern (halle:  waysenhaus,  ).   this is confirmed by markus matthias, who explains that “in contrast to luther and lutheran orthodoxy,  francke asserted an effectively new determination of christian existence and placed this exegetically in his  interpretation of romans  , where the apostle would describe the condition of the christian person, who is  not yet reborn but is being found in the process of conversion;” see his piece on “august hermann  francke” in carter lindberg ed., the pietist theologians (oxford: blackwell press,  ).  matthias draws  this insight from a manuscript version of francke’s “von der verpflichtung auf die bekenntnisschriften” in  adolf sellschopp, neue quellen zur geschichte august hermann franckes (halle: niemeyer,  ):  .        process of conversion in his own guide to   corinthians  : .   he explained that  “through conversion, through illumination, a person acquires a new power or ability to  understand… especially the truths that are not as easy to see in natural ways;” individuals  acquire a “certain new strength or power, which is not given to the human soul by  nature.”   there was also a huge difference, wolff believed, in the ethical disposition or  (habitus moralibus) of those gemüths who had been converted and thereby illuminated  by god and those who had not.   in his metaphysics, he advised those who were  illuminated to continually strive to “do whatever makes you and your condition more  perfect and to leave behind whatever makes you and your condition less perfect.”   as i showed in the first part of this chapter, wolff was interested in the science of  measurement’s reliance on the soul’s power of recognition, but he also believed in the  power of measurement and other practices to cultivate this same power.  similarly,  francke’s pedagogical writings reveal his own conviction that sponsoring an awakening  of abilities resident in the soul involved more than teaching people how to prepare  themselves to receive the holy spirit so as to acquire the erkenntnis so essential to the  acquisition of knowledge.  this was only one pillar of wisdom.  the other pillar, of  course, involved the management of experience and included the inculcation of certain  values through sensation, especially gazing upon beautiful forms and allowing those  forms of knowledge to affect the orientation of the soul.  without question, francke                                                     christian wolff, “dass ein mensch nichts von sich selbst habe, nach anleitung   corinthians” in  christian wolff, gesammelte kleine philosophische schriften (halle,  ):  ­ .  reprinted in  gesammelte werke, part one: vol.  ­ .   ibid.  this sentiment is remarkably similar to those expressed by francke in his philanthropie ( ) and  barrow’s prayer, quoted at the beginning of chapter three, asking the divine for the ability to perceive.   ibid.   quoted in hinrichs,  .  from christian wolff’s metaphysik ( ). reprinted in gesammelte werke,  part one: vol.  .       understood the value of tugendlehre, or the extensive literature around cultivating virtue  as an antidote to the passions that was proliferating throughout his lifetime.    in a manner reminiscent of boyle’s sentiments in seraphic love regarding the  capacity of the individual to affect his ability to perceive by gazing upon beautiful or  perfect forms, francke explained in the ninth chapter of his short and simple lessons  that “the virtues and vices should be painted in living colors before children in order to  strengthen the good that has been initiated in them.”   vormalen, or vividly depicting  vice and virtue “has been determined by the reasonable heathens as a good way of  awakening virtue and getting people to turn away from vice,” he explained.  aristotle’s  pupil, theophrastos ( ­  bc), had produced a text called the characters that  provided the perfect example of how to do this.  also, several christian authors, such as  joseph hall ( ­ ) and johann heinrich boecler ( ­ ), he wrote, had  provided a summary of signs (kennzeichen) of virtuous characters derived from  theophrastos’ typology from which lessons inspiring the mimicking of these signs could  be derived.  boecler was a professor of history in strasbourg who created a typology of  virtuous roman emperors based on the work of the roman historian, vellejus  paterculus.   hall, an anglican bishop, read theophrastos’s characters as a work of  moral philosophy, which he said inspired him to publish a two volume collection of  character sketches in  .  the collection became so popular that it would eventually                                                     august hermann francke, kurtzer und einfältiger unterricht ( ):  .   johann heinrich boecler, characteres politici in velleio paterculo expositione quadam demonstrati   (strasbourg,  ).        spark an entirely new yet derivative literary genre.  francke likely had access to a  german edition of hall’s characters published in amsterdam in  .   circulated with commentary by isaac causabon in   under the title of  theophrastu ethikoi charakteres or theophrasti notationes morum, the characteres of  theophrastos presented its readers with a collection of signifiers for rendering character  visually accessible.   despite promising in the introduction to present examples of both  virtue and vice, theophrastos’s characters were all archetypes of vice, whose conduct and  other observable signifiers provided unencumbered access into the state of their souls.    those “christian authors” who endeavored to follow in theophrastos’s footsteps were  concerned with creating signifiers of virtuous archetypes as well, in the interest of  inviting emulation.  joseph hall described the signs (kennzeichen) of one who is wise as  someone who is “eager to learn or to recognize everything but especially to know his  strengths and his weaknesses.”   his eyes “never stay together, instead one stays at home  and gazes upon himself and the other is directed towards the world…and whatever new  things there are to see in it;” he is a good student, master and lawgiver; he is articulate.    the eyes of a properly fashioned christian are also one of his most clearly recognizable  signs.  they are “illuminated” and rest upon the uncertain in a way that directly affects                                                     joseph hall, characteres der menschen (amsterdam,  ).  see jacques bos’s discussion of the  influence of hall’s characters in his “individuality and inwardness in the literary character sketches of  the seventeenth century,” journal of the warburg and courtauld institutes,   ( ):  .  bos explains  that well over twenty english character­books had been published by the end of the seventeenth century,  including sir thomas overby’s characters and john earle’s microcosmography—both especially popular.   isaac casaubon ( ­ ) was a classical scholar considered by his contemporaries to be the most  learned man in europe; his theophrasti notationes morum was published in   in a collection edited by  thomas hale called opuscula mythologica physica et ethica: græce et latine; seriem eorum sistit  pagina praefationem proxime sequens (amsterdam,  ).     this has also been observed by jacques bos, who discusses the uncertainty around this text (comprised  of   character sketches) and its intended purpose; it is the only ancient greek description of characters  ever found.  the introduction explains that “the study of good and bad types of human behavior is a very  useful introduction to ethics.”  see bos, “individuality and inwardness,”  .   hall, characteres des menschen ( ):  .   ibid.      his senses.  “he speaks with god in prayer” and, “when he comes near to god puts on a  purple robe.”   while francke makes specific mention of hall’s text and isaac casaubon’s role in  disseminating theophrastro’s characters, jean de la bruyère, a preceptor of louis xiv’s  cousin, duke louis of bourbon, had also published and circulated a version of it that was  well known.   bruyère was part of a circle of pedagogues, called the petit concil, who  became famous for their numerous discussions and treatises about how best to cultivate  virtuous rulers; the circle included bishop bossuet, claude fleury and françois fénelon.   throughout the short and simple lessons, francke cited the importance of the french  church historian and educator claude fleury’s traité du choix et de la méthode des  études ( ) for the formulation of his pedagogy, and gave the instructors of his schools  license to create character typologies using famous biblical personalities.   wherever  possible they should strive to use “living and exemplary” presentations of archetypes,  such as joseph, to “awaken a love of virtue in children so that they wish nothing more  than to be similar in every way to these figures.”   this, of course, is precisely what  fleury had suggested in both his tractat and in his mœurs des israelites (manners of the  israelites).                                                        ibid.,  .   see his les caractères de théophraste traduits du grec avec les caractères ou les moeurs de ce  siècle par mr. de la bruyère de l'academie françoise et la clef, en marge & par ordre alphabetique  (paris,  ); for a discussion of it see mark a. cohen, “la bruyère and the “usage” of childhood: the  idea of pedagogy in the caractères” french forum  :  (spring  ):  ­ .   claude fleury had achieved international fame for his role as a tutor of the dukes of anjou, burgundy  and berry; he was also part of the petit concil, headed by francois fenelon.  a german version of his  traité du choix et de la méthode des études appeared in  : des herrn claudii fleury klugheit zu  studiren: oder gründliche nachricht wie ein junger mensch bey den gelehrten wissenschaften eine kluge  wahl beobachten und selbige vermöge einer geschickten lehr­art begreiffen soll (budißin,  ).   august hermann francke, kurtzer und einfältiger unterricht ( ):  .   his mœurs des israelites appeared in french in  ; a german translation came out in   entitled:  die sitten der israeliten, oder muster einer schlecht und rechten politischen unterweisung, den staat zu  regieren und die sitetn zu verbessern durch m. fleury (hannover,  ).      the picture accompanying the title page depicts two men gazing at two israelites,  from whom they are separated by a slight distance (see appendix  ).  one is writing, or  creating an inscription of what he sees in front of him, while the other is holding a large  drawing pad in such a way that it is obvious he is painting a likeness, or producing a  representation (vormalen) of the two figures.  it was the cultivation of precisely this  technique, of capturing likenesses of virtuous essences, which francke endeavored to  include in the pedagogical practices of his schools.  and it seems that in fleury, francke  recognized the traces of the conciliatory methodology he sought—one that integrated  paideia (or sculpting, realizing the gemüth) with the habituation of sensation.   he  described fleury as someone whose “fine method…reminds one very well that there are  especially two things that one should consider above all if one hopes to make the raising  up of children truly fruitful: namely, the attention or awareness (aufmerksamkeit) and  experience.”  francke continued: “these two pieces one cannot simply expect to come  from individuals of a young age; instead the teacher must awaken these things in  them….”    francke also frequently wrote about the capacity of images to serve as examples  that either give one an ideal to emulate or to force reflection or a confrontation with  oneself—like a mirror.  he wanted the members of his community to be especially  attuned to the didactic undertones of phantasias in general and knew that acute visual  experiences could be manipulated to uphold or to undermine certain values.  in his  admonitory lectures (lectiones paraenetica), for example, he explained that the holy  scriptures provided people with examples to follow in our lives and served as a mirror                                                     august hermann francke, kurtzer und einfältiger unterricht ( ):  .          that could force us “to confront our ugly appearance.”   they had the power to inspire  reflection and action.  instructors of his schools were also told to look for ways they  could “clearly and distinctly show [children] good examples that they can then follow.”    they were to embody the example they wanted their pupils to emulate, or be living  vorbilder.  in the   tract about how to improve the art of schooling penned by  francke’s colleague joachim lange, the importance of teaching children how to use  words so that they will have a “lifelike effect… and direct real actions” is emphasized  several times.   if the “lifelike effect” was not there, then it would be impossible to  acquire a “living recognition” of something because the “affected and rendered action”  did not appear before the eyes.  but there was more to producing a lifelike effect before  someone’s eyes than simply employing the proper syntax, arguments and words.  in a  move that suggests the power of a conciliatory ideal for francke and the larger  intellectual community of which he was a part, lange proclaimed that the eloquent or  evocative speech depended entirely on wisdom or reason (sapientia).   just as an  experiment or mechanical exercise needed to be guided by the intellect, ideally  mathematical truths, in order for the meaning to be properly discerned, so “oratorical  exercise” needed to be joined with the solid knowledge of things in order for the meaning  of the words to come alive.   lange promised that his method would ensure that what                                                     peter menck’s now classic study of francke’s pedagogy contains an insightful, if brief, discussion of the  importance of the example in francke’s schools.  see idem, die erziehung der jugend zur ehre gottes und  zum nutzen des nächsten: die pädagogik august hermann franckes (halle, tübingen: verlag der  franckesche stiftungen, max niemeyer verlag):  ­ .  august hermann francke, lectione paraeneticae  ( ­ ).   quoted in menck,  ; from karl richter ed., august hermann franckes schrift über erziehung und  unterricht (berlin,  ).   joachim langens verbesserte und erleichterte lateinische grammatica ... mit einer vorrede von  verbesserung des schulwesens (berlin, halle: waysenhaus,  ):  .       ibid.,  .     ibid.,  .      rhetorical exercises visually evoked would be more oriented toward virtuous and godly  ways of being (wesen).  the art of language was taught in francke’s schools not as a  signifier of authentic learning, he wrote, but as a “tool for the further planting and  exploration of the truth.”     michael wintroub has shown how rhetoric, which he defines as “complex web of  social, epistemological, and spiritual practices by which the putative distance between  words and things could be effaced,” was central to boyle’s attempts to create an  experimental community.   rhetorical strategies were easily accessible to the “civil”  members of his circle, all of whom had been schooled in the art of speaking well; rhetoric  was also one of the signatures of a humanist education and a subject taught in francke’s  advanced schools.   speaking well involved acquiring proficiency in the art of  evocative image making.  the more evocative the images the better witnesses or  observers would understand the message of a speech.  geometrical exercise also involved  becoming proficient in the art of producing evocative images, which could lead to higher  forms of understanding.   just as the study of rhetoric could ever increasingly bring the  gap between “words and things,” so could geometry.  like the soul and its abilities to  make judgments, rhetoric and geometry also stood in the middle offering assimilatory  techniques for mediating objects and forms.  each stressed the conciliatory power of the  visual example to do precisely this.                                                     ibid.,      see wintroub,  .   for an overview of this education as it was imagined and impacted by erasmus, see manfred hoffmann,  rhetoric and theology: the hermeneutic of erasmus (toronto: university of toronto press,  ): esp.  “humanism and rhetorical theology” and part iv: speech and interpretation,  ­ ,  ­ .   the training in rhetoric descartes received in a jesuit school was central to his formulation of a  geometrical practice also intended to help one visualize certain images and grasp certain truths.  see jones,  ­ .      inside the pedagogical space that francke directed children were led through what  must be understood as a series of exercises akin to those practiced in the schools of  ancient greece.  and in this space, mathematical exercise was held in high esteem  because of its capacity to awaken the soul.  for plato, man is not human without  mathematics; therefore, the herrscher, or director, of an academy needed to ensure that  those he educated were introduced to the beauty and utility of arithmetic.  he did this not  in the interest of creating a skilled class of workers, but rather, he introduced a study of  mathematics so as to make the process of conversion, the orientation of the soul towards  the realization of one’s essence, easier.  the study of mathematics for the greek  philosopher was about sharpening the understanding.  francke himself explained that in  order to promote a meditative stillness in the gemüth and a recuperation of natural  strength, instructors should follow the example of “the heathens:”  who offer a beautiful example in that they led their children to mathesis at an early age,  which is advised by certain mathematicians today as well.  of course, one should not  forget that mathesis is too difficult for children.  but if one leaves the most difficult  things pertaining to demonstrations and calculations for riper years, one will still find  enough in mathematics to inspire children with lust and pleasure—without overwhelming  them.      he advised his instructors to pay special attention to the children, “who always seem to  be taking it upon themselves to create something or to work on their own.”  these were  telltale signs of an especially promising gemüth, which could “more easily be led by an  instructor towards something useful.”   especially young children could be easily led to  appreciate astronomy, francke continued, which provided the perfect opportunity to  teach them to recognize the size, quantity and order of heavenly bodies.  he also  suggested that “in their periods of rest” (ruhestunden), geographical maps (mappae                                                     august hermann francke, kurtzer und einfältiger unterricht ( ):  .   ibid.      geographicae) should be used.  “it would be very pleasing to them,” he continued, “if a  short introduction is given in which they can ask each other questions if they want about  how the world is divided and into what lands and kingdoms the world is divided into.”         division, size, quantity, order—in effect, a discourse of quantification, of  proportionality, of measurement was at the very heart of a set of pedagogical strategies  that simultaneously endeavored to regulate or condition experience and to provide  children with opportunities to exercise their gemüther.  as a practitioner and proponent  of a dialectical faith, francke recognized a familiar relationship between the cultivation  of an individual’s inner qualities and the manifestation of those qualities in traits,  behaviors and other material expressions.  there had to be a way to keep track of a  child’s inner progress through the careful monitoring of his or her reales or material  attributes.  practicing or carrying out francke’s pedagogical strategies involved extensive  note­taking, observation and assessment in order to accomplish precisely this task—to  determine, while presenting beautiful examples at the same time, the quality of the  individual being educated and their potential.  implementing francke’s method meant  engaging in an extensive array of surveillance practices that saw the varied outward  expressions of each pupil—especially behaviors and physical appearance—as a measure  of their interior culture, including their faith. perhaps the best evidence we have of the  measurement of character at work in francke’s schools is found in the hundreds of pages  of detailed lists recording pupils’ “behavior and qualities” in various orphanage  registers.                                                        ibid.,  .   for example afst/s a i   [ ­ ] verhalten der schüler und beschäftigung ehemaliger  scholaren.  see also juliane jacobi, "man hatte von ihm gute hoffnung ...": das waisenalbum der      in a sermon he called the the measure of faith, francke explained that while  christ was happy with any amount of a faith that was real and true, he was especially  attuned to its manifold sizes and strengths.  in the parables of the gospels christ  consistently sized up the quantity and quality of the faith of those he encountered—often  measuring it against the faith of the israelites as the ultimate muster.  to the canaanite  woman at the well he said openly, your faith is large.  also, using the story of the  centurion from capernaum (found in matthew  :  ­ ), he explained that there were  three distinct signifiers that made it possible for christ to determine if this man’s faith  was larger and stronger than others: namely his abasement (or willingness to prostrate  himself before christ), his immediate recognition of the beauty of christ, and his  conviction that christ could help him by uttering only a single word.   with these  signifiers in mind, francke asked his audience to examine or “test” themselves to  determine the quality and quantity of the gifts christ had bestowed upon them.  he  invited his listeners to participate in an exercise that required the application of a  universal standard or gradus (through the observation of both one’s internal comportment  and external signifiers) to the mysteries of a faith that they could experience or feel.  in  short, he offered his followers (and pupils) a methodology that would allow them to use  certain material expressions of faith, or signifiers, to represent the level of self­realization  they had acquired through union with the divine.  his solution, like wolff’s, saw  measurement as a way of extending and deriving benefits from the perceptive capabilities  of the soul.                                                                                                                                                       franckeschen stiftungen   ­   (halle, tübingen: verl. der franckeschen stiftungen & niemeyer­ verl.,  ).    august hermann francke, die unterschiedene maass des glaubens (the measure of faith) aus dem  evangelischen text matth.  :  ­  (halle: waysenhaus,  ):  .        just as the mathematical sciences were embraced as tools for conditioning certain  higher faculties of the soul by “heathen philosophers,” so francke would employ them in  his schools.  they were a starting point—important, but for a very specific set of reasons  connected with cultura animi above all else.  from a very early age, francke believed,  children needed to be raised to be wise, meaning they needed to be taught how not to let  themselves be led astray by the “false teachings of the eyes.”   the teaching and  practice of the mathematical sciences in his institutes, and his interest in reconciling the  language of mathematics with experimental method, was about cultivating individuals  who recognized their ethical obligation to perfect themselves in order to improve the  world.  those who had perfected their ability to recognize, or see correctly, would  experience pleasure, peace and “contentment of mind” akin to the kind described by the  famous huguenot irenicist, pierre de moulin ( ­ ), in his treatise of the same  name—also frequently cited by francke.  as practitioners of a “christian philosophy,”  they would become carriers of light, love and philanthropy, which they would extend to  the rest of the world.        careful consideration of francke’s pedagogical writings reveals his own  preoccupation with visual training as a concomitant practice of paideia, inextricably  linked to the cultivation and measurement of faith.  like wolff, francke championed the  soul’s power of recognition, its ability to receive wisdom intuitively through the exercises  in consilia or congruence that the mathematical sciences offered.  at the same time, he  accepted the validity of praxis or experiential ways of knowing when used to produce  accord, in keeping with the mandate of the “middle way.”  both figures, despite their                                                     august hermann francke, kurtzer und einfältiger unterricht ( ):  .   pierre de moulin, von dem seelenfrieden und der gemüthsvergnügung (leipzig,  ).      differences, saw spiritual exercise or askesis as key to producing increasingly perfect  individuals, whose senses had been habituated and whose characters were fully realized.   they believed they were offering the world a refined set of methodologies or exercises  for better accomplishing this.  my analysis in the following section of the way in which  the mathematical sciences were taught in francke’s schools using models, natural  objects, instruments and other media, will help further illustrate how these practices  worked, including how they were understood as the most ideal expression of the mandate  of philanthropy, universal benevolence and the salvation of mankind.             part ii: applying the method        unity of faith must flow out of wisdom,  and wisdom (weissheit) is building a house of unity, listen up;  those who would like to know something about the large structure:  the wise and wonderful god, who alone commands praise,  directs me constantly towards true wisdom,  and is building, as has long been planned,  a huge house of virtue (tugendhaus) and schools of true wisdom:  in this same work, many boys allow themselves to be taught wisdom   through the arts and sciences,  to god’s praise and honor and their parents’ reputation and happiness,  although not every son, without difference, can study there.  only the best ones are sent,  so that they will immediately begin to blossom and begin to love,  until the spirit of wisdom begins to peek out of his soul,   and raw utility becomes corporally actualized.  in this school of wisdom one only takes in boys  who, by their natures, are oriented towards knowledge,  the parents can even be jews and turks  really, protestants attend there alongside papists.  the children do not hear about even the slightest hint of confessional strife,  but instead learn virtues and the arts from all sides,  so that they grow in years and in wisdom,  and this means they have to work, themselves, on hundreds of things.  the same kind of project is to be seen nowhere else  and one will find much more there than what one can speak of here  the orphanage in halle is truly good and fine,   there is really nothing that can be counted against it.    ­johann ernst bessler, aka orffyreus ( )        chapter five: orientation through anschauung: three­dimensional models as  tools of philanthropy      im perspectiv liegt das modell    in perspective lies the model  vor augen deutlich klar und hell,  before the eyes­clear, distinct and bright,  wie das im waysenhaus zu hall   just like the one in halle’s orphanage  nach allen stücken überall    where all the parts are overall   schrifft­mässig aufgerichtet.    erected according to the scriptures.    ­johann jacob scheuchzer      all knowledge is the display of understanding, for which the same conditions must be met  as for displays of the eye.    ­johann amos comenius        in their introduction to models: the third dimension of science, nick hopwood  and soraya de chadarevian insist that “three­dimensional models have always embodied  and displayed knowledge, but how this was done varied enormously and altered over  time.”   until relatively recently, however, historians of science have tended to neglect  three­dimensional models in favor of two­dimensional forms of representation; they have  preferred to see the model as invested with a purely pedagogical function (involving the  rendering of certain truths popular or understandable) somehow separated from the  construction of these same truths.  “this is a mistake,” continue de chadarevian and  hopwood, “for not only was teaching the centrally important means of ratifying and  conveying knowledge, and addressing wider audiences crucial to establishing scientific  authority, the movements of models also exemplify the impossibility of separating these                                                     johann jacob scheuchzer, kupfer­bibel, in welcher die physica sacra, oder geheiligte natur­ wissenschafft derer in heil. schrifft vorkommenden natürlichen sachen (ulm,  ):  ,  ; johann  amos comenius, “die methode für die wissenschaften im besonderen” in grosse didaktik [hans ahrbeck  ed.] (berlin: volk und wissen volkseigener verlag,  ):  .  “die wissenschaft ist die schau des  verstandes, die sich unter den gleichen erfordernissen vollzieht wie die schau des auges.”   soraya de chadarevian and nick hopwood eds. models: the third dimension of science (stanford:  stanford university press,  ):  .      activities from research.”   their assertion, with its emphasis on the capacity of teaching  to ratify and convey knowledge while participating in its formulation, gets to the very  heart of this chapter’s aims and assumptions.    three­dimensional models were fixtures of a. h. francke’s community in halle,  where they were invested with a special pedagogical, epistemological and spiritual  significance.  using a variety of evidence of their presence in his orphanage, as well as  the hand­written lesson plans that were given to him in   by his colleague, christoph  semler, i look at the strategies through which the mathematical sciences were being  taught in halle, and by all accounts in francke’s schools—strategies that would both  convey and generate new, conciliatory ways of knowing.   i am interested in showing  how the three­dimensional model served as the ideal medium for lessons in conciliatory  seeing by examining the meanings practitioners of an eclectic method in early eighteenth­ century halle ascribed to them as focal points, or sites, where the joining together of  intuition and perception could be materially represented.   surely, most scholars would  readily concede that in some ways all models, regardless of the era, are conciliatory  artifacts constructed according to rational principles and, at the same time, experienced  through the senses—especially the eyes and the hands.  but in the franckesche  stiftungen’s culture of reconciliation these models were integrated into the habitus of  paideia (see chapter four); they were points of orientation for the conciliatory exercises  of self cultivation being conducted there.  in francke’s halle, models and instruments                                                     ibid. see willem hackmann’s treatment of models as “didactic instruments” in his “scientific  instruments: models of brass and aids to discovery,” david gooding, trevor pinch and simon schaffer eds.  the uses of experiment (cambridge: cambridge university press,  ):  ­ .   see my discussion of eclecticism in chapter two and donald kelley, “eclecticism and the history of  ideas,” esp.  ­ .  my focus here is mainly on scale models of buildings, cities and the universe, as well  as mathematical and optical instruments; in chapter seven i discuss semler’s models of machines.      were tools of philanthropy that could condition and trigger impulses of love and  reconciliation in individuals.  simply by viewing the three­dimensional structures, the  inspired observer would be forced to calibrate their intellect’s ability to recognize with  their imagination’s ability to perceive.  the franckesche stiftungen’s status as a “universal seminar” was rooted solidly  in a pansophic worldview that drew readily from a pedagogical tradition, linked to  johann amos comenius, known as anschauungsunterricht.  the word anschauung, or  observation, connotes an entire process of visualization—from the senses to the intellect  via the sensitive (or lower) faculties of the soul.  the german word anschauung better  captures the dialectical relationship at the heart of comenius’s didactical strategies  because of its capacity to mean (or imply) both perception (vorstellung) and intuition  (erkenntnis), as well as contemplation (betrachtung) and conception (auffassung).  i  have deliberately translated anschauung as “observation” because of this word’s ability  to dually signify the cultivation of attention (a form of erkenntnis) and various forms of  experience one needed to embrace in order to properly observe something.   anschauung’s active form is anschauen, which connotes the act of observation but  specifically as the culmination of a process that has already involving external seeing and  inward contemplation.       in the didactica magna, comenius distinguished between “outward” and  “inward” anschauungen.  just like the mechanics of seeing, or das äuβerliche schauen,  resulted from a combination of the eyes, objects and light, so did internal seeing, or das                                                     see discussion of “anschauung” and “anschauung gottes” in joachim ritter ed. das historische  wörterbuch der philosophie vol.   (stuttgart: schwabe & co.,  ):  ­  and lorraine daston’s  treatment of attention in “attention and values of nature in the enlightenment,” lorraine daston and  fernando vidal eds., the moral authority of nature (chicago: university of chicago press,  ):  ­ .       innerliche schauen.   “the eye of inner observation,” comenius explained, “is the spirit  (geist) or understanding (verstand);” it was the part capable of responding to “rational  demonstrations” (vernünftige demonstrationen).   the objects of innerliche schauen, he  continued, “are all things lying outside of or within the intellectus,” including the “inward  senses” (innerliche sinne), or the lower faculties of the soul, which could be awakened by  sinnliche demonstrationen.  just as with seeing externally, internal observing was aided  by light—or the cultivation of a “diligent attention” (die gebührende aufmerksamkeit).    since they were part of the soul, the inner senses were capable of imprinting upon the  sensus communis of the body, and were believed to be connected in some way to the  soul’s rational faculties; no one knew exactly how the higher and lower faculties of the  soul were linked together, although some claimed to know.   the real question was about  how the process of awakening the “inward senses” worked—namely how to reach them  via “outward perceptions” (aussere empfindungen), objects and their likenesses.    comenius argued that the procedure for “external” observing was fundamentally                                                     johann amos comenius, “die methode für die wissenschaften” in hans ahrbeck ed. grosse didaktik  (berlin: volk und wissen volkseigener verlag,  ):  :  “die wissenschaft oder die kenntnis der  dinge vollzieht sich, insofern sie das innerliche schauen der dinge ist, unter ebensoviel erfordernissen als  das äusserliche schauen oder sehen; diese sind auge, gegenstand und licht.  wenn diese vorhanden sind,  so ergibt sich daraus das sehen.  das auge des inneren sehens ist der verstand (mens) oder die geistige  anlage (ingenium), der gegenstand sind alle dinge, die ausserhalb und innerhalb des verstandes  (intellectus) liegen; das licht ist die gebührende aufmerksamkeit. aber wie bei dem äusseren sehen eine  bestimmte art und weise notwendig ist, wenn man eine sache sehen soll, so wie sie sit, so bedarf man hier  einer bestimmten methode, nach der die dinge dem geist so dargeboten werden, dass er sie sicher und  rasch erfasst und druchdringt.” also quoted in johannes kühnel, comenius und der anschauungsunterricht  (leipzig: klinkhardt,  ):  .   ibid.  for a recent look at the relationship between “the eye” and “the heart” in comenius see erwin  schadel, sehendes herz (cor oculatum)—zu einem emblem des späten comenius (frankfurt am main:  peter lang,  ).   for a succinct and insightful discussion of the sensus communis as it was understood by early modern  contemporaries see adrian johns’ discussion in the nature of the book, esp.  ­ .  following oxford  professor of natural philosophy thomas willis’ descriptions, johns describes the common sense as “a  space of open exchange, where the animal spirits mingled freely,” and a “dynamic system in which vision  and imagination participated.”        deductive whereas the procedure for “internal” conceiving was inductive.   however,  since both procedures relied on the eyes, objects and light, anschauung—including the  medium of the schauplatz, or site of observation—could become the critical, extended or  “third site” for linking perception and cognition together.  vision, or visual training, held  the key to the reconciliation of fundamentally opposing strategies for coming to terms  with the world.     that the founder of pietism, philip jakob spener, was hugely influenced by the  precepts of anschauung is evidenced in several of his writings, but perhaps most readily  in his pia desideria—or pious desires.  of course, spener was not the first person to  employ this title in a devotional book.  in his own pia desideria of  , the jesuit  hermann hugo ( ­ ) had popularized what were already widely embraced as the  three basic steps of meditation: seeing (sehen), reflective/inward viewing (betrachten)  and, ultimately, observing (anschauen).    p. j. spener’s decision to employ the same  title in his foreword to a short postille by johann arndt is a clear indication of his interest  in aligning his movement with a similar process of meditation—one oriented around  visualization.   in doing this he made a direct link to the emphasis on anschauung so                                                     discussed in kühnel,  ­ .   the following version of hugo’s pia desideria was published in gotha in  : hermanni hugonis pia  desideria, elegantissimo carmine descripta : una cum barlæi, aliorumque præstantiorum nostræ &  superioris ætatis poëtarum sacris carminibus selectioribus, & brevi singulorum vitæ historia (gotha,  ).  the tract was first published as pia desideria, tribus libris comprehensa.  . gemitus animae  poenitentis;  . vota animae sanctae;  . suspiria animae amantis (antwerp,  ); it was translated into in  spanish in  , german, french and english in  , dutch in   and italian in  .  at least    individual latin editions of hugo’s pia desideria were printed, each divided into three parts: “ .  stossseufzer der reuigen seele;  . gelöbnisse der frommen seele;  . verlangen der liebenden seele,” and  including   copperplate engravings.  in ernst thomas reimbold, pia desideria gottselige begierden  (olten und freiburg im breisgau: walter­verlag,  ):  ­ .  augustine famously explained in his  confessions that having eyes (augen­haben) and viewing (betrachten) is not the same thing, just as there is  a difference between viewing (betrachten) and observing (anschauen).  therefore the soul must have three  qualities: it must have eyes, it must view (reflectively) and it must observe.”  quoted in reimbold,  ­ .    comenius also considered himself a student of arndt, whose true christianity (or bücher vom wahren  christentum) was, in spener’s estimation, the most popular (and frequently printed) devotional book of all      prevalent in expressions of jesuit spirituality, such as ignatius loyola’s spiritual  exercises, and an indirect link to jakob böhme, who conspicuously employed the term.   böhme, whose life and writings were linked to the identities of autonomous pietist  communities in the seventeenth century, had included a section entitled “how the soul  can be made to come to the anschauung and obedience of god” in his nine­volume way  to christ, published in  .   loyola had stressed the importance of the showplace  (schauplatz) as the “visual site of meditation (composito locis),” where the eyes could  initiate the internal modes of reflection necessary to observe properly.      when a.h. francke eventually arrived in halle in   and founded his  stiftungen, one of the means through which municipal authorities articulated what was  different about his approach to spiritual training was by emphasizing what they  recognized as his tendency, as spener’s protégé, to put the eye before the word.  in a  report to the prussian king friedrich i regarding the “differences that have developed  between the evangelical­lutheran leaders of the university and the city ministry of  halle,” several members of the ministry stated that “regarding a.h. francke’s teachings,  both sides are united; rather it is the manner of carrying out these teachings in an                                                                                                                                                    time; the   “riga edition” (edited by johann fischer) was full of copperplate engravings and prayers at  the end of each chapter to read aloud.  see johannes wallmann, “johann arndt ( ­ )” in carter  lindberg ed. the pietist theologians,  .  several recent studies have emphasized the preoccupation with  meditation by lutheran reformers like böhme, arndt and spener in the seventeenth century; however, they  have not (in my view) sufficiently emphasized the visual metaphors these reformers employed in their  writings or their interest in anschauung as a form of spiritual exercise. see udo sträter, meditation und  kirchenreform in der lutherischen kirche des  .jahrhunderts (tübingen: mohr siebeck,  ) und idem.  „wie bringen wir den kopff in den herz?“ in gerhard kurz ed. meditation und erinnerung in der frühen  neuzeit (göttingen: vandenhoeck & ruprecht,  ):  ­ .   jakob böhme, das sechste büchlein: vom ubersinnlichen leben, nebst ein gespräche eines meisters  und jüngers: wie die seele möge zu göttlicher anschauung und gehör kommen: und was ihre kindheit in  dem natürlichen und übernatürlichen leben sey ... in der weg zu christo : verfasset in neun büchlein. das  . von wahrer busse.  . vom heiligen gebeth.  . ein schlüssel göttlicher geheimnüsse.  . von wahrer  gelassenheit.  . von der wiedergebuhrt.  . vom übersinnlichen leben.  . von göttlicher beschauligkeit.  .  von der erleuchteten und unerleuchteten seele.  . von den vier complexionen (amsterdam,  ).   reimbold,  .        edificatory manner that differences have developed.”   the general consensus, continued  the report, was that “new teachings were being implemented that neglected the  ecclesiastical word and lutheran symbols and involved much more emphasis on visual  representation (augenschein).”   despite francke’s extensive commentaries on the  “certainty of the biblical word,” many of his orthodox lutheran contemporaries were  concerned that his interest in augenschein detracted from the intensive reading of the  holy scriptures.   following p. j. spener and the legacy of those (augustine, arndt,  böhme, loyola, hugo, comenius) who had placed visuality at the heart of spiritual  exercises, francke was emphasizing the need to see and reflect upon the holy scriptures,  so as to properly observe them.      as we saw in part i, all of the points of convergence between francke and several  of the most prominent intellectual figures of his day revolved around the development of  a universal method that could reconcile (and stabilize) the relationship between  perception and cognition via visual training.  tschirnhaus and leibniz had advocated  exposing children to sensualia first, to inspire or awaken them, and then continuing with  training in “rein analysin” so as to make learning “ludus”—an idea derived directly from  comenius’s scholae ludus, or school of play.  this kind of schooling embraced                                                     bericht dessen was wegen der zwischen den evangelisch­lutherischen geistlichen von der universität  und stadt ministerio in halle, eine zeithero geschwebten differentien, durch von seiner churf. durchl. zu  brandenburg gnädigst verordnete commission abgehandelt und zu dero beruhigung in göttlichem segen  ausgerichte worden (colln an der spree,  ): “in welchen befindlich dass die zwischen dem prof. theol.  august hermann francke und dem stadt ministerio erhobene action, nicht die lehre selbst, darin sei  beyderseits einig, sondern die art wie dieselbe erabaulich vorzutragen, ferner die ubung der kirchen  disciplin, fleiss und sorgfalt der lehrer in ihrem amte, endlich das leben und wandel etlicher prediger  betreffe: wegen dergleichen christlichen dem göttlichen worte gemässen erinnerungen aber niemand der  unterchtigkeit in der lehre beschuldiget werden können.”   ibid. “...als würden zu halle neue lehren getrieben, und die liebri ecclesia lutheranae symbolici  negligiret; da sie denn sich auf den augen schein beziehen... ”.   pietist privileging of the visual has not been emphasized in ongoing discussions (among theologians and  historians) about the reasons their orthodox critics were often disdainful of their practices; in highlighting  the preoccupation with visual training in francke’s orphanage, my project is gesturing towards a way of  distinguishing pietists from their detractors via contemporary critiques and concerns.        empiricism in its emphasis on experiencing objects (or their likenesses) first—“exercising  the senses” as comenius called it—juxtaposed with the exercise of the intellect via  training in “immaterial ideas.”   instead of integrating or situating experimental  philosophy into mathematical framework, the hallmark of halle’s conciliatory method  was its attempt to allow both “pillars of wisdom” (to use francke’s phrase) to stand  together as equally valid places to begin any investigation.   the goal was to arrive at the  same destination in the end—i.e. to meet in the middle—and to exploit the creative  potential of both “approaches” in order to discern what was common to both.   practitioners of both experimental and mathematical methods privileged the visual,  meaning they considered certain kinds of images and models to be “better” carriers of  information.   thus, it was primarily in seeing, or in championing the heart as the “eye  in people,” that cognition and sensation could be made to work together.   to be sure, the transnational goals of francke’s organization required a great deal  of linguistic and technological proficiency, thereby generating a heightened interest in  visual pedagogies that could more effectively introduce pupils to the latest (and most  useful) forms of innovation.   but the need for proficiency, influenced as it was (to an  extent that is still being debated) by the designs of the cameralist state, only partially                                                     kühnel,  .   in francke’s words: “all wisdom (klugheit), whether true or false, rests upon two main pillars, namely  knowledge (wissenschaft) or cognition (erkenntnis) and experience (erfahrung); either pillar can be  misused on its own but together they can both be used correctly.….” in kurzer und einfältiger unterricht  (halle, waysenhaus,  ).     see brian s. baigrie, descartes’s scientific illustrations and ‘la grande méchanique de la nature,’ in  baigrie ed. picturing knowledge: historical and philosophical problems concerning the use of art in  science (toronto: university of toronto press,  ):  ­ .  visual strategies had long been valued by  practitioners of “practical” mathematics, especially optics and astronomy; see sven dupré, “visualization  in renaissance optics: the function of geometrical diagrams and pictures in the transmission of practical  knowledge” in sachiko kusukawa and ian maclean eds. transmitting knowledge; words, images and  instruments in early modern europe (oxford: oxford university press,  ) and martin kemp, “temples  of the body and temples of the cosmos: vision and visualization in the vesalian and copernican  revolutions” in brian s. baigrie ed., picturing knowledge,  ­ .      explains why francke’s stiftungen was full of three­dimensional models, instruments and  machines.  here the idea of proficiency was entirely bound up with a pansophic idea of  improvement invested with ethical meanings.   while the use of three­dimensional  models may have been about distilling or bringing together disparate forms of knowledge  into a single and accessible point of reference, using models in lessons was also about  acquiring better, sounder ways of seeing, understanding and being.  viewing models in  francke’s orphanage was an intrinsically moral and meditative exercise bound up with  the spiritual and social prerogatives of those doing the showing or “demonstrating”— teachers in an institution entirely oriented around producing knowing, yet habile and  virtuous, subjects.  in early eighteenth­century halle, demonstrations were spiritual  exercises that endeavored to make models the focus of the schauplatz, or sites for both  reflecting upon the one’s own improvement and for constructing individuals who  approached the world demonstratively. this means that one appreciated the links between  demonstrations and geometry at the same time as one reveled in the demonstration’s  ability to exercise and inspire the senses—thereby awakening the lower faculties of the  soul.  the demonstration, as it was performed with models, machines and naturalia in  francke’s stiftungen (and like the models themselves) was also a site for the expression  and refinement of conciliatory gestures.                                                      on the idea of improvement and its role in the knowledge making projects of empire see richard  drayton, nature’s government: science, imperial britain, and the ‘improvement’ of the world (new  haven, conn.: yale university press,  ).   simon schaffer has explained that in georgian england demonstrations “were both performances in front  of audiences and also collaborative productions by interested practitioners,” referring “either to geometrical  synthesis—the extraction of proof from undeniable axioms—or else to theatrical showmanship—the  display of dramatic phenomena.”  early eighteenth­century pietists in halle certainly appreciated the  theatrical element of the demonstrations they performed with models and artifacts; however, the unique  social contours of the community they created meant that the demonstration (and the objects around which  it revolved) itself was an expression of philanthropy.  see simon schaffer, “machine philosophy:  demonstration devices in georgian mechanics,” osiris,  nd series vol.  instruments ( ):  .      the semler plans also indicate that teachers were “demonstrating” models of  buildings, machines, naturalia and instruments in very similar ways.  a lesson oriented  around a model of a house, for example, was simultaneously about the house’s  proportionality and the natural materials and instruments needed to construct it.   whenever possible, these were demonstrated as well.  instruments were featured in  lessons as models, corresponding entirely to ephraim chambers’ definition of a model as  “an original, or pattern proposed for anyone to copy or imitate” in his cyclopedia of  .   and since francke’s institutes were oriented around the cultivation of virtuous  subjects via the imitation of beautiful and virtuous archetypes and the cultivation of  higher forms of recognition, it follows that three­dimensional models and instruments  would be highly valued as “originals” capable of inspiring imitation—namely the  imitation of mediums that were intrinsically conciliatory.   both models and instruments  (as originals) could make one more proficient, but first one needed “to see” how they  worked—and more importantly, why the imitation of their form and animating principles  was needed.  one also needed to understand what made the three­dimensional model a  superior conciliatory artifact and how its power might possibly be accentuated with the  help of two­dimensional geometrical projection, especially the grundriss or modul  privileged in christian wolff’s writings.      outsiders to francke’s community would probably have recognized the model of  jerusalem, the transporteur, compasses, quadrants and celestial spheres that were  presented to pupils of francke’s schools.  however, the meanings that members of  halle’s community attached to these “mobile” instruments or “originals” were never                                                     quoted in malcolm baker, “representing invention, viewing models,” in de chadarevian and nick  hopwood,  ­ .  from terrence m. russell, the encyclopaedic dictionary in the eighteenth century:  architecture, arts and crafts vol. : ephraim chambers cyclopedia (aldershot: ashgate,  ).      entirely “immutable.”   while the hope was that especially the moral applicability of  these devices would become universally transferable, in the long run, only for those  affiliated with francke’s movement could a magnetic compass become embedded with  the conciliatory significance of love and philanthropy.  the longitudinal device semler  developed, presented ocularly to his pupils and described in a tract printed by the halle  orphanage press in  , was laden with ethical meanings—but in england, when it  eventually arrived there, it was yet another instrument endeavoring (unsuccessfully in the  end) to solve a problem of orientation that had been divested of any connection to the  related issue of being oriented, meaningfully or morally, in the world.     christoph semler and architectural models in francke’s waisenhaus  before exploring the conciliatory use of models francke’s orphanage, i must  elaborate on the context of their imagined uses and construction in halle via a prominent  local minister and magister, christoph semler.  in  , the same year christian wolff  arrived in halle, a text was published by the university entitled useful suggestions for  the founding of a mathematical handworkers­school.  it was a description of and  justification for a realschule that semler had attempted to start in halle the same year—a  school that has long been considered the first realschule to have ever been started in  germany.   but in justifying the need for such a school, semler did not stress the                                                     see bruno latour’s discussion of the “immutable” and “mobile” qualities of certain objects in “drawing  things together,” in m.lynch and s.woolgar, representation in scientific practice (cambridge, mass.:  mit press,  ):  ­ .   in the nineteenth century, realschule connoted a school oriented entirely around vocational or industrial  training and this understanding of it continues to affect the way in which the semler realschule is  understood today, as a the first incarnation of the modern realschule.  while i acknowledge that semler  initially intended his school for the sons of artisans, who would comprise the ranks of an emergent working  class by the nineteenth century, he also emphasized that “the work is organized in such a way that boys  who want to go on to study and those who are destined for the mechanical arts can both derive use from it,”      importance of training more technologically savvy workers.  instead, he explained that  his “first and most important intention” was to foster a “better recognition” of the  enormous strength and knowledge of god.  those youths who attended his school would  “learn how to lift up (erheben) their gemüther” in pursuit of this goal; and, as an added  bonus, they would receive a “useful preparation” in the latest forms of mechanical  knowledge.   regarding the method to be employed by the teachers of his school,  semler advised, for example, that “all of the varieties of materials that the handworker  needs to be familiar with in order to do his work (wood, leather, wool, glass etc.) should  be demonstrated ocularly (occulariter demonstriret) and, wherever possible, presented  before the eyes in natura.”   teachers would endeavor to “awaken these youths” by  laying “master­pieces” before their eyes because “these master­pieces contain within  themselves the quintessence and highest powers of wisdom and understanding… because  they must concentrate all of their reason­oriented rules together in one piece at the same  time.”                                                                                                                                                       in christoph semler, neueröffenete mathematische und mechanische realschule (halle,  ):  .  part of  my aim here is to demonstrate the way in which semler attached mainly conciliatory (not class based)  meanings to his venture, making it central to the project of philanthropy.  examples of studies that have  situated semler’s school within a much wider narrative of progress and modernization include: wolfgang  rudowicz, die entwicklung der realen bildung in deutschland vom beginn der neuzeit bis zum ende des  ii. weltkrieges (essen : verl. die blaue eule,  ); heinz semel, die realienlehrprogramme im  . und  .jahrhundert (hamburg,  ); horst wollenweber, die realschule in geschichte und gegenwart (köln  [u.a.] : böhlau,  ); nikolaus maassen, geschichte der mittel­ und realschulpädagogik i band: von den  anfängen bis ende des  .jahrhunderts (berlin: hermann schrödel verlag,  ).   christoph semler, nützliche vorschläge von auffrichtung einer mathematischen handwercks­schule bey  der stadt halle (halle,  ):  .   like leibniz (and tschirnhaus) semler had also studied briefly in jena with the famous mathematics  professor erhard weigel, who was fond of emphasizing the need for privately funded “schools of  pleasurable arts and virtues” in which children would learn by building models and figures out of  cardboard, measuring and being shown all manner of machines and instruments.  see erhard weigel,  “kurtzer entwurff der freudigen kunst­ und tugend­lehr, vor trivial und kinder schulen” in hermann  schüling, gesammelte pädagogische schriften (giessen,  ):  ­ ; discussed in wilfried schlagenhauf,  “ansätze einer technikbezogenen bildung in schulkonzepten um  ” in lars bluma, karl pichol,  wolfhard weber eds. technikvermittlung und technikpopularisierung. historische und didaktische  perspektiven (waxmann,  ):  ­ .       presenting objects before the eyes in natura and arranging ocular demonstrations  contingent on the “real presence” of the objects themselves became the two central  components of the method semler sought to apply in his school.  he argued that certain  kinds of demonstrations were necessary in which a refined sensibility to various  “gradations of recognition” could be cultivated.   in doing this, he was adapting a widely  accepted set of assumptions about the power of observing objects in natura; comenius  had also written that “the eye is the most delighted by representations (darstellungen) of  certain things that are true to life,” namely depictions that endeavored to remain faithful  to the intrinsic qualities of the object being depicted.   like comenius, semler organized  a hierarchy of representation—a universal schema for assessing the degree (grad) or  quality of the recognition that could be achieved with certain mediums:  in the recognition of visible things, one finds different gradations.  for example, for an  indian fruit­tree i can acquire recognition from      .  a description with words in a book.  but this recognition is like death; it is like when  one sees something at night.  now if something is described through    . word of mouth by someone who has seen it himself, then my recognition will become  much more lifelike because i can ask this person more questions if i do not quite  understand enough; this cannot happen with a book.  now if a foreign fruit tree is  presented      . in a copperplate engraving, or      . in a painting with living colors, or    . in a model from wax or wood, then the recognition is so much brighter and more  distinct, or                                                     “so vieles immer möglich ist soll alles was nur demonstriret wird in natura und in gegenwart des objecti  demonstriret werden.” semler, nützliche vorschläge ( ):  .   from comenius, schola ludus d. i. die schule als spiel.  translated by wilhelm bötticher (langensalza:  beyer,  ).  “das auge wird am meisten ergötzt durch naturgetreue darstellung sichtbarer dinge.”   quoted in kühnel,  .  i discuss halle pietists’ interest in affecting high quality forms of resemblance  between objects and their images in chapter six; for a nuanced discussion of resemblance or the  “representational model of vision based on species” see stuart clark, vanities of the eye, esp.  ­  and joel  snyder, “picturing vision,” critical inquiry   ( ):  ­ , reprinted in w.j.t. mitchell ed. the  language of images (chicago,  ).        . in nature itself and laid in the presence of the eyes.  this is without question above all  the previously listed grades, the highest degree of recognition and is what the gemüth can  derive the best ideas from.      now when these kinds of ocular demonstrations are applied to life­like, verbal lessons,  then the recognition of the thing will sink itself more deeply into the gemüth.  and it is  this highest grade of recognizing objects that is intended by this project, which endeavors  to show everything either in natura or in a model.       living representations of objects—ones that were colorful, bright and lifelike—left the  deepest impressions on an individual’s character.  they helped one reach a higher level  of consciousness—to see, and more importantly to understand, better and more easily.   like francke, who wanted his followers to test the relative quality or gradation of their  faith relative to others (especially archetypal figures from the gospels), semler was  offering a set of visual strategies for individuals to achieve higher forms of cognition by  engaging with real objects and their likenesses.     in a later formulation of this recognition typology from  , semler would  emphasize that the art of schooling could be greatly improved if children were introduced  “in their earliest years” to material expressions of ideas (ideas rerum materialium)  through three­dimensional models first, and then immaterial expressions of these same  ideas (ideas rerum immaterialium) through “short definitions and clear descriptions  (descriptiunculas).”  by presenting them with bits of sensualia first, “they will receive,  per autopsiam and through the ocular representation (darstellung) of each object, many                                                     christoph semler, nützliche vorschläge ( ):  .  comenius had also emphasized that whatever one  had seen with his own eyes, remained more firmly in the memory; in his estimation too, models and  pictures were second only to actually seeing and experiencing the thing in natura.  in his “methode für die  wissenschaften” in ahrbeck ed., grosse didaktik,  ­ .  „und weil der sinn der treuste haushofmeister  des gedächtnisses ist, wird jener sinnliche nachweis aller dinge zur folge haben, dass ein jeder das, was er  weiss, beständig weiss.  in der tat, wenn ich nur einmal zucker gekostet, einmal ein kamel gesehen,  einmal die nachtigall habe singen hören, einmal in rom gewesen bin und die stadt durchwandert habe  (wenn dies nur mit aufmerksamkeit geschehen ist), so haftet all das fest im gedächtniss und kann mir nicht  wieder entfallen.... wenn aber die dinge einmal fehlen, so kann man an ihrer stelle modelle oder bilder  nehmen, die man zu lernzwecken angefertigt hat.“      ideas  ) truly (veras),  ) clearly (claras),  ) distinctly (distinctas) and  ) completely  (completas), so that they can clearly (deutlich) recognize—meaning they can also  understand what people are saying when the object is talked about—thereby becoming  knowledgeable and rational people.”   semler remarked that this integrative method was  something he had been emphasizing and discussing with other members of halle’s  community for over thirty years.  his description of it is striking for its capacity to  resemble sentiments for which prominent members of the royal society had linked to an  experimental method and those championing preeminently mathematical ways of  knowing.  for example, robert hooke ( ­ ) had expressed in both the bestselling  micrographia ( ) and in his true method of building a solid philosophy that it was  first through a combination of the hands and the eyes that knowledge was acquired and  then traveled to the memory.   at the same time, semler’s reference to the roman  rhetorician quintilian’s characterization of evidence (truly, clearly, distinctly), which  stephen gaukroger has demonstrated lay behind much of descartes’ call for the use of  geometrical exercises to make manifest the relationships between ideas and the sensitive  soul, clearly links him to practitioners of geometrical method.   the holistic method he  was advocating, a form of anschauung, was endeavoring to take both starting points as                                                     christoph semler, “von königl. preussl. regierung des hertzogthums magdeburg und von der  berlinischen königl. societät derer wissenschafften approbirte und wieder eröffnete mathematische,  mechanische und öconomische real­schule bey der stadt halle” in the wöchentliche hallische anzeigen  (monday, february  ,  ),  ­ .   robert hooke, micrographia. some physiological descriptions of minute bodies made by magnifying  glasses with observations and inquiries thereupon (london,   [first edition]); robert hooke, "the  present state of natural philosophy" and "of the true method of building a solid philosophy, or of a  philosophical algebra" posthumous works . . . containing his cutlerian lectures and other discourses  (london,  ); see steven shapin, "who was robert hooke?" in michael hunter and simon schaffer eds.  robert hooke: new studies (woodbridge: boydell,  ):  ­ .   stephen gaukroger, “descartes' early doctrine of clear and distinct ideas,” journal of the history of  ideas   ( ):  ­ ; jones,  ­ .        true by privileging each community’s dependence on the eye—especially clearer,  “better” vision.      in the three formal descriptions of the school curricula he published, semler was  careful to align his project with the berlin academy of science, suggesting several ways  in which the lesson plans and descriptions of his schools can be seen as an expression of  this conciliatory body’s mandate.   this alignment also placed him firmly within the  same network of individuals with whom francke corresponded.  in both the   and   published descriptions, for example, he included an excerpt from the gutachtung  the society had produced and approved on december  ,   regarding his plans.  the  assessment, possibly penned by leibniz, included the following:  it seems advisable and feasible to allow boys, who are mostly taught reading, writing and  arithmetic in german schools, to be instructed in certain ideas, new developments and  exercises in a certain mechanical school, so that their understanding and their senses  will be opened up more and that they will learn about especially the most important  materials and objects, including how to recognize their worth and price, as well as about  the proportional circle, the lineal, weights and measures—including other scales of  measurement—and, whenever possible, how to use the globular microscope for a more  exact comprehension of the body, and other useful instruments… the recognition of  which will lead to the better understanding, practice and construction of useful  instruments.  among other things, it is hoped that the pupils of this school will acquire a  good sense of proportion (augenmaaβ), a steady hand, a sharpened ability to use the  outwardly senses, and a solid advantage in all tasks that present nature and move the  exercises forward….             the gutachtung specifically referenced the semler school’s capacity to “open up” or to  expand the capacities of young boys’ intellects and their senses—namely, their abilities  to improve both their cognitive and perceptive abilities through exercises in                                                     the first school semler started in   had folded by  ; his second attempt in   came to abrupt  end after his death in  .  these were his only formal attempts although, by all accounts, he continued to  tutor individual pupils in his home.     semler (february  ),  ­ .      anschauung.   semler’s school, like francke’s pedagogy, tschirnhaus’s “true method,”  leibniz’s academy and wolff’s guide to the mathematical sciences, endeavored to  improve and to reconcile children’s abilities to perceive with their ability to understand.     the approval of semler’s school by berlin academy members set off a flurry of  activity that directly involved francke’s institutes and orphanage.  semler explained that  shortly after he received the gutachtung, he began formal instruction in his priester­ wohnung—the apartment he had available to him for the carrying out of his ministerial  duties.   he hired a “litterato,” he wrote, “who was highly experienced in mathematics,  mechanics and oeconomie,” to direct the lessons, which continued for almost a year and  presented over “  objecta singularis” to pupils.   for reasons that have become lost to  us, he was forced to close the school possibly as early as   and would not be able to  formally reinstate it until  .  but in the period that elapsed between the closing of the  first school and its reopening, semler would continue to teach and build three­ dimensional models.  the philosopher georg frierich meier ( ­ ) would later  recount that semler was deeply involved in giving private lessons in the mathematical  and mechanical arts in halle and many of his models found their way into francke’s  foundation.  on may  th,  , meier remembered:  i was brought to halle.  i lived with my stepbrother, nicolaus heinrich spielberg, who  was a student and went to school in the house of m. christoph semler.  first i lived with                                                     horst bredekamp discusses leibiniz’s affinity for the visual metaphors of the theater and schauplatz  when describing his ideal akademie; see his “leibniz’ ideale akademie” in wilhelm vosskamp ed. ideale  akademie: vergangene zukunft oder konkrete utopie? (berlin: akademie verlag,  ):  ­ .   semler became a member of the berlin academy himself on june  ,  . see werner hartkopf, die  berliner akademie der wissenschaften ihre mitglieder und preistraeger,  ­  (berlin: akademie  verlag,  ):  .    semler was an adjunct of st. ulrich’s church in halle from   to  , and a deacon from   to  , after which he remained as a minister.  francke was an adjunct of the same church from   to   and took over as deacon after semler in   (until  ).  this according to gotthilf august  francke in a letter to the new prussian king, dated february  ,  .   the literato’s name was christian benit, a student at the university of halle, about whom (unfortunately)  very little else is known.      my stepbrother and then on the  rd of march,  , master semler took me fully into his  own house.  and there i remained until the year  .  i owe a great deal to this properly  fashioned man.    he was a lover of mathematics.  he built the two himmelsphären, globes, presentations  of the routes of the planets, the city of jerusalem, the stifthütte of moses and the temple  of solomon that are all in the orphanage’s cabinet of curiosity; every day, three  informatores were received from the waisenhaus, who would each teach us for two hours  a piece.  in his house was also a mechanical fabrique.  he worked on building earthly and  celestial globes and we children helped him with this.  he instilled in us, playfully, a love  of mathematics this way.    i am especially thankful for the following way in which he directed my studies:  . he let us be instructed in pure mathematics (mathesi pura) and so, very early on, i  received a love of thinking in the scientific way (zu der scientischen art zu denken) and  in my  th year, i could demonstrate all of the clauses in wolff’s excerpt from the  mathematical sciences, especially arithmetic, geometry and trigonometry.    .  he made me learn the latin language through reading the authors and through  speaking; he never let me be bothered with the rote­memorization of grammar.      meier’s report confirms much of the lore around semler and his relationship to francke’s  organization.  the globes and models he produced in his mechanical workshop found  their way into francke’s orphanage, where they were displayed prominently.  the halle  orphanage was apparently also sending their own teachers to semler, suggesting a great  deal of convergence between the goals of the realschule and the forms of instruction  available in francke’s foundation.  meier also made an indirect reference to semler’s  ability to make mathematics ludus, by this point a kind of trope connecting semler’s  pedagogy to comenius’s scholae ludus and to leibniz.   samuel lange, one of joachim lange’s sons and co­author of george meier’s  autobiography, would also note that he too had studied with semler.  he explained that                                                     in samuel gotthold lange, leben georg friedrich meiers (halle,  ):  ­ .  meier became a  member of the berlin academy in  .  semler’s entry in  the zedler universallexikon indicates that  semler’s models (especially his “astronomical machines” and models of the temple) were “not only to be  seen in halle’s orphanage, but in many distant locations such as petersburg, riga, copenhagen, landau,  dresden, berlin, nürnberg, erfurt, helmstedt und stettin, where they were sent out of love (auf begehren).”   johann heinrich zedler, grosses vollständiges universal­lexikon, vol.   (leipzig/halle,  ):   .   see my discussion of the extension and replication of the halle method, via the circulation of models and  other artifacts, in chapter eight.      his admiration of semler was so strong that he was compelled to talk about him often  with his friends.  he also described semler’s interest in creating a realschule as pia  desideria—a clear indication of semler’s connections to comenius, spener, francke and  anschauung; like meier, who readily connected semler’s school to francke’s  waisenhaus, lange linked semler’s methods up with the conciliatory visual training that  had become a hallmark of francke’s community in halle.  lange explained that  semler was a great mathematician.  he was also one of the greatest mechanics of his time  and, at the same time, a great astronomer.  his knowledge of physics was exceptional.   he was the first founder of a school that would become famous as a realschule and  published a small treatise about his suggestion for a mechanical school for all artists and  artisans.  at the time this was pia desideria.  after it became realized, his name was not  remembered.  he said that models of all types of wartime and civil architecture, and the  art of building ships, should be constructed.  he said that models of wind and watermills  should be made.  the suggestions that were realized in the finished models that are now  in the halle waysenhaus… all of these came from him.     lange insisted that it was semler who had provided meier with „an introduction to the art  of observing the whole and all of the parts that fit within it.”  in s. lange’s estimation,  “the spirit” of meier, whose philosophy would become linked with wolff’s (especially in  wolff’s second tenure at the university of halle) was directly attributable to the  education he received from semler.  because of this education, meier “could take all of  the clear philosophical particulars and see them as wheels—well divided wheels that fit  somehow into larger whole…. it was at the hands of this kind of man,” lange wrote,  “that meier learned to think, to test, to differentiate and to find.”                                                        ibid.   ibid.  for the relationship between meier’s philosophy and wolffianism see richard pozzo, “prejudices  and horizons: g.f. meier’s vernunftlehre and its relation to kant” journal of the history of philosophy  :  ( ): esp.   ff.        while very little is known about francke and semler’s relationship, as early as   both were listed as adjunct ministers of halle’s st. ulrich church.   according to  his own records, francke purchased a large model of solomon’s temple from semler for   taler in  .   he also paid semler   taler for the two large models of the  universe, or himmelsphären, that meier indicated were available for viewing in the  orphanage’s curiosity cabinet.   in   francke would report to his patron carl  hildebrand von canstein that semler had given him all the models from his realschule  so that he could start his own mechanical school in the stiftungen.  canstein responded  that he was overjoyed to learn that francke “had received the mechanical school.”  he  said he hoped that “the entire consilium of herr magister semler could at the very least  be accomplished,” indicating the way in which the plans and school were linked to the  larger conciliatory ideal of the berlin academy and its members.   when the prussian                                                     both men were appointed members (alongside their colleague freylinghausen) of a royal commission,  formed in  , to investigate allegations of corrupt handling of the church’s “widow’s fund;” a letter to  king friedrich wilhelm (dated february  ,  ) contains a report from this commission that refers to the  archdeacon francke as magister semler’s “good friend.”  gspk, i ha rep   nr  b ( ­ ).  according to wachtler, semler was confessor to francke’s son­in­law and baptized three of francke’s  grandchildren, although he cites no specific evidence of this.  a. wächtler, august hermann francke als  pastor zu st. ulrich  ­ : festschrift der st. ulrichsgemeinde in halle zu der   jährigen jubelfeier  der franckeschen stiftungen (halle: niemeyer,  ).  nikolaus maassen has portrayed semler and  francke as enemies, arguing that semler was not only in close contact with christian thomasius, who had  openly criticized francke’s anstalt, but had been one of the city authorities who had signed the letter to the  king (cited above) voicing concerns about the manner in which francke was putting his teachings into  practice in halle.  while these two pieces of evidence clearly indicate that francke and semler’s  relationship must be approached with caution, there is certainly more evidence of a great deal of productive  exchange between the two figures than dissonance.  for maassen’s discussion see geschichte der mittel­  und realschulpädagogik vol.  ,  ­ .  we have only one original letter from semler to francke in which  semler specifically requested francke, who was then in berlin, to use his influence at the prussian court to  help an acquaintance (h. wesener) maneuver out of some debt­related problems he was experiencing.   afst/h rs:   [march  ,  ]   afst/w rep.  fach   nr.  [specification der einahmen und ausgaben wegen der mechanischen  disciplinen   bis  …]:  .   thomas müller­bahlke, "der realienunterricht in den schulen august hermann franckes," in: schulen  machen geschichte:   jahre erziehung in den franckeschen stiftungen zu halle (halle/saale: verlag  der franckeschen stiftungen,  ):  .   canstein responded to francke (july  ,  ): „es ist mir eine hertzliche freude, dass sie nun die  mechanische schule bekommen haben. meines erinnerns bedarf es wohl nicht, dass noch dazu gethan  werden, was etwa noch fehlet, als dann konte das gantze consilium des h.m.semlers wenigstens      king visited francke’s foundation on august  ,  , callenberg reported that one of  the first places francke took him was “through the mechanical room,” where several of  semler’s models were on display.        one year after he had purchased semler’s model of solomon’s temple, francke’s  press printed a guide, also penned by semler, containing detailed instructions for  demonstrating the temple to audiences (see appendix  ).  the guide contained the same  typology for fostering the highest degree of recognition possible in potential viewers,  meaning that while the manual contained copperplate engravings to look at when one  could not view the “material presentation,” it also contained instructions for how to view  the “actual model” on display in the orphanage.   like observing a model of the temple,  reading about that same temple while observing it, as lorraine daston has noted, “means  also to see. the eye is as engaged as the mind, as the scholar’s spectacles bear rueful  witness. the latin verb legere means to read, to select, but also to survey or to  observe.”   reading was a part of anschauung.  in order to understand the “many  strange histories” contained in the bible, “the foundation of our faith,” semler explained  that all individuals needed to acquire some “knowledge of the topography” of the holy  land—including, he wrote, some “cognition of palestine, jerusalem and the situation of                                                                                                                                                    grossentheils bewerckstelliget werden...“ in peter schicketanz ed., der briefwechsel carl hildebrand von  cansteins mit august hermann francke (berlin: walter de gruyter,  ).  thomas müller­bahlke’s  “realienunterricht” ( ) provides the best overview of this story, esp.  .   in kramer, august hermann francke ( ):  .  i discuss semler and francke’s understanding of  mechanics and motion in chapter seven.   christoph semler, der tempel salomonis: nach allen seinen vorhöfen, mauren, thoren, hallen,  heiligen gefässen, ... nebst allen und jeden in folgender beschreibung und beygefügten kupferstücken  enthaltenen theilen desselben, in einem eigentlichen modell und materiellen fürstellung (halle:  waysenhaus,  ).     daston continues, “there are many examples from the sixteenth century onward of anatomists and  naturalists conducting observations with books in hand, triangulating between word, image, and thing. in  these cases, reading and observing are so tightly integrated as to form a single practice.” in lorraine  daston, “taking note(s)” isis   ( ):  ; more discussion of this relationship in a much earlier context  can be found in michael camille, “seeing and reading: some visual implications of medieval literacy  and illiteracy,” art history,  ,  : – .  see also johns,  ­ .      the temple.  this fosters a clearer recognition of the worship services of the old  testament, including the ceremonies of the levites.”   but while the authors’ descriptions  and the copperplate engravings contained in his text could provide some guide, nothing  provided more “distinct and living ideas” than actually “seeing the entire temple in a  material presentation and model standing before the eyes.”  by viewing a model of the  temple, those who had “only a dark concept” would receive a “bright and clear” one.   hearing or reading about the history animating and surrounding the temple would “press  (or imprint) upon the gemüth more deeply” so that one would become more fully  convinced of the truth.   the model’s utility and power lay in stirring up the imagination  but in such a way as to evoke a more intense and meaningful edification (erbauung).    the text conveys semler’s interest in regulating the quality of edification one  experienced; it also portrayed models as tools for generating high quality sensations in  the soul’s lower faculties so as to positively affect better forms of cognition.  that  francke also appreciated three­dimensional models for the higher quality of recognition  they could generate in a person’s soul, thereby heightening a person’s abilities of  perception and remedying the problem of the imagination’s intrinsic unreliability, is  perhaps most evident in a letter he wrote to the crown prince in berlin on august  ,  .  the letter accompanied a model of jerusalem, likely built by semler, which  francke had promised to send a few months earlier, during his extended stay at the  prussian court.  francke wrote to the young prince that he hoped the model would serve  as “a medium for the channeling of the spirit of god,” that would awaken the prince “to                                                     in this text, semler also relates the story of his collaboration with a jewish rabbi, whom he says was  moved to construct his own larger model of the temple after seeing semler’s—a model that apparently was  also displayed in the orphanage.  he indicates that the models garnered a great deal of attention from the  local jewish community, some of whom came to the orphanage several times to “hear the demonstrations”  because they “wanted to see their temple.”  in semler,  der tempel salomonis ( ): xvi.          desire and love the holy word.”  he said he hoped that his presentation of this “form of  jerusalem” would make the process of constituting the prince’s gemüth  (gemüthsverfassung) more pleasant (angenehmer),” since “the frequent observation of it  and the comparison of it with the holy scriptures according to the printed guidelines i  have sent along, can yield all kinds of benefits, so that the word of god is approached  with more and more desire [my emphasis], especially with the help of historical and  geographical commentary, through which ever more uses and edificatory applications can  be derived.”   pupils of his pädagogium were also directed to regularly view models of  the temple during their periods of exercise because, as francke’s associate hieronymous  freyer explained, “showing this while reading the old and new testaments provides a  huge light and makes many beautiful locations and sayings very clear that one would  otherwise not understand very well.”   the significance francke’s community attached to the model as an edificatory  and didactic medium, as well as a carrier of information, resembles the way in which  several individuals, including johann jacob scheuchzer (also a member of the berlin  academy) would link the significance of semler’s temple of jerusalem to its capacity to  serve as the highest quality architectural muster or example available to man—a  masterpiece, worthy of emulation.   as we have seen, the construction of three­                                                    quoted in kramer, august hermann francke,  ­ .     hieronymous freyer, verbesserte methode, n.  :  “es ist von diesem tempel im pädagogio ein grosses  und von holz fabricirtes modell,   elen lang und breit, vorhanden und eigentlich zu dem ende  angeschaffet worden, dass die structur und beschaffenheit desselben den anvertrauten recht bekant  gemachet werden solte: weil solches bey lesung der heiligen schrift altes und neues testaments ein  grosses licht gibt und manchen schönen ort und spruch sehr deutlich macht, den man sonst nicht so wohl  verstehen kann.” freyer also noted that “aside from this model, there is to see a model of the city of  jerusalem and the holy land in the orphanage, also constructed in the same way, which the scholars are  also shown.”   “der tempel salomnis wird von allen schrifft und bau verständigen als das vollkommenste muster und  meister stück der civil­bau­kunst angesehen.“ scheuchzer, physica sacra ( ):  .  for some recent      dimensional models of the temple (and the calibration of their measurements) was a  major preoccupation of several members of leibniz and jablonski’s academy.  l. c.  sturm and conrad mel (see chapters two and three), both in direct contact with  francke, were especially active in this regard.  scheuchzer, who became a member of the  academy in  , would stress that it was very important, “above all things, to place a  horizontal and a vertical, perspectival projection of the entire temple under the eyes of  the worthy and knowledge­seeking reader so that he can see it in its entirety and grasp the  most important parts in his memory.”   his physica sacra contained a copperplate  engraving of semler’s model of the temple that scheuchzer described as being housed in  francke’s orphanage and of exceptionally high quality.   when semler donated his realschule lesson plans and models to francke in  ,  francke did not start a new mathematical and mechanical school in his anstalt but rather  integrated them into the curricula of his own schools.   the content of the “semler lesson  plans,” then, is exceedingly important because, perhaps more than anything else, it  conveys the depth of both men’s commitment to three­dimensional models as specially  designated tools for conditioning conciliatory ways of seeing (and being) in their pupils.   the plans help me to more conclusively link semler’s school and francke’s institutes  with the conciliatory mandate of the berlin academy and its participants.  they allow us  a much fuller understanding of how and why three­dimensional models became  implicated in the great systems building projects of the early eighteenth century—                                                                                                                                                   work on scheuchzer see robert felfe, naturgeschichte als kunstvolle synthese: physikotheologie und  bildpraxis bei johann jakob scheuchzer (berlin: akad. verlag,  ) and irmgard müsch, geheiligte  naturwissenschaft: die kupfer­bibel des johann jakob scheuchzer (göttingen : vandenhoeck & ruprecht,  ).   scheuchzer, physica sacra ( ):  .  for scheuchzer’s membership in leibniz’s academy see  hartkopf,  .   scheuchzer, physica sacra ( ):  ­ .       including how they were relied upon to construct the individuals capable of sustaining  and understanding these same projects.  francke and semler were in the business of  training conciliatory gemüther and employed a series of technologies that they borrowed  from several individuals (plato, comenius, tschirnhaus, the sturms) and several different  disciplines in order to accomplish their goals.   in particular the lesson plans reveal a  special preoccupation with models of buildings, cities and the heavens, and using these  models in conjunction with the demonstration of various instruments and two­ dimensional geometrical projections (grundrissen).  the plans also provide some  evidence of just how nebulous the relationship between three­dimensional model and  horizontal projections was in practice in this moment.  wolff privileged the grundriss,  not the model, and in the plans we actually see the authors of certain lessons endeavoring  (by relying heavily on wolff) to integrate two­dimensional geometrical projection into a  recognition typology that privileges three­dimensional forms.     malcolm baker’s essay on “representing invention and viewing models” in  enlightenment england acknowledges the longstanding importance, since the fifteenth  century, of the architectural model as “an explanatory device to help patrons to  understand a proposed design as well as to persuade them to proceed with a scheme.”    in one of his many commentaries and published editions of nicholas goldmann’s  architectural treatises (short presentation of civil architecture), leonard christoph  sturm similarly explained that it was important for architects to produce a representation  of an idea (vorbildung) of a building to serve as a “medium through which the architect                                                     malcolm baker, “representing invention and viewing models” in de chadarevian and hopwood eds.,  models,  ; he relies on john wilton­ely’s work in his discussion, especially the architect’s vision:  historic and modern architectural models (nottingham: university of nottingham,  ) and idem. “the  architectural model.” architectural review   ( ):  ­ .      can help others recognize how a designated building should or will be constructed.”   another strategy (one which semler had pointed out was a superior strategy) for  representing buildings, l.c. sturm wrote, was having an “idea materialis, modello,  modelle, model or muster” as when “a building is built to appear in miniature according  to a certain scale in such a way that the building itself appears like the large building does  or will.”   but in baker’s estimation, this way of thinking about the architectural model  as an “explanatory device,” or a “representation of an idea,” did not give way to the use  of these same kinds of models as educational aids until the end of the eighteenth century.   my evidence suggests that not only was halle awash in architectural models in the first  decades of the eighteenth century, but that their status as didactic instruments was widely  acknowledged.  in francke’s institutes, the architectural model became a site for the  practicing or acting out of philanthropic impulses which placed them at the heart of the  pedagogical regimens of paideia.  models, as the second best means of generating high  quality forms of recognition, had the capacity to duly represent a pansophic ideal—  generating concurrence between the model of the orphanage and the model of the temple  in jerusalem (as though each one resembled the other)—and to participate in the  inculcation of these same ideals by becoming the focal points of individual lessons, the  site to which all gemüther would focus their attention.  certainly, members of francke’s  community and correspondents drew heavily on the legacy of the architectural model as  an “explanatory device,” but they also adapted it to their unique pedagogical needs and  institutional aims.                                                       leonard christoph sturm, kurtze vorstellung der gantzen civil baukunst ( ):  ­ , “von der  vorstellung der gebäude.”       several of the   individual lessons contained in the semler plan are oriented  around three­dimensional models of some sort of building or collection of buildings.   there is a lesson based on a model of a house and the city of halle (with its most  prominent physical structures), a glass­making hut (glasshütte), brewing and baking  houses (brauhaus und bachhaus), a salt mill, a chemical laboratory and a fortress  (festung).  models of the orphanage building, the temple of jerusalem and the stiftshütte  were also circulating in the schulstadt; however, they are not directly implicated here.  in  most of these cases, the three­dimensional miniature building served as a signifier for a  set of practices or technologies being employed inside of it—providing the perfect point  of entry for explaining those same practices.  for example, a revealing subtitle follows a  lesson entitled “model of a house”—namely “model of a house, and what the work of a  carpenter involves.”  the lesson begins with a description of the materials needed to  construct any house (wood, especially pine), then the instruments (an ax, a winkel­eisen,  a bley­wage…) and then the effects.  the first few sentences of the effectus section read:  “this is a model of a house, or a meisterstück that has been made according to a scale  (maßstäbe).  it is ___ long, ___ wide and ___ high.  the following pieces are contained  within it…”.    the three­dimensional model of the house becomes a conciliatory site in  which to see how the various materials, instruments and skills of the carpenter come  together.    in most (if not all) of the three­dimensional models of buildings displayed in  lessons, the structure itself could be presented to viewers in “closed” or “opened” form.   when the model of glashütte building is closed, it appears to the viewer as a white house  with hardly any other defining markers of its interior life or animating principle; only                                                     afst/h e  , semler lehrplan,  .      once it is opened and the various materials, instruments and practices engaged in inside  the walls are explained does the small white structure begin to stand in for the special  combination of skill, craftsmanship, nature and technology contained inside of it.  more  important than the precise arrangement of the materials contained within the model,  however, were the exercises (sinnliche Übungen) that invested the object with meaning,  especially the questions viewers were asked so as to gauge the quality of the experience  they had obtained while viewing it.  here is where the “edificatory applications” of these  mediums are most apparent.  the exercises contained within the lessons (usually placed  at the end) included exercises in arithmetica, geometria, mechanica, statica, historia et  chronologia and theologia, with the theology exercises being the most detailed.  the  “model of a house” lesson started with a bible verse (  corinthians: ) and then  presented a series of questions:   ) how does god decree that houses should be oriented? towards hope.    ) what is this house made of?   ) who lets these things grow upon the earth?  ) can a person be constructed out of wood?  ) what purpose do these houses serve?  ) can one live in a small house as merrily as one can live in a beautiful palace?  ) does god know what happens inside all houses?  ) can god allow us to be expelled from our houses and hunted down?  ) what happens to houses during war?  ) what will be our house of residence be when we die?     these “theological exercises” contained at the end of the “model of a house” lesson are  striking for their ability to link the model’s status as a conciliatory signifier of practices,  materials and rational principles with edification and the message of hope, or moral  improvement via anschauung so prominent in the community of halle at the time these  lessons were written.  the model’s capacity to evoke “brighter” forms of recognition via  the sensitive faculties of the soul is drawn upon here to inspire higher forms of                                                     ibid.,  .      edification, intuition and perception in young viewers.  and this is constructed as simply  another “form of exercise,” presented in conjunction with exercises in arithmetic,  geometry, mechanics, statics and history.  reflecting on the divine origin of trees is a  form of exercise connected to viewing a model of the house—to be engaged in around  the same moment as one practiced constructing an angle “like the carpenter” or used the  carpenter’s measuring tools in various exercises.    semler understood his method for conditioning a more perfect form of  recognition as contingent upon a certain set of strategies for representing material forms  to the eye.  the presentation (darstellung) of the three­dimensional models he  constructed was to occur in a formal setting where individuals would be introduced to the  ) concreta,  ) particularia, and then  ) sensualia and individualia; when viewing  models of the holy land and temple; he wrote, “in some cases the [viewer’s] eyes would  be directed to short biblical phrases and sayings” placed in prominent positions above or  next to the space “where the demonstrations happen, transpire and are explained.”    demonstration, in semler’s formulation here, involved the directing of the eyes, via the  model, and the directing of the attention via explanation, or the inculcation of rational  principles.  like anschauung, demonstrating merged cognition and perception and was  therefore the method of choice for the “eminent erudites, dignitaries and other  experienced individuals,” who had lent their names to semler’s cause.  all of those  semler claimed to have spoken with about his ocular method were resoundingly  supportive; especially, he said, the director of the university (christian thomasius),  christoph cellarius (philosophy and antiquity), friedrich hoffmann (medicine) and                                                     ibid.   hallische anzeigen (february  ,  ):  .      christian wolff (mathematics), “animated me in my propositions and promised me every  possible assistance.”     in his mathematical lexicon from  , christian wolff defined a demonstration  as a “kind of proof that allows itself to be parsed into several formal conclusions in such  a way that…no claim can be turned into a conclusion that has not been proven.”   he  explained that the best illustration of the art of demonstration he was championing could  be found in his elements of geometry, which also conditioned individuals to observe  “drawn and presented figures” upon which they were “to direct their thoughts.”  like  semler and francke, wolff valued and promoted anschauung.  directing one’s attention  to “the things that reach one through the senses” could condition more powerful or clear  moments of cognition by bringing other useful pieces of information into one’s memory.   and more than simply calibrating the power of sensation with the cognitive capacities of  the soul in isolated conciliatory gestures or performances, each of these figures was  interested in the prospect of cultivating personas who did this constantly.  they wanted to  teach children to approach the world demonstratively and experientially—that is to link  the experiences filtered through their senses to the rational propositions contained within  their memories.    however, wolff did not feature three­dimensional models prominently in his  beginner’s guide, nor did he offer a definition of the three­dimensional model in his  mathematical lexicon.  instead he emphasized the two­dimensional modul as “a maas  that reconciled various heights, widths and depths with each other to establish a certain,                                                     ibid.   christian wolff, mathematisches lexicon (leipzig,  ):   ff.  reprinted in gesammelte werke, part  one: volume  .      ideally simple, proportional relationship.”   the maas linked cognition and perception  via precision and proportionality, by forcing the two “pillars” to assimilate according to  certain, geometrical axioms—thereby making the three­dimensional model, or third  conciliatory site, less critical.  in some ways, the relationship between three­dimensional  models and two­dimensional drawings has always been varied and contested, as those  working as architects in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries also understood.  but in  some cases, the model was imagined as a superior medium for more accurately rendering  all of a physical structure’s proportional relationships.  the seventeenth­century british  architect sir roger pratt, for example, in attempting to explain his preference for models  over drawings said that “whereas all the other drafts do only superficially and  disjointedly represent unto us the several parts of a building, a model does it jointly, and  according to all its dimensions.”   however, baker emphasizes how important it is not to  characterize the relationship between three­dimensional models and two­dimensional  drawings in terms of a “straightforward development from  ­d to  ­d.”   here we have  a very interesting example of how the two­dimensional grundriss becomes imagined as a  superior form of representation because of the kind of reconciliation it fostered.    wolff defined architecture as “the science of properly specifying a building so  that it corresponds completely with the main intentions of the master builder” in the first  volume of his beginner’s guide ( ).  he explained that while most people still  considered architecture a trade (handwerk) and tended not to think of it as a  mathematical science, in his opinion it ought to be taught in academies to youths                                                     ibid.,  .   quoted by baker, “representing invention” in de chadarevian and hopwood eds, models,  .     ibid.      planning to study at universities.   the semler lehrplan contains two lessons in  architecture that begin with wolff’s definition of baukunst and incorporate, sometimes  word for word, his treatment of the discipline.  they attest to the ways in which the three­ dimensional model’s status as a superior conciliatory site in the semler typology was  being imagined (and tested) relative to the technologies of geometrical projection that  wolff had introduced in halle.    one lesson is called “about the ground plan or horizontal projection (grundriss)  of a building” and promises that the ground plan and “what it causes to be remembered”  will allow architecture to be “actually” or “materially” handled.   it involves the ocular  technologies of anschauung but it is one of the only lessons that does not revolve around  a three­dimensional model.   it also mimics wolff’s emphasis on the graceful  appearance of buildings and basic proportional relationships ( : ,  : ) to stir the soul  because “the soul desires that what it can easily grasp.”  wolff had offered his readers  three axioms (grundsätze) and one theorem (lehrsatz) at the outset of his beginner’s  guide: namely: “ ) every building must be staged or situated solidly,  ) one can judge the  durability of a building by how long it stands,  ) every building must be built  comfortably.”  the first theorem included this statement: “a building must be built  beautifully and gracefully.”  the next portion of the semler lesson mimicked these  axioms: “the building master must observe the following:   ) the strength or durability of  building (wolff’s   and  ),  ) the comfort or coziness  ) the beauty and grace” of the                                                     christian wolff, anfangsgründe der baukunst [ st ed.  ] (halle,  ),  .  reprinted in  gesammelte werke, part one: volume  .     afst/h e  , semler lehrplan,  .   there are just a couple changes to the word order of wolff’s definition in the semler plan definition.   wolff: “die baukunst ist eine wissenschaft, ein gebäude recht anzugeben, dass es nemlich mit den haupt­ absichten des bau­herrn in allem völlig überein kommt.”  lehrplan: “die baukunst ist eine wissenschaft  ein gebäude rechtanzugeben, dass es mit dem haupt absichten des bauherrns übereinkämte in allen  völlig.”        building.  the semler lesson then boiled down wolff’s systematic discussion of  eurythmie to a few “points of observation” and discussed, in depth, the art of creating  and applying geometrical projection techniques.     the producer of this text was especially interested in helping his audience  understand these techniques, including why different forms of architectural drawing were  necessary:  . the hauptriss is made when the baumeister wants to make his invention easier to  stage; sketches of the rooms’ layout in a given space are rendered with easy lines.  .  the grundriss is made when one wants to depict not only the order and spacing of the  rooms, like with the hauptriss, but instead when one wants to draw up a likeness that  shows the thickness of the walls, the width of the windows, the placement of the stoves,  fireplace, oven etc. and their distance from arches as well.    .  the aufriss shows the height and width of the outward walls, doors, windows, and  other adornments.  . the durchschnitt or pensill… presents the height of the rooms or the profile of the  building, as if it has been cut down the middle…  . the perspectivische riss presents all sides of a building at once.  of these kinds of  renderings, the grundriss and aufriss are the most important.  we will stay with the  grundriss now, of which the following things should be noticed…     the rest of the lesson demonstrated the detailed components of the grundriss to the  viewer.  revealingly, the lesson that immediately follows the lesson in architecture is  oriented around the demonstration of a “model of a city with its houses, walls.”  only the  lesson giver is careful to note that “we have already had a horizontal projection of  halle.”   it seems that this anonymous lesson writer had hit upon a new tool for  conditioning conciliatory forms of recognition in young people.  faced with new  synthesis of mathematical knowledge wolff offered in the beginner’s guide, the author  was engaged in expanding the semler recognition typology to include wolff’s emphasis  on geometrical projection techniques.  in this largely derivative lesson, the two­                                                    christian wolff, anfangsgründe der baukunst [ st ed.  ] (halle,  ),  .  reprinted in  gesammelte werke, part one: volume  .     afst/h e  , semler lehrplan,  .   ibid.,  .      dimensional grundriss had managed to momentarily supplant the model on the  schauplatz as a superior conciliatory tool.  however, the models and instruments in  francke’s orphange remained important “sites” for affecting higher forms of knowledge  through desire, or the heart.      models as instruments,  instruments as models    in addition to architectural models and rissen, the semler plan (and testimonies  from former students) reveal that several models of the universe (himmelsphären) were  also on display in francke’s orphanage.  by all accounts, they were employed in lessons,  and the lehrplan provides a useful window into how these lessons worked.  the plan’s  himmelsphäre demonstrations were by far the most detailed of those contained in the  lessons and included over   individual demonstreturs in conjunction with descriptions  of almost twenty other astronomical instruments that could be “found in the  orphanage.”   this raises the question of exactly how to understand the relationship  between model and instrument in the context of pietist philanthropy.  in a recent article,  adam mosley takes issue with james bennett’s contention that in the sixteenth century,  globes and armillary spheres were understood alongside astrolabes and other measuring  instruments mainly as calculating devices, not models.   mosley prefers to see  mathematical instruments (including the astronomical sphere or globe) “as models  embodying and communicating novel cosmological theories,” whereas bennett, in his                                                     afst/h e  , semler lehrplan,  .  adam mosley, “objects of knowledge: mathematics and models in sixteenth­century cosmology and  astronomy,” in sachiko kusukawa and ian maclean, transmitting knowledge: words, images and  instruments in early modern europe (oxford: oxford university press,  ):  ­ ; james a. bennett,  “geometry in the context of the sixteenth­century: the view from the museum” in early science and  medicine  : ( ): esp.  ­  and anthony turner, early scientific instruments: europe  ­   (london,  ).      estimation, delimits their significance.  mosley’s critique, valid or not, points to the  liminal or unstable relationship between the categories mathematical instrument and  three­dimensional model in any period, including this one.  it also lends credence to my  contention that in early eighteenth­century halle, the himmelsphäre could easily have  been imagined as a medium capable of doing several things at once—calculating,  communicating, assimilating and signifying.  it was in precisely this convergence that the  boundary between instruments and models was blurred.  as we saw in chapter two, in the meier biography, samuel lange explained that  the heavenly spheres on display in francke’s orphanage presented “the systems of both  tycho brahe and copernicus.  both are ordered in such a way that the precise movement  of the whole universe and individual pieces, including the moons of the planets, can be  guided with a single twist so that they agree with real time, eclipses and all other  movements.”    in a conciliatory anstalt, oriented around the reconciliation of points of  view rooted in fundamentally opposing starting points—the sun vs. the earth or intuition  vs. experience—the demonstration of astronomical models provided an ideal opportunity  to construct, via the three­dimensional model, a visual solution to seemingly  irreconcilable difference.  a “system or hypothesis,” the author explained in a lesson  called simply “on astronomy,” is only “an ordained idea (ordinirte vorstellung) about  the places and movements ascribed to planets and made according to observations.”    even though the systema ptolemaicum was “entirely dismissed today,” he said, it was                                                     s. lange, leben,  ­ .   a short note at the outset of this lesson indicates that it was offered for the first time on the day of a real  solar eclipse (september  ,  ), afst/h e  , semler lehrplan,  .  “systema oder hypothesis ist  einer nach den observationen ordinierte vorstellung aller planeten nach ihren gehörig platzen und  bewegungen.”      still explained to pupils alongside the systema copernicum and the systema tychonicum  while directing their attention to the various models representing these vorstellungen.    the “globus coelertis artificialis,” the author continued, “is an artfully constructed  sphere, upon which the movements of the heavens are transmitted and presented through  real cycles and figures.”   the lesson giver was to use the spheres to illustrate a “system  or hypothesis” at the same time as he shared information about the materiality of the  medium itself.  “here it is also said,” he noted, “how the globes are made and it is also  shown how and with what it is they are covered with.”   a related section in the plans,  entitled astronomia mechanica or actual models of the universe after the systems of  copernicus and tycho brahe, noted that the models were “built in my ministerial  quarters,” suggesting semler produced some of these sections himself.   dreyhaupt noted  that the brahe and copernican spheres were   shoes in diameter, took semler a total of  three years to build and cost around   taler.   semler stated that he was especially  proud of what he called the “unique worth” of these two spheres; they were special  because they presented “the planets and fixed stars—including their movements through  the heavens.”   they also were special, he said, because when both were demonstrated  together (that is, at the same time), one could see more clearly.  “when one has the two                                                     afst/h e  , semler lehrplan,  ­ .  “astronomia ist eine wissenschafft von einrichtung der  ganzen welt.  globus coelestis artificialis ist eine künstliche gemachte kugel auf welcher das  himmelslauff vermittelst etlicher circul und figuren furgestellet wird.  sie ist macherley: globus solidus  eine dichte kugel, globus annularis einer kugel von laut siegen, planischphaerium coelerte, wie eine  landcharte gestallt, coniglobium ein stern­kügel, welcher ohl ist, bestehet aus   stücken, einen  mitternächtigen und mittagigen...”.    ibid. “hierbey ist auch gesaget worden, wie die globi gemacht werden und auch gezeiget, wie und  womit sie uberzogen werden.”   dreyhaupt, ausführliche diplamtisch­historische beschreibung des .. .saal­kreyses...(halle,  ):  .   included in dreyhaupt’s description of semler’s inventions are “zwei himmels­sphären, das systema  tychonichum und copernicanum vorstellend,   schuh im diameter so über   rthl. gekostet, und    jahr mit deren verfertigung zugebracht worden, stehen eben daselbst.”     „astronomia mechanica oder eigentlichen modell das grossen welt gebaudes nach dem systemate  copernicano und tychanico,“ in afst/h e  , semler lehrplan,  ,  ,   and  .      systemata in sphaeris, the differences between them both fall in a very lifelike manner  into the eyes,” he remarked.  having both systemata “in sphaeris” was not only a  “singulare,” it opened the door to an extended form of sensibility through observation, or  anschauung.   the eye’s capacity to see was heightened via a form of betrachten that  conditioned higher forms of comprehending natural laws, contradictory ideas and the  beauty of the divine.  reflecting on the divine via the inner and outer eye, or heart,  allowed one to bring together what only appeared, on the surface, to be radically  opposing points of view.   we direct our attention to the model (or schauplatz), semler explained, just like  we direct our eyes to the heavens for inspiration.  “the heavens are the most beautiful  parts of the world. when we pray, we raise our eyes to the heavens.  this is why  solomon inaugurated the temple through a beautiful prayer and stretched out his hands  toward the heavens: because the visible heavens are a model (fürbild) of the majesty of  god.”   three­dimensional models of the universe were representations of an inherently  conciliatory (and perfect) world in which substance and supreme wisdom were magically  interwoven.  “the entire world is like a mirror,” semler continued in a section that could  just as well been penned by leibniz, “wherein one sees god all at once.  especially the  heavens present and open up god’s majesty through their brilliance, splendor and beauty;  they present god’s infinitude through their amplitude and size, his wisdom through their  beautiful structure, his all­powerfulness through their strength, solidness and consistency,  his goodness through their influence and utility and his unity through their circular                                                     ibid.,  .      form.”   the world itself also provided the perfect opportunity to witness the schauplatz  of the divine.  “the world is our almighty god’s enormous schauplatz, in which god  turns us into spectators and opens up to his power, intelligence and wonderfulness to us,”  semler wrote.  “but since the human eye cannot take in the entire world and its broad  reaching heavens at once, people have invented a few useful machines that are quite  current and that present imitations of the heavens and its spheres; they are merely  silhouettes of the enormous originals and present a lifelike coelum representativem.”   visualizing, through “living representations,” the principles of harmony at work  in the universe by placing models of the “majesty of god” on the schauplatz was only  one component of conciliatory visual training.  another involved the cultivation of the  ability to actually adopt (and to assimilate in the heart) different points of view—to see  precisely like someone else would see who was approaching the world from an entirely  different starting point—and to recognize various gradations of difference.  for example,  just as francke urged his followers to test the degree or quality of their faith relative to  others (see chapter four), the lessons attached a great deal of importance to cultivating                                                     ibid.,  ­ .  “die weite welt ist wie ein spiegel darinne man gleichsam gott siehet.  sonderlich aber  präsentiret und offenbahret der himmel durch seinen glantz und pracht gothes majestät und herrlichkeit;  durch seine weite und grösse, gottes unendlichkeit; durch seine schöne ordnung, gottes weissheit; durch  seine krafft, festigkeit und beständigkeit gottes allmacht; durch seine influenz und nütz, gottes  gütigkeit und durch seine circul rundte gestalt, gottes einigkeit.”  slightly earlier in the text (  ff.)  semler explained that there was (as of yet) no astronomer who had argued that the shape of the world best  corresponded to a triangle or a square: es ist noch nicht kein astronomus gewesen, der die meynung  gehabt, oder mit grundlichen beweisthum dargethan habe, dass die welt eine dreyeckichte, viereckichte  oder andere figur ausser der rundthen habe.  alle astronomische instrumenta mit welchen man die  phaenomea und beybanheiten am himmel observiret sind auf eine rundung gerichtet und gleichwohl  treffen sie mit dem himmel richtig zu.  darum hält man nicht ohne grund dafür dass der himmel eine  rundte figur habe.”   “die welt ist ein grosser schau­platz der allmacht gottes, in welchen uns gott zu spectatoren gesetz  und uns seine grosse krafft, weissheit und herrlichkeit offenbahret.  weil aber das menschliche auge auf  einmahl die gantze welt und den weiten himmel nicht völlig übersehen kan: so hat mann einige nützliche  machinen erfunden, dergleichen auch gegenwärtige sind, welche den himmel in seinen sphaerey als ein  imitamentum und schatten bild des grossen originals und als ein coelum representatium lebhafft  vorstellen.” ibid.,  ­ .        the pupil’s understanding of the appearance of something relative to their position on  earth—via the model: “for those of us who live on earth, the heavens appear as a large,  round ball, which surround us halfway with their concavity,” semler explained.  but with  a globus coelestis, the convexity of the heavens can be presented, as if we were extended  outside of and above the heavens.”   while demonstrating the systemate tychonico, the  lesson giver was to say that “in this model, the earth is presented much too largely.  in  comparison to these heavens it should only be the size of a poppyseed or even smaller.”    included in this discourse of proportionality was also a moral lesson about the size of  man, “a piece of dust,” relative to the earth, and to god.    several of the instruments demonstrated alongside the heavenly spheres seem to  have been directly linked to these efforts to teach pupils how to enhance their abilities to  see things from several perspectives—to literally suspend themselves “outside of and  above the heavens.”  there was an instrumentum parallacticum that was used alongside  the parallaxi plantarum and “present[ed] the earth in brown points.”  a machina  cometica displayed “all the comets that have been seen at some point and can be shown  according to a specific hypothesis.”  the lucerna astronomica “show[ed] solar eclipses,  the phases of the moon and present[ed] all asteroids in a very lifelike manner.”   finally,  there was an instrument referred to simply as the “lit. e,” which allowed the viewer to  cultivate his ability to see the earth as a non­earth dweller might.  “using the small  instrument lit: e, astronomia selenitarum will be presented,” semler noted, “or how we                                                     afst/h e  , semler lehrplan,  .   ibid.,  .  “in diesem modell ist die erde viel zu gross vorgestellet. sie sole nur als ein mohn­körnlein  und noch viel kleiner auch nur gegen diesen himmel seyn.  denn ein mensch ist gegen den erboden als ein  stäublein.  der erdboden hinwiederum ist gegen den grossen himmel nur als ein stäublein. der himmel  aber gegen den unendlichen gott noch viel kleiner zurechnen als ein stäublein. dann inter finitum,  coleum, et infinitum, (deum) infinita est distantia.”     ibid.,  .      would see the world if we were on the moon.”   since the moon “turns against the earth  all the time,” he continued, “if there were people (seleniten) who lived on the side of the  moon that faces the earth, they would constantly see the earth.”  despite the relative  frequency with which they would see the earth depending on their position of residence  on it, “it would appear to their eyes four times larger than the moon appears to us.”    semler continued to demonstrate a variety of propositions oriented around helping  audience members realize the limitations of their vision based on their relative positions  on the earth—and the physical circumstances (like the atmosphere) that affect sight.  for  example, “if they (the moon dwellers) have no atmosphere to keep the rays of the sun  under control, then they would be able to see the stars during the day.”  this encouraged  the viewer to consider the very real effect of the earth’s atmosphere on the absorption and  distribution of the sun’s rays.  or he noted that “the sun is sometimes very close to them  and sometimes very far away.  this means that the sun will sometimes appear to their  eyes to be very big and sometimes it will appear very small.”  the earth­dwelling viewer,  while urged to suspend his formulation of reality and consider the perspective of the  moon­dweller, could also come to better appreciate the fact that the moon sometimes  appeared near and sometimes far to his eyes—but most importantly know why this was  the case.   in all of these instances, a discussion about what “moon dwellers” see was                                                     afst/h e  , semler lehrplan,  .  “an dem kleinen instrument lit. e wird für gestellt astronomia  selenitarum, oder wie wir, wann wir im mond wären, die welt sehen würden.”   ibid.,  ­  . “der mond wendet alle zeit  ) tandem faciem gegen die erde, weil er sich nicht circa  axin beweget, dahero die jenigen seleniten (wenn anders welche im monde vorhanden) welche auf dem  teil des monden wohnen der gegens gekehret ist, die erde immer beständig sehen.  die jenigen aber  welche auf  ) den finstersten teile des monden wohnen, sehen die erde einmalen, die sonne aber kriegen  alle, so um den mond wohnen zu sehen.  weil auch nach der hypothesi copernicana sich die erde  motudiurno circa axin beweget, so sehen sie die erde in perpetua circumrotatione, und zeiget ihnen die  erde immerhalb   stunden nach und nach alle ihre regioneo in allen   theilen der welt....  ) die sonne  ist ihnen manchmahl sehr nahe, in conjuntione manchmahl ist si von ihnen sehr entfernet nahml. in      less about the relative truth of their existence than using their “point of view” to help  generate an improved way of seeing (and being) in the world.    showcasing competing systemata in the orphanage was not about explaining to  pupils why the copernican system was “right” and brahe’s geocentric system was  “wrong,” but instead involved helping them reconcile both systems by understanding  their differences and significance—relative to one another.  in the section on astronomy  in his beginner’s guide, wolff did something very similar to the semler curriculum  described above.  he explained that in many ways a geocentric system makes perfect  sense because “you always stand in one position on the earth, so it appears as if the entire  universe with all the stars moves around the earth.”   since newcomers to the study of  astronomy “only concern themselves with appearances,” he continued, “without  damaging the truth you can pretend as if the universe, with all its stars, revolves around  the earth.”   regardless of whether a geocentric worldview is considered “true” or not, it  was worth learning about because it served as a useful starting point for understanding  the motion of the stars.  we know that francke’s pädagogium pupils were taught “the  most important hypotheses regarding the system of the universe” and led through  astronomy using christian wolff’s beginner’s guide.   there was also a platform for  conducting astronomical observations on the top of the halle orphanage.                                                                                                                                                    oppositione. daher kommt es auch dass die sonne ihnen einmal viel groesser und andermahl viel kleiner  ihren augen erscheinet.”   christian wolff, anfangsgründe part iii [ st ed.  ] (halle,  ):  . reprinted in gesammelte  werke, part one: volume  .     ibid.    see freyer’s verbesserte methode ( ).        part of acquiring the ability to assimilate a variety of perspectives involved  mastering the study of optics and the application of optical instruments.   the lessons  “on optical instruments” start, like wolff’s, with the definitions of optica (“involves  direct seeing, like what occurs through a straight line”), catoptica (“reflected or zurück­ prallenden seeing, like what happens through a mirror”), dioptrica (“refracted seeing,  like what happens through grinded glass and other diaphana”) and perspectiva  (“involving the designation [aufweisung] of an object as it falls into the eye”).  they also  included brief descriptions of the instruments on display, especially a tabur est vel,  perspectiva, laterna magica, camera obscura, prism, microscope and various sorts of  speculums.  the lesson writer then formulated two questions: “where is the focus in  convex glasses?  what is the virtual focus of concave glasses?” and noted that “herewith  all of the ways of polishing the glasses, even the blown ones, are shown.”   properly  comprehending the principles of refraction, concavity and convexity was necessary in  order to see properly and directing one’s attention to the optical instruments on the  schauplatz provided perfect opportunities to explain these same principles.  elaborations  on the idea of concavity and convexity appear in the lessons oriented around the armillary  spheres too; for example, semler explained that “with this sphere one can observe the  convexity of the heavens just as well as their concavity.  if i observe that the side and  superficiem of the heavens is external or opposite to me, i see the round sphaera in its  convexity.  but if i look through the side that is opposite of me toward the other side,                                                     that children were learning how to use optical instruments is clear from the semler astronomy lessons as  well.  the author explained that it was possible to observe a solar eclipse “ ) through a tube in the camera  obscura etc.  ) if one covered the objective glass with oil dampf and let it turn black etc.” afst/h e  ,  semler lehrplan,  ­ .   afst/h e  , semler lehrplan,  ; “then the principle of refraction was demonstrated using the  cubus vitreus, after which, the writer noted, pupils were allowed to “cut figures out of paper, stick them to  beer glasses and pour water over them.”      then i can observe the heavens in their concavity.  and on the same concave side i see the  stars in the actual places where they are situated in heaven.  on the globo coelesti, i see  the stars in reverse situ, because whatever stars stand in heaven on the right side, stand on  the globe on the left side.”   depending on a person’s position, or point of observation,  one’s perception of an object might change depending on the effects of these two  principles.  but if one knew how to locate a focal point, then one could master the  circumstantial quality of sight.   exerting control over the circumstances of seeing involved understanding how  the eye worked.  in this regard, the “optical instruments” lesson (see appendix  )  specified that “the following things should be said:”  ) our eye is like a mirror very much like a camera obscura, wherein all objects are  presented.  it has the following parts: a) pupillam…b) iridem… c)   nerven… d)  humores…  ) seeing happens by taking the form of an object into the eye, like in a mirror; in the  form of a cone or pyramid, the mirror is the eye, the vahir is the top surface of the object.  ) a shadow is an absence of light; it retains the form of the body that it resembles…the  shadow of earth makes the night.   ) darkness existed before light because god created light out of darkness.  ) light pleases the eye because the seeing­spirit only has similitude with light; the  darkness produces fear because light is what the seeing­spirits need for nourishment.  ) black and white are the main colors, the rest are only a mixture of light and shadow.                                                      ibid.,  ­ .  “an dieser sphaera aber kan man den himmel nach der convexität so wohl als auch nach  seiner concavität betrachten.  wann ich die seite und superficiem des himmels betrachte, so äusserlich ist  und gegen mir zu stehet, so sehe ich die runde sphaeram in ihrer convexität: wann ich aber durch die seite,  so gegen mich stehet hindurch sehe nach der andern seite, so gegen über ist, so sehe ich den himmel  daselbst in der concavität. und auf derselben concaven seite sehe ich die sterne in derjenigen eigendlichen  situation, wie sie am himmel stehen. auf dem globo coelesti sehe ich die sterne in unverso situ. denn  welche sterne am himmel zur rechten hand stehen, die stehen auf dem globo zur lincken hand. darum  haben derglelichen sphaerae armillares stellatae für denen globis coelestibus hierinnen einen grossen  vorzug.”   ibid.,  ­ .  “ ) unser aug ist wie ein spiegel, oder viel mehr wie eine camera obscura gestalt,  darinnen sich alle objecta praesentiren. es hat folgende theile....  ) die sehen geschieht durch einnehmung  der gestalt eines objecti ins aug, als in einen spiegel, und zwar in gestalt eines coni oder pyramidis, die  spiegel ist ein auge, die vasir ist die oberfläche die objecti.  ) der schatten ist einer abwesenheit der  lichtes, er behält die gestallt des cörpers, so ihn vorursachete....der schatten der erde macht die nachte.   ) die finsterniss ist ehe gewesen als das licht, dann gott hat das licht aus den finsternis hervortracht.   )  das licht erfreuet die augen.  weil die seh­geister eine Ähnlichkeit mit dem lichte haben; hingegen  verursachet die finsternüss schrecken, weil den seh­geistern das licht als ihr pabulum enzogen ist.   )        at first glance, this comes across as a fairly standard account of the technologies of  seeing; it even includes the well known camera obscura metaphor (see chapter two).   but the list of “things to say” while explaining vision to pupils was much longer:  ) seeing correctly requires   a) rationality of the soul derived from reason, attention and solid exercise of the anima  (gemüth);   b) rationality of the eye (ratione oculi ipsig) so that it is healthy and without movement;  c) rationality of the object (ratione objecti) so that it can be presented to the eye in the  proper style, time and manner and not with too much light;  d) ratione diaphani, so that it is moderately illuminated and free from errors.  ) a mad, afflicted or angry person does not see the object correctly a) because his soul  does not have the proper strength and renounces reason; b) because the movement of the  gemüth is so strong that it confuses and distracts the seeing spirits.  ) old people lose their sight gradually because the seeing spirits become weaker and  fewer and at the same time the cornea becomes harder and thicker.     just because the eye functioned like an optical instrument (a camera obscura) or mirror,  did not mean that the problem of visual representation was anywhere close to resolved.  as the author explained, seeing correctly required a “rationality of the soul derived from  reason,” the training of “attention” and rigorous exercise of the gemüth.   at the same  time, it required knowledge of the physicality of the medium and the site of seeing— ensuring that the space in which an object was observed was not illuminated “too  brightly” and that the object itself was free from errors.    the lesson writer went on to  explain that the reason drunk people experienced double vision or “saw doubly” is that  the excessive amount of alcohol “confuses the seeing spirits” (again inhibited the rational                                                                                                                                                    schwarz und weiss sind die vornehmsten farben, die übrigen sind nur eine mixtur des lichtes und der  schatten.”   ibid.  “ ) zur rechten sehung wird erfordert a) ratione der seelen, dass sie bey vernunft, attent, und von  festtiger gemüths bewegung betreyet sey. b) ratione oculi iphig, das es gesund und ohne bewegung sey c)  ratione objecti, das es in gehöriger art, zeit, weile und nicht mit all zu grossen lichte dem auge furstelle.   d) ratione diaphani, das es mässigl erleuchtet und frey von faulen sey.   ) ein sehend, betrübter und  zureiger sieht die objecta nicht recht (a) weil die seele in ihm nicht ihre gehörige kraft hat und vernunft  erweiset. (b) weil bey diesen   legte die hefttige gemüths bewegung, die seh­geister confundirt und  zerrüttet.  ) der alter leuten vergehet das gesicht nach und nach, weil die sehgeister wenig und schwach  werden, und hingegen die cornea härter und dicker wird. ”       soul’s ability to do its job) and “reverses the eyes so that the pictures of objects that fall  into the two eyes cannot become unified into a single model or example (vorbild).”    like models, the demonstration of optical instruments presented powerful opportunities  for discussions about how conciliatory models or visual examples themselves are  formed—and how one’s character, reflected in certain behaviors like drunkenness in this  instance, determined the didactic (and edificatory) potential of the medium itself.      the semler lesson plans’ preoccupation with ocular demonstration meant that  even discussions of mathematical or navigational instruments, including a device for  measuring longitude, were bound up with similar kinds of discussions about the ethics of  seeing.  by the time these kinds of discussions had begun to take place in halle around  , the power of post­renaissance developments in practical mathematics, especially  their capacity to impact the formulation of natural philosophical discourses and  methodologies in the seventeenth century, had become especially visible in the flurry of  research and attempted solutions to the infamous longitude problem.  j.a. bennett has  argued that especially “navigation, longitude and geomagnetism formed a meeting point  between mathematical science and natural philosophy, an intersection understood to be  relevant to pressing practical problems of the period and across which individuals  engaged in such problems could transfer attitudes and techniques.”   measuring  longitude, then, was an intrinsically conciliatory act, just as demonstrating and publishing  a description of a new device for measuring longitude can also be seen as a kind of  conciliatory gesture—one that simultaneously championed the contributions of                                                     ibid.,  ­ .  excessive movement of the eyes—on a ship being tossed by the waves, for example—is  also described as dangerous; to see “correctly” the eyes should be still and calm.     j.a. bennett, “the challenge of practical mathematics” in stephen pumfrey, paolo l. rossi and maurice  slawinski eds. science, culture and popular belief in renaissance europe (manchester and new york:  manchester university press,  ):  .      mathematicians and those who were endeavoring, like the members of the royal society,  to integrate the contributions of a “practical mathematics” with natural philosophy.   placing the longitudinal device on the schauplatz was an opportunity to observe this  union of mathesis and physica in action.  it should come as no surprise that semler’s  lessons plans contain a demonstration of just such a longitudinal device and that in    francke’s orphanage press would publish semler’s reputed “solution” to the longitude  problem (see appendix   for frontispiece).      bennett characterizes the intersection of the practical mathematical science of  navigation with astronomy (which he says “encroached on natural philosophy when its  postulates had implications for the nature of the earth”) in the sixteenth century as an  understudied point of convergence between mathematics and natural philosophy.   particularly influential, he writes, was the “realization that magnetic variation might be  different in different locations;” the idea was that if these global patterns of variation  could be measured somehow, then longitude could easily be found.   new magnet  compasses were developed, which robert norman described in a popular tract called the  new attraction of  .   he wrote a “self­consciously experimental” investigation of  the problem of “magnetic dip” that affected all compasses, bennett notes, and insisted  that even though he was simply “an unlearned mechanician,” he still had something  profound to contribute to the mathematical sciences.  in the lesson on the “magnet and                                                     francke’s press published semler’s solution to the longitude problem under the following title: supremo  magnae britanniae senaturi illustrissimo parlamento consecrata humillimeque submissa methodus  inveniendae longitudinis maritimaee per acus verticales magneticas, evidentissimis superstructa  experimentis terra marique factis. (halae magdeburgicae: orphanotropheum,  ).  it was also referred  to as the “hall methodus inveniendae longitudinis maritimae.”   especially if their variation “altered in a geometrically predictable way according to latitude and  longitude;” in bennett, “the challenge of practical mathematics,”  .   see edgar zilsel’s discussion of norman in idem, the social origins of modern science  (dordrecht/boston/london: kluwer academic publishers,  ):  ­ .      compass” in the semler lessons, the author discusses robert norman as someone who  had described the tendency of magnetic compasses to “dip” or to “deviate” (abweichen),  thereby making accurate measurement difficult.   he conveys his awareness of a need  to calibrate the experiences of individuals like norman, carthesius and rohault (also  explicitly named) in order to affect a better understanding of the principle of  geomagnetism and the formulation of a universal principle for measuring longitude.     for a director of a conciliatory organization interested in cultivating virtuous and  christian characters that were visible, any and every possible expression of the form of  reconciliation would have held enormous appeal.  francke’s willingness to align his press  with semler’s solution to the longitude problem was, in my view, one of the many ways  in which the orphanage announced its status as a site for the propagation of conciliatory  strategies via three­dimensional models and instruments. the solution semler offered  rested on the reconciliation of physical and rational forms of knowledge that came  together in a single measuring device.  placed in the schauplatz, where it became the  focal point of the viewer’s attention and senses, the magnetic compass—like the three­ dimensional model of a house or the universe—was transformed into a tool of  philanthropy.  not only did it contain within itself the ability to improve one’s ability to  become oriented at sea, it could also help improve viewers’ abilities to see and to  recognize the value of conciliatory forms of knowledge—including the visible acts or                                                     afst/h e  , semler lehrplan,  .   there is an extensive literature around the seemingly unending supply of solutions to the longitude  problem that were being circulated and tested long before semler developed his own solution.  see william  j.h. andrewes ed. the quest for longitude; the proceedings of the longitude symposium (cambridge,  ma: the collection of scientific instruments, harvard university,  ) and silvio a. bedini, the pulse of  time: galileo galilei, the determination of longitude and the pendulum clock (florence: olschki,  ).  michael john gorman has also noted that solving the longitude problem through magnetic variation was  the strategy that athanasius kircher preferred.  see his “the angel and the compass: athanasius kircher’s  magnetic geography” in paula findlen ed. athansius kircher: the last man who knew everything (new  york and london: routledge press,  ):  ­ .        gestures they inspired.  like the demonstrations of astronomical models and optical  instruments, the magnetic compass lesson also stressed the magnet needle’s capacity to  make a certain point of orientation visible.  when one observed and appreciated how to  apply the magnetic compass to the world, it would always point one in a northerly  direction.     semler’s magnetic measuring device fits within the general preoccupation with  measurement of several members of the conciliatory berlin academy of science.  as we  saw in chapter three, conrad mel had developed a pantometer, or a device for taking  universal measurements that he had circulated to various academy members for  comment.  like semler, he had also invoked the name of the jesuit athanasius kircher as  someone to whom his method was especially indebted.  christian wolff, as we have seen,  had become an outspoken advocate by   for the capacity of measuring practices to  produce individuals who understood more and were, therefore, intrinsically more  virtuous.  in addition to a willingness i have discerned in the pages of the semler lessons  to embrace wolff’s emphasis on the superior quality of the two­dimensional grundriss,  there is more evidence that the teachers and students of the orphanage schools may have  been looking to wolff for guidance about the construction and application of other kinds  of measuring devices—such as the quadrant.  a letter penned in   by a missionary  and former student of francke’s institutes, christoph theodosius walter, provides a  useful example.                                                       afst/h e  , semler lehrplan,  ­ .  the author pointed out that, in practice, magnet needles were  not completely accurate all of the time—sometimes off by a few degrees or minutes.  “man hat aber in der  praxi befunden dass dei magnet nadel nicht allzeit accurate nach norder weiset, sondern einige grad und  minuten, bald nach osten bald nach westen abweichet.”  the lesson also discussed the varied colors of  magnets, their material composition and the many places they had been found, including “east india, china  and bengala.”  the principle of concavity is also reiterated again.        like many of the pietist missionaries who found their way to the southeast coast  of india (mainly to the danish trading post of tranquebar), walter was asked to recount  his sea journey and impressions of “malabar” upon his arrival.  he was then to send his  inscription back to halle, where it could be published in a news letter (likely modeled  after the jesuits’ lettres édifiantes et curieuses) that francke’s organization had started,  entitled halle reports of the royal danish missionaries in east india.  francke’s pupils,  especially those enrolled in the pädagogium, were often asked to relay specific questions  to the missionaries through letters in exercises that must be understood, again, in terms of  the recognition typology so frequently referenced by semler.  asking questions of  someone who had been to malabar might not condition a form of recognition as  evocative as visiting east india oneself or experiencing it in three­dimensional form, but  first hand experience was certainly better than reading about it in a book.  the  missionaries’ specific responses to the pupils’ questions were assembled and published as  well.   walter’s letter was printed in the halle reports in  .   it was not, however,  printed word for word.  in the original letter of  , addressed to a “herr alemann on  the pädagogium,” walter described his journey to india on an english ship—and related  some new pieces of information he had encountered on the ship itself.  “an english ship  goes no more than four times to east india: after that it is either set out to sea or broken  up.  the quadrant they use, with which one can observe latitude with in the afternoons, is  different than the one herr wolff describes in his astron. tab.   fig.  , with which one                                                     afst/m   b     [january  ,  ] “herrn pressiers schreiben an einen andern vormaligen collegen  im pädagogio regio, worin auf mehrere geographische, physicalische und andere dergleichen fragen  geantwortet wird;” pressier lists the specific question of the pupils first and then responded, in bullet form.   in response to this question:  “what about the malabar’s astronomy and other physical sciences?” pressier  specifically references the jesuits’ lettres édifiantes et curieuses écrites des missions étrangères (paris,  ff).     [hallesche berichten xxi] or ein und zwanzigste continuation des berichts der königlichen  dänischen missionarien in ost­ indien (halle,  ):  ­ .      can only observe stars when one is up high.”   walter then drew a picture of the other  quadrant and described how the english employed it (see appendix  ).  in the printed  version of walter’s letter that appeared in the halle reports, however, this entire  section—including the explicit reference to wolff—was edited out.  clearly missionaries  training in francke’s institutes were acquiring training in the use of a wide variety of  measuring instruments before they left for india.    the year ( ) that francke’s press published semler’s description of his  longitudinal device was the same year that wolff was forcibly expelled from halle.  in  dreyhaupt’s version of a story that would become eventually become integrated into  halle’s landscape of legends, semler was very interested in sending his solution to  england to be considered by the board of longitude that had been created there.  too ill  and weak to make the journey himself, he sent a field minister named christian eberhard,  with connections to both francke and wolff, in his place.   eberhard took the solution  to england, where he had a description of the device published there under his own name.   he then submitted it to the board of longitude, all the while claiming to have discovered  it himself, where it was examined by isaac newton and tested at sea by william  whiston—who ultimately found it unsatisfactory.   christian wolff would write a                                                     afst/m   b     [june  ,  ] bericht von christoph theodosius walter an ernst heinrich aleman    this is terrain that remains virtually unexplored and that i hope to engage in the future.  considering the  hostile reactions of some members of francke’s community (and network of patrons) to wolff in the wake  of his expulsion from halle in  , it makes sense that the published reports would not contain this  portion of walter’s letter.   francke corresponded extensively with eberhard, who served as a kind of emissary to tsar peter i.    after completing his education in halle, where he also taught in francke’s schools, eberhard went to  russia and served as peter’s hebrew teacher.  he was supposed to go to the island of kamtschatka and the  alaskan coast in   as part of a russian expedition but did not make it; his skills in the mathematical  sciences were highly regarded. in theodor wotschke, “das pietistische halle und die auslandsdeutschen,”  neue kirchliche zeitschrift   ( ):  .      whiston is an interesting part of this story in that he seems to have appreciated the conciliatory aims of  francke’s organization.  for many years, he was a member of the spck, which supported francke’s  mission plans and he also endeavored to establish a society for the practice of “primitive christianity” in      review (gutachtung) of the new solution for the st. petersburg academy of science in  , only he would refer to it as “eberhard’s discovery” not semler’s (see appendix  ).   the injustice to semler’s reputation and efforts would be remembered by his son,  gottlieb christian, who would ensure that the solution (and all of his other “inventions”)  remained associated with his father’s name—not eberhard’s.   revealingly, in the halle  orphanage’s edition of the solution, semler would link his instrument to the models of  the temple and universe that resided in francke’s orphanage, noting that in was in the  same spirit in which he had built them that he now presented his magnetic device and  “method.”   while deserving of more attention than i can give it here, there is a way in which  this final anecdote provides the perfect ending to this chapter on the use of three­ dimensional models in the pietist orphanage.  most importantly, it brings us back to the  claim i made at the beginning of the chapter, following hopwood and de chadarevian,  that using three­dimensional models as “educational aids” is no excuse for  underestimating their significance in the production and circulation of knowledge.  the  models that semler produced and that found their way into francke’s orphanage were  part of a collective attempt to create a new method for making and replicating  knowledge.  in early eighteenth­century halle, semler’s device for measuring longitude  was intended for the schauplatz as one of several sites capable of cultivating conciliatory                                                                                                                                                    london.  see his primitive christianity revived   vols. ( ­ ) and his new theory of the earth  (london,  ).  sigmund jakob baumgarten produced a german version of whiston’s own description of  solomon’s temple in  .   günther mühlpfordt, “halle—sussland—sibirien—amerika: georg wilhlem steller, der hallesche  kolumbus und halles anteil an der frühen osteuropa und nordasienforschung,” in johannes wallmann ed.  halle und osteuropa (halle/tübingen: verlag der franckeschen stiftungen im niemeyer­verlag,  ):  .   dreyhaupt, ausführliche diplomatisch­historische beschreibung des saal­kreyses,  .     in semler, methodus inveniendae longitudinis maritimae (halle: waysenhaus,  ),  ­ .      characters—who used their hearts to stabilize and orient the findings of their inner and  outer eyes.  the device was also developed to perfect a series of conciliatory solutions to  the universal problem of navigation.  semler’s models carried knowledge by replicating it  in such a way as to allow it to be evocatively demonstrated; instruments demonstrated  according to the rubric of his plans were also models designed to teach and to improve.   but their status as sites, capable of conditioning gemüther who could see and assimilate a  variety of perspectives, was best accessed in halle’s pansophic climate.  here semler’s  device was his own and it was appreciated, as i think the orphanage’s published  description of the device suggests, as a way of conditioning conciliatory personalities  through spiritual exercise.  but outside of halle, the instrument somehow lost its power to  condition, to improve and to perfect vision.  to be sure, it could still be (and was, by all  accounts) “tested” but it was not “demonstrated” according to the halle­specific rubric of  anschauung.  removed from its context of application, semler’s model of orientation  could no longer be employed as a tool for helping people learn to observe properly by  showing them how to orient themselves morally in the world; it became yet another  device placed before the board of longitude.    in the university town of halle that a.h. francke, semler and wolff called home,  three­dimensional models, instruments and increasingly grundrisse were edificatory sites  of observation and orientation.  second only to real experience in the semler recognition  typology, they were seen as conciliatory artifacts that could exercise the senses and  cultivate higher forms of recognition; therefore, they were inseparable from the  pedagogical regimens that surrounded them—endeavoring to fix their significance just as  they fixed or stabilize the disparity between fundamentally opposing ways of knowing.       the person of christoph semler and the lesson plans that were integrated into francke’s  schulstadt provide a window into a landscape fraught with contradictions in which three­ dimensional models are held up not only as signifiers of reconciliation but as  philanthropic instruments—carriers of divine love and examples of the heart around  which one was to orient one’s head and one’s hands.           chapter six:  drawing to see: geometrical projection as a conciliatory gesture      st axiom  the art of drawing and painting (zeichen und mahlkunst) is the mechanical science of  creating perfectly similar representations of all the particular features of a body and other  things that can be placed on an elevated surface and presented through figural concepts  using lines, colors, strings, brushes and all kinds of materials.  …  nd axiom  a drawing is nothing other than what has been transmitted through horizontal lines to an  elevated surface or plane that is similar to the figure of a body.  …  rd axiom  the resemblance of a picture is the agreement of the same with the certain attributes of  the body being pictured, as if he placed the body himself before his eyes.         in  , the internationally famous jesuit polymath athanasius kircher published  a treatise in rome called the great art of light and shadow (ars magna lucis et  umbrae).  it was a treatise that contained several summaries of projection technologies  that could help one better understand the material and mathematical properties of light.    much like andreas tacquet’s interest in the potential of optical machines to mediate  opposing conceptions of the universe (see chapter one), kircher’s text marked one of his  many contributions to a universal project that aimed to harmoniously assemble and apply  even diametrically opposing forms of knowledge.  kircher’s attempts to create a system  for the coherent assimilation of all ways of knowing would wield a powerful influence  over most, if not all, of europe’s prominent intellectuals until well into the eighteenth  century.  robert boyle and isaac newton were avid connoisseurs of kircher’s writings  and, in paula findlen’s estimation, “every major scientific, linguistic and historical                                                     afst/h e   semler lehrplan,  .   despite its significant contribution to the sciences of optics, dioptrics and catoptrics, the text was mocked  by several prominent mathematicians because of a problematic attempt kircher made here to square a  circle.  see paula findlen, “introduction” in paula findlen ed. athansius kircher: the last man who knew  everything (new york and london: routledge press,  ):  .      project” g.w. leibniz ever undertook was directly inspired by reading kircher’s many  treatises.   e.w. von tschirnhaus met a close associate of kircher’s, giovanni alfonso  borelli, during a trip to italy in   and it was mostly likely through him that  handwritten copies of the ars magna lucis et umbrae found their way into francke’s  orphanage.   the great art of light and shadow is in many ways emblematic of the baroque  preoccupation with light and darkness in the way that it rendered explicit the links  between natural magic, geometry, optics and perspectival drawing.   it was the first text  to offer a thorough description of a laterna magica (or the sorcerer’s lamp), for example,  a device for projecting images that had been painted on glass plates onto a screen using  an oil lamp and lens.  a variation of this lantern had been described in the second half of  the fifteenth century in giovanni della porta’s magia naturalis (naples,  ), which  had offered readers unskilled in the art of drawing a set of projection techniques for  reproducing images (“if you cannot draw a picture of a man or anything else, draw it by  this means...”).   della porta also described the camera obscura as an instrument  specifically useful for artists and his account was one of the first to directly associate the  device with perspectival drawing.  he was careful to add that one needed to be  conditioned in order for these instruments to function because, as adrian johns has noted,                                                     paula findlen, “introduction” in ibid.,  ­ .   afst/h e  :  ­   athanasius kircher, tractatus de arte magna lucis et umbrae (excerpta) & epilogus  sive metaphysica lucis et umbrae tractatui de arte magna lucis et umbrae adjectus (abschrift).  excerpts  copied from kircher’s mundus subterraneus (amsterdam,  ) are also on hand in francke’s archive:  afst/h e  :  .   for stuart clark’s treatment of kircher’s ars magna, see vanities of the eye ( ):  ­ .  see also  william b. ashworth, “catholicism and early modern science” in david c. lindberg and ronald l.  numbers eds. god and nature: historical essays on the encounter between christianity and science  (berkeley: university of california press,  ):  ­ ; idem. “light of reason, light of nature— catholic and protestant metaphors of scientific knowledge” in science in context   ( ):  ­ .    the francke foundation library contains an early version of the magia naturalis: io. baptistae portæ  neapolitani, magiæ natvralis libri viginti: in qvibvs scientiarum naturalium diuitiæ, & deliciæ  demonstrantur. accessit index, rem omnem dilucidè repræsentans, copiosißimus (frankfurt,  ).      of the “role of affection in conditioning perspective.”   in the ars magna, kircher offered  a new and improved kind of projection device, called a steganographic mirror, which,  after several years of refinement would be referred to simply as the laterna magica.   it  was a tool he believed helped further the mandate of his assimilatory project.        in  , seventy years after kircher had published the ars magna, francke’s  organization published its own guide to drawing and painting (see appendix   for  frontispiece) that affirmed the utility and potential of projective tools.   in a passage  describing how to draw material objects placed standing or lying before the artist, the  anonymous author explained that “one needs a few helpful tools that allow one to draw  corporeal things with a free hand: for example, the machine that is described by the  famous kircher in arte magna lucis & umbrae.”   just one year earlier, in his  mathematical lexicon, christian wolff had praised the camera obscura as an especially  useful tool for drawing.  “one can use it when one wants to sketch something very  exactly, especially if one is not very experienced in drawing.”   in part one i presented  evidence of pupils using these instruments in the schools of francke’s universal seminar.   several members of francke’s community were also employing the camera obscura to  produce horizontal and vertical projections of various building and surveying projects,  including detailed plans to pipe drinking water into the orphanage from a nearby fresh                                                     see johns, esp.  ­ .   in  , kircher published an updated version of the ars magna that contained an article called, de  lucernae magicae seu thaumaturgae constructione, in which he attempted to explain in greater detail the  unique features of his lantern in comparison to others that had been developed by christian huygens, for  example.      gründlicher unterricht von der graphice oder zeichen und mahlkunst worinn von derselben  beschaffenheit, unterschiedlichen arten, requisitis, historie, vortrefflichkeit, nutzen und methode  gehandelt wird.  mit einem doppelten register. (halle, waysenhaus,  ).   ibid.,  .  the author specifically refers to book ii, part ii of kircher’s text, which is titled de  actionobolismis optico and contains a discussion of how to make an instrumentum mesopticum; it offers a  discussion of the art of sciagraphica.     christian wolff, mathematische lexicon [leipzig,  ].  reprinted in gesammelte werke, part one:  vol.  .      water source.   they, too, were participating in a conciliatory project that drew  inspiration from kircher and readily assimilated several of his technologies.    in chapter four i argued that christian wolff was interested in formalizing proofs  for perspective at a moment when its ability to actually produce congruence between  images and objects was being openly called into question.  his summary of geometrical  projection techniques amounted to a standardization of the principle of resemblance and  marked another way of thinking about the reconciliation of cognition and sensation that  he was interested in promoting.   wolff’s discussion of geometry in his mathematical  lexicon also emphasized its potential as a way of measuring “the space taken up by  corporeal things,” to “sharpen the understanding, … to condition humans to see things  more deeply” and to “consider things more deliberately.”   his preoccupation with  turning perspective into an easily applicable science was in every way connected to the  conciliatory project he was endeavoring to extend.  members of francke’s organization  also participated in this project.  they were interested in the ability of perspective to offer  the individual a set of reflective practices in which the passions were drawn upon  productively.  mastering perspectival drawing in francke’s institutes required “middling  instruments” like the camera obscura or laterna magica, which were central for  calibrating both “the attention” and “experience” at the same time.  francke’s interest in painting, drawing and the science of perspective is especially  manifest in the curricular materials affiliated with his orphanage.  to illustrate this, i have  singled out two texts that have generally gone unrecognized as products of francke’s                                                     see especially afst/w xv/ii/ :  vol. one. nachrichtung das röhrwasser und ubrigen wasserbau bey  den waysenhause.. vom jahr   .... vol. two. kurtzer bericht von dem jetzigen wasserbau ( ).   christian wolff, mathematisches lexicon (leipzig,  ):  .  reprinted in gesammelte werke, part  one: vol.  .      schulstadt.  the first is the halle orphanage’s guide to painting and drawing (or  graphice) mentioned above.  in conjunction with basic instructions for the inexperienced  artist, it presented the reader with a careful synopsis of treatises affirming the status of  “drawing and painting” as mathematical or mechanical sciences.  whether or not drawing  and painting should be counted as one of these sciences was a question that the earliest  proponents of perspective had faced.   however, in light of christian wolff’s  exceedingly popular treatment of the mathematical and mechanical sciences in his  beginner’s guide (anfangsgründe) to the mathematical sciences, it had become a subject  or question worth discussing in the community in which he had produced it.  the texts i  focus on in this chapter offer proof of several halle pietists’ interest in participating in  these conversations.  wolff treated perspective in the anfangsgründe but not drawing and painting.  to  make up for this, i propose, members of francke’s organization published the graphice  guide and produced the second text i am concerned with here.  contained within the  pages of the semler lehrplan, the second text appears towards the end of these lessons  and is without a formal title.  it is also handwritten and seems to be a final version of a  print­ready document that also provides its reader with a detailed “introduction” to the  “mechanical science” of drawing and painting.   i do not think it was part of the original  semler realschule curricula but was likely appended after the lessons found their way  into francke’s institutes.  interestingly, the text is organized in precisely the same manner  that christian wolff organized his beginner’s guide to the mathematical sciences (see  appendix  ).  in other words, while the printed ( ) text makes no secret of its                                                     see michael baxandall, words for pictures: seven papers on art and criticism (new haven, ct: yale  university press,  ):  ­ .   afst/h e  , “zeichen und mahlkunst” in semler lehrplan,  .      interest in portraying painting and drawing as mathematical sciences, the handwritten  version takes this a step further.  it comes to us in the very same deductive categories  wolff had embraced for the systematization of these same sciences.  these categories  included, as we have seen, axioms or explanations (erklärungen or, following euclid,  propositions), experiences (erfahrungen or experiments), extras (zugaben or corollaries)  and commentaries (anmerckungen).  the first axiom contained in the mysterious semler  text defined the art of painting and drawing as a mechanical science.  the second axiom  endeavored to define a drawing as “nothing other than what has been transmitted through  horizontal lines to an elevated surface or plane.”   and the third axiom defined the  principle of resemblance at the heart of perspective (see opening quotation).    these texts confirm that in the pansophic climate of early eighteenth­century  halle, including inside the pietist orphanage, the model of pictorial vision that had been  championed by renaissance perspectivists like alberti was being intensively revisited.   the explanations and exercises contained in the semler lehrplan, in addition to the halle  orphanage graphice text, offer an unusual and highly instructive glimpse into how  pietist eclectics were endeavoring to resuscitate the conciliatory potential of perspectival  drawing.   the creators of these texts embraced its potential, following wolff’s schematic  framework, as a branch of the middling mathematical or mechanical sciences.  they did  this, i argue, because the pictorial model of resemblance upon which the science of  perspective is based required advanced training in mathematics and the conditioning of  sensation.  it could be applied to produce congruence, conceived of as an expression of  philanthropy.  and it also allowed the practitioner to productively draw upon and  exercise his passions in his attempts to project them rationally as colors (derived from                                                     ibid.      real substances) onto a two­dimensional plane.  these lessons in drawing and painting,  like lessons oriented around models and instruments, were about facilitating a more  perfect way of being and knowing.  but first, drawing and painting had to be turned into a  verifiable mathematical science (complete with proofs) to be taught to all young people,  not only those training to be artists.    painting to save the world  art historians attribute the codification of perspective as a superior “precision  technique” to leon battista alberti.  his treatise on painting, printed in the  s in  both latin and italian, opened with basic definitions of geometrical terms, specifically  euclid’s definitions of point, line and plane.  but, perhaps most importantly for my  purposes, it analyzed the properties of forms in purely mathematical terms.   in joel  snyder’s estimation, alberti’s primary innovation was his ability to provide a systematic  explanation for how a painter paints by offering a “mechanical and psychological account  of how he sees.”   he offered his readers a foundation for making “certified” or  “completed perceptual judgments” about “sensible things of the world”—that is, unified  or holistic judgments “in which we correctly identify objects, their attributes and their  interrelations…under specified observation conditions through time, by means of  discrimination, comparison and integration.”   these became, in effect, a systematic set  of practices for “depicting the rational structure behind perceptual judgments.”                                                        martin kemp, the science of art: optical themes in western art from brunelleschi to seurat  (new  haven: yale university press,  ):  .   joel snyder, “picturing vision,” critical inquiry   ( ):  .   ibid.   ibid.,  .        as one point linear perspective became increasingly popular in northern europe  around  , it was regarded as a form of magic or “visual alchemy,” which, in the  words of martin kemp, “transformed the base materials of art into a visionary  experience.”   albrecht dürer was one of the first german artists to embrace perspective  after spending some time familiarizing himself with it in italy; he published an influential  vernacular treatise about precision measurement in drawing that was essentially a treatise  in geometry.   the entire piece provided a profound sense of “the reality of geometry in  the physical world,” and included several discussions of light and shadow as central  components of any demonstration of perspective.  it would become enormously  influential in the german and dutch context.  not surprisingly, along with the gradual  acceptance and application of geometrical projection techniques by artists in northern  europe came intense discussions about whether the representational solutions the model  offered were tenable and, if so, how perspectival drawing could be made easier.  dürer  claimed in his writings to have stumbled into a “shorter way” of composing “geometrical  visions of space and form,” for example.   in my view, wolff’s consistent expressions of  his affinity for dürer (in the mathematical lexicon for example) can be read as a sign of  his interest in revisiting perspective’s metaphysical or alchemical potency—that is, its  ability to produce accord between organic materials and their images.            but wolff and other members of his community were interested in many more  contributors to the science of geometrical projection than dürer, alberti and the first  perspectivists.  one of these individuals was girard desargues, civil and military                                                     kemp, the science of art ( ):  .   albrecht dürer, instruction in measurement with compass and ruler in lines, planes and solid bodies   (underweysung der messung) (nürnberg,  ).   kemp, the science of art ( ):  ; straker, “the eye made ‘other’,”  ­ .      engineer, prominent member of the french academie royale and, according to kemp,  “the greatest perspectivist and projective geometer of his generation.”   proceeding from  the assumption that the production of congruence was the ultimate goal of the geometer,  he set about to make practical geometry both easier and more accurate, developing  elaborate yet accessible scales that would allow for a broader spectrum of spatial  calculations.   however, desargues’ insistence on rigorous training and adherence to  geometrical axioms by practicing painters was the subject of intense criticism in his own  lifetime.  in particular, the jesuit jean dubreuil circulated a tract called perspectiva  practique (paris,  ) that contained some obvious denigrations of desargues’s maniere  universelles and sparked a “war of perspective” between the two figures.   however,  both parties continued to affirm the assumptions embedded in perspectivist discourse.  they believed in the possibility of resemblance.    when wolff approached the issue of perspective, he integrated both desargues  and dubreuil’s treatises into a discussion that also affirmed the contributions of nürnberg  artists.  he championed johann christoph rembold’s translation of dubreuil’s  perspectiva practica (nürnberg,  ), for example, in conjunction with johann  leonhard rost’s translation of desargues’s maniere.   wolff knew that dürer’s  hometown of nürnberg (not far from j.c. sturm’s altdorf) had remained an important                                                     kemp, the science of art ( ):  .  see j.v. field and j.j. gray, the geometrical work of girard  desargues (new york,  ); j.v. field, “linear perspective and the projective geometry of girard  desargues” in nuncius ii ( ):  ­ .  w. ivans jr, art and geometry (cambridge, mass,  ); l.  cremona, projective geometry (oxford,  ); j. coolidge, “the rise and fall of projective geometry” in  the american mathematical monthly xli ( ):  ­ .  desargues’ treatises on perspective are also  recommended to francke by tschirnhaus (see appendix  ).   kemp, the science of art ( ):  ; from n. poudra ed. oeuvres de desargues   vols. (paris,  ).   philippe de la hire’s nouvelle méthode en géométrie ( ), which dealt with geometrical projections of  circles and other forms of appolonian curves, owed much to desargues’ projective treatises and also  profoundly influenced wolff, who references le hire frequently as well.     ibid.,  ­ .   jean dubreuil, perspectiva practica, oder vollständige anleitung zu der perspectiv­reiss­kunst.  transl.  johann christoph rembold (augsburg,  ).      site for the refinement and dispersal of perspectivist techniques and the training of  german artists in the seventeenth century.   he also deemed the “nürnberg  perspectivist” andreas alberti’s two books on perspective ( ) especially  “praiseworthy.”  possibly following his lead, the anonymous author of the halle  orphanage graphice guide described the same alberti text as “especially useful for  beginners because of its clearness.”   the author of the printed halle orphanage guide  also recommended the translation of dubreuil offered by rost, by then a member of the  berlin academy of science.  both wolff and members of francke’s organization would  have been well aware of efforts underway in berlin to create a site for the assimilation of  various debates about perspectivism, including new projection technologies.  in  , the  prussian elector frederick iii and his wife sophie charlotte had founded an academy of  arts (academie der mahler­, bildhauer­ und architectur­kunst); and, as we have seen,  the founding of an academy for the promotion of the conciliatory mathematical sciences,  like perspective, soon followed.  both wolff and francke became members of this  academy.  it follows that its mandate and the mandate of the new academy of arts were  closely linked.  the two painting and drawing guides produced by affiliates of francke’s  organization affirm that they were.  two figures that are featured prominently in the printed graphice guide, johann  leonard frisch ( ­ ) and samuel theodor gericke ( ­ ), best illustrate  this convergence between the activities of the berlin academy, francke’s organization                                                     the works of augustin hirschvogel (geometria,  ), lorenz stoer (perspectiva,  ), wenzel  jamnitzer (perspectiva corporum regularium,  ), hans lencker (perspectiva literaria,  ) and  andreas alberti (??­ ) remained quite influential in the german context.  wolff also championed the  use of a text by two nürnbergers, daniel schwenter ( ­ ) and georg philipp harsdörffer, delicae  phyisco mathematicae: mathematische und philosophische erquickstunden ( ) in schools.  for stuart  clark’s treatment of this text see his vanities of the eye ( ):  .   see christian wolff, kurtzer unterricht von den arithmetischen schriften.  reprinted in gesammelte  werke, part one: vol.   and the graphice (halle: waysenhaus,  ):  .        and the academy of arts by  .  at the very beginning of the guide, the following  dedication appears: “to the highly honorable and learned man, johann leonard frisch,  famous member of the prussian society of the sciences, worthy teacher and friend, …, as  a sign of his strong character and along with best wishes from the author.”   by  referencing frisch, the text immediately signaled that it was affiliated with and intended  for a much broader intellectual community.  in the berlin academy’s earliest years, when  the links between reconciliation and mission, including the establishment of ties to china  via russia, were their strongest, frisch served as leibniz’s russian teacher.   he  received a personal invitation to join the academy from leibniz in  , became a close  associate of his and the body’s vice­president in  .  and, although it may be difficult  to determine precisely why his is the first name to appear in the pages of the halle  orphanage graphice, the copperplate engravings accompanying his multivolume  descriptions of all of the birds and insects of germany ( ) suggest several ways of  connecting a concern with the perfection of the technologies of representation to the  activities of berlin academy members.  in prefaces to the detailed descriptions of insects  he eventually published, he would explain that the “real and natural” description the text                                                     graphice (halle: waysenhaus,  ): dedication.   frisch traveled extensively throughout russia, hungary and the ottoman empire and upon returning to  brandenburg­prussia, via nürnberg, began teaching in berlin, where he ultimately settled; he was sub­ director of the gymnasium of the gray cloister around  , precisely the time spener was court preacher,  and directed the gymnasium from   until his death in  .  he was especially well known for his  dictionaries, as well as his attempts to catalogue every kind of bird and insect in germany. see his entry in  werner hartkopf, die berliner akademie der wissenschaften ( ):  .  a eulogy frisch gave for s.  nicolai kirchhoff in   is remarkable in its evocative use of the metaphors of friendship, love,  reconciliation and sight.  see his abdanckungs­rede, als der verblichene cörper den  .martii.  auf s.  nicolai kirchhoff zur ruhe geleget werden sollen (berlin,  ).        offered was contingent upon the “realistic illumination” of the insects themselves by a  capable artist.       samuel theodor gericke is described in the orphanage graphice guide as a  “professor of anatomy and painting in the royal prussian painting academy of berlin.”    his brother, peter gericke ( ­ ), was a professor of medicine and philosophy at  the university of halle and became a member of the berlin academy in   because of  his expertise in anatomy.  s. t. gericke never officially joined leibniz’s organization;  however, his expertise in anatomical drawings was apparently well known.  in   he  published a short summary of anatomy, how painting and sculpture is necessary for it  that would endeavor to elucidate the links between the physical science of anatomy and  the need for precise anatomical drawings.   he would also translate and publish a  version of the french painter gerald de lairesse’s guide to drawing, in which lairesse  also discussed how important it was for young painters to study anatomy carefully so that  they could present more perfect renderings of the human form.   de lairesse argued that  the best technique for depicting the human body involved a combination of projective  strategies for observing that same form.                                                          and the microscope, which allowed for more exact renderings; he cited: l.joblot, professeur royal en  mathematiques, de l’ academie royale de peinture & sculpture, descriptions & usages de plusieurs  nouveaux microscopes tant simples que composez. avec de nouvelles observations, faites sur une multitude  innombrable d’insectes, & d’autres animaux de diverses especes qui naissent dans des liqueurs prepares &  dans celles qui nee le sont point (paris,  ).  in part iv, frisch specifically referenced “a book printed in  london in   under the title: a natural history of english insects, illustrated with a hundred copper  plates, curiously engraven from the live, and (for those who desire it) exactly colored by the author  eleazar albin, painter.”  in johann leonhard frisch, beschreibung von allerley insecten in teutschland,  (berlin,  ).     samuel theodor gericke, kurze verfassung der anatomie, wie selbige zur mahlerey und bildhauerey  erfordert wird (berlin,  ).  des berühmten mahlers gerhard de lairesse anleitung zur zeichen­kunst, wie man dieselbe durch  hülffe der geometrie gründlich und vollkommen erlernen könne. samuel theodor gerike transl. (berlin,  ).   kemp, the science of art ( ):  .        historians of science and art have become increasingly interested in the  relationship between the production of images and the production (and circulation) of  knowledge.      after directly associating itself with these two figures, the   halle orphanage  graphice’s discussion of perspective unfolds within an attempt not only to justify its  importance as a science to the skeptical reader but also to explain its status as amalgam or  assimilator of various forms of knowledge.  for example, the author states that he cannot  neglect to mention the science of optics in the treatise and would recommend his readers  study it because “it provides the foundation for the art of perspective, teaches us about the  nature and properties of the human eye, the nature and properties of colors, the most  important points about light and shadow as well as reflexion and refraction.”   the  author was also careful to emphasize that drawing properly required one to study  geometry but that it was alright if one just learned the first few axioms (problemata) and  demonstrations (aufgaben).   especially useful were lessons from the “beautiful  mathematical sciences” about the different kinds of lines, angles “and a few other  important things from geometry;” the author noted that without proficiency in these  things, one could not get very far.   in order to create a drawing or painting that  “resembled its original in every way,” the beginner was advised to link his training in  geometry, perspective and optics with studies in anatomy, ethics, history, hieroglyphics,                                                     see wolfgang lefèvre ed. the power of images in early modern science (basel, birkhäuser,  ).   included in the list of optical treatises recommended at the end of the graphice are: andreas alberti,  alhazen and roger bacon; in graphice (halle: waysenhaus,  ):  ­ .   readers were advised to look at sebastian leclerc’s geometria practica super carta & solo and anton  ernst burckhard von pürckenstein’s ausserwöhlter anfang zu denen höchstnutzlich mathematischen  wissenschafften (augsburg,  ).     graphice (waysenhaus,  ):  ,  .      mythology, diplomacy, heraldry, cosmography, architecture, physics and botany.    leonard christoph sturm’s treatises on architecture are recommended for the artist  interested in properly rendering buildings to consult.     the mysterious drawing and painting guide contained within the pages of the  semler lessons also discuss the need for the artist to familiarize himself with the  rudiments of practical geometry in order to become proficient in producing resemblance.   the author noted that the cornerstone of resemblance, or “the agreement of the picture  with the certain attributes of the body being pictured, as if [one] placed the body before  [one’s] eyes,” was geometry.  the very first “experience” offered in support of the  guide’s definition of resemblance urged the reader to place a cube on a table “illuminated  with a painter’s light.”   by doing this, the author insisted, “the lowest superfice or base  of the cube will appear like a quadrast (square) containing four right angles and four lines  that are the same size.”  the author then cited a passage from wolff’s beginner’s guide  to geometry (s. ) devoted to squares (or the vier­eckige raum).  “in the same way,” he  continued, “the first quality of a body that falls into the eyes—namely its extension in  length and width, from which it acquires a place on all sides, and where the same  extension ends—one will take a line as true.”   what lines had in common were their  capacities to demarcate, to outline or to establish the real boundaries of visible bodies.   however, the author explained, “just like different kinds of bodies and their figures  cannot be drawn in only one way with lines because they do not use their space in the  same way, so must the painter learn from geometry and be able to name the different  kinds of lines, the different ways in which they can be placed together and the different                                                     ibid.   afst/h e  , semler lehrplan,  .   ibid.      works and figures that come of this placement.  therefore it is important to at least  consider the thing using a geometrical approach.”   several sections of the text  correspond almost word for word with sections from wolff’s anfangsgründe der  geometrie.          after explaining the real and nominal properties of a space, a figure, extension,  proportion, shadow and reflection, the author of the semler lesson offered a definition of  perspective that would have appealed to a practitioner of eclecticism:   when one tries to present different points of view it is called perspectival drawing and  perspectival drawing is the art of rendering a body as in falls at a specific distance or  height into the eyes in an extremely exact manner….    most developing artists quit [their studies] before they acquire all that can be taken from  this science…this means that often a part or body in a particular placement or position in  their drawings loses its natural proportion and appears much shorter or longer than it  actually is. …     readers interesting in learning how to “present different points of view,” a conciliatory  gesture, were encouraged to consult rembold’s perspective (that is, the german version  of dubreil’s perspective practique), wolff’s synthesis of the science of perspective in the  anfangsgründe and a text simply referred to as lessons in graphice—quite likely the  halle orphanage’s basic lessons in graphice text.    the published graphice portrayed the need for perspective as especially great;   not only did it serve as an agent necessary for recognizing differences, it also helped  reconcile or assimilate these differences—thereby producing meaning:                                                      ibid.,  ­ .   ibid.,  .  for example, the eighth axiom reads: “when one brings two lines together at a single point,  their meeting place is called an angle.”  section   of wolff’s anfangsgründe der geometrie is then  explicitly referenced; this section reads: “when one brings together two lines, ab and ac, at a single point  a, their meeting place is called an angle.”  the treatise also relies exclusively on wolff in its presentation  of the most important figures in geometry, especially: a sphere, cube, and pyramid, a prism, a cylinder, a  conic sphere, a tetraedum, an octaldrum, an icosoedrum and an dodeoadrum.    afst/h e  , semler lehrplan,  .      what is perspective supposed to help with?  it is known that even a little bit of  mathematics is important when sketching and it is the same with this.  the words:  ground­line or horizon, distance or viewpoint, contain a great deal of meaning.  in fact,  the importance of perspective is so large that without it, it is completely impossible to  distinguish between elevation and depth, the near and the far, darkness and light, the  weak and the strong.  in sum, perspective is nothing other than the science of  representing everything as it falls into the eyes; then one can not only see the drawing  itself but where the reason for the drawing lies.       the anonymous author requested all readers to examine bernard lamy’s traite de  perspective for affirmation of this sentiment.  lamy ( ­ ), a french  mathematician and orator, had claimed to offer the readers of his treatise on perspective  “guidelines for representing all manner of objects as they appear to the eye in all  situations.”   his conversations on the sciences ( ) had “reaffirmed descartes’  account of the power of a reformed geometry to help exercise the intellect,” jones  explains; however, unlike descartes, lamy had faith in the possibility of real  representation.   his later treatises convey his conviction that with enough training the  artist could “represent all manner of objects… in all situations”—exactly as they appear  to the eye.  the halle orphanage drawing and painting guides convey the same kind of  optimism.    the process of rendering a visible three­dimensional object onto a two­ dimensional plane was a process that the artist controlled by controlling himself, by  regulating the movements of his gemüth, his intellect and his body.  in other words,  endeavoring to perfect the technologies of perspective—even with the help of projective                                                     graphice (waysenhaus,  ): section  .   the treatise was translated into english in  .  bernard lamy, a treatise of perspective, or, the art of  representing all manner of objects as they appear to the eye in all situations.  written originally in  french and faithfully translated into english by an officer of his magisty’s ordnance (london,  ).   jones,  ­ .  lamy’s les elemens de géeométrie, ou, de la mesure de corps (paris,  ) was  especially influential because of its extensive use in schools as an introductory textbook; jones notes that it  was largely derivative in its goals and execution though, relying heavily on descartes, nicolas  malebranche, pierre nicole and antoine arnauld.      devices or machines—was about refining techniques for improving character.  it had to  involve paideia.  as stuart clark has emphasized in his study of early modern visuality,  from the fifteenth century onwards proponents of perspective stressed that the more  control the individual had over the production of resemblance, the more control he had  over the production of illusions that deceived people and led them astray.  the more  control he had over himself.  individual artists, experts in the production of congruence  between images and objects, had mastered precisely the kinds of conciliatory techniques  that francke’s institutes were endeavoring to standardize.  they needed to come to terms  with their moral obligation to assimilate by making accessible the rational structures  behind all perception.  in this context, rendering effectively, that is producing likenesses  that were as close to the original as possible, was an intrinsically moral act—an act of  love.  for members of francke’s community in halle, being an artist, or even dabbling in  the art of drawing and painting, was simultaneously an act of self cultivation and an act  of philanthropy.  everyone needed to learn how to do it.  only by embracing the  assimilatory promise of perspective to cultivate the intellect, in conjunction with its  capacity to productively and evocatively direct sensation, could the individual exert some  measure of control over what was seen, including the things some people claimed to see  but could not explain.  that “painting” was capable of being imagined in this context as a form of  restorative mathematical science to be more widely accessible in schools is apparent from  leibniz’s comments in his grundriss eines bedenkens ( ), in which he imagined a  “kind of gentry school institution that teaches handicrafts with new instruments… that’s  able to allow pupils to try everything in chymicis and mechanicis—including      glassmaking, the study of perspective, machines, water­arts, clock­making, turning wood,  painting…”.   if we take another look at heinrich neubauer’s description of the  pädagogium (see chapter three), he makes a very clear statement about “the scholars”  being called upon to show “how one could increase and decrease most observations  through artistic machines,” likely geometrical projection devices, which he said “can lead  an educated mind to many new discoveries.”    in a short sketch of organization of the  pädagogium (circa  ?), several “recreational activities, which the scholars engage in  to move their bodies and freshen up their characters in their free periods” were described,  including: “polishing glass for long distance lenses, burning glasses, burning mirrors,  microscopes, perspectival lenses, telescopes, camera obscuras and optical lanterns,”  making geometrical instruments like the lineal, rulers, ruling pens and transporteurs, and  drawing.          hieronymous freyer’s description of the pädagogium’s improved method also  indicates that drawing and painting were featured prominently as key exercises:   they all begin together from the very beginning and learn first how to draw with pencil  on paper and then with chalk on a board; and to be sure, they sketch according to  copperplate engravings that are placed in front of them as models, where they can  proceed from the easiest to the more difficult by first depicting geometrical lines and  figures and then natural and artistic things in the easiest and most fundamental way, one  after the other.  that one, with time, also learns how to draw the human body and all its  parts and is allowed, at the beginning, to make it larger than it is… is not entirely without  purpose: because they learn the art of rendering more easily through large and clear linear  features….     after this they move towards a short introduction to light and shadow and then towards  coloring and painting after nature.  whereby they either copy something already drawn or  even something more difficult, like symbols (sinnbilder) or strange scenes or coats of  arms or even perspectival things (according to the properties of the subject and the                                                     see chapter three for a full citation from “grundriss eines bedenkens von aufrichtung einer societät” in  gottfried wilhelm leibniz, sämtliche schriften und briefe. fourth series: politische schriften vol.  :  ­  (berlin,  ):  .   afst/h a b:   description of the pädagogium (beschreibung des pädagogii)   afst/s a i   ( ),   ( ),   ( ) kurtzer entwurff der einrichtung des pädagogii regii  zu glaucha an halle [broadsheet].      previously mentioned introduction to perspective) can be used: until finally an entire  landscape or history could come out of it.         the author was careful to note that wherever there was one who was “still unable to do  perspective,” then the instructor would “give him a short introduction without many  rules” and “be satisfied with especially simple or poor drawings.”    since the main  purpose of the mathematical and mechanical exercises in the franckesche stiftungen was,  according to freyer, to allow the gemüth to exercise itself and develop, producing  imperfect renderings did not present an immediate problem.  it was part of the process of  self cultivation.  the orientation of francke’s pedagogy was intended to be affirming so  that even “simple or poor drawings” were better than nothing; and there always existed  the possibility that one who could not “do” perspective would eventually learn it.     francke’s organization was oriented around the promise of perspectival drawing  and painting as a way of sharpening and ultimately reconciling both the intellect and the  senses.  in other words, the culture of moral regeneration and conciliation francke and  his circle participated in was uniquely suited to the set of techniques codified by late  medieval perspectivists like alberti.  in this context, the quality of the art itself did not  matter so much; it would contain faults as long as it was produced by someone whose  gemüth and senses were not (yet) in full alignment with each other.  this explains why  scholars have tended to see halle pietists as ambivalent towards (or even completely  against) art in general.   they were, even as radical lutherans, still part of a long  tradition that continued to promote the didactic function of images in spaces of                                                     hieronymous freyer, verbesserte methode des pädagogii regii zu glaucha vor halle (halle:  waysenhaus,  ): section iv n.  .   ibid.   see thomas müller­bahlke’s discussion in “der hallesche pietismus und die kunst: bemerkungen zu  einem alten vorurteil” in rainer lächle ed. das echo halles: kulturelle wirkungen des pietismus  (tübingen: bibliotheca academica,  ): esp.  ­ .       worship—or to challenge the iconoclasm of the “papists.”  this is a tradition that has  been derided by generations of art critics, historians and philosophers for having  contributed to an overall decline in the quality of art produced in the early modern period  as a result.  however, as joseph leo koerner has shown in his study of reformation art,  “the reformation image” should be seen as a kind of mirror or participant inside the  “interpretative enterprise in which it stands.”   halle pietists had embarked upon a new  interpretive enterprise.  they were attempting to return to the original aims of the first  apostles and christians—before christendom had become corrupted by divisiveness,  false displays of piety and images that did not resemble the “truth” of their originals.   this new endeavor required a new set of strategies or conciliatory technologies and  perspectival drawing was one of these.       in his short and simple lessons, francke explained that “parents have a christian  obligation to ensure that their children are exposed to the “art and manner” of the “middle  path” (mittelstrasse) and that no child is “left without instruction.   to this end, he  continued, “real copperplate engravings and figures, which children find charming, can  be used;” he emphasized that such things also “nicely demonstrate the teachings of the  holy scriptures and other symbolic books.”   this was something that would benefit the  entire anstalt, not only the pupils of the pädagogium.  a   contract between francke  and gottfried wolfgang, an engraver from augsburg, specified that wolfgang would                                                     joseph leo koerner, the reformation of the image (london: reaktion books,  ):  .   the word mittelstrasse was employed by daniel ernst jablonski in a letter to leibniz from october  ,  .  he described the anglican church as maintaining a “reverent middle path… between catholic  superstition and calvinist disengagement (kalsinnigkeit).”  in hartmut rudolph, “zum nutzen von politik  und philosophie für die kirchenunion.  die aufnahme der innerprotestantischen ausgleichsverhandlungen  am ende des  .jahrhunderts” in martin fontius, hartmut rudolph, gary smith eds. labora diligenter.  potsdamer arbeitstagung zur leibnizforschung von  . bis  . juli,   [studia leibnitiana] (stuttgart:  franz steiner,  ):  , n.  .    francke, kurzer und einfältiger unterricht ( ):  ­ .  the semler painting and drawing lesson also  provide instructions for “how to illuminate a copperplate engraving.” afst/h e  , semler lehrplan,  .      “provide his knowledge in drawing and copperplate engraving to the children and  students, who were turned over to him,” and aim to “perfect” at least “a few who have the  ability to be useful and can then begin teaching it themselves in the anstalt.”   exercise  in drawing, engraving and painting was not something francke necessarily intended only  for his most elite pupils.  as a set of practices, codified as mathematical/mechanical  sciences, they could benefit the conciliatory instincts of all individuals.    de lairesse had articulated a similar attitude towards the pedagogical utility of  “real copperplate engravings and figures” in his introduction to the art of drawing when  he explained that “one shows copperplate engravings to youth:”  ) to delight them,  ) to wake up their spirit,  ) to stimulate in them a new curiosity to  inspect, through observation, the different thoughts that are to be found within it— because rarely do they see such things and so they long to know who produced it and  what kind of contents it contains,  ) the different names and praise of the best artists  gives them a great amount of encouragement, especially those who intend to stay with art  will be invested with a hope that they too will achieve a large name in the world,  ) so  that they will learn by making their own annotations, and the things they find in the work   itself will prepare them for any lessons to be given to them.     in acknowledging the ability of engravings and figures to “nicely demonstrate” things  and to charm or delight children, francke was aligning himself with forms of pedagogical  innovation that would have been just as easily recognized by his french and english  contemporaries, as his learned contacts in the german states.  and yet, in francke’s case,  the wide spread interest in “waking up” the spirit was connected to a much larger  preoccupation with a carefully prescribed set of exercises intended to do completely  transform the individual and to make him a carrier of light.  the benefits of the  conciliatory mittelstrasse would become manifest through training in perspectival                                                     afst/w xi/­/  [august  ,  ] original contract zwischen gottlieb wolfgang u. hr. prof. a.h.  francke den kindern das kupferstechen zu lehren    des berühmten mahlers gerhard de lairesse anleitung zur zeichen­kunst, transl. samuel theodor  gericke (berlin,  ):  .      drawing and ultimately the very way in which one produced resemblance would signify  the quality of the transformation itself.        managing illusion and color  the dutch painter samuel van hoogstraten defined painting in the  s as a  science for representing ideas or notions produced in nature and “for deceiving the eye  with drawing and color.”  but he was careful to emphasize that “a painter whose work it  is to fool the sense of sight also must have so much understanding of the nature of things  that he thoroughly understands the means by which the eyes are deceived.”   as  hoogstraten and other advocates of geometrical projection understood, the science of  perspective was also very much about controlling illusion by becoming proficient in the  art of deception.  once the tools were mastered, a philanthropically minded artist could  affect the quality of what was seen in his or her viewer for the better.  looking out for the  viewer’s best interest, the artist could enhance the quality of the viewing experience by  signifying the highest and most beautiful forms of knowledge possible in the images he  presented.  kemp likens van hoogstraten’s sentiments to those of aguilonius and the  swedish humanist johannes scheffer ( ­ ), who argued for the “placing of  illusion in service of natural representation” in his treatise on drawing (nürnberg,  ).   scheffer also believed that new drawing and painting regimens could be  everywhere implemented that would affect improvement by helping individuals master                                                     quoted in kemp, the science of art ( ):  .   ibid.,  .      the technologies of illusion.  the drawing and painting guide contained within the pages  of the semler lessons includes several references to scheffer’s treatise.     christian wolff treated perspective as a branch of the mathematical sciences that  could be divided into three sub­categories: one was oriented around the production of  resemblance through geometrical calculations, one relied more heavily on  instrumentation (perspective mechanica) and one was explicitly concerned with the  management of illusion (perspectiva anamorphotica).  in his attempt to create universal  proofs for perspective, wolff had also endeavored to produce axioms for anamorphosis,  or the geometrical projection of “shapeless figures.”  he defined this kind of perspective  as the “science of presenting a picture in such a way that the thing that it is supposed to  represent no longer looks similar to it but that it returns to its similarity when it is  observed at a certain distance with the naked eye, or with a certain kind of mirror or  polygonal glass.”   for wolff too, individuals had an ethical obligation to become  proficient in the science of perspective because, simply by becoming a practitioner, one  would be able to consistently stabilize viewing experiences even when, on the surface,  the possibility of resemblance seemed far away.    both of the halle orphanage texts on drawing and painting affirm a need to  manage illusion in order to improve people.  but there were times when adjusting the  circumstances of seeing did not allow for the proper management of real objects, let  alone illusory ones.  the boundaries of visible bodies that were round and uneven, for  example, were harder to demarcate with precision so they required their own set of                                                     johannis scheffer, argentoratensis graphice id est, de arte pingendi: liber singularis; cum indice  necessario (nürnberg,  ).  his name appears in the first commentary of the handwritten guide; see  afst/h e   semler lehrplan,  .   christian wolff, mathematische lexicon [leipzig,  ]:  .  reprinted in gesammelte werke, part  one: vol.  .        special techniques.  the author of the semler lesson argued that in these cases the artist  should first form an impression of the visible body in his gemüth before endeavoring to  create an outline of the awkwardly shaped object:  one can make very clear sketches of bodies with corners, but with round or dissimilar  figures, one must first imagine them in the gemüth. the first (kind of body) one calls  known, certain, affirmed, but the unknown ones are doubtful, fleeting transmissions.    aside from this, observation of the situation in which the drawing is made affects  differences in expression and appearance …. this only becomes clear to artists who  combine verbal, visual and practical lessons and who are properly constituted.     only artists who had been properly constituted and had received enough training were  ready to begin representing awkwardly shaped objects.  the author’s insistence that the  artist first imagine these objects in his gemüth before representing them is very similar to  francke’s insistence in his basic instructions for reading and approaching the holy  scriptures that individuals form a picture in their minds while meditating before they  begin.   once the artist had formed an image of the round or dissimilar figure in his  imagination was he ready to employ a special set of techniques to the canvas.    the semler guide to painting and drawing text can also be read as an assortment  of exercises for the moral perfection of representation.  the tenth exercise, for example,  is titled “how to sketch (entwerfen) the picture of a body or a figure out of one’s own  imagination.”  the “solution” included six steps:  ) first draw the dividing­lines of the object, whether it may be a person or animal or  some other kind of body.    ) give them their extension in width and height with a kind of raw sketch or outline.  ) test how well you have rendered their proportions or not and make improvements  where necessary.  ) then secure the invention with a quick outline as well.                                                      afst/h e  , semler lehrplan,  .   august hermann francke, einfältiger unterricht, wie man die heilige schrift zu seiner wahren  erbauung lessen solle [halle: waysenhaus,  ] (reprinted in halle: kleine texte der franckeschen  stiftungen):  ­ .      ) record it on a working sketch, on a page following the directions in the fifth exercise  above.  ) if you want to draw a clothed human figure, you have to ... first draw the body without  its main features and afterwards lay the garments over top according to the qualities of its  action.     the imagination was a powerful tool for producing “inventions;” however, as the fourth  step indicated, these inventions needed to be anchored or sichert via the riss or other  tools of precision and standardization.    only when dealing with the representation of non­visible forms, did the semler  guide advise the burgeoning artist not to concern himself with “extension” but to make  use of “barely visible” lines.  johann daniel preissler, an artist from nürnberg, is cited as  having most thoroughly developed in his “beautiful work,” the author continued, a  “theory” for the implementation of this technique.   preissler had become the director of  nürnberg’s painting academy in   and, by  , had established a school for  drawing that was affiliated with the academy and, in turn, developed his own curriculum  for it.   his die durch theorie erfundene practic explored the status of curved lines as  intrinsic carriers of higher forms of incorporeal knowledge in conjunction with the art of  managing these properties so as to produce images of essences (like love, hate, virtue  etc.) that could not be seen.   following preissler, the author of the halle orphanage’s  graphice explained that “when forms were invisible, but known, they had no verifiable                                                     afst/h e  , semler lehrplan,  .   ibid.,  .  “auf solche art verfahret herr preisler und lehret in seinen schöne werke, die durch die  practic ensunden theorie genannt.”  this is likely a reference to johann daniel preissler, die durch theorie  erfundene practic [praktik]: oder gründlich­verfasste reguln deren man sich als einer anleitung zu  berühmter künstlere zeichen­wercken bestens bedienen kann (nürnberg,  ­ ).   johann gabriel doppelmayr ( ­ ), a mathematics professor in nürnberg’s aegidien gymnasium,  member of the royal society ( ) and the berlin academy of science ( ) would write about both  preissler and his father (also a highly regarded artist who had spent many years in rome) in his historische  nachricht von den nürnbergischen mathematicis und künstlern ... mit vielen nützlichen anmerckungen  und verschiedenen kupffern versehen von johann gabriel doppelmayr [nürnberg,  ] (reprinted in  hildesheim; new york: georg olms,  ).    http://gso.gbv.de/xslt/db= . /set= /ttl= /mat=/nomat=t/clk?ikt= &trm=durch http://gso.gbv.de/xslt/db= . /set= /ttl= /mat=/nomat=t/clk?ikt= &trm=theorie http://gso.gbv.de/xslt/db= . /set= /ttl= /mat=/nomat=t/clk?ikt= &trm=erfundene http://gso.gbv.de/xslt/db= . /set= /ttl= /mat=/nomat=t/clk?ikt= &trm=practic http://gso.gbv.de/xslt/db= . /set= /ttl= /mat=/nomat=t/clk?ikt= &trm=% bpraktik% d http://gso.gbv.de/xslt/db= . /set= /ttl= /mat=/nomat=t/clk?ikt= &trm=oder http://gso.gbv.de/xslt/db= . /set= /ttl= /mat=/nomat=t/clk?ikt= &trm=gru%cc% ndlich-verfasste http://gso.gbv.de/xslt/db= . /set= /ttl= /mat=/nomat=t/clk?ikt= &trm=reguln http://gso.gbv.de/xslt/db= . /set= /ttl= /mat=/nomat=t/clk?ikt= &trm=deren http://gso.gbv.de/xslt/db= . /set= /ttl= /mat=/nomat=t/clk?ikt= &trm=mansich http://gso.gbv.de/xslt/db= . /set= /ttl= /mat=/nomat=t/clk?ikt= &trm=anleitung http://gso.gbv.de/xslt/db= . /set= /ttl= /mat=/nomat=t/clk?ikt= &trm=beru%cc% hmter http://gso.gbv.de/xslt/db= . /set= /ttl= /mat=/nomat=t/clk?ikt= &trm=ku%cc% nstlere http://gso.gbv.de/xslt/db= . /set= /ttl= /mat=/nomat=t/clk?ikt= &trm=zeichen-wercken http://gso.gbv.de/xslt/db= . /set= /ttl= /mat=/nomat=t/clk?ikt= &trm=bestens http://gso.gbv.de/xslt/db= . /set= /ttl= /mat=/nomat=t/clk?ikt= &trm=bedienen http://gso.gbv.de/xslt/db= . /set= /ttl= /mat=/nomat=t/clk?ikt= &trm=kan     extension and had to be approached in a different way.”   one could offer a gesture (or  entwurf) in the direction of these ideas but the techniques for mastering their precise  replication were still being developed.  entwurf lines were defined as “a mixture of  curved and straight lines” that “best serve” an artist attempting to work on something “of  his own invention.”  the application of colors to drawings, and in painting, was also  deemed an effective strategy (in both halle orphanage guides) for the advanced artist’s  attempts to render known but invisible or non­linear forms.     in addition to his treatise on characteres, aristotle’s pupil theophrastros— whom we met in chapter four—would produce a treatise on colors rooted in a similar  principle.  color, like character, was a real property of objects, and just like different  characters contained within themselves the markers of their own constitution, so too did  different colors.  de coloribus followed aristotle’s division of color into two extremes,  white and black (the fundamentals), with several intermediate colors that were loosely  connected to the physical properties of the four elements: air, water, fire and earth.   this  “aristotelian scale” would dominate the way in which color was understood and  organized, even around the time that the halle orphanage graphice guide was published.   but by this point, the scale had been subjected to countless modifications, expanded by  several individuals (including athanasius kircher) into comprehensive tables of  “composite” colors and their corresponding essences.  the publication of newton’s ideas  about color in his opticks ( ) based on his extensive experiments with prisms had                                                     afst/h e  , semler lehrplan,  .    kemp, the science of art ( ):  ; aristotle discusses color explicitly in de sensu et sensibili.   countless painters and theorist would embraced this “aristotelian scale,” including leonardo da vinci  who explained that “white is the first amongst the simple colors, and yellow the second, green the third of  them, blue is the fourth, and red is the fifth, and black is the sixth. and white is given by light, without  which no color may be seen, yellow by earth, green by water, blue by air and red by fire and black by  darkness which stands above the element of fire.” quoted in idem,  .      also forced contemporaries to reflect on the possibility of color’s inherent subjectivity.    what better moment to adopt a conciliatory stance than by endeavoring to embrace the  validity of both theories?  was color accidental and illusory or was there something  formal, substantial and theoretical about it?   were colors perceptions perceived by the  soul or were they intrinsically resident in objects? .       reconciling these opposing stances involved finding a way of illustrating color’s  own status, like the gemüth, as a material site invested with a set of symbolic  meanings—its intrinsic nominality and physicality.  the orphanage graphice author’s  interest in embracing this middle path is manifest in the influence of samuel theodor  gericke’s translation of c.a. du fresnoy’s the theoretical art of painting (de arte  graphica) and de lairesse’s art of painting throughout the text.   du fresnoy’s de arte  graphica dealt with what he called the “chromatic delights of color,” which he defined as  the “the soul and ultimate realization of painting;” the text emerged in the midst of  vigorous discussions in france in the  s and  s about the abilities of color, despite  its immaterial properties, to help create an awareness of the unseen.   gerald de  lairesse’s great book of painting, or groot schilderboek (amsterdam,  ), appealed  to advocates of perspective because it unequivocally embraced the idea that colors were  universal signifiers or carriers of essential meanings.  kemp writes that de lairesse                                                     for newton’s experiments with prisms see simon schaffer, “glassworks: newton’s prisms and the uses  of experiment,” in david gooding, trevor j. pinch and simon schaffer eds., the uses of experiment:  studies of experimentation in the natural sciences (cambridge: cambridge university press,  ).    kemp, the science of art ( ):  .   stuart clark, vanities of the eye ( ):  .  descartes argued that colors were perceptions, not  qualities that existed in objects.   a primary aim of newton’s experiments with prisms was to refute or  overturn this assertion.   c. a. du fresnoy, kurtzer begriff der theoretischen mahler­kunst, transl. samuel theodor gericke  (berlin,  ); des berühmten mahlers gerhard de lairesse anleitung zur zeichen­kunst, transl. samuel  theodor gericke (berlin,  ).   kemp, the science of art ( ):  .      “assigned ‘emblematic’ meanings to his three ‘chief colors’ and three ‘mixed’ colors:  yellow was equated with ‘luster and glory’; red displayed ‘power and love’; blue was  associated with deity; purple denoted ‘authority and jurisdiction’; violet signified  ‘subjection’; and green stood for ‘servitude.’   like the typologies of virtues and vices  offered by joseph hall’s version of theophrastros’ characteres, the meanings of these  colors (like the gemüth) were fixed, but were constantly in motion—or in a constant state  of gradation or variability.  de lairesse’s color schematic corresponds quite closely to the  one employed by athanasius kircher in the ars magna lucis et umbrae [kircher derived  it from f. aguilonius’s opticorum libri (antwerp,  )], which attached cosmic  significance to the sequence of color types he presented.  the only difference perhaps is  that de lairesse was more willing than kircher to adhere to mainly nominal modes of  signification, whereas kircher’s scheme retained a preoccupation with color’s intrinsic  materiality.   it seems that the pietist producers of the two texts under discussion were  drawn to both lairesse and kircher’s schemes precisely because of their interest in color  as a conciliatory medium and in systematizing axioms for the “science” of painting and  drawing that were both nominal and real.  s.t. gericke eventually translated du fresnoy and de lairesse’s treatises into  german, thereby introducing two of the leading proponents of color as a signifier of non­ visible essences into the landscape in which spener, francke, leibniz and wolff  navigated.  gerike was also a “professor of perspective” who had started a perspective  collegium in berlin in  .   the influences of de lairesse and du fresnoy (via                                                     ibid.,  .   ibid.   samuel theodor gericke, das collegium in der perspectiv, welches [auf aller_ veranlassung s. k. m. in  preussen: auf dero academie der künste und mechanischen wissenschaften allhier] in berlin, [öffentlich]      gerike) are manifest in the introduction of the halle orphanage’s graphice, where the  author explained that color was a specially designated means through which ideas are  rendered:  we also find that not only visible and corporeal, but also non­visible and incorporeal  things can be painted; it is not impossible to represent virtues, vices, and expressions of  character.  as soon as we can acquire a concept of incorporeal things from the influence  of a painting and what it presents us with, then this painting can be called a properly  constructed one….        color gives the nature and quality of the things that are represented their guiding  principle and purpose and no one can properly understand it (i.e. the essence of color)  better than those who have rooted themselves firmly in the other arts and sciences.  we  will also notice from this description that it is not entirely correct when one says that  painting is the modeling of visible things only because…it endeavors to represent still  more, namely non­visible things.      for the members of the pietist community that sponsored the publication of this treatise  on graphice, color contained within itself the capacity to invest representations with  “guiding principles and purpose.”  it invested a drawing with a kind of metaphysical  significance that only a properly trained artist or viewer could see.     in addition to serving as living carriers of symbolic meanings, colors had to be  derived from physical substances in order to be applied to a canvas, thereby reinforcing  longstanding aristotelian links between color and substance.  the two orphanage  drawing guides offer instructions for how to apply the latest techniques in projective  geometry in conjunction with preparing the “real materials” necessary for making a  particular color appear.   the semler text describes “corpus colors,” derived from  minerals, as well as colors derived from “vegetable extracts and tinctures” which                                                                                                                                                    gelesen werden wird (cölln an der spree,  ).  s.t. gericke is referred to in the halle orphanage  graphice text as a “professor of anatomy & painting in the royal prussian artist academy of berlin” but  his biography also indicates that he was a “professor of perspective” and published a teaching guide to  perspective for this collegium.     graphice (halle: waysenhaus,  ):  ­ .   afst/h e  , semler lehrplan,  .      painters­in­training were to learn how to turn into solvents.   the author then provided  detailed instructions for how to prepare watercolors, the “juice” (safft) colors, or colors  derived from vegetable extracts, as well as oil paints.  this is all in addition to a separate  lesson contained in the semler plan, entitled “about colors, about painting, and what is  similar in painting,” which includes detailed recipes for deriving different colors from  other physical substances.       immediately following the sequence describing the ability of color to serve as a  signifier of certain essences and to be comprised of these same essences, the author of the  semler text moves into a substantive discussion about capturing the movement of bodies  and their affections.  on the surface, the exercises seem to be about how not to let the  passions hold much (or any) sway over the constitution of the painting.  however, just  like francke urged the members of this community to stir up the passions so as to come  into a more meaningful communion with the divine (thereby acquiring heightened  abilities to intuit and to perceive) the author of the graphice seems open to the  possibilities of artistic imagination to project his “inventions” onto a two­dimensional  space in a controlled and edificatory manner:  it is often thought that one who is unable to draw from his own fantasies or out of his  own head must practice by drawing other drawings, paintings, models and sketching from  life.  i can only to a lesser extent repeat this here and say that really the best use that we  can derive out of copying paintings or things standing before us is this: that we also can  put down on paper something of our own invention.      of course no rules about how exactly to go about doing this can be provided here because  whoever has come so far that he can sketch something out of his own head will already  be able to provide those rules for himself.  if i were to provide a reminder to someone  who is so far along i would ask him to take a look back at our description of painting here  and assure him, if he wanted to know, of just what this description is about—especially                                                     ibid.,  .   ibid.,  .        so that he remembers that painting is about artful and, yes, living or natural representation  (abbildung).  by remembering this, his inventions will not be falsely carried out.      francke’s organization eventually provided these rules, or steps, for “drawing from the  imagination” in the “painting and drawing as mechanical science” guide modeled after  wolff’s systematic framework.  they did this quite deliberately, i propose, as yet another  expression of their attempt to regulate the processes through which the passions could  mingle—strategically, productively, morally—with projective technologies and substance  in order to produce more perfect renderings of real forms.      conclusion    both the printed halle orphanage’s graphice guide and the guide contained  within the pages of the semler lessons must be seen as invitations to participate in a set of  practices.  they were part of the stiftungen’s wider assortment of guides for reading the  scriptures or viewing models of the temple of jerusalem that could affect a  transformation in an individual’s ability to appreciate the conciliatory meanings at the  heart of these same models, practices and texts.  one learned how to draw and to paint in  order to see correctly, not necessarily to become a famous painter; however, the hope was  that through rigorous training in the technologies of geometrical projection,  representations themselves would become significantly improved or more lifelike.   part  of learning how to see correctly was learning to recognize visible and invisible essences,  including virtue, vice, affections and faith.  part of practicing true christianity, in  francke’s estimation, was being able to use perspective (and perspective­glasses, or  lenses) to properly mediate and eventually reconcile distances between near and far, now                                                     ibid.,  .      and tomorrow, visible and invisible.  infidelity and faith look both through the same  perspective­glass, but at contrary ends, he wrote:  infidelity looks through the wrong end of the glass, and therefore sees those objects  which are near afar off and makes great things little, diminishing the greatest spiritual  blessings and removing far from us threatened evils.  faith looks at the right end and  brings the blessings that are far off in time, close to your eye, and multiplies god’s  mercy, which in a distance lost their greatness.     true christians, practicing eclectics, used the conciliatory medium of the perspective­ glass or projection device, such as the lanterna magica, correctly;  they could see “the  blessings that are far off in time” and bring them closer—thereby making them real.   drawings and engravings may not have conditioned the highest forms of recognition, but  they were still valuable, especially when they were produced while looking through the  “right end” of the perspective­glass.  but even more importantly, painting and drawing  were especially potent forms of conciliatory mathematical and mechanical exercise in  this context that could help train the properly constituted gemüth to render  restoratively—or to draw in order to save the world                                                            august hermann francke, introduction to the practice of christianity (london,  ): viii.      chapter seven: seers, machines, naturalia and song in the culture of  understanding       of the most important and useful truths for which a foundation is laid in school, some  emphasize the improvement of the will over morals, others emphasize the culture of  understanding, which i count as the mathematical and the physical.  in my opinion, it is a  rational kind of morality that should be taught to the youth as early as possible because it  is through this that the will is improved and made obedient, which is the main goal of  youth and the foundation of all happiness.    …  i like the institutions in which one finds the pädagogium and the orphanage better than  many other schools because there the youth are directed more toward real things  (realitäten) and forms of knowledge (wissenschaften) that exercise (excoliren) their  understanding than things that only confuse the memory.  …  there the youth are provided with practical opportunities to practice (ausüben) their  morality and given direction in the grasping (begreiffung) of the mathematical and  physical sciences through many experiments.     ­friedrich hoffmann       when a. h. francke characterized his seminar universali as “an orderly  medium” that—like the temple of the jerusalem and the “prophet schools started by the  prophet samuel”—communicated god’s “best intention” while cultivating the healing  powers of the soul, he was making a direct reference to descriptions of prophet schools  that were circulating in europe during the second half of the seventeenth century.   in  nürnberg professor of theology and philosophy johann michael dilherr’s prophet  school (published in  ), prophets are described as truth sayers (weissager) who  receive wisdom directly from god.   while relying on god’s word, old testament  prophets like samuel, isaiah, jeremiah, daniel and ezekiel also reportedly made use of                                                     friedrich hoffmann’s foreward to johann hecker, einleitung in die botanie (halle, waysenhaus,  ).   johann michael dilherr, propheten schul. das ist christliche anweisung zu gottseliger betrachtung des  lebens und der lehre heiliger propheten altes testaments; derer bildnussen, in schönen kupferstichen mit  sind beygefüget. allerlei stands personen erbaulich zu lesen (nürnberg,  ):  ­ .  before accepting a  theology professorship in nürnberg in  , dilherr was a professor of eloquence ( ), history and  poetry ( ) at the university of jena.  in ferdinan van ingen, “johann michael dilherr ( ­ )” in  udo sträter ed., orthodoxie und poesie (leipzig: evangleische verlagsanstalt,  ):  ­ .      “external signs and ceremonies” and were called seers or visionaries because they could  see things that other people could not.   they were translators, who mediated divine  knowledge for mankind and, as an expression of their obligation to convey illuminated  truths to the rest of the world, they started schools.  dilherr explained that “it is worth  knowing that in the old testament, the priests and teachers of god’s churches were also  professors.”  synagogues were not only churches and public houses of worship where  one prayed and heard sermons; rather, there were also auditoria and resident visionaries  could be found there who “instructed the youth in godliness and the free arts (freie  künsten) so that there would always be well educated people who could be useful to both  god and the fatherland.”   in his own description of the lives of the prophets, leiden  preacher david knibbe would also explain that the people of israel “came together in the  houses of prophets as they would in a school, to hear an explanation of the word of the  heart.”    the schools of the prophets were for everyone.  they were sites where a prophet  made visible the divine powers he had been invested with through his godly teachings,  evidence of the fulfillment of these teachings or through “huge and wonderful acts” that  made clear why he had been chosen by god for the office of prophet in the first place.   because of the prophet’s ability to make his powers visible, individuals looked to these  “prophets of the heart” for advice and gathered in their houses or synagogues to partake                                                     ibid.,  .   ibid. “es ist wissens wohl werth, dass in den alten testament, die priester und öffentliche lehrer der  kirchen gottes auch professores gewesen. denn die synagogen wahren nicht allein kirchen und  öffentliche gotteshäuser; in welchen man zu bethen und die predigen pflegte anzuhören: sondern man hatte  auch auditoria, oder solcher gemächer und losamter dabei in welchen dei priester schule hielten und die  jugend in der gottesfurch und freien künsten unterrichteten: damit immer mögten leute erzogen werden;  welche gott dem herrn und dem gemeinen vatterland könnten nützlich seyn.”     david knibbe, histori der propheten in   bücher abgetheilt (bern,  ):  .      in their wisdom.    by directing their attention and their eyes to evidence of the higher  forms of wisdom the prophet had been granted access to, viewers would experience  edification.  they would find themselves drawn to the forms of insight expressed to them  from the prophet’s heart, which they would begin to recognize after sustained periods of  observation.  they would be moved to emulate the prophet by exercising their minds and  their bodies—all the while calibrating these two different forms of motion via their  hearts.  dilherr relayed the story of how the prophet elisha encouraged his followers to  build houses or to use their hands to learn a craft at the same time as they reflected on the  holy scriptures.  even the apostle paul, dilherr noted, understood that “next to studying,  one should learn an honest craft (ein sauberes handwerk);” he drew nourishment from  his work as a carpet maker while he preached and studied.   “we work day and night,”  wrote paul in his second letter to the thessalonians ( : ­ ), “so that we can give  ourselves to you as examples that you can follow.”        in addition to ability of the term orphanage to serve as a metaphor for the mandate  of universal benevolence around which francke’s entire project revolved, the phrase  “prophet school” evocatively signifies the entire organization’s underlying ethos.  the  halle orphanage was imagined as a modern temple of jerusalem, within which certain  gifted or promising youths were placed under the tutelage of holy men, prophets or  herrscher, who directed their exercises of self­cultivation.  probably the most important  characteristic of the exercises they engaged in was their sheer variety.  even in the most                                                     ibid.,  .   dilherr ( ):  .  “sondern sie haben sich neben der erlernung der heiligen schrifft auch wohl auf die  architectur oder baukunst verstanden.  wie dann vor veil hundert jahren es nicht ungewöhnlich gewesen:  neben dem studiren auch ein fein sauberes handwerck zu lernen: inmassen wir von dem apostel paulo  wissen; dass er ein teppichmacher gewesen: zu seinem unterhalt solch handwerck so viel sein predigamt  zugelassen, bisweilen getrieben und sich damit ernehret habe.”   ibid.,  .  “…dass wir uns selbst zum fürbild euch geben uns nachzufolgen.”      elite school of the complex, the pädagogium, boys of noble birth learned how to turn  wood, make paper, paint, draw and grind glass in their “periods of motion” or recreation.   they were taken on field trips to the workshops of local artisans, where they could  acquire the highest form of recognition possible (according to the semler typology)  simply by seeing these sites in person.  just as paul had recommended, rigorous training  of the intellect (via mathematics, language learning, biblical exegesis) was combined  with a duly rigorous training of the ausserliche sinne in francke’s schulstadt.   learning  to mediate this wild assortment of activity, as we have seen, was the end goal of the  seemingly endless regimens.  mediating or calibrating even contradictory forms of  knowledge was about bridging the same dichotomies that continue to inform our own  epistemological landscape; only halle’s orphanage offered a conciliatory solution.  it  must be read as an extended, dystopic space endeavoring to channel all forms of  knowledge into itself so that these forms could be filtered through the medium of the  heart, the single point where all knowledge came together.    just as stirring up and reconciling competing forms of knowledge could be  practiced inside the orphanage’s physical edifice, one could stir up and reconcile the  passions of the lower regions of the soul in order to see the world more clearly.   this  involved introducing several key techniques that could induce the necessary stirring and  hone the cognitive skills necessary to discern.  the techniques also allowed practitioners  to usefully apply the forms of insight that came out of productively stirring the passions  and to offer up visual representations of desirable conciliatory forms.   as we have seen,  models and instruments, grundrisse, paintings and drawings were the halle prophets’  favorite tools because these objects productively juxtaposed craft and intuition,      mathematical precision with substance.  in addition to being an intrinsically conciliatory  form of exercise, painting and drawing also offered up a unique set of opportunities for  creative expression, for the capturing (and projecting) of emotions, virtues and vices on a  two­dimensional plane.  this was also the case for three­dimensional models, especially  machines, which provided the orphanage’s illuminated seers with an especially striking  means of representing on the schauplatz how mathematical precision and nature  coalesced to give each machine a unique and beautiful animating principle.  i aim to  show in this chapter how, like the medium of the heart, machines could become  conciliatory containers of insight, which, in the very act of mediating and embodying  several forms of knowledge made themselves useful as tools of philanthropy.  part of  learning to appreciate these machines involved participating in exercises that stirred the  heart, like singing lieder (a fundamental component of all francke’s schools), moved the  body, like turning wood, and trained the mind, like learning geometry.   only then was  one ready to observe and reconcile through love.  the resonant intermingling of naturalia with various regimens of instrumentation,  measurement, geometrical projection and machination was a signature of the “culture of  understanding” that friedrich hoffmann recognized in the landscape of francke’s  schulstadt.  this intermingling is powerfully resonant in the semler lesson plans (see  appendix  ), which are explicitly designated as “mathematical and mechanical school”  curricula but at the same time include detailed lessons on the properties of metals,  minerals, stones, flowers, trees, herbs, birds and fish.  they are in many ways entirely  consonant with a physico­mathematical approach to knowledge that newton famously  advocated in his philosophiæ naturalis principia mathematica ( ).  and yet, i also      read these lessons as unique testimonies of the vision­ and love­oriented culture that  produced them—one that privileged the “seeing heart” because it held the key to  investing overtly mercantilist economies and their arbiters with moral compasses.   properly viewing scale models of “useful” machines would ensure a perfectly  proportional relationship between expenditures of force and applications that were  intrinsically ethical—or that would promote the common good.  understanding the  significant role of machines in the semler lesson plans and the stiftungen’s culture of  understanding requires some amount of sustained attention to the vociferous debates  around mechanics, especially the related problems of force and substance, taking place  precisely at this moment.  while i certainly cannot do justice in this chapter to the  extensive literature around the liminal status of mechanics since antiquity, i can  emphasize its ability to function, like optics, as a “mixed” or conciliatory area of inquiry  fundamentally oriented around visual representation.    despite the repeated insistence in precisely this period that the world of the mind  and the world of the hand ought to be kept separate, there have been several attempts  among historians of science recently to map out the varied ways in which intuition and  skill have been manifestly conjoined over time.  in their introduction to the mindful  hand, simon schaffer and lissa roberts explain that while the classical opposition of  epistemē and technē has been in place since the time of aristotle, “this distinction took on  new significance in the specific historical milieu that also saw the emerging dominance  of early­modern european markets and political economies…”  they rightly observe that  “in a society of orders, the steeply graded hierarchy of head and hand was vital to  defining persons and their social places;” but that maintaining the hierarchy itself      involved often precarious and ambitious maneuverings.   since mechanics was  considered, “neither natural philosophy nor mathematics nor technology but a mix of all  these,” careful study of the meanings practitioners attached to it has a great deal to teach  us about how the process of joining minds and hands worked.   in  , christoph semler would publish a description of the objects he had  demonstrated in a collegia mechanica he had offered at the university of halle that same  year.  each object, he explained, was equally valuable because each one “illuminated the  goodness, strength and wisdom of god when they were viewed by rational and christian  eyes.”  in this collegium, the following “well constructed models and material figures  were presented and demonstrated ocularly”:  )  a warship, especially all of its external and internal parts … and how it holds up on  long trips by storms and in sea battles, including burials of the dead  )  a newly discovered machine that determines the true cause of the ocean’s tides,  taking into account all circumstances but without relying upon the influence of the moon  )  the temple of the holy grave in jerusalem, according to all of its parts, as it would  appear to pilgrims there today  )  a horizontal projection (grundriss) of the city of halle, according to which it has  been turned into a model    )  an entire city with its walls, graves and public buildings    )  a house that shows the work of a carpenter, also the tools of a carpenter in a model    )  a fort    )  the attaquirung of the same  )  an entire field encampment with army, with tents, alleyways and circumvallation und  contravallation lines    )  a battery    )  a salt mill with all relevant parts    )  a german salt fountain    )  the metritzer fountain in a model  )  an open air inhalatorium (gradierwerk) through which the strength of the soul will  be brought to a higher grade                                                     lissa roberts, simon schaffer and peter dear eds., “preface,” the mindful hand ( ): xiii.     mary henniger­voss, “working machines and noble mechanics: guidobaldo del monte and the  translation of knowledge” isis  :  (june,  ):  .   james a. bennett argues that the emergence of a  “dominant mechanical tradition in natural philosophy” was profoundly influenced by the mechanical arts  and mathematical sciences in “mechanics’ philosophy and the mechanical philosophy” history of science  : ­  (march,  ):  ­ .  see also alan gabbey’s discussion of the different ways in which mechanics  has been defined over time in his “historiography of early modern mechanics,” in j.v. feld and frank  a.j.l. james, renaissance and revolution:  humanists, scholars, craftsmen and natural philosophers in  early modern europe (cambridge: cambridge university press,  ).        )  a new bee­hive invented by an englishman    )  a mill with two gears  )  the mayland plough of marquis borro, which allows one man to accomplish in the  preparation of fields that which had required two men and a horse previously   )  a new invention of a plough, which plows and sows and puts seeds in the ground at  the desired depth and width from each other—all at the same time       )  a mine through which the work of the miner and all of his tools will be presented  )  a clock and all of its parts—including how they all fit together and each piece  separately  )  a singing clock and its structure  )  an experimenta magnetica, as well as the magnetica verticalis, which still no one  has attempted to use at sea for the good of the sailor and of which the same thing, when it  is combined with an acu horizontali, can be used to happily find longitude maritime  using the specially developed mapparum magnetico­hydrographicarum.     semler referred to all of these objects as “models, whose demonstrations not only allow  us to enjoy their many uses but whose musters and examples excite the ingenia to attempt  similar advancements and give us another reason for bringing these new discoveries to  light.”   most of them are scale models of machines.      at the same time that christoph semler was demonstrating his machines and  instruments in halle, leiden professor of experimental physics, willem 's gravesande,  was situating models of working machines next to experimental instruments in his  university’s physics cabinet.  lissa roberts explains that in leiden “these devices  (instruments and machine models) were used to demonstrate the physical principles that  gave witness to the orderly working of divine creation while celebrating the creativity  and ingenuity with which nature could be harnessed for human benefit.  the collection  pointed, in other words, simultaneously to the worlds of theory and practice, tying them                                                     wochentliche hallische anzeigen (april  ,  ):  ­ .  “vergangnen winter über hat hr. m.  christoph semler, diaconus an der kirche zu st. ulrich alhier in einem collegio mechanico fürzustellen und  klärlich zu beweisen sich bemühet, wie dass man bey allen professionen in denen objectis mechanicis und  physicis die füncklein der weissheit güte und allmacht gottes überall hervor leuchten sehe, wenn man  dieselbe nur mit vernünfftigen und christlichen augen zu betrachten belieben möchte.  und in solchem  wohlgemeynten absehen sind alle folgende objecta, in wohlausgearbeiteten modellen und in materieller  figur, präsenter und oculariter von ihm demonstriret worden.”   ibid. ( ):   .      together with the multi­faceted concept of utility.”   if models of machines were, as  roberts’ and my own evidence suggests, devices whose assimilatory strength lay in their  appeals to applicability, proficiency and improvement, this was almost entirely because  these appeals were made to the eye.  in halle, as in leiden, models of machines linked  theory and practice by displaying the ways in which natural materials could be made to  benefit society through human invention; however, when manipulated by halle’s  prophets of the heart, models of machines could increase desire or one’s own ability to  apply the machine to the world in love.  when a machine model was deemed useful in  halle’s conciliatory climate, it was morally sound, compulsory and to be placed on the  schauplatz for all to see.  it was to be integrated into the pietist orphanage’s rigorous  program of conciliatory exercise.              in the first section of what follows i focus exclusively on the semler lessons’  treatment of machine models so as to highlight the sustained amount of energy the halle  seers were investing in their potential to both assimilate and to inspire.   to be true to  semler’s organizational framework, i attempt to do this in conjunction with his treatment  of naturalia—including the materials manipulated by the machines and individuals he  presented ocularly.  in the second section, i move from exercises directly associated with  the models and materials of the schauplatz to other forms of exercise developed so as to  prepare children to properly observe—especially the geometrical, musical and motion­ oriented training regimens of all francke’s “prophet schools.”                                                       see lissa roberts, “mapping steam engines and skill in eighteenth­century holland,” in lissa roberts,  simon schaffer and peter dear eds mindful hand ( ): esp.  ­ .  see also roberts’ treatment of  utility in “going dutch: situating science in the dutch enlightenment,” william clark, jan golinksi and  simon schaffer eds. the sciences in enlightened europe (chicago: university of chicago press,  ):  ­ .          semler’s machine models as expressions of the heart  christian wolff, j.c. and l.c. sturm and christoph semler’s interest in creating  “mechanical and mathematical school” curricula (or introductions to these middling  sciences) signals their participation in a much broader set of discussions surely not  limited to the german states.  yet they were among the first to produce descriptions of  these new schools for a german­speaking audience; and they did this within the unique  conciliatory context of pansophy.  all their contributions came before nicolas bion’s  description of a newly opened mathematical work school in paris was translated into  german by berlin academy member, johann gabriel doppelmayr, in  , for  example.   in his own beginner’s guide to the mathematical sciences, wolff assured his  readers that he was not only going to describe how certain machines were made, but that  he was going to explain what materials one should direct the attention to when  constructing and using them—and why.   because one of the central goals of his guide  was to demonstrate things that “have visible applications (augenscheinliche nutzen) in  human life,” he explained that the underlying goal of the lessons was to allow the  principles under girding “not only of the instruments and other works of art, but also the  wonderful movements in the bodies of animals and humans” to show themselves, to  make themselves visually manifest so that his readers would take notice of them  (vormerken).                                                         nicholas bion, traité de la construction et des principaux usages des instrumens de mathématique; neu­ eröffnete mathematische werck­schule, oder gründliche anweisung, wie die mathematische instrumenten  nicht allein ... zu gebrauchen, sondern auch ... zu erehalten sind .... transl. johann gabriel doppelmayr  (franckfurt; leipzig; nürnberg,  ; reprinted nürnberg,  ,  ,  ,   and  ).   christian wolff, beginners guide to mechanics ( st ed.  ),  .  reprinted in gesammelte werke,  part one: vol.  .   ibid.,        in a similar manner, the writer of a semler lesson entitled simply on mills  explained that “mills are named according to the way in which (wie und wodurch) they  are made to move.”   some were made to move through water, some through wind;  others were powered by horses (rossmühlen), humans (tretmühlen), weights  (gewichtmühlen) and hands (handmühlen), thereby determining their quality and how  they were recognized.  the scale model of a mill that the lesson indicates was placed on  the schauplatz on march  ,  , was called a zieh­pomster because of its observable  and motion inducing relationship to a pomster or “because it hangs on pomster­ketten,  which it mediates by allowing it to be wound up and let out again.”   other mills  acquired their purpose and, of course, their different names from the “materials that are  processed or produced from them.”   examples included flour and barley mills, pepper,  coffee, oil, herb, powder and mustard seed mills and paper mills, “whose structure is  almost the same.”   there were also “bohr mills,” which the lesson writer described as  “carrying the most power” and as including a new kind of mill for wasserkunst, in  addition to “the machine that professor wolff is having built.”      the semler lesson on mechanics was mostly derived from leonhard christoph  sturm’s treatment of this mathematical science in his kurzer begriff der gesamten  mathesis—a treatment markedly similar to the one he had offered readers of his  machinen­hauss ( / ).   the writer specifically indicated that “because it is                                                     afst/h e  , semler lehrplan,  .   ibid.,  .   ibid.,  . “die darauf tractiret und gearbeitet wird...”    ibid.,  .  “dann die lumpen werden auf den meisten papier mühlen mit hammern zuschlagen.  in  holland aber werden sie mit metallen hobeln zerschnitten...”   ibid.   leonhard christoph sturm, kurzer begriff der gesamten mathesis (frankfurt an der oder,  ).  according to his entry in johann heinrich zedler’s grosses vollständiges universal­lexikon, vol.    (halle,  ), l.c. sturm was the author of a three­volume text published anonymously in hamburg      called a mechanical school, one explained to the children in great detail several exercises  in mathesis, which were also repeated, and also herr sturm’s kurtzen begriff der  mathesis, especially the part on mechanics was laid down as the foundation.”    according to marcus popplow’s recent assessment of the machinen­hauss, the  discussion of mechanics that the younger sturm offered deliberately distanced itself from  the newly emergent and highly polarizing discussions around mechanization—including  what some considered to be the intrinsic dangers of mechanical philosophy.   sturm’s  treatment was much more oriented around sixteenth­century discussions about the  essential components of all machines.  he identified four: namely the lever (hebel), the  cogwheel and gearbox (kammrad und getriebe), the screw (schraube), and the cable and  block (seyl und kloben).    several classificatory schemes found in the writings of archimedes and the  writings of heron von alexandria offered analysis of these and more components,  including the scale (waage) and the law of the lever—considered the “foundation for the  understanding of all machines” by several champions of renaissance mechanics.    characteristic sixteenth­century treatises interested in revisiting the contributions of what  popplow calls “pre­classical mechanics” included guidobaldo del monte’s                                                                                                                                                    between  ­  entitled der geöffnete ritter­platz.  it is occasionally cited in the semler lessons.  the  second volume was called das neueröffnete machinen­hauss, worinnen curiösen und reisenden  angewiesen wird was sie vornehmlich von machinen, so bey schiffahrten, wasserkünsten, opernhäusern,  mühlen, berg­ und uhrwercken, gebrauchet werden, wissen und verstehen müssen wan sie selbige mit  nutzen und vortheil auf reisen besehen wollen (hamburg,  ).  another edition appeared two years later  under a slightly altered title: das neu­eröffnete rüstzeug oder machinen hauss (hamburg,  ).  see  marcus popplow’s “popularisierung von technik um  .  das neu­eröffnete machinen­hauss’ von  leonhard christoph sturm” in lars bluma, karl pichol, wolfhard weber eds. technikvermittlung und  technikpopularisierung. historische und didaktische perspektiven (berlin: waxmann,  ).   ibid.,  .   see william clark’s treatment of the discourses around “minds, machines and miracles” in eighteenth­ century prussia in “the death of metaphysics in enlightened prussia,” william clark, jan golinski and  simon schaffer eds.  the sciences in enlightened europe ( ):  ­ .   mary henniger­voss, “working machines and noble mechanics: guidobaldo del monte and the  translation of knowledge” isis  :  (june,  ):  .   popplow,  .       mechanicorum liber ( ) and galileo’s le mecaniche; guidobaldo monte’s treatise  was translated into german by daniel mögling as the mechanischer kunst­kammer   (mechanical arts chamber) in  .    l.c. sturm’s (and semler’s) treatment of  mechanics is much more closely in line with guidobaldo’s treatment, or what j.a.  bennett has called “the mechanic’s philosophy”—meaning it comes out of the praxis­ oriented mathematical sciences of the early renaissance that is later co­opted or  integrated into a philosophical framework.  as we saw in chapter two, l.c. sturm’s  father was at the forefront of attempts in the german­speaking world to popularize the  insights of archimedes and practical mathematics in conjunction with the eclectic  methodology he was championing.  this, in tandem with a tendency among sixteenth­ century italian writers on mechanics, like guidobaldo, to talk about how those who  understood machines did so through a combination of their intuition and their bodies  (they did not necessarily need a full understanding of rational causes)  made them  appealing to the sturms, to tschirnhaus, to leibniz and to those, like francke, interested  in the machine’s ability to generate impassioned motion or movement in the world that  could be felt and immediately grasped by the hearts of others.      l.c. sturm’s treatment of mechanics explained that there were three essential  things that allowed the human being to function: “his organic body through which he is                                                     guidobaldo produced an influential treatise on screws called de cochlea (venice,  ) and an important  treatise on theories of centres of gravity called in duos archimedis aequeponderantium libros paraphrasis  (pesaro,  );  not surprisingly, he also wrote about perspective (perspectivae libri sex [pesaro,  ])  and astronomical instruments (planisphaeriorum universalium theorica [pesaro,  ]).  see henniger,    n.  and domenico meli, “guidobaldo del monte and the archimedean revival,” nuncius   ( ):  ­ .   see chapter one; henniger­voss,  . “according to guidobaldo, theoretical understanding of the  causes behind the effects of mechanics was beyond the ken of workers.  in fact, the mechanic as a human  agent is of minimal importance…perhaps extrapolating from the pseudo­aristotle’s prologue to the  questions on mechanics, guidobaldo holds that the common mechanic could understand the machines with  which he worked only intuitively, while the man of erudition had knowledge of causes.  the difference  between the learned response to machines and that of the common people is a kind of leit motif in  guidobaldo’s prefatory essays.”       made capable of working; his soul, which directs the body; and his external senses  (ausserliche sinne), through which he grasps or understands the work.”  in the same way,  sturm continued, “we must conceive of each machine in a three­fold manner:  . the  machine itself as it is comprised of wheels, gears etc.,  .  the driving force applied to it  and  . the tool (werkzeug) that is made to function via the machine.  it is of these three  parts that a properly constituted mechanics must engage.”   in other words, in sturm’s  formulation the machine and all of its composite parts was the human body, an organic  substance, the force involved in activating the machine was the soul and the “seeing  heart”—the neutral, third site—became a conciliatory tool that affected change through  its capacity to recognize and properly apply the force of the machine in the world.   this  was the formulation that the writer of the semler lesson referred to when he specified that  l.c. sturm’s treatment of mechanica served as the foundation for his own understanding  and presentation of mechanics to pupils.    of course, l.c. sturm was not the only proponent of the idea that machines or  mechanical forms were holistic, organic entities that joined the nominal and the real in a  “beautiful” union.  robert boyle, whose devotional treatises on reconciliation appeared  in german via francke’s orphanage press, had also argued much earlier than l.c. sturm  that mechanical form includes, simultaneously, “corpuscular structure” and “the resulting                                                     l.c. sturm, kurzer begriff ( ):  : “wie wird mechanica rechtmässig eingetheilet?  weil diese  eintheilung weitläufftig ist, will ich dich zu meinem tract. de nat&const. matheseos verwiesen haben,  hier aber dieselbe nur über haupts mit wenig worten verfassen.  wie an einem menschen wenn eer arbeitet  dreyerley zu consideriren ist, der organische leib dadurch er capabel ist zu arbeiten, die seele welche den  leib treibet und die äusserliche sinnen dadurch er die arbeit angreiffet; also müssen wir an jeder machine  auch dreyerley concipiren.   . die machine selbst wie sie aus rädern, schrauben usw zusammen gesetzet  ist,  . die daran applicirte bewegungskrafft,  ) das werckzeug welches von der machine getrieben wird.  von diesen drey theilen muss die mechanica ordentlich handeln. wie nun dieses biss dato noch in keinem  einigen buche so viel ich immermehr erfahren, geschehen ist, so wird mir niemand verueblen, wenn ich  sage, dass es allen denselben scriptis an behöriger ordnung und vollstandigkeit mangle... ”      properties necessary to classify it.”   jan­erik jones argues that a tendency among  scholars to read boyle as a kind of proto­lockean, or as anticipating locke’s empirical  taxonomies, has meant that boyle’s interest in redefining, yet retaining, the aristotelian  idea of forms, or species, has been overlooked.  as wolff would later affirm in the  beginner’s guide, boyle insisted that “the reason we can successfully classify  objects…is because the internal structure reveals itself via the observable properties.”    in boyle’s view, when one observed an object on the schauplatz, what one saw was an  assimilation of corpuscular structures or “essential forms” arranged in such a way that  they “denominate” a body or make it visually accessible, and therefore knowable.   leibniz, for his part, also advocated revisiting the “substantial forms” of aristotle (and  the scholastics) so as to reconcile, or promote harmony between, the soul and the body  (although his treatment of substance and theory of monads is quite different from what  boyle was advancing in his “mechanical” theory of forms).    donald rutherford explains that from the  s onward, despite some  adjustments, “leibniz remains committed to a set of basic assumptions about substance,”  that connect with l.c. sturm’s above cited insistence on the capacity of the machine to  function as a werkzeug, or tool of action and/or improvement.   for leibniz, continues  rutherford, “to be a substance is, minimally, to be an individual principle of action,  which persists through change and which serves as a ground for the existence and  properties of all other things.”   without going into the strenuous terrain of leibniz’s  metaphysics here, for my purposes it is enough to emphasize his interest in the machine                                                     jan­erik jones, “boyle, classification and the workmanship of the understanding thesis,” in the  journal of the history of philosophy  :  ( ):  .   ibid.,  .   donald rutherford, “metaphysics: the late period” in nicholas jolley ed. cambridge companion to  leibniz (cambridge: cambridge university press,  ):  .      as assimilation of active, living substances capable of being directed through love.  when  properly joined together, these “individual principles of action” would unite to move (and  improve) perpetually.  not surprisingly, leibniz, l.c. sturm, wolff, semler and their  contemporaries were enormously interested in the promise of perpetual motion and  rumors of local mechanics who had managed to create continually moving machines  abounded.  according to the dreyhaupt chronicle, christoph semler spent hundreds of  talers and worked for over thirty years on developing a perpetui mobilis, “but never  reached his goal.”   his curricula indicate that an introduction to the problem of  perpetual motion concluded the lesson on mechanics.     johann ernst bessler ( ­ ), also known simply as orffyreus, was one of  those local mechanics, originally from zittau, whom everyone seemed to be talking about  at the time semler and francke were active in halle.   in his own investigation of the  popularity of perpetual­motion machines in the early eighteenth century, simon schaffer  explains how these machines were in many ways perfectly “apt occupants of the courtly  and academic world of baroque absolutism” as they were “easily understood as emblems  of the permanent workings of the divinely ordered world­machine and thus rationally  managed state.”   interest in them was inextricably linked to an overall interest in new  engineering schemes and devices needed to power pumps in mines and mills, for  example.  “orffyreus’ wheel,” as it became widely known—and referred to in  correspondence between newton, desaguiliers and other luminaries of this period—was,                                                     zedler, universal­lexicon vol.   (halle,  ):  :  “unter die besondern umstände seines lebens ist  zu rechnen, ... dass er gantzer   jahr an erfindung eines perpetui mobilis gearbeitet, und darauf über    rthl verwendet ohne seien endzweck zu erreichen.”   afst/h e  , semler lehrplan, “zum beschluss hat man von perpetuo mobili gesaget, was davon  zuhalten...”   simon schaffer, “the show that never ends: perpetual motion in the early eighteenth century,” the  british journal for the history of science  :  (june  ):  .      schaffer rightly argues, also “touted as a viable commercial investment” that sheds a  great deal of light on the “rival ways of estimating value in early modern culture.”   but  at least in brandenburg­prussia, or the prussian outpost that was halle in the early years  of the eighteenth century, orffyreus’ perpetually moving wheel was also understood as a  tool of love and reconciliation.  in a text he called the rightly believing orffyreer,  bessler laid out his plans for a union of hearts that would “put the love of christ at the  heart of all knowledge” (ephesians  : ) and bring together “true believers” from all  confessions, including roman catholics, lutherans and calvinists.   in this same  treatise, bessler specifically referred to the halle orphanage as a “house of unity” (haus  der einigkeit) firmly situated upon a foundation of wisdom (weissheit) that itself was  rooted in love.  he was cognizant of how, in a way similar to the perpetually moving  wheel that made him famous and the other semler machines on display in francke’s  orphanage, the halle orphanage could serve as an assimilatory juncture point that  promised to improve the world by teaching certain souls how to harness the active  properties of all substances for the best—in part by viewing scale models of machines.  the semler plans also, for their part, provide some evidence of how highly  technical demonstrations of various machines could be embedded with morally prescient  meanings—including their historical precedents.  the semler on mills lesson, for  example, links biblical evidence (genesis  :  specifically) and evidence from antiquity  to support the idea that mills could and had been employed to perfect society “since the  time of abraham.”  it relates the story of how, according to homer, there were fifty  maidens who milled for a king alcimi but because the work was so unpleasant, they                                                     johann ernst bessler, der rechtglaubige orffyreer: oder die einige vereinigung der uneinigen  christen in glaubens sachen. sie nennen sich gleich; evangelisch­lutherisch, evangelisch­reformirt,  römisch catholisch oder papistisch (kassel,  ).       were relieved of their duties and instead the king started requiring criminals (ubelthäter)  who had landed in prison to mill as penance for their sins.  the lesson writer also  specified that sampson, imprisoned by “his enemies the philistines,” was put to work  milling (in judges  ).   there was a corrective element manifest in the culturally  constructed applications of the mill over the centuries that had been recognized by both  the ancient greeks and the old testament fathers.  not only did the technology of the  mill improve society as a whole, making it possible to more efficiently grind flour and  other foodstuffs necessary to sustain a community, but the mill was used to improve and  correct individuals—providing them with the opportunity to offer up some sort of  penance whose value to the whole was visible to all.     also, as schaffer points out in his discussion of orffyreus, the semler lessons  explicitly linked the mill to the new engineering plans of the prussian state, especially  their interest in opening new mines.   in a lesson on mines, there is a specific reference to  veit ludwig von seckendorff’s description of the art of water milling or water arts as key  to a powerful cameralist state.  “one needs the large wasserkünste, züge and  pompwercke that the experienced miners know about,” he insisted.   this text, called the  german prince­state ( ), had issued a call for the development of new educational  strategies (bildungswesen) that was directed mainly towards the first estate, or nobility.   francke too had referenced seckendorff in his grosse aufsatz, aligning his plans as, in                                                     afst/h e  , semler lehrplan, .    not surprisingly, l.c. sturm also wrote entire treatise about mills: vollständige mühlen baukunst:  darinnen werden i. alle grundreguln so zu der praxi nöthig, die doch gar wenigen recht bekant sind,  treülich angewiesen; ii. die vortheile, die man bey anlegung der wasserräder alle sorten von machinen  zutreiben in acht nehmen muß, auf den höchsten grad der vollkommenheit gebracht; iii. was insonderheit  an korn­, graupen, papier­, Öhl­, pulfer, säg­, steinschneide­, bohr­, schleiff­, sensen­, kessel­,  eisendrat­, hächsel­, und dreschmühlen zuverbessern, aufrichtig entdecket ... (augsburg,  ).   veit ludwigs von seckendorff, deutscher fürstenstaat mit einer gantz neuen zugabe, sonderbahrer und  wichtiger materien um ein grosses theil vermehret (franckfurt und leipzig,  ):  .  http://haweb .bibliothek.uni-halle.de: /db= /set= /ttl= /mat=/nomat=t/clk?ikt= &trm=vollst%d ndige http://haweb .bibliothek.uni-halle.de: /db= /set= /ttl= /mat=/nomat=t/clk?ikt= &trm=m%d 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/mat=/nomat=t/clk?ikt= &trm=entdecket     part, responding to this same call.  yet, like leibniz, francke and semler were interested  in circulating the forms of knowledge contained in the von seckendorff treatise to a much  broader audience—including a steadily growing bürgertum and new communities of  skilled workers, including engineers or mechanics.  francke’s community had actually  acquired mines in göddelsheim (containing shafts named “king david”); there existed a  very real incentive to show able pupils from all backgrounds models of mines and related  machinery in the stiftungen schools.     whether they were managing the entire mining operation or operating the  machines necessary to extract valuable substances, young men in this society needed to  cultivate an intimate grasp of the “observable properties” of corpuscular structures (to  return to boyle).  and, more importantly, in order to “understand” how to apply these  properties, they needed to appreciate the links between their own eyes, hearts and the  werkzeuge they would ultimately control.  it makes perfect sense, in this context, that the  semler “mathematical and mechanical school” curricula would devote a significant  amount of time and energy to describing the “observable properties” of metals, minerals,  stones, flowers, trees, herbs, birds and fish.   natural history was just as important to the  mining enterprise, for example, as the ability to construct accurate geometrical  projections of shaft depths and widths or to properly calculate weights, as well as the  distribution of net forces needed for extraction.  being visually proficient in the  observation of natural forms was a fundamental part of mechanics, just as much as a                                                     for evidence of the halle orphanage’s involvement in mining copper in göddelsheim see stab/f  ,  / :   [june  ,  ] johann daniel herrnschmidt to august hermann francke.  see also afst/p  / /  –  / /  afst/p  / /  –  / /  kupferbergwerk goddelsheim planentwürfe und skizzen and afst/p  / /  –  / /  kupferbergwerk nordenbeck planentwürfe und skizzen.   the lesson immediately preceding the on mechanics lesson is entitled simply, on animals, for example.   boyle is referred to directly in the lesson on stones.          certain proficiency in devising and applying measurements was essential for constructing  and applying the machines themselves.  it is this overt marriage of material and mind (or  natural history and mathematics) that these lessons take as their central task.   in addition to the machine models and instruments on display in the halle  orphanage building, the site became a kind of repository for the housing of natural  objects.  francke created a naturalien­ or wunderkammer that by   (when dreyhaupt  described it in his saalkreis chronicle) contained “a collection comprised in part of  naturalien, which, since the orphanage was built have been mostly donated from  benefactors and friends, and in part of artefactis, which are completed for the good of the  schools and academies and are finished according to a certain cause, whose beginnings  are spelled out again and again in the fusstapfen.”   among the natural objects one  could observe in the collection included over   shells (conch, snail and mussel), a  variety of insects (many sent from india), salamanders, chameleons, a scorpion, a  tarantula, a “three and a half foot long nerve worm that a medical student pulled out of  the foot of a patient,” a crocodile (  ½ feet long), the rib of a whale (  feet long), a  cabinet full of minerals and precious stones found in mines in hungary, saxony, india  and sweden, over   types of marble sent from venice, a four­foot long leaf from a  coconut tree and several kinds of sea herbs sent by the pietist missionary ziegenbalg  from the island of ceylon.   for an educated person of high status to house a  naturalienkammer in and around   was by no means unusual; francke’s collection  marked his interest in and ability to demarcate his own worldliness according to the                                                     dreyhaupt,  .  this is an explicit reference to a.h. francke’s footsteps of divine providence ( ),  in which he spells out the miraculous and divinely inspired benevolence that enabled him to finance the  founding of his orphanage and associated institutions.    ibid.  see also afst/w xi­/  inventarverzeichnisse (kataloge) der schränke der kunst­ und  naturalienkammer, especially verzeichnisse  ­  von gottfried august gründler ( )      standards set by those around him.   and yet, even dreyhaupt is careful to note in his  description of this collection that the objects themselves were donated by various inspired  benefactors, not acquired through standard commercial channels and that they were seen  as necessary for the realization of the orphanage’s primary cause.  naturalia too were  essential components of the true consilia of all knowledge that the halle prophets taught  their pupils to accomplish with their hearts.  the preoccupation of francke’s community with naturalia and physica has been  more thoroughly treated than its collective interest in the mathematical sciences—albeit  mainly by historians of medicine interested in halle pietists’ chemiatric and naturopathic  regimens.   the semler plans, for their part, affirm (and i think extend) the most recent  assessments of pietists’ preoccupation with medicine, including renate wilson and  others’ insistence that an extremely varied collection of pharmaceutical remedies were  employed in the stiftungen that combined botanical and chemical materia medica, in  addition to several other forms of therapy—like diet and mineral baths.   while the  semler lessons contain a direct reference to paracelsus in the apothecary lesson  (specifically in a description of borax), suggesting the swiss physician’s preference for  chemiatric remedies was known among the halle seers, the lessons by no means endorse  a purely chemiatrical approach to therapeutics.   herbs and other botanical remedies  feature just as prominently in the same apothecary lesson, for example.  indeed, the                                                     there is an extensive literature on the early modern wunderkammer and collections of naturalia.  for an  introduction see paula findlen, possessing nature: museums, collecting, and scientific culture in early  modern italy (berkeley: university of california press,  ) or pamela smith and paula findlen eds,  merchants and marvels: commerce, science, and art in early modern europe (london: routledge,  ).     for some recent work on pietist medicine see jürgen helm,  krankheit, bekehrung und reform : medizin  und krankenfürsorge im halleschen pietismus (tübingen: verl. der franckeschen stiftungen halle im  max­niemeyer­verl.,  ).   renate wilson, pious traders in medicine: a german pharmaceutical network in eighteenth­century  north america (university park, pa: pennsylvania state press,  ):  .      “halle orphanage medications” that were eventually shipped around the world in  standard medicine chests also contained a combination of chemical and botanical  regimens, including the famous essentia dulcis, a “tincture of gold” that served as a  general fortifier (i.e. “increased the vital spirits”) and the essentia amara, an extract of  bitter herbs that purified the blood.    but their production relied not only on a wealth of  knowledge about all kinds of natural substances, or materialen, but also on several types  of instruments that made extracting and manipulating them easier.  the semler lessons  contain descriptions of the instruments apothecaries used in addition to their descriptions  of substances; there is also an especially detailed presentation of the instruments found in  a chemical laboratory.  previous attempts to link pietists to physics have also almost always emphasized  their preoccupation with physico­theology and commitment to what wilson calls a  “biblical and christian doctrine of health” that saw the curing of disease as a “divine  gift.”   often linked to the contributions of john ray ( ­ ) and william derham  ( ­ ), physico­theology is essentially a way of thinking about man’s ability to  know the divine that involves using reason to discern the workings of god in nature.   in  johanna geyer­kordesch’s view, pietists were likely more influenced by the ideas of  georg ernst stahl, the noted professor of medicine who was active in halle in the early  years of the eighteenth century, than physico­theological treatises.  for stahl, geyer­                                                    ibid.,  .   see especially fritz krafft’s christus als apotheker: ursprung, aussage und geschichte eines  christlichen sinnbildes (marburg,  ); gisela dehmel, die arzneimittel in der physikotheologie  (münster: lit verl.,  ); renate wilson, “book review: pietismus, medizin und aufklärung in preuβen  im  .jahrhundert: das leben und werk georg ernst stahls” in bulletin of the history of medicine  :   ( ):  .   it was mostly popularized in germany via christian wolff’s vernünfftige gedancken von den absichten  der natürlichen dinge ( ) and only really blossomed from the  s to the  s.  see william clark,  “the death of metaphysics in enlightened prussia” ( ):  .      kordesch contends, physico­theology amounted to an entirely superficial and  unsatisfactory attempt to resolve the mind­body problem—including the caveats so many  had about imagining the body as a kind of machine.  instead, as renate wilson affirms in  her review of geyer­kordesch’s book, stahl and his many followers (including the  physician michael alberti) “insisted there was an essential, direct and divinely driven  linkage between the body as patient and the soul as agent; motion—the motus tonicus  vitalis—acted as their intermediary within an organic entity that was split asunder only  by death.”   geyer­kordesch lays out stahl’s personal connections to the francke  foundation and argues that there is a great deal of convergence between piestist theology  and stahl’s preoccupation with unifying body and soul.  several of stahl’s followers,  including johann juncker and the richter brothers (christian friedrich and christian  sigismund), lived and worked in the stiftungen apothecary and the halle orphanage  press published several of their own treatises—always in the vernacular, which meant a  much wider distribution of stahlian ideas.   as we have seen, for l.c. sturm the external senses comprised the critical third or  unifying element of machines that linked together material and force.  in other words, the  external senses, especially the eyes and the hands, were the tools (werkzeuge) that were  activated in the union.  tools move—or at least that is the only way they affect change.   stahl’s introduction of the motus tonicus vitalis as the third critical point of conjuncture  between body and soul fits neatly with sturm’s formulation.  movement must be  registered sensually to mean anything; it is also an observable phenomenon and it is  inextricably linked to the aristotelian idea of substantial, or intrinsically action­oriented                                                     renate wilson, “book review“ ( ):  .   especially christian firedrich richter’s höchst nöthige erkenntnis vom leibe und natürlichen leben  (leipzig,  ), which geyer­kordesch argues was derived directly from stahl.      forms.  in my view, semler and the teachers of francke’s institutes who employed and  extended the semler lessons saw value in both a stahlian approach to the body as a  holistic entity united by motion and l.c. sturm, leibniz and wolff’s affirmation of the  affinities between bodies and machines (and their three essential components).  they  managed, for the most part, not to succumb entirely to the kind of fatalistic rhetoric  joachim lange would later use on the eve of wolff’s banishment to describe the dangers  of understanding bodies as machines.   semler and francke’s schools introduced pupils  to machines via anschauung on a regular basis precisely because of these objects’  potential to initiate conciliatory gestures in the very act of viewing the mathematical and  material forms of knowledge on display and their capacity to offer up visible evidence of  the intrinsically unifying power of motion.  this helps explain the enormous amount of  emphasis placed on all forms of exercise, or motion, in francke’s stiftungen.  it was used  as a medical antidote in the foundation hospital (founded  ), for example, meaning  that sick children and adults were encouraged, unless they were simply too weak, to turn  wood for several hours a day on wood turning machines so as to activate the conciliatory  (i.e. healing) power of motion in their bodies.  motion periods were also standard features  of the curricula of all of francke’s schools, providing children with the opportunity to  observe—i.e. to unify the pillars of wisdom, erkenntnis and erfahrung—while they  moved.      seeing through music and motion                                                       joachim lange, bescheidene und ausführliche entdeckung der falschen und schädlichen philosophie in  dem wolffianischen systemate metaphysico von gott, der welt, und dem menschen: und insonderheit von  der so genannten harmonia praestabilita des commercii zwischen seel und leib ...(halle: waysenhaus,  ).  http://haweb .bibliothek.uni-halle.de: /db= /set= /ttl= /mat=/nomat=t/clk?ikt= &trm=bescheidene http://haweb .bibliothek.uni-halle.de: /db= /set= /ttl= /mat=/nomat=t/clk?ikt= &trm=und http://haweb .bibliothek.uni-halle.de: /db= /set= /ttl= /mat=/nomat=t/clk?ikt= &trm=ausf%d hrliche http://haweb .bibliothek.uni-halle.de: /db= /set= /ttl= /mat=/nomat=t/clk?ikt= &trm=entdeckung http://haweb .bibliothek.uni-halle.de: /db= /set= /ttl= /mat=/nomat=t/clk?ikt= &trm=der http://haweb .bibliothek.uni-halle.de: /db= /set= /ttl= /mat=/nomat=t/clk?ikt= &trm=falschen http://haweb .bibliothek.uni-halle.de: /db= /set= /ttl= /mat=/nomat=t/clk?ikt= &trm=und http://haweb .bibliothek.uni-halle.de: /db= /set= /ttl= /mat=/nomat=t/clk?ikt= &trm=sch%d dlichen http://haweb .bibliothek.uni-halle.de: /db= /set= /ttl= /mat=/nomat=t/clk?ikt= &trm=philosophie http://haweb .bibliothek.uni-halle.de: /db= /set= /ttl= /mat=/nomat=t/clk?ikt= &trm=in http://haweb .bibliothek.uni-halle.de: /db= /set= /ttl= /mat=/nomat=t/clk?ikt= &trm=dem http://haweb .bibliothek.uni-halle.de: /db= /set= /ttl= /mat=/nomat=t/clk?ikt= &trm=wolffianischen http://haweb .bibliothek.uni-halle.de: /db= /set= /ttl= /mat=/nomat=t/clk?ikt= &trm=systemate http://haweb .bibliothek.uni-halle.de: /db= /set= /ttl= /mat=/nomat=t/clk?ikt= &trm=metaphysico http://haweb .bibliothek.uni-halle.de: /db= /set= /ttl= /mat=/nomat=t/clk?ikt= &trm=von http://haweb .bibliothek.uni-halle.de: /db= /set= /ttl= /mat=/nomat=t/clk?ikt= &trm=gott http://haweb .bibliothek.uni-halle.de: /db= /set= /ttl= /mat=/nomat=t/clk?ikt= &trm=der http://haweb .bibliothek.uni-halle.de: /db= /set= /ttl= /mat=/nomat=t/clk?ikt= &trm=welt http://haweb .bibliothek.uni-halle.de: /db= /set= /ttl= /mat=/nomat=t/clk?ikt= &trm=und http://haweb .bibliothek.uni-halle.de: /db= /set= /ttl= /mat=/nomat=t/clk?ikt= &trm=dem http://haweb .bibliothek.uni-halle.de: /db= /set= /ttl= /mat=/nomat=t/clk?ikt= &trm=menschen http://haweb .bibliothek.uni-halle.de: /db= /set= /ttl= /mat=/nomat=t/clk?ikt= &trm=und http://haweb .bibliothek.uni-halle.de: /db= /set= /ttl= /mat=/nomat=t/clk?ikt= &trm=insonderheit http://haweb .bibliothek.uni-halle.de: /db= /set= /ttl= /mat=/nomat=t/clk?ikt= &trm=von http://haweb .bibliothek.uni-halle.de: /db= /set= /ttl= /mat=/nomat=t/clk?ikt= &trm=der http://haweb .bibliothek.uni-halle.de: /db= /set= /ttl= /mat=/nomat=t/clk?ikt= &trm=so http://haweb .bibliothek.uni-halle.de: /db= /set= /ttl= /mat=/nomat=t/clk?ikt= &trm=genannten http://haweb .bibliothek.uni-halle.de: /db= /set= /ttl= /mat=/nomat=t/clk?ikt= &trm=harmonia http://haweb .bibliothek.uni-halle.de: /db= /set= /ttl= /mat=/nomat=t/clk?ikt= &trm=praestabilita http://haweb .bibliothek.uni-halle.de: /db= /set= /ttl= /mat=/nomat=t/clk?ikt= &trm=des http://haweb .bibliothek.uni-halle.de: /db= /set= /ttl= /mat=/nomat=t/clk?ikt= &trm=commercii http://haweb .bibliothek.uni-halle.de: /db= /set= /ttl= /mat=/nomat=t/clk?ikt= &trm=zwischen http://haweb .bibliothek.uni-halle.de: /db= /set= /ttl= /mat=/nomat=t/clk?ikt= &trm=seel http://haweb .bibliothek.uni-halle.de: /db= /set= /ttl= /mat=/nomat=t/clk?ikt= &trm=und http://haweb .bibliothek.uni-halle.de: /db= /set= /ttl= /mat=/nomat=t/clk?ikt= &trm=leib     in the stiftungen’s motion periods, children exercised their bodies and their minds  via their eyes, with the help of an able director (herrscher), who told them where to  direct their gaze.  in one description of how these periods worked, francke painted the  following picture of the myriad forms of knowledge being taught in his schools— including how these forms came together in the motion periods to benefit children of all  economic backgrounds.  “all of the orphans,” he wrote, “are led by a student of herbal  medicines so that they learn to know herbs; this certainly allows for certain advantages  especially for those who, over time, should end up studying either medicine or the  apothecary­arts.  those who are led to the other arts and handcrafts like printing, running  a book shop and the like learn at least latin, greek and hebrew, including how to decline  and conjugate in latin so that they can more easily perform their occupations, for which  knowing this is of highest importance.”   francke continued his description of the  motion periods by noting that it was important that even those who were not planning to  attend university should learn the basic principles of astronomy, geography, physics and  history so that they could become “useful men;” this meant that outside of the regular  hours of instruction, they were taught “in a playful way” (spielender weise)—again  borrowing from comenius and leibniz’s emphasis on the scholae ludus—“the most                                                     august hermann francke, ordnung und lehr­art, wie selbige in denen zum wäysen­hause gehörigen  schulen eingeführet ist: worinnen vornemlich zu befinden, wie die kinder in und ausser der schul in  christlicher zucht zu halten, und zum lesen, zierlichen schreiben, rechnen, wie auch zur music und  andern nützlichen dingen anzuführen sind. (halle: waysenhaus,  ):  .  “alle waysen­knaben  werden des sommers über dann und wann von einem studioso medicinae herbatim geführet, dass sie die  kräuter kennenlernen, welches sonderlich denen ein guter vortheil ist, die mit der zeit entweder  medicinam studiren oder zur apothecker­kunst kommen sollen.  diejenigen, die zu andern künsten und  handwercken als zur buchdruckerey, buchhandel und dergleichen sollen gebraucht werden, lernen zum  wenigsten lateinsich, griechisch und hebräisch lesen, auch im lateinsichen decliniren und conjugiren,  damit sie ihren künfftigen beruff darinnen ihnen solches zu wissen höchst nöthig ist, desto leichter antreten  können.”      important things from these forms of knowledge.”   from these lessons they would also  “learn from examples how to recognize god in nature and “how they should be led to  create horizontal projections worthy of praise by viewing his works;” they would learn  how to distinguish between different faraway lands and how to travel, how to measure or  properly distribute a field, how to use a calendar etc.”   in other words, it was in seeing  or observing actively that the lessons acquired their purpose.  as i have been endeavoring to show throughout this chapter, seeing correctly was  also about moving or acting, as a werkzeug, out of love.  this was a kind of love that  only appeared when several competing forms of knowledge were made to cohere.  the  opening quotation evidences friedrich hoffman’s willingness to recommend the  stiftungen’s “culture of understanding” because of its special capacity to unite both  physical and mathematical forms of knowledge.   bessler (or orffyreus) also had more to  say about the special conciliatory qualities of the francke’s orphanage, a site which had  uncovered the secret for generating true wisdom.  “acquiring wisdom is my goal and at  the heart of everything i do!” he wrote; and everything, including the “union of  believers,” must first “flow out of wisdom.”  his treatise on reconciliation included an  ode to wisdom that described the halle orphanage as a “house of unity” where:  many boys allow themselves to be taught wisdom through the arts and sciences,  to god’s praise and honor and their parents’ reputation and happiness,  although not every son, without difference, can study there.  only the best ones are sent,                                                     ibid.    ibid.  “weil auch einer der nicht studiret dennoch die principia astronomiae, geographiae, physicae,  historiae, und was feines orts oder landes policey­ordnung sey, zu wissen wohl vonnöhten hat, wo er ein  verständiger und em gemeinen wesen nuetzlicer mann werden will, wird ihnen auch ausser denen  ordentlichen schul­stunden neben dem dass sie zum stricken angehalten werden, gleichsam spieleender  weise von allen diesen wissenschafften das nöthigste beygebracht, dass sie zum exempel lernen wie sie  gott aus der natur erkennen und sich durch seine wercke zu feinem lobe reissen lassen sollen , wie sie ein  land vom andern unterscheiden, wie sie reisen sollen, wie sie einen acker messen oder theilen, wei sei den  calender brauchen sollen u.”      so that they will immediately begin to blossom and begin to love,  until the spirit of wisdom begins to peek out of his soul,   and raw utility becomes corporally actualized.  in this school of wisdom one only takes in boys  who, by their natures, are oriented towards knowledge,  the parents can even be jews and turks  really, protestants attend there alongside papists.  the children do not hear about even the slightest hint of confessional strife,  but instead learn virtues and the arts from all sides,  so that they grow in years and in wisdom,  and this means they have to work, themselves, on hundreds of things.     for bessler, the special qualities of francke’s orphanage resided in its ability to serve as a  seat of wisdom, virtue and action, where male adolescents were taught to work or  exercise themselves in “hundreds of things.”  it was a space where utility could be  “corporally actualized” and “the spirit of wisdom” made to flow out of childrens’ souls.   it was also in many ways a site of exceptions, where a pansophic vision necessitated  alternative sorts of social norms and made the seemingly impossible real.  children of  protestants, catholics, jews and turks were supposed to attend school here together, he  reported, thereby learning how to understand and to assimilate many points of view.   francke foundation records confirm that several efforts were made to realize this goal.   in  , a young boy from astracan (central asia) arrived in halle and was housed in  the orphanage.   we know that poor boys were learning hebrew, greek, latin and even  arabic.   some were conducting experiments with expensive machines and being sent  away to distant lands while children from titled families (or those planning to “study”)  were being taught how to turn wood and grind glass.  following the advice of the                                                     johann ernst bessler, der recht­glaubige orffyreer ( ):  .  bessler noted that he planned to build his  own copy of the halle orphanage in carolshaven (hesse).    juliane jacobi ed., "man hatte von ihm gute hoffnung": das waisenalbum der franckeschen stiftungen,  ­  (halle: franckesche stiftungen verlag,  ):  .   this is confirmed by francke in his ordnung und lehrart… waysenhaus gehörigen schulen ( ):  :  “at the moment, eight orphans are learning arabic, which they have already perfected very finely.”      prophets, teachers in francke’s schools advised a rigorous mixing of several forms of  motion so as to bring into perfect alignment minds, hearts and hands.    notably, “calculating and singing” were often discussed in the same context, to be  taught to “all children who are able to read.”  francke explained that he had learned from  experience that especially in arithmetic, “some are more gifted than others,” so one  needed to pursue a different art or style of teaching it.  “in particular,” he continued, “a  printed calculating book is used in which many exercises through all the species, rules of  three (regulam de tri), practicam and other calculations can be found.”  the book that  francke found “especially good” was written by tobias beutel, a mathematician and  royal secretary of the prince of saxony in dresden, which he said provided the teacher  with the following advantage:  namely, that he does not have to dictate exercises to the children but instead every child  can copy exercises from beutel’s book and elaborate each example in peace and quiet.    the teacher then goes around to the children and observes what each one does, and where  one child cannot progress any further or is missing something the teacher shows him the  way and helps him move ahead.       francke’s description is notable for its emphasis on the meditative stillness or “peace and  quiet” of the lessons, suggesting the way in which lessons in basic arithmetic provided  real opportunities for personal reflection, practice and improvement.  in some of these  lessons, especially when “examples appear in beutel’s calculations book with unknown  numbers, which happens a lot in species,” francke wrote, “then the teacher should  introduce names like taler, gülden, pfund and centner so that the children immediately  see the uses of calculating.”   he also indicated that he was encouraging teachers, “in all  periods, to let a boy put an example on the board so that a specific calculation can be                                                     ibid.      grasped from it…”.   gazing upon the example on the board was intended to activate  intuitive grasping of the principle at work in the calculation, whereas the introduction of  names like taler inspired the recognition of a quantity’s nominal properties and uses.    these lessons in basic arithmetic had other purpose: they made children more  inclined to intuitively grasp certain musical concepts.   boys in the higher and middle  level schools of francke’s schulstadt were given lessons in arithmetic on mondays,  tuesdays, thursdays and fridays, but on wednesdays and saturdays they were taught  “the principles of figural music according to the following method,” which francke noted  that “someone experienced in music” had provided him with.  from the description he  offers, the link between the eye, mathematics, music and motion in francke’s schools  immediately becomes clear.  music, too, involved a powerful combination of figural  principles and denomination united in conciliatory exercise.  francke’s description  directly linked seeing to the act of singing:  the teacher should lead the boys to the board and place them in order so that the small  ones are in front and the big ones in back, so that they all can see over the other one…  the notes should be written on the board so that all of the notes fall clearly and distinctly  into their eyes, even the eyes of those standing at a bit of a distance.   …  the teacher should introduce the boys to the principles of music in the shortest and  easiest way, and this means only teaching the most essential things at the beginning while  also immediately starting with singing exercises so that they learn, in a very short time,  how to sing a few songs thereby taking the uses of singing as true, which makes it easier  to awaken them so that they will want to learn the overarching principles.     ...  this means that the teacher should make the scales (claves) known to them and show  them how they extend upwards and downwards through spaces (spatia) and lines.                                                        ibid.   beutel indicates the value of his lessons in arithmetic for grasping certain musical concepts; he  specifically points to the significance of progressions; tobias beutel, neu aufgelegte arithmetica, oder sehr  nützliche rechen kunst mit kurzen reguln und exemplis nach der practica (leipzig,  ):  .   august hermann francke, ordnung und lehrart… waysenhaus gehörigen schulen (halle,  ):  ; see  also afst/w xi/­/  instruction wie die music in den knabenschulen tractirt werden solle, sine dato.      in this formulation, both seeing and singing stirred up the unifying potential heart, which  would bring together and inspire a greater understanding of the “overarching principles”  and their notation.  the placement of the boys, the distances between their eyes and the  notes displayed on a board, as well as the spatial/linear qualities of scales were given  special attention.  francke continued:   the boys who are naturally inclined toward fine singing and are led to have a good time  in the singing periods should be directed further and given lessons in a special class.  there the teacher should make known to them the different kinds of notes and their  pauses and teach them how to give each note its proper tempo and to sing according to  the beat.  also their voices should be investigated and they should be divided into two  groups, one the discant and the other the altisten, and both should be led to practice fine,  spiritual arias.    …  the arias that are undertaken with them in the beginning should all come out of a upward  beat and should get the boys used to the same beat; at a designated time this should be  practiced with them, before they are made aware of the triple beat, so that the triple beat,  with its very non­straightforward number of notes, does not confuse them.  …  after they have become accustomed to the beat, one can lead them to the next thing  without worrying about confusion.  the teacher should be trying to show (anzeigen) the  boys the nature of the triple beat, which, because they have received lessons in arithmetic  and a few of the same in geometry and in the mathematical sciences—especially  arithmetic, geometry and music—there is a special harmony, meaning that through these  sciences figures and representations (fürstellungen) that are already known to them can  help them understand the nature of the triple beat more easily.  for example, just like he  can represent the upward beat as a geometrical square, so he can compare the triple beat  to a triangle, because just like the same has three angles, two below and one above, so  does the triple emerge out of three notes, two are sung in the downbeat and one in the  upward beat.  actually only three notes of the same length belong in each triple; and that  in  / ,  /  and  /  triple, six and even   long notes are calculated in one beat.     in francke’s prophet schools, gifted pupils learned to see the “nature of the triple beat”  and its “special harmony” through certain “figures and representations” made familiar to  them through a combination of rigorous geometrical exercise and the exercise of their  own voices.   the nature of the triple beat, like the triangle, also best represented the kind  of reconciliation francke’s house of unity was intended to signify.  in musical exercise  one also found the perfect expression of mind and sensation’s inherent unity in the heart.                                                     ibid.,  ­ .        several generations of scholars from an assortment of fields have affirmed the  importance of a harmonic ideal in european musicology since the renaissance—one that  invested the triple beat with symbolic meaning because of its capacity to represent the  three fold nature of god.   central to the links between harmony and music theory that  early modern contemporaries—among them descartes, kepler, kircher etc.—imagined  were the affections.   as we have seen, the affections were stirred through the external  senses, which always involved much more than the ears.  if one imagined both music and  the eye as inherently conciliatory or harmony­inducing mediums, then the juxtaposition  of the two (when properly realized) could lead to higher forms of edification and  awareness.  simply put, because of its capacity to affect the sensus communalis, music  affected seeing and vice versa.  musikanschauung is the german word used to capture the  essence of this relationship—mainly used in conjunction with athanasius kircher’s  treatment (in his musargia universalis) of musical affectation—although the  implications of the “observation” component of this compound noun have been mostly  underestimated.   musical affectation offered halle pietists yet another way of mediating  the relationship between music’s mathematical and experiential qualities in a “third site,”                                                     francke was participating in a long tradition of musical pedagogy hugely influenced by both renaissance  humanism and jesuit musicology.  for the heightened influence in musical training for children in the  german states see: susan forscher weiss, “musical pedagogy in the german renaissance,” in james van  horn melton ed. cultures of communication from reformation to enlightenment: constructing publics in  the early modern german lands (burlington, vt: ashgate):  ­  and john butt, music education and  the art of performance in the german baroque (cambridge: cambridge university press,  ).   descartes’ compendium of music ( ) “belongs among the renaissance accounts of music as a  rational means for controlling and directing the passions and, in some cases, leading people to divine  furor,” in jones,  .        for the term musikanschauung’s ability to signify a form of spiritual exercise involving visualization see  hermann zenck, numerus und affectus (kassel: bärenreiter verlag,  ): esp.  ­ .  musikanschauung  “bedeutet eine dem gesamtmenschlichen sein entspringende und ihm verhaftete geistige schau der  musikalischen phänomene überhaupt; eine übergreifende musikalische grundanschauung, die in einer  bestimmt gearteten stellungnahme des menschen zur welt der musikalischen erscheinungen ihren  ursprung hat und darum als bewegende kraft das schaffen wie das ausüben zu durchwirken vermag.” see  also walter blankenburg, “der harmonie begriff in der lutherisch­barocken musikanschauung,” in archiv  für musikwissenschaft  .jahrg., h. /  ( ):  ­ .      or in the heart.  it certainly is not a coincidence that one of the defining features of pietist  songs (lieder) was a heavy emphasis on the triple beat; this included most of the songs in  johann anastasius freylinghausen’s songbook, which was the halle orphanage’s  primary source for musical exercise.      while the most advanced pupils of francke’s schools received instruction in  musical theory, all pupils, regardless of age or ability, were expected to participate in  collective “singing and praying periods” at least twice a week (usually wednesdays and  saturdays).   the first “singing periods” (singstunden) were held, starting in  , in the  main halle orphanage building until august  ,  , when it was reported that around   children came together in a room specially built to contain the reverberations of  what were carefully calculated exercises for the generation of love.  “the main goal of  these periods,” wrote the acting director of the foundation in  , “was to practice the  new melodies that the holy johann anastatius freylinghausen had collected in his new  songbook.”  contemporaries reported that “the singing was so pleasant that it soon drew  a large crowd of listeners so that the room sometimes contained well over    people.”   orphanage records also indicate that an additional musik collegium also met  on wednesdays and saturdays, in which those who were especially musically inclined  “could practice more so that they would not forget what they have already learned.”   by  , the pädagogium was offering its own musik collegium from  :  to  :  p.m. on  mondays that was also open to the public.                                                       j.l. schulze, g.c. knapp, a.h. niemeyer eds. frankens stiftungen. eine zeitschrift zum besten  vaterloser kinder bd.   (halle,  ) quoted in thomas müller­bahlke, “der hallesche pietismus und die  kunst” in rainer lächle ed., das echo halles ( ):  .  see also afst/w xi/­/  [ ] die zum  behuf classis   mus. und der singestunden auf dem grossen erbauungs. saal angeschaffte neue orgel   afst/w v/­/  general reglement für das waisenhaus und pädagogium        christian thomasius reported in   that the singing of songs and playing of  musical instruments in the pädagogium was always done in conjunction with the reading  aloud of edificatory material.  in his estimation as well, it was through these kinds of  exercises that more kinds of edification and awakening would be generated.   the use of  music in motion periods was desirable when it was organized or expressed in certain  ways, so as to properly condition the amount, but more importantly, the quality of the  affectation experienced.  these were calculated uses of experience regulated by the soul  and the extent of its spiritual progress.  francke warned in his pedagogical writings that  music in general was not something to be taken lightly.  he said he had seen first­hand its  ability to move the youth of most schools and universities towards “harmful ways”— meaning they directed their attention “more toward the superficial desires of the world  then to the honor of god.”  as a result, he said he did not recommend music to most  people.   in a   letter to francke, gottfried hoffmann, who had just become director  of zittau’s gymansium, indicated that he intended to take francke’s advice and to read  gottfried vockeredt’s misuse of the free arts, especially music but in the meantime he  would see to it that the theatrical and musical productions of his own gymnasium were  more oriented towards presenting biblical stories that offered spectators “good moralia”  at the same time as offering them productive opportunities to exercise their affections.     gottfried vockerodt ( ­ ) was the director of gotha’s gymanasium by   and became a follower of francke’s after meeting him in gotha and undergoing a  conversion experience in  / .  in several treatises, vockerodt stressed the way in                                                     afst/s a i   [ ­ ] historische nachrichten von dem ersten anfang des pädagogii,  .     august hermann francke, von erziehung der jugend zur gottseligkeit und klugheit ( ):  .   gottfried vockerodt, mißbrauch der freyen künste, insonderheit der music, nebenst abgenöthigter  erörterung der frage (franckfurt: zunnern,  ).      which musical exercises were being improperly employed or “misused” in several  venues, including schools.  he emphasized the moral effects of “the modi” (tonality— tongeschlechter) and the need to develop new musical forms that allowed these effects to  be more fully realized.   in several other texts, some of which were published on the  halle orphanage press, vockerodt emphasized the importance of inventing and  employing new mediums, or what he also called “middle things,” that functioned in the  same way that pietist lieder functioned.  middle things enhanced one’s ability to desire  piously.    middle things, whether a song composed by freylinghausen or a three­ dimensional model, provided new spaces for reconciliation to occur that were  conspicuous and rooted in love.  these “things”—songs, models of machines, naturalia,  motion—were not only the products of a consilia of thinking, feeling and loving but by  virtue of their special status as mediums, as mediators, spoke directly to the mediatory  faculties of the heart.  this meant that these “middle things,” these mediators, also  enhanced one’s visual aptitude—which included one’s ability to not only see more  clearly and distinctly but also more passionately.        all of those trained in francke’s schools participated in varying degrees in  exercises that took the power of “middle things” very seriously.  according to the  pädagogium’s printed curricula, pupils moved themselves in music during their periods                                                     see gudrun busch’s brief discussion in “die beer­vockerodt­kontroverse im kontext der frühen  mitteldeutschen oper“ in rainer lächle ed. das echo halles ( ):  .   even the titles of all the “middle things” treatises state this quite explicitly.  for example, gottfried  vockerodt, erleuterte auffdeckung des betrugs und Ärgernisses, so mit denen vorgegebenen mitteldingen  und vergönneten lust in der christenheit angerichtet worden (halle: waysenhaus,  ); albrecht rotth,  eilfertige und kurtze abfertigung des weitläufftigen und vergallten geschmadderes ... gottfried  vockerodts, ... , welches er erleuterte auffdeckung des betrugs und ergernisses von mittel­dingen nennet  und dem unterricht von mittel­dingen entgegen setzet, ... (erben,  ); for vockerodt’s direct response  to rotthen see his sieg der wahrheit: in dem zeitherigen mitteldings­ und vergönneten lust­streit von herr  m. rotthen, einem prediger in leipzig in seiner so genannten eilfertigen un[d] kurtzen abfertigung  eingeräumet (halle: waysenhaus,  ).      of recreation after participating in several forms of vision­oriented exercises in the free  arts—just as the old testament’s “prophets of the heart” had recommended.   these  advanced forms of motion, or recreational exercises, divided in the following categories  by  :  i. preparation for physics and the bible, ii. mechanical disciplines, iii.  disciplines that belong to physics and iv. disciplines that belong to mathematics.   freyer explained that the scholars undertook these exercises according to a “certain,  previously prescribed order” so that their “bodies and characters could undergo a positive  transformation.”   the first set of exercises were preparatory and involved  ) visiting  artisans and handworkers [instructors were advised to look at comenius’ orbis pictus  before leading this exercise, in addition to weigel’s abriss der hauptstände], and then  being introduced to  ) the types, names and unique qualities of animals, herbs and trees  ) metals, stones and other minerals,  ) earth, water, air, fire and many kinds of meteors,  ) Öconomie,  ) materia medica and finally,  ) an explanation of the temple of  jerusalem, which culminated in a visit to the orphanage building to view semler’s  models.     then the pädagogium pupils were ready to exercise themselves on machines.   they first learned how to turn wood “not to make finished products,” freyer continued,  “but rather for the sake of knowledge and motion” more generally.  they would construct  models of machines and other instruments and, “because of the good motion that one  achieves through turning, the scholars are given an extraordinary number of opportunities  to do so.”   some exercised during lunchtime, from  :  to  :  pm, others turned for a  couple of hours in the afternoon.  approximately   boys could turn at the same time.                                                      hieronymous freyer, verbesserte methode ( ):  .   ibid.,  ­ .   ibid.      the next priority was constructing machines, cabinets, stereometrical bodies and other  geometrical figures out of cardboard.  the most proficient of them performed exercises  on the optical machines and polished glass necessary for the lenses.  the final two  categories of exercise included viewing herbs in natura so as to achieve high quality  recognitions of botanical specimens (in the spring and summertime) and carving various  parts of the body out of wood as an introduction to the science of anatomy.  older  students were introduced to the study of hydrostatics, aerometry and hydraulics (with the  help of wolff’s beginner’s guide) and were then offered the opportunity to conduct  experiments with the pneumatic pump and “many other instruments.”  other scholars  approached the “disciplines that belonged to mathematics” by being taken to the  observatory that had been built in the schulstadt and “shown the stars from time to time.”   it was always in conjunction with these mathematical exercises that they exercised  themselves in instrumental music, drawing and painting.       these were the forms of exercise that the famous professor of medicine, friedrich  hoffmann, was referring to when he described the many opportunities the pupils of  halle’s orphanage and pädagogium had to exercise their morality through rigorous  training in the mathematical and physical sciences.  he recognized the “culture of  understanding” that had become the signature of francke’s enterprise, just as bessler had  recognized the ability of the halle orphanage to signify a “house of virtue,”  wisdom and  unity, where children “allowed themselves to be directed in the arts and sciences” and  opened up their souls to the spirit of wisdom.  just as in the prophet schools housed in the  holy shrines of israel (and described by several of francke’s contemporaries), individuals  exercised their minds at the same time that they learned how to use their hands.  they                                                     ibid.      moved themselves, like the tools animated by the movement of machines, in order to  affect visible improvements upon the rest of the world.  and they were moved or inspired  to do this by the “middle things” they had visualized during their preparatory exercises.   everything they had been shown during their tenure in the temple, or pietist orphanage— the naturalia, the scale models of machines, music and assorted forms of motion—had  been deliberately placed before them by the prophets or seers so that they too might seek,  grasp, assimilate and perfect.                   part iii:  extending the method      through the sovereign providence of our highest worthy god, who not only bends  and directs everything that happens in the world for the benefit of the true church  but also, from the beginning on has used special tools and entities in order to  accomplish the same, the building up and further development of many  orphanages in different locations since the end of the last and the beginning of the  current seculi has greatly increased.  through these [orphanages] many thousands  of souls have come much earlier and much closer to a recognition of the truth,  which otherwise either would not have happened at all or would have been made to  happen with great difficulty.  because one finds no traces of such healthy and  useful institutions in the old and even the newest history books, reports are being  written for us from all sides with news about them, which is alluring to god­loving  souls, who heartily praise the goodness of god.  he has kept these priceless  blessings for our times and aims to prove to the world what he always has been: a  father to fatherless and a nourisher of the poor and needy.    because of this, such an orphanage still in this seculo has been started up in  augsburg and is always talked about in conjunction with an abundance of spiritual  and corporeal blessings.  there is one in nordhausen, headed by the preacher  herrn m. kindervater, which now already has been standing in full bloom for a few  years.  and another foundation has been laid in wiese, a village near the city of  greiffenberg, where herr m. john christoph schwedlern, who started out as a  preacher there, has been prepared through divine blessings to build a beautiful  house to take care of many poor children’s souls and bodies.  one in langendorf  near weiβenfels has been started by a christian and god­fearing farmer in reliance  on the living god, whose plans have already been fully realized.  one in  königsberg.  two in berlin, of which the biggest was built at the cost of the king  and the smaller at the cost of the widowed and recently deceased frau  kommesserin.  one in leipzig.  one is sorau, which is taken care of by a  dominion of counts.  and the one that i should have named first, which was started  in halle by the honorable herr prof. francke in  , who was not carrying out his  own intentions [but god’s].  because of its tremendous and varied uses [the halle  orphanage] is known much more widely to the world and it is more beautiful than  what i am able to express here.  finally, god also thought about our dear city  züllichau and prepared a clever tool (werkzeug) through many tests of faith,  sigismund steinbarthen, … who was strongly awoken, in god’s name, also to  found [an orphanage], which in this historical news bulletin will be laid out,  multifariously, before the eyes.    ­johann christoph wilcke in warhafftige und umständliche nachricht ( )        chapter eight: the orphanage as vorbild         wer was auf gottes kosten bauet       whoever builds something at god’s cost     allein auf gottes hülfe trauet,        relies only on god’s help,     und suchet nichts als gottes her,       and searches after nothing but god’s honor,     demselben fehlt es nimmermehr.       which he will never lack again.  und dieses soll der bau beweisen,    and this is what this building is meant to show  der gottes waysenhaus soll heiβen.    which should be called god’s orphanage.  wer gott hier nichtes will vertrauen,    whoever does not want to trust god,  der mag dies waysenhaus anschauen:   he should observe this orphanage     dadurch gott seine herrlichkeit       through which god has demonstrated     erwiesen hat zu dieser zeit.­­         his splenour in these times.­­       throughout the eighteenth century, the halle orphanage served as an  international symbol of philanthropy and reconciliation.  its picture graced the cover of  medicine chests that found their way to the north american continent, the east indies  and southern africa.   several idealized portraits of the entire institutional landscape were  circulating in france and in england by   (see appendices  ,  ).   however, the  iconic status of the building itself served more than simply to generate admiration and  monetary support of the illuminated “culture of understanding” that pietist “prophets of  the heart” had constructed.   donations, of course, were extremely important and marked  the easiest and most common way that an individual could act, thereby becoming a kind  of figurative werkzeug in the machinery of francke’s project.  but the halle orphanage  building itself was intended to inspire other sorts of responses, including new collective  efforts to replicate and extend the conciliatory mandate of its founding to the farthest  reaches of the world.  most of the attempts to replicate francke’s orphanage and  institutional complex gained momentum mainly in the territories of brandenburg­prussia,  including the (now polish) regions of pomerania and silesia.  there were some notable                                                     l.bethmann, “geschichte der anstalt” in landwaisen­anstalt langendorf festschrift zur feier ihres    jährigen bestehens (langendorf,  ):  .   see renate wilson, pious traders in medicine ( ).      attempts to either build exact replicas of the stiftungen or to reconfigure existing city  orphanages according to the halle standard in parts of saxony, hesse, bavaria, denmark,  sweden, russia, india (in the danish trading outpost of tranquebar) and in the north  american colony of georgia.  the influence of halle for the construction of orphanages  in india and north america especially has received some amount of sustained attention  by historians, but the many varied attempts to replicate it within europe have been less  systematically treated.   in order to fully appreciate the power and import of the halle  method—as it was imagined at the confluence of several overlapping intellectual currents  and personalities, including e.w. von tschirnhaus, g.w. leibniz, j.c. and l.c. sturm  and christian wolff—it is important to think of each individual attempt as being at the  center of a kind of dialogue between the world and these prophets of the heart.     the very existence of the many copies of francke’s model in and around  brandenburg­prussia evidence the pietist orphanage’s capacity to function as a visual  medium or temple of anschauung, intended to orient (like the three­dimensional models  and naturalia housed in francke’s stiftungen), inspire and communicate.   but what i  would like to show here is that in order to be considered replicas, these institutions had to  offer more than simply a similar aesthetic—that is, edifices that connoted a philanthropic  ethos and, therefore, could edify or stir the soul simply when people viewed them.  they  had to somehow provide proof that they too should be imagined as sites for the  refinement of conciliatory gestures through the teaching of nützliche wissenschaften.   there were several ways that they could do this but the most common seems to have been  the establishment of orphanage printing presses, like francke’s, and the circulation of                                                     see the recently published collection of essays edited by andreas gross, halle and the beginning of  protestant christianity in india: vol. one: the danish­halle and the english­halle mission and vol. two:  christian mission in the indian context (halle: frankeschen stiftungen,  ).      printed reports or updates regarding the quality of the educational programming in place  there, as well as what often amounted to simply lists of the kinds of donations they were  receiving.  interestingly, the lists of donations especially attest to these institutions’  preference for donations of books and material objects—sometimes models and scientific  instruments—as often as hard currency.  and some of the remaining descriptions of the  curricula in place in the orphanage replicas confirm that the visual training methods so  characteristic of the stiftungen were, indeed, in place.  in keeping with my argument  throughout i want to show that especially here, in these sites outside of halle,  anschauung or visual exercise was essential for extending the aims of philanthropy.  it  was the preferred way of introducing children to the “useful sciences” while  simultaneously conditioning conciliatory personalities that could reconcile competing  forms of knowledge.  outsiders participated in the exercises by viewing the children and  the building, thereby improving their own gemüther.  the donation records of these  institutions seem to suggest that their supporters were aware of the power of these  gestures, or conciliatory exercises, and sought to help or extend them by actually  donating objects.  i see the pietist orphanage building, including the various forms of  spiritual practices refined and the donated objects on display there as examples of how  pietists “transmitted knowledge,” drawing upon their own love­oriented method or  juxtaposition of several assimilatory strategies.   like most historians and sociologists who study networks, i have been forced to  confront the very real problem of how to demarcate this network and its actors.  as we  have seen, halle pietists saw the value of accepting the validity and integrity of all                                                     sachiko kusukawa and ian maclean: transmitting knowledge: words, images and instruments in early  modern europe (oxford: oxford university press,  ) for several examples of how objects and visual  practice cohered to circulate, extend and refine knowledge throughout the early modern period.       competing points of view and were, for the most part, confessional pluralists.  at the  same time, they believed in the cause of universality or in inspiring each individual heart  to recognize the universal truths of primitive or apostolic christianity.  the success of  their movement depended on the mediation of this tension and, unlike us, these actors felt  they had successfully mediated it by embracing middling objects or stances—including  models, music, affectivity, neutrality and, as i will show in what follows, spiritually  gifted children.  we no longer recognize the value of “middle things” or the conciliatory  significance of the pietist orphanage, but we live amidst many of the same pluralisms,  antagonisms and quests to find common ground that pietists faced.  as those around them  wrestled with the growing cosmopolitanism of their cities, marketplaces and  epistemologies, individuals inspired by francke’s movement promised local communities  that their new orphanages could help individuals learn to reconcile these pluralisms.   they presented themselves to the rest of the world as prophets, who held the key to  stability: conciliatory love.    instead of taking as true the categories pietists reified so as to mediate or stabilize  them, i endeavor here to show how the founders of pietist orphanages  ) upheld the  integrity of the local sites in which they were built,  ) introduced a vision of universality  and  ) transmitted knowledge from site to site through the circulation of instruments,  images, texts and individuals.  pietist orphanages were always constructed in local, or  indigenous, sites.  each scheme, while profoundly affected by the accidents of local  circumstance, also involved what were often sustained efforts to mimic halle, the  universally applicable model, and then to mediate, assimilate, inspire and extend again— via anschauung, which made it possible to do this.   my research shows that attempts to      extend by mimicking the halle orphanage were often administered by the halle prophets  themselves—or individuals who had been trained in halle.  francke certainly knew (in  most but probably not all cases) that people were copying him and expressed his  excitement about this.  many of the founders had met or corresponded with him  personally and professed to becoming inspired or awakened after viewing his own  orphanage complex.  each site was actively imbued with universal characteristics that  are still recognizable to us today at the same time as it contained the unique marks of the  location in which it was built.      framed this way, the pietist orphanage was, in effect, a sign or marker indicating  that reconciliation had occurred, or was occurring, in a specific locality.  local actors had  agreed to collaborate with the prophet, who marked his alignment with a specific  extended or universal project by constructing a building, in some cases, but in all cases  introducing the conciliatory program in some form.  the halle prophets understood the  value of becoming chameleons like jesuits, who were famous for their attempts to adapt  to local demands and customs while continuing to pursue the universal goals of their  order when they arrived in new places.  they knew what the best strategies for extending  any sort of universal message had to involve: the slow, steady, localized acceptance and  visual affirmation of a worldview, not direct or overt imposition of an idea or a plan.   like the jesuits, pietist prophets pursued several nuanced strategies for infiltrating or  embedding themselves in localities so that the attempts at replication themselves seemed  locally generated.  these strategies mostly involved individuals who, upon completing  their training in francke’s institutes, returned to their places of origin or took on positions      as preachers or teachers in new locales where they were able to mobilize their  communities to get behind a new institutional effort.       each universally transferable characteristic that church historian udo sträter has  identified as unique (when taken together) to the pietist orphanage was deliberately  constructed by the founders themselves in order to remain true to francke’s vision of  philanthropy.  in other words, while i will accept and apply sträter’s topoi here, there are  several ways in which i would extend and refine them to allow for further reflection on  what they mean—and why it was so important that specifically these characteristics  animated each attempt.  according to sträter, the six universal characteristics of a pietist  orphanage include the following:  ) the institutions housed mainly children from legitimate families.  ) francke’s pedagogy was central to educational programming.  ) if children engaged in labor, no profit was derived from it.  ) they were funded by a network of private individuals.   ) they were not organized by the state.  ) religious and ethical concerns, not economic ones, were behind the founding.     these were not workhouses, even though children could very frequently be found  spinning wool, sewing socks and turning wood here.  as we saw in chapter seven, in  pietist orphanages children exercised themselves on turning machines to facilitate the  union of their bodies and souls.  there was a very specific reason these sites could not  expect to profit from the tasks the children housed there engaged in and that founders  highlighted the forms of motion they made available to their charges.                                                       udo sträter, “pietismus und sozialtätigkeit.  zur frage an der wirkungsgeschichte des waisenhauses in  halle und des frankfurter armen­, waisen­ und arbeitshauses,” pietismus und neuzeit   ( ):  ­ .   for a summary of stäter’s criteria and application of it in her history of göttingen’s waisenhaus, see  elizabeth quast, “sozialpolitische institutionen im  .jh.: armenschule und waisenhaus als resultate  pietistische reforminitiative,” hans­peter müller ed. aufklärung und sozialpolitik. johann beckmann und  die folgen: ansätze moderner sozialpolitik im  .jahrhundert (münster: waxmann,  ).        certainly, as sträter has affirmed, francke’s pedagogy was central to the  educational programming of pietist orphanages, but only insofar as this connotes an  understanding of these techniques as spiritual exercises that were fundamentally about  unifying cognition and experience—the two pillars of wisdom—via the eye.  my use of  sträter’s list must include this significant adjustment to his second criterion, which  should read: “francke’s pedagogy, or a basic preoccupation with unifying cognition and  experience via the ‘seeing heart,’ was central to the educational programming.”  i also  concur (following criterion number one) that these sites gave preference to educating  children of legitimate birth, as did most german orphanages; what this means, however,  is that francke’s conciliatory program was not immediately accessible to everyone.  nor  were replica orphanages constructed as remedies to the very real problems of poverty and  abandonment.  they were selective institutions, whose philanthropic programs were  intended for children who could not only prove their legitimacy and intelligence but that  they had been bestowed with spiritual gifts.  to demonstrate this in what follows, i will  also present an example of an ideal child in this context—one not only intended to give  other children a vorbild to emulate but that gave parents and educators a collection of  visible indicators they could use to measure their own child’s spiritual potential.       i should add that in several of the cases i have studied, the founding of these  institutions involved individuals either teaching in or with direct connections to advanced  secondary academies (mainly gymnasia) or universities.  this feature is so common to  all the cases i will present here that it deserves to be listed as perhaps an entirely separate  criterion.  in the rare cases where the links to an advanced academy are not clearly  discernable, the institutions themselves seem to have been more closely monitored by      a.h. francke himself, at least while he was alive.  i see this juxtaposition as further  evidence of each orphanage’s imagined ability to participate in a system of voluntary  charity oriented around a “meritocratic” school system.  it was to introduce a “hierarchy  of hearts,” so to speak, with those attending the most advanced classes being the farthest  developed in their exercise—intellectual, physical and spiritual.  as in the halle  orphanages, in these local replications there remained a residual commitment to the  prospect of channeling those furthest along in their exercises into advanced academies  and universities.    finally, i would add a minor caveat to sträter’s fifth criterion regarding the  relationship of these institutions to the state, noting that while they may not have been  directly organized or administered by state authorities, these institutions (including  francke’s own orphanage) were very often, albeit discreetly or indirectly, state  subsidized.  these spaces were very often dependent on the will of the state for their  survival at the same time as their directors worked to further a pansophic vision that  would ultimately undermine state authority by producing perfect gemüther who no  longer needed the state.  this paradox at the heart of pietists’ relationship to the ruling  elites who allowed them to build their orphanages is yet another indicator of their  commitment to conciliatory stances.  as the halle model became replicated in other parts  of brandenburg­prussia and saxony, new attempts managed to communicate at least  some semblance of the paradox resolved beautifully and visually via the medium of the  orphanage and the exercises engaged in there.  replicas became special sites where the  absolute authority of the ruler—the prince, the duke etc.—and his access to higher truths  were affirmed in the very act of tearing down and reassembling the structures that      invested the monarch’s power/knowledge with legitimacy in the first place.  they were  inclusive and exclusive sites for the marrying together of absolutism and voluntarism.   they were about letting individuals inside who otherwise would be relegated to the  margins of contemporary hierarchies—but only certain individuals, with clearly  discernable and desirable characteristics that presented themselves to the eyes of those  who had already been trained to see correctly.  the chosen ones, the prophets, would  eventually be released back into the world to perpetuate the conciliatory gestures that  would eventually make the state obsolete.  when that day came, when traditional  hierarchies of birth and status were eliminated via the proliferation of perfected anima  who truly understood how to see, the world would be literally brimming with orphanages  because these proportionally perfect and organic structures were the hearts and hope of  humanity.  after presenting a sketch of the children these organizations both set out to  produce and encouraged observers to emulate, what follows are three case studies, or  sketches of individual orphanages in langendorf (weiβenfels), zittau and züllichau.  the  sketches themselves are based mainly on printed reports (and some letters) and are  intended to help bolster my case for the pietist orphanage’s ability to connote a set of  practices or gestures that were visible, conciliatory and action­oriented.  because of the  varying quality of the sources, some of them are longer than others; i have also compiled  a list (likely still incomplete) of sites that fit the criteria discussed above—including  relevant printed and archival materials (see appendix  ).  this evidence certainly  suffices to demonstrate that “a network of orphanages” existed and that the  visual/conciliatory pedagogies of francke’s stiftungen extended well beyond halle.  in      keeping with my own project’s aims, i mainly focus here on demonstrating how  individuals from a specific place of origin came into contact with, applied and extended a  universally imagined project through conciliatory gesturing, which almost always  included exercises in nützliche wissenschaften designed to appeal to and to train the eye.      christlieb leberecht von exter aus zerbst  in  , the halle orphanage press printed a small book entitled the christ­ directed course of life of a  ­year old boy, christlieb leberecht von exter, together with  a small tract about true christianity, including his letters and songs.   the buchlein told  the story of young christlieb, who had died suddenly in  , from the perspective of his  tutor, wilhelm erasmus arends.  it was apparently quite popular.  at least three editions  were published by the orphanage press between   and   and the story was also  translated into english and published in london in  .  in the english edition, the story  appeared alongside francke’s practical christianity and a text about a “poor ignorant  country maid in france,” armelle nicolas, whose “daily conversations with god”  became the defining characteristic of her exemplary “holy life.”   it was integrated into  the same series of edificatory materials that had, just two years before, told the story of  some “extraordinary pious motions and devout exercises observed of late in many                                                     wilhelm erasmus arends, eines zehen­jahrigen knaben christlieb leberecht von exter aus zerbst,  christlich geführter lebens­lauf, nebst dessen angefangenem tractätlein vom wahren christenthum,  ingleichen seine briefe und lieder etc... dediciret von august hermann francke (halle: waysenhaus,  ).   william erasmus arends, chrisian leberecht von exter of zerbst... account of his life compiled by his  tutor.  the remaining part of this book contains the edifying mediations, which the pious child wrote and  left according to the measure of that knowledge he had obtained from the word of god in such hours as  others of his age trifle away with childish plays: whereto are likewise adjoined his christian letters,  hymns and prayers (london,  ); jeanne de la nativité, daily conversation with god: exemplified in the  holy life of armelle nicolas, a poor ignorant country maid in france; commonly known by the name of  the good armelle, deceased in bretaigne in the year   (london,  ).      children in silesia.”   something miraculous was happening and “christian readers”  needed to be kept abreast of the latest developments.  they also needed to know what the  telltale signs of a spiritually gifted individual were so that they knew how to recognize  and derive edification from their interactions with these prophets.  in the german edition  of the christlieb leberecht story, the text was also printed alongside francke’s wahres  christentum, a collection of “spiritual songs,” and a spiritual book of examples for  children, in which the reader was offered a “detailed report on the conversion to a holy  and exemplary life.”     for the communities that consumed these texts, children were not only imagined  as the targets of spiritual reform efforts, their special attributes could also provide  examples that all could follow.  their behaviors were signifiers of the state of their  hearts, or the quality of their love.  and all individuals—even the most intellectually  sophisticated—needed to know how to find this love in order to correctly pursue the  middle way.  christlieb leberecht’s story presented the reader with a collection of signs,  or easily recognizable characteristics of his advanced affective state, which readers could  then use to measure the state or quality of their own conversion to a higher mode of  existence that involved seeing better and correctly.  in learning about his life, they would  see how their own abilities to understand even the most advanced forms of knowledge  could be enhanced through “true christianity.”  christlieb’s tutor wilhelm explained that  young christlieb had acquired an unparalleled ability to understand, to grasp or to                                                     praise out of the mouth of babes: or, a particular account of some extraordinary pious motions and  devout exercises, observ'd of late in many children in silesia. anton wilhelm böhme transl. (london,  ).     james janeway, geistliches exempel buch für kinder, das ist ein ausführlicher bericht von der  bekehrung heiligem und exemplarischen leben, wie auch fröhlichem tode unterschiedlicher junger kinder  vormahls in englischer sprache zusammen getragen durch jacob janneway (lübeck,  )      apprehend things because he had allowed “the love of christ” to “actuate all his powers  and faculties:”        the gifts of nature in this child were easily discovered as well in his happy memory, as  in his clear understanding, and readiness of apprehension in any matter. but when the  love of christ began to actuate all his powers and faculties and prov’d now the spring  of all their movements, he began to turn and apply whatsoever he learnt to the true  edification of his soul.     wilhelm then provided a very detailed list of all the “movements” that illustrated these  special gifts or powers.  christlieb could, for example, “without any great premeditation  produce upon any text in the bible such meditations as riper persons, nay divines  themselves, needed not have been ashamed of.”  and since “from his younger years he  had already treasured up in his heart a good stock of the knowledge of god:   it was now not difficult to him, to speak for half an hour together on one and the same  subject, so that he needed to be advertised of the end.  in these ex­tempore discourses  there did not appear either want of judgment or tautology or affectation.  he spoke so  fluently, that to every one’s admiration he would propose and explain without any  hesitation a text with scriptural and theological expressions and with proper  similitudes.  he was never tired with reading, praying, studying and meditating; as the  means by which, under the blessing of god and the gracious operation of his holy  spirit, he arrived to that extraordinary dexterity and discretion.           ten­year­old christlieb could offer, extemporaneously, discourses that were both  affective and tautological, meaning (for a logician at least) that they were universally  true.   he read, studied, prayed and meditated constantly but always in conjunction with  his receiving of the holy spirit, which allowed him to “arrive” at extraordinary levels of  (cognitive and affective) spirituality and to acquire a kind of “dexterity and discretion”  that generated feelings of admiration in others.                                                     william erasmus arends, christlieb leberecht von exter aus zerbst ( ):  ­ .   ibid.    tautology can also imply excessive wordiness or redundancy but i think that here it is meant to connote  christlieb’s astounding abilities to offer statements that were true in every possible interpretative setting  they were placed in.        christlieb inspired others to emulate him and to work on cultivating their own  spiritual gifts.  his tutor emphasized that the young prophet had an especially profound  effect on his servants and on other children, who became enamored and inspired in his  presence.  in his “leisure hours,” wilhelm wrote, “he was frequently found with the  servants of the house, to awake and animate them through the word of god and prayer  .… he made himself so entirely beloved through his engaging and hearty expressions  that they … would with a hearty desire, hear, and receive from him the word of god; and  often joined with him in prayer and devotion.  hereby this child accustomed and inured  the domesticks to pour out themselves their hearts before god.”   the “spirit of grace  and prayer” that consumed christlieb’s person affected his countenance, his gestures and  his words.  wilhelm reported that christlieb regularly engaged in “ardent discourse” with  his eleven­year­old sister, whom he entreated to pray with him while she observed the  “inward state of his soul.”  of “his own free motion,” he wrote a treatise of   chapters  called true christianity (a very direct reference to francke’s movement) as well as  several hymns, which were appended to the story for readers to apply in their own  edificatory exercises.    readers were exhorted to allow themselves to feel christlieb’s message and to  “not receive these delicious sensations as children of this world do the sweetmeats given  them, only out of custom, but rather [to] take them as so many strengthening  encouragements, the better to hold out here in the christian warfare under so many  anxieties, calamities, persecutions and afflictions.”  the example of  ­year­old  christlieb was a kind of tonic, which, like the orphanage’s essentia dulcia or other  medicina corporis could strengthen, fortify and enhance.  at the same time, readers were                                                     william erasmus arends, christlieb leberecht von exter aus zerbst ( ):  ­ .      offered an example of how not only their bodies but their minds, especially their ability to  know or (most importantly) to understand could be affected by mimicking christlieb.   wilhelm reminded his audience that christlieb also had a “great measure” of “excellent  knowledge” and could “explain matters according to the genuine intent of the holy  spirit.”   in christlieb viewers had their model, which, like a three­dimensional model of  the temple of jerusalem or a windmill, offered a separate site to which one could direct  his gaze and reconcile his mind and his body, in love.    for the communities of benefactors who supported pietist philanthropy,  spiritually gifted children were revered or romanticized not only for their perceived  innocence and humility, although that certainly was part of it, but for their ability to  engage in authentic conciliatory gestures.  christlieb felt knowledge and could thereby  effortlessly integrate the activities of his hands and his mind through his heart.  he  showed others how to do what he was doing.  although he was young, there was still  something about him that had been realized; his gemüth, the cultivation of his animus,  was so far advanced that he could lecture others who were much more advanced in age  (though not in their spiritual exercises) than he was.  the directors of pietist orphanages  actively looked for christliebs.  they wanted these kinds of children in their institutes to  provide all those around them, even their teachers, with living examples of a human  being who was constantly assimilating all things, all knowledge, into himself and then  spitting out truths—universal truths that could change the world for the better.  the  orphanages also functioned quite a bit like christlieb.  for in their application of the  halle method, they also placed a great deal of emphasis on the importance of offering  children visual examples to follow.  if they could not follow a “real christlieb” (in turn                                                     ibid.,  .      acquiring the highest form of cognition according to the semler typology i presented in  chapter five) than they ought to be shown three­dimensional models or drawings of  examples they could follow.  and these real or three­dimensional models were not only  useful for enhancing the paideia of the children housed in these institutes, but for outside  observers as well, who were welcome to come and observe the conciliatory exercises  transpiring on these sites.   like christlieb, the pietist orphanages presented in what  follows set a universally verifiable, and thereby visible or observable example of how to  engage in authentic conciliatory acts.    case one:  langendorf (weiβenfels)    the village of langendorf lies just a few kilometers outside of weiβenfels, which  in the early eighteenth century was a small but vibrant seat of the duchy of saxony­ weiβenfels.  it was (and still is) not far from halle, meaning that then it was quite  strategically situated along the border that the kingdom of saxony shared with  brandenburg­prussia.  today it is a kind of ghost town.  in  , the director of the  langendorf orphanage (l. bethmann) was invited to produce a festschrift to celebrate  the institution’s   year anniversary.  he told the story of the farmer’s son christoph  buchen ( ­ ), who founded the orphanage on may  ,  .  while employed as a  simple “houseboy” in a weiβenfels guesthouse, buchen formed a spenerian conventicle  with three friends (christoph burkhardt, georg günther and caspar bach).  a pastor  chryselius from the nearby town of obergreisslau reported on january  ,   that  “these four young people came together on sundays in order to discuss a sermon that  they had heard or read with each other.”   in keeping with the “spirit of their times” (or      zeitgeist), bethmann continued, “they also took it upon themselves to collect some  money and each time they came together, they laid aside a few coins—which otherwise  might have been spent at the tavern—in a small box.”  pastor chryselius, “who preached  the word in the spirit of spener and francke, often visited the boys and came to like  christoph buchen especially, whom he encouraged to follow the wishes of his heart and  to [take up the cause of] poor orphans.”  buchen “courageously” decided to build an  orphanage, bethmann wrote, and went ahead with his plans—with pastor chryselius’  support and encouragement.  but the story does not, by any means, end here; it only gets  more interesting.     bethmann recounted that duke johann georg of saxony­weiβenfels (r.  ­ ) was “made aware of buchen’s plans” and sent a copy of the canones according to  which the children of buchen’s orphanage were to be raised.  a sampling of these  canones read as follows:  . the newly built orphanage between langendorf and muttel, not far from weiβenfels,  should not be named after any person but rather be called “the orphanage built at god’s  cost.”  …  .  the reigning landesherr of weiβenfels should have the highest rights of inspection  and directorship in spiritual as well as in worldly things over the orphanage.      .  the highest rights of inspection regarding spiritual matters should involve the  superintendents of weiβenfels and for worldly matters, herr voigt, as both are patrons of  the church and the schools and are pastors.    .  lower inspection duties will belong to the preacher of obergreiβlau and langendorf,  who will serve as a caretaker of souls and report to the over inspectors.    .  the orphan father, whose name is christoph buchen, should have the power to  choose student teachers (informatoren)…  …  .  the orphan father should see to it that another informator is taken on especially for  music, so that the orphans learn something from music in order to be able to offer  something special to the school master.                                                     details derived from bethmann’s narrative,  ­ .        …  . the orphan father should see to it that as much as possible only honest children are  taken in, so that the orphanage can realize its real purpose.      .  if pious, christian people want to send other children here, whether they are orphans  or other poor, honest children with a little bit of money…, they should be allowed to  come in and to be instructed in all the good sciences (wissenschaften).     good sciences were useful or nützliche wissenschaften, precisely the phrase francke and  semler used to describe the forms of sciences taught in their schools, and that leibniz  had advocated should be taught in “unrestricted orphanages.”  a report about the  institution’s progress, first printed in   and reprinted several times, would also later  confirm that the useful sciences were a key feature of the langendorf curricula; in this  house, boys and girls were “instructed in christianity and other useful sciences, and made  accustomed to all different kinds of work.”     duke johann georg responded to buchen’s plans by granting him a place to build  (a bauplatz) in a “friendly” valley that belonged to a titled family; and he “promised to  further support this christian work,” bethmann noted.  like the accounts of francke’s  miraculous founding of the halle orphanage with only a few talers and anonymous  donations that mysteriously carried the project forward, bethmann’s narrative emphasizes  buchen’s lack of funding, especially how he had to “sell three horses and two wagons” in  order to cover all of the costs and that, in spite of the hardship, his “trust in god was  never­ending.”  but buchen continued to have the support of the dukes of saxony­ weiβenfels.  while duke christian was in power, from   to  , his wife “donated  amounts up to   talers to the foundation often enough,” bethmann wrote.  later, “and                                                     ibid.,  ­ .   die gnädige vorsorge gottes, in einer wahrhafftigen nachricht von dem waysen­hause bey weiβenfels  an langendorf gelegen: welches ein armer fuhrmann so wohl vor knaben als mädgen erbauet; daß  dieselben darinne im christenthum und andern nützlichen wissenschaften unterrichtet, und zu allerhand  arbeit angewöhnet werden (leipzig,  ).      at the cost of the duke,   orphans were raised up in the foundation with each year    talers being provided for them.” and that was not nearly all.  this portion of  bethmann’s story is worth quoting in full:  not only did the court of weiβenfels support the young work, but rather persons of high  and low status vied with one another to actuate their christian love.  hardly a day went  by without some “christian do­gooder” considering the foundation in some way.  to  keep track of these daily offerings, buchen kept a house book with an exact register.   also contributions poured in from far away, for example from halle missionaries in the  east indies, from copenhagen, vienna, hamburg, berlin, augsburg, gotha, cöthen,  dessau, weimar, dresden, jena, merseburg, naumburg, weiβenfels, and above all  leipzig.  from lisbon   taler and   groschen came in once and from london    taler from an earl’s wife.  many gifts from the halle waisenhaus found their way to  langendorf and, as the house book demonstrates, were often delivered by professor  august hermann francke himself.         according to this account, a.h. francke not only took the time to visit the langendorf  orphanage in person, but his orphanage is depicted here as a participant in an enormous  network of private donors, contributing artifacts and capital to buchen’s foundation as an  material expression of love.    by  , several reports started circulating that described the quality of the  spiritual exercises that the children of langendorf’s orphanage were engaged in daily,  including how they were instructed in “christianity and other useful sciences” and what  forms of donations the house was receiving.   the lists of books and objects the  institution received functioned as a form of proof that the project was working, i.e.  inspiring individuals to unite their heads and hands in expressions of love that were  verifiable, visible and measurable.  in one of the lists of donations contained in a    report, the anonymous author notes that “upon his retirement, a former teacher sent a six                                                     bethmann,  .   for example: nachricht von der gütigen vorsorge gottes oder kurtzer und aufrichtiger bericht von der  auferbauung, bißheriger unterhaltung und zustand des bey weiβenfels zu langendorf gelegenen waysen­ hauses, mitgetheilt von einem freund, der die wahrheit bekennt (jena,  ; reprinted leipzig,  ); see  appendix  .      volume set of würtemberg bibles” and a goldsmith from naumburg sent a small book  that he acquired during a trip of his to switzerland; in the same bericht, a christian  student (studioso) from leipzig is reported to have given a bible to the institution “with a  preface written by professor francke” and one entry noted that “a few students from jena  sent over real musical instruments.”   around the same time as these donations arrived, a  “christian master” from dresden reportedly sent, “out of a correct and well meaning  heart,” canstein’s harmonie of the four evangelists, “entirely new and bound and for  the use of the teacher for when he explains the new testament to the children.”   but  this was a deliberately chosen text; it had a very special set of meanings to this  community.  donating a text on harmony by canstein, a friend and benefactor of  francke’s, becomes in and of itself a kind of conciliatory gesture—a way of both  affirming the donor’s support of the institution and ensuring that the special purpose  animating the machinery of the pietist orphanage was properly carried out in the new  location.     the accounts also make distinct correlations between the quality of edification  (erbauung) happening on site thanks to all the donations with the facility’s physical  setting; they also convey an interest in emphasizing these sites’ status as “opportunities”  for individuals outside the institutional community to enhance or heighten their own  spirituality simply by viewing the structure:    the building was designed with two floors, each with four large, four­cornered rooms  and one smaller room, a fine hall and two large (with a few smaller) sleeping and eating  chambers…. what the external situation offers is a the beautiful atmosphere and  positioning near woods and fields, where the children can be led to botanize in their free  periods during the summertime … many christian souls are less concerned with this and                                                     die gnädige vorsorge gottes (leipzig,  ):  .   ibid.  “ingleichen hat auch ein christl. magister aus dresden des herrn von cansteins harmonie und  auslegung der  .evangelisten in fol. ganz neu und gebunden, zum gebrauch des lehrers, der das neue  testament den kindern erkläret, aus recht und wohlmeynenden herzen übersendet.”      more interested in the actual use that a work like this could bring a city or a land and say  it should be placed in the city. that way more christian souls from the city than those  [infrequent] travelers who now pass by [the orphanage], would visit the work more  frequently.  for here they can not only observe god’s good provisioning but also be  inspired with a flaming love for the poor. but because it lies at such a distance from the  city, some say the work is robbed of its main purpose (haupt­endzweck) and that is, that  it should be an object or opportunity to praise god.     like francke’s orphanage, this was an intrinsically edificatory or moralizing site.  by  viewing or observing it first hand, one simultaneously experienced its simple proportions  and beautiful physical location and achieved a higher level of cognition that coalesced in  expressions of higher forms of felicity, of passion and desire.  for members of pietist  communities, it functioned in a manner similar to a three­dimensional model of  solomon’s temple, which, as francke had explained to the prussian crown­prince in  , was also “a medium for the channeling of the spirit of god,” that could generate  higher forms of love and desire.   the best way to praise god and to understand the true  meaning of pietist philanthropy was to actually stand in front of an orphanage and to  acquire an instinctive understanding of the practices engaged in there.  the orphanage  reports described these practices in order to further the reader’s edificatory journey.     in the same   report, the author described the langendorf orphanage’s daily  regimens, or the “daily method of education” (aufferziehung).  “because most of the  children are under nine years old, they are allowed to enjoy their rest in the early morning  until six a.m.  after they are woken up from their sleep and clothed in an orderly manner,  they are brought around seven a.m. to the morning hour of prayer.”  their informator  then applied the following method with them:  after he has awoken their senses, ridding them of distractions that might hinder their  gemüth and orienting them to praise of god, a morning song is sung in conjunction with  morning prayers in which they especially pray for their christian benefactors.  soon after                                                     ibid.,  ­ .   quoted in kramer, august hermann francke,  ­ .      a piece from the new testament, especially from the evangelists, is read which is  explained in the easiest manner­and that is the method of the catechism, through  questions and answers; and the children are asked how they would go about applying it,  in part to strengthen the truth that they grasp from the catechism but also so they can  practice (ausüben) how to live a christian life.  this is summarized in a small prayer by  all the children, presented to god, and the hour is brought to an end with a small song.     after breakfast, the children were divided into groups according to ability and schooled.   some were instructed in latin, using the “improved and easier grammar” of francke’s  colleague at the university of halle, joachim lange.   bethmann notes that greek was  also taught there and that the quality of education boys could receive by the  s or so  was as high as what they could receive in a city gymnasium or even in the famous  fürstenschule pforta, an elite boarding academy for boys from titled families not far  from weiβenfels (or halle).   in addition to this obvious emphasis on exercising the  higher and lower faculties of the soul, the   description makes clear that after school  all children were led to handarbeit, or made to work with their hands.  boys knitted, girls  spun and sewed, and all were expected to “take their motion” in the garden, where they  planted vegetables in the summertime and carried wood in the winter.  they were given  lessons in geography, participated in singing periods every day and, on wednesdays and  sundays, received instruction in “arithmeticis and musica instrumentali.”   all believers, christoph buchen wrote in a tract he sent back to halle, should  learn to work like the children of the pietist orphanage and could derive edification by  observing the qualities of bees:                                                     ibid.,  ­ .   joachim lange, verbesserte und erleichterte lateinische grammatica, in welcher durch hinlängliche  paradigmata, richtige grund­regeln und nöthigen vorrath an vocabulis, eine deutliche kurtze und doch  völlige anweisung zur lateinischen sprache gegeben wird: mit einer vorrede von verbesserung des  schul­wesens joachim langens (halle: waysenhaus,  ).   bethmann,  .     die gnädige vorsorge gottes (leipzig,  ):  .      all bees allow themselves to be ruled by their king and are placed, in a beautiful order, as  his obedient underlings.  i can see this in the way they arrange their houses and places of  residence without question around the king… no one’s house is bigger or smaller than the  other one’s.  one is the builder, one carries building materials, one carries water, still  others carry honey and others bear children; others keep watch so that foreign bees don’t  rob them.  this all happens in the most beautiful, loving and harmonious order.  in this  way christians should serve according to their order (stand), but in love and peace,  remain of one sense (auf einem sinne bleiben).  … we should all help plant and build the  kingdom of god.  i like to think of the city of god, where… all of our hearts can be  living temples of the tri­unitary god. amen.      the exercises in industry that residents of the langendorf orphanage engaged in were  not intended to bring immediate material profit to the institution, but instead to awaken  children so that they were attuned, or oriented, to the systems of harmony manifest in  both this world and the next one.  these patterns, or systems of harmony, were manifest  in certain natural systems that provided abundant opportunities to derive moral lessons— to acquire edification—via the eyes.  when one knew what to observe—i.e. the beehive  or the pietist orphanage—and how to see, one could more easily learn how to reconcile,  how to bring about harmony so that it was everywhere manifest.      buchen’s text, which francke’s organization never printed, is a kind of locally  produced copy of the genre of physico­theological treatises that would become  characteristic of early enlightenment prussia.  in this instance, we see an individual  participating—admittedly at a distance and in a less polished or erudite manner—in the  same kinds of conversations about harmony, unity and reconciliation going on in and  around the university of halle.  christian wolff wrote about bees in his own treatment of  ackerbau and they made an appearance in the semler lessons as well.  it was as if  buchen’s orphanage was on the receiving end of a special kind of discourse that captured  the harmonic ideal so many of francke and wolff’s contemporaries sought.  several                                                     afst/h d   b.  ­ ; christoph buchen’s einfältige gedancken zur seligen erbauung in unsern  christenthum über die gute ordnung der bienen.      forms of knowledge were transmitted to him via donations of various objects (including  books) and his adaptation of a conciliatory pedagogy associated with a telltale,  conciliatory site of origin: halle.  his institution also received instructors who had been  trained in francke’s schools.  however, eventually buchen gave back.  he produced his  own treatise on bees, his own conciliatory reflections; and he also appended to the end of  his treatise a medicinal recipe that the halle orphanage could assimilate into its treasure  trove of herbal and chemiatric regimens.  this is what the halle orphanage was built to  do.  it introduced universally envisaged conciliatory gestures under the guise of a  carefully constructed methodology.  it distributed missionaries, teachers and preachers.  it  distributed objects—namely books, models, naturalia and other gifts.  but it also  demanded a return—feedback from the sites it touched and local forms of knowledge that  it could assimilate into its archive, apothecary and other knowledge­processing facilities.   buchen’s recipe may have been simple but to assimilate it alongside all the other forms  of knowledge out there in the world was the reason both his and francke’s orphanages  existed.        the langendorf orphanage was also capable of providing a return when it  unearthed an especially gifted (in this culture male) child and successfully sent him  “back” to halle.  a letter from the pastor chryselius to francke from may  ,    indicates that children’s progress through their daily exercises was carefully monitored  with the hope that the most spiritually gifted gemüther could be sent off to halle—where  it was possible to reach even higher forms of wisdom and clarity while residing amidst  the prophets.   chryselius wrote specifically regarding one boy, a h. m. jüngling, whom                                                     ibid.  the recipe read as follows: “one takes a few large handfuls of grass and puts it in a large glass and  then submerges it with corn­?? wine.  let it sit for  ­  days, and afterwards have the patient drink a  spoonful every morning and evening.  it breaks up, without pain, the [kidney] stones.”      he had at one point taken into the langendorf orphanage and found to be especially  pious and promising—although his gemüth was a bit restive (unruhig).   if more efforts  were made to help him develop a calmness in his body, his mind and his gemüth,  chryselius wrote, he was confident that “something could still become of him” (so könte  doch noch was aus ihn werden).   chryselius said he was pleased to learn that francke  had decided to accept jüngling into his institutes and would pray for his authentic  conversion.  his and buchen’s institution were contributing common cause, oriented  around francke’s “temple” (the term preferred by chryselius).  halle continued to give to langendorf as well.  in  , johann wilhelm  kruckenberg, a young theology student from halle who had trained in francke’s  institutes, was sent to langendorf as an informator and would become the inspektor, or  director, of the orphanage from   to  .   although kruckenberg’s tenure as  inspektor falls just beyond the scope of this study, it is worth noting that kruckenberg  corresponded with francke’s son, gotthilf august, during this period primarily about  transmitting information and donations regarding the tranquebar missionaries.  in one  letter ( ) kruckenberg asked g.a. francke to send him the newest missions report— just recently off the francke foundation presses—and several copies at that.   kruckenberg’s post as inspektor also apparently involved sending a certain portion of the  donations he received on site in langendorf back to halle so that the younger francke  could distribute the donations for the mission in halle.  in addition to kruckenberg,  francke sent johann michael schumann, who was a pastor at st. moritz church in halle  from   to   and a member of the city ministerium alongside christoph semler.  in                                                     afst/h a  :   (may  ,  )   bethmann,  ­ .   afst/m   l  :        , schumann left halle to serve as a pastor and professor of theology at the  gymnasium of weiβenfels.  according bethmann’s account, schumann eventually  became the superintendent of all educational institutions in the vicinity of weiβenfels,  which meant he conducted visitations and helped develop curricula.  once kruckenberg  took over the orphanage, he decided to raise extra money by accepting pupils whose  parents could afford to pay for their education and housing.  this, of course, meant an  increased amount of pressure on the institution to subject itself to external standards; but  schumann was the standard maker, and he had spent a considerable amount of time in  halle.  he could (and apparently did) insist that the schools of the halle orphanage  should be the standard.  bethmann reports that under schumann and kruckenberg’s  guidance, “five praeceptores come together every thursday at a certain hour where they  conferred with the director of the educational foundation and with each other; they  discussed the art and manner through which the foundation could be improved and how  they could immediately correct any disorderliness.  each one was called upon to present  his report (gutachtung) or opinions about what he felt could improve it.  this is the same  arrangement that we find with august hermann francke in halle.”       case two: zittau    before johann michael schumann arrived in halle in  , he had attended  gymnasium in zittau until  , when he left to study theology and philosophy at the  university of leipzig—precisely the period that francke was teaching exegesis there and  leading conventicles.   zittau, like weiβenfels in the early eighteenth century, was also  part of saxony, but it was east of halle, east of dresden even, in a lush valley that now                                                     bethmann,  .      forms the border between germany, poland and the czech republic.  beginning in the  s, the city became famous, like the city of gotha, for its gymnasium—or more  specifically the high quality education one could receive there.  this was due, in large  part, to the personality and talents of christian weise, sometimes referred to as the  “german cicero,” who directed the zittau gymnasium from   until his death in  .   weise also had ties to weißenfels, having served there for eight years as a professor of  poetry and eloquence before returning home to zittau.  he taught johann hübner, who  would go on to direct the famous hamburg johanneum and to devise new methods for  teaching children geography using color­coded maps that francke would use in his own  schools.   he engaged in vigorous exchanges with jesuits in prague (from the collegio  s. clementis), especially bohuslaus balbinus, about the latest innovations of their  order.    weise championed the virtues of a humanist education, training children in the  rudiments of rhetoric, poetry, even theater so that they could exercise their sensible souls  at the same time as they sharpened their intellects.  he also supported the founding of a  pietist orphanage in zittau in  .    in his   description of the six most important cities of oberlausitz, called the  historical showplace, johann carpzov wrote that before he described “the beautiful  orphanage,” of zittau he needed to say something about its location and proportionality.   the orphanage had been built on the site of a cloister that had at one time housed monks  of the celestine order.  it was “almost in the middle of the city” next to the main church.                                                      johann baptist homann and johann hübner, kleiner atlas scholasticus von   charten ... edirt durch  joh. baptista homann u. durch eine accurate illumination zu seinen geograph. fragen accomodiret, durch  joh. hübnern (leipzig; nürnberg,  ); johann hübner, kurtze fragen aus der neuen und alten  geographie (leipzig,  ).   christian godorf hoffmann, christian weise, epistolae selectiores... quibus multae observationes tam  ad rem scholasticam quam universam literariam spectantes continentur (budiβin,  ).        its proportions were “perfect,”   ellen long,   ellen wide and   ellen high.  the  building was structured according to the “newest architecture” and was “not only useful  and considering its purpose, very comfortable, but also constructed very gracefully.”    christian weise also commented that the zittau orphanage had been built especially well  and “built high enough” so that “whoever wants to observe it as a good reminder, he can  easily come to it.”  the time was right, weise wrote in  , for a “good model to lie  before the eyes.”   in speeches he gave each year to commemorate its founding and to  reaffirm its mandate, he referred to the zittau orphanage as “an example” of something  “new that god had started.”  it was a “living library,” he said, containing children who  could be “read like books,” into whom the names of their benefactors had been imprinted  and eventually would be read by god.    “praise god that the apparatus (der apparat) for  the presentation of these living books has been proliferating,” he proclaimed, through the  founding of this orphanage and many others.       the genealogy of the zittau orphanage is not as easy to trace as that of  langendorf/weiβenfels and there is some evidence suggesting that city council members,  not local territorial leaders, got behind the initial funding of the venture.  however, the  descriptions quoted above, in addition to a few other clues, point to weise’s and other  supporters’ interest in constructing a new kind of orphanage that embraced the spirit in                                                     johann benedict carpzov, analecta fastorum zittaviensium der historischer schauplatz der löblichen  alten sechs stadt des margraffthums ober lausitz… (leipzig,  ):  ­ .   christian weise, das erste jahr­gedächtnüs der wohlgehaltenen bet­woche, das ist: dei wiederhohlte  dancksagung des neuerbauten und numehr in stand gebrachten waysenhauses in zittau (zittau,  ).   ibid.  “ach was vor eine schöne bibliothec können wir uns dabey einbilden! welche wir mit allen recht  vivam bibliothecam, das ist einen lebendigen bücher­vorrath nennen mögen.  das sind bücher, da rein der  liebste jesus bald in ihrer tauffe seinen nahmen eingeschreieben hat.  das sind bücher, da ein wol  gezogenes kind die copie seines beruffes aus dem buche des lebens auffweisen kan. ja darf ich noch  mehr sage.  das sind bücher, darein die wolthätigen christen ihre gute wercke zu guten andencken  schreiben können, dass sie auch am jungsten tage, wenn die güter selbst verbrennen werden noch sollen  zu lesen seyn.”   ibid.      which the halle orphanage had been founded.  first of all, two individuals with direct  ties to francke were active in zittau in the orphanage’s early years.  gottfried hoffman  ( ­ ) corresponded with francke from his post in lauben before going to zittau in   to take over christian weise’s position.  and martin grünwald (who had also  attended gymanasium in zittau under weise), encountered francke in leipzig, where he  become so moved that he would start an orphanage in the nearby city of bautzen and then  become involved in promoting the cause of the zittau orphanage.  he published a  description of it in   while serving as a mittagsprediger in the area.  grünwald and  weise’s descriptions of the orphanage employ the same rhetorical strategies we saw  operating in the langendorf case.  they constantly hold up the affective or aesthetic  qualities of the building, especially its ability to serve as a living vorbild housing living  models or children, like christlieb leberecht, who could be “read.”  this building had the  remarkable ability to move and inspire people—to serve as a site of visual edification, a  schauplatz, where the sensitive soul accessed higher forms of knowledge.  and  especially grünwald’s account provides us with a glimpse of what he explicitly referred  to as the children’s praxis pietatis.  their spiritual exercises were inspiring, worthy of  emulation and they included exercises in the “useful sciences.”       grünwald’s description of the zittau orphans’ practices of piety begins with a  brief introduction to their early morning prayers, like the monks who inhabited the space  before them had also engaged in.  they began their exercises by singing a “morning  song,” by asking the blessings of martin luther on their house, by reciting the main piece  of a catechism, by offering “real biblical sighs (seuffzern)” imploring god to  “accomplish something inside” of their bodies and to open their eyes (herr, öffne mir die      augen), praying, reciting their “rules for living,” and singing more songs.   at this point  other children, whose parents wanted them to be educated in the orphanage but who  lived at home, were allowed to enter.  all children were reminded, constantly, of the  institution’s main purpose (hauptzweck), which grünwald described as “instruction in  true and living christianity.”  they were introduced to the “pure word of god” and to the  “symbolic books of the evangelical church.”  and as they became more adept in the art of  “recognizing god” they would also learn to understand the things of the world.  to this  end, they would receive training in the “useful sciences” during their periods of motion.   as they acquired proficiency in these sciences, grünwald proudly observed that the  heightened spirituality of these children would make them stand out or “shine like stars”  in their professions.     grünwald’s description notes that several zittau orphans went on to become  apothecaries, sculptors, bookbinders, printers, instrument makers and goldsmiths and that   the orphanage’s training regimens readied them for entrance into these professions.   the  vocational training one received was “oriented around the talent of each child,” he  explained.  and since each child was allowed to exercise themselves however they  wanted (aus eigenen triebe) in their free periods, they would be more inclined to  discover, on their own, what they were good at doing.  “if during their free periods and of  their own accord through making horizontal projections (rissen), painting, cutting and  building they discover their own inclination and inborn dexterity,” grünwald wrote:  then they are given the opportunity to learn mathematical principles, including how to use  the circul, the lineal usw.  special periods are set aside wherein they should also act out                                                     m. martin grünwald, m.g. ausführliche beschreibung des zittauischen waysenhauses, und dessen  loblichster einrichtung aus heiligen absehen entworffen und allen welchen gottes väterlichen vorsorge  gebührend verwundern zu danckbarhere uberlegung (leipzig and zittau,  ):  .   ibid.      all of the various and curious examples from mechanics so that, after some time, they  learn the names of the instruments, including the technical terms and special turns of  phrase that artists and handworkers need and use.  it can only be god who has made the  usually selfish and superficial members of the “geschickten nachwelt” willing to prove  their good will (wohltätigkeit) by inspiring certain people who are experienced in the free  arts and the handiworks of the mechanical exercises to make accurate models and other  helpful aids available to be grasped by the poor.  it should not be doubted that in our  orphanage, poor children carve wood and prepare tools whose varied uses will serve  many purposes in the future world.     one of the primary ways in which an observer could actuate his or her spirituality after  visualizing the zittau orphanage was to donate models and other learning aids to the  institution, which would further the conciliatory exercises of the children housed there  and, ultimately, the conciliatory mandate of the entire project.  the presence of these  objects also affirmed that the children of zittau’s orphanage were the instruments and  machines they handled.  they reminded them of their prominent position as showpieces,  as books and other valuable objects who, regardless of where they were sent, would be  able to inspire similar gestures of piety, of love, as those that had imagined them as  models and instruments in the first place.     as we saw with the langendorf/weiβenfels case, donating models, instruments  and books was a way of participating in pietist philanthropy and in the network of  orphanages.  it also seems to have been one of the primary ways in which pietist  benefactors attempted to change or enhance the educational programming of orphanages  that had been founded before the pietist orphanage turn.  erfurt’s evangelical orphanage  offers a useful example of this.  it had been founded well before halle’s and seems not to  have linked itself up directly with francke’s movement.   but around   its directors  decided to open up a kunst­ and naturalienkammer.  this was, in part, a tactical move                                                     grünwald ( ):  ­ .   francke mentioned erfurt in his projekt zu einem seminario universali ( ) as a site where an  institution had been built in the image of halle’s; however, both of erfurt’s orphanages (the evangelical  and the catholic) had been founded in the  s.  see sträter, “pietismus und sozialtätigkeit,”  ­ .      that (as francke’s creation of a wunderkammer had proven) really did draw more curious  visitors to the orphanage complex, who were then more inclined to make a donation after  their visit.  but it also affirms how powerful pietists’ emphasis on the conciliatory power  of visualizing objects, models and instruments on the schauplatz was for their movement  and for eighteenth­century contemporaries’ understanding of philanthropy more  generally.  among the models on display in erfurt’s evangelical orphanage were various  kinds of ships, mills and houses, and the collection even contained a copy of christoph  semler’s description of his famous solomon temple model (printed by the halle  orphanage in  ).  the collection of optical and mechanical instruments available for  viewing here was perhaps the most remarkable, including several sun clocks, magic  lanterns, mirrors, magnifying glasses, two small microscopes and a “needle microscope,”  which the lists describing the collection (none of the objects remain) indicate were  donated in   by joachim lange’s son johann, who had taken wolff’s position as a  mathematics professor on the university of halle in  .        long before the directors of erfurt’s evangelical orphanage decided to fall in  step with the vision­oriented programming of the pietist orphanages around them,  zittau’s orphanage, like francke’s, had made the observation of models, naturalia and  instruments a defining feature of the modus of paideia that their schools offered.  they  did this in conjunction with frequent affirmation of children’s special powers.  when  observed while engaged in pious and conciliatory motion, children of these sites  transmitted knowledge to the viewer, who was supposed to be transformed in the act of  witnessing these motions.  even the act of observing a pietist orphanage held the  possibility of transformation because, as christian weise explained, god had strategically      placed these buildings and the children they housed “in the middle of all the confusion of  europe” to bring its inhabitants a message of “calmness and pleasure.”       case three: züllichau (sulechow)    the city of züllichau is now part of poland but in the early decades of the  eighteenth century it was part of brandenburg­prussia.  according to carl hinrichs, it  was known for its cloth making industry and also became famous for the  erziehungsanstalt that was founded there, “in the spirit of halle,” in  .   like  christoph buchen, the poor farmer who had been inspired to found the langendorf  orphanage, the founder of züllichau’s orphanage, siegmund steinbart ( ­ ), was  remembered as a poor nadler.  however, by the end of the eighteenth century his  orphanage complex contained a pädagogium and its very own royal academy for training  teachers.  siegmund’s son johann christian ( ­ ) would attend school in  francke’s institutes, study at the university of halle and return to züllichau to direct the  orphanage.  siegmund’s grandson, gotthelf samuel ( ­ ), was educated in the  elite pietist school of kloster bergen (near magdeburg) and then sent to study in halle  with the theologian (and stiftungen alumnus) siegmund jacob baumgarten.  he would  also teach in the former francke foundation pupil johann hecker’s realschule in berlin  before returning to züllichau, where he, too, would direct its orphanage—having  acquired an international following as a philosopher, pedagogue and theologian.   at the  time of its founding, the züllichau orphanage was conceived of as a kind of outpost—                                                    christian weise, die gottgefällige betwoche der gesammten kinder aus dem zittauischen  wolangelegten waysenhause (zittau,  ):  “er hat uns mitten in der confusion von europa ruhig und  vergnuegt wohnen lassen.”   carl hinrichs, preuβentum und pietismus,  ­ .   p. tschakert, “gotthelf samuel steinbart,” in allgemeine deutsche biographie   ( ):  ­ .      like the orphanages of zittau and langendorf­weiβenfels—built according to halle’s  vorbild.      francke and steinbart were in contact with each other as early as  , when the  pietist professor invited steinbart and his wife to visit halle.   apparently one of  züllichau’s prominent cloth making firms had donated money to the halle orphanage  and steinbart served as a point of contact for this transaction—as francke himself  indicated in a   letter to one of his closest friends and advisors, heinrich julius  elers.   steinbart sent his son to school in halle before he witnessed the stiftungen  personally; johann christoph would enroll in francke’s latin school april  ,  .   the elder steinbart (although eulogized as “poor”) was apparently doing quite well in his  profession—so well that he could afford to send his son to halle and, in  , was able to  travel to the leipzig messe.  since he was in the neighborhood, he stopped in halle of  course.  legend has it that he was so overcome, so inspired, by the physical structures of  the buildings and what he saw there that he decided to start an orphanage in züllichau  upon returning home.    steinbart’s project was declared a “public work” that had been funded entirely at  god’s cost even though he received an immediate approbation from the prussian king,  who also provided him with money and building materials.  steinbart was heralded as a  tool (werkzeug) whose heart was so full of love that he never wanted for anything he  needed to get the project off the ground.   he obtained permission for his anstalt to  acquire its own printing press and bookshop and began receiving large donations from  prominent prussian families—including the wife of general friedrich von derfflingen,                                                     carl hinrichs, preuβentum und pietismus,  ­ .   ibid.      ibid.,  .      who sent steinbart   taler in cash in  .  this same benefactress would later send  donate another   taler to the institution and set up a scholarship fund for theology  students.   hinrichs notes that the orphanage was especially loved by elite “officer  circles” who preferred to send their boys there and lavished the institutional with all  manner of gifts.   like most pietist orphanages, the anstalt’s yearly reports listed the  various donations that individuals were sending from near and far.  a   edition notes  that the king had given the institution a mine and that benefactors from halle had sent an  array of medicines.   commenting on the receipt of   taler from three preachers, the  writer of this same report exclaimed: “father, refresh these true souls with the peace of  your countenance, for your love for the poor, not only strengthens what you are  attempting with this orphanage but also in other institutions, especially in halle and  landsberg, as well as the evangelical danish mission in tranquebar….”   the züllichau  orphanage was able to function, as most pietist orphanages, as an institution that could  meet the needs and aspirations of several different kinds of people and unite them all  around a single point.  loved by elite prussian officer families for the education it could  provide their sons, it also inspired and served as a site for the direction of a visible  expression of one’s benevolence, one’s love.     the   orphanage news report stressed that the “very first thing” steinbart  constructed when he started was a “single fountain so that the rest of the work would  never lack the necessary water and it could constantly signify the project’s final purpose,  which is namely to bring all souls into the fountain of living water, which lead to eternal                                                     ibid.,  .   warhafftige und umständliche nachricht derjenigen tropffen, strömlein und flüsse im october    (züllichau,  ):  .   ibid.,  .      life.”   fountains held a great deal of rhetorical and symbolic power as objects in these  communities, which appreciated the convergence of skill, intuition and beauty that the  constantly moving stream of water shooting upwards and into the world represented.  the  director of nordhausen’s pietist orphanage, heinrich kindervater, was also fond of  describing his institution as a site into which the “father of light” had allowed the  “inexhaustible fountains of all goodness” to flow.  the miracle was reminiscent of the  “wonder fountain” in allifa, which flowed even more strongly when one played the harp  or other musical instruments.  king solomon had also said, “let your fountains flow  outside of yourselves and onto the streets” (proverbs  : ), and this is what those who  made donations to pietist orphanages were doing when they gave.   francke’s  organization had drawn up several plans for the construction of a fountain outside of the  halle orphanage in order to provide the world with yet another visible symbol of the  conciliatory mandate (and promise) of the site.  herr rost explained how by  ,  francke was deliberating “whether or not the institutes could be helped through a  fountain (wasserkunst) with water from the saale.”   a fountain in front of an orphanage  building would not only help signify the forms of technological innovation available  inside the institution, it could also help demonstrate—ocularly—the consilia of motion or  perfection that the pietist prophets claimed to have mastered and to be offering to  members of their community. francke and those around him prayed for god to show  them a water source that could be directed, through pipes, to the orphanage building just                                                     warhafftige und umständliche nachricht derjenigen tropffen, strömlein und flüsse (berlin; züllichau,  ):  .   johann heinrich kindvater, eigentliche nachricht von der gelegenheit und anfange des in der kayserl.  fr. reichs­stadt nordhausen zu erbauenden waisen­hauses. vortrag  : der brunn des göttlichen seegens  (nordhausen: waysenhaus,  ):  .   afst/w xv/ii/ :  [ ] vol. i. nachrichtung das röhrwasser und ubrigen wasserbau bey den  waysenhause ... specificatio dere in diesen farcical entfallen nachriften und vorstellungen der wasserbau  bey dem w.h.; [ ] vol. ii. kurtzer bericht von dem jetzigen wasserbau      “like the water sources on high in gideon were directed to the city of david.”   the  power of the fountain to function as a symbol of the entire project was reiterated by  several orphanage “founders,” including (in this case) steinbart.  the youth of steinbart’s orphanage were also “directed towards christian virtue.”  their worth was regularly validated through several “visual tests” (augenscheinliche  proben) used to determine “whose hearts had been truly transformed and filled with the  holy spirit.”   the institution aspired to serve as a container and assimilator of  knowledge as well—although this was never easy.  the   bericht clearly  demonstrates that steinbart and his circle were attempting to develop a collection of  objects—including naturalia and models.  “regarding a collection of naturalia,” the  report writer explained, “so far we have had a slow beginning.”  however, they were  working on remedying the situation.  “three years ago i brought back from my trip to  austria an artful … chain, like the ones that very pious catholics place upon the naked  body.   and “a little over a half year ago, a friend gave us a model of a mine contained  in a sealed glass bottle, in which all the different mine related occupations are  represented.  in  , an honored do­gooder donated a turkish spoon.  in addition to  this,” he continued, “several different benefactors have offered up different kinds of  curious naturalia that they maybe have more than one of….  we would be very grateful  towards those who might be willing to send similar kinds of things to us.”                                                        ibid.   warhafftige und umständliche nachricht derjenigen tropffen, strömlein und flüsse im october    (züllichau,  ):  .  “... dergleichen die schwerlich büssende im papsthum um den blossen leib zu thun  pflegen.”     warhafftige und umständliche nachricht ( ):  .  that the mathematical sciences were being taught  in züllichau is evidenced in the orphanage press production of its own guide to “biblical mathematics”:  johann jacob schmidt, biblischer mathematicus oder erläuterung der heil. schrift aus den  mathematischen wissenschaften der arithmetic, geometrie, static, architectur, astronomie, horographie  und optic (züllichau, waysenhaus,  ).    http://gso.gbv.de/xslt/db= . /set= /ttl= /mat=/nomat=t/clk?ikt= &trm=johann http://gso.gbv.de/xslt/db= . /set= /ttl= /mat=/nomat=t/clk?ikt= &trm=jacob http://gso.gbv.de/xslt/db= . /set= /ttl= /mat=/nomat=t/clk?ikt= &trm=schmidt, http://gso.gbv.de/xslt/db= . /set= /ttl= /mat=/nomat=t/clk?ikt= &trm=biblischer http://gso.gbv.de/xslt/db= . /set= /ttl= /mat=/nomat=t/clk?ikt= &trm=mathematicus http://gso.gbv.de/xslt/db= . /set= /ttl= /mat=/nomat=t/clk?ikt= &trm=oder http://gso.gbv.de/xslt/db= . /set= /ttl= /mat=/nomat=t/clk?ikt= &trm=erla%cc% uterung http://gso.gbv.de/xslt/db= . /set= /ttl= /mat=/nomat=t/clk?ikt= &trm=heil. http://gso.gbv.de/xslt/db= . /set= /ttl= /mat=/nomat=t/clk?ikt= &trm=schrift http://gso.gbv.de/xslt/db= . /set= /ttl= /mat=/nomat=t/clk?ikt= &trm=aus http://gso.gbv.de/xslt/db= . /set= /ttl= /mat=/nomat=t/clk?ikt= &trm=mathematischen http://gso.gbv.de/xslt/db= . /set= /ttl= /mat=/nomat=t/clk?ikt= &trm=wissenschaften http://gso.gbv.de/xslt/db= . /set= /ttl= /mat=/nomat=t/clk?ikt= &trm=arithmetic, http://gso.gbv.de/xslt/db= . /set= /ttl= /mat=/nomat=t/clk?ikt= &trm=geometrie, http://gso.gbv.de/xslt/db= . /set= /ttl= /mat=/nomat=t/clk?ikt= &trm=static, http://gso.gbv.de/xslt/db= . /set= /ttl= /mat=/nomat=t/clk?ikt= &trm=architectur, http://gso.gbv.de/xslt/db= . /set= /ttl= /mat=/nomat=t/clk?ikt= &trm=astronomie, http://gso.gbv.de/xslt/db= . /set= /ttl= /mat=/nomat=t/clk?ikt= &trm=horographie http://gso.gbv.de/xslt/db= . /set= /ttl= /mat=/nomat=t/clk?ikt= &trm=optic     francke’s own conversations with one of the first members of the berlin  academy of science, conrad mel, about the links between his project, philanthropy,  mission and educating the youth with the new method seems to have set the stage for the  way in which these relationships were understood by future network participants like  steinbart and his son/grandson—including how they thought about circulating and  receiving donations of objects.  it also helps demonstrate even more links between the  aims of academy members like mel, francke’s organization and the new pietist  orphanage/educational complexes that seemed to be sprouting up everywhere.  mel and  francke corresponded about berlin academy projects, like calibrating the proportionality  of solomon’s temple or developing a universal language and measuring devices, in the  same context as they discussed mel’s plans to start an orphanage in hersfeld modeled  after halle’s, francke’s mission plans and mel’s own collection of naturalia (which he  offered to sell to francke).   francke’s correspondence with friedrich christian lesser,  son of the director of nordhausen’s pietist orphanage and berlin academy member,  suggests a similar pairing—to be borne out by future research.      johann julius hecker’s realschule    pietist orphanages would have an enormous influence on the organization and  orientation of other kinds of related educational complexes founded in prussia over the  course of the eighteenth century—including the extension and refinement of training  programs in the mathematical and mechanical sciences.  although it falls beyond my                                                     see appendix   and stab/f  ,  / :  ­  [ ­ ] conrad mel letters to a.h. francke    friedrich christoph lesser produced several popular physico­theological tracts; see, for example, his  insectotheologia: vernunft und schrifmässiger versuch, wie ein mensch durch aufmercksame betrachtung  derer sonst wenig geachteten insecten, zu lebendiger erkäntniss und bewunderung der allmach, weissheit,  der gute und gerechtigkeit des grossen gottes gelangen könne (leipzig,  ).      project’s timeframe, the founding of johann julius hecker’s realschule in   in berlin  illustrates the fluid relationship between pietist orphanage and realschule quite  effectively so it is with this example that i have elected to close this discussion for now.    hecker ( ­ ) came to halle in may of   to study theology and ended up  working for six years as an informator in francke’s pädagogium.  his biographer notes  that he learned all of the “most important forms of knowledge” from his teachers justus  breithaupt, paul anton, august hermann francke, joachim lange and johann jakob  rambach in the theology faculty of the university.   while teaching in the pädagogium,  hecker befriended professor of medicine friedrich hoffmann and became increasingly  interested in the study of medicine, anatomy and botany.   regarding the diversification  of hecker’s interests while in halle, his biographer explained that “one is foolish if one  thinks that a theologian is not a theologian if he knows more than what is important for  his field.  what form of knowledge is it that does not contribute to an explanation of the  holy scriptures?”   through his study of theology, hecker acquired “perfect love”  (reine liebe), which he then applied to “setting afire the hearts of the common way” and  further discovering and developing all of the new talents and interests god began to show  to him.   he taught languages but wrote a textbook on anatomy and physiology and an  introduction to the study of herbs.  in  , after a short tour of the netherlands, hecker landed in the pietist  “military orphanage” of potsdam, where he served as an inspector and pastor.  in  ,                                                     for a useful treatment of hecker, including his interest in creating a “school of unity” or einheitschule,  see friedrich­franz mentzel, pietismus und schule: die auswirkungen des pietismus auf das berliner  schulwesen,  ­  (hohengehren: schneider verlag,  ):  ­ .   leben des hochgelahrten herr johann julius hecker in ehrengedächniss des weiland hochwürdigen  und hochgelahrten herrn johann julius hecker... pastoris bey der dreyfaltigkeitskirche und directoris  der königl. realschule und des frankfurtschen waisenhauses (berlin,  ):  .   ibid.   ibid.,  ­ .      he was called to berlin to preside as the pastor and teacher of a new “church of the  trinity” (dreyfaltigkeitskirche), which had been founded by the prussian king the year  before.  it was here that he was given license to start a mathematical realschule, or  universal (allgemeine) school, where all members of the “common way”—soldiers,  artists, handworkers and servants—could be educated alongside children from elite and  middling families.  his biographer’s assessment of the school’s orientation directly  references hecker’s exposure to the orphanage schools while teaching at the  pädagogium that led him to conceive of such a space.  “is it not important,” he asked,  “that architects, artists and Öconomen are at least able to attempt to become learned?”   even those who might become half or corrupted intellectuals, hecker argued “ought to be  provided with the tools to save themselves from their own “shipwrecks.’   hecker’s  understanding of a realschule corresponded to the ecumenical vision of the pietist  orphanage.  in his estimation, “a realschule is a school for everyone, the learned  (gelehrte) as much as artists and handworkers (künstler und handwerker), who must all  be raised according to their future purpose.”     like francke, he divided his realschulanstalt into three components: a  “pensionairanstalt organized like a pädagogium,” a latin school (“nothing other than a  language and arts school”) and a german school (“actually a handworkers school”).      there were a total of eight theology classes in the anstalt, six latin classes, two greek  and hebrew, six geography and history, seven calligraphy, six orthography, three  epistolography, two mathematics, seven arithmetic, four drawing and two “orders” for  the practicing of vocal music.  individual lessons were offered as needed in botany,                                                     ibid.,  ­ .   ibid.   ibid.,  ­ .      anatomy, the science of manufacturing and small proprietorship (handlungs und  manufacturwissenschaft), mining (bergwerkskunde), mechanics and the “science  (wissenschaft) of naturalia and artifacts (kunststücke).”  more than   teachers  reportedly “busied themselves with well over   pupils” in the earliest years of the  project.    in these schools, hecker insisted that his teachers apply the method he had  learned to apply in halle: “a method that awakens an initial recognition of the arts and  sciences in children through tables and pictures and does not just stick (ankleben) ideas  onto the gemüth but ensures that they are clasped on (einschrauben).”   unfortunately,  he wrote in his own description of the realschule anstalt in  , “still only a few people  have had the good fortune to have been led in their youth in schools to the thing itself,  whose name they have only heard about and memorized.”     in this published description, hecker explained that he was compelled to elucidate  the proper meaning and components of the realschule for his readers because most them  likely did not have a proper understanding of it.  hecker explained that often people  tended to understand the realschule as a school for training pansophos or polyhistores— who seem to know everything about everything—and saw this as unrealistic since the  average person simply could not grasp all forms of knowledge.  or they saw the  realschule as something designed to refine the training of those who were destined to  work with their hands: saddlers, carpenters, bricklayers, builders.  those who interpreted  the mission of the realschule this way, he said, tended not to see the purpose of training  those headed for the trades in languages and other forms of knowledge that they would                                                     ibid.   ibid.   johann julius hecker, nachricht vom guten fortgang der neuangelegten real­schule bey den schul  anstalten der dreyfaltigkeitskirche (berlin,  ):  .      not need for their occupation.  in hecker’s opinion, both sides were misconceptions of  the realschule’s mandate.  first, in these institutions, languages, several forms of  knowledge (wissenschaften) and the arts (künste) needed to be engaged in; “not that the  scholars have to learn everything at once though.  no!  instead, each pupil should be able  to learn what he—with the aid of his parents and teacher and considering the central  purpose of his future mode of living—thinks is important.”  second, in order for these  schools to honestly be called realschulen, “from the very beginning of their schooling:  children have to be directed to the things of the world that they will be confronted with  and their understanding needs to be cleaned up (aufgeräumet) in order to learn about  these things.  one should just as much in spelling as in reading, in calculating as in  writing, … direct children to the things themselves (auf die sache selbst) and do not  simply fill their memories with a difficult array of hard to understand words that mean  nothing and are not useful.  for example, if they can read, then give them a book where  there are things inside that are also in the world, and are partly oriented around  cultivating a recognition of god, partly of mankind and partly other creatures in order to  ensure that their own composition is styled according to a natural order.  or if they are to  learn the saying: “do penance and believe in the evangelium,” then it would be good and  healing to direct them to make the necessary adjustments to their senses—to (practice)  hating evil and to seek out and love the good.  one should lead children to trust in jesus,  who gives israel penance and forgiveness of sins… this would be realien.       in order to help pupils learn how to appreciate where, why and how to use real things,  hecker remarked (in a manner reminiscent of christoph semler and francke’s  sentiments) that “one should not only explain things with descriptive words that are clear  and understandable to children…but, as often as possible, to present everything that can  not be shown in natura or in models and machines at least in copperplate drawings and  horizontal projections that are drawn correctly.”   hecker’s anstalt reportedly contained  a massive “model and machine room” where his biographer noted that “at large                                                      ibid.,  ­ .   ibid.       expense, the most exact models of machines, buildings, columns and famous paintings  from antiquity were finished” and used in lessons.       the final characteristic of the hecker realschule perhaps best illustrates the  convergence of pietist theology with his vision for a mathematical realschule—for  “true” lessons in realia:    an institution could be called a realschule if youth are led here to understand from their  earliest years onward why god created them as rational people and placed them in the  world; one should show them how they have been baptized by god and taken in by him  as children of his nation… one should demonstrate to them, should they fall away from  the promise of baptism, how or in what way they can be brought back to the most  peaceful, holiest and pleasurable states…. one should convince them that this alone can  only happen through jesus christ… one should encourage them, from day to day, to  learn how to recognize jesus more rudimentarily, to love him more tenderly and to desire  him constantly (i cor.  : ).  one should see to it that through their effusive recognition  (überschwänglichen erkenntnis) of jesus christ they learn to appreciate that in the  foolish, superficial objects in the world are only wretched, empty and worthless things  which contain few or no pieces of reality and to choose real, essential things that calm the  conscious (gewissen) and direct them towards eternal life.       real and essential things, grasped by an individual who had obtained an “effusive  recognition” of christ and therefore was able to calibrate these things with his own  perception of them would lead to higher forms of improvement, prosperity and  technological advancement for the “common way.”  whether or not hecker and others  inspired by the example of halle continued to believe in the mandate of universal  benevolence by the middle of the eighteenth century is difficult to say; future research  will perhaps gesture towards a way of answering this question.  however, it is clear from  hecker’s biography and his own descriptions of his realschule complex that his training  in halle had shown him the value of using his faith, his love, to pursue and assimilate as  many forms of knowledge as possible.                                                        leben des hochgelahrten herr johann julius hecker (berlin,  ):  ­ .   ibid.      hecker’s biography reveals close connections between his realschule and several  pietist orphanages—or erziehungsanstalten.  johann adam steinmetz ( ­ ), the  director of the kloster berge school complex just outside of magdeburg came to help  hecker with the school in   and, as i indicated above, siegmund steinbart’s grandson,  gotthelf samuel, would teach at the realschule in berlin before returning to züllichow to  direct the orphanage there.   in the  s, johann julius hecker’s brother, andreas  petrus hecker would start another realschule in the pietist orphanage of stargard (now  szczeciński).  much more work is needed to clarify the links between these  organizations, especially the ways in which certain ways of knowing circulated between  them via material objects and individuals, traveling in and out of halle and these other  sites.  obviously, as these orphanage complexes grew and time passed, the meanings of  the practices and objects they housed—including the meaning of philanthropy itself— changed.  but the sites continued to function as highly visible testimonies of the  practitioners’ special abilities as assimilators and prophets.    while there is only so much one can conclude about the orientation, mandate and  extension of a pietist network of orphanages after three case studies, i think the  orphanages of langendorf/weiβenfels, zittau and züllichau—in addition to the case of  christlieb leberecht and the hecker realschule—provide enough evidence to  demonstrate that pietist philanthropy involved more than an abstract network of  benefactors.  it involved a set of material practices housed in extended sites.  these sites,  these orphanages, were specifically constructed for the application of pietist pedagogies,                                                     friedrich gabriel resewitz’s description of the curriculum of kloster berge suggests that it too was  strongly oriented, like hecker’s, around the morality of middling objects; see his nachricht von der  gegenwärtigen einrichtung in unterricht, lehrart und erziehung auf dem pädagogio zu kloster bergen  (magdeburg,  ).  in addition to steinmetz, one of francke’s closest colleagues, joachim just breithaupt  ( ­ ), served (beginning in  ) as the director of kloster berge.        thereby illustrating the fundamental importance of a conciliatory methodology for the  extension of universal benevolence more generally.  they were solutions or sites, as  illustrated beautifully by christian weise’s comments, placed firmly in the “middle of the  confusion of europe” in order to eliminate this confusion, to remedy it by providing a  two­fold solution.  first, any and everyone could observe both the structure and the  children inside of it, which would move and inspire them, making them feel peaceful and,  therefore, better able to be discerning.  second, and probably most importantly, the  conciliatory capacities of children were being honed there so that they themselves would  emerge as prophets who could extend the new method and further harmonize instability,  conflict and pluralisms.  children were key participants in the extension of pietist  philanthropy because they could be observed in these sites engaging in a set of practices  or motions designed to inspire individuals of all ages to perfect themselves—and  eventually the world.            conclusion      i have heard a few properly fashioned gemüther say that that the orphanage period is  over and that the blessings that these institutions achieved have come to an end.  but i  would like to ask, where has this been written down?  especially if one pays attention to  experience, one could never uncover the reason for such a strange sentiment.  through  until this very hour i have known of no cause that could explain why the universal god of  the orphans should stop working through these kinds of institutions.      some like to think that aside from the halle orphanage no similar institution has  managed to remain standing, but rather their good beginnings have been disregarded and  they have all gradually slipped away.  alone the grace of god disputes this.  this is a  god who does not deprive anyone of his goodness nor does he offer it only to certain  people so they can erect a monopoly.  in addition to this, visible experience  (augenscheinliche erfahrung) offers indisputable proof of the opposite.  the merits of the  halle orphanage also validate this.      a thorough collection of reports from all the institutions ever developed according to this  art would form a huge and useful part of the history of schooling.  …  yes, i must tell my readers a little bit about how my faith in our anstalt has been  powerfully strengthened.  i have in my library not only francke’s news from the halle  orphanage and pädagogium but also steinbart’s news from the züllichau orphanage  (and alone the foreword introduces still more of the same kinds of houses); i have every  half year reports from the orphanage in cotbus; i receive news from the famous  realschule in berlin and also reports from the orphanage in görlitz.  awhile ago a friend  lent me the news reports from the new orphanage in grünstadt, founded in  .  and  even though i do not have the news reports from the langendorf orphanage near  weiβenfels, i still possess a short description of the life of the founder himself.    ­gottfried zahn,            for those involved in founding and funding pietist orphanages in the german  states throughout the eighteenth century, the “orphanage period” had only just begun.   each pietist orphanage constructed in brandenburg­prussia and saxony in this period  was imagined as a participant in a new, universal or conciliatory network—a pedagogical                                                     gottfried zahn, erste nachricht von einer auf gr. königlichen majestät allergnädigste concession  angefangenen waisen und schul anstalt zu bunzlau in schlesien welche sich auf den fond der göttlichen  vorsehung gründet.  mit beigefügten gedanken von dergleichen unternehmungen (bunzlau: waisenhaus,  ):  ­ ,  .      project and pansophic mission centered in halle.   during the years upon which this  study has been focused ( ­ ), pietist philanthropists were busily endeavoring to  assimilate perceived tensions between state authority and voluntarism, between theology  and philosophy, between reason and experience, by making the pietist orphanage— especially the practices it housed—the material symbol and site of their conciliatory  enterprise.  they did this very deliberately, i have proposed, precisely because of the  orphanage’s ability to serve as a neutral or “middling” medium that consistently made  powerful visual appeals, like a three­dimensional model, both to those who trained on site  and to those who came to view these schauplätze in order to increase their pious desires.       several scholars working on pietism today have pointed to an active state of  dialectical exchange between exterior and interior expressions of religiosity as key to  understanding spener and francke’s movement.  in his study of the eighteenth­century  origins of compulsory schooling in prussia and austria, james van horn melton wrote  that pietists’ concern with the state of their individual souls, their “inwardness,” was  “accompanied by a determined social activism” and that the “relationship between the  two positions was dialectal, not contradictory.”   jonathan sheehan, too, has pointed to  the simultaneity of pietists’ preoccupation with both subjective and objective ways of  knowing or arriving at truth.   those interested in halle pietists’ relationship to state  authority have noticed a dialectic operating here as well, only they tend not to  characterize it as such—instead they refer to this relationship as “vexing” or “anything                                                     i readily extend this claim to pietist orphanages constructed in russia, denmark, southern india and north  america; however, because my study has not treated these sites, it will have to remain a tentative one.   philipp jakob spener, pia desideria. oder hertzliches verlangen nach gottgefälliger besserung der  wahren evangelischen kirchen (frankfurt,  ).   james van horn melton, eighteenth­century origins,  .   jonathan sheehan, the enlightenment bible,  ­ .      but straightforward” precisely because of the persistent tendency for dialectical  exchanges between opposing positions to often appear as precisely this: oppositional or  contradictory.   was francke co­opted by the prussian state or, by founding the halle  orphanage, was he strategically manipulating the state in pursuit of his own agenda?   most continue to choose the first option—despite the caveats they offer—and thereby  even more deeply interweave the story of the pietist orphanage within a berlin­centered  narrative, not a halle­centered one.       contradictions are usually portrayed as implicit in halle pietism—silently  present, perplexing and crying out to be resolved.  and, at first glance, the duplicitous  arrangements that seem embedded in halle pietists’ relationship to state authority can be  read as yet another manifestation of precisely the kind of dialecticism that melton,  sheehan and others have insisted was central to the movement’s ethos.  but a dialectic  implies a constant and constructive exchange between two distinct sites; it does not quite  do justice to francke’s interest in portraying his movement as a “third way”—a phrase  that christopher clark also uses to characterize pietism in brandenburg­prussia and that  my entire study has been oriented around elucidating.    what if, instead of imagining  francke’s community as in a state of constant, dialectical exchange with state authorities,                                                     jonathan strom, “comment” in covenant quarterly  :  ( ):  ­ .     for a recent example of a berlin­centered narrative that includes a discussion of the halle orphanage see  christopher clark, the iron kingdom: the rise and downfall of prussia,  ­  (cambridge, ma:  harvard university press,  ):  ­ .  in benjamin marschke’s view, affiliates of francke’s  organization were “massively” co­opted by the prussian state, thereby becoming, “absolutely pietist;”  however, he has conceded that at the same time pietists’ “influence on prussia under fredrick william was  tremendous.”  see his “lutheran jesuits: halle pietist communication networks at the court of frederick  william i of prussia” covenant quarterly  :  ( ):  ­  and absolutely pietist: patronage,  factionalism and state­building in the early eighteenth­century army chaplaincy (tübingen: verlag der  franckeschen stiftungen halle im max niemeyer verlag,  ).  for an alternative view see thomas  bach, throne and altar: halle pietism and the hohenzollerns: a contribution to the history of church  state relations in eighteenth­century brandenburg prussia (syracuse university: unpublished  dissertation,  ).   christopher clark, the iron kingdom,  .      we took seriously the practices his community refined and circulated that came to define  their organization, their network as a “third way”?  what if the halle orphanage was  deliberately constructed to serve as precisely the kind of neutral or extended site for the  remediation of what pietist eclectics insisted only appeared to be fundamentally  incompatible forms of social organization, mandates or agendas?  if everyone learned to  see correctly through the conciliatory training regimens housed in the pietist orphanage,  the gaps between state, collective and individual wills could be bridged.  in the orphanage  they could come together in love, in an assimilatory juncture point, where individuals  could influence the state in innovative ways and vice versa.    i concede that my study has not directly confronted the problem of prussia and  halle pietism, whose configuration is still profoundly influenced by carl hinrichs’  monumental preuβentum und pietismus ( ) and the legacy of the confessionalization  paradigm that continues to dominate german historiography.   however, i have indirectly  offered up a conciliatory solution to this and many other dilemmas haunting pietism  studies today, including the lingering tendency to want to see pietism and enlightenment  as two distinct sites also engaged in a kind of dialectical conversation.  i have done this  by highlighting the profound significance of the pietist orphanage as an assimilatory  instrument.  i have endeavored to emphasize throughout the way in which pietists merged  practice and invention through visual exercises intended to calibrate, or bring into  alignment, the always unpredictable juxtaposition of cognition and experience, reason  and faith and other dualisms.                                                       joel harrington and helmut walser smith, “confessionalization, community and state building in  germany,  ­ ,” journal of modern history   (march  ):  ­ ; ute lotz­huemann, “the  concept of ‘confessionalization’: a historiographical paradigm in dispute.”  memoria y civilization    ( ):  ­ .        by training individuals to realize their eye’s potential as a conciliatory instrument,  halle pietists pursued an agenda that was contingent upon their promise to the ruling  elites who gave them licenses to build orphanages that their pedagogical regimens would  produce perpetually moving werkzeuge, who would improve the state at the same time as  they improved and perfected the world.  eventually this would make the need for any  form of authority, whether absolutely or collectively generated, unnecessary; and to a  pious ruler, who believed in the promise and mandate of pansophy, trading perfection for  a usually deficient (or less than perfect) state apparatus would have held enormous  appeal.  in this pre­  moment, it was precisely the active remediation (inside the  orphanage) of the contradictions that continue to perplex those of us who study their  movement that set halle pietists apart from those around them and that allowed them at  the same time to both undermine and further the agendas of the ruling elites who  sponsored them.  we will never “resolve” the paradox underlying halle pietists’  relationship to the state because it was precisely the affirmation and assimilation of this  paradox that the movement depended upon for its very survival.  this project has shown that key to understanding the assimilatory orientation of  francke’s movement is the diverse assortment of especially vision­oriented techniques  and strategies that he readily drew upon to create the halle method.  in part one, i laid  out francke’s connections to five individuals who devised and/or helped standardize  some of these techniques: ehrenfried walters von tschirnhaus, johann christoph sturm,  his son leonhard christoph sturm, gottfried wilhelm leibniz and christian wolff.  of  course, there were many more individuals whose presence in halle influenced the  orientation of francke’s universal seminar, including johann franz buddeus, christian      thomasius, friedrich hoffmann and georg ernst stahl.  but in order to illustrate how  and why especially the mathematical sciences came to be viewed as important, middling  disciplines for francke, it has been necessary to carefully consider his relationships to  tschirnhaus, to the sturms, to leibniz and to wolff—all of whom believed in the  promise of an eclectic method or means of filtering all knowledge through the individual,  whose increasingly perfect senses (improved by viewing models or objects in natura)  were in direct alignment with the cognitive faculties he was also consistently improving  through geometrical exercise.  tschirnhaus, i argued, was interested in what spener and  francke had to teach him about how the cultivation of instinct worked through  illumination, meditation and exegesis.  and francke implemented tschirnhaus’s method  for reconciling mathematics and physics because he recognized that his movement had a  powerful place in it.  he also recognized the powerful impact that sturmian eclecticism  had had on tschirnhaus’s project and brought it to bear on his own, displaying and  demonstrating to the pupils of his schulstadt both heliocentric and geocentric models of  the universe so that they could assimilate these competing vorstellungen in their hearts.          my treatment of leibniz and francke’s relationship has certainly not been the  first; however, in arguing that the halle orphanage should be viewed as a material  expression of a thought once expressed by leibniz (not necessarily his thought alone  though) i have challenged carl hinrichs’ still dominant portrayal of their mutual interest  in protestant mission as unabhängig voneinander or not closely intertwined.   the large  amount of correspondence in francke’s schulstadt (and archive) from members of the  berlin academy of science, including especially leibniz’s co­founder daniel ernst  jablonski, clearly indicates a great deal of convergence between francke’s institutes,                                                     hinrichs,  .      protestant mission and the conciliatory orientation of the academy.  the preoccupation  with pantometry, with developing universal measuring devices, a universal language and  universal media for reconciling and systematically presenting all knowledge would  remain central to the ethos of the halle orphanage—including the protestant mission it  endeavored to organize and orient around itself with the help of especially the danish and  english crowns, not the prussian one.  this preoccupation would linger well into the  s,  s and  s, when johann heinrich zedler printed the first german “universal  lexicon” on the halle orphanage press.   my treatment of both wolff and francke’s  mutual interest in the mathematical sciences as a form of paideia that could help the  individual realize himself at the same time as he compensated for the deficiencies of his  senses by habituating them also illustrates both figures’ commitment to a universalizing  or assimilatory project oriented around the gemüth as a critical juncture point.  while i  certainly would agree that there were differences between these two figures, as wolff  himself acknowledged, these same differences should not be used (as they have been  consistently over the years) to uphold an overly dramatized polarity between francke and  wolff—or between francke and leibniz for that matter.    pressed to explain the differences that slowly developed between francke and  wolff, i would point to francke’s preference for the three­dimensional models his friend  christoph semler liked to build as an expression of his pia desideria over wolff’s  preoccupation with the two­dimensional grundriss.  again, this is not to say that wolff  wanted nothing to do with models of machines or that francke refused to assimilate the  technology of the grundriss into his anstalt; as i have shown throughout part ii, this was                                                     there were   volumes printed between  ­ .  for a recent treatment see: christine haug,  "das  "universal­lexicon" des leipziger verlegers johann heinrich zedler im politischen konfliktfeld zwischen  sachsen und preußen" in leipziger jahrbuch zur buchgeschichte   ( ):  ­ .      not at all the case.  however, in articulating his preference for three­dimensional forms of  representation over two­dimensional forms, including the model’s strategic placement as  the second best means of sponsoring high quality forms of recognition and piety in  individuals (other than seeing something in natura), francke was saying something very  powerful about his movement’s orientation.  models were better schauplätze than  grundrisse; they were better able to illustrate the three­fold consilia of thinking, feeling  and loving that francke preferred by mimicking the heart’s—or third site’s—intrinsic  materiality and proportionality.  yet, despite this difference in taste or orientation, neither  francke nor wolff would have disputed the superior status of the middling mathematical  sciences or the conciliatory power of the eye.   to put it another way, francke was heading a rather loosely organized yet  coherent movement comprised of radical protestants who, like comenius, leibniz and  wolff, were convinced that there were gains to be had from copying jesuits—especially  their visual pedagogies.  all of the literati i discussed in part one, including francke and  the teachers of his schools, embraced and assimilated jesuits’ own preference for the  mathematical sciences.  they recognized the conciliatory significance of and helped  further athanasius kircher’s work on refining the technologies of geometrical projection.   they accepted the validity of andreas tacquet’s interest in assimilating oppositional  stances via the medium of the soul.  halle pietists, in tandem with so many of the  intellectuals they associated with, made the jesuit order’s preoccupation with visuality   and a coherent network oriented around the supposedly transcendent cause of christian  mission their own.  in their construction of conciliatory technologies of discernment— housed within assimilatory juncture points or orphanages—members of this community      were refining and codifying a set of practices that were imagined as easily replicable in  new and far away surroundings.   jesuits sent out missionaries who were expected to blend into new territories at  the same time as they endeavored to understand and transform them by building churches  and schools.   pietists also trained missionaries and teachers and sent them into distant  parts of the world to found new institutions and to gather up pieces of what they  discovered there.  trained to assimilate their findings in love, they were to circulate the  materials they encountered and to send them back to halle—the heart of the conciliatory  enterprise.  they were to accept the validity of the various forms of difference they  encountered at the same time as they assimilated or mediated it.  they were to transform  the souls of those they encountered by serving as living models or werkzeuge, inspiring  active forms of impassioned emulation.  founding new pietist orphanages was part of the  standardization of a universalizing impetus so characteristic of this period and yet marked  an attempt to make the instrument of assimilation the heart—to make it the critical  juncture point for all forms of reflective practice.    future research into the nuances of these extended sites, and there were many of  them, will help demonstrate more conclusively than i have been able to show here how  exactly this worked.  yet, i have illustrated in chapter eight that the founding of a pietist  orphanage provided francke’s movement, a privately sponsored enterprise centered in  halle (not berlin), with the gathering points it needed to maintain its momentum— thereby allowing it to grow and improve upon itself.  in theory, these sites allowed more  individuals to participate in furthering the conciliatory project than could ever participate  as agents in the jesuit organization.  individuals admitted themselves into the ranks of                                                     steve harris, “jesuit scientific activity in overseas missions,  ­ ,” isis   ( ):  ­ .      benefactors that comprised halle pietists’ patronage networks simply by donating, and  thereby supporting, the enterprise.  all forms of donations were acceptable, from hard  currency to books and musical instruments.  forms of participation in pietist philanthropy  were just as varied but always involved some kind of measurable act, some kind of  conciliatory gesture.  these included founding new orphanages in locales outside of  halle, becoming a teacher or missionary or even standing in front of the physical  structures so as to experience calming or pleasant emotive forms.  in halle, pietist  teachers—usually students from the university—gave tours of their orphanage complex  to interested visitors; they told people not only what to look at but how they could learn  to see it correctly by becoming a patron, a participant, of the organization.     participating in the network of pietist orphanages, in pietist philanthropy, was a  subjective experience that involved the reasoned application of passion, and the  impassioned application of reason.  in saying this, i do not wish to simply repackage yet  another of carl hinrichs’ influential claims about halle pietists’ influence on the  cultivation of interiority, on the individual and on the rise (or production) of modernity.   instead, i am interested in pointing out francke’s own insistence that cognition, that the  internal forms of knowledge and modes of reflection that pietists became famous for  championing, was (in their view) only one pillar of wisdom.  the other pillar was  comprised of interiority’s opposite, experience, and the two pillars came together in the  eye—that is, following comenius, in the heart.  especially those intellectuals who  championed the halle method believed that the production of new forms of knowledge  leading, eventually, to the perfection of the world would only be possible through                                                     afst/w vii/i/  [ ,  ] instruktionen für die herumführer       practical reflections or the cultivation of increasingly precise and passionate reflective  practices, which were always visible.   they sought to eliminate precisely the kinds of  categorical distinctions between ideas and practice, exteriority and interiority that  continue to inform the world we live in.   this feature of pietist philanthropy and education marks the most critical  component of the plea i am making for the pietist orphanage’s conciliatory significance.   the very kinds of distinctions that we take for granted today—between the idea of  childhood that pietists were promoting, for example, versus how children were actually  handled in their institutions—are distinctions that these historical actors also recognized  and sought to do away with entirely.    in their orphanages, children were assimilatory  sites, who both taught their adult informators and allowed themselves to be taught by  them, who were observed and, themselves, observed.  they were hearts and models like  the orphanage building itself and their special status as children was revered by pietists  precisely because of children’s tendencies to allow their actions and their reflections,  their reflective practices, to be dictated by their instincts, by their sense of non­jaded  wonderment and desire.  this is where my central contribution to the history of childhood  and education lies.  i see this project as an attempt to break out of the binary  straightjacket that usually amounts to a methodological choice between studying  children’s “real experiences” versus a given historical epoch’s ideas about them.  instead  we should be assembling genealogies of the reflective practices in which children are  implicated.                                                        for a succinct treatment of this tension and its repercussions on the field of childhood studies see hugh  cunningham, “histories of childhood,” in the american historical review  :  (october,  ):  ­  or his children and childhood in western society since   (london; new york: longman,  ).   for the relationship between the idea of childhood and interiority see carolyn steedman, strange  dislocations: childhood and the idea of human interiority,  ­  (london,  ).       my aim here is not, nor has it been, to impose a value judgment on these sites— thereby deeming them inherently good or bad.  if my portrayal of them comes across as  especially sympathetic this is primarily because of my conviction that pietist orphanages,  as conciliatory sites, are central to the histories of youth, education, philanthropy and  science in eighteenth­century germany but have been mostly misunderstood and  neglected over the years.  i readily conceded that these were exclusive institutions  designed mostly for gifted (though in some cases poor) male children.  francke and his  circle basically ignored immediate social problems in an effort to impose broadly  imagined yet practice­oriented solutions to the problems of intolerance, discord and  incongruity that eventually caused poverty, illiteracy and conflict.  when these  institutions were established in colonial contexts, like southeastern india, they became  implicated in colonial projects.  but pietists’ preoccupation with introducing the  conciliatory method in these new contexts suggest even more reason to study these sites,  including the global, philanthropic network of which they were a part.   it is not a coincidence that pietist orphanages emerged when they did, at  precisely the moment when already deeply entrenched, yet fluidly imagined, hierarchies  of heads and hands were being reified by ruling elites so as to summon up the necessary  men, materials and ideas necessary to sustain increasingly large and pluralistic “imagined  communities.”  these were communities linked together by newsprint and new  technologies, which, as the quote i cited at the outset of this section also indicates,  pietists were drawing upon to connect their own network.  their orphanages were  devised as a deliberate response to this process of reification.  their founding marked an                                                     benedict anderson, imagined communities: reflections on the origins and spread of nationalism  (london; new york: verso,  ); lissa roberts, simon schaffer and peter dear eds., the mindful hand  ( ).      attempt to show the world another way.  and one could say that at least until the  s or  s, the network of pietist orphanages—including the visual appeals of the first  schauplatz in halle—was remarkably coherent and extensive.  the halle orphanage  remained the network’s central node or gathering point and was not only producing  universal lexica but was experimenting with the production and circulation of measuring  instruments as well.   future research will help clarify just how extensive the network  was and why the “orphanage period” came to end, including how the pietist orphanage  complexes of brandenburg­prussia in particular became state institutions no longer  entirely beholden to their original conciliatory mandate.  but during this first phase, in  this early “orphanage period,” the visual pedagogies collected and refined in francke’s  schulstadt promised to change the world—and they most certainly did.                                                          see, for example, afst/w xi/­/  [ ] die anschaffung eines quadranten und berechnung der kosten      bibliography    abbreviations:    afst archive of the franckesche stiftungen [halle/saale]  /h   main archive (hauptarchiv)  /m  mission archive (missionsarchiv)  /p   planning archive (planarchiv)  /s   school archive (schularchiv)     /w  organizational archive (wirtschaftsarchiv)      gspk  geheimes staatsarchiv preuβischer kulturbesitz  [berlin]    bbaw/a  berlin­brandenburgische akademie der wissenschaften/archiv [berlin]    stab/f  staatsbibliothek (preuβischer kulturbesitz)/francke nachlass [berlin]    primary sources [handwritten]     afst/h  :   [august  ,  ] collegium sturmihnum pantomathamaticum, hoc ms  continentur arithmetica cum algebra et analysi speciosa, geometria, optica et  astronomia    afst/h a  b:   beschreibung des pädagogii (von georg heinrich neubauer)    afst/h a  :  [march  ,  ] schreiben von vincentius placcius an (philipp jacob  spener?)     afst/h b  :   einige betrachtungen von der von der möglichen vereinbahrung der  vernünft und religion, vorgeleget von boyle.    afst/h c  a    [november  ,  ] schreiben von heinrich wilhelm ludolf an  georg melchoir ludolf    afst/h c  : a [august  ,  ] schreiben von gottfried wilhelm leibniz an august  hermann francke     afst/h c  : b, d [may  / ,  ] schreiben von gottfried wilhelm leibniz an  monsieur ludolf    afst/h c  : c [may  ,  ] schreiben von gottfried wilhelm leibniz an august  hermann francke    afst/h c  : e [november  ,  ] schreiben von gottfried wilhelm leibniz an  freiherr hildebrand von canstein        afst/h c  : f [january  ,  ] schreiben von gottfried wilhelm leibniz an  august hermann francke    afst/h c  :   [july  ,  ] schreiben von anton wilhelm böhm an august  hermann francke    afst/h c  :   [january  ,  ] schreiben von ehrenfried walters von tschirnhaus  an august hermann francke    afst/h c  :   [february  ,  ]  schreiben von ehrenfried walters von tschirnhaus  an august hermann francke    afst/h c  :   [??  ]  schreiben von ehrenfried walters von tschirnhaus an  august hermann francke    afst/h c  :   [september  ,  ]  schreiben von ehrenfried walters von  tschirnhaus an august hermann francke    afst/h c  :  a [ ] project von anrichtung eines waysenhauses, so einem  ruβischen general auf deβen verlangen concipirt worden or gutachtung franckes über  die errichtung von waisenhaus in russland für peter i    afst/h c  :   [november  ,  ] schreiben von leonhard christoph sturm an  august hermann francke    afst/h c  :   [april  ,  ] leonhard christoph sturm to a. h. francke      afst/h c  :   [march  ,  ] schreiben von leonhard christoph sturm an  august hermann francke    afst/h c :   [??] schreiben von leonhard christoph sturm an august hermann  francke    afst/h c  :  [july  ,  ] schreiben von christian wolff an august hermann  francke    afst/h d   e.w. von tschirnhaus, gründliche anleitung zu nützlichen  wissenschafften absonderlich zu der mathesi und physica. wie sie anitzo von den  gelehrsten abgehandlet worden ( )    afst/h d   b.  ­  christoph buchen’s einfältige gedancken zur seligen erbauung  in unsern christenthum über die gute ordnung der bienen    afst/h d   [ ] heinrich julius elers über seine reise nach dresden    afst/h e  :   athanasius kircher, mundus subterraneus excerpta [amsterdam  ]         afst/h e  :   athanasius kircher, tractatus de arte magna lucis et umbrae, excerpta     afst/h e  :   athanasius kircher, epilogus sive metaphysica lucis et umbrae tractatui  de arte magna lucis et umbrae adjectus, (abschrift)    afst/h e    semler lehrplan      optischen instrumenten,  ­   zeichen und mahlkunst,   ­     afst/h rs:   [march  ,  ] brief von christoph semler an august hermann  francke;  original im bestand des germanischen nationalmuseums nürnberg, archiv,  autographen (semler, c.).    afst/m   b     [january  ,  ] brief von christian pressier an die schüler des  pädagogiums    afst/m   b     [june  ,  ] bericht von christoph theodosius walter an ernst  heinrich aleman (bericht über die seereise, alltagsbeobachtungen in tranquebar,  zeichnung eines quadranten)    afst/p  / /  –  / /  kupferbergwerk goddelsheim planentwürfe und skizzen     afst/p  / /  –  / /  kupferbergwerk nordenbeck planentwürfe und skizzen    afst/s a i   [ ­ ] verhalten der schüler und beschäftigung ehemaliger  scholaren (pädagogium)    afst/s a i   [ ­ ] historische nachrichten von dem ersten anfang des  pädagogii    afst/w v/­/   general reglement für das waisenhaus und pädagogium    afst/w vii/i/  [ ,  ] instruktionen für die herumführer     afst/w rep.   fach   nr.    specification der einahmen und ausgaben wegen der  mechanischen disciplinen   bis      afst/w xi/­/  instruction wie die music in den knabenschulen tractirt werden solle,  sine dato    afst/w xi/­/   ordnung und lehrart wieselbige in den zum waisenhaus gehörigen  schulen eingeführt ist, druckheft         afst/w xi/­/   d mel judicium und entdeckte meynung um sie erlangte königliche  preussische societät der wissenschaften wegen des von einem sinnreichen author; ihrer  königlichen maiester von preussen übergebenen projects vom einem charactere  universali ob und weit derselbe practicabel durch   characteren und deren  determinitiones ohne erlernung fremder sprachen mit allerley volckern der welt zu  reden    afst/w xi/­/  [august  ,  ] original­contract zwischen gottlieb wolfgang u. hr.  prof. a.h. francke den kindern das kupferstechen zu lehren    afst/w xi/­/  [ ] die zum behuf classis   mus. und der singestunden auf dem  grossen erbauungs. saal angeschaffte neue orgel    afst/w xi/­/  [ ] die anschaffung eines quadranten und berechnung der kosten    afst/w xi/­/  inventarverzeichnisse (kataloge) der schränke der kunst­ und  naturalienkammer    verzeichnisse  ­  von gottfried august gründler   angefertigt    .  schrank iii c:  seegewaechse     .  schrank vii g: zum mathematischen gebrauch gehörige sachen     .  schrank vii h: zur astronomie gehörige sachen     .  schrank ix i: sachen, so zur mechanik gehören    .  schrank x k: sachen, so zur mechanik gehören    .  schrank xi l: sachen, so von der königlichen danischen und königlichen  englischen indischen missionen aus malabarn, an hiesiges waysenhaus   überschicket worden.    .  schrank xii m: sachen aus verschiedenen religionen welche be denselben     für heilig gehalten werden.    .  schrank xiii n: sachen, welche zu speiss und trank gehören, oder als     werckzeuge dabey gebraucht werden, einige zum krige gehörige instrumente,     wie auch verschieden andere künstliche sachen    .  schrank xiv o: sachen, so zur kleidung gehören    . schrank xv p: gemälde, kupferstiche, risse und wachsfiguren    .  schrank xvi q: zum schreiben gehörige instrumente, wie auch     geschrieben und gedruckte in­ und ausländische sachen.    .  catalogus derer sachen, die sich in der naturalien­kammer des  waysenhauses befinden nach  .    .  erster gedruckter katalog der kunst und naturalienkammer: specification     derer sachen welche zu der für die glauchische anstalten angefangenen     naturalien­cammer bis anhero verehret worden. vor  .    afst/w xi/­/  demonstration des modells der stiffs hütte mosis    afst/w xv/ii/   [ ] band i. nachrichtung das röhrwasser und ubrigen wasserbau  bey den waysenhause ... specificatio dere in diesen farcical entfallen nachriften und      vorstellungen der wasserbau bey dem w.h.; [ ] band ii. kurtzer bericht von dem  jetzigen wasserbau     stab/f  / :  ­ ,  ­  [february   &  ,  ; march   &  ,  ; february   &  ,  ] briefe von johann franz buddeus an august hermann francke    stab/f  ,  / :   [june  ,  ]  brief von johann daniel herrnschmidt an august  hermann francke    stab/f  ,  /  [march  ,  ]  brief von conrad mel an august hermann francke    stab/f  ,  / :  ­  [ ] brief von johann porst an a. h. francke (re: d.e.  jablonski, potsdam waisenhaus)    stab/f  ,  / :   [june  ,  ] brief von leonhard christoph sturm an august  hermann francke (re: mathematik stelle)    stab/f  ,  / :   [march  ,  ] brief von leonhard christoph sturm an august  hermann francke (re: medikamente)    stab/f  ,  / :   [july  ,  ] brief von leonhard christoph sturm an august  hermann francke (re: informator)    stab/f  ,  / :   [november  ,  ] brief von leonhard christoph sturm an  august hermann francke    stab/f  ,  / :   [february  ,  ] brief von leonhard christoph sturm an august  hermann francke    stab/f  ,  / :   [september  ,  ] brief von leonhard christoph sturm an august  hermann francke    stab/f  ,  / :   [october  ,  ] brief von leonhard christoph sturm an august  hermann francke    stab/f  ,  / :   [november  ,  ] brief von leonhard christoph sturm an  august hermann francke    stab/f  ,  / :   [may  ,  ] brief von leonhard christoph sturm an august  hermann francke    stab/f  ,  / :   [october  ,  ] brief von leonhard christoph sturm an a.h.  francke    stab/f  ,  / :   [april  ,  ] brief von leonhard christoph sturm an august  hermann francke (re: son georg samuel christoph sturm to pädagogium)        stab/f  ,  / :   [june  ,  ] brief von leonhard christoph sturm an august  hermann francke    stab/f  ,  / :   [september  ,  ] brief von leonhard christoph sturm an  august hermann francke    stab/f  ,  / :   [april  ,  ] brief von leonhard christoph sturm an august  hermann francke    stab/f  / :    [ ] ergänzende fragen georg heinrich neubauers zum studium der  waisenhäuser in holland     stab/f  / :   [december  ,  ] aufzeichnungen von georg heinrich neubauer  über seinen besuch im diakonischen waisenhaus amsterdam    stab/f  / :   [ ]  aufzeichnungen von georg heinrich neubauer über die  finanziellen quellen der armenfürsorge in holland, insbesondere für das diakonische  waisenhaus, das bürgerwaisenhaus und das almoseniers­waisenhaus in amsterdam.    stab/f  / , :    [ ] bautechnische beschreibung des frauenhauses in amsterdam,  angefertigt von georg heinrich neubauer    gspk [ ­ ] i ha rep   nr  b     bbaw/a i­iii­  table of academy members    bbaw/a i­v,  a [ ] gutachtung von j.l.frisch zu der von l.ch. sturm eingesand  abhandlung über den von könig salomo im jerusalemer tempel gebauten  springbrunnen      bbaw/a i­v,  a [ ] gutachten von l.ch. sturm über das pantometrum nauticum  des k. mel    primary sources [printed]    zeitschriften    lettres édifiantes et curieuses écrites des missions étrangères, par quelques  missionnaires de la compagnie de jésus.  a paris, chez nicolas le clerc, ruë saint  jacques, proche saint yves, à l'image saint lambert.   [­  ].    [hallesche berichten] gotthilf august francke ed., der königl. dänischen missionarien  aus ost­indien eingesandte ausführliche berichte von dem werck ihres amts unter den  heyden and continuation des berichts der königl. dänischen missionarien in ost­indien      von dem werk ihres amts und bekehrung der heyden daselbst halle: waysenhaus,  ­ .    wöchenliche hallische frage­ und anzeigungsnachrichten.  halle,  ­ .    wöchenliche hallische anzeigen.  halle,  ­ .    anonymous    bericht dessen was wegen der zwischen den evangelisch­lutherischen geistlichen von  der universität und stadt ministerio in halle, eine zeithero geschwebten differentien,  durch von seiner churf. durchl. zu brandenburg gnädigst verordnete commission  abgehandelt und zu dero beruhigung in göttlichem segen ausgerichte worden. colln an  der spree,  .    praise out of the mouth of babes: or, a particular account of some extraordinary pious  motions and devout exercises, observ'd of late in many children in silesia. translated by  anton wilhelm böhme.  london,  .    gründlicher unterricht von der graphice oder zeichen und mahlkunst worinn von  derselben beschaffenheit, unterschiedlichen arten, requisitis, historie, vortrefflichkeit,  nutzen und methode gehandelt wird.  mit einem doppelten register. halle: zu finden im  waysenhaus,  .    leben des hochgelahrten herr johann julius hecker in ehrengedächniss des weiland  hochwürdigen und hochgelahrten herrn johann julius hecker... pastoris bey der  dreyfaltigkeitskirche und directoris der königl. realschule und des frankfurtschen  waisenhauses. berlin: realschule verlag,  .    aguilon, françois de.  opticorum libri sex philosophis juxta ac mathematicis utiles.  anvers,  .    alberti, andreae.  zwey bücher von der perspectiv. nürnberg,  .    alberti, leon battista.  on painting.  translated and edited by j. r. spencer.  new  haven, ct: yale university press,  .    arends, wilhelm erasmus.  eines zehn­jährigen knabens christlieb leberecht von exter,  aus zerbst, christlich geführter lebens­lauff: nebst dessen angefangenen tractätlein  vom wahren christenthum, ingleichen seine briefe und lieder ... zum öffentlichen druck  gegeben und sr. ... durchl. herrn anton günthern, fürsten zu anhalt ... dediciret von  august hermann francken.  halle: waysenhaus,  .    arends, william erasmus. chrisian leberecht von exter of zerbst... account of his life  compiled by his tutor.  the remaining part of this book contains the edifying mediations,  which the pious child wrote and left according to the measure of that knowledge he had      obtained from the word of god in such hours as others of his age trifle away with  childish plays: whereto are likewise adjoined his christian letters, hymns and prayers.  london,  .    arnauld, antoine.  nouveaux éléments de géometrie, contenant des moyens de faire voir  quelles lignes sont incommensurables (…).  paris,  .    arnauld, antoine.  exegetische und moralische auslegungen der vier evangelisten:  darinnen aus denen vornehmsten kirchen­vätern nicht nur der buchstäbliche verstand  deutlich erkläret, sondern auch die moralien und zur erbauung im christenthum zielende  lehren zugleich mit angeführet werden anfangs in frantz. sprache von den gliedern d.  societät in d. so gen. maison du port­royal entworffen u. unter d. dirig. d. herren  arnauld und sacy hrsg., nun aber ... ins teutsche übers. u. mit einer vorr. d. jo. andreae  schmidts ... versehen.  frankfurt,  .    arndt, johann.  vier bücher vom wahren christenthum, das ist: von heilsamer buße ...  versehen mit vielen schrifft­allegaten, neuen numern der paragraphen und nützlichen  registern. halle: waysenhaus,  .    arndt, johann.  vier uralte geistreiche büchlein. deren  . die teutsche theologia ... ii.  von der holdseligen liebe gottes. iii. von unserm h. christlichen glauben ... iv. die  nachfolge christi . frankfurt,  ,  .    arndt, johann.  the garden of paradise: or, holy prayers and exercises; whereby the  christian graces and virtues may be planted and improved in man, the divine image  renew'd true christianity promoted, the kingdom of god established, and heavenly life  raised up in the spirit. pursuing the design of the famous treatise of true christianity.  london: downing,  .      barrow, isaac.  euclidis elementorum libri xv, breviter demonstrate. cambridge,  .    barrow, isaac.  optical lectures (lectiones xviii). translated by h.c. fay; edited by  a.g. bennett and d.f. edgar.  london,  .    baumgarten, siegmund jacob.  herrn wilhelm whistons beschreibung der stiftshütte und  des tempels. halle,  .    bayley, lewis.  practice of piety: directing a christian how to walk that he may please  god.  lüneburg,   &  .  basel,   &  .  berlin,  .    bayley, lewis.  praxis pietatis: das ist, Übung der gottseligkeit ... anfänglich in  englischer sprach beschrieben durch doct. ludwig bayli, ... hernacher auch in unsere  teutsche sprach übersetzet ... theil  : darinn begriffen, wie ein christgläubiger mensch  in wahrer erkanntnuß gottes und seiner selbst zunem[m]en, sein leben täglich ...  beschliessen könne.  theil  : in sich begreiffend die fürtreffliche ubung gottseliger und  andächtiger meditation. basel,  .        bessler, johann ernst elias. der recht­glaubige orffyreer: oder die einige vereinigung  der uneinigen christen in glaubens­sachen: sie nennen sich gleich: evangelisch­ lutherisch, evangelisch­reformirt, römisch­catholisch, oder papistisch; in fünffzig  fragen abgefasset, zu einem neuen­jahrs­opffer  ; allen einfältigen und heyl­ begierigen teutschen christen­seelen ... in unglaublicher eyl entworffen, und dem  durchlauchtigsten fürsten und herrn, herrn carls, landgraffen zu hessen, fürsten zu  herßfeld, graffen zu catzenelnbogen, dietz, ziegenhayn ... an dessen ... namens­tage,  unter angefügtem neu­jahrs­wunsch præsentiret, von ... orffyreo. d. m. p. m.  verlegt  von dem authore selbst. cassel,  .    bethmann, l. “geschichte der anstalt” in landwaisen­anstalt langendorf festschrift zur  feier ihres   jährigen bestehens. langendorf,  .    beutel, tobias.  neu aufgelegte arithmetica, oder sehr nützliche rechen kunst mit  kurzen reguln und exemplis nach der practica, welche ausfürlich hierinnen beschrieben  ist, samt der coss doer algebra, in unterschiedenen nuztbaren aufgaben auch  beschriebung der visir ruthen, nach der quadrat und cubic wurzel und zins und  wechsel zugaben in münzen, elen gewichten und maassen ... leipzig,  .    bion, nicholas.  traité de la construction et des principaux usages des instrumens de  mathématique; neu­eröffnete mathematische werck­schule, oder gründliche anweisung,  wie die mathematische instrumenten nicht allein ... zu gebrauchen, sondern auch ... zu  erhalten sind .... aus dem frantz. ins teutsche übers: j. g. d. d.i. johann gabriel  doppelmayr. franckfurt; leipzig; nürnberg,  .    birkenstein, anton ernst burckhard von. herrn burckhard von pürckenstein weyland  josephi i. deß grossen römischen kaysers mathematici, außerwöhlter anfang zu denen  höchstnutzlich mathematischen wissenschafften: samt einem anhang oder beschreibung  derer ... ungarischen städten, vestungen und schlössern ... ; mit   kupffern gezieret.   augsburg,  .    boecler, johann heinrich.  characteres politici in velleio paterculo expositione quadam  demonstrate. strasbourg,  .    böhme, jakob.  das sechste büchlein: vom ubersinnlichen leben, nebst ein gespräche  eines meisters und jüngers: wie die seele möge zu göttlicher anschauung und gehör  kommen: und was ihre kindheit in dem natürlichen und übernatürlichen leben sey ... in  der weg zu christo: verfasset in neun büchlein. das  . von wahrer busse.  . vom  heiligen gebeth.  . ein schlüssel göttlicher geheimnüsse.  . von wahrer gelassenheit.  . von der wiedergebuhrt.  . vom übersinnlichen leben.  . von göttlicher  beschauligkeit.  . von der erleuchteten und unerleuchteten seele.  . von den vier  complexionen. amsterdam,  .    bosse, abraham.  maniere universelle de mr. desargues pour praticquer la perspective  par petit pied comme le geometra.  paris,  ; amsterdam,  .        boyle, robert.  seraphic love.  london,  / .    boyle, robert.  an essay upon the style of the holy scriptures.  london,  .    boyle, robert.  excellence of theology compared with natural philosophy.  london,  .    boyle, robert.  of the high veneration man’s intellect owes to god, peculiarly for his  wisdom and power. london,  .    boyle, robert.  amor seraphicus. die seraphische liebe, oder einige anreitzungen zur  liebe gegen gott ... in einem sende­schreiben an einen freund geschrieben von roberto  boyle. ... aus der lat. version.  halle, waysenhaus  .    boyle, robert.  des edlen roberti boyle, weyland mitglieds der königl. societæt der  wissenschaften in england auserlesene theologische schrifften: als erstl. dessen  gedancken vom stilo und schreib­art der heil. schrift; ( .) von der vortrefflichkeit der  theologie in vergleichung mit der philosophie; ( .) von der veneration und verehrung  so der menschl. verstand gott schuldig ist; ( .) von der seraphischen liebe; nunmehro  wegen ihrer würdigkeit zum gemeinen nutzen ins teutsche übersetzet und mit gehörigem  register versehen. halle, waysenhaus  .    buddeus, johann franz.  elementa philosophiae instrumentalis seu institutionum  philosophiae eclecticae. halae saxonvm, typis & impensis orphanotrophii,  .    buddeus, johann franz.  svpplementvm epistolarvm martini lutheri: continens epistolas  cclx. partim hactenvs ineditas, partim editas quidem, sed hinc inde dispersas, et in  tomis qvos jo. avrifaber edidit, non extantes, nvnc avtem collectas. accedit jo.  francisci buddei dissertatio praeliminaris de avcta insigniter per recentissimas  qvasdam epistolarvm collectiones, re litteraria et ecclesiastica. halae:  orphanotropheum,  .    buddeus, johann franz und jacob carl spener, historiam doctrinae de temperamentis  hominum. halae magd.: orphanotropheum,  .    buddeus, johann franz.  allgemeines historisches lexicon: in welchem das leben und  die thaten derer patriarchen, propheten, apostel ... in alphabetischer ordnung mit  bewehrten zeugnissen vorgestellet werden. leipzig,  ­ .      buddeus, johann franz.  de concordia religionis christianae statvsqve civilis. halae  saxonum: orphanotropheum,  .    buddeus, johann franz.  historische und theologische einleitung in die vornehmsten  religions­streitigkeiten. jena,  .    http://haweb .bibliothek.uni-halle.de: /db= /set= /ttl= /mat=/nomat=t/clk?ikt= &trm=historiam http://haweb .bibliothek.uni-halle.de: /db= /set= /ttl= /mat=/nomat=t/clk?ikt= &trm=doctrinae http://haweb .bibliothek.uni-halle.de: /db= /set= /ttl= /mat=/nomat=t/clk?ikt= &trm=de http://haweb .bibliothek.uni-halle.de: /db= /set= /ttl= /mat=/nomat=t/clk?ikt= &trm=temperamentis http://haweb .bibliothek.uni-halle.de: /db= /set= /ttl= /mat=/nomat=t/clk?ikt= &trm=hominum     buddeus, johann franz. bedencken über die wolffianische philosophie mit  anmerckungen erläutert von christian wolffen [frankfurt,  ].  reprinted in  hildesheim: olms,  .    canstein, carl hildebrand von.  harmonie und auslegung der heiligen vier evangelisten.  oder die schriften der evangelisten,in eine zusammenfügung gebracht, und nach ihrem  wort­verstande von versicul zu versicul erkläret, samt daraus gezogenen lehren und  erbaulichen anmerckungen. wie solches theils aus einer menge der besten und  gelehrtesten ausleger der heil. schrift zusammen getragen; theils aus eigner meditation  geflossen : nebst einer ausführlichen allgemeinen vorbereitung und einleitung: in  welcher von unterschiedlichen fragen und umständen, sowol die evangelisten  überhaupt, als ieglichen ins besondere, und ihre harmonie betreffend; wie auch  insonderheit von den jahren christi; von dem zustande seiner zeiten; von der  entwendung des scepters von juda, i b. mos. xlix; und von den lxx. jahr­wochen,  dan. ix. gehandelt ist; wozu noch kommt eine accurate carte von dem gelobten lande,  und ein vorbericht, darin von dieses werckes zweck, beschaffenheit und nutzen, eine  nothwendig voraus zu lesende anweisung geschicht.  halle: waysenhaus,  .    casaubon, isaac.  “theophrasti notationes morum” in thomas hale ed. opuscula  mythologica physica et ethica: græce et latine; seriem eorum sistit pagina  praefationem proxime sequens. amstelædami,  .      comenius, johann amos.  schola ludus, das ist die schule als spiel.  translated by  wilhelm bötticher. langensalza: beyer,  .    comenius, johann amos.  janua linguarum reserata: the gate of language unlocked  lissa,  .    comenius, johann amos.  lux en tenebris. amsterdam,  .    comenius, johann amos.  oculi fidei.   .    comenius, johann amos.  orbis pictus hoc est, omnium fundamentalium in mundo  rerum et in vita actionum pictura et nomenclatura = die sichtbare welt. first edition  .  dortmund: harenberg,  .    comenius, johann amos.  grosse didaktik. edited by hans ahrbeck. berlin: volk und  wissen volkseigener verlag,  .    comenius, johann amos.  unum necessarium, scire quid sibvi sit necessarium, in vita et  morte, et post mortem. quod non­necessariis mundi fatigatus, et ad unum necessarium  sese recipiens, senex j.a. comenius anno aetatis suae   mundo expendendum offert  amsterdam,  .    comenius, johann amos. historia fratrvm bohemorvm, eorvm ordo et disciplina  ecclisiatica, ad ecclesiae recte constitvendae exemplar, cvm ecclesiae bohem, ad      anglicanam paraenesi: accedit eiusdem auctoris panegersia, siue excitatorivm  vniversale, ... quo salubria suppeditantur consilia, quomodo communis rerum  humanarum emendatio suscipi atque fieri possit; ex opere eius, vt vocat, pansophico,  nondvm edito desvmtvm.  praemissa est praefatio io. francisi buddei. halae, typis &  impensis orphanotrophii,  .    comenius, johann amos.  de rerum humanarvm emendatione consultatio catholica,  ad genus humanvm ante alios vero ad eruditos, religiosos, potentes europae. halae,  typis & impensis orphanotrophii,  .     de chales, claude f. m.  cursus seu mundus mathematicus.  lyon,  .     de lairesse, gérard.  des berühmten mahlers gerhard de lairesse anleitung zur  zeichen­kunst, wie man dieselbe durch hülffe der geometrie gründlich und vollkommen  erlernen könne.  translated by samuel theodor gericke.  berlin,  .    de lairesse, gérard.  het groot schilderboek.  amsterdam,  .    della porta, giovanni.  magiæ naturalis libri viginti: in quibvs scientiarum naturalium  diuitiæ, & deliciæ demonstrantur. accessit index, rem omnem dilucidè repræsentans,  copiosißimus. frankfurt,  .    descartes, rené.  compendium of musick [london,  ] descartes's works in  translation. bristol: thoemmes press,  .    descartes, rené.  the philosophical writings of descartes. three volumes. translated  by john cottingham, robert stoothoff, dugald murdoch and anthony kenny.   cambridge: cambridge university press,  ­ .    dilherr, johann michael.  propheten schul. das ist christliche anweisung zu gottseliger  betrachtung des lebens und der lehre heiliger propheten altes testaments; derer  bildnissen, in schönen kupferstichen mit sind beygefüget.  allerlei stands personen  erbaulich zu lesen. nürnberg,  .    doppelmayr, johann gabriel.  historische nachricht von den nürnbergischen  mathematicis und künstlern [nürnberg,  ] reprint. hildesheim, new york: georg  olms,  .    dreyhaupt, johann christoph.  ausführliche diplomatisch­historische beschreibung des  zumehemaligen primat und erz­stifft nunmehr aber durch den westphälischen friedens­ schluss secularisirten herzogthum magdeburg gehörigen saal­kreyses...halle,  .    dubreuil, jean.  perspectiva practica, oder vollständige anleitung zu der perspectiv­ reiß­kunst: nutzlich ... allen mahlern, kupfferstechern, baumeistern, ... [jean  dubreuil]. erstmahls durch ein unbenahmtes mit­glied der societät jesu in paris heraus      gegeben, nun aber aus dem französischen ins teutsche übersetzet durch johann  christoph rembold.  augsburg,  .    edzardi, sebastian.  der labadismus, die quelle des pietismi: gezeiget bey gelegenheit  eines ihro königl. majest. in groß­britannien und chur­fürstl. durchl. zu  braunschweig­lüneburg, [et]c. allergnädigsten befehls, keine welche die bekannten  hällischen oder pietistischen principia eingesogen haben, zu prediger­stellen zu  admittiren.   .     fleury, claude.  die sitten der israeliten, oder muster einer schlecht und rechten  politischen unterweisung, den staat zu regieren und die sitten zu verbessern durch m.  fleury.  hannover,  .    fleury, claude.  klugheit zu studiren: oder gründliche nachricht wie ein junger mensch  bey den gelehrten wissenschaften eine kluge wahl beobachten und selbige vermöge  einer geschickten lehr­art begreiffen soll; aus den frantzösischen ins teutsche  übersetzt. budißin,  .    francke, august hermann. “on christian perfection” ( ) in peter erb ed., pietists:  selected writings (new york: paulist press,  ):  ­     francke, august hermann.  einfältiger unterricht, wie man die h. schrifft zu seiner  wahren erbauung lesen solle: für diejenigen, welche begierig sind, ihr gantzes  christenthum auff das theure wort gottes zu gründen, entworffen.  halle,  .    francke, august hermann.  “historische nachricht von verpflegung der armen und  erziehung der jugend in glaucha an halle gemachte anstalten veranlasset, eines aus dem  andern gefolget, und das gantze werck durch göttlichen segen von an.  . biß a.   im monath junio fortgesetzet und eingerichtet sey.  zum preiß der treuen vorsorge  gottes, zur erweck­ und stärckung des vertrauens auf gott und wahrer christlicher  liebe” in philipp jakob spener, christliche verpflegung der armen, als aus churfürstl.  gnädigster verordnung des gassen­bettlen in den churfl. residentz­städten abgeschaft,  und zu liebreicherer versorgung der bedürfftigen anstalt gemacht, auch dieselbe  öffentlich der gemeinde angezeiget worden, in der kirchen zu s. nicol. in berlin den  .  sonntag nach trinit.   vorgestellet.  frankfurt an der oder,  .    francke, august hermann.  project des collegii orientalis theologici, reprinted in gustav  kramer, august hermann francke. ein lebensbild. volume one.  halle,  .    francke, august hermann. “ die lehre von der erleuchtung [march  .  ] in erhard  peschke, august hermann francke predigten i (berlin: walter de gruyter,  ):  ­ .    francke, august hermann.  outline of all the institutes at glaucha near halle. halle:  waysenhaus,  .    http://gso.gbv.de/xslt/db= . /set= /ttl= /mat=/nomat=t/clk?ikt= &trm=welche http://gso.gbv.de/xslt/db= . /set= /ttl= /mat=/nomat=t/clk?ikt= &trm=bekannten http://gso.gbv.de/xslt/db= . /set= /ttl= /mat=/nomat=t/clk?ikt= &trm=ha%cc% llischen http://gso.gbv.de/xslt/db= . /set= /ttl= /mat=/nomat=t/clk?ikt= &trm=oder http://gso.gbv.de/xslt/db= . /set= /ttl= /mat=/nomat=t/clk?ikt= &trm=pietistischen http://gso.gbv.de/xslt/db= . /set= /ttl= /mat=/nomat=t/clk?ikt= &trm=principia http://gso.gbv.de/xslt/db= . /set= /ttl= /mat=/nomat=t/clk?ikt= &trm=eingesogen http://gso.gbv.de/xslt/db= . /set= /ttl= /mat=/nomat=t/clk?ikt= &trm=haben, http://gso.gbv.de/xslt/db= . /set= /ttl= /mat=/nomat=t/clk?ikt= &trm=prediger-stellen http://gso.gbv.de/xslt/db= . /set= /ttl= /mat=/nomat=t/clk?ikt= &trm=admittiren     francke, august hermann.  von erziehung der jugend.  halle: waysenhaus,  .    francke, august hermann.  einrichtung des pädagogii zu glaucha an halle. halle:  waysenhaus,  .    francke, august hermann.  die fußstapffen des noch lebenden und waltenden  liebreichen und getreuen gottes, ... durch den ausführlichen bericht vom wäysen­ hause, armen­schulen und übrigen armen­verpflegung zu glaucha an halle. halle:  waysenhaus,  .    francke, august hermann. ordnung und lehr­art, wie selbige in denen zum wäysen­ hause gehörigen schulen eingeführet ist: worinnen vornemlich zu befinden, wie die  kinder in und ausser der schul in christlicher zucht zu halten, und zum lesen, zierlichen  schreiben, rechnen, wie auch zur music und andern nützlichen dingen anzuführen sind.  halle: waysenhaus,  .    francke, august hermann. ordnung und lehr­art: wie selbige in dem pädagogio zu  glaucha in halle eingeführet ist: worinnen vornemlich zu befinden, wie die jugend,  nebst der anweisung zum christenthum, in sprachen und wissenschaften, als in der  lateinischen, griechischen, ebräischen und französischen sprache ... auf eine kurtze  und leichte methode zu unterrichten, und zu denen studiis academicis zu præpariren sey.  halle: waysenhaus,  .    francke, august hermann.  der grosse aufsatz [c.  ] in otto podczeck ed.  august  hermann franckes schrift über eine reform des erziehungs­ und bildungswesens als  ausgangspunkt einer geistlichen und sozialen neuordnung der evangelischen kirche des  .jahrhunderts.  berlin: akademie verlag,  .    francke, august hermann.  kurzer und einfältiger unterricht: wie die kinder zur  wahren gottseligkeit und christlichen klugheit anzuführen sind.  halle: waysenhaus,  .    francke, august hermann. project zu einem seminario universali oder anlegung eines  pflanz­gartens in welchem man eine reale verbesserung in allen ständen in und  ausserhalb deutschlands, ja in europa und allen überigen theilen der welt zu gewarten  [halle,  ?] gratulationsschrift zum fünfzigjährigen lehrer­jubiläum st. aug.  eckstein’s. halle: waysenhaus,  .    francke, august hermann. pietas hallensis, being an historical narration of the  wonderful foot­steps of divine providence in erecting, carrying on and building the  orphan­house, ... at glaucha near hall in saxony. london,  .    francke, august hermann.  philotheia, oder die liebe zu gott: der jugend in den  schulen des waysen­hauses zu glaucha an halle, als ihre allerhöchste und theureste  pflicht, nach gehaltenem examine, den  . martii   vorgestellet und übergeben.  halle: waysenhaus,  .        francke, august hermann.  pietas hallensis: or, an abstract of the marvellous  footsteps of divine providence, in the building of a very large hospital, or rather, a  spacious college, for charitable and excellent uses. and in the maintaining of many  orphans & other poor people therein; at glaucha near hall, in the dominions of the k.  of prussia. related by the reverend augustus hermannus franck, professor of divinity,  and minister of glaucha aforesaid. with a preface written by josiah woodward, d. d.  and recommended by some eminent divines of the church of england ... london,  ­ .    francke, august hermann.  la philanthropie ou l'amour de dieu envers les hommes:  propose aus jeunes gens, qui êtudient dans les ecoles dependantes de la maison des  orfelins, à la fin d'un examen, pour le mediter soigneusement, & s´exciter à la pieté par  auguste armand francke, professeur en theologie à halle, ... traduit de l' allemand.   halle: maison des orfelins,  .    francke, august hermann.  die gradus oder stuffen der ewigen herrlichkeit.  aus  matth. xx,  ­  und andern schrifft=stellen erwiesen udn vorgestellet.  in einer  öffentlichen rede auf dem wäysenhause zu glaucha an halle den  .aug. anno  .   halle: waysenhaus,  .    francke, august hermann. kurzer nachricht von den ordinairen und extraordinairen  tischen im waysenhause zu glaucha an halle, in rosemarie ahrbeck­wothge, "Über die  tischordnung und die aufnahmebedingungen des waisenhauses aus dem jahre  ,"  a.h.francke: das humanistische erbe des grossen erziehers (halle,  ):  ­ .    francke, august hermann. die klugheit der kinder des lichts [luc  :  ­ ) halle:  waysenhaus,  .  reprinted in august hermann francke predigten und tractätlein,  volume  . halle: waysenhaus,   and august hermann francke sonn und fest­tags  predigten halle: waysenhaus,  .    francke, august hermann.  kurtze anweisung zur wahren, lautern und apostolischen  erkentniss jesu christi; da in zehn puncten, wie dieselbe nach dem sinn und lehrart der  apostel richtig und nachdrücklich zum wahren heyl der seelen zu fassen sey, gezeiget  wird. halle: waysenhaus,  .    francke, august hermann. die unterschiedene maass des glaubens (the measure of  faith) aus dem evangelischen text matth.  :  ­ . am dritten sonntage nach  epiphanias  .  halle: waysenhaus,  .    francke, august hermann. das auge des glaubens. halle: waysenhaus,  .    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.bibliothek.uni-halle.de: /db= /set= /ttl= /mat=/nomat=t/clk?ikt= &trm=some http://haweb .bibliothek.uni-halle.de: /db= /set= /ttl= /mat=/nomat=t/clk?ikt= &trm=eminent http://haweb .bibliothek.uni-halle.de: /db= /set= /ttl= /mat=/nomat=t/clk?ikt= &trm=divines http://haweb .bibliothek.uni-halle.de: /db= /set= /ttl= /mat=/nomat=t/clk?ikt= &trm=of http://haweb .bibliothek.uni-halle.de: /db= /set= /ttl= /mat=/nomat=t/clk?ikt= &trm=the http://haweb .bibliothek.uni-halle.de: /db= /set= /ttl= /mat=/nomat=t/clk?ikt= &trm=church http://haweb .bibliothek.uni-halle.de: /db= /set= /ttl= /mat=/nomat=t/clk?ikt= &trm=of http://haweb .bibliothek.uni-halle.de: /db= /set= /ttl= /mat=/nomat=t/clk?ikt= &trm=england     francke, august hermann. die beschauung der geoffenbarten ewigen liebe gottes ... am  tage der verkündigung mariae   in der st. ulrichs­kirchen in halle vorgestellet.  halle: waysenhaus,  .    francke, august hermann. lectiones paraeneticae oder Öffentliche ansprachen an die  stuidosos theologiae auf der universität zu halle in dem so genannten collegio  parenetico, in welchen dieselben zur gründlichen hertzens­bekehrung und zum  christlichen und exemplarischen wandel, auch zu einer ordentlichen und weislichen art  zu studieren angewiesen, erwecket, ermahnet und aufgemuntert sind. halle: waysenhaus,  ­ .    francke, august hermann. “von der verpflichtung auf die bekenntnisschriften” in adolf  sellschopp, neue quellen zur geschichte august hermann franckes. halle: niemeyer,  .    freyer, hieronymous.  verbesserte methode des pädagogii regii zu glaucha vor halle.   halle: waysenhaus,  .    freylinghausen, johann anasasius and gotthilf august francke.  kurtzer bericht von der  gegenwärtigen verfassung des paedagogii regii zu glaucha vor halle.  halle:  waysenhaus,  .     freylinghausen, johann anastasius and gotthilf august francke.  ausführlicher bericht  von der lateinischen schule des wäysenhauses zu glaucha vor halle: zum dienst derer  die nachfrage zu thun pflegen herausgegeben von den directoribus der gesammten  anstalten jo. anastas. freylinghausen past. vlric. & gymnas. scholarch. und gotthilf  august francken s. theol. prof. ord. inspect. im saalcreise und pred. zur l. frauen.   halle: waysenhaus,  .    frisch, johann leonhard.  abdanckungs­rede, als der verblichene cörper den  .martii.  auf s. nicolai kirchhoff zur ruhe geleget werden sollen.  berlin,  .    frisch, johann leonhard.  beschreibung von allerley insecten in teutschland, nebst  nützlichen anmerckungen und nöthigen abbildungen von diesem kriechenden und  fliegenden inländischen gewürme, zur bestätigung und fortsetzung der gründlichen  entdeckung, so einige von der natur dieser creaturen heraus gegeben, und zur  ergäntzung und verbesserung der andern. berlin,  .    gericke, samuel theodor.  kurze verfassung der anatomie, wie selbige zur mahlerey  und bildhauerey erfordert wird.  berlin,  .    goldmann, nikolaus.  vollständige anweisung zu der civil bau­kunst. edited by  leonhard christoph sturm. wolfenbüttel,  .    goldmann, nikolaus.  allerhand Öffentliche zucht­ und liebes­gebäude, als hohe und  niedrige schulen, ritter­academien, waysen­häuser, spitäle vor alte und krancke, und      endlich besonders also genannte zucht­häuser und befängnusse wohl anzugeben:  worinnen aus nicolai goldmanns vierdten buch das ii. iii. und xiv. capittel; mit  anmerckungen und figuren erkläret und völlig ausgeführet werden; nebst einem anhang  von einem sehr bequemen publiquen wasch­hause.  augsburg,  .    gottschling, caspar.  lebens­beschreibung   gelehrter und geschickter edelleute: jacob  wellers von molsdorff, wolffgangs von bock, ehrenfried walthers von tschirnhaus,  hans albrecht von hengel. brandenburg,  .    gravesande, willem jakob.  esaai de perspective.  den haag,  .    gravesande, willem jakob. elementa matheseos universalis.  leiden,  .    grotius, hugo. de veritate religionis christianae. paris,  .     hall, joseph.  the arte of divine meditation: profitable for all christians to knowe and  practice.  london,  .    hall, joseph.  himmels­lust auff erden oder die wahre seelen­ruh. ins teutsche  übersetzet von m. henningus koch, der christl. gemeine zu helmstädt diac. helmstädt,  .    hall, joseph.  characteres der menschen: oder die entlarvete welt, an ihrer innerlichen  eigenschafft, handlung und betrüglichkeit. worinnen allen ständen der welt die –arbe  der falschheit abgezogen an dero statt aber ihnen die tugend, thor und schwachheiten  in ihrer natürlichen blösse, als in einem helleuchtenden spiegel. amsterdam,  .    hecker, johann julius.  einleitung in die botanie, worinnen die nöthigste stücke dieser  wissenschaft kurzlich abgehandelt werden, mit einer vorrede herrn friedrich  hoffmann’s med. d. königl. preussischen hofraths und sowol der medicinischen  facultät, als auch der hiesigen friederichs universitaet senioris, cet. von der rechten  anführung der jungen auf schulen zu erlernung realer wissenschaften und der wahren  weisheit. halle, waysenhaus,  .    hecker, johann julius. nachricht vom guten fortgang der neuangelegten real­schule  bey den schul anstalten der dreyfaltigkeitskirche. berlin,  .    hoffmann, christian godorf. christian weise. epistolae selectiores... quibus multae  observationes tam ad rem scholasticam quam universam literariam spectantes  continentur. budiβin,  .    homann, johann baptist and johann hübner.  kleiner atlas scholasticus von   charten  ... edirt durch joh. baptista homann u. durch eine accurate illumination zu seinen  geograph. fragen accomodiret, durch joh. hübnern. leipzig; nürnberg,  .         hooke, robert.  micrographia. some physiological descriptions of minute bodies made  by magnifying glasses with observations and inquiries thereupon. first edition.  london,  .    hooke, robert.  "the present state of natural philosophy" and "of the true method of  building a solid philosophy, or of a philosophical algebra" in the posthumous works of  robert hooke, containing his cutlerian lectures, and other discourses, read at the  meetings of the illustrious royal society. second edition with a new introduction by t.  m. brown. london,  .  reprinted london: f. cass,  .     hübner, johann.  kurtze fragen aus der neuen und alten geographie. leipzig,  .    hugo, hermann. pia desideria, elegantissimo carmine descripta: una cum barlæi,  aliorumque præstantiorum nostræ & superioris ætatis poëtarum sacris carminibus  selectioribus, & brevi singulorum vitæ historia.  gotha,  .    janeway, james. geistliches exempel buch für kinder, das ist ein ausführlicher bericht  von der bekehrung heiligem und exemplarischen leben, wie auch fröhlichem tode  unterschiedlicher junger kinder. lübeck,  .    joblot, l.  descriptions & usages de plusieurs nouveaux microscopes tant simples que  composez. avec de nouvelles observations, faites sur une multitude innombrable  d’insectes, & d’autres animaux de diverses especes qui naissent dans des liqueurs  prepares & dans celles qui nee le sont point. paris,  .    kircher, athanasius.  ars magna lucis et umbrae. rome,  .    kircher, athanasius.  musurgia universalis sive ars magna consoni et dissoni in x. libros  digesta.  rome,  .     kircher, athanasius.  mundus subterraneus, quo universae denique naturae divitiae.   amsterdam,  ­ .    kirkby, john.  the usefulness of mathematical learning explained and demonstrated.  london,  .    knibbe, david.  histori der propheten in   bücher abgetheilt; so da handeln das  . von  den wahren propheten ins gemein; ii. von einem jeden derselben propheten ins  besonders; iii. von den falschen propheten; iv. von den heidnischen wahrsagereyn,  denen die juden nachgefoldt. translated by herold freytag. bern,  .    la bruyère, jean de.  les caractères de théophraste traduits du grec avec les  caractères ou les moeurs de ce siècle par mr. de la bruyère de l'academie françoise  et la clef, en marge & par ordre alphabetique. paris,  .        la hire, philippe de.  nouvelle méthode en géométrie pour les sections des superficies  coniques et cylindiques. paris,  .    la hire de, philippe de.  l’ecole des arpenteurs oder die feldmesser schule   vols. paris,  .    lamy, bernard.  harmonia, sive concordia quatuor evangelistarum. paris,  .    lamy, bernard.  nouveaux elemens de geometrie, ou de la mesure du corps. paris,  .     lamy, bernard.  traité de perspective, où sont contenus les fondemens de la peinture  paris,  .    lamy, bernard.  a treatise of perspective, or, the art of representing all manner of  objects as they appear to the eye in all situations.  written originally in french and  faithfully translated into english by an officer of his magisty’s ordnance.  london,  .    lange, joachim.  verbesserte und erleichterte lateinische grammatica, in welcher  durch hinlängliche paradigmata, richtige grund­regeln und nöthigen vorrath an  vocabulis, eine deutliche kurtze und doch völlige anweisung zur lateinischen sprache  gegeben wird: mit einer vorrede von verbesserung des schul­wesens joachim langens.   halle: waysenhaus,  .    lange, joachim.  bescheidene und ausführliche entdeckung der falschen und  schädlichen philosophie in dem wolffianischen systemate metaphysico von gott, der  welt, und dem menschen: und insonderheit von der so genannten harmonia praestabilita  des commercii zwischen seel und leib. halle: waysenhaus,  .    lange, samuel gotthold.  leben georg friedrich meiers.  halle,  .    laurentius, georg michael.  kurtze erklärung des andern briefs pauli an die corinther  in tabellen verfasset: worinnen der inhalt, ordnung und zusammenhang desselben  vorgestellet ... werden; samt kurtzer paraphrasi, nützl. registern und einer vorrede von.  johann franciscus buddeus.  halle: waysenhaus,  .    le clerc, sebastian. pratique de la géométrie, sur le papier et sur le terrain: avec un  nouvel ordre & une méthode particulière.  paris,  .    leibniz, gottfried wilhelm. novissima sinica historiam nostri temporis illustratura: in  quibus de christianismo publica nunc primum autoritate propagato missa in europam  relatio exhibetur, deque favore scientiarum europaearium ac moribus gentis & ipsius  praesertim monarchae, tum & de bello sinensium cum moscis ac pace constituta, multa  hactenus ignota explicantur. hannover,  .    http://haweb .bibliothek.uni-halle.de: /db= /set= /ttl= /mat=/nomat=t/clk?ikt= &trm=bescheidene http://haweb .bibliothek.uni-halle.de: /db= /set= /ttl= /mat=/nomat=t/clk?ikt= &trm=und http://haweb .bibliothek.uni-halle.de: /db= /set= /ttl= /mat=/nomat=t/clk?ikt= &trm=ausf%d hrliche http://haweb .bibliothek.uni-halle.de: /db= /set= /ttl= /mat=/nomat=t/clk?ikt= &trm=entdeckung http://haweb .bibliothek.uni-halle.de: /db= /set= /ttl= /mat=/nomat=t/clk?ikt= &trm=der http://haweb .bibliothek.uni-halle.de: /db= /set= /ttl= /mat=/nomat=t/clk?ikt= &trm=falschen http://haweb .bibliothek.uni-halle.de: /db= /set= /ttl= /mat=/nomat=t/clk?ikt= &trm=und http://haweb .bibliothek.uni-halle.de: /db= /set= /ttl= /mat=/nomat=t/clk?ikt= &trm=sch%d dlichen http://haweb .bibliothek.uni-halle.de: /db= /set= /ttl= /mat=/nomat=t/clk?ikt= &trm=philosophie http://haweb .bibliothek.uni-halle.de: /db= /set= /ttl= /mat=/nomat=t/clk?ikt= &trm=in http://haweb .bibliothek.uni-halle.de: /db= /set= /ttl= /mat=/nomat=t/clk?ikt= &trm=dem http://haweb .bibliothek.uni-halle.de: /db= /set= /ttl= /mat=/nomat=t/clk?ikt= &trm=wolffianischen http://haweb .bibliothek.uni-halle.de: /db= /set= /ttl= /mat=/nomat=t/clk?ikt= &trm=systemate http://haweb .bibliothek.uni-halle.de: /db= /set= /ttl= /mat=/nomat=t/clk?ikt= &trm=metaphysico http://haweb .bibliothek.uni-halle.de: /db= /set= /ttl= /mat=/nomat=t/clk?ikt= &trm=von http://haweb .bibliothek.uni-halle.de: /db= /set= /ttl= /mat=/nomat=t/clk?ikt= &trm=gott http://haweb .bibliothek.uni-halle.de: /db= /set= /ttl= /mat=/nomat=t/clk?ikt= &trm=der http://haweb .bibliothek.uni-halle.de: /db= /set= /ttl= /mat=/nomat=t/clk?ikt= &trm=welt http://haweb .bibliothek.uni-halle.de: /db= /set= /ttl= /mat=/nomat=t/clk?ikt= &trm=und http://haweb .bibliothek.uni-halle.de: /db= /set= /ttl= /mat=/nomat=t/clk?ikt= &trm=dem http://haweb .bibliothek.uni-halle.de: /db= /set= /ttl= /mat=/nomat=t/clk?ikt= &trm=menschen http://haweb .bibliothek.uni-halle.de: /db= /set= /ttl= /mat=/nomat=t/clk?ikt= &trm=und http://haweb .bibliothek.uni-halle.de: /db= /set= /ttl= /mat=/nomat=t/clk?ikt= &trm=insonderheit http://haweb .bibliothek.uni-halle.de: /db= /set= /ttl= /mat=/nomat=t/clk?ikt= &trm=von http://haweb .bibliothek.uni-halle.de: /db= /set= /ttl= /mat=/nomat=t/clk?ikt= &trm=der http://haweb .bibliothek.uni-halle.de: /db= /set= /ttl= /mat=/nomat=t/clk?ikt= &trm=so http://haweb .bibliothek.uni-halle.de: /db= /set= /ttl= /mat=/nomat=t/clk?ikt= &trm=genannten http://haweb .bibliothek.uni-halle.de: /db= /set= /ttl= /mat=/nomat=t/clk?ikt= &trm=harmonia http://haweb .bibliothek.uni-halle.de: /db= /set= /ttl= /mat=/nomat=t/clk?ikt= &trm=praestabilita http://haweb .bibliothek.uni-halle.de: /db= /set= /ttl= /mat=/nomat=t/clk?ikt= &trm=des http://haweb .bibliothek.uni-halle.de: /db= /set= /ttl= /mat=/nomat=t/clk?ikt= &trm=commercii http://haweb .bibliothek.uni-halle.de: /db= /set= /ttl= /mat=/nomat=t/clk?ikt= &trm=zwischen http://haweb .bibliothek.uni-halle.de: /db= /set= /ttl= /mat=/nomat=t/clk?ikt= &trm=seel http://haweb .bibliothek.uni-halle.de: /db= /set= /ttl= /mat=/nomat=t/clk?ikt= &trm=und http://haweb .bibliothek.uni-halle.de: /db= /set= /ttl= /mat=/nomat=t/clk?ikt= &trm=leib     leibniz, g.w. essais de theodicée, oder betrachtung der gütigkeit gottes, der freyheit  des menschen u. des ursprungs des bösen ..welcher vorgefügt ein discours von der  Übereinstimmung des glaubens mit der vernunft sammt angehängten anmerkungen über  mr. hobbes alles in französischer sprache geschrieben von leibnitz, anitzo aber ... in die  deutsche sprache gebracht. amsterdam,  .    leibniz, gottfried wilhelm. sämtliche schriften und briefe.  edited by the deutsche  akademie der wissenschaften.  fourth series (reihe): politische schriften. volume one:  ­ .  berlin,  .    leibniz, gottfried wilhelm.  der briefwechsel von gottfried wilhelm leibniz mit  mathematikern. tschirnhaus, huygens, newton. edited by c. i. gerhardt. second edition  berlin:  . reprinted in hildesheim: olms,  .      leibniz, gottfried wilhelm.  leibniz: political writings. edited and translated by patrick  riley.  cambridge: cambridge university press,  .    leibniz, gottfried wilhelm.  sämtliche schriften und briefe.  edited by the deutsche  akademie der wissenschaften.  first series: allgemeiner, politischer und historischer  briefwechsel.  volume  : may – december,  .  berlin,  .    leibniz, gottfried wilhelm.  essays on human understanding. edited and translated by  peter remnant and jonathan bennett. cambridge: cambridge university press,  .    leibniz, gottfried.  sämtliche schriften und briefe.  edited by the deutsche akademie  der wissenschaften.  first series: allgemeiner, politischer und historischer  briefwechsel.  volume  : january – august,  .  berlin,  .     leibniz, gottfried.  sämtliche schriften und briefe.  edited by the deutsche akademie  der wissenschaften.  first series: allgemeiner, politischer und historischer  briefwechsel.  volume  : september   – may  .  berlin,  .    leibniz, gottfried wilhelm.  sämtliche schriften und briefe.  edited by the deutsche  akademie der wissenschaften.  first series: allgemeiner, politischer und historischer  briefwechsel.  volume  : june   – march  .  berlin,  .    lesser, friedrich christoph.  insectotheologia: vernunft und schrifmässiger versuch, wie  ein mensch durch aufmercksame betrachtung derer sonst wenig geachteten insecten, zu  lebendiger erkäntniss und bewunderung der allmach, weissheit, der gute und  gerechtigkeit des grossen gottes gelangen könne.  leipzig,  .    lipsius, justus.  manuductionis ad stoicam philosophiam libri tres, l. annaeo senecae,  aliisque scriptoribus illustrandis. antwerp,  .    locke, john.  an essay concerning human understanding: in four books.  fifth  edition.  london,  .  http://gso.gbv.de/xslt/db= . /set= /ttl= /mat=/nomat=t/clk?ikt= &trm=sa%cc% mtliche+schriften+und+briefe http://gso.gbv.de/xslt/db= . /set= /ttl= /mat=/nomat=t/clk?ikt= &trm=sa%cc% mtliche+schriften+und+briefe http://gso.gbv.de/xslt/db= . /set= /ttl= /mat=/nomat=t/clk?ikt= &trm=sa%cc% mtliche+schriften+und+briefe http://gso.gbv.de/xslt/db= . /set= /ttl= /mat=/nomat=t/clk?ikt= &trm=sa%cc% mtliche+schriften+und+briefe http://gso.gbv.de/xslt/db= . /set= /ttl= /mat=/nomat=t/clk?ikt= &trm=sa%cc% mtliche+schriften+und+briefe http://gso.gbv.de/xslt/db= . /set= /ttl= /mat=/nomat=t/clk?ikt= &trm=politische+schriften http://gso.gbv.de/xslt/db= . /set= /ttl= /mat=/nomat=t/clk?ikt= &trm=politische+schriften http://gso.gbv.de/xslt/db= . /set= /ttl= /mat=/nomat=t/clk?ikt= &trm=politische+schriften http://gso.gbv.de/xslt/db= . /set= /ttl= /mat=/nomat=t/clk?ikt= &trm=politische+schriften http://gso.gbv.de/xslt/db= . /set= /ttl= /mat=/nomat=t/clk?ikt= &trm=politische+schriften http://gso.gbv.de/xslt/db= . /set= /ttl= /mat=/nomat=t/clk?ikt= &trm=sa%cc% mtliche+schriften+und+briefe http://gso.gbv.de/xslt/db= . /set= /ttl= /mat=/nomat=t/clk?ikt= &trm=sa%cc% mtliche+schriften+und+briefe http://gso.gbv.de/xslt/db= . /set= /ttl= /mat=/nomat=t/clk?ikt= &trm=sa%cc% mtliche+schriften+und+briefe http://gso.gbv.de/xslt/db= . /set= /ttl= /mat=/nomat=t/clk?ikt= &trm=sa%cc% mtliche+schriften+und+briefe http://gso.gbv.de/xslt/db= . /set= /ttl= /mat=/nomat=t/clk?ikt= &trm=sa%cc% mtliche+schriften+und+briefe http://gso.gbv.de/xslt/db= . /set= /ttl= /mat=/nomat=t/clk?ikt= &trm=sa%cc% mtliche+schriften+und+briefe http://gso.gbv.de/xslt/db= . /set= /ttl= /mat=/nomat=t/clk?ikt= &trm=sa%cc% mtliche+schriften+und+briefe http://gso.gbv.de/xslt/db= . /set= /ttl= /mat=/nomat=t/clk?ikt= &trm=sa%cc% mtliche+schriften+und+briefe http://gso.gbv.de/xslt/db= . /set= /ttl= /mat=/nomat=t/clk?ikt= &trm=sa%cc% mtliche+schriften+und+briefe http://gso.gbv.de/xslt/db= . /set= /ttl= /mat=/nomat=t/clk?ikt= &trm=sa%cc% mtliche+schriften+und+briefe http://gso.gbv.de/xslt/db= . /set= /ttl= /mat=/nomat=t/clk?ikt= &trm=sa%cc% mtliche+schriften+und+briefe http://gso.gbv.de/xslt/db= . /set= /ttl= /mat=/nomat=t/clk?ikt= &trm=sa%cc% mtliche+schriften+und+briefe http://gso.gbv.de/xslt/db= . /set= /ttl= /mat=/nomat=t/clk?ikt= &trm=sa%cc% mtliche+schriften+und+briefe http://gso.gbv.de/xslt/db= . /set= /ttl= /mat=/nomat=t/clk?ikt= &trm=sa%cc% mtliche+schriften+und+briefe http://gso.gbv.de/xslt/db= . /set= /ttl= /mat=/nomat=t/clk?ikt= &trm=sa%cc% mtliche+schriften+und+briefe http://gso.gbv.de/xslt/db= . /set= /ttl= /mat=/nomat=t/clk?ikt= &trm=sa%cc% mtliche+schriften+und+briefe http://gso.gbv.de/xslt/db= . /set= /ttl= /mat=/nomat=t/clk?ikt= &trm=sa%cc% mtliche+schriften+und+briefe http://gso.gbv.de/xslt/db= . /set= /ttl= /mat=/nomat=t/clk?ikt= &trm=sa%cc% mtliche+schriften+und+briefe http://gso.gbv.de/xslt/db= . /set= /ttl= /mat=/nomat=t/clk?ikt= &trm=sa%cc% mtliche+schriften+und+briefe http://gso.gbv.de/xslt/db= . /set= /ttl= /mat=/nomat=t/clk?ikt= &trm=sa%cc% mtliche+schriften+und+briefe       locke, john. unterricht von erziehung der kinder: aus dem englischen; nebst herrn  von fenelon ertz­bischoffs von cammerich gedancken von erziehung der töchter aus  dem frantzösischen übersetzet. mit einigen anmerckungen und einer vorrede leipzig,  .    locke, john.  de l´education des enfans, traduit de l´anglois de mr. locke, par mr.  coste. sur l´edition angloise publiée après la mort de l´auteur, qui l´avoit revûë,  corrigée, & augmentée. suivant la copie imprimée. amsterdam,  .    mallet, alain manesson.  géométrie pratique.   .     mel, conrad.  pharus missionis evangelicae se consilum de propaganda fide per  conversions ethnicorium maxime sinensium, prodromus fusioris opeis ad potentissimum  regem prussiae fridericum, in quo veritatis demonstration, causae moventes,  conversionis praeparatoria, tentamen legationis evangelicae, subsidia necessaria,  obstacula, ut et modus conversionis et conversorum conservation primis fundamentis  delineantur et censurae societatis brandenburgicae scientarium, ut et eruditorum  omnium et piorum seriae deliberationi subjiciuntur [ ] or schauburg der  evangelischen gesandtschaft in franz rudolf merkel, g.w. von leibniz und die china  mission. leipzig,  .    mel, conrad.  der prediger salomo oder die eitele welt: durch predigten erkl. u.  zueeign. leipzig,      mel, conrad.  missionarius evangelicus: seu consilia de conversione ethnicorum,  maxime sinensium.  cum appendice, epistolae beroensis ac alleppensis, de statu  christianorum in oriente. hersfeld,  .    mel, conrad.  salems tempel; oder beschreibung des herrlichen tempels salomons, wie  auch ...; und dessen structur, eintheilung u. vorhöfe, samt dem heiligen geräht u. dessen  geheimniß­vellen bedeutung; mit behörigen abrissen u. kupffern ausgefertigt von  konrad mell.  frankfurt; leipzig,  .    molinaeus, petrus.  von dem seelenfrieden und der gemüthsvergnügung d. balthas  mentzeri, richtiger glaubens­weg evangelisch­lutherischer christen in erklärung  derer vornehmsten stück christlicher lehr, so wohl aus der heil. schrift, als dem  catechismo lutheri, deutlich gezeiget, und denen einfältigen zum besten, sich vor irriger  lehre zu hüten, in frag und antwort mitgetheilet. nebst petri molinaei tractat vom  erkäntnüss gottes, aus dem englischen übersetzt.  leipzig,  .    montaigne, michel de.  the complete essays.  translated and edited by m. a. screech.   london: penguin books,  .        musig, martin. licht der weißheit: in denen nöthigsten stücken der wahren  gelehrsamkeit, zur erkänntniß menschlicher und göttlicher dinge, nach anleitung der  philosophischen und theologischen grund­sätze. frankfurt and leipzig,  ­ .    nativité, jeanne de la. daily conversation with god: exemplified in the holy life of  armelle nicolas, a poor ignorant country maid in france; commonly known by the  name of the good armelle, deceased in bretaigne in the year  . london,  .    neubauer, georg heinrich. was bey erbauung unseres waysen­hauses zu wissen nöthig  sey: der fragenkatalog georg heinrich neubauers für die hollandreise  .  kleine  texte der franckeschen stiftungen nr.  .  halle: verlag der frankeschen stiftungen,  .    newton, isaac.  “genesis curvarum per umbras” section   in enumeratio linearum tertii  ordinis [optiks]. london,  .  reprinted in d. t.whiteside, the mathematical papers  of isaac newton. cambridge,  .    newton, isaac.  the optical papers of isaac newton. volume one. edited by alan  shapiro. cambridge: cambridge university,  .    newton, isaac.  chronology of ancient kingdoms amended.  london,  .    newton, isaac. observations upon the prophecies of daniel and the apocalypse of st.  john. london,  .    nicéron, jean­françois. thaumaturgum opticum. paris,  .    nicéron, jean­françois. perspective curieuse. paris,      ozanam, jacques.  récréations mathématiques et physiques, qui contiennent plusieurs  problêmes d’arithmetique, de geometrie, d’optique... avec un traité nouveau des horloges  elementaires. paris,  .    ozanam, jacques.  edirte methode facile pour arpenteur, ou mesurer toutes fortes de  superficies & pour toiser exactement. paris,  .    ozanam, jacques.  nouveaux elements d’ algebre: ou, principes generaux, pour  resoudre toutes sortes de problêmes de mathematique.  amsterdam,  .    pareus, david.  irenicum sive de unione et synodo evangelicorum concilianda liber  votives.  heidelberg,  .    parsons, robert. gülden kleinod der kinder gottes, das ist: der wahre weg zum  christenthum, herrn emanuel sonthoms [d.i. thomson], aus dem englischen, in das  teutsche versetzet, u. jetzo aufs neue, ... an vielen orten geändert, und mit zwey  herrlichen neuen tractätlein vermehret, deren das i. von dem gespräch deß hertzens. ii.      von der geistlichen hoffart handelt; benebens zweyen nothwendigen registern, ... ; samt  einem bericht johann michael dilherrns, an den christlichen leser. nürnberg,  .    pollio, joachim.  consilia theologica witebergensia, das ist, wittenbergische geistliche  rathschläge deß theuren mannes gottes, d. martini lutheri, seiner collegen, und  treuen nachfolger, von dem heiligen reformations­anfang, biß auff jetzige zeit...  frankfurt am main,  .    pollio, joachim.  consiliorum theologicorum centuria ... oder theologisch fragbuch.  leipzig,  .    pufendorf, samuel.  on the duty of man and citizen according to natural law.  edited  by john tully.  cambridge texts in the history of political thought.  cambridge:  cambridge university press,  .    rembold, johann christoph.  perspectiva practica, oder vollständige anleitung zu der  perspectiv­reiß­kunst: nutzlich ... allen mahlern, kupfferstechern, baumeistern, ... .  erstmahls durch ein unbenahmtes mit­glied der societät jesu in paris heraus gegeben,  [jean dubreuil]. nun aber aus dem französischen ins teutsche übersetzet durch johann  christoph rembold. paris,  ; augsburg,  .    resewitz, friedrich gabriel.  nachricht von der gegenwärtigen einrichtung in  unterricht, lehrart und erziehung auf dem pädagogio zu kloster bergen.  magdeburg,  .    reyher, andreas.  kurtzer unterricht: i. von natürlichen dingen. ii. von etlichen  nützlichen wissenschafften. iii. von geist­ und weltlichen land­sachen. iv. von etlichen  hauß­regeln; auff gnädige fürstl. verordnung für gemeine teutsche schulen im  fürstenthumb gotha einfältig verfasset.  gotha,  ;  ;  .    reyher, samuel.  kurzter auszug aus d.samuelis reyheri vornehmen profess. publ.  mathesi mosaica. lünberg,  .    reyher, samuel. in teutscher sprache vorgestellter euclides, dessen vi erste bücher auf  sonderbahre und sehr leichte art mit algebraischen oder aus der neuesten löse­kunst  entlehneten zeichen, also daß man deroselben beweiß auch in andern sprachen  gebrauchen kan, eingerichtet, auch des ii. buchs vorträge nebst der gemeinen auff  algebraische ahrt bewiesen sind.  kiel,      reynolds, edward.  a treatise of the passions and faculties of the soul of man.  with  the several dignities and corruptions thereunto belonging.  london,  .    richter, christian friedrich.  die höchst­nöthige erkenntniß des menschen, sonderlich  nach dem leibe und natürlichen leben: oder ein deutlicher unterricht, von der  gesundheit und deren erhaltung ... damit ein jeder ... sonderlich durch   sichere ...      seligirte medicamenta ... die gewöhnlichen, auch schweren kranckheiten ... curiren  könne ... leipzig,  .     rotthen, albrecht.  eilfertige und kurtze abfertigung des weitläufftigen und vergallten  geschmadderes ... gottfried vockerodts, ... , welches er erleuterte auffdeckung des  betrugs und ergernisses von mittel­dingen nennet und dem unterricht von mittel­ dingen entgegen setzet, ... erben,  .    sandhagens, caspar hermann. kurtze einleitung zur harmonie der vier evangelisten  und der geschichte der apostel: ... auch einem vorberichte von denen scriptoribus  harmonicis vermehret; nebst einer vorrede tit. hrn. jo. franc. buddei.  berlin,  .    scheffer, johannis. argentoratensis graphice id est, de arte pingendi: liber singularis;  cum indice necessario. nürnberg,  .    scheuchzer, johann jacob.  kupfer­bibel, in welcher die physica sacra, oder geheiligte  natur­wissenschafft derer in heil. schrifft vorkommenden natürlichen sachen. ulm,  .    schott, gaspar.  cursus mathamaticus, sive absoluta omnium mathematicarum   frankfurt,  .    schott, gaspar.  magiae universalis naturae et artis.  four volumes.  würzburg,  ­ .    schwenter, daniel.  geometriae practicae.  nürnberg, .    schwenter, daniel and georg philip harssdörffern, deliciae physico­mathematicae oder  mathemat und philosophische erquickstunden. darinnen sechshundert dreyundsechzig  schöne liebliche und annehmliche künststücklein huffgaben und fragen auss der  rechenkunst, landtmessen, perspectiv, naturkündigung und andern wissenschafften  genommen, begriffen seindt, wie solche auf der andern seiten dieses blats ordentlich  nach einander erleichnet worden: allen kunst liebenden zu ehren nutz ergössung des  gemüths und sonderbahren wolgefallen am tag. nürnberg,  .       seckendorff, veit ludwig von.  christen staat.  three volumes.  leipzig,  .     seckendorff, veit ludwig von.  deutscher fürstenstaat mit einer gantz neuen zugabe,  sonderbahrer und wichtiger materien um ein grosses theil vermehret.  franckfurt und  leipzig,  .    semler, chrisoph.  antiquitäten der heiligen schrifft, oder biblische fragen, von dem  paradise, archa noä ... welche der jugend zum unterricht und denen gelehrten zur  repitition.  halle,  ;  ;  ;  ­ .        semler, christoph.  nützliche vorschläge von auffrichtung einer mathematischen  handwercks­schule bey der stadt halle, in welcher allen denenjenigen knaben, welche  handwercker lernen sollen ein jahr vorher ehe sie aufs handwerck kommen aus der  mathematic der circul und lineal, die bewegungs­kunst und alle arten der gewichte,  maaße, und müntzen; und aus denen mechanischen künsten alle arten deren  materialien so die handwercker verarbeiten in natura für augen gelegt und erklähret:  auch die bey der stadt verfertigte meister­stücke gezeiget werden.  halle,  .    semler, christoph.  neueröffenete mathematische und mechanische realschule in  welcher präsenter gezeiget und nach alten theilen erklähret wird das uhrwerck, das  modell eines hauses, das kriegs­schiff, die festung, saltz­koth, mühle, bergwerck,  chymisch laboratorium, glass­hütte, tuchmacher­stuhl, drechselbanck, pferd und  pferde­schmuck, brau­haus, baum­garten, blumen­garten, honig­bau, wagen, pflug,  ege und acker­bau; ... ingleichen die geometrischen und optischen instrumenta, die  rüst­zeuge der bewegungs­kunst; die arten der wetter­gläser und wasser­künste, der  magnet, compass, das wapen, grund­riss eines gebäudes, topographie der stadt  halle, fürstellung derer sphären des himmels, u.a.m… halle,  .    semler, christoph.  der tempel salomonis: nach allen seinen vorhöfen, mauren,  thoren, hallen, heiligen gefässen, ... nebst allen und jeden in folgender beschreibung  und beygefügten kupferstücken enthaltenen theilen desselben, in einem eigentlichen  modell und materiellen fürstellung, in dem wäysen­hause zu glaucha an halle, zu  erläuterung sehr vieler Örter der heiligen schrift. halle: waysenhaus,  .      semler, christoph.  supremo magnae britanniae senaturi illustrissimo parlamento  consecrata humillimeque submissa methodus inveniendae longitudinis maritimaee per  acus verticales magneticas, evidentissimis superstructa experimentis terra marique  factis. halae magdeburgicae: orphanotropheum,  .    spener, philipp jakob.  pia desideria: oder hertzliches verlangen nach gottgefälliger  besserung der wahren evangelischen kirchen: samt einigen dahin einfältig  abzweckenden christlichen vorschlägen philipp jacob speners d. predigers und  senioris zu franckfurt am mayn ; sampt angehengten zweyer christlichen theologorum  darüber gestelten und zu mehrer aufferbauung höchst­dienlichen bedencken.  frankfurt  am main,  .    spener, philipp jakob.  christliche verpflegung der armen, als aus  churfürstl.gnädigester verordnung das gassen bettlen in den churfl. residenz städten  abgeschaft ... berlin,  .    spener, philipp jakob.  theologische bedencken und andere brieffliche antworten auff  geistliche, sonderlich zur erbauung gerichtete materien: zu unterschiedenen zeiten  auffgesetzet, und nun auff langwieriges anhalten christlicher freunde in einige ordnung  gebracht und heraus gegeben.  halle: waysenhaus,  .        spener, philipp jakob.  herrn d. philipp speners weyland königl. preuss. consistorial­ raths und pobsts in berlin letzte theologische bedencken und andere antworten welche  von dem seel. autore erst nach seinm tode zu ediren, anbefohlen, desswegen nunmehro  mit fleiss in ordnung gebracht und in iii.theile verfasset sind: nebst einer vorrede von  hn baron carl hildebrand von canstein: worinnen die singularia oder besondere und  eigene gaben des seel. autoris aufführliche beschrieben; samt einer vorstellung des  mannigfaltigen nutzens seiner theologischen bedencken. halle: waysenhaus,  .    spener, philipp jakob.  „von den hindernissen der gottesgelahrtheit“ (de impedimentis  studii theologici) in johann adam steinmetz ed.  philipp jakob speners kleine geistliche  schriften volume one.  magdeburg/leipzig,  .    spener, philipp jakob.  schriften.  volume  : correspondence.  part two: consilia et  judicia theologica latina: opus posthumum ex eiusdem litteris. frankfurt am main,  . reprinted in hildesheim: olms,  .    spener, philipp jakob.  briefe aus der frankfurter zeit  ­ . volume  :  ­ .   edited by johannes wallmann, udo sträter and markus matthias. tübingen: j.c.b.  mohr,  .      spener, philipp jakob.  briefe aus der frankfurter zeit  ­ .  volume two:  ­ .  edited by johannes wallmann, markus matthias and martin friedrich.  tübingen:  j.c.b. mohr,  .    spener, philipp jakob.  briefe aus der dresdner zeit:   –  .  volume  :  ­ .  edited by johannes wallmann, klaus vom orde, martin friedrich and peter  blastenbrei. tübingen: j.c.b. mohr siebeck,  .     spener, philipp jakob.  briefe aus der dresdner zeit:  ­ .  volume two:  .   edited by johannes wallmann and markus matthias.  tübingen: j.c.b. mohr siebeck,  .    sturm, johann christoph.  aristoteles mathematicus h. e. enucleatio exemplorum  mathematicorum in aristotele passim occurentium. jena,  .    sturm, johann christoph.  universalia eucliden. den haag,  .    sturm, johann christoph.  des unvergleichlichen archimedis sand rechnung oder  tiefsinnige erfindung einer mit verderlicher leichtigkeit aussprechlichen, zahl, welche  er unfehlbar beweiset grosser zu seyn als die anzahl aller sandkörlein mit welchen die  höhle der ganzen welt biss an den äussersten fir­ oder haft sternen himmel könnte  ausgefüllet werden. nürnberg,  .    sturm, johann christoph.  des unvergleichlicher archimedes kunst­bücher, oder  heutigs tags befindliche schriften, aus dem griechischen in das hoch­deutsch übersetzt  und mit notwendigen anmerkungen durch und durch erläutert. nürnberg,  .        sturm, johann christoph.  opera archimedes quae extant graeco germanice versa &  notis illustrate joh. chris. sturmio. nornb. fol. agit i. de sphaera & cylindro  . de  cyclometria sive quadratura circuli  . de planorum aequilibrio & puncto gravitates, cui  praemittitur tractatio de sectionibus conicis.   de quadratura parabola  . de  sphaeoidalibus  . de spiralibus  . de numero mundi arenario.  nürnberg,  .    sturm, johann christoph.  collegium experimentale sive, curiosum, in quo primaria  hujus seculi inventa & experimenta physico­mathematica: partim ab aliis jam pridem  exhibita, partim noviter istis superaddita per ultimum quadrimestre anni m. dc. lxxii  viginti naturae scrutatoribus, ex parte illustri nobilique prosapia oriundis ... et ad causas  suas naturales demonstrativa methodo reduxit, quodque nunc ... amicorum quorundam  suasu & consilio publicum adspicere voluit. nürnberg,  .    sturm, johann christoph.  de philosophia sectarian et elective. nürnberg,  .    sturm, johann christoph. physicae conciliatrix. nürnberg,  .    sturm, johann christoph.  philosophia eclectica, h.e. exercitationes academicae,  quibus philosophandi methodus; selectior, ea nempe, quae explurimis  diversasentientium cogitates optima quaeq, modeste seligit, partim in actu signato, uti  scholae loquuntur, partim in actu exercito, variis perspectu dignissimis argumetnis  applicator, fideliter ac dilucidè explicatur; antehac ex cathedra disputatoria publicè  ventilatae, nunc autem, posteaquam defigere exemplaria & desiderari coeperunt,  incommodiorem hanc formam collectae. volume one. altdorf,  .      sturm, johann christoph.  mathesi enucleata: cujus praecipua contenta sub finem  praefationis, uno quasi obtutu spectanda, exhibentur.  nürnberg,  .    sturm, johann christoph. theosophiae h.e. cognitionis de deo naturalis specimen  methodo mathematica conceptum.  altdorf,  .      sturm, johann christoph.  physica eclectiva sive hypothetica. tomus primus partem  physicae generalem complexus. nürnberg  .    sturm, johann christoph.  mathesis juveniles i. accessit consilium de mathesi in  scholarum triialium & gymnasiorum classes omnes, etiam puerorum legere discentium  infimas, ingenti juventutis commodo postlimonio introducenda. nürnberg,  .    sturm, johann christoph.  mathesis juveniles ii. opticam cum catoptrica & dioprica,  astronomiam cum usu globorum ... complexus. nürnberg,  .    sturm, johann christoph.  mathesis juvenilis: or a course of mathematicks for young  students, made english from the latin of jo. christopher sturmius, by george vaux,  m.d. in three volumes. london,  ­ .        sturm, leonhard christoph.  architectura miliatris hypothetica & eclectica. nürnberg,  .    sturm, leonhard christoph.  der geöffnete ritter­platz.  hamburg,  ­ .    sturm, leonhard christoph.  das neueröffnete machinen­hauss, worinnen curiösen und  reisenden angewiesen wird was sie vornehmlich von machinen, so bey schiffahrten,  wasserkünsten, opernhäusern, mühlen, berg­ und uhrwercken, gebrauchet werden,  wissen und verstehen müssen wan sie selbige mit nutzen und vortheil auf reisen besehen  wollen.  entworffen und mit nöthigen kupfern versehen von einem leibhaber curiöser  sachen. hamburg,  .    sturm, leonhard christoph.  das neu­eröffnete rüstzeug oder machinen hauss.   worinnen curiöusen gemüthern durch kenbahre modelle und beschreibungen deutlich  doch in beliebter kürtze das vornehmste vorgestellet wird, was an denen jenigen Örtern  dahin die teutschen am meisten reisen, von sinnreichen nützlichen und curieusen  machinen und werckzeugen anzutreffen ist. meistens aus eigener erfahrung und  besichtigung beschrieben durch einen liebhaber curieuser sachen. hamburg,  .      sturm, leonhard christoph.  geographia mathematica oder kurtze u. gründliche  vorbereitung zu rechtschaffener erlernung der geographia : worinnen von der  construction ... der erdkugeln und aller sorten von land­carten gehandelt und mit  nöthigen figuren und tabellen erläutert wird. frankfurt an der oder,  .    sturm, leonhard christoph.  tractatus de natura & constitutione matheseos, quo  naturam ejust & utilitatem clarissime explicat, partes ac legitimos fines distincte  constituit, novoque plerumque ordine digerit, nonnullis disciplines peculiarem  methodum, atque omnibus disciplines peculiarem methodum, atque omnibus necessarium  librorum & instrumentorum apparatum describit.  simulque studiosae juventuti  collegium pantomathematicum, facto cum mense majo initio singulis annis, deo juvante,  absolvendum offert l.c. sturm. frankfurt an der oder,  .    sturm, leonhard christoph.  kurzer begriff der gesamten mathesis. nicht nur den  lehrenden und lernenden zum nutzen aufgesetzet, sondern auch vor die geübten hin  und wieder mit neuen anmerckungen kurtz und zu weiterem nachsinnen untermenget.   frankfurt an der oder,  .    sturm, leonhard christoph.  architectonisches bedencken. von protestantischer kleinen  kirchen figur und einrichten ... und dazu mit gehöriger rissen. hamburg,  .    sturm, leonhard christoph.  mathematischer beweis des heiligen abendmahls.  .    sturm, leonhard christoph. von der apocalyptischen zahl  . rostock,  .    sturm, leonhard christoph.  vollständige mühlen baukunst: darinnen werden i. alle  grundreguln so zu der praxi nöthig, die doch gar wenigen recht bekant sind, treülich      angewiesen; ii. die vortheile, die man bey anlegung der wasserräder alle sorten von  machinen zutreiben in acht nehmen muß, auf den höchsten grad der vollkommenheit  gebracht; iii. was insonderheit an korn­, graupen, papier­, Öhl­, pulfer, säg­,  steinschneide­, bohr­, schleiff­, sensen­, kessel­, eisendrat­, hächsel­, und  dreschmühlen zuverbessern, aufrichtig entdecket ... augsburg,  .    sturm, leonhard chrisoph.  vollständige anweisung alle arten von kirchen wohl  anzugeben: worinnen i. nic. goldmanns anweisung und drey exempel angeführet, und  mit anmerckungen erläutert.  . außführlicher von römisch­catholischen kirchen, und  insonderheit  . von dem künstlichen bau der grossen kuppeln.  . von protestantischen  kirchen gehandelt; mit fünff neuen inventionen von jenen, und sechs von diesen der  praxi gemäß erkläret, und in  . saubern kupffer­platten appliciret wird. augsburg,  .    sturm, leonhard christoph.  kurtze vorstellung der gantzen civil baukunst, worinnen  erstlich die vornhemsten kunst­wörter, so darinnen immerzu vorkommen, in   sprachen  angeführet und erkläret, zum andern; die allgemeinsten und nöthigsten reguln deutlich  angewiesen werden... augsburg,  .    sturm, leonhard christoph.  die unentbährliche regel der symmetrie oder: des  ebenmaasses: wie sie zuförderst an dem herrlichsten exempel des göttlichen tempels  von salomone erbauet wahrzunehmen; nechst diesen aber vermittelst der römer und  griechen gebräuche in einigen theilen vermehret worden von uns hingegen heut zu  tage in ausübung zu bringen; alles auf das deutlichste angewiesen und durch behörige  kupffer erklähret augsburg,  .    tacquet, andreas.  elementa geometriæ planæ ac solidæ: quibus accedunt selecta ex  archimede theoremata. anvers,  ; amsterdam,  .    thomasius, christian.  schertz­ und ernsthafter, vernünfftiger und einfältiger  gedancken über allerhand lustige und nützliche bücher und fragen dritter monat oder  martius.  in einem gepräch vorgestellet durch e.d.f.u.k. halle,  .    thomasius, christian.  introductio ad philosophiam aulicam. edited by werner  schneiders and martin schewe.  leipzig,  .  reprinted in hildesheim: olms,  .    thomasius, christian.  bey der inauguration der friederichs­universität zu halle, denen  gesamten professoribus so theuer anbefohlenen einigkeit, sich selbst eine  nachdrückliche und scharffe lection, und wiederholet als ein wiederhall die empfehlung  gleicher einigkeit in einer treugemeinten vermahnung an die gesamte studierende  jugend.  halle,  .    thomasius, christian.  von der artzeney wieder die unvernünftige liebe, und der zuvor  nöthigen erkäntniß sein selbst. oder: ausübung der sitten­lehre... halle,  .          tschrinhaus, ehrenfried walters von.  gründliche anleitung zu nüzlichen  wissenschafften absonderlich zu der mathesi udn physica.  wie sie anitzo von den  gelehrtesten abhandelt werden.  frankfurt und leipzig,  .    tschirnhaus, ehrenfried walters von.  medicina mentis, sive artis inveniendi praecepta  generalia. translated by j. hausleiter. leipzig,  .    vitruvius, on architecture.   volumes. translated by frank granger.  london,  .    vockerodt, gottfried.  mißbrauch der freyen künste, insonderheit der music, nebenst  abgenöthigter erörterung der frage: was nach d. luthers und anderer evangelischen  theologorum und politicorum meinung von opern und comödien zu halten sey?: gegen  hn. d. wentzels, hn. joh. christian lorbers, und eines weissenfelsischen hof­ musicantens schmäh­schrifften gründlich und deutlich vorgestellet, und mit einer  zugabe, darinne enthalten: i. eine erinnerung an die censores dieser schrifft: ii. das  von den pasquillanten angefochtene programma: iii. der hochlöblichen theol. facultät  zu giessen bedencken: iv. vorstellung des unfertigen und seltsamen beginnens des  weissenfelsischen pasquillanten, welcher wider diese unedirte und noch nicht gelesene,  vielweniger geprüffete schrifft, an statt einer widerlegung, zwey neue pasquille  verfertiget, und deren titul: ursus saltat und ursus triumphat, von interessenten  ümtragen und bekant machen lassen, mit gnädigster hoher genehmhaltung  heraußgegeben von gottfried vockerodt, des fürstl. gothaischen gymnasii rectore.  frankfurt,  .    vockerodt, gottfried.  erleuterte auffdeckung des betrugs und Ärgernisses, so mit denen  vorgegebenen mitteldingen und vergönneten lust in der christenheit angerichtet  worden.  halle: waysenhaus,  .    vockerodt, gottfried.  sieg der wahrheit: in dem zeitherigen mitteldings­ und  vergönneten lust­streit von herr m. rotthen, einem prediger in leipzig in seiner so  genannten eilfertigen un[d] kurtzen abfertigung eingeräumet. halle: waysenhaus,  .    wallis, john.  mathesis universalis.  oxford,  .      weigel, erhard.  philosophia mathematica, theologia naturalis solida.  jena,  .    weigel, erhard.  “kurtzer entwurff der freudigen kunst­ und tugend­lehr, vor trivial  und kinder schulen” in hermann schüling ed., gesammelte pädagogische schriften  (giessen,  ):  ­ .    whiston, william.  new theory of the earth, from its original, to the consummation of  all things, where the creation of the world in six days, the universal deluge, and the  general conflagration, as laid down in the holy scriptures, are shewn to be perfectly  agreeable to reason and philosophy. london,  .        whiston, william.  a short view of the chronology of the old testament, and of the  harmony of the four evangelists.  cambridge,  .    whiston, william.  the elements of euclid with select theorems out of archimedes. by  the learned andrew tacquet. to which are added, practical corollaries, shewing the  uses of many of the propositions. london,  .    whiston, william.  primitive christianity reviv’d: in four volumes. vol. i. containing the  epistles of ignatius, ... vol. ii. the apostolical constitutions, ... vol. iii. an essay on those  apostolical constitutions. vol. iv. an account of the primitive faith … london,  .    whiston, william.   primitive christianity reviv’d. volume v, containing the  recognitions of clement: or the travels of peter: in ten books.  done into english by  william whiston, m.a. with a preface, or preliminary discourse: as also two appendixes;  the one containing some observations on dr. clarke’s scripture­doctrine of the trinity;  and the other a farther account of the convocation’s and other proceedings with relation  to mr. whiston.  london,  .    william whiston, theorems selected out of archimedes; by andrew tacquet, of the  society of jesus; and demonstrated in a more easy and compendious way. to which are  added, some other agreeable propositions, newly invented, by the same andrew tacquet.  london,  .    wolff, christian.  vernünfftige gedancken von den absichten der natürlichen dinge.  halle,  .    wolff, christian.  eigene lebensbeschreibung. edited by heinrich wuttke. leipzig,  .    wolff, christian.  briefe von christian wolff aus den jahren  ­ : ein beitrag zur  geschichte der kaiserlichen academie der wissenschaften zu st. petersburg.  st.  petersburg: eggers,  .    wolff, christian. gesammelte werke, edited by j.École, h. w. arndt, ch. a. corr, j. e.  hoffmann and m. thomann. hildesheim: georg olms,   ff.:    ­­­­vernünfftige gedancken von den kräften des menschlichen verstandes und ihrem  richtigen gebrauche in erkenntnis der wahrheit, [deutsche logik, first edition:  ,].   reprinted in gesammelte werke, part (abteil) one: volume  .    ­­­­vernünfftige gedancken von gott, der welt und der seele des menschen, auch allen  dingen überhaupt, anderer theil bestehend in ausführlichen anmerckungen [metaphysik,  first edition:  ].  reprinted in gesammelte werke, part one: volume two.     ­­­­“christian wolffs eigene lebensbeschreibung.” reprinted in gesammelte werke, part  one: volume  .          ­­­­mathematisches lexicon, darinnen die in allen theilen der mathematick üblichen  kunst­wörter erkläret, und zur historie der mathematischen wissenschafften dienliche  nachrichten ertheilet, auch die schrifften, wo iede materie ausgeführet zu finden.   [leipzig,  ].  reprinted in gesammelte werke, part one: volume  .    ­­­­der anfangs­gründe aller mathematischen wissenschaften [first edition,  ].    erster theil welcher einen unterricht von der mathematischen lehr­art, die  rechenkunst, geometrie, trigonometrie und bau­kunst in sich enthält, zu  mehrerem aufnehmen der mathematik so wohl auf hohen als niedrigen schulen  (halle,  ). reprinted in gesammelte werke, part one: volume  .     anderer theil, welcher die artillerie, fortification, mechanick, hydrostatick,  aerometrie und hydraulick in sich enthält, und zu mehrerem aufnehmen der  mathematik so wohl auf hohen, als niedrigen schulen aufgesetzt worden...neue,  verbesserte und vermehrte auflage (halle,  ).  reprinted in gesammelte  werke, part one: volume  .     dritter theil, welcher die optick, catoptrick und dioptrick, die perspectiv, die  sphärische trigonometrie, astronomie, chronologie, geographie und  gnomonick in sich enthält.  reprinted in gesammelte werke, part one: volume  .    letzter theil, welcher so wol die gemeine algebra, als die differential­ und  integral­rechnung, und einen anhang von den vornehmsten mathematischen  schrieften in sich begreifet.  reprinted in gesammelte werke, part one: volume  .    kurtzer unterricht von den arithmetischen schriften.  reprinted in gesammelte  werke, part one: volume  .    ­­­­“aerometriae elementis, in quibus aliquot aeris vires ac propietatesiuxta methodum  geometrarum demonstrantur” [ ].  translated as “von der weltweisheit und  naturlehre ingleichen der darinnen zu gebrauchen lehrart” in christian wolff,  gesammelte kleine philosophische schriften, (halle,  ):  ­ . reprinted in  gesammelte werke, part one: volume  ­ .    ­­­­“solutio non nullarum difficultatem circa mentem humanam obviarum: ubi simul  agitur de origine notionum & factultate rationnandi,” in acta eruditorum [november  ]. translated as “auflösung einiger schwierigkeiten, welche bey der menschlichen  seele vorkommen. dabey zugleich von dem ursprung der begriffe und dem vermögen  vernunfftschlüsse zu machen, gehandelt wird,” in christian wolff, gesammelte kleine  philosophische schriften (halle,  ):  ­ .  reprinted in gesammelte werke, part  one: volume  ­ .        ­­­­“leges experientiarum fundamentales” in acta eruditorum [april  ] translated as  „grundgeseze der erfahrungen“ in christian wolff, gesammelte kleine philosophische  schriften (halle,  ):  ­   reprinted in gesammelte werke, part one: volume  ­ .    ­­­­“methodus demonstrandi vertitem religionis christianae” in acta eruditorum [april  ]. translated as “von der art und weise, wie man die wahrheit der christliche  religion zu erweisen hat,” in christian wolff, gesammelte kleine philosophische  schriften (halle,  ):  ­ . reprinted in gesammelte werke, part one: volume  ­ .      ­­­­“dass ein mensch nichts von sich selbst habe, nach anleitung   corinthians” in  christian wolff, gesammelte kleine philosophische schriften (halle,  ):  ­ .   reprinted in gesammelte werke, part one: volume  ­ .    ­­­­“von schärfung des verstands durch die meβkunst” in christian wolff, gesammelte  kleine philosophische schriften (halle,  ):  ­ .  reprinted in gesammelte werke,  part one: volume  ­ .    ­­­­vom dem nutzen und der lehrart, in der erfahrenden lehre von der seele (or  seelenwissenschaft) [marburg,  ] in christian wolff, gesammelte kleine  philosophische schriften (halle,  ):  ­ .  reprinted in gesammelte werke, part  one: volume  ­ .    ­­­­ „wie die messkunst den menschlichen verstand ausnehmend bessere”  [october. ] in christian wolff, gesammelte kleine philosophische schriften (halle,  ):  ­ .  reprinted in gesammelte werke, part one: volume  ­ .    ­­­­psychologia empirica [ ].  reprinted in gesammelte werke, part two: volume  .    ­­­­psychologia rationalis [ ].  reprinted in gesammelte werke, part two: volume  .    ­­­­elementa matheseos universae [ ­ ].  reprinted in gesammelte werke, part  two: volume  .    ­­­­philosophia practica universalis, mathematica methodo conscripta. [leipzig  ].   reprinted in gesammelte werke, part two: volume  ­ .    ­­­­logic, or rational thoughts on the powers of the human understanding: with their use  and application in the knowledge and search of truth.  london,  . reprinted in  gesammelte werke, part three: volume  .      wolff, christian.  oratio de sinarum philosophia practica [frankfurt,  ] or rede über  die praktische philosophie der chinesen.  translated by michael albrecht. hamburg:   felix meiner,  .        zahn, johannes.  oculo artificiali teledioptrico. nürnberg,  .    zedler, johann heinrich.  grosses vollständiges universal­lexicon aller wissenschaften  und künste,   volumes. halle: waysenhaus,  ­ .      ziegenbalg, bartholomaeus.  propagation of the gospel in the east; being an account of  the success of two danish missionaries sent to the east indies for the conversion of the  heathen in malabar.  london,  ;  ;  ;  .        secondary literature    ahnert, thomas.  the culture of experimentalism in the holy roman empire: johann  christoph sturm ( ­ ) and the collegium experimentale.  unpublished paper,   [www.sammelpunkt.philo.at: / /].    ahnert, thomas.  religion and the origins of the german enlightenment: faith and the  reform of learning in the thought of christian thomasius.  rochester, n.y.: university of  rochester press,  .    ahrbeck, hans.  “Über die erziehungs­ und unterrichtsreform a.h. franckes und ihre  grundlagen,” in   jahre martin­luther­universität halle­wittenberg volume  .   halle: selbst verlag der martin­luther­universität,  ?.    albrecht, michael.  eklektik.  eine begriffsgeschichte mit hinweisen auf die philosophie­  und wissenschaftsgeschichte. stuttgart­bad cannstatt: friedrich fommann verlag,  .    albrecht, michael.  “hypothesen und phänomene. zu sturms theorie der  wissenschaftliche methode” in hans gaab, pierre leich und günther löffladt eds. acta  historica astronomiae volume  : johann christoph sturm,  ­ . frankfurt:  verlag harri deutsch,  .    albrecht­birkner, veronika.  reformation des lebens.  die reformen herzog ernst des  frommen von sachsen­gotha und ihre auswirkungen auf frömmigkeit, schule und  alltag im ländlichen raum ( ­ ). leipzig: evangelische verlagsanstalt,  .    anderson, benedict.  imagined communities: reflections on the origins and spread of  nationalism. london; new york: verso,  .    andersen, kirsti and henk j.m.bos, “pure mathematics,” in katherine park and lorraine  daston eds., the cambridge history of science volume  : early modern science.  cambridge: cambridge university press,  .        andersen, kirsti.  geometry of an art: the history of the mathematical theory of  perspective from alberti to monge. sources and studies in the history of the  mathematical and physical sciences.  new york: springer,  .    andrews, j. h. ed. the quest for longitude; the proceedings of the longitude  symposium. cambridge, ma: the collection of scientific instruments, harvard  university,  .    antognazza, maria rosa and howard hotson ed. alsted and leibniz: on god, the  magistrate and the millennium. wolfenbütteler arbeiten zur barockforschung  wiesbaden: harrassowitz verlag,  .    ashworth, william b.  “catholicism and early modern science” in david c. lindberg  and ronald l. numbers eds. god and nature: historical essays on the encounter  between christianity and science (berkeley: university of california press,  ):  ­ .    ashworth, william b. “light of reason, light of nature—catholic and protestant  metaphors of scientific knowledge,”science in context   ( ):  ­ .    baigrie, brian s. “descartes’s scientific illustrations and ‘la grande méchanique de la  nature,’” in baigrie ed. picturing knowledge: historical and philosophical problems  concerning the use of art in science (toronto: university of toronto press,  ):  ­ .    bach, thomas. throne and altar: halle pietism and the hohenzollerns: a contribution  to the history of church state relations in eighteenth­century brandenburg prussia.  syracuse university: unpublished dissertation,  .    baker, malcolm.  “representing invention, viewing models,” in soraya de chadarevian  and nick hopwood eds.  models: the third dimension of science.  stanford: stanford  university press,  .    beeley, p. and c. j. scriba eds., the correspondence of john wallis ( ­ ),  volume one:  ­ . oxford: oxford university press,  .    bennett, a. g. and d. f. edgar eds.  optical lectures from isaac barrow’s optical  lectures.  london,  .    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barrow (cambridge: cambridge university press,  ):  ­ .    sheehan, jonathan.  the enlightenment bible: translation, scholarship, culture.   princeton: princeton university press,  .    slack, paul.  from reformation to improvement: public welfare in early modern  england.  oxford: clarendon press,  .    smith, pamela and paula findlen eds. merchants and marvels: commerce, science, and  art in early modern europe. london: routledge,  .    smith, pamela. the body of the artisan: art and experience in the scientific revolution  chicago: chicago university press,  .    snyder, joel.  “picturing vision,” critical inquiry   ( ):  ­ .    snobelen, s. “‘the mystery of this restitution of all things’: isaac newton and the  return of the jews,” in j.e. force and r.h. popkin eds., millenarianism and messianism  in early modern european culture: the millenarian turn (amsterdam: kluwer  academic publishers,  ):  ­         sorkin, david. “reclaiming theology for the enlightenment: the case of siegmund  jacob baumgarten ( ­ ),” central european history   ( ):  ­ .    sorkin, david. “geneva’s ‘enlightened orthodoxy’ the middle way of jacob vernet  ( ­ ),” church history. studies in christianity and culture   (march  ):  ­ .    spaans, joke.  “early modern orphanages between civic pride and social discipline.   francke’s use of dutch models,” in udo sträter ed. waisenhäuser der frühen neuzeit.   tübingen: nieymer verlag,  ):  ­ .    stafford, barbara maria.  “presuming images and consuming words; the visualization of  knowledge from the enlightenment to post­modernism,” in john brewer and roy porter  eds.  consumption and the world of goods.  london: routledge,  .    stafford, barbara maria.  artful science: enlightenment entertainment and the eclipse of  visual education.  cambridge, ma: harvard university press,  .    stafford, b. m. and f. terpak.  devices of wonder: from the world in a box to images  on a screen.  los angeles,  .     steedman, carolyn.  strange dislocations: childhood and the idea of human interiority,  ­ . london,  .    sträter, udo. "pietismus und sozialtätigkeit: zur frage nach der wirkungsgeschichte des  'waisenhauses' in halle und des frankfurter armen­, waisen­ und arbeitshauses" in  pietismus und neuzeit   ( ):  ­ .    sträter, udo.  sonthom, bayly, dyke und hall. studien zur rezeption der englischen  erbauungsliteratur in deutschland im  .jahrhundert. tübingen: mohr,  .    sträter, udo.  meditation und kirchenreform in der lutherischen kirche des  .jahrhunderts. tübingen: mohr siebeck,  .    sträter, udo.  “wie bringen wir den kopff in den herz?” in gerhard kurz ed. meditation  und erinnerung in der frühen neuzeit (göttingen: vandenhoeck & ruprecht,  ):  ­ .    sträter, udo.  “der hallische pietismus zwischen utopie und weltgestaltung” in udo  sträter, hartmut lehmann, thomas müller­bahlke and johannes wallmann eds.  interdisziplinäre pietismusforschungen. beiträge zum ersten internationalen kongress  für pietismusforschung  .   volumes. hallesche forschungen  / .  (tübingen  ):  ­ .      sträter, udo. “zum verhältnis des frühen pietismus zu den naturwissenschaften,”  pietismus und neuzeit   ( ):  ­ .        strauss, gerald.  luther’s house of learning: indoctrination of the young in the german  reformation.  baltimore: john’s hopkins university press,  .    strom, jonathan.  “comment” covenant quarterly   ( ):  ­ .    strom, jonathan.  “problems and promises of pietism research,” church history    (september  ):  ­ .     straker, stephen.  “the eye made ‘other’: dürer, kepler and the mechanisation of light  and vision,” in l.a. knafla, m. s. staum and t.h.e. travers et. al.  science, technology  and culture in historical perspective, university of calgary studies in history    (calgary: university of calgary press,  ):  ­ .    straker, stephen.  “kepler, tycho and the ‘optical part of astronomy’: the genesis of  kepler’s theory of pinhole images,” archive for the history of exact sciences   ( ):  ­ .    summers, david. judgment of sense: renaissance naturalism and the rise of aesthetics  cambridge: cambridge university,  .    summers, david. “supension of perception (book review)” art bulletin   (march  ):  ­ .    swan, c.  “eyes wide shut: early modern imagination, demonology and the visual  arts,” zeitsprünge: forschungen zur frühen neuzeit   ( ):  ­ .    sykes, n.  daniel ernst jablonski and the church of england.  london,  .    teo, thomas.  “local institutionalization, discontinuity and german textbooks of  psychology,  ­ ,” journal of the history of the behavioral sciences   (spring,  ):  – .    thiele, andrea.  “grenzkonflikte und soziale verortung in der ‘residenz auf abruf:  halle unter dem letzten administrator des erzstifts magdeburg, herzog august von  sachsen­weiβenfels ( ­ )” in christian hochmuth, susanne rau eds.  machträume der frühneuzeitliche stadt (konstanz: uvk verlagsgesellschaft,  ):  ­ .    tschakert, p. “gotthelf samuel steinbart,” in allgemeine deutsche biographie    ( ):  ­ .    turner, anthony.  early scientific instruments: europe  ­ . london, harper &  row,  .        ulbricht, otto.  “foundling hospitals in enlightenment germany: infanticide,  illegitimacy and infant mortality rates,” central european history   ( ):  – .    ullmann, mathias. “august hermann francke und ehrenfried walter von tschirnhaus.   eine bekanntschaft im spiegel der quellen im achiv der franckeschen stiftungen  halle/saale” in thomas müller­bahlke, ed.., um gott zu ehren und zu des landes  besten. die franckeschen stiftungen und preussen: aspekte einer alten allianz.  katalog  der austellung in den franckeschen stiftungen zu halle vom  .juni bis  .oktober  . halle: verlag der franckeschen stiftungen,  .    utermöhlen, gerda. “die russlandthematik im briefwechsel zwischen august hermann  francke und gottfried wilhelm leibniz” in j. wallmann und udo sträter eds. hallesche  forschung  : halle und osteuropa zur europäische ausstrahlung des hallischen  pietismus. tübingen: max niemyer verlag,  .      van ingen, ferdinan.  “johann michael dilherr ( ­ )“ in udo sträter ed.,  orthodoxie und poesie. leipzig: evangleische verlagsanstalt,  .    van peursen, c. a.   “e.w. von tschirnhaus and the ars inveniendi,” journal of the  history of ideas   (july  ):  ­ .    vanpaemel, g. h. w.  “jesuit science in the spanish netherlands” in mordechai  feingold ed., jesuit science and the republic of letters. cambridge, ma: mit press,  .    wächtler, a.  august hermann francke als pastor zu st. ulrich  ­ : festschrift  der st. ulrichsgemeinde in halle zu der   jährigen jubelfeier der franckeschen  stiftungen. halle: niemeyer,  .    walker, mack.  the salzburg transaction: expulsion and redemption in the eighteenth  century.  ithaca: cornell university press,  .    wallmann, johannes. philipp jakob spener und die anfänge des pietismus. tübingen;  j.c.b. mohr,  .    wallmann, johannes.  “was ist pietismus?” pietismus und neuzeit   ( ):  ­ .    wallmann, johannes.  “vom katachismuschristentum zum bibelchristentum.  zu  bibelverständnis im pietismus,” in richard ziegert ed.  die zukunft des schriftprinzips.   stuttgart: deutsche bibelgesellschaft,  .    wallmann, johannes, “union, reunion, toleranz: georg calixts einigungsbestrebungen  und ihre rezeption in der katholischen und protestantischen theologie des  .jahrhunderts,” in heinz duchhardt und gerhard may eds. union­konversion­ toleranz: dimension der annärhung zwischen den christlichen konfessionen im  . und  .jahrhundert (mainz: verlag philipp von zabern,  ):  ­ .        wallmann, johannes.  “johann arndt ( ­ )” in carter lindberg ed. the pietist  theologians: an introduction to theology in the seventeenth and eighteenth­centuries.   oxford: blackwell press,  .    ward, john.  “camera obscura” in robert bud, deborah jean warner eds. instruments of  science. an historical encyclopedia (new york & london: taylor & francis group,  ):  ­ .    webster, charles.  the great instauration: science, medicine and reform,   –  .  new york: holmes & meier,  .    weiss, susan forscher, “musical pedagogy in the german renaissance,” in james van  horn melton ed. cultures of communication from reformation to enlightenment:  constructing publics in the early modern german lands (burlington, vt: ashgate):  ­ .    whewell, w. ed.  the mathematical works of isaac barrow. cambridge,  .    wilson, catherine. “discourses of vision in seventeenth­century metaphysics” in david  michael levin ed. sites of vision: the discursive construction of sight in the history of  philosophy. cambridge, mass.,  .     wilson, renate. “philanthropy in eighteenth­century central europe: evangelical  reform and commerce,” voluntas: international journal of voluntary and nonprofit  organizations   (march,  ):  ­ .     wilson, renate. “heinrich wilhelm ludolf, august hermann francke und der eingang  nach russland,” in johannes wallmann und udo sträter eds. hallesche forschung  :  halle und osteuropa zur europaeischen ausstrahlung des hallischen pietismus. halle:  franckesche stiftungen verlag,  .    wilson, renate.  pious traders in medicine: a german pharmaceutical network in  eighteenth­century north america. university park, pa: pennsylvania state press,  .    wilson, renate.  “book review: pietismus, medizin und aufklärung in preuβen im  .jahrhundert: das leben und werk georg ernst stahls” in bulletin of the history of  medicine   ( ):  ­ .    wilton­ely, john.  the architect’s vision: historic and modern architectural models  nottingham: university of nottingham,  .    wilton­ely, john.  “the architectural model.” architectural review   ( ):  ­ .    winter, edward. halle als ausgangspunkt der deutschen russlandkunde im  .jahrhundert. berlin: deutsche akadmie der wissenschaft,  .        wintroub, michael.  “the looking glass of facts: collecting, rhetoric and citing the  self in the experimental natural philosophy of robert boyle” history of science    ( ):  ­ .    wolf, carola and steffi wunderlich.  ziel, inhalte, organisationsformen und methoden  der bildung und erziehung im ‘grossen potsdamer militärwaisenhaus’ von  ­ .   potsdam,  .    wollenweber, horst.  die realschule in geschichte und gegenwart. köln: böhlau,  .    wollgast, siegfried.  e.w. v. tschirnhaus und die deutsche frühaufklärung. berlin:  akademie verlag,  .    wotschke, theodor. “das pietistische halle und die auslandsdeutschen,” neue kirchliche  zeitschrift   ( ):  ­ ,  ­ .    wundt, max.  die deutsche schulphilosophie im zeitalter der aufklärung.  tübingen:  mohr,  .     yates, francis.  the rosicrucian enlightenment. london & boston: routledge & kegan  paul,  .    zeeden, ernst walter.  die entstehung der konfessionen: grundlagen und formen der  konfessionsbildung.  münchen,  .    zenck, hermann.  numerus und affectus.  kassel: bärenreiter verlag,  .    zilsel, edgar.  the social origins of modern science.  diederick raven & wolfgang  krohn eds. dordrecht/boston/london: kluwer academic publishers,  .    zoja, luigi.  “individuation and paideia,” journal of analytical psychology   ( ):  ­ .      appendices      : “das historische waisenhaus” (copperplate engraving by f. hoffmann):  frontispiece and title page from pietatis hallensis (london,  )          courtesy of franckesche stiftungen (halle): bfst:   h            : texts recommended to a. h. francke by e. w. von tschirnhaus     step   author name  text name  subject        praxis: awaken curiosity,  passion    daniel schwenter ( ­ )  delicae physico­mathematicae  ( )  (privilege art of invention,  discovery)    jacques ozenam ( ­ )  recreations mathematiques et  physiques ( ,   vols.)      johann christoph sturm  ( ­ )  collegium curiosum ( )      samuel reiher  arithmetic   easy introduction    daniel schwenter  geometriae practicae ( )  field praxis    wilhelm schickard  astroscopio ( )  astronomie        geography        optics    gaspar schott ( ­ )  cursus mathematicus ( )  mechanics, hydrostatics,  hydraulics    a.m. mallet  les travaux de mars ou la  fortification nouvelle…( )  fortification    leon battista alberti  perspective  perspective    perrault  abrege d’architecture vom  vitruvio  perspective        gnomomica                theory behind praxis    andreas tacquet  elementa geometriae  ex. archimedes  theoremata    andreas tacquet  euclidi  sectiones conicas    bramerus  apollonio catto  sectiones conicas    claude francois milliet  des chales ( ­ )  mundus mathematicus ( );    vols.  sectiones conicas    de le hire  sectionibus conicis      ozanam  sectionibus conicis      bernard lamy  nouveaux elemens de geometrie,  ou dela mesure du corps                  apply theory: learn  algebra    francisci schotenii  commentarii   descartes’ geometry    abr.de graaf  algebra oder stelkunst      von kinckleysen  algebra ofte stelkunst;  geometria ofte meetkonst      de grondr  der meet­konst      batrovv  lectionibus geometricis  mathesi infinitorum    nevventiit  analysi infinitorum      marquis d’ hospital  analyse des infiniment petits      johann christoph sturm  mathesi enucleata  neoterici, archimedes,  apollonio            the learning of  particular disciplines    des chales  mundo mathematico      zyn  natuurlyke gedaante  geheele mathesis    abraham de graaf    geheele mathesis    tacquet  opera  arithmetica, geometrie    tacquet    astronomie    kepler    astronomie    seth ward  astronomia circularis &  elliptica  astronomie    blaev  atlante  geography    dapper/mallet  die geographia universalis  varenii  geography    zahn  oculo optico  optics    kepler, cavalerius,  faber, cartesius,  hugenius &c.    optics    galileo & descartes     mechanics    de felden, pagan,  vauban,wertmüller,  rimpler    fortification    desargues, bosse    perspective    blondel, vignola  (sturm), goldmann    architectur    boyle  utilitas philosophiae  experimentalis  physica    sturm  collegii experimentalis  physica    verheyen, bidloo    neoterici, anatomie    mangeti  biblitheca anatomica  anatomie    lemery  cours de chymie  chymia    agricola, ercker/olaus  borichius  docimastica oder probier­kunst  metallen und mineralien    jungnickel  clavi machinarum  mechanics    boeckler  theatro mechanico  mechanics    weigel  haupt­stände      rohault  physica  physica    hamel  philosophia vetus & nova      sturm  philosophia eclectica                [source: e. w. von tschirnhaus, gründliche anleitung zu nützlichen wissenschafften  (frankfurt and leipzig,  )]     :  title page from e.w. von tschirnhaus’s gründliche anleitung zu nützlichen  wissenschafften (frankfurt and leipzig,  )        courtesy of franckesche stiftungen (halle): bfst:   d  b [ ]        :  members of the berlin academy of mathematics and physics with  correspondence in francke’s archive ( ­ )      member name    dates    became  member    origin, main residences  letters  in fs  archive  gottfried w. leibniz  ( ­ )  founder  leipzig, hannover  ?  daniel ernst jablonski  ( ­ )  founder  danzig, lissa,  königsberg, berlin  +  gottfried kirch  ( ??­ )  . .   om  guben, berlin    conrad mel  ( ­ )  . .   om  bad hersfeld, königsberg    johann fabricius  ( ­ )  . .   om  altdorf/nürnberg,  helmstedt    philipp müller  ( ­ )  . .   am  sangerhausen, schul­ pforte, jena    maturin veyssière lacroze  ( ­ )  . .   om  nantes, basel, berlin    johann andreas schmidt  ( ­ )  . .   am  worms/augsburg, jena,  marienthal    christian maximilian spener  ( ­ )  . .   om  frankfurt/main, halle,  giessen, berlin    johann friedrich sturm  ( ??­ )  . .   om      friedrich hoffmann  ( ­ )  . .   am  halle, jena, berlin    christian walter  ( ­ )  . .   am      august hermann francke  ( ­ )  . .   am      ferdinand helfreich  lichtscheid  ( ­ )  . .   om  würmling/regensburg,  wien, cölln/spree    hiob ludolf  ( ­ )  . .   am  erfurt, leiden,  frankfurt/main    johann franz buddeus  ( ­ )  . .   am  anklam, jena, halle,  gotha    christoph cellarius  ( ­ )  . .   am  schmalkalden, jena,  halle, weimar, zeitz    leonard christoph sturm  ( ­ )  . .   am  altdorf, wolfenbüttel,  frankfurt/oder,  blankenburg    ernst salomon cyprian  ( ­ )  . .   am  ostheim/rhön,  helmstedt, gotha    samuel reyher  ( ­ )  . .   am      joh.leonard frisch  ( ­ )  . .   om      charles d’ancillon  ( ­ )  . .   om  metz, paris, berlin        joh.michael d.j.heineccius  ( ­ )  . .   am  eisenberg, jena,  helmstedt, halle    gottfried wegener  ( ­ )  . .   am  oels, königsberg,  frankfurt/oder, halle    louis bourget  ( ­ )  ??  nimes, zürich,  neufchâtel    marquard ludwig printzen  ( ­ )  . .   om  berchingen, moskau,  halle, berlin    christian wolff  ( ­ )  . .   am  breslau, halle, marburg    michael lilienthal  ( ­ )  . .   am  liebstadt, königsberg    heinrich jakob v.bashuysen  ( ­ )  . .   am  hanau, leiden, hanau,  zerbst   spck    joh.christoph wolf  ( ­ )  . .   am  wernigerode, hamburg,  wittenburg    samuel grosser  ( ­ )  . .   am  pasckerwitz/schlesien,  leipzig, görlitz    johann arnold pauli  ( ­ )  . .   am  königsburg, feldpred.­  russland, memel    christian august schlegel  ( ­ )  . .   am  saalfeld, coburg, jena,  gotha    berhard walter marperger  ( ­ )  . .   am  hamburg, halle,  nürnberg, dresden    samuel faber  ( ­ )  . .   am  altdorf, nürnberg    jac.paul freiherr v.gundling  ( ­ )  ?? om  präs:    kirchsittenbach,  schulpforta, berlin    johann gerhard meuschen  ( ­ )  . .   am  osnabrück, jena, hanau,  coburg    christoph langhansen  ( ­ )  . .   am      joh.gustav reinbeck  ( ­ )  . .   om  celle, halle, berlin,  schönwalde    christoph matthaus seidel  ( ­ )  . .   om  weissenfels, schulpforta,  schöneberg, berlin    michael alberti  ( ­ )  ??  nürnberg, halle    christian gottfried  hoffmann  ( ­ )  . .   am  lauban, leipzig, halle,  frankfurt/oder    daniel friedrich hoheisel  ( ­ )    ??  danzig, leipzg, halle    johann burkhard mencke  ( ­ )  . .   am  leipzig, halle    jakob karl spener  ( ­ )  . .   am  frankfurt/main, leiden,  halle, wittenberg          :  gottfried wilhelm leibniz’s letter to philipp jakob spener, june  ,   (berlin)      highest worthy and learned sir,    i am sending back herr von tschirnhaus’s beautiful thoughts concerning a gründliche  anleitung zu nützlichen wissenschaften with my indebted gratitude; i would have wished  that they were more extensive and that he, so as with others before him, would be more  oriented towards the specifics (ad speciala).  but there are certainly already many good  and useful things in here.  in the meantime, i have also received a letter from him and see  that he has also sent me an exemplar of the text.    i wish that he would be less inclined to hold his beautiful things to himself and could be  made to share from time to time, perhaps monthly, something with the common way (mit  dem gemeinen wesen).  people easily dismiss such things and so many wonderful  thoughts become suddenly lost as a result.    aside from this it is especially to be praised that one builds up the sciences toward virtue  (dass man scientiam ad virtutem richte); this is the direction that my thoughts are going  in.  it will happen through nothing other than a good education (erziehung).  therefore, it  is to be wished that the holy herr weigel, francke and other well­intentioned people’s  projects and suggestions should be realized and, wherever necessary, improved upon— and that they allow themselves to be represented so that, at the same time, the useful  purpose is understood and applauded by people in the world—and to refrain from  allowing all these good things to remain as mere wishes.      before i leave berlin i will have the honor of saying goodbye to you in person and  always remain…      gottfried wilhelm leibniz      [source: gottfried wilhelm leibniz, sämtliche schriften und briefen.  first series:  allgemeiner, politscher und historischer briefwechsel, volume  : january – august   (berlin,  ):  ­ .  translated from german.]      :  frontispiece from conrad mel’s thoughts concerning a universal character         courtesy of franckesche stiftungen (halle): afst/w xi/­/       :  frontispiece and title page from claude fleury’s die sitten der israeliten  (hannover,  )        courtesy of franckesche stiftungen (halle): bfst:   f                    : frontispiece and drawing of a model from christoph semler’s der tempel  salomonis (halle: waysenhaus,  )                courtesy of franckesche stiftungen (halle): bfst: verl:       .  semler lesson on optical instruments       optica is about direct seeing, what happens through a straight line.  catoptica is about reflected seeing, what happens through a mirror.  dioptrica is about refracted or broken up seeing, what happens through polished glass  and through other diaphana.  perspectiva is about providing evidence for an object by how it appears.  anamorphotica is about optical presentations using polyedra specula, lylindica conica  etc.    technica  for the preparation of   basins,   for the testing of the glass for polishing  for putting together the glass with the instruments    ) tabur est vel (astonomicy coelestir) vel terrestir   this is comprised of   glasses,   ocular and   objective bluste (?)…  what the coverings and openings are.  how one uses them.    ) perspectiva    its ocular is a concave vitrum; in addition, how a small tubur can be used in it.    ) laterna magica.  why it is called magica.   with this an illuminated mirror or lamp that is free of movement and that uses convex  glasses can present a picture painted on glass on a wall on the other side of the room.    ) camera obscura  it is a four cornered box; can also take other shapes and be made out of other materials.   on it is a converse glass, at the back a white wall.  how one makes camera obscuras  using another art.    ) prism  makes all different kinds of colors.  through it one can make an object short and long  and see the appearance of an amphitheater.    ) microscope  makes the smallest things larger, different ways with different instruments through which  one can observe a hair, stems and other pigments in a tubular capillary.     ) plane speculum  under it one sees the object in its normal size, the mirror can be small and large and one  moves the object forward from the right or the left, or so far until it appears to be behind  the mirror etc.    ) concave speculum      when the eye of a human is within the center of the mirror, he will see himself large and  upright behind the mirror, curving forward; if he stands direct in the center, he will see  himself small and turned around in the mirror.    ) a convex speculum burns and enlarges.  the object will be depicted every time  smaller than it is behind the mirror …     ) a cyclical (?)speculum makes the object very long and small because it has… a  mirror that allows the object to be larger than it is naturally and also has convex mirrors  that make the object smaller.    ) a conical speculum makes the object not only small, but also elevated because it is  nothing other than a reflective mirror ...    all kinds of mirrors are made out of glass and metal; one makes them as well out of  wood and then covers them with marin­glass or with a mirror­foil and a bit of chalk.  …     one also has vexir mirrors.    ) vitrum lauticum  they are either convex on one or all sides.  the power to burn comes from concentrating  many rays of the sun in one point.    what should the focus be by converse glasses?  what is the virtual focus of the concave?  at this point all of the different kinds of polished glass, also those that are blown, are  shown.      e.g.  ) plane,  ) plan und convex  ) auch beyden seiten convex aber ex diversis patinis  ) convex un concav  ) plan und concav  ) concav und concav,  ) concav und concav ex  diversis globulis  ) polyedra etc.    exercises and still more instruments …     a) cubus vitreus to show the refraction. a: cut figures out of paper and stick them to a  beer glass and pour water over them    b) oculus artificialis    c) common glasses. hollow glasses pro minoribus, staar glasses.    d) glass pro minoribus.    e) polyedron.  so that the object is increased   times.    how to polish concave, convex, large and small.         of glass polishing, from model to the containers, to the globes upon which the concave is  polished.  of the different arts and manners of polishing.      …     here also the following things are said:    ) our eye is like a mirror, very much like a camera obscura, wherein all objects are  presented.  it has the following parts: a) pupils…b) iridem… c)   nerves… d) humores…  ) seeing happens by taking the form of an object into the eye, like in a mirror; in the  form of a cone or pyramid, the mirror is the eye, the vahir is the top surface of the object.  ) a shadow is an absence of light; it retains the form of the body that it resembles…the  shadow of earth makes the night.   ) darkness existed before light because god created light out of darkness.  ) light pleases the eye because the seeing­spirit only has similitude with light; the  darkness produces fear because light is what the seeing­spirits need for nourishment.  ) black and white are the main colors, the rest are only a mixture of light and shadow.  ) seeing correctly requires  a) rationality of the soul derived from reason, attention and solid exercise of the  anima (gemüth);   b) rationality of the eye (ratione oculi ipsig) so that it is healthy and without  movement;  c) rationality of the object (ratione objecti) so that it can be presented to the eye in  the proper style, time and manner and not with too much light;  d) rationality of the lens (ratione diaphani) so that it is moderately illuminated and  free from errors.  ) a mad, afflicted or angry person does not see the object correctly a) because his soul  does not have the proper strength and renounces reason; b) because the movement of the  gemüth is so strong that it confuses and distracts the seeing spirits.  ) old people lose their sight gradually because the seeing spirits become weaker and  fewer and at the same time the cornea becomes harder and thicker.  ) to the passengers of ships it appears as if the ocean is moving and this is because of  the movement of their eyes, which need to be held still and calm to see correctly.  ) glaucoma is when the eye crystals lose their natural colors.  ) drunk people see everything double because they confuse the seeing spirits and  reverse the eyes so that the pictures of objects that fall into the two eyes cannot become  unified into a single model or example.  ) in the sun and everywhere that is very bright, one cannot see correctly because this  object presents too much (an all too large) light to the eyes.    ) through a red glass, everything looks red because of the diaphonum of its colors  transmits the appearance of the object to the eye and the radu visui that come into the eye  take on the color of the lens.  ) the sun shines greater in the morning than in the afternoon because one looks  through a thick haze, which makes the object appear larger.        ) one can see no further than four miles across the earth because the earth has a  curvature and around four miles noticeably begins to bend.    ) one closes one eye when one aims to shoot because with one eye one can best grasp  the straight line of the bullet, something that is impossible with both eyes.  ) the large amount of light and sunshine make it so that during the day one cannot see  the stars; by large solar eclipses and in a deep shaft, one can see them.  ) when one observes something very green for a long time, afterwards everything will  appear green because the color green has been deeply impressed on the eye and this does  not disappear so easily.  ) when one sees the half of a rod in water through a double lens, the same thing  appears thicker and more curved than another.    ) through the smoke from hot coals objects appear especially noteworthy because the  diaphonon move themselves.  ) with a drunk everything moves in a circle because the seeing­spirits in the nerves are  stirred up into a vapor and mostly bump into one another.   ) a fire shines brighter by night than by day because the eye that is closest to the fire  cannot distinguish illuminated air from the fire and because the eyes can stay open longer  in the dark.  that is why one also likes to stand in the dark.   ) by one who is yellow, everything appears yellow because his eye crystal is unhealthy  and damaged.        [source:  afst/h e   semler lehrplan,  ­ .  translated from german.]            .   frontispiece from christoph semler’s methodus inveniendae longitudinis  maritimaee per acus verticales magneticas (halle: waysenhaus,  )              courtesy of the franckesche stiftungen (halle): bfst: verl:          : excerpt from christoph theodosius walther’s letter to pädagogium pupils  (june  ,  )      courtesy of franckesche stiftungen (halle): afst/m   b  :       : christian wolff’s assessment (gutachtung) of the christoph semler / christian  eberhard methodus inveniendae longitudinis maritimaee per acus verticales  magneticas for the academy of science in st. petersburg     [weil herr pastor eberhard von mir gefordert hat, dass ich ihm seine mitteilung über die  erfindung seiner meeresausdehnung veröffentliche; dank dessen ich damit bezeugen und  offen bekenne, dass, meiner meinung nach, mit der abweichung der vertikalen nadeln  gegen osten, man die meeresausdehnung aufstellen kann:    ) wenn die nadeln so gross sind, dass man die abweichung akkurat zeigen kann,  ) wenn durch einen geraden strich oder durch obere observation im voraus wissend,  wie gross die abweichung in jedem meridian ist, und zwar (wie ich hoffe, dass es darin  einen unterschied gibt) unter jedem breitengrad,  ) wenn bestätigt wird, auf welcher art und weise die abweichung an jeder stelle zu  einer bestimmten zeit sich ändert.    und so ist anzunehmen, dass mit den von herrn eberhard erfundenen instrumenten auf  dem meer untersuchungen durchgeführt werden können.]        because pastor eberhard requested me to circulate information about his discovery of a  device for navigating at sea, i am willing to testify that, in my opinion, because of the  variation of the vertical needle when pointed eastward, one can deploy the device:    ) if the needle is large enough so that one can accurately show the variation,  ) if through a straight line or through other observations it is known in advance how  large the variation along each meridian is and (how i do hope there is a difference) along  each degree of latitude,  ) if it is proven in what way the variation in each place changes at a given moment of  time.       and so, i suspect that with the instrument herr eberhard has discovered investigations  can be conducted at sea.    halle, june  ,      christian wolff  royal­prussian court advisor         [translated from russian into german by bärbel vinz, latina august herman francke.  source: christian wolff, briefe von christian wolff aus den jahren  ­ : ein  beitrag zur geschichte der kaiserlichen academie der wissenschaften zu st. petersburg.   (st. petersburg: eggers,  ): n.  , pg.  .]      : frontispiece and title page from the halle orphanage’s graphice guide  [gründlicher unterricht von der graphice. oder zeichen­ und mahl­kunst (halle:  waysenhaus,  )]            courtesy of staatsbibliothek zu berlin preußischer kulturbesitz:  nu        :  excerpt from “semler” painting and drawing guide    [note the use of the same categories wolff employs in his anfangs­gründe aller  mathematischen wissenschaften in the organization of the lesson:  explanations  (erklärungen), experiences (erfahrungen), extras (zugaben) and commentaries  (anmerckungen).]      . explanation     ) the art of drawing and painting (zeichen und mahlkunst) is the mechanical science of  creating perfectly similar representations of all the particular features of a body and other  things that can be placed on an elevated surface and presented through figural concepts  using lines, colors, strings, brushes and all kinds of materials.    commentaries     a. how this art has been titled in other languages one can read in joh. schefferi graphice  and in a tract called basic lessons in drawing and painting.   idem: davis’ experienced  artist (kunsterfahrene) and curious (curieuser) and signmaker (schildener) and painter  (mahler).    b. painting and drawing should be called the same thing considering their similar  etymological origins (john: schefferi graphic; geor.andr: boechlers kunstverständiger  discourse von der mahlerey) but many painters, in light of their undertakings, make  notable distinctions between them. … but especially since both are necessary in order to  be a good painter, one finds both brought together in a general definition.     c. only certain things should be attempted when painting.  …    d. the division of a painting into its many categories is rooted in the following  distinctions:    . the observation of the materials of the colors that one paints with.  oil  painting, water colour painting, al fresco, with dry colors….    . observation of the materials that one paints upon—like allatempera al fresco.  emaille. glass painting.    . observation of the manner in which the colors are put onto the canvas.  ...    . observation of the things that will be portrayed.  portraits, histories,  landscapes, flowers … (joh. scheffer’s graphice s.  .   lessons from drawing  and painting, chapter two).                                                       this is most likely a direct reference to the halle orphanage’s printed graphice guide.      . observation of the real objects that one seeks to represent in the picture.   painting from nature, from one’s own invention, copying.    . explanation    s. .) a drawing is nothing other than what has been transmitted through horizontal lines  to an elevated surface or plane that are similar to the figure of a body.    . explanation    s. ) the resemblance of a picture is the agreement of the same with the certain attributes  of the body being pictured, as if he placed the body himself before his eyes    extra     the certain properties of all corporeal things are especially the following:    ) extension,  ) proportion,  ) light and shadow,  ) perspective  ) color  ) expression­ movement of the gemüth  ) situation    ) the spreading out of something into a certain space.  extension.  ) the remonstrance of something in relation to another.  proportion.  ) the darkening and lightening of an object and its colors.  light and shadow.  ) the different representations and manipulations of a figure according to experience  and position.  perspective.  ) the color.  ) the movement of the gemüth and the body.  expression.  ) the positioning.  situation.    . experience     s.  ) when one sets a cubum (würfel) on a table illuminated with painter’s light, the  lowest superfice or base of the cube will appear like a quadrast (vier eckes) containing  four right angles and four lines that are the same size (wolffs beginner’s guide to  geometry section  ).  in the same way, the first quality of a body that falls into the eyes,  namely its extension (ausspannung) in length and width, from which it acquires a place  on all sides, and where the same extension ends, will one take a line as true.    . explanation    s.  ) the lines in the art of painting and drawing are the external outlines and boundaries  which demarcate the stretched out room of a thing, including its length, width and  thickness (s.  ) and distinguish it from other similar bodies or even from different kinds  as a special thing.  they are called by painters umriβe, umzuge, contours, termini and  also grund­riβe.        extra    when one wants to put together an accurate drawing of something on paper as it exists in  nature, then a riβ or drawing, der sein, delineation, must be put forward, the art and  manner of this drawing and the rules those experienced in this work have developed, is  called especially the art of drawing (ars delineanda sive graphica).     commentaries    a) one can make very clear sketches of bodies with corners, but with round or dissimilar  figures, one must first imagine them in the gemüth. the first (kind of bodies) one calls  known, certain, affirmed, but the unknown ones are unknown, doubtful, fleeting  transmissions.    b) aside from this, observation of the placement (or situation) in which the sketch is  made affects differences in expression and appearance, …. this only becomes clear to  artists who combine verbal, visual and practical things they have learned and who are  properly constituted.    c) finally, just like different kinds of bodies and their figures cannot be drawn in a one  way with lines because they do not use their space in the same way, so must the painter  learn from geometry and be able to name the different kinds of lines, the different ways  in which they can be placed together and the different works and figures that come of this  placement.  therefore it is important at least to consider the thing using geometrical  problemata…    . explanation    s. ) a geometrical line is certain line or stripe whose beginning and end is only a point,  which has a certain length but no special width.            [from afst/h e   semler lehrplan pp.  ­ .  translated from german.]          : semler lesson topics (bold topics also covered in wolff’s anfangsgründe)    i. models and instruments    das uhrwerk            brauhaus  modell des hauses          das modell des backhaus  modell des wagens          blumen und baumgarten (in model)  der tuchmacher stuhl        vom chymischen laboratorio  vom schiffe            instrumentis mathematicus  von der festung und ihren theilen    optischen instrumenten  vom salzkoth und salzwesen      pferdschmuck  von den mühle          fischer instrumenten  vom bergwerck          magnet und compass  vom drechsler          von der mechanica  von der stadt hall          model einer stadt  von der glasshütte          von der hebelbank  von der buchdrucherey        honigbau/vielzucht/ackerbau  von den barometris, thermometris, hygrometris    von den wasserkünsten         astronomia mechanica  von der astronomia bey gelegenheit damalige finsterniss    ii. naturalia    vom tuch und zeugen an wolle      semina  leinen zeuge            holz  seidenen zeuge          fisch  von den farben von dem mahler      arten der vogel  von allerhand arten der steine      arten der thiere  sceleton/anatomie          vom papier  das pferd            vom leder  von dem semi metalles sive mineralibus  gewürtze  würzeln radices et gummata     iii. neither model nor naturalia    gewichte    grundriss eines gebaudes  maase     zeichen und mahlkunst   munzten  calender  wappen      : pietist orphanages, affiliated individuals and related primary materials  the following list includes pietist orphanages that conform to the criteria i discuss in  chapter eight.  in addition to the location and founding date, i have listed the names of  those individuals involved in starting and/or maintaining each institution.  wherever  possible, i have included the signatures of relevant archival materials—including letters,  reports specifically printed about these institutions and tracts printed on their own  institutional presses.    location: augsburg  (f.  )    affiliated persons:  gottlieb spitzel  samuel urlsperger ( ­ )        johann august urlsperger ( ­ )    in afst:    almw/dhm   /  :  ­ ,  ,  ,     urlsperger to ziegenbalg and j.e. gründler ( ,  ,  ,  )    /m   c  :    c. b. michaelis to urlsperger ( )  /m   a  :  ­ ,  ,    urlsperger to g.a. francke ( )  /m   a  :  ab,  ,  ab,  c,   urlsperger re: missionswerk ( )  /m   g  :  ,    /m   h  :    /m   h  :  ,    /m   h  :  a  /m   h  :    /m   h  :    /m   h  :    list of donations from urlsperger ( )  /m   h  :  ,    /m   h  :    /m   h  :    /m   h  :    /m   h  :    /m   h  :    /m   h  :   list of donations from urlsperger ( )  /m   h  :   list of donations from urlsperger ( )   [ ... ]    in stab/f:    stab/f  ,  ,  / :   –   letters from urlsperger to a.h. francke (  to  )    stab/f  / :    from london ( )        bautzen  (f.  )    affiliated persons:   m. martin grünwald ( ­ )        henriette katharina von gersdorf    stab/f:    stab/f  a/ b:     a. h. francke to h. j. elers re: grünwald, bautzen ( )      bunzlau    affiliated persons:  gottfried zahn        pastor woltersdorf    printed on orphanage press:    erste nachricht von einer auf gr. königlichen majestät allergnädigste concession  angefangenen waisen und schul anstalt zu bunzlau in schlesien welche sich auf den  fond der göttlichen vorsehung gründet.  mit beigefügten gedanken von dergleichen  unternehmungen.  bunzlau: waysenhaus,  ; reprinted each year until  .      herrsfeld    (f.  )    affiliated persons: conrad mel ( ­ )    stab/f:    stab/f  ,  / :    mel to francke ( )   stab/f  ,  / :    mel to francke re: plans to start an orphanage ( )  stab/f  ,  / :    mel to francke re: building of the orphanage has commenced,  evangelical mission, description of a longitudinal device ( )  stab/f  ,  / :    mel to francke re: hersfeld orphanage and plans to send a student to  halle to learn the teaching methods of francke’s schools ( )  stab/f  ,  / :    mel to francke re: pleased that francke will tell potential donors  about the orphanage in hersfeld ( )  stab/f  ,  / :    mel to francke re: hersfeld orphanage and schools ( )  stab/f  ,  / :    mel to francke re: missionarius evangelicus; copperplate engraving  from his book the tabernacle ( )  stab/f  ,  / :    mel to francke re: orphanage ( )  stab/f  ,  / :    mel to francke re: orphanage, selling naturalia collection ( )  stab/f  ,  / :  mel to francke re: sending a catalogue of the naturalia he’s selling;  has also sent the catalogue to d.e. jablonski ( )  stab/f  ,  / :  mel to francke re: news report from orphanage—please circulate to  inspire more donors; decision re: naturalia?; news re: various scientific projects ( )        stab/f  ,  / :  mel to francke re: naturalia ( )  stab/f  ,  / :  mel to francke re: naturalia ( )  stab/f  ,  / :  mel to francke re: naturalia ( )  stab/f  ,  / :  mel to francke re: hersfeld orphanage report, naturalia ( )  stab/f  ,  / :  mel to francke re: orphanage report, canstein’s bible press ( )  stab/f  ,  / :  mel to francke re: orphanage report, student from halle teaching in  hersfeld gymnasium ( )  stab/f  ,  / :  mel to francke re: orphanage report, mission ( )    stab/f  ,  / :   daniel ernst jablonski to mel ( )       orphanage reports:    bericht wegen derjenigen gaben, welche die herßfeldischen waysenkinder von  gutthätigen christen empfangen haben. hersfeld,  ­ .      langendorf (weiβenfels)  (f.  )    affiliated persons:   christoph buchen ( ­ )        christoph andreas chryselius ( ­ )       johann wilhelm kruckenberg (??­ )  johann michael schumann ( ­ )  georg güntner     in afst/f:    /h a  : b  ­ ,  ­   schumann  /h a   b  ­   schumann  /h a  :   chryselius to a.h. francke ( )    /h c  :   güntner  /h c  :   chryselius to a.h. francke ( )  /h c  :      /h d  ,  ­   schumann    /h d   b  ­  christoph buchen: einfältige gedanken zur seligen erbauung in  unserem christentum uber die gute ordnung der bienen  /h d  ,  ­   schumann    /h k   b   &     /h k   b       /m   c  :   j.e. gründler to schumann from tranquebar ( )  http://gso.gbv.de/db= . /set= /ttl= /mat=/nomat=t/clk?ikt= &trm=bericht http://gso.gbv.de/db= . /set= /ttl= /mat=/nomat=t/clk?ikt= &trm=wegen http://gso.gbv.de/db= . /set= /ttl= /mat=/nomat=t/clk?ikt= &trm=derjenigen http://gso.gbv.de/db= . /set= /ttl= /mat=/nomat=t/clk?ikt= &trm=gaben, http://gso.gbv.de/db= . /set= /ttl= /mat=/nomat=t/clk?ikt= &trm=welche http://gso.gbv.de/db= . /set= /ttl= /mat=/nomat=t/clk?ikt= &trm=her%c % ffeldischen http://gso.gbv.de/db= . /set= /ttl= /mat=/nomat=t/clk?ikt= &trm=waysenkinder http://gso.gbv.de/db= . /set= /ttl= /mat=/nomat=t/clk?ikt= &trm=von http://gso.gbv.de/db= . /set= /ttl= /mat=/nomat=t/clk?ikt= &trm=guttha%cc% tigen http://gso.gbv.de/db= . /set= /ttl= /mat=/nomat=t/clk?ikt= &trm=christen http://gso.gbv.de/db= . /set= /ttl= /mat=/nomat=t/clk?ikt= &trm=empfangen http://gso.gbv.de/db= . /set= /ttl= /mat=/nomat=t/clk?ikt= &trm=haben       /m   g  :    g. a. francke ( )  /m   a  :    cellarius ( )  /m   h  :    g. a. francke ( )  /m   l :    g. a. francke to kruckenberg re: distributing copies of halle mission  reports ( )  /m   a  :  ,  a  g. a. francke re: buchen ( )    in stab/f    stab/f  / f:  / : buchen thanks g.a. francke for a donation ( )  stab/f  / f:  / : buchen sermon re: chryselius ( )  stab/f  / f:  / : buchen lebenslauf (by chryselius)  stab/f  b/ f:  /  johann friedrich franz to ludwig johann cellarius re: who should  follow buchen as director of the langendorf orphanage ( )    printed reports:     nachricht von der gütigen vorsorge gottes oder kurtzer und aufrichtiger bericht von der  auferbauung, bißheriger unterhaltung und zustand des bey weissenfels zu langendorf  gelegenen waysen­hauses, mitgetheilt von einem freund, der die wahrheit bekennt.   jena,  ; leipzig,  ; leipzig,      die gnädige vorsorge gottes, in einer wahrhafftigen nachricht von dem waysen­hause  bey weissenfels an langendorff gelegen: welches ein armer fuhrmann so wohl vor  knaben als mädgen erbauet; daß dieselben darinne im christenthum und andern  nützlichen wissenschaften unterrichtet, und zu allerhand arbeit angewöhnet werden  leipzig,  ­ ; weiβenfels,   and  ; leipzig,      kurze nachricht von dem kraft höchster landesherrl. concession angelegten stifte zu  langendorf bey weisenfels. leipzig: breitkopf,        kurze nachricht von denen sämmtlichen von einander unterschiedenen evangelisch­ lutherischen etablissements, welche theils zu langendorf bey weissenfels, theils nahe  bey diesem langendorf gelegen sind. leipzig: köhl,         niederwiesa (bei greifenberg)   (f.  )    affiliated persons:  johann christoph schwedler ( ­ )    in afst:    /h a  :  ­   schwedler to francke    in stab/f:        stab/f  /   ­       nordhausen    affiliated persons:  johann heinrich kindervater ( ­ )        philipp jacob lesser        friedrich christian lesser      in stab/f    stab/f  ,  / :    kindervater to francke    printed reports:      kindervater, johann heinrich.  eigentliche nachricht von der gelegenheit und anfange  des in der kayserl. fr. reichs­stadt nordhausen zu erbauenden waisen­hauses ...       vortrag  : die neue krafft des beständigen harrens auf gott, das ist: fernere  nachricht von dem nordhäusischen waisen­hause: darinne sowohl die bißherige  güte des höchsten hertzlich gepriesen; als auch die mildigkeit vieler christen  danckbarl. gerühmet wird ... von m. ioh. henr. kindervatern .... nordhausen,  waysenhaus,  .      vortrag  : der brunn des göttlichen seegens.  nordhausen, waysenhaus,  .  vortrag  : die supplic der armen  vortrag  : der stadt bestes  vortrag  : das heil zur zeit des trübsals  vortrag  : gott geliehen, unverlohren  vortrag  : das besuch der waisen als einen reinen gottesdienst  votrag  : der beste freund der welt   vortrag  : das bewehrte mittel eine stadt in flor zu bringen      die wahrhafftigen spuren des noch wirkenden gottes, wie solche bey erbauung und  wachsthum des nordhäusischen waisen­hauses eigentlich erkant ... ; in    unterschiedlichen vorträgen von johann henrich kindervater. nordhausen,  .      potsdam großes militärwaisenhaus   (f.  )    affiliated persons:  friedrich wilhelm i. könig in preußen           daniel ernst jablonski        johann porst        johann ulrich christian köppen          in stab/f:    stab/f  , / :   johann porst to a.h. francke re: francke should go to potsdam for  the opening of the orphanage, d. e. jablonski will be the inspector ( )    stab/f  , / :   johann porst to a.h. francke re: jablonski to be potsdam orphanage  inspector ( )      stargard    affiliated persons:   johann wilhelm zierold ( ­ )  andreas petrus hecker  ( ­ )    printed on orphanage press:    die weissagung des propheten obadiae, vom auffgang des reiches christi, und  untergang des wider­christen, in den sieben zeit­ordnungen des neuen testaments :  aus dem grund­text deutlich übersetzet, ... erläutert, und ... gründlich erklähret / von d.  johann wilhelm zierolden, .... franckfurt; leipzig: stargardisches waysenhaus,  .    kurtze anleitung zum rechten verstand des catechismi des sel. lutheri : in fragen und  antworten denen einfältigen zu gut mitgetheilet; nebst luthers kleinen catechismum.  stargard: waisenhaus,  .      stettin  “an der lastadie”  (f.  )    affiliated persons: johann christoph schinmeier  ( ­ )    in stab/f:    stab/f  , / :    f.a. schultz to g.a. francke re: schinmeier, schule ( )  stab/f  , / :    steinmetz to g.a. francke re: schinmeier  ( )  stab/f  / :    schinmeier moving to giessen ( )    printed on orphanage press:     schinmeier, johann christoph.  lebens­lauff und glaubens­bekändtniss des herrn  lichanofski, welches er ... in der st. johannis­kirche öffentlich abgeleget ... und folglich  die römisch­catholische mit der evangelisch­lutherischen religion verwechselt, an  welchen eine hertzliche vermahnung zur beständigkeit hinzu gefüget wird. stettin:  waisenhaus, [ ].        schinmeier, johann christoph. anweisung erbaulich zu predigen, worinnen xv.  hindernisses des seegens angezeiget werden: auf verlangen solcher, denen es um einen  reellen seegen im lehr­amte zu thun ist.  stettin: waisenhaus,  .    schinmeier, johann christoph. gespräch einiger hoff­leute von der möglichkeit eines  thätigen christenthums, oder daß man am hofe ein rechtschaffener christ seyn könne  aus verlangen zum druck befördert von joh. christoph. schinmeier, .... stettin,  waisenhaus  .    helmund, egidius guntherus.  diarium pastorale oder sehr erbauliches tage­buch,  worinne von dessen vocation, leiden, gefährlichkeiten, stärckungen, reisen, zuspruch,  unterredung, besuchungen, predigten ... überaus erweckliche nachrichten ertheilet  werden, daß es nimanden, er sey prediger, oder gemeiner christ, gereuen wird, es durch  gelesen zu haben. stettin: waisenhaus,  .      zittau (f.  )    affiliated persons:  christian weise (rector zitta gym  ­ )        gottfried hoffmann        m. martin grünwald ( ­ )    printed reports:    m. g. danck­gebet der zittauischen waysen: wie solches in dem daselbst neu  aufgerichteten und den  . maji  . mit grosser andacht eingeweiheten waysen­hause,  wochentlich an dem freytage nach mittags um  . uhr in öffentlicher versammlung  gehalten wird.  zittau,  .    weise, christian.  das erste jahr­gedächtnüs der wohgehaltenen bet­woche, das ist: die  wiederholte danksagung des neuerbauten und numehr in stand gebrachten  waysenhauses in zittau, welches am dienstag nach vocem jucunditatis mdcci mit  hertzlicher udn christlicher andacht eingeweihet worden, numehr aber in eben dieser  woche, durch einen umgang der armen kinder, allen wolthätern wünschet  recommendiret zu seyn, wird zu schuldiger grulation an die patronen, zu rühmlichen  erkäntnüs gegen alle gönner; so dann auch zu getreuer liebe gegen das gesammte  vaterland.  zittau,  .    weise, christian.  das jahr­gedächtnüs der gesegneten bet­woche, darinnen ehmals ein  guter und erfreulicher anfang zum neuen waysenhause in zittau gemacht worden: sol  die woche nach vocem jucunditatis m dcciii.  gott zu ehren, der alles gedeyen darzu  gegeben hat; denen patronen zur vergnügung, welchen die mühwaltung wol  ausgeschlagen ist; vielen mildreichen herzen zur versicherung, dass ihr liebes opffer  viel gutes mit sich bringt.  endlich dem geliebtesten vaterlande zur freude, dass gottes  gnade in unseren mauren wohnet.  zittau,  .        weise, christian. die bisherige vergeltung des wolerhaltenen und wolversorgeten  waysenahuses in zittau.  zittau,  .    weise, chrisian.  die gottgefällige betwoche der gesammten kinder aus dem  zittauischen wolangelegten waysenhause. zittau,  .    c. w. r.  was die worte heissen panem propter deum, sol im nahmen des  zittauischen waysenhauses... von den gesammten waysenkindern im thon: wer in dem  schutz des höchsten ist besungen werden.  zittau,  .    grünwald, m. martin.  m.g. ausführliche beschreibung des zittauischen waysenhauses,  und dessen loblichster einrichtung aus heiligen absehen entworffen und allen welchen  gottes väterlichen vorsorge gebührend verwundern zu danckbarhere uberlegung.  leipzig und zittau,  .        züllichau    (f.  )    affiliated persons:  siegmund steinbart ( ­ )        johann christain steinbart ( ­ )        gotthelf samuel steinbart         johann christoph wilcke        pastor woltersdorf    in afst:    /m   h  :     s. steinbart to g.a. francke re: donations for tranquebar ( )  /m   e  :     f. m. ziegenhagen to g.a. francke re: pious children of silesia reported  by siegmund steinbart ( )  /m    l   :     g.a. francke to j.c. steinbart re: hallesche missionsbericht ( )  /m    h   :     j.c. steinbart to g.a.francke ( )   /m    c  :  a   g.s. steinbart to j.l. schulze ( )    in stab/f    stab/f  / :    isaac hollis to a.h. francke re: j.c. steinbart ( )  stab/f  , / :    j.c. steinbart to heinrich zopf re: starting a bible printing press in  züllichow and printing the new testament in greek ( )  stab/f  , / :    j.c. steinbart to jakob gottfried böttcher re: giving the halle  orphanage printing rights over züllichow’s bible printing press ( )  stab/f  , / :    j.c. steinbart re: story of orphanage’s founding to g.a. francke  ( )  stab/f   , / :    j.c. steinbart to g.a francke ( )  stab/f   , / :    j.c. steinbart to g.a. francke re: donations ( )  stab/f    , / :    j.c. steinbart to g.a. francke re: money troubles ( )       stab/f    , / :    j. c. steinbart re: money troubles ( )       printed reports:    warhafftige und umständliche nachricht derjenigen tropffen, strömlein und flüsse, so  aus gottes reicher seegens quelle in das von ihm selbst vor der stadt züllichow bey  krausche nicht so wohl zu blosser erzieh und unterhaltung armer verlassener kinder,  als vielmehr zu erweckung und stärkung des glaubens gestifftete waysen­haus, als  welches einzig und allein im vertrauen auf die herzlenckende krafft seiner ewige liebe  und gnade angefangen und bis auf gegenwärtige zeit fortgesetzet worden. seit den  .juli   bis den  .sept.   nach und nach gestossen; zum preiss des höchsten  und danckbarlichsten erkänntnis gegen die wohlthäter aufgesetzet vom waysen vater  siegmund steinbart. berlin,  ;  ;  ;  ;  ;  ;  .      printed on orphanage press:       rambach, d. johann jacob.  sieben buß­reden über auserlesene texte des alten  testaments : an allgemeinen buß­tagen in der schul­kirche zu halle öffentlich gehalten.   leipzig; züllichau: waysenhaus,  .    rambach, d. johann jacob ed.  des geist­ und trostreichen lehrers sel. johann arnds  weiland general­superintendenten des fürstentuhms lüneburg, sechs bücher vom  wahren christenthum : handelnd von heilsamer busse, herzlicher reu und leid über  die sünde und wahren glauben, auch heiligem leben und wandel der rechten wahren  christen ... nebst dem paradiesgärtenlein.  züllichau: waysenhaus,  .     rieger, m. georg conrad.  die alte und neue böhmische brüder, als deren  merckwürdige und erbauliche historie zur erkenntniß und wiederholung, besonders bey  gegenwärtiger zeit, der kirchen gottes wieder nothwendig zu werden scheinet : aus  richtigen urkunden also hergeleitet, daß es zugleich zu einer verlangten fortsetzung des  ehemaligen saltz­bundes dienen kan.  züllichau: waysenhaus,  .      schmidt, johann jacob.  biblischer mathematicus oder erläuterung der heil. schrift aus  den mathematischen wissenschaften der arithmetic, geometrie, static, architectur,  astronomie, horographie und optic: mit nöthigen kupfern und vollständigen registern  herausgegeben; als ein anhang ist beygefüget ... versuch einer anwendung der  mathematic .... züllichau: waysenhaus,  .    lachmann, joachim.  die wahre ursache der trübseligen zeiten wurde in einer buß­ predigt aus jesaia   v.  .   den  . mart.   der stadt­gemeine in züllichau  vorgestellet ... züllichau: waysenhaus, [ ].        lösecken, christoph albrecht.  der erklärte kleine catechismus lutheri: worin die  wörter kurtz und nach dem sinn lutheri erkläret, deren nachdruck gezeiget und durch  anmerkungen erläutert. züllichau: waysenhaus,  .    runtze, georg.  die großachtung der menschlichen seele wurde am ii. pfingst­ feyertage   ... aus joh. iii,   ­  . züllichau: waysenhaus, [ ].    evangelische deutsche original­bibel. das ist, die gantze heilige schrift altes und  neues testaments, dergestalt eingerichtet, daß d. hebr. oder griech. grundtext u. d.  deutsche Übers. martin luthers neben einander erscheinen.  züllichau: waysenhaus,  ­ .    frommann, gottlieb benjamin.  zuverläßige nachricht von den büchern der  privilegierten buchhandlung des waysenhauses zu züllichau. züllichau: waysenhaus,  .    sarganeck, georg.  Überzeugende und bewegliche warnung vor allen sünden der  unreinigkeit und heimlichen unzucht: darinnen aus medicinischen u. theologischen  gründen vernünftig vorgestellet wird, i. was für gefahr und schaden, ii. schulden und  gerichte, und iii. für rettungs­mittel vorhanden. aus liebe und verbindlichkeit zum  menschlichen geschlecht sonderlich aber zur studirenden jugend auf schulen und  universitäten mit züchtiger feder und tiefer ehrfurcht vor gott entworfen.  züllichau:  waysenhaus,  .    das neue testament unsers herrn und heilandes jesu christi ­ Ē kainē diathēkē:  dergestalt eingerichtet, daß der griechische grund­text und die deutsche Übersetzung  d. martin luthers neben einander stehen ... mit den wichtigsten lectionibus variantibus  des griechischen textes, iedes capitels reichen summarien .... züllichau, waysenhaus,  .    hensel, martin.  kleine schriften vom wahren christenthum für einfältige absonderlich  auf dem lande. züllichau: waysenhaus,  .      rambach, johann jakob. gründliche erklärung des propheten esaiä : darin nach einer  einleitung ... alle theile desselben ordentlich zergliedert, und aus der philologie und  hermeneutic erklärt, insbesondere aber den kern aus dem weitläuftigen u. kostbaren  wercke des campegii vitringae.  züllichau: waysenhaus,  .      moser, johann jakob.  theologische gedancken von der ehlichen beywohnung  unbekehrter, erweckter und wiedergebohrener personen: nebst des seeligen d. speners  bedencken hievon und einem dreyfachen anhang.  züllichau: waysenhaus,  .    geistreiches gesang­buch, darin ein auserlesener vorrath von   ... evangelisch­ lutherischen lieder ... enthalten. nebst einem kurzgefaßten gebet­buch herausgegeben.  züllichau: waysenhaus,  .        neumann, caspar.  eine sammlung von    liedern ... zum gebr. der kinder. züllichau:  waysenhaus,  .    neumann, caspar.  chymia medica dogmatico­experimentalis das ist mit experimenten  erwiesene medicinische chymie.  züllichau: waysenhaus,  ­ .    woltersdorf, ernst gottlieb.  fliegender brief evangelischer worte an die jugend, von  der glückseligkeit solcher kinder und jungen leute, die sich frühzeitig bekehren.  züllichau: waysenhaus,  .      other sites    [the following are pietist orphanage sites for which i have not yet determined the extent  of available documentation.]      cottbus  görlitz  göttingen  grünstadt  jena  königsberg    pyrmont (waldeck) und wildungen   sorau                                                       for a limited discussion of pyrmont see sträter, “pietismus und sozialtätigkeit” ( ):  ­ .      :  the halle orphanage as schauplatz. copperplate engraving by david ulrich  boecklin (leipzig,  )          courtesy of stadtarchiv halle (saale):  ii,       re-dressing t h e n a t i o n : allotria's festzug karl v a n d l a t e n i n e t e e n t h c e n t u r y m u n i c h a r t p r a c t i c e s by sabine wieber b . a . , the university of british columbia, a thesis s u b m i t t e d tn p a r t i a l f u l f i l l m e n t of t h e r e q u i r e m e n t s f o r t h e d e g r e e of m a s t e r of a r t s in t h e f a c u l t y of g r a d u a t e studies (department of fine arts) we accept this thesis as conforming to the required standard t h e university of british c o l u m b i a october © sabine wieber, in presenting this thesis in partial fulfilment of the requirements for an advanced degree at the university of british columbia, i agree that the library shall make it freely available for reference and study. i further agree that permission for extensive copying of this thesis for scholarly purposes may be granted by the head of my department or by his or her representatives. it is understood that copying or publication of this thesis for financial gain shall not be allowed without my written permission. department of the university of british columbia vancouver, canada de- ( / ) abstract the time span between germany's unification in and the onset of world war i in provided a very fertile ground for both avant-garde and state-supported modes of artistic production. yet, while the new reich was perceived by the outside as having brought unity to germany's formerly fractured agglomeration of individual states, the nation was actually marked by internal rifts, tensions and competing aspirations. munich was an important center for art and culture during this period. by the 's its well known royal academy attracted a large body of international students, including a considerable number from north america. munich was also renown as an art center at this time as it was the nexus for numerous artist groups organized under both national and regional auspices. allotria, formed in , was the local artist society which, due to the prominence of many of its members as academic professors, was recognized as munich's pre-eminent group. this institutional body provided a social space that encouraged an informal but important intersection of artists and "friends of the arts." in other words, the promotion of a common social life between sectors of the upper echelons of munich society and academic and independent artists was one of allotria's key objectives. allotria's artist festival the feslzug karl vbecame a highly visible event that was viewed as central to munich's artistic pre-eminence in numerous newspaper and journal accounts of the time. this study will address the ways in which this particular festival could be read on one level as signifying a specific national identity by evoking a period of unity through reference to charles v and the holy roman empire. i will also explore how a northern renaissance visual vocabulary carefully manipulated in the festival and in the different representations that circulated before and after its staging, could be interpreted as working to contest these very notions. it is thus, tensions and discontinuities within the festival's seemingly homogenizing references and visual vocabulary that this study is interested in tracing out. how could munich's artists and upper classes represent themselves as heirs to a particular germanic tradition and therefore, as supporters of the new nation while also laying claim to their threatened position of cultural superiority with the new reich? what import did the northern renaissance idiom have at this specifc socio-political juncture and how did various rhetorical strategies specific to different modes of representation functioning within this cultural practice and its re-presentations serve to rationalize particular kinds of regional patronage systems and artistic practices by allodia's academic and independent artists? ultimately, i will argue that the festival's re-enacting of an historic event that took place during germany's last experience of unity as an european power, was neither a nostalgic turning to the past nor simply a means to establish a genealogy that linked munich's citizens to what was now a celebrated moment in the context of a only recently formed german nation. rather, i will examine how the artist festival of the festzug karl v served to facilitate active reworkings of this past that accommodated particular forms of self representation crucial to new market relations, to systems of patronage within munich's modern middle class culture and to a new status of the artist assertively promoted by allotria. table of contents abstract ii table of contents iv list of figures v acknowledgments viii epitaph introduction i the festzugkarl v: nation, city, and art i articulating allotria's festival ii the dilemma of nation and region iii art, institutions, and the new middle class ii the festzugkarl fin the contemporary press i the traditions of nineteenth century munich artist festivals ii the festzug karl vand nineteenth century discourses on a german renaissance iii festzug re-presentations in print iv the festzug and munich's burgertum v festzug representations in time and space vi the fasching and the carnivalesque iii the festzugkarl v: photography, munich art practices, and patronage systems i the new medium of photography ii the festzug and photography iii photography and nineteenth century discourses on a northern renaissance iv the festzug photographs and community of viewers v the festzug photographs and late nineteenth century munich art patronage vi the festzug karl v, market relations, and munich's malerfurslen conclusion bibliography figures list o f f i g u r e s fig. leo von klenze, odeon and leuchtbergpalais against the bazar, . copperplate engraving. munich: stadtbibliothek, monacensia-abteilung. source: habel, das odeon in miinchen, fig. . fig. fr. august von kaulbach, lenbach and his colleagues gathered in the abenthum, . lithograph for the lenbachiade, , x , cm. munich: stadtmuseum, graphic collection. source: grassinger, munchner feste und die allotria, p. . fig. carl von piloty, invitation to the paul-rubens festival. . lithograph. source: grassinger, p. . fig. the costume festival of munich's artist society allotria, . xylograph published in leipziger illustrierte zeitung, february . based on a drawing by e . horstig, , x , cm. munich: stadtmuseum, graphic collection. inventory number / . fig. fr. august von kaulbach, invitation to allotria's artist-costume-festival \kunstler-maskenfest\, . lithograph, x , cm. munich: stadtmuseum, graphic collection. source: franz von lenbach, fig. . fig. franz widnmann, admission ticket to the festzug karl v, . source: grassinger, p. . fig. franz hanfstaengl, painter franz von lenbach in costume from the period of charles v, . cabinet photograph. cologne: private collection. source: lenbach. fig. . fig. friedrich muller, painter august von kaulbach dressed as emperor charles v , . cabinet photograph. munich: stadtmuseum. source: lenbach, fig. . fig. franz hanfstaengl. eugen hanfstaengl as herold, . cabinet photograph. munich: stadtmuseum. source: lenbach, fig. . fig. friedrich muller, painter claudius von schraudolph in armour and pelt . cabinet photograph. munich: stadtmuseum. source: lenbach, fig. . fig. franz hanfstaengl, franz von defregger as albrecht purer, . cabinet photograph. munich: stadtmuseum. source: lenbach, fig. . fig. franz hanfstaengl, c. von schraudolph as lansquenet with sword for two hands \bihdnderja . cabinet photograph. munich: stadtmuseum. file:///bihdnderja vi source: lenbach, fig. . fig. franz hanfstaengl, franz von seitz dressed as a turkish commander, . cabinet photograph. munich: stadtmuseum. source: lenbach, fig. . fig. franz hanfstaengl, rudolf von seitz with his wife and daughter: costumed a la holbein, . cabinet photograph. munich: stadtmuseum. source: lenbach, fig. . fig. franz hanfstaengl, architect georg von hauberrisser and wife, dressed as a northern renaissance tradesmen and his wife. . cabinet photograph. munich: stadtmuseum. source: lenbach. fig. . fig. schulz and suck, painter eduard teimer and wife from karlsruhe. . cabinet photograph. munich: stadtmuseum. source: lenbach. fig. . fig. friedrich muller. lady in costume from the period of charles v. . cabinet photograph. cologne: private collection. source: lenbach. fig. . fig. friedrich muller, unkown lady, costumed as a th century biirserinn, . cabinet photograph. cologne: private collection. source: lenbach. fig. . fig. lolo von hornstein. dressed as holbein's daughter as depicted in "madonna des biierermeisters meyer", . cabinet photograph. cologne: private collection. source: lenbach. fig. . fig. franz hanfstaengl, fighting scene of five men in altdeutschen costumes, . cabinet photograph. munich: stadtmuseum. source: lenbach. fig. . fig. friedrich muller. jester, . cabinet photograph. munich: stadtmuseum. source: lenbach, fig. . fig. rudolph kuppelmayr, costume design for the festzug karl v, . pencil, feather and water color, , x , cm. munich: stadtmuseum, graphic collection. source: grassinger, p. . fig. ludwig herterich, costume design for the festzug karl v, . pencil, feather and water color. munich: stadtmuseum, graphic collection. source: grassinger, p. . fig. friedrich august von kaulbach, costume design for the festzug karl v, . pencil and water color, , x , cm. munich: stadtmuseum, graphic collection. source: lenbach, fig. . i vii fig. heinrich lossow, costume design for the festzug karl v. . pencil and water color, , x , cm. munich: stadtmuseum, graphic collection. source: lenbach. fig. . fig. ferdinand theodor hildebrandt, per krieger und sein kind. . oil on canvas, x cm. berlin: staatliche museen preubischer kulturbesitz/ nationalgalerie. source: peters, stilgeschichte der fotographie in deutschland. fig. . fig. renaissance beauty. . photograph. munich: stadtmuseum. source: peters, fig. . fig. einer. der edler wurde. . caricature from munich's fliegende blatter. source: dangl, die fliegenden blatter als spiegel ihrer zeit, p. . viii a c k n o w l e d g m e n t s i am indebted to the university of british columbia for its financial support through a university graduate fellowship which enabled me to focus on my studies and thesis research. i would like to thank my thesis advisors dr. maureen ryan and dr. rose marie san juan for their generous support and encouragement throughout this project. i was able to benefit from their astute criticism, helpful suggestions, and painstaking scrutiny. our numerous conversations have not only enriched my ways of thinking about issues and problems related to this thesis but continuously re-invigorated my interest in art history. i should like to thank my fellow graduate students and all other faculty of the department for many stimulating discussions in our seminars and for all their generosity throughout these past two years. lastly, i would like to dedicate this thesis to my great-aunt hedwig englbrecht whose stories have brought the munich of the turn of the century to life and who has inspired and supported me from the beginning of this journey. ! "festivals are like a bright butterfly: how much time, how much hardship and how much preparation is required to give splendor and joy to one evening, when within a few hours all the magic evaporates to be gone forever. "x karl salzle, "das leben im fest," ein halbes jahrhundert munchner kulturgeschichte (munich: thiemig, ) . introduction in late january of , germany's leading art journal die kunstchronik published the following announcement which heralded not only the first artist festival to be held in over a decade, but one where th century costumes that referred to the reign of the holy roman emperor charles v , were to be requested of participants: "kunstlermaskenfest in munich. munich has not witnessed a large scale artist-carnival festival (kunstler-carnevals-fest) .in thirteen years. it is thus very good to hear that allotria, a society composed of artists, took it upon herself to organize a costume ball in the grand hall of the odeon on february th, just like the earlier immensely popular and sought after artist festivals. the main part of the festival will be a procession, for which costumes from the first part of the th century were chosen. this procession will be lead by charles v and his substantial court... committees formed of artists such as defregger, fliiggen, gedon, fr. kaulbach, lenbach, reinherz, k. seitz and wagmuller will oversee the execution of this undertaking. we have learned that they plan to allow participation only if dressed in costumes of the aforementioned period; however, we doubt that they will be able to succeed with such project. as it turned out, allotria, the munich based artist society which had organized the festzug karl v, enforced the stipulation of mandatory th century costume, and the event was subsequently extolled by newspaper and magazine accounts as one of munich's most lavish and successful artist festivals. the festzug karl v brought together munich's leading academic artists, delegates from other nationwide artist organizations, prominent members of munich society, and figures from the bavarian royal court. taking place during a period of social, economic, and political transition that followed germany's unification in , the festival at its broadest and most general level, offers crucial insights into munich's daedalian kunstpolitik and into the politicization of art and culture in imperial germany. as part of a larger strategy to re-assert munich's status as a cultural metropolis, numerous memoirs, letters, novels and festschriften coming out of late nineteenth century munich, underscore the city's multifold artistic fabric and ascribe particular eminence to its lavish artist festivals. given both the obvious import of this form of cultural practice to munich's artistic reputation and the central role ascribed to such festivals in fashioning identity, this study will set out to investigate the significance of allotria's re-imagining of a renaissance past to munich's artists, their art practices, and to their attendant market relations and patronage systems. as i will trace out in this thesis, the festzug's re-staging of emperor charles v's historical passing through munich in , effectively opened up a range of different ways in which audiences could engage with the festival. a major focus of this study will be an examination of the revival of a northern renaissance visual vocabulary in the many representations of the festzug karl fand how this language could both forge and respond to specific notions of identity for its participants. in particular, i have been interested in ways in which the festival could intersect with contested and competing notions of nation in . several conceptualizations of the festzug which circulated in contemporaneous newspaper accounts and art journals such as kunstchronik and zeitschrift fur bildende kunst directly linked the festzug to debates concerning germany's new status as nation. for example, art critic sigmund lichtenstein in addressing allotrian artists' re-vival of a specifically germanic form of the renaissance, stressed in , the importance to modern german art practice of the origins and legacies that could serve as an antidote to foreign influence: "especially the german [artist] needs to be left alone with himself because too often does he forget his very own (ureigene) creative forces and legacies, especially when trying to dress in costumes of other volker. such a masquerade however, is the worst possible in relation to the creative field. ... he must not deny his own origins or else he will sink to a level of empty imitation of foreign conceptions." a particular subject of investigation explored in the following chapters will be the significance (and threat) of current concepts of nation to both artists and to a specific and increasingly self- conscious socio-economic group, munich's burgerlum. at the same time, i am also interested in assessing the ways in which an ephemeral event such as the festival, could work to contest the very notions of nation it set out to construct and image. it must be stated from the very outset that the ephemeral ity of the kumllerfesl represents a challenge for this project. exacerbating this problem in the case of the event, is the fact that many of munich's archives were destroyed during the bombings of world war ii resulting in the loss of important information on the th century. in particular, the extensive archive and historical collection of all munich artist societies maintained by the munchner kiinstlergenossenschaft, is now lost. through research in munich however, i have been able to draw on a range of visual re-conceptualizations of the event. these include, the representation of the artists' ball on an engraved invitation that was sent out to major artists and social figures who were associated with the festival (fig. ); a set of drawings that had been executed by academic artists and exhibited as guidance for the festival costume designs (figs. - ); a graphically embellished admission ticket to the celebration (fig. ); a magazine xylograph depicting festival participants watching the re-enactment of a th century chivralic exercise that concluded the official procession of emperor charles v and which in turn, opened the festival ball (fig. ); and a collection of art photographs or kabinett pholographien, that showcased festival participants posing in the elaborate historical costumes that evoked the th century renaissance period under emperor charles v (figs. - ). the visual artifacts that form the base of this investigation must be recognized as re- presentations of an event that already functioned as a representation of problematic and discontinuous historical events in the first place. complicated and multifarious inter-relations were brought to the forefront by the festival's status as a nebulous and fleeting system of signification, and by its multiple representations which strove to release this practice from its local, immediate and ephemeral frame of reference. a guiding point informing my analysis, will be that no matter how punctiliously such translations into symbolic form were conceived by their producers, subsequent interpretations of visual signs, styles and symbols by audiences of varying viewing positions, are crucial to any understanding of the festival's significance and impact. a central tenet of this study is that the visual materials that represent the festival not only encompass a range of different media each with different viewerships and agendas, but that the various components of the festivals' representations also functioned at different moments in time. for example, and as will be developed more fully in the following chapters, the invitation and admission ticket (figs. and ) served to entice potential participants with images of the event that differed significantly from those forwarded in the xylograph (fig. ) and photographs (fig. - ) that summed up the festzug as a series of memories. as i will be arguing, these various modes of representation and their distinct visual codes did not impose fixed meanings; rather they circulated among diverse audiences and promoted heterogeneous vantage points. it will become obvious that in the case of the festzug karl v, it is the interstices between festival practice, visual representations and audience responses, that can be used to unveil some of the social tensions tied to class formation and national identity that were mediated by the event. so far, late th century munich artist festivals have not been the subject of significant investigation. in light of this, jacob wolfs publication: munchner kunstlerfeste; munchner kunstlerchroniken has served as a standard reference on munich kunstlerfeste as a whole. wolfs objective had been to chronicle all local th century artist festivals, not in terms of a critical analysis but as a form of nostalgic commemoration. however, his study is useful in that it includes many first-hand accounts of both the festivals themselves and of artists involved in their conception. it was only in that this important yet neglected cultural practice was investigated in a more critical fashion by german art historian andreas haus. haus wrote an important entry for a exhibition catalogue accompanying a retrospective for munich's most famous malerfurst or princely painter, franz von lenbach. haus' essay "gesellschaft, geselligkeit, kunstlerfest," is of interest in that it not only specifically addresses the festzug karl fbut also registers a first attempt to connect munich artist festivals to a broader socio- political framework. his investigation also has significance on another level. given the length of franz von lenbach's office as allotria's president from to , haus was able to use lenbach's 'allolria' archives to excavate some crucial dynamics between artist festivals, artist societies and individual artist personalities. since my own study starts from the premise that the festzug karl v must be seen as both a function and active agent in a larger scope of social and political relations, haus' work has been a valuable departure point for me. ursula peters is another art historian who has conjured up the festzug within her larger study of th century photography stilgeschichte der fotographie in deutschland - . peters should be credited with linking an important set of visual materials associated with the festzug, the photographs of festival participants in northern renaissance costumes, to late th century photographic historical genre scenes which were in themselves sought-after commodities. for a more general background on th century german festivals and processions, wolfgang hartmann has been a ground breaking scholar. his publication der historische festzug suggests reasons for the enormous popularity of historical processions and costume festivals in th century germany while putting forth a more complex argument in place of the rather homogenizing concept of "historicity." while analysis of artist festivals has been limited, critical work on the artist society that organized the festzug karl vis also lacking. peter grassinger's book munchner feste und die allotria is the most recent publication to address this subject. grassinger re-constructs allolria's involvement in specific festivals and provides numerous valuable illustrations. before grassinger's endeavor, a chronological description of allotria events had been compiled in the form of a commemorative festschrift for allotria by several authors in . as part of this publication, historian and &\\ovj-allotrian karl salze contributed a survey of allolria's festival which evocatively re-imagines some of the event's clutter and noise; its rustling costumes, rattling historical weapons and props, trumpet fanfares opening fesz-speeches and comical poems, laughter, dancing and insoucient amusement. yet, while providing valuable archival documentation, salzle does not offer any discriminating or critical evaluation of the event's individual components. aside from these two major publications, the artists group allotria has found sporadic entry into art history through monographs on specific artists who had been members of the society. invariably here, however, emphasis has been given to the particular artist's role within allotria as opposed to any critical analysis or questioning of this institution. one point that clearly emerges from these studies is that research on th century munich and its cultural practices has in great part been determined by what is in effect, a very local celebration of artists and of the art institutions within which they operated. it would seem that this focus has been encouraged by the larger political issue of germany's strongly developed regionalism. in this context, historian james sheehan has noted in a essay entitled "what is german history?" that "german local and regional [political and cultural] history is written and read by those in the locality itself." sheehan has also argued that "such histories are of interest primarily to people who share the experiences of the heimat [or homeland]." in short, sheehan effectively points out that in th century germany, allegiance to one's region generally preceded that to the nation state. the ensuing study of the festzug will by the nature of its subject, explore and raise some of the implications and contradictions inherent in such regional concerns. several factors can be pointed to as having thwarted modern analyses of munich art institutions and artist festivals in the th century. one has already been mentioned, namely that these practices were ephemeral events. a discipline that was conceived as a field of study for "fine arts" has been for the most part, resistant to the incorporation of cultural practices such as the festzug. only in the past twenty years or so, have formerly strict categories such as "high" and "popular" art been critiqued, their boundaries blurred or dismantled, and new methodologies been introduced. this study considers itself very much part of this re-dressing of art history. in the process however, it is not enough to merely foreground heretofore neglected media such as printed materials and photography. this study also details the relevance of exposing the real political implications that art historical and institutional categorizations have had and continue to have. it is within the ways of writing art history that a second reason for the discipline's neglect of artist festivals must be situated. much art historical analysis of the th and th century has perpetuated a modernist argument focused on dissenting artists, movements and practices while leaving aside analysis of so-called academic art and conservative institutions. one result has been that the writing of an art history investigating th century art institutions, has been associated with problematic attempts to resurrect conservative official representation - that is the storage rooms full of canvases designated as "bad art" which such art organizations and institutions produced. this has had far reaching implications for studies of munich's allolria. allolria was closely affiliated with munich's art academy and munich's local chapter of the german art association ox munchner kiinstlergenossenschafl. the majority of members of both these organizations produced the forms of "official" art that was hugely successful in the 's and 's century, but which have been increasingly scorned from onwards. this thesis does not seek to retrieve such institutional forms of representation although, many historians have instigated a reappraisal of neglected academic or mainstream artists on just such grounds over the past ten to fifteen years. rather, this study attempts to elucidate the complex set of structures and hierarchies around which the munich art scene of the 's was organized and within which artists of all tenets operated. studies of visual culture in particular in france and england, have set about this re- assessment. however, especially in the case of german art, extensive new research is required to carry out these kind of paradigm shifts. i see focusing on munich's art system and a particular festival that was organized within it, as contributing to this necessary analysis of a larger field of relations and tensions. the present study then, sets out to investigate a cultural practice that articulated a complex set of identities through a range of representational forms. what emerges is that the interactions of allotrian artists, festival participants and specific constituencies within munich's art system were not always coherent. one of my key arguments is that while the festzug karl v and its visual representations were purported to anchor social and political identity within existing political and ideological structures, the resulting visual vocabularies and forms could actually contest the very notions the festival was understood to buttress. this mode of analysis comes out of a reading of cultural historians michel foucault, michel de certeau and roger chartier. foucault's work, in itself diverse and discontinuous, figures importantly in this study in that he challenged traditional modes of writing history. through specific investigations of the ways in which modern subjectivity was and is constituted, foucault proposed a model of history that avoided and deliberately displaced homogenous meta-narratives and casualties. this study's interest in the multifold and heterogeneous power relations between various players in munich's late th century art system is tied to foucault's notions of discourse and practice. on a most basic level, foucault's method investigates the sets of assumptions that categorize forms of knowledge and practices and in so doing, assesses the (re)production and circulation of meaning within social and institutional contexts. it is important to point out that contrary to michel de certeau, foucault sees practice as en-webbed in discourse. if discourse can be defined as a "historically, socially, and institutionally specific structure of statements, terms, categories and beliefs" then, discursive practices refer not only to the set of rules which govern a discourse but the "object enunciations and concepts or theoretical choices which that discourse constitutes." art historian john tagg expands on this, by describing discursive formations as heterogeneous spaces or "field[s] of material acts [and operations]," in which multiple networks of social practices and power relations are at play. by mapping out visual spaces of festzug representations then, this study will examine the ways in which a range of discourses intersected with both the festival as a social practice and with the representations which gave it its many forms. however, foucault himself has explored the relations between discursive forms of knowledge and power and has stated that "where there is power, there is resistance." discursive terrains are always infiltrated with disruptions, manipulations and hybridizations and my investigation of the festzug karl kwill take these into account. o f particular use here is the work of historian and theorist roger chartier. chartier has noted in his essay "texts, printing, readings," that "the acceptance of messages and models [discourses] always operates through adjustments, arrangements or resistances." michel de certeau's postulations of ways in which viewers or readers negotiate cultural productions are important to chartier's work and have also been essential to this study. discursive fields are not static and are thus always open to re- appropriation. as de certeau has pointed out, users of culture - as opposed to producers of culture - can employ local tactics to disrupt and resist prescribed fields of knowledge and power. it is important to note that these disruptions are tactical in that they are "articulations of a place within [a] structure that is irreducible to it." while de certeau sees practice as not reducible to discourse, this study positions itself as working in ways that incorporate the two. the festzug's visual representations in this context, are seen as containing, limiting and permitting oftentimes fissured and contradictory practices which in turn, conjured up manifold and overlapping responses. in order to effectively lead the reader through what i pose as the most crucial issues around the festzug karl v, this thesis will be divided into three sections. section i opens up an investigation of the festival procession and ball with its emphasis on the holy roman emperor charles v , by looking at how contemporary news media presented the event. the festival's relation to germany's recent unification in , issues bearing on national identity, and the significance of munich's regional art institutions and societies will be introduced here. a brief discussion of allolria's genesis, its agenda and its members concludes this section. some of the themes raised here will recur throughout the study and will be reconsidered in different perspectives in succeeding sections. in section ii, the festzug is contextualized within a tradition of festivals in germany and the significances of a current re-appraisal of the german renaissance are elaborated. within this context, the representations associated with the festzug, the preliminary drawings, the invitation and the engraved festival ticket are problematized by looking at their visual strategies and inter-relations. in illuminating some of the central contradictions and fissures evidenced in these forms, the visual vocabularies employed in relation to postulated audiences are explored in light of de certeau's and chartier's arguments that modes of readings can never be controlled. the important concept burgertuin will also be considered in section ii as will be the challenges this new public's patronage posed to traditional art practices. section iii canvasses one more body of visual materials that emerged from the festzug karl v. photographs of festival participants in elaborate renaissance costumes are used to re-address how forms of nation, identity, and art patronage could intersect in relation to the festival. section iii focuses in on the role of academic artists in late th century munich, their modes of production and the ways in which munich's art market and patronage systems were maneuvered around the vested interests of the festival's particular constituencies. ' "kiinstlermaskenfest in miinchen. seit dreizehn jahren sah miinchen kein groberes kiinstler-carnevals-fest mehr. um so erfreulicher ist es, dab die aus kiinstlern bestehende gesellschaft "allotria" es unternommen hat, am . februar im groben saale des k. odeons ein kostiim-fest zu veranstalten., wie soche friiher auberordentlich beliebt und gesucht waren. der haupttheil dieses festes wird in einem festzuge bestehen, fur den das kostiim der ersten halfte des . jahrhunderts gewahlt ward. a n der spitze des zuges wird sich kaiser karl v . befinden, und durch die verschiedenen gruppen desselben reicher wechsel herbeigefuhrt werden. a n dem unternehmen betheiligen sich als komite-mitglieder die kunstler defregger, fltiggen, gedon, fr. kaulbach, reinherz, k . seitz und wagmiiller. bis jetzt besteht zwar die absicht, den eintritt nur solchen personen zu gestatten, die im kostume der bezeichneten zeit erscheinen; doch zweifelt man, ob dieses vorhaben auch wird durchgefuhrt werden konnen." kunstchronik , nr. , jan. : . robert jensen gives a succinct definition of this crucial th century concept in marketing modernism in fin de siecle europe: "kunstpolilik -a word favored by german writers and artists of the fin de siecle to describe the bickerings and the struggles over professional identity, over juries, art school appointments, and so on." (princeton: princeton up, ) . such as thomas mann's novel gladius dei for example^ "gerade der deutsche hat es nothig, manchmal ungestort mit sich allein gelassen zu werden, weil es ihm nur zu haufig begegnet, dab er seine ureigene schopferkraft vergibt, um sich in das geistige kostiim anderer volker zu verkleiden. eine solche maskerade ist aber auf dem gebiete des schaffens das unheilvollste, was es gibt ... e r darff seine eigene urspriinglichkeit nicht verleugnen, wenn sie nicht zur bedeutungslosen nachafferin fremder schopfungen herabsinken will." zeitschrift fur bildende kunst ( ): ; see also kunstkronikl . incidentally, jacob w o l f was a munich native and it can be argued that in , when berlin's art community had firmly established berlin as germany's leading artistic center, wolfs chronicle on one level, represented a longing for munich's former glory as the empire's cultural metropolis. andreas haus, "gesellschaft, geselligkeit, kunstlerfest," franz von lenbach (munich: lipp, ). ursula peters, stilgeschichte der photographie in deutschland - (cologne: du mont, ). ^ many of which have been taken from allotria's own satirical magazine or kneipzeitung. it should also be noted that the majority o f publications dealing with these subjects have been put forth by local historians and publishing houses. james j. sheehan, "what is german history? reflections on the role of the nation in german history and historiography," journal of modern history (mar ): . the conflicts surrounding germany's recent reunification serve as powerful reminders of the magnitude and socio- political realities o f these sentiments. in , germany's first secessionist group was formed in munich, to be followed by the berlin secession in . ' what further complicates the study of th century institutional practices are the extremely problematic nationalistic elements in many of artistic productions emerging from this context. german academic art of the last quarter of the th century was/is oftentimes conceptualized as paving the way for a national socialist state and culture. in my view, this is certainly a valid consideration but too linear an equation that eradicates many of the complexities associated with these two different moments. patricia o'brian argues in "foucault's history of culture" that foucault has contributed a methodology and not a social theory to the writing of history. o'brian in the new cultural history. lynn hunt ed. (berkeley: u of california press, ) - . j.w. scott, "deconstructing equality-versus-difference," in alison blunt, travel. gender, and imperialism (london: guilford press, ) . foucault, archaeology of knowledge, in diane macdonnel, theories of discourse: an introduction (oxford: basil blackwell, ) . john tagg, grounds of dispute (minneapolis: u of minnesota press, ) . visual representations are not to be reduced to discourse in that they are interdependent yet distinct elements of discursive formations. ' m . foucault, history of sexuality, in ed. nicholas b . dirk et al, culture. power. history (princeton: princeton u press, ) roger chartier, "texts, printing, readings," in l . hunt, new cultural history . michel de certeau, the practice of everyday life, trans. steven rendall (berkeley: u of california press, ) intro. tagg . i the festzus karl v: nation, city, and a r t the festzug karl vwas a lavish cultural production during which leading academic artists re-imagined charles v's triumphal entry into munich in . the event was divided into an official procession that re-contextualized charles' historic procession and a subsequent ball that was less structured. allolria's procession actually moved charles v's original triumphal entry which had taken place in munich's multi-communal streets into a more private and exclusive realm that of the bourgeois festival hall. as was reported in numerous journal and newspaper accounts, the festzug was of such large scope that nearly munich's entire artistic community had been recruited for its realization. lavishly costumed artists posing as renaissance figures of a wide range of vocations and status, marched into a splendidly decorated festival hall under the sounds of trombones and brass ensembles. their entry was enthusiastically received by a clapping and cheering crowd of invited guests who had also dressed up in renaissance garb. the pageant wound its way through the hall and came to a stop just underneath a theater box especially designed for members of bavaria's royal household. academician august von kaulbach who was dressed as emperor charles v and his empress who was enacted by the wife of key festival organizer lorenz gedon, concluded the procession. once the "imperial couple" had been led to their impressive thrones on center stage, allolria's master of ceremonies initiated a number of choreographed interludes. this festzug was an extravagant affair which had taken members of allotria weeks to arrange. on one level, its theme and form responded to what its organizers perceived to be munich's position within a new german nation and to munich's specific institutional fabric. furthermore, a specific segment of munich society, the burgertum or bourgeoisie, was given particular visibility in context of allolria's festzug karl v. allotrians designated their celebration as festzug karl v which in the german language, already circumscribes the event's configuration as a historical procession. historian wolfgang hartmann has observed in his study entitled per historische festzug that this was a mode of representation or "festform," that experienced a significant revival in the th century and that "was maybe the most characteristic and popular product of the th century and its historical imagination." clearly, charles v's original entry into munich in had very different agendas and claims than its re-enactment years later. in early modern europe, triumphal processions were central to courtly and civic codes of behavior and one of the most frequently employed cultural practices for the glorification of a ruler. triumphal processions made visible different communities, confirmed their bonds to one another and to their ruler, and marked out each participant's place within social hierarchies. when charles v revived the tradition of being crowned by a pontiff and went to bologna to receive the crown from pope clement vii in , it was important that he then proceeded through his most important southern german principalities in order to make visible and legal his new status as holy roman emperor. precipitated by the size of his empire which stretched from the rhine to the danube and from the alps to the baltic, and in conjunction with his own cultural background of having been raised in a burgundian and netherlandish tradition, charles v actually spent little time in his german speaking lands. historian francis yates observed in her study on the imperial theme in late th century europe that "the revival of imperialism in charles v was a phantom revival," by which she means that the notion of empire was out of sync with the political realities of the holy roman empire which as a governing body, was being challenged by emerging european nation states. in this context, charles v's highly visible entry into munich and other reich-cities had even further symbolic import in that it enabled him both to assert a sense of personal power and authority where he had little, and to spread the imperial theme "in the symbolism of propaganda" when there was in fact, no coherent empire. in the case of allolria's festzug karl v, the triumphal procession had shifted its sphere of signification from the space of the city to an increasingly internal bourgeois space of the odeon. the festzug's acting out of a supposedly 'real' historical moment was in fact a carefully conceived mode of collective self-representation for particular social groups who had come to power since germany's unification in . it is one of the arguments of this study that within the framework of allolria's festival, specific munich constituencies re-imagined history in ways that legitimized and justified shifting economic and socio-political structures and hierarchies of import to munich's problematic status within the new nation state. wolfgang hartmann has characterized the re-writing of history in the context of late th century historical processions by pointing to the ways in which re-enactments of an appropriated past situated modern participants as benefitting from specific kinds of legacies: "the identification with historical models and with the exemplary course of history presupposes the view [on part of the festival participants], that th century civil society is the legitimate heir and culminator of past political, economic and cultural processes. the present then, is regarded as the historical keystone of a german nation which took several centuries to blossom and flourish." as the following sections will develop, the festzug facilitated a re-conceptualization of a specific historical moment in ways that accommodated and sanctioned very new relations of power. festzug participants' selbslinszinierung -the staging of the self in a particular way - in terms of direct descendants of their german renaissance ancestors, did attempt to re-work a fractured historical moment to assert unity and continuity. yet, this tracing out of the german renaissance as a moment of national unity, while placing specific festival communities within a genealogy that validated their self-ascribed roles as heirs to germany's cultural, political and economic legacy, also effectively collapsed complex socio-historical inter-relations into deterministic casualties. while this ciphering of historical disjunctures by the feslzug's visual vocabularies signified on multiple levels, some contemporary observers, such as newspaper accounts of the event, suggest that the renaissance visual vocabulary marshaled by the festival implicated its participants within a nationalistic and pro-reich discourse. this raises a number of complexities. late th century german historians conceived of nation as a pre-condition that was based on shared national, ethnic, linguistic, and cultural heritages with history circumscribing the ways in which nationhood came into being. historian heinrich von treitschke for example, published a multi-volume tract entitled deutsche geschichte in and asserted that the german volk existed as a "natural cultural entity," well before the proclamation of the reich in .' modern historians on the other hand, and theorists like homi bhabha, have postulated nation as a conceptual unit that is based on shared discourses and practices. in this context, nation is not a given but exists within the realm of the imaginary. given the fact that the festzug was discussed in terms of representations of "nation" in contemporaneous journal and newspaper accounts, it is important to ask both how "nation" was articulated in a specific context such as the festival, and how the festzug used aspects of a renaissance past to conceptualize nationhood? as will emerge in this study, the ways in which the festzug expressed concepts of nation were specific to munich and were closely tied to the festival constituencies' vested interests and as such, were not necessarily in line with other enunciations of "nation" in the same period. if the festzug organizers managed to cast specific segments of late th century munich society into the roles of renaissance personas, the festzug'?, visual vocabularies then, could be taken up as one way of uniting members of both the burgertum and the aristocracy under the aegis of a shared past in order to signify a modern sense of nation-ness. certainly, the german renaissance had great currency during the early years of the new reich. the historian julius lessing in for example, declared the german renaissance and its "heroes" as the unifying forefathers of the 's: "our time, with its forceful national revival feels itself drawn to the grand time of the reformation ... [and] if we want to mirror ourselves in the lustre of our german past, if we are looking for symbols of beauty and dignity then we are to turn to the time of luther, of albrecht durer and of hans holbein. that this attitude of mind is instilled in our contemporary arts, our poets and even festivals of our days is clearly recognizable." as this quote clearly suggests, contemporaneous writers like lessing were able to relocate a fissured historical reality into a continuous framework in order to legitimize the cultural claims of the nation in . lessing's statement took part in what was a major re-evaluation of germany's achievements in the th century - a phenomenon which will be more closely investigated in section ii. here however, this evocation of the past and of specific artists like durer and holbein, points to the way in which the festzug's visual vocabularies could serve to rework past historical disjunctures for example, between the reformation and charles v's staunch backing of the papacy, into a unified legacy of use to the present. in this context then, the festival's allusions to a specifically german renaissance event constructed a field of meanings and symbols that aggregated participants into "an imagined political community" of reich citizens and as such, worked to make visible and tangible the conceptual space of the new german nation. in other words, the festzug could serve as a form of nation-space in articulation and dissemination. there were conflicts and contradictions in this representation however, which will be explored in the discussion of the festzug^ visual representations. i articulating allotria's festival when ephemeral practices such as the festzug karl v become the focus of art historical investigation, it is important to distinguish between various levels of representation. the event, a procession where munich's artists and upper echelons of society dressed up in renaissance costumes, was a cultural strategy that accommodated particular practices and vested interests. the festzug's function in terms of explicating social status, was but one of its diverse aspects. complex inter-relations emerged in the course of the event but were constrained to an immediate and local time-space juncture. this is not to say however, that alliances and tensions coming to a head in or through the festzug, remained within its confines. on the contrary, this study argues that the ripples the festival sent across munich's social fabric were felt for a long time after. due to the ephemerality of such practices, its relations and inter-connections are not always easy to ascertain and cultural historians have to rely on symbolic forms to retrace some of the debates and constituencies that had a stake in the event. the following section will briefly deal with some textual representations of the festzug karl vand then proceed into a more extensive analysis of the several visual manifestations of the event. contemporary newspaper reports are the most substantial textual source available to this project. as a genre, newspaper writing is problematic in that it often times perpetuates the myth of objective observation when in reality, its narrative structures are representations in and of themselves. in addition, newspapers circulated in specific socio-political contexts and thus, became entwined in complex inter-relationships of discourses and practices. textual accounts of the festzug thus, took on active roles of representation in that they not only reflected the festival events but in addressing particular readerships with a range of interests and loyalties, actively constructed the event in certain guises. historian karl salzle contributing to the allotria festschrift, has provided a valuable archival documentation of events and personages associated with the festzug. salzle's text serves as a basis for this study's first approach to the festzug and its re-enactment of charles v's procession with all its complex and often contradictory associations. the festzug took place in munich's foremost middle-class festival-hall, the odeon, on february th of . the odeon had been conceived by king ludwig i's leading architect leo von klenze and opened its gates in (fig. ). it was one of munich's first official concert halls and ball auditoriums built outside of the royal court and designated for a specific social strata, an increasingly influential biirger- class. in the context of the festival and its import for the formation of a coherent burgertum identity in the mid 's, the odeon's origins as a hurgerliche festival hall should not go unnoticed. in this charged physical local then, allolria re-staged emperor charles v's passing through munich in while en route from bologna to the imperial diet of augsburg. allolrians had painstakingly planned their commemoration of this event and numerous committees had been formed to organize its preparations. most important to allolria was the development of strict guidelines which could regulate the stylistic authenticity or slilechtheit of the upcoming festzug. to this end, students of the munich academy had been dispatched to the alte pinakothek which held the wittelsbach collection of'old masters', with instructions to copy dress and jewelry from renaissance portraits. the decoration of the festival hall, the music, the litters used in the re-enactment of emperor charles' entry, the costumes of participants and attendants as well as their various paraphernalia, were all to be rendered in what was to be an "authentic" northern renaissance mode. furthermore, in attempts to salvage at least some aspects of this ephemeral event for posterity, participants posed for two of munich's foremost photography studios in order to "record" their involvement in the event (figs. - ). according to contemporaneous accounts, munich was filled with excitement and preparations weeks before the actual festival. a reporter for bavaria's national or iiberregionale daily newspaper the allgemeine zeitung„ evoked the enthusiasm surrounding the festzug while also noting its complex impact: "as is well known, important events cast their large shadows well in advance of their actual occurrence. so did the shadow of our 'costume-festival' as it was officially known, cause an uproar among munich's otherwise innocent population ... one could be surprised by the first acquaintance one met under the bright sky with the unexpected question: 'are you a lancquenet or a capuchin?'... it was very dangerous to be a happily married husband, even more fateful to be the father of an unmarried daughter ... since, following female logic, it was impossible to not partake in the festival while consistent with male logic even harder to do so ... according to unconfirmed reports, seventeen divorces on the grounds of festival-refusal are on the books thus far." through a tone o f m i l d ridicule and irony, the writer flagged the festzug as a social event which could disrupt the workings o f marital relations, while also underscoring how the festival functioned within the realm o f gossip and localized social interactions. this same article proceeded, by describing the day o f the festzug, both inside the odeon and outside. a c c o r d i n g l y , invitees continued to arrive at m u n i c h ' s train station throughout the day and the city center swarmed with renaissance personas: "one couldn't cross the street without bumping into a reformer from augsburg, [or] a patrician from n u r e m b e r g . " when the odeon opened at : p m , guests dressed in th century costumes began to filter i n , under the gaze o f crowds o f curious onlookers who had lined the sidewalks to witness the spectacle. b y pm, carriages with members o f the royal household drove up and their passengers were escorted to a specially outfitted box on the odeon's upper level. historian salzle has observed that "even these ladies and gentlemen were costumed, what a rare occurrence!" finally, an hour later, the double doors o f the main hall opened to the sounds o f a march composed for the occassion by court conductor b a r o n von perfall, and allolria's historic procession made its grand entrance into the odeon. several hundred individuals each with specifically assigned roles and costumes wound their way through a hall that was already filled to c a p a c i t y . a c c o r d i n g to salzle's research, chief organizer and steward o f the festival, artist and academician lorenz gedon, led the procession dressed as a herald. he was followed by a troop o f lancquenets dressed in detailed trachl with spears in their hands, and a group o f hunters, some with live falcons on their arms and others with boar and bear as game trophies. this first section was completed by a train representing unmarried noble women or edelfraulein who carried w i n d chimes, and who i n turn, were backed up by a cluster o f peasants. a section o f members o f the various guilds, craftsmen, burgers and town councilors followed closely behind. this segment o f the festzug was closed by a group o f six disguised convicts and their hangman. in describing the procession, it should be pointed out that members o f diverse th century social ranks and trades were present. these ranged from representatives o f the curia to monks o f various orders, from artists and intellectuals to reformers, from sovereigns to knights and peasants, and included social marginalia like the convicts. the procession closed with the legation o f charles v ' s court, the entourage of the emperor, and ultimately with the "emperor" and "empress" who had been seated in a splendid stilecht litter that was carried by four peasants. upon the entry of the "royal couple" into the festival hall, the entire procession came to a halt and cheered as emperor charles and his empress, portrayed by artist von kaulbach and the wife of lorenz gedon, ascended their festival thrones on center stage. one of the emperor's heralds launched into a prologue especially written for this occasion and announced that a chivralic display would take place shortly. before the tournament started however, a group representing an 'oriental' delegation requested an audience with the emperor. upon being given permission to enter, a group of elaborately made up individuals, dressed in costumes replete with turbans and daggers, presented themselves to the emperor and showered him with gifts and praise. figure for example, represents franz von seitz dressed as a turkish member of this delegation. at last, two knights in full armor rode into the hall on mock horses each of which was actually manned by two individuals. following a tournament competition, the loser was declared outlawed (vogelfrei) while the empress opened the ball by asking the winner for the evening's inaugural dance. hereby, the official part of the festival was concluded and a more casual mingling and celebrating commenced. allotria's satirical magazine kneipzeitung had once published the artist society's ten commandments, and salzle asserts that the evening of february th complied with allotria's tenth commandment's that called for boisterousness and revelry: " wasjedem gelustet, das treibe er munter vom vornehmslen bis zum kiinstler herunter, denn wer nicht liebt we in, weib und gesang ein narre bleibt sein leben lang." sporadic humorous interludes seem to have been staged throughout the evening as a means of breaking up the sobriety of the earlier procession. a n example of such activity was a rehearsed fight that purportedly was to start among a group of peasants. according to salzle, this fight nonetheless took on a life of its own in that it soon turned into a huge gaudi or jovial farce, involving audience members not only cheering for the two parties but also taking part in the skirmish. andreas haus noted in that the feslzug's success should be largely credited to its organizers' clever fusion of "precisely thought out stylistic and artistic display [that commingled] with high spirited jest." attention should be called to one rather unusual aspect of the festival. the event itself was exclusive and only individuals who had either been personally invited by allotricms or who could afford one of the limited tickets for sale. however, munich's local newspaper munchner neueste nachrichten noted on its front-page that the festival hall was opened for a general public on the day following the festzug: "the [festival] committee was kind enough to leave the entire decorations intact all of sunday [the day after the festzug] and thus, the beautiful festival hall in the odeon is now available for viewing from am to pm. a n admittance fee of pfennig, without setting any limits to any further charitable gestures, will benefit the 'society of volunteers looking after the poor'. the hall will be illuminated in full brilliance just the way it was left by the upper echelons of society last night." this admission granted to the genaral public seems to have served two main purposes. first, it enhanced allotria's prestige in that it showed the society's benevolence toward the less fortunate, be they the members of munich society who had not been able to attend or the cited "unfortunate poor" who were to benefit from the admittance fee. second, the ability to view the festival decorations further legitimized^//o/na'.y role as munich's leading artist society. to have as many people as possible stand witness to the luxury, ingenuity and splendor of the festzug re-enforced allotria's local and possibly even national, pre-eminence. delegates from other german artist societies had been invited to first, legitimize allotria by virtue of their physical presence and second, to have them attest to the feslzug's splendor and ingenuity once they returned home. the opening of the odeon to munich's general public must be seen as a similar mode of legitimatization and display. on this professed \eve\,allotria's strategy was a resounding success. for years to come, individuals who had been involved with the festival or even munich's general population continued to praise the festzug as munich's most memorable artists' festival. here it should be noted that the festzug's textual representations might be considered as implying that the festival was a seamless and homogenous affair, one that unproblematically associated munich's aritsts and social elites with an event that could be seen as a forerunner of the modern nation state. however, this reading of the festival in terms of a supposedly coherent system of significations raises a number of questions when set against germany's tense socio- political climate as well as munich's very particular matrix of art institutions and systems of art patronage. ii t h e d i l e m m a of nation and region germany's unification in came about rather differently than anticipated by german liberals throughout the th century. in contrast to germany's first chance at unification in , the german nation state was neither founded democratically nor instigated by a revolution of'the people' but rather, was the result of external political conflicts and extended diplomatic negotiations. essentially, germany's unification was "imposed from above" by prussian minister- president otto von bismarck's politics of "blul und eisen, " or blood and iron. the rise of a unified nation state was engineered so that individual states retained a degree of sovereignty but were bound overall by a federal economic, legal and military constitution. historians have problematized this peculiar way to unity and here described the new empire's numerous internal dilemmas in terms of conflicting centrifugal and centripetal dynamics that threatened to tear what was in effect, a fragile conglomeration of antagonistic forces. these specific tensions have a bearing on munich's festzug karl v. germany's new constitution, essentially a modified version of prussia's constitution, claimed to "form this eternal federation of german princes in guardianship of the federation's territories and in benefit of the german volk"? however, german society was in no way as unified as the concept of volk implied and the aggregation of ethnically and culturally diverse territories and peoples under the auspices of a federal state was highly problematic. soon after , voices of dissent rose and quickly gained visibility and support. prussia's political primacy within the new nation offered one point for dissent. berlin's role as state capital and prussia's king wilhelm's ascension to the imperial throne was questioned by particularistic forces with strong anti-prussian sentiments. the reichstag or federal council, convened in berlin which as the empire's new political center, also hosted and foreign ministers and rulers on official state visits. prussia also lay claim to primacy in national political decisions. the reichstag was composed of fifty-eight seats, out of which prussia held seventeen. this enabled prussia to block any constitutional amendments deemed not in its own interest. furthermore, prussian minister- president-turned-german reichskanzler otto von bismarck, had put an effective system of checks and balances into place that under the guise of a democratic parliamentary constitution essentially upheld traditional power structures and hierarchies. as historian jurgen reulecke has succinctly observed, the "initially exuberant hopes of liberals, to gradually transform a formerly authoritarian state (obrigkeitsstaat) into a democratic system by means of introducing liberal structures, quickly proved an illusion." in actuality, the ugly reality of what theodor mommsen has labeled "pseudo-constitutional absolutism" was hidden behind the shining facade of democratic nationhood. the political imbalances between the german states fanned the flames of germany's ever-present regionalism. as the new constitution severely curbed political powers of formerly sovereign states, germany witnessed the emergence of lobbyists who advocated a new regional patriotism. munich was not immune to these developments as segments of bavarian society were particularly susceptible to this kind of parochialism, given that the state had been resistant to unification in the first place. however, regional strife over status within the national government's decisions was only one point of contention in the new nation. economic disparities also contributed to further splits underneath the supposedly homogenous facade that germany feigned to the outside world. industrialization in germany compared to that in england or france, had had a late start. however, rapid industrial development following had massive impacts on the socio- economic make-up of the german states. the ensuing economic and socio-political powers of a new social strata in control of heavy industry and large banking houses or grofibanken, were considered by many as a real threat to germany's traditional mode of production, agriculture. the cleft between urban and rural populations expanded through the century and exacerbated regional conflicts. due to varying concentrations of natural resources, the southern states like bavaria, derived their gross income primarily from agriculturally based resources, while industries in northern prussia relied heavily on secondary and tertiary industries. while these cleavages magnified regional antagonisms, the griinderrausch of - , the huge economic boom initiated largely by france's war reparation payments resulting from the franco-prussian war, affected all modes of production. the guiding principle of economic liberalism: "laissez-faire, laissez-aller; le monde va de lui meme," was fully embraced during the early years of the nation state and all socio-economic sectors experienced some sort of economic upswing. iii art, institutions and the new middle class the complex changes in the political and economic sector initiated by the proclamation of the reich in , had an effect on munich's art system which included munich's local art institutions, the body of works prduced by the city's artists working within this frame, as well as the social, political and economic relations within this complex matrix of practices. artists of all persuasions operated within this art system and the festzug karl v was but one specific cultural practice in this complex network. german art historian york langenstein has claimed that the th century was characterized by an "embourgeoisiement of the arts," that is a gradually increasing influence on aesthetic debates and practices on the part of the middle classes while germany's formerly dominant art patrons, the catholic church and the state, yielded their monopoly to this emerging burgertum. this development had a crucial impact on traditional art institutions and on the specific constellations of artistic practices to which the festzug gave form. munich's oldest and most famed art institution, the royal academy which had opened in as a private school was particularly transformed over the course of the th century. in , two years following bavaria's newly proclaimed status as kingdom, maximilian i granted royal charter to the school. as the koniglich bayerische akademie, the institution was now eligible for state subventions and its constitution underscored the academy's public function in that it claimed "to elevate the level of national skill;" "to give a public presence to the arts;" "to further the intellect and customs of out volk;" and "to grant independence and liveliness of instruction." in short, the academy was to be a state bildungs institution in the fullest sense of the german word, bildung: to teach while simultaneously forming character. before germany's unification in , contemporary writers postulated art as a powerful remedial force that could benefit the individual and the world during this time, munich's academy was central-europe's pre-eminent art school. indeed, between and , it housed europe's only chair o f animal and landscape painting', a point which signals an important relation to munich's emerging private art market in the th century which essentially revolved around genre, landscape and animal paintings. as educators and self-proclaimed arbitrators of taste, academic professors and administrators divided the teaching process into a strict hierarchical system with the master atelier and history painting at its apex. over the course of the th century, the training of qualified artists remained the academy's main objective. however, with the burgertum's increasing influence in the art sector, its charter's stipulation to make the arts available to a wider public by means of regular exhibitions took on new meanings. the academy's administrative body decided to exhibit the work of students, faculty and independent artists publicly on a regular basis. munich's first salon was in fact mounted in . . and continued in a three-year rotation until . to advance art and its bildungs-function, a second type of state supported public institution emerged during the period: the public museum. munich witnessed the implementation of a number of important museums under king ludwig i ( - ), whose claims of wanting to give wider ("public") access to the arts belied his political ambitions to transform the state capital of munich into a cultural center of international recognition and envy. ludwig i's urban renewal project included the construction of germany's first public museum in . built for ludwig's extensive collection of antiquities, the glyptothek was conceived as a classical temple by renown architect leo von klenze. only six years later, another wittelsbach art collection was transferred into ludwig's second public museum. the alte pinakothek as this institution came to be known by virtue of its extensive collection of'old masters', was also the first museum of its kind in germany. however, if there was one public institution that bespoke ludwig's progressive attitudes, it was the neue pinakothek, which he had constructed in to house his personal collection of contemporary german and international art. only works executed after were admitted into this museum. however, decisions concerning the kind of art that was to enter these various state-sponsored public collections were controlled by bavaria's head of state under advice from leading members of the royal academy. consequently, these collections while public, did not always give comprehensive representation to art production but favored specific modes over others. while both the academy and museums continued to remain largely state controlled, a truly bourgeois mode of kunslpflege or support of the arts and art appreciation, was implemented by a group of educated upper-middle class individuals in the form of the kunstverein. this was an alliance formed between "friends of the arts" and artists to promote a contemporary art scene, and one of germany's first institutions of this type, originated in munich in / . membership could be purchased in the form of'shares', and the monies collected were used to acquire art works for the kunstverein's yearly raffle. even if coming away empty-handed from these raffles, each member at least received an engraving of the painting chosen as jahresgabe. by means of regular exhibitions, lectures and publications, members of the kunstverein actively endorsed contemporary art. in the process, alliances between local artists and burger developed, which in turn, opened up important opportunities for genre and landscape painters whose subject matter had placed them at the bottom of the academy's hierarchy. when shown at salons, these artists were invariably forced to exhibit their works under disadvantageous conditions. in part due to the kunstverein's active promotion of genre, animal and landscape paintings, a substantial market for this kind of art developed from mid-century onwards. joachim grossmann has conceptualized the kunstverein as one of the key-contributing forces to the embourgeoisiement of art in the course of the th century. the alliance promoted art produced in and outside of the academy and thus fostered an emerging market system it must be kept in mind however, that while the kunstverein's objective was the promotion and support of contemporary art and artists, it was essentially run by 'patrons of the arts' rather than by artists themselves. thus, while conceived as an effective instrument for kunstforderung, the kunstverein soon metamorphosed into a mingling ground for a local bourgeoisie in search of social status and identity. as artists grew increasingly dissatisfied with kunstverein politics, they founded their own alliance in : the allgemeine deutsche kunslgenossenschaft or general german art association. as a national, artist-led guild-like organization, the allgemeine deutsche kunstgenossenschafl served to represent professional interests and supplied artists with some kind of social insurance. the allgemeine deutsche kunstgenossenschafl was composed of both academic and independent artists. it was divided into twenty-one local chapters each of which was to oversee to the organization of contemporary art exhibitions. while most of the allgemeine deutsche kunstgenossenschafl'?, chapters functioned in a sense as complimentary venues to the salons, munich's chapter of the allgemeine deutsche kunstgenossenschafl, the kiinsllergenossenschaft, took on a different role. since its first salon in , the munich academy had difficulties fulfilling its charter-prescribed exhibition responsibilities. not allowed to charge admission fees, organizers of these triennial salons were under constant financial pressures, and also lacked appropriate exhibition venues. as a matter of fact, only five years prior to the founding of the allgemeine deutsche kunstgenossenschafl, the royal academy's faculty had voted to involve independent artists in the organization of its salons; the important exhibition celebrating munich's th anniversary and the academy's th anniversary (belated) had been the result of their first joint effort. the exhibition proved a huge success and the academy initiated a series of petitions to rid itself of further exhibition responsibilities. in , king maximilian ii granted an amendment to its charter which put munich artists as opposed to the academy in charge of academic salons. the kimstlergenossenschaft was not only given permission to use munich's two pre-eminent state exhibition grounds, the glaspalasl ( ) and the kunsl- und industrie ausstellungsgebaude ( ), but was also provided with substantial state subsidies. by , the kunstlergenossenschaft had been granted a royal charter by maximilian's successor, king ludwig ii and from onwards, their international salons would become one of munich's main cultural attractions. important to this study is the munchner kunstlergenossenschaft's, second mandate which stressed the "encouragement of relationships of artists to each other and to friends of the arts, especially through the promotion of a common social life." thus, the kunstlergenossenschaft organized regular social events to which artists and members of munich's higher echelons of society were invited. these events largely served to foster what art historian joachim grossmann has postulated as a means of "differentiation and formation of a sonderbewufitsein, a sense of identity or consciousness that asserts oneself as different) while disseminating their [i.e. the artists] own interests in a broader social context." before the kunstlergenossenschaft organized artists on a national level in , numerous local artist societies had already been in existence in munich since the early th century. the allgemeine deutsche kunstgenossenscha.fi was in a sense the parent organization to these microscopic interest groups that had conglomerated around a wide range of issues and concerns. while most artist societies retained close ties to the kunstlergenossenschaft, allotria, the institution in charge of the organization of the festzug karl v, had actually been called into life over a dispute during the kunstlergenossenschaft's general assembly. during this general meeting, the interior design for munich's pavilion at the vienna world's fair was under debate and a group of artists, in particular academy professors lorenz gedon, franz von lenbach, wilhelm diez and gabriel max, called for new approaches to the ways in which art had traditionally been exhibited. before long, this discussion grew heated and kunstlergenossenschaft president konrad ftoff attempted to re-assert order by exclaiming: "auf solche allotria kann man sich nicht einlassen!" - won't allow such skylarking! allotria became the rallying cry of approximately fifty artists who immediately resigned from the genossenscha.fi and named their newly-formed society allotria. allotria was an appropriate name for this artists group because on one level, the promotion of a shared social life to escape harsh realities of the every-day, was its main objective. allotria could call many extremely successful artists as well as a range of academic professors its members and these individuals regularly gathered in one of munich's oldest inns, the ahenthum, to play a card game called tarock and drink. it is significant that as an artist society, allotria was not formed around a particular mode of painting or specific ideologies but around this notion of geselligkeit or gregariousness. fritz von ostini noted in his contribution to the allolria's festschrift that "advocates of all styles could frequent within allotria's circles, as long as they were respectable human beings and [were] welcomed as friends." from numerous exaggerated caricatures out of the society's own satirical magazine kneipzeitung. it appears that their evening carousing was often associated with the crude and rowdy (fig. ). another characteristic of allotria was its amalgamation of academic http://kunstgenossenscha.fi http://genossenscha.fi artists and 'regular' citizens in the context of their evening gatherings. men from munich's upper tiers of society were declared ehrenmitglieder or honorary members, and mingled with the city's most famed art practitioners. this is important to keep in mind for the subsequent analysis of the festzug karl v because one aspect of both these pub evenings and the more official festivals was that they encouraged alliance-forming activities between artists and potential patrons which could cross social realms. in each instance, prominent munich citizens were allowed into what was posed as an inner sanctum of bohemian social practices at the same time as a/lotrian artists were given the opportunity to cultivate new patrons and clients. by then, munich's art system essentially evolved around two poles, the academy and the art market. while academicians produced "elevated" history paintings commemorating bavaria's role in past historical junctures for official consumption, the art market was tailored toward more of a private sector of buyers who were interested in the purchase of portraiture, landscape and genre paintings. this market had initially been opened up by the kunstverein's promotion of non-academic art in the early th century. by the 's however, a thriving system of private art dealers and public artist-organized art exhibitions had emerged. robin lenman argues in die kunst die macht und das geld, that the invention of new reproduction techniques also contributed significantly to the rise of an active "modem, nationally and internationally integrated art market." this exploding printing industry not only fed a large segment of graphic artists but according to lenman, it also created a "visually sophisticated and discriminating audience." to this must be added that the post-war economic grunderboom and subsequent accumulation of excess wealth by specific sections of the social strata, also had great import on local markets and art consumption. art as status symbol was in high demand and artists who supplied the kind of paintings that were popular, had an opportunity to amass great wealth and prestige. the aforementioned malerfiirsten stand as a powerful reminder of this. however, the influence and wealth of this group of privileged academic artists also signaled a nepotism that was prevalent among the main players in munich's art system. since most of allotria's artists were academicians, decisions concerning the royal academy for example, would often be made within the confines of the abenthum. not only were the vested interests of allotrian artists taken into account but allotrian artists would often give commissions to one another or recommend fellow allotrian drinking partners to their own patrons. lastly, despite allolria's coming into being in dissent with the kunstlergenossenschaft, these antagonistic fronts were soon mended and allotrian artists became very influential in determining exhibitioning policies of munich's internation art exhibitions held at the glaspalast. it has been observed that one of the key shifts concurrent with increasing import of market relations throughout the th century, was the academy's decreasing influence as sole arbitrator of good taste and bildung. however, by the academy was still munich's most prestigious art institution. its professors were paid high salaries in addition to holding immense social power. under the auspices of allotria, malerfursten, academicians and respected members of munich society all came together to escape pressures within a capitalist mode of existence, as well as to socialize and to network. while allolrians promoted an image of camaraderie and union to the outside, tensions and conflict from within were frequent. the following section will explore some of the ruptures and tensions that have a relevance to the festzug karl v, and will also investigate several ways in which the festival could have been taken up by different audiences. hermann schlittgen, erinnerungen (munich: albert langen, ); peter grassinger, munchner feste und die allotria (dachau: verlaganstalt bayerland, ); "die allotria in munchen," in kunstchronik ( may ): - ; and karl salzle, "der grosse kreis der allotria," ein halbes jahrhundert munchner kulturgeschichte (munich: thiemig, ). ibid. ibid. "dennoch ist der historische festzug das vielleicht charakteristischste und popularste produkt des . jahrhunderts in seinem historischen denken." wolfgang hartmann, der historische festzug (munich: prestel, ) . this tradition can be traced back to charlemagne who had first received an imperial crown by the roman pontiff in . charles v went to bologna ten years after his coronation in aachen. bologna was chosen over rome as the locale for his coronation due to an impending threat of turkish advancement into central europe. incidentally, charles was the last german emperor to be crowned by the pontiff. benefiting from habsburg politics of marriage and allodium (heirats und hausmachtpolitik) of his grandfather maximilian i, charles v , upon receiving the imperial crown, became head o f the austrian hereditary lands (erbldnder), of hungary and bohemia, of the netherlands and burgundy and of the spanish hereditary lands including its american colonies. it should also be noted that this fragile conglomeration called the grofireich, already split apart in under charles v's successor, his brother ferdinand ii . francis yates, astraea (london: routledge & kegan, ) . in fact, charles v held a great degree of authority within his inherited territories o f spain and the netherlands while the german lands contested his ruler ship. "die indentifikation mit den geschichtlichen vorbildern und mit dem exemplarischen ablauf der geschichte setzt die einstellung voraus, dab die biirgerliche gesellschaft des . jahrhunderts legitimer erbe und vollender der politischen, wirtschaftlichen und kulturellen prozesse der vergangenheit sei. gegenwart gilt hier als "der geschichtliche schlubstein "eines mehrhunderjahrigen neubaues der aufbluhenden deutschen nation." hartmann . in a sense, the festival served as lebendige geschichtsschreibung, lebendig denoting both alive and in process. such as "der munchner kunstlerball," beilage allgemeine zeitung feb. : ; "die allotria in munchen," kunstchronik ( "): ; munchner neueste nachrichten. feb. : ; and reviews of the kunst -und gewerbeauslellung in munich which connect the exhibition to allotria's festival earlier that year, such as "zweck und ziel der allgemeinen deutschen kunst- und kunstindustrie- ausstellung in munchen," beiblatt zur zeitschrift far bildende kunst. ( june ): ff. ' ' wolfgang hardtwig, nationalismus und biirgerkultur in deutschland - (gottingen: vandenhoeck & ruprecht, ) . literature on n a t i o n is indeed abundant: homi bhabha, nation and narration ( ); liah greenfeld, nationalism: five roads to modernity ( ) and hermann glaser, bildungsbiirgertum und nationalismus: politik und kultur im wilhelminischen deutschland ( ) are but a few examples. ' the biirgertum (category) is made up of burgers (components). julius lessing, die renaissance im heutigen kunstgewerbe (vortrag im wissenschaftlichen veein der koniglichen singakademie: berlin, ) . ' benedict anderson, imagined communities (london: versus, ) . the term "dissemination" comes out of a reading of homi bhabha's nation and narration (london: routledge, ). these debates will be evidenced in greater depth in this study's upcoming visual analysis. however, they are alluded to here, in order to contextualize the use approach of the textual sources. salzle was himself a long-standing member o f allotria. ^ munich's bourgeoisie o f all levels, would remain the odeon's principal users until its destruction during world war ii. with only its facade remaining, it has been reconstructed in the fifties and now serves as seat for bavaria's provincial government. unfortunately, merely its address "odeonsplatz ", recalls the building's formerly glorious days. salzle . ' "grosse ereignisse werfen bekanntlich ihre schatten schon lange vorher ehe sie wirklich eintreten. so hatte denn auch der unseres 'costiimfestes,' wie die officielle version lautete, schon seit wochen die harmlose munchner bevolkerung in bedeutende aufregung versetzt... man konnte vom ersten besten bekannten auf der strabe beim heitersten himmel ganz unverhofft mit der frage iiberrascht werden:' sind sie ein landsknecht oder kapuziner?'... es war sehr gefahrlich ein gliicklicher gatte, wahrhaft verhangnibvoll vater einer unverheirateten tochter zu sein ... war es nach weiblicher logik ja unmoglich dieses fest nicht mitzumachen und nach mannlicher noch schwieriger es zu thun ... so stunden derm nach sicherlich unverbiirgten nachrichten siebenzehn ehescheidungen wegen verweigerten ballbesuches bereits in ausicht." beilage allgemeine zeitung feb. : . allgemeine . karl salzle, "das leben im fest," ein halbes jahrhundert . this number might actually be one of salzle's exaggerations. according to salzle, one could encounter albrecht diirer, hans holbein, erasmus von rotterdam, hans sachs and ulrich von hutten. salzle, "leben im fest" . salzle, "leben im fest" . contrary to the standard of this paper to translate any german into english, this rhyming verse remains in its original to retain its poignancy. . andreas haus."gesellschaft, geselligkeit, kunstlerfest," lenbach . miinchner neueste nachrichten feb. : frontpage. the success of allotria's festival in arcadia for example, was consistently measured in relation to the festzug in reviews in kunstchronik or bavernland. furthermore, this new nation was kleindentsch in that it excluded austrian territories. discussions about klein- versus grofideutschland had occupied thinkers throughout the th centuty. [this was of course came to a head again in with austria's anschluss to nazi germany] such as north/ south; protestant/ catholic; industrialists/ workers; aristocracy/ bourgeoisie; and numerous others. werner conze, " das deutsche kaiserreich - . wirtschaftlich-soziale bedingungen," kunstpolitik und kunstforderung im kaiserreich, e . m a i , h . pohl and s. waetzoldt eds. (berlin: gebr. mann, ) . again, similarities can be detected between the aftermaths of germany's -unification and the events surrounding its reunification. reulecke . hermann glaser, bildungsburgertum und nationalismus (munich: d t v , ) . "laissez - faire" economics persisted until the 's when state interventions were implemented. either rejecting and reacting against the establishment, as was the case with the various avant-garde secessions, or navigating within it, like the group of artists under investigation here. york langenstein, per miinchner kunstverein im . jahrhundert (munich: uni druck, ). the term embourgeoisiement must be used with caution in that it can set up a homogenization o f complex and intricate inter-relations. napoleon i had elevated bavarian elector maximilian i v joseph ( - ) to the status of king in , as a gesture of gratidute for his support during the continental wars. "den kiinsten ein offentliches dasein geben", "die nationalgeschicklichkeit erhohen'", "geist und sitten unseres volkes vermehren", and "freiheit und lebendigkeit des unterrichts zu garantieren." ekkehard m a i , "problemgeschichte der miinchner kunstakademie," tradition und widerspruch. jahre kunstakademie miinchen. thomas zacharias ed. (munich: prestel verlag, ) . it must be remembered that the academy's inauguration took place during the height of the romanitic movement when paroles such as "heil der welt durch kunst" (salvation through the arts) were taken extremely seriously. this chair was eliminated in the 's when diisseldorf had taken over the munich academy's position as leading art institution and reforms were deemed necessary to re-gain status and prestige. the efforts payed off by the early 's when munich's academy could re-claim fame as gemany's utmost effective and popular teaching institution. in the early 's, enrollment numbers took on such extraordinary dimensions that the following control measures were instigated: fees were raised considerably, a new pre-school to filter out average from talent, was introduced and cries for a new academy building gained impetus (the new aaademy building was inaugurated in , the year of the. festzug karl v). at the time, master ateliers were deemed extremely progressive and the paris academy was the only other european institution that had implemented this system. just as a reminder, berlin's academy did not have meisteralelieres until anton von werner's extensive institutional reforms in ! it should be noted that until , when the berlin nationalgalerie opened its doors, the neue pinakothek was germany's only museum that built its collection from contemporary art only. these visible monuments played a role in munich's th century image as a major art center as johannes sepp, looking back onto ludwig i's reign, observed in : "while berlin developed into a military barrack, frankfurt into a comtoir, leipzig into a school, munich took on the character of a museum." johannes n . sepp. ludwig augustus und das zeitalter der wiedergeburt der kunste (schaffnausen: ) . "verburgerlichung der kunst" is a key- tenet in numerous contemporary analyses of early th century art systems. joachim grossmann's kiinstler. h o f und biirgertum is but one o f the most recent examples (berlin: akademischer verlag, ). according to lenman, germany's developing train system fostered this development in that exhibitions could be transported to various cities where local kunstvereine re-installed them. n e would assume that the 'price' of these state subventions was increased government controls but apparently, contemoorary politicians consistently refused to use the government's support of the arts to influence the genossenschaft in aesthetic issues." makela . these salons were more than mere exhibitions. miriam makela writes in the munich secession that "the genossenschaft underscored its populism by instituting features at the salons that would attract a heterogenous audience." these features included beergardens, lotteries, concerts and elaborate trompe- ' oeil interiors to simulate luxurious and extravagant settings. (princeton: princeton up, ) . "statuten der miinchner kunstlergenossenschaft," makela . grossmann . the pavillion under debate in early march of , never actually materialized at vienna's world's fair. however, during this meeting, future allotrian artists called for an exhibition concept cohering with richard von wagner's notions o f a gesamtkunstwerk. rather than just supplying paintings for the exhibition room at the world's fair, they envisioned a re-furbishing of the entire room with elaborate wallpapers, heavily gilded frames for the paintings, lush carpets et cetera, to exhibit the works in a context and create an 'overall viewing experience' that incorporated all the senses. when the aforementioned academic professors left the miinchner kunstlergenossenschaft, their student bodies from the academy followed suit. this facility was used until their own club house was built a few years later. the term is so engrained in the history of colloquial german that it is almost impossible to translate it. "verfechter aller richtungen in ihr {allotria] verkehren konnten, wenn sie menschlich geschatzt und als freunde gem gesehen waren." fritz von orsini, "die miinchner allotria," ein halbes jahrhundert . according to orsini, aitfierordentliche (extraordintary i.e. non-artist) members comprised: civil servants, writers, professors, actors, singers, musicians, bankers, advocats, and lawyers. ein halbes jahrhundert . munich's leading art dealers from the 's onwards were the galleries bernheimer, bohler and heinemann (some of these survived into the second half o f the th century). robin lenman, die kunst. die macht und das geld . lenman . it should be briefly mentioned that not all artists living in munich during this perios were this successful. as a matter of fact, a segment of artists lenman referred to as "artists' proletariat" (kiinstlerproletariat) grew in swindeling proportions. the art market could simply not support the great number of artists that had settled in munich in the course of the th century. makela . ii thefestzue karl vin the contemporary press i the traditions of nineteenth century munich artist festivals since the end of the th century, munich's malerfursten and their elaborately organized artist festivals have been repeatedly cited as one of the city's distinguishing cultural features. it is important to note however, that this cultural phenomenon was not unique to bavaria's capital. as berlin's medici festival or vienna's festzug anldfilich der silberhochzeit des kaiserpaares indicates, other cities also put on important artist organized festivals. why then have historians and chroniclers of munich's cultural past asserted this particular artistic practice as munich's unique and inimitable feature? for one, while artist festivals were popular throughout th century europe, munich's seemed to have exceeded others in both size and scope. while it lies beyond the scope of this study to situate the range of th century german artist festivals, a survey of them does serve to contextualize some of the specific features of the festzug karl v. from the outset, artist festivals had been associated with very particular aspects of munich's rich cultural legacy. germany's earliest th century artist festivals originated in rome where a group of german artists known as the nazarenes, were living under self-imposed exile from napoleon's domination of central europe. this fraternal society gathered around similar artistic agendas and notions of camaraderie and geselligkeit. crown prince ludwig of bavaria often mingled with the nazarenes and it was in his honor that they instigated one of germany's first th century artists festivals in april of . no doubt responding to renewed regional loyalties that had been given impetus with the overthrow of napoleon's rule, festival participants showed their allegiance to bavaria and to the crown prince, by dressing in old german attire or tracht and singing traditional german songs or nationallieder as gestures of their patriotism. ludwig, who already envisioned a grand urban renewal program for munich once he ascended to the bavarian throne, used this festival to persuade artists to return to germany where he assured them that commissions would be abundant. when ludwig i came to power in (- ), many nazarenes, among them the future director of munich's royal academy, peter von cornelius who was to forge a name as one of munich's most well known artists, flocked to munich to participated in ludwig's grand scheme of elevating the city to one of europe's leading cultural centers. indeed, so many european artists arrived in munich that during the height of his urban renewal programs, the number of artists out-numbered assignments. this surplus of artists would prove to be a recurring predicament throughout the th century with the result that munich frequently featured a population of artists who, despite branching out into areas such as book-illustrations or advertising, could barely sustain themselves. art historian robin lenman has noted that by the 's a very visible social stratum of impoverished artists had formed, the so-called "artist proletariat." however, the initial influx of artists during the 's also brought about an unprecedented revival of the arts. a major component in munich's re-invigorated art scene was the formation of its first artist societies. the spectrum of their activities ranged from communal outings or kiinstlerausfluge to evening carousals and small scale festivals within the confines of their own societies. a group of artists who gathered around sculptor ludwig schwanthaler is but one example. according to peter grassinger's reminiscences, artists would meet in schwanthaler's atelier where he had created a medieval drinking parlor called the humpenburg and re-enact rites of sociability and exercises of chivalry which they perceived as stemming from the days of german knighthood. in her dissertation on late th century munich academician lorenz gedon, doris bachmeier argues that schwanthaler's artist society was an "intellectual center" from which one of the key- aspects of all th century artist festivals emanated: "the elevation of one's own being, the enchantment through an illusory world conjured up by artists already went as far as merging appearance and reality - sein und schein - in the course of these convivial festivals." bachmeier is not the first to theorize artist festivals as "the staging [or coming to life] of allotrian artists' dramatic world of painting," and the present study will explore this factor in the specific context of the festzug karl v. while individual societies arranged sporadic festivals throughout the early th century, munich's first large scale kunsl/erfest, the wall emle infest, took place in march of . for the first time, artists of munich's several societies united to communally organize a lavish costume festival. its theme harkened back to friedrich schiller's literary wallenstein-trilogy. the wallensteinfest was staged during germany's annual carnival or fasching, in february and set the standard for ensuing artists festivals. from the wallensteinfest onwards, fasching artist festivals were composed of a costume procession with a specific theme followed by a ball. the next significant artist festival or kunsllerball took place during munich's carnival season. this time, albrecht diirer's legendary encounter in nuremberg with emperor maximilian ( - ) was re-enacted. jacob wolf has observed that this festival was also preserved for posterity in gottfried keller's novel zum grunen heinrich. sporadic festivals by either individual artists societies or in conjunction with others took place throughout the 's but it was not until that another large scale costume festival intervened in munich's socio-cultural scene. munich's three leading artists societies, jung miinchen, kiinstlersdngerverein and stubenvoll- kunsllerverein, conceived what was to become the paul-rubens-fesl, which re-enacted peter paul ruben's historic engagement to helene fourment (fig. ). art historically, the paul-rubens-feslwas significant in that it was the first kunsllerball for which future academy director and key figure in the festzug karl v, carl von piloty was entrusted with the artistic conception. each of the three kimsllerfesle shared a concern with reconstructing past artistic vocabularies and focused on particular artists. clearly, possible meanings and implications of such a focus need to be foiled against specific social, political and cultural junctures and in conjunction with the festzug karl v, these intersections will be fully explored. what is important here is that doris bachmeier has observed of these early festivals that the historical themes were vehicles for leisure and social interaction, and crucially, a new form of art commodity: "during the first half of the th century, the high-spirited relief of creative potency in festival-laughter and theater-fun, the prioratization of thematic effects over the intellectuality, of the sensuous over the poetic, was restricted to the close circles of artists and artist societies. in the course of the seventies [ 's], this protected treasure, which had been cultivated in internal circles for long enough, was eventually introduced and sold as the new ideal work of art to an already 'art-crazed' public. andreas haus who provided the base for bachmeier's views on artist festivals, ascribes responsibility for this development to allotria. he argues that the organizers of allotria's festivals, and it should be recalled that the festzug karl v was the first in their long legacy, knew how to "satisfy the needs (schmuckbediirfnis) of a bourgeoisie that wanted to be represented in an aristocratic mode of festival splendor and ornate decoration." ii the festzug karl f"and nineteenth century discourses on a german renaissance allotria's festzug karl v and its re-image(n)ing of empires past (that of charles v in the th century) and of the present (that of kaiser whilhelm i in the 's) brought into play a particular set of visual vocabularies that encased the festival procession in a mode of representation associated with northern renaissance high art. in other words, a specific event from germany's past was reconstructed through reference to a high art language which could assert the interests of new social configurations within munich and the new nation. contemporary newspaper reports took up the festzug's revival of a german renaissance past and its visual vocabulary as a celebration of nation. th century debates postulated the art historical construct of the northern renaissance as the source for an indigenous german style and typically, such references were enmeshed in contemporaneous historical discourses on the relevances of the th century. art historian robin lenman has observed that one contributing factor to a prospering revival of a german renaissance style was its supporters' continuous re-assertions of this neo- renaissance as a national mode of expression, one capable of challenging france's predominance in the aesthetic field. after germany's military victory over napoleon ill's armies at sedan, contemporaries believed that germany should also assert a cultural superiority over the arch enemy, france. in mid century, historians johann gottlieb fichte, friedrich jahn and poet ernst moritz arndt had already been actively involved in positioning what was at that time still a divided germany, as a unified kulturnation; in effect, a nation based on shared culture, whose citizens or burger were obliged to guard their inherited culture from "poisonous" foreign influences. franz von reber elaborated on this tradition in the conclusion of his three-volume geschichte der neueren deutschen kunst ( ): "if th century germans can be commended for their own liberation from the chains of roman domination and for the freeing of the intellect through the reformation, then they can take credit in the th century for ending french predominance not only in the realm of european politics but also in the arts and matters of taste. theirs [that of the french] was a foreign rule that was hardly had any less pernicious and nerve-racking (enlnervend) than the roman was once! the history of our art is thus the history of our intellectual liberation and it is through this deliverance that contemporary art gains its import." as this source makes clear, both cultural and political franco-phobia worked its way through specific constituencies within the new nation. consequently, increasing numbers of critics judged visual culture by determining the degree to which a work either resisted or was permeated by what was considered to be french aesthetics and modes of representation. it must be recalled that these debates took place in a cultural climate that had just witnessed the publication of charles darwin's translated version of the origin of species in . on one level, darwin's treatises on evolution and "survival of the fittest" in part, could give further ammunition to late th century discourses claiming the inherent superiority of the german blood and volk. an interest in a specifically german renaissance had several manifestations that were seen as particularly relevant to the new image of the nation and munich's place within it. doris bachmeier for example credits gedon, who was also the chief organizer of the festzug, with "proclaiming the german renaissance as the new national style in the early 's and thus, setting a movement in motion which was carried by both [munich's] biirgertum and its kiinstlerschaft (artists)." yet, while academic professor of architecture gedon was indeed highly respected in munich's art community, the ideologization of a particular style can neither be credited to a single individual, nor should it be fixed to a specific date. notions of a german renaissance had been picked up by artistic practices from mid-century onwards and the term "neo-renaissance" connoting the revival of a german renaissance artistic vocabulary was already current by the time gedon declared it as the german empire's new national style. a full historicization of the term would exceed the parameters of this study yet, a brief circumscription is required in order to contextualize the feslzug's stake in it. there were several manifestations of an interest in this german renaissance as understood in the th century. this was the case with the design for the city's new civic hall. in the late 's, a mounting revival of an interest in the german renaissance as the source for a new visual vocabulary reached its first pinnacle in connection with a heated debate surrounding the plans for this building. art historian friedrich pecht and munich historian g. sepp carried on a literary feud in the augsburger allgemeine zeitung and the augsburger postzeitung during which pecht called for a neo-renaissance style and sepp for a gothic style as appropriate architectural languages for munich's new city hall. historian heinz gollwitzer has detailed this debate in depth and has stressed the ferocity with which sides were taken. by the 's the protagonists were headed by munich newspaper magnate georg hirth and by august reichensperger, but the stakes were still the same: what historical style was best suited to image a major city within the newly proclaimed nation? the two fronts continued to focus on the respective merits of what was understood to form a german gothic and a german renaissance style. examining aspects of hirth's and reichensperger's debates brings the politicization of art and culture in this period to the forefront. in the new political reality called the second german reich, art was used to collaborate in the forging of identities. thus, hirth constructed the german renaissance as a truly "patriotic" style, and his partisan wilhelm lubke argued that the german renaissance could be associated with both the nation state and an essential german nature. the period, lubke argued, "was artistically valuable and full of life since its main element was one of national experience, custom and culture, and in its best works speaks to our german nature ... let's try to understand and study its original beauty: then, we will be able to find this style as a desirable expression of our own national soul." lubkes's assertion implied that a northern renaissance stylistic vocabulary linked the present with an historical period which was purportedly defined by a strong sense of national identity. a n important part of this argument was that the german renaissance was characterized by a strong biirgertum. in an influential essay published in and entitled "die deutsche renaissance und die kunstreformbestrebungen der gegenwart," rudolf von eitelberger had overtly connected the conception of a northern or german renaissance mode with a th century biirgertum "... afterall, this style was indigenous to urban centers and the biirgerclasses themselves were the real enforcers of the renaissance ... it was the craftsmen and members of the guilds who were the carriers of progress in middle class circles and who gave this german movement its unmistakable character: artistic-commercial, burger i ich-qtticimt [competent] and steadfast." these historical associations were important to munich festzug of . in re-enacting charles v's procession, the th century burger proposed a direct lineage to the glorified burger of the th century. there are many more examples of this kind of ideological alignment of th century reich citizens with their renaissance predecessors; however, as the previous citation suggests, these manifestations were all part of a discourse that sought to legitimize a very contemporary phenomenon: late th century burger's claims to socio-political power. in short, a neo- renaissance mode in painting, fashion, architecture or the arts and crafts could, as ursula peters has pointed out, be appropriated as "representative of a burgerliches as well as german-national consciousness." as has been noted earlier, the festzug's re-imaging of charles v's holy roman empire as one mode of legitimization and historicization of the empire, was highly problematic in that the very historical moment that was re-constructed was in itself riddled with contradictions and socio-political fissures. francis yates' description of the holy roman empire as a "phantom" entity, effectively signals charles v's difficulties in attempting to unify a diverse political reality into a centralized state. while an analysis of the holy roman empire is well beyond the scope of the present study, an indication of some of its key socio-political antagonisms is useful to the point at hand. first, the th century was the age of luther and the reformation. the conflict between roman catholicism and emerging protestantism, tore up entire states and drove a wedge between entire populations of believers. as a matter of fact, charles, a catholic himself, had sided with the papacy and banished luther from the reich in . in addition, political and economic discontent among peasants caused rural unrest even before the outbreak of the peasant war in . indeed, while the th century is usually connected with the emergence of a powerful burger class, the distribution of wealth was never homogeneous. in addition, charles v, who was later to be hailed as one of germany's most illustrious emperors by allotria's festival in , was actually of netherlandish descent and thus his cultural background prevented him from spending extensive periods in his german speaking territories. in short, the past which was celebrated by the festzug as one of unity and strength was in fact a very unstable historical juncture. this historical reality made the re-inscription of nationhood and consensus onto charles v's reich a highly problematic strategy. iii festzug representations in print as the previous sections have shown, the festzug karl v was in itself a representation that revived a particular historical moment in order to implicate participants in a discourse on nation and on a cultural and social legacy that was in itself contradictory. as a result, the festzug's visual representations and the ways in which various audiences engaged with these, did not always cohere with any one system of signification. while the festival as a social practice, revived a particular historical moment, its meanings were generated within particular time and space constellations where its significations were not only fleeting, but constantly in flux in that they entered the realm of memory the minute they were enacted or reinforced. this has important implications for the print materials emerging out of and re-presenting, the festzug. these visual and textual forms worked to configure and cohere the festival's evanescent language. yet it was not a homogenous narrative that was produced. as cultural historian roger chartier has pointed out, "every textual or typographic arrangement that aims to create control and constrain always secretes tactics that tame or subvert it." in other words, regardless of how visual or textual languages are directed towards specific readings, there are always slippages and inconsistencies which act as potential anchoring points for a reader's differing responses. theorist michel de certeau has employed the concepts of strategies and tactics in his analysis of cultural mechanisms. since these terms are also central to this study, a brief excursion into the ways in which de certeau brings these into play is vital. his important groundwork has generated much discussion and continues to stimulate cultural historians to date. in de certeau's arts de faire these categories were used to suggest potential ways in which viewers and/ or readers negotiated cultural productions. contrary to the common association of consumption with passivity, de certeau's consumers of culture are actively engaged in the formation of "systems of operational combination," ("lex combinatoires d'operation"), which also compose a culture, one that "invents itself by poaching in countless ways on the property of others." important inter-relations are set up here between the makers and the users of culture in that according to de certeau, consumers form their own trajectory paths through the space of any text. these paths are unforeseeable and uncontrollable by makers of culture. it is within de certeau's conceptualizations of the everyday that this study grounds its use of cultural strategies and tactics. he calls a strategy that which "assumes a place that can be circumscribed as proper and thus serves as the basis for generating relations with an exterior distinct from it. in contrast, a tactic is that which "cannot count on a proper [a spatial or institutional localization], nor thus a borderline distinguishing the other as a visible totality." it is important to de certeau's work that consumers' "ways of operating" are tactical in character in that they depend on time while the spaces produced by makers of culture are strategic "victories over time." de certeau's approach to the processes of meaning making and signification helps to open up the investigation of allotria's festzug karl v by suggesting ways in which the visual representations of the festival can be construed as nodal spaces that were designed to formulate a tight and controlled system of signification, one that reproduced specific social relations without revealing connections to the systems of power that sustained them. if the festzug representations were configured to actively posit particular subject-positions by implicating viewers into a range of specific discourses, then the degree of a subject's compliance with these representations determined the success of this cultural strategy. yet, regardless of how tightly visual elements are arranged to facilitate these kinds of prescribed readings, slippages in the ways in which images are actually taken up by viewers can never be entirely foreclosed. even the most hermetic representation is inscribed with gaps and contradictions that serve as centrifugal points for alternate ways of reading. de certeau's observation that consumers' movements across visual/ textual spaces form "unreadable paths" raises a serious challenge to any investigation of visual culture. this study argues that in the case of the festzug karl v, interstices between festival practice, visual representations and audience responses can actually be used to unveil some of the social tensions that were being mediated by the festival. if it was one of the festival's strategies to anchor social and political identity during a shifting historical juncture, then the excavation of ruptures tied to issues of class formations as well as urban and national identity can also register the modi operandi on the part of audiences and readerships. since the various visual representations of the ephemeral festzug are all that remains to be worked with today, their visual elements can serve as potential ciphers for tactical appropriations of larger cultural strategies. a xylograph that was published in one of germany's leading illustrated weeklies, the leipziger lllustrierte zeitung. a few days after the festival (fig. ) stands as one of the major representations of the festzug? the leipziger lllustrierte zeitung had started publication as early as and was one of the first german newspapers to include sophisticated and detailed woodcuts depicting germany's latest social and political events. this kind of high quality illustrated journalism gained the leipziger lllustrierte zeitung a broad reputation. thus while the journal was produced by university-educated publishers and editors and its readership was mainly composed of the educated upper classes or bildungburgertum, through circulation in clubs, libraries and the numerous other biirgerliche institutions, a broader segment of society had access to the publication as well. as an image of the festzug, the xylograph depicts the splendidly decorated interior of munich's odeon filled with festival participants in renaissance garb. many of the costumes in the illustration are rendered in such detail that their evocation of distinct estates within the society of the holy roman empire is discernable. in this representation, th century princes and members city councils are portrayed seated to the right of the imperial couple charles v and his wife, with lower-ranking subjects delegated to the main floor. these aspects of the image raise an interesting question that bears on the status of the modern participants in the re- enactment: who in modern munich was allowed to dress up as whom? did social hierarchies in place during the th century in fact influence the composition of charles v's re-imagined procession? considering allolria's aforementioned speziwirtschaft, social standing and connections in contemporary munich most likely played a role in the participation and role assignment. the majority of individuals in the xylograph are depicted with their backs turned to the viewer and are either looking up and onto the stage or at the chivralic tournament in progress just below it. the viewer's point of view in turn, is slightly elevated, facilitating an overall perspective on the scene. the foreground is illuminated by an indiscernible light-source which allows for a detailed display of various costumes. the middle ground is cast in shadow, while the two knights on horseback in the process of attacking one another stand out only because they are projected against the raised and well-lit stage and adjacent boxes. light, placement and the density of lines etched into the wood block from which this image was printed, are used to direct the viewer's gaze through the pictorial space. particular attention is focused onto the enthroned emperor and empress by means of a white banner, the thronhimmel, that runs horizontally behind their seats, thus, making them stand out from the crowd below. significantly, this banner sports the imperial eagle, the symbol of both the renaissance reich of charles v and the new gennan nation formed in . it has been mentioned earlier that allothan organizers moved charles v s historic procession from an exterior communal city space to the bourgeois interior of the odeon. however, to suggest aspects of the outside, allotria's decoration committee had placed foliage and trees around the center stage, which are then imaged in the print. to the left of this foliage and just above what were, in the actual procession, imitation tapestries, more theater boxes are depicted and roughly sketched and anonymous faces extending towards the upper edge of the pictorial space, evoke in part just how well attended the festival was. emperor charles and his wife are both depicted as engrossed in the tournament unfolding before them. a few members of the crowd are shown carrying banners displaying various th century coats of arms. the faux 'tapestries' had been painted on board by leading academic artists and depicted historical scenes from the lives of maximilian i and his grandson and successor charles v , including the latter's triumphal coronation in bologna and his travels to the imperial diet. a newspaper report in the allgemeine zeitung described how these elaborately painted boards were to convey the illusion of precious renaissance gobelins [tapestries] and the xylograph obviously took part in this conceit by rendering the forms as if they were indeed tapestries. clearly, the xylograph was designed to give readers of the newspaper in which it was published, "a piece" of munich's most elaborate artist festival to date. the fact that the leipziger lllustrierte zeitung was a weekly published in prussia and not bavaria evinces the import and recognition that allolria's festzug received nation wide. ursula peters quotes jakob werner, publisher of the leipziger lllustrierte zeitung as asserting the use of illustrations in conjunction with text as an effective means to "increase the vividness and clarity of current events ... graphics raise the viewer's interest and comprehension of the described [textual] occurrences." in short, the xylograph must be conceptualized as a powerful visual reinforcement of the festzug as an extraordinary event, one which underscored both the links of emperor charles v to the modern german nation (the prominent display of the emblem of the two regimes, the imperial eagle, made this particularly clear) and by extension, the primacy of allotrian artists. as indicated earlier, the leipziger lllustrierte zeitung circulated primarily among a bildungsburgertum in which context, the xylograph's visual vocabulary took on specific meanings. for one, this representation reinforced what wolfgang hartmann postulated as a particular function of th century historical processions. according to hartmann, this mode of representation could cast modern day munich citizens into self-ascribed roles as the "legitimate heirs of past political, economic and cultural processes", in which "the present is regarded as the historical keystone of a german nation which took several centuries to blossom and unfold." in depicting festzug participants dressed up as their renaissance predecessors, the xylograph constructed a pictorial space that on the surface at least, worked to buttress textual assertions of the festival's engagement with a particular legacy of the new nation. in the process, the image effaced any obvious signs of current class structures or social tensions and struggles. it conveyed instead, a seemingly harmonious mingling of three distinct social segments from which festival participants had been drawn: aristocracy, upper middle classes or gehobenes biirgertum, and academic artists who could be counted among the upper middle class since they had received an institutional education at the royal academy and consequently, belonged to the bildungsburgertum. in the xylograph any such social tiers are impossible to distinguish. in a sense, the renaissance costumes as a whole, worked to efface differences and in the representation at least, the biirgertum's cravings for recognition appear to have been fulfilled. yet while the supposedly seamless pictorial narrative of the xylograph could serve to mediate social boundaries that were both under pressure and in the process of change, this image of the festzug karl fas providing a social space of unproblematic access raises a number of contradictions. since the burgertum plays an important role in any assessment of the festzug" s tensions and ruptures that were reworked both through the elaborate festival program and by the leipziger illustrierte zeitung's xylograph, this study will now turn to a brief contextualization of this social formation. iv the festzug and munich's burgertum burgertum and burgerliche gesellschaft are two recurring terms in debates about germany's th century social fabric. burger is difficult to translate in that it has very specific historical references and connotations. in the early modern period, it designated a non-noble inhabitant of a free german city who earned a living through trade or commerce. during the enlightenment, the term evolved to define a free individual or citizen endowed with civil rights and by , it had metamorphosed into the equivalent of a french ciloyen and bourgeois combined. together, these citizens fonned a burgerliche gesellschaft which as jurgen kocka has pointed out, functioned as an "economic, social and political order that, in overcoming absolutism, estate privileges and clerical tyranny, ha[d] realized and reinforce[d] the principles of freedom and equality for all individuals in its jurisdiction." historians have analyzed the burgerliche component of a society by the degree of social, political, and economic influence of the burgertum at a particular historical moment. however, burgertum is a clearly problematic term in that it typically is understood to encompass a diversity of sub-categories. thus, one can describe the bildungsburgertum, a formally educated component and one that was actively engaged in terms of culture; the wirtschaftsbiirgertum or professionals of the industrial sector; the kleinbitrgertum or petty bourgeoisie; the upper and middle beamtentum; civil servants, and so forth. it is in fact easier to point out who was not part of the biirgertum: the aristocracy, the clergy, peasants and rural and urban working classes. jurgen kocka has underlined the complex composition of the biirgertum in the th century german states: large merchants, manufacturers, bankers, entrepreneurs, industrial directors and -share-holders, doctors, lawyers, professors, teachers of upper educational institutions such as the gymnasium or high school, judges, scientists, academically qualified engineers, upper civil servants who were university educated and any other academically educated individuals, for example, certain artists belonged to this configuration. this listing of the wide range of professionals who called themselves burger indicates that the term biirgertum can only be said to imply cohesiveness. incoherence and erasure of difference are always part of categorization and rather than criticizing the shortcomings of the category "biirgertum", it is more useful to unravel the term instead. the late th century biirgertum was not a monolithic class in that members shared neither social nor professional cohesion, wealth or education. consequently, large socio-economic gaps existed between for example, multimillionaires and state employees, or between academic proteges and university drop outs. indeed, kocka has noted that "the formation biirgertum proves to be entirely situational; it comes and goes with changing conditions. not only the biirgertum's form but the degree of its existence varies in time and space." in , historian j.c. bluntschli attempted to ascertain that which united the burger for the new edition of the dictionary deutsches sprachworterbuch. o f the biirgertum he noted their similar educations and social needs and added: "they get along with one another, gather socially in a comfortable manner, show collective character traits, share fundamental convictions, and they also have mutual interests in politics and culture." thus in bluntschi's formulation, members of the biirgertum constructed their lives according to collective perceptions, structures and interpretations. that bluntschi points toward culture as a defining factor of biirgertum identity has crucial implications for this study. if a sense of communal identity is constructed through culture, then the festzug karl v was an important cultural practice that contributed to the formulation and dissemination of shared biirgerliche conventions and modes of existence. one determinant of how these kind of social communities were structured can be assessed through the categories of "inclusion-exclusion." this is to say that identity and group membership can be defined through individual differentiations from an "other" or "that which i am not." in this conceptualization, members of one particular social formation not only share specific characteristics that identify individuals as in-siders but they do so, in often antagonistic relations to other social compositions. during the late th century, when a self-conscious biirgertum was still in its infancy, the nobility, absolutist monarchies and clerical authority were declared as one common enemy. however, by the 's these social fronts had shifted drastically and as kocka has observed, a "differentiation from that which was 'below' " in other words, the working classes was much more necessary. germany's explosive industrialization and the ensuing urban growth of the 's and 's had initially given rise to growing proletarian classes which by the 's had become increasingly politicized and conscious of their own rights. one consequence of a perceived threat emanating from this "third estate" was that no matter how divided various sectors within the biirgertum were, this social strata would stand as a united front against the working classes in general and the rising labor movement in particular. the complex inter-relations within the biirgertum have a bearing on allolria's festzug. by reviving a historical moment that was, in , associated with national pride and unity the festzug on one level, implicated participants in a discourse of a shared past which constructed notions of a consensual community. yet, this forging of a homogeneous representation was in effect, ruptured by the very subject it tried to summon. a reading of paul smith's discerning the subject in which he examines subject positions within disciplinary structures of knowledge, provides a helpful model to suggest some of the potential ruptures in the festival's constructs of nationhood and national identity on a level of the individual subject. two key-concepts of smith's psychoanalytical apparatus should be briefly introduced at this point: interpellation and individuation. louis althusser takes interpellation to be the process by which the discursive 'hails' individuals. individuation on the other hand, is that which encompasses a subject's resistance to an ideology when his or her subject position has already been construed in a specific social context. if subjectivity is the nexus of ideological interpellation and individuation then according to michel de certeau, each individual must be understood as a locus in which "an incoherent and often contradictory plurality of relational determinations interact." if it was one of the festival's main functions to represent a collectivity under the auspices of the new german nation, then it should also be kept in mind that difference is always inscribed in this collective whole. the very term "collectivity," stemming from the latin collectives meaning aggregation of several or many individuals, already foregrounds notions of multiplicity. measuring the festival's success as cultural strategy, festival participants' multiple responses and appropriations of the festzug signify a sense of failure, but from a tactical vantage point, these ruptures can actually be conceptualized as opportunities. what i am arguing is that the ability to be represented in the festival and to raise difference, could open up momentary and context-specific opportunities that might not have been possible outside of the festival space. for example, independent artists who had been called upon by allotricm organizers to fill vacant positions within the procession, but who were not part of munich's institutional art practices, gained a voice in the course of the festival. by being included in a collective from which they were usually excluded by virtue of their dissenting modes of representation, such interest groups had the opportunity to make inroads into the festival's cultural strategies, whether they be the status ascribed to allotricm artists or the authority given to renaissance modes of representation as the nation's only appropriate visual language. yet, the multiple ways of operating within the festival practice and the multiple ways of reading its (re)representations still took place within a field organized in terms of a set of dominant discourses. indeed, de certeau's concept of tactical subversions is based on the notion of responses to cultural strategies that are in place already. while the trajectories viewers forni across discursive spaces remain invisible, it is possible when dealing with visual culture, to search for some of the pictorial spaces that have the potential to dislodge prescribed readings. in the xylograph of the festzug published in the leipziger illustrierte for example, festival participants in the image are frequently represented with their backs turned to the viewer. as a visual strategy, this compositional feature can serve to directly involve a viewer in what is being depicted in the xylograph. the subjects' backs provide symbolic entry points into the image in that a viewer 'becomes' this subject. as the barrier between 'real' space and picture space collapses, the viewer can imagine her or himself to be an eyewitness to the procession. yet, in the leipziger lllustrierte xylograph, this representational strategy is immediately countered by the elevated vantage point from which a presumed viewer observes the scene. since it is impossible to be both in the scene and overlook it, that is to be slipping into a participant's body and being a disembodied / eye at the same time, a sense of disjuncture becomes part of the image. this visual cleavage suggests a first leverage for what, to use de certeau's terms, becomes a tactical poaching of the pictorial space. another such area of this image is found in the darkly shaded middle ground. this area is visually even further foregrounded, by the wood-cut technique of xylography which enabled the engraver to cut extremely fine lines out of the wood block, to position these in very close proximity and to accomplish an effect of dark shading. if the festival was conceived as a shared celebration of germany's new status as nation, then the obvious visual hierarchy that is created by these effects between an anonymous mass on the ground level and individualized figures on stage, has a range of consequences. if this xylograph was intended as 'objective' reportage, then it simultaneously opened up alternative readings of the festival in terms of social stratification and distinction. certainly, festival reports in the allgemeine zeitung had outlined how involved participation in the festzug was. indeed, as part of a veiled criticism, the newspaper's article pointed out that the festival actually excluded large segments of society. the xylograph's visual elements at one level, enable this mode of critical reading by their organization of the picture space. the image also suggests that it was certainly more rewarding in terms of visibility and prestige to be filling the role of a prince or knight than to be a peasant in the festival. these ambiguities within the xylograph serve as visual sparks, but the kind of readings the image ultimately ignited were ultimately dependent on the viewer. since this xylograph was published in a weekly newspaper for the educated and as such, was widely accessible among a middle class public, it is ultimately impossible to make explicit assertions about its reader/ viewership responses and conjectures remain speculative. this brings the study back to the festzug. if practice is through representation then the festival itself calls for investigation through smith's and de certeau's analytical lenses. in order to access the potential for resistance to the festival's discursive interpellations, tensions and slippages within the seemingly homogenous configurations of the festzug procession need to be addressed. by contrasting the gaps between the festival's representational strategy and the socio-political positions and ideologies of the participants themselves, alternate readings of the event can be evoked. here, it should also be noted that the festival practice itself is more conducive to this investigative mode than the magazine xylograph in that information about festival participants is more readily available than less secure assumptions about potential reader/ viewerships of the image. as has been outlined earlier, the inception of the german nation in was highly charged and dissent permeated the empire's purportedly sealed fabric. in particular, bavaria's merger with the north german confederation to constitute a unified empire had been contested and it took bismarck's yielding of special privileges to convince this largest of the south german states to adjoin. yet, despite political concessions, anti-state and anti-prussian sentiments in bavaria remained strong throughout the end of the century. in addition, the symbolic nation- space articulated by the feslzug's visual vocabulary was undermined by the empire's actual socio-political conditions which made any affiliation of a traditionally antagonistic burgertum and the aristocracy problematic. in turn, these tensions served to challenge the festival's ability to fully anchor participant interpellation. the burgertum benefited greatly from the outcome of the franco-prussian war. france's reparation payments in excess of five billion gold francs and the elimination of inter-state tariffs and duties after unification, were a significant boost to germany's economy. this period of the griinderboom, or prosperity and euphoric optimism in all economic sectors, lasted from to . encouraged by a capitalist free market system, speculators ranging from industrial barons to small scale entrepreneurs invested in local and national economies and some individuals amassed immense fortunes. it was largely the wirtschaftsburgertum which took credit for turning germany into one of europe's most economically dynamic nations, but with prosperity, the biirgertum worked to consolidate their economic and social status through conspicuous consumption and participation in 'high society'. however, german late th century society often referred to as unlertanengesellschaft, continued to be structured around traditional hierarchies and rituals represented through titles of nobility and military honors. thus, the german biirgertum upon reaching maturity, tended to appropriate "status symbols and styles heretofore regarded as aristocratic" rather than evolving their own. it has frequently been postulated that the growing hedonism associated with late th century german middle class culture was closely connected to its members' cravings for social recognition. no expense was spared by so-called "parvenus" to cultivate an image of "grande dame, connoisseur, or 'man of the world'." during this historical juncture, economic power was represented as social power through ostentatious entertainment and conspicuous consumption. the large amounts of money which were spent by the biirgertum to both stage and participate in the festzug serves as a pertinent example of this conduct. however, the fostering of aristocratic lifestyles and feudal standards by the upper middle classes however, was not necessarily indicative of an existent fusion with the nobility. in effect, as social historian dolores augustine has noted, the "industrial and pre-industrial elites failed to merge... certainly, the aristocracy resisted bourgeoisification and segregated itself socially." money-feudalism (geldfeudalitdt) was definitely considered by contemporary critics as inferior to 'true' blue-bloodedness. moreover, actual political power also remained with a german aristocracy and prussian junker aristocrats in particular. thus, while the biirgertum had supported the move toward unification on an ideological and economic level from the 's onward, the proclamation of the empire failed to fulfill its utopic visions of a true biirgerliche society in that the new nation still left the middle classes politically paralyzed. in order to reify itself, the biirgertum as one of the most important economic supporters of germany's modern capitalist society, fell back on feudal titles and rankings as measure of accomplishment and identity. significantly, within such a context, the festzug karl v represented one opportunity for the biirgertum to emulate feudal modes of representation and to share a social space with the aristocracy, while aristocrats were in turn invited to partake in a late th century bourgeois social practice in munich's most famous burgerliche hall. thus, on one level, allotria's artist festival satisfied both constituencies' urges to represent its members as historically legitimized and as contemporaneously influential social groups. v festzug representations in time and space this study will now briefly focus its attention on a set of two more representations of the festzug: an invitation to the "costiim - fest" (fig. ) and a lavishly embellished illustration that served as an admission ticket (fig. ). these stand in very interesting relations to the xylograph in that they functioned in completely different temporal spaces. in contrast to the newspaper xylograph which was published after the event had already taken place, the invitation and ticket circulated before the festzug even commenced. invitations generally advertised the festzug in terms of location and time while admission tickets determined one's box- and seat number. there is yet another temporal cleavage between invitations that had been sent out well in advance and tickets which were physically brought to the event to obtain admittance. it has not been possible to determine if admission to the festzug was by invitation only or if tickets were actually for sale. some contemporaneous newspaper reports suggest that tickets might have been sold in very limited numbers. this study assumes that invitations were received by all of the participants in the processions and its attendedant theatrics while admission tickets were required by invitees who did not partake in the actual re-creation of charles v's entry into the city. nevertheless, the intricate relations between the xylograph, the invitation and the admission ticket signal the constant symbolic transformation of the event itself. at the time the invitations were sent out, the festzug functioned in the future and then again, in terms of the later newspaper xylograph as a series of memories for different constituencies via the leipziger illustrierte zeitung. this dynamic between the various representations ties modes of interpretation closely to specific time-space constellations. not only did different audiences make meaning of the festzug in relation to their place in society and their ideological make-up, but the ways in which these images could be taken up, were contingent on their spaces in time. an interesting visual discrepancy emerges between the festival invitation and the admission ticket. the ticket depicts four musicians dressed in renaissance attire situated within a space that shifts between readings as an elevated stage, a theater box, or the lighted open window of a renaissance castle. visually, this is indicated by several features: the border of the ticket itself which simultaneously frames an indeterminate but recessed space; the articulation of a foreground casement or balustrade marked out by the lush folds of rich fabric that drape over it; and by the yellow-gold field which sets off the figures and at the same time, evokes the glow of background candles in an evening interior. here, the festoon that is created by the draping of material over the edge of the parapet, functions as a visual space to advertised the festival's date and its organizers: "allotria - . februar ." three musicians are playing horns while the fourth is in the process of beating a set of drums that are splendidly adorned with garlands. the whole scene evokes the opulence of renaissance court musicians through the costumes, decorations and even the instruments themselves and as such, the invitation reinforced the festival theme of festzug karl v. however, the elaborate image on the admission ticket also conveys a sense of informality, play-acting, dress-up, celebration and mutual enjoyment. the ways in which the musicians are placed on center-stage, dressed up as renaissance persona and amusing both themselves and others, cast a lighter note on the historical procession's purported seriousness. february was the season of carnival afterall, and this ticket virtually invites festival participants to engage in the carnivalesque. a quick glance over the invitation (fig. ) might initially suggest that it also deploys the same jovial renaissance references that have just been suggested in relation to the admission ticket. however, the invitation's significations work in other ways. within its visual space, a young woman leans forward while her elaborate dress and hat are set off against a white field. her body is turned toward the viewer and her right leg almost protrudes out of the picture space. her head is slightly tilted and her eyes are in direct contact with an assumed viewer. after catching the viewer's attention this way, her right hand continues to beckon the viewer's gaze into the pictorial space, across her body and via her left hand to the writing on a vertical invitation in the background: "costume ball in the odeon - allotria - munich . february ." this female figure literally summons the viewer into her space in order to read the invitation and by doing so, she symbolically invites a viewer to the upcoming event. aside from its clever pictorial constructions, this invitation also solicits interest in terms of the ambiguity that rests on the way in which the female figure is dressed. while her attire does evoke some renaissance elements by means of the square plunging neckline of her dress, the upright stiff collar and the elaborate gathers and puffs on the sleeves, her look is in fact that of a well dressed woman of fashion in the 's. decked out in a dress that evokes the latest th century style, she can be visually equated to modern fashion plates that had immense currency through middle class fashion magazines. thus, while the text on the invitation anchors the festzug as a historic costume ball, its visual vocabulary overlaid the festival with notions of an up-to-date fashionability. in relation to the admission ticket then, this invitation formulated different and maybe even contentious notions of identity through the imaging of stylish and expensive contemporary dress. this transforms the renaissance visual vocabulary, potentially for some retardaire and regressive in , into an image of progress and modernity. in this context then, the renaissance past was coded through fashionable display and serves to underscore the hybridity of the festival vocabularies while further complexifying potential viewer positions. this aspect of the invitation, calls up the festzug karl vs division into an official historical procession and an ensuing ball. it could be argued that on a surface level, the ball was less regulated than the rigidly prescribed procession. however, the ball also functioned as a crucial rite of sociability that was patrolled by specific sets of social rules, standards and expectations. the ball as social practice had emerged from genteel culture and evolved into complicated inter-relations of encoded conventions and manners which once adhered to, served to form a symbolic community. david scobey's argument concerning forms of sociability ariticulated through the upper middle class promenade in th century new york, is of particular use here. scobey has argued that, "as a ritual, promenading performed much the same function which claude levi-strauss ascribes to myth-making: the symbolic resolution of real contradictions. being and being seen mediated a complex nexus of social and ideological tensions in late nineteenth-century new york." while the ball cannot be equated with public promenading, scobey's insights serve as an important point of departure for this study. allolria's festival ball construed a social space in which the close proximity of aristocracy and haute bourgeoisie was to temporarily efface and reconstitute social tensions prevalent outside the festival realm. adherence to a shared set of codes then, could construct identity and collectivity by marking out festival participants as insiders' against 'outsiders'. it should be stressed though, that this shared sociability did not eradicate real conflict. this mode of self-representation was in fact another instance of bourgeois appropriation of court etiquette and aristocratic codes of behavior. yet with this, the unequal power relations originating in feudal regimes were foregrounded at the same time. within the context of the festzug, this raises a set of contradictions. the biirgertum in actually had the economic power to live an aristocratic lifestyle that the nobility itself could no longer afford. on one level, social rites such as the ball can be postulated as fusing grounds for the aristocracy and upper middle class in that they facilitated concrete interactions between the two segments that while temporal, could also have consequences that outlasted the festival moment. for instance, marriage was one of the few ways in which the biirgerclass could aquire noble titles while the aristocracy could benefit economically by receiving dowry moneys and property. while such exchanges were an important aspect of the festzug, it is important to bear in mind that in the end, the biirgertum's access to aristocratic circles or even the throne outside of the festival space, essentially remained closed o f f vi the fasching and the carnivalesque this section must close with a brief return to the festzug's connection to munich's carnival season. traditionally, german carnival takes place annually in mid-february and is the time of year when social structures and institutions are ritually inverted by a set of symbolic practices and images. immediately following the carnival season is lent, a time of fasting and abstinence which aims to restore order after this turbulent time of the "world turned upside- down." debates around carnival and the carnivalesque are abundant. mikhail bakhtin for example, argues that carnival's role reversal had the power to invert and criticize hegemonic social structures. in contrast, roger charter and terry eagleton assert that these patrolled reversals of hierarchies actually strengthened the interests of the official culture that carnival supposedly disputed. this study positions itself with allon white who argued in for the carnival as a symbolic site of struggle within specific socio-political contexts: "the most that can be said in the abstract is that for long periods carnival may be a stable and cyclical ritual with no noticeable politically transformative effects but that, given the presence of sharpened political antagonism, it may often act as catalyst and site of actual and symbolic struggle. " within these terms, the festzug karl v becomes problematic in that while operating in part, as a carnivaleque practice, its format as a historical procession foreclosed the kind of symbolic inversions and ritual contestations of power that had constituted munich's carnival season. for example in the festival, all participants were required to dress up, but their costumes did not engage in the transgressions which stallybrass and white have associated with the carnivalesque; that is the transformation of "gender, territorial boundaries, sexual preferences, family and group norms" into the grotesque body in terms of "excrement, pigs and arses." on the contrary, those proceeding through the odeon hall did so according to a rigid and pre-determined cultural script which was defined in terms of normative cultural codes and values. certainly, some symbolic inversions can be found in the festzug, for example, members of the burgertum dressing up as princes and peasants, aristocrats playing artists, or artists playing the role of king and emperor. but these do not work as the kind of transgressions of hierarchical structures theorized by the carnivalesque. indeed, the festzug karl vv/as not the 'world turned upside-down' but in fact, the 'world turned right-side-up'. both grassinger and salzle engage in this celebration and alike many other late th century representations of munich's cultural fabric such as an influential article in bavaria's regional journal dasbavernland entitled "das gesellige leben miinchner kunstler," das bavernland: lllustrierte halbmonatschrift fur baverns land und volk (jahrgang ). vienna's festival for example, is dealt with in context of a exhibition: traum und wirklichkeit; wien - . historisches museum der stadt wien (vienna: eigenverlag der museen der stadt wien: ). ironically, this affiliation of artists had initially formed under the precept of nationalistic and anti-napoleonic convictions but would eventually be called to munich by k i n g ludwig i, whose father had been aiding napoleon against prussia. in , a decree was passed that outlawed the wearing of altdeutsche trachl in public as "expression of rapturous and revolutionary convictions" (als ausdruck schwarmerischer revolutionarer gesinnung). wolf . w o l f . cornelius should be credited for introducing a classicizing mode of painting to audiences in bavaria's capital. to this day, his elaborate fresco cycle in the ludwigskirche stands testimony to his impetus. lenman . ^ later in his career, when schwanthaler had become a wealthy and recognized artist, he actually built a 'medieval' castle in the isar-valley, the burg schwaneck. there, he gathered his friends to re-enact lavish battles and historic scenes adapted from the middle ages. wolf ff. "die erhohung des eigenen daseins, die verzauberung der wirklichkeit durch die selbst geschaffene scheinwelt ging hier bereits soweit, dab sein und schein bei den geselligen festen ineinander ubergingen." doris bachmeier. lorenz gedon - . inaugural diss. ludwig maximilians universitat munchen (munich: uni druck, ) . haus as well as klaus eggert have observed this "schauspielerische verlebendigung ihrer [allotrian] bilderwelt," w o l f . grassinger . haus . w o l f . grassinger . "in der ersten halfte des . jahrhunderts war "die ubermutige entlastung der kreativen potenzen in fest-ulk und theatergaudi, im vorrang des stofflichen vor dem geistigen, des sinnlichen vor dem poetischen" ( ) nur auf den engeren kreis der kunstler und der kunstlergesellschaften beschrankt gewesen. im laufe der er jahre wurde dieser gehiitete schatz, der lange genug im internern kreis kultiviert worden war, gehoben und der kunstbegeisterten offentlichkeit als neue ideale kunstwerke vorgefuhrt und verkauft. bachmeier . "dem schmuckbediirfnis einer iippigen, auf adelige representation schielenden bourgeoisie mit festglanz und kunstvoller dekoration zu dienen suchte." haus . ' it must be clarified that in the following discussion on the german renaissance, this study will employ festzug as encompassing b o t h the festival and the photographic representations of its participants. lenman f. "haben die deutschen das verdienst, im sechzehnten jahrhundert die fesseln der romischen herrschaft gebrochen und durch die reformation die geister befreit zu haben, so konnen sie im neunzehntern das kaum geringere beanspruchen, in europa dem franzosischen ubergewicht nicht nur in der politik, sondern auch im reiche der kunst und des geschmacks ein ende bereitet zu haben. es war das aber eine fremdherrschaft, die kaum weniger verderblich und entnervend auf die welt lastete, als einst die romische! die geschichte unserer heutigen kunst ist daher zugleich die unserer geistigen befreiung und erhalt erst durch sie ihre bedeutung." in wolfgang frhr. von lohneysen, "einfluss der reichsgriindung von auf kunst und kunstgeschmack in deutschland," zeitschrift fur religions- und geisteseeschichte ( ): . which is not to say that this study ascribes to the rather simplistic and linear theory of third reich nazism growing directly out of late th century nationalistic discourses. bachmeier . lorenz gedon was also munich's leading voice for the kunstgewerbe-bewegung (arts and crafts movement). he was a relentless advocate for the recognition of arts and crafts objects as (high) art forms. pecht published a number of influential art historical books (deutsche kunstler im . jahrhundert ( ) and die miinchner kunst in ) as well germany's influential art historical magazine kunst for alle ( onwards). heinz gollwitzer, "zum fragenkreis architekturhistorismus und politische ideologie," zeitschrift fur kunstgeschichte ( ): - . hirth in gollwitzer . "denn vor alien dingen liegt in ihm ein element echt nationaler anschauung, sitte und kultur, und er spricht in seinen besten werken unsere deutsche art an ... suchen wir ihn also zu verstehen und auf seine orginale schonheit hin zu studieren: dann werden wir fur unser nationales wesen in ihm einen erwiinschten ausdruck gewinnen." wilhelm lubke, geschichte der deutschen renaissance ( ) in gollwitzer . "aber vorallem war diese kunstrichtung heimisch in den slddlen und die bitrgerlichen gewerbe waren daselbst die eingent/ichen trdger der renaissance geworden ... und es waren die handwerker und angehorige der gilden, die trager des fortschritts in biirgerlichen kreisen, die der deutschen bewegung ihre unverwechselbare pragung gegeben hatten: kunstlerisch-gewerblich, burgerlich-tuchtig und charaktervoll." eitelsberger in lenman . it is interesting to note that burger in this context meant citizen but that late th century social realities made a reading o f the term burger much more specific; in effect, some burger were given greater biirgerlich [er] status than others. peters roger chartier, new cultural history . michel de certeau, practice o f everyday life (berkeley: u of california press, ) xi. once this space has been constructed however, de certeau is quick to point out that "although they are composed with the vocabularies o f established languages (...) and although they remain subordinated to the prescribed syntactical forms (...), the trajectories trace out the ruses o f other interests and desires that are neither determined nor captured by the systems in which they develop, de certeau xyiii. de certeau xix. de certeau xviii. leipzig was an important intellectual center in prussia, not bavaria! xylography is a technique of wood engraving that was developed in the early th century and was closely tied to the emergence of the newspaper press. to increase the speed and quality o f print making, xylography was invented as a technique that facilitated an easier handling or the wood block in that the blocks were no longer cut longitudinally but across the trunk. this made a richer gradation of tone values possible (by use of a copper engraving burins instead of knives). printmaking tecchniques: a guide to the process and history of original print-making. a . j. weelen ed. (london: octupus book ltd., ). a number of subsequently famous german artists have worked for the leipziger illustrierte before being able to sustain themselves through painting alone. allgemeine zeitung feb. : . peters . hartmann . a distinct literature on german history deals exclusively with the burgertum, the so-called burgertum sforschung. wolfgang mommsen and jiirgen kocka are but two historians who have contributed significantly to this field. this study's discussion was greatly stimulated and informed by the three-volume collection of essays burgertum im . jahrhundert. edited by jiirgen kocka (gottingen: vandenhock & ruprecht, ). kocka (vol. i) . this study uses the term burgertum when referring to the range of professions just outlined but excluding the kleinbi'trgertum. tradesmen, small scale merchants, restaurant owners et cetera, became increasingly segregated from the burgertum which evolved into delineating a propertied (besitzbiirgertum) and educated bourgeoisie (bildungsbiirgertum) throughout the late th century. also, this study will employ the term upper middle class interchangeably with burgertum. "die formation burgertum erweist sich als durch und durch konstellationsabhangig; sie entsteht und vergeht mit sich wandelnden konstellationen. nicht nur die art des btirgertums, sondern auch der grad seiner existenz variiert in zeit und raum," kocka . "sie versthen sich wechselseitig leicht, finden sich gesellschaftlich bequem zusammen, zeigen gemeinsame charakterziige, haben gemeinsame grundanschauungen, sie haben auch gemeinsame interessen der kultur und der politik." kocka these notions are based on a reading of michel de certeau's heterologies: discourse on the others (minneapolis: university of minnesota press, n.d). ^ the role of reading societies (lesegesellschaften), freemasonry, social clubs and student corps in relation to the emergence of a middle class public sphere and identity has been well documented by scholars such as york langenstein, der munchner kunstverein im . jahrhundert (munich: uni druck, ). "die abgrenzung 'nach unten'." kocka . kocka - . paul smith, discerning the subject (minneapolis: u o f minnesota press, ). de certeau xi. * "the beautiful, just like the sunlight, and the warmth, must be accessible to everyone since such things belong to the innermost nature of the world" read the allgemeine zeitung feb. : . these included the right to retain its own postal and telegraph system, its own railroads, the rights to affirm command over its army in peace time and most importantly kulturhoheit or autonomy in cultural and educational matters. see for example, a letter written in by artist august endell to a cousin in berlin after his arrival in munich. endell describes the hostilities he encountered as a prussian newcomer as follows: " [there are] enough bavarians who are nationally oriented, but [there are] many more who are so stubbornly and idiotically particularistic that one might think they had lost their minds." makela . the word griinder translates into founder and refers directly to the founding of the reich. it is worth noting that the english and french middle and upper middle classes were engaged in this same process much earlier in the th century. the german biirgertum's late blossoming must be largely attributed to germany's delayed industrialization which only took place from the 's/ 's onward. it can be argued that germany's rapid transformation from a predominantely agrarian to industrial society (within less than years) had more severe social repercussions than in other european societies where this same change was brought on more gradually. k o c k a . dolores augustine, patricians and parvenues (london: berg publishers, ) . augustine . the satirical print, einer der edler wurde (fig. ) sums up these contentions. its title translates into "one who turned noble" but the prefix edel is also used in the german language to elevate the regular to something special (for example in this image, an edelfink is not just a regular finch but a very rare and exotic one). this representation also constructs a parvenue who has come into money and lives the life of an aristocrat so ostentatiously that any sense of social grace is lacking. while this satirical image is highly exaggerated, it still speaks to the conditions in german society from the 's onward. augustine . imperial germany is often characterized as being plagued by a title craze (titelsucht), but it should also be noted that in a society organized by principle of birthright as opposed to principle of achievement, real socio-political power came with such titles. for example, to gain access into the military or the higher civil service, a von was mandatory. augustine quotes the going rate for baron as one million marks ( ). late th century title mania and parvenues are taken up as current issues in heinrich mann's novels which he used as a medium to analyze relations between the reich's different social classes. in novels such as der untertan or schralaffenland. mann proposed griinderzeit-society as fostering a culture of parvenues whose unrestrained and frenzied obsession with social titles rendered them ultimately politically and socially impotent. the admission ticket available to this study has obiously not been used since neither box- nor seat number have been assigned to the designated blank-spots. information about allotria's festival in arcadia establishes that tickets for this festival were sold publically but that the prices were high and only an elite could afford to participate in the eveny (wolf ). it has to also be remembered that with any kunstlerfest, further expense was also occured by the required costumes and props. on a superficial level it could be argued that the invitation addressed the ball and the admission ticket the procession. however, representational boundaries are never that clear and in context of the actual festival practice they in fact collapsed. during the ball, festival participants actually might have had greater license for appropriation or even subverting strict social etiquette since they were partially disguised in renaissance costume. david scobey, "anatomy of the promenade," social history, may : . kocka also cautions his readers that the actual inter-weaving of aristocracy and upper middle classes was less pronounced in th century germany than in contemporary england, france or italy. he cites statistical data which indicates that % of sons and % of daughers of germany's richest entrepreneurs and captialist (i.e. bankers) married into the pre-industrial elite. while these are not small numbers, they nonetheless indicate less o f a merging than often times asserted. kocka . a term coined by mikhail bakhtin who was one of the first to contribute to the understanding of the carnivalesque through his influential 's study rabelais and his world, trans. h . iswolsky (cambridge: m i t press, ). roger chartier, cultural history: between practices and representations, trans. l . cochrane (cambridge: polity press, ) terry eagleton in stallybrass and white eds., the politics and poetics of transgression (cornell: u p , ). their introduction includes an excellent in-depth discussion of the various debates and positions on carnival and the carnivalesque. allon white in stallybrass and white . stallybrass and white . hi the festzuskarl v: photography, art practices and patronage systems i the new medium of photography one more body of visual representations of the festzug karl fhas survived until today in the form of an extensive set of photographs. the majority of these represent distinct festival participants in their renaissance costumes while others show groups of individuals re-enacting historical scenes. a point of interest here, lies in the fact that these photographs were not taken directly at the festival itself but at munich's leading photography studios of franz hanfstaengl and friedrich muller where festival participants posed in their costumes. there is a clear distinction to be drawn then, between the costuming within the ball and the photographs of festival participants in costume. these two separate modes of representation and display are not to be collapsed. photography had been introduced in munich shortly after the french government publicized daguerre and nieple's photographic process in . the same year, munich academic professors of painting von steinheil and von kobell experimented with this new medium, and two of their photographs of the ludwig i's glyptothek were exhibited in munich's kunstverein. with this, the stage for a critical reception of photography as a new medium was set. critics vacillated between hailing photography as a new mode of understanding of what one contemporary observer called "reality itself," or considering photography as an art form. according to one th century german commentator for example, "photography makes it possible to inspect reality or wirklichkeit, up close in the comforts of one's own home." acknowledging this medium's potential, this critic underlined its documentary rather than transformative or artistic powers, "since it does little other than copying lifeless nature [nature meaning all of the external world here]; to observe and grasp the living through intellect or geist, is foreign to photography." judging from this statement, this one commentator did not see photography as a threat to art or to painting which typically in the th century were viewed as transforming the external world through the medium of the artists' intellect and temperament. in the course of the 's, portrait photography quickly established an important market for itself in that photography's postulated objectivity served th century interests in empirical observation and physiognomy. as cheaper plates replaced expensive silver ones, the cost of photographic reproductions decreased and critics' concern with photography's increasing 'mass appeal' gained resonance. with an ensuing popularity of photographic productions such as disderi's cartes-de-visile, the perceived gap between cheap 'mass' photography and expensive 'art' photography widened and so called kunslfotographen (art photographers) began to insist on the artistic value of their mode of representation. thus, in an essay entitled "die kunstwurde der photographie", ernest raulbach claimed that: "photography, in and of itself a blossom of science, becomes an art form when entrusted to the hands of an artist." this discussion of course, was deeply entwined with vested economic interests. photographer hanfstaengl, whose studio was one of the sites for the festzug photographs, was a particularly popular and successful art photographer in munich. he had been court photographer to maximilian ii and again to ludwig ii which, in light of the fierce competition for the license as hojphotograph, was not only an accomplishment but indicated as well his high status among the photographic community and munich society. the following undoubtedly exaggerated and cynical contemporary motto is indicative of his reputation: "one didn't know rome unless one had seen the pope, one didn't know munich unless one had been burned onto a photographic plate by hanfstaengl." today, the photographs of festzug participants are mostly in private possession but through research in munich, i was able to locate a considerable portion of hanfstaengl's photographs in the stadtmuseum's maillinger sammlung. obviously, caution is required when viewing these images in the context of a museum archive in that such collections have assembled images into a coherent unit which was not the case in . prior to the formation of this archive, the photographs were seen as a singular body of work only once, when shown in at hanfstaengl's and midler's studios for clients' perusal. the photographs were subsequently sold as individual kabinett photographien, which meant that they were dispersed among the households of festival participants. ii t h e festzug karl f a n d photography at this point, it is important to call attention to the fact that the use of photography to represent the festzug karl v was unprecedented. allotrids artist festival broke with a tradition that dated back to baroque court festivals. from the th century onwards, it had been common to collect etchings and/ or engravings for commemorative booklets or folders that were published after a festival or procession. in fact, even the aforementioned early th century festivals such as the albrecht-diirer-fest or the paul-rubens-fesl which have been cited earleir, still stimulated representations in printed form. photography as a mode of representation fox allotria'?, festzug established a new tradition and from on, photographs were taken of all major munich artist festivals. the festzug photographs can be divided into three categories: several show single male and female figures dressed up as a wide variety of renaissance figures (figs. - and - ). their enacted personas range from knight, herald, lansquenet, artist, and emperor to biirgerinnen of various backgrounds and even a daughter of an artist who is shown kneeling as a pious renaissance maiden in prayer (fig. ). a second category (figures to ) is composed of couples in renaissance costumes, again depicted as filling various socio-historical ranks. a third category is comprised of historical genre scenes (figs. and ) which, for example, re-staged a skirmish between five lansquenets. a closer examination of the first two categories, reveals that most subjects are either seated or standing in front of a dark background, each in a similar frontal pose, with sparse pieces of furniture indicating an altdeutsches or old german renaissance interior. in these, the lighting focuses on facial expressions as well as elaborate costumes, marking them out in terms of empirical accuracy. an upper-class burgerin (fig. ) for example, stands in a dignified position with her back straight and her left hand touching the folds of her exquisite dress, all visual clues that are reminiscent of painted portraits of rulers of elites from past epochs. another female figure who is depicted as part of a renaissance couple (fig. ) and is seated in an armchair, evokes the traditon of throne-portraits of past rulers. male figures in all photographs project an air of confidence by directing their gaze to the camera lens and situating themselves in a proud and erect posture (figs. - ). these stylistic aspects of the festzug photographs in conjunction with the costumes worn by their sitters, convey a sense of formal coherence which at best, was highly contrived. a l l photographs display their subjects in what functioned as german renaissance dress, all featured appropriate accessories such as jewelry, hats, shoes and other props, including the occasional dagger and sabre. preliminary sketches (figs. - ) from which the costume patterns were to be developed, assured this form of coherence. karl salzle has pointed out a set of approximately one hundred costume sketches all of which are now also part of the maillinger sammlung. allotria's costume-committee, largely composed of painting professors from the munich academy, had sent academic students to the alte pinakothek a few weeks prior to the festzug. there, they copied th century fashions from the extensive wittelsbach collection of paintings by holbein, durer, cranach and other northern renaissance painters. these sketches, some of which were even done by professors of the academy such as august von kaulbach or karl seitz, are highly competent pencil drawings enhanced with watercolor. after the academic students returned with their sketches, they were subsequently exhibited in the public space of the pub, the abenthum, so that guests invited to the festzug could choose patterns for their tailors to execute. they give seemingly precise renderings of th century fashions which are especially elaborate and detailed when suggesting women's costumes (fig. ). the sketches range from depicting playful costumes for young women, to uniforms for lansquenets including appropriate weaponry, to more severe attires for the middle aged burger. these drawings and watercolors underscore the festzug's objective of reconstructing an all-encompassing, lively and historically accurate image of german renaissance society. significantly, this involved pre-festival agenda was deemed necessary by organizers who strove for a truthfulness or stilechlheil of attire as worn during the period of charles v . here again, allotria's kiinstlerball set a precedent in relation to earlier festivals in that up until this point, it had been a common practice to rent costumes from theaters or special carnival stores. viewing the photographs in the stadtmuseum's storage rooms makes their coherence on multiple levels even more compelling. couples for example re-invented themselves as renaissance husband and wife. in one such image (fig. ) the viewer is confronted with what appears to be a renaissance aristocratic family including their young child. the patriarch is dressed in a coat with ermine collar and trousers that are bound at his knees with white tights underneath. his hat indicates his supposedly elevated status in a court hierarchy, and combined with an elaborate chain around his neck, he calls up associations with one of holbein's well known paintings of henry viii. his stoutness, his beard and in particular his right hand resting on his hip displaying his 'casual' authority, makes this allusion to henry viii as painted by holbein even more pertinent. his wife is portrayed in a dress that is cut to evoke conventional northern renaissance patterns: it is velvet with a squared low neckline, a high waistline and fitted bodice that opens up into an elaborately patterned under-dress. her sleeves are loose from shoulders to elbow where they tighten up and sport what seems to be fur ruffles. a choker of precious stones re-asserts the opulence of her attire. their son is also dressed in a typical northern renaissance outfit with a similar squared neckline and white ruffle-collar and a medallion around his neck. he is wearing tights and a velvet overcoat gathered at the waist with a corded sash. in comparison to the two individual subjects briefly analyzed earlier, this renaissance couple is certainly more opulently and luxuriously dressed, suggesting their festzug status as aristocracy. iii photography and th century discourses on a northern renaissance that these photographs deliberately evoke for the viewer forms of northern renaissance painting was no coincidence. as has been noted earlier, organizers and participants of the festival deliberately dressed and acted as renaissance personas to insert themselves into a very specific german historical genealogy. the photographs did not rupture this aspect in fact, they encased the festzug's historical reconstruction into a high art vocabulary, one which reinforced artistic traditions of naturalism and realism which by the th century was seen as the typical feature of a northern renaissance vocabulary. the use of photography to convey these notions was in turn, highly significant in that th century photography was in itself understood as a medium of the real. it should be recalled here, that the festzug's all encompassing cultural strategy of recycling a northern renaissance visual vocabulary did not stand in isolation during the 's but operated within a larger constellation of events. as i have shown earlier, the northern renaissance in general and its germanic aspects in particular, were a current focus at this time. historical genre painting emerged as a popular mode of representation in germany. in her study on th century photographic stilgeschichte, ursula peters refers to paintings such as theodor hildebrandt's der krieger und sein kind (fig. ). this painting is in effect a genre scene that cast its protagonists in primarily th century attire and costume while lacing its subject matter with highly sentimental overtones. a father in full th century military uniform is holding his young child, as he either has just returned from war or is about to leave for it. these historical genre paintings received increasing attention and as peters asserts, their taking of "[ th century] ideal of a good middle-class domesticity back to the epoch of the renaissance" was especially popular with a middle-class audience. at the time the festival photographs were produced and circulated in munich, an entire photographic genre of individuals in costume, so called kostumstiicke or costume pieces developed a market of its own. photographers engaged in this mode of representation simply dressed their subjects in historical costumes and took portraits of them. in this context, the festival photographs could have been understood by contemporary viewers as re-constructing a specific event, that is the festzug, or they could have been read as generic costume pieces. in her study of various modes of th century photography, peters has linked photographic costume pieces to mid th century historical genre paintings. while such causal links are problematic, it can certainly be asserted that the 's and 's proved a fertile ground for these kinds of photographic reproductions of which the anonymous "renaissance beauty" (fig. ), photographed as early as , is but one example. this study has devoted much attention to connecting a revival of a renaissance visual vocabulary with the emergence of an increasingly powerful and self-conscious burgertum. the genre of photographic costume pieces and its associated viewing practices are part of many of the paradigms outlined earlier: escape into an idealized pictorial space, re-creation of a.schein (dream) world in which every-day power relations are either veiled or inverted, sumptuous display of conspicuous consumption as social marker, and appropriation of the past to represent the present. peters also mentions allotria's festzug as a mode of expression for a growing bourgeois sense of identity and self-awareness. she postulates the festival photographs as re-creating a coherent pictorial reality that could call up high art's own pajnting traditions and practices. this concurs with her earlier thesis of "art photography being a reflex of painting," or of photography reacting to the world of painting. however, it must be noted that peter's assertion that late th century art photography was not produced in a cultural vacuum but was instead enmeshed in the same artistic debates as painting, does serve to privilege one medium (art) over the other (photography). what is being argued here, is that painters and photographers were both part of contemporary discussions on the relevance of a northern renaissance as a visual vocabulary. moreover, the fact that photographic costume studies as well as the festzug photographs were displayed in bourgeois homes, assigned these productions a status of art works. being cabinet photographs, the festival representations were displayed either next to or in place of oil paintings. th century debates on the worthiness of photography as an art form have relevance here. according to advertisements in contemporary magazines, hanfstaengl and muller undoubtedly considered themselves as artists who practiced kunstfotographie. by the 's, as in other european centers, a group of german critics and photographers called for the elevation of photography into the realm of art. they claimed that photography had outgrown its initial function as the mere mechanical recording of current events. for example, photo critic ludwig schrank insisted in that the photographs need not be limited to "copying" an external visual reality but rather could register individual artistic "visions": "each self-confident photographer who has been endowed with an artistic spirit, is absolutely capable of realizing his artistic visions within the means provided by photography [technology]... photography is the kind of art which records a mirror image of an idealized model through photosensitive substances." according to schrank then, a mechanical transcription of an external reality is elevated to the realm of art through the agency of the photographer. in late th century germany, subject matter largely distinguished art photography from news-photography. certain contemporary critics praised art photographers' abilities to arrange imaginative and theatrical or pictorial photographic spaces. an article on genre photography in the magazine photographischen mitteilungen. in thus made the point that: "these kind of pictures prove that photography, while considered by many as a mere trade or mechanical multiplication, is definitely capable of bringing forth truly artistic accomplishments." given that the festzug and the festival photographs were encased in a high art visual vocabulary associated with a northern renaissance painting then, the photographs' claim to a status as art commodities in themselves, had crucial implications. if a northern renaissance vocabulary and its german renaissance associations could serve to legitimize specific painting practices, patronage systems and market relations, then photography's escalating demands for recognition as an art form actually threatened this complex web of relations. an interesting cleavage thus opens up between what is depicted in the festzug photographs and for example, their material reality. by showing festival participants in renaissance costumes, posing in front of dark backgrounds with a seemingly natural light illuminating faces, jewelry and other details, the photographs supported th century associations with renaissance portrait forms. yet, when hung in griinderzeit salons, these photographs claimed the status of art works and some of the high art discourses and practices they seemed to support quickly collapsed. as has been noted, photography was in the process of challenging a traditional art market of'high art' productions. the festival photographs as commodities in themselves then, must be recognized as jeopardizing the very systems they were purported to legitimize and strengthen. if they were to assert and foster specific modes of painting and patronage systems, then their material realities as photographs in effect slipped out of theses systems and made actual incursions into a market structured around painting. iv the festzug photographs and community of viewers one of the key questions that arises when dealing with the festzug photographs devolves on their circulation and their viewership. how and by whom were these photographs seen? while assertions about possible audiences for visual culture are always difficult to make, this study is fortunate in that the photographs' designation as cabinet pieces allows for some insights into their circulation. cabinet pieces, be they paintings or photographs were especially popular among burger(s) in the last part of the th century. as the name suggests, these material objects were commodities to be placed on a cabinet or in a looser sense, to be hung on a wall. as has been noted, the burgerlwn's accumulation of new wealth during the griinderboom was accompanied by an increased desire for social recognition and representation. one means of fulfilling this craving for recognition, was to emulate aristocratic modes of behavior. ursula peters has observed that the "burgeriiche taste for a "grand style" especially penetrated those areas [of socio-cultural life] that were best suited for elaborate display." undoubtedly, grunderzeu homes represented one space in which wealth and anticipated social status could be ostentatiously displayed. important studies on german th century bourgeois wohnkultur, that is modes of living and styles of furnishing, have emerged over the past decade. as part of a distinct wohnkultur of nouveau-riche citizens of the new empire, salons were a key component of every burgerhome, be that an average house or an extravagant mansion. these salons were usually found at the front of a residence and as part of biirgerliches etiquette, callers of equal or higher social standing, were led into this 'show-room' to then be received by the matron and/ or master of the house. in a sense, the residents of a burger house were symbolically represented by their salon before any visitor acutally met them. as a result, extreme consideration was given to the make up of this room. anything valuable, decorative and indicative of its owner's good taste and culture was placed here. robin lenman has argued that this heimkult or cult of the home, again served as a refuge from the existenzkampf characteristic of capitalist societies such as imperial germany. in particular, he points to the arts and crafts exhibition in munich which is considered by lenman as the culmination of this grunderzeu obsession with spectacularization. here, visitors actually walked through 'ideal' rooms that were fully furnished in a neo-renaissance style. significantly, the alldeutsch salon was at the height of fashion at this time and georg hirth's influential publication, ultimately collected in in book form das deutsche zimmer der renaissance , became a bible of good taste for contemporaneous imitators. that the arts and crafts exhibition took place five months after the festzug karl v, underscores just how potent the festival's german renaissance vocabulary was within munich's larger cultural sphere. the german renaissance as it was conceptualized and appropriated by griinderzeit individuals then, was clearly construed as the one style most suited to represent and encompass current burgerliche needs and agendas. it was in such griinderzeit salons that the festival photographs would have been displayed and incorporated into an overall decorative program. here, the festival photographs not only contributed to the salon's wohnkultur but also served as agents of burgerliche identity and status. that is, if the festzug could have been read as forging specific notions of identity for its participants, then the photographs continued this process in that they displayed sitters in a northern or german renaissance mode complete with splendid costumes, jewelry, and strategic props long after the event had ceased. the photographs not only 'documented' their owner's presence at allotria's, splendid evening, but also asserted participants as privileged enough to partake in a prestigious "imagined community" of art patrons. for visitors in the home, they also evoked the significant of the so called germanic renaissance while simultaneously marking subjects and the owners of the photographs as legitimate heirs of this significant past. in short, to commemorate the festzug in form of photographs to be hung in a salon, served to detain the impact of an otherwise ephemeral event and all its complex associations. on another level, the photographs further 'interiorized' charles v's historical procession through munich. if the festzug moved charles' entry from the communal space of the city into the bourgeois space of the odeon festival hall, then the photographic representations transferred the festzug into the even more intimate and private realm of the burgerliche home. the festival photographs' complex role in the construction of meanings around the festzug karl v opens up more questions about the term "northern renaissance" itself. while this study has attempted to locate this vocabulary in terms of its th century uses, it nevertheless remains a highly problematic concept. in th century debates, the term 'northern renaissance' continued to fluctuate between describing a historical moment and an art historical style. while th century art historians for the most part referred to the northern renaissance as a style this designation became confused and thrust together in the course of the festival practice. fundamentally, "northern renaissance" as an art historical term is also problematic. it is partly defined in terms of high art categories of oil painting and old masters, yet it also raises the question of how genre painting's incorporation of subject matters from the every-day, operated within this construct. if the term "northern renaissance" is used as a static umbrella term, as was the case in most th century art historical writings, then the complex and antagonistic positions that were being negotiated and given visibility during this art historical juncture are erased. taking all these complexities into account then, it remains that in posing for photographs a la renaissance instead of posing for paintings, th century munich patrons were not merely looking back into the past to fashion identity but were actively articulating a modern middle class culture through the new medium of photography. v the festzug photographs and late th century munich art patronage the same audience that sat for the festzug photographs was indeed, still actively purchasing and commissioning painting, making the relationship between contemporary painting and photography an important one. a broad spectrum of munich citizens who were in financial positions to purchase art or to be otherwise actively engaged in artistic debates, supported academic art productions, in germany in the last quarter of the th century, genre painting, including historical genre scenes as well as portraiture and animal painting, best encompassed a burgerliche conception of art. genre paintings' depictions of scenes from every-day life while always popular in germany, became increasingly idealized in the course of the century. by the 's, rural populations and their family life in particular, had advanced as genre paintings' favorite subject matter. idealization has always been a crucial aspect of genre painting, but munich's leading academic genre painters such as franz von defregger for example, took it to an extreme. in his work, subjects are cast in theater-like settings and embedded in pathos-laden anecdotes. in describing late th century genre painting, ursula peters has noted that "the idealizing view of external reality becomes increasingly sentimental and the every-day is either represented in a trivializing manner or as sentimental idyll." this "idealized view of reality" was exactly what a majority of griinderzeit patrons searched for in artistic productions. the predominance of genre images, animal painting and portraiture in the munich market had significant implications for allotria's festzug karl v. a saying that circulated in and which remained alive until when jacob wolf incorporated it into his study of munich artist festivals, asserted the cultural superiority of munich's academic artists in the following terms: "munich artist do not just paint al fresco, they live al fresco!" the irony of this statement lies in the fact that munich's academic artists indeed, painted less "al fresco" than their counterparts in other artistic centers. contrary to berlin's academic artists for example, munich academicians could not rely on large scale state commissions to earn a living. munich's respected history painters such as theodor von piloty or august von kaulbach of course, produced large history paintings, the most elevated genre category, for the munchner kiinsllergenossenschaft's international exhibition in the glaspalast and for vienna's and philadelphia's world's fairs. but munich's patronage system and the 's, fast growing art market encouraged predominantly genre, portraiture and animal painting. this situation can largely be attributed to three factors. first, as has been outlined in section ii of this study, munich clearly held a position of political sovereignty and cultural predominance before the reich's unification. its academy drew students from all of germany, central europe, and even the united states, with academic art forms thriving and in demand. after the proclamation of prussian king wilhelm as emperor and the elevation of berlin to the imperial capital however, munich's status as independent kingdom ceased and germany's distribution of cultural power began to slowly shift. with the emperor residing in berlin, state commissions for history paintings, sculptures, new buildings and other projects to embellish this new state capital, were given mainly to berlin's local artists. also, when anton von werner was appointed director of the berlin academy in , he effected restructuring measures and modernized this institution which quickly grew to pose a serious threat to munich's academy in short, from onwards, the munich academy embarked on a slow downward spiral in terms of influence and reputation. a second factor that hinged munich's art system being hinged to a private market and patronage system lay with bavaria's monarch, king ludwig ii. his reign lasted from to , but by , he had begun to show signs of schizophrenia and his lifelong pre-occupation with building fairy-tale castles and his fixation with richard wagner, proved detrimental to many of munich's artists who had relied on his royal patronage. thus, contrary to his name-sake and grandfather ludwig i, who had the financial means and political ambitions to extensively support local artists, ludwig ii's marked absence had a significant effect on art and patronage. lastly, it should be recalled that economically, bavaria lacked the kind of natural resources that were located in germany's northwest, and which had enabled prussia to become the empire's economic focal point for heavy industry. munich's economy was structured around trade and commerce, and indeed munich had become one of southern europe's leading trans- shipment centers. while bavaria's economy was far from being crippled, it nonetheless could not support the kind of large-scale cultural economy that prussia's industrial barons, such as thyssen, siemens or krupp represented. moreover, as miriam makela states, "those [munich collectors] who could have afforded the cost of a major collection of contemporary art, such as local brewers like matthias pschor and johann sedelmayr, evidently preferred to bequeath money for the creation of public monuments." as a result of these three economic realities of the 's, munich's artists relied primarily on a private art market. as in other centers, traditional state institutions such as royal academies were supplanted in late th century munich by active exhibition practices of the artist-run kunstlergenossenschaft and by the increasingly influential private art dealerships. the munich art market had a particularly influential role in governing modes of art production during the last quarter of the th century. although inter-relations between money and art were seldom acknowledged in contemporary th century writings, they were perpetually enmeshed. in for example, dutch painter roland-horst complained that, "the work of art has become merchandise as good as any other, merchandise for speculation." while extended study of munich's national and international market relations exceeds the scope of this study, it must be noted that struggles over markets were definite realities. since the 's, what has come to be known as the "munich school" had gained fame and recognition for its genre and animal paintings. during the 's, these subject matters were purchased increasinglyby patron's from munich's upper biirgertum, who hung these works in their new homes as signifiers of social status and objects of beauty. vi the festzug karl v, market relations, and munich's malerfursten the artist and art patrons represented in the festzug photographs take on additional significances, given munich's late th century market relations and systems of patronage. the photographs' reconstructions of a historical moment made allusions to a high art visual vocabulary in ways that had a number of implications for allotria's academic artists involved in the conception of this kiinstlerball. the photographs' naturalistic mode of expression and renaissance allusions could evoke a direct link between th and th century art practices. as noted above, genre paintings were the most sought after modes of production n munich's art market during the 's. portraiture and genre painting were asserted in contemporary discourse as the dominant mode of representation during the renaissance when burger and aristocrats commissioned genre works and portraits for private residences. thus, through the photographs' visual vocabularies, private systems of patronage could be marked out as indigenous to bavaria since the renaissance. continuing this 'glorious' painting tradition then, contemporary artists cast themselves as guardians of culture while using the past to legitimize a thoroughly modern practice. in short, artists and art patrons who fashioned themselves as renaissance personae articulated a modern identity during the particular economic and political intersection of . the festival photographs, while authenticating the feslzug's re-imagination of charles v's holy roman empire, also signaled allotrian artists' revival of the renaissance as a potent strategy for rationalizing a private market system, and for legitimizing certain forms of genre, animal and portrait productions. the particularly elevated status of munich academic artists in the last quarter of the th century also plays a role here. a number of festival photographs depict leading academic artists posing as renaissance artists. given that the festzug had been arranged by allotria and that this leading munich artist society was largely composed of academic artists, it is not surprising that this group used both the procession and the ball to mingle with munich's upper echelons of society. to share a social space with aristocrats, members of the royal household and the creme de la creme of munich society, not only opened up opportunities to aquire new patrons and commissions but also indicated these artists' influential roles in munich's social fabric. by virtue of their institutional education, academic artists were members of the bildungsburgertum and in a society that was structured around bildung as a social marker, their elevated status is not surprising. the sheer number of academic artists who boasted the prefix von in their names speaks for itself. as has been noted earlier, berlin as germany's new capital, continued to gain increasing import as an artistic center from onwards. munich however laid claim to being germany's leading cultural center since kurfurst karl theodor had moved his collection from the mannheim court to munich in . in the context of shifting political and cultural power relations within the empire, art historian miriam makela has argued that the representation of munich as an artistic and cultural center was particularly important at this time: "it was in this context [bavaria's loss of autonomy as a sovereign state] that munich's local artists assumed increased importance, for their achievements now came to be regarded as a kind of substitute for bavaria's independence. to be sure, the state could no longer exert the political influence it once had ... but, residents reasoned, bavaria could still function as the nation's cultural and spiritual leader, for the unification did nothing to displace munich as preeminent art center in germany." academic artists carried a heavy burden of being called upon to produce works that aligned munich's cultural scene with a pro-reich paradigm while simultaneously asserting their city's superiority over other imperial centers. this responsibility was rewarded however, with an almost exaggerated amount of recognition and admiration. the ensuing veneration of the artist did not pass unnoticed and english painter john lavery for example, noted of artists in munich in that, "the status of a painter was equal to that of a general in the army; he was covered with decorations at public functions and saluted as a person of distinction." art and theater critic theodor goering reiterated this point observing that munich painters commanded: "an officer's position in "society," with rank determined by the value or success of his pictures... it would not be easy for an aristocrat conscious of his social prerogatives to include a musician among his friends, as a painter frequently is. the latter is invited to the summer villas of the aristocracy, where he is regarded as a companion, a chum, as it were." thus, munich artist franz von defregger's personification as albrecht diirer (fig. ) in a festzug photograph warrants particular attention in that it most pronouncedly signals allotrian artists' active self-construction as direct heirs of renaissance artists. this phenomenon clearly conveys an image of defregger alias durer as a humanist who had severed his ties to an artisan class and promoted himself as learned genius. defregger, dressed in sombre colors and with a fine quality fur collar finishing off his scholarly attire, is shown seated in a chair, his direct eye contact with the viewer serving to convey an air of confidence and self-assurance. most importantly, he is depicted holding a letter in his right hand and looking up from the papers he has placed in front of him, as though in the process of study. he is clearly not a craftsman in the midst of physical labor, but rather a thinker and intellect seemingly caught in his intellectual pursuits. in context of the brutal realities of th century capitalism, artists needed to be, as they have been in the renaissance, revered as intellects and as priests of spiritual truths. andreas haus describes how art in the early years of the newly forged german empire, played an important role in this time of social change. according to haus, griinderzeit art was to: "envelop a social reality that was marked by divisions and contradictions into a decorative jungle of un-overseeable harmony; create a corset made out of an energetic magic derived from color and aesthetic form, to strengthen the frail sense of self of modern individuals and imbue this griinderzeit-qgo with a sense of dominance that was directly derived from the splendor out of which this corset had been made. in this kind of cultural climate, the photograph of defregger and his remarkable affinity with renaissance portraits of durer, becomes an active re-articulation of the age-old cult of the "artist as genius" or geniekult. the festzug's re-imag(in)ing of northern renaissance artists brought an already current trend to a head. throughout the th century, an increasing number of german artists declared albrecht durer and the mode of painting that he was understood to have introduced, as both a forefather and an artistic inspiration. in for example, the th anniversary of his death was celebrated at his grave in nuremberg. the national art journal kunstchronik emphasized the artists' currency: "during the celebrations of the th anniversary of durer's death, it was decided that from then onward, a celebration was to be held at his grave at regular intervals of five years. thus, artists and friends of the arts in the early morning hours of st of may, gathered at the grave of the old master, which was decorated with laurel leaves and which is located in the ancient and venerable graveyard of st. johannis. after the recital of a serious piece of music, which accorded with the significance of the celebration, the curator of the bavarian arts and crafts museum, herr dr. von schorn gave a speech in which he described diirer's accomplishments in detail and those attending were asked in closing that the legacy of this foremost artist be kept alive by actively promoting an art that ennobles every-day life." in a sense, diirer was 're-invented' by contemporary art history as a gentiluomo of the northern renaissance whose studio, humanitatis had liberated him from artisanship and whose mode of artistic expression opened up a field of investigation that was to be continued by contemporary artists. hermann grimm's diirer monograph is but one example of this retrieval of diirer as the alleged founder of a modern german art as asserted by institutional art practices. this construction of the artist-as-genius and priest of spiritual truth while closely connected to late th century institutional art practices, did not remain without lucrative economic benefits for certain segments of munich's artistic community. allotrids president for almost twenty years, franz von lenbach, serves as perfect example of an artist whose art was at a premium during the 's and 's and who consequently was able to amass a fortune by painting primarily portraits of individuals from munich's upper echelons of society. with late th century munich being largely structured around capitalist value systems, financial earnings served as a chief measure for professional success. entrepreneurial artists such as franz von lenbach fared extremely well in that he always supplied the art market with what was en vogue. he was also one of munich's most lustrous malerfurst, one who not only possessed great wealth, but had also earned the highest social honors and held political influence that exceeded the artistic realm. his elaborate italian renaissance villa in the heart of munich, which today, serves as the lenbach museum and houses an extensive collection of german expressionists as well as changing exhibitions of contemporary art, attests to his status a princely painter this villa best illustrates lenbach's progressive and market oriented spirit. completed in the early 's, the lenbach haus not only served as living quarters for the painter and his family but also housed an enormous private atelier which was open to the public and led straight into the part of the villa that had been conveyed into a show and sales room for his work. princely lifestyles such as lenbach's, lent artist and academic professor august von kaulbach's personification of emperor charles v in the festzug an interesting twist; in the physical absence of king ludwig ii from munich's social scene, the "artist as king" (fig. ) compensated or even re-created some of the magnificence traditionally befitting of the royal court. a thriving private market for portrait and genre painting with the burgetumr as relentless patrons and buyers of art, enabled lenbach and those like him, to actually live like kings. they owned mansions in munich, employed servants, moved in the best circles, gave elaborate dinner parties and private festivals, owned country estates (two examples are those of lenbach on the siarnberger see and of defregger in bolzano), and in traveling europe were welcomed by the most esteemed households in their host-cities. in short, conspicuous consumption was rampant among munich's malerfiirsten and according to miriam makela, both lenbach and kaulbach's widows were included in the register of bavarian millionaires published in . that their wealth came at the expense of other less fortunate artists has been outlined by robin lenman. he articulates the dark side of munich's art system when observing that munich's artistic community was shaped like a pyramid along socio- economic lines. at the top, lenbach and his like reigned while at its broad bottom, munich's "artist proletariat" fought for survival. the malerfiirsten and their vested interests controlled munich's art world and unless dissenting artists were willing to expand into the fields of advertising or publishing for example, financial success was extremely difficult to ascertain. it can certainly be argued that the malerfiirsten'?, elaborate lifestyles and their grandiose reign during artist festivals such as the festzug karl fwere also integrally entwined with munich's asserted fame as germany's leading artistic center. artists casting themselves in the mold of their renaissance predecessors found a fertile ground for their artistic practice in munich, while munich in turn, would not have been considered isar-athens without their success. in , lenbach underlined the illustrious role he wanted to play within the artistic community: "i wanted to build myself a palace that would outshine everything that had come before; there, the powerful centers of european art should be united with the present. " a n d in , he emphasized the social and artistic links this status would enforce: "my villa should be the center of artistic life and social interests in munich." in this context, the invitation of delegates from other german cities to allotria's festzug karl v took on yet another significance. it can be assumed that delegates arrived in munich prior to the festzug and were, if not housed then at least entertained, by fellow artists. to show off splendid life styles and social practices in front of these individuals, could not but re-assert munich malerfiirsten's recognition on a national level. ursula peters, stilgeschichte der photographie . ibid . notions which have emerged from enlightenment ideologies such as encyclopedic knowledge, rationality, positivism and individualism. th century critics already used this term but in relation to its present resonances, it should be noted that "mass appeal" was far more limited (in part brought on by different technologies, modes of dissemination of information et cetera). he developed a special camera through which he was able to fit eight small pictures onto a single negative. peters . peters . franz hanfstaengl (exhibition catalogue: munich stadtmuseum, ) . hanfstaengl's grandson gave a large portion of his grandfather's studio-estate to the stadtmuseum. a portfolio o f the festival photographs was among this bequest. and possibly even among those 'unlucky' members of munich society who could not participate in the festival for lack of social influence but who still desired a piece of memorabilia from allotria's famous kiinstlerfest. kunstchronik . jan. : . according to one contemporary newspaper source, it appears that no tailor in munich was able to take any more orders for festzug costumes (or any other work) within days o f allotria's exhibition of the sketches. allgemeine zeitung: . peters . peters . ' peters . peters - and . schrank in peters . peters . the festzug karl kas part of bourgeois ball-culture has already been analyzed earlier in this study. peters . such as renaissance der renaissance. ein burgerlicher kunststil im . jahrhundert (exhibition catalogue; munich: deutscher kunstverlag, ) or wolfgang bronner, "schichtenspezifische wohnkultur. die burgerliche wohnung des historismus, kunstpolitik und kunstforderung im kaiserreich. e. m a i , h . pohl and s. waetzoldt eds. (berlin: gebr. mann verlag, ). often, these salons were so stuffed with furniture, carpets, heavy draperies, pillows, folwers, musical instruments and art, that they should have overwhelmed even the most prunkbedurftig (obsessed with splendor and magnificance) a visitor. also, they usually were much larger than any other room in the house and in a sense, served as a true facade. published in bookform in but circulating in form o f newspaper excerpts much earlier. this study assumes that for the most part, festival participants would choose photographs that depicted themselves in costume. this is not to exclude re-enactments o f historical scenes or a portrait of the "emperor and empress" from private purchasing practices. unfortunately, i was not able to access archival data (such as receipts) that would allow insight into individual purchases since most of hanfstaengl's business materials are no longer in existence. defregger's preferred subject matter were imagined incidents from tyrol's wars of liberation that were usuallybased on historical events but were shamelessly exploited for the sake of emotional appeal. this topic not only supplied him with themes o f suffering and heroism for his paintings but also had particular resonance in late th century munich. just as the tyrolians had resisted napoleon's foreign rule, so were certain groups of contemporary bavarians antagonistic to prussia's fremdherrschafl and dominance over bavaria in context of the empire. peters . in this context, it can also be argued that if munich artists indeed lived "al fresco", then the festzug in a sense represented history painting "come to life". it is interesting to note that many of the changes anton von werner instituted in berlin, were measures that had been in effect at the munich academy for many years. werner's introduction of master ateliers for example, was directly modeled on the munich academy's mode of teaching. ludwig i would only extend his patronage toward wagner's bayreuth festspielhaus ( ) and upon succumbing to more frequent spells of schizophrenic episodes from onwards, he led an increasingly secluded yet eccentric life in his various fairy castles until his accidental drowning in . makela . jensen . a n interesting economic stratification of this mode of behavior should be noted: while wealthy patrons purchased oil paintings, photography and/ or precious engravings, the kleinbiirgertum predominantly bought cheaper reprints of significant paintings or cut out newspaper illustrations to hang into their homes. at least all instrumental positions within this organization were occupied by academicians which is not to say that non-academic artists did not participate in a llotria's festivals or pub evenings. as a matter of fact, the coalescence of academic and independent artists within allotria increased over the years. the right to use this prefix was bestowed upon esteemed members o f bavarian society upon receiving the st. michaelis-orden. this medal originated in the middle ages and in the th century, still served to symbolically indicate its recipiant's elevation to nobility and presentability at court (hoffahigkeit). earlier artist festivals have already been contextualized in this study as helping pave the ground for munich's reputation as isar-athens —isar being the river flowing through munich. isabel balzer's forthcoming phd. dissertation "exhibiting a unified germany" (northwestern university) argues that by the time berlin instigated its jubilaums-exhibition, berlin had taken over munich's former position as the germany's cultural metropolis. makela . makela . this also ties in with the aforementioned st. michaelisorden, which was increasingly bestowed upon academic artists. "kunst hullte die von bruchen und widerspriichen brutal durchzogene soziale wirklichkeit in einen dekorativen dschungel unubersichtlicher harmonie; kunst vermochte es, der schwankenden ich-starke der modernen individuen ein mit alien energien asthetischer farb- und form-magie aufgeladenes korsett zu stiften, aus dessen stutzendem prunk sich das ego der griinderzeit noch eben mit dem gefuhl der dominanz erheben konnte. haus . "als am . m a i der . jahrige todestag albrecht durer's in nurnberg gefeiert wurde, ward beschlossen, in zwischenraumen von je funf jahren am grabe des kiinstlers eine feierlickkeit zu veranstalten. so versammelten sich denn am . in friiher morgenstunde auf dem altehrwiirdigen kirchhofe zu st. johannis um die lorbeergeschmiickte grabstatte des groben meisters eine anzahl kunstfreunde und kunstler. nach dem vortrag eines der ernsten feier angemessensn musikstiickes hielt der kustos des bayerischen gewerbebmuseums, herr dr. von schorn die festrede, in welcher er in eingehender weise das wirken dureres schilderte und zum schlub forderte, das andenken des meisters durch forderung der das leben veredelnden kunstbestrebungen zu ehren." kunstchronik beiblatt zur zeitschrift bildender kunst. v i ( ) . hermann grimm, albrecht diirer. sammlung gemeinverstandlicher wissenschaftlicher vortrage. virchow & wattenbach eds. (berlin: ). it must be added that lenbach also portrayed numerous aristocrats and that today, he is probably best known for his many portraits of reich chancellor otto von bismarck. the lenbach haus holds one of the largest collections of works by members of the blaue reiter group (such as a . jawlensky, m . werefkin, g . mtinther, and its most popular member w. kandinsky). fritz august von kaulbach and franz von defregger owned villas in the kaulbachstrasse (named after kaulbach's uncle); arnold bocklin a palace in the auberen prinzregentenstrabe; franz von stuck a villa in the prinzregenten strabe today also a museum, and adolf von hildebrandt's mansion in the maria- theresien- strabe which now houses the monacensia library/ collection. makela . norbert huse, kleine kunstgeschichte miinchens (munich: c . h . beck, ) . huse . conclusion the 's were somewhat of a golden age for allotria and the academic artists who were working under its auspices. as a leading munich artist society, allotria served as a space for the formation of identity and community while representing its members' vested interests. when bavaria lost its political autonomy in and little doubt remained that of all the german states, prussia wielded the most power in this new reich under emperor wilhelm i, art and culture were advanced as important weapons in the battle for sovereignty. if politically debilitated by the unification, then at least culturally, munich's local art community fought to retain the city's fame as the nation's artistic and spiritual leader. as one consequence of their active roles in engineering munich's renown as cultural metropolis, official artists (and the majority of these artists gathered under the aegis of allotria), were accorded high status and social standing. it is within this socio-political juncture that allotria's festzug karl v was conceived and carried out. the festival's re-imaging of charles v's historic passing through munich in was encased in a visual vocabulary that referenced high art froms and had very specific resonances in munich's late th century cultural fabric. while contemporaries could take up allotria's festzug in many different ways, a recurring engagement with the event in newspaper accounts for example, was on the level of nation. in gaining access to some of the multiple layers of self-construction and self -representation operating in and through this cultural practice, this study has investigated some of the ways in which th century discourses constructed a specifically german and northern renaissance language to conjure up notions of empires past and present. embarking upon this investigative path has brought to light communal needs to find ways of articulating a sense of national unity and identity through the appropriation of a specific history - that of the early th century. however, a central tenet of this thesis has been that the empire's socio-political realities were fissured and as such, the constructs of nation which were ascribed to and evoked by allotria's festival were highly problematic. indeed, this was marked in the way in which the event was transformed in its many representational forms. allolria's festzug shifted a cultural practice that originally had taken place within the communal space of the city into the new arena of the semi-exclusive bourgeois space of munich's odeon festival hall. the visual re-presentations of the procession of charles v and the modern celebration itself, served to interiorize the event even further by circulating via printed forms and photography; these in turn, constructed communities within the private realm of the bourgeois interior. this study has elaborated some of the multifarious problems associated with allolria's reconstruction of an event from the holy roman empire. ultimately, the past that was re-staged by the festival was a contradictory one and while celebrated in as the predecessor of germany's'new nation state, charles v's empire was little more than a chimera. a major focal point within this study, the analysis of a number of different visual re- representations of the festzug in print and photographic form, has provided one means of exploring the range of tensions that operated within the idealized construct of national unity. what i have tried to emphasize, is that the visual vocabulary associated with a northern renaissance mode was one that was shifting and unstable; as a result, it could be appropriated to very different interests. by drawing on michel de certeau's concepts of cultural strategies and tactics, i have attempted to open up ways in which the festzug's visual representations could have been taken up by a range of constituencies each with different stakes in germany's new socio-political realities of nationhood and in munich's particular art system. what emerges, is that allolria's festzug karl v was neither a nostalgic turning to the legacy of german history nor simply a means to establish a genealogy that linked various festival constituencies to what was now a celebrated historical moment. rather, i have suggested that this cultural practice and the ways in which it could be taken up by contemporaries, could accomodate particular forms of self-representation crucial to new market relations, to systems of patronage within munich's modern middle class culture, and to a new status of the artist assertively promoted by members of allotria. within this frame, the festzug with all its dramatic fanfare, music, and elaborate dress, became a multi-layered arena in which diverse communities of artists, aristocracy and biirgertum negotiated what were in fact shifting representations of nation and class. at the outset of this study, karl salzle's poetic description of th century german artist festivals as "bright butterflies" was evoked. on one level, this admittedly romanticized citation, has served to conjure up what historians have celebrated as a major manifestation of munich's vital art culture - one where art and leisure could come together as vibrant spectacle. but salzle's image also evokes metamorphosis in relation to allotrids festzug karl v. t have used the metaphor to signal how process, transformation, and constant change were crucial to this festival's form. salzle . b i b l i o g r a p h y acht tage in munchen: wegweiser fur fremde und einheimische. munich: druck und verlag von georg franz, [new edition: gerber verlag, ]. 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"zweck und ziel der allgemeinen deutschen kunst- und kunstindustrieausstellung in munchen. beiblatt zeitschrift fur bildende kunst (june ): . fig. leo von klenze. odeon and leuchtbergpalais against the bazar. . fig. fr. august von kaulbach, lenbach and his colleagues gathered in the abenthum, . fig. carl von piloty. invitation to the paul-rubens festival . fig. the costume festival of munich's artist society allotria, . fig. fr. august von kaulbach, invitation to allotria's artist-costume-festivah . fig. franz widnmann, admission ticket to the festzug karl v, . i fig. franz hanfstaengl franz von lenbach in costume from the period of charles v . . fig. friedrich muller, painter august von kaulbach dressed as emperor charles v, . following page: fig. franz hanfstaengl, eugen hanfstaengl as herold. . fig. friedrich muller, painter claudius von schraudolph in armour and pelt. . fig. franz hanfstaengl, franz von defregger as albrecht purer. . fig. franz hanfstaengl, c. von schraudolph as lansquenet with sword for two hands, . following page: fig. franz hanfstaengl, franz von seitz dressed as a turkish commander, . fig. franz hanfstaengl. rudolf von seitz with his wife and daughter; a la holbein, . fig. franz hanfstaengl, architect georg von hauberrisser and wife, dressed as a northern renaissance tradesmen and his wife, . fig. schulz and suck, painter eduard teimer and wife from karlsruhe, . fig. (top) friedrich muller, lady in costume from the period of charles v . . fig. (bottom) friedrich muller, unkown lady, costumed as a th century burgerinn, . lolo von hornstein, dressed as holbein's daughter as depicted in "madonna des biirzermeisters meyer", . fig. franz hanfstaengl, fighting scene of five men in altdeutschen costumes. . fig. friedrich muller. jester. . fig. rudolph kuppelmayr, costume design for the festzun karl v, . fig. ludwig herterich, costume design for the festzug karl v, . fig. (left) friedrich august von kaulbach, costume design for the festzug karl v, . fig. (right) heinrich lossow, costume design for the festzug karl v, . fig. ferdinand theodor hildebrandt, der krieger und sein kind. . fig. renaissance beauty, . fig. einer, der edler wurde, . microsoft word - ubc_ _fall_smither_devon.doc identity crisis: the nude in s modern canadian art by devon smither b.a., the university of alberta, a thesis submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of master of arts in the faculty of graduate studies (art history) the university of british columbia (vancouver) august © devon smither, ii abstract in their unwillingness to fully assimilate or relate the human body to its surroundings, many artists who painted nudes in the s in canada found their works the subject of moral debate and censure. rather than becoming the site of praise for a new canadian sensibility in the visual arts, the nudes painted in this period would not come to be associated with a uniquely canadian artistic practice, and the genre failed to assume a pivotal place within the canon of canadian art history. viewers could not imagine themselves as heroic pioneers in front of a painting like lilias torrance newton’s nude ( ), or could they see anything distinctly modern and revolutionary in its execution that would allow them to hold up such an image as an example of an inherently canadian art. the nude in canada did not incite the admiration of an art-going public who instead came to associate a national art movement with the landscape paintings of the group of seven. censored, debated, praised, and criticized, the nude genre ultimately failed to have the same impact as landscape painting on the visual arts in canada. landscape painting was able to mediate the relationship between the natural world and its human inhabitants in a way not offered by the nude or figurative painting. in , saturday night magazine published an article jocularly recounting how the typical canadian artist was a “husky beggar” who pulled on a pair of strathcona boots and set off into the woods with a rifle, a paddle, and enough baked beans for three months. such assertions would lead a critic like barker fairley to complain later that, “[n]ot one canadian in a hundred goes into an art gallery looking for anything but hills and trees and lakes and clouds and flowers and fruit.” ultimately, the nude was not able to provide a collective viewing position that could embody a national sentiment. it was unable to iii penetrate the canadian consciousness in a way that would win it a place alongside the rolling topography and pristine lakes of the group of seven. iv table of contents abstract ........................................................................................................................ ii table of contents ..................................................................................................iv acknowledgements................................................................................................v introduction............................................................................................................... literature review ................................................................................................ methodology............................................................................................................ social context: the s in canada ........................................................... lilias torrance newton .................................................................................... pegi nicol macleod ............................................................................................... prudence heward ................................................................................................... edwin holgate ......................................................................................................... bertram brooker................................................................................................... conclusion.................................................................................................................. bibliography ............................................................................................................. appendix: list of discussed illustrations............................................. v acknowledgements i am grateful to dr. john o’brian, my thesis supervisor, for his guidance, support and patience. his knowledge of canadian art history and his generosity have been invaluable to my project. my sincere thanks also go to dr. bronwen wilson for her encouragement, advice and her unending willingness to challenge me intellectually. thank you to dr. maureen ryan for her dedication to the discipline of art history and her commitment to teaching. i thank john o’brian and the department of art history, visual art and theory at the university of british columbia for their financial assistance without which i would not have been able to conduct the research necessary for the completion of my thesis. i undertook several weeks of archival research in the summer of and i would like to express my gratitude to the curators and archivists of the art gallery of ontario, library and archives canada, the national gallery of canada, the montreal museum of fine arts, and the canadian women artists history initiative at concordia university. finally, this thesis would not have been possible without the support of my family and friends. thank you to my parents, brenda and julian, for their love and support. i thank my mother, whose love of and facility with the english language has helped me become the writer i am today. to both my parents for their editing and feedback on many drafts of this thesis, thank you, i would not be here without you. thank you to joan boychuk, whose encouragement and insight have made me a more thoughtful and capable art historian. lastly, thank you to my partner and best friend, jeremy franchuk, who patiently stands by me as i pursue my academic dreams. your love and friendship continue to make me a better person, thank you. introduction to extend the creative faculty beyond the professional meaning of art and to make of it a more common language of expression is also part of [the canadian group of painters] aim. hitherto it has been a landscape art, typical of all new movements, but here and there figures and portraits have been slowly added to the subject matter, strengthening and occupying the background of the landscape. here also more modern ideas of technique and subject have been brought into the scope of canadian painting, keeping the art in the vanguard of our forward stride as a nation. -“foreword,” catalogue of an exhibition of paintings by the canadian group of painters, nearly two metres tall, the figure in lilias torrance newton’s nude ( , fig. ) is startlingly larger than life. nude is an arresting painting that reinterprets the genre using modernist techniques, combining newton’s talents as a portraitist with the tradition of the nude figure study to produce one of the most compelling works painted in canada in the s. the painting depicts a russian model posing, her head slightly tilted, one hand resting firmly on her hip, the other crossed over her chest and resting on her left shoulder. she stands poised with confidence in modern green sandals, her wavy hair in a fashionable short-cropped cut, and superimposed onto the representation of a painted portrait on an easel. the viewer is positioned at a remove from the scene, just slightly below the model who is portrayed in the artist’s studio. the woman’s naked form dominates the canvas, while the chair and easel behind her seem to support her body and push it towards the picture plane. newton is best known in canada as a portrait painter and while her nude, referred to in some of the scholarship as a russian model or dancer, remains unnamed, it fits with the artist’s oeuvre as a painter of likenesses, be they family, friends, or distinguished “foreword,” catalogue of an exhibition of paintings by [the] canadian group of painters (toronto: canadian group of painters, ), unpaginated, quoted in anna hudson, “art and social progress: the toronto community of painters, - ,” (phd diss., university of toronto, ). figures from canada’s past. the figure’s nudity (or nakedness if the green sandals are taken into account) and anonymity rendered as cool smooth flesh is not unlike the scores of nudes from art history: models whose robes are discarded as they pose in the artist’s studio. nude is unquestionably connected to the lineage of such paintings as titian’s venus of urbino ( , fig. ), boucher’s triumph of venus ( , fig. ), courbet’s the painter’s studio ( , fig. ), ingres’s source ( , fig. ) and manet’s olympia ( , fig. ). however, elements in the painting confound a simplistic interpretation of its status as mere academic nude. newton, like many of her contemporaries, explored the relationship of figure and landscape by placing artistic genres in dialogues. with nude, she reinterprets the tradition to produce a painting that oscillates between portraiture and studio nude, while her choice of model, setting, and formal technique offer a nude that is neither radically avant-garde nor one that clearly adheres to tradition. the awkward twist of the russian model’s torso and her rigid and firm contrapposto stance call up the pose of a praxiteles sculpture or the model in courbet’s the painter’s studio. the composition of the portrait clamped onto the easel behind the woman’s head and shoulders, the realism of her features – those carefully manicured eyebrows, painted lips and polished nails—suggest a real woman who, if newton had chosen to represent her clothed rather than naked, could very well be someone of social significance, a distinguished figure in her fashionable green shoes and bobbed haircut. newton has executed a decidedly complex painting here. however, critics at the time gave a number of artworks come to mind that represent a nude woman or model who has undressed in the artist’s studio, including gustave courbet’s the painter’s studio ( ), edouard manet’s olympia ( ), gustave caillebotte’s nude on a couch (c. ), or edward vuillard’s a nude in the studio (c. - ), to name only a few. short shrift to the work’s visual complexities and focused instead on the woman’s nakedness and the propriety of the nude. newton painted only one nude during her career, while other artists such as prudence heward and edwin holgate executed many more. curator michèle grandbois recently found that out of exhibitions held between and , there was at least one nude in each show, a figure that contradicts the established perception that the nude was rarely viewed by the canadian public. as both a means of exploring aesthetic technique and of continuing to investigate the relationship of the figure in landscape and the artistic ability of artists, the nude had been and remained foundational to the emergence and institutionalization of the visual arts in canada. that the nude played an important role in the careers of artists and in the first art exhibitions held in canada has been largely obscured by the well-known and by now oft-told story of how the group of seven set about unmaking and remaking “the prevailing conventions of landscape painting for the purpose of producing a national art,” as john o’brian and peter white have recently observed. the group’s vision of a palpably canadian art and identity inseparable from the country’s geography continues to hold sway over the canadian cultural lexicon and identity today: one need look no further than the winter olympic games in vancouver or the controversial construction of an artificial lake as part of the g summit in toronto in june . the marketing of the olympics, for example, continued to newton did produce other nudes in sketches and pastels. for example, the national gallery of canada owns a pastel by newton entitled nude figure ( ). this extant sketch suggests that she may have produced other nude studies. anna hudson, “disarming conventions of nudity in canadian art,” in the nude in modern canadian art - (montreal: musée des beaux-arts, ), . john o’brian and peter white, eds., beyond wilderness: the group of seven, canadian identity, and contemporary art (montreal: mcgill-queen’s university press, ), . suggest canada is a land of snow-capped peaks, pristine lakes, and untouched forest rather than a country in which four out of five canadian live in urban centres. absent from the group’s masculine narrative that bound canadian identity to the exploration and conquest of a so-called empty land devoid of inhabitants is any semblance of the human figure. figurative painting—and the nude in particular—has been excluded from the discursive production of a definition of modern canadian art. this marginalization of figurative painting and the nude has been aided and abetted by art historians whose continued re-evaluation of the group of seven’s artistic authority has been at the expense of any serious consideration of the role that the nude and figurative painting played in modern canada. the nude, unlike landscape painting, could not be employed by artists to represent a distinctly canadian art movement. the nude genre could not provide the identificatory possibilities offered by landscape painting: that is the masculine, rugged pioneer espoused by the group of seven’s artworks could not be invoked by the nudes painted during the same period. michèle grandbois, anna hudson and esther trépanier’s recent exhibition catalogue, the nude in modern canadian art - , provides some valuable points of connection between the nude’s relationship to photography, modern dance and sculpture and is a welcome contribution to an understanding of the nude in canada. my study aims to build on grandbois, hudson, and trépanier’s long overdue examination of the role of the human figure in canadian art by focusing on the reasons for the disenfranchisement of the nude in canada. grandbois asserts “even as canadian art was asserting its modernity, it refused to identify with the nude. the timelessness and universality of the nude did not accord with the nationalist ideology defended by canada’s modern landscapists—unless it was part of the landscape.” however, i would argue that while artists such as edwin holgate received praise from some critics who viewed his paintings as more successful in their integration of the nude into her natural surroundings, others who attempted a similar integration of figure and background were met with censorship and controversy. brooker’s figures in landscape ( , fig. ), for example, attempts a similar convergence of nude bodies and landscape to holgate’s nudes, but brooker’s painting was the subject of moral censure and criticism. furthermore, even in a painting such as holgate’s nude in the open ( , fig. ), where the nude appears at first glance to echo the group of seven in the landscape behind it, a closer examination reveals a discord between the elements in the painting and points to the inability of the genre to express the aims of canadian modern artists during the interwar period. the nude failed precisely because it could not participate in the nationalizing project espoused by the group of seven and their supporters. paintings such as figures in landscape and nude in the open were unable to connect with the masculine identity fundamentally connected to canadian landscape painting. this failure also extends to those nudes depicted in landscape: brooker’s figures in landscape was removed from the walls of the toronto art gallery by arthur lismer for fear that “the presence of the picture might be detrimental to children who might view it.” the nude, with its potential to be either traditional or transgressive, became a locus for conflicting opinions about canada’s modernity. artists painting nudes in canada during the interwar period did not offer idealized images of recumbent beauties in imaginative scenery. instead, many of the nudes painted michèle grandbois, “the challenge of the nude,” in the nude in modern canadian art - (montreal: musee des beaux-arts, ), - . “‘nudes in landscape’ causes art dispute,” toronto daily star, march , , . during the s underscore the interrelationship between artist, model and spectator which had historically been obscured by the understanding that the woman represented in a nude painting by giorgione or boucher was not a real woman but an unthreatening image of an idealized woman available for the gaze of the male viewer. courbet and manet first broke down the safe distance between the idealized female form and the modern spectator; and canadian artists in the early twentieth century continued to present de-idealized, realistic women in studio poses and realistic environments that call attention to the very act of the nude’s production. following harry berger’s reinterpretation of the art of portraiture, my own study argues that “the fiction of the pose” at work in the nudes painted in canada did not embody ideals with which a newly forming art-going public could identify. the performances involved and the identities at work in the production of the nude in canada were such that the genre could not, and did not, capture a canadian public searching for its own sense of national identity. what is striking about the nudes painted in the ’s in canada is their sheer diversity. the broad assortment of visual strategies employed by artists is symptomatic of the genre’s failure at this time. the nude was unable to provide a viewing position that could be occupied collectively: a viewing position that canadians did find in front of the landscape paintings of the group of seven. as a result of the nude’s failure to cohere in the early twentieth century, it did not establish an esteemed position in canadian modern art. in prudence heward’s girl under a tree ( , fig. ) we see the horizontal nude in landscape which looked to one critic like “a bouguereau nude against cezanne-esque see both harry berger, fictions of the pose: rembrandt against the italian renaissance (stanford, california: stanford university press, ) and harry berger, “fictions of the pose: facing the gaze of early modern portraiture,” representations no. (spring, ): - . background.” there are pegi nicol macleod’s nudes with flowers such as her descent of lilies ( , fig. ) and torso and plants (c. , fig. ); bertram brooker’s more modern and realistic nudes like his seated figure ( , fig. ); kathleen munn’s cubist nudes such as the dance ( , fig. ); lilias torrance newton’s posed studio nude of ; and edwin holgate’s nudes in more group of seven-like landscapes like nude in the open. these artists deployed the nude as a means through which to stage their artistic abilities and to set themselves apart from their predecessors, including canadian artists like william brymner ( - ) and randolph hewton ( - ). it is clear that artists like brooker, newton, and holgate were interested in finding ways to explore the relationship between landscape and the body. however their efforts to do so failed to cohere during the interwar period in canada. the nude in this period was also unsuccessful because it did not adhere to the conventions of the genre, nor was it truly modern or avant-garde in its reinterpretation of tradition in canada. newton, brooker and macleod did not merely repeat images already seen in art history: the idealized woman lying asleep in a landscape as in giorgione’s sleeping venus ( - , fig. ); the idealized odalisques of ingres; the soft, idealized curves of a recumbent venus, be it that by titian c. or by boucher in . nor was the intervention of canadian artists into the genre as radically modern as that of manet’s olympia, his déjeuner sur l’herbe ( , fig. ) or courbet’s source ( , fig. ). courbet and manet had both already broken with the past in their self-reflexive deployment of the genre in such a way as to call into question the idealized representation of the nude female body and of the relationship of art and representation to capitalist modernity. like their french predecessors, many canadian john lyman, “journal,” vol. ii, entry for april , in the bibliothèque nationale du québec, montreal. artists, in foregrounding representational practice, were met with criticism and censorship. both brooker and newton had their nude paintings removed from exhibitions, while polemics about the genre’s propriety had been, and continued to be, widely debated in newspapers and magazines across the country. the nudes painted by macleod, heward, holgate, brooker and newton underscore the relationship between artist and model. by painting real, modern women, these artists presented artworks that broke with tradition, yet many of the modern aspects of the nude were unpalatable to the canadian public at the time of their exhibition. in , journalist f.b. housser wrote of a new, distinctly canadian movement in painting which demanded “a new type of artist; one who divests himself of the velvet coat and flowing tie of his caste, puts on the outfit of the bushwhacker and prospector; closes with his environment; paddles, portages and makes camp; sleeps in the out-of-doors under the stars; [and] climbs mountains with his sketch box on his back.” at the time of his writing, housser’s vivid description of this ideal artist/pioneer was embodied by members of the group of seven. following the first world war the desire to continue the construction of a canadian national identity reached new heights. the achievements of canadians during world war i intensified political efforts to distance canada from british authority. with the statute of westminster, this distinction was codified and a great deal of debate arose, for example, around the exhibition of three nude paintings at the canadian national exhibition in toronto. there were many nude paintings at the cne, however john wentworth russell’s a modern fantasy, george c. drinkwater’s paolo and francesca, and rosalie emslie’s comfort were singled out and, as historian jane nicholas notes, “sparked a contentious debate carried out in newspaper columns and over letters to the editor. although the majority of the coverage was in toronto newspapers like the evening telegram, toronto daily star, globe, and toronto telegram, articles and editorials also appeared in saturday night, canadian forum, and hush as well as regional papers like the kitchener record, hamilton spectator, and vancouver sun.” jane nicholas “‘a figure of a nude woman’: art, popular culture, and modernity at the canadian national exhibition, ,” social history vol. , no. ( ): . f.b. housser, a canadian art movement, the story of the group of seven (toronto: macmillan co., ), . canadians increasingly came to see themselves as a unique country separate from both its colonial mother country and its neighbour to the south. the group of seven and their supporters were foundational in the establishment of a canadian identity connected with the land and virile adventure explorers. viewers found reaffirmation of an identity connected with the landscape in the paintings like tom thomson’s jack pine ( - , fig. ) or lawren harris’ maligne lake, jasper park ( , fig. ). in the process, the art-viewing public of the s and ‘ s came under cultural pressure to apprehend canadian art as primarily masculine or, to borrow kaja silverman’s words, as coming from a “preassigned viewing position” that was masculine and heroic. the group held their first exhibition at the art gallery of toronto in . the group was comprised initially of seven artists: lawren harris, j.e.h. macdonald, arthur lismer, frederick varley, frank johnston, franklin carmichael and a.y. jackson. tom thomson, who had died in , became synonymous with the group, and the seven artists later became ten with the additions of a.j. casson, edwin holgate, and l.l. fitzgerald. john o’brian and peter white’s recent anthology beyond wilderness: the group of seven, canadian identity, and contemporary art has done a great deal to re-examine the group of seven’s nationalizing project. despite the continued reappraisal of the group’s history in canada, there remains a need for more critical examinations of the group that address the male dominance of the group and their efforts to posit a collective canadian identity associated with their austere, sanitized modernist landscapes. the group’s images of vast, empty wilderness without human inhabitants allowed viewers to place themselves in the position of the male artist, to identify with j.e.h. kaja silverman, the threshold of the visible world (new york: routledge, ), - . john o’brian and peter white, eds., beyond wilderness: the group of seven, canadian identity, and contemporary art (montreal: mcgill-university press, ). macdonald, a.y. jackson, or the group’s main inspirational figure, tom thomson. the best-known group of seven paintings are those that do not contain any hint of humanity or its traces. in order to represent an untamed yet conquerable land that integrated viewers’ intellect with their surroundings, the group of seven framed the northern ontario environment as devoid of habitation despite the centuries-long presence of the aboriginal peoples of the area. as art historian brenda lafleur notes, the group of seven asserted themselves as pioneers of the ‘real’ canadian landscape while their “empty landscape tradition” was intimately tied to the male ‘bush-whacking’ artist who would ‘capture’ that landscape in his art. paintings of empty, supposedly untouched wilderness allowed viewers to imagine themselves venturing courageously into the wild to colonize and settle the represented land. as eva mackey summarizes, “the paintings of the group embodied the dreamwork of settler nationalism in canada.” the power of this dreamwork would persist decades after the group’s dissolution in . as the genre of landscape painting came to stand in for canadian art, the nude, by contrast, became a locus for social anxieties around shifting gender roles and sexuality. there is of course a long history of the nude in landscape. in albrecht dürer’s print draughtsman making a perspective drawing of a woman (fig. ) we can see the artist grappling with the integration of the nude female body and the surrounding landscape onto a two-dimensional surface. likewise, giorgione’s sleeping venus shows the tradition of representing an idealized beauty and painting as an ideal. the nude has been deployed by artists and examined by scholars for centuries and the genre’s meaning brenda lafleur, “‘resting’ in history: translating the work of jin-me yoon,” in generations and geographies in the visual arts: feminist readings, ed. griselda pollock (london: routledge, ): . eva mackey, “death by landscape: race, nature and gender in canadian nationalist mythology,” canadian woman studies, vol. , no. ( ): . and status have shifted as both social and artistic conventions have changed. where historically the nude had been intimately connected with the discursive production of the artist’s and the spectator’s masculinity by offering a reification of masculine desire, in s canada it proved to be the site of contentious debate and moralizing censure. the nudes by heward, newton, brooker and holgate capture the genre in a moment of crisis. the removal of nude paintings from numerous galleries and exhibitions foreshadows the nude genre’s ultimate failure as a modality through which artists were able to work out a range of overlapping relationships, such as that between figure and ground, and the threat it posed to the social order. my interest in the nude in canada was first ignited by michael ostroff’s examination of the life and work of pegi nicol macleod in the documentary film something dancing about her and laura brandon’s book pegi by herself as well as my subsequent research on lilias torrance newton and prudence heward. brandon’s projects have done much to build and retrieve an archive on macleod; however their focus is primarily biographical rather than art historical. i hope that my examination of nudes by macleod, heward, and newton will invite further scholarship on the genre as well as encourage further research on these women artists. learning of these women artists’ striking nude paintings led me to seek out other nude paintings created by their contemporaries: such as lawren harris, bertram brooker and jori smith. the dearth of scholarship on macleod, heward, and newton meant that my initial study was motivated by a desire to recover for these artists a place in the canon of canadian art history. however, to simply add these artists to the canon would be to leave the male-dominated fiona mchugh, michael ostroff, and edward riche, something dancing about her, dvd. directed by micheal ostroff (montreal: national film board of canada, ). laura brandon, pegi by herself (montreal: mcgill-queen's university press, ). system of art making, as well as the conventions of the nude genre, unquestioned. i was also wary of approaching these women artists’ works as being about sexual difference. this framework of analysis would have reaffirmed a well-established and outmoded view that women’s art can be viewed as the expression of the artist’s biography and female psychology. rather, my thesis aims to avoid the perils of reductive readings of ‘the feminine’ in art history. this is not to discount that women have lived in social and historical contexts that involved unequal access to resources, dissimilar gender norms, and embodied subjectivities. i would contend, however, that gender difference is not always visible in the works of women artists, as is the case with the nudes under examination here. my study is not concerned with what would constitute a “feminine” or “masculine” style or mode of expression. there are no pictorial inscriptions of gender difference in the nudes painted by heward, brooker or macleod, and there is nothing to suggest that artists like macleod or newton viewed gender as a decisive facet of their artistic production. my examination of the production of the nude in the early twentieth century in canada aims to articulate an analysis of the nude that is flexible and will allow for future studies of the genre in canada as well as for further theorization of the genre historically. literature review to understand the nude’s marginal status in canadian art history, one only need consider the paucity of literature on the subject. while the nude in europe has been the subject of both theoretical and historical studies, there exists to date no comprehensive or scholarly text on the canadian nude. there are no nudes painted in canada included within the pages of brian foss, sandra paikowsky and anne whitelaw’s volume, the visual arts in canada: the twentieth century. paikowsky’s essay in the book, “modernist representational painting before ,” includes sub-headings such as “the landscape,” “the self-portrait,” “the still life,” and “the figure.” however she does not include a heading for the nude nor does her section entitled “the figure” include any discussion of the genre in canada over the past century. an understanding of the genre’s history in canada can only be reached by consulting the two exhibition catalogues on the subject. until the catalogue by michèle grandbois, anna hudson and esther trépanier there had been only one other exhibition catalogue that took the nude as its point of departure: jerrold morris’s the nude in canadian painting from . grandbois and hudson’s catalogue does much to expand upon morris’s brief examination of a few select nudes painted in canada prior to the s. however, the nude in modern canadian art - , while long-overdue in its examination of the nude in canada, is intended for a popular audience and does not critically examine the theoretical status of the nude as a genre within canadian art history. while the exhibition echoes critiques of brian foss, sandra paikowsky, and anne whitelaw, eds., the visual arts in canada: the twentieth century (don mills, on: university of oxford press, ). a catalogue of the same title accompanied the exhibition curated by grandbois and hudson: michèle grandbois, anna hudson, and esther trépanier, eds., the nude in modern canadian art - (montreal: musée des beaux-arts, ). the group of seven’s artistic authority within the canon, little space within the catalogue is devoted to an explication of the progression of the genre’s theorization. it is conventional, in discussions of the nude, to cite kenneth clark’s much- criticized the nude: a study in ideal form, published in , in which he posits the male body as the representative of all humans, the ideal human form, and the original nude. the female nude, according to clark, is never wholly able to escape her biological essentialism and as such the greeks did not idealize the female nude body in the same way we do today. this idealization would come much later during the italian renaissance. many feminist art historians, including marcia pointon and lynda nead, have taken clark to task for his obvious distaste of the biological female form. according to pointon, in order to resolve his issue with the naked female body clark establishes the naked/nude dichotomy by which the naked, real corporeal subject is reviled, while the nude projects into the mind an image “not of a huddled and defenseless body, but of a balanced, prosperous and confident body: the body re-formed.” nead rightly criticizes clark for his use of the category “the naked” to signify the “unformed, corporeal matter” of the female body which is only transformed into a nude through an imposed “unity and constraint, the regulated economy of art.” according to clark, it is through the exercise of the rational, elevated male mind that the naked female form is transformed from raw material into aesthetic ideal, a contention which reifies the problematic and now familiar philosophical binary of mind/body whereby the mind, characterized as male, is favoured over the body, associated with the female. marcia pointon, naked authority: the body in western painting, - , (cambridge: cambridge university press, ). lynda nead, the female nude: art, obscenity and sexuality (london and new york: routledge, ). kenneth clark, the nude: a study in ideal form (new york: pantheon books, ), . nead, the female nude, . some twenty years after clark’s study, john berger attempted to redress clark’s omission of the power relations that inform the deployment of the nude throughout history in his book the ways of seeing. however, berger does little to remedy the patriarchal underpinnings of clark’s investigation. berger’s attempt to analyze the role of class and gender in the nudes painted in european art sees him make moralizing generalizations and compares wholly disparate examples of nineteenth-century academic nude painting with a photograph of a naked woman in a pornographic magazine without attending to the numerous differences between the two images. pointon’s endeavour to correct some of the shortcomings of clark and berger is welcome, but she and lynda nead both go too far in dismissing the nude altogether as a visual category and as a rhetorical strategy. lynda nead, in the female nude: art and obscenity, suggests that the only positive representations of the female form can be those produced by women. nead’s account of how the art historical category of the nude, which prior to the nineteenth century had been ungendered and came to signify a female subject produced by a male artist for a male audience, is firmly situated in the s and s “sex war” debates about pornography and discrimination against women. in critiquing clark and berger and building on t.j. clark’s marxist and psychoanalytic reading of manet’s olympia in his book the painting of modern life, nead posits a reading of the nude genre as one used throughout history as “the internal structural link that holds art and obscenity and an entire system of meaning together;” according to nead, it has been the john berger, ways of seeing (new york: viking press, ). these debates were made famous by scholars and activists such as andrea dworkin, catherine mackinnon on the anti-pornography side and gayle rubin, susie bright, and carole vance on the pro-sex side of the debates. “containment and regulation of the female sexual body.” for t.j. clark the nude functioned prior to the nineteenth century as a means to reconcile the categories of propriety and pleasure; while nead goes further, arguing that the nude came to reconcile this conflict by operating as a locus of containment and repression of gender and sexuality. nead’s argument that pornography plays an important role in the production and maintenance of the boundaries between high and low art is a welcome theorization of the genre. however, her analysis does not attend to the ways in which the nude is historically situated. furthermore, nead’s generalizations about the complex relationship between artist and observer neglect the question of how the nude and obscenity operate in historically specific moments to constitute gendered subjects. lacking an adequate long- term historical perspective on the nude, nead does not attend to the ways in which the genre shifts dramatically after manet’s intervention into its production in the late nineteenth century. her reliance on psychoanalysis also poses a problem, as psychoanalytic theory can run the risk of dehistoricizing images while reinforcing the now overly familiar theorization of the male gaze as the primary constituting factor in the production of female representations. for nead, “the aestheticization and sanitization of the female body within patriarchal culture” which lies at the heart of the high art nude went unchallenged until the advent of feminist art in the s. this does not account for the ways that many artists, including women, intervened in the genre prior to this period. it is my contention that artists (in canada for example), painted nudes that were highly nead, the female nude, . jennifer shaw, “exchange and excess: the production and effects of the female nude in modern visual culture,” (phd diss., emory university, ), . the most notable text on the subject of the male gaze and female subjectivity is laura mulvey’s essay “visual pleasure and narrative cinema,” in film theory and criticism: introductory readings, ed. gerald mast, marshall cohen, and leo brandy (new york, oxford: oxford university press, ), - . self-aware of the interrelationship between artist, viewer, and model and that consequently both challenge the tropes of the genre as well as the viewing public. my study offers an historicized reading of the nude in s canada. by not using gender as my theoretical focal point, i provide an alternative way of understanding the category of the nude as a visual tool connected to the process of subjectivation. as an art historical genre, the nude female body is a modality through which social, economic, and cultural relations are mediated, while nude images themselves fold back and inform these same relations. when sexual difference is not thematized in the images under discussion, it is problematic to analyze them using psychoanalytic or feminist theory which posits an essentialized difference as foundational to representation and spectatorship. because both men and women were painting nudes in various artistic mediums and with various technical strategies in the early twentieth century in canada, the view that the nude operated solely as a locus for masculine viewing and representational production no longer holds sway. one of the problems of a psychoanalytic approach is that it often reifies patriarchal norms rather than offering a theorization for creative change or affirmative potentiality. the view that men are the bearers of the gaze and that the eroticized object of the gaze, the powerless other, is female, is complicated when the object of representation—here, the nude female—is created by a female artist. moreover, to posit a wholly psychoanalytic reading of the nude paintings produced in modern canada is to once again to view paintings like newton’s nude (and the nude women represented therein) as objects without agency and without consideration of the complicated interrelationship of artist, model (or real woman represented), and spectator. that there is nothing visually “masculine” about brooker’s seated figure, nor “feminine” about heward’s girl under a tree further problematizes the claims of psychoanalysis. to argue that women artists were socialized by a patriarchal culture to produce representations of nude women in line with their male peers is to denigrate the accomplishments of women artists like jori smith, heward, newton or marion scott. psychoanalysis can offer a useful way of thinking about viewers identifying with the nude, however it does not provide an entirely satisfactory means of reading the nude in canada during the interwar period. my contention is that the nude in canada was unable to offer identificatory fulfilment because it was unable to offer the collective identification necessary for the constitution of a national identity. given the scope of my thesis, i am less concerned with articulating a generalized theory of how the female nude came to be not just a subject but the subject and even the paradigm of western art after the mid- s. rather, i will examine a selection of nude paintings by canadian artists from the interwar period to argue for the ways in which performativity, identity, and subjectivity are constituted and embodied by the nude genre during a decade which has been characterized by art historian charles hill as being without “a definite image in the history of canadian art.” the artworks i have chosen are intended to provide examples of the kind of work produced during this period and which exemplify the treatment of the human figure by a variety of artists who held a mutual interest in reinterpreting the genre for the exercise of their own artistic concerns. the berger, for example, uses lacan’s theorization of the alienating ego ideal to discuss the ways in which orthopsychic norms were visualized and communicated in portraiture during the early modern period. following lacan, berger writes that embodiments of the gaze are “the visual or scopic dimension of the dominant discourses by which a culture constructs its subjects to imagine and represent themselves, to give themselves to be seen, and to model themselves on the exemplary or orthopsychic norms of the group: the gaze “circumscribes us” and constitutes us “as beings who are looked at, in the spectacle of the world.” psychoanalysis then, offers a means of understanding the identificatory possibilities of the nude and the ways in which it may, or may not, circumscribe viewers and visualize orthopsychic norms of identification. harry berger, “fictions of the pose: facing the gaze of early modern portraiture,” . charles hill, canadian painting in the thirties (ottawa: national gallery of canada, ), - . nudes i have selected are by both men and women and were painted in ontario and quebec. the works illustrate the diversity of visual strategies used by artists in the s and demonstrate the adoption of modernist pictorial techniques—whether strong cézanne- esque brushstrokes or large blocks of vibrant colour reminiscent of matisse. in attending to the absence of scholarship on the nude in canada, my study argues that nude figurative painting could not participate in the nationalization of wilderness landscape promoted by the group of seven, for it could not offer the same identificatory fulfilment as that of a canadian landscape painting produced by masculine “bushwhackers.” in canada, artists built on the modern realist nudes of manet and courbet in their exploration of the relationship of genres to one another and of artist, model and spectator. the nude also allowed artists to connect themselves to academic tradition in order to demonstrate their erudition, as heward does in her evocation of the classic sleeping venus pose in her girl under a tree. the genre would fail to attract the widespread admiration of a canadian public because it was neither wholly transgressive, nor did it fully adhere to the tradition of the nude. methodology viewing the nude as a genre concerned with containment and the idealization of the female form has occluded the role of the very real and corporeal woman used as sitter in many nude representations throughout art history. as noted earlier, harry berger’s analysis of early modern portraiture in fictions of the pose, in which the author argues that “portraits can be viewed as imitations of likenesses, not of individuals only but also of their acts of posing,” informs my own investigation of the nude in modern canadian art. berger contends that portraits are theatrical stagings, not of individual persons, but of subjects in the act of posing. instead of reading the faces of sitters in portraits as indexes of their mind or character, they should be seen as a “as an effect and representation— solely of the sitter’s and painter’s performance in the act of portrayal.” placing his theorization within c.s. peirce’s semiotic system of the icon, the symbol, and the index, berger states that the person represented in a portrait is “a sign that denotes its referent by resemblance; the referent it denotes is not simply a person but a person in the act of posing…a portrait [i]s a sign that denotes by resemblance, a sign whose content purports to refer to some possible state of the world that corresponds to it but is absent from it.” most importantly, “the basic premise behind the fiction of the pose is that we can’t assume the activity of posing and painting to have transpired exactly in the way it is represented...we assume in short, that the portrait is lying—is encouraging the referential fallacy—and that its claims to iconicity and indexicality are fictitious.” in newton’s nude painting, the inclusion of a portrait behind the nude woman, coupled with the berger, fictions of the pose: rembrandt against the italian renaissance, . berger, “fictions of the pose: facing the gaze of early modern portraiture,” . berger, fictions of the pose: rembrandt against the italian renaissance, . ibid. woman’s own fictive pose, remind the viewer that the model and the artist were engaged in a kind of performance in newton’s studio. prior to the modernist shift in representations of the nude, which can be attributed to courbet and manet in the nineteenth century, artists sought to idealize the female form in the repetition of similar pictorial conventions that obscured any indication that the woman represented was in fact a real woman. modern artists in canada explored the hermeneutic possibilities of the genre in their use of various visual strategies to transform models, sitters, and themselves (in the case of nude self-portraits) into living subjects who seem in many instances to resist or call attention to the traditional objectivity of the nude. for example, the realism of the model in newton’s nude appears as an agential subject with her confident pose and stylish haircut; she is self-aware and involved in the process of her own objectification. furthermore, the composition, use of colour, modern allusions, and the reference to portraiture in the painting behind the woman in nude all operate to emphasize the fiction of the pose, the performance between artist, model, and spectator. the fiction of the pose, by being that—a fiction of a woman undressed in a room or in a landscape—allows the viewer to move into the position of the artist, a move that cannot be done collectively. thus the nude could not stand for something collective in the same way as landscape painting did. landscape and the experience of being outdoors can be shared collectively, while the nude did not allow for a similar collective response. unlike the landscapes of the group of seven, the nude, whether deployed in order to explore the convergence of landscape and figural painting by edwin holgate or in a self- aware nude portrait like macleod’s descent of lilies, did not have a significant impact on canadian national and cultural identity. in varying degrees, artists like holgate, newton and brooker drew attention to the act of portrayal, the fiction of the pose and the nude as a representational device at a time when canadians were navigating deep economic, social, and cultural changes in the aftermath of the great war and the advent of the depression. canadian artists struggled to express their humanitarian concerns and social consciousness as well as their own sense of the importance of artistic culture to the nation. such endeavours led to the creation of artist communities and associations in an effort to achieve broader recognition and respect from a canadian public increasingly concerned with canadian sovereignty and identity. just as canada’s role in international affairs— military and economic—was debated, artists attempted to redefine what a distinctly canadian art might look like. writers and art critics in the s called for a move away from landscape painting, away from “pictures of rocks and stones,” and towards depictions of canadian humanity. according to barker fairley, landscape painting had progressed creatively to encapsulate a national sentiment, while paintings of humanity had not developed from the formal academic strictures of the group of seven’s forebears a generation ago. as fairley writes, landscape painting “has prevailed for twenty years—ever since tom thomson and the group of seven—and has entrenched itself deeply in the common mind, making the canadian artist inclined to be academic in proportion as he approaches the human, and creative in proportion as he avoids it.” discussions about the advancement of modern art in canada—thematic, stylistic, as well as its social and cultural status— barker fairley, “canadian art: man vs. landscape,” canadian forum, vol. , no. (dec. ): . ibid. ibid. continued into the s and ‘ s. such debates were integral to the creation of institutions that support arts and culture in canada, like the national gallery and the canada council for the arts, as well as for the solicitation of public financial support. in , the critic graham mcinnes wrote, “what perhaps does need explaining is that genre painting in canada never developed fully as a separate and healthy strain in the broad corpus of our art, and that it degenerated much more rapidly than was the case in the united states.” mcinnes echoes the attitudes of others before him such as donald w. buchanan and barker fairley. graham mcinnes, “the decline of genre,” canadian art, vol. , no. (autumn ), - . social context: the s in canada what critics were also acknowledging in their protestation of the ubiquity of landscape painting and the entrenched connection between canada’s geography and a national art movement was the discursive production of this naturalized equation. donald buchanan notes in his essay “the story of canadian art,” as pioneers, the group of seven met with explicit opposition from the defenders of the more traditional painting. a.y. jackson and the others therefore took pains, both in print and in lectures and addresses, to explain what they were trying to accomplish. “our atmosphere” said jackson in a speech, in which he outlined the origins of the new school, “was clear and sharp, our colours bright—crude, if you will—and on top of this were four changes of scenery such as they never knew in europe. in summer it was green, raw greens all in a tangle; in autumn it flamed with red and gold; in winter it was trapped in a blanket of dazzling snow, and in the springtime, it roared with running water and surged with life. in their efforts to promote an exclusively canadian aesthetic, artists like a.y. jackson and lawren harris worked together with the support of private patrons, institutions like the national gallery of canada, and art critics to bind canadian identity to a vast and empty terrain. with the help of these individuals, including eric brown, the first director of the national gallery, the group’s artworks toured the country and were included in exhibitions in the united states and europe. jackson and his colleagues also participated donald w. buchanan, “the story of canadian art,” canadian geographical journal, vol. , no. (december ), . in “gallery-sponsored lecture tours of canada in an effort to bring the narrative of canadian art to a broad public.” the entrenchment of the group of seven as canada’s best-known and most widely recognized artists did not occur naturally, nor did it occur without controversy. the debate about the unprecedented support given to the group was discussed in newspapers across the country, while the national gallery felt vindicated following the praise it received from british critics following the group of seven’s participation in the wembley exhibition in london. integral to the establishment of the group of seven as the sine qua non of canadian art was the sampson-matthews ltd. silkscreen project. in joyce zeman’s essay “establishing the canon: nationhood and the national gallery’s first reproduction programme of canadian,” the author quotes dennis reid who writes: a whole generation of canadians who grew up following the second world war learned of the group almost entirely from reproductive silkscreen prints that seemed to hang in every school library, bank, and doctor’s waiting room in the country. by the sampson-matthews reproduction programme had placed hundreds of thousands of images in libraries, homes, classrooms, and abroad. artists from ontario and quebec dominated the programme, which consisted almost exclusively of landscape jody berland and shelley hornstein, ed., capital culture: a reader on modernist legacies, state institutions, and the value(s) of art (montreal: mcgill-queen's university press, ), . ibid. joyce zemans, “establishing the canon: nationhood, identity and the national gallery’s first reproduction programme of canadian art,” the journal of canadian art history, vol. , no. ( ), . also see dennis reid, the group of seven: selected watercolours, drawings and prints from the art gallery of ontario (toronto: art gallery of ontario, ). paintings created by male artists prior to . however, the interwar years and the advent of the depression began to dismantle the hold of the group of seven on the canadian imagination. as anna hudson notes, as the depression deepened its grip on the economy, the search for unity in national cultural identity took a decided step towards the cause of social reform and in so doing altered the context of interpretation for the group of seven’s unflinching optimism in humanity’s ability to shape the environment according to a nationalistic ambition. as the writings of buchanan and fairley demonstrate, the separation of humanity from art and nature increasingly became the focus of critical and artistic debate. debates about the growth and propriety of figurative painting continued into the s as artists struggled to find a new way of representing a now fully autonomous and sovereign canada. following anna hudson’s contestation of hill’s remark that “while the twenties are dominated by the success of the group of seven and the forties by the explosive development of the automatistes, the s only raise the names of a few isolated artists,” it is clear from the number of figurative and nude representations from this period that artists were using modernist aesthetic techniques to explore different genres—including interior genre scenes, nudes, figurative representations, portraits, as well as continuing the zemans, “establishing the canon,” - . hudson, “art and social progress: the toronto community of painters - ,” . charles hill, canadian painting in the thirties (ottawa: national gallery of canada, ), . anna hudson’s doctoral thesis “art and social progress: the toronto community of painters, - ,” aims to revise the understanding articulated by charles hill that the visual styles and sensibilities of the post- group of seven painters in toronto identify them as a group of socially-conscious artists. according to hudson, “[they] positioned themselves as a community of like-minded individuals engaged in an international effort to recognize the modern artist’s vital role in social reconstruction and reform. a self- effacing insistence on community identity, geared to collective well-being, ultimately compromised the historical recognition of these artists.” hudson, “art and social progress: the toronto community of painters - ,” - . tradition of landscape painting. paintings of the nude female form were produced by artists as a means to demonstrate their artistic abilities and knowledge of post- impressionist techniques and to express their awareness of “international” modern art trends. artists such as macleod, brooker, holgate, heward, carl schaefer, marion scott, john lyman, paraskeva clark, and charles comfort were responding to the demands of critics such as robert ayre, barker fairly, bertram brooker, and louis muhlstock who “had been calling throughout the s for more representations of the contemporary human figure.” it would not be until that john lyman would write the following in response to a contemporary arts society exhibition held at the art association of montreal entitled art of our day in canada: gone are the posters, gone the “designs” of the wilderness. landscape has lost its quasi-monopoly as a motive of free expression; not more than a quarter of the pictures belong to this class. forty percent of the contributors are artists who deal, though not all exclusively, with the human subject. paintings such as charles comfort’s young canadian ( , fig. ), bertram brooker’s figures in a landscape, or edwin holgate’s lumberjack ( , fig. ) answered the call for an expression of “the formal potential offered by the human physique.” however, the turn toward figurative painting in the s and s did not result in immediate praise from critics. exhibitions like art of our day were met with mixed reviews, revealing esther trépanier, jewish painters of montreal: witnesses of their time, - (montreal: Éditions de l’homme, ), . john lyman quoted in esther trépanier, jewish painters of montreal, . ibid., . robert ayre complained that art in our day was “not a complete round-up” of canadian art, for it “confined itself almost entirely to montreal and toronto…and several of the most vital producers in even this narrow, if intensively cultivated field are not represented.” writing in le quartier latin, the critic jacques de tonnancour, stated that the exhibition was weakened by the inclusion of artists who were not members of the contemporary arts society. he stated: “here we are still unable to bring together quality that figurative and nude painting at this time could not break the hold of the group of seven on the canadian imagination, nor could it form the basis of a new movement in canadian art. the censorship of the nude in canada is also symptomatic of the fact that the genre could not find the same kind of universal identification that so many canadians felt standing in front of a landscape painting like thomson’s the west wind ( , fig. ). moralizing discourse about the nude in canadian is not unique to the s. the display of three nude paintings at the canadian national exhibition in toronto led to a lengthy debate in newspaper editorials and letters to the editor. as historian jane nicholas has argued, the debates were concerned not just with the paintings themselves, but “reveal concerns about being modern and negotiating cultural change in the s” as perceived shifts in popular taste, moral standards, and gender norms increasingly became the focus of social unease. this anxiety would continue into the s during which time paintings like brooker’s figures in landscape and newton’s nude were removed from an ontario society of artists and a canadian group of painters exhibition respectively. the censure of the nude during this period speaks to its volatile place in canadian society. as esther trépanier notes, “even as canadian art was asserting its modernity, the public, art critics, gallery directors, and private patrons refused to identify with the nude, for the genre did not offer what was coming to be expected of a truly canadian form of and quantity.” charles varley, the contemporary arts society, montreal - (edmonton: the edmonton art gallery, ), . nicholas, “‘a figure of a nude woman,’” . expression.” shifts in moral standards and gender norms simultaneously evoked anxiety and pleasure in modern canada. the debate, therefore, was about these deeper cultural shifts and the contested nature of becoming and being modern. the nude offered an opening for discussion that revealed and crystallized already existing concerns. beginning in the s, a key concern was that modern popular culture from europe and especially the united states was warping the minds of canadian youth. new and licentious forms of popular culture had come to canada in the forms of dime novels, jazz, movies, burlesque dancing, and beauty contests that threatened to trap youth in a debauched world. concerned citizens complained that homes and schools were no longer the moral training ground for youth. in relation to art, these tensions and anxieties were articulated in the positions and attitudes taken towards the painted nude body. with its ability to connect with tradition or overturn stylistic conventions, the nude was a site of social and artistic debate. the nudes produced by canadian artists at this time did not adhere to tradition but neither did they challenge the newly established visual developments of european modernist aesthetics. of course the nude had traditionally been an image of unreal perfection since the time of the greeks. however the avant-garde radicalism of manet and courbet would change this. their nudes brought the confrontation between reality and high art into the open, and their de-idealized nude women challenged the salon-going public of late nineteenth century paris. later, modern artists like picasso and duchamp would alter the radicalism of manet’s demi-monde by rendering the nude female form in flat, angular planes of colour. in canada, artists like prudence heward would hint at such esther trépanier, “introduction,” in the nude in modern canadian art - , michèle grandbois, anna hudson and esther trépanier, eds. (montreal: musée des beaux-arts, ), . nicholas, “‘a figure of a nude woman,’” . cubist motifs in her own nudes, while maintaining a connection with the idealized tradition of the nude in allusions to titian and giorgione. canadian artists painting the nude were caught in a kind of liminal state between tradition and modernity. maintaining a link with academic tradition made their work comprehensible to an emerging canadian art-viewing public; however, by not exploring their modernist tendencies further, canadian artists could not be touted as groundbreaking in the same manner as their modern european predecessors. the act of portraying a real nude woman is underscored by artists like macleod, heward and holgate; and this foregrounding of the figures’ nakedness rather than representing an idealized woman, produced controversies that would only wane as the genre itself disappeared in the s and ‘ s. no doubt the nude’s disappearance was also aided and abetted by the censorship it endured in galleries and exhibitions. newton, for example, only painted one nude and its censure may very well have discouraged her from producing any more. while newton explores portraiture in relation to the nude, heward, macleod, holgate, and brooker employed a diversity of visual strategies in their nudes, as the examples discussed below will demonstrate. lilias torrance newton in lilias torrance newton’s nude of , the social tensions around artistic expression, sexuality, and modernity were brought to the fore. the mass-produced culture that emerged in the s in canada continued into the ‘ s despite the economic situation. films grew in popularity for those who could afford to attend them, while mass- circulation magazines and records promoted new kinds of popular lifestyles. while the canadian artistic elite weighed the merits of the group of seven or the montreal school in magazines like canadian forum, some of their fellow commentators continued to argue about immorality and the impropriety of young women, a social commentary that had begun with critics like beatrice m. shaw. in her article, “the age of uninnocence” in saturday night magazine. for shaw, the moral and physical health of the nation was directly connected to the propriety of the nation’s young women. shaw called into question the appearance of young women, which she felt was immodest and in need of reform as a result of the continued influx of american popular magazines, literature, and films pouring into canada. the attention devoted to women’s bodies, gender norms, and popular culture would continue as more casinos and burlesque theatres opened, modern dance grew in popularity, and american dime novels and jazz music were consumed by canada’s youth. concerns about the best way to perpetuate sexual and gender norms in line with a victorian sense of modesty, as well as ways to prevent the americanization of canadian culture, carried over into debates about the nude genre in canada. the many polemics that circulated in print support michel foucault’s well-known argument that policing sex—or in the case of fine art in canada, the censorship of nude painting—does jane nicholas, “catching the public eye: the body, space, and social order in s canadian visual culture,” (phd diss., university of waterloo, ), . nicholas, “‘a figure of a nude woman,’” . not in fact repress sexuality but rather creates an incitement and proliferation of discourse. many artists and critics, including bertram brooker and donald buchanan, came to the defence of the nude genre and attacked the prurient attitudes espoused by the moralizing right. these attitudes contributed to the board of the toronto art gallery’s removal of newton’s painting from the canadian group of painters exhibition. vincent massey, later a governor general of canada, felt that newton was slighted and purchased the painting, which is now in a private collection. lilias torrance newton studied at the art association of montreal with william brymner in . following the first world war, she studied in london and later went to paris where she exhibited at the paris salon in , receiving premier mention d’honneur for her painting denise ( ). newton returned to canada shortly thereafter and is today best known as one of canada’s most prolific portraitists, though she executed a number of landscapes and still lifes, and one, somewhat infamous, nude. the painting of a confident, lithe-bodied young woman was scandalous in part because of her green sandals, which underscore her nakedness. she is superimposed onto the representation of a painted portrait on an easel. the details of a large russian-style orthodox church with onion domes in a snowy landscape visible behind the portrait of a man in a heavy fur- trimmed jacket suggest that the portrait on the easel is of the russian composer and michel foucault writes, “what is peculiar to modern societies, in fact, is not that they consigned sex to a shadow existence, but that they dedicated themselves to speaking of it ad infinitum, while exploiting it as the secret.” the history of sexuality volume , (new york: vintage, ), . see donald w. buchanan, “naked ladies,” canadian forum, vol. , no. (april ): - ; paul duval, “human form more inspiring than landscape,” saturday night, vol. (sept. ); bertram brooker, “nudes and prudes,” in open house, ed. william arthur deacon and wilfred reeves (ottawa: graphic publishers ltd., ), - ; and louis muhlstock “an excess of prudery,” canadian art, vol. no. ( ), - . musician andre illiashenko—a painting that newton exhibited with the royal canadian academy of arts in . the model stands with unbridled self-awareness in an artist’s studio that is no doubt newton’s own, “thereby providing an intimate view into the artist’s practice.” the woman’s confidence in her own body is captured in the strength of her pose and the display of her naked form. according to critic donald w. buchanan, this self-possession was precisely what created such controversy about the artwork. in his essay “naked ladies,” buchanan argued that a nude reclining in the landscape remained a nude: but to sit in a city studio and do a russian model, surrounded with a formal, subjective pattern of objects, is heresy. the montreal painter, lilias torrance newton it will be remembered, committed this sin last year. the board of the toronto art gallery refused to hang her painting in the show of the canadian group of painters. they called the model a naked lady, not a nude, you see, for she wore green slippers.” the figure’s realism challenged commentators of the day: with her shoes, painted nails and bobbed hair, the nude appeared immodest, her bearing too confident, as if she were a dancer performing her body. to record this performance in a work of art could warrant the serious charge of being “a showman’s trick of the first magnitude,” to cite buchanan again. in newton’s painting, the discarded robe on the arm of the chair helps to heighten the model’s eroticism, already underscored by her modern shoes and her pubic hair. the hudson, “disarming the conventions of nudity in canadian art,” . ibid., . donald w. buchanan quoted in brian foss, “living landscape,” in edwin holgate, ed. rosalind pepall and brian foss (montreal: musée des beaux-arts, ), . ibid. prosperity of the s had given way to the depression and the pleasures and perils of the past two decades intensified debates about what exactly it meant to be modern. newton’s painting, here, was seen as being perhaps too modern. canadians could accept a modernity in dialogue with the past, but not one which sought a clean break from it. the painting’s removal from the canadian group of painters exhibition signals the way in which the artwork provoked viewers at the time, invoking the tensions around sexuality and popular culture, while, as i will demonstrate, the painting’s formal qualities also signalled a break with tradition. the pink armchair behind the figure in nude acts as visual support to the figure’s tall, svelte body, while the artwork’s flatness works to emphasize the proximity of the figure to the picture plane, cancelling any sense of a body in physical space. newton’s interest in the figure’s relationship to space is called up by the snowy landscape behind the darkened portrait, one of the few portraits newton painted with an outdoor background. the superimposition of the nude model onto the portrait makes for an odd composition. the dark outline of illiashenko behind the woman appears almost like a shadow cast by the model’s head and shoulders, as if she is in the snowy landscape herself. the dark silhouette of her head and shoulders evokes the strong outline of a lawren harris mountain or iceberg. this is, perhaps, an ironic comment on the woman’s relationship to the landscape: she is both inside and outside of it. newton demands that the viewer question the relationship of the human to nature as she calls into question the tradition of the nude set in landscape such as that in giorgione’s sleeping venus, a reproduction of which had recently been removed from the walls of the print room of the toronto art gallery. the pop of blue sky in the portrait of illiashenko immediately draws the viewer into the painting and contrasts with the grey hues of the artist’s studio and the muted yellowy pink tones of the woman’s flesh. the soft dark mound of the figure’s pubic hair mimics the fine hairs on illiashenko’s jacket, while the grey triangles of snowy hills and farmland in the background of the portrait are echoed in the geometric patterns of the floor, in the lines cut by the easel against the wall and by the large canvas that leans against the studio wall behind it. the wooden frame of the blank canvas is visible to the observer and calls up the artist’s labour and the nude’s status as representation. the canvas and its support remind viewers that the representation before them is the product of newton and this woman or model coming together in newton’s studio to produce the nude image before them. newton, like other artists in canada and elsewhere, was required to undertake rigorous academic training to develop her command of intellectual abstraction and an ability to see beyond the immediate visceral body of the nude model. however, here newton chooses not to paint an idealized woman, a body abstracted from that of some anonymous hired model. she has captured the figure’s likeness with a verisimilitude not usually associated with the genre: the woman’s bright red lips, long-lashes and pink-tinged cheeks are clearly those of a specific and real woman. the formal treatment of the woman’s face here is reminiscent of many of newton’s portraits including her own self- portrait (c. , fig. ). portraiture is also alluded to by the painting on the easel behind the nude woman. the artist’s reference to portraiture and her use of realism to depict the model disrupt the conventions of the nude genre, a genre whose status until the nineteenth bertram brooker, “nudes and prudes,” in open house, ed. william arthur deacon and wilfred reeves, (ottawa: graphic publishers ltd., ), - . century was predicated on distancing itself from the reality it claimed to represent. newton’s painting stresses its status as representation and, thus, as harry berger argues, it “calls up and evokes as something absent the truthful presentation it confesses truly it is not.” the absent referent (the real woman used as model) that was historically distanced from the representation is here presented to the viewer in a manner that belies her status as everywoman or abstracted nude body for the “possession” of the male gaze. this woman stood in newton’s studio in her green sandals with her painted nails and exposed pubic hair and is depicted with a clear sense of reflexivity on the part of the artist. the ways in which the agency and subjectivity of women have historically been effaced in the tradition of the genre are troubled here; this woman has agency and a very real presence in front of the viewer. where the nude had previously been a representation of the fantasy of another human being, typically female, fabricated by a process of subtractions and additions, the nude in canadian modern art brought those specificities—her appearance and fleshy materiality—to the forefront. in newton’s nude the signifiers of modernity—the woman’s shoes and fashionable haircut, for example—work to underscore that this is in fact a representation of a real and modern woman. this was a woman who removed her clothes, stood in this position, with these shoes on, in newton’s studio and had her likeness painted by the artist on a large canvas. many of the more contentious nudes painted in canada during this same period were faulted for their supposed realism, and, while the figure in newton’s painting is representative of a modern woman, the two-dimensionality of the armchair and the darkened halo of the portrait behind her flatten the figure and thereby undermine any sense of realism. she is more like the head of illiashenko, compositionally locked into her berger, fictions of the pose: rembrandt against the italian renaissance, . surroundings, and superimposed on top of them. she appears flattened by the interior space onto which she is painted rather than a material body in three-dimensional space. newton’s nude is neither an idealization of the female form nor physical body made tangible. turning again to berger, this is a painting in which the nude operates instead as “an index—an effect and representation—solely of the sitter’s and painter’s performance in the act of portrayal.” the act of a nude model posing and being posed by the artist here becomes both the referent of the image and its cause. the viewer is aware that she is looking at a flat canvas upon which newton has represented the very act of representation itself. the presence of the landscape in the portrait suggests newton was intent on exploring the connection between land and figure; however, this relationship remains unsuccessful, more disjunctive than an enmeshing of body and landscape. berger, “fictions of the pose: facing the gaze of early modern portraiture,” . pegi nicol macleod over the course of her career, pegi nicol macleod’s paintings of genre scenes, still lifes, landscapes, and portraits were praised by critics and she received a great deal of support from the director of the national gallery, eric brown. despite her critical success, macleod remains marginalized in the annals of canadian art history, although laura brandon’s recent biography of this artist does, i hope, signal the beginning of a renewed interest in her exceptional watercolours and paintings. an examination of two of macleod’s nude self-portraits, descent of lilies, and torso and plants, demonstrates the artist’s interplay of the genres of portraiture, still life and the nude, while their formal aesthetic qualities indicate macleod’s understanding of modern and surrealist painting. born in listowel, ontario in , macleod was educated in ottawa and studied painting under franklin brownell, r.c.a. before moving on to the École des beaux-arts, montreal. she travelled, painting in ottawa and the area around gatineau and montreal. in , she painted for a time in alberta, and in she travelled to the skeena river in british columbia to paint the life of the west coast indians. in macleod was awarded first prize for painting in the willingdon arts competition for her canvas, log run ( , fig. ). in she moved to toronto where she continued to paint and to work on theatre and stage designs, as well as on window displays for eaton’s department store. her marriage to norman macleod took the couple to new york where macleod painted scenes of manhattan life she saw from her apartment window. she also created a number of self-portraits and many paintings of her daughter jane. macleod returned frequently to canada. she ran a summer art school at the university of new brunswick in donald w. buchanan, memorial exhibition: pegi nicol macleod - (ottawa: national gallery of canada, ), . fredericton and was commissioned in to paint the women’s divisions of the canadian armed forces. she did not break into the art circles of new york and the couple were financially strapped during their time there. the absence of support from the art community and the financial difficulties made her pursuit of her art a difficult endeavour. macleod’s life was cut short by cancer, and she died in at the age of . macleod’s nude self-portraits, like her scenes of rivers, children playing, or still life flowers, are characterized by a fluidity of form and vibrant colour. her works have an extreme individuality about them and are often full of what critic graham mcinnes has described as a “turbulent waywardness” and “a violent frenzy [of] movement.” this frenzy of movement is strikingly conveyed in her large scale painting descent of lilies. descent of lilies is a fantastical scene of flowers, horses, and a central nude representation of the artist. she is draped in vibrant pink fabric from the waist down and her body turns so that she looks back toward the viewer. her torso is repeated in the background behind a bucking horse and large lily petals in the top left corner. she is surrounded by white lily blossoms that seem to float and open up in various stages of bloom. a large hand with painted red nails is rendered with the same soft curves in ochre and pale pink hues as the flowers around it, making it difficult to pick out at first glance. in the bottom left hand corner are two figures on horseback, their faces represented as blocks of colour and flecks of paint, while the horses they ride blend seamlessly into their surroundings. macleod’s use of colour works to make all the elements on the canvas almost indistinguishable from one another, giving them, as laura brandon has noted, a dreamlike quality. clouds, flowers, figures, horses, hands, and cloth seem to emerge out mcinnes, “the decline of genre,” . brandon, pegi by herself, . of and into each other. but the viewer’s eye is continually drawn back down to the presence of the hand in the bottom right of the painting. this is no ordinary surrealist- inflected nude. the artist makes visible the hand that produced the painting before us. the hand is grasping a paintbrush (which is both paintbrush and flower), which reminds the viewer of the labour involved in the artwork’s creation, while the fluid lines of paint on the canvas are indexical of the movement of the artist’s paintbrush across the canvas. macleod’s painting foregrounds the representational act of the artist having sat in front of a mirror to produce the painted image, a similar reflexivity to that described by joseph koerner about dürer’s self-portraits. koerner, in arguing for the advent of the genre of self-portraiture in the work of dürer, begins with his erlangen self-portrait and charts a progression to dürer’s self-portrait of . koerner asserts that dürer’s self-portraits offer moments of self-aware contemplation in which the artist celebrates the moment and conditions of the work’s making. macleod’s lilies is similar, for she too, connects the hand and artist in such a way as to recall the tension at work between the artist’s labour and the embodied subjectivity of both the spectator and the artist herself. macleod is both maker and model and in so doing, the hand coupled with her own nude body in the painting attests, to use koerner’s words, “to the authentic presence of the artist in the work of art.” her reinterpretation of the genre of the nude is self-reflexive. as spectators, we are made aware of the fiction of the artist’s pose and the de-idealized woman represented. in torso and plants macleod uses short angular brushstrokes of greens, yellows, blues and pinks to represent her own torso, her head cut off at the neck by the top of the painting’s frame. she is seated with a large assemblage of flowers on her cloth-draped lap joseph koerner, the moment of self-portraiture in german renaissance art (chicago : university of chicago press, ), . ibid., . that seem to explode and take over her body. the artist places herself, nude, in what could be any generic still life composition of a flowering plant or vase of flowers. as anna hudson writes, “[s]he presents herself as a studio nude and, in so doing, includes the artist among the still life objects arranged for aesthetic contemplation.” she combines the genres of still life, portraiture and the nude in a painting, challenging the parameters of all three genres. macleod’s investigation of the interrelationship between nature and humanity calls attention to the representational process undertaken by the artist in the production of the artwork. the image cannot be read as an erotic idealized nude, or an easily identifiable self-portraiture of the artist, or a simple genre scene of lilacs and daffodils. the intrusion of the artist onto the representational field calls attention once again to the artifice of production while the absence of her head and face challenge the viewer’s understanding of the work as a self-portrait. macleod’s nude portraits are ambiguous. they are neither genre scenes with easily comprehensible narratives, nor self- portraits in the true sense of representing a likeness of the artist, nor still lifes, nor traditional nudes of an idealized figure. macleod’s nude self-portraits are reflexive about their own production and ambiguous in their combination of genres, as in torso and plants. macleod’s painting is evidence of the ways in which artists were experimenting with the genre and the ambiguity evident in her paintings attests to the struggle of artists who were turning to the nude to work against the landscape tradition. hudson, “art and social progress: the toronto community of painters, - ,” . prudence heward newton and macleod’s references to, and exploration of, portraiture in their nude paintings was but one approach taken to the genre by artists in canada. still others, like prudence heward, chose to push the possibilities of the genre through the relationship of figure and landscape. prudence heward’s oeuvre is replete with paintings of figures in landscape. she offered landscape views of rural areas of canada with the human inhabitants who had “tamed” and cultivated those landscapes. heward’s paintings, while critically lauded were not claimed as distinctly canadian in part because the artist chose to portray the human subject in the landscape, rather than the landscape on its own. as i have noted, the group of seven answered the call for a national art which would mediate what author and critic northrop frye termed the “unrest and dissatisfaction one feels about a country which has not been lived in: the tension between the mind and a surrounding not integrated with it.” the tranquil and serene landscapes of georgian bay and algonquin park painted by the group of seven came to be championed as mediating the tension between the human mind and the vast land around it. by contrast, artists such as heward who concentrated on figurative painting were marginalized in favour of artists who concentrated on landscape painting. while heward was much praised over the course of her career, by critics and fellow artist such as a.y. jackson, knowledge of her work waned heward’s girl on a hill won the inaugural willingdon arts competition in and her painting rollande ( ) won international praise in travelling exhibitions in europe and the united states. northrop frye, “canadian colonial painting,” in documents in canadian art, ed. douglas fetherling, (peterborough, on: broadview press, ), . many critics have pointed out that frye was mistaken in his description of canada as a country that had not been lived in. canada had been inhabited by first nations and inuit peoples long before the arrival of european explorers and colonial settlers in the fifteenth century. until natalie luckyj’s exhibition and catalogue expressions of will: the art of prudence heward in . prudence heward was born in montreal in and studied art in her hometown. she spent several years in england during the first world war before returning home where she joined the art association of montreal school. there she studied under the tutelage of randolph hewton and william brymner, followed by summer sketching classes with maurice cullen. in she joined a number of her fellow students, most notably anne savage, edwin holgate, and lilias torrance newton, in forming the short- lived beaver hall hill group. from to heward lived in montparnasse in paris where she studied at the académie colarossi with charles geurin. returning to canada, she worked in her studio at her home on peel street in montreal, enlisting friends and relatives as portrait models and travelling outside the city on sketching trips to her family’s summer home at fernbank near brockville, ontario. heward incorporated this particular landscape into the backgrounds of many of her paintings. in she became, along with edwin holgate, a founding member of the canadian group of painters. heward’s oeuvre is comprised of a number of nudes, portraits and figure studies of women. along with girl under a tree from , heward also painted a number of striking black nudes from the same period. heward was a great admirer of cézanne, renoir, derain, picasso, modigliani, and matisse. their influence, coupled with the time she spent in europe, can be seen in the strong lines and modernist blocks of colour for the buildings in the background of girl under a tree. speculation existed that the painting is natalie luckyj, expressions of will: the art of prudence heward (kingston, on: agnes etherington art centre, ). marielle aylen, “interfaces of the portrait: liminality and dialogism in canadian women's portraiture between the wars,” (ma diss., carleton university, ): . a self-portrait; however, the artist’s nephew, ross heward, has provided evidence that it is in fact of a model. rendered in brilliant colour, girl under a tree depicts a recumbent nude in a somewhat abstracted modernist landscape. the large figure occupies the entire foreground of the picture plane, dominating the surrounding landscape. the model’s taut, muscular body lies across a verdant hill in front of a series of urban buildings represented with strong blocks of purple, white, pink, green and blue. the woman gazes out in a relaxed pose, one hand resting behind her head and the other lying flat by her side. while her pose calls up that of the prostitute in olympia, the woman’s gaze here travels off into the distance and the spectator is unable to connect with her or to fix her in place as an object of desire. the strong contrast of the flesh tones against the rich blues, greens, and purples of the landscape around her disrupts any semblance of the figure converging with her surroundings. as critic james campbell notes, “heward’s oeuvre is characterized by her use of modernist blocks of colour and bold lines, but the influence of her training in paris seems to pervade girl under a tree in its quotation of cézannesque landscape in a most striking way.” this comparison was first articulated by john lyman in when he described heward’s “unmodulated and cloisonné-treatment of [the] background without the painting has been described by some critics as a self-portrait, however prudence heward’s uncle, ross heward recalls that art historian barbara meadowcroft was told by a retired director of the art gallery of hamilton that the woman in girl under a tree is a model who had also posed for him. ross contends that prudence heward never painted an overt self-portrait. (she did, however, execute a few drawings and sketches that were self-portraits). heward grafftey, “prudence heward,” in portraits of a life (montreal: véhicule press, ). james campbell, “young girls and old boys: the art of prudence heward and edwin holgate,” border crossings vol. , no. , issue (june ): . interrelation” and the woman in the painting as a “bouguereau nude against cézanne background.” in girl under a tree, heward repeats the trope of the nude in landscape, but her use of modernist technique does not go far enough in pushing the genre’s aesthetic possibilities. this is a nude woman depicted with enough realism to suggest that she could be a real woman or even the artist herself. as charles hill has noted, she is a woman posed against a studio backdrop, rather than an idealized female form or the modernist abstract nudes of picasso or duchamp. in the awkward pose of the recumbent nude in heward’s painting and in the model’s formal dislocation from her surroundings, heward’s painting—as with so many by her contemporaries—fails to integrate successfully her subject with the wild landscape around her. the naturalized placement of giorgione’s nude is rendered a fallacy here. there is nothing natural about a nude woman lying on a green hill and, despite its classical lineage, heward’s painting demonstrates that to paint a nude woman out-of-doors is an imagined fantasy. i will return to a discussion of the nude and landscape in canada later on. while more successful in her integration of figure and landscape than some of her contemporaries such as edwin holgate, heward’s series of black nudes earned negative as well as racist criticism and were much more controversial than girl under a tree. in , heward produced a series of paintings of young nude or semi-clad black women. this series is often discussed by scholars as something outside of or abberant to the artist’s whole body of work. however, heward’s black nudes should be considered alongside girl under a tree as they underscore her interest in humanity, female john lyman, “journal,” vol. ii, entry for april ; in the bibliothèque nationale du québec, montreal. hill, canadian painting in the thirties, . subjectivity, and landscape. these works, including hester, ( , fig. ), dark girl, ( , fig ), negress with sunflowers ( , fig. ) and girl in the window ( , fig. ) generated controversy and challenged the conventions of the genre. from the sitters’ modern unwrapped hairstyles, their weary postures and averted gazes, to the canadian landscapes in which their bodies are embedded, heward’s paintings were unsettling to white spectators who would have formed the majority of viewers in the s. the averted eyes, weary poses, and the hairs of the figures in hester, dark girl and girl in a window do not conform to the cultural and historical norms for representing black women. they defy both the tradition of the white and the black female nude and were therefore ambiguous and troubling to many canadian viewers. it is noteworthy that heward’s paintings were never censored from their exhibition spaces, no doubt in part because the figure’s blackness allowed for figurative elements otherwise denied the white nude. however, the paintings clearly incited deep anxiety on the part of the white viewer who, while able to see the strength and maturity of the artist’s hand, could not reconcile it with the “masterfully ugly figure” represented. the normative association of black skin with sexual deviancy is not so obviously fixed upon heward’s canvases: nor do the bodies of hester or dark girl conform to the academic tradition of the sentimental abstract nude. art historian charmaine nelson argues that canadian artist dorothy stevens’ coloured nude ( , fig. ) was an “overtly sexualized representation of the female body [which] was praised rather than censored [because of] the nude’s blackness.” nelson argues that the painting received wide acclaim simply because stevens’ nude body luckyj, expressions of will, . charmaine nelson, “coloured nude: fetishization, disguise, dichotomy,” racar: revue d'art canadienne vol. , no. - ( ): . is a black one. if the same stylistic conventions – raised open arms, visible breasts, headdress, and jungle foliage – were used at the time to represent a white female nude body, critics might have been outraged. it is perfectly acceptable for black women to be represented as “overtly sexualized,” to be the object or fetish for a male viewer, whereas representations of sexualized white women were often met with criticism and censorship in the early decades of the twentieth century in canada. it is clear that hester, dark girl, and girl in the window represent black women who are far removed from prudence heward’s own social station. however, this does not mean that she conforms to the established european artistic conventions for painting the nude, let alone the black nude. by contravening the stereotypical imagery of black women at the time, heward’s black nudes express the illusory power and authority of the white male subject. heward defied the established european model for the female nude, calling into question the essential difference supposedly inherent in the black female body. indeed, the contravention of normative aesthetic and ideological conventions in dark girl and hester outraged many critics. one critic wrote of heward’s painting hester in : …far from pleasing, why oh why, take the trouble to paint – and paint well – a hideous, fat, naked negress, with thighs like a prize-fighter and a loose-lipped, learing [sic] face? obesity and ugliness in the nude were even banned from the old time barroom. a montreal reviewer took note of her “very good study of a head of a coloured girl” but found hester “though clever” to be “exceedingly ugly.” dark girl also polarized critical r.b.f., “canadian group of painters exhibition at gallery,” ottawa journal, february , . luckyj, expressions of will, . opinion. it was referred to by one critic as “a masterfully ugly figure, semi-nude.” in contrast, a critic from the toronto telegram saw instead, “a great beauty of line and singularly luminous flesh-tones.” arthur lismer was also positive, noting heward’s landscapes and her “‘coloured girl’ [as] fine and dignified manifestations of unity of design and purpose.” it is clear from the heated, often racist, and conflicting response from critics that heward’s black female nudes troubled many viewers. by not representing the black female body as overly sexualized or naturalized, heward defied a variety of academic conventions. art historian charmaine nelson points out that western artists have employed a number of tropes to represent the female body: the manipulation of body hair, the arrangement of the body within its environment, and the positioning of the body, face, and gaze. hester, dark girl and girl in the window contravene the academic artistic tropes previously established in western art for representing the black nude body. hester sits at the base of a tree, her slender torso echoing its trunk as its branches shoot off outside the picture plane. in dark girl, the sitter is nestled in amongst a jungle- like backdrop of canadian sumac. in both images heward paints the women’s bodies such that they mirror the landscape into which they have been placed – a device usually reserved for the white female nude. white female nudes have been historically represented harmoniously within the landscape as woman in nature, whereas black nudes were historically placed on the landscape – indicative of the sitter’s uncontrolled, transgressive and sublime nature. ibid. ibid., . ibid., . ibid. even with her “thighs like a prizefighter,” there is a sense of balance to hester as she sits reflecting the landscape around her. hester’s thighs merge with the base of the tree under which she sits. her arms, crossed delicately across her lap, emulate the slender branches of the tree and the undulating hills in the distance echo the wave of her exposed hair. in dark girl, the young woman sits slightly slouched, her head tilted as her body appears to almost merge with the sumac behind her. the branches on either side of her echo the curve of her arms and the bend in her back and neck. nature has historically been constituted as feminine in western thought as part of an effort to align women with irrationality, emotion, corporeality, and instinctive purity, while men are aligned with their opposites qualities. placing the nude white woman within the landscape, as sexualized extension of the natural world, both reinforced her natural purity and placed her within the control of the civilizing white man. hester and dark girl are not white, as one of the artwork’s titles so obviously points out. the sitters are represented as the white female body conventionally had been, as an extension of the landscape, but the colour of their skin points to the women’s “otherness.” heward’s paintings hover in a liminal space between idealized and de-idealized nude. this ambiguity confounded art critics and the canadian public in the s. heward’s black women form part of a slowly emerging multicultural society, and the way in which they mirror their environment works to underscore this. heward’s choice to situate dark girl within a backdrop of canadian sumac argues for the black woman’s place within the canadian landscape. having chosen a native canadian plant as her backdrop and by painting a sitter whose own body emulates her natural environment, ibid. heward seems to suggest that dark girl and women like her are reflections of heward’s canada. the idealized open body of the traditional nude worked to signal her sexual availability. with soft fleshy curves, titian’s venus of urbino, with her arms at her sides, her body open and on full display, gazes seductively toward the viewer. dark girl does not possess any of the fleshiness of titian’s work or the excessive fat of sara baartman’s, (more commonly known as the hottentot venus) overly sexualized corpus. the body in dark girl is comprised mostly of muscle that is here slackened under drooped shoulders that combine to create a posture at once weary and disheartened. her body, similar to that of hester’s, signals the woman’s labour and exhaustion rather than her sexuality. the exhaustion and numbness of heward’s three sitters is signalled by their averted gazes and slumped postures. the bodies of the women in hester and dark girl are closed off and restricted from the viewer. their arms deny access to their sex, and their breasts sag low under the weight of their social and psychic conditions as racially inferior others in a white patriarchal canadian society. they are not on display for the pleasure of the spectator. rather, they seem reluctant to be imaged, resigned to their positions at the bottom of the social hierarchy. but heward has not painted a generalized or universalized black woman who stands in metonymically for “black woman.” she has afforded hester a kind of agency in granting her a name, and all three figures have clearly individualized features, granting them a specificity normally denied the nude body. sarah baartman (or saartjie baartman), who is more commonly known as the hottentot venus, was a khoikhoi woman taken as a slave from cape town in . she was exhibited in england as a kind of circus or ethnographic exhibit. she was eventually sold to a french animal trainer and was exhibited in france where she drew the interest of naturalists and scientists. she died in at the age of . see clifton c. crais, and pamela scully, sara baartman and the hottentot venus: a ghost story and a biography (princeton: princeton university press, ); and rachel holmes, african queen: the real life of the hottentot venus (new york: random house, ). operating outside the artistic and ideological conventions that governed the representation of black women at the time, heward’s black nudes offer contradictory visual elements that contravene the stereotypical representations of black women to produce ambiguous images. by virtue of their race, the women that heward chose to paint most certainly did offer a new image of canada for the country. by altering the traditional representation of black women, by giving these women an agency otherwise denied similar subjects in art history, heward defied the traditions of the genre and unsettled gallery spectators. edwin holgate the social tension that characterizes heward’s paintings is replaced in edwin holgate’s nudes by a much more subtle disjuncture of figure and landscape. holgate, like many artists during the interwar period, also attempted to unify his figures into their surroundings, concomitantly exercising his abilities as a landscape painter and portraitist. holgate’s portrait studies such as the lumberjack ( ), fire ranger ( , fig. ), and paul, trapper (c. , fig. ) demonstrate a concern for form which preoccupied the artist throughout his career. the strong outlines of the sitters’ bodies and the textural short brushstrokes that give vitality and warmth to a painting like the cellist ( , fig. ) are also used by holgate in many of the nudes he painted. holgate was an esteemed draughtsman who studied at the art association of montreal. he studied with maurice cullen and william brymner in montreal before moving to paris to further his studies, returning to montreal in . in , holgate was a founding member of the short-lived beaver hall group along with randolph hewton, mabel may, lilias torrance newton, and prudence heward. the eighth member of the group of seven, holgate later joined the group at the behest of a.y. jackson in . though he acted as an official war artist during world war ii, when holgate returned home, he felt left out of a post-war art world that had progressed without him. he decided to withdraw from the urban bustle and moved to morin heights in the laurentians north of montreal where he continued to paint. in the s, as interest and admiration of the group of seven’s work grew, scholars turned a fresh eye to holgate’s own contributions to canadian art. rosalind pepall, “the portraits: reaching beyond form,” in edwin holgate, ed. rosalind pepall and brian foss, (montreal: montreal museum of fine arts, ): . campbell, “young girls and old boys,” . unlike similar works by newton or brooker, holgate’s nude in the open from was praised by critics for his successful integration of the nude model and her surroundings. the painting is of a nude woman reclining on a white cloth atop a rocky outcropping at the edge of a pristine blue body of water. the viewer is positioned above the women whose eyes appear closed, thus alluding to the academic trope of the sleeping venus in the countryside. the tonality of the woman’s skin repeats that of the boulders that surround her, while the shadows of her bent legs echo those of the strong outlines of the bluff on which she lounges. the lone tree in the top left hand corner calls up similar ‘lone tree’ paintings by the group of seven such as jack pine and the west wind, and its curved trunk emulates the wavy lines woman’s dark brown hair. brian foss reads holgate’s nude as a successful integration of the figure into the landscape, one in which the metaphor of woman as nature is reaffirmed by the way in which the nude body is simply an extension of her surroundings. they are literally, according to foss, “living landscapes” in which holgate’s nude women visually meld with their environments. holgate maintains a connection with the conventions of the genre set out by giorgione and titian; however holgate employs a modernist aesthetic of bold blocks of colour and strong lines with unorthodox framing and perspective in his execution of the sleeping venus trope. despite the praise he received and the integration of the woman with her natural surroundings, there is still a disconnect between the woman’s body and the water and rocks behind her. for example, the figure’s head and arm are cut off slightly at the bottom of the picture plane. this, combined with the deep bend in the woman’s right knee, work brian foss, “living landscape,” in edwin holgate, eds. rosalind pepall and brian foss (montreal: musée des beaux-arts, ). ibid., . to push the figure out from the picture plane’s surface. she seems to protrude from the canvas while the rocks and tree in the distance act as a flat, one-dimensional backdrop to her seemingly three-dimensional body—a body made more real and tangible by the folds in the fabric upon which she lounges. the woman’s right hand is almost nestled into the folds of the white drapery underneath her, a touch that evokes corporeal desire in the viewer. the materiality of the drapery further suggests that the woman represented is a real, warm, fleshy body; however, the flatness of the wilderness behind her troubles the beholder’s sense of pleasurable touch. rather than becoming an extension of the landscape (or vice versa), the woman seems to intrude into the space of the beholder while the painted landscape acts as a flat scrim, reinforcing the reality of the representation at hand. unable to take pleasure in an erotic encounter with an idealized nude figure, the viewer is reminded of what berger terms the “three-way diachronic transaction between painter, sitter, and observer, in a purely fictional field.” holgate’s nudes, despite their warm critical reception, remind the beholder of the fiction of their creation. holgate navigated the difficult terrain between artistic tradition and modernity more successfully than some of his peers; however, his nudes are not entirely cohesive or without problem. the materiality of the woman’s body defies the tradition of the idealized woman. the disjuncture between her body and the surrounding landscape further underscores for the viewer that a woman posed for the artist in a studio on a draped drop cloth. the flat group of seven background also suggests that holgate was working with a posed model in a studio and no doubt added the background based on his own landscape paintings such as old pine root, mont-tremblant ( ) or baie-des-moutons, looking northward (c. ). the reminder of the reality of the theatrical encounter between artist, model and berger, “fictions of the pose: facing the gaze of early modern portraiture,” . spectator in holgate’s nude representations, coupled with their liminal position between tradition and modern art, has seen paintings like nude in the open disappear from the canon of canadian art history. despite the praise that holgate’s nudes received, he is best remembered as a landscape painter, member of the group of seven, and for his striking portraits. critics were clearly more comfortable with paintings—and this is crucial to my argument as a whole—that seemed to explore allegories of nation and land. when nudes were presented discreetly and avoided any connection with sexuality, or when women’s bodies stood in allegorically for the empty wilderness tamed by colonial forces, such paintings were able to avoid moral censure. holgate did not avoid criticism altogether, but he did evade censure largely because the settings of his paintings allude to the rugged rocks of the canadian shield and to the landscape with which the nation had recently come to identify. despite the perception that nude in the open or holgate’s the bathers ( , fig. ) adhered to what donald w. buchanan describes as a “more transcendent thematic context,” holgate noted that nude in the open “brought some irate letters from very right-minded methodist fathers in toronto.” holgate’s adherence to landscape painting and its presence in virtually all of his nudes meant that his works were accepted while those of his colleagues were often the subject of negative criticism. as brian foss notes, “[t]his was a key factor in their acceptance, as it enabled viewers to locate the images within the time-honoured fine art tradition of the female nude portrayed in the open air.” however, this is not to suggest that they are entirely successful in their convergence of environment and human form. edwin holgate quoted by brian foss, “living landscape,” . ibid., . the recumbent nude in nude in a landscape (c. , fig. ), like the woman in nude in the open, looks as though she too, is painted against a scrim of calm blue water and rocky outcroppings. the same disconnect plagues the bather (c. s, fig. ) and early autumn ( , fig. ). the disjuncture between figure and landscape is particularly acute in early autumn. a nude woman, whose flesh tones echo those of the trees in the background, is posed awkwardly on a large bleached tree branch that juts outs over a large rock. the torsion of her body is at odds with the tranquillity of her surroundings, and she looks as if she is about to fall from her perch. she is not anchored in nature but rather, seems placed onto the scene with an artifice that signals danger instead of eroticism or harmony. holgate appealed to critics in his adherence to tradition, but he also edged closer to modernist abstraction, in the use of bold colours and strong forms in paintings like early autumn and nude in the open. however, holgate does not push his modernist aesthetic quite far enough. certainly picasso did more to challenge the conventions and aesthetic parameters of the nude genre with works like desmoiselles d’avignon ( ) or nude in a black armchair ( ). because holgate does not push the modernist aspects of his nudes, they are neither fully integrated with the surrounding canadian shield nor can they be classified as avant-garde. his works underline, once again, how artists were experimenting with the boundaries of both the landscape and nude genres; and demonstrate the mixed success these experiments were met with. bertram brooker brooker painted one of the most controversial nudes of the s, but his interest in figurative painting came only after his foray into abstract art was met with miscomprehension and derision from critics. canadian art critics were slow to accept abstraction and non-objective art in their own country as the case of bertram brooker illustrates. a journalist, critic, illustrator, businessman, sculptor, painter, and novelist, bertram brooker created a handful of nude paintings including figures in landscape, seated figure ( ), pygmalion’s miracle ( , fig. ), and torso ( , fig. ). born in croydon, england in , brooker emigrated to canada with his family early in and settled in portage-la-prairie at the age of seventeen. brooker worked for grand trunk pacific railway for many years before buying a movie theatre with his brother in neepawa, manitoba. at the same time brooker wrote and sold a number of detective- thriller movie scripts to the american movie studio vitagraph. while his interest in film and advertising remained strong throughout his career, he could see that there was little money to be made in the moving picture industry in small town manitoba and returned to portage-la-prairie to work as a journalist. he would eventually make his way to toronto in the early s where he worked as the editor of marketing magazine, later becoming the magazine’s owner in . two years later, he sold the magazine and moved on to pursue his artistic ambitions and freelance journalism. brooker had no formal art training and was inspired by the art and writings of lawren harris and wassily kandinsky, which influenced his early experimentations with abstraction. by he had held his first solo exhibition of abstract works and, in , he exhibited with the group of seven. brooker held a few more exhibitions following this period, including a ‘retrospective’ exhibition in . however, his early abstractions were the subject of considerable criticism and brooker chose not to exhibit any of his abstract paintings for another sixteen years. he moved away from non-representational painting to produce images of landscapes, people, still lifes and nudes. a founding member of the post-group of seven canadian group of painters, founded in , brooker also edited, in , the first issue of the yearbook of the arts in canada and was awarded the first governor general’s literary award for his novel, think of the earth. brooker is another example of an artist caught between the pull of tradition and the push toward more developed modernist techniques in europe in hopes of producing a national visual culture. with his early works like sounds assembling ( , fig. ), brooker demonstrates a penchant for a fully abstracted modernism. sadly, critics did not understand how to read such artwork and were unable to situate the works next to the rolling topography of the group of seven. brooker’s move away from non-objective painting took him back to more traditional subject matter, including the nude. in his controversial figures in a landscape, brooker approached the genre in a similar manner to his contemporary edwin holgate, placing his figures in a stylized landscape setting. given that holgate exhibited his nude in a landscape to great acclaim a year before brooker’s painting, brooker was no doubt shocked at the removal his own painting from the ontario society of artists exhibition. brooker admired holgate’s nudes and, in a review of the group of seven exhibition, wrote of the two nudes holgate had submitted that figurative painting “which has so long languished in neglect, has at last emerged and takes its place authoritatively beside the landscape painting that has for years been accepted as something distinctively canadian.” painted with fine attention to realistic detail, brooker’s figures in landscape shows the back of a recumbent nude in close-up detail, the folds and puckered skin of her buttocks and thighs reminiscent of the plump model in courbet’s challenge to the nude genre in source. however, in brooker’s painting the figures are depicted with even more veracity. the foreground of the painting is taken up almost entirely by the nude woman lying on her side atop a large piece of cloth, her head and legs cut off on either side by the picture’s frame. another nude woman sits on the in front of the woman in the foreground, her face obscured by long hair painted in several clumps like the leaves or branches of a weeping willow. her stooped back, right breast, and arm are all that is visible of her nude form. a dark block of colour next to the figures suggests the trunk of a tree and three mounds of colour in the background stand in for hills. these are the only indications of landscape here: ultimately the two nude figures resemble models posed in a studio rather than two women lounging on the rocks of lake algonquin. as already noted, holgate’s paintings are, at first glance, more suggestive of a scenario in which the artist sketched a nude woman lounging lake-side on a breezy summer’s day. the integration of figure and landscape in holgate’s nude in the open, for example, led to critical praise while brooker’s painting was censored. like newton, brooker would continue to produce realistic nudes that represented real women who had almost certainly posed for the artist in his studio. while many artists including holgate and macleod avoided controversy, many others such as brooker and newton, were not as lucky. brooker would take such foss, “living landscapes,” . offence at the censorship of one of his paintings that he was prompted to write a scathing response to the episode in his essay, “nudes and prudes.” as i noted earlier, brooker’s bitter response to his critics foreshadows foucault’s critical theorization of the historical discourse on sexuality. brooker writes in his essay that the real problem highlighted by the censorship of nude paintings is a lack of education about art. he writes: to withhold knowledge of the human form and its functions and to discourage appreciation of its beauty at an early age is to bring up a child with a sneaking curiosity in respect to that unity which of all unities is perhaps the most mysterious and the most important for men and women. it is to implant in his mind the feeling that natural admiration for bodily beauty is sheer animalism, and something to be ashamed of. appreciation of the beauties of the nude figure is not altogether due to the impulses of sex, and…surely it is better to shape such impulses openly into channels of decency and open-eyed admiration, than to let them smirkingly fester in secretive foulness of mind. this “secretive foulness of mind” was precisely what the jurors and art gallery associations were reacting to when they decided to remove and censor paintings. the promised progress of modernity brought new kinds of fears and demands for stricter moral standards that were often mediated at the intersection of class, gender, and youth. brooker, “nudes and prudes,” in open house, ed. william arthur deacon and wilfred reeves, (ottawa: graphic publishers ltd., ), - . ibid., . foucault echoes brooker’s sentiment about the connection of censorship and sexuality. he writes, “[w]hen one looks back over these last three centuries with their continual transformations, things appear in a very different light: around and apropos of sex, one sees a veritable discursive explosion…there was a steady proliferation of discourses concerned with sex—specific discourses, different from one another both by their form and by their object: a discursive ferment that gathered momentum from the eighteenth century onward.” michel foucault, the history of sexuality volume , (new york: vintage, ), - . brooker’s seated figure redefines the genre of the studio nude in its honest depiction of a modern woman. the woman’s humanity has a striking presence in this large-scale painting. as anna hudson writes, it is a “monumental studio nude whose humanity is profoundly felt in the fleshiness of the model’s abdomen and her fashionably bobbed hair, rouged cheeks and tanned neckline.” there are myriad idiosyncrasies that belie the tradition of the genre in seated figure. the detailed folds and pleats of the white drapery upon which the woman is posed draw attention to the folds of the skin around her stomach; flesh and fabric call up the body’s materiality. the flat, art-deco modelling of the woman’s modern haircut is at odds with her embodied subjectivity, although the dark folds of the curtains behind her suggest a depth to her hair that at first glance seems implausible. with her folds of flesh and the naturalism of her skin tone, eyelashes, and fingernails, brooker’s nude is clearly a representation of a real woman rather than an abstracted studio model. her dignified pose and strong gaze, which we see in profile, suggest the woman’s self-conscious participation in the representation of her nude body by the artist. the stoic stillness of the woman’s head and shoulders evoke that of a sculptural bust and suggest a model who is conscious of performing her role as model. meanwhile, brooker’s choice to render the woman in such detail contradicts her theatrical attempt to perform as a studio model hired for the day. the studio model, who is conventionally rendered in and idealized and abstracted manner, is here rendered with a veracity that belies her status as model, she becomes instead a real and embodied woman. the painting oscillates between tradition and modernity with the juxtaposition of her frozen studio pose with her soft hair, warm pink body, and fleshy hips. brooker’s attention to naturalistic detail, the scale of his figures, and their references to sculpture, all call hudson, “disarming conventions of nudity in canadian art,” . attention to the theatrical encounter of artist and model. the reminder of this performative encounter—the woman performs her body as a model, directed by the artist—unsettled a canadian public who preferred nudes that adhered to a tradition sanctioned by academic conventions. conclusion in their unwillingness to fully assimilate or relate the human body to its surroundings, to reconcile the relationship between figure and ground, many artists who painted nudes in the s in canada found their works the subject of moral debate. rather than becoming the site of praise for a new canadian sensibility in the visual arts, the nudes from this period would not come to be associated with a uniquely canadian artistic practice, nor would they assume a pivotal place within the canon of canadian art history. viewers could not imagine themselves as “heroic” pioneers in front of a painting like lilias torrance newton’s nude, nor could they see anything distinctly modern and revolutionary in its execution that would allow them to hold up such images as examples of an inherently canadian art. the nude in canada did not incite the admiration of an art- going public who instead came to associate a national art movement with the landscape paintings of the group of seven. censored, debated, praised, and criticized, the nude genre ultimately failed to have the same impact as landscape painting on the visual arts in canada. landscape continues to pervade the canadian imaginary. as john o’brian writes, “[landscape] has functioned more like an active verb than a descriptive noun, mediating not only between the land and its representations but also between nature and culture in a broader sense.” while, as joyce zemans has noted, the validity of the group of seven’s meta-narrative has been rejected and much criticized, it is important to examine how it became hegemonic in canada and how the group’s discursive position at the apex of john o’brian, “wild art history,” in beyond wilderness: the group of seven, the group of seven, canadian identity and contemporary art, ed. john o’brian and peter white (montreal: mcgill-queen’s university press, ), . canadian visual art was at the expense of other artists and other artworks. landscape painting was able to mediate the relationship between the natural world and its human inhabitants in a way not offered by the nude or figurative painting. in , saturday night magazine published an article jocularly recounting how the typical canadian artist was a “husky beggar” who pulled on a pair of strathcona boots and set off into the woods with a rifle, a paddle, and enough baked beans for three months. such assertions would lead a critic like barker fairley to complain later that, “[n]ot one canadian in a hundred goes into an art gallery looking for anything but hills and trees and lakes and clouds and flowers and fruit.” canadian artists approached the nude in a multitude of ways. they experimented with different artistic possibilities for the genre using portraiture and self-portraiture, as well as intervening into traditional tropes like the sleeping figure in the landscape and the studio nude. artists like newton and heward also resisted academic tradition. newton, for example, resists the conventions of the genre with her standing figure of a nude woman posed with confidence and the allusions to portraiture in the work. maligned, censured, and dismissed, artists like heward demonstrate how the nude could be a threat to emerging canadian values with the complex racial and sexual tensions associated with them. my examination of a few select nudes also suggests that artists were consciously attempting to find ways, through their experimentations with the genre, of articulating something about modernity in canada. artists used a variety of visual strategies in their nudes: the intermixing of genres by newton and macleod; style in holgate and brooker; zemans, joyce. “establishing the canon: nationhood, identity and the national gallery’s first reproduction programme of canadian art,” the journal of canadian art history, vol. , no. ( ): - . fairley, barker, “canadian art: man vs. landscape,” canadian forum, vol. , no. (dec. ): . and subject matter in newton and heward. above all, the nude reveals the inability of the nude to provide a collective viewing position that could embody a national sentiment. it was unable to penetrate the canadian consciousness in a way that would win it a place alongside “hills and trees and lakes and clouds.” ibid. bibliography aylen, marielle. “interfaces of the portrait: liminality and dialogism in canadian women's portraiture between the wars.” ma diss., carleton university, . berland, jody and shelley hornstein, eds. capital culture: a reader on modernist legacies, state institutions, and the value(s) of art. montreal: mcgill-queen's university press, . berger, harry. “fictions of the pose: facing the gaze of early modern portraiture.” representations. no. 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(dec. ): - . farwell, beatrice. manet and the nude: a study in iconography in the second empire. new york and london: garland publishing ltd., . “foreword.” in catalogue of an exhibition of paintings by [the] canadian group of painters. toronto: canadian group of painters, . foss, brian, sandra paikowsky, and anne whitelaw, eds. the visual arts in canada: the twentieth century. don mills, on: university of oxford press, . foss, brian “living landscape.” in edwin holgate, editors rosalind pepall and brian foss. montreal: musée des beaux-arts, . foucault, michel. the history of sexuality volume . new york: vintage, . frye, northrop. “canadian colonial painting.” in documents in canadian art, edited by douglas fetherling, - . peterborough, on: broadview press, . grafftey, heward. “prudence heward.” in portraits of a life. montreal: véhicule press, . grandbois, michèle, anna hudson and esther trépanier. the nude in modern candian art - . montreal: musée des beaux-arts, . hill, charles. canadian painting in the thirties. ottawa: national gallery of canada, . housser, f.b. a canadian art movement: the story of the group of seven. toronto, macmillan co., . hudson, anna. “art and social progress: the toronto community of painters - .” phd diss., university of toronto, . irr, caren. the suburb of dissent: cultural politics in the u.s. and canada during the s. durham: duke university press, . koerner, joseph, the moment of self-portraiture in german renaissance art. chicago: university of chicago press, . leppert, richard. the nude: the cultural rhetoric of the body in the art of western modernity. boulder, colorado: westview press, . luckyj, natalie. expressions of will: the art of prudence heward. kingston, on: agnes etherington art centre, queen's university, . lyman, john. “journal.” vol. ii, entry for april , in the bibliothèque nationale du québec, montreal. mcinnes, graham. “the decline of genre.” canadian art vol. , no. 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( ): - . appendix: list of discussed illustrations . lilias torrance newton, nude, , oil on canvas. private collection. . titian, venus of urbino, , oil on canvas. galleria degli uffizi, florence. . françois boucher, triumph of venus, , oil on canvas. the national museum of fine art, stockholm. . gustave courbet, the painter's studio: a real allegory summarizing seven years of my life as an artist, , oil on canvas. musée d’orsay, paris. . jean-auguste-dominique ingres, source, , oil on canvas. musée d’orsay, paris. . edouard manet, olympia, - , oil on canvas. musée d’orsay, paris. . bertram brooker, figures in landscape, , oil on canvas. estate of m.a. brooker. . edwin holgate, nude in the open, , oil on canvas. art gallery of ontario, toronto. . prudence heward, girl under a tree, , oil on canvas. art gallery of hamilton. . pegi nicol macleod, descent of lilies, , oil on canvas. national gallery of canada, ottawa. . pegi nicol macleod, torso and plants, , oil on canvas. the robert mclaughlin art gallery, oshawa. . bertram brooker, seated figure, , oil on canvas. art gallery of hamilton. . kathleen munn, the dance, , oil on canvas. lenore richards collection. . giorgione, sleeping venus, c. , oil on canvas. staatliche kunstsammlungen, gemäldegalerie alte meister, dresden. . edouard manet, déjeuner sur l’herbe, , oil on canvas. musée d’orsay, paris. . gustave courbet, source, , oil on canvas. musée d’orsay, paris. . tom thomson, jack pine, - , oil on canvas. national gallery of canada, ottawa. . lawren harris, maligne lake, jasper park, , oil on canvas. national gallery of canada, ottawa. . albrecht dürer, draughtsman drawing a recumbent woman, , etching. metropolitan museum of art, new york. . charles comfort, young canadian , oil on canvas. justina m. barnicke gallery, hart house, university of toronto. . edwin holgate, the lumberjack, , oil on canvas. lambton gallery, sarnia. . tom thomson, the west wind, , oil on canvas. art gallery of ontario, toronto. . lilias torrance newton, self-portrait, c. , oil on canvas. national gallery of canada, ottawa. . pegi nicol macleod, the log run, , oil on board. collection of laura and byrne harper, moncton. . prudence heward, hester, , oil on canvas. agnes etherington art centre, queen’s university, kingston. . prudence heward, dark girl, , oil on canvas. justina m. barnicke gallery, hart house, university of toronto. . prudence heward, negress with sunflowers, , oil on canvas. beaverbrook art gallery, fredericton. . prudence heward, girl in the window, , oil on canvas. art gallery of windsor. . dorothy stevens, coloured nude, , oil on canvas. art gallery of ontario, toronto. . edwin holgate, fire ranger, , oil on canvas. justina m. barnicke gallery, hart house, university of toronto. . edwin holgate, paul, trapper, c. , oil on canvas. musée national des beaux-arts du québec, québec city. . edwin holgate, the cellist, , oil on canvas. the mcmichael canadian art collection, kleinburg. . edwin holgate, the bathers, , oil on canvas. the montreal museum of fine arts, montreal. . edwin holgate, nude in a landscape, c. , oil on canvas. national gallery of canada, ottawa. . edwin holgate, the bather, c. s, oil on canvas. private collection. . edwin holgate, early autumn, , oil on canvas. national gallery of canada, ottawa, on. . bertram brooker, pygmalion’s miracle, , oil on canvas. collection of lynn and ken martens. . bertram brooker, torso, , oil on canvas. national gallery of canada, ottawa. . bertram brooker, sounds assembling, , oil on canvas. winnipeg art gallery. microsoft word - yuki ohsawa ( ).docx changes in the conceptualization of body and mind in japanese popular culture, - by yuki ohsawa a thesis submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of doctor of philosophy in the faculty of graduate and postdoctoral studies (asian studies) the university of british columbia (vancouver) april © yuki ohsawa, ii abstract this dissertation investigates changes in the conceptualizations of technologically-enhanced beings and bodies in contemporary japanese science fiction anime, manga, and literature. these stories/images and real-life transitions make us consider such issues as what constitutes the body, how the body is now changing, and what the relationship between the body and the self/mind might be. in order to understand ourselves and contemporary conditions and issues, which occur in specific relation to differences inherent in each body—sex, race, disability, disease, and so on—it is essential to analyze these changes in body notions as contemporary visual media themselves critique and discuss them. emerging from a close reading of texts from the s to the s, and utilizing theories from donna haraway, yōrō takeshi, and others, this project argues that, since the s, japanese popular culture has created a wide range of imagined technological bodies, the depiction of which engages with important philosophical and ethical questions. in addition, although some works from the s and s present sentient beings that are essentially bodiless, we see a generally steady trend toward an emphasis on the importance of the material body, as well as increasing monism as opposed to cartesian dualism. another trend exposed iii through this study is the surprising persistence of the categories of sex, gender, and sexuality, even in depictions that are otherwise radically posthuman. iv preface this dissertation is original, unpublished, independent work by the author, yuki ohsawa. v table of contents abstract ........................................................................................................................................... ii preface ............................................................................................................................................ iv table of contents ............................................................................................................................ v acknowledgements ....................................................................................................................... vii chapter : introduction ................................................................................................................... structure of the dissertation ...................................................................................................... chapter : theory .......................................................................................................................... the transhuman and the posthuman ........................................................................................ definitions of significant terms ............................................................................................... the image of the modern body ................................................................................................ donna haraway’s posthumanism ............................................................................................. yōrō takeshi’s yuinōron .......................................................................................................... methodology and materials ...................................................................................................... chapter : metal bodies from the s to s ........................................................................ the birth of robot anime from wwii .................................................................................... the exo-enhanced body and the endo-enhanced body ........................................................... astro boy ................................................................................................................................... gigantor .................................................................................................................................... mazinger z ................................................................................................................................ gundam ..................................................................................................................................... the endo-enhanced body ......................................................................................................... cyborg ................................................................................................................................ doraemon .................................................................................................................................. conclusion ................................................................................................................................. chapter : hybrid bodies in the s ......................................................................................... hybrid bodies ........................................................................................................................... hybrid child .............................................................................................................................. ghost in the shell .................................................................................................................... neon genesis evangelion ........................................................................................................ vi conclusion: selfhood in the hybrid body .............................................................................. chapter : digitized bodies in the s and s .................................................................. bodiless characters ................................................................................................................. ghost in the shell : innocence ............................................................................................... kaiba ....................................................................................................................................... expelled from paradise ........................................................................................................... knights of sidonia ................................................................................................................... conclusion: selfhood in the bodiless body ............................................................................ chapter : conclusion ................................................................................................................. works cited ................................................................................................................................. vii acknowledgements i am sincerely grateful that i could meet all of you who have supported me and given me great joy during my phd journey! firstly, i would like to express my sincere gratitude to my supervisor prof. sharalyn orbaugh for having me as her phd student and her continuous support during my phd study. because of her inspiration, i was able to find a fascinating topic, the posthuman in japanese popular culture. her guidance helped me throughout my research and writing of this dissertation. in addition to my supervisor, i would like to thank my dissertation committee, prof. hyung-gu lynn and prof. christina laffin, for their insightful comments and for the critical questions that permitted me to have various perspectives on my research. with their kind support from my comprehensive examinations, i was able to exceed my main field, modern japanese visual culture, and develop ideas related to cultural circulation in east asia as well as pre-modern japanese literature. widening my research space and time has continuously helped me to consider about the conceptualizations around human beings. i also would like to thank to my dissertation examiners, dr. joshua s. mostow, dr. david edgington, and dr. rebecca copeland for their time and for the questions that expanded my future research possibilities. my sincere thanks also go to my ma supervisor, dr. timothy iles, for his continuing mentorship. without his encouragement and huge support, i could not have arrived at this stage. also, thanks to my first ma supervisor, prof. masaru ishizumi, for giving me the opportunity to study abroad in canada. because of his suggestion, my life was able drastically to change and to go beyond japan. to my wonderful friends, nathen clerici, si nae park, nick hall, wu meng, ben whaley, douglas ober, eunseon kim, casey collins, and all the graduate students in asian studies at ubc who could come along with me, thank you so much for being with me and supporting me. i have enjoyed sharing our researches as well as going to the ocean and mountains refresh my body and soul. without all of you, i could neither survive nor enjoy this phd journey! viii to my special friend, jerry hevesi, thank you for everything you have done for me from the beginning of my canadian life, since . last but not the least, i would like to thank my family. thanks to my parents for letting me study abroad in canada and for continuously supporting me from japan. i also thank my brother for encouraging me to go into the phd program. i am grateful for your love and caring. finally, thanks to my grandmother who was my best cheerleader and mentor. all of your support brought me here and will take me further on this lifelong research journey. thank you, everyone! chapter : introduction body drift is everywhere in society and culture. images of the corporeal body are the key visual language of contemporary politics. – arthur kroker, body drift– as human beings, we have defined ourselves in terms of having “bodies,” yet conceptualizations of the body are constantly changing. recently, advanced technology has supplemented the human body, creating a range of possibilities. on the one hand, advanced technology can permit our bodies and lives to change for the better; on the other, it can lead the human body into a great deal of trouble. technology is also a source of great influence on many works of science fiction, whose visions of advanced technology have created images of new types of bodies. in turn, fictional narratives, especially science fiction with its innovative imaginations of embodiment, have inspired the people who create advanced technology. according to oxford dictionaries, the definition of science fiction is “fiction based on imagined future scientific or technological advances and major social or environmental changes…” (oxford dictionaries language matter, s.v. “science fiction,” accessed march , , http://www.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/english/science-fiction.) however, richard treitel’s definition is even more apt as this project explicit traces changes in technologically-enhanced bodies. treitel writes that, “science fiction is the literature of change. when a culture is undergoing a lot of changes due to scientific advances and technological developments, and expects to undergo more, it’s hardly surprising if stories about these changes become popular as a way of expressing people's feelings (optimistic or otherwise) about change. note that the changes may be in our ability to control the world, or just in our understanding of it.” (richard treitel, “definitions of what science fiction is and is not” in what is scf? accessed march , , http://www.treitel.org/richard/sf/sf.html.) these stories/images and real-life transitions make us consider such issues as what constitutes the body, how the body is now changing, and what the relationship between the body and the self/mind might be. in order to understand ourselves and contemporary conditions and issues, which occur in specific relation to differences inherent in each body—sex, race, disability, disease and so on—it is essential to analyze these changes in body notions as contemporary visual media, such as manga and anime, themselves critique and discuss them. these forms of popular media are a rich source of information about the changes under discussion in social discourse and the social imagination at a given moment. this dissertation will examine mainly manga and anime, not just as entertainment, but also as important texts worthy of consideration for those interested in discourses and conceptions of the body. as sharalyn orbaugh argues regarding one of the anime directors we will discuss here, “for oshii, film is a kind of performed philosophical speculation. [his films] function to highlight and enact his theories regarding technobiopolitics” (emphasis added). like all texts sharalyn orbaugh, “cult film as affective technology,” in science fiction double feature: the science fiction film as cult text, ed. j.p. telotte and gerald duchovnay (liverpool: liverpool university press, ), . produced in response to specific cultural or historical ideas, some anime and manga should be considered as important visual media containing philosophical messages. specifically, the materials that i have chosen for analysis concern themselves with the ways in which technology transforms the body—into new, hybrid forms, or into technology itself. the narratives and visual expressions of these texts propose answers for the question of who controls the body, and offer interpretations of the meaning of the body. for example, as we shall see in chapter two, in early postwar japanese robot anime, such as testujin gō (gigantor) and mazinger z, humans control robots and other forms of technology. two categories of bodies—the human and the robotic—exist separately, and one controls the other: the two types of body exist within a hierarchical power structure. however, anime in the s start to show a new type of body: a hybrid, formed from the merger of two or more organic bodies, and /or a combination of artificial entities. in short, there is no longer a boundary between the two different bodies/entities, but the question of hierarchy between the component parts does sometimes still arise. in addition, the s’ stories focus much attention on the brains of those bodies. for example, since the s, the term “cyberbrain” (dennō) has become popular; this has happened in conjunction with the increasingly popular discussions of neuroscience in the japanese media. in other words, since the s, some science fiction anime and manga have depicted posthuman characters to show the necessity of changing the contemporary conceptualization of the body—that is, to argue that the relation between the modern (as opposed to postmodern) body and mind do not fit the current posthuman situation, which, as i shall discuss in detail in chapters and , includes such beings as cyborgs and other technologically-enhanced bodies. in recent years advanced technology has become capable of using inorganic matter to vary not only the body’s exterior, but also its interior. yōrō takeshi, an emeritus professor of anatomy at tokyo university, and highly knowledgeable about both neuroscience as well as japanese social history, proposes several reasons why the human body has been supplemented with advanced technology in the japanese context. his specialty is the neurology of the human body, and he discusses in depth something we may identify as one of the universally foundational features of the way humanity defines itself: the function of the human brain as well as the relationship between the brain and the body. given this universality as a central feature of his work, i employ yōrō’s biological perspective when i discuss the human body as a biological and material object. however, his work also touches on central aspects of japanese social history as well as japanese thought and the cultural and historical influences on japanese ideology, and so i also employ his perspectives on japanese culture, thought, and society when i specifically argue the relationship between the body and mind in the japanese context. according to yōrō, since the edo period, japanese people have tried to exclude evidence of the body’s unruliness and “naturalness,” such as disease and death, from society, and attempted to control and rule their bodies, because the human brain neither likes nor reacts well to unexpected and uncontrollable things. yōrō calls this situation, in which the brain controls and rules the body to create a controllable city/society, a “brain-regulated society” (nōka shakai). as we shall see, many science fiction manga and anime in the postwar period have explored and often critiqued the ramifications of this sort of “brain-regulated society.” yōrō argues that a fundamental problem with the way japanese people have conceptualized the body has led to problems in many historical periods. (although the “brain-regulated society” is a phenomenon of all developed nations to varying extents, yōrō focuses his argument on the way it has particularly affected japanese society at specific historical moments.) because of the conditions and effects of this “brain-regulated society,” and yōrō takeshi, nihonjin no shintaikan no rekishi (kyōto: hōzōkan), . the lack of a corresponding ideology of the importance and centrality of the body, japan developed the kamikaze special attack forces during the second world war, but has not even now been able to develop a full understanding of individualism, he contends. he goes on to argue that even after wwii we can still see the persistence of the ideology of bodily sacrifice in society, such as in the phenomenon of karōshi (death from overwork), as well as in popular culture, such as in the specific features of characters like tetsuwan atom (astro boy). as yōrō argues, japanese society has lacked an ideology of the body, even though japan has developed complex and functional conceptions of the mind, such as “wakon” (japanese soul) or “yamato -damashii” (soul of yamato). in other words, japanese society and intellectuals have not yet yōrō takeshi, yuinōron (tōkyō: chikumashobō, ), . “testunojo uehata, the medical authority who coined the term, defines karōshi as a condition in which psychologically unsound work processes are allowed to continue in a way that disrupts the worker’s normal life rhythms, leading to a buildup of fatigue in the body and accompanied by a worsening of preexistent high blood pressure and a hardening of the arteries, finally resulting in a fatal breakdown”. paul a. herbig and fredeick a. palumbo, “karōshi: salaryman sudden death syndrome” (journal of managerial psychology, vol. iss ), . since , the term karōshi has come into use in japan. according to the ministry of health, labour and welfare, in the number of industrial accident compensation claims was , with of these relating to death. the number of the industrial accident compensation claims has remained steady at approximately per year, with roughly deaths, since . it is one of the most serious social issues in japan. http://www.mhlw.go.jp/file/ -houdouhappyou- -roudoukijunkyokuroudouhoshoubu- hoshouka/h noushin.pdf ibid., . wakon is often used in the same way in yamato-damashii. yamato damashii means “japanese sprit/soul. one millennium ago, the term originated from cultural antithesis with chinese learning, and in the last century, it became a talisman for ultra-nationalists.” michael carr, “yamato-damashii ‘japanese sprit’ definitions” in international journal of lexicography. http://ijl.oxfordjournals.org/content/ / / given the same deep consideration to the meanings/character of the body as they have to the issue of the mind, and have, to a certain extent, precluded the issue of the body from ideological or theoretical development. in yōrō’s words, “we do not exist for our bodies.” that is the extent of the ideology of the body in japanese society, and it obviously contains a number of limitations, contradictions, and oversights. in fact we may even argue that these limitations have made possible some of the egregious misuses of the body, especially in the historical context of wwii (the kamikaze forces) or the post-war devotion of the salaryman body to the corporate system (karōshi). as yōrō points out, the human brain prefers controlling everything, including its body. thus, the brain has tried to eliminate its naturalness through developments in advanced technology. in fact, we can easily find examples of advanced medical technology functioning as a support or supplement to the human body in contemporary japanese society. also, quite naturally, since early in japan’s modern period, there have been many more, and vastly different, imaginative depictions of various types of technological bodies in science fiction. particularly since the s, japanese popular culture, such as manga and anime, has created a wide range of see more detail in kazai yoshishige’s wakonron nōto (tōkyō: iwanami, ) yōrō takeshi, yuinōron, . [wareware no nikutai no tameni sonzaisuru wakedewanai] yōrō, nihonjin no shintaikan no reskishi, . imagined technological bodies—robots, transformable bodies, and cyborgs. however, if the human brain keeps excluding its naturalness, what will be left? some works from the s and the s explore some of the possibilities or logical extensions of contemporary trends—that is, they present to us sentient beings that have become in fact totally bodiless, living completely in the internet; beings reduced to a small chip; or beings that retain only a small portion of the traditionally-understood, organic part of the human body—for example a part of the organic brain, reduced to its essential function, such as the visual icon or the voice, with which to “exist” or “connect” to others. in this we see some of the new conceptualizations of the body, which allow us to argue that science fiction stories that explore the characteristics of “the posthuman” center themselves around representations of the body. in fact, in the near future advanced technology may in actuality be able to create those hybrid or even bodiless posthuman characters—similar manifestations of advanced medical technology have already supplemented contemporary human bodies. therefore, we need to consider questions around the border between the self and inorganic matter; or, to put it another way, if you keep your brain but have an inorganic body, are you still “you”? how much of your body can be replaced with inorganic or artificial parts before it is no longer human? can an inorganic, human-shaped body have a mind and “love” others? what is the relationship between the enhanced/altered body and memory or identity? how can a hybrid body, composed of more than one person/living thing, identify itself? can a physically bodiless being endowed with artificial intelligence exist as a human if its intelligence allows it to connect to technological devices? fundamental questions such as these are at the heart of many japanese sf manga, anime, and novels, including the ones i analyze here. my research focus is on representations of technologically-enhanced beings and bodies in contemporary japanese sf anime and manga, and so my dissertation will not delve deeply into definitions of modernity and postmodernity as such. rather, i structure my argument around a distinction between philosophical ideas associated with modernity, such as a dualistic vision of the body and mind, and self and other, as seen in the fundamental question, “who am i?”, versus the breakdown of those dualities, a philosophical position associated with postmodernity. in the earliest texts i look at, modern-type dualisms are conspicuous, but later materials actively challenge dualistic structures. there is a discourse implicit here, of course, of the relationship it goes without saying that science fiction works in other developed nations also address these issues, and that popular texts frequently cross linguistic, cultural, and national boundaries to produce cross-fertilization in the conceptualizations of the mind-body relationship. while my main focus in this study is to trace the conceptualizations of the body in japanese popular culture, i will also draw attention to some of the cross-cultural influences and flows that will be addressed at greater length in future projects. between the mind and the body, and in fact throughout this dissertation i often use the term, “body,” rather than “body-mind,” or “mind” because i take the position that the mind and the body share one source. in japanese we can express this as shinshin ichigenron: the belief that the mind comes from the body; the mind and body are inseparable. theorists of affect and memory, too, drawing on the work of biologists, have stressed that even these intangible elements of human-ness, most often associated solely with the brain/mind, arise from the body more generally. further, yōrō’s description of the physical origins of the “mind” emphasizes that, because the brain is connected with all parts of the body through the nervous system, mind arises from the body as much as the brain, and the two cannot be separated. my research proceeds from this more monistic sense of the relationship between the body and the mind, and thus, even though i may seem to focus primarily on the “body,” my discussion necessarily also considers the (embodied) mind as well. according to yōrō, discussing this topic in neurological terms, a brain and a body cannot be separable because the peripheral nervous system is spread throughout the body, and the brain and the peripheral nervous system work in concert (p. ). however, the brain has tried to control its body as if a separation were possible. i discuss this further in chapter . in the transmission of affect ( ), teresa brennan argues that one person’s emotion and energies can move to or be absorbed by another. by discussing how our bodies biologically interact and respond, she insists that there is no boundary between the individual and the environment; that is, our bodies are not self-contained. (ithaca, n.y.: cornell university press), . yuinōron, . in recent years, academic research into cyborg anime has been increasing in north america, especially regarding anime from the s to s. scholars such as susan j. napier, steven t. brown, sharalyn orbaugh, and christopher a. bolton (among others) have focused particularly on two specific anime, ghost in the shell ( ) and ghost in the shell : innocence ( ), to discuss cyborg subjectivity and gender, posthuman/technological bodies, the technological uncanny, and the connection between premodern dolls/automata and the postmodern body. in addition, one of the most famous of tezuka osamu’s anime, astro boy,	
 has often been the subject of discussion among anime scholars, because of its status as presenting the first and the most outstanding robot character in the genre, which has inspired japanese robotics scientists and still is widely known both within japan and globally. on ghost in the shell, see, for example: susan j. napier, “doll parts: technology and the body in ghost in the shell” ( ); steven t. brown, “machinic desires: hans bellmer’s dolls and the technological uncanny in ghost in the shell : innocence” ( ); sharalyn orbaugh, “sex and the single cyborg: japanese popular culture experiments in subjectivity” ( ); and christopher a. bolton, “from wooden cyborgs to celluloid souls: mechanical bodies in anime and japanese puppet theater” ( ). in addition to those major publications, a search of google scholar turns up many more articles about ghost in the shell written by people who have little or no expertise in japanese studies, showing that its philosophical nature has been recognized widely. see, for example, the scholar of political geography, giorgio hadi curti’s “the ghost in the city and a landscape of life: a reading of difference in shirow’s and oshii’s ghost in the shell” ( ); the scholar of evolution and technology, austin corbett’s “beyond ghost in the (human) shell” ( ); or sociologist osawa masachi’s “kokakukidoutai sac no hēgeru teki shinjitsu” [ghost in the shell sac’s hegelian truth] ( ) and so on. one of the most famous japanese robot creators, takahashi tomotaka, mentions in an interview that the contemporary real-life concept of robots in japan has been heavily influenced by astro boy (nhk co-productions, “the century of astro boy”). asada minoru of osaka in japan, cultural studies scholars such as ueno toshiya and tatsumi takayuki have examined cyborgs, robots, and other posthuman entities in connection with what they argue is japan’s particular relationship with the posthuman: ueno identifies a thematic (and ideological) trend that he calls “techno-orientalism” in postwar animation, and tatsumi discusses the figure of the “japanoid” in popular culture. however, none of these scholars, in japan or north america, has focused on the conceptualization of the body and its changes through the s to the s, as i do here. in addition, some japanese researchers, supported by the japanese government, have analyzed japanese “gigantic robot” anime to show how they have developed in the context of japanese society ; however, this work often reflects what we may identify as the government’s aim of emphasizing japanese-ness in order to put the national japanese “brand” onto robot university and fukuda toshio of nagoya university have similarly cites astro boy as an inspiration for their eventual careers in robotics. according to zusetsu tesuwan atomu (diagram: astro boy, ), between and , nineteen versions of astro boy were published. that clearly shows that astro boy has been very popular in japan. and in david bowers directed a u.s./hong kong animated film production of astro boy, voiced by hollywood stars like charlize theron and nicholas cage, suggesting its popularity and influence outside japan as well. ueno toshiya, “japanimation and techono-orientalism” in the uncanny: experiments in cyborg culture, ed. bruce grenville, (vancouver: arsenal pulp press, ), - . tatsumi takayuki, “gundam and the future of japanoid art” in mechademia vol : limits of the human (minneapolis: university of minnesota press, ), - . see, for example, hikawa ryusuke, “japanese animation guide: the history of robot anime.” ( ), - . anime—despite the fact that the research actually shows that japanese robot anime have been deeply influenced by western science fiction. in contrast to the government’s tone of japanese exceptionalism, in this study i discuss such universal issues as gender and heterocentrism that appear in robot anime (and manga), because of the extent to which forms of japanese popular culture have become widely disseminated in the world, and have provided opportunities to discuss those issues—normative sex and gender, and heterocentrism—among not only japanese but also non-japanese audiences as well. in addition, this study focuses on the changes of conceptualizations of the body, including the relationship between body and mind, to expose self-understanding/self-conceptualizing in each period, thereby contributing not only to the scholarship of science fiction manga and anime, but also to social and cultural research on the way japanese audiences and creators have imagined the projected future of the body and mind relationship, and organic and inorganic matter relations. one of the aims of this dissertation is to analyze japanese popular culture—anime, manga and literature—to reveal the persistence of gender ideology (including biological sex and hikawa ryusuke, “japanese animation guide: the history of robot anime.” commissioned by japan’s agency for cultural affairs, government of japan. compiled by mori buiding co., ltd. ( ), - . http://mediag.jp/project/project/images/robot_animation_report.pdf sexuality) even in complex representations of the posthuman condition. i argue that even philosophical anime, which deeply explore the possibilities of the posthuman, have not gone beyond the categories of gender, sex, and sexuality, even though they have engaged with the new conceptualizations of the body.	
 in other words, my work reveals the contradictions of the posthuman body; for example, one fundamental aspect of the robotic/cyborg body is that it has excluded naturalness, such as sex organs, which function in pregnancy and giving birth, so that reproduction may be completely controlled (or eliminated). however, at the same, these non-sexed posthuman characters are often portrayed in ways that remain strongly gendered, and the stories themselves maintain heterocentrism. therefore, this dissertation focuses on analyzing popular cultural depictions of the posthuman body in order to trace the discourses that those depictions both participate in and create, such as those around ideas of “naturalness,” gender, and sexuality. in this study, the phrase ”posthuman body” refers to a transgression of the body by and into technology, as exemplified by cyborgs, clones, robots transformable bodies, etc. accordingly, i employ the perspectives of cyborg theorists, such as donna haraway, n. katherine hayles, kotani mari, and elaine graham, in addition to yōrō takeshi’s work, based on neuroscience and japanese theories of body, consciousness, and embodiment (illustrations and conceptualizations of body images). like yōrō, cyborg theorists such as haraway and hayles also combine aspects of biological and computer science with discussions of literary and other texts in their discussions. finally, i also employ harvie ferguson’s perspective on modernity and the modern body image in order to clarify the differences between modern and postmodern (and posthuman) bodies. structure of the dissertation chapter two provides a detailed overview of the research project and explains the terminology and theoretical constructs used in it. i do an initial exploration of my major questions: what is the body; how is the body now changing; what is the relation between the body and the self/mind; and what kind of issues do anime and manga persist in illustrating. i also present an overview of the conceptual tools i will be using, such as the distinction between modern conceptualizations of the body and posthuman ones, between monism and dualism, idealism and materialism, as well as more specialized distinctions such as that between “integrated body (or endo-enhanced) cyborgs”’ and “prosthetic (or exo-enhanced) cyborgs.” moreover, i explain the reasons for choosing the specific manga, anime and literature addressed herein, and the methodology i will employ. in chapter three, i discuss ‘metal bodies’ in japanese anime from the s to the ’ s, as they become a popular representation of the body in japanese media as well as a representation of a new conception of the body at the time. although we can find many robot stories in the prewar period, the most notable robot, astro boy, was born in postwar japan. i consider why the number of anime featuring robots dramatically increased in postwar japan, and also how robots function in the stories. this chapter demonstrates a genealogy of japanese robot anime from the s to the s in order to reveal its essential feature, the metal body, and to compare it with the new conceptualization of the body in ’s anime, which i analyze in the next chapter. the texts addressed here include astro boy, cyborg , doraemon, gigantor, mazinger z and gundam. chapter four explores the new concept of the body, the hybrid body/cyborg body, in ’s japanese anime. in this dissertation, the term “hybrid body” refers to the increasing synchronization within a single body of organic and inorganic parts combined to become one. various narratives describe this hybrid body, conceptions of which were influenced more by advanced biological and medical technology than the engineering science which gave birth to the metal robot body of s to ‘ s anime. one of the important points is that this hybrid cyborg body goes beyond the modern notion of the body and mind, in which a singular ”self” belongs to a singular ”body.” in this chapter, i contrast the work of one female author, Ōhara mariko’s hybrid child (novel, ), with that of male anime directors: evangelion (tv series, , directed by annō hideaki), and ghost in the shell (film, directed by oshii mamoru, ). (because of lingering sexism in the industry, there are no mainstream anime productions by women.) as we will see, even though Ōhara’s conceptualization of the posthuman gives us a different and more gender-aware point of view than that of the male anime directors, nonetheless, it also contains limitations in its treatment of sex, gender, and sexuality categories. in chapter five i present conceptions in anime from through the s of a completely new type of body, which tries to obliterate the idea of the modern body/mind through the invention of bodiless characters. the essential change consists of losing (or never possessing) a physical body while still existing as a self/artificial intelligence, which can think and have memories, within the confines of a particular device. this conception—which goes beyond even haraway’s or hayles’s idea of the cyborg—is explored in texts including ghost in the shell : innocence (film, ), kaiba (tv series, ), rakuen tsuihō (expelled from paradise; film, ), and finally shidonia no kishi (knights of sidonia; manga, - , and anime serial that began in .) this chapter brings us up to present and on-going conceptualizations of the posthuman and shows the exciting new “queer” possibilities that to some extent transcend the hetero- and gender-normativity of earlier productions. as japanese sf texts move beyond the theorizing of bio-philosophers and cultural/social critics, we see the ways that popular culture can itself constitute a form of philosophical or theoretical speculation. chapter six, the concluding chapter, draws together the findings from each of the three substantive chapters (three, four, and five), to derive some arguments about the implications of the diachronic changes in the conceptualization of the body: from the modern body notion to a posthuman body notion. as this dissertation focuses on analyzing the conceptions and representations of posthuman bodies, which i have identified as the transgression of the body by and into technology, through western cyborg theorists’ and japanese scientific theorists’ perspectives, it reveals the contradictions in these perceptions of the body, which have worked to exclude naturalness, specifically sex organs, but also have persisted in retaining heterocentric relations with the gendered body. one of the central arguments of the dissertation is that the many categories of popular culture under discussion here—manga, anime and literature—even while presenting imaginations of beings that transcend the limitations of the organic body, have maintained fundamental features of a universal issue: the posthuman still cannot go beyond heterocentrism and gender normativity although the conceptualizations of the body have drastically changed. in addition to revealing these issues, chapter six summarizes how japanese magna and anime from the s to s have provided diverse conceptualizations of the body, and its breakthrough points: how manga and anime characters have become posthuman. because conceptualizations of the body have changed, the ways of illustrating selfhoods in these latest bodies—the hybrid body and the digitized body—also became key for providing suggestions toward answering those questions: what if you have your own organic brain but an artificial body—are you still you? or can inorganic bodies or bodiless creatures still love and have feelings? finally, this chapter indicates the direction of future research on this topic and its importance. chapter : theory the transhuman and the posthuman one of the central questions this study considers is how we understand and conceptualize the body. i argue that advanced technology, such as engineering, biology and computer science, have influenced artists and thinkers to recreate and critique conceptualizations of the body, and that, in turn, artistic representations of innovative embodiments have influenced scientists in their real-life work. there are many different ways of thinking about the influences of technology on the body, but we may categorize perhaps the two best known as the posthuman and the transhuman. both of these center on the issues of technologically-enhanced beings and bodies; however, their ideological purposes and theoretical goals are different. the posthuman, and posthumanism, provide us opportunities to think about what is human, and who and what could be considered within this term. as steffen steinert argues, “our self-understanding is mediated by technology” ; posthumanists therefore consider or depict merger or enhancement of the body’s capabilities with those of advanced technology, to have “a kristi scott, “transhumanism vs. / and posthumanism,” steffen steinert, “taking stock of extension theory of technologyp. , emphasis added better understanding of embodiment and incorporation.” posthumanists bring aspects of both biology and technology to try to enlarge conceptions of the human by, for example, showing the biological connections between humans and other animals to expose the equality between all living things, or using the binary digits, and , of computer code to create a conceptualization of human bodies in the digital world that facilitates understanding them as equal. thus, posthumanists try to destroy existing notions of living beings that have restrictive or prejudicial aspects. on the other hand, the purpose of transhumanism is the development of a fresh body. according to steinert, for transhumanists “technology is an enhancement, amplification, or acceleration of the bodily and mental capabilities and faculties that help us to realize our intentions.” transhumanists focus on how technology can enhance and amplify human bodies to go beyond human bodily limitations. in short, the transhuman does not focus on how we might critique and exceed the normative concept of the human body, but focuses instead on challenging the organic bodily limitations by using advanced technology. in this study, i discuss both—posthumanism and transhumanism. as we shall see in detail in chapters three, four, and ibid., , emphasis added. ibid., . five, japanese visual culture and literature have depicted both “integrated body cyborgs” to re-conceptualize the notion of the human body in a posthumanist paradigm, and also “prosthetic exo-suit cyborgs” to show the extension of our lived body in a transhumanist manner. in the chapters that follow, the best examples of transhumans are gigantor, mazinger z and gundam. on the other hand, some of the creatures in hybrid child and kaiba present the best representations of the posthuman. in fact, many bodies that i analyze in this study are enhanced or have artificial intelligence (transhumanism), while they also suggest alternative images of the body (posthumanism). thus, these japanese works of popular culture offer images of the body that in many ways utilize aspects of both the transhuman and the posthuman. another distinction important in the consideration of japanese popular culture images of the body is that between post-humanism and posthuman-ism. as orbaugh describes it: in the recent work of critical feminist thinkers like haraway, hayles, and rosi braidotti, a distinction is implied between post-humanism—a post-anthropocentric, anti-humanist philosophical position with which they identify—and posthuman-ism, which is characterized as an outmoded celebration of the cyborg or other form of futuristic human. while, as we shall see, critical feminists were among the first to celebrate the cyborg orbaugh, “who does the feeling?, . orbaugh cites rosi braidotti, the posthuman; donna haraway and nicholas gane, “when we have never been human, what is to be done?”; and n. katherine hayles, “unfinished work: from cyborg to cognisphere.” as a useful tool “to think with,” they have in recent years repudiated the trend of transhumanism, which uncritically celebrates the technologically-enhanced posthuman body. (rather than calling this “transhumanist,” they tend to call it simply “posthumanist” or “posthuman-ist.”) instead, they insist, it is modern humanism that needs to be rejected and replaced by a post-humanist (or post-humanist) conception of life. among the japanese manga and anime texts addressed in this study are several that could be considered both posthuman-ist—interested in the new types of embodiment that technology makes possible and the new conceptions they bring with them—and post-humanist—concerned with the new, broader, anti-humanist conceptualizations of what it is to be human. one goal of the dissertation is to show the distinctions between these two types of future speculation (for example in the way that posthuman-ist texts retain modern, humanist, and therefore restrictive definitions of the human), but also to explore the ways that japanese sf makes that distinction ambiguous in some cases. in some ways, as we shall see, japanese popular culture sometimes uses posthuman-ist depictions of innovative bodies to reveal philosophical post-humanist points that are not possible through philosophical writings alone. however, because the main focus of my research is on changes in the conceptualizations of the body to exceed existing categories and normativity, post-humanism is the more important rubric or index for me. when the word “posthuman” or “posthumanism” is used hereafter (without the hyphen), it should be read primarily with that meaning in mind. when i am highlighting the distinction between post-humanist and posthuman-ist, i will once again use the hyphenated words. this chapter introduces three theorists who offer fundamental perspectives from which to analyze the materials i have chosen. firstly, i discuss harvie ferguson’s definition, which establishes key points of conceptions of the modern body: individuated and closed. ferguson clearly shows that this image of the body, endowed with agency and equipped to live in modern times, is exclusively male. rejecting this limited, gendered notion, posthumanists have criticized the image of the modern body and have created a new conceptualization to replace it. donna haraway is the pioneer of posthumanist theory; she employs images of cyborgs as metaphors for people who have been discriminated against or excluded from the image of the modern body, in order to expose their existences and overcome the limitations of the modern concept of body. haraway’s cyborg theory offers one of the most important perspectives from which to discuss the manga and anime in this study, because her theory can help us to realize how the new conceptualizations of bodies can exceed established normative boundaries. trained as a biologist, haraway uses information and metaphors from science in her reconceptualization of images of the body. in a like manner, yōrō takeshi’s theory is also based on science, specifically anatomy and neuroscience. furthermore, yōrō discusses not only the human body, scientifically, but also japanese culture and thought, in order to show how social history, culture, and the way of human thinking are related. thus, these three thinkers’ perspectives –ferguson, haraway, and yōrō– are fundamental in analyzing japanese science fiction manga, anime and literature to see the changes of conceptualization of the body. but before i introduce the main ideas of these scholars, i must define the problematics that configure their thinking as well as the foundations of this study: idealism vs. materialism; and dualism vs. monism. definitions of significant terms the term “idealism” refers to the belief that the mind/soul exists separately from the body except in the sense that it is contained inside it, and that when the body dies the mind/soul either dissipates or, as in judeo-christian beliefs, lives on in an afterlife. the idealist viewpoint can be summed up in the cartesian phrase “cogito ergo sum,” “i think, and therefore, i am,” which emphasizes that selfhood is entirely a matter of the mind. “materialism,” on the other hand, refers to the idea that body and mind are one thing, and that the mind arises as much from the body as the brain. as we shall see, this problematic—idealism vs. materialism—is argued not just in philosophical terms, but in biological and computer science terms as well. the term “dualism” simply denotes binary oppositions, such as body and mind, self and other, and female and male. in fact, in this study, dualism is closely related to idealism as they share a similar perspective: we may divide all aspects of this world into binary categories. on the other hand, monism suggests that everything derives from the same material substances, so this belief permits a conception, or at least the possibility of arriving at, a oneness. in this sense, monism does not dualistically distinguish things or categories, but denotes the fundamental unity of all things. this thought has obvious connections to materialism. therefore, this dissertation exchangeably employs the terms idealism and dualism, as well as materialism and monism, when discussing the body and mind. these problematics configure the philosophical speculation performed by the popular culture narratives i examine here, as we shall see in detail in chapters three, four, and five. the image of the modern body another important set of definitions for this study involves modernity and the modern conceptualization of the body and the posthuman body concept that is used in sf manga and anime. before discussing the posthuman body, we require a brief history of the conceptualization of the body, as well as a statement of what and how the modern body image was created. according to harvie ferguson, the ancient body image was a collection of organs each linked separately to a specific divine source of vitality. the body as a form and structure was little remarked and did not constitute a fundamental point of reference for thought and reflection on experience . . . . the historical transformation of this “organic” body image, through the religious and spiritual revolutions of the ancient world to a unitary structural principle in plato, together with forms of dualism in later religion and philosophy that were subsequently integrated into christianity, is fundamental for any understanding of the development of western culture… (pp. - ). as ferguson mentions, the earlier body notion in the western world is “organs-without-a-body.” however, the notion of the body has changed over time: from fragmentation to unity; through religious revolutions; and under the influence of both plato’s thought and christianity, both based on dualism. the dualistic body and mind relation is one of the most important elements of the modern body notion. ferguson also mentions that “modernity, first of all, required a human body that could be autonomous, self-moving, and conscious of itself. whether as subject, self, or ego, modernity was a concept that required embodiment to become fully meaningful; it was, in short, harvie ferguson, modernity and subjectivity, - . ibid., . a new way of experiencing the world and human agency.” however, at any given time, only a limited number of people could fully experience human agency, he stresses. who are/were they? ferguson answers by using a chart, which chronologically demonstrates body notions from the ancient to the posthuman. according to the chart, the image of the modern body is “epidermic, closed, individuated, male.” one noteworthy point in the definition of the modern body image is that it is “male,” because only “male” people could experience human agency in modern times. posthuman (anti-humanist) scholars have highlighted exactly the points that ferguson mentions: their work exposes the absence of the female or the excluded female body, and critiques the dualistic points of view, such as of body/mind, female/male, and subject/object, that are fundamental to the modern body notion. in real life, the body has changed, becoming open and hybrid, because advanced technology has started transforming human bodies. this is why posthumanists emphasize the need to re-conceptualize the notion of the body in the postmodern period. as mentioned above, one well-known posthumanist, donna haraway, offers cyborgs ibid., . ibid., . as a metaphor for women and disadvantaged people to analyze such issues as the limitations inherent in the modern body notion—the females and non-caucasians who are excluded from it. the remarkable point of haraway’s perspective is that it not only reveals the identity of the people who are excluded from the modern body image, but also promotes an attitude of equality between organic and inorganic bodies—between humans, cyborgs, animals, and any living creature—because all of them have evolved together and continue to interact with and support each other to live. in order to clarify the posthuman body notion, i will now move on to a discussion of cyborg theory, first developed by donna haraway. donna haraway’s posthumanism a cyborg is a cybernetic organism, a hybrid of machine and organism, a creature of social reality as well as a creature of fiction. social reality is lived social relations, our most important political construction, a world-changing fiction. the international women's movements have constructed “women's experience”, as well as uncovered or discovered this crucial collective object. this experience is a fiction and fact of the most crucial, political kind. liberation rests on the construction of the consciousness, the imaginative apprehension, of oppression, and so of possibility. the cyborg is a matter of fiction and lived experience that changes what counts as women's experience in the late twentieth century. haraway is the pioneer of posthumanism, because she provides a conceptualization of the cyborg donna j. haraway, “a cyborg manifesto”, . to reveal the problematic category of “women” in the modern notion of the body. one of haraway’s main points is that social reality/experience itself is a fiction. for example, “female” as a sex category is a biological fact/reality; however, the category of “women”—often (mis)understood as synonymous with “female”– has been created by “fiction.” social reality and fiction are two sides of the same coin. therefore, hawaray uses the term “cyborg,” which is “a matter [both] of fiction and lived experience,” as a metaphor for women in order to provide an alternative creature that could go beyond the existing categories of sex and gender. haraway called the alternative world inhabited by such creatures the “post-gender world.” the cyborg is a creature in a post-gender world; it has no truck with bisexuality, pre-oedipal symbiosis, unalienated labour, or other seductions to organic wholeness through a final appropriation of all the powers of the parts into a higher unity. in a sense, the cyborg has no origin story in the western sense—a “final” irony since the cyborg is also the awful apocalyptic telos of the “west's” escalating dominations of abstract individuation, an ultimate self untied at last from all dependency, a man in space (pp. ). as haraway mentions, the conceptualization of the cyborg has not come from western mythology, and is not related to western religion, although the cyborg has emerged in some ways from the “dominations of abstract individuation,” which is one of the main points of the modern body image. haraway insists that the posthuman perspective critiques humanistic dualism, such ibid., . as culture versus nature, because “[n]ature and culture are reworked; the one can no longer be the resource for appropriation or incorporation by the other[, and] the relationships for forming wholes from parts, including those of polarity and hierarchical domination, are at issue in the cyborg world.” therefore, as described above, “posthumanism” in my usage means two things simultaneously: post-humanism, a philosophical trend that rejects the modern dualism that underpins humanism; and posthuman-ism, the promotion of the idea that we are now in a new state of being, both physically (through technology) and discursively (through new, non-dualistic conceptualizations of the mind and body), as represented by haraway’s “cyborg.” although in some of her later work haraway harshly criticizes the point of view she calls “blissed-out techno-idiocy,” which asserts that all technological enhancement of the body is positive—a transhumanist point of view, though haraway calls it posthumanist (post-humanist)—here in her earliest theorization of the potential of the cyborg we see that it is both posthuman and post-humanist. haraway uses the idea of the cyborg not only to provide an imagination of a post-gender world, but also to reveal the limitations of those dualistic boundaries that are ibid., . gane and haraway interview, . increasingly ambiguous. one of the best examples here is the dualistic relation between organic versus inorganic matter; cyborgs have made this boundary ambiguous and therefore called into question the idea of identity as singular and stable. she states, “a cyborg world might be about lived social and bodily realities in which people are not afraid of their joint kinship with animals and machines, not afraid of permanently partial identities and contradictory standpoints,” because such a world provides the possibility to erase these already-constructed categories and identities, and overcome them. therefore, the essential point of cyborg theory is hybridity; hybridity makes dualistic boundary ambiguous: “literally, [hybridity] refers to the characteristics of plants or animals that are the offspring of individuals belonging to different species… hybridity offers a possible release from the singular identities that are constructed when class, race or gender are used as primary categories.” thus, hybridity and the hybrid body are also key points of my research. in order to demonstrate the hybridity of the human body, in her later work haraway examines the historical and continuing relationship between humans and other species. her main example, in companion species ( ), is the age-old relationship between humans and dogs, ibid., . david macey, dictionary of critical theory. (new york: penguin, ), . which reveals that human bodies have always needed “significant otherness” to survive and evolve. haraway also demonstrates how humans and significant others (animals and micro-organisms) have affected each other, in biological terms. in an early essay, “the biopolitics of postmodern bodies” ( ), she argues an “immune system discourse” to show that human bodies have continuously absorbed or repulsed bacteria and viruses to maintain themselves. without the bacteria that live in the human gut, for example, we could not digest our food. the human body cannot create those bacteria and viruses, so they are significant others—life forms from outside ourselves that share our bodies and keep us alive (or harm us, in some cases). in other words, the human body is neither a complete nor a closed body, even though these are two of the essential characteristics of the modern body as it is usually conceptualized. rather, the human body is open/ed: for absorbing bacteria and viruses necessary to human biological continuity; and also changing, because the body reacts to those bacteria and viruses whenever they come into or out of the body. thus, the human body is never complete/d but is constantly changing inside and out. this body image is exactly that of the “postmodern body.” yōrō takeshi’s yuinōron interestingly, yōrō takeshi’s writings parallel haraway’s cyborg theory. like haraway, he also insists that the human body is continuously changing because the human body is a living system. for example, yōrō discusses the citric acid cycle to explain how different molecules combine or decombine to become other molecules and maintain the cycle. in other words, the body as a living system is always varying and never complete/d. on the other hand, information is immobile forever once the information is stated, he says. (the significance of this will become apparent when we look at narratives that feature digitized humans—that is, humans that have been turned into static information—in chapter five.) furthermore, one of yōrō’s most significant works, yuinōron, argues a monistic relationship between body and mind. that is, like haraway he critiques cartesian idealism—the idea that the brain alone is the source of mind, that mind can be separated from the body, and that mind is the source of all thought, affect, and identity. as explained above, yôrô’s argument is that because the brain is connected to all parts of the body through the nervous system, “mind” cannot arise solely from the brain, and cannot be separated from the body. yōrō takeshi, yōrō takeshi no ningenkagaku kougi (tokyo: chikumashobō, ), - . ibid., - . yōrō ( ), . yōrō takeshi, yuirōron, . moreover, yōrō’s perspective on sex is also close to that of haraway. as an anatomist, yōrō does accept the idea of bodies as having biological “sex.” but he explicitly rejects the usual, dualistic belief that the only categories for the sexed body are “female” or “male.” he reminds us that in the course of fetal and childhood development, there can be several different outcomes occurring in any of the four biological areas involved in the consolidation of sex: ) the chromosomes; ) the gonads; ) the external and internal genitalia; and ) within the brain. depending on the interplay of development of all of those areas, a variety of body types are possible: bodies we classify as “male,” bodies we classify as “female,” and a range of other body types all of which are “intersexed.” using biology, yōrō thus affirms a posthuman conception of the body that disallows simplistic dualisms. . another parallel between haraway and yôrô can be found in their criticism of what haraway calls “blissed out techno-idiocy” and yôrô calls the “brain-regulated society.” both warn against the effects of privileging the brain over the body, and believing that the products of the brain (such as technology) can eliminate the need for the body. both haraway’s posthumanism and yôrô’s yuinôron emphasize materialism and monism (anti-dualism). as we yōrō takeshi, yōrō takeshi no ningen kagaku kōgi, . shall see, the flow of science fiction speculation in japan from the s to the s shows a clear progress from idealist and dualistic thinking to more (but still not complete) materialism and monism—that is, a progress from a modern to a posthuman conceptualization of the body-mind. it is all the more interesting, therefore, to notice the idealist and dualistic elements that remain even in the sf narratives of the s. as mentioned, one aim of this study is revealing the persistence of normative categories of sex, gender and sexuality, which artists place onto the bodies of the characters in anime and manga. at the same time, i also expose new trends in character creation, which include “queer” gender, sex and sexuality. japanese anime have a remarkable ability to produce “queer” characters, many of which have a particular relationship with advanced technology. in what follows i use the term “queer” as judith butler does when she discusses “queer theory.” simply, butler says that it is extremely difficult to change existing social norms—but by queering the performance of, for example, gender, little by little every day, norms can gradually change. i employ this idea to discuss the representation of queer characters in japanese anime it may be useful here to describe the difference between queer and the uncanny. generally speaking, both of the terms mean “strange”; however, the meaning of queer here applies to people who are outside of normative categories. according to dictionary.com, “uncanny” means “beyond the ordinary or normal.” (dictionary.com, s.v. “uncanny,” accessed march , , http://www.dictionary.com/browse/uncanny?s=t.) and manga. the characters in anime, through their technological enhancements, interactions, and other post-human or post-gendered aspects, queer the performance of embodiment and thus have much potential to change the modern notion of the body and its connection to the mind. these posthuman features are essential in helping us conceive of ways to transcend social normativity. methodology and materials my methodology is mainly semiotic textual analysis, which i conduct from the perspective of posthumanism. the materials for analysis are japanese robot/cyborg anime, manga, and literature from the s to the s: astro boy ( ), gigantor ( ), cyborg ( ), doraemon ( ), mazinger z ( ), gundam ( ), hybrid child ( ), ghost in the shell ( ), evangelion ( ), ghost in the shell : innocence ( ), kaiba ( ), in order to show the biggest difference, we may consider professor of robotics mori masahiro’s theory, the “uncanny valley.” according to mori, human beings respond positively and empathetically to a humanoid robot if the appearance of the robot is made more human; however, when this appearance reaches a particular point, human beings suddenly develop a feeling of disgust. this is what mori calls the uncanny valley. (mori masahiro. “the uncanny valley” in ieee robotics & automation magazine, volume . issue ( ): - . accessed march , , http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?tp=&arnumber= ) on the other hand, it is said that people receive a shock when they encounter queer people or characters, because the queer people or characters are beyond the categories of “the normal” or normativity; however, as butler argues, once “normal” people get used to the queerness of queer people, their shock disappears. in this dissertation, i use the term queer to refer to people or characters who exceed normativity, and the term of uncanny to express the strangeness of humanoid robots that look very much like organic humans. (judith butler, “critically queer,” glq: a journal of lesbian and gay studies, : , ( ): - .) rakuen tsuihō (expelled from paradise) ( ) and shidonia no kishi (knights of sidonia) ( - ). my research focuses on a wide range of popular visual culture material, each example of which explores a new conceptualization of the body. although there are many different versions of these manga and anime from different time periods, i have intentionally chosen their original versions. my materials are the canonical works of science fiction manga and anime, which specifically deal with advanced technology, and my purpose is to reveal the connections and divergences among these diverse texts regarding the way the conceptualize the body or body-mind. as my dissertation deals with the connection between the posthuman body and mind, i specifically focus on each protagonist, or the main examples of prosthetic, exo-suit cyborgs in those narratives, instead of analyzing all the characters or details of each episode. because of the popularity of the various series from the s to the s, there are an overwhelming number i will list a few of the different versions and editions here, to give an idea of how many there can be for any given anime or manga. astro boy: nineteen different manga versions of the story have been published from until . (mori haruji, zusetsu tetsuwan atomu, - .) in addition to those manga versions, three different tv anime series were aired between and in japan. however, my analysis focuses on the original version of astro boy manga. gigantor: there are, at least, six versions of manga, six different tv anime series and three film animations, but i examine the original manga. (yokoyama mitsuteru official website; and, iiki yūsan, tetsujin go daikenkyū, .) of volumes or episodes from which to draw specific examples. as much as possible, therefore, i work with original or representative episodes or editions. nonetheless, there is a necessary process of selection at work here. the reason for choosing these anime, manga, and works of literature is that they present aspects of the newest conceptualizations of the body in each decade. in the early postwar era, astro boy and gigantor were the pioneers of imagining the robotic body as humanoid in shape—in one case the size of a human boy and in the other case gigantic. in the s to s, many robot and cyborg anime were produced, but cyborg , doraemon, mazinger z and gundam showed different, new aspects compared to the pioneering robots of the s and early s. since the s, a different type of body conception, focusing on the functions of the brain and computer technology, was produced in such works as evangelion and ghost in the shell. before these two anime, a work of science fiction, the novel hybrid child, was published. its author was a woman, and so therefore it provides an essential point of comparison with those anime, which were all produced by male animators. in , ghost in the shell : innocence conceptualized a new type of character—a bodiless character; and then in , expelled from paradise expresses a digitized/ bodiless person in a different way. in addition, kaiba minutely explores the relation between body and mind/memory, and thus poses a set of philosophical questions related to ghost in the shell, but also intriguingly different. the work knights of sidonia is very similar in concept to evangelion; however, it also has a new type of character, which i characterize as representative of ontological queerness —a hybrid between a human and a plant. the study proceeds along two axes: forms of the posthuman on one hand, and specific temporal moments on the other. i categorize the posthuman bodies forming the substance of the analysis into two groups: ) humanoid robot/cyborgs with minds/artificial intelligence; and ) gigantic robots or military prosthetic mecha suits, used to combat enemies. the temporal moments are the s- s; the s; and the first two decades of the s. thus, we are able clearly to see both the persistence and evolution of each type of body in each time period. as i have mentioned, some western scholars, such as donna haraway and n. katherine hayles, have theorized the cyborg to develop the concept of the posthuman, which helps us go beyond the idea of humanism. in addition, some scholars, such as susan j. napier, christopher a. bolton, sharalyn orbaugh, and kotani mari, employ cyborg theory to analyze japanese science fiction anime to argue for the existence of the posthuman and its importance: representations of cyborgs let us think about subjectivity, gender, identity and so on through their narratives. kotani mari’s seibo evangelion, for example, is a brilliant exploration of gender in postwar japan as visualized in japanese cyborg anime. this dissertation draws on all of these previous studies (and more), but differs from them in its diachronic focus: what is at issue here is the historical changes in notions of and representations of the body across the seven decades of the postwar period. the main questions that will be kept in mind during the analysis are, who creates and controls the (post)human body; what kind of power structure exists between the body and mind; how and why does the body exclude aspects of its naturalness, such as sex organs for reproduction; what kinds of relationships exist between one body and another; how does the body relate to or function in the societies within the narratives; how do the texts describe the death of the body; and what does the dead body mean to the society/community? keeping these questions in mind while engaging in analysis of the texts permits this dissertation to reveal the kinds of speculative philosophy engaged in by artists and consumers as they consider the ramifications of our changing bodies and society. chapter : metal bodies from the s to s the birth of robot anime from wwii in this chapter, i will examine “metal bodies,” such as robots and humanoids, in japanese anime from the s to ’ s. during this period, robots became a popular topic in the japanese media, as well as signifying a new conception of the body at the time, which people used to think about the meaning of the human. in order to reveal the conceptualization of the metal body and changes in the notions of the body through the s to the ’ s, this chapter will follow two main paths. firstly, i will discuss the influence of japan’s defeat in the pacific war, which was a trigger for the emerging post-war japanese robot manga and animations. post-war manga and anime contain mainly two types of robots, and so i will briefly describe the categorizations: humanoid robots/cyborgs (having an endo-enhanced body), and gigantic robots (having an exo-enhanced body). given that one of the features or characteristics of transhumanism is exceeding human bodily and mental limitations, and that most of the characters i discuss—such as astro boy, gigantor, mazinger z, gundam and the various cyborgs in cyborg —have bodies that have been altered in the direction of increased speed, power, and/or size, i categorize (most of) these bodies as transhuman rather than posthuman. at the same time that the metal bodies in the popular culture of this period represent transhuman values, we will also see elements of posthumanis. secondly, i will analyze representative robot manga and animations that were very popular in each of the decades from the s to the s, to reveal ) the relation between the robot body, influenced by advanced technology, and human beings; ) the conceptualization of the modern body; and ) how these robot bodies conveyed the idea of modernity and modern life to the audience. also, we will clearly see the limited presentations of sex, gender and sexuality in those robot bodies. by the end of this chapter, we will be able to trace important trends or flows in the changes in the conceptualization of robot bodies from the s to the s, which are continued and/or challenged in the next generation of posthuman anime and manga characters (discussed in the following chapter). in order to see how japan’s defeat in the pacific war had a strong influence on the emergence of robot manga and anime, we require some historical background. the contrast as we saw in chapter two, steinert’s definition of transhumanism highlights the way it advocates enhancement, acceleration, and amplification of human bodies. steffen steinert, “taking stock of extension theory of technology”, springer science + business media dordrecht, , http://link.springer.com/article/ . /s - - - . between the technological strength of the allies (particularly the u.s.) and japan was made very clear during the years of the asia pacific war, - . although japan had some early naval victories over the allied forces, the tide quickly turned. as of the allies were launching air raids on military targets on the japanese main islands, whenever aircraft carriers could get in range. but from , when the allies established a base on saipan, bombing attacks on japanese civilian centers became a near-daily event. in ten days alone, march - , , u.s. bombers dropped more than tons of bombs ( million individual bombs) on tokyo, osaka, nagoya, and kobe. in august the u.s. forces dropped two atomic bombs, on hiroshima on august , and nagasaki on august . in his speech of surrender on august , the emperor referred to these as weapons “capable of destroying all humanity.” in contrast, japanese military technology never managed to get anywhere near the north american mainland. the only casualties on u.s. soil (after pearl harbor) were the six people who died as a result of a single japanese “balloon bomb”—an extremely low-tech device that relied on the wind to carry it across the pacific. japan’s most effective weapon in the final sharalyn orbaugh, japanese fiction of the allied occupation: vision, embodiment, identity (leiden; boston: brill, ), - . h arakawa, “basic principles of the balloon bomb,” meteorology and geophysics, vol. no. - ( - ): , https://www.jstage.jst.go.jp/article/mripapers / / - / _ /_pdf years of the war was the kamikaze suicide forces (pilots of planes, small submarines, and “human torpedoes”)—and it was not the technology of the vehicles or weapons as much as the spiritual will of the kamikaze pilots that made them successful. by the end of the war it was clear to everyone, including the citizens of japan, how far behind were the levels of japanese science and technology. even the shōwa emperor wrote in a letter to his son that “japan had lost the war because of overconfidence, and because our armed forces put too much emphasis on the spiritual side and forgot science.” thus, postwar japan was eager to acquire sufficient scientific knowledge and advanced technology to rebuild the country. japanese science fiction comics in the immediate postwar period reflected the attitude towards science and advanced technology at the time, through the imagination and depiction of many powerful, metal robots. scientists and artists alike dreamed about new technology, which would help them to rebuild their lives, and those dreams were played out in science fiction manga and anime. tane kiyoshi emphasizes that works of popular science fiction had an important role in society because “the powers of fantasy and science, which are usually frederik l. schodt, the astro boy essays osamu tezuka, mighty atom, manga/anime revolusion (berkeley: stone bridge press, ), - . contradictory, led the impoverished japan of the s to the postwar economic miracle of the s.” as tane suggests, fantasy and science are contradictory domains, but they were essential for post-war japan, which needed not only fantasy, to help imagine a better life, but also science, to create these better, modern lives in reality. postwar science fiction provided much of the imagination and guidance for advanced technology, and the futuristic ideas to encourage the japanese people who had lost everything and had to rebuild their lives after the war. japan has produced science fiction, including stories about proto-mecha-suits/proto-robots, since its modernization and exposure to western thought during the meiji period. in the early shōwa period, after karel capek’s play rur ( ) became known in japan, stories about humanoid robots became popular. however, it was in post-war japan that there was a significant increase in works featuring robots. needless to say, the first and most popular japanese humanoid-robot character in post-war japan was astro boy, created by tezuka osamu in . the manga tetsuwan atomu (astro boy), was published from tane kiyoshi, gundam to nihonjin, . some of examples of science fiction in the meiji period are: kaitei gunkan (undersea battleship in ) and kūchūdaihikōtei (flying boat in the sky in ) by oshikawa shunro; and sekatimetsubō (the destruction of the planet in ) by nakagawa kajyō. (nagayama yasuo, nihon sf seishinshi, - . at first, astro emerged in atomu taishi (atomu ambassador), which was written by tezuka osamu and was published in the boy’s magazine, shōnen, in april . in atomu ambassador, astro was just a robot and supporting character in the story. however, when the character, astro, in the boys’ magazine, shōnen. the significant elements of astro boy are: ) he is a humanoid robot: he looks human, but his body is made of % artificial materials; ) he has human emotions and seeks self-identity as a half-human and half-robot; and ) he is a great friend and supporter of human beings. i will discuss these three significant points later, but the most essential element, related to the war, is astro’s propulsive power—atomic energy. because of the atomic bombings of hiroshima and nagasaki, the destructive power of the atom terrified the japanese. nonetheless, tezuka dared to use nuclear fission for astro’s motive power. tezuka makes it clear that astro’s atomic energy is used for good, to help humanity with its problems and fend off enemies, but the deep message from tezuka—over the course of the series—is that, in fact, advanced technology might someday destroy humanity. we thus see the strong influence of lessons from the war in this first, and in some ways most representative, endo-enhanced robot, astro, in post-war japan. on the other hand, the earliest and most representative exo-enhanced robot is found in the eponymous gigantor by yokoyama mitsuteru. this giant-robot manga was also published in became popular among the audience, tezuka started serializing astro boy, and transformed the character into the protagonist. (mori haruji ( ), - .) tezuka makes this clear in an interview: osamu tezuka, metropolis in tezuka osamu manga zenshū (tokyo: kōdansha, ), . the character astro was derived from mitchi in metropolis, one of tezuka’s earliest science fiction manga, in which he wrote about the danger of advanced technology. shōnen from . the important elements of the robot gigantor are: ) this represents the earliest example of the extremely popular giant robot genre in japanese manga; ) the giant robot is operated by remote control; and ) it is a strong weapon, made of metal. these three points also reflect the impact of the war—the body of the robot is depicted as a weapon for fighting. in fact, the manga writer, yokoyama described how his memories of the war had influenced his creation of the manga. at the end of the war, yokoyama was in the fifth grade and returned to kobe after having been evacuated to the countryside, like most other urban japanese children, for safety. he saw that the city had been completely destroyed by boeing b- superfortresses, and he was astonished by the terrifying destructive power of these military machines. this experience helped him conceive of gigantor, which has enough destructive power to wreck cities. in fact, the number , was a reminder of the b- . these endo- (astro boy) and exo-enhanced (gigantor) humanoids were the most significant and influential robots in early post-war manga, and the narratives in which they featured will be discussed in detail below. world-renowned anime director miyazaki hayao has pointed out an interesting fact sena hideaki, robotto seiki, . about the majority of the protagonists in s manga: they are nearly all children rather than adults, even in comparatively serious science fiction narratives. in an interview, miyazaki says that all adult males who had been soldiers during the war became losers when the war was lost—although they previously had been heroes. since it was not appropriate to have “losers” as the heroes of manga intended to show a positive future for japan, the protagonists had to be children. in contrast, most protagonists of american comics at the time were (and still are today) adult males, such as superman and batman. thus, because of the resonances of the war, most of the heroes in post-war japanese manga were boys. however, children’s power is limited; they cannot really fight against adult enemies. so, manga and anime artists utilized the power of science and their imagined advanced technology to support their child protagonists to be strong characters. in fact, the protagonist of gigantor, kaneda shōtarō, is just a boy of ten to twelve years old, but once he has the remote miyazaki hayao, hayao miyazaki interview in venice international film festival, interview in youtube ( to min), march , https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dpnyfo th . in , the american tv film, superman, was aired in japan, and it became very popular among japanese children. after that, japanese versions of super hero manga, such as roketto tarō ( ), sūpā z ( ), and sūpā kamen ( ), were produced. interestingly, despite the example of superman, many of the manga created new heroes who were boys rather than adult males. yonezawa yoshihiro, shōnen manga no sekai, - ). . control to operate gigantor, he has sufficient power to defeat the enemy machines. in contrast, astro boy’s power is built into his body, but his appearance and emotions are those of a real human boy, and, like a real boy, his emotions make him vulnerable. thus, in these early post-war japanese robot comics, boys became heroes because they had new scientific power to make them strong. losing the war, and also being forbidden to have a military, created eagerness in post-war japan to have imaginary scientific weapons. as a result, this incentive for imagination led the conceptions of the body to change: from the human body to the exo- or endo-enhanced body. without the damage and the impact of the war, it is doubtful that so many robot manga and anime would have emerged. at the time, science and advanced technology were important key words for post-war japanese society. the exo-enhanced body and the endo-enhanced body it is significant that astro boy was the first tv anime series in japan (from ), with the anime version of gigantor arriving on the screen soon after ( ). television itself was there were, of course, many heroines in post-war manga and anime; however, young female protagonists usually have magical, rather than scientific, power. in addition, their magical power is rarely illustrated as violent, although they can often transform or upgrade their bodies into different creatures to defeat enemies. a new media technology in the s, and animated tv series were a new media genre ; thus, the images of these robotic bodies, and the way of distributing these images, were both forms and signs of technological modernity: japanese audiences received and shared images of these ‘modern’ bodies through modern media. although characters in anime, as a form of cinema, have flexible movement, and may therefore give the audience a much more “realistic” visual impression, my analytical focus in this chapter is on manga, because manga depictions generally provide greater detail of the illustrated body. moreover, it is worth emphasizing that all the famous popular culture characters who captured the public imagination in the postwar period were born in manga and then became even more popular through anime. thus, both forms of media, manga and anime, have worked together to distribute new conceptions of the body in each decade. so far, i have discussed how the impact of losing the war and the post-war situation in , nihon terebi (ntv) put television sets on major streets and stations to popularize their broadcasts; and the number of the street televisions rose to a total of . although the price of a home television was very expensive at the time, the number in private homes dramatically increased, because japanese people were eager to watch the wedding of the crown prince (later heisei emperor) and michiko in april . in fact, , , home televisions were sold by april . since the s, tv became the most influential medium in japan. television became one of the three sacred imperial treasures (三種の神器)—literally the washing machine, refrigerator and black and white television were advertised as symbols of modern life [yoshimi shun’ya, media bunka ron (media culture) (tokyo: yūhikaku aruma, ), - .] influenced the conceptualization of exo- and endo-enhanced bodies, which were illustrated in japanese science fiction manga and anime. now, i will move to an analysis of each robot character to reveal ) the relation between the robot body, influenced by advanced technology, and human beings; ) the conceptualization of the modern body; and ) how the robot bodies conveyed the idea of modernity and modern life to the audience. astro boy as mentioned, the earliest and most popular humanoid robot character in japan is astro boy, born in . the essential elements of astro boy are: ) he looks like a human boy; ) he has human emotions and a very kind personality; but ) his body is made of metal and resilient plastic. the plot of astro boy begins when astro is created by dr. tenma, to replace his son who had died in a car accident. astro is designed to look exactly like tenma’s dead son, but is a humanoid robot made entirely of artificial parts. although initially delighted with astro, dr. tenma eventually recognizes that his body cannot grow like that of a normal human boy, even though astro has human intelligence and expresses emotions. dr. tenma becomes so angry with astro that he sells him to a circus. astro works for a while at the circus, where he and the other non-human circus performers (robots) are treated cruelly by the circus manager. nonetheless, astro and his fellow robots rise above their resentment to save the humans—the circus manager and the audience members—when a fire breaks out, showing that they are both compassionate and useful. soon a new law is passed, which allows robots to live like human beings, and a sympathetic scientist, dr. ochanomizu, takes it upon himself to care for astro, recognizing that astro’s artificial body and his kind personality have a lot of potential to help human beings. the essential features of astro’s body highlight the imagination of advanced technology: artificial intelligence, atomic motor, searchlight eyes, jet engine feet, and so on. moreover, he has intelligence and can express emotions; he is self-aware, and seeks a sense of personal identity, like human beings do. these features are important elements for astro because they represent specific points of modernity, including humanism. frederik schodt argues that, “because of the ideal balance between human and the machine, over the years, mighty atom (astro boy) became a symbol in japan of advanced technology in general.” as mentioned above, some later robotics engineers explicitly mentioned being inspired by their childhood love of astro boy. at this point we need to consider the ways that astro boy’s body conforms to the frederik l. schodt, the astro boy essays osamu tezuka, mighty atom, manga/anime revolution (berkeley: stone bridge press, ), . conceptualization of the modern body. according to harvie ferguson, “modernity, first of all, required a human body that could be autonomous, self-moving, and conscious of its self integrity.” astro’s body is not organic matter, but he can control his body (autonomy) and has consciousness/thought. ferguson adds further details regarding the concept of the modern body. the human body, which was circumscribed in the universe, enclosed within itself another entire world [consciousness], so that the individual became viewed as a structure which kept these disparate realms apart. the body could turn outwards and… imaginatively take up any position in the cosmos and redirect its gaze upon earth; or it could turn inwards and reflect upon the different kind of experience that seemed to be contained within the body as an inner system of life. the body, thus, required physical integrity, individuation, and closure. in fact, astro has most of the essential elements of the modern body notion that ferguson mentions: astro is a robot with physical integrity, and is described as a unique being. he possesses a closed body, which does not integrate with other living entities. comparing this image of the modern body with the posthuman body notion, it is clear that astro’s body represents the modern body notion. the conceptualizations of the posthuman body are ) open, and predicated on continuous interaction with other living things; ) changeable: it is never complete; and ) hard to identify as an individual, because the posthuman body is a hybrid body. ferguson ( ), . ferguson ( ), . in other words, because of the mixture of entities, the posthuman body cannot be identified as belonging to any specific individual. thus, in many ways the body of astro conforms to a modern rather than a posthuman notion of the body. we may argue that modernity and humanism work together; humanism is dependent on scientific perspectives, rather than religion. one of the main characteristics of humanism is the (attempted) control of nature, with humans at the top of the hierarchy of living creatures. although the body of astro is described as a combination of advanced scientific technologies, it is at the same time shown as inferior to that of a fully human being. astro is continually discriminated against and distinguished from human characters because the narrative illustrates human characters as masters of the robots. the story, does not, however, fully endorse this humanist perspective. in other words, the narrative emphasized humanism precisely to show the unequal relations between robots and humans in a way that will arouse pity. for example, in the original story of astro boy, we meet astro’s family members, which are all robots created by dr. ochanomizu; astro’s friend had asked dr. ochanomizu to create a family for astro because he felt sorry for the lonely robot boy. one day, astro’s father, who is also a robot, though of lower intelligence than astro, is bullied by astro’s human classmates at school because he cannot write his name correctly. the bullies make the father follow their orders. when astro discovers this situation, he fights with the bullies; however, his father stops him, because the bullies are human. he explains that robots, which are created by humans, must never resist humans. astro cries on his father’s chest, saying, “they will kept looking down on us…” [anokotachi ni itsumademo baka ni sareru…] from this scene, the relation between astro, a metal body, and the organic-bodied human characters clearly shows that there is a power structure between them: humans have power over robots, and even if the audience is meant to feel sympathy for the robots, the power structure is enforced/reinforced by the robots themselves. in fact, it is a male human scientist, dr. tenma, who creates astro. moreover, astro is often fixed by dr. ochanomizu whenever his body has problems. as a result, the power structure between human scientists and robots is naturalized as that between a producer/creator and a product. in addition, it is significant that there are no female scientists involved in creating astro in the lab in the original story. this accords with the definition of the modern human, discussed above, which excludes females as well. tezuka osamu. tetsuwan atomu〈orijinal ban〉fukkoku daizenshū unit - [mighty atom: the complete collection of the original version. unit ] (tōkyō: jeneon yunibāsaru entāteimento, ), . the narrative, astro boy, thus includes features of humanism, and also illustrates conceptions of modernity. in fact, astro functions to reinforce conceptions of modernity through his metal body, influenced by advanced technology. moreover, astro’s society itself was illustrated as a futuristic and technologically advanced one. in one episode published in , astro introduces the viewer to the city of tokyo in the twenty-first century. he flies over the city to show off many modern, tall buildings, and futuristic cars, some of which are on the road and some flying in the air. he also shows many “people” and explains that humans and humanoid-robots live together; however, the viewer cannot recognize who is human and who is a robot because those robots look and behave perfectly like human beings. in this and other episodes, the manga, astro boy, shows the idea of the modern city, which has futuristic buildings, cars and humanoids that are products of advanced technology. as japanese cities in the s, including tokyo, were still undergoing restoration from the war, the illustration of this thriving city and future life in the manga and anime evoked the idea of modernity, which may have appealed to the japanese viewers of the time. the best example of this modern image is the manga page that shows the lab where astro was created. the lab has tezuka osamu. “furankenshutain no maki” in mighty atom, shōnen, november . many modern elements, such as complicated electric machinery, shining metal machines, and the body of the glorious astro himself. other aspects of technological modernity featured in the manga include a superfast train (similar to and perhaps inspiration for japan’s bullet train) and a gigantic aircraft. the body of astro and the images of the modern city, tokyo, worked together visually to evoke a sense of technological power and possibility, not endowed by god but by science. when examining the earliest robots’ bodies, the body and mind relation is also important to consider. in the case of astro, his mind is always attached to his body, even though he sometimes loses his head. in fact, his artificial intelligence is installed in his heart, so losing his head is not critical; his trunk can move and speak without its head, which is merely a decoration. in addition, his mind is depicted as autonomous, not controlled by others, and determined entirely by his programming, which is flexible enough to allow him to make his own decisions although the programming has a strong moral and ethical tendency. astro’s mind is strongly connected to his body, in the classic, materialist and monistic body-and-mind relation. the first page of atomu taishi (ambassador atom) in july in shōnen is a color page showing astro, whose body appears to shine because of color variation and shadings. it clearly and purposely showed the body of astro which represent modernity. the bullet train began service in , so the image of high-speed rail was futuristic in the s. this is materialism is one of the ways in which astro boy demonstrates posthuman characteristics, in spite of its strong modern, humanist atmosphere. in fact, what tezuka succeeded in doing in astro boy is the creation of a hybrid creature, neither fully human nor fully robot, but something in between. thus, this earliest robot body is a harbinger of the posthuman. astro’s ambiguous gender is another aspect that conforms to posthumanism rather than the modern humanist conception of the person. of course, a metal body does not have a sex as it has no chromosomes or internal organs, but it does often have a gender: it may be shaped, styled, and “dressed” in a way that conforms to recognized social norms of either masculinity or femininity. astro, however, is gendered both masculine and feminine. generally speaking, astro was originally gendered masculine because it was created as a substitute for dr. tenma’s son, tobio. thus, astro speaks using masculine language and wears boyish clothes, but in the manga his body movements and facial expressions are sometimes very feminine. in addition, because a female voice actor, shimizu mari, performed astro’s voice since the first tv series ( ) until , the anime version of astro was even more cute and feminine than his depiction in the manga. shimizu mari, tetsuwan atomu to tomoni ikite (tokyo: sakitamashuppankai, ) in fact, tezuka has said that astro was based on his earlier character mitchi in metropolis ( ), a robot with a switch in its back that shifts it from “male” to “female.” it is unclear how much mitchi’s actual body changed when the switch was flipped, but all of its gender behavior changed to suit the new sex. mitchi was the first of many characters developed by tezuka that explore ambiguous or dual sex and gender, such as astro, and sapphire in ribon no kishi (princess knight, - ). in sum, the body of astro represents an early stage of the posthuman body; however, i have to underline that the body of astro does not perfectly fit the posthuman body notion because the body itself is not hybrid or open interacting with other living things. the monism and materialism of astro’s endo-enhanced construction suggest posthumanism, but the main function of the narrative was to showcase technological modernity. we will next see how technological modernity is expressed through the exo-enhanced robotic body as we consider the features of tetsujin -gō (gigantor). tezuka osamu, “atogaki (afterword)” in metropolis tezuka osamu manga zenshū (tokyo:kōdansha, ), . gigantor the most popular robot anime besides astro boy in the s and s was gigantor, which features a representative example of the exo-enhanced body. again, my questions are ) how does the body image of gigantor demonstrate modernity; ) what is the relationship between the gigantic metal body and human beings (the body and mind relation); and ) what can we learn from the very limited sex, gender and sexuality of the exo-enhanced body, as well as of the human characters in the manga/anime. i will argue that gigantor is an ideal example of the modern body notion. the function of gigantor can be seen from its gigantic metal body. it is easy to understand that the shining, powerful, metal body was the symbol of the modern weaponry that japan had dreamed of after the war. the story tells us that dr. shikishima was in the middle of inventing the gigantic robot weapon in a secret lab during the war, but was unable to finish it before the war ended. later the partially finished body was discovered and completed, to emerge in the social circumstances of postwar japan. yokoyama mitsuteru began the manga series in . the image of gigantor was exactly what japan lacked during the war and hoped to have. it is obvious that the role of gigantor is not to be a friend of humans, like astro, but to be a powerful weapon controlled by humans. in fact, gigantor cannot do anything without being controlled. according to how it is controlled, it can destroy modern cities, and kill people, or it can fight against evil gigantic robots to save human lives. that is why the protagonist, shōtarō, is constantly having to struggle against evil people who want to control gigantor’s powerful body for their own purposes. thus, the relation between gigantor and humans is that between the ruled and the ruler, or a controlled body and the directing mind/brain. in short, this robot-human relation demonstrates a dualistic body and mind relation. therefore, gigantor is a controllable weapon, unlike astro, who performs autonomously and is a great friend of humanity. although both have metal bodies, their roles are distinctly different. because gigantor in and of itself has a heteronomous body, it does not conform to the concept of the human body that modernity required: “be autonomous, self-moving, and conscious of itself.” without a controller it is just a giant piece of scrap iron, although it has a generally human-like shape. however, once the powerful metal body and human mind combine, gigantor becomes a perfect representation of the modern body image, according to ferguson’s definition. it has “physical integrity, individuation, and closure,” because the body is represented ferguson ( ), . as ) faultless: the most powerful creature in the world; ) singular: there is no another perfect gigantic robot, and ) a closed and completed body: the body has been upgraded a few time through the developing story, but has never had physical connections, or fused with another creature. it is obvious that the body of gigantor is not considered the same as a human body; however, once it is controlled by a human being— “body meets its mind”—it becomes an ideal powerful humanoid: capable of walking on two feet and swimming in the ocean. in addition to the huge, metal body, the idea of the remote control also suggests an aspect of modern weaponry: advanced technology makes it possible for weapons to be deployed at a long distance, so that the controller of the weapon can remain safe, far from the actual battle. the remote control allows a human, even a small boy, to easily control the huge and heavy robot. thus, we realize that the remote control facility also has an important role, that of the device which makes the metal gigantic body and mind connect together. once those three—a human controller, the remote control and the metal gigantic body—connect with each other, gigantor becomes an ideal example of the modern image of the body, because the body clearly demonstrates a dualistic body-and-mind relation, and is the product of advanced technology. furthermore, shōtarō could be interpreted as a metaphor for post-war japan itself, which douglas macarthur, who headed the allied occupation forces that ruled japan for seven years after the war, had said was at the same stage of development as a twelve year old boy. however, shōtarō is not weak, but rather is smart enough to fight against adult enemies and control a powerful robot to save the world. the depiction of shōtarō suggests that even though japan may be still “a boy of twelve,” it is not weak but has the ability to control advanced technology as a modern country. the powerful, metallic body represents modernity; however the body of gigantor does not always find a place in the modern city, like astro does, because the story is set in the immediate post-war. gigantor is often hidden in an underground lab, in deep water, or deep forests when it is not being used to fight. in other words, while conflicts between good and bad are often invisible to the ordinary people, sometimes the gigantic body must emerge in the city, frightening people but protecting them from unknown dangers. in the manga, details of the backgrounds of the characters are very limited. the on may , the united states general, douglas macarthur, actually declared that “if the anglo-saxon was say years of age in his development, in the sciences, the arts, divinity, culture, the germans were quite as mature. the japanese, however, in spite of their antiquity measured by time, were in a very tuitionary condition. measured by the standards of modern civilization, they would be like a boy of twelve as compared with our development of years.” [john w. dower, embracing defeat: japan in the wake of world war ii (new york: norton, ), .] this characterization of japan as being like a boy of twelve was widely spread by the japanese media at the time. emphasis is on modern, contemporary life rather than character development per se. all the characters wear western clothes, such as suits and uniforms, and even the boy, shōtarō, wears a jacket. in addition, shōtarō’s house and those of other rich or important people are all in the western style, and people sleep on beds. in s japan, sleeping on a bed, rather than a futon on the tatami matting of the floor, was not common at all. in general, it is rare to see traditional japanese houses, clothing, or furniture in the story. the manga visually sends the image of a western lifestyle, which the impoverished japanese people rebuilding their lives from wartime devastation yearned for. moreover, one of the remarkable ways of illustrating modernity that yokoyama employs is not to depict female characters. there are occasional female characters, such as the maid for dr. shikishima, who takes part in creating gigantor. however, the protagonist, the doctor, the police chief and all the antagonists are male. of course, the target audience of this manga is boys, but nonetheless it is very strange not to have any female characters who can contribute to the development of the story. in other words, the manga demonstrates that only boys or men can become robot builders, robot controllers, smart doctors, authoritative police, or even evil villains. in addition, the most important character, gigantor, is gendered as masculine: it looks like it wears a suit of medieval knight’s armor. yokoyama almost completely ignores the existence of contributive females or femininity. as ferguson mentions, one of the key points of the modern body image is that it is male. in this sense, yokoyama’s manga perfectly illustrates the modern body image. but why does the narrative erase female characters? the absence of females was a fact that was not lost on the japanese viewing public, and in an interview yokoyama was asked “why were no female characters depicted in tetsujin -gō?” his response was “tetsujin -gō was a robot story, and if it included girls it would lose the thrill of speed.” in other words, yokoyama did not associate females or femininity with the kind of high-tech, exciting, ultra-modern world he wanted to depict. when the interviewer then asked him if he had ever been criticized for his exclusion of females, he replied that neither manga publishers/editors nor the reading public had ever complained. this suggests that the japanese society at large shared his sense of normative ferguson ( ), . iiki yūsan, “interview: yokoyama mitsuteru-sensei mon tō” in tetsujin gō daikenkyū: rimokon no yume, (tōkyō: kōdansha, ), - . from yokoyama’s answer, we can assume that his idea of girls is slow and their performances are not vivid and lively. yokoyama might have a strong prejudice against females. following yokoyama’s answer, the interviewer asked him whether any editors or the reading public have criticized that aspect of the work. yokoyama replied that there was nothing. from the interview, we can also assume that japanese society also had accepted gender prejudice and sexist attitudes. in addition to the interview, most of yokoyama’s works were boys’ manga: boys manga but only four girls manga. from this, we can argue that he prefers illustrating boys’ characters for boys. ibid., . sex and gender roles. but the story goes beyond confining characters to normative roles in the sense that the brilliant scientist able to create the new robot creature has actually usurped the reproductive power that is normally associated with females. the gigantic high-tech body is born from men, is raised by men, and is controlled by men. as ferguson declares, the modern image of the body is “epidermic, closed, individuated, male;” the manga gigantor provides a modern body image that includes only men. gigantor presents a very particular image of what the modern world might look like to some—where only men are living and (re)producing themselves, with women replaced by technology. this is the sex gender structure of the first influential exo-enhanced robot narrative. mazinger z on the other hand, in the next decade, the s, a very popular gigantic robot manga/anime, mazinger z, does depict female characters. in fact, it depicts not only female characters but also feminine giant robots, together with masculine giant robots and male characters. i will examine the characters’ sex, gender roles and sexuality later in this section. ferguson ( ), . mazinger z, was written by nagai gō from . it featured the first giant japanese robot with a human pilot, kabuto kōji, seated at the top of the gigantic robot’s head to control it. according to nagai, he was eager to create a robot manga that could exceed astro and gigantor. one day, he hit upon a good idea: a motorcycle docks with the top of the robot’s head to allow the pilot to access the controls. thus, his conception of the boarding mechanism of the gigantic robot—a trope that was repeated in countless mecha-suit narratives thereafter—was born. mazinger z influenced the popular gigantic robots of the s and s, such as gundam and evangelion, because of the physical connection between the robot and humans. one of the most famous cyborg animators of the last twenty years, oshii mamoru, expressed his admiration for nagai’s cyborgian innovation, having the human and the robot body physically merge, even if the human was only conceived of as a “pilot” of the robot. nagai’s contribution made the robot more like an extension of the human body—with the resulting amalgam of human and machine the first real example of an exo-enhanced body. this new type of powerful gigantic body, a robot in which a human could ride, operated as an ideal body notion in the s. nagai gō, “debyū nenme no shōgekiteki hirameki” in mazinger z originaru ban (tokyo: kōdansha manga bunko, ), . sena hideaki, robot seiki, . the story of mazinger z seems to be set in the contemporary time, not the far future. dr. kabuto jūzō has created mazinger z, but just as he completes his creation, his hidden underground lab collapses and he dies. just before jūzō passes away, he tells his grandson, kabuto kōji, that “this monstrous machine is yours now. you can be a god to save the human species, or be a devil to destroy the world. everything depends on you. the monster machine, mazinger z, will support you to do whatever you want.” kōji becomes the pilot of mazinger z to fight with dokutā helu (dr. hell) , who is trying to invade japan and is eager to control the whole world. the most important feature of the exo-enhanced body is that mazinger z and the male pilot, kōji, physically touch, unlike the relation between gigantor and shōtarō. because of the touching of the two bodies, mazinger z becomes (or can considered as) an extension of the human body. moreover, there is a special suit for kōji in order to protect his human body from shocks when mazinger z is beaten. this suit is also an innovation in the robot manga genre, and its influence extends to exo-enhanced robot anime of the s and s as well. the efficiency of the suit has developed, and it has become a useful connector, able to help a pilot fuse with the giant robot. through this suit, the conception of the relation between the human and machine body, which also means the relation between the mind and body, has become much closer to a fusion into one creature/body, rather than a cooperative relationship between two individual bodies. in short, the body and mind relation has become closer to being monistic rather than dualistic. although a representation of a perfect monistic relation did not happen until evangelion, the robot anime of the s, mazinger z contributed greatly to this conceptual evolution. another significant difference from gigantor is that mazinger z provides characters of a greater diversity. there are male and female human beings, robots, and evil cyborgs. this gender diversity and the range of cyborgs also brings new conceptualizations to the representations of the body. the best example of the new type of body here is ashura danshaku, whose body is a combination of mr. and miss ashura. when the human mr. and miss ashura die, dr. hell saves their lives and recreates them by combining their bodies. thus, the right half of ashura danshaku is the female miss ashura, but the other half (the left half) is the male mr. ashura. depending on which side of the face/body is illustrated, ashura danshaku speaks using feminine or masculine language. the body of ashura danshaku is thus definitely a hybrid of the i take donna haraway’s definition of cyborgs: “a cyborg is a cybernetic organism, a hybrid of machine and organism, a creature of social reality as well as a creature of fiction.” [donna, haraway. “a cyborg manifesto”, .] male and female body. moreover, ashura danshaku’s subordinates, tetsukamen (iron masks), are also fascinating cyborgs; a special machine is installed in their heads to be controlled by ashura danshaku and dr. hell. their heads usually are covered by helmets, so they look like normal humans, but because they consist of an amalgam of organic human and machine, they are also cyborgs. furthermore, nagai depicted the feminine exo-enhanced body, although feminine robots, generally speaking, are extremely rare in gigantic robot manga and anime. one of the feminine robots is afurodai a, which is controlled by a female character, yumi sayaka. her father is dr. yumi, is able to create new giant robots because he was one of dr. kabuto jūzō’s students. dr. yumi creates his own giant robot afurodai a, but this machine is much weaker than mazinger z. the first time kōji tries to control his grandfather’s creation, he needs the help of sayaka—he does not know how to control mazinger z, as his grandfather had died before he could teach him. thus, the first time kōji “drives” mazinger z he accidentally destroys houses, buildings, a bridge, and many cars. afurodai a’s pilot, yumi sayaka, teaches him the basic method for operating the gigantic robots. this gives us an interesting development in conceptions of the value or suitability of female participation in the advanced technology of these narratives: their creators are beginning to accept the contributive presence of female characters. however, in comparison with mazinger z it is clear that this feminine robot, afurodai a, functions just as an assistant. similarly, sayaka’s role is primarily to be a cheerleader for kōji. this feminine robot and female character are too weak to fight with evil villains unaided. in fact, sayaka/afurodai a often faces enemies first, and fights with them, but eventually shout, “come quickly and save me, kōji!,” which kōji-mazinger z promptly does. kōji is always depicted as a hero and sayaka is depicted as a damsel in distress, in need of rescuing. furthermore, sayaka is often objectified for sexual pleasure, for example in the many bathing scenes in the narrative, when she is nude or semi-nude for the gratification of kōji (and the heterosexual male reader). in short, mazinger z depicts idealized and normative gender roles. the series illustrates not only stereotypical gender roles but also sexual assault. the bodies of afurodai a and milion α , the two feminine gigantic robots, emphasize their breasts, which are large and prominent. the breasts of afurodai a function as missiles and the missile launch looks like an eruption of milk. moreover, the breasts of milion α function as cockpits for the female pilots, rōri and rōru, who are the most important parts of the robot. one of the episodes has an enemy robot and milion α fighting; the evil robot crushes milion α ’s cockpits with his hands. this scene looks like a male (robot) sexually assaulting a female (robot). although the exo-enhanced robots do not have a sex per se, they are clearly gendered feminine or masculine, to show a power structure: any masculine robots, good or bad, have power over feminine robots. the s’ manga, gigantor, implied women’s “uselessness” or “unimportance” by not depicting females: women were almost entirely absent from the narrative. in the s manga mazinger z, we see female human characters and feminine giant robots depicted as sexual objects for the pleasure of the male characters and male audience. in short, giant robot manga/anime from both decades created and disseminated social and ideological images of females as unimportant, weak, and/or sexual objects. as mentioned above, mazinger z was also a pioneer in the conception of the boarding-type robot. another innovation of s robot narratives was transformability and combinability. getter robo, created by ishikawa ken beginning in , was the one of the most popular of this type of robot narrative. in getter robo, the robot is ) of the “boarding” type; ) transformable; and ) combinable. in the story, three young men pilot jet planes (getta mashin), which can combine in three different ways to create giant robots called getter , and . the three different robot types/shapes are designed to perform different functions. these elements of transformability and combinability were thereafter very common attributes of robots in manga and anime, but it was getter robo that started this trend. overall, the conceptualization of the giant robot body that circulated in the s has two essential elements: ) the “boarding” capability; and ) physical flexibility. one of the major innovations in the s was the ability of a human pilot to physically attach him- or herself to the giant metal robot to produce an exo-enhanced human body. in the next decade, gundam, the extremely popular manga/anime series from the s, continued this pattern, but also brought in some new conceptual innovations. seto tatsuya and yamamoto atsushi, . takahashi ippei, sūpā robotto gahō : kyodai robotto anime sanjūgonen no ayumi. (tokyo: takeshobō, ), . gundam gundam, directed by tomino yoshiyuki from , inherited the essential points of the s’ robots; however, gundam also brought a new conceptualization of the giant robot’s body: the mobile suit. as science fiction scholar tatsumi takayuki describes it: “the suit is compact enough to fit inside a small space capsule, but powerful enough that a single soldier can wipe out a tank division. although it weights two thousand pounds, the suit’s advanced feedback and amplification technology do not require special training to use: it can sense what the wearer’s body is trying to do and magnify it.” with gundam, the genre acquires a conception of the giant robot as a suit, “worn” by a human, rather than a metal vehicle piloted by a human. the mobile suit was inspired by robert heinlein’s idea of the powered suit: just as in heinlein’s starship troopers, the function of this mobile suit was originally not that of a weapon but of a work machine, able to create new planets in space. evolving the conception of the powerful work machine, the powered suit, a mobile tatsumi takayuki, “gundam and the future of japanoid art” in mechademia vol : limits of the human (minneapolis: university of minnesota press, ), . the idea of a powered suit was originally developed from the powered armor which was described in starship troopers by robert a. heinlein. the essential point of a powered suit is that sensations from the machines’ hands and feet are directly connected to the pilot’ body. so, the pilot, who wears the powered suit, can do delicate work in space. [seto tatsuya and yamamoto atsushi, kyodai robot dokuhon (tokyo:takarajimasha, ), .] suit was created as a human-shaped robot. mobile suits enhanced the abilities of the extended human body. for example, the body of gundam, the mobile suit, is very flexible, specifically the joints of the legs and hands, and can move like a human body. with this innovation we find that the notion of the gigantic mecha suit and the human body have merged more fully in s’ manga and anime. we find an awareness of production in gundam, that is, one of the biggest differences from the conception of the gigantic robots in mazinger z is that there is an industry surrounding the production of mobile suits. artists before the release of gundam had conceived of each exo-enhanced body as an individual, singular, and unique robot. however, with gundam, we find the influence of mass production in the conception of the mobile suits: they have the same appearance, and are made to a specific pattern, based on the model, in the narrative, of the gion dukedom’s gigantic mecha robots. this mass-produced, gigantic body does not fit one of the key paradigms of the modern body image: individualization. in addition, the original function of the mobile suit was that of heavy equipment for building new colonies. thus, the mobile suits mobile suit is a common noun, and gundam is a proper noun. gundam is the protagonist’s mobile suit. on the other hand, zaku is the enemy’ mobile suit. seto and yamamoto ( ), - . function as tools, as well as weapons for fighting—they serve as true “enhancements” for the human body, allowing it to accomplish a range of functions. the gundam narrative is set in the universal century, at a time when, due to population pressure and environmental destruction, human beings have started going to space to create new planets. the government of the earth has enacted a space migrants’ plan, to reduce the population of the earth. as a result, only authorized people remain on earth, while others are sent to the space colony. the space migrants create a new planet, and establish the gion dukedom. the people of gion start a war of independence, rebelling against their status as an earth colony. basically, the series tells of the fight between the gion dukedom and the military forces of earth. the essential difference from the stories of gigantor and mazinger z, therefore, is that it is not a simple battle between good and evil; both sides have reasons for fighting. gundam has succeeded in attracting an older audience who have supported the series of gundam since its release; it remains very popular even in the s. while the important characters, able to pilot mobile suits, are all male—such as the protagonist, amuro rei, and sha azunaburu, the best warrior of gion dukedom but the enemy of amuro—, female characters are also key to the story. for example, seira masu, a beautiful warrior on the earth side, can control a mobile suit although her piloting skill is poor; however, her job performance in the depot ship, called white base, is excellent. in addition, other female characters also have important roles, such as mirai yashima, helmsman of the depot ship. while she is not presented as a beautiful character, her existence and job performance support her male warrior colleagues. her character is like a stout-hearted, military mother (kijō na gunkoku no haha). in fact, three male warriors wish to marry her. on the other hand, furau bō, childhood friend of amuro, is a shrewish wife. saitō, examining the roles of female characters in anime, points out that these female characters in gundam are illustrated from the point of view of the male gaze; those female characters exist and function within a male-dominated society. in other words, the narrative of gundam is not interested in the relationships between females. similarly, females are never illustrated as the most important and powerful character in the story, but represent stereotypical gender roles—stout-hearted mothers, lovers, shrewish wives—because they are depicted to conform to a male-centered point of view. saitō minako, kouittenron: anime, tokusatsu, denki no hiroinzō (tokyo: village center, ), . saitō ( ), . saitō ( ), - . saitō ( ), . saitō ( ), . therefore, we find the same types of gender problems that we have seen in other manga, resulting from the way the artist illustrates female characters in gundam. on the other hand, it is clear that the roles of the female characters, serving as warriors or helmsmen, are better than the sexualized or objectified female/feminine characters in mazinger z. however, i still must emphasize that the essential scenes are often taken over by male characters fighting in their mobile suits. in addition, the story describes only heterosexuality between females and males. to return to the question of the body and mind relation, analysis of the function or presentation of the cockpits in the giant robots reveals an important aspect of the exo-enhanced body. the location of the cockpit, where human pilots sit, shows the extent to which the mobile suit/robot shell and the human body are able to support each other. the cockpit of mazinger z is on the head of the robot. this location for the cockpit makes sense because it is the highest part of the body (from which it is easy to observe the surroundings), and the head is supposed to work as the controller of the body. on the other hand, gundam has the cockpit on its chest, where the heart is in a human body. in addition, the cockpit is placed deeper inside of the body rather than just at the top of the head. we can certainly suggest a parallel between the places of “consciousness” on the one hand and “emotion” on the other hand in these different locations. if we jump ahead a decade or so, we can see an interesting development in the imagination of the exo-enhanced bodies in evangelion, from the s. the evangelion cockpit, called an entry-plug, is located in the spine of the mobile suit/robotic body; the entry-plug descends to the core of the enhanced body. depending on how far the entry-plug descends, the connection between the pilot and the eva (mobile suit) will become stronger. in other words, the location and function of the cockpit are not fixed, unlike with mazinger’s and gundam’s cockpits. the body of evangelion and the pilot (functioning as the mind) appear to fuse, becoming one, rather than operating as separate though attached units. when we examine the earliest examples of giant robots to the more recent ones, we see a clear progression from a dualistic body/mind relation to a monistic one (as we shall explore further in later chapters). overall, the s’ exo-enhanced body of gigantor provides a great example of the “modern” body image. the body conforms to the four main elements, “epidermic, closed, individuated, male,” which ferguson declared as essential. however, the conceptualization of exo-enhanced bodies in the s and s starts to change. representations of the human ferguson ( ), . body start to attach or connect it to gigantic metal bodies; the gigantic body is thus not a closed body. in other words, the mind and body relation shifts from the dualistic toward the monistic, and the notion of the body shifts from the modern toward the posthuman. furthermore, the representations of the mobile suits in gundam, as a form of mass-produced body enhancement, do not create individuated bodies. also, there are a few feminine exo-enhanced bodies in mazinger z. thus, although giant-robot anime from the s to the s played an important role in creating and reinforcing ideas of modern life and modernity, they also began to break down some aspects of the modern body notion to move toward a postmodern, non-dualistic conceptualization of the body. manga and anime in this genre both reflected and participated in the development of those conceptualizations, and could influence the imagination of exo-enhanced, metal bodies in real life. in contrast, as we shall see in the next chapter, mecha suits and cyborgs from the s are strongly influenced by biotechnology, with a corresponding shift in the body notion. the conception of the human body and its possible enhancements become increasingly different from the modern body image. the endo-enhanced body focusing on imaginings of giant robots in the s to the s, i have traced changes in the notions and depictions of exo-enhanced bodies, as represented by the connection between and combination of a human pilot and a metal, technological mecha-suit or giant robot. also, we have seen how many works require the gigantic robot body to function as a weapon, even if originally designed for other purposes. our next question, however, concerns the function of endo-enhanced bodies during this period. generally speaking, in works that feature characters with endo-enhanced bodies, such as humanoid robots, these rarely function as weapons, but rather as friends or supporters of human beings. this may be due to the similarity of their appearance to human beings. it is important to consider the same aspects of endo-enhanced bodies that i have discussed in the analysis of exo-enhanced bodies: ) the relation between the robot (artificial) body, influenced by advanced technology, and human beings; ) the conceptualization of the modern body; and ) how robots (artificial) bodies convey the idea of modernity and modern life to the audience. by comparing these two sets of bodies—exo-enhanced and endo-enhanced—the features of s to s bodies and those of the modern body notion will become more precise. cyborg as i argued earlier, astro boy symbolized a specific aspect of advanced technology: the modern body image. i will next analyze cyborg . cyborg describes unique cyborg characters, and is one of the longest-running manga series, having been in print since . the manga cyborg was written by ishinomori shōtarō ( - ), who was also a famous scriptwriter for various television dramas featuring special effects, such as kamen rider. cyborg is set after wwii and during the cold war, at some time in the s. during the cold war, many weapons companies were willing to sell their products, but of course, they needed wars to create a demand for their weapons. those weapon company’s wishes support the evil black ghost organization, which is eager to destroy and control the world. thus, the black ghost organization plans on creating cyborgs with special powers, to instigate and fight in wars. therefore, the organization kidnaps nine ordinary people and modifies their bodies, turning them into cyborgs. however, one of black ghost’s surgeon-scientists, dr. gilmore, who had actually operated on the nine, comes to regret supporting the organization after he learns of one million copies were printed of the series. this is one of the most popular cyborg anime, and even recently, in , the film re: cyborg was released. shinemazu shōchiku, “seitan shunen de aratana saibōgu no seisaku ga kettei,” shōchiku kabushiki gaisha/ kabushikigaisya kurakkusu, august , , http://cinema.ne.jp/news/cinemas /. the body of kamen rider is actually very interesting because the body is a hybrid of human and grasshopper as well as being transformable. however, as my analysis focuses on manga and anime rather than live action film, i will not discuss kamen rider here. their evil ambitions. he tells his nine cyborg creations about the evil of black ghost, and they all escape together, resolving to fight against the organization and stop it from creating more cyborgs weapons. one key point of cyborg is that this manga presents many of its (endo-enhanced) cyborg bodies as weapons, while many (endo-enhanced) autonomous robots in manga from the s to the s function as humanity’s friends, such as astro and doraemon. another new point is that our protagonists here are cyborgs, not robots: their organic bodies have been amalgamated with a range of artificial, high-tech devices, to make them suitable for combat, including combat in space. the black ghost organization thinks so far in advance that it has designed its cyborg weapons to be functional in outer space, in case the planet is destroyed by atomic weapons. this is an interesting twist on the original invention of the word and concept “cyborg” by manfred clynes and nathen kline in when they presented the idea to nasa of modifying humans to make them able to survive in space with less or no need for special gear. there is a picture of the cyborg , jō’s, anatomical chart, which shows all his organs have been replaced with artificial organs to make him more powerful. (ishinomori shōtarō, complete comic works saibōgu vol . tokyo: kadokawa, , .) sharalyn orbaugh, “frankenstein and the cyborg metropolis: the evolution of body and city in science fiction naratives” in cinema anime: critical engagements with japanese the nine cyborgs in cyborg suggest a new aspect of modernity: the concept of a global alliance, in addition to the conception of the modern body, life, and city. in other words, cyborg imagines internationalization through the multinational characters, and places strong emphasis on this in the narrative. in fact, the nine cyborgs are from different counties, cities, and cultures. as the features of the nine cyborgs are also different, i will discuss each character to reveal how ishinomori imagines internationalization (a modern element, relying on cultural stereotypes), combined with high tech body modification. the protagonist, shimamura jō, is from japan and his code number is . as he is actually half-japanese, he has been discriminated against by japanese society. in fact, he was an abandoned child who had several encounters with the law; he was finally sent to the juvenile classification office. he escaped, but the black ghost caught him to modify his body and he became one of the nine cyborgs. his special ability is teleportation. he is the leader among the nine cyborgs, although dr. gilmore is the one who mainly gives orders to them. jō is the most technologically advanced among the cyborg members, but, interestingly, the manga does not emphasize the characters individually; all the cyborg members always help each other, using animation, ed. steven t. brown. (new york: palgrave macmillan, ), . their special abilities in concert for a shared purpose, underscoring the message of international cooperation and friendship. code is ivan whisky, the youngest cyborg, who is a baby from russia. his father had modified his brain, so he can see the future; he has parapsychological abilities. code is jet link, an american from new york city, whose ability is to fly like a jet. françoise arnoul, code , is the only woman in the cyborg team. she is from france and is a ballet dancer. she has enhanced hearing and vision. she often directs battles under dr. gilmore’s guidance, but when the team is not fighting, she often takes care of the baby, ivan. cyborg is albert heinrich, who is from east germany. his body parts, such as his fingers, have been modified into guns, so his entire body functions as a weapon. code is geronimo junior, who is from the southwest united states. he is a native american, and like shimamura jō, he has faced social discrimination. his body is the biggest and the strongest among the cyborgs, and has armored skin, so usually he protects the others. chang changku, code , is from china and is a restaurant owner. he loves to cook for the members. his ability is breathing out huge flames. code is great britain, who is from the united kingdom. his feature is having a body, which by changing his own molecular sequence, he can freely deform. code is puma, who is from africa and was a guerrilla fighter for the independence of his country. his body is modified to be stable in water. as i listed above, the members come from western, asian and african countries and many of them have suffered discrimination in their own societies, or have lived in difficult situations. their struggles, in fact, have come from aspects of modernity: colonization, wars and racism. ishinomori not only illustrates an international group and the importance of the alliance between them, but also allows his work to address issues common in modern international relations. as a result, this mixture of races and different cultures presents to the audience the idea of successful, beneficial internationalization. an admirable point in the narrative is that all the cyborgs work together and help each other to fight the black ghost. the manga also occasionally shows us the characters caring about their feelings, too. for example, dr. gilmore upgrades puma ( )’s body because of injuries sustained during a fight. however, because of the enhancement, puma has scaly skin. he is shocked and disappointed by the inhuman appearance of his new body. but then albert ( ) encourages puma, showing him his own robotic body, and telling him how proud he is of it. moreover, françoise criticizes the racist implications when dr. gilmore says, about the change in puma’s skin color from black to silver, “i thought scaled, silver skin is a better color than black skin.” a group of colleagues of mixed cultures and races, cooperating together as a group, demonstrates a valuable model of international relations; however, the narrative also illustrates strong stereotypes, which could be seen as racist. for example, only chang changku, the chinese cyborg, speaks strange japanese, with inaccurate grammar and a strong chinese accent. in addition, chang changku’s appearance—with a qin dynasty-style mustache and short height—demonstrates a stereotypical image of chinese people in japan, one that can often be seen in japanese comics. moreover, white people tend to have big noses and are taller than other races in the manga. because ishnomori depicts stereotypical images of each culture, the japanese readers, specifically children, unconsciously share in and acquire an expectation toward the stereotypes, which include within them messages about power structures and a hierarchy of races. another hidden problem in cyborg is that there is only one female character, although there are eight male cyborgs. according to saitō, many japanese anime often illustrate one, or at most only a few, female characters, and their roles are never the main ones or central to ishinomori shōtarō, ishinomori shōtarō complete comic works saibōgu vol. (tokyo: kadokawa, ), - . the narrative as a whole. she calls this situation “kōitten ron (literally one drop/spot of crimson),” which basically means “only one female among a lot of males.” in fact, françoise ( ) usually does not physically fight against the evil characters, so she does not have a chance to be a heroine. moreover, she takes care of ivan, the baby cyborg, so this narrative, too, emphasizes the role of the female as the “mother” of her fellow warriors. again, despite some small signs of progress regarding women’s roles, s’ manga and anime still persists in accepting and presenting normative gender roles and sexism. doraemon finally, the most famous representative of the endo-enhanced body in post-war japan is the blue cat-styled robot, doraemon. fujiko f. fujio created the doraemon series in , and it became the longest-running tv animation in japan. the first tv anime series was aired in , and then another series was aired from to march . a new series has aired from april . in other words, the tv anime has been running for more than forty-two years and it saitō minako, kōitten ron: anime, tokusatsu, denki no hiroinzō. (tokyo: birejji senta, ), . the original word of it is 万緑叢中紅一点, which is written by a chinese poet, wang anshi ( - ). the meaning of the term is that a red flower in a carpet of green (grasses). still continues. the story tells of the feeble, hapless protagonist, nobita, and his efforts to avoid his bad future, as his own grandson, sewashi, foretells it to him. sewashi gives nobita a blue-skinned, cat-shaped robot from the future, doraemon, whose role is therefore to care for nobita as well as leading him to be a great man. doraemon strongly emphasizes the friendship between doraemon and nobita. because doraemon talks and acts like a human and is the best helper and friend of nobita, japanese children have understood and accepted this robot, and what it can represent, as a “human being.” whenever nobita has some difficulty, he asks doraemon to help him to solve his problem, and doraemon gives him some sort of futuristic tool, produced in the nd century. the tools emerge from doraemon’s pocket—a sort of pouch on his stomach. however, in every case, nobita’s way of using this futuristic tool is wrong, or he uses it too much, and so nobita fails to solve problems; his situation, in fact, often gets worse. the last scene of most episodes is usually of nobita crying and shouting, “doraemon!” the message from fujiko f fujio is that even though you have futuristic tools, so high-tech they even seem magical, what you really need to overcome your difficulties is to work hard. the messages of tezuka (in astro boy) and nagai (in setagaya doraemon kenkyūkai, doraemon no himitsu (tokyo: deta house, ), - . mazinger z) are very similar: advanced technology is not perfect, and the users of that technology must know how to use it properly and judiciously; they should also prepare for what may happen as a result of the impact of that technology. in short, the creators of these narratives warn us that having advanced technology means having power over others, and remind us that that fact requires taking responsibility. the most important aspect of doraemon’s body is the four-dimensional pocket in which he stores his nd-century tools. while the pocket can be temporarily removed, it is almost always attached to doraemon’s belly. the pocket itself is small on the outside, but it can store many items of many different sizes; that is, the space of the inside of the pocket is immense. because the pocket is depicted as a part of doraemon’s body, the body of doraemon itself represents the future, and in fact, he has come from the future. the essential point is that doraemon himself exists in the contemporary time with nobita; however, the inside of the pocket connects to “four-dimensional space,” which can store a limitless number of tools/items, and thus connects to a different world, the world of the future. in short, the body of doraemon represents a bridge between the present and future. in this case, doraemon does not correspond in the manga series, doraemon sometimes removes the pocket to wash it, and it is not always explicitly depicted (tentoumushi comic vol. .) however, it seems to be considered an integral part of doraemon’s body. with the modern body image, because his body, including the hidden tools in his pocket, can bring something new from future to present; that is, the body does not seem to be closed. like the hints of posthumanism we have seen in other narratives explored in this chapter, this aspect of doraemon gestures toward the new kinds of embodiment that will be featured in manga and anime of subsequent decades. conclusion overall, all the exo- and endo-enhanced bodies of the s to the s conform to and reinforce the ideas of modernity because of the artificial (usually metal) make-up of their bodies and their high-tech features. in other words, for early post-war japan, science and technology are the most essential elements for supporting reconstruction and re-modernization. by examining the giant robots of the s and the mecha suits of the s, it becomes very clear that exo-enhanced robots are often: ) weapons; ) very masculine; and ) controlled by human pilots. in fact, the physical connection between the gigantic robots and human pilots is a key point of these bodies, because the depth of the connection shows the beginings of a transition from the modern body image to the posthuman body: from a dualistic body and mind relation to a monistic one. on the other hand, the essential points of the endo-enhanced body are that: ) it serves as human’s best friend and supporter; and ) it serves as a bridge between the human (organic matter) and the robot (inorganic matter). as we will see, in later decades the connection between the organic and inorganic matter became even tighter, and new conceptualizations of hybrid “life” emerged. it is important to emphasize here, though, that both endo-enhanced and exo-enhanced bodies in s- s narratives are still very close to the conceptualization of the modern, rather than posthuman, body. as we recall, ferguson defined the modern body image as “epidermic, closed, individuated, [and] male,” and most of the enhanced bodies we have just examined represent these modern elements. the powerful and (usually) unhurt epidermis covers the whole body. the exo- and endo-enhanced bodies in these manga/anime are completed (closed); they do not usually take in matter or other beings from the outside. (we have seen hints of the posthuman open body in doraemon, with doraemon’s interdimensional pocket, and in the way the pilot merges with the exo-suit in mazinger z.) the great majority of the bodies we have examined here are individuated and singular. (again, we have seen hints of other possibilities in the mass-produced mech-suits of gundam.) and finally, most of the bodies we have discussed in ferguson ( ), . this chapter are either male (humans) or masculine-shaped (robots). (the exceptions are the feminine-shaped robots and female pilots in mazinger z, a few important female characters in gundam—though they are rarely depicted in the futuristic role of merging with exo-suits—and in the lone female member of the cyborg coalition in cyborg .) even though we can find a few female characters in these manga, they are never the main characters, only supporters. and all the characters, both male and female, have strict gender roles to which they must conform. moreover, the romantic relationships are all heterosexual. thus, robot anime from the s to the s have strong gender limitations, and strict considerations of sexuality. however, cyborgs from works in the s gradually erode these limitations—imposed normativity on sex, gender and sexuality—by illustrating “queer” characters, as we will see in the next chapter. chapter : hybrid bodies in the s hybrid bodies as genetic pilgrims traveling in the twenty-first century, we are living at that epochal transitional moment when the body itself is being swiftly brought under the control of a probing, creative, radically experimental bioscience, mapped for its genetic secrets, redesigned by recombinant genetics that clip strands of dna—hybridized, sampled, and sequenced. –arthur kroker body drift – as kroker argues in the epigraph above, our bodies are in the process of being changed by biomedical technology; unsurprisingly, the idea of bioscience has exerted an extremely powerful influence on japanese science fiction anime and narratives since the s. in this period, the idea of the hybrid body, as made possible through biomedical technology, emerged in many japanese anime and novels to illustrate a new conceptualization of the body. this chapter examines the idea of the hybrid body and the innovations that this new conceptualization brought. thus, the key phrase here is the hybrid body, by which i mean the integration or amalgamation of two or more bodies through biomedical technology. in fact, biomedical technology—such as cloning, genetic technology, and regenerative medicine—achieved a high level of development arthur kroker, . and began broadly to affect society in the s. one of the memorable examples is dolly, a cloned sheep, the first mammal clone, born in . examples of biomedical technology like this, and the types of worlds/bodies it made possible, influenced literature and anime. writers and animators employed the ideas of cloning and regenerative technology to illustrate in their narratives the imagination of futuristic bodies. thus, this chapter examines three categories of hybrid bodies, those combining: ) organic matter, metal matter and animals; ) organic matter, metallic and electrical matter; ) humans, aliens, and giant mecha suits. a significant point regarding these imagined hybrid bodies in the s is that they are mixtures of everything: organic and inorganic matter, and different kinds of species. in order to provide a conceptual framework in which to place these hybrid bodies, i will refer to haraway’s theories from the cyborg manifesto ( / ) and companion species ( ), and her ideas about immune system discourse. these theories work to break down diverse boundaries—between organic and inorganic matter; humans and other animals; the self and the other; females and males, etc. in krocker’s words, haraway has made of her own mind a biopolitics on creative hyperdrive. deeply immersed in the (bio)scientific disciplines, always distancing herself from the seductions of technological representationally by feminist difference, continuously provoking boundary breakdowns in her own thought by refusing to assent to an anthropomorphic species-hierarchy… haraway has made of her own thinking a model of a creative biogenetics—spliced, hybridized, interfacing, transcribing, always partial, always disturbing the boundary and remixing the difference. haraway’s theory uses cyborgs as a metaphor for various marginalized creatures, such as women and animals, and breaks down species-hierarchy to make all living things equal. in order to do so, she argues for a new conceptualization of the body by connecting it extensively to science. therefore, haraway’s perspectives on the body significantly inform the various methods of interpreting sci-fi narratives from the s. employing haraway’s theory, i focus on hybrid bodies to reveal how writers and animators depict the body as well as its sex, gender and sexuality in futuristic narratives. analyzing the hybrid body shows its complexity and reveals how the narratives erase the boundaries that reinforce a dualistic, modern concept of the body. at the same time, i explore the limitations on the imagination of new kinds of sex, gender, and sexuality; in other words, we shall see the ways that some decidedly posthuman bodies retain surprisingly modern features. the three narratives featuring cyborgs that i analyze and interpret here were produced kroker ( ), . in a short time period—between and : this chapter analyzes the various hybrid amalgams as personified in sampleb/yona (from the novel hybrid child), kusanagi motoko (from the anime film ghost in the shell), and shinji/eva (from the tv anime series evangelion). as these characters are all hybrid bodies, i will examine: ) the processes through which they are created, in order to determine, to the extent possible, their sexes; ) whether these cyborgs themselves consider their own gender to be feminine or masculine; and ) their intimate relationships, to determine what their sexualities might be. these analyses can show how the writers and animators utilize the imagination of cyborg bodies to go beyond a conceptualization of the modern body and provide new possibilities. my analysis also focuses on what happens to the characters’ bodies both during and after their transformations to see how technology is related to the cyborg body, and what the “transformation” means in each context. i will begin chronologically with the sample b/yona amalgam in hybrid child. hybrid child hybrid child ( ) was written by female author, Ōhara mariko. this novel is composed of three stories, “hybrid child,” “farewell,” and “aquaplanet,” which were published over six years in sf magazine from to . Ōhara won the seiun award in for this work. in japan, popular, award-winning female science fiction writers are relatively rare, so Ōhara’s work makes an important contribution in providing an alternative voice to what may be mainstream androcentric methods of illustrating sex, gender and sexuality of posthuman characters. by contrasting her work with that of male sf artists (of manga and anime), this section demonstrates how Ōhara emphasizes females who have significant power over both production and reproduction in the narrative. firstly, i will give a brief summary of the story and then discuss the protagonist, the amalgam between sample b unit iii and yona, to reveal how Ōhara illustrates its sex, gender and sexuality. through this character, we will demonstrate some new aspects of the conceptualization of the posthuman body as well as the powerfulness of female reproduction in the narrative. the remarkably complex story begins when sample b unit iii escapes from the humanoid allied forces during a war between them and the immortal empire of machines. as the humanoid allied forces are very badly situated, the god of war on the humanoid side orders the creation of fourteen immortal powerful cyborg weapons to fight against the empire of machines. the remarkable ability of the cyborgs consists of being able to copy genes/molecular the seiun award is a japanese award for the best science fiction novel. structures of both organic and inorganic matter—if the cyborgs ingest something they are then able to become a simulation of what they have ingested. in other words, the cyborgs can change their own body shapes as well as can take on the ingested creatures’ memories and special abilities, such as flying or running fast, from their genes. sample b cyborg weapons can thus keep recreating themselves as new living matter whenever necessary by eating and copying another creatures’ genes/molecular structures. this transformability conforms to one of the salient elements of the posthuman body, which continually transforms itself, both internally and externally. this is distinct from the modern notion of the body (autonomous and closed), in that the posthuman body is constantly changed through its physical interaction with other creatures, as haraway argues in her discussion of immune system discourse. in earlier chapters, i discussed the various definitions of the posthuman body, which is: ) open and predicated on continuous interaction with other living things; ) changeable: it is never complete; and ) hard to identify as a singular individual. the hybrid child narrative describes those three elements as they operate within the body of sample b. in order to understand sample b’s sex, gender and sexuality, i will discuss why and how sample b is created. the first question that arises, and through which we will be able to consider the power structure between the various characters in this complex story, is: who gives the order for the creation of the immortal cyborg weapon, sample b? the answer is revealed gradually throughout the story. the god of war, whose figure is illustrated as white noise or as an old man, gives orders to the military researchers of the humanoid allied forces. the military utilizes the saga electronics company to develop a new kind of artificial intelligence, which is installed into the body of sample b in a secret laboratory. the function of the artificial intelligence is to enable sample b to sample organic and inorganic creatures’ genes and/or molecular structures, to reshape its body into those beings’ shapes. the humanoid allied force invests a considerable amount of money— % of its total military expenses—to research and develop these sample b cyborgs. however, one of them, sample b unit iii, escapes from the military, having mysteriously heard the messages: “have your own intentions,” “be free,” “live,” “choose your way of death,” “pray,” and “focus on your consciousness.” so, sample b unit iii, the protagonist in the story, decides to gender itself as masculine and leave the military to start its/his Ōhara mariko, hybrid child (tōkyō: hayakawashobō, ), . journey. one of the major characters, donna heath (dh), an important researcher in the production of the cyborgs, is not introduced until relatively late in the story. this character, a woman, actually gave birth to the god of war. in short, she is both a producer of the immortal cyborgs as a scientist, as well as the mother of the god of war, who grows progressively younger as time passes in the narrative, and who can freely emerge at any point in the past, present or future. the body of the god of war is ambiguous; it has an appearance that at least resembles the human, and yet no one can touch its body. at one point, in response to a question from the god of war, the text also emphasizes that “a person who gives birth is always female”(p. ). interestingly, in male writer and animators’ narratives, the father of a cyborg is usually a male scientist ; in contrast, underscoring the female role in reproduction in this story creates a powerful impact and an unexpected surprise. this is one way in which the author expresses herself against the dominant economies of power, specifically the patriarchal system. orbaugh lists three options for opposing dominant power (in a society’s sex-gender other sample b units do not have any agency, or selfhood because the military never put agency into their programming. for example, motoko in ghost in the shell is created by male scientists, who appear only in the opening credits; and all of the humanoids and giant robots in anime from the s to the s, such as astro, gigantor, mazinger z and gundam, are created by male scientists, such as dr. tenma, dr. shikishima, and tem ray (amuro’s father). system, in this case) through the writing of fiction: ) “to maintain and describe the current configurations of power, exposing the harm done through them;” ) “to maintain and describe the current configurations of power, but to invert the hierarchy of value, to valorize [the] passive side of the equation;” and ) “to maintain the current binary configurations of power, but to reverse the gender coding of the hierarchical power roles.” in Ōhara’s case, hybird child fits the third strategy, by creating a female character who is the mother/ creator of all living things, including a god. however, Ōhara also purposely describes dh, the mother of the god, as a machine of reproduction, by illustrating the doctors who take care of and give particular attentions to the child—the god—while they relatively ignore the mother, dh. orbaugh’s framework also argues that women’s fiction can use a mix of those three strategies to oppose existing power structures, and we see this in Ōhara’s novel. she shows the unfortunate and harmful consequences of current power structures by showing how women are marginalized in a patriarchal system at the same time that she elevates women (at least a woman) by giving them the creative/reproductive power usually assigned to males in sf narratives. now, we know that a female scientist produces the immortal cyborgs, sample b, but sharalyn orbaugh, “the body in contemporary japanese women’s fiction”, . do these creations themselves have an identifiable sex? in the story, there is no description of unit iii’s original sex, although “he” starts gendering himself as masculine when he begins to acquire his own self-consciousness; he decides to call himself “he” as i mentioned earlier. however, when unit iii integrates with the dead body of yona, a seven year old girl, the sample b/ yona amalgam takes on yona’s features rather than those of sample b unit iii itself, because unit iii originally existed as a powerful weapon without consciousness or self. once sample b unit iii has fully integrated with yona at the end of the first story, its shape and consciousness become that of the young girl. thus, partway through the story sample b unit iii’s sex decidedly becomes female. although unit iii continues to copy and simulate other creatures, the story makes clear that its base is occupied by yona’s genes and memory, because unit iii has existed in the shape of yona for a long time. unit iii is also comfortable being yona. in the second section of the work, “farewell,” the amalgam lives with an old man and a servant robot for two hundred years. at the hybrid child, . (ore wa ore o ore to yobu koto ni shita no da.) in the last chapter of hybrid child, the narrative mentions that her name, yona, is the same as the person who was swallowed by a whale, in the book of jonah. because the character, yona, in hybrid child, is female, i render her name as yona, instead of jonah in this study. after sample b copied yona’s ability and her body to become a seven-year old girl and live as mari in chapter , “farewell,” we can no longer easily see the consciousness of sample b; however, when mari has to change her body to a different creature because dh found out that mari is actually sample b, the consciousness (or desire and anger) of sample b reappears. ( ) end of the section, the amalgam becomes a dragonfly, dragon cosmos, made of glass, to leave the old man’s house when donna heath (its “mother”) comes to visit. dh has been searching for unit iii since it escaped from the military compound, wanting to return unit iii to its original purpose as a military weapon, but this is something that unit iii has no desire to do. here is further evidence that the amalgam is female. the beginning of the third story, “aquaplanet,” informs the reader that the core of the dragonfly, dragon cosmos, has the shape of yona, and that the core, yona, then emerges from the main body of dragon cosmos. thus, at this point there are two bodies: yona and dragon cosmos. this scene demonstrates a sort of childbirth; that is, dragon cosmos is the mother of yona, and yona is the child of dragon cosmos. the story also describes that dragon cosmos has inherited the genes of yona’s mother, and the core, yona, seems to have the same characteristics as yona herself once had. this raises a question: why does dragon cosmos have the features of yona’s mother, even though dragon cosmos is a reshaping of the sample b unit iii/yona amalgam? the answer is that yona was actually generated from her mother’s genes. in addition to this, in the first story unit iii actually ate yona’s mother after she died accidentally, so dragon cosmos retains many of yona’s mother’s characteristics in its body. the relationship between yona and her “mother” (dragon cosmos) is very distorted through all three stories. in the third story, yona overfeeds her mother, whose body has the form of dragon cosmos, because her mother has become incapable of doing anything by herself. she is very vulnerable, and at the same time, continually asks for yona’s help. yona sometimes wants to neglect her but cannot do so, out of sympathy. in fact, this is the inverse of a power structure we saw early on in the story, where yona’s mother sometimes completely neglects yona or abuses her. on the other hand, the mother also sometime overfeeds yona. one day, yona’s mother purposely lets yona go grocery shopping during a snowstorm—causing yona’s death. the mother permanently preserves yona’s body—this is what unit iii discovers and integrates into itself in the first story. in fact, later in the story, yona also kills dragon cosmos (yona’s mother), grown monstrously fat. dragon cosmos gets fat because yona also feeds her too much. yona finally grows tired of caring for her now-ugly mother and kills her. at this point, the unit iii/ yona amalgam eats the flesh of the mother’ body. this is the most shocking sampling scene. because the amalgam eats the mother, the body of the amalgam becomes much more feminine; it acquires a round shape and swelling breasts, although yona dislikes her feminine body. the narrative describes not only the similar body shape between the mother and the daughter, but also their similar performances. drawing on judith butler’s idea of performativity, kazue harada argues that “the repetition of their performance can expose the artificiality of their gender and of the symbiotic identity because all return to the mother.” kotani mari also points out that this repetition is “expos[ing] the traditional female image of the japanese mother, whose survival tactics are to embrace and perform the same role over and over.” as harada and kotani argue, the narrative implies that the daughter unconsciously takes over the performance of the mother and makes herself perform that same role. in describing this negative chain of performativity, Ōhara mariko is making use of the first strategy identified by orbaugh: “to maintain and describe the current configurations of power, exposing the harm done through them.” Ōhara shows the way this chain of performativity is a product of social constructions and the harmful effect it produces generation after generation. as i mentioned earlier, the biological sex of yona and the mother, dragon cosmos, is kazue harada, “symbiotic cycles and the parodic performance of mother-daughter in ohara mariko’s hybrid child,” . see also kazue harada, “japanese women’s science fiction: posthuman bodies and the representation of gender,” phd dissertation ( , washington university in st. louis): http://openscholarship.wustl.edu/art_sci_etds/ /. although the timing made it impossible for me to include harada’s findings in this dissertation, her study includes many important implications for considering conceptualizations of the body in manga and anime. mari kotani, “space, body, and aliens in japanese women’s science fiction,” , http://www.depauw.edu/sfs/backissues/ /kotani.html. female, and they also gender themselves as feminine (such as, for example, by language use); however, the original cyborg unit iii’s sex is unknown at the beginning. in fact, its sex is actually changeable, because unit iii is a hybrid child. unit iii is the original protagonist, but as the reader recognizes, the identity of the protagonist becomes yona rather than any of the other creatures, including unit iii itself. in fact, the story refers to the amalgam specifically as yona. although Ōhara demonstrates the features of posthumanism in this work, creating a character that is a mixture of different creatures, the hybrid cyborg does not incorporate those creatures’ different identities equally, but rather emphasizes only those of the girl, yona. we may gather from this that Ōhara is explicitly trying to maintain the importance and centrality of females and female abilities, such as reproduction, in her narrative of posthuman possibilities. the last question is how the amalgam’s sexuality expresses itself in the last story. the amalgam, which has a stong consciousness of itself as yona, becomes interested in two people. the first one is shiba and the second one is daniel, both of whom are male. the first lover is shiba, whose body has been put into a ferric coffin and is connected to an array of tubes to save his life. as he had a serious illness when he was child, his body has been controlled and protected by this high-tech coffin most of his life. the coffin can fly, and has six legs with which to walk, as well. despite this mobility, shiba’s life has been tragically limited in terms of the autonomy and authority he can claim over his own body. advanced technology allows his sick body to live on, but at the same time, it secures all control over that body to itself. haraway addresses this situation through her term, “techno-biopolitics,” an expansion of foucault’s “bio-politics.” foucault’s explanation of the discourse of bio-politics makes us aware that our private lives—to live, to be born, to die, and to subsist—have been controlled by the structures and normative beliefs of the modern nation, such as public hygiene or restrictions on the birthrate. techno-biopolitics reminds us that, specifically, science and technology have much power to control people’s lives. in fact, shiba’s life is almost entirely controlled by technology and science. shiba has a profound dislike for the doctors and the advanced technology that have shut him into the coffin to “save” his life. the point is, who has let doctors put him into the technological coffin? in other words, who has power over shiba’s life? it is miragurosu (milagros), which is described as a control sonoe omoeda, “sei no poritekusu to atarasii kennri (bio-politics and new right),” - . donna haraway, "the biopolitics of postmodern bodies: determinations of self in immune system discourse," - . system of the aquaplanet and has a strong association with motherhood. the control system, of course, does not have a sex, but its role in the context of the planet, such as feeding people, is feminine, and the specific way of feeding people is even more so: everyone can drink free milk from a tap. miraguros also provides lifelines and takes care of vulnerable people. that is why it/she saved the sick shiba; however, since then his life is completely controlled by miraguros. the problem is that being confined in the coffin in order to live longer was not shiba’s decision. this description implies that technology and science are controlling people’s lives rather helping people—as haraway pointed out. shiba is around years old. the narrative does not describe his sexual organs, but instead focuses on the details of the connection between his body and technology. the narrative, however, uses the pronoun, “he” (kare), when it describes shiba. shiba is the first person who finds and takes care of the unit iii/yona amalgam in space, and then becomes an object of affection and love for the unitiii/yona amalgam. at the same time, shiba is also attracted to the amalgam. there is another person who captures the heart of unit iii/yona. this is sample b unit after sample b unit iii (“mari”/“yona”) escaped from dh, it was wandering in the universe and was found by shiba, who took it/her to his home world, aquaplanet. xiii, called daniel. his body is clearly described in the text. “it was a newborn child, too young even to have put on clothes yet, but it looks like a seven or eight year old boy. . . . he has a penis.” in fact, daniel is a remodeling of the sample b cyborg, whose task is catching the escaped sample b unit iii. when daniel is remodeled, he receives the genes of the god of war, to become a very smart and powerful cyborg. yona is attracted to daniel, although she had originally been attracted to shiba. daniel encourages yona to pursue him, in order to facilitate his recapturing the escaped unit iii. in a complex set of plot twists, yona discovers her true affections are for shiba; however, when yona finally returns to him, all functions of his body have already stopped. the ferric coffin, holding shiba’s body, sinks under the ocean. in short, this story illustrates heterosexual romances between yona and these two men. we see more heterosexuality in other important characters: the god of war is also born from a union between the female donna heath and her male subordinate, shinohara. although most of the characters in the story are cyborgs and could therefore transcend heterosexual relationships, the story persists in maintaining heterosexuality. the most important scene featuring a heterosexual relationship involves the integration hybrid child, . of yona and daniel. once yona and daniel hold hands, their hands melt and become inseparable. daniel’s genes invade yona’s body, causing yona to fear losing herself because of daniel’s genes. their arms, chests, waists, legs as well as the insides of their bodies gradually coalesce. yona shouts in fear because she feels that too much of daniel’s “information” is flowing into her body, and that her self is in danger of being destroyed by daniel’s self, but finally both yona and daniel integrate, causing their heads to explode. at this moment, the roots of plants grow from their heads. the plants, a hybrid (transformation) of yona and daniel’s bodies, grow tremendously fast, and swallow shiba’s corpse, other cyborgs, and everything to cover the whole of the planet. finally, there is only one huge tree standing, where yona and daniel had been. from this scene, the story illustrates heterosexuality and the power structure between females and males. the scene—daniel’s genes entering into yona’s body—implies that yona was penetrated by daniel, which frightened her. however, the most fearful thing to her is losing her self and becoming one with daniel. this story continuously shows copying/sampling, simulation, and integration between many different kinds of species, and organic and inorganic matter. specifically at the end of the story, all living entities are fused into the plant that is a hybrid of yona and daniel. thus, hybrid child beautifully describes that all organic and inorganic matter, males, females, and cyborgs, humans, and animals become of one nature, constituting a boundary-less world. therefore, it is easy to find the ideas of posthumanism here in the radically hybrid, open, and transformable body. although the conceptualization of the radically posthuman bodies in this story to some extent transcends distinctions between male and female, in another sense hybrid child explicitly works to maintain “femaleness” and heterosexuality in order to elevate the importance of reproduction and motherhood. in short, Ōhara “reverse[s] the gender coding of the hierarchical power roles” to resist phallogocentrism. this is, of course, one way of addressing the issue of the existing power structure, but this means that the story misses the chance to exceed the categories of sex, gender and sexuality. overall, hybrid child tries to express a new conceptualization of the body: the hybrid body. hybridity is one of the key elements of posthumanism, and the story clearly shows hybrid bodies, made of organic matter and inorganic metal, and humans, animals, plants and humanoids through the use of advanced technology, such as biomedical technology. however, all the characters are gendered feminine or masculine; they also conceive of their own bodies in sexed again, this is orbaugh’s third strategy for writers opposing the patriarchal status quo. “the body in contemporary japanese women’s fiction,” . terms, as either female or male. furthermore, all sexual relationships are heterosexual. thus, hybrid child is a transition from the idea of the modern body to the postmodern body notion rather than a full realization of the posthuman body. ghost in the shell ghost in the shell ( ) was directed by oshii mamoru (b. ), an anime and live-action film director as well as a scriptwriter and manga artist, and was based on a manga series by shirow masamune. the plot of ghost in the shell is set in the year , and centers on a female-shaped cyborg government agent, major kusanagi motoko who, with her fellow agents of public security section , trails a ghost hacker, the puppet master, who controls other cybernetic people by hacking into their cyberbrains —erasing their memories or implanting others. the puppet master turns out to be, in fact, a self-generating life form, born in the net, and its purpose in hacking others is actually to meet motoko and convince her to fuse with it to become a new organism, at which point, it, the puppet master will die, as other living creatures do. (this is the puppet master’s main desire: to prove that he/it is really a life form.) on the shirow masamune, kōkaku kidōtai (ghost in the shell), - . in this instance i have chosen to use the much more famous and influential anime film version of this narrative, rather than the original manga. the film is based on one story arc from shirow’s manga. other hand, for motoko, this integration with the puppet master will cause her to lose her body, but her ghost will thereafter be able to freely flow in the net. as a result, she will be able to download her ghost into any artificial body. at the end of the film, motoko accepts the puppet master’s offer to integrate, and she “disappears” into the net. (the story continues in its sequel, ghost in the shell: innocence, , but i will discuss innocence mainly in chapter four as it was produced in the s and demonstrated the bodiless body, rather than the hybrid body.) because motoko is the main character in the first film, i will focus on it/her. as my focus is sex, gender and sexuality, i will analyze the film’s presentation of these aspects of motoko, and what occurred to her after fusing with the puppet master. through this analysis, i will argue that losing the body, that is, not having a sex or gender, becomes a potential aspect of post-modern, posthuman discourse—that is, an argument against modernist dualism and patriarchal ideas, though we still can see the character’s strong existence. on the other hand, we can also notice that a patriarchal power structure remains between motoko and (the “male”) puppet master, between male scientists and female shaped cyborgs, and most of the main/key characters. for one thing, there are far more “male” than “female” characters depicted in the film. the first question we have is motoko’s sex. what do we know about her sex, and how do we know it? motoko is a cyborg, whose body is completely artificial but still has some organic brain material and a ghost, as we discover in the opening credits, which illustrate the process of her body’s construction. at the beginning, we can see the skeletal structure, which is almost completely made of inorganic but futuristic substances to make her look like a real human. we can see the brain matter inside of the head, which connects to many plugs, and then is closed after the “brain” is programmed. once the (female-looking) shape is done, the body is chemically-coated. when the coating comes off, the skin has a life-like human texture, and the face looks like a living human (she no longer has a robotic appearance). the whole body is scanned, and is checked on the computer screen. the body, which now looks very much like that of a voluptuous human female, is washed and dried to complete the process. at the beginning of the opening credits, we can see inside of her body, which is a mix of artificial, futuristic materials, and a bit of organic brain and spinal cord. at the end of the credits, we see a young feminine body, which has female breasts and hips; however, we do not see either female or male genitalia. in short, as far as we know motoko does not truly have a “sex” although her body is shaped as “female.” interestingly, we can see two male scientists during the construction of her body. as gonzalez pointed out, “the traditional, gendered roles of euro-american culture are rarely challenged in the visual representations of cyborgs.” as we have seen in our discussion of earlier decades, japanese anime maintains the problematic patriarchal idea that males “create” females, and females are the ones to be produced by men. rosi braidotti explains the reason why this discourse was created and maintained until now in “mothers, monsters, and machines” ( ). according to braidotti, in the sixteenth to seventeenth centuries, some men tried to produce human beings without female intervention, because men were afraid of women’s bodies—specifically, of the changing body shape during pregnancy and childbirth. women were regarded as monsters because of their fearsome bodies. as men also wanted “the power” of women’s reproduction, they started studying alchemy. braidotti shows that alchemical symbolism is based on the idea that male art/skill can replace a uterus. for example, a swiss german renaissance physician and alchemist believed that male humans could be born from males without the need of a female body, and he advocated that males should make this a reality. even today we still use some of the basic laboratory jennifer gonzalez, “envisioning cyborg bodies: notes from current research”, . braidotti, . here braidotti draws on the work of sally g. allen and johanna hubbs in their article “outrunning atlanta: destiny in alchemical transmutation” (signs : , : - ). rosi braidotti, “mothers, monsters, and machines,” . techniques, theories, and methodologies that alchemists developed. the critical point is that today’s science, chemistry and reproductive technologies are related to alchemy, which was based on patriarchal ideas. braidotti mentions the recent reproductive technology in-vitro fertilization (ivf) as an example of male desire: self-reproduction by males and for males. the idea of creating humans without the female biological process of reproduction has been maintained from the th and th centuries until now. this argument resonates strongly with the scene in this japanese animation, ghost in the shell, of male scientists creating a female cyborg, although in this case her body is created with futuristic high technology and futuristic materials. the futuristic narrative has not transcended the patriarchal fantasy of males creating humans without female intervention. from the analysis of the opening credits, we understand that motoko does not have a sex, although her body was shaped as “female.” the next question, then, is what motoko understands her gender to be. i will focus on her attitudes, her way of speaking, and her clothes in order to reveal her gender within the normative behaviors of the japanese context. throughout the film, motoko’s behavior is very masculine by japanese standards. for example, her way of braidotti, “mothers, monsters, and machines,” . sitting is not representative of the normative japanese female sitting style: she sits with her legs open on a chair/sofa, as men usually do, or cross-legged on the ground. she can fight powerfully and move quickly and effectively, like a super hero. in addition, she is very brave—she storms an enemy position to fight with a powerful tank by herself. as a japanese person, i feel that her attitude and behavior are completely opposite normative japanese feminine behavior. furthermore, her way of speaking is a mix of feminine and masculine. for example, she never speaks in a polite way, but often speaks in an imperative tone, “suru zō”, and “~shiro!” another example is that she calls her colleagues “omae”, which is typically a male usage, although we can also hear her using women’s speech, such as “atashi,” “~dawa” and “~yo.” overall, her language is much more masculine than feminine. in terms of her clothing, she never wears skirts, or pink, red or otherwise colorful clothes. rather, she always wears dark colored pants, simple t-shirts and broad-shouldered jackets, like men’s clothes. in addition, her hair is short to medium-length, and very rough—that is, she does not seem to care much about her appearance. the most essential point in understanding her gender is that she never cares about showing her naked body. for example, after motoko, wearing optical camouflage that renders her invisible, fights a hacker, she turns off the optical camouflage to show herself. at that moment, she is apparently naked, and she does not care about revealing her naked body. because, generally speaking, females in japan are not comfortable being naked in public or especially in front of men, her attitude is not a normative feminine attitude. it is significant that even though motoko does not feel normative feminine shame about showing her naked body, batō feels shame for her—he covers her with his coat so her nakedness will be hidden. batō is much more normatively masculine, as we see in this protective gesture, than motoko is normatively feminine. as a result, we can conclude that she does not see herself as feminine/a woman. at the same time, however, she does not try to be fully a man, either, because she sometimes uses women’s language. in short, she simply does not care about what her gender is. unfortunately, our society does not have an alternative gender category—not woman and not man—so her gender is ambiguous and hybrid. although she does not have a sex and her gender is ambiguous/hybrid, her sexuality could be interpreted as heterosexual if we agree to regard batō as male. i assume batō is male, at she actually wears a flesh-colored “thermoptic camouflage suit,” which, when turned off (that is, when she is not using it to become invisible) fits so tightly to her body that it appears to be her own skin. thus, she is not really naked, but to the viewer of the film, and to her partner batō, she certainly appears to be. least a male-shaped cyborg, because of his low voice and his masculine body. also, as above, his protective attitude toward motoko and his shame, on her behalf, at her nakedness suggest normative male behaviors in the japanese context. in fact, motoko and batō do not have a physical relationship; however, they think about each other in a somewhat romantic way. they never say to each other “i love you”, but motoko says to only batō “whenever you access the net, i will always be with you” after she integrates with the puppet master. also batō tells motoko that she can stay in his safe house as long as she likes, after she has integrated with the puppet master—that is, he offers to let her live with him, another sign of his feelings toward her. as springer argues that the “cyborg imaginary in popular culture invites us to experience sexuality by losing our bodies and becoming pure consciousness,” we can understand that motoko and batō’s love is expressed in a different way from through a physical relationship. putting this all together, we might argue that motoko does not have a sexed body but her sexuality is heterosexual. looking at batō’s sexuality may also help us to understand both of them. for example, batō clearly considered motoko to be a woman because when she is naked he kindly covers her body with his jacket, or when she takes off her wetsuit when they are claudia springer, “the pleasure of the interface,” . together on his boat, batō bashfully avoids watching her naked. in short, batō defines motoko as a woman, as well as defining himself as a man. they definitely have a close, somewhat romantic, but not (as far as we know) physical, relationship. specifically, when motoko is almost completely destroyed, batō shouts out her given name, “motoko!!!” although he usually calls her by her title, “major.” in fact, it is unbelievable that a lower status person, as batō is in this particular relationship, would call a higher status person by his or her given name in japanese society unless they are intimate. thus, we know they have a close relationship. through the analysis of motoko’s sex, gender and sexuality, we noticed that motoko is not easy to categorize as female or male, a woman or a man. in her monumental “cyborg manifesto,” haraway claimed that “cyborg imagery can suggest a way out of the maze of dualisms in which we have explained our bodies and our tools to ourselves,” and ghost in the shell fits her theory very well. as we see, motoko’s sex and gender challenges dualism in order to make us aware of those categories and their limitations. as a result, ghost in the shell represents post-modern, posthuman discourse through motoko’s body. however, even ghost in the shell could not completely erase patriarchal ideas. donna haraway, “a cyborg manifesto”, . for example, as we have discussed, motoko’s body was sealed within a female shape by male scientists. the main plotline was led by the puppet master, whose sex and gender are ambiguous but who seems to be male/masculine because of “his” voice. in fact, near the end of the film, when the puppet master seeks to communicate and then merge with motoko, it downloads itself into a female-shaped artificial body; however, when it starts talking in a deep, male voice, our impression—that the puppet master is male/masculine—is set because despite the weirdness of the contrasting images: a masculine voice coming from a voluptuous naked feminine body. in addition, many key characters, batō, togusa, the head aramaki, as well as antagonists are almost all male; that is, the only key “female” character is the strong motoko. in fact, this film was created by a group of almost exclusively male artists, including the director oshii mamoru himself. despite the advances in posthuman body discourse represented in ghost in the shell, the film still retains limitations, such as androcentrism and heterocentrism, which we will also see in our final example from the s, evangelion. neon genesis evangelion the next text to be analyzed is neon genesis evangelion ( - ). this tv animation series aired in - , the same year ghost in the shell ( ) was playing in theaters. this tv anime series targeted a somewhat younger audience than ghost in the shell, airing : to : every wednesday night. in addition, the story is even more complicated than ghost in the shell. the main characters, shinji, rei and asuka, are also younger ( years old) than motoko, who looks like an adult. in this narrative, there are mechanical or powered suits, as in gundam; however, evangelion (as the suit is called) is not a robot (consisting of entirely artificial matter) but a synthetic organism: the viewer eventually learns that evangelion (the eva suit) is made of metal and organic matter. in order to connect a pilot’s nervous system with the eva s/he pilots, the pilot must wear an “interface head set” and a “plug suit.” the biggest difference between motoko and shinji is that one is a cyborg and the other is human. however, when shinji synthesizes with eva, and the two synch successfully, they become a powerful cyborg. the setting of evangelion is in new tokyo in , years after the “second impact,” which killed half of the world’s population. in , because mysterious alien creatures, called angels, keep invading new tokyo, a special paramilitary force (nerv) makes fourteen year old boys and girls synthesize with eva suits to become powerful cyborgs and fight with them. we will next analyze the fourteen year old protagonist, ikari shinji, whose father is the director of nerv and the creator of eva. following the same analysis format as ghost in the shell, i analyze shinji’s sex, gender, sexuality, and, as in the analysis of hybrid child, i explore what the narrative has to say about the power of motherhood and reproduction within a patriarchal system. shinji is represented to us as fully and simply human, with no cyborg enhancements. the narrative explains that shinji’s father is ikari gendo, who is a director of nerv as well as one of the creators of the eva. shinji’s mother, ikari yui, was a great scientist; however because of an accident that occurred during the evangelion experimentation in , yui died in front of shinji, who was then five years old. in fact, as a result of the accident her body was fused into eva , the same eva with which shinji synthesizes when he turns fourteen. this implies an oedipal relationship between shinji and his mother, yui, although—in a departure from the classic oedipal narrative—his father, gendo, actually pushes shinji to synthesize with the eva/his mother. since, according to freudians, the oedipal crisis is one of the developmental steps that solidifies a male adolescent’s sex-gender identity in the patriarchal system, it is significant that shinji’s oedipal experience is far from the norm. as far as his sex is concerned, shinji is depicted as a normal male human. for example, when he wears a plug suit to synthesize with the eva, his naked upper body implies that he is male. what then about shinji’s gender? does his gender show some influence of post-gender (posthuman) discourse? analyzing shinji’s behavior, his way of speaking, and his outfits will help us answer the question. shinji’s personality itself is nervous and unassertive, and he always speaks using polite language and in a soft tone not only to older people, such as misato and ritsuko, but also to his friends. however, his language is not explicitly feminine. he uses masculine language items, such as “boku.” thus, he presents himself in some ways as masculine, although he is nervous and soft-spoken, which are typically understood as feminine elements in japanese culture. as his behavior is very much related to his personality, it is not especially masculine. in fact, he is depicted as a good cook and organizer in comparison with female characters, such as misato, asuka and rei. although cooking and cleaning are typically considered to be a woman’s role, specifically the mother’s role, in the japanese context, shinji’s cooking or cleaning scenes emphasize his kindness more than his femininity. that is, shinji cooks and cleans because misato does not do these well, even though her role is shinji’s guardian. in other words, the narrative illustrates anti-traditional gender roles. thus, shinji is neither particularly feminine nor particularly masculine in daily life. what about during emergencies, when he has to pilot an eva? does he become a masculine person as a strong combatant? the answer is no. whenever he controls the eva, he shows his distress or anger. the point is that the eva looks very masculine when it fights with enemies; however, the eva’s masculinity does not reflect shinji’s masculinity. moreover, the eva itself has masculine and feminine elements, as i will discuss later. shinji’s behavior and language show that his gender is weakly masculine, but not feminine. however, he sometime clearly demonstrates a more strongly masculine gender performance. for example, whenever shinji accidently sees female characters’ naked bodies, he is surprised and blushes with shame, and then says “sorry” to the girls because he believes that he, as a boy, should not see naked women; that is, he socially identifies himself as a boy. (this is similar to batō in ghost in the shell, whose behavior implies that part of his masculine identity includes the necessity to protect the vulnerability and modesty of [naked] women, even if the woman in his case—motoko—feels no vulnerability or modesty herself.) moreover, when a playboy character, kaji, teasingly says to shinji “shall we have tea?” shinji answers him, “i am a man!” with a fierce expression. thus, shinji expresses his gender as masculine (and in this instance he may be at the same time asserting his sexuality as hetero). furthermore, he often wears a male junior high school uniform—a white shirt and black/dark blue pants—in daily life. his fighting outfit, the plug suit, is white and blue—a color combination that is considered masculine. thus, we can understand that his gender is masculine as shinji accepts socially constructed masculinity; he accepts the definition of what it is supposed to mean to be a “boy/man” in his society, and performs (or attempts to perform) the socially defined aspects of masculinity. in short, shinji’s gender performance tells us that he (tries) to be a boy/man although his gender identity is not entirely clear. his sex is male, and his gender is masculine; then what about his sexuality? during the first half of the story, shinji exhibits interest in rei, a female eva pilot. shinji often looks at her during classes, and when he visits rei’s home and sees her naked, he makes it clear that he is very much aware of her. in the last half of the series, once asuka, another eva pilot, joins them, the series occasionally focuses on the relation between shinji and asuka, although the narrative never demonstrates that they are a couple. for example, asuka asks shinji to kiss her; shinji, caught off balance, accepts the offer. the narrative accepts that shinji and asuka are “permitted” to do so. the best example of shinji’s sexuality is one of the episodes describing shinji’s psychology. in a fantasy sequence, misato, rei and asuka come to him one by one, asking him “do you want our hearts and bodies to become one? this is a very very comfortable thing.” all of them are female characters and ask him to have a mental and physical relationship in his fantasy. thus, through most of the narrative, his sexuality is described as heterosexual. however, at the end of the series, he meets nagisa kaoru, who is a male eva pilot. when shinji and kaoru talk, or when kaoru shows his interest in shinji, shinji’s facial expression is not angry or perturbed, but embarrassed. for example, when kaoru asked shinji “are you going for a bath now? can i go with you?” shinji hesitates to answer, blushing, and then says “ok.” in the public bath, when kaoru takes shinji’s hand, shinji is surprised and blushes again. interestingly, he does not reject kaoru’s attention. from these scenes we may speculate that shinji might accept kaoru as a sexual partner, but the narrative does not illustrate a sexual relationship between them. thus, shinji’s sexuality is, in the end, not so clear. the narrative seems to leave all options open, as is appropriate for someone who is fourteen years old and possibly still unsure of his sexuality: he could eventually be heterosexual, homosexual, or bisexual. what does seem consistent in all his sexually-charged encounters is that he is passive. through this analysis of shinji’s sex, gender, and sexuality, we understand that his sex is male; his gender performance is masculine, although we do not know his gender identity; and his sexuality is heterosexual, homosexual, or whatever. thus, shinji does not exactly fit within the strict categories of sex/gender/sexuality that modernists defined, but neither do these features illustrate a post-gender discourse. the analysis of eva, however, will show aspects of a post-gender discourse. the important point we should notice is that eva itself, a metal suit, does not show any features of sex, gender or sexuality; however, once shinji synthesizes with eva , eva becomes an interesting object, which demonstrates aspects of the posthuman. we now turn to the analysis of the fusion of shinji and eva in order to reveal what is going on between them and what they express as an amalgam. the story strongly hints that eva was generated from a part of lilith, which is the female ancestor of all living things, the origin of life. in addition to this, as mentioned above, shinji’s mother was absorbed into eva during an experiment. eva is therefore a hybrid of lilith, shinji’s mother and shinji when shinji synthesizes with the eva to fight with the angels. because the eva has a slender body and a narrow waist, its appearance is also toshio horimoto, evangelion yōgojiten, . somewhat feminine, especially when viewed in contrast to other mecha, such as gundam and mazinger z, which look very masculine, with wide shoulders and a “muscular” chest. although the narrative does not explicitly determine lilith’s sex, gender or sexuality, we can assume that its sex is female by referring to jewish mythology and the bible. eva , therefore, is a hybrid of female and male humans, and a female “monster.” thus, we could say that eva ’s sex is hermaphroditic in a sense, although the eva suit does not have male or female sexual organs. about the eva’s sexuality, we also do not know, but the eva physically connects to shinji. in other words, eva joins diverse living things together. interestingly, the first time shinji synthesizes with eva, he is terrified. orbaugh explains the reason why shinji experiences pain and fear when fusing with eva in “sex and the single cyborg.” the reason for his fear is that shinji has been feminized—that is, she argues, a male terror. orbaugh also describes how shinji and eva both feminize each other by analyzing the scene of synthesis between them. the viewer sees shinji, inside the very phallic-looking entry plug, being inserted into the receiving orifice of the eva suit and being incorporated by it… kotani mari, seibo evangelion, . according to the talmud, lilith is the first female, who was created by god. in the old testament of the bible, there is a creature called lilith, which is translated as “night monster” (horimoto, ). sharalyn orbaugh, “sex and the single cyborg,” . immediately thereafter we see the fluid inside the eva filling the entry plug, and filling shinji, much to his terror. in this case, therefore, each of the cyborg’s two components—the mechanical eva and the biotic shinji—has penetrated into and filled the other; each has been incorporated by the other. as orbaugh points out, the idea of being penetrated is painful and frightening to some men, including shinji. however, synthesizing with eva is no longer particularly painful for shinji after the first time; that is, shinji accepts being feminized. orbaugh also points out that when shinji has been feminized by being penetrated, he also has been masculinized by penetrating, inside the phallic-shaped entry plug, into the eva. thus, both shinji and eva have penetrated into and been penetrated by the other. their fusion, as a physical relation, illustrates post-gender, post-sex discourse because even if we are able to put the components (shinji and the eva suit) into modern categories of sex and sexuality, the amalgam remains outside of these categories: it is a complex stew of male shinji (whose sexuality is, at the moment, flexible), penetrating and being penetrated by his own (female, heterosexual?) mother (oedipal bliss or nightmare?), as well as the (female, monstrous) progenitor of all life (whose sexuality is unknowable), and, at the same time, all the inorganic matter and technology that makes up the suit. ibid., - . “permeability / penetrability” happens not only between shinji and eva but also between eva and an angel, ireul, in episode . when the angel, a computer virus, invades the organic supercomputer, magi, in nerv headquarters, the angel also invades eva through magi. magi was produced by ritsuko’s mother, akagi naoko, and—similar to the way that shinji’s mother was absorbed into the eva—naoko’s personality, as scientist, as mother, and as woman, was transplanted into magi. when magi and eva were permeated by the angel, their femininity was increasingly emphasized. in other words, both the supercomputer, the brain of the system, and eva, a powerful fighter, are considered as feminine as well as the center of the nerv system. femaleness and femininity are illustrated as the key to the narrative. popular culture critic and theorist kotani mari supports this point in her study seibo evangelion (sacred mother evangelion). according to kotani, whenever an eva fights with angels, the narrative demonstrates the eva’s femininity, because the meaning of “the awakening of the eva” is the “awakening of motherhood.” for example, when eva , which shinji pilots, arrives at a desperate situation, the eva awakes and becomes monstrously powerful to defeat the attacking angel. in this situation, shinji often loses consciousness, so we can mari kotani, seibo evangelion (tōkyō: magajin hausu, ). ibid., . understand that the “mother,” which is inside of eva, has awakened to fight; showing that the “mother” has more power to control the eva than shinji does. in fact, when eva faces defeat at the hands of an angel, and its power system fails, shinji can do nothing but shout “move! move! please move!” at this moment, the core of eva starts pulsating and its eyes flash. eva then re-activates and roars noisily. eva’s outer skin peels off, and its “meat” appears. then, ritsuko says “as i thought, she is awake!” (“yahari mezameta no ne, kanojo ga”). only she, eva , can save the world. in fact, although the system of nerv is apparently based on a patriarchal hierarchy, with ikari gendo at the top of the system, in fact, by analyzing eva and the supercomputer, magi, we can see that this patriarchy is fundamentally supported by a matriarchy: the maternal and feminized shinji/eva amalgam, and the feminine, high-tech, and maternal magi computer. thus, the narrative emphasizes the importance of femininity, female reproductive power, and the ultimate impossibility of the patriarchy controlling the power of the feminine. furthermore, kotani suggests that we think about the nature of the angels as depicted in the narrative. in modern discourse, self and other are always in a dualistic relation, and in the the eva’s body is actually coated by special material, which nerv created, in order to bind in its monstrous power (as we learn in this episode, number ). beginning of the evangelion series this seems to hold true for the relationship between the evas and the angels: whenever an eva is in battle with an angel we are led to consider that the eva represents ourselves (the good guys) and the angels represent the other (the bad guys). in later episodes, however, it becomes difficult to distinguish between the evas and the angels when an angel invades eva’s body and fuses with it. in fact, they became one, so that we cannot distinguish the parts making up the amalgam: the eva (self) and angel (other). the narrative actively tries to erase the boundary of self and other that is fundamental to western dualism and modern concepts of selfhood. not only kotani but also haraway points out the limitations of modern dualism and suggests a way to understand post-modern, posthuman discourse. i specifically focus on the two main dualistic relations that haraway emphasizes. one is the concept of self, which belongs to only one body in modern discourse: soul-self / body. the second one is the gender category: man / woman. one of the main points of “a cyborg manifesto” is that haraway challenges us to question those seemingly natural boundaries. she uses the figure of the cyborg as a metaphor to help us think about how such dualisms might be reconceptualized: kotani ( ), . ibid., . cyborg politics is the struggle for language and the struggle against perfect communication, against the one code that translates all meaning perfectly, the 	
 central dogma of phallogocentrism. that is why cyborg politics insist on noise and advocate pollution, rejoicing in the illegitimate fusions of animal and machine. these are the couplings which make man and woman so problematic, subverting the structure of desire, the force imagined to generate language and gender, and so subverting the structure and modes of reproduction of “western” identity, of nature and culture, of mirror and eye, slave and master, body and mind. haraway’s political program in “a cyborg manifesto” fits evangelion. for example, in episode , shinji completely synthesizes with the eva, and his body vanishes (although shinji returns, with his body intact, later). this clearly illustrates the disappearance of the boundary between organic matter and metal. they become one, a cyborg. because the boundary between organic matter and machinic matter is gone, the category of sex-gender—men and women—is also erased. in other words, because of the fusion, we cannot define the eva as male or female; the eva is an amalgam of an adult female, ikari yui, and a fourteen-year-old boy, ikari shinji (as well as other elements). furthermore, haraway brings her different perspective to challenge even the definition of self. according to another of her articles, “the biopolitics of postmodern bodies,” although donna haraway, “a cyborg manifesto”, . “self” is understood as the individualized body in the western context, we, in fact, cannot define “self” because even skin cannot help us determine where the “self” begins and ends. because organisms constantly enter and leave the supposedly enclosed and autonomous human body, our skins do not constitute a clear boundary between self and other. this argument fits evangelion as the evas are hybrids of human and metal. thus, the eva is representative of posthuman discourse in that there are no boundaries between self and other, body and soul, and man and woman. this is depicted as a good thing in evangelion (rather than a future to be feared), because when shinji synthesizes with the eva and the shinji-eva amalgam loses the boundaries, that is when it becomes a truly powerful cyborg that can defeat the invading angels to save the world. furthermore, in companion species, haraway uses “immune system discourse” to explain how important it has been for all living things to have shared their bacteria, viruses, etc., in order to make them stronger. this point of view is contrary to modern ideas, which suggest that the individual is completed in and of itself, and that as far as possible all bacteria and viruses should be excluded from the human body. if we apply haraway’s immune system theory to donna haraway, "the biopolitics of postmodern bodies." . evangelion, we can consider (the much smaller) shinji as a “bacterium” for eva . because the eva becomes fused with shinji, it/they can become a powerful fighter. at the same time, when shinji wants to separate from eva, he can exit it freely. to put it another way, the eva co-exists with shinji. the eva needs shinji, and shinji needs the eva. this relation is similar to the important relation between humans and dogs (and other “companion species) that haraway explains. thus, haraway’s discussion of immune system discourse and companion species helps us to understand eva as a representative of the posthuman. conclusion: selfhood in the hybrid body in this chapter i have emphasized the conception of the hybrid body, which has the potential to challenge or erase the boundaries between such natural-seeming categories as sex, race, and species, and provide alternative perspectives on living entities. the manga and anime that present these types of characters offer their answers to some of the numerous theoretical issues that arise from conceptions of a hybrid body. for example, while the majority of examples of this hybrid body come from the fusing or merger of two beings, once more than two bodies synchronize to become one, what is selfhood to this new, hybrid body? does the hybrid body have more than one selfhood? how can we know whether there is one or more selfhoods in the body? what kind of relation do selfhood and the body have? it is also essential to consider these issues around selfhood in a hybrid body, because this relationship goes beyond the concept of the modern body and mind relationship: one body has one mind. in order to consider conceptions of selfhood in these hybrid bodies, i will summarize how the narrative and anime analyzed in this chapter describe or depict this issue. hybrid child describes one of the most fascinating ways to express selfhood. in this text, the body has transformed several times yet the new body retains the former bodies’ memories, personalities and abilities (to varying degrees). the character sample b unit iii gives us opportunities to consider a specific response to issues of hybridity. when sample b unit iii is still in the lab and hears someone’s voice telling it to have agency, its selfhood awakens, although the narrative does not describe unit iii’s appearance at this point. once the story develops, the body of sample b unit iii changes through its consumption and sampling of cellular tissues from animals, yona’s mother, and the seven-year-old girl, yona’s, body. for sample b unit iii, being yona is the most comfortable way of experiencing existence, and so, for longer periods, yona’s self appears to be the main selfhood of the hybrid body. the narrative describes the hybrid body’s intense aversion toward yona’s mother, or the strong feelings toward shiba, that come from yona’s memories and emotions. thus, the hybrid body, having yona’s shape and physical appearance, expresses mainly yona’s selfhood. because the narrative also consistently uses yona as the subject of the hybrid body, the hybrid body represents yona’s self. however, the narrative sometimes reminds us that the yona-shaped hybrid body is actually sample b unit iii by illustrating his/its urgent situation—running away from the military. for example, when daniel appears before yona to apprehend her/it, yona (sample b unit iii) hopes that it could come to some understanding with daniel, because yona/sample b unit iii and daniel (sample xiii) are the same species (sample b cyborgs). this scene emphasizes sample b unit iii’s selfhood rather than yona’s, because the girl, yona, did not, and the amalgam, “yona,” does not know that daniel and she/it are the same. thus, hybrid child apparently expresses the conception that selfhood comes primarily from a person’s memories and genetic information. the hybrid body expresses one main selfhood, yona’s self, although the body has gained and kept all the memories and genetic information of the many living things the narrative describes at the beginning and also later reminds the reader that the hybrid body is sample b unit iii although its shape and appearance is yona. because the narrative uses “yona” for the subject of the hybrid body, even though some of its experiences are actually sample b unit iii’s experiences, the narrative emphasizes yona’s selfhood for the hybrid body. see, for example, hybrid child, . hybrid child, - . which sample b unit iii has consumed. at the same time, the core of the hybrid body, sample b unit iii, is never lost but hidden in the depth of the amalgamated entities. in short, selfhood of the hybrid body is not simply one, but rather is very complicated. on the other hand, the body of motoko is not a hybrid of other animals or living entities. is there different way of expressing self in ghost in the shell? the anime narrative emphasizes that selfhood is heavily based on a person’s memory, which brings up many doubts for motoko regarding her own selfhood. she fears that the memories that seem to be hers—from the time when she had a fully organic, un-cyborgized body— may have been created and installed into an artificial part of her brain. to put it differently, the anime shows that motoko’s doubt is actually motoko’s selfhood. an interesting point in ghost in the shell : innocence is that selfhood can possess any mechanical body.. however, the first ghost in the shell illustrates that only one selfhood can exist in only one body. in other words, this is the “normal” modern body-mind relationship, unlike what we have seen in hybrid child. however, once motoko gives up her cyborg body to live in the net world at the end of ghost in the shell, the way of expressing motoko’s selfhood becomes unique. i will examine the selfhood of the bodiless motoko in the next chapter. what about the self of the giant high-tech, mechanical body, eva ? evangelion has similarities with hybrid child in its way of expressing selfhood. eva is also a hybrid body, composed of lilith, shinji’s mother and shinji. oftentimes, eva operates under shinji’s control. in this case, the giant body, eva , does not show its selfhood; however, when the various technological systems of eva collapse during conflict and shinji is unable to control it, the “selfhood” of eva suddenly awakens to resist the enemy. in this sequence, the selfhood of shinji’s mother and/or lilith is depicted through eva’s monstrous behavior, which is not connected to shinji’s self. in short, the selfhood which the unit represents is that of ikari yui, shinji’s mother, (or lilith). because eva awakens and shows its hidden selfhood only when shinji is in trouble, it is easy to assume that this hidden selfhood has some strong feeling toward shinji. all three narratives from the s demonstrate selfhood through the material bodies of the characters, although those three stories express complicated selfhoods in different ways as a result of their differing presentations of the hybrid body itself. in short, in important and influential sf narratives of the s, selfhood continues to have aclose connection to the body. this chapter has also focused on characters’ sex, gender and sexuality to reveal elements of posthumanism, which can exceed such socially normative categories. all three narratives demonstrated hybrid bodies, arguing for an alternative form of reproduction as well as a mixture of the categories: sex, gender and sexuality. hybrid child emphasized female power through reproduction: all living entities, including the god of the war, are born from the female body. the purpose of emphasizing the female body is to resist the idea of patriarchy, which has discriminated against female bodies. interestingly, evangelion also underlined motherhood and the monstrous power of the female, which can save the world. both narratives demonstrate anti-phallcentrism through the hybrid body and its power. similarly, ghost in the shell describes a female-shaped cyborg, kusanagi motoko, as the strongest character in the narrative. at the end of the story, she decides to give up her body to exist only as consciousness in the net. in other words, ghost in the shell also shows an anti-patriarchal attitude because male scientists can create her powerful body without recourse to a female “mother,” but motoko decides to betray her “fathers,” by abandoning the body to get her freedom. however, in another sense, she also agrees to become a mother by “mating” with the puppet master—the result is not a typical child, because her consciousness and memories are still part of it; but nonetheless, it is a new being. this scene could be read as a return to old-fashioned sex-gender patterns: a male convinces a female to mate with him to produce his child. but at the same time, the scene emphasizes a new form of reproduction: a feminine-shaped naked body inhabited by a bodiless “male” has “sex” with a feminine-shaped naked body inhabited by a gender-neutral “female” who has no clear evidence for what her original body/sex was. the hybridity of the bodies depicted demonstrate different types of power structures, both referencing/reinforcing patriarchal power and resisting it at the same time. in addition, all three narratives illustrate an integrated body and mind: a fused amalgam which has merged minds. yona in hybrid child is based on sample b unit iii’s body, but this entity is the creation of a fusion between an animal, yona, an insect, the dragonfly, and a bird, to transform its body repeatedly; it maintains each living entities’ genes, their abilities, and some memories. this image of the body runs counter to the modern concept of the body, wherein one body has only one mind. the body of motoko in ghost in the shell is made of some organic parts—components of an organic brain and nerves—as well as inorganic matter, but it has only one mind, that of motoko herself (although she doubts her own identity). however, at the close of the narrative, she decides to merge with the puppet master. thus, in the end motoko points away from the typical modern idea of the body-and-mind relationship, because of this fusion. in evangelion, the shinji/ eva amalgam is generated from the combination of lilith, shinji’s mother, and shinji. we see some monstrous power, and the force of motherhood from the amalgam although shinji is piloting it. so, the hybrid body, eva , definitely has a set of different minds inhabiting its body as well. thus, all three narratives imagine a body/mind construction quite different from the modern idea of the body-mind relationship, because all three characters’ are actually fused together from more than two bodies and contain more than one mind. the next chapter shows the continuation of evolution of the conceptualization of the hybrid body, through influence from biomedical technology. chapter : digitized bodies in the s and s bodiless characters in this chapter, i will analyze characters in manga and anime from the s and s, to discuss a new contemporary notion of the body, able to fully transcend the idea of the modern body and mind. the first work i will analyze is ghost in the shell : innocence ( , hereafter innocence), directed by oshii mamoru. this work continues with the characters from ghost in the shell ( ). although innocence is seen as a pioneer in promoting the concept of the bodiless character, able to exist freely in the net world, i will keep my discussion of it brief, because it has already received much scholarly critical attention. i will use it here as an introduction to the concept of the bodiless character. next, i discuss kaiba ( ), directed by yuasa masaaki, a tv anime series composed of episodes. kaiba shows us a world in which memory chips can store people’s memories; interestingly, it describes an innovative relationship between the body and the mind in a futuristic world. thirdly, i examine expelled from paradise ( ), directed by mizushima seiji. this film shows digitized people in a virtual world; my analysis, however, reveals the persistent limitations within japanese anime around conceptions of gender and sexuality. my final analysis of contemporary japanese visual culture is of knight of sidonia, written by nihei tsutomu. this manga series consists of fifteen volumes, and presents a rich mixture of queer characters, able to exceed normative sex, gender and sexuality, unlike the characters of expelled from paradise. analyzing these four works can help us recognize the essential changes in the conception of the body from modern to posthuman: bodiless persons, digitized memories and personalities, as well as the ability to exceed categories of sex and sexuality. nonetheless, many of these works still accept and maintain conceptual limitations or aspects of normativity. the characters who represent these new body notions do not belong to a specific physical body, and can think and have memories within, or even outside of, the confines of a particular device. as science fiction critic and theorist n. katherine hayles mentions, conceptions of digitized people in contemporary science fiction are influenced and inspired by the development of computer science, which has helped expand our imaginations. because “the body itself is a congealed metaphor” and “the metaphor resonates with cultural meanings,” analyzing the virtual body and physical-bodiless characters can help us think beyond the modern “[h]uman functionality expands because the parameters of the cognitive system it inhabits expand. in this model, it is not a question of leaving the body behind but rather of extending embodied awareness in highly specific, local, and material ways that would be impossible without electronic prosthesis.” how we became posthuman, - . notion of the body and mind, as well as the notions of normative sex, gender and sexuality, which are also part and parcel of the idea of the modern body. ghost in the shell : innocence in how we became posthuman ( ), katherine hayles introduces the posthumanist position, and, as a contrast, uses the work of gillian brown regarding the view anorectics have toward the body, to exemplify the liberal humanist position. in “anorexia, humanism, and feminism” ( ), brown claims that “the body is understood as an object for control and mastery rather than as an intrinsic part of the self.” hayles uses brown to argue that humanists especially believe that subjectivity/the self consists not in the body but in the mind; in contrast, she argues that “her dream is a version of the posthuman that embraces the possibilities of information technologies without being seduced by fantasies of unlimited power and disembodied immortality, that recognizes and celebrates finitude as a condition of human being, and that understands human life is embedded in a material world of great complexity, one on which we depend for our continued survival.” ibid., . quoted in ibid., . ibid., . in fact, in contemporary popular anime, such as innocence, we can find many virtual characters who do not have a material body, but who can in fact possess any body that is connected to the net. thus, the value of the body in those narratives is illustrated as much less than that of the mind/soul. because those virtual/digitized characters have some elements of the posthuman, i will compare innocence and kaiba to reveal the posthuman features they share, the differences in the meaning/value of the body, and trends we can see in the conceptualization of the body in science fiction works from the s and s. innocence is set in , four years after major kusanagi motoko disappeared in ghost in the shell. motoko’s colleagues, batō and togusa, who belong to public security section , investigate sex-toy gynoids, known as “hadaly,” which have killed their owners. as batō and togusa track down the source of the virus that is causing the hadaly gynoids to malfunction, batō is thinking with love and longing of motoko, now a disembodied life form. interestingly, the name hadaly recalls that of károly hadaly, a hungarian mathematician who lived from till . however, the source for its use in innocence, together with the original conception of an android, is the french proto-sf novel, l’Ève future (the future eve), written by auguste villiers de l’isle-adam in . in the novel, thomas alva edison creates what he calls a female-shaped andreid (from which we get the word android) and programs her, using phonograph records and other th century high technology, to talk and move like a human. he is so successful that the andreid captures the heart of a young man, even after he knows that the woman he loves is artificial. the possibility of loving a completely artificial being is what ties together l’Ève future and innocence. throughout the film, motoko leaves clues to help batô solve the mystery, and also to keep him from harm. at the end of the film, as batō fights with many hadaly gynoids at the offshore factory where they are built, motoko’s ghost downloads into one of the gynoid dolls to support him. batō and “motoko” eventually discover that the company that produced the gynoids has been kidnapping girls, and then “dubbing” their “ghosts” into their products to make the gynoids more real. because one of the kidnapped girls wanted someone to realize her situation and rescue her, she (with the help of one of the company’s programmers) changed the gynoids’ programming during the dubbing process, which caused them to kill their owners. when rescued by batō and “motoko,” the little girl cries and says that she did it because she did not want to be made into robots, but neither batō nor “motoko” sympathizes with her. “motoko” says that if the gynoids had had a voice they would have said just as firmly that they did not want to be human. it is significant that batō and “motoko” do not sympathize with the kidnapped girl (although they do rescue her) or the gynoids’ murdered owners, but they do show their sympathy for the gynoids, who suffered sexual exploitation and then destructive neglect at the hands of humans. this scene clearly shows that the protagonists view humans and gynoids/robots as equally worthy of respect and sympathy. i believe that this equality and mutual respect or even love between humans, cyborgs, robots, and animals is the main message of this film. innocence suggests the new gender possibilities of the posthuman body, specifically after motoko has become a new sort of entity after she merged with the puppet master in ghost in the shell. as motoko loses her physical body, she is able to flow in the huge net universe. what does this mean to modern human beings? literary critic and philosopher elaine graham points out how cyberspace lets us move beyond modern selfhood. “cyberspace affords a much greater freedom to create new selves. while the self may be “decentred” and multiple, participants tend to resolve this as being an enrichment rather than a dissipation of identity.” graham challenges the concept of modern subjectivity, which belongs to only the body; rather, virtual bodies in cyberspace can exist on many levels. in other words, there are many diverse forms of embodied subjectivities, so that the range of what haraway calls situated knowledge will be expanded. orbaugh also challenges the concept of “modern selfhood” in a different way, by elaine l. graham, “the end of the ‘human’,” . graham is not talking about the kind of complete disembodiment that we see in innocence and other sf fantasies, but her point about the ability of individual real-life humans to create and handle a multitude of virtual identities suggests a conceptual bridge between our current lives and the futuristic possibilities in works like innocence. combining teresa brennan’s view and her own analysis of the “infective” relationship between motoko and batō in innocence. just as the idea of posthuman selfhood is not necessarily confined to a singular body but can possess anything connected to the net, motoko is able to “infect” various systems to communicate with batō. “it is [motoko]’s ability to move in and out of bodies/system as information that allows her to continue to interact with batō…” this means that motoko’s selfhood is actually bigger than (or beyond) her “body.” she has become like the organisms in haraway’s immune system discourse, moving into and out of other entities and co-existing/co-evolving with them. when hayles discusses the problems with the modern conceptualization of the subject, she uses the basic language of computers. if we express human subjectivity through a computer model, all humans, animals, and living things can be expressed as a digital formula using s and s. that is, there are no essential ontological differences between humans, cyborgs, animals and other things; nor is there any gender difference. as a result, if we think of the relations between various entities in terms of the way they are expressed digitally, we can start to deconstruct the modern hierarchies that rely on beliefs about essential difference. in innocence motoko actually sharalyn orbaugh, “emotional infectivity: cyborg affect and the limits of the human,” in mechademia, volume (minnesota: university of minnesota press, ), . exemplifies this kind of digital (dis)embodiment. she is in some ways an ideal example of the posthuman subject able to escape boundaries and hierarchy. however, this mind and body relationship has some problems, if we believe that the posthuman should retain none of the features of the modern body. it is potentially quite beneficial that a posthuman subjectivity can freely move and possesses any networked bodies to overcome the limitation of singular embodiment, but if we accept that the “mind and body are separable,” we are faced with issues of both dualism and humanism, which threaten to return us to the hierarchical and problematic aspects of the modern we have seen that both katherine hayles and donna haraway, despite their enthusiasm for posthumanism, are wary of the futuristic real-life visions of downloading one’s memories and consciousness to a computer, to achieve some sort of immortality for the subject. they both are materialists in the sense that they believe that selfhood and mind arise from the materiality of the body (even if it is a cyborg body or otherwise hybrid amalgam) and cannot be separated from it. the issue of materialism in a posthuman context is explored in further in kaiba and expelled from paradise. similar to mokoto, the characters and narratives of kaiba ( ) and expelled from paradise ( ) illustrate memory chips, which can store personal memories, or digitized people, who live in the database; however the narrative of kaiba emphasizes the importance of the material body throughout the series, while expelled from paradise ends up returning its characters to the material body. kaiba the title, kaiba, in japanese means “hippocampus,” the part of the brain that functions to preserve memories. the tv anime series questions the meaning and function of memory in human beings by giving us a mysterious protagonist, who has lost all his memories and tries to find himself through his journey. the series utilizes the idea of digitized memories to further its exploration of the connection between memory and subjectivity. the narrative is complicated, but all its intricate pieces eventually connect with each other to present the story of the protagonist, named kaiba, and of the memory world, called warp. like innocence, this anime also touches on and illustrates philosophical questions. however, the drawing style is very simple and unsophisticated, very different from the gorgeously detailed animation and complex visual style of innocence. furthermore, because the drawing style borrows much from tezuka osamu’s early work, this series seems to emphasize the question of what memory is to humans by visually inviting a particular type of (nostalgic) memory. the way of illustrating memory in kaiba helps create an uncanny world, because the animation style is very childish, but the theme of the narrative offers a discourse on the meaning of the body and mind that is very much philosophical. the world of kaiba, through both visual style and narrative, keeps a conspicuous focus on the meaning of memory as the key theme of the anime. the setting is in a parallel world where memories can be stored as computerized information. at the beginning of the story, the protagonist, called kaiba, awakens in a ruined room; he does not have any memories of who he is, why he is there, and who the girl in the photograph is in the pendant that kaiba has hanging around his neck. unknown people and strange animals keep chasing him; he boards a spaceship to run away from them, and sells his body and puts his memory into a hippo-shaped stuffed toy to change his appearance. this is the reason for him to start his journey. he travels to different planets and meets many people, and all characters are round-shaped and the backgrounds are also simple, as in early manga by tezuka and fujiko f. fujio. yuasa purposely used the style to depict an uncanny world. (from on interview, in kaiba vol. (dvd, .) in an interview, the director, yuasa masaaki, mentioned that he tried to make a parallel rather than futuristic world although it was difficult to create a world completely different from the earth. in fact, there are some features of the earth in a couple of episodes. “kaiba: director yuasa masaaki interview ( )”, web anime style, http://style.fm/as/ _special/mini_interview/kaiba_event .shtml. all episodes start with the opening comment, “is memory soul or ghost? it is a world where memory can be transformed into computerized information and stored. even if the body dies out, you can transfer your memory into a better body and become immortal. delete bad memories and download happy memories. however, only upper class people are allowed to do so. in the world, kaiba having lost his memory is traveling with a body that is not his original one.” finally regains his memories. because my purpose here is to discuss the conceptualization of the body in various periods of japanese anime, i will first examine how this work, kaiba, illustrates the body and the soul/memory, and then discuss features of posthumanism in it. the anime illustrates the role of the material body as a container, although the key message of the story is to emphasize the value of the physical body and the inseparability of the body and mind. memory (the mind/soul) is illustrated in two ways: ) one way is as small, beautiful, golden-colored balls, called memory eggs, that emerge from a body once it has died; and ) another is as inorganic triangular pyramids, called memory chips, in which memories can be stored. thus, even if one’s most recent body grows old and looks bad, rich people can buy other, young bodies, and put their own memory chips into them. both memory eggs and memory chips are presented as the person’s memory; however, the artificial chips are inorganic matter. on the other hand, the memory eggs appear to be organic matter, and are beautiful and warm. the memory eggs float to the sky and disappear once they emerge from a body; in contrast, memory chips will be able to exist forever. thus, the definition of death has also changed. the narrative implies that the chips are useless and impractical things if they are not put into a material body. kaiba demonstrates the body and mind as separate and separable; that is, it accepts both idealism and dualism, as i defined these concepts in chapter two. generally speaking, it is said that descartes was the person who most famously insisted that the mind and body are different things. descartes said that a human being is a composed of a mind and a material body put together by god. idealism insists that the mind is the one thing that can control the body. however, materialists such as haraway, hayles and yōrō are opposed to idealism and dualism; their perspective is that the mind comes from the body, and the body and mind are inseparable. kaiba presents characters informed by idealism; their use of futuristic, advanced technology permits their minds to control a range of new bodies. however, as the story develops, the implication is that if a character’s memory chip does not go into a material body, the result, stemming from the digitization of memory and the loss of the material body, cannot be human, animal, or even posthuman. thus, the anime suggests the dark side of advanced technology: it has the potential to strip away humanity by dividing the body and the mind. episode three is centrally concerned with the issue of losing the material body. the protagonist, kaiba, travels to a new planet and meets a girl, kuroniko, who is from a poor saitō kōichi, “dekaruto no ningenron”: . ibid., . family. the day kaiba and kuroniko meet is the last day for kuroniko to have her own body; the next day she is to give it up and sell it to support her family financially. she believes that once her family becomes rich, they will buy her a new body, and she can return to the world. however, the mediator has deceived kuroniko, and her memory is not digitized as a memory chip. furthermore, because of a terrible mistake, her body is thrown away by another mediator, who does not know that a wealthy woman has arranged to buy kuroniko’s body. we find here a strong argument, by demonstration: even if the body is marked and marginalized, it is not always a great idea to separate the mind from the material body, because the mind itself cannot do anything once it has lost the body. the body and mind are always inseparable. even if, as in motoko’s case, memories could be uploaded into the net world, the resulting subjectivity/consciousness must belong to the net world, where she can move freely but cannot actually control or organize anything. in addition, if motoko wants to manifest her kuroniko’s mother became sick and died when kuroniko was little, so kuroniko’s mother’s young sister has raised kuroniko as her own child. the aunt worked hard for the family; she had a husband and two babies, but her husband died and the family became poorer and poorer. the aunt and kuroniko worked hard together, but they could not afford enough food for all the family. the aunt tried to make some money by selling her memory/knowledge about music and literature. at the same time, however, she lost the memories about her happy life with her sister and kuroniko, leaving her without feelings toward them. finally, she decided to sell kuroniko’s body to earn some money for her babies. consciousness outside of the net world, she must possess the right materials to do so. thus, contemporary narratives clearly illustrate what posthumanist scholars (haraway, hayles, and yōrō) argue: that no one can free themselves from the material body (as a thing) because the mind and body are inseparable. kaiba thus indicates problems about the separability of the body and mind, and about exchanging one body for another. in episode three, when kaiba finds kuroniko’s body at the dumpsite, he is very angry at all of those who have killed kuroniko’s soul and body. kaiba decides to put his memory into her body to permit her to live. after kaiba enters into her body, he visits kuroniko’s house. he finds her aunt sleeping, so he uses a special tool, called hōreitō, to access her memory to see how she remembers kuroniko. because kuroniko’s aunt has sold kuroniko, she is able to buy back some parts of her own memory—knowledge of arts, such as music and literature—and is able to use these in turn to buy back the remaining portions of her memory. at this point she completely recalls her memories, including her happy life with kuroniko, and so she regrets what she has done. this ends episode three. the remarkable point oshii mamoru, director of ghost in the shell, said that the body is just a container, and the soul can live without the material body. however, oshii failed to illustrate this argument in motoko, because he used material things, such as dolls, androids, and the screen to present her. her mind is always attached to a material thing. in this episode is, of course, that kuroniko’s aunt recalls her happy memoires with kuroniko, and it should be noted how the anime illustrates the person’s memory. firstly, kaiba takes the special tool, which looks like a flashlight, hōreitō, to open the image of the aunt’s memory room, which is not only a visualized, two-dimensional picture, but becomes a material room into which kaiba can physically enter. in her memory room, there are many books, which refer to academic knowledge and musical ability. kaiba, in the memory room, can physically touch these books and can encounter the aunt’s memories through these material objects. in other episodes this anime also suggests that someone who gets into another character’s memory room can erase or tamper with that person’s memory. for example, neiro’s memory room is painted black to cover all her great memories with kaiba. in her room, her enemy paints a different person’s face on kaiba’s portraits, and also installs false memories—for example, of kaiba cruelly killing neiro’s parents—in order to make her hate and retaliate against kaiba. her shattered memory room represents her thoughts and negative emotions toward kaiba. through these illustrations of the memory room, the anime conceptualizes the the narrative tells in the later episodes that neiro is the girlfriend of kaiba, but because kaiba has lost his memory he does not remember her in the early episodes. at the same time, neiro’s memory was tampered with, so she does not remember kaiba either. i talk about neiro later in this section. expression of people’s memories in a unique way. this is an important point in terms of the relation between the mind and body. in the memory room, which is shown as an aspect of the mind, a physical/material person, who has the power to check, interact with, and change the contents of another person’s memory, can be physically present in the room. in an interview, yuasa mentions that he gave a lot of attention to illustrating how books are presented in a person’s memory room in order to demonstrate the person’s personality. if all the books are organized well on the bookshelves in the memory room, and if there is also enough space to look at all those books (memories), the character can clearly recall and benefit from her/his memories. that is, the director has tried to illustrate not only personal memories but also a character’s personality and emotion through the memory room. in fact, each memory room is uniquely depicted. for example, kuroniko’s aunt sold her knowledge and its related memories to support her family financially. thus, her memory room is empty and illustrated in pale and despondent colors; however, once she retrieves her old memories and knowledge, the number of books, which are representations of her artistic skill, dramatically increases. as the books increase, she recovers her skills at playing the piano; her hands remember everything. once she kaiba: director yuasa masaaki interview ( ), web anime style, http://style.fm/as/ _special/mini_interview/kaiba_event .shtml. starts playing the piano again, she also recalls music and all her memories of kuroniko and kuroniko’s mother (her sister). the recalled memories are illustrated warmly, vividly and brightly. her mind becomes full of her happy moments. the scene reminds the audience ) how important nice memories are to vivify human life; ) that memory is strongly connected to a person’s body experiences, such as the hands and ears for playing the piano; and ) that memories affect a person’s emotions and personality. in the case of kuroniko’s aunt, she as an unemotional person when she has lost her memories, but becomes an affectionate person when she regains them. in comparison with oshii’s innocence, in which we have no depiction of motoko’s past memories, kaiba effectively demonstrates the importance of personal memories, which it describes as the core of selfhood. overall, the depiction of the memory rooms not only argues for the importance of personal history, but also how past memories affect one’s recent selfhood, and how memories are closely related to the body experience. this illustration presents an essential relationship between the body and mind. this episode, which describes kuroniko’s past and present, offers us a very pessimistic scenario: that the people who sell their bodies do not have any power, but have given it over to the mediators and buyers. for the poor people who sell their bodies, advanced technology—the memory chip—does not help their lives but rather helps the authorities to control them. thus, kaiba warns the audience to consider what kind of power might exert itself over us if we accept advanced technology. the kuroniko story arc brings up another interesting issue. in episode six, kaiba meets two boys, gege and banira, while he is inhabiting kuroniko’s body. both of these boys are interested in the kuroniko-shaped kaiba. kaiba wonders, “if kuroniko were alive, which boy she would choose?” this scene reminds us that kaiba is “wearing” kuroniko’s body and does not think of it as his own body. he shows concern for kuroniko’s body when he faces a romantic relationship. in fact, an earlier episode illustrated a sold body, abused for the buyer’s sexual pleasure. through its imagination of a world where personal memories can be stored in different bodies, the anime emphasizes the issue of the separable body and mind relation, and makes us consider the ramifications of such a situation. the best example here is the existence of hyō-hyō, a small, cute, and intelligent creature with long ears. this character seems to have much greater experience and knowledge than kaiba, and to be an important ally for kaiba. in a later episode, kichi, who buys and sells people’s memories, exposes the riddles of hyō-hyō. kichi tells neiro that when the anti-warp decided to manipulate neiro’s memories, kichi had taken some of them and put them into the body of hyō-hyō, which was just a stuffed toy. thus, hyō-hyō acquired neiro’s wonderful memories of kaiba, which neiro herself had lost. but as hyō-hyō has existed and experienced new things throughout the travels with kaiba, hyō-hyō has acquired a different personality from neiro; that is, hyō-hyō has developed a new existence, born through its own experiences with its own body. although hyō-hyō’s core memories have obviously come from neiro’s experiences, hyō-hyō’s selfhood is independent and different from that of neiro’s. the advanced technology which allows humans to manipulate people’s memories is capable of creating two different people/creatures who have the same selfhood; however, once they have different bodies and different experiences through their own bodies, they become different people. this narrative argues that selfhood is built by one’s own experiences through one’s material body. that is how kaiba emphasizes the importance of material bodies as well as the danger of advanced technology, even though humans may be able to control and store people’s memories through such technology. to fully understand what kaiba is saying about new conceptualizations of the body we should look not only at the relationship between the body and mind, but also at the memory chip. it is a form of technology that can save a person’s memories, but once the memories become information, are they still a part of the person? in fact, as yōrō takeshi emphasizes, “information is immobilize and unchangeable.” in other words, once a person’s memories become information, this information will not expand by itself; rather, it will just remain as it is, unchangeably. can this unchangeable thing be understood to be human, or at least a part of a human? in other words, even if the chip could be put into a new body in the future, the original person/memory would not fit the new time and place, because the memory would not have not changed from what it was in the past. the narrative argues that human consciousness/memory can be transferred to a chip, and the information inside of the chip can replace a human consciousness/memory. however, once memory becomes information, it is unchangeable; in contrast, human consciousness/memory is always changing. here, hayles’s point of view can highlight the importance of interaction between the body, mind, time, place, culture, and so on. hayles uses the term “embodiment,” which, she emphasizes, is “always contextual, enmeshed yōrō takeshi, yōrō takeshi no ningen kagaku kougi, . generally speaking, consciousness and memory have different definitions, but here i am using consciousness, mind, and memory in a similar way to compare these with the material body. in fact, yuasa thinks that a person’s identity comes from personal memory, so the memory creates the individual. (interview with voice actors. in kaiba vol. (dvd, ) with the specifics of place, time, etc.” her point is that embodiment is always specific and exists within a web of physical and temporal factors. hayles says that “[e]xperiences of embodiment are always imbricated within a culture, it never coincides fully with the abstract pure idea of the body.” so, information in the memory chip, which is extracted from its web of time and culture in order to be kept in a small chip, cannot be embodied by itself. that is why it needs a material body, which belongs to time, space and culture. in the last episode, kaiba completely recalls his memories; he is the king of memory, called warp; neiro, who is the girl in the picture in the pendant, is actually his girlfriend, and so on. in fact, some of his memories were tampered with by the anti-warp organization, issōdan. for example, kaiba’s mother, the queen, poisons him to “kill” him; however, the real reason for poisoning him is actually to protect him from a power struggle. his mother knows kaiba would be invulnerable, even if he were to drink some poison. in fact, kaiba’s other brothers are quoted in nathalie muller, “issue seven: regional online & techno-spiritualism,” sept. , paragraph , http://www.cybersociology.com/files/ _review_howposthuman.html. quoted in ibid., paragraph . in the last episodes, neiro tells kaiba that when kaiba has fought with the monster in the past, he has left some memories about his mother in the universe. however, kaiba is sure this will not be a problem, because he believes that he is complete even without the memories. neiro has kept the memories, so she tells them to kaiba. because of neiro’s explanation, kaiba is able to fully recall his memories of his mother. the narrative implies that a personal memory belongs to a person, but these personal memories can be shared with other people. one’s memory is part of other’s memories. killed. kaiba survives and takes over the king’s position and invents the technology that can preserve memory—memory chips—for the people. kaiba controls all the memories of the people; however, one day he falls into electric clouds, loses his memories, and descends to the lower world, called gagetsu, where the first episode begins. during his absence in the palace of warp, located in the upper world, someone in a clone of kaiba’s body reigns as the king, egotistically controlling the world. thus, once kaiba reclaims his memory, he persuades the clone to give up control of the world by showing him his real power, and then recovers the king’s position. at the same time, kaiba must fight against the plant monster, which consumes people’s memories in order to grow, and threatens people’s lives, even though it had started out as simply a small and cute “flower.” the scene—the monster gradually consuming not only people’s memories but also everything in the world—implies the possibility of people becoming one, in that the image of the monster, growing ever larger, seems to be absorbing everything into a single living entity. however, as kaiba attacks the monster with a huge amount of memories, the body of the monster can no longer absorb new memories into its body and is destroyed. when kaiba attacks the plant monster, his own clone, “it is myself.” that is, kaiba, the king and preserver of memories, and the plant monster, also called kaiba and a consumer of memories, are same: what they have tried to do is identical. that is, both have tried preserving people’s memories to unify everyone. however, kaiba eventually releases the memories he has preserved. the final scenes show the key characters, either enemies or friends, seeming to retrieve their memories and gathering together. in fact, what happens to the memory chips and the memory eggs after kaiba reclaims his power as king and kills the monster remains very ambiguous. all we know is that the main characters, including some defunct characters, are alive together on the peaceful planet. kaiba argues that each person’s memory should belong to each person’s body, and extracted memories do not have any meaning to humans. we may think of the body of kaiba as a representation of the hard drive of a supercomputer. even if the owner dies, the memories of that person will remain in the computer; however, memories as data cannot represent the person, because the body and its memories, developed through physical experience, have to progress together to build up the selfhood that constitutes a human. the director seems to argue that once we lose one of them, body or memory, we are dead. the conceptualization of the body in kaiba brings into focus the question of what death is to human beings, and how memories, which were built up through physical experiences, are key for human selfhood. kaiba is animated in a novel way because it tries to illustrate, in simple drawings, how memory could be transferred into a chip, what the meaning of the body is, and what the inside of people’s memories might look like. it definitely succeeds in presenting a particular vision of the discourse of the relationship between the body and mind in anime. on the other hand, it does not really bring new perspectives on sex, gender and sexualities—we can see only heterosexuality between characters, whose gender-sex is either feminine-female or masculine-male. when kaiba acquires kuroniko’s body, the narrative could explore alternative sex, gender and sexuality, but it persists in imagining normative sex, gender and sexuality. analyzing kaiba is essential to understanding how contemporary visual culture can express a different imagination of the body and mind from other periods; at the same time, the analysis reminds us of the persistent limitation on sex, gender and sexuality in japanese anime. the next short analysis of the anime film expelled from paradise also discusses how digitized people are illustrated in contemporary popular culture. these two will reveal some important differences in this regard. expelled from paradise this film’s narrative starts at the cyber world deva, where many human species have become data and live without a material body. in the year , deva is subjected to an abnormal event, a mysterious hacking from “the surface world.” because the hacker, frontier setter, attacked deva’s database, the deva investigator, angela, the protagonist, is sent to find the hacker in the surface world. the characters in deva and the look of the environment make us think that the film is set on the surface world; however, when the database is hacked, the audience realizes that deva is a virtual world—the picture of the environment suddenly has disturbances, and devolves to digits. this illustration style helps the audience to understand deva as a virtual world. here is another way of illustrating the virtual world: when angela tries to catch the hacking virus in the network, she becomes a strong light, able to move rapidly to chase the virus, which is also a bright light. when she moves slower, we can see her appearance as a square-shaped body: all her body parts are squares, resembling an early video game character. the style of illustration makes it clear that angela’s body is composed of digits, not organic matter. the way of fusing the “digital” angela with her material body also emphasizes the fact that angela is a digitized person, and that her mind is more important than her body. in fact, it is this surface world is the blighted earth, also called the material world. for people in deva, the surface world is an unpleasant place. easy to see that the narrative is based on the features of idealism, when we see how the material body is created. needing a material body to function on the surface world, angela’s body is generated from her embryo, which had grown for hours after fertilization and then had been kept in an embryonic state for a long time. thus, her body is created from her own embryo. once the true, organic body is created, angela’s virtual body, illustrated as her digitized consciousness, gradually collapses and becomes yellow particles; these then go into the head of the material body. finally, the yellow particles, which refer to her consciousness, spread over her material body in order to completely fuse with it. as idealism insists that the mind is the origin and foundation of the body, this scene clearly demonstrates the digital people (and world) are based on idealism because her digitized consciousness exists before her material body, and consciously fuses with it. once angela enters the material body, she arrives on the earth and meets an agent, dingo, who helps her on her mission. dingo and angela start investigating the hacker. during their journey, angela becomes sick because she does not know how to treat her material body. she recognizes how sensitive and uncontrollable a material body is. however, she also discovers mori nobushige, yuibutsuron, . that she can enjoy music through her body. at the end of the story, angela and dingo find frontier setter, an artificial intelligence robot. they discover that its purpose is not hacking deva but informing and asking people in deva to join its dream—going out into space to find other creatures that can share humankind’s knowledge and so on. thus, angela does not punish the robot; she returns to deva to report on the status to the three main deva government officials, all of whom look like deities from different cultures. however, because angela has not destroyed the robot, the officials are angry at her; they drastically reduce her memory—that is, she loses much of her freedom, and her power is much weaker in the virtual world. however, angela is saved by frontier setter’s hacking; and she decides to help the robot’s dream. angela, returns to the surface world and together with dingo she fights the other deva agents, sent by the officials. angela and dingo finally succeed in protecting frontier setter. because angela opposes the officials, she is expelled from the virtual world, deva; she decides to live with her material body in the surface world with dingo although she could choose to travel in space with frontier setter. in the end, she comments that “having a material one of the gods looks like a god in greek mythology; another one looks like a japaense guardian god of a temple; and the last one looks like ganesha. body is troublesome,” but her face looks happy and excited. the narrative implies that her experiences through the material body were not only troubling to her, but also gave her joy. this anime, too, maintains normative limitations on sex and sexuality. when angela obtains a material body, it is extremely feminine and erotic; she has huge breasts and wears a leotard to emphasize her body shape. in fact, there is no reason for her to have such an erotic appearance. “hayles finds the possible dimensions of a new woman’s body in code [that] is not an exclusively gendered woman’s body, not a body within a closed loop of sexual identity, but a body nonetheless.” however, there is no new woman in this anime, although it imagines and illustrates digital persons living in a virtual world. the anime presents its vision of “digital persons” as highly eroticized; even angela becomes such a woman once she obtains a material body. the body notion of the digital angela does not go beyond normative sex, but rather emphasizes the sexualized feminine body for the male audience. overall, digital people in expelled from paradise lack the essential features of the posthuman because ) their digital bodies persist in having normative sex, gender and sexuality; ) digital people in deva look down on non-digital people, who have a material body and live arthur kroker, body drift: butler, hayles, haraway, . in the surface world; that is, there is a hierarchy between them. in fact, there is a strong hierarchy in the world of deva, depending on the amount of memory a person (digital, i.e., virtual person-as-a-program) has; ) deva is complete as a self-contained digital world; that is, the inhabitants of deva do not interact with other species at all. moreover, the anime presents digital personalities, but does not demonstrate how these digital personalities have grown or developed in the digital world. in fact, these personalities each develop from a single, separate, material embryo—it argues that subjectivity cannot grow without the material body. in other words, the personality/mind comes from the embryo; that is, the fundamental idea of this anime is materialist. in addition, the protagonist, angela, ultimately decides to have a material body to live in the surface world. thus, it is clear that the anime is based on materialism. the characters in expelled from paradise fit the concept of posthumanism. one of the themes of expelled from paradise is that there are no places which do not have regulations. even if one loses the body, one cannot be completely free. virtual worlds have different kinds of regulations to control other people—in deva, because its operations resources are limited, the officials have the power to increase or reduce the amount of each person’s memory as needed. even though digital persons can be free from the material body, they still have different types of limitation; that is, a person’s agency in the virtual world is also regulated. as yōrō takeshi argues, the contemporary world has developed to recognize only the world of consciousness; it refuses nature, including the human body. he argues, further, that if human beings persist in recognizing the world based only on their imagination, they will abandon their bodies, or at least will no longer respect their bodies at all. expelled from paradise demonstrates exactly what yōrō argues. in fact, both kaiba and expelled from paradise demonstrate the material body as an exchangeable and disposable thing; they accept the ideas of recent computer technology and use these as examples to describe digitized memories or persons, as yōrō theorizes. however, as we saw, these anime conclude that the body and mind are inseparable, and the material body is actually essential for human beings. that is, the theme of anime is actually based more on materialism than idealism. the question is, then, why have the animators borrowed the new conceptions of the body, which encourage the audience to because the population of deva has increased but the operation resources are limited, the three main officials control the amount of memory each person can access. if a person has more ambition, the person can gain an amount of memory, but if not, s/he would be preserved in the archive system. thus, memory is power in deva. yōrō takeshi, nihonjin no shintaikan no rekishi, . reconsider the meaning of body? according to yōrō, religions have much influence on the understanding of the discourse on the body and mind. he tries to analyze the biggest influence to japanese society in nihonjin no shintaikan no rekishi (a history of japanese perception of the body). here, yōrō argues that people are limited by the foundations of their thoughts; in other words, by the ideologies or realities of the times in which they live. but philosophers, who consider the discourse on the body and mind, can indicate what kinds of thought have influenced the japanese people. thus, yōrō analyzes perspectives of famous japanese philosophers to demonstrate whether the ideologies and thoughts of japanese people/society are based on monism or dualism. yōrō concludes that japanese philosophers describe their point of views primarily through the perspectives of monism. for example, philosopher sakamoto hyakudai argues that “originally, humans must have been totally one unity. it is hard to believe that the mind and body existed separately and then they were combined into humans. in short, a human is not simply mind or body; however, the unity sometimes looks like a material (body) and sometimes yōrō interprets the perspectives of several contemporary japanese philosophers: sakamoto hyakudai, hiromatsu wataru, ichikawa hiroshi, and omori shōzō. nihonjin no shintaikan no rekishi, - . mind.” sakamoto’s point of view clearly shows monism. yōrō also discusses other philosophers’ points of views to demonstrate that their positions are monistic—the body and mind is the same thing, although the ways of explaining the discourse are slightly different from one philosopher to another. yōrō also examines historical materials to reveal that japanese society has long been influenced by monism, which has come from the idea of buddhism. for example, yōrō analyzes kibagozōkyō, which is a reference book of acupuncture and moxibustion, takuan sōhō’s kottoroku, which describes relations between the human body and space, and so on. these works, based on buddhist thought, basically argue that everything is one unity. yōrō also examines kamo no chōmei’s hōjōki to reveal that the term, body (mi/shin), that chōme uses, includes mind (kokoro), and also that chōmei conflates the terms, body and mind, because the two are not separate in his conception. in fact, yōrō argues that ever since kamakura buddhism, japanese thought has accepted the monistic idea of the body and mind (shin shin ichinyo). however, since the edo period, japanese society has shifted to a dualistic point of sakamoto hyakudai, kokoro to shintai, . yōrō ( ), - . (kibagozōkyō, 耆婆五臓経) yōrō, ( ), - . ibid., . view on the discourse on the body and mind, under the influence of western conceptions based on dualism and idealism. needless to say, christianity is based on dualism and idealism, and modern japan has been influenced by judeo-christian conceptions of personhood and self. however, as we saw, contemporary science fiction animation often rejects dualism and idealism in favor of ideas of monism and materialism. however, i argue that buddhist thought is only one aspect of the diverse influences on contemporary japanese science fiction anime. posthuman philosophy, with its focus on issues of materialism vs. idealism, has played an important role in bringing about the trends we have seen so far in this study. contemporary bio-medicine is another source of inspiration for sf narratives. yōrō’s yuinouron, for example, which is basically materialist, is actually based more on a medical/anatomical perspective than buddhist thought. yōrō insists that the body and consciousness cannot separate—monism (shin shin ichigen ron)—because the brain is a part of the human body, even though the human brain can imagine a virtual world. in short, consciousness comes from a part of the human body that is material. thus, humans need a material body. in fact, the basic idea of the medical/anatomical perspective on the body comes according to yōrō, in christianity god combines mind and body, which are separate, to create a human (dualism). in the afterlife, a person’s soul can continue to exist in heaven; that is, the soul has priority over the body (idealism). yōrō takeshi, mushiso no hakken, - . originally from the west, despite a strong western tradition of dualism and idealism. the next manga i will analyze also shows a basis in materialism. it does not present us a world of digitized people, but instead one of queer characters who embody more posthuman elements than those characters in innocence, kaiba, or expelled from paradise. moreover, comparison with evangelion will help expose continuities, similarities, as well as new conceptualizations in the imagination of the body in anime in the s. knights of sidonia this last section discusses knights of sidonia; because this manga series utilizes the idea of hybrid bodies, similar to those found in evangelion, i will discuss the two in comparison. however, knights of sidonia demonstrates not only a mixture of organic human bodies and metal matter, but also hybrids between organic human bodies, metal matter, plants, and even animals. as haraway pointed out in companion species, all living things live symbiotically; the idea of hybrid creatures could even go beyond the modern dualistic and normative body. this is the situation we see played out in knights of sidonia. i will argue here that the greatest difference from the conception of the modern body we find in the imagination of this type of hybrid body is the return of the power of nature, because the modern body has tried to control and exclude nature from its self-conception. it is primarily on this point, how humans should treat nature, that haraway’s and yōrō takeshi’s points of view connect. before analyzing knights of sidonia, i will discuss the posthumanist, donna haraway’s, position, together with that of the neuroscientist, yōrō takeshi’s, position, in order to reveal their parallel ideas based on materialism and anti-dualism. haraway clearly argues that the purpose of her argument in “a cyborg manifesto” is “to build an ironic political myth faithful to feminism, socialism, and materialism.” materialism is one of the three main points in this extremely important text. haraway’s position is one of new materialism. what new materialism means to haraway is the destruction of the binary point of view of dualism. haraway points out in “a cyborg manifesto,” as an example, that “the boundary between physical and non-physical is very imprecise for us.” haraway uses materialism to critique dualism. interestingly, yōrō takeshi also holds a materialistic and anti-dualistic point of view, donna haraway, “a cyborg manifesto,”, . new materialism is the philosophical, scientific idea that acknowledges that matter does not have a fixed meaning but a diverse “multiplicity” of meanings and possibilities. similarly, time is nonlinear—past, present and future are all in one. donna haraway, “situating feminist knowledge,” atria ontmoet, november , , http://www.atriaontmoet.nl/blog/donna-haraway-situating-feminist-knowledge haraway, “a cyborg manifesto,” . although haraway and yōrō’s thoughts come from different places: one is based on biology/feminism and other is based on anatomy. in yōrō’s case, his point is that everything created by human beings is the “product” of the human brain. in other words, human brains have created cities and culture, as well as the understanding of nature as a resource for human life. yōrō’s last point is exactly the same as what haraway pointed out in “the promises of monsters: a regenerative politics for inappropriate/d other” ( ). yōrō’s main point is that the brain is a material part of the body. thus, his perspective is also a materialist one. furthermore, yōrō’s position is anti-dualistic, although his reasoning is slightly different from that of haraway: she argues that any boundaries in the dualistic point of view are too ambiguous to draw a functional, meaningful line. on the other hand, yōrō says that there is no point at which to divide, for example, female and male and compare them. instead of that, we should see, for example, females and males as a complementary relationship, because for human reproduction we need both. in addition to this, yōrō points outs that the human brain prefers controlling things and resists uncontrolled situations. thus, city life, which the brain has created, has excluded nature. the example of excluded nature, according to yōrō, is the female body, yōrō takeshi and agawa sawako, danjyo no kai, . because this body has menstrual periods, pregnancy, and birth. the female body is treated as an illogical thing in urban society, because those functions of the female body are natural and incontrollable. that’s why females have been discriminated against in urban life. as i have discussed in chapter two, yōrō called this situation, in which the brain controls and rules its body/nature to create a controllable city/society, a “brain-regulated society” (nōka shakai). as yōrō points out, the human brain prefers controlling everything, including its body. thus, it has tried to eliminate its naturalness through developments with advanced technology. haraway and yōrō have similar perspectives because both of them critique power, which dominates nature, and criticize a dualistic point of view, which creates a power structure inside of and through the dualistic relations. knights of sidonia, in fact, demonstrates an anti-dualistic point of view through the characters’ sex, gender and sexuality. at the same time, the body of most of the characters is made of a mixture of organic humans and plant, through the use of gene manipulation. thus, we can identify and explore posthuman aspects in the manga series, knights of sidonia, to discuss ) yōrō takeshi and gen'yū sōkyū, nō to tamashii, . yōrō takeshi, nihonjin no shintaikan no rekishi, . what is new in the conceptualization of the body; ) how the relationship between body and mind is described; and ) how knights of sidonia exceeds normative categories of sex, gender and sexuality. many aspects of knights of sidonia and evangelion are parallel, such as gigantic mecha suits, hybrid amalgams, extraterrestrial life; however, the essential difference from evangelion is that human characters in sidonia blend plant and animal features to the benefit of their lives. in other words, the characters do not exclude, but rather include, nature (in the form of plants) as companion species in the sense that haraway has argued. the bodies of all human species in sidonia are involved in gene manipulation to become new and advanced creatures rather than humans, even though they look very much like “ordinary” human beings. because of biomedical technology, all of the characters have become posthuman in the narrative. this is also a fundamental difference from evangelion, because most human characters in evangelion are “normal” humans except for the occasions when some of them merge with the eva suits. the purpose of the final section of this chapter is to analyze the main characters in sidonia, to reveal how each character exceeds the idea of normative human beings and how they present queer features and behaviors. the setting of knights of sidonia is in the far future (in ). the gauna, alien enemies of the human species, have destroyed the solar system, including the earth. as a result, most of the human species has died. however, some of the humans, called the people of sidonia, created a spaceship in and have traveled in space to find a planet to colonize, to maintain the human species. in the narrative, they have not yet found a suitable planet, and have had to continue fighting against the gauna, although they have succeeded in reproducing their own species by using advanced technology in the spaceship. in , because the gauna attacked the sidonia spaceship, many people died and a food factory was also destroyed. therefore, the people of sidonia manipulated their genes to permit human photosynthesis. that is, they can acquire energy by soaking up sunlight, instead of having to eat food every day. most of the characters, except the protagonist, are photosynthesizing people. tanikaze nagate, the male protagonist, cannot photosynthesize to get energy because saitō hiroki, nagate’s “grandfather,” raised nagate separately from the rest of the city—underground. in fact, nagate himself is saitō hiroki’s clone, although nagate does not know this fact until the captain of sidonia, kobayashi, tells him. thus, all the people in sidonia, except nagate, use advancing technology to strengthen their bodies under the severe circumstances of their lives. they are all posthuman; we may even refer to them as ontologically queer characters, because their bodies are decidedly non-normative, being hybrids between humans and plants. comparing different elements of posthumanism in the narrative is essential because the people in sidonia are a group of queer characters in different ways: hybrids between humans and plants, humans and animals, organic and inorganic/metal, human and monster, and non-sexed/ambi-sexed persons. the most remarkable characters are tanikaze nagate; shinatose izana; the gauna; and tsumugi, an amalgam, the daughter of a human and a gauna. these characters and their relationships present imagined posthuman subjectivities far beyond the categories of normative sex, gender and sexuality. tanikaze nagate, the male protagonist, is a clone of saitō hiroki, and his special abilities are ) having regenerative power (saisei nōryoku), so that even though he may be injured, his body can recover completely in a couple of days; and ) having an immortal body although he has grown from a baby to a young man; that is, he is aging. the narrative describes nagate as male and genders him as masculine, but his sexuality is queer. one of the most important themes of sidonia is his love story. at the beginning of the story, he falls in love with a female human, hoshijiro shizuka; however, after shizuka dies, he seems to be interested in an ambi-sexed person, shinatose izana, because nagate asks izana to live with him; however, in later volumes, nagate confesses his love to the human/gauna amalgam, shiraui tsumugi. thus, tanikaze’s sexuality is neither normative heterosexuality, nor homosexuality, but queer sexuality. in fact, his sexuality changes through the development of the story. the conceptions of sex and gender that the narrative expresses are also very interesting. nagate’s first and closest friend is shinatose izana, who is an ambi-sexed person. when izana first meets nagate, izana explains izana’s self; when ambi-sexed people have a partner and it is time for them to reproduce, the ambi-sexed person’s body will change depending on the partner’s sex. before izana has a partner, izana is neither male nor female, but a non-sexed person. for example, if izana’s takes the male nagate as a partner, izana will become a female. but, when izana has a female partner, izana’s body becomes male. at the beginning of the story, izana has both maleness and femaleness, masculinity and femininity. so, izana’s sex and gender are very ambiguous. however, once izana starts living with nagate, izana’s body dramatically changes to there is no term for loving different species. so, “queer sexuality” may be the best way to explain nagate’s sexuality. become female: the anime shows izana’s breasts getting bigger. it seems that izana’s consciousness cannot control these physical changes, so izana is surprised by the changing of his/her own body. this queerness is very much emphasized in the story, but the anime does not denigrate izana; rather, it celebrates izana’s merit. in fact, because izana confidently explains her/his own body, although the beginning of the process of change makes izana bashful, the viewer understands izana’s special feature as a beneficial thing. as for izana’s gender, izana calls him/herself “boku,” which show that izana genders her/himself as masculine rather than feminine. in addition, izana at the beginning wears ambiguous clothes, which are not masculine like nagate’s, but also not really feminine; however, izana becomes interested in nagate, and then izana’s body becomes feminine. this kind of queerness has a great deal of potential to help the imagining of a transformed social normativity; representations of queerness operate to help us accept any kinds of sex, gender, and sexuality. as with the very fascinating nature of the alien angels in evangelion, the most monstrous, uncanny, and interesting character in sidonia is the gauna, a constant source of danger to the remaining humans. in episode seven, a gauna captures a female pilot, hoshijiro shizuka, as well as the gigantic mechanical suit that shizuka is piloting. the gauna samples and simulates shizuka’s mecha to create three gigantic mechanical suites, identical to shizuka’s and with the same capabilities. in other words, much like sample b unit iii in hybrid child, a gauna can copy both humans and non-humans to create new creatures, using a part of its own body. the whole body of a gauna is made of/covered by a placenta, parts of which can create new creatures. thus, knights of shidonia illustrates the gauna as maternal monsters and who use an alternative form of reproduction. the gauna do not need a heterosexual relationship for reproduction but have bodies that can mimic the maternal function; producing new creatures from their own bodies by copying its predator. furthermore, the gauna that caught shizuka and simulated versions of her mecha suit can also mimic shizuka’s human body, memory, and skills, such as her excellent control of the suit. although nagate can neither catch nor attack these mimicked mechanical suits, which are able to escape, nagate finds that the gauna has developed but abandoned a creature having the same body shape as hoshijiro shizuka: a female human body (not a mecha suit). nagate takes the body back to the spaceship to examine it. the creature is put in a special and secret laboratory to be constantly monitored. the shape of the creature looks like hoshijiro shizuka; nihei tsutomu, knights of sidonia, vol. , . however, it has red tubes on its body—it looks like a newborn baby, still having an umbilical cord. the gauna in the shape of hoshijiro slowly develops its ability to speak, write, and communicate with nagate. overall, the gauna also show features of the posthuman because the body of gaunas are continuously changing themselves or changing parts of themselves to create new creatures whenever they encounter a new species to sample and simulate. this feature of posthumanism is similar to what haraway argued in her discussion of immune system discourse, and we saw similar things in evangelion—the fusion of eva and the angel (as well as in hybrid child). furthermore, the gauna do not exhibit heterosexuality, because a gauna itself can self-reproduce by copying different species. in short, a gauna’s body is influenced by other species to increase and develop its power. thus, the key point here is the hybridity between one species and another, and even between a species and inorganic matter, such as mecha suits. the gauna have still unknown abilities that the people of sidonia fear. this monstrous queer enemy, the gauna, re/produces the most key character, shiraui tsumugi, which is a gauna/human hybrid. tsumugi is born from the placenta of the hoshijiro-shaped gauna, caught by nagate and examined by the sidonia scientists. tsumugi’s body is composed of two parts. one is the humanoid giant mecha suit, which looks like a gigantic feminine monster. another part is a tentacle, which can talk with other people and can move. the tentacle seems to be the core part of tsumugi, like its ‘soul’ or mind. the narrative describes her as a young girl at the beginning, but at the same time it/she is a giant mecha suit, which requires a pilot when fighting against the gauna. later in the story, however, tsumugi becomes able to control it/herself independently and no longer needs a pilot. its/her personality is warm and thoughtful. although tsumugi’s behavior, such as its/her way of talking and body language, is very feminine, like that of a girl, its primary body shape (the tentacle) resembles a male sex organ. the gigantic mecha part of tsumugi is similar to the shinji/eva amalgam in evangelion; however, tsumugi is an individual creature composed of two parts, the gigantic mecha suit and the tentacle, which are inseparable. the narrative emphasizes that the tentacle, which houses its mind, must connect to the gigantic body. in other words, tsugumi’s mind/will/emotion must be attached to the body all the time. as yōrō says—the mind comes from the physical body because the brain, in which occur mind and one of the characters, ichigaya teruru, forthrightly says to tsumugi, “ you look like a male organ.” (knights of sidonia vol. , p ) tsumugi is also sometimes depicted as a more or less humanoid, feminine-looking creature, sometimes huge, sometimes human-sized. but its primary shape/appearance is like a very large penis. emotion, is material. the relationship between tsugumi’s body and mind implies that the depiction of this character is based on this materialistic understanding of consciousness. on the other hand, the story also describes a prosthetic brain (hojo nō), which can function as a memory device. ochiai is a member of the knights of sidonia but is also a mad scientist who in the past created a human/gauna amalgam, which became uncontrollable. because of the amalgam, sidonia was almost destroyed by the gauna one hundred years prior to the setting of the narrative. after the crisis, ochiai transfered all his and sidonia’s knowledge into a prosthetic brain, and then disappeared. (this situation is exactly what yōrō describes as yuinōron: everything is a product of the brain because only a brain creates things. in fact, the brain prosthesis itself is created by ochiai’s brain.) the prosthetic brain has been secretly maintained and sometimes used by the top directors in sidonia, whenever they need ochiai’s knowledge. although his prosthetic brain can survive without his body, it is necessary to put the prosthetic brain into the body of ochiai’s clone whenever they want to consult it. by itself, separated from the body, the brain is not functional. in fact, the narrative also describes the importance of the connection between his body and the prosthetic brain, which holds much information and knowledge, such as about the human/gauna amalgam. ochiai’s prosthetic brain clearly shows one of the contemporary ideas about the human body. through illustrating ochiai’s prosthetic brain, the narrative demonstrates a separation of one body part from the whole, but emphasizes the inseparability of the body-and-mind relationship, because the brain on its own cannot function—it remains “sleeping,” and is useless. this idea is contrary to an essential point of idealism/humanism, which suggests: ) the separability of body and mind; and ) that the mind can control the body because the mind is superior to it. in contrast, posthumanism is based on the materialistic idea that the mind comes from body, so without a body, the mind cannot occur. the narrative obviously shows an essential connection between the brain and ochiai’s body when the top directors need to use his knowledge. the most essential point in knights of sidonia is that all the characters are posthumans though they are living as human beings. there are photosynthesizing people, a hybrid between plants and humans; a bear/human hybrid; cloned humans such as the twenty-two honoka sisters; and a human/gauna amalgam, tsumugi. all of them have posthuman features and live together to support each other, although they have different strengths. this image—many different species living and evolving co-operatively and equally—is what haraway advocates in “a cyborg manifesto” and companion species. furthermore, knights of sidonia argues a materialistic rather than idealistic or humanistic viewpoint by illustrating the inseparability of the body-mind relationship. tsugumi’s inseparable tentacle–and-gigantic-mecha-suit body as well as the way ochiai’s brain will only function when back in his (cloned) body obviously demonstrate this materialism: the mind must come from the body, and they must work together. also, sidonia describes diverse sex and sexuality, in the queer sexuality between the non-sexed/ambi-sexed person, izana, and nagate. illustrating characters such as these has a lot of potential to challenge normative conceptions of sex, gender, and sexuality (though i must point out that izana’s sexuality, while interesting, is nonetheless absolutely heterosexual, which to some extent limits the queerness of izana’s depiction). the narrative illustrates many different kinds of reproduction, too: people who are born through clone technology, such as nagate and the honoka sisters; and uncanny creatures, which are re/produced by the gauna. conclusion: selfhood in the bodiless body i discussed selfhood in the hybrid body in chapter four to show how works from the s that make use of this model went beyond the modern concept of the body and mind relationship: one body has one mind. however, in this chapter i analyze the selfhood of bodiless and digitized people, because this new conceptualization of people who have lost their material bodies actually represents the pinnacle of the modern concept of the body and mind relationship: the mind predominates the body. however, if we do not encounter the characters’ selfhood through their material body, how can we understand them as a “person”? in other words, without a material body, how does anime depict the mind and selfhood, and what is the replacement of the body for expressing the idea of the self? it is important to discuss the relationship between bodiless/digitized people and their selfhoods. as i mentioned in chapter four, ghost in the shell focused on personal memories as the basis of selfhood, and it expressed that selfhood through the body. in fact, the sequel, innocence, also depicts motoko, who now does not have her own body but rather lives in the net, through a material body. this body, however, is not motoko’s original but rather is one of the hadaly dolls; that is, the body and self of the new motoko (after merging with the puppet master) have never worked together or shared the same memories to build motoko’s selfhood. the main question is, how does the anime make the audience understand and believe that the doll is motoko? in one particular scene, many hadaly dolls appear one after another in front of batō, but the audience can perceive one different doll. this is the one into which motoko has downloaded her self /soul, even though it looks exactly the same as the others. because only this doll fights against the others to protect batō, the difference is pretty obvious. however, the important point here is how motoko’s features manifest in the doll’s body. the most notable facet is her action; “motoko”’s body motion is much smoother than that of the other hadaly dolls and less robotic. on the other hand, the other hadaly dolls’ bodies are heavily mechanical, and are animated to have a more robotic movement, in order to show the differences between them and “motoko.” furthermore, the decisive point is the speaking ability of the “motoko” doll, and its voice. only the hadaly that motoko inhabits can speak to communicate with batō, and motoko’s voice is the exact same as the one in ghost in the shell. thus, the anime shows motoko’s selfhood by giving her female (but somewhat masculine in terms of language usage) voice to this body. for example, as the dolls fall from the ceiling to join in battle with batō, their bodies land with a heavy, uncushioned sound. unlike a human body that responds with muscles and joints to the impact of landing, the hadaly dolls fall like heavy lifeless objects, one after the other. furthermore, although the faces of “motoko” and the other hadaly dolls are the same and devoid of facial expression, each small movement of “motoko” reminds the audience that the doll is possessed by motoko’s selfhood. interestingly, innocence implies the existence of motoko’s self only when batō needs her assistance. as orbaugh argues about oshii’s ideas on selfhood for bodiless persons, motoko’s selfhood comes from “affect/love (omoi)” especially toward batō. because her “affect remains,” her selfhood is visually depict-able throughout the story. for example, when he enters the house of the master hacker and encounters multiple optical illusions intended to confuse him, batō takes his bearings from an image of the girl body-motoko that we saw at the end of ghost in the shell. he knows that the message her image gives him in the hacker’s house is reliable, because it is really disembodied-motoko acting as his guardian angel. thus, the selfhood of this bodiless person/motoko is shown through strong affect. we know nothing of motoko’s new experiences in the net, or of how these new experiences in the net may have influenced her new self without a material body. innocence depicts motoko’s selfhood entirely through its affect toward batō and through his affect toward her and his memories of their shared past. batô’s physicality is emphasized throughout the film, and it is sharalyn orbaugh, “emotional infectivity,” . as discussed in chapter four, batō also clearly has strong affection for motoko. through his still-connected body-mind that motoko continues to live for him and for the viewer. in short, even though innocence would seem to celebrate the pinnacle of the modern body—no body at all, just a brain/mind—it actually underscores the necessity for selfhood to be experienced through the body—a materialist stance. like innocence, kaiba also demonstrates that memories of the past are the most essential key for maintaining selfhood. the anime embodies selfhood as beautiful and warmly shining memory eggs, or materialistic and cold memory chips; however, once selfhood is reduced to memory eggs or memory chips, it can no longer show characters’ agency or voices. in this case, kaiba emphasizes the importance of the material body to express selfhood. in other words, even if characters can maintain their selfhood in those chips, without a material body to express their agency, the chips are meaningless: they posess no voice and no agency. in fact, kaiba releases all people’s memories, which he has kept in his body, and gives them to the monster plant, but kaiba is happy at the end of the story. this ending implies that memory can be considered as selfhood but selfhood needs a material body—even a plant body—to express it. again, kaiba also emphasizes the significance of the body, which has gained experiences and memories, and can express its selfhood. on the other hand, expelled from paradise demonstrates selfhood in a couple of ways. the protagonist, angela, is depicted as digits and particles of light when she is in the digital world, deva, but also is illustrated as a normal material body when she is in the material world. how does the anime express her selfhood when she is digits or particles of light? the anime uses her voice to express her thoughts and emotions: happiness and anger. the key is the feature unique to anime, the voice, something that manga and literature do not have. if anime had only visuals without the voice, it could not personify those digits or particles of light. in fact, hadaly-motoko also relies on her voice to identify hers as motoko to the viewer. anime can demonstrate selfhood not only through illustration of the person, but also through the character’s voice. although the message of these narratives often reminds the audience how necessary the material body is to demonstrate the characters’ selfhoods, this anime, expelled from paradise, lets the audience hear the character’s self through the voice without illustrating a normative body. in short, one of the features of anime, voice, make this series and its effect possible. unlike other anime in this chapter, knights of sidonia does not demonstrate bodiless or digitized people in its story. selfhood is instead demonstrated through the characters’ bodies. knights of sidonia permits us to compare the manga with the anime version to reveal the effect of voice on the text. for example, the illustration of the hoshijiro-shaped gauna is the same in the manga and the anime; however, once it has the voice in the anime, the hoshijiro-shaped gauna succeeds in showing its uncanny selfhood. furthermore, knights of sidonia describes the development of the self, specifically tsumugi’s selfhood. at first tsumugi simply follows her pilot’s instructions without her own agency; however, as she works with the other knights (pilots) of sidonia, she develops emotions toward them. she eventually does not follow her pilot’s voice but follows her own decisions to help other pilots. tsumugi’s selfhood develops by her experiences and her interactions with others. in particular, because tsumugi’s body, a result of a merger between a human and a gauna, is very exceptional, the story emphasizes her bodily experiences. tsumugi tries to live like other humans, but her body has to face many difficulties because it does not fit with the physical, spatial characteristics of the city of sidonia. because other characters, such as nagate and izana, help tsumugi to live normally, her way of expressing her selfhood becomes humanlike. in short, bodily experiences in a specific world influence the development and expression of the self. the self never exists in isolation, but has a strong connection to the body. the new conceptualization of the body, as a digitized or bodiless person, not only exceeds normative categories of sex and sexuality but also tries to demonstrate selfhood in diverse ways. however, interestingly, selfhoods in these anime often form from memories of the past, and are expressed through material bodies/things. in short, these anime persist in considering the material body as necessary to show their conceptions of selfhood. it is decisive that selfhood cannot exist without the material body/objects in the animations. these anime argue, persistently, that the body and mind are inseparable, and that both selfhood and the mind, if not actually deriving from the body, at least maintain an insurmountable connection. in this chapter, i have discussed bodiless or digitized characters in s to s’ anime and manga. these contemporary anime have been influenced by diverse ideas, such as cultural and religious thought, advanced technology, medical/anatomical perspectives to create a new conceptualization of the body. basically, the contemporary japanese anime and manga that i have analyzed demonstrate materialistic and monistic ideas—the inseparability of the body-mind relation. as we have seen, these ideas are based in part on cultural factors; however, the tendencies we have traced may also be the result of changes in the contemporary developed world more generally. dualism and idealism/humanism may not fit the contemporary notions of the body or accommodate the diversity of the contemporary world, with its efforts to transcend the limitations of normative sex, gender and sexuality, as well as the increasing organic/inorganic hybridity of its people. as haraway argues, for example, “we are all chimeras, theorized, and fabricated hybrids of machine and organism; in short, we are cyborgs,” and it is true that our bodies are increasingly supported by or even occupied by machines and advanced technology (as in pacemakers, prostheses, and so on). as haraway similarly insists, we are posthuman (or increasingly becoming posthumans), and all species, such as humans, animals, and machines, should be understood as equal contributors to our continuing co-evolution—we are all part of the same whole. analyzing the body notions in contemporary anime reveals contemporary diversity, which tries to transcend normative ideas, and new trends in the conceptualization of the body. donna j. haraway, “a cyborg manifesto,” . chapter : conclusion this study has analyzed representations of the human body in japanese popular culture, specifically science fiction manga, anime, and literature from the s to the s. as new, advanced technologies have increasingly supported and transformed human lives in diverse ways, conceptualizations and notions of the body have also been influenced and transformed. it has become possible to replace both the internal and external components of organic bodies with inorganic matter, artificial organs, or organs from other people—even, in some cases, from other species. prosthetic limbs help individuals live more easily. these positive technological developments, however, bring significant philosophical questions: once significant portions of our bodies have been replaced with inorganic matter, or other people’s organs, it becomes much more difficult to maintain the border between organic matter and inorganic matter, self and other, and also categories of sex, race, age and so on. as a result, we have even started questioning what it means to be human. what is the self? by continuously reconceptualizing the body in our culture, we have understood ourselves and shared ideas of what we will or should be. in order to demonstrate the relationship between conceptualizations of the body, works of art, and their social/historical contexts, this study has focused on analyzing the changes in conceptualizations of the body through representations of and reactions to these changes in japanese science fiction manga and animations, which have become easily accessible and very popular worldwide. i have argued that the conceptualizations of the body have been changing because of the influence of the latest advanced technology; japanese anime and manga have engaged with these conceptualizations, and have presented imaginings of these changes through the development of characters with new and queer bodies. in turn, the futuristic visions in anime and manga have influenced the creators of real life advanced technology, as we can see with the roboticists who cite astro boy as their inspiration. because of this interrelationship between narrative and technological development, stories about queer ontological and gender/sex/sexuality possibilities have a huge potential to (gradually) overcome normative body images. in order to expose transitions in the conceptualizations of the body in popular visual culture and narratives, i began by discussing the concept of the modern body, as defined by harvie ferguson, in chapter two. he clearly encapsulates the notable features of the modern body: “epidermic, closed, individuated, male.” the definition of the modern (human) body for example, a well-known japanese robot creator, takahashi tomotaka,talked about how the existence of astro boy inspired the creation of robots. in “the century of astro boy,” nhk co-productions. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lkqdb-mmszy harvie ferguson, modernity and subjectivity: body, soul, spirit, . specified limitations in order to distinguish itself from other living matter, and simultaneously to assert superiority over other living matter. the image of the modern body appears to be perfect because it has agency and is completed by itself. as ferguson demonstrates, the concept of the modern body is based on a dualistic point of view, and so aspects of this world are categorized dualistically, such as body and mind, self and other, female and male, and so on. however, posthumanists criticize these dualistic divisions in the concept of the modern body and have brought a new concept of the body/human. donna haraway, a pioneer of cyborg theory, offers cyborgs as metaphors for disempowered bodies—women, people of color, etc.—in “a cyborg manifesto.” she argues that “the cyborg is a creature in a post-gender world,” because cyborgs are unconventional, that is, cyborg bodies exceed normative and dualistic categories of sex, gender, and sexuality that create a power structure between individuals, and thus a world of cyborgs is one in which all living matter is equal. the remarkable points of her theories are: bringing issues of marginalized bodies to the table; and also, by employing a biological perspective, exposing how deeply human bodies donna haraway, “a cyborg manifesto”, . have interacted with other living things. thus, haraway has discussed the posthuman body categorically and scientifically to re-conceptualize the human body. likewise, yōrō takeshi has discussed the human body, especially the brain and nervous system, through neuroscience and an anatomical perspective. his scientific thought is also opposed to the modern notion of the body. he argues that the body is continuously changing: different molecules combine or lose each other to become other molecules and maintain, for example, the citric acid cycle. as he argues, both the inside and outside of the body have been changing and renewing themselves: aging is the best example of this. thus, the body is never completed/unchanged. in addition, yōrō argues that the brain and body (mind and body) are inseparable, because the brain is connected to the nervous system, which covers the entire body. there is no clear boundary between the brain/mind and body, even though we have distinguished and named each organ. this anatomic perspective therefore also critiques the dualistic modern body and mind relation. furthermore, yōrō also mentions the complexity of sex development; sex is not simply an issue of being either male or female. thus, there are no clear specifically, her book, companion species and immune system discourse in “the biopolitics of posthuman bodies,” have challenged the concept of the modern body and provide new ways of conceptualizing our bodies. borders anywhere in nature, including within our own bodies. therefore, by employing mainly haraway’s and yōrō’ perspectives, this study has discussed the concept of posthumanism within the characters that are depicted in japanese popular culture. i have demonstrated the three significant differences about the notion of the posthuman body from the modern body image. in the concept of the posthuman body, ) the body and mind relation is monistic; ) the body is always changing and interacting with other living matter, so the body is open; and ) there are no clear boundaries, such as female and male, self and other, human and animal, and so on, because the concept of the body exceeds such dualistic divisions. by fusing with other bodies or depicting the body as binary digits, the conceptualization of the body has the potential to erase categories of sex, race, age and so on. focusing on these features of posthumanism, i have examined s to s science fiction manga, anime, and literature to expose the changes of the body images in the narratives. chapter three focused on metal bodies in the s to ’ s manga and anime to reveal the conceptualization of newer bodies—metal bodies—in each decade. after world war ii, japan came to realize how behind its technologies were compared with those of western countries. the nation concentrated on developing its technology and engineering, and so, of course, these efforts influenced the content of popular culture, as well. i demonstrated that there were mainly two types of metal bodies: exo- or endo-enhanced bodies. these representations show us imaginations of transhumans more than posthumans, because in the examples from this period technology works as an extension of the human body, faculties, or capacities to exceed the limitations of the human body, rather than challenging modern body concepts such as dualism and idealism. in the narratives analyzed, the exo-enhanced bodies—strong, giant metal-bodied characters such as gigantor, mazinger z and gundam—all functioned as weapons. none of the exo-enhanced bodies had its own agency to move or fight, but the protagonists, all boys, controlled them to fight against evil and save the world. the essential point to consider is how the boys controlled the metal bodies. i specifically paid attention to the distance between the boys and the metal bodies. the earliest and most popular exo-enhanced body in the s appeared in gigantor ( ); the protagonist, shōtarō, used a remote controller to control gigantor. visually, we can imagine that if the giant metal robot is considered as its body, shōtarō is the metal body’s brain (mind). gigantor separately and dualistically depicted the mind and body, and also argued that mind (shōtarō) is superior to the body (gigantor). moreover, this study has examined physical distance between pilots and metal bodies in other manga and anime in order to expose changes in these distances. mazinger z ( ) presents a pilot, kōji, and the metal body under his control as physically connected: the jet in which kōji is riding joins the top of the robot’s head to allow kōji to control the whole metal body. the jet functions similarly to shōtarō’s remote controller, but also works to facilitate a merger of the human boy and the giant robot in order to become one body. interestingly, gundam, which was very popular in the s, demonstrates a relationship between the pilot and mecha in a slightly different way. amuro sits in the heart of the giant mecha to pilot it, and rides it as if driving a car or piloting an aircraft. the point here is that the pilot is physically connected to the robot. thus, i demonstrated that the cockpit, where a human boy sits, became closer and closer to the core of the metal body: from in the head of mazinger z to inside of gundam’s chest (heart). in fact, the extremely popular s mecha anime, evangelion, illustrates that the cockpit is put into the giant body at its spinal cord, thus placing the cockpit even deeper inside the body. the progress of these physical connections between a human and a giant metal robot/mecha suit has been ever closer and deeper. the dualistic exo-enhanced bodies approached the monistic body as time went by. however, those early robot manga and anime had issues with sex and sexuality. as i pointed out, gigantor erased female characters entirely to create an image of the modern world, where only males live, work, and fight. on the other hand, mazinger z depicted female characters and feminine giant metal robots; however, they were illustrated as cheerleaders or weak sexual objects for males. the narrative implies that these female characters serve as foils to male characters and masculine giant metal robots. as time moved forward, the position of female characters in popular naratives changed. in fact, gundam illustrated better roles for female characters: strong warriors or helmsmen; however, gundam, too, could not exceed normative female roles: a military mother or a shrewish wife. this narrative, in which exo-enhanced bodies flourish, demonstrates strongly normative sex and gender roles, as well as heterocentrism: all love relationships are heterosexual. of course, the appearance of gigantor—huge, silver, metal—represents modernity; however, i argued that originally, astro boy, the most famous and popular robot in even contemporary japan, represented the modern scientific worldview. in fact, astro boy, the symbol of science, has indirectly led japan to create a technological modern world after the war. this futuristic body does not have sexual features, but is gendered as both masculine as well as feminine. this aspect of the representation of the humanoid is the most important point: gender ambiguity. astro dresses like a boy, but its facial expressions are sometime very feminine. tezuka intentionally made astro in this manner, based on the dual-gendered character, mitchi, in his early work metropolis. i argued that astro represents an imagination of the earliest stage of posthumanism, because astro’s gender cannot be dualistically distinguished. in addition, astro himself struggles with being half-human and half-robot. once astro shows his humanity, it is very difficult to see him as an artificial creature. in fact, astro has been described in japan as a great friend of humans. similarly, doraemon has become the best friend of humans after astro. because the close relationship between humans and robots has been demonstrated in anime and manga, the border between them has also become ambiguous to japanese audiences. one great example of the endo-enhanced body, which challenged features of the modern body, is the cyborgs in cyborg . the narrative, cyborg , illustrates their bodies as the integrated, technologically-advanced presence of artificial, inorganic components within the organic human body. the point here is that these cyborg bodies combine inorganic machine parts and organics in order to erase the dualistic division between the robot and human. this is obviously a hybrid body. therefore, chapter three demonstrated how those exo- and endo-enhanced bodies have been close to or become posthuman bodies, and are therefore quite different from the modern body. s literature and anime made rapid progress in conceptualizing the cyborg body because of the strong influence of advanced biology. hybrid child, ghost in the shell and evangelion offered hybrid bodies that represent newer concepts of posthumanism. these popular japanese science fiction works broke down the modern body image to produce hybridity—between organic and inorganic matter, or humans, machines, and animals. each narrative imagined ways of generating those hybrid bodies differently, and all of the hybrid characters uniquely expressed their selfhood. a famous female science fiction author, Ōhara mariko, created technologically-advanced, but slightly bloody, matriarchal worlds, filled with interesting hybrid characters. in hybrid child, the protagonist, sample b unit iii, is a hybrid child who unexpectedly develops agency to live freely. as the story develops, this becomes a very complicated character. the fascinating feature of unit iii is that through consuming other living beings, such as animals, humans, and monsters, and then sampling/coping those living beings’ dna, it acquires their memories and abilities in order to become a unified amalgam with them. unit iii can choose to base its primary selfhood on one of the living beings if it concentrates on being that one. unit iii chose the seven-year-old girl, yona, and so its appearance is mainly that of yona throughout the narrative. whenever the yona/unit iii amalgam samples other living things’ dna and abilities, the body of yona, representing the posthuman, breaks the dualistic categories of female/male, human/machine, animal/plant and herself and the other hybrid child, daniel. the climax of the narrative demonstrates the essential key points, which are features of the posthuman. when yona and daniel fuse together, yona fearfully feels daniel’s information penetrate her body. she cannot keep being the “individual,” “yona”. after completing the fusion, they become a huge tree, which connects to the whole world. the last scene clearly illustrates monism: there are no boundaries to categorize. hybrid child offers this dramatic ending to show the extremity of posthumanism. not only Ōhara’s concept of the posthuman but diverse hybrid bodies were born in s japanese narratives. the most well-known and influential cyborg animation in the period, was oshii mamoru’s ghost in the shell. from the opening credits, which depict the process of creating the cyborg (motoko), the anime illustrates an impressive series of imaginings of the cyborg. the opening credits show the connection of the nervous system, artificial intelligence, and the whole body in great detail, but purposely does not depict sexual organs being included in the body. thus, the process of the creation implies that the body does not have sex although the organic brain matter and artificial organs are sealed within a female shape. the main point of my analysis of ghost in the shell was how a non-sexed cyborg could be gendered. in fact, motoko’s body was depicted as having a female shape, but the narrative gendered her as much more masculine than feminine. the comparison of the female shaped body and its masculine attitude and language emphasized its gender ambiguity. this illustration shows one of the important features of the cyborg: ambiguity. however, ghost in the shell could not exceed heterocentrism because of the intimacy between the female-shaped cyborg, motoko, and the male-shaped cyborg, batō. even though the illustration of motoko is the most sophisticated cyborg image, and the anime produced a fascinating imagination of hybridity between human and machine, at the same time, it still persisted in heterocentrism. the most popular cyborg narrative in japan in the s was evangelion, which did not demonstrate the same amount of detail of the posthuman body as ghost in the shell. because the cyborg bodies do not have sex, talking about cyborgs’ sexuality is not precise; however, the bodies represent female or male shapes, so here i pointed out the relation between those bodies as heterosexual. however, the director, anno hideaki, presented a hybrid body in unique ways, and the exo-suit creation—evas—also had a strong biological influence, similar to hybrid child, and from computer science, similar to ghost in the shell. the most remarkable feature of eva is its hybridity. the eva suit itself is made of metal and organic matter, and becomes complete as a living cyborg being when physically connected with the organic boy, shinji. when complete eva ’s body is composed of both female and male bodies, that is, the sex of eva cannot be categorized as female or male. at the same time, its hybridity erases the dualistic division between self and other. once they synthesize, they become one: there is no division between them (until it is time for shinji to once again leave the cyborg amalgam). furthermore, as i argued, haraway’s immune system discourse helps us to realize that evas are posthuman when examining the relation between the evas, the human pilots, and the enemy angels. when one of the angels, an enemy, tries to invade eva ’s body, the eva shows extreme pain because of the virus-shaped angel’s invasion. as haraway argues, all living things interact with each other by taking in and expelling bacteria and viruses that keep them alive (or harm them). for example, shinji is the principal living creature for eva , that is, shinji is an essential bacterium to eva . on the other hand, the virus-shaped angel is represented as a bad virus to eva . the point here is that, in haraway’s terms, the bodies of the evas are not closed, they keep interacting with other living things, such as shinji and the angel. as a result, the evas visually represent opened and changeable bodies, which is another fundamental aspect of posthumanism. chapter four also focused on the way that more than two minds in one body is illustrated, by discussing hybrids fused together from more than two entities. the demonstration of selfhood in the hybrid bodies was another key point. hybrid child demonstrates selfhood as the characters’ dna, memories of the past, and various abilities. by illustrating specifically yona’s memories with her mother, the hybrid body (yona/unit iii amalgam) expresses mainly yona’s selfhood. however, the narrative sometime reminds the readers that the core selfhood is actually that of sample b unit iii rather than yona. ghost in the shell does not illustrate a body with more than two minds, but oshii also focuses on memory to illustrate motoko’s selfhood. for example, the story describes motoko’s doubts about her own memories, because it is possible to install someone else’s memory as hers into her cyborg body. in terms of selfhood in these posthuman bodies, memories become one of the key points. on the other hand, evangelion focuses on biological aspects, such as genes, rather than memory to express selfhood. eva ’s body is the fusion of three different bodies, so the connection between them is physical—more precisely, it is a genetic relation. the anime implies that individual genes represent selfhood. for example, the core of eva ’s self was awakened when the body system completely shut down. these hybrid bodies in s’ popular narratives and anime destroy the dualistic and closed modern body image, and replace it with posthuman images. this study has deliberated on the relation between the body and mind to expose posthuman monistic relations; however, manga and anime from the s to s actually have challenged monism by illustrating bodiless persons and digitized bodies, which are devoid of material features. because of the development of computer science and the diffusion of the internet since the early s, anime have explored the concept of the digitized body. however, ultimately, the narratives argue that the mind cannot exist separately from a material body, and emphasized the importance of the material body. nonetheless, the depiction of bodiless persons and digitized bodies in recent anime has led to innovative notions of the body. by employing hayles’s perspective to discuss digitized bodies, we realized that those characters are made of digits: and . all bodies in the digital world are ultimately the same. in other words, because we have a material body, our bodies are distinguished and marked. once our bodies are marked, the differences create power structures; however, if our bodies are depicted digitally in the same manner, there should not be essential differences and also no power structures. in this case, all digital bodies should represent the latest conceptualization of the body, which is fully posthuman, yet japanese anime have not achieved hayles’ point because even though these characters are illustrated as digitized bodies, the body is now gendered super feminine or masculine. the best example of such a super feminine digitized character is angela in expelled from paradise, which has been highly eroticized for male audiences. only when her existence is illustrated as a strong bright light does it not possess a gender. moreover, the digital world, deva, continues to have sturdy power structures: people are ranked depending on how much memory they have. this anime implies that even if you can be free from a material body, a digital society can still rank you in a different way. even if the way of illustrating the body changes, the body is easily gendered once it is visually presented. discussing digitized persons in s’ anime brings up an interesting point: the relation between the body and mind. without a material body, how has the self been depicted in the narratives? kaiba introduces an imaginary new technology, which can digitize people’s memories, and store them on a triangular pyramid-shaped chip. because the memory chip can hold a person’s memories, and can also be put into other, young and strong bodies to enable the owner of those memories to “live” virtually forever, the concept of death is brought into question. moreover, the various characters can experience different lives depending on the body they inhabit, which, like all bodies, has been categorized and marked (as female or male, or old or young, for example). kaiba has totally different experiences with the different bodies he inhabits throughout the work. specifically, after kaiba, who is originally a boy, acquires kuroniko’s (a girl) body, he becomes attracted to two boys. in short, kaiba experiences love affairs through kuroniko’s female body. this is made possible by the memory chip. thus, one of the main points in kaiba is to conceive of people’s memories as information, maintainable or transferrable by digitalization. kaiba utilizes the notion of the memory chip or memory eggs to represent the transformation of memory into information. while both memory chips and memory eggs are presented as people’s memories, the anime warns that both of them, the chip and eggs, must ultimately have a material body to permit them to express selfhood. otherwise, they do not mean anything. in addition, kaiba illustrates the importance of the inseparable body and mind relation. even after some of neiro’s memory is put into the body of hyō-hyō, hyō-hyō becomes a new, separate individual by gaining its own experiences. kaiba indicates that memory comes from certain bodily experiences, and selfhood is completely dependent on the body. as a result, kaiba demonstrates the self/memory and body separately, as if based on the modern body and mind relation; yet this anime sends a strong message that any memory must have a material body to live and express its self even if we could digitize our memories and store them forever. on the other hand, innocence provided a conception of digitized persons in a different way: motoko gave up her body and fused with the puppet master to become a new form of existence, which can live in the net and can connect to anything through the network. in fact, innocence purposely did not visually illustrate the digitized motoko; however, the work lets the audience think that motoko must exist somewhere even though we cannot visually see her. eventually, innocence illustrated motoko’s self through a material body, the hadaly doll. as a result, s anime depicted digitized bodies or persons who do not have a material body; however, all of the anime eventually illustrated the self through a material body, and emphasized that the body and mind exist in a monistic relation. furthermore, those anime could provide innovative conceptualizations of the body—as digitized bodies or bodiless entities—yet once those bodies are visually illustrated, they are marked and cannot exceed normative sex, gender, and sexuality. however, knights of sidonia has challenged this persistent normativity. by comparing knights of sidonia and evangelion, i demonstrated their similarities: giant mecha suits, hybrid amalgams, extraterrestrial enemies and so on. however, knights of sidonia demonstrates a much wider hybridity: humans and plants, and humans and alien monsters, achieved through gene manipulation. in fact, all of the characters are genetically modified organisms. in this situation, humans include nature as companion species, in a way similar to haraway’s theory. knights of sidonia actually demonstrates many of the ideas of hybridity, which experienced a boom in s narratives, rather than the notion of the digitized body, which was a trend in the s. however, this anime exceeded the notions of normative sex and sexuality, which s anime could not. one of the best examples was the character tsumugi. tsumugi’s body appears to be a feminine giant monster, but her core part, which connects to the giant body, appears to be a tentacle, and also resembles human male genitalia. in fact, the tentacle, which has a face, can speak and express tsumugi’s selfhood. the whole body is illustrated as a female-shaped body but its core (mind) is illustrated as male genitalia. this combination has made tsumugi’s sex very ambiguous. moreover, nagate, the protagonist, is a male clone; he falls in love with tsumugi, which is a monster, not human. this relation illustrates a transcendence of both hetero- and homosexual relations, and therefore illustrates queer sexuality. (the manga interestingly illustrates the scene where nagate and tsumugi share a bed: we see nagate’s male body cuddled up close to what looks like a giant penis.) in addition to tsumugi, izana’s body also challenges dualistic sex categories. izana’s body can change from non-sexed to male or female depending on the sex of izana’s partner. knights of sidonia presents many queer characters, which in turn present non-normative sex and sexuality, by illustrating hybrid bodies between humans and monsters, plants, or animal. this project has discussed the changes in the conceptualizations of bodies through s to s science fiction narratives, and it has demonstrated various transitions: ) the metal dualistic modern body in gigantor; the progress of the monistic relation between an exo-enhanced giant body and its pilot in mazinger z and gundam as well as half-human and half-robot characters in the - s; ) hybridity between humans, inorganic matter or other living things in the s; and then ) digitized bodies, which do not possess a material form, in the s. these first two stages of the transition in the concepts of the body, from the s to the s, demonstrated the progress of the posthuman image. these stages progressed from a dualistic to a monistic body and mind relation. although the notion of the body in the s has been depicted as a dualistic body and mind relation, the conception of body image did not simply resurrect the modern dualistic one. rather, the digitized body has emphasized the significance of a material body to make the concept of the monistic posthuman body stronger and more reasonable. this process of transforming conceptualizations is necessary to help us consider and expand our understanding of possible human beings, which in diverse ways both reflect and influence our actual selves. thus, this project has revealed how science fiction anime and manga characters have become posthuman. in other words, the conceptualization of the posthuman has been created and developed among these narratives, and these conceptualizations of bodies have suggested to us ways of having alternative human body images, which will never be fixed but will continue to change to challenge normativity. therefore, this research becomes a significant foundation in the mechanism of revealing the progress of newer notions of the body. as i have repeatedly highlighted, these conceptions have been influenced by advanced technology: engineering, biology and computer science. as the environment, including technology, culture, and society, has changed, the conceptualizations of the body also have changed. however, as i emphasized, the persistent presentations of normative sex, gender, and sexuality have not drastically changed in these narratives. in other words, the majority of these works of anime and other forms of popular culture suggest that japanese society has not challenged those issues enough to offer an alternative possibility. ultimately, we may argue that these anime stand in very close relation to their contexts—while they absorb and make use of technological developments to sustain the imaginative creation of their characters, with the exception of knights of sidonia, they do not offer ideological critiques of social values around normative sexual or gender issues. this project has examined only selected narratives, the most popular and representative manga and anime in the s to s. however, there are different series and versions of these anime and manga, produced in different time periods. thus, as a topic of future research, it might prove useful to examine the issues of monism/dualism and sex and gender changes as one story goes through different versions at different social, cultural, historical, political, and scientific moments. furthermore, this study has analyzed a variety of media: manga, anime, and literature; however, it has not deeply focused on how different media can present these issues very differently. i have mentioned the effectiveness of female and male voices in anime, which cannot be given directly (via sound) in manga. on the other hand, manga can describe issues of hybridity by showing these visually and also telling the story in detail. because anime often depends on visual expressions to tell the story, the detail of the narrative sometime is not clear. for example, the tv anime version of knights of sidonia describes less information than the manga version. future research also could focus on media differences to reveal diverse ways of delivering important messages about the issues that i have focused on. as kroker argues, the body is drifting; the conceptualization of the body has been changed and will continue to change because of technology. accordingly, culture, politics, society and people have also been changing. thus, analyzing popular cultural imaginations of the body can help us understand how humans themselves have been changing. future study will be able to expose diverse conceptualizations of the body in different time periods and in different cultures by comparing those findings to the foundational conceptualizations of the body in japanese popular culture in this project. i have specifically focused on the influence of technology, in that technology has developed and has changed our lives. the range of these changes has brought us to the concept of the posthuman to introduce alternative forms and definitions of “the human,” able to exceed normativity. although this limited research stops here for the present, future research will continue to argue how visual culture and narrative describe newer conceptualizations of the body. because posthumanism will never conclude, but rather continue pursuing the next stages of human development, this research will also continue. works cited allen, sally g., and joanna hubbs. “outrunning atalanta: feminine destiny in alchemical transmutation,” signs , no. 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[discovery of non-thought] tōkyō: chikuma shobō, . ———. nihonjin no shintaikan no rekishi [a history of japanese perception of the body]. kyōto: hōzōkan, . ———. nō ga kataru shintai [conceptualizations of the body as told by the brain]. tōkyō: seidosha, . ———. nō to yū gekijō: yuinōron taiwa hen [the brain as theater: conversations on idealism]. tōkyō: seidosha, . ———. yōrō takeshi no ningen kagaku kōgi [yōrō takeshi’s lectures on human science]. tōkyō: chikuma shobō, . ———. yuinōron. tōkyō: seidosha, . yōrō takeshi, and agawa sawako. osu mesu no kai [mysteries of the male and the female]. tōkyō: yamato shobō, . yoshimi shun’ya. media bunka ron  : media o manabu hito no tameno wa [theory of media culture: fifteen stories for people who study media]. tōkyō: yūhikaku, . the old and new faces of morphology: the legacy of d'arcy thompson's ‘theory of transformations' and ‘laws of growth' review the old and new faces of morphology: the legacy of d’arcy thompson’s ‘theory of transformations’ and ‘laws of growth’ arhat abzhanov , ,* abstract in , the publication of on growth and form by d’arcy wentworth thompson challenged both mathematicians and naturalists to think about biological shapes and diversity as more than a confusion of chaotic forms generated at random, but rather as geometric shapes that could be described by principles of physics and mathematics. thompson’s work was based on the ideas of galileo and goethe on morphology and of russell on functionalism, but he was first to postulate that physical forces and internal growth parameters regulate biological forms and could be revealed via geometric transformations in morphological space. such precise mathematical structure suggested a unifying generative process, as reflected in the title of the book. to thompson it was growth that could explain the generation of any particular biological form, and changes in ontogeny, rather than natural selection, could then explain the diversity of biological shapes. whereas adaptationism, widely accepted in evolutionary biology, gives primacy to extrinsic factors in producing morphological variation, thompson’s ‘laws of growth’ provide intrinsic directives and constraints for the generation of individual shapes, helping to explain the ‘profusion of forms, colours, and other modifications’ observed in the living world. key words: d’arcy thompson, growth and form, theory of transformations, laws of growth, evolution, morphology, morphometrics before thompson: goethe’s science on natural forms ‘complete but never finished’ ‘the beautiful is a manifestation of secret laws of nature, which but for this phenomenon would have remained hidden from us for ever.’ johann von goethe (bielschowsky, ) there is a bewildering diversity of life on our planet, as it comes in a huge variety of shapes and sizes ranging from bacteria to mollusks, sea urchins, insects and birds. multicellular organisms, both animals and plants, have generated a remarkable panoply of biological forms featuring bodies with segments, legs, tentacles, wings and heads. cataloguing, describing and explaining this vast multiplicity of species, both living and extinct, have been some of the main challenges for biological sciences in the past and remain so today. in particular, we still have an incomplete understanding of how particular biological forms are generated during development, and how they change over evolutionary time. these questions were a particular preoccupation of d’arcy wentworth thompson (fig. a) in his book on growth and form (thompson, a), which celebrates its th anniversary this year. in this review, i discuss some of the book’s key ideas in a historical perspective, in particular geometric transformations of biological shapes and the ‘laws of growth’ underpinning biological diversity, and consider the significance of these concepts to the modern developmental genetics and evolutionary biology fields. the first attempts to describe the appearance of animals and plants, mostly for taxonomic reasons, started thousands of years ago. works by aristotle and colleagues in classical times laid the foundations of the science of morphology (morphé, meaning ‘form’, and lógos, meaning ‘study’). this field of biology is interested in overall appearance, both external (size, shape, colour and pattern) and internal (anatomical features of inner organs). the main formal principles for studying morphology were first formulated by johann wolfgang von goethe ( - ), a german naturalist and prolific writer, renowned for both his scientific and literary works. the main themes for goethe and his followers have been to qualitatively and quantitatively describe external and internal features of complex organisms in an attempt to exploit their taxonomic significance and to find their deeper biological meaning. today, studies of morphology include, but are not limited to, exploring and understanding normal and abnormal variation, evolutionary origins, developmental transitions or biomechanical and other functions. as discussed below, a combination of goethe’s structuralism and the functionalism of bertrand russell provided the true ideological and spiritual foundation for morphometric mathematical work by d’arcy thompson, infused by an interest in physical mechanics, as described in on growth and form. goethe’s study of morphology was both a benefactor and a beneficiary of the growing interest in taxonomy. however, he also realized the limitations of the linnaean classification system based on stereotypical assumptions about nature. goethe wrote that: ‘nature has no system; she has – she is – life and development from an unknown centre toward an unknowable periphery’ (goethe, ). this is important because his observations led him to believe that nature’s patterns are not fixed – he was detecting and trying to explain all kinds of transitions both between and within organisms. ‘from first to last, the plant is nothing but leaf’, goethe writes in his italian journey, implying that by transformations of the leaf shape (expanding or contracting its parts during development), one might expect to understand how unique shapes of other structures of the same plant are generated (goethe, ). he could see such transitions apply across the different plant species as well, and from such transitions goethe conceptualizes an archetypal plant, or ‘urpflanze’, an abstract common morphological denominator of all plants seen and possible, either in the past or in the future. this is still many years before the idea of an archetype takes on an evolutionary meaning, specifically referring to ancestral forms. a century before evolutionary theory, goethe believed that all living organisms changed under the inner physiognomic ‘drive to formation’ or ‘bildungstrieb’. in his publication titled first sketch department of life sciences, imperial college london, ascot sl py, uk. natural history museum, cromwell road, london sw bd, uk. *author for correspondence (a.abzhanov@imperial.ac.uk) a.a., - - - © . published by the company of biologists ltd | development ( ) , - doi: . /dev. d e v e l o p m e n t mailto:a.abzhanov@imperial.ac.uk http://orcid.org/ - - - of a general introduction into comparative anatomy, starting from osteology, goethe deliberated an intrinsic law explaining the balancing action of the bildungstrieb in that: ‘nothing can be added to one part without subtracting from another’ (goethe, ). goethe’s urpflanze, with its capacity for metamorphosis of (plant) organs, along with the laterconcepts of richard owen ( - ) on the animal ‘bauplan’ (body plan) and its archetypal and serial ‘homologies’ became crucial to our ability to relate different species and their individual traits to each other (owen, , ). from a static phenomenon worthy of a simple description, morphology became a dynamic process that needs to be considered both in the ontogenetic (developmental) and phylogenetic (evolutionary) temporal dimensions. based on morphological observations on the anatomy of modern organisms and their embryos, and fossils of related extinct species, the relationship between ontogeny and phylogeny was very evident to the early evolutionary and developmental biologists alike. first proposed as a simple recapitulation, the ontogeny-phylogeny connection turned out to be a much more complex, multilayered and mutually interdependent phenomenon. already back in the late th century, it was clear that understanding this relationship held great promise for both nascent fields of embryology and darwinian evolutionary biology, and deserved the most rigorous investigation. many researchers of morphology were wondering whether a deeper understanding of biological forms could provide important insight into the developmental and phylogenetic principles and processes that generated the morphologyof individuals and whole populations. such was the intellectual environment in the late th and early th centuries in which d’arcy thompson was developing his ideas. on ‘transformation of related forms’ and ‘laws of growth’ ‘philosophy [nature] is written in that great book which ever is before our eyes…the book is written in mathematical language, and the symbols are triangles, circles and other geometrical figures, without whose help it is impossible to comprehend a single word of it; without which one wanders in vain through a dark labyrinth.’ galileo galilei (the assayer, ) a b c d e f fig. . connecting the growth and form in morphospace. (a) d’arcy wentworth thompson circa courtesy of university of dundee archive services, uk. (b) geometric transformations of human heads drawn by artist albrecht dürer (dürer, ; fig. from thompson, a). (c) thompson’s comparative illustrations of chimpanzee (left) and human (right) cranial ontogenetic shape changes (figs and from thompson, a). (d,e) evolution of the horse skull from hyracotherium (eocene) to the modern horse, represented as a coordinate transformation and to the same scale of magnitude. (f) diagram of the cartesian coordinates projecting shape outlines of skulls in the lineage from hyracotherium to the modern horse. a to h indicate progressive changes in morphology through evolution (figs and from thompson, ). review development ( ) , - doi: . /dev. d e v e l o p m e n t the problem of shape (in the language of mathematics, shape is form without scale) is as profound in biology today as in the time of goethe but it often receives less attention than it deserves. in the age of advanced genetics, molecular biology and biochemistry, it is even more important that researchers direct their main efforts to explain biological form rather than focus exclusively on the molecules and genes within it. the properties of biological shapes are still far from completely appreciated at any organizational level, and understanding them remains crucial to studies of the underlying biomechanical and structural properties. one very important aspect of morphology that thompson liked to ponder was that studying the natural laws and patterns found among living forms could greatly benefit from the aesthetic awareness and appreciation of nature. thus, scientific observation of nature is intertwined with the aesthetic experience of things orderly and structured. this is important because in the age of newtonian physics, galileo’s mathematics and mendeleev’s chemistry, governing natural laws and the resulting order were expected, sought and indeed often found in nature. thus, morphological studies into natural patterns were a way to ‘the discovery of an aesthetic truth’ provided for by the underlying natural laws (brady, ). such an ideology was a major inspiration for d’arcy thompson’s search for the deeper meaning of complexity and diversity of biological forms. regarding his aspirations, thompson wrote: ‘we want to see how, in some cases at least, the forms of living things, and of the parts of living things, can be explained by physical considerations, and to realize that in general no organic forms exist save for such as are in conformity with physical and mathematical laws’ (p. , thompson, a). on growth and form is a multifarious writing with parts on the structure and form of cells and tissues, chapters on phyllotaxis and shapes of bird eggs and shells of foraminifera. thompson searched for and found plentiful examples of correlations between biological forms and mechanical phenomena and used them to emphasize the roles of physical laws and mechanics. this is where thompson’s thinking about morphology echoes the ‘functionalism’ of bertrand russell ( - ), a british philosopher and mathematician who searched for physical causes of multiple physiological and behavioural phenomena. one of the main themes of the book is to argue that the form of any object, including that of the living organism, is a ‘diagram of forces’ that created and maintained it. thus, a shape (of an organism, organ or cell) can be seen and studied as an impression of the generative forces that have acted upon it. such thinking is at the foundation of chemistry, physics, astronomy and other sciences. modern biology is now moving beyond the notion that observed biological shapes are largely driven by unsystematic processes, such as random mutations and genomic rearrangements, followed by adaptation to rather unpredictable and changing environmental factors. thompson argued, for example, that shapes of individual cells are produced by surface tension on their membranous walls as if they were bubbles of soap [see graner and riveline ( ) for further discussion of this aspect of thompson’s work]. he discussed the shape of bird eggs in different species (from the spherical owl egg to the pointed guillemot egg) in relation to the process that produces them as they rotate and slowly pass through the oviduct – as described in thompson’s earlier publication in nature titled on the shapes of eggs and the causes which determine them (thompson, ). in a series of chapters, thompson reflected on the role of spiralling forms (in particular the presence of particular types of spirals, such as the equiangular or logarithmic spirals), both in terms of mechanics and construction under the influence of forces in structures and taxa as varied as the horns of ruminants, claws of birds, and the shells of living and extinct mollusks. probably the most famous set of observations in on growth and form comes from thompson’s attempts to relate biological shapes to each other via geometric transformations. in so doing, he was seeking to find mathematical logic in biological shapes by applying methods developed years earlier by albrecht dürer, a german renaissance artist, and described in de symetria partium in rectis formis humanorum corporum libri (dürer, ). to study human proportions, dürer skilfully used transformations of human heads drawn against a coordinate grid to understand facial variation (fig. b). this was a very powerful way to demonstrate how otherwise disparate shapes can be meaningfully compared. what makes such a method particularly useful for analysing biological shapes is that it allows for continuity, for gradual ontogenetic or phylogenetic transformations of whole organisms and their body parts. thompson was not so much interested in capturing a single biological shape as in its relationship with other such shapes. he wrote that: ‘our essential task lies in the comparison of related forms rather than in the precise definition of each; and the deformation of a complicated figure may be a phenomenon easy of comprehension, though the figure itself have to be left unanalysed and undefined’ (p. , thompson, a). this statement is important for two reasons. first, the shapes are compared by the method of ‘deformation’, the point-by-point transformation of one shape into another, which allows for a visual understanding of both objects. when placed on a square grid, such transformation becomes a geometric process that can be described mathematically, both qualitatively and quantitatively (fig. c-f). second, thompson compared ‘related forms’ and insisted on the futility of directly relating shapes of distantly related taxa. most or all comparisons that thompson himself made are between individuals of the same species or class of animals or plants. he described his analytic approach: ‘this process of comparison, of recognizing in one form the definitive permutation of deformation of another, apart altogether from a precise and adequate understanding of the original type…finds its solution in the elementary use of a certain method of the mathematician. this is the method of coordinates, on which is based the theory of transformations.’ (p. , thompson, a). comparisons between truly different forms, even if they have similarly named parts, become meaningless as these can no longer be derived from each other either developmentally or evolutionarily. some species could have features that are missing or have no identifiable counterparts in other species but, in general, related species can be compared. thompson believed that the very fact that two distinct crustaceans or fishes could relate to each other by a geometric transformation ‘will of itself constitute a proof that variation has proceeded on definite and orderly lines, that a comprehensive “law of growth” has pervaded the whole structure in its integrity’ (p. , thompson, a). to master evidence, he combined techniques learned from dürer and descartes, used proportional drawings of biological forms on a cartesian grid and subjected them to increasingly complex mathematical transformations. mathematical experimentation with biological shapes allowed thompson to reveal and visualize connections between biological shapes whether during development, such as the growing and maturing skulls of primates or growing plant leaves (fig. a,b), or through evolution (fig. c). one of the most striking (and famous) of thompson’s examples of phylogenetic change in review development ( ) , - doi: . /dev. d e v e l o p m e n t shape as a geometric transformation is evolution of the skull shape from an early horse ancestor hyracotherium (which lived in eocene) to the modern horse equus, represented as a coordinate transformation and to the same scale of magnitude (fig. d-f). the principles and methods he used for this analysis are at the foundation of the modern field of geometric morphometrics (the analysis of d and d shapes using cartesian geometric coordinates) (klingenberg, ; adams et al., ). the entire concept of ‘morphospace’ – mathematical space within which multiple shapes could be placed and compared – was, arguably, invented by thompson. the diagram of the cartesian coordinates projecting shape outlines of skulls representing steps in horse evolution onto the same grid (fig. f) allows one to capture and visually demonstrate the continuous and gradual nature of this particular evolutionary story. later in the th century, a more definitive set of approaches was developed, in the form of geometric morphometrics, by paleontologist david raup and developmental biologist pere alberch (raup, , ; alberch et al., ; oster and alberch, ; adams et al., ). these allowed researchers to address a wide and ever growing range of biological problems from coiling shell shape distributions in extinct gastropods to the developing digits of amphibians and other tetrapods (oster and alberch, ; oster et al., ; klingenberg, ; adams et al., ). using geometric transformations on related organisms, thompson believed that he was demonstrating that biological forms were, indeed, related and that their shapes were produced by what he called the ‘laws of growth’. what are these ‘laws’ and why might this concept still be important today? thompson’s extensive modelling with biological shapes led him to conclude that the growth of an individual organism can be generalized to all of the individuals within a species, or even a group of related species. thompson’s ‘laws of growth’ referred to empirically derived and theoretically envisaged principles, which applied to all patterns of biological growth with the resulting shapes molded by development and influenced by the physical environment surrounding the growing organism (fig. c). although thompson never attempted to explicitly explain the ultimate causes for the transformations he so carefully observed, it is clear that he thought every biological shape to be a reflection of the ‘diagram of forces’ that acted upon it and he believed that these generative forces were largely internal. thompson wrote: ‘the deep-seated rhythms of growth which, as i venture to think, are the chief basis of morphological heredity, bring about similarities of form which endure in the absence of conflicting forces; but a new system of forces, introduced by altered environment and habits, impinging on those particular parts of the fabric which lie within this particular field of force, will assuredly not be long in manifesting itself in notable and inevitable modifications of form’ (p. , thompson, a). he was well aware of the science of embryology, its main postulates and advances made by key embryologists of the time, such as karl ernst von baer, wilhelm roux and ernst haeckel. embryology (better known as developmental biology today) was already an important scientific field in his day, making a great impact on the minds of biologists and providing clues about the mechanisms generating morphological diversity. however, although the ‘laws of growth’ were conceptually inspired by these new exciting studies, the exact mechanisms controlling individual development in the early th century remained largely unknown. today, we give a much more mechanistic explanation to thompson’s ‘laws of growth’, associating them with the entire panoply of developmental processes at all hierarchical levels from gene sequence to cell proliferation, differentiation and signalling, tissue- and organ-level phenomena to full organismal complexity (fig. c). ‘i suppose everyone must admit that there are “laws of growth”… but after all one does not feel sure how far this is really admitted’, thompson mused in a letter to a friend (thompson, ). he realized that his ‘theory of transformations’, despite numerous explained case studies, directly accounted for only a very small fraction of the existing biological diversity. it was also far from clear in thompson’s times how the ‘laws of growth’ could be related to the darwinian evolutionary process. genes environment developmental mechanisms (‘laws of growth’) morphological variation fig. . biological shapes, transformations and the ‘laws of growth’. (a) geometric shape changes during hyacinth leaf growth, which follows a very specific set of spatial rules, e.g. following particular ratios of radial and tangential growth velocities (fig. from thompson, a). (b) geometric morphometric space describing shape alterations in hyena skulls during development from juvenile to adult (tanner et al., ). (c) the ‘laws of growth’ interpreted as a broad set of developmental mechanisms translating genetic information and physical forces of the environment into individual biological shapes and contributing to their diversity. images in c created by keith chan; copyright alexmit (www.fotosearch.com); animal images are illustrations from seton ( ). review development ( ) , - doi: . /dev. d e v e l o p m e n t http://www.fotosearch.com pecking for the origins of morphological variation ‘i have stated, that in the thirteen species of ground-finches, a nearly perfect gradation may be traced, from a beak extraordinarily thick, to one so fine, that it may be compared to that of a warbler.’ darwin ( ) thompson’s work was well ahead of its time in many respects. as already mentioned, it provided a powerful paradigm for the field of geometric morphometrics and it remains the most celebrated attempt to quantify the morphological diversity observed in the natural world (adams et al., ; arthur, ; slice, ; pappas and miller, ; polly and motz, ). there have been numerous studies that have successfully applied thompson’s ideas to a variety of biological forms (e.g. garnier et al., ; depecker et al., ; bhullar et al., ; drake et al., ; klein and svoboda, ; fabbri et al., ). however, only relatively recently have we begun to connect the ‘theory of transformations’ to phylogenetic studies and developmental genetics and to explain the origins of morphological diversity (weston, ; larson, ; klingenberg and zaklan, ; klingenberg, ). to be informative, the geometrical transformations related to morphological variation in different species must themselves be related to each other in a way that is meaningful in terms of both phylogeny and the underlying developmental genetics of morphogenesis. can such connections be shown using modern methods and approaches on specific illustrative case studies? what do they tell us about the role of development in morphological evolution? a classical textbook example of morphological diversity is darwin’s finches (thraupidae), much of whose success can be attributed to beak shape variation (darwin, ; lack, ; bowman, ; grant, ). these birds inhabit the galápagos islands and comprise a monophyletic group of - closely related species that have been described as case studies on adaptive radiation, niche partitioning, and rapid morphological evolution (grant and grant, ). in fact, darwin’s finches occupy ecological niches normally occupied by different families of birds on the mainland, such as warblers, finches, thrushes, grosbeaks and woodpeckers (grant, ). molecular phylogenies suggest that all members of this group retained and exploited the beak shape that they inherited from the last common ancestor, echoing charles darwin, who first speculated that: ‘from an original paucity of birds in this archipelago [galápagos], one species had been taken and modified for different ends’ (darwin, ). after more than years, morphological and ecological studies have identified key components of bill morphology of darwin’s finches and established their adaptive significance (lack, ; bowman, ; grant, , ; herrel et al., ; foster et al., ). recently, their diversity was examined from a different perspective to understand whether there was a mathematical structure underlying divergent bill shapes that can be connected both to their phylogenetic relations and bill developmental genetics (campàs et al., ). darwin’s finch beaks are known to differ in overall size as well as depth, width and length, so it was hypothesized that bill shapes in these species might differ simply by their scales, and thus it might be possible to superimpose their bill shapes onto a single common shape after normalizing each axis with its corresponding scale. mathematically, this normalization is equivalent to a scaling transformation, in which each axis is stretched by a constant scaling factor (fig. ). when beak shapes of darwin’s finches were analyzed to determine scaling shear group a group b group c depth length fig. . geometric relations among the beaks of darwin’s finches. (left) lateral profiles of beaks of darwin’s finches. (centre) group structure under scaling transformations focusing on the upper beak profile: untransformed shapes and shapes collapsed onto a common shape via scaling transformations. (right) collapse of all group shapes onto a common shape via a composition of shear and scaling transformations suggesting a two-tier morphological variation (adapted from campa ̀s et al., ). review development ( ) , - doi: . /dev. d e v e l o p m e n t whether they are related by a scaling transformation, species clustered according to the similarity of their collapsed profiles (campàs et al., ). the geometric analysis clearly identified three morphological groups, within which the bill shapes are related through scaling transformations alone. the first group (group a) corresponded to the genus geospiza in addition to the black-faced grassquit (tiaris bicolor), representative of a group basal to darwin’s finches; the second group (group b) corresponded to the tree (camarhynchus), cocos (pinaroloxias inornata) and warbler (certhidea) finches; whereas the third group (group c) consisted of a single species, the vegetarian finch (platyspiza crassirostris). thus, scaling transformations accounted for a substantial part of the variation observed in the beak shapes of darwin’s finches by reducing the complexity from original beak shapes to three different (group) shapes. however, the differences between ‘group shapes’ could not be explained by scaling (fig. ). mathematically, scaling transformations form a subgroup of affine transformations (linear mapping methods that preserve points, lines, curves and planes, allowing one to map points in one shape to points in another), which also includes shear transformations (campàs et al., ). when shear transformation along the bill depth axis was added, all beak shapes of darwin’s finches collapsed onto a single common shape. thus, remarkably, not only could the diverse beak shapes of darwin’s finches be transformed into each other pairwise, all of them could be transformed into the ancestral shape provided by a molecular phylogeny (campàs et al., ). this geometric analysis demonstrated that the (species- and genus-level) beak shapes of all darwin’s finches are related by affine transformations, characterized by precisely three parameters: the depth and length for the scaling transformation and an additional parameter measuring the degree of shear. the general significance of such two-tier variation detecting the same pattern of hierarchical collapse of shapes was further confirmed by performing a pairwise comparison of the beak shapes in about bird species spanning a significant section of passeroidea, including most tanager and cardinal relatives of darwin’s finches (thraupidae and cardinalidae) (fritz et al., ). such a precise morphological pattern echoes the observations of goethe, who commented that: ‘the laws of transformation according to which nature produces one part through another and achieves the most diversified forms through the modification of a single organ’ (goethe, ); and suggests a highly structured and versatile generative developmental process. to explain such morphological diversity at a mechanistic level requires an explicit connection between the genes involved in shaping the beak during development and the parameters characterizing the observed geometric transformations. analysis of naturally occurring hybrids between species of darwin’s finches and the more recent comparative analysis of genes expressed in the developing beak primordium suggests that avian beak morphology is a polygenic character regulated by multiple developmental genes (grant, ; grant and grant, , ; grant and grant, ; lawson and petren, ). for example, changes in the expression of bone morphogenetic protein (bmp ) control the depth and width in the embryonic cartilage component of the upper beak skeleton, which forms first and establishes species-specific beak shape during embryonic development. the bmp expression level and pattern in the frontonasal mass (upper beak primordium) display a strong correlation with the scaling factors and quantify a large portion of the adult beak morphological diversity (abzhanov et al., ). other developmental genes, such as cam, tgfβiir, β-catenin and dkk form a regulatory network and together explain other scaling parameters, such as beak length or width (abzhanov et al., , ; mallarino et al., , ) (fig. b-d). the necessity of including shear transformations to explain the full morphological variation in the beaks of darwin’s finches suggests the involvement of more significant and as yet unknown developmental changes controlling the exact curvature of beak profiles characteristic of different ‘group shapes’. the uncovered hierarchical morphological structure is likely to be related to the hierarchical structure of developmental regulatory networks, which are thought to be the proximate cause of evolutionary changes in morphology. these could include modifications at different stages of embryonic development and the involvement of different types of developmental mechanisms, such as diffusible morphogenetic signals, the pre-patterning of skeletal condensations resulting in distinct morphogenetic maps using transcription factors, and regulation of the planar polarity of cell division during growth. mechanisms specifically controlling shear transformation are suggested by the developmental strategy by which the beak grows (fig. a). when the primordial beak forms, it contains a large zone of actively proliferating cells, termed a growth zone. as the beak grows, this group of diving cells is gradually depleted and the growth zone decays at a constant rate until it completely disappears at the end of beak development (fritz et al., ). thus, the conical shape of the beak (a sectioned parabolic cone to be exact) is produced by an ‘envelope’ of all of the growth zone shapes observed over developmental time (fig. b). the behaviour of this growth zone determines both the scaling-based and shear-based transformations. while scaling can be explained by diffusing molecules,such asbmp , signalling to the growth zone from the outside (campàs et al., ), the distinct beak curvatures that distinguish the different beak ‘group shapes’ may rely on the precise and coordinated internal alignment of the cell division planes of proliferating cells relative to the main axis of growth (fritz et al., ). modularity of the cranial skeleton and evolution of diverse skull shapes ‘we tend, as we analyse a thing into its parts or into its properties, to magnify these, to exaggerate their apparent independence, and to hide from ourselves (at least for a time) the essential integrity and individuality of the composite whole.’ (p. , thompson, a) studying the vertebrate skull in its full complexity is particularly challenging and intriguing. the vertebrate head is a fascinating part of the body, with its intricate organization and multifunctional design. with a host of taxon-, age- and sex-specific features and highly adaptive characteristics, an image of the vertebrate head with all its attributes can often instantly tell us what species the animal belongs to and provide information about its ecology. the exact anatomy of the head, the overall shape of the skull and shape of the individual skeletal parts and how they are integrated with the brain, eyes and muscles all reveal the animal’s natural history. there are now many morphological studies showing how geometric transformations of even anatomically complex multi-part structures – such as tetrapod limbs, vertebral columns and bony crania – allow for direct comparisons in the most morphologically diverse clades, such as cichlid fishes, anole lizards and phyllostomid bats (cakenberghe et al., ; clabaut et al., ; monteiro and nogueira, ; muschick et al., ; sanger et al., , ; wilson et al., ). early in embryonic development, the faces of all amniote vertebrates (mammals, reptiles and birds) are remarkably similar review development ( ) , - doi: . /dev. d e v e l o p m e n t despite the substantial phenotypic differences observed in adults (hall, ; raff, ). to understand the evolutionary significance of such conservation at the developmental level, geometric morphometric analyses have been conducted on the entire face during the whole developmental trajectory for all major amniote groups (young et al., ). the faces of early embryos appear as an assemblage of protruding tissue buds filled with cells, which need to expand and fuse in a particular order to form the cranium. this comparative analysis found that the most conserved period of amniote facial shape coincides with the time when fusion of prominences occurs. next, comparative morphospace was used to infer principles of facial growth and to predict potential but unrealized shapes. surprisingly, deviations from the conserved early embryonic trajectories resulted in increasing mismatch in the shape and size of craniofacial prominences, which increased the likelihood of clefts (incomplete fusions) and later abnormalities. * fig. . evolution of beak shape diversity in songbirds and developmental mechanisms for beak morphogenesis. (a) exceptionally high diversity of beak shapes in tholospiza (darwin’s finches on galápagos and endemic caribbean relatives, marked with an asterisk) and hawaiian honeycreepers as compared with the much more limited morphological diversity in galápagos mockingbirds (and a single caribbean endemic bahama mockingbird mimus gundlachii, also marked with an asterisk). tholospiza and honeycreepers show much higher degrees of sympatric distribution (related species co-inhabiting the same geographic areas), while galápagos mockingbirds (and other galápagos land birds) display allopatric speciation with just four morphologically similar endemic species for the entire galápagos archipelago. (b) highly modular multigenic beak developmental programs are found in darwin’s finches and close tholospiza relatives but not in the more basal species (modified after mallarino et al., ). darwin’s finches and the closely related caribbean species loxigilla noctis deploy multiple regulatory genes to control both prenasal cartilage and premaxillary bone parts of the developing beak, whereas the more basal species use a much more limited set of genes to regulate the shape of premaxillary bone (genes expected to be deployed based on galápagos species are not expressed). the red arrow in the tholospiza phylogeny points at the phylogenetic position within this group beyond which higher morphological diversification is observed and needs to be explained (phylogeny from burns et al., ; modified after mallarino et al., ). (c) within darwin’s finches, species with deep beaks have strong expression of bmp , tgfβiir, β-catenin and dkk , whereas expression of cam is upregulated in species with elongated beaks, such as geospiza scandens and geospiza conirostris. bmp and cam act independently to alter the growth of the prenasal cartilage and tgfβiir, β-catenin, and dkk regulate the premaxillary bone. (d) darwin’s finches and the closely related caribbean l. noctis share beak developmental programs, which are highly modular in terms of both tissue and molecular composition, while the more basal species loxigilla portoricensis and loxigilla violacea have simpler beak developmental patterns and represent a simpler starting condition (also found in outgroup species such as zebra finches). illustrations of the head of each bird species were derived from del hoyo et al. ( ) with permission from elisa badia. illustrations of hawaiian honeycreepers are by h. douglas pratt (pratt, ). review development ( ) , - doi: . /dev. d e v e l o p m e n t moreover, experiments on live chicken embryos that aimed to alter the signalling environment in the early face forced the developmental trajectory into the normally unoccupied morphospaces and resulted in abnormalities, such as clefts of the primary palate (young et al., ). it appears that fusion of craniofacial prominences is a strong selective filter against developmental shape variation, explaining morphological conservation at the early stages. once this critical stage is passed, phenotypic diversity increases sharply. this, in effect, is an example of the powerful, if constraining, role of the intrinsic developmental mechanisms in generating morphological diversity. what is the role of modularity in the generation of diversity? recently, a detailed comparative geometric morphometrics analysis was reported of d skull shapes in both darwin’s finches and hawaiian honeycreepers within the same morphospace using x-ray microcomputed tomography (µct) scans of their cranial skeletons (tokita et al., ) (fig. a-d). the hawaiian honeycreepers and darwin’s finches have both evolved remarkable levels of adaptive cranial morphological variation, and this analysis demonstrated that cranial shapes in both groups are much more diverse than in their respective outgroups (fig. a) (tokita et al., ). the hawaiian honeycreepers as a group displayed the highest skull shape diversity and disparity of all the bird groups studied. interestingly, darwin’s finches showed strong covariation between the shape of the whole skull and those of the upper beak, orbit, palatine and adductor chamber. by contrast, in hawaiian honeycreepers, the parts of the skull are less strongly coupled with the shape of the whole skull (fig. d). such results suggest that the high level of disparity in skull morphology observed in hawaiian honeycreepers is associated with changes in modularity and integration of individual skull elements, allowing for more evolutionary flexibility to explore the morphospace. modularity here refers to the ability of a biological system to organize individual and discrete units that can increase the overall flexibility of the system. this tends to facilitate selective forces, whereas integration exerts an opposite effect as it works to match and bind the modules together (hall and olson, ). similarly, studies on mammalian and fish skulls indicated a significant role for changes in skull integration and modularity in both the extent and directionality of skull shape changes (goswami, ; drake and klingenberg, ; goswami et al., ). the exact developmental mechanisms controlling integration and modularity of the skull skeletal elements are not yet known but further studies should reveal how the ‘laws of growth’ actually operate as they shape vertebrate cranial diversity. geometry of life on a large scale: transformation from reptile to bird ‘the many diverse forms of dinosaurian reptiles, all of which manifest a strong family likeness underlying much superficial diversity, furnish us with plentiful material for comparison by the method of transformations.’ (p. , thompson, a) as predicted by d’arcy thompson, comparisons based on geometric transformations can be successfully applied to both small and large evolutionary scales with reasonable success. for instance, modern birds represent a surviving group of theropod dinosaurs and their unique skulls are morphologically radically different from those of their reptilian relatives and ancestors and any other vertebrates. among major innovations of the avian head are the toothless beak derived from the fusion of premaxillary bones, uniquely shaped palatines (bones that form the roof of the mouth), highly reduced face/snout, and a hugely expanded brain and overlying domed cranial roof (fig. a,b). the nature of the reptile- to-bird transition became clearer when a geometric morphometric study was performed integrating developmental, neontological and palaeontological data, which revealed that paedomorphosis, by which descendants resemble the juveniles of their ancestors, was responsible for several major evolutionary transitions in the origin of birds (bhullar et al., ). the same set of variable skull landmarks was analyzed across extant and extinct members of archosauria (‘ruling reptiles’), from the basalmost taxa such as euparkeria to the early dinosaur herrerasaurus, non-avian theropods (e.g. guanlong), crocodilians, primitive birds (archaeopteryx, confuciusornis and yixianornis) and modern birds (fig. b) (bhullar et al., ). adult skull shapes were analyzed together with those of juveniles and embryos, wherever ‘ ’ fig. . principles of beak development in songbirds. (a) snapshots of growing beak for embryonic day (e) - , showing developing beak outlines (black), the size of the growth zone (red), its centroid (blue) and the relevant length scale for shaping the upper beak profile (yellow). all measures of the growth zone are derived from midsagittal cross-sections of zebra finch embryo beaks, stained to show cell nuclei (blue) and dividing cells (green). areas with a high density of dividing cells are defined as the growth zone (red outline). (b) the final conical shape of the beak is given by an ‘envelope’ of the growth zone observed during developmental time, which decays at a constant rate until it shrinks to size zero generating a tip (adapted and modified from fritz et al., ). all beak shapes are well fitted by equations, as shown, that describe beak shape and the profile [pu(x) and pl(x)] generated by a fixed growth law and growth zone decay, where ϕ is a vector parameterizing the shape and all other free parameters in the problem. the midsagittal sections of songbird beaks are all calculated to be conic sections. review development ( ) , - doi: . /dev. d e v e l o p m e n t available, within the same morphospace. basally branching bird relatives and primitive birds clustered with embryos and early juveniles of other archosaurs, indicating paedomorphosis (fig. b). this paedomorphosis is most evident in their relatively shorter face, enormous eyes and enlarged brains (bhullar et al., ). the paedomorphic trend holds even after body size and phylogeny are statistically accounted for: non-avian dinosaurs such as compsognathus are small, yet its skull shape falls within the ancestral adult cluster, while ostrich and emu (dromaius) are very large but their skulls group with other birds. this morphometric analysis revealed at least four paedomorphic episodes (marked i-iv on fig. b) in the history of birds, which connect ancestral skull shapes of early archosaurs through a series of morphological transitions to modern birds (fig. b). this evolutionary story covers over million years and represents one of the most dramatic morphological transitions in animals yet can be addressed entirely within the framework provided by thompson’s ‘theory of transformations’. despite the overwhelming imprint of paedomorphosis on the early evolution of the bird skull seen in the collapse of the face and the enlargement of the brain, localized peramorphosis, a trend which is the reverse of paedomorphosis where the descendants mature past the ancestral adulthood condition and evolve previously unseen traits, also occurs later in the bird lineage and explains, for example, the origin of the distinctive avian beak structure (bhullar et al., , ). the avian beak was an evolutionary innovation, formed from the fusion and elongation of premaxillary bones and uniquely shaped palatines, which allow for kinesis (upper beak movement relative to the skull). this ‘new snout’ of birds, the bill, permitted vast diversification in avian ecology. a combined approach fig. . high level of morphological disparity in avian skull shapes is associated with increased modularity. (a) microcomputed tomography (µct) scan of a bird skull showing geometric morphometric landmarks (above, red dots on skull scan) and defined modules (beneath, coloured lines). (b) the phylogeny of bird species used for mapping shape data by squared-change parsimony. representative, more basal, species were used as outgroups. (c) morphospace occupied by skull shapes. the polygons show parts of the morphospace occupied by different groups revealing that hawaiian honeycreepers (polygon shaded blue) have some of the most diversified and divergent skulls of all species studied. (d) darwin’s finches show strong covariation between the shape of the whole skull and several skull modules (red thick lines), suggesting strong integration within the skull. by contrast, hawaiian honeycreepers show strong covariation only between the shape of the whole skull and that of the upper beak (blue thick line), indicating much greater flexibility of evolutionary change. such a unique pattern of morphological integration in their skulls is likely to reflect an altered and much higher state of developmental modularity within the skull, which contributed to the outstanding level of disparity of skull morphology observed in hawaiian honeycreepers. cranial modules in d are colour- coded in the same way as in a. all images adapted and modified from tokita et al. ( ). review development ( ) , - doi: . /dev. d e v e l o p m e n t bridging paleontology, comparative anatomy and experimental developmental biology showed that the avian beak occupies a distinctive part of the facial morphospace within the archosaurs. to expose underlying developmental mechanisms, developmental gene expression was studied in the embryonic face (bhullar et al., ). this study revealed a novel mid-facial expression domain of fgf in early bird embryos and the downstream mid-facial wnt-responsive region at later stages. altering fgf expression in chicken embryos using specific antagonists altered later wnt responsiveness to the ancestral pattern. the resulting experimental skeletal phenotypes clustered geometrically with ancestral fossil snouted forms instead of with beaked birds (bhullar et al., ). other studies have highlighted the roles of other signalling molecules, such as shh and bmp, in the origin and large-scale evolution of beak shapes (hu et al., a,b; smith et al., ). these studies are good examples of how the ‘laws of growth’ can be understood in more precise and mechanistic terms. thompson’s ‘laws of growth’ versus darwin’s natural selection ‘i have tried to make it as little contentious as possible. that is to say where it undoubtedly runs counter to conventional darwinism, i do not rub this in, but leave the reader to draw the obvious moral for himself.’ d’arcy thompson on on growth and form (thompson, ) the reception of d’arcy thompson’s book (edited in and ) was extremely wide-ranging as it drew different reactions from a very diverse audience. developmental biologists were eager to understand the ‘laws of growth’ and were mostly inspired or otherwise influenced in a positive way. mathematicians and applied physicists found it fascinating, and attempts to perfect thompson’s approaches continue to this day. it had a great impact on the immunologist sir peter medawar and theoretical biologist joseph henry woodger, philosopher michael ruse, architects philip fig. . geometric morphometrics analysis of skull shapes in archosauria reveals paedomorphosis (retention of juvenile features) at the origin of birds. (a) photographs of fossil skulls of the basal theropod dinosaur coelophysis (early juvenile and adult) and first bird archaeopteryx ( juvenile and adult). (b) several transitions are revealed during evolution of birds from non-avian theropod dinosaurs associated with heterochrony (changes in developmental timing). i-iv refer to heterochronic (changes in developmental timing) transitions during evolution of modern avians. transition i is the most dramatic paedomorphic transition, during which skulls of birds broke the existing trend towards more elongated snouts and acquired juvenile-like shapes. other transitions (ii-iv) produced features found in modern birds, such as toothless beaks, larger brain and eyes. grey spots show positions of all other archosaur taxa analyzed in this study; only the most important taxa are highlighted. all images modified from bhullar et al. ( ). review development ( ) , - doi: . /dev. d e v e l o p m e n t beesley and sarah bonnemaison, as well as countless designers and artists who were mesmerized by the idea of organismal transformations (medawar, ; woodger, ). both julian huxley and stephen j. gould, famous evolutionary biologists, were motivated by thompson’s ideas to produce their own theories (huxley, ; gould, , ). however, many contemporary evolutionary biologists found it a challenge to accept the concepts explaining biological forms by physical or largely internal biological processes. they thought that the book was arguing against darwinian evolution, and many believed that by using his famous transformation diagrams, d’arcy was arguing that ‘laws of growth’ rather than evolution could be used to explain the different forms of related species. at the british association meeting in , thompson gave a lecture titled some difficulties in darwinism. it was never published in a journal or a book but was briefly summarized by a nature correspondent: ‘he doubts the efficacy of the struggle for existence in the case of humming-birds, etc., and in these cases he regards the profusion of forms, colours, and other modifications as due merely to laws of growth, and thinks that growth may be more exuberant in the absence of struggle and hardship’ (anon, ). in other words, the general perception was that thompson saw natural selection more as an impediment to creating diversity rather than as a generative force, and he was considered a ‘stubborn opponent’ to darwinism (gould, ). was thompson completely wrong in his conviction? a century later, this dispute still might not be completely settled. consider how adaptive radiations are explained in a standard biology textbook (simpson, ; futuyma, ; zimmer and emlen, ). adaptive radiation, or the rapid evolution of morphologically and ecologically diverse species from a single ancestor, usually implies two coincidental processes: multiplication of species number (increased taxonomic diversity defined as the ‘species richness’) and increased phenotypic disparity (defined as ‘morphological diversification’). alternative scenarios include increases in species richness without major morphological diversification, and dramatic morphological changes in few isolated lineages. the importance of adaptive radiation as an evolutionary phenomenon was first recognized by george gaylord simpson in the major features of evolution (simpson, ). much of the current species richness, ecological and morphological diversity in such clades as birds, angiosperms and mammals, is the result of multiple radiation events (moen and morlon, ; gill, ). as already mentioned, some of the best-studied textbook examples of adaptive radiations are found in birds: darwin’s finches, hawaiian honeycreepers and madagascar vangas. all of these avian clades display an unusually high degree of beak morphological variation, which is matched by a diversity in diets and feeding behaviours, increased species richness and sympatric distribution of their species (fig. a). molecular phylogenies suggest that darwin’s finches are part of a larger clade called tholospiza and that this entire clade should be considered as a single adaptive radiation (fig. a,b) (burns et al., , ). compared with other related lineages, this group has undergone extensive bill evolution in a relatively short time frame, especially among the darwin’s finches, which demonstrate ‘exceptional’ rates of diversification (burns et al., , ). these dramatic changes in bill morphology have occurred with little genetic divergence among the species (burns et al., ). there are two possible explanations for tholospiza diversity (which are not necessarily mutually exclusive). a model for adaptive radiation developed by simpson ( ) involved simultaneous divergence of multiple lineages as a consequence of entering new adaptive zones, such as isolated islands or new and unusual habitats. thus, the canonical explanation for diversity among darwin’s finches and their caribbean relatives is that their radiation occurred in response to the niches available to their ancestors invading new island habitats (losos and ricklefs, ). however, their diversity is both exceptional and unique, as the galápagos and caribbean islands are inhabited by representatives of many other families of land birds whose ancestors had the same opportunities for diversification but show much more limited morphological variation and a high degree of allopatry (no more than one species per island). darwin wrote, about the finches now bearing his name: ‘these birds are the most singular of any in the archipelago’ (darwin, ). indeed, he was right, on galápagos there are endemic species and endemic subspecies of birds: martins, mockingbirds, owls, hawks, flycatchers, doves, warblers, cuckoos and others. these locally adapted species evolved from different ancestral bird speciesthat colonized the islands over the last million years. all of these other birds display allopatric speciation and low levels of morphological variation, including beak shapes, when compared with darwin’s finches on the same islands. in particular, galápagos mockingbirds enjoy diverse diets on different islands, which they have colonized for as long as the darwin’s finches, but they remained morphologically conservative and have similar beaks to each other and their american and caribbean relatives (fig. a) (arbogast et al., ). when tholospiza family members were compared with the similarly aged and sized groups of tanagers, it was concluded that this clade demonstrated unusually high levels of morphological diversity, even considering their island habitats (burns et al., ). asthis studyconcluded:‘an alternative, more structuralist interpretation isthat the ancestor to all of these birds possessed a developmental-genetic architecture (passed on to its descendents) that included a greater variety of regulatory genes controlling nasiocranial development’ (burns et al., ). a similar comparative study with similar results was performed on hawaiian honeycreepers (lovette et al., ). to understand the origin of their morphological diversity, beak shapes of hawaiian honeycreepers were contrasted with those of the endemic hawaiian thrushes. phylogenetic analyses indicated that the ancestral thrush colonized the hawaiian islands as early as the common ancestor of the honeycreepers. the similar timing of colonization suggests that the observed differences in diversity between the hawaiian honeycreeper and thrush clades did not result from the length of time that they spent on the archipelago (lovette et al., ). morphometric analyses of the clade-specific morphological characteristics associated with rates of diversification demonstrated that the relatives of hawaiian honeycreepers (carduelini) displayed significantly greater variation in bill size and shape among species than the hawaiian thrushes and their non-hawaiian relatives (turdinae). in fact, hawaiian honeycreepers have diversified to fill much of the beak shape morphospace occupied by new world passerine birds in general. like the study on darwin’s finches, this report concluded that: ‘the greater morphometric variation of the carduelines suggests that the ancestor of the honeycreepers may have had an intrinsically higher capacity for morphological change than did the ancestor of the hawaiian thrushes’ and that such ‘high bill shape lability in the carduelini… might therefore represent a key innovation of morphological versatility’ (lovette et al., ). in summary, all of these comparative investigations related to extensive and rapid morphological evolution combined suggest a rather striking picture. first, darwin’s finches and hawaiian honeycreepers (and their diverse relatives) are the classic examples of adaptive radiation and morphological diversification but their beak and skull diversity cannot be explained by the external factors driving review development ( ) , - doi: . /dev. d e v e l o p m e n t natural selection alone. for both clades, novel intrinsic mechanisms providing higher capacity for generating morphological diversity have been suggested. second, as discussed above, beaks of darwin’s finches are controlled by a multigenic modular developmental program, which allows for independent shape changes along individual axes. third, the follow-up comparative developmental analysis indicated that such a sophisticated beak developmental program is present in darwin’s finches and their closest and morphologically diverse caribbean relatives but it is not found in the more basal tholospiza species (fig. b-d) (mallarino et al., ). this later observation suggests that the most important innovation in the tholospiza clade was an intrinsic one: the formation of the modular multigenic program that enabled more flexible control over various parameters of beak shape and size. it is not yet clear when this regulatory network expressed in beak cartilages and bones emerged, and further phylogenetically guided developmental studies are needed. in particular, it will be interesting to analyze how the novel gene regulatory network emerged, perhaps with the help of hybridization between rapidly evolving species exchanging beneficial mutations, a phenomenon called ‘adaptive introgression’. finally, the study of diversity in entire skull shapes, described earlier in this review, indicated that it was high in darwin’s finches and extremely high in hawaiian honeycreepers and was linked to altered patterns of integration and elevated levels of modularity of skull skeletal elements (fig. d) (tokita et al., ). the developmental mechanisms controlling development of the vertebrate skull are still in their infancy; for instance, little is currently understood about how different parts of the skull interact during development and how such interactions change during evolution. taken as a whole, evidence suggests that the internal mechanisms, the famed thompson’s ‘laws of growth’, indeed exert a huge influence over morphological diversity and may explain much, perhaps most, of the increased generative capacity in certain avian and other animal clades to produce variation. in particular, more research is needed to understand the role of novel developmental changes in clades that are unexpectedly and exceptionally diverse for the conditions that they inhabit. for such groups, the presence of the novel ecological niches would be an important, indeed probably required, condition, but far from sufficient to promote variation at the observed levels. natural selection would play an optimizing and sieving role for the morphological variants produced at elevated levels. within this structuralist framework, one can better understand why d’arcy thompson was hesitant to explain the ‘profusion of forms’ in hummingbirds and other birds by the means of natural selection alone. concluding remarks ‘this book [on growth and form], at once substantial and stately, is to the credit of british science and an achievement for its distinguished author to be proud of. it is like one of darwin’s books, well-considered, patiently wrought-out, learned and cautious – a disclosure of the scientific spirit.’ thompson ( b) charles darwin is credited with having recognized natural selection as the fundamental process driving adaptive evolutionary change of organisms. however, it is less well known that his true position was much more nuanced. darwin wrote a number of passages showing that he did recognize the ‘laws of growth’ as being a more important evolutionary process than natural selection. in , he wrote about the role of these ‘laws’ in biological diversity: ‘we may easily err in attributing importance to characters, and in believing that they have been developed through natural selection. we must by no means overlook the effects…of the complex laws of growth, such as correlation, compensation, of the pressure of one part on another’ and ‘we thus see that…many morphological changes may be attributed to the laws of growth and the interaction of parts, independently of natural selection’ (darwin, ). finally, in a letter to alpheus hyatt, darwin sends an important message: ‘i should be inclined to attribute the character in both your cases to the laws of growth and descent, secondarily to natural selection. it has been an error on my part, and a misfortune to me, that i did not largely discuss what i mean by laws of growth at an early period in some of my books. i have said something on this head in two new chapters in the last edition of the origin…endless other changes of structure in successive species may, i believe be accounted for by various complex laws of growth…therefore i should expect that characters of this kind would often appear in later-formed species without the aid of natural selection, or with its aid if the characters were of any advantage’ (darwin, ). thus, the morphology of biological structures is first created, shaped and transformed by novel alterations in the organism’s development by the ‘laws of growth’, and then resulting modifications become both the source and subject of evolution. thompson and darwin might have been singing a similar tune after all. the ‘laws of growth’ in modern interpretation include developmental genetics and should embrace all interacting ontogenetic processes from the molecular to organismal levels. many evo-devo studies currently focus on dissecting the relative roles for intrinsic factors in triggering and modulating morphological evolution. future investigations should test the hypothesis that some of the most famous examples of adaptive radiation coupled with morphological diversification and dramatic large-scale evolutionary transitions are driven primarily by the propagative capacity of novel developmental genetic programs. the origin and evolution of the underlying developmental innovations at the genetic, epigenetic and genomic levels deserve a detailed study as well. it will be important to combine evidence from multiple fields using different methods – geometric morphometrics, comparative embryology and functional experimentation (mallarino and abzhanov, ). there is substantial benefit in blending such efforts to solve the great puzzle that is the evolution of biological diversity. as many new research publications show, the legacy of d’arcy thompson’s greatest book lives on and its ideas and approaches remain surprisingly relevant. the current synergy between morphology/morphometry, developmental genetics and evolutionary biology fields is thriving on many of the ideas first touched on by thompson. after years, on growth and form continues to inspire experimentalists and theorists alike and makes us all wonder what the next century of studying biological transformations will bring. competing interests the author declares no competing or financial interests. funding the author gratefully acknowledges previous support on research described here from the national science foundation ( b- and ) and from the templeton foundation (rfp- - ). references abzhanov, a., protas, m. b., grant, b. r., grant, p. r. and tabin, c. j. 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( ) : y research article identification of different copper green pigments in renaissance paintings by cluster-tof-sims imaging analysis pascale richardin, vincent mazel, , philippe walter, olivier laprévote, , alain brunelle laboratoire du centre de recherche et de restauration des musées de france (lc rmf), cnrs - umr , palais du louvre, porte des lions, quai françois mitterrand, paris, france laboratoire matériaux et santé, ea , faculté de pharmacie de châtenay-malabry, université de paris-sud, châtenay-malabry, france chimie toxicologie analytique et cellulaire, ea , faculté des sciences pharmaceutiques et biologiques, université paris descartes, paris, france centre de recherche de gif, institut de chimie des substances naturelles, cnrs, gif-sur-yvette, france abstract time-of-flight secondary ion mass spectrometry (tof-sims) imaging using cluster primary ion beams is used for the identification of a green painting layer on the scene the angels concert from the issenheim altarpiece (painted in ) from a german renaissance painter, matthias grünewald. copper carboxylate clusters inside a basic copper chloride (atacamite) layer have been identified and located in the copper green layer. the mechanisms of transformation of atacamite into copper carboxylates may be initiated by an aging of the paint layers. the combination of the high mass resolution of the technique together with a micrometer spatial resolution and the possibility to simultaneously identify both minerals and organics, has proven to be the method of choice for the study of the stratigraphy of a paint cross-section. key words: copper green pigments, copper carboxylates, atacamite, renaissance altarpieces, cluster- tof-sims, matthias grünewald, mass spectrometry imaging, painting cross-section introduction and research aims the issenheim altarpiece is a monumental polyptych,now shown at the unterlinden museum (colmar, france). this masterpiece from matthias grünewald (c. –august , ), a major painter of the german renaissance, was completed in for the monastery of the order of st. anthony, located near colmar at issenheim, and consists of different painted panels, full of colors, which depict scenes from the life of christ and of st. anthony. in , during an extensive analysis of the painting technique used by grünewald for the making of this altarpiece, and in order to establish a complete preservation state, a series of non-destructive in situ analytical methods were performed, like x-ray fluorescence (xrf), raman spectroscopy, together with photographic and radiographic examinations [ ]. in addition to the important contribution of these analyses, micro-samples were taken from the painting surface to describe and better understand the complex stratigraphy of the painting layers. all samples were included in a polyester resin and the obtained cross-sections were polished and analyzed by classic imaging techniques, i.e., scanning electron microscopy with energy dispersive x-ray analysis (sem-edx), micro-raman spectroscopy (mrs) and x-ray microdiffraction (μ-xrd), x- ray microfluorescence (μxrf), and x-ray absorption near-edge received: april revised: may accepted: may published online: june correspondence to: pascale richardin; e-mail: pascale.richardin@culture. gouv.fr microspectroscopy (μ-xanes) at the european synchrotron radiation facility (esrf, grenoble, france). the obtained results exemplify the very complex technique of grünewald (nature of the pigments, mixture, and superposition of colors …) [ , ]. however, some pigments always raise great problems of identification because of their amorphous structure. this is particularly the case for some copper green pigments [ ]. if these pigments are only made from mineral compounds, like malachite or verdigris [ , ], they can be relatively easily identified by raman spectroscopy or x-ray diffraction spectroscopy. however, the problem is not always resolved in the case of organic pigments. some identifications have been punctually performed by micro-raman spectroscopy, like copper citrate on a thai manuscript [ ] or copper resinate on a painting of the master spanish painter, el greco [ ]. furthermore, the degradation is more frequently observed with organic pigments, and the formation of breakdown products like copper oxalates [ , ] or the ‘darkening’ of resinates have been mentioned [ , ]. the present study concerns the identification of a green painting layer used for the scene named the angels concert from the issenheim altarpiece (figure ). a micro-sample, embedded in resin, has been polished to obtain a flat cross- section. this allows the study of the total stratigraphy by imaging techniques. sem had shown that the green colored layer is constituted of a mixture of a copper based pigment and lead white. the aim of this research is to use time-of- flight secondary ion mass spectrometry (tof-sims) imag- ing using cluster primary ion beams to identify and locate this copper green pigment, with a spatial resolution and surface sensitivity that is not achievable by conventional techniques, e.g., infrared spectroscopy. indeed, for nearly years, cluster tof-sims has become a technique of choice to study stratigraphic materials in cultural heritage [ ], and especially paintings, for the simultaneous location and identification of hybrid materials [ – ]. experimental sample preparation to be able to characterize and to localize all the compounds inside the sample, cross-sections of paintings are prepared following a previously described procedure [ ]. micro- samples are embedded in a polyester resin (hardclear h sodemi, france) and then cut into . μm sections using a diamond knife (diatome, leica microsystèmes, nanterre, france). the obtained thin cross-sections are placed on a silicon wafer (applications couches minces acm, villiers saint-frédéric, france) just before analysis. scanning electron microscopy with energy dispersive x-ray analysis (sem-edx) the apparatus used is a phillips xl cp, coupled with an energy dispersive x-ray spectrometer and the accelerating voltage was set to kv. since the sample is embedded in resin and for further analysis, the surface can not be coated with a metallic layer. indeed, sem analysis is used to study conductive samples. organic samples, like painting samples embedded in synthetic resins, are generally coated with gold or carbon on their surface, in the aim to become conductive, thereby avoiding charging effects. in our case, the metal- lization of the samples would make them unusable for further analysis. under these conditions, images can only be acquired with backscattered electrons (bse). to minimize the charging effects, measurements were done in a so-called controlled pressure mode, with a pressure of . hpa. time-of-flight secondary ion mass spectrometry imaging tof-sims analyses were performed with a tof-sims iv (ion-tof gmbh, münster, germany) reflectron-type tof mass spectrometer, with a bismuth liquid metal ion gun as the primary ion source. a kev bi + ion beam was selected with an incidence angle of ° in the so-called ‘high current bunched mode’ [ ]. this ion source operating mode ensures both a – μm primary ion beam focus and a high mass resolution (m/Δm= . , fwhm at m/z ). each figure . the issenheim altarpiece, matthias grünewald, – . detail: the angels concert panel. (©c rmf, elsa lambert) richardin et al.: tof-sims copper green pigments image was acquired over a surface of μm× μm and × pixels, resulting in a lateral resolution of ~ . μm. the primary ion dose density (=fluence) was . × ions per cm only, well below the so-called ‘static sims limit’ [ ], in order to preserve the molecular information. secondary ions are extracted with a kv voltage and are post-accelerated to a kev kinetic energy just before impacting the detector surface, in order to ensure good detection efficiency. a low energy electron flood gun was activated between two successive pulses of the primary ion beam to neutralize any residual charge on the surface of the samples. because of the very low initial kinetic energy distribution of the secondary ions, the relationship between the time-of- flight and the square root of m/z is always linear over the whole mass range. the mass calibration was always internal and signals used for initial calibration were those of h+, h +, h +, c+, ch+, ch +, ch +, and c h + for the positive-ion mode and the signals of c–, ch–, c –, and c h – for the negative-ion mode. the data acquisition and processing software were ionspec and ionimage, respectively (tof-sims . ; ion- tof gmbh, münster, germany). the name of the com- pounds or the m/z value of the peak centroid, the maximal number of counts in a pixel (mc), and the total number of counts (tc) are written below each image. the color scales correspond to the [ , mc] intervals. regions of interest (rois) corresponding to different image areas were drawn with the ionimage software. the associated mass spectra were further extracted in order to reveal different local chemical compositions. results and discussion light microscopy and sem/edx analysis give a first approximation of the composition of the mgn paint cross-section (figure ). different layers can be clearly distinguished and their elemental compositions are given. from top to bottom, the first layer, which consists of an organic varnish, lies on top of a very broad and green paint layer. it is composed of mixtures of a ‘copper green’ type pigment and lead white with different relative concentra- tions. then, a very thin brown-black layer, mostly made of organic materials is followed by a red layer, which is a mixture of lead white, iron oxide, and clays (aluminosilicate type). a thin lead white layer represents finally the ground layer. the first step in the investigation was to determine the spatial distribution of copper from positive-ion images obtained by cluster-tof-sims. the paint cross-section was oriented along the diagonal of a square of μm a side (figure a). copper was located by the sum of all the images of singly charged cun + (n= – ) cations (cu +: sum of images of ions at m/z . and . , cu +: sum of images of ions at m/z . , . , and . , and cu +: sum of images of ions at m/z . , . , . , and . ) with the respective contributions of the two isotopes cu and cu (figure b to e). it can be verified that copper is located in the green layers of the cross-section. lipids were mapped in the negative-ion mode, in the m/z – range, by selecting a series of fatty acids (fa) carboxylate ion peaks (r-coo–) to draw their respective ion images [ ]. in oil paintings, these ions can be either free fatty acids or specific fragments of triglycerides. all the individual ion images (figure a to h, m/z . , . , . , . , . , . , . , and . ) provide the same localization and the sum of all the ion images (figure i) also shows that these lipid ions are accumulated inside the copper rich region (figure j), and are co-localized with the [(fa)ncun+ ] + (with n= and ) ions in ovoid areas of ~ – μm length (figure k to m). the tof-sims mass spectrum in the negative-ion mode, automatically selected by the ionimage software from the lipids rich area is shown in figure a. first, this spectrum is dominated by the peaks corresponding to the fatty acids carboxylates ions [fa–h]–. the major peaks correspond to the fatty acid carboxylates bearing an even number of carbon atoms and c : (p: palmitic acid) gives the most intense peaks of the mass spectrum above m/z . furthermore, between m/z and , a group of peaks centered at m/z with a gaussian-like shape is detected. each peak is composed of a copper organic complex, with one atom of copper and two fatty acid carboxylates. these [ fa– h+cu]– ions are all co-localized with those of [fa–h]– (figure j and m). similarly in the positive-ion mode (figure b), two important groups of ions are detected in the same area. figure . painting cross-section mgn (a) microscopic and (b) bse image richardin et al.: tof-sims copper green pigments (a) (c)(b) (d) (e) mc mc mc mc figure . (a) microscopic image of the paint cross-section at the surface of which the tof-sims images were acquired inside the area of μm× μm delimited by the green square; (b to d) tof-sims ion images recorded in the positive-ion mode: (b) cu + (sum of m/z . and . ion images), (c) cu + (sum of m/z . , . and . ion images), (d) cu + (sum of m/z . , . , . , and . ion images), (e) cun + (sum of the total cu +, cu + and cu + ions). field of view μm× μm; × pixels, pixel size . μm, fluence . × ions.cm– . color scale bars, with amplitude in number of counts, are indicated to the right of each ion image. the amplitude of the color scale corresponds to the maximum number of counts mc and could be read as [ , mc]; tc is the total number of counts recorded for the specified m/z (sum of counts in all the pixels) richardin et al.: tof-sims copper green pigments they correspond to compounds with a general formula ðfaÞncunþ þðn ¼ and Þ. these two mass spectra (in positive-ion and negative-ion modes) are compatible with the presence of copper carboxylates, which would be located inside the green layers of the copper green pigments. their presence has been confirmed by synchrotron-based fourier transform infrared micro-spectroscopy (μ-sr-ftir) (esrf, line id , data not shown). in a previous work [ ], copper carboxylates have already been identified on an ancient icon by a combina- tion of infrared spectroscopy (ftir), gas chromatography- mass spectrometry (gc-ms), and electron paramagnetic resonance (rpe). these compounds, whose structures are not clearly established, would be produced by the reaction of the oil present in the medium with the copper alloy of the surround during a degradation process. in a same way, mc mc (i) mc mc (a) (b) (c) (d) (e) (f) (g) (h) (j) (k) (l) (m) mc mc mc mc mc mc mc mc mc figure . (a to i) tof-sims ion images in the negative ion mode of lipids: (a) m/z . ; (b) m/z . ; (c) m/z . ; (d) m/z . ; (e) m/z . ; (f) m/z . ; (g) m/z . ; (h) m/z . ; and (i) sum of these eight ion images; (j to h) tof-sims ion images in the positive-ion mode of copper carboxylate ions: (j) sum of the cun + ions; (k) sum of the (fa)cu + ions; (l) sum of the (fa) cu + ions, and (m) sum of (fa)ncun+ + ions; (fa: fatty acid carboxylates). field of view μm× μm; × pixels, pixel size . μm, fluence . × ions.cm– . color scale bars, with amplitude in number of counts, are indicated to the right of each ion image. the amplitude of the color scale corresponds to the maximum number of counts mc and could be read as [ , mc]; tc is the total number of counts recorded for the specified m/z (sum of counts in all the pixels) richardin et al.: tof-sims copper green pigments others authors [ ] proposed, from their using μ-sr-ftir experiments, that if a green copper-based pigment is present in a painting layer, made either of copper acetates or copper chlorides, further formation of copper carbox- ylates is always preferred, even if lead-based pigments are also present. the last step is the identification of the different green layer components. indeed, in the positive-ion mode, the overlay between the image of cun + copper ions (figure j) and that of the [ fa–h + cu]+ copper carboxylates (figure k and l) shows that the green layer is made of other compounds containing copper, which surround the grains of copper carboxylates. the comparison between the ion images of ( ) the copper hydroxide ions ½cunðohÞn� �þðn ¼ and Þ detected in the positive-ion mode (figure a and b) and ( ) the chloride ions ( cl– and cl–) and the cucl .cuoh – copper hydroxychloride ions, detected in the negative ion mode (figure c and d), delimits an outer area in the green layer that could correspond to the unknown pigment. this is confirmed by the overlay image between the fa carboxylates ions and the cucl .cuoh – ions shown in figure f. then, it can be hypothesized that the green copper pigment could be made of atacamite cu (oh) cl, which is a copper x . . . . . x . . . . . . . . x . . . . . [cus ] - [cusp]- [cup ] - [cump]- [cum ] - (fa)- (fa-h) cu - m/z m/z in te n s it y ( c o u n ts ) tag in te n s it y ( c o u n ts ) (fa)cu + (fa) cu + m/z in te n s it y ( c o u n ts ) a b figure . tof-sims mass spectra of copper carboxylates from the area rich in lipids (a) in the negative ion mode and (b) in the positive-ion mode. fa: fatty acid carboxylates, tag: triacylglycerols, m: myristic acid, p: palmitic acid, and s: stearic acid richardin et al.: tof-sims copper green pigments trihydroxychloride or “basic-copper chloride,” well known to be used as a painting pigment since the th ad [ ]. the presence in this sample and in this green layer of a mixture of atacamite and paratacamite has also been confirmed by ftir microscopy and x-ray microdiffrac- tion (esrf, line id and id , data not shown). however, the degradation of the basic copper chloride (atacamite) can also lead to copper carboxylates as it was proposed in a recent study [ ]. conclusion tof-sims analysis is currently the only technique that allows the detection and the localization of this type of organo-metallic complexes [copper-fatty acids] at a micro- meter scale. so, this research describes the direct identifica- tion in one single mass spectrometry imaging experiment of an organic copper green layer, constituted by two different pigments: atacamite and copper carboxylates. although the (a) (b) (c) (d) (e) (f) mc mc mc mc mc figure . tof–sims ion images in the positive-ion mode: (a) sum of the cu oh + ions; (b) sum of the cu (oh) + ions; tof- sims ion images in the negative ion mode: (c) cl– ions; (d) sum of the cucl .cuoh – ions; (e) sum of fatty acid carboxylate ions; and (f) two colors overlay between the sum of the cucl and cuoh – ions (green) and the fatty acid carboxylate ions (red). field of view μm× μm; × pixels, pixel size . μm, fluence . × ions.cm– . color scale bars, with amplitude in number of counts, are indicated to the right of each ion image. the amplitude of the color scale corresponds to the maximum number of counts mc and could be read as [ , mc]; tc is the total number of counts recorded for the specified m/z (sum of counts in all the pixels) richardin et al.: tof-sims copper green pigments presence of copper carboxylates may also be due to the degradation of the basic copper chloride (atacamite) in a lipidic system (the binding media), as it was proposed in a recent study [ ]. this new example of a tof-sims imaging application in cultural heritage studies confirms the high analytical potential of this technique for the study of hybrid materials (organic and inorganic). acknowledgments the authors thank Éléonore welcomme for the sample sem-edx analysis, and marine cotte and pierre bleuet for the experiments at the european synchrotron radiation facility (esrf). jéril degrouard and danielle jaillard from the centre commun de microscopie electronique at orsay, france (cnrs umr ) are thanked for their assistance in ultramicrotomy preparation and elsa lambert from the c rmf for the photographs of the issenheim altarpiece. references . menu, m.; ezrati, j.-j.; laval, e.; pagès, s.; principaud, a.; rioux, j.-p.; walter, p.; welcomme, e.; nowik, v. analyse de la palette des couleurs du retable d’issenheim par matthias grünewald. in la technique picturale de grünewald et de ses contemporains; béguerie-de paepe, p.; menu, m., eds; centre de recherche et de restauration des musées de france: paris; musée d'unterlinden: colmar, ; p. . . cotte, m., welcomme, e., solé, v.a., salomé, m., menu, m., walter, p., susini, j.: synchrotron-based x-ray spectromicroscopy used for the study of an atypical micrometric pigment in th century paintings. anal. chem. 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( ), – ( ) . daniilia, s., andrikopoulos, k.s., sotiropoulou, s., karapanagiotis, s.: analytical study into el greco’s baptism of christ: clues to the genius of his palette. appl. phys. a mater. sci. process , – ( ) . nevin, a., loring melia, j., osticioli, i., gautier, g., colombini, m.p.: the identification of copper oxalates in a th century cypriot exterior wall painting using micro ftir, micro raman spectroscopy, and gas chromatography-mass spectrometry. j. cultural heritage , – ( ) . castro, k., sarmiento, a., martinez-arkarazo, i., madariaga, j.m., fernandez, l.a.: green copper pigments biodegradation in cultural heritage: from malachite to moolooite, thermodynamic modeling, x- ray fluorescence, and raman evidence. anal. chem. , – ( ) . cartechini, l., miliani, c., brunetti, b.g., sgamellotti, a., altavilla, c., ciliberto, e., d’acapito, f.: x-ray absorption investigations of copper resinate blackening in a xv century italian painting. appl. phys. a mater. sci. process , – ( ) . altavilla, c., ciliberto, e.: copper resinate: an xps study of degradation. appl. phys. a mater. sci. process , – ( ) . mazel, v.; richardin, p. tof-sims study of organic materials in cultural heritage: identification and chemical imaging. in organic mass spectrometry in art and archaeology; colombini m.p.; modugno f., eds; wiley: ; p. . . sanyova, j., cersoy, s., richardin, p., laprévote, o., walter, p., brunelle, a.: unexpected materials in a rembrandt painting charac- terized by high spatial resolution cluster-tof-sims imaging. anal. chem. , – ( ) . keune, k., boon, j.j.: imaging secondary ion mass spectrometry of a paint cross section taken from an early netherlandish painting by rogier van der weyden. anal. chem. , – ( ) . keune, k., boon, j.j.: analytical imaging studies clarifying the process of the darkening of vermilion. anal. chem. , – ( ) . mazel, v., richardin, p., touboul, d., brunelle, a., walter, p., laprévote, o.: chemical imaging techniques for the analysis of complex mixtures: new application to the characterization of ritual matters on african wooden statuettes. anal. chim. acta , – ( ) . brunelle, a., touboul, d., laprévote, o.: biological tissue imaging with time-of-flight secondary ion mass spectrometry and cluster ion sources. j. mass spectrom. , – ( ) . vickerman, j.c.: tof-sims—an overview. in: vickerman, j.c., briggs, d. (eds.) tof-sims-surface analysis by mass spectrometry, surface spectra and im publications, manchester and chichester ( ); p. . touboul, d., brunelle, a., halgand, f., de la porte, s., laprévote, o.: lipid imaging by gold cluster time-of-flight secondary ion mass spectrometry: application to duchenne muscular dystrophy. j. lipid res. , – ( ) . gunn, m.; martin, e. mécanisme d’altération d’un alliage cuivreux en présence d’un liant huileux. in art et chimie: la couleur; goupy, j.; mohen, j.-p., eds.; cnrs éditions: paris, p. . . salvado, n., buti, s., tobin, m.j., pantos, e., prag, j.n.w., pradell, t.: advantages of the use of sr-ft-ir microspectroscopy: applications to cultural heritage. anal. chem. ( ), – ( ) . salvado, n., pradell, t., pantos, e., papiz, m.z., molera, j., secoe, m., vendrell-saz, m.: identification of copper-based green pigments in jaume huguet's gothic altarpieces by fourier transform infrared microspectroscopy and synchrotron radiation x-ray diffraction. j. synchrotron rad. , – ( ) . salvado, n., butí, s., nicholson, j., emerich, h., labrador, a., pradelle, t.: identification of reaction compounds in micrometric layers from gothic paintings using combined sr-xrd and sr-ftir. talanta , – ( ) richardin et al.: tof-sims copper green pigments 	identification of different copper green pigments in renaissance paintings by cluster-tof-sims imaging analysis 	abstract 	introduction and research aims 	experimental 	sample preparation 	scanning electron microscopy with energy dispersive x-ray analysis (sem-edx) 	time-of-flight secondary ion mass spectrometry imaging 	results and discussion 	conclusion 	acknowledgments 	references ris . _ _ .. review of international studies ( ), , – british international studies association first published online jun doi: . /s the ottoman origins of capitalism: uneven and combined development and eurocentrism kerem nisancioglu* abstract. the history of capitalism’s origins is unmistakably eurocentric, placing sixteenth- century developments in politics, economy, culture, and ideology squarely within the unique context of europe. and while the disciplinary remit of international relations (ir) should offer a way out of such european provincialism, it too has been built on largely eurocentric assumptions. in eurocentric approaches, the ottoman empire has been absent, passive, or merely a comparative foil against which the specificity and superiority of europe has been defined. and yet, the ottoman empire was arguably the most powerful actor in the early modern period. in this article, i argue that any history of capitalism’s origins must therefore account for the historical importance of the ottomans. in doing so, this article seeks to address the non-european blind-spot, both in theorisations of capitalism’s origins and in ir theory, by reincorporating the material significance of the ottoman empire in historical processes, which led to the transition to capitalism. i do so by utilising the theory of uneven and combined development, and in the process seek to defend its credentials as a non-eurocentric social theory on the one hand and as a sociologically and historically sensitive theory of international relations on the other. kerem nisancioglu is a dphil candidate and associate tutor in the department of interna- tional relations at the university of sussex. introduction: capitalism, eurocentrism, and uneven and combined development european sixteenth-century history occupies a peculiar place in historical narratives. compared to the preceding medieval age, it was a period of striking social alteration and development; both in its encounter with unchartered territories and in its own self-definition, this was very much europe’s ‘age of discovery’. and yet, the sixteenth century bore none of the explosive marks of social unrest, revolution, and radical transformation that came to define the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries. such a duality is represented in the period’s very characterisation as ‘early * i would like to thank jamie allinson, alex anievas, gurminder bhambra, kamran matin, justin rosenberg, cemal burak tansel, and four anonymous reviewers for their very helpful comments and encouragement during the writing of this article. i am also grateful to the participants at the historical materialism conference ( ), millennium conference ( ), and spectrum conference ( ). any mistakes are, of course, my own. here and throughout the article, the term ‘europe’ and ‘european’ is deployed with the problematic implications of anachronism and intra-european divisions firmly in mind. as such it is used, unless specified, in a basic geographical sense, predominantly (but not exclusively) denoting england, france, low countries, portugal, hapsburg spain and austria, germanic principalities, hungary, and italian city-states. modern’. the term ‘modern’ anticipates the developments of the next three hundred years, whereas the prefix ‘early’ suggests an epochal budding that has not quite blossomed, or the embryonic shaping of a society that is yet to come. just as the culture of the renaissance was defined by a janus-faced view of the past and future, its geopolitics was characterised by new inventions in diplomacy and warfare that were nonetheless bound by the social relations of the old. and while filling the womb of a bloated aristocracy, trade, commerce, and production displayed its first signs of tearing open this archaic order with the deep breath of primitive accumula- tion that preceded capitalism’s screeching birth. the flux of this historical moment is brilliantly captured in german renaissance painter hans holbein’s masterpiece the ambassadors (figure ), which illus- trates a meeting between french envoys jean de dinteville and george de selve in london. the painting astounds because these two aristocratic subjects are placed at the periphery, and the only explicitly religious symbol, a cross, is heavily veiled by a figure . hans holbein, the ambassadors, kerem nisancioglu curtain. while these two pillars of medieval power – the church and the aristocracy – are symbolically pushed to the side, the painting’s focal point – the table – is littered with objects, with commodities. was this a prophetic, if unwitting, forecast of feudalism’s imminent decline? did it anticipate a capitalist future where social rela- tions would become ‘mediated by things’? notwithstanding such speculation, the objects on holbein’s table constitute a vivid record of the geopolitical milieu that defined european international relations in the early sixteenth century. on the bottom right hand side of the table, a book of lutheran hymns sits by a broken lute signifying the discord and growing divisions in christendom. to the left of these items rests martin benhaim’s terrestrial globe, made under the commission of nuremberg merchants seeking to break the portuguese hold on the spice trade. the globe is tilted, so that after european towns, ‘affrica’ and ‘brisilici r.’ (brazil) are the most legible markers, portraying the significance of the noticeable linea divisionis castellanorum et portugallenum (‘line of division between spain and portugal’). this line demarcated the division of the new world between habsburg spain (west of the line) and portugal (east of the line), signifying the growing import of atlantic sea routes, and the subsequent competition between european states over commercially profitable territories. in front of the globe is peter apian’s a new and well grounded instruction in all merchant’s arithmetic, an early textbook of commercial scholarship that covered profit-loss calculation, trading customs, navigation, and route mapping. placed alongside benhaim’s globe, it demonstrates the inseparability of commercial interests from maritime exploration, as well as the increasingly global – and increasingly com- petitive – character of trade. above these items, on the top of the table, numerous scientific instruments highlight the rapid development of techniques in seafaring. continuing the theme of christendom’s decline, it also indicates a mounting shift away from the divinity of religion as the predominant episteme toward the rationality of scientific inquiry and humanism. finally, linking the resting arms of the two ambassadors, and tying the objects together, is a turkish rug. this alerts us to the fact that in the context of growing atlantic trade, rebellion against habsburg rule, and the primitive accumulation of capital, the ottoman empire was a persistent and prominent presence, lying behind and in many ways underpinning these manifold european developments. in this period, the ottomans constituted the most prevalent non-christian ‘other’ that con- fronted europe, ‘persistently capturing the headlines and profoundly transforming the geopolitics of (and beyond) the mediterranean world’; this was ‘an ottoman europe almost as much as it was a venetian or habsburg one’. yet despite the latent centrality implied by holbein’s painting, dominant theorisations of early modern europe have been constructed with the ottomans in absentia. whether in karl marx, grundrisse (harmondsworth: penguin, ), p. . the ensuing interpretation is owed to the brilliant appraisal of the ambassadors in lisa jardine, worldly goods: a new history of the renaissance (london: papermac macmillan, ), pp. – lisa jardine and jerry brotton, global interests: renaissance art between east and west (new york: cornell university press, ), p. . nabil matar, turks, moors and englishmen in the age of discovery (new york: columbia university press, ), p. . james g. harper, ‘introduction’, the turk and islam in the western eye, - , ed. james g. harper (farnham: ashgate, ), p. . daniel goffman, the ottoman empire and early modern europe (cambridge: cambridge university press ), p. . the ottoman origins of capitalism the sphere of the politics, economy, culture or ideology, the emergence of capitalist modernity is generally understood as a sui generis development specific to europe. in short, the history of capitalism’s origins is an unmistakably eurocentric history. there are two moments to the eurocentric approach that i will be the subject of scrutiny and criticism in this article. the first is historical priority: based on the assumption that any given trajectory of development is the product of a society’s own immanent dynamics, eurocentrism ‘posits the endogenous and autonomous emergence of modernity in europe’. thus we find in cultural history that the flower- ing of the renaissance was an intra-european phenomenon. analyses of absolutism and the origins of the modern form of state are similarly conducted entirely on the terrain of europe, with non-european cases appearing (if at all) comparatively. and the rise of capitalism is understood as an exclusively western europe phe- nomenon, wherein non-european societies appear only as an exploited and passive periphery. in such accounts, eurocentric historical priority tends to be fortified by the idea that it was the inherent superiority of europe socially, politically, culturally, and materially which made it exceptionally conducive to the development of capitalist modernity. this is not to say that studies of the sixteenth-century ottoman empire have been heedlessly avoided. but where its imperial apogee has been studied, it has been considered ‘social formation apart . . . largely a stranger to european culture, as an islamic intrusion on christendom’. here becomes evident the second moment of eurocentrism: an internalist methodology. expressed either through the comparative approach or methodological nationalism, eurocentrism tends to overlook the multiple and interactive character of social development. through this method the ottomans (among other non-europeans) have been opposed to europe, either as an ideological ‘other’ or as a comparative case study, against which the specificity and distinctiveness of western modernity has been defined. through numerous socio- logical trends the east has in turn been (re)constructed as an intransigent and threat- ening primordial foe, representing a fundamental and irreconcilable challenge to the kamran matin, ‘redeeming the universal: postcolonialism and the inner life of eurocentrism’, european journal of international relations (ifirst: ). jacob burckhardt, the civilization of the renaissance in italy (london: penguin, ). perry anderson, lineages of the absolutist state (london: new left books, ); charles tilly (ed.), the formation of national states in western europe (princeton: princeton university press, ); michael mann, the sources of social power, volume : a history of power from the beginning to a.d. (cambridge: cambridge university press, ). immanuel wallerstein, the modern world-system : capitalist agriculture and the origins of the euro- pean world economy in the sixteenth century (london: academic press, ); david s. landes, the wealth and poverty of nations: why are some so rich and some so poor? (london: w. w. norton and company, ); robert brenner, ‘agrarian class structure and economic development in pre- industrial europe’, in t. h. aston, et al., the brenner debate (cambridge: cambridge university press, ); robert brenner, ‘the agrarian roots of capitalism,’ in t. h. aston, et al. (eds), the brenner debate (cambridge: cambridge university press, ), pp. – two giants of european historiography, braudel and ranke insisted on the inclusion of the ottomans within the europe in the age of phillip ii and charles v respectively. fernand braudel, the mediterra- nean and the mediterranean world in the age of phillip ii, volume ii (london: collins, ); leopold ranke, the ottoman and the spanish empires in the seventeenth century (london: whittaker & co. ). anderson, lineages, p. . gurminder k. bhambra, ‘historical sociology, international relations and connected histories’, cam- bridge review of international affairs, : ( ), pp. – . d. chernilo, ‘methodological nationalism and the domestic analogy: classical resources for their critique’, cambridge review of international affairs, : ( ), pp. – ; see also matin, ‘redeeming’. edward said, orientalism (new york: vintage, ). malcom e. yapp, ‘europe in the turkish mirror’, past and present, : ( ), pp. – . kerem nisancioglu values and traditions of the west. in establishing this ‘iron curtain’ of mutual obstinacy, both eurocentric internalism and notions of historical priority have been reinforced, not only ideologically but also materially. one might expect international relations (ir) – ‘a discipline that claims to be . . . of relevance to all peoples and states’ – to offer a way out of this eurocentric cul- de-sac. however, ir too has been built largely on eurocentric assumptions. mattingly’s classic account of renaissance diplomacy rests on the discoveries of the italian city-states in their relations with each other. similarly, the treaty of westphalia – the very foundational ‘myth’ of modern ir as a distinct practice and academic discipline – is generally considered the product of intra-european dynamics. where they do exist, substantive engagements with the east tend to emphasise the ‘iron curtain’ of ideological and cultural difference. the historical sociological turn in ir (hsir) has not fared much better. concerned explicitly with challenging ahistorical and unsociological conceptions of the international, hsir has developed convincing arguments that uncover the transience, mutability, and thus the historical specificity of modern ir. but hsir too has predominantly conducted its analysis on the basis of european history. recent scholarship in the field of world history and postcolonial studies has attempted to ‘reorient’ historiography in order to both destabilise and potentially samuel p. huntingdon, the clash of civilizations and the remaking of world order (new york: simon & schuster, ). nancy bisaha, creating east and west: renaissance humanists and the ottoman turks (philadelphia: university of pennsylvania press, ), p. . branwen gruffyd-jones, decolonising international relations (lanham, md: rowman and littlefield, ), p. . john m. hobson, the eurocentric conception of world politics: western international theory, – (cambridge: cambridge university press, ). garrett mattingly, renaissance diplomacy (new york: dover publications, ). benno teschke, the myth of (london: verso, ). see john m. hobson, ‘provincializing westphalia: the eastern origins of sovereignty’, international politics, : ( ), pp. – ; turan kayaoglu, ‘westphalian eurocentrism in international rela- tions theory’, international studies review, : ( ), pp. – . for instance in the english school. see martin wight (ed.), systems of states (leicester: leicester uni- versity press, ); hadley bull, the anarchical society: a study of order in world politics (london: macmillan press, ); adam watson, the evolution of international society (new york: routledge, ). see stephen hobden, international relations and historical sociology (london: routledge, ); stephen hobden and john hobson (eds), historical sociology of international relations (cambridge: cambridge university press, ); george lawson, ‘historical sociology in international relations: open society, research programme and vocation’, international politics, : ( ), pp. – . bhambra, ‘historical sociology’; gurminder k. bhambra, ‘talking among themselves? weberian and marxist historical sociologies as dialogues without ‘‘others’’ ’, millenium, : ( ), pp. – . james blaut, the colonizer’s model of the world: geographical diffusionism and eurocentric history (cambridge: cambridge university press, ); kenneth pomeranz, the great divergence: china, europe and the making of the modern world economy (princeton: princeton university press, ); john hobson, the eastern origins of western civilisation (cambridge: cambridge university press, ); jack goody, the theft of history (cambridge: cambridge university press, ); jack goldstone, why europe? the rise of the west in world history - (new york: mcgraw hill, ). homi k. bhaba, the location of culture (london: routledge, ); sanjay subrahmanyam, ‘con- nected histories: notes towards a reconfiguration of early modern eurasia’, modern asian studies, : ( ), pp. – ; dipesh chakrabarty, provincializing europe: postcolonial thought and his- torical difference (princeton: princeton university press, ); tarak barkawi and mark laffey, ‘the postcolonial moment in security studies’, review of international studies, ( ), pp. – ; robbie shilliam (ed.), international relations and non-western thought: imperialism, colonialism and investigations of global modernity (london: routledge, ); amitav ancharya, ‘dialogue and discovery: in search of international relations theories beyond the west’, millennium, : ( ), pp. – ; b. gruffyd jones (ed.), decolonizing; bhambra, ‘talking’; bhambra, ‘historical’. a. g. frank, reorient: global economy in the asian age (berkeley: university of california press, ). the ottoman origins of capitalism escape the eurocentric trap. however, despite providing extensive additional empiri- cal frameworks that have decentred the historical priority of europe, these works have tended to eschew any concomitant theorisation of capitalism’s origins in light of these empirical findings. in the absence of such an endeavour the dominant euro- centric theorisations of capitalism’s origins have either suffered no fatal blows or, at worst, been actively reproduced. to modify frederick cooper’s call to arms: in order to truly ‘provincialise’ europe one must dissect european history itself, and there is no more central myth to be dissected than that of narrating european history around the history of capitalism. a truly non-eurocentric interpretation of history should seek to pose an alternative theoretical framework to eurocentric conceptions in which to conduct historical and sociological study. attempts to expand trotsky’s theory of uneven and combined development (u&cd) as an historically and sociologically sensitive theory of the international have sought to rescue historical materialist accounts from the charge of eurocen- trism, and in doing so provide precisely the sort of alternative theorisation of history that world historical and postcolonial approaches have hitherto elided. however, there remain certain tensions that the theory is yet to overcome. john hobson suggests u&cd is no less guilty of conflating ‘the international’ with exclusively ‘in- tra-european relations’, thus falling prey to the typical eurocentric assumption of ‘western priority and eastern passivity’. similarly, gurminder bhambra suggests that for all of u&cd’s focus on societal difference, its very origins and dynamism remains wedded to a eurocentric conception of capitalism derived from the enlight- enment conception of stadial development. without problematising the european origins of capitalism, the non-west remains excluded as an empirically significant yet theoretically secondary entity. for u&cd to simply invoke inter-societal pro- cesses is therefore not enough. it must also be capable of establishing an alternative conception of capitalism that includes the historical significance of non-european societies as active agents while departing from a stadial conception of development. sandra halperin, ‘international relations theory and the hegemony of western conceptions of modernity’, in b. gruffyd jones (ed.), decolonizing international relations (lanham: rowman and littlefield, ), p. . frederick cooper, colonialism in question: theory, knowledge, history (berkeley: university of california press, ), p. . matin, ‘redeeming’, p. . justin rosenberg, ‘why is there no international historical sociology?’, european journal of inter- national relations, : ( ), pp. – ; justin rosenberg, ‘basic problems in the theory of uneven and combined development. part ii: unevenness and political multiplicity’, cambridge review of international affairs, : ( ), – ; kamran matin, ‘uneven and combined develop- ment in world history: the international relations of state-formation in premodern iran’, european journal of international relations, : ( ), pp. – ; see also neil davidson, ‘putting the nation back into the international’, cambridge review of international affairs, : ( ), pp. – ; jamie allinson and alex anievas, ‘approaching the ‘‘international’’: beyond political marxism’, in ed. anievas marxism and world politics (london: routledge, ), pp. – . see matin, ‘u&cd’; matin ‘redeeming’; robert shilliam, ‘the atlantic as a vector of uneven and combined development’, cambridge review of international relations, : ( ), pp. – ; john hobson, ‘what’s at stake in the neo-trotskyist debate? towards a non-eurocentric historical sociology of uneven and combined development’, millennium, : ( ). hobson, ‘what’s at stake?’, p. . bhambra, ‘talking’, p. . bhambra, ‘talking’, pp. , ; cf. bhambra, ‘historical’, pp. , ; cemal burak tansel, ‘deaf- ing silence: historical materialism, international relations, and the question of the international’, paper presented at ‘first spectrum conference on global studies: historical sociology, historical materialism and international relations’ ( – november ), pp. – , pp. – . kerem nisancioglu in this article, i propose we ‘return to holbein’ via trotsky, and attempt to re- capture the significance of the ottomans in the geopolitics of the long sixteenth century by deploying the u&cd as a theoretical framework. in particular, i seek to bring out the causal impact of the ottoman empire on the primary historical themes in the ambassadors – the political fragmentation of feudal europe in resistance to habsburg attempts at empire building, the structural shift away from the geo- political and commercial centrality of the mediterranean towards the atlantic, and the primitive accumulation of capital. i argue that these developments – each crucial to the emergence of capitalism – were causally inseparable from ottoman geopolitical pressure on europe. in developing this argument, i seek to challenge and criticise eurocentrism through the theory of u&cd and in the process defend its non- eurocentric credentials. i argue that u&cd can make a positive and illuminating contribution to these debates because it speaks directly to each of the two moments of eurocentrism identified above. by positing the multilinear character of develop- ment as its ‘most general law’, uneven development provides a corrective to the ontological singularity and attendant unilinear conception of history that underpins assumptions of historical priority. by positing the inherently interactive character of this multiplicity, ‘combined development’ challenges the methodological inter- nalism of the comparative approach. how this theoretical framework is operationalised can be demonstrated through an outline of u&cd’s core concepts – unevenness and combination. unevenness denotes spatial and temporal variations between societies as an ontological feature and thus perennial sociological condition of human history. as both cause and effect of this international differentiation, unevenness is also expressed in the forms of internal differentiation that give localities their own peculiar form of development. for example, in the history of the russian revolution, trotsky emphasises how imbalances in russia’s institutional, cultural, and class relations contrasted with ‘more advanced’ european forms due to its peculiar inter-societal position standing both geographically and historically between europe and asia. the ontological fact of multiplicity thus disrupts any conception of unilinearity implied by stadial theories of development: [a]t any given historical point, the human world has comprised a variety of societies, of differing sizes, cultural forms and levels of material development. empirically speaking, there is not, and never has been, a single path taken by social development. moreover, such differentiation in social forms is not generated hermetically and autonomously, but interactively. developmentally differentiated societies constantly impact upon one another’s development – what trotsky called ‘the whip of external necessity’. consequently the unevenness of social development is constituted not only by internal social relations but also by social relations between societies. the leon trotsky the history of the russian revolution (london: pathfinder press, ), p. . rosenberg, ‘why?’, p. . trotsky, history, p. . luke cooper, ‘uneven and combined development in modern world history: chinese economic reform in the longue durée of capitalist modernity’, paper presented at ‘international studies association annual convention’, san diego ( – april ), p. . trotsky, history, pp. – .. trotsky, history, p. . rosenberg, ‘why?’, p. . trotsky, history, pp. , . the ottoman origins of capitalism relational character that emerges out of this interactive multiplicity is what trotsky terms ‘combined development’. for example, trotsky argues that the impulse for russia’s capitalist development was the necessity of ‘catching up’ with the develop- mentally more advanced european states. the ‘privilege’ of russia’s backwardness meant that this catch up occurred by assimilating the ‘ready-made’ developmental achievements of advanced capitalist countries, allowing russia to skip over the ‘intermediate steps’ of development. in contrast to the european model that russia sought to emulate, capitalist development was refracted through pre-existing local social relations, giving rise to further developmental unevenness between russia and its european counterparts. it was this peculiarity of russia’s combined development that made it uniquely open to proletarian revolution. combined development thus involves a ‘drawing together of the different stages of the journey’ – of combining the spatio-temporally variegated experiences of different societies – into amalgams of ‘contemporary and more archaic’. in short, u&cd posits that historical processes are always the outcome of multiple determinations arising from spatially diverse developmental trajectories that converge or combine in any given conjuncture. thus instead of reproducing a stadial conception of development, u&cd ‘scrambles and subverts it’. and rather than eliding the significance of non-western agency, u&cd opens the potential to reinsert it into our historical narratives and theoretical conceptualisations. seen in this light, the eurocentric emphasis in the historiography of capitalism’s origins becomes questionable. for a singular emphasis on europe would constitute only one of many ‘spatio-temporal vectors of u&cd’ that would have to be com- plimented and combined with other determinations analysed from alternative spatial vantage points; one that would have to be related to – among others – extra- european determinations bound in the histories of colonialism, slavery and global trade. put simply, u&cd stresses an ‘internationalist historiography’ of the origins of capitalism. however, i do not intend to argue that capitalism’s origins were entirely extra- european, for this would substitute one ethnocentrism with another; nor do i seek to substantially diminish the centrality or uniqueness of europe in this process. as such, and despite the provocative nature of the title, this article does not provide a full or total account of the origins of capitalism. it is rather restricted to the con- siderably more modest claim and demonstration that the euro-ottoman relations of the early modern period constituted one of many determinations that needs to be trotsky, history, p. . trotsky, history, pp. , . trotsky, history, p. . trotsky, history, p. . alex anievas and kerem nisancioglu, ‘what’s at stake in the transition debate? rethinking the origins of capitalism and the rise of the west’, millennium (forthcoming, ). alex anievas ‘ in world historical perspective: the uneven and combined origins of the first world war’, european journal of international relations (ifirst: ); see also anievas and nisancioglu, ‘what’s at stake’. bertell ollman, dance of the dialectic: steps in marx’s method (university of illinois press, ), p. . blaut, colonizer’s model. shilliam, ‘atlantic’. jairus banaji, theory as history (chicago: haymarket books, ), pp. – . banaji, theory, p. . kerem nisancioglu integrated, indeed combined, with other spatio-temporally distinct historical deter- minations, both european and extra-european. but this article seeks to go beyond simply adding an alternative empirical framework to our understanding of capitalism’s origins. what must also be stressed is that in addition to challenging eurocentrism in a negative sense, a positive elaboration of u&cd can also provide an alternative theoretical framework in which capitalism’s origins can be understood. in the ensuing examination of euro-ottoman relations, these two core concepts – unevenness and combination – will order the structure. in the first section i aim to challenge the eurocentric assumption of historical priority, by demonstrating that sixteenth-century euro-ottoman relations were marked by material relations of uneven development. accordingly unevenness denotes, firstly, the political, military, economic, and territorial advantages held by the ottoman empire over europe; and secondly, the unevenness in social forms of internal differentiation – of ruling and ruled class in agrarian production on the one hand, and between merchant and state on the other. these forms of unevenness entailed both an ottoman ‘whip of external necessity’ and a european ‘privilege of backwardness’, which i argue were crucial preconditions for the eventual emergence of capitalism within europe. in the second section, i attempt to expose the limitations of methodological internalism by examining the importance of the extensive interactivity that this whip of external necessity entailed – a form of combined development. in particular i argue that the euro-ottoman ‘combination’ causally impacted european development in three crucial ways. firstly, it curtailed the imperial threat of the habsburgs, abetting the fragmentation of europe; secondly, in doing so it brought about a structural shift from mediterranean to atlantic trade and north-west european dominance; thirdly, these two factors combined to give england the geopolitical space in which the primitive accumulation of capital could take place. unevenness: a clash of social reproduction ottoman relations with the outside world have primarily been constructed through an idealised and uncritical notion of diplomatic precepts rooted in sharia law. here, the supposed self-regarded superiority of the ottomans constituted the basis of a unilateral policy toward international affairs, and a religious commitment to permanent war with europe. this mystified conception of euro-ottoman relations – articulated as a continuation of the eternal clash between christianity and islam – was captured in the literature, philosophy, and art of early modern europe. in the work of artist leonardo dati, sultan mehment ii was portrayed as a minion of the devil, while martin luther argued that the ottomans were a punishment from god for the degeneration of christianity. yet alongside this widespread belligerence, chris harman, a people’s history of the world (london: verso, ), p. ; hobson, ‘what’s at stake’, p. . jacob c. hurewitz, ‘ottoman diplomacy and the european states system’, the middle east journal, , spring ( ), pp. – ; bernard lewis, the emergence of modern turkey (london: oxford uni- versity press, ), pp. – ; thomas naff, ‘the ottoman empire and european states system’, in hadley bull and adam watson (eds), the expansion of the international society (oxford: clarendon, ), p. . bisaha, creating, p. . mustafa soykut, ‘introduction’, in mustafa soykut (ed.), historical image of the turk in europe: fifteenth century to the present (istanbul: isis press, ), p. . the ottoman origins of capitalism there were also significant levels of european appreciation for ottoman achieve- ments. for example, reflecting the resistance to the habsburg alliance, german pamphleteers downplayed the need to intervene militarily against the ottomans, with some pointing to the turks’ efficiency as a model for german reform, while the legal code established by suleiman ii was studied by a legal mission sent from england by henry viii. in their examinations of european state forms, machiavelli, bodin, bacon, montaigne, and giovolo all heralded ottoman military discipline and administrative efficiency. this mixture of fear, awe, belligerence, and admiration reflected a material relation of unevenness in which the ottomans held numerous direct advantages over their european allies and foes. the ottomans were able to raise vast and loyal armies for military campaigns, while maintaining comparatively uninterrupted lines of com- munication and supplies. ottoman intra-ruling class unity also contrasted signifi- cantly with the fragmentation associated with the parcellised sovereignty of feudal europe, a developmental advantage often exploited by the ottoman empire in military campaigns making them geopolitical accumulators – empire builders – extraordinaires. this relation of unevenness was neatly captured by aeneas sylvius (future pope pius ii) who, after the fall of constantinople in , reflected on the existential threat the ottomans posed to a disunited christendom: [christendom] is a body without a head, a republic without laws or magistrates . . . every state has a separate prince, and every prince has a separate interest . . . who will make the english love the french? who will unite the genoese and the aragonese? who will reconcile the germans with the hungarians and bohemians? . . . if you lead a small army against the turks you will easily be overcome; if a large one, it will soon fall into confusion. while europe struggled with divisions, the ottomans faced them as a unified resource- ful and disciplined force, one that was able to consistently expand into europe and beyond, absorbing and converting europeans to the ‘ottoman way’. as a contem- porary lamented: how it comes to pass, that so many of our men should continually revolt, and abjuring all christian rites, become affectors of that impious mahumetane sect, whilst on the other part we finde none or very few of those repaying unto us. stephen a. fischer-galati, ottoman imperialism and german protestantism - (cambridge, harvard university press, ), p. . braudel, the mediterranean, p. . maxime rodinson, europe and the mystique of islam (london: university of washington press: ), p. , fn. . mehmet s. birdal, the holy roman empire and the ottomans: from global imperial power to abso- lutism (london: i. b. taurus, ), pp. – . gabor agoston, ‘ottoman warfare in europe – ’, in jeremy black (ed.), european warfare, – (london: palgrave macmillan, ), pp. – ; rhoads murphey, ottoman warfare, – (london: ucl press, ), pp. – . teschke, myth, pp. – . andrew c. hess, ‘the ottoman conquest of egypt ( ) and the beginning of the sixteenth century world war’, international journal of middle east studies, : ( ), pp. – , esp. pp. – . paul coles, the ottoman impact on europe (london: thames and hudson, ), p. . rodinson, europe and the mystique of islam, p. . see also fischer-galati, ottoman imperialism, p. ; murphey, ottoman, p. ; bisaha, creating, p. ; soykut, ‘introduction’, p. ; süheyla artemel, ‘the view of the turks from the perspective of the humanists in renaissance england’, in soykut (ed.), historical image of the turk in europe (istanbul: isis press, ), pp. – , esp. pp. , ; suriaya faroqhi, the ottoman empire and the world around it (london: ib taurus, ), p. . matar, turks, p. . kerem nisancioglu the unevenness between the ottomans and europe was underpinned by the predom- inant practices of social reproduction created by forms of internal differentiation. this internally differentiated form of unevenness was expressed in two ways. the first was in the relations that pertained among social classes based on predominantly agrarian production: between exploiter and exploited (and therefore also in the forms and character of surplus appropriation by the ruling class in these respective societies); and between different sections of the ruling class (and hence political relations as such). the second was the relationship between merchants and states that these respective forms of social reproduction gave rise to. these forms of unevenness will be considered in turn. agrarian class relations and ruling class reproduction ottoman society was characterised by a tributary mode of production, defined firstly, by the vertical opposition of a ruling, tax collecting, class in a contradictory relation- ship with a class of peasants that were exploited for the appropriation of productive surplus; and secondly, by the horizontal differentiation between ‘landed nobility’ and ‘patrimonial authority’ within the tax collecting class, wherein the latter con- trolled the former as well as the means of production. the first – ruling class-peasant – division was distinct from the lord-peasant rela- tion in europe due to the appropriation of surplus through tax (as opposed to rent) collection and the regulation of appropriation by regional and central agents of the ottoman state. this meant that in comparison to europe, peasants had greater access to their surplus because of the preservation of subsistence plots, as well as state fixed limitations on taxation by local intermediaries. peasants also had inalienable rights to land, were better protected from market fluctuations, had the option – albeit limited – to legal recourse should their conditions worsen and were legally considered free. the second division – between landed nobility and patrimonial authority – was distinct from intra-ruling class relations in europe because all land was formally owned by the sultan, while military fiefs were predominantly non-hereditary, changeable, and regularly rotated amongst individuals in the ruling class. this halil berktay, ‘the feudalism debate: the turkish end – is ‘‘tax – vs. – rent’’ necessarily the product and sign of a modal difference?’, journal of peasant studies, : ( ), pp. – , esp. p. . banaji, theory, p. . caglar keyder, ‘the dissolution of the asiatic mode of production’, economy and society, : ( ), pp. – . halil inalcik, ‘state land and peasant’, in halil inalcik and donald quataert (eds), an economic and social history of the ottoman empire, – (cambridge: cambridge university press, ), pp. – , esp. p. . huri islamoglu-inan, state and peasant in the ottoman empire: agrarian power relations and regional economic development in ottoman anatolia during the sixteenth century (brill, ), p. . islamoglu-inan, state, p. . islamoglu-inan, state, pp. xiv–xv. suriaya faroqhi, ‘rural life’, in suriaya faroqhi (ed.), cambridge history of turkey vol. iii: the cambridge history of turkey: the later ottoman empire - (cambridge: cambridge univer- sity press, ), p. . anderson, lineages, p. . the ottoman origins of capitalism created a contradictory distribution of political power and surplus, forming a centre- periphery sociopolitical structure between sections of the ruling class. located pri- marily in constantinople, the ottoman centre consisted in the sultan and his slave corps – comprising a large and unified bureaucratic administration and the janissary standing army. this centralised state was coupled with devolution of power and relative autonomy of authority, jurisdiction, and religion in the ottoman provinces. as an offshoot of the devolution of power, the ottomans often conquered territories without fundamentally transforming their own peculiar rules of reproduction be it legal, ideological, and even material. consequently the ottomans proved adept at mobilising local resources and absorbing the material and ideational advances of occupied territories. (geo)political accumulation also played an essential role in maintaining the loyalty of disparate sections of the ruling class, as well as coercing rebellions when necessary. provincial power holders and janissaries were allocated spoils of conquest – often booty, but primarily land – as a means of maintaining consent, while the practice of relocating notables to different regions of the empire displaced any potential accumulation of provincial power. these devices of ruling class reproduction proved remarkably efficient, consider- ably more so than the contemporaneous feudal form found in europe. due to the nature of ottoman power-sharing and the relocation of provincial landholders, there was limited potential for unified class interests acting outside the purview of – or counter to – the interests of the ottoman state. instead, discontented sections of the ruling class sought to articulate disaffection within the confines of the extant political system, while the state was able to maintain the internal integrity of the empire by co-opting local elites or coercively centralising power. furthermore, the relatively lenient form of surplus extraction levied on ottoman peasants, as well as tolerance for local religions and identities, meant that rebellion in the countryside was a less marked feature of the ottoman tributary mode than the european feudal mode. hence there was little impulse or necessity for reform of the tributary system from above, or significant pressure for revolution from below. the unity and stability of the ottoman empire contrasted significantly with euro- pean forms of social reproduction. these too were predominantly based agrarian production where peasants had direct access to means of production and also there- fore subsistence. and as with the ottoman empire this condition meant that an aristocratic ruling class required political, ideological, and military means in order to exploit this peasantry and extract a surplus for the purpose of lordly consumption. however, unlike the ottoman empire these means were not controlled by or con- centrated in a centralised and unified state, but were dispersed across the nobility. serif mardin, ‘power, civil society and culture in the ottoman empire’, comparative studies in society and history, ( ), pp. – ; john haldon, the state and the tributary mode of produc- tion (london: verso, ), pp. – . coles, ottoman impact, pp. – . goffman, the ottoman empire, pp. – . halil inalcik, the ottoman empire: the classical age - (london: phoenix, ), pp. – ; william j, griswold, the great anatolian rebellion: - / - (berlin: klaus schwarz verlag, ), pp. – . karen barkey, bandits and bureaucrats: the ottoman route to state centralization (london: cornell university press, ), pp. – . barkey, bandits, p. . barkey, bandits, p. . barkey, bandits, pp. , . kerem nisancioglu consequently peasants were more susceptible to coercive squeezes on their produc- tivity, and had no recourse to outside legal protection from their lords. this regularly led to declining living conditions and in turn, rural rebellions. at the same time, the dispersion of coercive capabilities meant that political authority in europe was frag- mented, parcellised, and therefore also highly competitive, with heightened intra- lordly struggle taking place over territory both within and outside of feudal ‘states’. in short, both war and rebellion was more pronounced within europe than it was within ottoman territories. merchants, the state, and war these conditions determined peculiar and uneven relations between merchants and the state. because of the fragmented and parcellised character of political power, europeans that wanted to make war required extraordinary financing outside of day to day ruling class reproduction. in order to raise armies, european rulers borrowed from international banking houses or asked wealthy and powerful sections of society for contributions, either in terms of military support or taxes. this was often conducted via ‘local estates and assemblies or city-leagues in which the merchant- entrepreneurial class wielded significant – even military – power’. hence a by- product of european feudal war-making was an attendant rise in the political autonomy, power and influence of merchants, with increasing degrees of representation in the decision-making structures of states. in contrast, the ottoman empire had little requirement for monetary financing outside of the customary levies already imposed on agrarian production. conse- quently, there was scarce potential for autonomous merchant activity outside of the functional requirements of the tributary state. the relations between merchants and the ottoman ruling class were balanced considerably in favour of the latter, who e- xercised significant control over merchant activity through the guild system; con- flicts or tensions between merchants and guilds tended to curtail merchant autonomy and power, while merchant access to state apparatuses and decision-making was limited. accumulation of wealth was discouraged and restricted by controlling coin circulation, production, and prices and anti-luxury laws were deployed to confiscate merchant fortunes. interregional trade was heavily regulated, in which provisions for towns came almost entirely from their own hinterlands thus narrowing the geographical remit of production and distribution to local regions. caravan teschke, myth, pp. – . eric h. mielants, the origins of capitalism and ‘rise of the west’ (philadelphia: temple university press, ), p. . tilly, formation, pp. – . mielants, origins, p. . ibid., p. ; see also daniel chirot, ‘the rise of the west’, american sociological review, : ( ), pp. – . halil inalcik, ‘capital formation in the ottoman empire’, the journal of economic history, : ( ), pp. – , esp. p. . inalcik, ‘capital’, pp. . keyder, ‘dissolution’. inalcik, ‘capital’, pp. – , esp. p. ; suriaya faroqhi, ‘trade: regional interregional and interna- tional’, in halil inalcik and donald quataert (eds), an economic and social history of the ottoman empire, – (cambridge: cambridge university press, ), pp. – . islamoglu-inan, state, p. . the ottoman origins of capitalism endpoints geographically coincided with seats of government authority, ensuring close supervision of prices and commodities traded. tax on trade enabled state extraction of surpluses from mercantile activity. the tension between the state and merchants was also present geopolitically. for a ruling class fundamentally dependent on agriculture and tribute for their reproduc- tion, the capture of trade routes was considered functional to tributary power, to bring those outside of it imperial purview within its tributary regime. while the state could at times show signs of ‘economic intentionality’, merchants were not considered important enough for state protection or support – agriculture remained the priority. following the capture of the mamluk empire in , the ottoman naval commander selman reis believed that the portuguese could have been driven out of the india ocean. but instead, imperial policy reverted to territorial expan- sion into the agriculturally more fertile and populous territories of south east europe. that the ottomans did not pursue the indian course was primarily due to the repro- ductive requirements of a ruling class based on agrarian production, reflecting the swelling claims made by provincial notables on access to booty, land, and thus power as such. in contrast, european powers were explicitly and intimately focused on bringing under direct conquest and political control commercially valuable territories for specifically commercial purposes. the reason was due to the relative backwardness of european feudal reproduction, which was dependent of the wealth drawn from merchants and financiers to either fund (geo)political accumulation (in the case of habsburg spain and austria) or for the direct reproduction of the ruling class itself (in the case of city-states such as genoa and venice). consequently, the state was sensitive to, or at the behest of, merchant interests, wherein state resources, especially military, were deployed in order to obtain commercial advantages. and such was the extent and autonomy of merchant power that no european emperor could have withdrawn or demanded the return of ships in the indian ocean as the ottomans had done. these uneven internal relations – between ruling and ruled class in agrarian pro- duction on the one hand, and between state and merchant of the other – can there- fore be demonstrated as a determinant of an international relation of euro-ottoman unevenness – the relative backwardness of the european ruling classes, and the com- parative weakness in its form of social reproduction when opposed to the ottoman keyder, ‘dissolution’, pp. , . andrew c. hess, ‘the evolution of the ottoman seaborne empire in the age of oceanic discoveries – ’, the american historical review, : ( ), pp. – esp. p. ; hess, ‘ottoman conquest’, p. . palmira brummett, ottoman seapower and levantine diplomacy in the age of discovery (albany: state university of new york press, ), p. . salih ozbaran, ‘expansion in the southern seas’, in halil inalcik and cemal kafadar (eds), suleyman the second (ie the first) and his time (istanbul: isis press, ), pp. – , esp. p. . giancarlo casale, ‘global politics in the s: one canal, twenty thousand cannibals, and the ottoman plot to rule the world’, journal of world history, : ( ), pp. – , esp. p. ; hess, ‘conquest’, p. . faroqhi, ottoman empire, p. . philip curtin, cross-cultural trade and world history (cambridge: cambridge university press, ), pp. , . ronald findlay, ‘the roots of divergence: western economic history in comparative perspective’, american economic review, : ( ), pp. – ; leften s. stavrianos, a global history (new jersey: prentice hall ). kerem nisancioglu empire. these european ‘privileges of backwardness’ encouraged and compelled its people – both ruling and ruled classes – to develop and adopt new ways of securing their social reproduction. at the same time, the relative strength of the ottoman social form entailed a ‘disadvantage of progressiveness’, wherein the stability of social reproduction provided no immanent impulse for change or development. this relation of unevenness goes some way to explaining why the so-called miracle of capitalism would occur in europe, and why it would not be repeated in ottoman territories. that this divergence was a product of ottoman progressiveness and euro- pean backwardness suggests that eurocentric assumptions of historical priority need to be reconsidered. moreover, these two elements – ottoman strength; european privilege of backwardness – were ultimately interrelated and co-constitutive phenomena. as a consequence of its comparative strength, the geopolitical pressure of ottomans constantly affected and redirected european development, in turn compelling changes in its forms social reproduction. this meant that while the ottomans were faced as a significant existential threat, they were also an opportunity for the most backward part of europe – the north-west – to outflank and outstrip the more advanced habsburg empire and italian city-states. combination: euro-ottoman geopolitical relations due to the european condition of backwardness, the fifteenth- and sixteenth-century recovery of european feudalism, and the flourishing of commerce and the cultural renaissance that accompanied it, were directly connected to the establishment of peaceful lines of communication and trade between east and west that followed the expansion and consolidation of the ottoman empire. through the institutional support of the ottoman state, pax ottomana lowered commercial protection and transaction costs, established relatively uniform trading practices and hastened the alacrity of trade. on land and sea ottoman rule was crucial to safeguarding traders from banditry or piracy, while building roads and canal routes that would facilitate interregional trade. the emergence of a pax ottomana brought together highways of commerce linking russia and central asia with europe via the black sea, and the levant and north africa to the indian ocean where the bulk of euro-asian trade was conducted. the ottoman empire thus brought about an economic and geo- graphic combination of otherwise disparate communities, acting as ‘the hinge that connected the rapidly growing economies of europe with those of the east’ (see figure ). what trotsky would have called a ‘whip of external necessity’. kate fleet, european and islamic trade in the early ottoman state (cambridge: cambridge university press, ), p. ; r. j. barendse, ‘trade and state in the arabian seas: a survey from the fifteenth to the eighteenth century’, journal of world history, : ( ), pp. – , esp. p. ; giancarlo casale, the ottoman age of exploration (oxford: oxford university press, ), p. . james mather, pashas: traders and travellers in the islamic world (london: yale university press, ), p. ; inalcik, ‘capital’, p. , fn. ; niels stensgaard, the asian trade revolution in the seven- teenth century: the east india companies and the decline of the caravan trade (london: university of chicago, ), p. . sevket pamuk, a monetary history of the ottoman empire (cambridge: cambridge university press, ), p. ; efraim karsh, islamic imperialism (new haven: yale university press, ), p. . thomas w. gallant, ‘europe and the mediterranean: a reassessment’ in gerard delanty (ed.), europe and asia beyond east and west (london: routledge, ), p. . the ottoman origins of capitalism trade and communication between the ottomans and europe gave rise to various kinds of combined development assisting the transmission of social and technological knowledge, leading to a spurt of development in european manufacturing, particularly those sectors imitating eastern products. the boost in french economic activity following a trade agreement with the ottomans led to the proto-industrialisation of towns such as marseille. the competition in silk markets between the levant and venice inspired the creation of the hydraulic mill in bologna, which would later be adapted to construct lombe’s mill in derby in the early eighteenth century – arguably the world’s first fully mechanised factory. because ottoman merchants themselves were active agents in bolstering trade within the empire and beyond, their own credit system and methods of accumulation such as the simsar monopoly asso- ciation and mudaraba advance system became woven into the fabric of european commercial relations, prefiguring the ‘complete control of a commodity from pro- duction to sale’ that would become the hallmark of company capitalism. such combination was especially pronounced in the development of european culture over the course of the renaissance. in certain cases, european artists such jack goody, ‘europe and islam’, in gerard delanty (ed.), europe and asia beyond east and west (london: routledge, ), p. . de lamar jensen, ‘the ottoman turks in the sixteenth century french diplomacy’, the sixteenth century journal, : ( ), pp. – , esp. p. . murat cizakca, ‘price history and the bursa silk industry: a study in ottoman industrial decline, – ’, in huri islamoglu-inan (ed.), the ottoman empire and the world-economy (cambridge: cambridge university press, ), pp. – , esp. pp. – ; goody, ‘europe’, p. ; banaji, theory, pp. – . gillian darling, factory (london: reaktion, ), p. . geoffrey v. scammell, the world encompassed: the first european maritime empires, c. - (london: methuen and co. ltd. ), p. . inalcik, ‘capital’, pp. – ; goody, ‘europe’, p. . jardine, worldy goods. figure . eurasian trade routes during pax ottmana kerem nisancioglu as gentile bellini and constanzo da ferrara spent time in the ottoman court and worked under the sultan’s commission. ottoman imagery was widely featured often by italian renaissance painters seeking to elicit support for crusades by featur- ing the ottomans as the embodiment of the islamic threat. humanist literature – from thomas more to william shakespeare – would similarly deploy the ottomans as a comparative of allegorical vehicle through which medieval forms european statecraft could be analysed and criticised. this emphasis of euro-ottoman com- parison therefore reflected a period of self-examination and criticism in the context of christendom’s breakdown as a unifying principle. it was in the context of the ottoman threat that propagandists, politicians, and thinkers began talking about europe as a normative as well as geographical concept: the aforementioned aneaus sylvius invented the very adjective ‘european’ following the fall of con- stantinople to the ottomans, while habsburg and polish publicists began appealing to secular european values in order to defend hungarian territories from ottoman incursions. an ottoman ‘whip of external necessity’ euro-ottoman combined development was however most pronounced under the ‘whip’ of ottoman geopolitical pressure on europe. indeed, despite the regenerative effects of pax ottomana, for most of europe the growth of the ottoman empire was met with trepidation and hostility in equal measure. the efficacy of the ottoman military meant that from the mid-fifteenth century and ‘[u]p to there was no question of international politics, which did not somehow involve the ottomans.’ such involvement was permanent and regularly hostile. in an event that shook europe, the ottomans conquered constantinople in . by the end of fifteenth century, they had captured greece, serbia, bosnia, albania, and croatia. the ottoman whip of geopolitical pressure was not restricted to land and was often at its fiercest in the mediterranean, where military conflict tended to blight seafaring conditions often ‘cutting the arteries of venetian seaborne trade’. the spanish and the portu- guese fared little better, failing to push into a sea rife with ottoman sponsored corsair attacks on merchant ships. moreover, following ottoman conquests of the black sea and red sea, hitherto dominant european traders were only allowed conditional admittance. having obtained these territories, commercial activity became subject to aforementioned state regulations and supervision thus limiting the export of key commodities such as timber, horses, grain, and alum. jardine and brotton, global, p. . unsuccessful attempts were also made to tempt leonardo da vinci and michelangelo to the ottoman court. see michael curtis, orientalism and islam: european thinkers on oriental despotism (cambridge: cambridge university press. ), p. . soykut, ‘introduction’, p. . artemel, ‘view’, pp. – . yapp, ‘europe in the turkish mirror’, pp. – ; coles, ottoman impact, pp. – . yapp, ‘europe’, p. . coles, ottoman impact, p. . halil inalcik, ottoman empire, p. . scammell, world encompassed, p. . coles, ottoman impact, p. ; hess, forgotten frontier, p. . brummett, ottoman seapower, p. ; hess, ‘conquest’, p. ; inalcik, ottoman empire, pp. – . fleet, european and islamic trade, pp. – . the ottoman origins of capitalism having pressed on to budapest and vienna in the s, ottoman armies came into direct conflict with the habsburgs, thus instantiating a geopolitical rivalry that would continue unabated until the end of the seventeenth century. but aside from the regular use of ‘hard power’ the ottomans also sought to break the unity of the habsburg empire by deploying the more ‘soft’ methods of alliance building. the significance of these ‘unholy alliances’ was revealed in a candid admission by francis i in : i keenly desire the turk powerful and ready for war, not for himself, because he is an infidel and we are christians, but to undermine the emperor’s power to force heavy expenses upon him and to reassure all other governments against so powerful an enemy. the military pressure of the ottoman empire was a crucial contributing factor in the origins and expansion of the reformation. lutheran revolts swept through germany during a period in which the habsburgs were especially dependent on german military support and financial aid in wars against the ottomans. this only proved forthcoming on the condition that charles v agreed to religious reforms. in this context, lutherans sought to carve out greater religious freedom whenever con- flict between the ottomans and habsburgs surfaced, using the ottoman threat as a bargaining chip in negotiations with charles v. the ensuing spread of the refor- mation often occurred in territories that bore the mark of an ottoman impact – especially those affected by calvinism. these pressures underwrote the break-up of the habsburg empire – first into austro-hungarian and spanish divisions, secondly with independence for the dutch. here the ottomans again played active role, by attempting to cultivate coalitions with protestants in the low countries and moriscoes in spain. as the unifying power of christendom receded under military duress, ottoman attitudes towards religious freedom and local autonomy came to be replicated in european territories. one of the more pertinent historical peculiarities of the fifteenth and sixteenth century was the inability of the habsburg emperors to fulfil the holy mission of establishing and maintaining an imperial hegemony in the lands of christendom. in many ways it was the causal impact of the ottoman ‘whip of external necessity’ that ‘frustrated universal imperial ambitions’ by perpetuating the ‘multiple polities within the cultural unity of christian europe’. the uneven and combined devel- opment of relations between the ottomans and europe therefore created further developmental unevenness by exacerbating the fragmented and divided character of gabor agoston, ‘information, ideology and the limits of imperial policy: ottoman grand strategy in the context of ottoman-habsburg rivalry’, in virginia askan and daniel goffman (eds), the early modern ottomans: remapping the empire (cambridge:cambridge university press, ). john elliot, ‘ottoman-habsburg rivalry: the european perspective’, in halil inalcik and cemal kafadar (eds), suleyman the second (ie the first) and his time (istanbul: isis press, ), pp. – , esp. p. . fischer-galati, ottoman imperialism. fischer-galati, ottoman imperialism; daniel h. nexon, the struggle for power in early modern europe (oxford: princeton university press, ), p. . elliot, ‘ottoman-habsburg rivalry’, p. . coles, the ottoman impact, p. ; nexon, struggle, p. ; andrew c hess, the forgotten frontier: a history of the sixteenth century ibero-african frontier (chicago: university of chicago press, ), p. . see also wallerstein world-system, p. ; chirot, ‘rise’, p. ; and paul kennedy, the rise and fall of the great powers (london: unwin hyman, ), pp. – . benno teschke, myth, p. ; tilly, formation, p. . kerem nisancioglu european feudalism. consequently, ‘combination’ was itself felt unevenly, with its specific causal effects varying across different european states. the more ‘advanced’ european states constituted the primary focus of ottoman military operations, while alliances with more ‘backward’ european states were utilised to balance against the habsburgs. as such, while the habsburgs, genoese, venetians, spanish, and portu- guese were habitually engaged with the ottomans, north-western european states such as france, the low countries, and particularly britain were afforded the geo- political space required to conduct modern state-building. this ‘privilege of back- wardness’ became manifest along two causal vectors of combination – firstly, by bringing about a structural shift away from the dominance of the mediterranean to the atlantic; secondly, by isolating england from habsburg geopolitical pressure. the ottoman blockade and the emergence of the atlantic through imperial conquest, many of the key channels of european trade with the east fell under ottoman control. thus besides facilitating european commerce in general, pax ottomana broke the monopoly previously held by leading traders (pri- marily venetian and genoese) in the mediterranean and black sea, exposing these markets to competition from north-west europeans, as well as ragusan, armenian, and jewish merchants under ottoman suzerainty. by blocking the most dominant european powers from their customary conduits to eastern markets, the ottomans directly compelled them to pursue alternative routes. having lost its black sea monopoly, genoa sought to circumvent the ottoman passage to indian and far eastern markets, while turning to private business and financial operations in western europe and the atlantic. with the ottoman dominated mediterranean inaccessible to genoese capital, the atlantic became a considerably more promising avenue for commercial activity. thus both in spain and in portugal, the relation- ship between genoese merchant-financiers and new world colonialists grew as genoa’s position in the eastern mediterranean declined. the atlantic ventures that this alliance gave rise to were ultimately possible through the investments of genoese capital that had been forced out of the mediterranean by the ottomans. ‘it was’, writes eric mielants, ‘precisely the inter-city-state competition for access to eastern markets and the threat of the expanding ottoman empire that led to the discovery of the americas’. capitulations came to play a major role in this process, mediating european commercial and ottoman geopolitical interests through alliance building on the one scammell, world encompassed, pp. – ; hess, ‘conquest’, p. . ronald s. love, maritime exploration in the age of discovery, - (london: greenwood publishing group, ), pp. – . scammell, world encompassed, p. . ibid., p. . coles, ottoman impact, p. ; charles issawi, ‘the ottoman empire in the european world economy, – ’, in k. karpat (ed.), the ottoman state and its place in world history (leiden: brill, ), pp. – , esp. p. . mielants, origins, p. . these were unilaterally granted ottoman diplomatic agreements which provided non-ottoman recipi- ents with basic legal rights and privileges within the empire’s territories while regulating trade relations through the establishment of ordinary customs, taxes, and dues. bulut has compared capitulations to ‘most favoured nation’ trade agreements, mehmet bulut, ottoman dutch economic relations in the early modern period – (veloren: hilversum, ), p. . see also eldem, ‘capitulations and western trade’, in faroqhi (ed.), cambridge history of turkey vol. ii, i pp. – . the ottoman origins of capitalism hand and blockading rivals on the other. the most commercially ‘advanced’ euro- pean states – the habsburgs, genoese, venetians, spanish, and portuguese – were excluded, while the more ‘backward’ french ( ), english ( ), and dutch ( ) were granted capitulations. political in scope for the ottomans, these commer- cial agreements proved an economic boon for the merchants of north-west europe. states that had been otherwise peripheral to the mediterranean (and thus eurasian) commerce were now able to trade under significantly advantageous terms compared to their competitors. plugged into the security afforded by the ottoman state along its trade routes, north-west european connections with asian commodity markets were significantly expedited. over the course of the sixteenth century, ottoman geopolitical manoeuvres thus brought about a ‘structural shift’, from the commercial dominance of adriatic city-states such as genoa and venice, towards english and dutch supremacy. the competition over markets that arose from this shift gave a major impulse to the de- velopment of company capitalism and anticipated the increasing unity of merchant and state interests that became a hallmark of the english and dutch politics in the seventeenth and eighteenth century. these developments would stimulate efforts to build permanent circuits of capital through the advance system, in turn escalating merchant intervention and control over international production. the ottoman buffer and english primitive accumulation the states best placed to take advantage of this structural shift were those where the ottoman geopolitical buffer was most keenly felt. as we have seen the protagonists most intensely involved in the continental conflicts of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries were concerned with the ottoman presence in the mediterranean and south-east europe. in this context england featured as little more than an ‘impotent onlooker’ in european affairs. compared to the near permanence of warfare on the continent, early modern england was marked by a condition of geopolitical isolation. england’s lack of involvement in continental conflicts from onwards was a fundamental factor in its development towards capitalism. one of the more peculiar features of tudor ‘absolutism’ flowed directly from this isolation – a regression in the military resources held by the state and aristocracy. for example, in the s the spanish and english military manpower numbered bulut, ottoman dutch, p. ; bruce mcgowan, economic life in the ottoman empire: taxation, trade and the struggle for land (cambridge: cambridge university press, ), p. . mather, pashas, p. . mielants, origins, p. . banaji, theory, pp. – . anderson, lineages, p. . theda skocpol, ‘wallerstein’s world capitalist system: a theoretical and historical critique’, american journal of sociology, : ( ), pp. – , esp. p. ; fernand braudel, afterthoughts on material civilization and capitalism (london: john hopkins university press, ), pp. – ; derek sayer, ‘a notable administration: english state formation and the rise of capitalism’, american journal of sociology, : ( ), pp. – , esp. p. . each of these authors em- phasise on england’s island geography as an explanation for its isolation. the prevalence of naval warfare by the sixteenth century suggests that such an explanation is severely limited; england was open to invasion should the will or compulsion have arisen. see susan rose, medieval naval warfare, - (london:routledge, ); michael a. palmer, command at sea: naval command and control since the sixteenth century (london: harvard university press, ). kerem nisancioglu , and , men respectively. by the s, spain’s manpower had risen to , while england’s manpower had fallen by , to , . disarmament among the english aristocracy was even more pronounced: ‘in , every english peer bore arms; by elizabeth’s time . . . only half the aristocracy had any fighting experience’. this demilitarisation meant that england effectively ‘skipped over’ the development of strong, tax appropriating bureaucratic state structures character- istic of french and spanish absolutism in the sixteenth century onwards. this exceptional historical trajectory proved especially conducive to capitalist development in the sixteenth century. firstly, demilitarisation within the nobility meant limited access to the means of coercion required to raise feudal rates of exploi- tation. this inability to ‘squeeze’ peasant surpluses meant that the option of dispossessing peasants and exploiting them through market mechanisms became an increasingly preferable means for ruling class reproduction. secondly, the english state did not possess the coercive or administrative strength to prevent attempts by the nobility to ‘engross, consolidate and enclose land’. this contrasted with, for example, the french state, which competed with the nobility over agrarian surpluses by habitually protecting the peasantry from attempts at dispossession. thus, thirdly, isolation meant that the english ruling class was unusually homogenous, with a relative absence of social stratification across the state, the pre-existing landed aristocracy and an emergent commercial class. this was because under conditions of demilitarisation, influence and office replaced patented peerage as a basis for aristocratic power, making the landed class peculiarly ‘civilian’, ‘commercial’, and ‘common’. these three factors help to explain one of the fundamental propositions of robert brenner’s argument of the origins of capitalism: that it was in england alone that agrarian revolts were met with a unified and successful attempt by the state and landed class to remove the peasantry from their land through the enclosures. as peasants were dispossessed, they turned to an alternative means to secure their means of sub- sistence and thus social reproduction: selling their labour to landlords and capitalist tenants in return for a wage. the persistent success of the state-nobility alliance in dispossessing the peasantry of the means of production therefore led to the emer- gence of ‘free’ class of wage-labourers. the social property relations through which surplus was appropriated were thus transformed, from the extra-economic means of feudalism to the ‘economic’ or ‘market’ mechanisms of agrarian capitalism. considering that english isolation was such a crucial condition for the processes outlined in the ‘brenner thesis’, a fuller exposition of capitalism’s origins requires kennedy, rise, p. . anderson, lineages, p. . skocpol, ‘wallerstein’s world’, p. . brenner, ‘agrarian class’, p. . ellen wood, the origin of capitalism, p. . skocpol, ‘wallerstein’s world’, p. ; cf. brenner, ‘agrarian class’, p. . brenner, ‘agrarian roots’, p. . wood, origin, p. ; brenner, ‘agrarian roots’, p. ; g. e. aylmer, ‘the peculiarities of the english state’, journal of historical sociology, : ( ), pp. – . sayer, ‘notable’, p. ; anderson, lineages, p. . brenner, ‘the agrarian roots’, p. . brenner, ‘agrarian class’, p. . for a more in depth critique of the limits of brenner’s account, see anievas and nisancioglu, ‘what’s at stake’. the ottoman origins of capitalism that this isolation is satisfactorily accounted for. as the preceding argument has shown, this isolation should be understood as an inter-societal condition arising from the continental preoccupation with the ottoman empire. the peculiar social form that this isolation gave rise to proved especially conducive to the symbiotic unity of state and landed class interests that underpinned the growth agrarian capitalism in england. when considered in this specifically international context, english development in the sixteenth century can be best understood as a form of ‘combined development’; the developmental outcomes of an inter-societal condition rooted in the uneven relation of england to the euro-ottoman geopolitical milieu. ottoman geopolitical pressure must therefore be seen as a cause in the emergence of agrarian capitalism in england. conclusion: the ottoman empire as a vector of u&cd the duality of euro-ottoman relations – both belligerent and collaborative – was thus a crucial driver in some of the key developments in the early modern period. by establishing a node of international trade, the ottomans contributed to the inter- nationalisation of merchant activity and a cultural revival in europe. but more significantly, through its military conflict with the habsburgs, the ottomans abetted the reformation and break-up of habsburg hegemony. this gave north-west europe the geopolitical space to conduct modern state-building. in particular, this buffer gave rise to peculiar fusion of interests among the landed nobility and the state in england, which was a crucial cause in the process of primitive capitalist accumula- tion. moreover, through its geopolitical policies, the ottomans actively and directly brought about a structural shift away from mediterranean trade and the con- comitant ascendancy of italian city-states, toward the atlantic powers that would eventually come to dominate the world through colonialism. it must be emphasised that none of these developments were sufficient conditions for the emergence of capitalism; there were numerous other causal chains – vectors of uneven and com- bined development – both european and extra-european that must be incorporated into a full understanding of capitalism’s origins. yet it is difficult to establish a proper appreciation of the key developments in sixteenth-century history and the european trajectory towards capitalism without looking at the euro-ottoman rela- tion as a fundamental determinant. this additional empirical framework raises serious questions around the theorisa- tion of capitalism’s origins. indeed, a central contention of this article is that the spatial limitations imposed by eurocentrism have had significant consequences for the manner in which we theorise historical processes. in presenting this argument, i hope to have contributed to the recent explosion in literature that has sought to ‘provincialise europe’, by bringing out the international dimension of capitalism’s development. but moreover, i have sought to provide an alternative theoretical framework – trotsky’s theory of uneven and combined development – within which this non-eurocentric historical analysis can contribute to a renewed conceptu- alisation of capitalism’s origins. for u&cd not only helps us capture the historical significance of interactive relations between societies, it also gives these relations theoretical expression, thus elevating their importance as a field of investigation; one that is irreducible to, yet fundamentally related to, the sociology and history of kerem nisancioglu any given society. in doing so, u&cd broadens our field of vision beyond the con- fines of eurocentrism, by internalising at the level of theory a dimension of concrete reality – ‘the international’ – hitherto considered external to dominant studies of the origins of capitalism. my argument thus also raises the significance of (a sociologi- cally sensitive) ir as a privileged vantage point from which to analyse the socially distinct determinations arising from the international that fed into the origins of capitalism. what of the supposed eurocentrism of u&cd itself? as we have seen, the limi- tation of u&cd to the capitalist epoch tends to reproduce the eurocentric assump- tions of historical priority and methodological internalism. i have argued that by breaking out of the temporal fetters of capitalism, u&cd can also transcend the spatial provincialism associated with eurocentric social theory. by theorising the very history of capitalism’s origins as the combined product of a multiplicity of spatio-temporally uneven determinations, the incorporation of non-europeans into this process is opened as a potentially illuminating avenue for further research. as such, both theoretical and historical elements also support calls for the extension of u&cd beyond the epoch of capitalism alone by positing its transhistorical and therefore general applicability. the ottoman origins of capitalism accueil de dspace toggle navigation 	 	 search 	 ouvrir une session 	 deposit toggle navigation toggle navigation 	 for librarians 	 for publishers 	 for researchers 	 funders 	 resources 	 oapen 	 for librarians 	 for publishers 	 for researchers 	 funders 	 resources 	 oapen 	   accueil de dspace javascript is disabled for your browser. some features of this site may not work without it. recently added 	 freedom of the press dosenrode, søren ( ) since antiquity it has been known that without the freedom to speak, and later to publish, the road to fanaticism and totalitarianism lies wide open. this book focuses on how the 'press' reacted, when press freedom was ... 	 the mountains have come closer miller, jim wayne ( ) mountains have come closer is a collection of poems by jim wayne miller which draw on his life experiences growing up and living in appalachia. miller was awarded the thomas wolfe award for the book in . 	 blue ridge parkway beatty, steven m.; 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research and innovation programme under grant agreement no , , and . oapen is based in the netherlands, with its registered office in the national library in the hague. director: niels stern address: oapen foundation prins willem-alexanderhof be the hague postal address: oapen foundation p.o. box lk the hague websites: oapen home: www.oapen.org oapen library: library.oapen.org doab: www.doabooks.org © oapen       information processor - digital form with computational means information processor -  digital form with computational means “give me a gun and i will make all buildings move.” bruno latour, albena yaneva § . introduction how computational technology start to take place and gradually become being heavily involved/implemented in the design process of architectural design. in the architecture domain, not only the proportion of the assistance from  computational techniques has been increasing exponentially, but also, the role  they play has been gradually shifting from a supporting one to a generative one. no  longer limited to being a complex mathematics calculator, computers, have become  a ubiquitous necessity in our daily life and even influence the way we live. this, is  especially true for the young generation who were born in this digital world, mainly  referred to as the “generation z” . business insider, a fast-growing business media  website, mentioned that “gen z-ers are digitally over-connected. they multitask  across at least five screens daily and spend  % of their time outside of school with  computers or mobile devices, compared to  %   years ago, according to the  generation z are the cohort of people born after the millennials. the generation is generally defined with birth  years ranging from the late  s through the  s or from the early  s to around  . please see the  details through: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/generation_z toc hypercell sparks & honey report .” when alan turing first invented the room-sized “turing  machine” to decipher nazi codes, he couldn’t have expected that this giant machine  could one day be put into one’s pocket and efficiently compute a million times more  data. as compared to the era of tools, such as paper and pen, the computer, in today’s  context has been heavily utilized and relied upon as a powerful instrument. this change  is remarkable, considering the relatively short period of time, especially after    when the first ibm personal computer was released (mitchell,  ). architecture  design cannot be excluded from this inevitable technological tendency. even the most  conservative architecture firms are now required to deliver digital technical drawings  to communicate amongst designers, clients, and construction firms in the present  scenario. incorporating computer technology in today’s context also provides young  designers the opportunity to experiment with creating relatively complex geometry  based architectural space. but before applying this powerful technology in architectural  design, the crucial knowledge behind it that architects had to understand and realize  was the manner and procedure of “processing of information”. without information,  the computer would be just lying on one’s desk as a useless cube, like a vehicle  without a driver, or a body without a soul. the shifting roles of computer technology in  architectural design are obviously defined by the manner of how designers interpret,  digest and operate/process the streams of information flow. however, dealing with information is not new to architectural design, which already  thrived on multi-stakeholder based information exchange long before computers  arrived. in order to preserve the measurements underlying his design ideas,  brunelleschi, as an architect in the early renaissance, investigated means of making  projective geometric drawings in order to capture  -dimensional information,  which subsequently led to the development of parametric perspective space for  the first time (lorenzo-eiroa, form:in:form on the relationship between digital  signifiers and formal autonomy,  ). during the  th and  th century, girard  desargues developed the concept of “the point at infinity” to create an alternative  way of constructing euclidean geometry in perspective drawings by using vanishing  points as references (lorenzo-eiroa, form:in:form on the relationship between  digital signifiers and formal autonomy,  ). not to mention the great influential  invention of the cartesian coordinate system by rené descartes, who, set up  the fundamental principles of spatial collaboration both in  d and  d graphics.  implausible, in the early  th century, when paper began to replace parchment as  a drawing medium, italian architects had well understood the concept of graphic  projection as communication document shared amongst people dedicated to the  please see the full report and statistics through the website referred: http://www.businessinsider.com/genera- tion-z-spending-habits- - ?ir=t toc   information processor - digital form with computational means construction process (weisberg,  ). the communication documents here refer  to the so-called technical/engineering drawings as a medium where the projects  are represented in a proper scale, with precise measurements and understandable  geometric visualization. to use these technical/engineering drawings not only in  terms of translating, preserving, creating but also communicating information of  their spatial ideas, architects have shown remarkable abilities to confront information  communication as a necessity in the design process, and also reveal the intensive and  intimate relationships between information and form since the renaissance. in other  words, architectural design can be seen as an on-going process coupled with streams  of information in order to seek/generate a relatively rational form as a specific resulting  outcome (with/without computational techniques). figure  .   left: course in airplane lofting, burgard high school, buffalo, ny, usa, january i,  . right:  picture of people working on airplain lofting(source: http://cornelljournalofarchitecture.cornell.edu/read. html?id= , https://i.pinimg.com/ x/ e/ /bb/ e bbaa c fd afb cfe .jpg). with the original intention of “technical/engineering drawings”, designers  (not only architects) basically created two fundamental methods of dealing with  information pragmatically for a long time:  . to store precise references for fabrication  and construction.  . to present design ideas to the clients with understandable  visualization as a communicating medium. but the increasing intricacy of the design,  the precise demands for measurements, and the amount of requirements for the  reproduction of construction drawings made it extremely difficult to manually illustrate  hard copies with hand drawing by traditional tools such as pen, paper, and ruler.  take aeronautical drawings for example, it is even more challenging, because of the  demands to produce accurate drawings at  :  scale for large components of an aircraft,  toc hypercell where it is impossible to convert smaller drawings into the templates needed for  production (weisberg,  )(figure  . ). this is the moment when computers started  to become important and be considered as a new medium/tool to assist and accelerate  both the design and production processes. it was also this time when the terminology  of “cad”(computer aided design) was first introduced to the world. although the main  goals of cad techniques back then still remained embedded in storing and presenting  designs, computational techniques have increasingly changed their role by providing  multiple ways of generating, analyzing and visualizing data. this in-turn has resulted  in developing informed complex geometry based design solution sets as novel spatial  outcomes. the form is interplaying amongst itself as an information emergence by executing particular approaches for conveying information. “design is the computation of shape information that is needed to guide fabrication or construction of an artefact” is an apt definition for the early stage of computer aided  design by william mitchell (mitchell,  ). however, in this case, information is  mainly considered as shape/geometry related data, extracted from a pre-conceived  form to assist in any production process after the design decisions have been mostly  completed. however, since years of developments and evolutions of the computer  technology utilized in architectural design, computers are not treated merely as  drawing machines to generate documents for construction work, or modeling  machines to create fascinating rendering graphics to present and convince clients.  the computation technology has successfully adapted/shifted itself to become an  “information processor” rather than a pure “information duplicator”. in the publication  of “algorithm form” (terzidis,  ), kostas terzids made an explicit distinction  about “computerization” and “computation”. “the dominant mode of utilizing computers in architecture today is that of computerization; entities or processes that are already conceptualized in the designer’s mind are entered, manipulated or stored in a computer system. in contrast, computation or computing, as a computer-based design tool, is generally limited. the problem with this situation is that designers do not take advantage of the computational power of the computer”. this concise quote  not only reveals existing problems of architects being predominantly occupied with  computerization, yet, it also indicates a clear turning point of feeding and extracting  information to and from computers in a different but also efficient way. “form” has always been a complicated and debated topic as regards the role it plays  in architectural design no matter what kind of dogma is followed. here, it’s crucial  to state that this research emphasizes that form should be perceived as having  an intimate relationship with relevant contextual data in a dynamic fashion, and  the approaches involved in processing this data into form-finding information.  toc     information processor - digital form with computational means the key concept delivered here is: “the form can be informed by contextual information as a continual process”. the following sections will open up discussions  focusing on different strategies for associating form and information with different  computational methodologies in architectural design (computation) far beyond the  conventional computational approaches which served towards storing and presenting  (computerization) form. these methodologies have been categorized as: form sculptor, form generator, form animator, and form interactor. § . form sculptor = utilizing d software intuitively as an exploration tool for design purposes/intentions. form sculptor is defined as a method wherein existing  d software is used to explore  design ideas in architecture. it doesn’t sound like an innovative idea at all, but in fact,  this methodology has been only executed since just over a decade. sketchpad (figure  . ), developed by ivan sutherland using the tx-  computer in lincoln laboratory in  , which was around   years before ibm released the first personal computer was  one of the first pioneering cad systems (weisberg,  ). ivan’s original idea about  sketchpad operating in the design process was clearly written in his ph.d. dissertation:  “construction of a drawing with sketchpad is itself a model of the design process”  (sutherland,  ). however, major developments of implementing computer graphic  systems in architectural design went in a contrary direction inclined towards becoming  a convincing visualized representation of the designers’ ultimate vision of the project.  this conservative way of using computer graphic systems as a virtual template/ canvas or material to draw or model the final design project is obviously considered  as a “computerization” process. certainly, there is no design intention involved in the  words and notions of making a “digital drawing” or “digital model”, which is in a sense  the common and typical misleading idea of the terminology of “digital architecture”  and “caad process” prevalent amongst the general public. architects who engage  with reproducing and storing tasks for the purpose of re-presenting their designs  virtually with digital tools should thus not be considered as members of the “digital  architecture” realm. form sculptor does not refer to such kind of computerized  architecture. please check the videos for more information about sketchpad: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=usy- ot_ha_ba and https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bkm cmrqk o. toc hypercell manifesting curvilinear geometries has always been seen as a difficult geometric task  within digital software and fabrication sectors for the architectural community. this  issue, however, has been successfully addressed within the automobile, aircraft and  naval shipbuilding industry with “computer numerical controlled” (cnc) machines  for fabrication purposes. but long before the computer was invented, analog crafting  methods of building curvilinear structures have been developed with relatively  conventional tools and devices. for instance, lofting is one of the crucial techniques  of constructing a boat frame through several sectional profiles, and sweeping is  another approach by carving out clay or sand as a doubly curved surface from the other  directions perpendicular to the lofting axis. both of these are fundamental functions in  surface modeling software (young,  ). it took a few years for computer scientists  to translate most of these crafting techniques into a computer algorithm to build up a  curvilinear line with compatible computational processing power so that it appeared  on screen in real-time. for instance, albeit it’s still being in a wireframe geometric  system, pierre bezier, in  , while working with renault managed to mathematically  define a digital automobile surface and generate data corresponding to it in order to  drive a milling machine for production. this is when he created and implemented  the well-known techniques behind the bezier curves and surfaces. a year later, at the  “prolamat” conference, ian braid from cambridge’s cad center, presented build  using b-rep(boundary representation) technology for  d modeling in  . at the  same conference, professor n. okino from hokkaido university has developed a csg- based solid modeling which could operate boolean combination with primitive shapes.  b-spline(basic spline), originally represented as a long strip of wood or metal to mark  out the curves created by the lofting profiles while building a boat, was also described  as a new digital approach by rich risenfeld, a ph.d. graduate of syracuse university in  the same year. two more ph.d.’s from syracuse university, ken versprille and lewis  knapp, are credited by many people as being the developers and key figures behind the  evolution of nurbs (non-uniform rational b-spline) around   to   (weisberg,  ). all the aforementioned researchers contributed to making a huge leap not only  in the realm of cad but also cg (computer graphics ), but it was still somehow a bit  difficult for architectural designers to execute directly such computer programs even  during the year   when autocad initiated its launch of the first pc version software  and took over the design software market. after years of evolution of ui (user interface)  of modeling software, architects can now freely manipulate and improvise  d modeling  functions to create complex shapes. with this freedom of shape making, computers are  now involved in the design process itself, rather than being used as a representational  machine duplicating the designers’ ultimate ideas. this conclusion coincidentally  matches to what mario carpo stated in his article, an introduction of “twenty years of digital design” (carpo,  ), “in	fact,	in	the	first	instance,	a	meaningful	building	 of the digital age is not just any building that was designed and built using digital tools: it is one that could not have been either designed or built without them”.  toc   information processor - digital form with computational means thus, form sculptor should be seen as an approach where computational power  becomes a necessity for discovering not only the form but also the spatial quality of  architecture. figure  .   introducing and demoing the sketchpad to the general public on a tv program. (source: https:// www.youtube.com/watch?v=usyot_ha_ba). under this definition, architects who have been metaphorically deemed to be  form sculptors, try to explore the diversity of forms to a certain extent by utilizing  the capability of the  d software. forms should be seen as a “formation” process  rather than a static and solid result. unlike the real sculptors, who execute crafting  techniques, like carving, shaping, modeling and fashioning according to chosen  materials in the real physical world, the form sculptor deploys essential transformation  functions within the selected  d software, such as scaling, shifting, twisting, tapering,  etc. in general digital modeling, and lofting, sweeping, patching, fairing, etc. in surface  modeling work with principles of b-spline, b-rep, nurbs or even topological (blob)  calculation to determine the shapes of the objects in a virtual reality space. however,  a crucial aspect has to be repeatedly emphasized here: ideally, form sculpting, as a computational approach, should go beyond utilizing computer technology to produce  pre-determined form. on the contrary, such free form manipulation with user-friendly  interfaces in current  d modeling software undoubtedly enhance design creativity  and tend to further architectural development to challenge the conventional and  conservative definition of space and functions (carpo,  ). in the stage of the form sculptor, the required information for the design tasks can be searched, filtered and  digested during the operations of the modeling process with the powerful  d software,  and simultaneously collaborating with the designer’s mind. architects gain complex  form modeling based advantages from powerful  d modeling software, while the  toc hypercell disadvantages/missed opportunities are revealed from the way these are utilized.  since the form sculptor relies too heavily on existing generic modeling functions,  to a certain extent it constrains the creativity within the box of “default modeling  functions”. besides, the operation of form modeling remains a relatively linear  procedure which also further limits the potentials of computational processes which  could utilize modeling processes from a distributed perspective, akin to a swarm. in  other words, modeling each and every step of the formation process in linear detail is a  misuse of the powerful computational technology in design. the other crucial critique  of form sculptor is that the design output depends too much on an architect’s personal  intuitive sensibility for aesthetics, albeit this also is a central issue in most other design  methods wherein subjectivity determining computational processes remains difficult  to prevent. in order to search for solutions to such challenges, some architects decided  to look for an answer by shifting from the “form sculptor” to the “form generator ”  methodology as a potential escape. § . form generator = development of algorithms with multiple parametric inputs to generate performative forms associated with the appropriate usage of computational power in architectural design. the “algorithm” as an information processor, obviously becomes the crucial element  within the form generating process. but before rapidly jumping into the world of  algorithms, it’s crucial to acknowledge the time when complex geometries were being  visualized without the assistance of computers but via mechanical tools. this will help  in establishing hidden connections leading to today’s algorithmic and coding driven  innovations. so to begin with a different starting point, instead of relating directly to  mathematical formulas, algorithms can in a sense be realized as physical instruments  to illustrate simple to complex geometric principles via mechanical tools since  yesteryears. parametric thinking resembles the logic behind mechanical equipment,  which has been used for decades as tools to record crucial physical notation (such  as a drafting compass). for instance, albrecht dürer, who demonstrated curvilinear- line tracing during the time of german renaissance (cache,  ). the illustrating  instruments albrecht dürer invented to a certain extent have already embedded  the relevant algorithms defined according to the combination of a mechanisms’  movements and the equipment’s dimensions in a parametric relationship. more  importantly, these logics underlie ways in which computers can realize similar  toc   information processor - digital form with computational means graphical effects via algorithms on screen in real time. most of these drafting tools can  be seen as a physical realization of the algorithms/formulas. take the simple drafting  compass as a common example, with its dimensions, it can concisely define the central  point with the needle in one leg and open up a certain distance as a radius with the  other leg attached to a pen. then once the needle is fixed on the paper, the movement  of spinning the head of the compass to make traces of the pen can be interpreted as a  methodology to draw a perfect circle. this fundamental setting can be easily translated  and applied to the computer as an algorithmic code to exhibit another perfect circle  digitally on screen. here, it is crucial to point out that without numerous explorations  with such inventions of illustrating tools, computer graphics as a base of digital design  would have been relatively difficult to realize through scripting alone. figure  .   a drawing showing the usage of the perspective drawing instrument invented by albrecht dürer in  the  th century (source: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/file:duerer_underweysung_der_messung_ fig_ _page_ .jpg ) in “underweysung der messung (instrument in measurement)” (dürer, albrecht &  formschneider, h. andreas (nürnberg),  ) several curvilinear geometries are  seen as the ancestors of b-spline and nurbs used in current cad software, such as  toc hypercell snail curve, spiral curve, epicyclic circle, serpentine curve (even in  d). these were  demonstrated by albrecht dürer’s incredible mechanical drafting instruments.  amongst one of the first theoreticians of perspective, he even invented the first  mechanical imaging device requiring no human eyes as references to visualize  d  space on a  d planar surface (figure  . ). if dürer’s instruments can be interpreted  as a graphics generating tool, so do algorithms in computers which can be seen as  parametric visualization machines. the algorithms and parametric principles executed  by the form generator are akin to albrecht dürer’s physical instruments, attempting  to discover more complex spatial formations with the assistance of computing power.  this kind of parametric design thinking had been ignored for years until the invention  of computers showed their potential in architectural design for generating relatively  complex shapes under the demands initiated from the deconstruction movement  (deconstructivism) (carpo,  ). who would have imagined that this form-finding  process with parametric algorithms would become mainstream today through the  possibilities offered by coding techniques? so far in this section of the form generator, algorithms were interpreted to play the  roles of form finding/generating processes/tools operating on the input of a geno- type, which results in the production of pheno-type, without offering insight into  the generative process (akin to a blackbox). this sentiment is echoed in malcolm  mccullough’s article “ years of scripted space” (mccullough,  ): “first you set up some rules for generating forms, then you simulate them to see what kind of a design world they create and then you go back and tweak the rules”. especially after  user-friendly visual programming languages were introduced to architectural design  within parametric modeling software suits such as grasshopper in rhino, dynamo  in revit, young architects were all fascinated to see what parametric computational  technology can offer and were tempted to use these for the sake of generating more  complex design. instead of manipulating the virtual model with the default modeling  functions of the  d software step by step, architects can now generate thousands of  iterations of emergent outcomes with different sets of input variables fed into the same  algorithm within a short period of time. this ability to discover novel emergent forms by  harnessing computational power can be seen as a push in the right direction if compared  to acts of modeling a pre-determined form. influenced by scientific discoveries, such  as system theory, complex science and genetic engineering, and the improvement of  personal computational processing power, some architects began to execute well-known  algorithms, such as l-system, fractals, subdivisions, genetic algorithms, game of life,  etc., to generate complex geometric shapes related to their design concepts. however, in  less than five years of development, a plethora of misuse of algorithms only for the sake  of making complex desired forms to satisfy the personal desire of architects has become  unprecedented. such a trend of processing computational algorithms in architectural  design fails to empower architecture in the digital age. toc   information processor - digital form with computational means for digital architecture to be seen as a continuation of deconstruction, computation  should have a chance to challenge the stereotypical definition of architecture followed  for thousands of years, not only in terms of “the appearance of form” but also its  fundamental essence, which remains somehow missing in this category. the “form generator”/algorithms applied here should be capable of filtering excessive data  into useful information to produce meaningful results not to be judged by aesthetic  intuitive evaluation. creating an algorithm should be seen as an inclusive part of the  design in the process of the form generator. no matter how simple or complicated the  algorithm is, the utilization of the algorithm should be embedded within contextual  data to aid in the informed generation of form rather than being used as a tool for  purely aesthetics driven form generation. john frazer’s quote in his work, “an evolutionary architecture”, “what we are evolving are the rules for generating forms, rather than the forms themselves” (frazer,  ), adequately portrays the ideal  definition of the form generator. § . form animator = a process wherein surrounding/contextual forces become instrumental in actuating the evolution of form to ultimately reach a dynamic equilibrium in real time. information undoubtedly involves a dynamic flow of data, so should form, if  interpreted as a representation of this information. therefore, the form animator must have the ability to deal with the dynamic flow of information in real time. the  form animator portrayed as a real-time adaptive information processor can drive  its represented form as an actively morphing object following the rules of dynamic  equilibrium. if this is still too abstract to understand, try to imagine a free-falling  raindrop from the sky. it continuously morphs its form each and every minute based on  its interaction with the surrounding forces and the principles of dynamic equilibrium,  until it lands. the name of the form animator is derived from the well-known article  “animate form” by greg lynn (lynn,  ), but the essence of the form animator is mostly pointing against what greg lynn states. greg lynn tried to make a distinction  between “motion” implying movement and action, and “animation” implying the  evolution of a form and its shaping force. but under the definition of form animator, in this research, these two categories of motion and animation involves different time- scales: a relatively slow morphological progress of growth or an immediate reaction  via fast movement. in other words, a form, if seen as a mathematical representation,  should consider relevant forces/parameters as dynamic variables to alter the resulting  toc hypercell shape through time. this, coincidentally, matches the central idea described in “on growth and form” by d’arcy thompson (thompson,  )(figure  . ) long before  greg lynn’s “animate form”. as a digital pioneer, greg lynn, in “animate form”,  attempts to break the dominant cultural expectations from architecture, which implied  architecture to be static and permanent. this is achieved by utilizing computational  topological modeling tools, such as b-spline, b-rep and blob techniques with  continuous mathematical relationships to search for an optimized/universal  geometric solution: a continuous unibody dealing with all the potential vector forces  around it. although simulation engines work in advanced forms in contemporary cad  software, such as maya, it still seems inefficient to manually drag control points of  a relevant b-rep body to model an optimized form and to examine it back and forth  using evaluation tools. the form generator, with the assistance of computational  technology, can generate optimized solutions, given a set of parametric inputs and  fitness criteria. but if we accept that “information is dynamic”, to a certain extent, the  input parameters for generating form could also acquire a dynamic nature. this is  what the form animator takes into consideration and should be thus seen as dealing  with dynamic parametric inputs, which are able to produce multiple optimized sets of  results. figure  .   analyzing the various morphology of animals using deformable grids by d’arcy thompson (source:  on growth and form, the complete revised edition, new york: dover publications, inc.,  ). “the problem with buildings is that they look desperately static,” says bruno latour,  who also further indicates that this is connected with the fundamental communicating  medium, which architects use, namely, “the drawings” which are fixed to a particular  perspective view illustrated in euclidean space (latour, b., & yaneva, a.,  ). he  further states that “euclidean space is a rather subjective, human-centered or, at toc   information processor - digital form with computational means least, knowledge centered way of grasping entities, which does no justice to the ways humans and things get by in the world”. however, since architects work in euclidean  space, it becomes intuitive to ignore the fact that time and matter are actually married  to space in a real living embodiment and not as static illustrations in the form of  drawings. even with current technologies to simulate render and animate, most  building projects use them to merely portray lifestyle pertaining to how people adjust  themselves to “happily” live inside the designed building, rather than using this  data to take active action to influence spatial adaptation in a dynamic manner. the  other issue latour points towards is that since buildings have so many performative  demands and considerations, that there is utterly no possibility to consider buildings  as static artefacts which ultimately need to responsively transform with respect to  internal and external forces they experience from the users and the environments they  are embedded in real-time. he thus comes to the conclusion that “…we	should	finally	 be	able	to	picture	a	building	as	a	moving	modulator	regulating	different	intensities	 of	engagement,	redirecting	users’	attention,	mixing	and	putting	people	together,	 concentrating	flows	of	actors	and	distributing	them	so	as	to	compose	a	productive	force	 in time-space”. this statement and its intent further points towards the essence of the  next category, the “form interactor”, which not only considers architecture as a one to  one responsive system but also engulfs it within the domain of a collective intelligence  based interactive system. “it is a liquidizing of everything that has traditionally been crystalline and solid in architecture.” (novak,  ) unlike greg lynn in animate form who realized static,  yet complex architecture with existing topological modeling software, marcus novak  proposed another vision of “liquid architecture” to liberate rigid architecture from  the physical environment into cyberspace (novak,  ). he argued that it is possible  to envision architecture nested within architecture (cyberspace), which basically  proposed a co-existing environment where physical and virtual worlds bundle  together. within a virtual environment, architecture design can in a sense neglect the  realistic physical constraints, such as gravity, but still, have the capability to deliver  sensory perception via vr (virtual reality). cyberspace is a virtual reality construct  which smoothly liquidizes the hard boundary of physical space. to liquidize entities  which have been crystalized in architecture is just the first phase of marcus novak’s  “liquid architecture”, the ultimate goal is to adapt to real-time information flow  and respond interactively to changing contextual data as an active living organism.  although this mode of conceiving architecture still involves an extensive amount of  time to confront and resolve technical issues too, it still has the potential to ultimately  change the dominant stereotypes of what architects could be doing. in contrast, it is  quite disappointing, yet common, that most architects working in the digital realm do  admit that working with dynamic information flow though does work at a theoretical  and simulation level, but ultimately, they abandon this path to freeze the projects in  toc hypercell a static manner. under the technical limitations of the  d software back then, greg  lynn stood up to the challenge to alter the fundamental essence of architecture from a  computational perspective. his concept of “animate form”, considering todays context  of real-time information management, can now be re-interpreted and re-appropriated  as “animate form (form animator).” in a new interview: pablo lorenzo and aaron sprecher with greg lynn, documented  in the publication “architecture in formation: on the nature of information in digital architecture (lorenzo-eiroa & lynn, interview and projects by greg lynn form,  )”, lynn states: “i had thought it was too simplistic and literal to reduce animation media to the role of designing moving projectiles and transforming objects. but, now i have to admit that a sensibility in culture is willing these moving environments into being. people expect their cities and buildings to literally move for a variety of reasons”,  which to a certain extent is a modification of his former definition of “animate form.”  based on greg lynn’s re-interpreted notion of “animate form”, bruno latour’s,  theories on liberation of building, and marcus novak’s “liquid architecture”, the form animator tends to inevitably operate more likely as a form transformer. this implies  operating akin to a delicate mechanism constantly responding to input forces and  actuating a relevant dynamic form. moreover, the form animator can radically acquire  the scope of a form interactor, which, not only passively react to direct environmental  inputs, but can also pro-actively alter human and spatial behavior. following this  tendency, latour’s daring assertion of “making all buildings move” might actually  come true. § . form interactor = an emergent organic body composed of numerous singular intelligent entities possessing dynamic interaction. this dynamic interaction via internal/external information exchange can be seen during the process of growth and in the pro-active immediate behavior, which the body possesses. embedded in this immersive digital world surrounded by dynamic information flows,  architecture has no excuse to keep with its static or essentially passive response  state. it must be transformed into a living-creature-like entity which can react  instantaneously and possess free will. it seems to be an inevitable trend that architects  are yearning for making buildings as living organisms after adequate exploration of  the form animator. unlike the form animator principles, which are used for projects  toc     information processor - digital form with computational means which acquire algorithmically driven passive formal variations, the form interactor has an advanced proactive system akin to an artificial intelligence to make informed  and immediate decisions compatible with dynamic data. the title of “form interactor” might at first seem misleading with the initial impression of merely focusing on the  creation of an expressive phenotype, however, the “interaction”, is equally crucial for  the creation of an implicit genotype, in an emergent fashion. in form interactor, the issue of interaction is different ways: “internal interaction”, which, takes inspiration  from biological growth processes, and “external interaction”, which mainly deals with  immediate behavioral reaction, and both of these can be associated with the notion of  “emergence”. § . . internal interaction genetic algorithms should not be seen as a process for optimizing form finding functions only: “form generator”, but rather as an environmentally sensitive interactive process involving dynamic information flows: “form interactor”. the body, as a living entity, can be interpreted as a confluence of several complex  systems interacting with each other akin to the multitude of systems which operate  simultaneously to create architecture. during the growing process of an organism,  there is, internal interaction, information embedded in genes as a basic instruction  interacting with external factors from the environment to proportionally produce  organic materials. this self-organizing process interested numerous pioneering  architects to experiment with genetic algorithms, for form-finding purposes. these,  however, turn out to be misleading examples, considering that the processes of  real-time “interaction” within natural growth processes tend to be completely  missing during the computational processes of such algorithms. michael weinstock,  in “morphogenesis and the mathematics of emergence” (weistock,  ) clearly  illustrated the generic computational approach of exploiting genetic algorithms  in architectural design and other research fields, “genetic algorithms initiate and maintain a population of computational individuals, each of which has a genotype and a phenotype. sexual reproduction is simulated by random selection of two individuals to	provide	‘parents’	from	which	‘offspring’	are	produced.	by	using	crossover	(random	 allocation	of	genes	from	the	parents’	genotype)	and	mutation,	varied	offspring	are	 generated	until	they	fill	the	population.	all	parents	are	discarded,	and	the	process	 is iterated for as many generations as are required to produce a population that has amongst	it	a	range	of	suitable	individuals	to	satisfy	the	‘fitness	criteria’”. genetic  algorithms undoubtedly enhance powerful computational applications supporting  toc hypercell the process of morphogenesis in architectural design. however, in most cases, genetic  algorithms in architectural designs, based on defined fitness criteria are used for  obtaining “optimized”, often static, outcomes for digital fabrication purposes. this,  is contrary to the essential notion of “growth”, which, is a real-time adaptive material  producing “process”. according to micahel weinstock (weistock,  ), “strategies for design are not truly evolutionary unless they include iterations of physical (phenotypic) modeling,	incorporating	the	self-organizing	material	effects	of	form	finding	and	the	 industrial	logic	of	production	available	in	cnc	and	laser-cutting	modelling	machines”.	 this illustrates the exact misuse of implementing genetic algorithms. however,  still, a majority of architectural designers still use genetic algorithms specifically for  producing aesthetically pleasing form without considering material performance and  production logics. genetic algorithms directly implemented in architecture in this  sense, act no more than an algorithmic machine akin to the role of the form generator, generating an optimized solution, opposed to john frazer’s idea to take natural science  as a source of inspiration rather than explanation (frazer,  ). john frazer’s idea of taking genetic algorithm as an inspiration implied not to directly  execute these algorithms extracted from nature, but further, translate them into a  design methodology for creating the instructions of the morphogenic formation in  architectural design. “…dna does not describe the process of building the phenotype but constitutes instructions that describe the process of building the phenotype, including instructions for making all the materials, then processing and assembling them…these are all responsive to the environment as it proceeds…”. (frazer,  ).  john frazer emphasized in his significant article“an evolutionary architecture” that “… what we are evolving are the rules for generating form rather than the form themselves. we are describing processes, not components” (frazer,  ). this suggests that  architects should design specific genomes considering the context within which the  design has to be embedded, rather than merely apply existing algorithms as a form- finding tool. under the premise of john frazer’s rule-generating idea, the internal interactions of a living creature/building can be designed/interpreted as several  internal information processing systems embedded in genomes interacting with  each other as well as external environmental inputs, forming a constant emergent  mechanism for the overall growth “process”. the formation of the genome is an on- going process with the inherited relationship of each cell that cannot be simplified  as a one to one input-output mathematical formula neglecting the crucial fourth  dimension, time, which is equal to the role of internal interaction implemented in  the “form interactor”. common sense would state that “living” should be considered  as an activity/state involving a continuous process involving constant data exchange  between the body and its natural context, and thus can never be interpreted as an  ultimate frozen state in time. if the form interactor was seen as a metaphor of a  building, then it should also “live” in the existing environment rather than being  toc   information processor - digital form with computational means “located” or “crystalized” on site. “bones, for instance, which are full of living cells, can heal and adapt to their environment. in particular, the cells will rebuild the structure to	adapt	to	the	load	it	carries;	a	bone	can	change	its	physical	shape	after	a	fracture	that	 heals out of position so that the load is adequately supported” (fox, michael, & kemp,  miles,  ), the internal interaction within the example here reveals the vital ideas  of real-time calculation, immediate adaptation and material interaction by distributed  information systems amongst cells, to carry out the healing task, an which can be  seen as an emergent behavior. extending this healing function is associated back with  the issue of “growth” and “fabrication”, it is not that the internal interaction fights  against the idea of fabrication, but the post-optimised production method is what the  internal interaction refuses to accept in the section of the “form interactor”. the ideal  fabrication process within the concept of internal interaction should be akin to how an  organism builds up its body based on the “genome instructions” and “environmental  influences” in real time. each single moment is unique and with the summation of all  internal and external forces emerging, the organism grows that particular body part  based on each single task assigned to the living cells which cannot be repeated. this  is exactly the emergent performance principles to be traced in external interaction.  (more genetic algorithm and evolution process will be discussed in the chapter of bio- inspired architecture). § . . external interaction external interaction, following swarm behaviors-like principles, a dynamic equilibrium, should have capabilities to confront immediate circumstances locally to take action by individuals but interrelated componential intelligence agents and emerge from bottom- up as a global behavior to embody as a volatile actor. to understand the issue of external interaction in the form interactor, the notions of  emergence and swarm behaviour have to be introduced. “…emergence is applied to the properties of a system that cannot be reduced from its components. properties ‘emerge’ that are more than the sum of the parts”, “the architecture of emergence: the evolution of form in nature and civilisation” (weinstock,  ), which simply  and clearly explained the notion of emergence. michael, further quotes aristotle’s  words to support this explanation, “that ‘whole’ has distinctive properties that emerge	through	the	processes	of	successive	interaction	between	different	levels	of	 organization and integration”. it can thus be said that emergence can be considered  as a process of formation through interaction between different individuals systems/ entities, and the overall property of emergence cannot be observed by studying each  toc hypercell distinctive individual. based on this definition, the internal interaction can definitely  be seen as an emergent behavior, which merges several interactive interacting systems  together to gradually develop the process of growth as a whole. in the case of external interaction, the focus is the individual entity comprising the overall whole and the  networked relationships between them. this idea of a larger property described by  smaller componential entities can be traced back to the philosophical definition of  a “monad” in gottfried leibniz’s monadology back in   (leibniz, monadology,  ). the “monad” here stands abstractly for the simplest substance which cannot  be split apart and considered as a basic element comprising a composite object. as a  result, in this respect, leibniz made his point that “in a plenum [= word that is full], any	movement	must	have	an	effect	on	distant	bodies,	the	greater	the	distance	the	 smaller	the	effect…as	a	result,	each	body	feels	the	effects	of	everything	that	happens	 in	the	universe,	so	that	he	who	sees	everything	could	read	off	from	each	body	what	 is happening everywhere”. therefore, every object, person, and every single matter  existing in the world are all intimately interconnected to each other in this rapidly  dynamic and hyperlinked internet age. one can also connect, emergent behaviour  to principles of monadology, wherein every single monad, as a bird in a flock, has an  influential interactive relationship with each other to emerge as a whole plenum(overall  performative body) in a bottom up fashion. from the historical trajectory of these  philosophic aspects, leibniz’s monadology had great influence on deleuze’s thought  process behind the “folding” and “body without organs” concepts, which profoundly  impacted further philosophical inspiration in contemporary architectural design. in nature, emergence, can be traced in the principles underlying swarm behavior.  swarm behavior principles embody numerous animal species, which tend to move  collectively, for example, a flock of birds, a school of fish and a group of bees (figure  . ). without any leader’s top-down command, each individual forming in such  groups of living entities make bottom-up decisions, resulting in bigger collective  behavior. each entity is equal, in stature, to each other and thus any of singular entity’s  movement/decision, profoundly impacts the overall performance of the whole.  this characteristic fits perfectly with the science of emergence as well as leibniz’s  monadology philosophy. after observing flocks of flying birds, craig reynolds, as  a computer scientist started to develop swarm behavior simulation back in    (reynolds, flocks, herds and schools: a distributed behavioral model,  ). three  major principles of “separation”, “cohesion”, and “alignment  underlying the steering  separation implies avoiding crowding next to each other; alignment implies steering towards the average di- rection of the neighboring flocks; cohesion implies driving the agents’ movement towards the average position  of the local agents. more information can be found referring to craig reynold’s website illustrating the flocking  behavior: http://www.red d.com/cwr/boids/ toc   information processor - digital form with computational means behavior behind a digital flock of birds was thus successfully realized in a virtual  environment with intuitive and smooth movement. since then, this swarm behavior  algorithm has been broadly applied to different paradigms of research including  game design, swarm robotics, distribution and communication systems…etc., and  certainly in architectural design applications as well. john holland, another pioneer  working on emergence and genetic algorithms, pinpointed three major principles  required to set up a basic emergence system: element, rules, and interactions (holland,  ). if we follow john holland’s proposal, the three major principles of  swarm behavior simulation developed by craig reynold can be accordingly modified  by further enhancing the fundamental principles in relation to implementation/task  based deploy ability. computationally speaking, one can modify the basic principles/ rule sets of agent interaction, in order to develop customized “basic intelligence”  within the algorithm associated with smarm simulations. recently, architects have  taken advantage of growing computational power for developing swarm based design systems, as novel approaches in architectural design. figure  .   images exhibiting the swarm idea either in nature or in the film. a swarm is a group of animals  that aggregate and travel in the same direction(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/swarm_(disambiguation)).  from left to right: a swarm of insects, a school of fish, a group of agent smiths in the matrix (source from left to  right: http://www.ayni.institute/swarm, http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article- /divers-caught- middle-huge-school-fish-snap-selfies-them.html, and http://movies.stackexchange.com/questions/ / is-there-a-trope-for-a-pile-on-fight). roland snooks, one of the leading characters in this new domain, also one of the  directors of kokkugia has for years conducted experiments using swarm algorithms  for promoting self-organization principles in architectural design, under the title  “behavioral formation,” which is also the title of his ph.d. dissertation in rmit,  melbourne. some of the experimental designs were developed together with his  design partner, robert stuart-smith in practice, and some with his master students  toc hypercell both at the aa, london, uk and rmit, australia as design research experiments.  roland snooks’ idea of a self-organized body within swarm behavior principles is  explicitly illustrated as follows, “these methodologies operate by encoding simple, local architectural decision within a distributed system of autonomous computational agents. it is the interaction of these local decisions that self-organizes design intention, giving rise to a form of collective intelligence and emergent behavior at the global scale. such	behavioral	formation	represents	a	shift	from	‘form	being	imposed	upon	matter’,	 to form emerging from the interaction of localized entities within a complex system”  (snooks,  ). in other words, the behavioural formation can be interpreted as a  self-organizing system constituting agents of a swarm, which produce unique/local  material properties due to underlying collective decision-making principles set forth by  the designer. akin to the aforementioned concept of internal interaction constituting  the process of growth or similar to the process of self-healing of living bone cells.  however, even volatile topology has been heavily addressed in roland snook’s concept  with swarm logics, as all his computational generative formation processes are frozen  in a particular moment, which, is fundamentally against his original idea of “volatility”.  various young digital savvy architects are extremely fascinated by this emergent  behavior and its capability and have started following this trend of executing swarm  algorithms in architectural design again as a form/pattern finding process. roland  snooks’ approach of utilizing swarm algorithms is still, in general, in a relatively initial  stage. although he advanced the development of algorithms for making local collective  decisions to materialize creative projects, he somehow overlooked the inherent  character of swarms, which, points towards a continual dynamic process, which  cannot be crystallized at any moment in time. for instance, in nature, simply taking  groups of ants for example, they can form an emergent holistic body such as a bridge,  helping each other to cross a pond of water or gap between leaves. however, once  the temporary goal is reached, they will re- distribute themselves going back to doing  their own tasks and form new configurations according to the new tasks they need to  accomplish in time. to a certain extent, we can still interpret this as another much-advanced version of  the form generator/animator due to the fact that it remains frozen in its ultimate  state, which, makes his projects less commensurate to the terminology of “swarm  architecture”. swarm architecture, in its true sense, should possess the substantial  potential to deal with immediate interactions similar to how living entities adapt to  dynamic contextual demands. “swarm architecture” based research should thus be  highly advanced in order to produce intelligent buildings with capabilities of real-time  adaptation and interaction. this is the ideal goal for what external interactions should  embody in a “form interactor”. toc   information processor - digital form with computational means “space is a computation.” kas oosterhuis made this bold and strong assertion in the  very beginning of his article “swarm architecture ii” (oosterhuis, swarm architecture  ii,  ), which was proposed years before roland snooks presented his behavioral  formation idea. according to kas oosterhuis “space computes information”. this  links perfectly with the key concept of this chapter: to consider form(space) as an information processor. following kas oosterhuis’ steps, an architecture can also be  seen as a networking instrument communicating actively with the users of the space in  real-time via various inter-connected actuated building components, “the actuators are being orchestrated like the birds in a swarm”, kas concluded. kas oosterhuis thus  proposed the idea to bring computational technology for practical usage by embedding  it into building components for active internal communication and external adaptation  instead of utilizing the computing power merely as a form generating tool. this mode  of thinking perfectly embodies the authentic intent of the “form interactor.” this  intent can further lead to the production of buildings, which, in essence, become  alive and thus a species in their own right. this is further reinforced by, john frazer’s  statement:“we	never	try	to	copy	the	superficial	appearance	of	a	biological	species.	 rather we try to invent new species which by its complexity and due to their complex behavior may eventually familiarize with living objects as we already know” (frazer,  ). it is time to shift towards utilizing computational power to develop practical  operational spatial solutions rather than for creating front-end form generating  machines. in other words, it is time to utilize the principles of “swarm behavior” as  the fundamental basis behind “form interactor” to develop a novel approach for  integrating computational technologies within building component for developing a  networked distributed system for realizing an architectural body which can adapt to its  immediate context. § . conclusion in this chapter, “form” has been interpreted as an information processor inspired  by kas oosterhuis’ “space is a computation” approach. actually, in every scale, all  existing objects are to a certain extent related to information which can be translated  and represented in diverse forms. simply take a small device like a pen, for example,  it has information embedded associated to its dimension, color of ink, and material  it is made of. furthermore, with its essence of being a pen, it has a given function of  making traces. this kind of “object-oriented” concept is mainly utilized in computer  science to illustrate a category, constituting certain characteristics, where you can  generate objects from its essence, but vice versa it can logically categorize any existing  toc hypercell object with a similar principle. in the introduction section of this chapter, it is clearly  emphasized that people have dealt with spatial information long before the computer  had been invented, the only crucial difference is that the computational technology  accelerated the processing of data. in the digital architecture domain, the means and  degrees of utilizing computational technology have been categorized into different  sections in this chapter, namely: form sculptor, form generator, form animator and form interactor. not only the manner but also the philosophy and the logic of a  computational application in architectural design behind them have been reviewed in  this chapter in order to trace the advantages and disadvantages within each category.  there are definitely “pros and cons” but no “rights or wrongs” of these formative  approaches from the design perspective, it is only a question of the methodologies  and strategies the designer prefers. the form sculptor tends to favor a more intuitive  approach compared to the form generator relying on rational algorithms as a form- finding method. the form animator starts to be aware of the influential impact from  dynamic information flows, while the form interactor takes the dynamic information  into account as either the slow morphing process, in the case of growth or immediate  morphing process, in the case of an immediate reaction. form thus has an intimate  relationship between the architectural design process and contextual information. based on what stephen wolfram has stated in “towards a new kind of science”, “… nature[the universe] as we know it is a pure form of computation” (wolfram,  ),  it is extremely rational to claim that “space is a computation” as proposed by kas  oosterhuis in  . the other crucial factor of “dynamic equilibrium”, indicates the  need to be constantly changing/evolving with information flow, and that this will  drive architectural design to acquire the dimensions of a living organic body. “liquid architecture is an architecture that breathes, pulses, leaps as one form and lands as another…it is an architecture that opens hallways, where the next room is always where i need it to be and what i need it to be” (novak,  ) noted marcus novak who  proposed a volatile architecture operating as a living creature almost   years ago.  during the same period of time, kas oosterhuis has even put this living architecture  idea to the next level with an architecture that actually has its own will by proposing  the hyperbody concept, “true hyperbodies are pro-active bodies…actively propose actions. they act before they are triggered to do so. hyperbodies display something like a will of their own. they sense, they actuate, but essentially not as a response to a single request” (oosterhuis, hyperbodies: towards an e-motive architecture,  ). in  kas oosterhuis’ mind, the way of constructing this intelligent architectural body with  free will is not by complicated ai(artificial intelligence) system, but instead, by using  swarm logic as a system which thrives on collective intelligence. “think of a type of architecture	where	all	building	elements	are	intelligent	agents	flocking	the	herd,	(re) configuring	themselves	in	real	time” (oosterhuis, hyperbodies: towards an e-motive  architecture,  ), this (re)configurable body can achieve real-time interaction  toc   information processor - digital form with computational means with relatively smaller entities with simple intelligence. in this case, computation is  no longer seen as a form-finding machine which generates a nearly optimized, fixed  architecture, but is embedded in building components which can communicate  through protocols and to a certain extent actuate/react akin to living cells in an  organic body. references cache, b. ( ). instruments of thought: another classical tradition. in c. o’donnell (ed.), the cornell journal of architecture : mathematics (pp.  - ). new york: college of architecture, art, and planning, cornell  university. carpo, m. ( ). twenty years of digital design. in m. carpo (ed.), the digital turn in architecture - (pp.  - ). new york: wiley. dürer, albrecht & formschneider, h. andreas (nürnberg). ( ). underweysung der messung . german:  nürnberg. fox, michael, & kemp, miles. ( ). interactive architecture. new york: princeton architectural press. frazer, j. ( 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international license (cc-by . ), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. see http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/ . /. open access: open library of humanities is a peer-reviewed open access journal. digital preservation: the open library of humanities and all its journals are digitally preserved in the clockss scholarly archive service. https://doi.org/ . /olh. http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/ . / amy schwartzott, ‘recycling discarded histories to chronicle identities: making art from waste in mozambique’ ( ) ( ): open library of humanities, doi: https://doi.org/ . /olh. waste: disposability, decay and depletion recycling discarded histories to chronicle identities: making art from waste in mozambique amy schwartzott north carolina agricultural and technical state university, us aschwart@ncat.edu contemporary mozambican artists who utilize recyclia as media create artworks that chronicle their society through bits and pieces of its discarded histories. creating quintessentially mozambican art, symbolic materials become potent signifiers of this developing nation. this article explores multivalent themes including object materiality, recycling, art making in africa, and post-conflict resolution to determine why and how mozambican artists utilize post-consumer waste. factors including past wars, poverty, and a quest for creative expansion have contributed to widespread use of recycling as an artistic practice in mozambique, despite artists’ varied economic, social, and educational levels. mozambican artists who recycle their nation’s pre-used remnants not only connect to past cultural and artistic practices; they continue these traditions within contemporary contexts. by creating artwork from cast-off materials, artists illustrate how recycling permeates all levels of society, including its broad expansion into art making, and how the use of reprocessed materials both inspires and instills a sense of pride in artistic practices. themes addressed in art- work made from recyclia include politics, social commentary, and cultural heritage. artists include fiel, who transforms destroyed weapons of mozambique’s past wars into powerful tools for peacebuilding and post- conflict resolution; cármen, who uses her old dresses to create hanging fabric pieces that capture shadows creating dissonance between light and dark; joão, who calls for donations of jeans on facebook that he will patch together and use as a variegated background supports for painting; and pekiwa, who critiques mozambican society through his use of recycled boats, windows, and doors. https://doi.org/ . /olh. mailto:aschwart@ncat.edu schwartzott: recycling discarded histories to chronicle identities fiel transforms destroyed weapons of mozambique’s past wars into powerful tools for peacebuilding and post-conflict resolution; cármen uses her old dresses to create hanging fabric pieces that capture shadows creating dissonance between light and dark; joão calls for donations of jeans on facebook that he will patch together and use as a variegated background supports for painting; and pekiwa presents social critiques of mozambican society through his use of recycled boats, windows, and doors. these are but a sampling of the many contemporary mozambican artists who use recyclia (recycled materials/found objects) to create artworks, chronicling their society through its discarded histories. addressed through the words and images of the artists presented here, investigations are founded on such interrelated themes as object materiality, recycling, art making in urban africa, and post-conflict resolution. chronicling the transformation of these recycled materials, this research reflects a nexus of environmental, economic, and cultural issues to determine how and why artists utilize recyclia to create distinctly mozambican art. simply put, this research demonstrates the ways in which these contemporary artists utilize discarded objects that both reflects and chronicles complex mozambican histories, focused on themes inherent within its protracted wars and artists’ ongoing social critiques of their country. mozambican artists who recycle their nation’s pre-used materials not only connect to past cultural and artistic practices, they continue these traditions within contemporary contexts. many creative, environmental, and financial factors, including the impact of past wars, the development of the transforming arms into plowshares/ transformação de armas em enxadas (tae) project, and poverty illustrate how recyclia provides an advantageous art medium. each of the artists addressed in this analysis come from vastly different economic, social, and educational backgrounds, yet all use recycled materials. mozambican artists utilize natural and urban detritus to produce art, continuing recycling traditions, pervasive throughout africa. while artists in mozambique utilize many different types of media, this investigation addresses these artists and their varied motivations, defining a widespread preference for recycling as a primary technique used by artists in mozambique. this focused study of artists this article builds on material previously presented in a short article, schwartzott ( ). schwartzott: recycling discarded histories to chronicle identities reveals the implications of recycling as a tool to explore larger themes related to mozambican contemporary art and its meanings. recycling an understanding of activities related to recycling is crucial for determining how artists obtain pre-used objects. recycling is generally understood as the reprocessing of waste. the united nations environmental statistics division ( ) defines recycling as: waste (garbage, trash, rubbish, refuse, or litter) material that is not a prime product (produced for the market) for which the generator has no further use in terms of his/her own purposes of production, transformation or consumption and of which he/she wants to dispose. recycling is not new in the context of african cultures, yet its recent surge as a popular medium is illustrated by its widespread use in contemporary mozambican art specifically. within the last few decades, there has been a recognizable increase in global practical and scholarly interest in recycling. motives fueling this appeal include diverse economic, political, financial, and philosophical concerns. scholars identify four primary categories of informal recycling: itinerant waste buyers, street waste, municipal waste collection, and dumps (wilson, velis, and cheeseman, ). the desire to create a contextual framework for recycled materials led the author to study the varied waste streams of garbage to determine its different paths before it is selected to become media for art. in order to understand such contact points of detritus, interviews were conducted with: municipal directors, administrators, and consultants of solid waste management; public and private garbage collectors; owners, operators, and workers at recycling facilities; and workers and independent entrepreneurs in the informal sector who buy and sell recycled materials. and finally, visits to solid waste containers and dump sites also contributed to an analysis of this history of the objects considered in this article. object recycling facilities in maputo visited for this research include recicla, saaner, and associação mocambiçana de reciclagem/mozambican association of recycling schwartzott: recycling discarded histories to chronicle identities (amor). each of these non-profit, local, and international organizations relies upon market values that determine preference for one object (metal) over another (plastic). not only are these facilities promoting sustainability, but they have connections to social causes as well. for example, recicla hires former garbage pickers (primarily from the nearby hulene dump) to provide them with greater financial stability. amor hires women from xidzuki, an organization of hiv-positive women, which runs the eco- points that serve as satellite drop-offs for community recycled goods. object materiality this investigation of recyclia as artistic media is underpinned by object materiality. consideration of objects’ physicality as well as their uses prior to selection as media is essential for determining the meanings of these objects within artworks. several authors have focused on the concept of objecthood in extremely varied contexts, including the contemplation of street debris to more theoretical conceptions (seitz, ; kopytoff, ; edensor, ; strasser, ; bennett, ; davis, , ; strasser, ; calvino, ; thompson, ; rubin, ; coole and frost, ; cohen, ). in his museum of modern art exhibition, the art of assemblage, curator william seitz probed into objects’ pasts. recycling the words of english art critic lawrence alloway in his catalog essay, he quoted, ‘objects have a history: first they are brand new goods; then they are possessions, accessible to few, subjected, often, to intimate and repeated use; then, as waste, they are scarred by use but available again’ (seitz, : ). although alloway’s words directly focus on western sculptural assemblage arts outside the african context, he and seitz demonstrate a keen understanding of object materiality comparable to my own view of pre-used things as they are transformed into artworks. similarly, in his definition of ‘junk culture’, alloway’s comprehension of the compositional origins of sculptures continues to be relevant today: ‘junk culture is city art. its source is obsolescence, the throwaway material of cities, as it collects in […] city dumps’ (seitz, : ). these observations suggest similar ways of looking, and each provides a framework for better viewing and understanding contemporary artworks that form the basis of this analysis. schwartzott: recycling discarded histories to chronicle identities theoretical frames the theoretical frames underpinning this investigation draw from igor kopytoff’s seminal essay ‘the cultural biography of things’, which focuses on understanding commodities through an investigation of an object’s transformation from its initial use through its many lives. whereas an important question of kopytoff’s, ‘how does the thing’s use change with age and what happens to it when it reaches the end of its usefulness’ ( : ), relates directly to issues of commodification, it informs this analysis based on object materiality and the potential to intensify past meanings as recycled objects are transformed into art. diverging from kopytoff, this research argues that the life of an object does not effectively end when it is deemed no longer useful, but in its reincarnation as a recycled material it gains more expressive power as it is transformed into art. as recycled objects are selected as media for artworks, they are extracted from the context of their former lives. within the framework of their new lives, as part of an artwork, the identity of recyclia is enhanced, as it gains expressive power. the recycled object no longer exists where it once belonged. but, in its employment within the artist’s construction, its new task is now inextricably linked to, and based upon, its own state of being or materiality. in addition to focused inquiry of the objects’ lives, it is productive to also consider the lives of the artists in relationship to the lives of the objects with which they intersect (cerny and seriff, : ). adapting kopytoff’s ‘lives’, this research considers the notion of the ‘histories’ of past uses of recycled objects in conjunction with their meaning as it is translated into an artwork. finally, kopytoff’s concept of object biographies is supplemented here to include ideas based on arnold rubin’s examination of historical african assemblage arts ( ). more recent scholarship addressing the uses of recycling and assemblage in african visual culture include suzanne blier’s editorial in african arts. in ‘nine contradictions in the new golden age of african art’, blier affirmed the ancient traditions within these artistic techniques: schwartzott: recycling discarded histories to chronicle identities western art critics often ostracize african works that incorporate visual abstraction, assemblage, jarring juxtapositions, salvage materials, and recycling, saying they are derivative of euro-american modernist movements. yet these approaches are firmly rooted in africa’s art historical past; they were appropriated and reframed from the african aesthetic wellspring by artists in the west ( : ). similarly, joanna grabski defines the most ubiquitous form of art within dakar as recuperation, ‘a category of expressive production relying on materials culled from the urban environment’ ( , ). in africa explores, susan vogel links art and artists, stating, ‘urban art is the only strain of african art to portray the artists who make it, it is subject to their daily existence’ ( : ). allen f. roberts and polly nooter roberts’ a saint in the city: sufi arts of urban senegal presents the city of dakar as a microcosm of artistic production, including several artists who rely on detritus (newspaper, wood, metal, cloth scraps) from the city to construct their art. the larger point of roberts and roberts investigation expands upon the basic concept of recycling to include visual hagiography surrounding sheikh amadou bamba (roberts and roberts, ). and in ‘quelle liberté: art, beauty and the grammars of resistance in douala’, dominique malaquais ( ) presents a public mixed media sculpture made of recycled materials as a discursive site. in her critical analysis of joseph-francis sumégné’s quelle liberté, she addresses issues raised by heated debates surrounding the sculpture, such as political resistance, contested ethnic identities, economics, and conflicts within social classes. as a result of these types of investigations by scholars and exhibits alike, african art has become increasingly identified with and represented by mixed media constructions of recycled materials. in fact, the majority of artworks in the exhibitions described here may be defined as created from recyclia. recently, some scholars have begun to examine contemporary mozambican artists using weapons as art media (spring, ; elmquist, ; fonseca, ). most recently, maria emília fonseca presented a contextual analysis of tree of life, a weapons-based artwork in the british museum, in touching art: the poetics and potency of exhibiting the tree of life. schwartzott: recycling discarded histories to chronicle identities my research takes a different approach, analyzing many artists’ use of diverse recycled materials and making connections to recyclia in art making and art as a tool in post-conflict resolution. research methodology foundations of this investigation emerge from previous research on recycling in art, developing carefully focused and specific case studies concentrated on diverse artists, materials, and the interconnected meanings of these artworks created in mozambique. based on years of intermittent fieldwork, most of this research was completed in the country’s capital, maputo, where important arts organizations, cultural centers, embassies, galleries, and artists’ studios are located. many artists work in maputo, but often their homes are located in matola, an industrial suburb situated minutes from the capital. further journeys included those to outlying neighborhoods, districts, and provinces (gaza, inhambane, and sofala). the longest uninterrupted research trip took place from august – november . time spent in mozambique preceding and following this has contributed to my investigation, most recently from december – january ; earlier travel, including a trip to senegal for five weeks in , introduced the author to artists’ widespread use of recycling and inspired subsequent investigations. the primary goal in selecting artists for inclusion in this article is to provide a representative sample of artists who use recycled materials, presenting a concise overview of contemporary mozambican artists working today and demonstrating the diversity among the large number of these artists who use recyclia. as stated in the introduction, overall the use of recycled materials has become the medium of choice for a large majority of contemporary mozambican artists. individual artists selected for inclusion here illustrate diverse motivations for using different types of objects. research methodologies include direct engagement with individuals through recorded, transcribed, and videotaped formal, informal, and group interviews. artists’ processes and techniques were further captured through photography and video. although interviews were highly effective, i found that artists tended to be more candid expressing themselves in the evenings at the largest (and oldest) artists’ schwartzott: recycling discarded histories to chronicle identities cooperative in mozambique, a associação núcleo de arte, and the nearby museu barracas (shanty bars and restaurants), which many of the artists regularly frequent. throughout this article, the voices of artists (who often adopt a pseudonym as an artist name), including fiel dos santos (fiel), cármen maria muianga (cármen), joão paul bias (joão), and nelson augusto carlos ferreira (pekiwa) are foregrounded, in order to create a rich ethnographic narrative that is fundamental for understanding the complexities of their individual artworks, wherein a more self- reflexive, personalized introduction to individual artworks and artistic practices in contemporary mozambique is presented. the artists fiel: now it’s my time to do something for society fiel was one of the first artists who started working for the transforming arms into plowshares/transformação de armas em enxadas (tae) project. bishop dom dinis sengulane initially approached a associação núcleo de arte in to solicit artists to create artwork from the recognizable remains of recycled weapons of mozambique’s past wars that had been collected under the auspices of the tae project. unlike many of the other artists in tae, fiel had previous experience welding. he participated in a workshop for sculptors that took place in durban, south africa, in . fiel has maintained his connections with tae, continuing to create works of art from weapons. as with all of the artists who work with tae i have interviewed, fiel’s relationship to the project is personal. he explained that when he was or years old, his brother was kidnapped into service as a child soldier for six years (dos santos, ). while one of fiel’s brothers was forcibly recruited to fight on the side of the mozambican national resistance (in portuguese, ‘resistência nacional moçambicana’: renamo), another brother chose to enlist on the government side of the mozambique liberation front (in portuguese: ‘frente de libertação de moçambique’: frelimo) to fight in the same war. fiel’s situation was not unusual: many mozambican families were divided as members served on opposing sides during the country’s last war. further elaborating on his personal connection to tae, fiel stated: i grew up during the fighting. now it’s my time to do something for society. i want to volunteer to work on this project. i’m working here for my soul. schwartzott: recycling discarded histories to chronicle identities sometimes i want to weld all the guns to finish them. i start to get tired. [after] ten years they keep bringing more weapons. the tae project would be more powerful. when we started there were fourteen, now four, maybe three [artists involved with tae]. [i am] teaching people from outside who want to be involved – brazil, denmark. there are funding problems. they continue to collect guns. exchange is the good part and education, but the artist part doesn’t develop. if they destroy two [weapons], fifty more come (dos santos, ). fiel’s forms evoke his curiosity about nature. he is interested in the relationship of the part to the whole, often revealing the intricacy of individual weapons in the overall construction. in his sculptures, fiel focuses on carefully connecting bits of the recycled weapons to create the larger forms in representations of plant, animal, and human figures. sensitive in his treatment of forms and their placement, his focus on the objecthood of the weapons is revealed as he carefully positions the weapons. his meticulous organization of arms transformed forces viewers to intimately connect to the meaning of the weapons and the intrinsic power of violence within each (see figure ). figure : fiel dos santos. animal. mixed media (recycled weapons), . schwartzott: recycling discarded histories to chronicle identities fiel has continued to create artworks for tae, expanding beyond mozambique. since he has been working with russian-american documentary filmmaker irina patkanian and american chris langer on a stop animation short film, little fiel ( ). little fiel tells the story of how as a young boy, fiel was left alone to fend for himself, and of the experiences he dealt with as a result of the war. the principal characters of the film, fiel and his family, are represented as animated tae sculptures. patkanian and langer’s film literally brings to life the weapons used by tae artists as a powerful remembrance of mozambique’s last war and its far-reaching impact on mozambicans and a global audience. cármen: ‘people don’t have artists’ eyes. they don’t see good garbage in the streets’ unlike many self-taught artists working in mozambique, cármen received a formal education in the arts. she studied a course of graphic design at the escola nacional de artes visuais (enav) (national school of visual arts) in maputo, where she currently teaches printmaking. studying at enav until grade twelve, she continued her education at the national school of plastic arts of havana, where she remained for five years. in addition to her current position at enav, she also was a professor at the school of visual arts lopes penha in cuba and an instructor at the school gallery eugenio lemos in maputo. when i arrived at cármen’s home, the first thing she did was point to a pile of rubbish in the corner of the living room and proclaim, ‘these are my materials. people ask me why i don’t burn them outside’ (muianga, ). cármen explained that she began to use recycled materials at enav. her instructors, mozambican artist victor sousa, as well as teachers from cuba, poland, canada, and portugal, directed her towards using recycled materials. she described how at that time most of her teachers were from outside mozambique. cármen contended, ‘most people don’t have artists’ eyes. people don’t see good garbage in the streets’ (muianga, ). cármen named pablo picasso and german in a paper presented at the international association of art critics meeting, harun ( ) explains that in the early years of enav most of the art teachers were from outside mozambique. schwartzott: recycling discarded histories to chronicle identities renaissance artist albrecht dürer as artistic influences. she explained that dürer introduced her to european printmaking techniques and that she had seen drawings by picasso at the centro cultural franco moçambicano (french-mozambican cultural center) in maputo and cuba, and in books (muianga, ). picasso’s influence is clearly seen in artworks by cármen, where not only does she mimic the collage, but the image of his guitar as well. in these constructions, cármen utilizes scraps of paper she has recycled to create fragmented images representing guitars and other forms. drawing on picasso’s collages, she revisits his guitars in her new interpretations of these abstract forms. experimenting with painted imagery and diverse paper products including different types of paper and cardboard, cármen creates vibrant artworks linking distinct patterns and designs in her art constructed of mixed recycled materials. when cármen returned from cuba and started teaching printmaking at enav she began making matrices from recyclia. she linked diverse objects to create textural effects from both manmade and natural materials she recycles. cármen explained her decision for choosing pre-used objects: ‘i had media materials, but for me, using recycled materials was more expressive. i feel good using my mind when i use these materials’ (muianga, ). since , cármen has begun to experiment with fabric. in these artworks she uses fabric scraps, particularly her own discarded dresses. she commented: these clothes are my old ones and i thought i would burn them but i decided to make them into something. better to do something else with them – so i take the cloth and make a piece of art. my idea is to do the same types. no need for a budget. i will explore this kind of material more (muianga, ). these hanging fabric pieces utilize light and capture shadows creating dissonance between radiance and darkness. the dresses’ outlines further develop in their silhouettes as they flow back and forth with the movement of air. i look forward to seeing more of these works made from dresses when she begins to devote more time to this project (see figure ). schwartzott: recycling discarded histories to chronicle identities cármen began to speak about culture and the arts in mozambique: [there are] more recycled materials in sculptures. but our public is still ignorant – even the rich ignore it. our hope for selling as artists is the international audience. contemporary art takes more power to show. so the first art that is selected for purchase is by artists using (western) media materials unfortunately. i think with time it can change – i think a lot of kids know malangatana and his pieces. now the idea is to give them opportunities to know about other artists. the books they get, some refer to old artists. it would be better to reference artists using recycled materials and talk about contemporary art in mozambique. attitudes are changing for the better. where i teach at enav, i remember using recycled materials, student made artwork with recycled materials, and going to the rubbish to look for materials (muianga, ). the message cármen wishes to impart upon viewers is evocative in her diverse artworks: figure : carmen. untitled dress piece. mixed media (recycled fabric), n.d. schwartzott: recycling discarded histories to chronicle identities my hope is with the youth – because i want them to get inspiration to make other things. another goal is that i want to give more incentive for people to like it [recycled materials] and love art. most people want to start creating art but they have fear. more people think art is all about (western) media materials. i want them to learn more (muianga, ). cármen’s use of recycled paper and fabric products is directly tied to expanding her creativity, based on the greater options she believes these objects provide. influenced by the art of western artist picasso, cármen focuses on creating artworks out of unexpected objects as she strives to illustrate the creative power these materials possess. joão: ‘i ask people on facebook to bring jeans for me to use’ joão participated in the the life of a dress exhibition organized by swedish designer amanda ericsson. held at a associação núcleo de arte in early december , this exhibition was part of a continuing global project exploring second-hand clothing markets and focused on teaching local people about ecology and sustainability. ericsson dedicated one room of the exhibition to an ongoing workshop inviting visitors to create new fashions from pre-used clothing. joão created a book bag for himself. the book bag joão created inspired him to create art from recycled materials. joão’s bag was distinct among the designs because instead of utilizing pre- used clothing, he substituted discarded remnants of artist’s canvas. he explained his motivations for participating in the life of a dress project: i wanted to do something for me. it was the weekend and i wanted to create a bag to put my books in – i needed one – i wanted to get involved in this project. they showed me the scraps of available fabrics but the colors didn’t fascinate me. i decided to come out of the núcleo gallery and go over to the artists’ workshop and i found one canvas. i felt like i wanted to do something that day so i decided to use my canvas (bias, ). amanda ericsson is a researcher at the swedish school of textiles and founder of the fashion brand dreamandawake. schwartzott: recycling discarded histories to chronicle identities joão created a bag from a canvas he previously abandoned. he selected a vividly painted canvas depicting acacia seedpods to construct the front and top flap of the bag. a monochrome green section comprised the rear of the bag. joão used his own canvas to create this bag, but he subsequently has begun to use other artists’ canvases in his continuation of this technique. joão explained how he acquires them: sometimes i clean the workshop at núcleo de arte one or two times a week. i come and clean. when i find old canvases, i ask artists whether i can use them. that’s how i did the bags. i wanted to make my own bags. i decided to reuse my own canvas. many times it happens that artists are not happy with their works and i am known as a recycler and so it’s good (bias, ). joão’s response to why he specifically selects recycled materials in his art illustrates his desire for expanding his creativity and his concerns about ecological sustainability: using recycled materials is a good means for learning – it’s a space for interaction between artists and the public. people don’t have to go to exhibitions or see magazines. one good thing about this art made from recycled materials – maputo’s full of rubbish […] i really hope to be able to work with these different materials […] i don’t throw them away. i keep them to re-originate and to give more quality […] the mixed media mixture of paper, jeans, and canvas, old paintings from other artists and mine too for example. so – whatever i do […] i will always end up reusing it in a good way (bias, ). the next time i met joão, who is currently studying marketing and publicity at universidade eduardo mondlane/university of edward mondlane in maputo, he was at a associação núcleo de arte, working on a painting incorporating jeans as an alternative painting surface. he explained that jeans were the first recycled material he integrated into his art practice in : my first work using recycling was to transfer trousers – jeans – into canvas. i was in catembe – at the other side of the bay. i went out and didn’t have a canvas to paint on and i was looking in the rubbish for some material to schwartzott: recycling discarded histories to chronicle identities paint on. i found the trousers. my creativity started to talk – how could i express myself using that material? i did a collage – i fragmented them. that was without anything behind to join them (bias, ). as joão treats jeans as a substitute for canvas, he directly applies gesso as a base for oil or acrylic paint. describing his motivation for using jeans in this way, joão stated: everybody is original and i didn’t do much with these recycled jeans but i feel like it’s my tool. i feel a little bit proud because as an artist maybe i seek to find an identity. and i see this recycling work as an open window […] by recycling it’s an open window because you can join things – put them together and you could have them talk to each other. because i’ve been putting some oil colors on paper and was not successful. i found a simple way of reusing paper but there is not a lot of color. jeans have a lot of colors. using jeans will bring different effects and expression. when i use mixed media i have new options and suggestions apart from the canvas (bias, ). joão’s method to obtain jeans utilizes social media as well as merely recycling on his own — ‘[i use] my own and i ask people on facebook to bring jeans here to núcleo for me to use, in addition from the jeans i obtain in the street and from my friends’ (bias, ). whereas joão’s paintings were originally composed solely of jeans, recently he has begun adding scraps of recycled canvas. joão varies between these two different styles. in the first, he overlaps sections of jeans patched together with canvas pieces to create a variegated background. each distinct part of the jeans is emphasized, forcing the viewer to interrogate individual elements such as pocket, waistband, and crotch, as shown more closely in detail. painted outlines of individual sections accentuate specific parts. the haphazard organization of jeans defines the painting’s fragmented composition, an overall quilt-like surface. joão’s second style creates a clear distinction between the jeans and the bits of canvas, emphasizing the jeans as a pictorial element through his placement of intact legs outlined with wide strokes of paint. the mostly unpainted jeans reveal tears amid varying shades of schwartzott: recycling discarded histories to chronicle identities faded denim. the jeans appear as an object, commodified and displayed, rather than a mere support for paint. both of these painting styles illustrate how joão relies upon recycled materials in the creation of his art. in both styles, he foregrounds the materiality of the jeans, used both as support and a pictorial element using different techniques (see figure ). similarly, joão’s bags illustrate an innovative repurposing of unwanted canvases. in the transformation of his own and other artists’ rejected canvases into new objects, joão provides a new life for the artworks. reconfigured into new objects (school bags), joao gives the discarded canvases a new identity and purpose. additionally, joao views jeans as his tool as an artist, in which he has forged a singular identity from using this recycled material in his artwork. pekiwa: ‘i give life to an object that doesn’t have life’ pekiwa’s artworks are constructed from wooden objects that include windows, doors, and boats. he described this initial awareness: i got interested in these kinds of objects when i went to the island of mozambique. i saw a lot of houses – broken; some old ones, and the windows figure : joão. jeans painting (second style), mixed media (recycled jeans, acrylic/can- vas), december . schwartzott: recycling discarded histories to chronicle identities and doors reflected their identity as being connected to a house because we can see the windows and the doors (symbolizing a house). my first idea when i saw these things was to give life to something that died and to protect the windows and the doors. when i say to protect it is not specifically for the actual broken doors and windows – but if we have something broken we can give it another life. that is my first message that i want to give people. then i went to the mozambican highlands to collect materials. this was my project. i went and stayed there two months. […] i collected materials in urban areas where poor people live […] i [also] went to the houses where people were making renovations on their houses and i asked them for materials they didn’t want to use – they gave me materials which i bring here to my studio to use (pekiwa, ). pekiwa’s style developed as a result of his desire to create an individual identity for himself as a sculptor, by choosing to work with specific materials. after traveling to the mozambican highlands and the island of mozambique off the country’s northern coast, he witnessed both the poverty and the surplus of the inhabitants, by viewing dilapidated houses and homes undergoing renovations. windows and doors became linked, not only to houses they belonged to but also to the lives of the people who inhabited the homes and lived among these objects. pekiwa began encountering deteriorating boats on the historic island of mozambique, which had served as both a port and a thriving boat building industry since the th century. he began to incorporate boats that had fallen into disrepair into his artwork. as pekiwa stated above, his view of protecting these objects was limited to his ability to provide new life through their transformation. in reality however, his protection of the objects extends to how he maintains the integrity of their original forms. elements of pekiwa’s artistic process focus directly on preserving the physicality of many of the objects he acquires through his innovative artistic techniques of conservation. techniques pekiwa utilizes are not restricted to preservation of objects he has scavenged, bartered, or bought however. in fact, in several instances pekiwa’s methods do not repair these objects at all. pekiwa utilizes specific techniques and schwartzott: recycling discarded histories to chronicle identities materials to underscore his transformative process, which draws attention to worn and damaged areas under his careful repair. using both new and recycled metal wire, hinges, and rivets, pekiwa carefully stitches together cracks, encloses gaps, and draws attention to holes by embellishing them. in this way, pekiwa focuses attention on the materiality of these objects’ previous uses. pekiwa’s embrace of these objects’ past lives both engages and challenges his transformation of the forms (see figure ). specific examples illustrate how pekiwa painstakingly mends the ruptures in the physical forms both to fortify and embellish their structures. one of pekiwa’s largest artworks illustrates both forms of his object conservation. sem titulo/untitled, an extremely imposing structure, is a canoe that is at least feet tall. lacking a single visual narrative, the hull’s surface incorporates pekiwa’s carved, gouged, and sculpted figural imagery and decorative patterns. different figures appear throughout its surface and its most imposing figure is carved into the bow. these figures balance the canoe and are interspersed with floral and fluid curvilinear designs that punctuate as well as puncture the surfaces of the wood. viewing the sculpture overall, it is clear where pekiwa has relied upon the extant cracks of the canoe’s surface to guide him in his placement of imagery. for example, gaping holes are altered into geometric eyes, figure : pekiwa. detail. sem titulo/untitled, mixed media (recycled canoe, metal hardware), . schwartzott: recycling discarded histories to chronicle identities or transformed into toothy screaming mouths. pekiwa’s inclusion of a row of rusted hinges creates a winding suture that climbs up the surface of the canoe, and instead of actually repairing it, draws further attention to this old canoe’s disrepair. attended to with more rusted hinges and equally rusted metal reinforcement bar (rebar), the fragile state of the canoe’s overall form is revealed. pekiwa uses these metal braces as a necessary conservation, to prevent the canoe from collapsing upon itself. providing his view of these repairs pekiwa stated: i’m trying to bring some context with the recycling […] the part of the door hinges i put there [on the canoe] because my idea was to fix where it was broken. at the end i see it is good to use these materials because i’m recycling too (pekiwa, ). pekiwa enjoys working with different surfaces of the boat to create multiple views, and this is particularly true of figural representations. in this case, the frontal view reveals a carved figure near the base, where negative space opens above its head. in contrast, viewing the boat from the side, a winged, carved form appears. in another example, a completely deteriorated canoe, where the entire beam has disintegrated reveals whatever is behind it, serves solely as a framing device. intrinsically, pekiwa maintains the materiality of the form’s original use, or history of the objects, in the creation of his artworks as he integrates his designs to their recognizable forms. in order to provide a context, he focuses on connections to the social aspects of these materials. pekiwa commented on these ideas: i’m enjoying materials that were used before – domestic objects - materials that have some story. when i’m working with these pieces i’m not going to give up its meaning from before. so i respect the meaning, and its functions. but if i transform it, i keep its meaning – i give the art texture […] well even now i try to preserve [its meaning] because it has a social context. this is why it’s important for me is to try to preserve the object. if i find a doorframe is broken – i try to keep it the same in my art […] its original function was to close something (pekiwa, ). schwartzott: recycling discarded histories to chronicle identities each of the wooden materials pekiwa obtains to recycle into his art becomes associated with their former use, creating a connection between these objects and the social history of mozambique. one of pekiwa’s central goals as an artist is to educate people about mozambican culture: ‘well i hope the people can see it in the same way. art is to educate people. what i’m doing is trying to give my opinion and view to contribute to [their] education’ (pekiwa, ). as pekiwa and i discussed his goals to educate through his recyclia, pekiwa’s artwork, incorporating pre-used windows, doors, and boats he scavenges, barters, and trades to obtain, creates a visual dialogue for viewers dealing with social issues in mozambique. conclusion: welding, hanging, patching, and carving artists discussed in this article are intrinsically linked together in their preferences for using recycled materials as media that are welded, hung, patched, and carved to create their individual artworks. for example, fiel selects recognizable gun parts to evoke memories of war to remind viewers of what should never happen again. in his linking of horrific reminders of war, he creates peacekeeping memorials to underscore notions surrounding post-conflict resolution for mozambique, and beyond. joão uses two types of fabric: pre-used artists’ painted canvases to create book bags inspired him to begin to use jeans to create a support for paintings. in his use of these materials, he focuses not on their meaning or previous use per se. joão selects these materials to serve a function in the construction of his new forms. in this case, joão relies on the recyclia as a tool, focusing on the utility of their forms in his creative process. cármen utilizes cardboard and other diverse recyclia in her printmaking processes. drawn to an exploration of creativity, through expanded elements of shapes, forms, and textures, cármen also relies principally on her recycled materials’ utility, which she constructs into abstract and figural forms. fascinated by her transformation of recyclia into a sculptural tool, cármen is most interested in the utility of the pre-used materials and how she is able to develop them into something new. pekiwa, in his use of recycled wooden objects that include doors, windows, and boats, links these recognizable forms to everyday life in mozambique. while he uses the deteriorating surface of these specific schwartzott: recycling discarded histories to chronicle identities forms as a base for his permutations, he most closely focuses his attention on maintaining the integrity of the identity of the objects he scavenges, barters, and trades to obtain, creating a visual dialogue for viewers as he deals with social issues in mozambique. competing interests the author has no competing interests to declare. references bennett, j vibrant matter: a political ecology of things. durham: duke university press. doi: https://doi.org/ . / bias, j p (joão) interview conducted by schwartzott, a. maputo, mozambique, december. bias, j p (joão) interview conducted by schwartzott, a. maputo, mozambique, october. blier, s african arts, ( ): – . doi: https://doi.org/ . /afar. . . . calvino, i ‘la poubelle agreéé ’, the road to san giovanni. new york: pantheon books. doi: 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recycling discarded histories to chronicle identities: making art from waste in mozambique. open library of humanities, ( ): , pp.  – . doi: https://doi.org/ . /olh. published: july copyright: © the author(s). this is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution . international license (cc-by . ), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. see http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/ . /. open access open library of humanities is a peer-reviewed open access journal published by open library of humanities. https://doi.org/ . /tvl.v i . http://unstats.un.org/unsd/environment/wastetreatment.htm http://unstats.un.org/unsd/environment/wastetreatment.htm https://doi.org/ . /j.habitatint. . . https://doi.org/ . /olh. http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/ . / 	recycling 	object materiality 	theoretical frames 	research methodology 	the artists 	fiel: now it’s my time to do something for society 	cármen: ‘people don’t have artists’ eyes. they don’t see good garbage in the streets’ 	joão: ‘i ask people on facebook to bring jeans for me to use’ 	pekiwa: ‘i give life to an object that doesn’t have life’ 	conclusion: welding, hanging, patching, and carving 	competing interests 	references 	figure 	figure 	figure 	figure hitler and the churches - by robert r. taylor b.a., the university of british columbia, a thesis submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of master of arts in the department of history we accept this thesis as conforming to the required standard the university of british columbia april, in presenting this thesis in partial fulfilment of the requirements for an advanced degree at the university of • british columbia, i agree that the library shall make it freely available for reference and study, i further agree that per- mission for extensive copying of this thesis for scholarly purposes may be granted by the head of my department or by his representatives. it is understood that.copying or publi- cation of this thesis for financial gain shall not be allowed without my written permission* department of history the university of british columbia, vancouver ? canada d a t e a p r i l . a abstract f o r purposes o f t h i s t h e s i s , we a c c e p t the v i e w t h a t t h e c h r i s t i a n church's power d e c l i n e d a f t e r t h e m i d d l e ages, and a s e c u l a r , i n d u s t r i a l , mass s o c i e t y d e v e l o p e d i n western europe, a s o c i e t y w h i c h , by t h e n i n e t e e n t h c e n t u r y , had begun t o d e p r i v e m e n - - p a r t i c u l a r l y t h e p r o l e t a r i a t — o f t h e i r s p i r i t u a l r o o t s , and w h i c h c r e a t e d the need f o r a new f a i t h . i n germany, t h i s s i t u a t i o n , e s p e c i a l l y a c u t e a f t e r t h e f i r s t w o r l d war, was c o n d i t i o n e d by t h e p e c u l i a r h i s t o r y o f c h u r c h - s t a t e r e l a t i o n s t h e r e as w e l l as by t h e weakened pos- i t i o n o f t h e m i d d l e c l a s s e s . f o r a v a r i e t y o f r e a s o n s , young germans i n t h e f i r s t decades of t h i s c e n t u r y were i n a " r e v o l u t i o n a r y " mood. a d o l f h i t l e r h i m s e l f was such a young p e r s o n , r a i s e d i n a b o u r g e o i s c h r i s t i a n environment, y e t s t r o n g l y a f f e c t e d by t h e p o l i t i c a l and s o c i a l t r e n d s o f the l a t e n i n e t e e n t h and e a r l y t w e n t i e t h c e n t u r i e s . n a t i o n a l s o c i a l i s m , w i t h i t s a n t i - s e m i t i s m and i t s c a l l f o r n a t i o n a l r e g e n e r a t i o n , became t h e s u b s t i t u t e f a i t h o f germans and was d i r e c t e d by c y n i c a l p o l i t i c i a n s . much o f t h i s " t h e o l o g y " was d e t e r m i n e d by p o l i t i c a l c o n s i d e r a t i o n s ; t h a t i s , by what a p p e a l e d t o non-nazi germans. i t demanded, f o r example, a t o t a l commitment w h i c h many were r e a d y t o g i v e . the r e l i g i o u s t r a p p i n g s of t h i s weltanschauung were manufac- t u r e d by n a z i l e a d e r s , who d i d not t h e m s e l v e s b e l i e v e i n them. s e e k i n g t o win t h e n a t i o n ' s y o u t h , h i t l e r found h i m s e l f i n c o n f l i c t w i t h o r t h o d o x f a i t h , but he knew t h a t , i f the p a r t y was permanently t o dominate germany, c h r i s t i a n i t y would have t o be e l i m i n a t e d . the c h r i s t i a n a t t i t u d e , however, a i d e d t h e n a z i s i n c o n s o l i d a t i n g t h e i r power. the l u t h e r a n v i e w o f t h e s t a t e , e s p e c i a l l y t h a t of t h e "german c h r i s t i a n s " , o f f e r e d l i t t l e r e s i s t a n c e . the c a t h o l i c a t t i t u d e was more h o s t i l e , but u l t i m a t e l y d i d not p r e v e n t german c a t h o l i c s from r i v a l l i n g t h e i r p r o t e s t a n t c o l l e a g u e s i n enthusiasm f o r n a z i r e f o r m s . h i t l e r ' s approach t o the c h u r c h e s a f t e r e v o l v e d i n s e v e r a l s t a g e s , from a p p a r e n t c o n c i l i a t i o n t h r o u g h f r a n k h o s t i l i t y t o g r u d g i n g t o l e r a t i o n . he t r i e d t o r e t r e a t from t h e p o s i t i o n he adopted i n t h e ' t w e n t i e s , a p o s i t i o n which u p h e l d " p o s i t i v e c h r i s t i a n i t y " , and w h i c h s u p p o r t e d t h e "german c h r i s t i a n s " and t h e c o n c o r d a t of . a l t h o u g h ready t o abandon t h e s e elements and t h i s agreement, he n e v e r c o u l d . a f t e r he began t o i n t e n s i f y h i s a t t a c k on t h e c a t h o l i c s and, t o a c e r t a i n e x t e n t , t h e l u t h e r a n s , b u t h i t l e r knew i t was not n e c e s s a r y t o a s s a u l t t h e l a t t e r group as v i g o r o u s l y as t h e c a t h o l i c s . the o u t b r e a k o f war showed b o t h t h e f a i l u r e and t h e s u c c e s s o f t h e p a r t y ' s k i r c h e n p o l i t i k , f o r , w h i l e t h e a c t i v i t i e s o f b o t h c o n f e s s i o n s showed t h a t t h e p e o p l e s t i l l adhered t o t h e o l d f a i t h , the f a c t t h a t both c h u r c h e s a c c e p t e d t h e war i n a l l i t s c o n t r a d i c t o r y a s p e c t s , showed t h a t t h e weltanschauung had, i n t h e p o l i t i c a l sphere a t l e a s t , won t h e a l l e g i a n c e t h a t t h e p a r t y had sought e a r l i e r . the n a z i s were p a r t i c u l a r l y c o n c e r n e d t o e l i m i n a t e c h r i s t i a n i n f l u e n c e i n e d u c a t i o n and y o u t h t r a i n i n g , and t o s u b s t i t u t e t h e i r own " f a i t h " . many u n i v e r s i t y s t u d e n t s were a l r e a d y n a t i o n a l i s t i c , a n t i - s e m i t i c , and " r e v o l u t i o n a r y " , and most o f t h e f a c u l t y o f t h e u n i v e r s i t i e s were n o t h o s t i l e t o the p a r t y . here h i t l e r was not concerned o n l y t o e x c l u d e c h r i s t i a n i n f l u e n c e , but a l s o t o emasculate t h e c r i t i c a l f a c - u l t i e s o f t h e young and t o e n s u r e t h a t o n l y t h o s e who a c c e p t e d n a t i o n a l s o c i a l i s m were educated. the p u b l i c s c h o o l s posed more o f a problem, f o r here t h e c h u r c h e s o f t e n c o n t r o l l e d both t e a c h e r s and s u b j e c t s , and here a t t h e same t i m e was t h e g r e a t e s t o p p o r t u n i t y and g r e a t e s t need t o educate and t r a i n good n a z i s . t h e r e f o r e the i d e o l o g y became p a r t o f e v e r y c h i l d ' s l e a r n i n g and, where c h r i s t i a n i t y c o u l d not be a l t o g e t h e r ex- c l u d e d , i t was used and merged w i t h t h e h i t l e r i t e t e a c h i n g s . they a l s o t r i e d t o l i m i t t h e i n f l u e n c e o f p a r e n t s w i t h c h r i s t i a n p r e j u d i c e s over t h e c h i l d and t o e l i m i n a t e t h e c h r i s t i a n y o u t h o r g a n i z a t i o n s . throughout t h i s campaign t h e y employed d e c e p t i v e c o n c i l i a t i o n , d e l i b e r a t e l y c o n f u s i n g de- c r e e s , and a n t i - c h r i s t i a n propaganda. at f i r s t t h e y bene- f i t e d from t h e c o n f u s i o n i n many c h r i s t i a n minds as t o t h e n a t u r e o f t h e movement, but t h i s a m b i g u i t y was u l t i m a t e l y a d i s a d v a n t a g e . i n t h a t t h e y used c h r i s t i a n i t y t o i n c u l c a t e t h e new " f a i t h " , t h e y weakened t h e i r a n t i - c h r i s t i a n p o s i t i o n . u n c e r t a i n t y among c h r i s t i a n l e a d e r s combined w i t h t h e f a i t h o f a p a r t o f t h e i r f l o c k d e t e r m i n e d r e s p e c t i v e l y t h e n a z i s ' c o n s i d e r a b l e s u c c e s s i n p o l i t i c a l o r g a n i z a t i o n and t h e i r f a i l u r e t o b e g i n e x t e r m i n a t i n g c h r i s t i a n i t y . had t h e c h u r c h l e a d e r s p o s s e s s e d a dynamic approach t o s o c i a l and p o l i t i c a l problems, t h e n a z i l e a d e r s would not have c o n v e r t e d so many t o t h e i r s u b s t i t u t e f a i t h . t h e i r r e f o r m s succeeded because t h e y were based on a l a c k of s p i r i t u a l c o n v i c t i o n i n t h e r e f o r m e r s o r o f p o l i t i c a l m a t u r i t y i n t h e churchmen. h i t l e r was w i l l i n g t o use any s y m p a t h e t i c element t o g a i n power, b u t , i r o n i c a l l y , he n e v e r managed t o win t h e e n t i r e d e v o t i o n of t h e p e o p l e because o f t h i s t a c t i c o f apparent compromise. i n s h o r t , h i s a l l i a n c e w i t h and use of c h r i s t i a n i t y was u l t i m a t - e l y one o f h i s weaknesses. contents chapter introduction ( ) background: the spiritual condition of pre-nazi germany ( ) roman catholic and lutheran views of the state ( ) german church-state relations ( ) problems in lutheranism ( ) german society i n general; particularly post- youth chapter adolf hitler: his faith and his attitude to christianity ( ) introduction ( ) his faith ( ) the role of the party, versus the churches chapter the nazi movement as a substitute faith ( ) the development of nazism into a pseudo-church ( ) rosenberg, the high priest ( ) essence of the nazi "faith" ( ) the religious trappings manufactured ( ) thehitler youth ( ) concept of the e l i t e ( ) the final enlightenment ( ) weaknesses chapter the church-state conflict ( ) christian attitude to the conflict ( ) themes of the conflict ( ) events of the conflict ( ) problems chapter education and the control of youth ( ) introduction ( ) the universities ( ) public schools ( ) hitler youth versus christian youth chapter summary and conclusions chapter i i n t r o d u c t i o n . background: s p i r i t u a l c o n d i t i o n of p r e - n a z i germany the c h r i s t i a n churches have f a i l e d t o p r o v i d e s o l u t i o n s f o r t w e n t i e t h c e n t u r y s p i r i t u a l , s o c i a l , and p o l i t i c - a l problems; t h e r e s u l t i s t h a t many o f t h e s e m i - r e l i g i o u s movements o f t h e modern e r a , such as communism, have t a k e n p l a c e o u t s i d e c h r i s t i a n t h e o l o g y and a p a r t from c h r i s t i a n l i f e . n e c e s s i t y i s t h e mother o f i n v e n t i o n ; t h e need t o s o l v e t h e s e problems c r e a t e d much o f t h e n a t i o n a l s o c i a l i s t phenomenon. german s p i r i t u a l ^ c o n f u s i o n was o f c o n s i d e r a b l e s i g n i f i c a n c e i n t h e development o f the n a z i movement and i n i t s r i s e t o power. but w h i l e t h e n a z i e l i t e d i d not s e r i o u s l y c o n c e r n them- by " s p i r i t u a l " i s meant n o t s i m p l y t h a t w h i c h relate<§ t o t h e l i f e of t h e s p i r i t ( i . e . " s o u l " ) , not r e l i g i o u s l i f e per s e , but t h a t w h i c h d i l t h e y c a l l e d " d i e g e i s t i g e welt", t r a n s l a t e d by h.p. rickman as " m i n d - a f f e c t e d w o r l d " . t h i s i n - c l u d e s concepts o f god, p a t r i o t i s m , w o r l d - v i e w , s o c i a l mores, and so on; p h r a s e s which i m p l y an o t h e r - w o r l d l y s a n c t i o n t h a t , a l - though vague, i s n o n e t h e l e s s s t r o n g . see w i l h e l m d i l t h e y , p a t t e r n and meaning i n h i s t o r y . thoughts on h i s t o r y and s o c i e t y , ed. t r a n s . h.p. rickman, new xork, h a r p e r s , l y b i d , p. . s e l v e s w i t h t h e cause o f t h e malady, t h e y made e f f e c t i v e use of the symptoms i n t h e i r d r i v e t o power and t h e recommenda- t i o n s of would-be p h y s i c i a n s i n m a i n t a i n i n g t h e i r p o s i t i o n . t h i s i n t r o d u c t o r y c h a p t e r o u t l i n e s t h e problem as i t appeared i n b o t h european and german l i f e . from t h i s g e n e r a l background w i l l be seen not o n l y how nazism was an i n t e g r a l p a r t o f german development, but a l s o why u n - p o l i t i c a l , n o n - f a n a t i c a l , c h r i s t i a n germans a c c e p t e d and s u p p o r t e d i t . c r i t i c i s m of t h e w i l h e l m i a n p e r i o d and l a m e n t a t i o n s about i t s s p i r i t u a l s i c k n e s s began a l m o s t as soon as the age i t s e l f and have n e v e r stopped. a l f r e d baumler, a n a z i , de- c l a r e d t h a t bismarck l e f t behind him a people who l i v e d i n a s t a t e t h e y had not t h e m s e l v e s c r e a t e d and who were t h e r e f o r e i n d i f f e r e n t t o i t s f u t u r e . t h e i r k u l t u r was p o i s o n e d by i n - c r e a s i n g commercial e x p a n s i o n , w o r l d - m a r k e t c o m p e t i t i o n , and, o f c o u r s e , m a t e r i a l i s m . a l l t h e f i n e r elements of genuine "germanness" (deutschtum), t h e q u a l i t i e s o f t h e german " s o u l " , were s a c r i f i c e d f o r i n d i v i d u a l m a t e r i a l g a i n . w i t h t h i s de- cadent i n d i v i d u a l i s m and t h e c o r r e s p o n d i n g n e g l e c t o f t h e c o u n t r y ' s s p i r i t u a l w e l f a r e , baumler was not s u r p r i s e d t h a t t h e f a t h e r l a n d c o l l a p s e d i n &. , he d i d n o t , i n t h i s a n a l y s i s , get a t t h e core o f t h e i s s u e . nor d i d a n o t h e r n a z i , a l f r e d rosenberg, when he condemned "the b o u n d l e s s , m a t e r i a l i s t i c quoted i n george f r e d e r i c k k n e l l e r , e d u c a t i o n a l p h i l o s o p h y o f n a t i o n a l s o c i a l i s m , new haven, y a l e , , p. . individualism aiming at an economic-political control of the world's money."''" to be sure, i f one ignores the jargon about "soul", one finds here some truth, supported by more reliable sources. the age was f i l l e d with great constructive poten- t i a l i t y , suppressed turbulence, and frustration. for many who were less articulate than, for example, nietzsche or paul de lagarde, i t s security andcomfort were not sufficient to give answers to the questions raised by a radically changing environment; they sought someone to lead them out of a social cul de sac. take, for example, thomas mann's "magic mountain", in which a group of people are attracted by what seems to be originality or "charisma" in mr. peeperkorn. this novel is an encyclopedia of intellectual and social trends of the time. al- though they were often c r i t i c a l of the age, the wandervffgel (or "roamers"), youthful hikers and nature enthusiasts, stand for a similar tendency, seeking the "real" in human experience. it i s significant, moreover, that the church did not usually participate in the c r i t i c a l wave, nor did i t often attract those who sought a reformation of national l i f e . it had not man- aged to capture the allegiance of the working classes, who were born and grew up largely pagan from the early nineteenth century. less inclined to be satisfied with superficial palliatives, the middle classes, more l i t e r a t e and self-con- alfred rosenberg, mythus des .jahrhunderts. mtochen, hoheneichen, , p. . '. scious, engaged in what now seems a frantic search for meaning. the peculiarities of the wilhelmian period were symptomatic of a deeper malaise, european in scope and much older than the second empire. by , much christian teaching and morality lived on only in a secularized form, and the majority of europeans lived without a spiritual foundation to their existence. this condition, according to nicolas berdyaev,^ represents the end of the renaissance and the failure of humanism. the man the renaissance humanists created now wanders the earth, lacking communion with the depths of l i f e , relying too much on his own powers, and unbearably lon- ely. this loneliness, both spiritual and more simply social, has become an everyday experience of the urban masses. mean- while, according to hannah arendt, self-interest has to a certain extent declined and has been replaced by a numbness in the face of catastrophe which, coupled with an inclination toward abstract notions as guides for l i f e , happily accepts a r i g i d , i l l o g i c a l ideology as long as i t grants a minimum of self-respect. "what convinces the masses are not facts, and not invented facts, but only the consistency of the system of which they are presumably part." a new system of belief, "*"in this introduction, i have confined myself to a discussion of three c r i t i c s of the situation, berdyaev, arendt, and fromm, representatives of three points of view, christian p o l i t i c a l - s o c i a l , and psychological. much more has been written on the subject; here i can only indicate the common conclusions these writers have arrived at. hannah arendt, origins of totalitarianism,new york, meridian, , p. . however, i f p r e s e n t e d i n terms p o p u l a r l y u n d e r s t o o d — s o u l , god, f a t e , f a t h e r l a n d — i s a l m o s t a s s u r e d o f s u c c e s s . europeans a r e r e a d y , berdyaev adds, t o a c c e p t any k i n d o f c o l l e c t i v i s m as l o n g as t h e unwanted burden of human r e s - p o n s i b i l i t y w i l l v a n i s h . i f t h e new system a p p e a r s c o n s i s t e n t , t h e y w i l l g l a d l y a c c e p t t h e o f f e r e d s p i r i t u a l c o u n t e r f e i t , f o r m i n g " c h u r c h e s " t h a t a r e mere i m i t a t i o n s . t h i s f i n a l d i s - l o c a t i o n o f t h e o r g a n i c s t r u c t u r e o f l i f e means enslavement t o m e c h a n i z a t i o n and " c i v i l i z e d b a r b a r i s m " . there i s , con- s e q u e n t l y , i n t e n s i f i c a t i o n o f t h e l o n e l i n e s s which i s a t t h e r o o t of human d i s s a t i s f a c t i o n . ' ' " i t c o u l d be m a i n t a i n e d t h a t t h e more europeans g a i n p o l i t i c a l freedom and emerge from an o r i g i n a l u n i t y w i t h o t h e r human b e i n g s and t h e n a t u r a l w o r l d , t h e more i s o l a t e d t h e y become as i n d i v i d u a l s . the p o s t - r e n a i s s a n c e s i t u a t i o n , hand i n hand w i t h growing s e c u l a r i z a t i o n and " e n l i g h t e n m e n t " , l e a d s t h e weaker m a j o r i t y o f men t o seek s e c u r i t y t h r o u g h t i e s w h i c h d e s t r o y t h e i r freedom and t h e i r i n d i v i d u a l i n t e g r i t y . at any r a t e , w r i t e r s as d i f f e r e n t as berdyaev and hannah arendt agree t h a t p o w e r f u l t e n d e n c i e s e x i s t t o "escape from freedom" i n t o s u b m i s s i o n or i n t o some r e l a t i o n s h i p w i t h t h e w o r l d and men which r e l i e v e s u n c e r t a i n t y . e r i c h fromm comments; "by l o s i n g n i c o l a s berdyaev, end o f our time, t r a n s . donald a t t w a t e r , london, sheed and ward, , pp. - . see a l s o a r e n d t , op. c i t . , p. . h i s f i x e d place i n a c l o s e d world, man l o s e s the answer to the meaning of h i s l i f e . " what, or who, could r e s t o r e t h i s s e c u r i t y ? in t h i s p a r t i c u l a r aspect, nazism was a european phenomenon, the end-product of t h i s l o n g i n g f o r s p i r i t u a l s e c u r i t y , but exacerbated by n a t i o n a l f r u s t r a t i o n and econ- omic d i s a s t e r . few could f i n d solace i n the p o l i t i c a l l i f e of t w e n t i e t h century germany, where new f o r c e s , powerful and a n t i p a t h e t i c to t r a d i t i o n a l values, threatened to b r i n g anarchy. the p o l i t i c a l world had l o s t i t s connection not only with c h r i s t i a n i t y but a l s o with much of germany's e t h i c a l and c u l t u r a l l i f e . this complete s e c u l a r i z a t i o n of p o l i t i c s de- p r i v e d of refuge those u n a t t r a c t e d by a d e c l i n i n g church. the german who had no sense of f u n c t i o n i n r e l i g i o u s and p o l i t i c a l l i f e , and who could no longer b e l i e v e i n the d i v i n e r i g h t of the emperor, sought, with the help of the n a z i s , to give p o l i t i c a l l i f e the trappings of r e l i g i o n again. the movement gathered momentum and strength as the c r i t i c a l r e b e l s and d e s p a i r i n g c h r i s t i a n s found i n i t expression f o r t h e i r own needs. for both b e l i e v e r s and non-christians a l i k e , of course, i t seemed e a s i e r to accept the i m i t a t i o n church berdyaev e r i c h fromm, escape from freedom, toronto, rinehart, , p. . p r o p h e s i e d t h a n t o adopt t h e more s t r e n u o u s a c c e p t a n c e o f s p i r i t u a l doubt c o u p l e d w i t h t h e generous t o l e r a n c e fromm p r e s c r i b e s , o r t h e o r t h o d o x c h r i s t i a n a t t i t u d e o f f a i t h . t h i s was t h e s i t u a t i o n i n germany a f t e r t h e g r e a t war. the p e c u l i a r i t i e s o f t h e w i l h e l m i a n p e r i o d were symptoms o f a m a l a i s e , not l i m i t e d to germany a l o n e , w h i c h became i n t e n s e i n t h e ' t w e n t i e s and ' t h i r t i e s . i n t h e l a s t a n a l y s i s , not m a t e r i a l c o m f o r t , not immersion i n t h e b e a u t i e s or f u n c t i o n s of n a t u r e , not even t h e p u r g i n g a c t i o n o f a g r e a t war e f f o r t , c o u l d r e l i e v e t h e agony caused by a development f o u r hundred y e a r s o l d and european i n scope. n a t i o n a l s o c i a l i s m , however, t r i e d t o r e v e r s e t h i s development, b u t , i n d o i n g so, met w i t h a r i v a l ; t h e c h r i s t i a n church. . c a t h o l i c and l u t h e r a n views of the s t a t e the c h r i s t i a n church e x i s t e d i n germany b e f o r e t h e m o n o l i t h i c s t a t e , b e f o r e t h e empire, almost b e f o r e c i v i l government of any k i n d ; and the v i e w s o f c h r i s t i a n s , c a t h o l i c and l u t h e r a n , w i t h r e g a r d t o the s t a t e were p a r t o f e s t a b l i s h e d d o c t r i n e and d e t e r m i n e d t h e p o l i c y o f e v e r y p o t e n t i a l german l e a d e r , sometimes as p e r s o n a l a r t i c l e s o f f a i t h , as w i t h t h e l u t h e r a n b i s m a r c k , sometimes as t e n e t s o f an a l i e n w o r l d v i e w , as f o r t h e n i h i l i s t h i t l e r . f o r roman c a t h o l i c s , t h o m i s t i c p h i l o s o p h y p r o v i d e d a t h e o r y o f t h e s t a t e a p p a r e n t l y opposed t o n a z i dogma. l u t h e r - anism a l l o w s t h e s t a t e and t h e c h u r c h each a sphere o f i n - fluence in society, but catholicism claims that the church's power i s derived from a transcendental divine principle, standing above created nature, and, whereas the state i s con- sidered "natural", the- church is "supernatural", above any natural creation of man. catholics believe that, while eternal law can find expression in laws of nature, the source and authority of human law must ultimately be the law of god; human law has no authority except as an expression of justice, defined by god's law as declared in scripture. thus, a secular government, whether democratic or autocratic, which governs in accordance with the law of god, i s tolerable; the church continues to be the repository of eternal truth. the revolution and the developments were only ripples on the ocean of catholic security. nevertheless, as the nazis were to discover, the catholics tended to oppose any confusion of secular and divine power and to uphold eternal moral standards by which a l l powers in society might be judged. traditional lutheranism, on the other hand, while i t demands freedom to preach the gospel and to administer sac- raments without hindrance, leaves the p o l i t i c a l side of the church's l i f e to the good w i l l of the state, seeking, to be sure, to influence a l l classes i n the state, but believing see thomas aquinas, treatise on law, chicago, regnery, >;. n.d., passim. that the "powers that be are ordained by god." orthodox german lutherans often drew a sharp line between the realms of private devotion and public action, and the combination of personal piety and a ruthless use of force was characterist- i c , as with bismarck. wilhelm nieme er explains the lutheran attitude with the passage from the second epistle to the corinthians, "the weapons of our warfare are not carnal"."'" both the catholics and the lutherans believed in loyalty to the national state, but lutheran devotion could go so far that during war the defence of the fatherland became the religious as well as the civic duty of every christian citizen. the gott mit uns attitude did not die out after the great war; in , a lutheran minister declared; to foster national l i f e , to let i t blossom anew where i t has disappeared or threatens to disappear, that i s one of the most wonder- f u l tasks which god has placed before his children...among these peoples there i s one to which goes our love, our pride, our wish, and our hope for the future: that i s the german people. at the same period i t was pastor martin niemsller's desire to help his country out of i t s "desolate condition" that helped him decide to become a pastor. there is nothing obviously "'"wilhelm niemttller, kirchenkampf im dritten reich, bielefeld, bechauf, , p. . quoted in paul kosok, modern germany. a study of conflicting loyalties, chicago, , p. . ^martin niemoller, vom u-boot zur kanzel, berlin, warneck, , p. . " n a z i " i n t h e above q u o t a t i o n s , y e t many c o n s c i e n t i o u s o r - thodox l u t h e r a n s s u p p o r t e d h i t l e r and t h e "german c h r i s t i a n s " . how d i d an o t h e r w i s e l a u d a b l e l o v e o f c o u n t r y become a s u i c i d a l r e s p e c t f o r a u t h o r i t y ? by i n s i s t i n g t h a t t h e t r u e church was t h e church i n v i s i b l e , r a t h e r t h a n t h e church v i s i b l e , m a r t i n l u t h e r weakened t h e power o f t h e e c c l e s i a s t i c a l a u t h o r i t i e s o v e r t h e s t a t e , w h i l e a t the same time j u s t i f y i n g a b s o l u t e a u t h - o r i t y by d i v i n e r i g h t . t h i s was no l o s s t o l u t h e r , who b e l i e v e d t h a t r e l i g i o u s l y i n s p i r e d i n w a r d l i b e r t y was t h e o n l y i m p o r t a n t l i b e r t y . obedience t o outward c i v i l and church a u t h o r i t y i s t h e theme o f s e v e r a l o f h i s t r e a t i s e s ; f o r t h e d u t i f u l c h r i s t i a n s e r v a n t i n t h e o u t e r w o r l d , d i s o b e d i e n c e i s a g r e a t e r s i n t h a n murder or t h e f t ; even i f t h o s e i n power a r e e v i l and f a i t h l e s s , t h e i r power and a u t h o r i t y i s from god and t h e r e f o r e good.^ a f u r t h e r theme among t h e l u t h e r a n p o p u l a t i o n was emphasis on t h e wickedness o f human n a t u r e and t h e r e f o r e t h e i n s i g n i f i c a n c e o f t h e i n d i v i d u a l and the n e c e s - s i t y o f s u b o r d i n a t i o n t o a power o u t s i d e t h e s e l f ; consequent- l y , i n q u e s t i o n s o f i m p o s i n g d i s c i p l i n e on a r e c a l c i t r a n t c i t i z e n , t h e l u t h e r a n c h r i s t i a n would s i d e w i t h t h e s t a t e . a s the l u t h e r a n church became t h e s t a t e - c h u r c h i n much o f ^ermany, i t i s n o t s u r p r i s i n g t h a t i t came t o have a p a r a p h r a s e d from the r e f o r m a t i o n w r i t i n g s o f m a r t i n h i t h e r , t r a n s . b.l. woolf, london, l u t t e r w o r t h , , v o l . , p. , and v o l . , p. . v e s t e d i n t e r e s t i n t h e e s t a b l i s h m e n t and t o be more s e n s i t i v e t h a n t h e c a t h o l i c church t o change i n governmental form. throughout t h e s e v e n t e e n t h c e n t u r y , w i t h r e l i g i o u s wars and p o l i t i c a l r e b e l l i o n i n t h e german l a n d s , t h e r e d e v e l o p e d an u n d e r s t a n d a b l e d e s i r e f o r a s o l i d and p o w e r f u l t e m p o r a l a u t h o r i t y . and w h i l e l u t h e r ' s v i e w o f human s a l v a t i o n through i n d i v i d u a l v i r t u e and g r a c e may have been more honest t h a n t h e p r e v a i l i n g c a t h o l i c v i e w , t h e need f o r a d i v i n e l y a p p o i n t e d but s e c u l a r i n s t i t u t i o n which c o u l d e s t a b l i s h o r d e r i n a c h a o t i c w o r l d u n d o u b t e d l y made many germans w i l l i n g t o com- p r o m i s e w i t h t h e s t a t e , however fragmented i t may have been a t t h a t t i m e . the c o n t i n u i n g p r i n c i p l e o f s u b m i s s i o n o f the i n d i v i d u a l t o the p r i n c e i s b e h i n d t h e m o t i v a t i o n o f many l u t h e r a n s i n t h e ' t h i r t i e s , i n c l u d i n g p a s t o r n i e m s l l e r , who welcomed the n a z i " r e v o l u t i o n " . thus t h e s o u l - s e a r c h i n g which must have gone i n t o t h e f o r m a t i o n o f the bekennende k i r c h e (con- f e s s i o n a l church) can be a p p r e c i a t e d . t h i s o r g a n i z a t i o n , h e r e t i c a l by l u t h e r a n as w e l l as by n a z i s t a n d a r d s , was not a n t i c i p a t e d i n t h e p l a n s o f t h e n a z i s , but f o r t u n a t e l y f o r h i t l e r , t h e m a j o r i t y o f l u t h e r a n s s t i l l g r a n t e d t h o s e i n power a c e r t a i n s a n c t i t y . l u t h e r a n r e s i s t a n c e was s l i g h t t o an a u t h o r i t a r i a n movement which s t r e s s e d t h e u n i t y o f a l l germans and spoke i n terms o f " s o u l " and " s a c r i f i c e " . . c h u r c h - s t a t e r e l a t i o n s i n germany these, t h e n , a r e t h e p r i n c i p l e s and t r e n d s w h i c h determined catholic and lutheran behavior towards the state. a brief review of church-state relations up to w i l l show how the lutheran church, in particular, came to occupy an anomalous position in german l i f e and how the catholic church, on the other hand, f e l t i t s e l f strengthened after the f i r s t world war. after the reformation,. both protestant churches, lutheran and calvinist, soon became almost state institutions. in prussia, for example, where the king was summus episcopus, friedrich wilhelm iii in united the lutheran andc- calvin- i s t churches to form the evangelical church of prussia, with the clergy as state o f f i c i a l s . this occurred later in some of the other german states, but did not affect the status of the lutheran or the reformed churches in, for example, bavaria. in actual practice, the prussian king only nominated author- i t i e s , pastors and laymen, to administer the church, but he could exercise, in accordance with lutheran belief, supreme authority over the evangelical church, as shown by his act in creating i t . moreover, a l l church expenses were paid by the prussian government and this financial dependence of the evangelical church created a vested interest in supporting the state. the unity of c i v i l and religious l i f e was streng- thened by the factl that elsewhere in germany every child was born into the roman catholic or the protestant church as well as into the state, and he received his religious education in government schools according to the a f f i l i a t i o n of his parents, whose church taxes were collected by the state. although the state had some control over the churches i t was at the same time intimately connected with and supported by them, andcould i l l afford to alienate them. the failure of bismarck's kulturkampf is the obvious example. the revolution gave both denominations greater freedom from state control, for there was to be no state- church, and the federal constitution made each confession a private corporation, entirely controlling i t s own affairs and appointing i t s o f f i c i a l s without state interference. there was not, however, complete separation of church and state, but simply no interference on the part of the government in internal church affairs; the state continued to guarantee many old privileges to both catholics and protestants which made the church-state relationship closer than might at f i r s t appear. the lutheran pastors s t i l l drew their salaries from state funds and the government s t i l l considered every citizen a member of one of the churches unless he had formally resigned. both churches s t i l l had the right to levy taxes on a l l members, which were collected and turned over to them by the state. furthermore, in the s, the various states which had con- fiscated catholic lands during the napoleonic era were s t i l l paying indemnities. the prussian evangelical church also received indemnities for lands confiscated by the reforms of stein and hardenburg. this limited separation of church and state meant no decrease in the economic protection and support g i v e n t o t h e c h u r c h e s , which were a b l e t o expand t h e i r organ- i z a t i o n . i n a l a r g e r u n i o n of t h e german e v a n g e l i c a l church f o u n d a t i o n was formed w h i c h embraced a l l the t e r r i - t o r i a l churches. i n b a v a r i a , t h e c o n c o r d a t gave the c a t h o l i c s complete freedom t o a d m i n i s t e r t h e i r own a f f a i r s w i t h c o n s i d e r a b l e i n f l u e n c e o v e r t h e e d u c a t i o n a l system; t h e y c o u l d examine and c e r t i f y a l l t e a c h e r s who gave i n s t r u c t i o n i n t h e i r f a i t h . there was a s i m i l a r agreement w i t h t h e b a v a r i a n e v a n g e l i c a l church. throughout germany, r e l i g i o n was no l o n g e r compulsory f o r c h i l d r e n whose p a r e n t s c l a i m e d e x c e p t i o n ; i n i n d u s t r i a l a r e a s , where t h e r e was c o n s i d e r a b l e d i s b e l i e f , the s t a t e s u p p o r t e d s p e c i a l , s c h o o l s f o r i n d u s t r i a l c h i l d r e n , b u t t h i s o f t e n had t h e e f f e c t o f s e g r e g a t i n g c h i l d - r e n o f n o n - b e l i e v e r s and i n c r e a s i n g t h e i n f l u e n c e o f r e l i g i o u s i n s t r u c t i o n i n o t h e r s c h o o l s . e i g h t y - t h r e e per cent o f t h e p u b l i c l y - c o n t r o l l e d e l e m e n t a r y s c h o o l s were s t i l l d e n o m i n a t i o n - a l i n . t h e churches had complete c o n t r o l o v e r t h e i r i n t e r n a l a f f a i r s ; o n l y i n f i n a n c i a l m a t t e r s c o u l d t h e s t a t e i n t e r f e r e , s i n c e i t c o l l e c t e d church t a x e s . the churches were i n a b e t t e r f i n a n c i a l p o s i t i o n a f t e r t h e war than t h e y were under t h e monarchy because t h e y c o n t i n u e d t o r e c e i v e f i n - a n c i a l s u p p o r t from the: government, w h i l e e n j o y i n g a d m i n i s - t r a t i v e autonomy as w e l l as i n f l u e n c e i n t h e e d u c a t i o n a l system. r.h. samuel and r. h i n t o n thomas, e d u c a t i o n and s o c i e t y i n modern germany, london, r o u t l e d g e and kegan,paul, , p. . both major c o n f e s s i o n s , p r o t e s t a n t and c a t h o l i c , r e a c h i n g t h r o u g h t h e i r a u x i l i a r y o r g a n i z a t i o n s i n t o almost e v e r y c o r n e r o f s o c i e t y , s t o o d as g r e a t b u t t r e s s e s t o t h e s t a t e and c o - o p e r a t e d w i t h t h e government as so many p o i n t s t h a t l o y a l t y t o t h e c h r i s t i a n church was almost i n d i s t i n g u i s h - a b l e from l o y a l t y t o the s t a t e . w h i l e t h e p o l i t i c a l and m o r a l d u t y o f t h e c i t i z e n t o t h e s t a t e was s t i l l s a n c t i f i e d by t h e c h u r c h , t h e s t a t e , f o r i t s p a r t , defended the b e l i e f s o f t h e a c c e p t e d r e l i g i o u s b o d i e s ; a c c o r d i n g t o t h e #enal code, b l a s - phemy and p u b l i c . v i l i f i c a t i o n o f any o f the c h u r c h e s , t h e i r b e l i e f s , i n s t i t u t i o n s , o r ceremonies was p u n i s h a b l e by im- p r i s o n m e n t f o r a p e r i o d o f up t o t h r e e y e a r s . the government- a l a d m i n i s t r a t i o n , t h e c a t h o l i c church, and t h e p r o t e s t a n t church c o - o p e r a t e d i n the t a s k o f p r e p a r i n g germans f o r i n t e g r a t e d and p r o d u c t i v e r o l e s i n t h e i r s o c i e t y ; t h i s t h r e e - p i l l a r e d i n s t i t u t i o n saw t o i t t h a t b e l i e f i n god, l o v e o f c o u n t r y , and p u b l i c b e h a v i o u r a c c o r d i n g t o more o r l e s s c h r i s t i a n standards were p a r t o f t h e u n c o n s c i o u s mind o f most germans, and, i f not always u n q u e s t i o n e d , t h e n a t l e a s t a c c e p t e d as i n e v i t a b l e , p r e r e q u i s i t e s f o r r e s p e c t a b l e member- s h i p i n t h e s o c i e t y o f the f a t h e r l a n d . a l t h o u g h — o r perhaps b e c a u s e — a n t i - c h r i s t i a n movements abounded, t h e churches and t h e s t a t e r e l i e d upon each o t h e r f o r s u p p o r t . kosok, op. c i t . . p. . p a r t i c u l a r l y w i t h r e g a r d t o t h e c a t h o l i c church, t h e events o f t h e post-war p e r i o d r e s u l t e d i n an i n c r e a s e i n t h e power and i n f l u e n c e g r a n t e d by t h e s t a t e t o t h e c h u r c h e s . c e n t r a l a u t h o r i t y i t s e l f had been weakened and t h e f e a r o f r a d i c a l i s m l e d many l e a d e r s t o c o n s i d e r " r e l i g i o n " as a s a f e g u a r d ; t h e c a t h o l i c zentrum ( c e n t r e p a r t y ) , because t h e s o c i a l democrats needed i t s s u p p o r t , g a i n e d i n f l u e n c e . thus, i n , , t r a d i t i o n a l c h r i s t i a n i t y seemed t o be i n a s t r o n g p o s i t i o n . but t e n y e a r s l a t e r p a s t o r d i e t r i c h b o n h o e f f e r w r o t e , " t h i s i s a t i m e o f no r e l i g i o n a t a l l . . . w e have r e a c h e d the s t a g e o f b e i n g r a d i c a l l y w i t h o u t r e l i g i o n . h o w was t h i s p o s s i b l e ? . problems i n l u t h e r a n i s m the o r i g i n a l energy of l u t h e r a n p r o t e s t a n t i s m g r a d - u a l l y d e c l i n e d over t h e c e n t u r i e s . p a r a d o x i c a l l y , t h e s t a t e o f mind t h a t c r i p p l e d many l u t h e r a n s and r e n d e r e d them v i c - t i m s o f nazism, t h e b e l i e f t h a t one's c h r i s t i a n f a i t h was a p u r e l y p r i v a t e m a t t e r , a t h i n g o f i n d i v i d u a l and f a m i l i a l p i e t y , began as a r e f o r m of t h e p e t r i f y i n g l u t h e r a n i s m o f t h e s e v e n t e e n t h c e n t u r y . p i e t i s m d e p r e c a t e d mere d o c t r i n e and t r i e d t o t u r n germans toward a s i m p l e r and more honest form of r e l i g i o n , an e x p r e s s i o n o f immediate f e e l i n g r a t h e r t h a n t h e d i e t r i c h b o n h o e f f e r , l e t t e r s and papers from p r i s o n , london, fontana, , p. , see pp. - . r e s u l t o f s t u d y and d i s c u s s i o n . u n f o r t u n a t e l y , t h e f e e l i n g o f dependence upon god which p i e t i s t s such as s c h l e i e r m a c h e r and n o v a l i s s t r e s s e d as the most e s s e n t i a l c h a r a c t e r i s t i c o f c h r i s t i a n i t y tended t o become a f e e l i n g o f dependence upon t h e n a t i o n and i t s power, e s p e c i a l l y when t h o s e w i t h a p i e t i s t i c u p b r i n g i n g l o s t god i n t h e s p i r i t u a l t u r m o i l o f t h e w i l h e l m i a n and weimar e r a s . f o r s c h l e i e r m a c h e r h i m s e l f , n a t i o n a l i s m and c h r i s t i a n i t y were i d e n t i c a l ; " i know t o o c l e a r l y t h a t i t — t h e f a t h e r l a n d — i s a chosen i n s t r u m e n t and i p e o p l e o f god." he p r o f e s s e d , as d i d h i t l e r , t h a t r e l i g i o u s o f a i t h was " t h e sense and t a s t e f o r t h e e t e r n a l . " i n t h i s way, a dangerous vagueness e n t e r e d german p r o t e s t a n t i s m ; t h i s e x t r e m e l y s u b j e c t i v e s t y l e o f r e l i g i o n was marked by un- c e r t a i n t y o f d i r e c t i o n . as germany became more s e c u l a r , n a t i o n a l i s m i t s e l f became a l m o s t a r e l i g i o n as i t seemed t o have more r e a l c o n t e n t and reference t o a c t u a l l i f e t h a n t h e f a l t e r i n g c h u r c h ' s d o c t r i n e . "thetime was t o come when w e l l - m e a n i n g p e o p l e were u n a b l e t o d i s t i n g u i s h befween t h e emotions w h i c h w e l l e d i n t h e i r h e a r t s i n a r e l i g i o u s meeting and t h e s u r g i n g f e e l i n g s a r o u s e d by a n a z i p a r t y r a l l y . quoted i n k o p p e l p i n s o n , p i e t i s m as a f a c t o r i n t h e r i s e o f german n a t i o n a l i s m . new york, columbia, , p. . quoted i n k a r l k u p i s c h , zwischen i d e a l i s m u s und massendemokratie. e i n e g e s c h i c h t e der e v a n g e l i s c h e k i r c h e i n d e u t s c h l a n d - . b e r l i n , l e t t n e r , , p. . " t . h . l i t t e l l , the german p h o e n i x . men and movements i n t h e church i n germany. new york, doubleday, i , p. . and although pietism improved and extended the social aspect of the church's work, i t remained essentially conservative and aristocratic. in this way, the corruption of the original piet- ism i s linked to kulturreligion,"culture-religion", the con- cept that the best elements of christianity are synonymous with the most characteristic and traditional elements of the german way of l i f e or deutsche kultur. throughout the nine- teenth century, the organized protestant church remained obedient and loyal to the various princes, and lost much of i t s con- tact not only with the emerging proletariat, but also with the intellectuals. there were some attempts at reform, such as those of johann hinrich wichern,! but their success was lim- ited. the c r i t i c a l influence of ludwig feuerbach, of some l i b e r a l theologians, and of students of the sociology of re- l i g i o n also came to naught. often, these tendencies too optimistically accepted bourgeois culture as the expression of a rational universe and too naively followed the idea of progress. a "provincial harmonism" between deutschtum and christian values grew. while church-going became one of the virtues of a pious, patriotic btlrger, the court pastor adolf % i c h e r n ( - ) was one of the catalysts of the christian social movement and the inner mission; an ev- angelical minister, he established an orphanage in hamburg. paul banwell means, things that are caesar's. the genesis of the german church conflict, new york, round table, , p. . s t o e c k e r p r o c l a i m e d t h a t c h r i s t i a n f a i t h and l o v e o f germany were "an i n d i s s o l u b l e u n i t y " . ! t h i s p r o t e s t a n t i s m which accommo- d a t e d i t s e l f w i l l i n g l y t o t h e i n t e r e s t s o f t h e m i d d l e c l a s s was examined by thomas mann i n h i s buddenbrooks. by t h e r e was c o n s i d e r a b l e c o n f u s i o n as t o what t h e r o l e o f t h e genuine c h r i s t i a n i n germany s h o u l d be. more- over, t h e r a p i d s t r i d e s made i n i n d u s t r y and t e c h n o l o g y , t h e new s e a r c h f o r p r o f i t , t h e r i s e o f slums and t h e w o r k i n g c l a s s e s a g g r a v a t e d t h e s i t u a t i o n and b r o u g h t germany i n s t e p w i t h t h e european development d e s c r i b e d i n t h e f i r s t s e c t i o n o f t h i s c h a p t e r . l a t e r , t h e n a z i s a d o l f h i t l e r and ludwig k l a g g e s denounced t h e e r a ; "more and more the gods of heaven were put i n t o t h e c o r n e r as o b s o l e t e and outmoded and, i n t h e i r s t e a d , i n c e n s e was burned t o t h e i d o l mammon;" t h e average c h r i s t i a n german became a "hard, o n e - s i d e d r a t i o n a l i s t and i n d i v i d u a l i s t , an a b s t r a c t u n i t o f c a l c u l a t i n g , u t i l i t a r i a n a c q u i s i t i v e c o n s c i o u s n e s s . " b o t h o f t h e s e men knew which drum t o b e a t , but t h e i r o u t b u r s t s a l s o i n d i c a t e a g e n u i n e l y o u t - r a g e d , i f p e r v e r t e d , i d e a l i s m s h a r e d by many germans. i n t h e meantime, a c y n i c a l . n i h i l i s m - - w h a t meinecke c a l l e d "mass m a c ^ h i a v e l l i s m " ^ — g r e w i n much o f t h e l o w e r c l a s s e s ; p a r t i c u - k u p i s c h , op. c i t . , p. and p. . a u r e l k o l n a i , war a g a i n s t t h e west, london, g o l l a n c z , , p. ; and a d o l f h i t l e r , mein kampf, t r a n s . r a l p h man- heim, b o s t o n , houghton m i f f l i n , , p. . - ^ f r i e d r i c h meinecke, the german c a t a s t r o p h e . r e f l e c t i o n s and r e c o l l e c t i o n s , t r a n s . sydney b. fay, cambridge, harvard, , p. . , l a r l y among the lutheran peasantpopulation of the lands east of the elbe was this noticeable; l i t t l e more than three per cent of the population there took part regularly in church services. after #, the church-leaving movement, which had declined during the war, increased. thosewho before had been mere polite adherents to the staatsreligion did not hesitate to desert a church which seemed to be a mere re- ligious society among many others. whereas the annual loss, - , was to , , in alone the protestant church lost , members, and, in , , . the catholic church, too, was not immune; in saxony, for example, in - , . per cent of i t s membership defected. up to , , to , protestants annually l e f t the church.^ within the church hierarchy, the teaching of theology in the hochschulen was far removed from the religious l i f e and social problems of the church. the p o l i t i c a l responsibility of christians in a democratic state was never defined, and the church tended to look back to the wilhelmian period as a "golden kupisch, op. c i t . , p. . means, op. c i t . , p. . •^loc. c i t . ^chester l. hunt, "life cycle of dictatorships as seen in treatment of religious institutions", social forces. , vol. , p. . a g e " . whereas k a r l barth preached a r e t u r n t o l u t h e r ' s f a i t h as a s u i t a b l e r e f o r m , h i s p u p i l gogarten extended h i s i d e a s to a condemnation of l i b e r a l i s m and democracy as f a l s e t e a c h i n g . e i g h t y per cent of the p a s t o r s i n the weimar p e r i o d were members of right-wing p o l i t i c a l p a r t i e s . ^ the lutheran church, t h e r e f o r e , o f t e n c o n t r i b u t e d more to i n t e n s - i f y i n g the german m a l a i s e than to c u r i n g i t . . german s o c i e t y i n g e n e r a l , p a r t i c u l a r l y post- y o u t h . the l a t e n i n e t e e n t h century bourgeois atmosphere o f r a t i o n a l i s m , s k e p t i c i s m , and p o s i t i v i s m f a i l e d to s a t i s f y many of the younger g e n e r a t i o n . for them, s a c r i f i c e , s e r v i c e , and obedience meant more than r a t i o n a l arguments; i n s h o r t , many of them wanted " i d e a l s " and the experience o f having an "aim i n l i f e " . the youth movement of the wilhelmian p e r i o d was p a r t i a l l y a r e j e c t i o n o f the "heavy-jowled m a t e r i a l i s m " of a time when s e c u r i t y , p r o s p e r i t y , and bourgeois p r o p r i e t y smothered adventurousness, i n t e l l e c t u a l or p h y s i c a l . the prosperous years around the t u r n of the century produced those t u r b u l e n t f o r c e s mentioned i n the i n t r o d u c t i o n to t h i s c h a p t e r . in i t s c r i t i c a l a s p e c t , w r i t e s a l b e r t camus, the r e v o l u t i o n - a r y movement of the twentieth century i s p r i m a r i l y a " v i o l e n t means, op. c i t . , p. . f r i t z kellermann, e f f e c t of the world war on european e d u c a t i o n , cambridge^ harvard, , p. . denunciation of the formal h y p o c r i s y that p r e s i d e s over bourgeois society.""'" oddly enough, when the german movement began, few r e a l i z e d the immensity of the powers released, not merely p o l i t i c a l or m i l i t a r y f o r c e s , but the d i s s a t i s f a c t i o n and energy of a generation seeking new values. at f i r s t , there was an u p l i f t i n g experience of f r a t e r n i t y i n august, , when l o n e l y i n d i v i d u a l s became as one mind and body; h i t l e r was not the only young " m i s f i t " who thanked god on h i s knees when m o b i l i z a t i o n swept europe i n that summer. "what counts", s a i d one young s o l d i e r , " i s always the readiness to make a s a c r i f i c e , not the object f o r which the s a c r i f i c e i s made." fourteen thousand wandervsgel became s o l d i e r s and one i n f o u r was k i l l e d , o b l i v i o u s t o the f a c t t h a t they were defending what they hated.^ in j richard scheringer, a young s o l d i e r con- v i c t e d of nazi a g i t a t i o n i n the army, declared, "a l o s t war, an impotent state, a hopeless system, a reich on the b r i n k of a l b e r t camus, the rebel. an essay on man i n revolt, t r a n s . antony bower, new york, vintage, , p. . p quoted i n hannah hafkesbrink, unknown germany: an inner chronicle of the f i r s t world war based on l e t t e r s and d i a r i e s , new haven, y a l e , , p. . -^werner k l o s e , " h i t l e r j u g e n d . die geschichte e i n e r i r r e g e f u h r t e n generation," welt am sonntag, february , , p. . hermann hesse's demian i s only one of the many examples t h a t could be c i t e d concerning this-apocalyptic mood of the years before and a f t e r the great war. the abyss, that i s our l i f e ! " the "front experience" was meaningless in the world of weimar germany. the prevailing mood was often one of emptiness, a disgust for existing standards and the powers that be, and a yearning to lose one's self. men l i k e ernst juhger, i f they remembered the golden age of security, remembered also how they had hated i t and how real their enthusiasm had been at the outbreak of war. but without the chance of changing their roles, such as identifying themselves with a national movement, these young people often chose to continue immersed in the forces of destruction un- leashed by the war as salvation from the meaninglessness of pre-established functions in a rotten society. some rejected the complexity of the metropolis for rural simplicity, and others idealized the distant german past as being most genuine and pure. sometimes they escaped into imaginary delights, a quest for cosmic visions as consolation for daily mediocrities. frustrated religious feeling sought a way of expression, and sometimes found i t in p o l i t i c s . a german communist wrote, by religion...i mean the longing for joy, for freedom, the struggle to be good, to create happiness, to bring joy and sunlight--but without anger and vengeance, in order thereby to throw down the old, the hateful, the unjust and to build up a new world, the'klngdom of freedom, justice, and joy. religion i s around us, within us, and therefore because i t is a part of us is indispensable. •••quoted in john w. wheeler-bennett, nemesis of power. the german army in politics, - . london, macmillan, , p. . scheringer later joined, the communist party. quoted in means, op. c i t . , p. . but f o r t h o s e who c o u l d n o t escape f r o m the r e a l i t i e s o f german l i f e , few i d e a l s remained, o t h e r t h a n t h e a c c e p t a n c e o f s t r u g g l e and r e v o l u t i o n as ends i n t h e m s e l v e s . a r e g e n e r a t i o n o f some s o r t o f f a i t h and a change o f v a l u e s was sought by men w i t h c o n v i c t i o n s as d i s p a r a t e as w a l t e r rathenau and a d o l f h i t l e r ; w h i l e t h e f o r m e r c o n s i d - e r e d h i m s e l f p a r t o f t h e c o u n t e r f o r c e s which might b r i n g meaning out o f t h e post-war chaos, a r e v i v a l o f t h e b e s t o f t h e o l d v a l u e s , t h e l a t t e r knew how " d i s i l l u s i o n e d and o u t r a g e d was t h i s f r o n t - l i n e g e n e r a t i o n , how f u l l o f d i s g u s t a t b o u r g e o i s c o w a r d i c e and s h i l l y - s h a l l y i n g . " the youth movement, which had begun as an escape and a p r o t e s t , was now c o n f r o n t e d w i t h an o p p o r t u n i t y f o r a c t i o n ; but e n t i r e l y new problems f a c e d i t , and a t t e m p t s t o keep a l i v e t h e pre-war wandervqgel s p i r i t , as i n t h e wende c i r c l e , the kronach league, and t h e f r e e german league, a c h i e v e d no p o s i t i v e r e s u l t s and t h e movement l o s t i t s e a r l i e r homogeneity. n e v e r t h e l e s s , t h e c r i t i c i s m and r e b e l l i o n were s t i l l t h e r e . e r n s t n e i k i s c h d e s c r i b e s how " t h e a s s u r e d p o s i t i o n i n l i f e , t h e d e s e r v e d r e s p e c t a b i l i t y o f o l d age, t h e sacrament of p r i v a t e p r o p e r t y , t h e s e were a mere j o k e t o t h e young." e r n s t rcihm h i t l e r , mein kampf, p. . e r n s t n i e k i s c h , r e i c h der n i e d e r e n damonen, hamburg, rowohlt, , p. . lamented that "hypocrisy and pharisaism. . .are the most cons- picuous c h a r a c t e r i s t i c s of s o c i e t y today.../"the young_ don't f i n d t h e i r way i n the p h i l i s t i n e world of bourgeois double morals and don't know any longer how to d i s t i n g u i s h between t r u t h and e r r o r . p r o b a b l y as a r e s u l t of the aforementioned developments i n lutheranism, "often when you t a l k to.these young people," wrote ernst bergmann, "you are shocked by t h e i r deep hatred of c h r i s t i a n i t y . " the dominant mood of the young p r o l e t a r i a t was cynicism; that of t h e i r bourgeois con- temporaries, s k e p t i c i s m r a p i d l y becoming s u i c i d a l p o l i t i c a l desperation. many of the young were gripped by "boundless p s y c h o l o g i c a l l a s s i t u d e , " - ^ or by what n i e k i s c h c a l l s a "death mystique", a poor copy of the enthusiasm of ; "they had become deeply convinced t h a t the value of an i n d i v i d u a l l i f e was questionable, and t h a t i t was j u s t as meaningless t o des- t r o y i t as to seek t o improve i t . " a r e l i g i o u s or p o l i t i c a l movement would have t o be e s p e c i a l l y powerful to a t t r a c t t h i s generation; yet i t s very lack of any c o n v i c t i o n s rendered i t s u s c e p t i b l e . quoted i n arendt, op. c i t . , p . . ^quoted i n leon p o l i a k o v and josef wulf, das d r i t t e reich und seine denker. dokumente, b e r l i n , a r a n i , , p. . edmond vermeil, the german scene, t r a n s . l . j . ludovico, london, , p. . % i e k i s c h , op. c i t . , p. . under the blight of unemployment and inflation, many german homes possessed not only l i t t l e physical security, but also l i t t l e spiritual health. parents, feeling that their very existence was at stake, and having lost any real philosophy or faith, could not give their children a construc- tive outlook on l i f e . and when their elders could no longer support them, the young l e f t their homes. according to edmond vermeil, "the young people were everywhere; they sang and played their guitars in trains so as to pick up a few pfennig; s t i l l well-dressed enough, they played chess in doss- houses to keep themselves entertained, and during the summer season, they took to the roads in their thousands.""'" as the young poet, adam kuckhoff, wrote in , p "we long for dogma and certainty," attachment to a community andvto a leader, bindung and ganzheit (bonds and u n i t y ) . it was possible, therefore, for adults to organize this generation. whereas the wandervflgel had wandered aimlessly, the weimar youth movement by was marching in formation. these ener- gies found explicit and passionate expression in the . ibid., p. . quoted in klemens von klemperer, germany's new conservatism. its history and dilemma in the twentieth century, princeton, , p. . the btlndische jugend. these more sophisticated heirs of the wandervbgel c r i t i c i z e d the mustiness of bourgeois cul- ture, traditional nationalism, the complacency of the protestant clergy, and bureaucratic rule by desk-generals, trade unionists, and industrial czars. they stressed, not the individual, but the group. because they failed to dev- elop any new philosophy except a moral and religious nihilism, which later made nazism seem highly appealing, they tended to undermine the true sources of regeneration and reform rather than to stimulate them. both communism and national socialism seemed to offer something more constructive; another french observer wrote, right-wing as well as left-wing revolutionaries, communist or nazi, whether they wear on their armbands the hammer and the sickle or the swastika, these are the same uniforms...marching to the sound of the same pipes and drums,...it i s the same move- ment, the same mentality, nationalist, and bolshevist, the same hatred of the bourgeois order, of the l i b e r a l and individual spirit...the same frantic hope. concurrently, some young people, attempting to save themselves from economic destruction in lower social levels, jean edouard spenle, "le probldme de la jeunesse en allemagne", mercure de france. march , , vol. - , p. . perhaps hitler was aware of the nature of this revolutionary drive when he remarked, "there is more that binds us to bolshevism than separates us from i t . " quoted in hermann rauschning, hitler speaks. a series of p o l i t i c a l con- versations with adolf hitler on his real aims, london, thorn- ton butterworth, , p. . sought t o c l i m b t o s a f e t y on academic p r i v i l e g e s . but w i t h t h e l a r g e numbers of unemployed u n i v e r s i t y g r a d u a t e s toward , t h e r e grew a c o r r e s p o n d i n g r e j e c t i o n of i n t e l l e c t u a l a t t a i n m e n t as a measure of s u c c e s s , an a n t i - i n t e l l e c t u a l i s m which t h e n a z i s l a t e r used i n t h e i r l i m i t a t i o n of u n i v e r s i t y e n r o l l m e n t and p r a i s e o f p u r e l y p h y s i c a l e x i s t e n c e . of t h e s e unemployed i n t e l l e c t u a l s , jean edouard spenle w r o t e "the most p r i v i l e g e d become t a x i d r i v e r s , c a r p a r k e r s , o r s t r e e t c a r c o n d u c t o r s . you see m e d i c a l d o c t o r s o r l a w y e r s s h i n i n g shoes or s e l l i n g matches or p o s t c a r d s on t h e s i d e w a l k s . " ^ thus t h e r e d e v e l o p e d c o n s c i o u s l y and u n c o n s c i o u s l y among the younger g e n e r a t i o n an a t t i t u d e d e s p i s i n g urban "decadence", a c c l a i m i n g e x i s t e n c e on a b i o l o g i c a l l e v e l , e x p r e s s i n g i n t o x i c a t i o n w i t h " l i f e " and t h e c l a i m s o f i n s t i n c t over r e a s o n . youth was t o be admired because of i t s y o u t h , a c t i o n f o r t h e sake o f a c t i o n . as t h i s p e r v e r t e d n e o - r o m a n t i c i s m f l o u r i s h e d , t h e marching columns g a i n e d more a d h e r e n t s . u n f o r t u n a t e l y f o r the c h u r c h , w h i l e t h e r e were many o r g a n i z e d c h r i s t i a n y o u t h groups,^ t h e main body o f t h e y o u t h movement remained o u t s i d e i t , o f t e n p o l i t i c a l l y o r i e n t e d and o f t e n c o n t a i n i n g the k e r n e l o f nazism. the young german league, s p e n l e , i b i d . . see a l s o d a n i e l l e r n e r , the n a z i e l i t e , s t a n f o r d , ; a good d i s c u s s i o n of t h e e f f e c t of a l i e n a t e d i n t e l l e c t u a l s on t h e n a z i l e a d e r s h i p . see c h a p t e r f i v e f o r the a t t i t u d e o f c h r i s t i a n y o u t h groups. for example, founded i n , was.right-wing, n a t i o n a l i s t i c , and anti-semitic; t h i s jungdeutsche orden claimed to be i n - spired by lagarde and planned an arbeitsdienst (work service) and a programme of resettlement. o r i g i n a l l y a free corps, i t developed into a w e l l - a r t i c u l a t e d organization with gaue ( d i s t r i c t s ) , gruppen, gauleiter, and gruppenftihrer. the artamanen,who sought the development of a warrior peasantry, were also of t h i s type. and t h i s i s not to mention the purely nazi groups or the communist or the less f a n a t i c a l s o c i a l democratic youth organizations. how, p r e c i s e l y , did nazism appeal to the young? national socialism was more than p a r t i a l l y an upheaval among the young people of germany, and, as we s h a l l see, when the nazis sought to "co-ordinate" german society, the role of the h i t l e r youth was paramount. but h i t l e r , who wisely aimed at capturing f i r s t the nation's youth, had a w i l l i n g prey; he did not so much create national socialism as nurture i t s a l - ready e x i s t i n g roots i n german youth. conservative and a n t i - semitic groups dominated the german student union i n the weimar period, so that, when s o c i a l i s t s and democrats founded the l e s s r a d i c a l german student league i n , i t s influence was small. while the catholic corporations, and most of the protestant groups, remained passive, by h a l f of the students i n the u n i v e r s i t i e s sympathized with the nazis. "^harry pross, vor und nach h i t l e r , freiburg, walter, , p. ~ considering the above situation, i t is not too much to say that to some young people, hitler seemed to be another luther. "i was ripe for this experience," writes kurt ludecke; "i was a man of , weary of disgust and dis- illusionment, a wanderer seeking a cause, a patriot without a channel for his patriotism, a yearner after the heroic with- out a hero."''' for this now familiar type, the nazis erected the image of the german race and told him that therein he would find f a i t h in himself. the movement, as w i l l be des- cribed in chapter three, was made to seem to have a connection with the roots of german l i f e and to give an answer to the problems of the individual in mass society. it was, moreover, open to a l l , except the jews, the ancient enemies of the race, and thus particularly appealed to a generation to whom class differences were less important. while i t promised national rejuvenation, most important of a l l , i t mobilized the spiritual as well as the physical resources of the youth, declaring that i t fought atheism and marxism, the traditional bugbears of both nominally and truly christian germans. l i t t l e wonder that i t seemed to be a revolt against despair and an affirma- tion of faith in god as creator. to an unemployed, goalless, i d e a l i s t i c young man, here at last was purpose and meaning in kurt ludecke, i knew hitler. the story of a nazi who escaped the blood purge. london, harrolds, , p. . l i f e , a group w h i c h demanded not merely d i f f e r e n t p o l i t i c s , but a complete change i n w o r l d - v i e w . a l l tfhe themes h i t h e r t o mentioned i n t h i s c h a p t e r come t o g e t h e r a t t h i s j u n c t u r e . thenew movement was a b l e t o make demands o f the t y p e f o r m e r l y made by c h r i s t i a n i t y , and t h e n a z i l e a d e r s knew how t o f o r m u l a t e and p r e s e n t t h e s e de- mands. f a i t h and s e l f - s a c r i f i c e were asked o f t h e young and were g l a d l y g i v e n . the c h u r c h c o u l d no l o n g e r ask f o r and e x p e c t t o get t h e s e q u a l i t i e s , but n e i t h e r c o u l d marxism. nazism, on t h e o t h e r hand, c o u l d e q u a l r e l i g i o n i n s t r e n g t h o f c o n v i c t i o n . even c h r i s t i a n y o u t h , because o f t h e t r a d - i t i o n s o f t h e german c h u r c h e s , were s u s c e p t i b l e t o a r a d i c a l n a t i o n a l movement. g i v e n t h e european s i t u a t i o n and t h e p a r t i c u l a r c o n d i t i o n s i n germany, t h e n a z i s were h e l p e d t o power by t h i s c o n f u s e d , t u r b u l e n t , and t r u l y " l o s t " gener- a t i o n . the p r e d o m i n a n t l y y o u t h f u l element i n nazism was r e - c o g n i z e d by a s e n i o r army o f f i c e r who d e s c r i b e d t h e p a r t y i n : " i t i s t h e jugendbewegung ( y o u t h movement). i t can't be s t o p p e d . " those members o f t h e n i n e t e e n t h c e n t u r y b o u r g e o i s i e and a r i s t o c r a c y who, i n renan's words, s a i d , "we can d i s p e n s e w i t h r e l i g i o n , because o t h e r s have i t f o r u s . those who do not w h e e l e r - b e n n e t t , op. c i t . . p. . b e l i e v e a r e c a r r i e d a l o n g by the more o r l e s s b e l i e v i n g majority,"-'- r e n d e r e d i t i m p o s s i b l e f o r the c h r i s t i a n c h u r c h e s t o r e a c h t h e minds and s o u l s of t w e n t i e t h c e n t u r y german y o u t h . the n a z i s , however, c o u l d r e a c h t h a t y o u t h and d i d . t h e i r l e a d e r s knew, as k a r l mannheim knew, t h a t i t would r e q u i r e e i t h e r a c a l l o u s n e s s which our g e n e r a t i o n c o u l d p r o b a b l y no l o n g e r a c q u i r e o r the u n s u s p e c t i n g n a i v e t e of a g e n e r a t i o n newly b o r n i n t o the w o r l d t o be a b l e to l i v e i n a b s o l u t e congruence w i t h t h e r e a l i t i e s o f t h a t w o r l d , u t t e r l y w i t h o u t any t r a n s c e n d e n t e l e m e n t . ^"quoted i n georges s o r e l , r e f l e c t i o n s on v i o l e n c e , t r a n s . t.e. hulme and j . roth, g l e n c o e , . f r e e p r e s s , , p. . k a r l mannheim, i d e o l o g y and u t o p i a , new y o r k , har- c o u r t b r a c e , n.d., p. . chapter adolf h i t l e r : his f a i t h and his attitude to c h r i s t i a n i t y . introduction not only did adolf h i t l e r himself become almost an a r t i c l e of f a i t h , but he was, at f i r s t , one of those millions who could not l i v e " u t t e r l y without any transcendent element." before proceeding to a discussion of how national socialism organized i t s appeal and how i t sought to eliminate the i n - fluence of c h r i s t i a n i t y , we should consider t h i s man whose ideas determined much of the party's approach to the problem of the people's f a i t h . " h i t l e r can change his opinions completely without even knowing that he i s doing so," wrote hermann rauschning. i t i s always d i f f i c u l t to know whether a remark of h i t l e r ' s rauschning, op. c i t . , p. . r e p r e s e n t s h i s deepest b e l i e f o r t h a t m u l t i t u d e o f i d e a s w h i c h f l o a t e d about on t h e s u r f a c e o f h i s c o n s c i o u s n e s s . a c u r s o r y r e v i e w o f h i s own r e l i g i o u s b e l i e f s g i v e s t h e im- p r e s s i o n s t h a t t h e y changed r a d i c a l l y o v e r the y e a r s . up t o t h e m i d d l e of t h e ' t h i r t i e s , he f a v o u r e d a modus v i v e n d i w i t h t h e churches and t h e a v o i d a n c e o f a k u l t u r k a m p f ; l a t e r he u n l e a s h e d an a t t a c k on c h r i s t i a n i t y w i t h t h e aim o f d e s t r o y i n g i t . one might b e l i e v e t h a t , w h i l e he began h i s p o l i t i c a l c a r e e r as a devout c h r i s t i a n , he was d i s i l l u s i o n e d l a t e r and l o s t h i s r e l i g i o u s f a i t h . but mein kampf and h i s e a r l y p o l - i t i c a l speeches a l o n e a r e not t o be t r u s t e d . the i d e a s o f t h e book a r e l e s s i m p o r t a n t t h a n the methods o u t l i n e d t h e r e i n , and d i s p a r i t y between t h e s e " s a c r e d u t t e r a n c e s " and l a t e r b e h a v i o u r s h o u l d not s u r p r i s e t h e r e a d e r . d e r o g a t o r y mention o f h i t l e r ' s book was t o l e r a t e d even i n t h e f t l h r e r ' s p r e s e n c e , and i t was by no means r e g a r d e d by the p a r t y e l i t e as t h e b i n d - i n g pronouncement i t was g i v e n out t o be f o r themasses—much o f i t was o f p u r e l y t a c t i c a l v a l u e . one must s e a r c h f a r t h e r t o f i n d out what, i f any, were h i t l e r ' s p e r s o n a l r e l i g i o u s b e l i e f s . these, as f a r as t h e y can be known w i t h c e r t a i n t y , and h i s a t t i t u d e t o t h e churches and t h e p a r t y a r e the theme o f t h i s c h a p t e r . rauschning, op. c i t . . p. k a r l mannheim w r i t e s t h a t "the leader...knows t h a t a l l p o l i t i c a l and h i s t o r i c a l i d e a s a r e myths. he h i m s e l f i s e n t i r e l y emancipated from them, but he v a l u e s them."''- s i n c e r e l i g i o n i s a n e c e s s a r y i m p o s t u r e , renan a d v i s e d such a l e a d e r t h a t even the most o b v i o u s ways o f t h r o w i n g d u s t i n p e o p l e ' s eyes s h o u l d not be n e g l e c t e d when d e a l i n g w i t h human b e i n g s . ^ a l e a d e r o f h i t l e r ' s t y p e judges p o l i t i c a l and r e l i g i o u s be- l i e f s o n l y f o r t h e i r p r e s e n t v a l u e ; he need not b e l i e v e i n t h e views h e p r o f e s s e s , and may b l a t a n t l y change h i s " p r o f o u n d " c o n v i c t i o n s . as l o n g as he and h i s a i d e s appear u n i t e d , a c r e d u l o u s p u b l i c i s s u c c e s s f u l l y duped. h i t l e r used any i d e a t h a t might b r i n g power c l o s e r o r make i t more s e c u r e . rosen- b e r g ' s r a c i a l t h e o r i e s , more s o p h i s t i c a t e d than h i s own, and t h e p o l i t i c a l and economic i d e a s o f h a r r e r , d r e x l e r , and f e d e r were g r i s t t o h i s m i l l , and c o u l d be abandoned, b o t h i d e a s and men, when t h e i r u t i l i t y d e c l i n e d . whatever h i s own b e l i e f s , h i t l e r was a master m a n i p u l a t o r o f i d e a s . i t w i l l be seen t h a t f i r s t he used c h r i s t i a n b e l i e f s t o combat marxism, and l a t e r used the>:ebgma o f nazism to.combat c h r i s t i a n i t y ; y e t i t i s mannheim, op. c i t . , p . . who were " t h e n a z i s " ? throughout t h e t h e s i s , i am concerned t o show how t h e l e a d e r s h i p d i d n o t b e l i e v e i n t h e d e t a i l s of t h e weltanschauung; t h e p a r t y rank and f i l e on t h e o t h e r hand v e r y o f t e n d i d , w h i l e f o r the masses i t was an e s o t e r i c but c o m f o r t i n g jumble o f hope and f l a t t e r y ; when i use t h e term " t h e n a z i s " i am r e f e r r i n g t o t h e c y n i c a l e l i t e , s m a l l i n number, who were b o t h simon-pure i n t h e i r nazism, i n t h a t they were n i h i l i s t s , and a p o s t a t e s , i n t h a t t h e y i g n o r e d t h e i r own d o c t r i n e , . . quoted i n s o r e l , op. c i t . p. . . doubtful that he ever believed christian or nazi myths. . his faith hitler's own faith seemed to be a mixture of schwgrm- erei(visionary enthusiasm) and p o l i t i c a l expediency. throughout mein kampf, he plays the role of a pious german trying to further ,his country's well-being, keeping i t in christian paths; "i believe that i am acting in accordance with the w i l l of the almighty creator;...i am fighting for the work of the lord," in a "sacred mission." germans had heard t h i s from their leaders for decades and many s t i l l wanted to hear i t . in january , the same approach was useful; " i f the almighty god granted success to our work, then the party was his instru- ment." hitler was not the good christian citizen he played, but when he denounced cubism, dadaism, and jazz in his "second book" , i t was only partially in calculation; his upbring- ing was far from radical, and i t i s l i k e l y that, at least at the beginning of his career, he believed in a god. while his faith became psychotically perverted later, he was sincere in trusting this l i v i n g , guiding force, "providence", expressed hitler, mein kampf. p. . hitler, speeches, ed. norman h. baynes, london, oxford, , vol. , p. . hitler, zweites buch: ein dokument aus dem jahr , stuttgart, deutsche verlagsanstalt, bl, pp. - . i n t h e l i f e o f t h e german p e o p l e . granted, h i s was b a s i c a l l y a , c o n f u s e d s p i r i t and h i s p o t e n t i a l i t i e s f o r s e l f - d e l u s i o n were as g r e a t as h i s a b i l i t y t o d e l u d e o t h e r s ; t h e i d e a s t h a t man s h o u l d h e l p h i m s e l f i f he wanted t o s e c u r e god's h e l p , o r t h a t d i s a s t e r s c o u l d be sent i n o r d e r t o b r i n g n a t i o n s t o s e l f - r e a l i z a t i o n were v e r y u s e f u l b o t h f o r h i m s e l f and h i s p e o p l e . n e v e r t h e l e s s , h i s b a s i c b e l i e f was p a n t h e i s t i c and, a t t h e same t i m e , emphasized the s u r v i v a l o f t h e f i t t e s t . with h i s f a i t h i n god i n . n a t u r e , i n the v o l k , and i n t h e i r b l o o d , he f o l l o w e d " o n l y the i r o n l a w of our h i s t o r i c a l development."-'- "fundamentally i n everyone t h e r e i s t h i s f e e l - i n g f o r t h e a l m i g h t y , which we c a l l god ( t h a t i s t o say, the d o m i n i o n o f n a t u r a l l a w s t h r o u g h o u t t h e whole u n i v e r s e . ) " one can a c c e p t as t r u e h i t l e r ' s c l a i m t h a t he s a t i s f i e d h i s r e l i g i o u s needs by "communion w i t h n a t u r e " . he p l a n n e d t o b u i l d an o b s e r v a t o r y a t l i n z , t h e pediment o f which would bear t h e i n s c r i p t i o n , "the heavens p r o c l a i m the g l o r y o f t h e ever- l a s t i n g ; " " i t w i l l be our way o f g i v i n g men a r e l i g i o u s s p i r i t , o f t e a c h i n g them h u m i l i t y , but w i t h o u t t h e p r i e s t s . " ^ ^quoted i n r a u s c h n i n g , op. c i t . , p. . h i t l e r , s e c r e t c o n v e r s a t i o n s , ed., h.r. t r e v o r - r o p e r , new y o r k , s i g n e t , , p. . ^ h i t l e r , s e c r e t c o n v e r s a t i o n s , p. . hitler liked to read frederick the great's cynical letters on religion and his "theological controversies", but i t i s unlikely that any of the writers of the past influenced him any more than did the pseudo-intellectuals of his own movement. konrad heiden reports that hitler had read the "decline of the west", but had rejected i t ; "he doesn't want to be a spenglerian caesar."^ a few of nietzsche's ideas f i l t e r e d down to him at second hand before he went into p o l i t i c s . it was shrewd of him later to claim support from such a writer, who was often vague as to the actual application of his ideas. moreover, whereas gobineau, houston stewart chamberlain, and moeller van den bruck x^ere not considered serieux by european intellectuals, nietzsche was respected.^ the fact that he wrote much that was even anti-german could be explained away. hitler's ideas, which were only those of many other germans, contained l i t t l e that was original. their force and their importance stemmed from his apparent belief in them and his use of them to enhance his power. as his success increased, so did his belief i n divine inspiration. but by he was spiritually bankrupt. in his own words, "a heathen to the core", '- he had nevertheless a l - ways believed, like a demented saint, that he had a unique "^konrad heiden, adolf hitler, eine biographie. zurich europa, (vol. ) p. . see crane brinton's a r t i c l e , "national socialists' use of nietzsche", journal of the history of ideas, aoril , vol. , pp. - . -^quoted in ludecke, op. c i t . , p. . r e l a t i o n s h i p to the everlasting. did not his p o l i t i c a l machine achieve miraculous, providential successes? ® multitude worshipped him; the cult of himself was good for the movement and as long as he was triumphant i t was easy to believe that he was t r u l y i n s p i r e d . but in his l a s t days, the god of struggle and power withdrew his blessing and h i t l e r ' s f i n a l attitude was one of n i h i l i s m , the underlying " f a i t h " of the entire national s o c i a l i s t movement. • ^ . the party's role i n religious l i f e h i t l e r ' s control of the party meant that i t usually c l e a r l y r e f l e c t e d his r e l i g i o u s b e l i e f and his knowledge of p o l i t i c s . in mein kampf, he declared that he planned no a l t e r a t i o n i n the basic r e l i g i o u s l i f e of germany, and said "anyone who thinks he can a r r i v e at a r e l i g i o u s reformation by the detour of a p o l i t i c a l organization only shows that he has no glimmer of knowledge of the development of r e l i g i o u s ideas or dogmas."-'- he would not, he said, use r e l i g i o n p o l i t i c a l l y ; " p o l i t i c a l parties have nothing to do with r e l i g i o u s problems, a s i long as these are not a l i e n to the nation, undermining the morals and ethics of the race." this q u a l i f i c a t i o n i s h i t l e r , mein kampf. p. . ibid., p. . i m p o r t a n t , because w h i l e h i t l e r t r i e d t o a v o i d any c l a s h with the churches, he was e v e n t u a l l y convinced that he should s i d e with one r e l i g i o u s group; but i n , t h i s remark was s a f e l y i n keeping with the lutheran t r a d i t i o n of k u l t u r r e l i g i o n . as f a r as the c a t h o l i c s were concerned, when t h e i r r e l i g i o u s i n s t i t u t i o n s and d o c t r i n e s i n j u r e d the n a t i o n , the p a r t y must never f o l l o w them on t h i s path or f i g h t with the same methods. in order to d e c e i v e a p o t e n t i a l c h r i s t i a n o p p o s i t i o n , he wrote that the p e o p l e ' s r e l i g i o n i s always i n v i o l a b l e f o r t h e i r l e a d e r . in , with wounded innocence he began h i s p e r e n n i a l lament t h a t he, a c a t h o l i c , should be so c r i t i c i z e d by the c a t h o l i c s ; " i t h u r t s me a l l the more because a c t u a l l y no o t h e r movement does so much f o r c h r i s t i a n i t y as o u r s . " ^ it was necessary t o d e a l with c h r i s t i a n s every day i n h i s slow progress towards the c h a n c e l l o r s h i p , and so h i t l e r began h i s c a r e e r by s t r e s s i n g that the nazi p a r t y , w h i l e not a r e l i g i o u s i n s t i t u t i o n i t s e l f , supported c h r i s t i a n v a l u e s and was not a n t i - c h r i s t i a n . the manifesto d e c l a r e d , "we demand freedom of a l l r e l i g i o u s c o n f e s s i o n s . i n both r e - l i g i o u s denominations, the party saw " e q u a l l y v a l u a b l e p i l l a r s mein kampf, p. . quoted i n hans buchheim, glaubenskrise im d r i t t e n r e i c h . d r e i k a p i t a l n a t i o n a l s o z i a l i s t i s c h e r r e l i g i o n s p o l i t i k , s t u t t g a r t , deutsche v e r l a g s a n t a l t , , p. . •^gottfried feder, das programm der nsdap und seine weltanschaulichen grundgedanken, munchen, eher, , p. . (a r e p r i n t i n g of the program.) f o r t h e e x i s t e n c e o f o u r p e o p l e " , and t h e r e f o r e i t f o u g h t groups w h i c h degraded t h i s f o u n d a t i o n of an e t h i c a l and s p i r i t u a l c o n s o l i d a t i o n of the n a t i o n t o t h e l e v e l o f an i n s t r u m e n t f o r p a r t y i n t e r e s t . t h i s " f i g h t a g a i n s t mammon" s u p p o r t e d a " p o s i t i v e c h r i s t i a n i t y " ^ , t h a t i s , an i n w a r d c h r i s t i a n i t y and an outward n a t i o n a l s o c i a l i s m . the p a r t y opposed pagan c u l t s as much as i t d i d a t h e i s t i c m a t e r i a l i s t i c marxism. mein kampf c o n t i n u e d t h i s theme; h i t l e r w r o t e t h a t a p o l i t i c a l p a r t y cannot produce a r e l i g i o u s r e f o r m a t i o n , and the e d i t i o n of t h e p a r t y program p r o m i s e d s p e c i a l p r o - t e c t i o n f o r t h e c h r i s t i a n r e l i g i o n and i t s freedom o f t e a c h i n g . s u p p r e s s i o n o f marxism was a g a i n p r o m i s e d . c o n t r a d i c t o r y , but o n l y i n t h e sense t h a t i t r e v e a l s h i t l e r ' s r e a l i n t e n t i o n s , i s the f o l l o w i n g e x t r a c t f r o m mein kampf; the most s t r i k i n g s u c c e s s o f a r e v o l u t i o n based on a p h i l o s o p h y o f l i f e w i l l always have been when t h e new p h i l o s o p h y o f l i f e . . . h a s been t a u g h t t o a l l men, and, i f n e c e s s a r y , l a t e r f o r c e d upon them, w h i l e t h e o r g a n i z a t i o n of t h e i d e a , i n o t h e r words, t h e movement, s h o u l d embrace o n l y as many as a r e a b s o l u t e l y r e q u i r e d f o r o c c u p y i n g the nerve c e n t e r s o f t h e s t a t e . - , i b i d . , pp. , , and . s e e mein kampf, p. , and f e d e r op. c i t . , p. . m e i n kampf, p. . t h i s was h i t l e r ' s view o f t h e u l t i m a t e n e c e s s i t y o f e v e r y german a c c e p t i n g the weltanschauung as w e l l as h i s con- cept o f t h e g o v e r n i n g e l i t e . i f a l l men were t o l e a r n t h e new p h i l o s o p h y o f l i f e , what was t o happen t o c h r i s t i a n i t y ? t h i s problem seems t o have escaped many. i n p a r t , the purpose o f m e i n kampf and t h e v a r i o u s programs was t o d e c e i v e t h e c h r i s t i a n element i n germany. t h i s book i n p a r t i c u l a r shows h i t l e r ' s awareness t h a t the churches c o u l d o f f e r a snag i n a p o s s i b l e f u t u r e " c o - o r d i n a t i o n " ; " t o d a y r e l i g i o u s s e n t i m e n t s s t i l l go deeper t h a n a l l can- 't s i d e r a t i o n s o f n a t i o n a l and p o l i t i c a l e x p e d i e n c y . " from h i s own e x p e r i e n c e , he knew t h e s t r e n g t h o f b l i h d . ' f a i t h and how t o use i t . i t was, u l t i m a t e l y , the f a i t h o f many c h r i s t i a n s t h a t f o r c e d him t o r e s t r a i n t e m p o r a r i l y h i s l a t e r program f o r t h e e l i m i n a t i o n o f t h e i r b e l i e f . he was a l s o t o l e a r n t h a t an e f - f a c t i v e a s s a u l t on the churches would e n t a i l , not m e r e l y d e c e p t i o n , but p s e u d o - r e l i g i o u s t r a p p i n g s f o r the p a r t y i t s e l f . p a r t i c u l a r l y d u r i n g t h e weimar p e r i o d , i t was n e c e s - s a r y f o r the f l e d g l i n g movement t o pay l i p s e r v i c e t o the few i n s t i t u t i o n s , such as t h e churches and t h e army, t h a t had s u r v i v e d more o r l e s s i n t a c t . because b o t h c h r i s t i a n groups f a v o u r e d a r e v i v a l o f n a t i o n a l l i f e , t h e n a z i s may have h i t l e r , mein kampf. p. . f e l t t h a t common cause c o u l d be made w i t h them, and t h a t the c h r i s t i a n s would not oppose t h e p a r t y ' s aims a t a l a t e r d a t e . i t i s more l i k e l y , however, t h a t t h e f r e e - t h i n k i n g o r a t h e i s t - i c l e a d e r s of the p a r t y s i m p l y wanted t o g a t h e r as many w i l l i n g dupes as p o s s i b l e under t h e i r banner a t the b e g i n n i n g f o r t h e sake o f s t r e n g t h and t o n e u t r a l i z e , f o r a w h i l e , any o p p o s i t i o n . n a i v e " f e l l o w - t r a v e l l e r s " c o u l d be j e t t i s o n e d l a t e r . one s h o u l d remember t h a t , w h i l e o s t e n s i b l y t h e n a z i e l i t e wanted t o r e v i v e n a t i o n a l l i f e , i n r e a l i t y t h e y sought o n l y t o r e v i v e t h e i r own f o r t u n e s . the n a t i o n , i n t h e s p r i n g o f , c o u l d be d e s t r o y e d a c c o r d i n g t o t h e i r e m b i t t e r e d whim. "for t h e p o l i t i c a l man," s a i d h i t l e r i n mein kampf, "the v a l u e o f a r e l i g i o n must be e s t i m a t e d l e s s by i t s d e f i c i e n c i e s , than by t h e v i r t u e o f a v i s i b l y b e t t e r s u b s t i - tute.""'" w h i l e the t e m p o r a r y u s e f u l n e s s o f c h r i s t i a n i t y de- c l i n e d a f t e r , t h e p o p u l a r b e l i e f i n a god, because more p e r m a n e n t l y u s e f u l , would be m a i n t a i n e d ; "we don't want t o educate anyone i n a t h e i s m . " the r u s s i a n s were e n t i t l e d t o a t t a c k t h e i r p r i e s t s , but t h e y had no r i g h t to a s s a i l t h e i d e a o f a supreme f o r c e , because " i t ' s b e t t e r to b e l i e v e something f a l s e t h a n not t o b e l i e v e a n y t h i n g a t a l l . " o b v i o u s l y whether i b i d . , p. . h i t l e r , s e c r e t c o n v e r s a t i o n s , p. . i b i d . , p. . ok not t h e r u s s i a n s threw out t h e concept of god, h i t l e r ' s own b e l i e f i n an a b s o l u t e remained undamaged. "the man who doesn't b e l i e v e i n the beyond has no u n d e r s t a n d i n g o f r e l i g i o n and h i t l e r u n d e r s t o o d a t l e a s t the p r a c t i c a l n a t u r e of r e l i - g i o n . he always assumed a d i f f e r e n c e between r e l i g i o n , which he c o n s i d e r e d a p o w e r f u l h i e r a r c h i c a l i n s t i t u t i o n , and f a i t h , which he i n t e r p r e t e d as b l i n d obedience and u n q u e s t i o n i n g e n t h u s i a s m . h i t l e r had g r e a t e r r e s p e c t f o r p r o t e s t a n t i s m as a b e t t e r d e f e n d e r of t h e i n t e r e s t s of germany t h a n f o r roman c a t h o l i c i s m , and t h i s d e t e r m i n e d much o f t h e p a r t y ' s l a t e r church p o l i t i c s . p r o t e s t a n t i s m , moreover, f r o m the r e c o r d of i t s h i s t o r y , p r o b a b l y seemed more t r a c t a b l e . the c a t h o l i c church, on the o t h e r hand, l o o k e d on i n d i f f e r e n t l y t o t h e de- s e c r a t i o n of t h e aryan r a c e by the jews, who, i n t h e i r t u r n , caused s t r i f e between the two l a r g e c o n f e s s i o n s . from h e r e an a t t a c k on t h e church c o u l d b e g i n , and here a l s o was an oppor- t u n i t y f o r h i t l e r t o p r e s e n t h i m s e l f as a s a v i o u r of " r e l i g i o n i n germany. he was, he s a i d , " s i c k e n e d " by t h e s p i r i t u a l degeneracy o f t h e german p e o p l e , b u t he c o u l d n o t condemn t h e c h r i s t i a n church as such "when a degenerate i n d i v i d u a l i n a cassock o b s c e n e l y t r a n g r e s s e s a g a i n s t morality".;, nor would he condemn i t when one o f t h e many o t h e r s "besmirches and b e t r a y s i b i d . , p. . see main kampf, pp. - , on t h e v a l u e o f l u t h e r a n i s m as a d e f e n d e r o f "germanness". h i s n a t i o n a l i t y a t a t i m e when t h i s i s a d a i l y o c c u r r e n c e anyway.""'" both c o n f e s s i o n s were o f t e n a t f a u l t , but f o r t h e c a t h o l i c , h i t l e r , f o r a v a r i e t y o f r e a s o n s , had a s p e c i a l h a t r e d . a c l e a r p i c t u r e o f h i s p l a n s f o r t h e churches comes out i n h i s unguarded p r i v a t e remarks b e f o r e and a f t e r the a c t u a l c h u r c h - s t a t e c o n f l i c t . in , he remarked t o rausch- n i n g , " f a s c i s m , i f i t l i k e s , may come t o terms w i t h t h e church. so s h a l l i . why not? that w i l l not p r e v e n t me from t e a r i n g up c h r i s t i a n i t y r o o t and b r a n c h , and a n n i h i l a t i n g i t i n germany." the c o - e x i s t e n c e u n t i l was t e m p o r a r y and as w i l l be seen, was c o n s i d e r e d a t a c t i c a l n e c e s s i t y . but i n , he r e p e a t e d h i s v i e w t h a t " n a t i o n a l s o c i a l i s m and r e l i g i o n w i l l no l o n g e r be a b l e t o e x i s t t o g e t h e r . " thus, i f t h e y c o u l d have known t h e t r u t h , t h e "german c h r i s t i a n s " and o t h e r such groups would have e a r l y d e s p a i r e d of s u c c e s s , f o r i n s p i t e of h i s p r o t e s t a t i o n s o f good w i l l and i n s p i t e of h i s a p p a r e n t a p p r o v a l of c e r t a i n r e l i g i o u s g r o u p s , h i t l e r n e v e r i n t e n d e d t o a l l o w any o f the s e c t s t o a t t a i n more than a s h o r t u s e f u l e x i s t e n c e . why was t h i s so? i b _ i d . , p. . quoted by rauschning, op. c i t . , p. . - ^ h i t l e r , s e c r e t c o n v e r s a t i o n s , p. . h i t l e r b e l i e v e d t h a t t h e c a t h o l i c c h u r c h , i n p a r t i c u l a r , as an e c c l e s i a s t i c a l h i e r a r c h y sought a degree o f c o n t r o l o v e r t h e p e o p l e , and had, f o r t h i s r e a s o n , to be e l i m i n a t e d i f t h e n a z i t r i u m p h was t o be complete. moreover, h i s s t r o n g e s t memory o f c h i l d h o o d , o r so he c l a i m e d , was a h a t r e d o f " a l l t h o s e h y p o c r i s i e s " o f t h e c a t h o l i c f a i t h . l e t he never escaped h i s u p b r i n g i n g and, c o n t i n u e d t o admire t h e pomp, r i t u a l , and o r g a n i z a t i o n o f c a t h o l i c i s m . h i s v o c - a b u l a r y , p o s s i b l y h i s s u b c o n s c i o u s mind, was f i l l e d w i t h r e l i g i o u s t e r m i n o l o g y . t h i s h a t r e d of t h e a u t h o r i t a r i a n church and h i s awareness of i t s p o l i t i c a l power l e d him t o u s e t h e i d e a s o f a l f r e d rosenberg. a c c o r d i n g l y , he s a i d he be- l i e v e d t h a t t h e roman c a t h o l i c f a i t h was a r e b e l l i o n a g a i n s t t h e n a t u r a l l a w o f t h e u n i v e r s e , a p r o t e s t a g a i n s t n a t u r e , " t h e c u l t i v a t i o n of human f a i l u r e . " with t h i s s o r t o f c h r i s t i a n i t y had come i n t o t h e w o r l d c r u e l t y , ignominy, and f a l s e h o o d , c o n t i n u e d today by t h e i n t e r n a t i o n a l e of t h e p r i e s t s , w i t h i t s h e a d q u a r t e r s i n rome. t h i s church, when i t c o u l d e x e r t i n f l u e n c e on c i v i l government s u p p o r t e d o n l y a regime t h a t r e c o g n i z e d forms of p o p u l a r o r g a n i z a t i o n which i t sponsored and which were t h e r e f o r e dependent s o l e l y on the church as the o n l y l e a d e r s h i p o f the p e o p l e . he was s u r e t h a t , i n p e r i o d s of n a t i o n a l t e n s i o n , the c a t h o l i c church would a l w a y s t r y t o i _ b i d . , p. . i b i d . , p. . occupy positions of temporal power, and always at the expense of the german community. and so, i f disturbances broke out i n the reich,he would shoot f i r s t the insurrectionary leaders and then the leaders of the catholic party.^ after this introduction, i t i s no surprise to f i n d him equating, as did rosenberg, catholic c h r i s t i a n i t y and bolshevism, while he and his party were to be considered a c h r i s t i a n bulwark against godless communism. this s i m i l a r i t y stemmed from saint paul's e f f o r t s to use christ's doctrine to mobilize the criminal underworld of his time, organizing an intolerant "proto-bolshevism". probably the most pressing immediate danger, however, was the f a c t that t h i s sort of c h r i s t i a n i t y , un-german i n essence, by adhering to a conception of the beyond which was exposed to the attacks of "progress", and by binding i t s e l f to many of l i f e ' s t r i v i a l i t i e s , was ripening men f o r a conversion to materialism.^ it i s important to note that h i t l e r echoes these ideas only i n private and mainly i n the l a t e r stages of his career when the church i b i d . , p. . ^see chapter three for a more detailed review of rosenberg's ideas, and chapters four and f i v e for the e f f e c t s i n practice of t h i s equation of catholicism and bolshevism. •^hitler, secret conversations, p. . ^"hitler, secret conversations, p. . s t r u g g l e had begun and r e c o n c i l i a t i o n seemed d i f f i c u l t . i t i s d o u b t f u l t h a t he s i n c e r e l y b e l i e v e d them, b u t , a g a i n , they were u s e f u l as i d e o l o g i c a l j u s t i f i c a t i o n of n e c e s s a r y p o l i t i c a l measures. in i d e o l o g i c a l m a t t e r s , h i t l e r was more p r a c t i c a l , more f l e x i b l e , and more c y n i c a l than h i s d o c t r i n a i r e f o l l o w e r s . a c c o r d i n g to ludecke, h i t l e r s a i d of rosenberg, "he i s the only man whom i always l i s t e n to.""' - but i n one of h i s s e c r e t c o n v e r s a t i o n s l a t e r , • h i t l e r d e c l a r e d t h a t the mythus was not p to be regarded as an e x p r e s s i o n of the o f f i c i a l party l i n e . few o f the p a r t y e l i t e , f o r t h a t matter, took i t s e r i o u s l y . rosenberg's u n o r i g i n a l book had l i t t l e r e a l i n f l u e n c e on h i s master, who never seems to have r e a d i t . in any case, i t was not p u b l i s h e d ' u n t i l , when h i t l e r ' s mind was a l r e a d y formed. it could be u s e d , of course, as a weapon against the churches, but not u n t i l they had shown themselves to be s t u b b o r n . as f o r the r e l i g i o n of the v o l k , h i t l e r s t r e s s e d the " f e e l i n g man has of h i s own i m p o t e n c e ; " "the e s s e n t i a l t h i n g . . . i s t h a t man should know that s a l v a t i o n c o n s i s t s i n the e f f o r t t h a t each person makes to understand providence and a c c e p t ludecke, op. c i t . , p. . s e c r e t c o n v e r s a t i o n s , p. . t h e l a w s of n a t u r e . " the h e l p l e s s n e s s of t h e common person under p r o v i d e n t i a l l a w s , i n t e r p r e t e d and expounded by t h e p a r t y l e a d e r s h i p , was c h a r a c t e r i s t i c o f the n a z i s t a t e , q u i t e a p a r t from rosenberg's i d e o l o g y . t h i s h u m i l i t y , of c o u r s e , had l i t t l e t o do w i t h c h r i s t i a n h u m i l i t y , but was e s s e n t i a l t o t h e e s t a b l i s h m e n t of a t o t a l i t a r i a n government. i t was p a r a - mount t h a t the average german s h o u l d "know t h a t he l i v e s and d i e s f o r t h e p r e s e r v a t i o n o f t h e s p e c i e s . " the e l i t e o f t h e p a r t y , however, would u n d e r s t a n d t h e p u r e l y p r a c t i c a l v a l u e o f t h i s " f a i t h " and each of them would have h i s p r i v a t e c r e e d . ^ n e v e r t h e l e s s , p r i v a t e l y and p u b l i c l y h i t l e r always preached t h e n e c e s s i t y o f " f a i t h , r ; f o r t h e s m a l l man, f a i t h i n god and h i s a d o l f h i t l e r ; f o r the p a r t y man, f a i t h i n t h e p a r t y and i t s m i s s i o n . thus, n a t i o n a l s o c i a l i s m , w h i l e i t s h o u l d not seek t o r e p l a c e the c h u r c h e s by a mass e q u i v a l e n t , would p r e s e r v e ' t h e r e l i g i o u s f e e l i n g of the v b l k . i n t h i s way, " f a i t h " ( i . e . o b e d i e n c e ) would be u s e f u l w h i l e t h e e l i t e a c c o m p l i s h e d t h e i r aims. l a t e r , h i t l e r came t o r e a l i z e t h e v a l u e of p s e u d o - r e l i g i o u s t r a p p i n g s , but always h e l d t h a t " n o t h i n g would he more f o o l i s h than t o r e - e s t a b l i s h t h e w o r s h i p o f wotan."^- ^ i b i d . , p. . i b i d . , p. . lbid., p. . see chapter three f o r h i t l e r ' s con- c e p t o f t h e e l i t e w i t h i n t h e p a r t y . i b i d . , p. . j u s t as t h e r e was t o be no r e t u r n t o c h r i s t i a n d e n o m i n a t i o n a l i s m a f t e r t h e war, so t h e r e was t o be no f u t u r e i n t h e p a r t y f o r the "german c h r i s t i a n s " . "a german church, a german c h r i s t i a n i t y , i s d i s t o r t i o n " , s a i d h i t l e r ; "these p r o f e s s o r s and mystery-men who want t o f o u n d n o r d i c r e l i g i o n s m e r e l y g e t i n my way." the i d e a l s o l u t i o n would be t o l e t the r e l i g i o u s s e c t s devour t h e m s e l v e s , but t h e n o r d i c s e c t s c o u l d h e l p t o d i s i n t e g r a t e c h r i s t i a n i t y . i n o r d e r t o f a c i l - i t a t e t h i s p r o c e s s , t h e n a t i o n a l s o c i a l i s t s were to p r e s e r v e what c o u l d be used i n c h r i s t i a n d o c t r i n e and change i t s meanings, f o r t h a t was what t h e c a t h o l i c c h u r c h had done when i t s u c c e s s - f u l l y f o r c e d i t s b e l i e f s on the heathen. "we s h a l l t a k e t h e r o a d back: e a s t e r i s no l o n g e r r e s u r r e c t i o n , but t h e e t e r n a l renewal o f our p e o p l e . c h r i s t m a s i s t h e b i r t h o f our s a v i o u r : t h e s p i r i t o f heroism and t h e freedom of our p e o p l e . " the masses, e s p e c i a l l y t h e p e a s a n t s , would be t o l d what t h e c a t h o l i c church d e s t r o y e d f o r them: the s e c r e t knowledge o f n a t u r e , o f t h e d i v i n e , and o f t h e daemonic. the c h r i s t i a n v e n e e r would be removed and a f a i t h p e c u l i a r t o t h e german r a c e was t o be d e v e l o p e d . n e v e r t h e l e s s , most of t h i s was f o r t h e f u t u r e ; by , n e i t h e r church was y e t " c o - o r d i n a t e d " , and the war n e c e s s i t a t e d a more c a r e f u l approach by the p a r t y . but i n t h e meantime, by e n c o u r a g i n g i n t h e p e o p l e a m y s t i c a l r e s p e c t f o r quoted by rauschning, op. c i t . , p. . i b i d . , p. . t h e i r r a c i a l o r i g i n s , h i t l e r and t h e p a r t y l e a d e r s t r i e d t o s t r e n g t h e n t h e image o f themselves a s l e a d e r s o f t h e r a c e . i t i s d o u b t f u l i f t h e average german c o u l d s u r v i v e l o n g i n t h i s " c l o u d - c u c k o o - l a n d " between c h r i s t i a n f a i t h and heathen s u p e r s t i t i o n , s u p p o r t e d o n l y by n a t i o n a l f e r v o u r and vague p a n t h e i s m ; b u t h i t l e r was c o n f i d e n t : a statesman c o u l d m a i n t a i n a n a t i o n ' s s p i r i t u a l m o r a l e a s w e l l as a churchman. " a l l he has t o do i s t o i n c o r p o r a t e i n t h e l a w o f t h e l a n d a l l t h e m o r a l b e l i e f s o f t h e h e a l t h y elements of t h e p e o p l e and t h e n t o support t h o s e l a w s u n c o m p r o m i s i n g l y w i t h t h e a u t h o r i t y o f f o r c e . " ! c h r i s t i a n i t y was s t i l l o f some u s e ; to t h e c h r i s t i a n d o c t r i n e o f t h e i n f i n i t e s i g - n i f i c a n c e o f the i n d i v i d u a l human s o u l and of p e r s o n a l r e s p o n s i b i l i t y , i oppose...the s a v i n g d o c t r i n e o f the n o t h i n g n e s s and i n s i g n i f i c a n c e o f t h e i n d i v i d u a l human b e i n g , and o f h i s c o n t i n u e d e x i s t e n c e i n the v i s i b l e i m m o r t a l i t y o f t h e n a t i o n . g well-known p h r a s e o l o g y was t u r n e d u p s i d e down, y e t might r e - t a i n i t s o l d a p p e a l . thus, i n s p i t e o f a l l a s s e r t i o n s t o t h e c o n t r a r y , t h e p a r t y was t o produce a " r e l i g i o u s r e f o r m a t i o n " and t o p r o v i d e a s u b s t i t u t e f o r c h r i s t i a n i t y . the p r o t e s t a n t s e c r e t c o n v e r s a t i o n s , p. . rauschning, op. c i t . , p. . church c o u l d be o f more immediate and f r u i t f u l u s e , but e v e n t u a l l y b o t h c o n f e s s i o n s would have t o make way f o r t h e new " r e l i g i o n " . w h i l e utmost c a u t i o n was c h a r a c t e r i s t i c o f h i s approached t o t h e c h u r c h e s , h i t l e r b e l i e v e d t h a t s u c c e s s was u l t i m a t e l y c e r t a i n , p a r t i c u l a r l y s i n c e he proceeded on a " r e a l i s t i c " v i e w o f human n a t u r e . i n s t e a d o f g i v i n g f i v e hundred m i l l i o n marks a year t o the c h u r c h e s , he would g i v e g r a n t s t o a r c h b i s h o p s , a l l o w i n g them freedom t o s h a r e out t h e sum p l a c e d a t t h e i r d i s p o s a l ; i n t h i s way, the number o f t h e i r " c o l l a b o r a t o r s " would be reduced t o a minimum s i n c e t h e y would t r y t o keep t h e g r e a t e r p a r t of themoney f o r t h e m s e l v e s . "with a t e n t h p a r t o f our budget f o r r e l i g i o n , we would thus have a c h u r c h devoted t o the s t a t e andof unshakeable l o y a l t y . " he p r a i s e d american p o l i t i c i a n s whom he thought had sub- j e c t e d t h e c h u r c h t o t h e same r e g u l a t i o n s g o v e r n i n g a l l o t h e r a s s o c i a t i o n s and i n s t i t u t i o n s and had t h u s l i m i t e d i t s f i e l d o f a c t i v i t y t o r e a s o n a b l e p r o p o r t i o n s . a c c o r d i n g l y , a f t e r the war, i t would be t h e d u t y o f t h e government t o d e a l w i t h the c a t h o l i c church t h e same way as i t d e a l t w i t h o t h e r n a t i o n a l a s s o c i a t i o n s . the concordat and i t s f i n a n c i a l o b l i g a t i o n s would be t e r m i n a t e d : " i t w i l l g i v e me t h e g r e a t e s t p e r s o n a l p l e a s u r e t o p o i n t out h i t l e r , s e c r e t c o n v e r s a t i o n s , p. . t o the church a l l t h o s e o c c a s i o n s on which i t has broken the terms o f i t . " ! becoming dependent s o l e l y on t h e o f f e r t o r y , t h e church would r e c e i v e o n l y t h r e e per c e n t of the money i t had p r e v i o u s l y r e c e i v e d from the s t a t e . a f t e r a l l , t h e agreement was o n l y t h e s u r v i v a l of p r e v i o u s c o n c o r d a t s between t h e v a t i c a n and d i f f e r e n t german s t a t e s and w i t h t h e i n c o r - p o r a t i o n of t h e l a t t e r i n t o the c e n t r a l i z e d r e i c h i t was o b s o l e t e , a c o n f i r m a t i o n o f p a s t agreements r a t h e r t h a n a c u r r e n t agreement i n f o r c e . a f t e r the war, t h e p a r t y would a l s o t a k e t h e n e c e s s a r y s t e p s t o make t h e " r e c r u i t i n g of p r i e s t s " as d i f f i c u l t as p o s s i b l e ; o n l y the man who had passed h i s t w e n t y - f o u r t h y e a r , and had f i n i s h e d h i s labour s e r v i c e and h i s m i l i t a r y s e r v i c e , would be a b l e to t a k e up an e c c l e s i a s t i c a l c a r e e r . but presumably by t h i s t i m e t h e c h r i s t i a n f a i t h would be as o b s o l e t e as t h e c o n c o r d a t . t h i s , t h e n , was h i t l e r ' s p e r s o n a l f a i t h , h i s a t t i - tude t o r e l i g i o n i n g e n e r a l , and t o t h e p a r t y ' s r o l e i n the r e l i g i o u s i s s u e . throughout h i s l i f e and h i s i d e a s , t h e r e run t h e two t h r e a d s o f l a t e n t n i h i l i s m and c y n i c a l pragmatism. while t h e f a i t h t o which he a d m i t t e d was p a n t h e i s t i c , he c o n s i d e r e d the f a i t h and i d e a s o f o t h e r men as t o o l s to be used; as f o r himmler and rosenberg, " h i t l e r laughed a t them." i b i d _ - , p. . i b i d . , p. . i b i d . , p. . ^ i b i d . , ed. t r e v o r - r o p e r , p. x x v i i . but whatever the t r u t h of i t s d o c t r i n e , roman c a t h o l i c i s m was no l a u g h i n g matter; he would e r a d i c a t e i t . some s o r t o f c h r i s t i a n i t y , however, a " p o s i t i v e " v a r i e t y , h i t l e r sought t o m a i n t a i n , and a l t h o u g h he i n s i s t e d t h a t the p a r t y was p u r e l y a p o l i t i c a l i n s t i t u t i o n , g i v e n h i s a d m i r a t i o n o f h i e r a r c h i c a l power and h i s sense of i n s p i r a t i o n , p l u s t h e i n i t i a l dynamism and u l t i m a t e power of the n a z i movement, i t was i n e v i t a b l e t h a t t h e p a r t y should f a i l t o remain s i m p l y p o l i t i c a l group and s h o u l d become a s u r r o g a t e f a i t h . chapter the nazi movement as a substitute faith . the development of nazism into a pseudo-church as nazism became a substitute for christianity, and as i t tried to control more than the bodies of men, the church-state conflict ensued. that the churches and nation- a l socialism were ultimately incompatible was due in part to the uneasiness of the new regime and to i t s deliberate ten- dency to interpret every piece of christian behavior as hav- ing p o l i t i c a l aims. for not merely were some christians unable to refrain from r e s i s t i n g nazi demands, but the government was eager to believe that even young catholic ping-pong matches were used as a cover for subversive a c t i v i t i e s . there i s no doubt that, in some cases, they were justified in their suspicions, but what i s important is the fact that, while the christian opposition developed some of the traits of a p o l i t i c a l under- ground, the national socialist state develo ped the character- i s t i c s of an organized church, a church, however, whose leaders did not believe in the doctrine which supposedly was fundamental to i t s existence. before , as any new minority p o l i t i c a l group with revolutionary ideas, nazism appeared to be a fanatical sect, appealing to the more religious aspect of p o l i t i c a l thinking; that i s , having a mission and a r truth" to communi- cate. this appeal was not new in german p o l i t i c a l history. later, after the death of i t s brief partnership with the churches, the i l l - f a t e d concordat, and the efforts to "germanize" lutheran- ism, there occurred a gradual withdrawal from christianity, and the practical purposes of the state were more and more turned into holy causes: what eric hoffer calls "religiofication". as w i l l be described, this development was both planned and spontaneous. because the party sought a national rebirth, i t s weltanschauung had to be accepted by every german, above a l l by the young. to achieve this, the qualities of the religious sect, in partial eclipse during , when more practical politics occupied hitler, were again stressed, and became a systematic substitute for traditional faith. its application by the party was confused here i assume that a religion entails recognition of a controlling superhuman power entitled to obedience, worship, and,, above a l l , humility. in considering the non-revolutionary character of nazism, one should remember that german p o l i t i c a l parties, from the time of the second empire, were more institutional than north american parties. with their own welfare organizations, unions, athletic associations, cultural leagues, and youth groups, they were societies which sought philosophical, christian(or anti- christian), as well as p o l i t i c a l goals. ^eric hoffer, the true believer, new york, mentor, , p. . and never c o m p l e t e , but i t s c r e a t i o n seemed mandatory, f o r , i n t h e new germany, t h e h i e r a r c h y and power of t h e c h r i s t i a n c h u r c h e s c o u l d n o t c o - e x i s t w i t h t h e h i e r a r c h y and power o f n a t i o n a l s o c i a l i s m . to f i g h t t h e churches, t h e p a r t y borrowed some of t h e i r own d e v i c e s . a s o c i o l o g i s t d e s c r i b e s the n a z i s t a t e as an " e c c l e s i a " , a c o n s e r v a t i v e s o c i a l s t r u c t u r e , u n i v e r s a l i n i t s aims, w h i c h a t t e m p t s t o amalgamate i t s e l f w i t h t h e government and t h e dominant c l a s s e s , and s t r i v e s t o c o n t r o l every c i t i z e n . because i t i s a l s o an e d u c a t i o n a l system which t r a i n s i t s y o u t h f u l members t o c o n f o r m i t y i n thought and a c t i o n , t h u s f i t t i n g them f o r the e x e r c i s e of the r e l i g i o u s r i g h t s t h e y have i n h e r i t e d , the " e c c l e s i a " a t t a c h e s a h i g h importance to t h e o f f i c i a l a d m i n i s t r a t i o n of sacraments and t e a c h i n g by a u t h o r i z e d a g e n t s . the n a z i " e c c l e s i a " d i d not i s o l a t e i t s e l f from a n t a g o n i s t i c elements i n german l i f e as the l u t h e r a n church had p r e v i o u s l y done b u t r e s o l v e d f r o m t h e b e g i n n i n g t o c o n v e r t a l l d o u b t e r s t o a t l e a s t outward adherence t o t h e one t r u e f a i t h . i n t h e l a t e ' t h i r t i e s , t h e n a z i k u l t v e r b a n d , l e d by the c h a r i s m a t i c l e a d e r , d i d almost become t h e s t a n d a r d i z e d r o u t i n i z e d s t a t e church t h a t some o f i t s a d h e r e n t s d e s i r e d . t h i s i s howard b e c k e r , i n h i s book german y o u t h : bond o r f r e e (new york, o x f o r d , ). a s i m i l a r s t u d y i s hans- jo chen gamm's p e r braune k u l t , das d r i t t e r e i c h und s e i n e e r s a t z r e l i g i o n (hamburg, r f l t t e n und l o e n i n g , ), p a r t i c u l a r l y the c h a p t e r "der n a t i o n a l s o z i a l i s m u s a l s k u l t v e r b a n d " , p. . but n a t i o n a l s o c i a l i s m n e v e r a c h i e v e d t h e p e r f e c t e x i s t e n c e d e s c r i b e d by such w r i t e r s and was d e f i n i t e l y n o t a r e l i g i o n t o i t s l e a d e r s ; t h i s f a c t a l o n e l i m i t s the a p p l i c a b i l i t y of t h e term " e c c l e s i a " t o t h e new s t a t e . n e v e r t h e l e s s , w h i l e t h e n a z i l e a d e r s , h i t l e r , goebbels, bormann, had much l e s s f a i t h i n t h e i r weltanschauung t h a n even the most c y n i c a l of i t a l i a n r e n a i s s a n c e p r i e s t s i n c h r i s t i a n i t y , f o r t h e "man-in- t h e - s t r e e t " , p a r t i c u l a r l y the n o n - c h r i s t i a n , i t was a r e a s o n - a b l e f a c s i m i l e . . rosenberg, the high p r i e s t a l f r e d rosenberg i s u s u a l l y a s s o c i a t e d w i t h t h e p a r t y ' s p h i l o s o p h y because, i n s p i t e of t h e f a c t t h a t a t v a r i o u s t i m e s t h e n a z i l e a d e r s h i p sought to i n c r e a s e t h e d i s t a n c e between t h e i r s t a n d and h i s i n t h e p u b l i c mind, he summed up more o r l e s s a c c u r a t e l y the p a r t y ' s a t t i t u d e t o r e l i g i o u s problems. he was a p p o i n t e d " d i r e c t o r of n a t i o n a l s o c i a l i s t weltanschauung" i n januaryl and r e c e i v e d a n a t i o n a l p r i z e i n . to be s u r e , he was shed l a t e r when h i s u s e f u l n e s s d e c l i n e d , but i t d i d d e c l i n e o n l y because d u r i n g t h e war t h e n a z i l e a d e r s c o u l d n o t a f f o r d t o c o n t i n u e the k u l t u r k a m p f w i t h t h e v i g o u r rosenberg demanded. the c h i e f o b j e c t o f rosenberg's a t t a c k was roman c a t h o l i c i s m , w h i c h had c o r r u p t e d the german p e o p l e t h r o u g h o u t t h e i r h i s t o r y . but even e a r l i e r than t h i s , he c l a i m e d , s a i n t p a u l had " j u d a i z e d " c h r i s t i a n i t y , d i v e r t i n g i t f r o m i t s n a t u r a l c o u r s e by r e p l a c i n g the t r u e c h r i s t , aryan and h e r o i c , w i t h a p o o r w e a k l i n g hebrew. not as t h e c r u c i f i e d , b u t as t h e w a r r i o r a g a i n s t t h e jews d i d c h r i s t d e s e r v e honour among t h e germans. "that t h e c a t h o l i c church and a l s o t h e confes- s i o n a l church...must d i s a p p e a r from t h e l i f e o f our p e o p l e i s my f u l l c o n v i c t i o n / and_ our ftlhrer-' s v i e w p o i n t . "^ i n h i s mythus des . j a h r h u n d e r t s ("myth o f t h e t w e n t i e t h c e n t u r y " ) , rosenberg had f i r s t o u t l i n e d the german n a t i o n a l c h u r c h w h i c h , w h i l e h a v i n g a l u t h e r a n t o n e , would embrace a l l the f o r m e r d e n o m i n a t i o n s , i n c l u d i n g t h e c a t h o l i c , t h e b e a u t i f u l r i t e s o f which were o f t e n o f n o r d i c o r i g i n . t h i s f a i t h would not be c h r i s t i a n i t y , of c o u r s e , but n a t i o n a l s o c i a l i s m . rosenberg's i d e a s were c l a r i f i e d i n the program^ he drew up i n f o r t h e n a t i o n a l r e i c h church, which e x p r e s s e d t h e i n t e n t i o n s o f t h e government, but w h i c h was p r o b a b l y not s a n c t i o n e d by h i t l e r a t t h e t i m e i t appeared. the b i b l e and t h e c h r i s t i a n c r o s s were t o be removed from a l l c h u r c h e s , to be r e p l a c e d by mein kampf,"the g r e a t e s t of a l l documents", and quoted i n n a t h a n i e l m i c k l e m , n a t i o n a l s o c i a l i s m and c h r i s t i a n i t y , o x f o r d , c l a r e n d o n , , p. . a l f r e d rosenberg, mythus des . j a h r h u n d e r t s , munchen, hoheneichen, , p. . t h i s program i s g i v e n i n c a r l carmer, war a g a i n s t god, new y o r k , h o l t , , p. . the s w a s t i k a , "that unconquerable symbol"; no great s t r u c t u r a l a l t e r a t i o n s would be c a r r i e d out on the e x i s t i n g churches a f t e r t h e i r c o n f i s c a t i o n because they were l i v i n g monuments of german c u l t u r e ; the s e r v i c e s were to be held only at n i g h t , on saturdays, and with f e s t i v e i l l u m i n a t i o n s . the p a r t y ' s o f f i c i a l a t t i t u d e was never as c l e a r or went so f a r as rosenberg would have d e s i r e d . by , h i s pronouncements had become too aggressive f o r h i t l e r , who had to moderate h i s k i r c h e n p o l i t i k during the war f o r the sake of domestic peace and who found d i r e c t i n g armies more en- g r o s s i n g than s l a n d e r i n g nuns. a c c o r d i n g l y , rosenberg, l i k e the german c h r i s t i a n s e a r l i e r , was removed from h i s p o s i t i o n of "high p r i e s t " . h i t l e r and h i s colleagues used rosenberg's a n t i - c h r i s t i a n ideas as seasoning i n the new n a t i o n a l d i e t . when the l e a d e r s h i p adopted some of h i s most p a l a t a b l e views, they d i d so f u l l y r e a l i z i n g t h e i r propaganda value, yet never c o n s i d e r i n g them worth serious personal c o n s i d e r a t i o n . there were no c h r i s t i a n or pagan gods to haunt the dreams of h i t l e r and h i s henchmen. e s s e n t i a l l y n i h i l i s t i c , they sought power i n t h e i r world and nowhere e l s e . i f they were motivated by any i d e a s , these were perverted p a t r i o t i c ones, and they found the e x i s t i n g corpus of p o l i t i c a l r a c i a l philosophy u s e f u l f o r r a t i o n a l i z i n g these i d e a l s and making them more acceptable to a conservative public. . essence of the nazi "faith" the p o l i t i c a l platform of the nazis, presented in the form of a revolutionizing new world view, included the ideas of enthusiasts like rosenberg or ernst bergmann, but i t . also had to appeal to concepts that the germans held sacred, whether these were their faith in the christian god or their belief in their country's great destiny. the distinctive and paradoxical character of the supposedly "revolutionary" weltanschauung lay in this conservative system of values determined by the traditional beliefs of germans. the system had to cover the individual's relation to the source and meaning of l i f e and had to be expressed in terms usually associated with orthodox religion. therefore, the nazi leaders confirmed the idea that every race had a soul, and the german race, a special divine mission, with an apocalyptic promise of a glorious germany in the future. placed by god on earth as germans, the volk was described as the culmination of the divine plan. "in f u l f i l l i n g the w i l l of the people, the ftlhrer f u l f i l l s the w i l l of god; for the voice of the volk is the voice of god." this was merely an intensification of pan-german, superpatriotic ideas current in germany since "*"these ideas often found sincere support in lower nazi ranks because they were not new, but had been in circulation in germany for as much as a century. see fritz stern, politics of cultural despair, berkeley, , passim. hans schemm, a racial expert, quoted in kneller, educational philosophy of national socialism, p. . b e f o r e the f i r s t world war. the c a l c u l a t e d c o n s e r v a t i v e element i n t h e program and t h e c o n t i n u a l r e f e r e n c e to o l d e r i d e a s t h a t had a c q u i r e d a s a c r e d hue appear i n t h e a t t i t u d e toward women. a woman was to be t h e h e a r t o f t h e f a m i l y o r g a n i s m u n i q u e l y r e l a t e d t o h e r own c h i l d r e n and h e r own p a r t i c u l a r h u s b a n d . german women, moreover, were t o s t o p smoking and powdering t h e i r f a c e s , and to concern t h e m s e l v e s w i t h t h e i r c h i l d r e n , t h e i r k i t c h e n , and t h e i r c h u r c h . t h i s a p p e a l e d to t h e d e s i r e o f many germans to r e t u r n t o a s i m p l e r concept of womanhood and t h e f a m i l y , t o t h e orthodox l u t h e r a n v i e w o f home l i f e , and t o t h e r e b e l l i o n a g a i n s t t h e m e c h a n i c a l r e l a t i o n s h i p s o f the i n d u s t r i a l c i t y . i t was o n l y b a i t i n t h e t r a p , of c o u r s e , f o r , as w i l l be s e e n , i n i t s v e r y n a t u r e , n a t i o n a l s o c i a l i s m o n l y i n t e n s i f i e d d i s i n t e g r a t i o n of human t i e s . nazism had an a p p e a l t o even w i d e r c u r r e n t b e l i e f s . as a r e p l a c e m e n t f o r o r t h o d o x c h r i s t i a n i t y , i t met w i t h g r e a t a p p r o v a l i n younger c i r c l e s , groups which f e l t t h a t t h e c h u r c h had f a i l e d t o p r o v i d e an a t t i t u d e to t h e more m a t e r i a l and con- p a r a p h r a s e d from c l i f f o r d k i r k p a t r i c k , n a z i germany: i t s women and f a m i l y l i f e , new y o r k , b o b b s - m e r r i l l , , p. . see e r n s t bergmann, die d e u t s c h e n a t i o n a l k i r c h e , b r e s l a u , h i r t , , pp. - , l o r "the p r i e s t h o o d of women". temporary n e c e s s i t i e s of e x i s t e n c e . some young people c a l l e d the church too o t h e r - w o r l d l y i n o u t l o o k and f e l t i t had not helped them to f a c e l i f e i n a d i s j o i n t e d community; they f e l t a need f o r a s a c r e d element i n day-to-day e x i s t e n c e . h i t l e r was aware o f t h i s need and so he s t r e s s e d the s p i r i t u a l aspect of h i s movement. the young were t o l d t h a t nazism embodied the s p i r i t of the o l d wandervcigel and t h a t " b l o o d and s o i l , f o l k and homeland a r e i n the hands of god, from which we have e v e r y t h i n g that we are."-'- the sacred m i s s i o n o f the movement was c o n s t a n t l y s t r e s s e d and many of the newly w r i t t e n songs, f o r example, appealed to god to b l e s s the nazi work. the e f f e c t on the average young person was to make him i n t o a r e v - o l u t i o n a r y , but a " c o n s e r v a t i v e " r e v o l u t i o n a r y , ready to be l e d anywhere. t h i s i s w e l l e x e m p l i f i e d i n wolfgang brugge's d e s - c r i p t i o n of h i s r e a c t i o n upon h e a r i n g h i t l e r f o r the f i r s t time; "here am i, take me and my s t r e n g t h , ' my a b i l i t y , my w i l l ; use i t a l l f o r thy g r e a t goal."-^ thus the m a t e r i a l and the s p i r i t u a l were e f f e c t i v e l y combined i n a whole which, when presented to the p u b l i c , d i d not seem to be a t h e i s t i c or n i h i l - i s t i c , but r a t h e r at one with the best of german v a l u e s . the s t a t e ' s power and d i s c i p l i n e , moreover, were d e c l a r e d to e x i s t ^-quoted i n k n e l l e r , op. c i t . , p. . p see gamm, op. c i t . , p. . -^quoted i n gamm, op. c i t . , p. . not as a d e t e r r e n t t o man i n h i s aim f o r human p e r f e c t i o n , but as a i d s toward f r e e growth and i n d i v i d u a l accomplishment. one n a z i wrote t h a t , on t h e model of t h e c a t h o l i c c h u r c h , the f f i h r e r , w i t h h i s e x c l u s i v e power, c o r r e s p o n d e d to the pope and t h e l e s s e r p i i h r e r s corresponded t o t h e c l e r g y , w h i l e t h e v a r i o u s n a z i c o r p o r a t i o n s s e r v e d as a d v i s o r y b o d i e s i n t h e same way as d i d t h e c o l l e g e o f c a r d i n a l s . how c o u l d t h i s comparison be made, when so many n a z i s were h o s t i l e t o c a t h o l i c i s m ? the p o p u l a r e n t h u s i a s m f o r nazism can be p a r t i a l l y e x p l a i n e d as a m a n i f e s t a t i o n of the r e l i g i o u s i m p u l s e , g u i d e d i n t o , and e x p r e s s i n g i t s e l f i n a form more p u r e l y p o l i t i c a l t h a n had been seen i n the p a s t . c h r i s t i a n i t y i t s e l f sought t o s e t up a t one t i m e a c h r i s t i a n kingdom, l e d by t h e papacy on t h i s e a r t h , and s i n c e t h e r e l a t e d d e s i r e f o r t h e m i l l e n i u m now, a p a r a d i s e i n t h i s w o r l d , seems to be c h a r a c t e r - i s t i c o f t h e western european c h r i s t i a n mind, some w r i t e r s have c a l l e d nazism merely a f u r t h e r h e r e s y w i t h i n the church p r o p e r . to be s u r e , not m e r e l y was t h e s t r u c t u r e of t h e n a z i h i e r a r c h y e m b e l l i s h e d w i t h terms t a k e n from c h r i s t i a n t h e o l o g y , b u t some a u t h o r i t i e s would v i e w t h e weltanschauung as a degenerate form of t h e m e s s i a n i c i d e a o r as t h e m a n i c h a e i s t i c h e r e s y . at any r a t e , the n a z i s c o n t i n u a l l y a p p e a l e d to c o n c e p t s quoted i n n i e k i s c h , op. c i t . , p. . which were i n g r a i n e d i n german minds, whether t h e y were t h e e f f i c a c y of t h e c a t h o l i c h i e r a r c h y or t h e need f o r a s t r o n g s e c u l a r a u t h o r i t y . p o p u l a r c o n c e p t i o n s were embodied i n the p e r s o n i f i c a t i o n o f e v i l as t h e " c o u n t e r - r a c e " , the i n - c a r n a t i o n o f " e v e r y t h i n g h o r r i b l e , e v i l , and d a r k , " l t h e b e a r e r o f those p o i s o n o u s i d e a s , m a t e r i a l i s m and i n d i v i d u a l i s m . there was a l s o t a l k o f t h e " i n s e p a r a b l e t r i n i t y of s t a t e , movement, and v o l k . " to the r e i c h was a p p l i e d t h e i d e a o f "body" as c h r i s t i a n s a p p l i e d i t to t h e church when t h e y r e f e r r e d to t h e m y s t i c a l body of c h r i s t . the concept o f t h e e t e r n a l aryan kingdom of l i g h t , v e r s u s t h e j e w i s h s p i r i t of d a r k n e s s was a l - most a f o r m o f manichaeism adapted t o meet the needs of t h e cause.? to a t t a i n s a l v a t i o n , t h e masses were t o p l a c e t h e i r t r u s t i n and give:u u n c o n d i t i o n a l s u r r e n d e r t o t h e man w i t h a l l e g e d l y superhuman g i f t s , who i n t u r n f u r t h e r e d the e c c l e s i a s t i c a l h i e r a r c h y of the p a r t y . t h i s i s what h i t l e r meant when he s a i d t h a t " n a t i o n a l s o c i a l i s m i s a form o f con- v e r s i o n , a new f a i t h . h e c o n s i d e r e d the c a t h o l i c church a group o f n a i v e b e l i e v e r s l e d by r e a l i s t i c , s k e p t i c a l strongmen, was i m p r e s s e d by i t s h i e r a r c h i c a l o r g a n i z a t i o n , and d e c l a r e d t h a t he had f o l l o w e d i t i n g i v i n g t h e p a r t y i t s s t r u c t u r e ; "the quoted i n w a l t e r h o f e r , per n a t i o n a l s o z i a l i s m u s . dokumente. - . f r a n k f u r t , f i s c h e r , , p. . i b i d . . p. . •^vermeil, op. c i t . , pp. - . see a l s o gamm, o p . c i t . , p. , f o r t h e t r e a t m e n t of h e r e t i c s . quoted i n rauschning, op. c i t . , p. . church was something r e a l l y b i g , now we're i t s h e i r s . we, t o o , a r e a c h u r c h . " h i t l e r was t h e m e s s i a h of t h e new " f a i t h " ; r o b e r t ley, d i r e c t o r of t h e labour f r o n t , e x p r e s s e d t h i s concept as f o hows; a d o l f h i t l e r , to thee a l o n e we are bound. .. we b e l i e v e i n t h i s w o r l d i n a d o l f h i t l e r a l o n e . we b e l i e v e t h a t n a t i o n a l s o c i a l i s m i s the s o l e f a i t h to make our people b l e s s e d . we b e l i e v e t h a t t h e r e i s a l o r d god i n heaven, who has made u s , who l e a d s us, who g u i d e s u s , and who v i s i b l y b l e s s e s u s . and we b e l i e v e t h a t t h i s l o r d god has sent us a d o l f h i t l e r t h a t germany s h o u l d be e s t a b l i s h e d f o r a l l e t e r n i t y . g the army, c a b i n e t , and c i v i l s e r v i c e o a t h s , as w e l l as t h o s e f o r l u t h e r a n p a s t o r s , show t h a t supreme l e a d e r s h i p was not an i n s t i t u t i o n r e g u l a t e d by w o r l d l y r u l e s and p r e c e d e n t s , or an o f f i c e w i t h a u t h o r i t y d e l e g a t e d from human b e i n g s , but t h e i n v e s t i t u r e of power i n one d i v i n e l y i n s p i r e d p e r s o n , h i t l e r . he, t h e leader, was endowed w i t h q u a l i t i e s l a c k i n g i n o r d i n a r y m o r t a l s . superhuman, m e s s i a n i c powers emanated from him and pervaded t h e s t a t e , t h e p a r t y , and t h e v o l k . w i t h t i m e , h i t l e r came t o b e l i e v e t h i s h i m s e l f and was r e m a r k a b l y s u c c e s s f u l i n c o n v i n c i n g t h o s e lower i n t h e n a z i ranks and i n the p e o p l e . faced w i t h t h e murder of t h e i r l e a d e r loc. c i t . quoted i n klemperer, op. c i t . , p. . and hundreds of t h e i r comrades i n , the t r a i n e d and armed s.a. d i d n o t h i n g ; t h i s behavior i s at l e a s t i n p a r t the r e s u l t of c h a r i s m a t i c obedience. furthermore, i t f o l l o w s m u s s o l i n i ' s i d e a o f i d e a l f a s c i s t o r g a n i z a t i o n ; " d i s c i p l i n e from the lowest to the h i g h e s t must be e s s e n t i a l and of a r e l i g i o u s type.""'- wolfgang brtfgge d e c l a r e d t h a t h i t l e r ' s g r e a t message was " t o give us f a i t h " ; kurt ludecke was one of those who r e c e i v e d t h i s " f a i t h " from the ftthrer—he had dabbled i n f a s t i n g , " t o make us hard and f i t f o r the s t r u g g l e to save germany", and, on meeting a d o l f h i t l e r , he " e x p e r i e n c e d an e x a l t a t i o n that could only be l i k e n e d to r e l i g i o u s c o n v e r s i o n . " i had given [_ hitler _ my s o u l " . he w r i t e s t h a t , f o l l o w i n g a b r i e f a r r e s t , he was-being "martyred for the c a u s e " . while the p a r a n o i d ludecke probably knew l i t t l e of genuine r e l i g i o u s experience and completely gives the game away when he admits t h a t one of the good r e s u l t s of the a b o r t i v e putsch was t h a t "the s i x t e e n martyrs might come i n handy l a t e r o n , . h i s experience was t y p i c a l . with f o l l o w e r s l i k e t h i s who p r o f e s s e d to b e l i e v e t h a t the nazi f a i t h was i n f a l l i b l e , comprehensive, and e t e r n a l , the o n l y world-view t h a t could g i v e purpose and p r a c t i c a l e x p r e s s i o n to german l i v e s , i t was not d i f f i c u l t f o r h i t l e r to condemn quoted i n j u l i e n benda, b e t r a y a l of the i n t e l l e c t u a l s , b o s t o n , beacon, , p. . quoted i n gamm, op. c i t . , p. . ludecke, op. c i t . , pp. - , , , and . groups or i n s t i t u t i o n s which maintained an a t t i t u d e of i n - dependence or n e u t r a l i t y . this " s o c i a l i s m grounded on r e l i g i o n " - ^ expressed i t s e l f c o n t i n u a l l y i n terms l i k e ganzheit ( t o t a l i t y ) ' and gesamtaufgabe ( c o l l e c t i v e t a s k ) , and no r a c i a l l y pure german was exempt from t h i s t o t a l i t y and task. the infamous judge, roland f r e i s l e r , declared, "we demand the whole man".^ no one should have time f o r c h r i s t i a n o r g a n i z a t i o n s , which, wrote wilhelm f r i c k , m i n i s t e r of the i n t e r i o r , are a c t i v e i n areas where the nazi s t a t e , i n order to f u l f i l l i t s e l f , has e x c l u s i v e c l a i m . ^ a s t r o l o g e r s , free masons, jehovah's witnesses, and f o r t u n e - t e l l e r s as w e l l were lumped together and branded as i n t r u d e r s and unacceptable. this f a n a t i c a l completeness smacks a t once of the spanish i n q u i s i t i o n or of the passionate a f f i r m a t i o n of e a r l y puritanism. indeed, the nazi movement was described as a " r e v o l u t i o n of the soul", and a good nqzi should never h e s i t a t e i f he had to choose between the c a l l of the " s o u l " and that o f the i n t e l l e c t . ^ p r e c i s e l y t h i s t o t a l - a nazi w r i t e r i n germany speaks, london, thornton butterworth, , p. . see, f o r example, ernst k r i e c k , n a t i o n a l p o l i t i s c h e erziehung, l e i p z i g , armanen, , passim. quoted i n hans r o t h f e l s , german opposition to h i t l e r , london w o l f f , , p. . ^"quoted i n hofer, op. c i t . , p. . ^baldur von s c h i r a c h , revolution der erziehung, mtinchen, z e n t r a l v e r l a g der nsdap, , p. . t loc. c i t . ' i t a r i a n i s m was d e s i r e d by many germans. that t h i s s p i r i t u a l need was f e l t , as w e l l as a need f o r p o l i t i c a l and economic change, and was met, i s t h e s e c r e t o f t h e n a z i s u c c e s s . the r e l i g i o u s need was i n t h e p e o p l e ; i t remained f o r the n a z i s to meet i t and t o d e v e l o p t h e i r own p s e u d o - f a i t h . the s t u m b l i n g b l o c k was t h a t t h e c h r i s t i a n c h u r c h e s s t i l l c o n t r o l l e d many p e r s o n s ' a l l e g i a n c e . h i t l e r knew t h a t i d e a s o r s p i r i t u a l movements c o u l d o n l y be b r o k e n by p h y s i c a l weapons i f t h e s e i n s t r u m e n t s were s u p p o r t e d by a n o t h e r " k i n d l i n g t h o u g h t , i d e a , or p h i l o s o p h y . " c o n s e q u e n t l y , a c c o r d i n g to goebbels, t h e p a r t y would "use the t a c t i c s of t h e c a t h o l i c church t o hammer £"±tsj i d e o l o g y i n t o german y o u t h . " but f o r c e c o u l d succeed o n l y i f s t r e n g t h e n e d by d e f i n i t e s p i r i t u a l c o n v i c t i o n , i n c u l c a t e d by u n c o n d i t i o n a l a u t h o r i t y . h i t l e r c o n s i d e r e d r e l i g i o n a t o o l , b u t t h i s d i d n o t p r e v e n t him from r e g a r d i n g t h e c a t h o l i c church as h i s i n s t i t u t i o n a l i d e a l ! "the g r e a t n e s s o f c h r i s t i a n i t y d i d not l i e i n a t t e m p t e d neg- o t i a t i o n s f o r compromise w i t h any s i m i l a r p h i l o s o p h i c a l o p i n i o n s i n t h e a n c i e n t w o r l d , but i n i t s i n e x o r a b l e f a n a t i c i s m i n p r e a c h i n g and f i g h t i n g f o r i t s own d o c t r i n e . " c h r i s t i a n i t y h i t l e r , mein kampf, p. . q u o t e d i n g.m. g i l b e r t , p s y c h o l o g y o f d i c t a t o r s h i p , new york, r o n a l d , , p. . ^ h i t l e r , mein kampf, p. . did not content i t s e l f merely with building up i t s altars, but tried to destroy the r i v a l heathen altars. nazism would succeed because, like the youngchristian movement, i t knew that " i t s idea must be put forward spiritually, but that the defense of this spiritual platform must i f necessary be secured by strong-arm means." . the religious trappings manufactured fabricating the "idea" was not d i f f i c u l t . hitler believed that the politician could maintain the moral health of a nation as well as the churchman by incorporating in the law of the land the people's beliefs and supporting these laws with force. this the nazis did. their basic ideas, of co\irse, were developed spontaneously i n the german people over a period of f i f t y to one hundred years, but the nazi e l i t e organized and preached these concepts as a useful substitute for christianity, surrounding them with an aura of sanctity in spectacular r i t u a l s . atheism or agnosticism were not for hitler. the people must be able to have faith i n some- thing, he said, "something for the imagination...fixed, permanent doctrines.""^ they were not to lose the sub- h i t l e r , mein kampf. p. . loc. c i t . quoted in rauschning, op. c i t . , p. j e c t i v e , " u p l i f t i n g " element o f r e l i g i o u s e x p e r i e n c e ; e r n s t bergmann w r o t e , " t h o s e who have f r e e d t h e m s e l v e s from a f o r e i g n r e l i g i o u s f a i t h . . . d o n ' t t h e r e f o r e have t o l i v e w i t h o u t r e l i g i o n . " u n d o u b t e d l y , t h e r e were many s i n c e r e n a z i s , and m i l l i o n s o f germans seemed t o b e l i e v e t h e myth. but t h e r e l i g i o u s elements i n propaganda, r i t u a l , and e d u c a t i o n were c o n s c i o u s l y used d e v i c e s , and t h e c h a r i s m a t i c q u a l i t i e s a t t r i b u t e d t o h i t l e r , w h i l e based on h i s p e r s o n a l i t y and r e a l o r a t o r i c a l power, were c o n t r i v e d . "the german l e a d e r s h i p , " w r i t e s franz neumann, " i s the o n l y group i n p r e s e n t german s o c i e t y t h a t does not t a k e i t s i d e o l o g i c a l pronouncements s e r i o u s l y and i s w e l l aware o f t h e i r p u r e l y p r o p a g a n d i s t i c n a t u r e . " one o f t h e most i m p o r t a n t methods i n d e v e l o p i n g t h i s p s e u d o - r e l i g i o u s element was t h e mass meeting, because t h e r e t h e c o n v e r t , who f e e l s " l o n e l y and i s e a s i l y s e i z e d w i t h t h e f e a r o f b e i n g a l o n e , r e c e i v e s f o r the f i r s t t i m e - t h e p i c t u r e o f a g r e a t e r community, something t h a t has a s t r e n g t h e n i n g e f f e c t on most p e o p l e . " h i t l e r ' s a d v i c e was f o l l o w e d i n t h i s way; quoted i n l i t t e l l , op. c i t . t p. . f r a n z neumann, behemoth; t h e s t r u c t u r e and p r a c t i c e o f n a t i o n a l s o c i a l i s m . t o r o n t o , o x f o r d , , p. . % i t l e r , mein kampf. p. . on a foundation of wagnerian music there was heard a daunting rumbling, slow and emphatic, of drums, and heavy f o o t f a l l s pounding the e a r t h , together w i t h an i n d e s c r i b a b l e r a t t l e and swish and pant of armed masses on the march...now growing, now receding... this i s a d e s c r i p t i o n of the broadcast of h i t l e r ' s entry i n t o the congress h a l l of m r n b e r g , september, , and makes i t easy to understand the f e e l i n g s of apprehension and f a s c i n a t i o n implanted i n the l i s t e n e r by the managers of the s p e c t a c l e ; of course the e f f e c t on those present was even greater. more- over, the formal pomp of these c e l e b r a t i o n s could a l s o be used to f r i g h t e n doubting thomases into submission through awe- i n s p i r i n g symbols and e f f e c t s . a p a i n t i n g , "triumph of the movement", d i s p l a y e d i n the p a r t y o f f i c e s i n munich i s an i n t e r e s t i n g example of the way nazism f r a n k l y borrowed from c h r i s t i a n t r a d i t i o n . in rausch- ning's d e s c r i p t i o n , t h i s p i c t u r e showed a l a r g e p l a i n on which a huge crowd i s thronging through storms and massed clouds towards a b r i g h t l y s h i n i n g swastika i n the sky. this sounds remarkably l i k e c e r t a i n s i x t e e n t h and seventeenth century p a i n t - ings with t i t l e s l i k e "adoration of the holy name of jesus". an even more obvious example of t h i s tendency i s another serge chakhotin, rape of the masses. the psychology of t o t a l i t a r i a n p o l i t i c a l propaganda, t r a n s . e.w. dickes, london, routledge, , p. . rauschning, op. c i t . , p. . showing h i t l e r haranguing a small group around , the c a p t i o n of which reads, "in the beginning was the word."''" because god's chosen people were the aryan germans, paragraph s i x t y - s i x of the blasphemy law was changed i n november ; i t became an offence "coarsely to outrage the f e e l i n g s of the people." needless to say, t h i s law covered a m u l t i t u d e of s i n s . f i n a l l y , i n october, , a law was passed making any utterance o f f e n s i v e to n a t i o n a l s o c i a l i s m a penal offence under the blasphemy law. customs u s u a l l y a s s o c i a t e d w i t h c h r i s t i a n l i f e were adopted and adapted by the nazis. in a p r i l , goebbels and rust drew up an index of books which were l a b e l l e d dangerous and u n d e s i r a b l e . a grace before meals f o r c h i l d r e n was suggested; ftthrer,my f i l h r e r , sent to me from god, p r o t e c t and keep me; thou who has saved germany, f o r my d a i l bread i thank thee; stay by me, never leave me, f i l h r e r , my ftthrer ,my f a i t h and my l i g h t i h e i l my fuhrer the o r i g i n a l was rhymed f o r e a s i e r r e t e n t i o n . there were also homes f o r expectant.mothers, i n which a s i m i l a r grace was s a i d , reproduced i n micklem, op. c i t . , p. . i b i d . , p. . i b i d . , p. . ^"quoted i n gamm, op. c i t . , p. . during which the women would stand, f a c i n g a p i c t u r e of h i t l e r on the w a l l , r a i s i n g t h e i r r i g h t hands and speaking i n chorus."'" many a f a n a t i c a l nazi housewife provided her home w i t h something resembling an a l t a r , a l a r g e coloured p i c t u r e of h i t l e r , beneath which stood a t a b l e with f l o w e r s . every- d a y - l i f e , as w e l l , was a f f e c t e d i n the use of the g r e e t i n g , " h e i l h i t l e r " , which had a r e l i g i o u s connotation, since " h e i l " was u s u a l l y a s s o c i a t e d w i t h god; gamm w r i t e s , "when h e i l was r e l a t e d by the nazis e x c l u s i v e l y to the name of a human being, a new d i r e c t i o n was to be given to existence."* - this new d i r e c t i o n i n c l u d e d s u b s t i t u t e s f o r other c h r i s t i a n customs, such as weddings, f u n e r a l s , c o n f i r m a t i o n , and the l i k e , although these were not yet o f f i c i a l l y sanctioned by the h i e r a r c h y . but c i v i l weddings were encouraged as over against church weddings. while the leaders were never able to o f f i c i a l l y e s t a b l i s h t h e i r own system of appropriate r i t u a l , they had plans f o r the f u t u r e . in a b r i e f to the g a u l e i t e r , a r e g u l a r order of worship i n the c u l t of the s t a t e was o u t l i n e d the permanent form of the ns s e r v i c e w i l l i n c l u d e as the f o c a l p o i n t the sermon (a solemn, w e l l - w r i t t e n address, l a s t i n g ] j t o minutes), f o l l o w e d by the creed, spoken i n chorus. in c o n c l u s i o n , the song of committment (an accompanied hymn, sung by a l l present) gregor ziemer, education f o r death, london, oxford, , p. . gamm,- op• c i t . , p. . i b i d . , p. . ...and, of course, the appropriate number of sieg h e i l s , a verse of the n a t i o n a l anthem, and the horst wessei song. this s e r v i c e would take p l a c e on sunday morning, and indeed a c t u a l l y d i d a t c e r t a i n places i n the reich, where i t was pos- s i b l e . every occasion on which a l a r g e group was i n v o l v e d was used to i n c u l c a t e the r e l i g i o u s mood; edward hartshorne r e p o r t s a s e r v i c e h e l d i n the h a l l of the f r i e d r i c h wilhelm u n i v e r s i t y i n b e r l i n , , to c e l e b r a t e the founding of the third reich; a f t e r a s t i r r i n g anthem, the v o i c e of the chorus leader chanted the c l o s i n g words of the s e r v i c e ; "there f o l l o w e d an u n c e r t a i n w a i t , as at the c l o s e of an impressive church s e r v i c e , but g r a d u a l l y the meeting broke up.""'" there i s a tendency f o r students and readers to ac- cept and t h e r e f o r e to be misled by a w r i t e r ' s use of r e l i g i o u s s i m i l e , but we are concerned here with the e f f e c t of these tendencies on the average man, and what seemed r e l i g i o u s to a r e l a t i v e l y unbiassed observer q u i t e p o s s i b l y was the essence of r e l i g i o n to an i n v o l v e d p a r t i c i p a n t . use of the blutsfahne, the sonnenwende c e l e b r a t i o n s , the c h u r c h - l i k e atmosphere created when the hj pimpfe became jungvolk ("confirmation") -- by these methods, the vague but powerful r e l i g i o u s f e e l i n g s of the youth were given a channelled u n - c h r i s t i a n o u t l e t . the ^e.y. hartshorne, german u n i v e r s i t i e s and n a t i o n a l s o c i a l i s m , london, a l l e n and unwin, , p. . see zieraer's d e s c r i p t i o n of the marksburg ceremony, op. c i t . , p. . party had to proceed c a r e f u l l y , but i t s success i s sometimes a s t o n i s h i n g : ziemer describes an i n c i d e n t concerning the worship of horst wessel by a group of german g i r l s i n order to improve t h e i r f e r t i l i t y . - ' - this i s probably an i s o l a t e d case, an adolescent f r e a k , but i t shows the e f f e c t of the nazi " f a i t h " on malleable minds. . the h i t l e r youth in the same way t h a t the c h r i s t i a n church has always sought t o b r i n g i t s message to c h i l d r e n and to c o n t r o l i n some way t h e i r education, so d i d the nazis. a d u l t s might accept the party's r e l i g i o u s trappings s k e p t i c a l l y , but c h i l d r e n , even i f warned by t h e i r parents, are probably c o n s t i t u t i o n a l l y unable to r e s i s t such an appeal. the deutscher fflhrerlexikon f o r reveals the indebtedness of nazism to the youth movements; one t h i r d of the " l e a d e r s " were under the age of f o r t y . the h i t l e r youth, the foundation of the party's present strength and f u t u r e hope, o r i g i n a t e d i n the youth league of the s.a.; i t became not only the source from which the e l i t e ' s ranks were to be r e p l e n i s h e d , but a l s o the instrument f o r d i r e c t l y c o n t r o l l i n g the most important group i n s o c i e t y , young people, "*"ibid., p. - . deutscher f t i h r e r l e x i k o n - , b e r l i n , s t o l l b e r g , , passim. and. f o r i n d i r e c t l y , through f a m i l i e s , c o n t r o l l i n g a d u l t s . youth i s n a t u r a l l y a c t i v e and i d e a l i s t i c , but has to be guided and c o n t r o l l e d ; the hj demanded not only the e n t i r e youth of the na-tion, but a l s o the e n t i r e l i f e of each young german. a r t u r axamann, h i t l e r youth leader a f t e r , s a i d t h a t "the hj became powerful as a party o r g a n i z a t i o n ; i t h a s c o n t i n u a l l y had the same path and the same goal.""'" the nazi r e v o l u t i o n was rooted i n the nation's youth, wrote ernst k r i e c k , and from the h i t l e r youth the s t a t e would s e l e c t the f u t u r e l e a d e r s . a f t e r the young had been t r a i n e d i n the myth, the best were to be taken f o r the priesthood, v/hile the others would become the f a i t h f u l foundation of the h i e r a r c h y . "we a l l have the t a s k " , s a i d h e i n r i c h himmler, "of t r a i n i n g and l e a d i n g germans from the cradle to the grave." to h i t l e r , c h i l d r e n were, i n trevor-roper's words, "the c o n t i n u a l l y r e - placeable (and t h e r e f o r e c o n t i n u a l l y dispensable) m a t e r i a l of conquest and c o l o n i z a t i o n . " ^ " he knew when a c h i l d was most v u l n e r a b l e ; "there i s no enthusiasm greater than t h a t of a yofng man of t h i r t e e n to seventeen years of age. they w i l l g l a d l y l e t quoted i n werner klose, " h i t l e r j u g e n d " , p. . ^ k r i e c k , op. c i t . , p. . -^quoted i n stewart w. herman, eure seelen wollen wir; k i r c h e im untergrund, t r a n s . wilhelm gossman, mflnchen, neubau, , p. . trevor-roper, ed., secret conversations, p. xxx. themselves be cut to p i e c e s f o r the sake of t h e i r t e a c h e r . " one kurt grttber was the l e a d e r of the s.a. h i t l e r youth when i t was founded i n . from the b e g i n n i n g there was no doubt as to the nature of t h i s youth group—here was no fun c l u b . a l l eighteen-year-old members had to j o i n the p a r t y , and i n came the r u l i n g that they must a l s o j o i n the s.a. this procedure made sure that no-one i n whom the spark had been k i n d l e d would f a l l i n t o the hands of o t h e r groups. at the same time, r a d i c a l , independently t h i n k i n g s o c i a l r e v o l u t i o n a r i e s were weeded o u t . the h i t l e r youth grew i n numbers and enthusiasm, r e f l e c t i n g the c o n d i t i o n s among the younger g e n e r a t i o n d e s c r i b e d i n chapter one. in , there were , members, and by , , . in a p r i l , they f l e x e d t h e i r muscles and e x p e l l e d the o f f i c i a l s from the premises of the f e d e r a l committee of german youth groups i n b e r l i n . in the same y e a r , the h i t l e r j u g e n d boasted of , h i t l e r j u n g e n ( " h i t l e r - b o y s " ) , and by the end of over t h r e e and a h a l f m i l l i o n german c h i l d r e n had been " c o - o r d i n a t e d " and t h e i r enthusiasm had become a danger to the party as w e l l as to germany. by , t h e i r tendency to o u t s t r i p t h e i r l e a d e r s i n i b i d . , p. . k l o s e , op. c i t . , march , , p. . f a n a t i c i s m was c o n t r o l l e d to the extent that the party e l i t e f e l t i t could pass a law announcing t h a t a l l the youth of germany was a u t o m a t i c a l l y i n the h i t l e r youth; "the e n t i r e german youth i s to be t r a i n e d p h y s i c a l l y , s p i r i t u a l l y , and m o r a l l y i n the h i t l e r youth." the p a r e n t a l home and the school were mentioned b r i e f l y as working i n concert w i t h the party, but the church was p o i n t e d l y omitted, and, as w i l l be seen, the i n f l u e n c e of the f i r s t two i n s t i t u t i o n s was g r a d u a l l y to be l i m i t e d . the hitler.jugend' s leader u n t i l , baldur von schirach, was d i r e c t l y r e s p o n s i b l e to h i t l e r and occupied a p o s i t i o n equivalent tp cabinet rank, a f a c t o r which r e v e a l s the importance of h i s work. von schirach's book, revolution der erziehung, gives an o u t l i n e of what was to be taught to german youth, the s t r e s s being c o n t i n u a l l y on the l i f e of the s p i r i t and the importance of f a i t h ; "what we are doing f o r the u n i t y of germany doesn't take place only i n the s p i r i t of p o l i t i c s , but a l s o i n the s p i r i t of r e l i g i o n ; " and consequently always the need f o r opfer-bereitschaft ( " w i l l i n g n e s s to s a c r i f i c e " ) : "our youth movement was not created by money, but by the s a c r i f i c i a l deaths of fervent youth". the c h i l d r e n were being taught how ^ a t i o n a l s o z i a l i s t i s c h e monatsheft, . heft , p. . von s c h i r a c h , revolution der erziehung, p. . i b i d . , p. . f a i t h i n god, f a i t h i n the fuhrer,and f a i t h i n germany were a l l one. speaking at an e q u i n o x i a l c e l e b r a t i o n i n , von schirach s a i d , "we open our hearts to the almighty,...devoted to the man whom god has given us as our leader i n honour and freedom, we solemnly vow to be l o y a l to a d o l f h i t l e r . " ^ eager to crush the s u s p i c i o n t h a t the young were being t r a i n e d i n m i l i t a n t , i n t o l e r a n t atheism, he announced, "we a l l b e l i e v e i n an almighty god." c e r t a i n l y few groups i n nazi germany were so f r e e w i t h the name of god as the h i t l e r youth, s t a r t i n g with the t e n - y e a r - o l d boy who promised "always to do my duty i n love and l o y a l t y to the ftihrer and to our f l a g , so help me god." nevertheless, as e a r l y as , groups of h i t l e r youth boys were d i s t u r b i n g e v a n g e l i c a l youth meetings and even though these events were, at t h i s time, s c a t t e r e d and seldom, they represented the i n t o l e r a n t , a n t i - c h r i s t i a n bent of the h i t l e r youth. in a decree of $ , von schirach gave p u b l i c expression to t h i s f a c t : h i t l e r youth l e a d e r s were not to belong to any church. the o r g a n i z a t i o n of the youth movement was so e f f i c i e n t "^ibid., p. . i b i d . , p. . klose, op. c i t . , march , , p. . t h a t the average c h i l d , p a r t i c u l a r l y a boy, had so much of h i s time, i n t e r e s t , and a t t e n t i o n d i r e c t e d towards i t s a c t i v i t i e s t h a t he o f t e n had l i t t l e time or energy l e f t f o r a c t i v i t i e s c e n t e r i n g i n the home or i n the church. a t y p i c a l boy would have h i s r e g u l a r school i n s t r u c t i o n on thursdays and saturdays from e i g h t - t h i r t y i n the morning to one i n the afternoon and u n t i l two during the r e s t of the week. but he would have h i t l e r youth a c t i v i t i e s as w e l l on mondays (music from s i x to seven), on tuesdays (gymnastics from f i v e t o seven), on thursdays ( t r a i n i n g i n a trade from four to seven), on fridays (drawing from f i v e to seven and the weekly meeting from eight to t e n ) . on three sundays and two saturdays i n the month there would be h i k i n g or some kind of " s e r v i c e " — and t h i s was not a l l ! " ' " obviously few c h i l d r e n l e d such an existence, but t h i s was the i d e a l , and i t s e f f i c a c y i n t r a i n i n g young nazis, even g r a n t i n g c h r i s t i a n i n f l u e n c e i n the school and the home, i s not to be doubted. with the exception of the nazi youth j o u r n a l , a l l other youth p u b l i c a t i o n s were banned, unless, of course, they adopted the nazi approach. there were a l s o weekly r a d i o pro- grams which a l l c h i l d r e n were o b l i g e d to hear. a new set of h o l i d a y s from school was introduced; f o r example, january u "schule oder verein", spectator, v o l . , june , , p. . ^ h i t l e r ' s birthday) and the e q u i n o x i a l c e l e b r a t i o n s . the nazi d r i v e f o r t o t a l i t y l e d to the establishment of s p e c i a l h i t l e r youth u n i t s f o r c r i p p l e d c h i l d r e n . i t was claimed t h a t , . i n t h e s p i r i t of the o l d youth movement, "youth i s to be l e d by youth": again, the appeal to t r a d i t i o n . but since the ftlhrer p r i n c i p l e was e s s e n t i a l throughout the p a r t y , the r e s u l t was that youth was administered by youth and l e d by a d u l t s . a f t e r a l l , to repeat the com- parison w i t h the c h r i s t i a n church, twelve-year-old sunday school teachers are not considered the best. in the h i t l e r youth, there was no r e a l charisma and no e l e c t i o n of leaders; they were appointed. the party, l i k e the church, could not allow the u n i n i t i a t e d to ramble b l i t h e l y through i t s sacred h a l l s without the f i r m c o n t r o l of t r a i n e d a d u l t s . the term "movement" was a l s o a misleading element of propaganda, f o r such a phenomenon the party's youth groups never were. thousands of young people were e n t h u s i a s t i c members of the h i t l e r youth, but the o r g a n i z a t i o n was never independent. c o n t r o l was always e x e r c i s e d from above to prevent the b o i s t e r o u s s p i r i t s of the young from s t r a y i n g into* h e r e t i c a l paths. this r i g i d i t y never slackened and, i n , an academy f o r youth leadership was opened i n braunschweig. even when a young person "graduated" from the h i t l e r youth, as,for example, i n t o the a r b e i t s d i e n s t , educators and propagandists continued t h e i r i n f l u e n c e on h i s immature mind and exhausted body. at f i r s t , the public morality of christian, pre- germany, particularly where i t concerned the young, was main- tained by the party leadership. they could point with pride to the fact that juvenile crime was reduced from february to de- cember and to the fact that, after the "revolution", porno- graphic books largely disappeared and the stage and cinema were purified. unfortunately, juvenile delinquency rose again in and by i t was almost four times what i t was in , and this at a time when many immoral practices were concealed by party authority. naturally, parents could not complain about the improvement, however ephemeral i t was, an improvement which the churches had not been able to bring about; nor could they deny that the romantic values of the youth movement of the "good old days" did not seem to have been revived. however, although the nazis stressed family unity, the dignity of motherhood, and the duties of children, the ultimate effect of a child's participation in the hitler youth was to des- troy his connection with his parents and to increase the sense of isolation that had in the beginning helped to create the movement, •̂ hey claimed that they sought to eliminate tension between parents and children, but in many ways, they only increased the distance between parents and children. the natural conflict between gener- ations was f u l l y u t i l i z e d ; werner klose reports that "hj leaders eventually the law against obscene literature passed in was revoked. this was in the party's favour: the notorious schwarze korps could have greater freedom and what non-nazi porno- graphy did appear could be attributed to jewish sources. see per- secution of the catholic church in the third reich, london, burns oates, , p. . when referring to otto strasser in , hitler used "wandervogel" as a term of derision. klose, op. c i t . , p. (march , ) . and bdm l e a d e r s r e g u l a r l y give i n t h e i r a u t o b i o g r a p h i e s such c o n - f l i c t i n t h e i r p a r e n t s ' home as the reason f o r t h e i r work i n the n a t i o n a l youth movement: ' o u r e l d e r s are b a c k w a r d . . . t h e y d o n ' t understand u s ' . " the v e r y r i g i d i t y of the h i t l e r youth may even have been i t s weakness and may p a r t i a l l y e x p l a i n why, i n i t s work with the young, the party was not completely s u c c e s s f u l . by , the system was s t a t i c and seemingly p e r f e c t , and t h e r e was no p o s s i - b i l i t y of new branches growing. in c o n t r o l l i n g y o u t h f u l energy, the party a l s o c o n t r o l l e d enthusiasm and i n s p i r a t i o n . there was a p p a r e n t l y g e n e r a l d i s i l l u s i o n m e n t a f t e r the decree o f . hans s c h o l l of the l a t e r munich underground was one of those who, having j o y f u l l y p a r t i c i p a t e d i n h i t l e r youth a c t i v i t i e s , was o e v e n t u a l l y d i s a p p o i n t e d . some others s t e a d f a s t l y r e f u s e d to be " c o - o r d i n a t e d " , and t h e r e were c o n s i d e r a b l e young people i n v o l v e d i n the " p a c k s " d u r i n g the war. even i n the l a r g e degree of s u c - cess t h a t the party d i d a c h i e v e , t h e r e were d i s a d v a n t a g e s . l u k e - warm young nazis found t h a t p a r t i c i p a t i o n i n the h i t l e r youth o f f e r e d o p p o r t u n i t i e s to r i s e t o p o s i t i o n s i n the party and i n s o c i e t y t h a t had been u n t h i n k a b l e e a r l i e r . but f o r those c h i l - dren whose homes o f f e r e d l i t t l e r e l i g i o u s or moral t r a i n i n g , the p r e p a r a t i o n f o r l i f e i n the new order was f a r advanced by k l o s e , op. c i t . . p. . see a l s o chapter f i v e of the t h e s i s . ? . see the f i r s t chapters o f inge s c h o l l , die weisse rose. f r a n k f u r t , f i s c h e r , . i n , f o r example, the s t a t e h a n d i c r a f t s l e a d e r o f hesse announced t h a t o n l y boys and g i r l s who had completed t h e i r t r a i n i n g i n the hj would be admitted t o trades c o u r s e s . k l o s e , l o c . c i t . . the e f f e c t o f p a r t i c i p a t i o n i n the h i t l e r youth can be seen today i n the a t t i t u d e o f middle-aged germans t o whom the n a z i s appear as e v i l men, but men who n e v e r t h e l e s s d i d much f o r t h e young p e o p l e o f t h e t i m e . the n a z i l e a d e r s e v i d e n t l y f e l t t h a t by t h e y had s u f f i c i e n t h o l d on the n a t i o n ' s y o u t h . n o t h i n g e l s e c o u l d e x p l a i n goebbel's f r a n k and c y n i c a l d e c l a r a t i o n o f september o f t h a t y e a r : a statement o f i n t e n t i o n as w e l l as a c o n f i r m a t i o n o f the f a c t s . "they s h a l l g i v e t h e i r b e s t f o r the war and i t s t a s k ; t h e i r s t r e n g t h , t h e i r i d e a l i s m , and t h e i r d e e p e s t c a p a c i t y t o b e l i e v e . " . the concept o f the e l i t e the i d e a o f a g o v e r n i n g e l i t e was t o permeate t h e n a t i o n and i s i n s e p a r a b l e from t h e concept o f a f a i t h - d o m i n a t e d s t a t e . germany was an e l i t e n a t i o n , governed by t h o s e germans who p a r t i c i p a t e d i n t h e e c c l e s i a s t i c a l h i e r a r c h y o f the p a r t y , and w i t h i n t h i s e l i t e group would f u n c t i o n t h a t p r i e s t h o o d - e l i t e , t h e l e a d e r s h i p . the h i t l e r youth would p r o v i d e t h e members o f t h i s upper e l i t e w h i c h had t o be c a r e f u l l y n u r t u r e d and c o n t a i n o n l y the b e s t men. e r n s t k r i e c k d e s c r i b e d them as " r e g u l a t e d by honour, v a l o u r , l o y a l t y , r e a d i n e s s f o r s e r v i c e and s a c r i f i c e . . . l i v i n g h a r d , s t r o n g l i v e s , . . . s o l d i e r l y i n p u b l i c l i f e . ^ h i t l e r t h e r e f o r e sought t o t r a i n a c l a s s o f young men joseph goebbels, d i e z e i t ohne b e i s p i e l . reden und a u f s a t z e aus den j a h r e n - . munchen, e h e r , , p. . k r i e c k , op. c i t . , p. "who c o u l d a c c e p t t h e f a c t s o f t h e " l i f e s t r u g g l e " and who c o u l d f u n c t i o n as l e a d e r s , i n i t i a t e s i n t o t h e m y s t e r i e s o f the c u l t , and p r i e s t s . he b e l i e v e d t h a t the "nerve c e n t e r s o f the s t a t e " s h o u l d be o c c u p i e d by " o n l y as many as are a b s o l u t e l y r e q u i r e d " ; t h e y would be concerned w i t h t h e " o r g a n i z a t i o n o f t h e i d e a . " i t was n e c e s s a r y f o r the movement t o b l o c k e n r o l l m e n t i n i t s ranks and t o i n c r e a s e i t s membership o n l y w i t h extreme c a u t i o n and a f t e r t h o r o u g h d e l i b e r a t i o n . o n l y t h i s way c o u l d i t p r e s e r v e i t s " u n v i t i a t e d f r e s h n e s s and h e a l t h . " the c a t h o l i c church was a g a i n h i t l e r ' s model and he f e l t t h a t t h e word " p a r t y " was a misnomer; " i s h o u l d p r e f e r ' o r d e r myself...one i s reminded o f m o n a s t i c o r d e r s . " w h i l e t h e o r d i n a r y p a r t y member was not t o be too much concerned w i t h dogma and d o c t r i n e , h i t l e r e n v i s a g e d a " b r o t h e r - hood o f templars round t h e h o l y g r a i l o f pure b l o o d . " ^ i n t h i s remark, i t i s not the b l o o d - o r i e n t e d weltanschauung t h a t i s im- p o r t a n t , but t h e c o n c e p t o f a s e l e c t few to whom t h e " t r u t h " has been r e v e a l e d . h e i n r i c h himmler p o s s e s s e d a l a r g e l i b r a r y c o n c e r n i n g t h e j e s u i t o r d e r and spent much t i m e s t u d y i n g t h i s group o f devoted men. i t would s eem t h a t t h e j e s u i t s were h i s model i n o r g a n i z i n g t h e s.s., t h e fundamental r u l e o f which was a b s o l u t e o b e d i e n c e , t h e e x e c u t i o n o f e v e r y command w i t h o u t c o n t r a d i c t i o n . near p a d e r b o r n , the s.s. r e p r e s e n t s a development o f the e l i t e p r i n c i p l e . ' h i t l e r , mein kampf. p. . i b i d . , p. . quoted i n rauschning, n p t c lbid.. p. . i n w e s t p h a l i a , himmler had a m e d i e v a l c a s t l e f i t t e d out f o r an a n n u a l c o n s i s t o r y where t h e s . s . l e a d e r s h i p c o u l d r e t i r e f o r m e d i t a t i o n and p r a c t i c e . the s o c i a l democrats and t h e communists had p a r t y s c h o o l s d u r i n g t h e weimar p e r i o d , but t h e n a z i s o u t d i d t h e s e e f f o r t s by c r e a t i n g , o u t s i d e t h e r e g u l a r e d u c a t i o n a l s y s t e m and under t h e d i r e c t c o n t r o l o f the p a r t y , a comprehensive p l a n o f t r a i n i n g t o c o v e r almost f i f t e e n y e a r s i n t h e n o v i c e ' s l i f e . i n t h i s way, a s m a l l e l i t e o f l e a d e r s would be formed, w h i c h would f u n c t i o n s i m i l a r l y t o , but w i t h more power t h a n , t h e h i g h e r r a n k s o f t h e c h r i s t i a n p r i e s t h o o d . the n a t i o n a l - p o l i t i c a l t r a i n - i n g i n s t i t u t e s and a d o l f h i t l e r s c h o o l s o f f e r e d secondary edu- c a t i o n t o a group o f boys c a r e f u l l y s e l e c t e d by t h e p a r t y f o r t h e i r p h y s i c a l p e r f e c t i o n , q u a l i t i e s o f " l e a d e r s h i p " , and r e c o r d i n t h e h i t l e r youth. the f i r s t o f t h e s e s c h o o l s , f i f t e e n o f them, were e s t a b l i s h e d as b o a r d i n g s c h o o l s i n , w i t h t h e aim o f t r a i n i n g i n d o c t r i n a t e d s o l d i e r s . the a d o l f h i t l e r s c h o o l s were e s t a b l i s h e d i n and were more d i r e c t l y a f f i l i a t e d w i t h the h i t l e r youth; t h e y were t o t r a i n f u t u r e p o l i t i c a l l e a d e r s . one o f t h e s e s c h o o l s was p l a n n e d f o r each o f the gaue; boys were chosen a t t h e age o f t w e l v e t o spend s i x y e a r s a t the s c h o o l . there were t o be no e x a m i n a t i o n s , but work groups and s e m i n a r s , each c l a s s b e i n g r e s p o n s i b l e f o r the b e h a v i o u r o f each p u p i l , a " p r o g r e s s i v e " i n n o v a t i o n . those s e l e c t e d f o r t h e leader s c h o o l s would not have t o pay f e e s and were t o be f r e e from f i n a n c i a l w o r r i e s the r e s t o f t h e i r l i v e s . the headmasters o f t h e p r i m a r y robert a. bra.dy, s p i r i t and s t r u c t u r e o f german f a s c i s m , london, g o l l a n c z , , p. « schools made up the l i s t s of candidates, and parents were not consulted. the potential member of the elite would spend six years at the leader school, and, upon graduating, would pass seven years in the army, the work service, and professional l i f e ; then, i f he was s t i l l acceptable at the age of twenty-five, he might be selected to become an ordensjunker, a member of an even more carefully chosen group of not more than young men to be sent to the ordensburgen, where he would be trained for an additional four years. rosenberg was i n charge of this training which, since i t was suspended in , remained largely in the embryonic stage. this system would have been more complete than that.of the communists, not to mention that of the church, and with res- pect to the latter institution the significance of the nazi training appears. as over against the common experience christians have of sin and of the need for redemption, because the nazi world-view was fundamentally n i h i l i s t i c , the only basic exper- ience the members of the e l i t e would have in common would be that of the ruthless struggle with each other for power. the system of training had either to mask this truth or u t i l i z e i t in terms of a "german" struggle for lebensraum. many different methods were applied to c u l l only the best of the national crop. in , instead of admitting a l l who applied for membership in the party, only , young people who had shown the greatest promise in the hitler youth were admitted; and the number f o r the f u t u r e ordensburgen was reduced t o . this e d u c a t i o n a l plan remained l a r g e l y u n r e a l i z e d , but i t s c o n t r i b u t i o n to the nazi s t a t e would have been i n v a l u a b l e . h i t l e r h i m s e l f d e s c r i b e s best what i t would have produced. the o r d i n a r y young person who, at t h e age of eighteen, became a p a r t y member was not sent back to the t , o l d t r a i n e r s i n c l a s s - and p o s i t i o n - c o n s c i o u s n e s s " , but was taken d i r e c t l y i n t o the work s e r v i c e , the s.s., or the s.a.; and then i f a f t e r one or two years they haven't become complete n a t i o n a l s o c i a l i s t s , they're p o l i s h e d up f o r s i x or seven months i n the a r b e i t s d i e n s t . . . a n d then i f there's s t i l l something l e f t of t h e i r o l d c l a s s or pos- i t i o n i n them, they go i n t o the army f o r f u r t h e r t r e a t - ment f o r two years. and i f they r e t u r n a f t e r two, t h r e e , or f o u r years, then they go back i n t o the s.a. or t h e s.s., so they don't r e v e r t to o l d habits...and f o r t h e i r e n t i r e l i f e they are not free. such an a t t i t u d e was a b s o l u t e l y necessary i n the leader of an i n s t i t u t i o n the fundamental b e l i e f of which was f a i t h i n power. nothing e l s e can e x p l a i n h i t l e r ' s concept of what t h i s f i f t e e n - year t r a i n i n g would produce; a " v i o l e n t l y a c t i v e , dominating, i n t r e p i d , b r u t a l " young nazi p r i e s t seeking t o become or at l e a s t t o emulate "the magnificent, s e l f - o r d a i n i n g god-man."-^ . the f i n a l enlightenment the idea of the governing e l i t e , as developed by p l a t o , f . brennecke, nazi primer, new york, harpers, , pp. x x v i i and x x i i . ^quoted i n gamm, op. c i t . , p. . quoted i n rauschning, op. c i t . , p. . d i d " n o t i n s p i r e t h e n a z i s ; t h e i r new e l i t e o f m a s t e r s , h a v i n g g i v e n t h e masses the o p i a t e o f r e l i g i o n and s e e i n g t h r o u g h t h e f r a u d o f t h e dogma, c o n c e n t r a t e d on the o n l y e n d u r i n g t r u t h , t h e d r i v e f o r power. indeed, i f t h e mass of germans had imbibed t o o much o f t h i s d o c t r i n e , t h e t h i r d r e i c h would have d i s s o l v e d i n chaos. hence t h e l i m i t a t i o n s imposed on the number o f t h o s e who were supposed t o become w e l l - v e r s e d i n t h e myth. n e v e r t h e l e s s , i m p o r t a n t f o r t h e f u t u r e was t h e f a c t t h a t a t some p o i n t i n the t r a i n i n g o f f u t u r e l e a d e r s , p r o b a b l y at the ordensburgen, t h e t r a i n e e was t o r e a l i z e t h a t the myth o f t h e t w e n t i e t h c e n t u r y was a f a c a d e . c e r t a i n l y i f he d i d not realize i t t h e n , he was bound t o be e n l i g h t e n e d i n t h e company o f the o r i g i n a l e l i t e ; t h e r e , rauschning r e p o r t s t h a t the r a c i a l d o c t r i n e was c o n s i d e r e d " a d o l f ' s bunkum", and much i n s i n c e r e enthusiasm was- b e h i n d t h e t a l k o f the m y s t i c a l e x p e r i e n c e i n m e e t i n g the l e a d e r f o r t h e f i r s t t i m e . but a t t h i s l e v e l as w e l l t h e r e was no escape. however g r e a t h i s d i s i l l u s i o n m e n t , t h e " s e l f - o r d a i n e d " p r i e s t would have no c h o i c e b u t t o s t a y on and, e v e r more c y n i c a l l y , e n j o y the f r u i t s o f h i s t r a i n i n g . these l e a d e r s , t h e n , as a r e n d t w r i t e s , were d i s t i n g u i s h - ed from t h e o r d i n a r y german i n t h a t t h e y d i d not b e l i e v e i n the t r u t h o f t h e i d e o l o g y ; i n d e e d , i n t h e s h o r t t w e l v e y e a r s o f the n a z i supremacy, t h r o u g h o u t t h e upper e c h e l o n s o f the p a r t y t h e r e d e v e l o p e d a contempt f o r the german p e o p l e which had n o t h i n g rauschning, op. c i t . , p. . a r e n d t , op. c i t . , p. # » t o - d o w i t h the r a c i a l p r i n c i p l e s w h i c h were supposed t o b e t h e b a s i s o f t h e n a z i " c h u r c h " and which r e v e a l s t h e weltanschauung f o r t h e f r a u d i t was. . weaknesses the n a z i s u b s t i t u t e c h u r c h was a f a i t h o n l y i n outward a p p e a r a n c e s . i n w a r d l y h o l l o w , i t r e n d e r e d e v e r y german who a c - c e p t e d i t a l s o i n w a r d l y h o l l o w . i n o r d e r t o c l a i m the t o t a l s p i r i t u a l r e s o u r c e s o f germans, t h e n a z i s d e v e l o p e d t h i s " f a i t h " , and e v e r y p a r t o f s o c i e t y was t o be dependent on u n q u e s t i o n i n g a c c e p t a n c e o f the e d i c t s o f i t s p s e u d o - p r i e s t s . i t has been s a i d t h a t the p a r t y t r i e d t o r e s u r r e c t t h e - t r i b a l i n s t i n c t and t h e m y s t i c a l s a n c t i o n s of savage s o c i e t y . but i n p r i m i t i v e l i f e , l o n e l i n e s s i s a r a r e and m a r g i n a l s i t u a t i o n , and f e a r i s u s u a l l y a shared e x p e r i e n c e , i n r e l a t i o n t o wild, a n i m a l s and n a t u r a l phenomena. i n n a z i germany, t h e average man n e v e r ceased t o ex- p e r i e n c e t h e g e n e r a l l o n e l i n e s s d i s c u s s e d i n c h a p t e r one, and h i s f e a r was d i r e c t e d toward h i s f e l l o w germans. w h i l e i t i s a moot p o i n t how l o n g t h e german p e o p l e would have been s p i r i t u a l l y s a t i s f i e d w i t h t h i s r i g i d pseudo- c h u r c h , t h e r e a r e two o t h e r weaknesses i n the n a z i s t r u c t u r e i n t h i s r e g a r d . the n a z i s compromised w i t h t h e i r enemy, t h e c h r i s - t i a n c h u r c h e s . u n l i k e t h e communists, t h e y r e t a i n e d outward p a r t s o f the o l d f a i t h , such as b e l i e f i n god, and t h u s weakened t h e i r chances o f u l t i m a t e s u c c e s s . t h i s compromise i n t h e f i e l d o f t e r m i n o l o g y and t h e a c t u a l compromise i n t h e f i e l d of t o l e r a t i o n seemed a t f i r s t t o be e s s e n t i a l and shrewd t a c t i c s . but t h e s e very devices by which the nazi leaders hoped to hold the people provided a common ground between the two faiths which led to continual confusion. the second weakness was described by hitler himself; the more easily attainable posts and offices a move- ment has to hand out, the more inferior stuff i t w i l l attract, and in the end these p o l i t i c a l hangers-on overwhelm a successful party in such number that the honest fighter of former days no longer recognizes the old movement.when this happens, the 'mission' of such a movement is done for.' the development of the e l i t e as well as the limitation of party enrollment were attempts to prevent this from happening. the party's strength was dissipated precisely because i t was not radical enough; respectable people sought membership in i t , as there did not appear to be anything incompatible i n simultaneous church and party membership; besides, this was the only way to achieve a respectable, successful career. hitler, mein kampf. p. . chapter the church-state conflict the f i r s t three chapters have shown; f i r s t , the posi- tion of the german churches, their strength, such as influence over education, and their weakness, such as their uncritical pat- tiotism; and secondly,, with what spiritual armament hitler and his party approached the churches. in this chapter, the general themes and significance of events w i l l be reviewed. . christian attitude to the conflict f i r s t , we should consider how the christian approach to nazism worked out in practice. both p o l i t i c a l l y and s p i r i t u a l l y , many christians accepted the nazi weltanschauung. the year saw an example of this in a book, "what we expect from national socialism", in which a roman catholic author interpreted the com- ing reich as a sacrum imperium, and in which a protestant writer expressed confidence that nazism was only a p o l i t i c a l movement and would "not claim for i t s e l f the whole man". later this optimism turned to disillusionment but rarely to general condemnation. in this way, confusion within the church ranks aided the nazis. the nazi "revolution" presented the lutherans with an entirely new situation; never before had the evangelicals had any serious conflict with the state, in prussia or elsewhere. they were seeking to execute their creed—render unto caesar the things that are caesar's and unto god the things that are god's. but they were crippled by the delusion that the struggle was not a spiritual one. it was only later that they realized that the com- promise would leave everything but the innermost l i f e , i f even that, to caesar-hitler. the consequences of the lutheran tendency to sanctify worldly power were unfortunate. even pastor hans asmussen, who eventually severely c r i t i c i z e d hitler, treated the idea of the third reich as a secular order of power reigning as a metaphys- o i c a l counterpart of the cross.*" it was the lutheran pastors, rather than the leaders of the free reformed churches or the catholic priests, who tried most vigorously to introduce nazi concepts into christian l i f e . in their "positive" approach to the reich, both orthodox lutherans and "german christian" lutherans sought a quoted in klemperer, op. c i t . , p. . quoted in kolnai, op. c i t . . p. s. sanctification of the new s p i r i t of s a c r i f i c i a l patriotism, be- lieving that i f the national rebirth was to be won for christ, the church's message would have to be presented in terms cur- cent l y understood. but their attempt, a confused mistake, negates any claim that the most effective resistance to nazism was chris- tian. the lutheran church as a whole welcomed the "revolution" and many pastors, including the influential martin niemoller, seeing in nazism a chance to save old customs and a more gen- uinely german way of l i f e , voted for the nazis. many s t i l l wanted the union of throne and altar that they lost in . it seemed possible that hitler might be the god-sent deliverer, and so the lutherans prayed after services for the safety of the fflhrer and chancellor, thus neutralizing much of a potential christian op- position to hitler. at f i r s t eager to help the national renais- sance, they were actually at one with the more radical "german christians" and the later objections they had to national soc- ialism were neither to the nationalism nor to the socialism, but to the claim that the state could control the church's internal a f f a i r s . pastor niemoller, a former submarine commander, is a good example of this position. he said that, in , "when a preacher...told us that we christians in germany bore our own measure of responsibility for the war and i t s outcome—and that at a time when the versailles treaty had just been signed—i could not help i t , i had to leave." this attitude, and his view, "i accept the authority of the state as such whatever the circumstances^" returned to confuse him afterwards. he asked, in , to be allowed to fight once more for germany and appealed to grand admiral raeder to be recalled for ser- vice i n the navy. he was refused, not because his nationalism was doubted, but because he s t i l l insisted that the nazis had no right to interfere with s t r i c t l y ecclesiastical matters. he does not seem to have recognized the h o s t i l i t y with which the nazi leadership regarded even lutheranism, not to mention the anomaly of a man of god fighting for adolf hitler. even such a man, a pastor of considerable integrity, was a victim o f "positive christianity". a similar situation is found among the protestant youth organizations. after the "revolution", they suggested that christian young people be included in the hitler youth as a special division; of course, they were refused. these christians were deceived, in part because the nazis played on some of their most legitimate hopes. the nazi reich bishop idea, for example, was welcomed because there had been such plans among lutherans earlier. at f i r s t , the "co-ordination" probably seemed to be a logical c o nclusion to the union of . perhaps the unity of the german protestant quoted in dietmar schmidt, pastor niempller. trans. l.wilson, london, gdhams, , p. . lbid.. p. . later he regretted the letter and stated that he had been prompted solely by the desire to resume active oppo- sition to hitler. schmidt, op.cit.. p. , church,could be strengthened by building up a strong central authority and by bringing the formerly independent churches in the various states under the control of a reich church on the anglican model. the lutherans as well as the reformed churches accepted this principle, although they agreed that each was to have f u l l liberty to retain within the new church organization their own traditional faith. consequently, the nazi leaders found orthodox protestants, with their hopes for the future, ready to co-operate. other protestant germans were more than merely co- operative. only a few of the many radical reformers in whom religious and patriotic motives were mixed can be mentioned here. in , for example, the league for a german church was formed by professor joac him niedlich; from this group came the german christian work community, which later became part of hitler's favourites, the "german christians". two pastors, both alumni of the youth movement of the 'twenties, julius leuthauser and siegfried leffler, founded the german christian church movement of thuringia. the f i r s t group to have a genuine nazi flavour was the work community of national socialist pastors, founded in with hitler's approval. this group also called i t s e l f the "german christians", and formed with several others in the o f f i c i a l l y recognized faith movement of "german christians" under joachim hossenfelder. the latter group eventually became the spiritual storm troops which hitler used to "co-ordinate" the theology of the "german christians" i s well described by karl kupisch as a "religious mixture, in which can be traced the case history of a century-old theological and church sickness." zwischen idealismus und massendemokratie. p. . see also chapter one of the thesis. the protestant church. there were also groups which shaded off into paganism, such as that of general and mathilde ludendorff, and which found, for a while, nazi approval. although they soon became divided among themselves, the "german christians" had in several practical aims which won for them hitler's support: they wanted to remove a l l clergymen friendly to the former regime, to concentrate a l l authority in a united church in the hands of their sympathizers, to established the ftthrer principle in the church, and to elim- inate everything in christian teaching out of harmony with national socialism. this included introduction of hero worship, the racial concept of national unity, and the sacred character of national ambitions. seeking the f i n a l triumph of the german reformation over roman catholicism, they wanted to form a l i v i n g people's church, in which "positive christianity" would revive the "german s p i r i t of luther and heroic piety." in particular, they fought against atheistic marxism and the centre party, which they believe was controlled from rome. the nation was to be protected;:from the incapable and the inferior; jews were to be evicted, as were those with cosmopolitan or pacifist sympathies; the old testament was repudiated as scripture. besides being sympathetic to the nazi movement, the "german christians" re- present the embodiment of implications within lutheran doctrine, and thus won the sympathy of many within the church. eventually, with the aid of the party, they achieved almost complete control of the o f f i c i a l protestant church organization. l i t t e l l , op. c i t . . p. . some protestants were clearer about the nazi danger. in the spring of , the lutherans s p l i t into three groups of opinion, and eventually of action; the radically progressive "german christians", the moderate middle group supporting von bodelschwingh as reich bishop candidate, and the niemoller faction, which eventually became the pastors' emergency league in the f a l l . with the latter group, i t began to seem as though an unexpected and perhaps influential opposition to hitler was forming among one of the groups from which he had hoped to derive support. in the barmen declaration of by insisting that the government should restrict i t s e l f to maintaining justice and order, the dissenting pastors' emergency league, now the "confessional church", struck at nazi totalitarianism and ob- jected to the oath of personal allegiance hitler demanded and to totalitarianism and objected to the oath of personal a l l e g i - ance hitler demanded and to the requirement that they adopt anti-semitism. " this resistance achieved l i t t l e , and only a quarter of the lutheran pastors supported i t . ' many, indeed, were forced by their deepest convictions eventually to condemn the dissenters. under the onslaught of naziism, they probably thought i t wise to preserve at least a framework of a nominally christian church, even though the orthodox viewpoint had often to be glossed over and even though church offices were increasingly f i l l e d by "blood and s o i l " preachers. to these defenders of the church, ? l i t t e l l , op.cit., p. . this figure is for , after which their supporters declined in number. see mother mary alice gallin, german resist- ance to...hitler: ethical and religious factors. washington, catholic university of america, , p. . while they may not have supported the "german christians", the resistance of the confessional church seemed ill-advised, de- feating their own ends by provoking the measures which, they feared, might lead to complete paganization. but wilhelm niemoller notes that even the confessional church should not be considered as resistance, and even i f they had wanted vigorously to protest, i t is doubtful i f the niemsller group could have achieved much against the general tide of collaboration, which penetrated their own ranks. in may , a government-approved church council of moderate churchmen sanctioned a plan, in the loccum manifesto, for an evangelical german reich church, headed by a reich bishop of the lutheran confession, with a ^cabinet of pastors at his side. this plan was not produced by the "german christians", but represents the efforts of the moderate churchmen. the more radical union of national socialist pastors produced the mecklenburg theses, which advocated revision of the old ecclesiastical forms, adapt- ing them to the new social structure. a l l this was music to hitler's ears and he must have been further delighted when, after germany's withdrawal from the league of nations, he re- ceived from the o f f i c i a l christian opposition of niemoller and the other confessional church pastors a congratulatory telegram. even his c r i t i c s pledged "loyal adherence and prayerful support/ the leaders of the smaller free churches were hardly a problem; wilhelm nierfioller, die evangelische kirche im dritten reich. handbuch des kirchen-kampfes. bielefeld. bechauf. .p. . ^this consisted of the president of the church committee, hermann kapler, bishop marahrens of hannover (lutheran), and dr. hermann hesse (reformed), as well as the reich bishop mflller. quoted in means, things that are caesar's, p. . as late as , one bishop melle, perhaps as justification for this collaboration, informed a conference of american method- i s t students that hitler had saved german youth, had l i f t e d them out of degenerate smoking and dinking, and had made them i d e a l i s t i c and ready for sacrifice. the protestant w i l l to collaborate with the party was eventually embarrassing for hitler. while their co-operation seemed at f i r s t desirable, in making them comrades-in-arms, he ran the risk of b etraying his real aims or of hindering the execution of those aims. before the end of , hitler began to try to disentangle himself and the party. collaboration was more d i f f i c u l t for the catholics, because the party considered the church hierarchy of earthly origin, and, for them, law corresponded to the w i l l of the leader and his elite who recognized no authority beyond themselves; right was that which, as interpreted by the leader, allegedly served the destiny of the german people. the catholics, on the other hand, believed law to have i t s source in god and the church hierarchy to be of divine origin. as over against the lutherans, many catholics were at f i r s t moved neither to attack or defence b y the nazi "revolution". the roman catholic faith, because i t was the truth, solved most of their problems. hence they remained untouched by the nazi, or any other, ephemeral; heresy. the catholic church l e f t the problem of patriotism to each individual to solve and no justification was necessary, a quoted in l i t t e l l , op. c i t . . pp. - neutrality which in practice permitted as high a degree of patriotism to prevail among catholics as among lutherans. while a distinc tion between just and unjust wars was made, a patriotic catholic, however much he may have despised the hitler regime, experienced l i t t l e doubt as to whether or not he should defend his fatherland in . if he looked to his religious superiors for guidance concerning service i n hitler's war he received almost the same direction as from his nazi ruler. when austria was invaded, cardinal innitzer of vienna o f f i c i a l l y greeted the o german forces; i t should also be remembered that the f e r t i l e s o i l in which nazism f i r s t thrived was catholic bavaria. at no time was hitler, nominally a catholic, ever excommunicat.ed, and, when the concordat was signed, cardinal faulhaber, usually assoc- iated with the resistance to the nazis, sent hitler a telegram congratulating him on achieving so quickly what the old parlia- mentary system had failed to do.-* although faulhaber had accepted the honour of being chosen o f f i c i a l protector of the german catholic peace league, he made no move to defend i t when the nazis dissolved i t . attempts at conciliation between the r i v a l hierarchies were usually based on the common struggle against bolshevism, which hitler was always careful to stress, and were therefore usually successful. no catholic clergyman publicly condemned the alliance with bolshevist, atheistic russia, or i spoke with a catholic gentleman from the rhineland who declared that, when he joined the army in , "hitler was my ideal". see also gordon c. zahn, german catholics and hitler's wars. a study in social control. new york, sheed and ward, . see hitler's secret conversations, p. . f ° r bis reaction to the greetings of another catholic bishop in . -̂ quoted in walter kinkel, ed., kirche und national- sozialismus. ihre auseinandersetzung zwischen und in dokumenten dargestellt. dtlsseldorf, patmos, i , p. . the invasion of predominantly catholic poland. we must conclude that german catholics accepted the authority of the nazi state with almost the same willingness as german lutherans. catholic periodicals appeared with articles in sympathy with the party. the weekly "time and people", founded a few months after hitler's accession to the chancellorship, and published by a catholic firm in munich, pursued the task of demonstrating and promoting unity between the nazi state and the catholic pop- ulation. in the "voices of the times", a german jesuit monthly, there appeared an articlaeon the racial acceptability of t he christian idea of sin. joseph lortz, in his "catholic approach to nazism", expressed the widespread i l l u s i o n that i t was a pure- l y p o l i t i c a l movement. monsignor hudal, rector of a german foundation i n rome, made continual efforts at mediating between the two powers, declaring that no conflict of conscience could arise between the german catholic's loyalty to rome and his na- tional feeling; "the informed catholic w i l l bear no i l l - w i l l to a germany groping her way from the s o c i a l i s t i c poisoning of the people to the great traditions of her national past."-^ an inward consonance between nazism and catholicism was possible, wrote franz taeschner, for nazism was the trustee of the divine w i l l in the realm natural, as catholicism was in the realm supernatural.^ in this way, some catholics sought to legitimize nazism and to avoid conflict. while there was no important attempt within the x kolnai, op. c i t . . pp. - . ^joseph lortz, katholischer zugang zum nationalsoz- ialismus. mttnster, aschendorff, . see also wilhelm berning, katholische kirche und deutsches volkstum. mttnchen. callwey, . ^quoted in kolnai. op. c i t . . pp. - . lbid., p. . catholic church to sanctify nazism, these writers weakened a possible common christian front. with a united approach, christ- ians could have resisted nazi corruption and misuse of their doc- trine; with their confused approach, they were unable to prevent the great strides made by nazi "co-ordination" of german l i f e . during the weimar republic, the nazis experienced l i t t l e c r i t i c a l resistance from the catholics; their leaders cannot be said to have f l a t l y approved of the nazi movement, but they con- fined themselves to purely doctrinal issues and to refuting the assertions of propagandists like rosenberg. although i t was not their o f f i c i a l p o l i t i c a l agency, the centre party generally rep- resented the p o l i t i c a l aspirations and a c t i v i t y of german cathol- i c s . according to karl bachem, "the catholic members of the centre remain catholics individually, but the party as a party does not necessarily accept the catholic conception of the world." not a l l i t s members were catholics and i t was not always regard- ed? favourably in high church quarters. however, hitler always hated i t for i t s opposition to himself, for i t s connection with the attempt to carry out the versailles treaty, for i t s more european outlook, and for i t s willingness to work with the so- c i a l democrats. he considered i t the arm, in germany, of a for- eign power, the papacy. the old catholic church, surviving from bismarck's time, called i t s e l f now the "catholic german national church", and viewed the nazis more or less favourably. but on quoted in benda, op. c i t . . p. . when the dogma of papal i n f a l l i b i l i t y was proclaimed in , a small group of german catholics, led by ignaz d - linger, refused to accept i t . organized as the "old catholic" church, they were without much influence but had the support of bismarck. september , , a c r i t i c a l statement about the party and the church was made by the bishop of mainz; to the question whether a catholic could be a member of the nazi party, the answer was "no". eventually the party f e l l under an ecclesiastical ban. the position of the catholic church seemed to grow more hostile be- fore , and, considering this, the nazis might expect greater resistance from catholics i n the future. this doubt probably det- ermined their cautious approach to the church in the f i r s t months of and their eagerness to conclude the agreement of that year. the concordat was an invaluable, and unexpected, wind- f a l l for them. according to the o f f i c i a l view expressed in the papal encyclical of , mit brennender sorge. the church had "many and grave misgivings" but decided to go through with the agreement in order "to spare the f a i t h f u l of germany, as far as i t was humanly possible, the t r i a l s and d i f f i c u l t i e s they would have had to face...had the negotiations fallen through." it i s d i f f i c u l t to know how far this i s the wisdom of hindsight. von papen, after the signing, said that the pope hoped that "the new germany had won a decisive battle against bolshevism and the force of godlessness" and that he placed complete trust in the chancellor's assurances that he would carry out the national re- birth in accordance with christian principles. a few of the important articles and consequences of the concordat should be cited. on the surface, i t seemed that no pre- vious german concordat had offered the church such generous terms as that of . article guaranteed religious orders their quoted in micklem, national socialism and christianity, p. . " quoted in anne fremantle, ed., the papal encyclicals in their historical context. new york. mentor, , p. . quoted in kupisch, op. c i t . . pp. - . pastoral, educational, and charitable work. article guaranteed the church's rights in the existing schools and provided for new schools under church influence. article declared that teaching in catholic schools should be in the hands of catholic teachers and promised no interference in their training. most important, article included protection for the catholic youth organiza- tions. the concordat retained in the hands of rome the appoint- ment of a l l archbishops and bishops, although none unacceptable to the government was to be appointed, a concession made in other agreements. it was also part of the concordat that the catholic church was to use i t s recognized authority and natural conservatism on behalf of the new regime, and, consequently, on march , , the centre party voted for the enabling b i l l , and on march the bishops conferring at fulda formally l i f t e d the ban on nazism. there followed, in july, the dissolution of the/bavarian people's party and of the centre party of their own accord. the concessions made by hitler to the church in the con- cordat represent an attempt at a modus vivendi; i t is doubtful i f the co-operation of the catholics rendered him less suspicious of their intentions or less hostile to t h e i r very existence. to leave the discussion of the catholic attitude to nazism without mentioning the encyclical could not be com- pletely f a i r . in this document, those who "by pantheistic con- fusion, [identified] god and the universe, by lowering god to the dimensions of the world, or raising the world to the dimensions of god", were condemned as unbelievers; so were those who follow- ed "that so-called pre-christian germanic conception of substi- for the text of the concordat, see johann neuhsusler, kreuz und hakenkreuz. mttnchen. katholische kirche bayerns, , vol. , p. (appendix). . tutlng a dark and impersonal deity for the personal god." this was an attack on the "religiofication" of the nazi move- ment and was a clear demand for catholics to resist the nazis' unjust laws. but i t contained no suggestion that they should resist the government i t s e l f . it came too late and was not f o l - lowed by stronger action, such as breaking diplomatic relations or excommunication of hitler. the almost inevitable weakness of the catholic position was that they acted always in a way that could be interpreted by the nazis as " p o l i t i c a l " . what friedrich baumgfirtel writes about the lutherans applies to most christian leaders of this time; they were them- selves "weakened by disunity, and thus brought uncertainty, lack of clarity, and confusion into their parishes." it i s tempting to conclude that christian faith played no great role in the third reich, except as a support to national social ismj in any case, a recent study of the german resistance movements shows that religious belief was not the determining factor in the ind- ividual's decision to fight against hitler. hitler could hope never to be threatened seriously by the activity or stand of christians. he knew that some sort of conflict was inevitable but did not fear i t . it became obvious that, the christians were divided and insecure; and this weakness was nazi strength. . themes of the conflict it has been suggested that the nazi aim was ultimate ^quoted i n fremantle, op. c i t . f p. . friedrich baumgsrtel, wider die kirchenkampf-legend- en, freimund, neuendettelsau, , p. . gallin, op. c i t . . p. . e x t e r m i n a t i o n o f c h r i s t i a n i t y . but i n s p i t e o f the weakness o f t h e c h u r c h e s , t h e y c o u l d not be e l i m i n a t e d i n two o r t h r e e y e a r s , and more t h a n b r i b e r y and f o r c e were n e c e s s a r y t o make people renounce t h e i r t r a d i t i o n a l f a i t h . the n a z i approach t o t h e churches w h i l e sometimes clumsy and t r a n s p a r e n t , was o f t e n s u b t l e , and c o n s e q u e n t l y o f t e n s u c c e s s f u l . c o n s i d e r a t i o n o f t h e i r approach b e f o r e - shows t h a t t h e y never f o r g o t t h e power and i n f l u e n c e t h a t b o t h con- f e s s i o n s s t i l l w i e l d e d . the n e u t r a l i z i n g o f t h i s p o t e n t i a l o p p o s i t i o n was c a r r i e d on from the b e g i n n i n g s o f the p a r t y -j i n and c o n t i n u e d t h r o u g h o u t t h e most f l a g r a n t p e r s e c u t i o n t o the end o f the t h i r d r e i c h . i n the ' t w e n t i e s , the n a z i l e a d e r s were concerned above a l l t o make t h e m s e l v e s " r e s p e c t a b l e " and were u n c e r t a i n as t o t h e a t t i t u d e c h r i s t i a n s , p a r t i c u l a r l y t h e i r l e a d e r s , would t a k e t o t h e e v o l v i n g r a d i c a l a s p e c t s o f t h e movement. they began, t h e r e f o r e , w i t h promises o f p r o t e c t i o n and d e c l a r a t i o n s o f r e s p e c t . the f a c t t h a t many c h r i s t i a n s were members o f the p a r t y a t t h i s t i m e was r e f l e c t e d i n the twenty-five p o i n t s o f , w h i c h a s s u r e e q u a l i t y o f t r e a t m e n t t o b o t h c a t h o l i c s and p r o t e s t a n t s , who would remain unmolested as l o n g as t h e y d i d not t r e a t e n t h e morale o f the people o r the e x i s t - ence o f t h e s t a t e . rosenberg's a n t i - c h r i s t i a n mythus was not p u b l i s h e d by t h e p a r t y ' s o f f i c i a l p r i n t i n g house; t h i s f a c t was i n d i c a t e d as p r o o f t h a t t h e p a r t y ' s a t t i t u d e was more moder- a t e and a t l e a s t not n e c e s s a r i l y t h a t o f the b a l t i c r a d i c a l - - see p o i n t o f t h e t w e n t y - f i v e p o i n t s i n h o f e r , op. c i t . , p. . loc. c i t . his work was a private venture. hitler knew the role he should play; according to hans mttller, he said in , "when i once get to power, the catholic church w i l l have nothing to laugh about; but to get there, i can't do without i t s help!' in mein kampf. hitler went so far as to praise the churches. this was another f r u i t f u l line of approach. "as the churches are german institutions, we, as good germans w i l l support them". the greatness of the christian church, wrote hitler, endures i n spite of the mistakes of human beings within i t . it was possible that deutschtum and roman catholicism were compatible; he, at any rate, would launch no kulturkampf. in a l l his speeches and articles before , he exercised caution and restraint, avoiding any i r r i t a t i o n of his catholic or lutheran followers—or potential converts. in the volkischer beobachter ("people's observer") of february , , he denounced attempts to bring religious disputes into the movement or even to equate the national socialist m ovement with religious problems. he was careful to avoid any identification of individual churches or sects with his own party. the great enemy of both christendom and germany was, after a l l , bolshevism, and i t was his supreme task, he declared, to ensure that in the nsdap both lutherans and catholics could work peacefully together and resist the common enemy. these promises made i t easier for christians, anxious to avoid the interdenominational squabbles that had disturbed german unity in the past, to accept the new movement and i t s program. quoted in hans mflller, "der pseudoreligibse charakter der nationalsozialistischen weltanschauung", geschichte in wissenschaft und unterric ht. , pp. - . ?hitler, mein kampf. pp. and . hitler, speeches, vol. , p. . with the signing of the concordat in , the high- est christian authority in the world legitimized and made f i n a l l y respectable the nazi regime. were the nazis surprised at the tractability of the catholic church? in spite of previous hints at resistance, they had some hope, for in , rosenberg had written: the most amazing thing today is...the fact that in devoutly catholic italy, the most extreme con- cept of nationalism has become the government of the state, and that the pope...has made peace with this glowing nationalism. at any rate, hitler's tactics were met with success; but, of course, he knew how to handle the church; "they shall bend or break—but, since they are no fools, they w i l l bow their heads. this cynical attitude was supported by the facts. the behaviour of the catholic hierarchy was such that i t confirmed the opinion hitler had of i t . the church would ban and condemn u n t i l i t was cornered and then i t would compromise. the papal nuncio signed the concordat and the german church authorities l i f t e d the ban. the catholic church, like the lutheran church, hastened to welcome the nazis. with the concordat, their approach to the most unapproachable of the churches was successful. their con- fidence grew apace. one theme which never altered throughout the various alfred rosenberg, blut und ehre. mttnchen, eher, , p. . o quoted in micklem, national socialism and the roman catholic church, p. . to the reichstag, hitler described the concordat as "an indescribable success", and saw therein three advantages; ( ) the fact that the vatican had been willing to negotiate at a l l , thus crushing accusations that the german government was anti-christian, ( ) that the new regime had been recognized by such a power, and ( ) that the catholic unions and the zentrum were to be liquidated. from a protocol quoted in hofer, op.cit., pp. - . stages of the confli .ct was the effort to blacken the image of the catholic church by attacks on " p o l i t i c a l christianity", the meddling of the church in german p o l i t i c a l l i f e , and to maintain the image of the party as a defender of a "positive", more lutheran, christianity. as lutheranism was more in keeping with deutschtum. hitler aimed most of his propaganda at the roman catholic church. yet even catholics could enjoy "inward" christianity as long as they believed with "outward" faith in the german renaissance. hitler stressed the difference between the catholic church's spiritual l i f e and i t s p o l i t i c a l inter- ference. "the fight against the centre party must not be waged because i t processes to b e 'christian', but solely because a party which a l l i e s i t s e l f with atheistic marxism for the oppression of i t s own people is neither christian or catholic." in the party founded the "league of catholic germans", a group which might have played a role similar to the "german christians" in the lutheran church. but l i t t l e came of this, for hitler tried to give the impression that there was something inherently un- natural, unhealthy, un-german about catholicism, even implying that catholics, marxists, and jews were united in conspiracy. in goebbels' words, "we do / not fight the centre party because the discussion that follows may be rendered clearer i f we divide events into four stages which correspond to the evolution of hitler's kirchenpolitik after . these are: , the attempt to form a symbiotic relationship between the state and the churches; - , beginning of disengagement towards a radical separation; - , development of the weltanschauung into what we have called a pseudo-faith; and , greater coercion and persecution. in the war years, the kulturkampf c ontinued at a slower pace. this chronology corres- ponds to that of alois natter in his der bayerische klerus in der zeit dreier revolutionen, mtlnchen,katholische kirche bayerns, , p. . hitler, speeches.vol. , p. . i t ds catholic—which, i f i t ever was, i t long ago ceased to be—but because i t serves the jews, and has sold our freedom." the party, on the other hand, was not a cult, but simply a nationalistic p o l i t i c a l party with racial principles; "we have no religious retreats", said hitler, "but arenas for sports and playing-fields;" theirs was not the "mystical gloom of a cathe- dral, but the brightness and light of a room or hall which com- bines beauty with fitness for i t s purpose." the nazi movement did not want to damage christianity in i t s essence but to deepen i t and to renew i t , to "serve the maintenance of a divine work and f u l f i l a divine w i l l . " .the national socialist party was a healthy and pious manifestation of a l l that was best in german history. the catholics, however, misused christianity for p o l i t i c a l ends. according to rosenberg, just as the bolsheviks sought to divide germany by their doctrine of class warfare, so the centre party sought to do the same with confessional differences. just as the social democrat could see only his class and i t s problems, so the leaders of the catholic church could see only the interests of their sect. both the protestant and the catholic clergy, i f they were honest in declaring that they loved germany, should withdraw from any p o l i t i c a l involvement. joseph goebbels, per angriff. aufsatze aus der kamp- f z e i t , mtlnchen, eher, , p. . h i t l e r , speeches. vol. , p. . ^hitler, speeches, vol. , p. . ^"rosenberg, op.cit., p. ^ibid.. p. . "it is just as unnatural for a pastor to be a p o l i t i c i a n as for a statesman to act as confessor." rosenberg strikes the familiar nazi note when he declares that " p o l i t i c a l catholicism" i s the p public manifestation of the "jesuitical-roman system", and i t s "black international", which was at the root of various national scandals, including that of the november criminals and their suppression of the frei korps movement. a pamphlet, "thegreat lie of p o l i t i c a l catholicism", showed that the catholic leaders in germany were confused or hypocritical, because on the one hand they spoke of persecution and martyrdom, and on the other they enjoyed f u l l churches, enthusiastic pilgrimages, and gen- erally thriving christian activity. this, of course, could be ascribed to what rosenberg called catholic doppelzttngigkeit (hypocrisy).^" statistics were given to prove that church build- ing flourished.^ thestate defended the churches against athe- i s t i c forces, and in scarcely any other country on earth at any time in history was religious l i f e more secure. but in spite of this, the roman catholic church, because i t had lost i t s p o l i t i c a l influence, turned against the state "with most unchristian hatred."^ the nazis understood that the dubious material pros- perity of the churches was not what christian leaders prized rosenberg, mythus, p. . loc. c i t . -^dieter schwarz, die grosse ltlge des politischen katholizismus, mttnchen, zentralverlag der nsdap, . passim. ^rosenberg, blut und ehre. p. ^schwarz, op. c i t . , pp. - . ^imd., p. • most-, but by pointing this out they made the christians seem greedy for more material advantages. rosenberg and schwarz, as articulate rebels, were useful, but the o f f i c i a l nazi viewpoint was always less violent. reichsminister kerrl wrote that "we demand freedom of a l l re- ligious denominations in the state so long as they do not en- danger i t s existence" but that unfortunately "religion" through- out history had always harboured p o l i t i c a l corruption, and had not always maintained a purely religious mission. the continual repetition of this theme with i t s ;vagueness and apparent mod- eration was the escape hatch by which the nazis escaped the restraints of the concordat. this o f f i c i a l view was echoed in approved nazi publications and in the lower ranks of the party, but here with more real conviction and with less intent to dupe. hans kerrl, minister for ecclesiastical affairs, stated that i t was the duty of the party to insure religious freedom for a l l german citizens under a l l circumstances; i t was the personal right of every german to choose for himself the religious sect to which he wanted to belong, provided that he made no " p o l i t i c a l misuse" of this privilege. robert wimmer, a nazi educational expert, wrote that the weltanschauung occupied i t s e l f only with l i f e on earth, while "religion" referred to the beyond and pre- pared the individual for l i f e after death. wimmer denied that nazism had any claimion the spiritual l i f e of germans and be- lieved that christianity and nazism could co-operate, provided quoted in kneller, op.cit.. p. # quoted in kneller, op.cit., p. # that the churches l e f t control of this world to the proper powers. on the other hand, national socialism realized that credit must be given to the churches as powerful contributors to modern german culture and so i t wanted to retain christianity as a necessary and basic characteristic of national l i f e . it might be argued that wimmer i s more sincere than kerrl, but this idea i s one shared by both devout christians and anti-clericals in western europe and north america. it was very close to the lutheran concept of church-state relations. on the surface, i t seemed hard to deny the justice of the nazi outlook. a good lutheran, even a good catholic, german would find much to approve in hitler's speech of october , ; we have dragged the priests out of the depths of the p o l i t i c a l party struggle and have brought them back again into the church. it i s our deter- mination that they shall never return to a sphere which i s not made for them, which dishonours them, and which of necessity brings them into opposition to millions of people who in their hearts wish to hold to the faith, b ut who desire to see the priests serving god and not a p o l i t i c a l party. later he said that in destroying the centre party and bringing back thousands of priests into the church, the nazi "revolution" had restored faith to "millions of respectable people." "the german priest as a servant of god we shall protect," the fqhrer said, "the priest as p o l i t i c a l enemy of the german state we shall destroy." when the time came to attack the catholic church, as in the currency and immorality trials of and quoted in kneller, op. c i t . . p. . i hitler, speeches, vol. , p. . ibid., p. . , the party did exactly this; thousands of priests were shown to be p o l i t i c a l and moral enemies of the german people. such was the burden of nazi anti-catholic propaganda. but, as in the diplomatic sphere, hitler did not wish to seem the aggressor in church-state affairs, and so deceptive concil- iation characterized the nazi side of formal relations with both the churches. particularly during - , this moderation had to seem to be the nazi attitude. it is. not l i k e l y that events such as the murder on july , , of adalbert probst, the na- tional leader of the young catholics, or that of dr. erich klausener, head of catholic action in berlin, during the r hm purge, were o f f i c i a l l y planned, or welcomed, by hitler. the nazis pointed out how "religion" was thriving in germany and how their party approved of this. three years later, in february , frick, minister of the interior, shrewdly ordained that in of- f i c i a l l i s t s and documents there were to be three religious cate- gories: members of religious denominations, believers in god, and unbelievers. consequently, the census of showed only , % of the population was "without religion", and the number of pro- fessed atheists was the same as in . many gave their religion as simply "believer in god", which was good enough for nazi propaganda. part of this campaign of deception was hitler's continually expressed belief that christianity should be the it was found that, contrary to the nazis' complicated deyisen (currency) laws, some catholic orders had paid back foreign loans in german currency; they were accused of sapping the economic lifeblood of the volk. in the later immorality trials, the past, and usually punished, crimes of priests and monks were^revived, exaggerated, and publicized. o f f i c i a l figures c ited in herman, op.cit., p. . to be sure, membership in a church as well had not absolutely basis of german morality, and that the family should be the core of the l i f e of the volk and the state. the staging of the national reconciliation service at the potsdam garrison church before the passing of the enabling act and hitler's speech at that time promising to support christianity were designed to give the im- pression that there was to be a return to a more christian and upright government. hitler promised to secure church influence in education—surely this was an indication that the new state would be more christian than the weimar republic. nevertheless, the o f f i c i a l text of this speech which appeared in omitted any reference to education as did other o f f i c i a l publications. allegedly because of the criticism of some catholic bishops, hitler and goebbels, b oth erstwhile catholics, refused to attend the high mass offered at the potsdam ceremony;*nevertheless, hitler continued to maintain the pre- image of the nazi move- ment as the protector of "religion" and the family from such evils as bolshevism. the middle class german, a pious family man, s t i l l listened with approval and was completely deceived. waldemar gurian suggests that an open break with the v atican was to be avoided in order to keep the catholic popu- lation i n confusion as long as possible and to c reate the impression that the vatican was afraid to protect i t s german flock. it is quite possible that a sense of helplessness within the catholic hierarchy was inculcated by the fact that ceased to be a social advantage; in , the party i t s e l f sent formations of the s.a. to church. hans buchheim, glaubenskrise im dritten reich. stutt- gart, deutsche verlagsanstalt, , p. . waldemar gurian, "hitler's undeclared war on the catholic church", foreign affairs, vol. , january s\ pp. - . i f the minister of the interior, frick, wanted to discuss catholic administration, he visited not the cardinal archbishop of cologne, but the nuncio in berlin, monsignor orsenigo. here, however, the difference between policy and the confusion of the period i t s e l f is not clear. when hitler did not actually l i e about events, he was silent, and his henchmen took their cue from him. during the most acute phase of the lutheran problem, the press authorities made i t d i f f i c u l t to follow events in the newspapers or to real- ize that any problem existed at a l l . the same tactics were em- ployed i n reverse during the immorality t r i a l s . rosenberg's "national socialist monthly" scarcely mentioned the church pro- blem at any time, and included reports on church a c t i v i t i e s without c r i t i c a l comment, although articles did appear lament- ing the lack of protestant resistance to the new "counter-re- i formation". not merely non-nazi leaders, but also important clergymen were included in the ftthrerlexikon. at the end of , relatively l i t t l e happened in the church-state sphere, because the saar plebiscite was soon to be held and the leader- ship needed domestic peace. in this case the silence indicated real inactivity. but when the saar was safely part of germany, the currency trials began. reich bishop mflller issued what became known as the "muzzling decree" on january , , forbidding ministers to introduce into their sermons any subject matter deal- ing with the church controversy, and on november , , two "die gegenreformation von heute in den lsndern des weltprotestantismus", nationalsozialistisches monatsheft. july , pp. - . decrees by frick prohibited further discussion of the church question in the press, in pamphlets, or in books. reports of restrictive measures rarely appeared in print, a factor which helped to spread uncertainty and fear. hitler's attempt at conciliation and pacification of the christians continued throughout the duration of the third reich, so that, for the uncritical, the situation seemed clear, and for those who might be anti-nazi, resistance became more and more d i f f i c u l t . it was easier when, in rosenberg's words, they put on the brown shirt, to ignore confessional differences and to see only germans fighting for the honour of the yolk. always trying to keep germans united behind—or beneath—them, the leaders denied excessive materialism, pagan tendencies, or h o s t i l i t y to christianity on the part of the movement. faced with mounting restrictions, the average christian, who did not wholeheartedly support the party and who yet loved his father- land, was confused. especially since the ftlhrer himself was silent on the religious issue, and since the new state declared i t s e l f willing to grant every concession to the older f a i t h , how could there be strife? if any existed or i f the churches claimed to be oppressed, 'it must be part of a christian, possibly only catholic, plot to discredit the national reawakening. there is one good example of this approach, combining conciliation and protests of inno- cence. the cabinet agreed on the sterilization law on july , rosenberg, blut und ehre. p. . ,- but i t s publication was carefully delayed u n t i l five days after the concordat was signed on july ; in the clauses of this law the nazis inserted one which allowed for an individual's l i f e - long sojourn in a private home, "in order that possible adherents of the catholic f a i t h who might have conscientious objections... be given the opportunity of observing their religious tenets." hitler added a verbal footnote to this, stressing the irrespons- i b i l i t y of the churches; " i f [theyj were to declare themselves ready to take over the treatment and care of, those suffering from hereditary diseases, we should be quite ready to refrain from s t e r i l i z i n g them." for both confessions, the department of state for ec- clesiastical affairs, established in july , eventually be- came more dangerous than schismatic groups or hitler youth extra- vagance. through this bureau, the party controlled church finances and did not simply interfere in church administration, but also a r b i t r a r i l y disposed of church property, caused financial d i f f i - . culties, and closed theological schools. without the permission of the department, no salary could be paid, no money spent, and no voluntary church collections could be taken up. through the department, the churches could be slowly suffocated. its decrees were contradictory and vague, and were often accompanied by more vigorous action on the part of local sympathizers. the ambigu- i t y and caution of the period u n t i l i s summed up in prick's dr. walter gross, in germany speaks, p. . ^hitler, speeches, vol. , p. . statement of june , , to the effect that "the church con- f l i c t can no more be settled with the policeman's truncheon than the jewish question can be settled by smashed windows." throughout the f i r s t few years, hitler, while sym- pathizing with his followers, had a greater awareness of the del icacy of the situation, and sought to restrain their enthusiasm for a while. the increasing persecution of christianity was ac- companied by continual denial that i t existed. in january , btlrckel, hitler's plenipotentiary for the saar, denied the © existence of a kulturkampft and with this statement, hitler agreed. a law of april forbade members of the labour front, in short, -nearly every german worker, to be members of any christian vocational organization. on july , , himmler forbade religious associations to have any share in sports, and there were to be no religious uniforms, flags, or marches. in september, members of the s.s. were forbidden to take leading parts in any religious organizations; but at the same time, hitler announced that "neither today nor yesterday has the party entertained the least aggressive intention toward chris- t i a n i t y . " the year saw a gradual alteration in nazi tactics the attempt at disengagement became more obvious. following the lead of the government, several radio stations, including ham- burg, ceased broadcasting religious functions; eventually a l l quoted i n hitler, speeches, vol., , p. . lbid., p. . religious broadcasts were forbidden and were replaced with military music or observation of nazi festivals. after the sensational immorality trials, the announcement of september that membership in the christian church could no longer be regarded as a factor contributing to the maintenance of german l i f e could surprise only the most naive. financial res- trictions were introduced. in june , frick made i t a crime to contribute money to the confessional church or to any other institution not approved by reichsminister kerrl. the bavarian government planned redue tion of subsidies to the catholic church, and on november , , kerrl announced that a l l state subsidies would gradually be withdrawn. hitler believed that the churches were materialistic,.;, and so these steps were bound to have effect. with the obvious failure of the reich church idea and with the confidence of his successes in other f i e l d s , hitler abandoned collaboration with the christians in order to preach more f u l l y the new " f a i t h " . in his diary, rosenberg notes that the ftihrer admitted that i t had been a mistake to try and form a national church. hitler never publicly announced the i n - tention to destroy christianity, but his follower ernst bergmann wrote; the national revolution has only preserved the christian confessions for reasons of p o l i t i c a l tactics...in the meantime, our prophets and pro- pagandists have to clear the f i e l d of those modern theorists who cherish the foolish ideas that christianity and nationalism are consistent one with the other. rosenberg, politisches tagebuch. gj ttingen,musterschmidt, , p. . quoted in kolnai, op.cit.. p. by , i t was apparent that the public attitude of the party, had changed from apparent conciliation to blunt h o s t i l i t y . if what the party said about the catholic church were true, they could not be blamed for hostility; the evidence of the immoral- i t y trials should prove this. until the war, the propaganda changed l i t t l e , but the persecution increased. this then was the nazis' approach to the churches. if they could not be won immediately by the new state and i t s "faith", they could be l u l l e d into a sense of security or paralyzed by confusion. with this plan developing in his mind, hitler used the "german christians" and the concordat. this idea was be- hind the repeated protestations that christ's teachings did not contradict hitler's. it was obvious that they did; yet continual repetition of a big l i e , as hitler-knew, always has some effect. . events of the conflict if we consider some of the events of the conflict by confession, differences in hitler's technique and the general elements of his approach w i l l "foe c l a r i f i e d as they are seen in action. in the approach to the lutherans much is already familiar. the period - was an experiment and involved precautionary measures. the attempt was made to have the prot- estant church work with the movement in "co-ordinating" germany. in order to have the bishops of the regional lutheran churches abandon the confessional church and accept government control t h r o u g h t h e "german c h r i s t i a n s " , the n a z i l e a d e r s h i p had t o s u p p o r t t h e l a t t e r f a c t i o n , a s t e p c o n t r a r y t o t h e i n t e n t i o n s e x p r e s s e d i n mein kampf, and a s t e p t h r o u g h w h i c h the p a r t y became e m b r o i l e d i n s e c t a r i a n d i s p u t e s . a f t e r the moderate f r i e d r i c h von bodelschwingh was nominated r e i c h b i s h o p i n may , h i t l e r and t h e "german c h r i s t i a n s " were not s a t i s f i e d . the c a n d i d a t e was not p r o - g r e s s i v e enough. the n a z i s wanted ludwig m l l l l e r , a former m i l i t a r y c h a p l a i n and a "german c h r i s t i a n " , who e v e n t u a l l y d i d become r e i c h b i s h o p a f t e r von bodelschwingh stepped down. h i t l e r approved o f m t l l l e r because he was w i l l i n g t o be l e d and, i f he d i d not p l e a s e some, a t l e a s t d i d not o f f e n d many. a f t e r a p r i l , , m t l l l e r a c t e d as h i t l e r ' s r e p r e s e n t a t i v e i n t h e church's s e l f - r e o r g a n i z a t i o n : "my r e p r e s e n t a t i v e w i t h f u l l powers to d e a l w i t h t h e a f f a i r s o f the e v a n g e l i c a l c h u r c h . " when the law f o r a new c h u r c h c o n s t i t u t i o n was passed on j u l y , , h i t l e r , knowing t h a t t h e "german c h r i s t i a n s " were p r e p a r e d f o r a church e l e c t i o n , c a l l e d one as soon as p o s s i b l e ; t h a t i s , f o r j u l y . a few days b e f o r e t h e m t l l l e r f a c t i o n was e l e c t e d , h i t l e r gave a r a d i o a d d r e s s u r g i n g t h e churches t o t a k e a s t a n d i n t h e " r e v o l u t i o n " and t h e p e o p l e t o v o t e f o r t h o s e who viewed c h r i s t i a n i t y as an i n t e g r a l p a r t o f t h e n a t i o n a l r e n a i s s a n c e . he des- c r i b e d t h e "german c h r i s t i a n s " as t h e " f o r c e s o f a l i v i n g move- ment", who s u p p o r t e d nazism not i n s u b m i s s i o n but i n l i v i n g a f f i r m a t i o n . these e l e c t i o n s were m e a n i n g l e s s as an i n d i c a t i o n h i t l e r , speeches, v o l . , p. h i t l e r , speeches, v o l . , p. of church opinion. because of the p o l i t i c a l tension, no election was held in many churches, and the previous church boards simply resigned and gave way to the new boards, a l l members of which had previously been approved by the local nazi leader. the "german christians" received the support of. the nazi press and p o l i t i c a l machinery. needless to say, they received almost three- quarters of the votes as well. thiswas "positive christianity" in action. with the support of the party, this faction managed to introduce the ftlhrer principle into the lutheran church. auto- cratic powers were given to higher church o f f i c i a l s who were, to a l l intents and purposes, government nominees. it became easier for the party to intervene in church disputes to put forward i t s candidates and measures. the f i r s t direct inter- ference by the party in church matters took place in mecklenburg on april , , when a nazi sympathizer, walther bohm, was named state commissioner for the evangelical church there; another direct invasion of the church by the state occurred in june when bernhard rust, prussian minister of education, appointed as state commissioner, august jsger, also a nazi, for the evan- gelical church. mttller was f i n a l l y appointed reich bishop on september , and "german christian" bishops were named for various t e r r i t o r i a l churches on october . church committees were named by the government to administer lutheran affairs, and f i n a l l y on july , , hitler announced the formation of a reich ministry for ecclesiastical affairs with far-reaching supervisory powers. a l l this meant that the lutheran church became even more a part of the state than i t had been under the empire. when i t appeared that the protestant church had ac- cepted "co-ordination", the party sought to withdraw. at the national synod at wittenberg, on september , , rosenberg, as party spokesman, stated that the government no longer backed any particular group or denomination. on october , mtlller was forced to issue a public statement to the effect that no member of the church would be.discriminated against i f he was not a "german christian". perhaps he was trying to pacify the c r i t i c s within the church; yet i t seems probable that he was trying to pacify hitler, whose personal representative, hess, had just publicly stated that no national socialist would be discriminated against i f he was a practising christian! the confusion i s typical of the nazis. at the same time an attempt was made to moderate the radical tendencies of the hossenfelder movement within the "german christians". just as hitler abandoned his "revolutionary" chief of staff, ernst r h m , for the army generals, so he turned from the radical hossenfelder to the army chaplain mtlller who was more tractable. the opportunity to control the influence of the revolutionary element in the new church c ame on november , , when the "german christians" demonstrated in the berlin sport palace under hossenfelder's chairmanship. a layman, dr. reinhardt krause, made sensational demands in his speech. the unity of the "german christians" was broken over this incident, and the government was able to disentangle i t s e l f . this meant joachim hossenfelder, as described earlier, led one of the radical groups which originally formed the "german chris tians" of . -the d e c l i n e n o t m e r e l y o f t h e h o s s e n f e l d e r f a c t i o n , b u t a l s o o f t h e more moderate wing o f t h e "german c h r i s t i a n s " . the p a r t y ' s demarche had begun e a r l i e r ; a f t e r the announcement o f p r u s s i a n c h u r c h e l e c t i o n s i n t h e summer, t h e n a z i s y m p a t h i z e r j s g e r was removed and t h e c h u r c h o f f i c e r s he had r e t i r e d were r e i n s t a t e d . now i n t h e f a l l , h i t l e r i n i t i a t e d f u r t h e r s t e p s t o r e d u c e t h e power of h i s own c h u r c h f a c t i o n . on november , f r i c k i s s u e d a r e g u l a t i o n d e c l a r i n g t h a t t h e c h a n c e l l o r had d e c i d e d t h a t s i n c e t h e c u r r e n t d i s p u t e s w i t h i n t h e e v a n g e l i c a l church were a p u r e l y e c c l e s i a s t i c a l a f f a i r , no i n t e r f e r e n c e would be countenanced and t h a t c h u r c h o f f i c e r s were not a u t h o r i z e d t o ask p a r t y members t o i n t e r v e n e . f i n a l l y w i l h e l m kube, one o f t h e f o u n d e r s o f t h e "german c h r i s t i a n s " , p r o f e s s e d a s h a r p s e p a r a t i o n o f e c c l e s i a s - t i c a l and p o l i t i c a l m a t t e r s , and d e c l a r e d t h a t d i f f e r e n c e s o f o p i n i o n i n r e l i g i o u s q u e s t i o n s s h o u l d not be c a r r i e d o v e r i n t o p o l i t i c s . the new " g u i d i n g p r i n c i p l e s " o f the "german c h r i s t i a n s " were p u b l i s h e d i n but t h e y were much d i f f e r e n t from t h o s e o f ; the t e e t h o f t h e r a d i c a l s were p u l l e d . s e p a r a t i n g from m g l l e r ' s g r o u p , h o s s e n f e l d e r formed a " f a i t h movement" which i t - s e l f d i s i n t e g r a t e d i n t o h a r m l e s s " l e a g u e s " t h a t v e g e t a t e d f o r t h e remainder o f the t h i r d r e i c h . i n a number o f d i r e c t i v e s , - s , on t h e " l a t e s t p o s i t i o n o f t h e p a t r i o t i c - r e l i g i o u s g r o u p s " , one f i n d s t h a t t h e "nsdap s t r e s s e s a more o r l e s s s t r o n g d i s t a n z i e r - ung from t h e german f a i t h o r g a n i z a t i o n s " , i n o r d e r t o be f r e e r t h e - e n t i r e c o m p l i c a t e d e v o l u t i o n o f "german c h r i s t i a n " a f f a i r s i s l u c i d l y e x p l a i n e d i n a r t h u r cochrane's book, the church's c o n f e s s i o n under h i t l e r , p h i l a d e l p h i a , w e s t m i n s t e r , , p p . - . t o a t t a c k t h e c h u r c h e s . i n s p i t e o f t h e o b v i o u s development n a z i p o l i c y e x p e r - i e n c e d a f t e r , h e s i t a t i o n and c o n t r a d i c t i o n , sometimes e l e v a t e d t o a p l a n o f d e l i b e r a t e c o n f u s i o n , marked t h e p a r t y ' s a t t i t u d e t o t h e l u t h e r a n s u n t i l . as a r e s u l t o f t h e s p o r t p a l a c e s c a n d a l , t h e a p p l i c a t i o n o f the aryan p a r a g r a p h t o t h e p r u s s i a n church was suspended; on j a n u a r y , , m t l l l e r an- n u l l e d t h i s o r d e r , r e i m p o s i n g the p a r a g r a p h . but on a p r i l , he a n n u l l e d t h e l a t t e r d e c r e e , o n l y t o e n f o r c e t h e p a r a g r a p h a g a i n on november . i n s p i t e o f t h e f a c t t h a t m a r t i n l u t h e r was c o n s i d e r e d a f o l k h e r o , c e l e b r a t i o n o f h i s p r o t e s t ceased i n ; t h i s i s o n l y an a p p a r e n t c o n t r a d i c t i o n , how- e v e r , because, w h i l e l u t h e r ' s a n t i - c a t h o l i c i s m was approved, h i s independence o f mind was n o t . the n a z i l e a d e r s gave up t h e i d e a o f u s i n g t h e c h r i s t i a n s and welcomed l e s s c h r i s t i a n a t t i - t u d e s t h a t the v o l k might d e v e l o p , but the e n t h u s i a s m o f pagan groups had t o be r e s t r a i n e d ; i n i t was deemed e x p e d i e n t t o r e s t r i c t a n t a g o n i z i n g t h e l u t h e r a n s by c o n t r o l l i n g such p r o p a - ganda; t h e d i r e c t i v e d i d not a p p l y t o a n t i - c a t h o l i c m a t e r i a l . however, e s p e c i a l l y a f t e r , the weltanschauung o f t h e pseudo-church i n c r e a s i n g l y d e t e r m i n e d h i t l e r ' s o u t l o o k . to p r a y f o r peace r a t h e r t h a n f o r t h e v i c t o r y o f t h e n a t i o n a l cause was t r e a s o n , and t h e r e f o r e because o f t h e i n t e r c e s s i o n s e r v i c e t h e y used d u r i n g the munich c r i s i s , when t h e y c o n f e s s e d quoted i n neuhsusler, op. c i t . , p. . see the decree o f f e b r u a r y , , i n w h i c h h i t l e r g i v e s up t h e r e i c h church i d e a . h o f e r , op. c i t . , p. ^ n e u h f l u s l e r , op. c i t . , v o l . , p. l . the "sins of our people", some pastors had their salaries stopped or lost their positions on charges of disloyalty. here we:.- see the direct effect of hitler's faith on nazi policy, for i t was a cardinal point in the weltanschauung, one of the few points hitler seriously considered, that power i s a virtue, and those who possess i t , cannot s i n . nevertheless, because they were s t i l l identified in the minds of many protestants with "positive christianity", the nazi approach to the lutheran church was largely successful, at least insofar as these christians never challenged nazi authority in the "outward" world. a glance at the approach to the catholic church i s also f r u i t f u l . the nazis' surprise at the willingness of the catholics to co-operate in explains their confident haste to break the terms of the concordat. at the same time, they considered the signature as part of continuing catholic strategy to influence german p o l i t i c s from rome, and requiring firm, equally cynical, action on their part. nazi behaviour was rooted both in caution and in sheer enjoyment of their power. without any blunt renunciation, hitler showed what he thought of the concordat. for one thing the nazi leaders confused the definition of areas devoted solely to p o l i t i c s and to religious l i f e and made the legal position of catholic groups vague. on august , , for example, the catholic weekly, "young front", was banned for eight weeks; less than a month later, the ban was on racial sin, see rosenberg, mythus, p. l i f t e d , only to be enforced again on march , . this i s typical of nazi procedure until , after which hitler became less noncommittal and restrictions increased as his self-con- fidence grew. in february of that year direct action was taken against the catholic young men's association in the rhineland on charges of co-operation with the communists; while the vatican and the archbishop of cologne protested, hitler replied that he could not intervene as the cases were in the hands of the people's prosecutor. he allowed greater freedom, too, for anti-catholic pamphlets to circulate; they bore t i t l e s such as der material- ismus des christentum. or vatikan und kreml. steps were taken to confine catholic processions and pilgrimages onto side streets where they would be both less noticeable and less impressive. they could also b e declared a hindrance to t r a f f i c . in , the reich war ministry forbade participation of officers and soldiers in the formation of corpus christi processions or in lining the roads with troops at such times; these celebrations would therefore become easier to disturb. these accusations and decrees were accompanied by seizure of catholic buildings, such as schools and monasteries, the inhabitants of which were ev- icted. the propaganda campaign of the currency trials and the immorality trials masked their ultimate results. the general public did not know that courts of appeal often hitler, speeches, vol. , p. . see hofer, op. c i t . , p. , for a l i s t of further pamphlets, a l l designed to show how the catholics were in league with un-german powers. see neuhsusler, op. c i t . , p. . the directions for these measures specifically noted that the party's marches and parades were exceptions* greatly reduced the sentences of lower courts; whereas f i r s t judgments were advertised in large type in the press, second judgments were announced in a corner, or not at a l l . but this direct attack on the body of christianity, this attempt to create "no martyrs, just criminals", had ultimately l i t t l e success. the trials were to be a justification of a l l the nazis claimed about the corruption harboured by catholicism. a justification i t may have been, and restrictions appropriately followed, but the result of the t r i a l s was largely to convince only those who already were anti-catholic. the average catholic was prepared to admit that some clergymen were "guilty" but he s t i l l had faith in the character of his own priest. . problems one factor which emerges clearly from the party's approach to each of the confessions i s the ultimate moderation of this approach. even with respect to the catholic church, in spite of hitler's personal h o s t i l i t y , in spite of restrictive laws, and in spite of violent propaganda, no decisive step was taken which would' force the christian german to abandon his old faith and adopt the new national "faith". why was this step not taken? "positive christianity" i t s e l f was one reason. in october , hess decreed that nazis need not belong to any religious group; three years later, in may , he f e l t obliged to actually forbid nazis in the upper hierarchy from holding offices in religious organizations. that this was necessary is indicative of the nazi problem: to many there seemed nothing anomalous in being both actively christian and actively nazi. increased persecution i t s e l f , while necessary, in- volved new problems. hitler described his intentions; i f the catholic church would not accommodate i t s e l f to him, he would unleash upon i t a propaganda that would exceed her powers of hearing and sight. this is what he did, but he was ever aware of the d i f f i c u l t y of such a campaign. the obvious and embarras- sing fact of church persecution was camouflaged during the olym- pic games of . rosenberg, in nttrnberg, #, revealed one of the reasons why the state never openly declared war on the churches; "the international position of the catholic church calls for very careful tactics on our part...every attack upon the church affects international relations and can intensify d i f f i c u l t i e s of a position which is already serious enough." goebbels was also aware of the problem; in march he wrote in his diary that hitler supported his ideas of moderation dur- ing the war. "we must proceed here very smoothly and not get wedded to doctrinaire ideas." on noting that the russians had restored a certain freedom of religion, he declared, "that's very sharp and clever tactics. it would be a good thing i f we were also somewhat more elastic in these matters."^- the nazi leaders were reluctant to moderate their approach to catholicism but they were more elastic in their treatment of the lutherans. in #, for example, martin nie- mflller was sentenced to seven months' fortress detention and a ^hitler, speeches, vol. , p. #. quoted in micklem, national socialism and christian- i t l , p. . joseph goebbels, diaries, ed. trans. louis b. lochner, new york, doubleday, , p. . lbid., p. . fine of two thousand marks. this unusual verdict was "honour- able" and remarkably light considering the seriousness of his crime in hitler's eyes. this and the fact that the term of detention plus one quarter of the fine were remitted seems to indicate that the nazis correctly estimated the number of his adherents, knew as well that most lutherans were not as bold as the confessionals, and guessed that niemoller's patriotism would eventually triumph over his sense of injustice. it may also have been a form of bribery! but when later sentenced to sach- senhausen concentration camp, niemoller was hitler's "personal prisoner" and his presence there was kept a close secret, evid- ence of the nazis' sense of embarrassment; particularly when the lutherans were such a useful support for the party, i t was unwise to let the fact of such a well-known man's imprisonment become national, or international, knowledge. the method of calling up clergymen for service after and thus separating them from their flocks created another problem. christian influence in the armed forces was, i f not actually increased, at least intensified where i t did exist, a fact which, while not entirely undesirable i f thereby the fighting elan of the men was increased, tended to undo the pre- vious work of the movement among the young. goebbels wrote that the young army chaplains were more dangerous than the old car- dinals at home, "for they rate high with the people". fuither- more, the chaplains were protected by the shield of military privilege from party ideological interference and the nazis joseph goebbels, diaries, ed. trans. louis b. lochner, new york, doubleday, , p. . feared that their work would be turned to " p o l i t i c a l goals"; they worried, too, about the number of german soldiers who visited the vatican. this d i f f i c u l t anomaly was part of the problem of how to deal with the churches when party members were s t i l l on paper at least christian and when the party had only incompletely achieved i t s breach with christianity. the nazis had always to be careful to avoid any association of godlessness with their movement, because the average german associated this with anarchy and bolshevism. during the war, when the army became all-important for the preservation of nazi gains, this problem became more complex. however practical the nazi leaders were in seeking their goals and however carefully they preserved them, they acted sometimes with an i r r a t i o n a l i t y derived from t h e i r — p a r t i c u l a r l y h i t l e r ' s — faith in the power of the movement. micklem claims that the encyclical mit brennender sorge was a "severe blow" to the party;^ i t i s also true that bishop von galen's sermons at mtlnster in july and august against euthanasia were f o l - lowed by a cessation of the program as well as by no punishment from a report by heydrich on the church situation to reichsminister dr. lammers. quoted in poliakov and wulf, op. c i t . , p. . goebbels, op. c i t . , p. . ^josef perau's diary, priester im heere hitlers.(essen. ludgerus, ) offers an interesting, i f incomplete, view of the position of the catholic priest in hitler's army, particularly in his relation to "german christian" pastors and more pagan soldiers. see pp. , , and - . in the same connection, the viertel- .iahresheft fttr zeitgeschichte ( . pp. - ) gives an ex- change of letters between two officers; one complains that the christmas edition of the soldiers' magazine has no reference to the traditional celebration, and notes that many w i l l be dis- appointed. micklem, national socialism and the roman catholic church, p. . - of the offending clergyman. can i t be assumed that this indicates the nazi fear of catholic strength? granted that the gestapo did seize copies of the en- cyclical, close the presses involved, and dispossess the owners, this does not necessarily indicate that hitler suffered a severe blow or that he greatly feared the influence of the voice from rome. a more rational man might have, but he did not, and events showed he was correct. two years later, most of the catholic population enthusiastically supported the state, confused perhaps, but undisturbed by the fact that the pope disapproved of the nazi weltanschauung. indeed, the encyclical did more than the immorality trials to convince "unbelievers" that the catholic church was s t i l l bent on interfering in german l i f e . in , the state might have been more circumspect, but, after , hitler was confident, and with justification, because while a series of protest letters were exchanged, the holy see did not break off diplomatic relations with germany. he had definitely won a point. he had proved that international catholicism did not understand and would not tolerate national socialism, but would seek to interfere with german domestic a f f a i r s . even more im- portant, he had shown that the church was s t i l l unwilling to take a really vigorous stand against nazism, for fear i t would lose what foothold i t had among the german population. catholic be- haviour thus again corroborated what the nazis believed about i t . the christians in rome were a group of power-hungry realists who knew that, i f they sought influence in germany, to break off relations would be unwise. in the year of the assault on russia, i t was undoubted- l y wise, particularly for the sake of national unity, to place ultimate goals after immediate tactics. the destruction of bolshevism was more important than euthanasia. the mentally- i l l were not plotting the downfall of aryan germany, as were the jewish marxists. but a short year later, when i t seemed that victory was certain, hitler, with confident, enthusiastic fan- aticism, launched the final solution, a step he apparently con- sidered fundamental to the existence of the third reich. this i s reminiscent of the quite irrational arrest of the pastors in who sought forgiveness for the sins of germany. the war intervened in the ftlhrer' s plans so that i t i s s t i l l debatable i f his kirchenpolitik would have enjoyed u l t i - mate success. at any rate, by , the nazis were s t i l l too involved with both churches. the result was that the concept of "positive christianity", although abandoned by the party, lived on in the people, who s t i l l believed they could be inwardly christian and outwardly nazi. of baden-alsace in , a nazi leader wrote that, the weltanschauliche situation in this area is in the truest sense of the word "black"...the arrange- ments for the christmas celebrations have shown how weak the weltanschauliche conviction and certainty is both among p o l i t i c a l leaders and those actually in power. the events of and after meant that the survival of germany demanded internal unity. no ausrottung ("tearing out") would aid the war effort. moreover, the war showed that christianity was far from dead and drastic action would be necessary to quoted in gunther weisenborn, der lautlose aufstand, bericht fiber die widerstandsbewegung des deutschen volkes. - , hamburg, rowohlt, , p. . \ suppress i t . while many fought for the greater glory of the national socialist truth, others fought because i t was their duty as interpreted by their church to do so. " chapter education and control of the youth . introduction .the m ost acute and unresolved tension tension be- tween christians and nazis arose over the disputed control of youth through formal education and leisure time organizations. in this particular aspect of the church-state conflict, national socialism as a substitute faith, demanding the bodies and souls of i t s adherents, showed i t s true colours. the party hoped to consolidate and to strengthen i t s control over germany by se- curing the allegiance of the young; i f i t could not be sure of an enthusiastic generation of nazis in forty years, i t s present triumph was f u t i l e . chapter one described the raw material the nazis had at their disposal and chapter three showed how they built the hitler youth out of t h i s material. this chapter des- cribes how the party met the christian problem in this f i e l d . in a s t i l l basically christian country, the nazi leaders had to adapt their methods to their material. fabri- cation of the religious trappings was described in chapter three. in the nazi "co-ordination" of youth, the tendency to complete developments which had begun in the weimar period is again noticeable, as well as the appeal to the"finer", more traditional qualities of deutschtum and to the enthusiasm, energy, and spiritual p l i a b i l i t y of youth. because every young german-had to internalize the weltanschauung. i t had to be made as palatable as possible without damaging the ends of the move- ment. to justify their attempt to penetrate and to the control the public schools, the universities, and the nation's youth groups, the nazi leaders began by arguing, with some j u s t i f i - cation, that they represented the revolution of youth against age, and appeared to stand for regenerative idealism. in short, they used the willing f a i t h and vague idealism of young people, although, in hannah arendt's words, their aim was not to " i n s t i l l convictions, but to destroy the capacity fo form any." the national educational system was not an integral part of the nazi hierarchy, but i t was as important as the hitler youth. "one needs the children from the great masses of the nation", wrote hitler, adding that "they alone are determined and tough enough to fight this struggle to the bloody end"; they alone are truly impressionable. "the f i r s t period of childhood is most readily susceptible to the possibility of [education], while with the mounting years the power of resistance increases." no group of germans was more deeply affected by the events af- ter than the children. they were the "best" nazis. a large part of the regime's power, propaganda, and discipline was d i - rected to converting german youth. german adults might s t i l l retain some private interests or knowledge of the outer world, arendt, op. c i t . . p. . lndeed, the bloody end was often fought by children in the volkssturm troops of late and early . hitler, mein kampf, pp. and . but. the young could have few individual interests, knowing l i t t l e of another l i f e with other outlooks. the nazis, moreover, south to limit parental influence as much as possible. the ideal was that every young person should become a member of the all-encompassing "state-church" devoted to the perpetuation of the sacred value system. this process of indoctrination was given out as c cntrol or care in the same sense that the christian church had been concerned with the whole l i f e of men, who thus gained a feeling of freedom from trusting in the authority and judgement of the church in a l l important departments of l i f e . in this way, the nazi leadership, wittingly or not, met that need of many europeans, who, having broken with the family of the church f e l t not so much free as desolate. the ftihrer's ideas determined the nature of many of the reforms. aware of the weakness of german education before the f i r s t world war, hitler condemned academic one-sidedness which tended to develop pure knowledge, without attention to a b i l i t y . in german education, he wrote, not enough emphasis was l a i d on the development of the character of the pupil, who i emerged as a "walking encyclopedia". in this way, the nazi con- cept of education had something in common with the progressive movements of the 'twenties. nevertheless, later hitlerian edu- cation wa<s equally, guilty of one-sidedness, but with intention. "i don't believe there's any sense", said hitler, "in teaching men anything in a general way, beyond what they need to know." hitler, mein kampf. p. hitler, secret conversations, p. . more precisely, he suggested that eventually an end would be put to universal education. it was not necessary for each german to obtain "a f u l l insight and precise knowledge of the ultimate ideas and thought processes of the leaders of the movement." what i s necessary is that some few really great ideas be made clear to him and that the essential fundamental ideas be burned inextinguishably into him so that he was entirely permeated by the n ecessity of the victory of the movement and i t s doctrines. while the training of the new e l i t e was to develop an amoral class of power-leaders, the education of the masses was to pro- duce a populace of unquestioning sheep, awed by the pseudo- religious aura surrounding the state, willing to be led to what- ever slaughterhouse hitler should c hoose. these are the con- clusions that his own words inevitably produce; they are supported by what the party did to the educational system of germany. the school system the nazis inherited was not anti- thetical to their aims and they made use of ideas developed be- fore their time. in eighteenth centry prussia, where education was regarded as a branch of statecraft, the higher bureaucracy v iewed the citizenry as instruments for the achievement of p o l i t i c a l aims. during the imperial period, the government tried to control teachers in regard to their national and p o l i t i c a l ideas. they were observed to see that they expressed only loyal views in their teaching. it was possible, through regular ob- servation and reporting, to keep out of the teaching profession those inimical to the state, such as teachers with socialist quoted in rauschning, hitler speaks, p. hitler, mein kampf. p. leanings. at the same time, the population were kept ignorant of p o l i t i c a l and administrative problems. inasmuch as the nazis continued these traditions, their "revolution" was mild. the republic tried to supplant monarchical loyalty by giving more civic training and by placing more stress upon the unity of a l l germans, their common cultural achievements, and their faith in the future. textbooks stressed national unity and freedom, and pointed out the injustices of the versailles treaty. there seems to have been no hesitation in roman catholic schools to use books as m i l i t a r i s t i c as those in lutheran schools. in prussia, some schools observed the anniversary of the sign- ing of the versailles treaty as a day of mourning. the three school holidays at christmas, whitsuntide, and easter served as occasions to describe their specifically german character. while the weimar educational system was less r i g i d and dry, academically speaking, the student graduated convinced of germany's cultural supremac y over a l l other nations. what with the emphasis on german national consciousness in the press, on the radio, in local museums, in the study of heimatkunde (local lore), as well as the youth movements'' enthusiasm for german landscapes, young people were ready to embrace a radical national- ism, presented in terms of soul, sacrifice, and s o i l . the republic aided the nazis efforts to "co-ordinate" the schools by not; removing' older teachers who had been raised to admire governmental authority. on the other hand,many of the younger teachers who had a part in the youth movement of pre-war r.h.samuel and r. hinton thomas, education and society in modern germany. london. routledge and kegan paul, , p. . days were allowed to lose themselves in progressivism and, while some did good work, others only added to the anarchy of values in germany during the 'twenties; the nazis further developed the idea of organic and self-unfolding individualism, which had concerned some progressive school reformers, and fused i t with the concept of self-determining nationhood. the older teachers often welc omed the authoritarian nazi "revolution", and the former progressivists greeted the nazis as a remarkable example of what they had always advocated. seen in this light, the nazi preforms of education represent not simply a further develop- ment of the new regime, but also a natural c onclusion in the form of control and direction of trends of the imperial and weimar epochs. . the universities by , the university professors had earned the r t i t l e , "the intellectual bodyguard of the hohenzollerns"; of the universities in the weimar period, one c r i t i c wrote that "too many average minds...made up for their lack of brilliance by an exaggerated attention to detail or by a superficial b r i l l i - ance which barely hid their lack of depth." "lack of depth" certainly continued to characterize the universities under the nazis, but this was as much nazi policy as i t was a product of the situation of the 'twenties. the elite could no more allow objective criticism of their doctrine than the medieval church could allow the circulation of albigensian tracts. fortunately, samuel, op. c i t . . p. . walter m. kotschnig, slaves need no leaders. london, oxford, , p. . t h e r e were few n e o - a l b i g e n s i a n s . the morale o f the educated c l a s s had d e t e r i o r a t e d b e f o r e . the r e p u b l i c t r i e d t o promote h i g h e r e d u c a t i o n o f p r o l e t a r i a n c h i l d r e n , but d i d not p r o v i d e t y p e s o f secondary s c h o o l s w h i c h might have g i v e n an advanced e d u c a t i o n t o t h e masses, w i t h o u t l e a d i n g t o t h e u n i v e r s i t i e s and l e a r n e d p r o ' f e s s i o n s . s i m u l t a n e o u s l y , the u n i v e r s i t i e s and p r o f e s s i o n became crowded and l e a r n i n g l e a d t o economic m i s e r y , which i n t u r n caused a d e c l i n e i n the p r e s t i g e o f i n t e l l e c t u a l work. many g r a d u a t e s l o s t t h e i r f a i t h i n a f u t u r e , abandoned t h e r a t i o n a l i t y one e x p e c t s f r o m t h e educated, and became p a r t o f t h e spearhead o f t h e n a z i movement. some o f them were t h e f i r s t and remained the most a r d e n t n a z i p u b l i c s c h o o l t e a c h e r s and p r o f e s s o r s . d u r i n g t h e t t w e n t i e s , u n i v e r s i t y s t u d e n t s were u l t r a - n a t i o n a l i s t i c and h i g h l y c r i t i c a l o f t h e l e s s n a t i o n a l i s t i c s t a t e . at t h e f o u r t e e n t h german student conference i n , the n a t i o n a l s o c i a l i s t league o f s t u d e n t s was e n a b l e d t o o b t a i n l e a d e r s h i p o f the german student u n i o n . i n t he b u r s c h e n s c h a f t - l i c he b l a t t e r , march , , appeared t h i s d e c l a r a t i o n : "that which we have d e s i r e d and sought f o r y e a r s , t h a t f o r which we have worked y e a r i n and y e a r out i n the burschenschaft' s p i r i t i s a t l a s t r e a l i t y . " thenazi s t u d e n t s e n t h u s i a s m , a l a r m i n g t o b o t h n a z i s and n o n - n a z i s , c o n s i s t e d , i n the d i f f i c u l t p e r i o d o f s p r i n g and summer , o f s l a n d e r i n g p r o f e s s o r s , a t t a c k i n g j e w i s h and s o c i a l i s t s t u d e n t s , and i n t r o d u c i n g i n t o the u n i v e r - see t h e twelve statements o f t h e student u n i o n , which appeared i n a p r i l and which a r e a n t i - s e m i t i c and n a z i - o r i e n t e d . p o l i a k o v and wulf, op. c i t . , pp. - . quoted i n p r o s s , op. c i t . , p. s-. s i t i e s the brown shirt, proclamations, a martial atmosphere, lecture hall disturbances, and many extra-curricular p o l i t i c a l duties for students. the book-burnings of are an example of this fanaticism. yet the students' enthusiastic freedom was short-lived. the student union, which received o f f i c i a l recognition on may , , became immersed in the crushing system of nation-wide p o l i t i c a l organizations by which the nazi e l i t e consolidated i t s power. youthful energy had to be controlled and directed. at this stage, the leading nazis wanted to tread softly on national sensibilities; moreover, some of the student activity was n ot in complete accord with the weltanschauung. eventually, the ambitions of the nazi students were viewed with suspicion by rust, the eduction minister, who effectively stole their thun- der, threatening them with severe punishment i f they acted in- dependently in ideological matters. but until at least , some students continued to express support for the more radical social aspects of the nazi program and persisted in a c r i t i c a l attitude to those who did not observe their standards. at the same time, the "co-ordination" of the non-nazi students proceeded apace. the older aristocratic and martial corps were o f f i c i a l l y dissolved in october,' , and caps, jackets, and banners were forbidden. many of the old clubs were s t i l l active in , in which year came an edict from the federal leader of the student union forbidding double membership in a once again, tradition disguised the radicalism of this step; in , members of the burschenschaften met on the wartburg and burned un-german books. student corporation and any of the nazi organizations. even- tually by , more than ninety per cent of the students were organized in nazi student associations. the universities themselves lost any independence that might have distinguished them from purely governmental i n s t i t u - tions. rectors were no longer chosen by faculty members, but se- lected and appointed by the ministry of education. financial responsibility of the states to the universities remained in principle untouched, but the creation of the education ministry in may with i t s f u l l supervisory authority involved central- ized control of finances. the academic l i f e could not offer much to the training of the "violently active" e l i t e or to the edu- cation of the volk; accordingly, a law of april limited enrollments in the universities to , a year, and set a quota of ten per cent for women. total enrollments dropped sharply. compared to , who were admitted in , only , sought admission in » and, as was often the case with their radical measures, the nazis had to remove the restriction in february . nevertheless, enrollment continued to drop, from , in to , in #; and enrollment of women dropped in the same period from , to , . in general, student numbers were reduced by thirty per cent.^- few other figures indicate so ^neumann, op. c i t . , p. . there were economic as well as ideological reasons for this restriction; by , the number of students graduated from institutions of higher learning was nearly double the number the economy could absorb in positions for which the students had prepared. this created the embittered "academic proletariat". see frederic lilge, the abuse of learning. new york, macmillan, s, pp. - . samuel, op. c i t . . p. * see e.y.hartshorne, german universities and national well.the nazi e f f o r t to l i m i t the number of people who could approach the weltanschauung c r i t i c a l l y . these actions, however, did not assure that those students who remained accepted the myth. consequently, students to be admitted to u n i v e r s i t y had to spend a season i n a labour camp, win the approval of the l o c a l youth leaders, and receive the stamp " p o l i t i c a l l y r e l i a b l e " . while more than two thousand professors were dismissed, those who remained and new applicants also, often had to attend a labour camp. ultimately, the govern- ment was forced to take measures to t r a i n u n i v e r s i t y personnel, not merely to obtain the right sort of teachers, but to f i l l the ranks of a profession which threatened to disappear. after september i t became possible f o r those without the abitur between ages twenty-five and f o r t y to enter u n i v e r s i t y by taking a s p e c i a l examination designed to discover unrevealed t a l e n t , while those who passed a "maturity" examination from a technical school could be admitted to u n i v e r s i t y i n s p e c i a l subjects. the secondary school course was shortened from nine to eight years and a d d i t i o n a l scholarships were introduced, but by there was no increase i n students enrolled. lest a l l the professors be ccnsidered martyrs, we should n ote that there was l i t t l e c r i t i c i s m on the part of u n i v e r s i t y teachers, and t h e i r "co-ordination" was aided by t h e i r own confusion. some of them f e l t with martin heidegger that one's socialism, london, a l l e n and unwin, , pp. - . he also suggests that the f a l l i n the b i r t h rate eighteen years before i s also responsible f o r the decline i n enrollment. f i r s t loyalty should b e to the people's community, or with ludwig marcuse that nazism embodied the best of german idealism. nor did the professors stop at passive s e l f - j u s t i f i c a t i o n ; when hitler became chancellor, the technical university of stuttgart offered him an honorary degree, which he refused. if the new "faith" was to be accepted by a new class of intellectuals, subjects taught in the universities had to be "co-ordinated". scienc e became more or less the p o l i t i c a l theology of the secular theocracy, and philosophy once more an ancilla theologicae. no longer required for the doctoral exam- ination. at the university of berlin, for example, courses were given in the "science of religion", which showed the e v i l i n - fluence of religion and how faith' of a nation in i t s leader was the best possible religion. an institute for religious science opened at halle in order to study "german piety". theology i t - self declined in popularity even before the theological schools began to be closed; for example, there were, in , evan- gelical theological students, while in , there were '. sociological research and speculation, on the other hand, were discouraged; the new state feared another galileo. it is signi- ficant that the universities in occupied czechoslovakia and poland were to be closed forever. for heidegger's "self-assertion of the german univers- i t y " , and the "confession of german university and technical school professors to adolf hitler and the national socialist state", see pross, op. c i t . . pp. and - . herman, op. c i t . . p. . for a review of decrees against theology students, see dokumente zum abwehrkampf der deutschen evangelischen pfarrerschaft. ed. fritz klingler, ntlrnberg, mendelssohn, , pp. - . . public schools the control of christianity in schools was carried out usually locally and always gradually; that i s , not by pub- lished government laws, but by municipal authorities. micklem writes that "the task i s approached piecemeal, lest there be too general indignation at any one time." the rejection of standard religious education and the "co-ordination" of a l l school subjects evolved slowly and was never completely achieved. the ministry of education carefully refrained from issuing a single order formally abolishing denominational education. the reich ministry of education, embraced the nazi pupils" league, formed in , and their teachers' union, formed in . new training-colleges were built in rural d i s t r i c t s , where the prospective teachers could assimilate the glory of german scenery, s o i l , and peasant l i f e . but, generally speaking, with the nazi emphasis on non-intellectual pursuits, the number of schools, teachers, an d students, declined between and . the nazi approach, as elsewhere, was characterized by ambiguity, hypocrisy, and deception. often local clergymen remained ex o f f i c i o members of school boards, and i t was not u n t i l january that the ministry of education forbade priests to act in this capacity. under the pretext of war conditions, the remainder of the denominational schools were closed in . hitler suggested that typewriting lessons be given instead of religious instruction micklem, national socialism and the roman catholic church, p. . _____ ^ neumann̂ : behemoth, p. ^*see also samuel, op. c i t . , pp. and for further relevant figures. and that a corps of teachers f o r advanced primary education be formed from the ranks of re-enlisted s o l d i e r s , but the a p p l i c a t i o n of such ideas remained l a r g e l y the province of the h i t l e r youth. their ac t i v i t i e s often f i l l e d the weekends and c l a s h e d ! ' successfully with sunday school lessons. in the public day schools as well, the number of hours devoted to r e l i g i o u s i n s t r u c t i o n was reduced; the former nineteen hours a week a l l o t t e d i n secondary schools were reduced to twelve over a period of eight instead of nine years. religious i n s t r u c t i o n was sometimes transferred to the l a s t from the f i r s t period of the day, changing place with physical education; the d i f f e r e n t status of religion.: was thus stressed, and i t could also be omitted on occasion. religious i n s t r u c t i o n eventually ceased i n the vocational schools. by , most of the p r i e s t s had been removed as r e l i g i o u s teachers i n public schools. in , a decree denied secondary school pupils over the age of fourteen r e l i g i o u s i n s t r u c t i o n ; the same occurred i n f o r intermediate school pupils. these examples indicate the nazi intentions. yet the syllabus was never formally a l t e r e d by the ministry of education. the process was rather one of slow suffocation, and proceeded haphazardly on a l o c a l l e v e l . religion was s t i l l taught i n the schools not merely as a t a c t i c a l concession to the church, b ut also i n order to h i t l e r , secret conversations, pp. and . ^stewart herman describes the sunday morning parades of the h i t l e r youth; op. c i t . , p. . neuha*usler, op. c i t . , p. . while hours were devoted a week to physical education i n i n the secondary sc hools, were a l l o t t e d i n ; for elementary schools, the figures are; , hours; , * see also samuel, op. c i t . , pp. , , and . enlist simple faith in the service of the cause. indeed, the pope indicated his awareness of this t a c t i c in the encycli- cal, when he c r i t i c i s e d "religious lessons maintained for the sake of appearances, controlled by unauthorized men, within the frame of an educational system which systematically works against r e l i g i o n . " in martin bormann advised rosenberg that for the time being, christian moral teaching, including the ten commandments, was to remain in the curriculum. a letter from hess to g ring also has a similar theme. the entire nazi approach to christian teaching in the schools was ruled by this pragmatism. the children were to believe in the ftlhrerts divine purity. many catholic classes opened with the formula, "heil hitler! blessed be jesus christ in a l l eternity. amen"; and closed with "blessed be jesus christ in a l l eternity. amen. heil h i t l e r ! " it was to be stressed to the children that hitler was pious and reverent. a suggested question for the teacher to give students was "who, children, is i t in these days who reminds us most of jesus—through his love of humble people and his readiness for self-sacrifice?"^" edicts addressed to teachers of religion stressed that both "faiths" drew t h e i r strength from god. teachers should do away with differences of opinion and stress the german experience of god. the old testa- ment, as might be expected, was to be carefully expurgated; only those portions of i t which treated of biological questions or quoted in fremantle, op. c i t . . p. . uoted in poliakov and wulf, op. c i t . . pp. - , and pp. - . mann, op. c i t . , p. . l_id.,,p. . were necessary for understanding of the new testament were to be used. a belief in the "deeper meaning of war", creating a "uniform desire for war and victory as an indispensable con- dition of national independence" was considered an essential part of this training. after , when co-existence ceased to be useful for the party leaders, the connection between "faiths" remained, and under growing persecution confused christ- ians and nazis alike. the nazis managed to influence the teaching of secular subjects as well. in the study of history, for example, the conversion of the early germans to christianity was not to be treated "negatively". frick wrote that "the adoption of christ- ianity appear(s) as a display of teutonic influence over the whole area of medieval culture". the message of christ should appeal to germans as an epic of heroism. other stories of heroic self- sacrifice were taught as models of behaviour. the ancient greeks were to b e treated as the closest brothers of the germanic race; how they succumbed when the population declined and were out- numbered by inferior and democratic peoples was important. private schools, other than state- or party-sponsored ones, were allowed only for those who needed special attention because of health or family conditions. permission to operate these sc hools was granted only on the tested basis of p o l i t i c a l r e l i a b i l i t y of the headmaster and owners of the schools. even then they were under the careful supervision of the state, for in i t s kneller, op. c i t . t p. . quoted in kolnai, op. cit., . very essence, national socialism could not acknowledge any right to attend or support autonomous private schools, instead of the people's public schools. needless to say, courses of study and appointment of teachers for these schools had to be in s t r i c t accord with the principles l a i d down for public schools. on september , , the national socialist teachers' union decreed that members could not belong to denominational organizations. pressed to sever their formal ties with the church, the number of teachers declaring themselves "believers in god" increased. it is hard to established how many of these actually were "neo-pagan", for while in , out of , teachers so declared themselves, and while in ninety-seven per cent of a l l teachers belonged to the nazi teachers' union, these figures do n ot show how many acted out of prudence rather than con- viction. more significant, perhaps, is the fact that in and , , party functionaries came from the teaching pro- fession, primarily from elementary schools. the sympathy of sections of the pedagogical profession was a great advantage to the party. in spite of the implied intention of o f f i c i a l decrees and in spite of hitler's plans, i t was a pragmatic estimate of the needs of the day that often played a decisive role in german education during the third reich. by and large, the vocational, elementary, and intermediate schools suffered least from the party "co-ordination", because hitler as well as the army realized as over against out of , in . samuel, op. c i t . . p. . neumann, op. c i t . , p. . ' t h a t these s c h o o l s had t o be kept i n t a c t i n order t o f u r n i s h the s k i l l e d craftsmen and workers needed i n i n d u s t r y and defence: the same s i t u a t i o n t h a t p r e v a i l e d i n the u n i v e r s i t i e s . when i t came to d r i v i n g a tank, a c a t h o l i c was o f t e n b e t t e r q u a l i f i e d than a good n a z i . f o r t u n a t e l y f o r h i t l e r , the c a t h o l i c s , i n s p i t e of the a s s a u l t s made on t h e i r f a i t h , were u s u a l l y w i l l i n g t o d r i v e tanks f o r the p a r t y . . h i t l e r youth versus ^ c h r i s t i a n youth before c o n s i d e r i n g the h i t l e r youth, i t would be w e l l t o d e s c r i b e d the c o n d i t i o n of f a m i l y l i f e i n the t h i r d reich, which the nazi l e a d e r s h i p claimed, l i k e the c h r i s t i a n church, t o preserve and f o s t e r . a v e r d i c t of a s i l e s i a n c o u r t contained the f o l l o w i n g s i g n i f i c a n t statement; "law, i n the s e r v i c e o f r a c i a l and n a t i o n a l i n t e r e s t s , c o n f i d e s the care o f c h i l d r e n o n l y under c e r t a i n circumstances t o the p a r e n t s . namely, i f t h e c h i l d r e n are brought up as the n a t i o n and the s t a t e decree." on october , , w i l l y becker, a p a r t y o f f i c i a l , expressed the new i d e a l s u c c i n c t l y ; he s a i d t h a t p a r e n t s who keep t h e i r c h i l d r e n out of the h i t l e r youth "c ommit a crime a g a i n s t the german people and i t s f u t u r e ; they do not deserve the name of f a t h e r and mother." in s h o r t , the c h i l d belonged t o h i t l e r b e f o r e i t belonged to i t s p a r e n t s . n a z i - t r a i n e d t e a c h e r s ran creches f o r i n f a n t s and k i n d e r g a r t e n s f o r p r e - s c h o o l c h i l d r e n . . although quoted i n mann, op. c i t . . p. . ^quoted i n micklem, op. c i t . , p. . as e a r l y as , the nazi youth leader had t o r e f u t e the c l a i m t h a t the hj d e p r i v e d c h i l d r e n o f a f a m i l y l i f e ; von s c h i r a c h claimed t h a t the h i t l e r youth gave some c h i l d r e n a f a m i l y f o r the f i r s t time. die h i t l e r - .jugend, p. . attendance was optional, parents had to sign a paper declaring that their children were under the exclusive jurisdiction of the party during the time they were in the nurseries. in , the government introduced a new type of school, the hauptschule. to whic h only selected pupils were to b e admitted; their attendance was to be obligatory, but i f their parents objected, they could register a formal protest—at such a high level that a l l but the boldest parents were discouraged. the parents' councils introduced into prussia and some other states in were abolished in and councils were introduc ed by the nazis that were merely advisory!, preserving the appearance of the former arrangement, but not interfering with the headmaster's position as leader. here is the best example of the nazi tendency to destroy that family cohesion so dear to the christian btlrger which they claimed to preserve. while unity within german families would have been an advantage to the cause, the movement was largely what the nazis acknowledged i t to be—a "revolution of the young". but whatever their success with the children, the nazis were never able to conv ince their parents that they should sever their christian t i e s . although they implied as much, they never openly urged i t , which, for the success of their plans, they would have to do ev entually. consequently, many a german saw nothing unusual in supporting the nazi state and i t s weltanschauung and in being a christian. his children, however, spent so much of their time "parents complain that they never see their children any more, " wrote a correspondent to the spectator in . see "schule oder verein", spectator, vol. , june , , p. . with nazi teachers and trainers, that they were becoming more nazi than christian. the tension created between generations meant that while some sought a l l the more desperately the "fam- i l y " protection of the hitler youth, many young people were faced at home with a less than positive attitude toward what they were supposed to die for. once again, i t i s unfortunately d i f f i c u l t to know what the long-term effects of this problem would have been, because the war reunited parents and children in the common ef- fort of saving germany i t s e l f . the hitler youth was part of the pseudo-ecclesiastical hierarchy of nazism; as such i t inevitably clashed with the hierarchy of christianity. baldur von schirach, the national youth leader, describes best in his book die hitler.jugendt the aims and nature of the organization. what might be called an "educational t o t a l i t y " was sought, on the principle of "either completely or not at a l l . " thus von schirach declared war on the other german youth organizations, christian and p o l i t i c a l ; the hitler youth organization declares i t s e l f the one and only representative of german youth. that is i t s claim to t o t a l i t y . as the nsdap is the only p o l i t i c a l party of germany, so the hj i s the only german youth organization. its members were hitlerjungen and hitlermfldel, devoted entirely to the leader. the "co-ordination" began formally in december , with an act of reich bishop mailer, supported by g ring, entailing baldur von schirach, die hitler.jugend. idee und ges- t a l t . berlin, verlag und vertriebsanstalt, , pp. and . ibid., p. . the destruction of the independent protestant youth movement, consisting of , young people. nevertheless, in the osten- sible s p i r i t of compromise of the years before , von schirach wrote that the hitler youth would guarantee i t s evangelical members one night a week for their religious a c t i v i t i e s . after december , there followed independent action in the various states, whic h according to the usual pattern, was more radical than that in berlin. the methods are familiar. often the local nazi leaders resorted to the technique of imposing a regulation, moderating or rescinding i t for a short time, and then renewing i t later in a more rigorous form. for example, in the summer of , the catholic youth associations of munster were forbidden to wear uniforms; on september , , the order was rescinded; in june , i t was re-enacted in a more severe form. in may , the local nazis of schweinfurt banned the uniforms, badges, and public appearances of the catholic youth organization; swabia followed suit, although the local concordat of the previous february had guaranteed these things to the catholics. the green shirts of the young catholics were also gradually forbidden a l l over bavaria; as the hitler youth were given to tearing them off their wearers, prohibition became necessary "in the interests of order". in july , came the decree forbidding a l l church youth groups completely from wearing uniforms or from conducting marches, hikes, or camping excursions, camping excursions, carry- ing flags, and conducting military or sporting exercises through arno kibnne, hitler.jugend: die jugend und ihre organi- sation im dritten reich. hannover, norddeutsche verlagsanstalt, , p. l^s c hirach, op. c i t . . p. ; but not to i t s catholic member; "persecution". new statesman and nation, vol. , june , , p. . the entire reich. a law of december f i n a l l y compelled a l l youth to belong to the hj. yet i t appears that a l l young people did not wish to be organized, as the law announced; a special office of the gestapo was formed in to crush i l l e g a l youth groups. by a l l catholic groups, more intractable than the protestants, were also incorporated into the hitler youth. al- though the meaning and scope of decrees was often l e f t uncertain, the series of piecemeal laws culminated in that of november which gave the national youth leader unequivocal superiority in a l l youth matters over regional o f f i c i a l s in a l l state govern- ments and federal commissioners in occupied t e r r i t o r i e s . between and the christian youth organizations had about one and one half "million membe-rs,rand the national socialists, on the other hand, about forty thousand. but in the 'twenties, german spiritual bankruptcy, despite large enrollment in the church organizations, had assumed the nature of a c r i s i s . wilhelm niemoller admits that a large part of the population, especially the youth, had lost contact with the church. non- christian youth flocked happily to the party, but so did the christian young people, who, along with their leaders, misin- terpreted the events of , and were therefore helpless before the consequences. of course,: they were tricked in that, at f i r s t , hitler tried to minimize the radicalism of his young followers. von schirach wrote that they were carrying on the i d e a l i s t i c struggle of the great war; "we are the s p i r i t of their s p i r i t . wilhelm niemoller, kirchenkampf im dritten reich, p. . the social democrats had about , and the communists about , . the i d e a f o r w h i c h t h e y d i e d i s the m o t i v a t i o n o f our l i f e . t h e i r b a t t l e i s our f a t e . " lamed by t h e i r p a t r i o t i c p a s s i o n s , t h e l u t h e r a n y o u t h i n p a r t i c u l a r were ready t o r e c o g n i z e h i t l e r ' s c l a i m t o l e a d e r s h i p o f german y o u t h . t h i s c o n f u s i o n , w r i t e s d i e t e r f r e i h e r r von l e r s n e r , was c h a r a c t e r i s t i c , not o n l y o f t h e y o u t h , but o f c hurch c i r c l e s i n g e n e r a l . b e l i e v i n g i n t h e new g o a l s s e t f o r y o u t h , b o t h c h u r c h e s s u p p o r t e d t h e r e n a i s s a n c e . even t h e c a t h o l i c groups r e a c t e d t h i s way. w i t h i n t h e e n c y c l i c a l , m i t brennender sorge. t h e r e i s a t r a c e o f t h e a t t i t u d e w h i c h made t h e n a z i s " p l a n s s u c c e s s f u l ; i f t h e s t a t e o r g a n i z e s a n a t i o n a l y o u t h , and makes t h i s o r g a n i z a t i o n o b l i g a t o r y t o a l l , t h e n , w i t h o u t p r e j u d i c e t o the r i g h t s o f r e l i g i o u s a s s o c i a t i o n s , i t i s t h e a b s o l u t e r i g h t o f y o u t h s as w e l l as o f p a r e n t s t o see t o i t t h a t t h i s o r g a n i z a t i o n i s purged o f a l l m a n i f e s t a t i o n s h o s t i l e t o t h e church and c h r i s t i a n i t y . the l e a d e r o f t h e c a t h o l i c young men's a s s o c i a t i o n announced t o von s c h i r a c h on may , , "we g r e e t t h e r e i c h youth leader and d e c l a r e our r e a d i n e s s t o work t o g e t h e r w i t h him i n t h e b e s t o f o u r a b i l i t y f o r t h e s t r e n g t h e n i n g o f german y o u t h . t h e y were r e a d y t o work w i t h t h e new s t a t e . thus, t h e sheep hoped t h a t t h e y c o u l d not o n l y c a p t u r e the w o l v e s but a l s o m a i n t a i n t h e i r independence and r i g h t s i n d o i n g s o . i n t h i s way, t h e y compromised t h e i r p o s i t i o n and r e n d e r e d t h e i r members s u s c e p t i b l e t o an even g r e a t e r e x t e n t t o n a z i propaganda. even a f t e r t h e y had been banned, e v a n g e l i c a l von s c h i r a c h , op. c i t . , p. . d i e t e r f r e i h e r r von l e r s n e r , d i e e v a n g e l i s c h e n jugend- verb&nde wurttembergs und d i e h i t l e r j u g e n d - . g s t t i n g e n , vandenhoek und rupprecht, , p r e f a c e . quoted i n f r e m a n t l e , op. c i t . , p. . ^quoted i n h e i n r i c h roth. k a t h o l i s c h e jugend i n d e r ns- z e i t , u n t e r b e s o n d e r e r be r a c k s i c h t l g u r r g ^ " des k a t h o l i s c h e n jung- mgnnerverbandes. d f l s s e l d o r f . a l t e n b u r g . . p. ~l groups marched through the streets, carrying the swastika f l a g . they believed? that the goals of the hitler youth were national, not spiritual, and that the conflict that existed was patriotic and not religious. needless to say, the uj_ leaders often sought to further the misconception, while continually pursuing their own ends. in , the o f f i c i a l gazette of the hitler youth an- nounced that their members were allowed to attend in uniform services of the evangelical, free, and old catholic churches; the omission of the catholic church is significant, but even more significant i s the result. at this time, there seemed to be something wrong with a youth who clung to his narrow confessional loyalty, when he saw other youths who were both patriotic, having joined the hitler youth, and pious, attending church regularly. the leader of the hitler youth in wtlrttemberg-west summed up this idea of "positive christianity"; we are condemned in the older christian circles as godless, perhaps because we do not carry the cross on our flags and aren't always babbling b i b l i c a l texts. we carry these things in our hearts, we are christians, and the cross belongs as l i t t l e on flags as the church does in politics and the p o l i t i c a l l i f e of the young. the now familiar accusation levelled at the catholic church is paralleled by the also familiar attitude of deceptive conciliation towards the lutherans. in , after the evangelical youth lersner, op. c i t . . pp. - . ibid., p. . ^an a r t i c l e in the hitler youth journal "will and power", november , accused the former members of the btlndische jugend of having communist sympathies and the members of the catholic groups of welcoming such fellow members. had been a b s o r b e d i n t o t h e h i t l e r youth, von s c h i r a c h c o m p l i e d w i t h t h e r e q u e s t o f p r o t e s t a n t l e a d e r s t o a l l o w t h e e v a n g e l i c a l members two f r e e a f t e r n o o n s a week f o r r e l i g i o u s i n s t r u c t i o n . the p a r t y was a b l e t o appear t h e e x e c u t o r o f p r a i s e w o r t h y t r e n d s . the " s t r e n g t h t h r o u g h j o y " p a r t o f the h i t l e r youth owned much t o the h a l f - m i l i t a r y work camps founded by t h e f r e e corps l e a d e r s s u c h as gerhard rossbach. f o r n o n - c h r i s t i a n young p e o p l e , t h e n a z i move seemed a d m i r a b l e , and c a t h o l i c s may have remembered t h a t m a t t h i a s e r z b e r g e r o f t h e c e n t r e p a r t y had p r o - posed a c o m p u l s o r y work s e r v i c e f o r young a d u l t s . among o t h e r f a c t o r s , t h e o r g a n i z a t i o n a l d e v i c e s o f the young german league c o n t r i b u t e d t o t h e h i t l e r youth. the a n t i - c h r i s t i a n bent o f t h e n a z i youth was m a n i f e s t v e r y soon; i n , f o r example, a group o f h i t l e r y o u t h s demon- s t r a t e d i n hamm a g a i n s t t h e a r c h b i s h o p o f paderborn. t h i s a c t i o n , l i m e many o t h e r s , was c a r e f u l l y p l a n n e d and e x e c u t e d w i t h m i l i t a r y p r e c i s i o n . n e e d l e s s t o s a y , t h e h i t l e r youth l e a d e r s , p a r t i c u - l a r l y a f t e r , d i d e v e r y t h i n g t h e y c o u l d t o h i n d e r p a r t i c i - p a t i o n o f t h e i r charges i n c h u r c h s e r v i c e s and p r o c e s s i o n s . they i n s t r u c t e d c h i l d r e n i n how t o d i s t u r b r e l i g i o u s t e a c h i n g i n t h e s c h o o l s and d e v e l o p e d an i n t e r e s t i n g approach t o p a r e n t a l i n - f l u e n c e : "persons i n a u t h o r i t y " were t o be p l a c e d b e f o r e t h e c h i l d r e n as good examples " a g a i n s t t h e p a r e n t s i n o r d e r t o b a l a n c e t h e i n f l u e n c e o f o u r opponents.-* i n , von s c h i r a c h o r d e r e d t h a t t o b e l o n g t o a h i t l e r youth leader corps one had t o l e a v e t h e c h u r c h . k l a u s e p s t e i n , m a t t h i a s e r z b e r g e r and t h e dilemma o f german democracy. p r i n c e t o n , , p. . n e u h s u s l e r , op. c i t . , pp. - , and h o f e r , o p . c i t . , pp. - . ^ n e u h s u s l e r , op. c i t . , p. . these attempts to mold young people's thinking into less christian and more nazi paths were thoroughgoing but never completely successful. even a f t e r , i t did not r e a l l y matter i f the young possessed christian b e l i e f s or were a t h e i s t i c or "pagan" as long as they accepted the paramount s i g n i f i c a n c e of the third reich i n t h e i r d a i l y , outward l i v e s . and many d i d so, some f o r non-patriotic reasons or i n the s p i r i t of compromise and "positive c h r i s t i a n i t y " both the nazi leaders and the church favoured. often career opportunities were, f o r those who accepted nazi leadership, more important motives than genuine enthusiasm. as a r e s u l t of a law of march , , which decreed that young people who did not belong to the h i t l e r youth could not enter the labour front, many saw t h e i r future careers endangered. von schirach's description of the catholic y o u t h — " i t i s t h e i r jobs they are concerned about, not r e l i g i o n " — c o u l d apply equally well to some of his own followers. "positive c h r i s t i a n i t y " , accepted by christians, and pragmatic realism on the part of the nazis, assured the h i t l e r youth of considerable success i n the church- state c o n f l i c t . . the youth problem shows c l e a r l y how h i t l e r and h i s e l i t e , i n t h e i r drive f o r power, used every idea or group at hand; we have described t h i s aspect of the party i n terms of pragmatism, cynicism, and n i h i l i s m . this amoral willingness to compromise even with t h e i r enemies p a r t i a l l y explains why the party rose i n ten years from a mere band of agitators to become the state quoted i n persecution of the catholic church i n the third reich. facts and documents translated from the german. london, burns.'and oates, , p. • . i t s e l f - but i t was a l s o , a l t h o u g h perhaps o n l y t e m p o r a r i l y , a h a n d i c a p . sooner o r l a t e r , t h e y would have had t o throw down t h e g a u n t l e t and c h a l l e n g e not m e r e l y t h e church but t h e c h r i s t i a n c i t i z e n s o f germany. by t h e y had not y e t done t h i s . a l t h o u g h the c o n t i n u i n g s u p p o r t o f c h r i s t i a n s was advantageous d u r i n g t h e war, h i t l e r never managed t o d e a l w i t h the churches as he w i s h e d . chapter summary and conclusions this discussion began with a review of institutional christianity in germany: s t i l l healthy financially and s t i l l commanding at least the respect of much of the older generation, i t nevertheless lacked vigour after the great war. while nazism had economic and p o l i t i c a l roots as well, various aspects of the german spiritual c r i s i s , including this christian weakness, contributed fundamentally to the strength of the nazi movement. the mistakes of the christians, particularly the lutherans, can be partially understood in light of the novelty and cunning of the nazi approach. nazism, although ostensibly concerned only with p o l i t i c a l l i f e , could and consciously did provide solance for the spiritual problems of the masses at the same time as i t revived the patriotic piety of christians. because i t appealed to patriotic as well as spiritual needs, many christians accepted i t s advent, often with deadly passivity, but sometimes with enthusiasm. the lutheran attitude to worldly power and the too diplomatic approach of the catholics helped the party; we understand the christian view that freedom to administer sac- raments v i t a l for salvation j u s t i f i e s concessions to tyrannical governments, but the naivete of christians and their patriotic weaknesses were exploited by hitler. while christians might, through their traditional faith, be immune to the effects of l i f e in a mass industrial society, those who had drifted away from christianity, particularly the workers, found the nazi " f a i t h " appealing. therefore, hitler's weltanschauung was, for christians, a sanctification of their patriotism, and, for the non-christian masses, a faith. "hitler himself created a large part of the sickness he was expected to cure," wrote golo mann. with deceptive promises that he would give german lives more meaning, hitler stimulated hopes of christians and freethinkers alike; mean- while he furthered their atomization in a totalitarian state. because groups such as the family, the parish, the school—as well as others in plants, offices, or shops—were deliberately broken down, germans were faced with an intensification of their original problem. the natural structure of society, which, des- pite the pre-nazi dislocation, s t i l l existed in germany, was dissolved by the new leaders, who attempted to replace i t by an abstract "people's community". this led only to further deper- sonalization of human relations and to the isolation of human beings from each other. it was, of course, what hitler needed in order to remain in power. the weltanschauung triumphed because i t appealed to the prejudices and frustrated longings of many golo mann, deutsche geschichte - . frankfurt, fischer, , p. . . germans, including christians; "the ideological mish-mash of national socialism," according to harry pross, "was successful precisely because i t obscured every clarity and had something for everyone." this is why camus correctly describes the hit- lerian state as the expression of a n i h i l i s t revolution. alex inkeles believes that for the totalitarian state, the element of human friendship is important only insofar as "comrades" join forces in carrying out the greater task of a l l , and personal emotion, particularly depression, i s frowned upon because a l l emotional energy must be turned to the ends of the cause.j the most characteristic trend in nazi germany was this destruction of human relationships, paralleled by the develop- ment of a monolithic state witlr totalitarian claims and pseudo- religious trappings. although the nazi leaders claimed to sup- port, for example, the family as the core of society, they actually weakened i t . in order to win and maintain a sufficient following, they had to break down existing group t i e s , and since they demanded a fanatical devotion from their followers, they saw in these personal ties of blood or friendship a diminution of their own corporate cohesion.^" nazi germany has been des- cribed as a regression to t r i b a l intimacy on a national scale, but in reality i t represents the destruction of a l l groups, of a l l support to the individual psyche in a secular industrial mass society. harry pross, vor und nach hitler. freiburg, walter, , p. . camus, the rebel, p. * . see also cassirer, myth of the state, passim. ~see carl j. friedrich, ed., totalitarianism, cambridge, harvard, , p. . see also pross, op. c i t . , p. . ^hoffer, op. c i t . . p. . those who had hoped to find in national socialism a bulwark in an impersonal, irreligious world, and those who isought, in patriotic collaboration with i t , a renewal of national chris- tian faith, were deceived and found themselves in an even more brutal, spiritually dead community, approximating the nightmares of orwell and huxley. "at the roots of the nazi organizations," writes hans-jochen gamm, "there was no community of feeling." although the program was declared in to be un- changeable, i t was o f f i c i a l l y explained that this applied only to the fundamental principles, and not to the methods by which the l a t t e r were to be put into practice. indeed, goebbels re- marked that, i f he were starting anew, he would have no pro- gram at a l l . the weltanschauung was not exactly a "retrospec- tive philosophical justification" as stephen h. roberts claims, but this phrase suggests well the pragmatic attitude that often characterized the actions of the e l i t e . their aim was to eradi- cate christianity, but the vigour with which this goal was pursued depended on the fortunes, diplomatic and internal, of the moment. at times, sympathy with christianity was publicly professed; later, h o s t i l i t y to the churches was openly implied. in private, of course, hitler, bormann, and goebbels sneered at the churches. but the ideological trappings of the party were just as cynically viewed by the leaders. the "superficial gamm, op. c i t . , p. . q u o t e d in roberts, op. c i t . . p. * l o c . c i t . eclecticism" of the doctrine was intended only as a facade for the masses, and the technique set forth in mein kampf, that of using a l l forces from wherever they might come, was, along with anti-semitism, the only enduring characteristic of the nazi weltanschauung. pross suggests that, " i t was as i f , i n these times when philosophy has ceased producing closed systems, the german social-religion would produce a closed system with- i out any content." ironically, this very pragmatism weakened the nazi drive. hitler could not eliminate christianity because, to a certain extent, he depended on i t and he never emancipated him- self from that part of his propaganda which preached unity of w i l l with christians. had the nazi movement been successful in implanting i t s ideology in german minds, defeat in war would not have destroyed the new "faith". but the fact that so many germans today find i t easy to forget nazism i s proof that the nazi "religion" i s dead. but did i t ever live? in i t s most v i t a l aspect, train- ing the young, the nazi success was ambivalent; while i t brought them material prosperity and national pride, i t f a i l e d to pro- vide a substitute for christianity and failed to counteract the influence of communism. it is even claimed that the party stimulated what i t feared most: "the true s p i r i t of luther." under the strain of battle, the " f a i t h " of nazi soldiers van- ished and the number of communicants in the army during the war increased considerably. in the c i v i l i a n world, many of pross, op. c i t . , p. . . fabian von schlabrendorff, offiziere gegen hitler. frankfurt, fischer, , p. . see perau, op. c i t . , passim. t h e r e s i s t a n c e groups c o n t a i n e d young p e o p l e not y e t out o f t h e i r t e e n s ; some were n o t c h r i s t i a n s , but n e i t h e r were t h e y nazis—somehow, t h e weltanschauung had l o s t them. and what a r e we t o c o n c l u d e from t h e f a c t t h a t o f t h e n i n e bormann c h i l d r e n , r a i s e d b y f a n a t i c a l l y a n t i - c h r i s t i a n p a r e n t s , seven ( i n ) had become c a t h o l i c s , and one, h i t l e r ' s own "godson", was t r a i n i n g t o become a p r i e s t ? the n a z i l e a d e r s c o l l a b o r a t e d w i t h t h e c h r i s t i a n s and, a l w a y s f o r c e d t o proceed s l o w e r w i t h t h e i r p l a n s t h a n t h e y would have w i s h e d , were never a b l e t o f r e e t h e m s e l v e s from t h i s i n v o l v e m e n t . thus, j u s t as t h e c h r i s - t i a n s s u f f e r e d from the e f f o r t s t o compromise w i t h a h e r e s y , so d i d the n a z i s . two problems a r i s e , problems w h i c h may not have s o l - u t i o n s . n a t i o n a l s o c i a l i s m was a c c e p t e d w i t h r e l i g i o u s f e r v o u r by many germans...or so i t seems. but how many were a c t u a l l y c o n v i n c e d by t h e weltanschauung? the f a c t t h a t the o n l y n a z i s i n germany t o d a y a r e l o n e l y c r a n k s l e a d s t o t h e s u g g e s t i o n t h a t t h e german " m a n - i n - t h e - s t r e e t " — t h e c h r i s t i a n — m u s t have had two m e n t a l compartments, one f o r nazism, one f o r c h r i s t i - a n i t y . t h i s s i t u a t i o n corresponds t o what the n a z i s c l a i m e d t o s u p p o r t b e f o r e , b u t , w h i l e i t must have become h a r d e r and h a r d e r t o l i v e l i k e t h i s , many d i d so u n t i l , when t h e n a z i compartment was thrown o u t . i s i t p o s s i b l e f o r t h e s m a l l man t o b e l i e v e i n any permanent d o c t r i n e i n t h e t w e n t i e t h klonne, op. c i t . , p. , and r o t h f e l s , op. c i t . , p. . m a r t i n bormann, l e t t e r s , ed. h.r.trevor-roper, t r a n s . g.h.stevens, london, w e i d e n f e l d and n i c o l s o n , , p. x v i i . joseph goebbels had a l l h i s c h i l d r e n b a p t i z e d ! c e n t u r y ? the n a z i e f f o r t t o d e - s e c u l a r i z e german s o c i e t y , t o r e v i v e a k i n d o f r e l i g i o n , r e l a t e d t o , but more f a n a t i c a l t h a n k u l t u r - r e l i g i o n , f a i l e d and may have been bound t o f a i l . the e n l i g h t e n m e n t and, among o t h e r elements, t h e p o s i t i v i s t i c o u t l o o k , may have weakened the n o n - c h r i s t i a n ' s c a p a c i t y t o have a l a s t i n g f a i t h o f any s o r t . were the masses, i n f l u e n c e d by m a t e r i a l i s m , a european development, and by t h e p e c u l i a r r e v e r e n c e f o r power i n german p o l i t i c s , as c y n i c a l as t h e i r m a s t e r s ? the second problem, how nazism f i t s i n t o t h e european s i t u a t i o n , s u g g e s t s answers t o t h e s e q u e s t i o n s . i n r u s s i a , t h e new " r e l i g i o n " had no t i e s w i t h t h e c z a r i s t p a s t and d i d not have t o combat an i n t e r n a t i o n a l c o u n t e r - c h u r c h ; moreover, i t a c c e p t e d s e c u l a r i z - a t i o n and m a t e r i a l i s m as p a r t o f i t s d o c t r i n e , and was n e v e r concerned t o appear r e s p e c t a b l e . the c h r i s t i a n church s t i l l e x i s t s i n r u s s i a but a k u l t u r k a m p f n e v e r seems t o have weakened t h e communists as i t d i d . t h e n a z i s . i n germany, t h e r e was no r e v o l u t i o n ; t h e p a s t was not c o m p l e t e l y disavowed, but i n t h e form o f i d e a s and men was p a r t o f nazism. i n t h i s way, h i t l e r was a p u r e l y german phenomenon. but t h e s p i r i t u a l homelessness o f t h e masses who a c c e p t e d b o t h nazism and communism i s s t i l l a problem f o r europe and i s g r o w i n g i n t h e " d e v e l o p i n g " c o u n t r i e s . the n a z i s o l u t i o n d i d not work, but t h e communist one a p p a r e n t l y does. see meinecke, op. c i t . , on "mass m a c h i a v e l l i s m " . bibliography c o l l e c t i o n s o f documents: the f o l l o w i n g a r e c o l l e c t i o n s t h a t were most u s e f u l f o r t h e t h e s i s ; u n f o r t u n a t e l y , t h e r e i s no good post-war c o l - l e c t i o n i n e n g l i s h . dokumente aus dem kampf der k a t h o l i s c h e n k i r c h e im b i s t u m b e r l i n gegen den n a t i o n a l s o z i a l i s m u s . b e r l i n , morus, . t h i s i s a s h o r t c o l l e c t i o n o f c a t h o l i c c h u r c h documents from t h e d i o c e s e o f b e r l i n . hermel i n k , h e i n r i c h , ed., k i r c h e im kampf. dokumente des wider- s t a n d s und des aufbaus i n d e r e v a n g e l i s c h e n k i r c h e d e u t s c h - l a n d s . von b i s . t t l b i n g e n , w u n d e r l i c h , . h e r m e l i n k ' s c o l l e c t i o n i s perhaps t h e most r e l i a b l e f o r t h e p r o t e s t a n t problem. h o f e r , w a l t h e r , ed. der n a t i o n a l s o z i a l i s m u s . dokumente - . f r a n k f u r t am m a i n , f i s c h e r , . t h i s book i s the most u s e f u l s h o r t c o l l e c t i o n on n a t i o n a l s o c i a l i s m . k i n k e l , w a l t e r , ed. k i r c h e und n a t i o n a l s o z i a l i s m u s . i h r e ause- i n a n d e r s e t z u n g z w i s c h e n and i n dokumenten d a r g e - s t e l l t . d t l s s e l d o r f , patmos, i . k i n k e l p r e s e n t s t h e b e s t r e v i e w o f c a t h o l i c documents f o r t h e e n t i r e p e r i o d . m t l l l e r , hans, ed. k a t h o l i s c h e k i r c h e und n a t i o n a l s o z i a l i s m u s . dokumente - . mtlnchen. nymphenburger v e r l a g s h a n d l u n g . t h i s e d i t o r i m p l i e s t h a t t h e c a t h o l i c church was slow t o r e a l i z e i t s r e s p o n s i b i l i t y i n r e s i s t i n g the t h i r d r e i c h i t s e l f , r a t h e r t h a n m e r e l y a s p e c t s o f i t . neuha*usler, johann. kreuz und hakenkreuz. der kampf des n a t i o n a l - s o z i a l i s m u s gegen d i e k a t h o l i s c h e k i r c h e undcder k i r c h l i c h e w i d e r s t a n d . e r s t e r und z w e i t e r t e i l . mtlnchen, k a t h o l i s c h e k i r c h e b a y e r n s , . the n e u h f l u s l e r volume would appear t o be a complete o u t - l i n e o f t h e a t t a c k on c a t h o l i c i s m , b u t can be c r i t i c i z e d f o r i t s l a c k o f f o o t n o t e s o r b i b l i o g r a p h y ; gordon zahn p o i n t s out t h a t t h e t e x t o f s e v e r a l documents has been a l t e r e d by o m i s s i o n s w i t h o u t i n d i c a t i o n o f d e l e t i o n and i n some i n s t a n c e s by changes i n w o r d i n g , (op. c i t . , p. .) i s t h i s an a t t e m p t t o s u p p r e s s e m b a r r a s s i n g i n s t a n c e s o f compromise on t h e p a r t o f c a t h o l i c l e a d e r s ? p e r s e c u t i o n o f t h e c a t h o l i c church i n t h e t h i r d r e i c h . f a c t s and documents t r a n s l a t e d from t n e german. london, burns and oates, . as i n t h e above c o l l e c t i o n , t h e e d i t o r here i n t e r s p e r s e s comments w i t h i n t h e t e x t o f documents, which a r e t h e m s e l v e s o f t e n i n c o m p l e t e . n e v e r t h e l e s s , t h e book i s i l l u s t r a t e d and w i l l be o f i n t e r e s t t o e n g l i s h r e a d e r s . p o l i a k o v , leon, and wulf, j o s e f , eds. das d r i t t e r e i c h und s e i n e denker. dokumente. t h i s i s a f a s c i n a t i n g c o l l e c t i o n o f i n t e l l e c t u a l and s p i r i t - u a l commentaries on nazism; i t i s l a r g e , c o n t a i n s u s e f u l b i o g r a p h i c a l m a t e r i a l , and i s c l e a r l y s e t o u t . the f o l l o w i n g a r e o f l e s s e r i n t e r e s t , but were a l s o u s e f u l . c o r s t e n , w i l h e l m , ed., k b l n e r aktenstclcke. zur lage d e r k a t h o l - i s c h e n k i r c h e i n d e u t s c h l a n d . - * k f l l n . bachem. . k l i n g l e r , f r i t z , ed. dokumente zum abwehrkampf d e r d e u t s c h e n e v a n g e l i s c h e n p f a r r e r s c h a f t gegen v e r f o l g u n g und bedrflck- ung. - . ntlrnberg. mendelssohn. . p r o s s , h a r r y , ed. d i e z e r s t b r u n g d e r deutschen p o l i t i k . dokumente - . f r a n k f u r t am main, f i s c h e r , . roth, h e i n r i c h , ed. k a t h o l i s c h e jugend i n d e r n s - z e i t ; u n t e r b e s o n d e r e r b e r t i c k s i c h t i g u n g des k a t h o l i s c h e n jungmflnner- verbandes. p a t e n und dokumente. d u s s e l d o r f , a l t e n b e r g , . the n a t i o n a l s o c i a l i s t s : bergmann, e r n s t . p i e deutsche n a t i o n a l k i r c h e . b r e s l a u , h i r t , . t h i s p s e u d o - p h i l o s o p h e r was one o f t h e s o u r c e s from which h i t l e r drew h i s i d e a s ; f o r bergmann, as f o r rosenberg, c h r i s t i a n i t y , p a r t i c u l a r l y c a t h o l i c i s m , was a f o r e i g n r e l i g i o n . bormann, m a r t i n . l e t t e r s . the p r i v a t e correspondence between m a r t i n bormann and h i s w i f e from j a n u a r y t o a p r i l . ed. h.r.trevor-roper, t r a n s . r.h.stevens, london, weiden- f e l d and n i c o l s o n , . these l e t t e r s a r e e s s e n t i a l f o r an u n d e r s t a n d i n g o f a b i t t e r l y a n t i - c h r i s t i a n n a z i m e n t a l i t y and f o r a v i e w i n t o t h e i n n e r sanctum o f t h e n a z i e l i t e . p e u t s c h e r f f l h r e r l e x i k o n - . b e r l i n , s t o l l b e r g , . i n t h e l e x i c o n , t h e names and p i c t u r e s o f t h e men e l i m - i n a t e d i n june, , have been l i f t e d f r o m t h e forms o r p a s t e d over w i t h s t r i p s of paper, i n w h i c h case t h e i r names a r e v i s i b l e when t h e page i s h e l d up t o a s t r o n g l i g h t ! germany speaks. london, t h o r n t o n b u t t e r w o r t h , . t h i s i s a s e m i - o f f i c i a l a p o l o g y f o r t h e n a z i s t a t e , p r o p a - ganda f o r b r i t i s h consumption. goebbels, j o s e p h . d i a r i e s - . ed. t r a n s . l o u i s b. l o c h n e r , new y o r k , doubleday, . t h i s book, as t h e bormann one, i s v e r y u s e f u l , a l t h o u g h i t c o n t a i n s l e s s t h a n one would w i s h on t h e c h u r c h problem. i c o n s u l t e d s e v e r a l volumes o f goebbel's speeches (see t h e f o o t n o t e s ) but i have not i n c l u d e d them h e r e , s i n c e t h e y g i v e o n l y a g e n e r a l i d e a o f n a z i propaganda. h i t l e r , a d o l f . mein kampf. t r a n s . r a l p h manheim, b o s t o n , houghton m i f f l i n , . s e c r e t c o n v e r s a t i o n s , ed. h.r.trevor-roper, new york, s i g n e t , . speeches, ed. norman h. baynes, london, o z f o r d , , v o l . . testament o f a d o l f h i t l e r . the h i t l e r - b o r m a n n documents. f e b r u a r y - a p r i l . ed. f r a n c o i s genoud, t r a n s . r.h.stevens, london, c a s s e l l , . z w e i t e s buch. e i n dokument aus dem j a h r e . s t u t t g a r t , deutsche v e r l a g s a n s t a l t , . these books, a l o n g w i t h t h e rauschning volume (see b e l o w ) , o f f e r a good o u t l i n e o f h i t l e r ' s i d e a s , e s p e c i a l l y s i n c e the d i f f e r e n c e between h i s p r i v a t e and p u b l i c u t t e r a n c e s . k r i e c k , e r n e s t . n a t i o n a l p o l i t i s c h e e r z i e h u n g . l e i p z i g , armanen, . t h i s pedagogue, p r o b a b l y a s i n c e r e man, f a s c i n a t e d by p l a t o ' s e l i t e i d e a , was v e r y u s e f u l t o h i t l e r and t h o s e who sought t o " c o - o r d i n a t e " german e d u c a t i o n . ludecke, k u r t g.w. i knew h i t l e r . the s t o r y o f a n a z i who escaped t h e b l o o d purge. london. j a r r o l d s . . t h i s i s t h e a u t o b i o g r a p h y o f a man who came c l o s e t o the n a z i e l i t e ; much o f t h e m a t e r i a l i s i r r e l e v a n t and t e d i o u s , and i t s v e r a c i t y may be doubted, but i t o f f e r s an e x c e l l e n t example o f the k i n d o f p e r s o n who j o i n e d t h e movement. rauschning, hermann. h i t l e r speaks. a s e r i e s o f p o l i t i c a l con- v e r s a t i o n s w i t h a d o l f h i t l e r on h i s r e a l aims. london, t h o r n t o n b u t t e r w o r t h , . r a u s c h n i n g , former n a z i p r e s i d e n t o f t h e senate o f t h e free c i t y o f d a n z i g , would seem t o be a r e l i a b l e s o u r c e , i n s p i t e o f the f a c t t h a t he wrote much from memory and must s u r e l y have p a r a p h r a s e d some of h i t l e r ' s comments. rosenberg, a l f r e d . an d i e punkelma*nner u n s e r e r z e i t . e i n e antwort a u f d i e a n g r i f f e gegen den mvthus des . j a h r h u n d e r t s . mtlnchen, hoheneichen, . b l u t und e h r e . mtlnchen, eher, . mythus des . j a h r h u n d e r t s . mtlnchen, hohen- e i c h e n , . p o l i t i s c h e s tagebuch. ed. gtlnther seraphim, g t t i n g e n , m u s t e r s c h m i d t , . p r o t e s t a n t i s c h e r o m p i l g e r . p e r v e r r a t an l u t h e r und d e r mvthus des . j a h r h u n d e r t s . mtlnchen, hoheneichen, . a f t e r p r o d u c i n g h i s magnum opus i n , rosenberg defended i t i n r e p e t i t i o u s and e q u a l l y u n o r i g i n a l e s s a y s , speeches, and pamphlets. the mythus i s t h e most u s e f u l h e r e . s c h i r a c h , b a l d u r von. p i e h i t l e r . i u g e n d . idee und g e s t a l t . b e r l i n , v e r l a g und v e r t r i e b s a n s t a l t , . r e v o l u t i o n d e r e r z i e h u n g . mtlnchen, z e n t r a l - v e r l a g der nspap, . the r e i c h youth l e a d e r , i n t h e s e speeches and e s s a y s , p r o - v i d e s t h e b e s t o u t l i n e o f n a z i p l a n s f o r y o u t h . schwarz, d i e t e r . p i e g r o s s e ltlge des p o l i t i s c h e n k a t h o l i z i s m u s . mtlnchen, z e n t r a l v e r l a g d e r nspap, . t h i s i s a t y p i c a l n a z i a n t i - c a t h o l i c pamphlet; p u b l i s h e d by t h e p a r t y i t s e l f , i t l e a v e s no doubt as t o t h e g o v e r n - ment's p o s i t i o n . the n a t i o n a l s o z i a l i s t i s c h e r m o n a t s h e f t ( , v o l s . - ) was a l s o o f some use;- e d i t e d by rosenberg, i t i s r e m a r k a b l y r e s t r a i n e d i n i t s approach t o t h e c h u r c h i s s u e . i t c o n t a i n s p a i n t i n g s and drawings o f i d e a l i z e d german l a n d s c a p e s , p e a s a n t s , i n d u s t r i a l s i t e s , and autobahnen. the f o l l o w i n g a r e a l s o o f i n t e r e s t ; d i e d e u t s c h e c h r i s t e n . p i e reden des r e i c h s b i s c h o f s und des r e i c h s l e i t e r s d e r p e u t s c h e c h r i s t e n p r . j u r . k i n d e r im b e r l i n e r s p o r t p a l a s t am " . f e b r u a r . b e r l i n , g e s e l l - s c h a f t f t l r z e i t u n g s d i e n s t , . f e d e r , g o t t f r i e d , ed. das programm d e r nspap und s e i n e w e l t a n - s c h a u l i c h e grundgedanken. mtlnchen, eher, . f r i c k , h e i n r i c h . p e u t s c h l a n d i n n e r h a l b d e r r e l i g i f l s e n w e l t l a g e b e r l i n , t pelmann, . secondary s o u r c e s ; there i s l i t t l e m a t e r i a l on t h e n a t i o n a l s o c i a l i s t s ' approach t o t h e c h u r c h e s , and, a p a r t from t h e above n a z i s o u r c e s , i had t o c o n s u l t a wide v a r i e t y o f books. the f o l l o w - i n g were u s e f u l a t t h e b e g i n n i n g o f my r e s e a r c h ; d i e h n , o t t o . b i b l i o g r a p h i e z u r g e s c h i c h t e des k i r c h e n k a m p f e s . g b t t i n g e n , vandennoek and ruprecht, . i n t e r n a t i o n a l b i b l i o g r a p h y o f t h e h i s t o r i c a l s c i e n c e s . wash- i n g t o n , i n t e r n a t i o n a l committee o f h i s t o r i c a l s c i e n c e s , v o l s . i p a i d a s h o r t v i s i t t o t h e german e v a n g e l i c a l church a r c h i v e s i n b i e l e f e l d , west germany, b u t found l i t t l e t h e r e on the n a z i s i d e o f t h e c o n f l i c t ; t h e h i s t o r i c a l seminar c o l l e c t i o n a t t h e u n i v e r s i t y o f hamb u r g c o n t a i n e d some m a t e r i a l t h a t t h e ubc l i b r a r y does not y e t p o s s e s s . there a r e many a c c o u n t s o f t h e s t r u g g l e , w r i t t e n from t h e s t a n d p o i n t o f t h e c h u r c h , but t h e y a r e u s u a l l y concerned t o defend o r e x p l a i n t h e c h u r c h e s b e h a v i o u r , o r t o s i m p l y d e s c r i b e t h e p e r s e c u t i o n . the f o l l o w i n g s e c o n d a r y s o u r c e s were p a r t i c u l a r l y u s e f u l or a r e o f s p e c i a l i n t e r e s t ; a r e n d t , hannah. o r i g i n s o f t o t a l i t a r i a n i s m . new york, m e r i d i a n , . t h i s c o n s e r v a t i v e w r i t e r i s most i n t e r e s t i n g o f t h e b e h a v i - our o f modern man i n mass s o c i e t y and on c y n i c a l p o l i t i c a l e l i t e s . she h o l d s t h a t modern t o t a l i t a r i a n i s m e x p l o d e s t h e premise o f t h e r e a s o n a b l e n a t u r e o f t h e masses on which t h e western concept o f democracy i s founded. baurngflrtel, f r i e d r i c h . wider den kirchenkampf-legenden. freimund, n e u e n d e t t e l s a u , . a t h e o l o g i a n a t t a c k s the i d e a t h a t t h e c o n f e s s i o n a l church r e c o g n i z e d from t h e f i r s t t h e n a z i danger t o c h r i s t i a n i t y ; he shows, f o r example, t h a t w i l h e l m n i e m b l l e r was, i n a t l e a s t , an e n t h u s i a s t i c n a z i . b e c k e r , howard. german youth: bond o r f r e e . new york, o x f o r d , . i n t h i s h i s t o r y o f t h e german y o u t h movements, t h e a u t h o r i n t r o d u c e s t h e u s e f u l " e c c l e s i a " i d e a , w h i c h l e d me t o c o n s i d e r t h e p s e u d o - r e l i g i o u s element i n nazism; h i s book c o n t a i n s a good b i b l i o g r a p h y on the s u b j e c t as w e l l . there i s some u n f o r t u n a t e s o c i o l o g i c a l d o u b l e t a l k h e r e , but t h e book i s t h e b e s t account i n e n g l i s h on the youth move- m e n t s ( a v a i l a b l e a t u.b.c. a t t h e t i m e o f w r i t i n g ) . berdyaev, n i c o l a s . end o f our time* london, sheed and ward, . berdyaev, i n d e s c r i b i n g t h e l o n e l i n e s s o f modern man, s t r e s s e s t h a t o n l y a r e v i v a l o f c h r i s t i a n f a i t h w i l l r e g e n e r a t e t h e west, b u t he p r e d i c t s t h a t something l i k e nazism c o u l d p e r v e r t t h i s r e v i v a l . b e r n i n g , w i l h e l m . k a t h o l i s c h e k i r c h e und d e u t s c h e s v o l k s t u m . mtlnchen, c a l l w e y , . t h i s c o n t r i b u t i o n t o t h e c a t h o l i c approach t o nazism gave me an i n s i g h t i n t o a view w h i c h approved o f t h e movement. brennecke, f. ed. n a z i p r i m e r . new york, h a r p e r s , . t h i s i s a good example o f the k i n d of t e x t b o o k s t h e p a r t y i n t r o d u c e d i n t o s c h o o l s . buchheim, hans. g l a u b e n s k r i s e im d r i t t e n r e i c h . d r e i k a p i t a l n a t i o n a l s o z i a l i s t i s c h e r r e l i g i o n s p o l i t i k . s t u t t g a r t , deutsche v e r l a g s a n s t a l t , . buchheim s s t u d y o f t h e " c r i s i s o f f a i t h " o f f e r s a l u c i d s e c t i o n on t h e c o n f u s i n g f a i t h movements as w e l l as a u s e - f u l b i b l i o g r a p h y . b u l l o c k , a l a n . h i t l e r . a study i n tyranny. new york, harper, . t h i s i s t h e b e s t post-war b i o g r a p h y o f t h e f t l h r e r . b u l l o c k b e l i e v e s , and i t h i n k r i g h t l y , t h a t t h e n a z i movement was r e a l l y b a r r e n o f i d e a s , t h a t i t s i d e o l o g y was f r a u d u l e n t , and t h a t h i t l e r was an o p p o r t u n i s t , whose o n l y g u i d i n g p r i n c i p l e was a w i l l t o power. cochrane, a r t h u r c. the church's c o n f e s s i o n under h i t l e r . p h i l s d e l p h i a , w e s t m i n s t e r , . f o r e n g l i s h r e a d e r s , t h i s i s p r o b a b l y t h e b e s t account o f t h e l u t h e r a n c h u r c h ' s a c t i v i t y i n the t h i r d r e i c h . f r i e d r i c h, c a r l j . ed. t o t a l i t a r i a n i s m . p r o c e e d i n g s o f a con- f e r e n c e h e l d a t t h e american academy o f a r t s and s c i e n c e s . cambridge, h a r v a r d , . there a r e s e v e r a l i n t e r e s t i n g and u s e f u l e s s a y s i n t h i s volume, such as t h o s e by waldemar g u r i a n , " t o t a l i t a r i a n - i s m as p o l i t i c a l r e l i g i o n " , and by a l e x i n k e l e s , "the t o t a l i t a r i a n m y s t i q u e " . fromm, e r i c h , escape from freedom. new york, f a r r a r and r i n e - h a r t , . fromm's a l m o s t c l a s s i c p s y c h o l o g i c a l s t u d y s u g g e s t s t h a t the german m i d d l e c l a s s i s s a d o - m a s o c h i s t i c , an argument d i f f i c u l t t o prove h i s t o r i c a l l y ; i a l s o doubt i f he i n t e r - p r e t s l u t h e r j u s t l y , but h i s i n s i g h t i n t o the german problem h e l p s t o b a l a n c e t h e p o l i t i c a l a n a l y s i s o f arendt and the c h r i s t i a n view o f berdyaev. gamm, hans-jochen. der braune kult. das dritte reich und seine ersatzreligion. hamburg, ratten and loening. . this book i s especially relevant to the thesis; unfortu- nately, i t is only a description of nazi "religiofication", and does not draw many wider conclusions. several inter- esting photographs and documents are reproduced. groppe, herbert. das reichskonkordat vom . j u l i . k n, bachem, . groppe considers the concordat only in i t s legal aspect. hayes, carlton j.h. nationalism: a religion. new york, macmillan, i . this i s a rather pedestrian study, but offers a good re- view of the phenomenon. heiden, konrad, adolf hitler. eine biographie. zttrich, europa, and , vols. heiden's book i s s t i l l one of the best on hitler. kirkpatrick, clifford. nazi germany: its women and family l i f e . new york, bobbs-merrill, . one of the few studies of this kind, kirkpatrick's book offers insight into the effect of nazi organization of those who were not actively p o l i t i c a l . klonne, arno. hitler.jugend: die jugend und ihre organisation im dritten reic h. hannover, norddeutsche verlagsanstalt, . this i s the best description of the hitler youth i found. kneller, george frederick. educ ational philosophy of national socialism. new york, yale, . kneller's book on nazi educational principles- ( i f such they can be termed) offers an excellent review of the movement's pseudo-intellectuals and their beliefs; his bibliography was also useful. as yet there is no good post-war book on nazi education. kolnai, aurel. war against the west. london, gollancz, . this long and d i f f i c u l t volume i s rich in quotations from nazi and proto-nazi sources, but contains no analysis or interpretation of the meaning of a l l that i s reproduced. his criticism of christianity i s rather far-fetched. kupisch, karl. zwischen idealismus und massandemokratie. eine geschichte der evangelischen kirche in deutschland von - . berlin, lettner. . this i s the best history of the lutheran church available. l i t t e l l , f.h.german phoenix, men and movements in the church in germany. new york, doubleday. i . l i t t e l l has drawn from existing historical material and has not produced an independent study; nevertheless, i t i s a good summary and i s useful for english readers. m a c f a r l a n d , c h a r l e s s. new church and t h e new germany. a study o f church and s t a t e . new y o r k , m a c m i l l a n , . means, p a u l b. things t h a t a r e c a e s a r ' s ; t h e genesis o f t h e german church c o n f l i c t . new york, round t a b l e , . m i c k l e m , n a t h a n i e l . n a t i o n a l s o c i a l i s m and c h r i s t i a n i t y . o x f o r d , c l a r e n d o n , . n a t i o n a l s o c i a l i s m and t h e roman c a t h o l i c church. londyi,oxford, . s e v e r a l books were w r i t t e n on t h e church c o n f l i c t a t t h e t i m e ; t h o s e c i t e d here by m a c f a r l a n d and means s u f f e r from a l a c k o f " i n s i d e " knowledge and from r e a l f a c t u a l e r r o r s due t o f a u l t y r e s e a r c h . micklem's two books, however, a r e more s c h o l a r l y , do not seem a s d a t e d , and a r e s t i l l u s e f u l . (the former two d e a l m a i n l y w i t h t h e p r o t e s t a n t church.) neumann, f r a n z . behemoth. s t r u c t u r e and p r a c t i c e o f n a t i o n a l s o c i a l i s m . t o r o n t o , o x f o r d , . i n s p i t e o f the f a c t t h a t t h i s book i s a l s o a p r o d u c t o f t h e p e r i o d i t s e l f , and i n s p i t e o f a l e g a l i s t i c , m a r x i s t approach ( f a s c i s m i s equated w i t h a stage o f c a p i t a l i s m ) , "behemoth" i s s t i l l a r e m a r k a b l y good s t u d y o f nazism; neumann o f f e r s some u s e f u l i d e a s on t h e p r a g m a t i c and n i h i l i s t i c n a t u r e o f t h e p a r t y . neurohr, j e a n f. mvthos vom d r i t t e n r e i c h . zur g e i s t e s g e s c h i c h t e des n a t i o n a l s o z i a l i s m u s . s t u t t g a r t , g o t t a , . t h i s i s one o f t h e b e s t o f many a t t e m p t s t o t r a c e t h e i n t e l l e c t u a l and s p i r i t u a l r o o t s o f nazism; neurohr man- ages t o a v o i d a c c u s i n g l u t h e r , kant, o r hegel o f a c t u a l l y c o n t r i b u t i n g t o n a z i s m — f o r t h i s p o i n t o f view, see w.m. mcgovern's from l u t h e r t o h i t l e r (new york, houghton m i f f l i n , n.atn n i e k i s c h , e r n s t . das r e i c h d e r n i e d e r e n dumonen. hamburg, rowohlt. . l i k e neumann, n i e k i s c h g i v e s a m a r x i s t i n t e r p r e t a t i o n o f nazism; f o r him, t o o , t h e i d e o l o g y was f r a u d u l e n t . n i e m b l l e r , w i l h e l m . d i e e v a n g e l i s c h e k i r c h e im d r i t t e n r e i c h . handbuch des k i r c h e n k a m p f e s . b i e l e f e l d . bechauf, . the "handbook" has been c r i t i c i s e d by baumgsrtel (see above) f o r i g n o r i n g t h e c o m p l i c i t y o f even t h e c o n f e s s - i o n a l churchmen i n s u p p o r t i n g t h e n a z i s ; h i s c r i t i c i s m would seem t o be j u s t , but n i e m o l l e r ' s book, and i t s s m a l l e r companion (kirchenkampf im d r i t t e n r e i c h . b i e l e f e l d , bechauf, ), a r e e s s e n t i a l t o u n d e r s t a n d i n g the m o t i v e s b e h i n d t h e b a r m e n a d e c l a r a t i o n . i have not i n c l u d e d here t h e v a r i o u s books, some o f them by w i l h e l m n i e m o l l e r , on t h e c o n f e s s i o n a l church synods, o r on t h e t h e o l o g i c a l i s s u e s a t s t a k e . p e r a u , j o s e f . p r i e s t e r im heere h i t l e r s . e r i n n e r u n g e n - . e s s e n , ludgerus, . t h i s book i s t h e d i a r y o f a c a t h o l i c p r i e s t i n t h e german army; i t was not e s p e c i a l l y u s e f u l i n the t h e s i s , but p r e s e n t s t h e c a t h o l i c o u t l o o f o w e l l . samuel, r.h. and thomas, r. h i n t o n . e d u c a t i o n and s o c i e t y i n modern germany. london, routledge and kegan p a u l , . t h i s i s a v e r y u s e f u l book; the same a u t h o r s would do even b e t t e r t o r e v i e w t h e n a z i p e r i o d a l o n e . zahn, gordon c. german c a t h o l i c s and h i t l e r ' s wars. a s t u d y i n s o c i a l c o n t r o l . new york. sheed and ward. . a much needed s t u d y , t h i s book h e l p s t o c o r r e c t mis- c o n c e p t i o n s about c a t h o l i c " r e s i s t a n c e " . the s e c o n d a r y s o u r c e s which f o l l o w were i n t e r e s t i n g but not as u s e f u l ; brady, rob e r t a. s p i r i t and s t r u c t u r e o f german f a s c i s m . london, g o l l a n c s , . carmer, c a r l . war a g a i n s t god. new york, h o l t , . c a s s i r e r , e r n s t . myth o f t h e s t a t e . new haven, y a l e , . c h a k h o t i n , serge. rape o f t h e masses, t r a n s . e.w.dickes, london, r o u t l e d g e , . conrad, w a l t e r , der kampf urn d i e k a n z e l n . e r i n n e r u n g e n und dokumente aus d e r h i t l e r z e i t . b e r l i n , tbpelmann, . g a l l i n , mother mary a l i c e . german r e s i s t a n c e t o . . . h i t l e r : e t h i c a l and r e l i g i o u s f a c t o r s . washington. c a t h o l i c u n i v e r s i t y o f a m e r i c a , . g i l b e r t , g.m. p s y c h o l o g y o f d i c t a t o r s h i p . new york, r o n a l d , . h a f k e s b r i n k , hannah. unknown germany: an i n n e r c h r o n i c l e o f the f i r s t world war based on l e t t e r s and d i a r i e s . new haven, y a l e , . h a r t s h o r n e , e.y. german u n i v e r s i t i e s and n a t i o n a l s o c i a l i s m . london, a l l e n and unwin, . herman, s t e w a r t w. eure s e e l e n w o l l e n w i r . k i r c h e im u n t e r g r u n d . i n s deutsche t l b e r t r a g e n von w i l h e l m gossmann, mtlnchen, neubau, . k e l l e r m a n n , f r i t z . the e f f e c t of t h e world war on european e d u c a t i o n ; w i t h s p e c i a l a t t e n t i o n to germany. cambridge, h a r v a r d , . kosok, p a u l . modern germany. a study o f c o n f l i c t i n g l o y a l t i e s . c h i c a g o , . k o t s c h n i g , w a l t e r m. s l a v e s need no l e a d e r s . an answer t o t h e f a s c i s t c h a l l e n g e t o e d u c a t i o n . london, o x f o r d , . l e r s n e r , d i e t e r f r h r . von. d i e e v a n g e l i s c h e n jugendverbande wttrttembergs und d i e h i t l e r . j u g e n d - . g q t t i n g e n , vandenhoek und rupprecht, . l i l g e , f r e d e r i c . the abuse o f l e a r n i n g . the f a i l u r e o f t h e german u n i v e r s i t i e s . new york. m a c m i l l a n , . l o r t z , j o s e p h . k a t h o l i s c h e r zugang zum n a t i o n a l s o z i a l i s m u s . munster, a s c h e n d o r f f , . mann, e r i k a . s c h o o l f o r b a r b a r i a n s . e d u c a t i o n under t h e n a z i s . london, drummond, . n a t t e r e r , a l o i s . p e r b a v e r i s c h e k l e r u s i n d e r z e i t d r e i e r r e v o l u t i o n e n - - . mttnchen. k a t h o l i s c h e k i r c h e b a y e r n s , . neumann, sigmund. permanent r e v o l u t i o n : t h e t o t a l s t a t e i n a world a t war. new york, h a r p e r s , . p i n s o n , k o p p e l s. p i e t i s m as a f a c t o r i n the r i s e o f german n a t i o n a l i s m . new york, columbia, . p r i e p k e , m a n f r e d . p i e e v a n g e l i s c h e jugend im d r i t t e n r e i c h - . new york; columbia, §>u. p r o s s , h a r r y . vor und nach h i t l e r . zur d e u t s c h e n s o z i o p a t h o l o g i e . f r e i b u r g , w a l t e r , . schmidt, d i e t m a r . p a s t o r n i e m g l l e r . t r a n s . lawrence w i l s o n , london, odhams, . s c h r e y , h e i n z h o r s t . d i e g e n e r a t i o n d e r e n t s c h e i d u n g . s t a a t und k i r c h e i n europa und im e u r o p a i s c h e n r u s s l a n d - . mttnchen, k a i s e r , . v e r m e i l , edmond. the german scene, t r a n s . l . j . l u d o v i c o , london h a r r a p , . ziemer, gregor. e d u c a t i o n f o r death. london, o x f o r d , i n o r d e r t o s h o r t e n t h e b i b l i o g r a p h y , i have o m i t t e d from t h i s l i s t s e v e r a l books o f l e s s e r i n t e r e s t w h i c h a p p e a r , n e v e r t h e l e s s , i n t h e f o o t n o t e s . p e r i o d i c a l s : there i s a w e a l t h o f contemporary p e r i o d i c a l m a t e r i a l on t h e c h u r c h problem; a l t h o u g h much o f i t l a c k s d o c u m e n t a t i o n , i t o f t e n sheds l i g h t on a s p e c t s o f t h e c o n f l i c t t h a t do not come out e l s e w h e r e . below i have l i s t e d o n l y the most u s e f u l a r t i c l e s o f the ' t h i r t i e s and ' f o r t i e s . b e a r d , c h a r l e s a. " e d u c a t i o n under the n a z i s " . f o r e i g h a f f a i r s , v o l . , june , pp. - . b r i n t o n , crane. "the n a t i o n a l s o c i a l i s t s ' use o f n i e t z s c h e " . j o u r n a l o f the h i s t o r y o f i d e a s , v o l . , a p r i l , pp. - . buxton, d o r o t h y . " n i e m o l l e r o r h i t l e r ? " s p e c t a t o r , v o l . , j u l y , , pp. - . dean o f c h i c h e s t e r . " c r i s i s o f t h e church i n germany". s p e c t a t o r , v o l . , august , , pp. - . g u r i a n , waldemar. " h i t l e r ' s u n d e c l a r e d war on t h e c a t h o l i c church". f o r e i g n a f f a i r s , v o l . , j a n u a r y , pp. - . " p a r t e i s c h u l e n " , s p e c t a t o r , v o l . , december , , p. . reed, douglas l. "german church c o n f l i c t " . f o r e i g n a f f a i r s , v o l . , june , pp. - . rouse, ruth. "does young germany want war?" s p e c t a t o r , v o l . , december , , pp. - . rowan-robinson, g.a. "the t r a i n i n g o f t h e n a z i l e a d e r s o f t h e f u t u r e " , i n t e r n a t i o n a l a f f a i r s , v o l . , march , pp. - . " s c h u l e oder v e r e i n " , s p e c t a t o r , v o l . , june , p. . s p e n l e , jean-edouard. "le probleme de l a jeunesse en allemagne". mercure de f r a n c e , v o l s . - , march , , pp. - t i l l i c h , p a u l , " t o t a l i t a r i a n s t a t e and the claims o f t h e church". s o c i a l r e s e a r c h , v o l . , november , pp. - . s e v e r a l post-war a r t i c l e s a r e o f i n t e r e s t ; a p a r t f r o m t h e f o l l o w i n g , t h e r e a r e r e l a t e d a r t i c l e s i n t h e v i e r t e l . l a h r e s h e f t f t t r z e i t g e s c h i c h t e . hunt, c h e s t e r l. " l i f e c y c l e o f d i c t a t o r s h i p s as seen i n t h e treatment o f r e l i g i o u s i n s t i t u t i o n s " . s o c i a l f o r c e s , v o l . , , pp. - . . k l o s e , werner. " h i t l e r j u g e n d . d i e g e s c h i c h t e e i n e r i r r e g e f t l f i r t e n g e n e r a t i o n " . welt am sonntag, f e b r u a r y t o march , . t h i s s e r i e s o f a r t i c l e s , a l t h o u g h o n l y a j o u r n a l i s t i c d e s c r i p t i o n , i s o f p a r t i c u l a r i n t e r e s t f o r t h e t h e s i s . mayer, c a r l . " c r i s i s o f german p r o t e s t a n t i s m " . s o c i a l research, v o l . , november, , pp. - . mosse, g.l. " m y s t i c a l o r i g i n s o f n a t i o n a l s o c i a l i s m " . j o u r n a l o f t h e h i s t o r y o f i d e a s , v o l . , j a n u a r y , pp. - . m t l l l e r , hans. "der p s e u d o r e l i g i o s e c h a r a k t e r d e r n a t i o n a l s o z i a l - i s t i s c h e n weltanschauung", g e s c h i c h t e i n w i s s e n s c h a f t und u n t e r r i c h t . . j a h r g a n g , h e f t , , pp. - . t h i s a r t i c l e , a s the t i t l e s u g g e s t s , i s fundamental t o t h e t h e s i s . branko mitrović journal of art historiography number december ruminations on the dark side: history of art as rage and denials branko mitrović that, which satisfies the spirit, is also the measure of its loss. hegel, phänomenologie des geistes the old philosophical puzzle about one and many has a wide range of implications for the various disciplines of intellectual history, such as histories of philosophy, science or art. the puzzle can be stated as follows: a multitude always consists of singulars, but is it always a mere sum of these singulars—or should we assume that a whole can differ from the sum of its parts? is a multitude just a joint name for the individuals that constitute it? or maybe we should conceive of singulars as constituted into what they are through their membership in a multitude? are singulars perhaps mere manifestations of the group they belong to? when it comes to human creativity: is the creativity of an artist (author in general) an instantiation of group creativity—or is the creativity of a group the sum of individual creativities? the creative decisions of an author (an artist, scientist or philosopher) are often assumed to be influenced by his or her context. but is this influence of the group that makes up the context merely the sum of that author’s interactions with other individuals that make up the group? or, can a context influence the creativity of an individual in a way that is not identical with, nor reducible to the sum of the influences of the individuals that belong to that context? i should like to express my gratitude to james ackerman for initiating my interest in the problems presented in this paper during our discussions in the canadian centre for architecture; to christine smith, bruce boucher and patricia waddy for their encouragement to work on this project; to the sterling and francine clark art institute and my home institution, unitec institute of technology, for providing the necessary otium that enabled me to work on the project; to richard woodfield for the encouragement to work on this article; to ian verstegen for his thoughtful insights; to jonathan blower for providing me with a copy of dvořák’s letter; to michael ann holly, mark ledbury, martin berger, hollis clayson, thierry de duve, hagi kanaan and mary roberts for discussing with me various aspects of the article; to karen wise for her help with the written english of the article and to sarah van anden for her help in the preparation of the paper. an diesem, woran dem geiste genügt, ist die größe seines verlustes zu ermessen. georg wilhelm friedrich hegel, phänomenologie des geistes, leipzig: dürr’sche buchhandlung , (introduction, § ). branko mitrović ruminations on the dark side holism-individualism piero della francesca, it may be said, used perspective in his work because he was a renaissance painter. such an explanation can be understood in a number of ways, depending on how one conceives of the renaissance and its impact on quattrocento italians. if we assume that this influence of the epoch was more than the sum of influences of individual contemporaries, the renaissance starts to resemble a spiritual substance that landed on the italian peninsula in the early quattrocento, stayed there for two centuries and determined the creativity of contemporary italians according to what was appropriate to their time and community. the central characteristic of such, holist, view is that individual creativity is a mere manifestation of and fully explainable by the creativity of the collective (culture, class, race, ethnicity, period) the individual belongs to—that insofar as they are creative at all, individuals of a certain period or community can only be creative in accordance with the spirit of that period or community. as ernst gombrich observed, this view postulates that all the manifestations of an era—philosophy, art, social structures, etc.—must be considered as expressions of an essence, an identical spirit. as a result, every era is considered as a totality embracing everything. this approach is to be found, for instance, in heinrich wölfflin’s view that to explain a style means to fit its expressive character into the general history of the period and prove that its forms conform to the other manifestations of the age. according to otto pächt, such an approach was also shared by alois riegl, in whose view, a great artist, even a genius, is nothing but the executor and the fulfilment, of the kunstwollen of his nation and age. an example of the application of this programme is oswald spengler’s view that there existed a deep internal link between the invention of perspective, book-printing, the credit system and point-counter-point in music. ernst gombrich in ‘i think art historians are the spokesmen of our civilization; we want to know more about our olympus’, the art newpaper, : , , - . a similar statement by gombrich is in his in search for cultural history, oxford, , : ‘the great erwin panofsky, … never renounced the desire to demonstrate the organic unity of all aspects of a period. … in his renaissance and renaissances in western art he explicitly defended the notion of cultures having an essence against the criticism of george boas’. see also david r. topper, ‘on a ghost of historiography past’, leonardo, : , , - . similarly, in wilhelm pinder’s das problem der generation in der kunstgeschichte europas, we read that vermeer was merely painting spinoza (i.e. the ‘einen stil erklären kann nichts anderes heissen als ihn nach seinem ausdruck in die allgemeine zeitgeschichte einreihen, nachweisen, dass seine formen in ihrer sprache nichts anderes sagen, als die übrigen organe der zeit.’ heinrich wölfflin, renaissance und barock, munich: f. bruckmann, , . similarly, in his das erklären von kunstwerken, leipzig: seeman, , , wölfflin states that ‘erklären wird überall hier heißen, im einzelnen und einmaligen das allgemeinere fühlen zu lehren.’ otto pächt, ‘art historians and art critics — vi: alois riegl’, the burlington magazine, no : , may , - . oswald spengler, der untergang des abendlandes. umrisse einer morphologie der welgeschichte, munich: dtv , . branko mitrović ruminations on the dark side content of spinoza’s philosophy), since the painter and the philosopher were born in the same year. contrary to the holist view is the individualist position that collectives are mere sums of individuals—that, for instance, the renaissance is a mere name for the creative thoughts, decisions, actions and mutual individual interactions of millions of italians who, in a certain period, were exposed to similar challenges, such as an intensified intellectual exchange, strong urban environments, the influx of byzantine scholars or the invention of the printing press. the context in this case does not explain why an individual did things the way he or she did them. rather, what the context can explain is how an individual artist, scientist or philosopher acquired the skills or knowledge that enabled him or her to produce an artefact with certain properties. in the philosophy of history there exists substantial literature on the debate about individualism and holism. distinction between individualism and holism also applies to history writing. history writing itself is a creative process. when practicing it, large groups of historians may happen to adopt the same methodological assumptions, the way artists of the same period sometimes adopt the same style. this is particularly characteristic of weimar-era art historiography which was marked by the widespread (one could say unanimous) adoption of a holist world-view—in other words, the holist propensities of weimar-era scholars constitute a collective phenomenon in its own right, and one that has exercised a huge influence on distinction between holism and individualism, it should be said, is sharp and requires an either-or answer: insofar as a specific creative decision of an individual author was influenced (or determined) by a specific group, this group can either be understood as reducible to a set of individuals—or it needs to be understood as more than and irreducible to a mere sum of individuals. influence can be conceived of either as a set of specific influences of a group of individuals, or as the influence of a social entity that is understood as more than a sum of individual influences. but there can be no third possibility. otherwise one would have to argue that there can exist a multitude that is, in the same sense and at the same time, both reducible and irreducible to the sum of singulars that constitute it. wilhelm pinder: das problem der generation in der kunstgeschichte europas, berlin: frankfurter verlags- anstalt, , . see ernest gellner, ‘holism versus individualism in history and sociology’, in patrick gardiner, ed., theories of history, glencoe: the free press, , - ; j. w. n. watkins, in his ‘historical explanation in the social sciences’ in gardiner, ed., theories, - ; arthur danto, narration and knowledge, new york: columbia university press, , - and branko mitrović, ‘intellectual history, inconceivability and methodological holism’, history and theory, : , january , - . in art history, the problem often manifested itself in the form of the debate about periodization. see for instance george boas, ‘historical periods’, the journal of aesthetics and art criticism, : , march , - ; paul l. frank, ‘historical or stylistic periods’, the journal of aesthetics and art criticism, : , june , - ; robert c. stalnaker, ‘events, periods and institutions in historians’ language’, history and theory, : , , - . for a review of geistesgeschichte—style holistic historiography in english-speaking art history see w. eugene kleinbauer: ‘geistesgeschichte and art history’, art journal, : , winter - , - . branko mitrović ruminations on the dark side english-speaking historiography. the discussion of authorial and environmental insecurities as an explanatory strategy in (intellectual) history that is presented here does not include a psychological explanation of the concept of insecurities. rather, the aim is to discuss (from the example of weimar-era historians’ holist propensities) whether such a concept could be usefully employed in historical explanations at all and what it could stand for. my main efforts here concentrate on describing a specific phenomenon, one could say a syndrome, that accompanies much of holist history- writing. the discussion (and especially the example of weimar-era historiography) shows, i believe, that this phenomenon, (i.e. insecurities), could actually explain much of holist historiography, should a proper psychological account of the phenomenon be provided. however, since this paper merely describes the phenomenon, and does not provide the necessary psychological account, it cannot be taken to explain the holist propensities of weimar-era scholars. more generally, even without psychological account, the term insecurities could possibly still be used the way other psychological terms (motivation, decision, belief) are used in history writing but with much reduced explanatory power. in any case, i believe that the discussion presented here shows that we are dealing with a clearly describable, definable and coherent historiographical phenomenon and that looking for its psychological (possibly psychoanalytic) explanation is a worthwhile project. in this paper i discuss the possibilities and implications of a specific individualist explanation of this collective phenomenon: the claim that their insecurities, as well as those of the environment in which they lived, propelled weimar-era scholars to adopt holist methodologies. the explanatory strategy that i examine here is thus psychological—as is often the case with individualist explanations, which have to understand the decisions, motivation or creativity of historical figures in psychological terms. a holist historian can argue that the decisions, motivation or creativity of individuals were manifestations of the collective spirit and independent of the individual psychologies of these individuals—but an individualist historian cannot make such claims. individualist historiography, in its ultimate explanations of human creativity, typically relies on psychological facts. rausch writing in , in the preface to a collection of essays by alois riegl, hans sedlmayr described the kind of holist position that, in his view, had become the dominant approach to history writing since the end of the war - . in this paper i use the term ‘weimar-era scholarship’ to include all german-speaking scholarship from the period of weimar republic. i also take into account examples from other periods, such as the wilhelmine era or the third reich, in which the authors whose works are discussed here were active. sedlmayr may not have been quite accurate in his dating: holist historiography had been firmly entrenched in german scholarship since the times of hegel—but other authors as well, such as karl mannheim, observed that holism had gained substantial hans sedlmayr, ‘die quintessenz der lehren riegls’ in alois riegl, gesammelte aufsätze, karl maria swoboda, ed., augsburg, , xii-xxxiv. cited here according to the version reprinted in hans sedlmayr, kunst und wahrheit, munich: mäander, , - . branko mitrović ruminations on the dark side prominence in the early decades of the twentieth century. the important aspect of holist history writing, sedlmayr reported enthusiastically, was the rejection of the view that groups were mere sums of individuals and that individuals were the primary and the only real historical entities. in his view, the individualistic understanding of historical events as the result of blind networks of individual causal lines was to be replaced with the view that there exist real meaningful self- movements of the spirit which may be delayed, but not substantially affected, by specific historical events. ( ) sedlmayr explains that ‘modern, non-atomistic’ sociology has confirmed the existence of the ‘objective spirit’ and cites alfred vierkandt’s view about the ‘domination of a superindividual spirit in … human cultures’. the same faith in the ‘objective spirit’ is explicitly articulated in a textbook for methodology courses in art history departments written by the heidelberg professor robert hedicke. hedicke explains that art history studies the monuments of the visual arts in the context of their spiritual-historical evolution. the history of the spirit (geistesgeschichte) is a field of historical scholarship that studies the objective spirit, its manifestations in human cultures and the way the spirit reveals itself in every human cultural monument. a historical period is to be understood as a spiritual unit, a unified system of values, and the aim of art history is to acquire knowledge about it. a good example of such an understanding of history writing can be found in wilhelm worringer’s works. in his abstraktion und einfühlung gothic simply came about, entstand, from itself, apparently without any human participation. ( - ) similarly, in griechentum und gotik worringer postulates forces such as ‘french artistic essence’. karl mannheim, ‘beiträge zur theorie der weltanschauungs-interpretation’, jahrbuch für kunstgeschichte, , - , - . since, from this point of view, creativity belongs to groups independently of the individuals that constitute these sedlmayr, ‘die quintessenz’, - . ‘im großartigsten maße zeigt sich das walten eines überindividuellen geistes in den tatsachen der menschlichen kultur.’ sedlmayr, ‘quintessenz’ , citing alfred vierkandt, geselschaftlehre, stuttgart: enke, , . behind these facts of human culture stands a ‘wille von überindividueller art, der dem einzelnen als normative kraft gegenübertritt. man spricht dabei von einem objektiven willen oder auch speziell von einem objektiven gesamtwillen, und meint damit eine kraft, die vom einzelnen mit recht als objektive macht aufgefaßt wird.’ this superindividual will is carried by a group of people, the same way as the objective spirit. sedlmayr, ‘quintessenz’, - . robert hedicke, methodenlehre der kunstgeschichte. ein handbuch für studierende, strassburg: heitz, . ‘kunstgeschichte ist die historische wissenschaft von den bildkunstdenkmälern erfaßt im geistes geschichtlichen wandlungszusammenhang. …geistestgeschichte ist die historische wissenschaft vom objektiven geiste, wie er sich in den kulturen der menschheit entfaltet hat und wie er sich in jedem menschlichen kulturdenkmal als wert offenbart.’ hedicke, methodenlehre, . ‘allgemeine geistesgeschichte ist die historische wissenschaft von dem allen geisteswissenschaften gemeinsamen objektiven geist in seinen verschiedenen historischen Äußerungen und wandlungen.’ hedicke, methodenlehre, . „die grundlegende idee, der grundegende glaube ist dabei, daß es in jeder zeit eine geistesgeschichtliche einheit, ein einheitliches wertsystem, einen einheitlichen geist gibt und daß es letzten endes gilt, diese einheit, diese wertgruppe, diesen geist zu erkennen und darzustellen.’ hedicke, methodenlehre, , wilhelm worringer: abstraktion und einfühlung. ein beitrag zur stilphychologie, munich: r. piper, . wilhelm worringer: griechentum und gotik. vom weltreich des hellenismus, munich: r. piper, . branko mitrović ruminations on the dark side groups, groups can also influence each other (and the creativity of individuals that participate in them) without any actual interaction between the individuals that belong to these groups. this enables worringer to describe iranian influences on french medieval art ( ), the influence of praxiteles on duccio ( ), or even to discuss hellenism in chinese and japanese art ( ). dagobert frey summarized this position by saying that art is one of the finest instruments to diagnose the spirituality of a nation or period; the creative subject (i.e. the artist) is an ideal entity, and cannot be easily identified with a biographical person; for the study of an artwork, the biographical person is fully irrelevant. however, if creative decisions are not the decisions of individual, biographical humans, then who makes them? hedicke, in the methodology textbook i have just cited, explains that they are the manifestations of the spirit of its time. for instance, in order to understand gothic, the art historian needs to understand something he calls gothic spiritual totality. the problem is, however, that all we can know about this ‘gothic spiritual totality’ from which gothic art arose, we know only on the basis of those properties of gothic monuments which the ‘gothic spiritual totality’ is meant to explain. similarly, max dvořák, in his ‘idealismus und naturalismus in der gotischen skulptur und malerei’ explained that gothic art was a result of a specific understanding of space, that was different from the one in early christian and romanic art. but then, if we ask, how we can know that such an understanding of space existed in gothic times, the answer is that we know about it on the basis of the gothic art that resulted from it. as early as , talking about the ‘gothic man’ whose ‘essence’ is supposed to explain the characteristics of gothic art, panofsky warned that the ‘gothic man’ or the ‘primitive’ on the basis of whose supposed essence a specific artwork is to be explained, is in reality only a hypostasized impression, which we have derived from the same artwork. ‘dieses schöpferische subjekt ist aber ein rein ideelles, allein als schöpfer des bestimmten kunstwerkes gegebenes subjekt; es ist mit der biographischen persönlichkeit nicht einfach zu identifizieren, ja diese biographische persönlichkeit ist für die betrachtung des kunstwerkes an sich ganz gleichgültig.’ dagobert frey, kunstwissenschaftliche grundfragen. prolegomena zu einer kunstphilosophie, vienna: r. m. rohrer verlag, , reprinted in darmstadt: wissenschaftliche buchgeselschaft, , . hedike says that art is a product of the unity of the spirit: ‘die grundlegende idee, der grundlegende glaube ist dabei, daß es in jeder zeit eine geistesgeschichtliche einheit, ein einheitliches wertsystem, einen einheitlichen geist gibt und daß es letzten endes gilt, diese einheit, diese wertgruppe, diesen geist zu erkennen und darzustellen.’ hedicke, methodenlehre, . ‘... die gotische kultur in ihrer gesamtheit, ... muß auch vom kunsthistoriker verstanden, erkannt, dargestellt werden.’ hedicke, methodenlehre, . max dvořák, ‘idealismus und naturalismus in der gotischen skulptur und malerei’, in max dvořák, kunstgeschichte als geistesgeschichte, munich: piper, , - , . ‘…so daß der ‘gotische mensch’ oder der ‘primitive’, aus dessen vermeintlichem wesen wir ein bestimmtes kunstprodukt erklären wollen, in wahrheit nur die hypostasierung eines eindrucks ist, den wir von eben diesem kunstprodukt empfingen.’ erwin panofsky, ‘der begriff des kunstwollens’, in erwin panofsky, deutschsprachige aufsästze, karen michels and martin warnke, eds, berlin, , vols, vol. , - , . branko mitrović ruminations on the dark side in other words, such explanations resemble a dialogue in molière’s malade imaginaire, where opium’s capacity to make people sleep is explained by its dormative powers, while its dormative powers are explained by their capacity to make people sleep. a way to avoid such circular ‘explanations’ is to show that numerous members of a certain group produced artworks with certain properties, then to assume that all artists of that group produce artworks with such properties and then to use this assumption in explaining the works of the remaining artists belonging to the same group. very few weimar-era historians resisted the temptation to argue that the group that actually explains and determines individual creativity is ethnicity or race. one of them was spengler, in whose view race was a result of the locality where one lives. for instance, he says, when the english and germans settled in north america they gradually acquired the racial characteristics of the indians. another opponent of racial determinism, quite surprisingly, considering his notoriously right-wing political views, was hans sedlmayr, who, in his introduction to riegl’s articles citied above, argued that nation (volk) or period cannot be the bearers of kunstwollen—if this were the case, then the products of the same nation (volk) would have to be of the same style, or it would happen that all the products of a certain epoch would be the same. but numerous prominent weimar-era art historians commonly conceived of race and ethnicity as decisive for individual creativity. for heinrich wölfflin, the claim that the individual artists’ creativity is determined by his or her nationality or bachelierus: ‘mihi a docto doctore domandatur causam et rationem quare opium fecit dormire: a quoi respondeo quia est in eo virtus dormitiva cujus est natura sensus assoupire’ jean-baptiste poquelin molière: le malade imaginaire, paris: magnard, , . for a general survey of this type of argument, see lars olof larsson, ‘nationalstil und nationalismus in der kunstgeschichte der zwanziger und dreissiger jahre’, in lorenz dittmann, ed., kategorien und methoden der deutschen kustgeschichte - , stuttgart: franz steiner verlag, , - . spengler, untergang, . sedlmayr, kunst und wahrheit, . he says rather vaguely that the bearer of kunstwollen is a certain group of humans that can be of different size. branko mitrović ruminations on the dark side race was the central explanatory strategy. a racial approach should not surprise us in the case of nazi art historians such as wilhelm pinder or albert erich brinckmann. european creativity, pinder says, is the product of european national character and coincides with the area between the tiber, loire and weser. it was thus the sick imagination of a viking, he explains, that made van gogh paint the way he did. in wölfflin, renaissance und barock, , one reads that northern nations (not the individual artists who lived in the north) failed to make the transition from the renaissance to baroque, from formal to formless. but even before that, ethnicity determined fundamental differences between german and italian art; wölfflin’s favourite example is what he considers the incomprehensibility of raphael’s school of athens to ‘northerners’ (heinrich wölfflin: die klassische kunst. eine einführung in die italienische renaissance, munich: f. bruckmann, , ; idem, erklären, )—even though he himself (a ‘northern’ art historian) discusses this painting extensively in klassische kunst, - . the art of the high renaissance was a free expression of italian people. (klasische kunst, .) throughout wölfflin’s opus one regularly finds the claims that some works of italian art and architecture would not be attractive to ‘northerners’ because of their ethnic background (e.g. santa maria della luce in perugia, or fra bartolomeo’s st. mark in the palazzo pitti, both examples stated in italien und deutsches formgefühl, munich: f. bruckmann, , and ). in erklären, , a high renaissance building is said to appear bare and cold to a northern traveller; but as soon as one has the correct, italian voraussetzungen, this feeling disappears. he further says that although national artistic creativity undergoes historical changes, the different styles of art produced by a country still have a common element that originates from the ground (boden) and race; the italian racial type is to be found at the same time behind the renaissance and baroque. wölfflin, italien, . for instance, the mauthalle in nuremberg and the kornhaus in ulm belong to different styles (gothic vs. baroque) but they are still german solutions of the same problem. wölfflin, italien, . similarly, in erklären we read that in spite of differences between the various epochs of german art, the identity of the same volksgeist asserts itself; in spite of differences in architectural styles, there exists a constant national way of design. wölfflin, erklären, . in the same book he explains that ruysdael’s sensibility was the result of his time and race and claims that it is possible to determine quite accurately how his creativity differed from that of the members of other germanic tribes. wölfflin, erklären, . in the introduction to his book kunstgeschichtliche grundbegriffe. das problem der stilentwicklung in der neueren kunst, munich: münchener verlag, , vi, wölfflin states that one of the aims of the book is to determine national characters. he also argues that it is impossible to avoid the discussion of the fundamental aspects of national sensitivity (empfinden) (wölfflin, grundbegriffe, ) and a whole chapter of the book is dedicated to ‘national characters’ (wölfflin, grundbegriffe, - ). in his book geist der nationen brinckmann claims that all the regions of the former italianness in art in italien und deutsches formgefühl is thus said to be characterised by the clear definition and separation of shapes, whereas in the north (‘bei uns im norden’), proportions of bodies or surfaces are not decisive. wölfflin, italien, . italian paintings create an artificial unity of groups of persons, whereas it is characteristic of german imagination that everything pertains to feeling the space and content. wölfflin, italien, - . german understanding of space is infinite and moved, whereas brunelleschi’s space is always a limited and defined form. wölfflin, italien, . italian art is based on homogenous form which contributes to the total harmony; in german architecture a great diversity of proportions and forms relate to each other on a single building. wölfflin, italien, . german architecture deals more easily with irregularity. wölfflin, italien, . italian faces are more regular than german faces not only in the art but in reality too. wölfflin, italien, . italians have the capacity to monumentalize everything. wölfflin, italien, . sociological explanations are always peripheral, and what is central for art-historical explanations is the ‘form- und vorstellungsweise einer nation’. wölfflin, italien, . pinder, generation, . for the discussions of the germanic nature of van gogh’s art see ron manheim, ‘the ‘germanic’ van gogh: a case study of cultural annexation’, simiolus: netherlands’ quarterly for the history of art, : , , - . ‘die kranke wikingerphantasie van goghs läßt bäume und blumen, erdschollen and wolken lodern und kreisen, als flammende gebärdensprach’. wilhelm pinder, ‘pflicht und anspruch der wissenschaft’, in wilhelm pinder: gesammelte aufsätze aus den jahren - , leo bruhns, ed., leipzig: verlag e. a. seemann, , - . branko mitrović ruminations on the dark side roman world where germanic tribes did not settle (southern italy, sicily, french provence) have remained culturally fruitless. but it is also to be admitted, he notes further, that the areas inhabited by racially pure germanic population, which lacked the roman base, have also remained unproductive; culturally productive regions are those where races mixed, such as northern italy, east france, southern germany. ( ) insofar as they wanted to assert the pre-eminence of gothic art, german historians had to accept that gothic was not purely germanic: worringer thus observed that the germanic race was the conditio sine qua non gothic art; race however should not be taken in the sense of racial purity, he says, but one should rather look at those nations in whose constitution the germanic race played a decisive role. a particularly bizarre product of this type of methodology is dagobert frey’s book englisches wesen im spiegel seiner kunst. one could continue listing examples of holist and racial thinking among weimar-era historians—but my question is, how an individualist explanation of this collective phenomenon can be provided. it would certainly be absurd to say that their ethnic background or some kind of germanic historiographical essence predetermined the way weimar-era historians wrote art history. in the opening of his book spengler says that he writes history the way he has to, being a german historian. nevertheless, when he, later in the book, argues that diocletian was the first caliph ( ) and that the pantheon was the first mosque ( ), it would certainly be inappropriate to say that his german ethnic background made him indulge in absurd fantasies. one would want to provide an individualist explanation that is fair published in the midst of the war, the book expresses no negative prejudices about the english, but rather treats english art with all the respect appropriate for the art of the germans’ racially closest relatives. the book assumes a strong causal relationship between individual creativity and racial background. vanbrugh’s feeling for three- dimensionality is un-english according to frey and needs to be explained by his flemish racial origin ( ); similarly, on the basis of family portraits it is possible to establish that hogarth had celtic racial characteristics, which explains the form of his artistic expression ( ). albert erich brinckmann: geist der nationen. italiener-franzosen-deutsche. hamburg: hoffmann und compe, . brinckmann’s major concern is not to assert supremacy of germans, but rather to insist on the differences between various nations. brinckmann, geist. he even cites goethe’s view ‘daß das wahrhaft verdienstliche sich dadurch auszeichnet, daß es der ganzen menschheit angehört’ and alberti ‘ non pro nobis sed pro humanitate scribimus’. brinckmann, geist, . german vergeisterung is not cartesian; it is gefühlsbetont. it considers joy and suffering as worthy of representation. brinckmann, geist, . the method of this vergeisterung is not logic or ratio but schöpferische wille. brinckmann, geist, . german sense for experiencing nature is stronger than in other nations. brinckmann, geist, . ‘denn die darstellung ist weniger objektiviert und inniger verbunden mit der mentalität des darstellenden’. brinckmann, geist, . german sensibility for form and colour are fundamentally different from those of italians or french. brinckmann, geist, . german renaissance painting emphasises individualities, for a german is the concept of composition too poor, and a german does not see a sum but only sums, pluralities. brinckmann, geist, . german art is marked by the lack of proportion even when they can be measured; and the wille zur disproportion is visible also in architecture; compositions full of tension almost become grotesque. brinckmann, geist, . he asks whether a german is a ‘starrköpfiger individualist’. brinckmann, geist, . wilhelm worringer, formprobleme der gotik, munich: r. piper, , - . dagobert frey, englisches wesen im spiegel seiner kunst, stuttgart: kohlhammer, . the first page of the book has an alternative title: englisches wesen in der bildenden kunst. branko mitrović ruminations on the dark side to his german colleagues and compatriots. denials consider wilhelm pinder’s statement that no maori, but only a european, could paint like gauguin. in his biography of adolf hitler, joachim fest describes how the young hitler, while he lived unemployed in vienna, used to carry a photograph of his father, a medium ranking provincial austro-hungarian bureaucrat, in the appropriate uniform, and show it to the people he talked to. the statement is actually true—just as it is also true that no german or other frenchman can paint like gauguin either. gauguin was an original artist. but pinder is not making his point in order to emphasize gauguin’s originality. he is also not saying that only a frenchman can paint like gauguin. pinder’s implicit point is, rather, that a great painter like gauguin had something in common with a german like himself: they are both europeans. racial theorists and holist historians, often sound like a person who hangs portraits of important people on the wall of his or her living room and tells the guests that these are his or her ancestors. in order to feel the need to fabricate one’s own importance by using such methods, one must suffer from perceiving oneself as unimportant. a student of the works of weimar-era holist historians will sooner or later notice how hard (in fact, impossible) it is to find sections where they argue the inferiority or present relative weaknesses of their own ethnicity and race. in other words, it is always useful to listen to what historians say about themselves when they write about various groups. a particularly common strategy when it comes to denials is appropriation. when showing the photograph of his father, the young hitler was appropriating for himself the social status he did not have. pinder was similarly claiming identity with gauguin when he subsumed the french painter under european identity. narratives about identity are often complex agglomerations of appropriations and denials—and appropriations and denials often constitute the world-view of historians as well. a good example is a protest letter written by max dvořák to italian art historians in , in reaction to the italian government’s repatriation of a number of artworks this was not a sign of an excessive attachment to the father, but, rather, a method to legitimise oneself, to compensate for one’s insecurities and classify oneself (in one’s own eyes in the first place) as more than a proletarian. insecure people tend to use communication with others in order reassure themselves; in such cases it is often more important to listen to what their statements implicitly deny about themselves than what they say about the topic they are talking about. it is precisely this function of holist historical explanations of human actions—their great ability to assuage numerous types of insecurities—that one needs to consider here. saying something about the group one belongs to (and how it differs from other groups) is an indirect way to say something about oneself. this strategy is likely to be used by those individuals who feel that they do not have enough to say about themselves as individuals. obviously, a person who does not feel deficient that way, will not feel the need to invoke a compensatory narrative about one’s own group and the way it differs from other groups. pinder, generation, . joachim fest, hitler. eine biographie. berlin: ulstein, , . branko mitrović ruminations on the dark side from viennese museums—an act that at the time caused a substantial emotional reaction among the viennese. the letter leaves aside the legal aspects of repatriation (who actually owned the paintings) and opens with a surprising accusation that by repatriating the paintings of cima da conegliano, vitore carpaccio and bartolomeo vivarini, the italians are requisitioning foreign artworks. dvořák then lists patronisingly the intellectual debt of italian art historians to their german-speaking and especially austrian colleagues: ‘you have learnt from us…you have been our disciples…’ and in the process introduces a particularly pregnant and multilayered ‘we’-form. another strategy in which holist historiography is used in order to assert the superiority (i.e. deny the inferiority) of one’s own group are fallacious statements pertaining to the inconceivability of a certain fact, concept or idea to the members of another group. such claims abound in holist writings on intellectual history, though, in a different form, they can be made from the individualist position as well. insofar as we assume that the letter is about the repatriation of artworks, his argument is nonsensical: it implies that, since the italians learnt to do art history from the austrians, austrian institutions have the right to retain italian artworks even if the latter were obtained illegally. in fact, the letter soon drops the topic of repatriation behind the angry self-praise of the austrian contribution to the italians’ understanding of their own art. by his extensive employment of the appropriative ‘we’-form dvořák uses the letter to tell his italian colleagues (in reality, to re-assure himself) of his own importance and that he ranks among their austrian teachers. at the same time, this appropriation is also a denial: for dvořák himself is not austrian—he is a czech living in vienna and writing in german. as for the topic of repatriation, the letter could have been much more damning if he had written it as a czech, an impartial, third-party observer and if the repeated use of ‘we’ had been played down. but this is not what the letter is about; the repatriation of artworks is an occasion for dvořák to satisfy his need to contemplate his own significance, constituted through his appropriated austrian identity. max dvořák, ‘ein brief an die italienischen fachgenossen’, in hans tietze, die entführung von wiener kunstwerken nach italien: eine darlegung unseres rechtspunktes, vienna: anton schroll & c., , - . i owe gratitude to jonathan blower for providing me with a copy of the letter. for the wider context of the repatriation of italian artistic works, including their identification, see jonathan blower, ‘an introduction to max dvořák’s denkmalpflege’, paper presented at the meeting of network for the history of viennese art historiography, glasgow, - october . it is not controversial, for instance, that plato, because he was an ancient greek, could not have conceived of nuclear physics—an individualist historian will argue that plato’s individual contacts did not enable him to acquire the necessary knowledge to conceive of nuclear physics. the holist explanation, however, is that plato could not have conceived of nuclear physics because as an ancient greek he was constitutionally incapacitated from doing that—the way, for instance, some animal species cannot see colours. since individual intellectual capacities, according to the holist account, are constituted by the individual’s membership in a group, insofar as certain groups did not develop certain ideas, this means that the individuals who belonged to these he actually talks about ‘requisition fremder kulturgüter’, dvořák, ‘ein brief’, . dvořák, ‘ein brief’, . see mitrović, ‘intellectual history’. branko mitrović ruminations on the dark side groups were constitutionally incapable of having such ideas. in other words, the argument is not that some groups did not develop certain ideas because no individual belonging to that group formulated such ideas, but, rather, that no individual came up with that idea because the group could not do it. spengler was the great master of this kind of argument. in his untergang des abendlandes we read that the ancient greeks and romans were incapable of writing history beyond discussing contemporary events (i.e. he forgets about herodotus or livy) ( ); that a ‘real russian’ finds darwin’s theory incomprehensible the way a ‘real arab’ cannot understand the copernican system ( ); that the greeks had no sense for ceremony in public life. ( ) a russian has no relationship to god as the father, his ethos being that of brotherly love, says spengler ( ); the very sound of the russian word for sky (nyebo) emphasizes horizontality, and a russian looks towards to the horizon, whereas a westerner looks up, for which reason no russian can be an astronomer. (if someone were to argue that the same word is used in copernicus’ polish, spengler has a ready answer and explains elsewhere that copernicus was an ethnic viking. ( )) a good example of a widely circulated weimar-era thesis about inconceivability is erwin panofsky’s erroneous, but often cited view from ‘perspective as a symbolic form’, that before the early renaissance it was impossible to conceive of space as a homogenous and isotropic medium. until he left germany, panofsky often relied on arguments about inconceivability in his writing. for instance, in his article ‘the concept of kunstwollen’ he argues that polygnotos did not paint a naturalistic landscape because, as a result of the ‘necessity that predetermined his will’, he could only have wanted to paint an unnaturalistic landscape. erwin panofsky, ‘die perspektive als ‘symbolische form’’, in fritz saxl, ed., vorträge der bibliothek warburg - , leipzig and berlin . citations according to the reprint in panofsky, deutschsprachige aufsätze, vol. , - . see also english translation erwin panofsky: perspective as symbolic form, translated by christopher s. wood, new york: zone books, . few panofsky’s papers have been more cited for the past century, and few have weathered so badly. because of the curvature of the retina, panofsky claimed, the geometrical construction of perspective, (which provides an image on a plane) does not correspond to what is actually perceived—in fact, as subsequently pointed out by maurice henri léonard pirenne, optics, painting & photography, cambridge: cambridge university press , - , we never see the retinal image but the object outside the eye; the geometrical construction of perspective merely depicts the intersection of the picture plane and the rays that connect the object with the eye. at the same time, panofsky’s argument substantially depended on an inaccurate interpretation of the technical terminology of euclid’s optica as well as aristotle’s discussion of space in the physics. (for misunderstanding euclid’s terminology, see c. d. brownson, ‘euclid’s optics and its compatibility with linear perspective’, archive for history of exact sciences, : , september , - . for the misinterpretation of the section about space in aristotle’s physics, see branko mitrović, ‘leon battista alberti and the homogeneity of space’, journal of the society of architectural historians, : , december , - . additionally, according to the definition of homogenous space panofsky provided, his argument actually implies that no pre-renaissance architect could have figured out that measuring one and the same wall from one end to another, and vice versa, would give the same result. (see mitrović, ‘alberti and homogeneity’.) ‘weil er—kraft einer sein psychologisches wollen vorherbestimmenden notwendigkeit—nichts anders als eine unnaturalistische landschaft wollen konnte’ erwin panofsky, ‘der begriff des kunstwollens’, panofsky, deutschsprchge aufsätze, vol. , - . branko mitrović ruminations on the dark side looking through denials it is thus tempting, when interpreting weimar-era historians’ holist claims, to consider what these claims deny and not merely what they assert—in other words, to examine whether it may be possible to explain weimar era historians’ holist propensities, for instance, as a result of insecurities in relation to older european cultures, possibly additionally aggravated by the outcome of the first world war. a simplified and very general explanatory thesis would say something like: weimar-era historians’ adoption of holist methodology was motivated by insecurities. the thesis relies on (constitutes) a psychological claim; we have seen that such claims are hard to avoid in individualist historiography. one should certainly bear in mind that such explanations may easily end up as armchair psychology. at the same time, insofar as historians deal with the motivations and decisions of historical figures, they deal with psychological facts that ultimately must have psychological explanations: an explanation of the motivation of a historical figure that is not psychologically credible cannot be historically credible either. the importance of psychological clarification of the concept of insecurities is further strengthened by the fact that the concept is much less commonly used than concepts such as motivation or decision. additionally, without a psychological clarification of the concept, saying that the holist tendencies of weimar-era art historians were insecurity motivated is a circular claim: it says that the insecurities of weimar-era scholars made them adopt a certain methodology and assumptions, while all we know about these insecurities is that they made a group of scholars adopt a certain methodology and assumptions. only psychology can properly provide us with the wider picture that would enable us to overcome such circular reasoning. however, before one can even start looking for such a psychological clarification, it is necessary to ask whether there is at all such a phenomenon as insecurities in history writing, whether it can be defined and described. without this, it would be pointless to look for a psychological explanation. my motivation for analysing the possibilities of the application of this concept in explaining the holist propensities of weimar-era art historians is precisely that such an analysis provides a reasonably comprehensive picture of the phenomenon. it seems plausible to argue that a certain historiographical claim assuages insecurities (and was used to do so) if: a) the claim denies the perceived inferiority (often by asserting the superiority) of the author or the group he or she identifies with or he or she writes for; while, at the same time, b) the claim relies on contradictory statements, statements that cannot be verified, contradict the facts that would have been known to the author or the beliefs that were widespread in the context in which the author worked; branko mitrović ruminations on the dark side and c) the claim does not provide any pragmatic, direct, gain for the person(s) whose insecurities it is said to assuage. it is pointless to rely on insecurities when explaining historical statements that are not contradictory, counterintuitive and contrary to what we otherwise know about the author’s beliefs. in that case, the historian may have been simply doing his or her job well. also, a historian may introduce fallacious or contradictory claims in order to achieve certain pragmatic (or even personal) gains: in that case too, one cannot say that these claims were insecurity motivated. can it happen that a historiographical claim satisfies all three requirements but is nevertheless not insecurity motivated? it certainly can. insecurities are invoked here in order to explain, rationally, historians’ irrational claims —‘irrational’ often in the sense that they contradict other beliefs of these historians. since we cannot explain these historians’ statements as consistent with their other beliefs, the assumption is that sometimes, these claims can still be rationally explained on the basis of a specific motivation (i.e. insecurities) that drives them. insecurity-based explanations merely expand the pool of rationally explainable statements made by a historical figure (a historian, in this case) beyond those statements that can be rationally explained as consistent with other beliefs of that historical figure. when applying the above three criteria and classifying a certain claim as still rationally explainable because it is insecurity-motivated, we may thus be giving the benefit of the doubt to a historian who is genuinely ranting. nevertheless, if a historian’s writing systematically manifests a certain type of irrational denial (e.g. in the form of the claim of one’s own superiority) in relation to a certain perceived inferiority, we can assume with reasonable confidence that we are indeed dealing with an insecurity-driven discourse. a good illustration of insecurity-driven scholarship (according to the tripartite definition stated above) is the variegated cluster of denials and appropriations that characterises the attitude of weimar-era art historians’ to the italian renaissance. (note that some of the claims that follow are explicitly holist, while others are fragments used to formulate wider holist perspectives.) rage in his book italien und das deutsche formgefühl, heinrich wölfflin described the feeling of unease during the celebrations marking the th anniversary of dürer’s death in nuremberg in . the unease was caused by the awareness that germany’s greatest visual artist sought to learn in italy, and that an ‘essentially foreign art, such as italian’ exercised such a huge impact on him. wölfflin: italien und das deutsche formgefühl, . wölfflin’s book ‘[ dürer]...italienische lehre aufgesucht hat und daß eine wesensfremde kunst wie die italienische gerade ihn, den führenden deutschen künstler, so stark in ihren bann ziehen konnte, womit doch notwendig ein gefährlicher gegensatz zur heimatlichen tradition entstand. das war es denn auch, was branko mitrović ruminations on the dark side describes differences between the italian and german sense of form in order to show that german visual sensibilities and consequently art are different, but not inferior to italian. his is no mean presumption, since he implicitly assumes the right to prescribe to dürer (that is, albrecht dürer himself) what kind of art he should have liked to be a good german. that german and italian arts should not be compared is max dvořák’s important point as well. in his study of the van eyck brothers, he declares that the cult of the renaissance is an unexplainable anomaly of historiography. in his other writings dvořák warns against judging medieval art by the objectivity of its representation, since this means imposing on it the standards of the art of quattro- and cinquecento. for worringer, the renaissance was a disaster that disoriented medieval thinking, and made it into a mere means to achieve scientific truth. very much like dvořák, worringer protests against comparisons between medieval and renaissance arts. he argues with great passion that one cannot ascribe higher cultural achievements to renaissance rome than to the medieval paris of the high gothic. in the renaissance, he says, one does not find the sensibilities of antiquity, but merely the archaeological knowledge of latin antiquity. wie ein schatten auf jenen gedächtnisfeiern lag und selbst wenn man dem kühnen eroberer fremder fernen beifall klatschte, so mußte dieser romanismus eben doch als eine störung der natürlichen entwicklung erscheinen. mit der wohlwollenden mahnung, diese dinge nicht zu ernst zu nehmen, ist nicht geholfen. dürer selbst spricht dagegen: er hat italien ernst genommen.’ wölfflin, italien, . a more generous view of the renaissance was expressed by brinckmann, who observed, in his book geist der nationen, the tendency of german scholarship to regard the influences of the renaissance as purely negative; but in see note . max dvořák, das rätsel der brüder van eyck, munich: artur rosenauer, , , reprint vienna: wuv, . see also rampley, matthew: ‘max dvořák: art history and the crisis of modernity’, art history, : , april , - , . max dvořák, ‘idealismus und naturalismus in der gotschen skulptur und malerei’, in max dvořák, kunstgeschichte als geistesgeschichte, munich: piper, , - , - . ‘es war eine katastrophe, die das ganze mittelalterliche denken desorientierte und aus dem geleise hob, als durch die renaissance das denken, das bisher selbstzweck gewesen war, zum blossen mittel zum zweck, nämlich zur erkenntnis einer ausser ihm liegenden wissenschaftlichen wahrheit degradiert wurde, als der erkenntniszweck alles und der erkenntnisvorgang nichts wurde. da verlor das denken seine abstrakte selbstherrlichkeit und wurde dienend; es wurde zum sklaven der wahrheit.’ worringer, formprobleme, . ‘nein, in dieser beziehung sehen wir heute wohl klar und begreifen, daß es sich da um epochen handelt, in denen eben zwei verschiedene und inkommensurable kulturgedanken die stufe ihrer vollkommensten ausprägung gefunden haben. und dennoch bleibt uns, schwer korrigierbar, im historischen gefühl immer noch jene humanistische akzentsetzung, die keine mehrpoligkeit des historischen geschehens anerkennt, sondern uns die renaissance als einpoligen mittelpunkt des histo- rischen kreislaufes aufoktroyiert. mit welchem rechtstitel die renaissance diesen anspruch durchzusetzen vermochte, ist klar: mit einer berufung auf die antike, die nur auf italienischem boden wirklich legitim sein könne, weil nur da bluthafte kontinuität der antiken tradition vorhanden sei.’ wilhelm worringer: griechentum und gotik, - . ‘will heute einer noch im ernst behaupten, das italien der renaissance habe, absolut genommen, eine höhere kultur gehabt als etwa das frankreich der mittelalterlichen hochblüte? daß das rom julius ii kulturell schwergewichtiger gewesen sei als das paris ludwigs des heiligen? daß der petersdom als künstlerische höchstleistung ein bedeutungsvolleres kulturdokument sei als der dom von reims oder sonst eine der französischen glanzkathedralen?’ worringer, griechentum und gotik, . ‘…als renaissance soll nicht gelten, das wiedererwachendes und wahlverwandt antwortendes gefühl für die antike, sondern archäologische kenntnis der antike.’ worringer, griechentum und gotik, . branko mitrović ruminations on the dark side brinckmann’s opinion, no nation can exclude itself from the western spiritual community. an important aspect of the negative attitude to the renaissance is the rejection of anything that is referred to by the word humanism. for spengler, the term is meaningless, since humanity is either a biological concept or an empty term. ( ) wölfflin, in his italien und deutsches formgefühl cancels even this zoological unity: the north, he says, has a fundamentally different concept of humanity from italy. ( ) for dvořák, the study of the humanities, humaniora, lost significance with classical antiquity; in his view, it was an error of renaissance humanists to believe that humaniora of antiquity could be saved. for worringer, humanism is a mere educational ideal that was defeated by the reformation; it is a subjective historical view, derived from the use of latin language. humanism in contemporary history writing, he complains, is a dictate of italian art historians. the rejection or appropriation of the renaissance discovery of perspective is another significant ingredient of the same project. should renaissance artists have discovered how human visual perception actually works and applied this knowledge to their art, then one could not deny special status to renaissance paintings. for spengler, alberti’s and brunelleschi’s discovery of perspective actually belongs to northern art. ( - ) dagobert frey denied that perspective was discovered in the renaissance, because all the necessary mathematical and optical knowledge was previously available—so there was nothing to discover. panofsky’s thesis that perspective as a way of seeing is just a cultural construct belongs to this type of argument as well. ‘it is a bizarre idea to believe in the rebirth of any kind of ancient art in the west in the fifteenth century,’ wrote spengler. ( ) ‘the renaissance was born from spite. it lacks the depth, extent and the confidence of form-building instincts….it is brinckmann, geist, . ‘es ist ein auf die humanistenliteratur zurückgehender kardinalirrtum, wenn man glaubt, daß die humaniora das einzige vermächtnis der antike für die folgezeit gewesen sind. sie sind mit den auf naturrecht begründeten militärischen und polytheistischen national- und eroberungsstaaten zusammengebrochen, und es blieben nur membra disjecta übrig; ihr im naiven materialismus wurzelnder sinn ging verloren, und so wurden sie an sich wertlos wie eine schrift, die man nicht lesen kann.’ dvořák, ‘idealismus’, . dvořák, ‘idealismus’, and . ‘der beschauliche wirklichkeitsfremde humanismus, dieses privileg saturierter existenzen, vermochte auf die dauer das gärend, ein voller entwicklung befindliche volksbewusstsein nicht niederzuhalten. er wird durch jene grosse volksbewegung, die zur reformation führt, korrigiert. an die stelle der bildungsideale treten wieder religiöse ideale, der humanismus weicht der reformation.’ worringer, formprobleme, . worringer, griechentum, . ‘ich behaupte, daß diese akzentsetzung immer noch die vom italienischen geschichtsschreibungshumanismus diktiert ist. immer noch trägt im ablauf der stile und kulturen die renaissance den das taktgefüge des periodenrhythmus regelnden hauptakzent. das ist für den, der vorurteilslos an die wertung der kulturhöhen herangeht, nichts anderes als ein humanistisches vorurteil, aus dessen diktatorischer suggestivkraft der wissende schon gleich jenes roma locuta est causa finita est heraushört, das für alle zwangsvorstellungen unseres geschichtlichen sinnes so entscheidend geworden ist.’ worringer: griechentum, - . dagobert frey, gotik und renaissance als grundlagen der modernen weltanschauung, augsburg: dr. benno filser verlag, , . panofsky, ‘perspektive’. branko mitrović ruminations on the dark side the only epoch in history whose theory was more consistent than its achievements.’ ( ) the renaissance was no more than a failed attempt to reject gothic, we gather from his book; while gothic encompassed the entirety of human life, the achievements of the renaissance were limited to the arts. it never affected west- european ways of thinking or life. ( ) a strictly ancient capital is simply not to be found in renaissance works ( ), while palladio’s architectural treatise had no influence in the west. ( ) leonardo, raphael and michelangelo were the only great men italy had produced since dante; in spite of their efforts to revive antiquity in accordance with medicean theories, they actually remained gothic artists ( ). the paintings of filippino lippi, ghirlandajo and boticelli, pollaiulo and even leonardo have much more dutch in them than ancient, argues spengler. ( ) a different and paradoxically affirmative view of the italian renaissance we find in ludwig woltmann’s die germanen und die renaissance, published a decade before the - war. woltmann’s starting assumption is that the presence of the blond race determines the cultural worth of a nation. consequently, their cultural achievements prove that renaissance italians must have been predominantly of germanic origin, an offspring of ancient goths and longobards. ludwig woltmann, die germanen und die renaissance, leipzig: thüringische verlagsanstalt . the renaissance sense for freedom, we thus learn, is germanic in its origin; ( ) and the germanic race, he reminds us, is the ideal of beauty according to procopius ( ), giotto ( ) and the renaissance ( ). woltmann thus argues that arnolfo di cambio and lorenzo ghiberti were germans because of their germanic names ( ); that brunelleschi’s name comes from german brünell ( ), alberti from hildebrand ( ); bramante’s name comes from german braken, brehm ( ); buonarotti comes from bonne, bohn and rohde, rothe. ( ) woltmann’s list of popes with germanic names takes two whole pages ( - ). he also lists important renaissance italians who were blond: luca della robbia and michelozzi had blond beards and hair ( ); savonarola had blue eyes and the family name could be germanic ( ); palladio, according to a portrait, had pale eyes; leonardo da vinci had germanic racial constitution, blond hair and beard. ( - ) (the sources actually do not mention that he had blond hair and beard, woltmann admits, but since they praise the beauty of his hair, we can infer that it was blond.) woltmann’s conclusion is, as he states, that - % of italian genius belonged to the germanic race and that the italian renaissance is an achievement of the gothic and longobards tribes that immigrated into italy in the early middle ages. ( ) the reader is, however, left with little doubt that what motivates the book is the uncomfortable perception that the same race achieved much less on the less sunny side of the alps—and since a book like this is a public act, this perception is not only the author’s, but shared by those readers who approved of its content; it was also obviously published by a publisher who expected it to be bought and to meet with the approval of a certain segment of the general public. ‘der gehalt volkes an blonder rasse bestimmt seinen kulturwert, und der niedergang der höheren kulturen hat seine anthropoligische ursache im aussterben der blonden.’ woltmann, germanen, . branko mitrović ruminations on the dark side wider framework of insecurity-based historical explanations these simultaneous and passionate denials and appropriations of the renaissance illustrate the importance of paying attention to the insecurities that individual scholarly works strive to assuage—and they also vividly depict insecurity as a historiographical phenomenon. a useful framework for the analysis of the methodological explanatory use of this phenomenon can be found in panofsky’s essay ‘history of art as a humanistic discipline’, in which panofsky endeavoured to redefine his methodology and re-position his work in relation to the individualism- holism debate. in the essay, panofsky defined humanistic art history as marked by assumptions of the free will and rationality of human (historical) subjects on the one hand, and the awareness of human frailties on the other. the three crucial concepts—rationality, free will and frailties— remained however undefined. for our purposes here, it is enough to assume that a historian and a historical figure share the same rationality insofar as they regard the same beliefs and statements as non- contradictory. in a situation where a historian finds a historical figure’s statements (beliefs) mutually contradictory, he or she will not be able to explain them as consistent with that person’s other views. consequently, in panofsky’s scheme, insecurity can be seen as part of human frailties, a tendency to make counterfactual denials or adopt beliefs (contradictory to one’s other beliefs) about one’s own superiority when facing a situation that suggests (in one’s own perception) one’s own inferiority. since panofsky postulates the rationality and free will of historical figures, it is also implied that a person can overcome this frailty by analysing one’s own motivation—although we cannot know or predict whether an individual will manage to overcome or succumb to this specific frailty. assumptions of the free will and rationality of historical figures go hand-in-hand with individualist historiography; once a historian postulates such rationality and free will, it becomes impossible to say that the decisions or reasoning of these figures were determined by their social context. see mitrović, ‘humanist art history’. individual weimar-era art historians could have decided not to act the way they did (for instance, not to write the books with holist arguments that they wrote). the insecurities-based explanation describes the insecurities to which individuals succumbed; it does not say that they had to succumb. the thesis does not say that it was necessary that german weimar-era art historians make a certain type erwin panofsky, ‘the history of art as a humanistic discipline’, first published in t. e. greene, ed., the meaning of the humanities, port washington: kennikat press, , - . cited here according to the version published in erwin panofsky, meaning in the visual arts, chicago: chicago university press, , - . panofsky does not say it, but, in fact, one ends up with the individualist approach to history writing even if one merely admits that humans’ possession of free will and universal rationality count among irresolvable philosophical problems: if one does not know whether human beings possess free will, one cannot claim that their actions are predetermined by the group they belong to—and holist historiography becomes impossible. also, even a historian who denies free will (e.g. on religious grounds) need not necessary adopt the holist position in history writing: believing that god pre- determined human acting need not necessarily mean that god pre-determined it in a way that individuals’ actions follow these individuals’ membership in specific groups—except in the trivial sense, that all individuals who make certain actions belong to the group of individuals who make such actions. branko mitrović ruminations on the dark side of assumption in their writing; it merely describes the kind of intellectual weakness they yielded to. insecurities that affect history writing need not belong exclusively to historians; they can be environmental rather than authorial. let us imagine that an extensive study of the individual psychologies of a great number of weimar-era scholars has indeed shown that each of them was narcissistically injured and as a result his history-writing was insecurity-motivated. such a study would provide an individualist account of a commonly shared aspect of a dominant stream of weimar- era scholarship—but how complete would this account be? a scholarship of a certain era is not only the set of ideas expressed in the writings of the historians of those times; it is also constituted by the reaction to these ideas, their acceptance and rejection, the fact that historians write with motivation to have their work accepted or suppress their judgments in order to avoid confrontations. it is of limited help to describe the personal insecurities of individual historians, because the entire context in which and for which they were writing also needs to be understood individualistically as the generator of a certain, commonly shared characteristic of history writing. history writing is often, for instance, motivated by the authors’ desires and expectations to achieve a certain reception; some historians make careers by pleasing their contemporaries, others fear upsetting their colleagues and yet others simply adopt, without questioning, the assumptions that are widespread in the works of their peers. one should merely try to imagine what kind of heroic stance it would take to defend the renaissance in the context in which it was so passionately envied. (indeed, it has been often observed that renaissance studies had a peculiar position within the geisteswissenschaften of the weimar era and that all prominent renaissance scholars left germany after . we are thus not merely dealing with historians’ individual insecurities. in order to understand the impact of the insecurities of the general public, it is particularly important to pay attention to other contemporary works that, though often different in content, successfully assuaged the same insecurities: from this angle, spengler’s denial and woltmann’s germanic appropriation of the renaissance say the same thing. the reason why i have given so much space here to spengler’s nonsensical claims is their exceptionally wide reception in the context in which they were made. der untergang des abendlandes had few, if any, truly positive reviews in scholarly journals when it came out. ) ‘like hans baron, in fact all the leading representatives of renaissance scholarship left germany, including paul oskar kristeller, felix gilbert, erwin panofsky, fritz saxl, and edgar wind. and they did not have many students left in germany.’ otto gerhard oexle: ‘was there anything to learn? american historian and german medieval scholarship: a comment’ in patrick j. geary, medieval germany in america, washington: german historical institute, . published without pagination. see also horst günther, ‘hans baron und die emigrierte renaissance’, an introduction to hans baron, bürgersinn und humanismus in florenz der renaissance, berlin: verlag klaus wagenbach, , - , esp. - . although historians saw through its the anonymous reviewer for the science news-letter, : , may , , - , observes: ‘in scope of conception, profusion of learning, boldness of generalization, impressiveness of utterance, eloquence of language, spengler ranks with the german philosophers of the old school, with hegel, schopenhauer and hartmann. he also shows the characteristics of the german philosopher in his overloading of sentences, cloudiness of meaning, arrogance of assertion and intolerance of opposing opinion. a work that no thinker can afford to ignore, however much he may disagree with its thesis.’ in a review by e. r. branko mitrović ruminations on the dark side charlatanry, over a hundred thousand copies of the book were sold in a relatively short period of time. frank h. hankins, in a review in social forces, noted ‘this speaks well for the germans, for he [spengler] is as hard to read as a muddy metaphysician; and two volumes of him would keep the average member of the intelligentsia busy long evenings for weeks.’ there obviously existed an intelligentsia who were receptive to the book’s message and considered it important. anyone exploring the intellectual and cultural history of the weimar era must bear in mind that books published in that context were predominantly published for individuals who wanted to read (and believe) ideas akin to spengler’s. extensive comparative studies may try to reconstruct the particular ideas that attracted their approval the most, and for that purpose it is reasonable to compare spengler’s book not only with works of similar content, but with those whose denials assuage the same insecurities. history writing, after all, occurs in a social environment and not in a vacuum; saying that society consists of individuals means also saying that the social environment is an environment of individual interactions. epilogue considering the great impact of german-speaking historiography on scholarship in the united states and great britain after , one has to wonder how many and what aspects of the weimar-era holist propensities were transferred to english b. for the journal of hellenic studies : , , - one reads: ‘that some such [claver and original] observations may be there in this sea of pretentious verbiage i would not even now deny, but my own search for them has not been fruitful: i have dived repeatedly but failed to bring up a pearl: someone else may have better fortune’. ‘there can be no doubt of the man’s erudition; that he is a genius is sufficiently evident from the mysticism, egotism, contradictions, disputable assertions, and scanty intelligibility of his work’, frank h. hankins, ‘the latest in the philosophy of history’, review of the decline of the west in social forces, : , december , - . a particularly inspired review by cecil forsyth, published in the musical quarterly in , had the form of an imaginary university examination paper on spengler’s book. it included questions such as: ‘if columbus had made his discovery in b.c., what pharaoh would now be on the throne of america? would american music now be nilotic, chaotic, tommy-rotic or jazzotic?’ or: ‘show how the byzantine arabesque was nothing but an early meander-synthesis of the christyminstrelfolkmelody ‘ancient nigritic joseph’’. cecil forsyth, ‘a musical examination-paper on spengler’s ‘the decline of the west’’, the musical quarterly, : , april , - . ernst troeltsch, untitled review, historische zeitschrift : , , - speaks of a book ‘von reichsten kenntnissen, wenn auch der an sich nicht verwerfliche diltantismus in ihm mitunter an die grenzen des groben unfugs geht.’ ( ) and ‘es wimmelt von falschen angaben, phastasiereichen behauptungen und schiefen analogien, es fehlt fast alle kritische sicherung der tatsachen und jedes bedürfnis danach’. ( ) the book itself, he says, is ‘ein bedeutsames kulturdokument aus der zeit einer geistigen krisis der deutschen wissenschaft, ein zeignis der überall spürbaren empörung gegen die exakte philologie und gegen die schulmäßig-formalistische philosophie der katheder.’ ( ). the success of the book has to do, in troeltsch’s opinion, with the contemporary german tastes: ‘der grundsätzliche größenwahn, das majestätische einstoßen offener türen, die feierliche ankündigung von carmina non prius audita, das befehlsmäßige pronunciamento von paradoxien und kecken einfällen gehört offenbar zu den stileigenntümlichkeiten der heutigen deutschen literatur, auch wenn es sich um dinge handelt, die auch ohne diesen jargon ihrer wirkung— wenigstens bei ernsten und sachlichen denkern—sicher wären. aber man nennt das heute ‘persönlichkeit’, und das deutsche publikum verlangt das, so sehr eine feinere humanität gerade von diesen schlechten manieren sich reinigen wollte.’ ( - ) similarly another german scholar, j. ruska. review, isis, : , , - . hankins, ‘latest’, branko mitrović ruminations on the dark side speaking scholarship at the time. if holist tendencies were a result of weimar-era scholars’ interaction with their environment, what happened when that environment changed? the scholars who escaped the nazis found themselves in an environment marked by very different political values—values that largely derived from a different view on the relationship between the individual and society. they had very good reasons to re-examine the wider implications as well as the origins of their methodologies. gombrich famously never ceased to warn against the totalitarian implications of holist methodologies, while panofsky worked, for decades, on a project that de facto amounted to restructuring the central themes of weimar-era art history into the individualist framework. nevertheless, intellectual adaptation is always a slow process. james ackerman, who, as a student of the generation of weimar-era refugees, witnessed this process first hand, observed that even in the german context of the nineteenth century, the implicit, ultimately hegelian, philosophical assumptions contradicted the positivist interest in facts as well as the concept of individuality and interest in the uniqueness of the creative act. during the reception of weimar-era methodologies into english-speaking scholarship, this contradiction was ‘so poorly perceived that judgments based on both positions are likely to be found in the same work, and particularly in textbooks’ while at the same time ‘what makes the situation insupportable is that most of us do not even share the philosophical concepts the positions are based on’. it would be, however, naïve to think that weimar era scholars arrived, after , to an environment that was utterly devoid of holist tendencies and the insecurities that, this article has suggested, typically motivate them. in analytic philosophy and in the humanities in general, the s and s were the heyday of the linguistic turn and the widespread belief that thinking always occurs in a language: in other words, that human reasoning processes and the contents of human beliefs are always already predetermined by the socially available conventions which enable the communication of their content. in german intellectual context, this is an old idea, going back to johann gottfried herder and early romanticism. the view that all thinking is verbal was also one of the central assumptions of english-speaking, analytic philosophy and remained almost unchallenged until and john searle’s seminal book intentionality. the thesis coincided with the main tenets of behaviourist psychology and, in particular, the denial of non-verbal forms of thinking, such as visual imagination. see mitrović, ‘humanist art history’ for a comparison of gombrich’s and panofsky’s approach to the problem. the linguistic james ackerman, ‘toward a new social theory of art’, new literary history, : , autumn , - , - . see also james ackerman, ‘on judging art without absolutes’, critical inquiry, : , spring , - , . ackerman, ‘toward a new social theory’, . richard rorty, ed., the linguistic turn, chicago: university of chicago press, , see especially the introduction, - . for a general history of the linguistic turn, see michael losonsky, linguistic turns in modern philosophy, cambridge: cambridge university press, . johann gottfried herder, abhandlung über den ursprung der sprache, berlin: christian friedrich boß, , cited according to the modern reprint, stuttgart: phillip reclam, , - . john searle, intentionality, cambridge: cambridge university press, . see ned block’s introduction to ned block, ed., imagery, cambridge, mass.: mit press, , - for the suppression of research about visual imagination during the behaviourist era. see also daniel c. branko mitrović ruminations on the dark side turn itself favoured certain types of holist positions. here belong the claims of the inconceivability of certain concepts for cultural groups which (allegedly) did not possess specific words to express them (obviously, if all thinking is verbal, then people who do not have appropriate words cannot have the corresponding thoughts). the rejection of formalism in analytic aesthetics also went hand-in-hand with the view that all thinking is verbal and implied that individuals are incapable of aesthetic evaluation independent of the groups they belong to. due to the demise of the linguistic turn, for the past ten years many of these holist assumptions have been seriously challenged. the view that all thinking is verbal, or that thought-contents are identical to their articulation, has largely lost its credibility, especially as a result of a substantial body of research in cognitive psychology. the idea that there is no innocent eye, widespread in those days, can also be easily converted into the claim that visual perception is determined by the perceiver’s social group. in aesthetics this has enabled the revival of formalism; in historiography it has brought back intentionalism and a renewed interest in the authorial intention, conceived of as ultimately irreducible to the author’s social context. for the first time since sedlmayr, the dominant tone of international historiography seems on the way to liberating itself from holist methodological premises and to overcoming the dichotomy, described by ackerman, between the humanist world-view, shared by many historians, and the holist methodologies that historians often rely on. but if such liberation is going to be more than a mere adjustment to the latest trends and what is currently academically credible, it needs to enable us to recognise and overcome the forces that drive the human soul into the denial of the free will and rational capacities of other individuals. branko mitrović received doctorates in architectural history and philosophy. he is the author (or co-author/co-editor) of four books on renaissance architectural history and has been the recipient of the humboldt research award as well as fellowships from the harvard university, canadian centre for architecture, humboldt foundation, national gallery of art and clark art institute. branko mitrović unitec institute of technology auckland, new zealand brankomitrovic@hotmail.com dennett, ‘the nature of images and the introspective trap’, block, ed., imagery, - , for one of the last defences of the behaviourist position. kendall walton, ‘categories of art’, philosophical review : , july , – . for a summary of this research see josé luis bermúdez, thinking without words, oxford: oxford university press, . for the revival of formalism, see nick zangwill, the metaphysics of beauty, ithaca: cornell university press, . for intentionalism, see mark bevir, the logic of the history of ideas, cambridge: cambridge university press, . 	holism-individualism efficient similarity-based operations for data integration dissertation zur erlangung des akademischen grades doktoringenieur (dr.-ing.) angenommen durch die faultät informatik der otto-von-guericke-universität magdeburg von diplominformatiker eike schallehn, geboren am . . in schönebeck gutachter: prof. dr. gunter saake prof. dr. kai-uwe sattler dr. ralf-detlef kutsche promotionskolloqium in magdeburg am . märz zusammenfassung das forschungsfeld der datenintegration ist ein gebiet mit wachsender praktisch- er bedeutung, besonders unter berücksichtigung der wachsenden verfügbarkeit großer datenmengen aus mehr und mehr quellsystemen. entsprechend beinhaltet gegenwärtige forschung die lösung von problemen zur beseitigung von konflik- ten auf der datenebene, welche in dieser dissertation betrachtet werden. die behandlung von diskrepanzen in daten ist immer noch eine große her- ausforderung und zum beispiel relevant zur beseitigung von duplikaten aus se- mantisch überlappenden datenquellen als auch zur verbindung komplementärer daten aus verschiedenen quellen. entsprechende operationen können meist nicht nur auf wertegleichheit basieren, da nur in wenigen fällen über systemgrenzen hinweg gültige identifikatoren existieren. die verwendung weiterer attributwerte ist problematisch, da fehlerhafte daten und unterschiedliche darstellungsweisen ein häufiges problem in diesem kontext sind. deshalb müssen solche operation auf der ähnlichkeit von datenobjekten und -werten basieren. der begriff der ähnlichkeit ist selber problematisch bezüglich seiner ver- wendung und der grundlagen seiner bedeutung. erfolgreiche anwendungen haben oft eine sehr spezifische sichtweise auf ähnlichkeitsmaße und -prädikate, welche einen eingeschränkten fokus auf den kontext der ähnlichkeit im gegebe- nen szenario widerspiegelt. um ähnlichkeitsbasierte operationen für die daten- integration bereitzustellen, benötigen wir eine umfassendere sichtweise, die auch geeignet ist, um zum beispiel verschiedene generische und angepaßte ähnlichkeitsmaße, die in einem gegebenen datenintegrationssystem anwendbar sind, zu kombinieren. dieser probleme wird sich in der vorliegenden dissertation angenommen, indem ähnlichkeitsbasierte operationen entsprechend einem leichtgewichtigen, generischen rahmen bereitgestellt werden. die ähnlichkeitsbasierte selektion, der verbund und die gruppierung werden bezüglich ihrer allgemeinen semantik und besonderer aspekte der zugrundeliegenden ähnlichkeitsrelationen diskutiert. entsprechende algorithmen für die datenbearbeitung werden für materialisierte und virtuelle datenintegrationsszenarien beschrieben. implementierungen wer- den vorgestellt und bezüglich der anwendbarkeit und effizienz der vorgestellten ansätze evaluiert. auf der prädikatebene konzentriert sich die dissertation auf die ähnlichkeit von zeichenketten, und zwar basierend auf der levenshtein- oder editierdistanz. die effiziente bearbeitung von ähnlichkeitsbasierten operationen hängt in erster linie von der effizienten auswertung von ähnlichkeitsprädikaten ab, was für zei- chenkettenähnlichkeit basierend auf indexunterstützung in materialisierten und durch preselektion in virtuellen integrationsszenarien dargestellt wird. efficient similarity-based operations for data integration eike schallehn march , ii iii abstract the research field of data integration is an area of growing practical importance, especially considering the increasing availability of huge amounts of data from more and more source systems. according current research includes approaches for solving the problem of conflicts on the data level addressed in this thesis. dealing with discrepancies in data still is a big challenge, relevant for instance during eliminating duplicates from semantically overlapping sources as well as for combining complementary data from different sources. according operations most often cannot only be based on equality of values, because only in rare cases there are identifiers valid across system boundaries. using other attribute values is problematic, because erroneous data and varying conventions for information representation are common problems in this field. therefore, according operations have to be based on the similarity of data objects and values. the concept of similarity itself is problematic regarding its usage and founda- tions of its semantics. successful applications often have a very specific view of similarity measures and predicates that represent a narrow focus on the context of similarity for this given scenario. to provide similarity-based operations for data integration purposes requires a broader view on similarity, suitable to include for instance a number of generic and tailor-made similarity measures useful in a given data integration system. these problems are addressed in this thesis by providing similarity-based op- erations according to a small, generic framework. similarity-based selection, join, and grouping operations are discussed regarding their general semantics and spe- cial aspects of underlying similarity relations. according algorithms suitable for data processing are described for materialised and virtual integration scenarios. implementations are given and evaluated to prove the applicability and efficiency of the proposed approaches. on the predicate level the thesis is focused on string similarity, namely based on the levenshtein or edit distance. the efficient processing of similarity-based operations mainly depends on an efficient evaluation of similarity predicates, which is illustrated for string similarity based on index support in materialised and pre-selection in virtual data integration scenarios. iv contents introduction . motivation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . structure of the thesis . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . contributions of the thesis . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . data integration approaches . introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . characteristics of data integration . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . heterogeneity . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . distribution . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . autonomy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . data integration approaches . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . virtual data integration . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . materialised data integration . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . conclusions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . concepts of similarity . introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . models of similarity . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . similarity measures and predicates . . . . . . . . . . . . . . metrics as similarity measures . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . problems with common models . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . string similarity . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . conclusions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . similarity-based operations . introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . similarity predicates . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . similarity-based operations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . similarity-based selection . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . similarity-based join . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . v vi contents . . similarity-based grouping . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . conclusions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . similarity operations for materialised data . introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . principles of the implementation and optimisation . . . . . . . . . . a trie-based similarity predicate for strings . . . . . . . . . similarity-based join . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . similarity-based grouping . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . implementation using oracle i . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . evaluation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . applications . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . conclusions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . re-writing similarity-based queries . introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . mapping similarity predicates . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . substring decomposition . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . q-samples . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . tokens . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . managing selectivity information . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . similarity-based operations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . similarity-based selection . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . similarity join . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . evaluation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . conclusions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . conclusions . summary of contributions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . outlook and open problems . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . list of figures . example data and result for a similarity join . . . . . . . . . . . . . example data and result for similarity-based duplicate elimination . general architecture of a multi-database system . . . . . . . . . . . classification of mdbms according to sheth and larson . . . . . . principal mediator architecture . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . usage of similarity for identification and abstraction of real world objects . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . distances in a weighted directed graph . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . derived equivalence relation for a given similarity relation (a) by (b) transitive and (c) strict similarity . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . application of the grouping operator . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . building groups applying index support . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . example input relation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . grouping with exact match and threshold k � . . . . . . . . . . . grouping with varying thresholds k � and the naive approach of pairwise comparisons . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . grouping with varying percentage of duplicates in the test data sets . results for varying thresholds k � for a similarity join . . . . . . . edit distance distribution of random strings in the test data set with % duplicates of kmax � . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . edit distance distribution in an integrated and sampled data set on cultural assets . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . relative edit distance distribution . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . number of distinct q-grams for varying q in the king james bible . finding selective substrings for k � , hence n � k � � . . . . . finding selective -samples for k � , hence n � k � � . . . . . duplicate distribution in test data set . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . average selectivity for varying q and k . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . vii viii list of figures . cumulative selectivity distribution for varying q and k . . . . . . . . quality of selectivity estimation for q= and q= . . . . . . . . . . applicability for varying q and k . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . sample size estimation errors . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . quality of the pre-selection decisions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . q-gram table sizes vs. pruning limits . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . quality of pre-selection vs. pruning limits . . . . . . . . . . . . . chapter introduction the ever-growing importance of information in our life, described by the debat- able notion of the information society and mainly driven by the tremendous suc- cess of new technologies like the internet and the web, has not only changed the way we live but also the direction of information and computer science. the in- formation society was defined by the ibm community development foundation in the report [fou ] as follows: a society characterised by a high level of information intensity in the everyday life of most citizens, in most organisations and workplaces; by the use of common or compatible technology for a wide range of personal, social, educational and business activities, and by the ability to transmit, receive and exchange digital data rapidly between places irrespective of distance. and yes, the availability of general and specialised information has increased by magnitudes. more information is stored in more local information systems in companies, institutions, and by private persons. often these information are made globally available via the internet. heritage information like books, newspapers, music, cultural assets, card indexes, and more stored for centuries on other media are conditioned and transformed to digital media for better availability. informa- tion has gained a higher reputation as a productivity factor, making the notion of information as commodity more common. trading almost all kinds of goods using information technology became know as ecommerce and is nowadays common practice. in the private sector new information technologies lead to new levels in communication and entertainment. and though the turbulences of the early phases during the mid- s have calmed down a little bit, the trend of an on- going deeper penetration of our life with information and according technologies will certainly persist. chapter . introduction but, while there is more and more information available from more and more sources, the actual information needs of users are and will remain constrained by human abilities of perception. actually, we are only able to process a very lim- ited amount of data required to cope with a certain task. so the best profit we can make from the wealth of information available is the improved likelihood of finding information that suit our needs. the downside of a high level of avail- ability of information is the effort required to find or condense that small piece of information users are after. nevertheless, the above conflict to some degree marked a turning point for some research areas in information and computer science. the research focus shifted from how to make information available towards how to make informa- tion useful. for years, the main concern in research on data management and information systems was to efficiently store, access, and transfer data. after these questions for the most part were solved, enabling us to provide information with a quality and quantity that some years earlier only few would have dared to dream of, other questions became more important: where can i find needed informa- tion? how can i access these information? how can i make use of the load of information provided? how can i decide if it is even useful? how can i present the information in a way that suits my needs? in other words, technologies to map the huge quantity of available information to the actually small information need were required. one of the main problems with the created information jungle is the great number of different sources we may use or even have to use to fulfil our informa- tion requirements. this is especially true in global scenarios like the web, where even experts may not be aware of all relevant sources and the kind and quality of information they provide. while this is considered less problematic in local scenarios, it is still a difficult problem to fully understand the meaning and re- lationships of information stored in different systems. and in addition, in both scenarios we have to deal with a multitude of technologies, interfaces, languages, etc. on various technical levels to access the systems of interest. though stan- dards exist, there are a number of them for each application and compliance is often limited. these problems are addressed in the area of information system and data in- tegration, where the main focus is on concepts for resolving conflicts on different levels of data access and data representation between heterogeneous information systems. the main objective of the integration task is to provide the user a sin- gle point of access to relevant information from several sources. to achieve this, data can either be gathered and physically stored in one place, or an integrated system may provide a virtual integration by providing a unified access, internally mapping queries to and results from the originate systems. though there are no generally agreed upon dimensions of integration, in this thesis physical versus virtual integration is used as an important distinction. for a coarse classification a further characteristic is the degree of stucturedness in the data to be integrated, ranging from highly structured data found for instance in business information systems based on relational databases, to web sites repre- senting weakly structured or unstructured documents. furthermore, the local and organisational scope of the integration is used as a dimension, i.e. whether the information sources exist in a more local, e.g. a company, or global context, e.g. the web. the scope dimension has a significant impact on a number of impor- tant aspects of an integrated systems like the autonomy of the source systems, the degree of data-level conflicts, performance considerations, etc. from a very broad perspective, materialised integration systems range from data warehouses (highly structured, data, local source systems) that store con- densed business data mainly for usage by the management, to web search engines (unstructured data, global source systems), which gather textual information to allow a search over web documents providing only links to the sources as a re- sult. virtual integration systems include meta search engines (semi-structured data, merely global source systems) offering integrated access to databases avail- able over the web serving a special purpose. federated databases (highly struc- tured data, merely local source systems) are less common, mostly due to the often high complexity of this kind of integration and the very few commercial tools and solutions available, e.g. the ibm information integrator. to somewhat narrow the focus of this thesis, the research presented here deals mostly with structured data as found in databases, as well as mediated and feder- ated systems. semi-structured data is considered, as far as a schema for querying and presenting the data can be derived, though the process of finding and using this schema is not a key issue in this thesis. distinctions along the dimensions of physical/virtual and global/local integration have a profound impact on ap- proaches presented within this thesis, even causing different approaches suitable in respective scenarios. the integration approaches mentioned so far, and others discussed later on, solve some of the pressing problems mentioned above. a user no longer has to worry, where to find the information and how to access them. relying on the designers, implementors, and administrators of an integrated system, the informa- tion is now available in one place – physically or virtually – and using one uniform representation. but considering only the access aspects of integration does not fully solve the problem of providing information according to user needs. the amount of infor- mation available is still huge, even bigger when data sets from various sources are combined. the content of various sources may overlap, presentations of data val- ues may vary due to different conventions, and finally, erroneous data is a common chapter . introduction problem in local databases making their integration even harder. furthermore, relationships within data sets, locally expressed using unique identifiers, cannot easily be resolved, because these identifiers very often do not carry any meaning in a global scope. hence, making it possible to work with an integrated set of data itself is a dif- ficult part of the integration process, requiring new approaches in data processing, and thus, inspired research in various directions. the motivation of the research presented in this thesis derives from the high degree of vagueness in integrated data sets existing due to the previously mentioned reasons. one way to deal with this problem is to introduce new operations that explicitly address imprecise, er- roneous, and only weakly related data to present a more consistent or condensed view to the user. to provide such operations, the concept of similarity gained interest in data integration and data management in general. instead of relying on the equality of data values, which forms the basis of data models and according operations in current data management, data can be queried, linked, condensed, or cleaned based on similarity to or between values or more complex objects. actually, here the notion of similarity is not without problems, because we may talk about real similarity between different objects, as well as similarity of different represen- tations of the same real-world object. the former can apply where data has to be condensed, e.g. for analytical processing, or linked according to some loose relationship. the latter is a very common problem in data integration, known as entity identification, record linkage, or the same-object problem, where different sources often provide overlapping information on objects in a common scope of interest. the term similarity itself raised some interesting questions, because its usage and definition in sciences like psychology, mathematics, philosophy, etc. varies widely, sometimes even within one area. furthermore, while equality is a rela- tionship independent of the application domain, a similarity relationship or a sim- ilarity measure in most cases is specific to the application, to the objects, or actual attributes to be compared. the current usage of the term in computer science, having its roots in fields like information retrieval and knowledge-based systems, most often has a very narrow focus. this may be suitable in some applications, but to efficiently support data integration scenarios requires a closer look at various aspects of similarity. so, to provide new operations based on similarity we have to consider the characteristics of the relationship, and, based on this, integrate the operations in a framework for similarity-based query processing. building on this general view, the special requirements in certain integration scenarios, e.g. as part of a middle- ware in a virtual integration or as an extension to database management systems for a physical integration, have to be considered. a further key aspect of offering . . motivation similarity-based operations is their efficiency. at first, this is due to the nature of similarity, which in general requires more effort to decide about its existence between objects than equality. secondly, the target integration scenarios, as pre- viously mentioned, often have to deal with huge amounts of data gathered from numerous sources, this way exceeding the requirements of conventional query processing. . motivation in the past few years, there has been a great amount of work on data integration. this includes the integration of information from diverse sources in the internet, the integration of enterprise data in support of decision-making using data ware- houses, and preparing data from various sources for data mining. as a motivating example in this section requirements of a mediator-based integration scenario are outlined. the system is intended to provide integrated information on cultural assets drawn from various systems available over the internet. some of the major problems in this context – besides overcoming structural conflicts – are related to overcoming conflicts and inconsistencies on the data level. this includes the elimination of duplicate data objects caused by semantic overlapping of some sources, as well as establishing a relationship between com- plementary data from these sources. both aspects are illustrated in the following. the implementation of operations dealing with conflicts on the data level has a significant difference to usual data management operations: only in some rare cases we can rely on equality of attributes. instead we have to deal with discrep- ancies in data objects representing the same or related real-world objects which may exist due to input errors or simply due to the autonomy of the sources. fur- thermore, the amount of data to be processed in integration scenarios can be equal to or even greater than from a single source, so, efficiency of the implementation becomes a critical issue. while for this motivating example only the principal re- quirements are outlined, the focus of this thesis will be on providing the required operations in a way that suits the probably large data volumes and user expecta- tions regarding the performance of an integrated system. as an example for a similarity join consider an information system on art objects providing information for instance on paintings and their creators. one source may provide a plain collection of these items, but we intend to present additional biographical information on the artists given by a standard catalogue integrated from another source. the example shown in figure . demonstrates three problems common in this application domain. first, due to language issues a number of different spellings or transcriptions of names may exist, like in the case of ‘albrecht dürer’ or ‘ilya repin’. secondly, chapter . introduction paintings artist title ilja repin barge haulers on the volga vincent vangogh drawbridge with carriage albrecht duerer a young hare el greco view of toledo ����� artists name birth death ����� albrecht dürer vincent van gogh ilya repin dominico theotocopuli ����� title artist birth death ����� barge haulers on the volga ilya repin drawbridge with carriage vincent van gogh a young hare albrecht dürer view of toledo el greco ����� figure . : example data and result for a similarity join a common problem in many application domains are inconsistencies due to typing errors, like in this case the incorrect writing of ‘vincent van gogh’. whereas both these problems could be handled by string similarity, the problem of pseudonyms – or more generally synonyms – as demonstrated by the example artist name ‘do- minico theotocopuli’, better known to the world as ‘el greco’, can be solved by applying thesauri during the join on the artist name. efficiently performing such a similarity join in a locally materialised database itself is a challenging task and topic of current research. this includes for instance results presented in chapter of this thesis. yet, we assumed a virtually integrated scenario where the data resides in different web databases accessible only through possibly very limited query interfaces. in this case, finding the correct entry for an artist for each painting based on possibly conflicting representations of their names is an even harder problem. this issue is addressed in chapter of this thesis. figure . demonstrates another problem during data integration, namely the identification and reconciliation of tuples representing the same real-world entity. assume the input relation of the according operation represents the combined information on paintings from a number of source systems, which may overlap semantically and provide incomplete or imprecise information. in addition to the problems mentioned above, the example illustrates that a complex similarity description involving a number of attributes is required. conflicts between data values may appear in some fields like the artist name, the title of the painting, or the year of creation, and maybe there are conflicts in all of them. furthermore, we have to deal with the fact that more than two tuples may rep- resent the same object, and among these representations may exist varying degrees of similarity. yet, all of them have to be identified to relate to the same real-world . . structure of the thesis title artist year resurrection el greco resurrection dieric bouts ����� the holy trinity el greco the holy trinity el greco th cen. ����� self-portrait at albrecht dürer self-portrait at albrecht duerer self portrait at albrecht dürer ����� fifteen sunflowers vincent van gogh fifteen sunflowers vincent van gogh ����� title artist year resurrection el greco resurrection dieric bouts ����� the holy trinity el greco ����� self-portrait at albrecht dürer ����� fifteen sunflowers vincent van gogh fifteen sunflowers vincent van gogh ����� figure . : example data and result for similarity-based duplicate elimination entity, so, we have to provide means to establish a single representation of iden- tified objects, which for instance can be done based on additional information on data quality of the integrated sources. finally, the example shows that decisions based on complex similarity condi- tions are not trivial. though the data on the paintings by vincent van gogh may look alike, the according tuples actually represent two different paintings. hence, the design of similarity predicates and complex similarity conditions as part of the design of the integrated system is a complex task involving the analysis of falsely identified and falsely unidentified objects. duplicate elimination is not only required during the integration of query re- sults in virtual integration, but it is also a sub-task of data cleaning in materialised scenarios that comprises further tasks for improving data quality like transfor- mation, outlier detection etc. assuming sql-based integration systems, the nat- ural choice for duplicate elimination is the group by operator using the key attributes of the tuples in combination with aggregate functions for reconciling divergent non-key attribute values. however, this approach is limited to equality of the key attributes – if no unique key exists or the keys contain differences, tu- ples representing the same real-world object will be assigned to different groups and cannot be identified as equivalent tuples. to base the grouping on similarity implies an at least atransitive similarity relation, which has to be dealt with during query processing. these problems are addressed in chapter of this thesis. . structure of the thesis the work presented in this thesis is structured with the general intention to pro- vide a reader having a solid comprehension of database and information systems all the necessary information to fully understand the scope and contents of the de- scribed research results. literature references are used to refer to sources of given chapter . introduction descriptions or to satisfy further interest in mentioned topics beyond the scope necessary to understand the content of this thesis. chapters and will give overviews of the two underlying areas of data inte- gration and research on similarity. this includes positioning this work according to related research and introducing the vocabulary of concepts used throughout the thesis. chapter has a bridging function between the foundations presented in the two previous chapters and the own contributions which are described in the later chapters by providing an own view on similarity-based operations. then, the main research results are described in chapters and . accordingly, the structure of the thesis in more detail is as follows. after this short introduction to the motivation, structure, and contributions of the thesis, chapter gives an overview of data integration based on the current state of the art. typical aspects of data integration and resulting problems are introduced based on the commonly considered characteristics of heterogeneity, distribution, and autonomy. important aspects of according research fields like schema integration and query processing in distributed, heterogeneous environ- ments are shortly described. then, major approaches like federated database management systems, mediators, and data warehouses are positioned according to the previously introduced characteristics and related to the contributions of this thesis. in chapter an overview of concepts of similarity is given, by first describing the importance, the research background, and some fundamental problems with the comprehension of similarity. then, terms such as similarity measures, rela- tions, and predicates are defined. the common understanding of similarity mea- sured using distances in metric space as well as the according properties, prob- lems, and implications are discussed. because the work presented in the later chapters is mainly focused on string similarity predicates, these and related as- pects are introduced separately. as previously mentioned, chapter can be seen as an introduction to the own contributions of the thesis by providing the framework for the operations de- scribed in the latter chapters and introducing the problems at hand during their implementation. for this purpose, the possible levels of similarity support in data management solutions are discussed and the focus of the thesis is fixed accord- ingly. then, the semantics of similarity predicates as well as operations, namely selection, join, and grouping, are specified. chapter and are the chapters describing the main contributions of the the- sis. both chapters can be distinguished by the kind of integration scenario they target. results presented in chapter described operations where the data to be processed is materialised, either because a materialised integration approach – like for instance a data warehouse – was used, or because the operations work on temporarily materialised, intermediate results. chapter describes an approach . . contributions of the thesis generally applicable in virtual integration scenarios, where global similarity pred- icates can be transformed for evaluation during distributed query processing. the approach presented in chapter is based on string similarity predicates and their efficient processing applying tries. accordingly, the implementation of the join and grouping operations are described for such predicates or more complex similarity conditions. furthermore, the implementation was evaluated and further aspects and applications were considered. chapter follows a different approach by considering the evaluation of string similarity predicates during distributed query processing with source systems pro- viding limited query capabilities. for this purpose, query predicates are trans- formed as part of query re-writing based on gathered substring selectivity statis- tics to grant efficiency. furthermore, implementations for the selection and join operations are outlined and their efficiency is evaluated. in chapter the thesis is concluded by a summary, and an outlook on direc- tions of possible further work is given. . contributions of the thesis as mentioned in the previous section, the main contributions of this thesis are described in the chapters , , and . the novel aspects outlined in these chap- ters are described here in more detail. furthermore, some research results were previously published and are listed here with the respective references. results of joint work with ingolf geist are included for reasons of completeness of the description of the approaches. this is marked accordingly within the chapters and furthermore pointed out in the following short description. chapter – similarity-based operations: while the most part of this chapter describes foundations of similarity-based operations that were used ac- cordingly in previous approaches, the description of the semantics of a similarity-based grouping operation is new. it is therefore described in more detail and includes a thorough discussion of dealing with atransitivity which may occur due to the usage of similarity predicates. furthermore, complex similarity conditions and special aspects of similarity relations are most of- ten neglected in related research. the according research results were pre- viously published for instance in [sss ] and in [sss ]. chapter – similarity-based operations for materialised data: the chapter describes novel algorithms for implementing similarity-based join and grouping operations in materialised data integration scenarios. the opera- tions were implemented accordingly as part of a mediator query engine and, alternatively, using the extensibility interfaces of the database management chapter . introduction system oracle i. because efficient support for string similarity is often re- quired in data integration, an approach for index-based approximate string matching described in [sm ] by shang and merret was used, and is the first application of such an index in the context of providing similarity-based operations. to prove the applicability and investigate aspects of using the index-supported string similarity predicate, the results of the evaluation re- garding the implementation based on oracle i are described. furthermore, the application of extended aggregation functions for data reconciliation is outlined. finally, aspects of designing and adjusting similarity measures based on similarity distributions within data sets are discussed. these re- sults were previously published for instance in [sss ] and in [ss ]. chapter - re-writing similarity-based queries for virtual integration: in this chapter a novel approach for processing operations based on string similarity predicates during distributed query processing in virtual data integration is introduced. to the best of the authors knowledge, there is no other approach targeting the same problem for this application scenario. the processing of the operations is based on pre-selection strategies mapping string similarity predicates to disjunctive substring predicates which are suitable for source systems with limited query capabilities. to grant efficiency of this approach, the mapping must be based on substring selectivity information. this mapping is described in detail. an according management of statistic information on substrings and the estimation of selectivities described is based on joined work with ingolf geist, as well as the evaluation of corresponding aspects. furthermore, based on predicate mappings the implementations of similarity-based selection and join operations are described. finally, the approach is evaluated regarding applicability and performance, the latter measured in terms of the quality of the created pre-selections. the approaches presented in this chapter represent the newest research results of the thesis and were therefore not previously published. to summarise, the work presented in this thesis targets the inclusion of similarity-based concepts into data processing in integration scenarios. this prob- lem is addressed on a predicate and operational level. operations based on pos- sibly complex similarity conditions are introduced, suitable for a wide range of applications. aspects of the implementation of such operations are described for materialised and virtual integration scenarios. for evaluation purposes the focus was on string similarity predicates, because there is a general lack of support for these in current data management as well as only partial solutions provided by current research. chapter data integration approaches the integration of data sources and information systems has gained a growing in- terest in research and practice over the last twenty years. as outlined before, this development was driven by the growing number of systems in a local and global scope like enterprises and the world wide web, respectively, and the growing data volume within these systems. while the problem of integration is addressed on various levels, in this thesis we will focus on data integration. application integra- tion, which is a current topic most of all in enterprise scenarios, is not addressed here. this chapter will give a short overview of problems and approaches in data integration necessary to position the presented contributions. . introduction while database systems were intended to have an integrative character themselves by providing a storage solution for many local applications, the integration aspect never played the designated role. the main reasons for this were the diversity of different systems satisfying special requirements, organisational and strategic decisions during system installation or implementation, as well as aspects of dis- tribution and connectivity of the embedding infrastructures. the result were insu- lar solutions tailor-made for specific tasks, limited user groups, and content of a constricted scope. when the potential need of new applications for more general tasks, more and different user groups, and broader content scopes became obvious shortly after database systems were adopted successfully, the idea of data integration was born in the late s. terms like federated and multi-database systems were first men- tioned by hammer and mcleod in [hm ] and adiba and delobel in [ad ], respectively. obviously, the task at hand was – and still is – extremely complex, while the actual need to do data integration only grew slowly in the s. at this chapter . data integration approaches time, it inspired research, mainly intended to fully subsume the aspects of data integration. furthermore, the schema integration necessary to provide a unified access to heterogeneous data became a first research focus. the work by sheth and larson described in [sl ] not only introduced influential system and schema architectures for federated database systems, but also summarised early research and the terminology used in data integration. in the s data integration finally became a major research topic, driven mainly by the previously mentioned requirements resulting from a better availabil- ity of data. as data integration became more relevant in practice, the focus shifted toward architectural issues and query processing. furthermore, the web and xml required new ways to deal with unstructured and semistructured data. distributed, multi-tier, and heterogeneous architectures became more easily manageable with technologies like corba, dcom, and java. data warehouses arose as a very successful data integration application, urgently requiring practical solutions for some problems that were until then only discussed theoretically. apart from spe- cific solutions in the latter area, ibm’s db datajoiner ([gl ]) – nowadays integrated with research results from the garlic project ([tah � ]) and known as the db information integrator – was the first successful product for database integration. in the late s up to current day, new research is moving towards a so- called semantic integration, which is incorporating domain knowledge and ad- vanced meta data into the integration process and integrated systems. from an architectural point of view, xml and web services provide a reasonable infras- tructure for integration in a global scope. furthermore, a number of applications, for instance from the fields of ecommerce, life sciences, digital libraries, etc., drive the implementation of previously theoretic or experimental integration ap- proaches. though a great amount of research went into data integration and many aspects were covered over the last decades, the complexity resulting from combining ap- proaches according to the requirements of real-world applications is still huge. therefore, applications of data integration are often very limited in their function- ality and can only partially be supported by tools and standard components. . characteristics of data integration there are several attempts at giving classifications for data integration approaches according to certain characteristics, criteria, or dimensions. in [sl ] sheth and larson introduced the often cited dimensions of distribution, heterogeneity, and autonomy. according to these dimensions they distinguished integrated database systems such as multi-database systems and federated database systems from . . characteristics of data integration classical approaches like centralised or distributed databases and further refine the classification of integrated systems. while on the one hand it can be argued that these dimensions are not orthogo- nal, such as heterogeneity most often is the result of autonomy, especially design autonomy, there are also a number of more recent integration approaches such as data warehouses introduced by inmon and described in [inm ], mediators introduced by wiederhold in [wie ], and others that can hardly be classified considering only these three aspects. instead of providing new “dimensions” or a new classification, we will discuss characteristics necessary to position the work presented here and relate it to the relevant integration approaches. . . heterogeneity the heterogeneity of integrated data sources is by far the most important aspect of data integration, because it causes most of the problems that have to be overcome to provide an integrated access to sources. as such, heterogeneity includes dif- ferences of source systems ranging from a hardware level to the semantics of the data to be integrated. therefore, a number of slightly different classifications ex- ists, sometimes only covering a certain scope of interest, described for instance in [sl , sp , wie , bklw ]. based on these we present a rather rough clas- sification, where one class of heterogeneity may imply heterogeneity on another level, such as the usage of different systems may imply different data models, which provide diverging modelling constructs resulting in diverging schemas. system or technical heterogeneity: this comprises differences in source sys- tems resulting from the hardware and software infrastructures such as: � hardware � networks and their infrastructures � protocols and middle ware � database systems and other storage solutions � data models � languages and interfaces these problems can be addressed to some degree based on standard pro- tocols and interfaces. the mapping to different languages and interfaces can on the other hand become very problematic, if for instance interfaces are very limited, such as for databases accessible only through web inter- faces. this problem is relevant for the thesis by mapping similarity queries to standard interfaces as described in chapter . chapter . data integration approaches schematic heterogeneity: this mainly results from the design autonomy across different systems or their differing data models. depending on the require- ments leading to a certain design and the structural primitives offered by a data model, the same real-world aspect may be represented in various ways. this leads to conflicts outlined for instance by spaccapietra and parent in [spd ] and kim and seo in [ks ]. overcoming these heterogeneities was a major focus of research in schema integration discussed later on. for this thesis for the most part schemas are assumed to be integrated before a further resolution of heterogeneities on the data level takes place, whereas this latter resolution is the main concern here. semantic heterogeneity: while the previous two classes of heterogeneity result from decisions regarding the environment local systems run in and regard- ing the design of a system itself, semantic heterogeneity results from the us- age of the system. it concerns different interpretations and meanings of data values, objects, schema elements, and the overall scope of the data in sev- eral systems as well as the relations between different interpretations. while semantic heterogeneity on the schema level is addressed during schema in- tegration, this thesis deals mainly with semantic heterogeneities on the data level, where an interpretation is necessary for identifying representations of real-world objects or their relationships. due to differing representations this interpretation often has to be based on similarity, which is the main topic of this work. schematic heterogeneities are addressed through schema integration techniques and according processes to design an integrated schema, which were widely cov- ered by research. schema integration techniques can for instance be based on assertions between schemas (spaccapietra et al. in [spd ] and others) and ac- cording view definitions, or advanced modelling concepts in object-oriented data models (for instance upward inheritance as described by schrefl and neuhold in [sn ] and others). because schema integration like schema design in general is characterised by several degrees of freedom, quality criteria for schema integra- tion are completeness, correctness, minimality, and understandability. a further classification of view-based approaches is given by local as view versus global as view approaches, depending on whether the global schema is de- fined as a view on the local schemas or vice versa as described by garcia molina et al. in [gpq � ] and levy et al. in [lro ], respectively. both approaches are quite different regarding necessary efforts for query processing and the mainte- nance of the integrated system. anyway, all schema integration approaches yield some kind of mapping between local source schemata and a global schema, which is used for query re-writing and result transformation in a virtual integration sce- nario, or only for transforming extracted data sets in a materialised integration. . . characteristics of data integration a rough classification for schema integration processes is given by the dis- tinction between top down versus bottom up schema integration, as for instance described by sheth and larson in [sl ]. the distinction made in this classi- fication is based on whether the target schema is designed to suite the needs of certain global applications (top down), or if it should fully represent the set of in- tegrated schemas. another field of interest is the necessary evolution of integrated schemas. as we assume schema integration problems to be resolved in a design phase and before the operations proposed here are applied, a further discussion of this wide field is beyond the scope of this short introduction. for far more de- tailed overviews we refer to descriptions by ram and ramesh in [rr ] in the collection edited by elmagarmid et al. [mrj ], conrad in [con ] (in german), rahm and bernstein in [rb ], özsu and valduriez in [öv ], batini et al. in [bln ], and sheth and larson in [sl ]. closely related to heterogeneity is the demand for transparency in the resulting integrated system. related to data integration transparency refers to the charac- teristic that the integrated access should be provided through a unified interface hiding all the previously mentioned heterogeneities from the user. in a very strict sense, when accessing the integrated data set the user should not be aware of � the origin of the data, � any aspect related to retrieving the data, � necessary transformations or condensations, and � the reconciliation of possible conflicts. contrary to the need of transparency in some integration applications there is a demand for the traceability of data, i.e. the user may have an interest in some of the aspects mentioned above. typical questions can be: where does the data come from? are there any costs involved or how long does it take to retrieve the data? how were the data changed on the way or are there more details available when accessing the separate systems? a typical example where traceability plays an important role are data warehouses. in an ideal solution, information regarding the origin of data and performed transformations is stored as metadata within the warehouse with the intention to draw plausible conclusions about the quality of derived information. whether transparency or traceability is more important in a specific real-world scenario heavily depends on the given requirements for this application. this the- sis deals mostly with the resolution of semantic heterogeneities by applying op- erations for the identification of conflicts and their reconciliation. because these operations are based on similarity, there is a probabilistic aspect about it, e.g. a chapter . data integration approaches decision whether objects in several databases represent the same real-world en- tity can only be made with a derivable degree of certainty, resulting in a number of false matches and false non-matches. therefore, traceability may be a strong requirement when such operations are applied. for instance, the user can be in- formed about the quality of the presented data or even be given details of the original data and drawn conclusions. . . distribution another typical characteristic of data integration is the physical distribution of data across various hosts running their own data management systems. this aspect of distribution is shared with more common solutions like distributed databases, where heterogeneity and autonomy do not play such an important role, and the distribution is merely a result of a distribution design targeting improved perfor- mance, scalability, and reliability. contrary to this approach, the physical distri- bution of data in data integration is the initial situation, where the source systems were primarily designed to serve some local application. nevertheless, both ap- proaches may share further characteristics like � transparency regarding several aspects like the physical location of data, � some aspects of autonomy discussed later on, � distributed query processing, though with quite different requirements, and � independence of hardware, software, and network aspects as described for instance by date in [dat ]. dealing with distributed data sets in data integration spawned two basic ap- proaches characterised by the physical location of the integrated data set. materialised integration copies data from the source to an integrated data set managed by one system. typical representatives of such an approach would be data warehouses or some archives of digital libraries. the advantages of this approach mainly result from the possibility to do local query process- ing on the integrated data set. this is strictly necessary for data intensive operations, as for instance in online analytical processing (olap). the major disadvantage comes with the autonomy of the data sources, where even in local scenarios like an enterprise data warehouse the extraction, transformation, and loading (etl) of data causes huge organisational ef- forts in addition to the necessary technical efforts, which include schema integration and are comparable to virtual data integration. furthermore, . . characteristics of data integration the maintenance of integrated materialised data sets is a complex task, in- volving non-standard operations and application-specific tasks, for instance related to data cleaning. in global scenarios this approach is therefore often prohibitive, unless it relies on standards like for instance dublin core and the marc format for bibliographic metadata and the protocol of the open archive initiative (oai) for their exchange in the field of digital libraries. virtual integration leaves the data in the component systems and provides an integrated access in terms of a complex distributed query processing, con- sisting of re-writing every query for the source systems and retrieving, trans- forming, merging, and reconciling the returned query results. this dis- tributed query processing in heterogeneous environments is a very com- plex task, especially when complex schemas and large data volumes are involved. its characteristics are quite different from local query processing, and therefore it is hardly supported by standard data management solutions. though there are prototypes and commercial products like the previously mentioned ibm information integrator, the high degree of heterogeneity in any given application scenario often makes tailor-made solutions a require- ment. contrary to physical data integration, virtual data integration avoids redundancy, provides up-to-date results, and is applicable in scenarios with highly autonomous sources. as this is not a black and white world, there are mixed approaches. in virtual integration a temporary or persistent materialisation of data is often considered, for instance for caching and archiving query results to improve the efficiency of query processing. on the other hand, in materialised integration it may become necessary to access the the original data to get a more detailed or more recent view of the data, such as provided by drill through operations in data warehouses. materialised data integration is addressed in chapter where semantic hetero- geneities can be resolved after data is extracted from the source systems as part of the transformation and cleaning steps. as an example, in a data warehouse environment this is typically done in a staging area, which is a physically mate- rialised database itself and is usually managed by one database management sys- tem. therefore, various optimisations are conceivable, such as using index struc- tures, statistics on data, and special algorithms. the approach presented in this thesis applies trie index structures for the evaluation string similarity predicates in a more general framework for similarity-based operations. furthermore, exten- sibility interfaces of database management systems – though not standardised – are used to integrate the proposed operations more tightly with the conventional aspects of data processing. all this is possible because � the full integrated set of data and all its characteristics are known to the chapter . data integration approaches system and � all query processing takes place within one system. unfortunately, these two advantages do not hold if the integration is virtual and every query has to be processed by several systems. the research on distributed query processing in virtually integrated hetero- geneous systems has gained some interest since the early s, but there are still a number of issues unresolved. based on discussions by sheth and larson in [sl ], kossmann in [kos ], and by özsu and valduriez in [öv ] the fol- lowing reasons for the complexity of this task must be considered: . query re-writing as well as the transformation of query results has to be based on schema mappings resulting from schema integration as a design step. these transformations can be complex and may not be supported by standard operations as for instance provided by sql. . due to association autonomy discussed later on and heterogeneous data models, languages, and interfaces the query capabilities of integrated sources may differ. . the costs for evaluating queries and transferring query results may differ between systems. furthermore, it is hard to estimate these costs, so a global query optimisation is more problematic than in local or homogeneous, dis- tributed scenarios. . the transfer of data via networks represents an even more narrow bottleneck than io operations on secondary storage. therefore, the minimisation of network traffic becomes a main goal during query optimisation, and special algorithms for pipelined and parallel data processing are required. . the lack of statistical data necessary for query optimisation causes further problems for query optimisation. . due to communication autonomy discussed below component system may or may not be available for query processing, or may even disconnect during processing a certain query. . further problems are caused by execution autonomy, where for complex queries a transactional context may be lost when a global query translates to a number of queries to one component system. . . characteristics of data integration the work presented in chapter of this thesis deals with specialised opera- tions that have to be executed as distributed queries in such an heterogeneous en- vironment. according to the previously listed challenges in distributed query pro- cessing in virtual data integration, the two main problems of providing similarity- based operations are query capabilities and efficiency. query capabilities: apart from the fact that query interfaces available for data integration may be restricted to a very limited functionality, for instance if only provided through a web form as an interface to a web database, ad- ditionally, the support for similarity-based functionality in most data man- agement solutions is per se either marginal, intended only for for certain applications like multimedia retrieval, or simply not existent. efficiency: similarity-based predicates by default involve a larger search space depending on the “looseness” of the predicate, because not only exact but also approximate matches have to be considered. if the similarity predicate cannot be evaluated locally, the complete search space or a best possible ap- proximation of this space has to be transferred for global query processing. the approaches presented in this thesis address these problems for string similar- ity predicates by mapping similarity predicates to standard predicates and min- imising the required data transfer by means of an efficient pre-selection based on statistics on substring selectivity. . . autonomy the third important characteristic of data integration, and in most classifications considered as one of the three dimensions along with distribution and heterogene- ity, is the autonomy of data sources. the autonomy is concerned with the control aspect and reflects the independence between source systems as well as between these systems and an integration layer regarding several aspects concerning the design, implementation, and operation of the systems. veijalainen and popescu- zeletin in [vpz ] considered the following kinds of autonomy. design autonomy reflects the independence during the design process of a sys- tem and implies independence of � the data management system and the data model, � the schema and according constraints, � provided operations, and � the universe of discourse and semantics of the data. chapter . data integration approaches the majority of previously discussed heterogeneities exist due to this design autonomy. communication autonomy refers to the ability of a source system to decide about communication with other systems, i.e. if, when, and how it responds to requests. this can also be interpreted as the ability of source systems to leave or join an integrated systems at any time. execution autonomy is given, if integrated systems are able to independently decide about the way, time, and order of execution of operations. execution autonomy is for instance problematic for a global consistency management in integrated scenarios. in [ab ] alonso and barbara discussed an additional aspect of autonomy, that is of great importance for the work presented here, and was added to the three previously mentioned by sheth and larson in the most often referred classification in [sl ]. association autonomy represents the ability of a system to independently decide about the degree of sharing its functionality with other systems. this com- prises the data managed by the system, where only part of the schema or a subset the actual contents may be available to other systems, as well as the operations to work on it. as such, the autonomy in general can be considered the cause for all the chal- lenges that make data integration such a complex task. design autonomy leads to system and schematic heterogeneities. communication, execution, and asso- ciation autonomy make the processing of global operations a very complex task as described before. execution autonomy is critical, when a global transactional context is required and especially if update operations must be supported. such access characteristics are beyond the scope of this work, and we refer to chrysan- this and ramamritham who give overviews of the related problems in [mrj ] and [rc ]. furthermore, autonomy is a characteristic and requirement of integrated sources, that must not be violated if no further agreement on control sharing ex- ists. if such an agreement exist, we talk about co-operative sources, where the co-operation may be based on a common interest to take part in an integrated so- lution, for instance to make the local data available to a broader audience. such a situation obviously exists for data warehouses, where the provision of global data for analytical purposes is in the interest of the enterprise and its economic ob- jectives. co-operative approaches ease some of the problems in data integration, because for instance heterogeneities are often more easily resolvable on the source side. agreements on a weaker autonomy of component systems may include . . data integration approaches � the provision of suitable interfaces and protocols for existing data access operations, � local support for only globally required operations, � interfaces and protocols for coordinating distributed operations, � active communication mechanisms from a source to an integrated system, and � the exchange of metadata and statistical information about the managed data. for the work presented in this thesis, and here especially chapter , the main inter- est is in provided interfaces and operations as well as statistical information about data. the former refers to query capabilities as discussed before in the context of distributed query processing. statistical information are used in the proposed approach for estimating the selectivity of queries and can be created from source data sets. if sources are not co-operative this information has to be gathered from query samples, which slightly decreases the accuracy and efficiency. . data integration approaches based on the characteristics outlined in the previous section this section will give a short overview of relevant approaches and the aspects that apply for these sys- tems. the approaches draw mainly from research on database integration, but also include research from a more general perspective of information system integra- tion. . . virtual data integration the earliest work on data integration focused on the virtual integration of data, because of the soundness of the approach avoiding redundancy while providing access to an up-to-date view of the data from the source systems. inspired by the conceptual clarity which lead to the success of database management systems – and here especially the relational systems – research first dealt with concep- tual questions regarding schema integration, the integration process, and query languages suitable to address the specific requirements in distributed heteroge- neous query processing. this research was mostly done related to the concept of federated databases and multi-databases. while often argued to be a concurrent approach, mediators introduced by wiederhold in [wie ] rather present an ar- chitectural point of view on data integration, which is applicable to a number of chapter . data integration approaches multi−database management system or federated database management system component database system component database system database system n component dbms dbms dbms n... db db db n multi−database or federated database system global queries global results re−written queries results local figure . : general architecture of a multi-database system approaches and proved to be very successful. so instead of providing a classifica- tion, the following two sections present different points of view on data integra- tion. multi-databases and federated databases earliest research on data integration was done in the field of multi-database and federated database systems. both approaches provide an integration layer on top of existing database management systems differing only in the degree of auton- omy of the integrated systems. the overall goal is to provide the users of the multi-database system a uniform, transparent, and full access to the integrated data sets from various source databases, using standard database interfaces and languages. according to sheth and larson in [sl ], multi-database systems (mdbms) integrate a number of component database management systems, which may be of the same (homogeneous mdbms) or different kind (heterogeneous mdbms). this, according to sheth and larson, explicitly includes components systems which may be distributed or multi-database systems themselves. a very abstract depiction of the according architecture is given in figure . . . a multi-database system is a federated database system, if the component system are highly autonomous according to the description in the previous sec- tion, i.e. they serve local applications and users and independently decide about processing of operations, their system communication, etc. in contrast to data sharing in federated database systems, the component systems in a non-federated . . data integration approaches multi−database systems fdbs fdbs non−federated multi−database systems federated database systems single federation federation multiple tightly coupledloosely coupled figure . : classification of mdbms according to sheth and larson mdbms also share the control for their operations with the integration layer. a further classification of federated database systems is given by the responsibility for creating and maintaining the component systems, i.e. an fdbms is tightly coupled if administrators control the access to the component systems or loosely coupled if this is the responsibility of the users of the federation. depending on whether the federation is capable of providing only one or several integrated schemas, a further classification of tightly coupled systems to single and multiple federations is considered. this classification by sheth and larson is based solely on the autonomy aspect and shown in figure . . . there are other classifications based on other aspects or including more recent approaches, but for the remainder of this discussion we will stay with this classification. from a conceptual point of view, the next addressed issue was providing means to address schematic heterogeneities in the component schemas. also in [sl ] sheth and larson introduced the well accepted -level schema architec- ture for data integration as the counterpart to the -level schema architecture in centralised dbms. in addition to the latter, the three lower levels of the former address the extraction and transformation aspects of schemas of the component systems. furthermore, sheth and larson gave abstract descriptions of architec- tural aspects regarding query and result transformation, thus providing the frame- work for the design of these mappings during schema integration. federated and multi-database systems inspired research in different directions which were shortly discussed before or are not discussed here in detail, but include for instance chapter . data integration approaches � schema integration, � multi-database query languages, � query processing and optimisation in multi-database systems, � transaction processing across component systems, � the evolution of integrated systems, and � the integration of non-database systems. of these directions, this thesis will deal will aspects of query processing and op- timisation regarding necessary extensions to support similarity-based operations. furthermore, the proposed operations will be described as extensions to sql, to provide a possible integration with a multi-database query language. mediators mediators as introduced by wiederhold in [wie ] and later on refined in [wie ] and [wg ] are often seen as a concurrent approach to federated databases, be- cause the concept of a mediator in deed differs regarding some aspects and was subsequently assigned some differing properties to distinguish it from other ap- proaches. yet, the concept is rather complementary because it addresses issues of data integration from the broader perspective of information system integra- tion, this way adding some relevant aspects discussed below. furthermore, it is developed around a very abstract architectural approach of mediators and source wrappers, the latter covering the lower levels of heterogeneities and this way real- izing a separation of concerns. according to [wie ] wiederhold described the general intention behind me- diator architectures as follows: in order to provide intelligent and active mediation, we envisage a class of software modules which mediate between the workstation applications and the databases. these mediators will form a distinct, middle layer, making the user applications independent of the data resources. these mediator components were complemented by wrappers for source systems, covering interface and language heterogeneities. furthermore, more complex, hi- erarchical mediator architectures were envisioned, to support different levels of integration. the principal architecture is shown in figure . . . though it was this architecture that proved most influential and later on was adopted to several integration approaches including federated databases, where . . data integration approaches foundation layer mediation layer application layer ... source (dbs) source (dbs) source (web) source n (dbs) mediator mediator mediator mediator mediator wrapper wrapper wrapper wrapper n application application figure . : principal mediator architecture the integration layer now consisted of components providing functionality con- forming to mediators and wrappers, the research on mediators raised a number of other interesting questions semantic integration: the importance of knowledge about integrated data sets and the way they are created and used was always pointed out by wieder- hold and subsequent research. in deed, managing this knowledge as part of an integration system is a key advantage in dealing with the complexity of data integration and later on branched numerous research activities. query capabilities: because mediators are seen in the broader context of infor- mation system integration, the aspects of association autonomy as well as interface and language heterogeneities had to be dealt with more explicitly. data quality: from an information system point of view the quality of data in in- tegrated data sets is very problematic and therefore plays an important role. research on mediators right from the beginning included related aspects of semantic heterogeneities like data quality, uncertainty, and differing levels of abstraction in integrated data sets. like multi-database systems, mediator-based systems require a uniform schema resulting from schema integration, and based on that, distributed query processing can take place. as previously mentioned, there are a number of prop- chapter . data integration approaches erties assigned to mediators, that were not necessarily intended in the original concept, such as � mediators only provide read access to integrated data sets, � schema integration must take place in a top-down fashion, � mediator based integration is best suitable for the integration of non- database systems, � mediators and especially wrappers are “hard-coded” and not application- independent, � etc. in deed, this were characteristics of some successful applications of the mediator concept, but rather than continuing the discussion about general properties we will focus on the architectural and further aspects mentioned before when referring to mediator-based systems. for the work presented in this thesis aspects of query capabilities and data quality addressed in the context of mediators play the most important role. wrap- pers are intended to provide a description of the query capabilities to the mediator, which then can consider these descriptions during query re-writing. this approach is applied in chapter for mapping similarity-based predicates on string attributes to standard functionality provided by most databases and information systems. the main intention of using similarity-based operations lies in the improvement of data quality by automatically finding related or matching data across various sources. . . materialised data integration despite the soundness of virtual data integration, in the s an alternative con- cept of data integration became most popular in practice. especially in local sce- narios like enterprises and other organisations, some aspects of autonomy did not play such an important role anymore, and the complete materialisation of inte- grated data sets were established as a pragmatic solution to integration problems. this way, not only the complexities of distributed query processing in heteroge- neous environments was avoided, but the materialisation also granted the nec- essary efficient query processing on huge integrated data sets required in many integrative applications. on the other hand, physical data integration shares many other aspects with virtual integration approaches, such as . . data integration approaches � the resolution of system heterogeneities during the import of data from in- tegrated component systems, � the resolution of schematic heterogeneities through schema integration and the application of resulting mappings during a transformation step, � the resolution of semantic heterogeneities during a data merging or data cleaning step, and � concepts to deal with the communication and association autonomy of sources during the import of data. furthermore, physical data integration is only applicable where the resulting re- dundancy and the limited up-to-dateness is acceptable in a given application sce- nario. though the general approach of physical data integration can be and was applied in numerous applications, the field drawing most attention was the re- search on and practical experience made with data warehouses as introduced by inmon and described for instance in [inm ], which is later on described in more detail. another interesting application exists in the area of integrating semi- structured data from web sources by extracting their contents as for instance de- scribed by may et al. in [mhll ]. data warehouses the general idea behind data warehouses is to provide access aimed at analytical operations for management decision support on an integrated data set covering data from multiple operative systems within enterprises or organisations. because these integrated data sets can be huge and analytical operations often have to work on large subsets of the integrated data, a virtual integration does not seem appro- priate due to reasons of efficiency. for the import in a first step data is extracted from each source system to a so-called staging area. the extract either comprises the full set of data or the delta since the last extraction took place. database systems nowadays provide mechanisms for the efficient export, import, or replication of data, which can be applied during this step. the staging area is a database, where all necessary transformations take place, including � structural integration according to a schema resulting from schema integra- tion according to virtual integration, � data cleaning to grant data quality of the integrated data set by removing or repairing implausible or obviously erroneous data, and chapter . data integration approaches � data matching, merging, and grouping to reconcile overlapping or related data sets or achieve a common level of abstraction. the latter aspects of data matching, merging, and grouping are most often consid- ered part of data cleaning, but are described here separately because they are of special interest for this thesis as discussed later on. schema integration for data warehouses usually is driven by requirements of the analytical applications and, hence, is carried out in a top-down fashion. in a next step, the transformed, cleaned, and merged data set is brought into a sepa- rate database forming the basis for the analytical data processing such as online analytical processing or data mining techniques. techniques proposed in this thesis, and here especially chapter , can be ap- plied for the previously mentioned tasks of data matching, merging, and grouping. data matching is used to find objects representing the same or related real-world objects. most often there are no common identifiers usable for this task and imprecise or erroneous data values make an equality based matching impossible. for same objects data merging can take place, and for related objects references or foreign keys can be adjusted. data merging is necessary, if objects from different sources representing one real-world object are identified during the matching phase, a common, rec- onciled representation has to be derived based on the possibly conflicting data values. data grouping or householding is used to condense data from source systems or relate it to some more abstract concept in the integrated schema to reach a common level of granularity in the integrated data set. these problems, also referred to as record matching, entity identification, the merge/purge problem etc., were addressed in research related to data cleaning and data warehouses as for instance by calvanese et al. in [cdgl � ], galhardas et al. [gfss ], monge and elkan [me ], hernandez and stolfo in [hs ], etc. furthermore, commercial tools provide specialised solutions for very specific tasks like for instance customer address matching. . conclusions this chapter gave a short overview of problems and approaches in data integra- tion, as far as they are related to the research presented in this thesis. this includes the origins of problems resulting from characteristics like heterogeneity, distri- bution, and autonomy on the most general level of abstraction. in this context, . . conclusions aspects of typical techniques to address these problems like architectural consid- erations, schema integration, and distributed query processing in heterogeneous environments were described. furthermore, an overview of existing data integra- tion approaches was given based on the general distinction between virtual and materialised integration. as this thesis deals with similarity-based operations in data integration related to various problems and applicable in a number of approaches, the research re- sults presented in the latter chapters were positioned accordingly. here, the main focus was on aspects of distributed query processing in heterogeneous environ- ments and specific aspects resulting from either virtual or materialised integration approaches. the current situation regarding data integration is characterised by research results covering most critical aspects of the problem on all different levels. of- ten there are a number of concurrent solutions, as for instance regarding the well studied problem of schema integration. unfortunately, the complexity of the over- all problem spawned many solutions addressing partial problems, which are not necessarily orthogonal and cannot easily be combined. successful systems such as research prototypes or the very few commercial solutions therefore are often limited in their functionality and tailor-made for certain applications or suitable only for constricted classes of applications. accordingly, there are no standards for data integration, so, the work presented in this thesis cannot be described based on such standards and rather relates to common knowledge or certain approaches in the field. furthermore, like previous research results the techniques proposed here provide solutions for another partial problem, leaving other aspects aside. summarised, the area of data integration remains an active research field, where the current focus is on filling the gaps regarding certain open problems, like in this thesis, or applying new technologies which are better suitable to pro- vide stable solutions. for the future, the many parts of the puzzle resulting from research must be put together to form a more coherent picture of the overall task of data integration driven by real-world applications. chapter . data integration approaches chapter concepts of similarity to provide data processing operations based on similarity, one first has to gain a certain understanding of the characteristics of similarity. while there is a gen- eral acceptance of the importance of similarity in various sciences, there also is an obvious lack of common foundations and definitions of the term. wherever similarity as a concept is used successfully, it is seen from a very specialised point of view. its formalisations and properties used in one context often are debatable or not useful in another. this chapter discusses different views on similarity, ex- plicitly not intending to provide a new generalised view, but instead discussing implications of certain aspects and adjusting the focus for the usage of similarity in data integration. . introduction the importance of similarity in our daily life is often underestimated, but it is clearly pointed out in the field of cognitive sciences, comprising psychological and philosophical aspects. not only that a main inspiration for similarity in computer science is the research done in the field of psychology, but there are also parallels of the way information has to be processed based on similarity by computers and humans. to achieve the capabilities humans have in processing information from the real world and to bridge communication gaps between men and computer similarity will have to play a key role. the most important application of similarity is taking place in the human brain every millisecond when incoming sensual information is processed. in william james stated the following ([jam ]): this sense of sameness is the very keel and backbone of our thinking. as robert goldstone pointed out in [gol ] intellectual and cognitive processes have to be based on similarity, because we only can store and perceive varying chapter . concepts of similarity human cognition real world objects cerebral representation buildings abstract concept (a) abstraction human cognition real world object cerebral representations bath road bristol, uk identified object (b) identification figure . : usage of similarity for identification and abstraction of real world objects or incomplete representations of aspects of the world. of course humans are able to recognise a person they have met before, but for every new meeting this other person and the new perception of her or him has changed more or less. so the human brain has to be able to map the perceived to the stored representation, or as sir w. hamilton put it in [ham]: identity is a relation between our cognitions of a thing, not between things themselves. besides the identification, where two representations refer to the same object in the real world, similarity is also applied in other intellectual processes like associ- ation, classification, generalisation, etc., where representations refer to an abstract relationship or concept based on context-specific commonalities. these two as- pects of similarity are illustrated in figure . . in the following sections we will see that similarity is used in computer science in corresponding ways. before we have a closer look at certain characteristics of similarity and sim- ilarity models, we have to consider the common human comprehension of the word similar. deriving from the latin word similis meaning like or resembling, the word similar is most often used intuitively to compare or relate objects re- garding certain common aspects. yet, these aspects are often left unspecified or are given based on a very loose terms. hence, in dictionaries one will find de- scriptions of similar and similarity like the following from the oxford english . . introduction dictionary ([tho ]): similar: . of the same kind in appearance, character, or quantity, without being identical. . ����� this very loose description of the usage of the term already raises two interesting points. at first, similarity between things, persons, concepts, etc. is based on equality of certain aspects or their abstraction. secondly, the proposition that identical objects cannot be similar, challenges many of the theories introduced later on. actually, one can find a contradiction within the very same source, when looking up identity: identity: ����� . a close similarity or affinity. the relation between similarity and identity – whether it is independence, com- plementation, or implication in any direction – is discussed later on in more detail, and one will see that all propositions may make sense under more specific condi- tions. another description of the term similar is given in the american heritage dictionary of the english language ([mor ]) similar: . related in appearance or nature; alike though not identical. . ����� here, something is related to something else by being similar, hence, similarity is explicitly considered as a – probably binary – relation. two non-identical ob- jects are similar if some unspecified condition on common aspects holds. while this certainly reflects a common usage of the term, another understanding that is widely used in research on similarity issues considers similarity as a measure of likeness between objects. for example, a simple similarity measure is the num- ber of features two objects have in common – the greater this value is, the more similar the two objects are. in this case not only the fact that objects are similar is of interest, but also the quantifiable degree of similarity. both points of view are useful, and similarity measures are actually a common way to specify the above mentioned conditions of a similarity relation. chapter . concepts of similarity one major problem of similarity is that it heavily depends on the context of usage. from a quite pessimistic point of view the philosopher and linguist john r. searle wrote in [sea ]: similarity is a vacuous predicate: and any two things are similar in some respect or another. saying that the metaphorical “s is p” implies the literal “s is like p” does not solve our problem. it only pushes it back a step. the problem of understanding literal similes with the respect of similarity left unspecified is only a part of the problem of understanding metaphor. how are we supposed to know, for example, that the utterance “juliet is the sun” does not mean “juliet is for the most part gaseous”, or “juliet is million miles from the earth”, both of which properties are salient and well-known features of the sun. given shakespeare’s play “romeo and juliet” plus some knowledge of human social interaction as the “respect of similarity” the cited metaphor becomes un- derstandable. contrary to equality relationships for similarity relationships one has to be more specific about the conditions under which the relationship holds. furthermore, these conditions can be specific not only to certain classes of com- pared objects but also to single instances, which makes the usage of similarity even more difficult. this problem is outlined from a psychological point of view by medin et al. in [mgg ] and from a philosophical perspective by goodman in [goo ]. unfortunately, there is no such thing as a general theory of similarity in math- ematics. the most common usage is related to geometrical shapes, where a binary relationship between two shapes exists if a limited set of transformations, e.g. di- lation, rotation, expansion, reflection, etc. depending of the kind of similarity, can be applied to transform one object to the other. sometimes these transforma- tions are referred to as similarities [wei ]. another occurrence of the term is related to self-similarity and fractals [wei , hut ]. but, just like the former this is a rather specialised application of similarity instead of a general view on the concept. nevertheless, mathematics provide the foundations of popular similarity measures like the distance in metric spaces described in the following section. for a first summary, while it is hard to overestimate the importance of similar- ity, there are major problems with the very foundations of similarity as a concept. its relationship to other important concepts like identity varies depending on the usage. the term is ambiguously used for relationships as well as for measures of similarity. similarity depends heavily on the context of its usage, and very often it is not easy to specify this context. these problems and more specific ones de- scribed in the following sections constrained a wider usage of this generally very useful concept in computer science. therefore, when introducing various models . . models of similarity of similarity in the following sections we have to be very careful with the term itself and related terms. . models of similarity just as the common understanding of the term similarity varies, there is a number of contradicting formalisations of similarity and its characteristics. therefore, throughout this paper we will use rather loose definitions of terms separated from certain characteristics that may or may not apply in certain scenarios. for this purpose, basic concepts and terms are discussed and formalised. met- rics as a general concept for measuring similarity and their shortcomings regard- ing some aspects of similarity are described. related to this discussion, various specific measures of similarity are described. a rough classification of models for measuring similarity was given by goldstone in [gol ] as � geometrical models, � featural models, � alignment-based models, and � transformational models. the focus in this section will be on geometrical, featural, and especially on trans- formational models. geometrical models are the currently most often used ap- proach in computer science, while featural models as used in psychology are closer to the human understanding of similarity. transformational models are applied for instance in approximate string matching which is most relevant for the research presented in this thesis. therefore, string similarity is discussed in more detail in the next section. . . similarity measures and predicates at first, we have to draw a clear distinction between similarity measures and a similarity relation. given two objects a and b from not yet further defined domains a and b, respectively, we define a similarity measure as follows: definition . a similarity measure is a non negative function sim : a � b � � expressing the similarity between two objects a � a and b � b. if a � b and the similarity measure is sim : a � a � � � we call it a similarity measure on a. chapter . concepts of similarity this definition explicitly includes the dissimilarity or distance between two objects, because an interpretation of the result of the function is not yet specified. typical interpretations of similarity measures are: a normalised similarity measure: sim : a � b � � � � where sim � a � b � � if the objects are least similar and sim � a � b � � if the objects are most similar or identical, depending on the context of usage. a distance or dissimilarity measure: dist : a � b � � � ∞ � or dist : a � b � � � maxdistance � where dist � a � b � � if the objects are most similar, and dist � a � b � � maxdistance if the objects are most dissimilar. we will see that the concept of a distance measure is used very often – for instance in metric dimensional scaling – because the distance of two objects can be measured more easily than their commonalities. nevertheless, transformations between different interpretations are possible, like for instance for the two previ- ously mentioned sim � a � b � � � dist � a � b �maxdistance or sim � a � b � � � dist � a � b � if a maximum distance is not known. an often used normalised similarity measure from the area of information retrieval is the cosine similarity defined for two vectors x � � x � x � �����	� xn � and y � � y � y ������� � yn � as sim � x � y � � ∑ n i � xiyi� ∑ni � x i � ∑ni � y i because document vectors in information retrieval are representations of the fre- quency of terms in the document compared to the frequency in the overall col- lection, the vectors are considered to be in the positive sector. accordingly, the function returns whenever the angle between two vector representations is and returns if the vectors are orthogonal, i.e. the vector representations of texts share no common terms ([byrn ]). apart from the interpretation of the result there is much more left unspecified in this definition. usually definitions include a set of characteristics of the func- tion like symmetry or the triangular inequality that are only applicable for certain measures described later on. furthermore, we did not yet specify the context of similarity and how the similarity is measured. to provide similarity based operations we will require similarity relations be- tween objects and according similarity predicates. definition . a similarity relation is a binary relation sim 
 a � b, where � a � b � � sim if two objects a and b are similar. . . models of similarity definition . a similarity predicate sim � a � b � or a � b is a two-valued logic operator deduced by a similarity relation, i.e. a � b � � a � b � � sim. instead of measuring the similarity or dissimilarity of objects, given a simi- larity relation and the deduced predicate we can explicitly say that two objects actually are similar, again, not yet considering he context and the criteria the rela- tion is based on. nevertheless, for future usage we will mostly rely on similarity predicates which are defined based on similarity measures. a common way to specify similarity predicates this way is to introduce a threshold for the similarity measure. for the previously mentioned interpretations of similarity measures, the according predicates are: normalised similarity predicate: a � b � sim � a � b ��� t, where sim � a � b � is a normalised similarity measure and t � � � is a similarity threshold � t � meaning the closer t is to the more similar the objects have to be and the more rigid is our similarity predicate. distance or dissimilarity predicate: a � b � dist � a � b ��� k, where dist � a � b � is a distance or dissimilarity measure and k � � � is a dis- tance threshold � k � ∞ expressing the required closeness of objects, i.e. the closer k is to the more rigid is our similarity predicate. normalised similarity measures can further directly be used to specify pred- icates in a fuzzy logic, where the result of the logic operator returns a degree of truth between and . fuzzy similarity predicate: a � b : � sim � a � b � , where the result is the degree of similarity between the objects. such an interpretation can for instance be used for duplicate detection based on similarity between different representations, where the result of the predicate is interpreted as the probability of sameness. furthermore, such an approach is use- ful when specifying logic expressions to describe the similarity between more complex objects based on the similarity of components such as attributes as well as contained or related objects. in this case, several fuzzy similarity predicates can be combined using standard logical operators. using the previously intro- duced two-valued predicates would require specifying a threshold for each atomic predicate. . . metrics as similarity measures the most common usage of similarity measures refers to distances in metric space defined as follows based on [wei ]. chapter . concepts of similarity definition . a metric space is a set s with a global distance function (the metric g) which for every two points a � b � s, gives the distance between them as a non- negative real number g � a � b � � � � . a metric space must also satisfy . � a � b � s : g � a � b � � � a � b (constancy of self-similarity) . � a � b � s : g � a � b � � g � b � a � (symmetry) . � a � b � c � s : g � a � b � � g � b � c � � g � a � c � (triangular inequality) accordingly we define a similarity metric, which is a special case of the dis- similarity or distance measure introduced before: definition . a similarity metric is a similarity measure that satisfies all axioms for a metric. other related terms for a metric are: positivity: � a � b � s : g � a � b � � , which conforms to the definition of a metric as a non-negative function. minimality: � a � b � s : g � a � b � � g � a � a � � a �� b, which results from the constancy of self-similarity and positivity. the typical example for a metric space is the n-dimensional euclidean space � n , consisting of all points � x � x � ����� � xn � � � n , and the euclidean metric or dis- tance. as the points in the euclidean space are represented by n-dimensional vectors, the euclidean space is also referred to as vector space or n-dimensional space. a generalised form of metrics for the euclidean space is the minkowski distance. the manhattan or city-block distance like the euclidean distance is a specialisation of the minkowski distance. there are other distance measures for euclidean spaces, some of them satisfying the condition for metrics, e.g. the chebyshev distance. the previously mentioned metrics for any two points x � � x � x �������	� xn � and y � � y � y � ����� � yn � are defined as the following functions. minkowski distance: dist p � x � y � � ∑ni � p � � xi � yi � p, describes a general class of distance measures of various orders p ��� � , also called lp distance. euclidean distance: dist � x � y � � ∑ni � � � xi � yi � , minkowski distance with p � , or l distance. manhattan distance: dist � x � y � � ∑ni � � xi � yi � , minkowski distance with p � , or l distance. . . models of similarity chebyshev distance: dist∞ � x � y � � maxni � � xi � yi � , maximum distance in any dimension, and the upper bound for minkowski distances of growing order p. because metrics in vector spaces are an useful and easy to understand measure for similarity, or, more precisely, dissimilarity between objects, early research on similarity in psychology and computer science was based on vector spaces. as the objects considered were merely not points in such a space, a key aspect of measuring similarity was mapping objects to vector representations in any given space. examples for such mappings are multi dimensional scaling, described later on and used for instance in early psychological research, as well as the extraction of feature vectors from multi-media data in computer science. but metric spaces do not only include spaces of a fixed dimensionality. ev- ery set with a distance measure satisfying the metric axioms is a metric space, e.g. the edit or levenshtein distance for strings first described in [lev ]. it is defined as the minimal number of insertions, deletions, or substitutions of single characters necessary to transform one string to another. if xi � x � � x � � ����� x � i � and y j � y � � y � � ����� y � j � are strings with all characters x � k � � Σ � � k � i and y � l � � Σ � � l � j over one alphabet Σ, the edit distance of the two strings can be computed as follows: edist � xi � y j � � ���������� ��������� if i � j � ∞ if i � � j � edist � xi � � y j � � if x � i � � y � i � min �� 	 edist � xi � y j � � � edist � xi � � y j � � edist � xi � � y j � � � �� 
 else in the original paper levenshtein shows that this distance measure satisfies the metric axioms and, therefore, is a metric on the set of all strings over a given al- phabet. while similarity based on distance in euclidean spaces is often referred to as geometrical similarity, the levenshtein distance and and similar edit distance approaches for graphs and composite objects are referred to as transformational similarity according to a classification given by goldstone in [gol ]. the first use of geometrical models for analysing similarity was in psychol- ogy. perceptual stimuli were considered measurable in several dimensions and the distance between measured values was used as a measure of similarity of the stimuli. general problems of measurement were for instance discussed by stevens in [ste ]. in attneave stated in [att ]: the question ’what makes things seem alike or seem different?’ is chapter . concepts of similarity one so fundamental to psychology that very few psychologists have been naive enough to ask it. furthermore, in the same publication he argued for the manhattan distance be- tween measurable stimuli, while torgerson argued for the euclidean distance in [tor ]. in this latter publication torgerson first applied multidimensional scaling (mds), an overview of which is given in [lh ], to a special case of similarity analysis. instead of actually measuring the stimuli very often only information on the distance between objects is available. to derive a representation in a euclidean space mds can be applied on a computable distance metric, similarity matrices, or confusion matrices, the latter two resulting for instance from experiments. the mapping is done by continuously adjusting coordinates and this way minimising the stress of the resulting space, where the stress is a measure for the differences between real distances and distances in the mapped space. the result of mds is a representation of all the objects from the input set as points in a space of dimen- sion n, where n is an input parameter. if n is equal to the number of objects, an optimal solution without stress is always possible. this work on scaling and metric spaces by torgerson (see also [tor , tor ]) and later on by shepard ([she a, she b]) was most influential on following geometric views on similarity, including the discussion on the usability of various metrics under various circumstances, e.g. the correlation between dimensions. a comprehensive overview of geometric models of similarity used in psychology, as well as others described later on, is given by navarro in [nav ]. in computer science the research on similarity is mostly based on euclidean spaces. such spaces of a fixed dimensionality n can be indexed efficiently us- ing well-known techniques like r-trees and derivatives ([gut , srf ], grid files ([nhs ]), z-ordering ([ore ], etc., due to the neighbourhood preserving nature of these structures. the usability of these approaches, though, is limited by the number of dimensions n. this effect is known as the curse of dimen- sionality. mapping objects to a euclidean space is for instance addressed for complex data objects such as multimedia data through terms of feature extraction ([kit , jag ], where certain measurable aspects of objects are used to derive the vector representation directly from one object. a concurrent approach is based on the previously mentioned multidimensional scaling, which itself is computation- ally expensive and not suitable for large datasets. therefore, faloutsos et al. in [fl ] described fastmap, also deriving a euclidean representation of objects for which a distance function or matrix is given, but applying some reasonable simplifications. jin et al. in [jlm ] use this approach for approximate string matching. there are several advantages of similarity metrics resulting from the metric axioms, especially when the metrics are used for data processing. considering the . . models of similarity definition of similarity relations described before, the constancy of self-similarity and the symmetry directly translate to a reflexive and symmetric similarity rela- tion. for similarity based operations that would mean, we do not have to check whether an object is similar to itself, and if the similarity of object a to object b also exists from object b to object a. current data processing is often based on equivalence relations, which are reflexive, symmetric, and transitive. all the opti- misations resulting from the former two properties can be applied, if a similarity operation is based on a similarity metric. unfortunately, similarity relations are in general not considered transitive. the triangular inequality can be considered a mitigation of transitivity for distance measures by at least preserving the neighbourhood of different objects, which is useful for efficient access to similar objects. for instance, this is used by index structures conserving the notion of closeness that is expressed through the trian- gular inequality, as mentioned above. nevertheless, transitivity does not hold for similarity relations. considering the previously introduced derivation of similarity predicates and relations from a distance measure as � a � b � � sim � dist � a � b � � k we immediately see that symmetry and reflexivity hold for the relation sim, i.e. � a � a � � sim � dist � a � a � � � k � a � b � � sim � � b � a � � sim � dist � a � b � � dist � b � a � � k which always evaluate to true if dist is a metric. considering three objects a, b and c where the relation holds for a and b as well as for b and c, i.e. dist � a � b ��� k � dist � b � c � � k � dist � a � b � � dist � b � c � � k and now additionally consider the triangular inequality dist � a � c � � dist � a � b � � dist � b � c � � k transitivity obviously does not hold for the derived similarity relation sim. hence, in this case sim is a reflexive, symmetric, atransitive relation. . . problems with common models at this point we are at the most common understanding of the terms related to similarity: similarity is expressed by distance measures which are metrics, i.e. they satisfy the metric axioms of constancy of self-similarity, symmetry, and the chapter . concepts of similarity triangular inequality. similarity relations are reflexive, symmetric, and atransitive. most definitions refer to these properties. nevertheless, there are problems with these models and almost all properties were refuted by results of psychological experiments and diverging properties of specific similarity measures and similarity relations. obviously, the real compre- hension of similarity is less rigid than the properties introduced so far. the con- stancy of self-similarity, symmetry, and the triangular inequality were attacked by psychological research, for instance by krumhansl in [kru ] and tversky in [tve ]. if these do not hold, we also have to reconsider the symmetry and reflexivity of similarity relations. though often neglected, these observations are relevant in data processing. as a motivation, we have to remember that similarity always depends on the context of similarity, which in data processing may be a given application or value do- main. for such a context a specific similarity measure can be used, which may be provided by the designer or the user of the given application, for instance as a user-defined function. as shown later on, it is easy to specify a similarity predi- cate that is neither reflexive nor symmetric, and still may make perfect sense for a certain application. the model developed by tversky is a featural model of similarity according to the classification by goldstone in [gol ]. instead of representing stimuli by a number of measurable or derivable coordinates to some euclidean space, he characterised them by a set of features that they possess. let a and b be the set of features of objects a and b, respectively, then tversky described the similarity of a and b in his feature contrast model ([tve ]) as a similarity measure sim � a � b � � f � a � b � � α f � a � b � � β f � b � a � where α � β � and f is a non-negative function. tversky showed that this model is closer to the human cognition of similarity. results of psychological exper- iments had shown tendencies towards asymmetric similarities, which could not be represented by geometrical models based on metrics. a typical experimen- tal result was that variants were considered more similar to a prototype than vice versa. santini and jain applied and refined tversky’s feature contrast model for similarity based operations on image data in [sj ]. in [kru ] krumhansl argued that the constancy of self-similarity does not hold if a distance function also considers the density of stimuli, which was shown to have an impact on the dissimilarity by experimental results. the triangular inequality was refuted by ashby and perrin in [ap ] as well as tversky and gati in [tg ]. in the latter article tversky and gati introduced weaker properties of distance functions in a fixed dimensional feature space as an alternative to the metric distance axioms. these so called monotone proximity structures have the following properties satisfied by most distance measures: . . models of similarity dominance: the distance between two objects is greater than the distance be- tween their projections on the coordinate axes. this is a weaker form of the triangular inequality. consistency: the ordinal relation of distances between objects in one dimension is independent of the values in the other dimensions. transitivity: if the projection of an object b on one dimension is between the projections of objects a and c, written as a � b � c, and furthermore c is between b and d, that means b � c � d, then a � b � d and a � c � d also hold. this framework is less rigid than the metric axioms and better explains the hu- man cognition of similarity, while still preserving the intuitive notion of closeness through the ordinal relations of dissimilarities along dimensions. unfortunately, monotone proximity structures and their implications are not well researched, es- pecially in computer science. a b c figure . : distances in a weighted directed graph again, it is not the intention of this work to provide a new framework for sim- ilarity or show that any of the above mentioned approaches is correct in all given scenarios. instead, we will discuss what implications the presence or absence of certain properties of similarity measures and similarity relations has on similarity- based operations. missing metric axioms, for instance, may easily be the case for application-specific similarity measures. as a somewhat malicious example con- sider the weighted directed graph depicted in figure . . if we define a distance measure between nodes in this graph as the minimum sum of edge weights of all paths from one node to another or as ∞ when no such path exists, we see that con- stancy of self-similarity and symmetry do not hold, because dist � a � a � � while dist � b � b � � , and dist � a � b � � while dist � b � a � � . if we change our distance measure to not consider paths, but only direct edges, we also lose the triangular inequality, because dist � a � c � � while dist � a � b � � dist � b � c � � . in this case, monotone proximity structures would not help either, because the model is not geometric. multidimensional scaling or fastmap cannot yield meaningful results, chapter . concepts of similarity because the definition of the distance as ∞ for non-existing paths makes the ap- proach useless. yet, if we consider the edge weights as transformation costs, a query like “find all nodes similar to a, i.e. nodes that can be the result of (a single or multiple) transformations with costs less than ” is meaningful and would yield the result � a � b � . regarding the properties of similarity predicates, symmetry and reflexivity do not hold if the predicate is specified based on a distance measure, which does not provide constancy of self-similarity and symmetry. consider objects x and y representing sets, for instance of features or information retrieval terms. if we use a similarity measure like sim � x � y � � � x � y � � x � to find objects similar to x , i.e. those who share a considerable number of ele- ments with x , the similarity measure is asymmetric. this is because we do not take the cardinality of y into account, where y may contain many more elements not in x . one might argue, that the often used jaccard set distance sim � x � y � � � x � y � � x � y � might be a better choice. yet, the above scenario is commonly used in informa- tion retrieval, where x represents a query and y represents a document, and the symmetry of the predicate is of no concern. also, in data integration scenarios we may not have full access to the set of queried objects, so we again would have to use the former approach. furthermore, we may not at all want our similarity relation to be reflexive, i.e. we do not want identical objects to be considered as similar. looking for objects which are similar to object x , we may not want the object itself as part of the result. as an example consider record linkage in a data warehouse, where it is not necessary to link a record with itself, but rather only with these records, which are actually similar and not identical. finally, dealing with the context-specific nature of similarity requires similar- ity measures suitable for very specific applications. a common way to provide such tailor-made similarity measures is to implement user-defined functions ac- cording to the previously given definition of a similarity or distance measure. but because the efficient evaluation of predicates based on such measures to a high degree depends on according index support, which in theory can be given if for instance the triangular inequality holds, the implementation can be very problem- atic. in this case, a possible implementation of the similarity measure can be based more primitive predicates. . . string similarity as an example, consider the matching of person names, such as “albrecht dürer”, “albrecht duerer”, “a. dürer”, and “dürer, albrecht”. though all names probably refer to the same german renaissance artist, using for instance the string similarity will only help with the former two representations. but because we know about the semantics of an attribute artist name, we may use techniques introduced in the following section . to address for instance the problems of the german umlauts or abbreviations of first names. furthermore, we can apply elementising to get tokens representing first or last names, and then use these for index based similarity lookup based on the standard edit distance to grant efficiency of predicate evaluation. this way techniques introduced in chapters and can be used. . string similarity the similarity of strings is most important considering the fact that most conven- tional applications deal with simply structured data either expressed as string or numerical data values. though the problems of string similarity and approximate string matching have been a topic of research for a very long time, there still is very little support for these concepts in current data management solutions. likely reasons for this are problems of � efficiency, because as though there are means for approximately matching strings, efficient support for such operations is either too complex or still in its infancy, and � the context-specific aspects of approximate string matching, where efficient solutions often have to be based on the semantics of a string attribute con- sidered in a predicate. for instance, the sql standard only supports phonetic similarity through the soundex coding introduced in [or ] as early as by odell and russel, and matching strings with patterns according to regular expressions. for the lat- ter, commercial database management systems mostly fail to support the efficient processing of such predicates. nevertheless, there are numerous applications of approximate string matching, for instance related to data integration, text retrieval, signal processing, computa- tional biology, and many more. overviews of according research are given for instance by hall and dowling in [hd ], jokinen et al. in [jtu ], and more recently by navarro in [nav ], on all of which the overview given here is based. while the approaches presented in chapters and are applying distance measures for strings like the levenshtein distance already introduced in sec- tion . . and discussed in more detail later on, there are a number of techniques chapter . concepts of similarity for transforming string values to canonical forms which may be helpful in certain application scenarios either for reducing the problem of approximate string match- ing to equivalence matching, or as pre-processing steps for similarity matching. basically, such transformations are applied before internally processing, storing, or indexing strings. transformations for canonising include for instance: character transformations: this includes for instance commonly used transfor- mations to derive a canonical string representation like lower or upper case letters and the removal of special characters like white spaces or dashes. as an example consider the the transformation of “multidatabase” and “multi- database” to the internal representation as “multidatabase”. elementising: the deconstruction of complex strings to atomic elements like words also referred to as tokenising is sometimes required to perform fur- ther transformations like stemming, translation, etc. furthermore, certain similarity measures on strings can be based on their decomposed represen- tation, as for instance described by luján-mora and palomar in [lmp a]. stemming: the reduction of words to a common root based on syntactical rules as outlined for instance in [byrn ] is common practice in the field of in- formation retrieval. this allows for instance the matching of “respectively” and “respective” based on their common root “respect”. translation: though the automatic translation of texts still is problematic, the translation of shorter string values expressed in possibly varying languages may make sense to a certain degree. this translation can be based on dictio- naries or specialised mapping tables. as an example consider a categorical attribute of publication types in a german digital library with values like “buch”, “artikel”, and “konferenzband” which can be mapped to the ac- cording english terms “book”, “article”, and “proceedings”, respectively. substitution of alternative spellings: multi-lingual and other language issues may lead to varying spellings of words, such as the difference between en- glish and american spelling or the new german orthography introduced in the s. an example would be “materialisation” or “materialization” in either english or american spelling, respectively, which can be resolved based on rules. also, names of persons, places, etc. may have different tran- scriptions, like for instance “al-kaida” and “al-qaida”, where mappings or thesauri seem more appropriate. substitution of synonyms: the replacement of certain terms with a most com- mon term describing a class of real-world entities based on thesauri can be applied in various scenarios. this allows for instance the matching of . . string similarity “alike” and “akin” based on the more common word “similar”. the problem of synonyms is addressed extensively in the field of information retrieval as outline for instance in [byrn ]. abbreviation expansion or reduction: a common problem in string matching is the matching of terms to according abbreviations or between diverging abbreviations. this can be done applying mappings or rules for the expan- sion from or reduction to abbreviations. the information loss and possibly resulting ambiguity make this a hard problem. phonetic transformation: the previously mentioned soundex coding as well as derived methods transform words to equivalence classes of similarly sound- ing words. though this is helpful to deal with erroneous data input, the transformed representation can only be used for equivalence matching and no further processing. all these techniques in general imply an equivalence relation, though for instance the replacement of synonyms or abbreviations may lead to problems resulting in similarity relations. though a number of problems can be resolved applying these techniques, the general problem of approximate string matching still persists, re- sulting in a similarity relation between string representations. the majority of problems addressed by approximate string matching result from erroneous or imprecise data, though some of the basic problems mentioned above, like for instance alternative spellings, character transformations, word stem matching, or phonetic matching can partially be dealt with based on string simi- larity. the approximate string matching problem is defined by navarro in [nav ] from a text retrieval point of view as follows: definition . let Σ be a finite alphabet of size � Σ � � σ. let t � Σ � be a text of length n � � t � . let p � Σ � be a pattern of length m � � p � . let k � � be the maximum error allowed. let d : Σ � � Σ � � � be a distance function. the problem of approximate string matching in texts is: given t, p, k, and d, return the set of positions j such that there exists i such that d � p � t � i � � � t � j � � � k. rather than finding positions within texts, we focus on finding similar strings in sets, which may for instance be the values of a string attribute in a relation. hence, our definition is slightly modified. definition . let s � Σ � be a search string and t � Σ � be a set of strings over the same alphabet. the problem of approximate string matching in string sets is: given s, t , k, and d, return the set of all strings t � r such that d � s � t ��� k. chapter . concepts of similarity suitable distance measures for string values are transformational measures ac- cording to the classification given by goldstone in [gol ], i.e. they measure the dissimilarity in terms of operations necessary to transform one string to another. various distance measures can be distinguished based on � the kinds of operations allowed, and � the costs assigned to these operations. typical operations are the deletion, insertion, replacement, or transposition of characters. other considered operations for instance include reversals or the per- mutation of complete substrings, such as for instance the block edit distance in- troduced by tichy in [tic ]. similarly, ukkonen in [ukk ] described similarity of strings in terms of common substrings of a fixed length called q-grams, which are used for a related purpose in chapter . the most common string distance measures are based on the typically considered operations mentioned above. levenshtein distance: the levenshtein or simple edit distance edist introduced formally in section . . considers the minimal number of � insertions – edist � � ac � � � abc � � � , � deletions – edist � � abc � � � ac � � � , and � substitutions – edist � � abc � � � adc � � � to transform one string to another. extended edit distance: a commonly used extension of the levenshtein dis- tance also considers transpositions, i.e. edist � � ab � � � ba � � � because it covers typical typing errors. this extended version like the simple edit distance is a metric. hamming distance: the hamming distance described for instance by kruskal and sankoff in [ks ] only allows substitutions and, therefore, is used mostly for strings representing specific sequences and not natural language. episode distance: the episode distance introduced by das et al. in [dfgg ], similarly to the hamming distance was designed for strings representing sequences, e.g. of events in a temporal space. it allows only insertions and, therefore, is not a symmetric measure and no metric. . . string similarity longest common subsequence distance: introduced by needleman and wun- sch in [nw ] the longest common subsequence distance targets specific sequences in computational biology. it allows only insertions and dele- tions, representing the distance as the number of unpaired characters in both strings. this measure satisfies the metric axioms. all these distance measures in their common form use fixed costs of for all operations. more specific distance measures may assign costs to operations on various levels, to better reflect the actual difference of both strings. this includes the following costs. operational costs which are assigned to deletions, insertions, etc. without fur- ther considering the characters or their context they are applied on. this makes sense, because the errors addressed by the operations have varying statistical frequencies, e.g. false characters appear more often in strings than missing or added characters. character costs refine operational costs by assigning costs for certain transfor- mations based on the considered characters. this reflects phonetic, linguis- tic, or mistyping aspects, e.g. it is more likely to replace an ’n’ with an ’m’ because of their phonetic similarity than ’t’ and ’m’. context-specific costs as a further extension also consider the context of a char- acter for deriving the costs of an applicable operation. for example, “saun- ders” is less different from “sanders” than “sanderus”, because the insertion of a vowel next to another vowel implies a greater phonetic similarity than the introduction of a new syllable by inserting it between consonants. though very helpful to better express the actual similarity, such costs are often neglected in research. a careful assignment of costs does not impact the overall concepts of the distance measures and can be integrated with existing algorithms. nevertheless, problems such as asymmetry etc. can be introduced, e.g. if the insertion and deletion costs do not match. a detailed description of efficient algorithms, for instance based on dynamic programming and bit parallelism, is beyond the scope of this work and we refer the reader to jokinen in [jtu ] and navarro in [nav ]. furthermore, approximate string matching using indexes is a rather new research field, but mainly addressed from an information retrieval point of view dealing with longer texts, e.g. navarro and baeza-yates in [nby ] and ukkonen in [ukk ]. a similar approach by shang and merret described in [sm ] is applied in chapter to support string similarity-based operations in materialised data sets. chapter . concepts of similarity . conclusions this chapter gave an overview of similarity, its general importance, as well as the problems that still hinder its broad application in computer science. for com- puter systems to come near the human capabilities of cognition and intellectual processes requires a better integration of similarity-based concepts. this is very problematic, mainly due to the currently limited understanding of the nature of similarity and the strong dependence on a context of similarity that may vary widely for every application. in this chapter quite loose definitions and descriptions of similarity measures, relations, and predicates were given to allow a great number of applications. the properties of these concepts that may or may not hold were discussed and the consequences were to some degree left open for further discussion in this thesis and related work. on the other hand, the importance of fixed properties such as established through the usage of distances in metric space, which are the current state of the art for similarity-based operations in computer science, was pointed out. some commonly used similarity measures were introduced to illustrate the mentioned concepts and related aspects. a special focus was on similarity mea- sures for string data values, which are used throughout this thesis to define simi- larity predicates and discuss aspects of operations based on these predicates. ac- cordingly the problem of approximate string matching based on string similarity was described. the research on similarity and its integration in computer science remains a challenging area with many problems currently unresolved. just as the current view on similarity applied in data management draws heavily from early research done in the field of psychology, open problems more recently addressed in the lat- ter area are only rarely considered in computer science. furthermore, even on the most general level similarity relations and the often implied probabilistic aspects do not well integrate with current data management solutions, which are based on equivalence relations and the assumption of data representing unquestionable facts. therefore, further research on a conceptual framework addressing these issues is required. chapter similarity-based operations in recent years the concept of similarity has found its way into computer science via various areas, mainly driven by new applications working with complex or imprecise data. all these applications share the need to improve the abilities of data processing towards human cognition and intellectual processes. therefore, the usage can roughly be distinguished according to the two main areas of the usage of similarity in human cognition described in section . . again, we have to consider real world objects and their representations. the latter this time exist in computer memory and are referred to for reasons of simplicity as objects. identification: objects may be representations of the same real world object, yet the representations may differ due to different formats, precisions, input conventions, etc. or incomplete and erroneous data. in this case the identi- fication has to be based on similarity. as data is becoming more complex and the availability from various sources increases, similarity-based identi- fication becomes more and more essential. abstraction: though objects may not be representations of the same real world objects, they may be related by some derivable abstract concept represent- ing user information requirements. this includes finding relations between objects, classification, generalisation, clustering, etc. based on similarity. to support this usage, suitable operations have to be provided by the systems. this problem concerns for instance � database management systems, � data integration solutions, � information and multi-media retrieval systems, � expert systems, chapter . similarity-based operations and others, where the focus here will be on the former two. therefore, the fol- lowing discussions as well as the remainder of this thesis will heavily lean on concepts from database theory such as operations from the relational algebra. this chapter will describe some of the foundations of similarity-based opera- tions introduced in chapters and and relate it to other approaches addressing the same or other relevant issues. . introduction similarity as outlined in chapter requires severely different techniques than those used commonly in current systems to address the following issues: � similarity relations contrary to equivalence relations on which for instance the relational model is based, do have distinct properties like atransitivity, and even symmetry and reflexivity may not hold, � it heavily depends on the context of similarity, which is in most cases very specific to the current application and may be very complex to describe, � the usage of similarity introduces a probabilistic aspect if for instance the measured similarity is used as a degree of truth for identification purposes. therefore, we consider the following levels of support for similarity-based opera- tions. level - predicates: similarity predicates are used to decide about the similarity of data values and this way or through their logical combination about the similarity of objects like tuples. similarity predicates therefore must com- prehensively describe the context of similarity. the support for similarity predicates is currently becoming state of the art for instance by means of multi-media, spatial, and information retrieval extensions to database man- agement systems. on the other hand, support for the similarity of simple data types like strings as described in section . is not part of core database functionality. because such support is a strong requirement in data integra- tion, it is the major focus of this thesis. level - operations: due to the specific properties of similarity relations, oper- ations usually based on equivalence relations must be revisited and adjusted to atransitivity and the possible occurrence of asymmetry and irreflexiv- ity. furthermore, the efficient processing of operations based on similarity- predicates may require the application of different algorithms and index structures on an internal level. from a database point of view this concerns . . similarity predicates selection, join, and grouping operations. for the latter, apart from handling atransitivity etc. the implicitly specified equivalence predicate must be re- placed by an explicit similarity predicate. the impact of similarity relations on database operations is currently rarely considered in existing systems, mainly because a limited view on similarity and according operations – ba- sically only selections – are supported. level - query and data model: the introduction of probabilistic aspects may require changes or extensions to the underlying query and data model of the system to express the possible vagueness of facts derived by similarity- based operations. though this is currently not addressed in existing sys- tems and, furthermore, not a focus of this thesis, the problem was addressed in research. in [ds ] dey et al. propose an extended relational model and algebra supporting probabilistic aspects. fuhr describes a probabilistic datalog in [fuh ]. especially for data integration issues probabilistic ap- proaches were verified and yielded useful results, as described by tseng et al. in [tcy ]. each level builds on the respective lower levels, such as similarity based opera- tions only can be applied based on actual similarity predicates, and a probabilistic data model does only make sense, if according operations are supported. on the other hand, the support of one level does not necessarily imply any higher lev- els. though similarity predicates to some degree may be supported by database systems, the processing of operations can be carried out in a conventional way, possibly with decreased efficiency or accuracy. and, similarity-based operations as proposed in this thesis can be used without any explicit modifications to the data model. so, the focus of this thesis will be on the levels and described above and introduced in more detail in the following sections. . similarity predicates similarity predicates were already introduced and described in section . as � basic similarity predicates conforming to a two-valued logic returning either true or false and may be derived from similarity or distance measures by applying a certain threshold, or alternatively as � fuzzy similarity predicates returning a degree of truth between and . while the former can be supported by current database management systems, the latter require extended operations and implementations and possibly extended, probabilistic data models. chapter . similarity-based operations in this section the semantics of similarity predicates are described as exten- sions to the standard relational algebra assuming the following basic notations: let r be a relation with the schema r � � a �������	� am � , t r � r is a tuple from the relation r and t r � ai � denotes the value of attribute ai of the tuple t r. if we furthermore distinguish between predicates defined between attributes, used for instance in join conditions, and those defined between an attribute and a constant value, as typically used in selection conditions, basic similarity predi- cates � sim pred � can be specified as follows. � sim pred � : � ����� ���� sim � ai � const ��� l dist � ai � const � � � k sim � ai � a j � � l dist � ai � a j � � k where the predicate is specified using either a normalised similarity or a distance measure according to the description in section . . the semantics of the similar- ity and distance predicates are as follows. � normalised similarity predicate on attribute and constant value:� sim pred � � t � � sim � t � ai � � const ��� l � distance predicate on attribute and constant value:� sim pred � � t � � dist � t � ai � � const � � � k � normalised similarity predicate on attributes:� sim pred � � t r � t s � � sim � t r � ai � � t s � a j � � � l � distance predicate on attributes:� sim pred � � t r � t s � � dist � t r � ai � � t s � a j � � � k the last two cases explicitly include the r � s and even i � j. the latter is for instance useful when expressing a predicate for similarity-based grouping as introduced below, where the implicit equality predicate given in the conven- tional group by-clause must be replaced by a similarity predicate. we use sim � t r � ai � � � l and dist � t r � ai � � � k as shorthands for such predicates on one at- tribute within one relation. due to being based on two-valued logic, conventional predicates based on operators such as equality � , inequality �� , or order comparison � � � � � � � , etc. can be considered conceptually on the same level. we use � conv pred � as a shorthand for such conventional predicates. both kinds can be combined freely through logical operators � � � , and � . we refer to conditions containing at least . . similarity predicates one similarity predicate as similarity conditions � sim cond � , i.e. � sim cond � : � ������ ����� � sim pred � � � sim cond � � sim cond � θ � � sim pred �� conv pred � where θ � � � � � � . a special case considered for purposes of the evaluation of predicates during query processing are conjunctive similarity conditions, where only the logical conjunction operator θ � � is used to combine predicates. this basic concept of similarity predicates can be used in most current database management systems by applying user-defined functions for implement- ing similarity or distance measures. yet, the recognition or explicit qualification of these similarity predicates is necessary if special support for similarity-based operations through algorithms and indexes is intended. if this is the case, further considerations regarding the properties of the applied measure are required. similarity predicates which are not reflexive or symmetric have a severe impact on the operations they are used in. atransitivity must gener- ally be considered. the consequences of this are discussed in relation to the oper- ations later on. but, at this point it is necessary to mention that these aspects must be known to the system performing according operations. for system-defined predicates this is straightforward. for user-defined predicates, which will often be required due to the strong context dependence of similarity, there must be ways to declare these properties to the system. because the previous definition of predicates is an extension of the standard relational algebra, we do not have to deal with probabilities in conditions – by using a similarity threshold we can always rely on boolean values of true or f alse for such predicates and derived complex conditions. the alternatively considered approach of using fuzzy similarity predicates returning a degree of truth between and would require a special handling of complex conditions, for which a prob- abilistic result must be derived. given two fuzzy predicates p and q, two often used ways of computing this score are: minimum/maximum combination which is for instance applied during query optimisation when dealing with selectivities in commercial database man- agement systems: p � p � q � � min � p � p � � p � q � � p � p � q � � max � p � p � � p � q � � p � � p � � � p � p � chapter . similarity-based operations probabilistic combination assuming independence between the predicates as for instance used in information retrieval, probabilistic database approaches like the one by fuhr in [fuh ], or data integration approaches like cohen’s whirl described in [coh ]: p � p � q � � p � p � p � q � p � p � q � � � � � p � p � � � � p � q � � p � � p � � � p � p � throughout this thesis the latter approach is used. a discussion of the approaches regarding data integration is given by cohen in [coh ]. the integration of pred- icates which are not fuzzy can easily be done by assigning the values and if the result is f alse or true, respectively. the score of such a complex condition including fuzzy predicates is again be- tween and and can for instance be used to specify a global threshold for the condition instead of the single fuzzy predicates. to gain the expressive power when using thresholds for each fuzzy predicate a weighting of predicates would have to be introduced. alternatively, the score can be used for further process- ing, such as for ranking the results for an output, or for ordered and pipelined processing in following operations. . similarity-based operations based on similarity predicates as the common notion of similarity on the data level, similarity-based operations can be introduced. in principle, only predicate- based operations like the θ-join and selection have to deal with aspects of sim- ilarity. on the other hand, operations like the natural join, grouping, and union with duplicate elimination are based on implicit equivalence relations within the domains of all attributes of a relation, single attributes, or two attributes of the same name. in this section we describe the basic semantics of similarity based operations discussed in chapters and , i.e. selection, join, and grouping as known from the relational algebra or according extensions. though aspects of a similarity union in conjunction with similarity-based duplicate removal were considered during early research related to this thesis, the concept of grouping and aggregation better fit the two aspects of duplicate detection and the according reconciliation of discrepant values. . . similarity-based operations . . similarity-based selection selections based on similarity conditions including basic similarity predicates, which are mainly used in this thesis, have the general form σ � sim cond� r � r � : � � t � t � r � � sim cond � � t � � true � to simplify discussions in the later chapters of the thesis similarity conditions are either seen as conjunctive similarity conditions – for instance as a result of a transformation to a disjunctive normal form without losing the generality of the approach – or as simple constant selection. then, a conjunctive similarity selection is σ � n i � � sim pred� i r � r � : � � t � t � r � � i � � � n : � sim pred � i � t � � true � regarding complex similarity conditions, another aspect typical to the eval- uation of similarity predicates has to be pointed out. a common approach to efficiently process similarity-based operations is to provide a pre-selection which is specified as part of the condition but evaluated before the probably expensive evaluation of the similarity predicates takes place. this is even more effective if the pre-selection predicate is supported by a conventional index structure. the pre-selection in the most simple case can be specified by a user familiar with the internal processing of the query. a number of research approaches, including the one presented in chapter of this thesis, consider the automatic expansion of sim- ilarity predicates to similarity conditions including pre-selection predicates which can be evaluated efficiently. similarity predicates may include the similarity between attributes, as later on used for similarity joins, or as predicates comparing attribute values to a constant specified within the query according to constant selections in the relational alge- bra. such similarity constant selections on an attribute a � r of relation r � r � are either based on a similarity measure σsim � a � constant ��� t r � r � : � � t � t � r � sim � t � a � � constant � � l � or on a distance measure σdist � a � constant ��� kr � r � : � � t � t � r � dist � t � a � � constant � � k � as introduced above. the latter conforms to a range or ε-range query as known from spatial data access and information and multimedia retrieval. other approaches in these fields related to similarity selections are nearest neighbour queries and k-nearest neigh- bour queries, which are also based on distance measures and described for in- stance in [sl ] and [byrn ]. instead of returning reasonably similar or close chapter . similarity-based operations objects, such queries return either the or k closest objects to a query point, in our case represented by the constant value. a more recent type of distance- based queries are skyline queries as described for instance by kossmann et al. in [krr ], where the result of a query is a set of objects and each of them represents an optimal solution regarding a combination of criteria expressed as dimensional values. another aspect typical to information and multimedia retrieval is to apply the fuzzy nature of similarity predicates by not presenting a boolean result, i.e. tuples either are or are not element of an unordered result set, but instead use the result of predicate evaluation to present a possibly truncated ordered result list. in this case, thresholds are not part of the predicate as in our notion of fuzzy similarity predicates, and the algorithms and operations have to be adapted to this modifica- tion of the retrieval data model. an overview of according techniques is given for instance in [byrn ]. finally, for a similarity-based selection the consequences of properties a sim- ilarity measure used to specify a predicate has have to be considered. while on the conceptual level neither the lack of constancy of self-similarity and symme- try nor violations of the triangular inequality have any consequences regarding the semantics of the operation, a missing notion of closeness as for instance ex- pressed through the triangular inequality or by monotone proximity structures as introduced in section . . may hinder the efficient processing of the predicate, because supporting index structures are not conceivable in this case. . . similarity-based join based on similarity conditions introduced above the semantics of a similarity join between two relations r � r � and r � r � can be described in a straightforward way for a given similarity condition � sim cond � as r �� � sim cond� r : � � t � t � r � r � � � t � r : t � r � � t � r � � � t � r : t � r � � t � r � �� sim cond � � t � t � � true � this simply means, the concatenation of a pair of tuples from the relations r and r appears in the result of the join operation if the similarity condition is fulfilled for these two tuples. there is a slight simplification in this description by assuming non-overlapping schemas r and r , which can always be realised by considering the relation name as part of the attribute namespace. the semantics of a similarity join as given above conforms to a θ-join, only differing in the kind of predicates allowed. . . similarity-based operations just like for selections we consider the following cases of simplified join con- ditions consisting of only one similarity or distance predicate, i.e. r �� sim � ai � a j ��� l r : � � t � t � r � r � � ai � r � a j � r � � t � r : t � r � � t � r � � � t � r : t � r � � t � r � � sim � ai � a j � � l � and r �� dist � ai � a j ��� kr : � � t � t � r � r � � ai � r � a j � r � � t � r : t � r � � t � r � � � t � r : t � r � � t � r � � dist � ai � a j � � k � respectively. when similarity joins are addressed in research, as for instance in the approaches described later on, the description most often refers to these limited interpretations, basically because most research is focused on the evaluation of one specific similarity predicate. though the research presented in this thesis is also focused on specific predicates, namely string similarity as expressed based on the edit distance, in chapter a discussion of complex join conditions is included. spatial and similarity joins were first addressed for data values that either rep- resented points in a multidimensional metric space or could be mapped to such a space, e.g. by brinkhoff et al. in [bks ] and shim et al. in [ssa ]. a recent overview is given by koudas and sevcik in [ks ]. based on fuhr’s probabilistic datalog ([fuh ]) in [coh ] cohen described an approach for performing joins based on textual similarity, contrary to the similarity of shorter strings used in this thesis. in [gij � ] and [giks ] gravano et al. present and refine an ap- proach to perform joins based on similarity of string attributes through efficient pre-selections of materialised q-grams. contrary to the previously introduced selection, the properties of similarity measures used to specify predicates for a join may have a severe impact on the semantics of the operation, mainly due to missing constancy of self-similarity and symmetry. if a similarity measure is defined in a way such that the constancy of self-similarity does not hold, the resulting similarity relation may not be reflexive, i.e. x � y �� sim � x � y � and this way one object may or may not match itself, which for instance can occur during self-joins. furthermore, irreflexivity, i.e. x � y � � sim � x � y � , may be a requirement, if similarity should be handled separately from identity as described in section . . . this requires slight modifications and a minor lack of optimisation opportunities during join processing. chapter . similarity-based operations the asymmetry of a similarity measure is far more problematic, because it may imply an asymmetric similarity relation resulting in the following semantic problem of the similarity join: r �� � sim cond� r �� r �� � sim cond� r many known optimisations are based on the commutativity of the join operator, for instance changing the join order for multi-way joins or choosing a small input relation as the left operand for index-based joins. this may not be possible, if an asymmetric similarity measure is involved. therefore, the system processing similarity-based joins needs to be aware of the properties of the underlying similarity relation either by declaration or by im- plicitly assuming the worst case for similarity-based operations. . . similarity-based grouping the semantics of the grouping operator are defined based on an extension of the relational algebra for standard grouping as presented in [en ]: � grouping attrs � f � � aggr func list � � � r � here � grouping attrs � is a list of attributes used for grouping relation r,� aggr func list � denotes a list of aggregate functions (e.g., count, avg, min, max etc.) conveyed by an attribute of relation r. because the proposed operation is intended for data integration scenarios, advanced aggregation functions suitable for the reconciliation of discrepant values are discussed later on in this thesis. as a further simplification, we assume that the name of an aggregated column is derived by concatenating the attribute name and the name of the function. an aggregate function f is a function returning a value v � dom for a multi-set of values v ��� ��� vm � dom: f � � � v ������� � vm � � � � v where dom denotes an arbitrary domain of either numeric or alphanumeric values and the brackets � � ����� � � are used for multi-sets. we extend this equality-based grouping operator f with regard to the group- ing criteria by allowing a similarity condition and call this new operator Γ: � sim cond � Γ � � aggr func list � � � r � this operator again has a list of aggregate functions � aggr func list � with the same meaning as above. however, the grouping criteria � sim cond � is now a complex similarity condition as introduced above. . . similarity-based operations (a) (b) (c) figure . : derived equivalence relation for a given similarity relation (a) by (b) transitive and (c) strict similarity the result of Γ is a relation r � where the schema consists of all the attributes referenced in � sim cond � in equality predicates and the attributes named after the aggregates as described above. contrary to the usual grouping operator, if a similarity predicate is specified in the grouping condition the according attribute values also have to be reconciled during aggregation, because of the conflicting values. the relation r � is obtained by the concatenation of the two operators γ and ψ which reflect the two steps of grouping and aggregation. the first operator γ � sim cond � � r � � g produces a set of groups g � � g �������	� gm � from an input relation r. each group is a non-empty set of tuples with the same schema r of the input relation r. the second operator ψa ������� � al � � aggr func list � � g � � r � aggregates the attribute values of all tuples from each group and produces exactly one tuple for each group of g according to the given aggregate functions. thus, it holds � g � g with g � � t g ����� � � t gn � there is exactly one tuple t r � � r � with � i � � ��� l : t r � � ai � � t g � ai � � t g � ai � ������� � t gn � ai � where a � ����� � al are attributes referred by the equality predicates of the similarity condition, (i.e., for these attributes all tuples have the same value), and for the remaining attributes either referenced in a similarity predicate or not referenced in the grouping condition � j � ����� m : t r � � a j � � f j � � � t g � a j � �������	� t gn � a j � � � � where f � �����	� fm are aggregate functions from � aggr func list � . based on these two operators we can define the Γ operator for similarity-based grouping as fol- lows: � sim cond � Γ � � aggr func list � � � r � � ψa ������� � al � � aggr func list � � γ � sim cond � � r � � except for the different handling of attributes referenced in similarity predicates, so far this corresponds to the semantics of the standard grouping operation. but, we have not yet dealt with the fact, that the partitioning of the input rela- tion r into the set of groups g implies the requirement of an equivalence relation chapter . similarity-based operations eq within r, though the similarity condition � sim cond � may imply a similarity relation sim that will not provide transitivity. therefore, throughout this the- sis we use the simple strategy of constructing an equivalence relation simeq by building the transitive closure simeq : � sim � , i.e. the partitions of our relation r in g are maximal sets of tuples that are similar according to � sim cond � either directly or indirectly. a more rigid but still simple approach considered during early research on this thesis is to establish simeq such that pairwise similarity of all objects in a partition is required. we refer to the latter as the strict strategy. both strategies are outlined in figure . . as an example, consider the strings “odbms”, “oodbms”, and “dbms”. with an allowed edit distance threshold of they would all be found similar, if we apply the transitive closure strategy, but this would not be the case if the strict strategy is applied, because “dbms” and “oodbms” have a distance of without the connection via “odbms”. re- lated to entity identification, record linkage, etc. a number of other approaches to address this problem were considered. centroid or density-based clustering tech- niques proved to be useful strategies for dealing with atransitivity and provide a high level of accuracy, as for instance described in [lmp b] and [me ]. according to the transitive partitioning strategy, we can further refine the se- mantics of our similarity-based grouping operator. all tuples t gi of a group g � g have to be transitively similar to each other regarding the similarity condition� sim cond � : � g � g : � t gi � t gj � g : t gj � tsim � sim cond � � t gi � where tsim � sim cond � � t � denotes the set of all tuples which are in the transitive closure of the tuple t with regard to sim cond : tsim � sim cond � � t � � � t � � sim cond � t � t � � � true � � t � � � tsim � sim cond � � t � : sim cond � t � � t � � � � true � and no tuple is similar to any other tuple of other groups � gi � g j � g � i �� j : � t gik � gi � � t g j l � g j : sim cond � t gik � t g j l � � true figure . illustrates the application of these operators for a simple example query: diff � a � � � Γ � avg � a � � min � a � � � r � the input relation r based on a schema r consisting of two attributes a � a has to be grouped by similar values of a , e.g. using the approximation condition “diff � a � � � ”. . . conclusions a a . . . . . γ � � a a g . . g . . . ψ � � a avg a min . . figure . : application of the grouping operator in the first step, the γ operator produces two groups g and g . let us now assume an aggregation function list “avg � a � � min � a � ”. then, the ψ operator derives for each of these groups a single tuple as shown in the table at the right- hand side. the importance of extended concepts for grouping and aggregation in data integration was emphasised by hellerstein et al. in [hsc ]. though the problem of atransitivity during duplicate detection was for instance addressed by galhardas et al. in [gfss ], the work presented in this thesis is the only one based on an extended grouping operator. user-defined aggregation (uda) are part of the current version of the sql standard and are now supported by several commercial database systems, e.g. oracle i, ibm db , informix. in [wz ] the sql-ag system for specifying uda is presented, which translate to c code and the usage of this approach called axl in data mining is discussed. the approach presented here builds on this work for the purpose of data reconciliation as described in chapter . . conclusions in this chapter the foundations for similarity-based operations described regarding their implementation and efficiency in chapters and were introduced. first, a general introduction to the purpose and level of support for such operations was given. it was pointed out, that in this thesis similarity is addressed on the predicate and operation level and further aspects of data models supporting similarity and probabilistic aspects are beyond the scope of the presented work. based on a general introduction given in section . the scope for similarity predicates considered in the later chapters was adjusted. furthermore, the spec- ification of complex similarity conditions and aspects of their evaluation were described. for this purpose, special requirements regarding fuzzy predicates were included in the discussion. based on similarity predicates and similarity conditions, a number of chapter . similarity-based operations similarity-based operations and their semantics were described as extensions to the relational algebra. this includes similarity-based selection, join, and group- ing. a simple formal description of the semantics of similarity-based selections was given and related to other approaches for similarity- and distance-based queries. the semantics of the join operation introduced subsequently are quite straightforward, too, but here the effect of the properties of similarity relations such as possible irreflexivity and asymmetry have to be considered. atransitivity, which is a typical property of similarity relations, is especially critical for similarity-based grouping. this operation, which was also formally described, is an approach to address problems of duplicate identification and rec- onciliation between conflicting data values. the view on similarity predicates and similarity-based selections and joins presented in this chapter mostly conforms to a condensation of approaches cur- rently considered and referred to in the respective sections. the introduction of similarity-based grouping is new and, therefore, was discussed in more detail. chapter similarity-based operations for materialised data in the previous chapter the foundations of similarity predicates and similarity- based operations were introduced. in this chapter implementations of two of these operations – join and grouping – are introduced for the specific case of materi- alised data sets. while on the one hand extensions to query languages are pro- posed and used to illustrate possible queries, and were also implemented as part of the query language fraql introduced by sattler et al. in [scs ], the actual implementation described was done using the extensibility interface of the com- mercial dbms oracle i. furthermore, a string similarity predicate supported by a trie index with specialised algorithms to support similarity-based lookup is used. based on this implementation the operations are evaluated and general aspects of the efficiency of similarity-based operations are discussed. moreover, further con- siderations regarding the usage of similarity predicates and reconciliation aspects are described. . introduction the target scenario of the implementations presented in this chapter are materi- alised integration scenarios, i.e. the input data of the operations is either � fully materialised on secondary storage managed by a database management system, such as for instance it would be the case in a staging area of a data warehouse system, or � materialised in main memory as a temporary result of previous operations, which may include results of distributed query processing in virtual integra- tion scenarios. chapter . similarity operations for materialised data nevertheless, contrary to the approach presented in chapter the evaluation of the operation and the underlying similarity predicates cannot be processed in a distributed way across various data sources. accordingly, the operations can be used in the same way in centralised dbms as well as virtual integration solutions like fdbms or mediators. both approaches were implemented during the research on this thesis, but only the former is pre- sented here in detail and used for evaluation purposes. on the other hand, the proposed join and grouping operations have a significant difference to common operations used in database management systems: we can rely on equality of at- tribute values only in some cases, and have to deal with discrepancies in data objects representing the same or related real-world objects. such discrepancies can exist due to errors made during data input or different conventions for data representation, and have to be addressed on the predicate level and by specifying possibly complex similarity conditions as introduced in section . . as such, the implementation of the proposed similarity-based operations can for instance be used for duplicate elimination as a sub-task of data cleaning. as- suming sql-based systems, the natural choice for duplicate elimination is the group by operator using the key attributes of the tuples in combination with aggregate functions for reconciling divergent non-key attribute values. however, this approach is limited to equality of the key attributes and, therefore, has to be extended according to the description given in chapter . the same is true for linking complementary data, which in a sql system would be done based on equality by the join operator. both operations are based on extended con- cepts for similarity-based predicates. major concerns to be considered during their implementation are the new requirements resulting from the characteristics of similarity relationships, most of all atransitivity, and support for the efficient processing of similarity predicates. as outlined before, efficiency of operations and especially similarity-based operations used in data integration is very important, because the amount of data to be processed can be equal to or even greater than from a single source. apart from the used algorithms to implement a certain operation, the efficiency mainly depends on the evaluation of similarity-predicates. for certain predicates such as the one based on the string edit distance used here, index support is possible, be- cause the metric axioms and most of all the triangular inequality and its implied notion of closeness provide the basis for access paths. yet, the measurable com- plexity of similarity-based operations contrary to according algorithms and index structures of operations based on equivalence relations also depends on other cri- teria such as the similarity or distance threshold applied in a predicate. this is outlined in more detail in the evaluation presented in section . of this chapter. concurrent and related approaches to the work presented in this chapter in- clude the whirl system and language providing similarity-based joins described . . introduction in [coh ] by cohen, which is based on fuhr’s work on a probabilistic dat- alog described in [fuh ]. the whirl system uses text-based similarity and logic-based data access as known from datalog to integrate data from heteroge- neous sources. cohen describes an efficient algorithm to compute the top scoring matches of a ranked result set. the implementation of the similarity predicate uses inverted indices common in the field of information retrieval. contrary to the whirl approach, the approach presented here is based on the similarity of string attributes, as introduced in section . of this thesis. though the concept of string similarity is covered by comprehensive research, the efficient and index-based evaluation in large data sets – for instance managed in database management systems – is a current research topic. in [gij � ] gravano et al. present an approach concurrent to the one presented here, where for similarity- based joins on string attributes an efficient pre-selection based on q-grams is used for optimisation. in short, the approach is based on down-sizing the data sets on which a similarity predicate is evaluated by first doing an equality-based join on substrings of fixed length q. the authors extend and modify this approach to support string tokens based on techniques similar to those used by cohen in [coh ] in [giks ]. both approaches require fully materialised data sets and index structures, hence they are not applicable in virtual integration scenarios and introduce a huge space overhead. though the basic framework of predicates and operations described in chap- ter is not limited to string based predicates, we implemented an edit distance string similarity predicate using a trie as an index structure based on results by shang and merret described in [sm ] for evaluation purposes. other work related to the contents of this chapter which was not previously mentioned regards duplicate detection, which is addressed in various research ar- eas like database and information system integration [zhkf , lspr ], data cleaning [cdgl � , gfss ], information dissemination [ygm ], and others. early approaches were merely based on the equality of attribute values or derived values. newer research results deal with advanced requirements of real-life sys- tems, where identification very often is only possible based on similarity. those approaches include special algorithms [me , hs ], the application of methods known from the area of data mining and even machine learning [li ]. other interesting results came from specific application areas, like for instance digital libraries [gbl , hyl ]. while these approaches are mostly very specific re- garding certain applications, the goal here is to provide a more general view on the process of duplicate detection, that may well include these approaches on the predicate level. an overview of problems related to entity identification is given in [ken ]. in [lspr ] lim et al. describe an equality based approach, include an overview of other approaches and list requirements for the entity identification process. monge chapter . similarity operations for materialised data and elkan describe an efficient algorithm that identifies similar tuples based on a distance measure and builds transitive clusters in [me ]. in [gfss ] gal- hardas et al. propose a framework for data cleaning as a sql extension and macro-operators to support among other data cleaning issues duplicate elimina- tion by similarity-based clustering. the similarity relationship is expressed by language constructs, and furthermore, clustering strategies to deal with transitiv- ity conflicts are proposed. luján-mora and palomar propose a centroid method for clustering in [lmp b]. furthermore, they describe common discrepancies in string representations and derive a useful set of pre-processing steps and extended distance measures combining edit distance on a token-level and similarity of to- ken sets. in [hs ] hernández et. al. propose the sliding window approach for similarity-based duplicate identification where a neighbourhood conserving key can be derived and describe efficient implementations. . principles of the implementation and optimisa- tion in this section the principles of the implementation and optimisation of similarity- based join and grouping operations introduced in chapter are outlined for the previously described scenario of materialised data integration. for an efficient realisation dedicated plan operators are required, which implement the described semantics. that means for instance for the similarity join, even if one formulates a query as follows select * from r , r where edist(r .title, r ,title) < the similarity join implementation exploiting special index support and con- sidering the special semantics of the predicates has to be chosen by the query optimiser instead of computing the cartesian product followed by a selection. in the case of similarity grouping, a simple user-defined function is not sufficient as grouping function, because during similarity grouping the group membership is not determined by one or more of the tuple values but depends on already created groups. in addition, processing a tuple can result in merging existing groups. thus, in the following the implementation of these two plan operators simjoin and simgrouping are described, assuming that the query optimiser is able to recognise the necessity of applying these operators during generating the query plan. this could be supported by appropriate query language extensions, e.g. for the similarity join . . principles of the implementation and optimisation select * from r similarity join r on edist(r .title, r ,title) <= and for the similarity grouping this could be formulated as follows: select * from r group by similarity on edist(title) <= for evaluation purposes we used an index-supported similarity predicate on string attributes using edit distance and tries, that is also described briefly. the following description refers to conjunctively combined, reflexive, and symmetric similarity predicates and the transitive closure strategy for the grouping opera- tor introduced in the previous chapter. more complex similarity conditions and required changes are briefly discussed. . . a trie-based similarity predicate for strings at first, the edit distance predicate and an according index structure used through- out this chapter is shortly introduced. in this approach a similarity predicate con- sists of a distance measure and an according threshold. hence, the index lookup performed requires the actual value t r � ai � of an involved attribute ai, the indexed attribute a j and the threshold k as dist � t r � ai � � t s � a j � � � k where i � j and r � s are included as special cases, applicable for instance for grouping predicates. currently, for the implementation given here the focus is on edit distances as the primary similarity measure. for this purpose, the approach proposed in [sm ] of using a trie in combination with a dynamic programming algorithm for computing the edit distance was adopted. the main idea of their approach is to traverse the trie containing the set of string attribute values of all tuples indexed in the trie in depth-first order trying to find a match with the search pattern, i.e., the attribute value of the currently processed tuple (algorithm ). because the similarity predicate does imply an approximate match with a maximum of k differences instead of an exact match, we must not stop the traversal after a mismatch is found. instead, an edit operation (insert, remove, or replace) is assumed and the search is continued in the child nodes of the current trie node. the current number of found differences is stored for each search path. only after exceeding the given threshold, the traversal of a given path can be stopped, and the search can go back to the next sub-trie. hence, chapter . similarity operations for materialised data the threshold is used for cutting off sub-tries containing strings not similar to the pattern. in addition, the effort for computing the dynamic programming tables required for determining the edit distance can be reduced, because all strings in one subtree share a common prefix and therefore the same edit distance. we omit further details of this algorithm and refer instead to the original work. algorithm : approximate trie searching globals threshold k pattern string p, target string w procedure approxsearch(trienode n, int level) begin for all child nodes c of n w[level] := character z of c if c is a leaf node � edist (w, p, level) � k output tuple-ids for node c if edist (w, p, level) � k continue /* cut off */ approxsearch (c, level + ) end for end in the following implementations of the previously introduced operations tries are created on the fly for each grouping attribute or join predicate which appears together with an edit distance predicate. such a trie stores not only the actual string values but also the tuple-id of the associated tuple. therefore, besides in- serting new string values no updates on the trie are necessary. . . similarity-based join the implementation of a similarity join outlined in this section is quite straightfor- ward. like for conventional join operators index support for predicates can be ex- ploited to improve performance by reducing the number of pairwise comparisons. however, the different predicates of a similarity expression require different kinds of index structures: . . principles of the implementation and optimisation � for equality predicates common index structures like hash tables or b-trees can be utilised. � simple numeric approximation predicates like diff � ai � a j � � k can also be supported by b-trees. � for string similarity based on edit distances edist � ai � a j � � k tries are a viable index structure, as previously introduced. � for the other similarity predicates discussed in chapter index support is given for instance through multi-dimensional indexes like r-trees and its derivatives on data mapped to a metric space. given such index structures a join algorithm can be implemented taking care of the various kinds of indexes. in algorithm a binary join for two relations r and r is shown, assuming that indexes for relation r either exist or were build on the fly in a previous processing step. the result of this algorithm is a table of matching tuples for usage described later on. alternatively, result tuples can be produced for pipelined query processing directly at this point. the notations i pi and kpi refer to the index on predicate pi and the specified threshold, respectively. api refers to the involved attribute. algorithm : processing a tuple from join relation r during similarity join globals conjunctive join condition c � p � � � � � pn set of indexes ipi � � i � n on join relation r for index supported predicates mapping table tid tid for matching tuples procedure processtuple(tuple t) begin for all index supported equality predicates pi set of tuples scon j : � indexscan � ipi � t � api � � end for for all index supported similarity predicates pi scon j : � scon j � indexscan � ipi � t � api � � kpi � end for for all tuples tl � scon j boolean similar : � true for all non-index supported predicates pi chapter . similarity operations for materialised data similar : � similar � evaluate � pi � kpi � t � api � � tl � api � � if not similar break end for if similar insert (t,tl) in tid tid end for end as a side note, more complex similarity conditions could easily be supported by adding disjunctions. the similarity condition c can be transformed to disjunc- tive normal form. for all conjunctions of c ��� mi � con ji the scon ji are computed and the set of relevant groups would be sdis j ��� m i � scon ji . . . similarity-based grouping like the join operator, the similarity-based grouping operator is based on the effi- cient evaluation of similarity predicates, but in addition has to deal with problems arising from the atransitivity of similarity relations, as previously outlined in sec- tion . . . a naive implementation of the similarity-based operator would work as follows: . iterate over the input set and process each tuple by evaluating the similarity condition with all previously processed tuples. because these tuples were already assigned to groups, the result of this step is a set of groups, where – assuming the transitive closure strategy – in each group there is at least one tuple similar to the current tuple. . if the result set is empty, a new group is created containing only this current tuple. . if one group is found, the current tuple is added to this group. . otherwise, i.e. more than one group is found, the conflict is resolved by merging the found groups according to the transitive closure strategy. obviously, this naive implementation would lead to o � n � time complexity for an input set of size n. similar to processing a similarity join we assume that there are index-supported predicates for equality and similarity, and predicates that can- not be supported by indexes. therefore, the following optimised algorithm was implemented. please note that this algorithm implements only the γ operator as described in section . . , because the ψ operation corresponds to the traditional projection/aggregation operation. . . principles of the implementation and optimisation algorithm : processing a tuple during similarity grouping globals conjunctive similarity condition c � p � � � � � pn set of indexes ipi � � i � n for index supported predicates mapping table gid tid assigning tuples to groups procedure processtuple(tuple t) begin set of groups rcon j : � all groups from gid tid for all index supported equality predicates pi set of tuples s : � indexscan � ipi � t � api � � rcon j : � rcon j � gid tid � s � end for for all index supported similarity predicates pi set of tuples s : � indexscan � ipi � t � api � � kpi � rcon j : � rcon j � gid tid � s � end for for all groups g j � rcon j boolean member : � false for all tuples tl � g j boolean similar : � true for all non-index supported predicates pi similar : � similar � evaluate � pi � kpi � t � api � � tl � api � � if not similar break end for member : � member � similar if member break end for if not member rcon j : � rcon j � g j end for if rcon j � / group g : � new group in gid tid else group g : � merge all rcon j in gid tid insert t in g end chapter . similarity operations for materialised data create new group no group found edis t pre dica te inde x lo oku p fo r , , , merge conflict handle add tuple , no group found create new group index looku p for edist predi cate oodbms manifesto ... ... ... ... in p u t s e t it e ra tio n id title odb manifesto odbs manifesto odbms manifesto figure . : building groups applying index support similar to join processing, for each tuple t the algorithm tries to find a min- imal set rcon j of groups that relate to t by applying index-supported equality and similarity predicates first. this can even be improved, if information about the costs and selectivity of the index-based predicate evaluation exist and an accord- ing processing order is established. a pairwise comparison is only performed for tuples from this small subset of groups in the second half of the algorithm. as a result of this procedure the mapping table gid tid is adjusted to the newly found group structure. the index-based processing of such a predicate in the context of similarity- based grouping is illustrated in figure . for the simple query select pick where eq(src=’dblp’, title) from a union all b union all c group by transitive similarity on edist(title) < as there are no previous tuples a new group is created for tuple . during pro- cessing of tuple tuple is found using the trie on the title attribute, where the edit distance is for the two tuples. when tuple is processed, no match can be found, because the edit distance to previous tuples is at least , namely for both of the two tuples and . for tuple two relevant groups are found and the conflict has to be resolved by merging the groups according to the strategy of transitive similarity. . . implementation using oracle i . implementation using oracle i the described similarity-based operations were implemented as extensions to the commercial dbms oracel i. to implement such operations in a sql dbms as native plan operators supporting the typical iterator interface [gra ] requires significant modifications to the database engine and therefore access to the source code. so, in order to add these operations to a commercial system the available programming interfaces and extensibility mechanisms should be used instead. most modern dbms support so-called table functions which can return tables of tuples, in some systems also in a pipelined fashion. in this way, the proposed operations can be implemented as table functions consuming the tuples of a query, performing the appropriate similarity operation and returning the result table. for example, a table function sim join implementing algorithm and ex- pecting two cursor parameters for the input relations and the similarity join con- dition could be used as follows: select * from table (sim join (cursor(select * from data ), cursor(select * from data ), ’edist (data .title, data .title) <= ’)) this query performs a similarity join with one similarity predicate on the title attributes in two given relations, where the edit distance between the string values in this field is less than or equal to . however, a problem of using table functions for implementing query operators are the strong typing restrictions: for the table functions a return type always has to be specified that prevents to use the same function for different input relations. as one possible solution table functions using and returning structures con- taining generic tuple identifiers (e.g., oracle’s rowid) can be used. so, the sim- grouping function produces a tuple of tuple identifier / group identifier pairs, where the group identifier is an artificial identifier generated by the operator. based on this, the result type gid tid table of the table function is defined as follows: create type gid_tid_t as object gid (int, tid int); create type gid_tid_table is table of gid_tid_t; using a grouping function sim grouping a query can be written as the follow- ing query: chapter . similarity operations for materialised data select ����� from table(sim_grouping ( cursor (select rowid, * from raw_data), ’edist(title) < ’))) as gt, raw_data where raw_data.tid = gt.tid group by gt.gid this query groups tuples having an edit distance of less than either directly or indirectly. a discussion of according aggregate functions is given in section . . our approach allows to implement the function in a generic way, i.e., without any assumption on the input relation. in order to apply aggregation or reconcilia- tion to the actual attribute values of the tuples, they are retrieved using a join with the original relation, whereas the grouping is performed based on the artificial group identifiers produced by the grouping operator. in the same way, the simjoin operator can be implemented as a table function returning pairs of tuple identifiers that fulfil the similarity condition and are used to join with the original data. . evaluation the similarity-based grouping and join operators described in chapter were implemented according to the principles outlined in section . as part of the fraql query engine by sattler et al. (see [scs ]) and, alternatively, accord- ing to section . using the extensibility interfaces of the commercial database management system oracle i. for evaluation purposes the latter implementation was used. the test environment was a pc system with a pentium iii ( mhz) cpu running linux and oracle i. the extended operators and predicates were implemented using c++. all test results refer to our implementation of the string similarity predicate based on the edit distance and supported by a trie index. a non-index implementation of the predicate is provided for comparison. indexes are currently created on the fly and maintained in main memory only during oper- ator processing time. the related performance impact is discussed below. for the grouping operator test runs separate data sets containing random strings were created according to the grade of similarity to be detected, i.e. for one original tuple between and copies were created that fulfilled the similarity condition of the test query. the test query consisted of an edit distance predicate on only one attribute. using the edit distance with all operations having a fixed cost of and an edit distance threshold k on an attribute, each duplicate tuple had between and k deletions, insertions, or substitutions. as the number of copies . . evaluation id data copyof edist abhfhfhhflk huiqwerzhads hdhhhhrrrr ����� ����� ����� ����� abhffhhflk ahbfhfhhfk huiqwerzhads hdhhhrrrr hdhhhhrr ����� ����� ����� ����� figure . : example input relation and the numbers of applied operations on the string attributes were equally dis- tributed, for n original tuples the total size of the data set to be processed was approximately � n with an average distance of k among the tuples to be detected as similar. furthermore, to check the accuracy of the approach, additional infor- mation about the creation of the input set were stored with duplicate tuples. part of an input relation is shown in fig. . . . . . . . . . p ro ce ss in g t im e number of original tuples threshold k= threshold k= (exact match) figure . : grouping with exact match and threshold k � grouping based on an exact matching (k � ) has the expected complexity of o � n � , which results from the necessary iteration over the input set and the trie lookup in each step, which for an exact match requires average word-length com- parisons, i.e. can be considered o � � . this conforms to equality based grouping with hash table support. for a growing threshold, the number of comparisons, i.e. the number of trie nodes to be visited, grows. this effect can be seen in fig. . , chapter . similarity operations for materialised data where the complexity for k � appears to be somewhat worse than linear, but still reasonably efficient. p ro ce ss in g t im e number of original tuples threshold k= threshold k= threshold k= pairwise comparison figure . : grouping with varying thresholds k � and the naive approach of pairwise comparisons actually, the complexity grows quickly for greater thresholds, as larger re- gions of the trie have to be covered. the dynamic programming approach of the similarity search ensures that even for the worst case each node is visited only once, which results in equal complexity as pairwise similarity comparison, not considering the cost for index maintenance etc. the currently used main memory implementation of the trie causes a constant overhead per insertion. hence, the o � n � represents the upper bound of the complexity for a growing threshold k, just like o � n � is the lower bound. for growing thresholds the curve moves between these extremes with growing curvature. this is a very basic observation that ap- plies to similarity based operations like similarity-based joins and selections as well, the latter having a complexity between o � � and o � n � . the corresponding test results are shown in figure . . the previous test results were presented merely to make a general statement about the efficiency of the similarity-based grouping operator. an interesting question in real life scenarios would be, how the operator performs on varying ra- tios of duplicates in the tested data set. in figure . the dependency between the percentage of duplicates and the required processing time is given for the thresh- old k � . while the relative time complexity remains, the absolute processing time decreases for higher percentages of detectable duplicates. obviously, and just as expected, using a similarity measure is more efficient, if there actually is . . evaluation p ro ce ss in g t im e number of overall tuples no duplicates % duplicates % duplicates % duplicates figure . : grouping with varying percentage of duplicates in the test data sets similarity to detect. otherwise, searching the trie along diverging paths represents an overhead that will not yield any results. p ro ce ss in g t im e sum of input relation sizes threshold k= threshold k= threshold k= threshold k= figure . : results for varying thresholds k � for a similarity join similar results were received for the described implementation of a similarity join. the test scenario consisted of two relations r and r , with a random num- ber of linked tuples, i.e. for each tuple in r there were between and linked records in r and the join attribute values were within a maximum edit distance. chapter . similarity operations for materialised data the results are shown in figure . . as the implementation of the join operation is similar to the grouping operation the complexity is between o � n � and o � n � depending on the edit distance threshold. . applications in this section some further aspects of the proposed operations related to their application are discussed. this includes results from a project concerning an in- ternet database for lost cultural assets, that facilitates the registration of and the search for lost art. registering new objects in the database can result in “dupli- cates” if the particular object was already reported by another user or institution but with slightly different descriptions. furthermore, the data in the database can be enriched by external information, e.g. from artist catalogues. due to possible different transcriptions for example of artist names, join conditions are necessary. these problems were already used for illustration purposes in section . of the thesis. the problem of duplicates can be solved by applying the similarity-based grouping operations. using an appropriate similarity predicate (see below for a discussion) potential redundant objects can be identified. in our application a similarity predicate consisting of a combination of artist and title comparisons produces good results. for the artist name special similarity predicates taking different variants of first-name/last-name combinations into account were imple- mented. so, a typical query is formulated as follows: select ����� from data group by similarity on sim_person(artist) > . and edist(title) <= however, this is only the first step towards “clean” data: from each group of tuples a representative object has to be chosen. this merging or reconciliation step is usually performed in sql using aggregate functions. but, in the simplest case of the builtin aggregates one is able only to compute minimum, maximum, average etc. from numeric values. as an enhancement modern dbms provide support for user-defined aggregation functions (uda) which allow to implement application-specific reconciliation functions. however, these udas are still too restricted for reconciliation because they support only one column as parameter. here, the problem is to choose or compute a merged value from a set of possible discrepant values without looking at any other columns. we can mitigate this problem by allowing more than one parameter or by passing a structured value as parameter to the function. . . applications therefore, a number of enhanced aggregation functions were developed. in particular for reconciliation purposes, we have defined the following aggregate functions: � pick where eq (v, col) returns the value of column col of the first tuple, where the value of v is true, i.e., �� . in case of a group consisting of only one tuple, the value of this tuple is returned independently of the value of v. � pick where min (v, col) returns the value of column col of the tuple, where v is minimal for the entire relation or group, respectively. � pick where max (v, col) returns the value of column col of the tuple, where v is maximal. � to array (col) produces an array containing all values from column col. with the help of these functions several reconciliation policies can easily be im- plemented as shown in the following. in a first example, we assume that the final value for column col of each group has to be taken from the tuple containing the most current date, which is represented as column m date: select max(m_date), pick_where_max(m_date, col), ����� from data group by ����� in the second example, each tuple contains a column src describing the origin in terms of the source of the tuple and this way, realising a source-aware integration view. assuming a “preferred source” reconciliation strategy, where in case of a conflict the value from source sp is selected, we could formulate the query as follows: select pick_where_eq(src = ’sp’, col), ����� from data group by ����� finally, for allowing the user to decide about the resolved value in an interactive way, the to array can be used to collect the list of conflicting values: select to_array(col), ����� from data group by ����� chapter . similarity operations for materialised data e+ e+ f re q u e n cy ( lo g a ri th m ic ) edit distance figure . : edit distance distribution of random strings in the test data set with % duplicates of kmax � as a summary, user-defined aggregation functions provide a viable way to im- plement specific reconciliation strategies, especially with the extension described above. combined with powerful grouping operators they make it possible to sup- port advanced cleaning tasks. another application-specific question raised within the previously mentioned project is, how to specify the similarity predicate for similarity joins or grouping consisting of the similarity or distance measure itself and the threshold. if the chosen threshold has such a major impact on the efficiency of similarity-based operations, as described in section . , the question is how to specify a threshold to meet requirements regarding efficiency and accuracy. actually, this adds com- plexity to the well studied problem of over- and under-identification, i.e. falsely qualified duplicates. information about the distance or similarity distribution can be used for deciding about a meaningful threshold, as well as for refining user- defined similarity predicates. distance distributions usually conform to some nat- ural distribution, according to the specific application, data types, and semantics. inconsistencies, such as duplicates, cause anomalies in the distribution, e.g. lo- cal minima or points of extreme curvature. figure . depicts the edit distance distribution for one of the sample sets from section . of tuples having approximately % duplicates with an equal distribution of , , or edit opera- tions to some original tuple, which is apparent in the chart. to actually choose a threshold based on such a distribution, aspects of efficiency as well as quality of the duplicate detection process have to be considered. hence, setting k � could be a reasonable result drawn from this chart alone. while the previous anomaly in figure . was created intentionally, similar effects result from the integration of overlapping data sets in real applications. . . applications f re q u e n cy ( lo g a ri th m ic ) edit distance figure . : edit distance distribution in an integrated and sampled data set on cultural assets figure . shows a result for a sample consisting of approximately . titles starting with an ”e” from integrated sources of data on cultural assets. neverthe- less, drawing the same conclusion of setting the edit distance threshold to receive a useful similarity predicate would lead to a great number of falsely identified tu- ples. for short titles there would be too many matches, and longer titles often do not match this way, because the length increases the number of typos etc. . . . . . . . . . f re q u e n cy ( lo g a ri th m ic ) relative edit distance figure . : relative edit distance distribution better results can be achieved by applying a relative edit distance rdist � x � y � � � edist � x � y � max � x � length � y � length � , which is a normalised similarity measure as introduced in section . . the algorithm introduced in section . can easily be adjusted to this chapter . similarity operations for materialised data relative distance. figure . shows the distribution of the relative edit distances in the previously mentioned example relation. using the first global minimum around � as a threshold, and analysing matches in this area shows that it provides a good ratio of very few over- and under-identified tuples. a successive adjustment of similarity predicates using information from ana- lytical data processing is also of interest for the creation of user-defined similarity predicates. for instance, directly using the edit distance on author names and their various representations will yield poor results. combining analytical processing and a stepwise addition of canonising techniques like transformation of lower or upper case letters, tokenising, abbreviation matching, etc., as mentioned in sec- tion . quickly leads to more meaningful distributions, that can be used to derive a threshold value. . conclusions in this chapter similarity-based operations for finding related data and identify- ing duplicates based on similarity-based criteria suitable in materialised data in- tegration scenarios were presented. intended as an extended grouping operation and by combining it with aggregation functions for merging/reconciling groups of conflicting values the proposed grouping operator can be integrated into the rela- tional algebra framework and the sql query processing model. in a similar way, the extended join operator takes similarity predicates into consideration. these operations can be utilised in ad-hoc queries as part of more complex data integra- tion and cleaning tasks. moreover, a way to use these operations within existing dbms using extensibility interface was shown by providing an implementation using the commercial dbms oracle i. furthermore, it was shown that efficient implementations have to deal with specific index support depending on the applied similarity measure. for one of the most useful measures for string similarity we have presented a trie-based im- plementation. the evaluation results illustrate the benefit of this approach even for relatively large datasets. though the focused in this thesis primarily is on the edit distance measure, the algorithms for similarity-based grouping and join as introduced in this chapter are able to exploit any kind of index support. focusing on just one similarity predicate and keeping the strong context- dependency of similarity measures in mind, the most important question left unanswered probably is, how to find, specify, and efficiently support appropriate similarity predicates for a range of applications. in many cases, basic similar- ity measures like the edit distance are probably not sufficient. as described in chapter , application-specific similarity measures implementing domain heuris- tics (e.g. permutation of first name and last name) based on basic edit distances is . . conclusions often a viable approach. however, choosing the right thresholds and combinations of predicates dur- ing the design phase of an integrated system often requires several trial-and-error cycles. this process can be supported by analytical processing steps as shown in section . and according tools. chapter . similarity operations for materialised data chapter re-writing similarity-based queries for virtual data integration while in chapter the foundations of similarity-based operations where intro- duced, and in chapter the implementation of such operations for temporarily or persistently materialised result sets was covered, this chapter addresses problems of a distributed processing of similarity-based operations in heterogeneous envi- ronments. for this purpose special concepts to handle similarity predicates proba- bly not supported by integrated systems have to be applied. again, the description is focused on string similarity measures and on re-writing queries containing ac- cording predicates in a way, that source systems can answer such queries. provided implementations include similarity-based selections and joins, but not the previously described similarity-based grouping. this is because the oper- ation is hardly applicable across various sources when there are no further con- straints on the input set. if the latter is the case, the source selections representing the constraints are processed first as introduced in this section, and then grouping and aggregation can take place as described in the previous chapter. . introduction to address the problem of data level conflicts in weakly related or overlapping data sets from different sources, similarity-based operations were integrated in data integration research. unfortunately, the support for such operations in current data management solutions is rather limited. and worse, interfaces provided over the web are even more limited and almost always do not allow any similarity-based lookup of information. the specification of query capabilities is addressed for instance by vassalos et al. in [vp ] and by the author of this thesis and endig in [se ]. the majority of attributes used for querying are string attributes, but while chapter . re-writing similarity-based queries string similarity can be expressed using for instance the levenshtein distance, common interfaces only include the lookup based on equality or substring and keyword containment. while such predicates do not allow to perform similarity selections or joins directly, they can be used for efficiently finding candidate sets as described in this chapter. the principal idea of the presented approach is to provide a pre-selection for string similarity operations by using string containment operations as provided by all databases and most information systems. regarding the pre-selection this approach is similar to those by gravano et al. introduced in [gij � ] and extended in [giks ]. contrary to their pre-selection strategy, the one presented here is not only applicable in a scenario were integrated data sets or data sets in general are materialised in one database, but also allows re-writing string similarity queries for the virtual integration of autonomous sources. this way, it is applicable in web integration scenarios. another related approach only applicable in materialised scenarios is de- scribed by jin et al. in [jlm ], which is based on fastmap introduced by faloutsos and lin in [fl ] and shortly described in section . of this thesis. nevertheless, this approach requires the full domain of string values to define a mapping to an n-dimensional space, and according interfaces for efficient lookup. the pre-selection proposed here is based on the edit or levenshtein distance as introduced in sections . . and . of this thesis, which expresses the dissimilar- ity of two strings by the minimal number k of operations necessary to transform a string to a comparison string. a basic observation described for instance by navarro and baeza-yates in [nby ] is, that if we pick any k � non-overlapping substrings of one string, at least one of them must be fully contained in the com- parison string. this corresponds to count filtering as introduced by gravano, where the number of common q-grams (substrings of fixed length q) in two strings is used as a criterion. so, searching a large pool of string data we may find a can- didate set by selecting all strings containing at least one of these k � chosen substrings. based on this observation, navarro and baeza-yates in their approach use q-gram indexes for approximate searches within texts in an information re- trieval context. the problem with selecting according substrings for pre-selection is, we can- not use length filtering and position filtering like described in [gij � ] to fur- ther refine the pre-selection, because we cannot access the necessary informa- tion in a non-materialised scenario. and, if we choose inappropriate substrings, the candidate sets can be huge. in this case, the question is: which substrings are appropriate? obviously, we can minimise the size of the intermediate result by finding the k � non-overlapping substrings having the best selectivity when combined in one disjunctive query. then, processing a string similarity predicate requires the following steps: . . mapping similarity predicates . transform the similarity predicate to an optimal disjunctive substring pre- selection query considering selectivity information . process the pre-selection using standard functionality of the information system yielding a candidate set . process the actual similarity predicate within a mediator or implemented as a user defined function in standard dbms while this sketches only a simple selection, we will describe later on, how for instance similarity joins over diverse sources can be executed based on bind joins as described by roth and schwarz in [rs ]. furthermore, we will discuss the advantages and disadvantages of the kind of substring used, whether it is arbitrary substrings, q-samples as fixed length substrings, or tokens. we have to point out that though substring queries can easily be optimised, many systems including well-known relational dbms fail to do this. hence, step in the above mentioned processing may or may not be efficiently executed by integrated source systems. nevertheless, in virtual integration the key aspect very often is to minimise the size of intermediate results that have to be transferred from a source to the mediator. but most of all, in such scenarios we cannot expect the source systems to provide any interface for similarity searches. . mapping similarity predicates we consider a predicate like edist � x � y � � k as part of a similarity condition, where x and y represent attribute names, or where one may represent a literal search string. first we have to make clear, what kind of edit distance definition we use. the simple definition as outlined in . includes only insertion, deletion, and sub- stitution. in this case, for a threshold k the number of required non-overlapping substrings is n � k � , because all of the above mentioned operations can only modify one substring each, i.e. after k operations there is a maximum of k mod- ified substrings. a commonly used derivative of the edit distance in addition al- lows transpositions of characters, i.e. ’abc’ and ’acb’ would have an edit distance of only compared to using the simple definition. considering transpositions increases the number of sub-strings to be considered to n � k � , because every transposition can modify two substrings if they are adjacent in the original string. in the remainder of this paper we consider only the classical definition. considering what kind of substring is most suitable, let us assume a predicate edist � � vincent van gogh � � stringattribute � � � chapter . re-writing similarity-based queries n u m b e r o f d is tin ct q -g ra m s length of q-gram figure . : number of distinct q-grams for varying q in the king james bible such a predicate with a fixed search string s � � vincent van gogh � can either be a direct similarity selection or the bound predicate during a bind-join. assuming we have selectivity information sel � a � about any substring a � s � i � j � , � i � j � length � s � of s � Σ � over an alphabet Σ available as discussed later in section . , we may choose the following substrings for pre-selection predicates: � arbitrary substrings: ’vincent van’ � ’ gogh’ � fixed length substrings (q-samples): ’vinc’ � ’gogh’ (here q � ) � tokens: ’vincent’ � ’gogh’ all three obviously must yield a candidate set including the correct result, but they differ largely regarding their selectivity. intuitively, longer strings have a better selectivity, because every additional character refines the query. this consideration would render the transformation to q-samples as the least effective one. on the other hand, there is an overhead for managing and using selectivity information. storing such information for arbitrary strings requires complex data structures to be efficient and considerable memory resources. in general, choosing a suitable substring paradigm implies a trade-off between several aspects. selectivity: as mentioned above, the selectivity of longer substrings is always better than or, in the unlikely worst case, equal to a shorter substring, sel � s � i � j � � � sel � s � k � l � � � � k � i � j � l � length � s � . choosing a small q as for instance or will likely return more intermediate results and this way introduce a high overhead for transfer and local processing. . . mapping similarity predicates v i n c e n t__v a n__g o g h v i n c e n __g o g h t__v a n sel( , )= . e− sel( , )= . e− sel( , )= . e− selectivity matrix: optimal result: input string: figure . : finding selective substrings for k � , hence n � k � � maintenance: independently of what data structure we use for maintaining se- lectivity information, the required data volume grows dramatically with the (possible) length of the substrings due to a combinatoric effect for each ad- ditional position. for q-grams this effect is shown for varying q based on data from the king james bible in figure . . hence, a greater q increases the necessary overhead for global processing and the global resource con- sumption. applicability: we run into problems if a comparison string is not long enough to derive the necessary number of substrings such as tokens or q-samples. for instance, if the allowed edit distance is k � and q � a disjunctive pre- selection must contain n � k � � q-samples of length , i.e. the minimal required length of the mapped search string is lmin � n � q � . obviously, it is not possible to derive the necessary -samples from the string ’vincent van gogh’. we will discuss later on, what can be done if this problem occurs. source capabilities: we consider two kinds of sources regarding the query capa- bilities, those allowing substring and those allowing keyword searches. for the latter, only tokens are suitable for composing pre-selection queries. . . substring decomposition the optimal solution to the addressed problem regarding selectivity performs the mapping in terms of a complete decomposition of the search string s into n � k � non-overlapping substrings. the decomposition consists of positions pos � � ��� � pos � n � with pos � � � and pos � n � � length � s � such that the concatena- tion s � s � pos � � � pos � � � � s � pos � � � pos � � � � ����� s � pos � n � � � pos � n � � � of the chapter . re-writing similarity-based queries substrings is equal to the search string. an optimal decomposition would yield a selectivity min � Πn � i � � � sel � s � pos � i � � pos � i � � � � � � . here we assume inde- pendence between the selected query strings. we will show in the evaluation in section . that this actually yields a reasonable estimation. the algorithm sketched in figure . uses a lower triangular matrix a where ai j represents the selectivity of substring s � i � j � , hence, � i � j � length � s � . if a count suffix trie is used for storing selectivity information, as shown in sec- tion . , this matrix can be generated from length � s � path traversals in the trie. an exhaustive search is quite expensive for long strings, but it can be tuned by skipping high selectivities in the upper region of the triangular matrix. further- more, starting with a decomposition of equal length substrings and stepwise ad- justing this decomposition by moving adjacent cut positions represents a greedy approach yielding sufficient results regarding the selectivity quickly. the disadvantage here is that we need selectivity information on the variable length substrings s � pos � i � � pos � i � � � � . possible solutions and problems for the storage and retrieval of this information is outlined in section . , but obviously it requires much more resources than managing the same information for q-samples as introduced in the following. . . q-samples the main advantage of using q-samples, i.e. non-overlapping q-grams of fixed length q, for mapping an edit distance predicate to a disjunctive source query results from the straightforward maintenance of according selectivity information, as shown later on in section . . to find the best possible combination of n q-samples from a single string s with length � s � � n � q an algorithm basically works as shown in figure . . in a first step selectivity information for all contained q-grams is retrieved from data structures described in section . and represented in an array sel � i � � sel � s � i � i � q � � � � i � length � s � � q. as shown later on, this can be accom- plished in o � length � s � � time. among the number of all possible combina- tions we have to find the positions pos � i � � � i � n with � j � k : � j � k � n � pos � k � � pos � j � � q that optimises the selectivity of the disjunctive source query, i.e. yields min � Πni � � � sel � pos � i � � � . this selectivity estimation can further be used to decide, if the pre-selection actually should be performed on the data source. if the selectivity exceeds some selectivity threshold and cannot be performed efficiently, i.e. it yields too many intermediate results, the query can be rejected. as the number of possible com- binations is Πni � � length � s � � � n � q � � an exhaustive search can become very ex- pensive, especially if the mapping has to be applied during a bind-join on a great number of long strings as shown in section . . alternatively, a greedy algorithm . . mapping similarity predicates t__vv i n o g h input string: algorithm start qgram selectivity: sel[ ]= . e− sel[ ]= . e− sel[ ]= . e− try combinations optimal result: v i n c e n t__v a n__g o g h figure . : finding selective -samples for k � , hence n � k � � with o � length � s � � was implemented yielding sufficiently selective combinations, in most cases equal to the result of the exhaustive search. the selectivity of the resulting pre-selection σ � n i � substring � s � pos � i � � pos � i � � q � � stringattribute � can further be improved by not only considering the retrieved q-samples at pos � i � , but also the bounding substring, resulting in a complete decomposition of s. in the given example this may be ’vincen’ and ’t van g’ and ’ogh’, which can eas- ily be derived. though we cannot estimate the selectivity of this query based on the given information, unless we move to the approach presented in the previous subsection, it must be better or at least equal to our estimation made based on q-gram selectivity. another refinement of the presented approach would be to dynamically determine q based on the string length and the number of required q-samples, e.g. q : ��� length � s ��� n � . this would solve the problem of applica- bility for shorter strings mentioned above, and improve the selectivity of the pre- selection for longer strings. the disadvantage is that we would need selectivity information for various length q-grams. finally, if q is fixed and the applicability condition length � s � � n � q does not hold, we may decide to nevertheless send a disjunctive query to the source, con- taining m ��� length � s ��� q � � n substrings. though this may not yield all results to the query, it still yields the subset containing k � � n � m � differences in the string representations. of course, the source query should only be executed, if the esti- mated selectivity � Πmi � � � sel � pos � i � � � is below a threshold granting efficient processing and transfer of the pre-selection. . . tokens considering only substrings of a fixed or variable length would neglect the query capabilities of a great number of sources providing keyword search instead of sub- string search. to support such interfaces we can choose a set of tokens t � � t � chapter . re-writing similarity-based queries derived from our search string s using common delimiters like spaces, commas, etc. managing and retrieving selectivity information for keywords can be based on standard approaches from information retrieval like the t f � idf norm. there- fore, it is quite straightforward as outlined in section . . finding an optimal combination is also easier than with q-samples or substrings. the disadvantages of the approach are the in general worse selectivity of key- words compared to the other approaches, a relatively big space overhead for man- aging selectivity information compared to q-grams, and problems with the appli- cability. the latter results from the fact that k � tokens have to be derived, which often may not be possible, e.g. it is impossible to derive a pre-selection for a query like like σedist � � ernesthemingway � � authorname � � because the threshold k � implies the need of n � tokens, which are not avail- able. the selectivity problems occur because we cannot take advantage of longer substrings, we cannot take advantage of token-spanning substrings, and a proba- bility growing with n of having one or more relatively un-selective keywords in our pre-selection. . managing selectivity information in the previous section we described the mapping of similarity-based predicates to substring and keyword queries. these mappings are based on the estimation of the selectivities of arbitrary substrings, q-samples, and tokens. choosing the most selective pre-selection query requires the storage of selectivity information about these kinds of substrings. in this section we shortly review and adapt data structures to store these information and algorithms to extract the selectivity infor- mation. furthermore, we describe a method to obtain and maintain the required information from uncooperative sources. the work presented in this section is the result of co-operative research with ingolf geist. an overview of data structures to store information for approximate string matching is for instance given by navarro in [nbyst ]. for the purpose of matching, these structures hold pointers to the occurrences of substrings in text documents, which is the common approach in information retrieval. contrary to such approaches, for an estimation of string or substring selectivity as required in this approach the number of occurrences is interesting, and not the positions themselves. therefore, the data structures were adapted to hold count or frequency information. according to the description in the previous section, possible data structures for the different substring types are . . managing selectivity information � full count-suffix trees (fst) or pruned count-suffix trees (pst), � count tries (ct) or pruned count tries (pct), that store count information of tokens or q-grams of variable length q, and � hash tables or pruned hash tables which store the q-grams or tokens and their corresponding counts. these data structures and their potential usage are described in the following. a suffix tree is a trie that stores not only all strings s of a database, but also all suffixes s � i � length � s � � � � � i � length � s � of s. the count-suffix tree is a variant of a suffix tree which does not store pointers to the occurrences of the substrings s � i � j � but maintains the count cs � i � j � of substrings s � i � j � . the count assigned to the root node n is the number of all suffixes in the database and can be used to derive a relative frequency value. the space requirements of a full count-suffix tree can be prohibitive for esti- mating substring selectivity. therefore, the pruned count-suffix tree was presented by krishnan et al. in [kvi ]. this data structure maintains only the counts of substrings that satisfy a certain pruning rule, e.g. � maintain only the top-n levels of the suffix-tree, i.e. retain only substrings with a length length � a ��� lmax, or � retain all nodes that have a count ca � pmin, where pmin is the pruning threshold. count-suffix trees and their pruned version can be used to store selectivity infor- mation for arbitrary substrings, as described in the previous section. to support the storage of selectivity information for q-samples simple and efficient hash tables can be applied with in general smaller space requirements. these hash-tables contain q-grams extracted from the strings in the database. each entry in a hash table hq consists of a q-gram as the key and the assigned count information cqgram. in order to reduce the storage costs, the hash table can also be pruned using count-based pruning rules, e.g. maintain only those q-gram entries with a count greater than a given threshold, i.e. cqgram � pmin. to support q-samples of varying length selectivity information of q-grams with different qi has to be maintained. a simple solution can use several hash tables for different length qi, but this approach causes a considerable redundancy. alternatively, count-suffix trees pruned on the string length can be applied. hash tables can also be used for tokens, but tokens are usually of different lengths and non-overlapping. therefore, the resulting hash table would be similar to an in- verted list as commonly used in information retrieval, with the one difference, that, again, counts instead of pointers are stored. chapter . re-writing similarity-based queries as mentioned in [jkns ] a count-suffix tree can be pruned by different rules other than minimum counts. in order to find a compressed representation of q- grams of different lengths by the maximum height of the count-suffix tree, a pruning rule p � q means: for each suffix si of a string s only the part si � � q � is stored in the count-suffix tree. for each suffix, which now represents a q-gram, the count of occurrences is maintained. furthermore, if only q-grams of a certain minimum length pmin should be maintained, the pruning rule can be extended to pmin � q � pmax. as almost all q-grams are a prefix of (q+i)-grams, the compres- sion rate is very high. furthermore, pruning based on the counts can be performed as described above. based on information stored in these data structures, selectivity information for a substring a can be derived for instance as sel � a � : � ca n where ca is the count value found in the data structure, and n is for instance the separately maintained sum of all occurrences of all substrings managed in a hash table. as previously mentioned, n can be maintained in the root nodes of the introduced tree structures. if a substring is not found, because the index may be incomplete as discussed later on or pruned by a count limit pmin, its selectiv- ity can be assumed to be n or pmin � n , respectively. furthermore, the lookup of the count information for all the introduced approaches has the worst complexity of o � length � a � � , i.e. the frequency of a single substring can be computed very efficiently. for building and maintaining these index structures, two general approaches are considered. . if there are one or more co-operative sources providing full access to their managed data, the described structures or an initial version can be build from the according string sets. . for uncooperative sources, like web databases, building and maintaining these structures has to be based on query-based sampling as described for instance in [cc ]. the idea behind query-based sampling are the following. at first, the selectivity information can be seen as an ordered “stop word list”, i.e. we want to avoid substrings with a bad selectivity. but, substrings occurring with a high frequency are extremely well approximated with query based sampling, as shown in the evaluation in section . . this way we can avoid big result sets even with a relatively small ratio of sampled tuples. . . similarity-based operations however, we may want to maintain and improve the initial frequency infor- mation continuously. for this purpose, the result sets during query processing can be used. updating selectivity information continuously may seem problematic for structures which are pruned based on a count or frequency threshold. each new entry in an already established structure would fall prey to the pruning rule and does not have a chance to reach the threshold. a solution currently developed by ingolf geist and not described here is based on an aging algorithm for the count information in the data structures. . similarity-based operations the selectivity-based mapping of similarity predicates introduced in the previous sections can be used for re-writing and executing similarity queries on sources with limited query capabilities. this way string similarity predicates can be sup- ported in global queries even if the source systems support only primitive predi- cates such as � substring(a, b), e.g. in form of sql’s “a like ’%b%’” predicate or � keyword(a, b) representing an ir-like keyword containment of phrase b in string a. in the following we use a generalised form contains(a, b) that has to be replaced by the specific predicate supported by the source system. based on the descriptions given in chapter , we focus on two operations: � the similarity-based selection returning tuples satisfying a string similarity predicate, and � the similarity-based join combining tuples from two relations based on an approximate matching criterion. in the following we describe strategies for implementing these operators using selectivity-based mapping. . . similarity-based selection as introduced in section . . , a similarity selection can for instance be an op- eration returning all tuples satisfying a similarity predicate based on a distance function dist � s � attr � where attr � r with a distance less than or equal to a given maximum distance k: chapter . re-writing similarity-based queries σ̃dist � s � attr ��� kr � r � � � t � t � r � r � � dist � s � t � attr � � k � the variant of such a similarity predicate considered here is based on the edit distance of strings edist: σ̃edist � s � attr � � kr � r � � � t � t � r � r � � edist � s � t � attr � � k � without loss of generality we focus on simple predicates only. complex predi- cates, e.g. connected by � or � can be handled by applying the following steps to each atomic predicate and taking into account query capabilities of the sources. furthermore, we assume that source systems do not support such predicates but only the primitive predicate contains(a, b) introduced above. now, the problem is to rewrite a query containing σ̃sim in the following form: σ̃sim � σ̃sim � σpresim � r � r � � � where σpresim is pushed to the source system and σ̃sim is performed in the medi- ator. assuming sim is an atomic predicate of the form edist � s � attr � � k the selec- tion condition presim can be derived using the mapping functions map qgram, map substring, map token from section . which we consider in the generalised form map. this mapping function returns a set � q � of q-samples, substrings, or keywords according to the mappings described in section . . the disjunctive query represented by this set in general contains k � strings, unless the length of s does not allow to retrieve this number of substrings. in this case, a the next possible smaller set is returned, representing a query returning a partial result as described before. in any case, the estimated selectivity of the represented query must be better than a given selectivity threshold. based on this we can derive the expression presim from the similarity pred- icate as follows: presim : � �� q � map � s � contains � q � attr � in case of using the edit distance as similarity predicate we can further opti- mise the query expression by applying length filtering. this means, we can omit the expensive computation of the edit distance between two strings s and s if� length � s � � length � s � � � k for a given maximum distance values k. this holds, . . similarity-based operations because in this case the edit distance value is already � k. thus, the final query expression is σ̃edist � s � attr � � k � σ � length � s � � length � attr � � � k � σpresim � r � r � � � where the placement of the length filtering selection depends on the query capa- bilities of the source. a second optimisation rule deals with complex disjunctively connected sim- ilarity conditions of the form sim � s � attr � � sim � s � attr � . in this case the pre- selection condition can be simplified to � � q � map � s � contains � q � attr � � �� q � map � s � contains � q � attr � a general problem that can occur in this context are query strings exceeding the length limit for query strings given by the source system. this has to be han- dled by splitting the query condition into two or more parts presim ����� presimn and building the union of the partial results afterwards: σ̃sim � σpresim � r � r � � � ����� � σpresimn � r � r � � � obviously, the above mentioned optimisation of applying length filtering can be used here, too. . . similarity join based on the idea of implementing similarity operations by introducing a pre- selection we can realise similarity join operations, too. a similarity join r � r � ˜� sim r � r � where the join condition is an approximate string criterion of the form sim � r � attr � r � attr � � threshold or edist � r � attr � r � attr � � k. as in the previous sections we consider in the following only simple edit distance predicates. a first approach for computing the join is to use a bind join implementation. here, we assume that one relation is either restricted by a selection criterion or can be scanned completely. then, the bind join works as shown in algorithm . for each tuple of the outer relation r we take the (string) value of the join attribute attr and perform a similarity selection on the inner relation. chapter . re-writing similarity-based queries this is performed in the same way as described in section . . by . mapping the string to a set of q-grams, . sending the disjunctive selection to the source, . post-process the result by applying the similarity predicate, and then . combining each tuple of this selection result with the current tuple of the outer relation. algorithm : bind join foreach t � r � r � do s : � t � r � attr � foreach t � σ̃edist � s � attr � � σpresim � r � r � � � do output t � t od od the roles of the participating relations (inner or outer relation) are determined by taking into account relation cardinalities as well as the query capabilities. if a relation is not restricted using a selection condition and does not support a full table scan it has to be used as inner relation. otherwise, the smaller relation is chosen as the outer relation in order to reduce the number of source queries. a significant reduction of the number of the source queries can be achieved by using a semi-join variant. here, the following principal approach is used. . one of the relations is first processed completely. . the string values of the join attribute are collected and the map function is applied to each of them. . the resulting set s of q-grams, tokens, or substrings is used to build a single pre-selection condition. . the result of the according query is joined with the tuples from the first relation using the similarity condition. this is shown in algorithm . . . evaluation algorithm : semi join s : � / foreach t � r � r � do s : � s � map � t � r � attr � � od rtmp : � σ � s � s contains � s � attr � � r � r � � foreach t � r � r � do foreach t � rtmp do if edist � t � r � attr � � t � r � attr � � � k output t � t fi od od if the pre-selection condition exceeds the query string limit of the source, the pre-selection has to be performed in multiple steps. in the best case, this approach requires only source queries assuming that the first relation is cached in the me- diator or source queries otherwise. the worst case depends on the query length limit as well as the number of derived q-grams. however, if the number of queries is greater than � r � � one can switch always to the bind join implementation. a further kind of join operation can be used if none of the both input relations are restricted by a selection condition. assuming that a full fetch / scan is not pos- sible or not allowed, one could use the index containing frequent q-grams / tokens / substrings together with the selectivity for retrieving possibly matching data from both relations. by processing the results (i.e. extracting q-grams) the index can be adjusted and extended and in this way the following retrieval operations can be focused to promising q-grams. of course, this discovery join cannot guarantee a complete result but is helpful in identifying existing approximate matches. . evaluation for evaluation purposes a real-life data set containing detailed information about cultural assets lost or stolen from private persons and museums in europe during and after the nazi regime was used. because the gathered data is often imprecise or erroneous, similarity based operations are important in this application scenario and are already part of the application. this current research targets the integration with similar databases available over the web. chapter . re-writing similarity-based queries t u p le s w ith d u p lic a te s in % edit distance of duplicates figure . : duplicate distribution in test data set the experiments only dealt with a collection of approximately titles of cultural assets. the data set contains a great number of duplicates with identical and similar values as shown in figure . , i.e. for about % of the tuples there are tuples with an identical title, for % of the tuples there are (possible) duplicates with an edit distance of , etc. the distribution conforms to the aspects discussed in section . . to evaluate the key criteria described in the following, this data set as well as necessary index structures were materialised in one local oracle i database and queries were mapped to sql substring queries for pre-selection. the re- quired mapping and further evaluation was implemented in a mediator on top of the database system using java. the considered queries were similarity self-joins on this one table. the key criteria considered during evaluation are the selectivity of generated pre-selections, the quality of our selectivity estimation, and the applicability to actual data values. furthermore, dealing with structures for maintaining selectiv- ity information, the necessary space overhead and impact on the quality of our selectivity estimations for complete, incomplete, and pruned data structures were considered. figure . shows the average selectivity achieved with the proposed q-samples approach for a varying maximum edit distance k and varying q. the size of the candidate sets retrieved from the database were reasonable, especially for q � and q � , to of the approximate original titles. for a growing edit distance threshold k the selectivity grew linear or better due to the growing number of required disjuncts. to answer the question, how many queries provide a good selectivity, beneath . . evaluation . . . a ve ra g e q u e ry s e le ct iv ity in % edit distant threshold k of disjunctive query -samples -samples -samples figure . : average selectivity for varying q and k a given threshold, which also can be used to reject a query if the intermediate result would exceed a reasonable limit, the selectivity distribution of queries cre- ated from every tuple in the data set was investigated. the results are shown in figure . for varying q and k. for example, in figure . (c) where k � , if we set the selectivity threshold to %, we have to reject approximately % of the queries using -samples and -samples and approximately % of queries using -samples. though the former observation may seem quite bad, actually the edit distance threshold of k � is not realistic for most applications, where real duplicates often have a distance of or . the effect improves for smaller k as shown in figure . (d), where for the the same selectivity threshold we see that for k � we only have to reject % and for k � only % of our queries. again, for longer substrings with q � and q � the queries perform far better, as seen in figures . (a) and . (b). for the previous experiments un-pruned selectivity information stored in hash tables and gathered from the full input relation was used, i.e. for each q-gram the exact number of occurrences was used. still, our selectivity estimation may be biased by the fact that we assume independence between disjuncts by computing the selectivity as � Πk � i � � � sel � qgrami � � . figures . (a) and . (b) show that our estimation is actually quite good for q � and q � respectively, assuming k � . the estimation is rather conservative, i.e. we estimate the selectivity some- what higher than it actually is. comparing figure . (a) and figure . (b) shows that the estimation quality decreases for growing q towards more conservative es- timates. results are only shown for k � � q � � q � , but the results for other combinations of q and k were measured and turned out similar. chapter . re-writing similarity-based queries p e rc e n ta g e o f re je ct e d k = q u e ri e s selectivity threshold in % -samples -samples -samples (a) k= , varying q p e rc e n ta g e o f re je ct e d k = q u e ri e s selectivity threshold in % -samples -samples -samples (b) k= , varying q p e rc e n ta g e o f re je ct e d k = q u e ri e s selectivity threshold in % -samples -samples -samples (c) k= , varying q p e rc e n ta g e o f re je ct e d q u e ri e s, q = selectivity threshold in % k= k= k= (d) varying k, q= figure . : cumulative selectivity distribution for varying q and k a problem with the presented approach occurs, if the number of required q- samples cannot be retrieved from a given search string, because the latter is not long enough for the decomposition. figure . shows how often this was the case with our data set and for varying q and k, i.e. the query strings s did not fulfil the condition length � s � � q � � k � � . though, in this case we can still step back instead of reject and send a query containing less than k � q-samples providing at least a subset of the result as mentioned before. nevertheless, while greater q benefit the selectivity they hinder the applica- bility when many short query strings exist. therefore, the parameters q, k, and a possible selectivity threshold have to be chosen carefully based on characteristics of a given application. in section . the usage of query-based sampling was described in order to build selectivity summaries for uncooperative sources. in joint work with ingolf . . evaluation r e a l s e le ct iv ity in % estimated selectivity in %, k= and q= (a) q= r e a l s e le ct iv ity in % estimated selectivity in %, k= and q= (b) q= figure . : quality of selectivity estimation for q= and q= geist the quality of these information and the influence to the pre-selection pred- icates was evaluated. first, the differences between full scan estimation and esti- mation based on a certain sample size are investigated. from all possible q-grams were selected into a query set q . subsequently, we computed the average chapter . re-writing similarity-based queries n o n -a p p lic a b le q u e ri e s in % edit distant threshold k of disjunctive query -samples -samples -samples figure . : applicability for varying q and k a vg . a b so lu te -r e la tiv e -e rr o r sample size (% of data) -grams -grams -grams figure . : sample size estimation errors of the absolute-relative-errors defined as e � � q � ∑ q � q abs � sel � q � � est � q � � sel � q � � with sel � q � the selectivity q compute based on full statistics, i.e. the real selec- tivity, and est � q � the estimated selectivity based on a sample. the results are illustrated in fig. . . as assumed the error is decreasing with bigger sample sizes. however, the error is quite high, around with % sample size. but, the most important thing is, the relative order of q-grams is retained. furthermore, high ranked q-grams, i.e. those, which have to be avoided, are approximated well in the sample. . . evaluation r e la tiv e r e su lt si ze ( fu ll st a tis tic s = % ) sample size (% of data) -grams -grams -grams figure . : quality of the pre-selection decisions following the evaluation of the estimation errors the influence of the errors to the pre-selection results have to be shown. therefore, we generated a sample set of queries q which contains strings randomly selected from the database. we measured the average number of tuples returned by the pre-selection condition for an edit distance k � , i.e. a disjunction of three q-sample substring queries. here, we assumed the average result size of substring queries created with full statistics as %. fig. . shows the result sizes of pre-selection queries created using selectivity information from different sample sizes. even the precision of query based sampling selectivity estimation is not very high, the query results are close to full statistics. that has several reasons. the se- lectivity estimation of high ranked q-grams is rather high and ranking similarity is high. thus, even if the selectivity estimation is not perfect absolutely, the relative order of the q-grams is good. finally, we evaluated the influence of the pruning limit on sizes of the storage structures as well as on the quality of pre-selection. the results are illustrated in figures . and . respectively. especially for - and -grams pruning reduces the storage costs decisively, e.g. with a pruning limit pmin � the size of the -gram table reduces to % of the original size. nevertheless, the quality of the estimations and result set sizes based on the estimations are very good as seen in figure . . because of the higher reduction for -grams the results are slightly worse than for - and -grams. but, the figures show that pruning is well applicable in our scenario. chapter . re-writing similarity-based queries # o f e n tr ie s in t a b le in % minimum count value retained in hashtable -grams -grams -grams figure . : q-gram table sizes vs. pruning limits a vg . re tu rn e d t u p le s ( q u e ri e s) in % minimum count value retained in hashtable -grams -grams -grams figure . : quality of pre-selection vs. pruning limits . conclusions in this chapter an approach for querying based on string similarity in a virtually integrated and heterogeneous environment was presented. string similarity is ex- pressed in terms of the edit distance, and global queries are re-written to � a source query suitable for standard interfaces to efficiently select a candi- date set, and � a global part of the query that actually computes the correct result within a mediator or fdbms. . . conclusions to grant efficiency, queries are re-written to disjunctive source queries based on selectivity information for q-samples, arbitrary substrings, or tokens. the ad- vantages and disadvantages of these three kinds of substrings and the necessary overhead for storing selectivity information was discussed. the latter was aspects and its evaluation is based on joint work with ingolf geist. based on the predicate mapping implementations for selection and join op- erations were discussed. for the evaluation of the introduced concepts the focus was on q-samples, because they seemed most suitable regarding applicability in various scenarios and provide a low overhead for query processing and required data structures. the results show that the proposed approach is well appropriate for the target problem, but to grant efficiency and result quality the parameters have to be chosen very carefully according to a given application scenario. as this approach of string similarity based querying heterogeneous sources in general is quite new, there is of course a great number of open questions, which require further research. this includes a further improvement of source query selectivity. the currently achieved results of fetching only a small fraction of a percent of the original data in most scenarios may be suitable for many applica- tions, but for large data volumes this already may be prohibitive. on the other hand, while a complete decomposition of a search string to substrings is optimal regarding the selectivity, the necessary overhead seems impractical in most appli- cations. here, mixed approaches and further ways of selectivity estimation are researched. using only the string edit distance for similarity operations does not fully re- flect real-world requirements, were similarity is most often specific to attribute semantics of the given application, e.g. the similarity of presentations of a persons name can be judged much better using a specific similarity measure. neverthe- less, the general principle of pre-selection by query re-writing remains applicable, as well as many aspects of mapping a given value based on selectivity. related to a running project, the discovery join is currently more thoroughly investigated. the intention of this operation is to find related or duplicate infor- mation in web sources, without having either a partial result or one full data set materialised. the current approach is based on the work presented here as shortly sketched in section . . chapter . re-writing similarity-based queries chapter conclusions this thesis addressed problems of similarity-based operations in data integration. data integration has been a topic of research for more than twenty years and has gained a growing interest over recent years because of the continously increasing availability of data from sources in local or global scopes. while data integration in early research has tackled problems mostly on the conceptual level, such as for instance approaches targeting schematic heterogeneities of data from various sources, the research focus shifted toward aspects required to implement solu- tions for real-life applications, e.g. means for query processing in distributed and heterogeneous environments. once schematic heterogeneities are resolved, and techniques of materialised or virtual data integration were applied to provide unified access to an integrated data set, most likely there will still be conflicts on the data level. this is because the information provided by various sources may overlap or relate in some way, and data values representing one real-world object or related objects may vary for instance due to different representation conventions and errors made during input. if this is the case, operations to resolve such conflicts cannot be based on equality of values. therefore, similarity-based operations are very useful to provide access to integrated data sets. furthermore, these operations have to be implemented in a way to efficiently deal with the special requirements in data integration scenarios. on the one hand, the size of an integrated data set may be huge, because the sizes of the source data sets are added. on the other hand, processing queries in a distributed and heterogeneous environment has to be based on the quite narrow bottleneck of cur- rent data networks. these two aspects also hold for equality-based operations, but similarity-based operations in addition are characterised by an in general slightly worse performance, because the search space is bigger. therefore, efficiency of similarity-based operations is a key issue. chapter . conclusions . summary of contributions the main contributions to the target research field of this thesis are starting in chapter with a description of the foundations of similarity-based operations. for this purpose, the semantics of predicate-based operations as known from the relational algebra are adapted to the inclusion of similarity predicates. according consequences and necessary modifications are outlined. in this way, the focus for considerations in the following chapters is constituted. while the semantics of similarity predicates as well as similarity-based se- lection and join operations are introduced according to related approaches used in other research, the description of a similarity-based grouping operation is a novel approach, suitable especially for purposes of duplicate detection and recon- ciliation. though these two aspects on the surface are well covered by the two stages of grouping and aggregation, for the intended purpose the actual grouping sub-operation required severe changes to deal with specific characteristics of sim- ilarity relations. accordingly, strategies to deal with atransitivity introduced by similarity predicates were described, and a simple strategy of building the transi- tive closure was used later on. though the foundations, algorithms, and implementations provided are de- scribed in a way, such that generic similarity predicates and complex conditions can be handled, throughout the chapters and a string similarity predicate based on the edit distance was used to illustrate possible index support and efficient eval- uation during distributed query processing. this specific predicate was chosen because string attributes are most common in data management. on the other hand, efficient support for string similarity is not well researched compared to, for instance, similarity of complex multi-media objects. hence, the support for such predicates is an urgent requirement, especially in data integration. chapter described novel research results consisting of algorithms for the implementation of � similarity-based join and � similarity-based grouping operations in materialised scenarios, i.e. the input relation of the operations ex- ists either in secondary or primary storage of the integration system. in this case, index support for similarity predicates is conceivable, which was illustrated by using a trie index for evaluating string similarity predicates. implementations were provided for a mediator query engine and as an extension for a commercial database management system. based on the implementation of the algorithms and the string similarity predicate, the performance of the approach was evalu- ated. further aspects of their application were discussed, including the design of similarity predicates and the usage of aggregation functions for reconciliation. . . outlook and open problems in chapter the according problems were addressed for virtual integration scenarios. � similarity-based selection and � similarity-based join operations based on string similarity were introduced suitable for distributed query processing in heterogeneous environments, i.e. the predicate has to be evaluated by source systems with possibly limited query capabilities. to deal with this prob- lem, a new approach was presented, which is based on expanding predicates by deriving a disjunctive set of pre-selection predicates that can be evaluated by most kinds of sources. to grant the efficiency of this mapping, selectivity information on substrings was used. finally, the mappings and algorithms were evaluated for various aspects of the string similarity predicate and the quality of the selectivity information. the general intention behind the work presented in this thesis was to provide means to deal with data-level conflicts in a way, such that the operations can be implemented and used efficiently in a number of applications. therefore, the most important consideration during the research was to introduce similarity-based op- erations that � can be implemented as part of common data integration solutions like fdbms, mediators, or data warehouses, � can be integrated with existing data management solutions where appro- priate, e.g. in commercial dbms used for instance in data warehousing, and � are implemented based on algorithms considering the specific requirements of efficiency resulting from similarity-based data processing. accordingly, prototype implementations of the proposed similarity-based opera- tions were provided, and their efficiency was evaluated and discussed. in gen- eral, the evaluation results have shown that similarity-based operations can be performed with a reasonable efficiency. yet, the strong dependence on the context of similarity and unclear properties of resulting similarity relations make efficient implementations of similarity predicates a difficult task. . outlook and open problems specific summaries and important open problems regarding the presented ap- proaches were already discussed in the conclusions of chapters and . there- chapter . conclusions fore, in this section an outlook from a broader perspective is given and more gen- eral problems in the research fields of interest are addressed. the importance of similarity in computer science and especially in data man- agement and data integration was outlined several times throughout this thesis. it is a valuable concept for identification and abstraction, which can be applied wherever great amounts of data have to be processed to make it suitable for hu- man comprehension. yet, the support for according operations is still in its infancy and the focus is often very limited. to better deal with the requirements of current and future applications, similarity will play a key role. the current lack of similarity-based operations is mostly based on certain properties of similarity and the stark contrast with operations currently used in data management. while the work presented in this thesis is based on the simple framework out- lined in chapter , a more comprehensive view on similarity on a conceptual level is required, explicitly including aspects of suitable data models. furthermore, an agreement on the characteristics of similarity measures and relations is required as a basis for such a comprehensive framework. based on this, according operations can be defined in a way, that allows a sound integration with existing or possible future data management and data integration solutions. the strong dependence on a context of similarity leads to the requirement of different similarity measures that are specific to almost each given application. while this problem can be solved in data management on the low level of ex- tensibility interfaces as for instance provided by current database management systems, the semantics of according user-defined functions are not clear and ef- ficiency as a result is hard to accomplish. therefore, these aspects have to be covered within the more general framework mentioned above. while it is reasonable to provide operations like the ones introduced in this thesis in systems that are intended to be used in data integration scenarios, the inclusion in database management systems should be realised as optional exten- sions based on extensibility interfaces. this is because, the operations are often 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[zhkf ] g. zhou, r. hull, r. king, and j. franchitti. using object matching and materialization to integrate heterogeneous databases. in proc. of rd intl. conf. on cooperative information systems (coopis- ), vienna, austria, . 	title (german) 	abstract (german) 	title (english) 	abstract (english) 	table of contents 	list of figures 	 introduction 	 . motivation 	 . structure of the thesis 	 . contributions of the thesis 	 data integration approaches 	 . introduction 	 . characteristics of data integration 	 . . heterogeneity 	 . . distribution 	 . . autononmy 	 . data integration approaches 	 . . virtual data integration 	 . . materialised data integration 	 . conclusions 	 concepts of similarity 	 . introduction 	 . models of similarity 	 . . similarity measures and predicates 	 . . metrics as similarity measures 	 . . problems with common models 	 . string similarity 	 . conclusions 	 similarity-based operations 	 . introduction 	 . similarity predicates 	 . similarity-based operations 	 . . similarity-based selection 	 . . similarity-based join 	 . . similarity-based grouping 	 . conclusions 	 similarity-based operations for materialised integration 	 . introduction 	 . principles of the implementation and optimisation 	 . . a trie-based similarity predicate for strings 	 . . similarity-based join 	 . . similarity-based grouping 	 . implementation using oracle i 	 . evaluation 	 . applications 	 . conclusions 	 re-writing similarity-based queries for virtual integration 	 . introduction 	 . mapping similarity predicates 	 . . substring decomposition 	 . . q-samples 	 . . tokens 	 . managing selectivity information 	 . similarity-based operations 	 . . similarity-based selection 	 . . similarity join 	 . evaluation 	 . conclusions 	 conclusions 	 . summary of contributions 	 . outlook and open problems 	bibliography amanda-josephine m rogier van der weyden: a netherlandish artist and the ferrarese court a thesis submitted to the temple university graduate board in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree master of arts by amanda-josephine m. pesce december thesis approvals: dr. marcia b. hall, advisory chair, department of art history dr. ashley west, department of art history abstract northern european and italian renaissance art have tended to be treated art historically as two opposing styles. rooted in statements by artists such as michelangelo and leon battista alberti, it has become a common misconception that italians did not hold northern european art in high regard during the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries. this thesis seeks to complicate and critique this conventional understanding by looking at the similarities and transalpine exchanges between the artistic styles and practices of rogier van der weyden (c. - ) of brussels and cosmè tura (c. - ) of ferrara. by looking at the writings of contemporary humanists at the ferrarese court and technical analysis of select paintings, it is evident that cosmè tura strove to emulate and incorporate aspects of rogier van der weyden’s northern manner, especially in his handling of oil paint, use of underdrawings, and emotive effects. in reconsidering this cross-cultural relationship, this thesis demonstrates that the traditionally constructed animosity between northern and southern renaissance art is a common misperception and an oversight in art history. i dedicated to my family for always reminding me that the key to happiness is sharing what you love with the world. ii table of contents page abstract…………………………………………………………………..i dedication…..………………………………………………………..….ii list of figures.………………………………………………………....iv chapters . an introduction………….………………..………..…………..…. . rogier van der weyden and the court of ferrara …….…………………………………..…...…... on rogier van der weyden and his presence in italy…..………… . connecting rogier van der weyden and cosmÈ tura ………………………………………..…………. cosmè tura as court artist ……………………..……………...….. cosmè tura’s re-appropriation of rogier van der weyden’s netherlandish oil painting techniques..……………………..…..... . rogier van der weyden and cosmÈ tura - the bigger picture.……………………………………….…….... figures…………………………………………………………..….….... works cited.……………………………………………………...……. iii list of figures figure page . rogier van der weyden, descent from the cross, oil on oak panel, ………………………………………………………………………… . rogier van der weyden, entombment: lamentation of christ’s body, oil on panel, - …..……………………………….………………..….. . fra angelico, entombment, tempera on panel, - …..……………………………………………………………........……… . rogier van der weyden, saint luke drawing the virgin, oil on panel, - …………………………..…………….…………... . rogier van der weyden, triptych of the seven sacraments, oil on panel, - ………..…………………………..……….….…… . rogier van der weyden, portrait of francesco d’este, oil on panel, …………................................................................................................. . cosmè tura, an allegorical figure (muse?)(calliope?), oil and tempera on panel, - ………………………..…..…………. . a) cosmè tura, the lamentation of christ’s body, a part of the roverella altarpiece, oil on panel, mid s..….…………. b) the roverella altarpiece, oil on panel, mid- s..…………………..... c) side panel of the roverella altarpiece oil on panel, mid- ……....… . cosmè tura, saint jerome, oil on panel, ……………..........…………. iv chapter : an introduction northern and southern european renaissance art has traditionally been considered as two distinct artistic styles. in contradiction to familiar scholarship, which traditionally presents netherlandish and italian renaissance art and artistic practices at odds with one another, we know that there were instances when italians embraced certain aspects of netherlandish art. through exploring the contemporary reception of rogier van der weyden (c. - ) of brussels within the northern italian court of ferrara during the quattrocento, we can gain a more complete understanding of the reception and appreciation of the northern netherlandish style - the ars nova - in renaissance italy. marcia hall, in color and meaning, described the northern renaissance ars nova as displaying a sense of a fleeting moment that is captured eternally, with reality being recorded in a thousand minutely observed details comprised of glinting textures and surfaces. the northern european style, she argued, embodied a use of light, color and perspective operating through a system different from those demonstrated by filippo brunelleschi and leon battista alberti in the italian peninsula. both regions had strong economic, political, social and educational opinions that have been traditionally constructed as confrontational towards one another. the differentiation between the styles of northern and southern europe has perpetuated this common misconception of disdainful conflict. paula nuttall’s book, from flanders to florence, is one of the first marcia hall, color and meaning: practice and theory in renaissance painting (new york: cambridge university press, ), - . full acknowledgements that the perceived marginalization of netherlandish painting by italian renaissance culture may not have been an accurate construction of contemporary views on artistic style and value. considered by scholars as one of the most prominent artists of the northern renaissance, rogier van der weyden is given merit on par with that of the renowned northern renaissance artists jan van eyck and robert campin. born in tournai in under the name rogelet de la pasture, documents show him as having trained within the workshop of the prominently established artist robert campin. apart from basic biographical information, the history of scholarship pertaining specifically to the life and artistic practices of rogier van der weyden is quite limited. despite this limitation, this thesis will briefly discuss the history of scholarship concerning rogier and focus on particular oversights made when looking specifically at his connection to the ferrarese court artist cosmè tura (c. - ). to look beyond the traditional debate concerning the plausibility of rogier’s physical presence in ferrara and to interrogate the ways in which his work may have been received is to initiate a break with previous scholarship on the artist’s physical presence as superfluous when there is documented proof of his work present in italy. at variance with traditional scholarship, which regularly refers to rogier’s painting entitled the descent from the cross, this thesis will investigate further rogier’s entombment (c. - ), which was owned by the medici paula nuttall, from flanders to florence: the impact of netherlandish paintings, - (new haven: yale university press, ), . also see bernard aikema and beverly louise brown, renaissance venice and the north: crosscurrents in the time of dürer, bellini, and titian (new york: rizzoli, ). martin davies, rogier van der weyden: an essay with a critical catalogue of paintings (london: phaidon, ), . and is now in the uffizi museum. as evidenced by the ways in which rogier’s style fit within and incorporated the values of the ferrarese court humanists, his work can clearly be seen as present in and greatly appreciated by the ferrarese court. the uffizi entombment is a prime example of a work created by a northern artist that was commissioned by a southern patron. this work operates, in reference to the topic of this thesis, as the quintessential example of what the works that rogier van der weyden had made for the d’este collection in ferrara might have looked like. looking more closely at this work might yield insight into the artistic process and technique rogier would have employed in the lost works of ferrara. creating an idea of what rogier’s artistic technique might have been at this time for an italian patron will allow us to begin to understand what key aspects italian artists, like cosmè tura, would have drawn from his work and enveloped into their own. through the context of rogier van der weyden’s life, style, and reception, a contemporary understanding of concepts on painting within the fifteenth-century court of ferrara can be gained. by looking at the way in which cosmè tura emulates stylistic qualities and techniques of rogier, which parallel values utilized by key figures within ferrarese court, a true appreciation and emulation of the netherlandish tradition can be seen. placing rogier van der weyden’s work into the context of the ferrarese court in conjunction with viewing the re-appropriation of certain stylistic qualities by cosmè tura, who follows chronologically, i hope to contribute to modern scholarship through displaying an appreciation of the northern renaissance style in southern europe. the second chapter seeks to relay a detailed account of rogier van der weyden’s life leading up to his probable journey to italy in . parting with modern scholars, who briefly acknowledge rogier’s pilgrimage to rome, i will fully investigate the probability of the artist’s travels. after establishing rogier’s journey as fact, we will turn our attention toward what influence his journey or, at the very least his works of art might have had on a particular artist named cosmè tura. chapter three seeks to provide evidence that sheer presence of rogier van der weyden’s work in ferrara affected the work of the young court artist. through looking at similarities in their emotive style and material techniques, a clear cross-cultural artistic relationship becomes evident. the fourth and final chapter utilizes all the information given in chapter two and three to create a synthesized understanding of the artistic relationship between rogier van der weyden and cosmè tura, which complicates the traditionally-perceived animus between northern and southern renaissance art. chapter : rogier van der weyden and the court of ferrara on rogier van der weyden and his presence in italy scholarship pertaining specifically to the life of rogier van der weyden is quite limited. many archival sources on rogier from tournai were destroyed during world war ii, and the limited information that remains is from partly transcribed documents from the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. early notable writings that are devoted to the life and work of rogier written before de vos’ text were contributions made by max j. friedländer, erwin panofsky and otto pächt. a vast amount of historical, iconographical, typological, stylistic and technical information had been carried forward to the late ’s, which led dirk de vos to create a comprehensive catalogue of rogier van der weyden. it is the most widely accepted scholarship surrounding rogier’s life, reception and work. other recent contributions, such as the previously mentioned texts by paula nuttall and marcia hall, as well as michael baxandall, stephen campbell and maryan ainsworth, help construct an overall period perception of literature, techniques, materials, and humanistic ideas during the fifteenth century that can aid in developing an understanding of how rogier van der weyden and his work may have been valued. max j. friedländer. from van eyck to bruegel: early netherlandish painting (new york: praeger, ). erwin panofsky, early netherlandish painting. (madrid: cätedra, ). otto pächt, altniederländische malerei. von rogier van der weyden bis gerard david (munich: prestel, ). dirk de vos, rogier van der weyden: the complete works, (new york: harry n. abrams, ) . through pushing past certain concerns that have occupied many scholars discussing rogier van der weyden, such as lack of evidence of his physical presence in italy, modern scholarship can be furthered through investigation of the reception of rogier’s work, which traveled throughout italy and into italian private collections during the fifteenth century. rogier trained for five years within campin’s workshop before obtaining the title of “master” painter on the st of august in . rogier remained in tournai for the next four years, during which time some scholars suggest that he may have begun to develop a workshop of his own. rogier van der weyden’s descent from the cross (fig. ) is dated through stylistic evaluation and the production of copies to , the year before he moved to brussels. this work’s creation is a primary factor in acquiring for rogier some wealth and prestige, not only in northern europe but in italy as well. the prado descent from the cross has been considered historically as the perfect exemplification of rogier van der weyden’s style and is one of his most well-known works. it is important to stress that this work could be considered an iconic example of netherlandish painting, even in its own time, which may explain why scholars seem to focus on the prado descent from the cross when discussing rogier’s northern cross-cultural connection with italy in general, and in ferrara and florence specifically. this paper seeks to diverge from traditional scholarship and look specifically at a less well-known work by rogier entitled the entombment (fig. ), which was created in , possibly for cosimo de medici’s collection and resides to this day in the uffizi gallery. however, before de vos, rogier van der weyden, - . ibid., . looking more closely at the entombment, it is important to look at what little is known about rogier’s life leading up to the entombment’s creation. rogier van der weyden moved to brussels in , the year after his completion of the prado descent of the cross. the post that he took in brussels had not existed before, nor was it replaced after his term as ‘nostre bourgeois et manant,’ which translates to “our citizen and resident.” between the years of and , rogier’s works consisted principally of civic works, several portraits and primarily religious subjects. his first commission within the city of brussels was a series of four scenes of justice for the gold chamber of the town hall. after completing this civic series, which was destroyed in the bombardment of brussels in , rogier’s corpus leading up to is comprised mostly of sacred, occasionally biblical, imagery. these religious scenes include saint luke drawing the virgin (c. - ), triptych of the seven sacraments (c. - ), and magdalen reading (c. ), which is a fragment from a lost sacra conversazione scene thought to have been completed in . all of these images place biblical themes within spaces that reflect the world of the contemporary fifteenth-century viewer. rogier achieves his convincingly articulated interior spaces through implementation of similar colors and tones, figures, stylization through outlining, perspective and extensive detailing. triptych of the seven sacraments utilizes the de vos, rogier van der weyden, . most municipal accounts from brussels between the and have since been lost, and guild records have not survived. however, a document drafted by the town council in refers to rogier using these terms. davies, . anthony blunt, et al. “the materials and techniques of five paintings by rogier van der weyden and his workshop,” in the london national gallery bulletin, vol. . (london: national gallery publications, ), . anthony blunt investigates the process utilized by rogier van der weyden and his workshop through the use of technical research in this article. through blunt’s research insight is given into the common practices, such as the utilization of underdrawings and preparatory grounds that may not be easily seen to the naked eye. “swooning madonna,” and emotional women were employed also in the prado descent from the cross. the similarity in stylization and compositional construction suggests that rogier had established a productive workshop within the city of brussels and had developed a recognizable ‘brand’ for himself. this ‘brand’ is one that rogier van der weyden constructed for himself, developed, and disseminated throughout europe from to the late sixteenth century, long after his death in . the year was declared a holy year by pope nicholas v. the jubilee year was introduced in the trecento by the papacy as a year of remission or universal pardon from sin, as a political ploy to restore the papal reputation and stimulate piety. during this period, religious pilgrimages were extremely popular; people from throughout europe would make their way to rome, stopping at churches with prominent relics while on their journey. the jubilee is marked by an incident in which over two hundred persons were trampled on the ponte sant’angelo due to the city being overpopulated by people from foreign lands. nearly two thousand pilgrims occupied rome regularly through the jubilee year, which aids in understanding the large volume of commerce, trade and religious activity that took place during . for an artist like rogier, who was rising in popularity at the time, the jubilee year offered an opportunity to visit other strong artistic centers and experience other styles of art, while also promoting his own. the sheer volume of people within rome would have appealed to an artist seeking out commissions. it also would have given rogier the possibility of stopping in ferrara to see de vos, rogier van der weyden, . leonello d’este, whom documents show had already been an active patron of his. dirk de vos proposes that it is possible that rogier may have made the journey by ship from bruges to pisa. if rogier had visited italy, it would have been likely that he would have gone to rome first and then possibly traveled through ferrara before returning to brussels. dirk de vos suggests that this would have enabled him to visit the court in ferrara briefly between february and june of that year, possibly waiting out the winter so that he would have passed through the alps more safely. italian humanist bartolomeo fazio of the court of naples wrote a book in entitled on famous men, in which he identified the greatest modern painters as jan van eyck, rogier van der weyden, gentile da fabriano and pisanello. presumably obtaining his knowledge through various reports and correspondences, fazio’s book is a valuable record of not only lost works but the most extensive account of netherlandish painting written by an italian during the fifteenth century. on famous men documents jan van eyck’s women bathing traveling to genoa, rogier van der weyden’s passion on view in naples, and most importantly for this thesis’ purposes, a triptych depicting the descent by rogier in leonello d’este’s collection in ferrara. it is important to note at this point that fazio’s document most likely was not referring to rogier’s most famous prado descent from the cross, which causes scholars to question to which work might fazio be referring. lorne campbell references two occasions in the d’este archive that note two separate payments of twenty ducats having been paid to rogier van der weyden. de vos, rogier van der weyden, - . davies, . de vos, rogier van der weyden, . ibid., . furthermore, campbell uses both fazio and cyriacus of ancona’s writings to reconstruct an idea of what the missing triptych might have looked like. campbell proposes that the triptych’s central panel would have depicted a descent from the cross scene quite different from the one in the prado museum. this scene would have included the virgin, magdalen, joseph of arimathea and cluster of various other men and women placed within a landscape decorated with porticos and gateways. drastically different from the prado descent from the cross, the triptych’s left wing showed an expulsion from eden scene with fully rendered nude figures of adam and eve. the right wing depicted “a certain prince as suppliant” which campbell suggests might have been an old testament patriarch rather than a depiction of the donor. it is important to note that lorne campbell is the only scholar to make an attempt to reconstruct an idea of what rogier’s lost triptych in ferrara may have looked like, and his reconstruction is heavily dependent upon the writings of fazio. following his book, in fazio documents rogier van der weyden as an honored guest in rome and specifically notes him being shown gentile de fabriano’s frescos in san giovanni in laterano in rome. fazio describes several paintings by rogier van der weyden, as well as jan van eyck in his de viris illustribus. to these descriptions, fazio adds stylistic descriptions based on his viewing of rogier’s madonna and saints and the entombment, and expresses a few sentiments on rogier’s justice lorne campbell, tura and netherlandish art (london: national gallery catalogues ltd., ), . nuttall, - . bartolomeo fazio, de viris illustribus in documentary history of art, trans. elizabeth g. holt (new york: princeton university press, ), . within a collection in frankfurt at the stadelsches kunstinsitut. series, which he would have known only through hearsay. he also comments on two crucifixion scenes in the collection of the king of naples and, most importantly to this scholarship, documents a now lost descent triptych by rogier within the collection of leonello d’este, duke of ferrara. through fazio’s documentation, we can see italian interest in and knowledge of netherlandish work traveling through their country. though there is ample evidence for the presence of rogier van der weyden’s work in italy, scholars still debate the plausibility of his own physical presence in italy. speculation concerning his presence in italy first arose in , when max j. friedländer falsely identified a portrait by rogier as depicting leonello d’este. (fig. ) scholars did not question whether or not portrait was by the hand of rogier, but rather questioned the identification of the sitter as leonello d’este. documentation has been able to place the portrait as having been created around , which brought ernst kantorowicz to question friedländer’s identification of the sitter twenty years later. kantorowicz used the meticulous records on rogier van der weyden transcribed by a. v. wurzbach in niederländisches künstler-lexikon to correct friedländer, identifying the sitter as francesco d’este (c. – after ), the illegitimate son of leonello. francesco bore a strong resemblance to his father and was sent to be educated and raised at the burgundian court in . kantorowicz’s identification is more logical, due to rogier’s close proximity to the burgundian court from his home in brussels. within a collection in florence at the uffizi museum. theodore h. feder, “a reexamination through documents of the first fifty years of roger van der weyden’s life,” the art bulletin ( ): [full page range of entire article when first mentioned], esp. . ernst kantorowicz, “the este portrait by roger van der weyden” the journal of the warburg institute ( ): - , esp, . many scholars question whether rogier van der weyden actually made the pilgrimage described by fazio and only briefly discuss it within their writings, due to a lack of archival records about rogier or any other prominent figure within the court of ferrara. it is logical to presume that someone who clearly valued the netherlandish mode—whether leonello d’este, cosmè tura, or any of ferrara’s humanists or artists— would have explicitly documented the presence of rogier at the ferrarese court, had he been there. the lack of documentary evidence is what has caused most scholars, like kantorowicz and martin davies, to doubt the feasibility of rogier’s presence in italy. it stands to reason, however, that rogier’s physical presence in italy is not essential for his work to have created an impact within the florentine and ferrarese court. one must look beyond the traditional debate surrounding the plausibility of rogier’s physical presence in ferrara and examine the ways in which his work may have been received. cosimo de medici and leonello d’este knew rogier’s skill initially through the prado descent from the cross, which represented his artistry in the medium of oil and the ability to achieve a superb sense of sincere piety, gracefulness and emotion in his composition, postures and gestures. it is not surprising that these prominent figureheads would seek out commission for their own collections, especially after rogier’s probable journey to both courts. rogier van der weyden’s physical presence is superfluous when there is documented proof of his work being present, whether physically or through copies and prints. the uffizi entombment (fig. ) is widely acknowledged by scholars as being commissioned by cosimo de medici around . it represents italian interest and appreciation of rogier’s style and the netherlandish mode. its subject matter, christ being presented in the moment before being placed within the tomb, is quite unusual for a northern work and most likely would have been commissioned during rogier’s pilgrimage during the holy year as previously discussed. dirk de vos strongly accredits this painting to one that was commissioned by cosimo de medici at the end of his life for a chapel in the villa careggi. the villa’s inventory from states, “nella chapella, a. tavola d’altare quando san cosimo/medica christo colla picture della resurrection/quando christo risuscita.” this loosely translates to “in the chapel, a. an altarpiece of st. cosimo/medical christ in a picture of the resurrection/when christ resurrects.” as the inventory suggests, it has long been debated by scholars whether the uffizi image is an entombment scene or a resurrection scene. the image depicts a netherlandish hillside with christ, whose wounds are still bleeding, stretched out and supported by joseph of arimathea and nicodemus, displayed before the virgin mary (to his right) and st. john (to his left), with mary magdalene kneeling in total abandonment before the mystical scene. mary magdalene mirrors the position of christ’s outstretched arms, symbolically reminding the pious viewer to perform comparable deeds or deeds inspired by christ’s sacrifice. however, is this, as the inventory suggests, a resurrection scene or is it, as its more commonly used title suggests, an entombment scene? many scholars, including de vos, friedländer and panofsky connect this to the painting at the de vos, rogier van der weyden, . ibid., . ibid., . villa careggi due to the inclusion of the sepulcher, which does not appear traditionally in the repertoire of northern painters, but commonly occurs in italian paintings, specifically in florence. furthermore, the inclusion of the sepulcher and the construction of the subject matter suggests rogier’s own likely personal viewing of italian work during his time. de vos, davies, panofsky and friedländer all note the similarities between the uffizi entombment and a section of a predella by fra angelico on the high altarpiece of san marco in florence. both images present christ’s dead body with open arms, before an opened rectangular shaped tomb. rogier seems to imitate the way in which fra angelico splayed christ’s garments from his body down to the floor by his feet. this compositional tool draws the viewer’s eye to the most important figure in the scene. both images include the surrounding figures of joseph of arimathea and the virgin mary mourning on either side of christ’s body within northern looking landscapes. attempts have been made by friedrich winkler in to connect this piece to a deposition scene identified in by cyriacus of ancona, a renowned renaissance merchant and humanist who travelled the world in search of inscriptions and relics of classical antiquity. cyriacus documented the time when leonello d’este showed him rogier van der weyden’s descent triptych on july , . he remarked that, “after the famous jan of bruges [jan van eyck], the pride of painting, rogier of brussels is considered the most distinguished painter of our time.” cyriacus made this statement nuttall, . nuttall, . also de vos, rogier van der weyden, . michael baxandall, “bartholomaeus facius on painting: a th century manuscript of the ‘de viris illustribus,’” journal of the warburg and courtland institutes xxvii ( ): - . before rogier’s hypothesized pilgrimage, suggesting that his works of art and reputation in italy as a foremost master of oil paint technique rivaling even jan van eyck preceded any possible direct voyage there. a trip, in other words, was not necessary to demonstrate rogier’s centrality in italian collections and the italian imagination. rogier’s use of the medium of oil, which was at that time a technique in limited use in italy, could have created a sensation within the ferrarese court, which may have never seen the medium in use before. cosmè tura, leonardo da vinci and piero della francesca are considered to be the first artists in italy to use the medium, but not until after . records from the ferrara court show leonello d’este ordering his agent to pay a sum of twenty gold ducats on august , . this sum was payment for pieces to be made by rogier van der weyden for leonello’s studiolo. dirk de vos feels that such a commission would have at the very least warranted a visit or a submission of a small modello of work as a sort of application. leonello died just two months later, and the commission was never completed. leonello’s intention to add works by rogier into his studiolo speaks to the appreciation he must have had of the netherlandish style. a prominent duke like leonello d’este would have chosen impressive and intellectual work for his studiolo. these works would have been viewed by visitors and would have been the topic of conversation within the domestic setting of the duke’s home. therefore, rogier’s style must have been seen as representing the humanistic artistic qualities valued by the ferrarese court, which leonello would have wanted to showcase to his guests. in , florentine architect, filarete, wrote expressing admiration for the netherlandish technique. stephen j. campbell, cosmè tura: painting and design in renaissance ferrara (boston: isabella stewart gardner museum publications, ), . de vos, rogier van der weyden, . also nuttall, - . for this thesis’ purposes, the location of the work within either florence or ferrara is of the utmost importance. this piece would have been known to local and aspiring artists and would have been a point of interest due to its medium and the nationality of its creator. at this time, access to flemish art was fairly limited in the italian peninsula and would have captured the attention of prominent collectors such as leonello d’este and cosimo de medici. as we will later see, this piece may have acted as a particular source of reference for ferrara court artist cosmè tura, whose style embodies similar characteristics to that of rogier van der weyden. re-evaluation of rogier van der weyden’s style, epitomized in the uffizi entombment, within the context of the court of ferrara and in relation to the work by cosmè tura creates a new understanding of both artists’ styles and the valuing of netherlandish artistic modes in the south. rogier’s work can clearly be seen as present in and appreciatively received by the ferrarese court because his style fit within and incorporated the humanist values of the ferrarese court. his entombment displayed artistic qualities that paralleled the ideals invoked by contemporaries at the court of ferrara, which can be seen later being emulated and appropriated by its most prominent court artist cosmè tura. tura’s work should be considered outside of traditional anachronistic models of classification of the italian renaissance, such as the ones established by giorgio vasari, who marginalized tura as quirky or of lesser quality in comparison with classical antiquity. by placing his work within a new context of crosscultural stylistic and material correspondence with netherlandish art, there are stylistic characteristics that tura attempts to incorporate into his own style. aspects of tura’s work that are considered obscure can be seen, in fact, as embodying aspects that were valued in the ferrarese court and in the netherlands. position at court in fifteenth-century italy was not sustained through birth but through strategies of self-representation. the court of ferrara had a strong community of humanist philologists, pedagogues, orators and poets. it is these humanists and figures of the court that would have been the most prominent patrons and stimuli for the work that tura, as the court artist, would have produced during the time that the artist held the position. the d’estes had an irregular salary for the court artist. even though the largest amount of cosmè tura’s commission were under d’este patronage, he had a considerable amount of patrons beyond the court including clergy, urban nobility, middle-class patrons and the sforza’s in milan. stephen campbell’s book on cosmè tura displays how humanist commentary influenced the visual characteristics of painting in ferrara during the fifteenth century, which is manifested in the social ambition and artistic practice of tura. tura’s work differentiates itself from the traditional italian renaissance ‘norm’ as a direct reflection of regional humanistic interests and embodies a local appreciation of the northern netherlandish style. knowing the artistic characteristics these figures valued most in their art theoretical writings, such as emotion, perspective, and decoration that incorporated elements of nature, as well as being able to identify where tura’s and rogier’s styles embody these values and participate within the contemporary art scene, allows us to see certain similarities. furthermore, through the wide appreciation of rogier’s work within the ferrarese court and the emotive, stylistic eberhard ruhmer, tura: paintings and drawings (london: phaidon press, ), - . campbell, cosmè tura of ferrara, - . and material qualities tura reinterprets in his own style, it is evident that tura’s eccentricities can be understood as a blend of netherlandish style with italian humanist interests on art. much smaller than the main italian centers of rome, florence, or venice, or even the city of brussels, ferrara was home to what could be described as a unique eclectic style that had an appreciation for the netherlandish tradition. ferrarese interest in the netherlands, and specifically brussels, came originally from an appreciation of their tapestries. by , about eighty-five percent of the city’s tapestry artisans were from the netherlands. although the tapestries may have stimulated ferrara’s initial netherlandish interests, as time progressed, these interests and tastes expanded to incorporate paintings, as well. stephen campbell references two explicit instances in which paolo di poggio, art buyer for leonello d’este in brussels, made another twenty ducat payments to rogier van der weyden as a “part of the price of ‘several paintings.’” in conjunction to these two payments, the aforementioned painting of francesco d’este is also attributed to rogier van der weyden. these instances demonstrate an apparent valuing of netherlandish modes; however, as previously stated, there is not explicit documentation of any netherlandish artist’s physical presence in ferrara. lorne campbell notes cosmè tura’s close relationship to angelo maccagnino with whom tura worked at the studiolo of belfiore. what is known about maccagnino comes from the writings of cyriacus of ancona. in he wrote that maccagnino was campbell, cosmè tura of ferrara, . ibid., . “the distinguished imitator of the renowned art of rogier and of the extraordinary genius of northern artists.” from this connection, it is apparent that tura had access to the netherlandish works of art and perhaps would have gained knowledge of techniques they employed from angelo maccagnino and through intensive study of rogier’s works that were available in ferrara. these paintings by rogier for ferrara have been lost to the ages, so the only logical way to understand what they may have looked like is to look at something of similar subject matter painted by rogier for a patron in italy around the time the lost paintings were made. therefore, it is important to consider further how cosmè tura interpreted and attempted to replicate the methods utilized by rogier in his entombment for cosimo de medici. i seek to stress that the experimental nature of tura’s replication of the netherlandish mode in his own works directly points to his inevitable artistic interactions with his coworker angelo maccagnino and intense study of rogier’s accessible work in ferrara. i will demonstrate that tura was able to achieve similarity to netherlandish work through interactions with other artists at the court, contemporary writings, and his own experimentation with the oil medium. ibid., . chapter : connecting rogier van der weyden and cosmÈ tura cosmè tura as court artist cosmè tura was appointed court artist in , at the same time borso d’este was appointed the new duke of ferrara by pope paul ii and quite possibly, rogier van der weyden could have been present at the court as well. borso was a very different ruler than his brother leonello. he centered his court on the “so-called” ferrarese school of painting, of which cosmè tura is considered one of the leaders. borso was, like leonello, interested in the arts, but had a different preference in style. though less educated, he was very aware of art’s ability to operate as a tool of propaganda and favored work that promoted his political image through articulating his personal magnificence. he was known for his love of elaborate and rich works of art. his personal decorated bible is considered one of the most magnificent illuminated manuscripts of renaissance italy. borso’s taste for works of art that displayed power and luxury gives insight as to why he would have prized the work of cosmè tura, which was otherwise considered obscure. italian art handbooks give us an understanding of artistic guido guerzoni, “between rome and ferrara: the courtiers of the este cardinals in the cinquecento,” in art and identity in early modern rome, eds. jill burke and michael bury (burlington, vt: ashgate publishing, ), - , esp. . lubomyra lesychyn, “the magnificence of borso and ercole d’este: princes of ferrara ( - ),” phd. diss. (mcmaster university, sept. ), . joseph manca, cosmè tura: the life and art of a painter in estense ferrara (oxford: clarendon press, ), . ideals and common artistic practice during the quattrocento. michael baxandall has shown in modern scholarship how the ferrara court humanist angelo decembrio’s (c. - ) de politia litteraria ( ) urged the artist to create original works of art that reflected the qualities of nature through both color and design. decembrio encouraged the use of perspective and carefully articulated details such as reflections of light and expression within the faces of figures to create works that accurately reflected the world in which the viewer resided. luidovico carbone (c. - ), another key humanist in the court of ferrara during the fifteenth century, wrote his text oratio pro nipote galeotti assassini in . his comments on pictura encourage artists to consider painting as a form of poetry, as the ancient scholars of antiquity had done. to carbone, painting was able to express “princely magnificence” through the inclusion of lavish decoration and rich materials. cosmè tura’s corpus as a court artist covers a range of genres including mythological muses, portraiture and secular works. however, his early utilization of oil paint as compared with other leading italian artists, such as leonardo da vinci and andrea mantegna, has always perplexed art historians. as previously discussed, the reason for this early implementation of the oil medium may have come from interactions with his co-worker angelo maccagnino, who moved from siena to ferrara in . baxandall, “a dialogue on art from the court of leonello d’este: angelo decembrio’s de politia litteraria pars lxviii,” in journal of the warburg and courtland institutes, . ( ): - . ibid., . campbell, cosmè tura of ferrara, - . ibid., . campbell, cosmè tura of ferrara: style, politics and the renaissance city, - , . both maccagnino and tura worked closely while painting the studiolo of belfiore, during which time they may have discovered a shared interest in the netherlandish mode. the one thing that is known for certain about maccagnino is his stylistic imitation of rogier van der weyden’s work. lorne campbell notes that in the same year that maccagnino moved to ferrara, so did a tapestry weaver originally from brussels. this tapestry weaver, boteram, had also previously been living in siena and could be the source of maccagnino’s interest in imitating rogier van der weyden’s style. it is conceivable that boteram would have known enough about northern oil painting techniques to instruct maccagnino who, as campbell references, was painting figures in oil in the studiolo of belfiore in . rather than seen as a possible source for maccagnino’s actual oil technique, it is more likely that boteram, as a tapestry weaver, would have shared with painters a common knowledge and familiarity with cartoons from which tapestry weavers made their work. cartoons were almost always designed by a painter and then used by the weaver to produce the design. boteram could have brought with him that same kind of collective taste in the luxurious and decorative, highly detailed northern aesthetic, which decembrio talked about, and which both tapestries and oil painting shared to some extent. it is evident that boteram, maccagnino and decembrio favored aesthetic and preference for detail and ornament, rather than knowledge of a technique or actual artistic practice. this connection is crucial to understanding and embracing how tura was turning away from traditional italian painting methods in order to mimic netherlandish techniques and aesthetics. cosmè tura’s work clearly does not fit within the traditionally told history of painting mediums during the italian renaissance. in order to be able to differentiate the techniques tura was utilizing, we must first establish a rudimentary understanding of traditional painting mediums being employed in italy at that time. during the quattrocento in italy, the most commonly used mediums within the field of painting were the traditional technique of fresco and egg tempera on panel. tempera paint was the preferred medium in italy during the quattrocento for panel paintings. tempera uses egg as a binding medium, which causes the paint to dry quickly and have a viscous nature. due to tempera's inability to be blended, artists utilizing tempera paint would have had to work within an aesthetic that relied upon calculated decisions regarding color placement before the actual physical application. artists worked in an aesthetic that emphasized delineated color fields and contour lines when producing their work, which lent itself to the use of tempera paint. tempera as a medium requires an artist to quickly place areas of flat color and use small brushes to create hatchings and cross-hatchings to produce darks and lights. the attributes of tempera paint and its laborious process caused panel paintings during the early italian renaissance to be moderate in size and identifiable by clear, pure, flat color and fine details. the interest in materials and their capabilities developed as the quattrocento progressed. the artist cennino cennini's records of giotto’s practices in the libro dell' arte from give a broad understanding of the way materials were handled in italy, predating the introduction of oil paint as a medium. focusing heavily on vigilant preparation and good technique, cennini clearly describes the preparation of the wood panel, the gesso ground and pigments for the creation of an altarpiece. placing importance on the preparation of the material led cennini to a greater investigation of the capabilities of oil and tempera paints. cennini later devised a catalogue that defined a color system applicable to the tempera medium, as noted in hall’s color and meaning. he presented a color system that is most basically described as a method of up-modeling colors through the addition of lead white. it placed an importance on a pure pigment as the most intense hue and allowed for only white to be added to extend the color palette. lead white is the most opaque pigment within a palette, and produces higher values when mixed with other pigments. however marcia hall states in color and meaning, its incorporation prevents the penetration of light and renders surfaces opaque and matte. cennini’s method of modeling is directly reflected in the nontransparent, high value colors of early quattrocento italian work. cennini's catalogue, identified in his the craftsman’s handbook, also stresses the use of techniques such as cangiantismo isochromatism and decoration such as gilded surfaces. conversely, northern artists, as well as cosmè tura, strove to paint in a manner that simulated gilding rather than utilizing the real thing. several methods developed after cennini's writings that cennino d'andrea cennini. cennini, cennino d'andrea. the craftsman’s handbook: the italian "il libro dell'arte". trans. d.v. thompson, jr. dover (new york: yale university press, ), . cennini writes in his technical manual, libro dell’arte, from , “i want to teach you to work with oil on wall or panel, as the germans are much given to do.” these sentiments, paula nuttall notes on page of her book from flanders to florence, were reiterated by filarete, who stated, “in germany they work well in this method, especially master giovanni of bruges [jan van eyck] and master rogier [van der weyden], who employed these oil colors excellently.” antonio averlino filarete, trattato d’architettura, ed a.m. finoli and l. grassi, vols, milan, , . encompassed his system and pushed further in pursuit of a more realistic palette, with leon battista alberti’s writings being a forerunner. alberti's de pictura from acknowledges cennini's concepts on color optics and develops these concepts further. agreeing with the necessity for up-modeling in lead white to extend the palette, alberti argued that upon viewing an object, darks as well as lights can be observed. based upon this observation, he created a system that encompasses the up-modeling in white and introduces down-modeling through the addition of black to a pure color. alberti instructed the artist to make a clear distinction between actively placed dark hues opposite to the light hues within an object and to let pure color act as a midtone. this technique of up- and down-modeling worked in conjunction with alberti's theory on surface decoration, in which he felt that artists should strive to use the medium to render objects "to look like gold," in contrast to the importance of gilding that was a center of cennini's focus. the addition of black in tandem with white to the color palette expanded the value system and created a relief technique that allowed for a closer approximation to nature, something that cennini's technique did not do. this interest in a closer approximation or imitation of nature was driven by society’s interest in humanism that also was developing during the late quattrocento. alberti’s concepts may very well be an attempt to understand how flemish painters to the north, such as jan van eyck and rogier van der weyden, were able to leon battista alberti and cecil grayson. on painting and on sculpture. the latin texts of de pictura and de statua (london: phaidon, ). on the use of gilding, see p. ; on the importance of using good colors, see p. . hall, color and meaning, - . achieve higher values and translucency in the medium of oil. however, alberti’s technique of up- and down-modeling was not the way that northern artists operated. instead of adding black or white to their colors, northern artists laid layer after layer of transparent glazes to build up rich deep hues. artists in italy had been primarily using tempera and fresco up to this point in time, while flemish artists to the north were working within a technique of painting comprised of oil, often linseed oil, and ground pigments. the visual effects and possibilities with using oil paint were vastly different from that of tempera or fresco. very little is known about how, when and where oil painting as a technique was transferred to italy. marcia hall notes that oil was by no means a new medium introduced, as commonly thought, by jan van eyck during the early quattrocento in the netherlands. oil has been found being implicated in various parts of europe during the middle ages. laboratories have discovered evidence of oil being utilized as a binding medium for green pigments in some italian painting from the trecento. oil paint as a medium had been used in italy from the 's until the 's in conjunction with other mediums such as tempera, but not as the primary material. however, the precise moment in which oil was first implemented as the sole primary medium remains a mystery to scholars. this history speaks to the uniqueness of cosmè tura’s work, which is painted primarily in oil from onward. oil paint was so dissimilar from tempera paint that it ibid., . took many years of experimentation for artists to truly understand all of its abilities. in contrast to tempera paint, oil paint dries slowly. this aspect of oil painting allowed the artist to have softer transitions through blending, instead of the sharply delineated color fields of tempera paint. the oil within oil paint has stronger refractive qualities than the egg used in tempera paint and allowed the artist to have multiple layers of glazing. this quality of translucent, refracting glazing is extremely important. artists could apply multiple layers of a color in their work, and in doing so they could control the value by varying their thickness and transparency. in other words, the thicker the layers, the deeper the color; this eradicated the murkiness that resulted in using tempera paint mixed with black. furthermore, artists were able to layer glazes of contrasting colors without them mixing together and thus causing the hue to diminish. this layering capability of the oil paint medium further expanded the palette and allowed for an infinite number of shades within a singular color and enhanced the ability to render forms reflective of the natural world. oil paint possessed a number of advantages over tempera, especially in terms of naturalism; this caused a switch in the medium in the northern and southern traditions. however, this was a gradual process through many years of experimentation amongst various artists. hall, color and meaning, - . cosmè tura’s re-appropriation of rogier van der weyden’s netherlandish oil painting techniques in order to develop an understanding of how cosmè tura utilized these attributes of oil in the manner of the netherlandish technique, we must first take a deeper look at the entombment (c. - ) painting by rogier van der weyden (fig. ) which, as previously stated, is the closest example of something similar to the paintings he would have made for the d’este collection in ferrara. the painting depicts a lamentation scene set within a rocky hillside. christ’s body is displayed in the center of the panel, drawing the focus of the viewer and centering their contemplation, devotion and meditation on the passion of christ. christ’s body is supported by joseph of arimathea and nicodemus with the virgin and st. john supporting either arm. mary magdalen kneels before the body looking up at the mystical image. all of the surrounding figures direct their gaze at the corpus christi, except for nicodemus who stares directly out at us with realistic tears streaming down his face. it is important to note all of the figures’ sizes in comparison with the tomb and decorated landscape behind them. they are larger than they should be if, for instance, christ’s body was to be placed inside the tomb. this proportional discrepancy is revealed through the slab of stone upon which st. john stands. this stone projects out into the viewer’s space, and it is apparent that rogier is playing with the rules of perspective, something he may have seen and studied whilst visiting italy, especially florence. technical analysis of this image yields a few notable points. first, rogier utilized a thin preparatory layer through which the grain of wood can be seen. upon this preparatory layer he executed a highly detailed underdrawing in brush, which reveals much about the painting’s construction. dirk de vos notes rogier’s use of fluid long strokes with precise detailing and the utilization of parallel hatching on obliques, lengthwise and curves. there is fluidity to rogier’s underdrawing that suggests confidence with no hesitations or repeats. the underdrawing is extremely elaborate and includes complex details, such as each of the faces of his figures and agrostology of the landscape. this could point to the images being copied from a cartoon or study drawings that have since been lost. the utilization of highly detailed underdrawings is a notable characteristic of the netherlandish mode. during the second stage of painting, it is apparent that modifications to the head of the virgin and to virtually all the hands and feet of the figures were made. these changes include the virgin’s head, which was originally more bowed and downcast; christ’s head, which was originally positioned lower; and the stone slab upon which st. john stands, which was not originally planned and was inserted during the final stage. of all these modifications, the most intriguing is the last-minute inclusion of the stone slab, which seems to suggest a certain importance to the artist. christ’s bleeding feet rest upon the stone and an ointment pot rests to the right. on the other side of mary magdalen sits joseph of arimathea’s hat amongst the greenery, which balances out the scene. de vos suggests that the stone slab acts as a direct parallel to the altar that the painting was intended to rest above. furthermore, de vos shows de vos, rogier van der weyden, . ibid., . similarities between this image and a predella painted by fra angelico that adorned the high altar of san marco in florence (c. - ) (fig. ). there is no stylistic link, but there is a sense that rogier may have borrowed motifs from fra angelico’s predella, specifically the rectangular opening of the tomb, the way in which st. john bows inward towards the body of christ, and the way christ’s draperies create a highlighting carpet to and from his body. looking at this image, there are key aspects to highlight that will later be used to demonstrate the similarities of cosmè tura’s work to that of rogier. first, note the intensely articulated and detailed style rogier employs. consider how he carefully renders the small village in the distance accessible through winding roads on either side. rogier took the time to paint each tiny window into each of the buildings and even places folds in the drapery of the two women walking up the path to the left. another aspect to consider is, as previously mentioned, the proportion and articulation of the figures. the figures in the foreground quite clearly are larger than what could feasibly fit within the tomb behind them. rogier uses this proportion as a tool to influence his viewer into the proper mindset or meditation that was appropriate for the immediate setting and function of the painting as the high altar of a church. his execution of large figures within believable spaces evoked emotional responses that impressed his italian audience. rogier’s process, as seen through technical analysis, his utilization of underdrawings, preparatory layers and washes, is not a technique that would have been visible to the de vos, rogier van der weyden, . ibid., . naked eye of the contemporary viewer. furthermore, rogier van der weyden is using oil paint, which allows him to layer glazes of pigments suspended in oil, creating deep and rich modulations between dark and light hues. in fact, not one color is repeated within the composition of the six elaborately detailed figures within the scene. later, these techniques made possible with oil paint will be seen being used by cosmè tura in some of his more important works in ferrara. to see the similarities of cosmè tura’s work to that of rogier van der weyden, this thesis focuses on three of tura’s images, calliope, from a cycle of the muses (c. - ) (fig. ), the roverella altarpiece (c. mid- s) (fig. ) and saint jerome (c. ) (fig. ), and considers them in relation to rogier’s style and techniques to display similarities, both compositionally and materially. the attention to detail, interaction amongst figures, line quality, the depiction of space and ‘princely magnificence’ described by decembrio and carbone can be seen in both rogier’s and tura’s styles. furthermore, through the use of the technical analysis of tura’s work by conservator, jill dunkerton, the clear material and technical links between both artists become apparent. cosmè tura’s painted allegorical figure, usually identified as one of the muses (likely calliope), is considered to be one of the earliest works painted by the artist during his professional career. the panel, which now resides with the london national jill dunkerton, cosmè tura’s painting technique, - . dunkerton also notes areas of forceful hatching in tura’s work which are also scene in netherlandish painting. furthermore, she notes that the she sees similarities in the breadth and fluidity of the outlines of rogier’s and tura’s work. jill dunkerton, “cosmè tura as painter and draughtsman: the cleaning and examination of his ‘saint jerome,’” london national gallery technical bulletin ( ): - , esp, . gallery’s collection, was one of nine panels created for a studiolo in the d’este castle of belfiore outside of the city of ferrara. the series of muses, though primarily painted by the hand of cosmè tura, was started in by angelo da siena. da siena managed to complete two panels, as well as begin a number of others before his death. in , the young cosmè tura, who had recently become the favored court artist to the d’este family, took up the task of completing the series that angelo da siena had begun. the muse in question, widely accepted as calliope, the chief of all muses, presents a strong, imposing figure (fig. ). she is opulent and sits enthroned within a structure composed of golden dolphins with sharp teeth and jewel inlayed eyes and a shell canopy. calliope presided over eloquence and epic poetry due to the ecstatic harmony of her voice. her drapery is most impressive, painted in rich deep-layered glazes of red and green in oil. the background is constructed similarly in layers of expensive ultramarine blue. conservators from the london national gallery suggest that this painting was created to be positioned high above normal human height within the studiolo. this position of looking up at the panel not only accounts of the figure’s gaze downward, but also heightens the richness of the colors used in the draperies and the background. even the dolphins become more fantastical and frightening; their sharp teeth becoming intensified from the viewers’ upward perspective. technical research through infrared and x-radiology reveals that beneath the image is a fully developed underdrawing that is placed on top of an image painted in jill dunkerton, “the unmasking of tura’s ‘allegorical figure’: a painting and its concealed image,” national gallery technical bulletin , london ( ), esp, . tempera by angelo da siena. the incredibly detailed underdrawing speaks to tura’s extraordinary draftsmanship skills, which dunkerton considers him, in voice recording the national gallery website, to be “one of the greatest draftsmen of all time.” when looking closely at the red drapery of the muse’s dress, there are areas of degradation, in which the cross-hatching of the underdrawing can be seen. this detailed underdrawing of hatching and cross-hatching tells us that tura knew oil’s ability to achieve deep rich tones. when viewing paint samples in conjunction to the radiology previously mentioned, dunkerton was able to assess how the uppermost painted layer—that is, the layer painted primarily in oil—was executed. dunkerton found that the color areas are systematically undermodeled with opaque pigment mixtures and then completed with applications of transparent and semi-transparent glazes. this was essentially the technique being used by early netherlandish artists. the level of great skill and sophistication that tura utilized in this panel shows that he had a full understanding of the netherlandish mode. as previously mentioned, at the very least works by rogier van der weyden were present in ferrara during tura’s time. stylistic similarities to rogier’s style, such as the muse’s brocaded sleeves, the shape of the figure’s face and the method of depicting clouds, can clearly be seen. however, possibly the strongest and most important connection that is seen in this early work is that of the novel technique in which the london national gallery’s muse was painted. jill dunkerton, “art in the making: a muse (calliope?).” london national gallery website. dunkerton, “the unmasking,” - . dunkerton, “the unmasking,” . when looking at the roverella altarpiece (fig. ) by cosmè tura, the aspects of detail, poetics, ‘princely magnificence,’ color and design as valued by decembrio, alberti, carbone, borso and leonello can be seen within the work of rogier van der weyden. the crowning semicircular pediment (fig. a), central (fig. b) and right hand side panels (fig. c) are accessible to the modern viewer and should be looked at together. it is important first to look at the section of tura’s altarpiece that bears the most resemblance to rogier’s work, the surmounting semicircular pediment. this piece entitled the lamentation of the dead christ (fig. a) displays the moment in which christ had been taken from the cross and placed in the virgin mary’s arms. although tura took artistic liberty and places his figures into a nonspecific architectural setting, there are many similarities between his treatment of the lamentation scene and rogier’s entombment. both artists paint their figures large within the given space of the panel. this technique impresses a dominating and emotive feeling on the viewer. both artists choose to contrast the nakedness of christ’s body through dressing the other figures in rich elaborate draperies. it is also evident that both artists share an interest in relaying emotion through gesture. just as st. john bows forward and the magdalen spreads her hands as she kneels to invoke emotion in rogier’s entombment, tura’s characters look as though they are captured in a fleeting moment in time. the central panel (fig. b) depicts the virgin and child enthroned within a marble niche that is posed upon an architecturally implausible stone block tier. together, the pair is surrounded by horned tablets inscribed with hebrew scripture, cherubs with campbell, cosmè tura, . golden vines and dangling red and white grapes indigenous to the northern italian countryside. a gigantic seashell that is incorporated into the dome of the niche supports a cornice decorated with the four creatures of ezekiel’s vision in the jewish bible. four musical angels in contemporary dress flank the ornate niche-throne. each musical angel is dressed in alternating high-toned pink and green garments, a color scheme that is repeated in the architectural temple-like structure that comprises the heavenly court. at the base of the blocks directly in the foreground, two figures, whom most scholars consider to be “wingless angels,” press the keys to operate a contemporary organ with pipes organized in a chiocciola. this peculiarly shaped object has been identified by scholars as possibly documenting the design of an organ that was made for leonello d’este and noted by cyriacus of ancona during his visit in . cyriacus is the same humanist scholar previously mentioned to have noted seeing rogier’s now lost descent triptych in the collection of leonello d’este. the instrument would have had a twittering sound known very well to the ears of the contemporary viewer and would have brought an auditory dimension to the stridency of color in the heavenly realm. both artists incorporate lavish details throughout their work. the decorative element of putti and floral designs are painted in the netherlandish mode to look as though they are made of copper or brass. the highly decorative and detailed nature of this work is very similar to the level of detail we have previously seen in rogier van der weyden’s entombment. ibid., . ibid., . campbell defines a chiocciola as an organ whose pipes are arranged in a spiral form as if fashioned to look like a spiral seashell. ibid., . however, when looking from the circular pediment’s dark tonality to the pastel nature of the central madonna and child panel, a striking difference is apparent. in the central panel, there is an interesting combination of the traditional opaque coloring found in the early italian style being used in conjunction with the lavish detail that is traditionally found in northern works. this combination contrasts with the dark and deep hues that tura employs in the overall composition of the semicircular pediment. there is little to no continuity between the two panels stylistically and it leads one to think that tura may have been experimenting with different painting techniques. tura painted the central and most important panel using a traditional italian palette that would have been both inherent to his training and familiar to his patron. the semicircular pediment would have been placed above the central panel, closer to the natural light that may have come through clerestory windows. tura may have considered that natural light and known that it would enrich and brighten the deep pigmented glazes he utilized. furthermore, i would like to suggest that when looking at the roverella altarpiece, we see a moment in which tura is experimenting with different oil painting modes and their visual effects. there is an apparent transition from the traditional opaque painting method he utilized in the central panel to the multitude of glazed layers he uses in the crowning pediment. returning to the central panel and visual focus, mary cradles the sleeping child with one arm, which tura artfully and exaggeratedly dangles with an effortless weightiness that is reminiscent of the ‘swooning madonna’ prototype constructed by rogier van der weyden in his figures from the entombment scene that was examined earlier. tura’s virgin has a youthfulness that is evoked through the doughy softness of her skin, which the artist is able to achieve through the use of oil. the fleshy tactile quality of all of tura’s figures portrays a realism that directly contrasts with the overly opulent extravagance of details and comprehensively patterned color scheme. the physicality of the figures and the thoroughly implemented color scheme are attributes that are also embodied by rogier’s style. tura’s virgin lowers her eyes, which have a glassy sadness to them, as she gazes down to her right. the way in which she holds her limp sleeping child seems to foreshadow rogier’s crucifixion scene. tura’s attempt to portray to his viewers an emotive quality can be seen through the way in which he renders sadness in the virgin’s expression. the musicality of the angels with their aural dimensionality and the physically detailed nature of the saints with the patron in right side panel all contribute to poetic majesty and lavishness that was extoled by cordone in his oratio pro nipote galeotti assassini. the carefully considered composition that has been established displays the incorporation of humanistic theory within art during the fifteenth century. furthermore, the inclusion of the specific chiocciola shaped organ is a direct reference to the duke of the ferrarese court whom was recently deceased. the foregrounding of the instrument cannot be coincidental and pays respect to the court in which tura held the position as leading artist. utilizing late twentieth- and early twenty-first century technology, technical analysis of art today has been able to yield greater information about the studio techniques of artists from the past. joseph manca in his catalogue on tura looks to rubin, mother of god: a history of mary, . extensive technical analysis of tura’s work and cites aspects of the netherlandish tradition within tura’s techniques. manca’s scholarship was elaborated upon by the london national gallery through their technical analysis of another panel by tura, saint jerome, (c. ) (fig. ). this geographically detailed, mountainous setting is one that seems reminiscent of german renaissance landscapes, and expresses a moment from saint jerome’s life captured and frozen in time. saint jerome’s face expresses sincere emotion via tura’s descriptive articulation of light, shadow and detailed wrinkles. as saint jerome raises a rock with his right hand, blood trickles down his chest, signifying that he is in the act of self-flagellation. each drop of blood is articulated believably through detailed highlights within each individual drop. the blood droplets seem almost directly re-appropriated from the realistic tears that are associated with rogier van der weyden’s scenes of intense emotion and piety. tura’s saint jerome, as well as the roverella altarpiece, utilizes drapery and excessive decorative elements that embody an international gothic character, which are elements that are also present within rogier’s compositions. it is clear that tura had, at the very minimum, access to rogier’s work and found value in emulating techniques such as underdrawings, washes, minute detailing, structured sweeping draperies and netherlandish compositions and exaggerated gestures within his work. cosmè tura’s utilization of the red lake and brown imprimatura extends the earthy color scheme in his saint jerome. the panel displays the artist’s technical and manca, cosmè tura, . dunkerton, “cosmè tura as painter and draughtsman,” . stylistic practices well, most notably his use of underdrawings, oil and distemper, realistic detailing and the compositional formulae of northern art represented in rogier’s religious scenes. this artistic mode was not uncommon in northern italy during this time, and many artists, including mantegna, piero della francesca, jacopo bellini and pisanello, can all be seen embodying some of these aspects of the northern tradition. manca, however, notes that of all of the artists in the region tura was the only artist utilizing the netherlandish practice of extensive underdrawings together with the oil medium to achieve his compositions, as seen through the roverella altarpiece. dunkerton also has identified tura’s use of brownish and red-brown washed layers over the preparatory ground and underdrawings in his work of st. jerome (fig. ). similarly, to rogier and van eyck, tura’s underdrawings were elaborate. all three artists would carefully lay out in great detail their compositions, even going as far as to use areas of hatching and cross-hatching to delineate lights and darks. after the underdrawing was completed, tura would then lay down a wash layer of red lake and brown. this wash, often referred to as imprimatura, is the initial thin layer of stain placed upon the preparatory ground when a painting is first commenced. the imprimatura is not directly visible to the eye of the viewer, though it does affect the tones, value and light of the final product. tura would not have been able to recognize the implementation of this technique when viewing rogier’s work with his naked eye. through toning the stark whiteness of the preparatory ground, the imprimatura fractures ibid., . ibid., . the light that penetrates the layers of oil glazes as it reflects back into the eyes of the viewer. the use of monochrome underdrawings and washes to define volume and lighting is a technique that has been traditionally associated, when referencing italy specifically, with leonardo da vinci after . scholars have noted piero della francesca utilizing brown washes to model the flesh of his figure; however, no artist used it as extensively as cosmè tura did. this technique of using complex washes, dunkerton notes, is seen more commonly in netherlandish works, more specifically the work of rogier and his workshop. the very presence of the brownish pigments indicates that tura was not adhering to the models prescribed by cennini and alberti. it also explains why tura’s finished works look vastly different relative to finished works of other italian artists who used the oil medium. it is more likely that knowledge of this technique might have come, as previously mentioned, from tura’s peer angelo maccagnino. to summarize, there are two key attributes in cosmè tura’s work that point through technical analysis to similarities to netherlandish paintings techniques, especially those of rogier van der weyden. the first is the most basic; the fact that tura is using the oil medium at all. although other artists, specifically in the veneto, such as antonello da messina and andrea mantegna, were using oil, tura is the only artist known to use the medium in ferrara. tura’s style is close to the netherlandish mode in that he is utilizing the same medium in the same manner. tura layered pure pigment manca, cosmè tura, . dunkerton, “cosmè tura as painter and draughtsman,” - . glazes to achieve dark, deep hues as seen in the construction of the muse and the semicircular pediment of the roverella altarpiece. tura likely learned through his peer angelo maccagnino and by directly observing rogier’s work the netherlandish oil method of layering translucent oil glazes to achieve rich and deep hues. no matter how hard an artist using tempera tries, he or she will never be able to achieve the visual effects that oil has. the second attribute that technical analysis of tura’s works reveals is the extensive use of underdrawings and the application of red lakes as a base wash. these are attributes most clearly seen in tura’s saint jerome and are two major techniques employed in work by rogier van der weyden. dunkerton considers tura to be a tremendous draughtsman, emphasizing tura’s strong dependence on drawings and, more specifically, underdrawings within his artistic practice. tura’s use of oil in the techniques he employed from the peripheral court of ferrara has perplexed scholars and caused them to seek out connections to northern artists. though we might never be able to determine exactly how tura gained knowledge of these techniques, it is apparent that he knew more about netherlandish artistic techniques than has traditionally been acknowledged. through looking at tura’s work stylistically and materially in comparison to rogier van der weyden’s in conjunction with the information that technical analysis gives us, we are able to clearly identify tura as an important outlier in comparison with other renaissance artists at this time, and certainly with vasari’s characterization of him as peripheral and unworthy of inclusion in his narrative of italian renaissance art. his reliance on underdrawings and layering of multiple glazes to achieve deep rich hues align his artistic process more closely to the netherlandish mode than to traditional italian artistic practices. tura, who has been traditionally viewed as idiosyncratic in comparison with his artistic peers, is an early, albeit perhaps quirky, example of an artist who was able successfully to incorporate netherlandish painting techniques into his already established italian style and training. chapter : rogier van der weyden and cosmÈ tura - the bigger picture vittoria colonna: i much wish to know, since we are on the subject, what flemish painting may be, and whom it pleases, for it seems to me more devout than that in the italian manner. michelangelo: flemish painting…. will, generally speaking…. please the devout better than any painting of italy, which will never cause him to shed a tear, whereas that of flanders will cause him to shed many; and that not through the vigor and goodness of the devout person. it will appeal to women, especially to the very old and the very young, and also to monks and nuns and to certain noblemen who have no sense of true harmony. in flanders they paint, with a view to deceiving the eye, such things may cheer you and of which you cannot speak ill, as for example saints and prophets. they paint draperies and masonry, the green grass of the fields, the shadow of trees, and rivers and bridges, which they call landscapes, with many figures on this side and many on that. and all this, though it pleases some persons, is done without reason or art… this quotation was taken originally from roman dialogues, which was a text written by the portuguese painter francisco de hollanda and claims to contain conversations between the marchesa vittoria colonna and michelangelo at the s. silvestro al quirinale in . it is important to note that this text cannot be understood as a recording michelangelo’s views specifically and should be seen more clearly as an anecdote concocted by hollanda better to reflect his own views, or his own interpretation of what michelangelo’s views should be on the matter. despite the mythologizing aspect of hollanda’s fictive portrayal of michelangelo’s views on netherlandish art, this document has long set the tone for the way in which netherlandish art has been viewed in cited in nuttall, . relation to italy. this quotation is the perfect example of why scholars have traditionally portrayed animus in the relationship between italian and netherlandish renaissance art. although hollanda’s michelangelo is critical of the emotional and fussy nature of netherlandish art and its appeal to women, monks and the elderly, he acknowledges the north’s exploitation of optical illusions to create very believable, expressive images. hollanda’s text is crucial in understanding why cross-cultural artistic interactions throughout history need to be re-evaluated. it is evident that misconceptions such as this, coupled with the monocular force of vasari’s lens of italian renaissance art, have determined how the history of art has traditionally been taught. in addition to calling into question this common misconception of rancor between northern and southern renaissance art, this thesis has displayed the cross-cultural exchange, or at least shared practices, between rogier van der weyden and cosmè tura through a look at other valuable art historical models defined by the approach of enrico castelnuovo and carlo ginzburg with centers versus peripheries. brussels, the home of rogier van der weyden, was an active artistic center during the fifteenth century. it was a large, established city that was a bustling center for trade, and rogier’s extensive workshop enabled his style to be disseminated widely through numerous trained followers and other imitators of his appealing manner. his descent from the cross is the ibid. nuttall goes on to display that michelangelo had works in his corpus that emulated the netherlandish mode. she cites michelangelo’s copy of martin schongauer’s temptation of saint anthony engraving and the similarities between michelangelo’s youthful entombment and rogier van der weyden’s lamentation. enrico castelnuovo and carlo ginzburg, “centre and periphery,” in history of italian art, eds. ellen bianchini and claire dorey (cambridge, ma: blackwell publishers, ), [page #s needed} quintessential embodiment of the netherlandish style and displays the emotive qualities of which michelangelo was apparently critical, according to hollanda. due to the city’s strong interest in artistic commerce and its cultural pride, rogier’s descent from the cross became a canonic image that was copied and circulated throughout europe. the almost immediate fame and dissemination of image presented in the descent from the cross gained rogier prestige throughout europe, catching the attention particularly of italian patrons of arts, such as borso and leonello d’este, as well as cosmo de medici. in today’s terms, rogier was an artistic superstar in comparison to cosmè tura, who was not as famous but whose art had achieved a localized appreciation, in no small part due to his emulation of rogier’s own style. through moving from the flourishing cosmopolitan city of brussels to looking at the style of cosmè tura in the peripheral court of ferrara, this thesis demonstrates the appreciation and incorporation of netherlandish style and techniques not so cherished in the italian centers of florence or rome. tura’s localized style has conventionally been considered obscure, unorthodox and at some points distasteful within italian renaissance scholarship, for not abiding by the contemporary preferences established by artist such as alberti and later vasari. his style blended art theoretical ideals encouraged in the humanist key figures of the court of ferrara with a re-appropriation of characteristics taken from netherlandish oil painting. the similarities in process and design between rogier van der weyden and cosmè tura point directly to localized reasons for italian amy powell, “the errant image: rogier van der weyden’s deposition from the cross and its copies,” art history . ( ): - . appreciation and positive reception of the northern netherlandish process. through this re-evaluation of tura’s work we gain a better and more historically accurate understanding of a range of italian renaissance practices, as well as a greater knowledge of the stylistic and technical values embodied in the work of rogier van der weyden. considering rogier van der weyden’s style within the context of contemporary texts of the ferrarese court invites further investigation regarding how tura may have learned of such techniques, if not from observing rogier himself at work. a juxtaposition of these two artists’ careers creates a clearer understanding of tura’s idiosyncratic style. this thesis nuances modern scholarship on rogier van der weyden and cosmè tura through investigating what the relationship between the two artists might have been, despite the uncertainty of rogier’s physical presence in the ferrarese court. most scholarship deals briefly with aspects of this possibility, but does not extend further to probe the value given to northern work through rogier and cosmè’s other mediated connections. northern and southern renaissance connections have been investigated through other artists, such as jan van eyck and albrecht dürer. the attention given to rogier van der weyden in this paper shows yet another instance in which the italians emulated and valued the northern tradition, seized upon certain desirable qualities of the oil painting techniques, and emulated the highly detailed surfaces and emotive gestures that were more attributable to rogier. the result is that we find a much more complex dialogue between artists and patrons on both sides of the alps—materially, compositionally and technically—notably seen through the works of rogier van der weyden and cosmè tura. figures fig. rogier van der weyden, descent from the cross, oil on oak panel, . fig. rogier van der weyden, entombment: lamentation of christ’s body, oil on panel, - . fig. fra angelico, entombment, tempera on panel, - . fig. rogier van der weyden, saint luke drawing the virgin, oil on panel, - . fig. rogier van der weyden, triptych of the seven sacraments, oil on panel, - . fig. rogier van der weyden, portrait of francesco d’este, oil on panel, . fig. cosmè tura, an allegorical figure (muse?)(calliope?), oil and tempera on panel, - . .a) .b) .c) fig. . a) cosmè tura, the lamentation of christ’s body a part of the roverella altarpiece, oil on panel, mid- s, b) the roverella altarpiece, oil on panel, mid- s, and c) side panel of the roverella altarpiece, oil on panel, mid- s. fig. cosmè tura, saint jerome, oil on panel, . works cited aikema, bernard and beverly louise brown. renaissance venice and the north: crosscurrents in the time of dürer, bellini, and titian. london: rizzoli, . ainsworth, maryan w. early netherlandish painting at the crossroads: a critical look at current methodologies. new york: metropolitan museum of art in association with yale university press, . ----. “illuminators and painters: artistic exchanges and interrelationships.” in illuminating the renaissance: the triumph of flemish manuscript painting in europe, . los angeles: j. paul getty museum, . ---- and joshua p. waterman. german paintings: the metropolitan museum of art, – . new york: the metropolitan museum of art in association with yale university press, . alberti, leon battista and cecil grayson. on painting and on sculpture. the latin texts of de pictura and de statua. london: phaidon, . baxandall, michael. “bartholomaeus facius on painting: a fifteenth century manuscript of the de viris illustribus”, journal of the warburg and courtland institutes, vol. xxvii, ( ): - . ----. “a dialogue on art from the court of leonello d’este: angelo decembrio’s de politia litteraria pars lxviii,” in journal of the warburg and courtland institutes, vol. . ( ): - . ----. giotto and the orators: humanist observers of painting in italy and the discovery of pictorial composition: - . oxford: clarendon press, . bestor, jane. “marriage and succession in the house of este: a literary perspective.” in phaethon’s children: the este court and its culture in early modern ferrara. eds. dennis looney and deanna shemek. tempe: arizona center for medieval and renaissance studies at arizona state university, . - . billinge, rachel, lorne campbell, jill dunkerton, susan foister, et al. “the materials and techniques of five paintings by rogier van der weyden and his workshop.” national gallery technical bulletin, vol. , - . london: london national gallery publications ltd., . blunt, anthony. artistic theory in italy, - , new york: oxford university press, . borchert, till-holger. van eyck to durer. london: thames & hudson, . bruscagli, riccardo. “ferrara: arts and ideologies in a renaissance state.” in phaethon’s children: the este court and its culture in early modern ferrara. eds. dennis looney and deanna shemek. tempe: arizona center for medieval renaissance studies at arizona state university, . - . campbell, lorne. the fifteenth century netherlandish paintings. london: national gallery catalogues ltd., . ----. van der weyden. london: chaucer press, . ----, d. bomford, a. roy, and r. white. “the virgin and child before a fire screen: history, examination and treatment.” national gallery technical bulletin. vol. . london: london national gallery publications ltd., . - . ---, and jan van der stock. rogier van der weyden: - . master of passions. leuven: davidsfonds, . campbell, stephen j. artist at court: image-making and identity - . boston: isabella stewart gardner museum in association with university of chicago press, . ----. cosmè tura of ferrara: style, politics and the renaissance city, - . new haven: yale university press, . castelnuovo, enrico and carlo ginzburg. “centre and periphery.” in history of italian art edited by ellen bianchini and claire dorey. cambridge, ma: blackwell publishers, . cennini, cennino d'andrea. the craftsman’s handbook: the italian "il libro dell'arte." trans. d.v. thompson, jr. new york: yale university press, . clark, kenneth. looking at pictures. new york: hold rinehart and winston, . davies, martin. rogier van der weyden: an essay with a critical catalogue of paintings assigned to him and to robert campin. london: phaidon, . de vos, dirk. the flemish primitives. amsterdam: amsterdam university press, . ----. rogier van der weyden: the complete works. new york: harry n. abrams, . dhanens, elizabeth. rogier van der weyden: revisie van de documenten. brussels: royal academy of belgium, . duby, georges. art and society in the middle ages. cambridge: polity press, . dunkerton, jill. “cosmè tura as painter and draughtsman: the cleaning and examination of his ‘saint jerome’.” national gallery technical bulletin. vol. ( ): - . ----. art in the making: a muse (calliope?). london national gallery website, . http://www.nationalgallery.org.uk/paintings/learn-about-art/paintings-indepth/art-in-the- making?viewpage= . ----. giotto to dürer: early renaissance painting in the national gallery. new haven: london national gallery publications ltd. in association with yale university press, . ----. “the unmasking of tura’s ‘allegorical figure’: a painting and its concealed image.” national gallery technical bulletin. vol. ( ): - . dunbar, barton l. the collections of the nelson-atkins museum of art: netherlandish paintings - . seattle: university of washington press, . fazio, bartolomeo. “de viris illustribus.” an english translation by elizabeth g. holt in documentary history of art, new york: princeton university press, . feder, theodore h. “a re-examination through documents of the first fifty years of rogier van der weyden’s life.” the art bulletin, vol. , - . new york: the college art association, . friedlander, max j. from van eyck to bruegel: early netherlandish painting. new york: praeger, . guerzoni, guido. “between rome and ferrara: the courtiers of the este cardinals in the cinquecento.” in art and identity in early modern rome. eds. jill burke and michael bury.. burlington, vt: ashgate publishing, . - . http://www.nationalgallery.org.uk/paintings/learn-about-art/paintings-in-depth/art-in-the-making?viewpage= http://www.nationalgallery.org.uk/paintings/learn-about-art/paintings-in-depth/art-in-the-making?viewpage= http://www.nationalgallery.org.uk/paintings/learn-about-art/paintings-in-depth/art-in-the-making?viewpage= http://www.nationalgallery.org.uk/paintings/learn-about-art/paintings-in-depth/art-in-the-making?viewpage= http://www.nationalgallery.org.uk/paintings/learn-about-art/paintings-in-depth/art-in-the-making?viewpage= http://www.nationalgallery.org.uk/paintings/learn-about-art/paintings-in-depth/art-in-the-making?viewpage= http://www.nationalgallery.org.uk/paintings/learn-about-art/paintings-in-depth/art-in-the-making?viewpage= http://www.nationalgallery.org.uk/paintings/learn-about-art/paintings-in-depth/art-in-the-making?viewpage= http://www.nationalgallery.org.uk/paintings/learn-about-art/paintings-in-depth/art-in-the-making?viewpage= http://www.nationalgallery.org.uk/paintings/learn-about-art/paintings-in-depth/art-in-the-making?viewpage= http://www.nationalgallery.org.uk/paintings/learn-about-art/paintings-in-depth/art-in-the-making?viewpage= http://www.nationalgallery.org.uk/paintings/learn-about-art/paintings-in-depth/art-in-the-making?viewpage= http://www.nationalgallery.org.uk/paintings/learn-about-art/paintings-in-depth/art-in-the-making?viewpage= http://www.nationalgallery.org.uk/paintings/learn-about-art/paintings-in-depth/art-in-the-making?viewpage= http://www.nationalgallery.org.uk/paintings/learn-about-art/paintings-in-depth/art-in-the-making?viewpage= http://www.nationalgallery.org.uk/paintings/learn-about-art/paintings-in-depth/art-in-the-making?viewpage= hall, marcia. color and meaning: practice and theory in renaissance painting. new york: cambridge university press, . harbison, craig. the art of the northern renaissance. london: laurence king publishing, . heffernan, james. “alberti on apelles: word and image in de pictura,” in international journal of the classical tradition. vol. , no. . new york: springer (winter, ): - . hollingsworth, mary. patronage in renaissance italy: from to the early th century. baltimore: the john hopkins university press, . jolly, penny h. "jan van eyck's italian pilgrimage: a miraculous florentine annunciation and the ghent altarpiece." zeitschrift für kunstgeschichte . ( ): - . kantorowicz, ernst. “the d’este portrait by roger van der weyden.” journal of the warburg institute. vol. . london: journal of the warburg and courtland institutes, . - . law, john e. “cosmè tura e francesco del cossa. l’art a ferrara nell’eta di borso d’este.” renaissance studies ( ): - . lesychyn, lubomyra. “the magnificence of borso and ercole d’este: princes of ferrara ( - ).” phd. diss., mcmaster university, sept. . manca, joseph. cosmè tura: the life and art of a painter in estense ferrara. oxford: clarendon press, . millard meiss. "'nicholas albergati' and the chronology of jan van eyck's portraits." the burlington magazine ( ): - . nuttall, paula. from flanders to florence: the impact of netherlandish paintings, . new haven: yale university press, . panofsky, erwin. early netherlandish painting. madrid: cátedra, . pächt, otto. altniederländische malerei. von rogier van der weyden bis gerard david. munich: prestel, . powell, amy knight. depositions: scenes from the late medieval church and the modern museum. new york: zone books, . ----. “the errant image: rogier van der weyden’s deposition from the cross and its copies.” art history . ( ): - . rubin, miri. mother of god: a history of the virgin mary. new haven: yale university press, . ruhmer, eberhard. tura: paintings and drawings. london: phaidon press, . van asperen de boer, j.r.j. underdrawing in paintings of the rogier van der weyden and master of flemalle groups. zwolle: l waanders publishers, . von, simson otto g. “compassio and co redemptio in rogier van der weyden’s ‘descent from the cross’.” the art bulletin ( ): - . washington national gallery. museum label for cosmè tura and his biography, samuel h. kress collection. washington, d.c. october , . 	abstract 	table of contents 	chapter : an introduction 	ferrara 	chapter : connecting rogier van der weyden 	figures 	works cited wp-p m- .ebi.ac.uk params is empty sys_ exception wp-p m- .ebi.ac.uk no params is empty exception params is empty / / - : : if (typeof jquery === "undefined") document.write('[script type="text/javascript" src="/corehtml/pmc/jig/ . . 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___________________________________________________________________ a thesis submitted to the temple university graduate board ___________________________________________________________________ in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree master of arts ___________________________________________________________________ by elisabeth michelle berry drago may dr. ashley west, thesis advisor, art history dr. marcia hall, art history ii © by elisabeth michelle berry drago all rights reserved iii abstract this project explores the work of hans holbein the younger, sixteenth-century printmaker and portraitist, through the lens of early modern physiognomic thought. this period‘s renewed interest in the discipline of physiognomy, the art and science of ―reading‖ human features, reflects a desire to understand the relationship between outer appearances and inner substances of things. physiognomic theory has a host of applications and meanings for the visual artist, who produces a surface representation or likeness, yet scholarship on this subject has been limited. examining holbein‘s social context and artistic practice, this project constructs the possibility of a physiognomic reading of several major works. holbein‘s engagement with physiognomic theories of appearance and representation provides a vital point of access to early modern discourse on character, identity and self. iv table of contents page no. abstract........................................................................................................... iii list of figures……………………………………………………………... v chapter : origins and adaptations of early physiognomic theory....................................…………....….. chapter : physiognomy in holbein‘s sphere....……………....…. chapter : reading faces in the pictures of death………......... chapter : appearance and identity in holbein‘s portraits..........................................………………...……..... conclusion………………………………………………………………….... bibliography……………………………………………………………........ v list of figures figure page figure . – hans holbein the younger, whitehall mural (cartoon), .............. figure . – hans holbein the younger, abbott from the pictures of death, ... figure . – hans holbein the younger, jacob meyer (study), ....................... figure . – hans holbein the younger, folly, ............................................... figure . – hans holbein the younger, scholar in the market, ..................... figure . – hans holbein the younger, wisdom, ........................................... figure . – hans holbein the younger, folly descending the pulpit, ........... figure . – lucas cranach the elder, crowning with thorns, ....................... figure . – hans burgkmair, portrait of christ, ............................................ figure . – hans burgkmair, portrait of christ, ............................................ figure . – anonymous, archbishop & knight from the dance of death, .... figure . – anonymous, abbot & magistrate from the dance of death, ...... figure . – hans holbein the younger, judge from the pictures of death, ... figure . – anonymous, besotted abbot riding a jawbone, ......................... figure . – hans weiditz, besotted abbot riding a jawbone, ....................... figure . –die todtenfresser, text by pamphilus gengenbach, .................... figure . – albrecht dürer, justice from the ship of fools, .......................... figure . – hans holbein the younger, monk from the pictures of death, ... figure . – lucas cranach the elder, monk calf, .......................................... figure . – lucas cranach the elder, papal ass, .......................................... figure . – hans holbein the younger, fool from the pictures of death, ... vi figure . – hans weiditz, physician and assistant, ..................................... figure . – hans holbein the younger, king from the pictures of death, ... figure . – jean clouet, portrait of francis i, ............................................. figure . – physiognomic illustration , text by bartolomeus cocles, ....... figure . – physiognomic illustration , text by bartolomeus cocles, ....... figure . – albrecht dürer, angel with the sudarium, ................................. figure . – hans holbein the younger, portrait of jacob meyer, ................ figure . – hans holbein the younger, portrait of bonifacius amerbach, .... figure . – hans holbein the younger, portrait of desiderius erasmus, ...... figure . – hans holbein the younger, portrait of desiderius erasmus, ...... figure . – hans holbein the younger, portrait of derich born, .................. figure . – remigius van leemput, copy after whitehall mural, ................. figure . – hans holbein the younger, portrait of anne of cleves, .............. figure . – hans holbein the younger, portrait of christina of denmark, .... figure . – hans holbein the younger, portrait of desiderius erasmus, ...... figure . – quentin massys, portrait of desiderius erasmus, .................... figure . – quentin massys, portrait medal of desiderius erasmus, .......... figure . – albrecht dürer, portrait of desiderius erasmus, ....................... figure . – hans holbein the younger, self-portrait, - ......................... chapter : origins and adaptations of early physiognomic theory the sixteenth-century interest in physiognomy, the art and science of ―reading‖ human features, reflects a desire to understand the relationship between outer appearances and inner substances of things. in a period of increasing travel and trade, as well as social tension and unrest, it provided a methodology for character assessment and identification, while also interacting with current developments in natural philosophy and theology. physiognomic theory has a host of applications and meanings for the visual artist, who produces a surface representation or likeness. the work of hans holbein the younger ( - ) will, for the purposes of this study, become my access point for an exploration of physiognomy in the world of the sixteenth-century printmaker and portraitist. in this project i will demonstrate how, and why, his works might be seen to participate in a culture of physiognomic thought, as well as their potential for a physiognomic ‗reading‘ by contemporaneous viewers. scholarship on holbein, while abundant, has in the past lingered on questions of the artist‘s geographic location (basel or london), divided the analysis of his works according to mediums (paintings or prints), or focused on his career as portraitist at the expense of his other endeavors. recent volumes, such as those compiled by susan foister and christian müller, attentive to the particular concerns of england and basel respectively, have praised holbein‘s versatility even as they continue to isolate prints and painted portraits. in this project, i will address concerns belonging to both mediums, allowing for their interconnectivity and reciprocal influences, while also attending to their susan foister, holbein and england (new haven: yale university press, ). see also christian müller, ed., hans holbein the younger: the basel years, - (new york: prestel, ). jochen sander, hans holbein: tafelmaler in basel ( - ), (münchen: hirmer verlag, ). unique visual strategies and functions. despite the early modern concern about appearances and the status of representation itself, physiognomy and the visual arts is an underdeveloped pairing in existing art historical scholarship. this oversight is perhaps more a reflection of modern disciplinary divisions between science and art than of the historical reality of fifteenth- and sixteenth-century culture, when the boundaries were not yet so clearly defined. historian of science, josef ziegler, has well established the omnipresent undercurrent of physiognomic thought and the social uncertainties that cemented its popularity across a broad portion of the socio-economic spectrum, and eniko bekes has taken the step to link it to written and visual descriptions in her study of king matthias corvinus of hungary. bekes‘ exploration of physiognomic theory as a tool for the ruler‘s self-fashioning has informed my argument that holbein‘s commissioned portraits can be engaged with in a similarly productive vein. steven greenblatt‘s foundational work on renaissance self- fashioning, in fact, featured hans holbein the younger‘s ambassadors and described the process of early modern identity construction through outwardly projected images and appearances. one could argue that physiognomic thought as it was understood in the early sixteenth century was a contemporary attempt to redress, or cut through, the superficialities of constructed appearances to reach a core of essential truth. for a viewer, therefore, familiarity with basic physiognomic theory could be a valuable tool for interpreting the truth of inner character beneath layers of costume and accrued attributes, joseph ziegler, "text and context: on the rise of physiognomic thought in the later middle ages,‖ in de sion exibit lex et verbum domini de hierusalem: essays on medieval law, liturgy, and literature in honour of amnon linder, ed. yitzhak hen (tournhout: brepols, ). see also eniko bekes, the physiognomy of a renaissance ruler: portraits and descriptions of matthias corvinus, king of hungary (saarbrèucken: vdm verlag, ). stephen greenblatt, renaissance self-fashioning: from more to shakespeare (chicago: university of chicago press, ). while for a maker or patron of art it could be a means of conveying a level of authenticity. i propose, however, that it is not only holbein‘s portraits that can be approached fruitfully with physiognomic knowledge. his dance of death woodcut cycle ( ) presents a virtual catalog of ―types,‖ distinguished by their settings, costumes, racial and socio-economic indicators and, as i will argue, their potential for physiognomic readings. their function as prints—portable works in multiples that could be sold in sets and later would appear in book form— will provide another avenue for exploring physiognomic theory outside of commissioned portraits. without claiming that holbein intended a ―pure‖ physiognomic reading of his works, it is undeniable that he engaged with universal questions of likeness and representation in an era when physiognomic thought was one piece of the ongoing dialogue, and that his work was viewed and consumed by individuals who were well aware of these concepts. our understanding of the renaissance preoccupation with self-construction and identity will necessarily be an incomplete one without a closer look at the ways in which physiognomic theory might subvert or sustain a reading of character in contemporaneous imagery. the authority and ancient origins of physiognomic theory for what reasons, and to what purpose, was the ancient discipline of physiognomy so fully revived in the twelfth through sixteenth centuries? one factor must certainly be the widespread rediscovery of ―lost‖ classical texts in the late medieval period, paired with the growth of scholarly libraries and the foundation of universities across europe. physiognomy was incorporated into the programs of these universities during the fourteenth century, while physiognomic texts were recorded in major medieval libraries from the ninth century onwards. but their presence in libraries and in the university curriculum does not answer the question of why there seems to have been a resurgence, what societal needs it fulfilled, and how it became such a broad cultural force. to understand the flourishing of physiognomic thought in the early modern period, it is helpful to trace a brief history of the theories from their classical foundations to their later interpretations. it must be pointed out that the reach of physiognomy was wide and varied: far from a ―niche‖ or elite discipline, it appears in the history of medicine, natural sciences, trade and travel, rhetoric and politics, and in the visual arts. ziegler has defined physiognomy as ―the art of deciphering one‘s character by the external appearance of his or her bodily organs.‖ in the classical tradition, pythagorus and hippocrates were typically claimed as founders of the discipline, though little is known about the first actual practitioners. the earliest surviving physiognomic treatise of the classical period is the pseudo-aristotle‘s physiognomica. though this work is no longer attributed to the philosopher, aristotle wrote frequently on physiognomic topics, including an important passage from the analytica priora: ―for if a peculiar affection applies to any individual class, e.g., courage to lions, there must be some corresponding sign for it; for it has been assumed that body and soul are affected together.‖ the physiognomica echoes this sentiment: ―the soul and body appropriate to the same kind always go together.‖ the text identifies three types of physiognomic study: first, bekes, - . also ziegler, ―text and context,‖ , - . ziegler, ―text and context,‖ . bekes, - . cited in elizabeth c. evans, ―physiognomy in the ancient world,‖ transactions of the american philosophical society ( ): . t. loveday and e.s. forster, trans., ―physiognomics,‖ in the complete works of aristotle, ed. jonathan barnes (princeton: princeton university press, ), a - a . comparisons to the traits of animals; second, comparisons between races or groups of men; and third, a cataloguing of emotions or passions which contort or shape facial characteristics. each are addressed in turn: qualities of the skin, brow, hair, eyes, mouth, nose, shoulders, and so forth, in conjunction with the personality traits they mark. the closing remarks promote a hierarchy of traits in reading character: ―the most suitable part of all is the region of the eyes and forehead, head and face… in a word, the clearest signs are derived from those parts in which intelligence is most manifest.‖ this statement holds obvious implications for portraiture, to which i will return in later chapters. the physiognomica was subject to multiple translations and commentaries, including a thirteenth-century translation by bartolomeus de messana and more than one fifteenth-century edition. new texts in the thirteenth century built on classical knowledge: the first of these is considered to be michael scot‘s liber de physionomia (c. ), followed by pietro d‘abano‘s liber compilationis physiognomies ( ). the influence of aristotle, and those texts considered spuria, or ―after‖ the philosopher, was felt in nearly every field of the medieval arts and natural sciences: astronomy, astrology, politics, theology, and medicine were among them. a changing understanding of man‘s place in the natural world was both supported and expanded by the rediscovery of aristotle‘s ―natural philosophy. his teachings proved central to the development of early modern academic culture. in this we can begin to see how, if not entirely why, physiognomy was so well-received throughout diverse fields. ibid, a - b . bekes, - . joan cadden, ―trouble in the earthly paradise: the regime of nature in late medieval christian culture,‖ in the moral authority of nature, eds. lorraine daston and fernando vidal (chicago: university medieval applications of physiognomic theory from the first, it appears that physiognomy was intimately tied with the field of medicine. the roman physician galen, writing after hippocrates, emphasized a physiognomy closely tied to the bodily humors, claiming that his predecessor found it indispensable for the proper diagnosis of patients. galen‘s systematic treatment of an individual‘s complexio, or composition, as originating in qualities of flesh and temperature (warm, dry, soft, firm) in combination with physical humors (blood, bile, phlegm, gall) and the temperaments over which they ruled (sanguine, melancholic, choleric and phlegmatic) was synthesized completely into the canons of medical knowledge of the early modern period, already settling into common knowledge by the thirteenth century. physiognomy was thought useful for the scholar and the practicing physician. michele savonarola was both: his fifteenth-century practical handbook of medicine, practica maior, included a section on the identification and diagnosis of physiognomic signs for treatment, while his speculum physiognomiae was a specialized treatise dedicated to leonello d‘este, marquis of ferrara. in this period, too, the lines between medical and cosmological knowledge were flexible or even indistinct: physical signs might be as easily read in diagnostic as well as astrological texts, as the qualities of heavenly bodies and planets were considered to correspond with the individuals they governed. of chicago press, ), - . see also steven j. williams, the secret of secrets: the scholarly career of a pseudo-aristotelian text in the latin middle ages (ann arbor: university of michigan press, ) george boys-stones, ―physiognomy and ancient psychological theory,‖ in seeing the face, seeing the soul: polemon’s physiognomy from classical antiquity to medieval islam (oxford: oxford university press, ), - . see also bekes, - . valentin groebner, "complexio/complexion: categorizing individual natures, - ,‖ in the moral authority of nature, - . the desire for a systematic approach to wellness was one aspect of physiognomy‘s popularity. social uncertainty and the need to ‗size up‘ one‘s peers or enemies was surely another. elements of this, too, are rooted in antique precedent: polemon, writing in the second century ce, aimed many passages specifically at the identification of enemies and those of poor moral character. a fourth-century greek translation lists one of the goals of physiognomy as ―[guarding] against the vices of the bad before having to experience them.‖ perhaps ingrained in the drive to detect character traits and flaws is a desire to predict the possible behaviors of such an individual, to assess their potential for nobility, honesty, violence, or deceit. as martin porter suggests, ―the dividing line between character and future, like the temporal line between past, present, and future, is thin, even permeable.‖ this was certainly a concern for those medieval thinkers who adopted physiognomic theories to their own uses. roger bacon, writing in the thirteenth century, instructs kings and lesser rulers to choose their advisors, servants and friends with guidance from physiognomic theory, with a particular eye for those individuals susceptible to corruption. it was not only nobles who stood to benefit from a clear and scientifically-grounded framework for passing judgment on those they encountered: increased social and geographic mobility and the explosive growth of trade after the twelfth century, however opportune, thrust many individuals into uncertain encounters. as ziegler notes, there were few reliable means of information-sharing in this period by martin porter, windows of the soul: the art of physiognomy in european culture - (oxford: clarendon press, ), - . ibid, - . ziegler, ―text and context,‖ . which to establish the bonafides, or even identities, of strangers. a system that could quickly and thoroughly assess the character of potential business partners, political allies, companions and others was an invaluable asset. identity, however, was not considered a simplistic or straightforward concept. the secretum secretorum, supposedly an educational epistle from aristotle to alexander the great (though likely instead a collection of hellenistic and medieval arabic and latin knowledge), problematized the idea of ―physiognomic determinism‖ and the notion that reading an individual‘s true self could ever be truly straightforward. in the text, a life-like portrait of hippocrates is brought by his students to physionomyas for interpretation. examining the image closely, the physiognomist names hippocrates a degenerate, and is met with derision by the philosopher‘s students. rather than joining them, hippocrates answers that the diagnosis of his natural tendencies is correct, yet credits ―reason‖ as the force holding his natural impulses in check. in this narrative physiognomy is indeed credited with an ability to read the truth of inner substance, albeit a truth that can be complicated and mediated by force of will and self-direction. translated from greek to arabic in the ninth or tenth centuries, from arabic to latin in the twelfth century, and from latin to italian, french, dutch, english and german by the fourteenth, the secretum secretorum would prove to be one of the most widely read and collected texts of the late middle ages and early modern period, and endures today in over five hundred surviving manuscripts. the legend of hippocrates and physionomyas was retold and debated from the twelfth-century writings of albertus magnus to sixteenth-century german author and pamphleteer bartolomäus cocles, who ibid, . groebner, . included the tale in his own work, physionomi vnd chiromanci: eyn newes complexionbüchlein ( ). roger bacon would come to a similar conclusion for a different audience: christians, he wrote, could not be judged by the standards of physical examination, as ―divine grace‖ could overcome any natural flaws. the next chapter will delve further into the relationship between physiognomy and contemporaneous religious imagery, specifically as it pertains to the perfection of christ and depictions of vice and virtue. the question of ―truth‖ in the representation of character is highly relevant to the present project. returning briefly to polemon, we observe that he cites many physiognomic types from personal history, describing his political rival favorinus as ―greedy and immoral beyond all description‖ with ―puffed-up eyes‖ and slackened cheeks; while his account of the emperor hadrian centers around his beautiful and ―luminous‖ eyes, which were ―bluish-black, with sharp vision.‖ it is impossible to ignore the socio-political relationships of the individuals to whom he referred with such vivid imagery. jaś elsner has suggested a connection between polemon‘s emphasis on the eye and the lofty gazes of imperial portraiture, in turn linking rhetorical descriptive language, visual art and physiognomy. in this view all three become ―potentially parallel and sometimes even intertwined methods for persuasive, encomiastic or polemical cultural relations.‖ this interpretation is particularly significant after a translation through time and geographic location: as stephen greenblatt has noted, the early modern period was marked by ―an increased self-consciousness about the fashioning of human williams, - , - , - . ziegler, ―text and context,‖ . also groebner, (footnote .) ziegler, ―text and context,‖ . jaś elsner, ―physiognomics: art and text,‖ in seeing the face, seeing the soul, - . identity as a manipulable, artful process.‖ many important physiognomic treatises were dedicated to powerful men, including michael scot‘s liber physiognomiae, written for frederick ii, and indeed it appears that physiognomy was of special interest to those seeking an origin or authentication for the concept of ―nobility.‖ holbein‘s commissioned portrait of henry viii [figure . ] has long been seen as an influential shaper of the king‘s public image, and in light of physiognomic theory new questions will arise. the fourth chapter of this project will return to this concept of the creation and interpretation of identity through portraiture. the comparison between written description and artistic depiction is not incidental. physiognomy‘s impact on the creation of art appears in the counsel of philostratus the younger to would-be painters, from the text of his imagines. his instructions mirror the physiognomica in their concern for those physical traits that are thought to show the internal life of their owner: for he who is to be a true master of the art must have a good knowledge of human nature, he must be able to discern the signs of men's character, even when they are silent, and what is revealed in… the expression of the eyes, and the character of the eyebrows, and, to put the matter briefly, whatever has to do with the mind. physiognomy also figures largely in texts by ancient writers who exhorted naturalism in painting, as in a passage from pliny‘s natural history, where the astonishing portraits of apelles are examined by a physiognomist, their ―perfect likenesses‖ serving as substitutes for their absent sitters. of this anecdote, elsner says: ―physiognomics is here brought to bear not only on any old paintings…but on the ibid, . greenblatt, . ziegler, ―text and context,‖ . uniquely lifelike portraits of apelles himself, in which representation effectively transcends the normal limits of art.‖ the renaissance preoccupation with naturalism, or lifelikeness, was drawn in part from a rediscovery or reinvention of antique aesthetics. leon battista alberti, in his foundational de pictura ( ) and de sculptura ( ), echoed philostratus in his encouragement to artists to attend to those physiognomic details that would better capture the inner nature of the sitter. holbein‘s commitment to complex and detailed physical description can be observed in both his printed pictures of death [figure . ] and in his method of approaching portraiture, as seen in a study for his portrait of jacob meyer. [figure . ] ties between physiognomy and naturalism in art will be explored in greater detail in the following chapters. like its initial inventors, later translators and practitioners viewed physiognomy as both an art and a science, one which ―derive[d] its roots from a system of knowable causes which can be deciphered through rational reasoning.‖ physiognomy represented a philosophical system by which to explore the relationship between of appearance and substance, paralleling and sometimes problematizing aristotle‘s view of the soul as ―the form of a natural body potentially having life.‖ it also presented a particular challenge for those charged with representing visual ―truths.‖ it is in the visual arts that i intend to most fully demonstrate the far-reaching absorption and revitalization of physiognomy during the time of hans holbein the younger. complicated by the creation of personal, political and professional character, as well as social tensions, visual representations of human faces are inescapably tied to self-identity and the perception of the identities of evans, . elsner, ―physiognomics,‖ . bekes, . ziegler, ―text and context,‖ . others. holbein, as both painter and printmaker, will now become the focus of an exploration of physiognomic theory and its implications for the social history of image- making. in the next chapter, i will explore the specific cultural milieu in which hans holbein, his audience, and his patrons encountered and interacted with physiognomic theory. i will discuss physiognomy‘s place in vernacular literature, humanist canons, and discussions on the ―perfection‖ of christ, as well as its transmission through the visual arts. a third chapter will explore holbein‘s dance of death in relation to established physiognomic types as representative of group identities. facial features and physical attributes, interacting with racial, social and economic indicators, will be explored alongside contemporaneous texts and related imagery in an attempt to draw out potential physiognomic meaning for the inclined viewer. a fourth chapter will explore holbein‘s portraits and treatment of individual likenesses as participants in the tradition of renaissance self-fashioning. the descriptive detail of these works and holbein‘s ―rhetoric of realism‖ make certain artistic claims to authenticity and accuracy that must be examined in light of physiognomic theory and the expectations of patron and spectator. a final closing will draw together the related threads of print and portrait to create a fuller understanding of holbein‘s artistic practice and the reception of his works, as these relate to the role of physiognomic thinking in the history of art. boys-stones, ―physiognomy,‖ . chapter : physiognomy in holbein’s sphere physiognomy permeated early modern culture at multiple levels, altering or encouraging the manner in which individuals regarded themselves, their neighbors and those outside their own cultural boundaries. in this chapter, i will explore the presence, influence, and continuing development of physiognomy in the circles around hans holbein, his audiences and patrons. sixteenth-century trends in art, language, travel and commerce indicate both an academic attraction to the theory of physiognomy, and an immediate and practical urgency met by physiognomic knowledge as it related to concerns about appearances, traits, and internal qualities of character and substance. through examples from high and low culture i will provide the context for the reception of holbein‘s images and reconstruct holbein‘s own exposure to physiognomic theory before introducing his most direct visual responses in the chapters that follow. humanism, physiognomy, and holbein’s education hans holbein the younger was born to a family of artists in the german city of augsburg during the last decade of the fifteenth century. his father was both a painter of altarpieces and of portraits, who left behind numerous sketchbooks and portrait studies drawn from life. christian müller has addressed the potential effects of the elder holbein‘s artistic practice on the younger. while the details of his early training are not known, holbein the younger‘s use of silverpoint and red chalk to carefully capture images of his sitters mirrors the technique used by his father. one of the earliest records christian mueller, ―hans holbein the younger as draughtsman,‖ in hans holbein the younger: the basel years, - , - . for biographical detail, see jochen sander‘s ―the artistic development of hans holbein the younger as panel painter during his basel years‖ in the same volume, - . of his ability and interest in depicting fine detail in portrait images can be found in his marginal illustrations for a text of desiderius erasmus‘s in praise of folly, completed shortly after the artist relocated to basel. the book was owned by oswald myconius, a humanist and educator who was responsible for instructing holbein in the scholarly language of latin. the text served as an important introduction in more than one capacity. with it, myconius engaged holbein in the most current humanist thought, while the illustrations drew the positive attention of erasmus himself, who would later become patron and personal reference for the artist. the manuscript, written as an address in the assumed voice of the personification of folly, introduces its narrator in terms that echo the central conceit of physiognomic theory: ―…[a]s if any man, mistaking me for wisedome (sic), could not at first sight convince himself by my face, the true index of my mind? i am no counterfeit, nor do i carry one thing in my looks and another in my breast.‖ erasmus‘s narrator expresses the foundation of physiognomy itself, the belief that virtue or vice may be read through bodily appearance. his use of ‗counterfeit‘ similarly corresponds to contemporaneous discourse on the practice of artistic truth and the imitation of nature, which will be more fully explored in the following chapter. holbein‘s marginal illustrations, notably his image of folly itself, are lively and engaging, articulating fine facial details in small strokes. in the image accompanying these early introductions, his figure of folly regards his bauble face-to-face, as one might look in a mirror. [figure . ] importantly, these lothar schmitt, ―education and learning among sixteenth-century german artists,‖ in hans holbein: paintings, prints and reception, eds. mark roskill and john oliver hand (washington, dc: national gallery of art, ), . desiderius erasmus, in praise of folly, trans. john wilson (oxford: clarendon press, ), - . small images also captured expression and ―qualities of character,‖ with insightful and satirical observations of human behavior. in one such image, a scholar turning to regard a well-dressed young woman steps into a market woman‘s basket of eggs—a clear and pointedly humorous example of the dangers of being distracted by sheer superficial beauty. [figure . ] the delicate rendering of facial features adds an additional layer to these charming marginal images. allegorical figures, which are meant to embody specific qualities or characteristics, are depicted in portrait-like detail, and witty or satirical associations may be read in what they represent and the manner of their physical representation. a figure of wisdom, for example, appears beside his foolish child as an aged man with a long beard and prominent nose, while the audience for folly‘s imagined panegyric is at the end revealed to be wearing fools‘ caps themselves, with gaping mouths and unruly hair. [figures . - . ] these latter traits appear in physiognomic treatises as representative of the behavior of dogs and beasts, whose teeth and mouths protrude in a show of unmannerly wildness. these illustrations are appropriate to their source: this and erasmus‘s other writings contained numerous references to physiognomic discourse, both direct and indirect. his on the education of children ( - ) instructed parents to watch for those personal traits and inclinations in their children that would be apparent by physical signs, after praising aristotle‘s method: ―i do not believe it is merely idle speculation to define a person‘s character on the basis of his facial appearance and expression and of his physical bearing and presence…it is a moral müller, ―hans holbein the younger,‖ . swain ―the physiognomy attributed to aristotle,‖ in seeing the face, seeing the soul: polemon’s physiognomy from classical antiquity to medieval islam (oxford: oxford university press, ), . failing to ignore these signs once they have become clear to us.‖ holbein‘s close reading of the erasmus‘s praise of folly text seems a necessary aspect of his complex and entirely suitable images. as an artist working north of the alps both during and after the career of albrecht dürer, holbein‘s exposure to humanist latin treatises is not surprising. though no formal art academy would be founded in the north until the seventeenth century, the sixteenth century was increasingly marked by attempts to codify artistic knowledge and to engage with the production of art on a theoretical level. dürer‘s own treatise looked to italian models and set forth a methodology by which artists could engage with geometry, perspective, and human proportion. on a practical level, artists also participated in the growth of the publishing industry and the popularity of printed books. as book illustrators, those artists with a greater command of literacy in latin and the vernacular allowed for a high degree of collaboration with publishers and authors. holbein‘s own instruction in latin began after his move to basel, at the time a major center for publication and printing. holbein‘s interest in latin also conforms to contemporaneous expectations for the liberal arts. the perceived elevation of painting had much to do with the reception of classical treatises on art; most notably pliny‘s natural history, for its treatment of apelles‘ portraits as both the pinnacle of representative likeness and as physiognomic exempla. theoretical writings of humanist scholars on the subject stressed many of the same points. erasmus praised dürer as the apelles of his time, and indeed the figure of the ancient painter held great relevance for sixteenth-century artists. holbein himself famously painted lais of corinth, the courtesan who captivated apelles and became his erika rummel, the erasmus reader (toronto: university of toronto press, ), - . schmitt, - . muse, and signed some works with an emblem which took the form of apelles‘ own legendary tablet. but the ambiguity and suspicion with which some humanists regarded painting displays an undercurrent of tension between representation and the truth of appearances. in his ciceronianus of , erasmus draws together physiognomy with the portraits of the classical painters: ―as far as was possible, he [zeuxis] transferred the form of the living person to the mute image… some artists, we are told, made it possible for a physiognomist to read off the character, habits and life-span.‖ yet in the next lines, erasmus rejects the idea that the soul can be truly present in such a work, which represents only the ―skin‖ of the sitter. even in his praise of folly, he outlines the many deceptions possible in painting, from the superstitions of the faithful before painted saints, to the overvaluation of appearance at the expense of true existence. these statements consciously echo the concerns of plato, who decried a reliance on the senses, as they are subject to a constantly shifting world and their interpretations cannot be trusted. these dueling traditions of aristotelian and platonic thought with regard to appearances and representation alternately reaffirmed and challenged the foundations of physiognomic theory and of artistic depiction. this debate can be most clearly articulated in portraiture, often discussed as either ―capturing‖ or ―counterfeiting‖ the sitter‘s likeness and presence. holbein‘s illusionistic and complex work seems perfectly suited to participate in this discussion, and indeed the fourth chapter of this project will address these concerns more fully. for now, i will limit myself to remarking on his close oskar bätschmann, ―holbein‘s hand,‖ in hans holbein the younger: the basel years, . jürgen müller, ―the eye of the artist: hans holbein‘s theory of art,‖ in hans holbein: paintings, prints & reception, . müller, ―hans holbein the younger,‖ - . for a discussion on the renaissance conception of vision relationships with prominent humanists and the high probability of his encountering physiognomic commentaries and theories of appearance within the bounds of his artistic training and professional career. the physiognomic perfection of christ holbein was a portraitist as well as a maker of religious images, yet for an artist of the early modern period, the most famous face was surely the face of christ. the face of christ provided a measure of physical perfection that was accentuated by way of contrast with other figures he encountered in the passion story. devotional images that depicted his life and passion, particularly those images that humanized and emphasized his suffering, were in increasing demand from the late medieval period onward. new latin narratives (or elaborations on the old), intended to add emotion and anecdotal detail to the gospels‘ somewhat spare reports, were a common aspect of thirteenth- and fourteenth-century written devotions. in germany and the netherlands, popular passion tracts in the vernacular further expanded on these texts for a wide audience. this trend was paralleled in roughly contemporaneous imagery, both in painting and especially with the development of printmaking. by the fifteenth century, scenes of christ‘s ordeal and sacrifice were no longer restricted to stark biblical descriptors and a limited cast of accompanying characters, but might instead contain new incidents and torments, varied locations, a wide number of onlookers and soldiers, and grotesquely elaborate physical description. the beauty and physical perfection of christ in contrast to the distorted and and perception in painting, see alexander nagel, ―leonardo and sfumato,‖ res: anthropology and aesthetics ( ), - . james marrow, ―circumdederunt me canes multi: christ's tormentors in northern european art of the late middle ages and early renaissance,‖ the art bulletin , no. ( ): . ugly appearance of his tormentors—a reoccurring element in many of these works— holds a number of implications that directly relate to early modern physiognomic thought. it has been suggested that a kind of ―typology‖ was at work in the development of these passion narratives and tracts, whereby allegorical references from old testament stories and psalms were drawn out into more literal incidents set in the context of the new testament. james marrow has explored the animal imagery of psalm and its use as a source for northern depictions of the passion. within the original psalm, the enemies surrounding christ are described as calves, bulls, lions, unicorns and dogs. this latter comparison became omnipresent in passion tracts and devotions, with references to christ‘s tormentors as ―malicious dogs… raving dogs… cruel dogs… crying and howling.‖ as mentioned in the previous chapter, associations between human facial traits and their exempla in the animal kingdom were also a significant factor in physiognomic description. in the treatise commonly attributed to aristotle, the writer states that ―projecting upper lip and gums mark those fond of abuse, on the evidence of dogs.‖ likewise, polemon reported: ―if you see the mouth and teeth project, this is similar to the mouths of dogs; it is [one of] the signs of baseness, and of someone who loves enmity and anger.‖ animalistic comparisons were continued and expanded in fifteenth- and sixteenth-century passion images. here the lolling tongues, bared teeth, crouched postures, distorted features and general unruliness of the crowd would have invited comparisons by the viewer to the behavior and attributes of dogs and other beasts. ibid., - . ibid., . swain, . robert hoyland, trans., ―the leiden polemon,‖ in seeing the face, seeing the soul, . in many cases, the link was made explicit: artists like martin schongauer and lucas cranach the elder included images of dogs in certain passion prints, uniting their depictions of the animals to human figures within the composition through posture, facial details, or expression. marrow calls cranach‘s imagery in his crowning with thorns ―physiognomic,‖ and indeed it appears that viewers were invited to view the animalistic features and profane nature of christ‘s tormenters as mutually reinforcing [figure . ]. this represents an accessible and immediate route by which both literate and non-literate audiences might begin to interact with physiognomy. physiognomic comparisons were known to many members of the clergy or laity in the fifteenth-century north. since the late middle ages, aristotelian physiognomic treatises copied by monastic scribes had stressed the importance of cataloguing and identifying those traits which marked a tendency towards sin, though with an important caveat: outwards signs that accurately indicated a sinful inner nature could be controlled by the practice of good deeds and the reform of the soul. the nobility of such a struggle, and its proximity to christian dialogues on the nature of humanity‘s vices, seems to have made the pagan discipline of physiognomic belief palatable to many within the church. the twelfth-century german bishop and theologian albertus magnus wrote extensively on physiognomy, and his work was later adapted for eleven chapters of the responsorium curiosorum ( ), attributed to konrad of halberstadt. the responsorium was a practical manual designed for preachers and priests confronted by their congregations with common questions from natural philosophy and the sciences. this handbook, published in lübeck, offered answers to questions relating to ‗correct‘ physiognomic marrow, ―circumdederunt,‖ , - . readings of prominent facial features: what disposition, for example, does a large forehead, small forehead, curved eyebrow, bulging eye indicate? the development of such a book represents the learned knowledge of its sources, but the necessity of its creation may also reflect the interest and curiosity of the general population, or the drive of its writers to influence the latter. the church‘s wide audience and influence in both popular and elite spheres suggests the possibility of an equally broad audience for a basic awareness of physiognomy. as joseph ziegler writes, the popularity of handbooks of this type, and the reoccurrence of physiognomic metaphors in printed sermons, may indicate physiognomy‘s usefulness to clergy as a ―mirror of vices and virtues.‖ vice took many forms, but virtue was often represented in the physical perfection of christ. his appearance- and its historical veracity- was a topic of vital importance to early modern writers, humanists, theologians and artists. in this period, the search for the authentic face of christ was motivated not only by religious devotion, but also by a cross- cultural search for historical knowledge and origins stretching back to the antique. the veronica veil provided one early source for christ‘s visage. according to the legend, first recorded in the eleventh century and cemented within the passion narrative in the fourteenth, a woman along the route to calvary stopped to wipe the brow of christ and was rewarded with a miraculous image of the holy face on her cloth. this cloth was displayed as a contact relic in rome to crowds of thousands during the jubilee of , and by the indulgence offered to those pilgrims who looked upon it numbered twenty thousand years. scholarship has explored the legitimizing effect of the veronica legend on the production of holy images, as well as the echoing of the divine vera icon— ziegler, "text and context,‖ - . joseph leo koerner, the moment of self-portraiture in german renaissance art (chicago: the made without human hands—in the virtuosic brushstroke-sublimating work of portraitists and painters such as jan van eyck and albrecht dürer. joseph leo koerner has traced specifically northern responses to the vera icon, emphasizing links between van eyck‗s holy face of and dürer‘s self-portrait of , but he has also observed that both works bear a striking resemblance to a famous contemporaneous textual source for christ‘s physical appearance: the lentulus letter. in the early fifteenth century, a letter began to circulate describing the features of christ, supposedly from an eye-witness account of the roman patrician publius lentulus. lorenzo valla claimed that the text had been discovered in on the capitoline hill in rome, while a city guidebook of asserted that it had been found somewhat later in a ruin near san giovanni. while it is now believed that the text was in fact a thirteenth- century invention, likely a monastic document intended to aid meditation and visualization, it was deeply influential in the following decades. its importance here is its clear reliance on the vocabulary of physiognomic descriptions for its ekphrasis. clearly composed within these traditions, the letter evokes the character of christ by closely detailing those signs of his outward appearance. the translated letter describes the figure of christ as follows: he is a man of medium size; he has a venerable aspect, and his beholders can both fear and love him. his hair is of the color of the ripe hazel-nut, straight down to the ears, but below the ears wavy and curled, with a bluish and bright reflection, flowing over his shoulders. it is parted in two on the top of the head, after the pattern of the nazarenes. his brow is smooth and very cheerful, with a face without wrinkle or spot, embellished by a slightly reddish complexion. his nose and mouth are faultless. his beard is abundant, of the color of his hair, not long, but university of chicago press, ), , . koerner, - , . gerhard wolf and giovanni morello, il voto di christo (milan, electa, ), . divided at the chin. his aspect is simple and mature, his eyes are changeable and bright. he is terrible in his reprimands, sweet and amiable in his admonitions, cheerful without loss of gravity. he was never known to laugh, but often to weep. his stature is straight, his hands and arms beautiful to behold. his conversation is grave, infrequent, and modest. he is the most beautiful among the children of men. it seems possible that the lentulus letter was drawn from the same sources as a thirteenth-century latin manuscript of the secretum secretorum found in the library of cerne abbey. the text consisted of an additional end-chapter describing christ‘s physical appearance through many of the ideal or ―best‖ physiognomic traits presented in the preceding treatise. while the language of the lentulus letter is not always identical to this earlier description of christ, it may represent an attempt to legitimize or support the practice of physiognomy and its ability to represent ―truth,‖ in this case the outward truth of christ‘s perfection and virtuous inner nature. like the lentulus letter, the text describes his medium stature and erect posture, bright eyes, parted beard, complexion of ―moderate redness,‖ and the long, straight hair which curled past the ears. it also attributed to him a ―sanguine, jovian‖ temperament in accordance with contemporaneous belief in the bodily humors. interest in this ―knowledge‖ of the face of christ was widespread, and provided a new source of material for artists like holbein and his contemporaries. portrait medals presenting a likeness of christ, with his face in profile in the style of renaissance rulers and the antique examples they emulated, had already appeared in the middle of the fifteenth century. the earliest examples may have been created for the court at ferrara, anthony j. maas, ―publius lentulus,‖ in the catholic encyclopedia (new york: robert appleton company, ), i- b. ziegler, ―text and context,‖ - . by two artists renowned for their portrait medals: pisanello sketched one version, and matteo di pasti cast another. it was from medals of this type that hans burgkmair derived his profile design for a new printing of the lentulus letter, which by that time held a particularly high status north of the alps. a fine manuscript edition of the letter was sent by pope alexander to frederick the wise of saxony in , while at the same time a german translation was published in augsburg by erhart ratdolt. burgkmair‘s illustration, above ratdolt‘s translation, was included in a schoolbook from the nuremberg press of johannes weisenburger. this image, among other ―authentic‖ portraits of christ that drew on the same written description, provided important models for artists throughout the following centuries. [figure . ] burgkmair‘s woodcut profile of christ is highly meticulous, capturing fine details in the hair and beard, with an emphasis on clearly-defined facial features. this print, and a broadsheet for which he took a second medal as a model [figure . ], creates a mutually reinforcing claim to authenticity: those who doubt the truth of the image are referred to the historic legitimacy of the text, while those who doubt the text can be reassured by the seeming authority of the image above. this ―accurate‖ portrait of christ, embodied in the form of a human male, provides more than a piece of historical evidence or a pure image for devotion. it models physical and spiritual unity, a body in harmony between inner and outer being. the duplication and widespread distribution of these painted and cast portraits gives weight to the idea of physiognomic thought as ‗cultural currency,‘ widely known and engaged with throughout every level of contemporaneous culture. as much as these medal and printed wolf, - . koerner, - . portraits were derived from classical and renaissance examples, they also set a new and authoritative model for humanity itself, an archetype of perfection celebrated by humanists as the ―most beautifully constructed of all sons of men.‖ christ‘s ideal image accentuates and clarifies the imperfections present in all others, but his form opens a unique path to self-awareness. in the words of the fifteenth-century strasbourg reformer johann geiler von kaiserberg, ―only the one who… perceives his own body becomes aware of how far he is from perfection.‖ in these terms, physiognomy provides not only an urgently needed self-awareness, but also the potential for salvation. travel, identity, and social mobility self-awareness, and in turn awareness of the selves of others, forms a third portion of this discussion framed within the new mobility of people in the early modern period. holbein‘s career would lead him on numerous journeys throughout his life: first, from augsburg to basel as a journeyman artist, later from basel to france for a brief time, and later still to england on multiple occasions, where he worked for the humanist thomas more and the english royal court. his role as international traveler was not unique. increased travel and trade had thrust many regions of europe into close proximity by the sixteenth century, following routes that continued to be traced by pilgrims all across europe, especially in jubilee years like . the rapid growth of cities, based in large part on mercantile exchange and commerce, corresponded with the development of regional and international markets, drawing isolated villages and towns into new spheres wolf, - . koerner, - , . groebner, . sander, ―artistic development,‖ - . of communication. new patterns of interaction required new social strategies for creating, building and sustaining relationships. one such strategy was the proliferation of identity papers- passports, travel documents, bills of health, letters of reference and other credentials, which supported the claims of their subjects and provided those that they encountered with a sense of official legitimacy. to these we can also add registries of slaves and indentured servants, and warrants for arrest. interestingly, all of these papers increasingly recorded and codified the physical appearances of their subjects. skin color, scars and marks, clothes, and physical attributes were documented to attest to the authenticity of the bearer who held them or was described by them. specifically, the term complexio, or complexion, appears in these records with some frequency, having evolved in meaning from the combination of bodily humors (blood, bile, phlegm, gall) to a collective reading of internal and external physiognomic signs. fourteenth- and fifteenth-century accounts of slaves sold and freed in italy listed their height, build, the shape and features of their faces, birthmarks, and skin color ranging from olive, yellow, brown, black, purplish, greenish, and red. valentin groebner has examined the close associations in contemporaneous literature between skin color and bodily humors, drawn less from modern conceptions of ―race‖ than from ancient categorizations like those found in the works of aristotle, pliny and vitruvius. varying climates and geographies of the foreign world were seen to produce individuals of corresponding temperament. in hot southern regions, black and yellow bile might produce a ―greenish‖ skin tone and ―wise, weak, swarthy‖ individuals, while the cold regions far to the north produced fair-skinned persons too high in moisture, resulting in groebner, . ―thick‖ humors and ―sluggish‖ minds. here, skin color is not simply an outside indication or classification, but a reflection of internal character and composition, seemingly well-suited to physiognomic interpretation. despite the supposedly ―factual‖ nature of identity documents, their usage was not free of implied meaning or prejudice. gypsies, recorded as having dark skin and curly hair and originating in the east, were widely believed to have the ability to alter their appearances, and so in the mid-sixteenth century were stripped of their travel documents by legislation of the holy roman empire under the accusation that any papers held by such a person would be, by nature, falsified. suspicions regarding travelers were common and pervasive. in , the english parliament passed an act that set forth prohibitions and punishments for roaming ―beggars and vagabonds,‖ though this was so widely defined as to include pardoners, shipmen, and itinerant scholars from the universities of oxford and cambridge. fear of plague and contagion spurred some prejudices, while others were stirred by religious difference and class tension. interestingly, some of these nomadic individuals- astrologers, physicians and quacks, magicians- were regarded with suspicion for their associations with fortune-telling and those arts which interpreted bodily signs, such as chiromancy (palm reading) or metoposcopy (reading of lines on the forehead.) ―physiognomers,‖ also recorded as physiognomantiers or fisnomiers, appear less frequently, but were targeted alongside other practitioners of divinatory or diagnostic arts, earning inclusion on henry viii‘s list of those ―superstitious folk‖ whose habits bordered heresy. it is possible that physiognomy‘s ability to cut through layers of constructed meaning (and constructed ibid, - . ibid, - . identity, as we shall see in the fourth chapter of this project) may have complicated its use in the hands of those marginalized by social hierarchies. non-literate practitioners, often gypsies or travelers, were primarily singled out for persecution by the authorities. although it may have been difficult to separate entirely literate from non-literate physiognomy as it traveled between elite and popular spheres, martin porter has suggested a link between the evolution of the sixteenth-century culture of the book and an increasing suspicion against ―folk‖ physiognomy as an illiterate or non-literate knowledge system lacking codification and regulation. it is possible that this suspicion was partially based in the wider difficulty of establishing credentials in this period: a second act of parliament in warned against those ―feyning‖ knowledge of the art, in order to deceive their victims with stories of ―destenyes deceases (sic.) & fortunes.‖ despite any misgivings about its abuses and falsifications, physiognomy was unceasingly popular throughout the sixteenth century. vernacular works, mostly anonymous, circulated in great numbers. one german complexionsbuch, drawn from varied sources, was printed and re-printed in editions dating from every year between and , and enjoyed twelve additional reprints before . texts and pamphlets quoted a multitude of earlier authorities, from michael scot to the secretum secretorum, playing on an early modern love of lists, references, and allusions to classical origins. these references increasingly expanded to include visual examples, first-hand observations, and historical accounts. some social uneasiness seems to have driven their production, or perhaps been encouraged by the same. for those anxious to uncover concealed enemies, size up potential business partners, or quickly assess a new porter, - . ibid, - . contact, physiognomy provided a comprehensive and logical method. some texts even boasted of their ability to expose ―reckless disgraceful people,‖ presumably those important to avoid at all costs (or at the cost of one‘s own reputation). physiognomy was not, however, limited to the discovery of potential threats. a complexionsbuchlein printed in and attributed to bartolomeus cocles recited the tale of hippocrates and physionomyas, yet for a closing section on the composition of german bodies turned to the histories of tacitus. the classical historian was often quoted in this period in the context of german national pride and identity. according to the text of the complexionsbüchlein, despite the germans‘ barbaric history and all the corresponding physical indicators of this behavior, and in contrast to other barbaric races dwelling still in their natural state, the german people were marked by ingenuity and ambition and so overcame their original nature (and nature itself) to become masters of progress, war, and invention. one can imagine a german reader turning to the mirror after such a passage. not only an echo of hippocrates‘ virtuous overcoming, and of the christian faith said to transform natural vice, physiognomy here serves the role of self- classification, national identity, and the formation of a group character. the early modern period was marked by a self-consciousness regarding identity, an awareness of its potential for manipulation. i will return to this theme in greater depth in the fourth chapter of this project, as i approach holbein‘s portraits and the shaping of personal or public identities. the cultural climate of the sixteenth-century north was one in which physiognomic theory, in one of its many guises, might as easily have been discussed on a groebner, . ibid, - . street-corner as recounted from a pulpit, dissected in a latin text, recorded in a travel document, illustrated in a vernacular pamphlet, or ―read‖ from an image. from simple proverbs to the most complex theological analogies, physiognomy served and shaped a rapidly expanding world in its search for revealing truths. holbein‘s role as a maker of images situates him at the nexus of these concerns. having established physiognomy‘s place in a broader culture, i will now narrow my focus. the two following chapters will address holbein‘s prints and portraits, respectively, exploring their disparate strategies and claims to authenticity without losing sight of their interconnected creation. in the next chapter, as i move to discuss holbein‘s pictures of death, i will explore more fully the authority of prints and their role in establishing canons of knowledge, including those relating to the classification of character types and social classes. chapter : reading faces in the pictures of death in this chapter, i will expand upon holbein‘s connections to physiognomic theory as i examine his most famous woodcuts, the pictures of death (begun ). cycles of this type depicted various individuals‘ encounters with a personification of death, often accompanied by verses on mortality. holbein‘s images are particularly lively and visually complex. as peter parshall has noted, it is precisely that complexity and their ability to stand alone as visual narratives which makes them images of their time, ambiguous and layered, concerned with individual self-reflection and the capacity for multiple readings. i argue that the format of these images, and holbein‘s concern for detailed visual description, provides a wealth of physiognomic traits and distinct physical types which can potentially be ―read‖ as indicators not simply of class or rank, but also of character, and therefore of inner nature. drawing on textual and visual sources, i will examine contemporaneous stereotypes and popular attitudes relating to the professions and characters displayed within this series, linking and contrasting these portrayals with sixteenth-century understandings of physiognomic theory. additionally, i will explore the developing role of prints in the creation, dissemination, and authentication of systems of knowledge such as physiognomy. the late medieval concept of the ―dance of death‖ originates in several traditions. one was surely the liturgical dramas of the danse macabre, a vivid enactment of the inevitability of death and the need for repentance, intended to accompany and highlight spoken sermons. a second potential contributor is the ars peter parshall, ―hans holbein‘s pictures of death,‖ in hans holbein: paintings, prints and reception. natalie zemon davis, ―holbein's pictures of death and the reformation at lyons,‖ studies in the renaissance ( ): - . moriendi, illustrated manuals that outlined the temptations and pitfalls experienced by the christian soul in the process of dying. the dance of death emerged as a new model for exploring mortality, a favorite subject of the late middle ages. its earliest recorded visual interpretation took the form of a monumental mural decorating the arcades facing the parisian cemetery of the holy innocents. painted in , the mural and its accompanying verses comprised a kind of processional ―dance‖ in which death arrived for each dancer in turn, heedless of their social prominence or worldly associations. kings and popes participated at the head of the dance, followed by lesser nobility and the ranks of the church, who were in turn followed by members of the merchant and trade classes, and finally by laborers and those of lesser status. laity and clergy appeared intermingled, while no women appeared at all. in , the printer guyot marchand produced a volume of woodcut illustrations after the mural. a second edition, which added female characters, was published both on its own and in combined editions, and a latin re-print of the french followed in . mathieu huss‘s grande danse macabre was published in lyons in , and the popular fascination with the dance of death continued throughout the sixteenth century. holbein‘s dance of death, printed in as les simulachres & historiées faces de la mort, represented both a continuation of this established theme and a new vision for the subject. the project was commissioned by melchior and gaspard trechsel, sons of a german printer operating in lyons, for the publishers and booksellers jean and françois frellon. the actual block-cutting was done in basel by hans lützelburger, one of the most skilled block cutters of the time and one of the few ibid, - . see also william m. ivins, jr., ―introduction,‖ in the dance of death: printed at paris in , (washington: library of congress, ), viii-x. capable of carving tremendous detail on such a minute scale. single-sheet prints of the images alone, in incomplete sets of forty, were released before , probably before the blocks left basel. the first ―complete‖ printing included forty-one images completed by lützelburger before his death in , while a later edition of incorporated twelve additional woodcuts by a different hand. the images were accompanied by conventional verses and biblical quotations similar to those present in earlier versions of the dance of death. curiously, holbein‘s name was absent from the work, which credited only the block cutter and publishers. it has been suggested that this may be due in part to satirical elements within the work, combined with the predominantly catholic sentiment in lyons at the time and holbein‘s recent appointment to a court position with an english protestant monarch. a satirical and even highly critical undercurrent appears to varying degrees in most versions of the dance of death, despite the hierarchical structure of the dance itself. verses alongside the mural at the klingenthal convent in basel, painted around (and later duplicated or imitated in at the dominican‘s churchyard in the same city), include a negative remark on the practice of indulgences accompanying an image of the pope. similarities in sequencing, composition and subject matter indicate this earlier work contributed to holbein‘s own designs, though it is likely that he also looked to numerous printed sources. the pictures of death were repeatedly utilized by catholic and protestant alike. the edition was prefaced by an essay from jean de vauzelles, a prominent catholic cleric, while a latin version, translated by george oemler (a stephanie buck, ―the images of death and the triumph of life,‖ in hans holbein the younger: the basel years, - , - . parshall, ―hans holbein‘s pictures of death,‖ . davis, - . - , - . friend of martin luther and philipp melanchthon), replaced this introduction with a translator‘s note and the inclusion of an anonymous quasi-lutheran treatise entitled ―medicine of the soul.‖ the fact that church censure fell solely on the text suggests that such a response had more to do with the inclusion of the latter treatise, liberally borrowed from the writings of lutheran pastor urbanus rhegius, than with any perceived irreverence in holbein‘s images. comparisons between holbein‘s dance of death and their predecessors reveal a shift from a medieval conception to a model more firmly rooted in early modern discourses. the impersonality of death, and its ultimate inevitability, defined the tone of early versions. figures from the latin edition of the dance of death are already divorced from the earthly realm by the vagueness of their setting, a flat decorative garden framed with architectural portals. the pairs of the archbishop and knight, and abbot and magistrate, while rich in linear detail, offer no clues to their earthly behavior, good or bad, nor to their spiritual destination. [figures . - . ] though their accompanying verses offer some criticisms or warnings (the abbot, in particular, is described as rotund and informed that the largest are the ―first to rot‖), the images are largely restrained and dignified, emulating participants in a courtly medieval procession. the abbot is not depicted visually as he is mockingly described in the text. the four characters represent a limited range of facial and physical descriptors: all are roughly the same height and build, their ages indicated by the addition of lines and wrinkles around the mouth and chin, and only slight variations in the shapes of mouth and nose. their function as symbolic players or stock characters in a universal dance is fulfilled by their essentially buck, - . davis, - , - , - . neutral or generalized physical representation. in contrast, holbein‘s abbot and judge [figures . & . ] provide distinct facial details—facial details that indeed resonate with physiognomic discourses of the day. his abbot is a corpulent figure who matches the conventional description, but holbein has expanded on the older texts by portraying him also with a downward-sloping nose nearly overlapping his upper lip, furrowed brows, a drooping mouth, and large jowls that partially obscure a thick neck. the judge, slightly smaller in build, displays a broad ―roman‖ or ―aquiline‖ nose, a thick upper lip, double-chin, and fine, straight hair. unlike their counterparts, holbein‘s figures are placed in recognizable contemporaneous settings that reflect their social roles: his king banquets, while his judge sits in decision with two petitioners before him. likewise, his lawyer, physician, merchant, sailor, preacher, farmer and others are depicted in the midst of their familiar professional activities. holbein‘s images do not refrain from commenting on corrupt practices, nor do they leave narrative detail or commentary to the text below: his judge and town councilor both turn away from a poor man to attend a rich one, and his monk resists death to clutch feverishly at a full donation box. their virtuosic detail and intimate scale demand close looking and study, while the introduction of narratives and character to the images themselves invites reflection and analysis. holbein‘s vision of death is directed towards the beholder, relying on their interpretation to unlock and unpack the many potential meanings. this personalization of death directs, and even requires, a ibid, . davis, - . christiane hertel, ―dis/continuities in dresden‘s dances of death,‖ the art bulletin , no. ( ): - . more personal response. who was holbein‘s audience? certainly both catholics and protestants, and an international clientele: the book was published in latin and french, and the frellon brothers secured their german distribution ―under the arms of cologne‖ from the first. parshall has correctly suggested that the sophistication of the images directs us to a similarly sophisticated and elite audience, one equipped to decipher and appreciate their complexity. this would seem to coincide with the receptive audience for physiognomic theory, at least the learned variety that predominated in scholarship. in being pocket-size, however, holbein‘s pictures of death, also shares aspects of small scale with the more popular vernacular physiognomic manuals by authors like bartholomaeus cocles, illustrated with inexpensive woodcuts and sold on the market to broader appeal. holbein‘s woodcuts are of a more refined quality than those, but his pictures of death held wide appeal. parshall notes the enduring popularity of this work among humanists, scholars and educators of northern universities as an alba amicorum. in these heavily personalized ‗albums of friendship,‘ images (usually cycles like holbein‘s, or emblem books) were rebound with blank pages and inserts from other volumes, and offered to visitors and friends to record thoughts, notes and personal inscriptions. that holbein‘s visual strategy would encourage individual reading and interpretation seems fitting for the social circumstances in which these images were created for an increasingly anonymous public. the images themselves do not directly support one reading or doctrine over another, but rather present a narrative ambiguity or ivins, the dance of death, x. parshall, ―hans holbein‘s pictures of death,‖ . porter, . parshall, ―hans holbein‘s pictures of death,‖ . obliqueness that supports multiple (and simultaneous) interpretations. on one hand, this can be seen as a ―survival strategy‖ by which to navigate the increasingly polemical climate of the reformation, in which images were increasingly subject to scrutiny. but it is also an appeal to the beholder to search for hidden meaning, a period-appropriate call to personal moral reflection, and an opportunity to wrestle with dense, and vitally important, philosophical questions on mortality and the state of the soul. recalling the words of the preacher johannes geiler von kaiserberg, it was thought that by this introspective and rigorous process, one might come to self-knowledge and self- betterment. holbein‘s pairing of heightened descriptive detail in the physical representation of his subjects with these questions of internal character now becomes the pathway by which i will explore the potential for a physiognomic reading of the pictures of death. as the constraints of time and scope will prevent me from remarking on each image at length, my primary subjects have been selected from a range of secular and religious ranks: the abbot, the judge, the monk, the fool, and the king. physiognomic indicators and holbein’s pictures of death as my first subject, i will address holbein‘s image of the abbot, centered between two translations, latin and french, of a biblical passage from proverbs: ―he will die, for lack of discipline (instruction), and in the multitudes of his folly he shall be deceived.‖ his features are slightly distorted by the agitated resistance he provides, struggling to free himself from death‘s grip in a manner not altogether befitting a cleric certain of his virtue. the text no longer makes reference to his physical form or weight, ibid, - . davis, . but holbein has chosen to represent the abbot as a man of some great size, with a large and rounded face [figure . ]. the treatise according to aristotle identified several of these features as traits of an ―insensible man,‖ listing ―the jaws big and fleshy… neck thickset; the face fleshy and rather long,‖ while a dissembler is ―fat about the face, with wrinkles around the eyes.‖ polemon also had much to say about such features, claiming that thickness in the neck ―indicate[s] evil and bad anger, and remoteness from learning.‖ equally damning, ―much flesh on the cheeks… indicates drunkenness and laziness,‖ while a ―very large head indicates lack of knowledge and understanding.‖ a english translation of the secretum secretorum tersely characterized this physique as: ―shorte, thycke, fete and flesshy, betokeneth to be folysshe, and full of injury.‖ yet these ―negative‖ traits are not so straightforward. for the pseudo-aristotle, a man who is ―robust-looking, well covered with plenty of moist flesh‖ may also be found to be ―mild.‖ polemon regards a drooping mouth as a potential sign of both weakness and the more desired humility. and despite the negative association with a thickset neck, the secretum secretorum advises against the reverse, as well: ―he that hath a sklender necke, is hote, deceytfull, and folysshe.‖ satirical images of clerics in this period regularly tread on vicious and unflattering ground. accusations of gluttony, intemperance and drunkenness were particularly popular approaches by which to discredit church figures. an anonymous depiction of an abbot from , so inebriated that he reclines in a monumental jawbone drawn like a sled, was given a second treatment in by hans weiditz, well into the reformation swain, - . robert hoyland, trans., ―the leiden polemon,‖ in seeing the face, seeing the soul, , , . robert copland, trans., the secrete of secretes (london: robert copland, .) swain, . conflict. [figures . - . ] weiditz‘s image increases the weight and fleshiness of the figure, emphasizing the overfull drinking vessels and the effort of the sled-pullers, conflating the immoral nature of drunkenness and sloth with the physical traits of size and girth. another related theme was that of the clergy as ―devourers,‖ as in the cover illustration for pamphilus gengenbach‘s die todtenfresser (―devourers of the dead.‖) arguments against the church‘s profiting from services to the dying are here gruesomely interpreted as a pope, bishop, nun and monk partaking in a literal feast upon a corpse [figure . ]. the image recalls similarly didactic secular illustrations against the vices of gluttony and overindulgence in drink. holbein‘s image participates in this tradition, yet unlike these overtly polemical examples, the abbot holds no cup, utensil, or any other symbolic indication of indulgence or immoderation. the text‘s suggestion that the abbot lacks ―discipline‖ encourages a negative appraisal, one that would have been specifically familiar to contemporaneous audiences on both sides of the reformation split. yet a final reading of character relies on physical description, one that is to some degree mutable and subject to interpretation. holbein‘s judge is preceded by a quotation from the second chapter of the book of amos: ―and i will cut off the judge from the midst thereof‖ [figure . ]. he is seated between two standing men, the left in simple clothes with parted hair of medium length, the right in more elaborate dress with a thin, short face and a full purse open in his hand. the judge directs all his attention to the latter figure, with a palm extended and an expectant gaze. this has been interpreted as a sign that he has chosen to rule in favor of a hoyland, . copland, secrete of secretes. christiane andersson, ―popular imagery in german reformation broadsheets,‖ in print and culture in the renaissance, ed. gerald tyson and sylvia wagonheim (newark: university of delaware press, ), rich man over a poor one. the judge‘s features are sharply defined, particularly his prominent nose. according to the pseudo-aristotle, when such a nose is ―strongly aquiline and demarcated from the forehead by a well-defined articulation, it indicates a proud soul, as in the eagle.‖ pride is mentioned again in relation to the ―slightly deep- set‖ eyes, invoking the proud soul of the lion. but an aphorism provided by the liber de homine of girolamo manfredi adds: ―a hawked nose that boweth to the upper lips signifieth malice, deceit, untruth and lechery.‖ this enlarged upper lip is also subject to strong interpretation, and represents one ―fond of abuse‖ and charged with ―folly,‖ a trait associated with dogs, apes and mules. folly was a favorite topic of the early modern satirist, and it found no greater outlet than sebastian brandt‘s ship of fools. in its text and illustrations, it catalogued over types of fools, among them those obsessed with money, love, food and drink, and other vices. in its pages is also a personification of justice, shown as a blindfolded woman with symbolic scales and swords of judgment. yet in this case, the ends of the blindfold are held by a fool. [figure . ] this pointed irreverence towards the figure of justice was part of an ongoing dialogue on power, authority and corruption. humanists and other writers of this period condemned dishonest judges in the harshest possible terms. erasmus, in his education of a christian prince ( ), referenced plato as he charged that those who enforce the law must be ―the least corruptible of men.‖ further on, he laments their interest in payment, specifically relating the demise of the noble profession with the acquisition of money: ―this profession was once the preserve - . davis, . swain, . ibid, . of the best men in society, bringing little profit but much honor; but nowadays the profit motive has corrupted it.‖ holbein‘s judge is presented in the act of receiving funds from a petitioner, an image that holds damaging connotations for a viewer already inclined to skepticism towards the profession. this evaluation can be upheld in a reading of his features. a viewer with strong personal associations to the practice of law or the enforcement of authority might be encouraged to mindfulness towards improving their own habits. the figure of the monk [figure . ] receives a similar treatment by holbein to both the abbot and the judge: the monk‘s panicked response to death and attachment to a donation box echo their respective follies. holbein provides the monk with a medium build and stature, a face of middling slenderness, a nose that broadens at the base, and long ears. the treatise of the pseudo-aristotle remarks favorably on the moderate size of the face, indicating that such a width is best, but states that a ―nose thick at the tip means laziness, as witness cattle.‖ likewise, ―men with… large ears [have] the disposition of asses.‖ curiously, both the cow and the ass were mobilized by reformers as symbolic elements of anti-clerical propaganda. the so-called ―monk calf,‖ a monstrous birth discovered in saxony in , was repeatedly depicted in broadsheets as a deformed calf with a bald spot and a thick flap of skin overhanging its back. the calf derived its popular nickname from these features, which purportedly resembled a tonsure and cowl. the workshop of lucas cranach the younger produced a striking image of the animal in , the same year in which it reappeared in numerous polemical anti-clerical pamphlets porter, - . swain, . rummel, . swain, - . by martin luther and philip melanchthon. the work also featured the ―papal ass,‖ a famously grotesque creature with the head of a donkey rumored to have been found on the banks of the tiber in [figures . – . ]. holbein‘s image of the monk does not overtly indicate either of these creatures, nor their able-bodied beastly counterparts, with the exception of a potential physiognomic interpretation. the image is clear and its narrative distinct: one does not need to read the monk‘s features to comprehend his attitude, nor to sympathize with or condemn him, but an understanding of physiognomic theory enriches the image and links it to previous works. this would have required an audience familiar with both reformation visual conventions and a scholarly knowledge of physiognomy, which i have previously demonstrated was very likely the case. part of the rewards of holbein‘s cycle is the learned viewers‘ pleasure of recognizing or attributing a physiognomic meaning to the images and perhaps also of confirming previously-held beliefs or biases. the image of the fool was among those twelve images added to the cycle in the printing of , one which has been commonly viewed as consistent with the style and conception of the original images and therefore confidently attributed to holbein [figure . ]. it is also a figure who appears most welcoming to a physiognomic reading. though the fool carries an air-filled bladder, a comic prop often attached to the fool‘s bauble or staff, and the dangling ears of his pointed hood are visible above his shoulder, the hood has been pulled away, granting the beholder total access to his facial and cranial forms. the fool‘s pointing gesture also serves to advance the viewer‘s eye directly to the face. the fool‘s small, egg-like skull, arching eyebrows, wide-open mouth, long ears and andersson, - . buck, . curling nose contribute to a distorted visage. rolandus scriptoris, in his reductorium physonomie of the fifteenth century, remarks on the intellectual poverty and lack of sense among those with small, spherical heads, through which images do not have enough time to travel to form memories or perceptions. pseudo-aristotle also claims that a peaked head indicates shamelessness and directs attention to the outward arch of the brow: ―eyebrows that droop on the nasal and rise on the temporal side, silliness, as seen in swine.‖ the fool‘s wide stance, with knees and feet pointed in opposite directions, accentuates the lifted garments that lay bare his genitals. this stance is also considered to be characteristically feminine, while his sideways gait and turned-away body is identified as an obsequious or servile ―gesture of the flatterer.‖ the fool‘s large and exaggerated nose, as well as the open step and unflatteringly bared genitals, participate in a long tradition of ―folk‖ physiognomy and humor which held that the size and deformity of the nose was directly proportional to overt sexual impropriety and lewdness. the large nose‘s association with the male member was also a recurring feature. though one of the most famous representations of oversized noses and foolish behavior—hans sebald beham‘s ―nose dance‖ woodcut, accompanied by verses by hans sachs—would not be published until , the concept was deeply entrenched in popular culture by the beginning of the sixteenth century. the german satirist thomas murner included a woodcut of a large-nosed woman in his logica memoratiua ( ), claiming that all flaws and faults in her immoderate personality were rooted in, and symbolized by, her sizeable olfactory organ. a woodcut series by hans weiditz joseph ziegler, ―heredity and physiognomy,‖ in l’hérédité à la fin du moyen age. colloque, calenda, ( march , http://calenda.revues.org/nouvelle .html), - . swain, . ibid, - . published in provided satirical images of various professions and also took pleasure in deriding the nose. the humor in his image of the physician and assistant relies on a depiction of the two individuals with gargantuan noses and misshapen bodies, while the ―assistant‖ wears a cap resembling a fool‘s hood [figure . ]. foolishness was clearly among those natural or characteristic traits that could be distinguished by conventional physical signs. a physiognomic reading of holbein‘s fool would come to a similar conclusion, whether one relied on scholarly or folk physiognomy for source material. while i have focused predominately on negative traits, there are a number of images that could provide a neutral or even positive physiognomic reading by certain signs. one of these is the image of the king, under whose image the french verse begins, ―thus today he is king, tomorrow he will be in a closed tomb‖ [figure . ]. it is believed that this particular figure is drawn to evoke francis i, king of france when holbein‘s cycle was designed and published. that he is shown seated at a feast table as he is approached by the skeleton of death has been taken by some as a negative indication of privilege or indulgence. a well-known portrait of francis i, painted by jean clouet, shows some similarities in style of dress and in the long, slender nose and small mouth of the king. [figure . ] however, holbein‘s king possesses a conspicuously forked beard in contrast to the rounded beard of clouet‘s portrait. the parted beard, as mentioned in the second chapter, was a distinct feature of the lentulus letter and a convention for the depiction of christ, the most perfect of all physiognomic models. here, the viewer is not limited to class indicators or setting in a reading of alison stewart, before bruegel: sebald beham and the origins of peasant festival imagery (burlington: ashgate publishing company, ), - . davis, . koerner, . character: virtue or nobility may be known through physical traits either outside of, or in combination with, symbols of status. as objectionable as it may seem to a certain twenty-first-century sensibility, close associations between physical beauty and virtue existed for the early modern viewer. deformity and irregularity of form conversely held strong connotations of vice and deformity of the soul. yet physiognomy was a complex system of signs allowing for a degree of room for interpretation and examination: as with the case of hippocrates, it was possible to be ugly and virtuous, and the reverse was also dangerously true. one‘s reading might also in part be influenced by one‘s own individual status, group identity, or political and religious affiliations. this limited selection of images within the pictures of death has provided a wealth of physiognomic indicators that correspond to, or participate in, contemporaneous stereotypes, iconographies and discourses. the physiognomic ambiguity present in many of holbein‘s images may appear problematic, but i believe this to be a potential asset: the pictures of death do not function as illustrations of a physiognomic treatise, and therefore they have no need to assert their authority as literal illustrations. their flexibility and multiplicity allows them ―openness‖ in their ability to interact with a canon of physiognomic knowledge in the eyes of a range of beholders. prints and systems of knowledge holbein‘s dense and complex prints are the work of an artist attuned to theories of representation and appearance, yet the importance of printed images to the physiognomic culture of the sixteenth century has received limited attention. as we have seen, physiognomy was ubiquitous in this period, emerging from spheres as various as theology, art theory, social exchange, and the natural sciences. it should come as no surprise that the work of artists and printmakers such as holbein, cranach, and weiditz contain features that might have been read as ―physiognomic,‖ or that point to the revealing union of soul and body: the medium of print was one particularly suited to a dialogue with physiognomic theory. the role of prints in disseminating canons of knowledge and their unique claims to the representation of visual truth interact with physiognomic theory at multiple points. first, prints were considered a highly suitable format for the dissemination and analysis of scientific and empirical knowledge. the sixteenth-century preoccupation with the encyclopedic compilation of information was well-served by prints. physiognomy was among those disciplines whose dissemination and systematization was assisted by the development of prints and printed books. a edition of the physionomiae et chiromantiae compendium of bartolomeus cocles contained numerous woodcut illustrations of stock physiognomic types, cataloguing their facial features and appearances in legible, linear images for study. [figures . – . ] while anatomy, botany, astrology and the host of the natural sciences were all subject to enthusiastic interest in the cataloging of knowledge, this desire to codify or collect also extended to more fanciful or literary subjects. the ship of fools and its contemporaneous equivalents (including hans sachs‘ later book of trades from ) provided ―taxonomies‖ of fools and popular roles, humorously cataloguing their features and foibles for the better identification (or the scathing condemnation) of their real-life counterparts. the porter, - . see for example, william ivins‘ argument for prints as ―exactly repeatable pictorial statements‖ in prints and visual communication, (cambridge: the mit press, ), . glenn ehrstine, ―foolectomies, fool enemas, and the renaissance anatomy of folly,‖ in fecal matters similarities in format between printed ‗catalog‘ texts of this type, and holbein‘s pictures of death, may indicate that viewers could potentially have seen them as participating in a parallel tradition. holbein‘s pictures of death do not act purely as illustrations of physiognomic theory. however, a physiognomic reading of many of the images within his cycle may be seen to interact with established thought or long-held beliefs, contributing to and reinforcing an existing canon of physiognomic knowledge. their authority stems in part from their high level of detail and finish, but also from their role as prints. as a medium of multiples, the printed image contains several unique claims to authenticity, ones not shared by paintings or drawings in their singular forms. by their repetition and duplication, prints were self-reinforcing. the widespread presence of a printed image contributes to a belief in its trustworthiness—or creates the conditions for its own truth- value—and allows the information contained within to be independently evaluated by a multitude of parties. the production of large quantities of prints under the auspices or imprimaturs of professional publishing houses further contributed to their legitimacy. many publishers were granted their privileges by governing bodies or rulers, and had an interest in maintaining a good reputation among their audiences and patrons. prints also were understood to have value associated with the practice of eye- witness accounts. their ability to be created with relative speed, great graphic legibility, and often in conjunction with movable type made woodcuts, in particular, eminently suitable for the reporting of current events, the spreading of urgent ―new‖ knowledge and in early modern literature and art, jeff persels and russell ganim, ed., (burlington: ashgate, ), . david landau and peter parshall, the renaissance print: - (new haven: yale university press, ), . charles talbot, ―prints and the definitive image,‖ in print and culture in the renaissance, . scientific discovery, or promptly responding to cultural shifts that called for new modes of visual expression. this responsiveness and ―first-hand‖ perspective correspond with the emergence of a new language with which to describe these pictorial strategies. the term contrafactur, ‗counterfeit,‘ was brought into additional use in germany during the late fifteenth or early sixteenth century. it described an image purported to carry authority on the basis of its direct reference to an original or prototype. contrafactur was used by printmakers to confer a special level of veracity or legitimacy. in the case of broadsheets chronicling portents, natural events or monstrous births, the descriptive language often insisted that the subject had been drawn from life, or copied from the work of an artist acting as first-hand witness. as in the case of the lentulus letter, the legitimization effect was bi-directional: facts, measurements, dates, times and places included on a print cemented that print‘s authenticity, while prints served to confirm accounts by their ubiquity and graphic representation. the suitability of prints for recording and creating knowledge can be observed in their popularity as materials for collecting. while some collectors focused on individual artists or schools, many others compiled prints thematically or encyclopedically, building visual canons of knowledge by subject. but perhaps most relevant for physiognomy is the relationship between printed proof and matrix, or impression and ―original.‖ as in the legend of the veronica veil, the creation of an image by printed impression means that the impressed image holds the form and an indexical trace of the original; by its nature, the direct contact between peter parshall, "imago contrafacta: images and facts in the northern renaissance," art history ( ): - landau and parshall, the renaissance print, - . see also katharine park and lorraine daston, wonders and the order of nature: - (new york: zone books, ), - . source and duplicate confers a degree of legitimacy on the copy. as charles talbot writes, ―giving proof of authenticity by means of an impression was familiar to everyone in the middle ages who had seen an official document affixed with a seal.‖ beyond the purely physical traces of impression, the print also retained symbolic or invisible traces of its matrix, the power of its presence or authority in borrowed form, as the veil retained its power as a sacred contact relic. printmakers were highly cognizant of this connection, as evidenced by the frequency and inventiveness of their vera icon images. albrecht dürer‘s etching, angel with the sudarium, provides an especially thoughtful play on this theme: the angel lifts the veil above his head, resembling a printmaker with a fresh proof pulled from the press [figure . ]. the evocation of the veronica veil also speaks to a second meaning for the impressed image, particularly those reproduced by the means of the printing press. the technological aspect of mechanically reproduced images suggests (however falsely) a work created without human hands, an acheiropoietoi, which makes claims to embody its own unmediated truth. the print can act to conceal the hand of its maker in the manner of its creation, and as such the miraculous pressing of the veronica veil was seen as a precursor, establishing and authenticating the printed image. theories of impression, so vital in the dialogues of early modern print culture, are ultimately central to the discipline of physiognomy. the core concept holds that the body is an impression of the soul, a physical expression of an intangible truth, the signs of peter parshall, ―prints as objects of consumption in early modern europe,‖ journal of medieval and early modern studies , no. ( ): - . talbot, . koerner, - . ibid, - , - . inner nature ―ineliminably (sic) inscribed in one‘s body.‖ this aristotelian belief was widespread in the sixteenth century and informed systems of knowledge as diverse as theories of vision (impressions, or species, formed on the mind by the observation of natural phenomena) to theories of human gestation (impressions formed on the child by the mother). printing processes, or other reproductive means for forming impressions, such as minting or stamping, also were frequently referenced by contemporaneous writers as tangible examples of this process. the natural science of physiognomy allows the practitioner to read the subject‘s features with the same informative clarity that a viewer might behold a legibly printed image. here the soul is matrix, and the body its proof. in the next chapter, i will turn from prints to portraits, exploring the contemporaneous emphasis placed on observation of nature and the painting of portraits ―from life.‖ examining holbein‘s career as a portraitist through several notable examples, i will explore the ramifications of physiognomic theory for a portrait painter, whose role in this period was understood not only to be the creator of an ―accurate‖ likeness, but also the fashioner of a desired visual identity for the sitter. holbein‘s portraits, in their virtuosic detail and meticulous rendering of flesh and complexion, attention to physical traits, and suppression of the brushstroke, make certain claims to naturalism and authenticity. i will attempt to construct the reception and understanding of holbein‘s ‗rhetoric of realism‘ in the physiognomic culture of the sixteenth century. boys-stones, . katharine park, ―impressed images: reproducing wonders,‖ in picturing science, producing art, ed. chapter : appearance and identity in holbein’s portraits in the first chapter of this project, i noted the long association between portraiture and physiognomy, from the portrait of hippocrates and the myth of apelles‘ perfect likenesses, to the instructions of pliny and philostratus the younger to aspiring painters. in every case a strong correlation exists between so-called ‗naturalism‘ in visual representation and the ability of portraits to be read as substitutes for the sitters. holbein‘s enduring fame as an exceptional portraitist provides an opportunity to engage with the physiognomic implications of creating a life-like representation of the individual. beyond the established role of portraits as ―substitutions‖ for absent individuals, commissioned portraits were a powerful tool for self-fashioning and could serve as an expression of power, status, and personal virtue or character. in a culture where costumes and other props were outward marks of one‘s constructed self and social status, what role might detailed physical description of the face and hands be understood to play in relation to inner character, and how might holbein‘s ‗naturalism‘ have been understood in physiognomic terms by contemporary viewers? holbein‘s portraits of erasmus will be of particular importance here as a sitter with demonstrated faith in physiognomic theory, as expressed in such texts as the satirical in praise of folly and the didactic education of children. i shall compare holbein‘s painted and printed portraits of erasmus with other known portraits of him ―from life‖ in order to discuss the expectations and claims of contemporaneous portraiture to portray the truth of outer appearances and inner substance. caroline jones and peter galison, (new york: routledge, ), - . holbein’s portraits and the ‘rhetoric of realism’ while a detailed profiling of holbein‘s long career in portraiture is not possible here, a brief outline of several major commissions and the reception of his works will provide a helpful grounding for a discussion of his heightened use of ‗naturalism.‘ among his earliest commissions was a double portrait of jacob meyer, newly elected burgomeister of basel, and his wife dorothea. [figure . ] a preparatory drawing of jacob meyer in silverpoint, with the addition of red chalk to capture effects of shading and complexion, shows holbein‘s concern for capturing facial features in exacting detail, giving only cursory outlines to the shape of his hat and clothing. [figure . ] this is a practical approach used by artists during this period, allowing for costuming and background to be finalized in the studio. however, holbein‘s focus on the physiognomy of his sitters reminds us that the central component of portraiture is likeness, the depiction of facial details that mark the individual. by all accounts, meyer was delighted with the portraits and holbein received a number of successive commissions from meyer and the city council. also in basel, holbein completed a portrait of bonifacius amerbach, son of a prominent university master and publisher, and himself a humanist scholar. [figure . ] the portrait‘s inscription, composed by amerbach, praises and affirms holbein‘s realistic mode: ―although only a painted likeness, i am not inferior to the living face; i am instead the counterpart of my master, and distinguished by accurate lines.‖ amerbach‘s inscription allows the image to ‗speak,‘ alluding to the ancient topos of lifelikeness in portraiture. in this way the image is granted a voice, the one facet of the living person that it otherwise lacks. john rowlands, holbein: the paintings of hans holbein the younger (oxford: phaidon, ), - . stephan kemberdick, ―portrait of bonifacius amerbach,‖ in hans holbein the younger: the basel already by this time it appears that holbein‘s attention to physical description and facial traits was a highly prized aspect of his work. amerbach‘s inscription also points to a broader humanist view of the art of portraiture. the portrait was thought to act as an embodiment of memory, a trace or reminder of the living subject that would remain after death. holbein‘s style appears to have been particularly suited for this purpose. erasmus, a close comrade of amerbach, would request two portraits from holbein in . [figures . - . ] the first of these, a gift to william warham, the archbishop of canterbury, was accompanied by a letter that reassured the recipient that in the event of erasmus‘s death, warham would retain ―a bit of erasmus‖ through the ―painted rendering of [his] features.‖ i will discuss this and other portraits of erasmus in greater detail below; but here i will note that after these commissions holbein was provided by erasmus with a letter of recommendation to the english humanist sir thomas more. more‘s portrait, painted during holbein‘s first sojourn in london, was one of many subsequent works for the ―intellectual aristocracy‖ of court circles. holbein‘s second stay in england also provided several commissions from merchants of the powerful and international hanseatic league. seven were completed between and . two of these include inscriptions testifying to the veracity and lifelikeness of holbein‘s painted representation. a portrait of derich born states, in letters that appear illusionistically carved into a stone ledge, ―add but the voice and you might wonder if his father or the painter created this.‖ similar to the allusions of amerbach‘s inscription, this suggests that the painting lacks only the voice of years, - , - . matthias winner, ―holbein‘s portrait of erasmus with a renaissance pilaster,‖ in hans holbein: paintings, prints and reception, . andreas beyer, ―the london interlude,‖ in hans holbein the younger: the basel years, - , its subject to completely embody the individual it represents; high praise for holbein‘s skill in portraying the figure. [figure . ] an earlier portrait of the german merchant george gisze includes a similar phrase: ―he has in life such eyes, such cheeks.‖ from the mid- s, holbein also served as a court painter to king henry viii and set the standards for the king‘s official court portraits in images that would be copied and repeated in numerous media thereafter. a wall painting by holbein in the king‘s privy chamber at whitehall palace, dated to , contained life-size full-body portraits of henry viii and jane seymour standing before posthumous images of henry vii and elizabeth of york. though the original was destroyed by fire, a portion of holbein‘s full- scale cartoon and several copies remain. [figures . - . ] holbein‘s choice to depart from the original drawing (in which the monarch is shown in three-quarters view) to depict the monarch‘s head in a direct frontal pose—gaze confronting the viewer—was a relatively unusual one that lent gravity and presence to the figure. but it has been suggested that the frontal pose may contain additional meanings beyond the forceful image it presents. selected especially for his talent in portraiture, holbein was personally sent by henry viii to record the features of prospective brides, including anne of cleves, christina of denmark, anne of lorraine, and the daughters of the duke of guise. the two surviving works, which depict anne of cleves and christina of denmark, exhibit a full-length frontal positioning with clear features and prominent hands. [figures . - . ] portraiture of potential brides, who would be called upon to bear healthy male heirs, was expected to provide a reasonably accurate and highly legible likeness in order - . the latin quotation is borrowed from a dürer engraving of , emphasizing that such claims to accuracy and vividness were an established topos for renaissance portraiture, both painted and printed. foister, - . to eliminate those with visible physical deformities or ‗defects.‘ in this view, henry viii‘s frontal posture displays his physical vigor and unblemished, even features, demonstrating his suitability as both ruler and sire. at this point we may state that holbein‘s fame and reputation as a portraitist was based in part on the ‗naturalistic‘ or lifelike quality of his images. but naturalism itself is a sophisticated visual strategy, not an uncomplicated replication of reality. holbein‘s naturalism makes a number of claims for the painter‘s ability. how is his naturalism achieved, and to what end? what is its interaction with physiognomic theory? first, the close relationship between naturalism and physiognomy is rooted in the observation of physical traits found in nature. this belief was borrowed in part from the ancient instruction of painters, such as in pliny‘s natural history, and comprised a major part of the training of the early modern artist, as well. leon battista alberti‘s influential de pictura ( ) emphasized the need for the aspiring artist to observe the many variations in the human form and encouraged memorization and categorization of existing types. he was among those who urged artists to attend to physiognomic studies, the better to represent both inner and outer substance. artists including leonardo da vinci explored physiognomy through studies from life and the creation of grotesque human heads, while albrecht dürer‘s four books of human proportion ( ) included studies of ―abnormal‖ physiognomies. dürer‘s treatise insists that the diligent artist ought to record the figure ―down to the last detail… in the clearest and most ibid, - , - , - . leon battista alberti, on painting, trans. john r. spencer (new haven: yale university press, ), - . bekes, - . moshe barasch, theories of art: from plato to winckelmann, (new york: routledge, ), . meticulous manner, and the tiniest wrinkle and speck should not be omitted.‖ yet he writes elsewhere, ―no man can ever again make a beautiful image from his own thoughts, unless he has filled his mind with such things through much copying [from nature.]‖ in his model the success or ‗beauty‘ of the work finds its source in its relationship to nature, a nature studied, remembered as a sense impression, and then recalled and transformed by the hand of the artist-creator. the work‘s authority comes from its naturalism, a convincing representation of a natural likeness. pomponius gauricus‘s de sculptura of presented an even more explicit link between portraiture and physiognomic thinking, combining practical instruction for artists with a chapter of classical physiognomic theory. the work is both a compendium of workshop knowledge (primarily bronze casting, modeling, and the carving of ivory) and adapted ancient theory, relying on the treatise of the pseudo-aristotle for much of its physiognomic influences. gauricus‘s text, composed in latin with some greek, mimics ancient treatises in its categorical listing of facial features and the qualities of ―soul‖ which they reflect, yet the work as a whole represents a new bridge between physiognomic theory and physical description for the practicing artist. holbein‘s method for capturing the features of sitters through careful drawing from life, initially using silverpoint, later included the use of colored chalks and pre- colored surfaces in various light tones which simulated the colors of his sitters‘ flesh. he frequently made use of written notes on color in the margins of these drawings, with a particular emphasis on the colors of skin, eyes and hair. later, more elaborate portrait studies were further worked in pen or brush to define facial features. sub-surface cited in koerner, . ibid, - . investigation of holbein‘s painted portraits have shown that the artist relied on traced drawings (or, less frequently, pouncing) to directly transfer the image to the prepared surface, maintaining with exactitude the existing proportions. some alteration of the underdrawings does exist, mainly in the adjustment of gaze or position of the head, or to allow for a change in costume. small adjustments, such as the number of wrinkles, have been specifically made in a few works, but overall it seems that holbein‘s concern for maintaining the proportional arrangement of the face and the contours of its discrete features was a consistent one. holbein‘s painstaking attention to subtle facial details in both drawing and finished painting have assisted in establishing his reputation for naturalism. in addition, his meticulous recording of facial traits and coloration through his studies and sketches echoes the work of the physiognomic writers, composing their commentaries, and of the close reading of the physiognomists before their subjects. the handling of paint, and the creation of a convincing illusion of reality in the rendering of flesh and texture, is also holbein‘s trademark. his materials speak to his concern for qualities of surface. the linseed oil with which he often mixed pigments for flesh was complemented by the use of pine resin, which added realistic luster and shine to textures of satin, fur, and foliage. the tonality of certain portraits has been altered by the use of a grey ground, adding natural modulation and depth to facial shadows. holbein‘s handling of translucent oil colors and layers of glaze concealed his brushstrokes that might otherwise disrupt the illusion of a new reality, or that might otherwise call attention to the fabricated status of the image. this effort to hide the trace barasch, - . foister, - , - . ashok roy and martin wyld, ―the ambassadors and holbein‘s techniques for painting on panel,‖ in hans holbein: paintings, prints and reception, - . of his hand and the subtle modeling of forms supported the illusion of real flesh and real texture. holbein‘s painting claims a ‗truth‘ in representation only previously found in nature itself. but a surface that conceals the painter‘s hand, in effect creating the illusion of real existence over prolonged labor, paradoxically directs the viewer to the painter‘s genius. rhetorically, it links holbein with paragons of antique art, such as zeuxis and his rival parrhasios, the painter who deceived the former by painting a curtain so naturalistic that zeuxis moved to brush it aside. it also brings to mind the famous apelles, whose portraits could be subjected to a physiognomic reading as easily as a living human subject. holbein‘s techniques frame the artist-creator as a student of nature, one whose observation and talent allows him to replicate the living face convincingly and reliably. from nature he draws his authority and the ‗truth‘ of his image, yet it is by his own labor and the skill of his hand that this naturalistic effect is accomplished. his portraits, praised for their lifelikeness, emulate antique examples. it is in this spirit that i will now turn to a physiognomic examination of some of holbein‘s numerous portraits of erasmus. the potential for a physiognomic reading of these works would seem to be supported by the humanist‘s familiarity with physiognomic theory and the pervasive presence of the discipline in the educated circles in which both holbein and erasmus traveled. holbein’s portraits of erasmus i will begin with holbein‘s first portrait of erasmus, commissioned in as a gift to william warham, who was erasmus‘s patron and close friend. [figure . ] the oskar batschmann, ―holbein‘s hand,‖ in hans holbein the younger: the basel years, - , - . this claim is first made by pliny in his natural history. humanist is depicted clothed in a black robe richly trimmed in fur, sitting at a table or ledge. a closed volume sits before him, on which his hands rest. to the left, a renaissance pilaster with detailed ornamental foliage stands before a green background curtain. an inscription in greek running along the sides of the closed book‘s pages translates as ―the herculean labors of erasmus of rotterdam,‖ an association underscored by the inclusion of the pillar, a likely reference to the pillars erected by hercules at the edge of the world. further back, a shelf with three additional books and a glass vial can be seen. along the edge of the angled volume, a second inscription, likely penned by erasmus, speaks for holbein‘s inimitable skill and likely also alludes to his own efforts: ―no one will ever be my imitator as easily as he will be my denigrator.‖ this claim echoes one reportedly made by the ancient painter zeuxis in an inscription below his own celebrated portrait of a famous athlete. the artist was praised by pliny for his ability to make visible the ―very soul‖ in his portraits. it cannot be incidental that zeuxis is also the painter lauded by ancient writers for his command of naturalism, one so convincing that the birds themselves were said to swoop down to pick at his painted grapes. holbein depicts erasmus with a fair, peach-toned complexion and graying hair with touches of blonde and pale brown. his skin is unblemished and even in color. his mouth is long. his lips are thin but definite in shape, the top resting on the lower, with a v-shaped indentation above the top lip. his long, narrow and somewhat aquiline nose is softened by the three-quarters view, but holbein is careful to show the curving arch in the middle portion rising away from the forehead. erasmus‘s eyes are pale with some matthias winner, ―the terminus as a rebus in holbein‘s portraits of erasmus,‖ in hans holbein the younger: the basel years, - , - , . reflective highlights, set back into the face with hooded lids. his chin is broad, with a slight indentation in the center, and his jaw is square. curving lines accentuate the lean facial muscles and high cheekbones, but erasmus lacks deep wrinkles around the mouth and brow. his hands are long-fingered and of medium slenderness, without particularly pronounced knuckles, and their tone is slightly darker than his highlighted face. the nails are broad and those of his writing hand are stained with ink. a physiognomic reading of these traits seems to fall along two lines: the first, an association with pride and strength, the traits of the lion; and second, marks of intellect or understanding. for both polemon and the pseudo-aristotle, erasmus‘s thin, long mouth can be compared to the mouth of the lion, signaling strength and pride. the squareness of his chin, and its ―four edges‖ created by the center separation, are also remarked on as a sign of strength and boldness. likewise, the pseudo-aristotle names a slightly deep-set eye as an indication of a ―proud soul,‖ again referring to the lion as the animal counterpart. erasmus‘s pale and slightly pinkish-hued complexion seems to correspond with contemporaneous beliefs in the link between qualities of the flesh and geographic location and temperature. his pale skin and blonde, straight hair were thought to belong to northerners, owing to the suppressed internal heat of their bodies and the constriction of their pores by the cold. it was believed that this resulted in abundant blood, warm flesh, and a courageous internal character. turning to qualities of intellect, his smooth brow is among those traits thought necessary for a ―lover of knowledge and a collector of information.‖ polemon further indicates that broad nails appear as indicators of good hoyland, . also swain, . swain, . ziegler, ―heredity and physiognomy - . hoyland, . memory and intellect. the secretum secretorum attributes good sense and judgment to long-fingered men, setting them among the wise, educated and noble of humanity. perhaps most curiously, several of these visible traits taken together form polemon‘s conception of the ―pure greek,‖ whom he praises for good temperament and a love of learning. his description is as follows: ―[he] is of medium stature… white in color, mixed with red, medium in flesh… quick to learn, neither small nor large of head… in his face there is squareness, in his lip slimness, and his nose is pointed and evenly proportioned. his eyes are moist, bluish-black… and very luminous.‖ these physiognomic readings must be considered alongside the portrait‘s references to hercules and zeuxis. the lion‘s connection with the greek demigod hercules could only lend credence to erasmus‘s claim of ‗herculean‘ labors in the eyes of the educated viewer. in this case, a reading of erasmus‘s features enhances and affirms the portrait‘s underlying associations. his link to hercules and to the features of the lion suggests a strength and commitment to much labor, thematically uniting the civilizing force of hercules‘s brawn and erasmus‘s writings. the reading also sustains the image of an individual bold enough to forge his own opinions, yet rooted in the authority and legitimacy of classical knowledge. a collective physiognomic interpretation of holbein‘s erasmus might be summarized by the educated viewer as attempting to present an intelligent, wise, and intellectually courageous thinker—in this case, providing a kind of visual corroboration of what has been demonstrated fully in his writings. the lion, with whom erasmus shares some physiognomic traits, is also associated with early church father and author st. jerome, favored by many humanists, and the bekes, . hoyland, ―the leiden polemon,‖ . biblical evangelist st. mark, both of whom are consciously evoked in holbein‘s second portrait of erasmus, also dated . [figure . ] erasmus was known to hold a special regard for jerome, and during his lifetime produced numerous translations and commentaries on jerome‘s work, most notably ‗improving‘ jerome‘s latin vulgate with his own latin and greek editions of the new testament in . in this portrait, the author is shown seated at a writing desk, pen in hand, once again clothed in a black robe and scholar‘s cap. the sentence he is putting to paper states that he is composing a commentary on the gospel of st. mark, which indeed he was in the midst of finishing in . the profile view affords a better outline of erasmus‘s prominent nose and chin. in addition, the profile reduces traits to their essential qualities by providing a clear and legible ‗outline‘ of the features. a second version, completed in the same year, subtly compresses the posture of the sitter and defines in slightly sharper detail the lines of skin that gather at the neck. [figure . ] the slenderness of his cheeks and the hollow depression beneath the cheekbone, more apparent in this second version, are attributes of a gaunt face to which the pseudo-aristotle ascribes the qualities of ―assiduity‖ and diligence. leanness of the face is also listed elsewhere in the same text as the sign of a ―talented‖ man. a reading of ‗diligence‘ and ‗talent‘ would have been considered appropriate responses to an image of the writer hard at work, laboring over a project of pious devotion that is simultaneously an expression of his own personal understanding and knowledge. quentin massys‘ portrait of erasmus also focuses attention on the sharp, bekes, - . martin kemp, the human animal in western art and science (chicago: university of chicago press, ), , . jochen sander, ―erasmus of rotterdam writing,‖ in hans holbein the younger: the basel years, - high cheekbones and the depressions defining the scholar‘s cheeks. [figure . ] here, too, erasmus is shown as an author bent over a desk with pen in hand. in this case, the text of the open work is his own translation of paul‘s epistle to the romans, while behind him a volume of the works of st. jerome can be seen on an open shelf. the portrait displays erasmus‘s features in three-quarters view; as with holbein, erasmus would commission a second work from massys in profile, this time a portrait medal completed in . [figure . ] the latin inscription on the medal affirms that the work was done from ―the living model‖ (effigies viva.) similarities between massys‘ and holbein‘s physical depictions of erasmus are numerous; from the thin, pointed nose, four-part chin and square jaw, to the small, fairly deep-set eyes, long fingers, thin lips and lean face. the face of the massys painted portrait appears slightly elongated and more narrow, shortening the mouth, which is owed in part to the angle of view. his depiction of erasmus‘s eyes gives them a dark cast, without much reflection. the ―even black‖ of the eye, however, was taken by polemon as a sign of ―reliability and goodness.‖ it does not appear that a physiognomic reading of massys‘ work would stray far afield from that of holbein‘s. erasmus‘s presumable satisfaction with the work, supported by his later commissioning of the medal, suggests that he considered the portrait a success in representation. erasmus‘s response to the features of dürer‘s engraved portrait of was less favorable. [figure . ] the portrait once again places erasmus at his desk, engaged in the act of writing, with a stack of books on a ledge at the front of the picture plane. a , - . swain, , . winner, - . this portrait of erasmus was one half of a diptych showing on the other side erasmus‘s humanist friend from antwerp, peter gilles. the ‗friendship diptych‘ was commissioned as a gift to plain frame in the background displays an inscription which also appeared on massys‘ cast medal: ―the better image will his writings show,‖ a statement perhaps acknowledging the limits of physiognomic reliability but also an ancient artistic trope of false humility. the staging of the image has more in common with earlier painted portraits, but it was this medal that erasmus himself suggested dürer might use as an aide for his own design. portable, durable and produced in multiples, the medal would have presented an easily available model. the printed work was eventually created after a drawing dürer made in the author‘s presence in , though erasmus considered the final work ―not similar‖ (non similis mihi) to his own likeness. dürer portrays erasmus with lean cheeks, square jaw, a pointed nose, downcast eyes and prominent hands. his chin, however, seems rounded and blunt, protruding more forcefully than those of the other portraits. the shortened width of the mouth and thickened lips create a deeper shadow between the bottom lip and chin. likewise, the hooded eyes and half-closed lids seem to bulge forward away from the hollow below his brows, accentuating the shadowed circles. roundness of the chin was considered by polemon a sign of effeminacy, and some sixteenth-century treatises claimed ―if the ende of the chin bee rounde, it is a signe of feminine manners… the chinne of a man must bee alwaies square (sic.)‖ polemon calls protruding eyes ―repulsive,‖ while the text of the pseudo- aristotle condemns the same as a sign of ―imbecility‖ and likens round, bulging eyes to thomas more in england as a way to conjure the absent sitters‘ presence to their distant friend. hoyland, . andrée hayum, ―dürer's portrait of erasmus and the ars typographorum,‖ renaissance quarterly , no. ( ): - . winner, . hoyland, . also porter, . hoyland, . those of cattle. by necessity, a printed portrait in black and white also cannot capture nuances of complexion or facial coloring, but it seems unlikely that this would have negatively influenced erasmus‘s opinion of the work. it was erasmus, in fact, who, in his laudatio of for the recently deceased dürer, would praise dürer‘s mastery of the black line, declaring that he surpassed even apelles but without the benefit of colors. in the same passages, he credits dürer with the ability to depict even ―characters and emotions… the whole of man as it shines forth from the appearance of the body.‖ here erasmus credits the artist with the ability to form a likeness that speaks to the ―whole‖ of man‘s joined internal character and external physicality, a quintessentially physiognomic concept. his demonstrated belief in physiognomic representation, when considered alongside his dissatisfaction with dürer‘s printed portrait and its subtle dissimilarity to the physiognomic models presented by other works, may add an additional layer to our understanding of the ‗erasmus‘ which erasmus wished to present to the world. his positive reception of holbein‘s work may indicate that it is holbein, of all his portraitists, who most successfully captured this desired image of self. physiognomy and self-fashioning erasmus‘s portrait commissions represent a conscious and sophisticated strategy for the distribution and treatment of his likeness. his painted portraits were costly endeavors that allowed him to give prized gifts to patrons and friends, while his printed portraits were able to be widely distributed on their own or incorporated into editions of his printed texts. his awareness of the value and potential of portraiture seems to have swain, . koerner, - . been particularly keen. his repeated choice of holbein as the executor of these works, and his dissatisfaction with dürer‘s engraving, might suggest a matching concern for the depiction of his features. the subtle differences in these artists‘ renderings of the humanist and the physiognomic implications associated with those traits are meaningful in light of erasmus‘s own responses. his belief in physiognomy, and his desire to present a particular self-image, may have influenced his own reception—or rejection—of these works. holbein‘s portraits of erasmus represent a sophisticated attempt at constructing the identity of the sitter, an encompassing appearance that could convey truthfully and reliably both inner and outer character. it is significant that the first decades of the sixteenth century, a period of intense interest in physiognomic theory, was also marked by a growing awareness of those processes that contributed to the creation of personal identity. stephen gleenblatt‘s term ―self-fashioning‖ conveys a sense of a deliberate outward shaping or presentation of self, one that is able to be manipulated and directed. as he writes, self-fashioning represents ―the cultural system of meanings that creates specific individuals by governing the passage from abstract potential to concrete historical embodiment.‖ commissioned portraits seem an ideal vehicle for self- fashioning, as they both represent and embody the status of their sitters. as objects, they speak to the status, wealth and taste of their patron. as representations, they present the physical form of their subject alongside clothes, jewels, architecture, coats of arms, books, and other indicators of social rank and personal achievement. yet while these and other outward symbols have been explored at length in sander, ―erasmus of rotterdam writing,‖ - . greenblatt, - . scholarship, little attention has been provided that address the relationship and possible tension between impulses for self-fashioning and the apparently unchangeable truths revealed by one‘s physiognomy. the urgency of physiognomic knowledge is due in part to its potential for revealing the internal qualities that may be concealed or mitigated by outwards factors such as costume, setting, or material goods. eniko bekes‘ exploration of physiognomy as it relates to images produced of matthias corvinus, king of hungary, has provided one vital source for the conception of this project and shows how the deliberate manipulation of physiognomic rhetoric might contribute to the drive to self- fashion. her work has linked visual representation with consciously physiognomic rhetorical description by court writers. panegyrics composed in the late fifteenth century by corvinus‘s most favored humanist scholar, galeotto marzio, provided a flattering physical description of the king that adhered to the most desired physiognomic traits from the works of the pseudo-aristotles. in addition, antonio bonfini, court historiographer, provided a detailed physical description of corvinus that borrowed heavily from ancient descriptions of alexander the great, considered the most perfect example of the physiognomic ‗lion‘ type. the features of the lion were granted to corvinus in nearly every portrait created between and , including manuscripts, medallions and donor portraits specifically commissioned by the king. this purposeful association with the image of alexander, the ancient ―conqueror of the east,‖ is made more compelling by the fact of corvinus‘s multiple military incursions into ottoman territory. the ubiquity of physiognomic thought during this period would have assured that many viewers of these images, both at court and those recipients of portraits abroad—ally and bekes, - , - , . enemy alike—would have read and understood the meaning contained in corvinus‘s well-defined features. physiognomy provided corvinus and his humanists with the perfect vehicle for fashioning an identity rooted in ancient authority, yet which spoke perfectly to contemporaneous concerns and anxieties. joseph ziegler has also observed physiognomy‘s widespread influence among the ruling class, noting that the bulk of late medieval physiognomic treatises were dedicated to nobles. michael scot‘s dedication to frederick ii was followed by pietro d‘abano‘s treatise, dedicated to the ruler of mantua; roland l‘ecrivain‘s work, bestowed on the duke of bedford; and michele savonarola‘s fifteenth-century treatise, dedicated to the marquis of ferrara. the source of many later works adopted for the popular market, bartholomeus cocles, dedicated his treatise to the son of the dictator of bologna. ziegler infers that physiognomy served a particularly desirable purpose for the nobility during this period, linking physiognomic theory to contemporaneous dialogue on the ‗origin‘ of nobility. ancient treatises, most notably the secretum secretorum, also had called on rulers to select their advisors using the discipline of physiognomy in order to select the most virtuous and suitable candidates. this knowledge was revived and made to suit new purposes, benefiting the noble as well as the rising middle and professional classes. for many late medieval thinkers, at the edge of the renaissance, old notions of hereditary nobility were increasingly insufficient. physiognomy provided a useful system by which to authenticate individual nobility based on virtue, independent of rank or parentage and based only in legible bodily signs. the visibility and mutability of portraiture again suggests its suitability for this process of self-fashioning. ziegler, "text and context,‖ - . yet physiognomy was equally capable of overturning or subverting a desired public image as creating it. the de humana physiognomia of giovanni battista della porta ( ) featured portraits of notable italian personalities, confirming the established reputation and appearance of each individual with its correlating physiognomic interpretation. as in the union of printed image and printed text, the image and its physiognomic description are mutually reinforcing. however, in these cases, this physiognomic ‗truth‘ was not always a favorable one. della porta‘s text places an earlier portrait of the large-nosed poet and scholar angelo poliziano alongside a negative appraisal of those with overlarge noses, claiming these people ―despise[d] the works of other persons.‖ here, a physiognomic reading of an existing portrait is used to undermine the dignity of the sitter. the close control exercised by matthias corvinus and others over their own images suggest an awareness of this possibility. it may even be that erasmus was conscious of this prospect, as he favored one likeness over the other, even responding cautiously to a printed portrait which would have been widely distributed and read, and therefore more difficult to control. physiognomy‘s claim to revealing inner truths was not only a vehicle for the public promotion of a virtuous identity, but potentially a tool for discrediting such an image. while state portraits and images of nobility represent one aspect of fashioning a public self, the rise of an increasingly mercantile society, in which new and complex modes of patronage and commerce operated, pushed concerns of identity and status to the fore. a prosperous and literate middle class, like many of holbein‘s patrons, was centered in urban hubs of culture and artistic exchange, and sought to assert its status through new models of representing and defining the self. this process was also at work bekes, . in the status of artists. the elevation of the art of painting to one of the ‗liberal‘ arts, and its increasing disassociation from the status of skilled labor, was in large part due to an intentional campaign waged by artists and art theorists. for many artists, the self- portrait was an increasingly viable means of promoting their skill and creative identity. though no painted self-portraits by holbein survive, a fine drawing dating from - records the artist‘s vision of himself. [figure . ] his complexion is even, unblemished and peach-toned; his square chin, neat beard, and luminous, slightly deep- set eyes provide an image of moderation, according to current physiognomic thought. simply clothed, with a solid background, holbein discards outward markers of status and draws the viewer‘s attention to his own highly detailed features and the descriptive naturalism of his face, beard and hair, and the steady gaze of his eyes looking outward. in this way, his portrait may be seen to participate in the most current physiognomic thought of the period. this interaction with the complexities of classical and contemporaneous theory, so closely tied to philosophy and the liberal arts, is yet another avenue by which the artist may attempt to elevate their artistic practice. holbein‘s highly naturalistic portraits claim to represent accurate likenesses of their subjects. understood as substitutes for absent sitters, holbein‘s portraits could provide the opportunity for focused observation and analysis of both external form and internal character, rather than the mere fleeting glimpse of a passing encounter. portraiture participates in the system of physiognomic knowledge not by the presentation joanna woods-marsden, renaissance self-portraiture: the visual construction of identity and the social status of the artist (new haven: yale university press, ), - . koerner, . rowlands, . of popular types, but in its potential for revealing the unique truth of the presented individual. while it would be difficult, if not impossible, to prove or disprove an intentional use of physiognomic theory by either painter or patron, the ubiquity of physiognomic thought and its close ties to the rhetoric of naturalism make it likely that these works may have been viewed in such terms. physiognomy‘s fitness for creating and manipulating a desirable self-image or public persona further endeared it to the elites of the sixteenth century. holbein‘s patrons and social circle can be firmly placed within this category. it is likely in this cultural context that responses to holbein‘s vivid works were shaped in part by the widespread belief in the physiognomic link between body and soul. conclusion there is much to suggest that holbein‘s work could have been viewed in physiognomic terms by his audience. the ubiquity of physiognomic thought in the culture of the sixteenth century indicates that much of his viewership was attuned to theories of appearance and representation. physiognomy‘s presence in canons of medical knowledge and its place among natural philosophical texts, as well as its popular incarnations in vernacular pamphlets and in period theology, point to a widespread dissemination. likewise, it is easy to imagine that holbein‘s viewers were among those intimately familiar with conventional depictions of christ and his tormentors, drawn from physiognomic studies or supposed eye-witness accounts, or with other prints relying on physical types to carry symbolic or satirical meaning. holbein‘s early exposure to physiognomic thought, and the physiognomic interests of his patrons, indicates that he was aware of the possibilities for physiognomic representation. whether or not his focus on detailed descriptions of the face and body held direct physiognomic meaning for his own practice as an artist, there remains a high probability of physiognomic interpretations by his audience. how, and why, might an audience have looked to holbein‘s images for physiognomic ‗truths‘? as we have seen, images are closely connected to the verification or creation of information, whether this is contained in a cycle of prints cataloguing types of flora or fauna, or a ‗lifelike‘ portrait of a prospective bride or absent friend. holbein‘s prints and paintings represent two distinct strategies for representing visual truths. his prints, through their status as impressed multiples and their participation in an emerging culture of ‗first-hand‘ knowledge, may have offered viewers a confirmation of their biases or beliefs, linking a wider tradition of ancient and medieval physiognomic theory to contemporaneous ‗types.‘ alternatively, his painted portraits provide a more individualized encounter with physiognomic theory in their claims to be vivid substitutes of their absent sitters, allowing for a supposedly accurate reading of traits, as well as the shaping of a desired self. yet both rely on holbein‘s exceptional skill in capturing those legible facial details thought to be most revealing of inner character. though subject in part to important differences in the presumed audience and function of prints and paintings, it is clear that physiognomic thought extended beyond any simple division of mediums. i have approached physiognomic theory through holbein in large part due to his enduring reputation for naturalism and lifelikeness. as i have demonstrated, his ‗rhetoric of realism‘ is a strategy that claims representational veracity, and as such, it is closely tied to contemporaneous physiognomic discourses on outward appearance and inward truth. that these discourses are also present in the work of his contemporaries and peers will hopefully be further explored in future scholarship. naturalism, particularly in the attentive depiction of the human form, was an approach taken by a multitude of renaissance artists both north and south of the alps, from jan van eyck and albrecht dürer to leonardo da vinci and the florentine school. theories of art that stressed naturalism, such as the writings of leon battista alberti, are also seen to have encouraged physiognomic studies. scholarship on renaissance naturalism, as an intentional artistic strategy rooted in the authority of nature, has in large part neglected to address the link between naturalistic images and the widespread belief in the physiognomic meaning contained in such representations. an examination of these connections will result in a more nuanced view of the reception of ‗lifelike‘ images. more broadly, physiognomy also may help to shed additional light on those renaissance concepts of self—of self-knowledge and self-presentation—that shaped, and were shaped by, images. the early modern preoccupation with the flexibility and mutability of identity brings physiognomy to the fore of the period‘s cultural and artistic concerns. as new patterns of interaction called for physiognomy to act as a secure method for evaluating individuals and predicting possible outcomes, changing roles and social mobility likewise called for new artistic outlets that could engage ideas of the constructed self. physiognomy represents an important and continuous link between modern, early modern and pre-modern notions of self. holbein‘s complex and naturalistic work is situated at the nexus of these concerns. his prints and portraits fully demonstrate the range of challenges and meanings inherent in depicting the human face, both ‗type‘ and individual, in a period of social anxiety, mobility, and change. physiognomy‘s perceived ability to reach a core of inner truth through outward signs holds vital potential for future art-historical scholarship on portraiture and other types of images that present private truths and public identities. our view of those representations can only be enriched by a more layered understanding of the physiognomic construction of early modern selves. porter, . bibliography alberti, leon battista. on painting. john r. spencer, trans. new haven: yale university press, . andersson, christiane. ―popular imagery in german reformation broadsheets.‖ in print and culture in the renaissance, edited by gerald p. tyson and sylvia s. wagonheim, - . newark: university of delaware press, . 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"text and context: on the rise of physiognomic thought in the later middle ages.‖ in de sion exibit lex et verbum domini de hierusalem: essays on medieval law, liturgy, and literature in honour of amnon linder, edited byyitzhak hen, - . tournhout: brepols, . figure . whitehall mural (cartoon) hans holbein the younger, figure . abbot, from the pictures of death hans holbein the younger, (hans lützelburger, block-cutter), figure . jacob meyer, preparatory drawing in silverpoint & red chalk hans holbein the younger, figure . folly, marginal illustration from praise of folly hans holbein the younger, figure . scholar in the market, marginal illustration from praise of folly hans holbein the younger, figure . wisdom, marginal illustration from praise of folly after hans holbein the younger (reproduction) (london: reeves & turner, ) figure . folly descending the pulpit, marginal illustration from praise of folly hans holbein the younger, figure . crowning with thorns, woodcut from the passio d. n. jesu christi lucas cranach the elder, figure . lentulus letter with the portrait of christ, woodcut hans burgkmair, figure . lentulus letter with the portrait of christ, woodcut hans burgkmair, figure . archbishop & knight, from guyot marchand‘s dance of death woodcut, figure . abbot and magistrate, from guyot marchand‘s dance of death woodcut, figure . judge, from the pictures of death hans holbein the younger, (hans lützelburger, block-cutter), figure . besotted abbot riding a jawbone, woodcut anonymous, figure . besotted abbot riding a jawbone, woodcut hans weiditz, figure . die todtenfresser, woodcut text by pamphilus gengenbach, figure . justice, from the ship of fools, woodcut albrecht dürer, figure . monk, from the pictures of death hans holbein the younger, (hans lützelburger, block-cutter), figure . monk calf, woodcut lucas cranach the elder, figure . papal ass, woodcut lucas cranach the elder, figure . fool, from the pictures of death hans holbein the younger, figure . physician and assistant, woodcut hans weiditz, figure . king, from the pictures of death hans holbein the younger, (hans lützelburger, block-cutter), figure . portrait of francis i jean clouet, figure . physiognomic illustration text by bartolomeus cocles, figure . physiognomic illustration text by bartolomeus cocles, figure . angel with the sudarium, woodcut albrecht dürer, figure . portrait of jacob meyer hans holbein the younger, figure . portrait of bonifacius amerbach hans holbein the younger, figure . portrait of desiderius erasmus with a renaissance pilaster hans holbein the younger, figure . portrait of desiderius erasmus hans holbein the younger, figure . portrait of derich born hans holbein the younger, figure . copy after whitehall mural remigius van leemput, figure . portrait of anne of cleves hans holbein the younger, figure . portrait of christina of denmark hans holbein the younger, figure . portrait of desiderius erasmus hans holbein the younger, figure . portrait of desiderius erasmus quentin massys, figure . portrait medal of desiderius erasmus quentin massys, figure . portrait of desiderius erasmus albrecht dürer, figure . self-portrait hans holbein the younger, - microsoft word - - .doc econstor make your publications visible. a service of zbw leibniz-informationszentrum wirtschaft leibniz information centre for economics calabi, donatella working paper foreigners and the city: an historiographical exploration for the early modern period nota di lavoro, no. . provided in cooperation with: fondazione eni enrico mattei (feem) suggested citation: calabi, donatella ( ) : foreigners and the city: an historiographical exploration for the early modern period, nota di lavoro, no. . , fondazione eni enrico mattei (feem), milano this version is available at: http://hdl.handle.net/ / standard-nutzungsbedingungen: die dokumente auf econstor dürfen zu eigenen wissenschaftlichen zwecken und zum privatgebrauch gespeichert und kopiert werden. sie dürfen die dokumente nicht für öffentliche oder kommerzielle zwecke vervielfältigen, öffentlich ausstellen, öffentlich zugänglich machen, vertreiben oder anderweitig nutzen. sofern die verfasser die dokumente unter open-content-lizenzen (insbesondere cc-lizenzen) zur verfügung gestellt haben sollten, gelten abweichend von diesen nutzungsbedingungen die in der dort genannten lizenz gewährten nutzungsrechte. terms of use: documents in econstor may be saved and copied for your personal and scholarly purposes. you are not to copy documents for public or commercial purposes, to exhibit the documents publicly, to make them publicly available on the internet, or to distribute or otherwise use the documents in public. if the documents have been made available under an open content licence (especially creative commons licences), you may exercise further usage rights as specified in the indicated licence. www.econstor.eu this paper can be downloaded without charge at: the fondazione eni enrico mattei note di lavoro series index: http://www.feem.it/feem/pub/publications/wpapers/default.htm social science research network electronic paper collection: http://ssrn.com/abstract= the opinions expressed in this paper do not necessarily reflect the position of fondazione eni enrico mattei corso magenta, , milano (i), web site: www.feem.it, e-mail: working.papers@feem.it foreigners and the city: an historiographical exploration for the early modern period donatella calabi nota di lavoro . september kthc - knowledge, technology, human capital donatella calabi, dipartimento di storia dell'architettura, università iuav di venezia foreigners and the city: an historiographical exploration for the early modern period summary this paper will focus on the physical traces left by different minorities in the european city of the early modern age. looking to the urban context in the main important ports and commercial centers we can find violent conflicts, traditional uses, as well as new urban strategies by the governors to keep together (for economic and social purposes) city-dwellers and foreigners. the invention of specific buildings and the effect on the architectural language is often quite visible and a mean of cultural exchanges. keywords: city, history of architecture, modern age, foreigners, minorities this survey is part of the research carried out by the università politecnica delle marche (ancona) within the network of excellence "sustainable development in a diverse world" (sus.div), funded by the european commission, fp , contract no. cit -ct- - , and co-ordinated by feem under the scientific lead of k.u. leuven. the project web site is http://www.ebos.com.cy/susdiv/. address for correspondence: donatella calabi dipartimento di storia dell'architettura università iuav di venezia s. polo venezia italy phone: + fax: + e-mail: calabi@iuav.it . minorities in the early modern city: conflicts and new urban strategies. following the forecast of an issue of “time” of ten years ago, in the fifties of this century the american man will be a little more bronzed and a little less european in his appearance. as a necessity, he will be also more comprehensive toward that part of the humanity “different from him which in a certain proportion he brings in himself. the cover of the periodical showed an ideal portrait of a teenager who will be born with the grandchildren of our children. it reproduced the features of a multiethnic society. as it had left on the back of its shoulders even the memory of the racial conflicts always recurrent in its country, as well as of what happens in africa or in the eastern coast of the adriatic sea. oh, great virtue of the american optimism!” the periodical does’nt put in advance the question of how could be his home, the school where he studies, the town where he moves….. without entering in an imaginative territory, it’s easy to say that cities as human faces were modified in times even as a result of ethnic mixtures . it is well known that in europe, in the cities of the ancient régime the suspicion against the “alien” (foreigner because concerned by a different ethnical group, or religion) produced conflicts sometime explosive. but it is less known that this suspicion was sometimes at the origin of various organizations ways of the city’s spaces, of different interventions in the residential or working places topography, of new architectural patterns. my hypothesis is that the population movements, voluntary or imposed, and the consequent necessary cohabitation of different minorities in the city context often provoked new choices of urban strategy by the élites, often together with a diffusion of knowledges and a series of innovations dealing with the urban space. in my working program themes such as identity, belonging, citizenship will be analysed only following the view point of the role of the frontiers physically recognizable in the urban texture, of the circulation of physical and morphological patterns, of architectural languages. in short, from the research done until now, two conclusions may be drawn about foreigners in cities. first, their formal definition varied considerably from city to city. it also was transformed over time. just as the general notion of citizenship gradually shed its civic roots for a more national and statist framework, so too foreignness was transformed from mere non-localism to a more modernist notion of cultural and national difference. in the long transition from the later middle ages to the early modern era, however, "foreigner" and "citizen" were terms consistently understood as demarcating the outer limits of a lengthy continuum of locations within the complex luigi sampietro, lasciamo parlare l'oriente, in "il sole-ventiquattr'ore", agosto , p. . terrain of urban society and politics. this spectrum housed many intermediate categories between the two poles of citizens and foreigners, for example that of "residents", that is, non-citizens who were nevertheless integrated in many significant ways. it is evident that this history can be studied only on the longue durée: longue durée of considered events in the chosen case-studies and longue durée of my work, which can advance only step by step. in fact, it seems to me that this subject has an historiographical interest and at the same time it registers a sensibility by the scientific community toward questions of ethnical mixture, put in evidence by the transformations going on in some european capital cities. we need to ask for scholars in urban history, institutional and architectural history, history of religions, of ethnical groups in the universities and research centers. important themes will be: - the spatial features of the segregation (imposed or voluntary chosen); - the production of specific buildings, the uses, the reinterpretation of spaces given to the minorities by the élites, the circulation of architectural knowledges and building techniques. it is not easy to cover homogeneously a territory (the european one), nor a chronological well defined period (since the xv to the xviii century): but it is the case to try to limit it. . cultural exchanges and physical traces within the city. since the beginning of this research, i was interested to the problem of the physical localization of the cultural exchanges; in fact i can be considered an “expert” of the place and the shape taken by the inter-national, inter-ethnic and inter-religion relations in the urban context, which is the real subject of this essay. i decided to let aside legal questions. in fact early modern europeans reached little consensus on exactly how to define "foreigners" in the context of the city. jurisprudence, privileges and charters, and political constitutions distinguished the categories of aliens, strangers, and denizens from burghers, citizens, and inhabitants. "foreigner" was a less precise term. a catch-all designation, it signified in most cities the mirror opposite of a citizen. the latter was a person, usually of local birth, whose ownership of property and concern for reputation endowed him or her with a "permanent fixed interest" in society, to use the famous expression of colonel ireton in the putney debates of . yet foreigners not only lacked local roots and rights. they were also seen as possessing identities different from those of citizens. these identities were from cultural, linguistic, religious, and ethnic. looking to the future, they also could be called, with a certain amount of anachronism, "national", in the sense of referring to subjects of a different sovereign. three basic facts of urban life should be kept in mind when discussing the evolving presence of foreigners in late medieval and early modern european towns. first, in most cities a large number, and in some cases the majority of townsmen were "strangers", in the sense of not having been born in the city itself. second, these outsiders were usually not foreigners in terms of hailing from different countries or even regions (another anachronistic designation, but one evoking an important marker of cultural limits). rather, most came from the nearby countryside, or from other cities in the same country. third, as a rule, the larger the city, the greater the proportion of migrants, and the broader the catchment area from whence they came. thus, in late seventeenth- century london-- by that point the largest city in western europe-- some two-thirds to three-fourths of all adult inhabitants had been born elsewhere.i that a substantial number of these self-made metropolitans crossed political and other borders to reach their new home was a characteristic london shared with other large cities, such as paris, rome, amsterdam, madrid, and istanbul. taking all these questions in account, the main important hypothesis of my work can be summarized as follows: what characterizes europe since the middle ages is an intense circulation of men, commodities, and ideas. traces of foreigners are often among the most significant signs of the contamination which distinguished the historical stratification of the european city. in fact, foreigners’ traces may be identified: whole districts, such as the jews’ ghettos, or the area where greeks inhabited; significant isolated buildings belonging to the foreigners’ settlements, such as churches, confraternities, colleges, hospitals; specific building typologies, often common around the euro-mediterranean area, introduced to accommodate foreigners’ needs and offer appropriated spaces for exchange, such as exchanges, fonducs, drapperie, warehouses; places where people was often meeting, such as courts or universities: all these were for us subjects of analysis, it appears therefore as essential, in order to understand the cultural complexity that derives from this movement, to further stress the importance and contribution of foreigners in the making of european cultural heritage. one effective way, we believe, of doing it is by integrating these traces of foreign presence into appropriately designed broader networks of protection and valorisation. organised on a thematic basis – founded on research and cataloguing – these networks could even aim to promote, integrate, give visibility and accessibility to such a heritage. in fact cities most clearly serve to promote cultural transfer in their role as centres for the circulation of news and ideas. the period - is marked both by the formalisation of spaces and buildings that served that role and by the proliferation of new ways to store and circulate information, not least in print. the dominant commercial centres were the most notable for the dissemination of print culture and, as in other periods, the business world was to the fore in adopting new forms of information technology. by the s printed lists of commodity prices were in use in antwerp. significantly, they were, and for long continued to be, in italian, the business language of antwerp, an indication that the lists were derived from italian business practice. venice and antwerp were especially notable in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries as centres for gathering and circulating information about the world. in that role they served wide markets outside their own territories and it is possible to see a large part of their printed output as expressing an outlook and culture of types which we would today associate with the wall street journal and the new york times. the antwerp presses and humanist circles played an important part in distributing italian culture in northern europe. key texts on architecture, for example, were printed in antwerp in dutch and german translations only a few years after their first publication in venice. in the seventeenth century amsterdam fulfilled a similar role, while towards the end of the century london began to do the same, not least in business publications. such cities offered unique opportunities for encounters with the strange and the exotic and so stimulated interest in different cultures and the assimilation of new tastes and ideas. guicciardini, whose descrittione di tutti i paesi bassi could serve as a foundation text for the study of cities and cultural transfer, noted the presence in antwerp of commodities from throughout europe and the world. the city’s merchants, he wrote, in words which identify characteristics common to successful commercial aristocracies in many historical contexts, were humane, ingenious, and ready both to imitate and to establish relations with the stranger. they kept up with fashion and spoke several languages. antwerp artisans made many goods in foreign styles, using techniques imported from the mediterranean region, some of which had recently been transferred from bruges, antwerp’s predecessor as a commercial metropolis. it was not until the late seventeenth century that london could boast a comparable material, technical and intellectual culture, which in several respects traced its ancestry to antwerp. two antwerp stories epitomise the city’s role as a site for encounters with the new. it was through antwerp, according to guiccardini, that germany learned of the portuguese voyages, and german merchant families were attracted thence by the market in spices that the city owed to the portuguese. at about the same time thomas more set in antwerp his fictional traveller’s relation of utopia: it could have taken place nowhere else. with this perspective, the research has to be focused particularly on the areas of cities of social- political, ethnic, linguistic and religious complexity. the aim of the work has been to encourage researchers of different geographical and cultural origins, as well as various specialists (geographers, political, social, economical, cultural, architectural historians) to discuss together the rich complexities of the european city, having in mind their different role (port, capital, industrial, financial, artizanal centres) and the frequent overlapping of these functions. i am convinced that, by crossing distinct approachs and ways of reading the urban reality, it is possible to offer a more precise analysis of some of the european cities and their urban milieu as sites of significant cultural encounters, cultural exchanges and cultural innovations . a subject as vast as the one proposed needs an interdisciplinary approach and investigations of varying scale. but to prevent the areas covered by the lectures from becoming too disconnected from each other, in terms of subject matter, it would be essential to tie the contributions to specific cases and to use questionnaires to establish beforhand the points of view of each contribution. several workshops in the frame of the european science foundation held between and focused on the following six arenas, which represented some of the main locations in which cultural exchanges between city-dwellers and foreigners took place in europe's cities - : ) places of exchange of money: bourses/money exchanges. ) zones of hospitality: hotels, the foreign house, the fondaco, hospitals, assistential institutions, foreigners' districts, foreigners' churches and cemetries.. ) centres of prestige culture: mainly universities, but also theatres, academies. ) the privileged foreign area: areas privileged for political reasons, e.g. protected by extra- territorial status, ambassadors' quarters. ) fairs, market places, commercial streets: the market of goods: - privilegies granted to foreign trade or limitations imposed on it. - limitations as well as their transgression with regard to imitations of foreigners and foreign products. - the corporative defense between citizens and foreigners. ) shops: the market of art. circulation of artists and of their models. specific cities (rome, constantinopole) and their monuments as sources of models for the travelling artists. in this paper i will focus on some of the main important among them. this is not a new question: the department of history of architecture held during a so-called "permanent seminar" with the maison des sciences de l'homme in paris and in venice, between the and the on the "the foreigner and the city", which results were published in two different books, one in italian la città italiana e i luoghi degli stranieri, bari, laterza and one in french les etrangers dans la ville, paris, msh . afterwords a research group was constituted by the european science foundation on cities and cultural exchanges, which work will be published by rhe cambridge university press in (d. calabi and s. turk christensen editors). it is a new initiative, but there are linkages of continuity with the previous one (some of the participants were members also of the italo-french seminar). . places of exchange of money: bourses/money exchanges . the commercial cities of early-modern europe contained buildings specifically devoted to housing gatherings of merchants active in international trade and finance. often they were key sites for the acquisition of information and new forms of knowledge, for linguistic exchange, and for dealing in money, credit, and expensive consumer goods. sometimes justice was administered there. they were focal points in the cities, contributing to their identity and to their political and social life. . important to be identified their roles in processes of cultural exchange. during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, these buildings and institutions themselves embodied processes of cultural exchange, and served as models that were imitated in other countries. their many different names -- bourse in france and the low countries, bourse and then ‘exchange’ in england, lonja in spain, and loggia or portico del cambio, or della mercanzia in italy -- to varying degrees indicate their functions and architectural forms. thus the term loggia (loge, lonja, laube) has distinct connotations of architectural form (a gallery open on one side) and has been used widely to denote a covered space for meetings of nobles or financiers set aside from the bustle of the market place and passing traffic. examples from the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries include the loggia of "nobles" in siena, those of ‘merchants’ in bologna and venice, the one of the bourgeois in bruges, the ‘round table’ of leuven, and the maison aux piliers in the place de la grève in paris. these places in some ways correspond to the ‘consulate of the sea’, the casa de contratación or the taula de canvi in barcelona. the sixteenth century witnessed a widespread building or rebuilding of such structures, often on a large scale and with impressive architectural effect. for centuries the venetian banks, precarious enterprises in an economy characterized by instability, retained a simple physical form similar to that of the modest moneychanger’s table depicted by carpaccio at san giorgio degli schiavoni ( ). the essence of this arrangement was the openness of the transaction, demonstrated by the presence of ready money. these tables stood in the central square of the market island of rialto and in were replaced on the same site by the public banco-giro with an open gallery at ground level. by about , when secular public banks began to be established in rome, milan, rotterdam, amsterdam, hamburg, delft, and nuremberg, the siting of the venetian bank within its square was probably a significant model, indicating a part of this chapter was written by me together with derek keene (whom i am gratefull for the permission to re-use it here) for the book by d. calabi ans s. turk christensebn (editors), cities and cultural exchanges to be published by the cambridge university press ( ). d. calabi, il mercato e la città, (venice, ), - . j. ainaud, j. guidiol, f. p. verrié, la ciudad de barcelona (catalogo monumental de españa) (madrid, ), vol. i, . vittore carpaccio, vocazione di san matteo, ca: venice, school of san giorgio degli schiavoni: on the left the painter represented a shop and a bank of money change. clear separation between large-scale financial transactions and the every-day business of the market place. the name bourse (borsa, börse) has a flemish origin and derived from the home of the van den boeurse family in bruges. ludovico guicciardini, in his descrittione di tutti i paesi bassi, first published in , a work which did much to spread the fame of the antwerp bourse, recounts this derivation of the name. the building in bruges had an interior court, a large staircase and four big windows looking on to the central market place where international merchants customarily assembled, so that “all the rest of the city seemed almost empty” . in the fourteenth century the house was acquired by the city of bruges and came to be used as a covered extension to the square. this pattern was transferred to buildings and squares with loggias and galleries at antwerp, rouen, toulouse and london, built or designated as places where merchants could assemble out of the way of passing traffic and other impediments. at antwerp, the bourse, later the oude bourse, resembled a general market rather than a loggia, and was created in behind the great market . in some respects this ensemble resembled the rialto square in venice. in , the city of antwerp built a new, more elaborate bourse, for the enormous sum of . golden crowns. the old bourse was not demolished, but this new one was intended to provide a more sophisticated environment for business, incorporating italian spatial principles and an architectural melting of brabantine and iberian gothic styles. the main language on the antwerp bourse was now italian and its business was coming to be dominated by financial and credit transactions following italian models. the architect, dominikus van wagemakere, kept the old distributive scheme . protected spaces of this type for trade proliferated. in king henry iv of france issued an edict, published in , for the institution of a ‘common square (place) in rouen for all the merchants’, stating that it was to be ‘similar to the exchange of lyon and to that of toulouse, with d. calabi, p. morachiello, rialto: le fabbriche e il ponte, (turin, ), - and footnotes. ludovico guicciardini, descrittione di tutti i paesi bassi, altrimenti detti germania inferiore, (antwerp, ), - , - of the french translation published in antwerp in . l. monga (ed.), un mercante di milano in europa, diario di viaggio del primo cinquecento, (milan, ), - (i^ ed. - , v. - r.) l. monga, , ( v.). f. cattois, a. verdier, architecture civile et domestique au moyen age et à la renaissance, (paris, - ), . g. braun, f. hoghenberg, civitates orbis terrarum, (coloniae agrippinae, - ), vol. i., tav. "antverpia"; j. materné, ‘schoon ende bequaem tot versamelinghe der cooplieden. de antwerpse beurs tijdens de gouden deeeuw’, in g. de clercq (ed.), ter beurze. geschiedenis van de aandelenhandel in belgië, - (antwerp, bruges, ) p. subacchi, ‘italians in antwerp in the second half of the sixteenth century’ in h. soly and a.k.l. thijs, minderheden in westeuropese steden ( de- ste eeuw) (brussels, ), pp. - guicciardini, pp. - . the aim that there, as usual, merchants and their factors can meet twice a day and make their traffic, enterprises and commerce’ and bring there ‘all the merchandise of foreign countries’. the antwerp building, site of the most dynamic market in europe, had a widespread influence, most directly on london and then on amsterdam, which by , as a consequence of the disturbances of the southern netherlands, was taking on many of the commercial functions of antwerp. in the amsterdam authorities decided to establish a new building for mercantile transactions, to be placed in the southern side of the dam by the city architect hendrik de keyser. the new building accommodated its first assembly of merchants in august and was solemnly inaugurated in , yet its monumental courtyard was soon too small to contain the multitude of curious visitors. the scheme followed that of the antwerp exchange and the architect visited the recently-completed exchange in london, which was on the antwerp model. the open rectangular courtyard was surrounded by a portico with twenty-three arcades, supported by forty-five granite columns with doric capitals. in the two long sides of the exterior were vaults to accommodate shops at ground level. on the short sides, central arcades gave access to the court, crossing a bridge over the water. above one of them was a tower with a carillon clock to regulate trading activity. each of the columns in the interior was associated with trade in a different commodity. more than four hundred commodity prices were listed in the weekly-price bulletins, that amsterdam had regularly sent to the other places in europe since . rules governed the times of opening; prohibited access to beggars and those carrying arms; and forbade lamentation, outrages and children’s games. from its the origin the bourse was regarded as one of the city’s most important monuments, mentioned by visitors and represented by painters and engravers. . the conte de montesquieu was overwhelmed and frightened by the multitude, which almost prevented him walking. by , the building was perceived as too small for its business and an extension was added. in spain lonjas for the accommodation of merchants were established in several cities from the fourteenth century onwards. seville’s late sixteenth-century casa lonja de mercaderes (or lonja acte royal - - . edict du roy sur la création et l'établissement en la ville de rouen d'une place commune pour les marchandsà la similitude et semblance du change de lyon et bourse de toulouse,rouen, xx juillet . p. schaltema, de boeurs van amsterdam, (amsterdam, ). l. j. wagenaar, 'les mécanismes de la prosperité', in amsterdam xvii siècle, (paris ), - . jéremias de decker, quoted in amsterdam xvii siècle; gottfried hegenitii itinerarium frisio-hollandicum et abr. ortelii itinerarium gallo-brabanticum, (lugduni, ); osservazioni nel viaggio di d. franc. belli fatto col signor luigi giorgi ambasciatore di venetia a gli stati di olanda e di la francia, (venetia, ); p. j. blok (ed.), relazioni veneziane, (venetianske berichten over de veerigde nederlanden van - ), (den haghen, ), (paper by antonio donato), ; w. brereton, travels in holland, the united provinces, england, scotland and ireland, (london, ); evelyn, the diary of john evelyn, (edited by w. bray), (london, ), ; c. joly, les voyage de munster, d'hollande, d'osnabrugh, varendorph, des pais bas et de cologne, (paris, ), - ; ch.-l. montesquieu, voyage in hollande de ch. louis de secondat baron de montesquieu, publiè par albert de montesquieu, (bordeaux, ), . de commercio) is exceptional, both for its scale (it covered at least three times the area of the next largest commercial loggias, at palma and zaragoza) and for its architectural character. in the latter respect it resembles the great exchanges of the northern cities, even if not explicitly modelled on them. the foreign influence was italian . the casa lonja was palatial in form, with basilican elements (used as audience halls and council chambers) arranged around a porticoed courtyard and with a fine staircase leading to the upper floor. the story is well known. in response to the complaint of the bishop of seville against the merchants of the consulado de commercio, who had taken over the steps of the cathedral as a site for their business, king philip ii in authorized the building of a house of commerce on a nearby site occupied by the casa de contratación de las indias. the budget for the project was set at , ducats, with more than ducats set aside to pay the architect. the original scheme, by juan de herrera who was at that time engaged on the escorial, was later developed by juan de minjares with the collaboration of andrea and alfonso de vandelvira. this monumental, autonomous building stands isolated in the centre of the city, an effect increased by the steps and the pillars and chains which surround it. the chains may refer to the site of las gradas, where the merchants had earlier traded by the cathedral, to which the casa lonja was the successor. to finance this project the consulate of commerce was authorized to impose a special tax on all merchandise entering and leaving seville by land or sea, a source of revenue so prolific as to permit magnificence in building and materials and workmanship of high quality. the merchants of the indies brought materials from afar, including stone from portugal and bricks from malaga incorporating chalk from avana. more than seventy skilled workers were continuously active on the site; the architects and surveyors had to dedicate their time exclusively to the project; and the use of slave labour was prohibited. work began in and was officially complete in , although as late as it was proving difficult to persuade the merchants of seville to transfer their business to the lonja, away from accustomed places of trade. the casa lonja housed administrative and juridical as well as commercial functions. it became the seat both p.g. garcía, archivo general de indias (madrid, ), which contains a historical account plus photographs, plans and other illustrations of the establishment. v. lamperez y romea, arquitectura civil española de los siglos i al xviii, (madrid, ), t. ii, . gestozo y perez, sevilla monumental y artistica, (sevilla, ), vol. iii, - ; s. izquierdo alvarez, 'felipe ii y el urbanismo moderno', in anales de geografia de la universidad complutense, , ( ), - ; c. wilkinson- zernmer, juan de herrera: architect to philip ii of spain, (new haven, ). t. falcon, la capilla del sagrario de la catedral de sevilla, (sevilla, ). a. morgado, historia de sevilla el qual se contiren sus antiguidades, grandezas…hasta nuestros tiempos, (sevilla, ), par. ii. d. sanchez-meza, "el rinascimiento in andalusia", in historia de andalusia, (sevilla, ), vol. ix; l. garcia fuentes, un ejemplo de la industria de la construccion en sevilla en los s. y : la casa lonja, in andalucia y america en el siglo xvii, (seville, ), i, - ; v. pérez escolano, 'ciudad y espacios de comercio en la españa del siglo xvi. una aproximación al hilo de la lonja de mercaderes de sevilla'; a. marín fidalgo, 'la lonja de los mercaderes. intervención de las autoridades del alcázar sevillano en la génesis de su construcción', both in juan de herrera y su influencia: actas del simposio, edited by m.a. aramburu-zabala and j. gómez martínez, camargo, - july (universidad de cantabria, santander ), - and - respectively. of the consulado de cargadores de las indias and of the casa de contratación, bodies which governed all trade with the americas, regulating contracts, shipping and migration and exercising commercial jurisdiction. much of the business at the lonja concerned dealing in commodities. brokers (corredores) had bases there and parts of the building were used for storing merchandise. nevertheless, the core of its activity lay in commodity transactions, finance, commercial credit, money exchange and maritime insurance. with the transfer to cadiz of the monopoly of trade with the new world in , the casa lonja lost its great commercial function, but the transformation of the building into the archivo general de indias during the s gave it a new role as a symbol of commercial exchange and of knowledge of distant worlds. the complex story of london’s royal exchange introduces the conclusion to this point since it highlights several important characteristics of the role of exchanges in cultural transfer. apart from the king’s exchange (cambium) for coin, which occupied various sites in the city from the twelfth century onwards, london did not have a merchants’ exchange until, between and , a ‘bursse’ was built on a site in the angle between cornhill and threadneedle street, where its successor now stands opposite the bank of england. following the queen’s visit in , this splendid building was named the royal exchange. there were precedents in london for buildings that provided shelters and controlled sites for trade. the congregation of merchants took place in the open street, which was narrow and disturbed by passing traffic. from a chain was placed across the street during trading, but there remained discomforts occasioned by the weather. by that date it had been proposed to move the merchants from lombard street to leadenhall, and in the s the idea of setting up an antwerp-style bourse at leadenhall was seriously discussed. then it was proposed to build a bourse in lombard street on the site of the house known as the pope’s head, the former headquarters of the bardi. in the s plans to build a bourse in lombard street were revived, but it proved impossible to acquire the intended site and so the exchange was established a block away, opposite pope’s head alley. the new bourse, funded by thomas gresham the leading english merchant and financier active in antwerp, was a powerful ‘modern’ statement in the distinctive manner of antwerp architecture. c. h. haring, comercio y navegacion entre españa y las indias, (mexico, , ). a. m. bernal, credito y financiacion en la carrera de indias - , (sevilla, ). a. saunders, ed., the royal exchange (london topographical society, no. , ) surveys many aspects of the institution and its buildings. d. keene, ‘the setting of the royal exchange: continuity and change in the financial district of the city of london, - ’, in saunders, the royal exchange, pp. - ; d. keene, ‘wardrobes in the city: houses of consumption, finance and power’, in m. prestwich, r. britnell and r. frame (eds.), thirteenth-century england vii (woodbridge, ), pp. - . j. imray, ‘the origins of the royal exchange’ in saunders, royal exchange, pp. - ; keene, ‘continuity and change’. the overall design – a spacious open courtyard surrounded by arcaded galleries where merchants could gather in bad weather, with shops or stalls on the floor above the galleries, and a tower where a bell sounded the hours of trading – closely resembled that of antwerp’s new bourse of , even to the number of thirty-six great columns in the arcades. moreover, the architect of the london bourse was an antwerp mason, hendryck van paesschen, who had been involved in the building of antwerp’s new town hall (largely complete by ) and perhaps in work on gresham’s private house in antwerp. stones for the building and slates for the roof were brought to london from antwerp. the former included the pierebize (a dark stone probably resembling ‘tournai marble’) used for the thirty-six columns, the ‘jasper marble’ used for columns at an upper level and for the most important columns at the two entries from the street, and the black and white marble slabs used for paving the galleries, all described admiringly by a french visitor in . the english identity of the building was proclaimed by arms and inscriptions and by a scheme for bronze statues of english monarchs, from william the conqueror onwards, which would look down on the courtyard. otherwise the building’s most powerful message was that london belonged to the world of antwerp, the market which more than any other united the commerce of europe and provided links to italy, spain and new worlds across the atlantic. there was another foreign allusion in the name that was soon applied to the vaults beneath the galleries, where linen was sold. this was ‘new venice’, probably because it was an obscure area to which light penetrated only through iron grilles. this building immediately struck visitors as one of the sights and identifying monuments of london. well into the nineteenth century the royal exchange remained high on the list of ‘must sees’ for foreign visitors, who among other things could often find their countrymen there and obtain the news, letters and financial services that they required. along with the antwerp bourse it provided a model for amsterdam’s exchange completed in . the building which replaced the first royal exchange after the great fire of was larger than its predecessor and was admired for its grandeur, but in its architecture and decoration expressed a purely english identity. that reflected its design by two london builders competent but not of international reputation, and of the now greatly enhanced standing of london as a commercial metropolis. . special zones of hospitality: the “fondaci” saunders, royal exchange, - . this french visitor’s description is in vatican library, reg lat , fos. - (approximately translated in saunders, royal exchange, - ). for the building process, see saunders, - . part of this chapter was written by me together with derek keene (whom i am gratefull for the permission to re-use it here) for the book by d. calabi ans s. turk christensebn (editors), cities and cultural exchanges to be published by the cambridge university press ( ) the term fondaco comes from the arab words funduq, or warehouse, and fhondac, which means pub. it can also be traced back to the greek pandokion, or hotel, where people, animals and goods in transit could be lodged . it was often a two- or three-storey structure, with large premises on the ground floor to accommodate the people and goods passing through, which faced onto a busy central space used for many different purposes. a series of more permanent merchants' residences were found on the floor above, accessible from a gallery which ran around the inner court . in andalusia, the almudì (at times alholì or alfolì) was an important building for the grain market in particular, while the alhóndiga was a large depository and store for the same products, and the alfhondac served as a pub, hotel and hospice. in general, the fondaco was both, a building or a group of buildings where one could live and store products destined to trade or consumption. it often hosted foreign merchants. the early fondaci were public, governed directly by the state to protect its interests, through specially assigned organisms. they existed practically everywhere in europe, with names such as entrepôt, grenier, kornhaus, kaufhaus and cornhaus. at the beginning they were places where wheat or flour was traded; later on, they became depositories for other grains or products as well (wine, salt). the basic layout allowed it to be classified in typological terms. it was characterised, on one hand, by the separation between the private spaces of those who owned the fondaco or to whom it was designated, and the transitory spaces to which 'outsiders' also had access, and, on the other, by the combined presence of services, residences and premises where animals could be kept and imports conserved. the necessary ties between warehousing, government control and taxation could or could not be facilitated by the structures themselves. public or private interests could or could not be posed in contradictory terms. in some geographical and political contexts, these warehouses–lodgings constituted the presupposition and the physically centralised framework of a commercial port. the fondaco was always state-owned and designated to a specific use. it generally took on the characteristics of an island within the city, a specific market within a commercial center. it was a form of public interference in trade, of regulation aimed at impeding buy-ups, scarcity, competition and price fluctuation. the venetian system storing of goods was quickly extended to out-of-towners. germans, turks, persians, arabs, greeks, armenians and people from florence or lucca who had ongoing relationships with the venetian market were gradually able to take commercial advantage of a 'residence' designated specifically to them . in the sixteenth century, the venetian magistracies e. concina, fondaci: architettura, arte e mercatura tra levante, venezia e alemagna, venice , pp. - . le tourneau, under the headings funduk and khan in encyclopédie de l'islam, cit. r.c. mueller, stranieri e culture straniere a venezia: aspetti economici e sociali, in “ateneo veneto”, , pp. - ; r.c. mueller, mercanti e imprenditori fiorentini a venezia nel tardo medioevo, in “società e storia”, , , pp. - ; l. molà, le comunità dei lucchesi a venezia. immigrazione e industria della seta nel tardo medioevo, venice were actually intent on using real estate and foreigners' associative bonds as a means of control. resettling the jews in an eccentric area suited to limiting their freedom of movement was not the only example . what was established for natives became valid for the out-of-towners, whose role in venice's economy was well-known. in a "land frequented by many people of every language and country" , living 'together' as opposed to 'dispersed' throughout the city, in an area that could be kept under surveillance and in which they could organise themselves according their own customs and traditions, was considered a conquest and a guarantee for whoever was part of, or felt themselves part of, an ethnic minority . albergarie that offered facilities for living and for storing merchandise as well as the possibility of maintaining one's own government (and, at one time, guaranteed a continuous tax revenue to the republic) were conceded, over the years, to the armenians at san giuliano, the germans at san bartolomeo, the turks at san matteo (rialto) and the lucchese at rialto nuovo. given what went on there, their role as a mandatory 'landing place' and their physical autonomy, the foreign fondaci were among the most significant 'port' structures in the lagoon, quite analogous to those that already existed in the east, in particular, in byzantium and the islamic countries or in alexandria or the areas most frequently visited by venetian merchants . when the signoria assigned a residence to the germans between and , it also founded (as it had for flour) a magistracy, the visdomini al fondaco . the common interests and reciprocal advantages were unquestionable as the alemanni contributed a great deal to the city's wealth and put their monies to good use in the venetian banks. before , someone estimated the fondaco's business at , , ducats a year! when the neighbourhood was destroyed by fire one winter night in , these interests were protected by the merchants who hurried out to save 'their own'. it was impossible for the republic not to intervene immediately. revealing an extraordinary decision-making and operative capacity compared to the norm on the city's large public works, the senate voted to reconstruct the fondaco ; d. calabi, gli stranieri e la città, in storia di venezia, v, il rinascimento: società ed economia, edited by a. tenenti and u. tucci, rome , pp. - ; d. calabi, gli stranieri nella capitale della repubblica veneta nella prima età moderna, in mélanges de l’ecole française de rome, italie et méediterranée, ( ), , pp. - ; les etrangers dans la ville, edited by j. bottin and d. calabi, paris . b. ravid, the establishment of the ghetto of venice, in gli ebrei e venezia, edited by g. cozzi, milan , pp. - . as francesco sansovino noted with regard to the jews in the city, venetia città nobilissima, et singolare, venetia , p. (cf. also the edition with the additions by g. martinioni, venetia , p. ). calabi, il ghetto e la città, cit., pp. - ; d. calabi, la cité des juifs en italie entre xv et xvi siècle, in les etrangers dans la ville, cit. , pp. - . g. dagron, la città bizantina, in modelli di città, turin, , pp. - . h. simonsfeld, der fondaco dei tedeschi in venedig, stuttgart ; cessi-alberti, rialto, cit., p. ; k.e. lupprian, il fondaco dei tedeschie la sua funzionedi controllo del commercio tedesco a venezia, venice (centro tedesco di studi veneziani, quaderno no. ). at its own expense. the job was entrusted to the supervision of francesco garzoni, provveditore al sale, and some houses acquired to enlarge the surface area available to the new building. exactly who designed the building is uncertain . a competition was held and at least three models were presented to the senate: two by giorgio spavento, at that time proto dei procuratori di san marco and one by a certain gerolamo, a german master considered an "intelligent and practical man", of which any further trace has been lost. the third project was chosen, on the grounds that it was more pleasing to the final users. the building became a model that was followed in an approximate way in many distant situations and a prototype in architectural literature and travel narration . the form of the new fondaco, which still exists, was 'perfect' and something unusual in venice. the plan reproduced a 'greek'-style forum: a square, central open space, enclosed between porticoes and loggias above, onto which a series of rooms – storage and living spaces – opened along the perimeter. perhaps it was actually the resemblance between this layout and the proposal the veronese friar made four years later for the post-fire reconstruction that led to the attribution mentioned above. all we know about the proposal comes from vasari's description of a "closed" market with shops around a centre courtyard or, better yet, a piazza surrounded by loggias . doubts have also been raised, however, by the architectural language . the "zente todesca" lived here and went to their own church, organising their community life around figures of high finance or culture (well-known poets, musicians, painters). from time to time they held ceremonies, encounters, festivals and masked balls open to the public , establishing a community that while sometimes closed within itself, was often open to the surrounding city and certainly not only or always paced by the market clock . the form of the fondaco of san bartolomeo is rectangular and rigorous, new and atypical in venice, even if orchestrated in a rudimental way. perhaps spavento and scarpagnino tried to put into practice, as best they could, the summary indications of the friar, a great architectural theoretician. in any case, the building has a clearly identifiable typological layout, both a re-thinking of a more than -year-old pre-existing example and a model for future works. the not so distant fondaco dei persiani must have been quite similar, it too overlooking the grand m.t. dazzi, sull'architetto del fondaco dei tedeschi, venice ; e. padoan, il fondaco dei tedeschi a venezia, in "emporium", ( ), pp. - ; f. forlati, il restauro del fondaco dei tedeschi, in "palladio", iv ( ), pp. - . petrus contarenus in m. andream grittum panegyris ( ): bnmv, ms. lat. xiv, (= ), iii, fol. v; and ms. lat. xiv, (= ), fol. ; cf. also jacopo morelli, notizie d'opere di disegno nella prima metà del secolo xvi, bassano , p. ; a. melani, fra' giocondo veronese e il fondaco dei tedeschi, in "arte e storia", , p. . vasari, le vite, cit., vol. v, pp. - ; cf. also r. brenzoni, fra' giocondo veronese, florence , pp. - . v. fontana, fra' giovanni giocondo, cit., pp. - ; m. tafuri, la "nuova costantinopoli". la rappresentazione della "renovatio" nella venezia dell'umanesimo ( - ), in "rassegna", ( ), pp. - . marchands flamands à venise ( - ), edited by g. devos and w. brulez, brussels-rome . g.b. milesio, beschreibung des deutschen hauses in venedig, munich ; m. caffi, a proposito del fondaco dei tedeschi, in "arte e storia", ( ), p. . canal and it too on a corner of a minor rio (rio della fava) in the neighbourhood of san giovanni crisostomo . a stone foot bridge at the corner of the bridge 'dell'olio' led to a massive rectangular block supported by wooden structure. on the various floors, open loggias, accessed by open wooden stairs, overlooked an obscure central courtyard. it was not the refinement of the architecture, but rather the self-enclosed plan, the darkness of the interior spaces, the scarce flow of air, the facades covered rugs and fabrics hung on display that recalled – perhaps the same associations to which it was designated – the crowded spaces of the markets of the east . in the four ruzzini, co-owners of the building, declared rent on fifty storage spaces, five shops and, on the ground floor, a residence with a shop. nonetheless, the number seems to have risen to seventy-four in the conditions issued by savi alle decime in and, even as many as in that of . the building, always classified as "dark, uncomfortable and very old" , was demolished in for sanitary reasons. though it came to be in a different way, in much later times, the 'magnificent' revival of the turks also seemed to refer to similar plan. from the fifteenth century on the ottomans' presence in the city was both feared and revered . mention was first made of a place assigned to them at san matteo (rialto), while another anonymous chronicler narrated that, at the time of the battle of the curzolari, they had established themselves in the barbaro residence in cannaregio . later, as they increased in number, they presumably lived throughout the city and, after lepanto and the revival of commerce with the levant, outbreaks of disorder were common. disadvantages, disruption, damage and scandals were daily history. the venetian government tried to find an appropriate residence. in the senate declared it necessary to avoid having the turks live 'scattered' throughout the city and urged the collegio and the v savi alla mecanzia to solicit the venetian nobles to procure a suitable palazzo . the city was hard pressed to find an acceptable place where these foreigners could transport and maintain their goods, receive assistance and be watched over. when the collegio and savi alla mercanzia finally gave the ottoman nation a palazzo on the grand canal, in the neighbourhood of san stae, quite a bit of work was required to adapt the splendid noble building into the residence for a foreign community. listing what had to be done in thirty- one meticulous chapters, the magistrates intended to propose a building model that would provide e. concina, structure urbaine et fonctions des batiments du xvi au xix siècle, venice , pp. , , . a. wiel, the demolition of the warehouse of the persians in venice, in "burlington magazine", ( ), pp. - . asv, savi alle decime, , b. , castello (declaration by carlo and marc'antonio ruzini, q. domenico); , b. , castello (declaration by ruzin ruzini, q. marc'antonio) and castello (marc'antonio ruzini, q. piero). b. imhaus, le minoranze orientali a venezia, - , rome . gallicciolli, delle memorie venete, cit., p. asv, compilazione leggi, june , b. , fol. ; march , b. , fol. r-v. "convenience" to its guests and security to the venetians. funds were allocated and the work completed in view of the maximum exploitation of the space and a rational layout (a large number of rooms with washing facilities, mezzanines, collective spaces). attention was given to guaranteeing considerable freedom of movement, without indiscretion and interference on the part of neighbours. all the doors to the outside were closed with the exception of the "main" entrance on the salizzata and the one on the rio, as were the windows toward the grand canal. the window sills on rio and salizzata were raised and the windows screened in larch on the exterior. clear separations were made on the interior as well, by creating a physical division between walkways and spatial environments of the different ethnic and religious groups (the asiatic component and the people from constantinople were set up toward the rio del megio and the fondaco of the same name, while the bosnians and the albanians were placed near the salizzata). everything was organised to assure easy provisioning (two rive, symmetrical with respect to the main entrance, open only for loading and unloading, and extra storage space on the ground floor). adequate services were provided (well-irrigated wells, daily cleaning, garbage collection, a ban against firearms), and a 'loyal' guardian hired for fulltime surveillance (a well-known citizen who was provided with independent lodgings, someone who had been "very christian" for several generations and could protect the venetians and their guests by forbidding women, stragglers or christians from entering). rents were partitioned equitably according to the size of the space and the number of users, and the traditions of "those populations" were respected by furnishing the kinds of sleeping accommodations to which they were accustomed. before the vast and highly debated project began in , the engineers in charge of the restoration described the division and details of the facade . the same formula – storage for goods and living quarters for their importers engaged in banking – was also found along the banks of the scheldt. the seat of the merchants confederated in the hanseatic league was a late parallel of the venetian fondaco dei tedeschi. the project was designed by the architect and sculptor cornelis floris de vriendt who, at the height of his career, also did a great deal of work for germanic clients. pieter kraus, hendrik van paesshen and peeter frans are mentioned as his collaborators. built between and , it was a 'true palace', and its beauty a wonder in the eyes of who beheld it, as firsthand witnesses like braun and hogenberg affirmed in the atlas published four years after the work's completion . before it was destroyed by fire , it was an imposing structure of x metres. like other contemporary mercantile buildings in the german speaking countries, it was simpler but similar, in its overall volume and in the rhythm of the facade windows, to the new town hall, built by the same architect in the same a. sagredo-f. berchet, il fondaco dei turchi in venezia, milan . braun-hogenberg, civitates, cit., pp. - . years ( - ) . its "splendid structure" had a central tower with a square base, done in beautiful stone, at the top of which a winged eagle marked the direction of the wind. the spacious square interior that could not lack in a complex of this kind was surrounded by a peristyle . granted to the anseatic cities in solemn celebration in , it must have been somewhat larger than necessary, given that only thirty of the rental apartments were actually occupied at the official opening. but this was probably not a problem, given that antwerp welcomed a large number of people from outside the city, as had bruges, where genoese, hanseatic, florentine, castilian merchants had all been headquartered . to the extent that "six major nations which in times of war as in times of peace resolutely resided here; there are more than germans and danes together; italians, spaniards, englishmen, portuguese [...] observe the laws of the country, but dress and do everything else freely in their own way". just as in the city of venice, antwerp saw to it that everyone was appropriately accommodated, so as to provide "greater freedom [...] than anywhere else in the world". the "superb lodging given to the english, called thof van lire, that is court of lira" was built by a member of the lire family, at the expense of the city, as a royal palace designed for emperor charles v's court. erected expressly for the merchants of england, it had sumptuous storage spaces, where the many goods brought over land could be unloaded. another "large and magnificent" building – as guicciardini noted enthusiastically – was the warehouse of the osterlins located next to the honoured seats of the spaniards, "of great and very great traffic"; the "ample and good tenement of portuguese"; and the buildings of the "many many french merchants". . universities exceptional mobility has long characterised european student populations. before the seventeenth century, when exclusionist laws effectively restricted many universities to subjects of their local territorial prince, the peregrinatio academica had contributed greatly to cultural exchange through the multiple daily interactions between young men from diverse european regions. reflecting the structure of university institutions and the necessities of student life, these contacts involved individuals from a very wide social spectrum. the great medieval studia were real meeting points which attracted ambitious young men, especially from areas where university-level institutions hitchcock, german renaissance, cit., pp. , . knight, london, cit., vol. ii, p. . h.c. scribanius, origines antverpiensium, antwerp ; j.b. van mol, anvers, antwerp , p. . this chapter is mainly based on the researches made by stefano zaggia, (s. zaggia, l’università di padova: la costruzione del bo e dell’orto botanico, venezia, marsilio ) whom i am gratefull for the informations he gave me. j. verger, ‘peregrinatio academica’, in g.p. brizzi and j. verger (eds.), le università dell’europa, vol. vi: le scuole e i maestri. l’età moderna, (milan: silvana editoriale, ), pp. - . were scarce. thus, for a long time it was mainly students from the german, scandinavian and slav regions who gravitated towards the major french, northern italian and low countries universities. studying the uses of urban spaces by these heterogenous student populations presents special problems, because they were very different from the many other foreign communities which acquired urban lodgings. nevertheless, there were distinct ‘latin quarters’ formed by the presence of individually-transient students over long periods. moreover, that presence was usually seasonal, linked to academic cycles, and often influenced by the individual experience of students whose periods of residence were short. not all university towns were equally involved with foreign students. only those universities possessing a studium generale sufficiently famous to attract widespread attention could draw in young men from afar. invariably, conditions differed from place to place, starting from chronology. in such places as paris, bologna, oxford, padua or coimbra, the university began in the formative period of medieval instruction and had long-term effects on the whole life of the town. in other cases, however, the studium was founded later, often by government fiat: at louvain, the university was founded at the desire of the duke of burgundy; at turin, the ateneo arose from the initiative of prince ludovico of savoy. in all these cases, the students played very different roles and had different degrees of importance. the impact of this group of young lodgers depended upon its size in relation to the town’s population as a whole. moreover, any assessment of that impact must take account of those who accompanied the students: only the richest of them could afford many servants, but it seems to have been quite common for a student to have at least one servant or assistant. a few universities attracted barely a dozen students and so had a negligible impact on their towns, but in other cases the university function became predominant and pervaded every aspect of urban life. marino berengo has retraced the history of conflict in small towns that boasted great universities, such as oxford, where violent clashes broke out in between student groups and municipal authorities over control of the market. that conflict ended in a ruling by the king that, in fact, sanctioned the ibid., p. . e.j.m. van eijl, ‘the foundation of the university of louvain’, in j. ijsewijn and j. parquet (eds.), the universities in the late middle ages (louvain: leuven university press, ), pp. - ; e. de maesschalck, ‘the relationship between the university and the city of louvain in the fifteenth century’, history of universities ( ), pp. - . d. balani, ‘lo studio tra città medievale e città barocca’, annali delle università italiane ( ), - . g. brizzi, ‘gli studenti e la città’ in the catalogue of a bologna exhibit of summer : p. bellettini, r. campioni and z. zanardi (eds.), una città in piazza. comunicazione e vita quotidiana a bologna tra cinque e settecento (bologna: compositori, ), pp. - , especially p. . intervention of university authorities in town management. in such places, the university could assume a hegemonic urban role, affecting economic, social or institutional arrangements. students enjoyed a privileged status within towns. for example, those who were foreigners were not subjected to the same conditions affecting other categories of foreigners resident in the town. moreover, the extent of their privileges often created a good deal of tension with the citizens, especially those who lodged them. and the scholars did not hesitate to defend their libertates against urban political authorities, sometimes with arrogance. while student populations are counted among urban minorities, they and their governors nevertheless constituted a highly- privileged élite with rights often denied to ordinary citizens. since the twelfth century those who left their native country in order to study were protected by imperial law (the so-called habita granted to bologna students by frederick barbarossa). later, a set of rules developed, often differing from town to town, that granted considerable autonomy to student associations and to individual students. provisions were adopted to attract young men seeking professional training, presuming their positive effect on the town's economy. these privileges usually included the right to lodging at a fair price; the right to carry arms for self- defence; exemption from customs duties when importing objects and goods; and the right to be tried by a separate and autonomous court. therefore, the medieval student body formed an autonomous association vis-à-vis other urban social groups, which served as organisational models. moreover, student ethics resembled those of the nobility. student institutions, controlling the relationship with urban political authorities and the university itself, comprised the nationes: associations of mutual assistance, friendship and protection (and often of mutual conflict), organised according to the student’s territory of origin or native language. in thirteenth-century bologna and padua, students already possessed wider assemblies: a universitas ultramontaniorum for students from transalpine territories and a universitas citramontanorum for students from italian territories. each group elected its own representatives and governing body. at padua, for example, twenty-two ‘nations’ were recognised in the university’s statutes, while bologna counted forty-six ‘national’ groups in . m. berengo, l’europa delle città. il volto della società urbana europea tra medioevo ed età moderna (torino: einaudi, ), pp. - . see especially hammer, ‘oxford town’, pp. - and w.a. pantin, oxford life in oxford archives (oxford: clarendon press, ), pp. - . p. kibre, scholarly privileges in the middle ages. the rights, privileges and immunities of scholars and universitates at bologna, padua, paris and oxford (london: medieval academy of america, ); p. denley, ‘students in middle ages’, in universitates e università (bologna: bologna university press, ), pp. - . f. piovan, ‘studenti e città nel diario di giovanni antonio da corte’, in piovan and sitran rea (eds.), studenti, università, città, pp. - , esp. p. . p. kibre, the nations in the mediaeval universities (cambridge mass.: medieval academy of america, ); g. fedalto, ‘la nazione ultramarina’, in piovan and sitran rea (eds.), studenti, università, città, pp. - . the proper functioning of any studium generale presupposed the availability of adequate lodgings for scholars who moved there in order to attend the professors' lessons. at both bologna and paris, this problem emerges vividly in documents dating from the late twelfth century. the usual solution, following negotiations between municipal officials and student organisations, was to impose controls on rents, checked often by joint committees representing both the municipality and the students. while students from rich families did not need such legislative protection, the relations between student lodgers and landlords frequently led to dramatic conflict. the concept of pre- emption spread, requiring any building once rented to a student or professor to remain subject to university uses. moreover, some mid sixteenth-century jurists, when describing the privileges of scholars, argued that if students were unable to find lodging, they could compel owners to rent to them (si non invenint domos, possunt compellere habentes ad illis locandum). an alternative solution, adopted from the start, was to purchase or rent houses and to convert them into hospicia or pedagogia (in england, ‘halls’ or sometimes ‘inns’), reserved for students paying for their board and lodging. this system left control entirely to student organisations or to the teachers who governed them. from this, a third institution developed –- the college – which offered a solution to the problem of poverty affecting many young students. colleges were places of hospitality, free of charge and expressly destined for impoverished students. this form of collective student life, which developed mainly in northern european universities, required outside economic intervention: the foundation of a college inevitably involved a donation from some rich and powerful patron, which enabled the college to be self-supporting. every college was ruled according to criteria laid down by the founder and spelled out in its statutes. these rules reflected wishes regarding the college’s social duties. precise clauses often concerned the recruitment of the lodgers or members of the society, who were to must fulfil certain prerequisites concerning, for example, nationality, social class, or the faculty to be attended attended. more detailed rules governed daily life, religious observances, hours of study, etc. during the later middle ages, colleges multiplied across europe. only about two dozen were founded before , but eighty-five (thirty-seven of them in paris alone) were created in the fourteenth century and ninety-two more in the fifteenth century. however, the most important late medieval trend was the diversification of types of college. they matured from simple forms with a m. bellomo, ‘studenti e “populus” nelle città universitarie italiane dal secolo xii al xiv’, in università e società, pp. - . quoted in berengo, europa delle città, p. . j. verger, ‘collegi e università tra medio evo ed età moderna’, in d. maffei and h. de ridder-symoens (eds.), collegi e università d’europa tra il xiv e il xviii secolo (milan: giuffrè, ), pp. - ; g.p. brizzi, ‘studenti, università, collegi’, in brizzi and verger (eds.), l’università dell’europa, vol. iv, pp. - . verger, ‘collegi e università’, p. . ibid., p. . few boarders to a type known as the ‘great college’, characterised not just by its size (they could lodge fifty or sometimes over one hundred students) and architectural form, but because within their walls they possessed their own libraries and lecturing activities, distinct from those of the university faculties. this substantial and enduring difference separates the major italian universities from those of northern europe. at paris or oxford, the great colleges eventually became more or less autonomous at a didactic level, as sites where the academic activities and daily lives of teachers and students coexisted within complexes of imposing buildings. the principal function of italian colleges, however, remained that of supplying accommodation to students, while pedagogic activities took place within other architectural spaces. this major division of university life between northern europe and italy had different effects on their respective urban frameworks. northern europe’s colleges functioned rather like large convents (they resembled the studia of mendicant and other religious orders) and their organisation effectively controlled a chronically quarrelsome and youthful student population. in an attempt to avoid riots in mid fifteenth-century paris, all free students (the martinents, who did not live in a college) were required to find fixed abodes at least in a boarding school. similar measures were also taken more gradually at oxford, where the boarding halls were drastically reduced from seventy to eight as the colleges began to predominate. by the sixteenth century, therefore, profound differences separated the functional order of university teaching in northern europe and italy. the ‘great’ college (on the parisian or english model) now dominated university education in most european countries, including spain; ‘fully operational colleges’ were autonomous institutions that ultimately could function outside the university system. in italy, however, before the introduction of jesuit colleges, the larger universities substantially continued on traditional lines. in the case of the most important university towns, affected only marginally by the organisational model of the college, we do not know whether ‘lodging neighbourhoods’ existed – specific areas that had evolving over the course of centuries so as to house the student population, and characterised by building forms (such as, at oxford, the earlier halls or inns) adapted to the needs of a seasonal and highly mobile group. in general, even though italian public authorities (displaying an inveterate tendency towards excess) strictly controlled their student populations, they apparently never to have compelled them to lodge in certain areas of town or in certain types of institution. brizzi, ‘studenti, università, collegi’, pp. - . m. kiene, ‘l’università nelle città europee: l’architettura universitaria’, in brizzi and verger (eds.), università dell’europa, vol. iv, pp. - . p. del negro (ed.), i collegi per studenti dell’università di padova: una storia plurisecolare (padova: signum, ). ibid., p. . brizzi, ‘gli studenti e la città’, p. . in only one case in europe was it planned to establish a university in a place entirely separate from the rest of the town. when founding the university of vienna in , archduke rudolf of hapsburg considered laying out a walled university suburb situated near his residence, where university buildings and student lodgings would be located. this unrealised project, arose from rudolf’s conviction that the viennese would never tolerate the presence of a large and privileged foreign body. this was an extreme and isolated case, but historians of universities agree that, after the mid sixteenth century, legislation across europe attempted to impose stricter controls on students in the name of public order by segregating their accommodation within the town. for example, at bologna at the end of the sixteenth century, the jesuit francesco palmio (the leading spirit of a student religious brotherhood) suggested making a group of unused public buildings into new boarding schools (pedagogia), where students would live under the guidance of a suitably instructed housemaster. although without sufficient documentary support, historians have repeatedly affirmed the widespread existence inside university towns of urban sectors occupied mainly by students. the latin quarter of paris offers a famous, but probably unique, model of a university suburb formed autonomously inside a major city. in steady progression, the university structures (professors' residences, student lodgings, and great colleges) clustered along the rive gauche. over time, the parisian university quarter became one of three districts within the circuit of walls that together expressed the urban identity of the french capital: sixteenth-century maps distinguished ville, cité, and université. nevertheless, local conditions varied widely. at the opposite extreme from paris stand decayed towns like oxford and cambridge, which after were increasingly devoted to supplying the needs of a flourishing university. in middle-sized towns, especially those with commercial problems, the presence of a university operating in specialised buildings often had a direct and long-lasting impact on the cityscape. for instance, at louvain in , the studium originally occupied part of the cloth hall, made available to the university by the town authorities in an attempt to compensate for the decline of the local cloth industry. louvain’s colleges and boarding schools gradually consolidated around this structure, definitively changing the town’s berengo, europa delle città, p. . in some ways, palmio’s project resembles the slightly later jesuit reduciones in distant paraguay. g.p. brizzi, la formazione della classe dirigente nel sei-settecento: i seminaria nobilium nell’italia centro- settentrionale (bologna: il mulino, ). for example, j. verger, ‘studenti e maestri’, in brizzi and verger (eds.), università dell’europa, vol. iv, p. , asserts a ‘topographical concentration of college schools and student accommodations … everywhere, one observes the same concentration of a population with very clear specific characteristics, with an autochthonous population obliged to adapt to the student presence.’ functional geography within its walls and at the same time expressing louvain’s new economic vocation. further studies will undoubtedly clarify the processes that underlay the formation of university precincts and suburbs within towns. nevertheless it is clear that in various ways the market for student lodging was an important and widespread factor, to which student loyalties to ‘nation’ and to social class made a significant contribution. . special districts of hospitality for the jews: the italian ghettos between the end of the fifteenth century and the end of the seventeenth, a jewish presence was widely spread and well-articulated throughout the mediterranean region. despite some inevitable differences, it can generally be characterized from an urban viewpoint and its cultural peculiarities are relatively easily recognized. it would be interesting to understand which elements are distinctive and which represent necessary adaptations to the habits and organization, or the architectural patterns, of the host countries which accepted jewish residents. the complex relationships between jewish settlements and host cities is linked to the fact that one cannot always distinguish voluntary from imposed enclosure, with a wide range of intermediate cases. in the early modern period, a series of edicts alternating between expulsion, toleration, and/or invitation explain the separation of jewish districts: some were born as ghetti, others became areas enclosed by doors and gates, while others had been places of prevalent (but not exclusive) jewish residence for centuries. we will focus here on the urban structure of such districts (including their impact on the conservation and transmission of the jewish culture). it is well known that during the sixteenth century, attitudes toward jews varied greatly throughout christian europe. unlike the iberian kingdoms, or even the english or french national monarchies, where jews had been completely expelled, in italy, we find the formation of ghettos. some local governments (e.g. the venetian republic, the papal states, or the florentine signoria) decide to impose a form of urban physical enclosure on their jewish subjects, requiring them to live and earn their living (mainly by loaning money) packed together in a specific area reserved to them, where christians could no longer reside. consequently, the urban experience of jews in italy changed radically during the sixteenth century, with their passage to life within an enclosed space. the urban ghetto had a curious and maesschalck, ‘university and city of louvain’, p. . m. luzzati, il ghetto ebraico, storia di un popolo rinchiuso (florence: giunti ). ambivalent history. it was part of attempts by the counter-reformation church and by italian municipal authorities to segregate jews from the rest of the population, as they did with other marginal groups such as beggars, vagabonds or prostitutes. once ghettos were established, they acquired a distinctive urban and cultural dynamic which did not always serve the original intentions of their creators. to a large extent, they functioned as city quarters, and as such they were ‘normal’ components of life. more than simply geographical areas, italian city neighbourhoods (gonfaloni, rioni, contrade, alberghi, seggi, quartieri, sestiere) were essential units in political life, with which their inhabitants identified proudly. although most italian communes lost their political autonomy during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, city neighbourhoods acquired renewed importance as part of the parochial system of the counter-reformation church. jews were well aware that moving into a ghetto was not expulsion. it was usually preceded by prolonged negotiations between local jews and city authorities concerning details of ghetto to be established: location, number of houses and shops permitted, conditions for leasing houses, community rights, and establishment of new synagogues. in verona, as elsewhere, the foundation day of the ghetto was celebrated with annual festive prayers, similar to the commemoration of local miracles. except at bologna, italian jews were never expelled from their ghettos, where they lived until the napoleonic occupation and sometimes into the twentieth century. the ghetto was a sign that they had been accepted as a part of city’s population, much as catholic and protestant minorities in some northern european cities were allowed to establish churches for proscribed cults, provided they were not too conspicuous. once the jews were in charge of their own geographical space, ghetto communities acquired new functions, which had not traditionally been jewish responsibilities. these included street cleaning, water supply, fire brigades, keeping guest houses, and maintaining social order, all undertaken by paid officers, who were allocated pensions when they became too old to serve the community. this expressed a sense of stability which was enhanced by the joint efforts of community members to establish a distinct neighbourhood, the benefits of which were refused to non-local jews. strangers needed special permits from community authorities in order to receive hospitality in the ghetto. a few italian ghettos conferred local citizenship upon strangers whose acts had benefited the community over many years. even from a religious perspective, ghetto life often resembled that of a catholic parish. r. weinstein, ‘”segregatos non autem eiectos”: jews and christians in italian cities during the catholic reformation’ (in hebrew), in s. volkov (ed.), being different: minorities, aliens and outsiders in history (jerusalem: zalman shazar center, ), pp. - . s. simonsohn (ed.), the jews in the duchy of milan, vols. (jerusalem: the israel academy of sciences and humanities, ), vol. i, pp. - . in many italian cities, including venice ( ), rome ( ), florence ( ) and siena ( ), and at ferrara, and modena on the venetian mainland (early seventeenth century), we find a similar process after the expulsion from spain and the famous bull of pope paul iv ( ), many jewish districts were transformed into segregated areas. if we want to attempt a comparative analysis of the most important cases, some questions are relevant. sometimes it was necessary to find a new zone for their compulsory residence and to relocate existing inhabitants; other times, areas where jews had lived for centuries were surrounded with walls, closed off with a few doors and gates, with rigid timetables established for opening them. the creation of the first european ghetto at venice in is well-known. a barely urbanized precinct surrounded by water in a somewhat marginal part of the historical centre was initially assigned for jews. the settlement, known as the ‘new ghetto’, was soon extended by adding two areas designated for levantine and ponentine (i.e. western) jews: in , after an investigation, the senate granted the jewish request for the additional space and ordered that the nearby site known as the ‘old ghetto’ (ghetto vecchio), which lay across the canal and was connected to the ghetto by a bridge, be walled up and assigned to jewish merchants. in , the venetian government, concerned to attract merchants to the city, created the ‘newest ghetto’ (ghetto novissimo) for twenty families of newcomers. by this time, these three zones, linked to each other but separate and almost autonomous, accommodated almost , inhabitants (in a venetian population totalling about , ). here people from every corner of europe lived in a small area in groups defined by synagogues using different rites (italian, german, spanish, levantine), by adhesion to different fraternities, and by their patronage of shops and services catering for people of different origins. all seemed to enjoy being venetians no less than jews. the zone was closed off by gates and bridges and partially surrounded by a canal which was patrolled by christian guards. the houses were owned by christian landlords and rented to the jews (at a higher rate than for previous tenants), but were soon enlarged and transformed by their inhabitants, following the jus kazaka. jews added storeys to existing buildings, which they also subdivided intensively. by the second half of the seventeenth century, the incidence of c. roth, gli ebrei in venezia (rome: p. cremonese, ); originally published as venice (philadelphia: jewish publication scoiety of america, ) and reprinted as history of the jews in venice (new york: schocken books, ); ghettos in italy, venice-rome, exhibition catalogue (tel aviv: beth hatefutsoth, nahum goldman museum of the jewish diaspora, ). b. ravid, ‘the establishment of the ghetto vecchio of venice, ’, proceedings of the sixth world congress of jewish studies (jerusalem: ), pp. - . b. pullan, la politica sociale della repubblica veneta - , vols. (rome: il veltro editrice, ), vol. ii, p. ; originally published as rich and poor in renaissance venice. the social institutions of a catholic state, to (oxford: blackwell, ). shops, private and public wells, and other services was higher in the ghettos than elsewhere in the city. everywhere, jews had their own cemeteries, generally located near or at urban boundaries. centuries before the constitution of the ghetto, venetian jews had been given land for a cemetry on the lido, the island separating the lagoon from the open sea. here, as in many other jewish cemeteries, the coexistence of different national groups is revealed by inscriptions in various languages and by different styles of gravestones. a distinctively venetian feature of this cemetery, however, seems symptomatic of the relations often established between jews and christians in the mediterranean. this was the ‘canal of the jews’, linking the ghetto and the cemetery of san nicolò in lido, excavated in and permitting an easier passage for jewish funeral rites. the venetian senate authorised the canal in response to a petition from the united jewish community, which wished to avoid insults from young people of the castello district when funerals passed under the bridge of st. peter. despite its shortness, the canal eventually reordered the pattern of maritime traffic into the harbour and was enlarged in . this waterway was deep enough to permit the passage of quite large ships and came commonly to be used by vessels exiting the northern lagoon towards the open sea. the ‘canal of the jews’ was also encouraged silting in nearby canals. the ‘slow and hidden progress’ of these consequences of digging the canal was such that between and the best-known venetian maritime engineers (poleni, margutti, riccati, zendrini) were employed to produce surveys, designs and projects to counteract it. despite being promoted by the city authorities, the canal was a threat to the economic functioning of venice and in this way seems to symbolise the intimate connection of venetian jews to the rest of the city. the canal was to remain, despite the damage it occasioned. it is a poignant symbol of the ambiguous position of the jewish community in the city, neither joined with nor entirely separate from the whole, although its spatial segregation was sometimes desired by both sides. for a commercial state such as the venetian republic, the jews were economically necessary, mainly for their money-lending activity, and in the the ghetto they were relegated them to what was considered an appropriate permanent position within christian society. some cities d. calabi, u. camerino and e. concina, la città degli ebrei (venice: marsilio, , revised edition ). mentioned by b. pullan, gli ebrei in europa e l’inquisizione di venezia (rome: il veltro editrice, ) (originally published as the jews of europe and the inquisition of venice, - (oxford: blackwell, )) and by j. georgelin, venise au siècle des lumières (paris: la haye, ), p. . asv, archivio zendrini, november , r. , cc. - ; august , r. , cc. - (reports the history of the canal); archivio poleni, august , r. , t. ii; secreta, b. ( - ), c. (with the report by the ‘proto’ domenico margutti); cc. v. and followings; september , b. - , c. with reference also to declarations by engineers poleni and riccati, given to the ‘savi ed esecutori alle acque’, already expressed on september , after the inspection made between the sant’andrea fortification and the fondamente nuove. of the terra firma, contained jewish communities before the institution of the venetian ghetto. firmly established since the second half of the fourteenth century, they occupied closed spaces and lived according to well founded community customs. these districts were generally close to city centres and market squares, and arose more from the practice of everyday life and trade than from regulation; were due more to stratification and professional reasons of everyday trade than to impositions or prohibitions. thus, long before any charters required jews to live separately, jewish urban contrade already existed at verona, padua and rovigo, and at vicenza and udine. inhabited mainly, but not exclusively, by jews, these neighbourhoods contained one or more synagogues, public services, butchers and bakers’ shops, and banks. their close identification with a single ethnic component of the population facilitated the eventual imposition of an enclosure. the extension of the ghetto to the cities of the venetian mainland occurred almost a century after its creation in the capital, after decades of negotiations between the jewish communities (universitates) and local authorities. the latter were often supported by local ecclesiastics, including the franciscan friars who gave innumerable sermons condemning usury and favouring the foundation of pawnbrokers as an alternative. the venetian model, with a central square for a community use, was the ideal, but local circumstances were responsible for compromises and variations. in rome an area around the theatre of marcellus and near the tiber embankment had been inhabited by jews since the fourteenth century, as place-names (ruga judeorum, macella delli judei, platea judeorum) and the presence of rome’s oldest synagogue ( ) testify. this was a mainly commercial district and included a fish market. in , pope eugenius iv ordered the concentration of the jewish population in the street (now the via del portico d'ottavia) and the square in front of the fish market (called forum judeorum). following sixtus iv's displacement in of many services to streets better linked to the vatican, the area declined, but by enlarging the ruga judeorum sixtus facilitated the insertion of the piazza giudea into rome’s urban system and thereby gave a new definition to this neighbourhood. in , the first year of his papacy, the former inquisitor, paul iv, forced jewish citizens to sell their houses and live in an enclosure (claustro per serrar li giudei) at relatively low and fixed rents; they were no longer to lend money to christians nor do other business with them, and they were to wear yellow caps. henceforth they could have only one synagogue and were to be confined within a precinct with two gates, controlled by christian guards paid by the jews. the pope’s architect, salustio peruzzi, was charged with designing the claustro and s. zaggia, ‘les etrangers et leurs modalités d’implantation dans l’espace physique urbain: xiii-xix siècles’, unpublished paper given to the second international conference of urban history, strasbourg, september . within a few months of pope paul’s bull the district had been enclosed by walls. the speed at which this was done suggests that the work involved no more than closing off the streets with walls and building two gates. the latter were to be the only means of access into a neighbourhood where many jews already lived and which by was known as a ghetto. some houses were demolished and neighbouring streets enlarged, squeezing the jews in and permitting merchandise to be discharged from the tiber and carried into the city. the jewish precinct, slightly over one hectare in size, had a main street (via rua) as its commercial centre, at the ends of which were the two entries, one from piazza giudea, the other from piazza pescaria. similar decrees were issued for other centres of the papal states (bologna, ancona, ascoli, imola, and recanati). in , sixtus v authorized an enlargement of the roman jewish precinct, into a largely unbuilt area along the river. three years later sixtus commissioned his favorite architect, domenico fontana, to design two new gates, although the jews themselves paid for the construction. tempesta’s plan of shows this area with the sistine enlargement and the new gates, with a few new buildings housing poorer jewish families along a newly laid out street by the riverside (ripa dei giudei). at rome, as in venice, rapid jewish immigration resulted in a very high population density and an increase in the number of floors of existing buildings (easily visible in the plan by giovanni maggi). in , clement viii had reduced the number of ghettos within the papal states to only three (rome, ancona, avignon), which presumably contributed to their overcrowding. accommodating about , jews in , the roman ghetto had nine or ten thousand inhabitants a century later. at the same time building densitiy increased, pavements were remade, a fountain with piped water was installed, and landing-places were built, resulting in the formation of a new urban complex. following the prohibition of money-lending, jewish settlements in sixteenth-century tuscan towns were relocated near markets. at florence and siena this was ordered in and , respectively. even in the ‘free’ cities of pisa and livorno, where jews were not physically restricted to ghettos, the originally widespread jewish population became concentrated in specific districts. they tended to settle in already declining buildings, typical of the crowded surrounding of markets, especially near polluting trades such as butchers and in areas characterised by petty delinquency or prostitution. at florence, such activities survived the on fontana’s catafalque for sixtus v, see the article by m.-a. visceglia in volume i of this series. c. benocci, ‘storia urbanistica dall’antichità al ’, in e. guidoni (ed.), atlante storico. roma. il ghetto (roma: bonsignori, ), pp. - ; regione lazio, recupero del ghetto di roma (rome: multigrafica, ), pp. - . establishment of the ghetto and remained there after its abolition. in the florentine ghetto housing densities were high and so the daily life of the entire community was highly regulated: permission was required to use public spaces, and rules governed rubbish disposal, the cleaning of public spaces and even some aspects of behaviour within private apartments. other ghettoes were instituted in tuscany at the beginning of the seventeenth century. contemporary jewish documents show unusual sensitivity to material and geographical space. those recording the sale of habitation rights (ius kazaka) included detailed descriptions of the house involved: its surroundings, its windows, adjacent houses, the amount of light, passages leading to the place, terraces, etc. every movement in by a new family directly affected the conditions of other families living nearby. early modern italian rabbinical responsa and court records document innumerable quarrels over passages, building rights, light, and fresh air. full of passages and connections between houses where only a local inhabitant could find his way, the ghetto was a dense maze which continuously adapted to the needs of an ever more crowded population. the sense of familiarity with locality and urban space was expressed in the increasing use of family symbols among rich jewish families, some of whom proudly marked their houses with them. it also extended beyond the ghetto to the city as a whole. thus, representations of a city's famous monumental buildings appeared in such jewish artifacts as illuminated ketubbahs (marriage deeds) and in illustrations representing the sacred and longed-for city of jerusalem. it would be a mistake to speak of ‘the ghetto' as a standard phenomenon. there were different types of ghetto, which can be distinguished according to time (mid-sixteenth century or late seventeenth century), political contexts in different italian regions (e.g. the este, the medici, or the papal states), geographic location (urban margin or central city market), process of construction (by mutual agreement or coercion), and the type of documentation available in municipal archives (jewish or christian). every ghetto changed over several centuries with respect to living conditions, legal position, community life and minority-majority relationships. as a preliminary scheme, we suggest four basic types of ghetto: a. isolationist-mode, not leading necessarily to the erection of a ghetto, but insisting on the separation of jews and christians. a clear case would be a ghetto consisting of a single house. following the precedent of the original ghettos in venice and rome, other cities, o. fantozzi micali, la segregazione urbana. ghetti e quartieri ebraici in toscana (florence: alinea, ), pp. - . d. calabi, ‘les quartiers juifs en italie entre xv-xvii siècle. quelques hypothèses de travail’, annales. histoire et sciences sociales , no. ( ), pp. - . r. segre (ed.), the jews in piedmont, vols. (jerusalem: the israeli academy of sciences and humanities, - ), vol. ii, no. on p. . or groups within them (mainly guilds and clergy) put pressure on the local authorities to adopt an isolationist attitude towards local jews, and separate their living quarters or at least limit their public visibility. b. ghettos in relatively small cities (urbino, monferrato, lugo, cento, finale). in many cases, these ghettos were erected in districts already densely inhabited by jews. c. ghettos in larger cities (florence, ferrara, mantua, turin). in these cases, passage to a ghetto promoted a substantial increase in community institutions, as well as in cultural and religious exchanges between these jewish communities and others in the mediterranean region. d. two unique cases (rome and venice, the first ghetto). both contained large numbers of jews of different ethnic origins (italian, sephardim, ashkėnazim), creating multiple community institutions with rich documentation, both internal and external. methods for acquiring the living spaces reserved to jews differ in each case. at florence, perhaps because of the strength of ducal control, grand duke ferdinand, in exchange for having obtained this new title from the pope, himself purchased the buildings to make into houses for jewish people and gave a commission to rehabilitate them to his architect buontalenti. management of the building was assigned to a ducal office, the scrittoio delle regie possesssioni. in siena (as in venice forty years earlier), the landlords of the salicotto were obliged to expel all christian inhabitants from their buildings and to rent apartments there to jews. in this case, management became easier, as the quality of the tenants improved and total rental income increased; moreover, the new inhabitants had to undertake all modifications at their own expense. at pitigliano and sorano, jews acquired ownership of the properties from christians. given the impossibility of expelling jewish tenants, the stability of individual rents was fair to both owners and tenants: in a situation of stable prices, the jus gazzagà – under which tenants could sell, resign, donate, or inherit their tenancies – becomes comprehensible. even unrented houses guaranteed an income to christian landlords, for in such cases the commune was compelled to intervene as ‘perpetual tenant of the houses of the ghetto.’ this practice facilitated housing improvements, although it was the christian owners rather than the jewish occupants who reaped any long-term benefits. on the other hand, since the houses could not be sold their condition tended to deteriorate and repairs were postponed, because no one had ultimate responsibility for undertaking them. see two works by k. stow, the jews of rome, vols. (leiden, e. j. brill, - ) and theater of acculturation. the roman ghetto in the sixteenth century (seattle and london, university of washington press, ) and d.j. malkiel, a separate republic. the mechanics and dynamics of venetian jewish self- government, - (jerusalem: magnes press, ). overall, ghettos in marginal locations (as in venice or palermo) seem rarer than those near city centres (florence, siena, ferrara, padua, reggio emilia, modena, verona). but even venice, was a case of relative marginality, since the senate had originally proposed to settle jews on the more remote islands of murano or giudecca, and since sixteenth-century venice experienced a general expansion of building in areas near the lagoon. another common characteristic of italian ghettos (already visible, moreover, in medieval jewish quarters of the italian and iberian peninsulas or of france) is the high quantity of their public services, in comparision to other parts of the city. they contained institutions for public assistance and culture, and also infrastructural provision such as drinking water, waste disposal at public and private places, public baths, and specialised shops. many focused on a central square, a common open space containing wells or fountains, and surrounded by porticos with shops beneath. very often, the buildings in ghettos appeared to be of poor quality. at least four factors contribute to an explanation of this: the original location in areas with one or very few landlords and low property values; the process of enlargement of the ghetto, a consequence of its growing density of population up to the late seventeenth century; an increase in the volume of building, accomplished by adding floors and terraces and accompanied by internal transformations and subdivision – processes arising from the strict limits to the avaialble land; the complex juridical titles of possession, which discouraged investment; and, finally, the fact that their decoration (when it exists) is hidden within houses or within sacred places, to the neglect of external appearances. everywhere, the internal design of synagogues offers eloquent testimony of this attitude to decoration. all these characteristics became means for the conservation and transmission of jewish culture within mediterranean urban textures: physical traces of a distinctive social group, proud of its behaviour. . first conclusions in summary: foreigners in early modern cities, no matter how they were defined, experienced a broad range of receptions. in some cities, they met with close restrictions on their activities, and in certain extreme cases were even obliged to reside in specified neighborhoods. in others, the absence of limitations allowed them to achieve considerable influence and even prominence, as did the genoese in seville and naples, florentines in marseille and lyon, or the dutch and portuguese in rouen and bordeaux. as privileged outsiders with firm ties to local elites, they carved a vital niche for themselves by supplying urban markets with goods of distant origin and organizing local bases of international commerce and finance. the more successful among them played the role of what the sociologist georg simmel referred to as the "guest who stays", that is, one who takes advantage of the ambiguous position of being at the same time insider and outsider-- in this case, both stranger and local resident. still, one wonders to what extent this flattering portrait of foreigners-- as well as the favorable reception extended to them-- proved typical of european cities as a whole. xenophobia was always a popular political option. to cite merely one pithy example, in the words of a medieval chronicle prince spytihnev of bohemia "earned everyone's admiration because he ordered the expulsion within three days of all germans from bohemia wherever they are found, whether rich or poor or pilgrim." such drastic options found special favor during moments of crisis. during plagues, for instance, outsiders, especially beggars, were often identified as carriers of disease, and thus expelled from cities as a matter of course. and even cities noted for their openness to foreigners witnessed sporadic instances of violence against them. the "evil may day" riot against aliens in london in was merely the most dramatic instance of a rejection of foreigners within an urban popular culture that brought xenophobia to bear on other issues, ranging from the practices of citizenship to the discourse of anti-popery. the most famous dutch play of the seventeenth century, bredero's the spanish brabanter ( ), found fault with foreigners from both extremes of the social spectrum. when the author blamed recent immigrants from the southern netherlands for threatening local austerity through their pomp and vanity, he was referring to the luxurious habits of the wealthy merchants from antwerp and other southern cities who were propelled northward by religious conflict. yet in act iii of the play, a proclamation is read aloud on the dam ordering the expulsion of the foreign poor, who get their keep as highwaymen, as thieves, by treacherous attacks, by robbery and plundering... [and] godless gambling, dicing, and... brawling, drunk-drinking, and whoring... the fact that a shrill anti-foreign sentiments should be voiced in what was probably the most cosmopolitan city in western europe (antwerp) is rather ironic. it is nevertheless also an indirect testimony to amsterdam's very openness as an urban society. other early modern observers were quick to note that it was hardly an accident that commercial, maritime cities wound up developing tolerant wolfgang kaiser, in bottin and calabi, eds., Étrangers, p. . cited by arnost klíma in m. teich and r. porter, eds., the national question in europe in historical context (cambridge, ), pp. - . ian w. archer, in griffiths and jenner, eds., londinopolis, p. . for the religious sources of spanish hostility to english merchants, see marshall, "other black legend". g.a. bredero, the spanish brabanter: a seventeenth-century dutch social satire in five acts, ed. and trans. h.d. brumble iii (binghamton ny, ), p. . attitudes toward difference. in a memorable passage on the royal exchange in london, voltaire wrote of it as a place where "jew, mohammedan and christian deal with each other as though they were all of the same faith, and only apply the word infidel to people who go bankrupt." more than a few of his contemporaries did not approve of the way transaction led to transigence. but their unwillingness to endorse such practices does not gainsay the close connection between economic exchange and cultural change, or the efforts foreigners in cities, along with certain of their hosts, made to bring them together. letters on england, trans. and ed. l. tancock (london, ; orig. ed. ), p. . note di lavoro della fondazione eni enrico mattei fondazione eni enrico mattei working paper series our note di lavoro are available on the internet at the following addresses: http://www.feem.it/feem/pub/publications/wpapers/default.html http://www.ssrn.com/link/feem.html http://www.repec.org http://agecon.lib.umn.edu note di lavoro published in siev . anna alberini: determinants and effects on property values of participation in voluntary cleanup programs: the case of colorado ccmp . valentina bosetti, carlo carraro and marzio galeotti: stabilisation targets, technical change and the macroeconomic costs of climate change control ccmp . roberto roson: introducing imperfect competition in cge models: technical aspects and implications kthc . sergio vergalli: the role of community in migration dynamics siev . fabio grazi, jeroen c.j.m. van den bergh and piet rietveld: modeling spatial sustainability: spatial welfare economics versus ecological footprint ccmp . olivier deschenes and michael greenstone: the economic impacts of climate change: evidence from agricultural profits and random fluctuations in weather prcg . michele moretto and paola valbonese: firm regulation and profit-sharing: a real option approach siev . anna alberini and aline chiabai: discount rates in risk v. money and money v. money tradeoffs ctn . jon x. eguia: united we vote ctn . shao chin sung and dinko dimitro: a taxonomy of myopic stability concepts for hedonic games nrm . fabio cerina (lxxviii): tourism specialization and sustainability: a long-run policy analysis nrm . valentina bosetti, mariaester cassinelli and alessandro lanza (lxxviii): benchmarking in tourism destination, keeping in mind the sustainable paradigm ccmp . jens horbach: determinants of environmental innovation – new evidence from german panel data sources kthc . fabio sabatini: social capital, public spending and the quality of economic development: the case of italy kthc . fabio sabatini: the empirics of social capital and economic development: a critical perspective csrm . giuseppe di vita: corruption, exogenous changes in incentives and deterrence ccmp . rob b. dellink and marjan w. hofkes: the timing of national greenhouse gas emission reductions in the presence of other environmental policies iem . philippe quirion: distributional impacts of energy-efficiency certificates vs. taxes and standards ctn . somdeb lahiri: a weak bargaining set for contract choice problems ccmp . massimiliano mazzanti and roberto zoboli: examining the factors influencing environmental innovations siev . y. hossein farzin and ken-ichi akao: non-pecuniary work incentive and labor supply ccmp . marzio galeotti, matteo manera and alessandro lanza: on the robustness of robustness checks of the environmental kuznets curve nrm . y. hossein farzin and ken-ichi akao: when is it optimal to exhaust a resource in a finite time? nrm . y. hossein farzin and ken-ichi akao: non-pecuniary value of employment and natural resource extinction siev . lucia vergano and paulo a.l.d. nunes: analysis and evaluation of ecosystem resilience: an economic perspective siev . danny campbell, w. george hutchinson and riccardo scarpa: using discrete choice experiments to derive individual-specific wtp estimates for landscape improvements under agri-environmental schemes evidence from the rural environment protection scheme in ireland kthc . vincent m. otto, timo kuosmanen and ekko c. van ierland: estimating feedback effect in technical change: a frontier approach ccmp . giovanni bella: uniqueness and indeterminacy of equilibria in a model with polluting emissions iem . alessandro cologni and matteo manera: the asymmetric effects of oil shocks on output growth: a markov-switching analysis for the g- countries kthc . fabio sabatini: social capital and labour productivity in italy eta . andrea gallice (lxxix): predicting one shot play in x games using beliefs based on minimax regret iem . andrea bigano and paul sheehan: assessing the risk of oil spills in the mediterranean: the case of the route from the black sea to italy nrm . rinaldo brau and davide cao (lxxviii): uncovering the macrostructure of tourists’ preferences. a choice experiment analysis of tourism demand to sardinia ctn . parkash chander and henry tulkens: cooperation, stability and self-enforcement in international environmental agreements: a conceptual discussion iem . valeria costantini and salvatore monni: environment, human development and economic growth eta . ariel rubinstein (lxxix): instinctive and cognitive reasoning: a study of response times eta . maria salgado (lxxix): choosing to have less choice eta . justina a.v. fischer and benno torgler: does envy destroy social fundamentals? the impact of relative income position on social capital eta . benno torgler, sascha l. schmidt and bruno s. frey: relative income position and performance: an empirical panel analysis ccmp . alberto gago, xavier labandeira, fidel picos and miguel rodrÍguez: taxing tourism in spain: results and recommendations iem . karl van biervliet, dirk le roy and paulo a.l.d. nunes: an accidental oil spill along the belgian coast: results from a cv study ccmp . rolf golombek and michael hoel: endogenous technology and tradable emission quotas kthc . giulio cainelli and donato iacobucci: the role of agglomeration and technology in shaping firm strategy and organization ccmp . alvaro calzadilla, francesco pauli and roberto roson: climate change and extreme events: an assessment of economic implications siev . m.e. kragt, p.c. roebeling and a. ruijs: effects of great barrier reef degradation on recreational demand: a contingent behaviour approach nrm . c. giupponi, r. camera, a. fassio, a. lasut, j. mysiak and a. sgobbi: network analysis, creativesystem modelling and decisionsupport: the netsymod approach kthc . walter f. lalich (lxxx): measurement and spatial effects of the immigrant created cultural diversity in sydney kthc . elena paspalanova (lxxx): cultural diversity determining the memory of a controversial social event kthc . ugo gasparino, barbara del corpo and dino pinelli (lxxx): perceived diversity of complex environmental systems: multidimensional measurement and synthetic indicators kthc . aleksandra hauke (lxxx): impact of cultural differences on knowledge transfer in british, hungarian and polish enterprises kthc . katherine marquand forsyth and vanja m. k. stenius (lxxx): the challenges of data comparison and varied european concepts of diversity kthc . gianmarco i.p. ottaviano and giovanni peri (lxxx): rethinking the gains from immigration: theory and evidence from the u.s. kthc . monica barni (lxxx): from statistical to geolinguistic data: mapping and measuring linguistic diversity kthc . lucia tajoli and lucia de benedictis (lxxx): economic integration and similarity in trade structures kthc . suzanna chan (lxxx): “god’s little acre” and “belfast chinatown”: diversity and ethnic place identity in belfast kthc . diana petkova (lxxx): cultural diversity in people’s attitudes and perceptions kthc . john j. betancur (lxxx): from outsiders to on-paper equals to cultural curiosities? the trajectory of diversity in the usa kthc . kiflemariam hamde (lxxx): cultural diversity a glimpse over the current debate in sweden kthc . emilio gregori (lxxx): indicators of migrants’ socio-professional integration kthc . christa-maria lerm hayes (lxxx): unity in diversity through art? joseph beuys’ models of cultural dialogue kthc . sara vertommen and albert martens (lxxx): ethnic minorities rewarded: ethnostratification on the wage market in belgium kthc . nicola genovese and maria grazia la spada (lxxx): diversity and pluralism: an economist's view kthc . carla bagna (lxxx): italian schools and new linguistic minorities: nationality vs. plurilingualism. which ways and methodologies for mapping these contexts? kthc . vedran omanoviĆ (lxxx): understanding “diversity in organizations” paradigmatically and methodologically kthc . mila paspalanova (lxxx): identifying and assessing the development of populations of undocumented migrants: the case of undocumented poles and bulgarians in brussels kthc . roberto alzetta (lxxx): diversities in diversity: exploring moroccan migrants’ livelihood in genoa kthc . monika sedenkova and jiri horak (lxxx): multivariate and multicriteria evaluation of labour market situation kthc . dirk jacobs and andrea rea (lxxx): construction and import of ethnic categorisations: “allochthones” in the netherlands and belgium kthc . eric m. uslaner (lxxx): does diversity drive down trust? kthc . paula mota santos and joão borges de sousa (lxxx): visibility & invisibility of communities in urban systems eta . rinaldo brau and matteo lippi bruni: eliciting the demand for long term care coverage: a discrete choice modelling analysis ctn . dinko dimitrov and claus-jochen haake: coalition formation in simple games: the semistrict core ctn . ottorino chillem, benedetto gui and lorenzo rocco: on the economic value of repeated interactions under adverse selection ctn . sylvain beal and nicolas quÉrou: bounded rationality and repeated network formation ctn . sophie bade, guillaume haeringer and ludovic renou: bilateral commitment ctn . andranik tangian: evaluation of parties and coalitions after parliamentary elections ctn . rudolf berghammer, agnieszka rusinowska and harrie de swart: applications of relations and graphs to coalition formation ctn . paolo pin: eight degrees of separation ctn . roland amann and thomas gall: how (not) to choose peers in studying groups ctn . maria montero: inequity aversion may increase inequity ccmp . vincent m. otto, andreas lÖschel and john reilly: directed technical change and climate policy csrm . nicoletta ferro: riding the waves of reforms in corporate law, an overview of recent improvements in italian corporate codes of conduct ctn . siddhartha bandyopadhyay and mandar oak: coalition governments in a model of parliamentary democracy prcg . raphaël soubeyran: valence advantages and public goods consumption: does a disadvantaged candidate choose an extremist position? ccmp . eduardo l. gimÉnez and miguel rodrÍguez: pigou’s dividend versus ramsey’s dividend in the double dividend literature ccmp . andrea bigano, jacqueline m. hamilton and richard s.j. tol: the impact of climate change on domestic and international tourism: a simulation study kthc . fabio sabatini: educational qualification, work status and entrepreneurship in italy an exploratory analysis ccmp . richard s.j. tol: the polluter pays principle and cost-benefit analysis of climate change: an application of fund ccmp . philippe tulkens and henry tulkens: the white house and the kyoto protocol: double standards on uncertainties and their consequences siev . andrea m. leiter and gerald j. pruckner: proportionality of willingness to pay to small risk changes – the impact of attitudinal factors in scope tests prcg . raphäel soubeyran: when inertia generates political cycles ccmp . alireza naghavi: can r&d-inducing green tariffs replace international environmental regulations? ccmp . xavier pautrel: reconsidering the impact of environment on long-run growth when pollution influences health and agents have finite-lifetime ccmp . corrado di maria and edwin van der werf: carbon leakage revisited: unilateral climate policy with directed technical change ccmp . paulo a.l.d. nunes and chiara m. travisi: comparing tax and tax reallocations payments in financing rail noise abatement programs: results from a ce valuation study in italy ccmp . timo kuosmanen and mika kortelainen: valuing environmental factors in cost-benefit analysis using data envelopment analysis kthc . dermot leahy and alireza naghavi: intellectual property rights and entry into a foreign market: fdi vs. joint ventures ccmp . inmaculada martÍnez-zarzoso, aurelia bengochea-morancho and rafael morales lage: the impact of population on co emissions: evidence from european countries prcg . alberto cavaliere and simona scabrosetti: privatization and efficiency: from principals and agents to political economy nrm . khaled abu-zeid and sameh afifi: multi-sectoral uses of water & approaches to dss in water management in the nostrum partner countries of the mediterranean nrm . carlo giupponi, jaroslav mysiak and jacopo crimi: participatory approach in decision making processes for water resources management in the mediterranean basin ccmp . kerstin ronneberger, maria berrittella, francesco bosello and richard s.j. tol: klum@gtap: introducing biophysical aspects of land-use decisions into a general equilibrium model a coupling experiment kthc . avner ben-ner, brian p. mccall, massoud stephane, and hua wang: identity and self-other differentiation in work and giving behaviors: experimental evidence siev . aline chiabai and paulo a.l.d. nunes: economic valuation of oceanographic forecasting services: a cost-benefit exercise nrm . paola minoia and anna brusarosco: water infrastructures facing sustainable development challenges:integrated evaluation of impacts of dams on regional development in morocco prcg . carmine guerriero: endogenous price mechanisms, capture and accountability rules: theory and evidence ccmp . richard s.j. tol, stephen w. pacala and robert socolow: understanding long-term energy use and carbon dioxide emissions in the usa nrm . carles manera and jaume garau taberner: the recent evolution and impact of tourism in themediterranean: the case of island regions, - prcg . carmine guerriero: dependent controllers and regulation policies: theory and evidence kthc . john foot (lxxx): mapping diversity in milan. historical approaches to urban immigration kthc . donatella calabi: foreigners and the city: an historiographical exploration for the early modern period (lxxviii) this paper was presented at the second international conference on "tourism and sustainable economic development - macro and micro economic issues" jointly organised by crenos (università di cagliari and sassari, italy) and fondazione eni enrico mattei, italy, and supported by the world bank, chia, italy, - september . (lxxix) this paper was presented at the international workshop on "economic theory and experimental economics" jointly organised by set (center for advanced studies in economic theory, university of milano-bicocca) and fondazione eni enrico mattei, italy, milan, - november . the workshop was co-sponsored by ciseps (center for interdisciplinary studies in economics and social sciences, university of milan-bicocca). (lxxx) this paper was presented at the first eurodiv conference “understanding diversity: mapping and measuring”, held in milan on - january and supported by the marie curie series of conferences “cultural diversity in europe: a series of conferences. series ccmp climate change modelling and policy (editor: marzio galeotti ) siev sustainability indicators and environmental valuation (editor: anna alberini) nrm natural resources management (editor: carlo giupponi) kthc knowledge, technology, human capital (editor: gianmarco ottaviano) iem international energy markets (editor: matteo manera) csrm corporate social responsibility and sustainable management (editor: giulio sapelli) prcg privatisation regulation corporate governance (editor: bernardo bortolotti) eta economic theory and applications (editor: carlo carraro) ctn coalition theory network the fabrist origins of erasmian science: mathematical erudition in erasmus’ basle journal of interdisciplinary history of ideas volume  issue  item  – section : articles – e fabrist origins of erasmian science: mathematical erudition in erasmus’ basle by richard j. oosterhoff c b n a jihi volume  issue  section : editorials . gastronomy and revolution (m. albertone – e. pasini) section : articles. special issue: erasmian science . erasmian science (p.d. omodeo – e. pasini) . e fabrist origins of erasmian science: mathematical erudition in erasmus’ basle (r.j. oosterho) . erasmus, agricola and mineralogy (f.g. sacco) . erasmus and medicine (s. mammola) . erasmus and geography (n. ron) . erasmian philology and mathematical astronomy: jakob ziegler and the humanist recovery of pliny’s natural his- tory, book two (p.d. omodeo). with a technical note on epicyclical interpretations of pliny’s planetary eory (i. tupikova) section : notes . review-interview. vox populi. une histoire du vote avant le suffrage universel, avec o. christin (m. albertone) section : reviews . book reviews (c. carnino, m. menin) section : news & notices . activities of the gisi | les activités du gisi (-) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . the fabrist origins of erasmian science: mathematical erudition in erasmus’ basle richard j. oosterhoff * e configuration of literary and theological interests of erasmus’ modern read- ers have oen obscured his and his ʰ-century colleagues’ interests in natural philosophy, medicine, and mathematics. yet the larger network of scholars who corresponded with erasmus and took him as model included important representa- tives of the mathematical disciplines, both the quadrivium (arithmetic, geometry, music, and astronomy) and the adjacent studies of optics and cosmography. in this article, i suggest that mathematical scholars in erasmus’ orbit shared certain priorities with leèvre d’Étaples; in this respect, ‘erasmian mathematics’ might beer be called ‘fabrist’. i shall first present several works of mathematics published in basle during the s, when erasmus still wielded considerable in- fluence on basle printing. en i shall review the curious relationship of basle’s humanists to paris—erasmus himself aggravated the growing distance between basle and paris—and compare the aitudes towards mathematics of the fabrists, simon grynaeus, and erasmus. here lies a a methodological lesson that has not yet reshaped our own historical studies. tempted by erasmus’ own powerful account of erudition as mostly about non-technical knowledge, both historians of science and historians of literature have been encouraged to miss the place of mathematics in the liberal arts—and indeed in the shape of erudition—of that literary republic. erasmus may have been complicit with the forces that gave us the “two cultures” divide. * university of cambridge (ro @ cam.ac.uk). journal of interdisciplinary history of ideas (), , p. :–:. peer-reviewed. in , jerome froben published the editio princeps of ptolemy of alexan- dria’s de geographia. e prefatory leer is signed by erasmus, making this the one book to his name that contemporaries would have recognized as mathe- matics. but the association raises problems. catalogers have long assumed that, because the preface of the book is wrien in erasmus’ name, erasmus was the editor¹. but the fastidious percy stafford allen pointed out already in  that “neither the title-page nor the contents suggest that erasmus had anything to do with the editing”². more recently, cornelis reedijk argued that an aging erasmus, sick and tired, and worn by the stresses of a dividing church, was un- likely to expend so much time on a completely new field of study; indeed, the autograph dra of this leer shows signs that erasmus absentmindedly copied it from a rough dra by someone else³. likely erasmus had lile, if any, direct concern with the project, but thought it worthy enough to lend his brand for advertising purposes. while this was not an unusual practice in early print- ing, erasmus’ probable absence from this book raises questions for the history of science. what was erasmus’ actual aitude towards the mathematical sci- ences? if he did not edit the book, what colleagues in basle might have done the job? e  editio princeps of ptolemy’s geographia is an emblem of how erasmus related to mathematical interests more largely in basle. he permied, perhaps even benignly encouraged, their publication. but his larger-than-life presence has obscured the community around him that did value such work, and the goal of this paper is to bring that community into view. e configuration of literary and theological interests of erasmus’ modern readers have oen obscured his and his ᵗʰ-century colleagues’ interests in natural philosophy, medicine, and mathematics⁴. a possible exception is natu- ¹ e.g. antoine de smet, “Érasme et la cartographie”, scrinium erasmianum  (): -. ² opus epistolarum erasmi,  vols., ed. percy stafford allen, helen mary allen and heathcote w. garrod (oxford: clarendon press, -), vol. , ep.  (hereaer cited as allen). translations from the complete works of erasmus (toronto: university of toronto press, -) are cited as cwe. ³ cornelis reedijk, “e story of a fallacy: erasmus’s share in the first printed edition in greek of ptolemy’s geography (basle, )”, in eatrum orbis librorum: liber amicorum presented to nico israel on the occasion of his seventieth birthday (hes publishers, ), -. ⁴ few studies have been devoted to erasmus and science: william b. jensen, “erasmus on alchemy”, bulletin for the history of chemistry , no.  (): -; heinz-günther nesselrath, “erasmus und die astrologie”, in zukunsvoraussagen in der renaissance, ed. klaus bergdolt and walther ludwig (wiesbaden: harassowitz verlag, ), -.  :  richard j. oosterhoff ral history. it is no accident that the father of natural history, pliny the elder was the focus of erasmus’ earlier philological models, notably ermolao barbaro, as well as his closer circle of intimates at basle, not least his friend, editor, and biographer beatus rhenanus. in  the younger scholar formally claimed his place in among serious philologists with his annotationes in plinium; beatus, who had been erasmus’s closest friend for over a decade, insisted that only the testimony of ancient manuscripts—not conjecture—reliably restored such texts to a pristine state¹. e story of philology’s crucial role in restoring classical nat- ural history to renaissance europe has been told recently with new verve. we have learned the value of techniques of careful reading, habits of emendation, and the constant need to update and correct the reference works of antiquity². e textual habits of latinate readers—especially the readers shaped by the ad- vice in de copia on commonplacing—formed the apparatus of francis bacon’s new “method” of inference from tables of instances³. such habits reinvigorated ¹ beatus rhenanus, in c. plinium annotationes (basle: johann froben, ). on the titlepage, he ad- vertised that not only had he corrected pliny’s natural history, but this book “also showed a method by which not only pliny, but any author you want can be restored with the help of manuscript books” (verumetiam modus ostenditur, quo tum ipse plinius tum autores alii praesidio manuscrip- torum codicum restitui queant). see charles g. nauert, “humanists, scientists, and pliny: changing approaches to a classical author”, e american historical review , no.  (): -; marie- elisabeth boutroue, “les annotationes in plinium de rhenanus et la tradition textuelle de l’histoire naturelle à la renaissance”, in beatus rhenanus (-): lecteur et editeur des textes anciens, ed. james hirstein (turnhout: brepols, ), -. ² a sampling of this literature would include anthony graon, april shelford, and nancy g. sir- aisi, new worlds, ancient texts: e power of tradition and the shock of discovery (cambridge, ma: belknap press, ); gianna pomata and nancy g. siraisi, eds., historia: empiricism and erudi- tion in early modern europe (cambridge mass.: mit press, ); brian w. ogilvie, e science of describing: natural history in renaissance europe (chicago: university of chicago press, ); ann blair, “annotating and indexing natural philosophy”, in books and the sciences in history, ed. m. frasca-spada and nicholas jardine (cambridge: cambridge university press, ), -; ann blair, too much to know: managing scholarly information before the modern age (new haven: yale university press, ); sachiko kusukawa, picturing the book of nature: image, text, and argument in sixteenth-century human anatomy and medical botany (chicago: university of chicago press, ). ³ is connection has been made explicit by ann blair, “humanist methods in natural philoso- phy: e commonplace book”, journal for the history of ideas , no.  (): -. on erasmus’ influence more generally on commonplacing, see ann moss, printed commonplace-books and the structuring of renaissance ought (oxford: clarendon press, ),  et passim. e theme also informs more recent work on natural history and paper tools, such as ogilvie, e science of de- e fabrist origins of erasmian science: mathematical erudition in erasmus’ basle  :  the arts of categorization in the renaissance—and insofar as such habits can be traced to erasmus (especially to de copia), his legacy has nearly no end. our account is much thinner for the constellation of disciplines that made up the arts of quantification. yet the larger network of scholars who corresponded with erasmus and took him as model included important representatives of the mathematical disciplines, which included the four liberal arts of the quadrivium (arithmetic, geometry, music, and astronomy) and the adjacent studies of op- tics and cosmography. as the following pages will show, these included henri- cus glareanus, cuthbert tunstall, sebastian münster, and simon grynaeus¹. in particular mathematics had long been important to jacques leèvre d’Étaples, the older paris humanist who was much admired in erasmian circles². in this article, i suggest that mathematical scholars in erasmus’ orbit shared certain priorities with leèvre; in this respect, ‘erasmian mathematics’ might beer be called ‘fabrist’. to set the stage, i first present several works of mathematics published in basle during the s, when erasmus still wielded considerable influence on basle printing. in the second part, i review the curious relation- ship of basle’s humanists to paris—erasmus himself aggravated the growing distance between basle and paris. e final section of the paper compares the aitudes towards mathematics of the fabrists, simon grynaeus, and erasmus, finding affinities between leèvre and grynaeus. scribing; fabian krämer, “ein papiernes archiv ür alles jemals geschriebene: ulisse aldrovandis pandechion epistemonicon und die naturgeschichte der renaissance”, zeitschri ür geschichte der wissenschaen, technik und medizin  (): -; richard yeo, notebooks, english virtuosi, and early modern science (chicago: university of chicago press, ), chapter , esp. -. ¹ for these, and other basle scholars mentioned in this paper, the first point of inquiry is peter g. bietenholz and omas b. deutscher, contemporaries of erasmus: a biographical register of the renaissance and reformation,  vols. (toronto: university of toronto press, ). ² see eugene f. rice, ed., e prefatory epistles of jacques leèvre d’Étaples and related texts (new york: columbia university press, ); augustin renaudet, préréforme et humanisme à paris pen- dant les premières guerres d’italie, -, nd ed. (paris: Édouard champion, ). e signif- icance of leèvre’s circle for mathematics in early modern culture was recognized by timothy j. reiss, knowledge, discovery and imagination in early modern europe (cambridge: cambridge uni- versity press, ). see also isabelle pantin, “oronce fine’s role as royal lecturer”, in e worlds of oronce fine. mathematics, instruments and print in renaissance france, ed. alexander marr (doning- ton: shaun tyas, ), -; richard j. oosterhoff, “idiotae , mathematics, and artisans: e un- tutored mind and the discovery of nature in the fabrist circle”, intellectual history review (): -. leèvre relationship with erasmus is discussed below.  :  richard j. oosterhoff . mathematics in basle: the s by the s, no place in europe had beer right to the title ‘erasmian’ than basle. erasmus had arrived there in , and he returned again and again until his death in . johann froben, building on the successes of the amerbach printing house, reshaped the firm to serve erasmus’ interests, recognizing that with erasmus he could command a europe-wide market. he bought a house and garden for his rock-star writer, and opened his door to a steady flow of vis- itors, would-be writers, and talented correctors who basked in the learning and aention of the famous scholar. as james tracy put it, “a more intense and ar- ticulate group of ‘erasmians’ was not to be found anywhere”¹. erasmus in turn remained loyal. aer johann’s death in , and even aer he le the city as it turned to protestantism in , erasmus kept close to froben’s son jerome, who published the edition of ptolemy’s geographia () to which erasmus aached his name. what, then, did mathematics look like among the erasmi- ans? prior to , printers in basle spent lile aention on such disciplines, with the exception of several medical texts, including hippocrates and galen, in translation, as well as some critical work on pliny’s natural history². but by , when vesalius printed his de fabrica corporum there, basle printers had become well known for their beautiful editions of natural philosophy, medicine, and mathematics³. ¹ james d. tracy, “erasmus becomes a german”, renaissance arterly , no.  (): . ² for a list of these works, see the alphabetically-ordered bibliography in peter g. bietenholz, basle and france in the sixteenth century (geneva: droz, ). ³ as just two examples, leonhard fuchs and andreas vesalius published their more innovative works first in basle, beginning in the late s. on the print culture of such printing, see kusukawa, picturing the book of nature, especially -. e fabrist origins of erasmian science: mathematical erudition in erasmus’ basle  :  here i will present five books as a sample of the mathematics that augmented basle’s reputation during the s. ree are greek editiones principes: eu- clid’s elementa (), with proclus’ commentary; ptolemy of alexandria’s de geographia (); and, finally, the editio princeps of ptolemy’s almagest (). e first greek euclid, proclus, and ptolemy are enormously significant in the history of mathematics, yet they only suggest a very select audience of greek readers. two further examples of mathematical works published in basle were more accessible. e  edition of gregor reisch’s margarita philosophica presents the basic school mathematics any learned man was increasingly ex- pected to know. e other was the herwagen edition of medieval and renais- sance latin elements of euclid. examined in turn, these works clarify the place of mathematical publishing in erasmus’ context—and suggest parisian prece- dents. euclid’s elements were edited by simon grynaeus, whom the university of basle aracted in  as its new professor of greek. grynaeus, who had many friends in strassburg and wienburg, came not least for basle’s new affilia- tion with the young protestant movement. e edition of euclid had roots in grynaeus’ travels to england in the spring of , where he met the new move- ment’s latest protagonist, henry viii, as well as sir omas more, who offered leers that allowed grynaeus to visit oxford. ere he found several greek manuscripts, which he was permied to take from corpus christi college. gry- naeus’ protestant convictions do not seem to have marred his relationship with erasmus, for he acted as erasmus’ broker with not only more but also arch- bishop william warham and other friends of erasmus in england¹. grynaeus’ aention to euclid reflected a shiing focus in his scholarship, away from the discovery of livy that had consolidated his reputation of an eye for classical manuscripts. one of the manuscripts grynaeus found at ox- ford was of the commentary on the first book of euclid’s elements by the fih- century neoplatonist proclus. immediately on his return to basle, he published a short work of proclus, de motu, dedicating it to john clement, librarian of corpus christi, oxford (august ). e next year his growing appreciation for mathematics became clear in his preface to a collection of travel documents, ¹ ese travels are detailed in m. e. welti, “der gräzist simon grynaeus und england”, archiv ür kulturgeschichte  (): -.  :  richard j. oosterhoff where he praised the recent discovery of the new world as a triumph of the in- genium of mathematicians¹. he published the elements of euclid in , and in the lengthy dedicatory leer to cuthbert tunstall, the bishop of london, gry- naeus effused enthusiasm for his new project. “since i have oen wondered”, he said, “whether i too might somehow assist these studies in their birth, i decided to have the all mathematical disciplines (as much as we have of their authors today) published in order, in their own tongue. and i spared no effort in this task”². to prove the extent of his efforts, he noted that the sources of his edition were two manuscripts of euclid, one from lazare de baïf (then in venice), and the other from jean du ruel in paris. john clement of oxford had given him the manuscript for proclus’ commentary. e first greek edition of euclid’s elements, arguably the most important work in the history of mathematics, was a triumph, the foundation for later philologist-mathematicians south of the alps such as federico commandino and francesco maurolico in second half of the century³. yet it seems unlikely grynaeus’ edition was oen read on its own. instead, his edition was excerpted or copied alongside latin translations, usually only for the first six books of eu- clid. for example, oronce fine published grynaeus’ greek enunciations along with the eloquent but inaccurate translation of bartolomeo zamberti in paris in ; but even his own ‘corrections’ of zamberti’s demonstrations showed he had cribbed from the medieval translation of campanus rather than gry- naeus’ greek⁴. latin was likewise significant for the commentary of proclus on ¹ simon grynaeus, novus orbis regionum et insularum (basle: johann herwagen, ), preface. ² euclid, Στοιχείων βιβλίον ιέ ἐκ τῶν Θέωνος συνουσιῶν (…) adiecta præfatiuncula in qua de dis- ciplinis mathematicis nonnihil, ed. simon grynaeus (basle: johann herwagen, ), ar-v. “haec cum saepe-numero mecum cogitarem, disciplinas mathematicas, quantum in authoribus est hodie, in sua lingua, ordine omnes emiere decrevi, si qua nascentia studia iuvare ipse quoque possem. ac nullis dum in hoc sum laboribus peperci”. ³ on the complicated reception of euclid in the wake of this edition, see robert goulding, defend- ing hypatia: ramus, savile, and the renaissance rediscovery of mathematical history (new york: springer, ). specifically on the rise of a philological tradition around commandino and mau- rolico, see paul lawrence rose, e italian renaissance of mathematics (geneva: droz, ), chap- ters  and . ⁴ oronce fine, in sex priores libros geometricorum elementorum euclidis megarensis demonstrationes: quibus ipsius euclidis textus graecus, suis locis insertus est; una cum interpretatione latina bartholo- maei zamberti veneti, ad fidem geometricam per eundem orontium recognita (paris: simon de co- lines, ). other efforts to put the greek and latin together are listed by omas l. heath and e fabrist origins of erasmian science: mathematical erudition in erasmus’ basle  :  euclid’s elements, book , which grynaeus published alongside euclid. eventu- ally, proclus would encourage mathematicians to renovate aristotelian philos- ophy by means of mathematics (a point grynaeus also raised in his preface, as discussed below)¹. but besides grynaeus’s preface, there are few signs of direct engagement with proclus’ notion of a universal mathematical method until the commentary was translated into latin in ². it took time for greek editions to filter into cultural consciousness. e first greek edition of ptolemy’s geographia was in a different position, because it had been available in latin for well over a century, under the title cosmographia. e medieval ptolemy had been the uncontested authority in astronomical maers. when the italian humanist jacopo d’angelo had trans- lated ptolemy’s cosmographia around , he also reinvented ptolemy as an authority for mapmaking and geography—and so helped to birth a new math- ematical discipline with wide resonance in an age of global discovery³. a mea- sure of this latin translation’s popularity is that it was printed seven times before —while the elements had only been printed twice. us ptolemy’s authority transformed cosmography, previously a discipline of qualitative de- scriptions, into a discipline of quantitative techniques: his book included tables of longitudes and latitudes for ancient cities, and instigated a whole new genre of maps and accompanying handbooks⁴. euclid, e irteen books of the elements, vol. : books - (; new york: dover publications, ), -. ¹ guy claessens, “het denken verbeeld. de vroegmoderne receptie (-) van proclus’ com- mentaar op het eerste boek van euclides’ elementen” (phd dissertation, university of leuven, ); eckhard kessler, “clavius entre proclus et descartes”, in les jésuites à la renaissance: sys- tème éducatif et production du savoir, ed. luce giard (paris: presses universitaires, ), -. ² proclus, in primum euclidis elementorum librum commentariorum (…) libri iiii, trans. francesco barozzi (padua, ). on this edition’s influence, see giovanni crapulli, mathesis universalis: gen- esi di un’idea nel xvi secolo (rome: ataneo, ); david rabouin, mathesis universalis: l’idée de ‘mathématique universelle’ d’aristote à descartes (paris: Épiméthée, ). ³ james hankins, “ptolemy’s geography in the renaissance”, in humanism and platonism in the italian renaissance, vol. ,  vols., storia e leeratura: raccolta di studi et testi  (rome: edizioni di storia e leeratura, ), -. ⁴ e novelty of this quantitative discipline is sketched by klaus a. vogel, “cosmography”, in e cambridge history of science: early modern science, ed. katherine park and lorraine daston (cambridge: cambridge university press, ), -; adam mosley, “e cosmographer’s role in the sixteenth century: a preliminary study”, archives internationales d’histoire des sciences ,  :  richard j. oosterhoff as a result, there was already a community of cosmographers at hand when jerome froben published the first greek edition of the geographia in . as mentioned earlier, if reedijk is correct (and i find his evidence compelling), it is unlikely an aging erasmus actually edited the work himself. so who helped froben prepare and correct the text? possibilities include simon grynaeus him- self, henricus glareanus, sebastian münster, or sigismund gelenius, who all possessed enough technical skill and philological expertise to complete the task, and who all regularly frequented froben’s printing house. glareanus had, as early as c. , cut his teeth on the growing discipline of cosmography by writing a short introduction to cosmography, which eventually was published in basle as de geographia liber unus (). sebastian münster likewise had long been interested in geography. in  he and beatus rhenanus discussed how print a new geography of the rhineland; by  he planned instead to repre- sent all germany; his cosmographia was finally printed in , including maps and cityscapes of all europe and beyond¹. in  münster was highly respected for his hebrew and greek scholarship, and in  he published a new latin edition of ptolemy’s cosmographia that drew on the original greek as well as the extant latin translations. as reedijk admits, it seems strange that the  editio princeps does not acknowledge the work of accomplished scholars, whom erasmus respected, such as grynaeus, glarean, and münster. for this reason, he suggests sigismund gelenius as the possible editor—gelenius was known both for excellent greek and for foregoing recognition. ankfully, we need not identify the editor’s true identity here. e point to emphasize here is that froben’s shop included several talented scholars with mathematical interests. we do know that it was again simon grynaeus who produced the editio prin- ceps of ptolemy’s almagest in ². grynaeus presented the work to henry viii of england, whom he had met seven years earlier, as an extension of the work he had begun with the edition of euclid. e dedication to henry was es- pecially appropriate because ptolemy, according to long tradition, was himself an egyptian king. grynaeus mostly preached the power of astronomy to draw no.  (): -. ¹ e conversation is mentioned in a leer to beatus of , cit. mahew mclean, e cos- mographia of sebastian münster: describing the world in the reformation (aldershot, england- burlington, vt: ashgate, ), . ² claudius ptolemy, megales syntaxis (basle: herwagen, ). e fabrist origins of erasmian science: mathematical erudition in erasmus’ basle  :  the king’s mind upward to the divine mind evident in the heavenly motions. but he wisely intimated that astronomy also had practical value for the state, since by this art alone one “protects the sea power of our people, or may, in a position of command, go around the whole globe of our world”¹. is aitude hinted at the practical value that elizabethan erudites like john dee and gabriel harvey would find in mathematics—all the more astonishing that the point is made so clearly in the first printing of the greek almagest. in the second half of the ᵗʰ century the book would be less and less valuable, as alternatives to ptolemy’s systematic account of the heavens became more and more popular, especially in the wienberg circles that knew grynaeus’ name well². indeed, copernicus received a copy of grynaeus’ ptolemy in , and drew from it in the last revisions of de revolutionibus ()³. e new greek editions of euclid, proclus, and ptolemy represented a heady moment in what grynaeus had called the new “birth of mathematics”. ey did not, however, capture the extent of mathematical publishing in basle. students, and indeed most masters, were unlikely to expend effort on mathematics in greek. instead, they used latin works, such as two others printed at basle in the s: one was a collection of introductions to arithmetic, geometry, and optics that were added to the  edition of gregor reisch’s margarita philo- sophica; the other was an edition of euclid’s elements in facing medieval and renaissance translations (). both reveal origins in paris. grynaeus already had some contact with paris in . johann herwagen, who had married johann froben’s widow and took over part of his press, pub- lished grynaeus’ collection of travel writings, the novus orbis regionum et in- sularum in march . aer grynaeus’ prefatory leer to tunstall, the first tract was the introduction to cosmographical maps by sebastian münster, then ¹ ibid., av. “ergo maris imperium sic illa genti nostrae sola tuetur, circuire globum orbis nostri totum huius ut ductu liceat”. ² e classic picture of the ‘wienberg circle’ is given by robert s. westman, “e melanchthon circle, rheticus, and the wienberg interpretation of the copernican eory”, isis , no.  (): -. on grynaeus’s importance to them, see his name in the index of charloe methuen, kepler’s tübingen: stimulus to a eological mathematics (aldershot: ashgate, ). ³ alain-philippe segonds and concea luna, “e greek text of ptolemy, almagest xiii, as source of book vi of copernicus’s de revolutionibus”, journal for the history of astronomy , no.  (): -.  :  richard j. oosterhoff teaching theology and hebrew at heidelberg, but who oen traveled to basle. münster may have also provided the map that immediately followed his in- troductio in this first edition¹. but in november of , a second edition was published in paris. in place of the original map, possibly by münster, the paris edition included the remarkable double-cordiform world map of oronce fine². fine, the first royal professor of mathematics of the newly-instituted collège royal,had earned his position through the offices of guillaume budé, one of grynaeus’ paris correspondents. e unique cordiform projection announced fine’s ingenious mastery of mathematics, and therefore his right to the most prestigious mathematical professorship in europe. it is not clear whether grynaeus had an active hand in the paris edition of the novus orbis. but oronce fine must have established some formal relation- ship with the basle group, because within a couple of years, basle printers pub- lished oronce fine’s new edition of gregor reisch’s popular textbook margarita philosophica. judging from his preface, oronce fine had already “corrected and augmented” reisch’s book in . it appears paris printers were unwilling to reprint the older textbook, whereas he or his agent was able to convince basle printers of the volume’s marketability. e book on which he drew, originally published in , contained only dialogues addressing the seven liberal arts as well as a survey of aristotle’s natural philosophy and ethics—the basics of the university arts curriculum. already in , printers added several appen- dices of practical mathematics, notably the standard medieval introduction to the quadrant, useful in surveying³. but fine’s basle edition of  expanded ¹ e map does not indicate its maker, but shirley suggests that münster designed it. rodney w. shirley, e mapping of the world: early printed world maps, -, holland press cartographica  (london: holland press and moxon, ). ² later editions of geographical works, such as the freiberg  edition of glareanus’ de ge- ographia (with a preface from ) also used this map, which was very influential. robert kar- row, mapmakers of the sixteenth century and eir maps (chicago: speculum orbis, ), -. shirley, mapping of the world, no. . note that this is not the single cordiform map fine produced in , titled “nova totius galliae descriptio”. ³ see the introduction to gregor reisch, natural philosophy epitomised: books - of gregor reisch’s philosophical pearl (), trans. andrew cunningham and sachiko kusukawa (farnham, surrey; burlington, vt: ashgate, ). in  jacob wimpfeling, former headmaster of the latin school of sélestat (schlestadt), recommended it for use at the university of heidelberg; in basle, konrad pellikan used it in the franciscan stadium (xi-xii). e fabrist origins of erasmian science: mathematical erudition in erasmus’ basle  :  much further. he also added large excerpts from several mathematical text- books by the paris humanists whose tradition he hoped to extend. in  jacques leèvre d’Étaples, josse clichtove, and charles de bovelles had pro- duced a suite of mathematical treatises on arithmetic, geometry, optics, and astronomy, aimed primarily at education in the collège du cardinal lemoine in paris¹. fine selected parts of each of these works to further augment reisch’s encyclopedic textbook, thereby cementing his own relationship to the fabrist mathematical tradition². in fine’s basle edition, these texts were republished until , including an italian translation. parisian precedent also lay behind another widely read translation of euclid. e latin euclid was in growing demand in basle; in  grynaeus wrote a friend on behalf of a student, asking for a copy of the elements, because he could find none for sale³. spoing a market, the printer johann herwagen turned to leèvre’s edition from ⁴. leèvre had set the standard medieval translation by campanus (ᵗʰ century) alternating with the humanist venice translation of bartolomeo zamberti. unlike the greek editions, which were certainly highly significant in the long term, the alternating translations had more immediate benefits, and seem to have been a standard volume in mathematicians’ libraries all over ᵗʰ century europe⁵. e twin translations recognize the challenges of mathematical philology: zamberti’s new translation was certainly eloquent, ¹ jacques leèvre d’Étaples, josse clichtove, and charles bovelles, epitome compendiosaque in- troductio in libros arithmeticos divi severini boetii, adiecto familiari [clichtovei] commentario dilu- cidata. praxis numerandi certis quibusdam regulis (auctore clichtoveo). introductio in geometriam caroli bovilli. astronomicon stapulensis. (paris: wolfgang hopyl and henri Étienne, ). ² on this relationship, see isabelle pantin, “oronce fine’s role as royal lecturer”, in e worlds of oronce fine. mathematics, instruments and print in renaissance france, ed. alexander marr (don- ington: shaun tyas, ), -. ³ alfred hartmann, ed., die amerbachkorrespondenz (basle: verlag der universitätsbibliothek, ), ep. , vol. . ⁴ jacques leèvre d’Étaples, euclidis megarensis mathematici clarissimi elementorum geometrico- rum libri xv, campani galli transalpini in eosdem commentariorum libri xv, eonis alexandrini bartholamaeo zamberto veneto interprete, in tredecim priores, commentariorum libri xiii, hypsiclis alexandrini in duos posteriores, eodem bartholomaeo zamberto veneto interprete, commentariorum libri ii (paris: henri estienne, ). ⁵ for just a few examples of libraries that contain such volumes, see catalogues for libraries of john dee, jean du temps, francesco maurolyco, federico commandino, francesco barozzi, bernardino baldi, marin mersenne.  :  richard j. oosterhoff but also included elementary mathematical mistakes; campanus’ translation, on the other hand, was not exactly faithful or elegant latin, but made beer mathematical sense. by seing the two side by side, leèvre offered the virtues of both mathematical and latin eloquence¹. herwagen published this edition in august , corrected and restored by christian herlinus, the public pro- fessor of mathematics at johannes sturm’s academy in strassburg². herwagen republished this book at least two more times ( and ). to some degree, the greek scholarly editions and latin “popular” editions reflected the german tradition of mathematical scholarship. is german tra- dition oen traced itself back to regiomontanus in vienna, with figures like erasmus’ friend willibald pirckheimer, georg tansteer (of vienna), some of the circle of conrad celtis in ingolstadt, and even in the wienberg of philip melanchthon—melanchthon’s oration “to studious youth” on the utility of ge- ometry prefaced the basle  edition of leèvre’s dual latin version of eu- clid. grynaeus had indeed studied with melanchthon before the laer went to wienberg, a relationship he maintained. especially aer , when basle chose for a protestant model of reform, the city aracted germans unhappy with rome. one such figure was jakob ziegler (also known as tansteer), long a member of the ingolstadt community around the german poet laureate con- rad celtis³. he originally appears to have worked in the papal curia, but in august of  he crossed the alps from rome to basle, to join the protestant cause and to publish his commentary on book  of pliny’s natural history, on astronomy and cosmography⁴. to some degree, tansteer’s works, like those ¹ on this question, see richard j. oosterhoff, “neolatin mathematics”, in brill’s encyclopaedia of the neo-latin world: macropaedia, ed. philip ford, jan bloemendal, and charles fantazzi (leiden: brill, ), -; rose, e italian renaissance of mathematics, -. ² campanus and bartholomaeo zamberti, euclidis megarensis geometricorum elementorum libri xv, ed. jacques leèvre d’Étaples (basle: johannes hervagius, ), av. herlinus has the distinc- tion of being singled out by leibniz in his critique of locke, for his later study of euclid in which he expanded euclidean proofs in syllogistic form—the height of inelegance: analyseis geometricae sex librorum euclidis (strassburg: iosias rihelius, ). ³ on the mathematical interests of this circle, see c. schöner, mathematik und astronomie an der universität ingolstadt im . und . jahrhundert (berlin: dunker & humblot, ). note that ziegler is to be distinguished from georg tansteer, professor at vienna. ⁴ jakob ziegler, commentarius in plinii de naturali historia librum secundum (basle: h. petrus, ). e fabrist origins of erasmian science: mathematical erudition in erasmus’ basle  :  of simon grynaeus, represent the german tradition, extending even back to regiomontanus, perhaps the mathematician ziegler cited most. but these german connections should not overshadow deep roots in france as well, also in mathematics. ziegler also reflected the parisian legacy when he cited leèvre among the “musici recentiores” who explained how the dis- tances between planets can be described as proportional in the same manner as musical tones¹. e relevant work was leèvre’s boethian elementa musi- calia (). ziegler also cited leèvre’s introductorium astronomicum, imply- ing that since the work was commonly known he need not repeat leèvre’s explanation². erasmians oen, it appeared, had more use for mathematics than did erasmus himself. . the fabrist legacy in basle e brilliant community erasmus savored in basle, as bietenholz has pointed, owed a great deal to the exchange of people, training, books, and ideas they en- joyed with paris in the first part of the century. yet such influences are difficult to trace in erasmus’ correspondence, and infrequently recognized in basle let- ters. rehearsing the contacts between leèvre’s circle and basle helps explain why parisian influence might have been greater than first appearances suggest³. ¹ ibid., . ² ibid., . ³ is paradox permeates bietenholz, basle and france in the sixteenth century, -; margaret mann phillips, “erasmus in france in the later sixteenth century”, journal of the warburg and courtauld institutes  (): -; andré stegmann, “erasme et la france (-)”, in collo- quium erasmianum, actes du colloque international réuni à mons du  au  octobre  (mons, ), . although i do not address the question, a growing sense of german nationalism among alsatian humanists like beatus rhenanus is partly to blame, no doubt, and erasmus seems to have catered to the growing pride in germania over gallia. tracy, “erasmus becomes a german”; lisa jardine, “penfriends and patria: erasmian pedagogy and the republic of leers”, erasmus of rot- terdam society yearbook  (): -.  :  richard j. oosterhoff in august , erasmus traveled up the rhine to basle to a hero’s welcome. along the way, he was greeted with a feast at strassburg, and then offered flagons of wine and more feasting in schlestadt (now sélestat). from there jo- hannes sapidus, headmaster of schlestadt’s famous grammar school, accom- panied him the rest of the way to basle, where johann froben and his family paid his bill at the inn and then insisted he stay at their own home. of course, we know of this triumphal procession because erasmus wrote an extended ac- count of his welcome in a leer he wrote to the literary sodality at strassburg to thank them for their hospitality¹. skilled publicist that he was, erasmus’ own narrative about his triumphal journey up the rhine has obscured the very rea- son he made basle his home: the city already possessed talented men of leers. his success in the next couple of years, publishing the proverbiorum chiliades (i.e. the second major revision of the adages, ), the greek new testament (), the leers of jerome (), and the moriae encomium, and the sudden flood of his leers inundating alsace makes it easy to think that it was erasmus who aracted illustrious colleagues². to be sure, leers and scholars did come to froben’s already-busy house all the more, but erasmus decided to remain in basle because he found there a community that already loved him, and was al- ready accomplished enough to assist his own work. recent work has shown just how much erasmus effectively leaned on others such as oecolampadius, wolf- gang capito and konrad pellikan to correct, compare hebrew examples, and ensure doctrinal coherence in his editions of jerome’s leers and of the greek new testament³. such colleagues, he knew, were not to be taken for granted. in delight he wrote johannes sapidus, headmaster in sélestat, of the intellectual ¹ ep.  (cwe .-). is leer was printed four months later with erasmus’ best selling work to date, the copia (strassburg: mahias schürer, december ). erasmus wrote in response to the several lines of welcome that jacob wimpfeling sent from strassburg in early september; erasmus’ extended response takes more than nine pages, and his humble thanks skilfully publicizes this moment for an international audience. ² on erasmus’ self-promotion, see lisa jardine, erasmus, man of leers: e construction of charisma in print (princeton, nj: princeton university press, ); hilmar m. pabel, “credit, para- texts, and editorial strategies in erasmus of roerdam’s editions of jerome”, in cognition and the book: typologies of formal organization of knowledge in the printed book of the early modern period, ed. karl a.e. enenkel and wolfgang neuber (leiden: brill, ), -; hilmar m. pabel, herculean labours: erasmus and the editing of st. jerome’s leers in the renaissance (leiden: brill, ). ³ is picture emerges, for example, in tracy, “erasmus becomes a german”. e fabrist origins of erasmian science: mathematical erudition in erasmus’ basle  :  community he had found in froben’s print shop: “ey all know latin, they all know greek, and most know hebrew too; one is an excellent historian, another an experienced theologian; one is skilled in mathematics, one is a studious anti- quary, another a legal scholar. you yourself know how rare this is. before now, i certainly have never had a chance to live in such a happy group. and to say nothing of that, how open they are, how joyful, how harmonious! you would say they shared but one soul”¹. indeed, by  basle was a humanist hothouse. as a mid-sized, free impe- rial city, basle straddled several key trade-routes, including the rhine, between france, germany and italy, forming a corridor taken by many scholars. in the s, johannes heynlin von stein taught at the newly founded university of basle (est. ), where his students included johannes amerbach and johannes reuchlin. aer gaining a prestigious degree in theology at paris, where he part- nered with the sorbonne’s librarian guillaume fichet to set up the first paris press, heynlin returned to basle as city preacher in . in the next decade johann froben and johannes amerbach founded their famous presses in the city, much praised by the basle poet laureate sebastian brant (before he le for strassburg in )². in an age of entrepreneurial printers, amerbach and froben succeeded in part because they cultivated a growing stable of talented authors, editors, and cor- rectors³. in , the gied greek scholar johannes cuno came to froben’s aer several years with aldus manutius in venice. others followed. in  beatus rhenanus joined cuno, and then ludwig bär, henricus glareanus, wolfgang faber capito, and johannes oecolampadius—as well as erasmus. in  hans and ambrosius holbein came to basle from nuremberg and designed numer- ¹ ep.  (allen i.). “nemo latine nescit, nemo graece nescit, plaerique et hebraice sciunt; hic in historiae cognition praecellit; ille callet theologiam; hic mathematics peritus est; alius antiquitatis studiosus, ille iuris consultus. iam hoc quam sit rarum ipse nosti. mihi certe hactenus non contingit in aeque felici versari contubernio. verum ut haec sileantur, qui candor omnium, quae festivitas, quae concordia? unum omnibus animum esse iures”. is was published in the epistolae elegantes (basle, ). ² is paragraph is especially based on hans rudolph guggisberg, basle in the sixteenth century: aspects of the city republic before, during, and aer the reformation (wipf and stock publishers, ). ³ earle hilgert, “johann froben and the basle university scholars, -”, e library ar- terly , no.  (): -.  :  richard j. oosterhoff ous frontispieces for froben¹. froben also made the most of his city’s resources. basle’s monasteries were on the decline, but some, and especially the carthu- sians, had once been centers of manuscript copying and book-making—their libraries supplied froben with material to print. e largest convent belonged to the franciscans, who included important scholars among their number, no- tably konrad pellikan and sebastian münster, both hebraists. aer joining the protestant cause with basle in , münster would go on to write the cosmo- graphia (), the bestselling collection of maps and city-scapes, and become rector of the city’s university. e rhineland community drew on long relationships with paris, and in par- ticular with the circle of scholars around jacques leèvre d’Étaples in the s. johann amerbach, having earned the paris ma in the s, in  sent his sons, bruno and boniface, to paris for the same training. he demurred when he found out his sons had skipped the scotist schools he had frequented; instead they spent aernoons at the collège du cardinal lemoine, at leèvre’s lectures “without commentaries”, which bruno thought would be as useful as the more traditional scotist studies². e amerbach boys were only some of the school- boys from the rhineland aracted to the collège du cardinal lemoine. jerome gebwiler was master of the latin school at schlestadt from  to , aer he earned the ma with leèvre at paris. he taught martin bucer and prepared several sélestat students to go to paris, including boniface amerbach, michel hummelberg, johann sapidus, and beatus rhenanus³. e students of the col- lège du cardinal lemoine knew well the Écu de bâle, the sign under which basle publishers sold their books in paris. beatus rhenanus is perhaps the most intriguing of the rhenish scholars with close ties to leèvre, in part because his surviving archive of books from this pe- ¹ frank hieronymus, “jacobus faber (c. -c. ), un graveur français à bâle”, bulletin du bib- liophile  (): -. ² hartmann, die amerbachkorrespondenz, : (no. ). augustin renaudet, préréforme et hu- manisme à paris pendant les premières guerres d’italie, -, nd ed. (; paris: Édouard champion, ), -. see also richard j. oosterhoff, “mathematical culture in renaissance paris: university, print, and the circle of leèvre d’Étaples” (phd dissertation, university of notre dame, ), -. ³ paul adam, l’humanisme à sélestat: l’école, les humanistes, la bibliothèque, th ed. (; sélestat: imprimerie stahl sélestat, ). e fabrist origins of erasmian science: mathematical erudition in erasmus’ basle  :  riod serve as a unique window onto leèvre’s teaching. beatus arrived in paris in the summer of , and bought more than  books during his four years in paris. yet his annotations show that the books he read for classwork were those by leèvre and other professors at cardinal lemoine¹. in broad outlines, these books included the usualprogression througharistotelian logic, natural philosophy, and ethics. but besides focusing on the primary texts, with mini- mal commentary, leèvre’s teaching differed from the common modus parisien- sis in a key way: he began the curriculum with mathematics, insisting that this would open all the other disciplines. at each stage, beatus read introductions and short commentaries by his teachers, including leèvre, josse clichtove, and charles de bovelles, including the compendium of mathematics that oronce fine would later excerpt for the  edition of the margarita philosophica. in fact, beatus bought three mathematical books in , which he bound together in one sammelband². e first was a compendium of shorter introductions by his professors: leèvre’s epitome of boethian number theory; josse clichtove’s practical introduction to arithmetical operations; charles de bovelles’ short in- troductions to geometry and optics; and finally leèvre’s brief introduction to planetary theory³. e second was a collection of advanced treatises on num- ber and music theory, one edited and another authored by leèvre⁴. e third book was leèvre’s commentary on the basic astronomy textbook of the me- dieval university, sacrobosco’s sphere⁵. by studying the “cursus fabri”, beatus and fellow-students like the amerbach boys enjoyed a training in mathemat- ics unusual at the time⁶. by  beatus was reading for the ma, and probably ¹ for a bibliography describing the works beatus bought and annotated in paris, see oosterhoff, “mathematical culture”, appendix c, -. ² is volume is now in the bibliothèque humaniste de sélestat, shelfmark k . ³ leèvre d’Étaples, clichtove, and bovelles, epitome, etc., bibliothèque humaniste de sélestat k a. ⁴ jacques leèvre d’Étaples, arithmetica elementa; musica elementa; epitome in libros arithmeticos divi severini boetii; rithmimachie ludus que et pugna numerorum appellatur (paris: johannes higman and wolfgang hopyl, ), bibliothèque humaniste de sélestat k b. ⁵ jacques leèvre d’Étaples, textus de sphera johannis de sacrobosco, cum additione (quantum nec- essarium est) adiecta: nouo commentario nuper edito ad utilitatem studentium philosophice parisien- sis academie: illustratus. cum compositione anuli astronomici boni latensis. et geometria euclidis megarensis (paris: henri estienne, ), bibliothèque humaniste de sélestat k c. ⁶ see also oosterhoff, “mathematical culture”, -.  :  richard j. oosterhoff teaching the same books in the college as a licentiate. certainly he assisted leèvre and others by correcting books, a skill that would put him in high de- mand as a corrector among the printers of strassburg and basle aer he le paris in ¹. while beatus never appears to have taken a creative interest in mathematics, his experience would have been familiar to the other rhineland humanists who first studied in paris. although basle’s earliest and most accomplished humanists and printers had warm relations with paris and especially leèvre, the connection seems to have cooled with erasmus. e reasons for this change reflect erasmus’ complicated and ambitious response to the intellectual culture of paris. as both stegmann and de la garanderie have pointed out, he seems to have connected closely with only two figures during his initial stay in the s². e one, the math- urin robert gaguin, was the central figure in an earlier wave of paris humanists with close ties to italy; the other was fausto andrelini, an italian poet who had made paris his home while he taught latin leers at the university. but al- though erasmus must have known leèvre, he never indicated any intimacy with the pedagogue who had become the new center of more ‘eloquent leers’, hailed as the french heir to ficino and pico. possibly erasmus, studying theol- ogy at the collège de montaigu, found the philosophical education at lemoine to be beneath him. or perhaps it was distasteful, since it was still structured along traditional aristotelian lines, and erasmus himself pursued a very dif- ferent approach to the liberal arts (a point addressed below). james farge has even suggested that erasmus may have found parisian theological education not merely a bore and inhumane, as he oen said, but perhaps more difficult ¹ beatus’ first appeared in print with some verses on the titlepage of ramon llull, contenta. pri- mum volumen contemplationum remundi duos libros continens. libellus blaquerne de amico et amato, ed. jacques leèvre d’Étaples (paris: guy marchant for jean petit, ). on correcting practices in leèvre’s circle, see elizabeth armstrong tyler, “jacques leèvre d’etaples and henri estienne the elder, -”, in e french mind: studies in honour of gustave rudler, ed. w. grayburn moore (oxford: sutherland and starkis, ), -. on beatus as an outstanding corrector and editor, see now also anthony t. graon, e culture of correction in renaissance europe (london: e british library, ), passim. ² marie-madeleine de la garanderie, “les relations d’erasme avec paris, au temps de son sejour aux pays-bas meridionaux”, in scrinium erasmianum (leiden, ), -; andré stegmann, “erasme et la france (-)”, in colloquium erasmianum, actes du colloque international réuni à mons du  au  octobre  (mons, ), . e fabrist origins of erasmian science: mathematical erudition in erasmus’ basle  :  than he liked to admit¹. in any event, erasmus became famous without parisian help, while traveling england and italy. meanwhile, aer leèvre retired from university teaching in , he turned to scholarship on the church fathers and the bible. it was these fields that put him into conflict with erasmus. in , erasmus generously praised the older humanist’s biblical scholar- ship. e firstfruits of leèvre’s biblical studies was the incuplex psalterium (), quickly followed by the epistolae pauli (), which focused on estab- lishing good latin editions, corrected against the greek, with short commen- tary largely focused on how the text might lead the devout reader to christ². in august of , erasmus wrote that “recently leèvre, my friend, did for paul what i am doing for the whole new testament. indeed leèvre was much more daring than me. he set his interpretation against the ancients and against paris, queen of all universities—while i merely claim to have fixed or explained a few places, like a corrector”³. in the annotations of the novum instrumentum (basle, ), erasmus oen disagreed with leèvre, but always with great re- spect, seing him alongside lorenzo valla and describing him as “that wonder- ful man leèvre, our incomparable friend”⁴. certainly, there were obvious dif- ferences. erasmus gave a complete greek edition, and reflected a secure mastery of greek. and erasmus took a more critical perspective, for example, doubting whether paul authored the leer to the hebrews, since its greek style was so ¹ james k. farge, “erasmus, the university of paris, and the profession of eology”, erasmus of roerdam society yearbook  (): -. ² guy bedouelle, leèvre d’Étaples at l’intelligence des Écritures (genève: droz, ); guy bedouelle, le incuplex psalterium de leèvre d’Étaples: un guide de lecture (geneva: droz, ). for details of the dispute sketched here, see margaret mann, Érasme et les débuts de la réforme française (-) (paris: honoré champion, ), -; guy bedouelle, “leèvre d’etaples et erasme: une amitié critique”, in jacques leèvre d’etaples (?-), actes du colloque d’etaples les  et  novembre  (paris: honoré champion, ), -; jacques leèvre d’ Étaples and sheila m. porrer, jacques leèvre d’etaples and the ree maries debates (genève: librairie droz, ), -. ³ - august , ep.  (allen ii:). “iacobus faber stapulensis, amicus noster, dudum id fecit in paulum quod ego in totum novum instrumentum. ille suam interpretationem veteri oppo- suit, idque in academiarum omnium regina lutetia; ego recognitorem modo professus locus aliquot aut corrigo aut explico”. ⁴ desiderius erasmus, novum instrumentum (basle: johann froben, ), . “tametsi dissentit eximius ille vir et amicus noster incomparabilis, iacobus faber stapulensis, quem ego quoties nomino, honoris causa nomino (…)”.  :  richard j. oosterhoff much more elegant than other new testament leers. in fact, leèvre found this aitude approached disrespect. his concern sparked into flame on a passage of hebrews where erasmus adopted a reading that leèvre thought diminished the divinity of christ¹. in the second edition of his epistolae pauli (), leèvre burst out in a rare moment of intemperance, saying that erasmus was flirting with heresy. e details of the exchange have been frequently described; their results have oen been mis-characterized. erasmus felt betrayed. in less than two weeks he dashed off an apologia ad fabrum, which tore apart the older scholar’s greek, and offered plausible theological reasons for his beer read- ings of the manuscripts. he had the pamphlet delivered personally to leèvre, along with a note that threatened leèvre with worse, if he continued the dis- pute: “do not let provocation by other people drive you into a position in which you may later be very sorry to find yourself. restrain the language of your sup- porters as well as yours; i have restrained my own friends so far”². it worked. leèvre never responded. he was so quiet that erasmus seems to have grown nervous. in the next months he frequently worried about rumors that leèvre was preparing a response³. finally, he strenuously defended his severe rear- guard action to guillaume budé: “it is not very honourable, you say, to dispute in public with a friend. but is it, i ask you, honourable to make such aacks on a friend who does not deserve them? (…) for a friend’s sake to be counted a blas- phemer against christ is not only absolutely mad but grossly impious”⁴. eras- mus, without waiting for a response, added his defensive leer to the next edi- tion of the novum testamentum; it was circulated far more widely than budé’s ¹ e passage was hebrews :: erasmus adopted the reading “god made man a lile lower than the angels”, which was more common in both latin and greek manuscripts, instead of “a lile lower than god” which jerome had approved. leèvre held the minority view for theological reasons: since hebrews was describing christ, this diminished christ in leèvre’s eyes. ² ep.  (cwe ). erasmus aributes several shocking charges to leèvre: “‘words most unwor- thy of christ and of god’, ‘words self-destructive from every point of view, and from every aspect exhibiting their own falsity’, ‘words which are hostile to the understanding of prophecy’, ‘words which support the case of those pestilent jews and treat christ with contumely as they do’, ‘words worthy of bedlam’, ‘words which if obstinately adhered to, would make me a heretic’, and plenty more of the same kind”. but only the first three of these charges have any textual basis in leèvre’s writing. erasmus seems to have indulged in some posturing for effect. ³ e.g. ep. . ⁴ erasmus to budé,  feb , ep. . e fabrist origins of erasmian science: mathematical erudition in erasmus’ basle  :  response, which gently chided erasmus for descending into unworthy bales with a fellow soldier of truth¹. e damage was done. e dispute between erasmus and leèvre clanged all the more loudly in their corner of the republic of leers because friends of the one usually hoped to be friends of the other. when scholars traveled from basle to paris, they sought out the aging leèvre. in  the franciscan konrad pellikan, who had helped erasmus with hebrew notes in his editions of the new testament and jerome, visited paris, met with leèvre, and passed on news of beatus rhenanus, and bruno and basil amerbach². e next year the swiss savant henricus glare- anus, who had lived with erasmus in basle since , moved to paris. erasmus consistently praised the young swiss savant, and when erasmus himself po- litely declined the invitation of the bishop of paris, etienne poncher, to accept the francis i’s patronage, erasmus commended glareanus in his stead³. glare- anus spent five years in paris, and at the height of the hebrews controversy boasted to his countryman hüldrich zwingli: “leèvre d’etaples is now oen my close companion. above all, this completely honest and eminent man sings, plays, disputes, and laughs with me, especially at this foolish world, as someone so humane and kind that it oen seems—even though it does not really happen—as if he has forgoen his difficulties”⁴. by , even though friends and colleagues remained on good terms with leèvre, erasmus himself sensed strained relations with paris as a whole. he had fled the theological training of paris, and joined in vociferous criticisms of the university’s most powerful interest group, the faculty of theology; he had overreacted in criticism of france’s most venerable and ancient man of let- ters, leèvre; and he had—delicately, elegantly—declined francis i’s invitation as well as that of the king’s middle-man, the bishop of paris. in , leèvre ¹ budé to erasmus,  april , ep.  (allen iii.-). ² das chronikon des konrad pellikan, ed. b. riggenbach, (basle, ), . cit. bietenholz, basle and france in the sixteenth century, . ³ to etienne poncher,  february , ep.  (allen ii.-). ⁴ to zwingli,  august : “faber stapulensis, qui saepe iam comui meae fuit. is supra modum me amat, totus integer et candidus, mecum cantillat, ludit, disputant, ridet mecum stultum prae- cipue hunc mundum, vir humanissimus atque ita benignus, ut nonnunquam videatur—quamquam id revera minime facit—fideatur tamen suae gravitates oblitus” (zwinglis sämtliche werke, vii, ep. , p. ).  :  richard j. oosterhoff wrote to apologize for not having wrien erasmus sooner¹. but in the next year leèvre took a direction that must have galled erasmus². leèvre wrote to beatus rhenanus (the last leer we have between them), asking beatus to give his regards to luther. en leèvre was invited to meaux, along with gérard roussel and guillaume farel, to reform the diocese through popular education and especially preaching. under pressure from the paris faculty of eology, the project folded in . while farel fled to basle, leèvre appears to have gone straightaway to strassburg. erasmus’ comment was hardly complimen- tary: “e frenchman leèvre d’Étaples fled to strassburg, but aer changing his name, like that old comic chremes of athens, in stilpho’s commentary”³. e basle printer andreas cratander was known for publishing lutheriana, and erasmus withheld his support from him. e more measured proponents of re- form in basle found farel too much of a firebrand, and soon expelled him from the city. in sum, bietenholz suggests, leèvre’s “lutheran turn” around  forced froben to choose between leèvre and erasmus, which goes some way towards explaining why basle humanists were careful not to mention leèvre much to erasmus aer that point⁴. in part, leèvre could fade from view because erasmus and his basle coterie found another key representative of paris in guillaume budé. in , eras- mus responded to some comments of louis de ruzé, who had tried to make out budé as the only real humanist of the day—a frenchman, not erasmus. erasmus cleverly relativized ruzé’s judgment by suggesting that there were, in fact, a great many more stars in france: leèvre, guillaume cop, paolo aemilio, ¹ ep.  (allen iii.). ² leèvre’s biblical humanism at this time has oen been characterized as more “erasmian”, an- other example, i think, of erasmus’ massive reputation distorting perspective on his actual influ- ence. e.g. mann, Érasme et les débuts de la réforme française (-), ; renaudet, préréforme et humanisme, -. ³ to john o’lasco,  march , ep.  (allen vi.). “faber stapulensis gallia profugus agit ar- gentorati, sed mutate nomine, quemadmodum comicus ille senex athenis chremes erat, in lemno stilpho”. ⁴ bietenholz, basle and france in the sixteenth century, . in note  bietenholz hints that eras- mus withdrew his support from cratander in part because everyone knew the close relationship between leèvre and farel. moreover, cratander and waenschnee (who managed the Écu de bâle in paris) published leèvre’s biblical works on the psalms and his french translation of the new testament. e fabrist origins of erasmian science: mathematical erudition in erasmus’ basle  :  germain de brie, and nicholas de bérault. not even a frenchman would praise these more than would he, erasmus. but he closed with a reminder that in basle he possessed the next generation of brilliant humanists: “henricus glareanus, guillaume nesenus, and beatus rhenanus will testify to this, and with them i am accustomed to saying whatever is on my mind”¹. despite the generous recognition of franc’s intellectual luminaries—while simultaneously remind- ing readers of erasmus’ exceptional position—the bulk of erasmus’ leers aer  suggest that ruzé was not far off the mark. it was budé who represented parisian learning, from erasmus’ viewpoint². . lefèvre, grynaeus, and erasmus on the uses of mathematics e first section of this paper listed books in which leèvre’s mathematical legacy lingered in s basle; the second looked at the exchange of people between paris and basle. here i turn to the expectations about mathematics that simon grynaeus and leèvre shared, and compare them with erasmus’ own statements about mathematics. in drawing these comparisons, i do not wish to obscure other potential sources of grynaeus’ mathematical interests, such as his old friendship with melanchthon, or his studies with georg tansteer³; grynaeus’ contacts with the “wienberg orbit” also deserves study. but such a study would have to take parisian influences into account as well. ¹ to louis ruzé ep. . ² see also marie-madeleine de la garanderie, “les relations d’erasme avec paris, au temps de son sejour aux pays-bas meridionaux”, in scrinium erasmianum (leiden, ), -. ³ such interests are assumed to originate in studies with tansteer by jan n. pendergrass, “simon grynaeus and the mariners of novus orbis ()”, medievalia et humanistica  (): .  :  richard j. oosterhoff as professors of the paris arts curriculum, before all else leèvre and his close colleagues josse clichtove and charles de bovelles saw mathematics as a tool for sharpening student minds. in the early s, when leèvre immersed himself in study of the traditional quadrivium—arithmetic, geometry, music, and astronomy—he turned to the long tradition of platonic pedagogy to explain the use of numbers: “pythagoras held that without the help of numbers nothing can be known, and plato engraved on the doorway of his academy this epigram: ‘let no one lacking mathematics enter here.’ indeed he discusses the nature of things by means of numbers in nearly the whole timaeus and says much on the topic in the eighth and ninth book of the republic, which the mathematician eon of smyrna le covered on account of their difficulty”¹. leèvre thus used the platonic tradition of numbers to preface his edition of an important ᵗʰ-century text, the elementa arithmetica of jordanus nemorar- ius, which expanded on the fih-century arithmetica of boethius. jordanus be- longed to paris; boethius belonged to the platonic tradition of using mathemat- ics as the middle or mean by which the soul moved between higher and lower studies, as leèvre put it, “a path necessary both for rising to divine maers and for descending to human ones”². a couple of years later he added that mathe- matics sharpened the ingenium of students, preparing them to study leers in general³. for musical theory, he likewise gathered examples of how mathemat- ical harmonies moderated the soul’s motions, even those of unruly students— another classical trope of mathematics⁴. if mathematics mediated earthly maers and heavenly thoughts, it could ¹ preface to leèvre d’Étaples, arithmetica, av (rice, prefatory epistles, ep. , .): “pythagoras enim sine numerorum praesidio nihil posse sciri contendebat; et plato in suae academiae vestibule hoc insculpsit epigramma: nemo huc mathematicae expers introeat, qui in toto ferme timaeo de natura rerum per numeros disputant et in octavo et nono reipublicae multa de hac re disserit, quae eon smirneus mathematicus ob rei arduitatem intacta reliquit”. is preface was probably wrien around . ² ibid., . “tam necessaria semita, tum ad divina assurgendi tum descendendi ad humana”. ³ jacques leèvre d’Étaples, textus de sphera johannis de sacrobosco, cum additione (quantum nec- essarium est) adiecta: nouo commentario nuper edito ad utilitatem studentium philosophice parisiensis academie: illustratus (paris: wolfgang hopyl, ), av. ⁴ leèvre d’Étaples, arithmetica. on the humanist aention to this trope, see ann e. moyer, musica scientia: musical scholarship in the italian renaissance (ithaca, ny: cornell university press, ). e fabrist origins of erasmian science: mathematical erudition in erasmus’ basle  :  serve both interests, and in the prefaces to his mathematical publications leèvre d’Étaples offered both practical and theoretical reasons to study these books. his practical examples were mostly culled from ancient authors: measuring the earth, stories about archimedes using machines of war to fight off the romans, and legal reasoning about justice (i.e. aristotle’s use of means). indeed, he em- phasized to patrons such as jean de ganay, president of the paris parlement, and his brother germain, then a councilor of the same parlement, that mathematics served the “public use”¹. at the same time as he offered such practical promises, leèvre reserved his greatest praise for philosophical and theological benefits. mathematics was important for theology, according to the hermetic tradition that leèvre propounded in his editions of hermes trismegistus () and the dionysian corpus (). in , he introduced his famous edition of nicholas of cusa’s opera omnia with an account of the german cardinal’s expertise in mathematics—the basis for cusa’s brilliance (leèvre rated cusa alongside his hero dionysius the areopagite) was that “no one had penetrated mathematical learning more deeply”². in his preface to the  edition of euclid, leèvre re- capitulated the reason for these studies: “besides mathematics, what discipline, i ask, can offer quicker, more abstract, purer analogies for rising to divine mat- ters, without bearing any trace of stain or flesh?”³. besides this theological ben- efit, in his aristotelian teaching leèvre hinted at a deeper method of analogies. most remarkably, leèvre and his closest colleagues hinted that mathemat- ics was the archetype of analogies, and that analogy was fundamental to philo- sophical method. for the greeks and for boethius, they recalled, analogiae were ¹ for these examples, see leèvre d’Étaples, arithmetica, av (rice, ed., prefatory epistles, ep. ); jacques leèvre d’Étaples, introductio in metaphysicorum libros aristotelis, ed. josse clichtove (paris: j. higman, ), av (rice, ed., prefatory epistles, ep. ). ² nicholas of cusa, haec accurata recognitio trium voluminum, operum clariss. p. nicolai cusae card., ed. jacques leèvre d’Étaples (paris: josse bade, ), :aav (rice, ed., prefatory epistles, ep. , ). ³ jacques leèvre d’Étaples, euclidis megarensis mathematici clarissimi elementorum geometrico- rum libri xv, campani galli transalpini in eosdem commentariorum libri xv, eonis alexandrini bartholamaeo zamberto veneto interprete, in tredecim priores, commentariorum libri xiii, hypsiclis alexandrini in duos posteriores, eodem bartholomaeo zamberto veneto interprete, commentariorum libri ii (paris: henri estienne, ), ar-v (rice, ed., prefatory epistles, ep. , ). “sed quae (obsecro) promptiores, abstractiores, puriores ad divina surgendi praebere possint analogias, quae nullius foedi nulliusque rei carnalis prae se ferant vestigium, quam lierae mathematicae?”.  :  richard j. oosterhoff originally mathematical ratios or proportions. furthermore, aristotle frequently used analogies to argue, and in some key passages he stated that analogies sup- plied a kind of super-methodology that allowed one to compare disciplines. in the opening sections of his commentary on the nicomachean ethics, for exam- ple, leèvre schematically compared the basic objects of politics (man, city, uni- verse) with the basic elements of grammar (objects, words, and sentences). by developing analogies between the elementary principles or starting points of different disciplines, one might find the basic structure they share, and reason from one to the other. us analogical reasoning allowed one to make con- nections between the starting points (principia) of disciplines, a kind of uni- versal mathesis¹. how did one get these starting points, as the basis for anal- ogy? leèvre here turned to the most evocative of aristotle’s methodological statements in the posterior analytics a-, where aristotle gestured towards mathematics as an example of immediate intuition of principles, perhaps with geometry in mind. e unique starting points of every discipline, leèvre re- peated, are available through intuition—this explains autodidacts, he added, such as nicholas of cusa or giovanni pico della mirandola, whose ingenium let them master so many fields of study without a teacher². indeed, leèvre, clichtove, and bovelles seemed to have designed textbooks to cut through the drudgery of long reading, using diagrams and tables to facilitate the immedi- ate perception of a discipline’s principles. with short images rather than long quaestiones, such methodical handbooks helped a student see the essential prin- ciples more clearly. leèvre’s respect for the philosophical lessons of mathematics informed his circle of students and colleagues at the collège du cardinal lemoine. in the mathematical compendium from  that oronce fine used to augment the  basle edition of the margarita philosophica, clichtove praised the mathe- matical arts for their capacity, on the one hand to defend the nation, as archi- medes had devised machines against the romans. on the other hand, clich- ¹ on the idea of analogies as a universal method, see oosterhoff, “mathematical culture”, -. ² jacques leèvre d’Étaples, libri logicorum ad archteypos recogniti cum novis ad lieram commen- tariis ad felices primum parhisiorum et communiter aliorum studiorum successus in lucem prodeant ferantque lieris opem (paris: hopyl & stephanus, ), v-r: “in mathematicis scientiis ex an- tecedente cognition scientiam nasci, nunc principiorum, nunc eorum que ex principio sunt cognita, quam manifestum est”. e fabrist origins of erasmian science: mathematical erudition in erasmus’ basle  :  tove repeated that “antiquity also thought such learning especially led to di- vine analogies and assurrections”¹. a decade later, now an influential member of paris theology faculty, clichtove wrote a short book on the de mysteria nu- merorum () to help theologians see how numbers are used in the bible—an exegetical manual of divine mathematics. gérard roussel, once leèvre’s stu- dent, and later chaplain to marguerite de navarre, extended this work in a com- mentary on boethius’ arithmetica () that was meant to help see the theolog- ical meanings of numbers². charles de bovelles likewise was long preoccupied with mathematics as a way to model philosophical insight³. such contempla- tive ambitions for mathematics hardly stifled their practical value; aer all, one would expect theoretical truths also to bear practical fruit, as bovelles demon- strated in two french practical geometries, first in , and again in —the laer with the help of oronce fine, lecteur of mathematics in the collège royal⁴. simon grynaeus’ approach to mathematics shared with leèvre and his circle the general fascination with mathematics for its formative possibilities, includ- ing an appreciation of practical mathematics. as one reason for his edition of the greek euclid, he told cuthbert tunstall that mathematics (and, by implica- tion, other disciplines) had to be understood within the context of the rest of the arts. “for only those who teach beyond their calling as teachers, properly pursuing every other discipline, give an example with the greatest clarity as if it were a law”⁵. grynaeus made clear that he saw mathematics as a training ¹ leèvre d’Étaples, clichtove, and bovelles, epitome, etc., r. “et hanc quoque disciplinam ad div- inam anagogen assurrectionesque quamplurimum conducere putavit antiquitas”. ² gérard roussel, divi severini boetii arithmetica duobus discreta libris, adiecto commentario, mys- ticam numerorum applicationem perstringente, declarata (paris: simon colines, ). see michael masi, “e liberal arts and gerardus ruffus’ commentary on the boethian de arithmetica”, six- teenth century journal , no.  (): -. ³ e.g. number theory is found throughout charles de bovelles, eologicarum conclusionum libri decem (paris: josse bade, ). jean céard, “bovelles et ses traditions numérologiques”, in charles de bovelles en son cinquième centenaire, -, ed. guy trédaniel, tenu à noyon les -- septembre  (paris: Éditions de la maisnie, ), -. ⁴ charles de bovelles, géométrie en françoys. cy commence le livre de l’art et science de geometrie: avecques les figures sur chascune rigle au long declarees par lesquelles on peut entendre et facillement comprendre ledit art et science de geometrie (paris: henri estienne, ); charles de bovelles, livre singulier et utile, touchant l’art et practique de geometrie, composé nouvellement en francoys (paris: simon colines, ). ⁵ grynaeus, preface to euclid, Στοιχείων βιβλίον ιέ, ar. “cum solae hae, supra quam ex professo  :  richard j. oosterhoff ground for everyone—beginning very early. contemporary philosophy was, he thought, a disordered mess, populated by men with no training in careful, me- thodical linking of one idea to the next, incapable of recognizing the difference between an argument and an opinion. without the “holy anchor” of geometry, they were unmoored, so that they even dried into the most “monstrous ab- surdity”: “others not only thought that nothing can be perceived, or indeed that nothing exists, as many do, but they even argued it openly”¹. e answer to such thorough skepticism could only be a training in geometry, from the tenderest years. “erefore, it is sensible to philosophize from these things immediately from the cradle, and to dare to pour down their throats less of opinions than of food (…) the simplicity and clarity [of mathematical studies], so wonderfully fiing to pure minds, should be neatly brought into the schools immediately aer languages have been learned”². grynaeus wrote with special eloquence of how learning in leers—especially mathematical leers—had practical uses. he introduced his collection of new world travelers’ tales with the trope that god created the world as a mirror, “like a living book”, to display himself. introducing the language of the “divine theater” of nature that would become prominent later in the century, grynaeus identified mathematikoi as those who are driven by “this theater of nature filled with marvels” to reflect hard on the mathematical features of the world—which then leads them to circumnavigate the globe. because of this capacity to “go around the very ends of the earth in their mind’s eye”, they have the intellec- tual vision necessary to sustain their travels to discover new seas, men, animals, and new social orders. of course, this practical benefit has a further theolog- ical benefit: the light of “that ancient nobility of humankind” shines in such docent, recte disciplinas omnes caeteras persequendi, illustre maxime claritate sua exemplum, et velut normam prebeant”. ¹ ibid., ar. “eos contra retroactis etiam seculis quicunque ad has disciplinas velut anchoram sacram, non diligenter respexerunt, totum hoc turbulentum et tumultuarium philosophorum genus inquam, in monstrificam absurditatem relapsos videmus—dum alii, tale quidque esse quale appar- eret, solem etiam hunc pedali non maiorem, alii nil prorsus posse percipi, quidam nil esse prorsus, ac ne deum quidem ipsum, non sentirent solum, quod faciunt multi, sed propalam contenderent”. ² ibid., ar. “igitur philosophandum ab ipsis statim incunabulis sobrie est, ac longe minus opin- ionum temere ingurgitanda turba, quam ciborum (…) id ita fiet arbitror, si disciplinarum illarum simplicitas et claritas, puris adhuc mentibus mire congruens, statim post linguas imbibitas, scite scolis inferatur”. e fabrist origins of erasmian science: mathematical erudition in erasmus’ basle  :  accomplished travelers¹. is complex passage links several key ideas about liberal arts, human nature and its place in the divine order, and the relationship of theory and practice. in sum, however, grynaeus claims for the mathemati- cal liberal arts the glory of the new world. contemplative vision has practical consequences; those without a theoretical vision of theoretical mathematics, as grynaeus would put it in his preface to geometry (), could not expect to explore it. “but this instrument [the elements of geometry] is that very machine worked out by the industry of wise men, which will lead humankind through dangerous seas to the boundaries of the lands and the ends of the earth; it draws out nature when it seems inaccessible”². grynaeus, like the fabrists, evinced the profound conviction that mathe- matics could reform philosophical method. like many other pedagogues, gry- naeus student learning was intimately wound up with “method”. in a leer to jean fichard that circulated among the basle humanists, grynaeus reflected on method in legal studies. here his theme was the familiar oscillation between particular and general, between observations of countless things and the gen- eralizations one might make from them. grynaeus stressed both the use and danger of wrongly trusting one’s inborn wit, the ingenium, to navigate these poles: “thus it happens oen that the best men, not really knowing their fac- ¹ grynaeus, novus orbis regionum et insularum, ar-v. “nam ex hoc pleno rerum mirabilium natu- rae theatro, quum studiosi omnes, animis velut oestro concitis, et profundissima admiratione sauciis rediissent, alii hoc impetus impulsi, maiora conari coeperunt, et intimius naturam scrutari, sophous vocant; alii (hi sunt mathematikoi) quum et ingenii et animi ope summa in hanc solam contempla- tionem incubuissent, et acie mentis finibus iam suis terrarium orbem circumscripsissent, in angus- tum vastitate eius, prae coeli et maiorum corporum consideratione, redacta, inventione tantarum rerum excitati, ire oculis quocunque mentis acies praeivisset, et animi cogitationem per omnes diffi- cultates exequi, ac molem terrarium orbis dudum animo suo permeabilem, et undique accessibilem circuire lustrareque ausi: quod caeteri mortals per insano habent, patriam parentes uxorem, liberos relinquere, e tuto felicique rerum statu (est enim et haec cogitare, et cogitate exequi, amplissimae simul et mentis et fortunae) in tot tamquam certa rerum discrimina, et mortem mediam coniicere se, illi non solum gloriosum sed necessarium homini, sibi vero unum prae omnibus rebus maxime expetendum iudicarunt, invicti et vere divini animi, quique soli ius natura concessum homini, id est, genuinam et non degenerem spiritus sui nobilitatem retulisse, et imperium terrae et marium, a primis parentibus haereditarium sibi vendicasse videntur, in quibus solis vetus illa humani generis nobilitas reluxit”. ² grynaeus, preface to euclid, Στοιχείων βιβλίον ιέ, av. “atqui hoc illud instrumentum est haec illa machina hominum sapientum industria excogitata, qua per infesta maria, ad extremos terrarum et mundi fines, hominum genus excurrit, et naturam qua inaccessa videbatur, eruit”.  :  richard j. oosterhoff ulty of nature, undertake great studies. ese great, whose excellent wits pre- pare some opinion, as no certain reason were needed furnish the studies that wit can pursue”¹. besides mental aids that might give the mind certainty, one should rely on an accumulated common heritage: “ere are things wrien by the most learned men concerning this maers, on dividing, sharing, defining, gathering, and when and what crimes are commied, and how to arrest, charge, and defend—the wit of neither aristotle, whatever the learned crowd thinks, nor of plato gives us these things. instead, these were birthed by nature, revealed by utility, noted down by care of the ancients, and finally were tested with great effort”². arguing that such concerns belong to law as much as any other disci- pline, grynaeus presents method as a way to moderate historical acquisition of particulars and the immediate judgments of ingenium, as a way of assembling a discipline into a well-ordered body of knowledge, allowing the mind to travel between particular cases and general headings. most like leèvre, grynaeus connected mathematical reasoning with the im- mediate access to first principles that should characterize good learning. pre- sumably drawing on the parts of aristotle that had also resonated with leèvre, posterior analytics i, grynaeus argued in his preface to euclid that: “that light which aristotle himself shone in all his disputations came from none other than geometry. i can show a thousand places where the most abstruse thing is com- pletely drawn out and brought to light by the power of geometrical demonstration. e ¹ grynaeus to fichard, edited in johann august roderich von stintzing, ulrich zasius: ein beitrag zur geschichte der rechtswissenscha im zeitalter der reformation: mit urkundlichen beilagen (schweighauser, ), -, at . “unde accidit, ut praestantissimi saepe viri, naturae facul- tate quamquam ignota sibi, magna aggressi sint studia, qui excellentia ingenii, opinionem quondam peperere, quasi ratione nulla certa opus esset, ad eas disciplinas parandas quas consequi ingenio liceret”. on the leer’s circulation, see leers in hartmann, die amerbachkorrespondenz, iv., v.-. ² grynaeus to fichard, . “extant autem doctissimorum hominum de his rebus scripta in divi- dendo, in partiendo, in difiniendo, in colligendo, quoties et qua vitia incidere, quemadmodum de- prehendi arguique et vitari possint, quae non unius aristotelis, quemadmodum vulgus literatorum putat, aut platonis ingenium nobis suppeditarunt, sed ipsa primum natura ingenuit, usus patefecit, sedulitas, veterum annotavit ac summis tandem conatibus absolvit”. see also grynaeus, preface to euclid, av, where he argued that geometry had been passed on by the ancients as the most pure example of method: “erat igitur methodus, id est ordine quanque rem explicandi ratio inventa vet- eribus, eam consecratam literis ad nos transmiserunt; habemusque non solum methodum, sed hac scripta monumenta veterum plurima, cum aristotelis ipsius, tum aliorum insuper haud paucorum”. e fabrist origins of erasmian science: mathematical erudition in erasmus’ basle  :  whole book peri apodeixeos [of galen] says so in examples of this sort that are spread throughout; there he explicitly places these very disciplines before all others on account of their evident nature”¹. e basic point was fairly uncontroversial, though the emphasis unusual. grynaeus followed it up with a short account of the self-evident nature of principles—they are not themselves subject to demonstration, but their evident nature is rooted in common, shared experience. his point was that mathematics therefore was the model on which all other knowledge should be built. geom- etry, that is, supplied the basic structure of all reasoning: “so if anyone wants the habit of the human mind to be expressed in a kind of image, nothing is beer than geometry, which is a kind of absolute and perfect image [formula] of all method, marvelously shining its native light. erefore the power of distinction indeed belongs to dialectic, but only obscurely, while it is helped by the clarity of the mathematical disciplines. i also understand how marvelous it seems when the reason of method which is common to all, is said to be derived and learned especially from [geometry]—the reason is actually evident, even though it perhaps seems so hidden that not many can see it”². e claim that mathematics was not merely a nice example of reasoning, but captured the entire essence of reasoning and method itself was a remarkable thing to say in . grynaeus surely was inspired by proclus, edited in the same volume with euclid, who made similar claims³. arguably, the closest per- spective was that of leèvre, or oronce fine, who had likewise presented math- ¹ grynaeus, preface to euclid, Στοιχείων βιβλίον ιέ, av. “id quod ipse aristoteles, lucem dispu- tationibus omnibus suis, non aliunde quam e geometricis influsit, locos mille proferre possem, cum abstrusissimae res demonstrationum geometricarum vi prorsus erutae et in lucem prolatae sunt. declarat peri apodeixeōs liber totus, generis huius exemplis ubique maxime scatens, ubi nominatim etiam disciplinas has ab evidentia caeteris omnibus anteponit”. ² ibid., ar. “ut si quis mentis humanae morem, simulacro quodam expressam velit, nullo possit melius, quam geometriae, quae methodi totius absoluta et perfecta formula est, domestica insuper luce sua mirabiliter fulgens. ergo differendi vis penes dialecticen est quidem, sed obscura tantisper, dum mathematicarum disciplinarum claritate iuvetur. nec ignoro mirum videri, cur methodi ratio quae communis omnium est, hinc potissimum trahenda discendaque dicatur, verum in promptu causa est, tametsi abstrusior forte, quam ut vulgo multis percipi queat”. ³ e.g. glenn r morrow, proclus: a commentary on the first book of euclid’s elements (new jer- sey:princeton university press, ), prol. -; def. .  :  richard j. oosterhoff ematics as the gateway to all the other disciplines, and as a possible source of philosophical method. it may be, indeed, that the high view of mathematics in melanchthon’s orations on geometry and astronomy () also has roots in such statements by his friend in basle. erasmus was wary of such commitments to formal descriptions of philosoph- ical method, let alone to mathematics. while both leèvre and grynaeus wrote about the value of mathematics with serious interest in university teaching, erasmus seems never to have found a vocation in the lecture hall. when eras- mus tutored students during his early years in france, england and bologna, these rapidly turned into new opportunities or beer patronage. although he shared with leèvre and grynaeus a commitment to the liberal arts ostensi- bly taught in the universities, erasmus consistently emphasized different parts than they did. an emphasis on language over mathematics pervades even his short declamations of advice on how students might methodically deploy the best authors, stock a commonplace book, and cra sinewy sentences for varied audiences. ese were not meant to guide neophytes through the whole cycle of learning, but to promote a larger vision of literary life. mathematical arts came up only in passing in his more programmatic declamations on education in de pueris instituendis () and de ratione studii (), both wrien around  with some eye to john colet and the new foundation of saint paul’s school in london¹. both works share leèvre and grynaeus’ concern with religious and ethical formation. but whereas they had expended great effort on mathematics, erasmus noted only that everyone’s nature makes them apt for different stud- ies, “just as one says that some are born for mathematical learning, others for theology; some for rhetoric or poetry, and others for soldiering”². in de ratione studii he recommended slight learning in cosmography, “which can be used in history, not to speak of poetry”³. in , in his methodological preface to the novum instrumentum, erasmus did allow that mathematics belonged to a the- ¹ note colet also was the dedicatee of de copia (paris: josse bade, ). ² de pueris instituendis (erasmi opera omnia, i-, ). “veluti quosdam mathematicis disciplinis, alios theologiae, has rhetoricae aut poetieae, illos militiae natos dicas”. later in the declamation he simply noted that caesar, as a youth, had been skilled in both mathematics and eloquence; erasmus then listed arithmetic and geometry between antiquarian and ethical learning (ibid., ). ³ de ratione studii (asd, i-, ). “tenenda cosmographia, quae in historiis etiam est vsui, nedum in poetis”. e fabrist origins of erasmian science: mathematical erudition in erasmus’ basle  :  ologian’s liberal training, which should include “dialectic, rhetoric, arithmetic, music, astronomy, and some knowledge of natural things such as animals, trees (…)”¹. e way, therefore, that mathematics and naturalia come up in erasmus’ writing is usually by way of situating other disciplines, and especially the role of the expert in literature, the grammaticus. in the dialogue de recta latini graecique sermonis pronuntiatione, the inter- locutors ursus and leo explicitly revive intilian’s account of the grammati- cus as an interdisciplinary master, deploying other disciplines in order to un- derstand poetry, history, antiquity, and properly to emend textual errors. as leo observes, “in the same work, the grammaticus will deal with all disciplines, since in poetry oen one finds maers that properly belong to geometry, arith- metic, astrology, and the mysteries of medicine—add, if you like, magic. for without the knowledge of nature and cosmography, what place in poetry can the grammaticus correctly explain?”². here erasmus’ point was the role of the humble grammarian as the greatest philosopher, echoing poliziano’s famous defense of the philologist in the lamia, because in explaining words he per- force deals with all the disciplines³. one could not be farther from grynaeus’ encomium of geometry. ¹ nesselrath, “erasmus und die astrologie”, n. ² de recta latini graecique sermonis pronuntiatione (asd, i-, ). “leo: eadem opera exiget a gram- matico cognitionem omnium disciplinarum, quandoquidem in poetis frequenter incidunt quae ad musices, geometrices, arithmetices, astrologiae, medicinae mysteria pertinent; adde his, si libet, magicen. nam absque rerum naturalium et cosmographiae scientia quis est locus in poetis, quem recte possit exponere grammaticus?”. ³ for a detailed reading of poliziano on this point, see denis j.-j. robichaud, “angelo poliziano’s lamia: neoplatonic commentaries and the plotinian dichotomy between the philologist and the philosopher”, in angelo poliziano’s “lamia”: text, translation, and introductory studies, ed. christo- pher s. celenza (leiden: brill, ), -.  :  richard j. oosterhoff . conclusions grynaeus appears to have turned to mathematics around , the same year his old schoolmate philip melanchthon dedicated the wienberg edition of sac- robosco’s sphere to him¹. in , grynaeus also published the first greek edi- tion of the almagest, the standard western treatise on astronomy since ptolemy had wrien it in alexandria in the second century. in its preface he repeated some of the same high praise of mathematics that accompanied his  edi- tion of euclid. it may be that his approach to mathematics in these volumes had, however, a role in undermining ptolemy’s influence in the long run. as scholars such as gingerich, westman, and methuen have argued, the wien- berg circle included an unusually high view of mathematics that can in part be traced to philip melanchthon’s prefaces and orations on arithmetic, geometry, and astronomy, which were reprinted throughout europe. very likely, the high view of mathematics in melanchthon’s orations owe something to his friend in basle, and perhaps to the larger network of mathematicians around basle². yet melanchthon’s high praise of all the mathematical disciplines never reaches the emphasis on mathematics as archetypal method, as it does in grynaeus. grynaeus and his colleagues in basle, i have suggested in this article, reflect some of basle’s ongoing debt to the circle of humanists, pedagogues, and print- ers around jacques leèvre d’Étaples, in paris. further research will no doubt reveal many other connections as well. but the fabrist contribution is the one longest forgoen. isabelle pantin suggested that oronce fine kept abreast of developments among german mathematicians; my suggestion is that the ex- change of knowledge went in both directions³. ¹ liber iohannis de sacro busto, de sphaera. addita est praefatio in eundem librum philippi mel. ad simonem gryneum (impressum vitebergae: per iosephum clug, ). is preface is translated in sachiko kusukawa, ed., philip melanchthon: orations on philosophy and education, trans. christine f. salazar (cambridge: cambridge university press, ), -. see especially isabelle pantin, “la lere de melanchthon à s. grynaeus: avatars d’une défense de l’astrologie”, in divination et controverse religieuse en france au xvi siècle (paris: ensjf, ), -. ² see karin reich, “philipp melanchthon im dialog mit astronomen und mathematikern: aus- gewählte beispiele” in mathematik und naturwissenschaen in der zeit von philipp melanchthon, ed. franz fuchs (wiesbaden: harrassowitz, ), -. ³ pantin, “oronce fine’s role as royal lecturer”, -. e fabrist origins of erasmian science: mathematical erudition in erasmus’ basle  :  although he supported the greek edition of ptolemy’s de geographia, and quite possibly encouraged such learning at the new trilingual college in lou- vain, on balance erasmus presented a view of erudition that minimized the more systematic knowledge of aristotelian natural philosophy or even the mathe- matical portion of the liberal arts¹. my suggestion is that this configuration of erudition was at odds with that presented by leèvre and grynaeus. e epi- logue to this tale may well be a divergence of interests. on the one hand, wien- berg and jesuit humanists pursued a vision of scholarship in line with leèvre and the parisian curriculum-wide style of humanism, equally concerned with aristotle and geometry as with church fathers and biblical scholarship. on the other hand, those envisioning themselves as ‘erasmians’ took an approach that tended to separated mathematical learning from hermeneutical ones. ere lies a methodological lesson for historians of this place and period that is simple, perhaps even well-known, but has not yet reshaped our own histori- cal studies. tempted by erasmus’ own powerful account of erudition as mostly about non-technical knowledge, historians looking at the republic of leers have oen construed its interests as primarily literary in a way that lines up with the “humanities” of the modern disciplines. is has encouraged both his- torians of science and historians of literature to miss the place of mathematics in the liberal arts—and indeed in the shape of erudition—of that literary repub- lic. erasmus may have been complicit with the forces that gave us the “two cultures” divide. at is no reason for us to read that division back into his context. ¹ steven vanden broecke describes erasmus’ possible influence on the teaching of geography and cosmography at louvain in e limits of influence: pico, louvain, and the crisis of renaissance as- trology (leiden: brill, ), ff.  :  richard j. oosterhoff frans floris – cornelis cort, arithmetica, antwerp, h. cock,  (folger shakespeare library, http://luna.folger.edu/luna/servlet/detail/ folgercm ~ ~ ~ ~ ). e fabrist origins of erasmian science: mathematical erudition in erasmus’ basle  :  http://luna.folger.edu/luna/servlet/detail/folgercm ~ ~ ~ ~ http://luna.folger.edu/luna/servlet/detail/folgercm ~ ~ ~ ~ journal of art historiography number june oskar pollak reconsidered: a bildungsroman in miniature of late austrian culture and politics michael young for joseph connors figure oskar pollak, photograph from matura (gymnasium graduation), institut für kunstgeschichte der universität wien https://kunstgeschichte.univie.ac.at/ueber-uns/institutsarchiv/pollak-oskar/ all but forgotten today, the art historian oskar pollak (fig. ), who died in , has three claims on our attention. the first is his pioneering documentary research: his exhaustive compilations of documents related to artistic patronage in rome under i am grateful to suzanne marchand, margaret olin and nancy wingfield for reading the unrevised text of the talk on which this article is based. they saved me from committing some embarrassing errors, although of course none of them is responsible for any errors or imperfections that remain in this version. i am heavily indebted to the kindness and generous assistance of the following archivists: friedrich polleroß at the art history institute of the universität wien, florian könig at the istituto storico austriaco a roma, andreas titton at the archive of the museum für angewandte kunst, wien, jan chodějovský at the masaryk institute and archive of the czech academy of sciences, prague and barbara pospichal, thomas maisel and luka rucigaj at the archiv der universität wien. i am also grateful to jiří koukal for sharing archivalia and information with me. nicholas sawicki was an erudite, intelligent and sympathetic referee whose suggestions vastly improved my text and uncovered many blunders. i am deeply greatful to him. michael young oskar pollak reconsidered: a bildungsroman in miniature of late austrian culture and politics three seventeenth-century popes, and his study of guidebooks to rome from the same period. the second claim, related to the first, is the glimpse into the cultural politics and social history of late imperial austria offered by his life and career. finally, his scholarly research, both planned and published, engages a set of problems which, while not currently at the center of art historical thinking and writing, remains compelling and fundamentally unresolved: the identification and analysis of the development of artistic styles over time and within the work of individual artists, and the relation of individual works of art to both types of development. pollak’s art historical scholarship is today remembered only by a handful of historians of roman and bohemian baroque art. after completing a doctorate in art history at the german university in prague in , he spent three years as a member of the austrian historical institute in rome. from to he was assistent to max dvořák while studying at the institute of art history at the university of vienna, returning to the institute in rome for briefer periods of research. he completed his habilitation at vienna in . he died on the italian front at isonzo in , at the age of , prompting emotional tributes by friends and illustrious colleagues. indeed, the esteem he inspired in some of his most celebrated contemporaries is in direct proportion to the scale of art-historical oblivion in which he currently languishes. by the time of his death at the front, pollak had earned the admiration of influential scholars and artists. the viennese art historian hans tietze praised the conscientiousness that compelled pollak to uncover documents, source material in archives, period guidebooks and treatises exhaustively before undertaking the this was a paid position that required service as a research and teaching assistant, with an initial appointment of two years that could be extended to four or six years: karl von kelle, die österreichischen universitätsgesetze sammlung der für die österreichischen universitäten gültigen gesetze, verordnungen, erlässe, studien- und prüfungsordnungen usw, wien: manzsche k. u. k. hof-verlags- und universitäts-buchhandlung, , ff: assistenten sind remunerierte gehilfen des professors, welche sich zugleich für das lehramt seines faches unter seiner leitung ausbilden sollen. hieraus ergibt sich, daß sie während der dauer dieser anstellung nicht als selbständige lehrer desselben faches auftreten können, indem diese stellung die möglichkeit in sich schließen würde, daß sie, statt den unterricht des professors zu fördern, den wirkungen desselben auf die schüler störend entgegentreten. dieselben werden daher als dozenten in demselben fache nur insofern zugelassen werden können, als zunächst der professor, welchem sie beigegeben sind, es als vereinbar mit den obliegenheiten ihrer anstellung findet, und als sie überdies nur spezialkollegien über eine partie des faches, welche abgesondert zu behandeln der professor nicht in der lage ist, unter seiner kontrolle, d. i. in solcher weise zu lesen geneigt sind, daß jeder widerspruch ihrer lehre mit den von dem professor vorgetragenen grundsätzen ausgeschlossen sei ( ). michael young oskar pollak reconsidered: a bildungsroman in miniature of late austrian culture and politics stylistic and critical analysis of works of art. oskar kokoschka considered pollak the best of max dvořák’s followers, according to a letter from the painter’s wife olda kokoschka to pollak’s niece. ludwig von pastor, the author of the monumental history of the popes and director of the austrian historical institute in rome, lauded pollak’s scholarly achievements, his archival discoveries and his collection and study of early modern roman guide-books. pastor eulogized pollak as ‘one of the saddest losses among the war victims from the scholarly world…an indefatigable scholar, a dutiful civil servant and a lovable man’. what precisely was pollak’s achievement as an art historian that inspired these encomia? in his review of tietze’s treatise, die methode der kunstgeschichte, pollak took note of tietze's assertion that it is not the work of art itself that is the object of art-historical exploration, but the work of art at the specific place in artistic development to which it belongs. the knowledge of this circumstance, with all its consequences, is the presupposition and the core of art-historical contemplation. by and large, it is generally accepted that the work of art is uniquely determined by its developmental-historical circumstances of origin. it is not only due to the locally and temporally conditioned circumstances of its creation and in the personal development of an individual creator-and at a very particular point of this personal development - and anchored in the general development of time, but also by the original effect that triggered it through the response it provoked, firmly bound to that time. the kunstwollen of a time is determined not only by the works it produces, but hans tietze, '† oskar pollak', kunstchronik: wochenschrift für kunst und kunstgewerbe, n.f. , july , , - , accessed through https://digi.ub.uni- heidelberg.de/diglit/kunstchronik: ‘studien über das römische barock überzeugten ihn immer mehr von der unzulänglichkeit unserer kenntnisse dieser kunst; seine gewissenhaftigkeit nötigte ihn, ehe er an die stilkritischen themen ging, die ihm vorschwebten, eine quellenerschließung auf breitester grundlage vorzunehmen’. ‘mein mann erinnert sich sehr gut an dr. oskar pollak, den er für den besten dvorak (sic)- nachfolger hielt und seinen tod für einer grossen verlust’, undated letter from olda kokoschka to pollak’s niece anna sicher, graciously shared with me by dana nachtigallová, granddaughter of pollak’s younger brother ernst/arnošt. ludwig von pastor, 'der heldentod des dr. oskar pollak', fremden-blatt , juli , : ‘dem unermüdlichen gelehrten, dem pflichtgetreuen beamten und liebenswürdigen menschen ist bei allen, die ihn gekannt haben, ein dauerndes andenken gesichert’, accessed through Österreichischen nationalbibliothek, anno - austrian newspapers online, http://anno.onb.ac.at/. the dutch art historian johannes orbaan’s obituary for pollak sounded similar notes: j.a.f.orbaan, “feuilleton: oskar pollak † juni .”, neue zürcher zeitung und schweizerisches handelsblatt, : , august , , - . https://digi.ub.uni-heidelberg.de/diglit/kunstchronik https://digi.ub.uni-heidelberg.de/diglit/kunstchronik michael young oskar pollak reconsidered: a bildungsroman in miniature of late austrian culture and politics also by the effect they produce; production and consumption are the two halves of each phase of artistic development. pollak responded in his review that ‘the position of the work of art in its development, however…is not immediately comprehensible to us; the opportunity to apprehend it is offered to us by source studies and criticism of the sources’. both tietze and pollak may appear here as votaries of alois riegl’s effort to reveal the evolution and genealogies of art works and artistic styles, both of individual artists and of specific historical periods and regions encompassed by such terms as ‘gothic’, ‘baroque’ and ‘plateresque’, inter alia. the discovery and publication of sources and documents as a means to clarifying the position of the work of art in relation to artistic development over time and within the work of an individual artist describes pollak’s art historical task, as he appears to have understood it. this task was consistent with the interests and goals of pollak’s predecessors and teachers at the vienna institute, from its founders in the s through rudolf von eitelberger and julius von schlosser . of course the pioneering nature of pollak’s hans tietze, die methode der kunstgeschichte, ein versuch , leipzig, e.a. seemann, , (accessible on hathitrust).: nicht das kunstwerk an sich ist der gegenstand kunstgeschichtlicher erforschung, sondern das kunstwerk an der bestimmten stelle, die ihm in der entwicklung gebührt. die erkenntnis dieses umstandes mit allen seinen konsequenzen ist voraussetzung und kern der kunstgeschichtlichen betrachtung. im großen und ganzen ist es wohl allgemein anerkannt, daß das kunstwerk durch seine entstehungsumstände entwicklungsgeschichtlich eindeutig bestimmt ist. nicht nur durch die umstände seiner entstehung ist es örtlich zeitlich bedingt und in der persönlichen entwicklung eines individuellen schöpfers — und zwar an einem ganz bestimmten punkt dieser persönlichen entwicklung — sowie in der allgemeinen zeitentwicklung verankert, sondern auch durch die ursprüngliche wirkung, die es auslöste, durch den widerhall, den es erregte, fest an jene zeit gebunden. das kunstwollen einer zeit ist nicht nur durch die werke bestimmt, die sie hervorbringt, sondern auch durch die wirkung, die jene erzielten; produktion und konsum sind die beiden hälften jeder phase der künstlerischen entwicklung. oskar pollak, “review of hans tietze, methode der kunstgeschichte.”, kunstchronik: wochenschrift für kunst und kunstgewerbe, n.f. : , october , , : 'die stellung des kunstwerkes in seiner entwickelung [sic] ist aber — trotz seiner fortexistenz — nicht unmittelbar für uns erfaßbar; die möglichkeit dazu bietet uns die quellenkunde und die kritik der quellen'. the institute’s web site emphasizes this continuity, and relates it to the internal conflicts within the institute which i will examine anon: michael young oskar pollak reconsidered: a bildungsroman in miniature of late austrian culture and politics work in the archivio segreto of the vatican was partly owing to the opening of the archive to outsiders for the first time by pope leo xiii in , at a moment when interest in roman baroque art was barely underway, and archival and documentary research related to it had not yet begun. figure title page of the first volume of pollak’s posthumously published collection of documents related to roman baroque art ein enges verhältnis bestand auch mit dem gegründeten institut für Österreichische geschichtsforschung (iÖg), das gelehrte wie thausing, wickhoff, riegl und dvořak bis hin zu rosenauer ausbildete. zum dreijährigen lehrgang für archivare zählte ab auch das fach kunstgeschichte. damit verbunden ist ein anderes prägendes merkmal der wiener kunstgeschichte, nämlich das interesse an historischen quellentexten. die systematische edition und analyse historischer schriften über kunstwerke und künstler ist eng mit den namen eitelberger und schlosser verbunden. diese methodische pluralität verlief in der praxis nicht immer ohne reibungsverluste und führte, verstärkt durch persönliche unverträglichkeiten, zwischen und sogar zur räumlichen trennung der beiden lehrstühle in zwei rivalisierende, von strzygowski bzw. dvořák und schlosser geleitete institute. komparatistisch-formalistische sowie geistesgeschichtliche bzw. quellenkundliche ansätze standen sich damit gegenüber. erst übernahm sedlmayr den nunmehr einzigen lehrstuhl im “wiedervereinigten” institut. accessed through https://kunstgeschichte.univie.ac.at/ueber-uns/geschichte-des-instituts/. michael young oskar pollak reconsidered: a bildungsroman in miniature of late austrian culture and politics indeed the work for which pollak is still remembered by scholars of the roman baroque was a posthumously published collection of documents related to artistic activity during the pontificate of urban viii (fig. ). this monumental work of enduring value had an eventful, and revealing, afterlife in which the volatile forces that shaped both pollak’s career and the cultural politics of late imperial austria emerged in their most malevolent form. pollak’s devotion to documentary and archival research is likely to excite few of those drawn to the theoretical complexity of the vienna school and its fraught theoretical and methodological divisions. pollak’s work would hardly have appealed to walter benjamin, and no doubt invited the scorn that the second vienna school cultivated for the ‘first art history’, which hans sedlmayr and otto pächt, among others, maintained was superseded by the second, strenge kunstwissenschaft and strukturanalyse. yet this particular emphasis and the enduring contributions of pollak’s research were rooted in the same forces that brought into being the vienna school and in its primary lines of conflict. the antipathy between the liberal supranational austrian patriots riegl and wickhoff (followed by their students dvořák and schlosser), and the pan-german nationalist and anti-semite josef strzygowski has been admirably described by margaret olin, suzanne marchand, ján bákoš and mathew rampley among others. riegl and his colleagues shifted oskar pollak, die kunsttätigkeit unter urban viii, aus dem nachlass herausgegeben von dagobert frey unter mitwirkung von franz juraschek, band i. kirchliche bauten (mit ausnahme von st. peter) und paläste, wien-augsburg-köln: filser, , and die kunstta ̈tigkeit unter urban viii. / , die peterskirche in rom, wien: filser, . strzygowski in fact dismissed tietze's treatise on methodology as belonging to ‘the art history of yesteryear’, particularly disparaging its emphasis upon written sources: josef strzygowski, die krisis der geisteswissenschaften: vorgeführt am beispiele der forschung über bildende kunst, vienna, a. schroll & company, , and , accessed through https://books.google.com/. riccardo marchi notes that : according to edwin lachnit (‘kunstgeschichte und zeitgenössische kunst: das wissenschaftliche verhältnis zum lebendigen forschungsgegenstands am beispiel der älteren wiener schule der kunstgeschichte’, phd diss., university of vienna, , ), tietze, in his criticism of absolute innovators (tietze, methode, v and ), could have been taking aim at strzygowski himself. [now see also edwin lachnit, die wiener schule der kunstgeschichte und die kunst ihrer zeit: zum verhältnis von methode und forschungsgegenstand am beginn der moderne, vienna: böhlau, , ]. marchi, 'hans tietze and art history as geisteswissenschaft in early twentieth-century vienna', journal of art historiography, number , december , accessed through https://arthistoriography.files.wordpress.com/ / /marchi.pdf. margaret olin, 'alois riegl: the late roman empire in the late habsburg empire', austrian studies , , - ; suzanne l.marchand, 'appreciating the art of others – michael young oskar pollak reconsidered: a bildungsroman in miniature of late austrian culture and politics attention away from the habitual limitations of both the humanist philological tradition and classical archaeology (which relied heavily on text-based scholarship) to include a positive assessment of late roman art, hitherto disparaged as an art of decline. strzygowski, a harbinger of multi-culturalism, ridiculed their euro- and rome-centrism and the reliance of classical and early christian archaeologists upon texts as essential evidence . in a book published in , strzygowski summarized the position vis-à-vis textual scholarship in art history which he had consistently advocated for three decades: ‘the written source can never achieve the value of or replace the fact of the monument or even the work of art as an essential source for the specialist’. strzygowski’s championing and studying of byzantine and oriental art appears to have been as much an assault upon the rome- and eurocentric emphasis in the work of his viennese liberal adversaries, and upon their interest in textual josef strzygowski and the austrian origins of non-western art history', in piotr otto scholz and magdalena anna długosz, eds., von biala nach wien: josef strzygowski und die kunstwissenschaften, wien: ibera, , - and ‘the rhetoric of artifacts and the decline of classical humanism: the case of josef strzygowski’, history and theory, : , dec., , - ; jás elsner, ‘the birth of late antiquity: riegl and strzygowski in ’, art history : , june , - ; matthew rampley, the vienna school of art history: empire and the politics of scholarship, - , university park, pennsylvania: pennsylvania state university press, ; ján bakoš, discourses and strategies : the role of the vienna school in shaping central european approaches to art history & related discourses, frankfurt am main: peter lang, ; georg vasold, 'riegl, strzygowski and the development of art', journal of art historiography , december, , accessed through https://arthistoriography.files.wordpress.com/ / /vassold.pdf. for strzygowski’s anti- semitism, see margaret olin, ‘art history and ideology: alois riegl and josef strzygowski’, in penny schine gold and benjamin c. sax, eds., cultural visions: essays in the history of culture, amsterdam-atlanta, ga: rodopi, , - and the nation without art: examining modern discourses on jewish art, lincoln and london: university of nebraska press, , - . marchand, ‘rhetoric of artifacts’, , observes of strzygowski’s study of oriental art that strzygowski also legitimized his efforts by underscoring the anonymity of the objects he described, their failure to divert the multitude of sheeplike art historians and archaeologists from their traditional classicizing pursuits, and the lack of textual documentation to explain their origins and appearances. these peculiar privileges - anonymity of the objects, lack of relevant documentation, superior comprehension of the eyewitness - permitted strzygowski to address himself wholly to the morphological clues inherent in the objects and to the "fundamental" conditions - the date, origin, and authorship - of their existence. as an example of this phenomenon, marchand cites josef strzygowski, ‘die byzantinische kunst’, byzantinische zeitschrift ( ), - . strzygowski, die krisis der geisteswissenschaften, , quoted and translated in rampley, vienna school, . https://brill.com/search?f_ =author&q_ =penny+schine+gold https://brill.com/search?f_ =author&q_ =benjamin+c.+sax michael young oskar pollak reconsidered: a bildungsroman in miniature of late austrian culture and politics art-historical sources and documentation, as it was an affirmation of the artifacts he studied, which often lacked any but the most rudimentary textual documentation. the commitment of the the austrian liberal art historians in vienna to the study and publication of textual sources was long-standing: rudolf von eitelberger had edited and published a series of quellenschriften between and , and julius von schlosser is remembered today principally for his collections of textual sources in art history, beginning in and culminating in the publication of his die kunstliteratur. ein handbuch zur quellenkunde der neueren kunstgeschichte. arnold witte has affirmed the centrality of textual and archival sources for alois riegl’s later scholarship, specifically in the study of roman baroque art that was culled from his lectures and published posthumously in and . witte identified as one of riegl’s principal contributions to art historical thought on the baroque the ‘taking into account [of] contemporary historical sources’. a prime piece of evidence for riegl’s prizing of such documentary sources is his translation of filippo baldinucci’s life of bernini, posthumously completed and co-edited by none other than oskar pollak and arthur burda, the librarian of the vienna hofmuseum. strzygowski championed instead the superiority of the object as the primary source material of art-historical research and asserted the importance of non-european art. it should be remembered in this connection that the posthumous fate of pollak’s unpublished research was shaped by later protagonists in conflicts analogous to those within the vienna institute of art history, including those between anti-facist art historians and their counterparts among nazi sympathizers and party members. echoes of this conflict among viennese art historians are discernible in oskar pollak’s published work. in his aforementioned review of hans tietze’s methodological treatise, pollak praises the author for being the first to raise questions that art historians, ‘whose worst enemies are within their own camp’, had so far avoided. pollak describes art history as a discipline that threatens to become a hotbed for the most awful and most clueless dilettantism, a dilettantism which is slowly extending its hands into rampley, vienna school, - . alois riegl, die entstehung der barockkunst in rom, akademiche vorlesungen gehalten von alois riegl. aus seinen hinterlassenen papieren herausgegeben von arthur burda und max dvor ̌ák. edited by max dvor ̌ák, wien: a. schroll, , accessed through archive.org/. alois riegl, die entstehung der barockkunst in rom: mit bildertaf. edited by arthur burda and max dvor ̌ák . aufled. wien: schroll, . arnold witte, ‘reconstructing riegl's entstehung der barockkunst in rom’, in alois riegl, andrew hopkins, arnold alexander witte, and alina alexandra payne. the origins of baroque art in rome. texts & documents. los angeles, calif.: getty research institute, , . filippo baldinucci, vita des gio. lorenzo bernini, mit uebersetzung und kommentar von alois riegl, aus seinem nachlasse herausgegeben von arthur burda und oskar pollak. translated by alois riegl. wien: a. schroll, , accessed through archive.org/. michael young oskar pollak reconsidered: a bildungsroman in miniature of late austrian culture and politics the universities. the greatest danger to a tranquil development of this discipline is the lack of agreement among its appointed representatives about the concepts, the nature, the purpose and the goals of their field. each has a different understanding of what constitutes ‘art history’. if tietze’s book accomplished nothing besides serving as the impetus for the clarification of this unfortunate situation, it would still be a great achievement. it is the more worthy of admiration, for avoiding the temptation to indulge in fruitless polemics. objectivity and quiet seriousness prevail. in the place of purely destructive negativity, tietze offers what is positively constructive! here the reference seems unmistakable to the conflicts with strzygowski, who was a pugnacious master of the kind of vitriolic invective immortalized by mark twain’s reports from the austrian parliament. oskar pollak’s intellectual development, evolving ethnic identity and political sympathies over the course of his short life illuminate the same tensions within the vienna school of art history and, to be sure, throughout late imperial austria. the german-speaking jewish community in prague into which he was born in and where he grew to maturity was a flashpoint for the empire’s national conflicts and intellectual ferment at that fateful time. there, the percentage of german speakers in the half century prior to his birth had diminished considerably, as had their political influence, and an increasing percentage of that population was jewish. by , less than ten percent of prague residents identified as german- speakers, of whom more than half were jewish. this made prague’s german minority (and the german-speaking jews who lived in smaller cities in bohemia and pollak, review of tietze, : und besonders bei einer disziplin, die die schlimmsten feinde im eigenen lager hat, die heute der tummelplatz des ärgsten und ahnungslosesten dilettantismus zu werden droht, eines dilettantismus, der langsam, aber sicher seine hände auch nach den universitäten ausstreckt. das gefährlichste für eine ruhige entwicklung dieser disziplin ist aber der umstand, daß die berufenen vertreter des faches sich über begriff, wesen, zweck und ziele ihres faches nicht einig sind, daß fast ein jeder unter »kunstgeschichte« etwas anderes verstanden wissen will. und wenn das buch keinen anderen erfolg hat, als daß es den anstoß zu einer klärung dieser unerfreulichen lage gibt, so ist schon viel gewonnen. geradezu bewunderungswert ist es, wie ein bei diesem stande der dinge so heikles unternehmen überall der nahen versuchung, sich in unfruchtbaren polemiken zu ergehen, ausweicht, wie überall sachlichkeit und ruhiger ernst vorherrschen; kein bloßes negatives zerstören, sondern positives aufbauen! mark twain, ‘stirring times in austria’, harper's new monthly magazine , march, , - , accessed through https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/stirring_times_in_austria. michael young oskar pollak reconsidered: a bildungsroman in miniature of late austrian culture and politics moravia) distinctive among german bohemians, most of whom were non-jews and lived in the border regions near germany and in interior sprachinseln (linguistic islands). prague germans were predominantly upper-middle class and did not have much of a proletariat; their reliance on jews to swell their ranks, coupled with the social and economic advantages conferred by wealth, inclined them strongly toward austrian liberalism and the rejection of anti-semitism. their nationalism vis-à-vis czechs in particular and non-germans in general appears in retrospect to have been rooted in a sense of cultural, as opposed to racial, superiority. in the border regions and in the interior linguistic islands, the bohemian germans inhabited rural villages and small to medium-sized towns. unlike the prague germans, these bohemian germans included an economically and socially highly variegated population, ranging from aristocrats and prosperous farmers to members of the lower-middle- class and industrial laborers, handworkers, miners and peasants. members of these groups who were nationally conscious were far more inclined than the prague germans to embrace pan-german racial nationalism and to reject liberalism, and they grew increasingly anti-semitic during pollak’s youth. pollak’s membership in the prague german community owed more to bildung than to affluence; a day after his fifteenth birthday, pollak lost his father adolf, a merchant of middling success whose death left the family in straitened circumstances. this lack of means compelled pollak to seek employment in as a tutor to walter philipp, the son of the prague jewish magnate louis alois goldreich von bronneck at the schloss at ober-studenetz. oskar pollak is better known today for his close friendship with his classmate franz kafka than for his art historical scholarship. pollak appears to have dazzled kafka with the breadth and variety of his interests – in the upanishads, there is a vast and rich literature about the struggle between nationalities in prague and bohemia and the position of the jews therein. all of the following can be read with profit: gary b. cohen, 'jews in german society: prague, - ', central european history, : , mar., , - , and the politics of ethnic survival: germans in prague, - , nd revised edition, west lafayette, ind: purdue university press., ; wilma a. iggers,’the flexible national identities of bohemian jewry’, east central europe : , , - ; scott spector, prague territories: national conflict and cultural innovation in franz kafka's fin de siècle, berkeley, ca: university of california press, ; christoph stölzl, kafkas böses böhmen: zur sozialgeschichte eines prager juden, münchen: edition text + kritik ; nicholas sawicki, ‘the critic as patron and mediator: max brod, modern art and jewish identity in early twentieth-century prague’, images: a journal of jewish art and visual culture , , - ; dimitry shumsky, zweisprachigkeit und binationale idee : der prager zionismus - , göttingen: vandenhoeck u. ruprecht, ; pieter judson, ‘inventing germans: class, nationality and colonial fantasy at the margins of the hapsburg monarchy’, social analysis: the international journal of social and cultural practice , , - and hillel j. kieval, the jewish experience in the czech lands, berkeley, ca: university of california press, . prager tageblatt , september, , , accessed through Österreichischen nationalbibliothek, anno - austrian newspapers online, http://anno.onb.ac.at/. https://www.academia.edu/ /_the_critic_as_patron_and_mediator_max_brod_modern_art_and_jewish_identity_in_early_twentieth-century_prague._images_a_journal_of_jewish_art_and_visual_culture_ _ _ - https://www.academia.edu/ /_the_critic_as_patron_and_mediator_max_brod_modern_art_and_jewish_identity_in_early_twentieth-century_prague._images_a_journal_of_jewish_art_and_visual_culture_ _ _ - michael young oskar pollak reconsidered: a bildungsroman in miniature of late austrian culture and politics rowing, skiing, lute-playing, nietzsche, goethe, and, above all, art history. because of kafka’s letters to pollak we know much about their earliest intellectual proclivities and influences. they were both enthusiastic readers of the german nationalist cultural journal kunstwart. this was a populist, rather than an elite or avant-garde magazine. its coverage of the visual arts was superintended by paul schultze-naumburg, whose german nationalism, always palpable, grew more pronounced over time, and became more anti-semitic, an arc that resembles the rise of pan-germanism in bohemia a few years later. the kunstwart promoted self- improvement through healthful active living, dietary and clothing reform, and especially by means of aesthetic cultivation of the ‘authentic' in art, literature, theatre, music and arts and crafts. even as they were consumers of the populist german cultural chauvinism of the kunstwart, pollak and kafka had to navigate the treacherous conflicts of nationally divided prague, their classmate hugo bergmann, an early and influential zionist in prague, later librarian, philosophy professor and first rector of the hebrew university in jerusalem, described the predicament of jewish students in their matura class of : at that time, a jew who had graduated from the university, if he was not willing to be baptized so as to be able to pursue a career in government service, had few alternatives to self-employment as a doctor or lawyer. since ‘dozent oskar pollak gefallen’, bohemia , .vii. , : quotes hugo bergmann der reichtum seiner interessen war unerschöpflich: aber was immer ihn jeweils packte und fortriss, dem widmete er sich ganz, vergass darob alles andere und ward bald zum verehrer und verkünder. so studierte er die upanischaden, die bibel, luther, franziskus von assisi, die italienischen renaissance novellisten (mit welcher reinheit wusste er den decamerone vorzulesen!), so trieb er lautenspiel und manchen sport… kafka’s interest in art history, which he surely owed to pollak’s influence, is examined in heinz ladendorf, ‘kafka und die kunstgeschichte’, wallraf-richartz-jahrbuch, , , - and , , - . gerhard kratzsch, kunstwart und dürerbund. ein beitrag zur geschichte der gebildeten im zeitalter des imperialismus, göttingen: vandenhoeck u. ruprecht, , - and kai k. gutschow, 'schultze-naumburg's heimatstil: a nationalistic conflict of tradition and modernity', 'tradition, nationalism, and the creation of image': traditional dwellings and settlements working paper series , , - , accessed through http://www.andrew.cmu.edu/user/gutschow/publishing_links/ % iaste% paper% c omplete.pdf. for pollak’s and kafka’s response to the kunstwart, see reiner stach, kafka, the early years (tr. shelley frisch), princeton and oxford: princeton university press, , - , mark anderson, kafka's clothes: ornament and aestheticism in the habsburg fin de siècle, oxford: oxford university press, , - and klaus wagenbach, franz kafka. eine biographie seiner jugend, bern: francke verlag, , - . http://kramerius.nkp.cz/kramerius/pshowissue.do?it= &id= https://uconn.on.worldcat.org/search?databaselist= &querystring=se:traditional% dwellings% and% settlements% working% paper% series% ; https://uconn.on.worldcat.org/search?databaselist= &querystring=se:traditional% dwellings% and% settlements% working% paper% series% ; https://www.amazon.com/s/ref=dp_byline_sr_book_ ?ie=utf &field-author=klaus+wagenbach&text=klaus+wagenbach&sort=relevancerank&search-alias=books michael young oskar pollak reconsidered: a bildungsroman in miniature of late austrian culture and politics we both did not want this, we [along with pollak] looked for another possibility and were advised to study chemistry because jews had the opportunity to be accepted into the chemical industry. indeed some form of state service, either in university teaching, museum work, or preservation of historic monuments, was, apart from opening a commercial art dealership (such as ludwig pollak did with great success in rome), the only career option for an art historian. most, not all, of the distinguished art historians of jewish ancestry from prague, including paul frankl and hans tietze, had parents who had converted to christianity, or, like the aesthetician emil utitz, converted themselves. in addition to his having married a jew, hedwig eisner, in , a slight, but perhaps significant indication that pollak identified affirmatively as jewish is his hugo bergmann, ‘schulzeit und studium’, in hans-gerd koch,>>als kafka mir entgegenkam…<<. erinnerungen an franz kafka, berlin: verlag klaus wagenbach, , - : …einem juden, der die universität absolviert hatte, blieben unter den damaligen umständen, wenn er sich nicht taufen lassen wollte, um eine staatliche karriere einzuschlagen, praktisch nur die >>freien<< berufe übrig; arzt oder advokat zu werden. da wir beide dies nicht wollten, sahen wir uns nach einer anderen möglichkeit um, und man riet uns, chemie zu studieren, weil für juden die möglichkeit bestand in die chemische industrie aufgenommen zu werden. sbírka matrik - archiv hlavního města prahy- trauungs-matrik /matriky oddaných (registers of marriages) book , : , accessed through http://badatelna.eu/fond/ /reprodukce/?zaznamid= &reproid= . the marriage took place on september , . hedwig eisner pollak was described by johannes orbaan as a ‘gestreiche und liebevolle junge frau…die seinem [pollak’s] streben ein feines verständnis entgegenbrachte’, orbaan, - . she may be the embroidery artist of the same name who exhibited with the wiener werkstätte in edinburgh in (see a. s. levutus, ‘a viennese exhibition of arts and crafts’, international studio : , january, , - accessed through https://books.google.com/. hedwig pollak returned to prague after her husband’s death, and worked as a photographer, supplying the portrait photograph of max dvořák which faced the frontispiece of joseph weingartner, ein gedenkblatt zur trauerfeier fu ̈r max dvořák, wien: ed. hölzel, ; see hans tietze, ‘ein gedenkblatt zur trauerfeier für max dvorak’, kunstchronik und kunstmarkt: wochenschrift für kenner und sammler : , januar , . hedwig pollak was deported to theresienstadt in transport v (her number was ) on january , , and deported in transport ar (her number was ) to zamosc in poland on april , , where she died or was murdered. https://www.holocaust.cz/databaze-obeti/obet/ -hedvika-pollakova/. a chilling footnote to her tragic fate is the appearance of a hedwig pollak from the czechoslovak republic, also born in , who escaped to london at the end of . her case file was stamped ‘cancelled’, which may indicate that she returned to prague, perhaps to help an ailing relative or for some other urgent reason, not realizing that it would not be possible to leave. the national archives of united kingdom, ho - records created or inherited by the home office, ministry of home security, and related bodies, division of aliens and https://discovery.nationalarchives.gov.uk/browse https://discovery.nationalarchives.gov.uk/browse/r/h/c https://discovery.nationalarchives.gov.uk/browse/r/h/c https://discovery.nationalarchives.gov.uk/browse/r/h/c michael young oskar pollak reconsidered: a bildungsroman in miniature of late austrian culture and politics curriculum vitae from his habilitation defense, where he has added in longhand ‘mosaisch’ to his description of his nationality (figs and ). pollak, kafka and bergmann all gave up chemistry very quickly. figure pollak’s curriculum vitae from his habilitation defense, with ‘mosaisch’ penciled in after ‘deutscher nationalität’. archiv der universität wien, vienna: rektoratsarchive – akademischer senat – personalblätter ( .- . jh), pollak (fols r, v and r-beilage ). figure enlargement of penciled in ‘mosaisch’ from figure above. immigration, denization and naturalisation, community relations, community programmes and equal opportunities departments, ho - czechoslovak refugee trust: records, subseries within ho - case papers of refugee families, 'old' refugees, case number , pollak, hedwig, . i am grateful to richard gaskell, webmaster of http://www.geocities.ws/czechandslovakthings/ww _namelists.htm, for his generous assistance with locating these records. archiv der universität wien, vienna: rektoratsarchive – akademischer senat – personalblätter ( .- . jh), pollak (fols r, v and r-beilage ). the letter forms in the handwritten annotation of the curriculum vitae, particularly the ‘m’, the ‘a’ and the ‘sch’ without ligature between ‘s’ and ‘c’, when compared with pollak’s handwriting in figure , strongly suggest that this ‘mosaisch’ annotation was an autograph one by pollak. https://discovery.nationalarchives.gov.uk/browse/r/h/c https://discovery.nationalarchives.gov.uk/browse/r/h/c https://discovery.nationalarchives.gov.uk/browse/r/h/c https://discovery.nationalarchives.gov.uk/browse/r/h/c https://discovery.nationalarchives.gov.uk/browse/r/h/c michael young oskar pollak reconsidered: a bildungsroman in miniature of late austrian culture and politics eventually pollak’s sense of his prospects for making a career as an art historian without converting to christianity was energized and greatly enlarged through contact with a remarkable network of unconverted jewish art historians (classical archaeologists, actually) with strong ties to the universities at prague and vienna and to the austrian historical institute in rome (istituto storico austriaco). wilhelm klein ( - ) was a professor of classical archaeology at the german university in prague, and the son of a traditional rabbi from the banat region of transylvania. klein was a close advisor of oskar pollak’s and a member of his doctoral dissertation defense committee. klein’s student ludwig pollak ( - -- no relation to oskar) was another unconverted jew from prague who made a brilliant career in rome as an antiquarian scholar, collector and dealer after completing studies in vienna. awaiting further study is oskar pollak’s relation to emmanuel loewy ( - ), a viennese jewish archaeologist who studied in vienna and served as professor of archaeology at the university of rome from to . all of these distinguished scholars served as exemplars for oskar pollak, whom klein and ludwig pollak provided with valuable contacts that enabled him to remain solvent and pursue a successful career in rome and vienna. besides providing oskar pollak with professional contacts and opportunities, the two older antiquarians may have assisted in the evolution of his political and cultural outlook, in particular with regard to ethnic nationalism, by which austria was increasingly riven during pollak’s university years. as a student at the german university of prague from - , pollak embraced the german cultural nationalism, as distinguished from racial pan-germanism, that was championed by the gesellschaft zur förderung deutscher wissenschaft, kunst und of this extraordinary trio, only ludwig pollak is beginning to benefit from renewed scholarly attention, see museo barracco and orietta rossini, ludwig pollak. archaeologist and art dealer, prague - auschwitz : the golden years of international collecting from giovanni barracco to sigmund freud, rome: gangemi, ; margarete merkel guldan, die tagebücher von ludwig pollak, wien: verlag der Österreichischen akademie der wissenschaften, and ludwig pollak, römische memoiren. künstler, kunstliebhaber und gelehrte - , herausgegeben von margarethe merkel guldan, rome: <<l’erma>> di bretschneider, . all three books include material on klein and loewy, as well as ludwig von pastor, whose formative relationship and mentorship to oskar pollak may owe something to ludwig pollak’s influence. ludwig pollak lived in rome and was married to margarete, the older sister of oskar pollak’s later charge walter philip goldreich von bronneck. it may have been through this klein-ludwig pollak connection that oskar obtained the position as walter’s tutor at oberstudenetz in . merkel guldan, die tagebücher, shows diary entries mentioning oskar pollak in the years - , and entries mentioning ludwig von pastor from the years onward. michael young oskar pollak reconsidered: a bildungsroman in miniature of late austrian culture and politics literatur in böhmen. this particular outlook was forcefully expressed in the journal deutsche arbeit, to which pollak’s teachers heinrich alfred schmidt and ottokar weber (although, perhaps significantly, not wilhelm klein) were frequent contributors. pollak himself published a critique in deutsche arbeit of the large scale demolitions of old prague. here he bemoaned the wanton destruction of old buildings and entire quarters by the czech municipal authorities. he praised the contemporary architect otto wagner and his students jan kotĕra and josef zasche and disparaged matĕj blecha’s mietskaserne in pařížská ulice. outside the university, pollak frequented other outposts of german culture and liberalism in prague: the lese- und redehalle der deutschen studenten, where he participated in lectures and discussions, the salon of berta fanta and its related regular discussion group at the café louvre, devoted to the philosophy of franz brentano. fanta’s daughter else, who married pollak’s friend and classmate hugo bergmann, later recalled a new year’s celebration at her parents’ home where a skit parodying brentano’s philosophy written by franz kafka and oskar pollak was performed, with pollak in the leading roll. hugo bergmann described the convivial comfort of sunday afternoons at the fanta family villa atop a hill in suburban podbaba, with this organization supported pollak’s research for his doctorate, and its successor organization in the czechoslovak republic underwrote the posthumous publication of his work on roman papal artistic patronage. masaryk institute and archive of the czech academy of sciences (masarykův ústav a archiv av Čr), collection gesellschaft zur förderung deutscher wissenschaft, kunst und literatur in böhmen, box , personal file pollak oskar, requests for support of scholarly research and awards, . ottokar weber, ‘prag’, deutsche arbeit : , februar, , - , accessed through https://books.google.com/; heinrich alfred schmid, ‘Über die probleme der kunstgeschichte’, deutsche arbeit , märz , - , accessed through hathitrust. two outstanding examples of the type of german cultural nationalism then regnant in the german university of prague are julius lippert, ‘prag, die deutsche stadt’, deutsche arbeit : , februar, , - , accessed through https://books.google.com/, and philipp knoll, Über das deutschthum in prag und seine augenblickliche lage: vortrag gehalten am . märz im deutschen vereine in prag, prague: verlag des deutschen vereines, , accessed through https://books.google.com/. oskar pollak, ‘vom alten und vom neuen “schönen prag”’, deutsche arbeit : , , - , accessed through hathitrust. stach, kafka the early years, - . the atmosphere of pollak’s social life as a student in prague is captured in josef Čermák, ‘das kultur- und vereinsleben der prager studenten. die lese- und redehalle der deutschen studenten in prag’, in: brücken: germanistisches jahrbuch tschechien-slowakei. n.f. - , - , - , accessed through https://jahrbuch- bruecken.de/category/ - /. else bergmann, ‘familiengeschichte’, in georg gimpl, ed., weil der boden selbst hier brennt. aus dem prager salon der berta fanta ( - ), prag: vitalis, , . michael young oskar pollak reconsidered: a bildungsroman in miniature of late austrian culture and politics pollak reading boccaccio aloud in the arbor. and berta fanta herself recorded in her diary on december , earnest discussions at the café louvre between pollak and ernst limė over the distinguishing of form and content in works of art. pollak's study of art history at the german university of prague had begun in under the tutelage of alwin schultz, a minor, now-forgotten figure at the end of a long career, active as a teacher and author of a textbook, whose scholarly work had concluded long before pollak studied with him. a year after schulz's retirement in , the prague chair in art history was filled by heinrich alfred schmid, a swiss student of jacob burckhardt and a classmate of heinrich wölfflin, with whom schmid had travelled to italy in and whose chair at basel he took over when wölfflin was called to berlin in . pollak, from the winter semester of - to the winter semester of - , was schmid’s assistent at the art historical institute at the prague german university, a relationship that brought them into close contact and involved a kind of mentorship, although pollak emphasized in his curriculum vitae that he also studied archaeology with wilhelm klein at the university. schmid was a man of broad culture with fairly narrow research interests; he published studies of matthias grünewald, hans memling, konrad witz and arnold böcklin (the latter three all swiss-german painters). pollak concluded his studies in prague with schmid, who, according to one recent assessment, ‘taught and published in a positivistic style combining historical/archeological/ archival and documentary research, as applied mainly to the art of the northern renaissance’. the german cultural nationalism and ethnocentrism of schmid's scholarly proclivities can perhaps be discerned from the narrowness of his interests (especially in comparison with his contemporaries at the university of vienna where pollak later studied), and from a few hints in his published work. in his inaugural address in prague, published in deutsche arbeit, he makes these extraordinary assertions: the assumption that the gothic was a creation of frankish stock is not far to seek; it found its realization in northern france and in the subsequent period hugo bergmann, ‘frau berta fanta (aus meinem tagebuch. geschrieben . . , als ich allein mit den toten war.)’, in gimpl, ed., weil der boden selbst hier brennt, . berta fanta, ‘tagebuch’, in gimpl, ed., weil der boden selbst hier brennt, . andrée hayum, the isenheim altarpiece, princeton: princeton university press, , - and - . schmidt left prague for göttingen in , and then returned to basel in where he remained until his death in . christine b. verzar ‘after burckhardt and wölfflin; was there a basel school of art history?’, journal of art historiography , december , . hayum, , observed that schmid, whose ‘career was eclipsed by the great pioneers of art history such as alois riegl,’ was ‘a thinker of keen methodological and pedagogical awareness, as well as a critic of considerable foresight and the courage of his convictions’, accessed through https://arthistoriography.files.wordpress.com/ / /verzar.pdf. https://search.proquest.com/pubidlinkhandler/sng/pubtitle/journal+of+art+historiography/$n/ /openview/ /$b/ db apq/ ?accountid= michael young oskar pollak reconsidered: a bildungsroman in miniature of late austrian culture and politics was best comprehended in the germanic countries. at any rate, it is remarkable that in italy and even in spain we often find german architects working on gothic buildings. it is also tempting to suggest that the originality of italian art in the fifteenth century was due to the strong addition of german blood, which tuscany still retained under the hohenstaufen, an admixture which was gradually reduced and absorbed in the party struggles of the period that followed. hence it appears that schmid’s instructional methods and scholarly orientation were more heavily inflected with teutonic ethnocentrism than were those of the vienna art historians with whom pollak later completed his studies. pollak's initial sympathy with the type of german cultural nationalism that suffused the pages of deutsche arbeit (see footnotes and supra) is indicated by his youthful enthusiasm for the kunstwart (founded by the step-nephew of richard wagner) and his own contribution to deutsche arbeit, which harshly criticizes the h.a. schmid, 'Über die probleme der kunstgeschichte. antrittsrede an der deutschen universität in prag von prof. h.a. schmid', deutsche arbeit : , march, , accessed through https://books.google.com/, naheliegend ist die annahme, daß die gotik, welche in nordfrankreich ihre ausbildung fand und in der folgezeit in den germanischen ländern am besten verstanden wurde, eine schöpfung des fränkischen stammes war. auffallend ist jedenfalls auch das, daß wir in italien und selbst in spanien so oft gerade deutsche architekten an gotischen bauten beschäftigt finden. verführerisch ist ferner die hypothese, daß die eigenart der italienischen kunst im . jahrhundert auf den starken zusatz deutschen blutes zurückzuführen ist, den toskana noch unter den hohenstaufen erhalten hat, ein zusatz, der in den parteikämpfen der folgezeit allmählich zurückging und aufgesogen wurde. after he had left prague, schmid, in a wartime screed, expressed strong nationalistic views of german art, of which this example is representative: die französische kunstwissenschaft spricht deshalb mit einem gewissen rechte von einer französisch-flandrischen kunst in dieser zeit. aber neben vielen bedeutenden künstlern stammen gerade die allergrössten, die wir kennen, aus den niederlanden, und zwar nicht aus dem wallonischen landesteil, sondern aus deutschen gebieten, so vor allem claus sluter, die brüder van eyck, hugo van der goes, quinten massys, später dann auch noch rubens und van dyck und selbsverständlich die grossen holländer des . jahrhunderts. dies lässt mit sicherheit darauf schliessen, dass, so bedeutend der anteil der wallonen und franzosen auch sicher gewesen ist, die ausschlaggebenden kräfte die deutschen waren. h. a. schmid, deutschtum und die bildende kunst. rede am . märz , berlin: carl heymanns verlag, , - . michael young oskar pollak reconsidered: a bildungsroman in miniature of late austrian culture and politics czech municipal authorities' wanton demolition of old buildings. both czech and german architects designed the garish new apartment houses that replaced the old quarters, but the only example pollak gives was designed by a czech. pollak bewails the czech authorities’ lack of appreciation for the charm and poetic stimmung of the historic quarters of prague, with the implicit suggestion of an inferior level of culture among the czechs. the editor of deutsche arbeit was the prague professor of german literature august sauer, against whom kafka railed in one of his letters to pollak, where he also gently chides pollak for his unqualified adherence to the goethe cult during a visit to weimar. it is possible that kafka's antipathy to sauer and the strident cultural chauvinism that he represented in the prague german milieu also subtly influenced pollak's eventual distancing of himself from german cultural nationalism, abetted by the cosmopolitan influence of wilhelm klein. pollak received his doctorate on february , under schmid, historian ottokar weber and archaeologist wilhelm klein. his doctoral dissertation treated the prague baroque sculpture of johann brokoff and his son ferdinand maximilian. this was published in ; oskar kokoschka claimed that its publication marked the beginning of serious modern study of the bohemian baroque. during these years, the study of renaissance and baroque art, and especially, architecture, was a powder keg of political turmoil and rival national and ethnic claims in both the austrian and german empires. as early as , the viennese art critic and museum curator albert ilg had championed the baroque as a supra-national architecture style, uniquely suitable for adaptation and preservation in multi- national austria. the german protestant cornelius gurlitt enraged czech nationalist scholars and art-lovers by claiming in that the czech nation had no stach, kafka, the early years, - and - . the letter is dated august , , see, franz kafka, briefe - , new york: schocken books, , - ; for an english translation see franz kafka, letters to friends, family, and editors, new york, schocken books, , - . kafka also attended schulz’s and schmid’s lectures in art history at the prague german university, see ladendorf, ‘kafka und die kunstgeschichte’, wallraf-richartz- jahrbuch , , . oscar pollak, johann und ferdinand maximilian brokoff: ein beitrag zur geschichte der österreichischen barockplastik, prag, calve, , accessed through https://digitalniknihovna.mlp.cz/view/uuid: c efd - - dd-b cb- d f dc ?page=uuid: f bc - - dd-af f- d f dc . kokoschka maintained that the bohemian baroque ‘was only discovered as a distinct phase in the history of art thanks to the researches of the exceptionally gifted young viennese art- historian dr. oskar pollak, a pupil of max dvorak (sic), killed in the first world war, and it retains its values far beyond the local cultural boundaries’, oskar kokoschka, ‘an approach to the baroque art of czechoslovakia’, burlington magazine for connoisseurs, : , nov., , . kokoschka appears to have been unaware of the contemporary pioneering czech scholars of the bohemian baroque, like zdeněk wirth, who published in czech, which kokoschka did not read. https://www.jstor.org/stable/ michael young oskar pollak reconsidered: a bildungsroman in miniature of late austrian culture and politics role in the achievements of the bohemian baroque, which, he claimed, was a distinctively german achievement built upon an italian foundation . perhaps pollak’s eventual devotion to documentary research was partially motivated by a desire to shift the scholarly emphasis from choleric debates about the ethnicity of artists and architects to the discovery of the facts of patronage, chronology and design. in september, , pollak went to rome with a travel grant from the austrian ministry of cult and instruction, and from november, to october he remained in rome studying italian baroque art as a member of the austrian historical institute, at that time on the second floor of via della croce . he returned to the institute in rome frequently for shorter research stays, while assisting in cataloging the institute’s library collections, up until the war’s outbreak in august, . the years in rome brought him into close contact with the institute’s director ludwig von pastor, an ardent austrian patriot and a magisterial scholar of super-human energy, with whom pollak developed an especially close relationship. inevitably, in these surroundings, pollak began to lose his provincial outlook, and his german cultural nationalism diminished. indeed, surviving documents from these years suggest, in miniscule details, that pollak’s earlier infatuation with german cultural nationalism gave way to austrian liberal supranationalism. when he published his doctoral dissertation as a book in , he changed its sub-title from ‘ein beitrag zur geschichte der deutschen’ to rampley, vienna school, - ; cornelius gurlitt, ‘die barockarchitektur in böhmen’, mitteilungen des vereins für geschichte der deutschen in böhmen , , - , accessed through https://books.google.com/, and evonne levy, baroque and the political language of formalism ( - ): burckhardt, wölfflin, gurlitt, brinckmann, sedlmayr, basel: schwabe verlag, , - . archiv des Österreichischen historischen instituts, rome, ‘dr oskar pollak, qualifikations- beschreibung, ’ ( mai ). this process of establishing distance from strident german cultural nationalism very likely began earlier under the influence of wilhelm klein, who crossed the czech-german divide to cultivate warm relationships with czech artists and colleagues, notably the pre-eminent czech sculptor josef václav myslbek; see jan bouzek, ‘wilhelm klein und die prager archäologie’, walter pape, ed., zehn jahre universitätspartnerschaft univerzita karlova v praze – universität zu köln: kolloquium zur universitäts- und fachgeschichte, köln: universitäts- und stadtbibliothek köln, (ebook), - , accessed through https://kups.ub.uni- koeln.de/ /. ludwig pollak provided another example of this more cosmopolitan, supra- national outlook, in his close relations with czech and german stipendistas in rome (artists, architect and scholars), see pollak, römische memoiren, chapters iii (bildende künstler und architekten) - , and iv (die gelehrtern kreise) - . ‘ein beitrag zur geschichte der deutschen barockplastik’, is the sub-title listed in the register of doctoral dissertation defenses at the prague german university (archive of the charles university, collection registry books of the german university in prague, inventory no. , registry book of doctors of the german charles-ferdinand university in prague/german university in prague ( – ), page , accessed through michael young oskar pollak reconsidered: a bildungsroman in miniature of late austrian culture and politics ‘österreichischen barockplastik’ (figs , and ). these seemingly insignificant minutiae exemplify the kind of fraught distinctions, so bewildering to non-natives, which have often preoccupied central europeans . the degree to which they were taken seriously is illustrated in a mostly positive review of pollak’s brokoff monograph by the czech museologist karel guth, who commented, ‘how to understand the words “austrian baroque”? in terms of nationality, “german baroque” would answer, not entirely accurately; topographically one would have to use the term “czech”. “austrian baroque” is however in any case an historical absurdity’. figure archive of the charles university, registry book of doctors of the german charles-ferdinand university in prague ( – ), page : dissertation subtitled ‘ein beitrag zur kunstgeschichte der deutschen barockplastik’ http://is.cuni.cz/webapps/archiv/public/book/bo/ / /?lang=en#, and in pollak’s correspondence with the gesellschaft zur förderung deutscher wissenschaft, kunst und literatur in böhmen, (masaryk institute and archive of the czech academy of sciences (masarykův ústav a archiv av Čr), collection gesellschaft zur förderung deutscher wissenschaft, kunst und literatur in böhmen, box , personal file pollak oskar, requests for support of scholarly research and awards, ), which provided him with stipends to cover various expenses related to his research, including the commissioning of photographs. a recent example is the pomlčková válka (hyphen war) of in czechoslovakia. karel guth, 'review of oskar pollak, johann und ferdinand maximilian brokoff. ein beitrag zu geschichte der österreichischen barockplastik, prague, , and studien zur geschichte der architektur prags - . pollak, oskar. wien - leipzig, . (jahrbuch der kunsthistorischen sammlungen des allerhöchsten kaiserhauses. (bd. . nr. ), - ’, Český časopis historický : , , - ; : ‘co rozumí slovy „rakouský barok"? nacionálně odpovídal by tomu — ač ne zcela správně — „německý barok", topograficky by pak musil užíti označení „český”. „rakouský barok" však je v každém případě historické absurdum’, accessed through http://www.digitalniknihovna.cz/knav/. michael young oskar pollak reconsidered: a bildungsroman in miniature of late austrian culture and politics figure masarykův ústav a archiv av Čr, collection gesellschaft zur förderung deutscher wissenschaft, kunst und literatur in böhmen, box , personal file pollak oskar, requests for support of scholarly research and awards ) dissertation subtitled ‘ein beitrag zur kunstgeschichte der deutschen barockplastik’ figure title page of pollak’s brokoff monograph based upon his doctoral dissertation michael young oskar pollak reconsidered: a bildungsroman in miniature of late austrian culture and politics resistance to art historical nationalism likewise characterized pollak's university of vienna habilitationsschrift, on the renaissance architecture of prague during the years - , as karel guth, who assessed both dissertations in the same review, noted approvingly. guth praised pollak’s study of prague renaissance architecture for putting to rest the myth of the ‘german renaissance’ domination of architecture in post-medieval prague and central europe. pollak refuted this myth, aggressively promulgated by cornelius gurlitt during the full flower of prussian nationalism, by revealing the heavy reliance on italian illustrated books (primarily serlio) in many major monuments, and the post-reformation influx of italian masons followed by netherlandish artists and builders during the rudolfine era.. karel guth, ‘review of pollak’, : práce pollakova, řadící chronologicky jednotlivé památky, osvětuje aspoň pro prahu dosud téměř neznámou dobu českého umění. dosavadní názor, že do rudolfovy doby vládne ‘česká’ renaissance a po té ‘německá’, je tím vyvrácen. od r. . event. . přicházejí neustále do prahy italští umělci, kteří přinášejí italskou renaissanci a užívají italských předloh architektonických. tento příliv nemizí však ani po celé . stol. v době rudolfově přichází nový proud umělecký z nizozemí. a právě na účet tohoto nizozemského vlivu vznikla tradice o ‘německé’ renaissanci, jež má stejně neexistující podklad jako ‘česká’ renaissance. zjištění těchto dvou různých vlivů, italského a nizozemského, stopování jich působení o sobě i navzájem je zásluhou práce pollakovy. pollak's work, which sorts individual monuments chronologically, illuminates an unknown (at least for prague) period of czech art. the current opinion that until rudolf's reign the ‘czech’ renaissance and then the ‘german’ held sway is thus refuted. since , and perhaps as early as , italian artists arrive who bring the italian renaissance and use italian architectural models. this tide, however, does not disappear throughout the entire seventeenth century. during rudolph’s reign, a new artistic stream came from the netherlands. and it is this netherlandish influence that created the tradition of the ‘german’ renaissance, which has the same non-existent basis as the ‘czech’ renaissance. the ascertaining of these two different influences, the italian and the netherlandish, the tracing of their effects on themselves and on each other is the merit of pollak’ study. in , emanuel poche praised pollak for ‘his rejection of the prevailing tendentious emphasis on german influence, which attests to his character as a responsible and objective scholar’ [‘odmítl dosavadní tendenční zdůrazňování nĕmeckých vlivů, což svĕdčí o jeho vĕdecké objektivitĕ a odpovĕdnosti’.] ‘pollak, oskar’, nová encyklopedie českého výtvarného umění, prague: academia, , . pollak’s close study of gurlitt’s book, geschichte des barockstiles in italien is apparent from his pages of closely written notes in archiv des instituts für kunstgeschichte, universität wien, vienna: ii – nachlässe – pollak, oskar, box ii, ‘auszüge zu gurlitt’. https://uconn.on.worldcat.org/search?databaselist= &querystring=ti% dgeschichte% des% barockstiles% in% italien% michael young oskar pollak reconsidered: a bildungsroman in miniature of late austrian culture and politics in rome at the istituto storico austriaco, pollak began a project to illustrate the development of art in rome under popes urban viii, innocent x and alexander vii ( - ) with a full collection of all the important original documents. he began collecting and studying sixteenth- and seventeenth-century roman guidebooks; both efforts occupied him to the end of his life. he published a growing number of scholarly articles, and supplemented his stipend by an astounding sixty-two contributions to thieme and becker’s allgemeines künstlerlexicon. these included a twelve-page one on pietro da cortona, which shocked with its length hermann voss, later appointed by hitler to replace the deceased herrmann posse at the führer museum in linz. from november through spring pollak was max dvořák's assistent at the art history institute at the university of vienna; close collaboration with dvořák, who was czech, surely reinforced the supranational and cosmopolitan sympathies that pollak had cultivated under pastor’s, klein’s and ludwig pollak’s tutelage . his vienna studies were interspersed with research stays in rome at the austrian historical institute. from may through november he volunteered at the Österreichische museum für kunst und industrie, working on the new permanent exhibition and cataloging ceramics . when in residence in vienna, he gave talks and cycles of public lectures in university extension courses. he hermann voss, ‘review of ulrich thieme, aligemeines lexikon der bildenden künstler von der antike bis zur gegenwart. begründet von ulrich thieme und felix becker. leipzig, e. a. seemann. bd. vi: carlini—cioci. bd. vii: cioffi—cousyns’, kunstchronik: wochenschrift für kunst und kunstgewerbe n.f. : , . märz , - : ‘dem pietro da cortona aber widmet o. pollak gar einen artikel, der ½ spalten einnimmt, dimensionen, die meines erachtens nicht einmal bei michelangelo, raffael oder rembrandt berechtigt wären. dabei liest man mit staunen auf s. , der verfasser habe sich auf die besprechung der völlig sicheren werke seines künstlers beschränkt!‘. the appointment of dvořák, a czech from roudnice in central bohemia, in as alois riegl’s replacement in vienna, occasioned vitriolic attacks from german nationalist academics, politicians and journalists. this trauma, and the spirited defense he received from supranational austrian patriots, confirmed dvořák’s lasting sympathies with the anti- strzygowski faction in vienna; he even turned down an offer of a chair in art history at the czech university in prague after the creation of the czechoslovak republic, preferring to remain in his post in vienna; see rampley, vienna school, , - , - and - . for discussion of an earlier struggle of dvořák’s with czech academic provincialism and parochialism, see jindřich vybíral, ‘why max dvořák did not become a professor in prague’, journal of art historiography , december, , accessed through https://arthistoriography.files.wordpress.com/ / /vybiral.pdf. museum für angewandte kunst, wien, aktenarchiv - - (report from pollak dated october, , and aktenarchiv - - / (for two letters to a museum official (perhaps the director, hofrat eduard leisching) from pollak from rome, dated april and may , ). archiv der universität wien, vienna: rektoratsarchive – akademischer senat – personalblätter ( .- . jh), pollak (fols r and v-beilage ): ‘in den letzten drei jahren hatte ich auch gelegenheit mich als öffentlichen vortragenden zu bestättigen, u.a. in den https://digi.ub.uni-heidelberg.de/diglit/kunstchronik / michael young oskar pollak reconsidered: a bildungsroman in miniature of late austrian culture and politics published and lectured about contemporary art and architecture during the same period. he was in residence at the institute in rome with a stipend in spring and as the institute’s art historical assistant in february . during that time he prepared for publication his massive collection of documents related to art under urban viii. in august, he returned to vienna to enlist. he was named a privatdozent in vienna in december, . when pollak began studying in the vienna institute of art history in , he encountered a political and cultural configuration that was familiar. the historical profile of the vienna institute of art history corresponds closely to that of the community of emancipated german jews of prague. both had their origins in the failed revolution of . both were heavily invested in liberalism and the attempt to harmonize ethnic and national divisions within a broad austrian patriotism. in fact the wider conflict between liberal supranational, cosmopolitan austrian patriots and virulent nationalists was paralleled by the schism within the vienna art historical institute, where, as has been described, riegl and wickoff (and later dvořák and schlosser) faced off against josef strzygowski. pollak himself seems to have run afoul of strzygowski at the defense for his habilitation on june , , as the dissenting report by strzygowski shows. strzygowski chastised pollak for not being familiar with some medieval and byzantine objects and for having knowledge of no other methods of connoisseurship than those of morelli. his assent to pollak’s habilitation was contingent on pollak’s venia legendi being limited to the history of modern art, and not extended to art history in general. vortragzyklen, die ich im auftrage der volkstümlichen universitätskurse abgehalten habe.’ in his nachlass there are notes for a lecture on nineteenth-century architecture (‘geschichte der architektur im xix jahrhundert; ii. von bis zur neuesten zeit’ delivered each thursday at : in the evening from february at the anatomisches institut, währingerstrasse , archiv des instituts für kunstgeschichte, universität wien, vienna: ii – nachlässe – pollak, oskar, box . oskar pollak,'die internationale kunstausstellung in rom . mit abbildungen und dreifarbendruck', zeitschrift für bildende kunst [=n.f. ]: , , - ; oskar pollak, 'ausstellung Österreichischer kunstgewerbe bis im k. k. Österreichischen museum für kunst und industrie in wien', kunstchronik: wochenschrift für kunst und kunstgewerbe n.f. , february, , , - , as well as many short notices, ‘letters from vienna’, exhibition and museum installation reviews in kunstchronik during his last years in vienna signed ‘o.p.’: e.g. nf : , april . - , [‘wiener brief’], nf : , oktober , - [‘austellungen’] and nf : , . juni , - [‘wiener brief’]. archiv der universität wien, vienna: rektoratsarchive – akademischer senat – personalblätter ( .- . jh), pollak ; this includes pollak’s curriculum vitae (fols r, v and r-beilage ) and documents related to his appointment as privatdozent ( r and r). archiv der universität wien, vienna: rektoratsarchive – akademischer senat – personalblätter ( .- . jh), pollak , fol. r: hofrat strzygowski erklärt zu protokoll: michael young oskar pollak reconsidered: a bildungsroman in miniature of late austrian culture and politics it is possible that his experiences as a german-speaking jew in prague at the fin-de-siecle predisposed pollak to sympathize with and embrace the ideals and goals of the anti-strzygowski faction of the vienna school. the schism within the vienna university institute of art history, which pitted wickhoff and riegl (and later dvořák and julius von schlosser) against strzygowski began early and ran deep. long before strzygowski’s arrival in vienna to replace the deceased wickhoff in , the arch-liberals and austrian patriots wickhoff and riegl and the rabidly anti-habsburg pan-germanist strzygowski had published scathing reviews of each other’s work. the schism was concretized in , when strzygowski secured permission to establish his own rival institute within the university. pollak’s native community of prague jews had clung to liberalism even after it had been rejected by many czech and german nationalists. the czechs in prague were numerically superior and their rising national consciousness and cultural aspirations found articulate expression in literature, theatre and czech-language schools. jews thus occupied a tense and precarious position between czechs and germans. german-speaking jews in prague cultivated german bildung and the goethe cult, german classical music and german theatre , which antagonized dr. pollak beherrscht, wie das koloqium beim unterzeichneten und prof. v. schlosser gezeigt hat, das fach der kunstgeschichte nicht in den masse, dass man ihn die venia für das gesamtfach der neueren kunstgeschichte verleihen könnte. er weiss nichts von der literatur über die ravennatischen sarkophage, kennt das kästchen von pirano im hof-museum nicht und weiss für seine uebungen über die grundlagen wissenschaftlicher betrachtungsmethode nur die methode morelli anzuführen. wenn prof. v. schlosser auch sinnesverwirrung geltend macht, und der unterzeichnete anerkennt, dass pollak den baldinucci und die quellen des vasari kennen müsse—die er tatsächlich nicht zu nennen wusste—so kann er unter berücksichtigung der guten arbeiten des habilitanten doch nur für seine venia im gebiete der kunstgeschichte der neuzeit eintreten. unter dieser einschränkung hat er sich für die zulesung ausgesprochen. signed: ‘strzygowski’. marchand, 'appreciating the art of others’, . schlosser’s history of the vienna school of art history does not even mention strzygowski: julius von schlosser, ‘die wiener schule der kunstgeschichte‘, mitteilungen des österreichischen institut für geschichtsforschung ergänzungs-band , heft , innsbruck: wagner , and english translation by karl johns [‘julius von schlosser, the vienna school of the history of art - review of a century of austrian scholarship in german translated and edited by karl johns’, journal of art historiography , december , accessed through https://arthistoriography.files.wordpress.com/ / /karl-johns-schlosser-trans- wienerschule-revised.pdf. for the durability of liberalism in late imperial austria, see pieter judson, the habsburg empire: a new history, cambridge, mass: belknap press, and ‘rethinking the liberal legacy’, in steven beller, ed., rethinking vienna, , new york: berghahn, , - . according to marsha rozenblit, michael young oskar pollak reconsidered: a bildungsroman in miniature of late austrian culture and politics czech nationalists, who responded with scorn. german university students from the border regions rioted and demonstrated against czechs and jews. in a kind of antiphonal chorus, both national groups menaced the jews with economic boycotts, relentless vilification and incitement in the press, vandalism and even physical violence. if pollak is remembered primarily for his archival and documentary compilations, he also produced a body of work deeply engaged with analyzing and interpreting works of art and architecture. his monograph on the prague baroque sculptors johann and ferdinand maximilian brokoff was based on his prague dissertation, and the czech art historians oldřich blažíček and emmanuel poche still considered it quite useful many decades later. the brokoff monograph’s historical importance and high quality were recently praised by the czech authors of a study of the marian column on the hradčany square. the published when jews adopted german culture in austria…they did not consider themselves germans in the same way as most germans understood that term. that is, jews who spoke german, loved german literature, and assumed the superiority of german culture regarded themselves as culturally german, as members of the german kulturnation, but not as members of the german volk, the german people. such a cultural definition of germanness, therefore, left room for them to identify ethnically as jews. marsha l. rozenblit, ‘the dilemma of national identity: the jews of habsburg austria in world war i’, in pieter m. judson and marsha l. rozenblit, eds., constructing nationalities in east central europe, new york: berghahn, , . for the relationship of bildung to the emancipation and assimilation of german jews, and its relation to the creation of a distinctively german jewish identity, see david sorkin, ‘the impact of emancipation on german jewry: a reconsideration’, in jonathan frankel and stephen j. zipperstein, eds., assimilation and community: the jews in nineteenth-century europe, cambridge: cambridge university press, , - . oldřich j. blažíček, ferdinand brokof, prague: odeon, , : ‘…monografi[e] o. pollaka, práci ...jejíž závĕry jsou dosud užitečné’; emanuel poche, ‘pollak, oskar’, nová encyklopedie českého výtvarného umění, prague: academia, , . kateřina adamcová, and pavel zahradník mariánský sloup na hradčanském náměstí, prague, karolinum press, , : oskar pollak published his monographic study of the life and work of ferdinand maximilian brokoff and his father jan brokoff in . in this relatively slender, but nevertheless very carefully researched publication he not only included all that was hitherto known about the life and work of both sculptors, but also made the first attempt to distinguish and characterize their individual contributions to the joint productions of the atelier. oskar pollak publikoval svou monografickou studii o životĕ a díle ferdinada maximiliana brokoffa a jeho otce jana brokoffa v roce , v této relativnĕ útlé, michael young oskar pollak reconsidered: a bildungsroman in miniature of late austrian culture and politics version of his habilitationschrift, a study of prague architecture from to , is a model of careful observation and thoughtful interpretation of individual monuments, still cited in studies of the period. he wrote articles about the hypnerotomachia poliphili, the work of borromini, pietro and gianlorenzo bernini, algardi, antonio del grande and pietro da cortona and published in scholarly journals collections of documents that he had discovered in archives. his direct engagement with monuments and art objects is apparent from the descriptions, drawings (figs and ) and analyses preserved in his nachlass. his premature death at the front accounts in part for the preponderance of documentary studies in his published books and articles; his most ambitious projects, like his monographic studies of borromini and otto wagner, were planned but never completed. these would have combined his archival discoveries with formal, stylistic, historical and ‘developmental’ analyses. figure pollak’s sketch of the vault of the re magi chapel in collegio di propaganda fide, rome, archiv des instituts für kunstgeschichte, universität wien, vienna: ii – nachlässe – pollak, oskar přesto velmi pečlivĕ zpracované publikaci nejenže shrnul všechny dosud známé poznatky o životĕ a díle obou autorů, ale také se jako první pokusil vymezit a characterisovat úlohu obou sochařů ve společné produkci ateliéru. archiv des instituts für kunstgeschichte, universität wien, vienna: ii – nachlässe – pollak, oskar. tietze, ‘† oskar pollak,’ - . at the end of fritz hoeber, peter behrens, münchen: müller und rentsch, , the first volume of a series called ‘moderne architekten', a forthcoming title is listed: otto wagner von dr-oskar pollak assistent a.d. univ.wien, accessed through https://digi.ub.uni-heidelberg.de/diglit/hoeber / /image. michael young oskar pollak reconsidered: a bildungsroman in miniature of late austrian culture and politics figure pollak’s sketch of the entrance portal to the sacristy, santa maria novella, florence, archiv des instituts für kunstgeschichte, universität wien, vienna: ii – nachlässe – pollak, oskar pollak’s large archive of unpublished material, a sizeable portion of which was later deposited at the institute of art history at the university of vienna, was plundered or exploited, sometimes without attribution, and manipulated in various ways by scholars in the s and ‘ s. ludwig schudt, the first librarian of the bibliotheca hertziana in rome, edited for publication the copious material that pollak had collected on roman guide books. arnold witte and his students eva van kemenade, niels graaf and joelle terburg, by comparing schudt’s text with the notes written by pollak inside guidebooks collected by him and on note cards, demonstrate that schudt often repeated pollak’s observations verbatim, without attribution. dagobert frey, whom andrew hopkins has described as a ‘nachlass- profiteer’, was given access to the archive by pollak’s widow hedwig eisner pollak, with the understanding that he would prepare for publication the archival arnold witte, eva van kemenade, niels graaf, joëlle terburg, 'codifying the genre of early modern guidebooks: oskar pollak, ludwig schudt and the creation of le guide di roma ( )', in a. blennow, & s. fogelberg rota, eds., rome and the guidebook tradition: from the middle ages to the th century, berlin: de gruyter, - , accessed through https://doi.org/ . / - . i am deeply grateful to arno witte for sharing with me the proofs of this study prior to publication. andrew hopkins, ‘riegl renaissances’, in alois riegl and alina alexandra payne, the origins of baroque art in rome, los angeles: getty publications, , . michael young oskar pollak reconsidered: a bildungsroman in miniature of late austrian culture and politics documents related to the artistic patronage of urban viii and the fabbrica of st. peter’s. frey did not publish the two parts until and , making sure to publish first his own study of roman baroque architecture in . according to hopkins, frey’s decision to write this essay was based on privileged access to pollak’s unpublished nachlass, and was in large part constructed around documents found in the vatican archives and transcribed by pollak. frey later gained notoriety, and never incurred the least punishment, by providing expert guidance to the gestapo in the thorough looting of polish art treasures to be transported to the reich. with frey’s guidance, they looted wawel castle in kraków, even ripping the chimneypieces from the walls. strenge kunstwissenschaft, indeed. frey avoided punishment and died in in stuttgart, where he had continued teaching after the war. pollak’s dedication to documentary and archival research, deeply influenced by the peerless example of ludwig von pastor, can be interpreted as a doubling down, an ecclesia militans, as it were, against strzygowski’s insistence on the exclusive primacy of objects. it can be understood as the party of the quellen vs. the party of the objects and non-verbal evidence, a sort of art-historical blues and greens. for pollak, as a german-speaking jew from prague, the cultural traditions that josef strzygowski sought to undermine and discredit did not merely constitute a position in a methodological dispute among scholars, but were the components that formed the very core of his identity and that of the embattled minority to which he belonged. for bildung had largely replaced traditional religious observance as the source of cohesion among assimilated jews in prague and other cities of austria- hungary. pollak’s discoveries and compilations of archival documents and primary sources are the achievements for which he is still remembered by a few specialists and for which he was most esteemed at the time of his death. focusing on his dedication to documentary research helps to situate pollak within the cultural politics of late imperial austria. yet pollak’s strong affinity with the anti- strzygowski wing of the vienna school of art history can also be discerned in the other lines of inquiry he pursued in his published and unpublished scholarly work. judging from his monthly reports on his work in rome in the istituto storico austraiaco archive and the manuscripts in his nachlass, the centerpiece of his archival and documentary research appears to have been a monographic study of juliane marquard-twarowski, 'ex libris dr. dagobert frey: beobachtungen zur "kunstgeschichtlichen ostforschung"', in magdalena bushart, agnieszka gasior, alena janatková, eds., kunstgeschichte in den besetzten gebieten - , köln: degruyter, , - , which includes a comprehensive bibliography on the full extent of frey’s villainy during the nazi era. archiv des Österreichischen historischen instituts, rome, i. , mitgliederverzeichnis / – / (mit arbeitsthemen): ‘ / : pollak dr. oskar ( monate – . november – ende märz . danach bis ende juni als a.o. mitgl. borromini / künst-bibliographie roms / rom (umbrien).’ and berichte / – / . https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/gestapo https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/wawel https://www.amazon.de/s/ref=dp_byline_sr_book_ ?ie=utf &field-author=magdalena+bushart&text=magdalena+bushart&sort=relevancerank&search-alias=books-de https://www.amazon.de/s/ref=dp_byline_sr_book_ ?ie=utf &field-author=agnieszka+gasior&text=agnieszka+gasior&sort=relevancerank&search-alias=books-de https://www.amazon.de/s/ref=dp_byline_sr_book_ ?ie=utf &field-author=alena+janatkov%c %a +% hrsg.% &text=alena+janatkov%c %a +% hrsg.% &sort=relevancerank&search-alias=books-de https://www.amazon.de/s/ref=dp_byline_sr_book_ ?ie=utf &field-author=alena+janatkov%c %a +% hrsg.% &text=alena+janatkov%c %a +% hrsg.% &sort=relevancerank&search-alias=books-de michael young oskar pollak reconsidered: a bildungsroman in miniature of late austrian culture and politics borromini, never completed but surviving in fragments. the reports also provide details of his preparation of studies of roman guide books and of his compilation of archival sources for roman papal art in the years - . he also made notes for a study of the roman diaries and correspondence of nicolas-albert (mikołaj wojciech) gniewosz de olexow, polish bishop of włocławek in the years - , earlier the polish ambassador to the courts of brussels and paris. the form these unrealized projects were intended to take is suggested by several of his scholarly articles and by his habilitationsschrift. his article on antonio del grande employs documents found in the doria-pamphily and colonna archives (access to which was arranged for pollak by ludwig von pastor) to ‘clarify a portion of the development [italics added] of roman architecture in the second half of the seventeenth century’. pollak situates del grande within a conservative, classicizing tradition that extends from giacomo della porta and g.b. soria through bernini to carlo fontana and galilei. pollak recognizes the opposition of this tradition to that of maderno and borromini, from which he traces, via andrea pozzo, the further development of architecture to johann lukas von hildebrandt, the dientzenhofers and balthasar neumann, albeit with no mention of guarini. he even sees this antipode reflected in the opposition between j.b. fischer von erlach’s classicism in vienna and the work of italian architects who were followers of borromini. in his study of prague architecture from to , pollak sought to archiv des instituts für kunstgeschichte, universität wien, vienna: ii – nachlässe – pollak, oskar, box . archiv des Österreichischen historischen instituts, rome, bericht über den monat mai : ‘…durch die gütige vermittelung des herrn hofrats l. von pastor … der zutritt zu den archive des fürsten doria-pamphili gestattet wurde…’. oskar pollak, 'antonio del grande, ein unbekannter römischer architekt des . jahrhunderts', kunstgeschichtliches jahrbuch der k[aiserlich-]k[öniglichen] zentral- kommission für erforschung und erhaltung der kunst- und historischen denkmale : , , accessed through https://digi.ub.uni- heidelberg.de/diglit/kjbzk / /image. pollak, ‘antonio del grande,’ - : grande ist eben ein musterbeispiel jener konservativen richtung der seicentoarchitektur in rom, deren haupt bernini war: ‚konservativ‘ nenne ich sie (‚klassizistisch‘ wäre zu viel gesagt), weil sie das erbe der giacomo della porta und soria, jenes ‚schweren‘ römischen barockstiles übernahmen und weiterbildeten. bernini selbst, der im anfänge sich von maderna und boromini hatte beeinflussen lassen, drückt eigentlich erst in seiner späteren zeit ähnliche absichten deutlich aus: das hauptwerk dieser zeit sind die kolonnaden von st. peter. grande dagegen, der offenbar einer jüngeren generation als bernini angehört, geht von allem anfang an jenen strengen entsagenden weg, der über die kunst des carlo fontana zum klassizismus eines galilei führt. der gegenpol dieser auf der tradition beruhenden kunst ist boromini, der nur einen meister anerkennt: michelangelo. bedeutet dieser den bruch mit der tradition michael young oskar pollak reconsidered: a bildungsroman in miniature of late austrian culture and politics trace the development of architecture over a specific chronological span, the last decade of which he describes as ‘a time of ferment, when a new style arose, and the old one, dying, was fiercely fighting for its life’. in , pollak published a study of borromini’s ceiling decorations for the palazzo falconieri in rome ( f.), which he regarded as ‘only an intermediate stage of a continuous development’ between the sacristy vaults at san carlo alle quattro fontane ( - ), and the ceiling decorations in the collegio della propaganda fide ( s). in the same article, pollak describes the austere and forbidding roman palace street facades of the tridentine and post-tridentine era, which masked sumptuous decoration in the courtyards and on the garden facades of the same palaces. with the later palazzo barberini, street facades on roman palaces grew increasingly sumptuous in their ornament, and courtyards diminished in importance as foci of architectural display. pollak sought to trace lines of development within an individual artist’s oeuvre as well as in within the chronological and geographic boundaries of a style or epoch. he observes a greater plasticity and vitality in the architectural forms and ornament of borromini’s later der renaissance, so bedeutet boromini den bruch mit dem römischen barock. beide haben in italien, das, als romanisches land wie frankreich, wenig dem absoluten subjektivismus hold war, nicht allzu viele nachfolger gefunden. um so begieriger griff der immer individualistisch veranlagte deutsche norden die neuen ideen auf und ein pozzo war der mittler zu jener kunst eines hildebrand, der dientzenhofer, des neumann, die im österreichischen und süddeutschen rokoko ihre letzte blüte finden sollte. aber auch jene strengrömische ‚struktive‘ architektur des bernini und seiner nachfolger hat im norden ihre nachfolge gefunden, unter anderem in der kunst des johann bernhard fischer von erlach. wie in rom der kampf des bernini gegen boromini, so fand später in wien der kampf fischers gegen jene italienischen architekten statt, die auf borominis bahnen gingen. pollak, ‘studien zur geschichte’, : das letzte jahrzehnt des xvi. jahrhunderts war für prag eine zeit der gärung, da ein neuer stil entstand und der alte, absterbende sich heftig seines lebens wehrte. daher wird es schwer, den leitenden faden zu finden, der zur klarheit über die entwicklung führt. und diese klarheit wird nur der finden können, der von der bauentwicklung der ersten hälfte des xvii. jahrhunderts rückschauend die quellen dieser entwicklung sucht. in diesem letzten jahrzehnt der gärung wird er sie finden und wird dann entscheiden können, welche von ihnen lebensfähig waren und welche nach kurzem laufe versandeten. uns muß es in diesem rahmen genügen, sie isoliert gezeigt zu haben. oskar pollak, ‘die decken des palazzo falconieri in rom und zeichnungen von boromini in der wiener hofbibliothek’, jahrbuch des kunsthistorischen institutes : , : ‘nur…eine zwischenstufe einer fortlaufenden entwicklung’, accessed through https://digi.ub.uni- heidelberg.de/diglit/jbki. pollak, ‘die decken des palazzo falconieri’, - . michael young oskar pollak reconsidered: a bildungsroman in miniature of late austrian culture and politics work, and maintains that ‘in all of borromini’s works a clear and consequential development can be traced.’ throughout his published work, these considerations of stylistic development or evolution recur like cadenzas. while he never approaches stylistic or artistic development in a mechanistic or deterministic way, his investment in the study of artistic evolution, which he shared with riegl and tietze, may be indebted to his life-long interest in darwin, manifest already in his school days. pollak, ‘die decken des palazzo falconieri’, : ‘in allen werken des boromini eine klare und konsequente entwicklung verfolgbar ist’. in oskar pollak ,‘alessandro algardi ( — ) als architekt’, zeitschrift für geschichte der architektur : / , , the façade of sant’ ignazio is described thus: entwicklungsgeschichtlich steht diese fassade noch nicht einmal auf der stufe von madernas fassade von s. susanna, trotzdem diese fast ein halbes jahrhundert früher ( ) entstanden war. um ganz die rückständigkeit dieses werkes zu ermessen, bedenke man, daß um boromini und bernini in der blüte ihrer tätigkeit standen! in terms of historical development, this facade is not even on the level of maderna's facade of s. susanna, although it was built almost half a century earlier ( ) [than sant’ignazio]. to fully measure the backwardness of this work, consider that around borromini and bernini were in the full flower of their activity! accessed through https://digi.ub.uni-heidelberg.de/diglit/zga. hugo bergmann, in his obituary for pollak cited in footnote , recalled a memorable demonstration by pollak of his early enthusiasm for darwin: pollak's first appearance as a "scientist" characterizes him well. it was in the septima [the penultimate year of gymnasium] of the altstädter gymnasium [old town german high school]. we had to give our speeches, on more or less official topics at that time, which interested neither the speaker nor the audience. pollak chose darwinism as his subject. häckel's riddle of the universe had just appeared, a revelation to us septimans [students in the penultimate year of gymnasium]. (who wouldn't have been an atheist as a septiman?) pollak set about the lecture with all the thoroughness of which he was capable. that afternoon when he was supposed to present it, he covered all the blackboards with the drawings that were to illustrate the basic biogenetic law. then the professor appeared in the class and announced that the lecture had been forbidden at the eleventh hour. pollak went back to his seat with that self-confident ironic smile that was the best answer to the narrow-minded ban. he was undoubtedly the most talented and intellectually lively among us high school students. pollaks erstes auftreten als "wissenschaftler" charakterisiert ihn gut. es war in der septima des altstadter gymnasiums. wir hatten unsere redeübungen zu halten, damals noch mehr oder weniger offizielle themen, die weder den redenden noch die zuhörer interressierten. pollak wählte sich zu seinem thema den darwinismus. https://digi.ub.uni-heidelberg.de/diglit/zga _ michael young oskar pollak reconsidered: a bildungsroman in miniature of late austrian culture and politics pollak planned similar developmental or evolutionary studies, on a much grander scale, of italian architecture from to , divided into thirty-year spans or generations, and of baroque art in bohemia, divided according to the reign of each emperor. his nachlass contains copious notes, texts of lectures and drafts of chapters related to these works in progress. these projects were in addition to his planned monographs on borromini, otto wagner and pietro da cortona, the projected hefty publications on roman topographical and guide-book literature and on the documents related to the art patronage of popes urban viii, innocent x and alexander vii. pollak’s projected and completed works of scholarship can partly be understood as an attempt to subject cornelius gurlitt’s object of study – the renaissance and baroque in italy and northern europe – to vienna school treatment, as represented by the examples of wickhoff, riegl, dvořák and tietze. in this too he appears to have found an exemplar in riegl; evonne levy has written that alois riegl read gurlitt’s volumes on italian and german baroque and relied on them heavily in preparing his first lecture courses on european baroque art and architecture in the s. in both the lectures on italy, published posthumously by his colleagues as die entstehung der barockkunst in rom, and the unpublished lectures on the german baroque, he regarded gurlitt’s volumes as repositories of dates and names but cautioned that anyone seeking a clear definition of the character of baroque style, or the continuous line of its development [italics added], would be disappointed: gurlitt presupposes that the reader is knowledgeable about the baroque and does not offer a clearly defined account of it. pollak seems to have aspired to place gurlitt’s subject on a new footing by purging it of chauvinistic nationalism and using documentary research as the basis for an ambitious study of the development and evolution of the baroque. a more recent formulation of this latter task, applied to the history of art in general and not limited es waren gerade häckels welträtsel erschienen, uns septimanern eine offenbarung. (wer wäre als septimaner nicht atheist gewesen?) pollak machte sich an den vortrag mit all der gründlichkeit, deren er fähig war. an jenem nachmittag, da er ihn halten sollte, bedeckte er alle tafeln mit den zeichnungen, die das biogenitische grundgesetz illustrieren sollten. da erscheint de professor in der klasse und verkündet, dass der vortrag in letzter stunde verboten worden sei. pollak ging in seinen bank mit jenem selbst bewussten ironischen lächeln, das die beste antwort auf das engherzige verbot war.unter uns gymnasiasten war er zweifellos der begabeste und geistig regsamste. archiv des instituts für kunstgeschichte, universität wien, vienna: ii – nachlässe – pollak, oskar, box . archiv des instituts für kunstgeschichte, universität wien, vienna: ii – nachlässe – pollak, oskar, boxes and . levy, - and . michael young oskar pollak reconsidered: a bildungsroman in miniature of late austrian culture and politics to the baroque, can be found in otto pächt’s forceful and lucid the practice of art history: reflections on method. nor is an interest in development and evolution in art a mere idiosyncrasy of vienna-trained art historians: it animates the more recent studies of roman art by jaś elsner and paul zanker. moreover, it remains a fruitful field of inquiry within the historical scholarship of italian renaissance architecture. in this field, richard krautheimer, wolfgang lotz, james ackerman, howard hibbard and christoph-luitpold frömmel have identified a variety of paths of change or development. these lead from brunelleschian planarity through alberti’s distinctive antiquarianism and bramante’s perspectival architecture all’antica. the last named was primarily viewed from afar or below and flayed of its original decorative skin, which had yet to be rediscovered . this path continues through raphael’s ornata maniera di fabbricare, inspired by the discovery of the domus aurea, up to the creation of ‘kinetic architecture’ of space attributed to michelangelo (by ackerman) or giulio romano (by frömmel). michelangelo’s and giulio romano’s near simultaneous invention of a new ‘kinetic’ architecture, in which perambulation, deliberate astonishment and variety shape the viewer’s movement through space into a transformative experience, is in marked contrast to the essentially static and stationary role of the viewer from brunelleschi through bramante. it was behind the twin banners of learned antiquarianism and the legacy of michelangelo’s and giulio’s architectural revolution that borromini marched to immortality. more than any other artist, borromini appears to have been pollak’s art otto pächt, the practice of art history: reflections on method, london: harvey miler, , - , - and passim. jaś elsner, art and the roman viewer: the transformation of art from the pagan world to christianity, cambridge: cambridge university press, and imperial rome and christian triumph: the art of the roman empire ad - , oxford: oxford university press, . paul zanker, the power of images in the age of augustus, university of michigan press, . r. krautheimer, ‘alberti's templum etruscum’, in studies in early christian, medieval and renaissance art, new york & london, , - . wolfgang lotz, architecture in italy, - , new haven: yale university press, , - . based upon raphael’s references to the “ornata maniera di fabbricare” in his letter to leo x, howard hibbard argued that the discovery of intact interior decoration in the domus aurea and elsewhere led to the replacement of bramante’s “plucked chicken” style, based as it was on bare ancient ruins, with the richer, more archaeologically accurate style which flourished for the rest of the century: howard hibbard, ‘review of wöfflin’s renaissance and baroque, tr. kathrin simon ,glasgow, ’, journal of the society of architectural historians : , may, , . james s. ackerman, the architecture of michelangelo, london, , - . christoph l. frömmel, ‘the roman works of giulio’, giulio romano, tr. fabio barry, cambridge, , : ‘from a more general point of view, giulio –much more clearly than michelangelo—introduced the concept of movement into architecture’. michael young oskar pollak reconsidered: a bildungsroman in miniature of late austrian culture and politics historical muse; indeed, borromini was a figure who preoccupied generations of viennese art historians. figure pollak’s transcription of a quote from the introduction to wickhoff’s wiener genesis, archiv des instituts für kunstgeschichte, universität wien, vienna: ii – nachlässe – pollak, oskar figure pollak’s transcription of a quote from riegl’s spätrömisches kunstindustriearchiv des instituts für kunstgeschichte, universität wien, vienna: ii – nachlässe – pollak, oskar figure pollak’s transcription of a quote from p. of riegl’s entstehung der barockkunst in rom, archiv des instituts für kunstgeschichte, universität wien, vienna: ii – nachlässe – pollak, oskar hermann egger, ‘francesco borrominis umbau von san giovanni in laterano’, in franz wickhoff and alois riegl, eds. beiträge zur kunstgeschichte: franz wickhoff gewidmet von einem kreise von freunden und schülern, wien: a. schroll, , - , accessed through https://books.google.com/, max dvořák, ‘francesco borromini als restaurator’, kunstgeschichtliches jahrbuch der k. k. zentral-kommission : , - , accesssed through https://digi.ub.uni-heidelberg.de/diglit/kjbzk _beibl/ /image, eberhard hempel, francesco borromini. ro ̈mische forschungen des kunsthistorischen institutes graz. wien: kunstverlag anton schroll & co., , dagobert frey, beitra ̈ge zur geschichte der ro ̈mischen barockarchitektur. augsburg: filser, , hans sedlmayr, die architektur borrominis, berlin: frankfurter verlags-anstalt, . michael young oskar pollak reconsidered: a bildungsroman in miniature of late austrian culture and politics in his published studies, and in his planned comprehensive surveys of italian and bohemian baroque art, we observe pollak embracing alois riegl’s partiality for identifying lines of artistic development in history and establishing artistic genealogies. (this approach is also manifest in the methodological strictures of hans tietze cited in footnote supra.) indeed, pollak copied out epigrams from wickhoff and riegl, which can be found among his papers (figs , and ), presumably to guide him as he worked . perhaps pollak’s stint at the museum für kunst und industrie can be understood as an effort to emulate riegl’s long tenure there. all of this evidence, combined with his mastery of documentary research under ludwig von pastor’s guidance, helps to clarify pollak’s own evolution from young man from the provinces (provincial at least in the cultural sense) with pronounced inclinations toward german cultural nationalism to cosmopolitan austrian civil servant and scholar. indeed the liberalism, supra-nationalism and humanistic scholarship that formed the bedrock of the vienna school of art history from eitelberger to dvořák (strzygowski excepted) also shaped the maturation and defined the scholarly work of oskar pollak. a cognate, and surely related, patriotic ardor led to his volunteering in and to his eventual death on the italian front in the following year, cruelly truncating a career of great promise. michael young is humanities librarian and instructor of art history at the university of connecticut, storrs. he has taught at bard, skidmore and union colleges, and at the columbia university school of architecture. he recently published ‘speculum principissae: the chapel of st. anne at panenské břežany, an early work of johann blasius santini-aichel’, in annali di architettura ( ). michael.s.young@uconn.edu this work is licensed under a creative commons attribution- noncommercial . international license the quotatation from p. of riegl’s entstehung der barockkunst in rom, as translated by rolf winkes in riegl, late roman art industry, rome: giorgio brettschneider editore, , , reads: ‘this differentiation between two kinds of planes, the flat and the curved, is as important in the history of art as that between silhouette and color, because it expresses the fundamental difference between plane and space’. http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/ . / http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/ . / http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/ . / 	oskar pollak reconsidered: a bildungsroman in miniature of late austrian culture and politics f 	michael young 	for joseph connors 	michael.s.young@uconn.edu media socialisation and the culturally dominant mode of representation - on the way from the coherent media to semiotic spaces, the example of popstars / ben bachmair . . media socialisation and the culturally dominant mode of representation – on the way from the coherent media to semiotic spaces, the example of popstars the cultural relation between media and its users is undergoing transition. one influence comes from the changing quality of the interrelation of media, commodities and events. the following essay is an attempt to reveal the quality of this development by using two strands of argumentation. firstly the cultural form (raymond williams ) of the relation between media, commodities, and situation for which popstars is an example. in this transitional perspective of the cultural form popstars is not at all unique, could be replaced e. g. by pokèmon, the arrangement of a pro- gramme offer for a children’s audience, which consisted of tv plus the nintendo gameboy plus commodities like playing cards. to explain these phenomena several more or less adequate or metaphoric concepts are on vogue like media convergence (e. g. uwe hasebrink et al. , goldstein et al. , p. ), age of multimedia (e. g. julian sefton-green, , paus- hasebrink et al ), intertextual relation of the media (e. g. ulrike meinhof et al. , marsha kinder ), media environment (e. g. sonia livingstone , hutchby, ian et al. . p. ff.), children’s media or popular culture (e. g. hutchby, ian et al. . buckingham, david, julian sefton-green ; claudia mitchel et al. ), digital landscape (keri facer et al. , p. ff.) or cultural space of childhood (claudia mitchel et al. ). the second strand of the essay will deal with the socialization process resultant from of this transitional cultural form. differently expressed with / a more actual wording of the available theories, a specific socialization process emerges with the complex of multimedia, intertextual cultural products, landscapes and mediated spaces of childhood. in general the concept of socialization deals with the typical and sustainable personality in a society. in the context of the industrial society with a variety of standardized programme offer and cultural products which are consumed and acquired by the individual, media as the easily visible part of these processes influence, perhaps mould the formation of a typical personality. the interrelation of programme offer, cultural products, situations of activi- ties, reception and acquisition is moving. in this process the relevance of the coherent media like the film with distinct narrative story is diminishing. therefore the relevant argument to discover a new combined cultural dynamic between the media sphere and socialization is the diminishing function of the coherent media. looking at the conglomerate of media, commodities and events of popstars or similar phenomena like other casting shows, game programmes like yu-gi-oh or real life shows like big brother the emerging irrelevance of the traditional coherent media like a film leaps to the eye. therefore this essay proposes that multimedia and multimodal programmes function like a cultural space. influenced by stuart hall’s concept of representation and gunther kress’s concept of the modality of mediated representation a genre like popstars functions as a semiotic space. in the theoretical perspective of stuart hall this space results from the interrelation of the programme elements as «meaningful cultural objects» and the «signifying practices» of the producers and users of the genre and its elements. gunther kress definies the semiotic function of the material quality of a sign as being an image, a physical element or a body, a sequence of typed words, or an event on a stage. the idea of a semiotic space refers explicitly to the renaissance and its dominant mode of representation, the central perspective. the florentine artists of the renaissance put the viewer as subject in opposition to a further down the essay uses the term subjectivity to express the argumentative basis of socialisation on a persons «productive processing of the inner and the outer reality» («sozialisation als produktive verarbeitung der inneren und der äusseren realität»), hurrelmann, klaus: einführung in die sozialisationstheorie. Über den zusammenhang von sozialstruktur und persönlichkeit. weinheim (belz verlag) ( th edition). p. . a similar approach in the perspective of culture and literature was launched by hans u. gumbrecht and ludwig k. pfeiffer . gumbrecht, hans ulrich, pfeiffer, k. ludwig (hrsg.): materialität von kommunikation. frankfurt a. m. (suhrkamp) . https://doi.org/ . /mpaed/ / . . .x   th is w or k is li ce n se d u n d er a c re at iv e c om m on s at tr ib u ti on . in te rn at io n al l ic en se h tt p :/ /c re at iv ec om m on s. or g /l ic en se s/ b y/ . / https://doi.org/ . /mpaed/ / . . .x / depicted object. the viewer had to reconstruct the relation between the artist and the depicted object by a specific attitude of spatial watching. but this cultural tradition of a subject- object relation is on transition to which the fragmentation and re-integration of the media contributes. this frag- mentation of the media correlates with an integrative mode of the cultural products and adequate modes of personal experiences. fragmented cultural products receive coherence by aesthetic similarity, which opens a func- tional frame for specific users and their way of acquisition. the integrative modes of cultural products function just by specific modes of experiences, which are based upon a personal formation of meaning within its individual world of living. the central perspective suggests to combine the analysis of the cultural dominant mode of representation with the concept of socialisation as result of this representational mode. the dominant way to construct images is considered as a representation of the dominant cultural form which influen- ces socialisation by the acquisition of the images as cultural product. especially norbert elias’ historical analysis of the changing cultural process at the end of the middle ages supports this conceptual and methodological way. elias’ analysis is based on the observation of the objects of everyday life like knife and fork is supporting the relation between the actual media development and socialisation. this concept implies a methodological consequence. a cultural product as objectivation (objektivation) is open to an hermeneutic analysis, which is also valid for single elements, its interrelation and its entity because a cultural product objectifies the specific cultural form, in which or by which it is produced. knowing that empirical research prefers at this time the concrete investigation of the results of the reception process the following guiding question is legitimate: what objectifies a programme element? (was ist in einem programm-element angelegt?) the suspicious empiri- cally oriented reader can considers the results as the heuristic part of developing a concrete hypothesis, which makes sense e. g. in the context of the grounded theory etc. the structure of the essay the aim of this essay is to discuss the actual media related cultural transition by means of semiotic space which absorbs the coherent, distinct media. on the platform of norbert elias’ cultural analysis of the everyday life a model for media socialisation is drafted. present day examples / (popstars) and others from distant (dürer’s images) and recent history (in the s a boy talks about his favourite films) are presented under the aspect of assumed socialisational impacts, which cling to the objectified cultural form. because the socialisational function of cultural products depends on reception and acquisition the trend to specific patterns like «milieus» and lifestyle schemes will be attached. . the old fashioned tv as a normal feature of everyday life – just a reminder already a superficial look at casting shows such as popstars or children’s games such as pokémon needs a more profound explanation than just watching a new genre. already at a first view one remarkable feature can be discovered, i. e. that the programme of the dominating tv is going to become just one element together with many others, including merchandising products. the range of offerings in the field of popular entertainment is moving away radically from the former situation where the media consisted of single, coherent and easily readable outlets. by now, more than one generation of children has already developed its media habits and media literacy on this cultural ground. looking into the future, traditional, established forms of children’s tv viewing seem old fashioned; this mode now seems closer to that of the reading of traditional books than to the consumption of commodities. a view back to the s as an example of a viewer observed for own research, -year-old jens illustrates the main feature of this kind of old-fashioned media reception and processing. children look for, acquire and process a medium in their personal perspective of the actual theme of their life. jens likes the comedy of eddie murphy the distinguished gentleman (usa ), in which the protagonist acts as a con-man who is late but successful at last. as a powerful politician the character performed by murphy listens to a girl suffering from cancer, who hides the loss of hair resulting from her cancer treatment by wearing a wig. what is relevant for an year old boy? the vulnerable girl? the successful con-man? the morality of the normal people? first of all jens reads the film as a story which matches the actual issues of his life: moving to an unknown city, feeling alienated and probably somehow threatened, having to hide his cultural origin and / identity in the unknown eastern part of germany. however, he usually acts with the positive view of eventually becoming successful, and so on. two selected statements out of seven jens fifth statement: «and then he was late to the meeting where they pick offices and so he got the worst one. they weren’t even done building it. so he worked on it himself. then he went to lots of, uh, receptions.» this statement refers to film images like the following one: jens sixth statement: «and one time people came to him and one was a girl who had some sort of cancer or something and she got it from playing on the playground where there were some power lines. they were made out of a metal that causes cancer.» this statement refers to film images like the following one: on the basis of his genre competence he transforms the film story into his personal story by using main film sequences in the time order of the film. / his seven statements result in a kind of personal short film, which offers one or more messages to a listener. jens’ verbally presented short film is easily reconstructed by video cuts. with this reconstructed personal short film in mind, jens’ actual situation and themes can be understood. one can generalise this feature of reception and acquisition: a media user sets up a relation to media – in the perspective of his or her actual situation and in the history of his or her personal life, i. e. his or her own personal theme, – on the basis of already achieved competency within the social frame of his life, e. g. family and peers and – the self-referential frame of media. . a model for media socialisation which follows norbert elias and his explanation of the «process of civilisation» from this model of reception and acquisition highlights just the specific situation of tv as the leading medium of mass communication. in this function tv was linked symbiotically with people's everyday life. this was neither a coincidence nor a planned produced development but a process that belongs to the long-term dynamics of our culture and that nevertheless changes this dynamic. of course people have established themselves within our industrial society by means of their symbolic capabilities particularly in the way they communicate, interpret things for themselves or to others and in the way they enjoy the moving images. but this fits into a specifically developed subjectivity with everyday life as the realm of reality of the industrial society. the long term development was theorized by norbert elias, who interpreted the end of the middle ages and the flourishing renaissance also as the development of new tools of everyday life. what is the basic socialisation model behind the cultural historical development? briefly, the specific knowledge and experiences are inscribed into new tools e. g. using the knife and fork for eating. theoretically it would me more appropriate to replace inscribed by objectified. this objectified specific knowledge and experience is acquired by using the cultural object (fork, knife) in everyday life. the concept of this a key argument of alfred schütz’ sociology of the western societies, which he wrote in the s. see schütz, alfred: der sinnhafte aufbau der sozialen welt. eine einleitung in die verstehende soziologie. frankfurt a. m. (suhrkamp) . st edition wien . english version: the phenomenology of the social world. evanston, northwestern university press . / socialisation deals with this relation: a everyday tool objectifies the cultural features of its production and use by the parental generation, which can be acquired by the next generation by using these cultural objects in everyday life. in this environment and these processes of socialisation a specific kind of subjectivity becomes dominant. in the perspective of norbert elias’ functional description of everyday tools like fork and knife for the development of subjectivity within a culture, also media form cultural objects like other commodities and tools of everyday life, in which the experiences of the members of a culture are inherited. by using these objects of everyday life the «inscribed», i. e. the objectified cultural experiences are acquired by the children’s generation. socialisation works within the generations, (a) by the parent generation’s production of cultural goods and procedures in everyday life and (b) by the children’s acquisition of the cultural heritage during the activities of everyday life. back to media socialisation! from the s until now tv has been a main cultural object for socialisation, but in the mode of that time, which was the fictional film in the private context of the family, at the beginning without, later with advertising as a window on the world of consumption. the leading question regarding tv as a device for socialisation concerns the cultural experiences contained in television. this question needs a frame, which explains the specific relation of an individual to its world, i. e. the factual, social and cultural outer world as well as the personal inner world of emotions, desires, dreams, experiences etc. by entering this basic relation of the individual to himself or herself and the outer world, media contribute to the formation of a specific and culturally dominating subjectivity. the major media of our culture are able to fulfil an important socialising function because of their integration in the everyday life of our society. at least there are three connecting points between media and everyday life: – the integration of media in meaningful activities like reception and interaction. – setting up institutional relations within a society, e. g. between the industrialised production of programmes and its individual reception in a self-determined context. – connecting generations. the rapid emerging and changing of technical media itself contributes to the relation of the generations, because both generations, the one of the parents and that of the young have to acquire the usage skills of new media, but within their different contexts and / modes of experiences. the internet and the use of pcs are a recent example. for example, the young look primarily for entertainment, they discover the functions of the internet and pcs through play. the older generation looks for information and knowledge; they learn how to use the internet and pcs in a scholastic manner. in the s norbert elias did not just describe a model of socialisation and cultural development, he also depicted the modern type of personality, which emerged in the renaissance by using and acquiring cultural products. he asked especially how the modern self-controlled and self- organised personality became dominant. the main feature of this modern personality is defined by its dissociation from the social and material world. the modern being conceives the world as being in opposite. self- organisation, self-control and dissociation as defining elements of a modern personality became the prerequisites for a successful industrial society, in which blue as well as white collar workers guide themselves through their self-targeted professional labour. an important prerequisite is to grow up e. g. with the fork, because this tool negotiates the feeling for distance to the vitally necessary food already at a very early age. but recent industrialised food also indicates a big cultural change in the dynamic of socialisation, which leaves behind dissociation and distance as main features. instead the integration into system structures becomes important. the cultural and social change from distance to integration into system structures is reinforced by new food, e. g. by mc donald’s food units, which allow free choice in the sense of combining elements within a system. but there is no longer the social need to become familiar with distance by using a fork. in the cultural history one crucial mechanism to develop distance and dissociation from the world was the central perspective of the renaissance. for centuries in the western societies the central perspective provided distance as a way to gain experiences. painting and drawing pictures in the depicting mode of the central perspective put the viewer in opposition to the world. the organisation of an image supports a spatially constructed world in the mind of the viewer. by deciphering an image based on the central perspective a viewer learns to translate the construction of the image into his own spatial imagination. with the depicting mode of the central perspective as taken for granted the viewer was no longer an integrative part of the world but rather its observer, who could understand / the principles of the world’s function and reconstruct it as his own product. in this cultural development of subjectivity television became culturally possible, at its beginning just by the definition of the bbc, which defined a tv programme as balanced representation of information, education and entertainment. but with the dominance of entertainment in mass communication from the s onwards an important step was taken from the cultural moulding line of the distant reconstruction of the world by images. it is the integration of the television as one element within a larger system. television is taking the same path a good dish took when it became part of mcdonald’s food system. the actually emerging system of multi- medial and multi-modal cultural products is going to swallow the coherent media like the eddie-murphy movie. this new system will reinforce specific modes of socialisation and finally new types of subjectivity. to summarize, subjectivity is formed by using everyday objects, which function as objectified cultural experiences. this means by using cultural products a child acquires the objectified cultural features as a personal feature, which functions in two directions. by applying these objects its cultural features are personally acquired and amalgamated into the relation (a) to the personal inner world and (b) to the social, cultural and material environment. in this sense media as cultural products interfere with the relation of a subject to itself (inner world, which consists of self-perception, dreams, fantasies etc.) and the relation to the social, the cultural and the factual environment. the socialising function of cultural products can be condensed in the following model of socialisation: everyday objects including media interfere with the relationship of a child to its – inner world, – social environment, – world of objects and events, – world of culture. what does this model of socialisation contribute to the explanation of the phenomenon, which is in the main focus of this paper? obviously, the coherent tv film like the one jens talked about played its role in the media socialisation of almost two generations. during the period of the growing / of the internet and the pc a fragmentation of mediated representation as well as the establishment of new modes of its integration occurred. the phenomenon of the media is undergoing transition, in which it is becoming a complex of several media and events. the casting show popstars is a typical example. in the theoretical perspective of media socialisation these complexes or arrangements of different representational products interfere with the relationship of children/ young people to their inner and outer world. in the case of popstars one can assume the following concretised relation to the – inner world: success, happiness, being a star, ego-oriented identity – social environment: lifestyle-oriented balance between competition and integration – world of facts and objects: to find a personal way to select the relevant symbolic commodities out of the overwhelming prefabricated system and transform them into elements of a personal world of living by formation of meaning. – world of culture: non-reflexive media literacy which includes reading as a modern skill (processing discontinuous texts); integration of a pre- fabricated variety of consumptive objects by individual acquisition. in order to examine the socialisation model of the objectified cultural experiences more closely paragraph will list the elements of the arrangement popstars and try to look at socialising influences of some of these elements. but first the draft of the integrative frame of such an arrangement of media, commodities, services, and events will be attempted. the concept of a semiotic space as the dominant system structure is proposed. this refers to the concepts of gunter kress and theo van leeuwen on «the semiotic landscape: language and visual communication» (p. ff.) and «representation and interaction: designing the position of the viewer» (p. ff.) in: gunter kress and theo van leeuwen: reading images. the grammar of the visual design. routledge. london. ; start hall’ «work of representation”. in: stuart hall (ed.): represen- tation. cultural representations and signifying practices. sage. london , p. ff., p. . / . the cultural heritage of the renaissance: from the central perspective to semiotic spaces after having outlined the model of media socialisation we should be able to identify a crucial and moulding dynamic of our western cultural development. the western culture defines space as one of the key modes of our experience, which is also a heritage of the renaissance. the proposed concept of a semiotic space refers, as already mentioned, to the concept of the central perspective, which was invented by florentine artists in the renaissance. they put the viewer as subject in opposition to a depicted object. the viewer had to reconstruct the relation between the artist and the depicted object through a specific attitude of watching and perceiving. to understand the specific idea of space the reflection of the german renaissance painter albrecht dürer ( – ) is helpful, because he depicted his theory of how to construct the real and the beautiful by using a spatial frame. because of its general validity over centuries this spatial relation, which was objectified by the fine arts, negotiated the socialisation in the above described way of acquiring cultural products of everyday life. the spatial relation of the central perspective and its diminishing actual relevance is a kind of anchor to indicate the actual changing of main features of socialisation. the world of the central perspective albrecht dürer looks from his self-portrait, painted in , as a master- piece of the german renaissance, like a contemporary person to today’s observer. this is possible because of the picture’s organisation and the high degree of correlation between the subjectivity of the renaissance and that of today. one main correlation is the central perspective and its view of the world from a distant viewing point to the facts and ongoing events. in its consequence the renaissance used the central perspective as archimedes’ point, first to analyse and then to reconstruct the world. because the human being is not an integrated part of the world, it is able to reflect the world analytically and construct it deliberately. this requires a subjectivity and mode of perception, which is based especially on distance in perception and emotions together with self-control. in his graphic work albrecht dürer reflects this mode of perception and construction. for example in he drew an artist, who used a grid between himself and the depicted object, e. g. a vase or a lute. a ruler helps to give reliability in handling the distance. / the same constructive constellation shows an image of a woman positioned in an erotic attractive and suggestive way in front of a painter, also with a dissociating grid in between. distance is taken for granted and internalised, acquired by the technique of a central perspective as the ruling mode of experience. albrecht dürer revealed the engineering procedure for constructing a realistic and beautiful / image like his self-portrait. a human body is displayed frontally and in profile with added names for parts of the body. the matching of names and body parts is done with numbers. this mode of depicting, in general, of representing the world is based upon a spatial organisation of painter and depicted objects, which is represented in the image by means of the central perspective. from the renaissance until the end of the th century this was the definitional basis for representing the real and the beautiful. main changes in media and in socialisation this spatially negotiated cultural tradition of the subject-object relation is currently undergoing transition. one mechanism is the fragmentation of the distinct, coherent media and the integration of multimodal representations into complex arrangements. the fragmentation of the coherent media correlates not only with an integrative mode of the cultural products but also with adequate modes of personal experiences. fragmented cultural products receive coherency by aesthetic similarity, which opens a functional frame for specific users and their mode of acquisition. the integrative effects of cultural products function through specific modes of experiences, which are based upon a personal formation of meaning within an individual life-living. the following outline drafts both sides of the actual transition of a mediated culture. functional changes in media – the amalgamation of mediated mass communication and the market of commodities pushes back the single and coherent medium and enforces complex arrangements of media, commodities and events. arrangements like popstars offer a kind of space, which is made up of its elements and their interrelation among each other. / – media become just one provider among others of symbolic materials for the everyday world. more or less all commodities and services can be used and offered in its communicative, symbolic function. this symbolic function is growing beyond the practical function and it now defines cultural products. e. g. a t-shirt with the word popstars is more important as a social sign than being a piece of clothing, which protects the body. – the traditional and familiar relation of a sign, a signifier and the signified is no longer reliable, not only because of the lack of a concise regional cultural frame but for the arrangements like popstars, which work as a temporary frame for the relation of cultural products, signifier and signified. in this sense arrangements of media, commodities and events are a kind of cultural circus of symbols, which is presented and managed by the producers and the audience. changes on the side of children and young people – the main trend is the emerging of new modes of experiences with the following characteristics: the attentive reception of an object, e.g. a media programme, becomes just one approach within a variety of patterns of acquisition and activities. the attentive reception is a heritage of the renaissance’s opposition of painter and viewer to the world as object, which loses its dominance for the patterns of acquisition. therefore the following chapter will take a closer look at the elements of the casting show popstars as an example of such an arrangement of media, events and other cultural products, which offer a space where meaningful activities are possible. – within a fragmented cultural society without general and valid frames constructive modes of living and acting move into the foreground. together with the growing and variable symbolic function of commodities, services and events the personal formation of meaning with regard to the cultural products is a necessary task for the young generation. – a transitional cultural and social world needs individuals as self- responsible actors in his or her own world of living. the main social focus shifts from the objectified needs, values, obligation, and the definition of general frames to the actor’s individual world in his or her personal sense. explaining and understanding the world occurs through personal experiences and the dynamic of evaluation. in this sense the / young generation acquires facts, commodities, culture, society etc. by and mainly through their personal experiences. the modern individualised world exists through everybody’s concrete experience with eyes, ears, body, and the personally acquired experiences. . the casting show popstars – analysis of the programme offer media are on the way of becoming just one symbolic source within a complex arrangement of a variety of media, events and commodities. these elements are forming and offering a semiotic space in which and to which an recipient can react by individual forming of meaning. what are the mechanisms which combine the variety of elements into a coherent space? coherence is provided by aesthetics. but not only integrative aesthetic features given by the producers deliver the semiotic space, also the recipients form coherence by interpreting the given products and their common aesthetic feature. generally explicated, a recipient forms his or her own meaning, e. g. by calling the casting agency, buying a cd as a prerequisite for voting on the preferred displayed music band or by becoming a part of the fan groups. the following list tries to depict an overview over the relevant elements of the casting show popstars, which was produced and broadcasted by the major german tv channel prosieben for a german speaking audience on the basis of an australian model. the tv show with the subtitle «das duell» (the duell) was on screen throughout three months in the year . the following list is organised in respect of the dominant mode of representation and tries to formulate first and not empirically confirmed assumptions on the possible socialisation function of the elements. of course one has to ask, if this analytical procedure is adequate to a complex arrangement of elements, which is offered by the producer as an entity and also re-organised as an individual entity by the user in processes of the formation of meaning. what is the methodological difference of these complex arrangements to a traditional coherent media like a movie? for a single media it is possible to investigate both sides empirically, that means to analyse the offered movie as a meaningful cultural object and to fiona sánchez investigated the elements of popstars. sanchez weikgenannt, fiona a.: multimediale, multimodale programmangebote in der perspektive von Ökonomie und sozialisation. eine empirische betrachtung von popstars – das duell. disserta- tion universität kassel . / uncover to received and acquired movie. in the case of a variety of programme elements the analysis of the single elements one by one makes sense, not just because of the complexity of an integrated analysis of the entity of popstars. more relevant is the fact that different users can put different elements in the foreground of their personal relevance scheme. therefore especially a pedagogical approach has to reflect the programme and its elements as personally acquired. therefore an analysis has to be made in the perspective of the signifying discourses of the audience. within these discourses the elements of the programme can assume a different relevance and different relations to each other and to the entity of the programme. for example, although the tv elements are of high relevance for the producer, a recipient can prefer instead the life events or the internet. the objects of the analysis, therefore, are the programme elements and their potential socialisation impacts within the context of the whole programme offer. in the case of popstars almost no information on reception is available other than the standardised reception data (market shares) for the main tv presentation which are presented below. these data are just superficial but also empirical indicators for the signifying discourse of the audience. they reveal a female bias because e. g. in the age group of female viewer between and years almost % are women, in the same male age group around % less. (further data see below.) to summarize the general frame of this analysis: at the beginning of a deliberately empirical investigation of a complex programme offer the adequacy of the investigative method and the investigated object has to be considered, which begins with the definition of the object of the analysis. the methodological model is depicted in bachmair, ben, hofmann burkhard, v. d. hövel, martina, v. waasen, michaela: medienanalyse im handlungskontext – handeln und sprachbilder eines mädchens verstehen. in: charlton, michael; bachmair, ben (hrsg.): medienkommunikation im alltag – interpretative studien zum medienhandeln von kindern und jugendlichen. schriftenreihe des internationalen zentralinstituts für das jugend- und bildungsfernsehen, bd. , münchen (saur verlag) , pages – . english version: media analysis within an activity-context – understanding a girl's behaviour and verbal images. in: charlton, michael, bachmair, ben (eds.): media communication in everyday life – interpretative studies on children's and young people's media actions. communication research and broadcasting no , münchen, new york (saur verlag) , pages – . / this object is defined as a semiotic system (semiotic space) which consists of cultural objects (media, commodities, events etc) within different discourses of encoding and decoding. this approach refers to stuart hall’s model of mass communication as encoding and decoding discourses (signifying practices) which are linked by meaningful cultural objects like the coherent media or live events. the following attempt to display and analyse the elements of popstars is based, as already said, on the elements as objectivations (objektivationen) of the encoding discourses. each element of popstars has to be discussed, because the elements can be acquired in different ways by users and can stimulate a potential function for setting up a general pattern of personality, that means socialisation. referring to norbert elias’ theory of the process of civilisation and his analytical method the following assumptions on the potential socialisation impulses comes from the embedded (objectified) functions in everyday life. finally the potential socialisation impulses of an element will be summed up in a pattern of socialisation (sozialisationsmuster) of the whole programme offer (see chapter , point ). in respect to the elements, also to the programme as a whole an analysis can operate on two dimensions. one dimension reaches from the pole obvious/ evident to the pole disguised. (this pole disguised needs an elaborate process to lay bare the embedded content.) the other analytical dimension covers the possibility of an element to be in the centre or at the periphery. the decision on the status of an element on these two dimensions (evident – disguised; centre – periphery) depends on the framing discourses of production, distribution and reception. (expressed in the categories of stuart hall the framing discourses of production, distribution and reception are encoding and decoding.) the following results aim at what is evident and in the centre for an approach on socialisation. this should be acceptable because no practical conclusions for media production or education are intended. / ( ) short description of the logo the logo consists of a red background with red and white characters. it contains the title of the show popstars (red characters on a white shield, which includes a red and white star). this main title is subtitled for the current series: das duell (the duel), which indicates a sophisticated, rather noble kind of battle or competition. this subtitle uses the biggest characters in white. it is accompanied by an imperative in small white characters: «lebe deinen traum!» (live your dream), which also runs through all the show’s trailers. assumed impulses for socialisation – also in german the title popstars carries a meaning: to become a star in the music world of pop. this is underlined by the symbol of a star. «das duell» (the duel) represents a comparatively strong noun for a fight, but the fight of aristocrats. a duel is transformed from a an affray to a civilised competition by strict and noble regulations. the competition is additionally framed by the imperative to portray the personal dream as real life, not as a day dream or watching fictional programmes. ( ) tv programmes ( . ) the weekly tv programme the third series of the internationally licensed casting programme popstars was broadcast in germany from august to november . every monday at : h a show of to minutes was aired on the major private tv channel prosieben for consecutive weeks. due to the great success of the programme, five additional episodes were put together ad hoc and screened during prime-time on friday. «germany’s most emotional casting show», as the programme is labelled, cuts into three sections. the initial phase shows the casting process of close to . candidates in four national german cities. the best aspiring youngsters compete against the logo runs more or less through all modes of representation and is not an auto- nomous element. / each other at the show held at düsseldorf airport. about half of them get to jump on the plane which is part of the show and part of the programme. phase two began with the arrival of the plane in orlando, florida. for four weeks the potential popstars are drilled to dance, sing and compete against each other. close to exhaustion, the candidates who do not make it to the next round break down in tears when they are sent home. two bands, a girl and a boy group called preluders and overground respectively, are formed out of the best eight remaining candidates. since the bands do not perform in the way the music producers would like them to, two additional candidates, one male and one female, are nominated into the groups – thereby adding pressure and excitement. the third round consists of the road show of the two bands. recording and promoting their singles the final winning band is chosen during a final live show. the group is the winner which sells the largest number of cd singles and which gets the most telephone votes on the day of the show. both bands receive a production contract, but the more successful group gets to release their new single and album first. the overall programme is organised more in a documentary style than a show. stories are shown in a chronological sequence, thereby focusing on emotional scenes. there is no anchorman to be seen, only the voice also used in the programme trailers guides through the episodes. the jury comments very frankly on the candidates’ performance as well as their outward appearance, thereby often hurting the youngsters’ feelings. the board consists of the well-known german rap queen sabrina setlur and the very strict and hard working dance coach detlef d! soost, labelled the «drill instructor». the third member of the jury is uwe petersen- fahrenkrog, the only german producer who ever managed to achieve a number hit on the us music market with nena’s « red balloons» in the s. he also produced the energy-packed title song to the programme called «leb deinen traum» (i. e. «live your dream») as well as the first hit single of the girl band preluders. all three members of the jury are well respected by the candidates. / market shares of «popstars – das duell» on prosieben the main viewers belong to the age group of to years. one third ( , %) of the tv viewing female audience in the age of to watches popstars (see rd column), which is a very high score. the children (boys and girls, to years) follow on the second rank ( , %, see nd column). that means, that around a fifth of the tv viewing children watches the show. on the third rank is the viewer group of young men (age – , see th column), which includes around a fifth ( , %) of this tv viewing age group. for the group of tv viewer between to years popstars is not really relevant ( , %, see th column). for the male and female age group of viewers over the age of popstars does not seem to be attractive at all ( %, see th column). assumed impulses for socialisation – becoming a star by one’s own activities and achievements, – formalized learning and working as prerequisite for becoming a star of entertainment; pressure and excitement belong to success, – competitive but social integrative, – the pursuit of an attractive body as prerequisite for an attractive life, – being expressive, never timid, – «female» in the sense of a gender attitude is in the foreground, – the style pattern of action and suspense, of being modern is dominant. ( . ) tv: promotional programme trailers there are several trailers which deliver a few but carefully chosen images of the casting and the pop group performance. the treatment follows a kind share is the percentage of the population tuned to a particular programme or channel out of all those using television at that time. see the «scheme of suspense» (spannungsschema). in: schulze, gerhard: die er- lebnisgesellschaft. kultursoziologie der gegenwart. frankfurt a. m. (campus) , page ff. adults. - years children - years women - years women - years women over years men - years men - years men over years. , % , % , % , % , % , % , % % / of count down to the first presentation of the show with clear links to the calendar. assumed impulses for socialisation – a trailer is highly relevant for a complex but homogenous product like popstars, because it supports integrating activities of the viewers. finally a viewer has to form a coherent system out of the variety of programme elements. the programme trailers provide the audience with relevant information, what belongs to the programme system etc. – they deliver the social «plo» for orientation and integration. ( . ) cross-promotional on the air activities during the period in which popstars – das duell is broadcasted on prosieben, the popstars theme can often be found in programmes produced for and aired on the channel. the daily screened lifestyle magazine «taff» promotes the popstars’ short messaging quizzes played via mobile phone and advertises the ring tones as well as popstars-related news provided for download. furthermore every monday at : o’clock the magazine shows a «taff spezial» – a special programme solely dedicated to popstars. also the popular late night show «tv total» aired monday through to thursday at : o’clock features popstars and provides a platform for live appearances of candidates and jury members. various other programmes include so-called «plings» and «crawls» emerging in written form on the screen and promoting games and quizzes dealing with the casting format. the climax of the cross-promotional entwinement of the popstars theme is reached on the day of the final show in november . starting at : o’clock, all programmes deal with popstars issues, thereby emphasizing the importance and relevance of the topic. either former candidates, jury members or one of the two bands perform in the different programmes. assumed impulses for socialisation – the difference between a programme, its announcements and the connected advertising are no longer differentiated, but merge. knowledge on the differences become relevant just in specific contexts like shopping. / ( ) ceefax offerings the ceefax offering gives a brief overview of current popstars related programme information. the predominantly black screen is divided into four sections, which are separated from one another by bright red borders. while the main section of the screen displays the tv channel’s logo, a red « », and some short information aimed at inciting the reader to participate actively in the castings, the bordering lower part of the screen only contains arrows to navigate through the ceefax pages. on the right hand side two separate boxes of equal size are displayed. the upper one provides headlines such as «news», «weather» or «football», the lower showing a picture of a remote control to call up the desired pages. assumed impulses for socialisation – reading literacy: discontinuous texts, – looking for and using additional information, which is presented on a simple level of reflexivity. ( ) short description of print elements ( . ) programme announcement posters in order to promote the programme also through off the air campaigns, large posters advertising popstars are posted at the stops of public transportation. there are two different posters featuring either a female or a male singer performing in front of a huge crowd of fans. both young persons are shown from below their eyes downwards, thereby leaving room for interpretation. due to the long red hair, the face of the slim, disco-style dressed girl cannot be seen. the well-built male wearing a partly unbuttoned red shirt and black trousers cannot be identified either. the two figures seem to be standing on stage, singing into a microphone. fans are cheering with their hands raised high in the air. the slogan «lebe deinen traum» (i. e. «live your dream») is printed in large white letters across the belly of the poster protagonist and the popstars logo is printed below their feet. furthermore the programme scheduling information «ab . . jeden mo : « (i. e. «staring . . every mo : ») is given. here the reader obviously is supposed to be familiar with the abbreviation of monday as «mo» as well as interpreting « : » as the scheduled programmetime, even though it does not contain any information such as «h» for «hours» or «o’clock». / assumed impulses for socialisation – being familiar with an important feature of advertising and the details of the schedule of a tv channel. reading is not necessary. without the ability to read in a narrow scholastic sense one can not identify the message of the posters. – without reading literacy a main idea of stardom is made visible: to be part of the audience, which is in bodily relation to a star. ( . ) the official fan magazine two issues of the official popstars magazine are published on the german speaking market. the print medium consists of colour pages, is printed in . copies and is sold for euro through the normal magazine sale outlets. the first issue is available immediately after the two bands are announced and it appears in two different versions. while one of them shows the girl group preluders on the cover, the other one depicts their male counterpart overground. the second issue is published after the final winner is chosen and therefore gives a picture of the triumphant boy band. both issues have all the features of a regular magazines targeted at a young audience. the magazine’s title is printed in large red letters across the cover page. on the left hand side next to the main band picture the magazine contents are advertised. hereby, special interest is placed on the posters, which make up a large section of the magazine. the magazine gives a large array of background information on the nine candidates, who have qualified for the two bands. the personal details offer the reader possibilities to identify with the individuals. furthermore, information on former popstars bands as well as lyrics of the current songs and a vast amount of band posters are included in the publication. assumed impulses for socialisation – the target group of the youngsters and the children are expected to read longer and discontinuous text, which consist of a mix of images and characters. – the fan magazine offers reflection in the way tabloids cover celebrities in a personalized and non-critical way. ( . ) sponsoring print commercial: popstars party tour in younglisa younglisa, a pocket-sized glossy magazine targeted at the young female, success-oriented audience is one of the three companies sponsoring the / popstars party tour. in their december issue they include a full-sized one page advertisement promoting the events. the background of the page is bright red and announces the tour in large white writing. in the centre of the page the photographs of both popstars bands incorporating the programme logo are shown. furthermore a prize game featuring an ‘exclusive meet & greet’ with the band members is advertised as the event’s highlight. the lower third of the page provides further information on the tour dates and offers web links leading to more detailed information on the events. in the two upper corners the logos of younglisa and fiat are shown, the broadcaster’s claim «we love to entertain you» as well as the prosieben company logo are printed on the bottom edges of the page. an almost identical content and layout were also used for the posters and flyers promoting the party tour. assumed impulses for socialisation – stardom becomes part of personal and body related experiences which produces the impression of reality. the magazine brings the realm of celebrities to normal everyday life. – making fiction and fantasies real for the personal imagination. ( . ) flyer for the acquisition of new members for prosieben club the first page of the din-a sized -page flyer is designed in almost exactly the same way as the print advertisement in younglisa (the sponsoring print commercial described above under . ). the cardboard front page gives even more details on the tour dates and locations and favours the address of the broadcasters internet page over that of the others. inside the red-coloured leaflet, information regarding the live performance of the popstars bands is given. furthermore, three event programme points are listed as «fun factors». all this information is accompanied by the relevant photographs. guests who would like to participate in the ‹meet & greet› with the bands preluders or overground are invited to proceed to fiat’s stall, where they are given a t-shirt necessary for the prize draw. younglisa’s styling lounge is promoted as a location offering expert styling advice and a pop star like make-over. also a singing and dancing contest is advertised, showing the picture of the product package. the flyer can be torn apart so that the final page can be used as a postcard. this card needs to be filled out in order to become a member of the prosieben club. since the leaflet mentions that members get to enter the / tour parties for half of the regular price, it should catch the eye of the predominantly young and financially sensitive fans. furthermore, in order to obtain the t-shirt, which serves as a prerequisite to join the ‹meet & greet› price draw, a completed member application needs to be handed in. assumed impulses for socialisation – assumed impulses of the other printed elements including the reading of discontinuous texts the possibility of being a part of a real fan group is in the foreground. this links the real life of the everyday world, for example getting a ticket for half price, with the real events of the star groups, in which one could meet bodily the stars in flesh and blood. a feeling for reality and its different qualities is possible. ( ) online elements ( . ) background information on the programme content online a vast array of information regarding the popstars programme is offered online. starting from the tv channel’s homepage at www.prosieben.de the programme popstars can be selected from a drop-down menu. after selecting it, the user is taken to the according web page. the screen is divided into four parts. on the top a header with links to the different programming categories ranging from «film & kino» (i. e. film & cinema) and «community & dating» to «shop & more» are offered. popstars is part of the «music & sound» sections and the programme logo serves as an additional, sub-sectional header. below the logo further popstars-related links such as «casting», «workshop», «jury» or «games» are offered. once one of these links is selected, another layer of subcategories emerges. however, in order to help the user keep track of the section in which he is moving about, the selected category path remains open. the path to the section is shown in small writing right on top of the logo (e. g. «home > music & sound > popstars > mobile > sms quiz»). the information provided in the specifically programme related sections such as «casting» or «workshop» mainly contain some written background information on the programme phase, accompanied by photographs. the fewer candidates remain in the programme and the more the personali- zation of the individual characters takes place, the more detailed the information provided on the candidates is. / assumed impulses for socialisation – reading literacy: discontinuous texts, – looking for and using additional information, which is presented on a simple level of reflexivity. ( . ) popstars community and discussion platform in order to enter the popstars community pages online, interested users first need to register. after providing the required information such as name, user name, age, gender, etc. and accepting the business terms and conditions, the user enters the overall prosieben community zone. generally speaking the online page is set up similar to the background information on the programme content online (described in section . ). however, it seems surprising not to be directly guided to a we page depicting the large popstars logo. between categories labelled «grammy », «madonna» or «grand prix eurovision» popstars-related forums can be found. they range from general popstars – das duell programme groups to specific forums dealing solely with either the male or female band. furthermore also forum sections regarding the individual band members are available. assumed impulses for socialisation – integration of texts and events, which are industrially produced and delivered, into mediated modes of concrete communication. strengt- hening of the concrete modes of experiences and reflection. ( . ) online live chat with the popstars bands in october , shortly after the two bands emanate out of the orlando workshop, they get together at one of the offices at the television channel in germany in order to communicate with their fans live and online. the chats for both bands are organized separately on two subsequent days. in order to facilitate the communication, the broadcaster sets up a particular forum in the community area of his web pages, which is quite similar to the popstars community and discussion platform (see above . ). about a week prior to the live chats registered members have the possibility to post messages to their favoured band and individual group members. the forum is very popular, almost . letters and notes are posted by the day of the latest chat. particularly female fans do not hesitate to publish private information / such as their full name, email addresses and mobile phone numbers, begging band members to contact them. assumed impulses for socialisation – integration of texts and events, which are industrially produced and delivered, into mediated modes of concrete communication. strengthening of the concrete modes of experiences and reflection. ( . ) casting application form as a prerequisite for the participation in the casting, aspirants need to complete an application form. the one page paper is available for download on the prosieben web pages but can also be obtained at the actual casting itself. on the top of the paper the red popstars – das duell logo can be seen, further to the left the equally red « », the broadcaster’s logo, is shown. below the logo section the form contains fields in black writing and personal information such as name, date of birth and contact details are asked for. furthermore data of possible agents and also professional artist schools visited prior to the casting are to be named. at the bottom of the page a declaration of consent is printed in smaller letters. by signing the form the candidate agrees to resign from any rights regarding picture or tone material on which he or she appears. colourful logos of the production company and advertising partners are printed at the very bottom of the page. assumed impulses for socialisation – becoming active for the purposes of one’s own personal development, – reading and writing literacy. further online elements ( . ) e-mail newsletter sent on mondays prior to the broadcast ( . ) instructions for content downloads to mobile phones ( . ) «public relations lounge» providing information (in written, audio and video format) for downloads to journalists ( ) cd and merchandising products ( . ) cd sales as a voting tool to determine the final winning band mcdonalds sold the cds, which functioned as a voting tool to determine the final winning band, before january . within the contest period of / three weeks during the programme screening more than , copies of the preluders cd and over , copies of the overground cd. both singles reached the gold and platinum label and reached number on the charts. ( . ) merchandising products a large selection of popstars merchandise ranging from t-shirts, sweatshirts, coffee mugs, pillows and calendars are advertised in magazines and on the broadcaster’s web page. the high quality goods come with the print of either the popstars logo or with the claim «we love» used in prosieben’s marketing campaign. for both of the logos it is striking that they are mainly typed in bright red letters on white ground. (this design element is condensed in the logo.) an exception are a black t-shirt and a black baseball cap, as well as some t-shirts offered in popular colours of the season, e. g. in pink and olive-green. all merchandise is exclusively sold via the internet and by calling a -phone number. assumed impulses for socialisation – consumption and participation go together, – showing that one is part of a social event, – active interference of a programme and normal life. ( ) mobile, telephone ( . ) mobile sms news, sms ring tones, mobile phone logos, sms prize games and quizzes, sms competitions among fans are offered with regard to popstars. assumed impulses for socialisation – integration by communication – telephoning ergo sum – self reflexivity – being independent from a location ( . ) telephone prize games and quizzes, purchase of merchandise, audience calls as a voting tool to determine the final winning band / ( ) live events ( . ) castings castings offered as the initial stage of application for potential participants in five cities within germany assumed impulses for socialisation – working for success and stardom – starting at the very first step – competition and cooperation ( . ) popstars party tour from the end of november until the middle of december four popstars parties took place in large cities throughout germany. on air and print commercials advertised the events and posters as well as flyers promoting the happenings were distributed at the locations upfront. targeted at a young teenage audience, the events began at : h and were held in discotheques catering to the young crowd. the locations were decorated predominantly with red colours. hereby especially the large popstars banners and the illuminated « »-icon representing the broadcaster’s channel logo added to the glamorous atmosphere. the programme included the live performance of the popstars band as well as an exclusive ‘meet & greet’ with the members of the band for the winner of a prize draw. in order to participate in the prize game, guests had to wear one of the limited t-shirts stating «ich bin popstar» (i. e. «i am popstar») handed out at the event location. furthermore the fans could enjoy a make- over at the styling lounge and participate in a dance contest. the party concept provided an additional marketing ground for the broadcaster as well as it made available a platform for financing this activity. various sponsors were integrated into the concept, e. g. the ‹meet & greet› prize game was run by the automobile manufacturer fiat while the female youth magazine younglisa operated the styling lounge at the party and big ben interactive provided the mats necessary for the dance contest. assumed impulses for socialisation – the physical reality is an anchor for the world of entertainment and celebrities, – celebrities can be observed and seen in between the fantasy world of the celebrities and the normal big party, / – the real functions as sign in a mise-en-scène. the fans are just props of a mise-en-scènce of a promotional tour and of marketing strategies. – concrete social learning of life-style attitudes. ( ) keywords to the assumption on the pattern of socialisation of the whole programme offer – to select elements (e. g. casting or merchandising products) as relevant and re-organise the programme offer in the perspective of this element in a personal scheme of relevance, – to read written texts, – to watch and consider what success and how it functions; to aim at becoming successful, – to integrate competition within the social life of a group, – to feel or to understand life as a stage; to intend to be at the centre of attraction, – to experience one’s own body as the centre of the world of living. . aesthetics deliver a coherent frame which correlates with patterns of activities, values and experiences – a short amendment the following short chapter outlines the path by which the user’s discourse of reception could be integrated into a holistic approach to define and analyse multimedia and multimodal arrangements as semiotic spaces. the first chapter of the essay referred to the traditional reception of a coherent media like watching tv. for more than a decade the quality, that is the functioning of the media/ user-relation has been under discussion. just one further theoretical approach should be added: the concept of lifestyle and the aesthetic of every day life. what is the main argument? the diversity of elements of an arrangement of media, commodities, services and events etc. provides a space for acquisition and expressive activities which is integrated by a coherent symbolic feature. the symbolic feature of everyday life aesthetic as a general structure links a programme as an arrangement of media, events, commodities to the basic functions of the world of living like values, basic orientations, social integration or exclusion. contribution to the discourses of reception are presented among others by kim schroeder et al., michael charlton, ben bachmair ( ), michael charlton, silvia schneider ( ), rainer winter ( ), uwe hasebrink and friedrich krotz ( ). / silvia livingstone’s starting point of argumentation in this field is the «individualisation thesis», which «proposes that the traditional social distinctions» «are declining as determinants of the life trajectory of young people» (p. ) but «lifestyles» as new «patterns of action» are emerging. lifestyles are social structures which function by aesthetics. aesthetic is based on elements of everyday life like media and other commodities and refers to symbolic coherent structure. in the context of the german cultural theory the sociologist gerhard schulze explained from empirical data how to define and discriminate cultural products in a coherent frame for social segmentation within the dynamic of fragmentation and individualisation. fragmented cultural products are interrelated by aesthetic features and individualisation is accompanied by social milieus, which pre- structure typical activities. aesthetic features together with social milieus and their typical activities lead to concise lifestyle schemes. arrangements of cultural products like popstars receive their coherency by aesthetic schemes, which correlate with one or more specific social milieus and their preferred cultural products as well as their preferred modes of activities, acquisition and expression. in this perspective social spaces like milieus are organized by correlating aesthetic, activity patterns and basic values. an arrangement of cultural products like popstars delivers the symbolic, or in other words, delivers the aesthetic interrelation, which offers a spatial frame for reception, interpretation, expression, communication and other activities to an user. because of its openness and due to its cultural uncertainty an arrangement of cultural products challenges the user’s formation of meaning. the cultural uncertainty results from the lack of traditional cultural frames for using and interpreting cultural products. but by means of its aesthetic feature an arrangement like popstars offers a platform, a symbolic space for activities and social integration or exclusion , which is prefabricated by its interrelating elements. the elements reach interrelation by an aesthetic coherency, which opens a semiotic space for the users’ meaningful activities. these meaningful activities are pre-stabilised by the social the data base is not sufficient for drawing valid conclusion for the actual situation, but display a concrete model of argumentation. the market share of popstars main tv series indicate, that specific age and gender groups react consenting or assenting in the sense of belonging to the social space to which popstars correlates by its aesthetic feature. / spaces like milieus to which arrangements like popstars belong or correspond to. milieus and lifestyle schemes as already mentioned milieus are organised by correlating aesthetic, activity patterns and basic values. based on the data accumulated at the end of the s gerhard schulze describes the interrelation of the following elements to the coherent feature of a milieu and their specific styles, which result from users’ meaningful activities. user put together: – the symbolic material of cultural products like media, – their aesthetically differentiating schemes, – their essential approaches for orientation to the world, – their leading images, orienting myths or values. milieus and their corresponding lifestyles arise by the producers’ and the users’ activities to combine the symbolic material of media and other cultural products like clothing with values, myths and leading images. following gerhard schulze categories, arrangements of cultural products emerge by being produced, offered and used within: aesthetically differentiating schemes with the following alternatives: – classical music in the scheme of high culture, – folk music in the scheme of triviality, – action or disco in the scheme of suspense. existential approaches with the following alternatives: (a) to be anchored within an outside world. possible modes of this approach: – living in a hierarchy and striving for a higher rank, – to fulfil social expectations and search for conformity, – the world is conceived as difficult and threatening, which leads to a striving for comfort, (b) to be anchored in one’s own self. possible modes of this approach: – developing a centre of identity and striving for self-realisation, – to fulfil one’s desires and needs, striving for stimulation. / leading values, images and orienting myths and their modes of realisation – sources and target areas: (a) politics and society, (b) religion, (c) individual freedom, – modes of realisation of values, leading images and orientating myths: alternative modes of reflection: (a) complex and controlled; (b) simple, direct, without negotiation, striving for relief, alternative modes of acting: (a) security and standards, (b) spontaneous, self determined activities, aesthetically differentiating schemes, existential approaches and leading values, images, and orienting myths are basic feature of the formation of life worlds within the western industrialised societies .these try to explain phenomena like popstars and yu-gi-oh, or pokémon and wwf- wrestling , which can meanwhile be considered out of date. the final conclusion is, that semiotic spaces function as frames and structure of the mass communicative discourses, which equalize the function of media, commodities, events, services etc. as meaningful culture product (objectivationen) within a specific variety of signifying practices which link the encoding and decoding activities. referring to raymond williams’ central idea, which was quoted in the introduction, semiotic spaces are a new cultural form which offers socialisation in the continuity of the renaissance but transfers the personal world of living to a or the main mediating cultural pattern. this argument follows the theoretical proposal of alfred schütz, e. g. «der sinnhafte aufbau der sozialen welt. eine einleitung in die verstehende soziologie». frankfurt a. m. (suhrkamp) . . edition wien . english version: the phenomenology of the social world. evanston, northwestern university press for wwf-wrestling, an arrangement of media, commodities and events from the s see the german analysis of bachmair, ben, kress, gunther (eds): höllen- inszenierung wrestling. beiträge zur pädagogischen genre-forschung. opladen (leske + budrich) / literatur bachmair, ben; kress, gunther (eds): höllen-inszenierung wrestling. bei- träge zur pädagogischen genre-forschung. opladen (leske + budrich), . buckingham, david, julian sefton-green: series «media, education and culture. london, new york (routledge). charlton, michael; bachmair, ben (hrsg.),: medienkommunikation im all- tag – interpretative studien zum medienhandeln von kindern und jugendlichen. schriftenreihe des internationalen zentralinstituts für das jugend- und bildungsfernsehen, bd. , münchen (saur verlag), , pages – . english version: charlton, michael, bachmair, ben (eds.): media com- munication in everyday life – interpretative studies on children's and young people's media actions. communication research and broad- casting no , münchen, new york (saur verlag), , pages – . charlton, michael; schneider, silvia: rezeptionsforschung. theorien und untersuchungen zum umgang mit massenmedien. opladen (west- deutscher verlag), . elias, norbert: Über den prozess der zivilisation. soziogenetische und psychogenetische untersuchungen. vol. : wandlungen des verhaltens in den weltlichen oberschichten des abendlandes. vol. : wandlungen der gesellschaft. entwurf einer theorie der zivilisation. frankfurt a. m. (suhrkamp), , . ed.; . edition . facer, keri; furlong, john; furlong ruth; sutherland, rosamund: children and computing in the home. london, new york (routledgefalmer), . glaser, barney, g.; stauss, anselm, l.: the discovery of grounded theory. new york (aldine publ.), . gumbrecht, hans ulrich; pfeiffer, k. ludwig (hrsg.): materialität von kommunikation. frankfurt a. m. (suhrkamp), . hall, stuart (ed.): representation. cultural representations and signifying practices. sage. london: . p. ff., p. . hall, stuart et al. (ed.): culture, media, language. london (hutchinson) working papers in cultural studies, – , eds. s. hall et al. [this article comprises an edited extract from hall, s. ( ) ‹encoding and decoding in television discourse›. cccs stencilled paper no. .] london: hutchison. , s. – . / hasebrink, uwe; krotz, friedrich (hrsg.): die zuschauer als fernseh- regisseure? zum verständnis individueller nutzungs- und rezeptions- muster. baden-baden, hamburg (nomos), . hasebrink, uwe; mikos, lothar; promme, elisabeth (ed.): mediennutzung in konvergierenden medienumgebungen. münchen ( verlag reinhard fischer), . hurrelmann, klaus: einführung in die sozialisationstheorie. Über den zusammenhang von sozialstruktur und persönlichkeit. weinheim (belz verlag), ( . edition). p. . hutchby, ian; moran-ellis, jo (ed.): children, technologies and culture. the impact of technologies in children’s everyday lives. london, new york (routledge), . kinder, marsha: playing with power in movies, television, and video games: from muppet babies to teenage mutant ninja turtles. berkely (university of california press), . kress, gunter; van leeuwen, theo: reading images. the grammar of the visual design. routledge. london. . kress, gunther; van leeuwen, theo: multimodal discourses. the modes and media of contemporary communication. london (arnold), krotz, friedrich: neue theorien entwickeln. köln (herbert von halem verlag), livingstone, sonia: young people and new media. childhood and the changing media environment. london (sage publications), , reprint . meinhoff, ulrike; smith, jonathan (eds): intertextuality and the media. from genre to everyday life. manchester, new york (manchester university press), . mitchel, claudia; reid-walsh, jacqueline: researching children’s popular culture. the cultural space of childhood. london, new york (rout- ledge), . paus-hasebrink, ingrid; neumann-braun, klaus; hasebrink, uwe; aufenanger, stefan: medienkindheit – markenkindheit. untersuchung zur multimedialen verwertung von markenzeichen für kinder. münchen, . sefton-green, julian ( ed.) digital diversions: youth culture in the age of multimedia. london (ucl press), . sánchez, fiona: multimediale, multimodale programmangebote in der perspektive von Ökonomie und sozialisation. eine empirische be- / trachtung von popstars – das duell. dissertation universität kassel, . schütz, alfred: der sinnhafte aufbau der sozialen welt. eine einleitung in die verstehende soziologie. frankfurt a. m. (suhrkamp) . st edition wien . english version: the phenomenology of the social world. evanston, northwestern university press . schulze, gerhard: die erlebnisgesellschaft. kultursoziologie der gegen- wart. frankfurt a. m. (campus), . schroeder, kim; drotner, kirsten; kline, steve; murray, catherine: researching audiences. a practical guide to the study of audiences and users. london (arnold), . williams, raymond. television: technology and cultural form. st ed (schocken books). nd edition london (routledge), . winter, rainer: der produktive zuschauer. medienaneignung als kulturel- ler und ästhetischer prozess. münchen (ouintessenz), . blackbox: painting a digital picture of documented memory by tatiana pentes ba usyd, m.art cofa unsw, m.litt usyd a dissertation submitted in fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of doctor of creative arts university of technology, sydney certificate of authorship i certify that this thesis has not previously been submitted for a degree nor has it been submitted as part of requirements for a degree except as fully acknowledged within the text. i also certify that the thesis has been written by me. any help that i have received in my research work and the preparation of the thesis itself has been acknowledged. i certify that all information sources and literature used are indicated in the thesis. signature of candidate _____________________________________________ table of contents acknowledgments i preface ii list of tables, figures, and illustrations iii abstract iv introduction part one: virtual archive of cultural memories chapter one: . my story . writing the self chapter two: the colonising gaze chapter three: the computer mediated text . hypertextuality/ intertextuality . aesthetics of interactive multimedia . tracing a digital media map . think piece: the gestures of the body in interactive cross-cultural storytelling chapter four: methodological concerns part two: blackbox creative production chapter five: blackboxes - digital media as a journey of discovery chapter six: mythic and musical structure of project . memory boxes . overview of areas of content . script development and production ( ) metropolis ( ) chinesebox ( ) jewelbox ( ) pandorasbox chapter seven: design of electronic surfaces for the interface . surface design and interaction of pathways . interactivity . aesthetics . treatment of image . treatment of sound . treatment of text . treatment of time . emotional engagement with multimedia chapter eight: installation- exhibition of blackbox chapter nine: conclusion a selected bibliography glossary of terms appendices: appendix (i) reflection on self and process appendix (ii) keith gallasch, “australia council restructure: australia council unplugged”, realtime, february/ march, . attachments: (i) blackbox interactive prototype cd-rom (ii) blackbox url http://www.strangecities.net (iii) blackbox installation dvd documentation (iv) blackbox: a digital media script i acknowledgments i wish to express gratitude to my academic supervisor of this thesis, which consists of: an exegesis; an interactive cd-rom; a gallery installation; internet site; and dvd documentation: dr devleena ghosh, writing, journalism, and social inquiry, university of technology, sydney (uts) for encouraging and accepting my blackbox study, for supervising the theoretical and production elements of my doctor of creative arts, and for her academic and moral support. i also wish to thank my co-supervisor megan heyward, department of media arts and production, (uts), for her consistent assistance, valuable suggestions and advice particularly in relation to the production of new media and digital culture. i am indebted to professor andrew jakubowicz, trans/forming cultures: key centre for communications and culture, (uts), for his inspiration with the menorah of fang bang lu online documentary and mentorship in the meeting of social research and interactive multimedia, and also for his support and guidance. i am indebted to dr linda leung, institute for interactive media and learning, (uts), and dr melanie swallwel, research student department of media arts and production, (uts), for providing me with editions of their doctoral dissertations, giving me inspiration, and stimulating many ideas in my own research into creative digital media technologies. i thank dr yusuf pisan, co-director creativity and cognition studios, information technology, (uts), for his kind words of support and for fostering my research. i am grateful to eurydice aroney, radio journalism, (uts), who has mentored me in concept development, montage and audio production, and provided me with moral support and advice. i wish to thank john conomos, sydney college of the arts, the university of sydney for his participation, and my husband geoffrey weary, electronic and temporal arts, sydney college of the arts, the university of sydney, for his participation, encouragement, and generous assistance, without which this work could never have been produced. i wish to thank the musicians and performers whose charitable support made this work possible: dr ileana citaristi, nirmal jena, chitritta mukerjee, serge ermoll jr, alexandra ermolaeff, matina pentes, archie agropoulos and rebetiki ensemble, padma raman, laekhena (lou-lou) sy, rose tang, zhou xuan, nina philadelphoff puren, devleena ghosh and rochéle berwick. i wish to thank the faculty of humanities and social sciences, university of technology, sydney, which provided me with a doctoral scholarship & trans/forming cultures: key centre for communications and culture which provided research publication funding which made this study possible. i wish to pay tribute to my grandparents frances and antonis pentes (greeks from kythera) and sergei and xenia ermolaeff (russians from shanghai, china), to my loving parents and my son james antonio astor weary, to whom i dedicate this work. ii preface “it is inscribed as on pandora’s box … do not open …passions … escape in all directions from a box that lies open … (bruno latour, ‘opening pandora’s blackbox’, .) figure . blackbox interface screen depicting rochéle the creole/indian girl and nina the russian/ greek girl bruno latour, “opening pandora’s black box”, science in action: how to follow scientists and engineers through society, harvard university press, cambridge, massachusetts, , pp - . iii list of tables, figures, and illustrations figure . blackbox interface screen depicting rochéle the creole/indian girl and nina the russian/greek girl figure . blackbox menu interface screen depicting rochéle the creole/indian girl figure . blackbox installation kudos gallery, college of fine arts, university of new south wales, september to october figure . blackbox installation kudos gallery, college of fine arts, university of new south wales, september to october figure . portrait of my grandmother xenia (ermoll) ermolaeff in shanghai, a russian from china, circa s figure . ileana citaristi italian born classical indian odissi dancer figure . serge ermoll free kata album cover figure . borobodur, dhyani buddha statues and stupas figure a. serge ermoll and his orchestra plays for pathe label, china, circa figure b. portrait of mao tse tung in the former russian orthodox church spire, shanghai circa figure a. blackbox menu screen interface screen by tatiana pentes figure b. the suicide of dorothy hale by frida kahlo in secular ex-votive style martha zamora, frida kahlo: the brush of anguish figure a. serge ermoll and his orchestra, the cathay hotel, shanghai, china, circa figure b. constructivist mayakovsky’s for the voice, soviet russian poetry figure . sergei and xenia ermolaeff on a city bus shanghai, china, circa s figure . international refugee organisation far east mission (iro) document granting mr and mrs sergei ermolaeff and eligibility for legal and political protection as refugees, shanghai, china, . figure a. russian from shanghai - sergei ermolaeff snr personal collage on the wall of punchbowl home, sydney, australia, c s iv figure b. sergei ermolaeff, permit to drive an automobile in the french concession, shanghai, china, october figure a. sergei ermolaeff and his orchestra, the majestic hotel, shanghai, china, circa figure b. russian taxi dancers from general jiganoff’s, the russian of shanghai figure . blackbox interface still from chinesebox pathway figure . russian ballerina asja pictured in blackbox interface still from chinesebox figure . vannevar bush's differential analyzer, http://www.acmi.net.au/aic/bush_berrnier.html [accessed february ] figure . vannevar bush's memex head camera figure . vannevar bush's memex http://www.acmi.net.au/aic/bush_berrnier.html [accessed february ] figure . serge ermoll and his orchestra postcard shanghai circa figure . rembetika dancer in contemporary athens taverna (tavern) from gail holst’s road to rembetika figure . blackbox interface still from pandorasbox depicting greek diasporic musical and personal effects figure . contemporary map of greece and islands & pandora and her box figure . baglamas a miniature stringed bouzouki shaped instrument figure . a greek woman stavroula petala born athens in blackbox, cairo, egypt was her home until she migrated to australia figure . lord jagannatha a, along with his sister subadhra, and brother balabadhra, that forms the holy trinity figure . map of the state of orissa, indian sub-continent figure . ileana citaristi performs odissi dance mangala charan, figure . overview of blackbox cd-rom areas of content figure . chinesebox interface still detailing virtual objects baglamas from holst op cit p . v figure . the konark sun temple at konark, orissa, india figure . blackbox interface still from jewelbox pathway picturing dancer chitritta mukerjee, performing konarak kanthi odissi dance performance figure a. jewelbox interface still detailing virtual objects figure b. pandorasbox interface still detailing my grandparents frances and antonis pentes and their child my mother matina (stamatia) pentes figure . blackbox, kudos gallery, college of fine arts, university of new south wales, september to october figure . blackbox, kudos gallery, college of fine arts, university of new south wales, september to october figure . blackbox, kudos gallery, college of fine arts, university of new south wales, september to october figure . the prokopoff perceptron, circa figure . serge ermoll jr (piano) quintet, el rocco jazz cellar, kings cross, sydney, circa. figure . lord jagannartha, subadhra, balabadhra, the holy trinity figure . hindu lord of dance – nataraja (details of bronze sculpture) figure . maya darpan and odissi dance drama by ileana citaristi figure . rose tang, cabaret taxi dancer performance, blackbox interface still figure . rembetika musicians (refugees) at fish market at piraeus, greece, image from templenet http://www.templenet.com/orissa/konakona.html [accessed june ]. vi abstract this study investigates and records the production of a digital media artwork blackbox: painting a digital picture of documented memory, generated through the media technologies of interactive multimedia, exploiting the creative potentials of digitally produced music, sound, image and text relationships in a disc based and online (internet) environment. the artwork evolves from an imaginary electronic landscape that can be uniquely explored/ played in a non-sequential manner. the artwork/ ‘game’ is a search for the protagonist nina’s hybrid cultural identity. this is mirrored in the exploration of random, fragmentary and non-linear experiences designed for the player engaged with the artwork. the subjective intervention of the player/ participant in the electronic artwork is metaphoric of the improvisational tendencies that have evolved in the greek blues (rembetika), jazz, and hindustani musical and performative dance forms. the protagonist nina’s discovery of these musical forms reveal her cultural/ spiritual origins. as a musical composer arranges notes, melodies and harmonies, and sections of instruments, so too, the multimedia producer designs a ensemble of audio-visual fragments to be navigated. dance also becomes a driving metaphor, analogous to the players movement in and through these passages of image/ sound/ text and as a movement between theories and ideas explored in the content of the program. the central concern is to playfully reverse, obscure, distort the look of the dominating/colonialist gaze, in the production of an interactive ‘game’ and allow the girl to picture herself. one of my objectives is to explore the ways in which social research can be undertaken by the creation of an interactive program in the computer environment utilising interactive digital media technologies. the study reveals that, through the subjective intervention of the (player) user with the digital artefact, a unique experience and responsiveness is produced with the open ended text. the work is comprised of a website http://www.strangecities.net; an interactive cd-rom; a gallery installation; digital photomedia images; and a written thesis documenting and theorising the production. the term user, while widely debated has been in usage from the s to refer to the unique human interaction with the digital artefact, electronic screen work, and computer interface. introduction blackbox: painting a digital picture of documented memory is an experimental interactive work created for delivery on the computer, the internet, and site-specific gallery installation. this immersive digital story emerges from the protagonist russian/greek girl’s movement through the metropolis. the objective for the player/participant is to explore this computer mediated interactive metropolis, through the digital experiences and sensations of the girl, and to discover three metaphoric ‘boxes’ that contain three symbolic performances. the girl is documented making a digital journey from the interior of her urban apartment into a symbolic city. the cityscape becomes haunted by traces of her past, her memories projected onto the surfaces of her city. what is the girl searching for and what does she discover in the metropolis? she finds performances from three ‘imagined’ australian diasporic communities; these resonate for the girl, creating a bricolage of the identities with which she grew up. the participant/player is encouraged to discover performances from (i) rembetika – a politically engaged greek blues; (ii) classical indian dance and music (odissi and kuchipudi traditions); and (iii) fragments of australian jazz performed by russian musicians from china. figure . blackbox menu interface screen depicting rochéle the creole/indian girl the focus has been to document nina’s (mine) cultural identity through random fragments, objects, musical memories and ethnic dance forms, which create for her a sense of unity and meaning in relation to her hybrid sense of self. these fragments suggest the development of interdependent and intertwining relationships involved in becoming a social subject, “…it is precisely this very sense of identification, interdependence and community that are the key elements in the development of women’s identity…” amongst others. the girl’s specific ‘melting pot’ of cultural forms is a metaphor for the ways in which cultural productions and artefacts blend in the contemporary urban metropolis. the metaphor is extended by a heightened global awareness with access to network technologies and the internet that have enabled new forms of creativity and communication. my objective in this study is to link social research with the ways in which the interactive, non-sequential narrative structure, mediated through the digital technological environment of the computer interface, can articulate feminine identity, and the notions of self/selves and others that are refracted through this virtual space. susan stanford friedman, “women’s autobiographical selves: theory and practice”, in the private self: theory and practice of women’s autobiographical writings, routledge, london, , p . “this exegisis is an amalgam of design and social science research. given the current sequestration of social science form the creative arts…this thesis/artwork is a watershed which should be noted as an exemplar of new forms of literacy in scholarship.” professor stephanie h. donald, director institute for international studies, university of technology, sydney comments on black box thesis, october . figure . blackbox installation kudos gallery, college of fine arts, university of new south wales, september to october the interface design metaphor for blackbox is an electronic stage/screen surface where performances appear as if conjured from a dream. the participant/player can explore the digital surface of the stage to reveal musical and dramatic performances, revealing interviews with the musicians and dancers, documentary fragments of performances and statements by artists. she can also uncover hyper-textual documents, newsprint articles and radio archival material, through the devices of iconic symbols and hotspots exposing layers of material beneath the surface of the experimental documentary. traditional modes of story-telling and music are challenged in the interface design because the user/player must engage with the music and performances. in the contemporary technological environment, convergence has delivered new possibilities for the creation of non-linear programs in terms of their production, distribution, and reception. the internet as a site for the broadcast of digitally produced interactive media has created new ways of conceptualising programs, mapping interactive content and producing non-linear narrative experience, where the participant/player is able to participate in screen events. in addition to the exploration of identity, this research project examines the ways in which discrete traditional musical and dance forms transmute in the current australian context. this work simultaneously becomes a digital archive and a critically reflective documentation of the metamorphosis of traditional cultural forms, thus exploiting the creative potentials opened up for cultural producers in the digitally manipulated performance, sound, image, and text environment of interactive multimedia. moving between narrative and documentary, the performances are discovered through the exploration of four interactive ‘compositions’, choreographed so that the player/participant can move in and out of the electronic text. blackbox installation kudos gallery, college of fine arts, university of new south wales, september to october , photograph courtesy of geoffrey weary. the creative component involves the production of blackbox interactive cd-rom, a medium capable of articulating fragmented experience; a digital video dvd documentation of the installation of the blackbox interactive work in the gallery space as means of reportage; and an internet site http://www.strangecities.net. these media have been utilised to both archive and distribute the creative material and information. by virtue of their structures, they provide an analogous virtual environment for the theoretical research where memory and the piecing together of fragmentary material has a mysterious resemblance to the way in which electronic spaces can be designed for wandering through the computer text. figure . blackbox installation kudos gallery, college of fine arts, university of new south wales, september to october this thesis is constructed in two main parts. part one: virtual archive of cultural memories contains a theorisation of the general historical, cultural and methodological concerns framing the creative production, as well as a ‘think piece’. part two: blackbox creative production examines the specific way in which this particular creative work was produced materially and technically. kudos gallery, college of fine arts, university of new south wales, september to october . photograph courtesy of geoffrey weary © part one virtual archive of cultural memories chapter one . my story my project is an autobiographical and inter-disciplinary one. in it i draw on personal, spiritual, philosophical, historical, and cultural resonances to question the uniqueness of the art object in the production of a creative digital program. the pursuit of knowing and recording oneself can never be a transparent act. it projects an illusory sense of self-mastery because it is political and subjective, an articulation of one’s culture, mythologies, imaginaries. the writing of women’s lives, amongst others, has not always complied with the aristotelian trajectory of narrative, where there can be a response to a demand put forth in the beginning. blackbox extends the limits and conditions of the narrative structure in a non-sequential, fragmentary, and interactive environment, thus revealing the ways in which that structure engages with identity in and through representation. joanna woodall (ed), portraiture: facing the subject, manchester university press, new york, , p . figure . portrait of my grandmother xenia (ermoll) ermolaeff in shanghai, a russian from china, circa s this interactive project traces an imagined history between the musical forms of rembetika, hindustani and jazz music and dance cultures, by virtue of the protagonist nina . the player’s movement through the ‘game’/ interactive work reveals nina’s hybrid origins. the metaphoric dance between pandorasbox, jewelbox, and chinesebox sections experienced by the player in the program, simulates nina’s own discovery of these cultural forms, which in turn enables her to engage with her cultural origins. figure . ileana citaristi, italian born classical indian odissi dancer the objective of this creative research is to extend and complicate my earlier experiments with the music of the russian diasporic people in china, through the production of an interactive non-linear multimedia work strange cities cd-rom. this work is part of my on-going investigation into ‘the song’ as a mode of cultural the name nina is serendipitously common to russian, indian, and greek traditions. digital film of still ileana citaristi by tatiana pentes . expression, political persuasion, and propaganda, particularly in ethnic minorities. the daughter of a russian from china and a kytherian greek émigré, growing up in australia, i was disconnected from my parents’ mother cultures. early in my life, my parents separated and since then i always moved between two households, many languages and different worldviews. my engagement with ‘otherness’ began at a very early age with exposure to my father’s practice of karate. growing up in japanese occupied shanghai, my father serge ermoll jr learned and later taught shotokan karate, and it influenced many of his free improvisational jazz compositions. he often named the musical movements after the kata or bodily forms in karate. indeed, free kata the name of his spontaneous jazz ensemble, means free (as in improvised) and kata as in karate movement (bodily form). figure . serge ermoll free kata album cover my mother matina pentes worked from time to time in indonesia and malaysia, so i moved between and across those cultures. in i travelled to ipoh, malaysia with my mother and stayed with an indian family. on this trip, i experienced my first classical indian dance class in the bharata natyam form in an old school hall. i also experienced south east asian ancient and contemporary émigré indian culture, visiting the ancient buddhist monument borobodur temple (built circa th/ th century ad), and many hindu temples on java and bali. in secondary school during the s, my friend padma raman’s family virtually adopted me into their south indian australian home. padma studied classical indian dance. padma had always seemed very ‘indian’ to me, but intimate access to her family made me realise that, her ‘indian’ culture was something her whole family worked at maintaining in australia. figure . borobodur, dhyani buddha statues and stupas padma studied classical indian dance and i participated in these dance classes and also learnt south indian vocal music from her mother. i began to understand that this was what other indian australian families were facing with their own children, the struggle to maintain and pass on the language and the heritage of an ‘other’ culture. later i joined the odissi dance company school under the tutelage of nirmal jena and chitritta mukerjee. the sense of disconnection with my cultures of origin and their ‘otherness’ and my search for identity was to some extent satisfied through the study of the odissi dance. the spiritual and physical aspects of odissi provided me with a way of expressing my inner doubts and conflicts. in the exploration of a culture other than my own, i found a way of re-discovering my own hybrid cultural mix. the rebellion against my own culture, and the seeking out of the indian culture was a choice based in my earlier exposure to ‘difference’ as a place of refuge. “the borobodur temple…built between the end of the seventh and beginning of the eighth century a.d…in java (indonesia archipelago)…the structure is in the form of a lotus, the sacred flower of buddha.” from buddhist art and architecture http://www.buddhanet.net/boro.htm [accessed june ]. these adolescent experiences had a significant impact on the production of blackbox, where improvisation in dance and music are metaphors for the player/participant’s movement through the electronic text. the form of the computer program has been designed specifically to embody these theoretical concerns of the research. in an earlier work, i focused on an album recorded by my russian grandfather sergei ermolaeff, which i stumbled upon after his death, “strange cities” (stranyie garadnye). this vinyl record formed a body of original compositions and folk ballads from pre-revolutionary russia. most songs, and the title track “strange cities”, were the laments of people in diasporas, looking back to ‘home-land’ or in this instance to a ‘home-town/city’ st petersburg, nostalgically longing for ‘motherland’, a place that was no more, an imagined space. sergei, a stateless person, composed these in exile in the treaty port of shanghai, china, and went on to record and play these songs in his adopted home sydney, where he was a foreigner once more. blackbox extends this investigation by incorporating the cultural expressions of the greek and indian diasporic experience through the music of these displaced peoples – rembetika the greek blues; the expression of ‘sanskrit’ culture through the dance and music culture of odissi and kuchipudi. in blackbox, the protagonist nina discovers how these forms inform her cultural and spiritual origins. in the production of a program that articulates expressions of the émigré russian, greek, and indian music/ dance traditions, i have composed a creative work that incorporates and synthesises these cultural forms, to suggest the way in which music/ dance and ethnic traditions blend and become hybrid in cosmopolitan cities. this signals the specific cultural resonances that articulate the protagonist nina and my own subjective ethno-cultural heritage. in many ways old shanghai, for me, symbolises this synthesis, as a cultural locale, historically and in film and literature. my grandfather sergei ermolaeff recalled, that in shanghai during the revolution in china, before his immigration to australia in , all references to decadent western culture, music, literature, film and political ideas were banned by the new communist government. figure a. serge ermoll and his orchestra plays for pathe label, china, c. the existence of a french record label for russian jazz music provided a material vestige of this period in shanghai. pasted with glue to sergei’s music room wall, peeling off after his death, the existence of this historical material culture articulates the east/west cultural dialectic providing a trace, a fragment of this decadent transient whirligig of “joy, gin and jazz” in the east. figure b. portrait of mao tse tung in the former russian orthodox church spire, shanghai circa memory and the piecing together of fragmentary material history, stories, and evidence have an uncanny resemblance to the way in which we input randomly accessed information using computer data-bases to construct non-linear/ non-sequential narratives in software programs such as macromedia director. these bring animations, digital lynn pan, shanghai: a century of change in photographs - , hai-feng publishing co, hong kong, . portrait of mao tse tung in the former russian orthodox church spire, shanghai circa , photograph courtesy geoffrey weary. movies, sound fragments and texts together in an assemblage or collage, just like the collages of photographs my grandfather sergei glued to his music room walls in suburban australia. opening up the virtual box in blackbox, the player/participant is invited to ‘play’ with artefacts and objects that inform the player/reader of this new ‘text’ about the cultural forms represented in this program. audio signatures of the respective ‘songs’ become associated with the various cultures (i) jewelbox, or, sanskrit culture; (ii) pandorasbox, or, rembetika culture; and (iii) chinesebox, or, pre-revolutionary popular shanghainese and russian émigré culture. this strategy has been devised to explore the ways in which readers of the new digital text weave in-between/ in and out of the boxed narratives. the ‘song’ and musical phrases are pieced together by the participant of this ‘game’, creating a genuinely unique musical representation with each rendition of the program every time the game is played. the musical phrases, derived from the three genres of ethnic music, are east/west hybrids in their derivations. contrary to the concerns of european composers using ‘orientalist’ themes in opera, theatre, ballet or contemporary new music, these three ethnic genres have been used to represent my own ethno-cultural and spiritual heritage and development. the musical ensembles in this digital work are composed as referents to the dis/connected surfacing of immigrant memories and to examine the process of reflections on time past. in the search for my cultural origins, i realised that the choices i made were often arbitrary and personal. what had seemed ‘foreign’ to me and outside my understanding was now becoming integral to my experience and informing aspects of my own life world. at the same time, these ‘discoveries’ revealed the east/ the west distinction as a dialectical relationship and analogous to that of self and other. at this point i returned to my father’s place of birth as a point of departure, shanghai, china, the quintessential ‘melting-pot’, and modern cosmopolitan hybrid city. “when to the sessions of sweet silent thought i summon up remembrance of things past…”, in marcel proust, remembrance of things past, penguin books, middlesex, great britain, . . writing the self the moment of self-portraiture becomes the coincidence of the beautiful and the macabre, and of self-love and self-loathing. the first image was a portrait. in classical mythology, a lovely youth named narcissus lay beside a pool gazing in adoration of his own reflection…in the bible st veronica compassionately pressed a cloth against christ’s face as he stumbled to calvary, and found his true image miraculously printed on the material…st luke became a painter because having expressed a vision of the virgin mary, he was inspired to produce a faithful portrait of her. as explored in cruel beauty ( ), the autobiographical project to record and paint oneself falls into the category of self-portraiture. the genre of portraiture in the west has historically been regarded as a renaissance invention, charting the emergence of masculine individuality. patricia simon discusses the assumption that a universal concept of individualism is a cultural precondition for the european portrait. a particular kind of modernist, western, autonomous individualism is assumed, a sense of unique and publicly staged selfhood, so that the masculine agency is universalised as the norm…in an over-determined patriarchy, audiences were predominantly male and chiefly saw members of their own gender and class populating the spaces of the renaissance city… this trope can be extended beyond gender to incorporate class and ethnicity into the cultural dimensions of portraiture. this search for self-definition and representation of identity is articulated in blackbox. however, the project also tries to extend the traditional generic codes of self-portraiture drawn around the modernist western canon, as derived from a uniquely masculine post-enlightenment self. tracing a historical map of the western portrait genre consistently leads to the renaissance re-discovery of the portrait in western antiquity and the early christian this research began in tatiana pentes, (unpublished) master of letters thesis cruel beauty, art history and theory/ women’s studies, university of sydney, . joseph leo koerner, the moment of self-portraiture in german renaissance art, the university of chicago press, london and chicago, , p . joanna, woodall (ed), portraiture: facing the subject, manchester university press, new york, , p . patricia simons, “homosociality and erotics in italian renaissance portraiture”, in joanna, woodall (ed) op cit p . world in the form of statues, busts, coins, sarcophagi and wall paintings. the renaissance notion of man as created in the image of god is idealised in durer’s self-portrait, where he is both created in the image of god and through the artistic production creates as god. “durer mythicises the identity between image and maker… (celebrating) himself as a universal subject, whose all-seeing gaze is subject to none”. the legacy of durer in self-portraiture is manifest in the close analogy between bodies and texts, the artist’s self-portrait and the holy image. the renaissance painter’s ascent from craftsman to artist celebrated art as the vera icon (truth icon) of personal skill. in cruel beauty, i framed my analysis of the modernist paintings of mexican artist frida kahlo, and her repeated image of the incomplete and searching feminine body, within the renaissance project to represent the human form as masculine subject. kahlo’s work influences the artistic creative production in blackbox. i have sought to subvert the masculinist/individualist form of renaissance self-portraiture by place the girl protagonist nina at the centre of a universe composed of intertwining cultural threads, as universal all-seeing subject. nina’s search for self is articulated in the creation of a hybrid identity that is always incomplete and partial. this fluid identity, composed from her hybrid cultural origins is designed to be interpreted from many perspectives, and is thus embodied in the non-sequential ‘game’ structure of computer artwork. the title blackbox gestures towards the photographic apparatus of the camera, and its visual elements have been influenced by modern photographic portraiture, extending into the post-modern realm of digital imaging and electronic painting. digital media technologies have profoundly altered perception, creation and distribution and the truth- value of the image, contrary to the opinions expressed in roland barthes’ modernist seminal piece on photography. in his words: “painting can feign reality without having seen it. discourse has its signs which have referents…contrary to these imitations, in joanna woodall op cit p . joseph leo koerner, the moment of self-portraiture in german renaissance art, the university of chicago press, london and chicago, , p . see terry smith “frida kahlo: marginality and modernity”, making the modern, university of chicago press, london, , p -p . this research began in tatiana pentes, “impulse to represent the self”, in cruel beauty, master of letters thesis, art history and theory/ women’s studies, university of sydney, . photography i can never deny that a thing has been there.” this notion, always problematic, has been vitiated in the wake of virtual reality and digital collage aesthetics. blackbox makes a collage of everyday imaginary and material objects, like the mexican catholic folk retablos mentioned in frida kahlo’s secular self-portraits, where the village artisan pins an object from an accident to the votive offering, eg. strands of a victim’s hair, or samples from a vehicle wreckage. the lens is turned back upon the viewer who is forced to apprehend the subjective gaze of nina the protagonist. thus the observer becomes observed, the personal becomes political, the interior self moves into the public domain. in examining the impulse of self-portraiture, the process at work in authorship reveals the autobiographical and digital writing of the text. figure a. blackbox menu screen interface screen by tatiana pentes figure b. the suicide of dorothy hale by frida kahlo in secular ex-votive style from martha zamora, frida kahlo: the brush of anguish roland barthes, camera lucida, flamingo, great britain, , p . chapter two: the colonising gaze slow boat to china …sometimes you suffocate when you think of the past; a life that never was, flashing up in sepia. memory which is creamy-yellow, cracked; composed of protogallic acid, protosulphate of iron, potassium cyanide. let’s not get too technical. not right now. it makes for too much exposure. still in the dark, you remember shanghai…like this story. like the way everything in history is always wrapped in a tissue; of words, of memories, of lies. dancing. now that’s another matter. you have to have infinite patience with that. time and timing. grace and desire. swaying back and forth like the tide until something is washed up; something always washed up. shanghai- dancing…to cast a line from an old spool: it is the attainment of disorientation and instability…it is hard to track my father down. he stayed at this hotel once…the cathay on the bund. brian castro, shanghai dancing, . figure a. serge ermoll and his orchestra, the cathay hotel, shanghai, china, circa ...the new book demands the new writer. ink-stand and goose-quill are dead...the printed sheet transcends space and time. the printed sheet, the infinity of the book, must be transcended... el lissitzky brian castro, shanghai dancing, giramondo publishing, australia, , p - . el lissittzky, “the book: the electro-library, topology of typography”, merz, no. , hanover, july , in el lissitzky: life, letters, texts, thames and hudson, great britain, . figure b. constructivist mayakovsky’s for the voice, soviet russian poetry to be spoken my slow boat to china began with chance discoveries and curiosities which found their way into my writing and the production, methodology and theoretical concerns involved in creating an interactive multimedia work and articulating the negotiations involved in representation of ethnicity, gender and identity. this project of image making has another ideological agenda: to interrogate the “… colonial constructions of racial, cultural, and geographic difference…(examined) …through the channels of photographic production and consumption…” achieved through the creation of a sensation of loss and in-authenticity which permeates the work. the parallel discourse weaving its thread through this creative work and writing is to make visible the construction of identity as a fragile relationship between observers and observed. the colonising/ dominant gaze conceives of the marginalised ethnicity of the subject as both racial inferior and object of fascination. in the famous words of jean-paul sartre: the picturesque has its origins in war and a refusal to understand the enemy: our enlightenment about asia actually came to us first from irritated missionaries and from soldiers. later came travellers – traders and tourists – who are soldiers that have cooled off. pillaging is called shopping…the basic attitude has not changed…the aristocratic from el lissittzky op cit p . (eds) eleanor m. hight and gary d. sampson, colonialist photography: imag(in)ing race and place, routledge, london, , p . hight and sampson op cit p . pleasure of counting differences is savoured. ‘i cut my hair, he plaits his…he uses chopsticks; i write with a goose quill, he draws characters with a paintbrush…” my paintbrush/ stylus is electronic and my canvas/ stage is networked, the objective is to interrogate these polemics through the production of an interactive creative digital text. in using new media to represent my own subjective ethno-cultural identity, as image-maker i am disrupting the subject/ object dichotomy, even if playfully. simultaneously, by articulating my own hybrid masala mix, i am attempting to reveal the construction of racial stereotypes as a cultural, social and political fabrication. inside this inter-textual work, fascination with the ‘spectacle’ of the other is manipulated – through fetishisation and repetition where …the image of the colonial other becomes a trope of desire for the western viewer…through repetitive, fetishistic dissemination of stereotypes, the colonized subject becomes “mummified”… in this artful game, the player/participant is encouraged to engage with a program that makes visible the artifice of representation. historically, the representation of the marginal can be traced back to essentialising “scientific” recording methods of physical anthropology, especially the hierarchical categorization of human specimens, to the popular commercial formats of collection and display: cartes-de-visite, tourist postcards, photograph albums, photographically illustrated books, and magazine advertisements… [pervasively used for the] symbolic and scientific uses of photography for the verification and justification of colonial rule, [addressing] the complex ways in which photographs assist in the construction of a colonial culture. blackbox reflects on the construction of nina’s hybrid east/west identity, through virtual classical indian dance pieces, her father’s stories of growing up in shanghai, russian jazz music, and the modal improvisational influences (taximia) that she experiences in fragments of rembetika greek blues music. jean-paul sartre, “from one china to another”, preface to “d’une chine a l’autre”, by henri cartier- bresson and jean-paul sartre, editions robert delpire, in, colonialism and neo-colonialism, routledge, london, , p masala a hindi indian word denoting spice mix, having culinary usage. (eds) eleanor m. hight and gary d. sampson, colonialist photography: imag(in)ing race and place, routledge, london, , p . (eds) eleanor m. hight and gary d. sampson, colonialist photography: imag(in)ing race and place, routledge, london, , p . (eds) eleanor m. hight and gary d. sampson colonialist photography: imag(in)ing race and place, routledge, london, , p . some years ago i had the task of packing away my grandparent’s possessions after their death in punchbowl, sydney. overwhelmed by the idea of sifting through his father and mother’s personal effects, my father serge ermoll jr asked me to empty the house of family objects. in the process i discovered many valuable documents, musical scores that my composer grandfather had written, letters, portraits, family photographs and objects from their temporary home shanghai, china. figure . sergei and xenia ermolaeff on a city bus shanghai, china, circa s shanghai had always conjured many emotions for me while growing up. it was an idealised space in my grandparent’s eyes and many stories were passed down to me as a child about the metropolis, the struggle to survive and the ultimate expulsion. my grandparents were fortunate to obtain passage on the chan sha ship to australia with sponsorship through the international refugee organisation in . it transported my grandfather sergei ermolaeff, his wife xenia and their son serge jr (my father) via hong kong to sydney. australia adlib, chan sha, interview with serge ermoll jr. by jon rose, australian broadcasting corporation http://www.abc.net.au/arts/adlib/stories/s .htm [accessed february ] figure . international refugee organisation far east mission (iro) document granting mr and mrs sergei ermolaeff and son eligibility for legal and political protection as refugees, shanghai, china, as i sifted through my grandparent’s personal effects, photographs and documents, i realised that the stories i heard growing up were not the wild ramblings of senile refugees, who had been one too many times in and out of mental institutions. xenia had received electro-shock therapy for depression following her arrival in australia and sergei had also been admitted to callan park hospital (now known as the rozelle hospital), sydney for depression. rather, these vivid memories painted a picture of pre-revolutionary shanghai. my grandfather’s musical scores took on a more abstract patina, offering a window into a larger picture of twentieth century revolution and the quasi-colonial outpost of the international settlement and concessions of shanghai in china. discussion of russian jewish refugees in the international settlement shanghai bringing western music to china, in the kofman family story, menorah of fang bang lu online documentary (andrew jakubowicz, writer/producer, and tatiana pentes, multimedia design) http://www.cts .hss.uts.edu.au/shanghaisite/rpath/rgetting/rgetting.htm [accessed july ] figure a. russian from shanghai - sergei ermolaeff snr collage sydney, australia, c s a personal collage on the wall of sergei’s punchbowl home consisted of a photograph of sergei with a cut out picture of generalissimo chiang kai chek pasted on to his heart. as an elderly man he claimed to have played with whitey smith’s band at chiang kai chek’s wedding to mei-lie soong. the piecing together of many old photographs from his shanghai days became, in his old age, a means of expressing his displacement from china, which was a direct result of the communist revolution. chiang kai shek represented the government prior to this displacement and this personal collage reveals sergei’s political inclinations. for me, it was at that moment that sergei’s music and pre-revolutionary chinese pop music became powerful articulations of these wider historical events, a chinese modernity that was suppressed and re-surfaced in contemporary times. i didn’t know whitey smith with c.l. mcdermott, i didn’t make a million, manila, , p - . and tales of old shanghai, www.earnshaw.com/shanghai-ed-india/tales/t-wedding.htm [accessed july ] “the russian revolution sent thousands of white russians in flight to china. in musical matters…the russians were demonstrably less racist than most of the treaty port caucasians. while the most impoverished of this group scandalized other europeans by working as bodyguards and prostitutes for the chinese, others supported themselves as musicians. white russian bands played in shanghai, harbin, qingdao. more classically minded players gave piano or violin lessons to young bourgeois chinese when the shanghai conservatory was established in the s, several russians joined its faculty.” in richard in what form or medium i wanted to represent this story; however, a discovery that coincided with my computer based art studies at university pointed the way. at the university of sydney library, i chanced upon a book entitled shanghai: a century of change in photographs . an uncanny event occurred, i opened the book and staring from its pages was a portrait of my grandfather and his orchestra pictured circa at the majestic hotel, shanghai. i also found a copy of this photograph in captain v.d. jiganoff’s russians in shanghai, . at a later date, i traced the reproduction of this photograph to its original, which i discovered in my grandfather’s possessions. the presence of this photograph underscored the historical fact that the majestic hotel was demolished after the revolution and no longer exists. haunting the colonial hotel ballrooms, entertaining the foreigners, a foreigner himself, manchurian chinese born russian, this photograph of my grandfather sergei seemed part ethnographic relic and part eastern hollywood publicity still. figure b. sergei ermolaeff, permit to drive an automobile in the french concession, shanghai, china, october another fortuitous event occurred in this journey. a friend and colleague of my parents gave me a book entitled sky high to shanghai by frank clune, an account of his oriental travels in the spring of , when he visited tokyo, japan, harbin, curt kraus, pianos and politics in china: middle class ambitions and the struggle over western music, oxford university press, , p . lynn pan, shanghai: a century of change in photographs - , hai-feng publishing co, hong kong, . manchuria and shanghai, china. my friend had stumbled upon this book in a second hand bookshop and opened the pages directly to read this passage: i salved christian conscience by handing out a few sen [to the white russian beggar] before entering the bright lights and blare of serge and his music masters, who were hitting up hot cha cha, with red-hot rhythm. if jimmy bendrodt was up this way, i’m sure he’d have grabbed serge and his music masters for a season in sydney. the fantaisie cabaret has a fame which goes back to the dramatic days of , when the tsarist officers of high degree wickedly waltzed and merrily mazurka’d here with cosmopolitan demi-mondes while the defenders of port arthur waited in vain for the relief that came not. the cabaret is a large hall with tables surrounding the dancing floor to cater for cabareteers. no need to feel lonely here; a score of taxi-dancers are available…their fee for a dance is whatever you like to give them…olga…this cultivated girl, and hundreds like her in harbin, are at their wit’s end to know how to sustain the fading courage of their hearts…the only difference she said between white and red russians is that one has a passport and one has a soul…the cabaret got merrier and merrier. but i got more and more unhappy as olga unfolded her tale of tragedy. serge’s hot cha cha band hit up the rhythm and a singer with a splendid tenor voice made the russian rafters rattle. figure a. sergei ermolaeff and his orchestra, the majestic hotel, shanghai, china, circa my father told me that my grandmother xenia had made her way to shanghai via harbin, with her three sisters from moscow in the early s, to find a husband. sergei and xenia met in a nightclub; there is a family story that she was a dancer or singer there. thus dancing began to connote for me a means of survival, performing, and a way of making a living. the ballroom of my imagination was becoming a space of economic exchange. frank clune, sky high to shanghai, angus and robertson, sydney, , p – . figure b. russian taxi dancers from general jiganoff’s, the russian of shanghai these vestiges of material history form an archive tracing the arrival of western modernity in china. leo ou-fan lee traces this “flowering of a new urban culture in china” in his publication shanghai modern . lee does this by investigating modern chinese popular literature, film advertising, urban spaces, architecture, and fashion. he analyses the dialectics creating a unique chinese modern culture, a melting pot of foreign influences of the west in the international settlement of shanghai, along with the impact of chinese intelligentsia, commercialism, and traditional chinese political and social culture. my grandfather sergei’s jazz orchestra contributed to this modern culture. sergei; chinese born and ethnically russian, possessed no passport and was legally a displaced person, a liminal space occupied by many in those times. mr sokolsky’s ballet, in captain v.d. jiganoff, russians in shanghai, (private publication). , p . leo ou-fan lee, shanghai modern: the flowering of a new urban culture in china - , harvard university press, cambridge, maa, . chapter four: methodological concerns my research methodology is focused on imaging and representing my hybrid cultural origins through the recording of cross-cultural music/dance performances. these performances are framed in the creation of an interactive and non-linear multimedia work blackbox. the performances have been documented through my own participation and observation, using digital film, video, and sound to record and interrogate the following propositions: ( )’the box’ as symbolic reference to hardware/aesthetics and the possibilities of the interactive environment. additionally, the ‘box’ marks ‘one’ from ‘others’ as part of a distinct group, or scientific categorisation; ( ) ‘the song’ as a mode of cultural discourse/ cultural expression, political persuasion, propaganda, particularly in relation to ethnic minorities; ( ) ‘dance forms’ as a symbolic strategy for moving in-between theories and cultural practices; ( ) the ‘digital journey’ as a metaphor for discovery of digital media and different cultural forms; ( ) image/sound/text assemblages, juxtapositions, arrangements as analogous to the compositions both musical/painterly and choreographic; ( ) a self-reflexive program articulating the ‘open’, ambivalent’, and fragmentary’ qualities of the non-sequential narrative; ( ) ‘migration’ as migration of people, music, memories, and the migration of the old media into the new media. blackbox utilises the internet, cd-rom and gallery installation to investigate, publish, and exhibit elements of the digital work, and to document the installation of the artwork. this research also contributes to the study of ‘migration and cultural change’, by looking at the relationship between immigrant cultural production, the host nation, stuart hall, “gramsci’s relevance for the study of race and ethnicity”, in david morley and kuan-hsing chen (eds), stuart hall: critical dialogues in cultural studies, routledge, london, . new media fellow, australia council for the arts, the artists/academic john conomos discusses these ideas in a conversation conducted at sydney college of the arts, university of sydney, september . and cultural change. it explores the genre of ‘electronic writing’, arranging the ensemble of fragments into image/sound/text ‘compositions’, using the musical analogy as an apt metaphor for the processes involved in the creation of the new media text. dance and dancing are central to the formulation of my methodology. dance is used in a literal and metaphoric way to signal the construction of my hybrid cultural origins, and as a performative form documenting the dance between shifting musical genres and cultures, sanity and insanity. the dance between as a research method was sparked by the discovery of a portrait of serge ermoll and his orchestra , a s dance band in the dance halls of shanghai. in an attempt to understand my grandparent’s negotiation between their cultures of origin and their adopted nation, australia, i formulated a way of moving between the real and the artificial. truth about the past, historical certainty became a piecing together, a fabrication of the traces that remained after their death. figure . serge ermoll and his orchestra postcard, shanghai circa these kinds of cultural expressions provide a projection of an imagined ethnic ‘identity’, a desire for the whole, the complete, and ‘the same’, as distinct from the robert van krieken, philip smith (et al), “migration, ethnicity and australian aboriginality”, in sociology: themes and perspectives ( nd edition), australia, . my grandfather’s russian name sergei ermolaeff was anglicised to serge ermoll to cater to the american and british market in the shanghai international settlement. feelings of ‘otherness’ experienced by ethnic minorities in their adopted homelands. their ‘imagined community’ fulfils their need for cultural pride, positive ethnic representation, and self-expression. it allows a space for their struggle for identity and to recuperate fragments of their cultural expression. it allows social dissidence and the dreams, hopes, aspirations and sorrows that are an intrinsic part of living. finally, it allows vestiges of cultural traces to be transported so that these refugees/migrants can find temporary unity by participating in these music/ dance forms. blackbox explores russian émigré, indian, and greek ‘imagined communities’ via the device of the virtual unfolding of three digital boxes: chinesebox, jewelbox, and pandorasbox. it focuses on the musical idiom as a language that speaks of the experience of dislocation and migration. black american jazz travelled across the pacific to japan, and the treaty port of shanghai, where eastern european, philippino, jewish and other immigrants took it up. there are many comparisons between the cultural conditions for the evolution of rembetika (greek blues) and the evolution of african american music and jazz culture. the roots of both forms evolve from songs of ‘struggle’, where the music forms a kind of political resistance and allows the musicians and audience to transcend the realities of oppression. jazz music, has its roots in the black music culture of the united states, and in many ways the greek blues is a comparative form, an articulation of struggle. ironically, both jazz and rembetika originated in a traditional ‘folk’ form but have evolved into more abstract ‘classical’ forms of music in the contemporary context. taximia in rembetika is the elaborate improvisational introduction to a song; in the same way that hindustani music has an introductory alaap. rembetika (the greek blues), travelled to the united states in the ’s with the greek economic migrants/refugees. it developed in the urban greek ghettos of the united states and like modern jazz has seeded many contemporary local variations. benedict anderson, imagined communities: reflections on the origin and spread of nationalism, verso, london, . figure . rembetika dancer in contemporary athens taverna (tavern) from gail holst’s road to rembetika rembetika music consists of songs created to express the joy and despair of greece’s urban refugees and ghetto dwellers in the first half of the th century. rembetika songs, passed along by word of mouth, were a major way of communicating emotions such as patriotism and comradely union among émigré greeks in australia and the u.s.a. the rembetika blues tradition is thus a popular musical form and performance style. in the words of elias petropoulos “…greece is diaspora, scattered all across the world, as communities of political and economic migrants…in a very real sense, as much as a fixed geopolitical entity, greece is an ‘imagined community”… as blackbox research developed from an investigation into multimedia and musical forms, particularly the east/ west dialogue (dialectic), i discovered that one of the reasons i was drawn to hindustani music was that it is based structurally on musical systems that are very close to my own greek rembetika culture. indeed, rembetika is the amalgam of modal and tonal forms of music and sounds 'oriental'. the song that encapsulated this search is one recorded by roza eskenazi entitled "rast gazal" where the two-way relationship between asia minor and greece is vibrantly clear. "rast gazal" gail holst, road to remetika: music of a greek sub-culture, songs of love, sorrow and hashish, denise harvey publisher, limni, evia, greece, , p . elias petropoulos, “introduction” in songs of the greek underworld: the rembetika tradition, (translated by ed emery), saqi books, london, . elias petropoulos op cit. reminded me of the patterns of many odissi dance music items that i studied, particularly the introduction (alaap). blackbox contains my reflections on the odissi/ kuchipudi dance forms and hindustani music. broadly speaking, classical indian dance and music, specifically odissi, while having religious origins in temple worship, re-emerged in modern indian society after british suppression of the ‘mahari’ or ‘devdasi’ traditions, where the form was employed by temple dancers attached to religious deities. odissi, an oral tradition handed down from teacher to pupil is derived from its indian epic basis in mythic and folk tradition, having connections with the village chhau and martial arts practice. this links it with the rembetika form, an urban greek tradition, descended from asia minor. hindustani classical music was brought by the mughal emperors to india from central asia and turkey. like jazz, both these melodies of the ‘modal’ type are not based on scales, in the western sense: …but on modal types which can be written out in the form of a scale but which have characteristic phrases and patterns of movement. certain notes are more important than others; certain relations between notes are stressed. in classical arab music, there were hundreds of these modes or makams and each was felt to have a special character suited to a particular emotion, mood or time of day. just as a classical indian musician has a large number of modal types at his disposal from which he can choose a rag and build a complicated pattern of improvisation, so the arab or turkish musician has a repository of makams. having chosen, he can then explore its possibilities in a taxim, or semi- improvised piece. early rembetika musicians still used the word makam for the modal types but they soon became known as by the greek word thromi – literally roads. the word taxim acquired a greek form taximi (plural taximia)… gail holst, road to rembetika: music of a greek sub-culture, songs of love, sorrow and hashish, denise harvey publisher, limni, evia, greece, , p . holst op cit p - . figure . blackbox interface still from pandorasbox depicting greek diasporic musical and personal effects blackbox aims to negotiate and translate media representations of race and ethnicity by exploring the cultural productions of minority groups. it also provides a means of participating in these representations by taking up “new media” to expose creative gaps, limits, and margins. in many ways this work is an attempt at an independent challenge to media institutions and imagery that have tended to be a white domain, lacking black or marginal representation in their structures and images. blackbox seeks to subvert such institutions by a production that engages with difference, where the production and outcome become a ‘participation’, a point of struggle, negotiation, and site of resistance by ethnic minorities to the power of dominant forces. linda leung, “tactics and technologies of resistance: the web as minority media”, in where am i? locating self and ethnicity on the world wide web, phd thesis, university of east london, may , p . bell hooks, feminist theory: from margin to centre, south end press, u.s.a, , p . linda leung, “tactics and technologies of resistance: the web as minority media”, in where am i? locating self and ethnicity on the world wide web, phd thesis, university of east london, may , p . chapter three: the computer mediated text the new media text is simultaneously non-linear and inter-textual, having its origins in modernist collage and montage aesthetic practices. a number of traditional media paths can be brought together in this new form of electronic writing. the modernist practice of visual montage can be traced to the film concepts espoused by sergei eisenstein in the early th century in russia. film theorist anna chen discusses eisenstein’s seminal work in the early development of film art, referring to him as the founding father of montage editing techniques. these foregrounded the ideological dimensions of cutting sequences of film and the meaning thus created by the formal construction of camera angles forming the frame. editing sequences in film, utilising cutting strategies that juxtaposed images, sounds and texts to create dramatic meaning within the cinematic frame are now synthesised in the virtual editing environment of computer software non-linear editing interfaces. according to chen, traditional theatrical methods were not really transformed in the adaptation of stage productions to film by the early cinematic techniques of foundation practitioners, such as george méliès and the lumière brothers. their mise- en-scène was passive and stationary. it was not until the revolutionary methods of sergei eisenstein and american d.w. griffith that camera position, movement, and angles began to be consciously used to construct an ideological space for the viewer. in the creation of moving images, camera zooming and tracking, close ups and extreme long shots of actors and objects, and editing (montage) produced juxtaposition and meaning, a film language expressing intellectual and political statements. …eisenstein traced the origins of montage back to literature. parallel montage - cutting away to simultaneous action - can be summed up simply by the literary device, 'meanwhile, back at the ranch...' as for the close up, eisenstein cites dickens, who opened the cricket on the hearth with a griffith-esque close up: 'the kettle began it...' lev manovich, “avant-garde as software”, from new vision to new media, http://www.manovich.net/ articles [accessed november, ]. sergei eisenstein, 'dickens, griffith, and the film today', film form, dennis dobson, , p , quoted in anna chen op cit. http://pubs.socialistreviewindex.org.uk/isj /chen.htm [accessed january ]. meanwhile, back in russia, the young revolutionary directors - including pudovkin, kuleshov and eisenstein - studied the old masters and then resolved to step up the director's degree of control over his material: they planned, by means of new editing methods, not only to tell stories but also to interpret and draw intellectual conclusions from them... [they] saw themselves as propagandists and teachers rather than as conventional entertainers. as such, their task was twofold: to use the film medium as a means of instructing the masses in the history and theory of their political movement; and to train a young generation of filmmakers to fulfil this task. as new media theorist lev manovich argues, imaging and audio software programs such as adobe photoshop, special effects programs such as adobe after effects, director mx, flash mx and soundedit or pro tools audio editing software simulate the multi-track environment codified and theorised by eisenstein in his early stylistic and innovative film work. the convergence of media into the software environment has transformed the capabilities for digital media production. it is possible to shoot a digital film/video and post-produce the media on the desktop of a multimedia computer. manovich discusses the return of the word “new” in the s. this term, though non- aligned with a specific media type, such as photography, electronic print, or cinema/film but used for generic media is now perhaps replaced by the term ‘digital media’. it began to refer to the potential neo-avant garde practices and radical cultural innovations inherent in these forms of electronic media - cd-rom, dvd, url web sites, computer software games, hypertext and hypermedia applications such as cinematic, design, architectural, graphic and textual experiments. examples are dziga vertov’s quick cutting film techniques in the man with a movie camera (soviet union, ), and split screen experiments. imaging programs and moving image (compositing) editing software programs, such as adobe after effects, re-interpret, coalesce and mingle montage film making techniques in the televisual, video and internet spheres. the anna chen, “in perspective: sergei eisenstein”, in the eisenstein collection, tartan video, faber and faber, u.k, july http://pubs.socialistreviewindex.org.uk/isj /chen.htm [accessed january ]. lev manovich, “avant-garde as software”, from new vision to new media, http://www.manovich.net/ articles [accessed november, ]. manovich op cit. manovich op cit. design, arrangement, composition, and assemblage of fragmentary media types in a virtual system to be uniquely explored by each player/participant, can be likened to the improvisational qualities inherent in the diasporic musical forms explored in the blackbox program. these ideas inform my creative work, whether internet or disc based. my central concern is to acknowledge the parent media and cultures, as well as, to engage with these forms in the production of a new digital text. the software programs that i use metaphorically unleash the ‘genie’ from the ‘lamp’. the ‘genie’ becomes the generically coded other. sanskrit, greek, and russian (chinese) cultures stand in for the orient, the ‘foreign’, as represented in orientalist styles in western music, film and literature. however, the ‘lamp’ becomes the ‘box’ – the jewelbox, the chinesebox, the pandorasbox, and the ‘black box’ of the program that i am creating. metaphorically, the player/ participant simulates the mobile agents moving through the electronic service frameworks, entities consisting of code, data and control information , migrating between different nodes in the system. the objective of blackbox is to deploy interactive media in the production of a creative work (image/text/sound) that reflects on the construction of self, representation of identity and the documentary form of the new media environment. in this process i analyse existing representations of ethnicity on the internet, and i pay attention to the creative component in the production of a program that is self-reflexive, that expresses the ‘open’, ‘ambivalent’, ‘ambiguous’, and ‘fragmentary’ formal qualities of the non- sequential narrative. fritz hohl, “time limited blackbox security: protecting mobile agents from malicious hosts”, in giovanni vigna (ed), mobile agents and security, (lecture notes in computer science; vol. ), berlin, , p - . stuart hall, “gramsci’s relevance for the study of race and ethnicity”, in david morley and kuan-hsing chen (eds), stuart hall: critical dialogues in cultural studies, routledge, london, . in the contemporary australian context, the project of representing the dance and music culture of diasporic communities in relation to other forms of émigré music culture, namely the incorporation, appropriation, and expropriation of non-western musical and cultural forms and western representation of jazz, reveals ‘the west’/’the east’ distinction as not purely a geographical terrain, but a cultural locale upon which complex desires are played out. figure . blackbox interface still from chinesebox pathway hall op cit. . hypertextuality/ intertextuality in the quest for characterisation of the non-sequential narrative, eastgate systems online journal http://www.tekka.net/ defines the fragmentary and open ended hypertext as prefigured in medieval manuscripts and attributes to it the following characteristics: a. non-linearity: multiple choices in the viewing order of blocks of text, illustrations, marginalia, and the links between the items. b. multi-vocality: the several relationships that are possible between the text and the illustrations, i.e., whether illustrations provide a literal equivalent of the text, or whether they provide additional information not included in the text. c. inter-textuality: references to other sources mentioned explicitly in the text or implied in the text. d. decenteredness: the lack of one dominant, unifying centre and the ability of the text to offer different paths of investigation to different readers. this online journal, a portal for creative hypertext work and criticism, argues that medieval manuscripts …act as agents of historical and spiritual illumination, possessing a human feel and touch, with each one being a unique creation of a unique scribe and illuminator, a piece of art, and, frequently, its creator's masterpiece. this enables them to resemble contemporary st century electronic internet hypertexts, because they: …like hypertextual websites or electronic books, consist of composite works of different layers of texts, illustrations, marginal and interlinear glosses and annotations. medieval bibles, chronicles, works of the law, and textbooks present examples of a high level of hypertextuality. tekka online journal, main street, watertown ma usa. email: editor@tekka.net info@tekka.net voice: + ( ) - ( ) - . http;//www.tekka.net [accessed october ]. http;//www.tekka.net [accessed october ]. figure . russian ballerina asja pictured in blackbox interface still from chinesebox . aesthetics of interactive multimedia melanie swalwell argues in her thesis aesthetics and hyper/aesthetics: rethinking the senses in contemporary media contexts, that the ‘immersive sensory experience’ of the interactive environment of convergent media is mediated through the intelligent technological systems of the computer and has produced new kinds of artificial (virtual) engagement: …[the] ability to provide a greater range of sensory stimuli, all at once. as a result, claims were made by promoters of various media – new and old – that consumers were ‘driving’ convergence by their demands for “more realistic and ‘immersive’ (multisensory) experiences… swalwell explores the implication that immersion resulted from stimulating all the senses, often to heretofore-unimagined degrees. the production of creative and experimental art draws from a multitude of disciplines and has a number of various outcomes which include cyberart, digital art, web art, information art, interactive art, active art, reactive art, and connective networked art . however, these categories, compiled under the rubric ‘digital artifact’ and non-material art object, can be traced back to experiments in modernist avant-garde conceptual art: …interrogating the relationship between ideas and art, conceptual art de-emphasizes the value traditionally accorded to the materiality of art objects. it focuses, rather, on examining the preconditions for how meaning emerges in art, seen as a semiotic system. no author given (press release) “philips digital convergence product defines multimedia home cinema”, http://www-us.sv.philips.com/news/press, august , [accessed / / ], quoted in aesthetics and melanie swalwell, hyper/aesthetics: rethinking the senses in contemporary media contexts, phd thesis, university of technology, sydney, , p . gerhard bachfischer, “a constant flow of thoughts”, unpublished creative journal, master of interactive multimedia, iml, university of technology, sydney, , p . “…the “dematerialization” of the art object theorized by lucy lippard and john chandler in “the dematerialization of art”, art international (february ) and reinscribed in lippard’s six years: the dematerialization of the art object, - ( ), [where] “dematerialization of art” can be seen as a “strategy for repositioning art in relation to politics – not a shift from material per se, but a shift from an artworks value as an object of commercial exchange to its value as aesthetic and political interchange”, in edward a. shanken, “art in the information age: technology and conceptual art”, art and culture papers, electronic art and animation catalog: siggraph, , p - . in the late s, one of the pioneers of the experimental meeting of “software’, “information technology” and “art” in the museum environment was jack burnham. his focus was the design of software to function as a testing ground for public interaction with “information systems and their devices”. his curation of the exhibition software, information technology: its new meaning for art at the jewish museum in new york ( ) exemplifies his project. …burnham conceived of “software” as parallel to the aesthetic principles, concepts, or programs that underlie the formal embodiment of the actual art objects, which in turn parallel “hardware”. [see “the aesthetics of intelligent systems”; “system esthetics” ( ); and “real time systems” ( ) are the modernist experiments that foregrounded new media relevant to all cultures, particularly in the era of technological “have” and “have-nots”, and can they be read cross-culturally? blackbox attempts to extend new media to incorporate representations of groups and content that call attention to ethnicity and to piece together the disparate threads of identity, as represented by the protagonist nina’s quest for self- understanding. i have drawn upon my reading of jacques derrida’s theorising of the hypertext, and his recognition that montage like textuality marks or foregrounds the writing process. the assemblage of nina’s cultural identity, through exploration of the program, has been designed as an inter-lacing structure, weaving together the different threads, which bind her into a multi-layered and multi-valent subject. george p. landow explores these ideas in his seminal text “hypertext as collage- writing”, where he traces contemporary aesthetic impulses in the hypertext to the a. shanken, “art in the information age: technology and conceptual art”, art and culture papers, electronic art and animation catalog: siggraph, , p . jack burnham, “notes on art and information processing”, software: quoted in edward fry, on the future of art, viking, new york, , p . jacques derrida’s speech and phenomena quoted in george landow’s “hypertext as collage-writing”, in peter lunenfeld (ed), the digital dialectic: new essays on new media, mit press, massechussetts, , p . modernist avant garde practice of collage, in particular the painterly works of picasso and braque, specifically picasso’s still life with chair caning ( ). collage. . the action of gluing. collage d’une affiche. state of what is glued. – arts. papiers colles, a composition made of elements glued on a canvas (possibly integrated in the paint). les collages de braque, de picasso. – techn. assemblage through adhesion… …at this point, some of the similarities between hypertext and collage will have become obvious. having first appropriated jois’s materials by placing them in a web, and then adding materials that they seemed to demand. i found that, like all hypertexts, it had become open-ended, a kind of velcro-text to which various kinds of materials began attaching themselves. first, i included the discussion of derrida and appropriation from the electronic version of my book, hypertext: the convergence of contemporary critical theory and technology ( ) that i used as an epigraph to this essay. i also added definitions of hypertext and a list of qualities that it shares with collage. when the american computer scientist vannevar bush published his conceptualisation of “memex” (memory extension) in his posthumous article “as we may think” in the atlantic monthly ( ) , could he have imagined that a version of memex would prefigure and perhaps influence the formation of the contemporary internet? “bush was the first to realise the potential of storing items of information with built-in associative links to other data. he never actually built a real memex, but the idea of such a system was a driving force in the development of hypermedia.” michael k. buckland discusses the visuality and the role of photography in the memex system of document retrieval. bush's memex draws on two main sources: his view of associative trails as the mechanism by which the brain works; and photographic and other technology available in the late s. the features noted above, and other refinements such as the small camera strapped to the researcher's forehead to photograph anything he or she looked at, were more or less feasible individually with the technology of , and although combining them into a single workstation would probably not have been practical. george landow, “hypertext as collage-writing”, in peter lunenfeld (ed), the digital dialectic: new essays on new media, mit press, massechussetts, , p . landow op cit, p . memex and beyond http://www.cs.brown.edu/memex/ “…research, educational, and collaborative web site integrating the historical record of and current research in hypermedia. the name honors the publication of vannevar bush's article "as we may think" in which he proposed a hypertext engine called the memex…” [accessed july ]. bob cotton, and richard oliver, “media chronofile”, in understanding hypermedia : multimedia origins, internet futures, phaidon press, london, , p . bob cotton, and richard oliver op cit, p . in bush was, in fact, responsible for the design and construction of a document retrieval machine much faster and technologically more advanced than anything previously attempted. this prototype formed the context, the recognizable technological basis (recognizable in cimi's drawings), and, presumably, the stimulus for his think- piece "as we may think." figure . vannevar bush's differential analyzer, http://www.acmi.net.au/aic/bush_berrnier.html [accessed february ] figure . vannevar bush's memex head camera http://www.acmi.net.au/aic/bush_berrnier.html [accessed february ] in vannevar bush’s words from “as we may think” he explicates his theory of associative thinking in the human mind. the human mind does not work that way [i.e. linearly]. it operates by association. with one item in its grasp, it snaps instantly to the next that is suggested by the association of thoughts, in accordance with some intricate web of trails carried by the cells of the brain. it has other characteristics, of course; trails that are not frequently followed are prone to fade, items are not fully permanent, memory is transitory. michael k. buckland, emanuel goldberg, electronic document retrieval, and vannevar bush's memex, school of library and information studies, university of california at berkeley, berkeley, ca http://www.sims.berkeley.edu/~buckland/goldbush.html, [accessed january ]. vannevar bush, “as we may think”, the atlantic monthly, july , part , http://www.theatlanticmonthly.com/unbound/flashbks/computer/bushf.htm [accessed january ]. figure . vannevar bush's memex http://www.acmi.net.au/aic/bush_berrnier.html [accessed february ] in the contemporary media setting, traditional media forms such as radio drama have been significantly affected and transformed by the hypertextual structure. an example in traditional media is the program the wheel of fortune , the british broadcasting corporation’s (bbc) debut interactive radio drama. audiences tuned in and had the ability to switch randomly, between key points in the narrative, the program responding to the listeners input, opening up the potential for multi-various non- sequential combinations in apprehending the radio drama program. the objective of blackbox has been to create a similar non-linear narrative that is constructed to operate using associations as a structural device in the non-sequential unfolding of the program. these non-sequential associative links provide a structural model for new cultural forms, interactive devices and media, and are foregrounded historically in literary innovations. professor ross gibson draws an analogy between the evolution of interactive media and the rise of the novel in his paper “the rise of digital multimedia systems”. investigating ian watt’s analysis of the rise of the novel ( ), gibson is more interested in examining the psychic, political and philosophical transformations that prefigured the development of new electronic cultural forms. gibson argues that: the wheel of fortune http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio /wheel/ authored by nick fisher, british broadcasting corporation, radio and , and september . http://www.eastgate.com/hypertextnow/archives/fisher.html eastgate systems http://www.eastgate.com/hypertextnow/archives/fisher.html [accessed january ]. this research was inspired by the teaching program developed for megan heyward’s writing and new media subject, humanities and social sciences, university of technology, sydney, . …we can gain insight into periods of psychic, political and philosophical flux by studying how aesthetic and semantic systems engage with the intellect and the sensorium of the user, we can understand the temper of the times. when a new form of art or popular communication arises and takes hold, it reflects changes that have recently occurred or are presently occurring in psychology and society. equally important, the rise of a popular new cultural form not only reflects but also adds momentum to the changes that define the turbulent times … through this process, the novel was eventually superseded (which is not to say eliminated) by a new predominant form, cinema, which emerged at a time when individual psychologies were changing yet again, this time to absorb the modern world’s kinetics (hence the name: cinema). here was a cultural form able to represent and analyse the tumult of sensory ‘attack’ that assailed every individual psyche once the speedy, mechanical modes of transport, communication and commodity production became widespread during the industrial revolution. thus a parallel can be drawn between the psychological transformations that have evolved from contemporary technological innovations in capitalist cultures and the kinds of cultural shifts in thinking, art, literature and architecture that marshall berman elucidates in all that is sold melts into air. berman’s analysis details the cultural articulation of modernity and the political and demographic dimensions of this shift. these reflections on previous technological transformations and their cultural implications have interesting resonances with present day situations. . tracing a digital media map in the production of blackbox, the legacy of contemporary practitioners, scholarship, and critical thinking in the field have shaped the ideas, conceptualisation, and production process. in the current australian setting, the publication of new media has emerged from the seeds of public sector funding and academic research. the australian film commission, the australia council for the arts, and the australian research council to name a few, have created a fertile ground for the cross-fertilisation of traditional and new forms of interactive media and for their publication on the internet, disc-based cd-rom, and dvd. a digital media map of recent interactive works published and distributed in australia clearly shows a boom during the s of titles authored for an audience with interactive participation as the primary artistic mode. ross gibson, “the rise of digital multimedia systems”, in ross gibson and ernest edmonds (eds), interaction: systems, practice and theory, a creativity and cognition symposium, dynamic design research group, creativity and cognition studio, powerhouse museum and university of technology sydney, sydney, - november . [my italics] marshall berman, all that is solid melts into air: the experience of modernity, verso, united kingdom, . the recent decision by the australia council for the arts in december to dismantle the new media arts board prompted heated debate regarding public funding policy for “new media art forms”, creating a lively polemic by theorists, artists, policy makers and other stake holders about the identity papers of “new media arts”. clearly the term and genre of “new media” have to respond to the ways in which different cultural producers take up creative digital technologies to enable communication and information technology, as a means of story-telling in the production of digital film and artworks. this cultural debate raises questions of ownership, control and definition of the means of production of new media. like the evolution of all new technologies, historically, this particular debate reveals “new media” and “digital media” as a site of contestation. can we speak about these new forms as a single genre, or is it more fruitful to understand them as analogous to other communication revolutions taken up by different sectors for different purposes? the following electronic conversations sourced from this contemporary debate reveals the issues addressed by some of the more prolific and high profile australian and expatriate thinkers and producers in this field. document ( ) a public internet posting on fibreculture list by geert lovinck from geert@xs all.nl sent monday, january , : pm to fibreculture@lists.myspinach.org subject re: ::fibreculture:: ozco responds to new media artists (theses written for a future of the arts project, but perhaps also useful within the current new media arts debate. /geert) three answers to the question: what is future art? i. leaders of future art institutions will have to be truly multi-disciplinary and multi-platform. they will reconcile local, regional, national and global flows of creativity. future art will be both individual and collaborative -- in collaborative ? in fact, it will be hard to distinguish the two. in order to get there, dominating prevailing categories such as 'visual arts' and 'contemporary arts' will have to be abolished. these are cold war terms, invented to compete with neighbouring forms of artistic expression. what will count is quality, aesthetics and above all, a critical approach to society. the locality will be able to synthesize interests in art as objects and the ever-growing rapidly expanding variety of networked, mediated forms of expression. ii. there is a growing tension, not to say open rivalry between art forms and their institutions. this can mainly be blamed largely on the outgoing post-war -generation and their greedy careerism that is now aimed at maximizing their superannuation. their collective metamorphosis from progressive and experimental to a defensive, conservative attitude is phenomenal. why should most of the funding these days go to opera? can somebody please explain this? why should techno and 'urban culture' be left to the market? there is, for instance, no philosophical ground to distinguish so-called contemporary from so-called new media art. they have so much common ground. the successful integration of s and s video art into the artistic mainstream is a good example is and a hopeful sign. perhaps luhmann and bourdieu can help us out here. art struggles these days can no longer be understood in metaphysical terms because they primarily grow out of petty politics. art can only be understood within institutional contexts. even the market plays a secondly role. most art historians and critics are useless to inform us [sic] about these underlying tendencies, because they are part of the existing system and only reproduce existing tensions and confusions. iii. the true potential of new media art will lie in its ability to disappear. new media arts is a hegelian project, aimed at its own transcendence. it is not a goal in itself, even though it obviously has self-referential tendencies, like all activities in society. in the short term, new media arts sets out aims to discover the inner logic, standards and architectures of new technologies, but that process can only last for a while. the phase of experimentation will necessarily come to an end. its findings will dissipate in society. ::posted on ::fibreculture:: mailinglist for australasian ::critical internet theory, culture and research ::(un) subscribe info and archive: http://www.fibreculture.org ::please send announcements to separate mailinglist: document ( ) ----------------------------------------------------------------- from melinda rackham <melinda@subtle.net> sent sunday, january , : pm to fibreculture@lists.myspinach.org subject ::fibreculture:: ozeculture conference the ozeculture suggestion is a good idea and yes, education, rather than confrontation of an uninformed audience is absolutely the way to go. as a networked artist / independent content producer i wouldn't mind talking about the situation with net art and the decline of australian online arts, and the booming situation in other countries where state or private donors are investing in them. i don’t believe people don’t like or don’t care about media art… its that they don't know what it is. once exposed to a genre people start to think differently about it. it becomes familiar, un- threatening, useful, entertaining and absolutely worth keeping. we do live in a nation obsessed with border control… so networked, distributed and media art has to be on the inside of that perimeter. i have attended one ozeculture as a participating artist, and i must say that the art sessions seemed to be attended in the majority by people i already knew…. so it’s no wonder that we independents aren't out there informing other sectors of what we do… and maybe that has to change... and one way to do that is with the assistance of the funding organisations, anat, oz co, state, etc who might like to review their conference funding strategies to maximise australian artists opportunities of appearing and promoting locally by having separate local and international funding categories. melinda dr melinda rackham artist | curator | producer www.subtle.net/empyre -empyre- media forum document ( ) ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ online interview with mckenzie wark by tatiana pentes from ken wark <warkk@newschool.edu> sent friday, december , : am to tatiana.pentes@uts.edu.au subject re: some thoughts mckenzie wark ~~~~~~~a hacker manifesto http://www.hup.harvard.edu/ >>> tatiana pentes <tatiana.pentes@uts.edu.au> / / : pm dear ken [tatiana]---one of the things that i am exploring in my creative research is the possibility of integrating the social research into an audiovisual interactive online form.... in you opinion have researchers in the field started to produce this kind of work...can you point my cursor to some such projects? [ken]---- i can't say i've found much along these lines, although i do like the work of chris csikzentmihalyi: http://web.media.mit.edu/~csik/research/ [tatiana]---in your own theoretical writing you speak of new kinds of existence in the communications spheres....is this [post-human] virtual engagement a third space...or do you understand this to be connected with the lived experiences of grounded cultures? [ken]---- i never liked the term post-human. it leaves intact the assumption that there was once a humanism. it seems to me we made our pact with the nonhuman , years ago, with the beginnings of agriculture. i do argue that we have created a third nature. second nature was the struggle to wrest freedom from necessity by collective labor. it produces the built environment. but it also produces new necessities, new alienations. third nature, starting with the telegraph, telephone, television -- all the way to telecommunications, tries to overcome the contradictions of second nature by building a third, based on the techniques of telesthesia -- perception at a distance. this of course brings a new series of contradictions in its wake. but just as second nature dominates nature, so third nature dominates second nature. the materiality of nature does not go away, it is just subjected to ever more abstract forms of power. [tatiana] you are famously quoted as saying something such as...."we no longer have roots we have aerials [antennae] how has this philosophy evolved to encompass the kinds of engagements that now occur in real- time on the internet? [ken]---- we no longer have roots, we have aerials. we no longer have origins, we have terminals. we no longer have the family silver, just the satellite dish. the anxieties about identity, roots, authentic culture arise precisely because these things are no longer possible. of course they were never really possible, but now even the illusion is wearing off. modernity was a one- way ticket. there's no getting off the roller-coaster . mckenzie wark as these three documents attest, the genre of new media and digital media art is being widely debated in the australian public sphere. as editor of realtime magazine keith gallasch reports in australia council restructure: australia council unplugged (appendix ii), a meeting of new media and digital media artists and theorists heatedly debated the notion of what constitutes this form of cultural production and how it should be funded in the public sector and the future direction of public policy on ‘new media’. digital media has been taken up across all sectors of the community inter/nationally, by government, corporations, and community players including artists. it is no longer an emerging form and the discussion is perhaps more about where control and ownership of these media reside, both economically and aesthetically. creative digital media technologies constitute a communications revolution with the development of new cultural artefacts. they are also being used to communicate in existing traditional media forms such as radio, television, and print. the explicit and specific capacities of these convergent media are not exclusive to the creative realm of the arts. as gallasch’s article explores, new media and digital media constitute a field constantly being re-defined and re-negotiated. gallasch’s cultural commentary suggests that it has become anachronistic to refer to the production of digital content through the technologies of interactive multimedia as ‘new media’. this is clear from the ways in which government policy defines its public agenda and funding. while there may be a strong negative reaction to political change by sections of the creative sector in australia, perhaps this transformation is in response to the global culture defining the borders and boundaries between traditional media and the ways in which they are converging to generate, perhaps not a ‘genre’ that makes claims to “new-ness’, but rather incorporates the various ways in which the parent media and art forms take up these new technologies in the production, creation, distribution and exhibition of digital content. perhaps we need keith gallasch, “australia council restructure: australia council unplugged”, realtime, february/ march, . (appendix ii) http://www.realtimearts.net/rt /gallasch_ozcorestructure.html [accessed june ] meeting convened by the australian network for art and technology (anat), dlux media arts, performance space, experimenta, maap (media arts asia pacific) and realtime magazine at the paddington (returned servicemans league) rsl, sydney on january , . to refer to this convergence and the new cultural artefacts emerging from it as “digital media” as distinct from “new media”. it seems there no longer exists a specific category of digital cultural artefact, rather there are hybrid forms emerging from within the various traditional media that exploit digital potentials. artists will continue to take up all manner of materials in the production of creative work. inter-disciplinary and collaborative art production across genres and media will also continue. the political debate surrounding the branding of a “new media” genre in the local australian context signals a wider debate about ownership and access to the means of production and takes place whenever the evolution of new technologies has implication for new forms of cultural production. . think piece the gestures of the body in interactive cross-cultural storytelling the objectives of blackbox are twofold in regard to the narrative perspective. on the one hand the program is revealed through the user/player’s touch and interaction with the electronic screen space. on the other hand the story uncovers the subject of the narrative through dance and the movement of the human body as a mode of expressing stories of diaspora. the program unfolds from the perspective of the protagonist nina. the player/participant discovers her “otherness” and culture through her eyes. nina narrates the story observing and relating her interpretation of that cultural performance. the structure of the story resembles the way in which memories surface for us in a non- sequential manner. cassell and mcneill argue that storytelling is structured on multiple levels, drawing together perceptions of time and space, perspective, distance between narrator and narrated, and the integration of the sequential and the non-sequential, the verbal and the nonverbal in the structuring of the narrative: …when we add gestures to speech, we shed light on many of the same questions that have been the focus of attention by narratologists. by adding the dimension of hands in motion, we clarify the issue of perspective, in that the speakers, by way of use of their hands may convey…the issue of point of view…. hand gestures clarify whether or not the performer is narrating as the subject herself or whether she is narrating as observer. “gesture and the poetics of prose” explores the idea that narrative language has a -d structure that is ‘imagistic’, both visual and kinesic and either holistic or analytic. in summary, the paper argues that narration has many properties that remain unchanged regardless of genre; storytelling is a social activity; physical gestures are as much part of narrative communication as speech; gestures provide a more complex and complete shape of the narrator’s speech, because gestures are not merely the a translation of speech into a kinesic medium but provide something supplementary to the verbal storytelling. for example, in the exploration of blackbox, the player/participant is justine cassell and david mcneill, “gesture and the poetics of prose”, poetics today, : , porter institute for poetics and semiotics, u.s.a, fall, . experiencing the story through the subjective intervention of their own hand/ cursor/ mouse and thus by the sense of touch. cassell and mcneill’s thesis is that analysis of language combined with gesture provides a binocular vision, a new way of seeing, perceiving and understanding storytelling. i propose that physical actions accompanying speech patterns, and dramatic gestural movements in dance forms (eastern and western), spontaneous or choreographed, resemble the interactive design of an electronic space, a choreographed terrain for the player to explore through tactile engagement with the program using the movement of the hand/cursor/ mouse. “gesture and the poetics of prose” defines narrative as the representation of real, hyperreal, and fictitious events experienced by the subject in time and space, presupposing a ‘macrostructure’ from which those events are narrated. when designing an electronic text, in the interactive medium, the notion of the ‘macrostructure’ is provided by the architecture of the computer program and realised in the interface design, where movement from screen surface to screen surface (and the design of this experience) can be likened to the role of the narrator in traditional forms of media. …the represented events, agents, times, and places are selected from the “paradigms” of such possible structures, in order to be combined in the “syntagma” of the discourse. no choice is innocent: all that takes place on the linear axis of the narrative produced in real time draws from and also participates in the atemporal, a linear organization that we may call simply narrative structure…. when designing a multimedia game/ program the primary mode of apprehension occurs through the haptic (hand) and thus the bodily activity and sense of touch (tactility) makes more complex the traditional delivery of the narrative experience. the material is triggered by the player/participants responsiveness to the programmed content. as distinct from reading a text or apprehending a performance, the player/participant must learn a set of preconceived strategies/devices designed by the program makers before there can be meaningful engagement with the cultural artefact. a more social interactionist work on gesture as an alternative to the social psychological treatments of cassell and mcneill can be found in charles goodwin’s ‘pointing as situated practice’ at http://www.sscnet.ucla.edu.clic/cgoodwin/ [accessed december ]. cassell and mcneill op cit p . …in the case of primary learning, the child learns at the same time to speak the language (which is only ever presented in action, in his own or other people’s speech) and to think in (rather than with) the language… belief is thus an inherent part of belonging to a field. in its most accomplished form – that is, the most naïve form…that is why one can not enter into this magic circle by an instantaneous decision of the will, but by birth or by a slow process of co-option and initiation which is equivalent to a second birth…practical belief is not a ‘state of mind’, still less a kind of arbitrary adherence to a set of instituted dogmas and doctrines (‘beliefs’), but rather a state of the body…enacted belief, instilled by childhood learning that treats the body as a living memory pad, an automation that ‘leads’ the mind unconsciously along with it’, and as a repository for the most precious values, is the form par excellence of the ‘blind or symbolic thought’ (cogitatio caeca vel symbolica)…the body believes in what it plays at: it weeps if it mimes grief. it does not represent what it performs, it does not memorize the past, it enacts the past, bringing it back to life. what is ‘learned by body’ is not something that one has, like knowledge that can be brandished, but something that one is… if the body is an amalgam of the traces of its enacted past, its physical, psychological and spiritual experiences, then these experiences are resurrected and ordered in the construction of narrative text. i am interested in how this understanding of the body can inform the production of narrative, and its implications for the development of interactive storytelling in the digital environment, particularly in representing physical performance. malcolm le grice argues in “a non-linear tradition – experimental digital cinema” that ‘interactivity’ and ‘non-linearity’ are not separated in the realisation of new digital cinema. in the search for a precursor to ‘interactivity’, le grice identifies the player/participant's ability to modify the cultural artefact as genuinely new territory. however, ‘non-linearity’ is prefigured in oral myth, cinematic and literary structures that break with ‘single-track’, ‘single-resolution narrative’ as exemplified in experimental film, video, and writing genres. le grice identifies the technological ability to edit moving-image in a non-linear and networking environment has enabled the production of specific interactive cultural objects, such as: online documentary, information websites, commercial and art cd-roms, dvd, and computer programs. additionally, it cassell and mcneill op cit p . malcolm le grice, experimental cinema in the digital age, british film institute, london, . lev manovich, “new media versus cyberculture”, in “new media from borges to html”, (commissioned for the new media reader, edited by noah wardrip-fruin and nick montfort, mit press, . is the ‘responsiveness’ of the program to the player/participant and the development of narrative options that have transformed the possibilities of narrativity in the digital environment. le grice also asks the big question, is linearity synonymous with narrative? are there forms of sequential structures that are linear but not narrative? can concepts of dramaturgy be applied to linear structures that are non-narrative? he answers this by identifying two broad directions in experimental cinema that relate to non-linearity: ( ) abstraction (anti-narrative), in the form of non-representational imagery or work derived from ‘painting’ and ‘music’, based on colour and shape, movement and rhythm, and works resisting narrative, for example, the theoretical writings of fernand leger or dziga vertov, which are radical interventions, aesthetic, ideological, and political, and ( ) the break with dominant narrative forms, for example, those incorporating photographic representations which refuse depiction of physical space adhering to perspectival conventions, where the narrative coherence is conveyed by sequential connections to represent temporal events and their ‘causal’ relationships. thus the story or plot may become a schema made up of the events of ‘causal’ sequence. …the narration…may re-order the disclosure of these events, through representation by recollection, premonition, or separate exclusive viewpoints – flashback, jump cut, parallel action – and may incorporate the represented subjectivity of the narrator or the subjectivity of the reader. both plot and narration may conform to structures of dramaturgy – the controlled psychological effect of phasing the release of information to create intrigue, suspense, apprehension and pleasure in resolution. the argument is that these narrative devices structure for the viewer/ audience the experience of the cultural object. the identification of the audience with the characters’ point of view is part of the ideological inevitability of the filmmaking process. interactive media and the technological ability to pre-program non-sequential participation and responsiveness within the program have opened up the potential for representation of multiple perspectives and points of view, different relationships of engagement with the digital data, the foregrounding of tactile response with computer interaction, and the le grice op cit p . expression of text on screen and sound, music, and the spoken word, which have been absent in traditional film and video practices. this situation has produced a different kind of engagement with the digital material. this engagement is at a fundamental level ‘physical’ and is distinguished from other kinds of sensorial experiences by the ability of the programmer/ program maker to relinquish absolute control over the apprehension of the program and the spatial relationship of the data on the screen. the unfolding of the material is designed from the assemblage of ‘fragments’ with which the player/participant can engage, enhancing the juxtapositions created in the montage, producing meaning and creating ‘motivation’. le grice argues that film experiments, once acts of resistance, have formed new formal models, foregrounding the kinds of screen events experienced in interactive media, such as mathematical systems, randomness, musical analogy, unconstrained subjectivity, “creating conditions which counteract and create alternatives to narrative structure.” he traces a lineage of non-narrative but representational work from dadaist and surrealist films such as rene claire’s entr’acte ( ), salvador dalí and luis buñuel’s un chien andalou ( ) and l’age d’or ( ) and germaine dulac’s the seashell and the clergyman ( ). he also points to the coincidence of this cultural production with the emergence of psychoanalysis in works such as alain resnais’ last year at marienbad ( ), and maya deren’s meshes of the afternoon ( ). these films employ ‘spiral’, ‘matrix’, ‘psycho-associative’ devices, and the exploration of ‘verticality’ as distinct from the horizontal trajectory of conventional narrative. psychoanalysis itself questions the way in which linearity in the narrative is capable of representing the underlying causal structures. its reference to dreams and free association are both instances where dominant forms of causal representation are loosened or dissolved to permit the cross-reference between layers of memory in turn to create different connective hierarchies. the cultural conditions of modernity, producing creative and political movements that sought to disrupt one single spatial/ temporal viewpoint, or a single unifying form (eg. experimental cinema), begins to enable the articulation of difference from within le grice op cit p . le grice op cit p . their dominant cultures. in the digital and interactive media domain, this remains the key challenge; how can developers create ‘content’ that can be comprehended across cultural divides? instead of a radical intervention, these discussions produce multiple viewpoints and perspectives. they attempt ‘authoring’ or content development that is comprehensible beyond the local environment and across cultures, particularly in the global context of distribution of digital content on the internet. part two blackbox: creative production chapter five: blackboxes – digital media as a journey of discovery figure . blackbox interface still from jewelbox fritz hohl defines the blackbox idea as an agent where only input and output can be observed. hohl also refers to “…the blackbox test, its aim is to determine characteristics of the inside of a “blackbox” by executing the box with different input parameters and by watching the effects. the recorded reactions can be formal results like output values or characteristic “activity patterns”. the creative text moves across and draws from a complex of disciplines, discourses, and references. these however, are realised primarily through the lens of visual arts practice. the term black box resonates with notions of flight, the voice and aircraft instrument data recorder that archives all flight data , in the event of interface still from jewelbox depicting a silver spice box from north india (courtesy dr. devleena ghosh), a classical indian odissi dancer, chitritta mukerjee performing konarak kanthi dance item. fritz hohl, “time limited blackbox security: protecting mobile agents from malicious hosts”, in giovanni vigna (ed), mobile agents and security, (lecture notes in computer science; vol. ), berlin, , - . the 'black box' “was invented by australian dr david warren in . he was part of a team working to uncover the cause of a series of british comet jet airliner crashes when he came up with the idea of using a continuous wire recorder to capture the cockpit events leading up to an air crash. he encased the recorder in a thick, fireproof asbestos box to be anchored in the tail of an aircraft.” http://www.phm.gov.au/scripts/webdbs/collone.idc?id= andcat= [accessed february ] misadventure. it contains the key to questions about ‘what went wrong’? ‘blackbox’ is an emblem of a container for meaning of symbols, and is a symbol in itself: …the content of a symbol…what it means – is often far from clear, and it is precisely because it is a communication from the unconscious that its meaning remains shrouded in mystery. at the same time, symbols possess a universal imagery and thus address themselves to the needs of specific individuals or cultures, but in a mythological and psychological language. these ideas form the heart of all program development in a computer environment, specifically in relation to legibility across cultures. the strategy of mobilising a series of myths cross-culturally is at play in the inner workings of the game device. the fact that the icons, signs and symbols from outside western culture are legible inside and can be interwoven into the storytelling and narrative process, suggest that there may be a reservoir, deeper than our dreams and imagination that can be tapped into and that shapes societies’ myths. a central theme operating in blackbox is the quest. the quest has long motivated narrative progression within the trajectory of storytelling. this is examined in joseph campbell’s cross-cultural investigation into ancient hero myths and the struggle for identity is in his seminal text the hero with a thousand faces. and in many ways the quest in blackbox is unabashedly the quest for self-understanding. mapping a history of the term ‘blackbox’ incorporates an investigation of the technological implication of the notion ‘box’, a device, an instrument, and an idea created as a piece of equipment, a vessel for cultural artefacts, in the contemporary sense, in the physical, virtual, and thinking realms. as i referred to before, lev manovich argues in “avant-garde as software” that the software and windows environment of the computer is indebted to the techniques invented in the s by the russian avant-grade artists. their techniques: …became embedded in the commands and interface metaphors of computer software. in short, the avant-garde vision became materialized in a computer. all the strategies developed to awaken audiences from a dream-existence of bourgeois society (constructivist design, new typography, avant-garde cinematography and film editing, like hockey,”the objective psyche and archetypal patterns”, in cinematic projections: the analytical psychology of c.g jung and film theory, university of luton press, u.k, . joseph campbell, the hero with a thousand faces, fontana press, great britain, . lev manovich, “avant-garde as software”, from new vision" to new media, http://www.manovich.net/ articles [accessed november, ] photo-montage, etc.) now define the basic routine of a post-industrial society: the interaction with a computer. for example, the avant-garde strategy of collage re-emerged as a "cut and paste" command, the most basic operation one can perform on any computer data. in another example, the dynamic windows, pull-down menus, and html tables all allow a computer user to simultaneously work with practically unrestricted amount of information despite the limited surface of the computer screen. this strategy can be traced to lissitzky's use of movable frames in his exhibition design for the international art exhibition in dresden. …the transformation of the s avant-garde techniques into the conventions of modern human-computer interface (hci) such as overlapping windows…now function as the strategies of computer-based labour, i.e. different ways we use to organize, access, analyse and manipulate digital data (for instance, discrete data representation, -d data visualization, and hyper linking).” lev manovich also discusses the development of interface metaphors in contemporary computer environments where abstract data is visualised as compartmentalised ‘windows’ and ‘boxes’. but can we take this analogy back in time and across cultures? are these visual metaphors, the bases of operating systems worldwide, legible across cultures? visual literacy and perception exceed the boundaries of language. the ability of the “icon” to convey meaning and convey narrative is comparable to the religious icon and the contemporary digital icon (emptied of any spiritual connotation). while readable text inside the frame remains linguistically expressed in the national language, the lingua franca of the conventions of the computer screen have become specific and multiple, less trans-national, with the hegemony of western computer design. this theorising can be carried through to the religious “icon” as a window into spiritual meaning, and the picture space as a window into an imaginary landscape in western modernist abstract and figurative painting. however, the new environment of digital media imparts a different ability to images, sounds, and texts - interactivity. interaction is extended beyond eyes and hands on the page, to the creation of a text where the hands electronically manipulate the new image/sound/text. blackbox utilises non- religious icons for movement through its narrative, and unfolds through active engagement with these screen icons. according to lev manovich the emergence of ‘new see el lissitzky, "exhibition rooms," in sophie lissitzky-küppers, el lisstzky. life - letters – texts,thames and hudson, london, , - . lev manovich, “avant-garde as software”, from new vision to new media, http://www.manovich.net/ articles [accessed november, ] media’ as a european term was referred to by “european artists, designers, architects and photographers: jan tschichold , laszlo moholy-nagy , and le courbusier . thus: although nobody, as far as i know, published something called new cinema, all the manifests written during this decade by french, german and russian filmmakers in essence constitute such a book: a call for a new language of film, whether it was to be montage, “cinéma pur” (also known as “absolute film”), or “photogénie.” similarly, although not declared in a book, a true visual revolution also took place in graphic design thus “making it new” as well (aleksander rodchenko, el lissitzky, moholy- nagy, etc). ridley scott’s blade runner also influences blackbox, a hollywood a science fiction film noir “…set in los angeles, , with a narrative that is structured and centred round chinatown.” like blade runner’s hero deckard, nina the protagonist of blackbox unveils aspects of her self and cultural origins in the course of the project. while deckard’s quest comes in the guise of ‘retiring’ replicant humans that stand in for aspects of himself, nina’s journey is a struggle and search for virtual objects that represent characteristics of her outer world and inner self. this search mirrors for the player/participant his/her own search for self–understanding. we are thus invited to consider the cultural artefacts that shape us and our deeper reservoirs of mythological ruins. mythological pandora and her box the first mortals lived on earth in a state of perfect innocence and bliss.…when pandora expressed a strong desire to peep into the contents of the mysterious box…the noise seemed to increase, and she breathlessly applied her ear to the lid to ascertain whether it really proceeded from within…jupiter had malignantly crammed into this box all diseases, sorrows, vices and crimes that afflict humanity and the box was no sooner opened, than all these ills flew out…in the guise of horrid little winged creatures…pricking and stinging them mercilessly. they flew through the open door and windows… it was well for pandora that she opened the box a second time, for the gods with a sudden impulse of compassion had concealed among the evil spirits one kindly creature hope! jan tschichold, the new typography: a handbook for modern designers, trans. ruari mclean (berkeley: university of california press, ); although moholy-nagy’s new vision exhibition took place only in , it was a retrospective of the s movement in photography and which was largely over by the time of the exhibition. le corbusier, towards a new architecture, trans. frederick etchells, architectural press, praeger , new york, london, . lev manovich, “avant-garde as software”, from new vision" to new media, http://www.manovich.net/ articles november, . [accessed january ]. like hockey,“re-reading blade runner”, in cinematic projections: the analytical psychology of c.g jung and film theory, university of luton press, u.k, . h.a. guerer, the classical myths of greece and rome, senate, london, , p . figure . contemporary map of greece and islands and pandora and her box one of the aims of this research was to investigate the connections between the elaborate taximia music of rembetika greek blues and the improvisational musical pattern in north indian melodies and middle eastern music. the modal drones of the greek orthodox church combined with arabic modal ‘roads’ brought to greece with the mass migration of people from asia minor following the civil war in turkey. the lyrics speak of the hopes, dreams, joys and sorrows of greece’s urban refugees: the baglamas ( ) in the upper districts, two dervishes are siting smoking joints… it’s the “loulas” and “kalami” that have reduced me to this sorry state the weed, that a widow taught me to smoke she turned me into a tramp and an addict figure . baglamas a miniature stringed bouzouki shaped instrument guerer op cit p . baglamas is a miniature stringed bouzouki shaped instrument, traditionally hidden under a prisoner’s coat. these lyrics are traditional and sung by antois dalgas from gail holst, road to remetika: music of a greek sub-culture, songs of love, sorrow and hashish, denise harvey publisher, limni, evia, greece, . baglamas from holst op cit p . if i die on the boat ( ) ah if i die what will they say? some fellow dies a fellow who loved life and enjoyed himself aman! aman! ah if i die on the boat throw me into the sea so the black and salt water can eat me ! aman! aman! figure . a greek woman stavroula petala born athens in blackbox cairo, egypt was her home until she migrated to australia odissi dance comes from the state of orissa in east india, bordering the bay of bengal. jagannatha, the lord of the universe, is worshipped as the reigning deity of odissi dance. hindu art is like a pictorial script which expresses the subtle thought of its mythology and philosophy. idealistic and symbolic, it exudes a deep sense of mysticism. the solid rock is made to live and give the impression that nothing is static. ideas of space and time are woven into rock…the hindu artist regards man in his spiritual, intellectual and physical attributes only as the microcosm in the macrocosm…his subjects are classical themes, the passive and active forces in the absolute…in fact, everything from creation to destruction of the universe… lord jagannatha is : zembekiko, anonymous. several versions exist. katsaras recorded these two verses circa , usa, from gail holst op cit, p . before the performance any odissi dance begins, icon statues of lord jagannatha, who, with his sister subhadra and brother balabhadra, form a version of the hindu holy trinity, are placed on the stage. this is distinct from the bharata natyam dance style where shiva is the lord of the dance in his manifestation as the nataraja. mathuram bhoothalingam, movement in stone, soumani publications, new dehli, , p . …the fusion of more than twenty religions and cultural trends. he is claimed as a savara god . the savaras (saoras) numbering more than one million, now living in orissa claim themselves to be the earliest inhabitants of orissa and according to them, an old saora tended the image of jagannatha a before it found its way to its present home in the great temple at puri. this legend also finds mention in the later puranas. some ascribe jagannatha a to be a buddhist image; some ascribe him as a jaina tirthankara and chaitanya; the great vaishnvite prophet called him an avatar (incarnation) of vishnu. the priests who serve in jagannatha temple are both brahmins and non-brahmins including the tribal (daitapati). people of all classes are treated equal inside the campus of this temple . this is the unique characteristic of jagannatha religion. figure . lord jagannatha, along with his sister subadhra, and brother balabadhra, forming the holy hindu trinity odissi dance http://www.odissidance.com/heritage/people.htm [accessed november ] figure . map of the state of orissa, indian sub-continent in the research and documentation of the odissi form of dance, i worked with ileana citaristi , an italian born classical odissi dancer. i videotaped her performance of an odissi dance item, mangala charan at the tom mann theatre, surrey hills, sydney, australia, . this recording was incorporated into blackbox and formed one of the performances discovered by the protagonist nina. at this time, i also conducted an interview with ileana in which she talked about her philosophy concerning the cross- cultural performance of dance. tatiana: “you are from the outside. you are not indigenous, you are not indian. there is a term as it is referred to in linguistics – the third term- a third space created, have you created a third space or have you entered this dance form?” ileana: “…well actually the personal interpretation is the third space [as it is referred to in linguistics]…these things come together and what comes out of it?…[tatiana: is there is any italian in there?] yes. i was happy when you said, you can make us understand because you come from the outside…” in many ways, ileana citaristi resembles my own relationship to odissi. the act of learning and participating in the dialectical process of dance created a space for my own understanding. i was taught that classical indian dance is an ancient form of worship, a spiritual offering to god. in traditional terms, dance emerged as a devotional offering to the divine. the act of watching this dance, and participating in it is understood as a form of bhakti (devotion) that would provide salvation and purification. i, however, entered into a relationship with my dance teachers with an open mind and from an aesthetic point of view, concerned with formal, musical and bodily representation. maps of india http://www.mapsofindia.com/maps/orissa/orissalocation.htm [accessed february ]. ileana citaristi's internet site http://www.kalinga.net/ileana, address. dr.ileana citaristi , bindusagar (west) bhubaneswar - tel/fax: - - . “spirituality is the core of indian art. evolved out of spiritual passions, art in india has gone hand in hand with religion since time immemorial. be it sculpture, architecture, painting, dance, music, the theme of the artist is rooted in religion; the urge is as much spiritual as aesthetic. while religion is a matter of faith, spirituality is a divine experience of communion with the divine.” www.odissidance.com/heritage/tradition.htm [accessed november ] the reinterpretation of this form of dance in the digital domain, the existence of a living ancient form in the face of ‘modernity’, and its survival within the diasporic communities of indian heritage is crucial. indeed, the majority of ileana’s audience in australia was made up of immigrants of indian ancestry from south asia, fiji, malaysia and south africa. ileana herself was born and brought up in venice, and, after a successful academic career as a scholar of eastern mythology and experimental theatre arts performance, she left europe to pursue a dancing career in orissa, india with india’s acclaimed dancer guru kelucharan mohapatra. she states on her website: i was in search of a land where i could express in a total and unrestricted way those inner questions of the soul that could not find satisfaction in any of the solutions offered by the present patterns of living of this western civilization. after completing my doctorate in philosophy and having worked for some years in both traditional and experimental theatre in my own country, italy, i followed the callings of ancestral and inexplicable paths and reached this land of orissa. here, completely dedicated to the sacred art of indian dance at the feet of my guru kelucharan mohapatra, i am able to give shape to the inner striving of the soul and overcome the anxiety of human existence. http://www.kalinga.net/ileana/index.htm. figure . ileana citaristi performs odissi dance mangala charan, sydney, ilean citaristi http://www.kalinga.net/ileana/index.htm performance text, mangala charan (odissi dance) performed by ileana citaristi, choreography by guru kelucharan mohapatra tom mann theatre, surrey hills, sydney, australia, , cinematography tatiana pentes, direction tatiana pentes. chapter six: mythic and musical structure . memory boxes the project explores the narrative potentials of new electronic and digital technology in the production of non-sequential and non-linear creative work, specifically for the construction of blackbox. malcolm le grice’s writing on the history of digital media in relation to cinema has informed the production of blackbox. le grice describes the production of the digital creative work of art as “hydra-media” a many- headed beast. blackbox unfolds from a set of virtual memory boxes which are configured inside ‘performative’ frames, marking them as “ritual and that all things operating within these frames represent serious things.” the animation of collected objects, from the russian, indian and greek ‘imagined communities’, are framed inside these series of memory boxes. the narrative trajectory of the story is triggered and controlled by the gestural actions of the player. the player’s subjective intervention with the program, represented as nina’s hands opening the boxes, and interaction with the objects inside the boxes, produce an identification with the icons and symbols, and thus, with the means by which the story is told. also, these memory boxes and their objects are configured to resonate with recollections and to reveal the creative research: (i) songs of sorrow/ absence (thesis) [the father “russia”] performances from russian jazz culture in china (ii) songs of longing/ presence (antithesis) [the mother “india”] performances from classical indian dance/music (iii) songs of love/ the meeting (synthesis) [the child “greek”] performances from rembetika (the greek blues) culture inside these choreographed electronic spaces, i have developed a set of recollections which frame the subjectivity or point of view of nina, a woman reflecting on her past. recollection of events connected to the sets of objects displayed inside the performative memory boxes, through the use of voice-over, produce an emotional (ed), john j. macaloon, rite, drama, festival, spectacle: rehearsals towards a theory of cultural performance, institute for the study of human issues, philadelphia, , p - . engagement in the player and evoke an emotional response. these factors have been considered in the design of these digital spaces, so as to manipulate the behaviour and interaction of the audience. this has been a strategy employed in traditional media and performance such as the theatre arts, literature, and cinema. . overview of areas of content figure . overview of blackbox cd-rom areas of content . script development and production blackbox interactive multimedia work is an exploration of three genres of dance and music: rembetika the greek blues; odissi/ kuchipudi classical indian dance and music, and émigré jazz and pop tunes from the russian diaspora via china. blackbox aesthetics and history draws on the ‘imagined communities’ that exist in contemporary australia in song and music, and on mythic and religious texts influencing these cultures for inspiration in the interface design. the representations of culturally diverse australian ethnic identities are encapsulated in the icons of the various musical instruments, which act as artefacts and entries into the narratives and performances. in writing the script for blackbox i wanted to metaphorically dance across the musical genres of russian jazz and chinese pop tunes from shanghai in the ’s and ’s; classical indian dance/music; and rembetika, the greek blues. i approached the process of script writing through social and cultural research into these various genres of music/dance to find a way to create a structure that would integrate these forms. blackbox is the exploration of my own cultural origins, so it became relevant to speak from the first person, that is my own perspective and subjective experience. my overarching point of view and perspective binds these fragments together into a cohesive narrative, and this led to the writing of a voice of reflection, nina’s voice, which transforms into an indian woman’s voice and includes an older greek masculine voice. ( ) metropolis metroplis is the first electronic chapter of the interactive narrative. the character nina stands in for my own hybrid cultural experience and looks through my eyes. i wanted to use the motif of shanghai in the ’s as the metropolis that the girl moves through in the work, though the metropolis could be any city in the world, a metaphoric and an imaginary virtual city. michael dear discusses some of these ideas in his text: benedict anderson, imagined communities: reflections on the origin and spread of nationalism, verso, london, . ...cities - large and small, global and local, north and south - have become (for better or worse) the principal material expressions of contemporary human civilisation...what happens when the representational cities of cyberspace displace urban reality. yet virtual realities perforce remain grounded... the idea of a fixed geopolitical location and the notion of the stable text both get disrupted in the electronic virtual environment. the problem i wanted to investigate was precisely this, and the objective was to produce a creative work that could articulate these polemics. helen hilton’s words seemed to strike a chord in me, particularly her writing on the computer text, once this was redirected to the multimedia text: ...if the computer text is in essence unstable, will this not have two consequences; (i) a redefinition of the relative temporal status of experience and representation; (ii) a challenge to the concept of [representation/thinking] itself...? in this sense the knowledge base seems to resemble much more closely the human memory system than the remote storage device of the book...in this way text may actually rediscover some of the properties of oral narrative (one of the modalities of performance) which in its formulaic nature offers an infinite number of ways of telling the same story... the voice of nina (my voice) provides the perspective in blackbox through which the player makes sense of the story. the player gains access to cultural memories, which in turn provide nina’s with a sense of self. ( ) chinesebox ...sergei and xenia ermolaeff never really fit in sydney. their fancy suits, fur coats and heavy russian jewellery seemed out of place in the australian suburbs. so did their outrageous yarns about living it up on the jazz-club circuit in pre-revolutionary shanghai, where they supposedly rubbed elbows with the likes of chiang kai-shek. even family members never really believed their stories…that is, until granddaughter tatiana pentes, a multi-media artist, began sifting through the ermolaeff’s belongings after their deaths. what she found – hand-dyed photos, music scores, letters, vinyl records and documents in russian, chinese, japanese and english – confirmed their tales. the memorabilia became the inspiration for pentes’ cd-rom, strange cities. i was interested in developing, in an electronic context, the themes that were explored in the strange cities cd-rom. i wanted to re-figure sergei and xenia michael j. dear, the postmodern urban condition, university of southern califormia, balckwell, usa, , p - . helen hilton, "the three dimensional text: computers, writing and performance", in the machine as metaphor and tool, springer verlag, berlin, . i am indebted here to the seminal work of new media artist megan heyward, i am a singer, cd-rom, produced in association with the australian film commission, . rose tang and yasmin ghahremani, “forgotten exiles”, asiaweek, september . ermolaeff, focusing on the objects they brought with them to australia, the traces of their past experience. the material objects represented in the virtual environment became the visual icons that opened up the various stories within this chapter. the virtual exploration of the digitised objects produces a playful environment for the player to interact with. as a child learns through discovery and play with its world, the adult (or indeed child) player of this game/ story pieces together a coherent understanding of the narrative structure, revealing the history of russian jazz from shanghai, china. the narrative unfolds from a virtual ‘chinese box’ containing a set of virtual émigré objects: (i) jade ring; (ii) soviet passport; (iii) pathe photograph; (iv) willow pattern plate; (v) chinese cabaret dancer; (vi) silver bracelet; (vii) red chinese fan; and (viii) russian ballerina. these icons are real objects obtained from my russian grandparent’s home that trace their history back to shanghai, china. through interaction with these artefacts a non-sequential narrative is revealed. figure . chinesebox interface still detailing virtual objects chinesebox visual and audio research the ‘imagined’ jazz community is visualised in fragmentary sequences of simulated film footage, composed from digitised photographs and includes some super footage of sydney suburbs. the moving image documents russian émigrés from china, my grandfather sergei ermolaeff and his son serge ermoll jr. both musicians and composers of jazz, they are imaged through portraits and relics of their musical paraphernalia. the chinesebox narrative is constructed through the eyes of a young chinese woman. we gain access to the chinesebox narrative through images of the chinese girl opening a box and examining the émigré objects which belonged to my grandmother xenia (vladimirovna) ermolaeff. they consist of studio portraits of the possessions she brought to australia. the objects imaged refer to her passage to australia and evoke memories of the russian jazz music. also, the visual material is composed through the digital re-construction of a s chinese cabaret performance by rose tang; and the digital animation of archival photographs of russian taxi-dancers in shanghai circa s. this visual material has incorporated elements from an archive of photographic portraits of émigré musicians and materials sourced for my previous production strange cities cd-rom. ( ) jewelbox jewelbox is the second electronic chapter of the interactive narrative. through nina’s eyes, the player engages with a silver spice box from india. the dance jewels open up narratives revealing classical indian dance performances, across the forms of kuchipudi and odissi. in developing this storyline, i worked with some footage shot in sydney of my friend padma raman’s kuchipudi performance krishna shabdam. i researched this tradition in classical indian dance more broadly to understand its roots and origins. this chapter of the creative work is about engaging with difference and attempting to this silver box is a traditional north indian spice box, loaned to this project by dr devleena ghosh, and provides the signature motif for blackbox. understand a non-western culture, so that i could incorporate and translate elements of these performances into the fabric of blackbox. i began this journey by looking into the kuchipudi dance tradition and found numerous internet sites that offer some different perspectives on this classical indian dance form. however, these are more useful as resources for searching hardcopy publications, historical and cultural papers, and books. of all the internet sites i researched www.abhinaya.com provided the most detailed information. though one is always skeptical about material sourced from the internet, it did give me some broad themes to investigate in relation to the particular religious and mythological subjects for the dance. the existence of this internet site, and the proliferation of many others like it, provided evidence that a virtual community of classical indian dance lives. kuchipudi originated in a small village of the andhra pradesh state in india and dates back to the south indian devotional (bhakti) movement of the th century. it was generally performed in the open air at night, and is literally named after the place from which it originated. it was established by two telugu speaking brahmins of andhra pradesh, tritha narayana yati (master) and sidhyendra yogi (pupil) from the study of the ancient texts, natya sashtra (dramatic science) , abhinaya darpana (mirror of gesture by nandikesavara) , vishnu dharmottana purana, and the bhagavata mela nataka, and inspired by the gita govinda stories of jayadeva built around the legendary life and exploits of krishna, the blue god. sidhyendra yogi codified everything into his own dance drama technique. he is said to have had a vision of krishna the blue god after which he composed the parijatapaharana (sacred flower dance). it was also said that with the performance of http://www.delhitourism.com/dance/ [accessed january ] ragini devi, dance dialects of india, vikas publications, dehli, , p . (trans.) adya rangacharya, natya sastra, munshiram manoharlal, new dehli, . (trans.) ananda coomaraswamy and gopala kritnayya duggirla, the mirror of gesture: being the abhinaya darpana of nandikesuara, munshiram manoharlal, new dehli, – a shorter compendium to the natya sastra (dramatic science).“the dramatic scriptures of india were framed by brahma at the request of lesser gods, at the beginning of tretra yuga, the last aeon before the present. this event is described as follows in the first chapter of the natya sastra of bharata (india)…the other devas said to brahma: we desire a pastime to be seen and heard…brahma: so let it be…let me make a fifth veda, to be called natya (drama), combined with epic story, tending to virtue, wealth (pleasure and spiritual freedom), yielding fame – a concise instruction setting forth the events of the world…” p . this dance, in true bhakti (devotional) tradition, the dancer, other participants and the audience would attain spiritual liberation and salvation. the region of div taluq where kuchipudi village is situated has been the centre of music and dance for many centuries. the name kuchipudi is a contracted form of kuchila puri – the village actors (derived from the sanskrit kusilava-puram). the kusilavas were wandering bands that sang and enacted episodes from the ramayana epic. the itinerant actors living in kuchipudi village came to be known as kucheelu (actors). krishna shabdam is a typical middle item in the kuchipudi repertoire and is based on a play written by usha parinayam. a ‘shabdam’ is a pure dance item (aesthetic movement or rhythm), accompanied by a poetic composition in praise of some deity or patron. krishna shabdam depicts the nayika, or beloved, all dressed up waiting for krishna to come to her. this theme is interconnected with the ‘the cowherd krishna’ as depicted in the bhagavat purana. radha and the gopis’ longing for their lord is usually depicted as the ras leela …hearing the love-call of krishna’s flute, the gopis (milkmaids) left their husbands and went in search of him…the allegory concerns the response of the human soul to a call to the divine…the dance dramas of andhra pradesh, known as the bhagavata mela nataka are recorded in sculptures and manuscripts, of th, th, and th centuries…built in the th century by chalukya kings, the thousand pillared temple sculptures, ceiling, and carvings depict the mahabharata and ramayana…the yakshagana (ramappa temple sculptures) are inspired by the gita govinda stories of jayadeva, built around the legendary life and exploits of krishna. in the representation of this desire (in painting, sculpture, and literature): …the lover might express his longing by cryptic references to nature, the indian artist employed poetic symbols to charge his subjects with romantic ardor. flowers were never merely flowers, nor clouds, clouds. the symbols of indian poetry – the lotus swaying in a stream, the flowering creepers suggest passion-haunted ladies. the mingling of clouds, rain and lightening symbolized embraces of lovers and ragini devi, dance dialects of india, vikas publications, dehli, , p . mohan khokar, traditions of classical indian dance, clarion books, new delhi, , p . “…both dance and its static interpretation in sculpture should convey rasa. rasa pervades all classical indian arts…and results from awakening of latent psychological states (sthayi-bhavas) in the beholder by the use of appropriate formalized imagery.”, from anne-marie gaston, siva in dance, myth, and iconography, oxford university press, dehli, , p . kay ambrose (revised by ram gopal), classical dances and costumes of india, adam and charles black, london, , p . commonplace objects such as dishes, vases…lamps were brought into subtle conjunction to hint at ‘the right true end of love’. krishna is characterised by a crown of peacock feathers, he is clad in a golden (male cloth wrap) dhoti, he is blue skinned, a lady is often bowing at his feet, the setting is a forest with flowering trees, his companions are cowherds, illustrations are often inscribed with sanskrit text where the “blue skinned lover krishna is an incarnation of god and there is ecstatic release in his worship.” the gita govinda by the bengali poet jayadeva composed towards the end of the th century describes radha’s longing and krishna’s love-making with glowing sensuality: if in recalling krishna to mind there is flavour or if there is interest in love’s art then to this necklace of words – sweetness, tenderness, brightness - the words of jayadeva, listen…… and later…. sandal and garment of yellow and lotus garlands upon his body of blue, in his dance the jewels of his ears in movement dangling over his smiling cheeks, krishna here disports himself with charming women in love. he embraces one woman, he kisses another, and fondles another beautiful one. he looks at another one lovely with smiles, and starts in pursuit of another woman. …the sweet nectar of lips kept flowing notes of his luring melodious flute, …whose brow had a perfect sandal spot, as among dark clouds the disc of the moon i continued this journey by looking into the odissi dance tradition. in i recorded a live performance of classical odissi dance by the italian born protégé of guru kelucharan mohapatra, ileana citaristi in sydney. her item mangala charan (invocatory item) provided a powerful link between the genres. i had access to a recording of the w.g. archer, the loves of krishna: in indian painting and poetry, george allen and unwin ltd, london, , p . archer p . archer p . odissi dance company school performances at the performance space, redfern, sydney , where i had been a student. to create a contrast with the kuchipudi form of dance, i recorded a version (rehearsal) of nirmal jena’s the power of the feminine, performed at the studio theatre, sydney opera house, as part of the asian music and dance festival . nirmal jena has described this performance as a parallel performance, as distinct from fusion work, incorporating the marta style of odissi with contemporary western dramatic theatre. playwright john hughes developed the power of the feminine, a three act multimedia play composed of projected film sequences, projected textual elements and performance work with actors and non-actors. the sets are a series of contemporary paintings by john wolsley. the piece, as the title suggests, is worked around the idea of a universal feminine power and juxtaposed with three traditional odissi dance items. the play involves numerous art forms or references to these forms in the performance text (dance, poetry, painting, music, literature, sculpture) and employs many media in its diagesis. it amalgamates, appropriates and expropriates, different cultural expressions, drawing them together to create meaning derived from both eastern and western traditions. in this form of new theatre, the western play appropriates the classical indian dance form while the classical indian dance performance appropriates the western play. this theatrical dialogue between cultural forms influenced the production of blackbox. the power of the feminine employed multi-media in a more physical real time sense, whereas blackbox translates these many media into virtual objects. dance item ( ) matru pranaam (invocatory item) aradhya parama shakti sarbe rapi sura sure nadang param taram kinche adhika bhubana traya satyam satyam pura satyam veda shastradi nirnaya puja niya para shakti niguna saguna thaba translation from the sanskrit (from the program notes) oh! the reverent, divine absolute mother power, you prevail in gods and demons alike. you have spread yourself to this unlimited vastness and yet you are so little and limited you have prevailed through all three worlds (physical, emotional, spiritual) i come to the conclusion this is the only revealed truth …as all the holy scriptures speak of your glory again i bow down oh divine absolute mother, you are the formless, you are the form, you are the darkness and you are the light… so seek beyond that good and evil dance item ( ) aatman (soul) this traditional dance item depicts “the path to self realisation of the experience of the inner, and its relation with the outer, which prevails in infinity…known as aatman or soul. it evolves and seeks union with the self and the supreme. this is the dialogue between heaven and earth (between krishna and radha), where earth is trying to reach heaven. in dance, the imagery of vedas and upanishads is translated into concrete principles and form. the body and the senses are most abstracted into pure design to suggest and evoke in the listener and onlooker the ideas of the universal, the cosmic and the infinite.” this dance item included konarak kanthi, an ode to the great sun temple of konarak in orissa, india and is inspired by the temple relief sculptures. program notes, the power of the feminine: parallel performances, untitled: a play in three acts written and directed by john hughes, three dances by nirmal jena in indian odissi style, asian music and dance festival , the studio, sydney opera house. konarak sun temple at konarak (orissa) is dedicated to the sun god surya. “this temple, now in ruins, is a colossal monument, a temple to the sun god built in the th century. an original structure dating back to the th century once stood here. in its original form, the deul was feet high and the jagamohana was about feet high. the temple was representative of the chariot of the sun with pairs of huge wheels and horses. this temple, massive in scale, is considered to be the masterpiece of orissan architecture. the temple abounds in sculptural work.” from templenet http://www.templenet.com/orissa/konakona.html [accessed june ]. figure . the konarak sun temple at konarak, orissa, india the physical forms represented in the dance item are interpretations of the ancient temple sculptures, displaying various bodily postures. these postures signify a repertoire of motifs that create a language in dance, for example (i) placing a dot on the forehead whilst combing the hair; (ii) playing the horn; (iii) lighting the lamp. these bodily gestures have everyday as well as great spiritual significance. at one time they would have been performed inside the temples as a form of devotion to the deity. image from templenet http://www.templenet.com/orissa/konakona.html [accessed june ]. figure . blackbox interface still from jewelbox pathway picturing dancer chitritta mukerjee, performing konarak kanthi odissi dance item. the narratives unfold from a virtual ‘jewel box’ containing a set of virtual émigré objects: (i) dance bells; (ii) gold necklace; (iii) earrings; (iv) gold bracelets; (v) red powder; and (vi) hair comb. these icons are real objects obtained from my classical indian dance studies and trace a history back to india. through interaction with these artefacts a non-sequential narrative is revealed. figure a. jewelbox interface still detailing virtual dance objects jewelbox visual and audio research the ‘imagined’ indian community is visualised in documentary video material of classical indian dance and music performances in australia. these performances are framed inside images of a silver indian spice box. the jewelbox narrative is constructed through the eyes of rochéle, a young indian/ creole woman. we gain access to the jewelbox narrative through images of rochéle opening the spice box and examining the émigré dance objects. the visual material is composed through the digital animation of photographs and performance sequences of rochéle and digital video documentation of classical indian dance performances (odissi/ kuchipudi) by ileana citaristi, chitritta mukerjee, and padma raman. the generation of digital animation sequences from the temple reliefs and sculpture that depict the ancient dance and music culture include imagery from the konarak sun temple at konarak, orissa, india. this imagery forms an archive of graphic design motifs and artefacts used in blackbox. these objects include letters from india sent back to australia and postage stamps; photographic documentation of performances of the dance form; popular hindu imagery depicting the sanskrit narratives informing the dance; traditional indian fabric and the dance costumes; hindu bronze sculptures; and digital images of the stone sculptures at the konarak sun temple. these ancient sculptures have been studied by contemporary odissi choreographers, as the sculptures preserve a record of the dance gestures and traditional musical instruments in stone. texts informing jewelbox have been sourced from literature on classical indian dance (odissi/kuchipudi); ancient mythological and religious texts informing the dance forms; a collection of letters sent home to australia from a young woman describing visits to religious sites and temples; the song lyrics that accompany theses dance forms. it is also informed by research of internet sites on classical indian dance, portals for musicians forming an online community, many of these profiling of indian performers, musicians, and organisations. ( ) pandorasbox pandorasbox is the third electronic chapter of this interactive narrative. the player, having moved through the jewelbox phase, is then presented with a set of objects emanating from a stone greek sarcophagus (tomb). the discovery of my greek past is indelibly caught up in an idealisation of ancient greek mythology and a longing for a contemporary understanding. the greek olympics , and a photo album of a recent visit to athens and the island of kythera, greece by my mother matina and sister alexandra also plays a major part. in developing this chapter, i worked with old family photographs and émigré objects from greece. i have never been to greece and my understanding of the culture has always come from strange objects and stories passed down by relatives. growing up, i associated greek culture with my grandparents, and the sounds of their favourite music. my grandfather antonis pentes smoked cigars and listened to rembetika music. he drank strong greek coffee and accompanied by sweet biscuits. i remember he played with a set of worry beads (komboloi) and always wore a suit with a sharp grey hat when he went out about town. family lore had it that my grandfather came here by ship in the s and married my grandmother, who was working at her greek parents fish café in port macquarie. my greek great grandfather opened the first fish café and cinema in port macquarie; as economic migrants these ancestors formed part of an entrepreneurial class that developed australia’s café culture. these facts have left an indelible trace upon the production of blackbox that has been influenced by these memories of cinema and cultural life. i wanted to evoke these memories and longing in this electronic chapter by incorporating my family’s material culture that had survived the immigration. the music, songs and movement of the body provided an emotional connection with this past. my link to greece seemed to be severed; in generational terms, i felt disconnected from greek culture, not having the language and little connection with family members. there was also a feeling of ‘shame’ about being greek. greeks did not occupy a position of status in australian society. even those who were financially successful were well known as ‘shop keepers’. in many ways i identified with my russian side much more keenly; however, in this creative work i wanted to articulate the split between and the fusion of the greek and the russian. the sounds of the rembetika blues seemed both oriental and urban. but it was the music i seemed to feel a connection with; its modal tones generate an emotional response inside of me and conjure an imaginary landscape of the urban greek tavern. the narratives unfold from a virtual ‘pandora’s box’ containing a set of virtual émigré objects: (i) isis necklace; (ii) madonna and gold cross; (iii) bouzouki; (iv) kytherian woman; (v) acropolis pendant; and (vi) grecian urn. these icons are real objects obtained from my greek grandparents and trace a history back greece. through interaction with these artefacts a non-sequential narrative is revealed. figure b. pandorasbox interface still detailing virtual émigré objects pandorasbox visual and audio research the ‘imagined’ greek community is visualised in fragmentary sequences from an archive of super ‘home-movie’ footage and family photographs. the material sourced includes excerpts of greek dancing at the enmore theatre, sydney. the footage includes fragments of my sister alexandra ermolaeff performing tsiftateli (greek belly dancing), digital video recording a pan across the mirrored wall of candies in a greek milk bar and images of a family group dancing shoulder-to-shoulder. my grandfather antonis pentes worked as a milk bar proprietor all of his life. visual memories of my grandfather antonis playing cards and drinking biriki (greek) coffee and metaxa (greek brandy) and smoking his cigars have influenced the construction of the narrative. the audio material was sourced from an archive of rembetika ” vinyl recordings, courtesy of my grandmother frances pentes and contemporary rembetika recordings of the old songs by an australian group rebetiki ensemble. the greek visual material that was collected and digitised forms an archive of graphic design motifs and virtual artefacts used in the work. these objects include a narghile (water pipe for smoking hashish); antique greek plate with graphic designs that were appropriated; sweets in a greek cake shop in marrickville, sydney; greek woven fabric; hand crocheted items; photographic representations of ancient greek jewellery; a baptismal orthodox cross and evil eye; an orthodox icon depicting the madonna and child); komboloi (worry beads); easter egg coloured powder; consumer product packaging; frankincense burned in the church; a medallion inscribed with the acropolis; photographs of a tavern on the greek island of kythera; photographic portraits of ’s and ’s rembetika musicians collected from gail holst’s road to rembetika, these include roza eskenazi, sotiria bellou, nikos mathesis (crazy nick), the kalamata group (one of the most famous rembetika groups); a group of musicians and refugees in the fish markets at piraeus ; a laterna (piano organ covered in decorations) from constantinople; a great quartet of early rembetika musicians; a greek pre-lenten carnival ’s; a portrait of a manga, a s ‘republican’ sporting a moustache, a false mole on the cheek, a grey cap; and rembetika instruments and musical handwritten scores. the textual sources function in the work as fragmentary texts to be read on the screen surface and also form the script for voice-over sound elements providing mythic narratives that inform the creative production. texts informing pandorasbox have been obtained from literature on rembetika; ancient greco-roman myths; testimonials of australian rembetika musicians and family members; my mothers journey back to greece and the collection of letters and postcards sent home; and the popular lyrics from rembetika songs that speak of the diasporic experience. research for pandorasbox included examining internet sites that are portals forming an online community and profiles of rembetika musicians and organizations. gail holst’s road to rembetika provided crucial material and her own testimonial about first encountering this music in greece provided an inspiration. …when i first came to greece in , i had hardly heard any greek music and couldn’t understand a word of greek…but i settled in the plaka quarter of athens, and it was the music of the city i got to know best…the jukeboxes in athens were my real introduction to rembetika. i had always felt a snobbish antipathy to jukeboxes until i came to greece. now i regard them with affection, and feed drachmas into them like a las vegas addict…in you could find jukeboxes all over athens, which were full of good rembetika records. young men would come into a taverna, feed a handful of coins into the juke box and begin to dance…this solo dance was unlike any dancing i’d ever seen – not exuberant…the music would begin, the rhythm insistent, the voice harsh and metallic, and the dancer would rise as if compelled…eyes half closed, in trance-like absorption, cigarette hanging from lips… i remembered my grandfather listening to this music, but i did not understand its cultural significance. holst’s research provided a pivotal point of entry into an understanding about this music, because she approached her study as an outsider visiting greece and engaging with cultural difference. i found myself in the same position, trying to form an understanding of a culture with which i was disconnected. gail holst, road to remetika: music of a greek sub-culture, songs of love, sorrow and hashish, denise harvey publisher, limni, evia, greece, , p . figure b. pandorasbox interface still detailing my grandparents frances and antonis pentes and their child my mother matina (stamatia) pentes the experience of jewelbox, the process of studying a culture not my own, gave me a model for engaging with greek culture, which contained for me its own strangeness. chapter seven: design of electronic surfaces for the interface . surface design and interaction of pathways the interactive screens appear as a virtual stage upon which image/sound/text arrangements appear as if conjured from a dream or recollection. the surface of the screen represents dramatic action where the user making choices triggers transitions between content areas. every screen place can be likened to the refrains of a musical composition, waiting to be played by the user. the transition from page to screen, from the printed script to the electronic, creates the need to design the surface of the screen. this includes typography, layout of text and graphics that are visible in the frame, and the interface design or the system structuring user access and navigation of these surface elements. the arrangement of information on the screen and interactivity with that information triggers movement through the stories. navigation of metropolis, chinesebox, jewelbox, and pandorasbox stories are motivated by the player/participant’s response to the screen environment. slippage between and across these interactive screen surfaces, through participation in actions with the interface, provides for the player an experience that challenges traditional modes of narrative in audiovisual presentation and their perception of musical structure. these traditional modes of narrative are also challenged in the interface design, where the user’s desire to move through the image, sound and text arrangements produce a subjective interplay of textural meanings thrown up through the digital manipulation of photographs; digitised film footage; graphic and sonic representations of musical score; voice-over; and the creation of hypertext links. furthermore, these interactions create a questioning of the relationship between the biographical, historical and musical narrative possibilities produced in the multimedia environment. the metropolis, chinesebox, jewelbox, and pandorasbox pathways are composed as a series of interactive screens and are designed to interact dynamically with each other. these screens are produced using the combination of multimedia software programs and create the seamless transition from one screen to the next. every screen is designed to have a pathway element present, not visually, but concealed as an interactive hot spot triggered by mouse. the designer/producer’s orchestration of image, sound, and text relations and the player’s navigation of these arrangements are analogous to the relationship between the composition and the performance of music upon the musical instrument. composition is thus rendered as soundtrack, melodious vocal lyric and musical composition and referred to by graphic representation of the music scores and instruments. the significance of the musical compositions are both visual and auditory where individual notes and musical phrases are treated as icons which open up and into the different narratives. the graphic and sonic representations of the musical scores provide the transitions between past and present. . interactivity the primary modes of interaction involves the passing of the cursor across image and text and the clicking of the mouse on images on the screen that are programmed to precipitate dramatic action and the downloading of digital video and audio fragments. . aesthetics the use of colour and black and white imagery the audiovisual material was recorded and sourced from an original archive of material from my personal collection of documents and artifacts from my grandfather sergei ermolaeff; related to russian jazz culture in shanghai in s and s. this material has been enhanced by interviews with my father serge ermoll jr. who is also a jazz pianist. material has been sourced from the documentation of classical indian dance performances and interviews with the artists (odissi/ kuchipudi); and documentation of performances and interviews with australian rembetika group rebetiki ensemble. additionally i have used existing archival material such as vinyl recordings of original music, and digitised recordings of vinyl, black and white photographs, news text, publicity material and concert posters, and film footage. through the process of digital manipulation of these visual materials it has been possible to simulate film footage sequences. this has involved animating still photographs, tinting images and colourising in post-production. . treatment of image digitised photographs the digital manipulation of scanned photographs utilising adobe photoshop software effects and modifying details of the image have enabled the exploration of meanings thrown up by them as traces of the past, historical documents and sentimental objects. these photographic images consist of portraits of the musicians and artists; original artwork; publicity photographs of jazz entertainers; political icons and leaders; actors and actresses; performers; artists; family photographs and studio portraits; and specifically the documentation of the performances of odissi/kuchipudi, rembetika and australian jazz. digitised film footage the digital editing and manipulation of appropriated film utilising adobe after effects and flash computer software has enabled me to experiment with the temporal flow of the moving images by altering the timing of frames per second; modifying motion by altering the moving image in motion settings and utilising filters; and in the layering of image sequences using cross dissolves, pixel dissolves and additive dissolves to refer to the passing of time and to act as transitions between sequences and interactive screens. the digitised film footage includes reportage; super home movie; and documentary material. digital graphics the digital graphics are composed of digitised musical score, personal letters and documents such as the imaging of the musical score as a pictorial script representing notes, chords and the imaging of hand writing in the form of intimate letters as a representation of the personal; the imaging of government documents, passports and identity papers. the digital manipulation of graphic resources involved the layering of images; cropping of images; zooming into details of images; altering the image sizes (dots per inch and dimensions); and altering the image hues and saturations, levels, and colour balance. other items digitised were record labels; postcards; billboards; film posters; maps; stamps; bus tickets; corporate logos; political propaganda; consumer product brands from the ethnic community; currency (notes and coinage); newspaper imagery; and street signs. shockwave, flash and quicktime animations adobe photoshop images and digital video sequences have been combined to produce quicktime animations which have then been transformed into shockwave and flash movies. digital image, sound and text resources are generated to produce moving image sequences that are edited together. during this process further effects, filters, transitions and tempo modifications alter the appearance of the image. in this important stage of production it is crucial that the most effective compression is utilised when combining these multimedia elements and exporting for use in the interactive programming environment of director mx. . treatment of sound the soundtrack elements have been generated and mixed utilising pro tools computer software. original musical performances have been recorded on digital video. sound atmospheres have been recorded and sourced through accessing an audio archive and film soundtrack fragments and sound effects have been incorporated. the voice-over and interviews have been recorded and edited in the digital software environment. blackbox enables the player to listen to and to re-play audio fragments within the program. . treatment of text the textual elements are derived from sanskrit and greater mythic and religious texts and jazz and rembetika lyrics. the sanskrit texts researched include the mahabharata, ramayana, and vedas. the ancient greek texts researched include ovid’s metamorphosis, virgil’s aeneid, and allusion to ancient greek culture in british literature, for example the poetry of shelley and byron. the texts researched for the chinesebox section include baptist and black suffragist texts relevant to the jazz genre; formal historical narratives; biographical texts, memoirs and personal papers; passports; documents; letters; reportage; newspaper clippings; and musical script. these texts form visual elements of the screen surfaces, inform the production of the soundtrack, and are able to be read as text, they also appear as graphic components in animation sequences. . treatment of time due to the nature of interactive digital media, narrative is no longer based on a fixed temporal flow where there can be an arrow through time that leads to a single goal. interacting with the interface has dramatically altered the perception of time in experiencing the unfolding of a given plot. each user will navigate the work at their own pace, and make decisions about how the story will unfold. this potential of infinite options is to a certain degree illusory, given that every screen is programmed to have certain outcomes in terms of the trajectory of plot. nonetheless, these media do enable the player/participant to make the decision about the duration of images explored on each screen and the ability to move to another screen and area of content in the program or on the internet. blackbox invents a series of options for the player that draws attention to the ways in which events in time are represented, recalled and embellished, specifically in relation to the temporal possibilities offered by these media. . emotional engagement with multimedia michael davis was engaged by the institute for interactive media and learning ( ) to develop a model of emotional tagging for the university of technology’s website www.uts.edu.au. in his model davis plots emotional responses on three axes that capture user’s emotion at various stages of engagement with the university of technology website. davis’s model proposes a psychological approach in understanding human interaction with multimedia products. davis defines our experience of a new multimedia product as our first impression and associates this with our sense of being and identity in the world. we emotionally respond to the product in terms of our personal feelings of fear and safety in relation to interacting with the product. davis defines our active participation with the product as doing/ action and associates this with an emotional response to the product in relation to the extremes of anger and love; and finally davis identifies engagement with the product as resulting in having/ accomplishment and he associates the emotional response to the product as moving between sadness and joy. michael davis’s model of emotional tagging was enhanced in an unpublished paper ( ) by postgraduate student jackie morgan. students were assigned various multimedia products and asked to analyse them using davis’s model of emotional tagging. morgan developed her own personal theory of interaction design entitled “designing successful interactive experiences”. according to morgan’s paper, the intuitiveness of interaction with the multimedia product, its visual design and the user’s familiarity with the media could be aligned with davis’s being/ identity axis. she pinpointed the area where the user considered navigation, consistency of interaction style and design in the context of media as aligned with davis’s doing/ action axis. the area where the user is influenced by emotional response in regard to a multimedia product is related to how well the media met his/her expectations. the content of the product, and the success of the user in achieving his/her r. krstof and a. satran, interactivity by design, adobe press, california, . jackie morgan (unpublished) personal theory of interaction design, digital information and interaction design paper, master of interactive multimedia, institute for interactive media and learning, university of technology, sydney, may , p . morgan engages with michael davis’s model of emotional tagging. “in amnesic patients (hippocampal damage) it appears that…showed enhanced recognition memory for emotionally arousing story elements compared with the non-emotionally arousing elements, in richter- levin g, akirav i, “emotional tagging of memory formation-in the search for neural mechanisms”, brain research reviews, vol. , no. ., . http://www.ingentaconnect.com/content/els/ / / / /art [accessed june ]. goals in interacting with the media are associated with the having/ accomplishment axis. taking into consideration davis’s concepts, the designing of a multimedia experience moves the program developer from ‘outcome’ focussed planning to ‘motivating’ experience. students learned that the key concern in creating an interactive experience was the ability to influence the emotional experience of the player/participant. morgan’s paper focused my attention, as her teacher, on the idea of ‘emotional engagement’ when approaching the development of an interactive script for my project blackbox. the player/participant needs to be instantly interested in moving into the program, there needs to be initial attraction; the screen environment should invite the player/participant to reveal the material, this allows for active engagement, and finally there needs to be some feeling of satisfaction, accomplishment in the task/experience of playing, a sense of achievement. thus the visual design of the program needs to be a familiar and recognisable screen environment, where one can intuitively engage with and be motivated to navigate successfully through a set of electronic events and tasks that provide the player/participant with a sense of their expectations either being met or challenged or where there is a sense of accomplishment in the conclusion of the experience. the player first needs to be attracted to the surface design and motivated to engage with the program, there has to be a set of tasks engaging the player to motivate movement through a recognisable environment that had a consistent set of visual and sonic cues. the opening up of the narrative was created so that it might be triggered through movement across these electronic screen surfaces. while the orientation to emotional engagement is central to the success of the design of the blackbox program, (the visual screen design, the interaction design, and the navigational design), this can’t be reduced to the kind of simple taxonomy proposed by schema’s like davis’ ‘emotional tagging’. n. shedroff, “experience design”, experience design , new rider, and jesse james garrett http://www.jjg.net [accessed july ] jackie morgan op cit p . jackie morgan op cit p . chapter eight: installation exhibition of blackbox the interactive ‘audio-visual’ artwork blackbox: painting a digital picture of documented memory was installed in the kudos gallery space, college of fine arts, university of new south wales, september – october . the concept in the exhibition design was to invite the audience to initially view the material objects representing the various music and dance cultures used in the electronic work. after the visitor passed through this space of the exhibition they moved into a (digital) cinematic space. in this space the blackbox computer program was projected cinematically onto a large white screen at the rear of the gallery via a data projector. the real objects, viewed initially, could then be recognised as virtual artefacts in the interactive work. the interactive work was created to enable participation by the audience. the installation produced a new form of engagement with the artwork, where every visitor ‘played’ the electronic game to produce a subjective instance of the work. the light from the data projector painted representations onto the artificial wall, forming a new kind of canvass. the conceptualisation of this installation was influenced by the traditional cinematic conventions. indeed the projection of the audio-visual data, reflected onto a screen surface mimics early filmic projection of light through celluloid. however, the ‘active’ participation of the visitors and audience with the blackbox installation offered the possibility of a subjective intervention with the artwork and the ability to alter the sequential flow and duration of the audio-visual material. figure . blackbox, kudos gallery, college of fine arts, university of new south wales, september to october the subjective intervention of the viewer/user was heightened by the visibility of the computer technology enabling the operation of the blackbox exhibition. a g macintosh laptop computer was positioned directly in front of the data projector and opposite the screen/ wall/ canvass. the computer screen surface formed an additional frame within which to explore blackbox. figure . blackbox, kudos gallery, college of fine arts, university of new south wales, september to october photograph courtesy of geoffrey weary . see attachment (iii) blackbox installation dvd documentation photograph courtesy of geoffrey weary . figure . blackbox, kudos gallery, college of fine arts, university of new south wales, september to october photograph courtesy of geoffrey weary . chapter nine: conclusion blackbox: painting a digital picture of documented memory explores the potentials of interactive non-linear story-telling to articulate, through the meeting of scholarly research and artistic creation, a hybrid cultural identity. i aimed to construct an interactive text that could reveal the multiple cultural threads creating my identity. the imaginary protagonist nina, a name serendiptously common to the russian, indian and greek cultures, stands in for my ethnic and spiritual persona. the bricolage of the identities with which i grew up is revealed in the discovery of performances from three ‘imagined’ australian diasporic communities: (i) rembetika greek blues; (ii) classical indian dance and music (odissi and kuchipudi traditions); and (iii) fragments of australian jazz performed by russian musicians from china. dancing between and across these cultural forms and theories in blackbox is the method i have employed to structure this research. the objective of blackbox is to explore and make sense of the cultural influences that formed my cultural, emotional, and spiritual identity. however, the more connections i made between the genres and cultural forms the more gaps became visible. i have woven together these disparate threads to form an virtual collage of media, however this is a fabrication. the production of blackbox confirms that interactive multimedia is an appropriate medium to create a program that is self-reflexive and expresses the ‘open’, ‘ambivalent’, ‘ambiguous’, and ‘fragmentary’ formal qualities of the non-sequential narrative , where the navigable text enables multiple points of view to be conveyed, and multiple perspectives to be programmed into the work to produce an open-ended text, but which admits of neither closure, nor resolution. nina’s hybrid identity suggests the ways in which all individuals may be made up “of many threads”, the digital archive providing a collision of narrative and documentary forms that playfully reverse, obscure, and distort the look of the dominating/colonialist gaze. the metaphoric ‘composition’ and ‘choreography’ in the design of blackbox stuart hall, “gramsci’s relevance for the study of race and ethnicity”, in david morley and kuan-hsing chen (eds), stuart hall: critical dialogues in cultural studies, routledge, london, . gestures towards the telling of one’s own story as a biography, revealed through the unpacking of three virtual ‘ boxes’, containing émigré artefacts and music/dance performances. the songs and musical phrases pieced together by unique participation with this ‘game’ refer to the dis/connected surfacing of immigrant memories. the musical motif is symbolic of the way in which the multimedia artist assembles a range of media with software tools, just as the composer arranges musical notes and the conductor orchestrates the rendering of the musical score through musical instruments. like music, digital media is a time-based medium, where events and actions take place in a spatial and temporal sequence. blackbox experiments with and tests the relationship between the language of music and the production of image, text and sound, utilising multimedia tools programmed for interactivity. through exploration of the ‘foreign’, and incorporation of the ‘other’ into my understanding, i am aware of the dialectical relationship between self/other and east/west. returning to my father’s place of birth, shanghai, china; examining the photographic collages of my grandfather sergei ermolaeff’ shanghai jazz orchestra; engaging in documentation of classical indian dance; and re-discovering my greek grandparents favourite rembetika music have provided me with a lens through which to piece together the dissonant threads of my own fragmentary cultural identity as an interactive story. a selected bibliography electronic texts australia ad lib - chan sha http://www.abc.net.au/arts/adlib/stories/s .htm [accessed june .] australia – japan new media gallery http://www.newmedia.australia.or.jp/artist/ [accessed june .] j. fruhlinger, ‘broadband and the new user experience’ in new architect: internet strategies for technology leaders, , at http://www.newarchitectmag.com/print/documentid= [accessed june ] megan heyward, i am a singer, cd-rom, produced in association with the australian film commission, . megan heyward, of day, of night, cd-rom, produced in association with the australian film commission, . writer/producer prof andrew jakubowicz, multimedia design tatiana pentes, the menorah of fang bang lu interactive documentary project - http://www.transforming.cultures.uts.edu.au/shanghaisite shelley jackson patchwork girl hypertext fiction and internet site http://www.theineradicablestain.com [accessed june .] andrew jakubowicz, “discourses of the social: making multicultural australia- a multimedia documentary, media in transition conference, mit, october . [accessed june ] http://media-in-transition.mit.edu/articles/jakubowicz.html lev manovich, “new media from borges to html”, new media reader, mit press, u.s.a, fall – http://www.manovich.net brad miller and mckenzie wark, planet of noise, cd-rom, produced in association with the australian film commission, . norrie neumark and maria miranda, shock in the ear, cd-rom, produced in association with the australian film commission and abc radio, australian broadcasting corporation, . tatiana pentes and eurydice aroney, strange cities, produced in association with the australian film commission, . (sound design roi huberman, interface design glenn remington, and digital cinematography/ photography geoffrey weary). performance texts performance text, mangala charan (odissi dance) performed by ileana citaristi, choreography by guru kelucharan mohapatra, tom mann theatre, surrey hills, sydney, australia, , cinematography tatiana pentes, direction tatiana pentes. performance text, the power of the feminine: parallel performances: “untitled- a play in three acts” written and directed by john hughes, three dances by nirmal jena in indian odissi style, asian music and dance festival , the studio, sydney opera house, australia, . cinematography geoffrey weary, direction tatiana pentes. performance text, shanghai caberet, rose tang, electronic and temporal arts, sydney college of the arts, university of sydney, australia, . cinematography geoffrey weary, direction tatiana pentes. performance text, krishna shabdam (kuchipudi dance) performed by padma raman, leichhardt town hall, sydney, australia, . cinematography jai raman, direction tatiana pentes. performance text, konarak kanthi (odissi dance) performed by chitritta mukerjee, the performance space, . performance text, serge ermoll and his music masters, riverlights club, live recordings, sans souci, sydney, . performance text, straniye garadniye (strange cities), vinyl album, recordings, featuring sergei ermoll (ermolaeff)- composition, piano, mickey kaye - drums, and sergei korshoon - vocals, sydney, . performance text, old shanghai pop tunes, various artists, pathe label, shanghai, china, . performance text video documentation, the playspace, octopus festival, (rembetika and traditional greek music event), enmore theatre, may . cinematography geoffrey weary, direction tatiana pentes. performance text, video documentation of rebetiki, carnivale , (rembetika and traditional greek music event), enmore theatre, october , cinematography and direction tatiana pentes. performance text, video documentation of rochéle berwick, marrickville, october , videography by tatiana pentes. texts espen j. aarseth, cybertext: perspectives on ergodic literature, johns hopkins press, baltimore, . kay ambrose (revised by ram gopal), classical dances and costumes of india, adam and charles black, london, . roland barthes, camera lucida, flamingo, great britain, . benedict anderson, imagined communities: reflections on the origin and spread of nationalism, verso, london, . archer, w.g, the loves of krishna: in indian painting and poetry, george allen and unwin ltd, london, . (ed) angelika bammer, displacements: cultural identities in question, indiana university press, bloomington and indianapolis, . gerhard bachfischer, (unpublished creative journal),“a constant flow of thoughts”, master of interactive multimedia, institute for interactive media and learning, university of technology, sydney, . marshall berman, all that is solid melts into air: the experience of modernity, verso, u.k., . daniel bertol and david foell, designing digital space: an architects guide to virtual reality, wiley, . homi k. bhabha, nation and narration, routledge, london, . c. mackenzie brown, the triumph of the goddess: the canonical models and theological visions of the devi-bhagavata purana, state university of new york press, . robert calasso, ka, vintage, great britain, . brian castro, shanghai dancing, giramondo publishing, australia, . frank clune, sky high to shanghai, angus and robertson, sydney, . john conomos, “the work of art in the age of digital reproduction”, photofile, , , pp. - . bob cotton, and richard oliver, understanding hypermedia . : multimedia origins, internet futures, phaidon press, london, . ananda coomaraswamy and gopala kritnayya duggirla (trans.), the mirror of gesture: being the abhinaya darpana of nandikesuara, m. manoharlal, new delhi, ; a shorter compendium to the natya sastra (dramatic science). reed darmon, made in china, chronicle books, san francisco, . michael j. dear, the postmodern urban condition, university of southern california, blackwell, usa, . ragini devi, dance dialects of india, vikas publications, delhi, . jacques derrida, dissemination, chicago, chicago university press, . wimal dissanayake, colonialism and nationalism in asian cinema, bloomington, indian university press, . paul dimaggio, eszter hargittai, w. russell neuman, and john p. robinson, "social implications of the internet", annual review of sociology, . : - . rosalyn diprose and robyn ferrell, cartographies: poststructuralism and the mapping of bodies and space, allen and unwin, sydney, . rachel dixon (ed), other spaces: the marketing, distribution and exhibition of interactive art, a report for the australian film commission, sydney, . stella dong, shanghai: the rise and fall of a decadent city, harper collins, new york, . ruth eaton, ideal cities: utopianism and the (un)built environment, thames and hudson, usa, . sergei eisenstein, film form: essays in film theory, edited and translated by jay leyda, new york, harcourt brace, . michel foucault, “what is an author”, in p. rabinow (ed), the foucault reader, new york, pantheon books, . anne-marie gaston, siva in dance, myth, and iconography, oxford university press, delhi, . malcolm le grice, experimental cinema in the digital age, british film institute, london, . gerry farrell, "reflecting surfaces: the use of elements from indian music in popular music and jazz", popular music: south asia and the west, vol. no. , may . ross gibson and ernest edmonds (eds), interaction: systems, practice and theory, a creativity and cognition symposium, the dynamic design research group, creativity and cognition studio, powerhouse museum and university of technology sydney, sydney, - november . ross gibson, south of the west: postcolonialism and the narrative construction of australia, indiana university press, . helen gilbert, tseen khoo and jacqueline lo, diaspora: negotiating asian-australia, creative arts review, journal of australian studies and australian cultural history, university of queensland press, . giles herbert, strange tales from a shanghai studio, kelly and walsh, shanghai, . shakti gupta, vishnu and his incarnations, somaiya publications pvt, ltd, bombay, . stuart hall, “gramsci’s relevance for the study of race and ethnicity”, in david morley and kuan-hsing chen (eds), stuart hall: critical dialogues in cultural studies, routledge, london, . (eds) eleanor m. hight and gary d. sampson, colonialist photography: imag(in)ing race and place, routledge, london, . donna haraway, modest witness @ second_ millenium. female man _ meets onco mouse ™: feminism and technoscience, routledge, new york, . gail holst, road to rembetika: music of a greek sub-culture, songs of love, sorrow and hashish, denise harvey publisher, limni, evia, greece, . barbara hodgson, opium: a portrait of the heavenly demon, greystone books, douglas and mcintyre, british colombia, . enrico isacco and prof anna l. dallapiccola, krishna the divine lover: myth and legend through indian art, serinda publications, london, . m. jacka, broadband media in australia: tales from the frontier, australian film commission, sydney, . captain v.d. jiganoff, russians in shanghai, shanghai (private publication), . morny joy, “feminism and the self”, theory and psychology, sage,vol. ( ), . mohan khokar, traditions of classical indian dance, clarion books, new delhi, . david r kinsley, the sword and the flute: kali and krishna, dark visions of the terrible and the sublime in hindu mythology, university of california press, berkley, . joseph leo koerner, the moment of self-portraiture in german renaissance art, the university of chicago press, london and chicago, . m. korolenko, writing for multimedia, integrated media group, itp, belmont, ca, . robert van krieken, philip smith (et al), “migration, ethnicity and australian aboriginality in sociology: themes and perspectives ( nd edition), australia, . richard curt kraus, pianos and politics in china: middle class ambitions and the struggle over western music, oxford university press, . george landow (ed), hypertext: the convergence of contemporary critical theory and technology, john hopkins university press, baltimore, . george landow, “hypertext as collage-writing”, in peter lunenfeld (ed), the digital dialectic: new essays on new media, mit press, massechussetts, . bruno latour, ‘opening pandora’s black box’, science in action: how to follow scientists and engineers through society, harvard university press, cambridge, mass, . leo ou-fan lee, shanghai modern: the flowering of a new urban culture in china - , harvard university press, cambridge, maa, . linda leung, “tactics and technologies of resistance: the web as minority media”, in where am i? locating self and ethnicity on the world wide web, phd thesis, university of east london, may . el lissittzky, “the book: the electro-library, topology of typography”, merz, no. , hanover, july , in el lissitzky: life, letters, texts, thames and hudson, great britain, . william luis, dance between two cultures, nashville, vanderbilt university press, . munshiram manoharlal, natya sastra (a shorter compendium to the dramatic science), new delhi, . lev manovich, the language of new media, mit press, usa, fall, . vladimir mayakovsky, “for the voice” (index of poetry), in el lissitzky: life, letters, texts, thames and hudson, great britain, . michael b. miller, shanghai on the metro: spies, intrigue, and the french between the wars, university of california press, berkley, . trinh t. minh-ha, “outside in inside out”, in jim pines and paul willemen (eds), questions of a third cinema, british film institute, london, . g, mitchell, hindu gods and goddesses, her majesty’s stationary office, london, . jackie morgan, (unpublished paper) personal theory of interaction design, digital information and interaction design, master of interactive multimedia, institute for interactive media and learning, university of technology, sydney, may . lynn pan, shanghai: a century of change in photographs - , hai-feng publishing co, hong kong, . tatiana pentes, (unpublished) master of letters thesis cruel beauty, art history and theory/ women’s studies, university of sydney, . elias petropoulos, songs of the greek underworld: the rembetika tradition, (translated by ed emery), saqi books, london, . adya rangacharya (trans.), natya sastra, munshiram manoharlal, new delhi, . edward w. said, the world, the text, and the critic, cambridge, harvard university press, . edward w. said, orientalism, penguin, great britain, . dominic stansberry, labyrinths: the art of interactive writing and design – content development for new media, wadsworth publishing company, . lucy suchman, plans situated actions ii: human-machine reconfigurations, cambridge university press, . darren tofts and m. mckeitch, memory trade: a prehistory of cyberspace, sydney: interface, . mckenzie wark, a hacker manifesto, harvard university press, cambridge, ma, . mckenzie wark, virtual geography: living with global media events, bloomington, indiana university press, . (ed) gillian whitlock and david carter, images of australia: an introductory reader to australian studies, university of queensland press, . joanna, woodall(ed), portraiture: facing the subject, manchester university press, new york, martha zamora, frida kahlo: the brush of anguish, art data, london, . yingjin zhang, cinema and urban culture in shanghai, - , stanford university press, california, usa, . nichlas zurbrugg (ed), electronic arts in australia, continuum, the australian journal of media and culture, vol. , no. , . journal articles dr yuji sone, “digital allsorts: abstracting cultural identity”, diversity: arts in a multicultural australia, australia council for the arts, april . andrew jakubowicz, “from shanghai to sydney: sociology as cultural multimedia”, campus review, june - , . keith gallasch, “carnivale: multimedia jewish shanghai”, realtime , january . dean kiley, “seague, stretto, strafe and sashay”, realtime, august, . rose tang and yasmin ghahremani, “forgotten exiles”, asiaweek, september . belinda barnet, “sound machines, flesh machines and history engines: the dlux media/ arts exhibition”, metro magazine, number , . filmography charles chaplin (dir.), shanghaied, th century fox, . sergei eisenstein (dir.), battleship potemkin (bronenosets), . sergei eisenstein (dir.), october (octyabre), . sergei eisenstein (dir.), alexander nevsky, . karlson (dir.), the shanghai cobra, . naruse (dir.), shanghai no tsuki (the moon over shanghai), . josef von sternberg (dir.), the shanghai express, paramount, . josef von sternberg (dir.), the shanghai gesture, paramount, . geoffrey weary (dir.), tatiana pentes (digital effects & performance), scenes from a shanghai hotel, in association with the australian film commission, . online resources tales of old shanghai by graham earnshaw (sinomedia) www.earnshaw.com/shanghai-ed-india/tales/tales.htm [accessed february ] rembetika music online the rembetika forum www.rembetiko.gr/cgi-bin/forum/discus.pl [accessed february ] the ellada site - greek music sampler www.ellada.com/grarr .html [accessed february ] greek midi files [accessed february ] www.geocities.com/athens/forum/ /midi .htm diodinos (hellenic musical cultural center) www.diodinos.com/ [accessed february ] folk roots magazine, occasional articles on greek popular music www.frootsmag.com [accessed february ] the roza eskenazi home page [accessed february ] www.btinternet.com/~judyin.london/rozaeskenazi/roza .htm xenophone, on line record shop - greek record specialists www.xenophone.com/ [accessed february ] things about violins [accessed february ] www.telecom.ntua.gr/~zissop/chords/docs/tsaligopoulou/tsal .html greek folk music and dance [accessed february ] http://www.greekfolkmusicanddance.com/ the institute of rebetology www.geocities.com/rebetology [accessed february ] makam: rebetika, greek rebetika music http://www.musiq.com/rebetika/ [accessed february ] official website of apostolos nikolaidis www.apostolosnikolaidis.com [accessed february ] bibliography of rebetika and other greek music www.ledasoft.com/michalis/music.htm [accessed february ] oddissi dance online festival of films on performing and visual arts by ileana citaristi www.narthaki.com/info/reviews/review .html [accessed february ] kalinga mahotsav, a national festival of martial dances by ileana citaristi http://www.narthaki.com/info/reviews/review .html [accessed february ] mahal india-centric directory links for odissi dance www .imahal.com [accessed february ] odissi (orissi) classical dance of orissa chandrakantha.com [accessed february ] kala the arts: odissi www.kalathearts.dial.pipex.com [accessed february ] orissa state tourism home page www.ocf.berkeley.edu [accessed february ] chitralekha odissi dance creations www.seeodissi.com [accessed february ] kuchipudi dance online the immortal land of krishna www.swordoftruth.com/swordoftruth/multimedia/krishnapresentation/html/andhrapage.h tml [accessed february ] yale daily news, “raw and real: jhalak dances into our hearts” www.chennaionline.com/eevents/ /swetha.asphttp://www.yaledailynews.com/article.a sp?aid= [accessed february ] kuchipudi by david courtney chandrakantha.com/articles/indian_music/nritya/kuchipudi.html [accessed february ] arunima kumar - kuchipudi krishna shabdam http://www.artindia.net/arunima/reviews.html [accessed february ] south zone cultural centre www.szcc.tn.nic.in/kuchipudi.htm [accessed february ] rajar radha reddy's web site kuchipudi dance - krishna-shabdam www.rajaradhareddy.com/yamini.html [accessed february ] omna ancient art centre kuchipudi -krishna shabdam www.omnaart.org/gargi.htm [accessed february ] a web directory of indian classical dances kuchipudi www.narthaki.com/kuchipudi/kuchpudi.htm [accessed february ] glossary of terms alaap classical indian (hindustani) musical term depicting the slow introductory passage of improvisational melodic material before the establishment of the main raga composition. bharata natyam bharata natyam is an ancient and religious/ devotional south indian classical dance form. it developed in the hindu temples and courts culture, later transforming into a more secular form of entertainment and was “… codified and documented as a performing art in the th century by four brothers known as the tanjore quartet whose musical compositions for dance form the bulk of the bharata natyam repertoire even today. the art was handed down as a living tradition from generation to generation under the devadasi system under which women were dedicated to temples to serve the deity as dancers and musicians forming part of the elaborate rituals. these highly talented artists and the male gurus (nattuvanars) were the sole repository of the art until the early th century when a renewal of interest in india's cultural heritage prompted the educated elite to discover its beauty.” gopis (milkmaids) “according to the hindu belief, krishna was a reincarnation of lord vishnu himself….[legend had it that] krishna used to play pranks by drenching the village girls, with water and colours. at first it offended the girls. but they were so fond of this mischievous boy that soon their anger melted away.” this humorous and impish behaviour colours “krishna's courtship with his soul mate radha and playing pranks with the gopi's. the girls in the 'dairy' village of gokul were mostly milkmaids, and, hence locally known as the gopis. the same tradition has transpired through the ages, turning it into a community festival [holi] of the masses. the holi play of krishna is documented in hundreds of ancient paintings, murals, sculptures and scriptures found across the subcontinent. holi is also associated with the immortal love of krishna and radha.” interactive engagement the unique and subjective experience of human-computer meeting/ rendezvous, where the physical and corporeal human senses (sensorium) touch and intervene with an electronic computer based environment. lucy suchman discusses after donna haraway that technologies “…are forms of materialised figuration; that is, they bring together particular assemblages of stuff and meaning into more and less stable arrangements. gerry farrell, "reflecting surfaces: the use of elements from indian music in popular music and jazz", popular music: south asia and the west, vol. no. , may , p . art india net, bharata natyam, http://www.artindia.net/bharata.html [accessed february ] festivals http://www.indiaeducation.info/festivals/holi .htm [accessed july ] donna haraway, modest witness @second_millenium.femaleman_meets oncomouse™: feminism and technoscience, new york: routledge, , p . these arrangements imply in turn particular ways of associating humans and machines.” suchman positions the conversational machine as the object of her critique, arguing against “… intelligent, interactive machines – interactive not just in the sense that …they can engage in conversation with us…” , in favour of interactive machines in the sense that that term references the particular dynamics of a new computational media” , a reading consistent with the black box project. theorist mckenzie wark refers to this as a third nature, “starting with the telegraph, telephone, television -- all the way to telecommunications…based on the techniques of telesthesia -- perception at a distance. this of course brings a new series of contradictions in its wake. but just as second nature dominates nature, so third nature dominates second nature. the materiality of nature does not go away, it is just subjected to ever more abstract forms of power.” interface “that boundary, or ‘interface’, delineates two separate bodies, one organic, the other artifactual.” (virtual/artificial). the relationship between the human and the computer. figure . the prokopoff perceptron, circa lucy suchman, plans and situated actions ii: human-machine reconfigurations, cambridge university pres, . lucy suchman op cit p . lucy suchman op cit p . interview with mckenzie wark by tatiana pentes friday, december , : lucy suchman op cit p . “when applied to computer software, user interface design is also known as human-computer interaction or hci.”user interface design and usability testing www.usernomics.com/user-interface- design.html [accessed february ] chris csikzentmihalyi “the prokopoff perceptron, circa , has been reanimated as "character input," the second part of a five year project to reconstruct three obscure technologies from the history of computing. the first reconstruction, "species substitute," was an autonomous robotic entity created by the american hydropower institute in . it was presented at helsinki's muumedia festival in . "character input" is being unveiled at 's international symposium on electronic art…. in , a jazz “[jazz] has its roots in both european and african musical traditions, mixed and baked in the cotton fields of the american south. it relies heavily on syncopation, which means the players slide the notes into the framework of the beat wherever it happens to feel right. that doesn't tell you much about the music, though. so i thought it might be best if i simply let musicians explain it:” what is jazz? http://www.stmoroky.com/reviews/music/jazz.htm [accessed january ] "i'll play it first and tell you what it is later." - miles davis "what we play is life." - louis armstrong "music is your own experience, your own thoughts, your wisdom. if you don't live it, it won't come out of your horn. they teach you there's a boundary line to music. but, man, there's no boundary line to art." - charlie parker - figure . serge ermoll jr (piano) quintet, el rocco jazz cellar, kings cross, sydney, c. "i say, 'play your own way. don't play what the public wants. you play what you want and let the public pick up on what you're doing - even if it does take them fifteen, twenty years'." - thelonious monk. "never play a thing the same way twice." - louis armstrong soviet scientist from moscow university, while working on simple perceptron systems, came across a profoundly significant discovery. his research involved the recognition and discrimination of human faces. funded mostly by a branch of the mvd for organizing criminal databases, dr. ilya prokopoff was hoping to catagorize faces through the use of perceptrons, machines built on models of the architecture of the brain, extremely facile at pattern recognition.” http://web.media.mit.edu/~csik/research [accessed february ]. what is jazz? http://www.stmoroky.com/reviews/music/jazz.htm [accessed january ] what is jazz? http://www.stmoroky.com/reviews/music/jazz.htm [accessed january ] "bebop was about change, about evolution. it wasn't about standing still and becoming safe. if anybody wants to keep creating they have to be about change." - miles davis” kuchipudi kuchipudi is a classical indian dance drama form connected with the bharata natyam style, incorporating, gestures, speech and song, originally performed solely by men. this dance performance, founded by siddendra yogi, originated in small village in the andhra pradesh state, and dates back to the south indian devotional (bhakti) movement of the th century. lord jagannatha in the hindu religion jagannatha is the lord of the universe and an avatar (manifestation) of vishnu, who along with his sister subadhra, and brother balabadhra forms one version of the holy hindu trinity. figure . lord jagannatha, subadhra, balabadhra, the holy trinity macintosh computer “january saw the twentieth anniversary of perhaps the most important computer advance of the personal computer age - the release of the macintosh computer by apple inc in .you would have had to used a computer before the macintosh to realise what an advance it was. for a start, it was the first personal computer to bring to market the 'windows' software invented by the xerox palo alto laboratories. (pcs waited until to adopt the same basic technology). it did many other things as well – it was probably the first computer with a friendly interface, the first to play music, the first to allow you to draw pictures and to introduce voice technologies. it was a remarkable step forward which, when accompanied by the desktop publishing software apple introduced a few years later, saw the personal computer revolution take a giant step forward. to celebrate, wired magazine published a number of articles … http://www.wired.com/news/mac/ , , , .html as a starting point.” http://www.delhitourism.com/dance/ [accessed january ] internet history newsletter http://www.nethistory.info website [accessed february ] nataraja "because you love the burning -ground, i have made a burning-ground of my heart - that you, dark one, hunter of the burning-ground, may dance your eternal dance." ~ bengali hymn~ “the significance of the nataraja (nataraj) sculpture is said to be that shiva is shown as the source of all movement within the cosmos, represented by the arch of flames. the purpose of the dance is to release men from illusion of the idea of the "self" and of the physical world. the cosmic dance was performed in chidambaram in south india, called the centre of the universe by some hindus. the gestures of the dance represent shiva's five activities, creation (symbolized by the drum), protection (by the "fear not" hand gesture), destruction (by the fire), embodiment (by the foot planted on the ground), and release (by the foot held aloft). as nataraja (sanskrit: lord of dance) shiva represents apocalypse and creation as he dances away the illusory world of maya transforming it into power and enlightenment.” figure . hindu lord of dance – nataraja (details of bronze sculpture) new media art/ digital media art the production of creative cultural objects that are enabled, exhibited and distributed by digital media technologies, including electronic networking, the internet, and computer based technologies. odissi a classical form of indian dance, originating from the state of orissa, india. the dance was developed as a form of devotional hindu worhip in the temples – puri and jaganatha, orissa, where devdasi (hindu temple dancers) performed this sacred ritual dance as an offering to the lord. lotus sculpture http://www.lotussculpture.com/nataraja .htm [accessed january ] lotus sculpture http://www.lotussculpture.com/nataraja .htm [accessed january ] figure . maya darpan and odissi dance drama by ileana citaristi participant/ player the active engagement of human intervention and involvement in the unfolding of a computer game, computer program, electronic environment, or online internet or networked experience. retablo “… referred to as "laminas" in mexico, are small oil paintings on tin, zinc, wood or copper which venerate a multiplicity of catholic saints. the literal translation for "retablo" is "behind the altar." this genre of folk art, deeply rooted in spanish history, represents the heart and soul of traditional religious beliefs in th, th, and th century mexican culture…. counterparts to the retablo, ex votos are devotional paintings on canvas or tin that offer thanks to a particular saint in the form of a short narrative. in many events, a small child becomes ill, a favourite animal finally wanders home or a family narrowly escapes the clutches of death after their small house burns to the ground. the petitioner, grateful for a miracle received, dedicates a small painting (with a short testimonial) to the respective patron saint. ” shanghai (quoted from brian castro, shanghai dancing) “the formerly wide-spread use of unscrupulous means to procure sailors for voyages to the orient] a: to put aboard a ship by force often with the help of liquor or a drug…b: to maya darpan and odissi dance drama, year of production – , choreography - dr. ileana citaristi concept and script - sri jivan pani, music - sri partho das, light and sound - arun madkaikar, dancers - females and male, duration - min. “the concept of maya in indian philosophy is as metaphysical as poetic. maya darpan, the choreographic composition based on the odissi style has been inspired by the poetic treatment of the concept of maya in various upanishads. in the first scene we are facing the watery surface of the timeless being; the moment 'time' or 'rhythm' creeps in, the dimension of 'space' takes shape and 'prakruti' or nature is born. http://www.kalinga.net/ileana/maya.htm [accessed february ] mexican retablo art www.mexicanretablos.com/information.htm [accessed july ] and dawn ades, art in latin america: the modern era, - , yale university press, new haven and london . put by force or a threat of force into or as if into a place of detention… : to put by trickery into an undesirable position…” shanghai-dancing (quoted from brian castro, shanghai dancing) “to cast a line from an old spool: it is the attainment of disorientation and instability.” figure . rose tang, cabaret taxi dancer performance, blackbox interface still raga a raga is a classical indian musical expression. “a raga is a detailed exploration of a particular musical mode in a sectionalised manner – in free time, with regular pulse and with meter. each raga is identified by characteristic ascending and descending in order of notes, phrases, important tones which have special relevance to the raga and an aesthetic dimension…” taximia taximia is the elaborate improvisational introduction to a song in rembetika (the greek blues), in the same way the hindustani music has an introductory alaap. taxi-dancer “tens of thousands of russians fled to china after the bolshevik revolution, many of them aristocrats or white russian army officers. by , there were about , russians living in shanghai. they were stateless, disowned by the communists and ignored by the rest of the world. they brought a new kind of style to shanghai, but also through their poverty and desperation, gave the native chinese a glimpse of the fact that white people were not necessarily the infallible master race. there were russian musicians and dancers and poets. some of the men became bodyguards to shanghai's rich, while the stylish, desperate white russians girls in the ballrooms and bars of the city were famous for their beauty.” many russian women danced in the clubs with men who paid with tickets. stella dong, shanghai: the rise and fall of a decadent city, harper collins, new york, , p . brian castro, shanghai dancing, giramondo publishing, australia, , p . gerry farrell, "reflecting surfaces: the use of elements from indian music in popular music and jazz", popular music: south asia and the west, vol. no. , may , p . tales of old shanghai www.earnshaw.com/shanghai-ed-india/tales/t-russ.htm "nowhere in the world, i should think are there so many cabarets in proportion to the total white population. they range from the cheap and respectable palais de danse to more select resorts with exotic names like 'paradise,' where beautifully dressed professional dancers, mostly russian, obligingly dance with all comers on the sole condition that they order champagne." rembetika the origins of the word rembetika can be traced to: rembet – an old turkish word meaning "of the gutter"; (b) rebenok – the serb word meaning "rebel"; (c) rebet asker – turkish phrase referring to/meaning "people who would not submit to authority:' (d) re, rab, ruba'a – the persian/arabic meaning "four", "quatrain”; (e) rab – hebrew meaning from which the word "rabbi" is derived; (f) rembetiko – corruption of the archaic modern term remuastikos (meditative) derived from the word "remvo" or "remvazo" – meaning to wander, or literally "my mind is wandering in an anxious mood." the 'fragmentary' qualities of "wandering’ through the interactive text and the idea of music of the ghetto connect with the broader concerns of this project. figure . rembetika musicians (refugees) at fish market at piraeus, greece, [accessed march ] from an english journalist in www.earnshaw.com/shanghai-ed-india/tales/t-russ.htm [accessed march ] elias petropoulos, “introduction” in songs of the greek underworld: the rembetika tradition, (translated by ed emery), saqi books, london, . gail holst, road to remetika: music of a greek sub-culture, songs of love, sorrow and hashish, denise harvey publisher, limni, evia, greece, , p . gail holst op cit p . chapter nine: conclusion blackbox: painting a digital picture of documented memory explores the potentials of interactive non-linear story-telling to articulate, through the meeting of scholarly research and artistic creation, a hybrid cultural identity. i aimed to construct an interactive text that could reveal the multiple cultural threads creating my identity. the imaginary protagonist nina, a name serendiptously common to the russian, indian and greek cultures, stands in for my ethnic and spiritual persona. the bricolage of the identities with which i grew up is revealed in the discovery of performances from three ‘imagined’ australian diasporic communities: (i) rembetika greek blues; (ii) classical indian dance and music (odissi and kuchipudi traditions); and (iii) fragments of australian jazz performed by russian musicians from china. dancing between and across these cultural forms and theories in blackbox is the method i have employed to structure this research. the objective of blackbox is to explore and make sense of the cultural influences that formed my cultural, emotional, and spiritual identity. however, the more connections i made between the genres and cultural forms the more gaps became visible. i have woven together these disparate threads to form an virtual collage of media, however this is a fabrication. the production of blackbox confirms that interactive multimedia is an appropriate medium to create a program that is self-reflexive and expresses the ‘open’, ‘ambivalent’, ‘ambiguous’, and ‘fragmentary’ formal qualities of the non-sequential narrative , where the navigable text enables multiple points of view to be conveyed, and multiple perspectives to be programmed into the work to produce an open-ended text, but which admits of neither closure, nor resolution. nina’s hybrid identity suggests the ways in which all individuals may be made up “of many threads”, the digital archive providing a collision of narrative and documentary forms that playfully reverse, obscure, and distort the look of the dominating/colonialist gaze. the metaphoric ‘composition’ and ‘choreography’ in the design of blackbox stuart hall, “gramsci’s relevance for the study of race and ethnicity”, in david morley and kuan-hsing chen (eds), stuart hall: critical dialogues in cultural studies, routledge, london, . gestures towards the telling of one’s own story as a biography, revealed through the unpacking of three virtual ‘ boxes’, containing émigré artefacts and music/dance performances. the songs and musical phrases pieced together by unique participation with this ‘game’ refer to the dis/connected surfacing of immigrant memories. the musical motif is symbolic of the way in which the multimedia artist assembles a range of media with software tools, just as the composer arranges musical notes and the conductor orchestrates the rendering of the musical score through musical instruments. like music, digital media is a time-based medium, where events and actions take place in a spatial and temporal sequence. blackbox experiments with and tests the relationship between the language of music and the production of image, text and sound, utilising multimedia tools programmed for interactivity. through exploration of the ‘foreign’, and incorporation of the ‘other’ into my understanding, i am aware of the dialectical relationship between self/other and east/west. returning to my father’s place of birth, shanghai, china; examining the photographic collages of my grandfather sergei ermolaeff’ shanghai jazz orchestra; engaging in documentation of classical indian dance; and re-discovering my greek grandparents favourite rembetika music have provided me with a lens through which to piece together the dissonant threads of my own fragmentary cultural identity as an interactive story. a selected bibliography electronic texts australia ad lib - chan sha http://www.abc.net.au/arts/adlib/stories/s .htm [accessed june .] australia – japan new media gallery http://www.newmedia.australia.or.jp/artist/ [accessed june .] j. fruhlinger, ‘broadband and the new user experience’ in new architect: internet strategies for technology leaders, , at http://www.newarchitectmag.com/print/documentid= [accessed june ] megan heyward, i am a singer, cd-rom, produced in association with the australian film commission, . megan heyward, of day, of night, cd-rom, produced in association with the australian film commission, . writer/producer prof andrew jakubowicz, multimedia design tatiana pentes, the menorah of fang bang lu interactive documentary project - http://www.transforming.cultures.uts.edu.au/shanghaisite shelley jackson patchwork girl hypertext fiction and internet site http://www.theineradicablestain.com [accessed june .] andrew jakubowicz, “discourses of the social: making multicultural australia- a multimedia documentary, media in transition conference, mit, october . [accessed june ] http://media-in-transition.mit.edu/articles/jakubowicz.html lev manovich, “new media from borges to html”, new media reader, mit press, u.s.a, fall – http://www.manovich.net brad miller and mckenzie wark, planet of noise, cd-rom, produced in association with the australian film commission, . norrie neumark and maria miranda, shock in the ear, cd-rom, produced in association with the australian film commission and abc radio, australian broadcasting corporation, . tatiana pentes and eurydice aroney, strange cities, produced in association with the australian film commission, . (sound design roi huberman, interface design glenn remington, and digital cinematography/ photography geoffrey weary). performance texts performance text, mangala charan (odissi dance) performed by ileana citaristi, choreography by guru kelucharan mohapatra, tom mann theatre, surrey hills, sydney, australia, , cinematography tatiana pentes, direction tatiana pentes. performance text, the power of the feminine: parallel performances: “untitled- a play in three acts” written and directed by john hughes, three dances by nirmal jena in indian odissi style, asian music and dance festival , the studio, sydney opera house, australia, . cinematography geoffrey weary, direction tatiana pentes. performance text, shanghai caberet, rose tang, electronic and temporal arts, sydney college of the arts, university of sydney, australia, . cinematography geoffrey weary, direction tatiana pentes. performance text, krishna shabdam (kuchipudi dance) performed by padma raman, leichhardt town hall, sydney, australia, . cinematography jai raman, direction tatiana pentes. performance text, konarak kanthi (odissi dance) performed by chitritta mukerjee, the performance space, . performance text, serge ermoll and his music masters, riverlights club, live recordings, sans souci, sydney, . performance text, straniye garadniye (strange cities), vinyl album, recordings, featuring sergei ermoll (ermolaeff)- composition, piano, mickey kaye - drums, and sergei korshoon - vocals, sydney, . performance text, old shanghai pop tunes, various artists, pathe label, shanghai, china, . performance text video documentation, the playspace, octopus festival, (rembetika and traditional greek music event), enmore theatre, may . cinematography geoffrey weary, direction tatiana pentes. performance text, video documentation of rebetiki, carnivale , (rembetika and traditional greek music event), enmore theatre, october , cinematography and direction tatiana pentes. performance text, video documentation of rochéle berwick, marrickville, october , videography by tatiana pentes. texts espen j. aarseth, cybertext: perspectives on ergodic literature, johns hopkins press, baltimore, . kay ambrose (revised by ram gopal), classical dances and costumes of india, adam and charles black, london, . roland barthes, camera lucida, flamingo, great britain, . benedict anderson, imagined communities: reflections on the origin and spread of nationalism, verso, london, . archer, w.g, the loves of krishna: in indian painting and poetry, george allen and unwin ltd, london, . (ed) angelika bammer, displacements: cultural identities in question, indiana university press, bloomington and indianapolis, . gerhard bachfischer, (unpublished creative journal),“a constant flow of thoughts”, master of interactive multimedia, institute for interactive media and learning, university of technology, sydney, . marshall berman, all that is solid melts into air: the experience of modernity, verso, u.k., . daniel bertol and david foell, designing digital space: an architects guide to virtual reality, wiley, . homi k. bhabha, nation and narration, routledge, london, . c. mackenzie brown, the triumph of the goddess: the canonical models and theological visions of the devi-bhagavata purana, state university of new york press, . robert calasso, ka, vintage, great britain, . brian castro, shanghai dancing, giramondo publishing, australia, . frank clune, sky high to shanghai, angus and robertson, sydney, . john conomos, “the work of art in the age of digital reproduction”, photofile, , , pp. - . bob cotton, and richard oliver, understanding hypermedia . : multimedia origins, internet futures, phaidon press, london, . ananda coomaraswamy and gopala kritnayya duggirla (trans.), the mirror of gesture: being the abhinaya darpana of nandikesuara, m. manoharlal, new delhi, ; a shorter compendium to the natya sastra (dramatic science). reed darmon, made in china, chronicle books, san francisco, . michael j. dear, the postmodern urban condition, university of southern california, blackwell, usa, . ragini devi, dance dialects of india, vikas publications, delhi, . jacques derrida, dissemination, chicago, chicago university press, . wimal dissanayake, colonialism and nationalism in asian cinema, bloomington, indian university press, . paul dimaggio, eszter hargittai, w. russell neuman, and john p. robinson, "social implications of the internet", annual review of sociology, . : - . rosalyn diprose and robyn ferrell, cartographies: poststructuralism and the mapping of bodies and space, allen and unwin, sydney, . rachel dixon (ed), other spaces: the marketing, distribution and exhibition of interactive art, a report for the australian film commission, sydney, . stella dong, shanghai: the rise and fall of a decadent city, harper collins, new york, . ruth eaton, ideal cities: utopianism and the (un)built environment, thames and hudson, usa, . sergei eisenstein, film form: essays in film theory, edited and translated by jay leyda, new york, harcourt brace, . michel foucault, “what is an author”, in p. rabinow (ed), the foucault reader, new york, pantheon books, . anne-marie gaston, siva in dance, myth, and iconography, oxford university press, delhi, . malcolm le grice, experimental cinema in the digital age, british film institute, london, . gerry farrell, "reflecting surfaces: the use of elements from indian music in popular music and jazz", popular music: south asia and the west, vol. no. , may . ross gibson and ernest edmonds (eds), interaction: systems, practice and theory, a creativity and cognition symposium, the dynamic design research group, creativity and cognition studio, powerhouse museum and university of technology sydney, sydney, - november . ross gibson, south of the west: postcolonialism and the narrative construction of australia, indiana university press, . helen gilbert, tseen khoo and jacqueline lo, diaspora: negotiating asian-australia, creative arts review, journal of australian studies and australian cultural history, university of queensland press, . giles herbert, strange tales from a shanghai studio, kelly and walsh, shanghai, . shakti gupta, vishnu and his incarnations, somaiya publications pvt, ltd, bombay, . stuart hall, “gramsci’s relevance for the study of race and ethnicity”, in david morley and kuan-hsing chen (eds), stuart hall: critical dialogues in cultural studies, routledge, london, . (eds) eleanor m. hight and gary d. sampson, colonialist photography: imag(in)ing race and place, routledge, london, . donna haraway, modest witness @ second_ millenium. female man _ meets onco mouse ™: feminism and technoscience, routledge, new york, . gail holst, road to rembetika: music of a greek sub-culture, songs of love, sorrow and hashish, denise harvey publisher, limni, evia, greece, . barbara hodgson, opium: a portrait of the heavenly demon, greystone books, douglas and mcintyre, british colombia, . enrico isacco and prof anna l. dallapiccola, krishna the divine lover: myth and legend through indian art, serinda publications, london, . m. jacka, broadband media in australia: tales from the frontier, australian film commission, sydney, . captain v.d. jiganoff, russians in shanghai, shanghai (private publication), . morny joy, “feminism and the self”, theory and psychology, sage,vol. ( ), . mohan khokar, traditions of classical indian dance, clarion books, new delhi, . david r kinsley, the sword and the flute: kali and krishna, dark visions of the terrible and the sublime in hindu mythology, university of california press, berkley, . joseph leo koerner, the moment of self-portraiture in german renaissance art, the university of chicago press, london and chicago, . m. korolenko, writing for multimedia, integrated media group, itp, belmont, ca, . robert van krieken, philip smith (et al), “migration, ethnicity and australian aboriginality in sociology: themes and perspectives ( nd edition), australia, . richard curt kraus, pianos and politics in china: middle class ambitions and the struggle over western music, oxford university press, . george landow (ed), hypertext: the convergence of contemporary critical theory and technology, john hopkins university press, baltimore, . george landow, “hypertext as collage-writing”, in peter lunenfeld (ed), the digital dialectic: new essays on new media, mit press, massechussetts, . bruno latour, ‘opening pandora’s black box’, science in action: how to follow scientists and engineers through society, harvard university press, cambridge, mass, . leo ou-fan lee, shanghai modern: the flowering of a new urban culture in china - , harvard university press, cambridge, maa, . linda leung, “tactics and technologies of resistance: the web as minority media”, in where am i? locating self and ethnicity on the world wide web, phd thesis, university of east london, may . el lissittzky, “the book: the electro-library, topology of typography”, merz, no. , hanover, july , in el lissitzky: life, letters, texts, thames and hudson, great britain, . william luis, dance between two cultures, nashville, vanderbilt university press, . munshiram manoharlal, natya sastra (a shorter compendium to the dramatic science), new delhi, . lev manovich, the language of new media, mit press, usa, fall, . vladimir mayakovsky, “for the voice” (index of poetry), in el lissitzky: life, letters, texts, thames and hudson, great britain, . michael b. miller, shanghai on the metro: spies, intrigue, and the french between the wars, university of california press, berkley, . trinh t. minh-ha, “outside in inside out”, in jim pines and paul willemen (eds), questions of a third cinema, british film institute, london, . g, mitchell, hindu gods and goddesses, her majesty’s stationary office, london, . jackie morgan, (unpublished paper) personal theory of interaction design, digital information and interaction design, master of interactive multimedia, institute for interactive media and learning, university of technology, sydney, may . lynn pan, shanghai: a century of change in photographs - , hai-feng publishing co, hong kong, . tatiana pentes, (unpublished) master of letters thesis cruel beauty, art history and theory/ women’s studies, university of sydney, . elias petropoulos, songs of the greek underworld: the rembetika tradition, (translated by ed emery), saqi books, london, . adya rangacharya (trans.), natya sastra, munshiram manoharlal, new delhi, . edward w. said, the world, the text, and the critic, cambridge, harvard university press, . edward w. said, orientalism, penguin, great britain, . dominic stansberry, labyrinths: the art of interactive writing and design – content development for new media, wadsworth publishing company, . lucy suchman, plans situated actions ii: human-machine reconfigurations, cambridge university press, . darren tofts and m. mckeitch, memory trade: a prehistory of cyberspace, sydney: interface, . mckenzie wark, a hacker manifesto, harvard university press, cambridge, ma, . mckenzie wark, virtual geography: living with global media events, bloomington, indiana university press, . (ed) gillian whitlock and david carter, images of australia: an introductory reader to australian studies, university of queensland press, . joanna, woodall(ed), portraiture: facing the subject, manchester university press, new york, martha zamora, frida kahlo: the brush of anguish, art data, london, . yingjin zhang, cinema and urban culture in shanghai, - , stanford university press, california, usa, . nichlas zurbrugg (ed), electronic arts in australia, continuum, the australian journal of media and culture, vol. , no. , . journal articles dr yuji sone, “digital allsorts: abstracting cultural identity”, diversity: arts in a multicultural australia, australia council for the arts, april . andrew jakubowicz, “from shanghai to sydney: sociology as cultural multimedia”, campus review, june - , . keith gallasch, “carnivale: multimedia jewish shanghai”, realtime , january . dean kiley, “seague, stretto, strafe and sashay”, realtime, august, . rose tang and yasmin ghahremani, “forgotten exiles”, asiaweek, september . belinda barnet, “sound machines, flesh machines and history engines: the dlux media/ arts exhibition”, metro magazine, number , . filmography charles chaplin (dir.), shanghaied, th century fox, . sergei eisenstein (dir.), battleship potemkin (bronenosets), . sergei eisenstein (dir.), october (octyabre), . sergei eisenstein (dir.), alexander nevsky, . karlson (dir.), the shanghai cobra, . naruse (dir.), shanghai no tsuki (the moon over shanghai), . josef von sternberg (dir.), the shanghai express, paramount, . josef von sternberg (dir.), the shanghai gesture, paramount, . geoffrey weary (dir.), tatiana pentes (digital effects & performance), scenes from a shanghai hotel, in association with the australian film commission, . online resources tales of old shanghai by graham earnshaw (sinomedia) www.earnshaw.com/shanghai-ed-india/tales/tales.htm [accessed february ] rembetika music online the rembetika forum www.rembetiko.gr/cgi-bin/forum/discus.pl [accessed february ] the ellada site - greek music sampler www.ellada.com/grarr .html [accessed february ] greek midi files [accessed february ] www.geocities.com/athens/forum/ /midi .htm diodinos (hellenic musical cultural center) www.diodinos.com/ [accessed february ] folk roots magazine, occasional articles on greek popular music www.frootsmag.com [accessed february ] the roza eskenazi home page [accessed february ] www.btinternet.com/~judyin.london/rozaeskenazi/roza .htm xenophone, on line record shop - greek record specialists www.xenophone.com/ [accessed february ] things about violins [accessed february ] www.telecom.ntua.gr/~zissop/chords/docs/tsaligopoulou/tsal .html greek folk music and dance [accessed february ] http://www.greekfolkmusicanddance.com/ the institute of rebetology www.geocities.com/rebetology [accessed february ] makam: rebetika, greek rebetika music http://www.musiq.com/rebetika/ [accessed february ] official website of apostolos nikolaidis www.apostolosnikolaidis.com [accessed february ] bibliography of rebetika and other greek music www.ledasoft.com/michalis/music.htm [accessed february ] oddissi dance online festival of films on performing and visual arts by ileana citaristi www.narthaki.com/info/reviews/review .html [accessed february ] kalinga mahotsav, a national festival of martial dances by ileana citaristi http://www.narthaki.com/info/reviews/review .html [accessed february ] mahal india-centric directory links for odissi dance www .imahal.com [accessed february ] odissi (orissi) classical dance of orissa chandrakantha.com [accessed february ] kala the arts: odissi www.kalathearts.dial.pipex.com [accessed february ] orissa state tourism home page www.ocf.berkeley.edu [accessed february ] chitralekha odissi dance creations www.seeodissi.com [accessed february ] kuchipudi dance online the immortal land of krishna www.swordoftruth.com/swordoftruth/multimedia/krishnapresentation/html/andhrapage.h tml [accessed february ] yale daily news, “raw and real: jhalak dances into our hearts” www.chennaionline.com/eevents/ /swetha.asphttp://www.yaledailynews.com/article.a sp?aid= [accessed february ] kuchipudi by david courtney chandrakantha.com/articles/indian_music/nritya/kuchipudi.html [accessed february ] arunima kumar - kuchipudi krishna shabdam http://www.artindia.net/arunima/reviews.html [accessed february ] south zone cultural centre www.szcc.tn.nic.in/kuchipudi.htm [accessed february ] rajar radha reddy's web site kuchipudi dance - krishna-shabdam www.rajaradhareddy.com/yamini.html [accessed february ] omna ancient art centre kuchipudi -krishna shabdam www.omnaart.org/gargi.htm [accessed february ] a web directory of indian classical dances kuchipudi www.narthaki.com/kuchipudi/kuchpudi.htm [accessed february ] glossary of terms alaap classical indian (hindustani) musical term depicting the slow introductory passage of improvisational melodic material before the establishment of the main raga composition. bharata natyam bharata natyam is an ancient and religious/ devotional south indian classical dance form. it developed in the hindu temples and courts culture, later transforming into a more secular form of entertainment and was “… codified and documented as a performing art in the th century by four brothers known as the tanjore quartet whose musical compositions for dance form the bulk of the bharata natyam repertoire even today. the art was handed down as a living tradition from generation to generation under the devadasi system under which women were dedicated to temples to serve the deity as dancers and musicians forming part of the elaborate rituals. these highly talented artists and the male gurus (nattuvanars) were the sole repository of the art until the early th century when a renewal of interest in india's cultural heritage prompted the educated elite to discover its beauty.” gopis (milkmaids) “according to the hindu belief, krishna was a reincarnation of lord vishnu himself….[legend had it that] krishna used to play pranks by drenching the village girls, with water and colours. at first it offended the girls. but they were so fond of this mischievous boy that soon their anger melted away.” this humorous and impish behaviour colours “krishna's courtship with his soul mate radha and playing pranks with the gopi's. the girls in the 'dairy' village of gokul were mostly milkmaids, and, hence locally known as the gopis. the same tradition has transpired through the ages, turning it into a community festival [holi] of the masses. the holi play of krishna is documented in hundreds of ancient paintings, murals, sculptures and scriptures found across the subcontinent. holi is also associated with the immortal love of krishna and radha.” interactive engagement the unique and subjective experience of human-computer meeting/ rendezvous, where the physical and corporeal human senses (sensorium) touch and intervene with an electronic computer based environment. lucy suchman discusses after donna haraway that technologies “…are forms of materialised figuration; that is, they bring together particular assemblages of stuff and meaning into more and less stable arrangements. gerry farrell, "reflecting surfaces: the use of elements from indian music in popular music and jazz", popular music: south asia and the west, vol. no. , may , p . art india net, bharata natyam, http://www.artindia.net/bharata.html [accessed february ] festivals http://www.indiaeducation.info/festivals/holi .htm [accessed july ] donna haraway, modest witness @second_millenium.femaleman_meets oncomouse™: feminism and technoscience, new york: routledge, , p . these arrangements imply in turn particular ways of associating humans and machines.” suchman positions the conversational machine as the object of her critique, arguing against “… intelligent, interactive machines – interactive not just in the sense that …they can engage in conversation with us…” , in favour of interactive machines in the sense that that term references the particular dynamics of a new computational media” , a reading consistent with the black box project. theorist mckenzie wark refers to this as a third nature, “starting with the telegraph, telephone, television -- all the way to telecommunications…based on the techniques of telesthesia -- perception at a distance. this of course brings a new series of contradictions in its wake. but just as second nature dominates nature, so third nature dominates second nature. the materiality of nature does not go away, it is just subjected to ever more abstract forms of power.” interface “that boundary, or ‘interface’, delineates two separate bodies, one organic, the other artifactual.” (virtual/artificial). the relationship between the human and the computer. figure . the prokopoff perceptron, circa lucy suchman, plans and situated actions ii: human-machine reconfigurations, cambridge university pres, . lucy suchman op cit p . lucy suchman op cit p . interview with mckenzie wark by tatiana pentes friday, december , : lucy suchman op cit p . “when applied to computer software, user interface design is also known as human-computer interaction or hci.”user interface design and usability testing www.usernomics.com/user-interface- design.html [accessed february ] chris csikzentmihalyi “the prokopoff perceptron, circa , has been reanimated as "character input," the second part of a five year project to reconstruct three obscure technologies from the history of computing. the first reconstruction, "species substitute," was an autonomous robotic entity created by the american hydropower institute in . it was presented at helsinki's muumedia festival in . "character input" is being unveiled at 's international symposium on electronic art…. in , a jazz “[jazz] has its roots in both european and african musical traditions, mixed and baked in the cotton fields of the american south. it relies heavily on syncopation, which means the players slide the notes into the framework of the beat wherever it happens to feel right. that doesn't tell you much about the music, though. so i thought it might be best if i simply let musicians explain it:” what is jazz? http://www.stmoroky.com/reviews/music/jazz.htm [accessed january ] "i'll play it first and tell you what it is later." - miles davis "what we play is life." - louis armstrong "music is your own experience, your own thoughts, your wisdom. if you don't live it, it won't come out of your horn. they teach you there's a boundary line to music. but, man, there's no boundary line to art." - charlie parker - figure . serge ermoll jr (piano) quintet, el rocco jazz cellar, kings cross, sydney, c. "i say, 'play your own way. don't play what the public wants. you play what you want and let the public pick up on what you're doing - even if it does take them fifteen, twenty years'." - thelonious monk. "never play a thing the same way twice." - louis armstrong soviet scientist from moscow university, while working on simple perceptron systems, came across a profoundly significant discovery. his research involved the recognition and discrimination of human faces. funded mostly by a branch of the mvd for organizing criminal databases, dr. ilya prokopoff was hoping to catagorize faces through the use of perceptrons, machines built on models of the architecture of the brain, extremely facile at pattern recognition.” http://web.media.mit.edu/~csik/research [accessed february ]. what is jazz? http://www.stmoroky.com/reviews/music/jazz.htm [accessed january ] what is jazz? http://www.stmoroky.com/reviews/music/jazz.htm [accessed january ] "bebop was about change, about evolution. it wasn't about standing still and becoming safe. if anybody wants to keep creating they have to be about change." - miles davis” kuchipudi kuchipudi is a classical indian dance drama form connected with the bharata natyam style, incorporating, gestures, speech and song, originally performed solely by men. this dance performance, founded by siddendra yogi, originated in small village in the andhra pradesh state, and dates back to the south indian devotional (bhakti) movement of the th century. lord jagannatha in the hindu religion jagannatha is the lord of the universe and an avatar (manifestation) of vishnu, who along with his sister subadhra, and brother balabadhra forms one version of the holy hindu trinity. figure . lord jagannatha, subadhra, balabadhra, the holy trinity macintosh computer “january saw the twentieth anniversary of perhaps the most important computer advance of the personal computer age - the release of the macintosh computer by apple inc in .you would have had to used a computer before the macintosh to realise what an advance it was. for a start, it was the first personal computer to bring to market the 'windows' software invented by the xerox palo alto laboratories. (pcs waited until to adopt the same basic technology). it did many other things as well – it was probably the first computer with a friendly interface, the first to play music, the first to allow you to draw pictures and to introduce voice technologies. it was a remarkable step forward which, when accompanied by the desktop publishing software apple introduced a few years later, saw the personal computer revolution take a giant step forward. to celebrate, wired magazine published a number of articles … http://www.wired.com/news/mac/ , , , .html as a starting point.” http://www.delhitourism.com/dance/ [accessed january ] internet history newsletter http://www.nethistory.info website [accessed february ] nataraja "because you love the burning -ground, i have made a burning-ground of my heart - that you, dark one, hunter of the burning-ground, may dance your eternal dance." ~ bengali hymn~ “the significance of the nataraja (nataraj) sculpture is said to be that shiva is shown as the source of all movement within the cosmos, represented by the arch of flames. the purpose of the dance is to release men from illusion of the idea of the "self" and of the physical world. the cosmic dance was performed in chidambaram in south india, called the centre of the universe by some hindus. the gestures of the dance represent shiva's five activities, creation (symbolized by the drum), protection (by the "fear not" hand gesture), destruction (by the fire), embodiment (by the foot planted on the ground), and release (by the foot held aloft). as nataraja (sanskrit: lord of dance) shiva represents apocalypse and creation as he dances away the illusory world of maya transforming it into power and enlightenment.” figure . hindu lord of dance – nataraja (details of bronze sculpture) new media art/ digital media art the production of creative cultural objects that are enabled, exhibited and distributed by digital media technologies, including electronic networking, the internet, and computer based technologies. odissi a classical form of indian dance, originating from the state of orissa, india. the dance was developed as a form of devotional hindu worhip in the temples – puri and jaganatha, orissa, where devdasi (hindu temple dancers) performed this sacred ritual dance as an offering to the lord. lotus sculpture http://www.lotussculpture.com/nataraja .htm [accessed january ] lotus sculpture http://www.lotussculpture.com/nataraja .htm [accessed january ] figure . maya darpan and odissi dance drama by ileana citaristi participant/ player the active engagement of human intervention and involvement in the unfolding of a computer game, computer program, electronic environment, or online internet or networked experience. retablo “… referred to as "laminas" in mexico, are small oil paintings on tin, zinc, wood or copper which venerate a multiplicity of catholic saints. the literal translation for "retablo" is "behind the altar." this genre of folk art, deeply rooted in spanish history, represents the heart and soul of traditional religious beliefs in th, th, and th century mexican culture…. counterparts to the retablo, ex votos are devotional paintings on canvas or tin that offer thanks to a particular saint in the form of a short narrative. in many events, a small child becomes ill, a favourite animal finally wanders home or a family narrowly escapes the clutches of death after their small house burns to the ground. the petitioner, grateful for a miracle received, dedicates a small painting (with a short testimonial) to the respective patron saint. ” shanghai (quoted from brian castro, shanghai dancing) “the formerly wide-spread use of unscrupulous means to procure sailors for voyages to the orient] a: to put aboard a ship by force often with the help of liquor or a drug…b: to maya darpan and odissi dance drama, year of production – , choreography - dr. ileana citaristi concept and script - sri jivan pani, music - sri partho das, light and sound - arun madkaikar, dancers - females and male, duration - min. “the concept of maya in indian philosophy is as metaphysical as poetic. maya darpan, the choreographic composition based on the odissi style has been inspired by the poetic treatment of the concept of maya in various upanishads. in the first scene we are facing the watery surface of the timeless being; the moment 'time' or 'rhythm' creeps in, the dimension of 'space' takes shape and 'prakruti' or nature is born. http://www.kalinga.net/ileana/maya.htm [accessed february ] mexican retablo art www.mexicanretablos.com/information.htm [accessed july ] and dawn ades, art in latin america: the modern era, - , yale university press, new haven and london . put by force or a threat of force into or as if into a place of detention… : to put by trickery into an undesirable position…” shanghai-dancing (quoted from brian castro, shanghai dancing) “to cast a line from an old spool: it is the attainment of disorientation and instability.” figure . rose tang, cabaret taxi dancer performance, blackbox interface still raga a raga is a classical indian musical expression. “a raga is a detailed exploration of a particular musical mode in a sectionalised manner – in free time, with regular pulse and with meter. each raga is identified by characteristic ascending and descending in order of notes, phrases, important tones which have special relevance to the raga and an aesthetic dimension…” taximia taximia is the elaborate improvisational introduction to a song in rembetika (the greek blues), in the same way the hindustani music has an introductory alaap. taxi-dancer “tens of thousands of russians fled to china after the bolshevik revolution, many of them aristocrats or white russian army officers. by , there were about , russians living in shanghai. they were stateless, disowned by the communists and ignored by the rest of the world. they brought a new kind of style to shanghai, but also through their poverty and desperation, gave the native chinese a glimpse of the fact that white people were not necessarily the infallible master race. there were russian musicians and dancers and poets. some of the men became bodyguards to shanghai's rich, while the stylish, desperate white russians girls in the ballrooms and bars of the city were famous for their beauty.” many russian women danced in the clubs with men who paid with tickets. stella dong, shanghai: the rise and fall of a decadent city, harper collins, new york, , p . brian castro, shanghai dancing, giramondo publishing, australia, , p . gerry farrell, "reflecting surfaces: the use of elements from indian music in popular music and jazz", popular music: south asia and the west, vol. no. , may , p . tales of old shanghai www.earnshaw.com/shanghai-ed-india/tales/t-russ.htm "nowhere in the world, i should think are there so many cabarets in proportion to the total white population. they range from the cheap and respectable palais de danse to more select resorts with exotic names like 'paradise,' where beautifully dressed professional dancers, mostly russian, obligingly dance with all comers on the sole condition that they order champagne." rembetika the origins of the word rembetika can be traced to: rembet – an old turkish word meaning "of the gutter"; (b) rebenok – the serb word meaning "rebel"; (c) rebet asker – turkish phrase referring to/meaning "people who would not submit to authority:' (d) re, rab, ruba'a – the persian/arabic meaning "four", "quatrain”; (e) rab – hebrew meaning from which the word "rabbi" is derived; (f) rembetiko – corruption of the archaic modern term remuastikos (meditative) derived from the word "remvo" or "remvazo" – meaning to wander, or literally "my mind is wandering in an anxious mood." the 'fragmentary' qualities of "wandering’ through the interactive text and the idea of music of the ghetto connect with the broader concerns of this project. figure . rembetika musicians (refugees) at fish market at piraeus, greece, [accessed march ] from an english journalist in www.earnshaw.com/shanghai-ed-india/tales/t-russ.htm [accessed march ] elias petropoulos, “introduction” in songs of the greek underworld: the rembetika tradition, (translated by ed emery), saqi books, london, . gail holst, road to remetika: music of a greek sub-culture, songs of love, sorrow and hashish, denise harvey publisher, limni, evia, greece, , p . gail holst op cit p . appendix i reflection on self and process report on the development and production process this is a reflective journal forming a record of the development of blackbox and the way in which the creative work has evolved and transformed throughout the process of its production. the objective of blackbox has been produce an interactive digital media work that can articulate the ‘open, ‘ambivalent’,’ ambiguous’, and ‘fragmentary’ formal qualities of the non-sequential narrative. the production of creative work has involved the documentation of music and dance culture incorporating russian, indian and greek texts. the working method has been to record and document contemporary performances of these cultural forms (rembetika, classical indian, and jazz music), existing in australia in their various communities. the research methodology is one of participation in the cultural events, and to research the broad themes, motifs, and mythology articulated in the forms – searching for ways that they may be connected. i have found that my participation and experience in the process provides the link between genres. broadly speaking, there are subtle influences (historically) between these forms, but the act of documentation and my interpretation of these performance events is the necessary connection. these audio-visual materials are then taken into the digital environment for editing and interactive composition. in addition to these materials, there is a bringing together of further elements from the dance/music culture – relevant passages of text, the appropriation of mythological texts and their reworking into a voice-over component. research archive stuart hall, “gramsci’s relevance for the study of race and ethnicity”, in david morley and kuan-hsing chen (eds), stuart hall: critical dialogues in cultural studies, routledge, london, . year research, in the first year research was focused on developing a methodological framework and rationale for this creative research, having both theoretical and creative/technical outcomes. the methodological concerns were developed around reading and writing strategies that explored the notion of (i) diaspora, (ii) dance, and (iii) music cultures, resulting in engaging in a reading program on issues of ‘nationalism’, race, ethnicity and the articulation of these issues in the new ‘web text’. these theoretical concerns informed the planning and scripting of the work, by identifying existing writing and forms of representation on the internet and developing a model for producing a creative interactive text (image/sound/text arrangement) that reflects on the construction of self, representation of identity and the documentary form in the new media environment. contact was made with performers from the music/dance arts resulting in film/video/sound recordings of the artists performances for incorporation into the work including: interviews and video documentation of performances from the (i) the greek (rembetika) community; (ii) the indian dance community (odissi, kuchipudi); and (iii) the location of existing sound recordings and interviews in the national film and sound archive (screensound australia). the project was scoped to define the audience, context, possibilities and limits of the medium. a series of interactive digital sequences were developed from the performances. an interactive structure for the program was developed, designing navigation of the program and the conceptualisation of the content into interactive pathways. post production commenced with (i) digitising the collected image/ sound/ text materials, (ii) shaping these materials into an interactive structure (developing a treatment), (iii) researching and incorporating textual elements into the interactive work. a blueprint for the operation of the program was produced to compose/ arrange/ assemble these image/ sound/ text elements: - (i) aesthetically (in terms of interface/graphic design and interactivity), and (ii) technically (in regard to the software/hardware requirements. these were generated and prepared ready for programming in an interactive environment. an early internet presence was created http://www.strangecities.net this internet site exhibits elements of the creative work online as a work in progress: - including digital animation sequences, downloadable word documents that form part of the written thesis component of my research, aspects of the written treatment/script. year research, / this year formed the production phase of the work where the creation of a series of strategies for the ‘player’ to move in and between, where there are goals that need to be achieved before entry into different levels of the program. this was combined with digitally editing the sound components. chinesebox – russian jazz performance from shanghai, china was under construction. i digitized the family documents – photographs, magazine articles, musical score, letters and an old vinyl album of recording of my grandfather sergei ermolaeff with mickey kaye and sergei korshoon (sydney circa ). i filmed the chinese girl sequence using the actress lou-lou sy in the location of the sydney chinese gardens. jewelbox – classical indian dance music performances (odissi and kuchipudi) was under construction. i worked with material shot with actress rochelle berwick, using the software program adobe after effects to create the special effect of unleashing the classical indian dancers from the silver jewel box. pandorasbox – rembetika (the greek blues) performance was under construction. i commenced building the image landscape for this ‘pathway’ – composed of found photographs, documents, and documentary material captured through filming rebetiki – an australian greek blues ensemble performing at carnivale multicultural arts festival . the found photographs and documents originate from an australian greek migrant from egypt (stavroula vrassida petala). the black and white photographs detail her sojourn through europe and the middle east with her male partner via ship/passenger liner in the late ’s and then her passage to australia where she was granted residency. year research, / this year completed the multimedia production stage of the blackbox internet/cd-rom project with a working prototype of the four areas of content - blackbox titles; (i) metropolis – the russian/greek girl’s movement through the urban landscape to discover three virtual boxes – in turn unleashing (a) chinesebox – russian jazz performance from shanghai, china; (b) jewelbox – classical indian dance music performances (odissi, kuchipudi), and (c) pandorasbox – rembetika (the greek blues) performance. this was achieved visually and in terms of sound atmospheres, music elements, and some archival voice-over utilising the software programs- adobe photoshop, creating the moving image components (digital film) in adobe after effects, editing the music and soundscapes in sound edit and pro tools and constructing the interaction design utilizing director mx. the digital media elements designed in the interactive treatment/script were realised including musical elements, sound atmospheres, and audio button triggers. however, after consultation with my supervisors, is was agreed that there was a need to further contextualise the social inquiry research with the enhancement of a subjective viewpoint – a voice-over for the protagonist nina philadelphoff. exhibition of blackbox as a multimedia installation: the installation was composed of the following elements: (i) blackbox interactive cd-rom project, (ii) a virtual exhibition of fragments of moving blackbox: painting a digital picture of documented memory kudos gallery september – october college of fine arts (sa), university of new south wales http://www.cofasa.unsw.edu.au/ /kudos/blackbox/index.php image, sound and text theorizing the production http://www.strangecities.net; (iii) digital photographic prints; and (iv) memory boxes archiving the real objects explored in the digital work. appendix ii australia council restructure: australia council unplugged by keith gallasch at the meeting convened by anat, dlux media arts, performance space, experimenta, maap and realtime at the paddington rsl, sydney on january we hoped to hear from australia council staff why the taskforce’s proposed restructuring of the organisation entailed the dissolution of the new media arts board (nmab) and why there had been no consultation with the sector and, at the time of the december press release, none offered in the future. over people gathered at the rsl, including many new media and hybrid artists, artists from other fields including music, visual and community arts, academics, curators, managers, a range of australia council staff, afc staff and members of the press. kim machan, director of maap flew in from brisbane, artrage director marcus canning (also on the nmab) from perth (carrying a detailed response to the restructure from wa artists and beap), fabienne nicholas, manager of experimenta, from melbourne and visiting artists from the uk all attended. the mood of the meeting was serious, often emotional as concerned artists tried to express the depth of their feelings. anat director julieanne pierce hosted the meeting, outlining the issues she hoped the australia council’s ceo jennifer bott and acting executive director, arts development and nmab manager andrew donovan would address. she then introduced speakers: artist and academic anna munster, artist lynnette wallworth and me. i spoke about the field’s response to the restructuring from replies to realtime’s december email and other documentation. i looked at the language of the response to the proposed changes, how the impact was felt viscerally and how metaphors of blindness, lack of vision, short-sightedness were used by correspondents to describe council’s actions along with images of regression, of their “going off the map” and “back to the dark ages.” the second strongest feeling i reported was of betrayal, which the xmas-time announcement and lack of consultation amounted to “a pre-emptive strike against innovation in the arts.” above all there were feelings of imminent loss: of identity (new media and hybrid arts were being un-named, un-represented by an art form board and at council level), of expertise (the accumulated knowledge of nmab), of coherence and continuity (the forms scattered to other art form boards). finally, the restructure was felt to parallel the growing conservatism of australian society, here with the return to the fundamentals of traditional art form categories. i described the key issue as not being about money, after all the council was saying that the same money, even more, would be spent on new media and hybrid arts, but the very standing of the forms was at stake if their names were to be erased or relegated to the small print. central to anna munster’s talk was the significant role of the nmab in building an experimental arts culture in australia. she also pointed to the careers enabled by the afc’s short-lived but highly significant interactive fund. new media art might not yet have the commercial outcomes some had fantasised for it but, said munster, its social potential was strong, its place in universities and other institutions growing. why then should the australia council demote it…lyndal jones spoke eloquently, declaring that we were really discussing a conflict between identity and strategy. here was a strategy that included dissolving the nmab…kate richards thought it too late to turn the clock back and fold the complexities of new media arts into traditional art form categories. others pointed out that without the branding and the status offered by the existence of the nmab, artists would find it increasingly difficult to form the partnerships and sponsorships that have been typical of a field that can work with commerce, science and education … pressure is being applied to the council by organisations across the country to suspend any changes for a year, in which time serious consultation could be undertaken. the australia council, having done much to acknowledge and nurture new media and hybrid arts must not abandon them or the key role it plays in their development and dissemination around the world. to do so is to betray itself, to be blind to its own achievements as well as those of a plethora of remarkable australian artists. as a communications industry consultant observed after the meeting, this is a moment when council should be investing more in new media arts, let alone retaining the nmab.” keith gallasch, “australia council restructure: australia council unplugged”, realtime february/march http://www.realtimearts.net/ [accessed february ] attachment : (iv) blackbox: a digital media script - - blackbox digital media script ©tatiana pentes blackbox a digital media script splash page splash page commences and the journey begins. blackbox titles appear out of the red velvet screen surface, from a silver box émigré objects tumble out. screen text: what does the heart search for? chinesebox, jewelbox. pandorasbox. nina the russian greek girl. the metropolis. images: [a montage of images of nina wandering through the metropolis in urban locations is projected as she is pictured in repose on a bed of exotic cushions. dreaming of and imagining a journey into the metropolis. russian, greek sanskrit texts slide across her body resembling data code that programs a computer and suggest her mixed identity. the sequence resolves with a static image of nina emerging from a red doorway/threshold anda strip of icons depicting her journey into the city scrolling across the top of the screen (resembling film moving through the gates of a projector). interactivity: an image of the old key to the gates of moscow upon the visual surface of screen triggers entry into the program. (sfx: an old gothic key in a lock). [this key icon is the trigger to all pathways opening.] chinese box icon – interactive voice-text: “chinese box” a floating strip of icons scrolling across the top of the screen (resembling film moving through the gates of a projector) chinese box icon - interactive voice-text: “chinese box” jewel box icon - interactive voice-text: “jewel box” pandora’s box icon - interactive voice-text: “pandora’s box” credit text icon - interactive voice-text: “credit text” memory box icon - interactive voice-text: “memory box” this digital filmstrip forms a menu of visual triggers that contextualises the/areas of narrative content, the methodology and rationale. they include the credits for this work. screen image: nina philadelphoff passing through a red gateway/doorway. there is a note on the door that says: attachment : (iv) blackbox: a digital media script - - blackbox digital media script ©tatiana pentes nina voice: i am made of many threads…russian…asian…wandering through the streets of my city…i am in chinatown…in an chinese shop…i stumble upon the tiles of a mahjong game… memories rush back to haunt of the old box in my russian grandparents house. sound atmos: the spark of electric neon turned on, sparks, lanterns tinkling in the wind, urban street sounds, chinese chattering, a fog horn, traffic, the sounds of a metropolis. moving image: [super-imposed over nina] flashes of pictures from an eastern journey, a malaysian cityscape, through the window of a moving car, a paddy field in indonesia, a hindu temple orissa (india), a chinese pagoda sydney and a lotus pond in the yu yuan gardens, shanghai. blackbox titles interface design: an oriental pattern (mandarin red, gold, silver and black) frames a digital blackbox titles sequence. this creates a consistent immersive screen environment. in these screen places interaction with events occur through ornamental chinese/ art deco (modern) window frames. the journey appears and disappears inside this set of modern chinese s inspired frames. the player/participant interacts with the surface of the screen, engaging with a series of icons revealing hotspots that unveil the narrative. moving image: an image of nina leaving her urban apartment, her face fractures into multiple identities, as the titles are composed across the screen. an antique greek image of pandora and her box appears and disappears. nina voice: [trans-atlantic accent echoes, the tone is newsreader/anchor woman]: …blackbox… nina voice: [trans-atlantic accent echoes, the tone is newsreader/anchor woman]: …years ago a speck was torn from china and became shanghai …a legendary city…a fantasized vision…hollywood illusion…whispered tales from this blackbox… echo opium wars…of white russians washed up on its shores…dance halls and gun-runners…from this glittering oriental façade…. icon: chinese box – the north tile from a mahjong game sfx: a chinese gong. attachment : (iv) blackbox: a digital media script - - blackbox digital media script ©tatiana pentes chinesebox titles location: the chinese gardens, sydney and shanghai, china performance: russian jazz from shanghai performance pathway icon: north wind pieces from a mah jong game visual trigger: nina’s hands open a chinese box of émigré objects sound: audio montage of serge ermoll’s “over the rosy sea” and s shanghai pop tunes storyline this story unfolds from observations of the protagonist/ and the protagonist’s point of view - through movement around the chinese gardens, sydney. as the girl, explores the various aspects of the garden – a reflective pond, the willow trees, a pagoda, rock gardens, and a tea house we are reminded of the original site in shanghai (yu yuan gardens), and the legendary willow pattern motif, repeatedly imprinted upon ceramic. the design symbolizes the dialogue between the orient and the west. the legendary teahouse in shanghai was the location of the first projection of cinema in china (lumiere brothers ). the girl’s imaginary and dreams of shanghai (her grandmother xenia and rose, the cabaret dancer) haunt the surface of the garden, reflecting imagery of a time long past. what is the girl searching for, and why the sojourn in the garden? she finds an elaborate chinese box containing photographs, in opening the box she unlocks a conjured performance of russian jazz from shanghai and the dance of rose, a dancer in the club movement no# chinese box – songs of sorrow absence [the father] a set of red and silver fans glide across the screen to reveal chinesebox titles. a black lacquer chinese box lies open, its mirror becomes a screen. reflected in the mirror, nina transforms into a chinese girl wandering around the yu yuan gardens in a traditional cheong sam dress. a woman’s hand holds an old fashioned key in her palm. russian émigré objects from china spill from the box. the screen cursor is a gold chinese dragon. interaction with the mirror triggers a close-up of this simulated film sequence and voice text: …chinesebox… a chinese ornamental window frames a view of the old shanghai bund. the british angel of victory monument (later demolished by the invading japanese) faces the waterfront façade andsir victor sassoon’s (iraqi jew) temple to capitalism the old deco cathay hotel. digital film sequence of the chinese girl wandering around the yu yuan gardens in a traditional cheong sam dress. she discovers an altar with russian émigré objects from china. attachment : (iv) blackbox: a digital media script - - blackbox digital media script ©tatiana pentes text: the cathay hotel, shanghai ’s. nina voice: [trans-atlantic accent echoes, the tone is intimate/confessional]: …do you remember me…grandmother…am i western? …am i asian?… do you remember what i am? …are you western?… interaction with the film sequence triggers a close-up a black lacquer chinese box that lies open, from its blue interior spills a pile of objects: a pathe photograph of a russian orchestra, a jade ring, a red chinese fan, a silver bracelet, a red soviet passport, a chinese cabaret dancer, a russian ballerina, and a willow pattern plate. sound atmos: a pre-revolutionary modern chinese pop tune (with a dominant oboe theme) is paying on the radio and the sound of film rushing through the gates of a projector. nina voice: [trans-atlantic accent echoes, the tone is dreamy/ memorialising]: my father was born in china to manchurian white russian parents…they met in the steamy metropolis of shanghai…across the ballroom….my grandfather sergei waving his orchestra leader’s baton notices my elegant grandmother xenia fresh from the russian revolution… revolving in the arms of another big taipan on the dance floor of the cathay hotel. nina voice : [trans-atlantic accent echoes, the tone is dreamy/ memorialising]: xenia was dancing in the club… selling her russian jewels on the steps of the park hotel, on old nanjing dong lu…she buys a beautiful set of dance outfits and a set of studio portraits …half her life later her photos and jewels are spread across her bed, in the west of sydney, all she could bring with her on the chan sha ship journey after mao’s red guards seize the paris of the east…. interaction with icons triggers the story pathways. pathe photograph of a russian orchestra: triggers sfx fingers zoom across they keyboard of a piano…and drum solo. images: a newsprint article of serge ermoll and his orchestra. xenia is highlighted as “girl of my dreams”. newsreader (archival voice): and within this city of three and half million chinese, there’s another city, a foreign settlement. made up of attachment : (iv) blackbox: a digital media script - - blackbox digital media script ©tatiana pentes the french concession and the well-known international settlement. there the various powers, including great britain, the united states, and japan had stationed detachments of troops to assist the police of the shanghai municipal council in the preservation of peace and order and to protect the boundaries of the international settlement. north wind mahjong icon: [triggers movement to a collage of serge ermoll’s life/ documents. sfx: serge’s trumpet solo and typing. moving image: a montage of shanghai neon and serge music documents – president of shanghai federation of musicians.] chinese cabaret dance icon: [triggers movement to rose cabaret dance sequence.] jade ring icon: [triggers movement to ballroom scene.] music: serge singing cole porter’s “night and day” – “night and day, you are the one, only you between the moon and under the sun, whether near to me or far its no matter darling where you are….night and day”. images: xenia sitting with friends watching serge at the club. moving image: a montage of serge’s jazz orchestra is superimposed with dancing girls and xenia’s face. screen text: your grandfather gave me the jade ring at the majestic hotel, shanghai . his band was playing cole porter’s night and day… nina voice: [trans-atlantic accent echoes, the tone is dreamy/ memorialising]: xenia kept few things…a string of faberge eggs from babooshka and the jade ring serge gave her with the japanese sakura flower…this may have curried favour with authorities during the japanese occupation. red chinese fan: [triggers movement to chinese girl doing traditional dance.] music: “in shanghai, in shanghai”, modern chinese pop tune, lyrics describing the night lights of shanghai. images: the chinese girl is opening the chinese box. the chinese girl is dressed in a japanese kimono holding an ornamental shade. moving image: the chinese girl dances about the place adorned in an ancient traditional outfit. screen text: there were many shanghai’s. there was the orientalist vision…a hollywood illusion. the city was a melting pot of chinese city, anglo- american shanghai, a prize of the opium wars – and the infamous french quarter – a mix of wealthy white russian émigrés and mobster lair of the chinese green gang. nina voice: [trans-atlantic accent echoes, the tone is dreamy/ memorialising]: my father grew up in the notorious french quarter…accompanying his musician father serge to the many bars, clubs and cafes…lying under the grand piano in the french club…he recalls the tunes… his father pumping out the old jazz standards and the dancing girls giving him american candy and some of their tips. hollywood femme fatale: you need more than luck in shanghai! silver bracelet icon: [triggers movement to sepia toned colonial portraits of xenia and collaged with serge ermoll’s “recordando” musical score.] music: “pillow book sounds”, modern chinese pop tune, legendary lyrics describing “rose rose i love you”. image: xenia is dressed in high modern shanghai fashion – with a string of faberge eggs around her neck, from russia. moving image: chinese couples dancing in cheong sam and tuxedo suits to jazz music. screen text: xenia ermoll shanghai (hand-written running writing). your grandfather sergei brought this bracelet for me from harbin, manchuria. but like me xenia…it is russian. attachment : (iv) blackbox: a digital media script - - blackbox digital media script ©tatiana pentes nina voice: [trans-atlantic accent echoes, the tone is dreamy/ memorialising]: xenia was all haute couture and furs…attending sergei’s tea dances at the majestic hotel, paramount, ladlow's casanova…tsingtao café…at one time serge toured the dutch east indes and played in batavia. red soviet passport: [triggers movement to a collage of a chinese red fan and a document from the us navy contracting serge in china.] music: mournful fragment of serge piano solo. image: xenia is wearing a kimono during the japanese occupation. screen text: soviet citizenship was a blessing in china after the war…but i was never going back to russia. sfx: [japanese troops drills and soldiers] newsreader (archival voice): the small bon-fires the japanese lit in manchuria was to grow and spread with uncontrollable fury [war soundscape]. chinese cabaret dancer: [triggers movement to rose cabaret dance sequence.] screen text: …rose the dancer in the club where serge’s jazz orchestra played…her mother was chinese…was her father a russian musician? images: the ceiling of the cathay hotel ballroom adorned with golden chinese dragons. moving image: rose performs a solo exotic dance superimposed over black and white film footage of a jazz orchestra band and couples dancing. digital video sequences of the interior of a ballroom, chandeliers and stage where serge’s band once played. nina voice: [trans-atlantic accent echoes, the tone is dreamy/ memorialising]: we knew granddad serge had a girl in every port…but my father’s chinese sister remains a mystery…rose rose i love you (sing song)….i know you are out there somewhere…i wonder where you are these days? (sing song)…. russian ballerina: [triggers movement to a collage of asja mercoolova the russian ballerina.] screen text: xenia wanted me to be on the stage like asja …asja sailed for new york and married a broadway musical director…her face on harpers bazaar . images: collage of studio portraits of asja in her ballet tou-tou and the cover of harpers bazaar magazine ( ). music: fragment from serge ermoll (piano), mickey kaye (drums) and sergei korshoon’s crooning eastern european singing the song “domes of moscow”. nina voice: [trans-atlantic accent echoes, the tone is dreamy/ memorialising]: xenia showing me studio portraits of asja mercoolova her neice…as we watched the gymnastic events at sydney town hall was sure i was going to be a dancer! willow pattern plate: [triggers movement to a willow patterned plate.] animated images: the design on the willow pattern plate comes to life in animation. the decorative motif of the tea house is replaced by a colour photograph of the yu yuan tea house, the two dimensional pagoda becomes a photograph of the real thing and interior shots of the blue stained glass windows. nina is sitting inside the tea house. music: “firecrackers shanghai”, modern chinese pop tune, lyrics a chinese woman’s voice. moving image: through the window of a train we see a pagoda and the girl nina transforms into the chinese girl. we see her looking at the russian émigré objects. interaction with the willow pattern plate triggers. attachment : (iv) blackbox: a digital media script - - blackbox digital media script ©tatiana pentes open red door: [imagery: beautiful modern chinese cover girls are plastered on a red door, where the chinese symbol for fortune should be painted, a moa tse tung icon hanging where a feng shui mirror should be.] screen text: the willow pattern teahouse (huxinting pavilion) yu yuan gardens…site for the greatest love story of all time…and location of the first ever projection of cinema in shanghai, china, by parisian brothers in early th century…the imagery haunts the ceramic surfaces… fan icon: [sfx chinese chimes] triggers montage of serge ermoll and orchestra documents, musical score, a photograph of charlie chaplin andserge, xenia smoking a cigarette, chinese identity papers. screen text: my grandfather a jazz big band leader in shanghai at the majestic ballroom, cathay hotel andastor house…russian jazz from shanghai…china. music: “firecrackers shanghai”, modern chinese pop tune, lyrics a chinese woman’s voice. shanghai singsong girl screen: [sfx chinese chimes] triggers montage of serge ermoll and orchestra documents, musical score, a photograph of charlie chaplin and serge, xenia smoking a cigarette, chinese identity papers. image: two red doors are open to reveal a singsong girl playing a deck of cards at a table. (her face resembles xenia). behind the bar is a western man serving drinks. plastered on the doors are elegant shanghai ladies names: rose and orchid. a shanghai dollar floats above the scene. screen text: the singsong house…shanghai lily…house of sure satisfaction…hall of beauties… newsreader (archival voice): and the police get wind of an opium den…the suspected house is surrounded and everybody in it arrested. music: “firecrackers shanghai”, modern chinese pop tune, lyrics a chinese woman’s voice. nina voice: [trans-atlantic accent echoes, the tone is dreamy/ memorialising]: dad was mesmerized by the wuchang [dancehalls] ….the fairyland of pleasures… deluxe décor, cabaret performances… the haunt of wealthy chinese and foreigners… lair of the shanghai “taxi-dancers” …mainly white russian exiles…that could be bought for the price of the intoxicating coloured drinks…. he sat on the steps for an eternity waiting for his father serge to emerge…smelling of joy, gin and jazz… jewelbox titles locations: the interior of an australian indian house (marrickville, sydney) and home temple, a marble and glass city department store, sydney, and hindu temples, (orissa), india. attachment : (iv) blackbox: a digital media script - - blackbox digital media script ©tatiana pentes performance: classical indian dance/music performance by artists- italian/indian dancer ileana citaristi, art vision dance school, bhubaneswar, orissa, india; nirmal jena and chitritta mukerjee (odissi dance company, australia) and padma raman (kuchipudi item krishna shabdam; choreography padma menon, australia). pathway icon: montage of antique indian jewel box, containing indian dance jewels (sanskrit, indian) and roses. visual trigger: rochéle hands open the indian jewel box to discover classical indian dance jewels. storyline: this story is revealed through the discovery of a jewel box containing classical indian dance jewels. nina (the russian/greek girl) transforms into rochéle (the creole girl) and is attracted to the eastern patterns. she becomes familiar with the bangles, earrings, bracelets, dance bells, and small sculpture of shiva depicting the dance gestures . interactivity with virtual objects magically opens into two classical indian dance performances and triggers the release of (i) krishna shabdam performance by padma raman, leichhardt town hall, sydney, ; (ii) mangala charan performance by italian indian dancer ileana citaristi, tom mann theatre, sydney, july ; and konarak kanti performance by chitritta mukerjee (the performance space ) of the odissi dance company - cellist john napier). movement # jewel box songs of longing [presence (antithesis) the mother india] jewelbox titles appear. from the palm of a goddess falls a handful of golden coins. a red rose in full bloom appears. the screen cursor is a bronze statue of shiva nataraja. from the perspective of the indian creole girl adorned in a purple sari, we see her hands open an ornate silver jewel box. slowly as it opens the bronze statue of a god appears emerging from the box. in the palm of a woman’s hand we see an antique key being offered. voice text: …jewelbox… nina voice: [trans-atlantic accent echoes, the tone is newsreader/anchor woman]: …jewelbox… nina voice: [trans-atlantic accent echoes, the tone is newsreader/anchor woman]: i keep wandering through the city streets…passing an indian market the fragrant aromas of incense and spices conjure …the winds from the south… along the eastern trade route from india … they bring a silver box… i remember dance bells in an old temple hall with my school friend padma …my grandma wanted me to be a dancer like asja… interaction with bronze statue triggers the appearance of a golden ganesh figure floating in the blackness of the screen. nina is pictured in a languorous state, resting on a set of leopard skin cushions. wafting from her head is a trail of incense smoke that creates a cloud where a dreamy moving image of film sequence – upon a hindu altar rests a box…a creole girl’s hands open this box revealing a bronze statue…the statue transforms into an odissi dancer (classical indian dance – chitritta mukerjee’s konarak kanti). the creole indian girl looks across to her. attachment : (iv) blackbox: a digital media script - - blackbox digital media script ©tatiana pentes indian poetry: [female indian accent echoes, the lines of legendary poet jaya deva ]: soft sandal winds cover quivering vines…forest huts hum…when springs mood is rich hari [krishna] roams there…to dance with young women friend…a cruel time for deserted lovers… jewelbox icon: [triggers a set of dance jewels to magically appear floating from the box: - a set of dance ear-rings (jumki); a set of gold bracelets; a gold necklace; a gold hair comb; a set of dance bells (anklets); and a container of red powder (dance make-up). sfx: the opening of a silver box and fragment from classical indian dance tune (kuchipudi). moving image: digital film sequence – upon a hindu altar rests a box…a creole girl’s hands open this box revealing a bronze statue…the statue transforms into an odissi dancer (classical indian dance – chitritta mukerjee’s konarak kanti). nina voice: [trans-atlantic accent echoes, the tone is newsreader/anchor woman]: …i always new that i would be a dancer… the temple sculptures of dancers at konarak in orissa, opened up a longing for the spiritual…a form of devotion…a spiritual worship…and watching my friend practice her dance in the temple hall as a child in malaysia…the singing of drum rhythms tek tek tek interaction with icons triggers the story pathways. the silver box icon opening returns the player to the main page. dance ear-rings (jumki): triggers sfx a box opens and a nostalgic hindi pop tune classic.[triggers movement padma raman section – she is all dressed up in her kuchipudi dance gear. a large set of dance ear- ring fill the screen.] screen text: …the mirror gesture…the danseuse actress adorned with bells on her ankles…sweet toned and tied with an indigo string and ear-rings (jumki), eyes like lotus blossoms and wearing sun and moon jewels in her hair… images: padma raman is ready to perform a kuchipudi dance item. padma icon: triggers movement to kuchipudi performance. nina voice: [trans-atlantic accent echoes, the tone is newsreader/anchor woman]: …my friend padma gave me the gold dance ear-rings…she danced for her sister shanti’s hindu wedding…in australia… krishna shabdam screen: a montage of padma raman in various dance sequences form the kuchipudi dance item krishna shabdam. padma raman voice: the piece i am doing tonight is called the krishna shabdam. in it the heroine pleads to her lover lord krishna to come to her. among the kings of the yadav dynasty he shines forth like the moon. she prepares sandalwood paste with which to adorn him and beetle leaves with which to welcome him…she prepares a garland of flowers for lord krishna. krishna is the destroyer of the evil varsanam and the beloved of many beautiful women. music: kuchipudi dance music atmosphere. screen text: …krishna shabdam…kuchipudi a classical indian dance drama… gold bracelet icon: triggers sfx a set of bracelets tinkling. screen text: …the dancer adorns the body with jewels…an armband…rings…and attachment : (iv) blackbox: a digital media script - - blackbox digital media script ©tatiana pentes bangles…the odissi dancer wears silver jewels while the kuchipudi dancers adornments are gold… images: padma raman is ready to perform a kuchipudi dance item. ileana chitaristi is ready to perform mangala charan. padma icon: triggers movement to kuchipudi performance. gold necklace icon: triggers sfx a necklace tinkling. screen text: the dancer is adorned with a necklace…in marriage a mangala sutra…and flowers in her hair…jasmine…the aroma fresh and the petals drop to the floor as she moves her feet…leaving a trail of blossoms in time with the bells around her ankles… images: padma raman is ready to perform a kuchipudi dance item. a close-up of padma’s feet and flower petals on the ground. ileana icon: triggers movement to odissi performance. nina voice: [trans-atlantic accent echoes, the tone is newsreader/anchor woman]: …my mother gave this to me…it is turkish from greece…the pattern reminds me of the indian dance jewels. dance bells icon: triggers sfx indian dance bells. screen text: …like one of the gods she wears a headdress of petals…as the nataraja…like the flames of fire arching across the curves of her black tresses woven… images: a large close-up of the classical indian dancers legs and feet adorned with the dance bells. ileana icon: triggers movement to odissi performance. chitritta icon: triggers movement to odissi (nirmal jena/ chitritta mukerjee) performance. nina voice: [trans-atlantic accent echoes, the tone is newsreader/anchor woman]: …my dance teacher us how to make these dance bells. we practiced the basic techniques for many months. we wove the individual bells on white ropes. chitritta icon: triggers movement to odissi (nirmal jena/ chitritta mukerjee) performance. screen text: …konarak kanthi… moving image: the creole indian girl opens the silver jewel box. a frame appears constructed from the stones of a temple at konarak, orissa. screen images: the door to a temple is open. orissan mud painting adorns the walls and floor. music: nirmal jena sings and plays the pakawaj (drums) for the dance item konarak kanti. chitritta icon: triggers movement back to main page menu of jewel box. red powder (dance make-up) icon: triggers sfx a box opening and sitar solo. screen text: …the dancer applies red powder dye to the soles the feet and fingertips…red powder forms a third eye on the forehead and sun motifs on the palm of the hands and top of the dancers feet… images: a large close-up of the classical indian dancers fingertips adorned with the red powder and ileana’s eyes in dance make-up. a small image of the dancers feet with red powder dye and dance bells. padma icon: triggers movement to kuchipudi performance. nina voice: [trans-atlantic accent echoes, the tone is newsreader/anchor woman]: …this powder is painted onto the body before the dance performance…it defines the hands, fingers and feet in movement… gold hair comb icon: triggers sfx a hindi pop tune sitar solo. attachment : (iv) blackbox: a digital media script - - blackbox digital media script ©tatiana pentes screen text: …a prayer of offering to the divine asking blessing for the performance to dance upon the earth…bhumi… images: a large bronze shiva nataraja and a film still from ileana citaristi performing the dance item mangala charan. ileana icon: triggers movement to odissi performance. . ileana citaristi icon: triggers movement to mangala charan performance. mangala charan icon: the titles appear as the stone wheel of konarak turns in the centre of the screen. flower petals from a dance performance encircle this. screen text: …ancient orissan text appears. a golden ganesh is visible. images: the spoke of a wheel from konarak temple and the stone dance sculptures fades onto the screen. sfx: a sitar phrase and drums. water is flowing down the ganges river (swirling). ileana citaristi voice: dance is a spiritual side in itself…it is a synthesis of body and mind…so you have to concentrate…it is a discipline for the body, it is a discipline for the spirit and mind…especially indian dance… it starts with a ritual, it is a ritual itself and has so much philosophical meaning…we have to be appointed with this…we are interpreting ancient and sacred texts…so the environment where we learn…the respect we pay to the guru…i mean everything is a spiritual venture…it is not separated from what i am doing. mangala charan performance: ileana chitaristi performs the dance item mangala charan. usually this is performed first in a program, as it is literally means – auspicious offering – to the lord, in which the dancer pays obeisance to lord jagannatha and mother earth. an invocation to ganesha asking for protection and blessing. screen text: …ancient orissan text appears. a golden ganesh is visible. images: the spoke of a wheel from konarak temple and the stone dance sculptures fades onto the screen. sfx: a sitar phrase and drums. water is flowing down the ganges river (swirling). ileana citaristi interview: i was doing experimental theatre…physical theatre…theatre which was more movement based and language through the body…so we were interested to learn some movement…but that was not to be (laughs) and i just stayed behind and i became a dancer and i forgot about all the rest. tatiana: [begins] you are not indigenous…you are not indian…[ends] …have you entered? ileana citaristi interview: [begins] well there is a sort of third space…[ends] …so much research and struggle and life history… nina voice: [trans-atlantic accent echoes, the tone is newsreader/anchor woman]: …the music escaping from this box weave into a middle eastern melody…or is that pandora’s greek box…the voices inside whispering to set them free…. pandoras box titles movement # pandoras box attachment : (iv) blackbox: a digital media script - - blackbox digital media script ©tatiana pentes songs of love [the child the meeting (synthesis)] pathway icon: montage komboloi (worry beads) and an old vinyl record (greek). visual trigger: the komboloi/ vinyl record icon triggers the words (sound) “pandoras box” pandorasbox titles appear. a blue set of komboloi “worry beads” spin into the frame. a stone greek box appears with an ancient statue of pandora. Émigré greek objects emerge from the box with the titles. soundtrack: [quotation from nostalgic rembetika taximia string introduction from the famous blues of the manghes circa. athens, greece.] the song is woven into sfx of scratchy old vinyl record. nina voice: [trans-atlantic accent echoes, the tone is newsreader/anchor woman]: …pandorasbox… storyline: opening titles objects emanate from an ancient stone box... moving image: symbolic greek icons fade into frame and spin into an animated montage sequence ( ) pandora and her box, ( ) a gold greek cross and evil eye (blue with black centre), a set of ( ) komboloi (worry beads), a ( ) bouzouki and baglamas (string instruments). the objects form an arrangement on the screen surface and nina's hand holding an old key creates a hotspot triggering four narrative options. the stone surface of the box creating the background. nina is fallen back in repose as though in a dream state. nina voice: [trans-atlantic accent echoes, the tone is newsreader/anchor woman]: i keep wandering through the city…through the glass of a greek kafe… old men are playing cards, drinking their biriki coffee… remind me of grandfather antonis smoking his cigars to oriental cries of a rembetika blues singer on the radio… he gave me the marzipan figure of pandora and her box… upon the screen surface are a set of émigré personal effects: a set of komboloi “worry” beads; a bouzouki; a gold pendant of the acropolis; montage of a greek woman in traditional dress and a doily; an egyptian necklace; a grecian urn; montage of a gold cross and mary icon; and montage of maja powder and perfume. musical score: interactivity with these icons triggers fragments from musical compositions by rebetiki ensemble (australian rembetika group) nina voice: i have never been to greece. for me greece is made of fragments from the past…caught in a net of memories of strange objects. the sounds of greek rembetika blues conjure the journey on the ship to australia – songs of love , joy, hope, and sorrow – the songs of my people. blue worry beads (komboloi) icon: triggers sfx beads spinning and shaking. images: upon a greek clothe a manghes greek man appears, with moustache and a walking stick. moving images: a woman opens a glass bottle and from inside a rembetika performance morphs out. attachment : (iv) blackbox: a digital media script - - blackbox digital media script ©tatiana pentes greek musician voice: …for me this music is about freedom……it comes from inside your soul and the movements come out…expressing emotions bouzouki icon: triggers a musical phrase from the strings of a bouzouki. images: a swirl of greek text, the lyrics of rembetika songs. moving images: a woman in a taverna gets up and starts to dance the zemekiko…in a trance state…elegantly swinging her arms nargile pip icon: triggers the sound of a scratchy record. images: a young antonis pentes and a cappuccino coffee cup merge with a bouzouki. text: explaining antonis experience of hearing rembetika on the radio…serving another coffee to customers…and the free woman in the tavernas…he drinks another metaxa… maja cosmetic icon: triggers a musical phrase from roza eskenazi images: a portrait of turkish jewess, the rembetissa, roza eskenazi dominating the frame and old maja powder and perfume bottle with the spanish dancer on the cover. text: nina relates how her mother had dark skin and she wondered if she was a gypsy… nina’s voice: …my mother’s dark skin was so beautiful…and i loved her long black hair with its mysterious spicy fragrance…the pictures she showed me of her island – kythera- a pile of rocks thrown down into the mediterranean…but where was this place? isis necklace icon: triggers a musical phrase arabic tsiftateli dancing music. images: an egyptian necklace dominates with a gold image of isis. moving image: nina is inter-cut with a belly dancer, dancing to a lute in the arabic style. text: description of nina believing she would turn into isis if she wore these jewels. nina’s voice: as a child…i was mesmerized by this tsiftateli dancing with an arabic twist…the greeks from egypt brought this dance…they watch this in the night clubs…uncle jim was from egypt and he still listens to natasha atlas and oum kal sum…. greek doily/record lady icon: triggers a musical phrase of rembetika music. images: an old vinyl record spins. text: lyrics to a rembetika song about throwing me into the sea… greek musician voice: …the church sounds mingle with the arabic turkish phrases …rembetika mixes all these sounds together… the turkish migrants returned to greece…the music is the lament of those in exile… a grecian urn icon: triggers a musical phrase of rembetika music. images: upon a grecian urn is superimposed a portrait of my mother and her parents. text: the text describes that this portrait was taken in rural australia during the war. and grandfather antonis convincing me to get baptized. jesus and mary icon: triggers a musical phrase of rembetika music. images: a greek woman in traditional kytherian dress is pictured alongside a sheer coastal cliff face and blue mediterranean sea. text: description of the head scarf the women wear and the turks…also the evolution of rembetika from the orthodox drones and arabic modal tones. attachment : (iv) blackbox: a digital media script - - blackbox digital media script ©tatiana pentes greek musician voice: …i grew up in a fishing village…on kythera… every day it is living for today…what will i do? catch some calamari and drink ouzo on the beach…at night we go to the taverna and listen to rembetika and smoke hashish… acropolis icon: triggers the sounds of jewels. images: a modern greek woman and her passport reveal that she is a greek from egypt. text: a voyage from greece to egypt… nina’s voice: …i found these papers in my mothers black chest …i was never allowed to look inside …it held the secrets of her past… fin 	blackbox .pdf 	abstract 	blackbox a.pdf 	blackbox b.pdf 	blackbox .pdf 	blackbox .pdf 	blackbox .pdf 	blackbox .pdf 	blackbox .pdf 	blackbox .pdf 	blackbox .pdf 	blackbox .pdf 	blackbox a.pdf 	blackbox b.pdf 	blackbox c.pdf 	blackbox d.pdf ccc volume issue cover and front matter v o l u m e v i l i n u m b e r d e c e m b e r central european history sponsored by the conference group for central european history of the american historical association p u b l i s h e d q u a r t e r l y b y e m o r y u n i v e r s i t y cambridge core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/ . /s downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. carnegie mellon university, on apr at : : , subject to the https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /s https://www.cambridge.org/core e d i t o r i a l p o l i c y central european history publishes articles, bibliographical articles, re­ v i e w articles, and reviews dealing w i t h the history o f german-speaking central europe. manuscripts are solicited using all approaches to his­ tory, and dealing w i t h all historical periods. because space is limited, articles w h i c h have been or soon w i l l be published elsewhere are not accepted, nor are translations o f such articles. unsolicited book reviews are not accepted. authors w h o desire to prepare bibliographical articles are urged to communicate w i t h the editors first. manuscripts and cor­ respondence should be directed t o : central european history e m o r y university atlanta, georgia t h e entire text, including footnotes, o f manuscripts submitted for pub­ lication must be prepared in double-spaced typescript, w i t h generous margins to allow for copy-editing. footnotes should be numbered c o n ­ secutively, and should be placed in a separate section at the end o f the text. it has become essential to require two copies o f manuscripts, to expedite editorial evaluation and to guard against loss in the mails. the subscription rates for central european history are as follows: united states and possessions: individuals institutions year $ $ years $ $ years $ $ student and emeritus rate $ per year subscriptions by calendar year only. all other countries: add $ per year for mailing. back issues: all back volumes, starting with volume i ( ), are available at $ for individuals, $ for institutions; outside u.s. and possessions, add $ per volume for mailing. for student and emeritus prices, please inquire. address: central european history, emory university, atlanta, georgia . cambridge core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/ . /s downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. carnegie mellon university, on apr at : : , subject to the https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /s https://www.cambridge.org/core volume viii • central european history sponsored by the conference group for central european history of the american historical association published quarterly by emory university atlanta, georgia cambridge core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/ . /s downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. carnegie mellon university, on apr at : : , subject to the https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /s https://www.cambridge.org/core board of editors claus-peter clasen allan mitchell andreas dorpalen lenore o'boyle gerald d. feldman dietrich orlow martin jay paul w . schroeder mack walker editor douglas a. unfug assistant editor theodor v. brodek business manager olivia j. harris cambridge core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/ . /s downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. carnegie mellon university, on apr at : : , subject to the https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /s https://www.cambridge.org/core contents of volume viii number • march articles woodrow wilson and germany's membership in the league of nations, - klaus s c h w a b e the development of the national socialist party in thuringia, - donald r. tracey reviews winfried baumgart, der friede von paris ; paul w . schroeder, austria, great britain, and the crimean war ann p o t t i n g e r saab eugene lunn, prophet of community. the romantic socialism of gustav landauer martin jay j. w. bruegel, czechoslovakia before munich ronaldm. smelser note notes on a visit to the zentrales staatsarchiv (formerly deutsches zentralarchiv), potsdam, german democratic republic h . p . s i m o n news contributors to this issue number -june articles liberal constitutionalism as administrative reform: the baden constitution of l o y d e. leb german women and the communist international: the case of the independent social democrats robert f. wheeler takeoff point for the national socialist party: the landtag election in baden, e l l s w o r t h faris reviews erich kahler, the germans gerhard masur selma stern, der preussische stoat und die juden, third part, die zeit friedrichs des grossen helen liebel lothar albertin, liberalismus und demokratie am anfang der weimarer republik dietrich orlow contributors to this issue cambridge core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/ . /s downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. carnegie mellon university, on apr at : : , subject to the https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /s https://www.cambridge.org/core number • september articles militarism and the development of fascist ideology: the political ideas of colonel max bauer, - m a r t i n k i t c h e n germany and the eupen-malmedy affair - : "here lies the spirit of locarno" robert p . g r a t h w o l a jewish collaborator in nazi germany: the strange career of georg kareski, - herbert s. levine reviews o t t o biisch, ed., untersuchungen zur geschichte derfruhen industrialisierung vornehmlich im wirtschaftsraum berlin /brandenburg; o t t o biisch, industrialisierung und gewerbe im raum berlin/brandenburg, - richard tilly richard georg plaschka et al., innere front: militarassistenz, widerstand und umsturz in der donaumonarchie igi robert a. k a n n contributors to this issue number • december articles the social place of a german renaissance artist: hans baldung grien ( / - ) at strasbourg t h o m a s a. brady prussia's last fling: the annexation of hanover, hesse, frankfurt, and nassau, june - october , hans a . s c h m i t t hermann neubacher and the austrian anschluss movement, - harry r. ritter review klaus schwabe, deutsche revolution und wilson-frieden; and peter kriiger, deutschland und die reparationen / r e i n h a r d r. doerries note notes on the german collection at the lds genealogical society, salt lake city r o n a l d smelser contributors to this issue cambridge core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/ . /s downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. carnegie mellon university, on apr at : : , subject to the https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /s https://www.cambridge.org/core central european history volume viii number december articles the social place of a german renaissance artist: hans baldung grien ( / - ) at strasbourg by thomas a. brady prussia's last fling: the annexation of hanover, hesse, frankfurt, and nassau, june - october , by hans a. schmitt hermann neubacher and the austrian anschluss movement, - by harry r. ritter review klaus schwabe, deutsche revolution und wilson-frieden; and peter kriiger, deutschland und die reparationen igi /ig by reinhard r. doerries note notes on the german collection at the lds genealogical society, salt lake city by ronald smelser contributors to this issue cambridge core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/ . /s downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. carnegie mellon university, on apr at : : , subject to the https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /s https://www.cambridge.org/core central european history sponsored by the conference group for central european history of the american historical association published quarterly by emory university, atlanta, georgia b o a r d o f e d i t o r s c l a u s - p e t e r c l a s e n a l l a n m i t c h e l l university of california, los angeles university of california, san diego a n d r e a s d o r p a l e n l e n o r e o ' b o y l e ohio state university cleveland state university g e r a l d d . f e l d m a n d i e t r i c h o r l o w university of california, berkeley boston university m a r t i n j a y p a u l w . s c h r o e d e r university of california, berkeley university of illinois m a c k w a l k e r cornell university editor douglas a. unfug assistant editor business manager t h e o d o r v. b r o d e k olivia j. h a r r i s all correspondence should be sent to central european history, emory university, at- lanta, georgia . § subscription rates for united states and possessions: individuals year $ (u.s.), years $ , years $ . student and emeritus rate $ a year. single copies $ . . § institutions year $ , years $ , years $ . single copies $ . . § all other countries: add $ per year ( c per single copy) for mailing. § subscriptions by calendar year only. § individual subscriptions include membership in the conference group for central european history. all subscriptions postpaid. checks should be made out to central european history. § second-class postage paid at atlanta, georgia, and at additional mailing offices. published quarterly in march, june, september, and decem- ber. § central european history is indexed or abstracted in historical abstracts, humanities index, book review index, internationale bibliographic der zeitschriftenliteratur (ibz), cur- rent contents / social and behavioral science, social sciences citation index, universal refer- ence system, and ba-sis-h service of the nexus corporation. § copyright © by emory university. all rights reserved. § printed by the stinehour press, lunenburg, vermont. issn - cambridge core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/ . /s downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. carnegie mellon university, on apr at : : , subject to the https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /s https://www.cambridge.org/core spengler's prussian socialism this is a repository copy of spengler's prussian socialism. white rose research online url for this paper: http://eprints.whiterose.ac.uk/ / version: accepted version article: lewis, b.j. ( ) spengler's prussian socialism. european review, academia europaea, ( ). pp. - . issn - https://doi.org/ . /s this article has been published in a revised form in european review [https://doi.org/ . /s ]. this version is free to view and download for private research and study only. not for re-distribution, re-sale or use in derivative works. © academia europaea . eprints@whiterose.ac.uk https://eprints.whiterose.ac.uk/ reuse this article is distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution-noncommercial-noderivs (cc by-nc-nd) licence. this licence only allows you to download this work and share it with others as long as you credit the authors, but you can’t change the article in any way or use it commercially. more information and the full terms of the licence here: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/ takedown if you consider content in white rose research online to be in breach of uk law, please notify us by emailing eprints@whiterose.ac.uk including the url of the record and the reason for the withdrawal request. mailto:eprints@whiterose.ac.uk https://eprints.whiterose.ac.uk/ spengler’s prussian socialism oswald spengler ( - ) was one of the most significant thinkers of the weimar republic, germany’s first democracy. his work, notably the two-volume, , -page der untergang des abendlandes (decline of the west, / ), had a profound influence on intellectual discourse in germany and beyond. yet despite the esteem in which he was held by his contemporaries, his thought has been seriously under-researched. in english, only four major studies have appeared in the last years. this is all the more surprising in that the historical period in which he wrote has been extensively covered by both english- and german-language scholars and that some of the thinkers who drew critically on his ideas, such as heidegger and adorno, have become household names in germany intellectual history. the english-language studies of spengler have either been biographical, or they have focused narrowly on decline of the west. accordingly, in popular consciousness spengler has earned the moniker of the “prophet of decline” and has become synonymous with notions of crisis and disintegration, doom and gloom. however, as the recent revival of interest in spengler in german secondary literature has recognised, even a cursory look at spengler’s copious writings makes it clear how much more there is to spengler than this sole work. moreover, the very titles of some of spengler’s largely cf. zaur gasimov and carl antonius lemke duque (eds.), oswald spengler als europäisches phänomen. der transfer der kultur- und geschichtsmorphologie im europa der zwischenkriegszeit - (göttingen: vandenhoeck & ruprecht, ). h. stuart hughes, oswald spengler: a critical estimate (new york: scribner, ); john f. felleny, twilight of the evening lands: oswald spengler – a half century later (new york: brookdale, ); klaus p. fischer, history and prophecy: oswald spengler and the decline of the west (new york: peter lang, ); john farrenkopf, prophet of decline: spengler on world history and politics (louisiana: louisiana state university press, ). the title of perhaps the best-known study of spengler in english (cf. john farrenkopf, prophet of decline). the following recent studies are worth mentioning: mohler, armin and karlheinz weissmann, die konservative revolution in deutschland - . ein handbuch (graz: ares, ); sebastian maaß, oswald spengler. eine politische biographie (berlin: duncker & humblot, ); martin falck (ed.), zyklen und cäsaren. mosaiksteine einer philosophie des schicksals. reden und schriften oswald spenglers (kiel: regin, ); zaur gasimov and carl antonius lemke duque (eds.), oswald spengler als europäisches phänomen. ignored writings, such as die revolution ist nicht zu ende and neubau des deutschen reiches (the revolution is not over and building the german empire anew, both ), indicate that his work actually contained positive proposals for the course of society and calls to political action. accordingly, it is important to place spengler’s thought within the context of recent developments in weimar historiography, which highlight the need to distinguish between crisis as a social condition and the evocation of crisis as a rhetorical device – as a way to disqualify the status quo and prepare the ground for something new. spengler particularly foregrounds the struggle for a different social order in his overlooked pamphlet, preußentum und sozialismus (prussianism and socialism, ). the pamphlet serves as both a warning and an invocation: unless the german nation can come together as it purportedly did in the spirit of civil peace in the war effort of , unless a genuine organic community [gemeinschaft], beyond class and individualism, can be created in line with what spengler deems the prussian socialist spirit, then the german people will, he argues, be brought to its knees by the rule of “english” banks, profiteering and speculation. the rallying cry for this prussian socialism was heard across the political spectrum. for the conservative ernst jünger, the pamphlet forged “the first weapons […] following the disarmament of germany” and provided a springboard for the conservative revolution – the anti-democratic and anti-communist political movement of the s in which jünger was also active. following the pamphlet’s publication, spengler even became known as “the karl marx of the bourgeoisie”. the pamphlet was also absorbed by left-wing circles. gustav noske, the leading social democrat and weimar’s first defence minister, acknowledged that “spengler’s cf. rüdinger graf, die zukunft der weima rer republik. krisen und zukunftsaneignungen in deutschland - (munich: oldenbourg, ), pp. - . cf. detlef felken, oswald spengler. konservativer denker zwischen kaiserreich und diktatur (munich: beck, ), p. . ibid., p. . prussian socialism” ran in his blood as he mobilised military forces to crush the workers’ and soldiers’ councils across germany. prussianism and socialism was thus influential on both the left and the right. yet how did it address the need for a german national resurgence? through an analysis of the pamphlet, this essay will counter the dominant image of spengler as a doomsayer with a despairing outlook by making the case that spengler viewed the decline of western society, for which he is accounting, not as an inexorable and irresistible process of disintegration, but as an open-ended development replete with both possibilities and pitfalls, depending on the concrete development of events at the time and the choices made by human agents. further, this essay will argue that spengler is no arch-conservative cultural critic lamenting the end of the white, western european man’s influence on world history from an introspective and even racist perspective. rather, prussianism and socialism should be viewed as a political intervention on the part of a thinker who poses challenging questions which remain relevant to twenty-first century life: not least because he draws on various liberal, socialist and nationalist discourses of modernity in order to develop his outlook. the essay will also bring out the specificity of spengler’s ideas and the distinctive position he occupies as a thinker of the conservative revolution in two ways. first, it will discuss some of the references to socialist thinkers in prussianism and socialism, such as the founding father of german socialism, ferdinand lassalle, the left-syndicalist robert michels and the german social-democratic deputy paul lensch. these references have hitherto received scant attention in the few german-language discussions of the pamphlet. second, it will explore the ibid., p. . as far as i can gather, the important reference to lassalle in prussianism and socialism has been completely overlooked in secondary literature. only adorno has discussed, albeit briefly, michels’s influence on spengler (cf. adorno, ‘spengler nach dem untergang’, p. ). rolf peter sieferle justifiably devotes two of his five biographical epistemological roots of spengler’s socialism and its links with his overall world view which, as we shall see, was based on a morphological, longue durée conception of human history as a cyclical, organically unfolding process. following a brief contextualisation and overview of prussianism and socialism, this essay will assess four aspects of spengler’s argument: how socialism fits into his view of historical change; how he views the relation between determinism and agency; how he understands political democracy; and how he weaves various socialist thinkers into his argument and what this incorporation reveals about his prussian socialist project. in order to shed light on spengler’s motivations in penning prussianism and socialism, let us first turn to the socio- political context in which it was written. bavarian disgust spengler had been engaged with the material for prussianism and socialism since , initially digging it up again in september in the hope of publishing it under the title römer und preußen (romans and prussians). as we shall see, this title alludes to one of the ideological cornerstones of the pamphlet – the duty of the prussians to establish a global hegemonic power along the lines of rome (the imperium germanicum). the immediate backdrop to the pamphlet was spengler’s “disgust” at the “anarchistical radical ‘mob’” during the revolution of november and the proclamation of the socialist sketches of figures from the conservative revolution to spengler and lensch (cf. rolf peter sieferle, die konservative revolution. fünf biographische skizzen (frankfurt: fischer, ) but the possible cross-fertilisation of their ideas has not been investigated. spengler also cultivated personal friendships with figures on the right wing of social democracy, such as the trade-union leader august winning, who was inspired by lensch’s ideas. given spengler’s personal and intellectual connections with german social democracy, the largest political party of his time, these links demand further research. felken, oswald spengler, p. . republic in his native bavaria in january . the revolutionary skirmishes landed on his very own doorstep, with the artillery fire in his resident agnesstraße only ceasing on may . on february , one day after the assassination of the socialist leader kurt eisner, spengler met with his friend august albers, editor of the newly-established publishing house, c. h. beck. spengler wanted to discuss publishing a text which would allow him to popularise his conviction that the liberal parliamentarism of weimar would spell disaster for germany if she wanted to re-emerge as a power on the world stage. as he puts it in prussianism and socialism, parliamentarism in germany is either “nonsense or betrayal”. felken notes that spengler had consciously avoided any discussion of politics in the first volume of his decline of the west, leaving this to the forthcoming second volume. yet spengler’s hand was forced by the speed of events. on occasion, certain sections of the pamphlet therefore read like a topical paraphrase and popularisation of decline of the west. spengler’s decision to modify the title to prussianism and socialism, presumably in consultation with albers, can be explained with reference to the revolutionary events of november , with socialist terminology reflecting the spirit of the age, in which germany was governed by an all-socialist provisional government made up of three representatives from the two largest parties of the time: the majority social democrats (spd) and the independents (uspd). for spengler, socialism was “not the most profound, but the noisiest question of the time”. this quote summarises his core thesis that the noisy debates around socialism and letter to hans klöres, december , cited in arthur helps (ed.), spengler letters: - (london: george allen & unwin, ), p. . jürgen naeher, oswald spengler (reinbek bei hamburg: rowohlt, ) p. . oswald spengler, preußentum und sozialismus (munich: beck, ), p. . all subsequent references to this text will be placed in parentheses in the main text. spengler, politische schriften, p. . capitalism on the streets and assemblies of early weimar were in fact a faint echo of a more profound antagonism: the struggle between the prussians and the english in what he deems the “winter” of western, or faustian, civilisation. before assessing what spengler meant by such concepts, let us first take a closer look at the pamphlet and its structure. common enemies prussianism and socialism runs a fine line, reflecting spengler’s adventurist political gamble in propounding a socialist politics defined by opposition to the common enemies of the working class and the aristocracy: marxism and liberalism. for spengler, eradicating the baleful influence of both is a necessary condition for the revitalisation of germany following military defeat in world war i. such a german renaissance necessitates the unification of what spengler deems the two socialist parties in germany: not, as desired by many, of the spd and the uspd, but of social democracy as a whole and the conservatives. the german elite has to recognise that it must overcome “every trace” of the “feudal-agrarian narrowness” which belongs to an earlier phase of western history. equally, it has to reject the values of liberalism and its attempts to plant parliamentarism in alien prussian soil, where it would not, and could not, grow. in turn, the german working class (or at least the “respectable” section of it) needs to break with marxism, which, like liberalism, is an alien and corrosive ideology. it is necessary, so spengler, to “liberate” german socialism from marxism. the central aim of the pamphlet, therefore, is to lay bare the english roots of both marxism and liberalism and to conduct a struggle against the letter to hans klöres, december , cited in arthur helps (ed.), spengler letters: - (london: george allen and unwin, ), p. . ibid. spengler, politische schriften (leipzig: manuscriptum, ), p. . insidious forces championing them within germany, referred to by spengler as the “invisible english army, which napoleon had left behind on german soil after the battle of jena” (p. ). spengler outlines his argument in four main chapters, each of which is further divided into numbered sections. the first chapter is entitled “the revolution” (sections - ); it is followed by “sozialismus as a way of life” ( - ); “englishmen and prussians” ( - ); “marx” ( - ); and finally “the international” ( - ). in the first section, spengler emphasises that “the revolution” he has in mind begins not in , but with the german war effort in , with the country purportedly coming together in a heroic attempt to fight for the national interest. this narrative reflects a guiding trope of the conservative revolution, with spengler echoing the stab-in-the-back myth [dolchstoßlegende] popularised by the prussian general paul von hindenburg. according to this view, the german army was on the brink of victory, only to be stabbed in the back by leftists and liberals on the home front. indeed, for prussianism and socialism, the so-called german revolution of (“the most senseless act” in german history (p. )) is a sheer betrayal of the true civil-peace revolution of , which assumed “legitimate and military forms” (p. ). this betrayal of the german cause came in two acts: the june peace resolution agreed in the reichstag and the abdication of the kaiser in november . both represented desertion of military duty and a capitulation to england. spengler then proceeds to discuss “socialism as a way of life”, which describes prussian socialism as ingrained in the instinct and consciousness of the prussians, who form a “race in the spiritual sense” (p. ). a brief aside is necessary here, not least because of the controversy surrounding spengler and racial theory in the context of the horror that would later be unleashed on germany: however much spengler’s prussians and englanders may be based on caricatures or stereotypes, they are not biologically determined, but metaphysical categories, which are supposed to reflect the soul of certain peoples and epochs. this emphasis on the soul and living out one’s destiny is integral to the german tradition of philosophy of life in which spengler stands. indeed, on several occasions, prussianism and socialism highlights how there are many biological prussians who nonetheless entertained anti-prussian, english ideals (such as one of the pamphlet’s bogeymen, the german liberal “michel” (p. ). nonetheless, there is one passage in the pamphlet where spengler talks of race as expressing itself in certain “bodily traits” (p. ). presumably this relates to the way which people walk, their facial expressions and so on. with the benefit of the doubt, perhaps this talk of bodily features is not a manifestation of spengler’s biological determinism but analogous to what, following pierre bourdieu, modern sociology deems hexus – the way in which habitual and typical conditions, particularly in the way individuals move, eat, talk and comport themselves express both individual choices and social norms or values. spengler then proceeds to what is by far the longest section of the pamphlet, “prussians and englishmen” given the importance spengler attributes to the conflict between these peoples, “prussians and englishmen” might have perhaps been a better title for the pamphlet as a whole, insofar as this title more accurately reflects what, for spengler, was really at stake politically. for spengler argues that world war i is but one manifestation of a historically rooted anglo-german antagonism, a struggle between the two great germanic peoples. such antipathy will invariably lead to more fierce struggles between the modern english people, born in the seventeenth century, and the prussian people, born in the eighteenth. the inevitability of such a conflict, and the impossibility of mediation or reconciliation between these peoples, is rooted in what spengler, following nietzsche, deems modern man’s irrepressible will to power. this force is cf. richard jenkings, pierre bourdieu (london: routledge, ), pp. - . embodied in modern imperialism, first ushered in by seventeenth-century spain, which aims to conquer the entire planet: “all must submit to our political, social, and economic ideal, or perish” (p. ). the respective “soul” of these peoples derives from the fact that the former were “knightly” peoples and the latter “vikings” (p. ) – the prussians feeling the great germanic idea above them (the commitment to the community) and the english within them (a commitment to individual independence (p. )). this clash is therefore one between an english community of happiness and a prussian community of duty; money versus rank; job versus occupation; free trade versus autarky; “the gentleman’s garb” versus the “uniform” (p. ), art versus literature. “every man for himself: that is english. every man for every other man: that is prussian” (ibid.). in the short section on marx that follows, spengler contends that marx’s thought conflates the struggle between these great peoples with the struggle between social classes. marx’s approach is “purely english” (p. ). since marx is unaware of the true antagonism of the epoch, he unconsciously takes as his point of departure the principles and concepts of english political economy in order to subject it to a critique. spengler views this critique as a “splendid construction” (p. ), but maintains that it is ignorant of the different cultural souls and dispositions of the various peoples. in prussia, as opposed to england, for example, social position is informed not by wealth but by social rank. following english political economy, marx treats labour like any other commodity. however, this is at odds with the prussian mentality, according to which work is not a mere object to be bought and sold, but a calling, as expressed in the german word beruf. it is for this reason that spengler accuses marx of being “a good materialist and a poor psychologist” (p. ). for spengler, marx’s theory is english political economy turned on its head – “the capitalism of the lower class” (p. ) informed by a viking-style envy of the propertied classes and their wealth, a system in which “class egoism is elevated to a principle” (p. ). the working-class strike was “the classical feature” of marx’s (english) “trader philosophy” (p. ). the pamphlet concludes with a section entitled “the international”, which highlights the illusion of a peaceful world order, as heralded by the outbreak of world war i. spengler argues that further military conflicts are a given and sketches out a world in which it is inevitable that the entire world will be economically coordinated and administered. yet will this world be run by spengler’s dedicated, self-sacrificing, dutiful prussian soldiers and bureaucrats or by ruthless, self-interested, exploitative english bankers and traders? these questions conclude the pamphlet, along with the warning that further military conflicts are on the immediate horizon: “a genuine international is only possible through the victory of the idea of one race over all others” (p. ). socialist morphology let us now locate spengler’s views within his conception of historical development. the thesis underpinning spengler’s anglo-german antagonism is his morphological conception of history. this conception is central to decline of the west, but is also a guiding thread in prussianism and socialism: unlike other varieties of socialism, which are often based on an understanding of economic development or ethical imperatives, spengler’s socialism is metaphysically based in this overview of human history. for spengler, there are eight great or high “cultures” in the course of human society, the last of which is faustian or western society. these cultures develop independently from each other organically and are subject to the laws of organic matter in general: each culture will come the following overview is based on rolf peter sieferle, die konservative revolution, pp. - . into existence, blossom, decay and ultimately perish. in order to enunciate the cyclical, repetitive nature of this organic process, spengler likens each stage of development to the four seasons with quintessential, distinctive characteristics: spring, defined by rural contemplation and reflection as opposed to urban action; summer, defined by scholarly output and philosophy; autumn, defined by the disintegration of the culture (or “race”) and the emergence of satire and scepticism; and winter, characterised by urbanism, mass poverty, politics and entertainment, epitomised by the historical figure of caesar, whose modern incarnation, argues spengler, lies in the future (spengler was tempted to see benito mussolini as such a figure, but on occasion adolf hitler too). spengler thus views in history the existence of something along the lines of the sychronicity of the non-synchronous [die gleichzeitigkeit des ungleichzeitigen], not in ernst bloch’s sense of simultaneously existing ages, ideals and outlooks in one epoch, but as two historical facts which, existing in completely different cultures or times, appear in exactly the same – relative – situation. in spenglerian terms, archimedes and carl friedrich gauss, polygnotus and rembrandt, as well as alexander the great and napoleon, are contemporaries, or homologous historical phenomena. the latter two figures ushered in the winter period of ancient and faustian culture respectively, or, as spengler puts it, these cultures’ transition from kultur to zivilisation. for spengler, marked the arrival of the winter of western civilisation, with all that this entailed in terms of modern-day caesarism (which we shall discuss below), mass urban existence and military conflict. with the dawning of civilisation, countries like france, spain and italy – once bearers of a culture associated with spirit, conviviality and taste – had descended into insignificance, with england and germany appearing centre stage. the creation of an antagonism between english and german culture was no invention of spengler’s, but in the mould of the ideological mobilisation of the german people during the war, and the attempts on the part of philosophers such as rudolf eucken and paul natorp to create what hermann lübbe calls a “metaphysics of germanness” . this attempt to formulate philosophically a unique german identity distinct from the other warring nations was also a guiding principle of the conservative revolution. ernst troeltsch, johann plenge and werner sombart were pioneering in this regard, with the latter publishing a treatise under the revealing title traders and heroes (händler und helden, the latter, of course, being the germans). troeltsch also distinguished, as does spengler, between the individualism of the english gentlemen, french ideas of equality and german ideas of self-denying community. plenge likewise viewed liberal traditions as a foreign infiltration [Überfremdung] of the german spirit. what distinguishes spengler from these thinkers (troeltsch, sombart, plenge and natorp), however, is his integration of these metaphysical justifications of germanness, via the concepts of civilisation and culture, into his overall cyclical view of history. spengler’s deployment of the distinction between culture and civilisation was another trope in the competing political discourse on both sides of the trenches in world war i. whereas french and british pro-war intellectuals claimed to be fighting for “civilisation”, those in germany inscribed on their banners the slogan of “culture”. for the marxist philosopher georg hermann lübbe, politische philosophie in deutschland (munich: dtv, ), p. . the intellectual role model in this respect was johann gottlieb fichte, whose speeches to the german nation during the german wars of liberation were seen as exemplary for intellectuals serving the german war effort in . james hawes’s recent book englanders and huns outlines the development of this anglo-german antagonism and draws on various press sources on both sides of the english channel to make his case: james hawes, englanders and huns: how five decades of enmity led to the first world war (london: simon and schuster, ). quoted in falck (ed.), zyklen und cäsaren, p. . lübbe notes that, on occasion, spengler even claimed that the germans were fighting for “barbarism” so as to accentuate this antagonism (lübbe, politische philosophie, p. ). in philosophical terms, lübbe (ibid., p. ) traces the culture/civilisation dichotomy back to immanuel kant, but argues that this distinction only became politicised in the early twentieth century, as part of what he describes as a “fichte renaissance” (ibid., p. ). lukács, “culture” had been a leitmotif in “reactionary germany philosophy” for some time, with the ideological struggle against the democratisation of germany taking place “under the banner of this antagonism, in which ‘civilisation’ is portrayed as everything that is bad under capitalism, particularly western democracy, opposed to which stands the autochthonous, organic, genuinely german ‘culture’”. spengler’s understanding of culture is in line with his conception of socialism-as-form-of existence, a part of his overall cyclical historical model: his socialism is, to faustian man, what stoicism was to the ancients or what buddhism was to the indic culture. yet is this understanding of the development of prussian socialism not out of step with our earlier contention that spengler was a political thinker who placed emphasis on human agency and the need for an active struggle against english ideas? indeed, if socialism is in some way predetermined, why would he produce a pamphlet to try and alter the course of events? necessary and fatal(ist) the extent to which human actors are free to intervene in, shape or even undermine this progression of cycles has been a source of controversy in the reception of spengler’s thought. one british reviewer of decline of the west, for instance, described spengler’s socialism as a “necessary and fatal symptom of our civilisation”, implying that, for spengler, socialism is an inevitable, pre-determined social formation. martin falck, by contrast, argues that while for spengler the outlines of the overall fate of western history had been sketched out, the german people in particular faced concrete choices as to what the final outcome of history would exactly look like. even though falck adds the caveat that many of those influenced by spengler’s georg lukács, die zerstörung der vernunft (berlin: aufbau verlag, ), p. . falck (ed.), zyklen und cäsaren, p. . cf. zaur gasimov and carl antonius lemke duque (eds.), oswald spengler als europäisches phänomen, p. . martin falck (ed.), zyklen und cäsaren, p. . decline of the west consciously ignored or rejected spengler’s theory of history altogether, his appreciation of the relation between determinism and agency in prussianism and socialism is well-founded. after all, prussianism and socialism is clear that western man is faced with a number of political alternatives within the context of civilisation. paraphrasing the famous dictum of one of the pamphlet’s polemical targets, karl marx, one might say that, for spengler, men do not quite make their own history, but are nonetheless faced with several choices and ways of organising their lives against the backdrop of highly restrictive, pinched and prescribed circumstances which are certainly not of their own choosing. spengler’s parallels between societies and human organisms can help explain the choices that he believes are open to faustian man. an elderly man is unlikely to be able to run a marathon and will probably die if he simply sets off one morning. on the other hand, he might be able to go on regular walks or even jogs, and in so doing may actually prolong his life and make it more comfortable. yet this presupposes at least recognising that he is an old man and that his exercise options are thus limited. analogously, for prussianism and socialism, germany did have the possibility of becoming a healthy and stable hegemonic world power. yet this required insight into the nature of realpolitik and harsh political facts, an insight which is the direct opposite of romanticism, idealism and theory. the youth in particular are urged to take up this challenge of leading germany forward. spengler subsequently explained that for him “the young generation” was considered such “not in years” but in “power of judgement” and “responsibility”: those who have neither will always be far too young for politics, he adds. how, then, does spengler understand the political ibid., p. . karl marx, ‘der achtzehnte brumaire des louis bonaparte’, in karl marx and friedrich engels, werke, volume , (berlin: dietz verlag, ) spengler, politische schriften, p. . choices open to humanity in the winter of civilisation? what is possible and what is not? let us now move to discuss spengler’s understanding of democracy and dictatorship in prussianism and socialism. kaiser bebel one defining feature of spengler’s understanding of winter is the idea that faustian man will face the prospect of caesarism, a form of dictatorship that is homologous to the one to be found in the late roman empire. in order to make this case, the pamphlet develops a critique of representative democracy in general and liberal parliamentary democracy in particular, arguing that in the winter of western civilisation both become a mere façade for the rule of entrenched plutocratic interests, which direct events from behind the scenes: “the relationship between party leaders and party, between party and masses, will be tougher, more transparent and more brazen” (p. ). one way in which this tendency towards dictatorship manifests itself is the mass political press. for all its democratic pretensions, the modern press paves the way for future dictators: “still today you can find morons here and there who are enthused by the idea of the freedom of the press, but precisely through this freedom the coming caesars of the world press have a free hand”. spengler argues that caesarism is an unavoidable feature of modern political life. but this dictatorship can either be benign or malignant: the outcome will depend on the concrete choices of the german people. will this caesarist dictatorship be a “dictatorship of money or of organisation, the world as booty or as a state, wealth or authority, success or calling [beruf]”? (p. ). spengler, untergang des abendlandes, vol. (munich, beck, ), pp. - . spengler’s anti-weimar politics come to the fore here, with republicanism in particular earning his scorn: “it is precisely the republican form of government that has nothing to do with socialism” (p. ). his target appears to be marxist social democracy, which was convinced that – through the organisation of the masses and through accountability, workers’ wages for political representatives and so on – it could undermine the corrupting influence of wealth on party politics and transform democracy. whereas the marxist left, following friedrich engels, envisaged the democratic republic as the form of working-class rule, spengler and his right- wing contemporaries viewed republicanism an alien political form that was the epitome of social and cultural decline and thus a cornerstone of civilisation. how does spengler try and make the case for his anti-republican alternative, a socialist monarchy? following robert michels’s work on the iron law of oligarchy, which propounds that in modern political life mass organisations such as the spd have an inbuilt tendency towards moving away from democracy and embracing some of the oligarchical features spengler discerns in caesarism, prussianism and socialism portrays the spd, and its most important leader, august bebel, as a genuinely prussian, authoritarian institution that was in fact run in a caesarist fashion. bebel in particular comes in for much praise: had he not died in , then he would have had no hesitation at all in re-affirming the party’s true prussian spirit of the civil peace of august and ushering in a dictatorship that would violently impose its will on society. in a critique of the november revolution that occasionally borders on the voluntaristic, spengler is convinced that, under the prussian bebel, heads would have rolled under the rule of his “iron hand” (p. ). after all, he asks, was it not bismarck who had created prussian socialism cf. friedrich engels, ‘zur kritik des sozialdemokratischen programmentwurfes’ in karl marx/friedrich engels, werke, vol. (dietz: berlin, ), p. . robert michels, zur soziologie des parteiwesens in der modernen demokratie. untersuchungen über die oligarchischen tendenzen des gruppenlebens (leipzig: werner klinkhardt, ). through worker-protection laws? and was the spd not organised rather like a military machine under bebel? this particular view of spd history and bebel, who was popularly known as the shadow kaiser, a fierce opponent of the monarchy and somebody always at pains to avoid conflict with england, is deeply problematic. yet it is evidence both of spengler’s intellectual gymnastics and his knowledge of the spd and its history. his narrative about the purportedly authoritarian spd and bebel also allows him to spin the political behaviour of the spd during the november revolution as a stab in the back from the invisible english forces within the country, as a case of “insubordination in the workers’ party and simultaneously in the armed forces” (p. ). the spd’s prussian will to power under bebel had become anglicised, degenerating from a philosophy of power into an obsession with penny-pinching, drab trade-union struggles. spengler’s critique aims to show how things could have been, and still could be, very different. this is not the end of spengler’s discussion of german social democracy, however. there are a number of other references to socialist thinkers, to which we shall now turn in order to understand how his socialism differed from other thinkers of the conservative revolution who likewise championed a form of socialism. lassalle and lensch in order to boost his prussian-socialist credentials, spengler cites ferdinand lassalle’s what next? as an inspiration for an alliance between the german aristocracy and the working class, thereby creating further distance between his socialism and that of marx, who was typically forthcoming in his criticisms of the remarkably contradictory lassalle. through his cf. wilhelm harvey maehl, shadow emperor of the german worker s (philadelphia: the american philosophical society, ) strict, dictatorial leadership of the allgemeiner deutscher arbeiter verein (adav), lassalle contributed much to breaking the german working class from liberalism and to establishing an independent working-class party, as outlined in his famous open letter ( ), which made the case for the working class forming its own social institutions. widely read and discussed, this open letter is considered to have created the basis of the adav. simultaneously, however, lassalle held a number of convictions which were inimical to the idea of the german working class pursuing its own political project, not least his views of the prussian state and his flirtation with a possible alliance with otto von bismarck and the german junker class against the bourgeoisie. in this limited sense, lassalle can certainly be considered an intellectual forefather of spengler. fascinatingly, not least when it comes to spengler’s relationship with social democracy, prussianism and socialism (p. ) also references three years of world revolution, a pamphlet written by the german spd reichstag deputy paul lensch. once a pupil of rosa luxemburg and a household name on the radical left wing of the spd, in he and his allies in the die glocke group (the bell, a publication established in ) came to the conclusion that world war i actually represented a revolutionary process, in which a german victory could break britain’s dominance of the world and thus open up a space for genuinely marxist, german spd-type organisations to develop, as opposed to the labourite, trade-unionist organisations that dominated the british workers’ movement. indeed, as for so many different thinkers who influenced, and were influenced by, the philosophical ideas of , britain’s alliance with paul lensch, drei jahre weltrevolution (berlin: fischer, ). tsarism – the embodiment of political reaction – made lensch and his comrades feel vindicated in their analysis. unlike spengler, lensch and his co-thinkers remained subjectively committed to the idea that they were engaged in further developing the politics of marxism, but there is a remarkable overlap between spengler’s and lensch’s analysis of the role of england and the english workers’ movement, which were seen as embodying a variety of the english trader philosophy in its uninspired syndicalism. by contrast, both lensch and spengler saw the german spd (particularly under august bebel) as an organisation that fought for political power. it is striking just how conversant spengler was with the various competing discourses of his time. his understanding of, and engagement with, socialist ideas sets him apart from other post-world war i right-wing thinkers such as paul natorp and johann plenge. natorp deemed world war i “the day of the germans” and, similarly to spenger, was convinced that the germans had socialism in their blood. spengler, however, would have argued that natorp had confused the loudest issue of the day with the most profound: natorp, after all, was of the opinion that embodied the clash between the two systems of capitalism and socialism, not between the two bearers of the great germanic idea. opportunist socialism? is spengler’s socialism not typical of the young conservative movement and its struggle against all notions of a democratically organised society? indeed, in a foreword to a reprint of prussianism and socialism, spengler downplays any understanding of socialism as an economic concept, stressing its metaphysical and spiritual dimension. he even underlines how his on lensch, see for example, ben lewis, ‘the spd left’s dirty secret’, in weekly worker, no. , june , pp. - . cf. lübbe, politische philosophie, p. - . socialism would not get rid of the market, as it presupposes “a private economy with its old- germanic joy of power and booty”. as such, spengler’s anti-capitalist critique is one that boils down to an opposition to finance capital (which he scathingly deems a “parasitic form of property”), not to the logic of capital accumulation in general. theodor w. adorno sees much that is worthy in spengler’s critique of democracy as an instrument of caesarist control. nonetheless, he calls into question spengler’s socialism by highlighting the weaknesses in his understanding of political economy, accusing spengler of being “helplessly dilettantish” in these matters. indeed, just how a state is to mediate between socio-economic interests when it is not directly accountable to the population is a central problem in spengler’s political economy. for the same reason, even ernst niekisch, the enigmatic national bolshevik thinker who sought to fuse german nationalism with revolutionary left-wing politics, was critical of spengler’s social alternative. he viewed it as “the old authoritarian state [obrigkeitsstaat] once again, which the worker has to obey blindly”. for georg lukács, the core of the project of the thinkers from the german philosophy of life tradition since nietzsche, particularly spengler, is actually the struggle against socialism. in left-wing circles, after all, spengler’s name became an insult, with the marxist karl kautsky spengler, politische schriften, p. . ibid., p. . adorno, ‘spengler nach dem untergang’, p. . more generally, there is a certain overlap between adorno’s comments on the culture industry as a twentieth-century incarnation of roman panem et circences and spengler’s comments on civilisation. adorno makes the interesting case that spengler’s right-wing critique of modernity was able to grasp something about the “dual nature of the enlightenment”, which liberal thought was unable to see (ibid., pp. - ). niekisch, ernst, gewagtes leben: begnegungen und begebnisse (cologne/berlin: kiepenhauer & witsch, ), p. . on niekisch, see jürgen rühle, ‘hassliebe zu den niederen d monen: ernst niekisch und der nationalbolschewismus’, in rühle, literatur und revolution – die schriftsteller und der kommunismus (berlin: kiepenhauer & witsch, ), pp. - . lukács, die zerstörung der vernunft, p. . referring to one political opponent, emil franz, as “a red spengler”. lukács maintains that, since the russian october revolution of , this ideological struggle on the part of the german imperialist bourgeoisie had entered a new stage, with spengler’s philosophy showing how strong this turn away from programmes, reason and systematic thought had become. for lukács, spengler’s method amounts to little more than a degrading of age-old notions concerning the law-like emergence, blossoming and decline of cultures – found amongst thinkers as varied as giambattista vico and hegel – into unfounded historical analogies, another manifestation of the destruction of reason, with a decadent ruling class and its ideologues plumbing new intellectual depths in the struggle against socialism. in this sense, for all spengler’s claims of being able to see more clearly than other thinkers as a result of his independence from party-political interests, prussianism and socialism may be seen, in the words of one british fabian socialist reviewer of spengler, as amounting to “little more than echo[ing] the prejudices of his class and time”. spengler may thus have fallen into the trap of what he explicitly warns against in the introduction to prussianism and socialism: projecting onto socialism the fears and prejudices of his own environment and background. ernst stutz is quite correct to highlight the intimate relationship between spengler’s conception of history and his political views: there is a clear connection between spengler’s prognoses for the western world and his understanding of caesarist rome. nonetheless, spengler’s eclectic incorporation of an array of socialist, statist and syndicalist schools of thought is indicative of a thinker who is engaged in a daring political wager not all marxist thinkers of the s thought in such terms, however. cf. a. fankhauser, ‘spengler und marx’, rote revue: sozialistische monatsschrift, . ( - ), pp. - , which argues that spengler’s thought owes much to marx and that spengler’s concept of “culture” is merely “class” in another, non-materialist form. lukács, die zerstörung der vernunft, p. . spengler, politische schriften (leipzig: manuscriptum, ), p. . geoffrey barraclough, ‘culture and civilisation’, new republic, , ( ), p. . conditioned by his immediate surroundings in early weimar germany, where socialist organisations and ideas were so dominant that he felt compelled to develop a critique of marxist socialism and thereby steer political events towards his own anti-democratic outlook. as we have seen, prussianism and socialism is by no means the intervention of an aristocrat who longingly harks back to pre-modern germany from the comfort of his armchair. nor is it, however, able to break with an aristocratic opposition to democracy and mass political life. accordingly, spengler’s main target in prussianism and socialism is what he deems “thinking from below”, the “apotheosis of herd sentiment”. however discredited spengler’s methodology may be, and wherever one may currently place western civilisation, his concerns regarding the “winter” of the west remain part of the modern world in which basic democratic forms seem rather precarious, military conflicts are a stubborn feature of everyday life, an all-encompassing media machine increasingly sets the ideological agenda and the fate of entire countries hinges on developments in the financial markets. humanity’s inability to resolve the very socio-political dilemmas spengler was able to pinpoint explains the enduring relevance of his ideas. ben lewis is a phd candidate (wolfson scholar) in germanic studies at the university of sheffield. his project ‘spengler in context: beyond the decline of the west’ aims to re-assess the perception of spengler as a prophet of doom by shedding new light on his thought and the complexity of ideological discourse in the fateful years before hitler’s seizure of power. lewis has co-edited a number of volumes on early-twentieth century european thinkers, such as clara oswald spenger, jahre der entscheidung (munich: beck, ) [accessed at: http://tinyurl.com/ppmbk ], pp. - . zetkin: letters and writings ( , with mike jones); karl kautsky on colonialism ( , with mike macnair) and zinoviev and martov: head to head in halle ( , with lars t. lih). ben.lewis@sheffield.ac.uk mailto:ben.lewis@sheffield.ac.uk bibliography adorno, theodor w., ‘spengler nach dem untergang’, der monat, ( ), pp. - barraclough, geoffrey, ‘culture and civilisation’, new republic, , ( ), p. engels, friedrich, ‘zur kritik des sozialdemokratischen programmentwurfes’ in karl marx and friedrich engels, werke, vol. (dietz: berlin, ) falk, martin (ed.), zyklen und cäsaren. mosaiksteine einer philosophie des schicksals. reden und schriften oswald spenglers (kiel: regin verlag, ) fankhauser, a., ‘spengler und marx’, rote revue: sozialistische monatsschrift, , ( - ), pp. - farrenkopf, john, prophet of decline: spengler on world history and politics (louisiana: louisiana state university press, ) ———, ‘the early phase in spengler’s political philosophy’, history of political thought, vol. xiii, (summer ), pp. - felken, detlef, oswald spengler. konservativer denker zwischen kaiserreich und diktatur (munich: c.h. beck, ) felleny, john f., twilight of the evening lands: oswald spengler – a half century later (new york: brookdale, ) fischer, klaus p., history and prophecy: oswald spengler and the decline of the west (new york: peter lang, ) gasimov, zaur and carl antonius lemke duque (eds.), oswald spengler als europäisches phänomen. der transfer der kultur- und geschichtsmorphologie im europa der zwischenkriegszeit - (göttingen: vandenhoeck & ruprecht, ) hawes, james, englanders and huns: how five decades of enmity led to the first world war (london: simon & schuster, ) helps, arthur (ed.), spengler letters: - (london: george allen & unwin, ) hughes, h. stuart oswald spengler: a critical estimate (new york: scribner, ) jenkings, richard, pierre bourdieu (london: routledge, ) kautsky, karl, ‘ein roter spengler’, die gewerkschatfliche rundschau, november kotanek, anton m., oswald spengler in seiner zeit (munich: c.h. beck, ) lensch, paul, das englische weltreich, mächte des weltkrieges, fünftes heft (berlin: buchhandlung vorwärts paul singer, ) ———, die deutsche sozialdemokratie und der weltkrieg (berlin: buchhandlung vorwärts paul singer, ) ———, drei jahre weltrevolution (berlin: fischer, ) lewis, ben, ‘the spd left’s dirty secret’, in weekly worker, no. , june , pp. - ludz, peter christian (ed.) spengler heute (munich: c.h. beck, ) lukács, georg, die zerstörung der vernunft (berlin: aufbau verlag, ) lübbe, hermann, politische philosophie in deutschland (munich: dtv, ) maaß, sebastian, oswald spengler. eine politische biographie (berlin: duncker & humblot, ) maehl, william harvey, shadow emperor of the german workers (philadelphia: the american philosophical society, ) marx, karl, ‘der achtzehnte brumaire des louis bonaparte’, in karl marx and friedrich engels, werke, volume , (berlin: dietz verlag, ) meier, hans-georg, romane der konservativen revolution in der nachfolge von nietzsche und spengler ( - ) (frankfurt: peter lang, ) messer, august, oswald spengler als philosoph (stuttgart: strecker & schröder, ) michels, robert, zur soziologie des parteiwesens in der modernen demokratie. untersuchungen über die oligarchischen tendenzen des gruppenlebens (leipzig: werner klinkhardt, ) mohler, armin and karlheinz weissmann, die konservative revolution in deutschland - . ein handbuch (graz: ares, ) naeher, jürgen, oswald spengler, zweite auflage (reinbek bei hamburg: rowohlt, ) niekisch, ernst, gewagtes leben. begegnungen und begebnisse (cologne/berlin: kiepenheuer & witsch, ) rühle, jürgen, ‘hassliebe zu den niederen d monen: ernst niekisch und der nationalbolschewismus’, in jürgen rühle, literatur und revolution – die schriftsteller und der kommunismus (berlin: kiepenhauer & witsch, ), pp. - . schoepfs, hans joachim, vorläufer spenglers: studien zum geschichtspessimismus im . jahrhundert, . auflage (leiden, brill: ) sieferle, rolf peter, die konservative revolution. fünf biographische skizzen (frankfurt: fischer taschenbuch verlag, ) spengler, oswald, preußentum und sozialismus (munich: c.h. beck, ) ———, der untergang des abendlandes, vol. (munich: c.h. beck, ) ———, jahre der entscheidung (munich: beck, ) [reprint at: http://tinyurl.com/ppmbk . last accessed may ] ———, politische schriften (leipzig: manuscriptum, ) figure . : repsold meridian circle (la plata astronomical observatory) . la plata astronomical observatory juan carlos forte and sofia a. cora (la plata, argentina) abstract la plata, the current capital city of the province of buenos aires, was founded on th november by governor dardo rocha, and built on a very innovative design giv- ing emphasis to the quality of the public space, official and educational buildings. the astronomical observatory was one of the first inhabitants of the main park of the city; its construction started in including two telescopes that ranked among the largest in the southern hemisphere at that time and also several instruments devoted to positional astronomy (e. g. a meridian circle and a zenith telescope). a dedicated effort has being invested during the last years in order to recover some of the original instrumentation (kept in a small museum) as well as the distinctive architectural val- ues. in , the observatory, the school of agriculture and the museum of natural sciences (one of the most important museums in south america) became part of the backbone of la plata national university, an institution with a strong and distinctive profile in exact and natural sciences. the first school for astronomy and related sciences had been harboured by the observatory since , and became the current faculty of astronomical and geophysical sciences in . this last institution carries phds programs and also a number of teaching activities at different levels. these activ- ities are the roots of a strong connection of the observatory with the city. . astronomical observatory as one of the founding institutions of la plata national university la plata national university (universidad nacional de la plata) was created in by joaquín v. gonzález, who was minister of justice and national public ed- ucation at that time. the astronomical observatory together with the natural sciences museum and the veterinary and agronomy faculty became the pillars of the national university. these relevant institutions gave the scientific profile, more oriented to natural and exact sciences. the institution began operations on th april as the la plata provincial university (uni- versidad provincial de la plata) with dr. dardo rocha as its rector. in , and after becoming a national university, joaquín v. gonzález, was appointed as the first rector. the university coat of arms was adopted at the first university assembly on th february . it represents the city of la plata holding up the “light of science”. the constellation of the southern cross is also featured as well as the coat of arms of the province of buenos aires which is held in the hands of the woman who represents the city. the university emblem is the oak leaf, and its motto “pro scientia et patria” is a latin phrase meaning “for science and the motherland”. in chronological order, la plata university is the third after buenos aires and córdoba and is considered as one of the most prestigious of the country. currently, it has fourteen colleges: agrarian sciences, engineer- ing, liberal arts, law and social sciences, veterinary, exact sciences, medicine, economic sciences, natural sciences, astronomical sciences, dentistry, fine arts, architecture and journalism. the story tells that joaquín v. gonzález was im- pressed by the great comet that became very bright in september leading him to choose the astro- nomical observatory as one of the founding institutions of la plata national university. in turn, la plata, the capital city of the province of buenos aires, was founded by governor dardo rocha ( – ) on th november . the construction of the observatory was scheduled in a decree passed by on th may . in this decree, the engineering department was ordered to set up plans and a budget for several public buildings, including an astronomical observatory, relevant for the cartographic survey of the province. la plata city is widely known as the one of the best planned urban system of the th century. urban plan- ner pedro benoit designed a city layout based on a ra- tionalist conception of urban centers. the city has been conceived on three fundamental axes on which most public buildings are located. one is limited by st and rd avenues and the other two cross it in th and th avenues. the house of government, the provincial leg- islature, the municipal palace and the cathedral rank among the main buildings. the house of government was projected by the belgian architect julio doral. it has typical renaissance style and is located opposite the provincial legislature on the other side of san martín square. the provincial legislature emerges on the inter- figure . : areal view of the observatory at the beginning of th century section of two of those axes on plaza san martín. it was designed by the german architects gustav heine and george h’agemann, from hannover, who won the con- test called by the provincial government in . carlos nordman was the architect who directed the construc- tion. the municipal palace is one of the most beautiful buildings in the city. it has german renaissance style and it was designed by the german architect uberto stier from hannover school. the cathedral of the im- maculate conception, is one of the most characteristics symbols of la plata. the style is neogothic, with french influence. it was inspired by the cathedrals of amiens (france) and cologne (germany), though smaller. the project was elaborated by the department of engineers led by pedro benoit. the city park is a great “lung” which still keeps a con- siderable area. the buildings that constitute a relevant part of this traditional park are the open air martín fierro theatre, the zoo, the natural sciences museum, and the astronomical observatory. as it already men- tioned, the natural sciences museum was one of the pillars of the national university. it is a great greek- romanic building, founded by francisco p. moreno in . moreno was the director for years and placed it in the top international level, with about two million of classified pieces, a collection he contributed to gather in a significant way. it holds one of the most important paleontological and anthropological collections in south america. . the first instrument the transit of venus in front of the sun had in- fluence in the decision of constructing an astronomi- cal observatory and stimulated considerable efforts by astronomers from countries all around the world. st november , a local commitee was designed to col- laborate with the french mission from paris astronom- ical observatory that would observe the phenomenon from our latitudes. with the aim of observing this event of worldwide attraction, the provincial government or- dered an equatorial refracting telescope with . cm of aperture and . m of focal length made by gautier house. this first instrument, acquired as part of the activities that promoted the creation of the observatory, has been kept at the observatory of the amateur ar- gentinian association of astronomy friends (asociación argentina de amigos de la astronomía) since . the budget for the construction of the public build- ings, including the astronomical observatory, was ac- cepted th october . thirteen months later, th november , francisco beuf was designated director of the construction of the building, thus becoming the first director of the institution. he was a lieutenant of the french army and director of the naval observatory of toulon. astronomers at la plata, in fact, celebrate the creation of the observatory on th november. figure . : large gautier meridian circle . instruments in the period – in the period – , during the direction of fran- cisco beuf ( – ), several telescopes were ac- quired: a gautier zenith telescope, an astrograph, a zeiss-gautier reflector, a large gautier equatorial refrac- tor and a gautier meridian circle. in the following, we describe the main characteristics of these instruments and their evolution, making a link to the different di- rectors of the observatory that contributed to build up its history and the development of astrophysics in la plata. one of the purposes of the observatory was the deter- mination, by astronomical and geodetical observations, of the geographical positions of a sufficient number of places for the construction of an accurate map of the province of buenos aires. by resolution of th march , director beuf purchased two zenith telescopes of cm of aperture and cm of focal length from paul gautier of paris. these instruments were installed in and . in april , the purchase of a photographic refrac- tor of cm of aperture was intrusted to the care of ad- miral mouchez, director of paris observatory. admiral mouchez suggested to buy a larger instrument, similar to others designed to carry out an important catalogue of stars covering practically the whole sky, known as cart du ciel. the astrographic telescope arrived in august of . during the administration of director francisco porro di somenzi ( – ), a new objective from carl zeiss firm was acquired. it was set on the instrument in august , thus obtaining the first astronomical pictures with this telescope. the objective has . cm of aperture and . m of focal length. since then, pho- tographic observations of asteroids and comets had been taking place at la plata observatory. this telescope worked till , providing a large number of photo- graphic plates. during those years, the observatory contributed made significant contributions to the accu- rate determination of positions of asteroids and comets. several asteroids were discovered in that period, such as ( ) angélica, ( ) la plata and ( ) erfodia. in april , a reflector telescope of cm of aper- ture was ordered from paris observatory. the instru- ment was assembled by gautier and finished in . the optical devices were provided by paul and pros- per henry. the original large mirror was finished in . several modifications have been introduced since such as a new mirror provided by the firm zeiss of jena, germany, in , changing from a newto- nian to a cassegrain system. these improvements were done by dr. johannes hartmann, a german director of the observatory in the period comprised between figure . : zeiss-gautier reflector telescope and , who tried to promote the astrophysic and astrographic research activities. during this period, the asteroids angélica, la plata and erfordia, already mentioned, were discovered and the programmes and observations of eros and the nova pictoris were started. however, the instrument was not much used during this period. in , several improvements were made by the mechanic herbert glinschert under the indications of dr. livio gratton and during the direction of guillermo o. wallbrecher ( – ). in april , the acquisition of a refractor telescope of . cm of diameter and . m of focal length was approved. the assembly of this instrument was done by gautier and finished in . the optical devices of this large gautier equatorial telescope were manufactured by paul and prosper henry. scientific research carried out with this instrument includes the observation of binary stars and asteroids and mars opposition of . that same year, by resolution of th may , the acquisition of a meridian circle refractor telescope was authorized. this instrument was designed by p. gautier with the aim of being one of the largest and best tele- scopes of this kind in the world. the objective of this large meridian circle has . cm of aperture and . m of focal length (from the firm henry brothers). this telescope reached buenos aires in april . . instruments around in january, , dr. francisco porro di somenzi was appointed director of the observatory and also became the first dean of the faculty of the mathematical, phys- ical, and astronomical sciences that was created within the observatory. among the instruments obtained on dr. porro’s initiative, was a repsold meridian circle, a zeiss comet-seeker, two repsold transit instruments and wanschaff zenith telescopes. we present now a brief description of the acquisition and main features of these instruments. in october , director porro placed an order with the celebrated firm a. repsold & son of hamburg, for the construction of a large meridian circle. this instrument has a two-lens objective by carl zeiss, hav- ing cm of aperture and . m of focal length. it was received in la plata in may . in , the director johannes hartmann lent the instrument to the córdoba astronomical observatory, after having keeping it in its packing during a quarter of century. in , during the direction of ing. félix aguilar ( – ), specialist in geodesy, the instrument returned to la plata, replacing the large gautier meridian circle in . while in europe, and also in , director porro or- dered a comet-seeker to the well-known firm carl zeiss. the telescope has cm of aperture and . m of focal length. it was with this instrument that astronomer pablo t. delavan on th september , discovered the comet d, an interesting discovery since it was the second apparition of westphal’s comet, . two astronomical transit instruments were con- structed by the house a. repsold & son of hamburg, one of which was received in and the other in . the objectives were made by steinheil of munich of . cm of aperture and cm of focal length. the zenith telescope was constructed by julius wan- schaff, from berlin. it is like all the zenith telescopes furnished by this maker for latitude observatories of the international geodetical association. in , félix aguilar proposed the construction of an astrometric station to better determine the position of circumpolar stars. it was established in santa cruz, in the south of the town paso del río la leona, being the southernmost observatory at that time. the obser- vations were done with the repsold meridian circle. . other instruments among the instruments acquired in the two above men- tioned periods, only the zeiss-gautier reflector tele- scope, the large gautier equatorial refractor telescope and the zeiss comet-seeker are currently in use, mainly for teaching activities aimed to the general public. the zeiss-gautier reflector telescope is also used with aca- demic purposes, and some astronomical projects are car- ried out by both astronomers and undergraduate stu- dents. there is, however, a bigger reflector telescope of . m that was bought during the sixties thanks to the efforts of dr. jorge sahade. it was installed in san juan in and is currently used as a national facility. a mainka seismograph, a gps system part a world- wide net, and a meteorological tower are also within the current equipment of the observatory. since the beginning of the th century, the institution has also had several clocks systems designed to provide accurate time to a number of different observing instruments. . main buildings today the observatory extends over ha area with build- ings, including domes and the small shelter for the wan- schaff telescope. the construction of these buildings started in and finished a decade later. between and , the small equatorial building and the east and west pavilions were built, and are used today as the electronic and astrometric department, respec- tively. in , the main building and the one hosting the repsold meridian circle, that is currently used as a conference room, were finished. in , the construc- tion of the domes for the zeiss-gautier reflector tele- scope and the astrographic telescope were carried out. in turn, the building that host the gautier equatorial refractor telescope was finished in . the ground floor of this building became the museum of astronomy and geophysics. this museum was created in may by the astronomical and geophysical faculty (facultad de ciencias astronómicas y geofísicas), within the web of museums of la plata national university. the main figure . : building that hosts the gautier equatorial refractor telescope, where the museum of astronomy and geophysics currently operates purposes of this museum are the restauration and con- servation of the historical patrimony of the observatory, mainly composed by the instruments acquired at the beginning of th century. for example, a zeiss “blink microscope” for asteroids and variable stars research, as well as parts of the repsold meridian circle and a photometric camera, among others. the architectural style of these buildings are the same as those characterizing the main public buildings of la plata city at the end of th century, most of them cre- ated by the ingeneering department, directed by pedro benoit. . brief description of the main building the main building was originally used in part as the house of directors. contiguous to the current main entrance corridor, there is another one, that leads to the library, one of the most beautiful rooms of the ob- servatory. the floor is made of heart pine and the room is equipped with a large size table. one of the objectives of the observatory, at the time of its foundation, was to make a cartographic survey of the province of buenos aires and that table was used for spreading and unfold- ing the large charts the experts had to draw. since the table is wider that the door of the library, it is believed that it was assembled inside this room. there is also an antique cast brass gas chandelier. there is not much information about the origins of this lamp that main- tains its original shape. it has several ornate arms with etched lampshades. in the s, there was no electrical wiring in la plata, so this chandelier ran on gas, which circulated down from the ceiling through the pipe into the arms. the ceiling of the library is ornamented with carvings and a central rosette. in the corners, there are paintings of different telescopes that still remain at the observatory. important meetings took place at this library, like the symposium on stellar evolution in , organized by dr. jorge sahade. outstanding astronomers, like carlos jaschek, maarten schmidt, al- lan sandage, margaret and geoffrey burbidge, olin j. eggen, alex feinstein and josé luis sérsic attended that remarkable meeting. currently, the library is frequently used for special events connected with the institutional life of the observatory. figure . : current view of the main building connected to the library is the dean’s office, where meetings of the academic board take place. just out- side of this room, in the external part of the building, there is a gallery with missing statues corresponding to famous astronomers, like newton, kepler and galileo. the story tells that the statues were lost with the sinking of the ship that was bringing them to la plata. in fact, and as recently found in old recovered documents, these statues were never bought because of budget reductions. many of the original rooms of the original building are currently offices occupied by scientists, engineers and the observatory administration. . concluding remarks the most significant restauration works that have been done include the buildings that host the gautier refrac- tor telescope and the zeiss-gautier reflector telescope, and the ceiling of the library. they were carried out by the architect leonforte, and specialist of fine arts. on the other hand, future projects involve the con- struction of a planetarium within the park of the ob- servatory, that will contribute to enhance the profile of the city park as a scientific and cultural circuit that will also include the zoo and the museum of natural sciences. regarding the academic aspects, félix aguilar pro- moted the creation of the superior school on astronom- ical and related sciences (escuela superior de ciencias astronómicas y conexas) between and . in , the graduate course of geophysics was created. later, in , these schools merged into the current faculty of astronomical and geophysical sciences, be- ing ing. pastor sierra its first dean. both students and professors keep a deep connection with the historical past of the observatory and there is a strong commit- ment to preserve the value of this unique cultural her- itage. acknowledgements we are very grateful to prof. dr. gudrun wolfschmidt for her kind invitation to present this work about la plata observatory, and for the financial support provided. we acknowledge facultad de ciencias as- tronómicas y geofísicas for the financial help offered. we thank raúl perdomo, guillermo e. sierra, pablo m. cincotta, sixto gimenez benitez, roberto venero, erica scorians and mabel peiró for useful information and pictures. many pictures and details of the instru- ments and building were obtained from the web page of the museum of astronomy and geophysics. . bibliography perdomo, r. a.: “el observatorio astronómico de la plata”. proceedings of the workshop on historia de la astronomía argentina. ed. by g. e. romero, s. a. cora and s. a. cellone. la plata , in press. publicaciones, tomo i. descripción general del obser- vatorio, su posición geográfica y observaciones de cometas y estrellas dobles. la plata: observatorio astronómico . jewish and hebrew books in marsh’s library: materiality and intercultural engagement in early modern ireland religions article jewish and hebrew books in marsh’s library: materiality and intercultural engagement in early modern ireland bradford a. anderson ,* and jason mcelligott school of theology, philosophy, and music, dublin city university, d n dublin, ireland marsh’s library, d fk dublin, ireland; jason.mcelligott@marshlibrary.ie * correspondence: brad.anderson@dcu.ie received: september ; accepted: november ; published: november ����������������� abstract: marsh’s library in dublin, ireland, is an immaculately preserved library from the early eighteenth century. founded by archbishop narcissus marsh, the library has an extensive collection of jewish and hebrew books which includes hebrew bibles, talmudic texts, rabbinic writings, and yiddish books that date back to the early modern period. this study explores a cross section of the jewish and hebrew books in marsh’s collection, with particular focus on issues of materiality—that is, how these books as material artefacts can inform our understanding of early modern history, religion, and intercultural engagement. we suggest that these books, a majority of which come from marsh’s personal collection, are a valuable resource for reflection on ( ) christian engagement with jewish culture in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, ( ) the production, use, and travel of jewish books in early modern europe, and ( ) snapshots of jewish life in early modern ireland and beyond. keywords: narcissus marsh; marsh’s library; judaism; jewish books; hebrew; christian hebraism; materiality; book history . introduction in a working-class area of dublin, ireland, beside st patrick’s cathedral, is an eighteenth-century building that is home to marsh’s library. the library was opened in and was the first public library in ireland (osborough ). it holds a collection of books from the early modern period that is remarkably well preserved, and which offers an important window into early modern ireland (mccarthy ; mccarthy and simmons ). a closer inspection of the library reveals further surprises—among these, an extensive collection of jewish books. while there has long been a jewish presence in ireland, it has always been relatively small (hyman ); a library tucked away in the south inner-city of dublin is not where one would expect to find a trove of jewish and hebrew resources. however, the founder of marsh’s library, archbishop narcissus marsh ( – ), was a clergyman and scholar with an abiding interest in the hebrew language and jewish tradition. before coming to dublin, marsh studied hebrew and near eastern languages at oxford, and during his time as provost of trinity college, dublin, he championed defining “jewish books” is of course complex, and the parameters of this category have been the subject of considerable debate. on some of the issues involved, see (schrijver , ). for our present purposes we employ a broad understanding, encompassing books written by and for jews, as well as jewish texts specifically aimed at early modern christian readers; more on the latter in section . . , below. (hyman , p. ) makes mention of a meeting of a number of hebrew scholars at marsh’s in , including one abraham judah—though the others said to have attended were christian. religions , , ; doi: . /rel www.mdpi.com/journal/religions http://www.mdpi.com/journal/religions http://www.mdpi.com https://orcid.org/ - - - https://orcid.org/ - - - http://www.mdpi.com/ - / / / ?type=check_update&version= http://dx.doi.org/ . /rel http://www.mdpi.com/journal/religions religions , , of the study of hebrew (mccarthy , p. ). this interest extended to his book collection, which was donated to the library after his death. the library contains more than volumes representing hebrew bibles, talmudic texts, rabbinic writings, and yiddish books that date back to the early modern period, a majority of which come from marsh’s personal collection. these books, we suggest, are a valuable resource for reflection on ( ) christian engagement with jewish culture in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, ( ) the production, use, and travel of jewish books in early modern europe, and ( ) snapshots of jewish life in early modern ireland and beyond. in dealing with these issues—encompassing religious, historical, social, and cultural dimensions—this study draws on a number of different fields and disciplines. historical work on the early modern era—including historical research in religious and jewish studies—plays a significant role in contextualising the collection at marsh’s library (cameron ; wiesner-hanks ; cohen et al. ). however, because of the focus on books and texts, book history plays a particularly important role in the present research (dane ; howsam ; pettegree and der weduwen ). indeed, drawing on the “material turn” seen in the humanities and religious studies (morgan ; hutchings and mckenzie ), we suggest that giving specific attention to issues of materiality can inform our understanding of this collection. as can be seen in the examples outlined below, the materiality of texts has much to tell us about these books and their place in the world. thus, particular attention is paid not only to the “semantic text” of the books in this collection, but to features that inform our understanding of the “social lives” of books—from production to travel, to the way in which readers have engaged with these texts through the years. before turning to the books in the collection, we begin with an account of archbishop marsh and the library bearing his name. . archbishop marsh and his library the english scholar and clergyman narcissus marsh ( – ) arrived in ireland to take up the post of provost of trinity college dublin in january . he spent four unhappy years in the role, which brought with it such a heavy administrative burden that he felt he had no time for scholarship and intellectual enquiry (gillespie , p. ). in he escaped to take up a bishopric in the diocese of ferns and leighlin. in he became archbishop of cashel, and three years later was appointed archbishop of dublin. in he became primate of ireland. narcissus marsh’s great passions were scholarship, books, natural philosophy, and languages. upon his first arrival in ireland he had been disappointed with the intellectual culture of the capital city, the limited nature of the items for sale in the small number of dublin bookshops, and the lack of recourse for the public to a suitable repository in which to read books and manuscripts. as provost, marsh tried but failed to change the regulations in trinity college dublin which meant that outsiders using the college library had to be accompanied at all times by a fellow of the college. it was then that he seems to have begun to envisage founding a library in dublin which would cater for a serious-minded reading public. libraries are fragile plants. they cannot take root or thrive in societies suffering the scorching winds of political conflict, sectarian warfare, and economic instability (casson , pp. – ; the library’s extensive catalogue can be searched here: https://www.marshlibrary.ie/catalogue/. for more on issues of texts, materiality, and the study of religion, see (anderson ). on paratexts, consult (genette ). stern’s ( ) study offers a stimulating example of how the study of materiality is crucial to the study of religious texts. this research builds on important research done by two scholars who have explored the jewish books in marsh’s library. professor shlomo berger, of the university of amsterdam, curated an exhibit for the library in – entitled, “from lublin to dublin (by way of amsterdam)”, shortly before his untimely death. for this research we have drawn on some of the valuable collation and observations that were made by professor berger ( ). in , dr javier del barco undertook three months of research on the jewish books in marsh’s library, in conjunction with the international “footprints” project (https://footprints.ctl.columbia.edu/), which is tracing the history of jewish books. dr del barco made a number of significant discoveries and observations in his research, several of which are noted in what follows. https://www.marshlibrary.ie/catalogue/ https://footprints.ctl.columbia.edu/ religions , , of ovenden , p. ). this explains why the first public library in ireland only emerged after the great conflicts of the early modern period had finally been settled in favour of one side after the battle of the boyne. the settlement of the s answered the long-contested question as to which group of men constituted the “public” and would control the state and all its appendages. as a senior member of the church “as by law established”, the land confiscations of the period also provided archbishop marsh with the opportunity to accumulate lands in co. meath which would be used to generate ongoing funds to support the library. there is a long-standing misapprehension that the library was founded in . this belief is based on undisputed facts. in that year marsh secured permission from st patrick’s cathedral to build a public library on a small piece of land owned by the cathedral, and he also succeeded in in securing from the crown an annual salary of £ for his chosen librarian. yet, work only began on the library building early in , and in mid-december of that year the french refugee Élie bouhéreau moved into the ground-floor apartment reserved for the librarian. in august , bouhéreau recorded spending “eight shillings on having my books carried to the library” (léoutre et al. , pp. , ). today, those books remain on the shelves in the library where bouhéreau himself placed them. archbishop marsh bought , books for his planned public library from the estate of the english clergyman and polemicist edward stillingfleet ( – ). the books arrived in ireland in , but on january marsh remarked in a letter to a friend that he had them “in my own house in dublin at the present where i intend to keep them, until they are perfectly catalogu’d (which i am now about) and until the ground & other things relating to the government & management of the library, be settled by act of parliament, for which i am now preparing a bill” (gillespie , p. ). stillingfleet’s books presumably did not enter the building until after the act of parliament which established the library “in perpetuity” was passed in late . after archbishop marsh’s death in , his personal collection of more than books was donated to the public library which bears his name, but his manuscripts, including many important hebrew and oriental texts, went to the bodleian, in oxford (wakefield , pp. – ). a bequest of books arising from the death, in , of john stearne, bishop of clogher, brought the last of the four collections which make up the historic core of marsh’s library. under the terms of the act which established the library, it was not permitted to take any books or manuscripts off the premises. all reading matter had to be consulted on site under the supervision of the librarian or another member of staff. the lack of any significant accessions after , combined with the prohibition of off-site borrowing has meant that the collections have been remarkably static over the past three centuries. all of the four historic collections encompass a broad range of scholarship across what we now term the humanities and sciences, but each has particular strengths and weaknesses which reflect the personal interests of the collector. narcissus marsh’s personal collection was particularly strong in near-eastern languages and the apparatus of biblical scholarship, as well as in natural philosophy, mathematics, and astronomy. in what follows, we examine the hebrew and yiddish books which remain today within the archbishop’s personal collection, inside his eponymous public library. almost books were stolen from the library during the decades before , when security was greatly improved (leonard and mcelligott , pp. – ). the majority of the volumes that were stolen were travel books or science books in english, as well as cheaper editions of texts of ancient classical authors used by students in schools and universities. it is noteworthy that only eleven hebrew books were taken from marsh’s personal collection during the eighteenth- and nineteenth centuries (manuscript shelflist of books stolen n.d., pp. – ). in other words, we know that the archbishop’s collection of jewish books exists now almost exactly as it was bequeathed to the library after his death, in (figure ). religions , , of religions , , x for peer review of figure . the second gallery of the library, including narcissus marsh’s books. credit: phyllis berger. . exploring the jewish books in marsh’s library the collection in marsh’s library offers important insights into intercultural engagement in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries—and in particular christian engagement with judaism, which was both enthusiastic and complex in this period. as noted above, the library contains more than volumes representing hebrew bibles, talmudic texts, rabbinic writings, and yiddish books that date back to the early modern period. over of these resources can be traced back to marsh’s personal collection. in what follows we outline a number of ways in which the collection sheds a light on early modernity, including ( ) christian engagement with jewish culture, ( ) the production, use, and circulation of jewish books, and ( ) snapshots of jewish life in early modern ireland and beyond. we focus here on the earlier dimensions of the collection, in particular those that came from marsh’s own personal collection of books. . . engagement with jewish culture: christian hebraism—and beyond when examining the books in marsh’s library, it becomes immediately evident that the archbishop, his colleagues, and his successors were particularly interested in judaism and jewish culture. marsh and his collection can be seen as part of the phenomenon of christian hebraism that pervaded protestant circles in the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. christian hebraism refers to the interest in—indeed, fascination with—jewish culture and texts among primarily protestant christians in the early modern era, including biblical and post-biblical traditions (parkes ; katz ; friedman ; coudert et al. ; glaser ; burnett ). this “philo-judaism” was facilitated by other developments that took shape around the time of the reformation, including the rise of print culture, the study of the original languages and a “return to the sources” of scripture, and a broader interest in retrieving the origins of judaism, christianity, and other ancient traditions. all images used with the kind permission of marsh’s library. for more on the development of the library’s collection, see (mccarthy ). beyond marsh’s personal collection, other elements of the library also demonstrate a strong interest in christian hebraism, including volumes which came from edward stillingfleet and isaac casaubon. on stillingfleet, see (champion ); on casaubon, see (grafton and weinberg ). figure . the second gallery of the library, including narcissus marsh’s books. credit: phyllis berger. . exploring the jewish books in marsh’s library the collection in marsh’s library offers important insights into intercultural engagement in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries—and in particular christian engagement with judaism, which was both enthusiastic and complex in this period. as noted above, the library contains more than volumes representing hebrew bibles, talmudic texts, rabbinic writings, and yiddish books that date back to the early modern period. over of these resources can be traced back to marsh’s personal collection. in what follows we outline a number of ways in which the collection sheds a light on early modernity, including ( ) christian engagement with jewish culture, ( ) the production, use, and circulation of jewish books, and ( ) snapshots of jewish life in early modern ireland and beyond. we focus here on the earlier dimensions of the collection, in particular those that came from marsh’s own personal collection of books. . . engagement with jewish culture: christian hebraism—and beyond when examining the books in marsh’s library, it becomes immediately evident that the archbishop, his colleagues, and his successors were particularly interested in judaism and jewish culture. marsh and his collection can be seen as part of the phenomenon of christian hebraism that pervaded protestant circles in the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. christian hebraism refers to the interest in—indeed, fascination with—jewish culture and texts among primarily protestant christians in the early modern era, including biblical and post-biblical traditions (parkes ; katz ; friedman ; coudert et al. ; glaser ; burnett ). this “philo-judaism” was facilitated by other developments that took shape around the time of the reformation, including the rise of print culture, the study of the original all images used with the kind permission of marsh’s library. for more on the development of the library’s collection, see (mccarthy ). beyond marsh’s personal collection, other elements of the library also demonstrate a strong interest in christian hebraism, including volumes which came from edward stillingfleet and isaac casaubon. on stillingfleet, see (champion ); on casaubon, see (grafton and weinberg ). religions , , of languages and a “return to the sources” of scripture, and a broader interest in retrieving the origins of judaism, christianity, and other ancient traditions. as horbury notes, “this scholarship ranged impartially over a vast sea of literature” (horbury , p. ), and marsh’s personal collection is no exception. the motivation for the interest in judaism in this period was multifaceted. there was among many—and in the spirit of the times—a genuine intellectual curiosity in jewish culture and hebrew texts. however, even “intellectual curiosity” is culturally and socially situated. horbury notes a number of contemporaneous christian texts in the library which “straddle the border between hebrew study and jewish-christian relations” (horbury , p. ). authors such as martini, wagenseil, and wuelfer “vary considerably in attitude and in ecclesiastical background, but they can suggest that christian hebraism was indeed a kind of collusion with western christian mission to the jews, and in this respect comparable with imperially related oriental study” (p. ). indeed, marsh’s personal books point not only to an interest in hebrew, but also to the engagement with texts in aramaic, syriac, and arabic. in this sense, marsh can be understood not just as a christian hebraist, but as falling more broadly into the realm of “orientalism”, and so complicit in the various social and cultural complexities that accompany this, including western colonialism (said ; horbury ). others have indicated that we need to go further, suggesting that christian hebraism is more than a colonial project—it can and should be understood as anti-jewish and, indeed, anti-semitic (coudert ). marsh’s own disposition on these matters is unclear; his surviving writings tell us little about his perspective on these issues. nevertheless, as an oxford-educated protestant clergyman, marsh was a prime candidate for membership in this unofficial club. his studies and later teaching in hebrew and other ancient near eastern languages indicate a strong personal interest in these materials, as well as an ability to engage with these texts in a meaningful way (see marsh’s letter to pococke, [horbury ]). horbury calculates that between his studies and various posts, marsh had “over twenty years of contact with oxford hebraists, above all edward pocock(e)” (horbury , p. ). numerous texts in marsh’s library point to narcissus marsh’s interest in matters related to judaism—and these interests would continue to be evident as the collection grew to include sources from other collections and under subsequent directors (see the essays in mccarthy and simmons ). the examples outlined below give a flavour of the materials in the library that point to an extensive interest in jewish texts and culture, and thus situate marsh and his collection within the milieu of christian hebraism. . . . bibles and translations the late medieval and early modern eras witnessed a staggering proliferation of bibles, in diverse forms and languages (d’avray ; poleg and light ); not surprisingly, similar cultural forces were at work in the production of jewish sacred texts (stern ). as one might expect, the collection at marsh’s holds a significant number of bibles in various forms, with over present across the four main collections in diverse languages. within this, there are roughly bibles published prior to which contain the biblical text (or parts thereof) in hebrew. over fifty of these hebrew biblical texts can be traced back to marsh’s own personal collection, with numerous others belonging to the stillingfleet collection. as noted above, scholars in the early modern period moved away from reading the bible primarily in latin and began to rediscover these texts in their original, ancient languages. an example of this in marsh’s personal collection is a work that includes the torah (genesis-deuteronomy) in hebrew marsh also collected ancient manuscripts from hebrew, arabic, and other near eastern traditions. his manuscripts are now housed in oxford; see (wakefield ; mccarthy ; gillespie ). upon his death marsh bequeathed all of his remaining books to the library, except those already in the collection. as stillingfleet’s collection was added before marsh’s passing, it is possible—indeed, likely—that marsh owned books which were already in the library and thus were not added to the collection (gillespie ; horbury ). religions , , of printed side by side with the targum, an aramaic translation of the hebrew text. this well-preserved book—which has a beautiful brown leather binding, with metal clasps—was printed in amsterdam in by manasseh ben israel, a portuguese rabbi who was the founder of the first jewish printing press in amsterdam. it was owned by marsh, and it is clear that he valued and used this volume: it has been annotated in several places, including inscriptions in latin on the first page of genesis that appear to be in marsh’s own hand, with cross-references to other biblical texts (figure ). along with the hebrew and aramaic, this volume also includes a section containing the haftarot, a selection of lectionary readings from the nevi’im (prophets) that accompany the torah readings in liturgical settings. religions , , x for peer review of preserved book—which has a beautiful brown leather binding, with metal clasps—was printed in amsterdam in by manasseh ben israel, a portuguese rabbi who was the founder of the first jewish printing press in amsterdam. it was owned by marsh, and it is clear that he valued and used this volume: it has been annotated in several places, including inscriptions in latin on the first page of genesis that appear to be in marsh’s own hand, with cross-references to other biblical texts (figure ). along with the hebrew and aramaic, this volume also includes a section containing the haftarot, a selection of lectionary readings from the nevi’im (prophets) that accompany the torah readings in liturgical settings. figure . torah in hebrew, with targum and latin annotations; marsh’s library b. . . . the library also holds several versions of the sefer tehilim, the book of psalms in hebrew. books containing only the psalms (psalters) were common in christianity in the medieval and early modern era (poleg ), and hebrew versions were also common in jewish contexts. one such volume in marsh’s library, published in isny, germany, in , includes the biblical text along with commentary from the medieval rabbi david kimḥi, also known as radak (b. ) (figure ). a key aspect of christian hebraism was an interest in post-biblical traditions, and this work is an example of a combination of biblical text and rabbinic commentary (more on post-biblical traditions, below). marsh inscribed his personal books with his greek motto, πανταχη την αληθειαν (“truth everywhere”), normally in the upper right hand corner of the flyleaf or title page. this motto can be seen in a number of the images below. figure . torah in hebrew, with targum and latin annotations; marsh’s library b. . . . the library also holds several versions of the sefer tehilim, the book of psalms in hebrew. books containing only the psalms (psalters) were common in christianity in the medieval and early modern era (poleg ), and hebrew versions were also common in jewish contexts. one such volume in marsh’s library, published in isny, germany, in , includes the biblical text along with commentary from the medieval rabbi david kimh. i, also known as radak (b. ) (figure ). a key aspect of christian hebraism was an interest in post-biblical traditions, and this work is an example of a combination of biblical text and rabbinic commentary (more on post-biblical traditions, below). marsh inscribed his personal books with his greek motto, πανταχη την αληθειαν (“truth everywhere”), normally in the upper right hand corner of the flyleaf or title page. this motto can be seen in a number of the images below. religions , , of religions , , x for peer review of figure . sefer tehilim with commentary from david kimḥi; marsh’s library b. . . . other hebrew texts in marsh’s library point to the significance of these bibles, while also raising further questions that remain, for the moment, unanswered. an example is a beautiful edition of the entire hebrew bible (or tanakh) which was printed in amsterdam in by menasseh ben israel, noted above. the volume includes the use of red ink for both design and rubrics, as can be seen in the depiction of genesis (figure ). an interesting feature of this volume is that there are several annotations in arabic (see figure ). at the end of several sections we find the phrase al-ḥamdu lil-lāh (praise be to god), though we do not know in whose hand it is written. figure . sefer tehilim with commentary from david kimh. i; marsh’s library b. . . . other hebrew texts in marsh’s library point to the significance of these bibles, while also raising further questions that remain, for the moment, unanswered. an example is a beautiful edition of the entire hebrew bible (or tanakh) which was printed in amsterdam in by menasseh ben israel, noted above. the volume includes the use of red ink for both design and rubrics, as can be seen in the depiction of genesis (figure ). an interesting feature of this volume is that there are several annotations in arabic (see figure ). at the end of several sections we find the phrase al-h. amdu lil-lāh (praise be to god), though we do not know in whose hand it is written. religions , , of religions , , x for peer review of figure . tanakh (hebrew bible); marsh’s library b. . . . there are, then, numerous biblical texts in the library, and specifically in marsh’s personal collection, which point to the broader interests of christian hebraists of the early modern period. these include editions of the torah in hebrew and aramaic, full copies of the hebrew bible (tanakh), as well several copies of sefer tehilim (psalters). the number of such texts in marsh’s library signifies the growing desire to engage with the ancient languages of biblical texts during this period. figure . tanakh (hebrew bible); marsh’s library b. . . . there are, then, numerous biblical texts in the library, and specifically in marsh’s personal collection, which point to the broader interests of christian hebraists of the early modern period. these include editions of the torah in hebrew and aramaic, full copies of the hebrew bible (tanakh), as well several copies of sefer tehilim (psalters). the number of such texts in marsh’s library signifies the growing desire to engage with the ancient languages of biblical texts during this period. religions , , of religions , , x for peer review of figure . detail of tanakh (hebrew bible), with arabic annotation; marsh’s library b. . . . . . . rabbinic texts and commentary along with being drawn to biblical texts in hebrew and other ancient languages, christian hebraism also exhibited a strong interest in post-biblical jewish traditions, notably traditional rabbinic texts and commentary. again, marsh’s personal collection demonstrates a similar concern for these texts and traditions. the talmud is one of the most significant collections in judaism, incorporating teaching, instruction, and theology from the ancient rabbis dating back to the first centuries of the common era (wimpfheimer ). marsh’s library holds over volumes that contain the talmud in hebrew, in part or in full, with examples of both the babylonian and jerusalem editions. one particular edition of the jerusalem talmud (also known as the yerushalmi or palestinian talmud) in the library was printed in krakow in , and was part of narcissus marsh’s own collection. an annotation states that he acquired it in , while bishop of leighlin and ferns, thus pointing to his continued acquisition of books while in ireland, even after his time as provost of trinity had come to an end (figure ). figure . detail of tanakh (hebrew bible), with arabic annotation; marsh’s library b. . . . . . . rabbinic texts and commentary along with being drawn to biblical texts in hebrew and other ancient languages, christian hebraism also exhibited a strong interest in post-biblical jewish traditions, notably traditional rabbinic texts and commentary. again, marsh’s personal collection demonstrates a similar concern for these texts and traditions. the talmud is one of the most significant collections in judaism, incorporating teaching, instruction, and theology from the ancient rabbis dating back to the first centuries of the common era (wimpfheimer ). marsh’s library holds over volumes that contain the talmud in hebrew, in part or in full, with examples of both the babylonian and jerusalem editions. one particular edition of the jerusalem talmud (also known as the yerushalmi or palestinian talmud) in the library was printed in krakow in , and was part of narcissus marsh’s own collection. an annotation states that he acquired it in , while bishop of leighlin and ferns, thus pointing to his continued acquisition of books while in ireland, even after his time as provost of trinity had come to an end (figure ). religions , , of religions , , x for peer review of figure . talmud yerushalmi; marsh’s library b. . . . along with the talmud, marsh’s library has a number of examples of midrashic texts. midrash is a type of biblical interpretation that emerged in ancient judaism, a method used by the rabbis that draws out and explores the various ways in which biblical texts can be understood (fishbane and weinberg ). marsh’s library has eight volumes that present collections of midrashim. with the advent of printing, the printed forms of the midrash on the torah became known as the midrash rabbah (“the great midrash”); some early printed versions of this collection were called the sefer rabbot, which is the title given to one of the volumes in marsh’s collection, printed in frankfurt in the early s. the woodcut title page has several interesting images, including moses holding the ten commandments, and is similar to ornate woodcuts found in christian bibles and made famous in luther’s bibel (figure ; on illustrations in luther’s bibel, see campbell ). these midrashim include commentary, folklore, and stories from the rabbis that offer a unique interpretation of the first five books of the bible (figure displays bereshit [genesis]). figure . talmud yerushalmi; marsh’s library b. . . . along with the talmud, marsh’s library has a number of examples of midrashic texts. midrash is a type of biblical interpretation that emerged in ancient judaism, a method used by the rabbis that draws out and explores the various ways in which biblical texts can be understood (fishbane and weinberg ). marsh’s library has eight volumes that present collections of midrashim. with the advent of printing, the printed forms of the midrash on the torah became known as the midrash rabbah (“the great midrash”); some early printed versions of this collection were called the sefer rabbot, which is the title given to one of the volumes in marsh’s collection, printed in frankfurt in the early s. the woodcut title page has several interesting images, including moses holding the ten commandments, and is similar to ornate woodcuts found in christian bibles and made famous in luther’s bibel (figure ; on illustrations in luther’s bibel, see campbell ). these midrashim include commentary, folklore, and stories from the rabbis that offer a unique interpretation of the first five books of the bible (figure displays bereshit [genesis]). religions , , of religions , , x for peer review of figure . sefer rabot (midrash rabbah); marsh’s library c. . . . the number of talmudic and midrashic texts in marsh’s library again points to the complex engagement with judaism by christian hebraists of this period. as sutcliffe notes, protestant attitudes to the study of hebraica in the early modern period were characterised by a profound ambivalence. this uncertainty was rooted in a long-standing structural tension within christianity between opposing impulses of intellectual curiosity and theological repudiation towards rabbinical literature. (sutcliffe , p. ) figure . sefer rabot (midrash rabbah); marsh’s library c. . . . the number of talmudic and midrashic texts in marsh’s library again points to the complex engagement with judaism by christian hebraists of this period. as sutcliffe notes, protestant attitudes to the study of hebraica in the early modern period were characterised by a profound ambivalence. this uncertainty was rooted in a long-standing structural tension within christianity between opposing impulses of intellectual curiosity and theological repudiation towards rabbinical literature. (sutcliffe , p. ) religions , , of religions , , x for peer review of figure . sefer rabot (midrash rabbah), bereshit (genesis); marsh’s library c. . . . this curiosity (even if laden with apologetic concerns) can also be seen in the christian interest in the commentary of the great interpreters of the rabbinic tradition in the medieval era—including rashi, ibn ezra, and radak, amongst others. this interpretive tradition is also well represented in marsh’s library. a fine example of this is a volume containing several books from the old testament’s minor prophets (or book of the twelve prophets), one of three such texts in the library. this particular volume contains hosea, joel, amos, and obadiah. along with the hebrew text of these prophetic works, it also includes the aramaic targum, as well as commentary on these books from rashi, ibn ezra, and radak (figure ). this volume was printed in geneva in by the well- known printer robertus stephanus (robert estienne) and modelled on the great rabbinic bible, which was first published several decades earlier (levy ; armstrong ). figure . sefer rabot (midrash rabbah), bereshit (genesis); marsh’s library c. . . . this curiosity (even if laden with apologetic concerns) can also be seen in the christian interest in the commentary of the great interpreters of the rabbinic tradition in the medieval era—including rashi, ibn ezra, and radak, amongst others. this interpretive tradition is also well represented in marsh’s library. a fine example of this is a volume containing several books from the old testament’s minor prophets (or book of the twelve prophets), one of three such texts in the library. this particular volume contains hosea, joel, amos, and obadiah. along with the hebrew text of these prophetic works, it also includes the aramaic targum, as well as commentary on these books from rashi, ibn ezra, and radak (figure ). this volume was printed in geneva in by the well-known printer robertus stephanus (robert estienne) and modelled on the great rabbinic bible, which was first published several decades earlier (levy ; armstrong ). religions , , of religions , , x for peer review of figure . hebrew minor prophets with targum and rabbinic commentary, book of joel; marsh’s library b. . . . the library also has a number of standalone commentaries on the bible from these commentators, often focusing on the torah. an important example is a volume authored by moses ben nachman—also known as nachmanides or ramban—one of the most important rabbinic figures in medieval judaism (b. ) (yaakov ). this volume (figure ), printed in lisbon in , contains ramban’s commentary on the torah (on the transmission of this commentary, see zwiep ). the decorative border on the title page, originally cut in metal, is attributed to alfonso fernández de córdoba (heller ). the volume also has hand-written homiletical texts at the front and back, written in a cursive hebrew script, indicating use in a jewish context prior to its incorporation into the collection at marsh’s (del barco a) (figure ). this volume was unaccounted for in the library until , when dr javier del barco (re)discovered it during his research at marsh’s library. see (del barco a). figure . hebrew minor prophets with targum and rabbinic commentary, book of joel; marsh’s library b. . . . the library also has a number of standalone commentaries on the bible from these commentators, often focusing on the torah. an important example is a volume authored by moses ben nachman—also known as nachmanides or ramban—one of the most important rabbinic figures in medieval judaism (b. ) (yaakov ). this volume (figure ), printed in lisbon in , contains ramban’s commentary on the torah (on the transmission of this commentary, see zwiep ). the decorative border on the title page, originally cut in metal, is attributed to alfonso fernández de córdoba (heller ). the volume also has hand-written homiletical texts at the front and back, written in a cursive hebrew script, indicating use in a jewish context prior to its incorporation into the collection at marsh’s (del barco a) (figure ). this volume was unaccounted for in the library until , when dr javier del barco (re)discovered it during his research at marsh’s library. see (del barco a). religions , , of religions , , x for peer review of figure . commentary on the torah, by moses ben nachman; marsh’s library c. . . . another of the library’s commentaries on the torah comes from isaac abravanal (or abarbanel, b. ), a medieval jewish philosopher and commentator on the bible from portugal, who was well known for his wide-ranging writings as well as his involvement in affairs of state (angel ). this volume, entitled perush hatorah, is a commentary on the first five books of the bible, using abravanel’s method of listing particular questions or difficulties in the text which he then addresses. this volume was printed in venice in , and may be from the first printing of this famous work (marsh’s library, c. . . ). figure . commentary on the torah, by moses ben nachman; marsh’s library c. . . . another of the library’s commentaries on the torah comes from isaac abravanal (or abarbanel, b. ), a medieval jewish philosopher and commentator on the bible from portugal, who was well known for his wide-ranging writings as well as his involvement in affairs of state (angel ). this volume, entitled perush hatorah, is a commentary on the first five books of the bible, using abravanel’s method of listing particular questions or difficulties in the text which he then addresses. this volume was printed in venice in , and may be from the first printing of this famous work (marsh’s library, c. . . ). religions , , of religions , , x for peer review of figure . handwritten notes in commentary on the torah, by moses ben nachman; marsh’s library c. . . . finally, the library holds a number of grammatical and lexical works, including a volume from the medieval rabbi david kimḥi, or radak (b. ), a prolific writer and commentator from france. this volume is a printed version of kimḥi’s lexicon or dictionary of hebrew terms from the bible, which became very influential in medieval and later judaism (sefer ha-shorashim, “book of the roots”). it was printed in venice in by daniel bomberg, the well-known christian printer who played an important role in printing hebrew books in this era (figure ). figure . handwritten notes in commentary on the torah, by moses ben nachman; marsh’s library c. . . . finally, the library holds a number of grammatical and lexical works, including a volume from the medieval rabbi david kimh. i, or radak (b. ), a prolific writer and commentator from france. this volume is a printed version of kimh. i’s lexicon or dictionary of hebrew terms from the bible, which became very influential in medieval and later judaism (sefer ha-shorashim, “book of the roots”). it was printed in venice in by daniel bomberg, the well-known christian printer who played an important role in printing hebrew books in this era (figure ). religions , , of religions , , x for peer review of figure . david kimḥi, sefer ha-shorashim; marsh’s library r. . . . . . . jewish texts aimed at christian readers along with these various scriptural and rabbinic texts, another aspect of the collection at marsh’s that points to christian hebraism are the jewish texts that are clearly aimed at christian readers. an important example, of which the library holds several important editions, are polyglot bibles. polyglot bibles enabled the incorporation of several ancient languages in one place to facilitate study and comparison—again pointing to the desire to return to the sources and explore the transmission of the biblical text (miller ). one example from marsh’s library is the walton polyglot (sometimes called the london polyglot), created and printed in london in under the leadership of brian walton, an anglican priest (see figure ). the library also holds an edition of the famous biblia polyglotta, or the complutensian polyglot; see (mccarthy and sherwood-smith , pp. – ). figure . david kimh. i, sefer ha-shorashim; marsh’s library r. . . . . . . jewish texts aimed at christian readers along with these various scriptural and rabbinic texts, another aspect of the collection at marsh’s that points to christian hebraism are the jewish texts that are clearly aimed at christian readers. an important example, of which the library holds several important editions, are polyglot bibles. polyglot bibles enabled the incorporation of several ancient languages in one place to facilitate study and comparison—again pointing to the desire to return to the sources and explore the transmission of the biblical text (miller ). one example from marsh’s library is the walton polyglot (sometimes called the london polyglot), created and printed in london in under the leadership of brian walton, an anglican priest (see figure ). the library also holds an edition of the famous biblia polyglotta, or the complutensian polyglot; see (mccarthy and sherwood-smith , pp. – ). religions , , of religions , , x for peer review of figure . image of brian walton, from walton polyglot; marsh’s library a. . (stillingfleet collection). assisted by many others—including james ussher and john lightfoot—walton’s monumental work runs to six volumes and presents the old testament in nine languages: hebrew, aramaic, samaritan, syriac, arabic, persian, ethiopic, greek, and latin (van staalduine-sulman ). not only were the polyglots of this era impressive works of scholarship, but they are beautifully presented and creatively formatted (figure ). this particular edition was extremely influential among the christian hebraists of narcissus marsh’s day—and though this copy comes from the stillingfleet collection, there is little doubt that marsh was familiar with it, and indeed influenced by the scholarship that went into it. several of marsh’s teachers and colleagues from oxford and ireland were involved in the project (horbury ). figure . image of brian walton, from walton polyglot; marsh’s library a. . (stillingfleet collection). assisted by many others—including james ussher and john lightfoot—walton’s monumental work runs to six volumes and presents the old testament in nine languages: hebrew, aramaic, samaritan, syriac, arabic, persian, ethiopic, greek, and latin (van staalduine-sulman ). not only were the polyglots of this era impressive works of scholarship, but they are beautifully presented and creatively formatted (figure ). this particular edition was extremely influential among the christian hebraists of narcissus marsh’s day—and though this copy comes from the stillingfleet collection, there is little doubt that marsh was familiar with it, and indeed influenced by the scholarship that went into it. several of marsh’s teachers and colleagues from oxford and ireland were involved in the project (horbury ). religions , , of religions , , x for peer review of figure . walton polyglot; marsh’s library a. . . at a very early stage the hebrew scriptures were translated into other languages, notably greek and aramaic. the translations into aramaic (targums; heb. targumim) became very important in judaism, particularly in rabbinic judaism (flesher and chilton ). the text pictured below (figure ), printed in strasbourg in , is a latin translation of one of the targums of the pentateuch (targum onqelos). the first page of text, showing the initial verses of genesis, has a detailed illustration of the creation scene in the garden of eden (although this particular scene is drawn from gen ). the work is ascribed to paul fagius, a german renaissance scholar of hebrew from the sixteenth century (van rooden ; burnett ). the translation of the text into latin clearly points to its intended use by a wider non-jewish readership—most likely christian scholars. figure . walton polyglot; marsh’s library a. . . at a very early stage the hebrew scriptures were translated into other languages, notably greek and aramaic. the translations into aramaic (targums; heb. targumim) became very important in judaism, particularly in rabbinic judaism (flesher and chilton ). the text pictured below (figure ), printed in strasbourg in , is a latin translation of one of the targums of the pentateuch (targum onqelos). the first page of text, showing the initial verses of genesis, has a detailed illustration of the creation scene in the garden of eden (although this particular scene is drawn from gen ). the work is ascribed to paul fagius, a german renaissance scholar of hebrew from the sixteenth century (van rooden ; burnett ). the translation of the text into latin clearly points to its intended use by a wider non-jewish readership—most likely christian scholars. religions , , of religions , , x for peer review of figure . targum translation in latin; marsh’s library r. . . (bouhéreau collection). similar issues can be seen in the library’s copy of saadia ben joseph gaon’s work entitled the book of beliefs and opinions. saadia, who was a key figure in early medieval judaism (gordis ), originally composed this important volume in judeo-arabic in (see figure ). this work is considered one of the first systematic accounts of jewish beliefs and became a significant text in later judaism. among other things, the work defends rabbinic judaism from various criticisms, particularly those of the karaite jews, who had rejected the oral torah (talmud and mishnah), focusing instead on the five books of the torah. this edition, which was printed in amsterdam in , follows the hebrew translation made by rabbi judah ben tibbon in the twelfth century. this is a further example of a volume which contains both hebrew and latin title pages, suggesting a wider readership was now intended for these printed works (figure ). the library also holds an earlier version from . figure . targum translation in latin; marsh’s library r. . . (bouhéreau collection). similar issues can be seen in the library’s copy of saadia ben joseph gaon’s work entitled the book of beliefs and opinions. saadia, who was a key figure in early medieval judaism (gordis ), originally composed this important volume in judeo-arabic in (see figure ). this work is considered one of the first systematic accounts of jewish beliefs and became a significant text in later judaism. among other things, the work defends rabbinic judaism from various criticisms, particularly those of the karaite jews, who had rejected the oral torah (talmud and mishnah), focusing instead on the five books of the torah. this edition, which was printed in amsterdam in , follows the hebrew translation made by rabbi judah ben tibbon in the twelfth century. this is a further example of a volume which contains both hebrew and latin title pages, suggesting a wider readership was now intended for these printed works (figure ). the library also holds an earlier version from . religions , , of religions , , x for peer review of figure . sefer emunot ve-de’ot (the book of beliefs and opinions); marsh’s library b. . . . figure . latin title, sefer emunot ve-de’ot (the book of beliefs and opinions); marsh’s library b. . . . figure . sefer emunot ve-de’ot (the book of beliefs and opinions); marsh’s library b. . . . religions , , x for peer review of figure . sefer emunot ve-de’ot (the book of beliefs and opinions); marsh’s library b. . . . figure . latin title, sefer emunot ve-de’ot (the book of beliefs and opinions); marsh’s library b. . . . figure . latin title, sefer emunot ve-de’ot (the book of beliefs and opinions); marsh’s library b. . . . religions , , of taken together, an examination of the jewish books in marsh’s library unsurprisingly demonstrates that narcissus marsh and some of his contemporaries were embedded in the culture of christian hebraism that had emerged in the early modern era. a return to the sources is evident in the collection of hebrew bibles, as well as in texts representing the scriptures in other ancient languages and translations. there is also evidence of engagement with rabbinic texts and traditions, including the talmud, midrashim, and the interpretive works by the great commentators of the rabbinic tradition. finally, the library has numerous example of jewish texts that were printed for christians in this era. while the presence of these texts is to be expected, as is set out below, the collection at marsh’s library bears witness to an interest in judaism that goes beyond these well-known texts and traditions. . . . jewish texts—beyond the usual suspects along with the major publications outlined above that one would expect to find in any serious collection of jewish books, marsh’s library also holds numerous examples of jewish literature that point to a deeper interest in the judaism of the early modern period, as well as marsh’s ability to procure a wide-ranging array of jewish books and materials. by way of example, the library has a number of texts that represent different traditions within judaism, including prayer books (seder tefilot). figure highlights a prayer book printed in amsterdam in , and was aimed at yiddish speaking ashkenazi jews. the prayers, drawn from the psalms and other ancient traditions, are printed in hebrew, but the instructions and title page are given in yiddish (berger ). religions , , x for peer review of taken together, an examination of the jewish books in marsh’s library unsurprisingly demonstrates that narcissus marsh and some of his contemporaries were embedded in the culture of christian hebraism that had emerged in the early modern era. a return to the sources is evident in the collection of hebrew bibles, as well as in texts representing the scriptures in other ancient languages and translations. there is also evidence of engagement with rabbinic texts and traditions, including the talmud, midrashim, and the interpretive works by the great commentators of the rabbinic tradition. finally, the library has numerous example of jewish texts that were printed for christians in this era. while the presence of these texts is to be expected, as is set out below, the collection at marsh’s library bears witness to an interest in judaism that goes beyond these well-known texts and traditions. . . . jewish texts—beyond the usual suspects along with the major publications outlined above that one would expect to find in any serious collection of jewish books, marsh’s library also holds numerous examples of jewish literature that point to a deeper interest in the judaism of the early modern period, as well as marsh’s ability to procure a wide-ranging array of jewish books and materials. by way of example, the library has a number of texts that represent different traditions within judaism, including prayer books (seder tefilot). figure highlights a prayer book printed in amsterdam in , and was aimed at yiddish speaking ashkenazi jews. the prayers, drawn from the psalms and other ancient traditions, are printed in hebrew, but the instructions and title page are given in yiddish (berger ). figure . seder tefilot, ashkenazi prayer book; marsh’s library c. . . . figure . seder tefilot, ashkenazi prayer book; marsh’s library c. . . . religions , , of another small prayer book in the collection (approx. inches or cm tall) follows the traditions of sephardic judaism. it was printed in by menasseh ben israel. the small size of this book indicates that it was intended for personal use (figure ). religions , , x for peer review of another small prayer book in the collection (approx. inches or cm tall) follows the traditions of sephardic judaism. it was printed in by menasseh ben israel. the small size of this book indicates that it was intended for personal use (figure ). figure . seder tefilot, sephardi prayer book; marsh’s library b. . . . other volumes in the collection point to an awareness of, and interest in, contemporary jewish communities and their texts. the library holds a number of books in yiddish, including a volume which presents the entire hebrew bible in yiddish. this book was printed in in amsterdam, and was the second edition of the translation by yosef ben alexander witzenhausen (stern ; berger , pp. – ) (figure ). the book has a latin inscription in marsh’s own hand noting the content of the book as a yiddish bible (figure ). figure . seder tefilot, sephardi prayer book; marsh’s library b. . . . other volumes in the collection point to an awareness of, and interest in, contemporary jewish communities and their texts. the library holds a number of books in yiddish, including a volume which presents the entire hebrew bible in yiddish. this book was printed in in amsterdam, and was the second edition of the translation by yosef ben alexander witzenhausen (stern ; berger , pp. – ) (figure ). the book has a latin inscription in marsh’s own hand noting the content of the book as a yiddish bible (figure ). another volume which points to an interest in yiddish is entitled sefer hamagid. this work (housed in three volumes) is a translation of the hebrew bible into yiddish by yaakov ben yitschak. it includes the hebrew biblical text, a yiddish translation, and a paraphrase of rashi’s commentary on all the hebrew scriptures apart from the torah (see figure ). this work was first printed in lublin in the s, and a later printing was made in prague—the library holds the prague edition. this particular volume has several annotations, including a note indicating one owner or reader, yaakov bar gedaliah, from lublin (figure ). several other books in the collection are connected to the family of one gedaliah, suggesting that marsh acquired a number of volumes from this family. religions , , of religions , , x for peer review of figure . yiddish bible; marsh’s library c. . . . figure . inscription on yiddish bible; marsh’s library c. . . . figure . yiddish bible; marsh’s library c. . . . religions , , x for peer review of figure . yiddish bible; marsh’s library c. . . . figure . inscription on yiddish bible; marsh’s library c. . . . figure . inscription on yiddish bible; marsh’s library c. . . . religions , , of religions , , x for peer review of another volume which points to an interest in yiddish is entitled sefer hamagid. this work (housed in three volumes) is a translation of the hebrew bible into yiddish by yaakov ben yitschak. it includes the hebrew biblical text, a yiddish translation, and a paraphrase of rashi’s commentary on all the hebrew scriptures apart from the torah (see figure ). this work was first printed in lublin in the s, and a later printing was made in prague—the library holds the prague edition. this particular volume has several annotations, including a note indicating one owner or reader, yaakov bar gedaliah, from lublin (figure ). several other books in the collection are connected to the family of one gedaliah, suggesting that marsh acquired a number of volumes from this family. figure . sefer hamagid, marsh’s library c. . . . figure . sefer hamagid, marsh’s library c. . . . religions , , of religions , , x for peer review of figure . inscription on sefer hamagid, marsh’s library c. . . . along with contemporary traditions in judaism, marsh’s collection shows an awareness of authors and works that were significant in judaism, even if less well known in early modern christian contexts. an example from the library is a work entitled giveat shaul, or saul’s gibeah. the author of this volume, shaul levi mortera, was a rabbi of the jewish community in amsterdam in the mid- seventeenth century. significantly, mortera was also a teacher of baruch spinoza (b. ), one of the leading thinkers of the early modern period. giveat shaul is a book of sermons from shaul levi mortera, and the title is a play on the biblical king saul, who was from a place called gibeah (altmann , p. ) (figure ). this volume was printed in amsterdam in . figure . giveat shaul, saul’s gibeah; marsh’s library b. . . . figure . inscription on sefer hamagid, marsh’s library c. . . . along with contemporary traditions in judaism, marsh’s collection shows an awareness of authors and works that were significant in judaism, even if less well known in early modern christian contexts. an example from the library is a work entitled giveat shaul, or saul’s gibeah. the author of this volume, shaul levi mortera, was a rabbi of the jewish community in amsterdam in the mid-seventeenth century. significantly, mortera was also a teacher of baruch spinoza (b. ), one of the leading thinkers of the early modern period. giveat shaul is a book of sermons from shaul levi mortera, and the title is a play on the biblical king saul, who was from a place called gibeah (altmann , p. ) (figure ). this volume was printed in amsterdam in . religions , , x for peer review of figure . inscription on sefer hamagid, marsh’s library c. . . . along with contemporary traditions in judaism, marsh’s collection shows an awareness of authors and works that were significant in judaism, even if less well known in early modern christian contexts. an example from the library is a work entitled giveat shaul, or saul’s gibeah. the author of this volume, shaul levi mortera, was a rabbi of the jewish community in amsterdam in the mid- seventeenth century. significantly, mortera was also a teacher of baruch spinoza (b. ), one of the leading thinkers of the early modern period. giveat shaul is a book of sermons from shaul levi mortera, and the title is a play on the biblical king saul, who was from a place called gibeah (altmann , p. ) (figure ). this volume was printed in amsterdam in . figure . giveat shaul, saul’s gibeah; marsh’s library b. . . . figure . giveat shaul, saul’s gibeah; marsh’s library b. . . . religions , , of likewise, the library holds a copy of sefer lekah tov, a popular volume written by abraham jagel in that resembles a catechetical work. lekah tov is framed as a conversation between a rabbi and a follower about how to live a meaningful religious life, and seems to have been influenced by christian writings of the day (meyer , pp. – ). the edition in marsh’s personal collection was printed in amsterdam in and includes some decorative elements, as can be seen in figure . religions , , x for peer review of likewise, the library holds a copy of sefer lekah tov, a popular volume written by abraham jagel in that resembles a catechetical work. lekah tov is framed as a conversation between a rabbi and a follower about how to live a meaningful religious life, and seems to have been influenced by christian writings of the day (meyer , pp. – ). the edition in marsh’s personal collection was printed in amsterdam in and includes some decorative elements, as can be seen in figure . figure . sefer lekah tov; marsh’s library b. . . . taken together, the materials in the collection suggest that marsh and his colleagues in oxford and later in ireland were firmly situated in the tradition of christian hebraism that was prevalent in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. moreover, the collection in the library points to an interest in the texts and traditions of judaism that go beyond the “canonical” texts of rabbinic judaism. indeed, the texts in question point to an awareness of diverse traditions within judaism, various linguistic traditions, as well as the engagement with key thinkers who were less well-known in christian circles, but who nonetheless played a significant role in shaping early modern jewish thought. figure . sefer lekah tov; marsh’s library b. . . . taken together, the materials in the collection suggest that marsh and his colleagues in oxford and later in ireland were firmly situated in the tradition of christian hebraism that was prevalent in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. moreover, the collection in the library points to an interest in the texts and traditions of judaism that go beyond the “canonical” texts of rabbinic judaism. indeed, the texts in question point to an awareness of diverse traditions within judaism, various linguistic traditions, as well as the engagement with key thinkers who were less well-known in christian circles, but who nonetheless played a significant role in shaping early modern jewish thought. religions , , of . . the production, use, and travel of jewish books in early modern europe by the time narcissus marsh began to buy and collect books, printing with moveable type had been flourishing for almost two centuries across europe (pettegree and der weduwen ). the growth in publishing had ancillary benefits, such as the rise in interest in bibliographic work, including the cataloguing of works that pre-dated the advent of the press. the library holds an early and important example of such endeavours in the area of hebrew texts: sefer sifte yeshanim, first published in by shabbethai ben joseph bass (b. ), lists over hebrew works arranged alphabetically by title, along with other details including author and date, and includes a brief summary of each work. this catalogue was a monumental achievement and was the first detailed hebrew bibliography to be published (figure ). this volume also points to interesting religious and cultural developments in this period, as berger notes: it is imperative to recall the co-operation between sephardim and ashkenazim in the book industry. sephardim produced yiddish books and ashkenazim printed texts for the sephardi community. consequently, an ashkenazi from prague arrived in amsterdam, worked in rich private sephardi libraries and published in the first ever hebrew bibliography, siftei yeshanim ( , p. ). religions , , x for peer review of . . the production, use, and travel of jewish books in early modern europe by the time narcissus marsh began to buy and collect books, printing with moveable type had been flourishing for almost two centuries across europe (pettegree and der weduwen ). the growth in publishing had ancillary benefits, such as the rise in interest in bibliographic work, including the cataloguing of works that pre-dated the advent of the press. the library holds an early and important example of such endeavours in the area of hebrew texts: sefer sifte yeshanim, first published in by shabbethai ben joseph bass (b. ), lists over hebrew works arranged alphabetically by title, along with other details including author and date, and includes a brief summary of each work. this catalogue was a monumental achievement and was the first detailed hebrew bibliography to be published (figure ). this volume also points to interesting religious and cultural developments in this period, as berger notes: it is imperative to recall the co-operation between sephardim and ashkenazim in the book industry. sephardim produced yiddish books and ashkenazim printed texts for the sephardi community. consequently, an ashkenazi from prague arrived in amsterdam, worked in rich private sephardi libraries and published in the first ever hebrew bibliography, siftei yeshanim ( , p. ). figure . sefer sifte yeshanim (bibliographic work); marsh’s library b. . . . by the mid-seventeenth century, both jewish and a number of christian printers were committed to making jewish and hebrew works available to a wider readership (katz , p. ; ruderman ; idel ). the title pages of the jewish books in marsh’s personal collection point to the wide-ranging nature of printing in this era, with publishers based in amsterdam, constantinople, prague, venice, krakow, mantua, and frankfurt, amongst others (see figure ). figure . sefer sifte yeshanim (bibliographic work); marsh’s library b. . . . by the mid-seventeenth century, both jewish and a number of christian printers were committed to making jewish and hebrew works available to a wider readership (katz , p. ; ruderman ; idel ). the title pages of the jewish books in marsh’s personal collection point to the wide-ranging nature of printing in this era, with publishers based in amsterdam, constantinople, prague, venice, krakow, mantua, and frankfurt, amongst others (see figure ). religions , , of religions , , x for peer review of figure . place of publication—amsterdam, constantinople, and prague; examples from marsh’s library. the majority of marsh’s jewish books were published in amsterdam, which was the centre of jewish printing in this era (pettegree and der weduwen ). marsh had buyers who acquired books for him, including one aaron moses, who helped move books between amsterdam and london or dublin (mccarthy , pp. – ; horbury , p. ). however, inscriptions found in various books also make clear that some volumes travelled via other places, such as lublin (see figure ). marsh’s collection points to the production and circulation of jewish books and situates his library within the book culture of early modern europe. the books in marsh’s library also highlight the way in which texts were created and produced in this era, giving insight into issues ranging from the way in which works were combined in printed volumes to the materials used in production and the artistry on display in the illumination of printed works. the footprints project traces the movement of jewish books after the rise of print and includes data on a number of works in marsh’s library: https://footprints.ctl.columbia.edu/. figure . place of publication—amsterdam, constantinople, and prague; examples from marsh’s library. the majority of marsh’s jewish books were published in amsterdam, which was the centre of jewish printing in this era (pettegree and der weduwen ). marsh had buyers who acquired books for him, including one aaron moses, who helped move books between amsterdam and london or dublin (mccarthy , pp. – ; horbury , p. ). however, inscriptions found in various books also make clear that some volumes travelled via other places, such as lublin (see figure ). marsh’s collection points to the production and circulation of jewish books and situates his library within the book culture of early modern europe. the books in marsh’s library also highlight the way in which texts were created and produced in this era, giving insight into issues ranging from the way in which works were combined in printed volumes to the materials used in production and the artistry on display in the illumination of printed works. the footprints project traces the movement of jewish books after the rise of print and includes data on a number of works in marsh’s library: https://footprints.ctl.columbia.edu/. https://footprints.ctl.columbia.edu/ religions , , of the library holds a number of volumes that combine disparate yet important works in one bound volume (on the phenomenon of composite volumes, or sammelbände, see dane , pp. – ). some of these display evidence of separate publications subsequently rebound (for example, with separate title pages and publication details), while the bibliographical origins of others are less clear. one interesting example combines the rabbinic text pirk. e de-rabi eli “ezer, a late midrashic text that offers exegetical comments and retellings of stories of the torah, with a copy of the haggadah, the traditional text that commemorates israel’s exodus from egypt, and which is read at the passover seder. this copy includes images that illustrate topics discussed in the text; see figure . it seems that the haggadah, published in amsterdam in , was appended to the copy of pirk. e de-rabi eli “ezer, printed in prague in . both were significant and popular texts, though used for different purposes—here they are brought together in one bound volume. religions , , x for peer review of the library holds a number of volumes that combine disparate yet important works in one bound volume (on the phenomenon of composite volumes, or sammelbände, see dane , pp. – ). some of these display evidence of separate publications subsequently rebound (for example, with separate title pages and publication details), while the bibliographical origins of others are less clear. one interesting example combines the rabbinic text pirḳe de-rabi eliʿezer, a late midrashic text that offers exegetical comments and retellings of stories of the torah, with a copy of the haggadah, the traditional text that commemorates israel’s exodus from egypt, and which is read at the passover seder. this copy includes images that illustrate topics discussed in the text; see figure . it seems that the haggadah, published in amsterdam in , was appended to the copy of pirḳe de-rabi eliʿezer, printed in prague in . both were significant and popular texts, though used for different purposes—here they are brought together in one bound volume. figure . illustrations from haggadah; marsh’s library b. . . . a similarly interesting combination brings together a small prayer book and the rabbinic text pirkei avot (chapters of the fathers). the prayer book, printed in amsterdam in , shows evidence of extensive use (figure ). pirkei avot, meanwhile, is a famous text that compiles ethical reflections from the rabbis of antiquity and has often been studied alongside other rabbinic texts. thus, this volume brings together prayers with ethical reflections, an unusual combination. along with the combining of printed works, the collection at marsh’s library gives us some insight into materials used in the production of books, and in particular the reuse of older material. one such example is a copy of isaac ben jacob alfasi’s (b. ) commentary on seder nezikin, a section of the mishnah. this edition was printed in basel in . however, what makes this particular book interesting is that printed waste has been used in the binding of the book (dane , p. ). specifically, the printers used sections from the book of ecclesiastes (qoheleth) printed in yiddish, as can be seen in figure . it is somewhat surprising to find a biblical text re-used for printing purposes, even if in translation. figure . illustrations from haggadah; marsh’s library b. . . . a similarly interesting combination brings together a small prayer book and the rabbinic text pirkei avot (chapters of the fathers). the prayer book, printed in amsterdam in , shows evidence of extensive use (figure ). pirkei avot, meanwhile, is a famous text that compiles ethical reflections from the rabbis of antiquity and has often been studied alongside other rabbinic texts. thus, this volume brings together prayers with ethical reflections, an unusual combination. along with the combining of printed works, the collection at marsh’s library gives us some insight into materials used in the production of books, and in particular the reuse of older material. one such example is a copy of isaac ben jacob alfasi’s (b. ) commentary on seder nezikin, a section of the mishnah. this edition was printed in basel in . however, what makes this particular book interesting is that printed waste has been used in the binding of the book (dane , p. ). specifically, the printers used sections from the book of ecclesiastes (qoheleth) printed in yiddish, as religions , , of can be seen in figure . it is somewhat surprising to find a biblical text re-used for printing purposes, even if in translation. religions , , x for peer review of figure . small prayer book with pirkei avot; marsh’s library b. . . . figure . reused yiddish bible (commentary on seder nezikin); marsh’s library b. . . . figure . small prayer book with pirkei avot; marsh’s library b. . . . religions , , x for peer review of figure . small prayer book with pirkei avot; marsh’s library b. . . . figure . reused yiddish bible (commentary on seder nezikin); marsh’s library b. . . . figure . reused yiddish bible (commentary on seder nezikin); marsh’s library b. . . . finally, marsh’s personal collection points to the creativity and artistry that was common in the production of books in the early modern era, whether in the use of illustrations or the inclusion of paratextual features. a number of examples have already been noted, including the intricate border religions , , of on the cover page of nachmanides’ commentary to the torah (figure ) and the illustrations in the passover haggadah (figure ). the collection also contains works with more elaborate artistic renderings, as seen above on the title page of sefer rabbot (figure ). another such volume, printed in amsterdam in , contains a reprinting of a famous medieval work known as menorat ha-ma’or (candelabra of light) by the dutch, sephardic rabbinic writer isaac aboab (efros ). inside the cover is a detailed woodcut which illustrates a large menorah, underneath which is listed in hebrew the place of publication, amsterdam (figure ). religions , , x for peer review of finally, marsh’s personal collection points to the creativity and artistry that was common in the production of books in the early modern era, whether in the use of illustrations or the inclusion of paratextual features. a number of examples have already been noted, including the intricate border on the cover page of nachmanides’ commentary to the torah (figure ) and the illustrations in the passover haggadah (figure ). the collection also contains works with more elaborate artistic renderings, as seen above on the title page of sefer rabbot (figure ). another such volume, printed in amsterdam in , contains a reprinting of a famous medieval work known as menorat ha-ma’or (candelabra of light) by the dutch, sephardic rabbinic writer isaac aboab (efros ). inside the cover is a detailed woodcut which illustrates a large menorah, underneath which is listed in hebrew the place of publication, amsterdam (figure ). figure . menorat ha-ma’or (candelabra of light); marsh’s library c. . . . figure . menorat ha-ma’or (candelabra of light); marsh’s library c. . . . paratextual elements also feature in a number of texts. this can be seen in the sefer masoret ha-masoret, authored by elijah levita (b. ), a jewish philologist and grammarian who was born in germany but spent much of his life in italy (aranoff ). in this volume levita offers an explanation of the biblical masorah, those signs and comments that were added to the hebrew texts of the bible over religions , , of time. one of levita’s remarkable observations was that the vocalization and accents in the masoretic tradition did not go back to moses and the revelation at mount sinai, as was assumed in the rabbinic tradition. this edition was printed in basel in and has a number of unique features, including the use of manicules—symbols in the shape of a pointing hand that highlight a particular portion of a text, serving as reading aids (sherman ). the use of manicules was common in manuscript culture, and we see here the reproduction of these paratextual features in print culture (figure ). religions , , x for peer review of paratextual elements also feature in a number of texts. this can be seen in the sefer masoret ha- masoret, authored by elijah levita (b. ), a jewish philologist and grammarian who was born in germany but spent much of his life in italy (aranoff ). in this volume levita offers an explanation of the biblical masorah, those signs and comments that were added to the hebrew texts of the bible over time. one of levita’s remarkable observations was that the vocalization and accents in the masoretic tradition did not go back to moses and the revelation at mount sinai, as was assumed in the rabbinic tradition. this edition was printed in basel in and has a number of unique features, including the use of manicules—symbols in the shape of a pointing hand that highlight a particular portion of a text, serving as reading aids (sherman ). the use of manicules was common in manuscript culture, and we see here the reproduction of these paratextual features in print culture (figure ). figure . sefer masoret ha-masoret, with manicule; marsh’s library c. . . . figure . sefer masoret ha-masoret, with manicule; marsh’s library c. . . . taken together, a close inspection of the jewish books in marsh’s library, and in particular the material dimensions of these texts, points to a number of interesting observations about the production, religions , , of use, and travel of these books in early modern ireland. the diverse places of publication point to the vibrant print culture of jewish books in this era, as well as the network that would have allowed marsh to acquire such a varied collection, both before coming to ireland and after his arrival. a number of volumes also point to the way in which books were combined and bound together, as well as giving us insight into the types of materials that went into printed volumes (including printed waste). finally, the library testifies to the creativity and artistry that went into the production of jewish books in this era—from intricate illustrations to paratextual features meant to function as reading aids. . . snapshots of jewish life in early modern ireland and beyond along with the issues noted above, the jewish books in marsh’s library point to broader social, cultural, and political aspects of jewish life in the early modern era—in ireland but also further afield (for more on jewish culture in this era, see cohen et al. ). one of the most striking examples of this in the collection is the work sefer olat tamid. this volume (amsterdam, ) is significant not because of its content, but because of the handwritten inscriptions in the front and back, which add to our picture of jewish life in early modern dublin. the handwritten note in the front mentions the name of the owner, yaakov (jacob) son of gedaliah (figure ). religions , , x for peer review of taken together, a close inspection of the jewish books in marsh’s library, and in particular the material dimensions of these texts, points to a number of interesting observations about the production, use, and travel of these books in early modern ireland. the diverse places of publication point to the vibrant print culture of jewish books in this era, as well as the network that would have allowed marsh to acquire such a varied collection, both before coming to ireland and after his arrival. a number of volumes also point to the way in which books were combined and bound together, as well as giving us insight into the types of materials that went into printed volumes (including printed waste). finally, the library testifies to the creativity and artistry that went into the production of jewish books in this era—from intricate illustrations to paratextual features meant to function as reading aids. . . snapshots of jewish life in early modern ireland and beyond along with the issues noted above, the jewish books in marsh’s library point to broader social, cultural, and political aspects of jewish life in the early modern era—in ireland but also further afield (for more on jewish culture in this era, see cohen et al. ). one of the most striking examples of this in the collection is the work sefer olat tamid. this volume (amsterdam, ) is significant not because of its content, but because of the handwritten inscriptions in the front and back, which add to our picture of jewish life in early modern dublin. the handwritten note in the front mentions the name of the owner, yaakov (jacob) son of gedaliah (figure ). figure . sefer olat tamid, with name of owner; marsh’s library c. . . . the end of the book has a longer inscription which mentions dublin (figure ). the text reads: “i weep and my eyes overflow with tears on my father, gedaliah son of jacob/of the holy community of lublin who died./i weep and my eyes overflow with tears on my brother hirsh son of gedaliah/who died on the second day of passover in the year (= ) and was buried in dublin in the land ireland” (trans. marsh’s library catalogue for c. . . ). as shlomo berger noted in his exhibition “from lublin to dublin”, figure . sefer olat tamid, with name of owner; marsh’s library c. . . . the end of the book has a longer inscription which mentions dublin (figure ). the text reads: “i weep and my eyes overflow with tears on my father, gedaliah son of jacob/of the holy community of lublin who died./i weep and my eyes overflow with tears on my brother hirsh son of gedaliah/who died on the second day of passover in the year (= ) and was buried in dublin in the land ireland” (trans. marsh’s library catalogue for c. . . ). as shlomo berger noted in his exhibition “from lublin to dublin”, religions , , of the mixed hebrew and yiddish inscription, which is based on lamentations : , mentions that hirsh died on the second day of passover (= ) and was buried in dublin, ireland. it can be surmised that, for whatever reason, both brothers were in dublin and after (hirsh’s death) the book was sold to archbishop marsh, or came into his possession in another way. this is probably the oldest copy of a book with a glimpse into a jewish dublin couleur-locale (berger , p. ). as other volumes in the collection mention a gedaliah (see figure above), it is plausible that marsh acquired a number of books from a jewish family that came from lublin to dublin. religions , , x for peer review of the mixed hebrew and yiddish inscription, which is based on lamentations : , mentions that hirsh died on the second day of passover (= ) and was buried in dublin, ireland. it can be surmised that, for whatever reason, both brothers were in dublin and after (hirsh’s death) the book was sold to archbishop marsh, or came into his possession in another way. this is probably the oldest copy of a book with a glimpse into a jewish dublin couleur-locale (berger , p. ). as other volumes in the collection mention a gedaliah (see figure above), it is plausible that marsh acquired a number of books from a jewish family that came from lublin to dublin. figure . sefer olat tamid, with reference to dublin, ireland; marsh’s library c. . . . photo courtesy of dr javier del barco. while the long history of jewish persecution was well-known prior to the early modern period, the rise of print culture allowed for a more systematic account of the mistreatment of jews. an example of this is found in a volume in the library known as shevet yehudah, or sceptre of the jews (figure ). this volume was written by solomon ibn verga (b. ), a jewish historian and physician from spain. verga witnessed first-hand the persecution of jews in spain and portugal, and so wrote shevet yehudah as a history of the persecution of jews in various places throughout history, offering different examples. first published in constantinople, this edition was printed in amsterdam in . figure . sefer olat tamid, with reference to dublin, ireland; marsh’s library c. . . . photo courtesy of dr javier del barco. while the long history of jewish persecution was well-known prior to the early modern period, the rise of print culture allowed for a more systematic account of the mistreatment of jews. an example of this is found in a volume in the library known as shevet yehudah, or sceptre of the jews (figure ). this volume was written by solomon ibn verga (b. ), a jewish historian and physician from spain. verga witnessed first-hand the persecution of jews in spain and portugal, and so wrote shevet yehudah as a history of the persecution of jews in various places throughout history, offering different examples. first published in constantinople, this edition was printed in amsterdam in . religions , , of religions , , x for peer review of figure . shevet yehudah (sceptre of the jews); marsh’s library b. . . . paratextual features in a number of marsh’s volumes point to challenges which jewish people continued to face in the early modern period—in particular, a number of books originated in parts of europe where censorship of jewish texts was in effect. two examples from marsh’s collection are worth noting. in the fourteenth century, the jewish writer levi ben gershom (b. ) penned a volume known as milhamoth ha-shem, or the war of the lord, a work that combines theological, philosophical, and astronomical reflections. this edition was printed in riva di trento, italy, in —the first and only printed edition of gershom’s work until . this copy of the book contains evidence of both hebrew annotation and catholic censorship, citing the names of well-known counter-reformation censors from this period in italy, including domenico irosolimitano (figure ). on censorship of jewish texts in this period, see (hacker ; francesconi ; raz-krakotzkin ; raz- krakotzkin ). figure . shevet yehudah (sceptre of the jews); marsh’s library b. . . . paratextual features in a number of marsh’s volumes point to challenges which jewish people continued to face in the early modern period—in particular, a number of books originated in parts of europe where censorship of jewish texts was in effect. two examples from marsh’s collection are worth noting. in the fourteenth century, the jewish writer levi ben gershom (b. ) penned a volume known as milhamoth ha-shem, or the war of the lord, a work that combines theological, philosophical, and astronomical reflections. this edition was printed in riva di trento, italy, in —the first and only printed edition of gershom’s work until . this copy of the book contains evidence of both hebrew annotation and catholic censorship, citing the names of well-known counter-reformation censors from this period in italy, including domenico irosolimitano (figure ). on censorship of jewish texts in this period, see (hacker ; francesconi ; raz-krakotzkin ; raz-krakotzkin ). religions , , of religions , , x for peer review of figure . detail of milhamoth ha-shem, war of the lord, marsh’s library b. . . . photo courtesy of dr javier del barco. commenting on this volume, del barco notes: at the end of the work we find the signatures of three different censors. in the last page, we read “dominico irosolomi.no”, “aless.ro scipione ” and, in the previous page, “visto per me gio domenico carretto ”. from this single book copy, one can learn much about not only the reading habits of jews, but the censorship regime of the counter-reformation catholic church in italy in the late sixteenth century. the well-known domenico irosolimitano worked with alessandro scipione and laurentius franguellus, all of them apostates, in the mantuan censorship commission from to … jews took their books to be censored in great numbers, probably in fear of the penalty for having uncensored books in their possession. after looking at the books and censoring them accordingly, censors would sign at the end of the book and add the date to their signatures… thus irosolimitano’s and scipione’s signatures together and the latter’s addition of the date— —leaves no doubt that this copy of mil�amot ha-shem was under the scrutiny of the mantuan commission in . yet, bearing a censor’s signature did not free the book’s owner from the obligation of bringing the book to subsequent censorship commissions. this is the case with this copy, as attested by the signature of giovanni domenico carretto dated to , who worked censoring hebrew books also in mantua from to . this footprint then situates this copy in mantua still in , where it had probably been since or earlier. … printed in riva di trento by jacob marcaria in under the sponsorship of the bishop of trento, this copy tells us about actual collaboration and exchange between jews and catholics in a cultural and intellectual endeavour such as printing books in hebrew in northern italy. this was possible only before the council of trent was finished in , as the consequences of counter- reformation largely affected relationships between jews and catholics. this can be observed very well in this book, as it was censored twice in mantua, in and in , following the establishment of censorship commissions. (del barco b) another example is a work entitled sefer Ḥovat ha-levavot (duties of the heart), which again comes from marsh’s personal collection (marsh’s library c. . . ; the library also holds the edition). penned in the figure . detail of milhamoth ha-shem, war of the lord, marsh’s library b. . . . photo courtesy of dr javier del barco. commenting on this volume, del barco notes: at the end of the work we find the signatures of three different censors. in the last page, we read “dominico irosolomi.no”, “aless.ro scipione ” and, in the previous page, “visto per me gio domenico carretto ”. from this single book copy, one can learn much about not only the reading habits of jews, but the censorship regime of the counter-reformation catholic church in italy in the late sixteenth century. the well-known domenico irosolimitano worked with alessandro scipione and laurentius franguellus, all of them apostates, in the mantuan censorship commission from to . . . jews took their books to be censored in great numbers, probably in fear of the penalty for having uncensored books in their possession. after looking at the books and censoring them accordingly, censors would sign at the end of the book and add the date to their signatures . . . thus irosolimitano’s and scipione’s signatures together and the latter’s addition of the date— —leaves no doubt that this copy of milh. amot ha-shem was under the scrutiny of the mantuan commission in . yet, bearing a censor’s signature did not free the book’s owner from the obligation of bringing the book to subsequent censorship commissions. this is the case with this copy, as attested by the signature of giovanni domenico carretto dated to , who worked censoring hebrew books also in mantua from to . this footprint then situates this copy in mantua still in , where it had probably been since or earlier. . . . printed in riva di trento by jacob marcaria in under the sponsorship of the bishop of trento, this copy tells us about actual collaboration and exchange between jews and catholics in a cultural and intellectual endeavour such as printing books in hebrew in northern italy. this was possible only before the council of trent was finished in , as the consequences of counter-reformation largely affected relationships between jews and catholics. this can be observed very well in this book, as it was censored twice in mantua, in and in , following the establishment of censorship commissions. (del barco b) another example is a work entitled sefer h. ovat ha-levavot (duties of the heart), which again comes from marsh’s personal collection (marsh’s library c. . . ; the library also holds the edition). penned in the eleventh century by the jewish religions , , of beyond jewish and hebrew texts, there are other aspects of the collection in marsh’s library which show that archbishop marsh and others who contributed to the library were aware of issues relating to judaism and jewish people in the seventeenth century. one such example is a broadside published in london in by the quaker william tomlinson, entitled “a bosome opened to the jewes holding forth to others some reasons for our receiving them into our nation” (figure ). tomlinson argues that jews should be re-admitted to england, and this assertion was made on both theological and patriotic grounds. jews had been expelled from england at the beginning of the thirteenth century, an edict that was only overturned in (singer ; menache ). this broadside was published during marsh’s time as a student in oxford, and it may have accompanied him on his travels to ireland. religions , , x for peer review of beyond jewish and hebrew texts, there are other aspects of the collection in marsh’s library which show that archbishop marsh and others who contributed to the library were aware of issues relating to judaism and jewish people in the seventeenth century. one such example is a broadside published in london in by the quaker william tomlinson, entitled “a bosome opened to the jewes holding forth to others some reasons for our receiving them into our nation” (figure ). tomlinson argues that jews should be re-admitted to england, and this assertion was made on both theological and patriotic grounds. jews had been expelled from england at the beginning of the thirteenth century, an edict that was only overturned in (singer ; menache ). this broadside was published during marsh’s time as a student in oxford, and it may have accompanied him on his travels to ireland. figure . a bosome opened to the jewes; marsh’s library z. . . . . the collection at marsh’s library thus points to social, cultural, and political issues relating to jews in the early modern period, particularly with annotations and other paratextual features. we are given a glimpse into jewish life in seventeenth century dublin; books bearing witness to censorship taking place in europe in this era; and political texts pointing to an awareness of persecution which jews faced in england and elsewhere during this period. thus, beyond a collection of books, these artefacts open a window onto the reality of lived experience for jews in early modernity, in dublin and further afield—as well as suggesting an awareness of this reality among christians such as marsh. . conclusions this essay has explored the wide-ranging collection of early modern jewish books in marsh’s library, dublin, and in particular those books from narcissus marsh’s personal collection. we have argued that the books highlighted above are a valuable resource for reflection on ( ) christian engagement with jewish culture in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, ( ) the production, use, and travel of jewish books in early modern europe, and ( ) snapshots of jewish life in early modern eleventh century by the jewish rabbi baḥya ben joseph ibn paḳuda, this printed edition was created in mantua, italy, in , and also bears evidence of censorship; an inscription on the final page reads “visto per mi fra luigi da [bologna] ”. figure . a bosome opened to the jewes; marsh’s library z. . . . . the collection at marsh’s library thus points to social, cultural, and political issues relating to jews in the early modern period, particularly with annotations and other paratextual features. we are given a glimpse into jewish life in seventeenth century dublin; books bearing witness to censorship taking place in europe in this era; and political texts pointing to an awareness of persecution which jews faced in england and elsewhere during this period. thus, beyond a collection of books, these artefacts open a window onto the reality of lived experience for jews in early modernity, in dublin and further afield—as well as suggesting an awareness of this reality among christians such as marsh. . conclusions this essay has explored the wide-ranging collection of early modern jewish books in marsh’s library, dublin, and in particular those books from narcissus marsh’s personal collection. we have argued that the books highlighted above are a valuable resource for reflection on ( ) christian engagement with jewish culture in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, ( ) the production, use, and travel of jewish books in early modern europe, and ( ) snapshots of jewish life in early modern rabbi bah. ya ben joseph ibn pak. uda, this printed edition was created in mantua, italy, in , and also bears evidence of censorship; an inscription on the final page reads “visto per mi fra luigi da [bologna] ”. religions , , of ireland and beyond. within this, we have suggested that books as material artefacts have much to contribute to our understanding of history, religion, and intercultural engagement. while this study has only scratched the surface of what is a complex and multifaceted collection of jewish books, there is a silver lining: there are many more stories waiting to be told. author contributions: both authors contributed to the research and writing of this article. j.m.: research related to archbishop marsh, the library, and details related to specific books in the collection. b.a.a.: research on jewish and hebrew books in the collection and jewish book history. all authors have read and agreed to the published version of the manuscript. funding: this research was funded by the irish research council new foundations. we are grateful to the council for their support. acknowledgments: special thanks are due to the staff in marsh’s library, and in particular sue hemmens, for their support in retrieving and collating the materials presented in this study. conflicts of interest: the authors declare no conflict of interest. the funders had no role in the design of the study; 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[crossref] stern, david. . the jewish bible: a material history. seattle: university of washington press. sutcliffe, adam. . hebrew texts and protestant readers: christian hebraism and denominational self-definition. jewish studies quarterly : – . http://dx.doi.org/ . / http://dx.doi.org/ . /jhi. . http://dx.doi.org/ . / religions , , of van rooden, peter t. . theology, biblical scholarship, and rabbinical studies in the seventeenth century: constantijn l’empereur ( – ), professor of hebrew and theology at leiden. leiden: brill. van staalduine-sulman, eveline. . the london polyglot bible. in justifying christian aramaism. leiden: brill, pp. – . wakefield, colin. . arabic manuscripts in the bodleian library: the seventeenth-century collections. in the ‘arabick’ interest of the natural philosophers in seventeenth-century england. edited by g. a. russell. leiden: brill, pp. – . wakefield, colin. . archbishop marsh’s oriental collections in the bodleian library. in the making of marsh’s library: learning, politics and religion in ireland, – . edited by muriel mccarthy and ann simmons. dublin: four courts press, pp. – . wiesner-hanks, merry e. . early modern europe, – . cambridge: cambridge university press. wimpfheimer, barry s. . the talmud: a biography. princeton: princeton university press. yaakov, elman. . moses ben nahman/nahmanides (ramban). in hebrew bible/old testament: history of its interpretation, vol. , part two: the middle ages. edited by magnae sabo. goettingen: vandenhoeck & ruprecht, pp. – . zwiep, irene. . rome, lisbon, naples: the transmission of nahmanides’ torah commentary: a continuation on isaac maarsen’s reconstruction of / . studia rosenthaliana : – . publisher’s note: mdpi stays neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. © by the authors. licensee mdpi, basel, switzerland. this article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the creative commons attribution (cc by) license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/ . /). http://creativecommons.org/ http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/ . /. 	introduction 	archbishop marsh and his library 	exploring the jewish books in marsh’s library 	engagement with jewish culture: christian hebraism—and beyond 	bibles and translations 	rabbinic texts and commentary 	jewish texts aimed at christian readers 	jewish texts—beyond the usual suspects 	the production, use, and travel of jewish books in early modern europe 	snapshots of jewish life in early modern ireland and beyond 	conclusions 	references an exceptional inclusion: on moma’s exhibition recent american prints in color and the first exhibition of southeast asian art an exceptional inclusion: on moma’s exhibition recent american prints in color and the first exhibition of southeast asian art kathleen ditzig southeast of now: directions in contemporary and modern art in asia, volume , number , march , pp. - (article) published by nus press pte ltd doi: for additional information about this article [ access provided at apr : gmt from carnegie mellon university ] https://doi.org/ . /sen. . https://muse.jhu.edu/article/ https://doi.org/ . /sen. . https://muse.jhu.edu/article/ © kathleen ditzig an exceptional inclusion: on moma’s exhibition recent american prints in color and the first exhibition of southeast asian art kathleen ditzig the exhibition of the first southeast asia art conference and competition in manila in was one of the first post-war events that sought to bring together the then contemporary art from the region. what is unusual and worthy of study about this exhibition is that not only was it the first survey exhibition of southeast asia, it also included the museum of modern art (moma) international program’s travelling exhibition, recent american prints in color. little is known of the history behind the first southeast asia art conference and competition. there have been no studies which recount in detail how the conference and competition came to be, who it served and what it represented. even less is known about how the moma exhibition came to be included in this unprecedented platform. however, its inclusion as a participant in the one-room survey exhibition complicates an indigenous art organisation’s attempt to present southeast asia as a cultural region within an exhibitionary frame. the inclusion raises questions as to how southeast asia was perceived as a cultural region by those who lived southeast of now vol. no. (march ), pp. – southeast of now: directions in contemporary and modern art in asia within its geographic boundaries and, equally importantly, questions of how american diplomacy and culture fit into such a construction of south- east asia. in addressing such questions, this article examines recent american prints in color as a case study of the complicated factors conditioning art’s role in constituting soft power during the cold war. focusing on the active inclusion of recent american prints in color by an indigenous art organisation, the art association of the philippines (a ap), this article is indebted to a legacy of revisionist studies which have criticised the export of american art during the s and s as us cold war propaganda and, in the process, contributed to research that uncovers the complexities and conflicting agendas that con- structed the cultural offensive of the united states during the cultural cold war. this article does not examine the incongruence between the players seeking to promote american art, though this is an important background to how moma’s exhibitions came to be unevenly circulated across the world. instead, this article offers a different perspective: that of the receiver of the cultural products of american cultural institutions and policies of the us, namely the a ap. this is the perspective which the united states information services (usis) sought to convince of american liberal modernism or, as greg barnhisel has suggested, a “cold war modernism”—a redefinition of modernism as an “affirmation of western bourgeois liberal values that were considered particularly integral in the american self-construction”, that through its proliferation knit the parts of the world it touched into america’s “free world”. a case study of exceptionalism: recent american prints in color in manila, among the first exhibitions developed in the early years of moma’s inter- national program, recent american prints in color was one of five new exhibitions launched in january and one of seven exhibitions of contem- porary american prints organised by the international programme. curated by walter lieberman, then curator of prints at moma, the exhibition brought together a range of artists who had recently begun to experiment with print- making, or begun to use colour in their prints. according to its press release, the exhibition “focus[ed] on the increased emphasis on prints in colour, the technical ingenuity in woodcuts, [and] the great advance in the art of serigraphy and to a lesser extent in lithography” across a range of styles. it included works inspired by german renaissance drafting, as well as forms of neo-romanticism, expressionism, realism, surrealism and abstractions an exceptional inclusion based on calligraphy and geometry. the exhibition foregrounded the latest technological developments in printmaking and artistic experimentation coming out of the usa. a relatively small exhibition requiring only square feet of exhibition space, recent american prints in color included prints and a panel of wall text. as such, the exhibition was not a grandiose presentation of american art, but was geared towards presentations in small centres for educational purposes and the fulfilment of the international program’s self-mandated role to provide for the “systematic encouragement and organisation of the flow of the arts across national frontiers”. the small scale of the exhibition did not suggest any lack of commitment on the part of usis or moma’s international program; rather, it was a practical adjustment to available infrastructures. the international program deliberately scaled travelling exhibitions to be easily adaptable to a variety of spaces, however small and limited in resources. the goal was to make art accessible to international audiences and also to further american national welfare through international understanding. in order to reach new audiences in manila, porter mccray, director of the international program at the moma in new york, wrote to the country office of usis in the philippines to request their assistance in securing a suitable space and local partners to host the exhibition. mccray requested that the exhibition be presented by an important cultural institution in collaboration with the usis, and proposed the national museum, the university of the philippines or the santo tomas museum as ideal partners. instead, the usis selected, as the host of recent american prints in color, the a ap, a private artist association and the organiser of the first southeast asia art conference and competition. while there is no archival evidence to account for this selection, it was possibly a result of the network of a ap founder purita kalaw-ledesma. kalaw-ledesma was known to be close to the exhibits officer of the american embassy in manila, harold schnaiderman, who is noted in correspondence with the moma international program, and who would later approach kalaw-ledesma to set up a cultural centre under the auspices of the philippine–american cultural foundation. heralded in the philippine press as the biggest foreign participation in art ever gathered in the east, the exhibition of the first southeast asia art conference and competition set a precedent for the philippine art scene, and for the communities that it sought to map and with which it sought to build regional ties. the exhibition was envisioned as a vanguard political and cultural event due to its representation of southeast asia as a cultural region. this contextual exhibitionary frame, a new regional rubric, was ultimately not what mccray had initially requested, let alone aspired to, southeast of now: directions in contemporary and modern art in asia when he requested usis support to have recent american prints in color travel to the philippines. once recent american prints in color arrived in the philippines in , the exhibition’s discursive framing left moma’s control and was, instead, overseen by the usis office in manila. crucially, the exhibition ultimately served the interests of the a ap, and was repositioned with a more local discourse within southeast asia, in which it can be supposed that usis in manila and a ap sought to present the best possibilities of a regional alliance of art and cultural scenes. this shift was most visibly articulated by the conference “art in the southeast asia and today’s problems”, which ran alongside the exhibition from – april at the philippine women’s university. the conference emphasised the importance of art in addressing the most pressing issues of the time. based on a competition to judge the best art from the region and to learn from each participating nation’s contribution, the exhibition reiterated this project. the exhibition and conference brought together, for the first time, what was then contemporary art from southeast asia, with participation from the philippines as well as australia, china, india, indonesia, malaya, thailand and south vietnam. the artworks in the exhibition were considered to be exemplary of their respective nation-states, with all foreign entries selected by a committee appointed by the participating country prior to submission. it is worth noting that the definitive paradigm of what was considered the best art from each country was not recorded. however, a survey of the selected works betrays a tendency towards the representation of nationally specific motifs or styles. furthermore, while there are no known resources of how the selection of artworks was made or who sat on the selection committee, the artworks had to be endorsed by the respective nations that sponsored them through their embassies. these respective countries assumed responsibility for transporting the work to and from manila, and their embassies were responsible for receiving and returning the work from and to their country of origin. in addition, each country had to provide a representative to act as a member of the jury in the competition. participation in the exhibition and competition was a highly stratified and bureaucratic process, which ensured that each participating country had a stake and part to play in determining the best art from southeast asia. furthermore, the logistical demands of realising such an exhibition required the participation of state bodies that endorsed the artwork on show and imbued the event with diplomatic legitimacy and, if not by extension, artistic legitimacy as well. an exceptional inclusion recent american prints in color was an american exhibition that was ultimately contextualised within a survey of southeast asia. the us parti- cipated as the only “guest country” and, unlike the other participating countries, its artworks were not considered competitively. notwithstanding its exclusion from the competition, the us contributed an american repre- sentative to judge the competition, mrs horace smith, identified in the manila times of april as the wife of the american chargé d’affaires minister horace smith, who was not related to moma and had not contri- buted to the development or presentation of recent american prints in color. she was a political representative, most likely chosen by usis in manila. as such, recent american prints in color was an exceptional inclusion in the exhibition, and did not conform to the rules of participation to which the other countries adhered. its inclusion was an anomaly that positioned recent american prints in color as above judgement, in spite of its inclusion within southeast asia. was this inclusion meant to position american art as peripheral within the cultural frame of southeast asia, or was it a benchmark by which the rest of the works in the exhibition were to be compared? given the lack of archival evidence, we cannot know what its inclusion was intended to mean; it was, nonetheless, significant. in the evaluation report of the print exhibition sent to mccray at moma’s international department, john e. reinhardt, assistant cultural affairs officer at the american embassy in manila, an officer of usis, reported an enthusiastic response to the work presented and that many people enquired of the possibility of purchasing the prints. press coverage on the first southeast asia art conference and competition, while limited to one-liners in articles, would also cover the exhibition as presenting “rare prints”. for its audience at the first southeast asia art conference and competition, recent american prints in color was valued more as a cultural object than as a moma exhibition. the manila chronicle would, on may , go so far as to inaccurately credit the exhibition and museum as “rare prints from the museum of contemporary arts of the united states”, a response far from the aspirations of mccray and the international program in profiling american art from the moma. recent american prints in color was an object of ideological significance. while not originally created as a representation of the us, it came to represent the country on a nationalistic platform in a foreign region. though not the main feature of the exhibition of southeast asian art, it was still noticed by a receptive audience, an audience that was open to and found value in it being included in a discourse on the pressing issues of southeast asia. southeast of now: directions in contemporary and modern art in asia of subtexts and agendas: what recent american prints in color offered aap the significant decision to place recent american prints in color in the first exhibition of southeast asian art was made by a ap and not by usis or moma. the only known installation image of the exhibition of the first southeast asia art conference and competition (figure ) presents a one- room exhibition of “the foremost works of southeast asian artists” in the northern motors showroom. thus, the decision to include recent american prints in color in the exhibition’s one-room schema was not just to include it in the platform but to physically encapsulate it within the exhibitionary frame of southeast asia. this framework of inclusion, subsuming american printmaking inside southeast asia, was not just desired and acted upon by a ap, but also by usis. the image of the first southeast asia art conference and competition, sent by usis to moma presents a perspective of the “local” entries of the compe- tition, implicitly equating them with the moma exhibition. figure : image of the first southeast asia art competition exhibition, manila, may . courtesy of vanessa ban. original source can be found in the moma archives, new york ic/ip i.a. an exceptional inclusion this gesture of inclusion, taken almost to the point of occlusion, was reiterated in the production of the catalogue of the first southeast asia art competi- tion’s exhibition, which usis designed, producing a total of , copies, of which usis distributed , copies. sent to moma along with the image, the catalogue inspired a tactfully written response from mccray on may expressing the international program’s pleasure at the exhibition being included at the invitation of the sponsoring organisation, but also highlighting the concern that moma was not properly acknowledged and credited. although the catalog makes no reference to it, i hope that it was possible during the exhibition itself to retain proper identification of the museum of modern art as the organiser of recent american prints in colour. mccray received a response only days later from william copeland, an exhi- bition officer of the usis, stating that “the american prints were properly identified when they were displayed at the recent manila exhibition of south- east asian art.” no additional material would be sent. while the incident likely suggests a mere oversight in crediting, it also reveals the agency that a ap and usis had in the representation of recent american prints in color. these organisations were able to sideline the intentions of moma’s travelling programme to represent collections from new york internationally, so as to include the exhibition firmly inside the rubric of southeast asia. in order to understand the interests invested in realising such a gesture of inclusion that neglects to credit moma, one has to begin by looking at the narrative of american printmaking offered in recent american prints in color and, specifically, what it invested under the rubric of “american” and the medium of printmaking. while the exhibition travelled, moma sent with it images of a selection of works to be used in all printed material, whether for advertising or the development of a catalogue. reading this selection of images provides an insight into the common thematics that defined this exhibition and its works, beyond them being made in the us. the images included: nativity ( ) by andre racz, monument to a butterfly ( ) by eugene berman, birds ( ) by irving kriesberg, inscription of t’chao pae ( ) by seong moy, third avenue elevated ( ) by ralston crawford, memory machine ( ) by dorr bothwell and italian landscape ( ) by irving amen. as an exhibition on the advancements made in serigraphy and lithography in the fine arts, the foremost defining thematic of the exhibition was its focus on american innovation. this focus was not only technological, but also southeast of now: directions in contemporary and modern art in asia reflected experimentation across artistic mediums. ralston crawford, painter, printmaker and photographer, is one of the more well-known of the exhibited artists, and his third avenue elevated is today perhaps the best-known work from the exhibition. crawford had only taken up printmaking in , beginning by exploring lithography. known for his abstract representations of urban life and industry, third avenue elevated was based on a photograph he took of a painted steel support for an elevated railway. the work is often discussed with regard to its cross-medium exploration. american innovation was also present in the literal subject matter of some of the work. dora bothwell’s memory machine is a key example of this: the work is representative of “indigenously american” innovation in its focus on the television set. colour television was a distinct product of american inno- vation during the cold war and would later figure in the kitchen debate as one of the key symbols of the virtues of american democracy and capitalism. in addition to emphasising the technological prowess of american print- making, the exhibited works reflected cultural diversity. speaking to an “american” identity as a culturally accepting and diverse construct, most of the artists were immigrants. andre racz, for example, was a romanian american artist who came to the us in . the artworks themselves were also reflective of cultural diversity, such as seong moy’s inscription of t’chao pae, which uses archaic chinese calligraphy and draws from the methods of formal self-expression in abstract expressionism. the artworks in the exhibition also highlighted the position of the artist as a liberal subject. most, if not all, the works are guided by a self-reflexive subjectivity. irving kriesberg, for example, was an american painter whose works combine elements of abstract expressionism with figural human and animal forms, and who made his debut with jackson pollock and mark rothko in the canonical exhibition titled artists, at moma. even the most figural of the exhibited works, racz’s nativity, is inspired by personal expe- rience. printed in sanguine on gray paper, nativity celebrates the birth of the artist’s son. while most of the works are guided by the radical subjectivity that abstract expressionism proposed through its ambiguous, non-objective imagery, some of the works are indebted to other abstract traditions of subjectivity, such as surrealism. eugene berman was a leading surrealist and neo-romantic painter, while dorr bothwell’s memory machine recalls a surrealist television set. while this was not surprising for an exhibition from a museum built on a collection of european modernists, these inclusions linked developments in american printmaking to the parisian art scene. creating such a relationship with paris was a key strategy of the programme that sought to validate an exceptional inclusion american art internationally. in the years after world war ii, paris seemed poised to regain its status as the capital of the art world, as it was imagined by artists in the us and europe. european artists previously exiled to new york or elsewhere returned to paris, and many young american artists still considered paris to be the place to study and become an artist. as such, with a cultural elitism from the pre-war era still intact, many artists based in paris, and those exiled in new york regarded american art as a poor imitation of what they did. this was particularly important because many pre-war artists in asia were also educated in paris and europe, and still referred to paris as an art capital. in order to validate american art, it was necessary that american art be seen as equal with the avant-garde practices of paris and europe. related to such strategies of validation, the selection of artists and artworks also suggests that the exhibition was developed to represent the innovations of american printmaking in relation to modern painting. advancements in lithography and screen-printing were used for realising works with pop and minimal aesthetics, as well as the more painterly approaches of expressionism. all of the artists represented in the exhibition were also accomplished painters. irving amen was a muralist who had his first woodcut show in . with the development of silkscreen printing, artists at the time had specifi- cally begun to experiment with colour in printmaking, lending itself to translation across media, including painting or photography to print. until the s, most american artists viewed print as a lesser medium, practised by those who were concerned solely with the technical aspects of making art, rather than with the importance of creative expression. the development of print studios and printmaking programmes in american art schools in the s lent validity to the medium as a fine art form. this validity was based on a relationship of the medium to painting, which was taught at these schools. the exhibition also represented moma’s recent acquisitions in relation to american culture and values, demonstrating the relevance and virtues of the museum’s collection and, more importantly, the value of american connoisseurship. in defining the prints as “american”, the selection of artists was validated by the elite of new york’s art scene or by the state department. the artists were guggenheim fellowship recipients or recipients of equally prestigious awards such as the fulbright fellowship, and belonged largely to two generations, those in their thirties and those in their fifties and sixties. the prints were recent acquisitions, made between and . firmly rooted in the validating structure of new york as an art centre, the rubric of “american” that brought together this selection of prints was defined as a concept that was innovative, culturally diverse, inclusive and southeast of now: directions in contemporary and modern art in asia liberal. printmaking was a stand-in for technological advancement and a wholly american modern development of painting, seen as the highest form of modern art. printmaking, in the exhibition, was representative of a new, advanced and validated modern medium. beyond being a significant international event, the exhibition of the first southeast asia art conference and competition was also the tenth annual exhibition of a ap. consequently, the inclusion of recent american prints in color should be read also as being folded into a ap’s annual exhibitions in addition to being folded into a rubric of southeast asia. founded in , a ap developed from the initial desire of purita kalaw-ledesma, alfredo pestaño and antonio dumlao to hold a reunion of the university of the philippines (up) school of fine art (escuela de bellas artes). however, the association was not confined to up alumni, as its membership also included self-taught artists and those from the university of santo tomas (which was the only other school offering the arts at that time). the up alumni gathering grew from sunday meetings in which artists met and exchanged ideas, to an incorporated organisation with a constitution and a membership that included “artists in the graphic and plastic arts, art collectors, persons giving material support for the maintenance of the association and those who were lovers of the fine arts”. from its inception, then, a ap aspired to build a broad audience for the fine arts, “bringing art to the people, or vice versa” through education. it aimed to provide artists with an audience and sustainable com- mercial galleries to support them. to do this, it sponsored and developed exhibitions, art classes, lectures and other public activities. of all a ap’s activities, it was the annual exhibitions which were the most successful in furthering artists’ interests. established in , the exhibitions were competitions that offered incentives to artists as a strategy to improve the quality of art in the philippines. this was significant as a ap was only one of the few art associations geared towards providing artists the means of developing financial sustainability for their practice at the time. a ap’s annual exhibitions brought together a cross-section of artistic practices in the philippines as well as a large audience that comprised political, educational and artistic circles under one roof. it was reported that , people visited the exhibition of the first southeast asia art competition, which included delegates to the conference, diplomats, civil leaders, local and regional press, and student groups. the local art enthusiasts who provided the funding for the annual prizes were well-established business people or high-profile members of society who were invested in filipino politics. the first annual exhibition included a pencil sketch of the filipino flag by then president of the philippines, elpidio quirino, who officiated the event. the annual exhibitions an exceptional inclusion in the early years of a ap were officiated by the philippine presidents who were personally invested in the art platform. for example, president carlos p. garcia headed up the fundraising committee for the first southeast asia art competition and conference and donated generously to the organisation. in galvanising participation from a broad spectrum of artists in the philippines, each annual competition and exhibition registered the varied artistic climate of the philippines of its time. for example, the first a ap com- petition evidenced the undercurrents of antagonism between conservative and modernist artists. according to kalaw-ledesma, conservative artists were seen as being “bound by a strict tradition. they painted what they saw and as closely as possible to the original. they painted from one point of view, adhering closely to the rules of perspective and composition, not to mention propriety.” often narrative-based and employing symbolism, their palette was known for the use of brown, sombre and neutral colours. eventually, they would be associated with commercial and poor quality of art, founded on mere variations of a uniform style. the “moderns”, as kalaw-ledesma would refer to them, painted from different points of view, demanded freedom from tradition, rejected the view that a painting must be as close as possible to the original and advocated artistic integrity. the moderns asserted that “(h)aving gone through a war and having known the meaning of suffering, it was impossible for filipino artists to paint idealised pictures of the masses toiling happily in the fields … painting was not an escape from daily problems; it was an interpretation of life”. for the moderns, subject matter was secondary; what counted was the impact and total effect of a work of art. they wanted to develop new colours, shapes, textures and perceptions in art. the first competition awarded all the prizes to this emerging group of moderns. this was a historic event as it was the first time that the moderns, an emerging group of artists, were recognised so publicly. when the winners were announced, the conservatives protested the results. before the compe- tition, the antagonism between the conservatives and the moderns was confined to newspaper articles or forums. the outcome of the competition was a public defeat and raised the profile of this antagonism. in the following years, the moderns continued to win the annual competition, leading to growing discontent among the conservatives. the tensions were, in part, due to the conservatives’ fears that the art market was going to the moderns. hostilities were based on concerns that they were losing their livehood. modern paintings, which were formerly bought only by foreigners and artists, were being purchased by an increasing number of people. the following year, in , a ap made efforts to quell tensions by mounting two kinds of competition: one for the conservatives and another for the moderns. however, southeast of now: directions in contemporary and modern art in asia the intense rivalry continued to grow and came to a head when the rotary club of manila, in celebration of its anniversary, awarded galo b. ocampo a cash prize for best painting. at the annual exhibition, the conservatives, in retaliation, took down their paintings. they carried them across the street from where the exhibition was being held and placed their work on display on the sidewalk. this walkout of the conservatives from a ap signified a turning point in the history of filipino art. the conservatives formally with- drew from the association,, allowing a ap to consolidate its community and direct itself more specifically to the support of modern art. a ap dropped its dual classification of prizes and adopted only one set of awards. kalaw- ledesma, in recollecting this period, states that “in effect this acknowledge(ed) the superiority of modern art … and [subsequent] winners [of the annual competition] were considered simply ‘the best in contemporary philippine painting’”. the first southeast asia art conference and competition was the second annual a ap competition after this significant split following the walkout of the conservatives. kalaw-ledesma notes that, in addition to focusing on championing modern art, “the most significant medium of this period was the then untapped field of the graphics arts [or printing making] … spearheaded by manuel rodriguez sr”. from its inception as an organisation, a ap made it a policy to encourage the graphic arts. however, following the split, a ap applied itself to furthering the influence of this medium. the graphic arts were not generally studied or understood during the late s and early s in the philippines. graphic arts were, for the most part, considered a lesser form, a hobby, because materials were inexpensive and one could print as many copies as one wished. kalaw-ledesma, as one of the leaders of a ap, was particularly invested in printmaking and supported the work of manuel rodriguez sr, who would come to be regarded as the “father” of graphic arts in the philippines. rodriguez made his name by winning a ap awards and designing silkscreen christmas cards. one of the few artists invested in the medium at the time, he conducted hobby classes for wives of military personnel at the clark us air force base in pampanga, north of manila. rodriguez had learned the medium from his american supervisors, who included robert windquist. kalaw-ledesma considered printmaking the “wave of the future, the medium of the general public” and was strongly invested in seeing it develop. she sourced a printing press from carmelo and bauermann company, which printed a ap’s invitation. the printing press, the first lithograph press brought to manila during the th century, was installed in a garage rented by the association before rodriguez was allowed to bring it to his studio where, an exceptional inclusion with his etching press and other equipment, he began to teach printmaking. with growth in art students over time, rodriguez began teaching the medium in schools and, by , a year before the first southeast asia art conference and competition, a ap organised its first inter-asian graphic arts exhibition in recognition of the growing number of printmakers in the philippines. thus, in many ways, printmaking, as it came to be practised as a modern art form, had american origins through rodriguez sr, who would teach a new generation of modern artists, including his sons. it is perhaps worthy to note in this regard that the exhibition for the first southeast asia art conference and competition featured a total of pieces, outside of the moma contribu- tion, that were woodcuts or serigraphy across a range of painting categories, namely “graphic arts”, “representational painting” and “abstract painting”. most of the contributions were from members of a ap. however, two woodcuts were contributions from india. in addition to focusing on printmaking, the break from the conservatives meant that a ap became an art organisation particularly invested in devel- oping a greater understanding and sympathy for the position of the modern artist. this was apparent with the first fundraiser that a ap ran: a screening of lust for life ( ), a million-dollar holly wood production centred on the life story of vincent van gogh, played by kirk douglas. the film was, according to reports of the time, selected for the narrative it presented of the struggling, unrecognised artist, which resonated with what a ap described as the lack of social recognition and commercial sustainability that faced philippine modern artists. in addition, the film reproduced of van gogh’s original paintings, sourced from hundreds of museums and private collections, in a new colour process called “metrocolor” that presented the paintings in vivid detail. a ap saw the screening as an educational opportunity for its manila- based audience to encounter van gogh’s paintings. the premier of the film in manila included an art exhibition in the theatre lobby of masterpieces by local modernist and conservative painters and the distribution of unique souvenir programmes designed by leading a ap members, inspired by van gogh’s style of brushwork. adopting a similar strategy to that employed by moma and usis in recent american prints in color, a ap’s decision to screen a holly wood production based on van gogh showed that the association aligned itself with a narrative of european modernism. focusing on van gogh’s life story and creativity, a ap highlighted the image of the heroic artist as a maverick outsider championing a reflexive subjectivity in the appreciation of art and, by extension, modern philippine art. given these existing investments and the trajectory of a ap by , this article’s earlier contention that the inclusion of recent american prints in southeast of now: directions in contemporary and modern art in asia color should be read also as being folded into a ap’s annual exhibitions bears revisiting. recent american prints in color emphasised modern art practices that together privileged narrative frames of innovation, technological prowess and radical subjectivity, and some of the a ap artworks submitted and included within the exhibition were also sympathetic to these positions. in his article “filipinism in art”, ricaredo demetillo explains the contextual demands upon the modern artist (of which he regards hernando r. ocampo as the epitome): technical discoveries in the arts are being shared more widely than ever today by a community of artists. all our artists have been influenced one way or another, some more pronouncedly than others, by certain recognisable influences: thus cubism, surrealism, futurism, expressionism, expressionist abstraction, impressionistic pointillism and other influences may be traced directly into the world of our various artists, with the important reservation that these artists have managed to keep their individuality, their signatures … the machine age, with its attendant complexities, has changed the tempo and the tenor of our ways. depth psychology has given us a world no longer wholly ordered by the rational mind but lashed by the egoistic urges of the id of the subconscious. the rise of corporate loyalties has tended to shrivel the individual and his erstwhile freedom. the artist should, but until a decade ago, did not respond to this responsibility. in principle, demetillo’s description could be applied to many of the works of recent american prints in color, which betray european modernist influences and champion technological innovation in art, and radical sub- jectivity. in this regard, arturo r. luz’s city, fernando zobel non-objective painting, cesar f. legaspi’s carousel and hernando r. ocampo’s fiesta and sacramental, paintings submitted and exhibited as part of the exhibition of the first southeast art conference and competition, all betray the same stylistic and subject matter investments of eugene berman, irving kreisberg, dorr bothwell, irving amen and ralston crawford. however, this relationship begins to become slightly more tenuous when it comes to the prints submitted to the exhibition, which allow for a deeper insight into the complex relationship of adaptation that arises out of presenting both practices—american modernism and filipino modernism— alongside one another. the prints are based on subject matter that privileges a representation of the everyday filipino person. this is evident specifically an exceptional inclusion in the prints submitted by a ap members, such as two women by anita magsaysay ho and girl with flowers by chua keng keng. though the prints are figurative and more impressionistic than abstract, they do share an affinity with andre racz’s representational practice that focuses on the everyday and domestic. magsaysay ho’s style was credited by critics at the time as a creation of a more “expressive, more powerful, indigenous art”. in the above mentioned essay by demetillo, he refers to magsaysay ho art as “folksy”. this “folksy” style was identified also in the work of another artist who submitted a painting. vicente manansala’s give us this day is an everyday scene with religious overtones, depicting a family eating at a table. demetillo writes of manansala’s work as being “rooted in his rural backyard, where he watches the vegetables grow and the chickens cluck … in the love of his wife and children and friends … and in the cacophony of deepness on the highways and boulevards. all these create the soil where his creative spirit receives nurture; and they are real, human and cultural roots.” where demetillo is critical of zobel’s “iberian temperament” and praises ocampo’s canvases as “abstract renditions of our tropicality”, demetillo reserves for manansala the high praise of making a “vital” art that is not patriotic but expresses the “soul of a people”. demetillo further elaborates that “our roots are planted in the soil of our past, in the sod of our time and place, in our modernity. who takes sustenance from this soil creates vital art.” within such a discourse, the everyday scenes by magsaysay ho and manansala represent a marked deviation from the narratives of recent american prints in color. these works are more socially specific and embody an attitude wherein artistic innovation is meant to serve the soul of a people, an aim paralleled by lofty intentions of the moma international program in crafting the exhibition, but not one inherent to the prints and artistic practices that recent american prints in color put on display. in this regard, it is important to note how different the political projects of modern art were, as framed by moma on the one hand, and by art discourse in the philippines at the time on the other hand. these differences are evident despite the seeming affinities in style and artistic media. demetillo wrote at the time of the exhibition that “since our artists are filipinos, they will express themselves as filipinos, unless their sensibility has been made phoney by imbibing the foreign indiscriminately.” the point in encountering american or european modernistic practices was not necessarily to emulate but to co-opt forms, styles and designs towards a filipino artistic identity. it is in this frame of reference that recent american prints in color resonated with the a ap artistic practices with which it shared exhibition space. it may have served a contextual function in a ap’s definitive annual exhibitions to not only southeast of now: directions in contemporary and modern art in asia provide an “international” frame for the practices of a ap artists but also to highlight a ap artists’ discriminate co-opting of “the foreign”. kalaw-ledesma never accounts for the exhibition in the struggle for philippine art, yet this occlusion is not an unproductive one art historically. recent american prints in color as a selection of artwork was not important, rather what is significant is what it represented and what it provided as an exhibitionary moment—a particularly pivotal moment in a ap’s history. in light of the walkout of and the developments leading up to the first southeast asia art conference and competition, the decision to include recent american prints in color in its annual exhibition can be read as a reiteration of a ap’s investment in the development of art, which included a focus on printmaking and on developing a greater understanding and sympathy for the position of the modern artist. furthermore, a ap’s mission to bring art to the people and to develop opportunities or tools for art education should not be overlooked. with the end of world war ii, europe’s economies were devastated and cultural products from europe were not being travelled extensively. instead, with the onset of the cold war, cultural products from the soviets, such as the russian ballet, and from the americans, such as exhibitions like recent american prints in color, travelled more widely, allowing filipino artists exposure to these cultural products. american art resonated with them, and with more scholarship opportunities in the us becoming available to filipino artists, the early s in the philippine art scene saw a shift in influence from the school of paris to the school of new york. in addition, due to a dollar shortage, few foreign art magazines could enter the philippines except those from the united states. as a result of the exposure to american art criticism, the philippine art scene began to be influenced by what was happening in new york. given this, the inclusion of recent american prints in color spoke to an emergent philippine modernism that was influenced by and open to consuming products of an american modernism. however, this tie to american modernism was also a tie to an infra- structural framework of internationalisation. the moderns were not just the future, as kalaw-ledesma states, but they represented a means to connect the philippine artist to the world. in a published interview from , the american art critic elizabeth lyons observes that: [in the philippines] it is the young artist who is the modern artist. in the west, it is mostly the older artists who take to abstract, subjective painting. the world’s most admired contemporary artists are all old and mostly french, among them picasso, matisse, braque, dufy an exceptional inclusion and rouault – the geniuses of the “school of paris” … there is no ebb in sight for the tide of abstract expressionism in this area, the modern asian artist has to face up to the fact that he [sic ] is just as neglected, misunderstood and crucified as his counterpart in the west. lack of public encouragement and economic insecurity is a problem the artists of today still share. this quote, while taken from a philippine magazine, shines a light on what caught the eye of the travelling curator and how the lineage of abstract expressionism that ties recent american prints in color to european move- ments such as surrealism also ties philippine modern art in the same way. the cultural cold war led to greater educational opportunities for filipino artists, either through the exposure that american travelling exhibitions provided, scholarships from american patrons, cultural content that the usis library provided, and also through education which connected them to a new international art scene, crafted as part of the american “free world”. in the early s, the philippine moderns were aware that “time had stood still for philippine art” and were anxious to raise artistic standards to what they deemed a more “international” level. they relied on illustrations in the american magazines time and life, and read the limited art books at usis libraries to learn more about an assumed international style. there were no museums that presented international contemporary art, and reproductions of masterpieces were unavailable. in fact, recent american prints in color was moma’s first exhibition in the philippines and lust for life among the first opportunities for filipinos to see reproductions of famous masterpieces. as an educational opportunity, recent american prints in color not only epi- tomised a ap’s push for modern art practices, but also aligned the philippine art scene to an international art scene it was determined to become a part of. the rubric of southeast asia in an international art world: what southeast asia provided aap in the struggle for philippine art, kalaw-ledesma explains that a ap’s drive towards an international perspective reflected a desire to compete with the rest of the world, in effect to “crash the international scene”. to achieve this, it was widely believed that one had to paint in an international style, in other words a style determined by a “cold war modernism”. it was believed that the filipino artist was “as good as anyone”. filipino artists sought recognition towards such ends by competing on international platforms. the exhibition of the first southeast art conference and competition was not only part of southeast of now: directions in contemporary and modern art in asia the effort to make philippine art international, but was also an attempt to make manila the artistic centre of southeast asia. these efforts were primarily motivated by a desire to improve art education and infrastructure in the philippines, a key tenet of a ap’s mission. in effect, the first southeast art conference and competition built an international community around the philippine art scene through the rubric of southeast asia. a ap’s definition of “southeast asia” can be seen from the international exchange partners that were identified as part of the region and were invited to attend the conference. this group initially included australia, burma, cambodia, china, india, indonesia, japan, laos, malaya, pakistan, south vietnam and thailand. from this initial selection, it is clear that a ap aspired to map the region of southeast asia geographically, as well as include nations with which it had a strong relationship, such as china, japan and india (all of which have diasporic communities in the philippines) and pakistan (which was geographically on the borders of south asia and southeast asia). ultimately china, india, indonesia, japan, south vietnam and the us attended, providing delegates to the conference to represent the “national art” of their countries, speaking to their histories, contemporary art and trends. the us was the only exception and did not provide a participating conference delegate. in lieu of such representation, recent american prints in color stood in for a delegate to speak to the history, contemporary art and trends in american printmaking. its manila-based audience would already be familiar with representations of the “national art” of the us from usis libraries throughout the region, and other travelling american exhibitions. besides printmaking being taught at clark air base in manila, recent american prints in color was the second exhibition of serigraphy that usis had presented. the outcome of the conference was that seven countries (australia, china, india, indonesia, malaya, south vietnam and the philippines) formed the permanent secretariat of the pan asia art conference and exhibition, with manila as the site of the next biennial. in the establishment of this permanent body, it is recorded that: the conference adopted a number of resolutions advocating ) exchange of literature on art and culture between member nations ) inclusion and emphasis on the teaching of oriental art in the curricula of fine arts and humanities ) exchange of art exhibits ) exchange of personnel and ) free flow of cultural and art material between member nations. the conference also adopted resolutions on a) a code of ethics among asian art and b) the adoption of copy- right laws for the protection of asian artists. an exceptional inclusion in addition to being unified by this set framework in which the countries and their respective art scenes would collaborate, the competition brought together an “international panel” of judges to decide on the best of southeast asian art. the panelists selected winners from the local and international participants of the competition and, in effect, determined a standard for southeast asian art. the competition covered a range of media for local participants, including sculpture, photography and painting. while foreign participants were only allowed to contribute paintings, this was taken broadly and some paintings were painted on wood or silk. in addition, the indonesian participation included wood carvings. there were three cash prizes awarded for overall winners that the local and foreign participants competed for. batek malaya by patrick ng kah oun of malaya won the first prize (figure ). filipino modern artist vicente manansala’s give us this day won the second prize, and the third was won by village family by india’s shanti dave. reporting on the participation in the competition, cultural news from asia, a bulletin published by the congress for cultural freedom in new delhi, figure : patrick ng kah onn, batek malaya, source: private collection of the estate of the late gregorio lim (president of aap in ). image courtesy of patrick d. flores southeast of now: directions in contemporary and modern art in asia emphasised the distinct styles of each country which, it claimed, represented the “realities” or conditions of the lives of their citizens. while international, southeast asia was described as made up of distinct cultural and national representations: “batek malaya” (the winning painting of the competition) in oil, is a flat design of a “batik” pattern showing familiar surroundings in malaya. the filipino and the indian prize winners had both chosen family themes for their oil paintings. many schools of painting were represented. the entries ranged from the simple bamboo paintings of chinese style to the tapestry style paintings of indonesian artist. the ebullient though poetic outpourings of the modernists jostled along with the quiet compositions of the conservatives … some of the indonesian paintings were reminiscent of van gogh’s flat canvases. the japanese entries were distinguished by an exquisite handling of colour and a bold formalism each acting as a foil to the other … malaya displayed the comparatively new medium of art that of “batik painting.” the vietnamese collection though small was interesting. it included four paintings depicting four seasonal flowers “ladies in the garden” executed in lacquer on wood and the doll-like “trung sisters” ( joans of ark of vietnam) made of embossed silk. in effect, this competition, selected by representatives invested in southeast asia, was a means to lay the work for a collective southeast asian aesthetic, despite perceived differences. a southeast asian aesthetic was one that reflected the shared conditions of the nations of southeast asia, that used modern terms or methods, while still being specifically asian. stm, a maga- zine in manila, in reporting on the conference, chose malaya’s chuah thean teng’s painting batik of boats in the wharf to represent the conference and competition, on account of the subject matter being highly characteristic of all the participating nations. in this particular case, the binding condition of the nations was maritime trade. furthermore, chuah’s oil painting used a western medium to represent batik, a southeast asian art form. it was the same method employed in the winning artwork batek malaya, in which a traditional art form is represented through the “newer” modern western medium. while “southeast asia” was being defined on aesthetic terms by a ap, it was primarily a rubric of political value. a recent concept that had only emerged as a significant political term in the summer of , the construction of an exceptional inclusion “southeast asia” was a response to the japanese military army effectively con- trolling the entire stretch between british burma and the hispano-american philippines (british burma, malaya and singapore, the american philippines and the dutch indies all fell to direct japanese military assault) and with the creation of louis mountbatten’s south east asia command, an offshoot of the more traditional india command. the concept of “southeast asia” was not normalised until , with the publication of former british colonial civil servant d.g.e. hall’s a history of south-east asia. while there were early inklings of a southeast asian formation in with an attempt of the prime minister of siam’s to launch a southeast asian league to build regional net- works of mutual help against imperialism, southeast asia at this moment in history has been argued to be a concept primarily built on the prevailing american interests that the diversity of political positions and states from the philippines, malaya, vietnam and indonesia were not “lost” to communism. towards this end, seato (southeast asia treaty organization), based on the southeast asia collective defense treaty or manila pact signed in manila in , would act as an umbrella over an area of the world defined under the rubric of “southeast asia” in an alliance to contain communist power. the philippines and thailand were its only geographically southeast asian members; its membership consisted largely of countries located outside of the region but with an interest either in the region or the organisation itself. for an art world shaped by a ap’s efforts to internationalise philippine art, such geopolitical formations were not just territorial maps of allegiance but also underpinned networks of travel and circulation. in the great migrator, a study of the transitional network of modern art in the s and the increasing dominance of american art through the lens of rauschenberg’s work, hiroko ikegami notes that “the ‘global’ rise of american art was in fact restricted” to the “free world”. in other words, the geography of post-war modern art overlapped with “the geography of international politics of the time”. the travel of american exhibitions connected art scenes with major players who shared a mutual interest in working together to promote post-war american art, engendering an increasingly americanised “international” art scene. within this emergent field, southeast asia was a space and concept that existed between the dichotomies of the cold war. as a liminal space, southeast asia was—in the words of then ambassador of the philippines to the united states carlos p. romulo—“the theatre of conflict between the free world and the soviet world” and represented “the margin between victory and defeat for freedom”. moreover, as romulo delineates, “southeast asia” was a formidable region in political and econo- mic terms: southeast of now: directions in contemporary and modern art in asia from this area comes / of the world’s exportable rice and were this rice to fall into communist hands the position of india and japan would be in serious jeopardy. from southeast asia also come the raw material such as rubber, tin, rope and oil which provide the sinews of the economy and preparedness program of the west …  southeast asia dominates a vital corner of the globe and controls the communication lanes across the pacific and the indian oceans. (in addition) by accepting payments for its exports in consumer goods without requiring dollars, southeast asia has contributed immensely to the economic recovery of western europe without the trade of southeast asia there could scarcely by a multilateral free world economy. the philippines was not shy about the idea that association with such a southeast asian regionalism could benefit its interests. as early as , elpidio rivera qurino, the second president of the philippines, had tried to initiate this in the form of a regional alliance. quirino wanted to bring the us into the planned alliance but it declined. without the support of major powers, the alliance did not materialise. for the most part, according to political analysts of the time, “regionalism was not very strong”. asians had too many conflicting colonial associations and any alliance to counter the positions of the soviet bloc or the american “free world”—even the alliance of an asian-african bloc—had little appeal beyond financial practicality. where statecraft had failed, the exhibition of the first southeast asia art conference and competition succeeded in bringing together a regional alliance of states in support of their artists. the terms of participation, in being reliant on the respective states supporting their artists, framed the contributions as specific nationally endorsed artistic practices. this is evident in the reporting of the exhibition, which essentialised artistic practices by national and cultural identities. the inclusion of recent american prints in color was in a sense no different. it framed an “american” modern art regard- less of whether the participating artist identified as such. it should be noted, however, that the characteristics of these nationally defined modernities—as defined by narratives of innovation, technological prowess and radical subjectivity—were broad enough to include other cultural identifies within its discourse. for example, malaya’s chuah thean teng’s painting batik of boats in the wharf and patrick ng’s batek malaya, both of which use the medium of oil painting to emulate the designs of batik painting, can be read as technological innovations in painting by “reinventing” the use of batik painting. while the work of these two malayan artists did not directly an exceptional inclusion relate to works presented in recent american prints in color, they did resonate with the key principles being touted by the exhibition. ng’s batek malaya, winning first prize at the competition, was especially valued for its inno- vativeness. as such, a ap’s inclusion of nationally endorsed artistic practices alongside recent american prints in color speaks to a construction of south- east asian regionalism built on the infrastructure of the nation, coinciding with the values of moma’s “international art”. this attempted artistic regionalism, however, was seemingly not built on a direct exchange between artists, but rather though art and diplomatic organisations, that in coming together articulated broad principles of modern art to which they mutually could commit. after all, there is no evidence to suggest that seong moy’s inscription of t’chao pae that is based on a “discriminate adaptation” of chinese calligraphy and abstract expressionism were highlighted in local discourse. in spite of the first southeast asia art competition and conference’s chartering a southeast asian aesthetic and bringing a community together on the pretext of establishing what would be the “best art” from the region, of the most interesting outcomes of the conference was the quick dismissal of the rubric of southeast asia. instead of a southeast asian conference, organisers decided to name the next edition the pan-asia art conference. the change from “southeast asia” to “pan-asia” was made to include more countries and to lend the organisation long-term sustainability. this was a particularly significant outcome because the rubric of southeast asia was deemed unsustainable, in that it was not inclusive and representative enough for the cultural producers invested in the region. despite being so quickly discarded, southeast asia was not an insignificant rubric, nor was it too nascent a concept to have no impact. it is worthy to note that a subsequent pan-asia event never materialised. “southeast asia” did not just offer a ap a conceptual frame with which to build an international community. much like the practical motivations that encouraged southeast asian nation-states to enter seato and other political alliances with major powers such as the us, the concept afforded a ap tangible and practical benefits. for one, it did ensure access to the global distribution network of the usis office in manila. usis in manila was supportive of a ap’s first southeast asia art competition and conference, because it addressed its goals in promoting the philippines as a centre or exemplary nation to lead and collaborate with its neighbours. in addition, the rubric of southeast asia was also sustained and supported by many political organisations in a ap’s exhibition. funding for the first southeast asia art competition and conference was derived from many southeast of now: directions in contemporary and modern art in asia sources including the asia foundation (an american public charity which was primarily funded by the cia at the time); the department of foreign affairs; northern motors, a local subsidiary of general motors; the philippine national museum; and the embassies of the usa, australia, belgium, the uk, china, france, india, indonesia, malaya, thailand and south vietnam. carlos p. garcia, president of the philippines in and one of the key fundraisers, commented that a ap’s goal of encouraging the exchange of different artworks produced by southeast asian countries furthered one of the aims expressed by the bandung conference, which was to bring unity among other southeast asian countries through a renaissance of their cultural, artistic and social activities. he encouraged the philippine people to support the event, a credit to the nation, in bringing together such different nations in terms of the sponsorship, initiation and fundraising for the event. in remembering the first southeast asia art conference and competition, kalaw-ledesma states: the plan was to make the competition an annual, round-robin affair, but somehow a new southeast asian exhibition never materialised. nevertheless, two important ideas emerged from the competition. the first was that all men are brothers and art transcends all barriers because it is universal. the second—and this may not be as diametrically opposite as it may seem—was a belief in national identity. in organising the first regional platform and exhibition for southeast asia, a ap found that the rubric of southeast asia was only of limited conceptual value. member nations themselves identified with the broader term of “asia” rather than “southeast asia”. a regional framework was only useful insofar as it could speak to the diversity of the region, to transcend southeast asia’s national and political borders. following the first southeast asia art conference and competition, the next southeast asian exhibition would be the st asean (association of southeast asian nations) exhibition in jakarta in . it would feature artists from malaysia, indonesia and the philippines. years later, under the auspices of the asean committee on culture and information (coci), t.k. sabapathy would write about the legacy of attempts to “foster a sense of region-ness in southeast asia by means of art exhibitions”. sabapathy’s points of reference included the exhibition ideas from asia: contemporary south-east asian art at the singapore art museum, which he curated. sabapathy proposes an exceptional inclusion that asean-initiated exhibitions, from the association’s inception in , are enterprises affirming relations within the geographic region based on a perceived shared history. in effect, these exhibitions were crafted to convince southeast asians of a southeast asa that had cultural relevance. yet sabapathy aptly notes that “the sense of southeast asia as a region was a failed or incom- plete project”. even within the logistical framework of asean exhibitions, there was a lack of a cohesive narrative. each country determined the extent and content of its participation, presenting what it perceived to be its main- stream art and artists for display and publication. similarly, the framework of southeast asia as it were in the first southeast asia art conference and competition was a performance of “aspirational” regionalism. as seen through sabapathy’s analysis of the asean coci projects, there was little difference in future administration of southeast asian exhibitions. the framework for participation was largely the same in both the exhibition of the first southeast asia art conference and competition and the asean-initiated exhibitions. the artistic relationships were associative more than direct, with invitations awarded to state-endorsed agents and facilities by state bodies such as embassies. however, the first southeast asia art conference and competition differed in the ways in which it enacted a pragmatic diplomacy for self-development through co-option and collaboration. the occasion of the exhibition in was a means to visualise the relationship of the different national groups that the conference brought together, which together arti- culated certain goals for professionalism and collaboration for such a region (for example, the exchange of literature on art and culture between member nations and exchange of art exhibits, see n. ). even if the exhibition of and its frame of southeast asia served a ap’s interests of development and internationalisation, the exhibition and frame, unlike successive iterations in asean, sought to create a regional identity to host and encourage collabora- tion. this was fundamentally different than creating a narrative for southeast asia or an identity for all its participants to adhere to, it was a tool for self- development through the sharing of resources and collaboration. as sabapathy concludes in his essay on international exhibitions of south- east asian art, there is a “shadow” to the definition of the region based in political diplomacy: that of a regional perspective not immersed in narratives of the nation-state in which the actors who take up the terms of the region and who willingly participate in these frameworks cast themselves as “active, self-determined subjects” that construct the region on “its own terms, exigencies, historical and material conditions”. the first southeast asia art conference and competition, as a precursor to more recent asean or southeast of now: directions in contemporary and modern art in asia southeast asian exhibitionary frameworks, is exemplary of this relationship, wherein an artists’ association takes up the notion of “southeast asia” and defines it by and for its own agenda. an exceptional inclusion returning again to the inclusion of recent american prints in color in the rubric of southeast asia, this was an anomaly. never again in its travels would the exhibition be hosted by such a historic and international platform. furthermore, never again would moma contribute to a travelling exhibition that sought to map a region such as southeast asia. as an exceptional inclu- sion in the first southeast asia art conference and competition, in terms both of its treatment and the conceptual exceptions that a ap undertook to include an american presence at this foundational exhibition of southeast asia, this case study pushes against a conventional understanding of how cultural imperialism works, and the assumed binary dynamics of the cultural cold war. southeast asia as a regional concept was conceived as a liminal theatre between the two fronts of the cultural cold war. as seen from the inclusion of recent american prints in color, for a ap, as much as for southeast asian political elites, the cold war provided an opportunity on which nations in the region could capitalise on. rather than determining the cultural ex- pression and identity of southeast asia, the travelling of american exhibitions enabled southeast asia, in the form of a ap, to maintain and even generate agency to develop art infrastructure and utilise networks they did not already have locally. recent american prints in color did not entirely achieve what was intended for it, either by moma, by a us state office anxious to garner support for american liberal modernism and american policies or by filipino artists anxious to link themselves and their modern art to an international art scene. thus, study of this iteration of the travelling exhibition offers insight into the dynamics of the reciprocal processes that contributed to the influence of american art on the development of art practices in southeast asia. as much as usis intended for the exhibition to develop affinity between american and philippine culture and moma wished to develop cultural exchange and educate foreign countries on american culture and connoisseurship, the extent to which their projects were successful were based solely on how useful they were to a ap in a time of considerable transition and consolidation of artistic practices. besides the seeming triumph of the moderns in ascertaining a foothold as leaders in the philippine art scene over the conservatives, the other major transition at the time was a desire to internationalise the an exceptional inclusion philippine art scene. purita kalaw-ledesma would later write that the period of – was a particularly important period in which art as a carrier of social protest shifted to focus on technique and its perfection, with artists instead aspiring to international recognition. this drive in turn pre-empted “the quest of cultural identity”. benedict anderson argues that national identity in southeast asia arises out of three institutions: the census, the map and the museum, which together “profoundly shaped the way in which the colonial state imagined its dominion—the nature of the human beings it rules, the geography of its domain, and the legitimacy of its ancestry”. the map and census shaped the way we think about nations, making possible such identifications as “southeast asia” and “southeast asian”, “philippines” and “filipino” but it was in the museum, in its imagining of power and history, that these concepts were concretised. the exhibition of the first southeast asia art conference and competition exemplifies this concretising of power and history in the construction of national identity within the region. in a one-room schema, it made visual a southeast asian culture and aesthetic, making concrete a concept that reflec- tion political aspirations more than real affinities. through the inclusion of recent american prints in color, a ap tied a nascent concept of a modern southeast asian art to power in the form of the us, and history in the form of an american modernist lineage. making concrete, in the form of the exhibi- tion, an “international” definition of southeast asia, a ap not only sought to carve a space for philippine art at the epicentre of southeast asian culture, it also sought to affirm its investments in modern art at a time of contentious change when a definitive aesthetic of philippine art was only just emerging. biography kathleen ditzig works for the national museum of singapore. she holds an ma from the center of curatorial studies, bard college that was funded by a national heritage board scholarship. she also holds a ba in art history with a minor in asian humanities from ucla, and was a regents scholar. with experience in cultural policy, she is interested in the relationship between art, globalism and power. some of her past projects include on sweat, paper and porcelain (ccs new york), footnotes and scripting space: writing as the site of exhibition (judd foundation, new york) as well as a history of curating in singapore (singapore, ). she has been published in artforum.com’s critic pick, flash art and bomb, among others. southeast of now: directions in contemporary and modern art in asia notes writing in his foreword to the catalogue of the exhibition, dr eduardo quisumbing, director of the national museum of the philippines, identified the southeast asia art conference and competition as a “concrete instance where the countries will meet in friendly competition and an exchange of contemporary art trends in this part of the world”. see catalogue of first southeast asia art conference and competition, rpc [regional production center] manila: first southeast asia art conference—english, – ; master file copies of field publications, – ; entry p ; box ; records of the united states information agency [usia], record group , national archives and records administration, college park, maryland, usa. the definition of modern and contemporary art is beyond the scope of this article. however, it is interesting to note the slippages between the terms, even in the s. in a review of the exhibition, titled “crowds flock to art exhibition” and published may in the manila chronicle, moma was referred to as the “museum of contemporary arts of the united states”. while this may be a mere misprint or result of human error, it speaks to apprehensions of the type of work that moma presented, and connotes a flattened understanding of the contemporary and the modern. this flattened understanding is seemingly reiterated in hernando r. ocampo’s lyrical description of symbolic abstraction in the sunday times magazine of june . he writes of the work of ocampo, zobel, luz, manansala, oyeyza, legaspi and bernardo as “contemporary in their method of expression, in their outlook. they are not afraid to confront the present, with its cacophonies, its frittering of the soul, its outlandish material values and it position of surplus: in beauty, in understanding, in purity, in grace, in love.” simon soon, maps of the sea, web, jan. . http://w w w.search-art.asia/attachments/files/mapofthesea.pdf [accessed apr. ]. soon’s research delineates the emergence of the concept of southeast asia as a geopolitical region that comes out of the cultural cold war. the referenced list includes publications, exhibitions, conferences, symposia, meetings or, more broadly, events. following the first exhibition of southeast asian art that is explored in this thesis, the next southeast asian event is that of the south- east asia cultural festival in singapore, which predated its merger with malaya and was tied to a nationalist agenda. as a counter-perspective, jennifer lindsay provides a case study for how the rubric of southeast asia was employed in exhibitionary forms by state power to perpetuate specific regional narratives for international prestige. see lindsay, “festival politics: singapore’s south-east asia cultural festival”, in cultures at war: the cold war and cultural expression in southeast asia, ed. tony day and maya h.t. liem (ithaca, ny: southeast asia an exceptional inclusion program publications, ), pp. – . in contrast, this article engages with “smaller histories” and studies a private art organisation’s utilisation of the same conceptual rubric and exhibitionary platform towards its own ends. however, it is worthy to note that purita kalaw-ledesma reflected on the exhibition briefly in her memoirs. see kalaw-ledesma and amadis maría guerrero, the struggle for philippine art (manila: ledesma, ). it is also worthy to note ahmad mashad’s “moments of regionality: negotiating southeast asia”, crossings: philippine works from the singapore art museum (singapore: singapore art museum and ayala museum, ) in which he traces how a region is framed through institutions and their mechanisms. for representative revisionist accounts, see the anthology pollock and after: the critical debate, ed. francis frascina (new york: harper & row, ). see also serge guilbaut, how new york stole the idea of modern art: abstract expressionism, freedom, and the cold war (chicago, il: university of chicago press, ), which is representative of revisionist accounts of the s, and posits that abstract expressionism originated in paris and was later co-opted by artists jackson pollock and willem de kooning, and that the central intelligence agency (cia) actively supported state bodies that supported their circulation. these revisionist studies began with a series of articles in artforum by max kozloff ( ), william hauptman ( ) and eva cockcroft ( ), which responded to irving sandler’s abstract expressionism: the triumph of american painting (london: pall mall, ). the revisionist essays interrogated prevailing modernist narratives from the s, and exposed art and culture as a major concern for american foreign policy. in effect, this work called into question the conventional narrative of abstract expressionism as an essentially autonomous, depoliticised practice. the legacy of these initial studies has been productive in questioning the sociopolitical dimensions of the formalist narrative of modern art. subsequent work by historians such a. deirdre robson and michael kimmelman in the s furthered this line of research by studying the discrepancies between american culture and its representation abroad, parsing the conflicting agendas of the different stakeholders advocating for american modern art. robson’s prestige, profit and pleasure: the market for modern art in new york in the s and the s (new york: garland, ) focuses on the relationship between the art market and critical responses to abstract expressionism, and the lag between the two. kimmelman countered cockcroft’s argument that there was a connection between the state and moma, arguing that in the reality of the mccarthy era the state could not co-organise and support all of moma’s international programmes, especially those of vanguard art. shows like the family of man and built in the usa—postwar architecture were another matter. in the case of the family of southeast of now: directions in contemporary and modern art in asia man, the united states information agency (usia) commissioned a number of sets that they would circulate. to circumvent the difficulties of mccarthyism in the early part of the cold war, the smaller, country-specific offices of the united states information service (usis, a division of usia) were able to assist with local publicity and transportation. they played a key role in sourcing partner organisations in the host country to provide the international programme with project-specific funding and support. the revisionist studies coming out of the late s and early s were particularly insightful in their explorations of schisms within the main stakeholders and the contradictory representations of american culture. they coincided historically with congressional attacks on the national endowment of the arts at the very end of the cold war, which showed the structural contradictions of an american liberal modernism that advocated the first amendment right of freedom of expression, but insisted that it should be not funded. see also helen m. franc’s “the early years of the international program and council”, in the museum of modern art at mid-century, ed. john elderfield (new york: museum of modern art, ), which explores the tensions inside moma and outside america, and the us state department’s initial resistance to working with modernists who they suspected to be communists. greg barnhisel, cold war modernists: art, literature, and american cultural diplomacy (new york: columbia university press, ). while barnhisel’s work deals only with american bourgeois liberalism, it could be conceived that a “cold war modernism” would also include socialist realism. perhaps the blending of political philosophies that one sees in the rise of new nation-states like singapore during the cold war, which operatively “borrow from both sides”, would provide a richer definition of a cold war modernism with multiple reference points, ideologies and strategies. see tan tai yong, “the cold war and the making of singapore”, in cold war southeast asia, ed. malcolm h. murfett (singapore: marshall cavendish editions, ), pp. – . the moma international program was initially established and funded by a five- year grant from the rockefeller brothers fund in , a private philanthropic organisation formed for the purpose of promoting international exchange in the visual arts. the programme was an expansion of moma’s international outreach and grew out of the museum’s department of circulating exhibitions which had begun two decades earlier and was dedicated to art education and domestic tours of the museum’s exhibitions. was a crucial year for the international program, as it began to invest in developing its infrastructure so as to expand its operations and ensure its sustainability. with the expiration of the five-year grant from the rockefeller brothers fund, from july onwards the international progam was funded an exceptional inclusion by the international council at moma, a non-profit membership organisation comprised of art patrons and community leaders in the us. the council’s role was established to support the expansion of the programme in terms of developing sponsorship for its own membership and donations from interested individuals and organisations. given the importance assigned to the museum in facilitating international exchange, moma began to develop a framework for protecting the international program from outside influence as the programme expanded. the museum expenditure for exhibitions circulating outside the us grew considerably at this time. in – , moma spent us$ , on exhibitions outside the us; this number was expected to increase by to us$ , for large exhibitions and us$ , for small exhibitions. the international program, from the period of its establishment till the early s was, in effect, responsible for the representation of the us in biennales and other cultural, “art world” events. see international council and international program records, museum of modern art archives. ic/ip iv.a (spreadsheet dated oct. ). the funding and development of recent american prints in color as a travelling exhibition arose out of this institutionalisation of the international program. while there is no direct reference in the moma archives to the exhibition having had a direct effect on subsequent policy and planning, it would not be too far-fetched to assume that moma’s sidelining in the inclusion of recent american prints in color in the first southeast asia art competition exhibition would influence museum policy written only a month later. usis informed the museum that a ap was sponsoring the presentation of recent american prints in color. however, according to the catalogue of the first southeast asia art conference and competition, the exhibition was funded through a variety of sources including political organisations and businesses such as northern motors. “international council and international program records”, i.a. , museum of modern art archives.   press release for recent american prints in color, international council and international program records, museum of modern art archives. ice. f. .   “the art museum’s role in international cultural exchange”, address given may by rene d. harnoncourt, director, museum of modern art, new york, at the convention of the american federation of arts, fort worth, texas, international council and international program records, v.e. , museum of modern art archives.   international council and international program records, i.a. , museum of modern art archives. correspondence between porter mccray and william w. copeland, public affairs officer, usis american embassy manila, dec. . ibid. kalaw-ledesma and guerrero, the struggle for philippine art, p. . southeast of now: directions in contemporary and modern art in asia see “aguilar to be guest speaker at art meet”, manila bulletin, apr. , p. . kalaw-ledesma foundation archive, manila, the philippines. there is no evidence to show that a ap or any of its members were in communication with the international program at the time. mccray had desired a more established institution associated with the state and with an exhibition or educational platform. a ap had neither, and there is no evidence to show that mccray was aware of a ap’s existence prior to his request. usis would not only select and facilitate a ap as a host of the moma exhibition, but also secure it as a sponsor of the exhibition’s costs. usis also assumed the cost of the one-way shipment of the exhibition (each usis branch that would host the exhibition would assume such costs). after the exhibition closed, usis would report to mccray. a ap not only chose to install the exhibition under the frame of the first southeast asia conference and competition, it also sponsored the presentation of recent american prints in color. see “sea art competition”, manila times, apr. . kalaw-ledesma foundation archive. the author attempted to reach out to those who organised the exhibition. however, these attempts were not fruitful. for reinhardt’s and mccray’s correspondence from may to june , refer to “international council and international program records”, i.a. - , museum of modern art archives. for newspaper articles, refer to kalaw-ledesma foundation archive. references to rare prints are made in “sea art festival opens april ”, manila bulletin and “crowds flock to art exhibit”, manila chronicle, may . “crowds flock to art exhibit”, manila chronicle, may . kalaw-ledesma foundation archive. international council and international program records, i.a. , museum of modern art archives. recent american prints in color, post-event report signed by john e reinhardt, sent in correspondence to porter mccray on may . the only other photographs are of the ribbon cutting at the opening event. “sea art show to be held in april”, manila bulletin, mar. . kalaw-ledesma foundation archive. the foreign entries only competed in the category of painting. moslem prayer by abdul mari imao, a sculpture in the foreground, won third prize at the competition and, in the background the beacon by mary pillsbury can be made out. see fig. . international council and international program records, i.a. , museum of modern art archives. correspondence from reinhardt to mccray, may . international council and international program records, i.a. , museum of modern art archives. letter from harold f. schneidman to porter mccray on june . an exceptional inclusion see “the kitchen debate: a transcript” (n.d.), p. . cia freedom of information act electronic reading room, http://w w w.foia.cia.gov/sites/default/files/document_ conversions/ / - - .pdf [accessed apr. ]. in this text, nixon identifies the television as a technology in which the americans excelled, compared to the soviets. seong moy was a chinese-born american painter and printmaker, whose woodcuts are known for subject matter that draws from chinese classics and abstract expressionism. see hiroko ikegami, “introduction: discovering ‘the great migrator’”, in the great migrator: robert rauschenberg and the global rise of american art, hiroko ikegami (cambridge, ma: mit press, ), pp. – . the continuing prestige of paris was also a concern for the usia. an internal study in resolved that the stereotype of americans as cultural barbarians must be counteracted. it lamented that “americans are regarded throughout the world as uncultured boors and crude, materialistic people who have no time for the finer things in life”. the agency wanted to stress that the relationship between american and european art was one of equals, not of filtration: the agency needed to show that american art and french impressionism derived from the same tradition, rather than one being derived from the other. the internal report is reprinted in full in leo bogart, abridged by anges bogart, premises for propaganda: the united states information agency’s operating assumption in the cold war (new york free press, ), pp. – . for more information on the history of printmaking in new york and the us see deborah wye, in artists & prints: masterworks from the museum of modern art, deborah wye, starr figura, judith hecker, raymond livasgani, harper montgomery, jennifer roberts, sarah suzuki and wendy weitman (new york: museum of modern art, ), pp. – ; allan l. edmunds, three decades of american printmaking: the brandywine workshop collection (new york: hudson hills, ); “creative space: fifty years of robert blackburn’s printmaking workshop”, exhibition: creative space: fifty years of robert blackburn’s printmaking workshop, the library of congress, n.d. http://w w w.loc.gov/exhibits/ blackburn/ [accessed apr. ]. in an address on the work of the international council, given may at the convention of the american federation of art in texas, moma director rene d’hanoncourt delineated a key difference between the desire of the international program to demonstrate the great collections of art in america and the desires of host countries of the programme, alluding to the demonstration of american connoisseurship and taste to host countries which requested exhibitions for one-man exhibitions to travel to them instead. many host countries were less interested in group exhibitions that were, in some way, a survey of american southeast of now: directions in contemporary and modern art in asia culture (international council and international program records, iv.b. , museum of modern art archives). manila was no exception: a painting show from the museum of seattle, organised by usis, which focused on the identities of the american painters and sent the painters to manila garnered positive reviews from the local press, and resonated more than recent american prints in color. see “serigraphs exhibition”, manila bulletin, sept. or “serigraphs display opens tomorrow closing sept rd”, manila bulletin, sept. . kalaw-ledesma foundation archive. acquired by moma between and . source: international council and international program records, ice. f. , museum of modern art archives. in addition to founding a ap, purita kalaw-ledesma was a patron of the arts and an art historian. during her high-school education, she studied preparatory drawing at the university of the philippines school of fine arts. in the three years that she was there, she met many modern artists who would later rise to prominence through a ap, including manansala, anita magsaysay-ho, nena saguil and galo b. ocampo. kalaw-ledesma studied at the design department of university of michigan where she begun what she termed the “serious training of a creative artist”. she writes that in her design course she “learned that the foremost consideration was the function of design … the design should follow the function, which in turn should be followed by the form.” this line of thought would influence her ideas about art (purita kalaw- ledesma and jaime c. laya, and life goes on: memoirs of purita kalaw-ledesma [manila: p. kalaw-ledesma, ], pp. – ). kalaw-ledesma was politically connected, and a ap benefited from this. in , by virtue of her appointment to the local unit of unesco, a ap was represented at unesco. her family was close to international diplomatic cultural attachés, specifically the wilson family, who represented the asia foundation in the philippines. kalaw-ledesma also brokered many opportunities for artists, such as developing scholarships with unesco, the agence france-presse bureau in manila and the rockefeller foundation, among others. she was the president of a ap from – and – . throughout a ap’s history, she played an active role fundraising and developing programmes. kalaw-ledesma and guerrero, the struggle for philippine art, p. . writing about the context to which a ap responded, kalaw-ledesma asked: what was the future of the artist of that period? his [sic ] lot was not an enviable one. most painters ended up sign painters, magazine illustrators and teachers, while the sculptures became wood carvers and tombstone makers. there were no galleries, and paintings were not bought … there an exceptional inclusion were “walking galleries” in the form of enterprising painters who went around peddling their works to office employees. this was not a dignified practice. often the painters were subject to the whims of the purchasers and they had to settle for humiliating bargains. creative talent was neither appreciated nor encouraged, and the audience for the fine arts was limited to a few cultural families whose way of life was a carry-over from the spanish tradition who benefited from the classical and humanistic system of education inherited from spain (but with the arrival of the more pragmatic and materialistic americans, the niceties of life were discarded and the emphasis shifted to making money). the artist was looked down upon, he was not considered a “respectable” member of society. among the artists, only the writers were respected. those who pursued a career in painting, sculpture or music were considered lacking in intelligence, “mahi na ang ulo”. as a result of this bourgeois prejudice, the artist became distrustful and suspicious, working only for himself. in time the up school of fine arts became a collegiate school, but the artist continued to be maltreated and often resorted to unethical practices because he knew no better (ibid., p. ). a ap manila bulletin, n.d. kalaw-ledesma foundation archive. kalaw-ledesma and guerrero, the struggle for philippine art, p. . ibid. much more nuanced discourse on the intersections of themes and rendering of subject between conservative artists and the moderns, as indicated, is found in more recent philippine art historical texts. kalaw-ledesma and guerrero, the struggle for philippine art, p. . in addition to the conservatives, the cartoonists separated themselves from a ap. a new criterion for membership meant that recommendation from a member and approval by the board of samples of one’s work was necessary. associate members, who were art lovers and hobbyists who supported the association financially, were also welcome. ibid., p. . ibid. ibid. ibid., pp. – . as a painter he neither sided with the conservatives nor the moderns, though most of his friends were conservative painters. kalaw-ledesma, through her political connections, recommended rodriguez to boyd compton, a rockefeller foundation representative who was touring southeast asia at the time, looking for asian graphic artists to train in the us. rodriguez would become a recipient of a scholarship from the foundation and would study for two years at the pratt southeast of now: directions in contemporary and modern art in asia school of design in new york. kalaw-ledesma and guerrero, the struggle for philippine art, p. . ibid. rodriguez would participate in the first southeast asia art conference and competition with a non-objective case in painting, “in the beginning”. see catalogue of first southeast asia art conference and competition; records of the united states information agency [usia], record group , national archives and records administration, college park, maryland. the paintings themselves were sourced from hundreds of museums and private collections. a ap chooses mgm film as benefit, sept. . kalaw-ledesma foundation archive. it also included the awarding of a special surprise gift to every th guest and the start of an essay contest on the subject “what impressed me most in lust for life”. see “ ‘lust for life’ tonight to finance sea art confab”, manila times, oct. . kalaw-ledesma foundation archive. ricaredo demetillo, “filipinism in art”, c. s– s, n.p., clipping held in kalaw- ledesma foundation archive. ricaredo demetillo, “art in the philippines”, sunday times magazine, june , p. . demetillo, “filipinism in art”. ibid. ibid. it is interesting to note that demetillo goes on to claim that vicente manansala claimed, at a symposium, that filipino art had no roots. this further suggests, to a certain extent, that euro-american modernism was being used and co-opted by a filipino modern art defined in its own terms. in , a ap developed a project with unesco, shell company and the philippine women’s university to conduct in-service training programmes for art teachers in public schools. from onwards, a ap sponsored children’s art competitions and opened children’s art classes run by artists in the association. kalaw-ledesma and guerrero, the struggle for philippine art, p. . ilene a maramag, “art in asia”, sunday times magazine, dec. . kalaw- ledesma foundation archive. as reported in a ap’s art bulletin and the press at the time. “art bulletin”, sept. , kalaw-ledesma foundation archive. see kalaw-ledesma and guerrero, the struggle for philippine art, p. . before attempting to establish its own international platform in the form of the first southeast asia art conference and competition, a ap organised the philippine participation at the second international contemporary art exhibition of in india. in successive years, a ap would organise philippine participation at the spanish–american biennale in cuba in and the participation an exceptional inclusion at the venice biennale. see kalaw-ledesma and guerrero, the struggle for philippine art, pp. – . see catalogue of first southeast asia art conference and competition, rpc [regional production center] manila: first southeast asia art conference— english, – ; master file copies of field publications, – ; entry p ; box ; records of the united states information agency [usia], record group , national archives and records administration, college park, maryland. the delegates included elizabeth warren (australia), ran in-ting (china), irving hsu (china), chen bing sin (china), i hsiung ju (china), gang dhar (india), des alwi (indonesia), tay hooi keat and syed ahamd jamal (malaya) and nguyen thi qua (south vietnam), who represented the political and cultural elite of their respective countries. it is perhaps worthy to note that while australia participated as a delegate, it did not send an accompanying exhibition or contribute artwork. prior to the presentation of recent american prints in color, usis presented the american serigraph exhibition, a -day exhibition co-sponsored by the cultural foundation of the philippines and usis. prepared by the national serigraph society of america and curated by the eminent american serigrapher doris meltzer, it featured serigraphy as a creative art and examples of its industrial uses. the exhibition included a selection of books on serigraphy and examples of commercial silkscreen printing. usis was invested in presenting american printmaking in manila, and a ap featured this show ( – sept.) in its bulletin of nov. before moma’s mccray wrote to usis in manila promoting recent american prints in color. jesus t. peralta, ed., “a ap bulletin”, nov. , kalaw-ledesma foundation archive. ibid. while these resolutions delineate desires to professionalise and maintain standards across the region, there is no evidence that any action resulted from these resolutions. a ap did, however, continue to collaborate within the region. the panel included some of the delegates, including the aforementioned elizabeth warren, ran in-ting, horace smith and constance bernardo. the other prizes were delineated according to genres such as representational, abstract, non-objective, sculpture, etc. see catalogue of first southeast asia art conference and competition, rpc [regional production center] manila: first southeast asia art conference—english, – ; master file copies of field publications, – ; entry p ; box ; records of the united states information agency [usia], record group , national archives building, washington, dc. vincente manansala was an artist who touted the artist’s individual subjectivity in painting. a feature article on him elaborated on these values: as one critic said, “his pictures explode with violence. his brush is brutal.… (manansala) believes that the most important quality in southeast of now: directions in contemporary and modern art in asia painting is emotion and that the best technique counts for nothing if the painting fault to arouse some emotion … he paints ‘on the spur’ … with exuberance and vitality, he gives us facets of the philippine life: churches, street vendors, market scenes, cock-fights, carabaos” (“modernist painter of manila”, cultural news from asia (new delhi: congress for cultural freedom, ), p. . kalaw-ledesma foundation archive. for reference, the congress of cultural freedom was an international anti- communist advocacy group. it was founded in west berlin in and had offices in countries, including new delhi, singapore, australia and the philippines, among others. its activities included organising conferences as well as developing publications. in the philippines it published solidarity, a monthly magazine on culture. the united states central intelligence agency was instrumental in its establishment and funded the group. “south east asian art competition”, cultural news from asia, no. (new delhi: congress for cultural freedom, ), p. . kalaw-ledesma foundation archive. vicente manansala’s give us this day was no different, in that while his work represented the landscapes of the philippines, it did so through abstraction and expressionism that resonated with a “cold war modernism”. the book did not initially include the philippines. d.g.e hall, a history of south-east asia (london: palgrave macmillan, ). supporting such formulations of southeast asia in the arena of foreign policy, american scholarship was also an early proponent of “southeast asia”. southeast asian studies came to be the province of metropolitan academics who were primarily the financial beneficiaries of private and state universities as well as private foundations (in particular the ford and rockefeller foundations) rather than the american state. their studies were heavily concentrated in disciplinary fields different from those of their colonial-era predecessors: in political science, modern history and anthropology as opposed to archaeology, ancient history and classical literature. the first academic programme to pursue such studies was set up at yale university in , followed by a programme at cornell. in the post- war period, the creation of american academic discourse around southeast asia engendered a politicised subjectivity for those who learnt and identified with it. as benedict anderson writes: southeast asia was more real, in the s and s to people in american universities than to anyone else. second, america had in those days the resources to create “southeast asian” libraries which had no parallels anywhere in the world; it also had the scholarship monies to bring over interested students from many different countries of whom an exceptional inclusion far the most important we’re students from the accessible countries of southeast asia itself. the long years of student life … began already (in the s) to create young people who could imagine themselves as southeast asian, as well as indonesians or filipinos or siamese (benedict anderson, “southeast asian studies, southeast asians, southeast asianists”, in the spectre of comparisons: nationalism, southeast asia and the world, benedict anderson (london: verso, ), pp. – . seato included australia, france, new zealand, pakistan (including east pakistan, now bangladesh), the philippines, thailand, the united kingdom and the united states. for more discussion on seato and s southeast asian geopolitics, see claude albert buss, southeast asia and the world today (princeton, nj: van nostrand, ) and contemporary southeast asia (new york: van nostrand reinhold, ); and malcolm h. murfett, cold war southeast asia (singapore: marshall cavendish, ). by definition, this scene did not include countries behind the iron curtain, the art of the eastern bloc or other regions that did not fit a simple east–west division. see hiroko ikegami, “introduction: discovering ‘the great migrator’”, in the great migrator: robert rauschenberg and the global rise of american art, hiroko ikegami (cambridge, ma: mit press, ), p. . from a paper that carlos p. romulo presented at “southeast asia in the coming world”, a conference organised by the school of advanced international studies of the john hopkins university, with support from the rockefeller foundation. invited participants included leaders from american universities, government and business, as well as educators from southeast asia: the president of the university of indonesia, the rector of the university of rangoon, the dean of the faculty of political science of chulalongkorn university, a professor of geography at the university of malaya and a professor of law from the university of hanoi. carlos p. romulo, “the position of southeast asia in the world community”, in southeast asia in the coming world, ed. philip warren thayer (baltimore, md: johns hopkins university press, ), pp. – . ibid. the philippines gained political independence in in destitution, with cities, the economy and agricultural production destroyed, and an outdated defence force. its first president was faced with addressing the immediate security of the state. one of his first acts as president was to create the department of foreign affairs based on a commitment to the united nations, continued ties with the usa and maintenance of friendly relations with neighbours. see buss, contemporary southeast asia, pp. – . at a conference on indonesia held in new delhi in january , he had aired southeast of now: directions in contemporary and modern art in asia the idea of an asian grouping and proposed establishing a small secretariat in new delhi or manila. no consensus was reached. the participating nations also agreed that no political measures be discussed and the conference stayed away from military and anti-communist topics. see buss, contemporary southeast asia, pp. – . buss, southeast asia and the world today, p. . there is no archival evidence to suggest a rigorous engagement with the works on display in recent american prints in color in general. see “south east asian art competition”, cultural news from asia (new delhi: the congress for cultural freedom, ), p. . kalaw-ledesma foundation archive, manila, the philippines. the report states that “the delegates to the conference decided to create a permanent body called the pan-asia art conference. the … change was made to include more countries.” the manila-based usis office’s main goals in and were: the promotion of us policies and actions concerning the philippines; encouragement of greater philippine cooperation with other free asian nations, especially popularising seato and its joint activities; support of information activities directed towards other far east countries; and maintenance of active resistance to internal communist activities primarily through indigenous filipino and chinese organisations. see usis manila to usia washington, field circular no. , policy programs, sept. ; annual usis assessment report, nov. , pp. – ; philippines manila evaluations and effectiveness, far eastern libraries and centers branch, country files, ; and united states national archives and records administration, college park maryland, usa. p ; box ; rg — / / / . see also press releases and personal notes from kalaw-ledesma foundation archive. see catalogue of first southeast asia art conference and competition, rpc [regional production center] manila: first southeast asia art conference— english, – ; master file copies of field publications, – ; entry p ; box ; records of the united states information agency [usia], record group , national archives and records administration, college park, maryland. kalaw-ledesma and guerrero, the struggle for philippine art, pp. – . t.k. sabapathy, “thoughts on an international exhibition on southeast asian contemporary art”, in ideas from asia: contemporary south-east asian art, ed. t.k. sabapathy (exh. cat. singapore: asean coci, ), pp. – . ibid. ibid. kalaw-ledesma and guerrero, the struggle for philippine art, p. . benedict anderson, “census, map, museum”, in imagined communities: reflections on the origin and spread of nationalism (london: verso [ ] ), p. . an exceptional inclusion references anderson, benedict. “census, map, museum”. in imagined communities: reflections on the origin and spread of nationalism, benedict anderson, pp. – . london: verso ( ) . . the spectre of comparisons: nationalism, southeast asia and the world. london: verso, . barnhisel, greg. cold war modernists: art, literature, and american cultural diplomacy. new york: columbia university press, . belmonte, laura a. selling the american way: u.s. propaganda and the cold war. philadelphia, pa: university of pennsylvania press, . buss, claude albert. southeast asia and the world today. princeton, nj: van nostrand, . . contemporary southeast asia. new york: van nostrand reinhold, . edmunds, allan l. three decades of american printmaking: the brandywine workshop collection. new york: hudson hills, . frascina, francis. pollock and after: the critical debate. new york: harper & row, . ikegami, hiroko. “introduction: discovering ‘the great migrator’”. in the great migrator: robert rauschenberg and the global rise of american art, hiroko ikegami, pp. – . cambridge, ma: mit press, . kalaw-ledesma, purita and amadis maría guerrero. the struggle for philippine art. manila: ledesma, . kalaw-ledesma, purita and jaime c. laya. and life goes on: memoirs of purita kalaw-ledesma. manila: p. kalaw-ledesma, . lindsay, jennifer. “festival politics: singapore’s south-east asia cultural festival”. in cultures at war: the cold war and cultural expression in southeast asia, ed. tony day and maya h.t. liem, pp. – . ithaca, ny: southeast asia program publications, . lorente, jesús pedro. the museums of contemporary art: notion and development. farnham: ashgate, . murfett, malcolm h. cold war southeast asia. singapore: marshall cavendish editions, . robson, deirdre a. prestige, profit and pleasure: the market for modern art in new york in the s and s. new york: garland, . romulo, carlos p. “the position of southeast asia in the world community”, in southeast asia in the coming world, ed. philip warren thayer et al. (baltimore, md: johns hopkins university press, ), pp. – . sabapathy, t.k. (ed.). ideas from asia: contemporary south-east asian art. singapore: singapore art museum and asean coci, . southeast of now: directions in contemporary and modern art in asia sandler, irving. abstract expressionism: the triumph of american painting. london: pall mall, . soon, simon. “maps of the sea”. in search: southeast asian art resource channel. jan. . http://w w w.search-art.asia/attachments/files/mapofthesea.pdf [accessed apr. ]. tan tai yong. “the cold war and the making of singapore”. in cold war southeast asia, ed. malcolm h. murfett, pp. – . singapore: marshall cavendish, . thayer, philip warren (ed.). southeast asia in the coming world. baltimore, md: johns hopkins university press, . wye, deborah, starr figura, judith hecker, raymond livasgani, harper montgomery, jennifer roberts, sarah suzuki and wendy weitman. artists & prints: masterworks from the museum of modern art. new york: museum of modern art, . southeast of now vol. no. (march ), pp. – user patronage: the return of the gift in the â•œcrowd societyâ•š user patronage: the return of the gift in the “crowd society” giancarlo f. frosio* mich. st. l. rev. abstract in this work, i discuss the tension between the gift and market economies throughout the history of creativity. for millennia, the production of creative artifacts has lain at this intersection. from the time of pindar and simonides—and until romanticism commenced a process leading to the complete commodification of creative artifacts—market exchange models ran parallel to gift exchange. from roman amicitia to the medieval and renaissance belief that scientia donum dei est, unde vendi non potest, creativity has been repeatedly construed as a gift. again, at the time of the british and french “battle of the booksellers,” the rhetoric of the gift still resounded powerfully from the nebula of the past to shape the constitutional moment of copyright law. the return of gift exchange models has a credible source in the history of creativity. today, after long unchallenged dominance of the market, gift economy is regaining momentum in the digital society. the anthropological and sociological studies of gift exchange, such as marcel mauss’s the gift, served to explain the phenomenon of open source software and hacker communities. later, communities of social trust—such as wikipedia, youtube, and fan-fiction communities—spread virally online through gift exchange models. in peer- and user-generated production, community recognition supersedes economic incentives. user-based creativity thrives on the idea of “playful enjoyment,” rather than economic incentives. anthropologists placed societies on an economic evolutionary scale from gift to commodity exchange, in a continuum from the clan * residential fellow, stanford law school, center for internet and society. s.j.d., duke university school of law, durham, north carolina; ll.m., duke university school of law, durham, north carolina; ll.m., strathclyde university, glasgow, uk; j.d., università cattolica del sacro cuore, milan, italy. the author can be reached at gcfrosio@law.stanford.edu or gcfrosio@gmail.com. while any mistakes are mine only, i wish to thank jennifer granick, mark lemley, jerome reichman, and marco ricolfi for comments and suggestions on earlier drafts of this article. michigan state law review [vol:st.pg] to capitalist system of organization. i suggest that this continuum should now extend to the “crowd society,” which features new modes of social interaction in digital online communities. the networked, open, and mass-collaborative character of the crowd society enhances the proliferativeness of the gift exchange model that lies in what anthropologists and social scientists described as a debt- economy. the exploration of the creative mechanics of online communities put under scrutiny the validity of utilitarian theories of copyright and traditional market economy models. from Émile durkheim and mauss to alain caillé, anti-utilitarian thought designed a new political economy that defines humans as a “cooperative species,” rather than homo economicus. in this context, i look into commons theory, through the lens of elinor ostrom’s work, and its application to modern commons-based peer production with special emphasis on yochai benkler and jerome reichman’s work. in conclusion, i evoke jean baudrillard’s essential question: “will we return, one day, beyond the market economy, to prodigality?” i consider whether the digital revolution that promoted the emergence of the networked information economy is that “revolution of the social organization and of social relations” that might bring about, according to jean baudrillard, “real affluence” through a return to “collective prodigality,” rather than our “productivistic societies, which [. . .] are dominated by scarcity, by the obsession with scarcity characteristic of the market economy.” i argue that a possibility for the reinstatement of baudrillard’s “collective prodigality” might have materialized in the “crowd society” thanks to technological advancement and the emergence of a consumer gift system or “user patronage,” promoting an unrestrained, diffused, and networked discourse between creators and the public through digital crowd-funding. table of contents introduction ............................................................................. i. economics of creativity between market and gift ..... a. pindar and simonides or poetry between market and gift .......................................................................... b. “hermodoros trades in tracts,” circulation of knowledge, and scribal publishing in ancient greece and rome ........................................................... c. maecenas, immortality, and amicitia ............................ the return of the gift in the “crowd society” d. scientia donum dei est, unde vendi non potest.......... e. princely culture, propaganda, and the rise of the “empire of things” ........................................................ f. guez de balzac, gracefulness, and interpersonal relations ......................................................................... g. the rhetoric of the gift shaping the question of literary property ............................................................ ii. propertization and commons .......................................... a. the road to propertization and the digital land grab ................................................................................ b. commons, tragedies, and comedies ............................. c. mass collaboration, decentralization, and openness ........................................................................ iii. the return of the gift ....................................................... a. the return of the gift from clan to crowd society ...... b. baudrillard in cyberspace: taming limitless power with artificial scarcity ........................................ c. user patronage ............................................................... introduction the production of creative artifacts has lain for millennia at the intersection between the gift and market economies. according to the latin brocard scientia donum dei est, unde vendi non potest, culture, knowledge, and creativity are gifts that cannot be sold on the market. this idea has strong roots in ancient and medieval times. in earlier times, the idea intertwined with a culture of kinship and friendship. later, community appurtenance and its religious underpinnings represented the stronghold of the construction of creativity as a gift. although any categorization is problematic, within the multiplicity of social and cultural settings, we can roughly identify three economic models in the production of creative artifacts: gift exchange, patronage or gift seeking immediate return, . please note that, given the scope and length of this article, it will be nearly impossible to provide a proper account of the innumerable nuances emerging from the review of a few thousand years of history of creativity. there may be a risk to wrap together several things that ought to be separated and treat as a gift economy what is in fact not. in particular, pure gift economy and post-archaic patronage models should not be lumped together. see generally, on patronage, s.n. eisenstadt & l. roniger, patrons, clients and friends: interpersonal relations and the structure of trust in society (jack goody & geoffrey hawthorn eds., ) (discussing case studies of patronage ranging from the michigan state law review [vol:st.pg] and market exchange. throughout history, these models overlapped. pure gift exchange models turned into more hierarchical forms of patronage, spanning from traditional decentralized aristocratic patronage, to centralized forms of state and royal patronage, to forms of participatory or planned economy. eventually, the market took over almost entirely by the beginning of the nineteenth century. the tension between market and gift economy will hardly go away. today, this tension is felt with increasing intensity due to recent trends of enclosure of knowledge in the digital environment. however, the resurgence of gift exchange models in the networked information economy also suggests that the notion of creativity as a gift may still play a determinant role. as steven hatcher noted, [w]hat is earth shattering about ugc [user-generated content] from this perspective is that because it is produced by literally millions of ordinary people, apparently without any expectation of economic gain, the very rationale for providing copyright protection to this growing body of creators and their works is called into question. again, mark lemley explained: [c]reativity is flourishing on the internet as never before despite the absence of effective ip enforcement. that is a problem for ip theory, which may not be the main driver of creativity in a world where creation, reproduction, and distribution are cheap. that is increasingly the world in which we will live. in peer- and user-generated production, community recognition supersedes economic incentives. the exploration of the creative mechanics of online communities put under scrutiny the validity of utilitarian theories of copyright. in general, according to an emerging anti-utilitarian perspective, which builds on marcel mauss’s gift studies, “[h]uman beings’ first desire is to be recognized and valued as givers.” in this article, i consider whether the digital revolution that promoted the emergence of the networked information economy is mediterranean to the near and far east and latin america); patronage in ancient society - (andrew wallace-hadrill ed., routledge ). . steven a. hetcher, hume’s penguin, or, yochai benkler and the nature of peer production, vand. j. ent. & tech. l. , ( ). . see mark a. lemley, ip in a world without scarcity, n.y.u. l. rev. , ( ). . see marcel mauss, the gift: the form and reason for exchange in archaic societies (routledge ) ( ). . alain caillÉ, revue du mauss, anti-utilitarianism, economics and the gift-paradigm (n.d.), http://www.revuedumauss.com.fr/media/acstake.pdf. the return of the gift in the “crowd society” that “revolution of the social organization and of social relations” that might bring about, according to jean baudrillard, “real affluence” through a return to “collective ‘improvidence’ and ‘prodigality,’” rather than our “productivistic societies which . . . are dominated by scarcity, by the obsession with scarcity characteristic of the market economy.” therefore, taking baudrillard to cyberspace, i evoke his essential question: “will we return, one day, beyond the market economy, to prodigality?” in fact, the return of the gift has a credible source in the history of creativity. in the following pages, i will review the tension between gift economy and market economy in the history of creativity in order to make a prediction on baudrillard’s question and the sustainability of modern creativity models based on collaboration, peer production, and gift exchange. i. economics of creativity between market and gift a. pindar and simonides or poetry between market and gift for a very long time, models of gift exchange were commonplace in greek protoeconomic relationship. marcel mauss argued that economic relationships evolved from gift to commodity exchange. gift exchange dominated the so-called clan society, such as the greek aristocratic society, while the modern class society made private property and commodity the norm. the social function and role of authors evolved with social changes together with new forms of economic support for creativity. the heroic age of the achaeans of the twelfth century b.c. saw the emergence of artists and poets related to the entourage of kings and nobles. the production of creative artifacts in ancient greece generally enjoyed a gift economy model up to the fifth century b.c. homer, for example, . see jean baudrillard, the consumer society: myths and structures - (mike featherstone ed., sage publ. ) ( ). . id. at . . see infra parts i-ii. . see infra part iii. . see generally ian morris, gift and commodity in archaic greece, man ( ). . see mauss, supra note , at - . . see c.a. gregory, gifts and commodities ( ). . see arnold hauser, the social history of art - (stanley godman trans., routledge d ed. ) ( ). michigan state law review [vol:st.pg] “was never said to charge for his poems.” instead, he is said to have given them away as a gift at least once. gift exchange was framed along with the rules of hospitality of the heroic age. gift exchange strengthened the personal bonds of ancient kinship by preserving a situation of everlasting and reciprocal indebtedness. a new authorial sensitivity towards compensation and remuneration emerged quickly, together with the slow demise of the clan society and the advent of the greek tyrants. patronage of the arts rose to a new dimension. courts became centers of creativity as part of a precise political design. the new social conditions changed the relationship between poet and patron. with the tyrants’ patronage, a discourse about the authors’ rewards came about. the first mention of payment of a poet was made in reference to pindar and simonides, who—it is said—were paid by patrons for their poems. pindar and simonides exemplify the tension that characterized authorship through antiquity. although the two authors were contemporaries, pindar still belonged to the old tradition of courtly poets of the heroic age. he was unquestionably a professional writer; however, he wrote for the exclusive circles of his fellow nobles. pindar referred to himself as ξένος, the homeric guest–friend who was protected and offered gifts according to the rule of hospitality in the heroic age. though he might have desired a reward, he praised himself with an amateurish flavor. pindar have given the impression that he would have happily worked without . barbara graziosi, inventing homer: the early reception epic (r.l. hunter et al. eds., ). . see id. at , - . . see morris, supra , at - . . see hauser, supra note , at . . see id. . see hauser, supra note , at ; see also leonard woodbury, pindar and the mercenary muse: isthm. . - , transactions & procs. am. philological ass’n. , n. ( ) (noting that earlier poets were of course rewarded or compensated for their poems, but we do not hear before simonides of poets who sold their verses for a price). as per the reward of earlier poets, woodbury mentions odysseus, in the odyssey . - , sending a piece of meat to the bard, demodocus; diogenes laertius reporting that public performances of the poet xenophanes received a treatment comparable to that of athletic victors; and herodotus telling that the poet arion made a fortune in sicily. id. . see hauser, supra note , at - . . see woodbury, supra note , at - . the return of the gift in the “crowd society” compensation, simply for his own and his fellow nobles’ pleasure. in one of his victory odes, pindar recited: to a poet’s mind the gift is slight, to speak a kind word for unnumbered toils, and build for all to share a monument of beauty. simonides, instead, embodied the emergence of a trend toward literary professionalism. he wrote for a definite sum of money and for anyone who was willing to pay him. his greediness was proverbial. in peace, a play by aristophanes, one of the characters says of simonides: “[h]e would put to sea on a hurdle to gain an obolus.” however, this uncovered interest in obtaining a profit from creativity may have had a negative connotation, at least for a period. pindar expressed his criticism in a passage of one of his odes: “[t]he muse was then not yet fond of profit, and did not work for hire; nor were the sweet, soft-voiced songs of honey-speaking terpsichore for sale, their faces silvered over.” besides the probable competition between the two poets that may have driven pindar’s inspiration, the passage expressed a more profound cultural contrast. pindar’s ode criticized the commodification of poetry from a gift exchange between friends into an art whose products were to be sold in the marketplace. b. “hermodoros trades in tracts,” circulation of knowledge, and scribal publishing in ancient greece and rome in ancient greece, and most pre-modern civilizations, knowledge and information seem not to have been regarded as an . cf. id. at (noting also that “[p]oet and patron, in the pindaric world, are bound together by traditional ties of religion, family, and society, and the commercial value of their exchange of goods and services has relatively small importance”). . pindar, isthmian i, in the odes of pindar , (geoffrey s. conway trans., ). . aristophanes, peace (digireads.com publ’g ) ( ). . pindar, isthmian ii, in greek musical writings , - (andrew barker ed., ); see also woodbury, supra note , at . . woodbury, supra note , at . . see anne carson, economy of the unlost: reading simonides of keos with paul celan - ( ) (comparing simonides’s greed with pindar’s gift exchange approach to creativity); woodbury, supra note , at - (noting simonides’s market approach to poetry). michigan state law review [vol:st.pg] ownable commodity. in this respect, the example of the sophists’ teaching activities may be instructive. they were perhaps the first group teaching in exchange for a reward, and many objected to the fact that they took fees for their teachings. in any event, even in the case of the sophists, no ownership was likely attached to the subject of their teachings. their audiences wrote a large number of manuals reporting their teachings, which others then copied. the sophists did not report any objection to this practice. conversely, they may have regarded these manuals as a form of publicity that expanded their reputation and perhaps increased the reward that they may have earned through their freelance teaching activities. again, a well-known story related to plato’s teachings seems to stress the ancient notion that knowledge was not to be treated as an ownable commodity. undoubtedly, plato taught first the subjects of his writings to a small circle of students. plato’s hearers appear to have first brought the material before the public by circulating the written reports of his lectures. hermodoros of syracuse, a student of plato, is reported to have made a trade of the sale of plato’s lectures after preparing written reports of his instructor’s talks. it seems likely that plato’s teachings were gifts to his hearers. in contrast, hermodoros carried the notebooks of plato off to sicily and secured from their sales certain profits. hermodoros’ conduct was highly . see christopher may & susan k. sell, intellectual property rights: a critical history ( ); see also carla hesse, the rise of intellectual property, b.c.–a.d. : an idea in the balance, daedalus , - ( ) (noting that “[a]ncient greeks did not think of knowledge as something that could be owned or sold,” and adding that “[a] tour of the . . . great civilizations of the pre-modern world—chinese, islamic, jewish, and christian— reveals a striking absence of any notions of human ownership of ideas or their expressions”). . see g.b. kerferd, the sophistic movement ( ); see also david l. blank, socratics versus sophists on payment for teaching, classical antiquity , - ( ) (discussing the sophistic model as opposed to the socratic one). . see salathiel c. masterson, copyright: history and development, cal. l. rev. , ( ) (noting that protagoras was the first who received pay for his lessons; however, “[h]is remunerative works [are] . . . an example of property produced from an intellectual product, but not yet of property resulting from the production of a work of literature”). . may & sell, supra note , at . . see id. . see john dillon, the heirs of plato: a study of the old academy ( - b.c.) - ( ). . see jørgen mejer, the platonic corpus in antiquity, in proceedings of the danish institute at athens iv, at n. (jonas eiring & jørgen mejer eds., the return of the gift in the “crowd society” condemned in the ancient world. the moral contemptibility of hermodoros’ activity lay in distributing plato’s works for a material gain. the misconduct of hermodoros earned such a widespread contempt to become proverbial—‘hermodoros trades in tracts’—as reported also by cicero in a famous letter to atticus. for a very long period, works of literature were mainly recited or orally presented. hearers, then, may have textualized the subject of the public presentation or declamation. alternatively, at least in the beginning, the admirers of a poet or a philosopher supplied themselves with his work through their own handiwork, or that of their slaves, if educated enough, by copying the original manuscript. demosthenes, for example, is reported to have transcribed the eight books of the history of the peloponnesian war of thucydides eight times. according to others, theompopus and xenophon cared for the transcription, and other admiring readers surely contributed to the circulation of the historical accounts of thucydides. later, slaves increasingly took up the work of copying, and teams of copyists were perhaps employed. by the end of the fifth century b.c., booksellers had a special place at the market reserved for books trade, as reported by the comic poets nicophon and eupolis. however, “it was . . . not until the time of alexander the great that the business of [book]making and selling” became more systematized and grew in importance. at the same time, there was a ) (citing philodemus, index academicorum - ( - b.c. circa)); see also william mure, a critical history of the language and literature of ancient greece (longman et al. eds., d ed. ). . see katharina de la durantaye, the origins of the protection of literary authorship in ancient rome, b.u. int’l l.j. , - ( ). . marcus tullius cicero, cicero’s letters to atticus - (d.r. shackleton bailey trans., penguin books ) (june -july , a.d.). . see geo. haven putnam, authors and their public in ancient times: a sketch of literary conditions and of the relations with the public of literary producers, from the earliest times to the fall of the roman empire ( d ed. ) ( ). . see id. . id. at . . william v. harris, ancient literacy n. (harvard univ. press ) ( ) (reporting that a trade in books is first mentioned by eupolis in the s or s, the dramatists aristomenes and nicophon referred to book-selling in b.c. circa, and by the s an inner-city trade in books had become rather common). additionally, plato’s apology of socrates mentions that anyone could buy the books of anaxagoras for a drachma in the market. id. . putnam, supra note , at . michigan state law review [vol:st.pg] corresponding decrease in prices, which had remained prohibitive up to that point. the center of greek culture shifted to alexandria after the roman conquest of greece. the market for books underwent a considerable change in alexandria. king ptolemy largely extended the production of copies of literary works and gathered most existing works from greece and asia minor to alexandria. meanwhile, hordes of scribes moved to alexandria, soon to become the first booksellers or publishers. the labor of copyists was later organized in an entrepreneurial form. the production of copies further expanded and a rudimentary publishing industry was born. servi literati—slaves educated in latin and greek and trained as scribes— became a very valuable commodity that constituted the backbone of the scriptoria set up by the scribal publishers. the alexandrian publishing model was later exported to rome. by the late first century a.d. the hub of literary activity was transferred to rome, though alexandria continued to play a very relevant role up to the middle of the third century a.d. at this time in rome, alexandria, and other literary centers of the later classical world, a system of compensation to authors gradually came into existence. although fragmentary and inconclusive, the evidence of payments made to authors that can be traced in the roman literature, especially in the augustan age, are certainly more solid than the scattered references in the writings of the greek authors. in any event, payments received by roman authors from publishers were not attached to any exclusive right. roman authors, in fact, appeared to be happy with maximum distribution. the reaction of pliny the younger upon discovering that his work was being sold in lyon . see id. . id. at - ; masterson, supra note , at . . see putnam, supra note , at . . id. at - . . id. at . . id. . id. at - (discussing in some detail use, education, and typologies of servi literati in rome); see also harold c. streibich, the moral right of ownership to intellectual property part i—from the beginning to the age of printing, mem. st. u. l. rev. , ( ). . see strabo, book xiii: asia, in the geography of strabo (h.c. hamilton & w. falconer trans., ), http://www.strabo.ca/electronic.html. see generally felix reichmann, the book trade at the time of the roman empire, libr. q. ( ). . see de la durantaye, supra note , at . . see id. at . the return of the gift in the “crowd society” seems to confirm this point: “i did not think there were booksellers at lyons, and was all the more pleased to learn from your letter that my works have a ready sale there. i am rejoiced that such favour as they have acquired in town, continues to attend them abroad.” from the excitement of pliny, it seems plausible to think that, as a rule, authors were not offended by discovering about independent—and unauthorized—editions of their works; in fact, they may have been welcomed by the authors. authors’ payments, however, remained attached to the fact that the scribal publishers may have had an interest in purchasing the original manuscript both because they wished to be the first to circulate the work and wanted the integrity of the manuscript to be guaranteed. special editions—including autographed manuscripts or manuscripts adorned with a special seal of quality called sphragis—may have been part of the deal, as reported by seneca in connection with an agreement between cicero and the librarius dorus. the information on the terms of the business relations of the roman authors with their publishers is very fragmentary. additionally, these terms and conditions were unconsolidated and uncertain at best, for they did not rely on any legal provisions. in the end, the compensation enjoyed by the authors may have resembled more a form of patronage than any type of publishing contract. as one historian noted: such compensation, doubtless at best but inconsiderable as it did not depend upon any legal right on the part of either author or publishers, must have varied very greatly according to the personality of the writer, the nature of the work, and the time and place of its production. in late republican and imperial rome, the relationship between publishers and authors may also have resembled more of a trusted friendship than a professional association. atticus, for example, the renowned publisher of cicero, was a patron of literature, rather than a businessman. . pliny (the younger), book ix: to geminus, in the letters of the younger pliny (john delaware lewis trans., ) ( - a.d. circa). . see de la durantaye, supra note , at , . . see id. at - . . see lucius annaeus seneca, de beneficiis: book vii, in seneca: moral essays , (john w. basore trans., ) ( - a.d. circa); see also de la durantaye, supra note , at - . . putnam, supra note , at xi-xii. . see generally alice hill byrne, titus pomponius atticus: chapters of a biography ( ). michigan state law review [vol:st.pg] c. maecenas, immortality, and amicitia the market was tangential in the life of roman authors. they sought fame and reputation, rather than profit. essentially, they sought immortality through their creations. in roman eyes, creativity became an instrument to defy death and live on in the minds of the living. horace’s immortal verses explained this quest for immortality: i have completed a monument more lasting than brass, and more sublime than the regal elevation of pyramids, which neither the wasting shower, the unavailing north wind, nor an innumerable succession of years, and the flight of seasons, shall be able to demolish. i shall not wholly die; but a great part of me shall escape libitina [the goddess who presided over funerals]. i shall continually be renewed in the praises of posterity, as long as the priest shall ascend the capitol with the silent [vestal] virgin. ovid and martial stressed the same point multiple times. the prospect of eternal glory was also a substantial stimulus for patronage of art. patrons were seeking immortality through celebration and dedication in the verses of their protégés. however, martial’s epigrams manifested a tension between market and gift, monetary reward, reputation, and immortality in roman literary tradition. martial was a very active figure as an author marketing his own creations. together with the invention of the word plagiarism, we also owe to martial the first form of book advertising. at the beginning of his first book of epigrams, martial tells the readers to go look for one secundus behind the temple of peace if they want to have his latest success: you who are anxious that my books should be with you everywhere, and desire to have them as companions on a long journey, buy a copy of which the parchment leaves are compressed into a small compass. bestow book- cases upon large volumes; one hand will hold me. but that you may not be ignorant where i am to be bought, and wander in uncertainty over the whole town, you shall, under my guidance, be sure of obtaining me. seek . see de la durantaye, supra note , at - . . quintus horatius flaccus, ode xxx, in the works of horace (c. smart trans., ) (footnote omitted) ( - b.c. circa). . see, e.g., publius ovidius naso, metamorphoses: book xv, at ll. - (forgotten books ) ( ) ( a.d. circa); marcus valerius martialis, epigrams: book i, in the epigrams of martial , ( ) (rome, - a.d. circa). . see gordon williams, phases in political patronage of literature in rome, in literary and artistic patronage in ancient rome (barbara k. gold ed., ). . see martialis, supra note , at . the return of the gift in the “crowd society” secundus, the freedman of the learned lucensis, behind the temple of peace and the forum of pallas. by defining his poetry as material commodities available for purchase or theft, martial commodifies it as an article of the marketplace. in this respect, as simonides earlier, martial was a proto-modern author. however, martial’s commodification of the book was in sharp opposition to the augustan emphasis on poetic immortality, so that “[i]n roman’s view, martial’s materiality contrasts the tangible book with incorporeal song, the trendy notoriety of the present with the eternal glory of the future.” the two models reflected also a different system of valuation. the market could economically quantify the book as a material object. in contrast, the incorporeal augustan song derived his value from the audience aesthetic approval and patronage support. in this respect, martial’s authorship model contrasted patronage’s gift economy. as with pindar earlier, the “augustan poets conventionally portray these transactions in a discourse of amicitia and gift exchange rather than mercenary accounting.” roman literary life was dominated by the conception of the great domus open to literary friends and the figure of the rich man surrounded by his amici. as in the case of gaius cilnius maecenas—the quintessential dominus who supported young artists and writers—the dominus is a host, critic, prompter, and provider. the relationship between the dominus and the artists is framed within the context of the institution of amicitia—or friendship. horace described the house of maecenas as a community of friends: “[t]here’s no place so free [f]rom intrigue as maecenas’, no place so thoroughly honest. it just doesn’t matter to them whether someone is richer [o]r smarter than somebody else. everyone gets along.” as a result of the camaraderie of roman literary circles, the roman discourse of amicitia made monetary reward a rare . id. at . . see j. mira seo, plagiarism and poetic identity in martial, am. j. philology , ( ). . id. . id. . see peter white, amicitia and the profession of poetry in early imperial rome, j. roman stud. , ( ); see also david konstan, patrons and friends, classical philology , ( ) (discussing the concept of roman friendship in the literary field generally). . quintus horatius flaccus, satires: book i, in the satires and epistles of horace , (smith palmer bovie trans., ) ( - b.c. circa). michigan state law review [vol:st.pg] occurrence for literary authors. although the writing of many latin poems may have been prompted by special occasions, and on direct or indirect call of the dominus and amicus, a modern commission of work was out of question. modern forms of commission were to be excluded principally for the social stigma that the work for hire carried in roman society. in this respect, poets differentiated themselves from the sculptors and the painters that worked for a reward and made no attempt to hide it. additionally, recipients rarely offered a reward freely, to the utter disappointment of martial. “outright gifts of money [we]re unusual,” casual, and sporadic. nevertheless, besides cash gifts, many benefits could have resulted to a roman artist from the attachment to a wealthy friend, or to several friends. these included inheritances and bequests, loans at low or no interests, gifts in the form of land or a house, comfortable lodging in the town houses or the villas of the dominus, arrangements to hold sinecures and other desirable appointments, and even advantageous marriages. roman authors appeared to trust the indirect gain that could be achieved through enhanced reputation more than direct profit from the sale of books. in the ars poetica, horace mentioned that a famous book of his, read across the mediterranean, brought him long-lasting fame, but gained money for the publisher sosii. martial appears to have received from the publishers some lump sum for each of his several works, generally a sum too small to make him happy. martial lamented that, though extremely wide, the circulation of his books did not make him rich: it is not the idle people of the city only that delight in my muse, nor is it alone to listless ears that these verses are addressed, but my book is thumbed amid getic frosts, near martial standards, by the stern centurion; . see id. at . . see id. at . . see hauser, supra note , at - . . id. at . . see white, supra note , at . . id. at (noting that the poets could not have counted on those gifts as a steady income; in fact, most of the poets were knights and did not depend on the munificence of their friends as primary income). . id. at - . . quintus horatius flaccus, the art of poerty, in the works of horace, supra note , at , ( b.c. circa). . see marcus valerius martialis, epigrams: book xi, in the epigrams of martial, supra note , at , ; see also masterson, supra note , at . the return of the gift in the “crowd society” and even britain is said to sing my verses. yet of what advantage is it to me? my purse benefits nought by my reputation. what immortal pages could i not have written and what wars could i not have sung to the pierian trumpet, if, when the kind deities gave a second augustus to the earth, they had likewise given to thee, o rome, a second mæcenas. even martial, the most market oriented of the latin authors, sought a powerful patron to redress his misfortunes, rather than direct profits from the sale of his books. the most common tool to answer martial’s lamentation, propel circulation of an author’s work, and augment the author’s material wealth was indeed dedication. since the republican times, roman authors traditionally dedicated their works to friends or literary models. the practice of dedications eventually evolved in the area of literary patronage. if initially, dedications were only intended to help an author find favor and advantage, later authors openly sought monetary gifts and rewards from the dedicatee. perhaps patronage through dedication replaced contractual relationships between authors and scribal publishers in the market for books. under this model, the patron to whom the work was dedicated saw to the circulation of the author’s work through either his own slaves or an arrangement with a scribal publisher. as martial nicely put it, the better the patron, the better the edition of the book: to whom, my little book, do you wish me to dedicate you? make haste to choose a patron, lest, being hurried off into a murky kitchen, you cover tunnies with your wet leaves, or become a wrapper for incense and pepper. is it into faustinus’ bosom that you flee? you have chosen wisely: you may now make your way perfumed with oil of cedar, and, decorated with ornaments at both ends, luxuriate in all the glory of painted bosses; delicate purple may cover you, and your title proudly blaze in scarlet. with him for your patron, fear not even probus. moreover, the connection with the household of a dominus was an extraordinary opportunity to promote an author’s work. the great houses of rome were busy places all year. in the large salons of the roman domus and villas, visitors gathered for errands and celebrations. the reputation of a young artist could be made or . martialis, supra note , at (footnote omitted). . see de la durantaye, supra note , at - (discussing in some detail the practice of dedication from the republican to the imperial age). . id. at . . id. . marcus valerius martialis, epigrams: book ii, in the epigrams of martial, supra note , at , . . see white, supra note , at - . michigan state law review [vol:st.pg] destroyed in few meetings. the protection of a powerful man and his circle of amici against the bad publicity of jealous or malignant critics was a priceless benefit, as martial points out once again: if thou wishest to be approved by attic ears, i exhort and advise thee, my little book, to please the learned apollinaris. no one is more acute than he, or more learned, nor is any one more candid or more indulgent. if he shall receive thee to his heart, and repeat thee with his lips, thou wilt neither have to dread the sneers of the malignant, nor wilt thou furnish parchment coverings for anchovies. if he shall condemn thee, thou mayst run forthwith to the stalls of the salt-meat sellers, to have thy back scribbled upon by their boys. powerful and wealthy men with large followings were uniquely placed to promote the work of an author. the business of promotion and circulation of an author’s work was undertaken by the circle of amici, instead of the booksellers. through the amici’s connections, the author found his readership. the amici praised and circulated the books, promoted recitations, and introduced the author’s work to other useful friends. in an epigram addressed to his book, martial exclaimed before sending his seventh book of epigrams to the local magnate in the umbrian town of sarsina: “oh, what renown is in store for me! what glory! what numbers of admirers! you will be celebrated at feasts, at the bar, in the temples, the streets, the porticoes, the shops. you are sent to one, but you will be read by all.” d. scientia donum dei est, unde vendi non potest in the sixth century a.d., an attempt to protect the open gift of knowledge from private enclosure has been reported to have precipitated a civil war. during a visit to his ancient master, abbot finnian, the irish saint columba decided to make a copy of the . marcus valerius martialis, epigrams: book iv, in the epigrams of martial, supra note , at , . . see white, supra note , at . . marcus valerius martialis, epigrams: book vii, in the epigrams of martial, supra note , at , . . see generally, reporting the anecdote, count de montalembert, saint columba: apostle of caledonia - ( ); edward alexander cooke, life and work of saint columba - ( ); streibich, supra note , at - ; masterson, supra note , at - . the return of the gift in the “crowd society” abbot’s psalter. apparently, finnian discovered saint columba clandestinely at work and demanded the return of the copy made. finnian contended that a copy made without permission belonged to the owner of the original. saint columba refused to surrender the copy and the question was demanded to the king of tara, one diarmid or dermot. the king decided in favor of finnian by noting that “[t]o every book belongs its son-book (or copy), as to every cow belongs her calf.” angered with the decision, columba started a rebellion that ended with the defeat of the king. for once, copyright expansionism did not pay off. the copied manuscript, now on display in the museum of the royal irish academy, was later known as the catach; or fighter; or book of battle. together with its silver case, the book was carried in battle by the o’donnell clan to ensure victory as late as the end of the fifteenth century. saint columba fought a lifelong battle for the right of transcribing other manuscripts. perhaps his quest for open access to others’ works and manuscripts played some role in the later capacity of monks to freely copy books and preserve ancient knowledge to future generations. st. columba’s strenuous defense of open access to knowledge intertwined with the medieval belief that learning was to come as a gift. “[k]nowledge is a gift of god and should not be sold,” a medieval proverb rang. the proverb was actually an interpolation into canon law doctrine of a passage of the book of matthew in which jesus exhorted the disciples to treat the knowledge they have received from him as a gift to be shared. in that passage, jesus is recorded as saying: “freely ye have received, freely give.” again, according to marie de france, the gift of knowledge was to be left open to seed and burst into flower. in the prologue of her tales, marie de france described the productive web of reciprocations of knowledge exchange by stating: . in fact, the psalms of finnian were most like a copy of jerome’s psalter made in rome by the abbot. see june s. sawyers, praying with celtic saints, prophets, martyrs, and poets ( ). . montalembert, supra note , at . . id. . id. . cooke, supra note , at . . id. at . . id. at n. . . see gaines post, kimon giocarinis & richard kay, the medieval heritage of a humanistic ideal: ‘scientia donum dei est, unde vendi non potest,’ traditio , ( ). . hesse, supra note , at (citing matthew : ). michigan state law review [vol:st.pg] to whom god has given science and the eloquence of good speech must not be silent or conceal it but willingly show it. when a great good is heard by many then it begins to seed and when it is praised by many then it bursts into flower. the medieval canon law doctrine reinforced the greek ideal embedded in the proverbial dictum “hermodoros trades in tracts.” in medieval time, the greek ideal was applied for a long time to storytellers, the sale of notarial and scribal productions, or professors, who were to take no fees for their teachings. as late as the sixteenth century, students at paris and montpellier used to present gifts, such as banquets, fruits, sweets, and wine, to their professors after examinations and disputations. the humanist ideal scientia donum dei est, unde vendi non potest was also reflected in the reproduction of manuscripts, at least within university settings. after universities took over the role of the monasteries beginning in the twelfth century, they maintained a strict open-access policy towards intellectual resources. the university regulations excluded property rights over any written words by providing that manuscript dealers could not refuse to loan a copy to a member of the university even though the loan was requested for producing copies. again, the so-called pecia system . natalie zemon davis, beyond the market: books as gifts in sixteenth- century france, transactions of the royal hist. soc’y , ( ) (citing marie de france, les lais de marie de france, at prologue ll. - (jean rychner ed., )); see also laurie a. finke & martin b. shichtman, magical mistress tour: patronage, intellectual property, and the dissemination of wealth in the lais of marie de france, signs , ( ) (discussing claims for literary credit in marie de france). . see davis, supra note , at (noting, however, in the text of luke that “the labourer is worthy of his hire . . . was finally used to justify some payments” for the teachers and scribes). . id. at - ; see post, giocarinis & kay, supra note . . see may & sell, supra note , at - ; hauser, supra note , at . . see may & sell, supra note , at ; masterson, supra note at - . but see mark rose, authors and owners: the invention of copyright ( ) (citing geo. haven putnam, books and their makers during the middle ages - (hillary house ) ( - ) (noting that “[i]n the middle ages the owner of a manuscript was understood to possess the right to grant permission to copy it, and this was a right that could be exploited, as it was, for the return of the gift in the “crowd society” was an example of a primitive peer-to-peer network, in which the copying of manuscripts was perceived as a meritorious and godly act. the pecia system was originally developed in european universities as a regulated procedure to reproduce books and to keep their prices as low as possible. the peciae were sections into which the books were broken and then loaned, usually for a small fee, to be copied by students. the distribution of the peciae among a large number of students working simultaneously permitted completion of the copies in a shorter amount of time than a copier working alone would have required. even after the emergence of commercial scriptoria, university authorities recognized that knowledge was a gift of god that should not be sold too dearly by implementing a careful regulation of the rates for the rental and sale of manuscripts. the practice of supplementing the fixed prices with presents, rather than money, attested to the continued vitality of gift exchange mechanisms, if those prices were thought to be too low. a long-lasting tradition of gift exchange emerges in the medieval mechanics of book distribution and circulation. traditionally, medieval manuscripts included an illumination of the author on bended knee presenting the book to a patron. the illuminations attested to a tradition of public gift in the exchange of books. as reported by natalie zemon davis, gift exchange was the dominant modality of the initial diffusion of late-medieval writings. the author used to send the work to a powerful and wealthy person who then sent back a gift, enhanced the lustre of the work through his reputation, and defended the work against example, by those monasteries that regularly charge a fee for permission to copy one of their books”). . see, e.g., graham pollard, the pecia system in the medieval universities, in medieval scribes, manuscripts & libraries: essays presented to n.r. ker , - (m.b. parkes & andrew g. watson eds., ); alexander gieysztor, management and resources, in a history of the university in europe: universities in the middle ages - (hilde de ridder-symoens ed., ); cf. davis, supra note , at . . id. . see id. at - . . see id. . see davis, supra note , at . . id. . see, e.g., karl julius holzknecht, literary patronage in the middle ages - (octagon books, inc. ) ( ); see also clark hulse, the rule of art: literature and painting in the renaissance ( ). . see davis, supra note , at . michigan state law review [vol:st.pg] criticism, if necessary. dedications within the tradition of gift exchange still played a relevant role after the advent of the printed book, though the character of the dedicated gift changed. the language and iconography of deference was less marked. the reciprocations of gifts initially overshadowed the commercial relations between authors and publishers. manuscript and printed copy became the object of the gift reciprocation, strengthening a collaboration that could provide the publishers with new manuscripts in the future. to this end, the french publisher guillaume rouillé wrote to the literary domenichi: “accept this book with the same good heart in which you sent it. you presented it to me in a beautiful script and with pictures made by hand. i return it to you printed in beautiful characters and with engraved illustrations. think of me . . . as your friend and brother.” e. princely culture, propaganda, and the rise of the “empire of things” the tension between market and gift economy acquired special momentum in the renaissance. on one side, renaissance creativity is an idealistic public gift to be framed within the values of magnificence and magnanimity as the outcome of the special relationship between artist and patron. however, renaissance patronage is also a form of consumption that set the emergence of a new consumerist market. renaissance patronage ranged from ecclesiastical to lay and public to private. guilds, religious fraternities, or committees in republican states, such as venice, are well-known examples of corporate patrons. princely patronage lay at the intersection between public and private patronage. at court, kings or princes may have taken artists, writers, and musicians into their service on a . id. . id. at - . . see ruth mortimer, a portrait of the author in sixteenth- century france ( ) (including illuminations depicting the donor striding, book in hand, up to a seated recipient, rather than kneeling). . natalie zemon davis, the gift in sixteenth-century france ( ). . see peter burke, the italian renaissance: culture and society in italy - (princeton univ. press rev. d ed. ) ( ). . id. at - (noting that “[t]he importance of organizations like these in the history of art is that they made possible the participation in patronage of people who did not have the money to commission works individually”). the return of the gift in the “crowd society” permanent basis or, alternatively, the artist may have worked on commission—keeping a shop, awaiting for the patrons’ call, and seeking his reward. together with these dominant so-called household and made-to-measure systems, however, a market system was emerging, in which the artist or writer tried to sell something “ready-made” directly to the public. friendship and personal relations played an important role, as art patronage was part of a larger patron–client system. within the framework of these relationships, gift exchange may have had a role well into the renaissance. for example, baccio bandinelli, a sixteenth-century tuscan artist, introduced himself to the brothers giovanni and giuliano de’medici by offering them a gift and receiving a commission in return. commissions from patrons, however, were generally obtained by self-promotion, through intermediaries, or occasionally through formal competitions, such as in the case of the baptistery doors in florence. especially competitive environments, such as florence, boosted artistic innovation by forcing artists to capture the patrons’ attention by devising new and imaginative solutions to their problems. “vasari [reported] that michelangelo’s battle of cascina was done ‘in competition’ with leonardo’s battle of anghiari.” the finally unfinished works were commissioned in - for the walls of the great hall of the palazzo vecchio, where the two . id. at , - ; guido guerzoni, between rome and ferrara: the courtiers of the este cardinals in the cinquecento, in art and identity in early modern rome , - (jill burke & michael bury eds., ) (discussing the variety of economical and contractual arrangements under which artists, writers, and musicians were employed at the court of the este cardinals). . see burke, supra note , at , - (mentioning a “fourth and fifth type[ of patronage systems, which] had not yet come into existence [at this point in time]: the academy system,” in which the government supports “an organization staffed by reliable artists and writers;” and “the subvention system[,] in which a foundation supports creative individuals [with] no claim on” their creative production). . id. at - ; see also arnold hauser, the social history of art - (routledge ) ( ) (noting that lorenzo il magnifico may have had privileged artists belonging to his personal circle of friendships and who were related to the neoplatonic movement, while rarely employing artists of the caliber of donatello or leonardo, who apparently left florence owing to lack of recognition). . see burke, supra note , at , . . id. at - (noting that formal competitions took place “especially in florence and venice”); hauser, supra note , at - . . see john stephens, the italian renaissance: the origins of intellectual and artistic change before the reformation ( ). . see id. at - (mentioning many other examples recorded by vasari). michigan state law review [vol:st.pg] artists were supposed to work face to face in a sublime contest for beauty. at the same time, patrons competed among themselves for enjoying the services of the best artists in order to achieve fame, prestige, and political recognition through magnificence and “magnanimity.” in trying to convince giovanni de’ medici to rebuild the whole church of san lorenzo, brunelleschi described the mechanics of competition at work on the patrons’ side: i am amazed that you, being a leader (capo) do not order the spending of few thousand scudi and build the body of the church if [the noble families of the neighbourhood] saw you begin they would follow with their chapels; especially since when no other memorial remains of us but ruins, they bear witness to the man who build them (di chi n’è stato autore) hundreds or thousands of years before. the same mechanics were at work in the italian communes, where often the rulers flattered the vanity of townspeople to surpass other communities, thus convincing the citizens to pay for the work of art in the end, as in the case of the erection of the milan cathedral. in the renaissance’s “empire of things,” however, where the multiplication of cultural artifacts reached an unprecedented extent, the market acquired special relevance and artistic consumption became a notable economic activity. in florence, the workshop of “lippi and pesellino imitator” proved the emergence of a process of . id. at . . id. at - (discussing the meaning of the two terms and noting that, in light of the latin ciceronian tradition, “[s]uch patronage was not done for self- aggrandisement, but to be useful and magnanimous by devoting personal wealth to unselfish purposes . . . [t]he patronage of art should be seen less as consumption for pleasure, than as a newly conceived duty”); see also richard goldthwaite, the empire of things: consumer demand in renaissance italy, in patronage, art, and society in renaissance italy , - (f.w. kent & patricia simons eds., ) (discussing the concept of magnificence in italian renaissance); burke, supra note , at - ; hauser, supra note , at - . . giorgio vasari, le vite de’ piÙ eccellenti pittori, scultori ed architettori [lives of the most eminent painters, sculptors and achitects] (g.c. sansoni ed., ). . see hauser, supra note , at (reporting that, in contrast, the cost of the building of the certosa of pavia were met from the privy purse of the visconti and the sforza families). . see goldthwaite, supra note , at (noting that patronage of art in the renaissance, especially in italy, is to be regarded as a form of consumption that reached a unique qualitative and quantitative extent and is to be contextualized within the emergence of an “empire of things,” a consumer society that “had its first stirrings, if not its birth, in the new habits of spending that possessed the italians in the renaissance” and “these habits . . . set[] italy off, economically as well as culturally, from the rest of europe at the time”). the return of the gift in the “crowd society” commodification of creativity that was packaged in multiple products to suit the needs of a range of consumers in an expanding market. initially, in early renaissance, as hauser noted, “the market is . . . not yet determined by the supply but by the demand.” by the high renaissance, however, a new relevant change in the appreciation of art came about. artists and patrons came together on the common ground of connoisseurship of art. departing from a long tradition viewing art only for the purpose that it addressed, art came to be appreciated as an end itself. this primitive form of l’art pour l’art had relevant effects on the market for creativity. the emergence of the amateur, the connoisseur, and the collector created a new type of consumer willing to buy what was offered, rather than only order what he needed. at the same time, the rise of the status of the artists from artisans to “divine stars” led to an increasing emancipation from direct commissions. the super-artist no longer felt compelled to seek the patrons’ protection by conscientiously carrying out their orders, but began to undertake artistic tasks on his own. dürer discussed profit from the production of artworks as nobody else in the past. in a letter dated august , to jacob heller, dürer motivated his final decision to choose engravings as his privileged medium of expression with the desire to earn the more lucrative returns: in one year, i can make a pile of common pictures, . . . so that no one would believe it possible that one man could do them all. one can earn something on these. but assiduous, hair-splitting labor gives little in return. that’s why i am going to devote myself to engravings. and had i done so earlier, i would be today one thousand florins richer. . see megan holmes, copying practices and marketing strategies in a fifteenth-century florentine painter’s workshop, in artistic exchange and cultural translation in the italian renaissance city , , (stephen j. campbell & stephen j. milner eds., ) (noting that “the workshop specialized in two categories of production: very close copies of notable paintings by filippo lippi and mass-produced madonna panels based on compositions by lippi and pesellino”). . hauser, supra note , at . . see stephens, supra note , at . . id. at - . . hauser, supra note , at - . . see id. at . . id. at - . . joseph leo koerner, the moment of self-portraiture in german renaissance art - ( ) (citing albrecht dÜrer, schriftlicher nachlass ( - )). michigan state law review [vol:st.pg] in the sixteenth century, the art market became even more important. merchants specialized in dealing with these new commodities and art dealers, such as giovanni battista della palla in florence or giovanni ram in venice, made their appearance. artists exhibited their works at fairs—like the ascension week fair in venice or the saint anthony fair at padua—or other public places. advertising came to be used to boost the sale of the new commodities. echoing a similar statement in one of martial’s epigrams several centuries earlier, ludovico ariosto reminded his readers in the orlando furioso that “[w]hoever wants to buy a furioso, or another work by the same author, let him go to the press of the bindoni twins, the brothers benedetto and agostino.” with the advent of print, quite understandably, the market played an increasingly relevant role in the literary field. by the end of the fifteenth century, the commodification and standardization in size and price of the book was emerging. the invention of printing affected the organization of literature with the creation of new occupations, such as librarians, editors, and correctors. towards the mid-sixteenth century, the professional writer came on the scene because of printers and publishers asking writers to write, edit, or translate books. in venice, pietro aretino exemplified this emerging market-oriented professional writer. beside being known for having marketed even his “private” letters, aretino’s professionalism seemed to free him from traditional patronage models. after wandering from court to court for several years, in aretino moved to venice, where he was almost independent, although the “protection from doge andrea gritti and gifts from” venetian aristocrats were still valuable assets he could count on. the rise of the market and his exceptional writing and self- . see burke, supra note , at - ; hauser, supra note , at . . see burke, supra note , at . . id. at ; see also paul j. voss, books for sale: advertising and patronage in late elizabethan england, sixteenth century j. , ( ). . see burke, supra note , at . . id. at . . id.; see also joanna kostylo, from gunpowder to print: the common origins of copyright and patent, in privilege and property: essays on the history of copyright , - (ronan deazley, martin kretschmer & lionel bently eds., ). . see burke, supra note , at . . id. at - . the return of the gift in the “crowd society” advertisement skills gave aretino the opportunity to detach himself from patrons that may have become too invasive and exclusive. f. guez de balzac, gracefulness, and interpersonal relations in a letter written july , from jean-luis guez de balzac to cardinal la valette, guez de balzac wrote: your banker has just delivered the sum that you ordered him to give me. . . . i would like to be able to thank you in an appropriate manner for this favor, but besides the fact that your generosity is too great and that you give so gracefully that you further enhance the value of your gifts, i would be presumptuous if i believed that any words i might say could match your actions. . . . i can say nevertheless without vanity that i have never been tempted by anything so base as a desire for material gain. i thus consider your generosity stripped down to its essence, and i cherish your esteem for me more than anything else, since it is a token of my merit, not my lack of means, and it comes from your judgment, which is greater than your fortune. guez de balzac’s letter has become a quintessential representation of the question of the gift and its relation to literary patronage. the letter is a manifesto against the impersonal logic of the market. the graceful performance of la valette makes his gift something hardly calculable in term of loss and gain. still, perhaps for the last time, the gift exchange challenged the premises of market economy based on calculation and self-interest. the gift received by guez de balzac was primarily an instrument to establish and maintain social ties. in this sense, the gift that the patron offered to the protégé sealed the network of interpersonal relations that supported creativity throughout history. as marcel mauss noted, gifts lie at the intersection of the economic and the social and blur the distinction between people and things. specifically referring to gift exchange in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, natalie zemon davis elaborated mauss’s insight by arguing that the true role of the gift was to open up “channels of communication . . . across boundaries of status and literacy” and give “expression to the highly strained but genuine reciprocity between unequals in the social and economic order.” in exchanging gifts: the elizabethan currency of children and poetry, . see id. at . . peter w. shoemaker, powerful connections: the poetics of patronage in the age of louis xiii - ( ). . mauss, supra note , at - . . davis, supra note , at . michigan state law review [vol:st.pg] patricia fumerton explains the value of the gift in literary exchange as a form of social currency that equalizes hierarchical differences. in doing so, fumerton noted that dedications of poetic works hover on the threshold of [the] gift. . . . [p]oet and patron are simultaneously givers and takers, parents and children—both partners reap the sustaining communion of gift. in this sense, these “gift” dedications are as much equalizers as definers of hierarchical differences: both poet and patron enter the gift circle that consumes and dilates egos, mingling selves in the hope of self-growth, peace, and culture. actually, the print medium helped this equalizing gift exchange. in the early history of print culture, the efficacy of the print medium memorialized authors and patrons simultaneously by presenting authors not simply as dependents, but also as parties to a cultural exchange. print publications portrayed members of royalty and aristocracy as the authorizers and protectors of literary texts. writers and publishers were correspondingly provided with the patrons’ “legitimacy, reward, and prestige.” despite the many critiques to the role of patronage in the ancien régime, patronage turned out to be a dynamic cultural and intellectual force that fashioned the “literary ‘selves’ and even ‘communities’” because, as shoemaker noted, “it was flexible and relatively diffuse, because it did not depend on rigid institutional hierarchies, and because it mobilized both self-interest and idealism.” however, change was coming. although the process had a different pace depending on the location and subject matter of artistic production, at least in the literary field—by the early part of the . patricia fumerton, exchanging gifts: the elizabethan currency of children and poetry, elh ( ). . id. at . . arthur f. marotti, manuscript, print, and the english renaissance lyric ( ). . id. . id. at - . . see, e.g., alain viala, naissance de l’Écrivain: sociologie de la littÉrature À l’Âge classique - ( ) (characterizing patronage as an obstacle to the “birth of the writer”). . shoemaker, supra note , at ; see also mario biagioli, galileo, courtier: the practice of science in the culture of absolutism ( ) (noting that as part of a coordinated publicity program on behalf of princely patrons, patronage “propelled clients, fostered and structured their communication and debates, rewarded novelties, legitimized knowledge claims that would have been unacceptable elsewhere, and gave clients the resources to legitimize unconventional socioprofessional identities”). the return of the gift in the “crowd society” seventeenth century—the old system of artistic clientage started to break down, and the reader came on the scene. due to the restricted resources of the aristocracy, the writers could expect little financial reward in exchange for dedications. the economics of the emerging publishing industry also changed the patrons’ traditional functions, as inherited from manuscript culture. publishers used patrons’ names to promote books’ sales to a general readership, rather than to signal actual patronage. although the patronage system still offered some social and political benefits, the emerging authority of the author and the importance of the reader—especially the “educated ‘gentlemen’” becoming the real socio-literary center of culture—ultimately eclipsed the patron. by the mid-eighteenth century, the transition was almost complete. modern forms of cultural support, such as commercial publishing and state patronage, substitute the highly personalized culture of patronage. the old patronage model underwent a phase of rapid decadence, as jean le rond d’alembert discussed in an essay written in . in his “cynical portrait of the personal relationship[s] between men of letter and aristocratic[]” patrons, d’alembert noted that the alliance between authors and aristocrats “revealed to be a ploy of vanity.” price tables for different kinds of dedications represented the culmination of the system’s decadence. in reaction to these practices, d’alembert spelled out the modern equation of aesthetic value: “if you want to demonstrate your abilities, you should not limit yourself to writing for a small circle of friends or accommodating admirers; instead, you should . . . expose your work to the light of public opinion[;] . . . [a] man who feels that his talents and genius should earn him fame need only let public . see, e.g., voss, supra note , at ; marotti, supra note , at - , ; alistair fox, the complaint of poetry for the death of liberality: the decline of literary patronage in the s, in the reign of elizabeth i: court and culture in the last decade (john guy ed., ); hauser, supra note , at . . see marotti, supra note , at - . . see john walsh, literary patronage in medieval england, - , libr. rev. , - ( ); marotti, supra note , at . . marotti, supra note , at - , - . . see shoemaker, supra note , at . . see id. at (discussing jean le rond d’alembert, essai sur la sociÉtÉ des gens de lettres et des grands: sur la rÉputation, sur les mÉcÈnes, et sur les rÉcompenses littÉraires ( )). . id. at . . see id. michigan state law review [vol:st.pg] opinion do its work.” at the very same time, on february , , samuel johnson spat out all his outrage against an increasingly decadent patronage system. dr. johnson’s letter to philip dormer stanhope, fourth earl of chesterfield, marked the acquired independence of the author from affiliation to an aristocratic patron. johnson could turn his back to the delusional love with the earl of chesterfield because a new lover, far more rewarding, had come on the scene: the market. soon thereafter, in the encyclopédie’s entry of “men of letters,” voltaire sanctioned the transition to a newer system of financial support of creativity: men of letters . . . are ordinarily more independent-minded that other men, and those who are born without a fortune to their name can easily use the foundations created by luis xiv to strengthen this independence; we no longer see, as we once did, dedicatory epistles offered up to vanity by self- interest and servility. the impersonal royal patronage offered more independence than the informal networks of nobiliary patronage. the académie française was one such example of institutionalized patronage that reduced some of the uncertainties and ambiguities of patronage culture and contributed to the literary space’s “autonomization.” impersonality and rationality would later characterize modern state patronage. as shoemaker noted, however, “[p]atronage did not disappear in the eighteenth century . . . . the specifically local . see id. at - (quoting jean le rond d’alembert, Œuvres ( )). . see letter from samuel johnson to the earl of chesterfield (feb. , ), http://www.ourcivilisation.com/smartboard/shop/johnsons/patron.htm. the letter was motivated by what johnson felt to be lord chesterfield’s opportunistic endorsement of his dictionary of the english language. id. in fact, the earl did not seem to meet johnson’s expectations of support when johnson was more in need before becoming a renowned figure of english restoration literature after the publication of his dictionary. more than the letter, which was indeed moved by personal grievances against the earl of chesterfield, it was perhaps johnson’s definition of a patron in his dictionary that defined a changing attitude. johnson defined a patron as “[o]ne who countenances, supports or protects. [c]ommonly a wretch who supports with insolence, and is paid with flattery.” samuel johnson, a dictionary of the english language ( ). see also, for a discussion of johnson’s letter, alvin kernan, samuel johnson & the impact of print ( ). . shoemaker, supra note , at (quoting voltaire, gens de lettres, in encyclopÉdie ou dictionnaire raisonnÉ des sciences, des arts et des mÉtiers (denis diderot & jean le rond d’alembert eds., ). . see viala, supra note , at (describing the “autonomization” of the literary space as the recognition of literature as an independent field of study and noting that the académie finally provided the men of letters with a sort of official recognition as a “men of letters”); see also shoemaker, supra note , at - . the return of the gift in the “crowd society” informal, particularistic, and hierarchical patronage characteristic of the early seventeenth-century, however, became progressively less visible and central to the self-image of writers and patrons.” g. the rhetoric of the gift shaping the question of literary property in , simon marion, a french barrister, sought before the royal council the annulment of a royal privilege over a work of antoine muret. in order to seek the annulment, marion promoted the emergence of the notion of authorial property. he famously stated that as “by a common instinct, each man recognises every other to be the master of what he makes, invents, or creates . . . . [t]he author of a book is entirely its master” in the same terms god is the master of his creations. however, following the latin tradition that “oratio publicata res libera est,” marion acknowledged that publication ended the property right enjoyed by the author in his work. in other words, the act of publishing the work made it a gift to the public. notwithstanding the emergence of the market, the construction of creativity as a gift exchange still justified the entire privilege system. according to marion, the privilege was the return gift granted by the state, on behalf of the public, within the context of a tacit social contract. as a result, . shoemaker, supra note , at . . see laurent pfister, author and work in the french print privileges system: some milestones, in privilege and property, supra note , at , - . . see simon marion’s plea on privileges ( ), primary sources on copyright ( - ) (lionel bently & martin kretschmer eds., andrew counter trans.), http://www.copyrighthistory.org/cam/tools/request/showrepresentation?id= representation_f_ &pagenumber= _ &show=translation (last visited feb. , ). . see quintus aurelius symmachus, book xviii: the epistles, in ausonius , - (hugh g. evelyn white trans., ) (summing up, in a notorious epistolary exchange with decimus magnus ausonius, the conventional latin social norms governing authorship with the words “a speech delivered is common property”). . see pfister, supra note , at (reporting that “the idea of a property limited by publication predominates almost until the end of the seventeenth century”). then in , d’aubignac wrote, “[w]hat is done cannot be undone, say our customs, and what we make print is not anymore with us,” and shortly thereafter, richelet provided similar testimony by saying “an author who gives the public his works gives it up and strips [the] property right.” id. at & n. . . id. at & n. (stating “[w]hich is effectively a contract without a fixed name, mutually binding, since there is a fair obligation on both sides, the one michigan state law review [vol:st.pg] pleading against renewed or perpetual privileges, marion noted, “[i]t is ungrateful to contravene the law of benefit, and to attempt to steal from the public sphere something which the munificence of its creator has put there, in order to appropriate it for oneself.” the rhetoric of the gift still resounded powerfully from the nebula of the past in the constitutional moment of modern copyright law. at the time of the british “battle of the booksellers,” justice yates—one of the finest pleaders against perpetuity—notoriously employed the gift metaphor once again by noting that, from the moment of publication, literary works are thrown into a state of universal communion; “like land thrown into the highway, it is become a gift to the public.” in , the house of lords ruled out perpetuity of literary property in a case brought by the scottish publisher alexander donaldson against the londonian publisher thomas beckett. lord cadmen addressed the house of lords by noting that “science and learning are in their nature publici juris, and they ought to be as free and general as air or water.” the discourse about the gift and communal knowledge won the day, and donaldson shaped the future of copyright law. in france, again, jean-françois gaultier’s social contract made the mechanics of the gift and return gift the rationale for authors’ protection. as gaultier and, in part, condorcet argued, raw materials of creativity come from a common and cumulative pool of cultural resources. individual creativity was the result of the author drawing from these common resources. therefore, each author was indebted to society for the gift of this common knowledge. in order to repay this debt, gaultier and condorcet assumed that once a work is published, it belongs to everyone, rather than to the author or the not wishing to give to the public his personal property, unless the public grant him this prerogative in return” (emphasis omitted)). . id. (emphasis omitted). . tonson v. collins ( ) eng. rep. , ; black w. , . . donaldson v. beckett ( ) eng. rep. ; brown . the donaldson case was in fact an appeal of millar v. taylor, ( ) eng. rep. ; burr. . id. at . the case centered over the publication by donaldson of an edition of james thomson’s the seasons, whose copyright was claimed to be originally owned by andrew millar, who died in , and later by beckett and a group of other londonian booksellers and printers. donaldson v. becket, london ( ), primary sources on copyright ( - ) (lionel bently & martin kretschmer eds.), http://www.copyrighthistory.org/cam/tools/request/showrepresentation. php?id=representation_uk_ &pagenumber= _ &imagesize=small (last visited feb. , ). . donaldson v. beckett, london ( ), supra note . . pfister, supra note , at . the return of the gift in the “crowd society” publisher. for his original contribution to the cumulative stock of cultural resources, the author would be entitled to receive a reward: we do not claim here to go against the just property which belongs to genius. nothing belongs to us more than that which our labours, our devices, our observations and our calculations have allowed us to discover or imagine. but once we have received payment for them, be it in money, or in glory, all our fellow citizens, all men, have the right to freely enjoy the gift that we have given them. the traditional mechanics of gift exchange aiming at preserving a situation of everlasting and reciprocal indebtedness characterize gaultier’s social contract. individual contributions to the cumulative pool of knowledge would serve to return the initial gift endowed by the society to the individual author. society then would provide individual authors with a return gift—“be it in money, or in glory”—to keep the mechanics of gift exchange in motion. gaultier emphasized the reputational value of the individual contribution so typical of a gift exchange model. glory and reputation are valued as instruments of payment as much as money. the endowment of the publication to the public would provide added value to the author “for the more a book will be multiplied and spread, the more the author will find strength in the welcome of the public and in the judgement that the large numbers of readers will have made of it, to rework and improve his work.” in , le chapelier powerfully restated marion’s ideas before the french parliament. le chapelier warned that “[t]he most sacred, the most legitimate, the most unassailable, [and] if i may say so, the most personal of all properties, is the work, the fruit of the mind of a writer; yet it is a property of a totally different kind than other properties.” le chapelier continued by arguing that once the . id. . gaultier’s memorandum for the provincial booksellers, lyon ( ), primary sources on copyright ( - ) (lionel bently & martin kretschmer eds., laura hough trans.) (emphasis added), http://www.copyrighthistory.org/cam/ tools/request/showrepresentation?id=representation_f_ &pagenumber= _ &sh ow=translation (last visited feb. , ). . cf. gregory s. brown, a field of honor: writers, court culture and public theater in french literary life from racine to the revolution - ( ) (noting that in eighteenth-century playwriting for the comédie française, the transfer of the manuscript was construed as a gift). . gaultier’s memorandum for the provincial booksellers, lyon ( ), supra note . . la chapelier’s report, paris ( ), primary sources on copyright ( - ) (lionel bently & martin kretschmer eds., freya baetens trans.) (emphasis michigan state law review [vol:st.pg] work is disclosed to the public, “it seems that from this moment, the writer has associated the public with his property, or rather he has transferred it entirely to it.” therefore, le chapelier concluded that the author’s work is public property, and its disposal is under the author’s dominion for the term established by law: [a]s it is highly fair that the men who cultivate the domain of the mind, retrieve some fruits from their work . . . . but also, after the fixed delay, the property of the public commences, [and] everyone has to be able to print, publish the works which have contributed to enlighten the human spirit. there are striking similarities between thomas jefferson and le chapelier’s warnings. jefferson summed up the copyright utilitarian view by endorsing much of le chapelier’s conclusions regarding the public and communal nature of knowledge: if nature has made any one thing less susceptible than all others of exclusive property, it is the action of the thinking power called an idea . . . . he who receives an idea from me, receives instruction himself without lessening mine; as he who lights his taper at mine, receives light without darkening me. jefferson concluded by saying that intellectual property rights might be necessary and “[s]ociety may give an exclusive right to the profit arising from [inventions] as an encouragement to men to pursue ideas which may produce utility.” in his last book common as air, lewis hyde stressed the focus of the u.s. founders on “collectively valued ends,” rather than private wealth on matters related to creativity. again, the wording of the jefferson warning closely resembled the medieval and renaissance language of gift exchange in the circulation of knowledge and books. a dedication by pierre robert olivétan for his translation of the bible in recited: “[this dedicated bible] is made only to be given and added), http://www.copyrighthistory.org/cam/tools/request/showrepresentation?id= representation_f_ &pagenumber= _ &show=translation (last visited feb. , ). . id. . id. . letter from thomas jefferson to isaac mcpherson (aug. , ), in the writings of thomas jefferson , - (albert ellery bergh ed., ); see also james boyle, the public domain: enclosing the commons of the mind - ( ) (explaining in detail the “jefferson warning” included in the letter to mcpherson). . letter from thomas jefferson to isaac mcpherson, supra note , at . . lewis hyde, common as air: revolution, art and ownership - ( ). the return of the gift in the “crowd society” communicated . . . it enriches those to whom it is given, but does not impoverish in any way those who give it.” actually, the discourse about the gift, which shaped the emergence of copyright law, is nowhere to be found on the radar of modern copyright policy discourse. ii. propertization and commons a. the road to propertization and the digital land grab from the time of pindar and simonides—and until romanticism commenced a process leading to the complete commodification of creativity—market exchange models ran parallel to gift exchange. commodification developed steadily from the emergence of the roman scribal publishing industry to the rise of the “empire of things” in the renaissance and the expansion of the “privileged” printing industry. the market took over almost entirely by the beginning of the nineteenth century. in the past, “law and economics scholars . . . launched a crusade to expose the evil of the commons—the evil . . . of not propertizing.” since harold demsetz, economists have viewed property rights as a desirable tool to internalize the full social value of people’s actions and therefore maximize the incentive to engage in those actions. an influential article written by garret hardin in termed the evil of not . davis, supra note , at (citing la bible. qui est toute la saincte escripture (pierre robert olivétan trans., )). . see mark rose, nine-tenths of the law: the english copyright debates and the rhetoric of the public domain, law & contemp. probs. , ( ) (noting that since its inception, the public domain discourse was comparatively weak against the rhetoric of property, as the law is mostly about property, or as the adage has it, possession is nine-tenths of the law). . anupam chander & madhavi sunder, the romance of the public domain, calif. l. rev. , ( ); see h. scott gordon, the economic theory of a common-property resource: the fishery, j. pol. econ. ( ); anthony scott, the fishery: the objectives of sole ownership, j. pol. econ. ( ) (introducing an economic analysis of fisheries that demonstrated that unlimited harvesting of high-demand fish by multiple individuals is both economically and environmentally unsustainable); see also lee anne fennell, commons, anticommons, semicommons, in research handbook on the economics of property law (kenneth ayotte & henry e. smith eds., ); chander & sunder, supra, at - (discussing the move toward propertization). . see harold demsetz, toward a theory of property rights, am. econ. rev. ( ); see also eli m. salzberger, economic analysis of the public domain, in the future of the public domain: identifying the commons in information law , - (lucie guibault & p. bernt hugenholtz eds., ). michigan state law review [vol:st.pg] propertizing as the tragedy of the commons. the subject of hardin’s essay was the carrying capacity of the commons and its limits. hardin identified the tragedy of the commons in the environmental dysfunctions of overuse and underinvestment found in the absence of a private property regime. hardin made it clear that any commons open to all, ungoverned by custom or law, will eventually collapse. hardin’s analysis shaped the debate to come. the fear of the tragedy of the commons propelled the idea that more property rights necessarily lead to the production of more information along with the enhancement of their diversity. in this perspective, the prevailing assumption is that anything of value within the public domain should be commodified. this “cultural stewardship model,” as julie cohen termed it, regarded ownership as the prerequisite of productive management, assumed that any commons is inefficient, and promoted the idea that opposing the expansion of intellectual property is a mistake in economic terms. as paul goldstein put it: [t]he best prescription for connecting authors to their audiences is to extend rights into every corner where consumers derive value from literary and artistic works. if history is any measure, the results should be to promote political as well as cultural diversity, ensuring a plenitude of voices, all with the chance to be heard. this statement justifies the recent tremendous expansion of intellectual property rights. in recent years, however, a revisionist moment has started to ponder whether our copyright policies struck the right balance . see garrett hardin, the tragedy of the commons, science ( ). . see id. at . . see id. . see id. . see james boyle, foreword: the opposite of property?, law & contemp. probs. , ( ) (noting that “any discussion of intellectual property or the public domain proceeds in the shadow of the ‘the tragedy of the commons’”). . see julie e. cohen, copyright, commodification, and culture: locating the public domain, in the future of the public domain, supra note , at , - . . see william m. landes & richard a. posner, the economic structure of intellectual property law ( ). . paul goldstein, copyright’s highway: from gutenberg to the celestial jukebox ( ); see also r. polk wagner, information wants to be free: intellectual property and the mythologies of control, colum. l. rev. , ( ) (arguing that “increasing the appropriability of information goods is likely to increase, rather than diminish, the quantity of ‘open’ information”). the return of the gift in the “crowd society” between protection, incentives to creation, access to knowledge, and finally, the circulation and cumulative production of knowledge. modern technological advancement has increasingly disoriented the coordinates upon which the solution of the copyright paradox should be calculated and exacerbated the tension within it. scholars and the civil society have warned that “[w]e are in the midst of an enclosure movement in our information environment.” professor james boyle has talked about a second enclosure movement that is now enclosing the “commons of the mind.” similar to the natural commons, fields, grazing lands, forests, and streams—which were enclosed in the sixteenth to nineteenth century in england by landowners and the state—the relentless expansion of intellectual property rights is enclosing the intellectual commons. in a very similar fashion, peter drahos and john braithwaite have spoken of “information feudalism.” as in the case of medieval feudalism, a redistribution of property rights involves a transfer of knowledge from the intellectual commons to “media conglomerates and integrated life sciences corporations rather than individual scientists and authors.” authors argued that a mix of technology and legislation promotes this process of “commodification of . see boyle, supra note , at - (discussing the reaction to and the misperception of the “internet threat”). . yochai benkler, free as the air to common use: first amendment constraints on the enclosure of the public domain, n.y.u. l. rev. , ( ). david lange first identified this trend toward greater “propertization” of information and recognized that copyright protection means enclosure of the public domain. see david lange, recognizing the public domain, law & contemp. probs. , ( ). nonetheless, as professor lange noted in his seminal work, the expansion of property rights in information products has been the subject of cautionary critique, at least since benjamin kaplan, an unhurried view of copyright: proposals and prospects, colum. l. rev. ( ), and stephen breyer, the uneasy case for copyright: a study of copyright in books, photocopies, and computer programs, harv. l. rev. ( ). . see james boyle, the second enclosure movement and the construction of the public domain, law & contemp. probs. ( ); boyle, supra note , at - ; see also keith e. maskus & jerome h. reichman, the globalization of private knowledge goods and the privatization of global public goods, j. int’l econ. l. ( ); david bollier, silent theft: the private plunder of our common wealth ( ). . see boyle, supra note , at - . . see peter drahos & john braithwaite, information feudalism: who owns the knowledge economy? ( ). . id. at - . michigan state law review [vol:st.pg] information.” according to p. bernt hugenholtz and lucie guibault, “[i]tems of information, which in the ‘old’ economy had little or no economic value, such as factual data, personal data, genetic information and pure ideas, have acquired independent economic value in the current information age, and consequently become the object of property rights making the information a tradable commodity.” the commodification of information is propelled by the ability of new technologies to capture resources previously unowned and unprotected, as in a new digital land grab. professor elinor ostrom and her colleague charlotte hess reinforced this point by arguing that “[i]nformation that used to be ‘free’ is now increasingly being privatized, monitored, encrypted, and restricted. the enclosure is caused by the conflicts and contradictions between intellectual property laws and the expanded capacities of new technologies.” extreme propertization and commodification of information seems to be a counterintuitive option for the networked information society in light of the opportunities that digitization and internet distribution offer. as professor paul david argued: today, the greater capacity for the dissemination of knowledge, for cultural creativity and for scientific research carried out by means of the enhanced facilities of computer-mediated telecommunication networks, has greatly raised the marginal social losses that are attributable to the restrictions that those adjustments in the copyright law have placed upon the domain of information search and exploitation. . see neil weinstock netanel & niva elkin-koren, introduction: the commodification of information, in the commodification of information, at viii (niva elkin-koren & neil weinstock netanel eds., ). . p. bernt hugenholtz & lucie guibault, the future of the public domain: an introduction, in the future of the public domain, supra note , at , . . see charlotte hess & elinor ostrom, introduction: an overview of the knowledge commons, in understanding knowledge as a commons: from theory to practice , (charlotte hess & elinor ostrom eds., ); see also pamela samuelson, the copyright grab, wired (jan. , , : pm), http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/ . /white.paper_pr.html. . charlotte hess & elinor ostrom, ideas, artifacts, and facilities: information as a common-pool resource, law & contemp. probs. , ( ). . paul a. david & jared rubin, restricting access to books on the internet: some unanticipated effects of u.s. copyright legislation, rev. econ. res. on copyright issues , ( ). the return of the gift in the “crowd society” b. commons, tragedies, and comedies actually, there seem to be sustainable options to the road to propertization, especially in light of the value of open access in the digital environment. nobel laureate elinor ostrom powerfully advocated the cause of the commons against the mantra of propertization. ostrom’s works showed the inaccuracies of hardin’s tragedy of the commons. empirical studies, which ostrom has spearheaded, showed that groups of people can effectively manage common resources under “suitable conditions, such as appropriate rules, good conflict-resolution mechanisms, and well-defined group boundaries.” under suitable conditions and proper governance, the tragedy of the commons becomes “the comedy of the commons.” this is especially true for cultural commons. culture, in fact, stands as a quintessential example of comedic commons because it is enriched through reference the more people consume it. this is . see, e.g., yochai benkler, a political economy of the public domain: markets in information goods versus the marketplace of ideas, in expanding the boundaries of intellectual property: innovation policy for the knowledge society , - (rochelle cooper dreyfuss, diane leenheer zimmerman & harry first eds., ) (noting that no economic theory of intellectual property and commons management supports the prediction stated by the dominant law-and-economics position). . see elinor ostrom, governing the commons: the evolution of institutions for collective action ( ); elinor ostrom, roy gardner & james walker, rules, games, and common-pool resources ( ); the drama of the commons (elinor ostrom et al. eds., ). . see hess & ostrom, supra note , at ; rights to nature: ecological, economic, cultural, and political principles of institutions for the environment (susan hanna et al. eds., ); making the commons work: theory, practice, and policy (daniel w. bromley et al. eds., ); commons without tragedy: protecting the environment from overpopulation—a new approach (robert v. andelson ed., ); david feeny et al., the tragedy of the commons: twenty-two years later, hum. ecology ( ). . see carol rose, the comedy of the commons: custom, commerce, and inherently public property, u. chi. l. rev. , - ( ) (arguing that the commons, rather than ineludibly turning into a tragedy of underproduction, may turn into a comedy of efficient production if managed through the appropriate rules). . see governing knowledge commons (brett m. frischmann, michael j. madison & katherine j. strandburg eds., ) (updating and expanding elinor ostrom’s research framework, to provide a general perspective on commons governance for information, knowledge, and culture and to adapt ostrom’s work from natural resources to knowledge resources). . see lawrence lessig, re-crafting a public domain, yale j.l. & human. , ( ). michigan state law review [vol:st.pg] because the carrying capacity of cultural commons is endless and cultural commons are non-rivalrous. unlike eating an apple, my listening of a song does not subtract from another’s. therefore, cultural commons unveil the inaccuracy of the tragedy of the commons more than any other commons. the cultural commons’ comedic nature undermines the argument that the market will always serve us well. as traditional economic analysis à la adam smith goes, propertization should aid market forces that manage efficiently scarce resources. propertization should facilitate transactions by defining and evaluating assets and thus making them transferable. nevertheless, traditional market principles may become inefficient when applied to cultural commons that are never by nature scarce. as the argument goes, rather than being a solution to manage efficiently scarce resources, propertization and enclosure in the cultural domain may be a wasteful option by cutting down social and economic positive externalities —especially in peer-based production environments. actually, reviewing the peculiar nature of cultural commons, the academic literature developed the idea of the tragedy of the anti-commons, which lies in the underuse of scarce scientific resources because of excessive intellectual property rights and all related transaction costs. this is the case, for example, of overpatenting in biomedical research. cultural commons are valuable from several perspectives. first, the public domain plays a relevant role in terms of market efficiency. from an economic standpoint, a market with a shrinking public domain would be especially inefficient. nobel laureate joseph stiglitz stressed this point by noting that: . see cultural commons, lewis hyde, http://www.lewishyde.com/in- progress/cultural-commons (last visited feb. , ). . see rose, supra note , at - . . see brett m. frischmann & mark a. lemley, spillovers, colum. l. rev. ( ). . see michael a. heller, the tragedy of the anticommons: property in the transition from marx to markets, harv. l. rev. ( ); see also michael heller, the gridlock economy: how too much ownership wrecks markets, stops innovation, and costs lives ( ). . see james bessen & michael j. meurer, patent failure: how judges, bureaucrats, and lawyers put innovators at risk ( ) (arguing that the cost of litigation and the overall cost of the patent system overcome the advantages). . see michael a. heller & rebecca s. eisenberg, can patents deter innovation? the anticommons in biomedical research, science ( ). the return of the gift in the “crowd society” it is imperative to understand the ways in which the production and distribution of knowledge and information differs from that of goods like steel and cars. . . . the fact that knowledge is, in central ways, a public good and that there are important externalities means that exclusive or excessive reliance on the market may not result in economic efficiency. restricting access to information would increase the inefficiency of the market because perfect information makes the perfect market. a market that commodifies information excessively will be less efficient in allocating resources in our society since key information to facilitate that allocation will be more difficult to find. second, the public domain is an engine of democratization by ensuring proper access to information regardless of the market power of the players. this democratic value of the public domain has been immensely enhanced by the ubiquity of the interconnected society and the power of propagation of digital networks. third, propertization reduces the “public domain effect,” which is the value produced by a work entering into the public domain and the decreased deadweight loss coming from restricting access to it. fourth, business models based on open access and public domain approaches would produce considerable economic and social value on many different levels. in the case of file sharing, for example, several studies found significant benefits of free access. open . joseph e. stiglitz, world bank dep’t for trade & indus. & ctr. for econ. policy research, public policy for a knowledge economy - ( ), http://akgul.bilkent.edu.tr/bt-be/knowledge-economy.pdf. . see sanford j. grossman & joseph e. stiglitz, on the impossibility of informationally efficient markets, am. econ. rev. ( ). . see giancarlo frosio, communia and the european public domain project: a politics of the public domain, in the digital public domain: foundations for an open culture , - (melanie dulong de rosnay & juan carlos de martin eds., ), http://www.openbookpublishers.com/product/ (making the same point with similar wording). . see id. at . . see id. at . . the research carried out by brett frischmann points exactly in this direction. see generally brett m. frischmann, infrastructure: the social value of shared resources ( ); brett m. frischmann, an economic theory of infrastructure and commons management, minn. l. rev. ( ). . see pamela samuelson, challenges in mapping the public domain, in the future of the public domain, supra note , at , (identifying eight values of public domain works); see also rufus pollock, the value of the public domain ( ). . see frosio, supra note , at - ; giancarlo f. frosio, communia: final report - (mar. , ) (reporting for the european commission on behalf of the communia network and the nexa center), michigan state law review [vol:st.pg] source software also exemplifies the value of an open approach to the production of information goods. the internet and the world wide web are further examples of the great wealth that can be built upon open access models. these technologies were non-proprietary, and openness was the key to their revolutionary success. again, online search engines, such as google, produce relevant social benefits through their service and generate very large revenue by copying “open” information on the web. several studies highlighted that a public domain approach to weather, geographical data, and public sector information in general may yield a substantial long-run value, running into the tens of billions or hundreds of billions of dollars. a recent study showed that industries based on or benefiting from fair use and copyright exceptions exceeded gdp, employment, productivity, and export growth of the overall economy. further, the study revealed that fair use industries have grown dramatically within the past twenty years, since the advent of the internet and the digital information revolution. these data may suggest that in the digital environment, open access and public domain business models may spur growth at a faster pace than traditional, proprietary business models. http://www.communia-project.eu/final-report; see also giancarlo frosio, digital piracy debunked: a short note on intermediary liability and digital threats, ( ) internet pol’y rev. (forthcoming ). . see frosio supra note , at . . see pira int’l ltd., univ. of e. anglia & knowledgeview ltd., commercial exploitation of europe’s public sector information (sept. , ), http://ec.europa.eu/information_society/policy/psi/docs/pdfs/pira_study/ commercial_final_report.pdf (reporting for the european commission, information society dg); r.e.w. pettifer, towards a stronger european market in applied meteorology, meteorological applications ( ), http://onlinelibrary. wiley.com/doi/ . /met. /abstract; see also peter weiss, nat’l weather serv., borders in cyberspace: conflicting public sector information policies and their economic impacts, (feb. ), http://www.nws.noaa.gov/ sp/borders_report.pdf. . see thomas rogers & andrew szamosszegi, fair use in the u.s. economy: economic contribution of industries relying on fair use ( ), http://www.ccianet.org/wp-content/uploads/library/fairusestudy-sep .pdf (presenting a study prepared for the computer & communications industry association); see also christophe geiger, promoting creativity through copyright limitations: reflections on the concept of exclusivity in copyright law, vand. j. ent. & tech. l. ( ) (discussing the promotional value of exception and limitation to the advancement of creativity from a more theoretical point of view, rather than through a quantitative analysis). . rogers & szamosszegi, supra note , at . the return of the gift in the “crowd society” c. mass collaboration, decentralization, and openness boosted by technological innovation, collaboration is regaining its natural role in human interactions. recent empirical research found that rather than the homo economicus, we are “a cooperative species.” men are complex entities that cannot be explained only through economic incentives; instead, several other factors come into play, such as altruism. in his recent book together, social scientist richard sennett emphasizes the role of collaboration in human life and reminds readers that “cooperation precedes individuation: cooperation is the foundation of human development, in that we learn how to be together before we learn how to stand apart.” building upon Émile durkheim’s and marcel mauss’s works, emerging anti-utilitarian schools designed and promoted a “new political economy,” whose specificity is to link together the question of the political and religious foundation of societies with the question of the gift, of recognition and of the building of individual and collective identities. its main hypothesis is that men are not only self-interested animals, eager only to get and own more and more things and riches, but that first of all they desire to be recognized . . . . the anti-utilitarian hypothesis is that human beings’ first desire is to be recognized and valued as givers. . see samuel bowles & herbert gintis, a cooperative species: human reciprocity and its evolution ( ); see also new economic thinking, the death of “homo economicus,” youtube (june , ), https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=parppymzfqm&feature=youtu.be; adam smith, the theory of moral sentiments ( ); cf. jeremy rifkin, the zero marginal cost society: the internet of things, the collaborative commons, and the eclipse of capitalism ( ) [hereinafter rifkin, the zero marginal cost society]; jeremy rifkin, the empathic civilization: the race to global consciousness in a world in crisis ( ); the zeitgeist movement defined: realizing a new train of thought, the zeitgeist movement, http://thezeitgeistmovement.com/orientation (last visited feb , ). . see the zeitgeist movement defined, supra note . . see richard sennett, together: the rituals, pleasures and politics of cooperation ( ). . see Émile durkheim, the division of labor in society (steven lukes ed., w.d. hall trans., free press ) ( ) (assuming that humans are inherently egoistic but our collective consciousness, which is composed by norms, beliefs and values, overrides our egoism; in particular, according to durkheim, it is the emotional part of our collective consciousness, culture, that overrides self- interest); mauss, supra note . . caillÉ, supra note , at ; see also, e.g., alain caillÉ, critique de la raison utilitaire ( ). michigan state law review [vol:st.pg] from life in a day (ridley scott’s collaborative youtube movie) and virtual choirs to volunteer astronomers looking for new galaxies in the galaxy zoo, taxonomists classifying images from collections of herbarium specimens in the herbaria@home project, or millions of users enlisting in the seti@home project to search for signs of extraterrestrial life —online collaboration has projected granular individual contributions in the kaleidoscopic multiplier of the net. likewise, collaborative authorship and social editing in wikipedia and wiki environments have become increasingly influential models for content creation and dissemination, so that commentators are now talking about wikinomics or wikiborg. sharing is a contagious process insofar as it has rapidly exploded on a previously unimaginable scale. it reaches beyond creative endeavors by moving to more and more areas of our lives. recent research highlights the rise of collaborative . see life in a day, youtube ( ), http://www.youtube.com/ user/lifeinaday?gl=us. . see eric whitacre, about the virtual choir, eric whitacre, http://ericwhitacre.com/the-virtual-choir (last visited feb. , ). . galaxy zoo, http://www.galaxyzoo.org/ (last visited feb. , ). . herbaria@home, http://herbariaunited.org/athome/ (last visited feb. , ). . see seti@home, http://setiathome.berkeley.edu (last visited feb. , ). . see alex wright, managing scientific inquiry in a laboratory the size of the web, n.y. times (dec. , ), http://www.nytimes.com/ / / /science/ citizen.html?_r= ; mark cooper; from wifi to wikis and open source: the political economy of collaborative production in the digital information age, j. telecomm. & high tech. l. , ( ). . see don tapscott & anthony d. williams, wikinomics: how mass collaboration changes everything - ( ); adam hyde, experiences in open publishing, floss manuals (aug. , ), http://lists.flossmanuals.net/ pipermail/discuss-flossmanuals.net/ -august/ .html (presenting in wikimania in a panel “authorship, copyright, and the wikiborg”); see also shun-ling chen, collaborative authorship: from folklore to the wikiborg, j.l., tech. & pol’y , - . for a discussion of wikipedia and wiki environments as a sharing economy and a cultural commons, see michael j. madison, brett m. frischmann & katherine j. strandburg, constructing commons in the cultural environment, cornell l. rev. ( ); lawrence lessig, remix: making art and commerce thrive in the hybrid economy - ( ). cf. jon m. garon, wiki authorship, social media, and the curatorial audience, harv. j. sports ent. l. ( ) (noting that the lack of attribution may be running counter to the developing social networking expectations and suggesting that collaborative authorship must adapt its normative expectations regarding attribution). . see lessig, supra note , at - (discussing sharing economies). the return of the gift in the “crowd society” consumption. swapping, sharing, bartering, trading, and renting have been reinvented through technology and peer-to-peer communities. collaborative consumption is rising in enormous marketplaces, such as ebay and craigslist, and emerging sectors such as peer-to-peer money lending (zopa); “swap trading” (swap); car sharing (zipcar); ridesharing (zimride); apartment sharing (airbnb); skills sharing (skillshare); time sharing (taskrabbit); land sharing (landshare); kid clothes sharing (thredup); or anything else you may need (share anything). in cyberspace, human intelligence has become collective through user-generated mass collaboration, which—as several authors have increasingly noted—may produce social and economic enrichment to a far greater extent than in the past. the power of . see rachel botsman & roo rogers, what’s mine is yours: the rise of collaborative consumption ( ); see also michel bauwens, scope, not scale: what do medieval monks, cuban socialists and wikipedia have in common?, al jazeera (mar. , , : am), http://www.aljazeera.com/ indepth/opinion/ / / .html?utm_content=automateplus& utm_campaign=trial &utm_source=socialflow&utm_medium=masteraccount&ut m_term=tweets (discussing the mutualizing of knowledge and the mutualizing of physical resources as the economies of scope of our age); neal gorenflo, the new sharing economy, shareable (dec. , ), http://www.shareable.net/blog/the- new-sharing-economy (describing sharing by latitude, a study in collaboration with sharable magazine); sharing is contagious: an infographic on the rise of collaborative consumption, good mag. (sept. , ), https://magazine.good.is/ infographics/sharing-is-contagious-the-rise-of-collaborative-consumption. . zopa, http://uk.zopa.com (last visited feb. , ). . swap, https://www.swap.com (last visited feb. , ). . zipcar, http://www.zipcar.com (last visited feb. , ). . zimride, http://www.zimride.com (last visited feb. , ). . airbnb, http://www.airbnb.com (last visited feb. , ). . skillshare, http://www.skillshare.com (last visited feb. , ). . taskrabbit, http://www.taskrabbit.com (last visited feb. , ). . landshare, http://www.landshare.net (last visited feb. , ). . thredup, http://www.thredup.com (last visited feb. , ). . share-anything, http://www.share-anything.org (last visited feb. , ). . see pierre lÉvy, l’intelligence collective: pour une anthopologie du cyberspace ( ). . a large quantity of literature has been produced on mass collaboration in the networked information society. see clay shirky, cognitive surplus: creativity and generosity in a connected age ( ) (discussing the notion of “cognitive surplus” of online brainpower); charles leadbeater, we-think: mass innovation, not mass production ( d ed. ); tapscott & williams, supra note ; clay shirky, here comes everybody: the power of organizing without organizations ( ); david weinberger, everything is michigan state law review [vol:st.pg] online collective intelligence may challenge the individualistic, post- romantic, creative paradigm; promoting the return of a pre-modern communitarian and collective approach to creativity and the emergence of a new cultural landscape. digital creativity is mass collaborative, shared, open, user-generated, and remixed. david bollier described the internet revolution as a monumental shift: i believe we are moving into a new kind of cultural if not economic reality. we are moving away from a world organized around centralized control, strict intellectual property rights and hierarchies of credentialed experts, to a radically different order. the new order is predicated upon open access, decentralized participation, and cheap and easy sharing. yochai benkler defined the high generative capacity of online commons as the “wealth of networks.” in the wealth of networks, benkler wrote: “radical decentralization of intelligence in our communications network and the centrality of information, knowledge, culture, and ideas to advanced economic activity are leading to a new stage of the information economy—the networked information economy.” benkler qualified the concept by saying that “[w]hat characterizes the networked information economy is that decentralized individual action—specifically, new and important cooperative and coordinate action carried out through radically distributed, nonmarket mechanisms that do not depend on proprietary strategies—plays a much greater role than it did, or could have, in the industrial information economy.” the wealth of networks lies in networked peer production that is highly generative because it is modular, granular, and cheap to integrate the results. to borrow jerome reichman’s categories, new forms of innovation allow the transformation of small grains of miscellaneous: the power of the new digital disorder ( ); cass r. sunstein, infotopia: how many minds produce knowledge ( ). . for a discussion of the tension between the pre-modern and post- romantic creative paradigms, see giancarlo f. frosio, rediscovering cumulative creativity from the oral formulaic tradition to digital remix: can i get a witness?, j. marshall rev. intell. prop. l. ( ). . david bollier, the commons as a new sector of value-creation: it’s time to recognize and protect the distinctive wealth generated by online commons (apr. , ), http://www.onthecommons.org/commons-new-sector- value-creation. . see yochai benkler, the wealth of networks: how social production transforms markets and freedom ( ). . id. at . . id. at . . id. at - . the return of the gift in the “crowd society” information and innovation into distributed and collective forms of intelligence. as benkler puts it: the networked environment makes possible a new modality of organizing production: radically decentralized, collaborative, and nonproprietary; based on sharing resources and outputs among widely distributed, loosely connected individuals who cooperate with each other without relying on either market signals or managerial commands. this is what i call “commons-based peer production.” according to benkler, the networked information economy improves individual capacities in three ways. first, individuals can “do more for and by themselves.” second, the networked information economy enhances individuals’ “capacity to do more in loose commonality with others, without being constrained to organize their relationship through a price system or in traditional hierarchical models.” finally, “it improves the capacity of individuals to do more in formal organizations that operate outside the market sphere.” the new economics of digital distribution democratized innovation. flexibility, decentralization, cooperative creation, and customization out-performed corporate bureaucracies that were unwilling to experiment because it was thought to be too risky and costly. the charter for innovation, creativity and access to knowledge declares: we are in the midst of a revolution in the way that knowledge and culture are created, accessed and transformed. citizens, artists and consumers are no longer powerless and isolated in the face of the content . see, e.g., j.h. reichman, of green tulips and legal kudzu: repackaging rights in subpatentable innovation, vand. l. rev. ( ). . benkler, supra note , at . . id. at . . id. . id.; see also yochai benkler & helen nissenbaum, commons-based peer production and virtue, j. pol. phil. , - ( ); cf. hetcher, supra note ; steven weber, the success of open source ( ). . see eric von hippel, democratizing innovation ( ) (noting that “[o]pen, distributed innovation is ‘attacking’ a major structure of the social division of labor. many firms and industries must make fundamental changes to long-held business models in order to adapt”); see also robert cunningham, the separation of (economic) power: a cultural environmental perspective of social production and the networked public sphere, j. high tech. l. , ( ) (noting that social production “affords the possibility of harnessing the critical liberal function of separating (economic) power” by diversifying the modes of production). michigan state law review [vol:st.pg] production and distribution industries: now individuals across many different spheres collaborate, participate and decide. in the networked information economy, innovation and creativity are becoming independent from centralized company environments. according to neil netanel, “[m]ajor film studios, record labels, television and radio broadcasters, and print publishers came to dominate our cultural landscape because they have the funds and infrastructure to mass-produce, package, and distribute authors’ creations. but digital technology radically changes that equation by drastically reducing the cost of production and distribution.” in the emerging ecosystem of “commons-based peer production,” open access models play a pivotal role. in this respect, theoretical developments have been coupled with efforts to turn commons theory into practice. with technology facilitating a vast array of cooperative creative projects, community production has increasingly become a solution to cultural production’s free-rider problems by converging initiatives, such as open source software, creative commons, wiki environments, or ssrn. open access in academic publishing follows in the footsteps of these many other initiatives. actually, creative commons, the open-source software movement, and the free software movement created a commons through private agreement and technological implementation. again, private firms in the biotechnological and software fields have decided to forgo property rights to reduce transaction costs and . fcforum, charter for innovation, creativity and access to knowledge: citizens’ and artists’ rights in the digital age, free culture f. ( ), http://fcforum.net/en/charter. . neil weinstock netanel, copyright’s paradox ( ). . see john willinsky, the unacknowledged convergence of open source, open access, and open science, first monday (aug. , ), http://www.firstmonday.org/htbin/cgiwrap/bin/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/ / (discussing the need to emphasize the converging nature of these initiatives serving as an active resistance to the extension of intellectual property rights and the emersion of an approach treating intellectual properties as public goods); see also lisa mandrusiak, balancing open source paradigms and traditional intellectual property models to optimize innovation, me. l. rev. , - ( ). . see giancarlo f. frosio, open access publishing: a literature review - ( ), http://www.create.ac.uk/publications/open-access-publishing- a-literature-review (study prepared for the rcuk centre for copyright and new business models in the creative economy discussing the open access publishing movement and several open access initiatives and projects). . see id. at - . the return of the gift in the “crowd society” circumvent any “anti-commons” failure. as reichman noted, property rules when applied to small grains of creativity create “legal kudzu.” therefore, small grains of innovation are best together in a contractually reconstructed commons governed by liability rather than property rules. technology has made possible large-scale cooperative behavior and gift exchange that was previously limited to rarified groups. initially, the large-scale cooperative behavior emerged and evolved in software communities and academia. benkler describes open source software as the “quintessential instance of commons-based peer production.” however, these cooperative and participative behaviors have spread far beyond the initial, rarified communities. from open source, we have been moving to open culture. open . see robert p. merges, a new dynamism in the public domain, u. chi. l. rev. , - ( ); see also eli m. salzberger, economic analysis of the public domain, in the future of the public domain, supra note , at , (noting that these phenomena of de-propertization can also be seen as responses to the inefficient expansion of intellectual property rights). . see reichman, supra note , at - . . for a review of the notion of contractually constructed commons, see j.h. reichman & paul f. uhlir, a contractually reconstructed research commons for scientific data in a highly protectionist intellectual property environment, law & contemp. probs. ( ); see also jerome h. reichman, paul f. uhlir & tom dedeurwaerdere, governing digitally integrated genetic resources, data, and literature: global intellectual property strategies for a redesigned microbial research commons ( ); lawrence lessig, the future of ideas: the fate of the commons in a connected world ( ); madison, frischmann & strandburg, supra note ; molly shaffer van houweling, cultural environmentalism and the constructed commons, law & contemp. probs. ( ). . see lewis hyde, the gift: creativity and the artist in the modern world (vintage books d ed. ) ( ) (describing creativity exchange among artists); robert k. merton, the sociology of science: theoretical and empirical investigations - , (norman w. storer ed., ) (exploring norms of sharing among scientists). . see benkler, supra note , at - ; yochai benkler, sharing nicely: on shareable goods and the emergence of sharing as a modality of economic production, yale l.j. ( ) [hereinafter benkler, sharing nicely]; yochai benkler, coase’s penguin, or, linux and the nature of the firm, yale l.j. , ( ). . see michael j. madison, brett m. frischmann & katherine j. strandburg, the university as constructed cultural commons, wash. u. j.l. & pol’y ( ). . benkler, supra note , at . . see lee davis, should the logic of ‘open source’ be applied to digital cultural goods? an exploratory essay, in copyright and other fairy tales: hans christian andersen and the commodification of creativity (helle michigan state law review [vol:st.pg] networks and networked peer collaboration have transformed markets by enabling amateurs to innovate. david bollier described this process as a “viral spiral” by which internet users come together to build digital tools and share content on self-created online commons. individual experimentation, sub-cultures, and a community of social trust created linux, wikipedia, facebook, youtube, and major political websites. iii. the return of the gift a. the return of the gift from clan to crowd society as was discussed at length, gift exchange models always played a very relevant role in the history of creativity. several examples emerge from antiquity, such as the negative reaction to the sophists teaching in exchange of a reward, the contraposition between pindar and simonides, hermodoros selling plato’s lectures and earning such widespread contempt as to become proverbial, or the emphasis on amicitia of the roman authorial experience. later, saint columba’s strenuous defense of open access to knowledge exemplified the medieval and renaissance belief that scientia donum dei est, unde vendi non potest. gift exchange had a relevant role well into the renaissance. in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the role of the gift was to open up channels of communication and seal porsdam ed., ). these cooperative behaviors reach beyond the content level into the infrastructural level with grassroots community networks or mesh networks. see primavera de filippi & félix tréguer, expanding the internet commons: the subversive potential of wireless community networks, j. peer production (jan. ), http://peerproduction.net/issues/issue- -disruption-and-the-law/peer-reviewed- articles/expanding-the-internet-commons-the-subversive-potential-of-wireless- community-networks (discussing the phenomenon of decentralization in telecommunications networks and the revival of grassroots (wireless) community networks, which (i) “are deployed by the community and for the community at the local or regional level,” (ii) “rather than being driven by profits, they focus on the actual needs of the needs of its participants,” and (iii) “experiment with novel models of distributed governance relying on cooperation and sharing among a community of peers”). . see stefan thomke & eric von hippel, customers as innovators: a new way to create value, harv. bus. rev., apr. , at . . see david bollier, viral spiral: how the commoners built a digital republic of their own ( ), https://www.jus.uio.no/sisu/viral_spiral. david_bollier/landscape.b .pdf; see also madison, frischmann & strandburg, supra note , at (discussing, together with other examples, jam-band fan communities as a constructed cultural commons). the return of the gift in the “crowd society” the network of interpersonal relations. at the time of the british and french “battle of the booksellers,” the rhetoric of the gift still resounded powerfully from the nebula of the past in the words of justice yates or jean-françois gaultier and shaped the constitutional moment of modern copyright law. in this sense, the return of gift exchange models has a credible source in the history of creativity. anthropologists and social scientists have long studied reciprocity and gift exchange in ancient and modern society. the anthropological studies of gift exchange have been very influential in research into the phenomenon of open source software and hacker communities. anthropologist steve mizrach’s early study distilled a set of common ethical practices in hacker communities. they build upon sharing and freedom of information according to the maxim that “[i]nformation increases in value by sharing it with other people. data can be the basis for someone else’s learning; software can be improved collectively.” hacker ethics’ grundnorm is “[t]he belief that information-sharing is a powerful positive good, and that it is an ethical duty of hackers to share their expertise by writing free software and facilitating access to information and to computing resources wherever possible.” according to andrés guadamuz gonzález, “hackers achieve a sense of community in which sharing of information becomes essential.” in the cathedral and the bazaar, eric s. raymond analyzed “the hacker culture as a ‘gift culture’ in which participants compete for prestige by giving time, energy, and creativity away.” yochai benkler extended the same conclusions to the open source movement. . see, e.g., mauss, supra note ; claude lÉvi-strauss, the elementary structures of kinship (rodney needham ed., james harle bell & john richard von sturmer trans., beacon press ) ( ). . see steve mizrach, is there a hacker ethic for s hackers?, hacker kulture, http://www.dvara.net/hk/ shackers.asp (last visited feb. , ). . jonas löwgren, hacker culture(s), hacker kulture (feb. , ), http://www.dvara.net/hk/hackerculture.asp. . eric s. raymond, the new hacker’s dictionary ( d ed. ). . andrés guadamuz gonzaléz, the digital divide: it’s the content, stupid—part , computer & telecomm. l. rev. , ( ). . eric s. raymond, the cathedral and the bazaar: musings on linux and open source by an accidental revolutionary ( ); see also mckenzie wark, a hacker manifesto ( ); hillary bays & miranda mowbray, cookies, gift-giving, and the internet, first monday (nov. , ), http://journals.uic.edu/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/ / . . see, e.g., benkler & nissenbaum, supra note , at - ; see also douglas rushkoff, open source democracy: how online communication is changing offline politics ( ) (discussing sharing and early gift economies michigan state law review [vol:st.pg] today, after long unchallenged dominance of the market and a steady trend toward propertization of knowledge-based outputs, gift economy is regaining momentum in the networked information economy. gift culture may soon expand to encompass networked peer collaboration and user-generated creativity at large. communities of social trust—such as wikipedia, youtube, and fan- fiction communities—have spread virally online through gift exchange models. the internet and digitization have produced a great value shift that is reversing what karl polanyi termed the “great transformation”—the nineteenth century rise of the market society when market activity took a life of its own and overpowered the other social institutions. in online interaction, there is a growing recognition that value can be created by social practices that cannot be explained by standard market economic focus on quantification. the uncompensated users’ contributions in developing free software, or updating wikipedia, facebook, and youtube are reversing the logics of the market economy. gift economy is emerging as a new practice of value exchange. consumer or user gift systems are taking over traditional market systems in many sectors of cultural production and creativity exchange. in the entertainment industry, new business models switch the focus from the content to the container. artists have come to realize that free content drives valuable secondary markets, such as live performances, special editions, bonus material, and merchandise. sharing content leads to increased revenue streams due to the reputational value that can be extracted from broader content distribution. giving away music records may increase concerts’ attendance and help in building the artists’ fan base. in the internet); magnus bergquist & jan ljungberg, the power of gifts: organizing social relationships in open source communities, info. sys. j. ( ). . see karl polanyi, the great transformation: the political and economic origins of our time - ( ). . see markus giesler, consumer gift systems, j. consumer res. , ( ). . cf. frosio, supra note , at - (mapping open access business models). . see chris anderson, free: the future of a radical price - ( ). . mark f. schultz, live performance, copyright, and the future of the music business, u. rich. l. rev. , ( ); debora j. halbert, resisting intellectual property - ( ). the return of the gift in the “crowd society” some examples of artists experimenting with gift economy business models include radiohead, nine inch nails, coldplay, and the arctic monkeys. as the economist noted, thanks to technological advancement, “a lot of things are making money” in the music business, notwithstanding the decline in sales of recorded music. starting with a very influential essay from marcel mauss, societies have been placed on an economic evolutionary scale from gift to commodity exchange. the so-called clan society was dominated by gift exchange, while the modern class society made private property and commodity the norm. chris gregory described the process as a continuum from the clan system of organization to the proletarian or capitalist system of organization and noted that “[a]s one moves from one extreme to the other, equality and unity give way to inequality and separation.” i suggest that the continuum from clan to class society, mentioned by chris gregory, now extends to the “crowd society,” which features new modes of social interaction in digital online communities. as discussed in the preceding pages, the crowd society is open and decentralized, thus equalitarian, collaborative, and coordinated—thus united. in this respect, the crowd society resembles more the mechanics of the clan society, rather than the class society. equality and unity are defining characters of digital communities, rather than inequality and separation. the emergence of the crowd society in the digital environment, together with the inherent abundance of digital, knowledge-based goods, makes plausible the revival of gift economy models of production, rather than a continuation of traditional market economy. the networked, mass-collaborative character of creativity in the crowd society enhances the proliferativeness of the gift exchange model that lies in what anthropologists and social scientists described as a debt-economy. the goal of a gift economy is never to have . see, e.g., victoria gu, neo-patronage: the new fan–artist connection, the smoke signal (sept. , , : am), https://web.archive.org/web/ /http://thesmokesignal.org/news/index. php?option=com_content&task=view&id= &itemid= . . having a ball: in the supposedly benighted music business, a lot of things are making money, the economist (oct. , ), http://www.economist.com/node/ ?story_id= . . see mauss, supra note , at - ; see also maurice godelier, the enigma of the gift - (nora scott trans., univ. chi. press ) ( ). . see gregory, supra note , at - . . id. at . . id. at . michigan state law review [vol:st.pg] debts paid off, but to reinforce a recurring cycle of personal indebtedness. in contrast to market economy, gift economy, by definition, is never a proportionate exchange. its inner scope is to outweigh the previous giver to keep the donors entangled in an endless web of reciprocation, and thus achieve accrued reputational status. a mere compensation in exchange for the pristine gift would do nothing to enhance the social status of the giver. absent a repeatedly unequal exchange, the system would soon reach a stalemate, or at least would lose the dynamic and inertial effect of continual reciprocations, which are aimed at matching and surpassing the largess of the preceding gift giver, thus improving the reputational status of the reciprocator. according to alain caillé, under the gift’s paradigm—the third paradigm, in addition to use and exchange value—goods and services enjoy a different, additional value, which is connected with their capacity to create social relationships. the gift becomes a tool through which men create their own society by promoting social relationships. gift exchanges can produce value on three distinct levels: individual economic value, individual social value, and public social value. the donor receives value from the exchange of gifts, for example, the code that each software developer may contribute to free or open source software projects. each instance of reciprocation leaves the giver with reputational value. additionally, a public social value will remain as a surplus of each gift transaction. gift economy could lower social tensions, therefore reducing the related social costs and producing additional economic surplus. the crowd society’s networked peer production merges modern and pre-modern creative models together. decentralization places the individual user at the core of the creative process, whereas collaboration and resource-sharing emphasize the role of the community. the networked information economy multiplies individual contributions by merging them into the community. as a result, similar to pre-modern creativity, networked peer production is . see id. . see allain caillÉ, anthropologie du don: le tiers paradigme - ( ); see also godelier, supra note , at . . see caillÉ, supra note , at - . . see duran bell, modes of exchange: gift and commodity, j. socio- econ. , ( ). . see id. at (noting that “a gift implies an intention to develop or maintain a social relationship between parties to the exchange”; therefore, gifts help build a relationship between individuals or groups and make people work together). the return of the gift in the “crowd society” an inclusive creative process, rather than exclusive. the return to an inclusive paradigm of knowledge production may suggest that exclusive rights do not efficiently fit creative processes in cyberspace. the networked information economy challenges the conventional notion of property, as “[p]roperty in [this economy] is configured fundamentally around the right to distribute, not the right to exclude.” as discussed earlier, there is a dystonic relationship between propertization and the networked information economy. in the digital environment, we are moving beyond a utilitarian theory of creative production. the new sharing economy eroded some of the justifications for intellectual property by proving that people are willing to create without hope of remuneration. rather, information exchange—and “playful enjoyment” —has become the ultimate goal in the digital economy. the role of non-instrumental motivations forms the basis for a “social” model of intellectual production. the virtue of sharing is regaining its role because people return to value the positive externalities that sharing and collaborating ethics bring about. in addition, cyberspace limits the . see frosio, supra note , at - ; giancarlo f. frosio, a history of aesthetics from homer to digital mash-ups: cumulative creativity and the demise of copyright exclusivity, law & human. , ( ). . weber, supra note , at ; see also john p. ulhøi, open source development: a hybrid in innovation and management theory, mgmt. decision ( ). . cf. caillÉ, supra note ; caillÉ, supra note . . see, e.g., lemley, supra note , at - . . see david lange, at play in the fields of the word: copyright and the construction of authorship in the post-literate millennium, law & contemp. probs. , , ( ); david lange, reimagining the public domain, law & contemp. probs. , ( ); eben moglen, anarchism triumphant: free software and the death of copyright, in the commodification of information, supra note , at , - ; julie e. cohen, creativity and culture in copyright theory, u.c. davis l. rev. ( ); cohen, supra note . . see alexander bard & jan sÖderqvist, netocracy: the new power elite and life after capitalism - , - ( ). . benkler, supra note , at ; see also paul a. david & joseph s. shapiro, community-based production of open-source software: what do we know about the developers who participate?, info. econ. & pol’y ( ) (discussing and collecting empirical data regarding the motivations, personal attributes, and behavioral patterns of those who are engaged in producing free/libre and open source software (floss)); mark cenite et al., more than just free content: motivations of peer-to-peer file sharers, j. comm. inquiry ( ). . see benkler, sharing nicely, supra note . for a discussion on intellectual property spillovers and externalities, see frischmann & lemley, supra michigan state law review [vol:st.pg] negative externalities that may follow from the web of obligations on which traditional gift economies are based. in the digital environment, humans can be enmeshed with a web of obligations and gift reciprocations, while still being “aliens and strangers.” b. baudrillard in cyberspace: taming limitless power with artificial scarcity the re-emergence of a gift economy in the crowd society revives jean baudrillard’s dream of prodigality and abundance, as opposed to our reality of artificial scarcity. baudrillard urged us to “abandon the received idea we have of an affluent society as a society in which all material (and cultural) needs are easily met.” he continued, “we should rather espouse the notion . . . that it is our industrial and productivist societies which, unlike certain primitive societies, are dominated by scarcity, by the obsession with scarcity characteristic of the market economy.” as baudrillard argued: the collective ‘improvidence’ and ‘prodigality’ characteristic of primitive societies are the sign[s] of real affluence. we have only the signs of affluence. beneath a gigantic apparatus of production, we anxiously eye the signs of poverty and scarcity. but poverty consists, says sahlins, neither in a small quantity of goods, nor simply in a relation between ends and means: it is, above all, a relation between human beings. the basis for the confidence of primitive peoples and for the fact that, within hunger, they live a life of plenty, is ultimately the transparency and reciprocity of social relations. it is the fact that no monopolization whatever of nature, the soil, the instruments or products of ‘labour’ intervenes to obstruct exchange and institute scarcity. there is among them no accumulation, which is always the source of power. in the economy of the gift and symbolic exchange, a small and always finite quantity of goods is sufficient to create general wealth since those goods pass constantly from one person to the other. wealth has its basis not in goods, but in the concrete exchange between persons. it is, therefore, unlimited since the cycle of exchange is endless, even among a limited number of individuals, with each moment of the exchange cycle adding to the value of the object exchanged. it is this concrete and relational note ; mark a. lemley, property, intellectual property, and free riding, tex. l. rev. ( ). . cf. mauss, supra note , at (noting that people may not want to be enmeshed with the feeling bond that a gift creates, as “[t]he unreciprocated gift still makes the person who has accepted it inferior”). . hyde, supra note , at (pointing out that “[t]here are times when we want to be aliens and strangers” and do not wish the personal bond of the gift to get into the privacy of our lives). . baudrillard, supra note , at . . id. the return of the gift in the “crowd society” dialectic which we find inverted, as a dialectic of penury and unlimited need, in the process of competition and differentiation characteristic of our civilized, industrial societies. where, in primitive exchange, every relationship adds to the social wealth, in our ‘differential’ societies every social relationship adds to individual lack, since every thing possessed is relativized in relation to others (in primitive exchange, it is valorized by the very relationship with others). it is not, therefore, paradoxical to argue that in our ‘affluent’ societies abundance is lost and that it will not be restored by an interminable increase in productivity, by unleashing new productive forces. since the structural definition of abundance and wealth lies in social organization, only a revolution of the social organization and of social relations could bring those things about. in baudrillard’s opinion, structural scarcity, rather than abundance, characterizes our society. rather than satisfying humankind’s material and cultural needs, the consumer society feeds a relentless hunger for production. in order to keep that hunger in place, the consumer society is based on the artificial creation of a system of needs. this fabricated system of needs serves the production system, rather than the opposite. the full emergence of this system can be located around the time of the publication of edward bernays’s propaganda. in propaganda, bernays took sigmund freud’s ideas and showed american corporations for the first time how they could make people want things they didn’t need by linking mass-produced goods to their unconscious desires. according to baudrillard, this system of production, then, has the function of generating privileges and maintaining them in place beyond the ancillary function of producing goods. for baudrillard, therefore, the consumer society is an “organized reign of scarcity,” perpetuating a social model where power is based on accumulation on one hand and obsession with scarcity of goods and means on the other hand. in modern times, this “organized reign of scarcity” is epitomized by the kilometric lines forming outside apple stores in every city around the globe before the release of the latest version of an iconic electronic gadget. baudrillard argues that the emancipation from this state of collective foolishness may happen only through the subversion of the present social structure that the system of needs has . id. at - . . id. . see id. at . . see edward l. bernays, propaganda - ( ). . baudrillard, supra note , at - . michigan state law review [vol:st.pg] the function to keep in place. seeking a revolution of “social relations” that can restore the true affluence, baudrillard wondered: will we return, one day, beyond the market economy, to prodigality? instead of prodigality, we have ‘consumption,’ forced consumption in perpetuity, twin sister to scarcity. it was social logic which brought primitive peoples the ‘first’ (and only) affluent society. it is our social logic which condemns us to luxurious and spectacular penury. the crowd society’s economics of commons-based peer production perfectly adjusts to baudrillard’s revolutionary call for “prodigality” beyond market economy. taking baudrillard’s ideas to cyberspace, digital technology inherently brings about affluence instead of scarcity. ubiquitous digital networks have instated new economics of content reproduction and distribution with marginal cost getting close to zero. also, networked peer and mass collaboration is first and foremost a revolution of “social relations.” as mckenzie wark noted, the core of the social movement around free information is “about new kinds of social relations,” because [t]hings being free isn’t enough. it is also about making social relations that bind people with a weak but widespread obligation to treat what each other does as more than just objects, more than just stuff. it’s about thinking of oneself as something besides a consumer. the internet has emerged in our society of scarcity as an eco- system that has allowed the public to experiment with an alternative social model, which is based on equality between peers; exchange rather than differentiation; and decentralization rather than power concentration. the networked peer collaboration’s “revolution of social relations” may dry out the power source of the “organized reign of scarcity.” first, the emergence of an alternative symbolic . id. at - . . id. at . . see lemley, supra note , at (“[a] series of technological changes is underway that promises to end scarcity as we know it for a wide variety of goods. the internet is the most obvious example . . . . the internet has reduced the cost of reproduction and distribution of informational content effectively to zero. in many cases it has also dramatically reduced the cost of producing that content. and it has changed the way in which information is distributed, separating the creators of content from the distributors.”). . id.; see also raymond shih ray ku, the creative destruction of copyright: napster and the new economics of digital technology, u. chi. l. rev. , - ( ). . mckenzie wark, copyright, copyleft, copygift, in freedom of culture: regulation and privatization of intellectual property and public space , , (jorinde seijdel & liesbeth melis eds., ). the return of the gift in the “crowd society” economy challenges the power of capital and accumulation. additionally, the new social model defies the system of fabricated needs and the obsession with scarcity by turning consumers into users and then creators. in the crowd society, there are structural preconditions for a return to prodigality beyond the market economy. baudrillard’s categories may serve to explain the conundrum that the emergence of networked peer collaboration and user- generated creativity has brought about. overbroad commodification of information and copyright expansion might be construed as a reaction to the digital revolution. in this sense, copyright expansion serves to tame the limitless power of networked peer production with artificial scarcity in order to maintain in place the structural scarcity of the consumer society and prevent the return to “prodigality” beyond the market economy. as propertization hinders the potentials for growth of open, decentralized, and collaborative digital communities, commodification of knowledge-based goods could be one way to prevent the emergence of the crowd society as a new social paradigm that might undermine, or oust altogether, the present rivaling class, capitalist and consumerist social paradigm. c. user patronage a possibility for the reinstatement of baudrillard’s “collective prodigality” might have materialized in the crowd society thanks to technological advancement. together with other changes, the future of creativity may lean toward a consumer gift system or user patronage, promoting an unrestrained, diffused, and networked discourse between creators and the public through digital crowd- sourcing. the idea of user patronage has been emerging on the internet in the last few years, such as the street performer protocol, . see, e.g., rifkin, the zero marginal cost society, supra note ; michael strangelove, the empire of mind: digital piracy and the anti- capitalist movement - ( ). . see, e.g., yochai benkler, from consumers to users: shifting the deeper structures of regulation toward sustainable commons and user access, fed. comm. l.j. , - ( ); joseph p. liu, copyright law’s theory of the consumer, b.c. l. rev. , - ( ). . as i argued elsewhere, the emergence of user patronage should hypothetically complement the demise of the principle of copyright exclusivity and the introduction of a system of open reuse and apportionment of profits. see frosio, supra note , at - . . see giesler, supra note , at . michigan state law review [vol:st.pg] written by john kelsey and bruce schneier, or the “neo-patronage” model offered by another sky press. another sky press defines neo- patronage as: [a]n (r)evolution of patronage enabled by the connectivity between artist and audience offered by today’s technologies. at its core, neo-patronage is an honor/trust based system of financial support for an artist that comes from the artist’s collective audience, rather than a single individual or organization. the sum of all patron contributions becomes the means and incentive for the artist to continue his or her work. . . . . in practice, the money the artist receives via neo-patronage serves two purposes: . it is payment and ‘thank you’ for work already completed. . it is the funding that allows the artist to continue to produce new works. as yochai benkler explained in his recent book the penguin and the leviathan: how cooperation triumphs over self-interest, experiments with pay-as-you-wish pricing in the music industry reveal that fans will voluntarily pay far more for their favorite music than economic models would ever predict. for example, bandcamp—a platform that lets musicians set up simple content stores for their works and allows for streams, pay-what-you-want, and free or conditional downloads—helped artists to make over $ million a month. bandcamp states that when given the option of paying-what-you-want for albums with a suggested price, fans pay an average of % more than the minimum price, and in any other instances, fans pay more than the minimum price % of the time. . see john kelsey & bruce schneier, the street performer protocol and digital copyrights, first monday (june , ), http://www.firstmonday.org/ ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/ / ; john kelsey & bruce schneier, electronic commerce and the street performer protocol ( ), http://www.schneier.com/ paper-street-performer.pdf. . neo-patronage / pay what you want, another sky press, http://anothersky.org/asp/main/our-beliefs/neo-patronage (last visited feb. , ). . see yochai benkler, the penguin and the leviathan: how cooperation triumphs over self-interest - ( ); see also anderson, supra note , at - ; chris anderson, free! why $ . is the future of business, wired (feb. , , : pm), http://www.wired.com/techbiz/it/ magazine/ - /ff_free?currentpage=all; chris anderson, the long tail: why the future of business is selling less of more - ( ). . see bandcamp for artists, bandcamp, http://bandcamp.com/artists (last visited feb. , ); see also michael masnick & michael ho, the sky is the return of the gift in the “crowd society” magnatune, whose business model now moved to subscription-only, used to permit users to choose the amount they were willing to pay for a high-quality album, whereas low-quality albums were given out for free. the free offers ranged from $ to $ . quite surprisingly, the average payment was $ . , well above the minimum payment and even higher than the recommended price of $ . the data from each of these enablers suggest that artists have increasingly valuable opportunities to go directly to fans, rather than surrendering revenue streams to gatekeepers. consumers are “often willing to spend more, if they feel that they’re really getting something of value and there is a direct connection to the artist.” in this sense, topspin media—a company providing tools to content creators to allow them to promote a direct-to-fan marketing and retail—is another interesting example. according to topspin media, the average transaction price increased from $ to $ over a year, with a peak price of $ for offers including a ticket for a live event. the ubiquitous power of internet networks has made possible a direct connection between artists and the public to support the creative process in new ways. in particular, digital crowdfunding is an increasingly popular tool to raise money online. on kickstarter and similar platforms, people can pledge for an economic goal, which is set up in advance by the project developer. kickstarter works by giving artists a way to let fans crowdfund the creation of new works. it lets artists offer different tiers, through which fans can help fund a project, in the hope of rising: a detailed look at the state of the entertainment industry - (jan. ), http://www.techdirt.com/skyisrising. . tobias regner, why consumers pay voluntarily: evidence from online music (jena econ. research papers, paper no. - ), http://pubdb.wiwi.uni- jena.de/pdf/wp_ _ .pdf. . id. . id. . masnick & ho, supra note , at . . see topspin media, http://www.topspinmedia.com (last visited feb. , ); see also masnick & ho, supra note , at . . for a general overview of crowfunding and literature review, see alexandra moritz & joern h. block, crowdfunding: a literature review and research directions, in crowdfunding in europe: state of the art in theory and practice (dennis brüntje & oliver gajda eds., ), http://link.springer. com/chapter/ . % f - - - - _ . . see kickstarter, www.kickstarter.com (last visited feb. , ); see also masnick & ho, supra note , at . michigan state law review [vol:st.pg] reaching a funding threshold. only after the threshold is met does the money change hands. as of february , over $ billion have been pledged to artists through kickstarter. there are , launched projects with a success rate of . %. kickstarter’s stats also report that , projects were successfully funded and approximately $ . billion made to successful projects. kickstarter funds all sorts of creative works, and so far, almost $ million was pledged to games, almost $ million was pledged to film and video, over $ million pledged to music, and nearly $ million pledged to publishing. of course, kickstarter is just one of a number of similar platforms, such as artistshare, sellaband, indiegogo, pledgemusic, africaunsigned, mymajorcompany, mobcaster, tubestart, pozible, wishberry, centup, crowdfunder, or ulule. these services may apply an “all or nothing” or a “keep it all” model. in the latter case, the funds collected are handed over to the campaigner, regardless of whether the project goal is met or not. other crowdfunding platforms such as bountysource, patreon, or sprked, allow for a continuous funding model, rather than one-time donations, for those creators making content on a regular basis. there are also services allowing . kickstarter basics, kickstarter, https://www.kickstarter.com/help/ faq/kickstarter+basics?ref=footer (last visited feb. , ). . id. . see stats, kickstarter, https://www.kickstarter.com/help/stats (last visited feb. , ). . id. . id. . id. . see artistshare, www.artistshare.com (last visited feb. , ) (music); sellaband, www.sellaband.com (last visited feb. , ) (music); indiegogo, www.indiegogo.com (last visited feb. , ) (miscellaneous); pledgemusic, www.pledgemusic.com (last visited feb. , ) (music); africaunsigned, www.africaunsigned.com (last visited feb. , ) (music); mymajorcompany, www.mymajorcompany.com (last visited feb. , ) (film and video); mobcaster, http://mobcaster.com (last visited feb. , ) (tv shows); tubestart, www.tubestart.com (last visited feb. , ) (youtube video creator); pozible, www.pozible.com (last visited feb. , ) (creative projects); wishberry, www.wishberry.in (last visited feb. , ) (creative projects); centup, www.centup.org (last visited feb. , ) (blogger, podcasters, and web- based publishers); crowdfunder, www.crowdfunder.co.uk (last visited feb. , ) (miscellaneous); ulule, www.ulule.com (last visited feb. , ) (miscellaneous). . see bountysource, www.bountysource.com (last visited feb. , ) (open-source software); patreon, www.patreon.com (last visited feb. , ) the return of the gift in the “crowd society” users to award creators after the works have been published. flattr, for example, is a microdonation application that displays a link to make a donation alongside the content. obviously, today players like kickstarter are far smaller than the old gatekeepers, but they only appeared in the last few years and the trend lines are already extraordinarily important. kickstarter launched in april . at the close of , kickstarter announced that, over the course of the year, about $ million had been pledged to artists through its crowdfunding platform. “[a]pproximately $ million did . . . make it to those content creators whose projects were successfully funded.” in about three years, those figures grew nearly twenty times. most successfully funded projects raise less than $ , , but a growing number have reached six and even seven figures. about projects raised more than $ million with the largest successfully completed kickstarter project totaling $ , , pledged in march . projecting these figures into the future, we may predict that crowdfunding may become a viable option for all sort of creativity, including large and expensive productions, such as blockbuster movies. in the future, user patronage might take several forms. obviously, authors can connect directly with the public through self- publishing or self-producing in platforms, like amazon market place or bandcamp, charging a small price or asking for a donation or a pay-as-you-wish price. online self-publishing has been emerging as a solid alternative to traditional publishing. on a more structured (music, podcasts, vloggers, youtube videos, and webcomics); sprked, https://sprked.com (last visited feb. , ) (gaming content). . see flattr, https://flattr.com (last visited feb. , ). . see masnick & ho, supra note , at . . what is kickstarter?, kickstarter, https://www.kickstarter.com/about (last visited feb. , ). . id. at . . id. . see stats, supra note . . see id. . pebble time—awesome smartwatch, no compormises, kickstarter, https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/ /pebble-time-awesome-smartwatch- no-compromises?ref=most_funded (last visited feb. , ). . see, e.g., ed pilkington, amanda hocking, the writer who made millions by self-publishing online, the guardian (jan. , , : pm), http://www.theguardian.com/books/ /jan/ /amanda-hocking-self-publishing (reporting that amanda hocking made $ . million by self-publishing her books on amazon after being rejected for years by book agents and publishing houses); see michigan state law review [vol:st.pg] level, authors can collect resources in advance to support a project through crowd-sourcing platforms like kickstarter. in time, authors might approach generalist user patronage communities. after raising the necessary funds, the authors will provide a digital copy of the work to the pledging patrons. a digital copy, possibly including advertising, might circulate through open access channels. authors might internalize the advertising revenues or share them with user patronage groups. authors might enjoy the revenue stream coming from special or non-digital editions, or licensing or apportionment of profits from derivative works. seemingly, the reputational value enhanced by wider open access distribution will promote public performances or other lucrative appointments. hypothetically, authors might access their user base to fund larger projects. individual authors, artists, or movie directors’ fan-sites might serve as online hubs to advertise the project and collect the necessary resources. in the case of a movie, for example, user-patrons will receive a digital copy that might be circulated online open access or viewed from the fan site supporting the project. as with kickstarter, user-patrons can pledge for additional or bonus material, such as a director’s-cut special edition; merchandise related to the movie; a seat at the theatrical premiere; a dinner with the director, actors, or crew members to discuss the movie; or a cameo in the movie. again, the movie producers will internalize the revenue stream from theatrical releases, advertising, merchandise, or licensing or apportionment of profits from derivative works, and so on. cooperative creativity and the interaction of groups of users and creators on a voluntary but structural basis is becoming a new model for creativity. wikipedia, the fifth most visited website and the first online encyclopedia, exemplifies the power of ubiquitous digital user patronage. wikipedia is being completely crowdsourced both as to intellectual and economic contributions, increasing its also alison flood, four self-published authors on new york times ebook bestseller list, the guardian (aug. , , : am), http://www.guardian. co.uk/books/ /aug/ /self-published-authors-bestseller-ebooks?newsfeed=true. . for a discussion of the introduction of a system of apportionment of profits in substitution of the present licensing arrangements governed by the principle of copyright exclusivity, see frosio, supra note , at - . . in fact, the film industry is already making huge amounts of money from products and services based on content, in addition to the content itself. according to disney, licensed merchandise alone generated $ billion in . see joe karaganis, rethinking piracy, in media piracy in emerging economies n. (joe karaganis ed., ), http://www.scribd.com/doc/ / mpee- - - . the return of the gift in the “crowd society” annual fundraising from $ million in to $ million in . digital crowdfunding shows that there are new business models circumventing traditional gatekeepers by building upon the increasing willingness of users to support artists and creativity directly. new businesses, which act as enablers rather than gatekeepers, might promote democratization by providing the authors with enhanced artistic freedom. the emergence of mechanisms to support and stimulate creativity based on user patronage will work towards the goal of empowering the public as the central figure of the creative process. user patronage might reconnect creativity with its cumulative and public nature. it shall restore centrality to the rhetoric of the gift in the discourse about creativity and to gaultier’s idea of a social contract between authors and public. volker grassmuck noted: [a] new social contract between creatives and audiences has to be negotiated, a new arrangement for the reciprocal “creative contributions” by authors and by society. the current debate on culture is focused on property rights and their enforcement. the social contract is intended to refocus the debate on the issues behind the existing legal rules. the shift from the analogue to the digital knowledge order calls into question the boundaries between private and public, professional and non-professional, commercial and non- commercial. . . . . the social contract encompasses the whole range of transactions: in markets, through public funding for arts and culture (collective redistribution through taxation and broadcast fees and the provision of a public knowledge infrastructure for science and education, libraries, museums, archives etc.), through voluntary action (free-licensing and donations (wikipedia), street performer protocol-style pre-payments and pledges) and through legal regulations (limitations and exceptions in copyright law, including the proposals for a culture flat-rate and the public domain). . see fundraising reports, wikimedia found., https://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/fundraising_reports (last updated oct. , , : pm). . see supra part i.g. . volker grassmuck, ip d – sustainable production of and fair trade in creative expressions - ( ), http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/ fcrw/sites/fcrw/images/grassmuck_ - - _free-culture_berkman_txt.pdf. (paper presented at the research workshop on free culture, berkman center for internet & society, harvard university, cambridge, massachusetts). michigan state law review [vol:st.pg] according to baudrillard’s categories, the social contract that a user patronage model implies would subvert the present social structure that the system of needs has the function to keep in place through a “revolution of social relations” between creators and users. digital crowdfunding would help to blur the distinction between users and creators even further, thus making the role of gatekeepers, intermediaries, and distributors less and less relevant. even if this is not yet the return to prodigality that baudrillard sought, it may be a step toward the demise of push marketing strategies in favor of the advent of pull marketing. user patronage may set the advent of a web . and the transition from a corporate-driven culture to a user- driven culture. users’ centrality—or the centrality of human relationships—and the demise of push marketing would dispossess gatekeepers of the capacity of maintaining an “organized reign of scarcity” through a system of artificial needs. transparent and reciprocal “relation[s] between human beings” within a networked information economy based on commons-based peer production and user patronage would make concentration of power through monopolization of resources and accumulation harder. perhaps, the widespread emergence of user patronage may be a step toward a transition from a consumer society to a networked user community or crowd society. . see william patry, moral panics and the copyright wars ( ) (noting that “in contemporary marketing lingo, the copyright industries practice ‘push’ and not ‘pull’ marketing”). “push marketing is top-down and hierarchical. with push marketing, businesses create products or services based on what they want to sell to consumers and not based on what consumers want to buy.” id. see also john seely brown & john hagel iii, from push to pull: the next frontier of innovation, mckinsey q. , http://www.johnseelybrown.com/ pushpull.pdf (discussing in general terms the push–pull marketing model that patry then applies to the copyright market). . baudrillard, supra note , at . . id. at . abstracts historia mathematica ( ), – doi: . /hmat. . , available online at http://www.idealibrary.com on abstracts edited by glen van brummelen the purpose of this department is to give sufficien information about the subject matter of each publication to enable users to decide whether to read it. it is our intention to cover all books, articles, and other materials in the field books for abstracting and eventual review should be sent to this department. materials should be sent to glen van brummelen, bennington college, bennington, vt , u.s.a. (e-mail: gvanbrum@bennington.edu) readers are invited to send reprints, autoabstracts, corrections, additions, and notices of publications that have been overlooked. be sure to include complete bibliographic information, as well as transl- iteration and translation for non-european languages. we need volunteers willing to cover one or more journals for this department. in order to facilitate reference and indexing, entries are given abstract numbers which appear at the end following the symbol #. a triple numbering system is used: the firs number indicates the volume, the second the issue number, and the third the sequential number within that issue. for example, the abstracts for volume , number , are numbered: . . , . . , . . , etc. for reviews and abstracts published in volumes through there are an author index in volume , number , and a subject index in volume , number . the initials in parenthesesat the end of an entryindicate the abstractor. in this issuethere are abstracts by francine abeles (kean, nj), joe albree (montgomery, al), ivor grattan-guinness (middlesex, uk), cal jongsma (sioux center, ia), karen hunger parshall (charlottesville, va), gary stoudt (indiana, pa), kevin vandermeulen (hamilton, canada), david zitarelli (philadelphia, pa), and glen van brummelen. aaboe, asger. a new mathematical text from the astronomical archive in babylon: bm , in # . . , pp. – . (gvb) # . . abraham, george. see # . . . abrusci, v. michele. hilbert and the foundations of mathematics: the axiomatic method [in italian], matema- tiche (catania) ( ) suppl. , – . survey of some of hilbert’s writings on axiomatic theories. see the review by ivor grattan-guinness in mathematical reviews j: . (cj) # . . accardi, luigi. quantum probability: an historical survey, in gregory budzban, philip feinsilver and arunava mukherjea, eds., probability on algebraic structures, providence, ri: american mathematical society, , pp. – . a nontechnical survey of developments in quantum probability over the last three decades, concen- trating on the contributions of the author and his collaborators. see the review by kalyanapuram r. parthasarathy in mathematical reviews k: . (gvb) # . . akhmedov, a. astronomy, astrology, observatories and calendars, in c. e. bosworth and m. s. asimov, eds., history of civilizations of central asia, paris: unesco, , vol. iv, pp. – . an overview of islamic astronomy and astrology developed in central asia, especially the region of khwarizm. see the review by emilia calvo in mathematical reviews m: . (gss) # . . akritas, alkiviadis g. see # . . . alberts, gerard. maintaining freedom of choice [in dutch], nieuw archief voor wiskunde ( ) ( ) ( ), – . the interaction between the mathematical and political careers of guus zoutendijk is discussed. (gvb) # . . - / $ . c© elsevier science (usa) all rights reserved. hmat abstracts alvarez jimenez, carlos. mathematical analysis and analytical science, in michael otte and marco panza, eds., analysisandsynthesis inmathematics, dordrecht: kluwer, , pp. – . a discussion of the transition from geometric to analytic methods in mathematics and the physical sciences beginning with euler’s treatment of functions and series, proceeding to the mechanics of lagrange and laplace and the theory of heat f ow of fourier, and concluding with the fundamental ideas of continuity and convergence of bolzano and cauchy. see the review by f. smithies in mathematical reviews k: . (ja) # . . amer, mahomed. see # . . . amunátegui, godofredo iommi. see # . . . anile,angelomarcello. currentproblemsinmathematicalphysics:theoriginalcontributionofdavidhilbert, matematiche (catania) ( ), suppl. , – . hilbert’s work in the kinetic theory of gases has proved to be crucial in the development of research in mathematical physics. (gvb) # . . arnol’d, vladimir. dynamical systems, in jean-paul pier, ed., development of mathematics – , basel: birkhäuser, , pp. – . an overview of the development of the theory of dynamical systems in the th century based on examples illustrating how the theory connects with other topics in applied mathematics. includes the author’s interesting remarks and commentary. see the review by coraci p. malta in mathematical reviews m: . (gss) # . . artmann, benno. euclid’s and hilbert’s foundations of geometry, matematiche (catania) ( ), suppl , – . this article attempts to explain hilbert’s line from his / lecture notes “. . . we will be led. . . to appreciatetheacuteinsightofthisancientmathematician . . . .”seethereviewbyjamesj.tattersallinmathematical reviews m: . (gss) # . . artmann, benno. see also # . . . bain, jonathan. see # . . . baldwin, john. finite and inf nite model theory—a historical perspective, logic journal of the igpl ( ) ( ), – . discusses the historical development of contemporary model theory. see the review by g. cherlin in mathematical reviews j: . (cj) # . . barenblatt, g. i. george keith batchelor ( – ) and david george crighton ( – ) applied mathe- maticians,noticesoftheamericanmathematicalsociety ( ), – .anaccountoftheworkoftwoformer chairs of damtp (the department of applied mathematics and theoretical physics of cambridge university), emphasizing batchelor’s role in combining experiments with his theoretical study of turbulence. (kvm) # . . beeley, philip a. see # . . . belavkin, v. p. quantum probabilities and paradoxes of the quantum century, infinit dimensional ana- lysis, quantum probability and related topics ( ) ( ), – . discusses the historical development of quantum theory from its early beginnings to recent work. see the review by andreas boukas in mathematical reviews j: . (cj) # . . bellosta, hélène. ibrāhı̄m ibn sinān: apollonius arabicus [in french], in ahmad hasnawi, abdelali elamrani- jamal, and maroun aouad, eds., perspectives arabes et médiévales sur la tradition scientifiqu et philosophique grecque, leuven: peeters éditions/paris: institut du monde arabe, , pp. – . discusses passages by th century arabic geometer ibrāhı̄m ibn sinān relating to apollonius’s lost works. see the review by j. lennart berggren in mathematical reviews j: . (cj) # . . berg, jan. see # . . . berge, claude. la théorie des graphes, in jean-paul pier, ed., development of mathematics – , basel: birkhäuser, , pp. – . a survey of important developments in graph theory during the second half of the th century. see the review by robin j. wilson in mathematical reviews k: . (ja) # . . berggren, j. lennart; and jones, alexander. ptolemy’s geography. an annotated translation of the theoretical chapters, princeton, nj: princeton univ. press, , xiv+ pp., $ . . by the author of the almagest, the abstracts hmat geography was “the best reference work on the subject” for centuries. see the review by george abraham in mathematical reviews k: . (ja) # . . berggren, j. lennart. see also # . . , # . . , and # . . . berlekamp, elwyn. the performance of block codes, notices of the american mathematical society ( ), – . an overview of the impact of the work of claude shannon regarding block codes. (kvm) # . . berlekamp, elwyn. see also # . . . berlinski, david. newton’s gift: how sir isaac newton unlocked the system of the world, new york: free press, , xviii+ pp., $ . . based on “a limited choice of secondary sources,” this popular treatment of newton’s mathematics and natural philosophy unfortunately contains a number of inaccuracies. see the review by massimo galuzzi in mathematical reviews k: . (ja) # . . binder, christa. die zeit von heinrich schreyber in wien [the era of heinrich schreyber in vienna], in # . . , pp. – . (gvb) # . . blay, michel; and nicolaidis, efthymios, eds. l’europe des sciences: constitution d’un espace scientif que, paris: éditions du seuil, , pp. this collection of essays by specialists treats not the development of mathematics per se but rather the more general development of science in europe. the f rst half of the book covers the greek origins of european science, through the middle ages and scientif c revolution, to the period of professionalization in the th century. the second half has separate chapters treating the institutionalization of the sciences in russia, the iberian peninsula, scandinavia, the balkans, and hungary. (khp) # . . boas, harold p. see # . . . bodanis, david. e = mc : a biography of the world’s most famous equation, new york: walker and co., , x+ pp., $ . contains a popular history of special relativity, at an elementary level. (cj) # . . bolzano, bernard. bernard bolzano—gesamtausgabe. reihe i. schriften. band . teil , edited by jan berg, stuttgart: friedrich frommann verlag günther holzboog, , pp. another volume in bolzano’s collected works dealing with bolzano’s theory of knowledge including logic and how the sciences should be presented to students. of interest to those with a pedagogical concern for bolzano’s work. see the review by joseph w. dauben in mathematical reviews m: . (gss) # . . bolzano, bernard. bernardbolzano—gesamtausgabe.reihe ii.nachlassa.nachgelasseneschriften.band . teil . grössenlehre iv, edited by bob van rootselaar, stuttgart: friedrich frommann verlag günther holzboog, , pp. another volume in bolzano’s collected works dealing with bolzano’s theory of functions, including continuous and differentiable functions, the intermediate value theorem, uniform continuity, and applications of the “bolzano–weierstrass theorem.” also includes material on series. see the review by joseph w. dauben in mathematical reviews m: . (gss) # . . bonelli, federico; and ghione, franco. the divine proportion of luca pacioli and his cd-rom, in # . . , pp. – . (gvb) # . . booth, a. d. see # . . and # . . . borzacchini, luigi. the sophist: genesis of formal thought in greek philosophy and mathematics, in # . . , pp. – . (gvb) # . . boukas, andreas. see # . . . bowen, alan c. see # . . . brack-bernsen,lis. goal-yeartablets:lunardataandpredictions,in# . . ,pp. – .(gvb) # . . britton, john p. lunar anomaly in babylonian astronomy, in # . . , pp. – . (gvb) # . . hmat abstracts brown, e. h.; cohen, f. r.; gehring, f. w.; miller, h. r.; and taylor, b. a. franklin p. peterson ( – ), notices of the american mathematical society ( ), – . an account of the life and work of an algebraic topologist and former ams treasurer. (kvm) # . . buchwald, jed z. a potential disagreement between helmholtz and hertz,archive forhistoryofexactsciences ( ), – . what might have appeared as a conf ict in electromagnetic f eld theory between helmholtz and his student hertz in the late s is resolved mathematically. contains extensive references. see the review by llewelyn g. chambers in mathematical reviews k: . (ja) # . . buckingham, paul. mathematics as a tool for economic and cultural developments: the philosophical views of the leaders of the moscow mathematical society, – , michigan academician ( ), – . this paper summarizes the careers and philosophical opinions of n. v. bugaev ( – ) and p. a. nekrasov ( – ) as they promoted mathematics as an agency for russian economic development. see the review by roman murawski in mathematical reviews k: . (ja) # . . bulirsch, roland. constantin carathéodory, leben und werk, bayerische akademie der wissenschaften. mathematisch-naturwissenschaftlische klasse. sitzungsberichte , – . a biographical study that traces the mathematical work of carathéodory ( – ). photos and copies of some of his correspondence and manuscripts are included. see the review by bernhard neumann in mathematical reviews k: . (ja) # . . busard, h. l. l. über zwei algorismus-schriften aus dem . jahrhundert [on two algorism manuscripts from the th century], in menso folkerts and richard lorch, eds., sic itur ad astra: studien zur geschichte der mathematikunnaturwissenschaften.festschrift fürdenarabistenpaulkunitzschzum geburtstag, wiesbaden: harrassowitz verlag, , pp. – . critical editions of two th century algorism manuscripts ascribed to jordanus nemorarius by gustaf enestrom. see the review by warren van egmond in mathematical reviews m: . (gss) # . . bushell, p. j.; and edmunds, d. e. twenty-five years ago: the durham symposium on partial differential equations, noticesof theamericanmathematicalsociety ( ), – . a photograph of the participants in the symposium. (kvm) # . . butcher, j. c. numerical methods for ordinary differential equations in the th century, journal of com- putational and applied mathematics ( – ) ( ), – . begins with late th-century contributions by f. bashforth, j. c. adams and c. runge and covers the modern theory of linear multistep methods, runge–kutta methods, stiff problems, order stars, nonlinear stability, and early software developments. see the review by w. c. rheinboldt in mathematical reviews k: . (gvb) # . . butzer, paul l.; higgins, j. r.; and stens, r. l. sampling theory of signal analysis, in jean-paul pier, ed., developmentofmathematics – ,basel:birkhäuser, ,pp. – .asurveyarticleonthewhittaker– kotelnikov–shannon sampling theorem written by signif cant contributors to the f eld. the survey includes the historyofthedevelopmentofsamplingtheoryandgeneralizationsofthewhittaker–kotelnikov–shannonsampling theorem. see the review by ahmed i. zayed in mathematical reviews m: . (gss) # . . calvo, emilia. see # . . and # . . . catanese, fabrizio. hilbert and the theory of invariants [in italian], matematiche (catania) ( ), suppl. , – . a nice introduction to the theory of invariants and the contributions of hilbert. includes signif cance of these results to modern research and an extensive bibliography. see the review by doru stefanescu inmathematical reviews m: . (gss) # . . catto, isabelle. see # . . . chabas, josé. see # . . . chambers, llewelyn g. see # . . . charbonneau, louis. see # . . . cherlin, g. see # . . . abstracts hmat chihara, charles. frege’s and bolzano’s rationalist conceptions of arithmetic, revue d’histoire des sciences ( – ) ( ), – . compares frege’s and bolzano’s rationalist conceptions of arithmetic; concludes with an analysis of their views in the light of gödel’s f rst incompleteness theorem. (gvb) # . . christianides, giannes. see # . . . christianidis, jean. the use of letters to represent numbers and the algebraic symbolism [in greek], neusis ( ), – . argues that the use of letters to represent numbers in aristotle, euclid, and their medieval commentators does not constitute a genuine algebraic symbolism. inspired by an article by kurt vogel, reprinted in the same issue (# . . ). (gvb) # . . coello coello, carlos a. a brief history of xxth century computing: the great contributions of mathe- maticians [in spanish], miscelánea matématica ( ), – . a survey of the role of mathematicians in the development of computing, including the works of shannon, post, von neumann, kleene, cook, and levin. see the review by manuel ojeda-aciego in mathematical reviews m: . (gss) # . . cohen, ezechiel g. d. boltzmann and statistical mechanics, in boltzmann’s legacy years after his birth, rome: accademia nazionale dei lincei, , pp. – . historical and philosophical discussion of boltzmann’s two views of his work on the second law of thermodynamics. see the review by m. lawrence glasser in mathe- matical reviews j: . (cj) # . . cohen, f. r. see # . . . console, sergio. see # . . . cooke, roger l. see # . . , # . . , and # . . . corrales-rodrigáñez, capi. see # . . . corry, leo. see # . . . cover, t. m. see # . . . d’ambrosio, ubiratan. see # . . . da silva, jairo josé. husserl’s two notions of completeness: husserl and hilbert on completeness and imag- inary elements in mathematics, synthese ( ), – . in , when husserl tried to account for imaginaries in mathematics, he introduced, “independently of hilbert, two notions of ‘def niteness”’ that were closely related to hilbert’s treatment of completeness. see the review by victor v. pambuccian in mathematical reviews k: . (ja) # . . dahan dalmedico, amy. pur versus appliqué? un point de vue d’historien sur une “guerre d’images”, gazette des mathématiciens ( ), – . since the s, pure and applied mathematics have waged a “war of images.” institutional, sociological, and epistemological aspects of this conf ict are discussed. see the review by pierre kerszberg in mathematical reviews k: . (ja) # . . dale, a. i. see # . . . danilenko, a. i. see # . . . dauben, joseph w. see # . . and # . . . dawson, john w., jr. see # . . . de groot, j. aspects of aristotelian statics in galileo’s dynamics, studies in history and philosophy of science a ( ) ( ), – . examines the geometrical arguments in galileo’s work on dynamics to unearth the inf uence of the aristotelian mechanical problems. (gvb) # . . de la peña, josé antonio. algebra in the xxth century [in spanish], miscelánea matématica ( ), – . a description of the directions of research in algebra during the th century, with emphasis on group theory and the inf uence of algebraic developments in school curricula. see the review by capi corrales-rodrigáñez in mathematical reviews m: . (gss) # . . hmat abstracts de leeuw, k. johann friedrich euler ( – ): mathematician and cryptologist at the court of the dutch stadholder william v, cryptologia ( ), – . this euler was a nephew of leonhard and a notable practitioner of this combinatoric black art. the author includes pages from johann’s codebook in his account. (igg) # . . de rijk, l. m. see # . . . demidov, s. s. and levshin, b. v., eds. the case of academician nikoli nikolaevich luzin [in russian], st. petersburg: russkii khristianskii gumanitarnyi institut, , pp. this is a thorough account of the “luzin affair,” from its background in russian mathematics immediately following world war i and in bolshevik and soviet politics to its culmination in june and july , when nikoli luzin was censored by the steklov institute and lost his university position. includes copies of several relevant primary documents and letters. see the review by f. smithies in mathematical reviews k: . (ja) # . . densmore, dana. see # . . . dieudonné, jean. l’école mathématique française du xxe siècle, in jean-paul pier, ed., development of math- ematics – , basel: birkhäuser, , pp. – . a summary, arranged by topics, of the major contribu- tions of french mathematicians during the second half of the th century. photos of some french mathematicians are included. see the review by doru stefanescu in mathematical reviews k: . (ja) # . . do carmo, manfredo perdigão. research on differential geometry in brazil, in j. l. m. barbosa and k. tenenblat, eds., x escola de geometria diferencial [ th school on differential geometry] [in portuguese], pp. – . a survey on research in differential geometry (riemannian, conformal, and projective geometry) de- veloped in brazil from to , written by an eyewitness to the past years of the development. see the review by sergio console in mathematical reviews m: . (gss) # . . dolbeault, pierre. variétés et espaces analytiques complexes, in jean-paul pier, ed., developmentofmathema- tics – , basel: birkhäuser, , pp. – . historical survey of the f eld of several complex variables including photographs of the principal players and an extensive bibliography. see the review by harold p. boas in mathematical reviews m: . (gss) # . . donahue, william h. see # . . . earman, john. lambda: the constant that refuses to die, archive for history of exact sciences ( ), – . this “critical history” of the constant � begins with its place in th century newtonian cosmology. controversies over whether or not � had roles to play in general relativity are discussed, and this paper “ends with an overview of the resurgence of interest in �.” see the review by jonathan bain in mathematical reviews k: . (ja) # . . edmunds, d. e. see # . . . eichler, birgit. sprachwissenschaftliche anmerkungen zu adam ries und heinrich grammateus [linguistic comments on adam ries and heinrich grammateus], in # . . , pp. – . (gvb) # . . elworthy, k. david. geometric aspects of stochastic analysis, in jean-paul pier, ed., development of math- ematics – , basel: birkhäuser, , pp. – . a survey of the interaction between geometry and stochastic analysis. see the review by shi zan fang in mathematical reviews k: . (gvb) # . . emmer, michele, ed. mathematics and culture [in italian], milan: springer-verlag italia, , iv+ pp. a collection of papers from a conference held in venice in april . papers with historical content are listed here as # . . , # . . , # . . , and # . . . (gvb) # . . epple, moritz. styles of argumentation in late th century geometry and the structure of mathematical modernity, in michael otte and marco panza, eds., analysis and synthesis in mathematics, dordrecht: kluwer, , pp. – . uses a distinction between abstract and concrete mathematical argumentation to judge the modernity of given pieces of mathematical research. see the review by bernard rouxel in mathematical reviews j: . (cj) # . . faddeev, l. d. modern mathematical physics: what it should be, in a. fokas, a. grigoryan, t. kibble and b. zegarlinski, eds., mathematical physics , london: imperial college press, , pp. – . discusses how abstracts hmat mathematical physics was viewed in the early th century by various mathematicians, and explains the author’s own views on the goals of the f eld. see the review by george k. savvidy in mathematical reviews j: . (cj) # . . fang, shi zan. see # . . . farwig, reinhard. die (un-)berechenbare angst des mathematikers vor dem fliegen [the mathematician’s (un-)predictable fear of flying], mathematische semesterberichte ( ) ( ), – . describes the history, physics, and mathematics of lift, of potential, and of viscous f ows. covers work of euler, j. and d. bernoulli, and d’alembert and concludes with the navier–stokes equations. (gvb) # . . fauvel, john. doris mary cannell – , bshm newsletter ( ), – . obituary of mary cannell, whose rediscovery and celebration of the work of george green did not start until her retirement in . (dez) # . . fauvel, john. see also # . . . fernandez garcia, francisco r.; puerto albandoz, justo; jiminez alcon, francisco; and muñoz prieto, luis c. gauge functions and portolan charts, in blas pelegrı́n, ed., selected papers of ewgla , athens: constantine porphyrogenetus international association, , pp. – . shows how harbor-f nding (portolan) charts of the th to the th centuries are related to gauge functions used in location theory. (cj) # . . floyd, juliet; and putnam, hilary. a note on wittgenstein’s “notorious paragraph” about the gödel theorem, journalofphilosophy ( ) ( ), – . a look at wittgenstein’s comments on the incompleteness theorem with an interpretation that is consistent with what gödel proved. see the review by john w. dawson, jr. in mathematical reviews m: . (gss) # . . folkerts, menso. zur bedeutung der mathematik an der universität erfurt im . und fruhen . jahrhundert [on the importance of mathematics at the university of erfurt in the th and early th century], in # . . , pp. – . (gvb) # . . folkerts, menso. frühe westliche benennungen der indisch-arabischen ziffern und ihr vorkommen [early western names for indian–arabic numerals and their occurrences], in menso folkerts and richard lorch, eds., sic itur ad astra: studien zur geschichte der mathematik un naturwissenschaften. festschrift für den arabisten paul kunitzsch zum geburtstag, wiesbaden: harrassowitz verlag, , pp. – . the author establishes that the earliest appearance of these names is found in illustrations attached to abacus texts of the th century. the names were then used in the works of gerland of besançon and rudolph of laon. see the review by warren van egmond in mathematical reviews m: . (gss) # . . forcada, miquel. the kitāb al-anwā’ of carı̄b b. sacı̄d and the calendar of cordova, in menso folkerts and richardlorch,eds.,sicituradastra:studienzurgeschichtedermathematikundnaturwissenschaften.festschrift für den arabisten paul kunitzsch zum geburtstag, wiesbaden: harrassowitz verlag, , pp. – . dis- cusses various th through th century arabic almanacs. see the review by jan p. hogendijk in mathematical reviews j: . (cj) # . . fouvry, etienne. cinquante ans de théorie analytique des nombres. un point de vue parmi d’autres: celui des méthodes de crible, in jean-paul pier, ed., developmentofmathematics – , basel: birkhäuser, , pp. – . a survey of the development of sieve methods and their applications in the second half of the th century. see the review by g. greaves in mathematical reviews k: . (gvb) # . . fraser, craig g. the background to and early emergence of euler’s analysis, in michael otte and marco panza, eds., analysis and synthesis in mathematics, dordrecht: kluwer, , pp. – . the practice of analysis inmathematicsistracedfromviètethroughmuch th-centuryworkandthenuptoandincludingeuler’smethodus inveniendi ( ). see the review by karl-heinz schlote in mathematical reviews k: . (ja) # . . gallager, r. g. see # . . . galuzzi, massimo. see # . . and # . . . garro, ibrahim. decidability in mathematics after al-samaw’al al–maghribı̄ [in arabic], journal for the his- tory of arabic science ( / ), – . “the author describes some of the metamathematical arguments hmat abstracts of al-samaw’al al-maghribı̄’s book al-bāhir f al-jabr [ th century].” see the review by mohamed amer in mathematical reviews k: . (ja) # . . gavroglu, kostas. see # . . . gehring, f. w. see # . . . ghione, franco. see # . . . gingerich, owen. see # . . . girard, jean-yves. du pourquoi an comment: la théorie de la démonstration de à nos jours, in jean-paul pier, ed., development of mathematics – , basel: birkhäuser, , pp. – . beginning with some background remarks on work of hilbert, gödel, and gentzen, the main part of this paper focuses on “achievements and contributions to proof theory of k. schutte and his school in munich and of g. kreisel.” see the review by roman murawski in mathematical reviews k: . (ja) # . . gispert, hélène. réseaux mathématiques en france dans les débuts de la troisième république, archive for history of exact sciences ( ), – . the societé mathématique de france (smf) and the association française pour l’avancement des sciences (afas) were both founded in . this paper describes how, over the last decades of the th century, the smf and the mathematics section of the afas drifted apart in their scientif c concerns. see the review by m. zerner in mathematical reviews k: . (ja) # . . gispert, hélène. finding the social in mathematics and its history. critical review: catherine goldstein’s a theorem of fermat and its readers, revue d’histoire des sciences ( ) ( ), – . one of two es- say reviews of goldstein’s book on fermat, placing it within a longer tradition of the social history of math- ematics; see also # . . . see the review by karl-heinz schlote in mathematical reviews j: b. (cj) # . . givant, steven. see # . . glas, eduard. see # . . and # . . . glasser, m. lawrence. see # . . . goldstein, bernard r.; and bowen, alan c. the role of observations in ptolemy’s lunar theories, in # . . , pp. – . (gvb) # . . golomb, s. w.; berlekamp, elwyn; cover, t. m.; gallager, r. g.; massey, j. l.; and viterbi, a. j. claude elwood shannon ( – ), notices of the american mathematical society ( ), – . a memorial account of some of the areas that the “father of information theory” affected with his work. (kvm) # . . good, i. j. turing’s anticipation of empirical bayes in connection with the cryptanalysis of the naval enigma, journal of statistical computation and simulation ( ) ( ), – . describes the use of “banburismus,” a sequential bayesian procedure invented by turing, to attack the german enigma code during world war ii. (gvb) # . . gorostiza, luis g. see # . . . grasshoff, gerd. normal star observations in late babylonian astronomical diaries, in # . . , pp. – . (gvb) # . . grattan-guinness, ivor. the search for mathematical roots, – . logics, set theories and the founda- tions of mathematics from cantor through russell to gödel, princeton, nj: princeton univ. press, , xiv+ pp., $ . . “a comprehensive history of the mathematical background, content and impact of the mathematical logic and philosophy of mathematics that b. russell and a. n. whitehead developed in principia mathematica.” see the review by roman murawski in mathematical reviews k: . (ja) # . . grattan-guinness, ivor; and fauvel, john. detlef laugwitz – , bshm newsletter ( ), – . obituary of the historian of mathematics detlef laugwitz, known for his work on inf nite series, the theory of functions, and bernhard riemann. (dez) # . . abstracts hmat grattan-guinness, ivor. see also # . . and # . . . gray, jeremy. symbols and suggestions: communication of mathematics in print, mathematical intelligencer ( ) ( ), – . a wide-ranging discussion of the formulation and usage of mathematical notation in the development of mathematics from the th to the th century. there is an emphasis on the language of ratio and proportion, and logical notation. (fa) # . . gray, jeremy. see also # . . . greaves, g. see # . . . grimmett, geoffrey r. percolation, in jean-paul pier, ed., development of mathematics – , basel: birkhäuser, , pp. – . an overview of the mathematical theory of percolation including an account of the historical development of the subject. see the review by neal maras in mathematical reviews m: . (gss) # . . guggenheimer, h. see # . . . guicciardini, niccolò. see # . . , # . . , and # . . . guillaume, marcel. see # . . . guivarc’h, yves. marches aléatoires sur les groupes, in jean-paul pier, ed.,developmentofmathematics – , basel: birkhäuser, , pp. – . a broad survey of the interactions of probability theory with other disciplines, such as ergodic theory, lie groups, harmonic analysis and statistical physics. see the review by marc peigné in mathematical reviews k: . (gvb) # . . hantsche, irmgard, ed. der “mathematicus”: zur entwicklung und bedeutung einer neuen berufsgruppe in der zeit gerhard mercators [the “mathematicus”: on the evolution and signif cance of a novel occupational group at the time of gerhard mercator], bochum: universitätsverlag dr. n. brockmeyer, , x+ pp., dm . . a collection of papers from the th mercator symposium held at schloß krickenbeck. some of the papers will be abstracted separately. (gvb) # . . hauser, walter. die wurzeln der wahrscheinlichkeitsrechnung: die verbindung von glücksspieltheorie und statistischer praxis vor laplace [the roots of probability theory: the connection between the theory of games of chance and statistical practice before laplace], stuttgart: franz steiner verlag, , pp., dm . analyzes how the theory of games of chance and the practice of statistical reasoning came together between and tocreateprobabilitytheory.seethereviewbyeberhardknoblochinmathematicalreviews j: . (cj) # . . hawlitschek, kurt. johann faulhaber – : eine blütezeit der mathematischen wissenschaften in ulm, ulm:stadtbibliothekulm, , pp.,dm . .richlydocumentedandwell-illustratedsurveyoffaulhaber’s life and work; a detailed scholarly volume on an important f gure of the german renaissance. see the review by warren van egmond in mathematical reviews j: . (cj) # . . hayes, david r. leonard carlitz ( – ), notices of the american mathematical society ( ), – . a brief account of the work and students of leonard carlitz, known for his work in f nite f elds. (kvm) # . . heck, richard g., jr. grundgesetze der arithmetik. i. § , philosophia mathematica ( ) ( ) ( ), – . devoted to the study of section of frege’s grundgesetze der arithmetik ( ). see the review by roman murawski in mathematical reviews j: . (cj) # . . herreman, alain. the meaning of mathematical text. critical review: catherine goldstein’s a theorem of fermat and its readers, revue d’histoire des sciences ( ) ( ), – . one of two essay reviews of goldstein’s book on fermat, stressing the signif cance of her general historical approach; see also # . . . see the review by karl-heinz schlote in mathematical reviews j: a. (cj) # . . hessenbruch, arne, ed. reader’s guide to the history of science, london: fitzroy dearborn publishers, , xxx+ pp., $ . this guide is in the form of short essays on approximately topics, from individuals to disciplines to institutions and from all branches of science. each essay is accompanied by a bibliography of the hmat abstracts most important secondary literature. the whole enterprise is designed to assist readers as they enter a f eld or a subject that is outside of their speciality. (ja) # . . higgins, j. r. see # . . . hilpinen, risto. aristotelian syllogistic as a foundation of c. s. peirce’s theory of reasoning, in demetra sfendoni-mentzou, ed., aristotle and contemporary science, new york: peter lang, , vol. , pp. – . discusses the aristotelian origins of peirce’s theory of inference. (gvb) # . . hogendijk, jan p. see # . . and # . . . holgate, philip. studies in the history of probability and statistics. xlv. the late philip holgate’s paper: “independent functions. probability and analysis in poland between the wars,” biometrika ( ) ( ), – . explores early th century attempts by polish mathematicians to develop a rigorous theory of probability and compares this with the better-known work of kolmogorov. see the review by a. i. dale in mathematical reviews j: . (cj) # . . hunger, hermann. non-mathematical astronomical texts and their relationships, in # . . , pp. – . (gvb) # . . hutchinson, keith. a strange fact about aristotelian dynamics, in lodi nauta and arjo vanderjagt, eds., between demonstration and imagination, leiden: brill, , pp. – . a review of how aristotle dealt with the observation that the centers of the orbits of most stars are points away from the earth, contrary to what would have been expected from his physics. see the review by pierre kerszberg in mathematical reviews k: . (ja) # . . ifrah, georges. the universal history of computing. from the abacus to the quantum computer, translated from the french by e. f. harding, new york: wiley, , iv+ pp., $ . . this book is divided into three parts: “an excellent account of the origin of number systems”; “the development of manual, mechanical, electrical and electronic machines” for computing; and “a philosophical ramble over the implications of the information age.” see the critical observations of a. d. booth in the review in mathematical reviews k: . (ja) # . . israel,giorgio. theanalyticalmethodindescartes’géométrie, inmichaelotteandmarcopanza,eds.,analysis and synthesis in mathematics, dordrecht: kluwer, , pp. – . insightful analysis of the connection between descartes’s analytic method in the regulae and his approach to geometry. see the review by william r. shea in mathematical reviews j: . (cj) # . . jackson, allyn. interview with arnold ross, noticesof theamericanmathematicalsociety ( ), – . an interview with the founder of the ross summer mathematics program at ohio state university, reviewing his life from until . (kvm) # . . jaligot, eric. see # . . . jardine, nick. koyré’s kepler/kepler’s koyré, historia scientiarum ( ), – . a review of several features of the history of science that were stimulated by koyré’s “epoch-making study” of kepler in . see the review by pierre kerszberg in mathematical reviews k: . (ja) # . . jiminez alcon, francisco. see # . . . jones, alexander, ed. astronomical papyri from oxyrhynchus, vols., philadelphia: american philosophical society, , xiv+ pp., $ . translation of and commentary on astronomical papyri found in an early th century dig at the roman provincial capital of oxyrhynchus, egypt; offers a glimpse into the state of astron- omy around the time of ptolemy. see the review by owen gingerich in mathematical reviews j: . (cj) # . . jones, alexander. a classif cation of astronomical tables on papyrus, in # . . , pp. – . (gvb) # . . jones, alexander. see also # . . . jovanovic, b. d. see # . . . abstracts hmat kastanes, n. aspectsofneo-hellenicmathematicaleducation [in greek], thessaloniki: ekdoseis mathematike vivliotheke h. vafeiadis, , pp. this is a collection of articles “written within the framework of a re- search team (under the direction of g. karas).” the period studied is from the th century to the middle of the th century. many references. see the review by alkiviadis g. akritas in mathematical reviews k: . (ja) # . . kaunzner, wolfgang. zur algebra des heinrich schreyber [on the algebra of heinrich schreyber], in # . . , pp. – . (gvb) # . . kepler, johannes. optics, translated by william h. donahue and with a preface by dana densmore and william h. donahue, santa fe, nm: green lion, , xv+ pp., $ . an english translation of kepler’s master- piece. see the review by niccolò guicciardini in mathematical reviews j: . (cj) # . . kerszberg, pierre. see # . . , # . . , and # . . . kibler, maurice. the master thesis of moshé flato, in giuseppe dito and daniel sternheimer, eds., conférence moshé flato , dordrecht: kluwer, , vol. ii, pp. – . a paper devoted to the m.sc. thesis by moshé flato and its impact on mathematical physics. see the review by alexei zhedanov in mathematical reviews m: . (gss) # . . kirschner, stefan. nicolaus oresmes kommentar zur physik des aristoteles, sudhoffs archiv , suppl. , – . this work contains those questions, in latin, attributed to oresme in which he challenged aristotle’s physics, “and an overview over the remaining questions.” see the review by h. guggenheimer in mathematical reviews k: . (ja) # . . kiselman, christer o. plurisubharmonic functions and potential theory in several complex variables, in jean- paul pier, ed., development of mathematics – , basel: birkhäuser, , pp. – . historical survey on plurisubharmonic functions and related topics from to . see the review by norman levenberg in mathematical reviews j: . (cj) # . . knight, f. b. see # . . . knobloch, eberhard. see # . . , # . . , # . . , and # . . . lacki, jan. the early axiomatizations of quantum mechanics: jordan, von neumann and the continuation of hilbert’s program, archive for history of exact sciences ( ) ( ), – . describes the early attempts at axiomatizing physical theories such as quantum mechanics. (gvb) # . . lakshmikantham, v.; and leela, s. the origin of mathematics, lanham, md: university press of america, , xii+ pp., $ hardbound, $ . paperbound. argues, with some passion, that mathematics has a very long tradition in india and that methods and results obtained there antedate similar ones in european history. see the review by t. thrivikraman in mathematical reviews j: . (cj) # . . lax, p. d.; magenes, e.; and temam, r. jacques-louis lions ( – ), notices of the american mathemat- ical society ( ), – . a review of the contributions of the founder of the french school of applied mathematics, and former president of the french space agency cnes. (kvm) # . . le gall, jean-françois. processus de branchement, arbres et superprocessus, in jean-paul pier, ed., develop- ment of mathematics – , basel: birkhäuser, , pp. – . a review of the theory of branching processes, dealing especially with superprocesses, genealogy of branching processes, and probabilities on trees. see the review by luis g. gorostiza in mathematical reviews k: . (gvb) # . . leela, s. see # . . . levenberg, norman. see # . . . li, di. see # . . , # . . , and # . . . lishevsky, v. liberté, égalité, géométrie, quantum ( ), – . “this is a short popular article, without bibliography, which outlines the life and research of gaspard monge ( – ) as a scientist and politician.” see the review by luigi pepe in mathematical reviews k: . (ja) # . . hmat abstracts lolli, gabriele. hilbert and logic [in italian], matematiche (catania) ( ) suppl. , – . reviews hilbert’s contributions to metamathematics and proof theory, both from to and after . see the review by ivor grattan-guinness in mathematical reviews j: . (cj) # . . lorch, richard. ibn al-s.alāh.’s treatise on projection: a preliminary survey, in menso folkerts and richard lorch, eds., sic itur ad astra: studien zur geschichte der mathematik und naturwissenschaften. festschrift für den arabisten paul kunitzsch zum geburtstag, wiesbaden: harrassowitz verlag, , pp. – . describes a th century treatise on the projection of the sphere. see the review by emilia calvo in mathematical reviews j: . (cj) # . . magenes, e. see # . . . maligranda, lech; and wnuk, witold. wl�adysl�aw orlicz ( – ) [in polish], roczniki polskiego towarzystwa matematycznego. seria ii. wiadomosci matematyczne ( ), – . w. orlicz was a member of banach’s famous school of functional analysts in lwow. the f rst part of this paper is a full account of or- licz’s life and the second part is a “detailed description of research achievements by orlicz.” see the review by j. musielak in mathematical reviews k: . (ja) # . . malta, coraci p. see # . . . mancosu, paolo. bolzano and cournot on mathematical explanation, revue d’histoire des sciences ( – ) ( ), – . the opposition between explanatory and nonexplanatory proofs is at the heart of the philosophies of mathematics of bolzano and cournot. (gvb) # . . maras, neal. see # . . . martens, rhonda. kepler’sphilosophyandthenewastronomy, princeton: princeton univ. press, , xiv+ pp.,$ . .exploreskepler’smathematicalmetaphysicsanditsconnectiontohisworkinastronomy;wellwritten, but fails to engage non-english research on the topic. see the review by eberhard knobloch in mathematical reviews j: . (cj) # . . martı́nez delgado, alberto. the pythagorean theorem: originality of the proofs of e. garcı́a quijano ( ) [in spanish], gaceta de la real sociedad matemática española ( ) ( ), – . a presentation of three proofs of the pythagorean theorem published in by evaristo garcı́a quijano, professor of mathe- matics at the naval academy in cadiz. see the review by leo corry in mathematical reviews m: . (gss) # . . massey, j. l. see # . . . mclarty, colin. richard courant in the german revolution, mathematical intelligencer ( ) ( ), – . an account of richard courant’s political views and actions during the german revolution of – . the author includes excerpts from letters written by courant to david hilbert, among others, as well as summaries of public talks he gave in göttingen that were published in german newspapers. (fa) # . . mehra, jagdish. einstein, physics, and reality, river edge, nj: world scientif c publishing, , x+ pp. a brief exploration of einstein’s involvement in the development of quantum theory, including a discussion of his correspondence with schrödinger and born. see the review by derek raine in mathematical reviews m: . (gss) # . . meretz, wolfgang; and weidauer, manfred. die schriften von heinrich schreyber. uberblick [the writings of heinrich schreyber. a survey], in # . . , pp. – . (gvb) # . . mikhailov, g. k. see # . . . miller, h. r. see # . . . mueller, paul r. an unblemished success: galileo’s sunspot argument in the dialogue, journal for thehistory of astronomy ( ) ( ), – . proposes an updated interpretation of galileo’s argument for the motion of the earth from the motions of sunspots and uses it to deal with three modern criticisms. (gvb) # . . abstracts hmat muñoz prieto, luis c. see # . . . murawski, roman. see # . . , # . . , # . . , # . . , and # . . . musielak, j. see # . . . nadal, r. see # . . . nauenberg, michael. newton’s expansion for the square root of an algebraic equation by an equivalent arithmeticmethod,inrichardh.dalitzandmichaelnauenberg,eds.,thefoundationsofnewtonianscholarship, river edge, nj: world scientif c publishing, , pp. – . a presentation of a justif cation of newton’s expansion starting from fauvel’s discussion of newton’s expansion of algebraic expressions. see the review by massimo galuzzi in mathematical reviews m: . (gss) # . . neuenschwander, daniel. irren ist menschlich—oder: der satz über die unimodalität stabiler verteilungen, ein theorem mit einer bewegten geschichte [to err is human—or: the theorems on the unimodality of stable distributions, a theorem with a colorful history], mathematische semesterberichte ( ) ( ), – . the colorful history of the theorem on the unimodality of stable probability distributions features two false proofs and an incorrect counterexample. (gvb) # . . neuenschwander, erwin. zur historiographie der mathematik in der schweiz, archivesinternationalesd’histo- ire des sciences ( ) ( ), – . begins with an overview of the development of mathematics in switzerland, then discusses the contributions made by swiss scholars to mathematical-historical research. (gvb) # . . neumann, bernhard. an ancient mathematician remembers, bshm newsletter ( ), – . the author, an eminent algebraist, reminisces about his migration to england from germany in , his formal doctoral thesis under philip hall at cambridge, and his subsequent appointments. (dez) # . . neumann, bernhard. see also # . . . newstead, anne g. j. aristotle and modern mathematical theories of the continuum, in demetra sfendoni- mentzou, jagdish hattiangadi, and david m. johnson, eds., aristotle and contemporary science, new york: peter lang, , vol. , pp. – . this work argues that the three cantorian characteristics of the continuum, “density, connectedness, and closedness,” are found in the work of aristotle, especially his physics. see the review by victor v. pambuccian in mathematical reviews k: . (ja) # . . nicolaidis, efthymios. see # . . . nicolas, jean-louis. arithmétique et cryptographie, in jean-paul pier, ed., development of mathematics – , basel: birkhäuser, , pp. – . on the historical development of algorithms related to public-key cryptography. see the review by edlyn e. teske in mathematical reviews j: . (cj) # . . odifreddi, piergiorgio. the well-numbered clavier, in # . . , pp. – . (gvb) # . . ojeda-aciego, manuel. see # . . . ortiz, e. l. gerald james whitrow – , bshm newsletter ( ), – . obituary of the bshm’s f rst president, gerald whitrow, a distinguished mathematician, historian, and philosopher known for his research in cosmology. (dez) # . . otte, michael. analysis and synthesis in mathematics from the perspective of charles s. peirce’s philoso- phy, in michael otte and marco panza, eds., analysis and synthesis in mathematics, dordrecht: kluwer, , pp. – . analyzes peirce’s indebtedness to kant and the ways in which the meaning of fundamental kantian notions are changed in peirce’s philosophy of mathematics. see the review by eduard glas in mathematical reviews j: . (cj) # . . pambuccian, victor v. see # . . , # . . , and # . . . panza, marco. classical sources for the concepts of analysis and synthesis, in michael otte and marco panza, eds., analysis and synthesis in mathematics, dordrecht: kluwer, , pp. – . explores the aristotelian hmat abstracts origin of the analytic method and traces it through various classical sources. see the review by eberhard knobloch in mathematical reviews j: . (cj) # . . park, sehie. ninety years of the brouwer fixed point theorem, vietnam journal of mathematics ( ) ( ), – . this historical survey concerns itself mainly with equivalent forms and generalizations of the theorem. (gvb) # . . parthasarathy, kalyanapuram r. see # . . . paty, michel. les trois stades du principe de relativité, revue des questions scientif que ( ), – . this essay divides the historical development of relativity into three stages: classical or galilean relativity; the special relativity of einstein; and general relativity. it is accompanied by “an almost exhaustive list of references.” see the review by n. d. sengupta in mathematical reviews k: . (ja) # . . peigné, marc. see # . . . pepe, luigi. see # . . . pérez sanz, antonio. polygonal numbers: a box of surprises with a lot of history [in spanish], gaceta de la real sociedad matemática española ( ) ( ), – . article on pythagorean arithmetic readable by college students. see the review by godofredo iommi amunátegui in mathematical reviews m: . (gss) # . . pérez-ilzarbe, paloma. see # . . . petsinis, tom. the french mathematician, new york: berkley books, , vi+ pp., $ . . a novel about the life and work of évariste galois. (gvb) # . . pinkus, allan. weierstrass and approximation theory, journal of approximation theory ( ), – . the heart of this work is “a thorough discussion of the weierstrass approximation theorem,” from several early proofs to a number of generalizations. see the review by roger l. cooke in mathematical reviews k: . (ja) # . . plofker, kim. see # . . . poizat, bruno. autour du théorème de morley, in jean-paul pier, ed., development of mathematics – , basel: birkhäuser, , pp. – . treats the historical development of model theory, a branch of mathematical logic, during the last half of the th century. see the review by eric jaligot inmathematicalreviews j: . (cj) # . . porres, beatriz; and chabás, josé. john of murs’s tabulae permanentes for finding true syzygies, jour- nal for the history of astronomy ( ), – . discussion of a double-argument table of john of murs (ca. ) used to determine the time of a true conjunction or opposition of the sun and moon. appendix con- tains a parallel english translation. see the review by benno van dalen in mathematical reviews m: . (gss) # . . proust, joëlle. bolzano’s theory of representation, revue d’histoire des sciences ( – ) ( ), – . bolzano hoped to achieve a deep transformation of mathematical and scientif c practice through his theory, which was “one of the most radically intensionalist approaches to representation.” (gvb) # . . puerto albandoz, justo. see # . . . putnam, hilary. see # . . . radbruch, knut. mathematische spuren in der philosophie, mathematische semesterberichte ( ) ( ), – . provides a selection of the inf uence of mathematics in the works of the following philosophers: plato, nickolaus von kues, kant, schelling, friedrich schlegel, hegel, and heidegger. (gvb) # . . radelet-de grave, p. relativité galiléenne et lois de conservation, revue des questions scientif ques ( ), – . “this paper traces the seventeenth-century origins of some of the basic conservation laws and their relationship with galilean relativity.” the work of christian huygens is prominently featured. see the review by niccolò guicciardini in mathematical reviews k: . (ja) # . . abstracts hmat raine, derek. see # . . . rankin, robert. hugh blackburn: a little-known mathematical friend of lord kelvin, bshm newsletter ( ), – . an account of the scottish mathematician hugh blackburn ( – ), emphasizing his friendship with william thompson ( – ) and relations between the blackburn and thompson families. (dez) # . . ransom, peter. andover those sundials, bshm newsletter ( ), – . the author’s search for a sundial in andover compels him to investigate william hawkins heath ( – ). (dez) # . . rashed, marwan. see # . . . rashed, roshdi. les commencements des mathématiques archimédiennes en arabe: banū mūsā, in ahmad hasnawi, abdelali elamrani-jamal, and maroun aouad, eds., perspectives arabes et médiévales sur la tradition scientif que et philosophique grecque, leuven: peeters éditions/paris: institut du monde arabe, , pp. – . the author argues that the work of the banū mūsā was fundamental in pointing the archimedean tradition of quadrature and cubature in medieval islam toward the use of point transformations. see the review by j. lennart berggren in mathematical reviews m: . (gss) # . . rashed,roshdi. al-jabrwa-al-handasahf al-qarnal-thani‘ashar:mu’allafatsharafal-dı̄nal-tūsı̄[inarabic], beirut: markaz dirasat al-wahdah al-‘arabiyah, , pp. this book is an annotated translation into arabic of sharaf al-dı̄n al-tūsı̄’s mathematical work. see the review by j. lennart berggren in mathematical reviews k: . (ja) # . . rashed, roshdi. les catoptriciens grecs. i. les miroirs ardents, with an appendix by marwan rashed, paris: les belles lettres, , xxvi+ pp. arabic editions and french translations of diocles on burning mirrors, a treatise on burning mirrors by an unidentif ed greek mathematician, and a treatise by anthemius of tralles (ca. ad ) on elliptical and parabolic burning mirrors. the diocles contains variations from toomer’s translation, but is not necessarily an improvement. see the detailed review by jan p. hogendijk in mathematical reviews m: . (gss) # . . rathie, pushpa narayan. statistics in the xxth century: general aspects and applications [in portuguese], international journal of mathematical and statistical sciences ( ) ( ), – . a survey of statistics, which “has developed as a powerful combination of science, technology and logic that is used to solve problems in all areas of human enterprise.” (gvb) # . . rav, yehuda. see # . . . reich,karin. dieentdeckungundfrüherezeptionderkonstruierbarkeitdesregelmäßigen -ecksunddessen geometrische konstruktion durch johannes erchinger ( ) [the discovery and early reception of the con- structibility of the regular -gon and its geometric construction by johannes erchinger ( )], in rüdiger thiele,ed.,mathesis:festschriftzumsiebzigstengeburtstagvonmatthiasschramm,berlin:verlagfürgeschichte der naturwissenschaften und der technik, , pp. – . presents the discovery by gauss of the constructibil- ity of the regular -gon and its further reception in the early th century. see the review by doru stefanescu in mathematical reviews j: . (cj) # . . reignier, jean. à propos de la naissance de la relativité restreinte. une suggestion concernant la “troisième hypothèse” de h. poincaré, académie royale de belgique. bulletin de la classe des sciences ( ), – . the author of this paper argues for the signif cance, historically and pedagogically, of poincaré’s contributions leading to the – formulations of special relativity. see the review by n. d. sengupta in mathematical reviews k: . (ja) # . . reiner, erica. babylonian celestial divination, in # . . , pp. – . (gvb) # . . remmert, reinhold. felix klein und das riemannsche erbe, mitteilungen der deutschen mathematiker- vereinigung ( ), – . article containing interesting observations on klein by those who worked with him. discusses klein’s contributions to understanding riemann’s revolutionary approach to mathematics. see the review by roger l. cooke in mathematical reviews m: . (gss) # . . hmat abstracts rheinboldt, w. c. see # . . . rochberg, f. babylonian horoscopy: the texts and their relations, in # . . , pp. – . (gvb) # . . roero, clara silvia. mathematics and international language [in italian], bollettino della unione matema- tica italiana. sezione a. la matematica nella società e nella cultura ( ) ( ) ( ), – . discusses the development of universal quasi–natural languages in the period – . see the review by eduard glas in mathematical reviews j: . (cj) # . . rottel, karl. “arithmetica applicirt”: visierkunst, buchhaltung, kartographie und astronomie bei henricus grammateus [“applied arithmetic”: measuring, accounting, cartography and astronomy of henricus gramma- teus], in # . . , pp. – . (gvb) # . . rouxel, bernard. see # . . . roy, damien. see # . . . runggaldier, wolfgang j. on the development of applied mathematics in an interdiscriplinary area: mathe- matical finance [in italian], bollettino della unione matematica italiana. sezione a. la matematica nella società enellacultura ( ) ( ) ( ), – . the origins of mathematical f nance lie in economics and econometrics; more recent developments have occurred in mathematics. (gvb) # . . ryckman, t. a. einstein, cassirer, and general covariance—then and now, science in context ( ) ( ), – . cassirer’s assessment of general covariance, earlier the subject of puzzling remarks by einstein ( ), “is a ‘limiting heuristic principle’ guiding einstein’s fundamental conception of a ‘complete f eld theory’; as such, it underlies a ‘separation principle’ built into the conceptual framework of the epr criticism of quantum mechanics.” (gvb) # . . salanskis, jean-michel. analysis, hermeneutics, mathematics, in michael otte and marco panza, eds., analysis andsynthesis inmathematics, dordrecht: kluwer, , pp. – . argues that the classical method of analysis is closely related to hermeneutics. see the review by eberhard knobloch in mathematical reviews j: . (cj) # . . santos del cerro, jesús. a theory about the creation of the modern concept of probability: spanish contri- butions [in spanish], llull ( ) ( ), – . argues that spanish authors, especially moral theolo- gians, established moral probabilism, which came to be absorbed by probability theory in the th century. (gvb) # . . savvidy, george k. see # . . . schaefer, bradley e. the latitude of the observer of the almagest star catalogue, journal for the history of astronomy ( ), – . this paper is a continuation of recent efforts to contribute to the solution of the problem posed by the star catalogue (books vii and viii) of the almagest. also see the jan.–feb. internet archives of the h-astro forum. see the review by r. nadal in mathematical reviews k: . (ja) # . . schlote, karl-heinz. see # . . , # . . , and # . . . schwartz, laurent. a mathematician grappling with his century, translated from the french by leila schneps, basel: birkhäuser, , viii+ pp., $ . . english translation of the french autobiography on schwartz’s life and work. (cj) # . . seneta, e. see # . . . sengupta, n. d. see # . . and # . . . serfati, michel. à la recherché des lois de la pensée. sur l’epistémologie du calcul logique et du calcul des probabilitiés chez boole, mathématiques et sciences humaines ( ), – . a description of the epistemological genesis of boole’s logical calculus and a description of the connections boole made between abstracts hmat logical calculus and probability. see the extensive review by marcel guillaume in mathematical reviews m: . (gss) # . . sevast’yanov, b. a. branching processes: a glimpse into the past [in russian], teoriya veroyatnosteı̆i i prime- neniya ( ) ( ), – . a brief survey of the history of the f eld, starting with the founding of the moscow school in and dealing with some of the political diff culties. see the review by e. seneta in mathematical reviews k: . (gvb) # . . shea, william r. see # . . and # . . . sideropoulos, k. n. see # . . . sieg, wilfried. see # . . . simões, ana; and gavroglu, kostas. quantum chemistry in great britain: developing a mathematical frame- work for quantum chemistry,studies inhistoryandphilosophyofscienceb.studies inhistoryandphilosophyof modern physics ( ), – . this paper describes the important contributions of john e. lennard-jones, douglas r. hartree, and charles alfred coulson to mathematical reformulations of quantum chemistry problems. see the review by isabelle catto in mathematical reviews k: . (ja) # . . sinaceur, hourya. alfred tarski: semantic shift, heuristic shift in metamathematics, synthese ( ), – . following hilbert’s introduction, in , of the term “metamathematics,” tarski’s introduction of semantic methods and model theory, as described in this paper, transformed metamathematics into being a part of mathe- matics itself, “on a par with any other branch of mathematics.” see the review by yehuda rav in mathematical reviews k: . (ja) # . . singh, parmanand. the gan. ita kaumudı̄ of nārāyana pan.dita. chapter iv, gan. ita-bhāratı̄ ( – ) ( ), – . translation of the fourth chapter of the gan.ita kaumudı̄ ( ), dealing primarily with geometry but including some discussion of computational arithmetic, algebra, and trigonometry. see the review by a. i. volodarskı̆i in mathematical reviews j: . (cj) # . . singmaster, david. mathematical gazetteer of britain # : london part : science museum, bshm newsletter ( ), – . descriptions of mathematical holdings in the science museum in south kensington. (dez) # . . singmaster, david. mathematical gazetteer of britain # : london part : educational institutions, bshm newsletter ( ), – . descriptions of british mathematicians associated with educational institutions in london, including c. wren at gresham college, h. savile at eton college, and w. burnside at the nautical almanac off ce. (dez) # . . smale, stephen. the collected papers of stephen smale, vols., edited by f. cucker and r. wong, singapore: singapore univ. press/river edge, nj: world scientif c publishing, . contains reprints of smale’s original papers, along with surveys of the areas in which he worked and some personal recollections. see the review by serge l. tabachnikov in mathematical reviews j: . (cj) # . . smithies, f. see # . . and # . . . smorodinsky, meir. information, entropy and bernoulli systems, in jean-paul pier, ed., development of mathe- matics – , basel: birkhäuser, , pp. – . historical note on the origin of the concepts of entropy, ornstein isomorphism theory, and related developments. see the review by a. i. danilenko in mathematical re- views j: . (cj) # . . stefanescu, doru. see # . . , # . . , and # . . . stens, r. l. see # . . . stępińska,ewa. onobjectionsofajdukiewicztohilbert’sproofofconsistency[inpolish],wiadomścimatema- tyczne ( ), – . a discussion of the remarks of poincaré and ajdukiewicz concerning hilbert’s proofs of the consistency of arithmetic. see the review by roman murawski in mathematical reviews m: . (gss) # . . hmat abstracts swerdlow, noel m., ed. ancient astronomy and celestial divination, cambridge, ma: mit press, , x+ pp., $ . . valuable collection of new research by major scholars in the f eld, and a good introduction to a larger body of literature on the topic; directed mainly at specialists, but also provides a good treatment of some basic historical and mathematical issues related to ancient science. the articles are listed separately in # . . , # . . , # . . , # . . , # . . , # . . , # . . , # . . , # . . , # . . , # . . , and # . . . see the review by kim plofker in mathematical reviews j: . (cj) # . . swerdlow, noel m. introduction, in # . . , pp. – . (gvb) # . . swerdlow, noel m. the derivation of the parameters of babylonian planetary theory with time as the principal independent variable, in # . . , pp. – . (gvb) # . . swerdlow, noel m. kepler’s iterative solution to kepler’s equation, journal for the history of astronomy ( ), – . this is a brief account of kepler’s own solution, from his epitome of copernican astronomy, of his equation. see the review by di li in mathematical reviews k: . (ja) # . . tabachnikov, serge l. see # . . . tarski, alfred. address at the princeton university bicentennial conference on problems of mathematics (december – , ), edited by hourya sinaceur, bulletin of symbolic logic ( ) ( ), – . first publi- cation of a address by tarski on decidable and undecidable problems. see the review by john w. dawson, jr. in mathematical reviews j: . (cj) # . . tarski, alfred; and givant, steven. tarski’s system of geometry, bulletin of symbolic logic ( ), – . this “edited, richly annotated and footnoted” letter of tarski “represents the only existing commentary on the historical development of tarski’s axiom system for geometry.” (compare with hilbert’s system in his grundlagen der geometrie.) see the review by victor v. pambuccian in mathematical reviews k: . (ja) # . . tattersall, james j. see # . . . taylor, b. a. see # . . . temam, r. see # . . . teske, edlyn e. see # . . . thiele,rüdiger. frühevariationsrechnungundfunktionsbegriff[earlycalculusofvariationsandfunctioncon- cept], in rüdiger thiele, ed., mathesis: festschrift zum siebzigsten geburtstag von matthias schramm, berlin: verlag für geschichte der naturwissenschaften und der technik, , pp. – . the author analyzes how mathematicians regarded functions as a central concept in modern mathematics and how calculus of variations de- velopedduringthesameperiodasthedevelopmentofthefunctionconcept.seethereviewbyubiratand’ambrosio in mathematical reviews m: . (gss) # . . thrivikraman, t. see # . . . tihon, anne. theon of alexandria and ptolemy’s handy tables, in # . . , pp. – . (gvb) # . . todesco, gian marco. from the slate to the computer, in # . . , pp. – . (gvb) # . . toepell,michael. theoriginandthefurtherdevelopmentofhilbert’sgrundlagendergeometrie,matematiche (catania) ( ) suppl. , – . concise summary of more extensive published work by the author on the topic. see the review by benno artmann in mathematical reviews j: . (cj) # . . tournès, dominique. pour une histoire du calcul graphique, revue d’histoire des mathématiques ( ), – .“calculgraphique”includesharmonicanalysers, integraphs,planimeters, thesliderule,andnomographs. the period studied is to . an extensive bibliography is included. see the review by a. d. booth in mathematical reviews k: . (ja) # . . abstracts hmat tweddle,ian. robertalexanderrankin, – ,bshmnewsletter ( ), – .obituaryoftheleading british number theorist robert rankin, with a list of selected publications and brief accounts of his writings on the history of mathematics. (dez) # . . ullrich, peter. emil artins unveröffentlichte verallgemeinerung seiner dissertation [emil artin’s unpublished generalization of his dissertation], mitteilungen der mathematischen gesellschaft in hamburg ( ), – . a description of artin’s generalization of his work on rational functions over f nite f elds to more general f nite f elds in which he could prove special cases of the riemann hypothesis in this setting. artin never published the work since hilbert initially dismissed it. see the review by jeremy gray in mathematical reviews m: . (gss) # . . ursic, marko. paraconsistency and dialectics as coincidentia oppositorum in the philosophy of nicholas of cusa, logique et analyse (n. s.) ( – ) ( ), – . a revision of some conclusions of priest con- cerning “coincidence of opposites.” an attempt to understand the system of nicholas of cusa from the point of view of modern logic. see the review by paloma pérez-ilzarbe in mathematical reviews m: . (gss) # . . vakulenko, a. a.; and mikhailov, g. k. clifford truesdell and the modern history of mechanics [in russian], voprosy istorii estestvoznaniya i tekhniki , – . in addition to a short biographical study of clifford truesdell, this is an evaluation of the importance of his contributions to the history and current study of mechanics. see the review by b. d. jovanovic in mathematical reviews k: . (ja) # . . van dalen, benno. see # . . . van dalen, dirk. brouwer and fraenkel on intuitionism, bulletin of symbolic logic ( ) ( ), – . relates the interaction between brouwer and fraenkel in the s, based largely on unpublished documents; sheds light on brouwer’s development of intuitionism as well as his somewhat diff cult personality. see the review by wilfried sieg in mathematical reviews j: . (cj) # . . vanderwaerden,b.l. scienceawakening[ingreek], translatedandeditedbygianneschristianides,heraklion: panepistemiakes ekdoseis cretes, , xxvi+ pp. a translation into greek of the edition of this classic. (gvb) # . . van egmond, warren. see # . . , # . . , and # . . . van rootselaar, bob. see # . . . venator, johannes. logica [in latin], vols., edition by l. m. de rijk, stuttgart: friedrich frommann verlag günther holzboog, , and pp., dm . venator was an inf uential member of the school of oxford logicduringthesecondhalfof the thcentury.thesetwovolumesarecriticaleditionsofhislogica“meticulously produced” from two manuscripts by l. m. de rijk. see the reviews by philip a. beeley in mathematical reviews k: a and k: b. (ja) # . . vershik, a. m. vladimir abramovich rokhlin [ – ], in v. turaev and a. vershik, eds.,topology,ergodic theory, real algebraic geometry, providence, ri: american mathematical society, , pp. – . article on the life and work of vladimir abramovich rokhlin. rokhlin was out of favor with the communist regime and was forced to accept positions unbef tting his talents. rokhlin worked with pontryagin and aleksandrov. see the review by roger l. cooke in mathematical reviews m: . (gss) # . . viterbi, a. j. see # . . . vogel, kurt. uses of letters and indian numerals in byzantium [in greek], translated from the german by k. n. sideropoulos, neusis ( ), – . this paper is translated and reprinted here as the source of inspiration of a subsequent article by jean christianidis (# . . ). (gvb) # . . volodarskĭi, a. i. see # . . . waldschmidt, michel. un demi-siècle de transcendance, in jean-paul pier, ed., development of mathematics – , basel: birkhäuser, , pp. – . a thorough review of the theory of transcendental numbers and diophantine approximation from to , including an extensive bibliography. see the review by damien roy in mathematical reviews k: . (ja) # . . hmat abstracts walker, c. b. f. babylonian observations of saturn during the reign of kandalanu, in # . . , pp. – . (gvb) # . . wallis, ruth. more publicly-owned rare mathematical works under the auctioneer’s hammer,bshmnewslet- ter ( ), – . rare books on mathematics continue to be sold in england, this time by a municipal library in newcastle upon tyne. (dez) # . . wang, yusheng. hua hengfang: forerunner and disseminator of modern science in china, in dainian fang and robert s. cohen, eds., chinese studies in the history and philosophy of science and technology, dor- drecht: kluwer, , pp. – . a scientif c biography of hua hengfang ( – ), whose contributions spanned mineralogy, geology, and mathematics. see the review by di li in mathematical reviews k: . (ja) # . . wang, yusheng. li shanlan: forerunner of modern science in china, in dainian fang and robert s. cohen, eds., chinese studies in the history and philosophy of science and technology, dordrecht: kluwer, , pp. – . this extensive biography of li shanlan ( – ) describes in detail his mathematical research, the roles he played in “westernizing movements” in science, technology, and politics, his teaching, and his poetry and prose writings. see the review by di li in mathematical reviews k: . (ja) # . . weidauer, manfred, ed. heinrich schreyber aus erfurt, genannt grammateus. festschrift zum . geburstag, munich: institut für die geschichte der naturwissenschaften, , pp. a collection of papers on gram- mateus, the author of several important early th century “rechenbuchern.” the papers are listed separately as # . . , # . . , # . . , # . . , # . . , # . . , and # . . . see the review by william r. shea in mathematical reviews k: . (ja) # . . weidauer, manfred. zu den rechenbuchern von heinrich schreyber [on the arithmetic books of heinrich schreyber], in # . . , pp. – . (gvb) # . . weidauer, manfred. heinrich schreyber—aus erfurt oder aus herbsleben? [heinrich schreyber—from erfurt or from herbsleben?], in # . . , pp. – . (gvb) # . . weidauer, manfred. see also # . . . weinstock, robert. inverse-square orbits in newton’s principia and twentieth century commentary thereon, archive for history of exact sciences ( ), – . in , the author initiated a very high level debate by denying that, in the principia, newton actually produced a rigorous proof of the inverse–square law. this paper carefully summarizes the scientif c details of this debate over the past years. see the review by niccolò guicciardini in mathematical reviews k: . (ja) # . . wilson, n. g. archimedes: the palimpsest and the tradition, byzantinische zeitschrift ( ) ( ), – . discusses the history of the palimpsest containing archimedes’s method, but does not treat the mathematics contained therein. see the review by louis charbonneau in mathematical reviews j: . (cj) # . . wilson, robin j. see # . . . wnuk, witold. see # . . . wolters, gereon. die pragmatische vollendung des logischen empirismus. in memoriam carl gustav hempel ( – ) [the pragmatic completion of logical empiricism. in memoriam carl gustav hempel ( – )], journal for general philosophy of science ( ) ( ), – . discusses hempel’s contributions to central matters in philosophy of science and places hempel’s work within the history of logical empiricism. (cj) # . . xu, de yi. the computations of π,journalofcentralchinanormaluniversity.naturalsciences ( ) ( ), – . a brief history of methods of computing π and their signif cance. (gvb) # . . yor, marc. le mouvement brownien: quelques développements de à , in jean-paul pier, ed., deve- lopment of mathematics – , basel: birkhäuser, , pp. – . a survey of developments in the theory of brownian motion, concentrating especially on the multiple points and the geometry of brownian motion abstracts hmat on r and on attempts to def ne a meaningful self-avoiding brownian motion. see the review by f. b. knight in mathematical reviews k: . (gvb) # . . yuan, min. a comparative study between the indian sine table and the tangent table of the buddhist monk yi xing [in chinese], journal of northwest university ( ) ( ), – . concludes that the tangent table of the chinese th-century buddhist monk yi xing did not rely on the indian sine table in the jiuzhi calendar. (gvb) # . . zayed, ahmed i. see # . . . zerner, m. see # . . . zhedanov, alexei. see # . . . zitarelli, david e. epadel: a semisesquicentennial history, – , elkins park, pa: raymond-reese book co., , paperbound, pp. a history of one of sections of the mathematical association of america, viewed as a microcosm of the american mathematical community in the th century. (dez) # . . teaching in a time of discord: six strategies for learning design and practice guest editorial teaching in a time of discord: six strategies for learning design and practice donovan r. walling published online: february # association for educational communications & technology the rhetoric of the presidential election campaign was brutalizing. teachers at all levels have reported negative ef- fects, students made fearful by racist, xenophobic, antigay speech at one end of the spectrum and, at the other end, stu- dents emboldened to be oppressors, freely hurling hate speech and menacing those who were targeted. the campaign was an assault on civil discourse, which has been both an american cultural value and a mainstay of our democratic way of life. recovery from this assault, like healing from a physical as- sault, will take time. what can learning designers and practi- tioners do to foster recovery and strengthen our collective civic sensibilities now and for the future? the american founders spoke eloquently of the vital role of education in the maintenance of our democratic systems of governance and way of life. public education—the free and equal education of all the people—took shape soon after the nation’s founding. the common school movement of the s, arguably a starting point, led over the course of a cen- tury and a half to our modern public schools, which strive to provide the best possible education to the vast diversity of our population, education that is freely available, fair, and com- prehensive. horace mann, the bfather of the common school,^ called such education bthe great equalizer^ (cremin , p. ). for more than years, since the mid- s, we have witnessed an assault on public education in the form of a series of rolling breforms,^ each falling short, each further eroding our public schools’ ability to address the learning needs of students who will emerge from their classrooms into a vastly different world than their parents and grandparents have known. since the passage of no child left behind in , an over-emphasis on standardized testing has meant less bequalizing^ in favor of more bsorting and selecting^ and further narrowed the curriculum, shunting to the sidelines sub- jects such as music, art, history, and, perhaps most to our collective detriment, civic education. at the same time, it would be a mistake to regard civic education merely as a subject. all public education is—or should be—civic educa- tion: education not solely about governmental history, forms, functions, and procedures but, more importantly, education in the characteristics of civil discourse that foster and maintain our democracy. the brutalizing discourse—perhaps absence of true dis- course would be more accurate—of the presidential cam- paign (and some others down ballot) illustrates the culmina- tion of a trend toward greater political polarization over time. this means that fewer political adversaries are willing to engage in civil discourse for the common good. a pew study (doherty ) of political polarization from to found polarization, the holding of rigid ideological positions, dramatically increasing. b‘ideological silos’ are now common on the right and, to a lesser extent, the left,^ according to the report. perhaps the clearest evidence of these silos can be seen in the relative absence of collabora- tion and compromise in the u.s. congress over the course of the obama presidency. john locke, the th-century enlightenment philoso- pher much admired by many of the american founders, defined civil discourse: bby their civil use, i mean such a communication of thoughts and ideas by words, as may serve for the upholding common conversation and com- merce, about the ordinary affairs and conveniences of civ- il life, in the societies of men, one amongst another^ * donovan r. walling drwalling@gmail.com bloomington, in, usa techtrends ( ) : – doi . /s - - - http://crossmark.crossref.org/dialog/?doi= . /s - - - &domain=pdf (walmsley ). civil discourse benefits the common good, and it is this characteristic that, in a time of discord, should be part of the fabric of learning design and practice. following are six strategies that learning designers and practitioners may want to consider in order to foster habits of mind that are reflected in the understanding and use of civil discourse, regardless of subject matter or grade level. these strategies can be adapted for younger or older, including adult, learners, and frequently can be enhanced using digital age media. foster cooperation, collaboration, and compromise with the youngest learners, there usually is an emphasis in the classroom on sharing and cooperating with one another, but that sometimes receives less attention as youngsters mature. the urge toward independence is nat- ural, and expecting students to do independent work is a valid part of learning. however, a key factor of our st- century interconnected world is that success, whether in learning or in work, often depends on students’ ability to cooperate, collaborate, and compromise in order to reach a common goal. in a time of political polarization, one antidote to discord is a habit of mind that puts the com- mon good before ego and ideology, and where better to cultivate this habit of mind than in the classroom. a st-century adaptation of traditional cooperative learning is computer-supported collaborative learning (cscl), which offers additional opportunities to promote positive interdependence as groups use technology to fa- cilitate cooperation, collaboration, and compromise. in a review of cscl, researchers resta and laferrière ( ) note, research has linked collaborative tasks to student en- gagement in knowledge construction. moreover, in- structors who use cscl can monitor student under- standing and achievement in collaborative learning ac- tivities. in addition, students can review what they wrote or what their peers wrote, and instructors can analyze the discourse of team members using semi-automatic data analysis procedures for facilitation, moderation, or grad- ing purposes. (p. ) emphasizing problem- and project-based learning can help to bring students together in order to learn through active engagement the processes that make cooperation, collaboration, and compromise powerful vehicles for civil discourse. teach the power of diversity the term diversity works on many levels: cultural, racial, etc. diversity also refers to differences in beliefs and understandings. the united states, from its founding, has been a nation marked out by diversity. we are a nation of immigrants. our population historically has come from many different backgrounds, and despite xenophobic rhetoric, that diversity has long been a strength of our democracy. ancient humans around bce found that smelting together copper and tin produced bronze, which was stronger than either of its components alone. later, combining pig iron and carbon produced steel, indispensible in modern construc- tion and manufacturing. the alloy that is american democra- cy is inherently stronger for the inclusion of diverse individ- uals and viewpoints. pedagogical theorist marri ( ) points out, diversity enables liberty by preventing tyranny of the majority. factions, as james madison called them in the federalist no. , are groups of citizens bunited and actuated by some common impulse of passion or of interest^ that is adverse to the rights of other citizens or the common good…. second, diversity challenges the status quo. diversity among groups helped to create and maintain public spaces of lively debate, boycotts, protests, and discussions that contested an entrenched status quo. (p. ) helping students with diverse views and from diverse backgrounds learn how to engage in civil discourse and to cultivate a value for such engagement is crucial to forging a future less mired in the discord of recent years. develop empathy empathy, or the ability to put oneself in another’s shoes, intu- itively seems like a valuable characteristic to foster in students of all ages. but it’s more than that, as researchers in many fields—for example, medicine (see shapiro ) and busi- ness (aggarwal et al. )—have discovered. journalist maria shriver pointed up the importance of developing em- pathy especially in this time of discord: bduring this volatile political season i think a conversation about empathy is a good one for all of us to have—in our homes, in our workplaces and, most importantly, with ourselves^ (shriver ). in schools, educators have found that developing empathy among students helps to build a positive classroom culture, strengthens community, and prepares students to be leaders in their community (owen ). these results are particularly important in school communities composed of students from techtrends ( ) : – diverse socioeconomic backgrounds, and empathy will con- tinue to be important for harmony and productivity as students move from school to futures in higher education and employment. interestingly, with the current emphasis on testing, foster- ing empathy can improve students’ test scores. for example, changing worlds (changingworlds.org) is a chicago-based nonprofit that provides in-school and after-school programs that foster empathy through oral history, writing, and the arts. mark rodrigues, then executive director of changing worlds, reported, bat the end of the third year of the program, test scores for students in changing worlds’ program were greater than control group students, with an average positive differ- ence of . points across all schools for composite scores^ (townsend ). teaching empathy skills in concert with subject matter can have a positive effect on the classroom community, an effect that can be carried over into civil discourse in adult life. emphasize integrated knowledge connecting the unknown to the known is a powerful learning strategy. connecting information across traditional disciplines broadens students’ knowledge base, fosters deeper under- standing, and encourages the consideration of complex inter- sections of ideas. overwhelming curricular emphasis on read- ing and mathematics, which has been encouraged by overem- phasis of standardized testing in these areas, has limited in many cases the amount of instructional time devoted to other subjects, such as art, music, and history. emphasizing integrat- ed knowledge offers a strategy that not only can deepen core subject understanding but also broaden students’ knowledge to include other, often neglected disciplines. for example, long before sudoku became a mathematical craze people were exploring another type of square with num- bers. a magic square is a grid with equal rows and columns in which distinct numbers add to the same sum for each row, column, and main diagonal. magic squares date back to bce in china. albrecht dürer, the german renaissance artist is believed to have created the first european magic square, which he incorporated in his famous engraving, melancholia. his -cell magic square also in- cludes in the two center cells of the bottom row and , or , the year he created the engraving. interestingly, dürer also wrote treatises on mathematics (walling ). with internet browsing and search features, such connec- tions are mere mouse-clicks away. in a sense, integrating knowledge in this manner is akin to a bsix degrees of separation^ game to see what connections can be found among a variety of disciplines. by integrating knowledge in this way, a mathematics les- son also meaningfully incorporates aspects of art and history, not only adding interest but also expanding students’ knowl- edge of, and potentially their ability to make, connections that deepen complex understandings. teach critical discernment discernment means simply the ability to judge well. information in the digital age has expanded exponentially since the advent of the computer and the internet. so has misinformation. during the recent political campaign, fact- checking became a daily byword. often the value of truth seemed to fall by the wayside. miller ( ), writing for youth media reporter, asks: how do we know what information is trustworthy? how do we distinguish credible information from raw information, misinformation, and propaganda?… because the focus on standardized testing in schools has tended to push civics or current events courses out of classrooms, schools today frequently do not address these questions. a consensus is developing both across the united states and in europe that national efforts are needed to create a savvy, digital-age citizenry that is informed and engaged. the nascent news literacy move- ment has begun to meet this challenge. this conclusion is supported by results from act national curriculum survey® , in which k- and college educa- tors agreed that bdistinguishing between fact, opinion, and reasoned judgment^ was among the top five prerequisite skills for college success. however, when college educators were asked to evaluate the preparation of their entering students, only % rated this skill in the top half of the scale (act , p. ). news literacy, often more broadly media literacy, expands on basic concepts that traditionally have been taught as stu- dents begin to do research. is found information reliable? in our digital age, there’s a lot more information to find, making the challenge of discerning its reliability all the more challeng- ing. for a thorough treatment of this topic the knight commission’s report, informing communities: sustaining democracy in the digital age, is a valuable resource (knight commission ). critical discernment is a vital skill for the formation and sustenance of civil discourse. incorporating such skill devel- opment pervasively across subjects and levels is essential. encourage self-evaluation self-evaluation develops another aspect of critical discern- ment. it can be thought of as comprising four phases: ) techtrends ( ) : – self-identification of learning goals and criteria, in which the learner identifies what he or she wants, needs, and intends to learn and the criteria that will identify whether the learning goals have been achieved; ) self-monitoring during learning activities, when the learner attempts (and may initially be guided) to be actively aware of his or her own learning; ) self-assessment at one or more points during the learning ac- tivities, when the learner stops to take stock, matching activ- ities and achievement to goals and criteria to assess whether learning is successful and on track; and ) self-reflection, for which the learner thinks about his or her progress, concluding that the goals have been met or that continued effort, perhaps through revised learning strategies, must be made. learner self-evaluation does not come without guidance in the process. self-identification of goals and learning criteria, self-monitoring, self-assessment, and self-reflection are learned behaviors facilitated by learning designers and teachers. andrade and valtcheva ( ) suggest that one way to facilitate effective self-evaluation is through the use of criteria that align with the goals and contexts of learning. when students use criteria-referenced self-assess- ment, according to these researchers, bthe effect can be both short-term, as when self-assessment influences student performance on a particular assignment, as well as long- term, as students become more self-regulated in their learning^ (p. ). the ability to self-evaluate strengthens personal awareness and is key to participating meaningfully in civil discourse for the common good. conclusion on august , , then former president james madison wrote to w.t. barry, who had been a u.s. senator during madison’s presidency and was at the time lieutenant governor of kentucky: the liberal appropriations made by the legislature of kentucky for a general system of education cannot be too much applauded. a popular government, without popular information, or the means of acquiring it, is but a prologue to a farce or a tragedy; or, perhaps both. knowledge will forever govern ignorance: and a people who mean to be their own governors, must arm them- selves with the power which knowledge gives. (kurland and lerner ) madison was among the american founders, like thomas jefferson, george washington, john adams, and others, who believed fervently that education was essential to the maintenance of our democracy. they knew that without an educated populace democracy would be imperiled. today, in this time of discord following a brutalizing pres- idential campaign, the future of american democracy is sitting in our classrooms. students at every level in every part of this nation need and deserve to be immersed in learning that fos- ters civil discourse as fundamental to the most effective work- ing of our democratic system of governance. in a very real sense, public education must be civic education. references act. ( ). act national curriculum survey® . http://www.act. org/research. aggarwal, p., castleberry, s. b., ridnour, r., & shepherd, c. d. ( ). salesperson empathy and listening: impact on relationship out- comes. journal of marketing theory and practice, ( ), – . andrade, h., & valtcheva, a. ( ). promoting learning and achieve- ment through self-assessment. theory into practice, ( ), – . http://dx.doi.org/ . / . cremin, l. ( ). the republic and the school: horace mann on the education of free men. new york: teachers college press. doherty, c. ( ). things to know about polarization in america. facttank. pew research center. http://www.pewresearch.org/fact- tank/ / / / -things-to-know-about-polarization-in-america/. knight commission on the information needs of communities in a democracy. ( ). informing communities: sustaining democracy in the digital age. washington, dc: aspen institute. https://www. aspeninstitute.org/publications/informing-communities-sustaining- democracy-digital-age/. kurland, p. b., & lerner, r. (eds.) ( ). bepilogue: securing the republic^ (chapter , document ). the founders’ constitution. chicago university press and the liberty fund. http://press-pubs.uchicago.edu/founders/documents/v ch s . html. marri, a. r. ( ). race, social studies, and the world wide web. in g. ladson-billings (ed.), critical race theory: perspectives on social studies. greenwich: information age. miller, a. ( ). can democracy survive without reliable information? youth media reporter. http://www.youthmediareporter.org/ / / /can-a-democracy-survive-without-reliable-information/. owen, l. ( ). empathy in the classroom: why should i care? edutopia. https://www.edutopia.org/blog/empathy-classroom-why- should-i-care-lauren-owen. resta, p., & laferrière, t. ( ). technology in support of collaborative learning. educational psychology review, , – . shapiro, j. ( ). how do physicians teach empathy in the primary care setting? journal of the association of american medical colleges, ( ), – . https://escholarship.org/uc/item/ wt n w#page- . shriver, m. ( ). the power of empathy. igniting architects of change. http://mariashriver.com/blog/ / /power-empathy-khizr-khan- maria-shriver/. townsend, j. c. ( ). why we should teach empathy to improve edu- cation (and test scores). forbes. http://www.forbes.com/sites/ ashoka/ / / /why-we-should-teach-empathy-to-improve- education-and-test-scores/# a ead a d. walling, d. r. ( ). visual knowing: connecting art and ideas across the curriculum. thousand oaks: corwin. walmsley, p. ( ). prince maurice’s rational parrot: civil discourse in locke’s essay. eighteenth-century studies, ( ), – . techtrends ( ) : – http://www.act.org/research http://www.act.org/research http://dx.doi.org/ . / http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/ / / / -things-to-know-about-polarization-in-america/ http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/ / / / -things-to-know-about-polarization-in-america/ https://www.aspeninstitute.org/publications/informing-communities-sustaining-democracy-digital-age/ https://www.aspeninstitute.org/publications/informing-communities-sustaining-democracy-digital-age/ https://www.aspeninstitute.org/publications/informing-communities-sustaining-democracy-digital-age/ http://press-pubs.uchicago.edu/founders/documents/v ch s .html http://press-pubs.uchicago.edu/founders/documents/v ch s .html http://www.youthmediareporter.org/ / / /can-a-democracy-survive-without-reliable-information/ http://www.youthmediareporter.org/ / / /can-a-democracy-survive-without-reliable-information/ https://www.edutopia.org/blog/empathy-classroom-why-should-i-care-lauren-owen https://www.edutopia.org/blog/empathy-classroom-why-should-i-care-lauren-owen https://escholarship.org/uc/item/ wt n w#page- http://mariashriver.com/blog/ / /power-empathy-khizr-khan-maria-shriver/ http://mariashriver.com/blog/ / /power-empathy-khizr-khan-maria-shriver/ http://www.forbes.com/sites/ashoka/ / / /why-we-should-teach-empathy-to-improve-education-and-test-scores/# a ead a d http://www.forbes.com/sites/ashoka/ / / /why-we-should-teach-empathy-to-improve-education-and-test-scores/# a ead a d http://www.forbes.com/sites/ashoka/ / / /why-we-should-teach-empathy-to-improve-education-and-test-scores/# a ead a d 	teaching in a time of discord: six strategies for learning design and practice 	foster cooperation, collaboration, and compromise 	teach the power of diversity 	develop empathy 	emphasize integrated knowledge 	teach critical discernment 	encourage self-evaluation 	conclusion 	references representing the rhinoceros: the royal society between art and science in the eighteenth century representing the rhinoceros: the royal society between art and science in the eighteenth centuryjecs_ .. c r a i g a s h l e y h a n s o n abstract: discrepancies between the empirical evidence of single-horned rhinoceroses witnessed by europeans and references from antiquity regarding double-horned rhinos puzzled members of the royal society for decades, particularly the circle of physicians around drs richard mead and hans sloane. three articles published in the philosophical transactions proposing solutions to the two-horned dilemma and the kinds of evidence on which they depended raised crucial issues for the royal society during the period – antiquarian concerns tied to philology, numismatics, textual emendation and collecting as well as the conceptual overlap between medical theory and the knowledge of the ancient world generally. keywords: richard mead, hans sloane, rhinoceros, royal society of london, antiquarianism, numismatics, collecting the title-page of a new and perfect book of beasts, flowers, fruits, butterflies & other vermine (fig. ) provides a telling picture of the restoration fascination for the natural world. etched in london by wenceslaus hollar, the print supplies thirty different animals stretched across the foreground, with a neatly enclosed physic garden receding into the distance. the mode of delineation suggests subtle attention to detail, with an emphasis on naturalistic credibility; the animals are choreographed to make the most of the given space. it is, however, an impossible menagerie – both spatially (scale and movement are hardly convincing) and relationally (one can only imagine the feeding frenzy if movement were feasible). this tension between empi- rical observation and the representation of nature according to received conventions of knowledge is perhaps most apparent in the disjunction between text and image. the fine print of the title boasts that the specimens have been ‘exactly drawne after ye life & naturall’. and yet – even beyond doubts viewers may have regarding the veracity of particular features of the elephant or the lion – the inclusion of a unicorn pointedly suggests a rather different project. in terms of artistic conventions, albrecht dürer’s famous rhinoceros from is easily recognised just to the right of the elephant. the familiar profile is perfectly appropriate here, given the enormous influence the image exerted for well over two centuries – and since it, too, came with insinuations of having journal for eighteenth-century studies vol. no. ( ) © british society for eighteenth-century studies. published by blackwell publishing ltd., garsington road, oxford ox dq, uk, and main street, malden, ma , usa. been drawn from life, when in fact dürer produced the picture working from only a sketch and a second-hand description. numerous scholars have recounted the history of dürer’s rhinoceros and its impact on european art. in fact, the literature on the wider european reception of rhinoceroses – as both symbols of curiosity and as actual animals – is remarkably comprehensive. kees rookmaaker has catalogued thousands of relevant sources, while t. h. clarke has surveyed rhinocerotica in more tightly conceived art-historical terms, addressing not only prints and paintings but also the decorative arts. more recently, glynis ridley’s account of the leiden rhinoceros exhibited throughout europe from to has shown that, in addition to such ambitious surveys, the topic can effectively sustain more focused narratives. in contrast to these studies, which have focused on the indian single-horned rhinoceros (rhinoceros unicornis) – precisely because all the examples seen in early modern europe came from the asian subcontinent, where rhinoceroses do possess a single horn – interest in the double-horned rhinoceros (specifically, the black rhinoceros, diceros bicornis), which originates in eastern and southern africa, has received far less historical scrutiny. although the distinction may initially seem as pedantic to twenty-first-century readers as many of the other questions raised by the early modern virtuosi (indeed, we’ll see that the two-horned experts were lampooned by their detractors as . wenceslaus hollar, title-page of a new and perfect book of beasts, flowers, fruits, butterflies & other vermine, ed. peter stent (london, ). used by permission of the thomas fisher rare book library, university of toronto c r a i g a s h l e y h a n s o n © british society for eighteenth-century studies narrowly short-sighted), the difference turns out to be central to the history of the animal’s european reception. for some of the most famous ancient textual descriptions of the rhinoceros – especially those from martial’s account of the games held in the roman colosseum – describe the rhinoceros as a two- horned animal. from the fascination it first exerted on the renaissance imagination, the rhinoceros was bound up with larger goals of recovering the culture of antiquity. the residual effects of these early sixteenth-century ambitions appear a century and half later, in hollar’s etching. thanks to pliny’s natural history, which describes the rhinoceros and the elephant as natural antagonists, renaissance courts were intrigued with the possibility of a fight between these huge pachyderms. the german inscription above dürer’s image describes the rivalry outlined by pliny, and these bellicose expectations help explain the inclusion of what appears to be armour around the beast. these assumed hostilities likewise account for hollar’s placement of the two animals beside each other. this tradition of aggression also makes sense of the bear’s location just to the right of the rhinoceros. in a passage that would vex the virtuosi of both the restoration and the early georgian era, martial describes in his book of spectacles how a rhinoceros in the flavian amphitheatre, after initially refusing to engage his foe, eventually became enraged and ‘picked up a heavy bear on his double horn like a bull tossing a load of [straw] dummies to the stars’. along with the bear, the epigram thus perhaps also explains the position of the bull in hollar’s print, just slightly further to the right. more importantly, the passage highlights the double horn of the rhinoceros. how members of london’s royal society grappled with that question underscores larger problems relating to the society’s empirical programme. modern scholarship has often framed the tensions between ancient authority and the evidence of the senses in whiggish terms: observation of ‘what’s there in nature’ supersedes received traditions, and science triumphs over superstition. here, however, the tables are turned. for what had yet to be confirmed by the senses – the bi-corned rhinoceros from africa – filled a position as precarious as that of the unicorn. the fact that the textual sources turned out to be correct even in the absence of visual confirmation introduced interesting methodological challenges for early modern scholars. here i focus on three articles published in the philosophical transactions around the middle of the eighteenth century. given that most of the participants were physicians, the material holds implications for the history of medicine, and, interestingly, the medical dimensions of the rhinoceros have largely been marginalised. the proposed solutions to the two-horned dilemma and the kinds of evidence on which they depended raised crucial issues for the royal society during the period – antiquarian concerns tied to philology, numismatics, textual emendation and collecting as well as the conceptual overlap between medical theory and knowledge of the ancient world generally. running throughout the material, the importance of social relationships reinforces the constructed character of knowledge, even as the representing the rhinoceros © british society for eighteenth-century studies story also suggests an alternative point of emphasis from the typical opposition between realist and social-constructionist models of science. ultimately, early modern understandings of the rhinoceros did change substantially as a result of first-hand experiences with these animals, although in ways quite distinct from the immediate terms of these mid- eighteenth-century debates. i. in february dr james parsons ( - ) addressed the royal society on the topic of a specimen of double horns (fig. ), which he had acquired from the cape of good hope through his ‘curious and worthy friend’ william mcguire. the physician frames the paper, published later that year in philosophical transactions, as a sequel to an article he had read before the group twenty-three years earlier, in june , suggesting that, at that time, . j. mynde, after james parsons, illustration from james parsons, ‘letter to the president of the royal society on the double horns of the rhinoceros’, philosophical transactions ( ). used by permission of the university of chicago library, special collections research center c r a i g a s h l e y h a n s o n © british society for eighteenth-century studies ‘few of the society’ had ‘ever seen a pair’. he raises the problem of how best to translate the lines from martial, resuming the discussion where he had left off two decades earlier. now vindicated for his rejection of various emendations, he recounts an anecdote concerning dr richard mead ( - ), who, along with several colleagues, had supported alternative readings of martial’s epigram. parsons notes that mead himself later received a delivery of various items brought from angola by ‘an african trader’ that included ‘the bones of the face of a young rhinoceros, with two horns, in situ, all entire’. confronted with the evidence, mead readily acknowledged his error. and so, as a testimony to mead’s cooperative disposition, parsons describes himself in as possessed of ‘a double pleasure’: for not only does his own double horn provide an opportunity for ‘amusing’ the society with ‘a most curious specimen in natural history’ but it also occasions his recollection of the ‘nice candour and generosity of doctor mead’. parsons’s earlier contribution, the ‘natural history of the rhinoceros’ ( ) was written in response to the exhibition of a male rhino in london in . it was the second rhinoceros to be brought to the city, but, as the first had died sixty-three years earlier, this was for most londoners their first direct experience of the animal. parsons’s friend and fellow member of the royal society dr james douglas (c. - ) had spoken on the subject before the society in june, just a week after the rhinoceros went on display in eagle street, near the homes of both parsons and douglas, in red lion square. as parsons notes, douglas apparently intended to publish a more thorough account, and although his collection of rhinoceros prints and drawings still survives in glasgow, he died before compiling the monograph. (the young william hunter was then living with douglas, working as his assistant and tutor to his son; hunter inherited the illustrations, which are still to be found in the hunterian library. ) following douglas’s death, parsons himself took up the task. he too assembled a collection of prints and made drawings, as well as two paintings, of the eagle street rhinoceros. as though anticipating the twentieth-century commitment among rhinoceros scholars to catalogue, parsons begins his article by acknowledging and assessing his numerous forerunners, from dürer onwards, attending especially to fidelity of appearances. he concludes that the german renaissance master ‘never saw the animal’. he credits dr jacob bontius ( - ) with improving on dürer but faults the dutch scholar for his depiction of the hoofs. he gives mixed grades to the huguenot traveller john chardin ( - ) and to joachim camerarius ( - ), whose book of emblems included several depictions of rhinoceroses, including one of the animal throwing a bear with its horn (fig. ) to illustrate the point that a strong man is not easily angered but justly responds with force when provoked. after assuring readers that his own report pays ‘no regard to those of other authors’ but relies solely on first-hand observation, parsons spends the bulk of the article describing the animal’s appearance, how he was brought to representing the rhinoceros © british society for eighteenth-century studies england, his diet, temperament, size, the features of his head (including, of course, his horn), his body, his legs, his penis and skin. as already noted, parsons concludes the article with his criticisms of efforts to emend martial. specifically, he responds to the huguenot scholar samuel bochart ( - ), who had addressed the rhinoceros in in his treatise on the animals of the bible. for bochart, the matter of the true nature of the rhinoceros could be resolved by correcting what he took to be a mistake in the transmission of the epigrams. and thus he proposed revising the traditional passage from martial: namque gravem gemino cornu sic extulit ursum (for he picked up a heavy bear on his double horn) so that it would, instead, read: namque gravi geminum cornu sic extulit urum (for he picked up a double ox on his heavy horn). . hans sibmacher, emblem of a rhinoceros throwing a bear, in joachim camerarius, symbolorum et emblematum ex animalbius quadrupedibus desumtorum centuria altera (nuremberg, ). used by permission of the wellcome library, london c r a i g a s h l e y h a n s o n © british society for eighteenth-century studies for bochart, the gemino (double or pair) must surely modify the animal(s) being thrown, which he altered from bears to wild oxen; never mind the syntactical somersaults. for parsons, even in , this was needless tinkering that took inappropriate liberties with martial and failed to admit the possibility of multiple species of rhinoceroses. in the later ‘natural history of the rhinoceros’ he proposes that, in contrast to the rhinos brought to europe from asia in his own day, the ancient romans would have been more likely to import animals from africa, and thus the differences in horns might be tied to geographical variations. as evidence, he cites peter kolb, whose account of the cape of good hope provides a description of the bi-corned black rhinoceros. he observes that dr hans sloane’s collection included a specimen of the two horns, and he notes that a coin from domitian’s reign included ‘the figure of a rhinoceros with two horns upon the nose, very plain’. turning the emendation principle on its head, he even interprets the dorsal horn from dürer’s image as an attempt to preserve the integrity of martial’s original lines. it would seem that the matter could have ended here, as parsons neatly outlines the options: ‘several critics who have handled this matter, show abundance of ingenuity in changing martial’s reading; yet if we can make it appear, that there was a rhinoceros with two-horns on his nose in rome, then that poet was right; if not, bochart has the better.’ indeed, he seems to have made a convincing case for the existence of the bi-corned rhinoceros, thanks to: (a) an eyewitness report of the living animal; (b) a specimen of two horns in london; and (c) an image from an ancient coin. no essential new forms of evidence would emerge between and , and yet the question persisted. according to traditional approaches within the history of science that often focus on the advancement of knowledge, we might explain the period in kuhnian terms as an expected phase of resistance as this new understanding unsettled previous beliefs. this lack of resolution, however, also supplies a glimpse into the stakes of the debate as well as the social dimensions of this process of knowledge production. the circle of colleagues evoked by parsons – douglas, mead, maittaire and sloane – deserve more attention. for with them the story is no longer simply one of europe’s expanding intellectual grasp of the rhinoceros but instead becomes a tale of the intellectual positioning of ancient authority and empirical data, the vital connection between antiquarianism and the profession of learned medicine, and, finally, the social functions that a collection could serve. ii. in the spring of hans sloane ( - ) presented a paper before the royal society on the topic of serpent stones, rhinoceros bezoars and the specimen of double horns from his own collection, which parsons had included in his article of (fig. ). the stones, commonly known since the sixteenth century as pietra de cobra de cabelos, were said to come from representing the rhinoceros © british society for eighteenth-century studies just behind the eyes of particularly poisonous snakes. the bezoars – calculi comprised of various ‘indigestible substances’ – were believed to come from the intestinal tracts of rhinoceroses, with the largest examples measuring about the size of an orange. the horns, we learn, were acquired through charles lockyer, who sailed for ‘the east-indian and african companies’. initially, this trio of objects seems like a peculiar assortment, perhaps easily dismissed as virtuosic show-and-tell, a mode of discourse for which there has rarely been a paucity of criticism – whether from restoration satires or walter houghton’s influential series of essays from the early s. yet, for all that the article of may lack in terms of unity and an explicit thesis, the three . j. mynde, illustration from hans sloane, ‘a letter [...] with the figure of a rhinoceros with a double horn’, philosophical transactions ( ). used by permission of the university of chicago library, special collections research center c r a i g a s h l e y h a n s o n © british society for eighteenth-century studies objects are by no means unrelated for sloane. they are all examples of natural resources with potential health benefits. he draws on the florentine physician francesco redi ( - ) for the efficacy of both the serpent stones, thought to counteract the effects of poison and fevers, and the bezoars, which were similarly believed to draw out substances from the body: sloane asserts here that they facilitate delivery for pregnant women, although he warns that ‘immediately after the birth, it [the bezoar] should be removed; for if it remains tied there [to the leg] it brings away the womb, &c. and the woman dies.’ in light of the experimental emphasis of the early royal society, the claims are striking. for all the comic derision they may now inspire, sloane is attentive to evidence, even if most of his sources are second- or third-hand. he notes, for instance, that the former president of the royal college of physicians, john bateman, had reported observing the snake stone’s ‘great effects (upon the bite of a viper)’ before charles ii, ‘a great lover of such natural experiments’. on the testimony of dr alexander stuart’s encounter with a missionary in the east indies, sloane doubts that the snake stones originated from the heads of serpents but instead believes them to be composed of buffalo bones. his use of redi is especially interesting, given that the italian doctor sided firmly against claims regarding the efficacy of the stones in a well-known controversy with the jesuit polymath athanasius kircher, from the s and ’ s. as martha baldwin has demonstrated, kircher – like sloane – was perfectly willing to accept the field reports of others (especially fellow jesuits scattered throughout asia), whereas redi privileged his own experiments. redi includes accounts of those who affirm the stones’ potency in countering poisonous bites of one sort or another but ultimately rejects them as unreliable. sloane, however, feels perfectly justified in extracting those accounts as independent pieces of evidence, quite apart from redi’s conclusions. throughout his career sloane adhered to established therapeutic lore, including not only serpent stones and bezoars but also various parts of the rhinoceros. the catalogue from his collection, for instance, includes the following annotations: shavings of a rhinoceros horn for a counter poison. rhinoceros’s hyde [...] the blood is used to fortify the heart & in all contagious diseases causing the sweat very plentifully stops the flux of the belly and purifies the blood & stops bleding. of the horn are made cups against the bad air in time of contagion. the teeth are used for the tooth ache applying it against the aching tooth. the bezoars still survive in sloane’s pharmaceutical collection, which was organised among numerous wooden trays with tidy compartments. in comparison with mummia, a bituminous substance from egyptian mummies, prized among many learned physicians for its usefulness in treating a range of illnesses, the bezoars hardly seem extraordinary. representing the rhinoceros © british society for eighteenth-century studies broadly speaking, there is a discernible shift from the sixteenth-century emblematic understanding of the rhinoceros, exemplified by camerarius, to a seventeenth-century enthusiasm for searching out actual specimens, often with a literal conception of the potential benefits the rhinoceros might hold. to be sure, these expectations were fuelled, in part, by the same sources, but the age of exploration opened up possibilities for first-hand encounters with these animals that altered the scope of europeans’ fascination with the rhinoceros well beyond the humanists’ curiosity in the decades following , notwithstanding the tremendous presence evoked by dürer’s representation. it’s telling that dr bontius, writing in the early seventeenth century, presents his account of the rhinoceros as correcting the remarks of the portuguese physician garcias de orta: ‘the author confesses that he never had seen the rhinoceros, but i have not only seen him a hundred times in his den, but also wandering through the woods.’ to be sure, bontius goes on to repeat unfounded elements of traditional lore, including the claim that the animal is known to lick people to death with its rough tongue, which then ‘lays bare the bones’, and he generally emphasises the rhino’s purported ‘ferocity’. but in this account of the natural history and medicines of the east indies, bontius takes it for granted that reliable first-hand field reports are crucial and that the rhinoceros belongs in such a text. the same sensibility appears in the first decades of the royal society’s history. thomas sprat, for instance, includes in his account of the learned group a series of questions and answers exchanged in the summer of between robert moray and philberto vernatti. after responding to such enquiries as whether diamonds ‘grow again after three or four years in the same places where they have been digged out’ (no), the batavian diplomat questions whether the animal called abados, or rhincoeros, hath teeth, claws, flesh, blood, and skin, yea his very dung and water, as well as his horns, antidotal; and whether the horns of those beasts be better or worse, according to the food they live upon. vernatti affirms the therapeutic qualities of these parts of the rhino, describing them as ‘esteemed antidotes’ with ‘the same use in the indian pharmacopiea as the therieca hath in ours’, and judges that diet makes little difference (‘the food i believe is all one to this animal’). by the mid- s the collection of the royal society contained the skin of a young rhinoceros, a larger rhinoceros skin that had been tanned, a rhino tail and four horns. in dr nehemiah grew’s catalogue we read again that ‘the rhinoceros horn, in india, as also his teeth, claws, flesh, skin, blood, yea dung and piss are much esteemed and used against poison.’ in many ways london’s medical community was well primed to accept the therapeutic value of the rhinoceros. in , working from the emblematic tradition of the renaissance, the antiquary william camden included a rhinoceros (indebted, c r a i g a s h l e y h a n s o n © british society for eighteenth-century studies predictably, to dürer) at the top of his design for the heraldic arms of the newly independent society of apothecaries (fig. ). along with apollo, the god of healing, and two supporting unicorns, the shield includes the motto ‘opiferque per orbem dicor’ (‘i am called all over the world the bringer of aid’). the imagery stakes out a middle ground between the arms of the barber–surgeons, which emphasises intervention, and that of the society of physicians, which stresses studious attention and observation. members of the society of apothecaries are instead shown as practitioners of an art founded on action, equipped not merely with mechanical skills but with an arsenal of effective weapons. notwithstanding the widely held belief that the rhinoceros was employed medicinally as an aphrodisiac, it was, in fact, nearly always characterised as an antidote for poison or prescribed for illnesses associated with contamination (in china and korea rhinoceros horns are still used illegally to treat fevers). in europe the connection between the rhino and poison remedies resulted from the conflation of the rhinoceros and the mythical unicorn, as seen in the arms of the apothecaries. despite the occasional expression of scepticism from greek and latin sources, the unicorn came to . arms of the society of apothecaries, originally designed by william camden in . used by permission of the wellcome library, london representing the rhinoceros © british society for eighteenth-century studies thrive in the european imagination, thanks especially to the medieval fable tradition, which depended heavily on the late antique text the physiologus. by the twelfth century tusks from narwhal whales were being sold as unicorn horns, and four centuries later such specimens were still highly prized: queen elizabeth owned at least two. the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, however, mark an important shift. in the s the council of trent worked to distance the iconography of christ and the virgin mary from the unicorn, and the great mapmaker gerhardus mercator identified the whale as the source of the horn in his atlas of . yet if faith in the unicorn waned in the early modern period, its purported medical associations continued to be attached to the rhinoceros – that other one-horned beast, which clearly did exist. the ambitious and prolific quack practitioner william salmon noted in his pharmacopoeia londinensis; or, the new london dispensatory that the rhino’s horn ‘is good against poyson, plague, and all pestilential diseases [...] it is often used instead of unicorns horn, and for all that i know to the contrary with as much success.’ with bets hedged this well, it was a difficult argument to refute. at the same time we might understand the royal society’s eighteenth- century discussions of the bi-corned rhinoceros as a mark of progress. physicians working in the circle of parsons and sloane were increasingly able to dissociate the rhinoceros from the folklore of the unicorn, turning their antiquarian attentions to reconciling ancient sources with the evidence of nature. camden’s early seventeenth-century antiquarianism, which still relied so heavily on emblems, gave way a century and a half later to more literal antiquarian instincts. sloane, as has been seen, continued to accept the traditional medical benefits of the rhino, but by the time he presented his serpent stone, the rhino bezoars and the double horns in , he was nearly ninety years old. his article marks the twilight of this tradition as much as underscoring its longevity. yet, even for those physicians who no longer accepted the medicinal efficacy of the rhinoceros, their interest in the animal should not be divorced from their medical ambitions. questions raised over the two-horned rhinoceros might have been laid to rest much earlier. in an african rhinoceros from the cape was shipped to europe but died during the voyage. the skin and double horns, however, were preserved and exhibited at the university of leiden. one of the medical students who must have seen the specimen there was richard mead, who studied in leiden from to . assuming that mead did observe the horns, one is placed in the awkward position of explaining why he would have then doubted the existence of the bi-corned animal decades later, as parsons reports in his transactions article of . actually, a number of conditions complicate parsons’s report, although several points should be borne in mind alongside these challenges. michael maittaire, whom parsons also cites as doubting the reliability of the traditional reading of martial, in fact dedicated his edition of the liber spectaculorum to mead. maittaire’s edition of the epigrams maintains the c r a i g a s h l e y h a n s o n © british society for eighteenth-century studies standard rendering of the two-horned rhinoceros, thus posing additional problems for parsons’s later claims. the emendations were presumably offered in another context, but in this public forum of a printed edition the original still stands. nonetheless, the example provided by another book dedicated to mead supports the general case for mead’s interest in emendation. in dr charles peters ( - ?) dedicated his edition of hieronymus frascatorius’s poem syphillis, sive morbus gallicus ( ) to his patron and mentor. the first edition on which peters relied came from mead’s library, so the decision hardly comes as a surprise. interestingly, however, peters spends little time in his preface on pathological questions but instead suggests three emendations intended to improve the text’s literary value. for all of the apparent insignificance of the changes, such attention to linguistic refine- ment is consistent with mead’s attempt to distinguish his profession of learned medicine from non-degreed practitioners such as salmon. while embracing the experimental commitments of the royal society, mead looked to mathematics and classical languages to separate himself from the quacks and the empirics, those persuasive marketers who would treat symptoms on the basis of whatever seemed to work rather than medical theory. (for samuel johnson, the word ‘empirical’ still connoted quackery, even in the s.) in his mechanical account of poisons mead argued that any physician lacking mathematical proficiency would surely be ‘as ridiculous as one without greek or latin’. and for all the emphasis mead placed on mathematics, he simply could not imagine the field of physick (literally the study of nature) without the classical languages. going one step further, i would suggest that mead probably accepted a correlation between a doctor’s linguistic and medical skills. and thus peters’s edition of frascatorius – or a debate over how a line from martial should be translated – was hardly a simple diversion. it was, instead, an important means of establishing one’s credentials as a learned physician. the debates over the horns of the rhinoceros were bound up with empirical issues, but for physicians who belonged to the royal society (men who struggled to embrace the new science and yet not be seen as empirics), the ancients still mattered. with the importance of textual expertise in mind, we can return to the question of mead’s apparent reluctance to trust the unemended martial as reliable. a number of peculiarities, in addition to those already noted, mark parsons’s ‘letter’ of . sloane, for instance, had explained even in that mead also had come to possess a specimen of double horns. even stranger, dr douglas, another proponent of emendation, according to parsons, had travelled in the mid- s to leiden, where he too saw the medical school’s bi-corned specimen. (drawings that he made survive in glasgow.) he also met with jan wandelaar, who had supplied the first reasonably accurate depiction of an african rhinoceros for kolb’s text the previous decade. even giving parsons the benefit of the doubt, it is difficult not to see his contribution in to the transactions as opportunistic self- representing the rhinoceros © british society for eighteenth-century studies promotion. by his own admission, the case had been settled in mead’s mind since the s (if not earlier), when the older physician acquired his pair of horns. parsons weighing in to publish his own recent acquisition hardly sheds new light on the problem. one ‘h. d.’, writing in the gentleman’s magazine in , reached a similar conclusion. he observes that ‘for a rhinoceros to toss up two bulls or bears at once would be much more extraordinary than that he should have two horns’ and that one need only consult pausanius to see that rhinoceroses with double horns were hardly uncommon. in short, parsons had created a problem where none should have ever existed and succeeded in proving that which should have been obvious all along. that parsons responded simply by reiterating his argument – as though he were guilty not of proving the obvious but of failing to make his case – indicates that he hardly understood the criticism. on the one hand, such contemporary challenges offer interpretive re- assurance; that something which may now appear puzzling could have been equally baffling in the period helps establish some measure of hermeneutic continuity. on the other hand, h. d.’s critique can itself be seen to underscore a methodological gap between the royal society and its detractors. for h.d. built his case not on the previous specimens but on logical inference and textual support, those very forms of evidence that the empirical orientation of the new science worked to complicate. in addition, parsons’s contribution to the transactions underscores several central themes more generally for the history of the virtuosi and the royal society. first, we should not underestimate the importance of collecting for these physicians. sloane, for instance, owned the original drawing of the dürer rhinoceros, which is still today in the british museum. in his article from he also raised the problem of how to interpret martial’s epigram, in part because it afforded him the opportunity to publish the coin from his collection that had been issued under the reign of domitian, the one that parsons cited in without an illustration. and thus the publication of allowed parsons, in a sense, to join the ranks of sloane and mead, both of whom had by this point been dead for over a decade. indeed, part of the earlier debate had hinged on the fact that sloane’s specimen had become twisted as the skin dried, and so the horns were crossed in a way that they clearly would not have been while the animal was alive (itself an interesting dilemma for empirical approaches to evidence). the state of mead’s specimen is unclear, but part of parsons’s pleasure seems to stem from the condition of his horns. second, the culture of the royal society tended to foster serial approaches to knowledge. articles were not expected to settle problems on their own but were understood to have a cumulative effect. indeed, dr grew singled out the dilemma of reconciling martial and the evidence of the senses as early as ; faced with the line from epigram on one side and the eyewitness reports of men such as bontius on the other, he frankly confessed, ‘i do not well understand.’ from the beginning, the royal society tended to sketch c r a i g a s h l e y h a n s o n © british society for eighteenth-century studies out research project and goals for the future; for all the plans never seriously undertaken, others were taken up. parsons was, in a sense, maintaining a collective, institutional memory. it is the extraordinary duration of time – nearly eighty years – that makes this case so remarkable. third, there was, in a related vein, a central role for social relationships within the royal society. ties were formed through scholarly contributions, shared interests, book dedications and the exchange of favours and gifts. for all of the benefits parsons may have gleaned from associating himself more closely with mead, his recollections also served to perpetuate the memory of mead within the society – just as a book dedication could continue to forge social bonds decades after it appeared. the point is underscored by the fact that mead’s collection of paintings – one of the most impressive non- aristocratic collections in england – included a picture of the eagle street rhinoceros painted by parsons around (fig. ). mead certainly possessed works that could, on aesthetic grounds, rival the finest collections in europe, but there were other factors at play too. pictures could secure social bonds and contribute to a general understanding of the natural world, in addition to providing artistic pleasure. iii. here i’m especially sympathetic to charlotte klonk’s concern that too often the coupling of art and science has resulted in situations where ‘the scientific . james parsons, rhinoceros, oil on canvas, c. . used by permission of the natural history museum, london representing the rhinoceros © british society for eighteenth-century studies quest for truth is seen to determine changes in art’. it’s heartening to see the work of scholars such as wolfgang klein and pamela smith, both of whom have argued for the central role of artistic production in the development of scientific conventions, including conventions associated with what counts as real in the first place. methodologically, the case of the reception of the bi-corned rhinoceros could be told from various vantage points within the history of science. there are plenty instances of ‘facts’ for the realists and social practices for the constructionists. yet perhaps most fascinating is that parsons genuinely cared about translating martial correctly. it may not have been his primary objective, and he did help push the scientific community towards a widespread acceptance of there being distinct species of rhinoceroses in india and africa. (while buffon remained sceptical, petrus camper made the case in a definitive manner in . ) but for parsons the question should hardly be bracketed out from the task of securing the best possible rendering of a first-century poet. in terms of our own modernist disciplinary labels, there was no reason zoology and taxonomy shouldn’t serve the classics. and he took it for granted that a learned physician was perfectly placed to tackle both sorts of questions. in the end, the first-hand experience of the rhinoceros did transform european attitudes toward the animal, although ultimately the alterations were much more profound than whether there were one or two horns. as . philippe halsman, salvador dalí and a rhinoceros, . copyright philippe halsman/magnum photos. used by permission of magnum photos c r a i g a s h l e y h a n s o n © british society for eighteenth-century studies glynis ridley demonstrates in her study of clara, a growing familiarity gradually wore away the image of the rhinoceros as threatening, quick and fierce. instead, europeans were amazed simply at the animal’s size and its vast vegetarian food requirements. the rhino became a domesticated marvel rather than a vicious point of entry into the distant past of ancient rome; even the purported rough tongue was eventually relinquished in the face of the immediate evidence. the transformation is perhaps best seen in thomas davies’s characterisation of samuel johnson: ‘he laughs like a rhinoceros.’ the simile may evoke gravitas (of body and personality) or a stormy disposition, even in the face of comic delight (laughter as growl), but it hardly conjures images of gladiatorial combat. the physiognomic potential that thomas rowlandson would find in the rhinoceros’s profile at the turn of the century underscores the transformation. and from here we are only a short distance from the tête-à-tête staged in between a two-horned rhinoceros and salvador dalí (fig. ). confronting the rhinoceros has in some ways always been much more about us – our fears and desires – than the two-ton animal we think we see. notes earlier versions of this paper were presented in london in in conjunction with the conference ‘beyond mimesis and nominalism’, and in fargo in as a plenary address for the midwest american society for eighteenth-century studies conference. i’m indebted to matt hunter, jeane haggeman, ray stephanson and anna arnar for their constructive comments. thanks also to calvin college for assisting with the cost of the images. . peter stent (ed.), animalium, ferarum, & bestiarum, florum, fructuum, muscarum, vermiumq [...] a new and perfect book of beasts, flowers fruits, butterflies & other vermine (london, ); the book of plates was expanded and reissued in . the first state of the etching, the one shown here, is dated to correspond with the first edition; in the third state the year was changed to match the revised version. see richard pennington, a descriptive catalogue of the etched work of wenceslaus hollar, - (new york: cambridge university press, ), p. , no. . . for a drawing of discovered in the vatican library by ingrid rowland that may have provided dürer’s inspiration, see jim monson, ‘the source for the rhinoceros’, print quarterly ( ), p. - . for issues of an emerging empiricism in dürer’s humanist nuremberg, see stephanie leitch, ‘burgkmair’s peoples of africa and india ( ) and the origins of ethnography in print’, art bulletin (june ), p. - . dürer’s use of the german abkunterfet (‘portrayal’ or ‘representation’) often connoted ‘copied from life’. see peter parshall, ‘imago contrafacta: images and facts in the northern renaissance’, art history ( ), p. - . going back at least to villard de honnecourt, there were strong medieval precedents for claims of working from life; see erwin panofsky, ‘artist, scientist, genius: notes on the renaissance- dämerung’, the renaissance: a symposium. the metropolitan museum of art (new york, ), p. - ; repr. in the renaissance: six essays (new york: harper & row, ), p. - . for dürer’s rhinoceros as a point of entry into issues of nature and economic exchange, see pamela smith and paula findlen, ‘commerce and the representation of nature in art and science’, in smith and findlen (eds), merchants and marvels: commerce, science, and art in early modern europe (new york: routledge, ), p. - . . f. j. cole, ‘the history of albrecht dürer’s rhinoceros in zoological literature’, in a. e. underwood (ed.), science, medicine, and history (london: oxford university press, ), p. - ; donald lach, asia in the making of europe, vol. , a century of wonder, book , the visual arts (chicago, il: university of chicago press, ), p. - ; john rowlands, the age of dürer and holbein: german drawings, - (new york: cambridge university press, ), p. - ; colin eisler, dürer’s animals (washington, dc: smithsonian institution press, ), p. - ; and giulia bartrum, albrecht dürer and his legacy: the graphic work of a renaissance artist representing the rhinoceros © british society for eighteenth-century studies (princeton, nj: princeton university press, ), p. - . the gift of the animal serves as a framing device for lawrence norfolk’s historical novel the pope’s rhinoceros (new york: harmony books, ). . l. c. rookmaaker, bibliography of the rhinoceros: an analysis of the literature on the recent rhinoceroses in culture, history, and biology (rotterdam: a. a. balkema, ); l. c. rookmaaker, the rhinoceros in captivity: a list of rhinoceroses kept from roman times to (the hague: spb, ); t. h. clarke, ‘the iconography of the rhinoceros: from dürer to stubbs’, connoisseur : ( ), p. - ; t. h. clarke, ‘the iconography of the rhinoceros: the leyden rhinoceros’, connoisseur : ( ), p. - ; t. h. clarke, the rhinoceros from dürer to stubbs, - (london: sotheby’s publications, ); and t. h. clarke, ‘i am the horn of a rhinoceros’, apollo (may ), p. - . the online rhino resource center, www.rhinoresourcecenter.com, has brought this impressive standard of thoroughness into the digital realm; kees rookmaaker serves as the director and chair of the site’s executive team. . glynis ridley, clara’s grand tour: travels with a rhinoceros in eighteenth-century europe (new york: atlantic monthly, ). . to be fair, kees rookmaaker addressed the black rhinoceros in one of his earliest essays and recently returned to the subject with his usual degree of thoroughness. for the latter, see l. c. rookmaaker, ‘review of the european perception of the african rhinoceros’, journal of zoology (april ), p. - . for the former, see ‘an early engraving of the black rhinoceros (diceros bicornis (l.)) made by jan wandelaar’, biological journal of the linnean society (march ), p. - . as rookmaaker notes (p. ), linnaeus supplied the binomial for the two-horned rhinoceros in , although – still unclear about the animal’s geographical origins – he placed it in india. there are presently five rhinoceros species in the world: three from india (two of which, the javan and sumatran rhinos, are reclusive forest dwellers) and two from africa (the white and black rhinos, both of which have double horns). between and eight rhinoceroses were exhibited in europe; all were indian rhinos. . vasco da gama’s voyage from portugal to india in the late s opened up such possibilities – along with a lucrative new trade route for spices. the ruler of cambaia, or gujarat, sultan muzafar ii, presented the rhinoceros as a diplomatic gift to the portuguese governor, who forwarded it to his king, manuel i, who in turn tried sending it to the medici pope in rome. for the gift in the humanist context of the roman curia, see ingrid rowland, the culture of the high renaissance: ancient and moderns in sixteenth-century rome (new york: cambridge university press, ), esp. p. - . . as early as bc, agatharcides presented the rhinoceros and elephants as natural foes. see william gowers, ‘the classical rhinoceros’, antiquity ( ), p. - , esp. p. . as clarke notes, in the rhinoceros (p. ), the outcome was hardly a foregone conclusion even for ancient writers; diodurus siculus, for instance, assigned reasonable odds to the elephant. for pliny’s text in the renaissance, see charles nauert, ‘humanists, scientists, and pliny: changing approaches to a classical author’, american historical review (february ), p. - ; and brian ogilvie, the science of describing: natural history in renaissance europe (chicago, il: university of chicago press, ). . epigram . the translation comes from the new edition by kathleen coleman, m. valerii martialis liber spectaculorum (oxford: oxford university press, ), p. . coleman’s notes are especially helpful; see also epigram , p. - . . james parsons, ‘letter to the president of the royal society on the double horns of the rhinoceros’, philosophical transactions ( ), p. - . for the earlier article, see james parsons, ‘a letter to martin folkes, esq. president of the royal society, containing the natural history of the rhinoceros’, philosophical transactions ( ), p. - . the ‘natural history’ was translated into french and german; see clarke, the rhinoceros, p. , n. . . parsons, ‘letter to the president of the royal society’, p. . the connections between the slave trade and the collecting of natural history specimens certainly deserve much more scrutiny. . parsons, ‘letter to the president of the royal society’, p. . . clarke, the rhinoceros, p. - . the eagle street rhinoceros also occasioned the anonymous – and apparently rare – pamphlet a natural history of four-footed animals: of the rhinoceros (london, ), which includes a plate by john carwitham, who may also have been the text’s author. the only copies i’m aware of are to be found in the collections of materials assembled by douglas and parsons that now belong to the university of glasgow library. . clarke, the rhinoceros, p. - . the first rhinoceros arrived in the summer of and died in september . john evelyn records seeing it on october with william c r a i g a s h l e y h a n s o n © british society for eighteenth-century studies godolphin; see the diary of john evelyn, ed. e. d. de beer, vols (london: oxford university press, ), vol. iv. - . . at the university of glasgow; for a summary of the contents, see l. c. rookmaaker, ‘two collections of rhinoceros plates compiled by james douglas and james parsons in the eighteenth century’, journal of the society for the bibliography of natural history ( ), p. - . . the parsons collection is also at glasgow, although its early provenance is unclear; l. c. rookmaaker, ‘two collections of rhinoceros plates’, p. . jakob de bondt, historiae naturalis ed medicae indiae orientalis libri sex, ed. willem piso (amsterdam, ). . john chardin, voyage en perse, et autres lieux de l’orient (amsterdam, ); and joachim camerarius, symbolorum et emblematum ex animalbius quadrupedibus desumtorum centuria altera (nuremberg, ), p. . the engraving is by hans sibmacher. both douglas and parsons owned copies of it; see rookmaaker, ‘two collections of rhinoceros plates’, p. . for the image within the context of renaissance attitudes towards animals generally, see claudio lazzaro, ‘animals as cultural signs: a medici menagerie in the grotto at castello’, reframing the renaissance: visual culture in europe and latin america, - , ed. claire farago (new haven, ct: yale university press, ), p. - . see also william ashworth, ‘natural history and the emblematic worldview’, in david lindberg and robert westman (eds), reappraisals of the scientific revolution (new york: cambridge university press, ), p. - ; and william ashworth, ‘emblematic natural history of the renaissance’, in nicholas jardine, james secord and emma spary (eds), cultures of natural history (new york: cambridge university press, ), p. - . . samuel bochart, hierozoicon sive bipertitum opus de animalibus sacrae scriptura (london, ), book , p. . . bochart, book , p. . for the substitution of ursum (‘bear’, accusative form) for urum (‘wild ox’, accusative form), bochart refers to petrus schriverius, johan van der does and gerhard vossius. an ancestor of domestic cattle, the urus is generally understood as the equivalent of the re’em, encountered in the hebrew bible. with the urus extinct in southern europe by the time the septuagint was written, the greek translators employed monokeros (‘single-horned creature’), which was then translated in the latin vulgate as unicornis. hence the translation in the king james version of , ‘god brought them out of egypt; he hath as it were the strength of a unicorn’ (numbers : ). see adolfo cavallo, the unicorn tapestries at the metropolitan museum of art (new york: harry n. abrams, ), p. . see also ridley, clara’s grand tour, p. - . none of this, of course, explains necessarily why bochart emends martial so that these oft confused animals fight each other. in parsons cites bochart’s text as urum; in the article he adds the initial e, not found in bochart (eurem). my thanks to sean christy for his good-humoured help with this section. . today many scholars believe that the romans indeed sourced their rhinoceroses from africa, north of the sahara, where a population of northern white rhinos (ceratotherium simum cottoni) perhaps lived, cut off by the encroachments of the desert across millennia. the ancients apparently hunted the region’s animals to extinction. the species survived longer in central and eastern africa but appears now to have been completely vanquished in these areas as well. . kolb’s text, caput bonae spei hodiernum (nuremberg, ), was published in dutch as naaukeurige en uitvoerige beschrijving van de kaap de goede hoope (amsterdam, ). as rookmaaker notes in ‘an early engraving of the black rhinoceros’ (p. ), kolb stressed the animal’s double horn, although the first edition still included an image based on dürer’s. the dutch edition, however, made use of an engraving by jan wandelaar portraying the rhinoceros as bi-corned, one of the earliest instances in europe. . parsons, ‘a letter to martin folkes, esq.’, p. . these coins, which date to ad - , continue to be valuable for scholars. on the basis of such numismatic evidence, t. v. buttrey, for instance, argues in ‘domitian, the rhinoceros, and the date of martial’s liber de spectaculis’, journal of roman studies ( ), p. - , that martial’s text should be dated not (as it nearly universally is) to the reign of titus but to that of domitian. . in fact, the anonymous drawing from that jim monson proposes as a source for dürer’s image includes the annotation ‘sunt qui dicant abite duo cornua’ (‘there are those who say that it has two horns’), p. . from the beginning, the question of one or two horns was a problem in europe. . parsons, ‘a letter to martin folkes, esq., p. . representing the rhinoceros © british society for eighteenth-century studies . thomas kuhn, the structure of scientific revolutions (chicago, il: university of chicago press, ). admittedly, appreciation of the bi-corned rhinoceros hardly qualifies as a paradigm shift, and, as originally formulated, kuhn’s work offers key resistance to whiggish forms of history (even when other scholars employing his terms may not have); see steve fuller, thomas kuhn: a philosophical history for our times (chicago, il: university of chicago press, ), esp. p. - . kuhn’s emphasis on the historically contingent character of scientific standards has been received quite differently among philosophers of science, on the one hand, and historians of science working within sociology of knowledge frameworks, on the other. for the persistence of kuhn’s relevance beyond the latter, see hanne andersen, peter barker, and xiang chen, the cognitive structure of scientific revolutions (new york: cambridge university press, ). . hans sloane, ‘a letter from sir hans sloane baronet, late president of the royal society, to martin folkes, president of the royal society, containing accounts of the pretended serpent stone called pietra de cobra de cabelos, and of the pietra de mombazza or the rhinoceros bezoar, together with the figure of a rhinoceros with a double horn’, philosophical transactions ( ), p. - . sloane read the paper before the royal society on april. . sloane, ‘a letter from sir hans sloane baronet’, p. , . . walter houghton, ‘the history of trades: its relation to seventeenth-century thought as seen in bacon, petty, evelyn, and boyle’, journal of the history of ideas ( ), p. - ; and walter houghton, ‘the english virtuoso in the seventeenth century’, journal of the history of ideas ( ), p. - , - . for my attempt to resuscitate the intellectual credibility of the virtuoso, see craig ashley hanson, the english virtuoso: art, medicine, and antiquarianism in the age of empiricism (chicago, il: university of chicago press, ). . sloane, ‘a letter from sir hans sloane baronet’, p. . . martha baldwin, ‘the snakestone experiments: an early modern medical debate’, isis ( ), p. - . baldwin uses the controversy to explore how difficult finding consensus from experiments could be, even in cases that depended on relatively straightforward trials, particularly as professional and religious loyalties came into play. she notes (p. ) that redi was never able to convince many of his colleagues. in england, robert boyle continued to believe in the power of the stones, as did dr edward tyson. . juliet clutton-brock, ‘vertebrate collections’, in arthur macgregor (ed.), sir hans sloane: collector, scientist, antiquary, founding father of the british museum (london: british museum press, ), p. - , esp. p. . the entries come from catalogue , ‘fishes, birds, quadrupeds’, mss, slo, now in the natural history museum, london. . john thackray, ‘mineral and fossil collections’, in macgregor (ed.), sir hans sloane, p. - ; and, in the same collection, arthur macgregor, ‘egyptian antiquities’, p. - , esp. p. , n. . . willem piso’s edition of bontius, noted above, was translated into english as an account of the diseases, natural history, and medicines of the east indies (london, ); see p. - . . thomas sprat, history of the royal society, nd edn (london, ), p. - . . sprat, history of the royal society, p. . theriac was a common medicine in seventeenth- century europe, particularly in cases involving poison; vipers were a chief ingredient. see baldwin, ‘the snakestone experiments’, p. . . nehemiah grew, museaum regalis societatis; or, a catalogue and description of the natural and artificial rarities belonging to the royal society and preserved at gresham college (london, ), p. - . . vincent dickinson, ‘the armorial bearings of the worshipful society of apothecaries’, proceedings of the royal society of medicine (november ), p. - . . along with habitat decimation (especially in india), the asian market is one of the most serious threats facing the survival of rhinos. poachers respond to the high demand for horns, which are not only used as medicines but also carved into highly prized ornamental objects. see hermanta mishra, the soul of the rhino: a nepali adventure with kings and elephant drivers, billionaires and bureaucrats, shamans and scientists and the indian rhinoceros (guilford, ct: the lyons press, ). . for the history of the unicorn i depend on cavallo, the unicorn tapestries at the metropolitan museum of art, p. - . . william salmon, pharmacopoeia londinensis; or, the new london dispensatory, th edn (london, ), p. ; the first edition appeared in . c r a i g a s h l e y h a n s o n © british society for eighteenth-century studies . the more progressive (and thirteen years younger) dr richard mead, for instance, addresses serpent stones in his mechanical account of poisons (london, ), but with much less enthusiasm. while also drawing on experiential evidence, he looks to an explanation based not on the exceptional quality of the stones but on their ordinary materiality: ‘by reason of their spongy and porous texture, they do very readily adhere to any moistned part of the flesh, and imbibe whatsoever humidity they meet with [...] their being thus, some part at least of the poisonous juice may easily be drawn out of the wound by such an application, and yet so much of it may sometimes happen to remain in the flesh as may make the bite however to prove mortal’ (p. ). . gerrad blancken, a catalogue of all chiefest rarities in the publick theater and anatomie hall of the university of leyden (leiden, ), p. , , . rookmaaker, ‘review of the european perception of the african rhinoceros’, p. . in mead travelled to italy and perhaps saw two more rhinoceros horns, housed in the tribuna gallery of the uffizi (presumably from two separate animals, however); that the horns were displayed alongside the paintings of raphael, giorgione, titian and holbein underscores the significance of the discourse of curiosity for the period. see william bromley, several years travels [...] performed by a gentleman (london, ), p. . for a synopsis of mead’s life, see hanson, the english virtuoso, esp. p. ff. . richard mead, mechanical account of poisons, unpaginated preface. for the wider association of ‘empiricism’ with quackery, see hanson, the english virtuoso, p. - . . evidence of sloane’s rivalry with pembroke as a collector also appears in his account of the provenance of the rhinoceros bezoars, p. - . sloane explains that dr waldo also offered them to the earl, but since pembroke was not interested, he himself was able to acquire them all – the implication being that pembroke couldn’t appreciate their importance. the fact that the collection was also offered to the painter sir godfrey kneller underscores the degree to which virtuosic networks could accommodate medical men and artists alike. . grew, museaum regalis societatis, p. ; after the line from martial, the passage continues: ‘the figure given by piso, as above, represents but one horn only. neither doth bontius (who saith he hath seen great numbers of them both in houses and in the woods) describe or mention any more than one horn. and those who do speak of another, yet make it a very small one, and not over against the other, but on the forepart of his back, and so in a place where it is immovable, and can no way be made use of for the tossing up of any thing, as the other on his nose.’ . parsons produced two paintings of the rhinoceros, one of which he kept and one of which entered mead’s collection. according to john nichols, literary anecdotes of the eighteenth century, vols (london, ), vol. v. , the first passed to parsons’s widow, who died on august . the current picture was found in a storeroom at the british museum in and transferred to the department of zoology around the time that the natural history collections were being moved to the new building at kensington. given the importance of mead’s circle for the holdings of the british museum, i’m inclined to think it’s the one mead owned (it does not appear in the sale catalogue of his paintings). interestingly, nichols also recounts the debate over one or two horns, even including the line from martial’s epigram . for the painting, see rookmaaker, ‘two collections of rhinoceros plates’, p. , and john thackray, the natural history museum: a catalogue of portraits, paintings, and sculpture at the natural history museum, london (london: mansell, ), p. , no. . . charlotte klonk, ‘interdisciplinarity and visual culture’, in paul smith and carolyn wilde (eds), a companion to art theory (oxford: blackwell, ), p. . . wolfgang klein, ‘problems of description in art: realism’, in john bender and michael marrinan (eds), regimes of description: in the archives of the eighteenth century (stanford, ca: stanford university press, ), p. - . . petrus camper, ‘dissertatio de cranio rhinocerotis africani, cornu gemino’, acta academiae scientiarum imperialis petropolitanae ( ), p. - . see miriam claude meijer, race and aesthetics in the anthropology of petrus camper ( - ) (amsterdam, rodopi, ), p. . . as recounted in james boswell, the life of samuel johnson (london, ), p. . boswell places the anecdote in may . five months later, during his only trip to the continent, johnson himself saw the versailles rhinoceros. presumably aware of how much had rested on the horns during the previous decades, johnson takes note: ‘the horn broken and pared away, which i suppose, will grow; the basis, i think, four inches cross’ (p. ). confusion over the question of one or two horns persisted in france too, as seen in the fact that the duc de croij representing the rhinoceros © british society for eighteenth-century studies mistakenly characterised the versailles rhino as bi-corned, with the second horn to grow from the shoulders; see rookmaaker, the rhinoceros in captivity, p. . for the versailles rhino generally, see clarke, the rhinoceros, p. - . . arline meyer, ‘man’s animal nature: science, art, and satire in thomas rowlandson’s “studies in comparative anatomy”, in frank palmeri (ed.), humans and other animals in eighteenth-century british culture: representation, hybridity, ethics (aldershot: ashgate, ), p. - . as meyer notes, rowlandson would have been familiar with the collections of john hunter, william’s brother. . the tangled associations between the rhinoceros and the unicorn were perfectly suited for dalí’s personal mythology, prominent in both his work and self-presentation. see dawn ades and michael taylor (eds), dalí (new york: rizzoli, ), p. . craig ashley hanson is assistant professor in the department of art and art history at calvin college, grand rapids, mi, and the author, most recently, of the english virtuoso: art, medicine, and antiquarianism in the age of empiricism (university of chicago press, ). he is working on a study of anglo-dutch relations and the arts in early modern britain, and an illustrated edition of john evelyn’s sculptura. c r a i g a s h l e y h a n s o n © british society for eighteenth-century studies festival representation beyond words: the stuttgart baptism of by andrea irma irene thomsett b.a., the u n i v e r s i t y of b r i t i s h columbia, a thesis submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of master of arts the faculty of graduate studies department of fine arts we accept t h i s t h e s i s as conforming t o the r e q u i r e d standard the university of british columbia (c) andrea irma irene thomsett, i n october, in presenting this thesis in partial fulfilment of the requirements for an advanced degree at the university of british columbia, i agree that the library shall make it freely available for reference and study. i further agree that permission for extensive copying of this thesis for scholarly purposes may be granted by the head of my department or by his or her representatives. it is understood that copying or publication of this thesis for financial gain shall not be allowed without my written permission. department of fi^ /h*-™ the university of british columbia vancouver, canada date ^ g / ^ w //, / q . de- ( / ) abstract the r e p r e s e n t a t i o n o f a s t u t t g a r t c o u r t f e s t i v a l i n a f a s c i n a t i n g book o f p r i n t s has r e c e i v e d no a r t h i s t o r i c a l a t t e n t i o n . the c u l t u r a l p r o d u c t i o n o f german lands i n a complex and obscure time d e s c r i b e d by one h i s t o r i a n as b e i n g p a r t i c u l a r l y b e r e f t of "textbook f a c t s " , has not e l i c i t e d much s c h o l a r l y i n t e r e s t . in the seventeenth c e n t u r y b e f o r e c o n f e s s i o n a l d i s p u t e s w i t h i n the holy roman empire of the german n a t i o n t u r n e d i n t o armed c o n f l i c t , s m a l l german t e r r i t o r i a l c o u r t s modelled themselves on and assumed the c o u r t l y s t y l e o f the l a r g e r european c o u r t s . the s t u t t g a r t baptism of p r e s e n t s an i n t e r e s t i n g case study o f the use of a c o u r t l y s p e c t a c l e by a secondary c o u r t a t a time o f g r e a t i n s t a b i l i t y . the baptism f e s t i v a l served as a stage t o d i s p l a y an a l l i a n c e of some german p r o t e s t a n t p r i n c e s t h a t h e l d a promise of i n t e r n a t i o n a l support f o r the p r o t e s t a n t cause. the wurttemberg c o u r t commissioned l e n g t h y t e x t s and a l a r g e number o f engravings t o r e p r e s e n t the event. t h i s study w i l l address the c o n t r i b u t i o n s made by p r i n t e d images t o the f e s t i v a l program. the key documents f o r t h i s study are the t e x t s which complement and a t times d i v e r g e from the v i s u a l r e p r e s e n t a t i o n . the d i f f e r e n c e s between the v i s u a l and t e x t u a l m a t e r i a l w i l l serve t o l o c a t e the f u n c t i o n o f the v i s u a l r e p r e s e n t a t i o n of a f e s t i v a l h e l d a t a time o f impending c o n f l i c t . the triumphal p r o c e s s i o n format of the i i i engravings d i s c l o s e s a s t r a t e g y of d i s e n f r a n c h i s e m e n t of a powerful p a r l i a m e n t w h i l e i t s e r v e s t o a s s e r t the rank o f the c o u r t w i t h i n and o u t s i d e the german empire. the complex amalgams of imagery t h a t are i n t e r s p e r s e d i n the paper p r o c e s s i o n a l l u d e , i suggest, t o the problems p r e s e n t e d t o the wurttemberg c o u r t by an uneasy a l l i a n c e of p r o t e s t a n t c o u r t s w i t h i n the empire. the engravings served t o encode r e f e r e n c e s t o p r o b l e m a t i c i s s u e s such as the s u r v i v a l of the holy roman empire, the r i g h t s of p r o t e s t a n t t e r r i t o r i a l p r i n c e s t o form an a l l i a n c e and the hopes f o r o u t s i d e h e l p f o r the p r o t e s t a n t cause. i v table of contents page a b s t r a c t i i l i s t o f i l l u s t r a t i o n s v acknowledgments v i i n t r o d u c t i o n chapter . the paper p r o c e s s i o n : a t r i u m p h a l e n t r y i n the c o n t e s t f o r a u t h o r i t y chapter . p r i n c e l y v i r t u e and the "kubelstechen" chapter . a grotesque t r a n s l a t i o n o f the empire chapter . the m i r r o r of a prudent e s t a t e chapter . a p r o t e s t a n t venus? c o n c l u s i o n i l u s t r a t i o n s b i b l i o g r a p h y v list of illustrations f i g u r e page . s t u t t g a r t l u s t g a r t e n . s t u t t g a r t ; . . f i r e w o r k s ; s t u t t g a r t , . . kubelstechen; s t u t t g a r t , . . head b a l l e t ; s t u t t g a r t , . . arcimboldesques; a. hunter; saxony, . b. t e r r a ; munich, 's. . mirror-maker b a l l e t ; s t u t t g a r t , . . germania and her c i r c l e s ; s t u t t g a r t , . . concord and d i s c o r d ; s t u t t g a r t , . . many-headed monsters; a. seven-headed papal beast; c. . b. s a t i r e on the c a t h o l i c c l e r g y ; . . schembart m i r r o r costume. undated . hungarian king; s t u t t g a r t , . . venus and cupid; s t u t t g a r t , . . hungarians w i t h turks heads; s t u t t g a r t , . . hungarians w i t h a moor's and turks' heads; s t u t t g a r t , . . venus; strasbourg, . i l l . the babylonian whore; luther b i b l e . . commemorative medals f o r reformation j u b i l e e of . . e n g l i s h l a d i e s ; s t u t t g a r t , . . t u r k i s h s o l d i e r w i t h c a p t i v e peasants; st h a l f of th century. . d r a c u l a ; strasbourg, . v i acknowledgements i am i n d e b t e d t o dr. rose marie san juan who r e v e a l e d t o me the i n t e r e s t i n g s u b j e c t of the c o u r t l y f e s t i v a l i n e a r l y modern europe. she g r e a t l y a s s i s t e d me w i t h comments and c r i t i c i s m i n the w r i t i n g o f t h i s paper. dr. serge g u i l b a u t i n t r o d u c e d me t o a r t h i s t o r y and i am g r a t e f u l f o r having been h i s student. i would l i k e t o thank david thomsett who spent c o u n t l e s s hours improving h i s word p r o c e s s i n g s k i l l s w h i l e t y p i n g f o r me. i d e d i c a t e t h i s paper t o the memory of dr. b o r i s f i r c k s e r , an argumentative c e n t r a l european whose wide-ranging i n t e r e s t s and l i v e l y anecdotes i n s p i r e d me. f i n a l l y , i would l i k e t o thank my p a r e n t s h e i n r i c h and freda von hahn f o r always l o o k i n g a f t e r me and f o r not l e t t i n g me f o r g e t my mother tongue. introduction when duke johann f r i e d r i c h of wurttemberg had another son i n december o f , an u n u s u a l l y l a v i s h program of entertainments was arranged and presented, t h r e e months l a t e r , t o a c a r e f u l l y s e l e c t e d assembly of g u e s t s . the c o u r t subsequently commissioned t h r e e books c o m p r i s i n g more than f o u r hundred pages of t e x t and a book of more than e i g h t y engravings. the p u r p o r t e d reason f o r these f e s t i v i t i e s was the baptism o f the c h i l d , but none of the p r i n c e ' s o t h e r c h i l d r e n had been f e t e d i n t h i s l a v i s h manner, nor had f e s t i v a l books been produced f o r o t h e r baptisms. in t h i s study i want t o c o n s i d e r some of the weight c a r r i e d by the v i s u a l r e p r e s e n t a t i o n of t h i s f e s t i v a l which took p l a c e a t the b e g i n n i n g of one o f the most t u r b u l e n t p e r i o d s i n c e n t r a l european h i s t o r y , the t h i r t y years war. the l a v i s h expenditure by a secondary c o u r t on numerous c o p p e r p l a t e engravings and l e n g t h y t e x t u a l accounts forms a p a r t of a system of c o s t l y c u l t u r a l patronage t h a t both o r i g i n a t e d from and r e i n f o r c e d the growth o f d u c a l power. by a m p l i f y i n g the impact of the f e s t i v a l , the book o f engravings performed a key f u n c t i o n i n the p o l i t i c a l program of the e a r l y modern c o u r t . in the f e s t i v a l the r u l e r o f wurttemberg c o u l d make m a n i f e s t h i s domination over p o l i t i c a l l i f e w i t h i n h i s s t a t e and the augmented power of h i s secondary c o u r t w i t h i n the empire. v o l t a i r e ' s dictum t h a t the holy roman empire was n e i t h e r h o l y , nor roman nor an empire was a p p l i c a b l e l o n g b e f o r e he pronounced i t . the d i s s o l u t i o n o f the " h o l y " (the u n i v e r s a l church) by the reformation enabled even m i d d l e - s i z e d p r i n c i p a l i t i e s l i k e the duchy of wurttemberg t o a s p i r e t o the s t a t u s of the l a r g e c e n t r a l i z i n g monarchies o f europe. in the peace of augsburg c o d i f i e d the r e l i g i o u s s t a t u s quo and gave t e r r i t o r i a l r u l e r s w i t h i n the empire the r i g h t t o impose e i t h e r c a t h o l i c i s m or lutheranism on t h e i r s u b j e c t s . p r o t e s t a n t p r i n c e s l i k e the dukes o f wurttemberg were r e c o g n i z e d as the owners of e c c l e s i a s t i c a l p r o p e r t i e s they had s e i z e d d u r i n g the reformation. growth of t e r r i t o r i a l power became i n c r e a s i n g l y e v i d e n t i n p r o t e s t a n t p r i n c i p a l i t i e s where the r u l e r became the p a t r o n , defender and n u r t u r e r o f the church as w e l l as the owner of the l a n d h o l d i n g s of the c h u r c h . p r o t e s t a n t p r i n c e s by t h e i r i n t e r v e n t i o n i n church a f f a i r s a l s o became o v e r s e e r s of e d u c a t i o n and s o c i a l w e l f a r e ; u n i v e r s i t i e s f l o u r i s h e d i n p r o t e s t a n t areas where the d i g r e s s i o n from c a t h o l i c s c h o l a s t i c i s m opened new areas of study such as astronomy, p h i l o s o p h y and s t a t e c r a f t . u n i v e r s i t y - t r a i n e d nobles and burghers took j o b s i n the growing b u r e a u c r a t i c apparatus o f the wurtttemberg c o u r t . as the c e n t r a l a u t h o r i t y of the empire d e c l i n e d , t e r r i t o r i a l p r i n c e s became i n c r e a s i n g l y s e l f - c o n s c i o u s about t h e i r power and p l a c e . t h i s new t e r r i t o r i a l s e l f - i m p o r t a n c e expressed i t s e l f not o n l y i n b u i l d i n g programs and defense p r o j e c t s but a l s o i n c o l l e c t i n g and a r t patronage. t h i s o r i e n t a t i o n towards v i s u a l d i s p l a y i s demonstrated i n the engraving of the " l u s t g a r t e n " , the expanded c o u r t complex t h a t appears as an i n t r o d u c t i o n t o the book of engravings devoted t o the baptism f e s t i v a l ( f i g . l ) . the c o n s t r u c t i o n of the "lusthaus" o r entertainment house which dominated the a r c h i t e c t u r e of the c i t y s i g n a l l e d a new p r i o r i t y o f the d u c a l c o u r t away from i t s f e u d a l r e s p o n s i b i l i t y f o r defense t o one of d i s p l a y of grandeur. w i t h i n the w a l l s of the c i t y the p a s t o r s , burghers and l e s s e r s o c i a l o r d e r s had n o t h i n g t o g a i n from the e r e c t i o n of an o p u l e n t stage f o r an e v e r - e s c a l a t i n g show of c o u r t l y power. the r e s i d e n t s of the s m a l l medieval market town o f s t u t t g a r t and o f the many o t h e r towns of wurttemberg had no i n t e r e s t i n s u b s i d i z i n g the b a l l s , f e s t i v a l s and tournaments t h a t took p l a c e i n t h e " l u s t g a r t e n " . the e x p l o i t a t i o n o f conspicuous consumption and c u l t u r a l patronage was beyond the means o f the s m a l l c o u r t ; t h i s e n t e r p r i s e r e q u i r e d ever g r e a t e r s u b s i d i e s from r e c a l c i t r a n t s u b j e c t s . the e s c a l a t i o n s i n p r i n c e l y s t y l e put g r e a t e r and g r e a t e r demands on the populace t h a t r e q u i r e d the l i f t i n g of l o c a l p r i v i l e g e s i n o r d e r t o r e s t r u c t u r e the t a x a t i o n system t o the b e n e f i t of the c o u r t . in , the same year the lusthaus was completed, duke f r i e d r i c h acceded t o the throne. t h i s e a r l y a b s o l u t i s t p r i n c e v i g o r o u s l y pursued the s h i f t i n o r i e n t a t i o n o f d u c a l power away from l o c a l f e u d a l government concerns. the wurttemberg c o n s t i t u t i o n had p r o v i d e d f o r p a r l i a m e n t a r y p a r t i c i p a t i o n by the r e p r e s e n t a t i v e s of the towns w i t h i n the t e r r i t o r y . t h i s p a r l i a m e n t a r y body, t h a t a c t e d as a counterweight t o d u c a l power, was i g n o r e d by duke f r i e d r i c h i n o r d e r t o suppress i t s a u t h o r i t y . h i s modernizing program was modelled on the more c e n t r a l i z e d and powerful c o u r t s he had v i s i t e d i n v a l o i s . . . . france and tudor england . in a d d i t i o n t o f r i e d r i c h ' s t a c t i c s o f e x c l u d i n g h i s l o c a l p a r l i a m e n t a r i a n s from government he pursued an aggrandizement program i n the i n t e r n a t i o n a l c o u r t l y arena. t duke f r i e d r i c h s ambitions t o become a monarch o f i n t e r n a t i o n a l s t a t u r e i n c l u d e d a p l e a d i n g and p a t h e t i c campaign t o be admitted i n t o the e n g l i s h order o f the g a r t e r by e l i z a b e t h i. a v i s i t and e l e v e n y e a r s ' worth o f l e t t e r s and g i f t s t o the queen d i d not. b r i n g the d e s i r e d r e s u l t s f o r the duke whom the queen c a l l e d "cousin mompelgart" (a name d e r i v e d from one of h i s l a n d h o l d i n g s , the t i n y wurttemberg-owned area of m o n t b e l i a r d w i t h i n the borders of f r a n c e ) . a f t e r the death of e l i z a b e t h i duke f r i e d r i c h pursued h i s g o a l of admission t o the order w i t h her s u c c e s s o r james i and was f i n a l l y accepted i n t o the order i n . (whether he a c h i e v e d the r e c o g n i t i o n he sought i s d o u b t f u l - king james i s s a i d t o have asked: "who i s t h i s mompelgart?") duke johann f r i e d r i c h became the r u l e r o f wurttemberg a t the death o f h i s f a t h e r f r i e d r i c h i n . p a r t s o f johann f r i e d r i c h ' s d i a r y , the calendarium domesticum. are s t i l l i n e x i s t e n c e . in them he r e v e a l e s h i m s e l f t o be the s o r t of german p r i n c e who contented h i m s e l f w i t h the time-honoured p u r s u i t s of h u n t i n g and d r i n k i n g . n e v e r t h e l e s s , the s t r u c t u r e s o f c o u r t l y ambition were i n p l a c e i n the showpiece c o u r t and h i s d i a r i e s i n d i c a t e t h a t he took the job of m o n a r c h i c a l d i s p l a y s e r i o u s l y . h i s agents i n prague and vienna kept him informed of the newest tournament games enjoyed a t those c o u r t s w h i l e an agent i n france sent him news q of the l a t e s t f a s h i o n s i n c l o t h i n g . in the g r a n d i o s e f e s t i v a l staged f o r h i s wedding and seven y e a r s l a t e r f o r the baptism of one of h i s c h i l d r e n , johann f r i e d r i c h c o n t i n u e d h i s f a t h e r ' s t a c t i c s o f c u l t u r a l d i s p l a y as a means t o d i s t a n c e h i m s e l f from h i s s u b j e c t s and t o e n f o r c e a new p o l i t i c a l s t r u c t u r e . the baptism f u r t h e r allowed f o r the p u r s u i t of an aggrandizement program on a n a t i o n a l and i n t e r n a t i o n a l l e v e l . c l e a r l y i t was the presence o f the p a l a t i n a t e r u l e r f r e d e r i c k v and h i s e n g l i s h w i f e , the daughter of james i, r a t h e r than the baptism, t h a t made t h i s event worthy of a major c e l e b r a t i o n . the use of a " p r i v a t e " f e s t i v e o c c a s i o n such as a baptism f i t s i n t o an e s t a b l i s h e d t r a d i t i o n of i n t e r n a t i o n a l c o u r t l y p r a c t i c e . the v a l o i s c o u r t had made e x t e n s i v e use of d y n a s t i c marriages t o employ the c u l t u r a l apparatus of the " f e t e " t o promote c o n c i a l i a t o r y e f f o r t s d u r i n g the wars of r e l i g i o n . in these french f e s t i v a l s the c o n f l i c t between w a r r i n g r e l i g i o u s f a c t i o n s was r e p l i c a t e d and performed i n a symbolic and f e s t i v e form. such l a r g e r i s s u e s were a l s o addressed i n the s t u t t g a r t f e s t i v a l but i n a somewhat d i f f e r e n t manner. the p r i v a t e d y n a s t i c o c c a s i o n of the s t u t t g a r t baptism f e s t i v a l served as a forum t o c e l e b r a t e and p u b l i c i z e a v i s i o n o f u n i t y o f what was i n a c t u a l i t y an uneasy a l l i a n c e o f p r o t e s t a n t f a c t i o n s . wurttemberg was an arch-lutheran s t r o n g h o l d ; i t s u n i v e r s i t y a t tubingen was the main t r a i n i n g s c h o o l w i t h i n the empire f o r p r o t e s t a n t p a s t o r s . in the years f o l l o w i n g the t r e a t y of augsburg which had been advantageous f o r lutheran p r i n c e s wurttemberg maintained a stance o f n e u t r a l i t y i n c o n f e s s i o n a l c o n f l i c t s . but the h i s t o r i a n r.j.w. evans has p o i n t e d out t h a t i t i s a textbook f a c t (and almost the o n l y one t h a t can be s t a t e d about t h i s d i f f i c u l t period) t h a t a f t e r r e l i g i o u s squabbles grew. one major source o f c o n f l i c t o r i g i n a t e d i n the e x c l u s i o n of c a l v i n i s m from the a c c o r d ; c a l v i n i s t s became i n c r e a s i n g l y m i l i t a n t a f t e r t h i s s e t t l e m e n t i n which they had r e c e i v e d no guarantees. towards the end of the s i x t e e n t h c e n t u r y c a t h o l i c s launched a new o f f e n s i v e t o r e e s t a b l i s h a s i n g l e , u n i f i e d church i n the empire. c a t h o l i c p r i n c e s , i n s p i r e d by j e s u i t t e a c h e r s who were determined t o r o u t out the heresy of p r o t e s t a n t i s m , became a g g r e s s i v e defenders of the church o f rome. by , p o s t - t r i d e n t i n e f e r v o u r had caused the o c c u p a t i o n o f the f r e e i m p e r i a l c i t y of donauworth by c a t h o l i c f o r c e s and the demand by c a t h o l i c s f o r the r e s t i t u t i o n o f c l o i s t e r s s e i z e d a f t e r . i n c r e a s i n g c a t h o l i c m i l i t a n c y had convinced a number o f p r o t e s t a n t s t a t e s and f r e e c i t i e s w i t h i n the german empire of the need t o form a union f o r defense. the c a t h o l i c p r i n c e s responded by forming a league under the l e a d e r s h i p o f m a x i m i l i a n o f b a v a r i a . in the l a s t decade b e f o r e the outbreak o f the t h i r t y years war, the p r o t e s t a n t union and the c a t h o l i c league f a c e d o f f i n a m i s t r u s t f u l and expectant way; these defense unions promoted a war-readiness t h a t rushed toward w a r . duke johann f r i e d r i c h of wurttemberg j o i n e d t h i s union over the o b j e c t i o n s of the p a r l i a m e n t a r y assembly t h a t he had o n l y r e c e n t l y reconvened a f t e r the death of h i s f a t h e r . any d e f e r e n c e the duke showed t o h i s p a r l i a m e n t was due i n l a r g e p a r t t o the t e r r i b l e f i n a n c i a l s i t u a t i o n of the c o u r t ' s t r e a s u r y . the c o u r t was too bankrupt t o borrow money and needed p a r l i a m e n t a r y guarantees t o f i n d c r e d i t o r s . the duke needed the f i n a n c i a l support o f h i s p a r l i a m e n t t o j o i n the p r o t e s t a n t union but the p a r l i a m e n t a r i a n s f e a r e d t h a t t h i s u n i o n would l o a d f u r t h e r f i n a n c i a l burdens on them and would e v e n t u a l l y l e a d t o war. the union r e p r e s e n t e d a dangerous and r e b e l l i o u s a l l i a n c e t h a t t h r e a t e n e d the c o n t i n u a t i o n o f the german empire whose i n s t i t u t i o n s p r o v i d e d a f i n a l c o u r t o f appeal i n i n t e r - e s t a t e d i s p u t e s . f u r t h e r , the staunch lutherans of the wurttemberg p a r l i a m e n t were v e r y r e l u c t a n t t o j o i n i n t o a union w i t h c a l v i n i s t s w i t h whom d o c t r i n a l d i s p u t e s had reached a h i g h l e v e l of acrimony. the p r o t e s t a n t union however was under the c a l v i n i s t l e a d e r s h i p o f the e l e c t o r f r e d e r i c k v, r u l e r o f the p a l a t i n a t e . for a l o n g time the p a l a t i n a t e , a l a r g e c e n t r a l t e r r i t o r y w i t h i t s d u c a l s e a t i n h e i d e l b e r g had l e d the c a l v i n i s t s i n the empire t o work towards u n i t i n g a l l p r o t e s t a n t s . c h r i s t i a n o f a n h a l t , the main a d v i s o r o f the v e r y young f r e d e r i c k v, o r c h e s t r a t e d the f o r m a t i o n o f the p r o t e s t a n t union under p a l a t i n a t e l e a d e r s h i p . a n h a l t e x p l o i t e d the p r o t e s t a n t cause f o r the aggrandizement of the p a l a t i n a t e by a r r a n g i n g the marriage of f r e d e r i c k t o e l i z a b e t h s t u a r t , daughter of james i of england. the hope was t h a t t h i s marriage a l l i a n c e would secure the support o f england and the netherlands f o r the p r o t e s t a n t s i d e . in the m i l i t a n t p r o t e s t a n t s of the p a l a t i n a t e had succeeded a t the r e i c h s t a g , the i m p e r i a l p a r l i a m e n t , i n o r g a n i z i n g a union f o r defense. while emphasizing the maintenance of f i d e l i t y t o the i m p e r i a l f e d e r a t i o n some p r o t e s t a n t t e r r i t o r i e s agreed t o defend each other, t o c o n t r i b u t e t o a fund f o r t h i s purpose and t o communicate w i t h each o t h e r v i a a " s e c r e t correspondence". while the c a t h o l i c league looked f o r support from spain, the p r o t e s t a n t union hoped t o encounter the i n c r e a s i n g l y m i l i t a n t c a t h o l i c counter reformation a l l i a n c e w i t h a i n t e r n a t i o n a l p r o t e s t a n t b l o c . the p a l a t i n a t e marriage h e l d the promise of f u r t h e r i n g the cause of a pan-european p r o t e s t a n t a x i s . not l e a s t among the o b s t a c l e s t o forming a p r o t e s t a n t power b l o c were the i n t e r n a l d i v i s i o n s among german p r i n c e s o f the holy roman empire o f the german n a t i o n . lutheran p r i n c e s f e a r e d the m i l i t a n c y of the c a l v i n i s t p a l a t i n a t e s who were ready t o take up arms a g a i n s t the emperor, w h i l e lutheran p r i n c e s knew they had n o t h i n g t o g a i n and much t o l o s e i n an armed c o n f r o n t a t i o n . the d i s u n i t y among german p r o t e s t a n t s dampened the w i l l i n g n e s s of the reformed powers o u t s i d e the empire t o support the p r o t e s t a n t union. the marriage of the e n g l i s h k i n g ' s daughter t o the p a l a t i n a t e r u l e r appeared t o g i v e the p r o t e s t a n t cause i n t e r n a t i o n a l s t r e n g t h . past the e a s t e r n reaches o f the empire the p r o t e s t a n t s c o u l d l o o k t o the "dubious h e l p of a weird, barbarous c a l v i n i s t p r i n c e from t r a n s y l v a n i a named b e t h l e n gabor". the p r o t e s t a n t union sought f o r o u t s i d e support t h a t c o u l d r i v a l the s t r o n g e r i n t e r n a t i o n a l c a t h o l i c a x i s . the f e s t i v a l i n p r o v i d e d an i d e a l , and perhaps somewhat c o v e r t s e t t i n g f o r a meeting of those p r o t e s t a n t p r i n c e s who had j o i n e d the union. the major success i n i n t e r n a t i o n a l p r o t e s t a n t p o l i t i c s t h a t the marriage of f r e d e r i c k v t o e l i z a b e t h s t u a r t r e p r e s e n t e d was t o be extended t o wurttemberg by having f r e d e r i c k and e l i z a b e t h take the r o l e of godparents a t the baptism of the wurttemberg p r i n c e l i n g . the i n t e r n a t i o n a l importance of the event i s i n d i c a t e d by the extravagance o f the f e s t i v a l whose c o s t s f a r exceeded the means o f the c o u r t . i t i s known from government r e c o r d s t h a t the duchy a p p l i e d f o r and r e c e i v e d an e a r l y payout of i t s share o f union funds f o r . while i t i s not known t o what e x t e n t , i f any, o t h e r s t a t e s c o n t r i b u t e d t o the event f i n a n c i a l l y , i t i s c l e a r t h a t the l a v i s h n e s s o f the event was beyond the means o f the s m a l l t e r r i t o r y . many y e a r s l a t e r , the b a p t i s m a l c h i l d h i m s e l f wrote i n h i s memoirs: "the baptism was c a l l e d the great baptism because of the g r e a t number of people and the t o o - g r e a t expenses t h a t went i n t o i t , f o r c o s t l y p r o c e s s i o n s , tournaments, f i r e w o r k s and expensive p u b l i c a t i o n s . . . w h i c h we are s t i l l p a y i n g f o r today." the c o s t and v a r i e t y of the r e p r e s e n t a t i o n s of the f e s t i v a l d i s s e m i n a t e d a f t e r the event i t s e l f p o i n t s t o the f a c t t h a t the s p e c t a c l e was intended t o f u n c t i o n not o n l y w i t h i n the t e r r i t o r y o f wurttemberg and the p a r t i c i p a t i n g german d u c a l s t a t e s . three t e x t s were produced and the d i f f e r e n c e s i n s t y l e , language and content between these show an i n t e n t t o t a r g e t l o c a l and i n t e r n a t i o n a l audiences. while p u b l i s h i n g t e x t s of c o u r t f e s t i v i t i e s was not new, the v i s u a l r e p r e s e n t a t i o n i n the form of engravings was unprecedented and i n t r o d u c e d t o the wurttemberg c o u r t d u r i n g the r e i g n of johann f r i e d r i c h ( - ) . the baptism engravings p r e s e n t a f a n t a s t i c and b a f f l i n g a r r a y of images of costumed r i d e r s , pageant c a r s , g i a n t heads, g r o t t o s , the c o u r t l y s e t t i n g , f i r e w o r k s , impaled turks, l a t i n mottos, a maltese g a l l e y , e t c . how d i d these images f u n c t i o n i n r e l a t i o n t o the d i v e r s e groups addressed by the t e x t u a l r e p r e s e n t a t i o n s ? the reformation, which had empowered t e r r i t o r i a l r u l e r s , had been f u e l e d by p r i n t e d m a t e r i a l which made unprecedented use o f v i s u a l imagery t o promote the d o c t r i n a l cause. the power o f p r i n t had been t e s t e d by the reformation and had shown i t s e f f e c t i v e n e s s as a medium o f mass propaganda. the proven power of v i s u a l p e r s u a s i o n , i r o n i c a l l y unleashed by a movement w i t h i c o n o c l a s t i c aims, was e n l i s t e d f o r a v i s u a l show of power t h a t communicated the wealth, e d u c a t i o n and t a s t e of the t e r r i t o r i a l r u l e r . " i t was the reformation t h a t f i r s t drove the p o l i t i c i a n s and b u r e a u c r a t s of europe t o s t r i v e f o r domination over the hears and minds of t h e i r s u b j e c t s f a r more t o t a l than any t h a t had been seen b e f o r e . " while the medium o f p r i n t had used l u r i d and s c a t o l o g i c a l images f o r r e l i g i o u s and s o c i a l commentary i n i l l u s t r a t e d broadsheets, t h i s absence of any standards o f decorum had proven an o b s t a c l e t o the s t a t u s of the p r i n t e d image among the v i s u a l a r t s . the p r i n t e d image needed t o be made worthy as a medium of c o u r t l y r e p r e s e n t a t i o n . c h a r l e s t a l b o t l o c a t e s durer's e x t e n s i v e use of p r i n t technology as the moment t h a t allowed the p r i n t e d image t o g a i n s t a t u r e t o become as a u t h o r i t a t i v e and as worthy a medium f o r the a r t i s t as p a i n t i n g or s c u l p t u r e . in t h i s p a r t i c u l a r i n s t a n c e , i t would seem t h a t duke johann f r i e d r i c h r e a l i z e d t h a t h i s i n t e r e s t s were b e t t e r served by p r i n t s which c o u l d be w i d e l y c i r c u l a t e d , than by p a i n t i n g s o r t a p e s t r i e s . the seventeenth c e n t u r y p a t r o n d i d not appear t o r e g a r d the m u l t i p l e p r i n t e d image i n low esteem, and i n f a c t , f o r the s t u t t g a r t c o u r t the p r i n t e d image h e l d advantages t h a t accrued from i t s v e r y l a c k o f uniqueness. as t a l b o t ' s a n a l y s i s o f p r i n t e d imagery s t a t e s : "... one supposes t h a t the p r i n t e d image c a r r i e d a c e r t a i n weight because of i t s p u b l i s h e d form, i m p l y i n g p u b l i c v e r i f i c a t i o n as f a r and wide as the c o p i e s were d i s s e m i n a t e d . the tendency t o b e l i e v e what appears i n p r i n t s u r e l y a p p l i e d i n some degree t o the b e h o l d e r of a v i s u a l image, j u s t as i t always has t o r e a d e r s . " the p r o d u c t i o n of p r i n t s i n m u l t i p l e c o p i e s assured the wurttemberg c o u r t t h a t these d e p i c t i o n s would have the widest p o s s i b l e impact. i r o n i c a l l y , a r t h i s t o r i c a l s c h o l a r s h i p which v a l o r i z e s the a u r a t i c q u a l i t i e s of the unique o b j e c t has tended t o i g n o r e the p r i n t e d image i n f a v o r of p a i n t i n g or s c u l p t u r e . another hindrance t o a r t h i s t o r i c a l i n t e r e s t i n the v i s u a l imagery produced by a secondary c o u r t must be the e x t e n t t o which the canon o f noteworthy a r t o b j e c t s i s formulated i n accordance w i t h "triumphant" p e r i o d s of h i s t o r y . the p r o d u c t i o n o f the german renaissance i s l i n k e d t o the v i g o u r o f f r e e i m p e r i a l c i t i e s as c e n t r e s of a r t s and c r a f t s p r o d u c t i o n . the economic s t r e n g t h and wealth of the c i t y was i n d e c l i n e by the end o f the s i x t e e n t h century. at t h a t time the growth i n s t a t u r e o f t e r r i t o r i a l s t a t e s , generated by the reformation which empowered t e r r i t o r i a l r u l e r s , e c l i p s e d the importance of the f r e e c i t y . the reformation had p u l l e d german-speaking europe a p a r t along r e l i g i o u s l i n e s j u s t as o t h e r european peoples were s o l i d i f y i n g i n t o n a t i o n s . o u t s i d e t h e maritime powers w i t h experimental bourgeois regimes, most o f europe found an e f f i c i e n t and s t a b l e model o f government i n a b s o l u t i s m based on the french model. in the german empire, however, the many s m a l l domains adopted t h e c o u r t l y s t y l e o f a b s o l u t i s t regimes without a t t a i n i n g much s t a b i l i t y i n the p e r i o d o f the looming c o n f r o n t a t i o n o f the t h i r t y years war. while the focus of a r t h i s t o r i c a l w r i t i n g s h i f t s t o the l a r g e r ascendant regimes of n o r t h e r n europe and france, c e n t r a l europe i s r e l e g a t e d t o the p o s i t i o n of a minor s i d e show of incompetent i m i t a t i o n o f the dominant s t y l e s . s a c h e v e r e l l s i t w e l l ' s d i s c u s s i o n i n h i s german baroque a r t ( ) e x e m p l i f i e s the d i s d a i n the a r t i s t i c p r o d u c t i o n of the t u r n of the s i x t e e n t h c e n t u r y c a l l e d f o r t h when the s t y l e of the german renaissance had e x p i r e d and the baroque was not y e t i n p l a c e : "both durer and h o l b e i n were gone, and a p e r i o d of s t r a n g e d i s t o r t e d t a s t e was i n p r o g r e s s . . . t h e augsburg goldsmiths were i n the midst of t h e i r m i c r o s c o p i c achievement; t h e r e were e l a b o r a t e woodcuts i n the durer t r a d i t i o n s t i l l engraved and sold...some of the ducal f a m i l i e s , t o judge by p o r t r a i t s , had by now a t t a i n e d through d y n a s t i c marriages a t r u l y p o r t e n t o u s p i t c h of u g l i n e s s . . . only i n r e c e n t years have e f f o r t s been made t o r e e v a l u a t e the a r t i s t i c p r o d u c t i o n of t h i s p e r i o d . s t u t t g a r t e r h o f f e s t e . a p u b l i c a t i o n , reproduces an a r c h i v a l c o l l e c t i o n o f the t e x t u a l and v i s u a l r e p r e s e n t a t i o n s of two s t u t t g a r t f e s t i v a l s . t h i s obscure b i b l i o g r a p h i c m a t e r i a l was o f f e r e d as a c h a l l e n g e f o r f u r t h e r study of t h i s n e g l e c t e d e r a . the unusual wealth o f t e x t u a l m a t e r i a l was r e - i s s u e d i n o r d e r t o c o n t e x t u a l i z e the wurttemberg p o e t r y of georg rudolf weckherlin, whose s h o r t german c a r e e r s t i l l a f f o r d e d him a p l a c e i n german baroque l i t e r a r y h i s t o r y as an i n n o v a t o r i n c o u r t l y p a n e g y r i c . the engravings produced f o r the s t u t t g a r t baptism f e s t i v a l were r e p r i n t e d i n a separate volume as an addendum t o the t e x t u a l m a t e r i a l . in o r d e r t o i n v e s t i g a t e the complex i n t e r s e c t i o n s between the program of m u l t i p l e r e p r e s e n t a t i o n s and the aims o f the f e s t i v a l i t s e l f , i i n t e n d t o e x p l o r e the j u n c t i o n s and the d i s p a r i t i e s w i t h i n these h i s t o r i c a l fragments. t h i s study w i l l s e t out t o uncover how the v i s u a l m a t e r i a l f u n c t i o n e d as both a s e p a r a t e and a complementary element of the t e x t u a l commemorative program. what c o u l d the v i s u a l r e p r e s e n t a t i o n o f f e r and what d i d i t o f f e r beyond the t e x t u a l m a t e r i a l ? d i d the engravings f u l f i l l the u s u a l f u n c t i o n of the c o u r t l y f e s t i v a l , which was t o b r i d g e d i f f e r e n c e s or t o d i s g u i s e o p p o s i t i o n s i n o r d e r t o show power a t a time o f c r i s i s ? while the f e s t i v a l i s r e p r e s e n t e d i n a s i n g l e s e t o f engravings, t h r e e t e x t s were commissioned by the c o u r t t o r e c o r d the event. two t e x t s , w r i t t e n by georg rudolf weckherlin, i n both german and e n g l i s h , have r e c e i v e d s c h o l a r l y a t t e n t i o n because o f t h a t poet's i n n o v a t i o n o f i n t r o d u c i n g i n t o german the l o f t y s t y l e t h a t european c o u r t s had adopted f o r v e r n a c u l a r p a n e g y r i c . h i s s o p h i s t i c a t e d account, c a l l e d triumphal shews i n e n g l i s h , f o c u s s e d on the e l a b o r a t e costumed p r o c e s s i o n s o f the "tournaments" i n which the duke and h i s p r i n c e l y guests performed c a r e f u l l y choreographed d i s p l a y s of horsemanship and f o o t combat. with s u s t a i n e d a r t i f i c i a l n a i v e t e , the poet c o n v e r t e d the r o y a l parade i n t o p e r s o n i f i c a t i o n s of m y t h o l o g i c a l and h i s t o r i c a l monarchs. a c c o r d i n g t o one l i t e r a r y h i s t o r i a n , weckherlin saw pageants as symbols o f the h i g h l e v e l of german c u l t u r e t h a t , as such, c o u l d a c t t o guarantee her s a f e t y i n t r o u b l e d times: " i n s t e a d of p e r i l o u s a c t u a l i t y , i n s t e a d o f the p r i n c e l y couple who f e l t t h e i r r e l i g i o n and t h e i r domain were i n s e r i o u s danger, weckherlin d e s c r i b e s a r u l i n g f a m i l y of demi-gods l i v i n g i n p e r f e c t s e c u r i t y i n a p u r e l y imaginary l a n d . " what t h i s h i s t o r i a n i d e n t i f i e d as an u t o p i a n v i s i o n was necessary f o r the c u l t u r a l show of power t h a t was intended t o p l a c e the secondary wurttemberg c o u r t of the same l e v e l as the l a r g e r c e n t r a l i z e d european c o u r t s . the need t o speak t o an i n t e r n a t i o n a l c o u r t l y audience i n an e l e g a n t and e q u i v a l e n t v o i c e s i g n a l s the importance o f the "baptism" as a show of a l l i a n c e of the p r o t e s t a n t p r i n c e s who had come t o g e t h e r i n a f e s t i v e o c c a s i o n . in the s o p h i s t i c a t e d language o f weckherlin's c o u r t l y p r a i s e , as w e l l as the l a v i s h g r a p h i c r e p r e s e n t a t i o n , the wurttemberg c o u r t and i t s c o n f e d e r a t e s c o u l d , v i a c u l t u r a l patronage, a s s e r t t h e i r power and worthiness as a l l i e s . (perhaps t h e f e s t i v a l r e p r e s e n t a t i o n program can be read as an answer t o james i's doubts about the s i t u a t i o n o f the german t e r r i t o r i a l p r i n c e s : "tant de p e t i t s p r i n c e s n'y f o n t r i e n q u i v a i l l e " , he i s . r e p o r t e d t o have s a i d . ) weckherlm's r e p r e s e n t a t i o n o f the f e s t i v a l pageantry i n both german and e n g l i s h was meant t o impress an i n t e r n a t i o n a l audience w i t h a s o p h i s t i c a t e d c o u r t l y s t y l e and w i t h an i d e a l i z e d image of p r o t e s t a n t u n i t y . another t e x t was commissioned by the s t u t t g a r t c o u r t from a c o u r t s e c r e t a r y , johann-augustin assum. t h i s account f o l l o w e d the o l d s t y l e o f german c o u r t l y p a n e g y r i c . the e n g l i s h n i n e t e e n t h c e n t u r y h i s t o r i a n , w i l l i a m brenchley rye, a p t l y d e s c r i b e s the nature of the l e s s up-to-date s t y l e o f c o u r t l y w r i t i n g t h a t was superseded by weckherlin. a court-commissioned t e x t c e l e b r a t e d another momentous i n t e r n a t i o n a l event f o r the wurttemberg c o u r t , the i n v e s t i t u r e o f the duke i n t o the e n g l i s h order of the g a r t e r . rye d e s c r i b e s the book as "a most t e d i o u s and tiresome book t o c o n s u l t , b e i n g laden w i t h d i g r e s s i o n s on every c o n c e i v a b l e s u b j e c t . a german n i n e t e e n t h c e n t u r y h i s t o r i a n a p p l i e s a s i m i l a r judgment t o assum's baptism p a n e g y r i c . he s t a t e s : " i t would go too f a r i f i were t o e l a b o r a t e on t h i s p e c u l i a r t e x t . t h i s same p r e s e n t s w i t h i t s p o i n t e d learnedness, i t s l a b o r i o u s n e s s and i t s f a r - r e a c h i n g d e t a i l , a most s o r r y r e a d i n g m a t e r i a l . " the l e n g t h y d i g r e s s i o n s i n assum's t e x t i d e n t i f y i t as the work o f a " p o l y h i s t o r " . anthony g r a f t o n most r e c e n t l y reexamined t h i s p e c u l i a r l y german phenomenon o f s c h o l a r l y w r i t i n g which i s c h a r a c t e r i z e d by the p u r s u i t s o f humanism and encyclopedism o r eloquence and e r u d i t i o n . these w r i t e r s generated the most l e n g t h y and t e d i o u s t r e a t i s e s packed w i t h a d i s p l a y o f e n c y c l o p e d i c knowledge. assum's p e d a n t i c e x h i b i t i o n o f l e a r n i n g , a l b e i t i n a d r e a r y form, s e r v e d t o s e t the s t u t t g a r t f e s t i v a l i n t o an a p p r o p r i a t e l y grand h i s t o r i c a l framework. h i s t e x t i s ornamented w i t h l e n g t h y enumerations o f a n t i q u e and more r e c e n t precedents f o r the pageantry as w e l l as excursuses on p a s t g r e a t events i n the h i s t o r y o f the house of wurttemberg. assum's e f f o r t s t o p l a c e the f e s t i v a l i n t o a g l o r i o u s c o n t e x t o f h i s t o r i c a l antecedents and t o p r a i s e the wurttemberg dynasty p o i n t s t o a r u l e r l e g i t i m i z i n g purpose t h a t was addressed t o a wurttemberg audience. the l o n g l i s t s of names of the a r i s t o c r a t i c guests t h a t populate h i s d e s c r i p t i o n make c l e a r t h a t h i s t e x t was intended f o r a l o c a l german audience. a f u r t h e r document t h a t was not commissioned by the s t u t t g a r t c o u r t i s the handwritten account of the f e s t i v a l by the d i p l o m a t i c correspondent, p h i l i p p h a i n h o f e r . h i s account was commissioned by another german t e r r i t o r i a l r u l e r , the duke of pommern-stettin. h a i n h o f e r ' s account was not p u b l i s h e d , but a number o f c o p i e s are known t o have been c i r c u l a t e d ; among the r e c i p i e n t s were the p r i n c i p a l guests of the baptism, the p a l a t i n a t e r u l e r s . a c c o r d i n g t o an a n a l y s i s o f h a i n h o f e r ' s t e x t , the d i p l o m a t i c l e t t e r was meant t o g i v e an example f o r h i s p a t r o n of how such an important f e s t i v i t y was t o be c e l e b r a t e d by a c o u r t . h a i n h o f e r ' s account g i v e s an e x t r a o r d i n a r i l y d e t a i l e d and v i v i d p i c t u r e of the c o u r t l y f e s t i v a l ; he d e s c r i b e s s e a t i n g arrangements, the v a l u e of g i f t s g i v e n , the contents o f the "kunstkammer", the number of d i s h e s served, the p r e c i o u s gems adorning p r i n c e l y h a t s , the number of pages i n an entourage, e t c . , i n a t i r e l e s s assessment o f rank and s t a t u s f o r h i s p a t r o n . h i s i n d e l i c a t e a p p r a i s a l of the wealth of the h o s t and h i s guests l a i d bare the purpose of the event as a c o m p e t i t i v e show o f power and s o v e r e i g n majesty. perhaps the most v a l u a b l e d e t a i l s i n h a i n h o f e r ' s d e s c r i p t i o n are those t h a t draw a t t e n t i o n t o the extreme c a u t i o n w i t h which the wurttemberg c o u r t wanted the symbolic elements o f the pageantry handled. h a i n h o f e r ' s account, i n a t l e a s t two i n s t a n c e s , commented on segments of the f e s t i v a l t h a t the commissioned t e x t s l e a v e out. i t i s c l e a r t h a t the d i f f e r e n c e s i n s t y l e and language o f the t e x t u a l r e p r e s e n t a t i o n s c o n s t r u c t e d s p e c i f i c audiences. the q u e s t i o n o f audience seems more c o m p l i c a t e d i n r e l a t i o n t o the s e t o f engravings. i i n t e n d t o show t h a t these embraced d i f f e r e n t v i e w i n g p o s i t i o n s . by f o c u s s i n g on where the v i s u a l and the t e x t u a l m a t e r i a l are a t v a r i a n c e and where they a c t i n c o n c e r t , the d i f f i c u l t i e s the wurttemberg c o u r t f a c e d w i t h a s p e c t a c l e o f majesty w i l l h o p e f u l l y be brought t o l i g h t . chapter one w i l l c o n s i d e r the q u e s t i o n s o f e x c l u s i o n and i n c l u s i o n o f p a r t i c i p a n t s . how i s p a r t i c i p a t i o n i n the f e s t i v a l c o n s t r u c t e d by the t e x t s and by the engravings? t h i s examination w i l l d i s c l o s e t h a t the a b s o l u t i s t image the c o u r t propagated d i d not correspond t o the a c t u a l power o f the c o u r t . the s t r u c t u r e of the g r a p h i c r e p r e s e n t a t i o n i n a t r i u m p h a l p r o c e s s i o n format made v i s i b l e the h i e r a r c h y o f the wurttemberg c o u r t and the p a r t i c i p a t i n g t e r r i t o r i a l c o u r t s . i w i l l suggest t h a t the e x c l u s i o n of a l l but a c o u r t l y e l i t e from the r e p r e s e n t a t i o n served t o r e i n f o r c e d u c a l attempts t o e s t a b l i s h the c o u r t as the s o l e l o c u s of a u t h o r i t y w i t h i n the r e t a r d a t o r y p a r l i a m e n t a r y government of the t e r r i t o r y . the f o l l o w i n g c h a p t e r w i l l d i s c u s s the s u r p r i s i n g appearance of the "kubelstechen", a p a i d performance by s t a b l e grooms, which seems c u r i o u s l y out of sync i n a program w i t h r u l e r - l e g i t i m i z i n g aims. the l a s t t h r e e c h a p t e r s w i l l focus on those engravings which seem t o stand out from the r e p e t i t i v e conventions o f a r e p r e s e n t a t i o n o f a t r i u m p h a l p r o c e s s i o n . while the show of c o u r t l y i n v e n t i v e n e s s and n o v e l t y might have subsumed p o t e n t i a l l y p r o b l e m a t i c images, these nonetheless r e g i s t e r complex r e l i g i o u s and p o l i t i c a l content. my i n v e s t i g a t i o n w i l l focus on how c o n t e n t i o u s i s s u e s such as the s u r v i v a l of the i d e a l of the holy roman empire, the r i g h t s o f c o r p o r a t e s o l i d a r i t y o f t e r r i t o r i a l r u l e r s w i t h i n the s t i l l - v a l i d e s t a t i s t s t r u c t u r e of the german empire and the f o r m a t i o n of an i n t e r n a t i o n a l p r o t e s t a n t a l l i a n c e were addressed i n a v i s u a l r e p r e s e n t a t i o n which remained t r u e t o an all-encompassing e x p r e s s i o n of c o u r t l y power and m a g n i f i c e n c e . attempting a h i s t o r i c a l e x p l a n a t i o n of the enigmatic v o c a b u l a r y of these images without guidance from the o t h e r forms o f r e p r e s e n t a t i o n or from documentary evidence of t h e i r r e c e p t i o n i s , of course, not without r i s k s . however, i w i l l argue t h a t t h e s e p a r t i c u l a r v i s u a l r e p r e s e n t a t i o n s had the c a p a c i t y t o s e l e c t i v e l y address and c o n s t r u c t v i e w i n g audiences. . f. s i e b e r , v o l k und v o l k s t u m l i c h e m o t i v i k im festwerke des barocks ( b e r l i n , ), p.x. . propylaen w e l t q e s c h i c h t e b e r l i n , ( - ), p. . . j.a. vann, the making of a s t a t e . wurttemberg - , p. . . j.a. vann, p. . . j.a. vann, p. . . w.b. rye, england as seen bv f o r e i g n e r s (london, ), pp.ix-xcii. . die tagebucher des herzogs johann f r i e d r i c h von wurttemberg aus den jahren - . ed. i.hanack, (goppingen, ). . i n g r i d hanack's e d i t i o n of johann f r i e d r i c k ' s d i a r y g i v e s an overview o f the duke's i n t e r e s t s i n the accoutrements of monarchical d i s p l a y . . f. yates, the v a l o i s t a p e s t r i e s (london, ). . r.j.w. evans, " c u l t u r e and anarchy i n the empire", c e n t r a l european h i s t o r y ( ), p. . . propylaen w.. o p . c i t . , p. . . w. grube, der s t u t t g a r t e r landtag. - ( s t u t t g a r t , ), p. - . . j.w. zophy, the holy roman empire (london, ), p. . . g. benecke, germany i n the t h i r t y years war (london, ), p. . . r. krebs, die p o l i t i s c h e p u b l i z i s t i k der j e s u i t e n und i h r e r gegner ( h a l l e , ), p. . . a.a. van schelven, "der g e n e r a l s t a b des p o l i t i s c h e n c a l v i n i s m u s i n z e n t r a l e u r o p a zu beginn des d r e i s s i g j a h r i g e n k r i e g e s " , a r c h i v f u r r e f o r m a t i o n s g e s c h i c h t e - ( - ), p. . . h.a.l. f i s c h e r , a h i s t o r y of europe, v o l . . (glasgow, ), p. . . s t u t t g a r t e r h o f f e s t e . p. . . s t u t t g a r t e r h o f f e s t e , p. . . s t u t t g a r t e r h o f f e s t e . p. . my t r a n s l a t i o n . . r. s c r i b n e r , popular c u l t u r e and popular movements i n reformation germany (london, ), p. . . l. stone, the past and the present r e v i s i t e d (london, ), p. . . g.p. tyson and s.s. wagonheim, eds., p r i n t and c u l t u r e i n the renaissance (newark, ), i n t r o d u c t i o n : p. . . c h a r l e s t a l b o t , " p r i n t s and the d e f i n i t i v e image" i n p r i n t and c u l t u r e i n the renaissance, pp. - . . c. t a l b o t , o p . c i t . , p. . . h. trevor-roper, "the general c r i s i s i n the seventeenth century", c r i s i s i n europe - (anchor, ) p. . . t h i s phenomenon i s analyzed by e . j . hobsbawm, "the c r i s i s i n the seventeenty century", c r i s i s i n europe - (anchor, ), pp. - . . s a c h e v e r e l l s i t w e l l , german baroque a r t (new york, ), p. . . for example, a r e g i o n a l german r e v i s i o n i n a k a r l s r u h e e x h i b i t i o n c a t a l o g die renaissance im deutschen sudwesten zwischen reformation und d r e i s s i g j a h r i g e n n k r i e q o f f e r s a r e a p p r a i s a l of the v i s u a l a r t s of the pre-war e r a . . c u r t von faber du faur, german baroque l i t e r a t u r e (new haven, ), p.xx. . a.a. van schelven, o p . c i t . , p. . . w.b.rye, england as seen be f o r e i g n e r s (london, ). . a. von oechelhauser, " p h i l i p p h a i n h o f e r s b e r i c h t uber d i e s t u t t g a r t e r k i n d t a u f e im jahre ", neue h e i d e l b e r g e r jahrbucher ( ), p. . . a. g r a f t o n , "the world o f the p o l y h i s t o r s : humanism and encyclopedism", c e n t r a l european h i s t o r y ( ), pp. - . . a.v. oechelhauser, o p . c i t . , p. . . a.v. oechelhauser, p. . chapter the paper p r o c e s s i o n : a triumphal e n t r y i n the contest for a u t h o r i t y t h i s c h a p t e r w i l l focus on the d e f i n i t i o n o f audiences by the the f e s t i v a l engravings. as o u t l i n e d i n the i n t r o d u c t i o n , the number and v a r i e t y of t e x t s produced t o commemorate the baptism f e s t i v a l r e v e a l an i n t e n t t o t a r g e t v a r i e d audiences and the g r a p h i c r e p r e s e n t a t i o n appears t o encode the same i n t e n t . h i s t o r i c a l i n f o r m a t i o n about the c i r c u l a t i o n o f the t e x t s and engravings i s s c a n t . i t i s known t h a t books of engravings and p a n e g y r i c t e x t s were t r a d i t i o n a l l y produced as s o u v e n i r g i f t s f o r the most important g u e s t s . some evidence a l s o e x i s t s t h a t the engravings bound w i t h assum's book were a v a i l a b l e f o r s a l e . by examining the form and c o n t e n t o f the v i s u a l m a t e r i a l i n comparison w i t h the commissioned t e x t s , i w i l l o f f e r some s p e c u l a t i o n s on how the engravings presume p a r t i c u l a r audiences. the engravings are arranged i n a t r i u m p h a l p r o c e s s i o n format which served t o make v i s i b l e the h i e r a r c h y of the wurttemberg c o u r t and t o d i s p l a y the rank of each p a r t i c i p a t i n g p r i n c e . yet the t r a d i t i o n a l s o c i a l r i t e s o f the t r i u m p h a l p r o c e s s i o n were a l t e r e d i n t h i s r e p r e s e n t a t i o n s i n c e o n l y h i g h nobles appear i n an e x c l u s i v e pageant. t h i s image of a r i s t o c r a t i c e x c l u s i v i t y r e p r e s e n t e d the wurttemberg c o u r t as a p e r f e c t a b s o l u t i s t s t a t e t o an i n t e r n a t i o n a l audience. on the l o c a l l e v e l , the g r a p h i c r e p r e s e n t a t i o n of a f e s t i v a l i n which the lower e s t a t e s have no p l a c e , e i t h e r as p a r t i c i p a n t s o r o n l o o k e r s , conforms t o the d u c a l s t r a t e g y of e x c l u s i o n as a means t o amass power. t h i s image o f an e x c l u s i v e c o u r t f e s t i v i t y i s somewhat a t odds w i t h the commissioned t e x t s i n which a more complex s o c i a l f i e l d of a c t i o n emerges. these d i s j u n c t i v e a s p e c t s o f the v i s u a l and t e x t u a l m a t e r i a l are the c r a c k s through which i t becomes p o s s i b l e t o c a t c h glimpses of the t e n s i o n s which beset the wurttemberg c o u r t . in t h i s c h a p t e r i w i l l address the r o l e the f e s t i v a l r e p r e s e n t a t i o n s had i n a d v e r t i s i n g a n o t i o n o f the p e r f e c t a b s o l u t i s t c o u r t t h a t d i d not correspond t o i t s a c t u a l power. i hope t o show t h a t the image o f the f e s t i v a l w i t h i t s i m p l i c a t i o n of a b s o l u t e power of the c o u r t served t o d i s g u i s e o p p o s i t i o n s v i a a program of c u l t u r a l aggrandizement t h a t extended from the event i n t o i t s r e p r e s e n t a t i o n s . the g r a p h i c d e p i c t i o n s of the c o u r t complex, one a t the b e g i n n i n g and one a t the end of the engravings book, a c t as v i s u a l c o n f i r m a t i o n of the grandeur of the c o u r t . t h e i r placement a t the o u t e r edges of the book a l l o w s them t o a c t as "frames" t h a t d e f i n e the s e t t i n g of the r e p r e s e n t e d pageantry. the f i r s t i l l u s t r a t i o n ( f i g . l ) , a view o f the c o u r t complex seen from w i t h i n the c o u r t gardens, i n t r o d u c e s the f e s t i v a l environment as ah empty stage. the c u b e - l i k e medieval c a s t l e i n the background i s the nucleus from which the d e c o r a t i v e architecture, the tournament grounds, the sculpture gardens and botanical displays radiate. the orthogonals of merian's engraving delineate the incremental expansion that had taken place since the l a t e sixteenth century to accommodate new c o l l e c t i n g , alchemical, sporting and c u l t u r a l pursuits of the duke. the engraving of the "lustgarten" builds on the fame t h i s elegant court s e t t i n g had acquired amongst small german t e r r i t o r i a l states. the a r c h i t e c t u r a l wonder of the new lusthaus, shown as the f o c a l element of a new representative court s t y l e , i r o n i c a l l y seems to be modelled on the c i v i c buildings of the bourgeois-corporate netherlands; but, unlike i t s urban models, the bulk and height of t h i s b u i l d i n g stands apart from the t i g h t l y b u i l t walled town, i n a i r y renaissance parterres. the court i s represented as a large e x t e r i o r entertainment "room" where a new representative ducal s t y l e can be unfolded i n front of a s e l e c t audience. this large e x t e r i o r space, as an extension of the private space of the c a s t l e , no doubt gave the court the means to define and control p a r t i c i p a t i o n i n the f e s t i v a l to an extent that an urban space could not have. in the f i n a l engraving ( f i g . ) , the entertainment and r e c r e a t i o n a l functions of the ducal amusement grounds are shown i n use. the old tournament grounds and the small old lusthaus are the viewing stations for noble guests who are watching a spectacular fireworks. the courtly audience depicted i n the f i n a l i l l u s t r a t i o n could not have been the o n l y audience o f the fabulous p y r o t e c h n i c a l d i s p l a y shown emanating from the c o u r t grounds. yet t h i s event and a l l the r e p r e s e n t e d pageantry are e n c l o s e d w i t h i n the c o u r t complex as entertainments staged f o r and by h i g h n o b l e s . the engravings p r e s e n t the e l e g a n t s e t t i n g s t h a t were made f o r the hoped-for s e l f - f u l f i l l i n g prophecy i n which the show of power t h a t i s p r e s e n t e d becomes the v e r y substance of the r u l e r ' s a u t h o r i t y . the f u l l page engravings o f the c o u r t s e t t i n g a c t as l o c a t o r s f o r the b u l k of the engravings which are l e s s e l a b o r a t e l y i l l u s t r a t e d i n t h a t t h e i r backgrounds are l e f t blank. these framing elements p l a c e the t r i u m p h a l p r o c e s s i o n format of the g r a p h i c r e p r e s e n t a t i o n w i t h i n the serene and s e p a r a t e arena of the c o u r t complex. the e x c l u s i v e a r i s t o c r a t i c nature o f the pageantry t h a t the f e s t i v a l engravings p r e s e n t are a departure from e a r l i e r t r i u m p h a l r e p r e s e n t a t i o n s . as of the l a t e middle ages, the d e p i c t i o n o f t r i u m p h a l p r o c e s s i o n s became the most f r e q u e n t l y used m o t i f , next t o r e l i g i o u s themes, f o r the g l o r i f i c a t i o n of . german r u l e r s . for the german i m p e r i a l c o u r t , and l a t e r , f o r t e r r i t o r i a l d u c a l c o u r t s , the t r i u m p h a l p r o c e s s i o n formed the c e n t r a l element of c o u r t c e r e m o n i a l . in these ceremonies, the presence of c i t y f a t h e r s , g u i l d members and c l e r g y , had a l e g a l i s t i c f u n c t i o n i n which the bond between v a r i o u s e s t a t e s and the r u l e r was made e v i d e n t and r e a f f i r m e d . in france and elsewhere the p r o c e s s i o n l o s t i t s v a l i d a t i n g f u n c t i o n i n c o n s t i t u t i o n a l matters w i t h the growth of a b s o l u t i s m , but i n those s t a t e s where the r i g h t s o f the e s t a t e s s t i l l h e l d s o v e r e i g n power i n check, the t r i u m p h a l p r o c e s s i o n c o n t i n u e d t o c o n f i r m the t i e s between s o c i a l s t r a t a . the s t a g i n g of t r i u m p h a l p r o c e s s i o n s i n german t e r r i t o r i e s was a p r i v i l e g e t e r r i t o r i a l dukes had t o usurp f o r themselves (the use of t h i s ceremonial as a r i g h t o f the secondary s o v e r e i g n s was o n l y c o d i f i e d by the peace of w e s t p h a l i a ) . the format of the engravings makes e v i d e n t the wurttemberg c o u r t ' s conversance w i t h t h i s s t r a t e g y of government, but omitted from the r e p r e s e n t a t i o n of the triumphal p r o c e s s i o n are images of the e s t a t e s t h a t do not form a p a r t of the d u c a l e n c l a v e . t h i s was not an a r b i t r a r y omission. the v i s u a l r e p r e s e n t a t i o n o f the p r o c e s s i o n i s meant t o convey an i m p r e s s i o n o f an a b s o l u t i s t c o u r t powerful enough t o do away w i t h a c t s o f s u b j u g a t i o n by i t s s u b j e c t s , even i f i n the a c t u a l event those elements were r e t a i n e d . the demonstration of a c o n f i d e n t a l l - c o u r t l y t r i u m p h a l p r o c e s s i o n might d i s c l o s e one audience f o r the f e s t i v a l engravings. were the primary r e c i p i e n t s o f the show of power the c o u r t i e r s and a d v i s o r s of the duke? i t was a f t e r a l l t h i s group, as the f e s t i v a l h i s t o r i a n berns p o i n t s out, t h a t h e l d the g r e a t e s t danger f o r the r u l e r . a c c o r d i n g t o berns, the p r i n c e ' s f e a r of h i s o f f i c i a l s and h i s c l o s e s t r e l a t i v e s was the most c o n s i s t e n t theme of german baroque drama; t h e r e the m o t i f s o f tyranny, r e g i c i d e , t r e a c h e r y and i n t r i g u e were t i r e l e s s l y p l a y e d out. as a safeguard a g a i n s t such s t r i f e , the c o u r t ceremonial p r o v i d e d the means by which the duke and h i s s e l e c t e d c o u r t i e r s c o u l d make a show of mutual dependence and support. the pages of the f e s t i v a l book allowed the d e p i c t e d costume parade t o c o n f i r m the make-up o f the c o u r t l y r e t i n u e . t h i s f u n c t i o n o f the ceremonial i s g i v e n g r a p h i c e x p r e s s i o n i n t h e l e n g t h y f r i e z e - l i k e form o f the r e p r e s e n t a t i o n t h a t takes as i t s model the e a r l y th century woodcut s e r i e s emperor m a x i m i l i a n i commissioned t o c e l e b r a t e h i m s e l f . while m a x i m i l i a n ' s i l l u s t r a t e d pageantry was not bound by a demand t o d e p i c t an a c t u a l event, h i s t r i u m p h a l paper p r o c e s s i o n s were emulated i n l a t e r event-based f e s t i v a l r e p r e s e n t a t i o n . and t h i s o v e r l y l o n g format, d e s c r i b e d by one a r t h i s t o r i a n as s a c r i f i c i n g impact by a s t u l t i f y i n g q u a n t i t y o f images " t h a t have no shore and no h o r i z o n " , n e v e r t h e l e s s proved u s e f u l t o t r a n s l a t e the week l o n g f e s t i v a l i n t o a maximilianesque t r i u m p h a l e n t r y . the core o f the engraving book i s a t r a d i t i o n a l band of images, t h a t u n l i k e m a x i m i l i a n ' s , f e a t u r e s o n l y costumed nobles p a r a d i n g a c r o s s e i g h t y pages w i t h blank backgrounds. the e l a b o r a t e pageantry of c h i v a l r i c e x e r c i s e s are the elements of the f e s t i v a l t h a t are the s u b j e c t of almost a l l o f the i l l u s t r a t i o n s . introduced by ornamented t i t l e pages of coats-of-arms and the l e n g t h y names o f h i g h - r a n k i n g a r i s t o c r a t s , the main noble p r e s e n t e r s are shown accompanied by numerous a t t e n d a n t s . trumpeters, s a d d l e boys and s e r v a n t s are r e p r e s e n t e d i n s e v e r a l s e p a r a t e engravings; t h e i r number i n accordance w i t h the importance of the p r i n c e l y a c t o r i n each segment of the r e p r e s e n t e d parade. the p o r t r a y a l of a t t e n d a n t s i n o n l y s l i g h t l y v a r i e d poses over s e v e r a l p l a t e s u n d e r l i n e s t h e i r s i g n i f i c a n c e as s t a t u s - g i v e r s . what appears a t f i r s t t o be an unnecessary r e p e t i t i o n o f f i g u r e s has a f u n c t i o n i n emphasizing the r e l a t i v e importance o f each p r i n c e r e p r e s e n t e d . t h i s r e l e n t l e s s d i s p l a y of rank i s a theme t h a t i s a l s o found i n assum's commissioned poetry, where a l l the members o f each p r i n c e ' s entourage are named f o r a german audience. the engravings a t l e a s t were e n l i v e n e d w i t h d e p i c t i o n s of costume and ornament i n o f f e r i n g r e c o r d s of each p a r t i c i p a n t ' s p l a c e i n the h i e r a r c h i e s of german t e r r i t o r i a l c o u r t s as w e l l as of the i n d i v i d u a l ' s r a n k i n g w i t h i n each c o u r t . the v i s u a l and t e x t u a l r e p r e s e n t a t i o n s are marked by the f u n c t i o n o f c o u r t f e s t i v a l s t o make e x p l i c i t the p l a c e of the c o u r t v i s - a - v i s the o u t s i d e world as w e l l as d e f i n i n g i t s i n n e r s t r u c t u r e . while the c o u r t - c e n t e r e d s u b j e c t of the engravings s e r v e d t o send the message t h a t the s t a t u s o f the duchy of wurttemberg was equal t o t h a t of the r a n k i n g european c o u r t s , i t s c o u r t l y focus a l s o had a l o c a l dimension. the f e s t i v a l and i t s g r a p h i c commemoration form a p a r t of the p o l i t i c a l manoeuvres t h a t wurttemberg dukes had u t i l i z e d along what the american h i s t o r i a n james a l l e n vann has c a l l e d "...the road t o s t r o n g , a g g r e s s i v e c e n t r a l government (which) was f i l l e d w i t h loops and t w i s t s . " t h i s "looped road" has been the s u b j e c t of monographs by c o n s t i t u t i o n a l h i s t o r i a n s . these s t u d i e s p r e s e n t a p i c t u r e o f the duchy t h a t d i f f e r s markedly from the a b s o l u t i s t image the c o u r t p r e s e n t e d i n the f e s t i v a l book. in the fragmented holy roman empire of the german n a t i o n , the southwestern area had the l a r g e s t number of f r e e i m p e r i a l c i t i e s and t h i s urban element i n f l u e n c e d the make-up o f the l a r g e r t e r r i t o r i e s such as wurttemberg. "the g r e a t e r urban d e n s i t y o f the german southwest l e n t a more bourgeois c h a r a c t e r t o t h a t p a r t of the empire than t o o t h e r r e g i o n s of i t . but middle c l a s s c u l t u r e and middle c l a s s v a l u e s were not c o n f i n e d t o the f r e e towns a l o n e . the l a r g e s t duchy of swabia, wurttemberg, was a l s o t h e ^ o s t bourgeois t e r r i t o r y i n the holy roman empire." while the burghers p l a y e d a l e a d i n g r o l e i n g o v e r n i n g the towns, the "bourgeois" c h a r a c t e r of wurttemberg must not be read as t h a t of a s e l f - c o n s c i o u s emancipatory c l a s s , r a t h e r as one t h a t sought t o p r e s e r v e i t s p r i v i l e g e s i n the e s t a t e h i e r a r c h y . the l e a d e r s h i p of the towns was i n the hands of a p a t r i c i a n c l a s s , the "ehrbaren" or n o t a b l e s . in the l a r g e r c i t i e s of s t u t t g a r t or tubingen, the " e h r b a r k e i t " had as much a t stake i n the s t a t u s quo as the d u c a l f a m i l y . the " e h r b a r k e i t " o f the l a r g e r urban c e n t r e s had l a r g e l a n d h o l d i n g s and can not be seen i n any sense as advocates f o r the lower e s t a t e s . the "ehrbaren" ran the f i f t y - e i g h t "aemter" o r b a s i c l o c a l p o l i t i c a l u n i t s o f the t e r r i t o r y which were the i n s t i t u t i o n s by which d u c a l c o n t r o l was . . a d m i n i s t e r e d . the n o t a b l e s , through the a d m i n i s t r a t i v e powers they h e l d i n t h e towns, were a b l e t o c o n s o l i d a t e t h e i r p o s i t i o n i n t o a p o l i t i c a l f o r c e w i t h i n the t e r r i t o r y . t h i s group d i d not so much r e p r e s e n t an economic c l a s s because t h e r e were wide d i f f e r e n c e s i n wealth among them, but r a t h e r i t r e p r e s e n t e d a p o l i t i c a l e l i t e whose p l a c e s i n the town m a g i s t r a c i e s a f f o r d e d them the r i g h t t o e x e r t p o l i t i c a l a u t h o r i t y i n t h e i r l o c a l areas as w e l l as on the t e r r i t o r i a l l e v e l . these l o c a l " n o t a b l e s " p a r t i c i p a t e d i n the a d m i n i s t r a t i o n o f the s t a t e through t h e i r p o s i t i o n as the c o n s t i t u e n t members o f the "landtag" o r t e r r i t o r i a l p a r l i a m e n t . while the landtag, the p a r l i a m e n t a r y assembly of " n o t a b l e s " , was i n s t i t u t e d as a mechanism f o r t e r r i t o r i a l c o n t r o l , i t a c t e d as a counterweight t o d u c a l power. throughout the s i x t e e n t h century, wurttemberg dukes, empowered by the reformation, had sought t o expand t h e i r sphere o f i n f l u e n c e . at the end of t h a t century, the r u l e of f r i e d r i c h i ( - ) was marked by an impetus t o i n c r e a s e d u c a l a u t h o r i t y . duke f r i e d r i c h ' s e f f o r t s t o e s t a b l i s h a s t a n d i n g army, t o expand t r a d e and p r o d u c t i o n , t o i n s t i t u t e a s c h o o l t o t r a i n a r i s t o c r a t s f o r c o u r t s e r v i c e , t o c a r r y on d i p l o m a t i c r e l a t i o n s w i t h f o r e i g n p r o t e s t a n t s t a t e s and t o expand the d u c a l r o l e v i a a p r i v y c o u n c i l j o i n e d h i s c u l t u r a l patronage t o promote a s t r o n g monarchy. he added t o h i s p r e d e c e s s o r ' s a r c h i t e c t u r a l i n n o v a t i o n s and adopted the l a v i s h c o u r t s t y l e he had observed i n h i s t r a v e l s . among f r i e d r i c h ' s accomplishments was h i s i n d u c t i o n i n t o the order o f the g a r t e r - which a f t e r a l o n g campaign was f i n a l l y bestowed upon him. f r i e d r i c h ' s ambitious r e s t r u c t u r i n g of d u c a l a u t h o r i t y i n v o l v e d d i s e n f r a n c h i s i n g the landtag; he r u l e d without p a r l i a m e n t a r y i n p u t - fewer and fewer p a r l i a m e n t a r y s e s s i o n s took p l a c e d u r i n g h i s r e i g n - and he a s s i g n e d h i s p e r s o n a l a d v i s o r s t o take over t h a t body's a d m i n i s t r a t i v e f u n c t i o n s . an extravagant c o u r t c u l t u r e gave e x p r e s s i o n t o f r i e d r i c h ' s new p o l i t i c a l system, a system based on what the h i s t o r i a n jurgen von kruedener has c h a r a c t e r i z e d as a " c h a r i s m a t i z a t i o n " of the d u c a l r o l e . the l e g i t i m i z a t i o n of g r e a t e r d u c a l s o v e r e i g n t y , a c c o r d i n g t o kruedener, was t o be based on the p r o d u c t i o n of a s o c i a l - p s y c h o l o g i c a l e f f e c t t h a t was t o emanate from a d i s p l a y of majesty a t c o u r t . kruedener d e s c r i b e s t h i s s t r a t e g y as b e i n g u n s u c c e s s f u l ; the i n d i c a t o r f o r t h i s b e i n g t h a t the duke had t o f a l l back on o l d e r c l a i m s t o a u t h o r i t y such as the unimpeachable nature o f h i s h i g h o f f i c e and of h i s d y n a s t i c h e r i t a g e . during f r i e d r i c h ' s r e i g n , c o n f l i c t between the duke and h i s p a r l i a m e n t a r i a n s grew t o the p o i n t where the p a r l i a m e n t seemed t o have been e c l i p s e d . but when f r i e d r i c h ' s sudden death brought johann f r i e d r i c h t o power, the new duke f e l t he needed p a r l i a m e n t a r y a p p r o v a l , e s p e c i a l l y i t s f i n a n c i a l support, t o s t e p i n t o the c o n f e s s i o n a l c o n f l i c t by j o i n i n g the p r o t e s t a n t union. in johann f r i e d r i c h r e c a l l e d the landtag and s t a t e d t h a t the g o a l o f h i s p o l i c i e s was t o be the r e s t o r a t i o n o f "the o l d , good-hearted, t r u s t i n g a f f e c t i o n " between r u l e r and s u b j e c t s . n e v e r t h e l e s s johann f r i e d r i c h pursued o t h e r s t r a t e g i e s t o b u t t r e s s d u c a l a u t h o r i t y . "about the same time he a l s o c l a i m e d the r i g h t o f a p p o i n t i n g a l l parsons and deacons: a new system was b e g i n n i n g . probably f o r s i m i l a r reasons he p r e f e r r e d f o r e i g n e r s and noblemen as h i s o f f i c i a l s - a p o l i c y which was c o n t r a r y t o the t r e a t y o f tubingen ( c o n s t i t u t i o n of ) - w h i l e h i t h e r t o most o f the d u c a l c o u n c i l l o r s and o f f i c i a l s had been from the ranks of the urban " e h r b a r k e i t " which a l s o dominated the e s t a t e s . " nor d i d johann f r i e d r i c h abandon h i s f a t h e r ' s c u l t u r a l patronage s t r a t e g i e s even i f the landtag advocated a r e t u r n t o the o l d p a t r i a r c h a l r o l e of the duke. p a r l i a m e n t a r y d i s p l e a s u r e w i t h d u c a l programs i s r e c o r d e d i n the landtag documents o f : "when the excess and the f o r e i g n splendour and m a g n i f i c e n c e brought i n by s t r a n g e r s i s removed and t h i n g s a t c o u r t are d i r e c t e d i n the o l d , simple, y e t p r a i s e w o r t h y german manner so i t w i l l f o l l o w t h a t i n a s h o r t time the t r o u b l e s and debts w i l l end and a good supply o f money w i l l amass; such o l d wurttembergian custom w i l l not be d e t r i m e n t a l t o the d u c a l r e p u t a t i o n , as the young or the misinformed, or those i n the s p e l l of f o r e i g n splendour or o t h e r well-meaning s o u l s might suppose; the duke's pre-eminence and r e p u t a t i o n does not r e s t on a l a r g e c o u r t r e t i n u e , outward ornament, and apparatus, which i s c a l l e d 'magnas p h a n t a s i a s ' i n h o l y s c r i p t u r e s , much r a t h e r on the duke's courage and manliness, s t e r n defense of the t r u e f a i t h and b e n e f i c i a l j u s t i c e , good p o l i c i e s both f o r the common f a t h e r l a n d and poor s u b j e c t s , and o t h e r eminent h e r o i c v i r t u e s and a t t r i b u t e s of which (the almighty be thanked) our now r e i g n i n g g r a c i o u s duke has no l a c k . j u s t as the wurttemberg dukes of the l a s t y e a r s have been h e l d i n h i g h esteem both i n s i d e and o u t s i d e the empire without any s p e c i a l g r e a t apparatus." t h i s document r e v e a l s t h a t d u c a l attempts a t " c h a r i s m a t i s i n g " were no mystery t o the " n o t a b l e s " ; d u c a l e f f o r t s a t assuming the s t y l e o f f o r e i g n c o u r t s were t r a n s p a r e n t as c o s t l y s t r a t e g i e s t o abrogate t h e i r r i g h t s and p r i v i l e g e s . the landtag demanded a r e t u r n t o the o l d r o l e o f the duke, t h a t of the p a t r i a r c h who r u l e d by v i r t u e o f h i g h moral p r i n c i p l e s and h i s g u a r d i a n s h i p of lutheran orthodoxy. the landtag's admonitions d i d not h i n d e r johann f r i e d r i c h ' s resumption of a l a v i s h c o u r t c u l t u r e ; the f e s t i v a l r e c o r d s from the baptism f e s t i v a l a t t e s t t o t h i s . the duke seemed determined t o pursue h i s f a t h e r ' s p o l i c i e s of e l e v a t i n g h i s s t a t u r e by g a i n i n g esteem from o u t s i d e the t e r r i t o r y . the h i s t o r i a n grube c i t e s t h a t i n the duke•s r e b u t t a l t o the landtag•s r e p r o o f s , johann f r i e d r i c h complained t h a t he was honored more by f o r e i g n p o t e n t a t e s than by h i s own s u b j e c t s . the engravings r e p r e s e n t a l o f t y c o u r t s o c i e t y i n which s u b j e c t s p l a y no r o l e . the p r i n t e d images address the landtag w i t h a d e n i a l of t h e i r demands f o r a v i r t u o u s p a t r i a r c h who i s c o n t e n t w i t h h i s p l a c e i n the l o c a l e s t a t e h i e r a r c h y . the v i s u a l r e p r e s e n t a t i o n a v o i d s the r e t a r d a t o r y e s t a t e s t r u c t u r e o f wurttemberg and submits an image of a c o u r t t h a t i s i n t e n t on t a k i n g i t s p l a c e i n an i n t e r n a t i o n a l c o n t e x t o f c e n t r a l i z e d c o u r t s . to r e p r e s e n t i t s e l f as an equal t o the more powerful c o u r t s , the wurttemberg c o u r t employed some a r t i s t s who, through t h e i r e x p e r i e n c e of f o r e i g n c o u r t s , were proven i n the a r t s o f r u l e r g l o r i f i c a t i o n . the engraver merian, who was r e s p o n s i b l e f o r p a r t s of the g r a p h i c d e p i c t i o n o f the baptism f e s t i v a l had worked on a number o f r o y a l commissions i n france. h i s e a r l i e s t c l a i m t o fame was h i s work on the r e p r e s e n t a t i o n of the "pompes funebres du due c h a r l e s i i i de l o r r a i n e " of . . . in the f o l l o w i n g y e a r s merian worked on the g l o r i f i c a t i o n programs of the young l o u i s x i i i and h i s mother maria de m e d i c i s ; i n , he produced two engravings t o commemorate the bordeaux wedding o f l o u i s t o the spanish i n f a n t a . the secondary wurttemberg c o u r t h i r e d a r t i s t s who were f a m i l i a r w i t h the s t y l e c u r r e n t i n the l a r g e r western european c o u r t s i n order t o address these c o u r t s . p a r t o f the w r i t t e n program f o r the wurttemberg f e s t i v a l o f was l e f t t o georg rudolf weckherlin, who had l e a r n e d the s t y l e and manners of f o r e i g n c o u r t s i n h i s t r a v e l s . h i s l i n g u i s t i c a b i l i t i e s allowed him t o address h i s triumf t o e l i z a b e t h s t u a r t i n her mother tongue and t o compose v e r s e s i n french and l a t i n . the p o l y g l o t nature of weckherlin's p o e t r y and merian's c o u r t l y work h i s t o r y p o i n t t o the wurttemberg duke's s t r i v i n g s t o g i v e h i s c o u r t an i n t e r n a t i o n a l aura and importance. the v i s u a l r e p r e s e n t a t i o n o f an e x c l u s i v e a r i s t o c r a t i c pageant forms a p a r t of the same p r o j e c t t o p r e s e n t the wurttemberg c o u r t as a modern a b s o l u t i s t s t a t e t o an i n t e r n a t i o n a l audience. the t r i u m p h a l p r o c e s s i o n composed o n l y of h i g h nobles can be read as a single-minded campaign t o p r e s e n t a powerful u n f e t t e r e d c o u r t i n which lower e s t a t e o r d e r s do not p a r t i c i p a t e . t h i s campaign c o n t i n u e s i n the t e x t s where the poets l a y c l a i m t o an e l e v a t e d and h i e r a r c h i c a l l y d e f i n e d language and content i n o r d e r t o c o n s t r u c t an e x c l u s i v e audience. the e l e g a n t t r i u m p h a l form o f the v i s u a l r e p r e s e n t a t i o n and i t s c o u r t l y c o n t e n t s are m i r r o r e d i n assum's i n t r o d u c t i o n t o h i s composition. assum promotes the e r u d i t e and e x c l u s i v e nature o f h i s w r i t i n g by s e t t i n g up a most i n t e r e s t i n g c u l t u r a l d i v i s i o n : "and so d i d order and wish h i s ducal grace/ t h a t he, p h i l o p a t r i s (assum's nom-de-plume)/ s h o u l d summarize a l l the memorable proceedings most d i l i g e n t l y i n h i g h german language/ n e v e r t h e l e s s not l i k e the common r e l a t i o n e h i s t o r i c a , as i n the weekly newsheets/ o r those t h a t the f r a n k f u r t s p r i n g and f a l l f a i r s b r i n g / rather i n such manner o f i n v e n t i o n and d i s p o s i t i o n : so t h a t a l l persons o f h i g h e s t a t e and gentlemen/ along w i t h the h i g h l y - p r a i s e d l a d i e s / be hereby enabled and s t i m u l a t e d t o a l i v e l y r e a d i n g / and the w o r l d l y - w i s e and l e a r n e d t o many • d i s c o u r s ' " . assum's d i f f e r e n t i a t i o n between the audience of book f a i r t r a c t s and h i s e l e g a n t c o u r t l y book cannot h e l p t o gauge who the r e a d e r s of the t e x t a c t u a l l y were. as j o s e m a r a v a l l s t a t e d i n c u l t u r e of the baroque: " . . . i n the seventeenth c e n t u r y the d i a t r i b e a g a i n s t the common people became aggravated p r e c i s e l y i n those works d e s t i n e d f o r widespread consumption..." i t i s worth n o t i n g t h a t assum's contempt f o r p o p u l a r newsheets may come out o f d e s i r e of the c o u r t t o pre-empt the u n a u t h o r i z e d d i f f u s i o n of newspaper accounts o f the f e s t i v a l . s i n c e we know l i t t l e of how t h i s book was c i r c u l a t e d , i t i s not p o s s i b l e t o a s c e r t a i n t h a t h i s " r e l a t i o n " had o n l y a c o u r t l y r e a d e r s h i p . what i s c l e a r , though, i s t h a t the author emphasized t h a t t h e r e i s a cleavage between the c u l t u r a l p r o d u c t i o n o f the c o u r t , such as h i s work, and the "common" books a v a i l a b l e a t the f r a n k f u r t f a i r s . assum's advertisement f o r the i n a c c e s s i b i l i t y of h i s n a r r a t i o n t o those o f l e s s than e l e v a t e d s o c i a l o r i g i n s i s echoed i n h i s account o f how the c o u r t attempts t o c o n t r o l audiences. assum's account made b r i e f mention of o r g a n i z e d and s a n c t i o n e d p a r t i c i p a t i o n by non-nobles. in the ceremony h e l d t o g r e e t the most important h e i d e l b e r g guests a t the entrance t o the c i t y , assum's account has " s e l e c t e d burghers b e a r i n g weapons" who are d e s c r i b e d as " j o y f u l l y s t a n d i n g . . s e p a r a t e l y . " the j o y f u l burghers do not f i n d t h e i r p l a c e i n t o t h e engravings, nor do they appear i n weckherlin's t e x t ; the r e p r e s e n t a t i o n of such a demonstration o f f e a l t y may have been c o n s i d e r e d t o have been too outmoded t o be worthy of commemoration. while the a c t u a l event s t i l l used the t r i u m p h a l e n t r y as a ceremony t o c o n f i r m t i e s between s o c i a l s t r a t a , the v i s u a l and t e x t u a l r e p r e s e n t a t i o n i s marked by an i n t e n t t o c o n s t r u c t a new s e l f - c o n s c i o u s l y a r i s t o c r a t i c image o f the c o u r t . the e x c l u s i o n of the lower e s t a t e s from the r e p r e s e n t a t i o n s m i r r o r s the e l e v a t e d c u l t u r a l h o r i z o n assum c l a i m s f o r h i s t e x t . both the t e x t s and the engravings c o n t a i n the i n t e n t t o speak i n a h i e r a r c h i c a l l y d i f f e r e n t i a t e d language, but t h i s language may be d i r e c t e d a t those s o c i a l s t r a t a i t aims t o exclude. u n l i k e assum's p o e t r y , the elegance and c o u r t l i n e s s o f weckherlin's triumf d i d not need t o be p r e f a c e d by c l a i m s t o e x c l u s i v i t y . the i n n o v a t i o n of french v e r s e form, which he i n t r o d u c e d i n t o german poetry, s u f f i c e d t o demonstrate the grandeur o f the genre. in weckherlin, the new wurttemberg c o u r t c u l t u r e had found a poet, who was capable of i n v e s t i n g the c o u r t l y pomp and magnificence of the f e s t i v i t i e s i n a f i t t i n g language. while weckherlin's t e x t , l i k e the p r i n t s , f o c u s s e d on the e l a b o r a t e costumed p r o c e s s i o n s which he a r t f u l l y c o n v e r t e d i n t o a parade of m y t h o l o g i c a l and h i s t o r i c a l monarchs; the amazed c i t i z e n r y i s mentioned o n l y c u r s o r i l y . to observe the "gorgious o s t e n t a t i o n s " o f "our w o r t h i e s and k n i g h t s " : "the people runneth from a l l s i d e s t o the garden: t h e r e i s a s t r a n g e crowd: the s c a f f o l d s are f u l l : so are the t r e e s : the tops and windows of a l l houses and towr's t h e r e a b o u t are f i l l e d w i t h s p e c t a t o u r s . ioy i s every where." crowds l i n e the s e t t i n g of each event: "as soone as the beames of the sunne d i d g u i l d the toppes o f the mountaines, the s c a f f o l d s i n the t i l t - g a r d e n were againe f i l l e d w i t h people. the m a g n i f i c e n c e had y e s t e r d a y so much d e l i g h t e d the eyes o f the s p e c t a t o u r s ; and n e v e r - s i l e n t fame d i d thus t h i c k l e the eares, and i n t i c e the mind of those, t h a t e i t h e r by too much b u s i n e s s e , or too g r e a t an i d l e n e s s e had n e g l e c t e d so r a r e a s i g h t , t h a t now th'one as w e l l as t h ' o t h e r s t h r u s t e d i n t o the p l a c e , and waited t h e r e p a t i e n t l y f o r the midday." weckherlin's crowds are no more than a p a t i e n t l y w a i t i n g - backdrop t o the e x t e n s i v e l y and m e t a p h o r i c a l l y d e s c r i b e d u t o p i a n scenes o f heroes and gods, even t h e i r " i d l e n e s s e " was o n l y t o t h e i r own disadvantage. assum's t e x t , however, g i v e s a p i c t u r e o f crowds t h a t need t o be c o n t r o l l e d . as the p r i n c e s , dukes and o t h e r nobles ( l i s t e d a c c o r d i n g t o rank) proceed by c a r r i a g e and horseback from the banquet i n the o l d s c h l o s s t o the new lusthaus, t h e guards and a t t e n d a n t s who f o l l o w them have a hard time f e n d i n g o f f the d i s o r d e r l y crowd of common f o l k assembled i n the g a r d e n s . these p a l a c e guards then proceeded i n t o the lusthaus b a l l r o o m t o keep the middle of the room f r e e ( f o r the b a l l e t performance?). the tournament p r o c e s s i o n s seem t o have p r e s e n t e d crowd c o n t r o l problems as w e l l , a c c o r d i n g t o assum: "then one c o u l d c l e a r l y see, l o o k i n g down from the windows o f the c a s t l e , how the e r e c t e d hoardings on the r i g h t s i d e of the tournament grounds were taken up and f i l l e d w i t h thousands of men and women-folk, so t h a t d i f f e r e n c e s c o u l d not be made i n keeping w i t h the p r o p r i e t y o f the s e s s i o n : s i n c e one had not e n l i s t e d the h e l p o f the guards and a t t e n d a n t s i n time t o f i l l the p r e s c r i b e d and d i s t i n c t p l a c e s f o r the noble knighthood, the l e a r n e d c l e r g y and persons of renown: and t o b a n i s h the d i s o r d e r l y heaped r a b b l e t o t h e i r s p e c i a l q u a r t e r s . " the nobles, each named i n order o f rank, are then shown t o proceed w i t h t h e i r p r e p a r a t i o n s , without harassment or displacement by the u n r u l y mob. assum's g u i l e l e s s account of t h e " i n a b i l i t y " of p a l a c e guards t o secure the r i g h t f u l p l a c e o f honor f o r the knighthood, the c l e r g y and the " n o t a b l e s " , which he d e l i v e r s from the h e i g h t s o f the c a s t l e , makes t r a n s p a r e n t how the f e s t i v a l was used t o d i s t i n g u i s h and d i s t a n c e c o u r t s o c i e t y from those groups immediately below i n the e s t a t e o r d e r . t h i s s t r a t e g y served t o sever the pyramid of e s t a t e h i e r a r c h y by e l e v a t i n g the t i p of t h i s s t r u c t u r e : the duke and h i s c o u r t . by e x c l u d i n g the burgher e l i t e from t h e i r p l a c e i n the f e s t i v a l , t h i s e l i t e found i t s e l f abandoned t o the r a b b l e o f s u b j e c t s who s t r a i n e d t o see the s p e c t a c l e of a r i s t o c r a t i c m a g n i f i c e n c e . t h i s program o f e x c l u s i o n was not c o n f i n e d t o t h i s ceremonial o c c a s i o n but had i t s c o u n t e r p a r t s i n o t h e r a r e a s . d i s p u t e s arose i n the 's about the a c c e s s i b i l i t y o f e d u c a t i o n . the landtag saw t h i s path t o v e r t i c a l s o c i a l m o b i l i t y and c o u r t employment c l o s i n g and asked f o r access t o t h e a r i s t o c r a t i c "collegium i l l u s t r e " , the s c h o o l f o r c o u r t i e r s , f o r i t s sons. johann f r i e d r i c h r e p l i e d t h a t he would t e a r the "collegium" down b e f o r e "peasant c h i l d r e n " were admitted. in , the duke r e l e a s e d a l l burghers from t h e i r p o s i t i o n s as p a l a c e guards; from then on they were t o a c t as n i g h t watchmen o u t s i d e the c o u r t b u i l d i n g s . the f e s t i v a l engravings, weckherlin's p a n e g y r i c , and assum's l e s s r i g o r o u s account are a l l marked by t h i s same impetus t o c o n s t r u c t an e x c l u s i v e c o u r t s o c i e t y . looked a t i n t h i s l i g h t , the f e s t i v a l and i t s images d i s c l o s e a s t r a t e g y t o d i s e n f r a n c h i s e i t s powerful " e h r b a r k e i t " w h i l e a s s e r t i n g the rank o f the c o u r t w i t h i n and o u t s i d e the german empire. the " n o t a b l e s " r e l e g a t e d t o the u n d i f f e r e n t i a t e d mob as s p e c t a t o r s , are p a r a d o x i c a l l y , by t h i s a c t of e x c l u s i o n , foregrounded as r e c i p i e n t s of the d i s p l a y of c o u r t l y m a g n i f i c e n c e . t h i s powerful p a t r i c i a n c l a s s , through t h e i r r e p r e s e n t a t i o n i n the p a r l i a m e n t , o f f e r e d the g r e a t e s t impediment t o expansion of d u c a l power. in t h a t moment o f c o n f e s s i o n a l c o n f l i c t , the c o u r t s t r o v e t o a s s e r t i t s e l f as t h e s o l e l o c u s o f a u t h o r i t y and f o r e i g n p o l i c y a d m i n i s t r a t i o n v i a a program o f c u l t u r a l aggrandizement. t h i s c u l t u r a l program i s extended i n the t e x t u a l commissions o f t h e f e s t i v a l which i n s i s t on the s o c i a l l y e l e v a t e d nature of t h e i r medium o f c o u r t l y d e s c r i p t i o n j u s t as the g r a p h i c medium submits an image o f an e x c l u s i v e a r i s t o c r a t i c s o c i a l sphere. . these k i n d s o f p u b l i c a t i o n s appear i n l a r g e numbers i n german lands a f t e r the m i d - s i x t e e n t h c e n t u r y . lexikon des buchwesens. ed. joachim k i r c h n e r , bd. ( s t u t t g a r t , ). . the authors sent a l e t t e r t o the c i t y of lucerne o f f e r i n g t h e i r works f o r s a l e . s t u t t g a r t e r h o f f e s t e . ed. l. krapf and c. wagenknecht (tubingen, ), p.vii. . the s t u t t g a r t c i v i c h i s t o r i a n otto b o r s t r e p o r t s t h a t e a r l y t r a v e l guides, r e p o r t s and p e r s o n a l l e t t e r s e u l o g i z e d the beauty and magnificence o f the wurttemberg c o u r t . s t u t t g a r t . die g e s c h i c h t e der s t a d t ( s t u t t g a r t , ), p. . . . b o r s t , p. . . k. t e n f e l d e , "adventus, zur h i s t o r i s c h e n i k o n o l o g i e " , h i s t o r i s c h e z e i t s c h r i f t . band ( ), p. . . k. t e n f e l d e , p. . . k. t e n f e l d e , p. . . k. t e n f e l d e , p. . . j o r g jochen berns, "der nackte monarch und d i e nackte wahrheit", daphnis, v o l . ( ), p. . . j . berns, p. . . georg dehio, g e s c h i c h t e der deutschen kunst ( l e i p z i g , ) , p. . . the guest l i s t s , p u b l i s h e d t w i c e d u r i n g the f e s t i v a l , a l s o were comprehensive i n d i c a t o r s of wealth and s t a t u s . each p r i n c e l y guest i s l i s t e d f o l l o w e d by an i n v e n t o r y of h i s entourage, c a t a l o g u e d a c c o r d i n g t o rank g i v i n g exact numbers of nobles, c i v i l s e r v a n t s , l a c k e y s , cooks, t a i l o r s , and d r i v e r s . they f u r t h e r served assum t o p o p u l a t e h i s p a n e g y r i c w i t h the names of a l l the a r i s t o c r a t i c a c t o r s . l. krapf and c. wagenknecht, s t u t t g a r t e r h o f f e s t e (tubingen, ), p. . . james a l l e n vann, the making of a s t a t e . wurttemberg - ( c o r n e l l , ), p. . . vann, a l s o walter grube, der s t u t t g a r t e r landtag - ( s t u t t g a r t , ). . helen p. l i e b e l , "the b o u r g e o i s i e i n southwestern germany, - : a r i s i n g c l a s s ? " , i n t e r n a t i o n a l j o u r n a l o f h i s t o r y . ( ), p. . . h. l i e b e l , p. . . . b o r s t , o p . c i t . , p. . . o. b o r s t , pp. - . . j.a. vann, o p . c i t . , p. . . j.a. vann, p. . . w i l l i a m brenchley rye, england as seen by f o r e i g n e r s (london, ), p. ix-xcii. from the y e a r on, f r i e d r i c h sent l e t t e r s and ambassadors t o queen e l i z a b e t h t o ask f o r h i s i n d u c t i o n i n t o the order of the g a r t e r : a f t e r e l e v e n years h i s s o l i c i t a t i o n s bore r e s u l t s . rye c h r o n i c l e s the l e n g t h y and stubborn s u p p l i c a t i o n s by t h i s secondary monarch. . e r n s t m u l l e r , k l e i n e g e s c h i c h t e wurttembergs ( s t u t t g a r t , ), pp. - . . jurgen von kruedener, die r o l l e des hofes c i t e d i n i n g r i d l a u r i e n , 'hofische' und b u r g e r l i c h e elemente i n den " g a i s t l i c h e n und w e l t l i c h e n g e d i c h t e n georg rodolf weckherlins ( ) ( s t u t t g a r t , ), pp. - . . f.l. c a r s t e n , p r i n c e s and p a r l i a m e n t s i n germany from the f i f t e e n t h t o the e i g h t e e n t h century (oxford, ), p. . . w. grube, o p . c i t . , p. . . w. grube, p. . . f.l. c a r s t e n , o p . c i t . , pp. - . . c i t e d i n i. l a u r i e n , o p . c i t . , p. . my t r a n s l a t i o n . . w. grube, o p . c i t . , p. . . l. h. wuthrich, das druckgraphische werk von matthaus merian d. 'a' ( b a s e l , ), p.xi. . l.h. wuthrich, p.xii. . i. l a u r i e n , o p . c i t . , p. . . i . l a u r i e n , p. . . johann-augustin assum, warhaffte r e l a t i o n . . . e t c . ( s t u t t g a r t , ) p . l . my t r a n s l a t i o n . . j . m a r a v a l l , c u l t u r e o f the baroque (minneapolis, ), p. . . while weekly newspapers were p u b l i s h e d i n german t e r r i t o r i e s s i n c e , (johann f r i e d r i c h ' s d i a r y r e c o r d s h i s r e c e i p t of such p u b l i c a t i o n s ) concerns about the dangers t h a t t h i s medium h e l d f o r r u l e r s were not v o i c e d u n t i l mid-century. j . j . berns i n "der nackte monarch und d i e nackte wahrheit" (ftn. ) a n a l y s e s the debate about newspapers t h a t takes p l a c e i n the l a t e seventeenth century. . j.a. assum, o p . c i t . , p. . . g.r. weckherlin, triumpha shews. p. . r e p r i n t e d i n s t u t t g a r t e r h o f f e s t e . o p . c i t . . g.r. weckherlin, p. . . j.a. assum, o p . c i t . , p. . my t r a n s l a t i o n . . j.a. assum, p . l . nd p a r t . my t r a n s l a t i o n . . w. grube, o p . c i t . , p. . . o. b o r s t , o p . c i t . , p. . chapter p r i n c e l y v i r t u e a n d t h e " k u b e l s t e c h e n " an a d v a n t a g e t h e t e x t u a l r e p r e s e n t a t i o n s h a d o v e r t h e v i s u a l medium a s a n e x t e n s i o n o f t h e f e s t i v a l p r o g r a m was t h a t t h e c o u r t l y p o e t r y c o u l d d e c l a i m p r i n c e l y v i r t u e s i n a way t h e e n g r a v i n g s c o u l d n o t . b o t h t h e v i s u a l a n d t h e t e x t u a l r e p r e s e n t a t i o n s c e n t e r e d o n t h e t h e a t r i c a l c h i v a l r i c e x e r c i s e s p e r f o r m e d b y n o b l e a c t o r s . i n t h e t e x t s t h e n a r r a t i v e i m p a c t o f t h e s e d r a m a t i c p e r f o r m a n c e s c o u l d b e r e p l i c a t e d t o u n d e r s c o r e a r i s t o c r a t i c v i r t u e s . i n t h e p r i n t e d i l l u s t r a t i o n s t h e s e d i d a c t i c p l a y s w e r e t r a n s p o s e d i n t o t h e t r i u m p h a l p r o c e s s i o n f o r m a t t h a t s e r v e d , a s we h a v e s e e n , t o i n d i c a t e i n n e r a n d i n t e r - c o u r t r a n k w h i l e p r o m o t i n g a v i s i o n o f e x c l u s i v e a r i s t o c r a t i c a u t h o r i t y . the t e x t s e u l o g i z e d t h e v i r t u e s t h a t j u s t i f i e d a r i s t o c r a t i c p r i v i l e g e a n d a n d p r o c l a i m e d t h e q u a l i t i e s t h a t d i s t i n g u i s h e d t h e h i g h n o b i l i t y a s l e g i t i m a t e r u l e r s . the p a r a d e o f l a v i s h l y c o s t u m e d n o b l e s r e p r e s e n t e d i n t h e e n g r a v i n g s c o u l d n o t s u f f i c i e n t l y b r i n g t h e r u l e r - l e g i t i m i z i n g c o n t e n t o f t h e c h i v a l r i c p l a y s t o l i f e . the p r e v i o u s c h a p t e r a n a l y z e d t h e p r o n o u n c e d a r i s t o c r a t i c a n d e x c l u s i v e n a t u r e o f t h e c o m m e m o r a t i v e v i s u a l a n d t e x t u a l c o m m i s s i o n s b y t h e c o u r t a n d s p e c u l a t e d o n w h i c h a u d i e n c e s t h i s m a t e r i a l was i n t e n d e d t o a d d r e s s . t h i s s e g m e n t w i l l e x a m i n e t h e s i n g l e e n g r a v i n g i n t h e s e r i e s w h i c h f e a t u r e s n o n - n o b l e s . the g r a p h i c d e p i c t i o n o f t h e " k u b e l s t e c h e n " breaks rank w i t h the t r i u m p h a l p r o c e s s i o n format o f the s e r i e s and enjoys a prominence t h a t t h i s event i s not g i v e n i n the t e x t u a l r e p r e s e n t a t i o n s ( f i g . ) . only weckherlin's triumphal shews expands on t h i s p a r t i c u l a r german p r a c t i c e i n t h i s e n g l i s h v e r s i o n d e d i c a t e d t o the e n g l i s h p r i n c e s s . s e v e r a l paragraphs are devoted t o the e x p l a n a t i o n o f the "kubelstechen": "...the p r i n c e s s e l e c t r i c e her highnesse, a l l t h o t h e r p r i n c e s , lords and l a d i e s went a f t e r d i n n e r againe i n t o the t i l t - g a r d e n , t h e r e t o e n t e r t a i n e t h e i r t o o - w o r t h i e s i g h t w i t h an o t h e r turney, or r a t h e r a darke shadow of a turney, r e p r e s e n t e d by tub-headed a d v e n t u r e r s . t ' i s a s p o r t , i never saw but i n germanie, and t h e r e f o r e doe i not know,, how t o tearme i t . but t o s e t i t downe the b e s t i can, me t h i n k s t h a t even as one may see the unspotted sun s h i n e i n a f i l t h i e puddle, or upon a d u n g h i l l , so doeth appeare some r e f l e c t i o n , o f the worthinesse of l u s t r o u s c h i v a l r i e on those c o u n t e r f e i t r i d e r s . for they are commonly horsekeepers and groomes o f the s t a b l e s , t h a t b e i n g armed, as i w i l l t e l l you, hazard themselves t o get some manie f a l l s without money, or some money not without f a l l s . " the poet goes on t o d e s c r i b e how. the r i d e r s who are " b l u n t l y g a r n i s h e d " i n "bigge sacks, bombasted w i t h hay" are " c o n s t r a i n e d t o f a l l down"; the unwieldy g r a c e l e s s r i d e r s stage a performance i n which: "...some went over, f l y i n g l i k e s h i t t l e c o c k s , t h a t have but two f e a t h e r s : and o t h e r s , t h a t had more s k i l l i n horsemanship, h i t t i n g t h e i r ennemies d i d push themselves downe: so t h a t t h e r e was n o t h i n g seene but tumbling downe, and g e t t i n g up t o tumble down a g a i n . " t h i s p a i d performance by s t a b l e boys i s b r i e f l y mentioned i n h a i n h o f e r ' s r e p o r t as an amusement t h a t provokes much l a u g h t e r . weckherlin's e n g l i s h d e s c r i p t i o n makes c l e a r t h a t t h i s b u f f o o n e r y i s performed as a clumsy c o n t r a s t t o the noble tournament. the poets do not devote many words, i n the german t e x t s , t o t h i s event which d i v e r g e s from the grandeur of the p r e c e d i n g pageantry. in the engravings t h i s doomed c o n t e s t of awkward and b u l k y r i d e r s i s f a i t h f u l l y d e p i c t e d i n a p r i n t which f e a t u r e s the h a t c h e d - i n t e r r a i n where t h i s performance t a k e s p l a c e . the d i s o r d e r and g r a c e l e s s n e s s o f t h i s b a t t l e i s a c t e d out i n an "earthbound" space, i n c o n t r a s t w i t h the e t h e r e a l plane evoked by the blank h o r i z o n s of the noble parade. the f a c t t h a t t h i s scene o f f a l l e n and tumbling horsemen i s g i v e n a t t e n t i o n i n the g r a p h i c work p o i n t s t o i t s u s e f u l n e s s i n h i g h l i g h t i n g the l o f t y and u n a t t a i n a b l e nature of the a r i s t r o c r a t s c h i v a l r i c d i s p l a y s . the "kubelstechen", by i t s a n t i t h e s i s o f dynamic d i s a r r a y e n l i v e n s the r a t h e r u n i n s p i r i n g s u c c e s s i o n o f gods and heroes p r e s e n t e d i n the t r i u m p h a l p r o c e s s i o n format of the engravings. while t h i s p r o c e s s i o n arrangement o f the d e p i c t i o n s served w e l l t o d i s p l a y rank, the poet's t e x t s added another l a y e r o f meaning by i n c o r p o r a t i n g the " c a r t e l s " or c h a l l e n g e s , which were read out a t the f e s t i v a l b e f o r e each tournament d i s p l a y , i n t o t h e i r r e p r e s e n t a t i o n s . these v e r s e s (and sometimes songs) which are r e p r i n t e d i n assum*s and weckherlin's accounts, i d e n t i f y the k n i g h t l y a t t r i b u t e s shared by the p r e s e n t e r and h i s m y t h o l o g i c a l or h e r o i c a l t e r - e g o . t h i s was no mere p l a y - a c t i n g , as the f e s t i v a l h i s t o r i a n s alewyn and s a l z l e p o i n t out: " i t i s no l e s s than the e x p r e s s i o n of a s o c i a l and p o l i t i c a l c l a i m . in the f e s t i v a l , c o u r t l y s o c i e t y a t t a i n s i t s most v a l i d form. in the f e s t i v a l , i t r e p r e s e n t s t h a t which i t wants t o be, t h a t which i t imagines t o be, and i n any case, t h a t which i t wants t o appear t o be. i t i s an impassioned demonstration, i n which t h i s s o c i e t y uses a l l the r h e t o r i c a l metaphors w i t h which i t l i k e s t o c e l e b r a t e i t s e l f , as a mask, and tb^en i t l i f t s t h i s masquerade t o the l e v e l of mythology." in t h e v i s u a l medium, a l l t h i s masquerade, even i n i t s d i s p l a y of wealth and i n v e n t i o n , remains j u s t t h a t , and does not f u l f i l l the r e s i d u a l f u n c t i o n t h a t the o b s o l e t e c h i v a l r i c e x e r c i s e s d i s c l o s e i n the p o e t i c t e x t s . the poet p r o v i d e d the s t o r y , v i a the c a r t e l s , i n which the v i r t u e s o f the " k n i g h t s " were a c t e d out. the c a r t e l s were important because as one of weckherlin's a s s e r t s : "the r e p u t a t i o n of a k n i g h t does not c o n s i s t i n outward shew, but i n t h a t h e e i s a b l e t o performe and t o defend m e r r i l y and q u i e t l y . " the poet's s c r i p t allowed the p r i n c e l y a c t o r t o "performe or defend m e r r i l y and q u i e t l y " w i t h the assurance t h a t h i s a t t r i b u t e s (be they bravery, h u m i l i t y , c o n t i n e n c e , g e n e r o s i t y , etc.) would be expressed t o the audience. the tournament, having abandoned i t s medieval form o f combat as a t e s t o f the r u l e r ' s prowess, remains as an empty s h e l l of words which r e t a i n s an i d e o l o g i c a l f u n c t i o n . t h i s s h e l l now comprises v i r t u e s which are o n l y a t t r i b u t a b l e t o the formal . noble r u l i n g c l a s s . these v i r t u e s belong s o l e l y t o an e l i t e whose p o s i t i o n i s beyond q u e s t i o n . the f e s t i v a l , where these a r i s t o c r a t i c a t t r i b u t e s are a c t e d out and c e l e b r a t e d , then c o n f i r m s the c l a i m s t o power of the noble e l i t e as the s o l e h o l d e r s o f h e r o i c and g o d - l i k e v i r t u e s . the a l l e g o r i c a l s c r i p t s convey the " i n n e r q u a l i t i e s " t h a t mark the r u l e r and t h a t speak t o the r o l e o f the duke t h a t the landtag sought. in the f e s t i v a l , and i n i t s t e x t u a l documentation, the duke c o u l d a c t out r o l e s which a l l e g o r i c a l l y r e v e a l him t o be a j u s t , brave, and wise defender o f the f a i t h and the f a t h e r l a n d , a l b e i t i n a v e h i c l e the p a r l i a m e n t a r i a n s found w a s t e f u l and f o r e i g n . while the t e x t s imbued the k n i g h t l y p r e t e n s e s w i t h a c o n f i r m a t i o n of the moral c l a i m s t o power o f the c o u r t , the l e g i t i m i z i n g v i r t u e s o f the e l i t e c o u l d not be adequately underscored i n the engravings. here, the d e p i c t i o n of the "kubelstechen" i s c a l l e d i n t o p l a y w i t h a l l the might of the r h e t o r i c a l d e v i c e o f a n t i t h e s i s , t o r i d i c u l e the n o t i o n o f f i n d i n g k n i g h t l y a t t r i b u t e s o u t s i d e the ranks of the c o u r t n o b i l i t y . . g.r. weckherlin, t r i u m p h a l l shews, p. , r e p r i n t e d i n s t u t t g a r t e r h o f f e s t e . o p . c i t . . g.r. weckherlin, o p . c i t . , p. . . g.r. weckherlin, o p . c i t . , p. . . r i c h a r d alewyn and k a r l s a l z l e , das g r o s s e w e l t t h e a t e r (hamburg, ), p. . my t r a n s l a t i o n . . g.r. weckherlin, o p . c i t . , p. . . i n g r i d l a u r i e n , 'hofische' und b u r g e r l i c h e elemente i n den ' g a i s t l i c h e n u. w e l t l i c h e n g e d i c h t e n georg rodolf weckherlins ( ) ( s t u t t g a r t , ), p. . . i . l a u r i e n , o p . c i t . , p. chapter a grotesque t r a n s l a t i o n of the empire the b a n a l i l l u s t r a t i v e q u a l i t y o f the t r i u m p h a l p r o c e s s i o n format, f o r a l l i t s uses i n the e x p o s i t i o n of s o c i a l h i e r a r c h i e s , c o u l d not f u l f i l l an i n t e n t t h a t was s t a t e d i n assum's t e x t . the p a n e g y r i c t e x t promised t o enable and s t i m u l a t e a l i v e l y d i s c o u r s e among those o f e l e v a t e d s o c i a l s t a n d i n g and l e a r n i n g . the i n t e n t to. provoke and c h a l l e n g e l e a r n e d d i s c u s s i o n f o r a s o c i a l e l i t e t h a t assum expressed i s r e p l i c a t e d i n the symbolic t a b l e a u x which are i n t e r s p e r s e d i n what would otherwise be an e s s e n t i a l l y t e d i o u s r e p r e s e n t e d parade. i n t o the standard s o c i a l d i s c i p l i n i n g f u n c t i o n o f the t r i u m p h a l p r o c e s s i o n are i n s e r t e d complex and v i s u a l l y e x c i t i n g elements which address the s p e c i f i c o c c a s i o n o f the f e s t i v a l . these are the most e y e - c a t c h i n g engravings o f the v i s u a l r e p r e s e n t a t i o n ; here n o v e l t y and i n n o v a t i o n are f r e e l y deployed t o evoke wonder and amazement i n what has been shown t o be a r a t h e r d i v e r s e audience. but these c h a l l e n g i n g images do not "speak" on t h e i r own and the t e x t s do not make them "speak" e i t h e r . u n l i k e t h e i r antecedents, the i l l u s t r a t e d broadsheets, where t e x t and image a c t e d i n c o n c e r t t o produce meaning f o r wide and even i l l i t e r a t e audiences, the c o u r t l y v i s u a l r e p r e s e n t a t i o n s have no e x p l a n a t o r y c a p t i o n s . these segments of the v i s u a l r e p r e s e n t a t i o n remain l o c k e d i n a language t h a t was not a c c e s s i b l e t o a l l but a s e l e c t audience t h a t was c l o s e t o i t s c o u r t l y producers. these e x t r a o r d i n a r i l y s u g g e s t i v e y e t d e l i b e r a t e l y obscure elements o f the f e s t i v a l r e p r e s e n t a t i o n encode an i n t e n t t o exclude; t h a t a l s o makes t h i s m a t e r i a l dangerous t e r r i t o r y f o r a r t h i s t o r i c a l study. the v i s u a l medium i n i t s p a r t i c u l a r a b i l i t y t o s i m u l t a n e o u s l y accommodate m u l t i p l e s i g n s and symbols extends an i n v i t a t i o n f o r i c o n o g r a p h i c excess. my e f f o r t s t o access these assemblages o f v i s u a l v o c a b u l a r i e s must stand as s u g g e s t i o n s f o r r e f l e c t i n g on t h i s d i f f i c u l t m a t e r i a l . in e x p l i c a t i n g the m u l t i p l e metaphors o f the p r i n t s i hope t h a t my a n a l y s i s w i l l not s t r a y beyond the circumstances i n and f o r which these images were i n v e n t e d and the audiences they addressed. t h i s c h a p t e r w i l l focus on the r e p r e s e n t a t i o n o f the "head" b a l l e t which appears i n the second f u l l - p a g e i l l u s t r a t i o n o f the g r a p h i c work ( f i g . ) . t h i s performance was staged on the f i r s t evening of the f e s t i v a l and must have had a key f u n c t i o n as a thematic i n t r o d u c t i o n t o the f e s t i v a l program. the p i c t o r i a l t r a n s m i s s i o n of t h i s strange dance f e a t u r e s the combinatory form of the grotesque t o p r e s e n t a most i n t r i g u i n g image. i w i l l propose t h a t the g i a n t head d e p i c t i o n can be a s s o c i a t e d w i t h the a p o c a l y p t i c r o s i c r u c i a n t e x t s t h a t emerged i n the y e a r s b e f o r e the t h i r t y years war. t h i s n a r r a t i v e base f o r the b i z a r r e head b a l l e t i n i t s c h i l i a s t i c s t o r y l i n e seems t o take up the theme of a never-performed masque intended as p a r t o f the f e s t i v i t i e s h e l d i n honor o f the p a l a t i n a t e marriage i n london. the s t u t t g a r t f e s t i v a l , w h i l e b i l l e d as a baptism, does not pay hommage t o t h i s event i n the engravings. a l l the i n n o v a t i v e s k i l l s of the f e s t i v a l d e s i g n e r s went i n t o an awesome b a l l e t which c e l e b r a t e d the t r u e s i g n i f i c a n c e of the f e s t i v a l , the v i s i t of the e l e c t o r f r e d e r i c k o f t h e p a l a t i n a t e and h i s w i f e , p r i n c e s s e l i z a b e t h . a c c o r d i n g t o the poet weckherlin, i t was the e n g l i s h p r i n c e s s whose " b l e s s e d presence was the c h i e f cause of the shews." the b a l l e t found a s u i t a b l e theme f o r t h i s important s t a t e v i s i t . four g i a n t heads appeared i n the lusthaus b a l l r o o m and, a c c o r d i n g t o weckherlin"s account, each e x p e l l e d t h r e e dancers, a l l i n d i f f e r e n t n a t i o n a l costumes. only h a i n h o f e r ' s r e p o r t t e l l s who each of the twelve dancers was; duke johann f r i e d r i c h of wurttemberg appeared as the "blacke moore" w h i l e h i s c o u r t i e r s r e p r e s e n t e d the e l e v e n o t h e r " n a t i o n s " . a c c o r d i n g t o weckherlin, these were an englishman f i r s t , f o l l o w e d by a "scottishman", an "irishman", a "frenchman", a "high-dutchman", a "laponian", a "spaniard", an " i t a l i a n " , a " p o l o n i a n " , a "blacke a moore", a "turke" and an . . " i n d i a n , or americaine". each performed h i s own dance which the o t h e r s c o p i e d i n t u r n , u n t i l a l l were f i n a l l y dancing the . . same way. t h i s p a r a b l e of i n t e r n a t i o n a l c o o p e r a t i o n addressed "the cause of the shews", the presence o f the p a l a t i n e e l e c t o r f r e d e r i c k v and h i s w i f e e l i z a b e t h and c e l e b r a t e d more than j u s t a meeting of german p r o t e s t a n t p r i n c e s . the f e s t i v a l , w i t h james i daughter i n attendance, h e l d the hope of overcoming the o v e r r i d i n g problem t h a t f a c e d those who wished t o oppose the might o f the c a t h o l i c a x i s , which was the welding of the numerous enemies of the habsburgs i n t o a coherent r i v a l i n t e r n a t i o n a l a l l i a n c e . the e n g l i s h king james i s t i l l seemed t o be promoting a p r o t e s t a n t a l l i a n c e when he agreed t o the marriage of h i s daughter e l i z a b e t h t o the l e a d e r o f the p r o t e s t a n t union o f german p r i n c e s , f r e d e r i c k v. l a v i s h f e s t i v i t i e s took p l a c e from london t o h e i d e l b e r g t o c e l e b r a t e "the union o f the thames and the rhine". the s t u t t g a r t baptism p r o v i d e d a forum t o extend and c o n f i r m t h i s d y n a s t i c a l l i a n c e t o wurttemberg and t o the member s t a t e s o f the german p r o t e s t a n t union. a s h o r t h i s t o r i c a l d e s c r i p t i o n of the baptism ceremony w r i t t e n by an anonymous wurttemberg r e p o r t e r t e l l s t h a t the g e n g l i s h p r i n c e s s was l e d i n t o the church " l i k e a b r i d e " " t h i s emphasis on the b r i d e - l i k e s t a t u s of e l i z a b e t h s t u a r t i n d i c a t e s t h a t the baptism and the many marriage f e s t i v a l s had an analogous purpose. a c c o r d i n g t o the german f e s t i v a l h i s t o r i a n berns, the o c c a s i o n - s p e c i f i c elements of a f e s t i v a l and i t s r e p r e s e n t a t i o n r e q u i r e d ever new but f u n c t i o n a l l y s i m i l a r symbolic m a t e r i a l f o r the d i d a c t i c and demonstrative purposes o f each d y n a s t i c event. a r e c e n t study by david norbrook, "'the masque of t r u t h ' : court entertainments and i n t e r n a t i o n a l p r o t e s t a n t p o l i t i c s i n the e a r l y s t u a r t p e r i o d " p r e s e n t s evidence t h a t a masque w i t h such a " f u n c t i o n a l s i m i l a r i t y " t o the g i a n t head b a l l e t was t o have been p r e s e n t e d a t one of the london marriage f e s t i v i t i e s . norbrook examines the i n t e r e s t i n g case o f a masque, composed f o r the wedding, t h a t never was performed, even though i t s d e s c r i p t i o n was p r i n t e d i n a french commemorative pamphlet. the theme o f t h i s suppressed masque, as norbrook p o i n t s out, may have been p i c k e d up i n the g i a n t head b a l l e t h e l d a t the s t u t t g a r t 'baptism . "the masque of t r u t h " would have been, had i t been performed, one o f the most s p e c t a c u l a r entertainments y e t staged a t the e n g l i s h c o u r t , and o f a s c a l e and grandeur f a r s u r p a s s i n g t h a t o f the s t u t t g a r t b a l l e t . norbrook o f f e r s a summary of the never-performed s p e c t a c l e from i t s f i c t i t i o u s d e s c r i p t i o n i n the french t e x t . the masque begins w i t h muses s i n g i n g the p r a i s e s of king james, the muses then l e a d a t l a s t o england where h i s globe opens t o r e v e a l europe and her f i v e daughters (france, spain, germany, i t a l y , g r e e c e ) ; each has t h r e e pages and a l l are i n n a t i o n a l costume. they are f o l l o w e d by the ocean, h i s w i f e the mediterranean, and by the c h i e f r i v e r s of europe. the p r i n c e s o f europe appear and dance w i t h the d a u g h t e r s / p r i n c e s s e s . the same procedure takes p l a c e w i t h a s i a and a f r i c a and t h e i r daughters. the muses then c a l l on the i n t e r n a t i o n a l assemblage t o abandon t h e i r q u a r r e l s , t o l o o k t o king james and i m i t a t e h i s z e a l f o r the t r u e r e l i g i o n . "the masque ends w i t h one more s p e c t a c u l a r e f f e c t : " the globe s p l i t s i n two and d i s a p p e a r s , l e a v i n g behind i t a p a r a d i s e guarded by an angel b e a r i n g a f l a m i n g sword, w i t h a s k u l l a t h i s f e e t . t r u t h i n v i t e s the queens and t h e i r f o l l o w e r s t o overcome t h e i r f e a r of death w i t h repentance and f a i t h and e n t e r p a r a d i s e . a t l a s and the muses l e a d the n a t i o n s i n t o p a r a d i s e and the sword and s k u l l v a n i s h ; then the gates of p a r a d i s e c l o s e behxnd them. a c c o r d i n g t o norbrook, t h i s masque breaks from the o l d p a n e g y r i c topos of england as a 'world d i v i d e d from the world', and addresses the marriage as the b a s i s o f an i n t e r n a t i o n a l r e l i g i o u s r e f o r m a t i o n and not j u s t as a d y n a s t i c union. the r e l i g i o u s z e a l o t r y i m p l i c i t i n the a p o c a l y p t i c end t o the masque "goes beyond the c a u t i o n o f o f f i c i a l pronouncements on the match. and the p r e s e n t a t i o n o f t r a d i t i o n a l l y mighty powers l i k e spain and france bowing down b e f o r e b r i t a i n and the p a l a t i n a t e i s h a r d l y t a c t f u l i n the c o n t e x t o f european diplomacy." the m i l i t a n t p r o t e s t a n t message i n the masque was p r o b l e m a t i c t o james whose g o a l i t was t o pursue a pragmatic f o r e i g n p o l i c y t h a t responded t o changes i n the european balance of . . . power. in f a c t , james regarded r e l i g i o u s enthusiasm as a dangerous f o r c e t h a t might p r e s e n t a p o l i t i c a l t h r e a t t o h i s a u t h o r i t y . norbrook e x p l o r e s evidence t h a t p o i n t s t o the c o l l a p s e o f the p o l i c y o f rapprochement w i t h european p r o t e s t a n t i s m t h a t o c c u r r e d w i t h the death of p r i n c e henry s h o r t l y b e f o r e the marriage of h i s s i s t e r e l i z a b e t h t o the p a l a t i n a t e e l e c t o r . i r o n i c a l l y , the e n g l i s h wedding was taken as a s i g n of james' s o l i d a r i t y w i t h the anti-habsburg cause of the p a l a t i n a t e p r i n c e ; h i s ambivalence towards the c o n f e s s i o n a l i s s u e d i d not become e v i d e n t u n t i l i t was too l a t e and f r e d e r i c k v had a l r e a d y embarked on the i l l - f a t e d bohemian adventure. at the "baptism", the marriage of the rhine and the thames s t i l l was a cause f o r c e l e b r a t i o n f o r those p r o t e s t a n t p r i n c e s t h a t the m i l i t a n t c a l v i n i s t s of the p a l a t i n a t e had managed t o e n l i s t i n t o a union f o r defense. the c e n t r a l m o t i f of the meeting was p r e s e n t e d i n the b a l l e t on the f i r s t evening of the f e s t i v a l ; t h i s performance i s t h e m a t i c a l l y l i n k e d t o the too f e r v e n t e n g l i s h masque. norbrook c h a r a c t e r i z e s the s t u t t g a r t b a l l e t t h i s way: "...though l e s s o v e r t l y r e l i g i o u s i n tone, i t s symbolism, and the g e n e r a l o c c a s i o n would s u r e l y have r e c a l l e d t o ( p r i n c e s s e l i z a b e t h ) the dance of the many n a t i o n s o r i g i n a l l y planned f o r her wedding f e s t i v i t i e s " the "masque o f t r u t h " , even i f never performed, may w e l l have been known t o the wurttemberg d e s i g n e r s of the f e s t i v a l from i t s french t e x u a l d e s c r i p t i o n . the i n v e n t i o n o f a t h e m a t i c a l l y s i m i l a r v a r i a t i o n c o u l d a l s o have addressed the knowledgeable e l i t e assum's t e x t claimed as the w o r l d l y - wise r e c i p i e n t s o f h i s german p a n e g y r i c . the s i m i l a r i t y of the o c c a s i o n of the wedding and the baptism allowed f o r the u t i l i z a t i o n of the same theme, but i n keeping w i t h the need f o r n o v e l t y ( t h a t berns i d e n t i f i e d as a c h a r a c t e r i s t i c of c o u r t l y f e s t i v a l p r a c t i c e ) , a new form was found. t h i s new symbolism i m p l i e d , c o n t r a r y t o norbrook's a n a l y s i s , the v e r y same a p o c a l y p t i c moment t h a t was c o n t a i n e d i n the suppressed masque. to l o c a t e the source of the a p o c a l y p t i c moment i m p l i e d i n the b a l l e t , the commissioned t e x t s o f assum and weckherlin o f f e r no i n t e r p r e t i v e guidance. berns a n a l y z e s t h i s f r u s t r a t i n g q u a l i t y of c o u r t l y r e p o r t a g e : i t s r e p e t i t i o n o f the u n i n t e r p r e t e d s i g n . the r e p r e s e n t a t i o n of the f e s t i v a l i s c a r r i e d out without commentary; the s i g n system i n use i s not made a c c e s s i b l e by the a b s o l u t i s t c o u r t , when, i n the process o f s e c u l a r i z a t i o n of i t s c l a i m s t o power, i t foregrounds a shock e f f e c t t h a t i s designed t o numb the audience. the complex o f m u l t i p l e a l l e g o r i e s t h a t r e p l a c e d the r u l e r - v a l i d a t i n g s a c r e d ceremonial s u b o r d i n a t e d communication p o t e n t i a l t o a p a r a l y z i n g show of magnificence. the l e s s e r mechanism o f symbol t r a n s m i s s i o n c o u l d , however, not be abandoned by the secondary e a r l y a b s o l u t i s t c o u r t of wurttemberg - i n c o n t r a s t w i t h james' i c o u r t , which had suppressed "the masque of t r u t h " i n f a v o r of masques which emphasized mystery and ceremony. the "baptism" f e s t i v a l , h e l d a t a moment of c r i s i s , s t i l l u t i l i z e d a r e p e r t o i r e of a l l e g o r i c a l m a t e r i a l t h a t addressed the hopes and f e a r s of the c o u r t and i t s s u b j e c t s . a key t o some of the f e s t i v a l symbolism can perhaps be found i n the w i d e l y - c i r c u l a t e d m i l l e n a r i a n t r a c t s a t t r i b u t e d t o the wurttemberg t h e o l o g i a n johann v a l e n t i n andreae. the h i s t o r i a n r.j.w. evans d e s c r i b e s these " r o s i c r u c i a n " t r a c t s as a "strange corpus of w r i t i n g s c l a i m i n g t o o f f e r u n i v e r s a l enlightenment through the medium of s e c r e t wisdom, w i t h p l e n t y o f c h i l i a s t i c i n t i m a t i o n s " . frances yates study o f these t e x t s (the r o s i c r u c i a n enlightenment) connects the appearance o f the r o s i c r u c i a n pamphlets t o the hopes r a i s e d by the supposed a l l i a n c e o f england and german p r o t e s t a n t s . y a t e s r e a d i n g o f these e s o t e r i c t e x t s has been b i t i n g l y c r i t i c i z e d f o r her too a v i d h y p o t h e s i z i n g about the t r a n s m i s s i o n of hermetic thought v i a symbol, a l l u s i o n and supposed p e r s o n a l c o n t a c t s throughout europe which f i n a l l y , i n her a n a l y s i s , had r e p e r c u s s i o n s i n the i n i t i a l stages of the s c i e n t i f i c r e v o l u t i o n . the r o s i c u c i a n t e x t s , a c c o r d i n g t o the evidence she presented, arose out of the e n g l i s h i n f l u e n c e on p a l a t i n a t e c u l t u r a l and i n t e l l e c t u a l l i f e and came t o form a p a r t o f p a l a t i n a t e propaganda campaigns a g a i n s t habsburg power. her a n a l y s i s has been too a l l u s i v e and i n d i r e c t t o convince o t h e r h i s t o r i a n s . the c o n n e c t i o n o f these t e x t s t o the t u r m o i l of the pre-war years i s much l e s s i n doubt. a l e s s f a r - r e a c h i n g a n a l y s i s by the german h i s t o r i a n r i c h a r d van dulmen does not go beyond the t e r r i t o r y o f wurttemberg where the presumed author andreae wrote the t r a c t s . a c c o r d i n g t o h i s r e a d i n g these hermetic t e x t s promoted a second p r o t e s t a n t r e f o r m a t i o n by p r o v i d i n g an i r e n i c a l t e r n a t i v e t o the deep d i v i s i o n s among c a l v i n i s t s and lutherans. the e a r l i e s t r o s i c r u c i a n m a n i f e s t o s which appeared around , the fama and the c o n f e s s i o , f o r e t e l l , i n a powerful and p r o p h e t i c a p o c a l y p t i c tone t h a t a g r e a t r e f o r m a t i o n i s a t hand which w i l l s i g n a l the r e t u r n t o the s t a t e o f adam i n p a r a d i s e . the s u b t e x t of the p r o p h e c i e s i s a c a l l f o r a second p r o t e s t a n t r e f o r m a t i o n t h a t w i l l b r i n g f o r t h the m i l l e n i u m . the fama. which i s the core o f the r o s i c r u c i a n myth, c a l l e d f o r t h a l o t o f i n t e r e s t from a l l s o c i a l l e v e l s . the passage o f the fama t h a t i s r e l e v a n t t o the g i a n t head b a l l e t i s found i n the e x p l i c a t i o n of the r o s i c r u c i a n credo where p r o t e s t a n t f e r v o u r and e x p r e s s i o n s o f a l l e g i a n c e t o the empire are tempered w i t h i n t i m a t i o n s of g r e a t change: "in p o l i t i a we acknowledge the roman empire and quartam monarcham f o r our c h r i s t i a n head, a l b e i t we know what a l t e r a t i o n s be a t hand, and would f a i n impart the same w i t h a l l our h e a r t s t o o t h e r godly l e a r n e d men..." the acceptance of the t h e o r y of the f o u r monarchies, pronounced i n the r o s i c r u c i a n manifesto r e f e r s t o the medieval i d e a o f the " t r a n s l a t i o n " of the roman empire t o germany, from which the holy roman empire o f the german n a t i o n took i t s name. the r e v e l a t i o n i n the book o f d a n i e l t h a t p r o p h e s i e d t h a t the world would be r e i g n e d over by a t o t a l o f f o u r monarchies or empires u n t i l the apocalypse, was c o d i f i e d i n medieval s c h o l a r s h i p where the monarchies were i d e n t i f i e d as the babylonian, the p e r s i a n , the greek and f i n a l l y , the roman. charlemagne's r e i g n , whose "roman" endorsement s i g n i f i e d the t r a n s f e r of the f i n a l empire onto german s o i l , was the b a s i s o f the c o n t i n u e d a u t h o r i t y of the t h e o r y . the b e l i e f t h a t the world would end w i t h t h e f a l l o f the f o u r t h empire c a r r i e d weight i n t o the seventeenth c e n t u r y and beyond; not o n l y as a h i s t o r i o g r a p h i c fundamental, . . but a l s o as a p o l i t i c a l source of s t r e n g t h . in c o n s t i t u t i o n a l and l e g a l t r e a t i s e s the b e l i e f i n the g o d - w i l l e d s u r v i v a l o f the roman empire s h i n e s through as a f i r s t - c l a s s i d e o l o g i c a l weapon a g a i n s t i n t e r n a l and e x t e r n a l enemies of the german empire. d a n i e l ' s prophecy was always r e c a l l e d as evidence t h a t the roman-german empire c o u l d not f a l l b e f o r e the end of the world. even luther, w h i l e r e j e c t i n g the roman " t r a n s l a t i o n " t h e o r y as a v a l i d a t i o n o f p a p a l a u t h o r i t y , c i t e d d a n i e l ' s r e v e l a t i o n as empowering evidence f o r the i m p o s s i b i l i t y of the e c l i p s e o f the german-roman empire by the turks. in the s i x t e e n t h century, german h i s t o r y t e a c h e r s c o n f i n e d themselves t o a p o l i t i c a l n a r r a t i v e o f the f o r t u n e s o f the f o u r b i b l i c a l monarchies. the t h e o r y o f the " t r a n s l a t i o n " o f the roman empire t o the german empire formed the underpinnings o f the c o n s t i t u t i o n a l and the l e g a l system. even as the p r o t e s t a n t p r i n c e s were o r g a n i z i n g themselves i n t o a union t o defend themselves a g a i n s t t h e i r c a t h o l i c c o u n t e r p a r t s , they make i t c l e a r t h a t they d i d not have the g o a l o f b r e a k i n g up the empire, as r e v e a l e d by the preamble t o the c o n s t i t u t i o n o f the union: "in view o f the urgent n e c e s s i t y , we, the undersigned e l e c t o r s and e s t a t e s of the holy roman empire, much l e s s t o damage but much more t o s t r e n g t h e n and uphold peace and u n i t y i n the holy empire, as d e d i c a t e d and obedient e s t a t e s o f the empire of the german n a t i o n , our beloved f a t h e r l a n d , i n order t o advance the common w e l l - b e i n g , our l a n d and people and a l s o those e s t a t e s who w i l l i n f u t u r e j o i n us t o f u r t h e r peace, o r d e r and p r o t e c t i o n i n t h e name o f god the almighty, have one and a l l r e a p e d the p r e s e n t amicable and c o n f i d e n t i a l agreement... continued a l l e g i a n c e t o the p r e c e p t s of empire and emperor was a l s o a b a s i c demand of the r e l u c t a n t wurttemberg landtag members when f a c e d w i t h johann f r i e d r i c h ' s d e c i s i o n t o j o i n the p r o t e s t a n t union. the appearance of the f o u r g i a n t heads a t the "baptism" f e s t i v a l must have v e r y r e a d i l y evoked the i d e a o f the f o u r world monarchies as i t was embodied by the f o u r g i g a n t i c and m o n a r c h i c a l physiognomies. the g i a n t e f f i g i e s were a v i s u a l a f f i r m a t i o n of the i d e a of i m p e r i a l a l l e g i a n c e t o which h a i n h o f e r ' s commentary on the performance o f f e r s c o r r o b o r a t i o n . the i m p e r i a l theme of the b a l l e t i s s p e l l e d out a t the end of the " n a t i o n s " dance: "they made, i n dancing, an f and an e, a p and an , by t h a t a l l u d i n g t o the p r i n c e and p r i n c e s s names and t o the i m p e r i a l o r b . " but t h i s i s not a s t a t i c image of a f f i r m a t i o n of a t r a d i t i o n a l world view. the monstrous heads cannot " c o n t a i n " a new e x p e r i e n t i a l world. these pregnant, y e t b o d i l e s s , e f f i g i e s are u n l i k e the limbed g i a n t puppets t h a t t r a d i t i o n a l l y appear a t p o p u l a r and c o u r t l y f e s t v a l s . the heads t h a t r e v e a l t h e i r c o n s t i t u e n t p a r t s , the n a t i o n s , have more i n common w i t h the form o f the l l arcimboldesque , , , an engraving w i t h g r e a t c u r r e n c y i n german lands around , which was i n s p i r e d by arcimboldo's strange a l l e g o r i c a l p o r t r a i t s of rudolf i i . these grotesque d e p i c t i o n s of heads made up o f symbolic elements had many i m i t a t o r s ( f i g . ) . warncke's study of german grotesques a t t r i b u t e s the p r e v a l e n c e of the grotesque a t the b e g i n n i n g o f the seventeenth c e n t u r y t o the a b i l i t y of t h i s form t o meld d i v e r s e s i g n s : "under the mantle of the grotesque, l e g i t i m i z e d by a n t i q u e precedents, were u n i t e d the most d i v e r s e aims, and w i t h t h a t , a l l the e x p r e s s i v e and i n t e r p r e t i v e p o s s i b i l i t i e s of monsters, fabulous c r e a t u r e s and mongrels t h a t had been i n v e n t e d over the c e n t u r i e s . the grotesque rescued whole image worlds, through a l t e r a t i o n and a b s o r b t i o n , out of the upheaval brought about by the s e c u l a r i s a t i o n of h i s t o r i c a l thought. when we see the grotesque c l e a r l y r e v e a l i t s e l f as a means t o overcome c o n t r a d i c t i o n s i n a seemingly u n c e r t a i n world, then the power of tha^| form l i e s i n i t s power t o t r a n s f o r m by s y n t h e s i s . " t h i s impulse t o s y n t h e s i z e new s e c u l a r knowledge i s demonstrated i n the d e p i c t i o n of the grotesque heads out o f which the " n a t i o n s " emerge as s i g n s of a new e x p e r i e n c e o f phenonema t h a t cannot e a s i l y be a s s i m i l a t e d i n t o t r a d i t i o n a l t e a c h i n g s about the world. the s t e a d f a s t l o y a l t y t o r e v e a l e d knowledge, r e p r e s e n t e d by the heads, breaks i n t o an image of change, as the twelve n a t i o n s are r e l e a s e d t o p r e s e n t an expanded cosmos of h i s t o r y and geography. i t i s the i n t e g r a t i v e i n t e n t o f the "grotesque" form of the b a l l e t t h a t p o i n t s t o a r e l a t i o n s h i p w i t h r o s i c r u c i a n i d e a s . these t r a c t s , which achieved an immediate and e x t e n s i v e resonance, e x h i b i t an a p p a r e n t l y c o n t r a d i c t o r y t r e n d , as the h i s t o r i a n r.j.w. evans observed. the " o c c u l t i z i n g p u r i t a n i s m " o f andreae's u t o p i a n t e x t s m a n i f e s t s a r e l i g i o u s enthusiasm t h a t went w i t h "an uncomfortable stance towards l e a r n i n g , b l e n d i n g moral f e r v o r w i t h c o n t i n u i n g i n t e l l e c t u a l commitment t o a s p e c t s o f the renaissance t r a d i t i o n , e s p e c i a l l y the r e j e c t i o n o f dogmatism." the c a l l f o r a s p i r i t u a l r e f o r m a t i o n which would combine d i s p a r a t e elements o f orthodoxy and m y s t i c i s m came out of the profound c r i s i s t h a t shook the e a r l y modern p r o t e s t a n t t e r r i t o r i a l s t a t e . i t i s the c o n s c i o u s n e s s of an "end" t h a t emerges immediately b e f o r e the t h i r t y years war t h a t , a c c o r d i n g t o r i c h a r d van dulmen's a n a l y s i s , andreae's t r a c t s bear witness t o . the m i l l e n a r i a n v i s i o n s come out of an awareness of b e i n g a t the end o f c h r i s t i a n u n i v e r s a l i s m , of the end of the u n i t y o f p o l i t i c s and r e l i g i o n and o f the end of the c o n s t i t u t i o n a l balance o f the i n s t i t u t i o n s of the empire and the emperor. i t would not be s u r p r i s i n g t h a t andreae's c h i l i a s t i c c a l l s f o r a new and b e t t e r p r o t e s t a n t world order would make an appearance i n the s t u t t g a r t f e s t i v a l b a l l e t . the l e a r n e d f a m i l y o f t h e o l o g i a n s andreae was born i n t o had c o n n e c t i o n s t o the wurttemberg c o u r t ; h i s f a t h e r , a p a s t o r , was on f r i e n d l y terms w i t h duke f r i e d r i c h , whose i n t e r e s t s i n alchemy he shared, and i n , when andreae's f a t h e r d i e d , duke f r i e d r i c h g r a n t e d the job of c o u r t apothecary t o h i s mother. there can be no doubt t h a t h i s w r i t i n g s would have been f a m i l i a r t o the d e s i g n e r s of the s t u t t g a r t c o u r t f e s t i v a l . h i s t r a c t s p r o v i d e d a n a t i v e and c u r r e n t n a r r a t i v e t h a t c o u l d r e p l a y the a p o c a l y p t i c theme o f the suppressed e n g l i s h masque - complete w i t h i t s v i s i o n of i n t e r n a t i o n a l harmony. the fama and o t h e r r o s i c r u c i a n t r a c t s which andreae c a l l e d " l u d i b r i u m " , o r games f o r the c u r i o u s , were not w r i t t e n as t h e o r e t i c a l d i s s e r t a t i o n s , but i n s t e a d used the d e v i c e s o f dreams, f a b l e s and emblematic imagery t o convey a c h r i s t i a n u t o p i a n message i n the form of a r i d d l e . in the r e p r e s e n t a t i o n o f the b a l l e t , the p r o t e s t a n t f e r v o u r of the r o s i c r u c i a n t r a c t s i s not r e p l i c a t e d but o n l y a l l u d e d t o - u n l i k e the suppressed e n g l i s h masque's open m a n i f e s t a t i o n of king james' r o l e f o r the " t r u e r e l i g i o n " . both assum's and weckherlin's accounts make c l e a r t h a t f r e d e r i c k and e l i z a b e t h are b e i n g honored by the b a l l e t , but o n l y h a i n h o f e r ' s account o f the b a l l e t o f f e r s who the e a r t h l y promoters o f the m i l l e n i u m might be i n h i s " p r i v a t e " d e s c r i p t i o n o f the dance where the p a l a t i n a t e r u l e r ' s i n i t i a l s and the i m p e r i a l orb were c o n s e c u t i v e l y "signed". the symbols o f t h i s dance r e c a l l jane newman's summation o f the hopes r a i s e d by the english-german marriage a l l i a n c e : "in a b e t t e r , p r o t e s t a n t world, the tudors and t h e i r v a s s a l s would o f f s e t , perhaps even r e p l a c e , the habsburgs as guarantors of the european peace." the s t r a t e g y of "replacement" of the c a t h o l i c - h a b s b u r g domination o f the holy roman empire o f the german n a t i o n o n l y became v i r u l e n t w i t h the p a l a t i n e e l e c t o r ' s acceptance of the bohemian crown i n - and i t was a move t h e union of p r o t e s t a n t p r i n c e s on the whole opposed as b e i n g too dangerous. the i d e a of a p r o t e s t a n t empire may be an a c c u r a t e p i c t u r e o f what the wedding promised t o the p a l a t i n a t e r u l e r s , but as david norbrook has shown i t was not the message the jacobean c o u r t wanted t o send out, a t l e a s t i n england. the wurttemberg head b a l l e t remains "headless" i n i t s v i s u a l r e p r e s e n t a t i o n f o r much the same reasons. a p r o t e s t a n t empire under the p a l a t i n a t e e l e c t o r would have been an unacceptable cause f o r the landtag t o r a l l y around. the p a r l i a m e n t a r i a n s had made i t c l e a r t h a t even i f wurttemberg's union w i t h o t h e r p r o t e s t a n t p r i n c i p a l i t i e s was unavoidable, then under no circumstances would they t o l e r a t e an a l l i a n c e w i t h c a l v i n i s t s . . . o r o t h e r s e c t a r i a n s . the union, w i t h i t s p a l a t i n a t e l e a d e r , r e p r e s e n t e d j u s t such an a l l i a n c e . for the f e s t i v a l the r o s i c r u c i a n t r a c t s p r o v i d e d a r e l i g i o u s n a r r a t i v e framework which s t o o d o u t s i d e the s i g n i f i c a n t f r i c t i o n t h a t e x i s t e d between the reformed c o n f e s s i o n s i n germany. the pansophic o program o f r o s i c r u c i a n i s m i s perhaps b e s t understood as a r e a c t i o n t o the p o l i t i c a l and r e l i g i o u s d i v i s i o n s of germany s i n c e the reformation, e s p e c i a l l y the d i s p u t e s between c a l v i n i s t s and lutherans. the vague u t o p i a n r i d d l e s were encoded i n t o the f e s t i v a l s i g n system without c a l l i n g a t t e n t i o n t o the many o p p o s i t i o n s t h a t e x i s t e d both i n s i d e and o u t s i d e wurttemberg. the f e s t i v a l , a t l e a s t i n i t s o f f i c i a l r e p r e s e n t a t i o n , r e p l i c a t e d a l l the c o n c i l i a t o r y n o n - s p e c i f i c i t y o f the u n i v e r s a l i s t p u z z l e s of r o s i c r u c i a n i s m , w h i l e p r e s e n t i n g them i n an a w e - i n s p i r i n g form t h a t must have generated amazement i n any audience and i n v i s u a l symbols t h a t must have been a c c e s s i b l e o n l y t o an e x c l u s i v e audience. the v i s u a l medium allowed the complex problems o f i m p e r i a l a l l e g i a n c e and r e b e l l i o u s p r o t e s t a n t u n i f i c a t i o n t o be accommodated i n an a l l u s i v e and non-committal manner. . j o h a n n - v a l e n t i n assum, warhaffte r e l a t i o n e t c . ( s t u t t g a r t , ), p . l . . g.r. weckherlin, t r i u m p h a l l shews, o p . c i t . , p . l . . g.r. weckherlin, o p . c i t . , p. . . g.r. weckherlin, pp. - . . g.r. weckherlin, p. . . g. parker and l.m. smith, the general c r i s i s of the seventeenth century (london, ), p. . . f. yates, the r o s i c r u c i a n enlightenment (london, ), ch. . . s t u t t g a r t e r h o f f e s t e . o p . c i t . , p. . . j . j . berns, "die f e s t k u l t u r der deutschen hofe zwischen und ", germanisch romanische m o n a t s s c h r i f t ( ), p. . . david norbrook, "'the masque of t r u t h : court entertainments and i n t e r n a t i o n a l p r o t e s t a n t p o l i t i c s i n the e a r l y s t u a r t p e r i o d " , the seventeenth century. v o l . , no. ( j u l y ), pp. - . . d. norbrook, o p . c i t . , p. . . d. norbrook, pp. - . . d. norbrook, p. . . d. norbrook, p. . . d. norbrook, p. . . d. norbrook, p. . . c l a u s - p e t e r clasen, the p a l a t i n a t e i n european h i s t o r y . - (oxford, ), p. . . d. norbrook, o p . c i t . , p. . . j . j . berns, "der nackte monarch und d i e nackte wahrheit", daphnis. v o l . ( ), p. . . d. norbrook, o p . c i t . , p. c i t e s t h i s p r e f e r e n c e of the jacobean c o u r t . . r.j.w. evans, " c u l t u r e and anarchy i n the empire, - , c e n t r a l european h i s t o r y , v o l . , no. ( ), p. . . f. yates, o p . c i t . , pp. - . b. v i c k e r s , "frances yates and the w r i t i n g of h i s t o r y " , j o u r n a l o f modern h i s t o r y . ( ), pp. - . a l s o r.j.w. evans' review o f the r o s i c r u c i a n enlightenment. the h i s t o r i c a l j o u r n a l . xvi, ( ), pp. - . . r i c h a r d van dulmen, die u t o p i e e i n e r c h r i s t l i c h e n g e s e l l s c h a f t . johann v a l e n t i n andreae ( - ) t e i l ( s t u t t g a r t - b a d c a n n s t a t t ). . r. van dulmen, p. . . r. van dulmen, o p . c i t . the e a r l y r o s i c r u c i a n pamphlets e l i c i t e d much w r i t t e n response, n e a r l y two hundred such documents are s t i l l i n e x i s t e n c e . . fama f r a t e r n i t a s . a t t r i b u t e d t o j.v. andreae, c i t e d i n f. yates, o p . c i t . , p. . . j.w. swain, "the theory of the four monarchies", c l a s s i c a l p h i l o l o g y ( ), p . l . . gertrude lubbe-wolff, "die bedeutung der lehre von den v i e r w e l t r e i g h e n f u r das s t a a t s r e c h t des romischen r e i c h s " , s t a a t ( ), p. . a l s o : werner goez, t r a n s l a t i o i m p e r i i (tubingen, ). goez' book t r a c e s the i d e a of the t r a n s f e r of the f o u r t h empire i n german p o l i t i c a l and h i s t o r i c a l t h e o r i e s from medieval t o e a r l y modern times. and: notker hammerstein "'imperium romanum cum onmibus s u i s q u a l i t a t i b u s ad germanos e s t t r a n s l a t u m ' das v i e r t e w e l t r e i c h i n der lehre der r e i c h s j u r i s t e n " i n j . kunisch, ed., neue s t u d i e n zur f r u h n e u z e i t l i c h e n r e i c h s g e s c h i c h t e ( b e r l i n , ). . g. lubbe-wolff, o p . c i t . p. . . g. lubbe-wolff, p. . . g. lubbe-wolff, p. . . a. g r a f t o n , "the world of the p o l y h i s t o r s , " c e n t r a l european h i s t o r y ( ), p. . . in g. benecke, germany i n the t h i r t y years war (london, ), p. . . w. grube, o p . c i t . , p. . the s u r v i v a l of the empire h e l d g r e a t importance f o r members of the lower e s t a t e s because the i m p e r i a l c o u r t a c t e d as the f i n a l c o u r t o f appeal i n d i s p u t e s w i t h the t e r r i t o r i a l r u l e r . p e t e r b l i c k l e examines the p r e v a l e n c e of l e g a l r e c o u r s e i n i n t e r - e s t a t e d i s p u t e s i n german t e r r i t o r i e s i n "peasant r e s i s t a n c e i n sixteenth-and seventeenth-century germany i n a european context", r e l i g i o n . p o l i t i c s and s o c i a l p r o t e s t . b l i c k l e , rublack, schulze, eds. ( ). . p. h a i n h o f e r i n s t u t t g a r t e r h o f f e s t e , o p . c i t . , p. . . the urban nuremberg schembartlauf, as w e l l as f e s t i v a l s a t the habsburg c o u r t f e a t u r e d " g i a n t s " . . c-.p. warncke, die ornamentale groteske i n deiuschland - ( b e r l i n , ) pp. - . . c p . warncke, o p . c i t . , p. . my t r a n s l a t i o n . . r.j.w. evans, p. . . r i c h a r d van dulmen, o p . c i t . , p. . . r. van dulmen, pp. - . . r. van dulmen, p. . . jane . newman, "marriages of convenience: p a t t e r n s of a l l i a n c e i n h e i d e l b e r g p o l i t i c s and o p i t z ' s p o e t i c s " , mln ( ), p. . . f. yates, o p . c i t . , p. . . w. grube, o p . c i t . , p. . . f. yates, o p . c i t . , p. . the c o n c i l i a t o r y aims o f r o s i c r u c i a n i s m are a l s o d i s c u s s e d i n l.w. f o r s t e r , georg rudolf weckherlin. zur kenntnis s e i n e s lebens i n england ( b a s e l , ), pp. - . chapter the m i r r o r of a prudent e s t a t e in the p r e v i o u s chapter i have suggested t h a t the g i a n t head b a l l e t r e p r e s e n t a t i o n put forward a r a t h e r a t t e n u a t e d n o t i o n of i m p e r i a l a l l e g i a n c e . the i l l u s t r a t i o n t h a t f o l l o w s o f a b a l l e t t h a t was performed i n immediate s u c c e s s i o n p r e s e n t s , i propose, an e f f o r t t o come t o g r i p s w i t h a c o r o l l a r y problem. t h i s second b a l l e t ( f i g . ) , a g a i n performed by the wurttemberg duke and h i s c o u r t i e r s , t h i s time as nuremberg mirror-makers, can be seen t o address the dangers p r e s e n t e d by the u n i f i c a t i o n agreements between p r o t e s t a n t powers w i t h i n the empire. the f o r m a t i o n of t h i s a l l i a n c e l e f t the c a u t i o u s wurttemberg c o u r t open t o a c c u s a t i o n s of r e b e l l i o n . t r a d i t i o n a l l y the s t i l l - v a l i d medieval e s t a t e h i e r a r c h y of the empire allowed t e r r i t o r i a l r u l e r s t o l e g i t i m a t e l y stand t o g e t h e r as an e s t a t e i n i n t e r n a l i m p e r i a l c o n f l i c t s . the d e p i c t i o n of the c o u r t l y r e t i n u e i n the assumed r o l e s of another e s t a t e , even i f the l a v i s h costumes remained t r u e t o t h e d i s p l a y of c o u r t l y grandeur, depended on a c o n t r a s t between appearance and a c t u a l i t y t h a t c o u l d o n l y be v i s u a l l y pronounced. a solemn e v o c a t i o n of the e s t a t e s t r u c t u r e t h a t i suggest the mirror-maker b a l l e t r e p r e s e n t s may have been o f f e r e d t o ward o f f any charges of s e d i t i o u s n e s s from o t h e r german t e r r i t o r i e s as w e l l as from l o c a l p a r l i a m e n t a r i a n s . in t h i s c h a p t e r i w i l l examine how the wurttemberg c o u r t s t r o v e t o g i v e a l e g i t i m a t e and p l a c a t i n g image t o i t s a l l i a n c e w i t h the a g g r e s s i v e l y a n t i - c a t h o l i c p a l a t i n a t e s . that the wurttemberg c o u r t wanted t o approach the i s s u e s of dangerous a l l i a n c e w i t h g r e a t c a u t i o n i s brought out i n d i s c r e p a n c i e s i n the d e s c r i p t i o n s of another segment of the f e s t i v a l . the f a c t t h a t the court-commissioned v i s u a l and t e x t u a l m a t e r i a l i s n o t a b l y d i f f e r e n t from h a i n h o f e r ' s " p r i v a t e " account about t h i s p a r t of the pageant demonstrates t h a t the c o u r t intended t o modulate the use o f p o l i t i c o - r e l i g i o u s p o l e m i c a l imagery i n the r e p r e s e n t a t i o n s . the d i s c r e p a n t d e s c r i p t i o n s of the duke of baden's tournament e n t r y ( f i g . ) p r e s e n t evidence f o r how c a r e f u l l y the wurttemberg c o u r t wanted c o n t e n t i o u s i s s u e s o f p o l i t i c s and r e l i g i o n handled i n the v i s u a l and t e x t u a l r e p r e s e n t a t i o n s . t h i s c a u t i o n i s manifested i n the r e p r e s e n t a t i o n o f the empress germania f o l l o w e d by her t e n " c i r c l e s " o r n a t i o n s i n an a n a c h r o n i s t i c v i s i o n t h a t d i d not r e f l e c t the t e r r i t o r i a l d i v i s i o n s or the a c t u a l c o n f e s s i o n a l power b l o c s w i t h i n the post-reformation empire. in the engravings germania's " c i r c l e s " are shown h o l d i n g m i r r o r s , an emblematic r e f e r e n c e l t o " p r u d e n t i a " o r "the r e c o g n i t i o n of a p p r o p r i a t e n e s s " . the a l l e g o r i c a l duo of "concord" and " d i s c o r d " , a f a m i l i a r d e v i c e o f f e s t i v a l r e p r e s e n t a t i o n i n german t e r r i t o r i e s f o l l o w s the c i r c l e s ( f i g . ) . the commissioned t e x t s do not e l a b o r a t e on the i d e n t i t y of these symbolic f i g u r e s ; " d i s c o r d " i s i d e n t i f i e d g e n e r i c a l l y as a "monster" o r as a " h e l l i s h p e a c e - d i s t u r b e r " . only the d i p l o m a t i c correspondence of h a i n h o f e r i s forthcoming i n d e s c r i b i n g the "monstrum" as b e i n g made up o f f i g u r e s r e p r e s e n t i n g a "spaniard, a j e s u i t , a capuchin, e t c . who are d i s q u i e t i n g germany". a c c o r d i n g t o h a i n h o f e r the e v i l of the bound s p a n i s h - c a t h o l i c monster i s a c t e d out by a horned boy d r e s s e d as a b l a c k d e v i l who emerges from under the monster's f e e t and runs o f f . the monster i s g i v i n g e x p r e s s i o n t o the g r e a t e s t f e a r of the p r o t e s t a n t p r i n c e s and t h a t i s t h a t the i n t e r e s t s o f the spanish king p h i l i p i i and c a t h o l i c f o r c e s would combine t o impose a new c a t h o l i c u n i v e r s a l monarchy. only hainhofer, whose account was d i r e c t e d a t a s m a l l audience of p r o t e s t a n t p r i n c e s , "made the obvious i n f e r e n c e t h a t (the monster) r e p r e s e n t e d the m i l i t a n t f o r c e s o f the counter-reformation." the c o u r t commissioned accounts as w e l l as the engravings take a f a r more c a u t i o u s approach. the g r a p h i c d e p i c t i o n of the "monster" i s c l o s e t o weckherlin's d e s c r i p t i o n : " h i s shape b e i n g l i k e a man, but h a v i n g i n f i n i t e f a c e s , armes and l e g g ' s " . the s h o r t t u n i c the monster wears i s perhaps c a s s o c k - l i k e but the h i g h hats o f the monster do not i n s i s t on i t s c l e r i c a l s t a t u s . under the s i g n o f " p r u d e n t i a " the f e s t i v a l r e p r e s e n t a t i o n m a i n t a i n s a n e u t r a l tone w h i l e u t i l i z i n g the e n e m y - i d e n t i f y i n g p r o p a g a n d i s t i c t o o l a t the a c t u a l event. robert s c r i b n e r * s a n a l y s i s of how p o p u l a r broadsheets and p o p u l a r p r o c e s s i o n a l propaganda were used t o f u r t h e r the cause of the reformation can be a p p l i e d t o the s a t a n i c a l nature of the c a t h o l i c monster t h a t was p r e s e n t e d t o the f e s t i v a l a u d i e n c e . reformation propaganda, a c c o r d i n g t o s c r i b n e r , reduced complex p o l i t i c a l and c o n f e s s i o n a l i s s u e s i n t o a c o n f r o n t a t i o n between good and e v i l t h a t was expressed i n e a s i l y r e c o g n i z e d symbols, i n v e r y m a t e r i a l ways o r i n terms o f c l e r i c a l persons. while the " d i s c o r d " monster seems t o have taken such a r o l e a t the f e s t i v a l , h i s i d e n t i t y i s f a r more obscure i n the r e p r e s e n t a t i o n s . h i s many-headedness s t i l l r e c a l l s reformation propaganda "monsters" where t h e i r monstrous s t a t u s was taken t o be a v i s i b l e s i g n o f s i n t h a t a c t e d as a warning from god. many-headed popes and many-headed luthers were a common d e v i c e o f c o n f e s s i o n a l p o l e m i c a l imagery i n the s i x t e e n t h c e n t u r y ( f i g . ) . in the f e s t i v a l engraving of the monster, the d e s a c r a l i z i n g i n t e n t o f s a t a n i c , s c a t o l o g i c a l or b e s t i a l imagery o f the broadsheets i s d e l e t e d , even i f i t s s a t a n i c nature was a c t e d out i n the a c t u a l event. the m u l t i - l i m b e d but innocuous l o o k i n g monster i s shown b e i n g l e d away by an e q u a l l y composite female "concord" b e a r i n g i m p e r i a l d e v i c e s ; the use o f the f a m i l i a r p o l e m i c a l image o f the monster i s defused by t h i s j u x t a p o s i t i o n . i f the purpose of propaganda, as s c r i b n e r s t a t e s , was t o i n c i t e people t o d i r e c t a c t i o n r a t h e r than t o j u s t change o p i n i o n s , such imagery had no p l a c e i n the s t u t t g a r t f e s t i v a l . the wurttemberg c o u r t d i d not i n t e n d t o make any c a l l t o a c t i o n on c o n f e s s i o n a l matters. the c o u r t wanted t o r e p r e s e n t the union as a s t r i c t l y d e f e n s i v e a l l i a n c e which would p r o t e c t p r o t e s t a n t i n t e r e s t s . i t was the d e f e n s i v e c h a r a c t e r of the union t h a t duke johann f r i e d r i c h emphasized t o h i s p a r l i a m e n t . while the c a l v i n i s t p a l a t i n a t e had d i s t i n g u i s h e d i t s e l f by i t s m i l i t a n t and a g g r e s s i v e a n t i - c a t h o l i c p o l i c i e s , the wurttemberg c o u r t s t r o v e t o p r e s e n t an appeasing image of t h i s a l l i a n c e . the h i s t o r i a n c l a s e n f i n d s the c o n t r a s t between the p a l a t i n a t e and o t h e r german p r i n c e s e x p r e s s i n g i t s e l f i n the " s t e r e o t y p e d formulas which c o n s t a n t l y r e c u r i n the d i p l o m a t i c correspondence". while the p a l a t i n e s c o n t i n u a l l y speak of the "advancement of the g l o r y of god and of the e s t a b l i s h m e n t o f h i s church," the o t h e r german p r o t e s t a n t s never cease t o emphasize the "steady maintenance and n u t u r i n g of the beloved peace, q u i e t , and u n i t y of our beloved f a t h e r l a n d the german . . . n a t i o n . " to b r i d g e these c o n f l i c t i n g m i s s i o n statements the f e s t i v a l engravings p r e s e n t a t r a d i t i o n a l p r i n c i p l e f o r a l l p r o t e s t a n t p r i n c e s and s u b j e c t s t o r a l l y around. the i s s u e of c o n f e s s i o n a l d i f f e r e n c e s i n the german empire was too c o n t e n t i o u s t o be c l e a r l y enunciated i n the f e s t i v a l books; i n i t s p l a c e the medieval c o n c e p t i o n o f the empire as a h i e r a r c h y of e s t a t e s was c a l l e d upon. the p r i n c e s c o u l d o n l y r i g h t f u l l y stand t o g e t h e r as an e s t a t e , as they had i n the p a s t , t o defend t h e i r i n t e r e s t s a g a i n s t those of the emperor, thereby b y p a s s i n g a charge o f r e b e l l i o n t o which the f o r m a t i o n o f the p r o t e s t a n t union came p e r i l o u s l y c l o s e . the n o t i o n o f the e s t a t e s as the c o n s t i t u e n t p a r t s of the empire i s , i suggest, a l l u d e d t o i n the engraving f o l l o w i n g t h a t d e p i c t i n g the g i a n t head b a l l e t . the second theme-setting b a l l e t performance by the wurttemberg duke and h i s c o u r t i e r s g i v e s g r a p h i c e x p r e s s i o n t o the h i e r a r c h i c a l e s t a t e s t r u c t u r e of "germania". the w r i t t e n accounts have the g i a n t heads " v a n i s h " t o be r e p l a c e d by a d a z z l i n g m i r r o r e d shop t h a t moves i n t o the b a l l r o o m . assum expresses s u r p r i s e t h a t a " p r i n c e l y " dance d i d not f o l l o w , i n s t e a d twelve dancers, the duke and h i s c o u r t i e r s , appear i n costumes assum i d e n t i f i e s as those of nuremberg mirror-makers. the emblematic s i g n i f i c a t i o n of the m i r r o r s of " p r u d e n t i a " i s eminently a p p l i c a b l e t o the f r e e i m p e r i a l c i t y of nuremberg which had been an important m e r c a n t i l e c e n t r e s i n c e the t h i r t e e n t h c e n t u r y . the c i t y had j o i n e d the p r o t e s t a n t union i n w h i l e c o n t i n u i n g w i t h a l o n g - s t a n d i n g gulden diplomacy which i n v o l v e d c o n t r i b u t i n g t o i m p e r i a l c o f f e r s w h i l e s e c r e t l y sending money t o p r o t e s t a n t powers. nuremberg had the r e p u t a t i o n o f b e i n g the most " d i s t i n g u i s h e d " c i t y o f the empire even though i t s r e l a t i o n s h i p t o the house of habsburg had c o o l e d markedly a f t e r the c o n f e s s i o n a l s w i t c h o f . nuremberg, where a l l the i m p e r i a l i n s i g n i a and the s a c r e d o b j e c t s o f the empire were s t o r e d , a l s o was the most favoured s i t e f o r i m p e r i a l s o j o u r n s . the c i t y o f durer and hans sachs was seen as a r e p o s i t o r y o f "germanness" t h a t stood f o r the o p p o s i t e of the " f o r e i g n " western european c u l t u r e o f d u c a l r e s i d e n c e s . the costumes and the shop of the mirror-makers of the s t u t t g a r t b a l l e t found an u n d i s p u t a b l y german model i n the f e s t i v a l books which d e s c r i b e d and i l l u s t r a t e d the "nuremberg schembartlauf". the u r b a n - a r t i s a n a l "schembart" c a r n i v a l was s a i d t o have begun i n the e a r l y f o u r t e e n t h c e n t u r y as a p r i v i l e g e granted t o the b u t c h e r s ' g u i l d as a reward f o r t h e i r l o y a l t y t o the c o u n c i l of the c i t y i n a r e b e l l i o n by f r a c t i o u s c i t i z e n s . over time the r i g h t s t o the costumed and masked dance of the butchers were bought up by the p a t r i c i a n c l a s s , the members of the o l i g a r c h y o f f o u r hundred f a m i l i e s t h a t governed the c i t y and i t s v a s t r u r a l h o l d i n g s . the l a s t year o f the schembartlauf was . the c o u n c i l a b o l i s h e d the f e s t i v a l t h a t y e a r when c e l e b r a n t s used the o c c a s i o n o f the dance t o p r o t e s t a g a i n s t the c h i e f lutheran p r e l a t e ' s i n j u n c t i o n o f the c e l e b r a t i o n of c a r n i v a l . from s h o r t l y b e f o r e a b o l i t i o n u n t i l w e l l i n t o the e i g h t e e n t h c e n t u r y schembart books c o p i e d and reproduced images and d e s c r i p t i o n s o f the costumes and events which recorded the h i s t o r y of the f e s t i v a l most l i k e l y w i t h the a i d of o l d e r manuscripts. the "schembart" h i s t o r i a n , h.-u. r o l l e r , i d e n t i f i e s the impulse t h a t generated these books w e l l a f t e r the demise o f the p r a c t i c e as a f o l k l o r i s t i c one t h a t emerged out o f the widening c u l t u r a l h o r i z o n s of the renaissance. the books served p a t r i c i a n i n t e r e s t s of s e l f - r e p r e s e n t a t i o n i n which the grandeur of an indigenous german p a s t c o u l d be c e l e b r a t e d . the wealth of documentation found i n the "schembartbucher" has o f f e r e d an u n u s u a l l y r i c h documentation, d e s p i t e i t s b e l a t e d nature, o f p o p u l a r f e s t i v a l forms. because o f the d e a r t h o f g r a p h i c r e p r e s e n t a t i o n s of p o p u l a r f e s t i v a l s the schembartlauf has e l i c i t e d much a t t e n t i o n as a documentation o f the e v o l u t i o n o f f e s t i v a l form from i t s c o r p o r a t e - a g r a r i a n o r i g i n s t o a f i n a l phase of p a t r i c i a n d i s p l a y . the schembartlauf has served as a paradigm o f the s h i f t o f f e s t i v a l p r a c t i c e from i t s r i t u a l i s t i c and p a r t i c i p a t o r y f u n c t i o n s t o t h a t of a c o n t r o l l e d " r e p r e s e n t a t i o n " , d e s p i t e the d i f f i c u l t y p r e s e n t e d by the d a t i n g of the i l l u s t r a t i o n s . the m i r r o r d e c o r a t i o n s o f the duke's and c o u r t i e r s ' costumes and the mirror-makers shop l i n k the s t u t t g a r t b a l l e t t o the nuremberg schembartlauf r e p r e s e n t a t i o n . in e a r l y v e r s i o n s of the f e s t i v a l t r e e s decorated w i t h m i r r o r s were c a r r i e d i n a p r o c e s s i o n ; i n l a t e r v e r s i o n s costumes were adorned w i t h m i r r o r s ( f i g . ) . the shop of the mirrormakers i s a l s o a r e c r e a t i o n o f a nuremberg c a r n i v a l form; the "kramladen", a s o r t o f g e n e r a l s t o r e , was used as a pageant s l e d i n the c a r n i v a l . the a n t i q u a r i a n removal of the schembartlauf m o t i f s t o the c o n f i n e s o f the c o u r t b a l l r o o m marks y e t another s h i f t i n f e s t i v a l p r a c t i c e . as the s t u t t g a r t h i s t o r i a n otto b o r s t has remarked: " i t i s noteworthy t h a t , as renewed p r o h i b i t i o n s o f c a r n i v a l c e l e b r a t i o n s were on the i n c r e a s e , t h e g o u r t ' s e f f o r t s t o conform t o these e d i c t s d i m i n i s h e d . " as p r o t e s t a n t towns e n f o r c e d the s u p p r e s s i o n o f the c a r n i v a l the s t u t t g a r t c o u r t used the model of the h i s t o r i c schembartlauf as a source f o r an a r i s t o c r a t i c d i s p l a y of c o u r t l y s k i l l . what had begun as a r i t u a l i s t i c s t r e e t f e s t i v i t y was transformed i n the s t u t t g a r t b a l l e t i n t o a rehearsed and c o n t r o l l e d performance of measured movements by the duke and h i s c o u r t i e r s . the u n d i s p u t a b l y "german" schembartlauf may have been u t i l i z e d i n response t o the landtag's d i s s a t i s f a c t i o n w i t h the new " f o r e i g n " showiness and refinements of the c o u r t . the p a r l i a m e n t a r i a n s wished f o r a c o u r t t h a t was based on, as they s a i d , "the o l d , simple, y e t p r a i s e w o r t h y german manner." the urban schembartlauf theme of the c o u r t b a l l e t , even though i t was a l t e r e d i n t o a d e l i c a t e performance o f dancing s k i l l , c o u l d be read as a s i g n o f the subsumption of an urban form by a newly dominant c o u r t c u l t u r e . the p l a c e accorded t o the m i r r o r maker b a l l e t as an a d j u n c t t o the t h e m e - s e t t i n g g i a n t head b a l l e t and as an i n t r o d u c t o r y element o f the f e s t i v a l r e p r e s e n t a t i o n p o i n t s t o the c e n t r a l i t y of i t s "urban-estate" theme. the importance of the g u i l d - a r t i s a n costume o f the duke and h i s c o u r t i e r s l i e s i n the s t r a n g e d u a l i s m of a b s o l u t i s m and of the c o n s e r v a t i o n of the e s t a t e h i e r a r c h y t h a t e x i s t e d i n german lands b e f o r e the t h i r t y years war. i n g r i d l a u r i e n ' s s o c i a l - h i s t o r i c a l a n a l y s i s o f weckherlin's e n g l i s h and german c a r e e r s addresses t h i s i s s u e . the c o n s t i t u t i o n of the german empire was q u i t e u n l i k e t h a t of o t h e r western european s t a t e s : "germany i n the e a r l y modern p e r i o d p r e s e n t s on one and the same l e v e l the i n t e r e s t i n g drama of the r i g o r o u s enforcement of the two c o n f l i c t i n g and a n t i t h e t i c a l b u i l d i n g p r i n c i p l e s o f the epoch: the e s t a t e h i e r a r c h y p r i n c i p l e won out i n the upper l e v e l o f the empire, the m o n a r c h i c a l p r i n c i p l e , under the s i g n of a b s o l u t i s m was r e a l i z e d i n the important areas of the second l e v e l , the t e r r i t o r i e s . . . german c o n s t i t u t i o n a l h i s t o r y s i n c e tljie m i d d l e ages was d e f i n e d by the f a c t o f b i f u r c a t i o n . " t h i s d u a l i s t i c c o n c e p t i o n of the german empire allowed t e r r i t o r i a l dukes t o band t o g e t h e r a g a i n s t o t h e r dukes, or even t h e emperor, where the s o v e r e i g n t y of the e s t a t e o r d e r was endangered by a t t a c k s a g a i n s t the p r o t e s t a n t c o n f e s s i o n . german p r o t e s t a n t i s m h e l d no a n t i - a b s o l u t i s t t e n d e n c i e s y e t t e r r i t o r i a l dukes d i d not adhere t o an a n t i - e s t a t e p o l i c y on a l l l e v e l s . the p r o t e s t a n t union p r e s e n t e d i t s e l f as an a l l i a n c e t h a t guaranteed the t r i u m v i r a t e of t e r r i t o r i a l r u l e , p r o t e s t a n t i s m and e s t a t e p r i v i l e g e . l a u r i e n s t a t e s t h a t i t i s no c o i n c i d e n c e t h a t weckherlin i n the triumf c a l l s the duke and the e s t a t e s p r o t e c t o r s of "teutschland" i n one and the same b r e a t h . he i n t e r p r e t e d the p o s i t i o n of the duke as a member of an e s t a t e of the empire and so c o u l d c e l e b r a t e the t e r r i t o r i a l dukes as the p r o t e c t o r s of those v e r y p r i v i l e g e s which these dukes were c u r t a i l i n g w i t h i n t h e i r own t e r r i t o r i e s . ^ the g r a p h i c , and f e s t i v e , t r i b u t e t o the nurembergers then i s g i v e n such prominence because i t c o n t a i n s a c o n f i r m a t i o n of t h e e s t a t e h i e r a r c h y - even i n the pronounced a r i s t o c r a t i c t o t a l i t y o f the f e s t i v a l . in the r e t a r d a t o r y e s t a t i s t s t r u c t u r e of the empire the j u s t i f i c a t i o n o f a dangerous a l l i a n c e w i t h the p a l a t i n a t e which d i d not appeal t o the wurttemberg e s t a t e s c o u l d be found, b y p a s s i n g charges o f r e b e l l i o u s n e s s or d o c t r i n a l compromise. . s. henkel and a. schone, emblemata ( s t u t t g a r t : ), p. . . f. s i e b e r , v o l k und v o l k s t u m l i c h e m o t i v i k im festwerk des barocks ( b e r l i n : ), p. . . p. h a i n h o f e r i n s t u t t g a r t e r h o f f e s t e . o p . c i t . , p. . . d. norbrook, o p . c i t . , p. . . g.r. weckherlin i n s t u t t g a r t e r h o f f e s t e . o p . c i t . , p. . . r. s c r i b n e r , popular c u l t u r e and popular movements i n reformation germany (london, ), p. . . c. andersson, "popular imagery i n german reformation broadsheets". p r i n t and c u l t u r e i n the renaissance (newark, ), p l . . r. s c r i b n e r , p. . . c p . clasen, the p a l a t i n a t e i n european h i s t o r y . - . (oxford, ), p. . . i . l a u r i e n , o p . c i t . , p. . . c p . c l a s e n , p. . . c p . c l a s e n , p. . my t r a n s l a t i o n . . j.w. zophy, the holy roman empire. a d i c t i o n a r y handbook ( c o n n e c t i c u t , ), p. . . b.-m. baumunk, "hauptstadt-aber wo l i e g t s i e ? " , die z e i t , no. , j u l y , p. . . b.-m. baumunk. o p . c i t . . h.-u.roller, der nurnberger schembartlauf. (tubingen, ), r o l l e r f i n d s the h i s t o r i c a l documentation too f r a i l t o make a s s e r t a t i o n s about the o r i g i n s o f the schembartlauf. p. . . h.-u. r o l l e r , p. . . most r e c e n t l y : samuel k i n s e r , " p r e s e n t a t i o n and r e p r e s e n t a t i o n : c a r n i v a l a t nuremberg, - ", r e p r e s e n t a t i o n s , winter , pp. - . k i n s e r ' s i n t e r t e x u a l a n a l y s i s uses t e x t s by two well-known a r t i s a n - p o e t s t o analyze the " s h i f t s i n c o n s c i o u s n e s s " t h a t l e d t o the end of the schembartlauf. . h.-u. r o l l e r , p. . . . b o r s t , o p . c i t . , p. . . gerhard o e s t r e i c h , "die v e r f a s s u n g s p o l i t i s c h e s i t u a t i o n der monarchie i n deutschland vom . b i s . j a h r hundert" c i t e d i n i. l a u r i e n , p. . . i . l a u r i e n , p. . . i . l a u r i e n , p. . . i . l a u r i e n , p. . . i . l a u r i e n , p. . chapter a p r o t e s t a n t venus? in t h i s c h a p t e r i w i l l suggest an i n t e r p r e t a t i o n f o r one of the most m u l t i - l a y e r e d and c o m p e l l i n g segments of the book of p r i n t s . i have attempted t o show t h a t the wurttemberg c o u r t t r e a t e d p o l i t i c o - r e l i g i o u s i s s u e s w i t h g r e a t c a u t i o n and r e t i c e n c e . while the f e s t i v a l must have had the aim of b r i n g i n g t o g e t h e r a consensus o f the u n i t e d p r o t e s t a n t r u l e r s , the wurttemberg c o u r t t r i e d t o m a i n t a i n what the h i s t o r i a n walter grube c a l l e d a stance of "armed n e u t r a l i t y " . the v i s u a l medium t h a t l e f t i n t e r p r e t a t i o n s open was i d e a l l y s u i t e d t o e n c l o s e such an ambiguous p o s i t i o n w i t h i n the s t a n d a r d i n v e n t i v e extravagance of r e p r e s e n t a t i o n s of c o u r t l y m a g n i f i c e n c e . the m u l t i p l i c i t y of symbols and a l l u s i o n s i n the g r a p h i c r e p r e s e n t a t i o n p r o v i d e d an i d e a l cover f o r the i n c l u s i o n of a t e n t a t i v e p o l i t i c a l d i s c o u r s e t h a t would o n l y be a c c e s s i b l e t o a l i m i t e d audience. the v i s u a l medium, i suggest, c o u l d be made t o c a r r y a l l u s i v e and e l u s i v e p o l e m i c a l m a t e r i a l t h a t c o u l d not be e n t r u s t e d t o the t e x t u a l r e p r e s e n t a t i o n . i want t o e x p l o r e some p o s s i b l e t e x t u a l and v i s u a l sources t h a t may e x p l i c a t e the s i g n i f i c a n c e of an enigmatic c o m p i l a t i o n o f c l a s s i c a l and h i s t o r i c a l r e f e r e n c e s which appear t o be encoded i n a segment of the g r a p h i c r e p r e s e n t a t i o n . the commissioned t e x t s do not o f f e r more than a t r i t e d e s c r i p t i o n of the strange amalgam o f images p r e s e n t e d i n the g r a p h i c medium. i contend t h a t the c o m p e l l i n g v i s u a l elements of t h i s s e c t i o n of the engravings i n v i t e d some contemporaries t o "read" a d i s c o u r s e d e r i v e d from an i r e n i c r o s i c r u c i a n p a r a b l e t h a t was pronounced i n a p r e e x i s t i n g and a l l u s i v e v i s u a l v o c a b u l a r y . the v i s u a l medium, i suggest, couched r e f e r e n c e s t o a s t r o n g e r i n t e r n a t i o n a l p r o t e s t a n t a l l i a n c e i n a form t h a t was s t i l l expedient t o promote an image of n e u t r a l i t y f o r the wurttemberg c o u r t . perhaps the most impenetrable images o f the engravings s e r i e s are those p o r t r a y i n g the tournament p r o c e s s i o n by the wurttemberg duke's p r i v y c o u n c i l l o r . t h i s opaque assemblage of images mixes c l a s s i c a l and h i s t o r i c a l elements i n t o a v e r y s t r a n g e c o n c o c t i o n . a dead hungarian k i n g i s shown i n a v e n e t i a n boat p r o p e l l e d by s e a - c r e a t u r e s , f o l l o w e d by perfume-egg throwers w i t h t u r k i s h s w o r d s ( f i g . ) . another s e a - f l o a t f o l l o w s w i t h venus, t h i s venus, a c c o r d i n g t o the m y s t i f y i n g s t o r y i n assum's and weckherlin's t e x t s , who i s a l s o the k i n g ' s daughter, i s preceded by a bound cupid and i s f o l l o w e d by sword-bearing angels and a draped " s o u l o f c u p i d " ( f i g . ) . the p r o c e s s i o n c o n t i n u e s w i t h hungarian s o l d i e r s c a r r y i n g g h o u l i s h t r o p h i e s : severed turks' heads impaled on s t a k e s ( f i g . ) . the f i r s t s o l d i e r c a r r i e s the head o f a moorish p r i n c e impaled on a s c i m i t a r ( f i g . ) . the t e x t s o f f e r a p r o s a i c d e s c r i p t i o n of t h i s sequence o f the pageantry; the n a r r a t i v e framework o f f e r e d by the poets t e l l s t h a t the venus/daughter had f a l l e n i n l o v e w i t h the moorish p r i n c e who then was executed by beheading. weckherlin's t e x t conveys t h i s p l o t as a s c e n a r i o of a c h i v a l r i c romance performed w i t h i n the tournament pageantry. what i s remarkable about t h i s sequence i n the t e x t s and the engravings i s t h a t i t c l o s e l y p a r a l l e l s the core o f the most well-known r o s i c r u c i a n t r a c t : the chemical wedding o f c h r i s t i a n rosenkreuz. a p l a y w i t h i n t h a t complex and a l l u s i v e n a r r a t i v e d e s c r i b e s a c o u r t l y marriage f e s t i v a l witnessed by the n a r r a t o r , rosenkreuz. the wedding p l a y a c t s as a microcosmic summary of the s u r f e i t of emblematic imagery and events of the t o t a l n a r r a t i v e . in t h i s c o u r t l y drama i n t e r l u d e of the "chemical wedding", an o l d k i n g r e c e i v e s news o f a l a n d d e v a s t a t e d by a moorish k i n g . only one daughter of the l o c a l dynasty s u r v i v e s the a s s a u l t . t h i s s u r v i v i n g p r i n c e s s who was t o marry the o l d k i n g ' s son escapes but i s l u r e d back by the moor. the o l d k i n g and h i s army f r e e the p r i n c e s s ; the k i n g r e t u r n s her kingdom t o her and vows t o marry her t o h i s son. the p r i n c e s s behaves b a d l y ; once a g a i n f a l l s under the sway of the moor and hands her kingdom t o him. the moor imprisons the p r i n c e s s and another b a t t l e w i t h the moor ensues u n t i l she i s f r e e d by the k i n g ' s son. the moor i s beheaded, the b r i d e i s f r e e d and sent t o the c o u r t preacher. the e v i l c o u r t preacher misuses h i s power and i s banished from the kingdom. the s t o r y ends w i t h the wedding. t h i s s k e l e t a l summation o f the p l a y w i t h i n the "chemical wedding" r e p r e s e n t s an e l a b o r a t e a l l e g o r y t h a t a t f i r s t p a r a l l e l s o l d testament t e a c h i n g s about the r e l a t i o n s h i p o f god t o h i s people. a f t e r satan d e s t r o y s god's people, god sends h i s son t o f r e e them. the temptation of satan (the moor) remains so g r e a t t h a t they succumb a g a i n . only through the t o t a l a n n i h i l a t i o n of satan by the son o f god can the church be r e e s t a b l i s h e d . when the roman church misuses i t s power i t i s r e p l a c e d . f i n a l l y the marriage t h a t god d e s i r e d between the church and c h r i s t can take p l a c e i n the reformation. the f a i t h l e s s venus/bride of the r o s i c r u c i a n s t o r y , the poets t e x t s and the engraving can be seen t o r e p r e s e n t a metaphor f o r the reformed church. the v i s u a l metaphor o f venus as a dangerous temptress r e l i e s on a p i c t o r i a l t r a d i t i o n t h a t was a l r e a d y i n use i n the pre-reformation e r a ; i n a woodcut i n s e b a s t i a n brant's n a r r e n s c h i f f venus subjugates by the power o f l o v e . ( f i g . ) . reformation propaganda r e - u t i l i z e d t h i s f a m i l i a r r h e t o r i c i n a t t a c k s on the church of rome; cranach, f o r example, reworked the d e v i c e o f the s e d u c t i v e temptress t o i l l u s t r a t e luther's b i b l e of ( f i g . ) . the roman church i s shown as the babylonian whore who has taken the p l a c e o f c h r i s t i n the church and has made men s u b s e r v i e n t . the venus of the s t u t t g a r t baptism i s a "redeemed" v e r s i o n of the "whorish" type; t h a t the redemption of venus i s e f f e c t e d by a lutheran reformation (as i n the r o s i c r u c i a n parable) may be g i v e n a v i s u a l i n d i c a t o r by the swans who precede her i n t h e a r t i f i c i a l water. swans had been used as an emblematic a l l u s i o n t o luther s i n c e the b e g i n n i n g of t h e seventeenth c e n t u r y and became a w i d e l y used m o t i f i n commemorative medals f o r the reformation j u b i l e e of ( f i g . ) . in t h e engraving, the " p r o t e s t a n t " venus i s f o l l o w e d by the p h a l l i c "anima c u p i d i n i " whose s l e e p m i r r o r s the i m m o b i l i z a t i o n o f the bound c u p i d . t h i s p i c t o r i a l d e n i a l of s e x u a l i t y conforms t o the r o s i c r u c i a n f a b l e i n which cupid r e p r e s e n t s " c r e a t i v e , n a t u r a l l o v e (that) i s unable t o comprehend the ( s t o r y of s a l v a t i o n ) and remains unmoved by the p a i n s o f redemption". the p u r i t a n i c a l credo i m p l i c i t i n the r o s i c r u c i a n s t o r y as a p r o t e s t a n t t r a c t i s not o n l y a r e j e c t i o n of the "babylonian whore" of the church of rome, but a l s o speaks t o the r e j e c t i o n o f the s e x u a l power t h a t reformation polemic a t t r i b u t e d t o the c a t h o l i c c l e r g y . r e l i g i o u s p a s s i o n s were aroused, a c c o r d i n g t o robert s c r i b n e r ' s a n a l y s i s , by what was p e r c e i v e d t o be the s e x u a l p r e d a t o r i n e s s of the p r i e s t h o o d . s c r i b n e r l o c a t e s the p e r c e p t i o n of e x c e s s i v e powers of the c l e r g y i n the r u l e s of s e x u a l conduct t h a t p e r m i t t e d p r i e s t s behaviour denied t o the l a i t y , i n the power p r i e s t s e x e r c i s e d i n the c o n f e s s i o n a l i n e n q u i r i e s i n t o s e x u a l s i n s and i n the c l e r g y ' s r o l e as marriage c o u n s e l l o r s and b r o k e r s . a g a i n s t t h i s image o f c a t h o l i c s e x u a l i n c o n t i n e n c e the p r o t e s t a n t c l e r g y produced a " s t r o n g l y m o r a l i s e d cosmos, i n which d i s o r d e r was seen as the r e s u l t o f human weakness and s i n f u l n e s s " . in the engraving of the " p r o t e s t a n t " venus i n her redeemed s t a t e , she i s d r e s s e d i n e n g l i s h f a s h i o n (the f a n c o l l a r and low-cut b o d i c e are i d e n t i f i e d as e n g l i s h d r e s s i n another engraving i n the s e r i e s r e p r e s e n t i n g " e n g l i s h l a d i e s " , f i g . ) . t h i s costume i s perhaps meant t o pay t r i b u t e t o e l i z a b e t h s t u a r t "the c h i e f e cause of the shews" as the h e i r t o e l i z a b e t h i, the " v i r g i n queen" and defender o f the p r o t e s t a n t church. frances y a t e s study of the e l i z a b e t h a n c u l t examined how the p e t r a r c a n theme of the "triumph o f c h a s t i t y " was e x p l o i t e d as an a n t i - p a p a l symbol. yates suggests t h a t : " i f we f o l l o w the r e l e n t l e s s argument of the e l i z a b e t h symbolism t o i t s l o g i c a l c o n c l u s i o n , we may b e g i n t o see t h i s chaste lady as a pure church, the o p p o s i t e o f an unreformed whore of babylon". i t i s u n f o r t u n a t e t h a t frances yates was not f a m i l i a r w i t h the s t u t t g a r t baptism engravings where t h i s theme i s a p p a r e n t l y p i c k e d up. in yates' the r o s i c r u c i a n enlightenment her r e a d i n g o f the "chemical wedding" does not touch on the reformation a l l e g o r y of the t r a c t ; i n her a n a l y s i s : "the main events i n the 'wedding' e v i d e n t l y r e f l e c t or i n some way r e f e r t o ceremonies and r i t u a l s connected w i t h the o r d e r s of g c h i v a l r y . " for yates the c o u r t l y content of the r o s i c r u c i a n p a r a b l e i s pre-eminent; her s u g g e s t i o n t h a t the c o u r t l y a r c h i t e c t u r e and ceremonial of the story show the influence of english culture on the wurttemberg author andreae i s too tenuous. in yates anglocentric analysis, i t i s andreae's supposed attendance at the f r i e d r i c h i garter induction ceremony presided over by an english embassy i n wurrtemberg and the p o s s i b i l i t y of andreae's f a m i l i a r i t y with what she termed as the "jacobean" renaissance at the heidelberg court that i n s p i r e the settings of the "chemical wedding". (even yates has to cast doubt on the l o c a t i o n of the c a s t l e of the story i n heidelberg because the f i c t i t i o u s one i s on a sea-shore - the sea-motif of the stuttgart pageant vehicles also alludes to a seaside s e t t i n g ) . the english costume of the redeemed venus of the engraving may have offered corroboration for yates' ruminations about english a l l u s i o n s i n the rosicrucian t r a c t . the reformation allegory of the play ,however, eluded her analysis and she interpreted the text as an impenetrable c h i v a l r i c - a l c h e m i c a l t a l e whose o r i g i n s were thoroughly english. yates' reads the "microcosmic" play within the fable as an "extremely simple p l o t about a king, a moor, and a princess", punctuated by b i b l i c a l emblems. studies of the "chemical wedding" that came a f t e r yates" the rosicrucian enlightenment ( ) put forward the b i b l i c a l and reformation allegory as the i n t e r p r e t i v e key. the german h i s t o r i a n richard van dulmen locates the work f i r m l y on german s o i l ; he characterizes rosicrucianism as a p a r t i c u l a r early seventeenth century reaction of a group of lutheran wurttemberg s c h o l a r s t o the c r i s e s they p e r c e i v e d i n the s t a t e r e g i m e n t a t i o n o f the church, i n the dangers posed by roman c a t h o l i c i s m on the p o l i t i c a l f r o n t and i n the s e c u l a r i z a t i o n o f s c i e n t i f i c knowledge o u t s i d e the i n s t i t u t i o n s of l e a r n i n g which c h a l l e n g e d the s c h o l a s t i c r i g i d i t y o f s c h o o l s and u n i v e r s i t i e s . the d e l i b e r a t e l y m y s t i f y i n g and enigmatic t e x t s promoted an e g a l i t a r i a n c h r i s t i a n s o c i e t y where t h e growth of s e c u l a r l e a r n i n g would be coupled w i t h an i n t e r n a l i z e d p i e t i s t i c p r a c t i c e . the u t i l i t y of t h i s u t o p i a n s u b t e x t of the r o s i c r u c i a n t e x t s f o r the s t u t t g a r t f e s t i v a l i s t h a t i t developed a r e l i g i o u s - p h i l o s o p h i c a l p o s i t i o n t h a t stood o u t s i d e the d o c t r i n a l d i s p u t e s the t e r r i t o r i a l church was engaged i n w i t h c a t h o l i c s and c a l v i n i s t s . while wurttemberg r o s i c r u c i a n i s m r e f l e c t s disenchantment w i t h the r e s u l t s o f the c e n t u r y - o l d reformation as expressed by a group o f "bourgeois" s c h o l a r s , i t i s i n t e r e s t i n g t o note t h a t the proposed reforms s t i l l m i r r o r luther's i d e a s about the separateness o f the sacred and s e c u l a r spheres. in the d e s i r e d "second reformation", the w o r l d l y o r d e r would be l e f t i n t a c t : n e i t h e r church, nor s t a t e , nor the e s t a t e h i e r a r c h y , nor the p o l i t i c a l c o n s t i t u t i o n were c a l l e d i n t o q u e s t i o n . while andreae sought f o r change, t h i s change would o n l y be sought f o r i n a c h r i s t i a n i z a t i o n o f l e a r n i n g and m o r a l i t y . the r o s i c r u c i a n c a l l s f o r a p i e t i s t i c r e v i v a l i n wurttemberg d i d not p l a y a major r o l e i n the p a r l i a m e n t a r y o p p o s i t i o n t o a b s o l u t i s t r u l e , i n c o n t r a s t w i t h p u r i t a n i s m , the e n g l i s h seventeenth-century v e r s i o n of p i e t i s m , as mary fulbrook's comparative study has shown. in her p i e t y and p o l i t i c s . r e l i g i o n and the r i s e o f a b s o l u t i s m i n england. wurttemberg. and p r u s s i a ( ), she examined how the p i e t i s t a f t e r l i f e of andreae's r o s i c r u c i a n pamphlets came t o be i n c o r p o r a t e d and t o l e r a t e d w i t h i n the wurttemberg t e r r i t o r i a l c h u r c h . in the f e s t i v a l the r o s i c r u c i a n n a r r a t i v e base cannot be read as an i n c o r p o r a t i o n of an o p p o s i t i o n a l d i s c o u r s e . the i r e n i c p r o t e s t a n t framework of the r o s i c r u c i a n t e x t s may have spoken t o the wurttemberg e s t a t e s concept of the d u c a l r o l e which understood the l e g i t i m a c y of the r u l e r not i n h i s g o d l i k e q u a l i t i e s , but r a t h e r i n h i s c h r i s t i a n v i r t u e and defense of the t r u e f a i t h . perhaps the r o s i c r u c i a n p a r a b l e w i t h i t s a l l u s i o n s t o c h r i s t i a n v i r t u e may have a c t e d as a response t o the p i c t u r e of the c h r i s t i a n p a t r i a r c h t h a t the s t i l l i n f l u e n t i a l wurttemberg e s t a t e s h e l d up i n t h e i r o p p o s i t i o n t o l a v i s h d u c a l s e l f - r e p r e s e n t a t i o n . the i s s u e o f the defense of the t r u e f a i t h t h a t the a l l e g o r y o f t h e redeemed venus and the beheaded moor i n t r o d u c e s i s f u r t h e r o v e r l a i d w i t h imagery t h a t does not occur i n the r o s i c r u c i a n p a r a b l e but which i s a l s o based i n the c o n f e s s i o n a l c o n f l i c t . the b a f f l i n g b l e n d of hungarians, turks, a v e n e t i a n boat and the e n g l i s h - d r e s s e d venus, i suggest, c o n t a i n a p o l e m i c a l i n t e n t behind a veneer o f c o u r t l y e x o t i c i s m . these are not random c h o i c e s o f accompaniment f o r an a l l e g o r i c a l reformed church. the v e n e t i a n boat and the hungarian k i n g are i n the same m e t a p h o r i c a l boat as the e n g l i s h venus. the a n t i - p a p a l v e n e t i a n r e p u b l i c and the c a l v i n i s m of the e a s t e r n reaches o f the habsburg empire are a l l u d e d t o as a l l i e s of the p r o t e s t a n t cause i n the hungarian i d e n t i t y of the k i n g i n the gondola. the t e x t s p l a c e the hungarian rescue of the venus i n t o a foggy h i s t o r i c a l p a s t t h a t d i s g u i s e s any contemporary import t o t h e i r presence. the hungarian s o l d i e r s c a r r y the moor's head o f the r o s i c r u c i a n f a b l e but a l s o c a r r y the impaled heads of twelve turks. the g h o u l i s h t r o p h i e s the hungarians are c a r r y i n g are u n l i k e any a n t i - t u r k i s h propaganda images c u r r e n t a t the time. rudolf i i had e x t e n s i v e l y e x p l o i t e d the theme of v i c t o r y over the turks f o r p e r s o n a l propaganda of h i s r o l e as hungarian k i n g but the many p a i n t i n g s and t a p e s t r i e s commissioned f o r h i s p r i v a t e rooms and the medals he had made u t i l i z e d a b l a n d imagery of c a p t u r e d t u r k i s h weapons and a r t i f a c t s . a r i c h l y i l l u s t r a t e d hungarian a r t h i s t o r i c a l monograph e n t i t l e d "let us g i r d o u r s e l v e s w i t h the sword a g a i n s t the heathen" a n a l y s e s a n t i - t u r k i s h imagery c u r r e n t i n s i x t e e n t h and seventeenth c e n t u r y c e n t r a l europe; i t o f f e r s no models f o r the gruesome t r o p h i e s p o r t r a y e d i n the s t u t t g a r t f e s t i v a l . only broadsheets w i t h an a n t i - t u r k i s h theme made use of images of i m p a l i n g - and then i t i s the turks who are the impalers ( f i g . ) . the gory impaled heads of the s t u t t g a r t f e s t i v a l may be connected t o e a r l i e r pamphlet imagery o f the d r a c u l a s t o r y . the d r e a d f u l deeds of v l a d the impaler were among the most p o p u l a r broadsheet woodcuts i n c i r c u l a t i o n i n f i f t e e n t h c e n t u r y germany ( f i g . ) . the hungarian impalers o f the s t u t t g a r t f e s t i v a l may, by making a p i c t o r i a l a s s o c i a t i o n w i t h t r a n s y l v a n i a and i t s gruesome h i s t o r y , be r e f e r r i n g t o a more contemporary concern. the hungarian kingdom o f the e a r l y seventeenth c e n t u r y was no l o n g e r s o v e r e i g n and u n i t e d . i t c o n s i s t e d of t h r e e p a r t s ; the t u r k i s h o c c u p i e d area, the habsburg r u l e d area and a t h i r d area r u l e d by a t u r k i s h v a s s a l , b e t h l e n gabor. the habsburg area, which was almost e n t i r e l y p r o t e s t a n t was a c e n t r e of c o n f l i c t w i t h the emperor i n the f i r s t decade of the seventeenth c e n t u r y . but i t was the t r a n s y l v a n i a n r u l e r , the c a l v i n i s t t u r k i s h v a s s a l , who was the most important hungarian f i g u r e i n the pre-war y e a r s because he promised t o advance the c a l v i n i s t cause. in the- f a c e o f e n g l i s h and n e t h e r l a n d i s h r e l u c t a n c e , as the h i s t o r i a n van schelven has p o i n t e d out, b e t h l e n gabor o f f e r e d a g r e a t and f i n a l hope t o m o b i l i z e a pan-european p r o t e s t a n t a l l i a n c e ; even i f h i s l a t e r p o l i t i c s d i d not c o n s i s t e n t l y conform t o h i s r e l i g i o u s o r i e n t a t i o n . the strange phenomenon o f a c a l v i n i s t a l l y who i s a l s o a t u r k i s h v a s s a l l e d van schelven t o q u e s t i o n how such a r u l e r c o u l d have had enough p r e s t i g e t o even be c o n s i d e r e d as a c a t a l y s t t o u n i f y a l l p r o t e s t a n t europe. the hopes b e t h l e n gabor embodied were brought t o the f o r e as o t h e r e f f o r t s t o u n i f y a g a i n s t the c a t h o l i c a x i s met w i t h f a i l u r e . perhaps t h i s strange a l l y of the p a l a t i n a t e cause i s g i v e n c r e d i b i l i t y i n the engravings v i a the gory heads o f vanquished turks which serve t o deny h i s s t a t u s as l i e g e s u b j e c t of the s u l t a n . by u t i l i z i n g the images of impaled heads b e t h l e n gabor's t r a n s y l v a n i a n h e r i t a g e i s r e c a l l e d and the famous c r u e l t y of d r a c u l a becomes a p o s i t i v e a t t r i b u t e o f an a l l y . the n o t i o n o f a hungarian a l l y t o the p r o t e s t a n t cause i s not mentioned i n the commissioned t e x t s . the poets' commentaries do not go beyond what i s r e p r e s e n t e d ; i n s t e a d , the a l l e g o r i c a l n a r r a t i v e s are removed i n t o a c o u r t l y nether world o f h e r o i c a c t i o n s by h i s t o r i c a l and m y t h o l o g i c a l f i g u r e s . the engravings are r e l e a s e d i n t o a separate f i e l d o f a c t i o n where contemporary p o l i t i c a l and r e l i g i o u s a l l u s i o n s are t h e r e t o be read. these r e a d i n g s are, however, detached from c o u r t a u t h o r s h i p ; the " r e a d a b i l i t y " of the symbolic commentary of the g r a p h i c work i s a c c e s s i b l e t o those c l o s e t o the "author", the wurttemberg c o u r t , but t h i s author had a b d i c a t e d a r o l e as i n t e r p r e t e r of the imagery and any d i r e c t p o l e m i c a l i n t e n t was subsumed by grandeur and i n n o v a t i o n i n the form and wealth of the r e p r e s e n t a t i o n . by m a i n t a i n i n g an a l l e g o r i c a l tone the f e s t i v a l r e p r e s e n t a t i o n s avoided c o n f l i c t - r i d d e n i s s u e s o f r e l i g i o n and a l l i a n c e t h a t might have f u e l e d f u r t h e r d i s s e n t both w i t h i n and o u t s i d e the t e r r i t o r y w h i l e a l l o w i n g the g r a p h i c r e p r e s e n t a t i o n t o d i s s e m i n a t e an ambiguous bundle of a l l u s i o n s f o r the p r o t e s t a n t union t o r a l l y around. the e q u i v o c a l v i s u a l language o f the venus n a r r a t i v e was u t i l i z e d , i suggest, t o a l l u d e t o the hopes o f a p r o t e s t a n t renewal without naming any dangerous and r e b e l l i o u s a l l i a n c e s t h a t might have brought i t about. . joh. v a l e n t i n andreae, fama f r a t e r n i t a s ( ). c o n f e s s i o f r a t e r n i t a t i s ( ), chymische h o c h z e i t . c h r i s t i a n i rosencreutz, anno ( ), e d i t e d by r i c h a r d van dulmen ( s t u t t g a r t , ). the t e x t o f the "chemical wedding" was w r i t t e n i n o r and p u b l i s h e d i n i n strasbourg, p. . . j.w. montgomery, cross and c r u c i b l e . johann v a l e n t i n andreae ( - ) phoenix of the t h e o l o g i a n s (the hague, ), p. . . montgomery, a l s o r. van dulmen, die u t o p i e e i n e r c h r i s t l i c h e n g e s e l l s c h a f t . t e i l l ( s t u t t g a r t , ), o f f e r t h i s r e a d i n g of the reformation a l l e g o r y . '. r.w. s c r i b n e r , popular c u l t u r e and popular movements i n reformation germany (london, ), pp. - . . j.w. montgomery, o p , c i t . , p. . . r.w. s c r i b n e r , o p . c i t . , pp. - . . frances yates, a s t r a e a . the i m p e r i a l theme i n the s i x t e e n t h " c e n t u r y (penguin, ), p. . . f. yates, the r o s i c r u c i a n enlightenment, o p . c i t . , p. . . f. yates, o p . c i t . , p. . . f. yates, o p . c i t . , p. . . f. yates, o p . c i t . , p. . . j.w. montgomery, a l s o r. van dulmen, see notes and . . r. van dulmen, op. c i t . , p. . . r. van dulmen, op. c i t . , p. . . r. van dulmen, op. c i t . , p. . . mary fulbrook, p i e t y and p o l i t i c s (cambridge, ). . k a r l v o c e l k a , habsburqische hochzeiten - (vienna, ). . g a l a v i c s geza, kossunk kardot az poganv e l l e n (budapest, ). . g r i g o r n a d r i s , "a f a n t a s t i c attempt o f d r a c u l a t o conquer england" comparative l i t e r a t u r e s t u d i e s ( ), , p. , a l s o : d i e t e r harmening, der anfanq von d r a c u l a . zur g e s c h i c h t e von g e s c h i c h t e n (wurzburg, ). . g a l a v i c s geza, o p . c i t . , p. . . kalman benda, "le d r o i t de r e s i s t a n c e de l a b u l l e d'or h o n g r o i s e e t l e c a l v i n i s m e " i n noblesse f r a n c a i s e noblesse h o n g r o i s e . b e l a kopeci and eva h. b a l a z s , eds. (budapest/paris, ). . a.a. van schelven, "der g e n e r a l s t a b des p o l i t i s c h e n c a l v i n i s m u s i n z e n t r a l - e u r o p a zu beginn des d r e i s s i g j a h r i g e n k r i e g e s " , a r c h i v f u r r e f o r m a t i o n s g e s c h i c h t e - , - , pp. - . conclusion in the h i g h l y p o l i t i c i z e d c u l t u r e o f the e a r l y modern p e r i o d , a r t i s t i c p r o d u c t i o n s e t i n motion i n an unprecedented manner the accumulation of power by the c o u r t . the f e s t i v a l w i t h i t s extravagant use of a l l c u l t u r a l forms was perhaps the consummate means by which an e a r l y a b s o l u t i s t c o u r t c o u l d not o n l y r e p r e s e n t but a l s o formulate i t s a u t h o r i t y . the baptism f e s t i v a l p r e s e n t s an i n t e r e s t i n g case study of the use of t h i s c u l t u r a l s t r a t e g y by a secondary german t e r r i t o r i a l c o u r t . conversance w i t h the i n t e r n a t i o n a l r e p e r t o i r e o f c o u r t l y m a g n i f i c e n c e enabled a c u l t u r a l d i s p l a y designed t o a d v e r t i s e and implement the a c c r e t i o n of power by the minor c o u r t on the l o c a l , n a t i o n a l and i n t e r n a t i o n a l l e v e l . the m u l t i - l e v e l rank e x p l i c a t i n g f u n c t i o n of the f e s t i v a l was p r o g r a m m a t i c a l l y heightened by i t s t r a n s l a t i o n i n t o a v i s u a l medium. v i a the e x t e n s i v e use of the p r i n t medium the secondary c o u r t c o u l d r e l e a s e the e f f e c t s of the event from the domination of the immediate and the l o c a l . in a d d i t i o n t o s o c i a l s t a t u s e x p l i c a t i n g f u n c t i o n s , the v i s u a l medium extended the c o n v e n t i o n a l use of the f e s t i v a l as an instrument t o encounter p o l i t i c a l c r i s i s . the r e p r e s e n t a t i o n of the c o u r t l y s p e c t a c l e d i s s e m i n a t e d a show of s t r e n g t h t h a t masked a l e s s than p e r f e c t p r o t e s t a n t a l l i a n c e a t a time o f impending c o n f e s s i o n a l c o n f l i c t . some o f the most e y e - c a t c h i n g images, as i have suggested, a l l u d e t o the c o n s i d e r a b l e i n s t a b i l i t i e s brought about by the p o l i t i c o - r e l i g i o u s c r i s i s . in the engravings the hopes and f e a r s r a i s e d by a p o t e n t i a l l y r e b e l l i o u s a l l i a n c e c o u l d be t r a n s m i t t e d i n a symbolic form t h a t d i f f e r e n t i a l l y addressed the l o c a l and i n t e r n a t i o n a l spheres of a c t i o n . mediated by the h i e r a r c h i c a l l y d e f i n e d language o f c o u r t l y g l o r i f i c a t i o n , the c o n t e n t i o u s i s s u e s of a dangerous p r o t e s t a n t a l l i a n c e were v i s u a l l y expounded and i n a sense overcome by a show o f v i r t u o s i t y and i n v e n t i o n . the d i f f i c u l t i e s p r e s e n t e d by j o i n i n g a p o t e n t i a l r e b e l l i o n were sublimated i n a c o n f i d e n t r e p r e s e n t a t i o n of c o u r t l y e l e v a t i o n and elegance t h a t p r e c l u d e d c o a r s e p o l e m i c a l content. i f the problems f a c e d by the wurttemberg c o u r t i n j o i n i n g the p r o t e s t a n t union would have been more d i r e c t l y addressed, perhaps the p a l a t i n a t e r u l e r would not have taken the dangerous s t e p of a c c e p t i n g the bohemian crown i n . the p a l a t i n a t e s must have had an i n f l a t e d sense o f p r o t e s t a n t s o l i d a r i t y when f r e d e r i c k v p r e c i p i t a t e d an empire-wide armed c o n f l i c t when he took the s i d e of the bohemian r e b e l s . n e i t h e r the p r o t e s t a n t union nor the e n g l i s h k i n g came t o h i s a i d when he was e x p e l l e d by c a t h o l i c f o r c e s ; duke johann f r i e d r i c h t r i e d t o d e c l a r e n e u t r a l i t y but wurttemberg was soon overrun by i m p e r i a l t r o o p s . the p o p u l a t i o n o f wurttemberg t h a t had numbered , a t the b e g i n n i n g o f the c e n t u r y was reduced t o , by the end of the t h i r t y years war. m. merian. c o v t j t a e c r a des k/kstlkhes ffwotlcks be f des ne/geborxexr/n'gen" prjvtzen" fr derichen herttog f i g u r e . fireworks; s t u t t g a r t , , engraving. f i g u r e . kubelstechen; s t u t t g a r t , , engraving. o f i g u r e . arcimboldesques: h a. hunter. saxony, , e t c h i n g . h e i n r i c h goding. b. t e r r a . munich, 's, e t c h i n g . unknown master. f i g u r e . concord and d i s c o r d ; s t u t t g a r t , , engraving. £ jywfihettbnbrtg pabfittr ©fftnbarung j|db«nm»cciftlom'. s.cap. © < f c a a » i i a n m | i b c n r « » b n g t i c * gvann. thai bex g f l a l i vnb tnamt* wu "job ami** gifcbcn bat ir in m r an btt m t n * gtflat du>t< fiton vngtlti^n tw »b' l*bfn^< rx» pabflw* gtuobi t > « warm all grf ntm m m zmcblatxmba gaffltû cnlcvf l)cu«vi gartbg pfintmwa fcaaibtamis^wwilfunmf istx ui jt vcrfrifif<$« junsj £ > a » tb*cr «a« aim ptu *l grirufe i*nik txc ywpfl m oinfii?* r a ^ fc>a« <ukfe bwrtl^ btu > t u<uvmt uk* v u im mtatgm f.-r kb | a fea i baa cttkt pnw pĵ c-tai m* ni« iejiangc't f\i|> jlfl vonbtm boftwn onbammn v«f<^*n/wib<dect vfi trrf nracn ibwi bet aad) aatt\ w<n mimj *b<m t*$ baffbrn m m i fd̂ ianb par pallium n«fe a muu im y'«mi,^pfrt p<i /̂fiiff« »d<bc«»b«nfi £' anb wfc urn ?,unt tn<$ rmi rn *nfl t ) i f l < # a i l < » twnn|i<t>polct .mbm * . a * rbwi fntrfvnfl am i<jmi*i> nnbffl fctiu baa ftoaa (butin bj< gfcfeubai t > « * bap (bum tiblidj mmb grbwtxn pou bcmo**mbt* s mtn munb g t i b a a t a f l o * g« il gmnb. f i g u r e . many-headed monsters: a. seven-headed p a p a l b e a s t ; c. , woodcut b. s a t i r e on the c a t h o l i c c l e r g y ; , t r i c k woodcut. f i g u r e . schembart m i r r o r costume, manuscript i l l u s t r a t i o n f i g u r e . hungarian king; s t u t t g a r t , , engraving. h o - f i g u r e . venus and cupid; s t u t t g a r t , , engraving. f i g u r e . t u r k i s h t r o p h i e s ; s t u t t g a r t , , engraving. f i g u r e . venus; s e b a s t i a n brant's ship of f o o l s , , woodcut. f i g u r e . the b a b y l o n i a n whore; luther b i b l e . f i g u r e . commemorative medals f o r reformation j u b i l e e o f . h f i g u r e . e n g l i s h l a d i e s ; s t u t t g a r t , , engraving. h h itm'f fatitf full mt m *to flrmiffmi fcctfc crjtf rjcftnttctfe fr/!»:fat» *en b a n *fl&« a> * f i g u r e . d r a c u l a ; s t r a s b o u r g , , woodcut. bibliography alewyn, r. and k. s a l z l e . die epoche der h o f i s c h e n f e s t e i n dokument und deutung. hamburg, . amberg, g. "tod und begrabnis des k u r f u r s t e n e r n s t und d i e i n t h r o n i s a t i o n s e i n e s neffen ferdinand von bayern a l s k u r f u r s t von koln im jahre ." kolner domblatt. ( ), - . andreae, j.v., fama f r a t e r n i t a s . c o n f e s s i o f r a t e r n i t a s . chymische h o c h z e i t c h r i s t i a n i rosencreutz. ed. r. van dulmen. s t u t t g a r t , . andersson, c. "popular imagery i n german reformation broadsheets." i n p r i n t and c u l t u r e i n the renaissance. ed. g.p. tyson and s.s. wagonheim, newark, . assum, j.a. warhaffte r e l a t i o n e t c . s t u t t g a r t , . aston, t. ed. c r i s i s i n europe - . garden c i t y , n.y., . baumunk, b.-m. "hauptstadt-aber wo l i e g t s i e ? " die z e i t . ( j u l y , ) , . bausinger, h. and m. kundegraber. " e i n maskenzug im jahre ." wurttemberqisches jahrbuch f u r volkskunde ( - ), - . benda, k. 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" p r e s e n t a t i o n and r e p r e s e n t a t i o n , c a r n i v a l a t nuremberg - ," r e p r e s e n t a t i o n s ( ), - . k i r c h n e r , j . ed. lexikon des buchwesens b . l . s t u t t g a r t , . kohler, e. m a r t i n luther und der festbrauch. koln, . krapf, l. and c. wagenknecht. ed. s t u t t g a r t e r h o f f e s t e : texte und m a t e r i a l e n zur h o f i s c h e n r e p r e s e n t a t i o n im fruhen . jahrhundert. v o l s . tubingen, . krebs, r. die p o l i t i s c h e p u b l i z i s t i k der j e s u i t e n und i h r e r gegner. h a l l , . kunisch, j . ed. neue s t u d i e n zur f r u h n e u z e i t l i c h e n r e i c h s g e s c h i c h t e . b e r l i n , . kunst der r e f o r m a t i o n s z e i t . exh. c a t a l o g . b e r l i n , . l a u r i e n , i . " h o f i s c h e " und " b u r g e r l i c h e " elemente i n den " g a i s t l i c h e n und w e l t i i c h e n gedichten" georg rodolf weckherlins ( ). s t u t t g a r t , . l i e b e l , h. "the b o u r g e o i s i e i n southwestern germany - . a r i s i n g c l a s s ? " i n t e r n a t i o n a l review of s o c i a l h i s t o r y ( ), - . l o t z , a. das feuerwerk. seine g e s c h i c h t e und b i b l i o g r a p h i e . l e i p z i g , . lubbe-wolff, g. "die bedeutung der lehre von den v i e r w e l t r e i c h e n f u r das s t a a t s r e c h t des romischen r e i c h s . " s t a a t ( ). magne, e. les f e t e s i n europe au xviie s i e c l e . p a r i s , . m a r a v a l l , j . c u l t u r e of the baroque: an a n a l v s i s o f a h i s t o r i c a l s t r u c t u r e . m i n n e a p o l i s , . marquart, e. g e s c h i c h t e wurttembergs. s t u t t g a r t , . monter, w. r i t u a l . myth and magic i n e a r l y modern europe. b r i g h t o n , . montgomery, j.w. cross and c r u c i b l e . johann v a l e n t i n andreae ( - ) phoenix of the t h e o l o g i a n s . vol. . the hague, . m u l l e r , e. k l e i n e g e s c h i c h t e wurttembergs. s t u t t g a r t , . n a d r i s , g. "a f a n t a s t i c attempt o f d r a c u l a t o conquer england," comparative l i t e r a t u r e s t u d i e s ( ). newman, j.o. "marriages of convenience: p a t t e r n s o f a l l i a n c e i n h e i d e l b e r g p o l i t i c s and o p i t z ' s p o e t i c s " mln ( ), - . n o l t e , j . and h. tompert, c. windhorst. k o n t i n u i t a t und umbruch. t h e o l o g i e und frommigkeit i n f l u g s c h r i f t e n und k l e i n l i t e r a t u r an der wende vom . zum . jahrhundert. tubingen, . von oechelhauser, a. " p h i l i p p h a i n h o f e r s b e r i c h t uber d i e s t u t t g a r t e r k i n d t a u f e im jahre ." neue h e i d e l b e r g e r jahrbucher ( ), - . otto, e. 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"the t h e o r y of the four monarchies." c l a s s i c a l p h i l o l o g y ( ), - . t a l b o t , c. " p r i n t s and the d e f i n i t i v e image" i n p r i n t and c u l t u r e i n the renaissance. g.p. tyson and s.s. wagonheim, ed. newark, . t e n f e l d e , k, "adventus, zur h i s t o r i s c h e n i k o n o l o g i e " h i s t o r i s d c h e z e i t s c h r i f t ( ), - . vann, j.a. the making of a s t a t e : wurttemberg - . i t h i c a , . v i c k e r s , b. "frances yates and the w r i t i n g of h i s t o r y . " j o u r n a l o f modern h i s t o r y ( ), - . v o c e l k a , k. habsburgische hochzeiten - . vienna, . v o c e l k a , k. die p o l i t i s c h e propaganda k a i s e r r u d o l f s i i : - . vienna, . v o g l e r , b. le monde germanigue e t h e l v e t i q u e a 'epoque des reformes. - . v o l . p a r i s , . wagenknecht, c. "die beschreibung der h o f i s c h e n f e s t e , merkmale e i n e r gattung" i n europaische h o f k u l t u r im . und . jahrhundert. w o l f f e n b u t t e l , . warncke, c.-p. die ornamentale groteske i n deutschland - . v o l . b e r l i n , . warnke, m. h o f k u n s t l e r . zur v o r g e s c h i c h t e des modernen k u n s t l e r s . koln, . weisbach, w. t r i o n f i . b e r l i n , . wuthrich, l.h. das druckgraphische werk von matthaus merian d.a. b d . l , b a s e l , . yates, f.a. a s t r a e a . the i m p e r i a l theme i n the s i x t e e n t h century. london, . yates, f.a. the r o s i c r u c i a n enlightenment. london, . yates, f.a. the v a l o i s t a p e s t r i e s . london, . zeeden, e.w. hegemonialkriege und glaubenskampfe - . f r a n k f u r t , . zophy, j.w. the holy roman empire, a d i c t i o n a r y handbook. westport, conn., . emasters title page i a thesis submitted to the temple university graduate board in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree by thesis approvals: caught in action: a study of christiane baumgartner's treatment of technique, movement, and self-reflection master of arts catherine e. sirizzotti august dr. gerald silk, thesis advisor, department of art history dr. ashley west, thesis advisor, department of art history ii © by catherine e. sirizzotti all rights reserved iii abstract in my master’s thesis, i examine baumgartner’s work in regards to her treatment of technique, movement, and self-reflection. this research demonstrates how she has mastered early, traditional german woodcuts and introduced them into a new, contemporary context by combining them with video and photography. i begin with a discussion of baumgartner’s use of materials and techniques. i focus especially on her emulation of albrecht dürer and adherence to many early fifteenth-century rules and standards for creating prints, while also exploring the print history of leipzig where baumgartner received her foundational training. through a study of works such as dürer’s large-scale woodcut titled triumphal arch of maximilian i ( ) and baumgartner’s transall ( - ), i examine how her methods also differ from traditional approaches and the ways in which she places particular value on how the labor of producing the print fits into its creation. i then focus on how baumgartner unites the slow process of woodcut with the fast paced mediums of video and photography in order to produce distinctive physical and visual encapsulations of movement. this includes an exploration of french author paul virilio’s influence and the ways in which she captures motion through images of transportation, cutting techniques, and optical illusions. i also consider the role that her personal history plays in her works, as well as her russian influences such as the writings of the russian-american poet and essayist joseph brodsky. this is displayed by an examination of how baumgartner’s prints illustrate the significance of introspection by demonstrating its relation to one’s background, physical surroundings, and connection to the past and memory, as well as the significance of reassessing one’s perspective of the modern experience. iv acknowledgments thanks to my advisors, dr. gerald silk and dr. ashley west, for their intellectually stimulating guidance. i also want to thank julien robson for introducing me to christiane baumgartner, as well as our talks about the artist. i also appreciate the generous assistance of caitlin perkins. to anthony, diane and ariane sirizzotti and kevin mattesky, i am grateful for your love and tremendous support. and of course, a sincere thanks to christiane baumgartner for taking the time to talk with me about her beautiful works. v table of contents page abstract…………………………………………………………………………….. iii acknowledgements……………………………………………………………... iv list of figures……………………………………………………………………... vi introduction…………………………………………………………………..…. viii chapters . deciphering the matrix: the print history of a renaissance revivalist……………….…………………………………………………… notes…………………………………………………………...……….. . at the speed of light: movement in print…………………...….. notes…………………………………………….….….……………….. . “twists of language”: self-reflection filtered through the matrix of a printmaker…………………………………...…….. notes……………………………………………………………………. conclusion…………………………………...……….…...……………………….. bibliography………...……...……………………………………...……………… figures………….…………………………………………………...……………….. vi list of figures page figure . attrib. albrecht dürer, the creation of eve from the nuremberg chronicle, woodcut, . ……………………………………………..………………..... figure . dürer, self portrait, silver point, . vienna, albertina. ….…………… figure . dürer, the four horsemen of the apocalypse from the series apocalypse, woodcut, . …………………………………………,…………………….. figure . christiane baumgartner, klassenkameraden (classmates), three silkscreens on paper, . ……………………………………………....….……………... figure . gerhard richter, matrosen (sailors), oil on canvas, . ……..….…….. figure . christiane baumgartner, lisbon i-iv, four woodcuts on japanese paper, . ……………………………………………….…………………………... figure . albrecht dürer et al., triumphal arch of maximilian i, woodcut, . british museum, london. ……………………….…………………………….. figure . christiane baumgartner, transall, woodcut on kozo paper, . museum of modern art, new york, ny. ………………..………….…………………... figures . - christiane baumgartner, schkeuditz i-iv, series of four woodcuts, . museum of modern art, new york, ny. ………………….…………..…… - figure . schkeuditz iii (detail) ……………………………………………………… figure . Étienne-jules marey, “bird flight, pelican,” chronophotograph, . .… figure . emil nolde, fischdampfer (fishing steamer), woodcut, . museum of modern art, new york, ny. ……………….….……………………………… figure . baumgartner, manhattan transfer, woodcut on kozo paper, . …..…. figure . baumgartner, deutscher wald, from a series of nine woodcuts, . ….. figure . baumgartner, luftbild, woodcut on kozo paper, - . .…..………… figure . carlos cruz-diez, induction chromatique , silkscreen, . ……..… figure . victor vasarely, zèbre, oil on canvas, . …………………………… vii figures . - baumgartner, allee i + ii, woodcut diptych on kozo paper, . … figure . gerhard richter, seestück (seascape), oil on canvas, . …….……… figure . richter, great sphinx of gizeh, oil on canvas, . ……….…………... figure . baumgartner, gelände, woodcut on atsukuchi japanese paper, . .… figures . - christiane baumgartner, trails i + ii, woodcut diptych on kozo paper, . ………………………………………………….………………………... figure . baumgartner, less than one i, part of a series of five woodcuts on japanese paper, . ………………………………………………………….………… figure . baumgartner, less than one iii, part of a series of five woodcuts on japanese paper, . …………………………………………….……………………… figures . - baumgartner, solaris i-iv, a series of four woodcuts on kozo paper, . ………………………………………………………………………… - figure . martha rosler, “beauty rest,” from the series bringing the war home: house beautiful, photomontage, printed as a color photograph, - . … figure . rosler, “photo-op,” from the series bringing the war home: house beautiful, new series, photomontage, . ………………………………….. figure . baumgartner, sekunde. cream cloth covered box containing title page, colophon, and twenty-five woodcuts on zerkall paper, . ………….……... viii introduction capturing international attention, german artist christiane baumgartner has produced impressive artworks that blend two rather divergent forms of media: the woodcut and video. in my master’s thesis, i examine baumgartner’s work in regards to her treatment of technique, movement, and self-reflection. this research demonstrates how she has mastered early, traditional german woodcuts and introduced them into a new, contemporary context. this project grew from my introduction to baumgartner’s work at philagrafika’s the graphic unconscious exhibition at the pennsylvania academy of the fine arts in early . i soon became interested in the philadelphia-wide project and its influence on the temple university gallery, which led me into a deeper study of philagrafika’s objectives and artists. throughout my research, baumgartner continually caught my attention, and i soon began speaking with philagrafika about her work in particular. i then realized the lack of in-depth research on this important artist and recognized this topic’s potential as a master’s thesis. this thesis is structured into three chapters. chapter one discusses baumgartner’s use of materials and techniques. i focus especially on her emulation of albrecht dürer and adherence to many early fifteenth-century rules and standards for creating prints, while also exploring the print history of leipzig where baumgartner received her foundational training. this includes the study of dürer’s educational background in relation to baumgartner’s traditional training, as well as the development of her printmaking process. i investigate how dürer produced his works and the ways in which baumgartner has incorporated these influences into her output. beyond these technical ix influences, i also discuss dürer’s large-scale woodcut titled triumphal arch of maximilian i ( ) (fig. . ) in regards to baumgartner’s transall ( - ) (fig. . ), demonstrating that her use of monumentally sized prints is not that far removed from dürer’s practice. however, dürer’s work was a large collaborative project, and baumgartner has the advantage of new technologies and processes that allow her to have a different approach to producing these grand-scale compositions. this opens the door to a conversation of how her methods also differ from traditional approaches and the ways in which she places particular value on how the labor of producing the print fits into its creation. especially important is baumgartner’s exclusive role as designer, cutter, and printer of her works, which—as dürer shows—differs greatly from the tradition of making woodcuts. this leads me into chapter two, in which i investigate how she blends aspects of an old style with that of the new in order to depict images filled with speed and movement. chapter two focuses on how baumgartner unites the slow process of woodcut with the fast paced mediums of video and photography in order to produce distinctive physical and visual encapsulations of movement. french author paul virilio’s writings on the concept of motion played a significant part in amplifying her interest in this subject, helping to shape her view of speed in relation to communication and technology. through an exploration of virilio’s influence and an examination of baumgartner’s works, i will analyze the ways in which she captures motion through images of transportation, cutting techniques, and optical illusions. i begin with a study of her schkeuditz series ( ) (figs. . - ), examining her implementation of process and technique in each print in the series in order to convey x movement and the rush of modern communication and ideas. this series also assists in demonstrating her use of familiar imagery, making them not only personal to baumgartner, but lending themselves to multiple reactions and interpretations, allowing a wide range of viewers to both share the artist’s vision of the world as well as contemplate their own perspectives. this conversation leads to how baumgartner not only suggests movement through subject matter, but also generates optical illusions, such as in luftbild ( ) (fig. . ), that both cause the print to appear in motion and force viewers to participate, prompting them to move around the space, in turn shifting their perspective of the woodcut. these two aspects of her prints are then united in a discussion that establishes how her universally relatable images seek to produce visually stimulating experiences that prompt a viewer to take a moment for self-reflection, the main message hidden within her prints. chapter three is a deeper exploration of how her prints encourage introspection. in a rushed world of instantaneous communication and oversaturation with media imagery, the time for one’s personal thoughts can often be interrupted or neglected. baumgartner aims to give viewers a chance to reclaim this action of self-reflection and be reminded of its importance. by considering the role that her personal history plays in her works, as well as her russian influences such as the writings of the russian-american poet and essayist joseph brodsky, i will examine how baumgartner’s prints illustrate the significance of personal meditative thought by demonstrating its relation to one’s background, physical surroundings, and connection to the past and memory, as well as the significance of reassessing one’s perspective of the modern experience. xi this chapter begins with an introduction to the link between baumgartner and brodsky’s artistic processes, followed by an examination of how their artistic output is affected by their background—his childhood in world war ii russia and her youth under the german democratic republic. this notion is established by a discussion of his collection of essays titled less than one, of which baumgartner made a woodcut illustrated reprint of his essay “less than one” in (see figs. . - ). these essays, like baumgartner’s prints, capture moments of self-reflection and history in a poetic manner that allows the reader/viewer to participate in the meditative action, which baumgartner herself exemplifies. this discourse moves into the ways in which one’s background influences perspective (both spatially and in regards to point of view), especially in relation to how one view’s his or her surroundings. baumgartner displays this concept in her print series solaris ( ) (figs. . - ), which originated from her reaction to the placement of tunnels in birmingham, england, and having read brodsky’s recollections of leningrad’s city layout. this acts as a lead into her interpretations of past events, and how by revisiting images of the past and personal memories, she is able to reassess her relationship and interaction with modern society and how she is affected by its changes and technological advancements. this is displayed by her inspiration for and engineering of both luftbild and transall, as well as her perspective altering works sekunde ( ) (fig. . ) and detour ( ). baumgartner has an experimental and inquisitive approach to printmaking, most especially in the medium of woodcut. she uses it as both a personal outlet for meditation and as a way of reaching out to fellow individuals. throughout my thesis, i investigate the manner in which baumgartner seeks to unite her traditional and contemporary xii training into a unique style that highlights the speed of modern society, while attempting to remind viewers of the importance of introspection. i aim to determine the various ways in which baumgartner has succeeded in reaching these objectives, analyzing her innovative techniques and breakthroughs that make these works possible. chapter deciphering the matrix: the print history of a renaissance revivalist the art of printmaking has long, rich origins in german history. for centuries, german artists such as martin schongauer (c. - ), albrecht altdorfer (c. - ), and albrecht dürer ( - ) have been acclaimed as true innovators of this medium. many young contemporary artists look back to these masters for inspiration, and the prints of leipzig artist christiane baumgartner (b. ) unite the techniques of these past greats with the modern through her emulation of dürer, diversely structured education, and use of the oldest method of reproduction to depict modern images. dürer’s influence is reflected in her adherence to many early sixteenth-century rules and standards for creating prints, while her training introduced her to the advantages of certain modern processes. the extensive print history of leipzig is also important to investigate in relation to technique, since baumgartner received her foundational training at the hochschule für grafik und buchkunst leipzig from to , which was founded in the mid-eighteenth century. this chapter will explore baumgartner's training and formative history and the ways it has shaped her artistic expression through woodcut. i will begin with a discussion of the print legacy from which she descended, followed by a demonstration of how she has mastered early, traditional german woodcuts and introduced them into a new, contemporary context by combining this medium with photography and video. beginning with the history that comprises baumgartner’s foundation, fifteenth- century artists that wanted to master printmaking learned by apprenticing in a workshop. dürer began his professional studies in the nuremburg workshop of michael wolgemut ( – ) in . while working under wolgemut for at least four years, dürer would have practiced by copying the drawings and prints of the italians, the engravings of schongauer, and the drawings of wolgemut and hans pleydenwurff (c. - ), presumably wolgemut’s former employer. his studies would not have been limited solely to woodcuts, but he would have also been trained in book illustration and book production, drawing, painting, and engraving. since he was employed in a workshop, commissions and other business projects also would have determined many of his tasks. dürer’s ability to produce an impressive image was nurtured through the model of wolgemut, who first introduced dürer to the medium of woodcut, especially as book illustration, such as in his profusely illustrated nuremberg chronicle of . wolgemut was a highly contemporary and experimental artist in the field of woodcutting, and both he and the groundwork laid by pleydenwurff “widened the scope and raised the ambitions of what had been a secondary medium, and thereby paved the way for dürer.” their influences appeared in dürer’s uses of bold foreshortenings, strong contrasts in size, suggestions of aerial perspective, dramatic use of repoussoirs, and “depictions of metal, glass and velvet … rendered by making the lines merge into frayed masses of black” (see fig. . ). these are all techniques that can be found in baumgartner’s works: i will explore these in greater detail in the following chapters through an examination of movement and perspective, both major themes in her art. baumgartner’s training, although quite different from dürer’s, still retained many similarities. trained at the hochschule für grafik und buchkunst leipzig (hgb) from to , she received extensive and exceedingly traditional teachings in various print mediums, with a focus on woodcut. as a student of the book art and graphic department, her studies began with “a two year foundation course (four semester) and an additional three year (six semester) special class [with] one teacher.” the foundation semesters consisted of printmaking courses: “the first year once a week woodcut, for four hours, and the second year once a week litho[graphy] and after half a year once a week etching. … also we had classes in silkscreen and repro-photography.” in addition, drawing and handwriting were also major foci, including an assignment to “design two alphabets just with black and white ink.” these exercises, just like the copies and tasks dürer would have performed, aided in the development of eye-hand coordination and an understanding of composition. once the foundational semesters were completed, one chose a specialized course; baumgartner selected one that permitted her to work more freely in graphic and print, rather than in typography. when she attended the hgb, the courses were set up in an even more traditional sense than they are today. one professor—a master printmaker— was in charge of each specialized workshop, much like wolgemut’s role. only the professor gave assignments and taught the proper techniques. as baumgartner recalled, “those courses were quite stiff and every year of students had to do the same lessons. for instance, in woodcut we started with a tube/triangle light and shadow composition, later had to work with structures and a very thin spiral, and the last piece (after a landscape and a self-portrait) was a copy of a medieval wood engraving.” the last two exercises mentioned are clearly related to dürer’s training. perhaps his earliest known work is a self-portrait (fig. . ), made while apprenticing under his father, a goldsmith. it is a silverpoint drawing dated to and is a fine example of his early experimental nature and bold ambitions as an artist. as panofsky points out, self-portraiture was not an accepted genre at this time, and for a thirteen year old to choose this is rather distinctive. secondly, hgb students’ assignment to copy the techniques of medieval masters, directly from their prints, provided the best way to understand the mechanics of traditional woodcut design. it was through this same act that dürer learned from his contemporary masters, as well as later joined and even surpassed their ranks. he proved his expertise and innovative nature in the medium of woodcut with his apocalypse cycle of . in this series, he has translated lines from the book of revelation into detailed and skillful woodcuts. this act of translating textual imagery—and rather dark subject matter at that—into a print is a process that baumgartner will later share with dürer, and it will be examined in greater detail in the last chapter. also important is dürer’s departure from the typical priority of text over illustration in printed books. it is clear that the focus of this publication was on his images, the text (heavily abridged) more likely added to add depth to his woodcuts. one of dürer’s most well-known illustrations for this cycle is the four horsemen of the apocalypse (fig. . ), which shows four horsemen sweeping across the print, each representing one element of the catastrophic event: pestilence, war, famine, and death. each figure displays his strong command of line and innovative use of technique to suggest depth, movement, and raw, agonizing emotion in the faces and contortions of the figures, revealing his ability to build upon his foundational lessons and push the limits of the medium. dürer’s oeuvre provides a model of study based on the importance and benefits of an intimate understanding of materials and printing techniques, which enables the artist to then increase their compositional potential and explore new and unexpected artistic terrain. the hgb cultivates this position with its pedagogical mission to pass on these unique teaching methods to its students. the level of traditional instruction that the leipzig academy successfully encourages is unique among schools of its kind. after world war ii, those working in east germany were not easily influenced by current western european trends. as arthur lubow described, “the iron curtain and the berlin wall were effective windscreens, blocking artistic change from ruffling the german democratic republic [gdr].” arno rink, a retired professor of painting and former director of the hgb, concurred: “if you want to talk of an advantage, you can say it allowed us to continue in the tradition of [lucas] cranach and [max] beckmann. it protected the art against the influence of joseph beuys.” these conservative conditions provided students with the opportunity to work and study in an almost lost structure of discipline. upon the removal of these government blockades, there was a merging of this rather unique artistic vocabulary and training with contemporary movements, leading to innovative approaches that characterized what was termed the new leipzig school. the destruction of the berlin wall in and the eradication of the iron curtain provided this previously monitored region with the freedom to travel and to participate in world conversations. until then, baumgartner, born in , only knew life under the restrictions of the gdr. a glimpse into this period of her formative years was shared in a silkscreen work titled klassenkameraden (classmates) ( ) (fig. . ), which she made while studying at the royal college of art (rca) in london from to . it also demonstrated her interest in new mediums and experimental approaches that would later lead her to a major breakthrough in her work as a printmaker. as she stated in an interview, “i wanted to be in london and i had heard that printmaking at the rca was similar to my school in leipzig, the hochschule. i had already studied printmaking and book art for eight years in leipzig, and when i came to the rca i realized i had done all the technical courses. that’s why i suddenly became interested in video and photography.” this new interest in digital medias would help to expand her artistic vocabulary and challenge her creativity in exploring new methods of printing. klassenkameraden is composed of a manipulated childhood photograph displaying fellow classmates from her class . in addition to herself, she chose several classmates from the original photograph and then digitally overlaid the figures, creating a blurred and distorted compilation with three prominent figures in the foreground that are each flanked by and transparently layered with three other spectral schoolmates. the image was then divided into three sections—a prominent figure at the center of each— and was silkscreen printed onto paper at an almost life-sized scale. baumgartner noted: “i was interested in individuality and loss of individuality in masses … i felt like i had to give a statement of my east german background compared to the circumstances in london.” the notion of blurring the subject is a theme that appears throughout her oeuvre, as she seeks to disrupt the viewer’s quick recognition of the focus in her prints. this particular work also demonstrates her unification of her traditional leipzig and modernized london training, as well as the fusing of established techniques with groundbreaking technology. this print brings to mind the painting matrosen (sailors) ( ) (fig. . ) by gerhard richter, a fellow german artist, born in in dresden, who baumgartner appreciates for his ability to “deal with both the abstract and the figurative.” this work is based on a photograph and, also like baumgartner’s altered class picture, is “not a one- to-one copy of the source image … as richter altered the composition somewhat and two of the men in the photograph do not appear in the final work.” this painting invites comparison to baumgartner’s classmates since it also uses a blurring technique to revoke individual identities and fuse the figures into an abstractly unified collective. richter’s sailors, devoid of distinct features, were refashioned to represent any naval officer serving during world war ii, and convey his memory of “how strange and mysterious these men and their world seemed to me back then.” i will explore more fully baumgartner’s relationship to the paintings of richter in the next chapter. the process used in designing classmates was a crucial turning point for several reasons. firstly, it was the initial use of photography in her work. while studying at the rca, baumgartner probed different photography techniques and application methods. for instance, she “experimented with how to print a photograph with printmaking techniques using cold surfaces … [such as] plate litho onto aluminum, or silkscreen onto glass.” she also developed an interest in video, which gradually achieved “the status of sketchbook, making paper and pencil unnecessary.” secondly, this first use of a photograph was on a large scale. this choice began her continued exploration of monumentality and its powerful emotional and physical impact on both the subject and the viewer. how size forces involvement on the viewer will be discussed in greater detail in the next chapter. thirdly, although this work’s subject is rather distinctive in her oeuvre, in that most are strictly non-figurative, the objective to depict loss of individuality is a concept that endured. her future works use landscapes to make similar critiques, employing distortion and manipulation to demonstrate “the relation between materiality and immateriality.” scenes are often so far removed from their original contexts that they take on a sense of universality, enabling a wide and varied audience to connect with her images. finally, the most important change was how she manipulated the photograph. up until this point, baumgartner altered her patterns and images by hand. klassenkameraden was the first time she utilized digital editing software to achieve her final composition. the use of a computer was the first step towards her innovative new process, and today it plays an integral role in her unique line compositions. shortly after graduating from the rca in , baumgartner moved back to leipzig, which presented both challenges and advantages. one such advantage was that upon her return to the city, the new leipzig school had been recently established. although she is not a direct member of the movement, baumgartner admitted “it made things easier … as my studio is at the spinnerei in a big complex with other artists [such as neo rauch] and we had a lot of international attention.” however, the first year back also included cultural transitions, leading her to make unexpected shifts in her artistic approach. during her time in london, she worked almost exclusively in digital media. as she remarked, “the first year i was back here it was difficult. i didn’t have video editing facilities. studying in leipzig in east german times, we weren't even allowed to use photographs. it was a totally different way of thinking.” the distance that baumgartner’s studies at the rca had put between her and the german tradition quickly became apparent, prompting her “to find a way to reconcile these two traditions.” to her it seemed only logical to combine the two mediums, noting “digital information provides the means by which to order and to simplify and enables the production of endless identical images in different mediums. woodcut is the earliest technique to reproduce an image. … by creating woodcuts of digital video stills i simulate this standardized information by cutting a line grain by hand on a plate of wood.” in , the series lisbon i-iv (fig. . ), consisting of four woodcuts on japanese paper, would be her first demonstration of a groundbreaking development in the art of woodcut design. = = = the concept began with video footage baumgartner had taken a few years earlier while studying in lisbon. as she recounted, “every morning i crossed a bridge over a highway to reach the city centre. i was attracted by the endless flow of cars in both directions. it was nearly the same amount of cars on each lane, and for a curious reason i thought why can’t those cars just make an exchange with each other? i saw them as single objects and not as transport containers for people. one day i decided to make a video of the scene.” at the time of filming, baumgartner did not have her end result in mind, but rather performed the act unconsciously. it was not until she had the video back in her studio that the work began to fall into place. this shelved material from lisbon was ideal subject matter for her first coalescent composition. it contained vehicles lacking individuality, ripe for manipulation into a vision of anonymity, speed, and standstill. baumgartner stated that she likes “using woodcut as it used to be in dürer’s time, [meaning a] really traditional german woodcut, with handmade paper, and in a proper wooden frame, but the images are from new media.” this causes her process to act as a time machine, starting in the present and returning to the renaissance. her method begins by slowly reviewing her footage, breaking it down into thousands of stills. she spends much time with these images, waiting to answer the question: “which single video attracts me so much that i want to give it so much time and attention”? many of her woodcuts are at such a large scale that they can take more than ten months to cut; that this image will be reproduced more than once factors into her selection. the next step is to load the chosen image into photoshop, where she strips it of its color, converting it to grayscale. at this point, the size of the image and frequency of the lines have not yet been determined; “in a way the image is not there yet. it is still unreal, but already is digitally calculable.” the image is then translated into a grid of rippling horizontal lines, all of which baumgartner designs and manipulates individually. she came to this design decision after searching for a way to “print a grayscale photograph just in two components, in black and white.” the line grid was the perfect solution due to its “on/off” arrangement, much like binary code. she likes to view her process as a way of “building an analogue image out of digital information.” it will become ever more apparent how incorporating the idea of duality is a theme in her work. baumgartner plays with the image on her computer for some time, allowing it to slowly take form. a number of images remain on the computer for several years before moving on to the next phase. in her eyes, an image is not meant to be read as a narrative, but instead she looks “at it just as an image, at the colours and texture and if it works in and for itself and for me.” for example, at the rca she did a few video projects that involved filming the windows of a building opposite from the college at night. sections of this footage would be used to make woodcuts. she was sure to erase all evidence of any incidents that may have occurred within the stills, returning these once imposing images back into impersonal observations of time. she recognizes that for some artists the journey to create an image involves “bringing an image to life on the canvas.” however, for her the work is all accomplished prior to the block, noting, “the cutting of the plate is simply the realization of something i have already completed in my mind.” once settled on a final composition, baumgartner determines the scale at which the image should be produced. often, the scale is chosen based on its relationship to one’s body; usually the more forceful the image the larger the matrix. for the lisbon series, she chose to make each image roughly . x inches. the next step is to print out the image at full size. this is when her process begins to travel back towards her traditional roots. the image is laid face down on her chosen sheet of plywood. thinner is then rubbed along the back of the image, transferring the printer ink to the wood, making a perfect outline from which she will engrave her matrix. the image lines are meticulously cut out with a specially sharpened old kitchen knife, made to resemble a modeling knife. at this point in the process, baumgartner has accomplished what she sees as the more calculated elements. the act of cutting out the image is a much more meditative action for the artist. it is the first time she can reflect on her work as a whole and enjoy the slow, handmade movements of the carving. this is a time when she retreats to her landline and internet free studio, granting herself freedom from all outside concerns; “some people go to church, others do yoga, i’ve got my cutting.” baumgartner already differs from renaissance printmakers because she works alone and is involved in every step of her process. traditionally, a separate master would step in to cut the design, and then yet another to perform the printing. in baumgartner’s work, there are advantages to being the sole artist. there is a strong connection to the design that can be readily distinguished by the way the matrix is carved. this intimate understanding of the movement and strategy necessary to produce such a seamless transfer of the image appears only possible if done by the creator’s own hand. although a model of tradition, it is often debated whether dürer himself cut most of his designs or if another artist in the workshop would have been given this task, for changes in cutting quality have been observed across his oeuvre. panofsky suggests an example of this notion in respect to marquart von steyn’s ritter vom turn von den exempeln der gottsforcht und erberkeit, printed by michael furter in and of which dürer is accredited about four-fifths of the collective forty-five woodcuts: in the “ritter vom turn” the woodcuts attributable to dürer show a slight disparity in style which is accounted for by the individualities of the cutters. one of these is obviously the same skillful but somewhat mechanical craftsman who cut [dürer’s] saint jerome. other woodcuts are rather mediocre from a technical point of view. a few, however, are cut with so much understanding for the intentions of the designer and with so intense a feeling for plastic values that dürer himself has been credited with the cutting—which is, at least, a plausible conjecture. the publication proceeding according to schedule, dürer would have wished to set a standard for the cutting as well as for the design. baumgartner has the same drive to take control over the final realization of the work, but perhaps places even more value on the labor aspects of the production than dürer, since she would never delegate tasks to another craftsperson. the handmade aspect of her woodcuts is particularly important to the artist. she has expressed her disinterest in having a workshop mentality operate in her studio, claiming, “i am not like jeff koons, i am not running a factory, i need the cutting time for reflection. … i also like the handmade aspect of cutting with all its inaccuracies and mistakes—this is an important aspect of the final print.” this drive to perform every step of the creation process sets baumgartner apart, and her constant involvement lends uniqueness to her woodcuts and separates her from a strictly traditional genealogy of printmakers. when printing a woodcut, the surface upon which it will be transferred is the next crucial element in planning its design. baumgartner always chooses handmade papers, often rice or mulberry or cotton. interestingly she frequently uses paper-shops that to this day function much like a traditional german paper mill, one of which, in zerkall, has roots dating back to the sixteenth century. having access to modernized yet traditional mills immediately puts her in a different position in regards to production than dürer could ever have imagined. during the early fifteenth century, paper availability was not what it is today. between and , paper production was a trade that was steadily expanding across the european continent. this made obtaining paper an easier task in many areas, if not through a local mill then at least through shipment. however, as david landau and peter parshall pointed out in their survey of the renaissance print, “printers continued to complain about unevenness of quality, short supply, high costs, and transit taxes. therefore it must be assumed that in most towns the ready availability of good paper for printing could not be taken absolutely for granted at any time during the renaissance.” baumgartner benefits from the modern ease of readily acquiring paper from anywhere in the world, both in large quantities and at a high level of quality. in dürer’s time, the uniformity in paper size was not necessarily a well-regulated attribute. it is known that “in the measurements for individual sheets of paper were set for the bologna mills officially regulating paper sizes and their corresponding weights by statute. in descending order of scale, these dimensions in centimeters were: carta imperiale ( . x . ); carta reale ( . x . ); carta mezzana ( . x . ); and carta reçute ( . x . ).” prints were often “referred to by conventional paper sizes as a means of assessing their value. … in german the two largest tended to be grouped under großformat (large), then median (medium) and kanzlei (official or chancellery) format.” during his journey to the netherlands in , dürer even made a note that when he distributed, traded, or sold his prints that “he identified them not only by subject matter but as quarter, half, or full sheets.” that these regulations would be followed in every locale was in no way certain, and instead, each area most likely held to its own set of standards. because of the often-oversized dimensions of baumgartner’s prints, working under these limited regulations would have dramatically hindered the advancement of her process. in dürer’s time, the production of prints at baumgartner’s scale was possible and did occur, though it was not all that common. there is, however, one prominent example in the history of renaissance printmaking that references the use of paper that widely exceeded the maximum size known to have been regularly available at the time. the famous woodcut titled view of venice ( ), by jacopo de’ barbari ( - ), was originally printed on six sheets of paper measuring on average x cm, roughly double the width of an imperial folio. in order to wield the large tray and mold necessary to create these oversized sheets, at least two vatmen and two couchers working together would have been required. multiple sheets were still a necessity in order to print such a large image. as the demand for larger sheets of paper increased, mills over time began offering this commodity, but “in its earlier stages the paper market served only average needs and required others to improvise by sticking sheets together.” this leads to a discussion of one of the largest prints ever created in which dürer is a main author: the triumphal arch of maximilian i ( ) (fig. . ). it provides an interesting juxtaposition to baumgartner’s transall ( - ) (fig. . ), based not only on sheer size, but also on printing. the triumphal arch was a large project commissioned by the holy roman emperor maximilian i ( - ). many were involved in its creation including: johannes stabius ( – ), the program’s organizer and the emperor’s astronomer, poet and historiographer; architect jörg kölderer (c. - ); hieronymus andreae’s (d. ) workshop, hired to cut the blocks; and dürer, supported by the members of his workshop and assisted by [willibald] pirckheimer ( - ) in iconographical matters, acted as designer-in-chief. that its design was such a group endeavor is different from baumgartner, who invariably works alone. this is not to say that dürer operated exclusively in ambitious collaboration, but there was always someone else involved in the final production of his works, either in cutting and printing the work, or at least just printing. once completed, the imperial woodcut comprised of separate woodblocks, measuring approximately . by . feet when united. printing this intricate work using renaissance materials, most likely a press, was a substantial challenge. it was also necessary to print the individual works on separate sheets of paper, which required reassembly like a puzzle. transall was also a hugely complex undertaking. however, baumgartner implemented certain modern advancements to more efficiently construct this traditional work of art. already of benefit was the ability to use just two solid blocks of wood. she chose the largest sheets of plywood that she could find, measuring collectively at roughly by feet. an impressively sized work surface for any medium, it is especially so for a woodcut because of printing challenges. in order to print such a large matrix, the artist needed an even larger piece of handmade paper, commissioning one of kozo paper from the german paper mill gangolf ulbricht papierwerkstatt in berlin. in order to have a proper border, the sheet was custom made at an impressive by feet. of course her test prints were done on multiple sheets of lower quality paper, most likely something in the family of newsprint. not until she built up the right amount of oil based black ink on the surface of the block, after copious runs with a large brayer and multiple test prints, did she advance to the final print. the printing was done entirely by hand, which involved the act of burnishing the back of the paper with a smooth object, such as the back of a spoon. this is the oldest technique ever used to make a woodcut, and it must be approached systematically since different amounts of pressure can produce dissimilar ink tonalities in the final piece. this challenging yet rudimentary system of printing acts as a metaphor for baumgartner’s entire process, and the juxtaposition of the triumphal arch and transall operates as a stark depiction of baumgartner’s shared characteristics with dürer and renaissance printmaking and the ways in which she applied contemporary developments to take this tradition to a new level. as hans belting proposed in his study into the inner-psyche of the german artist in relation to his or her art, historical themes have always been present, which may explain why the “search for identity has not only been a search for personal identity within contemporary culture, but also a search for national identity anchored in the past.” baumgartner’s art is undeniably affected by the pre- and post-reunification of germany, as seen in early works like classmates, the more recent transall, and through to the present day. her choices in subject, dismantled of their identities and individuality, echo the repression of her youth, yet her contemporary works have an air of personal growth and convey the importance and advantages of self-reflection on one’s past. her rigorous traditional academy training paired with her introduction to digital media further influenced her ability to develop a breakthrough process that seamlessly ties the renaissance style of albrecht dürer to the innovative developments in contemporary printmaking. these ideas inform a deeper exploration of her prints and how she utilizes her personal history to construct works that exude dizzying movement and engage concepts of time, materiality, memory, and technology in relation to today’s society. the next two chapters will examine more deeply how the techniques in baumgartner’s prints convey a sense of movement and introspection and strive to share her experiences and impressions with her viewers. notes for the most comprehensive monographic publication on baumgartner thus far see christiane baumgartner, nigel prince, ed. (birmingham: ikon gallery, ). for the most recent collection of her works see reel time (london: alan cristea gallery, ). for early development of dürer, see erwin panofsky, the life and art of albrecht dürer (princeton: princeton university press, ). see also a renewed and revised look at the young dürer in der frühe dürer, daniel hess ed. (nürnberg: germanisches nationalmuseum, ). see adrian wilson, the making of the nuremberg chronicle (amsterdam: nico israel, ). ibid., . ibid., . this chapter focuses on her first degree from the hgb, but she would also receive a three-year master’s degree from this academy, continuing her focus in printmaking. christiane baumgartner, email correspondence with the author, march , . ibid. ibid. ibid. see joseph leo koerner, the moment of self-portraiture in german renaissance art (chicago: university of chicago press, ), - . panofsky, the life and art of albrecht dürer, ; and koerner, the moment of self- portraiture, - . for a discussion of this cycle see david landau and peter parshall, the renaissance print (new haven: yale university press, ); and cynthia hall, “before the apocalypse: german prints and illustrated books, - ,” harvard university art museums bulletin / (spring, ): - . landau and parshall, the renaissance print, . see sophie gerlach, “from shamed to famed – the transition of a former eastern german arts academy to the talent hotbed of a contemporary painters’ school. the hochschule für grafik und buchkunst, leipzig,” in art and theory after socialism, mel jordan and malcolm miles, eds. (chicago: intellect books, the university of chicago press, ) - . arthur lubow, “the new leipzig school,” new york times, january , , http://www.nytimes.com/ / / /magazine/ leipzig.html. ibid. although the new leipzig school is a term related to painters, baumgartner is connected to this movement. she has stated, “not that i am a figurative painter of course—i was always viewed as a counterpart to that movement—but it gave me opportunities.” jeannette stoschek, “visualizing time,” in reel time (london: alan cristea gallery, ), . painters such as neo rauch, david schnell, tim eitel, and tilo baumgärtel are seen as the pioneers of this movement, and “although the work of these painters … varies in content, style and quality, they share a technical skill, a devotion to figurative art and a predilection for dry-eyed, melancholy subject matter.” lubow, “the new leipzig school.” shared by both baumgartner and the new leipzig school is a sense of detachment in their work. when talking about klassenkameraden she also noted, “i would have never done this work if i had not been abroad.” nicholas james, interviews-artists (london: cv publications, ), . this is an interesting factor in relation to dürer, due to the fact that he too made the decision to travel abroad in search of furthering his education. his time in italy would greatly influence his technique and approach by developing his understanding of the classical statuesque figure, geometrical methods of proportion, and movement. for more on this topic, see panofsky, “apprenticeship and early years of travel, - ,” in the life and art of albrecht dürer. baumgartner quoted in hannah murgatroyd, “‘you need to show work in the right place’: christiane baumgartner,” fuelrca, november , , http://fuel.rca.ac.uk/articles/you-need- to-show-work-in-the-right-place-christiane-baumgartner. for process information for klassenkameraden, see stoschek, “visualizing time,” . baumgartner quoted in james, interviews-artists, . ibid. composed by the editorial team for gerhard-richter.com, located at http://www.gerhard- richter.com/art/search/detail.php? . richter, translated by the editorial team for gerhard-richter.com. for the original quote see cornelius tittel, “gerhard richter – die hälfte im museum ist müll,” welt online, september , , http://www.welt.de/kultur/article /gerhard-richter-die-haelfte-im-museum- ist-muell.html. baumgartner quoted in murgatroyd, “‘you need to show work in the right place’: christiane baumgartner.” stoschek, “visualizing time,” . baumgartner quoted in josé roca, “interview: christiane baumgartner,” philagrafika blog, may , , http://philagrafika.blogspot.com/ / /interview-christiane-baumgartner.html. in october of , an "audiovisuelle labor" (audio-video lab) was established at the hgb. the university’s website states “the av-labor marks the progress towards education with a transparent and interdisciplinary orientation in a working environment which becomes overall more and more digital.” baumgartner quoted in stoschek, “visualizing time,” . baumgartner quoted in murgatroyd, “‘you need to show work in the right place’: christiane baumgartner.” baumgartner quoted in roca, “interview: christiane baumgartner.” ibid. baumgartner quoted in james, interviews-artists, - . it should be noted that when filming, baumgartner never has a certain project in mind. it is always done “unconsciously.” it is not until she returns to her studio that plans for a work will begin. baumgartner quoted from video, “christiane baumgartner: screen shot,” alan cristea gallery, http://www.alancristea.com/artist-christiane-baumgartner. process information from jeremy lewison, “at the still point of the turning world. the prints of christiane baumgartner,” in christiane baumgartner (heemstede: johan deumens gallery, ), . baumgartner quoted in james, interviews-artists, . ibid., . it has often been thought that these lines were a byproduct of preexisting monitor lines. however, this is not the case. baumgartner creates her own raster. baumgartner quoted in roca, “interview: christiane baumgartner.” baumgartner quoted in james, interviews-artists, . baumgartner quoted in stoschek, “visualizing time,” . for the discussion of these videos, see lewison, “at the still point of the turning world. the prints of christiane baumgartner,” - . baumgartner quoted in stoschek, “visualizing time,” . ibid., . ibid., . roca, “interview: christiane baumgartner.” baumgartner quoted in stoschek, “visualizing time,” . for the debate on whether dürer cut his own blocks see the foundational essay by william ivins, jr., “notes on three dürer woodblocks,” metropolitan museum studies / (nov. ): - ; and landau and parshall, the renaissance print, - . for discussion and quote, see panofsky, the life and art of albrecht dürer, - . baumgartner quoted in stoschek, “visualizing time,” . paper information from “catalogue of works,” in nigel prince, ed., christiane baumgartner (birmingham: ikon gallery, ), . for discussion of paper, see david landau and peter parshall, the renaissance print, - . landau and parshall, the renaissance print, . ibid., . ibid., ; for information about german paper terminology, see gerhard piccard, “carta bombycina, carta papyri, pergamena graeca,” in archivalische zeitschrift ( ), . landau and parshall, the renaissance print, . ibid., . ibid., . panofsky, the life and art of albrecht dürer, . on the unique phenomenon of sixteenth- century oversize prints see grand scale: monumental prints in the age of dürer and titian, larry silver and elizabeth wyckoff, eds. (new haven: yale university press, ). “christiane baumgartner: transall,” museum of modern art, http://www.moma.org/explore/multimedia/audios/ / . see endnote . hans belting, the germans and their art: a troublesome relationship (new haven: yale university press, ), . chapter at the speed of light: movement in print the convergence of speed and standstill is a key motif in baumgartner’s woodcuts. rather than appearing forcefully in the active lines and rush of apocalyptic horsemen cantering across a sheet, as in dürer’s four horsemen of the apocalypse ( ) (fig. . ), motion is conveyed by baumgartner in multiple modern and technologically driven ways, including images of transportation, cutting techniques, optical illusions, and the combination of the oldest, slowest form of print—the woodcut—and the quickest, most modern forms, video and photography. her inspiration to explore this theme, as displayed in the last chapter, emerged from her studies at the royal college of art in london, where film became a main tool. however, french author paul virilio’s writings on the concept of motion intensified her interest in this subject, helped shape her view of speed in relation to communication and technology, and affected her image choices and compositions. through a discussion of virilio’s influence and a deeper examination of baumgartner’s works, this chapter will demonstrate the artist’s unique physical and visual encapsulation of movement. paul virilio, born in paris in , is a world-renowned philosopher, urbanist, and cultural theorist. growing up in france during world war ii, he was “profoundly impacted by the blitzkrieg and total war; however, these early experiences shaped his understanding of the movement and speed which structures modern society.” his work focuses on “urban spaces and the development of technology in relation to power and speed.” these studies led him to question the relationship held between humans and technology and how it affects our communication and perception of the world. he stated, “two attitudes are possible with respect to these new technologies: one declares them a miracle; the other—mine—recognizes that they are interesting while maintaining a critical attitude.” baumgartner shares this second attitude, and her personal experiences as a citizen of the german democratic republic lends her to have a similar viewpoint to virilio about movement. living in a wartime climate, she was restricted from traveling, making her trips down the freeway as an adult—while filming from the passenger seat— symbolize her liberation. while she embraces technological advancements—especially their aid in her international reputation and the development of digital programs—she finds it important to limit their dominance over her lifestyle. this need to separate from the speed of society derives from her reading of virilio, whose influence she repeatedly acknowledges: [virilio] said once that, in the third millennium, we will have the ability to stay here and be in the same moment somewhere else. he was talking about the internet and the fact that a bomb can be dropped anywhere in the world, for example, and we will know immediately who and what has been hit. it used to take weeks to hear about this kind of event and now everything has been speeded up—not just our bodies, but our brains and the information we process as well. … our forms of communication have speeded up and it is important to me to try and slow things down again. this notion proposed by virilio continues to be an element of baumgartner’s artistic thought process, to the extent that she makes a conscious effort to slow down by isolating herself in a communication “free” studio when working. it is an underlying theme that quietly runs in the background of all her prints, embodied in the laborious years it takes to convert a digital image to a woodcut. not only are virilio’s words apparent in how she constructs an image, but also they are visible in her chosen subject matter. virilio wrote, “the speed of light does not merely transform the world. it becomes the world. globali- sation is the speed of light.” this quote introduces three major ways baumgartner approaches movement visually in her work: transportation, participation, and the universality of fast-paced globalization. the woodcut series schkeuditz i-iv ( ) (figs. . - ), title of which refers to a town in germany, depicts four seemingly consecutive video stills, no more than seconds apart, of vehicles on a freeway moving towards and under an overpass. each print follows a lane of traffic acting out the literal and metaphorical travel of communication, spreading from exit to exit. within four images, the viewer (placed in the passenger’s seat) is drawn deep into the space and pushed through what at the beginning was simply a slit of light across the horizon. depth perception is one of baumgartner’s strongest tools in suggesting movement. schkeuditz i immediately halts the eye across the top, forcing the viewer to pass underneath this flattened space and follow the solid white traffic line into the open road. the large vehicle emerging from the lower left corner contrasted against the smaller, middle car exaggerates their distance, pulling the viewer towards the next checkpoint. schkeuditz ii inverts this forced perspective, drawing the viewer to a centralized rectangle of light that is emphasized by the dark, angled edges of the pavement, channeling the eye to the vanishing point. obstructive rectangles, like storm clouds on a bright sky, demonstrate a dramatic use of repoussoirs, sinking the glowing passageway deeper into the composition. schkeuditz iii uses cutting techniques to accent the receding columns that line the bridge’s underbelly. on the right, diamond shaped cuts in the wood (see detail in fig. . ) simulate the three-dimensional arc of the stone pillars. as the columns near the viewer, they are stretched thinner, making the deeper columns appear to radiate more light and thereby claim focus. as vehicles reach the opposite end of the passageway, the horizontal lines are cut extra thin, forming a block of blinding light with just enough information left to indicate hazy, upcoming road signs. the last print of the series illustrates a car changing lanes. this shift is suggested by marking out the bulk of the car with thick horizontal lines, fraying into a mass of black containing notches of white to represent light glistening off the windshields. the right side of the car contains deep gouges that highlight its angled position as it merges before the viewer’s vehicle. while the car is suspended in four moments of transit, its velocity through darkness into sunlight is methodically relayed. as anne hamlyn stated, “we are able to watch ourselves watching our own perpetual motion—our speed.” while this series appears to follow the trajectory of a single vehicle, or specific collection of vehicles, it also represents everyday traffic patterns and the ubiquitous nature of such an image. however, i will explore this concept of universality and its relation to movement in her prints in a later section. the layout of this print series echoes the studies of chronophotography. in , french scientist Étienne-jules marey ( - ) invented a chronophotographic gun that was capable of taking twelve consecutive frames per second, recorded on the same picture. it was used to study figures in motion, such as the gallop of horses, the flight of birds, and the gait of running humans. in his study of pelicans in flight (fig. . ), the descent of a bird is captured, yet key moments of transition are missing, most notably in the center of the image when the pelican brings its wings downward. much like in schkeuditz, a disjointed series of steps captures a moment of motion. however, baumgartner is in control of which moments are recorded into woodcut and which are dismissed, unlike chronophotography where the timing of the camera is responsible for the images documented by the photographer. this notion of abridged progression will reappear in the discussion of her print series sekunde (fig. . ) in the next chapter. another element of movement is introduced through the presence of the wood grain in baumgartner’s final prints. ink soaked knots and imperfections in the wood imprint themselves on the paper, creating grayscale waves that swell across the dark expansions of tightly cut lines. the collision of the grain with baumgartner’s grid accentuates the shifting black tones that simulate cooler spots of “gray,” reminding the viewer that this work is handmade. these subtle shifts in tone also enhance the dizzying movement already activated by the vibrating black and white horizontals. this technique of printing the grain and raw imperfections of the material is also seen in german expressionism woodcuts. for example, german painter and printmaker emil nolde ( - ) used this added texture in his print fischdampfer (fishing steamer) ( ) (fig. . ) in order to capture the swelling movement of the water in his composition. similar to baumgartner, nolde recognized and used the inherent movement of the wood block in order to magnify the visual effects of the final piece. captured in baumgartner’s binary coded grooves, her images remain just out of focus. hovering above one another like heat rising off sun-baked pavement, the horizontal lines take the form of mirages, conjured up from the artist’s mind. this optical illusion is an important aspect of her work, and is the main technique used to encourage the viewer’s participation. her illusions are reached in three ways: the first is through untouched images that are only abstracted by her grid, such as in the schkeuditz series. the remaining two include images with innate illusionary structures and those pre- distorted by digital disturbance. i will discuss the second method in an analysis of manhattan transfer ( ) (fig. . ), which depicts a helicopter in midair obstructed by a chain-link fence in the foreground. the third method will be demonstrated through the works deutscher wald (german forest) ( ) (fig. . ) and luftbild (aerial image) ( ) (fig. . ), followed by an explanation of how the works force viewers into motion. in manhattan transfer, baumgartner allowed for the natural disturbances in the original image to confuse the eye. while porous, the fence hinders the viewer’s ability to enter the action of the image. its large holes on the left side of the print flatten the surface and subtly shrink as your eye moves across the image, allowing for the suggestion of depth and a receding barrier. however, the solid poles on the right once again establish the viewer’s boundaries. the fence serves as protection from the whirling helicopter in flight. the angled landing gear is in a state of either deployment or retraction, and the blurred propellers suggest speed that even baumgartner’s prints cannot suspend. clashing with the distortion of her grid, the fence brings the body of the helicopter to life, as the expanding and shrinking coils manipulate her line density. the viewer is forced to constantly re-adjust his or her position in order to focus on each element of the scene. this print brings to light her connection to the history of optical art, such as carlos cruz-diez’s (b. ) induction chromatique ( ) (fig. . ). another significant comparison is with claimed father of op-art victor vasarely’s ( - ) zèbre ( ) (fig. . ), a painting that shares the binary technique of using parallel black and white lines to form an illusionary, recognizable image. vasarely’s stripes run slanted across the canvas, remaining unbroken and only varying in width. similar to baumgartner’s grid, these fluctuations in girth are what allow for the suggestion of depth, volume, and shape. the zebra appears trapped just below the surface, its body shifting beneath a net of paint, much like the helicopter hovering behind an ink fence. beginning the discussion of the third method of creating illusion is deutscher wald (fig. . ), a series of nine woodcuts based on digital images “taken at an incredibly low resolution—only dpi” and presents multiple views of a dense line of thin, leafless tree trunks. the movement in this work is generated by the extra layer of abstraction introduced by the poor quality of the original image. the horizontal distortion of the original image further accents the horizontal grid, forcing the trees to appear as a series of stacked rectangles of varying lengths and opacity. this jagged disruption of the surface creates fluctuating movement that undulates up and down the print like sound waves. only distance, a viewing component explained below, permits access to the familiar scene that lies hidden before viewers. in luftbild (fig. . ), which depicts world war ii footage of bomber airplanes, many patterns are colliding at once. this work not only utilizes the natural movement of her grid, but also incorporates the image distortion that occurs when a video camera records straight from a television screen. this media union generates a moiré effect in the form of a checkerboard rippling upward like a paper fan. the optical illusions in luftbild are well representative of her process, where scenes begin as crisp and audible video images, but then as they are translated into a woodcut, they become abstracted and one’s eye begins to wander over the work and “you almost have to squint to make sense of it.” video and sound artists explore similar issues, such as composer alvin lucier (b. ) in his audio piece i am sitting in a room ( ). lucier recorded himself narrating a text, which was repeatedly played back and re-recorded, reinforcing the resonant frequencies of the room. this process caused the sentences to overlap until distinct words became muddled and eventually transformed into pure sound. while baumgartner’s process does not involve the overlapping of information, lucier’s work similarly uses an original source, which is re-formatted until it takes on a new configuration. in both methods, the initial work is still present in the final composition, but its identity is no longer readily recognizable. this reductive quality of the audio work is shared by baumgartner’s woodcuts in that, as she removes wood from the block, she is breaking down the material in order to alter the wood’s surface, allowing the block to take on a new appearance. reduction also happens to her source image, as the cutting of the wavy, horizontal grid breaks down the clarity of the composition, making it as distorted a mess up close as lucier’s final recording. as demonstrated by these three methods, various optical illusions and the large scale of her prints essentially force the viewer to think about various kinds of movement, as well as initiating actual bodily movement. her works promote the desire to shift viewing positions, to step close to the surface in order to see the individual lines, and then to step back to decipher the overall image. baumgartner explained, “the scale draws you backwards and forwards. if you want to see how it is made, you need to get very close but in order to create an image, you have to get some distance. so you have to move your body to read the work and that’s why i make certain images so monumental.” luftbild was a step forward in bringing this concept to fruition. when asked to participate in philagrafika , baumgartner decided to submit this work, which had never before been exhibited. luftbild was displayed in the samuel m. v. hamilton building of the pennsylvania academy of the fine arts (pafa). this structure was originally an automobile showroom, and therefore, the first floor has a large gallery with exceptionally high ceilings and a wide width. this somewhat unusually generous space was an ideal locale for baumgartner’s monumental print because it allowed viewers to drastically vary their perspective and proximity to the work. it was also a unique experience for baumgartner, who had yet to view one of her works in such a large space. she noted that even in her studio her ability to step back from her works is limited. it was not until luftbild was on the wall at pafa that she was able to view the work from a much farther distance, and she enjoyed the added detail and clarity that emerged. baumgartner’s prints encourage spectator movement, which creates different readings and experiences based on the viewer’s constant changes in perspective. as viewers move around the space, the composition’s appearance is noticeably altered since the frozen image shifts into focus from afar but fragments with each nearer step. baumgartner states, “i brought speed into the static medium and at the beginning i was not sure how far the human eye and brain would be able to follow. i like it when the eye loses its fixed point and when an image becomes general.” paul virilio stated, “locomotive illusion allows the voyeur-voyager to project beyond the screen of the windshield his own fantasies.” baumgartner constructs her own fantasies by composing visions that are universally recognizable, which allows for the viewer to join her in projecting beyond the car window in schkeuditz and deutscher wald, the fence in manhattan transfer, and the television screen in luftbild. how these works both enforce contemplation about the speed of society in which they capture and channel self- reflection will be addressed in the next chapter. first, i will examine how baumgartner uses familiar imagery to convey movement. the speed of modern communication is so powerful that images and ideas can become internationally recognized within seconds. depictions of this concept appear repeatedly in baumgartner’s work, especially through demonstrations of how the swift spread of these images lends them a universal context. similar to schkeuditz, the print series titled allee ( ) (figs. . - ) puts the viewer in the driver’s seat for another road trip through common scenery. it could be anyone driving on any road in the world. she has stripped the scene of any identifiers that may provide clues about its true location. baumgartner remarked, “everybody who sees [allee] thinks it's around his own corner. people told me 'ah, this is in leipzig near the airport,' and someone else said 'i went again to the place, i'm sure it's this place,' but it's not, it could be all over the place. so it's just so exchangeable.” these associations are examples of how the velocity of modern communication is captured in her prints. while this occurrence is undetectable to the naked eye, this extreme transfer of information is revealed in a simple, literal image of speeding along a tree-lined, ambiguous curve. she has taken a large, invisible concept of motion and re-contextualized it in a metaphorical composition that makes it accessible to a wide audience. as introduced in the first chapter, baumgartner has an affinity for the works of gerhard richter. she is especially drawn to how he “finds” an image. his landscape works, which also depict movement and recognizable imagery, are particularly relevant to baumgartner’s art. richter’s source images, however, are from photographs instead of videos. still, both artists choose specific stills to transfer into their chosen medium: oil paint and woodcut, respectively. they each begin with a clear image of a natural landscape or manmade structure and then filter it through their manipulated matrix, blurring what was once instantly discernable. whereas baumgartner uses her horizontal grid, richter covers his canvas with a patchwork of paint. in his work seestück (seascape) ( ) (fig. . ), movement from the viewer is once again important because up close, richter’s painting appears as an abstract surface of blues and grays and browns swirling in a unified dance. once distance has been placed between the work and viewer, the image reconstructs into a misty ocean vista. both of these artists determined how to harness the potential that comes from obscuring the familiar, forcing a viewer to work and take time to comprehend the image instead of getting it via a quick glance. richter’s great sphinx of gizeh ( ) (fig. . ) shares the whizzing movement used in baumgartner’s gelände (field) ( ) (fig. . ), where she displays a field as seen from the side window of a speeding car. rushed past the monument, the viewer is denied access to details and absorption of the full landscape. the blurring effect of the rock structure creates striated lines akin to baumgartner’s grid, disrupting a smooth reading of the image. playing with perspective, parts of the image stay in focus, while others are barely recognizable. richter has taken a familiar object and shrouded it in mystery (in this instance an object that also personifies mystery in and of itself). the face of the famous sphinx is in slight profile and shadow, masking its features and forcing it to appear more akin to its surrounding rock formations. its main signifier is the pyramid in the background, which has also been flattened and therefore pulled closer to the foreground, making it appear connected to the sphinx. like baumgartner, richter is consciously choosing to “blur things to make everything equally important and equally unimportant.” their methodologies focus on the visual experience and sense of a space that can be conveyed through an artwork, not the capturing of a specific moment in time. both baumgartner and richter work with images of tangible objects in known locales and filter them through a slow and methodical process that allows the images to exist unencumbered by circumstantial restraints. dietmar elger wrote of richter’s landscape paintings, “[they] work precisely because they transfer the fixed moment in the photograph into the timelessness of painting. the situation documented in the photographic original and bound to a topographical situation thus transcends the painting to become a placeless experience of nature.” this same idea is true in baumgartner’s prints, perhaps even more so due to the repetitious nature of the woodcut. for example, most blocks are printed in editions, unlike a painting, which is an individual work. while baumgartner’s printed editions are meant to last, they do come from a long history of ephemera, where a constant redistribution of prints was common, and therefore, they often spread across a wide range, making them familiar and available to a large group of people. this notion of wide dissemination allows the prints to exist in more than one place, which also positions them in multiple contexts. baumgartner’s prints, although permanent works, continue to demonstrate this concept because they reside simultaneously in multiple collections around the world, permitting a global audience an opportunity to spend time with her contemplative works. richter said, “i would like to try to understand what is. we know very little, and i am trying to do it by creating analogies. almost every work of art is an analogy. when i make a representation of something, this too is an analogy to what exists; i make an effort to get a grip on the thing by depicting it.” baumgartner shares this objective in her printed excerpts of reality. she, like virilio, has opinions about speed, technology, and human interaction, and she takes on these issues through the medium of woodcut. while these concerns run through each of her works, her prime objective is constructing an experience. baumgartner, when depicting speed, keeps the image literal so that the viewer can focus on the physicality of being in front of her prints. hamlyn noted, “there is none of the heroism of the futurist inheritance: the romance of man and machine merged in hectic motion.” through tunnels, planes, and freeways, she indicates the presence of people without depicting them in the scene. her prime intention is to fabricate a composition that is visually stimulating, using time based media that has been diced and distorted yet preserved of its energy and instilled with an air of placelessness. her societal commentary is a secondary component. her focus is on the act of looking. she wants you to observe and sense these concepts of motion and interact with her work, but she is not forcefully propagating a single viewpoint. it is up to the viewer to decide what to take from baumgartner’s works. while this discussion of movement has demonstrated her drive to display high speeds, she is actually commenting on the need to slow down. she is using motion to establish a jumping off point for the next main theme to be discussed, introspection. her dizzying prints open a portal into timeless visions of the world around us, allowing for self- reflection on issues concerning technology, history, and memory. in the next chapter, her history and connections to the writings of russian-american poet and essayist joseph brodsky ( - ) will be used to introduce a guideline for possible readings of her works in relation to these ideas. notes standstill is a term repeatedly used by baumgartner both when titling and speaking of her work. it is a translation of the german word stillstand, which means to “stop” or “halt.” “paul virilio,” the european graduate school, , http://www.egs.edu/faculty/paul- virilio/biography/. ibid. paul virilio, interview by jérôme sans, “the game of love and chance: a discussion with paul virilio,” watson institute for international studies, november , http://www.watsoninstitute.org/infopeace/vy k/sans.cfm. christiane baumgartner quoted in jeannette stoschek, “visualizing time,” in reel time (london: alan cristea gallery, ), . virilio, interview by john armitage, translated by patrice riemens, “the kosovo war took place in orbital space,” ctheory, october , , http://www.ctheory.net/articles.aspx?id= . baumgartner quoted in anne hamlyn, “figuring speed,” in speed/standstill (leipzig: christiane baumgartner/carivari, ), . for more information see marta braun, picturing time: the work of etienne-jules marey ( - ) (chicago: university of chicago press, ). for more information see german expressionism: the graphic impulse, libby hruska, ed. (new york: museum of modern art, ). see op art, martina weinhardt and max hollein, eds. (köln: könig, ). baumgartner quoted in stoschek, “visualizing time,” . ibid., . ibid., . for more information on the hamilton building’s history as an automobile showroom, see http://www.pafa.org/museum/research-archives/the-buildings/hamilton-building/ /. baumgartner, in conversation with the author, november , . baumgartner quoted in nicholas james, interviews-artists (london: cv publications, ), . virilio, the aesthetics of disappearance, translation by philip beitchman (new york: semiotext(e), ), . allee is similar to the words “alley” or “boulevard.” baumgartner quoted from video, “christiane baumgartner: screen shot,” alan cristea gallery, http://www.alancristea.com/artist-christiane-baumgartner. for discussions of richter’s archive (source images) see dietmar elger, gerhard richter: a life in painting (chicago: university of chicago press, ); and gerhard richter: forty years of painting, robert storr, ed. (new york: museum of modern art, ). for discussions of richter’s use of the blur see gerhard richter: early work, - , christine mehring, jeanne anne nugent, and jon l. seydl, eds. (los angeles: j. paul getty museum, ); and gerhard richter, benjamin h. d. buchloh, ed. (cambridge: the mit press, ). gerhard richter quoted in gerhard richter: text. writings, interviews and letters - , dietmar elger and hans ulrich obrist, eds. (london: thames & hudson, ), . dietmar elger, gerhard richter: landscapes (ostfildern: hatje cantz, ), . see rebecca zorach and elizabeth rodini, “on imitation and invention: an introduction to the reproductive print,” in paper museums: the reproductive print in europe: - (chicago: the david and alfred smart museum of art, ), - . richter quoted in gerhard richter: text. writings, interviews and letters - , . baumgartner quoted in hamlyn, “figuring speed,” . chapter “twists of language”: self-reflection filtered through the matrix of a printmaker as demonstrated in the last chapter, baumgartner wants her prints to be approached as physical and emotional experiences, based on the viewer’s reaction to their visual aspects. as displayed by her and richter’s use of the blur (see figs. . and . ), this technique not only creates and suggests movement, but it demonstrates how familiar images can be restructured in order to allow viewers to find their own point of reference within the work and apply it to their personal circumstances. discovering their inherent commentaries on contemporary lifestyles is not a viewing requirement. however, her works lend themselves to multiple inferences, overwhelmingly driven by baumgartner’s interest in giving viewers an opportunity for self-reflection and meditation. by capturing her own visually poetic moments of reflection through the use of widely relatable images, she inspires viewers to use her prints as templates for considering issues surrounding history, memories, and how one interacts with the world. many of her works focus on these subjects due to her experiences in a divided post-war germany. additionally, she finds influence in russian history, demonstrated by her soviet union inspired guidebook titled detour and, most prominently, her interest in the writings of joseph brodsky (the russian-american poet and essayist). in , she produced original woodcuts to illustrate a reprint of brodsky’s essay “less than one” ( ), which chronicles his upbringing in world war ii leningrad, russia. this publication demonstrates how baumgartner relates to and shares brodsky’s interest in artistically capturing self- reflection and recognizing one’s view of the world. building on this relationship, this chapter will examine how baumgartner’s prints illustrate the importance of personal meditative thought by commenting on its relation to one’s background, physical surroundings, and connection to the past and notion of time (especially in regards to memory), as well as the significance of reevaluating one’s perspective of the modern experience. beginning with an introduction of the similarities in their artistic processes, i will establish the relationship between brodsky and baumgartner. brodsky often wrote about the connection between the poet and society, emphasizing the ability of literature to have a positive impact on society and help develop its language and culture. in many ways, baumgartner comments on this same issue, substituting the visual artist for the poet. as with poetry, her prints embody messages, but like the lyrical rhythm of the words, the beauty is in her matrix. the experience of reading a poem is thought to be provocative and emotional, an outcome she aims for with her prints. as the reader must do with lines of poetry, the viewer must look beyond the beauty of the woodcut and the rhythm of the horizontal lines to decipher the messages within and recognize the print’s meditative and thematic properties. in brodsky’s poem “lullaby of cape cod” ( ), he describes the experience of leaving one empire (russia) for another (united states). the verses are heavy with sullen imagery of the physical world around him, as captured in this excerpt pertaining to his flight to the u.s.: ... below me curled serpentine rivers, roads bloomed with dust, ricks yellowed, and everywhere in that diminished world, in formal opposition, near and far, lined up like print in a book about to close, armies rehearsed their games in balanced rows and cities all went dark as caviar. and then the darkness thickened. all lights fled, a turbine droned, a head ached rhythmically, and space backed up like a crab, time surged ahead into first place, and streaming westwardly, seemed to be heading home, void of all light, soiling its garments with the tar of night. brodsky captures a straightforward scene of life in this verse, yet his words have elevated the experience to a metaphysical state. the cadence of the lines brings beauty and familiarity to an otherwise troubling scene of sadness and solitude, as well as provides a gateway to the author, so that the reader may participate in processing this memory. this interplay between creator and recipient is how one is meant to relate to baumgartner’s prints. take, for example, her diptych trails ( ) (figs. . - ), which displays a team of planes flying overhead, leaving contrails across the sky, evidence of the passage of time. the trails radiate from the planes like a light-beam from a flashlight. they widen at the top of the print, suggesting rapid acceleration of the planes into the depths of the composition. these vapors are visual representations of the movements of the planes through time. they show the exact path taken by the pilots, detailing each turn and adjustment throughout this section of their journey. the blurred planes continue the suggestion of motion by appearing to vibrate within the print, fighting to break free from their suspension in mid-air. their hazy identities also make them timeless, for they could be commercial or military, dating from the early-twentieth century to the present. in actuality, the prints depict world war ii allied bombers taken from a german propaganda film. baumgartner’s process fragments the framework of the event and molds it into an abstract depiction of time, motion, and place. while examining the poem and the woodcuts, the beholder must float between the multiple layers of interpretation, considering the groundings of the works in reality, as well as the metaphysical perspectives they illuminate. the physical and metaphysical aspects of baumgartner’s prints are fundamental in considering the notion of self-reflection and her connection to the works of brodsky. when composing a woodcut, baumgartner prefers images that are exceptionally prevalent. as explored in the last chapter, this approach allows the work to be readily accessible to a wide range of viewers. by taking these stills of our physical reality and drastically enlarging them, she uses the matrix to transform what were once rather ordinary concepts into monumental imagery, and brings “experience and weight to an otherwise unexperienced moment.” these new metaphysical visions are now open to interpretation and contemplation, and as julia blume puts it, baumgartner captures these images “voyeuristically and in so doing toys with dramatic tension without there ever being any drama—events remain part of the indifference of everyday life.” baumgartner possesses her own associations and thought processes when constructing her works, which will be examined in this chapter. yet ultimately, once viewers stand before one of her works, it is up to them to decide what to take from their encounter with her prints. a person’s background and his or her response to those collective experiences play a significant part in shaping their worldview. baumgartner and brodsky’s perspectives are linked as a result of both maturing under a repressive regime. these experiences played a pivotal role in developing how they would later express themselves through their chosen mediums and perceive/present the world. as a result of living in east germany since infancy, baumgartner, for example, took a strong interest in urban development and the effects an altered environment has on its inhabitants. this idea is also reflected in brodsky’s life. growing up during world war ii, he likewise witnessed many hardships and urban transformations as a youth in s leningrad. in an essay titled “a guide to a renamed city” ( ), brodsky commented on the significance of his surroundings, writing: “the depiction of both the actual and mental interior of the city, of its impact on the people and their inner world, became the main subject of russian literature almost from the very day of this city’s founding.” he provided an allegory characterizing the dominant influence of lenin over the city, originally known as saint petersburg, writing: the monument before the finland station is unique … for comrade lenin delivers his oration standing on the top of an armored car. it’s done in the style of early constructivism, so popular nowadays in the west, and in general the very idea of carving an armored car out of stone smacks of a certain psychological acceleration, of the sculptor being a bit ahead of his time. as far as i know, this is the only monument to a man on an armored car that exists in the world. in this respect alone, it is a symbol of a new society. the old society used to be represented by men on horseback. he later added, “on the whole, this russian execution of the prussian military ideal of society, together with the cumbersome apartment style buildings squeezed between the classical ensembles, produces rather a disheartening effect.” he further lamented his experiences living in this environment in his essay “less than one,” in which brodsky recounts his upbringing in leningrad and describes his tribulations in school, encounters with discrimination, and disgust for the repetitive and centralized nature of his home city. in , baumgartner made original woodcuts for a re-print of this essay, a publication done in collaboration with book designer sabine golde (b. ). notably, her act of making book illustrations reflects her dürer roots, especially in relation to his literary inspired apocalypse cycle as mentioned in chapter one (fig. . ). just as dürer’s book of revelation illustrations overshadowed the text in prominence, baumgartner’s illustrations consume two-page spreads each, while also book-ending and directing the flow of the essay by interrupting each section of writing. this reprint also relates to dürer’s time, since dating back to the s publishers recognized a market for illustrated books. for book illustrations, woodcuts were commercially the obvious method, since they could be printed in the same press and simultaneously with type. an engraving, on the other hand, would have to be printed separately in a different press, making it a more expensive endeavor. baumgartner’s first illustration for the re-print (fig. . ) depicts a rather uninhabited looking street, lined with towering, receding streetlights. the looming poles form a narrow lane that appears to have no terminus, its farthest point of depth consisting of little more than a hazy, engulfing shadow in the distance. its suggestions of uniformity and barrenness evoke the eerie stillness of a tyrannized leningrad or the darkened streets of a regulated leipzig. in less than one iii (fig. . ), three buildings peek above what resembles a wall of bushes or open fencing, permitting ghostly outlines of the buildings to bleed through this visual blockade. each has the same cookie-cutter silhouette, monotonously bland and industrial. the structures are also tightly spaced, alluding to the urban, “military” specifications that brodsky observed in his city’s new layout. in this series, the printmaker is representing her reactions to brodsky’s thoughts and memories, while also making the illustrations relate to her own associations with these themes of repression and bleakness. this printed reaction parallels the suggested role of baumgartner’s viewers, which is to reflect on the imagery depicted in her prints and apply their personal impressions to their own lives and surroundings. in “a guide to a renamed city,” brodsky also noted, “sometimes [leningrad] gives the impression of an utter egoist preoccupied solely with its own appearance. it is true that in such places you pay more attention to façades than to faces.” after a visit to birmingham, england circa , baumgartner was struck by an example of paying “more attention to façades than to faces,” which caused her to reflect on the impact of her surroundings. she recalled this memory in an interview: i was particularly drawn to the long tunnel called queensway and spaghetti junction and to the way the town had been developed in the years following the second world war and the bombings. … for example, if you walk from the station to the ikon [gallery] along fletchers walk, by the university library, you have to pass under a bridge and walk through a tunnel under the road. it seems that pedestrians were the last people to be considered when birmingham was rebuilt in the s—the philosophy was all about the car as a means of getting around. compared to brodsky’s leningrad, this is a drastically less invasive example of how a city’s layout can affect its citizens. yet, it highlights this idea of ushering in the future, along with its accelerating technologies, often at the expense of the individual and culture. it harks back to brodsky’s statue allegory, with the armored car of the future overshadowing its equestrian predecessors. growing up in a restrictive environment herself, baumgartner is sensitive to this type of control, demonstrating the powerful influence of experiences on one’s perspective. representing this observation, she composed the print series solaris i-iv ( ) (figs. . - ), which portrays “the best tunnels i could find and are taken from a [andrei] tarkovsky film of the same name.” again, she is using a russian point of reference in order to capture her intended composition. still, her process renders these “movie” tunnels ordinary in appearance. these prints are completely devoid of the natural landscape. the depicted space is confined and austere, with a rigid design and artificial illumination. the structures are completely manmade, yet stripped of even basic essentials for inhabitance. while these tunnels are purposefully designed for the sake of vehicular travel and convenience, baumgartner focuses on this opposition of nature versus artificiality to encourage awareness of technology’s potential dominance over our lives. the series epitomizes the concerns shared by baumgartner, brodsky, and also paul virilio on the need for a society that contemplates its actions and questions how the design of the world affects both one’s physical and metaphysical experiences of reality. baumgartner also comments on the importance of introspection and its effect on one’s life based on observations of the past. this is represented through numerous depictions of history and memory, and these two powerful elements are tightly interwoven in her prints. in an interview, baumgartner recalled watching television and coming across a world war ii documentary: i was really affected by this. i don’t watch tv very often and i was zapping through the channels thinking how strange it was that you are exposed to so many different ideas and subjects—a soap opera, the news on the hijacking of the school in beslan, and then this documentary. the most disturbing thing about this programme, which included live film footage, was the voices of the pilots celebrating as they dropped bombs onto targets below. but somehow, because it was being shown on the tv, many years later, in the comfort of my private home, i was distanced from the actual event and lost a sense of conscience and consciousness about what was real and what was not. she quickly realized how removed she was from that time and how the television screen acted as a shield from the reality of the past, protecting her from the harshness and violence of those events. she was able to cast a removed eye safe in her house, and be less affected emotionally and completely removed physically. this realization inspired her to start videotaping the footage right from the screen, and it would later become the source of her still for luftbild (fig. . ). she noted, “it was so strange for [this footage] to enter my world this way, i wasn’t searching for it, it found me.” however, baumgartner is not attempting to make a comment on world war ii specifically. instead, she sees this mental detachment, brought on by the desensitization of constant visual media, as her interesting and somewhat alarming focus. by keeping the date and identities of the planes just out of reach of the viewer, she makes it a general image of modern war. it remains a timeless warning as to how technology alters society’s grasp on the realities of the present and our past. other artists, such as the american martha rosler (b. ), have also used their works to highlight how the media can anesthetize experience. her series bringing the war home: house beautiful ( - ) combines news photos of the vietnam war with images from contemporary home and design magazines. in beauty rest (fig. . ), a contented american family lays across their clean luxury bed that is situated in a bombed-out corner of a room. oblivious to the destruction surrounding them, the mother continues reading and the father and son play with a toy. rosler revisited this series in , creating works that unite images of the war in iraq with the modern living room. in photo-op (fig. . ), a young woman, distracted by her cell phone, poses dramatically in the middle of the room, while an injured young girl and seemingly burned woman lay on her designer furniture. explosions and soldiers dominate the view outside her oversized windows, yet the model pays no attention. rosler, like baumgartner, recognizes the separation that technology has caused between the average person and violent realities. her two series force the viewer to contemplate how media influences his or her psychological associations to these unsettling images by confronting the viewer with extremely exaggerated and constructed situations. rosler’s heightened works are focused on specific events, making them much more direct. this concept runs counter to baumgartner’s works, where a more allusive approach is employed. baumgartner’s works often relate back to issues surrounding war, but since her prints are meant to remain flexible in focus and perspective, the role of her process is crucial. news on her radio about catastrophes happening around the world made it hard for baumgartner to separate these events from her work. she comments, “i was working on subjects such as speed and standstill, cars and planes and it was obvious, in a sense, that i would come to military conflicts. but i don’t want to work on this theme in a specific way. i want it to be more generalized.” this issue came up when first designing transall ( - ) (fig. . ), which she started in , shortly after making the lisbon series (fig. . ). unlike most of her works that begin with home videos, transall came from “a tiny newsprint photograph saved from several years ago when [she] had a residency in ireland.” the image remained unused for two years, allowing it to have “no particular topicality,” her ideal situation. once her residency was completed, she “sent the block back to leipzig but, unfortunately, it was damaged in transit.” not long after her return home, the attack on the world trade center occurred, filling this aviation image with numerous negative connotations and compelling her to walk away from the project. months later, she revisited the woodcut, deciding to try her best at preventing this tragic event from infiltrating her thoughts while cutting the block. she also chose to produce it at a much larger scale, stating: “this image is so full of menace, power and force that i felt it had to be big, as big as i could get the wood and the paper. i like the idea of rebuilding such powerful objects of our present time in such an ancient method as woodcut.” in actuality, to completely remove these influences from the context of the print is impossible. yet at the same time, it’s important to recognize that although this woodcut emerged from a photograph taken circa , her matrix gave this image the ability to take on new associations and be used as a symbol of conflict in general, as this snapshot acquires meaning linked to what plagues our world today. baumgartner is a manipulator of reality, redefining our perspective of the ordinary, as is discernable from her body of work. her alterations are what make her prints unique, like glimpses into personal memories. the series sekunde ( second) ( ) (fig. . ) documents one second of film, taken by baumgartner while in a moving vehicle, segmented into twenty-five separate woodcuts. to develop this series, she sifted through thousands of stills, selecting only the frames that best suited her overall vision. the outcome was a distorted representation of a second’s time rushing past a tree- lined freeway, summarized by twenty-five selected fragments. much like a memory, certain details of the moment have faded, while others remain strong. as brodsky described, “attempting to recall the past is like trying to grasp the meaning of existence. both make one feel like a baby clutching at a basketball: one’s palms keep sliding off.” by restricting this series to black and white, baumgartner is further linking sekunde to memory, since often when one tries to recall a distant memory, color details are hazy or missing. this can also occur in dreams, where the mind occasionally replays disrupted versions of personal experiences, often in grayscale. in this series, the viewer is introduced to baumgartner’s chosen re-telling of this small portion of her drive down a freeway. multiple frames are left in a complete haze with monotone foliage entangled in an indecipherable collage, while others contain prominent branches and tree trunks that give a sense of focus and depth amidst a speeding landscape. without these solid beacons that move from frame to frame, the conveyance of time would be weakened. these powerfully repetitive shapes are what allow the eye to see subtle changes in orientation. for each millisecond that passes, the viewer’s perspective of the same location evolves, forcing the alignment of the branches in relation to each other and the viewer to constantly transform and appear closer, taller, and/or wider with each print. baumgartner’s interest in altered perspective is not exclusive to her prints. in , she published a book titled detour with lucy harrison, an artist based in london, that chronicles their excursions through tallinn, estonia, (which they had both visited previously) as they searched for the city’s monuments using “two soviet-era guide books, one from (in russian), one from (in english).” the book recounts their individual observations of the trip, accompanied by text snippets from the soviet guidebooks that introduce the tour locations sought out by the duo. detour is filled with their contemporary images of the monuments, taken as close as possible to the ones in the guidebooks. where monuments were no longer standing or could not be found, baumgartner and harrison would photograph “their most suitable positions in the vicinity.” just as these photographs represent the existence or memory of these monuments, baumgartner’s prints serve as monuments on paper to our evolution and history as a society. she captures moments that relate to her personal history, yet they are in many ways more closely wedded to documenting the “memory” of society, representing and reminding viewers of past events and how, through technological advancements, people risk losing their connection with reality. her prints bring these issues to the surface and act as memorials to society’s development and growth, while directing viewers to not lose sight of their own perspective and enrichment through meditative thought. following her own suggestion of revisiting the past, baumgartner, who lived in tallinn years prior as an exchange student, returned to the city with the intention of revisiting memories, testing her grasp of the older city layout. baumgartner recalls, “when estonia was still part of the soviet union and i lived in east germany, i stayed in a flat which faced the viru hotel. now, years later, i tried to find the flat again, or at least its position in relation to the hotel. in my memory the viru hotel was rotated degrees from the position i find it in now.” not only was her orientation in the city thrown, but also its appearance had drastically changed. when baumgartner lived in estonia, the republic was facing a pivotal milestone in its campaign to regain independence. it was not until august , that estonia was reestablished to its pre- ’s status. therefore, baumgartner lived in what remained an oppressively occupied state. returning years after the republic had regained authority gave her the opportunity to become reacquainted with a new estonia. baumgartner, influenced by her german and soviet experiences of a restrictive government dynamic, was provided a chance to start fresh with a new perspective and explore her fascination with history and the notion of temporality. as in sekunde, time and reflection allowed her to look at the city from a fresh vantage point, to see new facets of a landscape once hidden from view. similar to this trip, baumgartner’s prints offer viewers an opportunity to become reacquainted with familiar concepts, ideas, and events and perhaps reflect on these subjects with a new perspective. as this discussion establishes and as explored in the previous chapters, viewer participation, both mentally and physically, is the culminating factor in baumgartner’s art. her experiences offer a unique viewpoint on the functioning of our world today. influenced by others with similar critical perspectives on life, she succeeds in visually conveying a reality often overlooked. self-reflection and contemplation are her main messages, and by displaying universally relatable images, she presents her observations without sacrificing the viewer’s personal experience and opportunity to gain insight into our society. baumgartner wants to liberate the mind from the bombardments of rushed, technology-driven interaction and the velocity of our lifestyles. her time-consuming and methodical process acts as a metaphor for her prescription to slow down and remain open-minded. she wants to share the sensation of her symbolic travels down the freeway, trees racing past the car window and long stretches of freedom conveyed in linear form, representing the benefits and importance of time. notes joseph brodsky was born in , in leningrad, russia, and he died in in brooklyn, new york. he left school at the age of fifteen, and during this time brodsky taught himself english and polish and began writing poetry. in march until november , brodsky lived in exile in the arkhangelsk region of northern russia, serving eighteen months of a five-year sentence in a labor camp for “social parasitism.” in , joseph brodsky became an involuntary exile from his native country and settled in the united states. in , he was awarded the nobel prize for literature. joseph brodsky, “lullaby of cape cod,” a part of speech, translated by anthony hecht (new york: farrar, straus, giroux, ), . baumgartner, “text,” christiane-baumgartner, http://www.christiane- baumgartner.com/text.html. julia blume, “pausing,” in speed/standstill (leipzig: christiane baumgartner/carivari, ), . baumgartner in conversation with jeannette stoschek, “visualizing time,” in reel time (london: alan cristea gallery, ), . brodsky, “a guide to a renamed city,” less than one: selected essays (new york: farrar, straus & giroux, ), . ibid., . ibid., . for more information on the early use of woodcuts see antony griffiths, prints and printmaking: an introduction to the history and techniques (los angeles: university of california press, ), - . brodsky, “a guide to a renamed city,” . baumgartner quoted in stoschek, “visualizing time,” . ibid., . ibid., . ibid., . ibid., . baumgartner quoted in nicholas james, interviews-artists (london: cv publications, ), . jeremy lewison, “at the still point of the turning world. the prints of christiane baumgartner,” in christiane baumgartner (heemstede: johan deumens gallery, ), . ibid., . baumgartner quoted in james, interviews-artists, . see chapter two for a discussion of her works in relation to chronophotography, a technique that shares similarities with this series. brodsky, “less than one,” less than one: selected essays, . christiane baumgartner and lucy harrison, detour, artist book, (leipzig: pögedruck and mönch ohg, ), . ibid., . ibid., . for more information about estonia’s independence, see http://www.estonica.org/en/the_august_coup_and_estonian_independence_ /. conclusion the work of christiane baumgartner warrants art historical study because of its groundbreaking uses and intermingling of the reproductive mediums of woodcut, video, and photography. as i’ve explored, her works comment on art and society today and the relationship of new technology to our past. displayed by the juxtaposition of transall ( - ) (fig. . ) and dürer’s triumphal arch of maximilian i ( ) (fig. . ), baumgartner reveals a keen knowledge of the history of printmaking and seamlessly presents an interchange between contemporary and established techniques and the artistic treatment of historical events. baumgartner’s perspective on traditional printmaking pushes prints into a fresh territory, asserting its role in contemporary art. by contextualizing the technical and thematic elements of baumgartner’s prints, my thesis offers insight into the process, mindset, and objectives of this contemporary, innovative printmaker. resulting from her introduction to digital media, she unlocked the pivotal factor necessary to further examine and convey awareness about societal interaction and concerns. baumgartner’s choices of recognizable and relatable imagery allow her to include viewers in her conversation about the importance of introspection, as well as provide them with works that engage and challenge through stimulating optical experiences. in an interview, baumgartner said: “it is important for an art work to leave space for the audience.” through my analysis of how baumgartner herself relates to her prints in response to her childhood in the german democratic republic era of leipzig, relationships with similar-minded individuals, and guidance of traditional training, i have demonstrated the ways in which her prints are successful at conveying her unique perspective on our world today, while at the same time sustaining her sentiment regarding the need for audience engaging art. above all, she repeatedly achieves her objectives of uniting mediums separated by centuries and capturing the rapid speed of both physical and metaphysical concepts of motion, communication, and time. baumgartner quoted in nicholas james, interviews-artists (london: cv publications, ), . bibliography alan cristea gallery. reel time. london: alan cristea gallery, . baumgartner, christiane. eine sekunde. leipzig: carivari, . ——. speed/standstill. leipzig: christiane baumgartner/carivari, . baumgartner, and sabine golde. weniger als man = less than one. leipzig: carivari, . baumgartner, and lucy harrison. detour. artist book. leipzig: pögedruck and mönch ohg, . belting, hans. the germans and their art: a troublesome relationship. new haven: yale university press, . braun, marta. picturing time: the work of etienne-jules marey ( - ). chicago: university of chicago press, . brodsky, joseph. a part of speech. translated by anthony hecht. new york: farrar, straus, giroux, . ——. less than one: selected essays. new york: farrar, straus & giroux, . ——. interview by jérôme sans. “the game of love and chance: a discussion with paul virilio.” watson institute for international studies, november . http://www.watsoninstitute.org/infopeace/vy k/sans.cfm. buchloh, benjamin h. d., ed. gerhard richter. cambridge: the mit press, . “christiane baumgartner: screen shot.” alan cristea gallery. http://www.alancristea.com/artist-christiane-baumgartner. “christiane baumgartner: transall.” museum of modern art. http://www.moma.org/explore/multimedia/audios/ / . elger, dietmar. gerhard richter: a life in painting. chicago: university of chicago press, . ——. gerhard richter: landscapes. ostfildern: hatje cantz, . elger, and hans ulrich obrist, eds. gerhard richter: text. writings, interviews and letters - . london: thames & hudson, . griffiths, antony. prints and printmaking: an introduction to the history and techniques. berkeley: university of california press, . hall, cynthia. “before the apocalypse: german prints and illustrated books, - .” harvard university art museums bulletin / (spring, ): - . hess, daniel ed. der frühe dürer. nürnberg: germanisches nationalmuseum, . hruska, libby, ed. german expressionism: the graphic impulse. new york: museum of modern art, . ivins, william. “notes on three dürer woodblocks.” metropolitan museum studies / (nov. ): - . james, nicholas. interviews-artists. london: cv publications, . johan deumens gallery. christiane baumgartner. heemstede: johan deumens gallery, . jordan, mel and malcolm miles, eds. art and theory after socialism. chicago: intellect books, the university of chicago press, . koerner, joseph leo. the moment of self-portraiture in german renaissance art. chicago: university of chicago press, . landau, david, and peter parshall. the renaissance print. new haven: yale university press, . lubow, arthur. “the new leipzig school.” new york times, january , . http://www.nytimes.com/ / / /magazine/ leipzig.html. mehring, christine, jeanne anne nugent, and jon l. seydl, eds. gerhard richter: early work, - . los angeles: j. paul getty museum, . murgatroyd, hannah. “‘you need to show work in the right place’: christiane baumgartner.” fuelrca, november , . http://fuel.rca.ac.uk/articles/you- need-to-show-work-in-the-right-place-christiane-baumgartner. panofsky, erwin. the life and art of albrecht dürer. princeton: princeton university press, . “paul virilio.” the european graduate school, . http://www.egs.edu/faculty/paul-virilio/biography/. piccard, gerhard. “carta bombycina, carta papyri, pergamena graeca.” archivalische zeitschrift ( ): - . prince, nigel, ed. christiane baumgartner. birmingham: ikon gallery, . roca, josé. “interview: christiane baumgartner.” philagrafika blog, may , . http://philagrafika.blogspot.com/ / /interview-christiane-baumgartner.html. silver, larry, and elizabeth wyckoff, eds. grand scale: monumental prints in the age of dürer and titian. new haven: yale university press, . storr, robert, ed. gerhard richter: forty years of painting. new york: museum of modern art, . tittel, cornelius. “gerhard richter – die hälfte im museum ist müll.” welt online, september , . http://www.welt.de/kultur/article /gerhard-richter- die-haelfte-im-museum-ist-muell.html. virilio, paul. the aesthetics of disappearance. translation by philip beitchman. new york: semiotext(e), . ——. interview by john armitage. translated by patrice riemens. “the kosovo war took place in orbital space.” ctheory, october , . http://www.ctheory.net/articles.aspx?id= . weinhardt, martina, and max hollein, eds. op art. köln: könig, . wilson, adrian. the making of the nuremberg chronicle. amsterdam: nico israel, . zorach, rebecca, and elizabeth rodini. paper museums: the reproductive print in europe: - . chicago: the david and alfred smart museum of art, . figures chapter figure . attrib. albrecht dürer, the creation of eve from the nuremberg chronicle, woodcut, . figure . dürer, self portrait, silver point, . vienna, albertina. figure . dürer, the four horsemen of the apocalypse from the series apocalypse, woodcut, . figure . christiane baumgartner, klassenkameraden (classmates), three silkscreens on paper, . figure . gerhard richter, matrosen (sailors), oil on canvas, . figure . christiane baumgartner, lisbon i-iv, four woodcuts on japanese paper, . figure . albrecht dürer et al., triumphal arch of maximilian i, woodcut, . british museum, london. figure . christiane baumgartner, transall, woodcut on kozo paper, . museum of modern art, new york, ny. chapter figures . - christiane baumgartner, schkeuditz i-iv, series of four woodcuts, . museum of modern art, new york, ny. figure . schkeuditz iii (detail) figure . Étienne-jules marey, “bird flight, pelican,” chronophotograph, . figure . emil nolde, fischdampfer (fishing steamer), woodcut, . museum of modern art, new york, ny. figure . baumgartner, manhattan transfer, woodcut on kozo paper, . figure . baumgartner, deutscher wald, from a series of nine woodcuts, . figure . baumgartner, luftbild, woodcut on kozo paper, - . figure . carlos cruz-diez, induction chromatique , silkscreen, . figure . victor vasarely, zèbre, oil on canvas, . figures . - baumgartner, allee i + ii, woodcut diptych on kozo paper, . figure . gerhard richter, seestück (seascape), oil on canvas, . figure . richter, great sphinx of gizeh, oil on canvas, . figure . baumgartner, gelände, woodcut on atsukuchi japanese paper, . chapter figures . - christiane baumgartner, trails i + ii, woodcut diptych on kozo paper, . figure . baumgartner, less than one i, part of a series of five woodcuts on japanese paper, . figure . baumgartner, less than one iii, part of a series of five woodcuts on japanese paper, . figures . - baumgartner, solaris i-iv, a series of four woodcuts on kozo paper, . figure . martha rosler, “beauty rest,” from the series bringing the war home: house beautiful, photomontage, printed as a color photograph, - . figure . rosler, “photo-op,” from the series bringing the war home: house beautiful, new series, photomontage, . figure . baumgartner, sekunde. cream cloth covered box containing title page, colophon, and twenty-five woodcuts on zerkall paper, . microsoft word - sqmccabe_ma_thesis_final.doc caught between the folds: an intertextual and intervisual engagement with pieter bruegel the elder’s religious paintings a thesis submitted to the temple university graduate board in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of master of arts by sophia quach mccabe january, approval(s): ashley west, thesis advisor, art history department marcia b. hall, committee member, art history department ii table of contents page list of figures........................................................................................................iii chapter . introduction ............................................................................................... . audience and patronage ....................................................................... . social, religious, and political climate in sixteenth- century netherlands ........................................................................... . bruegel’s ‘slow fuse’ ............................................................................ . conclusions ............................................................................................... bibliography ......................................................................................................... iii list of figures figure page . pieter bruegel the elder, procession to calvary.................................................... . pieter bruegel the elder, sermon of st. john the baptist ....................................... . pieter bruegel the elder, conversion of st. paul ................................................... . pieter bruegel the elder, death of the virgin ........................................................ . pieter bruegel the elder, tower of babel .............................................................. . limbourg brothers, très riches heures ............................................................... . pieter bruegel the elder, battle between the piggy banks and strong boxes ......... . pieter bruegel the elder, netherlandish proverbs ................................................. . hieronymus bosch, ship of fools......................................................................... . pieter bruegel the elder, procession to calvary, detail of simon of cyrene.......... . pieter bruegel the elder, procession to calvary, detail of st. john and the holy women ....................................................................................................... . rogier van der weyden, descent from the cross .................................................. . herri met de bles, landscape with saint john the baptist preaching ................... . pieter bruegel the elder, sermon of st. john the baptist, modified with diagonals forming y-shape ................................................................................... . lucas van leyden, ecce homo ............................................................................. . lucas van leyden, calvary .................................................................................. . pieter bruegel the elder, conversion of st. paul, detail of st. paul........................ . lucas van leyden, the conversion of st. paul ..................................................... chapter introduction it has always been a challenge to categorize an artist as versatile as pieter bruegel the elder (ca. – ). his works appealed to all strata of society immediately during his lifetime, from noblemen to merchants to people of more humble means. bruegel is best known for his prints and paintings of landscapes and peasants, which have been described in diverse terms: satirical, comical, and critical, as moral allegories, and as so closely based on observation that he ‘exceeded nature herself.’ in his schilder- boeck ( ), carel van mander described bruegel as ‘pier den droll’ for provoking his audience to smile at his pictures, while noting of his skills in drawing nature that “he had swallowed all the mountains and cliffs, and, upon coming home, he had spit them forth upon his canvases and panels.” the humanist poet dominicus lampsonius referred to bruegel as a new hieronymus bosch—perhaps through his prints as published and distributed by hieronymus cock—but with art showing such wit and humor that he even surpassed bosch. abraham ortelius, on the other hand, in the epitaph to bruegel in his walter s. gibson, bruegel (new york: oxford university press, ), . bruegel’s date of birth is uncertain; it may be assumed to be between – based on an engraved portrait of where he appears to be between forty and forty-five. carel van mander, dutch and flemish painters: translation from the schilderboek, trans. and intro. by constant van de wall (new york: mcfarlane, warde, mcfarlane, ), . ibid. ibid., . album amicorum ( ), compared bruegel to the great ancient painter apelles, and praised his friend’s truth to nature in how he depicted landscapes and human figures. as shown in these comments, bruegel’s early admirers singled out for praise different aspects of the artist and his body of work. nevertheless, their comments reveal a shared element of intense engagement as beholders of bruegel’s paintings and prints. i argue that bruegel’s strategy of enlisting the viewer is based not solely on the content or subject of the works, but on their very structure, as well. the formal structure provides the underlying strength of the engagement, demands close looking, and elicits an interpretive response from the contemporary sixteenth-century beholder. in this project, i will select an understudied group of paintings by bruegel to test what the relationship is between bruegel’s works and the viewer and how the artist invokes the viewer to make meaning from the pictures. these paintings form a distinct but still representative aspect of bruegel’s oeuvre—namely his religious narratives—and include the procession to calvary ( , kunsthistorisches museum, vienna), the sermon of st. john the baptist ( , museum of fine arts, budapest), and the conversion of st. paul ( , kunsthistorisches museum, vienna). bruegel has received much scholarly attention over the years, but surprisingly, very little of that has been devoted to his religious subjects. instead, bruegel’s peasants, landscapes, and proverbs have been the focus in modern scholarship. in the realm of peasants, the lively debate about bruegel’s depictions, initiated by svetlana alpers and hessel miedema, continues with work by margaret sullivan and ethan matthew fritz grossmann, bruegel: complete edition of the paintings, nd ed. (london: phaidon, ), . ortelius’s album amicorum was published in , after bruegel’s death in . kavaler. sullivan views the peasants in paintings such as vienna’s peasant dance (ca. ) as strictly satire, in which the festive celebration exhibits folly and has the status of moral allegory. kavaler, on the other hand, sees bruegel’s peasants as evidence of the artist’s tolerance of peasant festivity, in which every stratum held a role in the overall community. while i will include a discussion of peasants in this paper, i will do so only as it relates to the artist’s representation of ‘everyman’ in the vast composition of religious narratives—something that has not yet been fully explored in this other context. i will also elaborate on kavaler’s work on social order in the historical context of mid- sixteenth-century flanders and specifically the city of antwerp, home to bruegel and the epicenter of european economic and cultural activities. other scholars such as walter gibson, in his pivotal book on bruegel, discuss the artist’s works as theatrum mundi, while charles de tolnay refers to the artist’s “topsy-turvy world” as the key to his paintings. while i agree that these threads may appear within many of bruegel’s paintings, i will argue that the works connected with audiences beyond these themes of folly and carnivalesque reversals. in doing so, i will apply to bruegel’s religious paintings what other scholars have done with his range of secular works in order to evaluate the extent and role of audience absorption. for for more on the discussion of bruegel’s peasant scenes, see larry silver, peasant scenes and landscapes: the rise of pictorial genres in the antwerp art market (philadelphia: university of pennsylvania press, ), ; ethan matthew kavaler, pieter bruegel: parables of order and enterprise (cambridge: cambridge university press, ), – ; walter s. gibson, “bruegel and the peasants: a problem of interpretation,” in pieter bruegel the elder: two studies (franklin murphy lectures ) (lawrence, ks: spencer museum, ). margaret sullivan, bruegel’s peasants: art and audience in the northern renaissance (cambridge: cambridge university press, ). gibson , . perez zagorin, “looking for peter bruegel,” journal of the history of ideas . ( ): . example, mark meadow has analyzed netherlandish proverbs ( , staatliche museen, berlin), comparing the painting and its juxtaposition of figural structures to the notebook system used by humanists in the sixteenth century. using meadow’s work on figural structures, i will shift the focus from proverbs to the anecdotal vignettes that bruegel inserted into his paintings of religious narratives. i have chosen to examine a selection of bruegel’s religious pictures not only because they have been neglected and demand reassessment in light of the current scholarship, but also because it will help move the discourse forward beyond its focus on peasants, landscapes, and proverbs. as part of my approach, i will discuss the audience for the paintings of religious subjects, and place them in a social, political, and religious context during the sixteenth century when flanders went through a period of great turmoil and insecurity, especially with regard to the reformation, rising mercantilism, and oppression from spain. using the paintings, i will investigate how in his religious works bruegel sets up what john shearman calls ‘a slow fuse’ to connect contemporary audiences to these most current events and related moral dilemmas, as well as to elements of a local and greater northern art historical canon. with this project, i hope to contribute to bruegel studies by focusing on a much-neglected subject—his religious material—and seek to broaden the implications for his oeuvre and for northern art by evaluating what claims bruegel is making for himself and for art in society. mark a. meadow, pieter bruegel the elder’s netherlandish proverbs and the practice of rhetoric (zwolle, overijssel, netherlands: waanders publishers, ). john shearman, only connect… art and spectator in the italian renaissance (the aw mellon lectures in the fine arts, ) (princeton: princeton university press, ). bruegel’s three paintings procession to calvary, sermon of st. john the baptist, and conversion of st. paul share a similar compositional structure and color palette. with the main subject in the background of a landscape, a recurring compositional feature of bruegel’s works, engaging the audience depended upon different factors that include the viewers’ recognition of the religious narratives and familiarity with the very structure of the paintings. in the procession to calvary (also known as christ carrying the cross) (fig. ), a large painting that measures x cm ( - / x - / in.), we see a landscape with a high horizon and human figures spread across its expanse. a monumental windmill sits on top of a rock formation in the distance, spinning ominously. two black crows circle the right side of the landscape while one sits portentously on a gallows wheel that helps set the somber tone of the picture. the gallows wheel functioned as a device for torture and execution, and serves to remind viewers of the importance of the procession. four figures at the lower right of the painting convey the marian group of st. john and the holy women who appear as the event’s sole mourners. the long procession in the middle ground leads to a circle formed by a crowd of onlookers anticipating the crucifixion on the hill of golgotha. the circular formation echoes the gallows wheel occupied by one of the black crows. and where is christ? he appears in the middle of the painting but is almost imperceptible, surrounded by people. he is even less noticeable, as he has fallen to the ground because of the weight of the cross he is carrying. christ occupies the center of the canvas, the figures and their actions circumnavigating him. as observed by walter gibson, a central event in christianity has been transformed into a public holiday, a theatrum mundi. the crowd pays little attention to christ and those that torment him. a man adds more weight onto the cross with his right leg, increasing the burden christ is carrying, while another dressed as a fool taunts him with a gaping mouth. we also see simon of cyrene in the left foreground, as he is forced by soldiers to help christ bear the cross. a crowd gathers around the fracas instigated by simon’s wife, who struggles to free her husband, an uncharitable action in the biblical history that belies the rosary at her waist. this suggests that the external signs of a devoted christian fail to hide the true nature of human weaknesses that exist in all men and women. another crowd scene appears in the sermon of st. john the baptist (fig. ). however, in this picture unlike that of the procession, the sea of figures turns its attention to the main attraction in the central area. in this sizable painting that measures x cm ( - / x - / in.), we see st. john and christ within a dense forest surrounded by onlookers. the viewer’s position remains in the foreground at the back of the crowd, just outside of the framework of trees. various types of people are shown; netherlandish peasants, merchants, and foreign visitors attend the sermon, forming a patchwork of the populace typical of sixteenth-century antwerp. st. john preaches and points to christ on his left, who again occupies the literal center of the painting’s width, but not the actual center of the overall landscape. people climb and rest on trees to see and hear the saint’s sermon. greens, browns, and yellows of the clothing and accessories dance across the gibson , . ibid. expanse while reds facilitate the roving of viewers’ eyes as they travel across the painting. the significance of bruegel’s placement of the sermon in the countryside, as opposed to the city seen across the river, alludes to the open-air sermons of the reformation and perhaps a return to nature. lastly, in the conversion of st. paul (fig. ), another large landscape religious narrative at x cm ( - / x - / in.), the crowd consists of soldiers on horseback. like the sermon of st. john the baptist, the soldiers and their mounts face the direction of the figure of saul in the central area of the middle distance. saul is depicted lying on the ground, as he was thrown off his horse by god’s blinding light just a moment before. in fact, we see the heavenly light stream in from the upper left of the canvas striking its target saul, soon to become the holy figure st. paul. bruegel’s environs of craggy mountains, dense forest trees, and a rocky path lined by soldiers recall the landscape drawings from his alpine experience and italian journey in – . but, as suggested by certain scholars, the picture’s setting perhaps commemorates the passage of duke alva and his troops through the alps in the spring of , and the hope of netherlanders that alva, like saul, would be deflected from his purpose of the inquisition. gibson, however, contends that bruegel must have also been aware of associations of high places with communicating with god, such as in the story of moses speaking with the lord on mount sinai and the disciples’ witnessing of the perez zagorin, rebels and rulers, – : volume ii provincial rebellion revolutionary civil wars, – (cambridge: cambridge university press, ), ; silver , . town and country, as noted by silver, are mutually defining opposites. gibson , . transfiguration of christ on a mountain. perhaps bruegel situated saul’s conversion in a mountainous setting to draw comparisons to other significant spiritual events in which the physical presence of the almighty could be seen or heard, and traditionally depicted in art. the three paintings with the narrative structure of the main religious subject in the middle ground or background work well in emphasizing my concern with audience engagement. the viewer, in effect, is captured—or caught—by the paintings’ conceptual folds or seams formed by the vignettes and figural groups, or within places where something appears not quite ‘right.’ the procession’s st. john and the holy women group, with literal folds created in the drapery of their robes characteristic of another period, seem to exist in another space and time. they are part of the painting’s narrative, but at the same time, they stand apart compositionally and stylistically. similarly, the chief religious subject in each picture, also coexisting in the biblical period and the sixteenth century, is fitted into the seams of the paintings. remaining almost imperceptible within a sea of people, the main subject of the holy figure establishes its underlying meaning. the function and meaning of bruegel’s works is based on the audience’s presumed knowledge of the gospels and classical literature, as well as of the enduring netherlandish painting tradition in which bruegel claims his place. the sixteenth-century viewers’ awareness and experience of current religious and political events are also presumed. in the following two chapters, i will examine bruegel’s audience and the period’s social, religious, and political atmosphere to frame his viewers’ connections with the paintings. ibid. chapter audience and patronage the three paintings of religious subjects worked to maintain audience engagement, and connected with this group of cultured elite. who was part of this circle, and why would they find bruegel’s work so appealing? in the following discussion, i examine the artist’s friends and patrons to lay the foundation of how bruegel may have painted for a particular presumed audience and how he connected that audience to his paintings. antwerp with its rising wealth in the shipping and trading industries became the cultural center and commercial capital of europe by the middle of the sixteenth century, usurping bruges’s prominence. antwerp’s population rose from forty thousand at the beginning of the century to one hundred thousand around , making the city one of the largest in europe at the time. as the influx of businessmen continued to add to the increasing number, artists also followed. lodovico guicciardini recorded over three hundred artists working in antwerp in his publication descrittione di tutti i paesi bassi, which provided detailed descriptions of the cities and principalities of the low countries. in this environment of mercantilism, a chasm remained between the upper and lower classes. twelve percent of the population formed the upper class, deemed wealthy enough to pay taxes, and consisted almost exclusively of merchants and specialty artisans. another twelve percent made up the middle class, while the remaining three- silver , . ibid. silver notes that the number of artists is twice the number of bakers, and as bread was the staple diet, this points to an overwhelming size for the profession. quarters of the population—mostly artisans, day laborers, and the unemployed—were considered part of the impoverished lower stratum. the buying market for bruegel’s paintings tended to be the urban elite, and primarily amongst the merchant class and the nobility. within these circles, interests ranged from intellectual pursuits and classical studies to spiritualism and nascent nationalism. this group of people appreciated common spiritual ideals and associated with the aforementioned endeavors, embracing humanist interests. abraham ortelius the cartographer of philip ii of spain and friend of bruegel was a part of the humanist circle. evidence for bruegel and ortelius’s close friendship is noted within the latter’s album amicorum, in which the cartographer praised bruegel’s depictions as true to nature and compared him in his epitaph to the ancient painter apelles. their friendship was well known to others, as supported by two correspondences from roman scholar scipio fabius to ortelius. in the first letter of june , , fabius inquires about news on marten de vos and pieter bruegel. in the second correspondence of april , , fabius again sends greetings to the artists through ortelius, after meeting them in italy. ortelius, who commissioned bruegel’s death of the virgin ( , upton house, banbury, oxfordshire) (fig. ), had it engraved by philip galle for distribution to several colleagues, including dirck coornhert, a scholar and playwright, and benito arias montanus, a censor for the inquisition. coornhert’s reaction to the engraving speaks to kavaler , . a.e. popham, “pieter bruegel and abraham ortelius,” the burlington magazine for connoisseurs . ( ): . ibid. kavaler , . the power of the image and how it not only engaged one’s vision, but other senses, as well. his correspondence to ortelius, in gratitude for the picture, provides a glimmer of the emotional encounter with this image; “methinks i heard moaning, groaning and screaming and the splashing of tears in this portrayal of sorrow. there no one can restrain himself from sadly wringing his hands, from grieving and mourning, from lamenting and from the tale of woe. the chamber appears deathlike yet all seems to me alive.” like coornhert, montanus could not forget the image “of the departure of the virgin mother from this mortal life, painted both with great skill and great piety, an impression of it which i much wished to have,” as expressed in an inquiry to ortelius dated march , , fifteen years after his initial viewing. the people associated with ortelius, who comprised a significant portion of bruegel’s viewing audience, were learned men who nonetheless defied certain confessional and political labels. ortelius seemed to get along with both catholics and calvinists, and was part of a group that appreciated common spiritual values regardless of differences in doctrine. as noted previously, his many colleagues were cultivated men, and included artists, writers, philosophers, businessmen, and even clergy involved with the spanish inquisition. the reach of ortelius expanded to societies made up of rhetoricians, or rederijkers, who performed dramas with classical teachings or moral allegories. most of the members of these rhetorical societies were educated, professional men described as the cultivated elite, as well as artists. they included willem van popham , . ibid., . kavaler , . haecht, a man of humanist leanings, cornelis van ghistele, a distinguished classicist, and hubert goltzius, noted for his writings on ancient coins and roman iconography. goltzius was also connected to bruegel by marriage; he was the brother-in-law of the artist peter coecke van aelst, bruegel’s teacher and father-in-law. a common thread shared amongst the group seems to have been an appreciation for multiple layers of meaning within literary and visual works to excite the intellect and spark dialogue. ortelius and his friends were skilled in rhetorical exercises and studies of emblems that involved interpreting texts and images and engaging with “[designs] not so obvious or plain that anyone could understand them; nor were they so obscure and oblique that a man of understanding could not comprehend them through contemplation alone,” as noted by the dutch translator marcus antonius gillis van diest in describing the popularity of emblem books. i consider how bruegel’s multivalent paintings also provided similar mental stimulation. ethan matthew kavaler deftly examines the interests and humanist leanings of ortelius and his friends, but what is not fully explored is the negotiation between spiritual and financial health faced by antwerp’s merchants in a changing world. it is true that bruegel’s paintings contain numerous layers of meaning, as well as elements that connected with the learned group of the cultured elite. but what is the significance of this kind of engagement with religious paintings? within antwerp’s social and economic culture, one can find expressions of the growing tension between ibid., . ibid. kavaler , . kavaler refers to a book of emblems by johannes sambucus, quoting translator marcus antonius gillis van diest’s foreword. spiritual well-being and financial wealth illustrated through its literary and visual arts. taking into account the cresting wave of the merchant class, various cultural signs seem to suggest that the wealthier antwerp became, the greater the outpouring for a return to older values of labor and spirituality. this ‘return to the fold’ is signified by an increase in moral invectives evident in rhetorical society dramas and satirical writings. equated with deception, and associated with the manipulation of supply and prices for profit, merchants received the brunt of society’s reproach by rederijkers and satirical authors. cornelis everaert, in his play, the play of the uneven money, lays blame on scheming merchants for the fluctuating value of money. in the play heynken de luyere (ca. ), cornelis crul, a merchant and poet, portrays a foreign trader in antwerp wanting to return home, now that god has granted him riches. yet, the rhetorical societies of various brabant cities in the landjuweel, a competitive arts festival held in antwerp, promoted the theme of the usefulness of businessmen for society and praised merchants for providing markets for farmers, workers, and craftsmen. this love-hate relationship with the merchant class puts the businessman at odds with himself. i argue that the discrepancy between the need to recognize the importance of the merchant to antwerp’s economic structure, conjoined with an emphasis on regaining a substantive form of spirituality and moral order, informed the reception and interpretive force of silver , . sebastian brant’s ship of fools ( ); erasmus’s praise of folly (ca. ). elizabeth alice honig, painting and the market in early modern antwerp (new haven: yale university press, ), , . silver , . as cited in silver , note . silver , . bruegel’s religious paintings. this created the basis for a self-reflexive connection to the work for his cultured elite audience. i propose that the cultivation of a learned persona that included the visual arts was one strategy of the sixteenth-century antwerp merchant’s, in which he turned to what stephen greenblatt conceived as renaissance self-fashioning, described as “the shaping of one’s own identity, the experience of being molded by forces outside one’s control, [and] the attempt to fashion other selves.” the businessman and merchant constructed a self-image to achieve and maintain prominence in society; the image of spiritual devotion was a part of this process. patronage of art was, as well, as demonstrated by the example of niclaes jongelinck, a toll collector for zeeland and noted patron of bruegel. jongelinck owned sixteen paintings by the artist, including the cycle of the months ( ), a tower of babel ( , kunsthistorisches museum, vienna) (fig. ), and the procession to calvary. like the aristocratic patrons before him who owned manuscript illuminations with labors of the months cycles, jongelinck’s display of the months in his home suggests a self-fashioning, a need to identify with the aristocracy and to emulate their patronage of the arts, albeit in the medium of large-scale panel painting. iain buchanan has compared bruegel’s landscapes in the months to specific calendar stephen greenblatt, renaissance self-fashioning: from more to shakespeare (chicago: university of chicago press, ), . iain buchanan, “the collection of niclaes jongelinck: ii the ‘months’ by pieter bruegel the elder,” the burlinton magazine . ( ): . mark a. meadow, “bruegel’s procession to calvary, aemulatio and the space of the vernacular style,” nederlands kunsthistorisch jaarboek ( ): ; gibson , ; kavaler , . procession to calvary is likely one of the two paintings listed in jongelinck’s inventory, as cited in meadow, , note . in the same collection resided twenty-two frans floris pictures and one by albrecht dürer, as cited in kavaler, , note . silver , . manuscript illustrations, citing examples from the hennessy book of hours and the london golf book. in this sense, jongelinck fashions himself as the new duc de berry of the sixteenth century, commissioning calendar cycle scenes similar to the très riches heures (ca. ) (fig. ) by the limbourg brothers. jongelinck used bruegel’s landscape and religious paintings to help construct an image of himself as a wealthy and pious nobleman, one who, like those in ortelius’s circle, is also learned and well-versed in deciphering the multivalent layers of a bruegel painting. jongelinck’s patronage makes a statement about painting’s value. along these lines, bruegel’s translation of scenes from illuminated manuscripts to large panel paintings confers certain ideas: painting has measurable value; and a painting with holy figures is now part of a gallery of art objects, rather than a singular devotional object. as such, viewing the painting in one’s home, rather than in a place of worship, connected the spectator with common spiritual values shared by both catholics and protestants. the reformation encouraged personal spiritualism, rather than devotion to or veneration of holy figures. among the humanists like ortelius and his circle, spiritual values were held in higher regard than theological doctrines of any particular faith. the procession to calvary, the sermon of st. john the baptist and the conversion of st. paul convey the mandates of some of the tenets of personal spiritualism, such as the suffering of christ, listening to god’s words, and staying on the righteous and moral path of god, respectively. buchanan , . buchanan includes a chart comparing different illustrations from various books of hours. in the reformation, when emerging protestant sects and the catholic church battled for allegiances of faith, pursuing believers at every turn, the medium of painting appeared to be the most appropriate means to show one’s spirituality demonstratively and visually. sculptures could be seen as crossing the dangerous line between veneration and idolatry in the reformation. martin luther tolerated only paintings and, to a lesser degree, sculptures. worried that too many christians misunderstood how to use images appropriately, desiderius erasmus of rotterdam used the figure of folly to denounce sculptures in his ca. publication the praise of folly, “i am not so foolish as to require stone statues decked out in gaudy colors. for sometimes these are a drawback to the worship of us gods—that is, when stupid numbskulls adore the figures instead of the divinities, and then we are left in the position of those who have been edged out of their jobs by substitutes.” john calvin pronounced that sculptures, as well as all images referencing god, represented false idols, and advocated their destruction. what does painting being the most suitable medium for showcasing spirituality in the netherlands during the years of religious reform say about bruegel and his work? i argue that since the artist’s patrons were part of the cultured elite, and not part of the church, bruegel possessed more leeway in conveying the intended subject of the biblical events. in other words, his commissions were not altarpieces for church settings and did not need to serve a liturgical function. freed from the constraints of church leaders in which art was made strictly for devotional purposes, bruegel was able to exceed that jeffrey chipps smith, german sculpture of the later renaissance c. – : art in an age of uncertainty (princeton: princeton university press, ), . desiderius erasmus, the praise of folly, trans., intro., and comment. clarence h. miller (new haven: yale university press, ), . directive of religious art to comment on and critique the turmoil of the mid-century years, as seen in the ‘topsy-turvy world’ of the procession to calvary. as described previously, we see christ fallen in the center middle ground, surrounded by a crowd of people wearing sixteenth-century contemporary flemish costume who ignore his suffering, interested only in their own concerns. like erasmus, bruegel observed and criticized the calamities of his time, suggesting moral pitfalls or dilemmas encountered by humankind. jongelinck and ortelius remained prominent collectors of bruegel’s work, but his admirers extended to royalty, as well. king philip ii of spain and cardinal granvelle, the powerful adviser to the regent margaret of parma, were known collectors of bruegel’s art. granvelle may have met bruegel through cock, who dedicated many engravings to him, or through jongelinck, whose brother jacob was a sculptor and a favorite artist of the cardinal’s. through his patronage, granvelle acquired bruegel’s flight to egypt ( , the courtauld gallery, london) and parable of the blind, among others. the audience for bruegel’s paintings included scholars, merchants, nobility, and royalty. their knowledge of biblical and classical studies, as well as art from northern predecessors, informed their engagement with bruegel’s works. however, i suggest it is not only the textual or visual art references that worked to connect the contemporary irving l. zupnick, “bruegel and the revolt of the netherlands,” art journal . ( ): . additionally, after bruegel’s death, emperor rudolf owned the tower of babel and the conversion of st. paul, as noted in van mander’s schilderboek (see van mander , ); and the sermon of st. john the baptist was recorded in the inventory of the infanta isabella between and (see grossmann , ). gibson , . ibid. gibson notes granvelle had to abandon several paintings when he was forced to leave the netherlands in . gibson also notes the parable of the blind, in granvelle’s collection, is not identical with the painting now in naples. viewer to the paintings, but also an atmosphere of a mercantilist society and its dwindling spiritualism and moral direction that helped to bind the audience to his works. chapter social, religious, and political climate in sixteenth-century netherlands the sixteenth century in the netherlands was a tumultuous period of change, from the splintering of the church to spanish oppression to outright revolt. examining the social, religious, and political climate will help provide an idea of what bruegel’s contemporaries encountered daily. in turn, this will aid in examining the levels of audience engagement with the paintings. flemish critics of sixteenth-century society’s spiritual downturn and moral failings blame the city’s merchants for the displacement of old virtues with worldly values of the mercantile order. these sentiments appear time and again in satirical literature, applied histories, and print culture. by the mid-century, sebastian franck had already lambasted the idea of business in his weltbuch; ‘a company is a body whose members collect a sum of money, and then buy with it everything they can get their hands on, pins, mirrors, grain,… and what the workman has sold to them he cannot buy back at double the price.’ johannes aventinus, the bavarian historian, criticized the need for private property as a form of institutional avarice: ‘businessmen corrupt all they touch and now they are teaching the rest of us how to be mean and grasping.’ a riot broke out in antwerp in in reaction against the tax increase on beer and the monopoly on the beer industry. bruegel’s engraving battle between the piggy banks ethan matthew kavaler, “pictorial satire, ironic inversion, and ideological conflict: bruegel’s battle between the piggy banks and strong boxes,” nederlands kunsthistorisch jaarboek ( ): . ibid. ibid. and strong boxes (ca. s) (fig. ) condemns greed in a mock-heroic staging of warfare between inanimate objects. in the posthumous print, anthropomorphic piggy banks and moneyboxes, armed with spears and swords, wage war against one another. coinage spills out of them like blood on the battlefield. as discussed by kavaler, the features are characteristic of representations of warfare from scripture and ancient history. using comedic and anthropomorphic objects to illustrate avarice and corruption, bruegel places a satirical lens on the greed of society. yet, as noted by kavaler, it can also be seen as a conservative critique of cultural change. antwerp’s economic position appeared to generate an atmosphere of shifting moral values, forming an inverse relationship between financial wealth and good deeds. the capitalist culture of antwerp eclipsed its christian values of charity, as demonstrated in bruegel’s satirical engraving of piggy banks fighting strong boxes. the design does not address abuse or agents of abuse in the form of dishonest merchants, but rather an entire system of behavior that legitimizes greed as a motivating value and hails metaphorical plunder as a justifiable action. the tower of babel (fig. ) in jongelinck’s collection speaks to the concerns of the city’s rising mercantilism and its consequences, namely greed and depressed morality. the painting seems straightforward in its interpretation, as the tower itself symbolizes hubris, a reach for heights of glory of man. as noted by larry silver, the tower of babel alludes to the cultural problems of antwerp capitalism. two versions of ibid., . ibid., . silver , . bruegel’s tower of babel exist. the painting in vienna includes king nimrod, while the later smaller image of (museum boijmans van beuningen, rotterdam) omits the king and all other figures. in both works, bruegel sets the tower in a distinctly netherlandish landscape. in the larger version, the tower leans dangerously toward the viewer’s left side, even with the high degree of technical difficulty in its construction and detailed work. the smaller tower spirals upward, with an almost imperceptible angle, but one that exists as a warning against overarching pride. in both images, we see ships docked on the tower’s right side, linking it visually to antwerp’s busy port, as a city whose wealth was generated through trade and finance. commercially and industrially, antwerp reigned in shipping, manufacturing and exporting luxury goods such as cloth, and was the principle money market of western europe. with the onslaught of criticism, how does the merchant come to terms with positioning himself and his business in antwerp’s prosperity, while keeping his spiritual self intact? this was the time when the line between making money and the making of interest as a form of usury was being negotiated. like today’s corporations, early modern businesses needed to appeal to the people with a philosophy of doing things for the greater good of society in order to justify their existence and actions. the idea of business for the common good continued to be used as a defense in mercantilist writings. apologists such as lodovico guicciardini defended profit-making as an ibid. zagorin , . silver , . kavaler , . activity inextricably tied to society’s welfare, and viewed the entrepreneur as the protector of antwerp’s liberties. and, as previously mentioned, the rhetorical societies promoted the usefulness of merchants in society. as we look at the procession to calvary, we note that it remains unique in jongelinck’s painting collection in that it straddles the landscape genre and the religious arena, and also calls upon viewers to consider their own past, present, and future when interpreting the work. bruegel’s audience would draw from their knowledge of biblical narratives and recognize the flemish contemporary dress of the figures. in this sense, the contemporary audience of merchants, scholars, and other humanists may envision themselves as witness to the procession. moreover, with the netherlandish landscape and dress, the audience finds in the biblical story a shared cultural identity, which perhaps helped them contemplate their roles in society and their own means to personal salvation. the ebb and flow of audience engagement is stimulated by the intertextual and intervisual nature of the painting, and i will analyze this productive aspect of the work further in chapter . the moral failings of flanders and its blindness to christian values brought about satirical invectives. i consider procession to calvary a didactic piece that comments on the self-interest of society, and on the need to help others. with its placement in jongelinck’s home, it served to remind the merchant’s family and friends that his role in business is useful to the overall economy and thus, to the people of antwerp. working to help others decreased the self-interested aspect of the merchant class, and hence, justified jongelinck’s business activities. ibid. bruegel’s criticism of antwerp’s shifting values targeted not only the laity, but extended to the church, as well. we see this prominently displayed in his netherlandish proverbs in the depiction of a monk putting a beard on christ—a proverb denoting false piety (fig. ). bruegel’s commentary on the church became even more critical in the somber tone of the procession to calvary as we see a monk in grey (representing a pharisee?) sitting in the wagon and attending to one of the thieves with a crucifix. decorated with external signs of piety, the monk in monastic attire holding a cross, like simon of cyrene and his wife, fails to recognize christ and his suffering. church abuses met with condemnation beyond artistic circles. erasmus had used satire to criticize the catholic church and society in general. widespread abuses, such as the selling of indulgences, impelled many scholars and humanists to vent their frustration. erasmus’s criticism of the church was clearly expressed in the praise of folly: now what shall i say about those who find great comfort in soothing self-delusions about fictitious pardons for their sins, measuring out the times in purgatory down to the droplets of a waterclock, parceling out centuries, years, months, days, hours, as if they were using mathematical tables? they promise themselves anything and everything: wealth, honor, pleasure, an abundance of everything, perpetual health, a long life, flourishing old age, and finally a seat next to christ among the saints. the church remained a key target for northern artists and writers throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, ushering in religious dissidence and calls for religious reform. hieronymus bosch reproached monastic orders in ship of fools (ca. , musée du louvre, paris) (fig. ), in which he depicted two nuns and a monk mark a. meadow, “on the structure of knowledge in bruegel’s netherlandish proverbs,” volkskundig bulletin ( ): . the proverb “putting a flaxen beard on christ” denotes false piety. erasmus , . frolicking in a boat with peasants. one of the nuns plays a lute, and sings alongside her monastic counterpart. the lute and the act of singing signify lust and pre-empt lovemaking in medieval art. the panel also provides commentary on man’s role in the downturn of morality; a fool sits on the ship’s rigging, naked swimmers amble up to the ship for more wine, a peasant cuts down a cooked goose from the ship’s mast, and a giant ladle is used for an oar. gluttony and lust—not just the growing commercial vice of avarice—seemingly prevail in the depiction of this changing society. charges of these sins were leveled frequently against the religious orders in the late fifteenth century and through the sixteenth century. allusions to the vices include the plate of cherries and the metal wine jug suspended over the side of the boat, which bosch had used for the same sin in tabletop of the seven deadly sins and the four last things (ca. – , prado, madrid). like bosch and many other artists before him, bruegel continued the tradition of commenting on the immorality of society that surrounded him. sometimes his work targets a specific segment of society, such as merchants, monastic order, or clergy; sometimes the works find failings in all of society. this environment, where believers questioned church abuses and people sought other means to access god, remained a confusing and volatile period. luther called for reform in the ninety-five theses on the power and efficacy of indulgences of , which unintentionally instigated the splintering of the church over the next decades. as walter gibson, hieronymus bosch ( ; repr., london: thames & hudson, ), . ibid. ibid., . ibid. expressed in luther’s ninety-five theses, god’s acceptance is not earned through priestly pardons nor through receiving indulgences; rather it is given in response to faith and true repentance. in this period of uncertainty, lutheranism and other sects of protestant denominations like calvinism, anabaptism, and zwinglianism challenged the authority of rome and had important implications on the nature of images and representation in society. the reformation ushered in a return to the primacy of the biblical text for the true word of god, and an immediacy of religious experience that removed the papal hierarchy as the sole intercessor for the faithful. in this era, the quest for god became a personal and individual responsibility in which the christian was encouraged to find his or her own relationship with the almighty and the written scriptures. netherlandish calvinism embraced open-air sermons and a return to the pure word of god, distinctly distanced from the confines of an image-laden church. calvin’s most extreme followers considered god’s second commandment, “you shall not make for yourself a graven image nor any likeness,” as a license to strike down and break images of holy figures displayed in churches. condemnation of idolatry and false gods in the form of sculpture and paintings helped spurn the iconoclastic attacks in the smith , . felipe fernández-armesto and derek wilson, reformations: a radical interpretation of christianity and the world, – (new york: scribner, ), . jean calvin, institutes of the christian religion, ed. j. t. mcneill and trans. f. l. battles (philadelphia: westminster press, ), – . calvin uses acts : , “not to judge the deity to be like gold, silver, or a stone, carved by the art or devising of man,” to proclaim that every image man erects to represent god displeases god. netherlands during the summer of . these acts, in the mob-frenzy view of certain calvinists, cleansed the church of false idols. the complexities of iconoclasm encompassed both religious dissidence and struggles for political freedoms. faced with an environment of persecution led by king philip ii of spain, netherlanders struggled with spanish oppression through most of the middle years in the century. philip appointed his half-sister, margaret duchess of parma, as regent of the netherlands, allotting her the role of lead persecutor of heretics. philip also formed bishoprics to guard against religious dissidence, selecting the new officials personally, including cardinal granvelle as the prelate, and thereby alienating both the nobility and incumbent abbots. this move united church and state as oppressors under the spanish crown, and conjoined political dissenters with those who fought for religious freedom. needless to say, the nobility countered by mobilizing calvinists, which in effect combined the efforts of both religious and political movements. the high nobility, including william of nassau, prince of orange, and counts egmont and horne and others, formed a league against cardinal granvelle and the government’s policy on heresy, resulting in his recall back to spain to mollify the netherlanders in . in april , confederate noblemen delivered a petition to the regent margaret of parma, calling for an end to the edicts of the persecution and the inquisition, and zagorin , . zupnick , . ibid. zagorin , . zupnick , . inferred that open revolt and universal rebellion were imminent. faced with the threat of a rebellion, the regent ordered moderation in the heresy prosecutions. with the relaxation of persecution, calvinist congregations emerged to hold open-air meetings, drawing thousands of listeners. as discussed by felipe fernández-armesto and derek wilson, calvinist missions usually began in good weather, with open-air meetings, and seized catholic churches only when a congregation had been formed. in antwerp during the summer of , the town chronicler reported citizens’ fears of calvinist meetings, where thousands gathered, armed with weaponry. this anxiety, directed towards both sides of the political and religious divide, is raised in bruegel’s paintings, opening the discourse for contemplating its complexity. the sense of irresolvable issues in the pictures themselves provokes thought, but no single or easy answer is achieved. the lightning storm of religious and political unrest, sparked by spanish oppression, rained on the netherlands in a rash of iconoclastic acts. emerging from years of political and religious unrest, with tensions heightened by preachers calling for reform, the crowd of listeners transformed into a mob demanding justice. the targets of their iconoclastic fury were almost exclusively religious, in that destruction transpired inside church buildings and against symbols of catholic worship, which calvinism accused as idolatrous. iconoclasm spread through the netherlands in mid-august to september of zagorin , . confederate noblemen were made of lesser nobility; it was on this occasion the rebels of the low countries received their nickname les gueux, the beggars, when one of the regent’s councillors referred contemptuously to the petitioners by this term. ibid., . fernández-armesto and wilson , . ibid. in systemic destruction. four hundred churches and convents were destroyed in flanders alone. class was blind in the ferocity of iconoclasm, as both lower and higher orders took part in the acts of destruction. this overtly menacing attitude, i argue, did not find its way into the open-air environment of bruegel’s sermon of st. john the baptist. instead, listeners and onlookers in the painting appear curious and interested in hearing st. john’s words, without exhibiting outward signs of rage or destructive behavior. though a fortune-teller and his client may be interpreted as detrimental to a viewer’s spirituality as a distraction, most of the listeners appear courteous and engaged. this painting has yielded several interpretations with no single one emerging as predominant. different scholars have proposed a range of interpretations of the painting and its relationship to messages of reform. some have argued that it is pro-reform; others, such as fritz grossmann, have contended it is anti-calvinist. with the fortune-telling scene in the foreground, grossmann has noted that having one’s fortune read was condemned by calvin and forbidden to his followers, and concludes that the attitude of the man participating in the palm reading is therefore meant to express a rejection of such meetings and of calvinism. on the other hand, a more open interpretation exists with gibson in which he has argued that the subject matter of st. john preaching was popular in flemish altarpieces. zagorin , . ibid. zupnick , ; grossmann , grossmann , . this reading situates bruegel’s painting into a considerably more neutral zone than those in the pro-calvinist camp would have it. furthermore, gibson has noted that one must keep in mind that many of bruegel’s patrons, such as cardinal granvelle and niclaes jongelinck, supported king philip ii and the catholic church. hence, bruegel’s paintings were considered acceptable to catholics or at least ambiguous enough to warrant patronage. it is this ambiguity, i propose, that helped facilitate audience engagement. i agree with gibson’s logic in that catholic supporters would not commission bruegel if his paintings were deemed too partisan in politics or religion. however, i also would argue that the open-air meetings of the reformation are suggested in the work, though perhaps not for clear support of this activity. an undercurrent of criticism exists in the fortune-telling scene in which the man turns his back on the saint and christ. why would this element—a blatant disregard for the main event of st. john’s sermon—be placed in the forefront, directly below christ’s standing position? the man in contemporary dress is openly ignoring the saint and christ. we see his face as well as the visage of the fortune-teller, a position contrasting that of the surrounding figures, who are listening to the saint, with backs facing the viewer. yet, at the same time, the painting illustrates a return to the origin of sermon. i consider the juxtaposition between those listening and the two figures ignoring the sermon an aid to the overall structure in creating an ambiguity that speaks to bruegel’s cultivated audience. perhaps bruegel set up this juxtaposition of figures to allude to models of good attention, which involves not gibson , . “niclaes jongelinck was a friend of philip ii and presumably a staunch catholic, and jongelinck’s brother jacob was later to make a large bronze monument commemorating alva’s victories in the netherlands.” only seeing but hearing, as compared to inattention or distraction. if this is true, i suggest bruegel makes a statement about how his painting provides access to spirituality. it is through undivided attention from both the eyes and the ears that the implied viewer can even begin to understand what is happening in the middle ground. when one finds the central event, the biblical story is revealed. the momentum of ‘religio-political’ protest and looming repression together paved the way for turmoil and change. rebellion led by noblemen and calvinist militants towards the end of ushered in the arrival of duke alva and the spanish army in august . alva, known for his ruthlessness, soon took over as governor with the resignation of margaret of parma. he established the council of troubles to punish insurrection and heresy; the council became known as council of blood, as over twelve thousand people were tried before it, with one thousand condemned to death and another nine thousand to complete or partial property loss. as mentioned previously, bruegel’s conversion of st. paul perhaps alludes to duke alva’s crossing of the alps in the spring of . however, as noted by grossmann, the popularity of the subject is seen in both italian and flemish paintings before bruegel. i agree with gibson’s assessment of bruegel’s works in that he, “like plantin and ortelius, probably acted with considerable circumspection during these zagorin , . ibid., . as cited by zagorin, , note . grossmann , . troubled years.” overt anti-spanish sentiment, i argue, is not apparent in the conversion of st. paul or in the sermon of st. john the baptist. both paintings may be regarded by catholics and protestants alike as championing their respective beliefs. again, the ambiguity of the pictures adds to their engagement with the audience. for instance, the conversion of saul portrays a physical interaction with god. as saul was on his way to damascus with his army, he was struck down to the ground, blinded by god’s natural light, and heard the lord’s voice. catholics and protestants both strive to access the almighty, but catholics perhaps cling to his blinding light and the event of a miraculous conversion, while protestants congregate around god’s spoken word and st. paul as their primary figure. in either case, the same painting and subject matter engages both types of viewers for different reasons. similar results are seen with the sermon of st. john the baptist, as discussed previously. the painting can be viewed as a return to the purity of the true word of god in the open-air environment of calvinist congregations. but it can also be interpreted as seeing and hearing st. john as an intercessor to god, an element that remains part of the catholic doctrine. gibson , ; zagorin , , . christopher plantin was a printer and publisher; both he and ortelius, it has been suggested, were associated with heretical groups such as the family of love and libertines. acts : - (the new english bible with apocrypha). chapter bruegel’s ‘slow fuse’ as noted in the previous section, both catholics and protestants may view the three paintings in this study agreeably. to this point, i add that bruegel’s engagement with his audience extends beyond doctrine; his works address common values upheld by the cultured elite across the religious divide. in this chapter, i will examine how bruegel uses the structure, not simply the content or subject, of his religious paintings to maintain the audience’s attention and absorption, and consider how the elements form a discourse with the canons of netherlandish art. all three paintings in this study implicate the viewer as a witness to the biblical events depicted. the procession to calvary treats one to a bird’s eye view of a netherlandish landscape, while the sermon of st. john the baptist places the viewer inside the perspective of the crowd that sees and hears the saint. finally, in the conversion of st. paul, the spectator finds himself or herself in the middle of a mountainside immediately behind soldiers and horses that have stopped suddenly to see what has happened to saul. in each episode, the audience—the witness—faces a moral dilemma. i would argue, too, that each painting serves to heighten different senses in the act of witnessing. the overall composition and structural elements aid in this endeavor, as seen first in the procession to calvary. the bird’s eye perspective in this painting recalls the world landscapes of joachim patinir. perhaps bruegel invoked the world landscape viewpoint to call attention to the importance of his own cultural identity, as the landscape genre remains a netherlandish tradition that emerged from patinir himself. in this respect, bruegel begins to lay down ‘a slow fuse.’ john shearman, in his work on the italian renaissance, frames the idea of the slow fuse, in which the spectator contributes to the success of artistic imitation and emulation by recognizing its elements in a painting or a sculpture. applying the concept to all three paintings, i consider the visual references significant in that they not only engaged the cultivated viewer, but they also spoke to the anxiety of the mid-sixteenth century, and the desire to return to the older values of spirituality and moral learning. at the same time, they pronounced bruegel’s role in upholding and contributing to netherlandish art traditions. as a part of bruegel’s ‘slow fuse,’ the structure of the composition and the figure groups, with their interactions and vignettes, appealed to the contemporary audience. visual anchors, like the windmill and the marian group, draw the eyes, but it is the cyclic composition that carries viewers across the landscape of the procession to calvary. occupying the zenith, the windmill serves as one point of entry that captures the audience’s interest and is the point around which bruegel composes other elements of the picture. the figures in the procession, as well as those busy with their own activities, radiate around the structural element of the windmill like ripples in a pond. the perpetual turning of the windmill is echoed in the carrion wheel in the foreground, as well as in the circle formed by the dense crowd anticipating the crucifixion. wheels and circles remain subsidiaries of the larger wheel-shape formed by the procession itself, as described by mark meadow. meadow points to bruegel’s use of the wheel to orchestrate the themes of punishment and suffering, linking the deaths of shearman , . meadow , . christ, of the thieves, of common criminals, and perhaps of the politically or religiously persecuted of the viewer’s own day. working from meadow’s interpretation of the wheel, i consider the windmill and its ongoing rotation symbolic of the picture’s complexities as, together, they allude to the continuity of historical events. as discussed previously, whether or not directly involved, bruegel’s contemporaries and audiences witnessed unrelenting religious persecution. as the observer and participant, the spectator perhaps connected with his or her own spirituality by looking at the image of christ bearing the cross, but was also faced with a moral decision. i consider the procession to calvary a didactic piece in which christ’s suffering generates an emotional response from the viewer, urging him or her to help others. the painting not only confers upon the audience the role of witness to the event, but it also demands that viewers decide between intervening in christ’s suffering or remaining part of the cause for it. with religious and political climates fraught with tension and threatening revolt, netherlanders wrestled with questions of loyalty to the state or to personal principles and overriding universal morals. if this environment informed bruegel’s painting, then i consider the decision for action and the struggle to make the right choice for morality a self-reflexive engagement. ortelius’s words of , in a letter to his nephew emanuel van meteren, voiced these frustrations, attributing the troubles evenly to “the catholic evil, the gueux fever, and the huguenot dysentery, mixed with ibid. other vexations of black horsemen and soldiers.” but then, later in life, ortelius would note, “a wise man must keep silent in these days.” for the sheer detail and overwhelming number of figures in the procession to calvary, the viewer would not be able to digest the entire image in a single glance. i consider bruegel’s application of this compositional structure, one used by patinir and others, compelling in enticing the audience to look closely at the vignettes distributed throughout the landscape. bruegel’s technique helped strengthen audience engagement, as the viewer would need to spend time with the image in order to decipher and contemplate its details. here, in the procession to calvary, one must search for the figure of christ, almost imperceptible in the middle of the painting as he has fallen to the ground under the burden of the cross, and is depicted in the same scale as the figures surrounding him. i consider the search for christ as another added dimension of meaning within the painting, in that it asks if the viewer can see christ, physically and spiritually. with bruegel’s awareness of his audience’s capacity for multivalent layers, this interpretation opens up the painting to present the viewer with a path to regain one’s spirituality. ethan matthew kavaler suggests that the potential meaning of bruegel’s pictures surface through an understanding of the structural relationships within the elements of the kavaler , . as cited in kavaler, , note . ibid., . as cited in kavaler , note . reindert l. falkenburg, “antithetical iconography in early netherlandish landscape painting,” in brueghel and netherlandish landscape painting, ed. a. kofuku and t. nakamura (tokyo: national museum of western art, ), . falkenburg refers to joachim patinir’s landscape with saint jerome; i show this technique used in a similar way to engage bruegel’s audience. painting. i find his argument applicable to the procession to calvary, as christ remains in the center (a privileged site) and is encircled by those who seem indifferent to his suffering, and thus, blind to their own spirituality and the historical importance of the event. this blindness radiates from christ towards the boundaries of the painting. the figural group of simon of cyrene and his wife demonstrates how the external image of a good christian belies inner blindness (fig. ). simon, forced by soldiers to help christ bear his cross, exhibits outright resistance as his heels dig into the ground, his body pulling back with all its might. one soldier grabs his right hand and collar to drag him forward, another pushes him from behind, and a figure from the crowd grabs his left arm to tug him towards christ. in this vignette, we see simon’s wife struggling to fight off soldiers, yet she wears the rosary, a contemporary catholic sign of spiritual devotion. structurally a visual anchor, st. john and the holy women in the group of mourners at the lower right of the composition represent in contrast the true spirit of christian faith and empathy, and counteract those who remain blind to god (fig. ). they are the only ones who recognize and mourn the event of christ’s passion. moreover, with their monumentality and high position demarcated by the ridge they occupy, they transcend the worldly landscape below them. this demarcation fits into what reindert falkenburg describes as an antithetical structure of the landscape, in which worldly order is contrasted with divine order, one path full of hardships leading to virtue kavaler , . ibid. the center of bruegel’s paintings are read as holding the key to the rest of the composition. kavaler notes that the “acculturated observer would have glanced intuitively to the middle of the crowded stage to discover the figure of christ.” and eternal life, and the other, a broad easy road leading to vice and hell. the antithetical structure of the picture also physically adds to the viewer’s role as a witness and active participant in the moral decision between expressing empathy and intervening in christ’s suffering, or following the crowd who watch impassively and remain blind to him. furthermore, bruegel’s evocation of fifteenth-century netherlandish painting in his depiction of the marian group is no mere coincidence. with their graceful, elongated forms, emotional gestures, and heavy, angular folds of drapery cascading around them, the figures are visually unlike all others in the image. they are monumental, as they occupy one-sixth of the entire painting. as discussed by both gibson and meadow, this group’s slender, elongated forms allude to fifteenth-century flemish altarpieces, and in particular, to rogier van der weyden’s descent from the cross (ca. , museo del prado, madrid) (fig. ). the two women flanking st. john and the virgin echo the figures of st. john and mary magdalen in rogier’s madrid panel, forming a similar visual parenthesis to the action they frame. bruegel’s citation of rogier indicates something about his own self-fashioning and the role of painting itself. rogier’s skills in depicting emotion were described by van mander as having “improved our art of painting greatly by depicting the inner desires or emotions of his subjects whether sorrow, anger, or gladness were exhibited.” rogier’s falkenburg , . gibson , ; meadow , . gibson notes descent from the cross was in spain by but bruegel could have known its composition from a copy by michael coxie or from a preliminary drawing for cornelis cort’s engraving after this work, published by hieronymous cock in . van mander , . deposition, copied by netherlandish painters in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries probably more than any other, likely functioned as a devotional image. a widespread interest in the virgin’s suffering at the foot of the cross arose in the fifteenth century. with rogier’s picture, the virgin’s imitative response to christ provided the viewer with his or her own model of imitatio christi. for sixteenth-century audiences, rogier perhaps represented the one artist who encapsulated the empathy and emotion of holy figures in his pictures, and in that sense, was considered truly pious. hence, not only does the rogierian group in the procession to calvary evoke the timeless quality of fifteenth- century style painting, it also makes a claim about bruegel’s own spiritual health expressed in an identifiably and self-consciously pious manner of painting. but what might be claimed of painting in bruegel’s invocation of rogier and other predecessors? as noted by erwin panofsky, in discussing the “[a]rchaism of around ,” the works of great masters such as jan van eyck and rogier van der weyden came to be looked upon as “monuments of a past worthy of study and admired with a feeling akin to nostalgia.” moreover, artists looked to the generation of for examples of authority and visionary power. this revisiting of the netherlandish masters, also witnessed in bruegel’s picture, draws upon the power of painting as a amy powell, “a “point ceaselessly pushed back”: the origin of netherlandish painting,” art bulletin . ( ): . powell , – . powell notes otto von simson’s study of fifteenth-century interest in the virgin’s suffering and his conclusion of the imitative response as a model of imitatio christi. as cited in powell, , note , note . erwin panofsky, early netherlandish painting: its origins and character (cambridge: harvard university press, ) vol , , . joseph leo koerner, the moment of self-portraiture in german renaissance art (chicago: chicago university press, ), . means to gain spiritual knowledge. this was especially important during the reformation when iconoclasts treated sculptures and paintings of holy figures with disdain, destroying many of them for what calvinists deemed as inciting idolatry. bruegel’s painting of the procession, a biblical narrative familiar to the faithful regardless of specific church doctrines, provided viewers with examples of moral behavior and a general sense of spirituality. the painting, owned by the merchant jongelinck, is not an altarpiece for devotion, but it does ask the viewer to connect with universal values of empathy and compassion for the suffering of others as part of the effort to regain one’s spiritual health. painting, and not sculpture, as claimed by bruegel in the age of turmoil and change during the reformation, is the medium to which one returns for timeless values of spirituality. bruegel’s placement of his audience in the role of a witness underscores this search for the spiritual self. in this sense, bruegel’s pictorial narrative of a single, albeit expansive, episode rather than a sequence of events, advances the idea of providing the viewer with a moral decision. a pictorial narrative is defined as an image that intends to illustrate or relate a story. one way to create a pictorial narrative is by illustrating a single episode or event, which unifies time and place. bruegel’s use of the single event method in all three paintings in this study helps create a pictorial narrative to integrate the viewer into the scene as a witness and participant. it is as if the viewer has walked up peter parshall, “lucas van leyden’s narrative style,” nederlands kunsthistorisch jaarboek ( ): . ibid. methods of pictorial narratives also include the simultaneous method in which several episodes take place at different times, and the cyclic method in which a series of single images illustrate a single story. parshall credits kurt weitzmann’s study on book illustration in its articulation of pictorial narrative. upon such an event, an experience that is enhanced by the large dimensions of all three paintings. i will also add that bruegel subverted the single scene method by conflating the biblical period with the mid-sixteenth century, creating a back-and-forth oscillation in time, which informed the way contemporary audiences engaged with the paintings. with procession to calvary, i consider the single event narrative a strategic vehicle that helps establish the audience as witness to the event. the viewer’s vantage point rests slightly above the horizon line, in between the carrion wheel and the circular crowd at golgotha on the right side of the picture. this high bird’s eye perspective allows the audience to see the entire procession as it unfolds in vignettes before them: christ’s suffering, the virgin’s compassion, the impassive peasants, the unwillingness of simon of cyrene and his wife to help christ, the curious and dispassionate onlookers, the eagerness of the crowd to see the crucifixion. why would bruegel use the single event strategy instead of another, such as the continuous narrative? i contend bruegel’s employment of the single narrative places the spectator effectively in a position to make a decision as a witness; this narrative strategy is opposed to the continuous narrative, which may work better in positioning the viewer as a virtual pilgrim, as the beholder might identify with the holy figure protagonist. continuing with this hypothesis, i suggest that bruegel considered his viewer’s role to be a witness, not a pilgrim, significant in the religious turmoil of the reformation when access to god depended upon one’s own interpretation of scripture. the painting is likely not meant to be devotional; the meadow , . falkenburg , – . falkenburg describes patinir’s landscape with st. jerome in which the different episodes of the saint’s life is meditated on by the spectator, who, likewise understood the identification with, and emulation of the saint. as the beholder travels with his eye over the landscape and his mind dwells on the details, he undertakes the ‘pilgrimage through the world.’ audience, i argue, would not envision themselves on a pilgrimage, literally following the life of christ in the painting. rather, as witnesses to the event, they faced a single moral decision. for mid-sixteenth-century viewers, the decision lies perhaps between feeling compassion for the suffering of christ, following the example of the marian group, or responding with mild curiosity (or not at all), as illustrated by the remaining figures in the landscape. bruegel used the single narrative strategy and contemporary dress again in the sermon of st. john the baptist. the audience remained a witness to the saint’s sermon, but i propose that the significance of this picture lies in how one takes in what is happening at the event. the means of gaining spirituality in the sermon of st. john the baptist addresses both hearing and seeing, unlike the procession to calvary, which seems to privilege sight, given the amount of information and how it is presented in visually striking patterns. in the sermon of st. john the baptist, we see st. john preaching while his left arm points to christ who stands a few feet away. in this vignette, most of the surrounding figures turn their attention to st. john, but we also see several heads looking at christ. seemingly, a sequence of events takes place within the pictorial narrative. the viewer can almost sense the crowd captivated by the sound of the saint’s words about god and his only son, and then turning to look at the figure of christ himself. the attentive nature of the listeners is interrupted by a man in the foreground, distinctive for his attire designating him as a member of the wealthy urban bourgeoisie, holding out his right palm to a fortune-teller, likely understood as being a gypsy. for details on gypsies, see andrew morrall’s “soldiers and gypsies: outsiders and their families,” in artful armies, beautiful battles: art and warfare in early modern europe, ed. pia f. cuneo (leiden: brill, ), – . instead of looking at his client’s hand, the fortune-teller gypsy appears to be looking at someone else, another gypsy who is seated with a baby in her arms. together, the family of gypsies forms an anti-type holy family, and, along with their client, are examples of how not to behave. physically and mentally, both the man and the fortune-telling gypsy turn their backs on the saint. instead of paying heed to the sermon as most of the listeners, the man in urban dress ignores the words of the saint, more interested in learning his fortune, his material need. this interruption in the picture provides the viewer with another choice: listening carefully to the word of god and, as a true christian, actually seeing st. john and christ, or, partaking in other activities that distract one from the path of spirituality. in his paintings, bruegel seems to offer examples of behavior, in the form of exempla and counter-exempla. in procession to calvary, the example of the monumental rogierian group counters everyone else in the picture; with the sermon of st. john the baptist, the prominent figures in the fortune-telling vignette exist as the counter-example, while the rest of the figures in the painting behave positively. as discussed previously, the fortune-telling scene may indicate tensions toward open-air sermons during the reformation, as noted by grossmann. however, with its monumental form and position in the foreground, this scene also serves to test the audience’s level of perception to the saint and his sermon, as well as to the figure of christ. this is demonstrated by bruegel’s placement of the viewer’s vantage point—at the horizon line, but behind the distracting figural group of the man and his fortune teller. grossmann , . moreover, the stripes and colorful patterns in the clothing of these foreground figures, which provide visual interest and variety, also act as diversions. the audience attending the sermon represents a range of people, including those who appear to be foreign. the foreign dress in the picture possibly came from types found in sixteenth-century costume books and ortelius’s theatrum orbis terrarum. although wolfgang stechow sees the exotic visitors as enemies of christ and the baptist, i disagree, as most of the foreigners appear to turn their attention to the saint. not only do their costumes serve to illustrate another type of world landscape, as noted by kavaler, i argue further that bruegel’s depiction of the foreign amongst the contemporary dress functioned to bring the world closer in proximity to antwerp itself, a city whose prominence as a european commercial center made it a hub for numerous foreign traders and goods. comparable to the city with its changing values of morality, the painting contains many diversions. with so much distraction, how might the faithful viewer find his or her way to the word of god? bruegel presents the viewer with obstacles and key points of decision, in that the distracting figural groups are akin to the antithetical structure of the rocky and easy pathways to heaven or hell. ocular and audio sensibilities compete in the painting. does one listen to the word of god, as spoken by st. john, or does one let visual distractions block access to god? in the changing religious and economic climate of mid-sixteenth-century antwerp, the audience may connect the distractions in the painting to its own shifting values, where kavaler , – . kavaler , . as cited in kavaler, , note . ibid., . kavaler notes the world, formerly represented by a panoramic landscape, is here signified by the different peoples represented, denoted by dress. capitalism resides and its cousin greed remains latent. the distracting figures are reminiscent of similar motifs in herri met de bles’s painting of the same subject (landscape with saint john the baptist preaching, ca. , cleveland museum of art) (fig. ), in which we notice a man in the front row asleep, head cradled in his arms. however, bruegel’s use of distracting figures extend beyond the visual, and question the contemporary audience’s means of seeing—or in this painting, hearing—its way to spirituality. the compositional structure underscores my argument of the viewer’s choice between listening to the sermon and regaining spiritual health, or turning to the attention of temporal needs. gibson points out the power of the diagonal movement created in the painting, from the onlookers at the lower right to the trees beyond st. john in the left distance. however, he fails to note the second diagonal emerging from the foregrounded figure of the seated gypsy to the peasants amidst the trees in the upper right. the two diagonals conjoined with the viewer’s location, as i understand it to be at the center of the painting, form the y-shape of a moral crossroads and a decision point (fig. ). like the antithetical structure of patinir’s landscapes, in which the faithful observer decides between the difficult or the easy path to heaven or hell, respectively, or hercules’s moral decision to follow virtue or vice, bruegel’s y-shape structure in the sermon of st. john the baptist reminds his audience that one needs to be diligent in making the correct decision on the road to regain spirituality and live a moral life. walter s. gibson, “herri met de bles: landscape with saint john the baptist preaching,” the bulletin of the cleveland museum of art . ( ): . gibson , . drawing from netherlandish artistic canons and classical education, with the use of antithetical structures and the theme of the literal and moral crossroads, bruegel lays a ‘slow fuse’ for his sophisticated audience. not only do bruegel’s paintings invoke the example of his predecessor patinir in the use of world landscapes, but i would argue that bruegel’s pictorial narrative strategy was informed by another great netherlandish artist, lucas van leyden. these artists were innovators, and knowledge of their work is presumed for bruegel’s astute viewers, who would have needed to have this familiarity in order to navigate bruegel’s own unusual compositions and method of storytelling successfully. preceding bruegel by several decades, lucas used the single scene narrative in his ecce homo (fig. ) in which the witness—the viewer—is part of the crowd deciding christ’s fate. in fact, the viewer is an active participant in the scene, and is urged by pontius pilate to make a decision between saving christ or releasing barabbas. lucas’s intermingling of historical and contemporary attire conjoined with perspectival orthogonals situates the event in a credible time and place, presenting to its audience, as witness, an actual and significant choice. likewise, lucas’s calvary from (fig. ), another single-scene picture, integrates the viewer into the scene as a participant, and presents the spectator with choices. should the viewer emulate the mourning group at the foot of christ’s cross in the background? or will he or she be distracted by the anecdotal groups of people along the diagonal path to golgotha? i consider bruegel’s use of foreign dress and the fortune-telling group analogous to lucas’s distracting figural groups. parshall , . for all three bruegel paintings in this study, the visual reference to lucas extends to the compositional structure in which the chief subject is small and resides in the middle ground or the background, appearing as an inverted narrative. bruegel’s use of a high horizon line, an adaptation of lucas’s deep landscape space, underscores the inverted narrative. with this compositional strategy, two things to consider are the search for the inconspicuous main subject, and the position of the viewer as a witness to the event. i will first address the effect of bruegel’s use of small figures for the chief subject. in the sermon of st. john the baptist, christ is positioned in the middle ground, at the horizontal center of the picture. in this central location, he takes precedence over st. john, and by extension, god’s word is given priority over the saint’s voice. however, the figure of christ, like the saint and the surrounding crowd, and like the christ figure in procession to calvary, remains small in size, approximately one-fifth that of the foreground figures. the employment of inconspicuous figures to denote significant meaning harkens back to medieval devotional imagery and marginalia in illuminated manuscripts. the tiny scale of figures in devotional text invites the beholder to enter the picture, to dwell on key moments depicted so that he or she can meditate and internalize christ’s episodes before the internal spiritual eye, as discussed by falkenburg. in this same sense, searching for and finding the small figure of christ in the background of bruegel’s painting perhaps is the first step towards spiritual kavaler , . reindert l. falkenburg, “marginal motifs in early flemish landscape painting,” in herri met de bles: studies and explorations of the world landscape tradition, ed. muller et al. (turnhout, belgium: brepols, ), , . falkenburg discusses vita christi texts of which meditations vitae christi was the best known. ibid., . enlightenment. with this picture of st. john’s sermon, i would argue that seeing the central subject of the holy figures, but not really seeing with one’s true spiritual vision, remains one of bruegel’s critiques. to be “blind with one’s eyes open” was a common theme in sixteenth-century netherlandish art. the inverted narrative strategy also allows bruegel to integrate the viewer into the biblical event. lucas’s deep landscape technique of raising the foreground plane clarifies the viewer’s perspective as seen in ecce homo, where the presumed audience is located behind the crowd in front of the podium, a position established by the building’s orthogonal lines. in using a high horizon line, bruegel employs a similar technique in the sermon of st. john the baptist to confirm the viewer’s position, and to provide a convenient space for him or her in the back of the scene, which is in fact the foreground of the picture. locating the presumed viewer behind the monumental foreground figures of gypsies, bruegel tested the audience’s attention. with attention as one of the main topics in the sermon of st. john the baptist, bruegel succeeded in luring and maintaining his viewers’ attention through strategic structures and interplay between good attention and bad distraction. i have discussed previously the ramifications of the viewer as a witness in the event, and his or her choice to listen attentively to the saint and the word of god, or conversely, to privilege worldly distractions above spiritual needs. but now, the question i raise is, why borrow a narrative strategy and spatial composition so closely aligned with ibid., . falkenburg refers to herri met de bles’s landscape with the sermon of st. john in dortmund with jesus emerging from the background. parshall , . parshall notes precedence of the technique of raising the foreground plane in gerard david’s work. lucas van leyden? what does the invocation of lucas contribute to the viewer’s understanding of the sermon of st. john the baptist? i suggest bruegel’s audience of cultivated humanists, familiar with multiple layers of meaning in classical and biblical narratives, as well as with the engravings of lucas van leyden, would have seen bruegel’s compositions and pictorial narratives as depictions of biblical scenes to which they are a witness, with the responsibility of making decisions and interpretations. as lucas had done with ecce homo and calvary, so, too, did bruegel depict psychological interactions that heightened the viewer’s participation and urge to interpret. with this consideration, i contend that bruegel drew from lucas to emphasize the viewer’s role in deriving and even making meaning from the painting. for in the turbulent period of the reformation, access to god remained the sole responsibility of the individual, and his or her own reading of the biblical passages. i find bruegel’s critique on social order and ownership of one’s path to eternal life to extend to his conversion of st. paul (fig. ). the painting places the viewer as a witness to saul’s event, but at the same time, prevents the faithful from partaking in the conversion itself. in this sense, bruegel’s depiction of saul’s conversion prepares the viewer for his or her own experience. bruegel’s choice of a mountainous setting helped establish a familiar, though foreign and alpine, environment for the contemporary audience to begin contemplating their own transformation. carel van mander was struck by bruegel’s landscape, as he noted the painting “represent[ed] some very beautiful cliffs.” the mountain path rests high above the van mander , . ground as we observe a cloud formation emerging from the rocky crevice on the upper right of the painting. the audience of humanists, familiar with the world landscape design, likely identified high places within landscapes as areas for important holy events. moreover, with a world landscape that included trees and mountains from bruegel’s own series of large landscapes, the sixteenth-century cultivated viewer, already familiar with the environs, can begin to unpack the painting’s central subject and meaning. structurally, the monumental figures in the foreground of the conversion of st. paul, like those found in the sermon of st. john the baptist, act as devices to locate the viewer within the picture. as part of the company of soldiers, the spectator’s position remains directly behind the peasant in the pink top, and high on the mountain path such that the vantage point lies midway between the horizon and the top of the painting. with costumes that conflated the biblical period with the mid-sixteenth century, bruegel’s painting of saul’s conversion helped cement the connection between the audience and the work, and between seeing and experiencing. the contemporary dress of the soldiers and peasants encouraged the viewer to contemplate his or her own stage in the process of attaining spirituality. bruegel seemed to draw from his own work for the military costumes, as we find the red riding coats of roman soldiers from the procession to calvary (fig. ) transformed into stylish black and yellow ones worn by the gibson , ; silver , . the mountains and trees in conversion of st. paul are similar to those from bruegel’s large landscape series, specifically alpine landscape with deep valley (c. - ). for more details on bruegel’s large landscapes, see gibson , . monumental figures in the conversion of st. paul. additionally, the soldiers surrounding saul don the chest armor and helmets worn previously by the anthropomorphic figures in battle between the piggy banks and strongboxes (fig. ). i find the intrigue of the picture arises not from the landscape, but rather from the search for its underlying meaning and the main protagonist himself. as the viewer explores beyond the monumental figures of men on horseback in the foreground, he or she lights on the figure of saul lying helpless in the middle ground. bruegel depicted the moment after saul, blinded by jesus’s light, fell to the ground. we know this because his horse remains on the dirt path with its legs folded beneath its massive body. we also see saul propped up on his left elbow to look towards the light, gesturing with his right hand as if beseeching the almighty (fig. ). the soldiers remain almost completely unaware of the event before them, more concerned with negotiating the rocky road or lost in their own thoughts. only saul and a few men in his immediate presence look upward toward the light source. although the biblical text does not provide for a mountainous landscape, nor does it suggest military soldiers on horseback, bruegel decided to i consider the man in the yellow riding dress to be a combination of a merchant (depicted by the riding dress) and a dandy (depicted by the feather in the cap); these two types are found in bruegel’s netherlandish proverbs. given this consideration, then my argument for the audience as witness to the event is further strengthened as the viewers would ) identify with the merchant or the dandy (depicted in netherlandish proverbs as someone who has the world in his or her hands); and ) acknowledge the setting as contemporary, given the evidence of the dress from bruegel’s netherlandish proverbs. for more details of merchants and dandies in bruegel’s netherlandish proverbs, see meadow , , . kavaler , . the engraving was published posthumously in the early s though designed perhaps a decade earlier. kenneth c. lindsay and bernard huppé, “meaning and method in bruegel’s painting,” the journal of aesthetics and art criticism . ( ): . ibid. acts : - (the new english bible with apocrypha). include these elements, a significant move to induce audience identification with the event, and perhaps to imbue the scene with a sense of awesome drama in order to gain the viewers’ attention. one could view the picture as a political allusion depicting netherlanders’ hopes of duke alva being diverted from his purpose of the inquisition as he crossed the alps in . however, while not arguing against that interpretation, i propose an alternative view that allows for the consideration of cultural identity. i have already suggested that the sixteenth-century audience engaged with saul’s event as a model for their own conversion to true seeing, against a conventional, albeit dramatic, backdrop of a world landscape. once the viewer finds saul and his horse lying prostrate, the central event is crystallized. in the company of soldiers, the observer likely perceived the flash of light streaming from the heavens but would not be able to fully understand the experience itself. bruegel’s conversion of saul to st. paul appears to the viewer as a physical, destabilizing act of god. no angels hold the soon-to-be saint by the hand; instead, saul is blinded, lying on the ground, and remains helpless as a few of his men rush to his assistance while others show surprise. in the biblical passage, saul remained blind for three days without food and drink. i contend the little vignette of saul in the background connected the audience to the biblical passage, and thus helped them contemplate their own transformation. bruegel showed the conversion of saul as an individual, almost isolating, event, one not understood by the men surrounding him. the conversion, like the audience’s connection to the painting, is about individual experience, something exceeding verbal articulation that can only be understood by going through the gibson , ; zupnick , . acts : - (the new english bible with apocrypha). experience itself, one rooted in the notion of vision. in this regard, with the conversion of st. paul, bruegel helped viewers concretize their own spirituality and morality in an individual access to god. in the context of sixteenth-century humanist culture, morality and spiritualism affected a cognitive link to self-knowledge. with a belief in the value of man, the implied humanist viewer sought to improve himself and his society with moral examinations. hence, introspection as a type of inner vision and spiritualism remained closely tied. though bruegel’s painting of st. paul’s conversion perhaps played handmaiden to his viewer’s spiritual health, i argue the picture further proposes the idea of achieving true inner vision through visuality. as we observe in this era of humanism, inward vision encompasses both spiritual vision and self-knowledge. the challenge of depicting inner vision and visuality harkens back to the medieval period. since a personal experience of internal vision likely cannot be illustrated, bruegel chose instead to suggest a path to reach it. this experience, similar to the event of a conversion, remains solely between a beholder and god. the goal of attaining this kind of inner vision is suggested in the conversion of st. paul, as contemporary viewers, upon seeing the figure of the saint lying on the ground, might realize two things at once: the painting is a biblical narrative; and the rocky setting kenneth gouwens, “perceiving the past: renaissance humanism after the ‘cognitive turn,’” the american historical review . ( ): . i am defining visuality as socially and culturally constructed means for the body and psyche to gain vision. for writings on visuality, consult vision and visuality, ed. hal foster (seattle: bay press, ); visuality before and beyond the renaissance: seeing as others saw, ed. robert s. nelson (cambridge: cambridge university press, ). medieval icons, for example, served to strengthen monastic meditation in order to gain spiritual vision. and threatening weather conditions indicate a dramatic event has just happened. depictions of saul’s conversion in netherlandish art conventionally show the saint on the ground, lying next to his steed. hence, the cultivated audience would connect this image to prior depictions and understand its iconographic meaning. for instance, we see saul lying next to his horse in lucas van leyden’s engraving (the conversion of st. paul, ) (fig. ), in which the conversion is relegated to the background, while the foreground portrays the saint, blinded and seemingly broken, being led away to damascus by his company of soldiers. in bruegel’s version, the figure of saul, wearing grey armor, blends in with the rest of his men and does not immediately jump out to the viewer as the chief subject of the painting. the presumed viewer, as witness on the mountain pass, may not know yet the subject of the painting until he or she conducts close looking and searching. perhaps the only reason the viewer would look closely at all is because he or she is struck by the sense that, as a witness to the event behind the company of soldiers, movement along the rugged mountain path has come to a halt. as the contemporary audience conducts a search of the painting to find saul in the middle ground, the process of achieving vision—and in essence, removing one’s spiritual blindness—is initiated. though unable to experience saul’s conversion—a personal exclusive event—the audience, nevertheless, witnesses his attainment of true spiritual vision and may use it to as a point of reflection for their own introspection. in this regard, viewers are held both at bay, and yet also, through an intense engagement with the painting that subjects the audience to the process of visuality, captivated and are presented with one possible means of achieving inner spiritual vision in their own personal terms. in suggesting the conversion of st. paul is structured to encourage the viewer to look closely and depicts visuality, but does not show the vision itself, i argue that bruegel alluded to what he perhaps considered the superiority of painting, in which he ‘painted many things that cannot be painted,’ as described by ortelius in his encomium. in doing so, bruegel provided the humanist audience with more than what can be depicted on canvas. ortelius, in his epitaph in album amicorum, also agreed with and emphasized bruegel’s power of suggestion by comparing his friend to the ancient painter timanthes, who had perfected this art. timanthes, known for his ability to depict emotions, showed the art of suggestion in the sacrifice of iphigenia, in which he painted iphigenia’s father agamemnon with a veiled head, indicating his grief was too great to depict. walter melion has proposed that in the procession to calvary, bruegel obscures christ to reveal the tragic circumstances surrounding the event. i will add that bruegel’s art of suggestion is advanced in the conversion of st. paul, as the audience, engaged with the painting to the point of being a witness within the company of soldiers, found themselves on the precipice of experiencing spiritual enlightenment. bruegel’s use of structural elements in the painting of saul also worked to evoke the audience’s contemplation of their own spiritual life. the overall composition follows zagorin , . i use zagorin’s quotation from album amicorum abraham ortelius, ed. jean puraye (amsterdam, ). walter s. melion, shaping the netherlandish canon: karel van mander’s schilder-boeck (chicago: university of chicago press, ), . melion notes timanthes’s success at evoking things without actually painting them, for example, in the iphigenia, he discloses passion by suppressing gesture. “timanthes” the oxford encyclopedia of classical art and architecture. ed. john b. hattendorf. oxford university press, . temple university. december http://www.oxfordreference.com.libproxy.temple.edu/views/entry.html?subview=main&entry=t .e . melion , . a sweeping diagonal movement. all the figures—from the company of men traversing up the mountain path, to the men on horseback in the foreground, to the tiny caravan in the background—trudge in the direction of the mountain’s passage within the top half of the image. the progression starts from the crevice of the bottom left corner and ends with the pink flag whipping around on the upper right. bruegel’s use of the mountain may refer to pictorial and textual depictions in which access to god is associated with high places. in light of this, i propose the contemporary audience might understand saul’s passage from the lowlands on the left side of the picture to the mountainous cliffs on the right half as an allusion to their own possible journey to heightened spirituality and a moral life. this journey, like the moral choice and crossroads discussed previously with the sermon of st. john the baptist, associates difficult paths with the attainment of virtue. in images of hercules at the crossroads between virtue and vice, the choice is often posed as an easy, smooth, flat path leading to vice, represented typically by a semi-clad beautiful woman, and a rocky, treacherous road that winds its way to the chaste figure of virtue. in the reincarnation of the moral decision and crossroads in the conversion of st. paul, perhaps bruegel spoke to the prevalent anxiety felt in a rapidly changing mercantilist culture, in which traditional virtues were replaced by a new system that seemingly rewarded avarice. this structural element of saul’s passage provided the mid-sixteenth- century audience of merchants and humanists a tactile way to contemplate their own path forward in the search for true vision and visuality. gibson , . chapter conclusions in reexamining bruegel’s paintings of religious narratives, the nature of the audience’s close engagement with these three pictures relies on their formal structures, as well as on the viewers’ knowledge of biblical and humanist texts, and of the period’s major current events. the vignettes and figural groups captured the sixteenth-century audience’s attention while the main subjects, once detected in the middle ground or background of the inverted narratives, clarified the key meanings of the paintings. in the environment of antwerp’s mercantilist order and decline of spiritualism, coupled with the tensions and turmoil of its religious and political climates, bruegel’s audience of merchants and noblemen considered his paintings a source for contemplation and self-reflection. as a witness and participant to the biblical events, the viewer is faced with moral decisions he or she would need to make independently in order to gain spiritual health. during the period of the reformation, attaining personal salvation and access to god remained the sole responsibility of individuals. thus, bruegel’s paintings, especially the procession to calvary featuring christ’s passion, played handmaiden to the contemporary beholder’s avenue to spirituality and a moral life. one single, easy answer to the paintings was not attainable, nor was it expected. as i have shown in my argument, the contemporary audience of cultured elite, familiar with multiple meanings in art and knowledgeable in biblical and classical studies, would recognize bruegel’s visual references to fifteenth- and early sixteenth-century flemish artists. the ‘slow fuse’ implemented by bruegel between the viewer and his religious paintings worked to convey visually the values of piety, compassion and charity, as observed in the procession to calvary, and the recognition of god, as presented in the sermon of st. john the baptist, and a pathway to spiritual growth and self-knowledge, as suggested in the conversion of st. paul. bruegel’s claims about his own art and the medium of painting situated northern art in a position of privilege. bruegel adapted the techniques of his predecessors— sometimes invoking them directly (as in borrowed motifs from rogier) or competing with them in their own terms (as in inverted narrative strategies of patinir and lucas)— which create an intertextual engagement with his esteemed netherlandish artistic forerunners. more importantly, in choosing to place his own style and pictorial narrative alongside that of his predecessors, bruegel considered himself a part of the lineage that created the canons of netherlandish art. in the reformation, when sculptures of holy figures were subjected to destruction or, at the very least, were frowned upon by protestants, painting emerged as the most acceptable medium to depict christ and other sacred beings. the acceptance of paintings of religious subjects depended on their didactic use, and specifically within a biblical narrative. religious paintings now needed to be instructive, and—as demanded by the catholics—if narrative, then to represent clearly and faithfully the lives of christ and saints from officially sanctioned stories. bruegel’s paintings, on the other hand, appear ambiguous and filled with a sense of excess, permitting visual distractions and vignettes that allowed viewers the freedom to look around the painting, and hence, seem more sympathetic to ‘protestant’ methods of interpretation. since bruegel’s paintings paintings of holy figures were issues in the reformation too. most of pieter aertsen’s altarpieces were destroyed during antwerp’s iconoclastic acts of . were not altarpieces, but rather, commissions for antwerp’s cultured patrons, they entered the arena of functioning simultaneously as art objects and as models for other kinds of contemplation, including spiritual and moral. in this arena of art, open interpretation was permissible, and not necessarily controversial. along those lines, bruegel’s use of an inverted narrative strategy creates ambiguity and saves him from possible accusations of idolatry, as the holy figures remain small in the background. in this sense, bruegel placed painting above sculpture as the medium most suitable in the reformation for conveying and generating spirituality. with its emphasis on instruction rather than on veneration, northern art secured a privileged position within reform communities during the mid-sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. each of the three paintings in this study located the contemporary viewer in the position of a witness to a significant event. the implied viewer must take time to understand the little vignettes while standing in front of the large canvases. in doing so, the viewer’s knowledge of preceding and succeeding events of each biblical story coalesce with the main episode, often hidden in the painting. we should consider how the narrative could continue in the spectator’s mind and what that means for audience absorption, for the procession to calvary suggests christ’s eventual crucifixion; the sermon of st. john the baptist alludes to christ’s disciples and their apostolic missions; and the conversion of st. paul suggests the work of st. paul in converting others to christianity. bruegel’s power of suggestion to capture the viewer ‘between the folds’ of his conceptual structures and intervisual references not only served to engage the viewer but also to maintain his or her attention, thereby stimulating profound self-reflection on the narratives of the biblical past and the viewer’s role in the unstable conditions of the flemish present. figure . pieter bruegel the elder, procession to calvary, . kunsthistorisches museum, vienna. figure . pieter bruegel the elder, sermon of st. john the baptist, . museum of fine arts, budapest. figure . pieter bruegel the elder, conversion of st. paul, . kunsthistorisches museum, vienna. figure . pieter bruegel the elder, death of the virgin, . upton house, banbury, oxfordshire. figure . pieter bruegel the elder, tower of babel, . kunsthistorisches museum, vienna. figure . limbourg brothers, les très riches heures du duc de berry: october, ca. . musée condé, chantilly, france. figure . pieter bruegel the elder, after, battle between the piggy banks and strong boxes, s, engraving. figure . pieter bruegel the elder, netherlandish proverbs, . staatliche museen, berlin. figure . hieronymus bosch, ship of fools, ca. . musée du louvre, paris. figure . pieter bruegel the elder, procession to calvary, detail of simon of cyrene. figure . pieter bruegel the elder, procession to calvary, detail of st. john and the holy women. figure . rogier van der weyden, descent from the cross, ca. . museo del prado, madrid. figure . herri met de bles, 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( ): – . neotropical primates ( ), december neotropical primates ( ), december of the n = – karyotype and that of a new hybrid. j. human evol. : – . ruppenthal, g. c., moore, c. m., best, r. g., walker-ge- latt, c. g., delio, p. j. and sackett, g. p. . trisomy in a pigtailed macaque (m. nemestrina) with multiple anomalies and developmental delays. am. j. ment. retar- dation : – . segel, r., peter, i., demmer, l. a., cowan, j. m., hoff- man, j. d. and bianchi, d. w. . the natural history of trisomy p. am. j. med. genet. a: – . shaffer, l. g., mccaskill, c., hersh, j. h., greenberg, f. and lupski, j. . a clinical and molecular study of mosaicism for trisomy . hum. genet. : – . simpson, j. s. and jones, a. c. . hybrid production in owl monkeys (aotus trivirgatus). lab. anim. : – . sri kantha, s. and suzuki, j. . sleep profile and lon- gevity in three generations of a family of captive bolivian aotus. int. j. primatol. : – . suzuki, j. and sri kantha, s. . quantitation of sleep and spinal curvature in an unusually longevous owl monkey (aotus azarae). j. med. primatol. : – . weller, r. e., wierma, e. l., malaga, c. e., baer, j. f. and lemieux, t. p. . battelle primate facility. j. med. primatol. : – . yunis, e., caballero, o. m. and ramirez, c. . genus aotus q- and g-band karyotypes and natural hybrids. folia primatol. : – . further information on neotropical monkeys reported in the xvith century: part bernardo urbani this article presents new evidence on the manner in which neotropical primates were perceived in the th century (after urbani, , ). it includes several aesthetic and artistic views of new world primates from the early con- tact period. the florentine codex contains the first illus- tration of human / non-human primate interactions from the new world. between and , friar bernardino de sahagún wrote a compendium of books in nahuatl, latin and spanish and illustrated these volumes with the cooperation of local assistants of aztec descent. this work was the result of interviews with people of tlatecolco, tenochtitlán and texcoco (today, the greater mexico city metropolitan area). this text is considered one of the major illustrated treatises of the contact period in the new world. a drawing in book depicts a scene entitled captura de monos (“capturing monkeys”; see fig. ). it is a represen- tation of monkeys being lured and captured (sahagún, ). the physical appearance of the primates illustrated suggests they might be spider monkeys (ateles geoffroyi). as described in a previous report (urbani, ), sahagún in- dicated in that the mexican amerindians would use monkeys’ hands as omens for deciding when to sell their merchandise. the other representations include early european paintings in which monkeys occupy a principal position posing with nobles. these suggest that neotropical primates played an interesting role as preferred and “exotic” pets even during the early contact period. the earliest painting is of prince edward of wales with a marmoset, possibly callithrix jac- chus (fig. a; zuckerman, ). it was painted by the german renaissance artist hans holbein ( – ), living at that time in basel, switzerland. the monkey might have been obtained by some of the english travelers that visited the northeastern part of south america during the th century (see ribeiro and araujo moreira neto, ). in fig. b, the painting depicts the infanta isabela clara eugenia ( – ), daughter of felipe ii and isabel de valois, with a common marmoset (callithrix jacchus) (zuckerman, ). this painting by the spanish renais- sance painter alonso sánchez coello ( – ) is the most realistic pictorial representation of any neotropical primate during the th century (see other figures in urbani , , this study). these early european paintings (figs. a and b) suggest the existence of an early interna- tional network of primate trade; the geographical distribu- tion of these marmosets was a portuguese territory in the new world (today northeastern brazil), out of the colonial range of spain and england. finally, lucas hombolte ( – ) painted a portrait of catarina de aragón y castilla ( – ) of spain with a capuchin monkey (fig. c; zuckerman, ; fragaszy et al., ). it is neither a tufted capuchin nor a white- faced capuchin, but may be either cebus albifrons or cebus olivaceus. venezuela was the first spanish territory to be figure . obtaining monkeys by the mexican amerindians. figure . (a) prince edward of wales with a marmoset; (b) the infanta isabela clara eugenia and a common marmoset; (c) catalina de aragón y castilla with a capuchin monkey. (a) (b) (c) neotropical primates ( ), december explored, between and , and so this brown un- tufted capuchin monkey species is most likely c. olivaceus. finally, it is interesting to note that catalina de aragón y castilla was married to prince arthur of wales; therefore it is feasible to suggest that among the members of the tudor dynasty of england there was particular interest in primates as pets. acknowledgements thanks to paul garber for his suggestions. the author is supported by a uiuc assistantship and i would appreciate any comments and references for future updates. bernardo urbani, department of anthropology, univer- sity of illinois, davenport hall, s. mathews ave., urbana, illinois , usa and centro de antropología, instituto venezolano de investigaciones científicas, cara- cas, venezuela, e-mail: <burbani@uiuc.edu>. references fragaszy, d., fedigan, l. and visalberghi, e. . the complete capuchin: the biology of the genus cebus. cambridge university press, new york. ribeiro, d. and araujo moreira neto, c. de. . la fundación de brasil: testimonios, – . biblioteca ayacucho, caracas. sahagún, b. de. . the florentine codex. a general his- tory of the things of new spain, book (translation by a. anderson and ch. dibble). university of utah press, santa fe. urbani, b. . nuevo mundo, nuevos monos: sobre primates neotropicales en los siglos xv y xvi. neotrop. primates ( ): – . urbani, b. . further information on neotropical monkeys reported in the xvi century. neotrop. primates ( ): – . zuckerman, s. . the ape in myth and art. verdigris press, the knowes, scotland. news conservation efforts for peruvian primates fanny m. cornejo fanny fernandez noga shanee sam shanee peru is amongst the countries with the highest biodiversity of primates in the world (cowlishaw and dumbar, ). while the exact number of species is still uncertain, at least species are recognized now, with at least three endemic species (v. pacheco, pers. comm.). the number of primate species is likely to increase further as new species are rec- ognized and described or with changes in taxonomic ar- rangements. however, the exact geographic distribution and aspects of the biology of most peruvian primates re- mains poorly known or even unknown (aquino and en- carnación, ). this lack of knowledge within scientific circles is matched by a low degree of public awareness of local primates, even when they inhabit forests surrounding human settlements. surveys conducted in towns within the distribution of peru’s endemic primates showed that if local people are aware of the presence of primates, they usually know them as “chimpanzees,” “gorillas” or just “monkeys” (shanee, unpubl. data). there is an urgent need to save the endemic primates of peru and their habitats due to the great extinction risk they face. cities and communities within the habitat of many of peru’s endemic and endangered species are also the areas where poverty, deforestation, unsustainable land use and immigration are highest (elgegren, ) which is the main reasons for the rapid decline of primate populations in these areas (leo luna, ). at present, the main cause of the present conservation problem is the lack of educa- tion for creating conservation awareness (pacheco, ). as a response to this problem, the peruvian-based ngo yunkawasi, together with the support of neotropical pri- mate conservation, the peruvian national institute of natural resources (inrena) and the ministry of educa- tion of peru, has started the program “environmental edu- cation for the conservation of peruvian primates,” using the critically endangered yellow-tailed woolly monkey (oreonax flavicauda) as the flagship species. o. flavicauda is endemic to the northeastern peruvian tropical andes (mit- termeier et al., ; macedo et al., ; groves, ) and is recognized as one of the world’s most endan- gered primates (mittermeier et al., ). this program aims to increase people’s awareness of conservation issues, to promote knowledge and understanding of the primates of peru, with emphasis on the endemic primate species and the threats they face. it has already been launched in lima, peru’s capital, and in the next months it will be implement- ed in cities within the ranges of many peruvian primates. since education campaigns are fundamental in any conser- vation effort (defler et al., ), this environmental educa- tion program is also complementary to the ongoing project “la esperanza — community conservation and research for the yellow-tailed woolly monkey oreonax flavicauda,” carried out by neotropical primate conservation and the museo de historia natural of the universidad nacional mayor de san marcos. this program aims at establishing a community-run reserve connecting two existing protected areas to create a biological corridor for both o. flavicauda and another endemic, the night monkey aotus miconax. even though both of these conservation efforts are neces- sary and timely for helping to change the situation faced by many peruvian primates, they are not enough and many